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Eve-Online IS still growing

Submitted by Abalieno on September 5, 2006 - 18:18.

Yesterday Eve-Online had more than 30k players active online (30.538).

Active subscribers are currently at 142k.

I wish I could say the same about DAoC.

In the meantime I'm waiting CCP to actually develop and show something. They patched recently but it was just a whole lot of work on the backend in preparation for Kali (performance improvements are always great, though). I was expecting that patch to come for the end of July, instead it arrived for the end of August. Still no mention when we'll finally see something done. What about the Battleplan?

I cannot avoid to think to Mythic everytime. They are like one the negative image of the other. 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).

When is Kali One coming, you ask? I'd like to see it in the end of September, but Dragon still needs maintenance on TQ, so we can't assign as many resources over to the final push of Kali One as we wanted.

The communication through the dev blogs is excellent, though. Thanks a lot. That's the VERY BEST communication I've seen in this industry so far.

If someone from CCP passes here: could we have a "dev tracker" page with links to dev posts on the forums? That would be nice.

P.S.
That blog from Tuxford about fleet battles is great (you can still see in the dev blog with the title "post vacation thoughts"). Good ideas as well. Reduce the range of ships, formation flight, AoE weapons and directional defences. All great. The problem is to get them in the game in the foreseeable future. Should I remind you that formation flight was promised for release? ;p

Usually the large battles are completely ignored in game design and nothing is made to make them more fun and interesting.

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

Eskie (not verified) on September 6, 2006 - 14:52.

For an Eve-Online DevTracker look here: http://www.eve-search.com/index.dxd?f=DPF&type=devs

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

WARCRYtm (not verified) on September 6, 2006 - 18:45.

EVE have 170k subs
Oficial press from CCP at their web page

http://www.eve-online.com/pressreleases/default.asp?pressReleaseID=25

Regards

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

Lachek on September 8, 2006 - 23:55.

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.

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

Innsmouth on September 10, 2006 - 08:42.

The Eve team doesn't respect deadlines because they follow the "it'll be released when it's ready" philosophy.

Uhm, no. The Eve team has released plenty of incomplete or buggy stuff. "Polish" definitely isn't something that they have shown to do really well and the steep learning curve isn't just due to the complexity of the game, but also because the game has very rough edges.

So that's not part of what makes Eve successful today, imho.

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

Lachek on September 11, 2006 - 16:09.

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.

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Re: Eve-Online IS still growing

SghnDubh on September 21, 2006 - 23:37.

Come on--these guys are blazing trails as they put out new content...and that's gonna take some time to get it right, especially since they're the only unsharded MMO on the market. It's certainly easier to just put out a new sword or helm of not-dumbness or something; much more difficult and therefore more time consuming to get it right inside such an intricately balanced game in front of 30k concurrent users.

Fight Smart: http://www.BattleClinic.com

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