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EVE Spotlight: An interview with CCP Zulu
EVE Spotlight is a new bi-weekly feature in which we interview prominent members of EVE Online's player community or development team. Twice each month, we'll be shining the spotlight on a player or developer who has a significant impact on EVE to highlight the efforts of EVE's most influential people. It's almost an unwritten rule of game development that someone from quality assurance should never be promoted into a game design role. Game testing and QA are said to be so fundamentally different to design that it's argued the roles require incompatible skillsets. Arnar "CCP Zulu" Gylfason has definitely proven that this isn't the case, successfully migrating from QA to game design and finally being promoted to senior producer on EVE Online. Taking over from CCP T0rfifrans, Arnar has become a very public figure for CCP in the EVE community. Older players will remember Arnar as CCP Zulupark, that horrible guy who nerfed their carriers back in 2007. Alternatively, you may remember a fantastic forum thread from 2008 in which he personally answered countless player questions on game design and balance issues. Since becoming senior producer on EVE, Arnar has been a strong advocate of this kind of heavy communication with players. Through devblogs, interviews and interactions with the Council of Stellar Management, he's helped to fill the information vacuum players have become accustomed to. We caught up with EVE senior producer Arnar "CCP Zulu" Gylfason several weeks ago at the EVE Fanfest. In this EVE Spotlight, I ask him about communication with players, the role of live events in future expansions, and other topics.
Proposed changes to EVE's nullsec regions cause a stir
At the end of 2009, EVE Online's vast and lawless nullsec regions were given a complete overhaul with the Dominion expansion. System sovereignty mechanics were changed, and a new infrastructure system was put in place. Through an infrastructure hub interface, alliances were given the ability to upgrade the systems within their borders. Areas of space near EVE's empire systems that were rarely fought over suddenly became prime real-estate, ripe for conquest and development. The difference in quality between the best systems deep in nullsec and poor systems nearer empire was significantly lowered. The hope was that by increasing the carrying capacity of each individual system, CCP would cause large alliances to contract into smaller areas of space. The result hasn't been exactly as CCP had planned, since huge areas of nullsec are now being dominated by massive coalitions of alliances. In a new devblog, CCP Greyscale has explained steps that CCP plans to take in order to rectify the situation. The quality of cosmic anomalies provided by system upgrades will soon depend largely on the system's true security rating. Systems that were highly sought before Dominion will now be significantly better for making ISK. CCP hopes that this will cause high-end alliances to concentrate in higher-end space, leaving power vacuums near empire space for smaller alliances to fill. Player reaction to the devblog has been fierce, with the comments thread reaching over 65 pages, the vast majority of it negative. Whether the changes are a good idea is debatable, but the one thing players have widely agreed on is that the changes will not achieve the goals CCP has set out in the devblog. As the changes are part of the official Incursion features list, however, it's highly likely that they'll go to the live server in a future patch deployment.
Tune into EVE's live dev blog on fiction and content design tonight
Back in January, EVE Online developer CCP Games revived a much-loved old habit by bringing back regular live dev blogs. Up until a few years ago, live dev blogs were used as a way for players to chat with developers directly and ask them questions about upcoming changes or features. As EVE's playerbase grew, it became impractical for the devs to host live chats and answer the questions of players directly. At the start of this year, CCP took advantage of EVE's integrated voice chat service, EVE Voice, to bring back live dev blogs. The first developer chat on game design in the Incursion expansion was a big success, with a large number of players tuning in to participate. Tonight at 5:00 p.m. EST (22:00 EVE Time/GMT), CCP Shadow will lead a new live audio dev blog session on EVE fiction and game content. Developers t0nyG and Abraxas will be talking about the Immersion project, which aims to link EVE's powerful backstory with gameplay. CCP Soundwave, Gnauton, and Big Dumb Object will then be tackling the topic of content design. Players have written in with plenty of questions for the team on EVE's backstory and content development, which will also be answered in tonight's session. To join in, just log into EVE, join the chat channel "Live Dev Blog" before 5:00 p.m. EST tonight and join EVE Voice.
New zones and artifacts in latest Perpetuum devblog
Perpetuum has been stomping its way along after its fairly recent launch, doing its level best to prove that everything really is better with giant robots. While the development team has been a bit quiet the past few weeks, the newest devblog entry explains some of the reasons behind the silence. A lot of the team's focus has been on adding new zones to the game for players to explore, with six new zones in development -- three of them remaining safe and three allowing for the unrepentant robot warfare that drives the core game. The game's artifact scanning minigame is also nearing completion, and while the blog entry states outright that the mechanics will be fairly similar, it sounds like a good way to pass some time while there's nothing for your robot to shoot at. There's also official support for an emulation platform on Linux and OSX, which makes the game available to a wider range of potential players. Perpetuum players should take a look at the full entry for all the details. [Thanks to Roy Ary for the tip!]
Candidates announced for EVE's sixth CSM
Over the past few years, EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management has been making an increasingly large impact on the game. Every year, thousands of players vote in the CSM elections to select nine volunteers who can represent the interests of EVE's players. The council's job is to collect together details of issues players are having with the game, from bugs and balance issues to widely supported gameplay suggestions. Twice per year, the council members meet with CCP's developers in Iceland for the CSM Summit. It's here that the issues players have raised are discussed and prioritised. As CCP's advisory council on game design, the CSM has been placed in a position of significant influence over EVE Online's development. Early last month, CCP put out the call for players interested in running for election to sign up and declare their intent to join the council. The entry period is now over, and a list of the approved candidates we'll soon be voting on has been published. Of the 72 players who applied, only 57 met the role's criteria for eligibility. Among those accepted are four previous council members hoping to continue their stay in the group and two former alternates. Each candidate has prepared a short statement on his or her reasons for standing for election, and many will be running campaigns on the forum and in-game in the weeks running up to the vote.
Avatar Creations lays out plans for Perpetuum's future
While there are some still players steaming about the recent insurance fraud situation in Perpetuum, many others are excited about the plans that Avatar Creations has revealed in its most recent dev blog. After receiving player feedback indicating that the company wasn't doing as good a job of communicating its plans for the game as many players would like, the team decided to lay out its development goals well into the latter half of this year in a new dev blog -- and those goals look pretty awesome! Starting off, players will be glad to hear that the upcoming PvE content that the devs were hinting at isn't just more missions and mob grinding. Instead, players are going to be treated to a new system: artifact scanning and discovery. By scanning down hidden spots, players can net basic goodies like salvage containers all the way up to special alien intel revealing special missions or new Mk2 robots. What's better, the devs intend to add more things into the artifacting system as things develop, offering a plethora of possibilities for everyone from the solo carebears to the largest groups. Among the other plans are a new energy-credit system (which will give players the chance to pick up even more new modules and components), changes to the Assignments currently offered in-game, help for corporations seeking to recruit new players, area-of-effect explosions for your PvP fiends, new lands, terraforming, and much more. So if you've been curious about the plans for this fascinating indie sci-fi sandbox, then head over to the Perpetuum site and check out all the details in this wide-ranging devblog.
Candidacy opens for EVE Online's sixth CSM term
While many MMOs have a community team whose job it is to bring issues affecting players to the attention of developers, EVE Online goes one step further by involving players directly. Once per year, players vote on whom they want to represent the playerbase in meetings with CCP Games as part of the democratically elected Council of Stellar Management. During its 12-month term, each edition of the CSM works hard to compile a list of issues players are having with the game or its development, including balance issues, bugs and ideas for changes the developers might not have considered. The most important of these are scheduled for discussion at one of the twice-yearly CSM council summits in Iceland, in which the council converses directly with developers. The fifth council session will soon be coming to a close, and as with the previous councils, it has had both high points and low points during the year. The council's poor treatment in the summer summit and the subsequent player uproar was followed up with some positive changes at CCP and a complete turnaround in the winter talks. With the fifth council session ending, CCP has issued an open call for candidates for the sixth council. To submit yourself for consideration and public voting, read the official conditions in the latest EVE devblog and then head over to the submission page on the EVE website. Among the terms and conditions this year is a new requirement that makes a campaign message mandatory. The last election saw several players enter the running without any campaign message, so this is a welcome change from last year's submission rules.
EVE Online player creativity -- Papercraft pod edition
Every month, EVE Online developer CCP Fallout trawls the forums to find the best of the community's creative efforts. Previous editions of the Celebrating the Creative Player blog have looked at in-game news websites, a Gallente shuttle remade in Minecraft, and the cross-platform Python Fitting Tool. This month's bumper edition starts off with one of my favourite recent creations -- a flowchart designed to help players pick what they want to do in EVE. Each option is linked to further reading on the topic, making it a handy tool for new players who find themselves lost in EVE. Also impressing the devs this month is a tool designed to track the bounties gained from missions. It's often difficult to work out what the most profitable missions are to run, and this tool simplifies that by recording a log of bounties on each mission. My personal favourite highlight this month was EVE player Guindel Angeline's papercraft escape pod. We've seen some incredible papercraft EVE ships before, but I think this is the first time someone's made the escape pod.
EVE live developer chat tonight to discuss Incursion game design [Updated]
In years gone by, EVE Online developers CCP Games interacted with the game's playerbase very directly through the forums and live audio developer blogs. As EVE's subscriber-base has grown, developers began to take a more hands-off approach to forum discussions and the live dev blogs gave way to solely written blogs. Back in July, reactions to the June CSM summit highlighted problems with CCP's approach to communicating with players and the way feedback was collected. Since then, CCP has been making an absolutely colossal effort to communicate more with players through focused technical devblogs and a recent series of video blogs. Tonight, CCP is kicking that communication up another notch with the first of a new monthly live audio developer chat series. The first live dev blog will begin in just two hours at 22:00 EVE time (GMT/UTC). The discussion will focus on game design in the Incursion expansion, with EVE's lead game designer CCP Hammer being joined by senior game designer CCP Flying Scotsman and game designer CCP Omen. During a question an answer segment, players will have an opportunity to ask specific questions on the new character creator, Incursion game design goals and improvements to the planetary interaction feature. To join in, just log into EVE and join the chat channel "Live Dev Blog" and join EVE Voice. [Update: CCP has contacted us to tell us that it's received far more questions via the forum than the devs can answer in today's Q&A session, so the team will be unable to take additional questions from the live chat channel.]
Massively's EVE Online Incursion video devblog roundup
Having progressed from being a small independent studio in Iceland to a successful multinational industry leader, EVE Online's developer CCP Games has always had a reputation for being very close to the game's playerbase. Back in July, this view was soured when information from devblogs and the June CSM summit seemed to suggest that EVE would receive no bug-fixes or iterations on old gameplay features for at least 18 months. Players were in an uproar, and a growing perception began to spread that CCP was selling current EVE players short in order to focus on Incarna. In the past six months, things at CCP have take a complete 180-degree turn. Planetary Interaction has received the iteration players were promised, with gameplay tweaks and user interface fixes being deployed at a rapid pace. CCP also instituted team GridLock, whose purpose was to wage an all-out war on lag and fleet issues. In a refreshing and extremely welcome turn of affairs, CCP has been making a gargantuan effort lately to communicate with the players about upcoming changes and collect feedback. Though regular technical devblogs and pre-released test-server patches, players have been kept more informed than ever about what's going on behind the scenes at CCP HQ. Most recently, a series of 18 developer videos was released leading up to the Incursion expansion's final release today. Topics covered include battle reports from the ongoing war on lag, information on server optimisations that have been made recently, updates to planetary interaction, and other interesting topics. Skip past the cut for a detailed roundup of all 18 videos, all hosted on CCP's official YouTube page.
EVE's incursions go live on Tuesday, Sansha events to follow
The first two stages of EVE Online's new Incursion expansion were released in November and December, bringing us some much-needed UI fixes and removing learning skills from the game. Citing a commitment to polishing the expansion's main features before publishing them, CCP delayed most of the expansion until a third major patch. Scheduled for release on Tuesday, January 18th, the third phase of Incursion will include the extremely impressive new Incarna character builder and periodic Sansha invasions into constellations across EVE. In a new devblog, CCP has revealed that the Sansha incursions will be starting with some well-deserved build-up events. In previous expansions, new content was simply present as soon as players logged in, with little more than a few lines in the patch notes and a devblog or two to describe the new additions. The fact that the incursions are being heralded in with live events is sure to be popular with players, and it may represent a change in the way CCP delivers new major features. When the final Incursion patch goes live on Tuesday, players may begin to see some odd occurrences that seem very out of place. Events will build up to Sansha's Nation inevitably beginning its crusade against all the systems of New Eden and the incursions going into full swing.
EVE Online to get shiny new forums as part of Incursion
Despite calls for some new features, the EVE Online forums haven't changed much at all since their release in 2003. A search feature was added several years ago, but it failed to produce reliable results. As usually happens when there's something missing in EVE, the community filled in the gaps with Chribba's popular EVE-Search forum archive and search tool. In a new devblog, CCP Alice has revealed that the forum will finally get a face-lift during the Incursion expansion. Players will be happy to know that a useful advanced search feature is definitely on the way, with some handy innovations like the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results. In addition to displaying the shiny new avatars we'll create with the new character generator, the new forum has a quick-reply feature, a "like" button next to every post and a share option to link the post on various social networking tools. Each thread will also post to an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to interesting threads and receive replies on any device with an RSS reader. Players will also have a favourite thread list, which could be handy for saving a list of the various guides and information posts players find themselves looking up on a regular basis. The new forum will be integrated with EVE Gate, and the old forum will be left as an archive for posterity. The exact release schedule of the new forum isn't yet decided, but as it's part of Incursion, it will have to be released before the summer.
Improvements on the way for EVE Online's contract system
There are many professions open to players in EVE Online, but it's the trading that often draws players to the game. Due to the number of players buying and selling on EVE's single server and the fact that items are destroyed on death, a savvy player can find countless opportunities for profit. To avoid overloading the market window with thousands of items most players will never need to buy, CCP limits rare and unusual items to being sold on the contract system. Items can be listed as auctions or direct sales, and players can search for items by name. The system has been working amicably for years, but recently several back-end performance issues were identified in it. As part of CCP's on-going war on lag, major back-end optimisations were made. Due to this restructuring of how contracts are handled on the EVE server, several new features have suddenly become possible. In a new devblog, CCP Atlas explains the back-end improvements and what they mean for the average player. Several features players have asked for over the years are on the way, such as the ability to put damaged items into contracts. Ammo in the guns of a ship being contracted will now be moved into the ship's cargo hold rather than the item hangar, and ship insurance will no longer be voided when a ship is contracted. A whole host of improvements are also on the way to make the terms of courier missions more obvious. Players will be informed of the dangers of a contract before they accept it, including dangerous systems en-route and whether the destination station might refuse them docking rights. The upgrades are already live on the EVE test server and will be hitting the live server as part of the Incursion expansion's third phase in January.
APB's Book-Larsson talks story, game modes
Bjorn Book-Larsson is back! Forgive the exclamation point, but we had to accentuate the latest in the long line of developers with action hero names (and with apologies to Atanas Atanasov and Tasos Flambouras, Book-Larsson has vaulted near the top of the spiffy name list). In any case, the GamersFirst COO/CTO has updated his APB Reloaded blog with some interesting insights into the game's story. Yes, you read that right; we said story and APB in the same sentence, and before you think we've been brainwashed by the likes of The Old Republic, TERA, and other story-centric MMOs in the offing, consider Book-Larsson's assertion that APB was originally designed to facilitate the "open world-ish" nature of the Grand Theft Auto series. "APB actually has the beginnings of a lot of the elements that will make it a really successful game in the long term, and could in theory exploit (maybe complete) both types of interactions [story and shooter elements]; there is actually a giant backstory to the entire city (100 plus pages of it), there are deep anthologies of the various factions in the city, and there is even the foundation for a single-player mission mode," he writes. Whether or not players will care about APB's potential to grow beyond an ordinary shooter remains to be seen. After all, Global Agenda is a similar title with a fairly deep backstory (and one that is summarily ignored by 99.9% of the players fragging it up in AvA and merc matches). The fact that GamersFirst is even considering future additions to APB is relatively exciting news, and we'll be watching with great interest.
UI upgrades on the way for EVE Online
EVE Online's complex user interface has been a sticking point for many new and prospective players over the years. Although the interface has been drastically improved in the seven years that EVE has been in operation, it lacks much of the customisability players expect from a modern MMO. Players have been asking for UI overhauls and customisation options for some time, and it seems CCP is finally poised to deliver on those requests. In a new devblog, CCP Optimal has explained some preliminary UI overhauls coming with the Incursion expansion's final release on January 18th. As expansions tend to add new features that must be accessed via the neocom, that little bar on the left of the screen has become cluttered. CCP aims to replace it with a new neocom bar along the bottom, moving many of the existing buttons to a familiar start-menu type system. The new neocom bar is customisable both in size and in what buttons are on it. Functions a player uses frequently can be dragged from the EVE menu onto the neocom bar, while underused options can be removed. Rather than gathering feedback on the new UI exclusively on the test server, CCP will debut it as a beta feature on the live server on January 18th. CCP hopes to use this new approach to gather more accurate feedback on several upcoming features before they're released.
EVE devblogs discuss developments in the war on lag and RMT
With the Incursion expansion's second phase almost ready to deploy, it's been a busy few weeks for the developers at CCP Games. Work is well underway, but a few of the folks at CCP have taken time out of their busy schedules this week to explain some of the interesting developments that have recently gone on behind the scenes. GM Grimmi, well-known for his work battling EVE's RMT (Real Money Trading) problem, delivered an update on the problem and what CCP is doing to tackle it. Similarly, aptly named developer CCP Masterplan wrote two in-depth devblogs detailing the latest developments in the war on lag. Lag has always been an issue in EVE Online's territorial warfare, as each side in a fight will try to bring as many ships as possible to major battles. The point at which the EVE server lags and server nodes begin to drop has been increased over the years through hardware upgrades and software performance optimisations, allowing much larger fights than were previously possible. With the playerbase growing every year, however, the number of players who can potentially meet in one place for a major battle has similarly risen and the issue of lag has persisted. Skip past the cut for a roundup of three new devblogs detailing CCP's progress in the war on lag, recently deployed optimisations for fleet battles, and the progress made in the fight against RMT and botting.
EVE Online player creativity -- Gallente shuttle in Minecraft and more
Over the years, the EVE Online community has produced some stunning creative works. From epic videos that have been years in the making to fictional stories or artwork, EVE has inspired some fantastic creative efforts. Last month, CCP posted the first of a new monthly series of devblogs highlighting the creative efforts of people in the EVE community. In last month's installment, CCP Fallout looked at two of her favourite fan-run websites -- EVE News 24 and Skill Training Complete. In this month's second part of the series, Fallout is joined by CCP Zymurgist to discuss some of the awesome things players have done throughout November. The report kicks off with some videos of the awesome new Incursion character generator in action, produced by players on the EVE test server. Also in the news is a list of player-run podcasts called the EVE Pod Pack, maintained in a similar manner to CrazyKinux's EVE Blog Pack. The highlight of this month's piece, however, is undeniably the video of a full scale Gallente shuttle faithfully reproduced in Minecraft.
Massively interviews CCP Greyscale on the EVE Christmas gift
Early yesterday morning, a new devblog by EVE Online developer CCP Greyscale brought us an exciting first look at something awesome arriving in the upcoming Incursion expansion's December release. Speaking on behalf of development team Yggdrasill at CCP's top secret Iceland hideout, Greyscale explained CCP's plans to completely abolish learning skills in EVE. Learning skills increase a player's attributes, which decrease the time it takes to train skills. Since they take some time to train, however, dedicating time to them will only pay off after several months of subsequent skill training. As a result, new players are often advised to put off training for that ship they want or those useful industrial skills, as focusing on learning skills early on will pay off in the long run. This can stunt a player's progression in his early days, making for a very boring early play experience that can be distinctly off-putting. As part of the company's Christmas gift to all EVE players, the skillpoints we have invested in learning skills will be reimbursed so that we can add them to any skill we want. To compensate for the decrease in attributes and give new players a bit of a boost, all players will have 12 points added to every attribute. This is exciting news, as the removal of learning skills has always been strongly supported by the EVE community. We caught up with CCP Greyscale to ask a few important questions about what this change means for players. Skip past the cut for our interview with CCP Greyscale on the EVE Christmas gift and what the learning skill changes mean for players new and old.
Darkfall dev diary talks new UI, quest content, and more
Aventurine's Tasos Flambouras returns with another activity report on the Darkfall Epic Blog, and the focus is fairly broad. He touches on the dynamic quests and lore-driven events we mentioned last week, as well as upcoming world optimizations that include aggressive wildlife based on location and time of day, new monster families and epic mob encounters, and improvements to both player character models and monster animations. Those of you who haven't been able to get past Darkfall's unique user interface will also have reason to give the game a second look in the near future, as Flambouras states that Aventurine has decided on a new GUI framework and tools. "These should yield a vastly improved user interface. The next phase for the GUI is the architecture and adapting the current GUI functionality to the new framework," he says. Other notable items include the mention of a completely new environmental sound system as well as an in-game political map which will feature clan associations, vendor and bank locations, and various other resources. Check out all the details on the official Darkfall blog.
Darkfall dev blog hints at dynamic quests and events
Think Darkfall is all about crushing your enemies, driving them before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women? Well you're partially right, but Aventurine is also taking pains to highlight the game's inherent sandboxiness. While you can spend your entire Darkfall career ganking and being ganked, the game does offer a fair bit of PvE fun, moreso now after the release of the Hellfreeze expansion. In the latest Aventurine devblog, community liasion Laenih outlines plans to bring the game's lore to the forefront. Dynamic quests and events are hinted at, and it seems that knowledge of Agon's lore may help players solve tasks in the near future. At the very least, the updates will add a bit of context and flavor to the proceedings. Laenih uses a member of the Vargashi race as an example, and if you're wondering who or what the Vargashi are, the devblog also features conceptual artwork highlighting the new NPCs. Check it out on the official site, and also have a look at Darkfall's lore entries while you're at it.
