Until you hear EVE Developers talking about Dust/Legion, there's nothing there. They're the gatekeepers (to resources in and out of Game, Roadmaps and Planning) Not whomever is tasked with making the mechanics of a FPS component (or 0g FlightSim component).

Obviously Dust was to be released alongside/shortly after a successful Incarna component in EVE.Obviously Carbon failed both Dust and EVE (as well as WoD). If those had worked (even a little bit) we might have a different state of affairs.

Beyond OBs there's never been a discussion of shared platforms coming from EVE devs.

I think like a lot of us I saw simple and obvious places for the 2 games to interact: PI.

It would have been simple (conecptually) to have made Dust/Legion maps and assets that used the PI concepts in EVE to produce sockets in Dust that then overlay on their trumpeted procedurally generated terrain. There were only like 16-24 'buildings' that EVE players could place on planets. More than we have in Dust as sockets now, but not many more.

The problems arise when you consider that EVE devs would have to introduce a mechanic into EVE that took something from EVE players. There's never been any EVE devs (of those left) that have spoken on Dust/Legion let alone advocating deeper interaction between the games.

Its pretty clear once you consider mounting direct competition (Elite, Star Citizen) and the last year's worth of messaging from CCP that they intend to make the Legion and Valkyrie components a part of the EVE client, if they can, before those competitors are fully in place.

But until you hear EVE Devs talking about how they want their players interacting (winning *and* losing) with players in another game, there won't be any.

It's CCP's game. Not yours. If you're not satisfied with content they're releasing now, nothing will be good for you. You want your candy and you want it now. Jump up and down harder, hold your breath and bite your arm. Because it'll be here when it's ready. Not when you want it. :)

Maybe if I get you a bottle, you'll be happier, eh?

Maybe if I get you a bottle, you'll be happier, eh?

Can I get one too, I prefer rum, any kind is good.

Also Aeon, the fact that you're still asking the hard questions after months of silence is remarkable. However I doubt the community can see past these short term goals anymore. Most of the people who cared either moved on or stopped.

Can I get one too, I prefer rum, any kind is good.

Also Aeon, the fact that you're still asking the hard questions after months of silence is remarkable. However I doubt the community can see past these short term goals anymore. Most of the people who cared either moved on or stopped.

Also Aeon, the fact that you're still asking the hard questions after months of silence is remarkable. However I doubt the community can see past these short term goals anymore. Most of the people who cared either moved on or stopped.

Haven't read the whole thread yet, but here are some thoughts I've had since 1.9 was announced. What has been announced about Legion so far is the Eve equivalent of mission running and ninja salvaging. The essence of the gameplay is good, but there's not enough meat in that to make a full game from. When it comes down to it people only became interested in Dust because of the tie-in to Eve and the potential for it to become an FPS where the results of a fight had meaning. What we've seen so far from Legion just isn't enough, which is likely why it still hasn't been given the green light as an actual game they're going to release.

So I think what is happening is they're working on ways to give Legion some meat for us to chew on. Which means some kind of significant interaction with Eve. The problem there is that CCP is in the middle of ripping the guts out of the sov system in Eve, which at the moment is kind of terrible. Sov battles in Eve are dramatic and fun to talk about, but actually participating in them is like hitting yourself in the nuts unless you're drunk or high. The problem is that the system is based around structures with timers, which inevitably results in the attempt to stuff as many nerds into one system as possible...which leads to soul crushing amounts of lag and battles that take ages to finish. People wind up setting alarm clocks for this stuff, and it just isn't fun. So what they want to do is change it so that ownership of a system is based on "occupancy". ie: if you're living somewhere, your groups is the sovereign entity.

But how do you define "living somewhere"? What does it look like when another group contests sovereignty? I'm sure CCP and the CSM have some good ideas rolling around, but things are far from worked out. In the meantime Shanghai is trying to figure out how Legion ties into this. This could be why we got 1.9 instead of a simple hotfix, with the delays created by the uncertainty of how major critical parts of Eve are going to work next year some parts of Legion just couldn't be worked on yet. That means developers with free cycles, and since Legion also runs on UE3 they were able to put some lipstick on the pig. In theory it should be possible to reuse at least some of that work in Legion, so it would be time well spent.

Project Legion -can- work without Eve Online by providing unique gameplay features that no-one else does and they had a good start with the PvEvP discussions. We need more of that. Need more info to continue this "dialogue" and to keep "giving them feedback" otherwise, I guess I could just give some feedback on the five seconds of gameplay we saw in John Wick.

Except we've not seen any PvE FPS gameplay at all in either Dust or Legion. I've seen screen shots and renders, but nothing more (please link if anyone has video.)
Consider this thread: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2175598#post2175598
and that it's been locked. (not moved to 'Legion Discussions' assuming it was 'off topic')
how's that for dialogue?

I've created a sister thread with questions for the CPM. Feel free to add your own if they are related.

Aeon,

I didn't vote for CPM. Maybe I should have. Keep up the fight.

Alright. Back from the hospital so I don't have to read this banter on a tiny little phone screen.



Kay, so when I was at Fanfest I started asking a bunch of Eve players how Dust 514 / Project Legion -should- interact with Eve Online and PI was one of the least favored if only because... Well, it's not exactly changing the course of any wars. On the other hand, the Eve guys did make a lot of really cool suggestions that are a lot more feasible, justify the re-use of static maps (like we have now), and a lot more meaningful.

Attacking/Defending Station Services.

Capturing POS towers (something that cannot be done in Eve currently, they can only be destroyed).

Obligatory mention of Titan capturing.

Attacking planet districts as a means of reducing/increasing Sov timers in the system.

But, yanno, that's to do with Legion, not so much this thread. It's only loosely related because we're not able to talk with any devs about these sorts of ideas (despite them saying that they're watching the forums). Just as well, Legion is slated to have any interaction with Eve Online at first so it's kind of a moot point anyway.

As a reminder, we -desperately- need more interaction with Legion devs and I think we should make it a priority to go out to other members within the community to remind them not to be distracted with the short-term shinnies and thing of the larger scheme of things. Reading about it and agreeing with it here does help to some degree but it's only going to take off if everyone else knows about it.

Which begs the question: Is that a subconscious status update? That Legion -is not- a game and Dust 514 is all we have; a dead end that will only continue until the very last die hard fan caps out all of his skills and turns the PS3 off one last time. Who knows? The hilarious irony is that a game company that uses uncertainty in all areas of gameplay as its primary hallmark now has us completely uncertain about part of the franchise's inevitable fate.

I think that answer is "yes" Aeon. I don't think any company, any person, with a good conscious says "we're listening to the fans" and then won't drop a single word on the apparent resource vampire sucking away our franchise's hope at a future.

Frankly, I'd think that CCP has let go quite a substantial number of Shanghai's employees. Right after FanFest, they claimed to be at 60 developers, so y'know 50 at max by this point. Despite some vigorous discussion in this area, my gut feeling is that the amount of resources sunk into 1.9 is about the extent of CCP Shanghai's past exertions on other Uprising 1.X variants. I don't get the impression that the material, no matter how much of it was already half complete, was done by anything less than the majority of their devs.

Altogether? Legion is probably iced, at best in hypersleep. Meanwhile CCP do as much as they can to wring revenue out of Dust, long term be-damned. This isn't a negative, I completely understand the need to make as much money as you can on your product, but as people have mentioned in this thread the changes that have been made really don't help the game's longevity. They'll keep on talking about mid-term and short-term plans for the game, and fulfilling some of them, just to keep the servers alive and to try to recoup some of the game's sunk costs.

Unless CCP tell us otherwise, they're not working on Legion. This silence is just another typical round of betrayal of their fan base by CCP. I would say that it breaks my trust and loyalty, but those have been long spent up on my account. Maybe they'll start working on Legion again when and if Valkyrie releases and replenishes their coffers and their investors' confidence.

Consider this thread: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2175598#post2175598


and that it's been locked. (not moved to 'Legion Discussions' assuming it was 'off topic')


how's that for dialogue?

We're sorry for surprising you with Legion. We promise to keep you, our loyal fans, informed on our progress with Legion...as soon as it is greenlit.

Just read the PSU Exclusive Interview with CCP Rouge and CCP Rattati. Here's what I have to say about that.

First of all I want to mention that I feel as though I've had a moment of clarity recently. Excitement about recent hotfixes and Uprising 1.9 were distracting, absolutely, but after focusing on this recent interview and feelings I've had in the past I'm starting to understand what I'm trying to convey more clearly now.

A while back I asked the question: "What if Legion dies...?". It was a thought provoking exercise toward the community to consider the long-term possibilities of what could happen if not everything went according to plan. CPM weighed in with the "It's still being worked on and you should be worried if we ever stop talking about that". Which is cool, it's a minor reassurance, but it's not the reassurance we needed.

Consider for a moment the rate of communication. At Fanfest 2014, the big surprise was out and it went terrible. Hell, it was dubbed the "Rouge Wedding", just to give you some context as to how bad it was. Understand that even with that in mind, there was no reason any longer to continue long-term silence and for a while we were seeing tidbits from Legion developers about what they were working on... Then, out of no where, dead silence again. Like a stick of chewing gum that had lost it's flavor.

What's bewildering is the continued rhetoric about Legion: "We want to hear your feedback, keep it coming." But as I explained in my thread on Legion Transparency, that dialogue is not a one-sided street and it is physically impossible to give feedback on a game that doesn't exist yet without any sort of information to go off of. The devs are silent, the most recent tidbit of info was a few seconds of gameplay in the John Wick movie, and all eyes are on Dust 514 all of a sudden.

Consider the wording used in the interview when asked the second question: "We were told we weren't going to be getting any major updates. Why the sudden change?" It started as a bug fix and then started growing more and more but the general gist is that very few of the additions in the update weren't trickle down from previous projects (Caldari Production facility) or something that was already desperately needed (NPC market).

The premise here is that the content of the newest update was already there; it just needed optimizing. Sure, some things were added in after talking with the CPM but there wasn't a substantial amount of -DEVELOPMENT- shifted over. Which either means that all focus is still on Legion - truthfully - or development has come to a grinding halt entirely and we're right back to the same routine we were at toward the end of 2013 with CCP Shanghai being dead silent on everything that actually matters while sponging as much as possible to stay afloat.

It's a hypothesis, a theory, if you will.. But there's really no other option here. We're not holding CCP Shanghai hostage when they're the ones with the gun. By all accounts, there is no mid-term or long-term plan. There is only a short-term plan that bounces between hotfixes and balance passes... Which is worrying because eventually we -WILL- run out of things to balance and fix. It was said that before Legion releases, they wanted Dust 514 to be as enjoyable as possible and that there were no plans to end it's current reign... but in the same sense, it has no where to progress without development. This is made even more evident by the considerations I've made in this thread.

The catch here is that if Dust 514 -DOES- start getting development (which looks to be increasingly likely as of late) then it really does meant there is no mid or long-term plan to keep the studio in action. Legion -IS- the only option for CCP Shanghai to have long-term viability and it is imperative that it be done properly; which can only happen at the behest of their current and future consumers. Neither of which are available as long as there is perpetual silence.

What is CCP Shanghai's mid-term and long-term goals for EITHER game?

What part does the community play in it and do we even have a say, or is this just another case of "CCP knows best", perpetuating the endless cycle we've gone through for years?

Where do we go after everything is balanced in Dust 514 - without the excuse that "there is so much more to balance" as it is a fallacy that does not answer the question; a deflection?

EDIT: I've consolidated some questions for the CPM as well in a sister thread here
Scrutinizing the Long-Term: Questions for the CPM.