It's Time - Yearly Expansion Cycle

We're never going to see another expansion like Apocrypha.

You see, CCP learned an important lesson from the Summer of Rage as discussed yesterday: you can't let current features lie fallow forever when they are in a dysfunctional or broken state. Thus since Incarna we've seen massive ship rebalancing on a scale never seen before, Crimewatch 2.0, probing rework, factional warfare redone, graphical updates, unified inventory, UI enhancements, ... the list goes on and on from big to small.

But these iterations take development cycles, and these cycles come from what used to be the pool of new development. Combine that with ~6 month development and hardening time and that means that brand new content comes in smaller, more discrete chunks. Thus why we see new ships more often since Incarna (Tier 3 Battlecruisers, ORE Frigate, Navy Battlecruisers) and new modules (Ancillary shield and armour mods, Micro jump drives, target breakers, etc), but not intensive/extensive new systems like wormholes, factional warfare, or even incursions.

Now CCP is aware that players want those big shiny features as well as the small stuff and iterations and that is what Rubicon is all about: delivering a large intensive/extensive feature over several expansions instead of one expansion so that the small features and iterations can be delivered alongside instead of letting the game get stale.

You've Seen This Before.

This is good, but it leads to the perception that each individual expansion is lackluster since the amount of new big and shiny content is lower and/or in smaller chunks. Out of this perception come comments like "this is not an expansion, its more like a patch". And in MMOs, as in everything else, perception can become reality in the minds of the masses.

To combat this, I suggest that its time CCP considers moving away from the 6 month expansion cycle to something that supports the reality of their two-pronged development of new content plus iteration.

My suggestion is a yearly "Expansion" each summer that gives players 8-9 months of development time of new features, and then during the year there are two point releases that gives iterations and smaller features, one point release in the fall that addresses any immediate concerns from the major expansions as well as normal iterations, and a point release in the late winter/early spring that has iterations and can lay groundwork for the next major expansion.

This would still allow players to get the same content over the same time-frame but would change perception that they are getting more in an expansion as well as maintain the feeling that CCP is continuing to do iterations on existing content.

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I realize that the likelihood of CCP changing their entire development methodology structure based on my suggestion in a fansite blog post is low, but I felt the need to put it out there. Someday, when I rule the world, I'll make sure to address this issue personally.

Agile Development Revisited - Rebuttal

Ripard Teg wrote a post yesterday that I'm going to have to disagree with. In COTW: Agile Development Revisited he is complaining about the speed at which the overhaul of ship balancing is occurring:

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.

I started composing this post prior to the release of this dev blog which basically proves my point, but I'm going to write it anyways.

I work in an Agile software development shop, doing 2 week sprints and about 10-12 sprints per release. Hell, I even took scrummaster training and am a scrummaster of an eight person team and we've been doing Agile/Scrum for about 3 years. One thing that becomes apparent if you do it all right is that initial stories (i.e. pieces of work) take more time and effort than subsequent stories in the same development area. There is always ramp up effort to learn the existing architecture, determining the known unknowns, and making a task plan. Then there are refinements after the first couple stories as earlier designs and ideas get proven out or thrown out altogether.

Subsequent stories can build on the groundwork and lessons learned of previous stories. Backlog grooming for future stories can take these lessons into account as the picture becomes clearer. The end result is that no matter where you start, early stories take a lot more effort than later stories as the variables get nailed down.

The dev blog Ship Balancing Winter Update kind of proves this out, lucky for me. Instead of only the logi-frigates and new destroyers we are getting all 16 cruisers revamped, putting on the step of the all important battlecruiser and battleship classes.

So why was the initial ramp up of the first few frigate so long? Well, the plan of how to go from tiers to roles must of have been controversial and had a lot of false starts and revisions within the planning of CCP itself. How to make ships distinct without covering the same roles is a difficult proposition as I can attest to in my ponderings. But now that the framework is mostly set in the 24 frigates, it will be easier to take that model as a base and apply it to the other classes. Plus the devs have a better feel for what works in balancing and what does not work with the players and ships. Less trial and error, more forward development.

When I first started writing this post, I was going to say in reply to Ripard's post that "yes, the winter update is not a lot for ship updates but I expect the rest of the classes (crusiers, BCs, BSs, Tech II) will be a lot faster". However the dev blog shows that the acceleration is already begun.

I predict that the summer update will see all 24 battlecruiser and battleships done and discussions for what Tech II ships need love to have begun.