So the team just ended up building stuff and throwing it away, over and over again. It's something I saw on Eve and Dust as well - the teams would build a feature, then be told by management to make GÇÿsmall changesGÇÖ which necessitated a full, back-to-square-one rewrite.

Most of the sources spoken to for this piece identified the same problematic CCP manager, who had little vision for what the finished game would look like [...] "I once saw him looking over the shoulder of a programmer at some bit of User Interface the poor guy had hacked together. He straightened up, put fingers to lips and said, GÇÿNo, this isn't it at all. Make it more... psssshhhhGÇÖ He hissed on his ******* fingertips, like the air coming out of a bicycle tire, and then just walked away."

Sources report that, over the nine-year period, the game effectively reached alpha GÇô the stage at which all the major features have been implemented - three times, only for each version to be scrapped.