The server problems of the past week seem to have settled down, the situation is much better and the game is playable even in the heavily trafficked systems. Another client patch is expected later this week to fix some more issues, then I think CCP will go quiet for a couple of months as Kali goes in full development.

It’s still truly impressive to see 600+ players packed in the same system without much lag and more than 20k indirectly interacting within the same universe. Eve is probably the only game that could be considered truly “massive”.

An interview with Eve’s senior producer reveals some interesting informations about the plans for Kali and what’s next along the year.

The first big feature is about the “factional warfare”. It’s still an obscure system but it seems to work as a much needed “bridge” between the secure empire space and the low-security systems where the wars between the player corporations take place. The factional warfare should finally bring some dynamism and intense, competitive gameplay even in the empire space, allowing the players to join a NPC faction and participate in a more structured conflict. There’s a lot of potential because it could finally tie together the two extremes, making the true potential of the game much more accessible for all players instead of just the minority deeply involved in player’s alliences and corps.

Knowing CCP this whole thing will be developed in progressive steps, adding more to it as they get more ideas and see them moving in a positive direction. So Kali here is probably just the beginning of what they are going to do (and potentially close to my ideas).

It’s also interesting the comment about the possibility to use NPCs. Which really resembles closely to my idea to use NPCs as a work force to automate the boring activities:

Whether to include NPCs in Factional Warfare or not is also heavily debated. The question is, how to use them and where. Many want NPCs to be a part of Factional Warfare but only in a supportive role.

Objectives might have a minimum NPC garrison which helps the player soldiers defending it, but the NPCs would never be something which rivals a real player force. As such, NPCs might be an objective or part of an objective, but you should always expect other player soldiers to be either at the objective or right around the corner.

Ahh, my ideas… They are really anticipating and realizing concretely so many of the plans I was incubating along these months and years. It will be truly interesting to observe how all this pans out.

It isn’t even all, still with Kali they are bringing up another utopia of the whole genre: player created missions.

The Contract system aims to formalize a subset of all the agreements you can do. It’s more focused on complex combinations of escrow, auction, courier, collateral and prerequisites rather than putting in some arbitrary conditions which then need to be measured and/or enforced.

As an example of an “official” contract in our new system, I can easily create a Bring-Your-Own-Materials deal, where I specify what materials I want in exchange for release of an item or set of items. As such, I could require the mineral ingredients for a certain item, X amount of ISK and a number of Tags, in return for which I will give the ship with a full fitting of named modules. When the items I require are at the location, my contractor simply fulfills the contract and the items I said would be given in return are released. With this system I can’t back out of the contract, since when I create it, the items are taken into escrow and can be released only upon fulfilment of the contract.

Likewise, you can utilize contracts in a limited trust relationship, where you put up contracts only for your Alliance or Corporation members. For example, you could easily create mining contracts, which would give you a mining ship when you accept the contract, but to fulfill the contract and get the cruiser which is the completion reward, you have to give the mining ship back along with 1 million units of Tritanium.

With this you have “corporation missions,” where the directors can issue what has to be done and members can then fulfill the contracts – and add that to their track record, because we keep the player’s contract history.

Here I underline how this whole system is possible thanks to the “truly communal objectives” that unite the player’s corporations. Even the boring activities like mining become much more interesting when they are part of a much bigger scheme and contribute to a communal effort. Without this depth to found the game none of this would be possible because the players wouldn’t be able to be the real subjects of the game world, using all the tools available to create something unique and affecting the overall equilibre. The player’s mission would be just “grind” content without a mean and an end.

Even here Eve demonstrates to be a true pioneer as no other.

Oh, and I love Nathan Richardsson when he says these nice things (and I already praised him in the past):

It’s probably more correct to say that the rapid frequency of expansions enable us to react to the feedback rather than the other way around. We firmly believe in iterative design, where we have a system developed in staged deliveries, with the functionality constantly adjusted based on usage statistics and feedback.

Yes, they are probably the only ones to have truly understood the strength of the genre. The possibility to observe and react dynamically, try new ideas and slowly adding depth and substance to the game, instead of just stretching it till it breaks. Iterate, observe. That’s the utopia of game design made concrete. The “living worlds” done the right way.

Finally there’s a rumored “graphic update” that should also arrive before the year is over. Here I really don’t know what to expect because the graphic engine does already its duty at the best of what you could expect and I don’t see how it could be improved. There are some major glitches that I’d like to see solved, like the flickering textures and the wrong FOV that makes all the objects at the margin of the screen appear distorted (for example the planets look elliptical instead of… round), but nothing that would really justify a graphic update. Maybe larger textures on the ships? They already look gorgeous, imho. If it was for me I would allocate resources to make the graphic representation more meaningful and consistent (the second idea in the link), but I’m still curious to hear more details about their plans.

We probably won’t know anything else till around May, when the third issue of E-ON (Eve-Online’s paper magazine) will be out.

Interesting stuff going on. I wish I could say the same for the other companies out there who just seem to reheat the same food without really impressing anyone anymore.

I don’t know how much time I spent playing with the char creation of the new races, but it was really hard to make a choice. There are so many awsome-looking combinations and so great characters.

I’m really pleased with the final result, though. I love her so much. These portraits make you really want to try to roleplay.

I think she is going to be nice with you ;)

That said, I also had to spend as much time with the char creation as to wrestle with the tutorial. The servers are currently in a BAD state and my new shiny character gets constantly stuck (right now the server went down again) and swamped in all sort of exception errors, crashes and disconnections. The tutorial goes crazy if you get desynched with it and it wasn’t simple to un-stuck myself in a number of situations.

The newbie system is insanely crowded but I guess things will get better as the shiny of the new races will wore off. It’s still fun to see noobs blowing up on a not so clear step of the tutorial where it asks you to “try” to shoot to the station but WITHOUT confirming the action. CONCORDOKEN!

Eve just hit 106k of subscribers (mostly thanks to the double accounts promotion, to be honest), but I hope the new players have the patience to wait for the situation to settle down. Right now it is not too pretty and the problems add to the already steep learning curve.

I don’t think the average player knows how to wrestle with the tutorial, read the symptoms of something going wrong and clear the client cache files to get unstuck (when getting unstuck is a possibility).

Big, huge grats to Eve-Online artists, they are among the best if not THE best. The new asian races are soooo shiny. I’m seriously impressed. They look realistic and then far from ugly photos slapped on a model. They do not even seem 3D models but paintings and the faces seem already to tell a story about the characters…

Now the biggest problem is that some of the old races cannot keep up with the same quality of the new ones (and some scream GAY too much).

I wonder why CCP doesn’t licence its character creation engine. It’s really great but then thanks to the inspired art permeating the game. I wish this artistic talent could be used better than just for an enhanced “poser”. It’s really a pity.

I believe the screenshots speak by themselves, even if you cannot see how absolutely great are the dynamic reflections and lights. If you don’t have an active account it would be worth get a trial just to toy with the character creation for a couple of hours.

PLAY THE DRESS-UP GAME!

(more example screenshots divided by race)

This is the result of a thread I opened on F13 a while ago to ask the details about the crafting in Eve-Online, the guide is not written by me but here I archive the article slightly reorganizing it. The original posts are still in the original thread. Thanks to Yoru to have written it.

The crafting system in Eve is rather complex and not really accessible if you don’t read and learn about it somewhere. It’s one of those parts of the game with a lot of depth and complexity but that you have to discover all by yourself and without any help from the game. It’s completely missing from the tutorial and I don’t think you can build a character that can “craft” right out of the box. So it’s one of the advanced parts that you usually discover only when you have already invested a good amount of time in the game.

Basically everything you can use in the game is craftable. Ships, ammunition, modules. You can buy these right off the market already ready for the use or produce them yourself. In general the crafting is an highly specialized activity that also depends on other parts of the game, so it’s actually not really possible to build all you need directly without depending on anyone else. That’s one myth that doesn’t work in Eve and to be a good crafter you must be already deeply involved in the game on other levels, or have a player corporation supporting you.

There’s two big parts to crafting: manufacturing and research. For basic tech 1 stuff, these involve two components: minerals and blueprints.

BLUEPRINTS

Blueprints are recipes; they let you combine a given quantity of minerals and produce something. There’s two types of blueprints: blueprint originals (“BPOs“) and blueprint copies (“BPCs“).

The difference between the two isn’t about the final product (that is always the same) but about the process to create/craft it. BPOs can be “researched” to optimize the crafting process (time and resources consumed) and can be used an unlimited number of times. While the BPCs have a limited number of runs and cannot be used in research.

Blueprints have four basic stats:

* Number of runs – This dictates how many times you can use the blueprint. (only for BPCs, the BPOs are infinite)
* Base Production Time – How long manufacturing will take for one use of the blueprint.
* Mineral Efficiency (“ME”) – This dictates how much material will be wasted. Higher mineral efficiency means less waste, but the effect of higher mineral efficiency increases at a logarithmic rate (that is, as the level of mineral efficiency increases, each additional level eliminates less and less waste).
* Production Efficiency (“PE”) – This dictates how long manufacturing one run of the blueprint will take. Like mineral efficiency, the benefit has a logarithmic dropoff.

(Math: Both efficiencies are basically used to calculate waste by taking the base waste and multiplying by 1/(1+x), where x is the ME or PE rating. 1/(1+x) isn’t the exact formula, but it’s a close approximation.)

As already explained, only a BPO can be researched. So the last two stats are fixed in a BPC, while they can improve through research in a BPO. A brand new BPO is supposed to always start with both ME and PE at zero.

BPOs also have three additional stats:

* ME Research Time – How long the BPO will be sitting in a lab when researching 1 point of ME.
* PE Research Time – Same thing as above, but for PE.
* Copy time – Same as above, but how long it will take to create a BPC with 1 run from this BPO.

How to acquire BPs in the game:
– Tech 1 Blueprint Originals can be acquired either as a reward for running agent missions, purchased off the standardmarket from NPCs or (rarely) purchased off the escrow market from PCs.
– Blueprint Copies are acquired either as a reward for running agent missions or via trade with other players (either directly or via the escrow market). They can be created by players; a BPO is put into a ‘copying’ research slot and produces a BPC after a given amount of time. BPCs inherit the basic stats of their BPO parents if they’re manufactured; otherwise, the stats are determined by the mission system.

– Tech 2 BPO Lottery (note from Dave Rickey): You have to work up your standing with the companies that have R&D agents, and with the individual agents, and have high enough Sience skills yourself. Once you have, you can tell the R&D agents to start researching. They accumulate Research Points, which are basically tickets for a lottery. When you win the lottery for a BPO, you don’t have to take it, you can choose to hold your points and keep trying. Even a marginal T2 BPO is worth more than a billion, the really good ones (like those just coming out for Interdictors and Recon ships) are worth upwards of 20 billion isk. But it takes a lot of time and money to get into the running, you have to work up your Science skills, some of which are very expensive, as well as run all the missions to get your standing up with the agents and their NPC corporations.

But it takes a lot of time and money to get into the running, you have to work up your Science skills, some of which are very expensive, as well as run all the missions to get your standing up with the agents and their NPC corporations.

MINERALS

Raw materials that come from reprocessing items at the stations or mined ore. ‘Nuff said.

RESEARCH

Research is a time and money sink that slowly improves MP or PE values of the blueprint being researched. Only a BPO can be researched since a BPC has fixed values for MP and PE.

Research is meant to help you improve your BPO before using it in production, since a ‘raw’ BPO off the market is generally quite slow and wasteful. Research is performed at stations (NPC-owned stations, PC outpost stations; I believe the POS research arrays are currently bugged). Any given research-capable station will have a fixed number of slots, usually 20. You can search for research-capable stations by clicking on the ‘science & industry’ button on your UI, going to the last tab (‘Installations’), and setting the filters to search for whatever you’re looking for.

When you have a BPO you want to research, you first look for a station with open slots for the research type you want to perform. For manufacturing, PE research and Blueprint Copying, you should be fine – in empire, I rarely see a shortage of these. Mineral Efficiency research slots are almost always clogged up in the main regions, so you may have to travel around to find an open slot.

Once you’ve found a station with an open slot, you physically take your blueprint to that station and drop it in your hangar (or your corp’s hangar). Next, you install your blueprint, either by rightclicking on the blueprint and choosing the type of research you want, or by navigating through the science & industry UI. You’ll be asked where you want the blueprint to be taken from and placed into, as well as asked for a number of runs through the research facility. Punch in your info and hit OK, you’ll be presented with a price quote. Generally, only ME research is particularly expensive. Hit OK and your BPO will get sucked into the system. Your science & industry UI’s ‘jobs’ tab will now show your job as ‘In Progress’ for a while.

As an aside, when doing research, it’s usually worth it to specify multiple batches at a time. This allows you to keep your slot for multiple runs and avoid having to run around looking for a slot each time you want to research the BPO. For low-end stuff, like ammo and frigates, a ME of 10 is probably enough. Generally, as the item’s expense increases, the more valuable higher ME will be.

Wait a while. Your research will probably take hours, days or even weeks. Go do other stuff. Once your job is done, it’ll be shown as ‘completed’. You then have to go back to the station where the completed job is and hit ‘deliver’ in the science & industry UI. The blueprint, now improved as you’ve specified, will pop out into your (or your corp’s) hangar, ready to be researched again or used in production.

In order to do research, you will need the skill Laboratory Operation, at least at level 1. This will require the skill Science at level 3. There are skills that can be used to speed up the research process (Metallurgy for ME; for larger blueprints, having a good Metallurgy is recommended), but they’re optional, especially for low-end BPOs.

Research generally has no material requirements and tends to not cost too much; the exception is ME research. (Research is priced by the hour. Most research costs a few hundred isk per hour, whereas ME research can cost upwards of 2,000 isk per hour.)

MANUFACTURING

Okay, so you’ve got your nice, researched-up BPO, or your shiny freshly-acquired BPC and now you want to make stuff.

Manufacturing is just like research in that you take your blueprint to a station with the proper facilities; in fact, it uses the same UI, as you’ve probably noticed by now. Instead of Laboratory Operation, you need the Industry skill to run manufacturing jobs.

The main difference is that, for manufacturing, you also need minerals. Rightclicking on your blueprint and opening the ‘show info’ window will reveal that there’s a second tab on the blueprint’s info, containing the materials required to run the blueprint once.

Two numbers will be displayed, an ‘ideal’ number and ‘your cost’. Your cost is primarily determined by your skills, in particular the ‘production efficiency’ skill (this is different from the stats of a BP), which requires an Industry skill of level 3. It’s a very good idea to get your own PE up at 3 or 4 before you start manufacturing anything more expensive than ammo, as you’ll save a lot of expensive materials. If you want to focus on industry, PE 5 is almost mandatory in the long run; start worrying about PE 5 around the time you want to manufacture stuff larger than cruisers.

Anyway, once you’ve found a free manufacturing slot (shouldn’t be hard), take ‘your cost’ in minerals and the blueprint to that station, and dump them either in your hangar or your corp’s hangar. Set up a manufacturing job in the same way you set up a research job. Select the installation, set your input/output hangars and choose a number of runs.

You’ll be given a quote for the material and ISK cost for the job you’ve submitted; annoyingly, they only give you an itemized list broken out by materials-used-for-production and materials-used-for-waste, with no aggregate total. Hit OK and the minerals and blueprint will disappear from your hangar. Note that the material costs listed on a blueprint are usually a little bit of an overestimate, so don’t panic when you have stuff left in your hangar.

Manufacturing takes much less time than research, usually on the order of minutes or hours. Once it’s done, hit the deliver button on the science & industry UI. Your finished items will be deposited in the appropriate hangar. If you were using a BPO or didn’t use all of a BPC’s runs, it will reappear in the hangar it was taken from.

Congratulations, you’re now a basic crafter in Eve. There’s a lot more skills you can add on beyond the four I’ve mentioned; most of them let you run multiple jobs, let you run jobs remotely, or speed jobs up. They’re beyond the scope of a noobler’s guide to crafting, though. Browse the market and read the skill descriptions, they’re mostly self-explanatory.

Ahaha, I just enjoy too much reading his posts about Eve-Online. It’s the best PR for CCP, they should consider hiring him.

MahrinSkel:
The Goons are way up north, subletting a piece of Syndicate from The Five and pissing off the pirate corps in the area. FIX and [5] are technically hostile, but we have little contact. SA is the result of the Stain Civil War, and that’s probably the root of the current conflict, Catch was ceded to FIX by SE during the civil war and SA wants it back now that it’s over. It put us in a position across their best route from Stain to Empire (although we only had sovereignty over western Catch and not the HED-GP “pipe”, we spent a lot of time camping and patrolling in there), and they probably didn’t like us camping on their oxygen supply.

He is sooo into it ;)

I really didn’t know about this. Someone corrected me in a comment.

You thought that some of the ships in Eve-Online were huge? Well, you were wrong.

They are HUGE.

These two ideas (plus one I was forgetting) sit on a text file for a lot of time. They aren’t anything impressive, just two “quality of life” features that I believe would improve the game and be well accepted by all the players. They don’t add content or depth, but I believe they shouldn’t be too complex to implement and would be used extensively by everyone, instead of just a minor feature than noone will ever use much.

Here are my thoughts:

(ship model browser)
– One of the fundamental problems I think the game has and that contributes to make the accessibility hard is about the presentation. Often the game is hard to figure out because its structure is not well presented. I’m not saying that the structure should be changed, I’m just saying that it could use a better presentation. The first idea is a tiny step going in that direction and it comes directly from the frustration I had in the game. The icons of the ships when you delve informations from the market really don’t do justice to the models. They aren’t good enough to give you an idea of the ship you are browsing. Often the icons aren’t even centered and oriented properly and it’s simply impossible to understand the scale. This makes all the ships really hard to recognize at the first glance.

The idea (but it would be only the first part) would be to add an option to the window with the detailed informations of a ship. A button that you can click and that would open a window working like a “3D model browser”. You could then see the ship, rotate it and figure out its scale (shown in a corner). This would help not only to see what you are buying and going to fly, but it will also accustom the new players to the different ships in the game, helping them to recognize them instead of just stare at counterintuitive numbers. Having a precise idea of the scale would already help to compare the role and purpose of each ship.

(more accurate graphical combat representation)
– The second idea is one I already hinted (at the end). Eve doesn’t feel that different from those browser-based managment games (here’s one) and could really use better its graphical possibilities. Right now it’s mostly an evolved interface and all the gameplay pivots around it more than the simulation itself. I already wrote at length about moving past the interface for a better immersion. In this case the “technicisms” are part of the setting and the type of game, but there’s still some space to make the graphic reflect what is actually going on.

The graphic representation seems rather rudimental, when it comes to combat. Sometimes it is out of synch and I’ve seen missiles just vanish in the space. All these quirks aren’t really problems because what you see is only an approximate representation of what is going on with the numbers. You react to these numbers, and elements of the interface, not to the action on screen iself. This could hardly change without a complete redesign of the game. But even here a better presentation could do wonders. For example, it is already known that if you shoot a tiny missles to a Titan (those HUGE ships) the impact will make the ship shake violently. This because the graphic representation is hardcoded: for every missile you shoot, the missiles will land and shake that ship with a strong explosion. The client knows only one pattern and repeats it in every situation. It doesn’t factor anything else, like the damage, size of the ship or even a ‘miss’. The same for the turrets, you fire them and they display their effect. This effect is NOT a representation of what is going on.

The graphical combat just doesn’t recognize a difference in damage and doesn’t even distinguish between a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’. This is why I’d like to see some more accuracy implemented that could also be helpful to understand what is going on. In Eve the turret mechanics are rather complex and the possibility to hit while invulnerable to enemy attacks is a viable and absolutely normal tactic. The point is that with this type of graphical representation you’ll still see your ship being hit by the lasers and shaken violently by missiles. Even if those lasers aren’t even hitting you and those missles doing zero damage.

So what I’d like to see is an implementation of the “misses”, so that I could clearly see that the laser is missing my ship instead of watching it hit, while the combat log says it missed. And also the feedback tuned and scaled accordingly based on the damage. For example making the ship not move if the missile isn’t doing any damage, or shake it heavily in the case it is getting almost one-shotted (concretely it would be about matching and scaling the graphical effect with a % calculation on the damage done to a ship).

Of course this would require some coding on the client but I believe it’s definitely needed and would be another little step forward for the game that I believe noone would criticize or rant about.

(make the right click menu sticky)
– The right click menu is what I use the most to interact with the game. It’s rather small but I wouldn’t like to have it changed (and it already was with the last patch). Still it’s rather frustrating when you have to navigate through multiple sub-menus, for example to do a warp or, even worst, in the heat of combat, then move the pointer slightly outside it and lose the selection, so that you have to navigate again through all the nested menus from the start.

The idea here is rather simple. Right click to open the menu (as right now) then left click on a sub-menu to make it ‘sticky’ so that you don’t lose the selection if you move the mouse pointer away, at least if you don’t click again to select something else. That’s all. I believe it could really make the navigation of the nested menus easier and more precise, in particular where you are trying to issue a command during combat and continue to lose focus because you are trying to do it too quickly.

I think this feature could have saved my ass in the game a couple of times if it was implemented.

NOTE: The first idea ties to what I wrote here. In particular about a reorganization of the ships to make the classes more defined and understandable. Again this doesn’t mean that I would like to see the statistics of those ships changed. It’s still about the presentation, not the content.