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Slant Six Games rolls out 'temporary' layoffs again
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City developer Slant Six Games laid off some of its employees temporarily, intending to rehire all of the people once it secures new projects or funding, a representative told Games Industry today."This necessary measure has been taken to reduce the size of our team and to decrease interim operating costs while we continue to negotiate new business," Slant Six said. "Temporary layoffs provide us with a time period to keep everyone's employment position open with full benefits. The intention is to reinstate all of the people affected when new projects or funding has been secured."Slant Six has used this temporary layoff method before: Once in April 2010, coinciding with rumors that Star Wars Battlefront Online was canceled, though all of those employees were rehired. In June 2012, following Operation Raccoon City's launch, Slant Six offered one fourth of its team a severance package or the temporary layoff route. There were 96 employees at Slant Six at the time, and before today's layoffs, the studio had 60 employees.Under British Columbia law, the laid off employees retain benefits and collect employment insurance for 13 weeks, at which time the firing becomes permanent, unless they are rehired.
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.
