Goric Rumis wrote:FoxFour, in response to your post, I personally like to think that stories are the best way to communicate what users (in our case players) want. Maybe it's just my storytelling background. I would like to encourage players on the forums to post stories about the kind of gameplay they want to have. I've done it a few times myself here and there and would love to read some of the games other people are playing in their heads.
To give you an idea of just how much we at CCP agree with you here is a bit of insight into our development. This of course not the same for the entire company, not every one and every team works the same way, or even uses the same project management tracking software, but for the most part this stands true.
When we are looking at what to develop next we fill out our roadmap with epic stories. These come from brainstorming and thinking and are generally very much like what was posted in the OP just shorter and more focused. These epics will generally have a title that describes the feature and then a longer description that is a really small short story of what the user (or developer, but we don't have many developer focused epics) should experience.
These epics fill our backlog and every now and then we take the epics from our backlog and populate a roadmap. More of a fuzzy look into the future and a rough idea of us wanting to do A, B, C for this release, D, E, F for the next release. Very rough.
Each of the epics is broken down into many many small stories. Where as an epic would describe something like planetary conquest a story is a very small focused piece of the epic. So in the case of planetary conquest a story might be something like: As a player I can quickly and easily change the SI of a district my corporation owns from the starmap.
The story would then have attached to it more details if needed and some quick criteria about what defines it as done. Most stories are something that should be achievable in a few days, 2 weeks at most but ones that big should really be made smaller.
The idea is that when we start planning we start with this overarching epic story that describes a players experience and we do longer term planning with those. When we get to a release we break the epics down into stories. As we approach every sprint (a 2 week block of time) we break each story down into tasks and assign the tasks to team members.
A couple of really awesome things come from this. It means the whole time we are developing we are thinking about the users experience and those design goals for the feature but it also means are plans are rapidly changing and never really set in stone for very far in the future. What used to be common is spending a whole bunch of time up front planning all the details and tasks of a release, and then spending lots of time during the release changing that plan as new features get added, bugs come up, problems with technology or design come up, all of which require readjusting the grand plan. With this, we just add a new story in the list of stories and prioritize them based on priority. Whatever doesn't get done for release doesn't get done.
Any ways, that was was a long post (most of which you guys probably don't care about) just for me to say: I, and a lot of us at CCP, completely agree with you!
Hope you guys at least find the post slightly interesting.