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G Torq
ALTA B2O
804
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Posted - 2014.05.04 12:25:00 -
[1] - Quote
These are my goodbyes - this is my catharsis.
(Pretty version)
Just under 2 years ago, I heard about a game coming to consoles, that would be part of a GÇ£livingGÇ¥ universe, and with a life-span well beyond that of most games; A universe of consequence, intrigue and not-at-least persistence.
Sure, it was an online shooter, an FPS, a genre that I generally donGÇÖt play, but the notion that I could train to a specific skill-set and play in my own way, that it was a never-ending story written in-part by the players, that was enough for me to look beyond it being a much-loathed game-type.
A little over one-and-a-half year ago, I got my invite to the closed beta, to play this thing that should eventually be a grand experience: The MMOFPSRGP to end all MMOFSPRPGs.
Sure, it was a broken, and kind-of bland shooter...
Sure, it was an incomplete, and slightly misguided RPG experience...
Sure, it was an underwhelming, and GÇ£smallGÇ¥ MMO...
...but think of what it will be as content is added, scale is increased, bugs fixed, infrastructure is put in place, all as we move from one console generation to the next.
Investing into the game, buying Aurum to get some select items (blueprints and boosters) seemed logical. Buying a Dren package for a more complete set of blueprints is expensive, but long-term worth it. Playing the game for the next some years, having access to these will be useful, and giving CCP Games a bit of money for the current-and-future entertainment makes sense.
Open Beta arrived, and with it more players. Friends are encouraged to come and play, to try this wonderful experience; Game is still not impressive, and friends are rather underwhelmed, and move on to other games.
I help moderate an online community around DUST514, posting a bit of news, drum up some excitement about events.
The game is eventually released, and more content is released. Sure, it is still buggy and incomplete, but when measuring a gameGÇÖs life across many years, early issues are not too critical, and CCP Games move into a monthly release-cycle to ensure that things are improved quickly.
A CPM0 member tries to scold me for saying that the game is still in a Beta state and questioning the merchantability of the product. Obviously the game will never be finished, as CCP Games will continue to release incremental improvements for years to come.
Late last year I figured I can improve my own experience of the game, by adding my own expertise: Looking at fittings, calculating more data than is shown in-game and making a website where I could manage my characters, fittings, skills etc.
Sharing my prototyping with the community for feedback, I hear that they have been presented internally at CCP Games, used as argument for why they should release the DUST514 SDE and give players access to more information. We worked a bit with some from CCP Games to clarify what is needed and how, offering advice for free, and as the SDE is released, I open my pet-project (dust.thang.dk) to the general community.
Time and money gets invested in this; A separate website is opened (NewEden-Dev.com) by DUST514 and EVE players together, documentation for DUST514, the DUST514 SDE and 3rd Party Development is written, and an out-of-game group (Team Fairy DUST) is created for the purpose of collecting and sharing information (e.g. the Laser Rifle details released earlier this year).
Eventually CCP Games opened up the Historical Market Data endpoint for the EVE API, and I found that we could extract sales-numbers and historical pricing for DUST514 equipment. Work went into first collecting this data, and later presenting it (The TryHardinatorGäó, The Stomp-o-meterGäó). Various players started encouraging me to write more detailed posts about the numbers, both out of interest, but also due to the dearth of information from CCP Games.
Sure, finding and analysing data takes time, writing articles with graphs, getting others to read copy, posting them and answering questions is all part of how I am now playing this game; being a community-service.
Digging through the data I even find bits and pieces that I decide to keep out of my reviews, areas that could be used negatively, all out of respect for CCP Games.
Uprising 1.7 causes some issues - stability, and my Playstation 3 starts acting strange. Reaching out, I find that IGÇÖm not alone in this, and as CCP Games is being quiet about it, I reach out to Sony.
A single message comes back from Sony: The recommendation to uninstall DUST514, along with instructions on how to.
Team Fairy DUST
HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE
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G Torq
ALTA B2O
804
|
Posted - 2014.05.04 12:25:00 -
[2] - Quote
FanFest 2014 approaches, and before it, the Uprising 1.8 patch.
With 1.8, content is added, stuff is changed, and at first sight things look good. But even a week before 1.8 arrives, we have the SDE, and we are finding issues: Data doesnGÇÖt match the earlier dev-blogs (esp. scouts and heavies), bugs appear to be obvious (Scanners affected by Logi bonuses), and these are reported to CCP.
Release Date for 1.8 arrives, and the issues are still there - even the small, trivially fixed ones. A patch comes out to fix things, then more patches, then regression! A patch accidentally reverses a previous patch.
Amongst the 3rd Party Devs we look at this and start worrying. This kind of behaviour, this pattern, is usually indicative of software development done with a skeleton-crew, or on a separate, secondary branch working on back-ports from a main trunk. 20 years of working on every side of IT and Software Development, and my gut is telling me something about what we are seeing. We, the 3rd Party Devs, rationalize it: Obviously CCP Games is working on a larger patch for DUST514, a GÇ£2.0GÇ¥ (actually GÇ£6.0GÇ¥), and Uprising 1.8 is simply a maintenance-release, with content back-ported from the main trunk. All is good, and we simply have to wait for FanFest and the reveal of the next iteration.
I tell CCP Frame to tell the developers in Shanghai GÇ£Xi+¿xi+¿GÇ¥ (thank you) for the work on 1.8, and his response was to save the GÇ£xi+¿xi+¿GÇ¥s until the FanFest reveal.
Now we are here - Fanfest has come and gone.
Time has been spent, both in the game and outside.
Money has been used, per the promise on a long ride.
Emotional and social investments have happened.
All of this is called GÇ£Sunk CostGÇ¥ in the world of business, and is what causes the Sunk Cost Fallacy: That you keep investing in something due to the previous investment.
I know of of players, that have stayed, or left and come back, due to their earlier investments.
For me, though, at this stage, this is simply not relevant. CCP Rouge immediately pointed out that to reach the end-goal the game "[..]have to move to PC", and GÇ£[..]we need to do it on the PC platform firstGÇ¥. This means CCP Games is going where I cannot follow them; I am not going to buy a Desktop PC running Windows for the purpose of a single game, just as I am not going to dedicate space in my apartment just for playing games. So, for me the choice is simple: Stop playing a game I invested so heavily in, since it will never be what was repeatedly promised. There is no future (for me) in DUST514, and there is (for me) no migration-path to Project Legion.
I understand the decision to try again, the decision to move to a Windows PC platform, the decision to make DUST514 a legacy product. The intellectual, business-minded part of me fully understands this. The artistic part of me also understands why CCP GamesGÇÖ employees were so giddy and gleeful about it all.
What gets to me, now, is not the announcement of Project Legion, is not that DUST514 is now basically on life-support, and is not even all the things that were talked about and promised over these last 2 years.
What gets to me is that I believed in it.
So, staying makes no sense, and I am leaving DUST514 behind me.
The website, http://dust.thang.dk/ will stay up for a while still, but no updates will be done.
An aggregate (without Region-details) of the Market Data extracted until recently will be made available soon.
You GÇ£can haz ISKGÇ¥ - I will make a 50million ISK lottery on BrushmasterGÇÖs lottery site, which will complete at a future date to ensure it goes to those that decide to stay.
Finally, for CCP:
Thank you for the fun, the anguish, the entertainment, the broken promises, the friendships, the bullshit, and all the things in-between.
As you move on to greener pastures, I observe:
- Those of us leaving, we, too, are legion.
Team Fairy DUST
HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE
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G Torq
ALTA B2O
806
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Posted - 2014.05.04 12:33:00 -
[3] - Quote
Kovinis Sparagas wrote:Can I have your ISK? No seriously can you send it to me via game? I would gladly protostomp with your money in pub matches
Some of my ISK can be collected here: http://dustlottery.com/lottery/legion
Team Fairy DUST
HTTP://Dust.Thang.DK/ - DUST514 Fitting Tool based on DUST SDE
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