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.
BoB CEO's to be strung up? (Score:1, Informative)
Send a message, have bob descend into civil war, its win win!
Re:as good as WoW? (Score:3, Informative)
Fleet actions with hundreds of ships fighting lag the hell out of whichever node they're running on. CCP says they're optimizing as fast as they can, but with each ship moving, launching missiles and drones and so on there's a staggering amount of data going back and forth in a large fight. The largest I've been in was a 40 v 50 action and that was pretty much a slideshow.
I'd love to see hard data on how they're progressing, but other than hardware upgrades and additions you really can't make a solid time estimate on optimizing existing code. They are trumpeting the new Need For Speed initiative in their dev blogs, I wish them all the luck - and to hurry the frack up.
Oh yeah, it's better than WoW. No "endgame" to finish, no raid loot grinding, nd PvP with consequences. Yeah, it's better.
Re:Real advance in game mechanics (Score:4, Informative)
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:PvE (Score:2, Informative)
http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bi
Re:Real advance in game mechanics (Score:3, Informative)
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 doing. And I guarantee you that gangs of 6 month players take down 4 year players all the time. There's a corporation dedicated to training players with new characters how to effectively PvP in small ships, called Agony Unleashed. Check it out. On weekends, they have wolfpacks of 30+ frigates roaming Placid and Syndicate.
Re:Physics, the Legal System, and Geography (Score:3, Informative)
> 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!)
Re:real sense of loss (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:Do they plan to change EVE's beginning (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Employee Players (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, in the BoD/T20 incident, there are apparently a number of BPOs unaccounted for still.
Re:Band of Developers? (Score:1, Informative)
And it is being kept quiet by CCP. They've refused to answer questions about it, immediately lock and/or delete threads about it, and ban signatures that mention it.
Yet those guilty of obvious EULA violations, which are bannable offenses, continue to have access to their accounts.
Re:Band of Developers? (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:Band of Developers? (Score:4, Informative)
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=top
New internal investigators:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=top
Re:as good as WoW? (Score:2, Informative)
A grand coalition of alliances gathered more than 1000 players to assault a single system, within which the Lotka Voltera alliance was defending a capital shipyard. That shipyard was in the process of building a Titan, the largest most expensive ship in the game, costing several times more than a player built outpost, and worth several thousand US dollars of minerals and components.
Lotka Volterra was defending with a fleet of more than 250 players, as well as several hundred drones, controlled by the players as separate entities. They had taken a defensive position around the one and only jumpgate leading into their system, and were awaiting our assault.
Unfortunately that's where the story gets dull. Upon jumping several hundred of our fleet into the beseiged system, the server node crashes. For the next several hours, the node crashes repeatedly, in spite of the services provided by one of CCP's server administrators in moving the system to one of their most powerful server nodes.
In the end, the battle was won through sheer stubbornness, when the coalition was willing to out-wait the Lotka volterra alliance. Eventually a few dozen ships were able to take control of the system for long enough to allow capital dreadnoughts to jump in and destroy the Titan in its construction bay.
So in closing, Eve has the largest PvP engagements of any game that I know of, but it still cannot actually _handle_ the scale of fight that the players are willing to engage in. I have been involved in non-lagged fleet activity with numbers of 100 on a side, but usually battles of that size are fairly laggy.