Paradise Lost

  

Losing your faith is a tough thing regardless of to whom or in what that faith is placed in.  In a shocking blow to my own continued journey through all the turbulent ups and downs of EVE Online, I have found myself suddenly bereft of any and all faith in the developers at this time.

It is not something I expected, nor do I on the other hand feel like it is misplaced or emboldened by my own somewhat muddled personal experiences in the game itself as of late, per diplomacy and tactical combat, or lack thereof, insofar as tainting my outlook in general is concerned.  This is a legitimate plea of concern and bewilderment at some of the design and development decisions made by CCP in the past year or so, maybe longer now that I have the advantage of hindsight.

One thing is certain, in today's world economy, a decent product or service will fail whereas a superb or well orchestrated one will barely skirt by.  I believe that CCP may have fallen a victim of the times in that they are now forced to keep finding newer and newer carrots to propel the deus ex machina ever forward, for fear that any sudden stops along the way, or any scenic routes taken, will forever stall the product out, and lead to the branding going to the wayside as we have seen with other MMOs in recent years that suddenly found themselves lacking further funding or impetus from their shareholders, going from releasing new patches and content frequently, that added much polish and new veneer to the content of the game, to squeaking by with flowery updates few and far between that maintain a thinly veiled skein of new development or redress of old content that needs polish less but makes it appear that a great deal of effort is being put into the game client, i.e. Warhammer Online for literally the last two years since release.

Beyond going into detail ad nauseum I will just summarize what I can see from factual, anecdotal, and personal views and notes.

CCP claimed, and I remember this well, as little as I trudge through every scrap of new developments and rumor mills, CCP clearly claimed about a year or so ago, that they would in no way, shape, or form, take away from the support, development, progression, and funding of the EVE client itself while pursuing such side projects as Incarna and DUST512.

What do we find a year or so later, in the digital age, where multinational companies like BP still think they can buy their way to the top of the Yahoo! search list in order to obfuscate the obvious and wage a PR campaign without anyone noticing, is that CCP have suddenly found themselves in a financial black hole.  Having somehow entrenched a seemingly vast majority of their development resources into side projects, they are now telling us that not only are they not even as of yet fully appraised of the entire scope of the lag issues introduced with Dominion, and shockingly worsened with Tyrannis, even seven months after Dominion was released, but that they are literally incapable at this time of devoting any additional resources to resolving any major ongoing contrivances, conflicts, and issues in the main client itself until after said side projects are fully fleshed out and released.

Wait a second, please.  You should read that again.  Let me quote it so it stands out, I want to make sure you are reading this correctly, as it is paraphrased directly from the CSM summit meeting in Iceland that occurred two weeks ago or so.

Having somehow entrenched a seemingly vast majority of their development resources into side projects, they are now telling us that not only are they not even as of yet fully appraised of the entire scope of the lag issues introduced with Dominion, and shockingly worsened with Tyrannis, even seven months after Dominion was released, but they are incapable at this time of devoting any additional resources to resolving any major ongoing contrivances, conflicts, and issues in the main client itself until after said side projects are fully fleshed out and released.

Did you catch it all this time?  Good.

Now, for an old salt, ingame, like me, this matters more because I have already lost that shiny new rookie feeling where everything is still so mysterious with this sheen of discovery and entertainment to it, I am well versed enough in the game to know pretty much anything that is available to me via the content of the game itself to the point that, not only have I experienced or dabbled in a vast majority of it, but I have found myself bored or generally disinterested in that same majority, save the things I have not experienced to their fullest extent, i.e. 0.0 sovereignty and capital warfare and the extenuating circumstances of political conflict and resolution that reside therein.

In English, 0.0 is the only place for me in the long run, and now it looks like CCP has not only fubar'd 0.0 once but twice in consecutive expansions with reports leaking out on the EVE-O forums that various entire regions are suffering from untold lag issues when there are so very few people in the region as a whole, and engagements in double digit numbers are nearly impossible in certain circumstances.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as well, as each new content patch fixes one thing and breaks another.  Now, I know what most veterans who have stuck with the game for longer than I, a two and a half year span, would say, and that is, welcome to EVE Online, adapt to it and move along like the rest of us.

The only difference now is these issues are accelerating at a shocking pace, and the development company is now so blatantly desperate to create new revenue rather than support existing revenue that they have for all intents and purposes done a full 180 degree spin on their previous stance regarding allotment of time, energy, manpower, and resources, and given their claim that most issues with 0.0 including the sovereignty mechanic itself, which has failed to achieve the so called Emergent Theory they so lauded during its development, will not see a legitimately genuine look-through and appraisal until after Incarna which even now is rumored and slated to be looking at a Summer of '11 release date.  That's just under twelve months from now folks.  Twelve months.

Being a programmer, and being not only THE programmer at my place of business, but nearing on being in some terms a senior programmer after having almost five years under my belt, I have myself seen, bore witness to, and caused whether directly or indirectly the exact same issues that CCP has.  As you start off with a foundation and continue to put frame after frame, room after room, kitchen sink after sink upon that frame, it becomes laden and unwieldy, and it is almost as much work to fix or expand the foundation than it is to just start over entirely.  I have gone through not one, not two, but three entire rewrites of the client application at my place of business for this very reason.  The client became so laden and overburdened with thread and lag issues over time that it was like spaghetti, and the only way for me to address the issues I had built into the application slowly over time with new additions in every nook and cranny of the code, was to start from scratch.  Eventually I settled on an independently operating and modular design, concurrent threaded model that feeds into a single thread at runtime to ensure continuity and flow.  Each module can operate independent of the other, as long as it is provided with some cursory data flow to begin or continue operations, i.e. there is a very clear and unwavering contract between each module as to exactly how they communicate with one another.  I am adamant personally that this new modular design will stand the test of time as each module itself can be rewritten independent of all other modules so long as the contract is upheld.  Obviously this is likely not an option for CCP as the client code for EVE is undoubtedly millions of lines of code whereas I deal with under fifty thousand lines, easily.  The programmer in me is very disturbed by what I know is likely the problem with the EVE client, at least in theory, and maybe this is bad in the sense that, ignorance would be bliss for me, I could logon, play the game, adapt to the lag issues, and be happy as a clam like a lot of people would be, but I cannot.  I like knowing the truth, whether it hurts or not, it is the cost and suffering of enlightenment and I never shy away from that.

Now, for me, like I said, as a veteran, and as a young adult reaching a somewhat poignant age milestone in the next sixteen months, I have the unfortunate circumstance of having to make decisions that an adult would make rather than a youth would make, i.e. I have to think about the short term as it relates to my personal life and goals compared to simply doing whatever I want and entertaining myself in any way I feel.

That is to say, I do not really feel like I have the luxury to wait around another year just for CCP to start addressing all these issues with what to me is the most prominent and entertaining (i.e. retentive) content in the game, especially when it has already been seven months since they turned it upside down and shook the framework loose.

For me this means a few things, that are not as grim as I am undoubtedly making them sound to my friends and companions, but are still a little depressing.  First off, I am going to be scaling back my number of accounts from four to two, as I simply cannot bring myself to drop the subscription on my capital pilot in the rare event these issues see the light of day from CCP in the next six to twelve months well ahead of how they claim this is all going to pan out.  Second off, I am going to be going casual to the point that as of now I am putting the Aurelius Federation in hibernation and/or social mode, with people free to come and go as they please, or to find a suitable alliance in the Northern Coalition for us to all go over to, while I maintain the Aurelius Federation with an alternate character in the interim.  Cmdr GAT is already on the case with this, looking into various alliances here and there, and joining them to discern whether they have the right feel for us as players.  Thirdly, this means that as of now, EVE is no longer my nightly passion more so than it is the longest running MMO that I have until now never taken a real break from whether at the leadership level or at a personal level.  Until now.

It is not something I thought I would find myself doing, though I feared it may come to fruition, but it was really the CSM summit, I do not know if it was just one too many sour grapes from the developers after years of watching them fiddle and tinker with every little thing while leaving broken content broken and introducing new content that is broken, then leaving it in the dust to develop even more new content or if it was just that I have been at it so long in EVE that I am now a little turned off more than a rookie or relatively fresh player would be.  I do know one thing, I am not really so much mad at CCP as I am sorry for them.  I know given the time, energy, resources, and money there would be no limit to what they could do, but to be honest, at this point I think they are in very short supply of any of it.  This is not due to any one thing other than the fact that EVE is a niche game, and that means funding is always a thin line because there is not a surplus of subscription money or cash shop novelties like name, race, gender, server, etc. like there are in other MMOs.

What does this all actually mean, well it means as usual there are a million things racing through my mind, but I am able to put so very few of them to words, though I am sure some would disagree and argue that point, as much as I see the wall of text above me continues to grow.

The basic gist is, I may not be logging on much for weeks and months, and where my own members go, I may simply follow, as I said to a good friend the other day, you can only learn to lead if you learn to first follow, that tired old cliche, that so many in the previous alliance we were in could learn from, but I digress.

The options include:

1. AU-F somehow slips through the door into a very large and stable NC alliance, upon which I can simply be content to participate within an existing framework regardless of the game client's absurd and lingering problems.

2. Cmdr GAT finds a very nice corporation in a very nice alliance within the Northern Coalition and pilots in the AU-F join said corporation, including myself, at which time I just become another member, which is fine.

3. A suitable corporation for the lot of us cannot be found and we unfortunately have to go our separate ways at least ingame, and maintain our friendship without having the corporate flag to share, or maintain a friendship outside the game itself.

4. The people in the AU-F, about half of them if not more, who are already at the same point I am, all hang up their turrets for weeks and months, or for good, out of disillusionment with the direction the game client and developer are going.

I am chagrin to say that the last option is likely to be the course of action for a majority of the amazing friends I have found in EVE and will still continue to maintain said friendship with regardless of whether we are logging into EVE nightly, weekly, monthly, or never again.  I know Devin only really plays because he has friends like us to enjoy the game with, and Cmdr GAT is finding it increasingly hard to believe in the game, Kubert has disappeared now for more than week (although I have no idea why, and it worries me), Kuroda Tsu does not play much at all anymore, though he can thank me for that indirectly as our friendship took a nose dive, Varian Knight and his cadre of RL friends have long since quit entirely and moved onto LOL, Huff has taken a big hit in his personal life and is finding it difficult to entertain himself with the game, Meatay is off having the time of his life during the summer months, Nylint is of course only able to play in spurts as his job is very taxing, Amos is lucky he gets to play as his wife absolutely hates the game, Rayth I think only plays because of the group we have fostered here, much like Devin, and Rasnow, being a new father, does not have 5-6 hours a night to roll around in space and devote to a single enterprise, though he would adore doing so, he has rightly chosen to go more casual to better support his family, which does not mean he will or will not leave EVE, it just means he is or will not be on much.  Sorry to anyone I have not listed, but are in a similar position.

To me, playing this game, was always about seeing if I could amass a veritable army of people like those I have surrounded myself with for the past two and a half years, but the unfortunate part is that there are so few amazingly unique, strong willed, determined, genuine, independent, and intelligent people out there in the EVE subscriber base that these are the few good men (and women on occasion) I have been able to find in the entirety of my time in the game thus far.  And to me, the fact that I found as many as I did over that time span, is a success.

So, without any further pomp and circumstance, I am signing off on what is likely to be the last blog entry here for an indeterminate amount of time, as I scale back my support of the development company CCP and pursue other interests in both RL and in the gaming entertainment industry.

I hope to see you in the plumbs of space on occasion but unless one of the first two options listed above becomes a reality, when I log onto the game may end up being based around training regimens alone, which means weekly or monthly, depending on the circumstances.

Adieu, my friends!