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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.
For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player.
This is actually wrong. Eve's skill system is set up on diminishing returns. For each of the 5 levels of a skill, the amount of time spent to train each level increases drastically. So while someone might have trained a skill to level 5 for 2% bonus at each level, a younger player might have trained it up to level 4 and only be 2% behind on the particular skill.
Ship fittings and player tactics also play a great deal into who wins a combat as well. Even if you're outskilled by an older player, get a friend or two to come and help you fight, and you will often have a great chance of overwhelming the older player and killing him, even if he's in a Battleship and the three of you are in Battlecruisers or Cruisers.
To be clear, you do not lose your character, nor any skills trained because of the "clone" system.
Even without a clone, you only lose 60% of your highest-level skill... which usually amounts to less than 3% of your total skill base.
The loss of a ship may be painful, but the "Insurance" system makes it so that you generally only lose 30% of the value of the ship and the "loot drop" system ensures that only about 60% of the modules on the ship are "lost".
In all, it's quite fair and makes it a non-trivial thing to lose a ship, but not devistating to your long-term gameplay.
This is perfect....
One of CCP's mottos is "there is no 'easy' button".
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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...
You got bad advice. Many new players are told by older players to train the Learning skills up (which raise the character's attributes, and cause him to learn other skills faster - a lot faster) before starting on combat and ship skills. That's terrible advice. New players are not intended to sit in station for two months waiting for non-combat skills to train. You can train Frigate 5 and a small weapon to level 5 before the 14 day trial runs out, and Mechanic and Engineering to 5 before the 1st month subscription is done. You can do that with the attributes you got at character creation, no implants. Now you're in a Elite Frigate and can take on almost any agent mission, even some level 4 missions. You can kill belt rats in 0.0 space without breaking a sweat, although not as quickly as larger ships can. Still, that's some good cash for a 1 month player.
Maxing out Learning skills first is something older players do with their second character, their "alt." And yeah, it makes the alts skills train up a lot faster. But the older player can do this because his first character is financing the skillbooks for the second one, and he has a developed character to play already while the second one "cooks."
I really wish players would stop giving that advice.
Edith Keeler Must Die
"However, what you say about CCP trying to cover up does not in any way correspond to what I've seen. Every single dev-blog the last month has mentioned this, they are trying to change some of the mechanics to prevent anything like this ever happening again, not to mention that they haven't deleted a single (coherent) post about this on THEIR OWN forums."
I can't believe how utterly inaccurate your statement is.
There have been a total of three dev blogs on the subject. One was t20's confession, one was Hellmar's post, one was from the new "internal affairs" guy.
Keep in mind that despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, t20 wasn't fired or even really punished for his actions.
Kugutsumen discovered quite a bit of evidence that t20 was not the only developer doing "shady" things in regards to BoD. CCP has not responded at all to this evidence other than deleting threads and banning users, including Kugutsumen. (Your claim that CCP has not deleted any posts is blatantly false - CCP was deleting threads and banning users right and left to try and cover things up.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There were two dev posts, one from the CEO, one from the guilty party, on the issue. Another post was made about a new internal investigations team being formed.
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The player who was banned was supposedly not banned for being a whistleblower, but for other infractions.
Posts addressing the issue:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=top
New internal investigators:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=top