Stay the Course

There recently has been some increased chatter among the EVE community regarding an old subject that has never truly died, yet also is sort of on life support; Walking In Stations.

Originally, Walking In Stations (WIS) was designed to allow capsuleers the ability to walk around inside of a station.  This was a lofty idea when it was originally announced, and CCP put in some significant hours towards the development of WIS.  However, it did not go as smoothly as proposed, and we are left with a half developed product.

Rixx Javix posted to his blog earlier this week and Drackarn posted earlier today.  Both of them address the chatter that is being circulated in regards to possibly resurrecting the development of WIS to be a much larger part of the game.

I have a very similar opinion to both of these pilots.  I agree with Rixx that WIS is in my mind dead.  Yes, I can stand in the station and see a few things, but that has no benefit to me, and there is no improved game play or advantages that WIS provide over the standard functionality of the User Interface.  Drackarn brings up the concepts of possibly some additional areas that your character can actual go to and stand.  The one that jumps out the most would be the corp office/corp hangar concept.  I could see this as being nice, but other than that anything to do with WIS is a bad idea.

Now, on to the serious side of this post.  CCP Development and the change in the development cycle has been a breath of fresh air.  Development is now coming out with releases "roughly" every 6 weeks which do not offer the same amount of changes or new content as the old model.  However, there is consistently new stuff in these releases and they are clearly showing a model of being light, agile, able to react, in tune with player requests (sorry CFC, you cannot ask for supers to get nerfed, then cry about jump capable changes).  The re-booted version of CCP Development is very similar to the United States Military post Cold War.

You see, the United States Army was a much larger force in 1992 having just finished the first conflict with Iraq in the Persian Gulf.  As the Soviet bloc countries were now beginning to move away from communism and being puppets of the Soviet Union, there was no big bully across the ocean for the United States to face in a knockdown drag out conflict.  Instead, the United States would be faced with much smaller regional conflicts.  This would require a much smaller force, able to deploy rapidly, possibly alter their TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment) based on the conflict and react as necessary.

I see very similar traits in how CCP has performed a makeover on Development and we now have the type of department which clearly is on a path which has a specific goal.  So far, they have stayed true to the path and are releasing content in small bit sized pieces.  These changes are slowly altering the EVE universe and creating content, yet they also are addressing years old issues which have made many an old bittervet come back to the game and re-subscribe.

I realize that the opportunity seems very interesting.  "What if we were to go back and look at the Walking In Stations aspect of EVE?" With all of the new bros joining EVE and many new subscribers to the game, I understand that this can be a very tantilizing prospect, but if I could I would scream STAY THE COURSE.

Do not stray from your path.  Do not consider re-allocating any development resources towards WIS.  Build towards the eventual end product you are looking for when you started this three year project.  Continue to build subscriptions to the game and increase the player base.  If you want to come back and re-visit this concept in 2017, I would have no complaints.  But do not now.