Thank you very much everyone for placing me on CSM 6 and now on CSM 7 where I am currently serving as the Chairman! If you would like to contact me directly, do not hesitate to just send me an eve mail in game. Keep your eyes here and watch for new posts.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Can former Devs be impartial?

And then one day, Donald Trump couldn't find a parking place...
Scatim Helicon of Goonswarm asks:
Should we worry that your past as a Developer may prevent you from being impartial when working as a CSM? I'm thinking particularly of issues bought about under your watch - if CSM discussions turn to, say, de-buffing Supercarriers or changing some aspects of the Dominion sov system, will you be able to put ego to one side and be willing to take the axe to your own creations in the same way as you would that of others?
An axe? How about a flaming sword? Bear in mind that anything created on 'my watch' wasn't purely my own but the result of some sort of team effort that may or may not have been what was originally intended or desired. I know there are several things on TQ which I would have wanted to see come out differently or... finished.

As a case in point, the old sov system was a dead end from both a technical and a game play standpoint. The new sov system was designed to be able to be tweaked, iterated on and balanced on the fly. Multiple objectives, tiered goals and all that stuff. Yet there's so much that didn't make it into the first release of Dominion that it was gimped from day one. I've waited for two expansions and still not seen any sign that they are going back to it or finish it properly. All I see is vague talk about how jump bridges will probably get nerfed or fixed or whatever but probably not oh look a butterfly let's make more NPC stuff, etc...

Iteration is all about updating, tweaking and even scrapping things that do not work. This should be happening much more often than once every six months or every two years. It's one of the main reasons I am running for CSM - so I can go back there and ask in person, "Where the hell is XXXX? Sansha, wtf?" and a lot of other things.

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