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Eve
Eve Lead Designer: Drama Is Cool!
Mar 2nd
Eve’s lead designer (you know Eve, it’s that really hardcore PvP game that we at Broken Toys are honor bound to despise because, um, I’m sure there’s some reason that can be found in any 200+ comment thread on Darkfall) was interviewed by MTV and I bet you can guess the first question!
When you give players freedom to do whatever they want, then you’re going to have these sorts of massive political scandals — and the players really love it. The largest alliance in the game was broken up by a trader on the inside and when this happened we were really worried at first because we were like, “Oh no! Everyone’s going to quit!” And it was really horrible for us.
That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens. Somebody on the other side was interviewed, and he was saying “When you beat the biggest raid in World of Warcraft you don’t get an interview in The New York Times but when this sort of thing happens it makes real-world news.”
Barbarians At The Gate
Feb 11th
Raph Koster breaks down the recent Eve hoohah.
Lots of folks lose their livelihoods when an empire falls, and players invested in BoB are likely upset that years of work were lost. But EVE is not a game about the height of the Roman Empire. It’s a game about the sacking of Rome by barbarians, so that they can become the next short-lived top dog. BoB existed to be torn down, and anyone who dreams of permanent glory in a game like that should understand that their destiny is to be taken down by the next upstart, in a dog-eat-dog world.
Doubt Thou The Stars Are Fire
Feb 6th
How PvP works:
Step 1: Global war between bitter enemies rages for years and years and years
Step 2: As part of that war, someone tries to join one of the warring parties, and after paying his entry fee is told “thanks, no thanks” (this being a common scam, since the side in question is, well, griefing the entire game as a hobby).
Step 3: Said someone says “No, wait, I’m actually an alt of one of the leaders of your enemy alliance. I can help you.”
Step 4: Response to said someone: “Hmmmm…. You don’t say.”
Step 5: Weltanschauung
Step 6: Kriegsnachwirkung
Step 7: Ragnarok
The day before…
And the day after.
I’m sure there’s a few design, development, and community implications to be learned here. Just how much power do you want to give your players to screw each other over, anyway? Because with unlimited power comes unlimited hijinks.
Eve To Flee Iceland?
Dec 22nd
Hidden in a Guardian story about the general Icelandic economic collapse:
On three shiny floors of a former fish factory is CCP, a company best known in computer gaming for Eve Online, which has 300,000 participants all over the world – as many inhabitants as Iceland itself. However, restrictions on access to foreign currency for individuals and businesses and on foreign investment into Iceland are making life difficult. “To make new games, we need foreign investors,” says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Akureyri, who supervises Eve’s virtual economy. “The present currency restrictions are putting us in a straitjacket. We are in talks with the government, but if we can’t let capital in, we might be compelled to leave Iceland, even though this would be against our wishes.”
No word on if this is a lock-stock-and-barrel move or, more likely, Eve’s ‘headquarters’ moving to offshore offices, as hinted by a CCP developer in a related thread. CCP is one of Iceland’s more successful companies, so changing its mailing address to Bermuda would be kinda a big deal.
In Eve, Even The Dupes Are Massive
Dec 11th
PlayNoEvil has all the links of what looks to be a really, really massive dupe:
The expanse of this so far is probably lost on most people so I would like to make a few facts clear. In the past 4 jears we are talking about ISK in value of 2.500.000.000.000 ISK to 3.000.000.000.000 ISK. That’s 2500 – 3000 billion. Everyone that owns a T2 item can bet that it was build in part from resources due to this phenomenon. At this point I would like to thank CCP for making it possible to buy GTC’s with ISK.
Also, Please Submit A Trouble Ticket Before Any Dupes
Dec 6th
Eve asks its players to file a GM ticket to reserve server space before fighting any large battles.
Well, that’s new.
Cue The Raph Koster Quote: Today’s Eve Drama
Apr 14th
The source code for the Eve Online client has apparently leaked out to the Internet.
Reports are being posted that CCP is seeding most of the torrent themselves, then using the IP addresses of those who download the client’s source code to ban Eve Online accounts.
Based on this official comment and this Slashdot comment, it’s decompiled Python source, and not an actual full source code leak. Which would make CCP’s permabanning torrent seeders somewhat… draconian. I’d have to wonder how much of the game client, outside of the UI, would actually be coded in Python anyway.
(Not posting a link to the actual torrent – if you’re into that sort of thing it should take you all of 10 seconds to find, anyway.)
On Mac OSX, It Installs Internet Explorer, And On Linux, It Forces You To Vote Republican
Dec 6th
Well, that’s an unfortunate patch bug.
CCP’s latest major patch to the EVE-Online client, Trinity, comes with an optional DX9-enhanced graphics patch that dramatically improves the visual quality of the in-game graphics through remade models, textures, and HDR. It also has an unfortunate bug: the incredibly stupid choice of boot.ini as a game configuration file, coupled with an errant extra backslash in the installer configuration. The result is that anyone who installs the enhanced graphics patch overwrites the windows XP c:\boot.ini file with the EVE client configuration file, bricking the machine on the next boot. Discussion in a couple of forums threads is becoming understandably heated.
There May Be Some Subliminal Message Here
Oct 27th
Courtesy of a poster on F13 who spotted Eve Online’s latest ad campaign for its demo:
Eve: where the size of your ship really doesn’t matter, honest.
From Russia With Pew Pew
Sep 14th
Another in Shacknews’ fascinating history of Eve’s conflicts, this one looks at the origin of Goonswarm’s partnership with the Red Alliance.
“For two years, Lotka Volterra and the Southern Coalition fighting RA would basically fling every racist stereotype about Russians onto the forums that you could imagine,” says GoonSwarm’s Mittani. “Really over-the-top, obvious racist stuff, like ‘They’re feeding their families by selling isk for money over Ebay,’ jokes about buying Russian brides, calling them ‘Russian Dogs.’
“RA gets very offended about attacks on their ethnicity… Even today, RA leaders will be able to tell you which LV individual pilots smack-talked them in local and made racist jokes. They’ll drop anything to go kill them or hurt them in-game.”
Sure enough, with no prompting, UAxDeath recalled the harassment in a separate interview: “Russian dogs. Feed our children. I still have those screenshots.”
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