My NDA is expired. It's worse than you know, AMA | Hacker News Reader

My NDA is expired. It's worse than you know, AMA

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64 pointsJCharante24 comments

I love that the evidence of widespread misuse of company funds is someone booked their flights too late to a conference.

Also, the idea that employees of a game company don't play the game they work on for fun is pretty understandable.

Like it's their job. The last thing they're gonna want to do on their time off is play it.

> Also, the idea that employees of a game company don't play the game they work on for fun is pretty understandable.

This is true, but I think for a game as complex as Eve, developpers need to know the game they work on. Eve is constantly changing and evolving because of its nature.

For example Riot games required (I don't know if they still do) employees to have and maintain a certain rank in competitive queues.

The community has been complaining about a big disconnect between devs and players and this could explain it.

At Blizzard, employees get free stuff like free sub for WoW. If its free you value it less (I had Apple TV+ for free for a year and the only thing I watched was Snoopy with my kid). They are encouraged to play other games to get inspiration from, amd they do (but AFAIK not during work hours, though perhaps during lunch break or on friday afternoon?)

> Like it's their job. The last thing they're gonna want to do on their time off is play it.

this is maybe why i have played more terraria and noita this year than Halo and GTAV. different strokes and all that, and i get that the triple A stuff demands larger staff with more diverse interests but sometimes it is nice to play stuff where the passion and focus of the devs is concentrated… and they play the game they are making.

I think there’s a serious reason for this: becoming a powerful EVE player is a big deal. It’s possible to make actual money that way. You don’t want employees playing the game any more than a casino lets a dealer play a couple of hands against herself.

Policies distancing devs from being serious players started after the T20 scandal, when a dev was giving T2 Blueprints to certain players (and these blueprints were worth a loooot) but were probably too strict.

I used to be experienced enough that I had more than a dozen accounts and probably a couple thousand dollars worth of assets. And I run an ingame business that I still manage. And yet I'm nothing on a corp or alliance level, so the average employee could be more engaged without getting into dangerous territory.

Aside from the acquisitions at the end (last paragraph) that the workplace is toxic I don't read much other then a difference in vision.

> It started with me trying to convince CCP that skins and vanity items [...] CCP was against selling these types of flashy vanity items and were not really keen on skins in general,

That actually....doesn't sound bad? Just a difference in vision?

> Aryth asked them to show JFs and Shuttles and it was at this point CCP conceded that maybe the tool was not 100% accurate.

Yeah, creating reports which all align perfectly is hard (ie. getting "100%" when you add them up). You need to aligning cut-off dates and what not. Sometimes it's just not worth the hassle if you want a "good enough" picture.

> was caught several times spending 3 to 4 times the money needed on flights and lodgings simply because this individual waited until the literal last minute to book and allocate travel accommodations for company events.

People make mistakes and some people keep making mistakes. And some of these mistakes costs money. Still not hearing anything earth shattering here. And, sure, at some point someone needs to be held accountable and possibly be re-assigned.

> CCP is staffed by intelligent people who are very adept at using every possible stratagem to avoid reprisal. Their public image and the way they are seen by the public is paramount.

Not saying it's a good thing but not that different from any other large(r) company.

> This is why a laptop with over 60-80GB of data related to the CSM went “missing” during my term. If it’s not in minutes or a dev blog or on confluence then it is probably on this mysterious laptop.

That's about as well substantiated as the average 9/11 conspiracy claim.

> Workplace culture in iceland must be really lax because most of the people you see throughout the day are just kinda chillin in the kitchen area or hanging out. Has a big silicon valley tech startup vibe to it, everybody isn’t really in a hurry to do anything and is taking it easy.

Terrible...?

Sound pretty standard for any company and not that bad.

The flight thing sounded more like "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity".

Maybe it would make more sense to someone who plays EVE and has more context but from outside I don't see anything terrible.

> > It started with me trying to convince CCP that skins and vanity items [...] CCP was against selling these types of flashy vanity items and were not really keen on skins in general,

> That actually....doesn't sound bad? Just a difference in vision?

Yeah, CCP's position makes sense, assuming that a consistent aesthetic is the most imporant goal. But I could easily see the player's perspective. Maybe people are leaving/plan to leave in part due to visual boredom. Maybe injecting a little bit of flavor via wacky skins would nudge them to log in frequently and for long enough that it would keep a corporation alive and actually improve members' overall gameplay. And EVE is special in that you don't really see anyone's skins. You'll see your own most closely when docked, but when undocked you're probably zoomed out far enough that you just see a bunch of dots on a radar screen. So if you chose to buy a wacky anime skin, it would only affect your own experience.

It really helps to include things like the fact that you're talking about Eve online in your subject title

Ya I had no clue what this is about

It's in an eve online subreddit. It's not hard to infer what they're talking about here.

We're not in the eve subreddit, we're on hacker news.

Did you click on the link? Because that's where it goes. You should probably read the article before commenting.

Sorry, I thought it was a rule to have the title be the title of the article / post.

Some of these types of things happen at other gaming companies as well. I worked at a leading multiplayer online gaming company that has some of the most played games in the world.

There was a person that pushed for a feature in a game citing "decline in player base" that needed to be remediated ASAP. The data was being shown with reports that this was the case and these reports were escalated to the CEO and leadership for the game.

The feature was in development for over a year, released, and had incredibly negative player reception. So much that we started to see an ACTUAL decline in player engagement due to the nature of the change.

Retrospectively, re-analyzing the reports we found that there was a critical transformation happening that caused for most of our players and our most engaged players to be removed from the number of total players. This was an incredibly small bug that was caused by not accounting for a previous feature release in the game.

Essentially a data engineering/PM bug and pushing of a perspective caused for a lack of double checking the data and caused for the company to make an incredibly bad bet on a new feature that actually removed player engagement.

This is why it is helpful to use data, but validate, and listen to players at every step of the way. Player happiness will drive engagement, manufacturing engagement is much harder.

What is a CCP. What is a CSM.

I thought I will be able to guess it after reading this wall of text. But I wasn't, is it a person, is it the company?

Seems like:

CCP Games (company)

The Council of Stellar Management (CSM) is a player-elected council created to represent the views of the players to CCP.

Regarding the first: https://www.ccpgames.com/

Regarding the second: Council of Stellar Management. It's a player-elected lobbying group to steer and give feedback on (some) development decisions. You can read more about it here: https://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/

CCP are an Icelandic video game developer, famous in particular for the giant single instance MMORPG Eve Online.

CSM is the Council of Stellar Management, it's an elected, CCP supported group of players who they consult with on how to improve the game.

For a moment there I thought the Chinese Communist Party had expirations on their NDAs!

I would love to have some NDAs expire. I still have some NDAs active from 2010s

I realize the AMA is about working at CCP, but someone really needs to write a book detailing the exploits of various corporations and nefarious denizens playing their game Eve Online. It's like a game of Dwarf Fortress writ large in that thanks to human ingenuity there's always a new and unexpected twist, but it still ends in a sudden but inevitable betrayal.

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