Producer's Letter: Incursion takes it to 11 by counting steadily
It's now closing in on two and a half months since we started rolling out the EVE Online: Incursion expansion in various neatly wrapped packages. Since then so much has happened that it's hard to remember it all. We began by deploying a significant amount of small fixes and changes, many of which were advocated directly by the CSM. We removed the learning skills from the game and reimbursed players the skillpoints they'd invested. The holiday gift ship (Echelon) rolled out of factories and into player hangars, planetary interaction got some love in reducing its potential to induce carpal tunnel syndrome and in adding a depletion mechanic and there were several improvements to the UI and long-awaited balancing changes. We also improved the performance of fleet fights on our path ever upwards!
And then we changed the faces of EVE with the new character creator . And then we killed everyone with Sansha’s Nation. And you reshipped and fought back.
It's been a wild ride and we believe that it's been a successful evolution of our deployment model and rollout strategy. At least our new PCU record of 63.170 leads us to believe that you, our players, are happy with the content and delivery of what we've been doing.
The best part is that Incursion isn’t over. We’ve still got tons of changes and at least three more planned point releases for Incursion with the possibility of more stuff added in between them. First, on Tuesday, there’s the changes outlined in CCP Soundwave’s recent blog--a potent mix of quality of life changes that should bring something for everyone. Then the long-awaited switch from our old, admittedly dated forums to EVE Gate with all kinds of new functionality. The Incursion voyage means even more “little fixes” from Team BFF in the future, adjustments to the character creator and also some sizeable database steroid injections. Fixes and faces and uberhamsters oh my.
We're going to continue on this path of more, smaller and more evenly distributed deployments in the future now that we have the ability to do so and it seemed quite well received by you all. Over the coming weeks and months, our dev teams will add meaningful content and fixes to EVE and we'll be sure to keep you up to speed on all the upcoming face-meltitude that they entail.
But wait there's more! We've been discussing the Incarna project’s rollout plans and integration into EVE with the CSM since mid-last year and we're happy to say that we're coming to a place where we can begin dialogue about actual features and gameplay that's been in development. We’ll kick it off with a blog from the team working on captains quarters next week that should lead quite nicely into several presentations at Fanfest.
CCP Zulu
Senior Producer for EVE Online
