Hot Drop Target: Digital Solaris

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I stick a microphone in front of Digital Solaris (full-time forum whorewarrior), who rants with me about the current state of EVE.  Like well… everyone else seems to be doing these days.  I apologize in advance for the wonky quality of the interview section of the recording.

Episode Music:

Rufus White
“Every Little Star” (mp3)
from “Every Little Star”
(Soul Shift Music)

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In what could possibly be the scariest thing ever to come out of CGDC, we’re treated to the following news about EVE.

At CGDC 2010 (Game Developers Conference) held in Shanghai, China, Hilmar V. Petursson, CEO of CCP Games, disclosed a crazy plan that they would connect the Chinese server of EVE Online with its world server in the future to make all EVE Online players throughout the world gather together.

If by some chance you were unaware, there are actually two EVE Onlines. One that you’re probably playing, and a second in China which so far has been kept entirely separate from the the first EVE Online.

According to Hilmar Petursson, this plan will provide an opportunity for Chinese players and other players in the world to compete with each other in a same place and make them enjoy better gaming services.

At this point, I’ll break out a big bag of popcorn and start munching away.

Personally, I feel EVE has enough of its own issues currently that should be addressed first before anything like this is even entertained.  You know, maybe the solution to curing lag isn’t to add 1.3 billion new potential customers.

Sources:

• EVE Online’s Chinese Server to Be Merged with Its World Server

You can click the link below for the full details, but for now lets look at the breakdown:

• Incarna: 9 teams, approximately 70 developers
• Dust 514/EVE link: 1 team, approximately 7 developers
• In-space features: 3 teams, approximately 22 developers
• EVE Gate: 1 team, approximately 10 developers
• Others: 4 teams, approximately 15 developers

Nine teams for Incarna, huh.  Admittedly it’s going to be a very tech-heavy expansion, involving folks from multiple disciplines to pull off, but for a lot of folks we’re talking about something that is utterly forgettable if all you want to do is undock and blow ships to pieces.

All is not lost, if you’re thinking this means all CCP is doing is tacking on frivolous features to EVE…

That does not mean that we won‘t make any improvements until then!  We haven‘t started planning the Spring 2011 or Winter 2011 expansions yet (not to that level of granularity) but we do realize the urgency of revisiting certain key game features. Rest assured, the CSM will play a large role in identifying those.

Please, also keep in mind that our developers are constantly fixing bugs – small ones, big ones, important ones and obvious ones. But also bugs you‘ve never experienced, never seen and never heard of. The EVE code base is as big as the universe itself and we‘re constantly engaged in cleanup and backend work that the players will never notice unless something goes horribly wrong.

I’m sure at least some of those people are also hard at work with new COSMOS constellation content, and bringing Faction Warfare across the finish line.

…right?

Sources:

• Iterative Development and What’s Happening in 2011

As players we’ve been treated to a brand spanking new server cluster. Thanks to the immense downtime associated with that, we’re also getting some free skillpoints.

In gratitude for your patience and after consulting the Council of Stellar Management, we will give an extra pool of skillpoints to all accounts (paying and trial) that were active at the beginning of this downtime, on one character per account. This skillpoint pool will be appropriately sized for the downtime time frame, universal across all accounts regardless of character attributes/implants and may be applied as each player wants.

It’s not like you’re suddenly going to be able to insta-train to Titan 5 with this but it’s definitely better than nothing. Congratulations are in order to CCP for getting the cluster business sorted too, that’s definitely more than a cut-and-paste job.

But wait… there’s more! Apparently feeling bad about the loss of so many ships in the tournament, a magic wand is being waved in order to give us all a brand new ship, the Primae. Quoth CCP Zinfandel:

The Primae is a repurposed ORE design intended to ease the task of extracting resources from planetbound environments. Initially devised as a deep space salvage vessel for large-scale ore retrieval from destroyed ORE fleets in pirate-occupied areas, its previous incarnation was made all but obsolete by the arrival of capsuleers on the interstellar scene. Realizing that the ship could, with a few minor modifications, be made into an efficient resource harvesting aid, ORE wasted no time in revamping the design.

You’re probably wondering how and when you can get your hands on this wondrous machine of planetary … something.

Beginning June 29, 2010, you will find the ability to redeem it on your account login screen. You can then assign it to a particular character and a friendly ORE agent will deliver it to your hangar bay. You will be able to redeem the Primae once per active (not trial) account and will no longer be available after downtime on Tuesday, July 13th 2010, so make sure you log in to receive yours.

It may not be as pretty as the Hyperion but hey, it’s a free shippy ship!

Sources:

• News: Welcome Back to Tranquility
• Dev Blog: ORE Primae Ship Nearing Distribution

As awesome as the video stream is for the latest in EVE Online’s fantastic tournament offerings, pictures can often capture an interesting moment in the middle of all the carnage. In previous tournaments, I was able to attend and snap some photos during the matches, and put them online pretty quickly. This year, I’m happy to announce I’ll be able to do this again.

You can see all of the pictures at the link below. Enjoy!

Sources:

• EVE Online Alliance Tournament 8 Flickr Set

Hot Drop Target: Tournament Organizers and Experts

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I get a chance to sit down with the kind folks from CCP involved in organizing the upcoming Alliance Tournament 8, as well as the expert players who will be commentating the matches. We find out what kind of work goes into the preparation for EVE’s tournaments, and what we can all expect from this one. Why, there may even be a surprise announcement or two thrown in for giggles, so have a listen and enjoy!

Episode Music:

:Papercutz
“Lylac” (mp3)
from “Do Outro Lado Do Espelho – Lylac Ambient Reworks”
(Audiobulb Records)

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The upcoming Tyrannis expansion was nearly upon us, when CCP announced their decision to delay its release.

We regret to inform you that deployment of our upcoming expansion Tyrannis has been pushed back by one week to May 26th, and that market seeding of Planetary Command Centers is pushed back to June 8th.

In our regression testing, we have identified scalability issues with the Planetary Interaction feature, which led to code refactoring that then needed further testing before being launched to Tranquility. Planetary Interaction is a unique feature in the sense that it is available to almost all players in the game providing opportunity for manufacturing for the masses, so ensuring that it runs smoothly on our cluster is of great importance to all.

Long story short, something’s broken. And, in a move that is so totally unlike developers of games the world over, CCP has chosen to fix it first before releasing it upon the unsuspecting masses.

The coolest aspect of this is that they’re doing a partial deploy, in a way. Giving people a chance to get their brain wrapped around the concepts here is a good thing, because it’s not a feature that I would personally recommend people just run headlong into, lest they end up wasting quantities of ISK needlessly. Consider playing around on the test server first.

One of the worst aspects so far of what I’ve seen is the whole concept of knowing what the hell to do with the stuff afterwards. Previously, I’ve made note that all I could find as an end product is nanite paste, but in fact the high end outputs of the processes here will end up as inputs to manufacturing sovereignty gear. The pain in the ass here is that in order to find that out, you have to dig into the blueprints section of the market.

Ok ok, so that’s not too bad, but think of this from a different perspective. You’re a person just starting out with your planetary endeavors, and you can see all the things you’ll be producing and how they tie into other planetary productions. Beyond that, you get no direct information. Why not show a subgrouping of products the stuff can be used in that is outside of  planet production, like oh I don’t know, sovereignty gear?

At any rate, fear not, for you will have some additional stuff to play with on the 26th.

EVE Gate will also be released on May 26th, with its web access to EVE Mail, Calendar and revamped contacts, both in-game and on the web.

The EVE Gate service is pretty cool actually, and I’ll be doing a writeup on winterblink.com about it soon. I can’t wait to see how that service grows in the future, but having access to evemail outside of EVE has been one of my wish list items for a while now.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Tyrannis Release Delayed

Hot Drop Target: Yon89, Shou Ning

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I try to get as many random people as possible to talk about Tyrannis with zero notice. I manage to catch Yon89 while he’s at work, and interrupt Shou Ning’s evening watching movies with his kiddo. In typical fashion, we end up talking about cows, Avatar, and some sort of upcoming expansion for EVE. Oh, and we get spammed, live.

Episode Music:

Stars
“The Night Starts Here” (mp3)
from “In Our Bedroom After the War”
(Arts & Crafts)

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Today is EVE’s seventh birthday, and what better way to celebrate than with some spaceship cake. I mean just look at how many weapon slots that thing has! Uber…

In honor of this occasion, CCP has taken time out of their busy schedule to create a whole forum thread for birthday wishes. Click here to go there and drop a birthday wish or two for the devs and GMs, who are gracing the thread with their presence and making it stand out on the forum’s thread listing with all the nice colored bars.

Me, well, I just baked/search for this nice spaceship cake and all. Enjoy!

So then for those reading this, how many of EVE’s birthdays have you been witness to? Myself personally, I’ve been here since beta, so my mind’s just blown that I’ve played a game for more than seven years straight. Then again that’s a testament to the support the game has received from CCP, with all the patches, expansions, etc. that have kept the game smelling fresh for everyone.

Happy Birthday!

The new Tyrannis trailer’s pretty awesome. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do so immediately. Skip the IGN failgasm version and head to EVE-Files for the 720p version, crank the sound, and enjoy.

Just no rollback jokes.

Just fyi, I’ve been going back to the back-catalog of comics starting from the oldest ones and moving forward to the newer ones, putting them back online. I’m still not done, but it’s getting there, so thanks for being patient. :)

UPDATE: CCP has the high resolution version of the trailer available for download by clicking here. 1080p, here we come!

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