The beast awakens, lets get ready to rumble
It's been very quiet the last couple of weeks at CCP offices. The reason for this is that we put most of the staff on mandatory vacation during the last weeks of July. Might sound crazy to you but the explanation is simple and there are two main reasons for it.
First of all, we wanted to minize the effect of summer vacations on productivity at CCP. To address this, we put 90% of the staff on vacation at the same time meaning we get June, beginning of July and half of August at high productivity. Quite nifty.
Second, we had to put our staff on vacation to let them recharge their batteries. Besides the purely human factor (and all that touchy-feely-good-stuff) of vacation, we of course had an ulterior motive for this, we need the people so fresh and so clean to take on Kali.
Yes, that's right. We're taking on Kali, now.
The last couple of weeks were certainly not our most glorious moment. We had a number of issues we responded quite slowly to, a direct - and accepted - consequence of massing the people into vacations. However, most of it could have been averted and it's all traced down to having too big "cojones" rather than thinking a bit.
We decided to keep on deploying server hotfixes which wasn't such a good idea. "It sounded like a good idea at the time", but I wonder how often that sentence has been the famous last word of some poor soul.
Two of the server hotfixes resulted in the biggest stuck crisis we have had for almost a year. We rolled them back of course but that's no excuse, the damage was already done.
In addition to that, our SQL layer hardware failed twice, resulting in two 4 hour downtimes, not something our vacations could have prevented our handled better but it sure did hurt nonetheless.
So, everything went bad, huh?
No. Lets not forget the 2 major good things this vacation strategy brought us. We were able to deploy the Cold War patch before summer since vacations first began in late July and we are able to start Kali development in August.
Long term, the plan for the beast is the right one but we could have done better in the short term. But now the beast awakens. It's time for Kali. We expect to release some minor patches, just to fix bugs but there are at this point in time, no plan to release any features.
Wait, no new Stuff(TM)? No "love me long time"?
As always, lets try to seperate coding features from manufacturing content. If we have the available testing and content resources available from the Kali development, we will release a number of new Tech Level 2 ships. How many and what ship classes hasn't been decided, but we aim to put at least one Tech Level 2 Battleship in there.
That's it for now, an update on what's happening at CCP and what's coming up next. We'll be doing some sneak peaks for Kali in the blogs and I'll drop some of my personal thoughts in now and then. These are interesting times we live in. EVE now has more than 64 thousand subscribers, we are releasing more content faster and we have at least 5 expansions worth of features and content just waiting to be implemented.
EVE is here to stay. We hope you have - and will continue to - enjoy the ride.