Ask CCP About EVE Online

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.

real sense of loss

[Digitus1337 (671442)]

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?

Re:real sense of loss

[StewedSquirrel (574170)]

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

Band of Developers?

[Notabadguy (961343)]

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?

Re:Band of Developers?

[aafiske (243836)]

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]

Re:Band of Developers?

[Andy Dodd (701)]

"However, what you say about CCP trying to cover up does not in any way correspond to what I've seen. Every single dev-blog the last month has mentioned this, they are trying to change some of the mechanics to prevent anything like this ever happening again, not to mention that they haven't deleted a single (coherent) post about this on THEIR OWN forums."

I can't believe how utterly inaccurate your statement is.

There have been a total of three dev blogs on the subject. One was t20's confession, one was Hellmar's post, one was from the new "internal affairs" guy.

Keep in mind that despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, t20 wasn't fired or even really punished for his actions.

Kugutsumen discovered quite a bit of evidence that t20 was not the only developer doing "shady" things in regards to BoD. CCP has not responded at all to this evidence other than deleting threads and banning users, including Kugutsumen. (Your claim that CCP has not deleted any posts is blatantly false - CCP was deleting threads and banning users right and left to try and cover things up.)

Come clean and do the right thing..

[Taelron (1046946)]

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.

Game Developer should not be able to play your....

[Joe The Dragon (967727)]

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.

Satsisfying New and Old Customers

[hardburn (141468)]

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?

User limits per system?

[TwoStep (36482)]

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

[Vrallis (33290)]

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!

White Wolf

[flymolo (28723)]

What White Wolf IP will see electronic editions from CCP?

Do they plan to change EVE's beginning

[mmalove (919245)]

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?

Re:Do they plan to change EVE's beginning

[kindbud (90044)]

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.

Physics, the Legal System, and Geography

[amper (33785)]

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.

Re:Physics, the Legal System, and Geography

[LakeSolon (699033)]

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? =)

Roleplay

[John Nowak (872479)]

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

[mikkelm (1000451)]

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

[Hitokiri (220183)]

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

[rsmith-mac (639075)]

And the same question for MS SQL(the DB system they use for their backend).

CCP

[brkello (642429)]

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?

They're still slap-fighting for the job.

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

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

Why not ban SirMolle?

[X.25 (255792)]

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.

Why do you keep a cheater in-house?

[X.25 (255792)]

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?

Re:

[LakeSolon (699033)]

While most of the high-level logic is written in Python there's still a great deal of C++ code, but the main issue is that it's written against Microsoft's DirectX.

Re:Real advance in game mechanics

[scoser (780371)]

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.