This is coming a bit late now but in case you haven’t been following things, CCP met with the CSM members on June 30th to discuss the recent troubles surrounding the recent addition of the Noble Exchange to the game. You can catch up on the background on the post here with the totally-not-inflammatory-title How to Destroy the EVE Community, but for now lets look at the output of the recent meeting.

We’re treated to two very different statements, one from CCP and one from the CSM. First, the CCP statement:

Statement on behalf of CCP from Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, Senior Producer for EVE Online

Following the series of events surrounding the launch of Incarna, CCP invited the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) to an extraordinary meeting in Reykjavik to discuss and address a variety of topics ranging from ship spinning to performance to virtual goods strategies. The discussions were very productive and both parties came to an understanding and agreement on key topics. That meeting has now ended and a firm resolution reached by both parties.

CCP acknowledges that the reaction following the leaked internal communication could have been handled better. Good communication and trust between CCP and the EVE community has always been a fundamental priority for CCP and will continue to be so.

It is CCP‘s plan that the Noble Exchange (NeX store) will be used for the sale of vanity items only. There are no plans, and have been no plans, as per previous communication and CSM meetings, to introduce the sale of game breaking items or enhancements in the NeX store.

The investment of money in EVE should not give you an unfair advantage over the investment of time. The CSM, under NDA, has been presented with CCP‘s plans for continued evolution of the business model and agrees that nothing they saw breaks this principle. CCP has committed to sharing their plans with the CSM on this front on an ongoing basis.

CCP acknowledges that communication surrounding the launch of the virtual goods store should have been better. To address that, we will write up dev blogs that explain the pricing strategy of the NeX store and the price tiering system. We will also communicate that we intend to put the focus on further fleshing out the lower price range and give visual examples of upcoming items.

The CSM raised concerns with performance running multiple clients after the Incarna launch where the minimum hardware spec will only support one client logged in when in a station environment. CCP will work on creating a minimum hardware spec that supports multiple clients, but wants it to be clear that the current minimum specification aims at single client with low settings.

The CSM helped CCP understand the emotional connection players had with „ship spinning”. They vehemently demanded the return of the feature, which CCP committed to introduce in some form at a future date. Until that functionality is added back in, the option to load station environments will remain in the Settings menu.

We are very happy with the results of the meetings and appreciate the commitment to EVE the CSM members have shown by attending the meeting on short notice.

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason
Senior Producer of EVE Online

And then we have the statement from the CSM:

Statement on behalf of the Council of Stellar Management from The Mittani, Chairman of CSM 6

The CSM came to Reykjavik for this extraordinary summit to address the cloud of suspicion and fear which has descended upon CCP and the EVE community in the aftermath of the Incarna expansion and the various internal leaks.

The issues we have addressed and discussed with CCP are:

Captain’s Quarters: We discussed the hardware and lighting issues within the CQ and we were satisfied that they were being addressed. We were pleased when Torfi announced that the current “Disabled Incarna Door” will be replaced with an environment that will provide similar functionality and performance to the pre-Incarna Hangar, and this environment will be available until Incarna performance is similar to pre-Incarna performance. While the final details and timelines have not been worked out, ships will once again spin all over New Eden.

Noble Exchange Rollout Debacle: We were shocked and appalled to discover how badly the planning and implementation of the Noble Exchange was executed. Despite the fact that they did not have enough assets of the right types to do a proper rollout, they launched anyway. The CSM believes that if CCP had properly communicated the details of their vanity goods pricing strategy and had sufficient low-tier items available at launch, the controversy would have been greatly reduced. CCP will issue a dev blog in the near future explaining their vanity goods strategy and how it will be implemented in the Noble Exchange.

Game-affecting Virtual Goods: We are convinced that CCP has no plans to introduce any game-affecting virtual goods, only pure vanity items such as clothing and ship skins. We have been repeatedly assured that there are no plans for ‘gold ammo’, ships which have different statistics from existing common hulls, or any other feared ‘game destroying’ virtual goods or services. We have expressed our deep concern about potential grey areas that the introduction of virtual goods permits, and CCP has made a commitment to discuss any proposals that might fall into these grey areas in detail with CSM at the earliest possible stage.

The Fearless “Greed is Good?” Leak: We accept CCP’s position that Fearless is a deliberately controversial internal publication and does not represent the policy of CCP Management or of CCP Zulu, the Senior Producer of EVE Online, nor the direction of game design.

The Leaked Hilmar Global Email: We were appalled by the leaked Hilmar email and the atrocious and out-of-touch messaging it contained. We sympathize and agree with those players offended and disgusted by it.

Arnar (CCP Zulu)’s Angry Friday Blog: We were disappointed by the tone taken in Arnar’s Blog, but we understand that he was in a state of extreme agitation and reacting to the leaks coming from within his company, which he saw as a breach of trust. While we may disagree with some of his decisions, we are united in our support of Arnar as the Senior Producer, and were pleased with his followup Apology Blog. We hope that his statement today will begin to restore your trust in his leadership and vision.

We believe that the situation that has unfolded in the past week has been a perfect storm of CCP communication failures, poor planning and sheer bad luck. Most of these issues, when dealt with in isolation, were reasonably simple to discuss and resolve, but combined they transformed a series of errors into the most significant crisis the EVE community has yet experienced.

We hope that this meeting will be the first step in the restoration of trust between CCP and the EVE community, and we will keep the community informed as to CCP’s efforts in delivering on the commitments they have made to us and to you.

First off, I have to say that I’m entirely impressed with the current CSM. When the current group was announced it was easy to see that this CSM would be an effective one, and this kind of thing really shows that off. Their statement really is indicative of the feelings of the players that care even the tiniest bit about the game. In my opinion, this is what CSM is all about.

The CCP statement is a mixed bag for me. It’s a combination of “we think we get it now” type of stuff, mixed with a baffling lack of focus. I don’t know about the rest of you, but there are a hundred other things I’d rather like to see their development focus dedicated to resolving before even considering looking at ship spinning. Get a grip.

There is also a distinct lack of  attention paid to the elephant in the room: Hilmar’s e-mail. I’m just going to put it out there that no response to that in the CCP statement is unbelievably irresponsible. To be honest, I don’t think one can possibly ever undo that kind of thing anyway, but a response to it in some capacity would have been nice, rather than just a generic “derp, we suck at communicating” thing. Maybe a statement about the issue from the man himself is forthcoming, who knows.

In conclusion, I think these statements reflect that the emergency summit actually did manage to accomplish a lot. I think the point has been driven home to CCP that they need to connect more with players about these kinds of major changes to the game, although time will tell if we will see some actual beneficial changes to the way this interaction is carried out.

It should also show the players that their voice can count in times like these, and that this is totally unlike other games out there where your feedback will generally stop at the meatshield level (community forums and the people who moderate them). In no way do I intend to diminish the efforts of previous CSMs, but I have to really salute The Mittani and the rest of the current CSM with their ability to represent that feedback in an intelligent manner.

Click through to the dev blog to watch the video where the statement is discussed, and admire Mittens’ beard grooming skills.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Accord Reached At CCP’s Special Summit

The newest Dev Blog from CCP Zulu has some things to say about the recent events in EVE Online…

The tone and demeanor of my blog on Friday did not correctly portray my emotions towards the community and player base at large. I love and respect EVE and its community on a level that’s hard to really do justice in words. However I let my frustration take charge of me, fueled by emotions that had built up due to a breach of trust we at CCP have been experiencing over the past few days. I know that sounds ironic considering those are the exact same feelings you have been having towards CCP.

For that I am sorry.

Having cooled off a bit and taken a solemn look at the situation, I see it’s clear we need to strengthen the deep mutual trust and respect that’s been so unique and descriptive of our relationship. There are certain questions you want answered and there isn’t room for more error in our communication on those topics or our perception of the root causes.

Therefore we have asked the CSM to join us in Iceland for an extraordinary meeting June 30^th and July 1^st to discuss the events of past week, to help us define and address the real underlying concerns, and to assist us in defining and iterating on our virtual goods strategy.

The result of this meeting should be mutual agreement of how virtual goods and services will evolve in EVE. Other issues may be brought up and we urge you to contact the CSM with your comments and concerns so that they may be addressed at this session.

However, just to prove the point of the Fearless newsletter and give you a further understanding of what it is then there are no and never have been plans to sell “gold ammo” for Aurum. In Fearless people are arguing a point, which doesn’t even have to be their view, they are debating an issue. This is another example of how information out of context is no information at all.

Due to the volatility of the topic we want to refrain from any further comments on this matter until after meeting with the CSM.

Thank you for your patience,

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason

Senior Producer of EVE Online

You know what, lets try something different… lets word cloud this thing and see what we get.

Yep, that’s what I thought… words.  To be honest I don’t know if this says much other than there being a distinct focus on the future. If one were so inclined, one could whittle the whole blog down to “lets just forget about that stuff and move forward”. Honestly that might not be such a bad idea… if EVE Online was similar to World of Warcraft in its complexities.

But it’s not.

I have to tip the hat to Zulu for apologizing, and chasing after getting a CSM meeting going on such short notice. Based on comments I’ve seen around the interwebz, I think the CSM have the greater community’s needs in mind and can represent them effectively.

I am concerned about the openness of the meeting, and others have indicated this in forum posts about this. Non-disclosure agreements are frequently employed in situations where exposing strategic business directions could compromise that business. Sorry to say it folks, but this is obviously going to be one of those cases, so don’t expect a live webcast of the meetings to occur. I imagine we’ll get a somewhat informative statement from CCP about it, and some incredibly informative stuff from CSM.

We know there were no plans to do microtransactions in EVE before. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be in the future, so the same applies to the “gold ammo” concept. The fact that the idea is prevalent enough in CCP to be discussed and not whacked with a mallet like a mole from upper management strikes me that we’re one or two design team reshufflings away from seeing gold ammo in EVE.

Four things are true:

• CCP is a business
• Microtransactions = $$$
• Businesses <3 $$$
• Players of other games have shown it’s a model that works well for companies that employ the concept.

I don’t expect the concept to go away anytime soon, but I would expect is for CCP to come back down to planet Earth for a few minutes and be made to understand that just because a shirt costs $20 in real life does not mean we should have to pay that for an e-shirt.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: The Realities of EVE

Today has been a day that will live in stupidity. I’m a fairly positive person about things, as those of you who listen to the podcasts can probably attest to, but even I can’t help but be a bit speechless when seeing the events of the last day unfold. The sheer mind-blowingness of the whole thing is force multiplied by a factor of a million monocoles when one keeps in mind who are the ones responsible for it all. Lets look at what happened.

It started out with this un-stickied thread by CCP Pann, which grew into a threadnought of biblical proportions almost instantaneously:

Hi, everyone

Some of you who have been around for a while may remember me. I was the original community manager for EVE. These days, I oversee the PR and Community teams. While most of what I do happens behind the curtains, I am still aware of what’s going on front and center. I would be lying if I said that what’s happening now didn’t make me sad, but I’m not here to ask for your sympathy. To be perfectly honest, I’m here to buy time while we try to sort things out. No sense in lying about it so I’ll call a spade a spade.

It’s clear that many of you are <understatement alert> angry </alert>. There’s a lot happening, things are changing quickly and we haven’t been as forthcoming as you were used to in the past. I’m willing to step out front and take a lot of heat for that since I was the one who made the decision to hold off on responding for a while to see if things cooled down once the new wore off.

I was wrong to do that and I apologize. We should have said something much sooner. We should have done more to address your concerns and be forthcoming, even if we weren’t going to be able to immediately give you all of the answers you were looking for or the answer your questions in ways that will instantly turn those frowns upside down. To be even more candid, I cannot answer all of your questions, either, but I am working with the people who can to start getting those answers for you. Again, I know we’re doing this past the expiration date of your patience but I hope you’ll bear with me.

I know that, with very few exceptions, most of you don’t know me from Adam. I haven’t earned your trust or respect; therefore I have no right to ask anything of you – but I am going to try, anyway. Can I please count on at least some of you to help bring the pitchforks and torches down a few notches?

Like I said, I won’t be able to answer all of your questions tonight, but I promise we’ll start getting some info out tomorrow. As I see it, the chief complaint is regarding the high cost of goods in the Noble Market. Second, many people are unhappy about the Captain’s Quarters. Third, there are some performance issues with Incarna. I would appreciate it if you would confirm my observations or tell me what I’m missing, but I do ask that you do it in a productive way. I will remove posts without prejudice if they are counterproductive to the conversation I hope to have with you.

If you’ve read this much, thanks for staying with me. If you have something to say, I’d like very much to hear it.

Humbly yours,
~P~

Later that day, probably due to the writeup needing to run through the spanking machine of CCP’s communications and PR departments, we get this bit of damage control. No wait, that’s not it…  it’s just more uncontrolled damage:

Dear concerned citizens of New Eden

This week has seen quite a controversy unfold. In almost the same instant as we deployed Incarna – which by the way is one of our more smooth and successful expansions, not to mention absolutely gorgeous – an internal newsletter with rather controversial topics addressed leaked out. To further compound the confusion there was a clear and rather large gap in virtual goods pricing expectation and reality with a large segment of the community. I‘m going to address both these issues right here.

Fearless

Fearless is one of our company values. It‘s also the name of an internal newsletter that has been designed and developed specifically to catalyze discussions on controversial topics. One of the biggest elephants in the room these days, not just for EVE but for the gaming industry as a whole, is virtual goods sales and microtransactions.

Therefore we dedicated an entire issue to exactly that topic. It‘s worth mentioning that the topic of the issue was “Greed is good?” as a way to ask a question that would then be debated back and forth and often exaggerated purposefully to draw contrasts and make points. The result of that is now widely available on the internet.

The opinions and views expressed in Fearless are just that; opinions and views. They are not CCP policy nor are they a reliable source of CCP views as a company. The employees who submitted articles to that newsletter did exactly what they were asked to do, write about theories and opinions from an exaggerated stand.

While it‘s perfectly fine to disagree and attack CCP over policies or actions we take, we think it‘s not cool how individuals that work here have been called out and dragged through the mud due to something they wrote in the internal company newsletter. Seriously, these people were doing their jobs and do not deserve the hate and shitstorm being pointed at them.

Pricing structure

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don’t need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don’t need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

We will gradually introduce items at other price points, definitely lower and probably higher than what‘s in the store today. We hope you enjoy them and are as passionate about them as you are of the current items that are for sale.

I hope I‘ve addressed your concerns and cleared up a lot of the issues you‘re having. We‘ll continue monitoring the forums and other communications channels and pick up and reply if there are concerns not covered by this blog.

Thanks,

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason

Senior Producer of EVE Online

And now the finale, delivered by none other than Hilmar himself, proving once again that community destroying business development tactics always come in threes:

Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:16:54 -0400
To: riverini@gmail.com
Subject: ccp ceo global msg sent today
From: evewatch@hush.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=.UTF-8.
Message-Id: <20110623221654.CF1E76F438@smtp.hushmail.com>

sent by hilmar to ccp global list-

(strt)

We live in interesting times; in fact CCP is the kind of company that if things get repetitive we instinctively crank it up a notch. That, we certainly have done this week. First of we have Incarna, an amazing technological and artistic achievement. A vision from years ago realized to a point that no one could have imaged but a few months ago. It rolls out without a hitch, is in some cases faster than what we had before, this is the pinnacle of professional achievement. For all the noise in the channel we should all stand proud, years from now this is what people will remember.

But we have done more, not only have we redefined the production quality one can apply to virtual worlds with the beautiful Incarna but we have also defined what it really means to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life when it comes to launching our new virtual goods currency, Aurum.

Naturally, we have caught the attention of the world. Only a few weeks ago we revealed more information about DUST 514 and now we have done it again by committing to our core purpose as a company by redefining assumptions. After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles, generating more revenue than any of the other items in the store.

This we have done after months of research by a group of highly competent professionals, soliciting input and perspective from thought leaders and experts in and around our industry. We have communicated our intention here internally in very wide circles through the Virtual Economy Summit presentation at the GSM, our Fearless newsletter, sprint reviews, email lists and multiple other channels. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say. Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change.

We went out with a decisive strategy on pricing and we will stay the course and not flip flop around or knee jerk react to the predictable. That is not saying nothing will change, on the contrary, in fact we know that success in this space is through learning and adapting to _what is actually happening_ and new knowledge gained in addition to what we knew before and expected.

All that said, I couldnât be prouder of what we have accomplished as a company, changing the world is hard and we are doing it as so many times before! Stay the course, we have done this many times before.

(end)

I know it’s been said a lot before around the EVE forums, and I’ve echoed the sentiment myself frequently over the past bunch of years: CCP is disconnected from its community. It’s done so in the hopes it can garner more attention from the media and prospective subscribers, to attract more MMO fans over to a wonderful world filled with spaceships, dedicated players, and a fully realized universe driven by the actions of its players.

It looks like the trailers were right after all: the smallest of your actions do resonate and affect thousands of players. Lets see how these ones resonate.

Sources:

• Dev Blog by CCP Zulu: Fearless, Virtual Goods, and Rage
• Forum Post by CCP Pann: An overdue apology and request for parley
• EVENews24: Leaked Hilmar Email

Seriously, I’m really curious who came up with the pricing for the items in the new Noble Exchange. Not only are the players’ jaws on the floor about this, but gaming media is all over this.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the value in microtransactions for the MMO industry. Other games are making a mint off of selling people items and services for a few bucks here and there, but they sure didn’t get buy-in from players by selling virtual monocles for $70. Incarna, and subsequent immersion-oriented expansions to do more with our now-bodied avatars, will do well with properly managed microtransaction content, but pricing like this shows that someone over there at CCP doesn’t quite get it.

Everyone likes money, right? CCP thinks you do, so they’re giving you some ability to make a bit more by developing third-party applications and services for EVE.

At this year’s Fanfest CCP hosted the first Dev Track in what we hope will be a regular event. To kick off the event I gave an exciting announcement about monetization, which has up to this point been a sore point for EVE Online 3rd party software development, since it has been against the ToS to charge for applications or services which use the EVE Online Intellectual Property.

Starting this summer you will be able to charge people for usage of your applications, websites and services for EVE Online.

CCP will license 3rd party developers to create commercial applications and services created using the EVE API, In-Game Browser, Static Data Export, Image Export and Eve Image server.

You as a developer will basically be signing up, and paying for, a license that will allow you to be all commercial-like while powering your product with EVE goo. Non-commercial folks will need to grab a non-commercial license, that will cost them nothing. Well almost, because since this is a license both options will, at minimum, cost you YOUR SOUL.

There is currently a rant/comments thread happening on the forums about this, and the original dev blog is being updated with some responses to the concerns of folks.

To be honest, I’m a bit concerned myself. While WDA is not a commercial venture at all, licenses like this have the possibility of being more like gags. Now note, there isn’t the full text of the licenses yet available for the masses to look at, but as a site which primarily deals with opinions on the game I will have to say that the concept of a forced-upon-me agreement is hilarious.

This apparently came from CCP’s business development group. Great for them, maybe they forgot about that part of EVE called community development, which is solely responsible for EVE being a functioning game since 2003. Is this step indicative that one of those things is more important than the other?

It will be interesting to see when more information becomes available.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Monetizing your Apps and Services

Breaking news here, but it appears that the guys responsible for the recent swath of hacks has taken out EVE Online. Here’s hoping the damage is not permanent, but the site and game is currently down.

We just wiped out the login server for Eve Online, and it accidentally took their website out at the same time

It’s also going to be an interesting day on Twitter for @EveOnline, writing:

EVE Online and related services are currently offline, to return ASAP after investigation of some issues

More on this as it develops.

UPDATE (correcting post title too)

Looks like the game’s back online, and there’s this handy update from CCP’s COO:

A message from our COO.

At 17:00 UTC today, CCP became aware of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the EVE Online cluster and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 17:55 UTC, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to ensure the best possible service for our players and the security of their personal, billing and account information.

We understand the effect this disruption has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain fully to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of any potential problem.

Our taskforce concluded at 22:05 that neither the game servers nor the CCP infrastructure had been breached. Further, we can also confirm that no personal details such as users’ credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident.

The servers were brought back online at 23:00 and we will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Again, we sincerely apologize for this disruption.

Regards,

Jón Hörðdal

Chief Operating Officer

Nice job. Disruption of service sure, but at least CCP has some monitoring in place to know what was done. Kudos.

Sources:

• News: EVE Back Online

Incarna is coming on the 21st of June, and CCP is celebrating this by unleashing the new Incarna feature page upon the internets.

Incarna represents a pretty significant set of changes to EVE, and the site largely ignores that fact and instead takes it as an opportunity to shove social networking and marketing before meaningful content. Inexplicably, there is yet another countdown clock on the site. I’m beginning to wonder if this was some super expensive component or something, that they have to use it on every marketing site from here on to recoup costs.

Ok so there IS one redeeming page in the whole site, and that is the actual feature descriptions page. It’s largely a mix of content and links dealing with existing dev blogs on the subject of this coming patch, but it serves as a handy summary for those looking for a one stop shop.

Sources:

• Incarna – Features Page

The countdown is over.  The world is now shocked to find that the site that previously held a countdown clock is in fact a marketing site for a first person shooter set — get this — in the EVE universe.

No, seriously! Check this out, I’m not making this up:

DUST 514 is a PS3-exclusive persistent shooter focused on intense infantry combat augmented by powerful vehicles. Uniquely, it is set in, and directly connected to, the thriving player driven universe of EVE Online.

There are even bullet points, just like any good console game marketing site should have:

• A Galaxy of Battlefields: check
• An Immortal Soldier: check
• Conflict is a Way of Life: check
• An Economy Fueled By War: check

Yep, it’s an EVE game.

Ok seriously, now…  The site’s got a bunch of new screens, and a new trailer, so we can get a slightly better feel for how the game will play than the videos shown before. And you didn’t read that wrong: it’s a PS3 exclusive.

This part actually baffles me, since the larger market for multiplayer online is clearly the Xbox 360. Then again, the PS3 has been a platform more welcoming to developers that take risks, and is a much less closed ecosystem than Xbox Live. All the better to integrate a game with a third party online service, say like the CCP servers for DUST.

Noticeably absent from class: a firm release date. He’s probably out back having a smoke with World of Darkness.

Sources:

• DUST 514 (now with 100% less countdown clocks)

There are times when countdowns are bad things.  Thankfully though, you’re not  a secret agent tasked with disarming a nuclear bomb. This time you’re an EVE player or fan, and E3 is just around the corner.

The game industry is no stranger to this concept — sometimes there are announcement countdowns, and there are even more ridiculous times where the result is a tweet about a new game. This time I’m thinking we’re all in for a treat: a spanky new marketing site all about DUST 514, and along with industry folks at E3 we will finally see some more concrete and interesting details about the game.

Clicking below will only let you watch the clock for now. But very soon I think we will be welcoming a bunch of new players to EVE via consoles.

Or, just playing it ourselves. No worries either way.

Sources:

• DUST 514

EVE’s marketing has, in the past, outpaced the game by huge strides when it comes to overall presentation. That’s not a bad thing really; it is precisely what marketing is supposed to do in order to sell the game to a new audience. Occasionally there are aspects which current players look at and salivate over to see in the game.

Remember that really cool part in the Tyrannis trailer where the ships had fitting windows and other user interfaces hovering around the ships in space? If not, click here. Lots of people were wondering if this was possible with EVE, and the latest dev blog from CCP Snorlax seems to indicate that the groundwork for this kind of stuff is coming in the next Incursion patch.

CarbonUI is an evolution of the existing UI framework, with a completely new rendering layer.  We’ve strived to change as little as we can in the high-level interface, so the UI programmer, working in Python doesn’t see much change – and more importantly, those ~200K lines of UI related code continue to work.

The full feature list of available UI options is in the blog itself for you to read, but includes such fun things like sticking 2D UI on a 3D object. If you’ve played any recent games like Crysis 2 or Dead Space you’ll know how these kinds of UI options can really add an immersion factor to a game.

When EVE was launched some 8 years ago, the UI looked pretty much on par with other games. Times have changed, but our UI hasn’t really. Even though projects such as CarbonUI are difficult to pull through, they are absolutely essential if we ever want to move beyond what the current technology allows for. Even though players won’t see much visual difference once we launch CarbonUI on to TQ, we can promise you that our UI designers are already hearing a lot more of “sure, no problem” when they deliver their regular batch of crazy ideas to their fellow programmers, ultimately resulting in UI that’s fittingly awesome for our lovely little space game.

Sounds awesome.

Ok, so your Abaddon won’t be firing a giant blue ball of fleet melting death plasma anytime soon, but at least you’ll soon be able to browse your in-game underwear drawer in true Minority Report style.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: CarbonUI and Eve Online: Incursion 1.6