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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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