Monday, February 2, 2015

BB62: Walking In Stations

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 62nd edition!  For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

Niden (@niden_GMVA) tweeted this: "It's not cool to want walking in stations, right?"

That tweet got a few positive agreements, but on the other side of the coin we have Xander Phoena of Crossing Zebras being mentioned in the current minutes: "Xander said that he would officially like to be documented as protesting any art time going to avatars instead of spaceships."

What is and/or should be the future for walking in stations?

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I originally wrote a post back on January 14, which went into this very subject, go ahead and take a glance at it here.

When I originally wrote the post, it was primarily in response to the twitter discussion on Walking In Stations.

I still have the same general feelings in regards to Walking In Stations that I did back when the original post was written.  There is a place for a stripped down version of WiS with access to things like Corporate Hangar and possibly the Bounty or Employment Office.  Outside of those limited areas where this could actually be useful, I do not see any reason for WiS development.

I agree strongly with Xander that I would rather see development resources being devoted to "The Plan".  If there are art resources being used in development, help with the SKIN program or some of the rendering changes.  Other developers have far more important things to do like provide us with more and new content and new ships.

CCP corrected their course and got the damage control parties working 18-24 months ago when they started down this path of where development is currently at and where they are taking us.  To potentially alter the course for development due to a few twitter posts or the influx in new subscribers to the game is flawed.  It is that type of development strategy that lead CCP to the dark days prior to CCP Seagull taking over as EP.

Current path for development, +1.  Current projects for the art team, +1.  WiS, -1 as originally proposed.  WiS in a stripped down, modified approach, 0.

Finish the track of development now, then possibly start thinking of concepts like WiS.

1 comment:

  1. I do find the argument of no resources to other things so that the plan goes faster to be rather funny, and in many ways naïve, as well as flawed. The lack of understanding of how things like this might work is especially funny coming from EVE players who should actually know better, because of at least partially, module fitting.

    Some people look at problems and say to a developer: "How long will it take you to do X" when the dev pipes up that it will currently take him Y (wo)man hours to complete the person goes: "ahah I want it done in 1/4th that time so we are going to get 4 of you on it".

    That is flawed. and the flaw is the same as the stacking penalty in EVE. throwing 2 devs at any one task in a process doesn't half the amount of time it takes, In fact it could take longer if Dev A needs to teach Dev B a bunch of stuff. Look at drone damage amps. I could fly 4 on my rattlesnake, and get a couple extra% of dps, but it is better to find something else because the ROI is better. At some point, even on a large project (this varies incredibly based on the project, but anything creative IE not just building something will have this point) the Completion time for the project no longer decreases linearly with the number of Warm Trained Bodies you throw at it. The number of required person hours required to complete a project actually increases with every body you throw at it. Meetings, training, coordinating etc.

    So for a while N+1 bodies gives you almost /(n+1) total working time, but it degrades, to the point where you don't see the benefit in real terms.

    CCP may or may not have completely reached that point with their grand vision, but it could very well be that they have reached the point where another body isn't cost effective anymore. At that point other projects are viable, and indeed necessary to keep the company solvent to reach the end of project X.

    In short: Xander was a dick, and being stupid.

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