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.
real sense of loss (Score:4, Insightful)
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I haven't played a MMOG yet that won't let you delete your character.
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I love Eve. It keeps people who like that playstyle away from games I enjoy.
-c.
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
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Band of Developers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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.)
Other means of CCP suppression (Score:3, Insightful)
If the 1st GM is corrupt, and players cannot escalate, then what recourse is there? What checks and balances are there? None. So it should be no surprise that there is widespread corruption in Eve Online.
Come clean and do the right thing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Game Developer should not be able to play your.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Game Developer should not be able to play your. (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Satsisfying New and Old Customers (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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User limits per system? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I guess another reasonable suggestion is to make locking times exponentially scale based on the number of ships near you. More than 50 ships within 100km means you locking times would increase to 30 seconds or so. 100 ships and you are taking minutes to lock. There is even a reasonable in game reason for this (sensor interference) o
Employee Players (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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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
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And as for the can't-fire-him, well, the way it was explained is that he was disciplined at the time (no idea how, pay cut, suspension?) and to punish him twice for the same thing would be unjust. While I don't think it was handled particularly well, I don't think all the other employees were happy with what he did
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Besides, in the BoD/T20 incident, there are apparently a number of BPOs unaccounted for still.
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White Wolf (Score:5, Interesting)
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Many players dislike... (Score:2, Funny)
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Do they plan to change EVE's beginning (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
Physics, the Legal System, and Geography (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Physics, the Legal System, and Geography (Score:5, Insightful)
Short answer: Microsoft's DirectX. Slightly longer answer: this comment [slashdot.org].
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).
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.
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.
Warp Drives, Jump Drives, wormholes, tens of thousands of years in the future... but you want realism you say? =)
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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
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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.
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> 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!)
OSX Port (Score:2)
Alternate Clients (Score:2, Interesting)
Roleplay (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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.
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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bi
Stackless Python (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stackless Python (Score:5, Interesting)
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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?
Real advance in game mechanics (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
Consolidated Highsec (Score:2)
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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)
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&bi
CCP's limp-wristed response is here: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bi
CCCP (Score:2)
Monopolies over items and space - antitrust laws? (Score:2)
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
Re:Monopolies over items and space - antitrust law (Score:2)
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
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Stew
PVP (Score:2)
What is currently being done improve th
CCP (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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But splitting a new shard has advantages in multiple ways....
worth a thought.
Stew
New users growing further disadvantaged (Score:2)
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
My question is: Who cares? (Score:2)
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?
They're still slap-fighting for the job. (Score:4, Funny)
* translated from Icelandic crying
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*translated back to Icelandic crying
EVE Online for a GNU/Linux and OS X platform? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are there any plans to port EVE Online to the GNU/Linux or OS X platform?
Wine/Cedega (Score:2)
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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)
"Walking" in EVE (Score:2)
Mod's (Score:2)
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 ?
No EO question, but yet: I want 'Exalted Online'! (Score:2)
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
Why not ban SirMolle? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust via censorship? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Appearently the entire game. Eve is many things, you can play it for an economic sim, or you can fight things, plus many activites. The one thing eve is not is a flight sim. Flying actually takes little time now, they removed the time sink it used to be with 'Warp to 0km'.
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I'm actually playing a 14 day demo now and I'm struggling with that question, what exactly is the point. Sure I can buy a decent ship thanks to my friend who sent me the trial code (it's nice to start with a couple million ISK), but damn it, I STILL CAN'T EVEN SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETE THE THIRD AGENT MISSION!!! Then I lose a ship and it's 4 jumps to buy one again, and I have to pick weapons, rearm, etc... it's just a pain.
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Also during that time I didn't see a *single* other character - I know space is big and all that, but where's the interactivity? Might as well have made it single player and stuck it on a CD.
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Well, space is big.
Also, the n00b areas aren't always well populated by non-n00bs (depending on where you start) due to their relatively low profit potential. However, I've yet to see a high-sec system in Empire space that didn't have people in it (even if you didn't see them visually, they show up in the [local] list if they're in the same system).
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Even so, as I understand it, if you want to get into the real player driven activities, you need to join a corporation. If you didn't do that, you may simply have just missed the action you were looking for. Big news this week was that there was a 1300+ player battle out in the low securit
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This is untrue. Not the 1300+ player part, that is true. The being still too new to see it for yourself, you should join a corp and get out there.
I'm in GoonFleet. We were in the 1000 side of the 1300+ battle. A good chunk of that fleet was less than a month old characters. It takes maybe a day to h
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This is probably why carmack is a big OpenGL head.
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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
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google for their current hardware setup, they're doing exactly that (granted not the 72-way servers)
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2006/S ep/13/eve_online_30000_users_on_one_server_shard.h tml [datacenterknowledge.com] could be a good place to start
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I've been online when concurrent-player records have been set and it's been very playable. It's the fleet actions that suck, and I'd like to see a WoW server handle more than 100 players in a PvP contest.
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The issue you're thinking of is that any given solar system (of which there are more than five thousand) runs on a single node of the server cluster, and can only handle a few hundred pilots before playability becomes an issue.
These massive fleet battles do not happen very often, and CCP has already posted (in various dev blogs) indicating that they're working on game play changes to avoid such
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In Eve, each server carries the load of one part of the whole universe, and you travel from server to server seemlessly as you move around the game universe. The 400 people limit is roughly how many people you can get in one small sector of the universe, there's often 100,000 or more people currently online in the overall universe.
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Stew
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I thought your product, based on its name, was pr0n! I want my money back.
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