The Attack of Oveurs Killer Trivial Clone Blog Wars | EVE Online

The Attack of Oveurs Killer Trivial Clone Blog Wars

2004-06-26 - By CCP Oveur

Since the last Council of Stellar Management gave me an excuse to start blogging about ideas, my opinion and other trivial stuff, I guess I'll start. At least until I'm asked to stop. Well, probably not even then :)

I also have alterior motives behind doing this. The Devblogs have been going on a far to serious note the last months, and not really a "blog" but an unofficial announcement thingamajig. I'd like this to change, for a number of reasons.

The reason I have hanged around EVE since closed Alpha and eventually joined the team 2 months ago, is the openness of the developers, their participiation in the community and the attention to community feedback. (That's how I joined the team, and how 12 other staff members joined CCP, by playing the game and participating in the community).

It of course varies on times, often too little, and sometimes too much but can always be better. But in my 15 years of gaming, I haven't encountered very many game developers that have been this open, that often discuss ideas, what they'd like to do, what's being worked on and what's getting deployed.

This however often backfires and this is the reason I'd like to make this blog less formal. All the developers within CCP have opinions and passions about EVE. They often voice them ranging from "I'd like to do this" to "this is being developed", "this has been designed", "this is getting released". Much of this is taken as promises. Sure, many have been real promises. And some got broken. There are a myriad of reasons for that and players understandably get annoyed by it.

I understand that annoyance and respect that. Most game developers I have encountered only communicate with the community on a very formal basis. I grew up with game developers that rarely gave anything up except pre-prepared marketing babble that took months to make and other canned responses. Between that, very little, and usually they were stating facts, not something they were considering. Those few words were considered law.

I also grew up with games from ID Software, where they were the only remotely open developers in their days with .plan files. This I really appreciated. But it also caused various uproars when they said something the community didn't like. And in some cases, Carmack listened. (If you don't know who John Carmack is, he's like God, only better at programming)

Because of this I can understand the impression you get of us ignorant Icelanders that open their mouth about anything as long as somebody listens. (Well, they don't really have to listen, just be within shouting range).

The only problem is that we have 50.000 people that listen to each and every word we say and take it as law. I wan't to change that perception. I'm going to do more blogs on various ideas going on, my opinion, player concerns and other trivial stuff like Gallente Eye For The Amarr Guy. But to sum it up, this is the only thing promised for this year besides getting out the rest Tech Level 2 ships and modules. Hope you like it ;)

p.s. Yes, Shiva is a Free expansion, contrary to some strange rumours :)