Eve-Online has a great direction, a growing, dedicated team, but still cannot manage to develop things at an acceptable pace and respect deadlines (but, despite this, the growth of players is rewarding them even if development is super slow). Instead DAoC has a bad direction, a costantly shrinking dev team and ambition to "feed" Warhammer, but they always respect deadlines (but the players feel directly that the project is just being left behind and are trickling off).
The Eve team doesn't respect deadlines because they follow the "it'll be released when it's ready" philosophy. Even so, they still have occasional issues, such as the day-long downtime after Dragon and the week-long period of weirdness after Dragon and before the current patch. Imagine what would happen if they just slapped a patch on when the deadline was up! I'm willing to bet they'd lose, not thousands of subscribers, but 142k - because Tranquility would eat the user database. =)
Following the user feedback in response to the fubared Dragon patch, I noticed something intriguing - while there were some who moaned and whined they couldn't play and demanded their money back for lost playtime, the majority of users posted about how appreciative they were that the devs were staying after-hours to work on the problem, discussing the possibility of setting up a beer fund for CCP techs and so on. Eve has a great community, I believe in part due to the relative maturity level of the players (the game has a rather high barrier of entry compared to your average orc-slasher) and in part due to CCP's attitude - they're right in there with the players, commenting on forums and in-game help channels, responding to petitions in a semi-timely fashion, and seem genuinely concerned with making their game more full-featured and enjoyable rather than implementing the trend-of-the-day (*hrm* Battlegrounds *hrm*) to squeeze in some more subscribers.
Personally, I'd rather have a smaller company deliver an enjoyable, functional game with great support, direction and growth than a huge office situated in a proverbial ivory tower cranking out features in smooth, straight lines because their trend analyses state it's the best way to maintain the subscriptions of a bunch of bored level 60s. Factional Warfare and the likes would be nice, but Eve is an enjoyable game without it and I'd rather play that until Kali's done than face a potentially unbalancing and buggy patch.
Re: Eve-Online IS still growing
The Eve team doesn't respect deadlines because they follow the "it'll be released when it's ready" philosophy. Even so, they still have occasional issues, such as the day-long downtime after Dragon and the week-long period of weirdness after Dragon and before the current patch. Imagine what would happen if they just slapped a patch on when the deadline was up! I'm willing to bet they'd lose, not thousands of subscribers, but 142k - because Tranquility would eat the user database. =)
Following the user feedback in response to the fubared Dragon patch, I noticed something intriguing - while there were some who moaned and whined they couldn't play and demanded their money back for lost playtime, the majority of users posted about how appreciative they were that the devs were staying after-hours to work on the problem, discussing the possibility of setting up a beer fund for CCP techs and so on. Eve has a great community, I believe in part due to the relative maturity level of the players (the game has a rather high barrier of entry compared to your average orc-slasher) and in part due to CCP's attitude - they're right in there with the players, commenting on forums and in-game help channels, responding to petitions in a semi-timely fashion, and seem genuinely concerned with making their game more full-featured and enjoyable rather than implementing the trend-of-the-day (*hrm* Battlegrounds *hrm*) to squeeze in some more subscribers.
Personally, I'd rather have a smaller company deliver an enjoyable, functional game with great support, direction and growth than a huge office situated in a proverbial ivory tower cranking out features in smooth, straight lines because their trend analyses state it's the best way to maintain the subscriptions of a bunch of bored level 60s. Factional Warfare and the likes would be nice, but Eve is an enjoyable game without it and I'd rather play that until Kali's done than face a potentially unbalancing and buggy patch.