Tag Archives: Eve-Online

Even CCP devs don’t play their own game!

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I skimmed some more through E-On and my opinion is still the same. Lots of interesting stuff, I’m glad I got a copy before it was too late.

Still didn’t have the time to actually read it but I found some interesting things.

They talk about their upcoming launch in China (can I have one of those pretty PR girls? thanks!) with some interesting comments:

Currently Eve Online boasts about 2.000 Chinese subscribers, but in the long-term CCP hopes to increase that figure beyond that of the global Eve player base.

“The Chinese MMOG market is currently about 10 times bigger than Europe and the US combined, about 27 million players,” says Hilmar, “Given that we now have more than 70.000 subscribers in the West, all things being equal we could have 700.000 subs in China.”

Cheap math for the win! Keep dreaming :)

Anyway they also reference an interesting project, the “wild idea”. We already know that they are going to build a separate server cluster for the eastern market, so moving away from the one-world concept. But this doesn’t seem to be the end of their plans:

Imagine, if you will, a new larger universe developing beyond Eve current space, with hundreds of thausands of players fighting wars and forging alliances. Alliances and wars that may one day find a way to reach the ‘Western’ arm of the Eve galaxy. On one hand it’s frightening – threatening, almost overwhelming – but the possibilities for interaction must surely go far beyond even CCP’s far-from modest ambitions.

Eve Online may only be just beginning.

“The wildest ideas about the China cluster involve them starting out in a different part of the galaxy, unconnected to the regions of Amarr, Minmantar, Gallente, Caldari and Jove. We could give them, say, two years to catch up, in an accelerated fashion then, once TQ (Tranquility) and the China cluster are about equal in tech level and player infrastructure , we would merge the clusters and alloe everyone to duel it out in massive uber-fleet combats on server hardware of the future.”

The idea is rather crazy but also terribly interesting. It’s also not so far off from my ‘shard travel’ idea. The possibility to create two different communities developing as two different cultures has a lot of potential. Linking them would probably have a strong destabilizing impact on both. But the fact that these “passages” would be in low-security space controlled directly by the player corporations themselves would open so many possibilities.

This is again how worlds are built. Forming own rules and structures that could have a strong impact on the whole game.

Another thing that caught my eye is the Eve CGI movie, no really. This isn’t another crazy project by CCP but something done by a player in the community. There’s a thread on the official forums with the links to mirrors for the original two-minute trailer released early this year. The plan is to release consequent chapters with a duration around five minutes. The first is named “Darwin’s Contraption” and is slated for a Q1 2006 release. The trailer feels really short but not too bad (brighten up the monitor).

Then there are the two devs profiles that excused the title. I already explanied my point of view about developers not playing their games (I’m really not shocked) and it’s fun to see those questions coming up in the interviews.

Interesting stuff, especially because you would expect those sort of comments to come from a player, as a rant. Not from the lead designer:

Do you play much EVE yourself – for fun?

Kjartan ‘LeKjart’ Emilsson (lead game designer): No. I played early on in the game, but quickly realized that to have any chance to compete with the hardcore players I would have to sacrifice the precious little time I have left with my family. I sometimes go in, train some skills and do an occasional mission, but I have long foregone any hope of becoming an EVE tycoon.

Borkur ‘Nag’ Eiriksson (illustrator/artist): I played it ferverishly for a year after release and I was so consumed by it that I almost screwed up my graduation! After I started working for CCP I found I had less time to play and slowly drew myself out of it so I could devote more time to work (and more time to my girlfriend as she was complaining a lot). So today I play it regularly but not nearly as much as I used to.

The last page is instead about “Teh Funnies”. On the left there are some funny quotes taken from the game chat (with portraits):

Harry Stoteles> rofl, i just tried for 3 minutes to target lock a small stain on my monitor
Shrike> ……..
Harry Stoteles> thought it was a rock…
Harry Stoteles> honestly

Futher Bezluden> 3653m/s in my stiletto
Bjorn Stahle> Pretty good speed in heels, how fast is your ship?

Talostan Gurt> how ya doin?
LordChaos> ALL BOW TO THE MIGHT LC!!!!!!!!!
LordChaos> i always forget the f*****g Y lol
Talostan Gurt> /emote licks lc in the balls
Talostan Gurt> kick***
LordChaos> lick?
LordChaos> ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Talostan Gurt> ewwwwww
Talostan Gurt> nooooooooooooo
LordChaos> LMAO
Talostan Gurt> i did not mean that!!!!!!!

And on the right of the page, a glossary:

AGENT:
Brash, overbearing NPCs who reward the completition of deathly dull assignments with thousands of items that you’ll either never need, never be able to sell or be permitted to recycle.

So true!! Here’s more:

AMARR:
A race of pompous religious fanatics who take themselves far too seriously, some of whom have taken to hiding their faces under a hood because they are so abominably hideous.

ATTRIBUTES:
Arbitrary character statistics, decided upon without due knowledge as you begin your EVE journey, that after two years you’ll realise you got horribly wrong.

AUGMENTATIONS:
Ridiculously expensive cranial inserts that enhance characteristics and skills, that upon death will have you crying like a baby that you ever bought them.

On a sidenote not related to the mag: I saved on the forum section a guide to the use of missiles to complete the wonderful guide about the turrets.

One of the aspects of Eve I find severely lacking is the graphical representation of the combat: there is no difference between a hit, a hit for no damage and a miss. That’s something that could use some work…

Ooh, so pretty

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I *just now* received the first issue of E-ON. Woo!

That’s Eve-Online print magazine. They beat SOE on that. Bwahahah.

I always wanted to order it and got finally motivated after they announced they were going to run out of copies (and they have now).

I only had time to skim through it. It’s really, really, really, really pretty. High “production value”, I didn’t expect it. 66 pages full-color (next issue will have 76), magazine format, glossy paper. Lots of very good images, but also lots of text. Small text, I was actually expecting they were going to use something big to fill the space. Dev profiles, concept images, ship descriptions/sheets, design notes about the Titans, stories and guides. There’s only one ad from ATI in the backcover, the other few are about in-game corporations ads.

I want more.

It’s a really good idea for this type of game. There’s a context to write about things, the game has a huge breadth. It’s also useful to valorize the time. Things that change, how the game evolves, the corporations turnabouts, new ships and stuff. There’s a whole lot going on in and around Eve. It wouldn’t work for the other one-dimensional games where you already know all there is to know.

It seems they are also planning a trading-card game. Let’s see if they beat WoW on that as well.

(I also received Lum’s book a while ago and it is good too. I just don’t have enough time to read and comment… Hmm…)

Accessibility in Eve-Online, some vague ideas

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Just saving a short discussion on Dave’s blog about Eve-Online’s accessibility and the gap between the tutorial and what is only “supposed” to come later and that too many players hear about and aspire but never manage to actually see (myself included, heh..).

—
Abalieno:
I believe that a lot could be done in Eve to make it more accessible and to bring the players more near to where the fun is (I know this because it’s already a big accessibility barrier for me).

I’m one of those that need something linear to follow before having the courage and knowledge to move on my own and Eve is the opposite of linearity (which is where it’s the quality). But my belief is that, while you cannot have a freeform game within a linear one, you can still have linear, leading paths (and more than one) within freeform games (not too differently from what Raph writes here). Eve could do a whole lot from this perspective.

Another example would be about organizing the categories of the ships, which is another part of the game that I still have no clue about. You can give a look at the ship page like I did but there isn’t a clear definition of the roles, scale and how they compare with each other. It’s hard to understand which ship you need and can afford next and what are the main roles or purposes of each type so that you can make your choice.

There’s enough space here for the documentation to improve (outside the game) and the linear paths I described above to help the players understand all this directly in the game. That’s what I would develop in the game. Instead of a tutorial that explains the UI and the basic types of gameplay, I would add linear careers, semi-scripted, that you can follow and switch (or quit) at will. So that you can learn progressively the game at your pace or just go on your own.

That’s what I think should do a good freeform game. Take the players by the hand if they don’t feel ready to go on their own, while giving them total freedom to forget about the linear path and search the luck in their own way.

—
Lydia Leong:
EVE is initially accessible, from the standpoint that the tutorial is magnificent (probably the single best MMO tutorial I’ve played through, and I’ve played through a lot), and help is more readily available than in practically any other game. The raw tediousness of mining (as well as travel through higher-security space) ensures that everyone has plenty of time to chat. Getting staked as a newbie is critical, but seems to be relatively commonplace.

Where it falls down in accessibility is probably around ten hours into gameplay, when you’re really running out of more directed things to do and find the world to be a fairly bewildering place. You have the awareness that fascinating things are going on elsewhere, but you have no idea how to become a part of them. The gap between the newbie game and the corporation game is just too vast.

—
Abalieno:
Yes, that’s what I think too and what I meant with my suggestion to add some linear careers. The purpose is to have something to do past the tutorial and that makes you explore with more depth the other parts of the game if you feel still too intimidated to go explore on your own and set your own goals. Also giving a longer term motivation to excuse the progress.

It could be done as an expansion to the mission system, but by making it more cohesive and articulated in the longer term. Bringing also some fun in the “empire space”.

It would also offer the possibility to set many different progressive ranks that could work like levels to bring the players together, for example by creating some hubs around the world where more players at the same “rank” would meet to take some group-tailored missions (a problem in EvE I have is that I NEVER grouped with anyone. Mostly because the game does very little to bring people together in a natural, seamless way).

Eve-Online victim of its own success

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And now Eve-Online is growing too fast:

Max Headroom

Red Moon Rising is out and as you have probably noticed we are still dealing with issues from the deployment. RMR is a rather big change, in many aspects close to Exodus in scope, especially at the lower levels. RMR contains many optimizations and improvements behind the scenes to deal with EVE’s continued success (BTW thank you so much for that, EVE owes much of it’s success to you the EVE Player community).

As the game grows and we stubbornly maintain our goal of one cluster, we have to take a more drastic approach to platform management than before. The gradual addition of hardware and on going software optimizations are not able to keep up with EVE any more. Oveur recently did an excellent blog describing our efforts.

The urgency of the situation becomes evident when we do updates of the scale of Red Moon Rising. The margin of error is virtually non-existent as we are already so close to the glass ceiling of our current cluster architecture that the smallest mis-configuration leads to us banging against it. This causes effects which we just witnessed at 15:00 GMT today.

We have been doing research into how we can considerably increase our headroom, the first step was the Ramsan, the next step involves a move to 64 bit architecture. We have brought Christian Tismer, the godfather of Stackless Python to Iceland and him and porkbelly are here at the office busy figuring out how to squeeze all potential power out of the x64 AMDs we are planning to build our next major cluster upgrade on.

Next to them Papasmurf and Dr.J are feverishly calibrating all pistons of our current cluster to focus all computing resources in the right areas so that RMR will hold the 25.000 PCU we seem destined to achieve before we manage to have the new super cluster hardware assembled, delivered, installed, tuned and tested.

The hardware needed to increase our headroom isn’t something you can go to the store and buy. We have world experts assisting us and after everything has been completed the EVE cluster will probably be the first game related cluster site to rank on the Top500 list.

Anyway I wanted to offer my small reassurance that we are focused on backing our commitment to single cluster for the world wide market (The China cluster is a whole different ballgame which warrants a separate blog) and we fully realize that seriously increased hardware and R&D investment is required to back it and that will be done.

In the short term we have world leading experts in MMO development working around the clock here at the office, ignoring all other commitments (which understandably are considerable this close to Christmas). I remain in constant amazement how committed our developers are to make sure we pass each hurdle, commitment that is only matched by the understanding of their families.

In the long term we will build a completely new cluster utilizing all modern day technology to construct something at the scale needed to simulate nuclear explosions or the earth’s weather system.

So this is blog is our plea to you, the EVE Player community, to yet again give us a chance to resolve these matters and to explain that we have long term and short term goals to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.

Of course EVE Online is a commercial venture but seeing what we have achieved together often makes you think otherwise. We here at CCP remain committed to keep up our end of the bargain. With your help we’ll take MMOGs to the next level.

Maybe someone still remembers all the claims about the support for more than 100k “PCU” (aka “Peak Concurrent Player”, CCP’s definition for the maximum number of accounts logged in at the same time) back in beta. Heh…

The subscription numbers are growing at an impressive rate. Really, I expect a collapse because this is going beyond every expectation. Basically *everyone* is now giving it a try or discussing it. If anything, this confirms how important is our community and the true impact we can have on these games. This market is starting to belong more to these communities. We decide who succeeds and who fails and I’m not sure game companies are going to like how unpredictable (and unfaithful) we are.

EVE has over 100k active accounts, including trials. Active subscriptions are now over 86k.

This Sunday the number of contemporary logged in accounts was above 20k.

The 100k mark could be reached much sooner than expected. I’m actually hoping things will slow down, or this may burn both CCP and the future of the game.

Commercial success is corrupting.

Eve-Online growing steadily

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Quick update about Eve-Online (and I’m back as a subscriber as well).

CCP’s plan in September was to reach 70k subs by the end of the year but early this week Oveur announced they are already above 80k. Today the new record about concurrent users online was broken as well, going above 19k (19.486).

This means they gained more than 20k subscriptions just in the last seven months, corresponding to more than 25% in growth. Pretty outstanding. I wish they could continue with this impressive J-curve (Raph can write all he wants, but that’s just the market interpreted as a sexual metaphor) but I also believe that it’s too unrealistic to expect that 25% growth every few months. Still, they have gained the space to improve the game more consistently and secure a good number of loyal subscribers in the longer term.

The new major patch/expansion is planned to go live early this week (Tuesday?). The patch notes are already out but there’s also the possibility that the devs won’t meet the deadlines. In this case the patch will have be pushed to after the holidays.

Among the content aimed to the bigger alliances there are still many changes that will affect everyone, like the huge changes to the combat and a rebalance and power-up of the noob ships (details here). Plus the addition of four new bloodlines (one for each race) and a revision of the tutorial. It’s important to notice how they work and develop at all levels, from the network infrastructure to the higher level design.

It’s also noteworthy that they’ll finally display the “criminal flagging”. About which I ranted here in the past.

Between the other things I digged, I’ve been completely in awe for this flash tutorial. It’s really amazing even if it just explains how the turrets work in the game. Even if you don’t play the game I suggest to read it from the first to the last page because I think it really describes what Eve is at its core and why many love or hate it. Of course that’s the opposite of intuitive, visceral combat. But noone could negate the huge appeal that even that type of approach can have. Really, that little tutorial is incredible. Go toy with it now because it’s worth it. I’ve never seen something niftier and intriguing.

Finally an external program I found and that is extremely useful for me. It simply allows the game client to fill the screen while playing in a window so that you can multitasking without having to set the game client at a smaller resolution than your desktop so that the window can fit in. What it does in practice is remove the borders and the title-bar so that the window will fill the screen without leaving spaces or going off it. I tried it and it works perfectly.

Hey Lum, if I get the source-code can you port it to DAoC? :)

EDIT- I quote here the latest news since they are unavailable for non-subscribers.

We have been working hard on testing Red Moon Rising (RMR) – which is tentatively scheduled for deployment next week. Besides all the new content in RMR, we’ve been working hard on optimizations too, especially since the EVE universe continues to grow at a faster rate than we have ever seen before.

Recently, we deployed server optimization hotfixes seperate from optimizations made in RMR. One of the hotfixes performed beyond our expectations. We regained 25% of our CPU usage on all Proxies resulting in a noticeable lag reduction in most systems.

In addition to these optimizations, we started testing 64-bit server hardware last week on Tranquility. This is in preparation for our upcoming server upgrades – and the results are astonishing. A Proxy server previously running at 70% CPU, which came down from 95% CPU after the aforementioned optimization hotfix, is only using 25% CPU on the new 64-bit hardware.

Please note, only one of the many Proxies is running on 64-bit hardware, the testing is to make sure the replacements we are considering investing in actually give a performance increase. We feel the results speak for themselves and are moving forward in the testing and upgrade process.

—
On the RMR side of the news, we are still testing the current candidate for deployment. If testing goes as well as the hardware and software testing, we will break our Tuesday deployment cycle and RMR will go live on Thursday, 15 December. If we are not satisfied with the results of testing this deployment candidate, RMR will go live in January.

Eve-Online – Next stop 100k

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That it is pretty it’s out of doubt.

Red Moon Rising is the upcoming free half-expansion to be released in December. The original plan was to have all features packed in Kali, the next one now scheduled for Q2 2006, but the devs decided to split the project in two in order to keep everything under control considering the sheer scope of the ongoing development.

The new screenshots just released are wonderful and finally show the “Titans”, the biggest ships you will be able to control in the game.

The focus of this further step is on the warfare and PvP action but there are many more features and enhancements that are being added, starting from the client optimization to the addition of four new “asian” bloodlines (one per race) to appeal the eastern market where the game is going to be launched (and it will be truly interesting to see how it goes).

While the hugest ships aren’t going to be accessible if not for those long-time and organized players that accumulated an insane wealth and the support from the largest corporations and alliances, still they reinforce the “sense of wonder” created by the absurd unbalance in the scale of the vessels. And this definitely is what a game also inspired to the Golden Age of the Space Opera should aspire to reproduce.

If at some point you’ll see a Titan passing by during your travels, you’ll surely remember that moment. It’s something real. Those ships ARE insanely valuable and if they are destroyed they are gone. This creates a sense of ownerships and self-consistence in the game-world that sweeps off the “arcade” mood of other games with faked, trivialized environments and rulesets. In Eve things truly exist. The space is huge but in the hands of the players. And it’s undeniable how all these elements are truly appealing and fascinating despite the very slow pace of the game for most of the new players and those not deeply involved in the PvP scene.

It’s not surprising, considering also the steady and ambitious development, that the last press release announces nearly 80k active subscriptions even before the launch of the new expansion and the release of the game on the eastern market. (waiting for proper source)

EVE ONLINE: RED MOON RISING

CCP Announces Major Upgrade to EVE Online

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – November 18st, 2005 – CCP Games, an independent developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online games, today announced the public release of “EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising”, a new expansion to its highly successful and fast-growing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) “EVE Online®: Exodus”. Red Moon Rising is scheduled for release this December, and will be provided to subscribers free of charge.

“Red Moon Rising is the last of the EXODUS chapters and is the precursor of the Kali expansion,” said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games. “Players will see new ships and features in Red Moon Rising created explicitly to augment warfare, so those who crave the adrenaline rush of action-packed PVP will really enjoy this release!”

With nearly 80,000 active subscribers and over 17,000 simultaneous users on one server, “EVE Online” is the largest independently developed and published MMORPG on the market.

“The introduction of these new components is analogous to adding rooks, knights, and the mighty queen to a galactic chessboard,” said Nathan Richardsson, Lead Producer for EVE Online. “Fighters, carriers, and titans are going to take combat to a scale that the MMPORG genre has never seen before. In addition, the sheer economics required just to produce these leviathans will create great opportunities for industrious-minded gamers to take advantage of.”

EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising is the march towards an epic clash between the empires as the tentative peace presiding over the galaxy continues to slip away. Nations begin to conspire against one another, secretly preparing for the inevitable conflict that threatens to redefine the borderlines of EVE forever.

Some of the key features of this upgrade are:

* Titans: The largest, most fearsome space faring battle vessels ever created
* Carriers: Front line capital ships providing fighter coverage and support for fleets
* Bloodlines: The addition of Asian bloodlines available to each of the races
* COSMOS Constellation Expansion: Addition of constellation missions to Gallente and Amarr territories
* Fighters: The main offensive and defensive weapon of the Carrier
* Starbases and sovereignty: Additions of roles to improve control access of services and improved calculations of player-determined Sovereignty
* Next-Generation Manufacturing & Research Facilities: Mass-manufacturing enabling and remote industry management.
* Performance Optimizations: Optimizations to core systems to provide even better performance.
* Mining Industry Upgrade: New equipment, ships and skills for miners
* Combat Enhancements: Varied improvements to combat, enhanced defenses and configuration overhauls
* Jettisoned Canister Flagging: Removing the contents of a jettisoned canister that is not your own will flag you as a thief
* Drone Enhancements: New drone capabilities and improved performance
* An Eye for an Eye: You are allowed to revenge the unlawful destruction of your ship
* Tech II: 23 new Tech II ships, including destroyers, battlecruisers and mining barges
* New Corporate Logos: Corporations have more options to create their own identity
* NPC Changes: New NPC’s featuring elite ships with advanced capabilities such as cap draining
* UI Improvements: Need info from Hagen. (lol?)
* Full Unicode Client: The EVE client now supports any language in the universe

This while they speak about “growing pains”:

What you guys need to be aware of, however, is that due to CCP’s ongoing growth spurt, we’ve presently hit the absolute limit with regards to how many people we can fit in our current housing. We physically cannot add more people until we move to our new facilities (a move currently scheduled for next month). Therefore, to meet current production schedules with available manpower, our focus needs to remain squarely on static content for the time being.

Our company’s having growing pains, but once they’re past us we’ll be better equipped to bring you a more well-rounded gaming experience.

And fancy projects to spare some space for the exponential growth:

64bits

A common cause for node deaths is memory exhaustion. Sometimes this is due to some memory-eating monsterbug, but often the virtual address space of 2GB in a 32-bit process simply fills up with legitimate user data. No matter how much memory is installed on the machine, each process can only address 2GB of this.

In order to alleviate this and to buy us more room for growth, we have been working on porting the server binaries to the new x64 architecture and have them run as 64 bit processes under Windows 2003 server 64, or even XP 64.

The ~150k subscriptions of City of Heroes aren’t that far away. We’ll see for how long this will be considered “niche” or “outlier”.

The GoonFleet may also help:

It’s a completely different game than it was in beta/launch.

What the hell…I’m game. I’m sick of WoW. And since I’ve been busy at work lately, this sounds like a good game to get stuff done while I do work with the mining and all.

As new people can see, the devs maintain a very active and responsive relationship with the player base. They frequently post on the online forums in response to threads commenting/complaining about changes, and make an effort to justify their decisions in a way SOE never would.

Btw, they added an into movie to the game with a voice narrating the backstory and mostly-static beautiful art screens to illustrate it. It sets the mood rather well.

Fascinating, indeed.

CCP lectures on how to develop a mmorpg

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We recently discussed a lot about “change” in MMO. I explained that I love to see mmorpgs evolving and I support when game companies make daring choices. But at the same time I support a type of evolution, more than revolution, that builds on top of what you did already. Learning from the experience and reiterating the process to move the game more and more near to an ideal. That you never reach, because that’s the nature of the dreams.

So I hate when one of these games stands still just hoping to preserve its status quo or stretching its life-cycle as far as possible. It’s frustrating, it’s simply a way to choke the potential and handing out the competition the opportunity to fulfill those dreams that should belong to you. After all building games is exclusively for those who chase silly, unrealistic dreams and don’t feel like fitting in the real world. Building games is already an utopia in the concept.

Lum summarized prefectly what I could only explain in long paragraphs:
“MMOs are living worlds, living worlds grow, and players — and designers — should embrace growth and change as part of the game’s life cycle.”

CCP (Eve-Online) offers another example about how it’s possible to put those silly ideas into the practice. This is another dev blog I save from the feeds. Taking the parts I find worthwhile.

—
My presentation was about the upcoming content expansion, Red Moon Rising, slated for December this year and our full expansion, codenamed Kali which is tentatively scheduled for late Q2 2006. We wanted to divide and conquer, splitting Kali up into two releases.

We have a lot of optimizations, fixes and general improvements that we want out and releasing the Kali features which are already done decreases a lot of risk factors. It also enables us to focus on the major things we want to release in Kali.

– Red Moon Rising –

The name signifies the total lunar eclipse where it turns blood red. It fits well with the escalation towards war and the arms race of the factions. What we’ll see in Red Moon Rising is mainly optimizations, fixes and improvements but there are a couple of features in there and a lot of content.

On the Optimizations front we have the Turrets & Effects system rewrite ongoing and much of that will be released in RMR. We also have the Next-Gen Manufacturing & Research Facilities rewrite which should result in 5% of 140 cpu’s being freed up.

On the Improvements side, you’ll see Starbase Roles, MK2 Ships and a number of UI Improvements both new stuff and feedback from useability tests and of course we have tons of bugfixes. We’re also adding more Corporation logos and if we have time, we’re going to check out if we can make logos viewable on the ships when you do “look at”.

We have a number of Tech 2 ships coming in Red Moon Rising, The Interdictor, which is the Tech 2 Destroyer and is a warp scrambling bubble ship, the Recon and Force Recon cruisers Tech 2 Cruisers, EW platforms where one of them has covert ops cloaking ability and bonsues to cynosural field generation.

We’re also doing two Tech 2 Battlecruisers, the Command Ship and the Fleet Command ship, where the former is more combat focused while the latter is a pure tanking and leadership platform. In addition to that we will probably be able to get Tech 2 ammunition into RMR.

Needful things for mining coming in Red Moon Rising, 4 skills, 3 leadership modules, 2 mining upgrade modules – one for Ice and one for regular mining. 4 hardwiring implants and a leadership implant (mindlink). We also have Tech 2 Mining Barges and we added named ice-, strip- and Deep Core miners in addition to named mining upgrade modules.

With the Nex-Gen Manufacturing & Research Facilities coming in RMR, we will deploy Manufacturing & Research Starbase structures which allow for specialization, a reward for the added risk. If we have time, we’d like to add special manufacturing modules for some of the Capital ships allowing them for example to replenish their supply of Fighters but currently we’re focusing on the Starbase structures and getting them ready.

We have 4 new bloodlines coming in RMR, one for each race, male and female. They look quite good at the moment but as was frequently asked about, you will not able to switch between bloodlines.

NPCs are revisited, we’re adding elite pirates in Tech 2-ish ships and adding a number of ship classes like Destroyers and Dreadnoughts, too. We’re enabling players to affect them with cap drainers and other offensive modules, but the NPCs are going to be able to retaliate in kind.

We’re trying move to fewer but stronger NPCs which not only should make it more fun but also drastically reduce server load and client performance in high-end encounters but this is more of a long-term project so don’t expect everything to be like this in RMR.

Eye for an Eye is a new system, which allows you to revenge the podding of your character if it happens under unlawful circumstances, such as in empire and not at war. You get a time limited contract, most likely a month, to revenge your death.

We’re also flagging can’s by ownership, criminally flagging you against the owner of the can, enabling him to shoot you without CONCORDOKEN for stealing his ore or loot.

Combat Revisited is a big and ongoing project, now focusing on prolonging combat by adding new defensive skills and improvements on a lot of defensive modules. We made some modules useful, like the damage controls and are looking at a number of other modules, making them a more viable choice in combat.

Prolonging combat should not only make it more fun but also enable us to take new paths in future expansions to deepen combat, like allowing players to overload modules at the risk of them getting damaged or destroyed and even allowing targeting of certain ship sub-systems – something which the current combat times does not offer you.

The flagship features of Red Moon Rising are Carriers and Titans. They fully personify the arms race of the empires, where you have the massive fleet support ships and a newer, more practical version of Titans which don’t require depleting moons (well, not as much anyways).

There are 8 Carriers coming in RMR, 2 for each Empire eace. The Carrier is quite affordable in terms of Capital Ship and we expect most major corps to have at least one or two of these in their engagements, but we also have the Mothership which are considerably bigger version of the Carrier.

Motherships feature Ship Maintenace Array functionality allowing you to store ships and fit modules in space around it. They also have an corp hangar-ish ability so that you can get modules from it in space depending on your access rights.

You also get X-Large logistics modules for Carriers which should have drastic effects in fleet engagements and Fighters, the X-Large drones. We’re also adding new drone functionality, which ones will make it into RMR is unknown at this point. The often mentioned salvage drone will not come since we’re planning on doing a tractor beam for RMR allowing you to drag in your loot cans.

Player Titans are a less resource intensive version of Empire Titans requiring less depletion of the universe’s resources but are just as big and more powerful in many ways than the older empire versions. They feature most of the main benefits of Carriers but have the added ability of fitting X-Large turrets and has a massive Superweapon.

Both Carriers and Titans are Tech 1 ships, so they will be available to everyone from day one. We might do something else with Titans but I think the sheer mineral logistics and costs associated with it should in itself keep them few and rare.

Kali – Q2 2006

I went over our main features for Kali and a couple that we really want in there. We’re focusing on Factional Warfare in Kali since it includes Combat Organization, the project name for better fighting hierarchies and gang abilities, Medals and Certifications both for awarding by EVE through factional warfare but also for corps or alliances to give internally, Ranks for better visible organizations which should also benefit corporations and a number or ranking lists, such as the EVE Combat Rating which is ELO based.

One of the biggest changes to EVE in Kali will be the Contracts system, which not only enables complex contracts between parties which do not have established lines of trust – such as BYOM manufacturing contracts – but also enable organizations with established trust, like corporations or alliances to create “mission” like contracts, milestones and allow them to track achievement and empower players which are even more trusted without having to give full access to corp hangars.

We also have Combat Boosters. Think time-limited hardwire implants with drawbacks. They are creating a whole new value chain since the foundation of Combat Boosters are new ingredients found in 0.0 COSMOS regions, which then require Starbases with Drug or Chemical labs to create.

The 0.0 COSMOS regions all have the basic ingredients gathered with mini-professions, have a single unique ingredient, which allows you to create that regions special line of Combat Boosters and formulas for creating them all.

Get more unique ingredients from other COSMOS regions and you’ll be able to make even more powerfull Combat Boosters. That should either lead to trading contracts – or simply people killing each other for them :)

On the list of what we really want to get into Kali is Next-Gen R&D moving us away from the free dish outs of blueprints and involving the player more in the gamplay. It also includes customization and modding of ships as well as more complex research of bleuprints and branding of the products.

We’d like to do rewarding Exploration, with system scanning and escalating paths (both seen under the drawingboard, New Environments which are also listed there but are really big projects requiring a lot of effort which we haven’t been in the position to do and probably won’t be in the near future. We’d also like to see Tier-3 Battleships and Tier-2 Battlecruisers.

Planetary Flight will not be in Kali, the effort required to make that the way we want to do it and how EVE deserves it makes all of Red Moon Rising pale in comparison. We might have to notch it down a bit in the end but it’s currently post-Kali and requires a full expansion in itself.

– China –

The first major decision is that the universes are twins, they are identical except for a new resource distribution. There are a number of reasons for this. First and most obvious, is that all content and features created for Tranquility work directly in China, minimizing all porting and integration to a China universe, so we can instead focus our resources on creating rather than adjusting it all to fit both universes.

It’s also financial and manpower. With a unified development path for both universe, we can leverage all the incoming revenue on increasing the team to create more content and finally be able to do bigger projects like Planetary Flight without it taking three years and half the company’s manpower.

—
Notice how it’s all about or around systems. As new features or enhancements.

Notice how they plan to revisit the combat by slowing it down and opening the way for brand new mechanics and possibilities to make it more meaningful and involving. Not scared to death about moving something they shouldn’t, but just looking ahead to those goals they set and that they want to reach.

Notice what they say about China. They aren’t planning for sequels, new projects or new markets. They aren’t planning to make money hats and swim in the money pool. Eventually they’ll do that in the spare time.

They’ll reinvest the resources they may acquire to finally reach and fulfill those ideas that aren’t possible right now. This is a type of development that doesn’t know what the mudflation is and doesn’t waste the resources on it. Instead it naturally creates the conditions so that the game can grow and embrace new ideas and possible developments in a positive, steady way.

And that’s only where things start.

My words in others words

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Dave Rickey linked an interview to Eve-Online producer (Nathan Richardsson) and I was wondering why since he already covered those points not long ago. I also thought it was about another interview I didn’t really find that interesting.

Then I read the one done by Gamasutra and figured out why he linked it. It is really that good and I felt like reading the exact same stuff I’ve preached about for all this time. All the basic points. I event felt jealous.

He speaks about the virtual world focused on PvP without instancing and sharding, the focus on the players and the social aspects, the unique traits that a “mmorpg” has to offer, the instancing applied to PvE used to “control” the experience ( the problem of authorship I often tried to bring up), the “power to the players” slogan (mine is “give back the world to the players”), content build through the development of tools to be used by the players (opposed to mudflated content), the conquest and control of the game world through PvP, the iterative development as one of the most unique traits and strengths of mmorpg development, the community seen as a resource and not as something to muffle in every way possible, “embrace and evolve”, “we try to put us in the position of “what would I really like to do here?” and then try to develop that” (in-character development), the “open source” attitude (full disclosure to the community, no drama, no hiding, no information control. Just openness and honesty), the PvP as an endlessly renewable and fun source of content, the truly communal goals, the freedom from obsolete publishers that just contribute to sink the potential and nothing else… is this enough?

In particular: the prefect timing to launch something different and dare with the ideas. Right now, exactly when the genre grew so much thanks to WoW and other games, exactly when there are so many players who would like to ask more from this genre.

My ideas on how to deliver that type of experience are different, but I saw him quoting all the exact same principles I have.

– Our strong belief in PvP and a single universe is probably the main differentiator between us and other MMOs. We strongly believe that MMOs should focus on social interaction between people, but many MMOs tend to go in the opposite direction. We don’t like instancing and we don’t like sharding and we believe that too much focus on player versus environment is taking us more closer to the newly coined term ‘Massively Single Player Games.’

We fully understand the reason behind sharding, instancing and the PvE focus. A lot of players want this kind of experience and these tools are far more commercially viable to fully control the experience and content created. We however decided to take the more difficult path and try to take on those obstacles head-on. It certainly has a lot of unpleasant side effects and EVE will never be a mainstream game. We’re complex, we’re open ended, we’re fully PvP oriented and you can lose six months work in a second. But we believe this is what makes EVE so unique and we’re trying to follow this vision and principles as well as we can.

– Power to the players. Nothing compares to a player that is enabled to affect the universe. We create tools for players to create content. For example, a massive alliance of corporations – our versions of guilds – with real, legendary players, leading them, controlling large areas of space and building up infrastructure is truly awesome content. We can never create that, but we can create the environment and tools enabling to happen.

We’re also very iterative in our work and keep continuous feedback cycles on the features we do, then regularly improve them based on that feedback. The community is an incredible source for how to improve the game and what they do within the game gives us constant inspiration for what we should implement next. Being so open-ended means the players do what they want and we try to keep up and add support and tools to take emerging behavior further. Embrace and evolve are the keywords here.

– The players are the foundation for what we do next in EVE. We follow what they do and listen to their dreams and again: ‘embrace and evolve.’ When playing ourselves, we try to put us in the position of “what would I really like to do here?” and then try to develop that.

We set the course a long time ago on what we wanted to do and we are very open about ideas. Openness creates a certain atmosphere where early in the development cycle you get player reactions and suggestions, which help make the feature better. It’s kind of like “open source” development of ideas and as a result, players have a lot to say about the features.

– Player owned structures which create resources for a player needs to be defended. Since it’s profitable, it will be attacked by players that want to either take that profit from you or own the location himself. By creating more locations where you can put player owned structures and defend it in more innovative ways, players start creating content for other players.

– Being our own master has contributed to a lot of our recent success and we feel we are doing so many things which we otherwise could not have done if we were working for a publisher. This can range from utilizing marketing opportunities to implementing a less-than-politically correct feature, which we feel fit with the cruel nature of the game but might not exactly be the nicest thing to do.

We’re more than confident in the net being a solid distribution method for games, both technically and financially. The technical aspects doesn’t need to be proven by us, just look at the illegal distribution scene, they have the games even before the computer store across the street. That’s what I call quick and effective distribution.

There’s also a last quote. One of those points that make me “angry”. The discussion about “sequels”.

But he doesn’t fail on this argument either:

– We’re currently only working on EVE but we have a plans for at least one more game in the near future in addition to any sequels to EVE. That would however be a totally new team and separately funded, the EVE team will continue to grow. We have more than five expansions worth of features that we want to implement and the list is constantly growing.

I can easily see us having more than two games in commercial service. We have investors eager to participate in ventures with us and we think we have a lot of good things to bring to the table. We’re all gamers and we have lots of games that we’d like to make. We often get those “wouldn’t it be cool to make” moments; it’s just a matter of time.

– We think that constant evolution of MMOs is required. We have the full team still working on taking EVE further – and all our expansions are included in the subscription. We consider it something which should be included in the subscription, because that’s what you’re paying for: Evolution.

Yes, Evolution.

Eve-Online growing some more

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Follow-up.

From the boards:

“Due to the efforts of the Marketing team, magazines and player recommendations, EVE now has over 65k active accounts and close to another 15k on trial.

We are on track for over 75k active accounts before the end of the year.”

Actually I’m starting to believe that they are pushing the marketing right now at its best and they cannot keep this pace for too long. A slow, steady growth is still possible, though and it will just do good to the game in the long term.

As long they keep working on the game as they are doing now.