Leither Yiltron
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
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Posted - 2013.02.13 23:16:00 -
[1] - Quote
This post captures the state of Dust's development really well. If I have the luxury, I'd like to boil the content down to these two issues:
(1) Expectation management of the beta player base has been exceedingly poor.
(2) Developmental progress is, or should be, getting pulled in about three different macro directions right now, and has been for quite a long time.
Point (1): We've been promised the world by CCP's development team once, twice, ..., more times than you can count. By this point, most of Dust's veterans have reached the level of resignation that Nova details in his original post. We just don't believe anything that isn't cold, hard facts about Dust. Day after day we see threads go through the forums. "Can't wait until MTAC's," "When are fighter jets coming?," etc. These are symptomatic of a larger problem in how information is released to the Dust community, in that we're given almost nothing in terms of cold, hard facts about what our expectations for Dust should be in even such a short time frame as the next year.
Apparently the CSM know more about the overarching development schedule for Dust than does anyone in the Dust community. The divide in knowledge here is widened by the fact that we still haven't seen the CSM Minutes from the Dust 514 meetings that were held 2 EFFING MONTHS AGO.
All we're left with here in the community is our own speculation and almost supernatural attempts to divine what is actually on the table from CCP's own official releases. Look at it this way- our best information about the next upcoming Dust build wasn't released in a dev blog, it was released in an interview for some Sony podcast or whatever. What?
This issue is somewhat separate from point (2) to follow, but it's an area that desperately needs reevaluation. Please just tell us more, and more things that are factual. The Eve side teams have been doing a spanking nice job of this.
Point (2): There are three areas of development that Dust needs to consult to keep in business:
a. High end content - New weapons, new maps, additional game modes. In general, the stuff that a person who hasn't played the game can look at and say: "That's a feature."
b. Metagaming content - Although a lot of this overlaps with part (a), the metagaming content is the pieces of Dust that allow organization of large groups of players into a body that has the ability to focus on macro-level objectives. This includes stuff like a player market, even though the player market would also be a high end content piece.
c. Core content - The basic mechanics of the game and its backend.
These three areas are the ones that are essential to Dust at the moment. Huge corporations and alliances, both Dust and Eve-centric, are waiting with baited breath on the metagaming elements. The entire audience of the game has an intrinsic need for good core content. The high-end content appeals to different audiences, but it's what keeps people playing your game.
Now Eve's and Dust's whole model is based on the idea that you don't need as much high-end content as long as you can provide enough that's compatible with your metagaming content to let PLAYERS be your content. The thing about Dust right now is that we have very little of (a), (b), and as Nova points out in his original post, (c) hasn't seen that much development even though practically the past year has been devoted to it.
We need a balance, and right now we just haven't seen it. On top of that, Nova has a point. The ONE THING CCP has been concentrating on the last 12ish months still has kinks. That's understandable, if they can turn around and say: "Guys, it's not perfect, but we have enough to start moving forward with a balanced design table while completing the backend polishing necessary to make the game successful." And then they do that. Right now though, we've made it through months and months of pretty much a static gameplay experience. It's about time to freshen it up, and it's about time to step it up with a balanced approach. |