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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.
What is the annual profit of EVE Online?
What are the costs to run it?
What is the annual gross revenue?
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?
Why do you cheat, and why haven't you adressed the issue infront of your subscribers even after being presented with the facts?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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 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
Suggestion for a question:
Are there any plans to port EVE Online to the GNU/Linux or OS X platform?
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.
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.
How do you expect your customers to ever trust you again, when you continously censor most comments/criticism in relation to your actions?