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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.
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.
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
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.
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?