The White Rabbit Syndrome and "Off With Their Heads!"

After posting this in THE OLD TRUSTY FORUMS in the General Discussion thread - New EVE Online forums temporarily disabled - setup by CCP Navigator, I decided it should have been here in my blog, so, I plagiarized myself...

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I usually keep my arse out of whine-fests, troll parades, and general rock throwing, but this fiasco warrants grabbing my pitchfork and joining the mob if only because of the fact that after the two test runs of the new forums, they were released not only with HUGE, wide-open security problems, but little if any of the testers' feedback was heeded.  I took part in the first test run (unfortunately I couldn't find enough time due to RL issues to help with the second) but when the forums opened, I could only find a miniscule few examples of the user feedback actually being used.  Why bother with tests CCP, if our input is thrown out and disregarded along with the garbage?

It is becoming obvious that someone in upper management doesn't have a clue.  They want their new toys - the way it was designed, regardless of flaws and lack of features - out the door and to hell with what the customer wants, needs, envisions, or finds lacking, and worse, to hell with the silly 'polished' idea.  "Get it out so that we can move onto the next new toy and we'll finish fixing it later (maybe)", seems to be this person's (or persons') motto.

I actually have a lot of respect for most of the dev teams at CCP, and I applaud their apology and acknowledgement of the problem here as well as their dropping back and punting the old forums into service again.  Many companies (no *cough* *S.O.E* *cough* names here) would have taken the stoic, we-know-best-and-you-couldn't-grasp-the-issues route by simply reopening the old forums with a message along the lines of "Due to technical issues, we will be using the old forums until further notice." and that would be that.  I'm not implying that the web team should not be tarred-and-feathered for this MAJOR coding ineptitude they called a forum, but I seriously believe the issue began and ended in the top echelon of management.  Something this bad quite frankly should not have happened, not even in the devs' worse nightmares.  The issue HAD to be a time/deadline/personnel squeeze. Plain and simple.

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~~~Spyke