Turiko

Okay, this honestly just further troubles things. I just kind of assumed June patch notes meant patch notes for things in June and i imagine most people will not expect information on August under the previous month.

No word on the rest? You've cleared up that there is information to be found if you look things up on the eve online site, but this still means the player needs to look it up without the launcher or game implying something changed. Honestly, i don't get why this was removed from the launcher so quickly.

EDIT: i've added a note on my OP to reflect the patch notes.

It wasn't removed from the launcher, it drops out of the news cycle when we release more news after it. The launcher displays the most recent news.

Regardless of the news, people should be checking their market orders before they're hitting any buttons to accept any form of trade, and should be checking numbers.

If you're not doing so, then you're just assuming that you've done everything right, which is incredibly dumb and part of the core issue with the current state of the game - people feel too safe.

ericader

Why not change wormholes cloaks and kitey ships to all be less powerful and “put it in devblogs and patch notes”

It’s against your preferential narrative but show you’re unbiased for once as a developer

The dumbness of your post makes my brain hurt.

Turiko

Currently i don't see any current patch notes, the last patch notes are for June and it's currently (and was yesterday, when the update happened) August; https://www.eveonline.com/articles/patch-notes. There are no patch notes for August (yet? I suppose it is yet to be posted then?)

Meanwhile, the launcher looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/DJPzorW.png . There isn't a mention of any dev blog anymore. It's been hidden, as i stated in my OP, 24 hours after it went live. Sure, it still exists, you can find it. But that means the player has to look it up and nobody is going to randomly look up devblogs every time they've stepped away a few days. Something needs to notify the player something changed before that happens.

The changes themselves is not why i created this post; the changes and their intended / expected / subjective results is a whole different can of worms other people can discuss in their posts. The reason i created this post is because any information to the players about this change posted yesterday is already hidden unless you specifically come to reddit (and that source will vanish in a few days too) or look up past dev blogs (which few people do out of the blue). This is just plain bad communication from a game to its players.

Lastly: no offense, but complaining about someone with valid criticism about the way CCP has done something with going "all of a sudden it's REEE" is not really a valid response. Visibly showing changes for people that aren't glued to reddit 24/7 is kind of important, especially (as i mentioned in my original post) during a holiday season where part of the playerbase is basically expected to be gone for a week or more at a time.That's a longer period than the time it took between devblog, changes on the live server and all information being hidden.

My biggest suggestion would be to ensure information about changes to long-established mechanics stay visible in the launcher for at least a week or two, or give an ingame message / notification if it's a "hidden" mechanic like the tax numbers. They're there, but they're tiny and everyone has seen them a million times. Notable changes are kind of expected to have notable visibility. Hiding all mention of it without digging in deeper, such a very short time after the changes, isn't exactly notable visibility.

EDIT: patch notes exist, i simply didn't notice as they're posted under June, not August, despite it being a patch in August.

The patch notes are here. The August Release hasn't shipped yet.

The most recent patch notes are always at the top, and are sorted by our development branch.

MilanaO

That you are at a loss, does not surprise me. If you have time to read all this shit here means you are not working.

You do realize that it's literally part of my job to read this subreddit, right?

Jesus Christ, lol

StainGuy

For a quite long i people are asking for the Lowsec Gate To Stain (LGTS)
Based on this post - when we can expect it.

BTW nice job with this Tax isk sink, have you read my post about additional industrial taxation btw?

Yup, I've read it :)

Also, if you eventually get your lowsec gate to Stain, what are you going to do? You'll literally have nothing to talk about any more :P

There are patch notes. There was a dev blog.

People have complained for ages that we're not doing enough, that we're not changing enough, that we're too slow to get changes out of the door, that we're letting the game stagnate.

Now we start to make rapid changes and all of a sudden it's "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE you're doing things too fast!"

I'm at a loss, really.

Finn_A

Why Eminem? This great poem above relates to a Bloodhound Gang song !

It reads to me like "Stan" by Eminem haha

zerodamage

I'm trying to decide if this would improve or further harm an already mostly dead part of New Eden (lowsec). The change alone without other changes i think would do harm i think.

It'd need to be part of a group of changes for sure :)

Great, now I'm listening to Eminem for the first time since I was like, fifteen.

Ming_Tso

Freedom isnt free

It cost a buck 'o five.

haha this is epic, love it :D

This is pretty sweet :D

AneuAng

That there are plentiful examples of why CCP say one thing and do another. How changes CCP make do not have the desired outcome and how CCP favour certain groups of players over others, need I bring up bob and T20?

Point is here, you come out with your soundbyte of wanting blackout to be permanent because you know it plays well with Reddit. It’s your job, you are a community manager. Your job is to make what flows down from above you palatable for players, but what I am seeing in addition to this is a pandering to a specific type of player that has caused CCP massive issues before. Maybe you don’t care anymore? Maybe you know the trajectory of the game is down from here?

Eve is a microcosm of hundreds of different play styles that CCP used to know was the strength of Eve, you’ve turned it into a bitter and twisted rage fest where people are even more vile to one another than I have ever seen before. I hope you are not proud of this, and I hope you realise that pandering to one group will simply accelerate the decline of this game.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with every single point you've made in these three paragraphs.

Feel free to dredge up T20 - I was on the other side of the fence as an angry player when that happened. Completely different company now, completely different people. Your point is entirely moot. Correct, it was a shitshow, and it was dealt with when it happened way back in the day. You screw around like that at CCP these days, you're out of the door. It's as simple as that. I get accused of being biased on a daily basis, and of being a cheater. One day I'm being accused of being biased toward PL, the next day it's GSF. Life goes on.

On your point about soundbytes - news flash - anyone who knows me knows that I don't pander. If I have something to say, I say it. I don't give a shit what "demographic" it plays well with - if I have an opinion on the game as a 17 year veteran of it, I'll be sure to express it, both externally to the community, and internally at CCP. Admittedly that's ca...

AneuAng

Considering past experience with CCP data gathering, you expect a player from 2003 to trust you on this?

I am a player from 2003. Well, 2002 technically.

Your point?

StainGuy

Well trying to be honest here.
English is not my primary language. I read the title ... and my first impression is - it is till the end of the month.
I read the content, trying to not skip details ... ok it is not only for a month.

^{apparently many people skipped some parts in the content}

Like trying to be actually accurate with my assumptions here and showing where and why people can get wrong impression on the length.

Literally yesterday guy jumped on the TS we use and asked what changed as he was not logging in since the blackout started ... and it was meant to end tomorrow.

Dude, I'm just messing with you <3

We said in the same article that the length of the blackout wasn't specified though, so there's plenty of time for it to continue.

LuluHottum

Hey Falcon, any chance we ever see those changes you mentioned to capital ships? I for one agree capitals have no place in ganking small ships and ratting...

They were just my opinions mate, I'm not a game designer :)

AneuAng

Your data collection is already flawed, with the fact you've introduced so many programs in order to get people to login/kill NPCs and so on, during the blackout. How can that be a good data sample? It's ridiculous, on top of the fact your boss stated that its clear from people swapping to a 64bit client, means they are not risk adverse, what kind of logic is it your are using in your office?

Let me make this plain and simple for you, outside of the echo-chamber that is reddit, which you seem to use as your brain-storming saloon, the blackout is a massive flop. It does not fix the massive issues facing Eve. It does not fix the cyno-mechanics, it does not fix the capital proliferation, it does not fix the terrible sov system in place. Adding more chaos to these already terrible mechanics is not going to fix anything. The game is already one of the hardest MMOs to get into online, adding chaos, making it even more punishing is going to push people away from the game. This is not the way to fix things. Creating incentives to fight, reasons for big player-empires to attack one another, less restrictive and time consuming sov-mechanics, flash points, catalysts for wars. These are things that bring players, as exemplified by multiple data-sources of massive wars in eve.

You are killing your own game, even if the people who want easy kills on reddit are laying down at your feat, praising your every move, the data simply shows that blackout is killing nullsec, which is meant to be a player-generated area of the game, untouched by CCP, outside of structural changes to mechanics. The trajectory of online players is going down. Making the game harder wont change that.

It's not like we have the ability to filter data or anything, right?