If you have 18 months, you can probably make two babies. Or not, it's up to you.
Dear Spacefriends
It’s been a pretty crazy ride. We’ve made some really cool spaceships, made some not so cool pants (the pants look good, but you know what I mean) and now we’re making cool spaceships again. I remember back when the CSM came here once and the “18 months” meme was first created. Hearing people complain that we didn’t put enough work into the spaceship side of the game (and those people being entirely right) has not been a lot of fun.
(that's a picture of me burning in hell viewed through the door in Incarna, just in case you were wondering)
But how does the future look?
The good news is that the 18 months are over and it feels pretty good. We had about 4-6 weeks of actual development time to put this release together and I honestly feel that this is the best release we’ve done in years. The recipe contains a few teaspoons of really good looking people, an ounce of love for EVE and is topped off with good ideas from the community.
It’s really only the beginning though. If you liked this release, all of next year should be right up your alley. If it’s old, rusty and not in good shape, there is a chance it will be looked at. Anyway, the future still feels far away, so let’s look at some of the stuff we’ve done. I’m really happy with the entire package, but here are some of my personal highlights:
Being able to drag and drop targets to re-order them in any way you like. Anything that lets me drag and drop makes me really happy. The look and feel of EVE is so incredibly important and a usability change like this really makes it feel much more like we’ve reached the usability standard of most software in 1999. We’re still a few years behind, but goddamit, we’re getting there. Another change that falls into this category is rubberband selection. I’m pretty sure I’ll spend the first day after the patch just randomly selecting things in my hangar JUST BECAUSE I CAN. Haters gonna hate.
Constant ship/module balance is really the cornerstone of maintaining a healthy live game and we’ve not been doing a very good job of it lately. I hope we can keep up the momentum from this release and continue to do a wide range of balancing changes several times a year. Every time we do a big release, it should contain changes like the ones we’ve just put in. If we do put out a major release without balancing changes, it probably means that CCP Tallest and/or Ytterbium have been eaten by bears. That would be bad, but the reality is that there are very few things you can do to prevent a bear from killing you. According to what I’ve read online, playing dead isn’t necessarily the correct strategy and while there are a lot of great tips, I guess your best odds really comes from not being around bears.
Corp bookmarks. I’ve spent time in wormholes and the tools available to the people living there were in a state where I basically consider anyone there an internet spaceship MacGyver (Here is a link for you young people: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver). They’ve been able to create a lot from very little and hopefully our changes to scanning, POSs and bookmarks will make their existence there better. I suspect we’ll be able to do more in the long run, but this is a pretty good start. In general, central storing of information like bookmarks, fittings etc should be a natural development in EVE. Having to carry around a USB drive, CD or a floppy disc (Here is a link for you young people: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disc) is a waste of space when you could carry equipment to protect yourself from a potential bear attack.
I’m also hoping that our fuel blocks change will positively impact the ratio of corp/alliance logistics pilots that slit their wrists putting an arbitrary number of components into a spacebucket. This not only represented a lot of work, but also an arbitrary barrier of entry which I hope we can lower even more the coming year. Owning a massive structure in space that “does stuff” should be a cool thing everyone wants. These days, it’s basically something a few people do because they have a higher pain tolerance than the average human being.
Then there is a batch of changes that just make sense. That’s really the only way to describe them. They’re basically a set of changes that come off game features that are so silly this mental image pops up every time I run into them:
They are changes like not having an “enter old password” field on a container when you set the password for the FIRST time, being able to remotely un-rent an office and not being allowed to keep a dungeon alive just because you’re in a cloaked ship. Changes like that restore my faith in our collective ability to not have the dumb.
Anyway, at the end of the day, November 29th will contain a ton of changes that we feel were overdue. But even more importantly, it will be the first step in our road back to spaceships. Stick around, it will only get better.
We’ve had some great people working on this release. I’d like to extend a big thanks to Team Best Friends Forever for continuing to make awesome changes, Team Pink Zombie Kittens who join the spaceteam after working on Incarna and Team Papercuts who have contributed tremendously, considering they were on loan and made the transition from sparkly vampires to spaceships extremely quickly. All three teams have done a fantastic job and this is really just the beginning.
Toodles spacefriends,
Soundwave
