DUST Search - An Open letter to CCP : A year in summary

Quoting for the lazy : You're welcome wrote:

EDIT: An addendum about the communication issues. This is really a tricky thing to comment on. To be completely honest, it does seem like CCP is trying hard to listen to the community. The problem is, they listen to us too much but never seem to hear what we are saying. They've allowed player complaints to dictate the direction of the game to the point where they've never really focused on their own plans, or that's the way it seemed. Best example : People said grouping was important. Instead of just giving us squads to let us play with four of our friends, they rushed to give us corporations with incomplete functionality fairly earlier on than they planned... instead of working on the core gameplay. Grouping and corps definitely improved the social aspects of the game which was a much needed breath of life at that point, but it still didn't change the fact that all it really added was that you could play (what still remains) a barebones game with your couple hundred closest friends four at a time.

CCP has a pretty awesome plan for the long term with dust. Anyone who's read anything about Dust from CCP can see that. The problem here is... They don't seem to actually have anything for the short term, or it changes wildly with every build. There is a serious lack of direction in making those plans actually happen. They don't seem to know what to focus on, so the bouncing from plan to plan ends up hindering development overall. CCP does need to listen to its community, but they need to pick and choose what they listen to more carefully. They need to not let players completely change their plans except in the more dire of circumstances. Make a plan. Stick with it. Make minor adjustments as needed. CCP can afford to go more free-form after all the necessary and basic features are in the game. Right now though, the absolute best thing CCP can do is to just focus on the core experience. We've had months of stability and backend changes. Now it's time to make the frontend shine. (And I'm not talking about graphics) That said... CCP can't get tunnel vision. I know that sounds like a mixed message, but that's been the problem this entire development cycle. They get so caught up working on fixes that they seemingly stop working on newer stuff. No matter what, there always needs to be tangible forward progress.

There's just really not much excuse for the lack of delivery on even the most basic of stated plans so far. If they honestly can't focus on doing current content fixes along with the addition of new content... They need to hire more people for these teams to accommodate that. Plain and simple. The current pace of development has been languid at best. As much as I love the CCP guys I've had the chance to talk to.. I have to believe they can do better.


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Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.13 06:57:00 - [1] - Quote Howdy. The first thing to note... While this is a long post it is not intended to be a rant. It is feedback meant to be constructive. Most of you know me, or have some idea of who I am and what I do around here. For those that don't, I'll introduce myself briefly. Like a lot of people, I've been following dust intently since it was first announced back in 2009. I've been a part of the actual beta for very close to a full year now. For about half that time, I've been writing for Dust514.org, dust514base.com and co-hosting CAST514 with Grideris. I currently own the #dust514 channel on irc.coldfront.net which is where most dust fans hang out. I've been as active as I can within the community, and interact with (read: harass) developers on a semi-regular basis. I've mingled and murdered with most of the big name corps and a lot of smaller ones. It's been something of a goal of mine to squad with pretty much everyone I can, at least once. But, I digress. The point of the introduction, is to add a sense of gravity to this letter. Very few (if anyone) can say they have been more active or contributed more to the community than I have. It'd be fairly safe to say I am probably one of the biggest (or at least the most prominent) Dust Fanboys out there. Few have defended CCP over the last year as much as I have, or remained as positive and hopeful. I write this though, with a heavy heart. In the past, I expressed similar concerns privately via email not wanting to start a threadnaught. However, I am no longer convinced my upbeat attitude will get through to CCP, and the only course forward is tough love and a more public approach. A lot of this has been said before, but I'm hoping that because it's me saying it.. CCP will take an extra ear and hopefully get their butts in gear. To put it as bluntly as possible : Dust will never be a great game if things progress as they have been so far. CCP needs to seriously step up their game, or Dust will never be the amazing game they want it to be. To clarify : I am not saying dust is going to fail. I am saying that Dust does not and probably will not have that 'timeless' quality that makes a FPS game great enough to have a huge chunk of players till playing it a decade later. This is a very hard thing to do, and there's really only been a dozen, maybe two dozen or so FPS games that really stood out like that over the years. There's no question Dust will be successful and always have a decently sized following just because of the Eve players who are interested in FPS games. Being free doesn't hurt either. CCP has made history by linking the two games together... but the big question is and always has been 'Now what?' "Now What?" has been the question we've been asking CCP for almost three years. Every time we get an answer, the plan dazzles and amazes those able to live in the same imagination land as CCP when they get that twinkle in their eye. Yet... CCP has been coming notoriously short when it comes to the actual delivery part of those plans. When I look at the past year of beta, I've heard lots of great plans and cool stuff from the Devs, but yet looking at the actual progress of the game... I'm actually becoming very worried. We've gotten shinier textures, a couple new guns, and a new map or two... but that's pretty much it. In almost a year of beta, they added the mass driver and laser rifle, black ops tanks, and I think it was 3 maps. Throw in a about 5-6 variants of modules too I guess. They've actually removed more guns and modules for 'adjustments' than they put in by like twice the amount, though! They added corporation/squad support and orbital strikes. Dropship handling was changed a bit. The last two builds/expansions (I'm gonna call them builds from here on) were pretty much entirely focused on fixing stability and added almost nothing to actual game play. This is a huge core of the problem. The last few builds were necessary to make things more playable, but the foundation of the game (The actual gun play and shooting aspects) is still severely lacking and has not been given nearly as much attention as it should have gotten. Moving forward, if this is not a high priority... any grand future plans will be build on a poor foundation and the game overall will suffer immensely. I'm hesitant to bring up Incarna because it's too easy and convenient to say "Hey CCP... Incarna (blah blah something something)" and use it to bully them about pretty much any subject with it. But for the last 3-5 months, They have spent very little (noticeable) time on the actual shooting part of this FPS game. To me, that is a problem. A -very- big problem. We've had about 2-3 incarna-esque builds in a row now and most of the bigger supporters in the community said nothing of it because we had heard the bigger plans and were always looking over the hill to the greener pastures that lay ahead. Only... when we got there they weren't so green. Personally, I can't stand by and let this continue without speaking out. I may be a fanboy, but I'm perfectly capable of calling CCP out on their **** when they need to be. Point being.. In pretty more than a year of beta almost all of the main changes have been on the backend and had very little to do with actual gameplay itself. Some of it is a problem with managing the expectations of the players. Is CCP really at fault there? Hard to say. One thing is for sure though... CCP has handled expectation management pretty poorly. While I personally take any future plans I hear from them with a grain of salt and assume it's just something on the table, there's many others in the community that will just rush to post any tiny tidbit they hear, filling in any blanks with speculation of their own and posting it as irrefutable fact. While the bigger problem there is (mostly well intentioned) players, CCP never stepping in to debunk these wild speculations certainly does not help.
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.13 06:57:00 - [2] - Quote Though, moving back to my earlier point : What is there that will make dust stand out and make it great? I ask this openly, knowing full well at least some of the plans for the nearish and far future. At least currently? We have nothing. The guns & suits are generic, with very little to actually differentiate them. The only suit that is really 'special' is the heavy, because it is the only suit that can rock heavy weapons. The scout suit is essentially just a faster, weaker assault suit, and the logistics suit is essentially just a slower, more versatile assault. None of these suits really do anything special that the other suits can't. It's just a matter of one being marginally more useful in like 1/10 situations than another suit. To be frank, it's kind of dull. None of the suits or vehicles really do anything special. None of them have any sort of 'Wow' factor. Bonuses and abilities such have been talked about.. but I'm trying to avoid futuretalk and focus on what we have now. The current 'sidegrades' which we were told would be expanded on, have instead been mostly flattened so that there is very little difference between tiers & versions. The fitting system really isn't that different from loadout editing in other FPS games. Pretty much the only 'unique' spin that Dust has going for it right now compared to most FPS games is the fact you need to buy your own equipment. I don't count OB's because they are essentially a killstreak air strike, something mirrored in other games as well. The only thing special about OB's is that they can come from Eve which is honestly not very exciting (In current form) Then we have the game modes: Ambush and skirmish 2.0, with ambush being your stock TDM. A staple in any FPS game, there's really not much to criticize here other than the spawn system and most of the maps either being way too large or way too small. But when we talk about skirmish 2.0, the people who remember the original version from 8+ months ago pretty much unanimously want it back. There was an actual sense of attacking/defending, but instead of working to resolve the imbalances... they completely revamped the game mode into something totally different. Skirmish 2.0 could've easily been a completely different game mode, and then we'd have much more variety than we had now. And yet... we're stuck wondering what could've been and feeling nostalgic over the 'good old days'. It's also worth mentioning the canyon tile set/layout. This vanished, but people who gave feedback about the original craterlake layout again almost unanimously loved the canyon style and preferred it to the redline fishbowl mountains every other current map is plagued with. A much loved game mode was killed because it was too easy to attack. A balance issue killed skirmish 1.0 when a fix to defence relays would've been just as good. That brings me to balance as a whole. In this regard, there has been almost zero (if any) forward progress in almost a year of playing the beta. It's been a largely illogical teeter-totter of a couple things being the only things worth using, then becoming worthless, then becoming godly again or staying worthless. A few things have remained far too good and been almost completely unchanged for almost a year. Shotguns, and the incredibly broken 450% headshot modifier on scrambler pistols for instance. From my chatting with people on the dev teams, there really isn't anyone specifically in charge of balancing. If there is any point I could stress enough in this letter, it is that this needs to change. I'm not going to argue this a lot. The history of the beta and the long series of mostly confusing over-nerfs (Or lack of nerfs) or nerfs in completely wrong areas leaving something still far too strong speaks entirely for itself. Balance is a tricky thing, though. For this, CCP has to rely a lot on the community to playtest and provide feedback. However... even more daunting than the task of balancing, is filtering through the trash on the forums and finding the good/useful feedback. It is here that one of the biggest communication gaps emerges. Probably the best example I can give you : We were talking to CCP Blam, one of the main dudes in charge of vehicle related stuff. He was (seemingly) completely unaware of the hilariously broken vehicle collision damage that had emerged like two builds ago, but got incredibly worse with this latest build. There are many more examples of similar conversations with devs where they go "Really, that happens!?" that draw serious questions to if any of them actually play the builds once they are released. If they do play with us on current builds, they are either (seemingly) unwilling or unable to recognize faults in their own work, which is distressing and worrisome in itself.
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.13 06:57:00 - [3] - Quote The communication gap has been something multiple people have spoken out and asked desperately for measures to improve things. To be as blunt as possible : The information that needs to be getting to the dev teams in most cases (apparently) never reaches them, and when it does it lacks proper context so they don't really know what to do with it. So they just slap-dash something together and in nearly every circumstance to date... it just makes things worse. The weekly updates threads just reinforce this, The community team is definitely reading the forums and passing some things along... but it's usually not the right things unless there's a threadnaught(s), or it's unclear what about a specific subject they are passing along, only that they are talking about something. This desperately needs to improve. We as players could do a lot to help them in this regard, if we policed ourselves a bit better and posted much less trash for them to wade through to get to the good stuff. If you have a friend that likes to shitpost, just tell them it's not cool and to cut it out. Peer pressure can be a wonderful thing if used for good! Even then, the community team has probably one of the worst jobs out there in the eyes of most. It falls to them to pick through the trash, and then pass information along to the devs during their weekly meeting. I'd honestly like to blame the junk posts, but the perception is that they're still missing a lot of the legitimate stuff. While none of us know what's going on in these meetings... one can't help but feel that important stuff is being overlooked. (See earlier example with CCP Blam) EDIT: An addendum about the communication issues. This is really a tricky thing to comment on. To be completely honest, it does seem like CCP is trying hard to listen to the community. The problem is, they listen to us too much but never seem to hear what we are saying. They've allowed player complaints to dictate the direction of the game to the point where they've never really focused on their own plans, or that's the way it seemed. Best example : People said grouping was important. Instead of just giving us squads to let us play with four of our friends, they rushed to give us corporations with incomplete functionality fairly earlier on than they planned... instead of working on the core gameplay. Grouping and corps definitely improved the social aspects of the game which was a much needed breath of life at that point, but it still didn't change the fact that all it really added was that you could play (what still remains) a barebones game with your couple hundred closest friends four at a time. CCP has a pretty awesome plan for the long term with dust. Anyone who's read anything about Dust from CCP can see that. The problem here is... They don't seem to actually have anything for the short term, or it changes wildly with every build. There is a serious lack of direction in making those plans actually happen. They don't seem to know what to focus on, so the bouncing from plan to plan ends up hindering development overall. CCP does need to listen to its community, but they need to pick and choose what they listen to more carefully. They need to not let players completely change their plans except in the more dire of circumstances. Make a plan. Stick with it. Make minor adjustments as needed. CCP can afford to go more free-form after all the necessary and basic features are in the game. Right now though, the absolute best thing CCP can do is to just focus on the core experience. We've had months of stability and backend changes. Now it's time to make the frontend shine. (And I'm not talking about graphics) That said... CCP can't get tunnel vision. I know that sounds like a mixed message, but that's been the problem this entire development cycle. They get so caught up working on fixes that they seemingly stop working on newer stuff. No matter what, there always needs to be tangible forward progress. There's just really not much excuse for the lack of delivery on even the most basic of stated plans so far. If they honestly can't focus on doing current content fixes along with the addition of new content... They need to hire more people for these teams to accommodate that. Plain and simple. The current pace of development has been languid at best. As much as I love the CCP guys I've had the chance to talk to.. I have to believe they can do better. I don't want to make this seem like I'm rambling, So I'll cut this short. Anyone who's been a regular on the forums has probably noticed my activity has severely dropped. I'm not the only one, either. The goodposters are dwindling. Despite being an avid supporter of Dust... I find myself becoming less willing to help a company that won't help itself. I see other people making amazing posts and feedback which seems to fall on deaf ears, as it seems many of my own attempts do. Though admittedly I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if they simply patronized me and nodded their heads every time I approach them, because of how much I prod and harass them. TL:DR (Don't be a slacker, read it) Lovingly, Nova Knife
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.13 07:21:00 - [4] - Quote Sylvana Nightwind wrote: Ah another build fatigue post. Well, what can you do? You can either spit at ccp for not delivering new content to the game/fixing stuff quicker or deal with it and just wait :D If they say that dust office is like 3x smaller than eve office I kinda understand how they don't really have that many resources to push stuff forward harder like in eve. This is not a build fatigue post. This is a post drawing attention to the fact that there has been a pretty small amount of tangible progress as far as content goes in almost an entire year of development, coming from someone who has seen that entire period go by pretty unremarkably. This is a post drawing attention to the fact that balance as a whole has gotten much worse over the course of a year, You know, stuff like that.
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.14 02:27:00 - [5] - Quote Added some more stuff to the third post : Quoting for the lazy : You're welcome wrote: EDIT: An addendum about the communication issues. This is really a tricky thing to comment on. To be completely honest, it does seem like CCP is trying hard to listen to the community. The problem is, they listen to us too much but never seem to hear what we are saying. They've allowed player complaints to dictate the direction of the game to the point where they've never really focused on their own plans, or that's the way it seemed. Best example : People said grouping was important. Instead of just giving us squads to let us play with four of our friends, they rushed to give us corporations with incomplete functionality fairly earlier on than they planned... instead of working on the core gameplay. Grouping and corps definitely improved the social aspects of the game which was a much needed breath of life at that point, but it still didn't change the fact that all it really added was that you could play (what still remains) a barebones game with your couple hundred closest friends four at a time. CCP has a pretty awesome plan for the long term with dust. Anyone who's read anything about Dust from CCP can see that. The problem here is... They don't seem to actually have anything for the short term, or it changes wildly with every build. There is a serious lack of direction in making those plans actually happen. They don't seem to know what to focus on, so the bouncing from plan to plan ends up hindering development overall. CCP does need to listen to its community, but they need to pick and choose what they listen to more carefully. They need to not let players completely change their plans except in the more dire of circumstances. Make a plan. Stick with it. Make minor adjustments as needed. CCP can afford to go more free-form after all the necessary and basic features are in the game. Right now though, the absolute best thing CCP can do is to just focus on the core experience. We've had months of stability and backend changes. Now it's time to make the frontend shine. (And I'm not talking about graphics) That said... CCP can't get tunnel vision. I know that sounds like a mixed message, but that's been the problem this entire development cycle. They get so caught up working on fixes that they seemingly stop working on newer stuff. No matter what, there always needs to be tangible forward progress. There's just really not much excuse for the lack of delivery on even the most basic of stated plans so far. If they honestly can't focus on doing current content fixes along with the addition of new content... They need to hire more people for these teams to accommodate that. Plain and simple. The current pace of development has been languid at best. As much as I love the CCP guys I've had the chance to talk to.. I have to believe they can do better.
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.14 02:33:00 - [6] - Quote KalOfTheRathi wrote: Yay! Nova Knife has criticisms and DUST will fail unless their own personal list of entitlements is implemented. Surprise! No, not surprised at all. TL;DR QQ, Kitten Breath is at it again. Oh look. Someone didn't bother to read past the first paragraph. Surprised? Not really. If you had, you would've seen: Quote: To clarify : I am not saying dust is going to fail. I am saying that Dust does not and probably will not have that 'timeless' quality that makes a FPS game great enough to have a huge chunk of players till playing it a decade later Most of these are not originally my sentiments either, for what it's worth. I am merely stating in a more patient and friendly manner what the forums have been screaming about for months... Because apparently CCP like me, and I honestly hope that this coming from me means that the masses who've been screaming this for months at least get some vindication as a result. I'm sad to see that you couldn't see past your apparent dislike for me to realize this. If you'd like to squad up with me sometime and hash this out, consider olive branch extended.
Nova Knife Seituoda Taskforce Command Caldari State 789	Posted - 2013.02.15 02:01:00 - [7] - Quote RoundEy3 wrote: Think of it like this, this game is meant to work along side another MMO. One which has already been out many years (7+ right?) The timeline for release, development, and new features is going to be far stretched no matter what the damn podcasts say. You don't have to believe me, but keep up all of the naive expectations of insta product if you want. I mentioned earlier it's a free game by choice, and of course someone gives the predicted response of something "that's not an excuse." No, it's not an excuse it's just a fact. The fact being that it doesn't have huge funding. Anyone with some real life experience knows that money makes things happen much faster. So since it's free, and a beta, and only been open beta for a few weeks I'm pretty sure the actual time line for this game is barely touched upon. You say these things like you assume I've got no experience or understanding of the design process, which is incorrect. I've got varying degrees of experience with nearly every aspect of game design except marketing and art. As an outsider... If you looked at the beta build from a year ago and the one we have today, you'd assume maybe 3-4 months or so went by. Maybe 5-6 months at most. No one here (At least, the reasonable people) Expected dust to instantly blossom into something great. No one is saying that in this thread. Dust actually has pretty decent funding, CCP got around 20 million or so (I think that was the number, you can look it up though) to work on Dust. It's not the most well funded, but it's not exactly a poorly funded project either. Dust is definitely a long term game, but that doesn't mean CCP can be excused if they done goofed. The problem with overall progress I bought up in the OP is that CCP's been all over the place so far. They did fixes, then a tiny bit of content, then like seven months of more fixes, without new content being thrown in on the side. Even with Eve, when CCP has a themed patch, they still manage to throw in a bunch of unrelated 'little things' that make the overall experience better. But Seriously? Adding three maps, Two guns, a tank variant, changing dropship and PS move controls slightly, and some shinier visuals, and giving us corps/squads is not something that should take a full year. I'm not saying the game should be finished by now... but the fact that what I just listed is pretty much all we have to show for the last year of development... That is something that worries me greatly. I spent most of that year defending CCP from people saying pretty much what I am saying now. "Wait until next build, you'll love what they have planned!" I'd say. Yet, while those new builds might've been mildly satisfactory at the time, only later did it sink in that they didn't give us like half the things they talked about giving us that build, or it got pushed back for some undisclosed reason. "The Plan" has never really matched what we get. And while I love CCP's plans... I don't like that we never really actually see any of it come to fruition. The majority of the magic of dust is still in some far off dream land, and I'm honestly worried that CCP has no concrete plan for the short term of how to actually get to where they are ready to turn those long term plans into a reality. I want dust to do well. I want it to be great so that it's the favorite shooter of the masses for years to come. But it's never going to happen if CCP keeps this pace. If they don't step it up, even if they introduce changes that make us literally **** gold IRL... It'll be too little too late before long. Dust is always going to have a following. I said this in my OP. I'm one of the people that will pretty much always play no matter what they do, because I love Eve and I love CCP. But not everyone is a fanboy like that. Not everyone is going to stick it through. CCP needs to ask themselves : Do they want a small loyal playerbase who will play pretty much no matter what they ship out, or do they want FPS fans to speak of dust with the same respect and love that they do of the 'greats' of the FPS genre: Counterstrike, Quake, Socom 2, Goldeneye007 for n64... I could go on, but you get the idea. Because honestly the way we've been heading so far... Dust is never going to hit that level.