Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

COTW: Agile development revisited

I was reading one of the anonymous comments from my post this morning about winter expansion features vis a vis DUST:

What's really pissing me off is the GLACIAL pace of 'tiericide'. I just do not think making the unused T1 frigates better is more important than making balance changes more popular classes like Cruisers and Battle Cruisers.

At the current rate any meaningful, systemic change seems like it is going to take half a decade to happen.

I think that's what we should just get used to though. CCP has so few resources working on EVE that its taking them 2 weeks per frigate to balance them. That's embarrassing.

And yeah, I'm forced to agree.  Best information says that frigates and destroyers will be done for winter, with the addition of one new destroyer for each race and the new logistics frigates being major features of the expansion.  With the mining ship updates, that's roughly 40 ships rebalanced in 2012.  Which means that at this pace, CCP will be getting around to balancing T2 battle-cruisers sometime late in 2015 and Black Ops, other T2 battleships, and maybe the T3s the following year.  So as much as it sounds like an exaggeration at this level of resources, "a half decade" to get the re-balancing done is pretty much on-the-nose.

It reminded me of something that I wrote last year, comparing CCP's idea of agile development to that of S2Games, developers of Heroes of Newerth, who managed:

...a development time from concept art to finished product in about six weeks.  That's agile development.  S2Games, the developers of Heroes of Newerth, should be proud of their achievement...

Granted, EVE is a much more complex game than HoN and there would be a lot more balancing issues to work out.  But it's increasingly obvious with the ships that have been balanced already that that's gonna happen whether the process is done quickly or slowly.  So it'd be nice to speed things up with a lot of little changes more frequently.  I'm pretty sure that's what we were promised on this topic...

Thanks for the comment, Anonymous!

EDIT (10/Sep/2012): CCP Fozzie seems to be letting cats out of bags.  Perhaps this means that we can look forward to some T1 cruiser re-balancing this year, too?
Source: COTW: Agile development revisited