Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom - and lag?

Very many things are happening here at castle CCP. Well, a lot has already happened. We should probably begin at the beginning, right? Anxiety for me is a good thing. It's a complex feeling and you can have it for positive and negative reasons, but in the end, it's one of my main driving forces.

Is this good enough? Could we have done better? How will it really be recieved? Does beer numb the pain? Based on my experience, I can ever only answer the last one with the utmost certainty. For the other questions, it makes me try harder. This blog is one in that. I've been tending to personal life issues lately and I feel I've not been up to par so I apologize for that and I'll try to make up for that with spending some time in the feedback thread and a Live Voice Dev Chat tomorrow about Revelations 2.0.

And they brought forth further Revelations (1.4.X)

We deployed Revelations 1.4 and 1.4.1. We didn't like the problems that were associated but we did like the fixes. Starting to address Nanophoons and Logoff mechanics, remembering the Need for Speed and various other fixes in there - we were happy - but not quite there. For example, the asteroid reseed in the new regions is slow - because it's a reseed, it's not a refill of them all. They take time to grow to their original size, but at least, now they are growing (which they didn't). We're still monitoring it and have been looking at the mineral count of all the regions vs. other regions.

We also have another maintenance patch coming out next Tuesday, very cleverly named 1.4.2 and you can check out the patch notes associated when they are published in the next days.

However, this is the end of the major line of maintenance releases for Revelations 1. To clarify that even further, there might be smaller releases (1.4.3, 1.4.4) but no major relases (no 1.5) because we're now switching most of our effort to Revelations 2!

Oh noes, the bastards! Keep on fixing my EVE!

Before you start screaming about "fix first, then add stuff", which is perfectly valid mind you, hear this first. Revelations 2 has already been cut in half in favor of optimizations, fixes and now focuses on improvements to features already in EVE.

Some of you might consider improvements not fixing, so let's address that specifically. Starbase warfare needs improving. It encourages blobbing, it has no intermediate goals, a bastard to manage and could use new structures.

Outpost warfare isn't that dissimilar and needs to be improved. There should also be an upgrade path for them. Do you get my drift? I can mention other current functionality which require improvements, the Corporations and Alliance system, the Contract system, War system and Combat systems (to counter blobs for example).

Bah, no details! GIMMEH DETAILS!

We'd love to give you details on these systems, all which we want to improve in Revelations 2 but that will wait for a better time, when we have finalized what we will do specifically and preferably when it's close to hitting the test servers. We try to have an iterative development process, we try to prototype and an important part of that process is to adapt to the feedback. Therefore features change. Change is good though.

So what about new Content?

New "content" on the other hand is a different beast entirely. We always have a big team on creating new content. New content is like new modules or items, exploration sites & encounters, agent missions and so forth. The stuff we use our current functionality and features to implement more content, it is not writing new code or features.

In new content, we have more Exploration sites for the whole universe (including some special love for the Drone regions) and Level 5/6 Agent missions. We have some other module and item love up our sleeves for the industrial and mini-profession part of us, but it's to early to tell how much of that we'll be able to do.

It's gettin' hot in here!

Please keep your clothes on though. In the brand new feature area - we have Heat. It looks cool and Tux will probably blog about it in the near future when we have our prototypes up and running, but we hope this brings an entirely new angle to combat.

What about them factions

You might also be one of those that wonder where Factional Warfare went and that's perfectly understandable. Not everyone manages to read through all the blogs here so let's cover that again. When we started designing Factional Warfare, it became more and more apparent that we needed to evolve all warfare in EVE.

We found us constantly going back to "this could be so much more cool if the Outposts had these goals" or "how do we address blobs", "how do we determine a winner of war" and "princess beefie wants a dread". Warfare in EVE simply wasn't good enough. And it has to be great.

The most important question was however, "why are we trying to make only the Factional Warfare more interesting and fun? Why are we leaving all the player corporate Warfare behind?" The answer is of course obvious, we shouldn't be. All warfare should be fun, let's focus on what's already in there and make that better instead of a special "Faction" version. When that's done, we'll allow pilots to fly for their respective factions.

Summarizing

We hope this has given you a bit more insight into what we're going to be doing the next months. You are probably also wondering when on earth we're going to be delivering Revelations 2.0 (and so are we), but we have a goal - and that is this summer. It's all about fixes, optimizations and improvements with a lot of new content and a new feature to spice things up.

The lagmonster

In an effort where you can help us out with identifying in what situations you get eaten by the beaten-with-the-ugly-stick-lag-monster, we have created a special thread for you which we will be monitoring. However, remember that the format required to be actually helpful requires certain vital information for it to be useful, in fact, it's useless without it:

My character name(s): This is part of your forum posts but add it in case you are using other characters.
My solar system: Not the one you own, the one you were in.
My time: Essential. The forum post only shows when you post, please be specific and indicate timezone you are in.
What was I doing: Be very specific. Did you open a specific window? Jumping? Warping into something? Press that red button again?
Additional data: Pingplotter and other tools can be very helpful for you to sanity check the internet route to rule that out. The fault can be happening at our end, our provider or some other destination, in which case we've often been able to address it directly or indirectly. Some of you remember our initiatives with this before and they have always proved helpful.

In any case, know that you are not ignored, we're quite aware of the situation and you could really help us out.