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Eruditus 920 wrote:

First let me say I respect your opinion and I am sure most it not all of what you stated is valid. I only played Eve for two weeks and my relationship with CCP in general is only a few months old.

Having said that, not once in your post did you reference DUST, which is what we are talking about. What CCP does with Eve is different necessarily than how DUST evolves (cringing as I say that about a game with no future). But I digress.

If the logic you borrow from Eve Online applies to DUST, why did the game ultimately fail? The answers are myriad to be sure, but the onus falls at the feet of CCP and their obvious inability to create a viable FPS.

Ask yourself, if they truly had a handle on what they were doing with DUST, why would there even be a need to make changes based on the opinions of a fraction of the player base? No other software co that I know of does this and for good reason. That is what internal testing is for and is the industry standard for quality control.

Balancing should be done internally via mathematics, achieved easily enough.

I'll leave you with this:

For a game in which the model is one of a very lengthy process for leveling or achieving SP, experience points or whatever, the habit of making radical changes every 3 months to just what that SP garners you smacks of incompetence at best, and corruption at worst for a "free to play" game.


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Maken Tosch DUST University Ivy League 8701	Posted - 2014.05.25 18:27:00 - [1] - Quote Eruditus 920 wrote: ...to dictate stats. I came to DUST in Feb so I am still relatively new to CCP's style of doing business but after 1.8 and now seeing the proposed hotfix coming I am appalled as to how they make decisions and do business. It is obvious that they really struggle with how to design a game if they simply make changes based on which the direction the wind is blowing on the forums. THE FORUMS. Let that sink in for a moment. The forums represent a very small % of the player base. The poster may be a very bright player, or may be 10 years old. But the every poster has a personal agenda. Every poster is biased in one way or another. The game developer is not biased. They make decisions based on what's best for the overall game. This is how it should be. Catering to what players who forum post want is a backward way of designing/evolving any game. It is impossible for a player to offer an unbiased opinion. Our input is based on in game experiences that our intrinsically personal. I worked for a well known software company in Dallas for a few years and this approach would have been laughed out of the meeting room had it ever been broached. I played my two weeks of Eve Online. I am aware of the WoD failure. CCP is scary. You are right that this is an unorthodox approach by CCP and that many companies would rather ignore the request of the players posting on forums just to make a game however they feel like it. But at the same time it is not taboo to crowd source help from the community at all. Eve Online has had its development crowd sources for the better part of 11 years straight and up until now has become the only MMO in the market to have a steady rise in subscriptions in a market where free-to-play is dominating despite its low subscription numbers when compared to WoW's high subscription numbers but wild fluctuations of growth and decline. Eve has become more and more vibrant in terms of better emergent game play and balancing during those 11 years and it's all because CCP listened to the players. Now, in a typical game forum you are right that those forums are usually filled with selfish players who have no clue what they're asking for nor understand the ramifications of what they're asking for. But the Eve Online forum is not that typical game forum. Eve Online is a highly-niche game that attracts intelligent players a lot of which tend to be accountants, economists, real-world day traders, actual politicians (I'm not kidding here), engineers, statisticians and mathematicians. It's complex economics and player-generated social structures is also what attracts the attention of universities around the world who are eager to study the treasure trove of social science there in Eve Online. It is also the topic of economic and social discussion in several colleges. But again, you are right that players often can't be trusted even if they are grown ups with engineering degrees, experience in real-world market trading, etc. But if you stop and think about it, you will see that that is why CCP instituted the Council of Stellar Management while at the same time hiring their own economic professionals to keep tabs on certain things while also hiring seasoned MMO developers from companies like DICE and others. CCP is also the final word on what can and cannot go in based on these things. So the players on the Eve forums don't really have 100% control over what gets changed in the game because there are so many factors being taken into account. Most of which are unseen factors that none of us players know about for good reason. So it's more of a 50-60% control while the remaining 50-40% is every other factor (both seen and unseen) at play here. Ok, so maybe that percentage figure is an exaggeration but that if you look at how Eve has developed over these 11 years you start to feel that this might be the case. So far, it's been working and Eve Online has become a vibrant MMO that is already competing with the likes of Guild Wars and WoW. So as long as CCP continues to be careful as they should be in Eve and apply that methodology to Legion, things will be ok even if CCP continues to crowd source help from the forums. <--- Playing Eve Online since 2008. On Twitter: @HilmarVeigar #greenlightlegion #dust514 players are waiting.
Maken Tosch DUST University Ivy League 8703	Posted - 2014.05.25 23:26:00 - [2] - Quote Eruditus 920 wrote: First let me say I respect your opinion and I am sure most it not all of what you stated is valid. I only played Eve for two weeks and my relationship with CCP in general is only a few months old. Having said that, not once in your post did you reference DUST, which is what we are talking about. What CCP does with Eve is different necessarily than how DUST evolves (cringing as I say that about a game with no future). But I digress. If the logic you borrow from Eve Online applies to DUST, why did the game ultimately fail? The answers are myriad to be sure, but the onus falls at the feet of CCP and their obvious inability to create a viable FPS. Ask yourself, if they truly had a handle on what they were doing with DUST, why would there even be a need to make changes based on the opinions of a fraction of the player base? No other software co that I know of does this and for good reason. That is what internal testing is for and is the industry standard for quality control. Balancing should be done internally via mathematics, achieved easily enough. I'll leave you with this: For a game in which the model is one of a very lengthy process for leveling or achieving SP, experience points or whatever, the habit of making radical changes every 3 months to just what that SP garners you smacks of incompetence at best, and corruption at worst for a "free to play" game. Thanks for respecting my opinion as I will with yours. Moving on. That said, what I was pointing out in the post is that the methodology used in Eve Online "should" have been applied to Dust. But it didn't. To me, the principle culprit is that CCP Shanghai and CCP Reykjavik were (at the time) operating under two completely different formats or methodologies. The Reykjavik format just wasn't translating well or at all into the Shanghai and thus management of the development of Dust was suffering. By the time Reykjavik realized what was wrong and tried to fix it. The old Executive Producer got replaced by CCP Rouge, management had to spend the majority of their time fixing up the mess left behind by Uprising 1.0 when they should have got it right the first time, etc. In the end, it was too late for Dust. Development suffered too many delays in meaningful content and the PS3 was nearing closer and closer to being irrelevant before Dust had any chance to reinvigorate it. On top of that, Sony's QA process took too long and was beginning to be too costly for CCP especially with all the pressure from the community to move it to the PS4. As a result, Project Legion was announced and the PC will be handling it from there. Obviously, as of right now, this is CCP's last chance. Now that Project Legion is out of the bag and everyone knows about it and since it's going to be on the PC where it can finally blossom more quickly without all the red tape and middlemen that Sony has, Legion is CCP's last chance to finally apply the Eve methodology. They should have done it sooner with Dust, but it's too late now. All we can do from this point on is hope Legion doesn't suffer the same fate. Now, if you noticed, most of us give somewhat generalized feedback and suggestions. If we give out suggestions for stats, we usually leave a disclaimer saying that these numbers are just ball park estimates and that we'll leave it up to CCP to decide what those figures will be. After all, CCP has access to stats that we can't see and thus all we can do is just nudge CCP in the general direction of where we want them to take while still allowing CCP to make their own decisions. As for me focusing a lot on the Eve Online example I setup earlier in my last post, that was just to give you an idea on how it's possible to make a great game with player-provided feedback as long as you make sure that bad ideas don't get implemented while the good ideas get listened to. On Twitter: @HilmarVeigar #greenlightlegion #dust514 players are waiting.