Earlier this week I had already prepared a sort of news roundup kind of post. Then the CCP personel cut news hit and I was pondering another post. A lot has already been said about it though, I will make just a few comments here later on.
Incarna 1.1.2
Main thing this new update brings is Ship Spinning 2.0 ! The dread door is gone, you can now see your ship in your hangar without having to enter the captain’s quarter. CCP Aporia explains what’s up in this devblog. Other changes can be found in the patchnotes.
Eve Is Real
Shame the site is somewhat of a nuisance to navigate, but the idea is nice. The third level has been unlocked at the www.eveisreal.net website. This means Aurum reward, so you can finally buy those fancy boots you always wanted. I have been watching some videos and pics and it’s nice, also brings back some memories when I was still actively participating in (factional warfare) fleet battles.
Blog Banter #29 – Immersion
Which brings me to Blog Banter #29. The freebooted Eve Blog started a blog banter on Immersion in Eve. To be honest, I never really felt that much like a cold hearted Caldari business man when I played my main character. But when I was playing factional warfare in it’s prime, I felt much more immersed in the game, and it’s backstory ! I also learned to hate the Amarr. There are some very nice contributions to the banter, al in all a good read, check it out at Blog Banter #29.
The Lay Offs
No need in repeating the news here, every one who reads this will know about it now. Keith Neilson has a nice blogpost that also includes a list of names. What a lot of people already had been saying turned out to be true, CCP cannot sustain development for Dust and World of Darkness on just the income EVE generates. Maybe they barely could, but the drop in subs since MonocleGate hit hard. Of course it’s sad for those people that worked on WOD, but I can certainly understand CCP’s move here.
What I don’t get, and a lot of people with me, if I read the response to the layoffs on the blogs and forum, is that the Community Team was also layed off. Well almost all of them anyway. This comes across as if uppper management is somehow blaming the community team for the events that unfold around the Incarna release. Some of these people (for me CCP Fallout especially) were the face of CCP in a difficult time, and they made the most of a difficult situation. Ok CCP Pann’s post at the time was not so great but uhm, well we’re gonna let that slide… Needless to say the ‘suits’ are free of blame as it seems only ‘lower personel’ was fired.
It’s interesting how every time when CCP seems to get things right, ie focusing on Flying In Space instead of Incarna etc, they blunder in some other sort of way. I also wonder what all of this means for Walking in Stations, will it ever expand beyond the single room, where you walk around like a drunken sailor ? That would make Incarna the most useless expansion in an MMO ever, 4 years of dev time wasted.
really sad about they layoffs. they seem t have attempted to chew more than they could. as soon as i was beginning to get my faith back into them with the new changes they seem to mess up again.
Also, nice to see you posting again 🙂
I think you’ve nailed it there Morph.
Why would you lay off the community team for this? They are the ones, for the most part, that handled the shitstorm when Incarna and Monocle-gate hit.
I think they did a fantastic job and should be pissed off they got ‘rewarded’ like this.
There’s an interview over at Eurogamer http://v.gd/1MlvHw where Hilmar says that we’ll get the 4 racial CQs but after that.. who knows.
From what I’ve been reading and hearing, the problems at CCP were structural and procedural in nature, not the fault of any one group of people. Unfortunately remedying those structural issues has cost some people their jobs. Some would say that it cost the wrong people their jobs, and they could be right. Time will tell I suppose.
Looks like CCP has backed up the whole “I wish we made WoW instead of a spaceship game” thing.
New BC’s and assault ship changes have been great additions.