Another week passes! The summer summit attendees have been announced, or rather we’ve been told we can talk about it. It’ll be the 17th through the 19th of September, with Sion, Ali, myself, Sugar Kyle, Mike Azariah, Corbexx and Steve Ronuken going. “Summer” is a bit misnamed at this point given the actual timing, but over the years they’ve drifted a bit… though as Sugar pointed out, the last day of Summer is the 21st so it’s still technically true.
One other note in this otherwise short (blah blah Crius soon, the usual excuses…) update is the concept of “Little Things” as Sugar Kyle touched on in her post. One “Heretic Caldari” had taken exception to the naming, seeing it as asking players to self-censor and possibly losing out on things, because we of course do not know what is or is not “little” from CCP’s perspective. But that actually deviates rather significantly from the way I (and I think CCP as well) think of them. The idea of “little things” is not “things that take minimal developer effort”, but rather things that are little to the players. If they take minimal developer time that’s certainly going to make it more likely to be implemented, but you absolutely shouldn’t be thinking about it when making you’re suggestions. What you want to think about are minor gripes and annoyances and quality of life flaws, things that don’t necessarily break gameplay in a huge way but just annoy you a little when you’re trying to do something.
Examples? Well how about the little things in Crius? Among others…
- Separating corp & personally insured ships.
- A default “No Label” label for contacts, and a label on the online/offline indicator for your contacts.
- No skills required to fit a ship.
- Reloading indicators
- Highlighting in Assets
- Cleaner info windows.
And so on and so forth. The Rubicon 1.1 devblog actually has all the “little things” devblogs since CCP Karkur’s first one back in early 2012, and the trend is repeated throughout: Little things are little to you.
Borrowing an example from Sugar Kyle’s PvE little things, “The entire mission system is boring and awful” isn’t little. There’s nothing little about it, you’re talking about an entire gameplay system there. Something along the lines of “an overlay that shows me where I have to go and a summary of my objectives without having to open my journal and check each mission individually” though, that’s little (and it already exists to boot.) Or, with my own little anomaly oriented project, “Anomalies are awful and bad, replace them with a dynamic PvE system with high-functioning player-like AI that spawns and reacts based on the number of players present and what they’re flying” isn’t little. But, “Hidden Rally Points are supposedly the lowest difficulty type of Rally Point, but widely separated spawns slow down completion time considerably and an incredible number of elite cruisers per wave makes them a lot harder than you’d expect; grouping the spawn points into a couple of clusters and replacing some of the cruisers with battlecruisers or battleships would help balance the site” would be.
And one last non-PvE example, one of my own favorite pet peeves, “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to create multiple stacks of a given size at once?”
As of now, one week to Crius! Once it launches we’ll get more activity, likely a good split between tweaks and adjustments to Crius and short & long term future work.
This is late because I was going to combo-post about the NPE, but welp, post still isn’t done…
The Third N 