What Game Devs Should Learn From EVE

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Gamesradar about EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group of elected player representatives that serve to facilitate communications between the developers and the community: "On the last day, the devs announced that after the earlier discussions about improving the CSM’s ability to effect change, the CSM was being raised to the status of its own department within CCP. This is revolutionary; in one swift move, the CSM went from what could be considered a glorified focus group to what CCP considers to be a 'stakeholder' in the company, given equal consideration with every other department in requesting development time for a project. That means the CSM — and the entire playerbase it represents — has as much influence on development projects as Marketing, Accounting, Publicity and all the other teams outside of the development team. This is, of course, the stated intention. But has any developer gone to such lengths for its fans?"

Comments

Re:Their thinking

[Chatsubo]

EVE divides space into regions that have several (10) different levels of policing. This affects many game dynamics, but in short:

In systems with a security status >= 0.5: If you shoot at another player, the fuzz show up with overwhelming force almost immediately and kills you with extreme prejudice (aka: Empire space)

0.1 to 0.4: The fuzz won't show up to deal retribution, but gates and stations have stationary turrets that will fire on you if you shoot at other players within their range. (aka: Lowsec)

0.0: Absolutely lawless space. Anyone can shoot at anyone. Usually ruled by alliances because they have enough firepower to assure relative safety. (aka: Nullsec)

You can, if you want, pay isk to "declare war" on another corporation. In that case, all of the fuzz/turrets won't intervene, no matter the security status, as long as you only fire on THAT corp, of course.