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Role Playing (Games)

Ask CCP About EVE Online 306

The week after next, the annual Game Developer's Conference is happening in San Francisco. I'll be there providing coverage on the keynotes, and some of the talks that I think will appeal to the Slashdot sensibility. I've also been digging to see if there's any folks willing to speak with the Slashdot community 'in person'. The fine folks at CCP, makers of the Massively Multiplayer game EVE Online, have kindly agreed to take some time out of their busy conference schedule to answer your questions. So, what do you want to know about the present and future of this fascinating MMOG? One question per comment, please. I'll present your questions to CCP, and pass their answer back once I'm home from the event. Update: 02/22 19:51 GMT by Z : I asked Sharon Howell, the PR rep for CCP, who I might be speaking with at GDC. Unfortunately, they're still nailing down schedules. We'll be talking with one of the following: Hilmar Veigar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer, Magnus Bergsson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nathan Richardsson, Senior Producer, Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, Chief Technology Officer. One of these members of the top brass will be available to answer your questions.
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Ask CCP About EVE Online

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  • real sense of loss (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Digitus1337 ( 671442 ) <lk_digitus@noSPAM.hotmail.com> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:00PM (#18111810) Homepage
    If you lose a ship in EVE it's gone, no free respawn once you walk back to your body. Diablo 2 is the only other game that offered anything like this. Why haven't other games caught on?
    • by faloi ( 738831 )
      If you lose a ship in EVE it's gone, no free respawn once you walk back to your body. Diablo 2 is the only other game that offered anything like this. Why haven't other games caught on?

      I haven't played a MMOG yet that won't let you delete your character.
    • Why haven't other games caught on?
      Because most gamers are babies who want it easy and risk-free.
    • by StewedSquirrel ( 574170 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:06PM (#18112808)
      To be clear, you do not lose your character, nor any skills trained because of the "clone" system.

      Even without a clone, you only lose 60% of your highest-level skill... which usually amounts to less than 3% of your total skill base.

      The loss of a ship may be painful, but the "Insurance" system makes it so that you generally only lose 30% of the value of the ship and the "loot drop" system ensures that only about 60% of the modules on the ship are "lost".

      In all, it's quite fair and makes it a non-trivial thing to lose a ship, but not devistating to your long-term gameplay.

      This is perfect....

      One of CCP's mottos is "there is no 'easy' button".

      Stew
      • The game also tends to be pretty good about ramping up the risk as you progress in the game. 30% of the value of a ship gets to be more significant as your ship costs increase of course, and many of the rarer and more valuable ships insure much more poorly in relation to their average sale value. Also, after you've spent a lot on an expensive ship, you're likely going to want to fill it with the more expensive modules, further increasing your risk. The loot drop system saves some modules, but in PVP, you sh
  • Band of Developers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Notabadguy ( 961343 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:02PM (#18111824)
    The recent scandal involving a CCP Developer(s) abusing game mechanics to benefit an in-game alliance shook the gaming community, not only because of its ramifications to the company itself, but because the "whistleblower" was banned for revealing a developer's in-game identity -- despite the fact that his identity was already selectively known to an in-game alliance. Many feel that the issue needs closure -- that scandal was quietly swept away, and that CCP's punitive measures were misdirected. What steps does CCP plan to take in the future to keep from discouraging players from revealing illegal activity by others, and does CCP intend to bring closure to the Eve community on this game-breaking issue?
    • by aafiske ( 243836 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @06:25PM (#18115038)
      There were two dev posts, one from the CEO, one from the guilty party, on the issue. Another post was made about a new internal investigations team being formed.

      The player who was banned was supposedly not banned for being a whistleblower, but for other infractions.

      Posts addressing the issue:
      http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topi c&threadID=473335 [eve-online.com]

      New internal investigators:
      http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topi c&threadID=475706 [eve-online.com]

  • by Taelron ( 1046946 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:02PM (#18111834)
    Will they ever give the game community a satisfactory resolution to the incident where their staff have cheated in the game? Any other game company would have fired those employees... Theirs kept their jobs and simply created new accounts, that with their developer access, can just quickly ramp back up... The way they treated the whistle blower was much harsher than those actually guilty of deceiving and betraying their player base. I know I will never purchase any additional services or titles from CCP as a result of this gaff.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Is0m0rph ( 819726 )
      And please let us know if some or all of Eve Online's group will be cheating or not and which factions they will be cheating for so we can plan.
  • by Joe The Dragon ( 967727 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:06PM (#18111880)
    Game Developer should not be able to play your game with out saying that they are one as they can easily work scrams , help people they know play for free, and so on. As in that game you can use in game money to pay for time card and you can also unofficially sell it for real money as well. If the IRS where to stat taxing people for they type of games I don't thing they would like people who run the game helping other covering up there taxable income.
    • Oh my god get out.

      I can work a scram myself. The skill training is pretty minor, so I'm not sure what your beef is. They're handy, cause it keeps the other ship from warping away while you kill it. But I think you mean scam, and frankly, scams are half the fun of Eve. I've been subject to a few, it's just part of the experience. As to the IRS angle, you can't really address a taxable income issue where the taxation would be on illegal funds, as CCP does NOT sanction selling time cards for real life cur
  • CCCP (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In Soviet Russia... wait, you said CCP. Never mind.
  • by hardburn ( 141468 ) <hardburn AT wumpus-cave DOT net> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:07PM (#18111900)

    As a community grows, it tends to attract more diverse viewpoints, not all of which are healthy for things such as game design. This can be seen on the Eve-O forums after nearly every dev blog about an upcoming change, the recent nano blog being a prime example. Almost immediately, you get a hundred posts of someone suggesting a completely contrary solution, and threaten to leave the game if their demands aren't made.

    Over time, this tends to draw away some of the smarter members of the community to other boards, such as Scrapheap Challenge.

    Given that no company in its right mind would ask to have fewer customers, how do you handle being able to keep new subscribers coming in while also keeping existing ones happy?

    • by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
      This is a good point. While the revamped character creation process with Revelations improved things greatly for the newest players, the fact is that there is still a huge gap between the "haves" and "have-nots", and due to the way things work, it is nearly impossible for existing "have-nots" to become "haves" without existing "haves" taking them under their wing. A new player has little chance whatsoever of getting into an alliance, and without an alliance, a player can't experience 0.0 at all. There's
  • by TwoStep ( 36482 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:07PM (#18111908) Homepage
    It has become clear in the recent LV-Goon war that the servers are not capable of handling more than 300-400 players per system. What is CCP planning to do about this? No matter how many optimizations the server team makes, the users will always be able to gather enough people to overwhelm the server.
  • Employee Players (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vrallis ( 33290 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:09PM (#18111946) Homepage
    Given the recent events (mainly surrounding Band of Brothers) of employee misconduct, have you considered changing your privacy policies in cases where an employee is involved?

    I understand the privacy policy concerning the average player, and not wanting to discuss GM actions. However, when it is an employee involved who has been found guilty, some things need to be aired out in public in order to instill confidence in CCP by your playerbase.

    We aren't looking for their real names. We want to know:

    1) What exactly was the offense?
    2) How was the offense corrected? (ISK or items removed)
    3) What characters were terminated as a result of the investigation?
    4) Is the person still a CCP employee?

    *avoided mentioning BoD even once!
    **oops!
    • by aafiske ( 243836 )
      This was already answered for players.

      The dev in question spawned these blueprints:
      Flameburst Precision Light Missile Blueprint
      Phalanx Rage Rocket Blueprint
      Havoc Fury Heavy Missile Blueprint
      Bloodclaw Fury Light Missile Blueprint
      Spike L Blueprint
      Sabre Blueprint

      The Sabre one is the particularly bad one, that could pull in billions.

      The blueprints in question will be returned to CCP and reintroduced through a new raffle in the future.

      The all the characters of that dev were terminated.

      They are still an employee
  • White Wolf (Score:5, Interesting)

    by flymolo ( 28723 ) <flymolo.gmail@com> on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:09PM (#18111948)
    What White Wolf IP will see electronic editions from CCP?
    • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
      I was thinking about how to ask this sort of question myself. I like your wording. Unfortunately, I doubt any WW question will get mod'd up enough to matter, because everyone will be too busy with silly questions and stuff that they actually know/care about - which isn't WW ;)
  • The fact that eve is so open ended that when the player considers his or her freedom for a few moments they realise that this game just like RL life has seemingly no purpose. Is there any content that would be added in the future that would appease players who want a traditional mmo experience (linear story, enless grinding and mind numbing repition)?
    • Mine veldpar in high sec for 14 hours per day, or run crappy courier missions until your eyes glaze over. Both of those exciting jobs can be yours in EVE-Online!
  • by mmalove ( 919245 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:15PM (#18112032)
    So in their most recent patch, CCP apparently altered the way character creation works to give starting players more skill points, enabling them to do more out of the starting gate. This is an interesting turn to me - as one of the things that drove me away from that game was the fact that I faced potentially months of basically waiting for skills to train before I could try my hand at flying a real ship - getting involved in meaningful pvp, and, well, participating in the game world at all really. What other steps does CCP plan to introduce new players to the game economics, without destroying the depth that is a main attraction of EVE?
    • by kindbud ( 90044 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:06PM (#18112830) Homepage
      This is an interesting turn to me - as one of the things that drove me away from that game was the fact that I faced potentially months of basically waiting for skills to train before I could try my hand at flying a real ship...

      You got bad advice. Many new players are told by older players to train the Learning skills up (which raise the character's attributes, and cause him to learn other skills faster - a lot faster) before starting on combat and ship skills. That's terrible advice. New players are not intended to sit in station for two months waiting for non-combat skills to train. You can train Frigate 5 and a small weapon to level 5 before the 14 day trial runs out, and Mechanic and Engineering to 5 before the 1st month subscription is done. You can do that with the attributes you got at character creation, no implants. Now you're in a Elite Frigate and can take on almost any agent mission, even some level 4 missions. You can kill belt rats in 0.0 space without breaking a sweat, although not as quickly as larger ships can. Still, that's some good cash for a 1 month player.

      Maxing out Learning skills first is something older players do with their second character, their "alt." And yeah, it makes the alts skills train up a lot faster. But the older player can do this because his first character is financing the skillbooks for the second one, and he has a developed character to play already while the second one "cooks."

      I really wish players would stop giving that advice.
      • by Cylix ( 55374 )
        It's actually a balance most of us recommend.

        In the long term, it's going to be better to train your learning and attributes up, but that needs to be balanced with action.

        Even then, it's fairly trivial to train base + level 3 advanced up.

        Honestly, I wish I had started the game with training things higher, but I took a mixed route myself.

        Someone did the math on a forum once and it would take a significant amount of time to recoup the lost time for training all advanced learning/attribute skills to L5. Genera
  • by amper ( 33785 ) * on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:18PM (#18112064) Journal
    I only recently heard about EVE Online, thanks to all the brouhaha that appeared here on Slashdot a few weeks ago. I downloaded the client and signed up for a trial account. After 14 days, I plunked down my credit card number for a full account. The game is very fun to play, but I have a few questions about certain decisions that the designers have made.

    First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client? I despise having to use Windows for any reason at all. The only reason it's even installed on my Macs is because I'm a technology consultant and I have to deal with Windows professionally, but I'd really rather not have to.

    The second thing I'd like to know is why the physics are all screwed up, specifically, why are ships limited to a particular velocity. This flies in the face of logic, and makes no sense whatsoever. Ships should be rated according to their acceleration characteristics. As an aside to this, the spaceship designers might want to study the concept of "moment of inertia" to see why it is highly unlikely that real spaceships would exhibit the highly asymmetrical designs that are so prevalent in EVE.

    Thirdly, what's up with the seemingly bizarre layouts of the solar systems, as relates to the legal system? There are many pockets of high-sec regions and systems in EVE that are ony reachable through long strings of low-sec jumps. This really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as in any real empire, if a particular part of said empire were similarly isolated, it would very quickly cease to be viable.

    I play a character which is part of the Gallente Federation. I have noticed that many Federation stations are located in low-sec space. This also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The construction of a station would require a massive investment, making it highly unlikely that any entity would choose to locate such an expensive piece of hardware in such a place, unless they felt they could defend that space easily, which almost by definition would make that space relatively high security.

    I suppose that you could some up my questions here by saying that I'm really requesting that the game be made much more realistic than it is.
    • by amper ( 33785 ) *
      One other thing that I almost forgot. The online documentation is very poor. You really need to offer a downloadable, complete manual to the game. In only 20 or so days of playing I've come up with so many questions that could not be answered by the available documentation, or the answers that were available were so imprecise as to be useless, that I've lost count.
    • by LakeSolon ( 699033 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:42PM (#18112434) Homepage

      First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client?


      Short answer: Microsoft's DirectX. Slightly longer answer: this comment [slashdot.org].

      The second thing I'd like to know is why the physics are all screwed up


      Simplicity. I couldn't tell you if it was simplicity for the purposes of the physics engine/network coherency or game balance that came first, but both contribute. Trying to balance the gameplay without an over-simplified speed model (I can't actually think of any games off the top of my head that respect real-universe physics in a space environment, though I imagine someone has tried it) would be excruciating if not impossible. Even in the simplified model there have been issues and several overhauls. Just the other day there was a dev blog that mentioned the issue of the "Nanophoon" (a particular ship+configuration that's hard to counter in PvP).

      Thirdly, what's up with the seemingly bizarre layouts of the solar systems, as relates to the legal system?


      You might be referring to something else, but my first guess is that you're trying to get from one empire's hub to that of another. There are barriers of low security between center of each of the Amarr, Caldari, Minmatar and Gallente empires. There are higher security paths available, but you'll likely end up going slightly out of your way. You can adjust your autpilot to prefer safer routes.

      The construction of a station would require a massive investment, making it highly unlikely that any entity would choose to locate such an expensive piece of hardware in such a place, unless they felt they could defend that space easily, which almost by definition would make that space relatively high security.


      Actually, there are many player-constructed stations in EVE these days. Every single one of them has been (and must be) placed in "zero security" space, purely controlled by players. You're right, they're not cheap.

      I suppose that you could some up my questions here by saying that I'm really requesting that the game be made much more realistic than it is.


      Warp Drives, Jump Drives, wormholes, tens of thousands of years in the future... but you want realism you say? =)
      • by Knara ( 9377 )
        You can do high-sec POS, I get charters once in a while when I run missions. Dunno if anyone bothers, though.
        • by jsfetzik ( 40515 )
          Yes a high-sec POS is useful, but only as a place to do blueprint research. For this purpose high-sec is very nice because if the POS is attacked CONCORD will come to your aid even if at war. Combined with the inability to bring a capital ship into high-sec space makes it almost impossible for a high-sec POS to be destroyed. At least until the change the rules. ;-)
      • You might be referring to something else, but my first guess is that you're trying to get from one empire's hub to that of another. There are barriers of low security between center of each of the Amarr, Caldari, Minmatar and Gallente empires. There are higher security paths available, but you'll likely end up going slightly out of your way. You can adjust your autpilot to prefer safer routes.

        I personally have run into a couple of systems that were highsec, but completely surrounded by lowsec, and belonged to the same faction as the rest of the region I was in. It's rare, I've only seen it once or twice, but it did seem very odd to have a highsec system that is so dangerous to get to.

        Actually, there are many player-constructed stations in EVE these days. Every single one of them has been (and must be) placed in "zero security" space, purely controlled by players. You're right, they're not cheap.

        This is not entirely accurate. A player owned station can be placed in high security space, but the corporation placing it must have a particular standing with the faction that owns the system they wish to place

        • by Rinikusu ( 28164 )
          Uh, Baghdad, anyone?

          The Green Zone is one of the most fortified positions in the world these days, and not too far from the Green Zone are some of the most lawless, low "security" areas that are extremely dangerous... It's not too far-fetched.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by levell ( 538346 )

      > First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client?

      Given that they have announced that they are working a linux client [linux-gamers.net] the question is: When when will it be ready? rather than why not make one.

      (I can't wait personally!)

    • Yah if a game doesn't have an OSX port I'm not going to play it. I'll be damned if I'm going to install windows on my system for that. You can kind of make Eve work with cedega under Linux but I found that it was so unstable that it was pretty much unplayable. Plus I'd found in the past that wine is very fiddley and breaks for no apparent reason every few months anyway. I found this to be the case both with the free Wine that I was using to run Lotus Notes as well as cedega which I was using to run Ultima O
  • Alternate Clients (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Judeccan ( 638549 )
    I would love to play your game again, especially after the last few expansions-- but I've abandoned Windows in the years since my old EVE account lapsed. Will we ever see a Mac client? Linux?
  • Roleplay (Score:3, Interesting)

    by John Nowak ( 872479 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:20PM (#18112084)
    Eve markets itself as a MMORPG --A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. However, in my brief experience with it, I could not find a single person engaging in roleplay beyond "Arr, surrender yer ship!". All channels of communication are filled with out of character conversation. For me at least, this makes it impossible to get truly immersed in the game, and hence I cancelled my account.

    I'll admit I still find MUDs to be the best way to engage in decent roleplaying. My question is, what are your thoughts on roleplay in modern, graphical MMOGs, and is it possible to have RP on the level textual a MUD can offer?
  • PvE (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mikkelm ( 1000451 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:25PM (#18112164)
    My fiancée and I recently played through the 14 day trial, and at the end of it, we both agreed that if the PvE elements were more organised, we would probably have bought the game and kept playing.

    My question is whether or not CCP has any plans on expanding the PvE mission system to allow gang missions where all party members can participate in the same mission, as long as they all have the required standing.

    The game is brilliant and it has a lot of potential to us, but what's keeping us from playing it is that playing PvE together seems less co-operative and more like we're just lending eachother a helping hand, which isn't really what we look for in games.
  • Stackless Python (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hitokiri ( 220183 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:26PM (#18112184) Homepage
    Over the years of development how well has Stackless Python scaled to your demands? Is it still a valuable tool or has it become a bottleneck? If you had to do it all over again would you still consider its use?
    • Re:Stackless Python (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:04PM (#18112792)
      And the same question for MS SQL(the DB system they use for their backend).
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by synx ( 29979 )
      I wish I had modpoints - I am interested in this question as well.

      Specifically, the rise of safer highly concurrent languages such as Erlang that provide a different concurrent approach, would you reconsider the use of stackless python if you were doing Eve all over again?
  • I play the game, I was an ardent FPS fan but a friend reccomended me to this game and I now play.

    BUT

    The inherent problem with MMORPG's is that they reward players for time spent in game rather than player skill. For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player. Are there any real idea's to create a level playing field and bring skill into the game rather than grind?
    • by scoser ( 780371 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:44PM (#18112480) Journal

      For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player.

      This is actually wrong. Eve's skill system is set up on diminishing returns. For each of the 5 levels of a skill, the amount of time spent to train each level increases drastically. So while someone might have trained a skill to level 5 for 2% bonus at each level, a younger player might have trained it up to level 4 and only be 2% behind on the particular skill.

      Ship fittings and player tactics also play a great deal into who wins a combat as well. Even if you're outskilled by an older player, get a friend or two to come and help you fight, and you will often have a great chance of overwhelming the older player and killing him, even if he's in a Battleship and the three of you are in Battlecruisers or Cruisers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kindbud ( 90044 )
      For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player.

      If you're talking about manufacturing, yes. If you're talking about mining, then yes. Those skills are character skills, and they act the same for all characters, and the only way to get better is to spend more time training the character skills.

      But PvP, no way. There's plenty of opportunity for player tactics and yes, 6 month players can kill 4 year players in PvP, if the 6 month player knows what he is
      • by raehl ( 609729 )
        If you're talking about manufacturing, yes. If you're talking about mining, then yes. Those skills are character skills, and they act the same for all characters, and the only way to get better is to spend more time training the character skills.

        I disagree here. You can max out mining skills pretty quickly, expcept for the 'really nice' rocks, and even those your ability to SURVIVE while mining is more important than your raw mining skills.

        For manufacturing/trade, I have very basic skills in those areas bu
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Llywelyn ( 531070 )

        There's a corporation dedicated to training players with new characters how to effectively PvP in small ships, called Agony Unleashed.

        The link [agony-unleashed.com] for anyone who is interested in their classes ^_^

        These days they work out of Pure Blind instead of Syndicate, but the class is the same.

    • """For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player."""

      This is more or less untrue in Eve.

      - First, because of the group elements. A group of 8-10 month old players flying frigates can take down a player with several years experience in a Tech 2 fitted Battleship.

      - Second, the amount of time it takes to improve is an exponential curve. For instance, take Cruise Missile Specialization (a random "high tier" skill"). Getting one rank takes an hour. Two tak
  • As an earlier poster mentioned, having high/lowsec mixes is pretty pointless. Beke is a perfect example. It seperates two big blocks of highsec Genesis, and as a result is heavily camped. Going around Beke results in a 12 jump detour. CCP has expressed in the past that they want to mix up pvp and pve, but this isn't the way to do it. Empire should be a core of highsec, with lowsec on the fringes, and then 0.0 out beyond. I enjoy hoping in a gang and roming around looking for a fight in 0.0, but I don't enjo
    • Let the players decide if they want to visit lowsec, don't force it upon them.

      They did let you decide. You decide either to take a chance on the dangerous shortcut, or take the long and safe way.

      Why is that a problem? Sounds like a neat feature to me.

      Eve is all about choices. If there is no 'shortcut' then why make that choice?

      If that lowsec didn't exist and you had to fly the extra 12 jumps, you'd be complaining that there should be a shortcut. :-)

      Stew

  • Dev/GM Cheating (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joelleo ( 900926 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:48PM (#18112562)
    Background: I've been playing eve since august of 2003 with two accounts

    Currently: I've cancelled both accounts due to CCP's flaccid response to the dev/gm cheating scandal

    Question: Why wasn't the scandal - discovered by CCP back in the middle of 2006 - publicized and the dev (t20) properly punished (fired, per CCP policy) at that time? Why, after the scandal was publicized 6 months later haven't you taken appropriate action per your own policies and yet stretched your policies to ban the person that publicized the events? Why haven't CCP publicized the full extent of the cheating and the damage caused to the rest of the eve public?

    Most of the allegations were publicized via http://www.kugutsumen.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2 [kugutsumen.com] but suspicions have been rampant for ages.

    The allegations were confirmed by one of the dev's involved, t20, in this post: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =424 [eve-online.com].

    CCP's limp-wristed response is here: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =423 [eve-online.com]
  • by GoRK ( 10018 )
    In CCCP Eve Online questions YOU!
  • CCP.

    In any real world government, there are controls and laws in place to prevent monopolies.

    Once one entity controls all of a commodity, they have an unfair and potentially economically devistating control over the free market for an object.

    The same would likely apply to space, in the case of Eve.

    What controls are in place, or what discussions have been had in the event that a single entity gains control over *all* of a certain blueprint original, or *all* of un-policed 0.0 space?

    As we saw with the recent
    • <quote>
      What controls are in place, or what discussions have been had in the event that a single entity gains control over *all* of a certain blueprint original, or *all* of un-policed 0.0 space?
      </quote>

      <p>As to the former: NPCs control T1 BPOs, so they cannot be completely controlled (or someone would have already tried to do it with a Tier 2 BC BPO). For T2, they've recently blogged about doing away with T2 BPOs entirely, which will remove the oligopoly elements of T2 production.</p
  • I played Eve for about 6 months. When I joined a serious PVP corp, it seemed most of our activities involved were flying around and ganking defenseless ships or gatecamping. Our larger battles, which were rare, usually involved one fleet completely devestating the other. If PVP involved NPC stations, it was just a cat and mouse game where the mouse was always able to run back to his hole. As an overall experience, I felt PVP was dull and yielded little rewards.

    What is currently being done improve th
  • CCP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brkello ( 642429 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:00PM (#18112722)
    In a game like Eve, T2 BPOs can give an alliance a huge advantage since they are able to essentially print money. Since the GM scandal, the alliance BoB was able to take advantage of ill gotten T2 BPOs for many months allowing them to dominate the game. Why didn't you address the issue of the BPOs before the GM was outed? Why did you not fire the person responsible? How can you regain the trust of the community? Currently, it seems like you just delete posts and hope it goes away. But Eve has been permanently been tainted by one employees action. Are you going to take any steps in the future to further address this?

    Also, it is clear Eve can not handle its current playerbase (gate queues, lag in large battles). Have you considered multiple servers to lighten the load?
    • Just FYI, Eve runs on an absolutely state-of-the-art cluster of several hundred high end multi-processor servers, using a solid-state RAMSAN array to store critical database tables (as 18k RPM SCSI drives simply aren't fast enough random seek times).

      But splitting a new shard has advantages in multiple ways....

      worth a thought.

      Stew
  • It is nice to recognize the recent increase in starting skillpoints, and the benefit this provides for newer users.

    However, because of the mechanics of skill training and the fact that CCP has continued to increase the number of skills and the rank of those skills... and also increased the power of ships and modules obtained through these higher level skills, is there a point at which we can say that the game is no longer appealing to new users?

    When the new people are 4-5 years behind the highest level pla
    • What does it matter if other players are 'more advanced' than you are? What's the difference between that and really advanced, intelligent NPC's?

      Would you bitch about the fact that you can never beat CONCORD? No matter what you do, those CONCORD ships will blow you to pieces in seconds?

      What difference does it make if the things that are 'better' than you are are NPC ships or PC ships?
  • by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:06PM (#18112816) Homepage Journal

    We'll be talking with one of the following: Hilmar Veigar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer, Magnus Bergsson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nathan Richardsson, Senior Producer, Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, Chief Technology Officer. One of these members of the top brass will be available to answer your questions.
    All through the hallways of CCP headquarters, you can still hear the plaintive cries of "You talk to the Slashdotters!" "No, you do it!" *

    * translated from Icelandic crying
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by HalliS ( 668627 )
      "ú talar við Slashdottarana!" "Nei, ú gerir að!"*

      *translated back to Icelandic crying
  • Suggestion for a question:

    Are there any plans to port EVE Online to the GNU/Linux or OS X platform?
    • Does anyone know how well it works on Wine/Cedega? I haven't tried the game on either platform but I tend to run most of my games natively in linux or through one of the intermediary programs for windows games.
    • by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
      As others have mentioned, no. If it ever happens, it will probably be via Winelib or the Cedega variant of Winelib.

      That said, unlike many MMO companies, I believe CCP actively cooperates with Transgaming to keep EVE and Cedega working (reasonably) well together. (I haven't tried it myself, although I really should. I've heard there are problems with running certain resolutions though.)
  • Software (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zefrer ( 729860 )
    My question is regarding the technical reasons of using Windows based servers to run the cluster that EVE runs on. Is that because you've tried Unix or Linux or BSD or what not and found it lacking, is the code base not easily portable to a different architecture or is there some other reason? It seems to me from a purely technical perspective that using windows to run such a large cluster is a waste of resources and a very expensive one at that.
  • For the last year or two, I have heard rumors of "walking in EVE" gameplay. In the latest issue of E-ON and numerous EVE fansites, it seems that there is a real effort at CCP to bring humanoid character gameplay to a game that has always been ship-based. With the load problems that are still being addressed during fleet battles or heavily trafficked systems (400+ ships), does it make sense to begin exploring gameplay modes that could exacerbate a problem that is already causing much frustration in the EVE
  • by bug1 ( 96678 )
    Have you considered adding scripting support to eve-online ?

    I consider WoW mods to make that game much more pleasurable to play, as eve-online is only my second MMORPG, i expected the same in eve-online.

    Did you consider and reject the idea of supporting user scripting, or is it somthing you would like to happen but havent gotten around to it yet ?
  • I know this isn't an Eve-Online questions, but still: I want 'Exalted Online'. I do not want another World of Warcraft. (WoW is pretty good at that all by itself)

    I've allways imagined an Exalted MMORPG as a game that captures the Manga/Anime slant by turning melee combat into something simular or closer to a console combat game like Soul Blade with the charms simular to special moves player and character can learn together as they progress. I also think there generally is room for sophisitcated avatar comba
  • by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Friday February 23, 2007 @01:10AM (#18118832)
    Why you ignore any questions in regards to banning SirMolle, for posting someone's real-life information on forums? Yet you decided to ban others who did the same?

    Is it because he's the CEO of alliance that houses biggest number of CCP developers? Or he is also developer, and they don't need to follow rules that we mortals need to?

    Thank you.
  • by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Friday February 23, 2007 @01:14AM (#18118868)
    Why is it that developer who has been found to abuse privileges can keep his job, while you permanently banned person who exposed the whole thing?
  • by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Friday February 23, 2007 @01:21AM (#18118912)
    How do you expect your customers to ever trust you again, when you continously censor most comments/criticism in relation to your actions?

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