Caring Is Preparing

Greetings Apocryphans,

Recently you‘ve had the chance to read about the construction of Apocrypha in quite some detail. The scrum teams designing and building the largest EVE Expansion ever have been doing an impressive job of keeping you informed on the progress despite their challenging schedules.

I want to tell you what us GMs have been doing down in our dungeons while the scrumbags upstairs have been busy creating greatness. Many might think we‘ve been spending more and more time at the bar every night, crying to a bewildered bartender about the upcoming influx of petitions on artificially intelligent NPCs and lost T3 ships. That is not the case however, as we bravely cling to the hope that we will still be smarter than those NPCs and we‘ve been spending our time proactively preparing for what is up ahead.

You may have read our GM blog last year where we mentioned our commitment to proactive support. Our Apocrypha preparations are a perfect example of that. Instead of succumbing to fate (and I don‘t mean GM Fate, we all succumb to him), we try to master it. Instead of just waiting and reacting to whatever comes following a big expansion, we devote a portion of our time to scrutinizing every feature and every change, foreseeing possible issues and making sure we have the tools we need to service all the new shiny things the expansion brings.

We have assigned GM teams to each scrum team. These surgical strike teams will perform the following tasks...

• Study intensely all designs made by their foster team of developers, and read all documentation available (which is a lot).
• Test out all the designs on SiSi, get a feel for them and try to spot issues customers might experience.
• Prepare documentation tailored for the rest of the GMs, internal pages, work procedures and so on.

Afterwards these GMs will be acknowledged as „experts" in the features they studied and proactively hunt down and make sure that bugs/borked functionality related to them are fixed.

We don‘t just support, we try to make the need for our support as minimal as possible.

Furthermore, we´ll be having the designers of each feature give the whole GM Team a support centric demonstration of how the new features work - logging, potential pitfalls and possible exploitability. All the stuff that we especially need to keep in mind as the eyes and ears of CCP in space.

See you in Apocrypha, pilots!

• GM Guard