I received an interesting EVE mail the other day that’s got me thinking and I thought I’d expand on my response to it here, in relation to a couple of three blog posts today (the other two are coming later this evening). The question was basically “Jester, you say at the top of your blog that you’re a bitter-vet but it’s obvious you’re enjoying your activities in Rote Kapelle. Isn’t that a contradiction?” And the short answer that I provided was that yes, I am enjoying my activities in Rote Kapelle quite a lot, but no, I’m still a bitter-vet.
Being a bitter-vet springs from a deep well of experience of watching how CCP develops the game and proceeds with their various activities. You can still greatly enjoy EVE Online and yet still be a bitter-vet. Being a bitter-vet goes beyond that. Distilled down to its essence, all one needs to declare one-self a bitter-vet is to be willing and ready to believe that whatever choice CCP makes about something, it’s going to be in their own interests instead of that of EVE players. Coming back to the beginning, the ability to be able to do that comes from long experience watching CCP develop their game. That “bitter-vet-ness” then resolves itself into a lot of cynicism directed toward CCP and usually toward the CSM that’s supposed to represent players to CCP.
Some examples will suffice.
When it was announced that Orcas and carriers were going to lose their traditional seven-slot Corporate Hangar Arrays in preference for one-slot Fleet Hangars, the devs involved clearly felt that their change would be greeted with cheerful enthusiasm from all involved. Those that actually spend time flying those ships, though — had they been consulted — would have been quick to point out what a bad idea this was. Where was the CSM in this? Who knows, but chances are they were never consulted for this change. The change itself probably came from some esoteric bit of programming weirdness that the person involved didn’t feel like tracing to the drunk Icelandic coder that put it together back in 2006 or so. So hitting the “delete” key on all of it was viewed within CCP as the obvious solution.
This is a sort of programming that I occasionally think of to myself as “CCP lazy mode”: the person involved is given the job to fix something broken, and fixes it by just deleting features. Then the deletion is sold to management and players in terms of “it will make the code easier to maintain.” The missing features or some substitutes thereof (or perhaps even new features) are then added over the next several years until it’s time for the cycle to start again because the people who added all those features back are by that point long gone.
Usually, this is easiest to spot with the “durable” sections of the code… the stuff that’s been around a while. Just in the last four years, we’ve seen this again and again with the fitting window, the inventory system, sov mechanics, POSes, player notifications and timers, and ship cargo bays of various kinds. Think about ore and fuel bays. These were added with a great deal of fanfare some time back, with extravagant promises of more specialized cargo bays soon to come: ammo bays and the like. Hasn’t happened. And over time, the specialized cargo bays we do have will get older and hoarier and start interacting in strange ways with other new features that are added (like fleet hangars and loot drops) and sooner or later a bright-eyed CCP dev will come along and just decide to delete these bays and throw ore and fuel back into the main cargo bay.
“It will make cargo bays easier to maintain.”
Similar things happen with CCP activities. I’ll cover this in a bit more detail in one of the two follow-on posts, but consider things like Incursion live events, pirate live events, dev PvP fleets, Armageddon Day, and the like. Each is announced with a great deal of fan-fare, players love them, and many wonderful follow-ups are promised. And then the follow-ups don’t happen and the fact that the events happened in the first place is forgotten.
That’s the well from which being a bitter-vet springs from. I’m sure you can think of other examples yourself where CCP has followed this pattern. They’re following it today with all the cool new player notifications that are going to be included in Retribution. And of course, the ones that exist today that they decided not to include because coding them would be annoying or hard.
When one of these changes goes bad, it also manifests itself as cynicism toward the CSM… “why didn’t you guys say something about this?!” But of course, the answer is often “we weren’t told”, only it’s kind of embarrassing for CSM members to say that. Which is probably part of the reason you get a lot of CSM members that say nothing at all. This is one of those areas where CSMs 5 and 6 were much superior to the current model: if they weren’t being told something, they would publicly declare that and the consequences of embarrassing CCP be damned. This CSM? Not so much. But that’s a whole other topic and not really something I want to get into again. Maybe I’ll bring it up at the next CSM Town Hall. 
As I said, I’ll be expanding on this topic with a couple more posts today, both shorter than this one but covering slightly different facets of the bitter-vet experience. Call it bitter-vet day around here. Anyway, to the person that sent in the question, thanks very much! Gave me something to think about the last couple of days.
Send us Intel/Corrections via dropbox or shoot us an e-mail
If you would like to read more we invite you to visit his blog here.
TLDR Bitching about something is better than bitching about nothing.
I cant wait for the tears of all the horrible empire orca pubbies who will now feel the wrath of minilove.
They could jsut blue frog their stuff.
And thats not the point, the point is that the ability to sort items in corprate hanger arrays is going to be lost to a one large bin, rather than 7 individual bins.
This will hurt carrier pilots who use the 7 hangers to sort extra fittings and super pilots who need to be able to switch to travel fit etc.
That requires significant number of highsec pilots to read (and understand implications correctly) devblogs, patchnotes, forum posts or some blogs. Previous experience shows that this is very unlikely. CCP just going to make another present to goons.
HUUUGE buff to ganking. But lets just wait a few months until elite high sec PvPers whine about CCP always nerfing their precious hobby.
Oh, we all can see how fast CCP reacted to Catalyst swarms taking out freighters, right?
WTF is pubie?
Those hairs down there..those are pubies.
what about hairs "up there"
and dont forget those "back behind there"
99% of the people who post comments here
Isn't Pubie the bass player for Jefferson Starship?
Oh really? A fleet hangar? Let me guess, every scrub with any permission will be able to steal/borrow from this…
Worse, I hadn't even heard about it until i read it in a story on evenews24.
Sign me up for that bitter vet title too I guess.
the only sad thing was before we had two options when hauling cargo
Orca — Small cargo (40 000 m3 corp bay) + 40-60 000 m3 cargo bay
Freighter — Large cargobay (800 000m3 ) slower warp speed
after patch i see no reason to use an orca as a glorified mini freighter as its almost as expensive, and if you fit for tank its just abit stronger then the freighter.
We are all bitter vets. We play a game made by a company. Companies are not designed for happiness, or for paying employees. Companies are made to make money. CCp will always do what they think will make them money, only to the limit that they feel it might not KEEP making them money in the long term; that's just the truth. A dev might really like what he does, and enjoy making players happy, but the people at the tippy top count the beans.
Oh poor, poor CSM. They obviously have our interests at heart.
[02:56:13] Darius III > and please keep paying your subscription fees, CCP needs your cash for my free trips to Iceland ;0
Nvm
Great post Ripard. IMO the reason that CSM are quiet is this: THE CURRENT CSM ARE TRYING TO STAY COZY IN BED WITH CCP. Yes this is the 'real' Darius and yes I want to be on record about this. This post (if you read it even) will make more sense in the coming weeks
I fly carriers and my orca all the time. Although the loss of an unscannable cargo-bay is a bit of a downside I view these changes as great.
The setup like it was a corp hangar was just stupid because 99.9% of the players didn't use it as a corp but just as a personal hangar. Also the refitting option is great because what do you do when you jump your carrier into system, either you dock or right click capacitor allow fleet usage………..that's a mandatory action you have to do all the time.
All in all good change.
I agree 100%, new features, not deletion of old ones that work ok. Why should we indirectly pay someone to delete features in a game we pay for?
Corp hangers in carriers make things so much easier to sort and give permissions to in corp fleets / POSs.
Unified inventory was just as retarded a change and continues to annoy me every day.
Do any of these changes improve the game from where it was 7 years ago, are any of them new features? No.. stupid CCP.
What about switching charactere without typing your pasword again ? Like a Real "log off " .
For me the OVERVIEW is the worst bit in the whole game.
I have be a paying customer from 2005 and it has never change or evolve to something better or smarter way to interact.
The whole UI, chat box windows, Inventory (ships, Items and corp hangars), loot containers etc, i can go for a while and everyone who plays the game understands me.
A proper revamp, redo is a MUST DO, for me and nothing else matter to US the players.
CCP do it NOW!
I am enjoying my activities in Rote Kapelle quite a lot, but no, I’m still a bitter-vet.