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EVE Vegas 2014: Getting players involved in EVE's development
Back in 2011, EVE Online developer CCP Games was rocked by controversy when players outraged over the Incarna expansion's microtransactions and CCP's indifference to player feedback spoke with their wallets and quit the game. In what became known as the monoclegate scandal, an estimated 8% of players quit, and CCP eventually laid off 20% of its staff worldwide. Some tough lessons were learned about keeping players looped into the development process, and CCP began involving players more closely in the development process. At EVE Vegas 2014 today, developer CCP Fozzie looked at the ways that CCP gathers ideas and feedback from the community. As a sandbox MMO with a very dedicated community, EVE is in the interesting position that many of the players know more about the game than the developers themselves and can identify problems with ideas very early in the development process. Plans are now announced earlier in development to gather feedback, some new features are now made optional on release to gauge usage, and failed ideas will even be rolled back if necessary. During the talk, Fozzie confirmed that each SCRUM team within CCP focuses on one particular area of gameplay and that player ideas are often brought into internal meetings for discussion. A new rig named the Higgs Anchor is even being introduced based on player suggestions; it will decrease movement speed by 75% but increase agility to make it easier to align to warp out if hostiles approach the player's location. If this level of player participation keeps up, hopefully disasters like monoclegate will never happen again.
EVE Online kicks off a new story-driven competitive event
A new post by CCP Fozzie on the EVE Online website outlines an ongoing plotline running in the sc-fi sandbox right now. Reacting to research on unusual behavior of Sleeper Drones in W-Space, each of the four factional groups in New Eden has requested help collecting stuff... for science. Capsuleers, that means you'll be rounding up Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries and turning them in to your factions in a competitive galactic donation drive. Fozzie notes that the results of the story-driven event will directly affect tech rollout for the game: Out of character, I can reveal that this storyline and the associated donation drive will lead directly to new technology falling into the hands of players in the near future. The relative success of each empire's donation drive will determine in what order each faction will get access to this new technology. Each faction navy will also express their gratitude through a special ingame item representing an honorary commission to their forces. The commissions will be given to the character that donates the highest value of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries (combined and weighted) to each faction over the course of the event. Each commission will be a unique item that will forever contain the name of the winning character in the description. Players can donate the relevant items from Sleeper Drones via item exchange contracts to their factional contacts. The event is live now and closes out on October 14th.
EVE Evolved: Temporarily fixing starbases
With its exploration-focused Odyssey expansion on the way, EVE Online is about to be hit with a deluge of players (new and old) venturing into the unknown. The expansion will introduce the yet-to-be-revealed Discovery Scanner and will add a ton of new exploration content all across New Eden. Odyssey aims to follow the lead of 2009's Apocrypha expansion, which saw hundreds of corporations lead lucrative expeditions into uncharted wormhole systems. We don't yet know whether the expansion will open new systems for exploration, but when Odyssey goes live, the race will be on to find and lay claim to all the goodies hidden in deep space. With no stations to dock at in wormhole space, corps currently have to store everything in destructible starbases that aren't really up to the task. Player-owned starbases were released in 2004 as sandbox-style tools for tech 2 industry and alliance territorial warfare. They were never intended to be the sole base of operations for an entire corporation, so they suffer from some pretty severe security and usability flaws as a result. Theft from ship and item hangars in wormhole space is commonplace, setting up corp roles for them is a nightmare, and living exclusively in a starbase provides a daily dose of frustration players could seriously do without. CCP has been planning to completely overhaul player-owned starbases for years, but some of today's issues can't afford to wait any longer. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the chronic problems faced by starbase-dwelling explorers and how CCP plans to temporarily fix some of them for Odyssey.
EVE Evolved: New Ancillary Armor Repairers aren't up to the task
EVE Online's Retribution 1.1 patch went live this week, overhauling armour tanking and rebalancing some ships that traditionally fit armour tanks. Last week I looked at why people usually choose passive buffer tanks for PvP over active tanks and how the Ancillary Shield Boosters changed all that by giving shield users a huge free burst tank that can often outperform a front-loaded buffer tank. The new Ancillary Armor Repairers look similarly amazing on paper with their ability to consume nanite repair paste to triple repair output, but how do they stack up against their shield-based counterparts? Now that the patch is out and I've finally got my hands on the Ancillary Armor Repairers, I'm not sure they're any good. They're limited to one per ship even though most active armour tanking ships use dual or triple repairer setups, and they can run for only eight repair cycles before running out of paste. They're also only 68.75% more effective than tech 2 repairers and still require the same amount of capacitor. Ancillary Shield Boosters may provide a slightly smaller 63.33% repair boost over tech 2 boosters, but they can cycle at double the rate of Ancillary Armor Repairers and don't require any capacitor. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at what makes Ancillary Shield Boosters a strong contender in PvP and show that the new Ancillary Armor Repairers just aren't up to the task.
EVE devs struggle with factional warfare stagnation
CCP Games isn't completely happy with the results brought on by EVE Online's most recent expansion, Inferno. In a frank dev blog, CCP Fozzie admits that its factional warfare system has fizzled in places and caused inflation in the market. So the team is preparing a new patch for tomorrow to combat these undesirable elements. "These are the problems that our retribution changes were designed to alleviate, but players have been telling us that the situation is degrading faster than we had expected," Fozzie writes. "Faced with the dual problems of factional warfare stagnation and PLEX inflation, we saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone." Inferno 1.3.2 will make significant changes to loyalty point acquisition and expenditure rates. The team's also patching in a fix to combat AFK plexing while continuing to work on improved NPCs for the factional warfare system for the future.
