Ryan Noir
Chatelain Rapid Response
Gallente Federation
19
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Posted - 2014.05.05 05:42:00 -
[1] - Quote
The larger concern here is time-management of development resources. You essentially have a half finished game on a console that is being phased out, you have features worked out for said game, BUT you are implementing them on a new platform, and you have a community both in EVE and Dust who are tired of beta-testing.
So here is how I see the issue, you have at least half (I assume) of Dust Devs working with project Legion. This presents a real problem in terms of development, Dust is already in a pretty rough state, it needs the features you are wanting to put on PC in order to maintain the player base. With that being said, Legion is still too early in the development stage to really offer an outlet for this game. So you have this span of time between now and Legion beta testing that Dust will receive minimal updates. This of course would not be acceptable in EVE, why do you expect it to be acceptable here?
The public apology needs to happen...bottom line. One was issued in Incarna for CCP's lack of communication and connection to the eve community which resulted in features not wanted, only this resulted in pushing your players away via an improper way of communicating. The timing of the announcement is horrible, yes it took place when the most people could be reached at one time; however, it was at the end of the week, CCP would not be back to work until Monday thus leaving a good 2 days of waiting.
Which brings us to problem three, Dust has been a working promise to EVE players since around what...2008? When it finally does get released, they are pissed that its only PS3 and Dust players are pissed that the last two years have effectively amounted to nothing but a waste of time. Thus Legion needs to be cautious in its beta phase and how long that last as well as the shape of the game entering it.
I would suggest one thing however, instead of focusing on working legion into the PC, take that and apply it toward Dust, assure the PS3 community that you are committed to the product by ensuring you will strongly look into deploying this to PS4. Fix the issues with Dust first, Legion isn't in a deployment state yet, so no need to rush getting that work done. Keep at least a good 80% of the dust team working on Dust and not Legion, in between major updates you can work on Legion. There needs to be an assurance that you will continue to provide a huge majority of dust resources to working on that game not project legion.
I think you will find that if you can solve some of these issues on Dust, you can develop Legion at an increased rate. What I think has happened is a lot of the sandbox type of features you were hoping to put on PS3 just aren't working well, so you have explored trying it on PC. However, you should take what you have learned from that and reapply it back to PS3/PS4. When you have given all of these features to Dust and solidified its future on PS4, you can then start to bleed off some dev resources toward Legion. Prioritizing is key, you need to focus on Dust and PS3/PS4 before moving on.
Finally for the love of God, stop miss-communication. You ran a sell on boosters prior to fanfest, you ensured last year a 10 year road map for EVE and that Dust will join it but then was unclear this week, and you re-purposed a Dust keynote to talk about a PC game. All of these are a recipe for disaster. |