Posted on 2011-08-01 by Ecliptic Rift

EVE Vegas: CCP Dropbear

EVE Vegas has completed, but my notes still keep coming. CCP Dropbear, who may have the most epic name I’ve ever heard (“Nick Blood”), gave the last presentation on Saturday evening, and did so in appropriate CCP fashion: inebriated. In fact, we just called him Dropmic the rest of the evening…

He's the skinny, I'm the neckbeard.

Background

For those that don’t know, Dropbear works in the Content department out of the Atlanta office, working on live events and such with CCP Headfirst in conjunction with Internal Affairs (yes, really) and the Storyline team like Abraxas and the rest. As presented, he has the goal of developing more game content that would flow from the live events. And he emphasized that much of what he’d say came from his own ideas; CCP hasn’t yet approved everything he wants to do, but things continue to look good. And if you didn’t know much about what that means, read the dev blog post Live Events: Only the Beginning by Headfirst.

Presentation

Live events actually fit under the storyline stuff rather than comprising their own official department. In fact, even the Storyline department doesn’t exist as such, or rather doesn’t have a fixed definition. This works because broad definitions lead to broad possibilities. They push interaction forward by using CCP actors: developer accounts whose chat shows up as purple text. (The sample text showed a bit of interaction with Mizhara Del’thul and Gottii, both former alliance mates of mine (so represent, Electus Matari!)

CCP’s goals here include fun, rewarding, and meaningful experiences – but the distribution of that may vary. As an example, some gameplay may be very meaningful (onlining SBUs) or rewarding (grinding standings) without necessarily being fun. And other stuff might be fun and meaningful for some players even without a game reward. Of course, stuff works best when it has a reasonable balance between the three. Live events help evolve a living, breathing fictional universe, but they also hand some of that power over to the players and catalyze emergent gameplay. This gives a lot of bang for the buck even with a small team. Experimental projects like this one help CCP learn a lot about players: what we want, how we act, and how we react. In fact, they ended up inadvertently proving the concept that developers can play EVE openly with us, without any undue rewards (cue the T20 and Aurora cries). And prodding the player base in new ways led to things like gate camping Jita…

The last set of live events during 2010 focused on the Sansha invasions, and Dropbear & Headfirst apparently had a lot of fun with those. (Dropbear took a screen shot of every Drake he killed, actually!) Players jumped on this with such enthusiasm that CCP simply couldn’t keep up with everything. In fact, they ended up using some of the player-generated battle data to help their own tracking and planning, doing ARG-style stuff by releasing data and creating various puzzles. The events really consisted of defending a planet from the Sansha, but in addition to blowing up ships, players came up with all sorts of other ideas such as destabilizing wormholes in various ways (ECM, freighter suicide runs), establishing planetary defenses via planetary interaction, and using locator agents on known Sansha actors. These events slowly expanded as CCP figured more things out and dealt with internal resource constraints. In fact, this ended up at the core of the winter 2010 expansion. Incursions started out as gameplay design for large-scale group PVE, and when Content saw it, they insisted on merging in the Sansha events due to the player response.

Now in the summer of 2011, we have three parallel event series. Headfirst continues to run events focused on the Sansha, and he will also launch an event series based on factional warfare using actors belonging to the NPC militia corps directly.

Dropbear, however, has a separate event series dealing with the Sleeper mysteries. This particular series launched on 7 July but really built on some very old EVE content about Sleepers and Talocans, plus the wormholes that began with the launch of Apocrypha. The new Arek’jaalan project focuses on research, documentation, and education related to these things, but players largely drive it and do so in-character. The distribution of rewarding versus fun shows up here: not everyone will enjoy doing science and archiving in their gameplay, so for those players, they may have more fun following Headfirst’s event series to blow things up (NPCs or other players).

To that end, players defined the vision to organize the project, with divisions like Ethics, Media Relations, Security, etc. Many folks had already created huge amounts of stuff, like a 95-page document reviewing all related content, but this existed OOC (out of character). Arek’jaalan will help filter this stuff so that our characters know it, rather than just the players, make it all available via EVElopedia, and then drive more in-game content including events, static sites, and other things. Dropbear made it clear that players interested in this general aspect of the universe of EVE who don’t get all excited about this could have plenty more to do in the future: large scale construction projects, co-designing new ships, field expeditions, unlocking new Incarna content, etc. Arek’Jaalan itself, though, doesn’t have much to do with making ships explode.

CCP wants to drive conflict so that it occurs organically between players. Some examples of this came up when a notorious Blood Raider pilot, Revan Neferis, pushed to lead the Ethics committee. CCP would like to take a conservative approach to this in creating it, in the sense of letting players and characters clash, but will keep throwing new problems and challenges up so that, as soon as the baby starts to walk, Dropbear will kneecap it.

Conversations

Seismic Stan and his wife

Seismic Stan and I spent hours drinking in the middle of a casino with Dropbear, joined at times by Stan’s charming wife and with a brief cameo by CCP Cupcake.

The afternoon just became an epic back-and-forth exchange of ideas, as we picked Dropbear’s brain about all sorts of things, mostly dealing with EVE content and such. He comes from a background of philosophy and ‘amateur science’ and in fact in the past played EVE (as a RPer) before joining CCP full-time in October 2008. He likes to poke around and understand actual current science, blend that with his thoughts on immortality, trans- and post-humanism, and then start mind screwing us all. While CCP has various restrictions on developers, they do pay lots of attention to the stuff we put out there, whether on blogs, forums, or other social media, and that includes the Content devs like him. He mentioned Peter Watts and Blindsight as a specific influence, among others, but he tries to focus more on reading things other than genre stuff (i.e. not spending a lot of time just with science fiction).

The Arek’Jaalan project basically consists of iterating on three core processes:

  1. Research and create content.
  2. Filter that content into the EVElopedia.
  3. Move the content in-game.

One shouldn’t view that as some sort of a waterfall process, nor does any of it belong exclusively to CCP (nor to players). The process has lots of collaboration, bleed-over, and experimentation to see what works and roll with it. Rather than wait until somebody has defined everything, the project contains lots of opportunities for discovery. In other words, Dropbear doesn’t have every single thing figured out, because we as players can come up with far more extensive and creative stuff than just one or two guys can.

That should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever played old-school pen and paper RPGs. No matter how much the GM plans, the player group will go off the rails and come up with something new and unexpected, so the GM must instead prepare to improvise so that everyone has fun without putting on too many constraints outside of what fits in the fictional universe.

And this stuff takes time. The event series won’t end in a month or two, but instead becomes a new way of developing content that can both create gameplay now and drive new things in the future. As an example (my own speculation here), Arek’Jaalan could lead to developing new forms of technology that could figure into a revamp of the exploration profession someday, much as the Sansha events led to the Incursions. And this can change how players experience the game, like the recent Incursion that effectively cynojammed a system where Fidelis Constans had a technetium moon POS reinforced.

More than anything else, I picked up on the fact that Dropbear is an EVE player. He has an almost scary amount of knowledge about the RP community, for example, and he plays the game actively, including “ninja missioning” in NPC nullsec. He wants the same things we do, and his vision for immersive gameplay with players affecting the development of the fiction made me glad. Those players who think that these things happen on rails, or that they move too slowly, or that they have no ‘opportunity’ to get involved once things have started to happen really should take a closer look and find new ways to get involved.

Tomorrow, I’ll post my notes from CCP Sreegs’ talk on security and general thoughts on the conference overall.

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Posted on 2011-07-31 by Ecliptic Rift

EVE Vegas: Community and Monkeys

EVE Vegas kicked off for real today, at least in terms of the conference. While they’d expected about 20 people to show up for last night’s pub crawl, over 60 of us actually showed up. If anything seems wrong to you, please check with me before screaming about CCP destroying the game; I may have made a mistake in my notes. Or maybe they’re going to destroy the game.

I have extensive notes on Dropbear’s presentation as well, but those will get their own blog post because they’re so close to my heart. Also, it’s time for me to drink.

Keynote

Zapawork (the EVE Vegas organizer / facilitator) told us that half of the ticket price goes to cover the open bar at the reception, which starts shortly here. As it turns out, the promised discussion of Russian nullsec bloc politics was a joke based on a forum post he’d made in the Goon forums some time ago. Disappointing, but this place seems almost like Goonfest 2011 anyway.

CCP Soundwave gave the second half of the keynote. He acknowledged the rough few months CCP has had this summer and that they have to grow up as a company. He compared CCP to Radiohead, in the sense that both groups have evolved and not everybody can stay on board with the changes. EVE isn’t the game from 2003 anymore, and the game we’ll see five years from now will be different still. From this uncomfortable discussion, he moved on to talk about spaceships. He believes that balancing should take place constantly, as discussed with the CSM in May. CCP Greyscale will have a blog post out soon describing the direction they’ll take nullsec this winter. Supercapitals and capitals will see tweaks in that expansion along with Dramiels and logistics, plus a few other unspecified tweaks. But apparently hell has frozen over, as they’re going to (attempt to) fix lowsec and Gallente ships. Soundwave has a plan to fix lowsec (essentially “ripping it out and putting it in again” rather than making small changes), and they’ll work on hybrids after the winter expansion deployment. He also took the time to acknowledge that we need new ships.

Also, more iterations on Incarna: additional captains quarters, establishments, and possibly eventually moving station services to a player-controlled model. They’ll add the already-announced new nebulae and ship skins, including stamping alliance logos, and hopefully more game functionality into EVE Gate. In his own (tongue-in-cheek?) words, “IT’S GOING TO BE AWESOME, DON’T WORRY, EVERYTHING IS GONNA GO EXACTLY AS PLANNED.” He also noted that the DUST 514 beta will launch this winter, though I’ll wait to see what happens there.

CCP Navigator

Navigator gave a very nice presentation on the Community team, emphasizing that they do a lot more than just monkeying around on the forums. He talked about working with fan sites like DOTLAN, blogs, podcasts, etc. They run events, some of which occur at Fanfest like the charity poker tournaments. Get Well Gamers received single biggest donation in their history (over 10k USD) from EVE gamers. Community also handles PLEX for good. The four drives have thus far raised over 170k USD for Haiti, Japan, Pakistan, and the USA. They handle alliance logo submissions and, yes, the forums, where they deal with quality posts like “FIRST” and “GO BACK TO WOW” and “IN BEFORE CHRIBBA”. They recognize the lack of functionality in the forums and drive the requirements for the new forums based on player feedback.

The community team also handles patch notes, announcements, and news, including social media coverage and handling deployment issues threads. They run the competitions and giveaways, industry and player events like PAX, E3, Gamescom (which won’t have a booth this year but will have a CCP-supported player meetup), EVE Moscow, and obviously EVE Vegas as well. Reading every post on the forums would require the team to do nothing else, and they’d still only get to spend 12 seconds per post, but they do listen and sift through it to take the feedback to the developers in the form of weekly and special reports. And we all know their great interaction with us via social media like Twitter, plus working with the CSM via note taking and blog posts and such.

This presentation started out a little slow but ended up having lots of good information, and we could tell that Navigator really enjoys his job and the team takes what it does seriously.

CCP Soundwave

Monkeys and rats provide good examples (and test subjects) for the psychology of game design, though he took pains to note that he has a nuanced view of animal testing for many things, to put it mildly.

Balance is impossible and not always what you want. Courage Wolf says “BRING A KNIFE TO A GUNFIGHT – STAB THEM WHILE THEY’RE LAUGHING”. If done correctly, balancing (and imbalancing) keeps the game experience fresh. As an example, he talked about goal setting when he first started playing EVE. He first focused on flying an Arbitrator for solo PVP because nobody told him that was a bad ship. But when he found out about the Pilgrim, he started flying that, only to have CCP nerf it. So he cross-trained over to the Rapier instead for his solo PVP, only to have CCP nerf it. From there, it didn’t take too much training to get into the Vagabond, only to have CCP nerf it. But as frustrating as this seemed from time to time, that provided his first goal-oriented path in game based on his perceived view of power.

Does CCP do this because they’re jerks? No. (Well, maybe, he says.) Imbalancing can create an entertaining game experience for a subset of players because they feel powerful. Chasing the “next big thing” provides an incredibly powerful goal-setting mechanism; if all ships were the same, we’d be bored to death. That said, balancing through roles provides the best result despite the challenges involved. Balancing through power is easier but not always better.

From psychological studies of monkeys, we’ve learned a lot about how much power and novelty can drive satisfaction. Trying to know and predict the world is a powerful natural evolutionary drive, so identifying unknowns and learning about them trigger dopamine in the brain, which leads to happiness. In fact, this mechanism is the main reason games are so popular, because we figure things out and win and our brains feel like we’re improving our understanding of the world and surviving better.

Based on all this, Soundwave presented his Rules for Imbalance. If you’re going to have imbalance, how can you do it in a healthy way?

  1. Give players access to the same imbalanced items. This is why supercarriers create larger problems than Dramiels: almost anyone can train for and afford a Dramiel, but that’s not so for SCs.
  2. Make the imbalance only slight or, even better, only perceived. This might happen through players using things that the others just haven’t considered and thus aren’t prepared to handle, even if they really do have the tools to do so.
  3. Continually rotate the imbalance. A “better” solution will always exist, but change which one wins from time to time.

People die. That’s good. Solo and small gang PVP often happens in the most effective ships because those ships are “imbalanced.” To extend on the common advice given to every single EVE player, fly the best ship possible that you can afford to lose.

This led to a discussion of “stroking”, which essentially means recognition from somebody else. Strokes can be positive, like a friendly wave in Local from a pilot who recognizes you, or negative, like a pilot who ganks you. But even negative strokes are better than no strokes, because at least then you know you matter in some way. This leads to exchanging strokes: raiding an alliance’s space leads to forming defense gangs, which eventually becomes a default social behavior. We’re like rats, using negative and positive strokes to satisfy our hunger for stimulation and recognition. So conflict is good. To encourage risk taking, you have to give some people an advantage, like imbalanced rewards. Tech moons, anyone? No advantage or reward leads to boring gameplay.

In taking questions, he noted that mining works primarily as a social activity rather than pure gameplay. D-scan changes may be coming, and although he’d like to increase grid size dramatically, the engineers stab him when he suggests it.

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Posted on 2011-07-30 by Ecliptic Rift

EVE Vegas: Arrival and pub crawl

So I’ve arrived in Las Vegas for a gathering of Internet spaceship nerds. The temperature here actually compares favorably with that in my home of Dallas, so the weather’s bearable. After I got to the hotel and checked in early, I wandered around for a burger. For my first time in Sin City, I don’t think I was prepared for the food prices, but, well, the views compensated for it.

After a nice long 3-hour nap, I managed to track down the pub crawl as it began by looking for EVE celebrities. This worked out well, as The Mittani was holding court in the humidor at a hotel bar. As many other EVE players have told me, the in-game hostilities and rivalries melt away almost immediately when players meet IRL, especially when bonding over beer and other alcoholic drinks. I had a really nice time chatting up Kristoffer “Soundwave” Touborg. Also, it turns out The Mittani is a friend of this little blog, and I quickly got introduced to folks as “that Ecliptic Rift guy”.

When we started to lag out the bar, Zapawork warped the fleet over to Bally’s Sport, where the station bartender in an almost-empty system rejoiced at the spike in local. Before ganking another beer, I met Sean “Sreegs” Conover, and found that a number of folks there also work in the same general area as we do (digital forensics and incident response). The total lack of through traffic, though, led us to roam cross-region to Planet Hollywood’s Heart Bar. Unquestionably Gallente, I noted with pleasure the presence of multiple Minmatar girls. One in particular drew lots of attention from my fellow pilots, and I was proud to see her representing our people.

After a few casualties – I think some pilots might have managed to put themselves into structure somehow – we all met at the out gate, passive aligned while we held for the stragglers to arrive, then made it back to the Paris Las Vegas. At this point, a number of us decided to dock up. I understand that the roam continued, however.

About time for me to undock and head to the POS for fleet assembly, so check in with me on Twitter later.

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Posted on 2011-07-26 by Ecliptic Rift

CSM Crowdsourcing Votes

The CSM needs our help for the July 2011 prioritization crowdsourcing. This means, essentially, you go through the list and vote for items you want CCP to prioritize. You can also vote against certain items, though I chose not to do so this time around. Order doesn’t matter, but choose somewhere between 7 and 20 items.

Your picks will almost certainly vary from mine, and that reflects how the process should work. But in any case, I thought I’d list out the ten items I chose.

16. Boost Warfare Links and Revisit Information Warfare
28. Corporation and Alliance tool overhaul
33. Directscan improvement
38. Experimental industry issues
44. Factional warfare – focus and goals
50. Group market orders
65. Machinima support in Walking in Stations
68. Make guns continue firing at previous target after reload
99. Save and Reuse Scan Probe Patterns
125. Third bloodline background (CSM)

If we don’t tell them what matters, we lose credibility when we complain about our issues not receiving appropriate attention. Alternately, CCP might actually listen, and the potential benefit of that happening outweighs the ten or fifteen minutes it takes to collate a list.

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Posted on 2011-07-18 by Ecliptic Rift

Musing on highsec piracy corporations

Lately, I’ve started to grow a little bored with my market efforts. Iurnan Mileghere still makes quite a bit of ISK on the market, enough to fund PLEXes for several accounts and still turn profit. But after the events of last month, I promised myself to re-evaluate how I play the game. To that end, I have a bunch of active alts again (oops) trying out different things: exploration, ratting, and even canflipping.

As described on this blog in the past, I’ve spent time in the past engaging in a bit of highsec piracy of various sorts: canflipping, ganking, ninja salvaging and looting, and (rarely) a bit of contract fraud. The slightly seedier, darker side of EVE has allure for almost everyone in this game, even those who choose not to participate in it, if only for how those activities add to the complexity and provide opportunities for all sorts of emergent gameplay. I’ve flown with Suddenly Ninjas, the premier ninja corp in EVE, as well as Naraka., an Angel Cartel roleplay alliance.

I think maybe that’s what I need to do again: get together with some suitably rowdy friends, or just fly by myself, and find ways to keep EVE dangerous. The ninja playstyle works great for me due to me need to fly solo. Otherwise I hold up other folks due to RL spawn aggro. But some things work better in corporations: empire wardecs and ganking, primarily.

Now to find an appropriate corporation – at least roleplay-friendly, if not full-on RP.

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Posted on 2011-07-17 by Ecliptic Rift

CSM May 2011 analysis

The minutes for the CSM Summit in May 2011 have lots of useful and interesting information. Most of this impacts the larger issues of the game, of course, but some of it has specific application to roleplay. Here, I’ll review the things that got my attention. With that said, publishing these documents shouldn’t take so long. Add this to one more area where CCP’s understanding of communication strategies needs to improve.

Business considerations

The CSM project has been moved out of the Research and Statistics department and is now alongside Customer Support, Community Management and The Volunteer Division… Ívar, the current Director of Customer Support is this person. Ívar is a co-founder to CCP, a former CEO
of CCP, former CFO and has basically served any and all roles imaginable within CCP.

This strikes me as a very good move and something that should have happened since the very beginning. I can’t imagine why somebody thought it made sense in Research, anyway, even if it was a bit of an experimental project. The player base is much more than a set of numbers, and I wonder if this might not have contributed to the communications problems with the CSM trying to reach other teams within CCP.

Zinfandel made the point that some people treat MMO’s (sic) like a videogame, and some people treat them like a hobby. Hobbyists both desire and look for ways to invest in their hobby, and virtual goods are a way to satisfy this desire.

I hate this improper use of the word “invest”. It’s not an investment, it’s an expense. Changing the word to make it sound a little more palatable might be what marketers do, but let’s not fool ourselves – particularly when we have no ownership rights whatsoever in anything in the game. I spend money on this blog, and while I don’t consider it an “investment”, I’m glad to do it because it comprises part of my enjoyment of the hobby. But even though my words are mine, I don’t fool myself that I might get some sort of return on it. Orwell’s famous essay on Politics and the English Language is worth a review here.

There was concern over the tease factor; the analogy given was “Imagine if a girl came up to you and said, ‘I’m not going to have sex with you now, but if I do at some time in the future, I’m going to do all these things to you, and it will be
great.”

The CSM emphasized that this only works if the girl has a history of keeping such promises.

I could not possibly have come up with a better metaphor. This says it all on its own. Except CCP says “awesome”, not “great”, but I have nothing further to add on feature abandonment.

Towards the end of the Summit, the CSM had a very positive meeting with CCP CEO Hilmar.

Given the events of June 2011, this seems in hindsight to be the most ironically foreboding statement in the entire document.

Tyrannis was, in CCP’s eyes, a failed expansion in terms of expansion of the player base. There was a small bump in accounts which quickly leveled off. The pattern more recently has been steady growth, and the usually post-expansion “hangover” has been greatly delayed. They are also seeing the start of the expected jump in subscribers because of the upcoming Incarna expansion.

The bit about Tyrannis surprises me not at all. CCP simply failed to deliver anything exciting at the time, and the deployment was marred by technical issues and unmet expectations. However, I suspect that the Incarna expansion turned out to eclipse that (Hilmar’s email aside). Maybe we’ll find out more about this later.

Space considerations

Soundwave then spoke briefly about the non-FiS aspects of the Winter expansion and how they would relate to walking in stations. Establishments, the progression of Captains Quarters introduced with Incarna 1.0, would also deal with smuggling contraband and boosters.

Soundwave and Greyscale reviewed the current game mechanic wherein NPC customs officers are responsible for confiscating contraband. The change that they envision would see this enforcement fall into the laps of players. A vague mechanic was discussed with the CSM about how the players would scan and enforce “the law”. The CSM response was positive, emphasizing that corruption and bribery amongst player-enforcers should be a viable mechanic. CCP agreed.

I desperately hope this doesn’t get scoped out. It sounds like they haven’t quite figured out what they want to do, but they have gotten on the right track to allow some hopefully really interesting emergent gameplay. WiS needs more links than just boosters to FiS, of course. We will pay attention to what CCP does more than what they say.

Arnar mentioned that local as we know it is going to change in a Winter expansion. The CSM was taken aback by this and let fly a torrent of questions about this new “no local”. Local, as it was explained, had to change because of changes to EVE’s infrastructure needed for future Incarna development. However, it would be replaced by a new, yet-to-be-designed intelligence gathering tool. Local would not simply just “turn off” and turn into delayed mode, such as in wormhole space. It is worth a repeat – local will NOT be simply turned off and/or turned into delayed mode. Arnar and Torfi both emphasized the importance of not feeling alone in space; they reasoned that the game has fifty thousand players and that it shouldn’t feel as though you’re alone.

Everyone should pay close attention to this, as (depending on what happens) this could turn out to be the biggest change in the winter expansion. I don’t have a lot to say on it for now, but I will say that intel-gathering tools overall need a large overhaul and we should definitely not lose the sense of crowded versus empty systems.

The plan involved releasing not just one large expansion on Christmas, but instead several moderately-sized expansions leading up to the main Winter expansion. The main theme of this Winter expansion, at least with regards to FiS, would be iterations on 0.0 space. Specifically: null-sec sovereignty related features, supercap proliferation and the rule of super-capitals, and various other “Team BFF” tweaks.

We more or less knew this already, but it bears repeating. I don’t spend much time in 0.0, and even that activity mostly stays in NPC 0.0. But I recognize the impact that nullsec has on the overall game. (Perhaps someday I could move out there, but I’d have to find an appropriately casual way to participate. ‘Alarm clock’ operations and CTAs don’t appeal to me, nor does excessive rulemaking.)

In the meantime, Dominion felt like a very unfinished expansion. It provides one of the best examples of CCP promising that a new implementation just provides a framework for rapid future iteration. And here we are, something like 18 months later…

The CSM expressed a desire to have exploration expanded to be more interesting, with archaeology particularly awful, hacking a little bit better. CCP noted that boosting archaeology is a high priority for the content department… The CSM emphasized the entertainment value of the ‘seeking’ process – search, find, risk and profit – as long as the scanning interface continues to be improved.

I don’t see where archaeology is any worse than hacking, except insofar as the value of what you get. But the activity itself doesn’t have anywhere near as much “fun” as the scanning does. I’ve talked before about the need for minigames or something for these professions, possibly to include mining as well. This would almost certainly provide a huge draw for new players and re-invigorate one of the most unique things about EVE. An earlier discussion in the minutes referenced datacores from nullsec exploration, and this seems good if properly tuned.

CCP agreed with CSM that lowsec is fundamentally broken as an area of gameplay.

We need context here, because this occurred in the middle of a discussion about nullsec. Right after this one-sentence paragraph, they went back to talking about nullsec. I’ve about given up on it myself, preferring NPC 0.0, so maybe they’ll have to go in an entirely new direction here.

Lowsec population has remained consistently low, while nullsec has doubled in the past 18 months.

While intriguing, and related to the bits I mentioned earlier, I suspect that such a large increase in nullsec population is very healthy for the game. After all, in a sandbox, don’t we want this?

CSM began by requesting that there be smaller/smarter iteration of ships on a regular basis to maintain balance…

CSM noted that the ship being worked on isn’t as important as seeing progress on ship balance. CSM would prefer to see a steady stream of minor tweaks as opposed to once-in-a-blue-moon overhauls. In CSM’s opinion, the single most important CCP can do to show progress is to remain engaged on the subject and steadily release tweaks.

Others have talked about this in more detail, but a constant stream of small adjustments would probably work better than the current approach. With a developer (CCP Tallest) now dedicated to this, hopefully they’ll see the wisdom in this approach.

Other matters

CCP Greyscale revealed the dark secret of storytelling in EVE: anything can be explained by Nanobots or Jovians.

I KNEW IT. (This is only half a joke…)

CCP then introduced the Unified Service Layer (USL), a new construct building upon the API to allow a web-interface with Eve; effectively the API on steroids. The USL would be capable of allowing end users to buy items from the Eve market without logging in, and a variety of other similar things. If all goes well, CCP hopes to be able deploy the USL soon

In the past, I’ve pushed for this very thing. At the moment, it concerns me greatly. Given CCP’s track record with both web security and bot detection, I have real concerns here. What happens when those of us whose primary profession is trading suddenly get pushed aside by real market bots, on a scale that we’ve never seen before? CCP has a lot of work to do to convince me that this won’t be an unmitigated disaster.

(I plan to write later in more detail on the Security session, rather than just a paragraph or two in this review.)

Dr. Eyjo said that about 30 trillion ISK per month enters the game through bounties. This is about 80% of all the ISK entering the game. The good doctor has been, and still is, concerned about the imbalance between ISK entering and being removed from the game, and has been asking the game designers to either reduce the flow in or add increased ISK sinks.

I think we knew this from previous QENs. However, it doesn’t really surprise me: what other ISK sources do we have? Insurance is one, which includes a built-in sink as well. Some NPC buy orders remain, many of which function similarly to bounties (as in the case of tags and some Sleeper artifacts). Most players’ income comes either from bounties or from other players, like selling minerals and modules on the market. We definitely need more sinks, however, because mudflation may already be getting a little out of control.

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Posted on 2011-07-11 by Ecliptic Rift

Who was there?

CCP released the Incarna trailer last week, and if you haven’t seen it:

I know I frequently call out CCP when they do something that I think deserves criticism. Fairness requires me to say this, then:

I love this trailer.

It shows relatively realistic gameplay with an evident focus on nullsec, though in reality the emotions and tactics and whatnot could apply to any area of space. The player interactions seem fairly realistic. And despite the name, the trailer doesn’t seem expansion-focused. It focuses on EVE Online, where Incarna is part of that, and that doesn’t even show up until the last few seconds. The core narrative focuses on spaceships, followed by an avatar to emphasize the connection between the player and his avatar.

Yes, some folks nitpick tiny details (e.g. “who flies Gallente lolololol”, “melodramatic actor”), but in general CCP did the right thing in first focusing on a popular ship for fairly new PVP pilots, the Taranis, and then working from there for a fairly consistent visual look by using other ships that used the same design language. Ergo, lots of Gallente ships. And CCP doesn’t generally use live actors, so I look at this like a first effort.

Could CCP have done something better? Sure, I suppose so. Anybody can always make improvements given unlimited time. But this seems pretty good to me. Past trailers have shown a bunch of stuff that we can’t do in-game (cf. Tyrannis and Future Vision), or a bunch of overblown UI elements that we never see (cf. Dominion), or an unrealistic portrayal of player interactions (cf. Butterfly Effect). They avoided those mistakes this time around.

This is the sort of thing that draws in new players who want to fly Internet spaceships, not play Spaceship Barbie.

Filed in Links | 2 Comments
Posted on 2011-07-02 by Ecliptic Rift

CSM Emergency Summit Wrap-up

CCP and CSM wrap up their emergency summit, the CSM wing their way back home, and the players keep wondering what happened…

Now we know.

First, watch the video. It makes it clear to me that, while CCP might have called the CSM out there, The Mittani (and likely the rest of the CSM) essentially called CCP on the carpet. In fact, while Arnar and even the CSM might disagree with my characterization, the tone of voice and body language from both says “Mittens kicked your ass.” Look at some of the language from the CSM statement:

We were shocked and appalled to discover how badly the planning and implementation of the Noble Exchange was executed.

The CSM also refer to Hilmar’s leaked email as “atrocious and out-of-touch”, and they likewise felt “offended and disgusted by it”. Note that CCP do not mention the CEO memo at all. Arnar might have pulled his cranium out of his rectum, but Hilmar has not, as far as we can tell publicly.

Further, I feel comfortable that CCP won’t start with “gold ammo” or other microtransactions that affect gameplay directly. Should they go back on that — we know what to do. And the CSM expressly discussed and will continue to discuss “potential grey areas that the introduction of virtual goods permits.” Look, this got lots of attention out there in Reykjavik. If CCP have any sense at all, they won’t want to repeat this fiasco.

Speaking only about my experience, I don’t really care a bit about the performance issues or ship spinning. Captain’s Quarters need a lot of work, granted, and I’ll write a blog post about them later. But the heat issues and frame rate problems haven’t caused me personally any trouble. So I’ll just leave those parts for the folks who need to deal with it.

So what’s next? I don’t know, but I do know we’ll continue ‘to watch what CCP does and listen to less of what they say.’

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Posted on 2011-06-27 by Ecliptic Rift

Provisional arrest

Based on today’s response from CCP, I have put my plans to leave EVE on hold for now. But I’ve also put my plans for my corp on ice.

The rest of this post just has a brief analysis of the devblog and a bit of explanation about what I intend.

’100% more love’

Arnar (Zulu) didn’t have quite everything I’d like, and I’d like to see some sort of response from Hilmar as well. But I heard enough of what I wanted (“no golden ammo” and what sounds like a very sincere apology for his handling on Friday) that I decided to stick it out a little longer.

One bit generated some particular controversy:

However I let my frustration take charge of me, fueled by emotions that had built up due to a breach of trust we at CCP have been experiencing over the past few days. I know that sounds ironic considering those are the exact same feelings you have been having towards CCP.

I read this as CCP employees feeling betrayed by whomever leaked the newsletter and CEO email. As much as I appreciate what the leaker did (from the perspective of a player and customer), I can certainly understand why the folks out there would feel this way. And he recognizes the irony in his statement, something that matters a great deal to me.

Apparently, CCP will bring the CSM out for an emergency summit meeting during the next week. They don’t plan to say anything else in the meantime, which strikes me as the right choice. I don’t know whether CCP runs into cultural issues between Iceland and the rest of Europe plus the US, or whether they have even more financial pressure than we know about, or whether something else drives these issues, but they’ve got to get things together.

My plans

In addition to the health issues I already mentioned, it strikes me that centering so much of my social life around a single corporation can’t be good. CCP and our interests may align somewhat and to some degree, but the fact remains that they want to make money and we want to have fun. While they hope to accomplish their goal by providing ours to us, those two goals can diverge. Sometimes that happens because a player’s needs change, but that can happen when a corporation’s needs (or strategy) changes, too.

Make no mistake: a corporation and a human being cannot, in any true sense of the word, have friendship. Some of the employees may have friendships among themselves and even with us as players, but don’t confuse the individual employees with the corporation, which really has no personality and, in a human sense, does not even exist.

Therefore, I have decided not to launch and grow the Singularity Foundation. It will still exist, partly as an “alt corp” for the current membership (all two of us) and possibly a few friends, and partly as a platform for roleplay. But Iurnan will primarily just engage in RP and “casual” trade, as my goals in EVE changed dramatically over the last week. I don’t want to grow any sort of power base in-game, and I don’t want to focus my game activity on things I can do in real life. I hack and do research both at work and at home. Power out here in the real world doesn’t interest me in any sense that compares to what my characters seek.

I do have another character I’ve brought back, as I will pare down to only two active accounts. Iurnan’s casual trading will keep my accounts going through PLEXes, and I plan to apply to a casual PVP corporation with the other character. I’d like to try highsec piracy again. Rather than try to build anything in EVE – something that can tumble down at the whim of some Viking committee – I’d rather just have fun without taking things too seriously.

And the next time CCP pulls something foolish, I won’t feel quite the same disappointment.

Filed in Announcements | 2 Comments
Posted on 2011-06-24 by Ecliptic Rift

Good run while it lasted

My EVE ‘career’ has come to an end. Arnar/Zulu just administered the execution serum to EVE Online. The body may thrash for a few minutes, but it’s already as good as dead. I don’t feel anger or bitterness, but resignation and sadness.

I have not decided yet what to do with this blog, beyond a few minor posts. But I will certainly be keeping Twitter, just not EVE-exclusive.

Fly safe and o7

Filed in Announcements | 14 Comments