EVE's Manual

Did you know that there was a Manual for EVE. As in the kind of manual you would find in most other games giving a complete and comprehensive description of everything you need to know to use the game. Well by god there turns out to be a 400 page manual describing everything from the skill queue to mining to trading to turrets to the fitting screen. Bloody amazing.

Click here to go to download site - ISK 2.0

Of course it is not actually published by CCP, rather by a bunch of Hungarians with more time on their hands then they know what to do with. Great job guys! Amazing work that should be standard reading for all new players (and old ones).

RPS: CCP And The Wrath Of The Playerbase

Over at Rock Paper Shotgun (RPS) there is a great article CCP And The Wrath Of The Playerbase. RPS interviews CCP Zulu, the Senior Producer for EVE Online. It is a fascinating read. It clearly indicates that CCP Zulu is one of those clever marketing types with a silver tongue. I particularly like the following exchange...

RPS: Why can’t you commit any resources to the “core issues” raised for eighteen months?

Gylfason: This misunderstanding of 18 months comes up a lot and I’d like to correct it. We have for the past few years been very focused on adding new features to EVE Online. We added Factional Warfare, Wormhole exploration, Loyalty Points stores, Planetary Interaction and tech 3 ships to name a few. During this era of expanding the gameplay we shifted our focus somewhat away from iterating and refactoring on older game systems and features. What we’ve been doing for the past few months is move that focus back. Over the next months we will be increasing our focus on iteration up to the point where, 18 months or so from now, we are only doing work on existing gameplay.–both in terms of polish and general refactoring for scalability purposes. The EVE Development team counts around 140 people (closer to 200 when you count in developers contributing to deliver Incarna and our core technology group) now and the choice between iteration and new feature development isn’t a binary one, it’s more of a gradient scale and we’ve already started moving the needle on that towards iteration.

In other words this misunderstanding about 18 months is silly, blah blah new features blah blah farmville in space blah blah, and in 18 to 36 months we will be working on the core issues.

Great, I feel better already. :)

Now if you actually want to feel better go and read the exceptional devblog fixing lag: module lag - why not all bugfixes are a good idea. I will summarize it for you. The CSM described what has happening while under lag conditions. The developers managed to reproduce it. The developers quantified that it was a big issue. The developers identified the lines of code that were the problem. Although the bug is hard to solve the developers are working like mad to fix it, and not just give it a patch, but fixing the underlying cause of the bug.

There, now I do feel much better now.

Note to CCP: we are not idiots, don't give us marketingspeak from those MBA type ... give us details from the geek programmers instead.