"Press X to screw team"

Not going to lie, I like the idea of it.

Over all though we are a long way away but this is the kind of thing we are working towards.

Take a look at any of the many presentations done about DUST and I think you will see we have the ambition and desire to do this kind of crazy stuff.

Right now you can see, hopefully, that we are making good progress towards this objective as well. Small steps, but small and pointed steps.

Oh we probably have things to say about this at Fanfest as well by the way. We like talking about things at Fanfest.

Like what we are looking at after uprising. That will be awesome.

Like... wait to be clear I don't know what else is being presented at Fanfest but CCP as a company sure does like to talk about crazy future stuff. No surprise there.

However all that being said, our targets are always changing. We know we want to do lots of crazy stuff, and while working towards one thing we take experiences and adapt our plans with the knew ideas and knowledge.

Everyone should know though how much the discussion right here on the forums, in person at Fanfest, and all the other communication methods we have, influence where we go and what we do next.

You should be sure to grab the HD stream package and make sure you set aside time to watch the live stream if you are not going to be at Fanfest itself.

! this took me way to long, but considering how late it is I think it is acceptable. You did say you can't be trolled. Best of luck with that.

You should be sure to grab the HD stream package and make sure you set aside time to watch the live stream if you are not going to be at Fanfest itself.

so, you're basically saying CCP is crazy as a whole?

thaT'S BEEN KNOWN SINCE 2003

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.

You should be sure to grab the HD stream package and make sure you set aside time to watch the live stream if you are not going to be at Fanfest itself.

I think the most important thing about the meta-game thing, is that it shouldn't be a built-in game design feature. "Press X to screw team". Screwing over your allies should be a calculated process that requires skill and guile.

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.

Foxfour that sounds like a really smart way of doing things so a noticed from the terminology u guys run a scrum style development process.

Edit English fail but u get the idea. Total nerd love hearing about how these things are pulled together just wished I lived in Iceland :-P:-P

CCP Nullabor and I were just discussing this last night actually. We were actually discussing the transferring of districts for planetary conquest and how in the future if we do it how we should do it.

How safe should it be in the actual transfer?
How easily could this feature be used to give away all a corporations districts by a rouge director?

CCP Nullabor and I were just discussing this last night actually. We were actually discussing the transferring of districts for planetary conquest and how in the future if we do it how we should do it.

How safe should it be in the actual transfer?
How easily could this feature be used to give away all a corporations districts by a rouge director?

Things like that. We don't want to make it perfectly safe, they should kind of be some risk may. Some trust required during the trade. But how far do we go? It is a long ways off, but yes, we agree and discuss that kind of thing all the time!

You are indeed correct! :D

You are indeed correct! :D

You crazy hippies and your agile processes. Real men use waterfall, take ten times longer to accomplish half as much and run over budget and over time.

....intresting loads up CV :-).

Last question of me mining your internal working lol. Does that mean then u have lots of small teams that get assigned a "story" and u all come together at release point and see what everyones got :-)

Man, my speculative fiction didn't get nearly this much love. I guess I'm just bad at it.

too much computer jargon, gah!

i assume i am missing out on a ton of stuff by not being in these "IRC's"