EVE Online

EVE Online Interview (Page 2 of 3)

We have both the PvE and PVP tracks running at all times, but resources are shifted between them depending on the focus of the content expansions. Red Moon released two empire COSMOS constellations, heavily focusing on agent activity and mini-professions, but the general focus was more on the new capital ships, new modules, mining improvements and overhauling the old Tech 1 ships.

COSMOS is our project for painting more unique features on the 5000 solar system canvas we have. They consist of agents, missions, deadspace complexes and mini-profession activity such as archaeology or hacking for Empire space and resource gathering/player research and manufacturing for the outer regions.

Kali will have at least eight 0.0 COSMOS regions, which will constitute the base for the new Combat Boosters. In itself, the activity of gathering and harvesting is PvE based and much of it will come from our new Exploration element in Kali, but since this will be in 0.0, you should expect these locations to be fought over.

In addition to this, we’re always adding agent missions, new complexes and other PvE activity, but EVE is a PvP world – so even by selling your items on the market, you are engaging in PvP. You’re putting up market orders which are better than the next guy’s so yours get bought and not his. PvP is everywhere in EVE, it’s just an oft-overlooked fact that combat isn’t the beginning and end of it. Research, Manufacturing and Trading can be PvP activities every bit as vicious as combat.

One element which will benefit PvE players in Kali is Exploration. We’re now increasing our focus on exploration. Now, it may sound strange that in a 5000 solar system universe, exploration isn’t firmly entrenched as a feature. However, exploration in its current form more involves searching for good resources and a place to call home rather than really exploring deep space. We want players to be able to search for hidden deadspace complexes, find and excavate ancient ruins, hack into secret communications relays or steal technology assets from empire or pirate research facilities.

We’re also working on Next-Generation Research & Development, which will require a lot of PvE activity for success while still focusing heavily on interaction with other people to achieve a reputation in the field. Real player connections will benefit you; there are aspects which you can’t acquire alone, so it’s either team up or contract someone to get it for you.

We already have a proof-of-concept engine for planetary flight and this is something we’ve wanted to do for a very long time. However, there is simply so much left to do “in space” that we’re still focusing on getting all that to the point where we’re confident with assigning that many resources to a new aspect of the game.

How planetary gameplay will manifest itself is still very open. There are so many opportunities. Planetary interaction can range from something simple – like controlling the planet from within your station as a governor – to more involving gameplay and exploration, like a full strategic buildup of the planetary surface.

What may be more important, though, is the opportunity for large player organizations to really own planets, enabling other players or organizations to live there and build up infrastructure. We think it’s bringing a whole new twist to the concept of “housing;” you could own an industrial facility, a city or a planet.

It’s value chains like that which enable the thick, complex political gameplay in EVE. You should be able to be a link in a larger chain and take your share of the profit. This way, you have a vested interest in the chain you are part of and, as such, would participate in defending that interest. This further builds trust relationships, resulting in the complex political and social aspect of EVE.

The simple answer is that all the stuff which gets created can be destroyed. Combined with the fact that EVE is a single universe, where we now have 100.000 people interacting, you have a massively complex supply and demand landscape which never seems to be saturated.

There are surely fluctuations, some quite extensive, especially after major changes on our part, but this is part of the natural environment of a realistic market. Think of it as “force majeure” – it just makes it all more interesting.

However, we would argue that the real key here is the players themselves. They have different demands and other players try to supply and fulfill those demands. The market thus regulates itself in the end.

Especially interesting with the player base growing so large is cross-regional trading, where players are buying player-manufactured items at low prices and selling them to other players in higher-demand, out-of-the-way regions. The margins here can be quite good and in the end it benefits all parts of the value chain. The manufacturer is selling at a profit, the transporter gets his part of the margin and the buyer is happy he didn’t have to travel to get the item at a price he’s prepared to pay.

Yes it has. We’ve been doing trials with a number of magazines and websites recently and this is considerably raising awareness of the game. We’ve doubled our subscriber base in the last year and there are still massive numbers of players joining the EVE universe today.

This is actually a problem for us today; success problems can be the hardest to deal with. Our old Tranquility server hardware can’t handle the peak hours adequately and some overloaded Empire solar systems are becoming unplayable during the evenings. Evenings, of course, are when the majority of new players enter the game.

We reacted to that in December by acquiring a full replacement of all the hardware in our Tranquility cluster from our partner, IBM. We’re upgrading the servers to 64-bit AMD Opterons, which should in itself result in doubling – even tripling – of our overall capacity. In addition to that, we’re porting all of our server code to 64-bit code, which will result in even further performance gains. The new cluster should be operational in mid-February.

From an economic perspective it’s been all good, since the new players are creating far more demand than supply. We’ve been slowly removing the last Tech 1 components from NPC distribution and player manufacturers are compensating by supplying the newer players with equipment.

The Tech 2 market, however, is starting to struggle, since it is based on limited “patents” with a maximum of only 40 organizations manufacturing each item. We’re addressing this in Kali with the Next-Generation Research & Development system, where players will be able to reverse engineer and acquire more limited Tech 2 rewards such as limited-run blueprint copies.

In the long term, more people in the universe of EVE is only a good thing. The economy gets bigger and more complex, the feuds get more intense, the world becomes more alive and the politics will reach epic scales with player organizations numbering in the tens of thousands. We’re just grateful to our playerbase for sticking with us through thick and thin and I hope the replacement of the Tranquility hardware shows how dedicated we are to EVE.

We are closer, but still far away. We’ve tried new environments before; some of them were slated for a EXODUS release, but we decided to put them on hold because we weren’t able to deliver the experience we wanted.

An example of an environment would be Deadspace. You can’t use warp drives inside it – except to get out – and as such you’re limited in speed, which would be the characteristic of that environment.

To deliver some of these aspects in Kali we need entirely new environments, such as Gas Clouds for Combat Booster resources. The environment will then have some native characteristics which affect you while you are inside it; some unique form of danger in the resource gathering and a number of other distinctive aspects.

More advanced environments would be something like a comet, where you have to trail the comet to gather its resources, or a planet-wide asteroid belt where you’re bombarded with asteroid fragments while flying through it. It remains to be seen what we’ll be able to achieve technically before the Kali timeframe, but currently we’re focusing on Gas Clouds since the Combat Boosters are high on our priority list at the moment.