I never said they follow a "It'll be released when it's at state where our playerbase considers it ready" philosophy. If that were the case, no company would ever release patches. :)
No doubt about it, Eve has released some pretty majorly flawed code, with bugs that could well have been nigh game-killing in other, more high-profile games. After the Dragon patch brought down TQ for a day, there were still major issues with markets in certain areas, T2 ships could not be built, and half the NPC missions were cut out until reimplemented for the new mission system. Some things are likely still very buggy even after the patch-to-the-patch. Compare with WoW - let's say 1.13 brought down all the servers for a day, then proceeds to depopulate the Barrens of NPCs and mobs, raid instances leave no loot and half the NPC quest-givers are turned into statues for almost two weeks.
But they do release their patches when they THINK it's ready, not when Corporate says "Dammit, that Paladin talent tree revamp is way overdue and our figures show we've lost 2.3% of potential subscribers because of it. Taking average player retention statistics and cross-promotion opportunities into account, that's 27.6 million in lost revenue! Roll the damn thing out already!" When things go wrong, both devs and PR (do they have PR?) are genuinely concerned and get down to the players' level to explain the problems and what is being done about it. Players generally find this type of resolution preferrable to the "damage control" method used by most other companies, and by and large decide to go trade in some other region for the duration of the problem instead of unsubbing in a huff.
Re: Eve-Online IS still growing
I never said they follow a "It'll be released when it's at state where our playerbase considers it ready" philosophy. If that were the case, no company would ever release patches. :)
No doubt about it, Eve has released some pretty majorly flawed code, with bugs that could well have been nigh game-killing in other, more high-profile games. After the Dragon patch brought down TQ for a day, there were still major issues with markets in certain areas, T2 ships could not be built, and half the NPC missions were cut out until reimplemented for the new mission system. Some things are likely still very buggy even after the patch-to-the-patch. Compare with WoW - let's say 1.13 brought down all the servers for a day, then proceeds to depopulate the Barrens of NPCs and mobs, raid instances leave no loot and half the NPC quest-givers are turned into statues for almost two weeks.
But they do release their patches when they THINK it's ready, not when Corporate says "Dammit, that Paladin talent tree revamp is way overdue and our figures show we've lost 2.3% of potential subscribers because of it. Taking average player retention statistics and cross-promotion opportunities into account, that's 27.6 million in lost revenue! Roll the damn thing out already!" When things go wrong, both devs and PR (do they have PR?) are genuinely concerned and get down to the players' level to explain the problems and what is being done about it. Players generally find this type of resolution preferrable to the "damage control" method used by most other companies, and by and large decide to go trade in some other region for the duration of the problem instead of unsubbing in a huff.