Shadow of Cerberus
Public => EVE World News => Thema gestartet von: Aura am Mai 20, 2013, 07:45:02 Vormittag
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Anatomy of a screw-up
About once a year, I have to write a major mea cupla blog post. Welcome to this year's. Well, at least I hope it's this year's! If you write 500 blog posts a year, mistakes -- major mistakes -- are inevitable. When I make a mistake, I always try to be diligent about first, correcting it, and second, owning up to it. But I thought it'd be interesting to delve into this one in detail.
First, the mistake itself: in the midst of a little QOTW post earlier today, I said that the Odyssey feature of Personal Hangar Array module for POSes was going to be delayed to a point release. That was mistaken.
For those who want to gloat at me, feel free to gloat. I feel completely awful about this error, and have fallen on my sword to CCP. It was a stupid thing to do. When I was just a blogger, making a mistake like that is dumb but forgivable. But for a CSM member, it's a lot more dangerous: while this blog is not an official communications medium, it'd be real easy for a mistake like that to go viral. So I really need to be more careful about what I print here this coming year and that's why I feel so terrible about this early screw-up.
So I want to extend my apologies to CCP and specifically to Team Superfriends for this error. If you want to know the story how this error happened, read on. It might be of interest to EVE bloggers or potential EVE bloggers. If you don't care, then you can move on to the next post.
Here's how it happened.
Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time knows that once a month, I do a little post that I call the "Junk Drawer". The junk drawer is really a side effect of how this blog gets created. To create the blog, I have a little mind-mapping application where I take daily notes on things that I read about, see in the game, hear about, or whatever. Some of those little notes get expanded into outlines, and some of those outlines get expanded into full blog posts. At any given time, there are a hundred or so "active" items in my notes, of which about ten of them are a paragraph or two (more about these in a second), three of them are outlines and about four or five more are blog posts in the process of being written.
Anything that doesn't make it into at least an outline in 90 days or so ends up in a junk drawer post. And that's how those posts get created.
In particular, sometimes the notes themselves aren't big enough to generate full blog posts by themselves. So they sit as a paragraph or two waiting to be connected to something else. Sometimes when this happens, those two paragraphs go into the junk drawer and that's it. But other times, I like to connect those two paragraphs to two paragraphs about something else if I can find a way to link them. This month, I had written three paragraphs about MSCW that I thought would be interesting, but they didn't really warrant their own blog post.
On May 8th, I read this dev-post from CCP Fozzie early that morning. Go read it. Did you catch what I misread? It was that second-to-last line:
We unfortunately will not be able to get Private SMAs into the initial Odyssey release. It is still something we want to do, possibly in a point release.
Apparently I should have waited to do my EVE Online forum reading until I was a little more awake because here's what I wrote in the mind-mapping app that morning:
DP: personal POS hangar delay point release, NBD
It's short-hand. DP is dev-post. NBD is exactly what it sounds like. Usually, I attach the link next to it but for some reason, this time I didn't. This would prove to be a major mistake. Still, it wasn't enough to warrant a blog post of its own and hell, if I had gotten to the end of the month, then I would have realized that the line was wrong and I would have deleted it and no damage done. Scary truth: sometimes this happens.
Know what else I had three paragraphs written on? Themes, and how those themes would probably affect the future development of EVE, and how things might get pulled out of EVE expansions or delayed at the last minute if they didn't fit the theme. Then, this morning, I watched that funny little exchange between CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie in the QOTW post and that exchange forged the connection in my head:
- Odyssey is about finding things in space and things happening to you there.
- MSCW might cause features that didn't totally fit that theme to be delayed.
- What features have been delayed from Odyssey?
Into the mind-map I went looking for the word "delay". And that's how a screw-up on a blog happens. When I connected those three thoughts, I thought the resulting blog post was very clever! Sometimes, it's when you think you're being clever that you're really not.
So now you know how that screw-up happened. And knowing is half the battle.
I want to again apologize to CCP for my unintentional bit of spreading misinformation. Fortunately, with the help of CCP Fozzie and a couple of comments here, I caught it only a couple of hours after it was published so hopefully the damage was minimal. And hopefully the rest of the post still ended up being interesting for a reason other than the screw-up. ;-)
Source: Anatomy of a screw-up (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/05/anatomy-of-screw-up.html)