EVE Evolved: Eight years of EVE Online, part 2

Eighth year retrospective: The negative points

It's been a tricky year for EVE, with last year's Apocrypha expansion being an incredibly hard act to follow and the community split in opinion on whether Incarna is worth developing. The summer's Tyrannis expansion was sold to players as an epic addition to EVE in which players would lord over the populations of planets as either benevolent rulers or tyrannical overlords. In the trailer, we saw an epic clash of fleets in a fight for control of a planet, but by the time the expansion was finally released, it bore little semblance to the trailer. Tyrannis became a minor industrial minigame for casual players, something that we could log in every week or so and tend to.

Tyrannis wasn't the only case of poor expectations management this year. Around the time of the June CSM summit, CCP published a devblog setting out development plans for the next 18 months. Seeing a heavy focus on Incarna and no mention of revisiting broken parts of the game or tackling small issues and lag, players took to the forums in complete outrage. The matter appeared to be largely a case of poor communication from CCP, which had already assigned dedicated teams to work on small issues and lag but had not told players about ongoing developments in those areas.

Eighth year retrospective: A positive turnaround

Following some serious internal discussion, CCP came to the conclusion that it hadn't been communicating internal work with players adequately. Since then, we've seen a remarkable turnaround in both communication of ongoing work at CCP and collection of feedback from players via the CSM. Impressions of the December CSM summit were extremely positive, and CCP has since published a large number of detailed devblogs on work going on behind the scenes at the company.

A series on the war on lag from Team Gridlock showed exactly how complex the lag issue is and why it hasn't been easy to solve. In the lead-up to the Incursion expansion, we even saw frequent video devblogs introducing players to the various new game mechanics and explaining why CCP took the development approaches it did. At this year's EVE Fanfest, I got the impression that CCP wants the same for EVE as its most dedicated players want. If that well-directed ambition can be kept up during the development process and players can be actively involved in gathering feedback, the coming year is going to be fantastic for EVE.

Eighth year retrospective: Incursion and awesome stuff

Perhaps the most promising thing to happen this year has been the Incursion expansion. EVE's winter expansion is typically very light on content, but this year's was awesome. Immediately following the Tyrannis expansion's release, the EVE dev team started up one of the best live events I've ever seen in an MMO. Live events used to happen a lot in EVE, but the practice proved to be too expensive and time-consuming to manage. With the Sansha abduction events, CCP Dropbear and CCP Headfirst put in a remarkable effort to keep players engaged and lead Sansha raids on the populated planets of EVE.

The events served as a prelude to the expansion itself, introducing the backstory on which the new game mechanics have been based. Of course, the most awesome events happening in EVE this year came from players rather than developers. In October, the largest battle ever held in EVE Online occurred when 3,000 players waged war over ownership of a nullsec system. This year has also seen its fair share of awesome kills and heists, with one player losing $1,000 worth of game time codes in his cargo, EVE player Bad Bobby stealing $45,000 worth of ISK in a massive investment-scheme-turned-scam, and gambling website Somer.BLINK being hit for 125 billion ISK.

Summary

I find it hard to believe that EVE Online has been going strong for over eight years and that I've been playing for over seven of them. It feels like just last year that I was dropped into the deep end of the sandbox with nothing but a rookie ship and the tutorial equivalent of a kick in the head. We covered the top EVE stories of 2010 in a roundup article back in December for those interested in reading more about what happened this year. Over the coming year, we'll see the staged release of Incarna and hopefully EVE transformed for the better. CCP has hinted that we'll be receiving a special redeemable present on May 6th to celebrate EVE's eighth birthday, and I can't wait to find out what it is.

Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at Massively. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you have an idea for a column or guide, or you just want to message him, send an email to brendan@massively.com.