Ecliptic Rift

Put down the pitchforks. Not only would CCP never move in the general direction of Blizzard’s game design philosophies and implementations, I’d never even think such a thing. We have a few abortive attempts in the game anyway (think COSMOS), and they never went anywhere for good reason. We don’t want their stinking theme park in our sandbox.

But that doesn’t mean Blizzard has nothing to teach CCP. As I’ve started to dabble in World of Warcraft lately so as to run dungeons occasionally with work mates, already I’ve noticed at least three areas where I wish EVE Online did seem a little more WoW-ish.

Attention to detail

Okay, I don’t want to dog pile here, but after the recent controversies about “excellence” and “eighteen months” and whatnot, playing WoW did show me just how much taking the time to put out something really polished can add to the experience. WoW has some very nice environments, excellent sound effects, and things just seem to work as expected. For more reference, pick an EVE forum thread over the last two months at random and you’re bound to find someone braying about how EVE doesn’t have it.

Environmental graphics

No, seriously, WoW looks gorgeous. It has an unconventional art style and low polygon count, and it still has a definite sense of “placeness”. Different regions look different, and each city looks unique. Ironforge particularly stands out, with something like a fantasy cyberpunk feel to it: all dark corners and alleyways, technical and magical geegaws everywhere, teeming with shady activity. Great stuff.

In EVE, one system tends to look like another. We have a few crummy-looking nebulae seemingly at random, and wormholes have had some work done, but in general it doesn’t go any further than that. Some deadspace environments look pretty cool, but I’d like some way to look at the sky and realize I’m in Verge Vendor or Metropolis or Stain.

Authenticators

If you think EVE has trouble with account compromises via phishing and such, imagine what happens with a market larger by at least an order of magnitude and no legal RMT (PLEX trading in EVE’s case). In response, Blizzard has implemented two-factor authentication. To log into the game, players who have enabled this option need something they know (a password) AND something they have (either a key fob or their phone running a particular app). The fob or app, called the Mobile Authenticator, displays an eight-digit code that changes every thirty seconds or so.

Phishers could conceivably still log in once, assuming they can use your credentials within that short time window of receiving them. This reduces the risk immensely, in addition to cutting way down on account sharing and the ensuing drama.

Personally, I have the Blizzard app running on my Android phone. I’ve used this technology at work for over a decade across multiple different organizations and I can’t understand why CCP hasn’t yet implemented it. I’d certainly pay a few extra bucks for this sort of thing, though free is better.

What else could EVE learn from WoW?

Several folks have posted or tweeted support for a proposal for CCP Games to commit to excellence.

Over the last month or so, the player base has had growing calls for CCP to fix the little things and to finish what they’ve started. Factional warfare, nullsec improvements, tech III frigates, the fifth subsystem, the fiction fixes, all examples of how CCP really does come up with great ideas and then leave them behind. Organizational ADHD, I’ve called it before.

A friend told me that she felt she had to “defend” CCP, but I don’t believe I’m attacking them at all. On the contrary: we have a passion for this game, this community, and (yes) this company. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t put this much time, effort, and energy into everything that surrounds it. We want to see CCP do what we know it can do, but with the awesome and incomplete ideas already started.

EVE doesn’t get sold just on advertising the newest whiz-bang stuff. It gets sold when players convince their friends to play, join their corps and alliances, and form community bonds. We are their greatest marketing asset. To unleash it, inspire us. Listen to us.

Ride the Cluetrain, CCP. We want you on board with us.

Get on board with the Cluetrain.

CCP Games rides the Cluetrain. Not perfectly, and sometimes they take a wrong step, but they’ve gotten onboard.

They talk to us, and not just with a flat corporate voice. We don’t get too much MBA-speak from them. I don’t want it, and I don’t think you do, either. They’ve got some cool people in there, and not all of them work in community management. If they locked away their devs and only worked through the community team, we’d lose a lot. Right now, we can bat around ideas, talk about problems, get insight on various decisions, and get confirmation that they love games, science fiction, net culture, and (of course) Internet spaceships as much as we do.

Some devs could use a little coaching, of course, as we’ve seen in recent months. Sometimes the Loving Mallet of Correction gets deployed a little strong, or they lock their designers and programmers up in their Viking mead halls and we don’t get to understand what happens. But more communication will always make the players happy.

I have great respect for Kaarback, but I could not possibly disagree more strongly with the suggestion that we should keep the devs from talking to us. In a communication vacuum, players get angry, developers misunderstand, and problems crop up. When we can short-circuit that process and get passionate people – players and devs – talking to each other, much better things happen.

Using Yahoo! Pipes, I keep a CCP Devs feed. Basically, I take the EVE Devs feed from EVE Search and filter out the moderators and whatnot. I don’t care about locked threads or edited flames, but I do care about seeing them engage on awesome player-created content, talk about championing feature requests, and sometimes even show us their warts.

Much love to the community folks, but they do something even better than just act like a mouthpiece. They keep us engaged, talk to us about community-specific stuff, and hopefully teach the other devs how to interact with us.

Let’s keep riding the Cluetrain.

UPDATE: Kaarbaak posted a well-thought-out rejoinder, to which I commented that we more or less agree. I want CCP to humanize themselves, solicit general ideas, and fix the CSM process. I don’t want them taking forum polls on whether a certain stat should have a 5% or 6% bonus (though dealing with dedicated playtesters on Sisi is another matter entirely).

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

I want EVE everywhere.

Mobile devices, netbooks, web sites, you name it. The API has gotten us started, of course, but only a start. Essentially, we should only require the client for undocking. Every other operation and activity can interact with the outside world. CCP should provide basic web clients, including a mobile version, but if they let us consume and manipulate the data via the API, we can see a vibrant ecosystem continue to grow and develop around it.

If I can do it without undocking, I want to do it remotely.

Hit “more” to see the details.

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We’ve known for a while that CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson will make an announcement at his GDC Europe 2009 keynote presentation in which he will reveal the next big project CCP will produce.

I believe that he will announce that their long-delayed “walking in stations” feature has grown to include a full-scale add-on including ground combat.

Of course, that sort of ambitious prediction doesn’t come out of the ether. We know at least the following:

• A recent trademark filing by CCP seems to hint at a new EVE-related game. And based on the logo, I’d say it focuses on individuals rather than ships.
• The Art of EVE book includes a section devoted to the concept art they have developed related to ground games.
• Rumors surfaced last year of some sort of EVE FPS.
• The oft-delayed WiS feature will not come in the winter expansion.

Thin stuff? Maybe. But I have every confidence that early next Tuesday morning, Hilmar will make me a very happy player. And I think he’ll do it with some awesomeness related to WiS and a ground game. However, I really hope that, rather than actual FPS mechanics, they focus in some way on RPG-style combat. This would fit the EVE player base and approach much better than bunny-hopping, rocket-jumping soldiers.

What do you think he’ll say?

Cross-posted to Chrome Bits