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Ask CCP About EVE Online
The week after next, the annual Game Developer's Conference is happening in San Francisco. I'll be there providing coverage on the keynotes, and some of the talks that I think will appeal to the Slashdot sensibility. I've also been digging to see if there's any folks willing to speak with the Slashdot community 'in person'. The fine folks at CCP, makers of the Massively Multiplayer game EVE Online, have kindly agreed to take some time out of their busy conference schedule to answer your questions. So, what do you want to know about the present and future of this fascinating MMOG? One question per comment, please. I'll present your questions to CCP, and pass their answer back once I'm home from the event. Update: 02/22 19:51 GMT by Z : I asked Sharon Howell, the PR rep for CCP, who I might be speaking with at GDC. Unfortunately, they're still nailing down schedules. We'll be talking with one of the following: Hilmar Veigar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer, Magnus Bergsson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nathan Richardsson, Senior Producer, Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, Chief Technology Officer. One of these members of the top brass will be available to answer your questions.
Do you think POS warfare is fun? If not, do you have any plans on changing it so that it is fun?
What is the annual profit of EVE Online?
What are the costs to run it?
What is the annual gross revenue?
If you lose a ship in EVE it's gone, no free respawn once you walk back to your body. Diablo 2 is the only other game that offered anything like this. Why haven't other games caught on?
The recent scandal involving a CCP Developer(s) abusing game mechanics to benefit an in-game alliance shook the gaming community, not only because of its ramifications to the company itself, but because the "whistleblower" was banned for revealing a developer's in-game identity -- despite the fact that his identity was already selectively known to an in-game alliance. Many feel that the issue needs closure -- that scandal was quietly swept away, and that CCP's punitive measures were misdirected. What steps does CCP plan to take in the future to keep from discouraging players from revealing illegal activity by others, and does CCP intend to bring closure to the Eve community on this game-breaking issue?
Will they ever give the game community a satisfactory resolution to the incident where their staff have cheated in the game? Any other game company would have fired those employees... Theirs kept their jobs and simply created new accounts, that with their developer access, can just quickly ramp back up... The way they treated the whistle blower was much harsher than those actually guilty of deceiving and betraying their player base. I know I will never purchase any additional services or titles from CCP as a result of this gaff.
Why do you cheat, and why haven't you adressed the issue infront of your subscribers even after being presented with the facts?
WhisperJeff, you may not understand how the game works. Turning on your afterburner and flying somewhere DOES take hours. That's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to warp somewhere, not fly there. =p Travelling across an entire region takes....10 minutes? Travelling across the entire galaxy from one end to the other (lets say 80 jumps) will take you an hour or so, maybe a little more. Warp to 0km, jump, load the next system, warp to 0km (next gate) rinse and repeat. Perhaps you should explore the game a bit more?
Game Developer should not be able to play your game with out saying that they are one as they can easily work scrams , help people they know play for free, and so on. As in that game you can use in game money to pay for time card and you can also unofficially sell it for real money as well. If the IRS where to stat taxing people for they type of games I don't thing they would like people who run the game helping other covering up there taxable income.
In Soviet Russia... wait, you said CCP. Never mind.
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?
Not a typewriter
Given that the new IA department is meant to rat on co-workers at CCP if any foul play is discovered, what steps are CCP taking to ensure that any foul play is dealt with and not swept under the carpet, and how is CCP going to reassure the player base that "good deeds" are indeed happening in the IA office?
It has become clear in the recent LV-Goon war that the servers are not capable of handling more than 300-400 players per system. What is CCP planning to do about this? No matter how many optimizations the server team makes, the users will always be able to gather enough people to overwhelm the server.
There are 10 different types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I love EVE. But is still somewhat cold game. Having something personal can help:
:D )
- Portraits. Very nice feature, but you can't personalize more your portrait. Ideas:
* Make your Corportation Flag your portrait background
* Able people zoom the portraits. Maybe even give people pre-rendered scenes with his portrair rendered as a guy looking trought a station window!. Maybe able to replace human eyes, by enhanced ones (red? deep blue?).
- Commerce ticker. Make a ticker with sales and prices on the screen, so you can enter a area and check this area prices for ice, or something. If this game can be more "wall street" simulator, people that love that simulator will love it.
- More non-fighting quest. Whats about other type of quest than "kill 3 rats", or "Kill 20 rats" or "Kill 90 rats"? I can give you ideas: races!, spying, spaceship transportation (a ship is given to you, and you have to move that ship to some location), etc...
- Fatalities. Make very damaged ships rotate like cracy, or break engines?, Is a idea, maybe a bad idea.
- Lag and you!. Maybe the way EVE buttons work is not lag-safe.
Etc. (check the EVE forums for good ideas
Random ideas:
- A alien race
- More lore stuff, history, plot, etc
-Woof woof woof!
I don't quite know what game you're playing, but I don't see how you're going to take 8-10 hours doing any journey in EVE, unless you're in a really slow ship, have autopilot on, and are travelling between the two farthest points you can travel between. Doing a quick estimate from the map, that'd be about 80-90 jumps. Each jump would maybe take 2 minutes of warping between gates, tops. So you're looking at 3 hours, if you could even get clearance with all the alliances to travel through some of the territory you'd be travelling through.
Unless, of course, you're talking about manually approaching an entity in a solarsystem without warping. But if you're doing that, you're probably too stupid to work out what the "point" of the game is.
I hope you realise that it's perfectly possible to do a large segment of what it's possible to do in EVE without ever venturing more than 5 jumps away from where you start, and that most of the locations you start at are within 20 jumps or so of places where the other stuff happens.
Considering that you can not really have dev collusion with players without both parties knowingly doing something morally wrong, why is there currently no plan to whipe chars/string up the CEO's of the cheating bob alliance companies?
Send a message, have bob descend into civil war, its win win!
Given the recent events (mainly surrounding Band of Brothers) of employee misconduct, have you considered changing your privacy policies in cases where an employee is involved?
I understand the privacy policy concerning the average player, and not wanting to discuss GM actions. However, when it is an employee involved who has been found guilty, some things need to be aired out in public in order to instill confidence in CCP by your playerbase.
We aren't looking for their real names. We want to know:
1) What exactly was the offense?
2) How was the offense corrected? (ISK or items removed)
3) What characters were terminated as a result of the investigation?
4) Is the person still a CCP employee?
*avoided mentioning BoD even once!
**oops!
What White Wolf IP will see electronic editions from CCP?
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
Eve Online is the first MMORPG to interest me in about 8 years (once UO went with the split shards, that was the nail in its coffin for me). However, I have a Mac. Guessing I'm outta luck?
The fact that eve is so open ended that when the player considers his or her freedom for a few moments they realise that this game just like RL life has seemingly no purpose. Is there any content that would be added in the future that would appease players who want a traditional mmo experience (linear story, enless grinding and mind numbing repition)?
So in their most recent patch, CCP apparently altered the way character creation works to give starting players more skill points, enabling them to do more out of the starting gate. This is an interesting turn to me - as one of the things that drove me away from that game was the fact that I faced potentially months of basically waiting for skills to train before I could try my hand at flying a real ship - getting involved in meaningful pvp, and, well, participating in the game world at all really. What other steps does CCP plan to introduce new players to the game economics, without destroying the depth that is a main attraction of EVE?
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
While the GP may have missed the important, "need to warp" element, he does have a point.
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. I understand from my friends that the medium and long game is much more enjoyable, once you start getting real skills developed and can get good ships to suit your play style, but the short game needs serious work. Is it too much to ask for a series of well designed agent missions or something for novice players?
Rant off, still don't know if I'm going to put down money, 9 days to decide I guess.
l4h
About the only ship that would take that long to get from one corner of the map to the other would be a freighter, and that would be traveling AFK. Since they added "warp to zero" everywhere, travel is faster even without instas. In addition, if your goal is just to get somewhere, rather than get cargo there, you can either deathjump anywhere your corp has an office + lots of other places in a couple minutes, or clone jump without losing implants once every 24 hours.
So, what you're missing I think is that part of the way people make ISK is moving cargo- in order to be able to make money moving cargo there has to be some time cost to do that- so big cargo capacity ships either need to be slow (freighter) or cost fuel to move (carriers).
Your question is kind of like asking what the point in New York City is if it takes 8 to 10 hours to get from one point in the city to another while crawling on your hands and knees.
Eve is a multi aspected game, currently with room for both of the main types of players - those who primarily play 'Player v. Empire', (and seek to avoid Player v Player combat) and the players who seek 'Player v Player' ie. direct, unconsential PvP combat with others. As a general rule, the first group tend to remain with Empire space, while the second tend to head out to lawless 0.0 security space as soon as possible.
Could you please tell us the number ratios of the two groups please (ideally the numbers of players who have destroyed another players ship in the last week, compared to those who have not), and also what plans you may have to encourage the 'PvE-ers' to enter 0.0 space?
Also, do you accept that despite CCP's best efforts, there will always be a considerable number of Eve players who have no interest whatsoever in direct PvP combat?
I only recently heard about EVE Online, thanks to all the brouhaha that appeared here on Slashdot a few weeks ago. I downloaded the client and signed up for a trial account. After 14 days, I plunked down my credit card number for a full account. The game is very fun to play, but I have a few questions about certain decisions that the designers have made.
First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client? I despise having to use Windows for any reason at all. The only reason it's even installed on my Macs is because I'm a technology consultant and I have to deal with Windows professionally, but I'd really rather not have to.
The second thing I'd like to know is why the physics are all screwed up, specifically, why are ships limited to a particular velocity. This flies in the face of logic, and makes no sense whatsoever. Ships should be rated according to their acceleration characteristics. As an aside to this, the spaceship designers might want to study the concept of "moment of inertia" to see why it is highly unlikely that real spaceships would exhibit the highly asymmetrical designs that are so prevalent in EVE.
Thirdly, what's up with the seemingly bizarre layouts of the solar systems, as relates to the legal system? There are many pockets of high-sec regions and systems in EVE that are ony reachable through long strings of low-sec jumps. This really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as in any real empire, if a particular part of said empire were similarly isolated, it would very quickly cease to be viable.
I play a character which is part of the Gallente Federation. I have noticed that many Federation stations are located in low-sec space. This also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The construction of a station would require a massive investment, making it highly unlikely that any entity would choose to locate such an expensive piece of hardware in such a place, unless they felt they could defend that space easily, which almost by definition would make that space relatively high security.
I suppose that you could some up my questions here by saying that I'm really requesting that the game be made much more realistic than it is.
What is the database used?
Why is the client written mostly in python?
Given that a lot of the client is (was?) written in Python (Stackless Python, IIRC), what's preventing an OS X client? I don't play EVE anymore mostly because I've switched away from Windows.
I would love to play your game again, especially after the last few expansions-- but I've abandoned Windows in the years since my old EVE account lapsed. Will we ever see a Mac client? Linux?
Eve markets itself as a MMORPG --A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. However, in my brief experience with it, I could not find a single person engaging in roleplay beyond "Arr, surrender yer ship!". All channels of communication are filled with out of character conversation. For me at least, this makes it impossible to get truly immersed in the game, and hence I cancelled my account.
I'll admit I still find MUDs to be the best way to engage in decent roleplaying. My question is, what are your thoughts on roleplay in modern, graphical MMOGs, and is it possible to have RP on the level textual a MUD can offer?
Ok the screenshots looks awwsome but over what I can see, but this game does not handle as many players online as World Of Warcraft. 400 users per servers compared to what.. 20000 users per WoW servers? Where does their idea of *massive online multiplayer* stand at? I think this game will be worth checking out after all..
Are you guys just doing this Q&A now because you've just had a huge scandal that hurt the credibility of your entire company and you want to get some free PR, or is there some less crass motive behind it? Also: Why should we believe anything you say?
My fiancée and I recently played through the 14 day trial, and at the end of it, we both agreed that if the PvE elements were more organised, we would probably have bought the game and kept playing.
My question is whether or not CCP has any plans on expanding the PvE mission system to allow gang missions where all party members can participate in the same mission, as long as they all have the required standing.
The game is brilliant and it has a lot of potential to us, but what's keeping us from playing it is that playing PvE together seems less co-operative and more like we're just lending eachother a helping hand, which isn't really what we look for in games.
Over the years of development how well has Stackless Python scaled to your demands? Is it still a valuable tool or has it become a bottleneck? If you had to do it all over again would you still consider its use?
The combat system in EvE, while in-depth, lacks the amount of control that other great MMO's give a user, and this lack of control was the main reason I quit.
As fun as it is to level up skills and put things on autopilot while orbiting an enemy, I'd love to strap myself into the actual ship and chase someone down; all the while, using a controller of some sort to do barrel rolls and fire weapons.
Are there any plans in the future to allow First-Person Cockpit battles using a joystick or some other way of controlling the ship other than point-click and wait?
Training is very important in Eve, but it's also extremely clunky. There is no way to set up a 'Ciriculum' where you would buy the skills that you want to train and set up a training order. Instead I have to log on at weird times and train to the next level, in order to keep from being idle. Also, now that you can warp to 0km from a gate, is there going to be a skill that will allow autopilot to do the same, ie, level 1 would warp to 12km rather than 15km, level 5 would warp to 0km? Quit changing the 'rules of the road'. I hear the Type II BPO lottery is going away, what about all the RPs that I've been earning?
I play the game, I was an ardent FPS fan but a friend reccomended me to this game and I now play.
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?
Why is it that even after I complete the training on using a rocket launcher, I have to train in rockets? What was I doing all that time I was playing with the launcher?!?
Many of us players would enjoy being able to use real-life physics and politics in EVE, but it probably wouldn't create a very interesting game in the end. Real-life physics would almost certainly overwhelm the capabilities of both the client and the server; imagine hundreds of ships and drones in space all colliding and reacting to explosions; the set-up simply can't handle it. In EVE, there really aren't any collisions beyond ship-on-ship, which are simplified at best.
Stations are required to be well-dispersed within the universe. Without this, the player-base would have little incentive to move out of the safety of Empire-space and into more lawless areas. Again, this would stress the servers and would create a much less interesting game.
As far as a non-Windows client, I'm interested in that too!
What am I missing?
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'.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
As an earlier poster mentioned, having high/lowsec mixes is pretty pointless. Beke is a perfect example. It seperates two big blocks of highsec Genesis, and as a result is heavily camped. Going around Beke results in a 12 jump detour. CCP has expressed in the past that they want to mix up pvp and pve, but this isn't the way to do it. Empire should be a core of highsec, with lowsec on the fringes, and then 0.0 out beyond. I enjoy hoping in a gang and roming around looking for a fight in 0.0, but I don't enjoy being forced to waste an enormous amount of time taking detours around lowsec pockets when trying to make some isk so I can head out to PB and lose some more cruisers. Let the players decide if they want to visit lowsec, don't force it upon them.
And the proposed changes in the devblog from yesterday are absolute crap. Removing the T2 lottery, but letting existing BPO holders keep theirs? That just makes the whole T2 BPO problem far worse. And moving belts to the exploration system will annoy players who have been playing for a while (and not do a damn thing to macroers, which a reason given), and completely fuck new players. When the only thing you have is a Navitas and a pair of Miner Is, how the fuck are you supposed to find a belt to mine? With Scordite/Veld being far more profitable these days, new players need to mine in order to afford a ship that they can go pew pew with. Hiding the belts completely shafts them. Unless CCP is planning on removing the noob ships and replacing them with real frigates with real fittings, new players aren't going to be able to afford anything, and sure as hell won't stick around.
First, hello, I'm a fan of your work in stackless, and have spoken with CCP about employment opportunities in the past.
Anyways, on to the questions:
Recently, it was announced on the CCP Games site that you were merging with White Wolf. Does this mean we'll finally see a World of Darkness Online? Also, is CCP going to be re-collecting the old White Wolf rights out there, such as the once-highly-anticipated Werewolf PC game that was never released when the rights holder went under?
Background: I've been playing eve since august of 2003 with two accounts
d =424.
d =423
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 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
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
In CCCP Eve Online questions YOU!
I played it for over a month and dropped it because of that - it basically boils down to ferrying various items from planet A to planet B and back... over .. and .. over .. again...
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.
CCP.
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 near complete destruction of two of the largest "carebear" (industrial-focused, rather than PvP) alliances, ASCN and ISS, and the relative ineffectiveness of ASCN's defenses in the face of BoB's military prowess (and apparent knowledge of game architecture, using coordinated crashing of server nodes as an offensive ploy), what would be done in the event that an alliance like BoB were to wipe out all of the other major alliances and begin exacting taxes for travel through and existence within all of 0.0 space?
Just curious...
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I played Eve for about 6 months. When I joined a serious PVP corp, it seemed most of our activities involved were flying around and ganking defenseless ships or gatecamping. Our larger battles, which were rare, usually involved one fleet completely devestating the other. If PVP involved NPC stations, it was just a cat and mouse game where the mouse was always able to run back to his hole. As an overall experience, I felt PVP was dull and yielded little rewards.
What is currently being done improve the PVP experience?
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
While I can't say for sure in your particular case, the newbie missions are fairly well scaled to make it easy for n00bs, so dying shouldn't be too much of an issue unless there's an aspect of gameplay that you've overlooked (my mistake, years ago, was not understanding how ammunition effects the optimum range of my guns, and how necessary it was to always orbit a target at optimum range when you're in a frigate, not to mention how ammo types effect damage to various mission rats).
Take a look at the Caldari, they are designed around the idea of large corporations that rule everything they can get their hands on. No Antitrust laws in Eve, at least not in Caldari space.
In a game like Eve, T2 BPOs can give an alliance a huge advantage since they are able to essentially print money. Since the GM scandal, the alliance BoB was able to take advantage of ill gotten T2 BPOs for many months allowing them to dominate the game. Why didn't you address the issue of the BPOs before the GM was outed? Why did you not fire the person responsible? How can you regain the trust of the community? Currently, it seems like you just delete posts and hope it goes away. But Eve has been permanently been tainted by one employees action. Are you going to take any steps in the future to further address this?
Also, it is clear Eve can not handle its current playerbase (gate queues, lag in large battles). Have you considered multiple servers to lighten the load?
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
In recent devblogs it was stated that the T2 lottery was going to go away in favor of the new game mechanism of Invention. Given that cetain T2 BPOs are the keys to near limitless wealth and the fact that Invention only provides for T2 BPCs, how do you justify this lock on permanent wealth in the game for those who happen to be fortunate enough to have a T2 BPO before this change occurs? Also in recent devblogs was the statement that bounties in missions will be eliminated. In any good MMO there is an economy that is based on ways to make money and ways to spend money. Given that mission bounties are probably the predominant method of earning available in the game, what will replace this and will the money sinks be modified in kind. In other words, how will the economic balance be maintained so there is no collapse of the markets and the value of trade goods and manufactured items?
It is nice to recognize the recent increase in starting skillpoints, and the benefit this provides for newer users.
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 players with really no way of gaining ground (especially since very old users will have high level learning skills and implants to boot), what is the point that you consider creating a new shard and "starting over" as it were, with a totally fresh world.
While my character in the current system is fairly high level, I have discussed with a lot of newer players (even those in game for 6-12 months) who would jump at the opportunity to "start over" in a fresh world where there are no SirMolle's with 95 million skillpoints.
What are your long term plans or thoughts in this regard?
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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).
* translated from Icelandic crying
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The basic structure of EVE closely resembles to the old text-based game Trade Wars, and to an even greater extent the "newer" web-based space trading/combat games such as Space Merchant (sadly no longer available) and the many Space Merchant clones. I'd be interested to know how much the developers played these games prior to writing EVE, and how they influenced the early development of the game.
Suggestion for a question:
Are there any plans to port EVE Online to the GNU/Linux or OS X platform?
One might thing the Caldari would have a problem with an all-controlling corporation challenging the creation and spread of new corporate influence, especially caldari state influence... seeing that many of the large Alliance leaders are Kill-On-Site within Caldari space because of their low security standing.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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 security space, and I get the impression that wars are going on all the time out there. Though I'm still too new to go see it for myself.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
CCP has taken the rare stance with EVE Online to include REAL repercussions to ship loss, including (but not limited to) skill point loss, ship loss (hope you had insurance, and if you had a faction ship, hope you don't mind not being compensated accordingly), and semi loss of modules. This has probably turned more players off to the game then it has turned on (although admittedly, those that like that kind of risk LOVE Eve, and rightfully so). With financial motivations ever present (I assume you have investors to answer to), is CCP likely to ever buckle under the pressure and make Eve into a more mainstream game with less risk that caters more to the "Care Bear" audience?
My question is regarding the technical reasons of using Windows based servers to run the cluster that EVE runs on. Is that because you've tried Unix or Linux or BSD or what not and found it lacking, is the code base not easily portable to a different architecture or is there some other reason? It seems to me from a purely technical perspective that using windows to run such a large cluster is a waste of resources and a very expensive one at that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Background:
I believe EVE Online is best experienced fullscreen. However, I miss being able to control the MP3 player (given the ingame jukebox cannot accept external files) and instant messaging. So, to scratch that particular itch, I've decided to create tools to fill the gaps.
Reverse-engineering is forbidden by the EULA, and there are no APIs, but I still needed some way to control the applications from inside EVE. Then I figured the ingame browser would be perfect for the task.
The Winamp controller worked beautifully. There are still some playlist management issues to be solved before I release the tool to the public. However, I couldn't find a way for the IM application (originally intended as a Gaim plugin) to work. The ingame browser lacks the features I require (actually, something as simple as a meta-refresh tag would be enough).
Question:
Are there plans to provide APIs, or to enhance the ingame browser to allow for such third-party integration?
Disclaimer:
I don't want to make life easier for macro writers, it's not the purpose.
As a newbie to Eve, there doesn't seem to be much of a penalty for killing (ganking) other players. You can gank all day long, then simply run a few missions to erase your negative standing. Have you considered harsher penalties for anti-social behavior?
Yah if a game doesn't have an OSX port I'm not going to play it. I'll be damned if I'm going to install windows on my system for that. You can kind of make Eve work with cedega under Linux but I found that it was so unstable that it was pretty much unplayable. Plus I'd found in the past that wine is very fiddley and breaks for no apparent reason every few months anyway. I found this to be the case both with the free Wine that I was using to run Lotus Notes as well as cedega which I was using to run Ultima Online and Morrowind.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Would CCP ever consider building in a programming macro code to the game? Since it is sci-fi themed, I think it would be a great addition, to program your own ship's actions triggered by in-game events. For example, if shields drop below 50%, and shield booster is off, turn it on. If capacitor drops below 25%, turn capacitor booster on.
What does it matter if other players are 'more advanced' than you are? What's the difference between that and really advanced, intelligent NPC's?
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?
paintball
Does anyone know how well it works on Wine/Cedega? I haven't tried the game on either platform but I tend to run most of my games natively in linux or through one of the intermediary programs for windows games.
I play EVE. My char is about 6 months old and although I like the chatting with corp members, etc... the game really does just boil down to a IRC chat sessoion with pretty graphics while making money via mining, making ships, etc... the actual combat portion of the game is pointless and honestly, pretty boring. Any person with half a brain can select a load out, set their optimum distance for damage and hit their F1-F6 keys to fire their weapons. How I would improve EVE?
:)
1) combat should be more like the old Wing Commander games where skill actually matters, not just the amount of training points. For those of the younger generation perhaps something more like Battlefront II's space combat, just with more weapons / defences / ship types. I should be able to execute a looping maneuver, outwit the ship following me and come up on his rear. Combat is far, far to automated.
2) A broader depth of content. I know their working on this and that it's hard.
3) Drop the fact that blowing the shit out of a CONCORD ship is considered a "hack" and against the rules of the game. If I want to park a Titan outside of a station in Hek and blow the crap out of everyone it should be up to the players and NPC game mechanics (calling up more troops, having the NPC corps place bounties on players, etc...) to fight against this. Simply having a distinct rule that says you can't do this is silly.
4) The ability to damage everything and anything. Want to blow up that stargate? Sure, go ahead. That space station in your way? See ya. Of course, do this too many times and the bounty on your head would be very, very large.
5) OS X, Linux and FreeBSD clients
EVE is so close to the perfect PvP AND PvE game that caters so well to both hard-core PvP'ers and carebears that you just want to scream. I believe more actual player toon interaction (walking around a space statoin, etc..) is being planned. It would be nice as well to able to land on some planets and possible starting doing some mining or something on planets.
I dug around and found the 14 day trial. I played it and read all about it so I knew what I needed to do. At the end of the 14 day trial I was not impressed by the MMO aspect of it, but it is the genre I like so I decided to purchase an account. It's cheap, imo.
CCP's billing system was broken at the time. It was impossible for me to switch my trial to a paid account. CCP could not accept funds in any manor. This persisted for around 3 weeks that I know of. At that point I decided to go with CoV.
CoV got boring. It's been about 9 months. I headed back over to CCP to see about setting up my account. Once again I find that the billing system is broken and it's been weeks since anyone could renew or setup new accounts.
That says a lot. They are a private company. They really don't care. No public company would ever go so many weeks with no ability to collect revenue. They throw money towards hardware (SSD SANs) to try and solve problems which can really only be solved by hiring better programmers. You can actually "feel" the SQL queries running when you right click on areas such as the market.
As a person in the +1000GMT time zone - downtime (which occurs nightly) screws up a perfectly good night on eve. In no other industry that I know of would a public system be torn down nightly for maintenance - every other company advertise how much uptime they have - yet EVE advertise how much down time you get.. Why don't you fix your processes so they don't require downtime -except when actually needed to patch the system. (ie have patch night on Tuesday's only) Alternately why don't you randomly choose a different downtime so the same group of customers is not being punished.
Eve client freezes totally for a while when it is waiting for data from the server. When I warp into some area with lots of other ships, everything stops, when I open character skills screen, everything stops, etc.
If there's one thing that causes mouse rage it's freezing and laggy user interface. There should be absolutely no reason in this day and age to freeze window drawing and other non-related things when waiting for data to draw spaceships.
This thing was ultimately the one that pushed me away from Eve.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
For the last year or two, I have heard rumors of "walking in EVE" gameplay. In the latest issue of E-ON and numerous EVE fansites, it seems that there is a real effort at CCP to bring humanoid character gameplay to a game that has always been ship-based. With the load problems that are still being addressed during fleet battles or heavily trafficked systems (400+ ships), does it make sense to begin exploring gameplay modes that could exacerbate a problem that is already causing much frustration in the EVE community? Also, what is the motivation behind what would be a large paradigm shift in how EVE is played? Is this an attempt to satisfy long-time players who may have grown weary of mining or ship combat? Or are you trying to attract players who prefer a World of Warcraft form of gameplay?
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
Have you considered adding scripting support to eve-online ?
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 ?
I made a comment to myself a couple months ago that the issues in game that are going to be fixed Soon(TM) are going to affect alliances, corporations and the general player now. Why is it that bugs in Eve now that can cause the demise of an alliance(s) despite their best efforts are not fixed sooner rather than later?
POS warefare - boring and with current developments can be useless for defenders.
LAG - <-- all caps because it is a HUGE problem. If my personal experience hadn't been how it has, I would have left the game a long time ago. Fleet battles are pointless most of the time and that goes for either defender or attacker. I hate the whole, "were working to improve..yadayada". These issues have been in game for a long time. I thought bookmarks were going to fix this??
Forethought - Does CCP actually think about the bug...er, I mean "features" they introduce into Eve before they make a move? Nanobs's? Lowering POS defense effectiveness? There are so many, I can't even get them straight in my head enough to type them.
Is money the only motivator? - Do you CCP, only make decisions based on money? Like, let's say there were a bunch of people that exploit game bugs together, do you let them be for the most part because changing the game so that they can't do what they do would mean less subscribers?
When CCP messes up, why don't you fess up and change what you screwed up? - Point in case. GM was supposed to reset sov in a system recently, the alliance offlined all pos's out of desperation. Why are they now fu**ed over because of just trying to rectify the situation? Why are GM's so cold most of the time? Why are cheaters still working for CCP? Why allow the community to lambaste an entire alliance(s) because of your F-up? Your lack of communication and cold sholder for as long as it occurred allowed the public to form a mob mentality.
Was the name of the current release "Revelations" named such because you realize that your time is running out and you are unrepentant thus sealing your (Eve's) fate as just another "game gone by"?
I could go on but I am sure that we will get the same PR answers just like politicians give. "Keep the masses guessing, tell them what they want to hear" and then do what you want.
I promise, as soon as another space mmo comes along, I am gone from Eve, most likely even before that since I have been planning on it for around 2 months now and have been working to get my corp into a position where I feel comfortable leaving them with thing's to do. By the way, this means 3 accounts are leaving, 1 has been playing since 03, the other 05 and the other more recent.
And nope, my junk is going to corp, so go get your own stuff.
There are occasionally battles in High sec too. A corp mate came across the remnents of one just the other night and had quite the merry time scooping up drones and looting what was left before reinforcements began arriving. He was just passing through and got to watch these folks blasting each other - pretty cool :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
What do you plan to do about the ever increasing gap in wealth between newbies and older players?
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>
<p>As to "all of 0.0"--that is a rather massive amount of space to lock down.</p>
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
This point has been raised again and again on the eve-online forums - the Amarr races ships are subpar. They dont even do what the overall race description says - namely, have massive armor, and devastating lasers. They have armor about as good as any other race, specifically Gallante, and lasers just dont cut it in PVP. Their ships are rather inflexible, and that would be fine, so long as they are little more than reactor cores surrounded by many metres of armor plating and omgwtf lasers. They dont have many EW options, considering the state of their mid slots, and the need to fill them with cap rechargers just to run their guns and armor without dying a capacitor death. Also, in regards to the bonuses given to the ships: It has been pointed out that the -10% cap usage per battleship level is a horribly nasty thing to give to Amarr ships. Where every other race gets 2 useful bonuses, Amarr get 1 that lets them use lasers without cap death. Fun. In short, Amarr have no niche in PVP. They are only barely competitive, where every other race has an advantage in some aspect. Why is this, when they are supposed to be the most warlike, ancient, and effective race in EVE?
That's why they have 14-day trial accounts. I've been playing Eve for going on 8 months, and I spend very little time "grinding" or "traveling from place to place". I've only played a few other MMORPGs, but I've got pretty high standards for computer games and Eve Online exceeds them. I find the political aspect, the interplay between the races, factions and alliances, and the dynamic economics of Eve fascinating and fun, and the PvP is a stone gas. Yes, you can have a ship that you've spent weeks outfitting and training for and lose it in a minute if you run into a griefer, but that's part of the thrill. And, it makes you learn how to carefully plan your travels through space.
I recently lost a very expensive ship of which I was quite fond. It was a setback and I felt a real impact and anger at the gatecamper who caught me napping. In a short time, though, I've put together a better ship and am working an area of Eve that I'd never tried before: Research and Manufacturing.
The social/political aspects of the game keep me thinking about it long after I've logged off and there really is a place in Eve for both mature players who enjoy the politics as well as the mostly younger, kick-ass gankers. Not only have I NOT become bored, but I keep finding new angles to enjoy.
Having said all that, I'd like to ask CCP why they haven't reacted in a more responsible manner to the cheating among CCP employees that's been recently exposed. Keeping Eve going requires a careful balance and the minute I am convinced that shenanigans are impacting my experience, I'll bail, as will many of my cohorts. Nine million skill points or no, the thought that insiders are taking unfair advantage would spoil it all for me. The surprising thing is that I've looked into some of the other RPGs being run on the web and if I left Eve I don't know that I'd join any of those. But that doesn't mean another really good one won't come along.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Big news this week was that there was a 1300+ player battle out in the low security space, and I get the impression that wars are going on all the time out there. Though I'm still too new to go see it for myself.
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 have the skills to fly a tackling frigate. I've been playing for almost 6 months and that is still what I sometimes fly in fleet battles. Any PvP gang needs tacklers to keep the enemy from repositioning or escaping. I hear all the time that people are going to 'wait' and do that when they can fly X. I say don't wait. Any smart alliance realizes it needs new pilots, and there is nothing more satisfying than getting on a battleship killmail because you in the smallest ship in the game held him there for your friends.
What I love about this game is the newest of players can make a difference.
Get out there!
Got Apathy?
Do you have any plans to balance the minmatar ship lineup? Currently they are the weakest by a wide margin, with stars like the Bellicose, Muninn, Typhoon, any of the capital ships, etc. Their electronic warfare is absolutely useless, they do not have enough slots to tank (even though Minmatar are theoretically shield tankers a lot of Amarr ships have more midslots), speed tanking is going to be nerfed soon, and their weapons have the least damage and range. And that is without taking into account that a lot of those ships take much more time to train than any other race. What is the appeal of this race anymore?
Are you aware that Titans have destroyed all sense of fun involved in alliance warfare and has made it impossible for smaller corps to stand up to the old powers? Why must you focus on capital ship warfare when it's the most boring part of the game?
Do you feel the trust of your customers to be as important as your loyality to your employees?
I'm a relatively new player, still learning the ropes and all. There has been some discussion in my group of friends around the idea of ships that have multiple people running them. All ships that I know of are piloted by a single person. Given the general paranoia of your typical Eve player I'm not sure how popular this would be but ... a ship with say one person piloting and one person running the weapons systems might be alot of fun and worth investigating.
Will the White Wolf devs be selling the rare cards they steal on eBay or just give them to friends for them to sell? Where do we apply for Dev jobs at your company?
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.
So... is the "-sson" an official requirement for an executive level position at CCP? Or were the "-dóttir"s just in short supply?Oh my god get out.
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 currency except through their licensed dealers. If we're going to try to enforce that, I'd like to see all the illegal gambling income from last year reported as well. While we're at it, I'd like a unicorn and the power of flight.
Your only salient point is the concern of cheating. Fact is, game developers SHOULD play their games, they SHOULD participate in the community. As far as I'm concerned, a game developer can run an alliance or rule the known universe as long as CCP is ensuring the guy/gal isn't cheating. I want devs interested in the game, improving mechanics, finding problems, sitting through the system lag. I want them invested in the project. The problem is tracking their activity, and generally one of trust. If I'm CCP, I'd have clear policies denoting real-life consequences for employee in-game misconduct. A dev doing what this dev did has opened a Pandora's Box of paranoia and a chorus of players claiming every victory/loss is a result of developer intervention and player misconduct. If I found one of my devs cheating in-game, I'd can them outright. Their head would only marginally account for the potential damage to the community's trust and the changes in both meta-game and in-game politics and social order, not to mention the massive number of issues it creates for game masters and other devs who play fair and have fun.
Also, I just can't help myself:
-Spaces come after commas, not before as in "That grammar nazi is awesome, isn't he?"
-Without is one word as in "Without grammar nazis, the whole world would exist in chaos."
-"As in" in your context is a sentence continuance not a start, as in this usage right here.
-Time card requires an article to address it, as in "That grammar nazi has a time card."
-"can also" negates the need for "as well"
-Where denotes a place, were denotes a state of being, example: "Where is that grammar nazi? We were going to give him a hug for improving our writing by an order of magnitude!"
-Thing is not think
-There as in "He's over there with the grammar nazi.", They're as in "They're being grammar nazis.", Their as in "Their grammar nazi is the best grammar nazi in the whole world."
I don't claim writing perfection, but I do claim due diligence in ensuring I did my best. The parent does not demonstrate this effort. Shun the non believer!
One of the great fatures of World of Warcraft is the customizability, from macros to dozens of key bindings, to the whole lua mod engine. Any thought to including better customizability in EVE?
I find EVE to have a terrible user interface, that gives the player little option to do anything but just put up with it. *Everything* is mouse driven, which can be a pain at times. Try playing sometime using a laptop with just a touchpad mouse and you can see the kind of pain I'm referring to.
I've been playing EVE over 2 years, and World of Warcraft for as long as its been out, and the customizability of WoW is the one thing I would love to see the most in EVE.
I know this isn't an Eve-Online questions, but still: I want 'Exalted Online'. I do not want another World of Warcraft. (WoW is pretty good at that all by itself)
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 combat movements and more diverse Avatar combat actions in MMORPGs and I also think an 'Exalted Online' would be the exact place for it. The structure of the Pen & Paper RPG and it's background allows for instancing in many places and a PvP stance which could make it more feasible for a studio to implement.
Since you've gone together with White Wolf - a company I'm a fan of - I think this is a justified request: I want 'Exalted Online' and I would like it to capture the feel of the White Wolf RPG with unique and fitting aproaches to online gameplay. What are my chances?
Thank you for your time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Parent should be >= the score of grandparent.
Or rather: Mod Parent Up.
So, how exactly would one go about joining GoonFleet? You seem like a fun bunch of people, at least according to the recent forum buzz.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
Joining Goonfleet takes one of two things: A something awful forum account or a sponsor in goonfleet that has a something awful account. I was sponsored in, so I can't help anyone join myself. www.goonfleet.com for more info.
;)
LV should have known it was coming, they watched us destroy all of their allies over the last six months.
Got Apathy?
Actually, I recall CCP working closely with Transgaming in the past to introduce and maintain Linux support. Currently this was being offered through Cedega.
As recently as a week ago, a friend shelved his years-old Eve character to give WoW a spin. He has a LOT of xp on this character. Why did he do this?
One of the reasons is as simple as single-session time commitment. When he did a high-level mission, he had to clear some 5 levels that take 30 min each. If he doesn't have several hours set aside to do this, the instance resets (during downtime) and he has to start from the beginning of the level and finish it, or lose faction. He was finding he couldn't take missions unless he knew, for sure, that he'd have time to do the mission.
This is terribly unfriendly to a dedicated but "casual" player as far as time commitment goes. Meanwhile, this same guy is having a blast in WoW, playing for 30 minutes at a time before he comes into work, and another hour late at night before bed.
I realize there were some strides made in Eve to get newer players up and running faster, with some nice bonus skills.
But, Does CCP have plans to make the time commitment more casual-friendly in terms of single-sessions? WoW was able to do it, quite well, giving a ton of new 5 and 10-man content if you have an hour to play.
Please change the warp to distance for structures and gates to 5km. As it is now, 0km removes all of the risk from the equation, which while that sounds good, it also means that the biggest ships in the game effectively have no speed penalty.
When the warp-to distance was 15km, those big, slow ships were hard pressed to get around without major support. Now, they warp to the gate and presto-they're gone. Sure, you can sit on the other side and wait for them, but that just encourages gate-camping(simmialr to zone-camping in most other games).
The solution people have come up with is to fit big ships to go silly fast and ram into you - to bounce you away from the gate before you can jump. This seems to be completely counter to the playstyle of the game. Changing it to 5km, or better yet, making how close you can warp to something skill-based would be a good change.
P.S. If it's a skill, it should be very hard to learn - and definately restricted to non-trial accounts.
I can think of a number of mechanisms for preventing this such as stopping trial accounts from transfering is to anywhere but the corp wallet, reducing by 99% the efficiency of mining lasers while in a gang that has any member who is in an NPC corp.
Since we already seen some upgraded models and visuals, and that we also heard about plans for DirectX10 and Vista, we would like to know if there will be any upgrade plan (visually) for those who are going to keep themselves away from Vista... and... why? what are the features EVE Online needs in DX10.
As mentioned, CCP WAS _MASS_ deleting posts.
The ONLY reason they addressed the issue was that the community was posting and re-posting the deleted threads and posts faster than the mods could keep up. It was several days between the first posted evidence and when CCP finally said ANYTHING about the issue.
My question directly addresses the internal software/hardware combo. Eve-online decided from the beginning to be a single instance game, ie EVERYONE is in the same "universe" and/or cluster of servers. As the userbase increases (and it has been doing so steadily), so do the sizes of some of the alliances, generally those that control a part of "0.0" space (the dangerous lawless areas). This means also, that when wanting to attack an alliance controlled area, the defence they will amount means you will also have to send in a sizeable force to deal with them.
Eve-online now regularly gets 30-35,000 simultaneous players online. Only last week, a "battle" where the defender "dug in" with aproximately 300-350 players with a very well fortified position, had an attacker of 800-1000 players. When the attacking force tried to enter the defended system, the server running this system crashed. And did so again a few times (they are VERY stressed when they have more than 500 players on the same node, let alone 1100 - 1450, all in the same space).
With an arithmetical growth of the size of the battles, comes an geometrical growth of the traffic that single server has to generate.
Lets imagine for a moment that in a fighting situation each player generates a single byte of traffic that has to be fed to all the other players per second (forget about packets, headers etc... which will of course only worsen the problem).
With 10 players, each of those players will have to be updated with 1 byte for each of the other 9 players, so each one will get 9bytes/sec, total load on the server is 90bytes/sec (9 bytes/sec x 10 players).
With 100 players, each of those will have to be updated with info from 99 players, so 99bytes/sec per player,
Total load on the server is 9900bytes/sec (99 bytes/sec x 100 players).
With 1000 players, each recieves 999bytes/sec, total load on the server is 999000 bytes/sec
As you can see, if you multiply players by 10, you multiply traffic by 100... This also means (and it seems that nobody
at CCP has realized this), that if your servers are running at full capacity (process-wise) with 20000 players online,
and you want to now be able to handle 40000 players (double), you won't have enough process-power if you just double
the power of your server cluster. You have in fact to multiply it by 4.
The more people you get in your single instance, the worse it scales.
They desperately need somebody who can stand back and take a look at the big picture, and somehow realistically design
a system that will handle the load gracefully. Either limit the amount of accounts you will have, or limit the
simultaneous players on the system/node/etc, or (shock/horror!!!) maybe have to think about creating another instance (or
more of them).
Single instance space is NOT infinitely scalable the way things are currently done.
So, the question. What are you going to do about scalability in the current system?
I was a member of Band of Brothers. Now, being ex-Military, I saw many things that attribute to the Alliances militaristic strengths. From superior and thorough logistics, to the common psychology binding all the members together. They don't need CCP developers to succeed and I argue that regardless of CCP Developer involvment within the game, BoB would still be where they are. The effect of CCP's Developers abusing their positions in favor of BoB (and no other group, what are the odds?) only presented negligable results for the Alliance.
I think that CCP has handled the situation well. And I don't look down on CCP for the allegations of those that fell. Only 1% of the ideas expressed by the Fallen are remotely close to the truth, and this is why history is always written by the Victor.
I imagine every game developer or engineer for every game probably went online and exploited something just for the kicks of it. The difference is, there's a lot of jealously about BoB's success in EVE, sheer inability to understand the personality and discipline of the conqueror, they are a target because they are the King of the Hill. Also, the numbers involved are smaller, and the scope of the playing field is much more confined. Point is, I garuntee World of Warcraft developers grotesquely abuse their positions. I bet John Carmack probably raged havoc on many of Quake III/Doom III servers, impossible to be beat. And if we took the loudest drum beaters in EVE-ONLINE, so eager to point the finger and believe the most horrible stories they can imagine, and told them they could work at CCP... I garuntee they would be more than happy and part of the reason why is they know they could give themselves an advantage far and beyond fair play mechanics.
BTW, I do develop software, I just don't work for CCP. Sadly. Because if I did, hell yes I'd spot myself a T2 BPO sure as hell.
I quote:
"You gotta know that a guy who helps you steal... even if you take care of him real well... he's gonna steal a little extra for himself." -- Casino, Joe Pesci
Why you ignore any questions in regards to banning SirMolle, for posting someone's real-life information on forums? Yet you decided to ban others who did the same?
Is it because he's the CEO of alliance that houses biggest number of CCP developers? Or he is also developer, and they don't need to follow rules that we mortals need to?
Thank you.
Why is it that developer who has been found to abuse privileges can keep his job, while you permanently banned person who exposed the whole thing?
At this point, noone knows how your game works. Not even your developers, which can be seen by recent scandal of shooting through POS shields, where GMs/devs gave different answers, and it even went so far that dev claimed it was a 'feature'.
Why is it a 'feature' when BoB is found out guilty of using it? Not even a 'bug', but a 'feature'?
Thank you.
How do you expect your customers to ever trust you again, when you continously censor most comments/criticism in relation to your actions?
You have also never answered this:
Why did you allow private info from ASCN forums to be posted on eve-online forums, yet when info from BoB private forums showed up, it was promptly removed and new rules were set?
Please don't pull the "BoB info was from hacked forums" story, since there is no evidence to support that theory, and for all we know BoB also hacked ASCN forums in order to gain information. It's simply hard to prove, so - why double standards?
By allowing a developer to cheat and get away with it, you cheat your customers.
By shooting the messenger who is bringing up these sort of incidents, you cheat your customers.
Is it more profitable in the long term? Or are you only in it for the short term?
Yup, join a corp. I'm a director in Lucky Hydra Corp. We're a PvP/Industrial corp with ties to alliances and connections in 0.0 space. We're based in Metropolis near the Minmatar-Gallente border. Message Llaneza, Bayleor or Rowynn (our lead recruiters) in-game and we'll set you up and get you started right.
If you're interested in the war situation, I get my news from the EVE Tribune
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Why are you such faggots? If 150 000 people pay you to play a game, and one of your employees cheats in said game, you FIRE him.
Well I should say that High Sierra introduced me to Derek
:)
o/ to the Scrap heap
Deren Thaldrel
P.S. this will make sense to a really small portion of the EVE community
The portrait generator is fantastic. How about a standalone version ? Or, god help us, put it on the website.
It's a nifty toy in its own right, my mom spent an hour with it. It could see some use making chat avatars. EVE does have a reputation for graphics and this would help spread the word (and maybe bring in enough to cover development and marketing costs).
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
A couple of years ago there was some talk of other ways of connecting to EVE. In-game chat integration with other chat systems, accessing market data and conducting trades or manufacturing from a smartphone or web interface. More ways to get into the EVE 'verse without sitting down at a PC. What's in the works on this front and can you reassure us that it has a higher priority than walking in stations ?
Heck, hook up a Jabber server and wire it into in-game chat. That'd be a good start. Some way, any way, to connect with an existing multi-chat clients like Gaim would be fantastic. I wanna launch Audium and see my EVE channels available and my in-game buddy list.
Follow up question. Is changing skill training from a web interface too much to hope for ?
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Ask them Why they charged me for another whole month after I cancelled my subscription! Fuck EVE ON-LINE!
A more interesting question is "when does meta gaming becoming an exploit" as in the alleged mass login and logout of the goon+ fleet in said war for JV1V.
A lot of accusations have been flying around about a deliberately crashed node allowing the attackers to completely bypass the defences and I'd like to understand CCPs position on this
CONCORD merely enforces a safe area for newbies, which is IMHO necessary for new players to enjoy the game. But even so, I would be in favor of making them a bit less invincible. Make high sec raidable but at great difficulty so it does not happen all the time.
Player alliances, however, do try to take over large areas of 0.0 space and deny it to others. That has a much greater impact on new players, and I can see how starting on a new shard might be attractive.
C - the footgun of programming languages
DirectX is a poor excuse when you see guys like Icculus porting such games to Linux within hours. There are equivalent libraries available for roughly everything and they use roughly similar logics. All that is required is some simple connecting two dots sort of plumbing. DirectX is really not a proper reason not to make a Linux client.
ASCN disbanded, ISS still numbers about 800 pilots. It's a far cry from full strength, but it's still not that sloppy.
One thing you may want to look out for, if you are into the space based MMOs, is a game from a new developer working for NCSoft. Spacetime Studios is working on the new MMO, and everything is pointing to it being space-based. With EVE being the only real space-based MMO since EA sucked the life out of Earth and Beyond and killed it, it should be interesting to see what happens.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Recently, there's been a lot of fighting between LV and GoonSwarm in Tenerifis. How do you feel about how the whole campaign, and the reflections it's cast on large scale warfare in EVE?
Are there any plans to integrate certain EVE services with out of game? From my point of view, it would be vastly preferable to have POP access to my EVEMail, so I can use a 'useful' mail client (sorry, the in game one's not all that great, and positively horrible when you're faced with 50 evemails a day) and IRC Access to public in game channels. Of course, I'd also like SAP support for my corp management, but that might be a little harder to accomplish. Although I daresay you _might_ be able to persuade SAP to do it as a publicity stunt. Think of all the PR as all the EVE gamers get used to SAP and use that to promote it in their workplace.
Do you guys feel there is any ethical concern about having people pay monthly for a game where most of your time is either spent waiting for your ship to autopilot somewhere, waiting for it to drill an asteroid, or waiting for a skill training timer to finish? These are all arbitrary and unneccesary wastes of time, yet you have to pay monthly to "play..."
Was there any debate about going a different route when the game was in development? I played EO for a while and thought it got a lot of things very right, but I couldn't help but feel like a sucker paying to watch progress bars creep over the course of weeks, so I quit.
I can't help you about getting a copy, but to me this sounds like Dungeon & Fighter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_%26_Fighter
I don't know if it's an MMO per se, but do you do have to log in online to play it.
Sharon Howell at the Sept AGC in 2006 on the panel about third party sites stated clearly that she always recommended to "her clients" from "worrying" about the feedback of players and player run sites. I have her saying this, on mp3. She's not an advocate of communities, and she sees players (customers) as a hostile force she has to react against. Sad but true. I can understand some of it, but she was overboard IMO. For me her attitude and that of one CCP Sr. Producer there pretty much sums up that CCP is not in the MMO business for the long term. Not like an NCSoft or an SOE. They built a great game that they decided not to police or effectively manage, from a community perspective.
You can possibly ask her opinions about what she thinks about player communities in general, and in particular, you can ask her why CCP does not bother to help manage the griefing behaviors of some of their own community (on their boards and into Tranquility). Thanks Mike.
Tide
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been thinking about playing a MMORPG and Eve-Online sounds very interesting, much more interresting to me than WoW. I've been to the site and have read the backstory and traits of the different "sub-species" of humans.
Two-part question for a MMORPG noob.
Part 1. While I have extensive FPS and RTS gaming experience, MMORPGs are new to me. Will I get flamed to oblivion for not understanding the jargon from the get-go? Will I enjoy the MM aspect if I don't personally know anyone in RL that plays the game?
Part 2. I am very competitive. I love to complete and I don't mind losing a fair fight. I am a good sport, but I have no patience for cheaters. Some like to argue that whatever can be done is fair game. I disagree and firmly believe that games, all games and sports, are meant to be played by the rules. This is the essence of competition. Anything less undermines the integrity of the game and reduces it to a waste of time artificially stroking the ego of the cheater. What is being done to (A.) ensure developers don't take advantage of their position to cheat and (B.) ensure others are not able to load their own client-side hacks?
Last year, when they weren't drinking, they were on the smoking porch, drinking. Oh, and they went to a couple of panels, only slightly inebriated. Don't get me wrong, they were fun guys to hang out and talk with, but "professionalism" doesn't exactly come to mind. And the way they've handled the recent scandal has burned a lot of people, so hopefully they'll be a little more sober this year.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
With all the Developers having extra time on their hands and needing to play Eve in order to experience the game enough to make Eve better in the future through thoroughly understanding the game itself...
Why don't you have the Developers spend more time developing the Role Playing content, Back Story, and fixing the courier missions (Fed-Ex type) so that the game is smoother?
For instance, there are rumors about the Caldari Empire from before the Caldari/Gallente War. What was it's history and how many stars were in this ancient empire? What was society like before the Gallente destroyed the Caldari Homeworld?
As a player, it is really frustrating that we hear this Homeworld was destroyed and now this other one is - so everyone is just jumping into space to seek other lives now. Well, we get very little information as to what they were all about before they jumped into space.
I would also like to give a shout out to the people of CCP who did hard work to remove the initial grind of gameplay, made the tutorial nicer with the voiceover, and generally have done great graphics work.
For those who have not fixed the hardware problems limiting play - I think you need better salesmen with a sense of Caldari honor instead of Amarr faith.
Even if all I said was positive things, the fear of a CCP instaban or some other form of GM reprisal of which I HAVE experienced prevents me from being anything but an anonymous coward. Even with this heavy handedness, Eve is a great game and very enjoyable. Just remember if you play, EVERYONE and that includes the makers of Eve itself, are indeed possibly out to ruin your day. So be careful and make your own happiness within game as others will surely mess you up.
(hating being a coward, but there you have it...)
Eve is definitely a game that can benefit greatly from support for dual-monitor setups. Imagine having the market map, or the overview on a separate monitor! Is CCP planning to add dual-monitor support anytime in the future?
What prompted CCP to investigate walking around in stations? Is it player demand? Perceived demand from potential players? Just the possiblities for White Wolf IP?
Jonathan Pearce jonathan@pearce.name
3EAAFB2A http://www.jonathan.pearce.name/
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.
GMs need checks and balances. I've heard multiple anecdotes of GM corruption. I've heard an anecdote of someone killing people at a defective jump-gate. (Usually, people in rage at a jump-gate just jump out to escape.) This is clearly an exploit, but the GM did nothing to an exploiter.
1 01603137/p1/
I know of instances where GMs will mess around with Player Owned Stations (POS) -- resetting POS shields or taking large numbers of POS offline. Resetting POS shields after an attack obliterates the efforts of dozens of players over several hours. This is clearly skewed in favor of the defender. Taking large numbers of POS offline is very significant, because it directly impacts which alliance has sovereignty over the system.
http://vnboards.ign.com/eve_general_board/b22281/
Are GM actions logged? If not, then why not? GM actions should be logged, and the logs subject to oversight. There have to be some sort of checks and balances, or there will be GM corruption!
Why are the only laws in EVE-online that are enforcable IP laws/DRM of plans. Why aren't all productions plans equivalent and able to make an infinite number of items? It blows the whole libertarian slant and skews the play in favor of factions that have CCP employees for them when they can get the BPO for new items and sell BPC's. BPC's should not exist; only BPO's. Why you can be a real Pirate, but not pirate some in game IP in the game makes no sense.
Where there any surprises in server requirements? ie did user authentication require more then expected or internal network speed a bottleneck?
Also do game objects communicate with each other asynchronously? even if they are on the same physical server? do they communicate with one another in any case where they are not on the same server?
About how large is your game database, what types of events trigger queries and how often does this happen for a typical player?