Fensfield said:
Sorry, but I'm not seeing how this rant has anything to do with my saying
Fensfield said:
it was my understanding ... that Tyrannis made some small improvements [to the lag situation], albeit situational and only very minor
or at least didn't make it worse than it has been since Dominion hit.
Also important to understanding the situation is the interview with CSM that was recently published, wherein CSM addressed the '18 months' concern. But again, this comes back to my 'clarity, not silence, is the issue' point.
Oh, you must have understood, that was not a rant, but a summary of observations visible in feedback threads across community sites, but most importantly from the CSM communications and CCP communications.
Either way, Tyrannis did not improve on lag. On the contrary, the expansion itself marked a noticable decline in performance of the cluster, noticable in PVP independant of scale, but also of market mechanisms, contract listing updates, evemail functionality, etcetera. To give an example, one of the commonly heard comments of players appreciating EVE Gate is that EVE Gate provides access to the in game mail, which since Tyrannis is suffering in performance. To the point of simply not being able to use the in game mail functionality for days on end.
I agree silence is not the issue. But neither is clarity. CCP have made abundantly clear where they place their value markers in their development and commercial focus, their allocations of resources, product priorities and timelines, players have made themselves abundantly clear in their feedback - interestingly both on the EVE community forums as on a plaethora of other community sites.
It's a communication issue. Or, you could argue that it is a language problem, where one side speaks a different language and places value on different information then the other side.
Other things apply as well. Do not forget how for years expansions have been cut into pieces, were delivered solely partially, and always with great marketing and massive exposure and great promises of iterating on partial deployments. Unfortunately, this is where overexposure and something akin to a law of diminishing returns comes into play. The type of players EVE attracts and who grow with the product and stick with it, they have never seen CCP deliver a single iteration on any feature. Ever. With a customer base like EVE, something which is one of the biggest strengths of the product because of the sandbox concept and the synergy of building on top of trends and events set by players, this becomes a bit of a stretch. And that is where the bottleneck is really.
It certainly does not help to subsequently see more "marketing", or ventures like hiring PRC social media to track & influence social media exposure & perception of the product. On the contrary. Keep in mind here that because so many aspects of EVE feature sets are only present partially, are structurally limited or segregated, or simply not working as intended by CCP, that it takes players roughly an Expansion or two to punch through the marketing.
But this is where it gets so interesting. In spite of that, players stick with it, for far longer then what I've seen in many other MMO's. It's as if they want to believe because they have faith. The current outcries can be seen to originate in pretty much every niche of the game, from virtual bankers to industrialists who go made because of clickfests, to casual pvp players participating in Faction Warfare which CCP has classed as "not of interest in spite of awareness of broken immersion", to hardcore pvp'ers in 0.0 why scratch behind their ears when they see CCP's resident economist not even make the effort to investigate relations in account numbers and retention of those of their niche and their supporting accounts in other game niches.
Players do not mind CCP expanding the IP established by EVE. On the contrary. But to players it is clear that CCP is somewhat suffering from cubicle syndrome at the top. While developers communicate clearly and quite frequently, it is visible that on a decision level most processes either change direction in spite of the available information, kneejerk to counterproductive implementation changes, or are simply not prioritied - regardless of how suitable CCP's development system of Agile/Scrum is to deliver quality, ahead of time.
The CSM is most interesting in these regards. But, the information their meetings with CCP compiled through those sessions was not really new information. It just was not as clear until the delivery of those meeting minutes.
But, once again it comes back to communication. Players grumbled, were frustrated a bit, but alright we want to believe so on average while people were restless they gave it more or less the benefit of the doubt. What followed was a discussion process where it became clear that communication would have to follow to provide some clarity. What followed however, was a devblog from the new "boss" of the product, who in as little as a single page managed to demonstrate beyond a doubt that on a decision level AND an immersion level of the product, CCP was simply not communicating with themselves. His statements and comments, shocked players to the core. More so even then Nathan's comments, because while those signalled a gap in language and values, they showed that he still had the emotional link with EVE. Zulupark however coldly demonstrated a complete unawareness and failing in communication. Adding historic context to that on Zulupark and prevous historic product processes, players more or less said "now that does it. Later in the feedback thread on that devblog, CCP's CEO managed to make it worse, by showing up with what essentially was a marketing statement, further removing foundation beneath the trust and faith EVE players develop through their immersion.
As I said, it is a shame. EVE was awesome, suffered from growing pains, but right when it's time to stop for a moment and recover a bit (to look at what really grows loyal subscribers who push the game and commercial growth of EVE) CCP engaged in pushing through on product ventures which had long looked as ending up as vapourware. Players understand the business decisions involved, but they are trying to make clear to CCP that the metrics CCP have demonstrated to rely on is only a portion of what really pushes the IP. Unfortunately, because previous technology paths and ventures for Dust 514 and Incarna failed, it means that CCP has to make a major commitment to both these ventures, even without all positions filled, to make up for lost time ... and resource allocations.
Combined with the current state of the product EVE, the visible gaps in communication by CCP (and by result as well as visibility also inside CCP), and CCP's clarity on what they place value on, players are simply raising a red flag. They want to believe, but not unconditionally.
