Category: dev blog

CCP Bayesian breaks out Excel to run the numbers on Odyssey now that the expansion has been out for a few weeks. Specifically, the Data and Relic site activities performed by players.

All of this has been made possible by a push towards gathering a lot more metrics from the game. Team Data, our dedicated metrics guys have given us some really powerful tools to crunch logs and generate the information below.

It’s pretty clear from these three graphs that usage and completion of these sites has increased immensely since the launch of Odyssey.

Other than winning the 2013 Captain Obvious Award, CCP Bayesian’s series of graphs does prove that player interest in exploration content has been not only initially strong, but has backed off to a level which continues to be significantly higher.

The entire point of the expansion was to put exploration on the table in front of as many people as possible, and almost everyone I’ve heard from has tried it at least once. Most people have figured out that the sites are basically free ISK, with the minigames not being a huge barrier between pilots and the exploding pinata of loot. Hell, even in empire space I’ve made fifty million ISK in a single site; while this isn’t a huge fortune by any stretch, it’s almost effortless to obtain and the grind is fairly fast.

We can see within a week of release that the player population had generally worked out what was and wasn’t worthwhile to take. This graph also shows that quite a large number of cans are going uncollected, losing whatever value they happened to contain. We’ll have to do some more digging to see how much value is represented there.

Yep. It didn’t take long for sites like Neural Boost to provide handy loot distribution information for folks to figure out what they should be focusing on.

As for what digging to CCP needs to do, here’s a freebie from me to you: ditch the scrap containers. They’re ignored by everyone except for the newest of explorers, and provide nothing for the effort. Get rid of them and ponder the distribution of loot in the remaining cans.

One of the things NOT touched on by the blog is resulting value of the items dropped in the sites.  I can imagine the next economic report blog will be an interesting read with regards to this.

Taking a look at the image above, see if you can guess the point where the expansion was released. Decryptor values have nosedived almost across the board, and there’s plenty of people and organizations in the game who have invested in them pre-Odyssey that saw the value of them disappear within a week or two. I’m no market nut, but I’m willing to bet the folks who deal with Invention have a thing or two to say about it.

Like any other mechanic and economic pot-stirring feature introduced to EVE, values and opinions will stabilize to a level that everyone will eventually accept. For now it seems that plenty of people are at least giving this a try, and that CCP are paying attention to how we’re trying it. Hopefully this means that future iterations of the features refine things for the better.

Sources:

• Exploration Sites in Odyssey – It’s Graph Time!

If you look back through the history of EVE’s dev blogs, you’ll find hidden gems strewn throughout the patch previews, feature discussions, and other more mainstream dev bloggy type of writeups. Blogs like The EVE Cluster gave us some inside information about the hardware infrastructure that drives a single shard sandbox games.  There was the cool one where CCP strode along the at-the-time bleeding edge by switching their database storage to a solid state SAN solution that drastically improved ingame market performance overnight.

The list goes on, but now we’re lucky to be treated to a day in the life of CCP WhiteTrashNoise, one member of Team Klang who are largely responsible for me turning back up the volume slider in the settings menu after years of space silence. The audio in EVE has evolved massively over the last couple of years, and with Odyssey things continue to be tweaked and improved; this new blog shows us how these changes were accomplished.

To create a whole new jump sequence when the actual jump is performed I was greatly inspired by a feature I had previously made sound for, the micro jump drive module.  It has a charging period, a jump and an arrival which is different depending on whether you are the ship actually jumping or you are a 3rd party witnessing a jump. I took apart the old jump gate sounds and began manipulating the sound when being fired away through the jump gate and used those waveforms to design a sort of traveling sound, which could then be used to morph between the jump gate sound and going through the wormhole.  In this way no matter what jump sound is used, we are certain that the sound of traveling will always fit the actual jump as well as the arrival.

The complexity of the audio system EVE wields is quite impressive. Instead of just playing the same audio asset no matter what, thought is put towards contextualizing its use for the player and also the observers. The reuse of existing sound assets for new audio means that new sounds will situate themselves naturally with everything else.

The audio team is working hard to get more “Information” in EVE’s soundscape.  This doesn’t mean that this information is a game or experience changer, but more that this is sound that is adaptive to the current situation; it may be very small changes but they are, none the less, important.

Such changes could be that the undocking sound is faction dependent, so depending on your ship’s faction and the type of station you are in the sounds will generate differently.

It’s not so much that they put these little details everywhere, it’s the forethought to leave it open to even more depth to be added later, such as the above point about having faction specific undocking sounds.

The new experience will be that you are dying. And I mean really dying like only a frozen space corpse can.

The sound of the explosion is now much more prominent (to complement with the new visual sequence of the players body floating in space) and is accompanied by the sound of the defeated capsuleer choking in the vacuum of space and taking his or her final breath, along with a re-spawn sound which is race and station dependent.

Name another game where you’ll see the equivalent of “Dying now sounds more realistic” in their patch notes.

…the entire soundscape is changed once entering the hacking interface.

A combination of soothing sounds, atmospheres and interaction sounds will take over, with each type of node has a unique interaction sound depending on the result of the node once clicked.  Every type of tool or object picked up has a sound.

The most important and coolest audio feature in this case is the ability to hover over the yet-to-be-clicked nodes and, as part of the soundscape, hear very subtle changes to the sounds of the computer you are trying to hack.

Having been messing with exploration a lot lately, I started to notice these little sound cues and I honestly figured they were totally random.  For the most part I’m trying my best to be quick about a hack before someone else scans down the anomaly and goes after cans I’ve not checked yet, so I never really fully paid attention to the audio details. Thinking back on it though, I can remember there being a lot of different and interesting audio cues going on for both hacking and archaeology minigames, and I’m definitely going to be paying more attention to them as a hinting detail.

These behind-the-scenes glimpses are pretty rare in the games industry. I can’t think of any other game which delves into this kind of detail about how specific aspects of the game was developed.  The history of EVE’s dev blogs show that CCP is like a proud parent, always willing to point out the achievements of its creation, big and small, and the role they took in its development.

EVE’s always been full of these tiny meticulous details in places you’d never imagine, even though for the most part they’re completely unnecessary. That said, I still love that they are there.  They’re like little signatures made by the developers, indicators of the care and attention brought to the game by the individuals working on it.

Sources:

• An Audio Transition: Introducing Odyssey’s New Transition Sounds
  

It’s been a busy last little while for dev blogs so I figured it would be a good idea to do a single wrap-up post about the new ones. I won’t go into meticulous detail on each, however links to the blogs themselves are at the bottom for further reading.

Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey

There certainly has been no shortage of drama over the upcoming scanning changes. It seems that with every new release of information, be it official or unofficial by folks trying it out on the test server, there are more worries that the changes are reducing the complexity of probing too much. CCP SoniClover gives a giant infodump of details just ahead of Odyssey’s arrival.

Rather than delve into all the details, lets explore a few of the more interesting highlights.

The recall and expire options have been changed a bit – recall is now instantaneous and happens automatically on system jump or dock. Probes still have a timer, but instead of being lost when the timer is out, they automatically recall instead. The system remembers your last probe setup before they were automatically recalled so they can be quickly deployed again in the same pattern (by activating the launcher).

I’d like to chalk this up as a streamlined process, and sure it will save people’s time, but words like “instantaneous” and “automatic” scare me when referring to things in EVE.

We changed the terminology of some of the exploration sites:

• Radar sites become Data sites
• Magnometric sites become Relic sites
• Gravimetric sites become Ore sites
• Ladar sites become Gas sites
• The Unknown type has also been split into Combat and Wormholes.

Updating the terminology makes a ton of sense to be honest. The current system doesn’t make a ton of sense when you consider that probes don’t have an explicit sensor type like ships do. This way you know what you’ve got in your results list right away so you can make an informed decision about which scan hit you want to pursue.

As part of the work Team Five-0 is doing, Ore sites (aka Gravimetric sites) are being made Cosmic Anomalies instead of Cosmic Signatures, meaning you no longer need probes to find them.

Every so often someone hints at the current mineral system of asteroid belts becoming scannable anomalies. While this isn’t being applied across the board, could this be a hint of things to come? With ice fields no longer appearing as belts with Odyssey, things could be getting more interesting in the future for miners.

Alliance Tournament Rules and Format

CCP Bro is probably going for a word count record with his Alliance Tournament blog. There’s way too much information there to comment on explicitly, so hit up the blog in the link below. They do want folks to pay attention to the following:

Major changes from previous years that you shouldn’t miss include:

• Tournament format has been converted to one 64 team double-elimination tournament, with no pre-qualifying or group stages.
• Minimum entry payment has been reduced to 5 plex, as we pass our cost optimization improvements on to you.
• We will be providing a dedicated tournament practice server for competing teams.
• We have a new tiebreaking system that takes advantage of time dilation.
• Several ship point changes, remote reps allowed on T1 Support Cruisers and Support Frigates, and a limitation of one remote energy transfer module per ship.
• Number of identical ships allowed reduced back to three.
• Hardwirings beyond 3%s are not allowed (Leadership mindlinks are an exception)
• The ship banning system from the New Eden Open is being introduced into the Alliance Tournament during the second and third weekends.
• Flagships are immune from banning.

Whether you plan on competing in the event or viewing it, some or all of the following dates will be worth keeping in mind.

Alliance Signup Period – June 3rd until June 9th at 23:59 UTC
Live stream of the 32 team random draw – June 11th
Silent Auction Period – June 12th to the 16th at 23:59 UTC
Participating Teams & Schedule Confirmed – June 19th
Tournament Weekend One (Non-studio, no banning) – July 20th & 21st
Tournament Weekend Two (Studio, Banning active) – July 27th & 28th
Tournament Weekend Three (Studio, Banning, Finals) – August 3rd and 4th

U and I made some changes: Odyssey UI changes

CCP Karkur spills the beans on a fuckton of UI fixes coming, most of which centered around maintaining player sanity and improving quality of life for players.

The blog included the following screenshot of the right click menu improvements made to the Watch List.

This is the kind of thing that smacks you as a no-brainer for anyone designing a UI, and calls into question the decisions behind the “Before” layout. My guess is that while implementing the new radial menu changes, all of the right click menus came under intense scrutiny in order to identify most frequently used items.  However I do have to giggle a bit at an initiative designed to remove UI clutter, at odds with one designed to reduce menus within menus.

So we made a small change so now when the ship is popping off your target list because it’s dead, it will blink a few times before it disappears so there should no longer be any confusion about whether the ship went down in flames or managed to warp away. Tl;dr: It blinks: “He’s dead, Jim.” It disappears: “She got away, captain.”

The fleet window also gets some love, with current features being improved as well as copy-pasting of fleet compositions. Hit the blog for all the details on these and other changes.

I realize of course that UI is the front and center part of EVE for all of us so there are certainly efforts by other teams to improve other less in-your-face aspects of the game. However, these guys have really been impressing me with what they’ve done to the front-end of EVE. Their team is one whose blogs I look forward to reading.

EVE on Steam: Past, Present and Future

EVE’s been on Steam for quite some time now, but soon its presence will be a bit more than just a basic game storefront on the Steam Store. CCP Spitfire gives us some details about what’s coming.

Coming soon you’ll not only be able to log in to EVE with your Steam credentials, but you’ll also be able to pay for your game time through Steam’s billing service.

First of all, tomorrow you might notice a new Steam icon on the EVE web login page. This means that you no longer need to manually create an EVE Online account after buying the game activation key on Steam; instead you use your Steam credentials to log into the game and the websites. This has been made possible by the Single Sign-On (SSO) technology developed by Team GForce.

Furthermore, players who have bought EVE Online on Steam from May 31 will be able to pay for their subscription on a recurring basis and buy PLEX packages directly via Steam, thanks to the back-end work done by Team Mammon.

One of the most compelling future possibilities was mentioned as well:

Other aspects of Steam we are potentially very interested in are the Community Hub and Steam Workshop – our community team has already started looking into the possibilities here, and we would love to hear your feedback on this as well.

Now those who’ve played other popular Steam games such as Team Fortress 2 will have already perked up their ears about this point. For those who don’t know, Steam Workshop opens up a whole world of community-created content possibilities for games. Who knows what kind of interesting things CCP could enable through this, but the success of the Steam Workshop with other games proves that it’s a viable platform for fan made content.

Summary

All in all, this has been a really busy week for dev blogs, not entirely unusual as the Odyssey expansion is right around the corner and major feature development has probably been frozen for a while.  There’s a lot of cool stuff coming, and it’s always nice to have the sneak peeks.

Sources:

• Probe Scanning and other Goodies for Odyssey
• Alliance Tournament Rules and Format
• U and I made some changes: Odyssey UI changes
• EVE on Steam: Past, Present and Future

 

CCP Bayesian brings us a new Dev Blog, detailing the upcoming changes to the Hacking and Archaeology sub-professions in EVE.

Team Prototyping Rocks has been working hard on improving the depth of gameplay that explorers will enjoy in their day to day lives. The devil is in the details and until this release the details behind Hacking and Archaeology have been very sparse. Our brief was to make the tasks you do in sites much more immersive and interactive.

Now I’ll admit that hacking/archaeology in EVE has never been one of those things I’ve fiddled with a ton.  It’s not that there’s no reward for doing it, it’s just that the activity itself isn’t awfully exciting. With the upcoming Odyssey expansion, CCP is hoping to change that for the better.

Instead of the current mechanic of shooting all the NPCs in a site, and hitting locked containers with your specialized module until they open, and looting the contents when it unlocks. If you’ve done salvaging then you can see the similarities here. With Odyssey will come a new minigame, pitting you against the device you’re trying to unlock.

The window shows the user the computer system mapped out as a network of interconnected nodes. One of the node’s contents is already visible as this was the penetration point of the activated module. Users hack a system by exploring the nodes adjacent to the nodes that they have already explored. Their goal is to find the core or cores in the system and taking them over by destroying them.

If all this sounds a lot like something you may have seen before, here’s a screenshot from Deus Ex: Human Revolution for comparison.

Deux Ex’s hacking was an easy to grasp concept that could still present challenges as the game progressed, and I feel it’s an excellent thing to draw inspiration on.  The addition of a minigames to EVE in order to spice up the hacking and archaeology processes is a fantastic one in my opinion, adding an element of randomness and interactivity to what is a mostly passive process right now. The blog also speaks of future enhancements which will bring more variety to this in the future.

Your success in the game is rewarded with a kind of loot piñata of sorts, whereby the contents of whatever you’re trying to get into spill out into space and disappear after a few seconds.

Once the core is destroyed the system has been hacked and the module forces the site to scatter its contents from the cargo hold into the vacuum of space. The hacker, his friends and anyone else around can then collect the scattered contents. We’ll be releasing another devblog shortly that will go into details of how the contents of the site are distributed and how they are collected.

It looks awesome when it happens, and I like their concept of teaming up with others providing a benefit to collecting the loot. Most people will probably do this solo, and I’m willing to bet someone will come up the perfect ship setup to collect it all without needing others, but CCP’s sentiment with this is a good one.

Odyssey is proving to be an interesting expansion for me. Playing around with some of these features on Singularity gives me that sci-fi nerdy feeling of exploration that wormholes did when they first came on scene.  There’s just something cool about jumping to a new system and having a sensor sweep light up the anomalies for you. In systems you frequent, it’s a little like discovering a new room in your house you didn’t know was there.

Since it was first introduced, very little has been done to keep things fresh and interesting; hell, I’m sure there’s a huge percentage of people who didn’t even know it existed, much less gave it a try or focused on it as a profession. My hope is that making this kind of content more front-and-center to more people gives CCP incentive to continue to develop it.

Sources:

• Hacking in Odyssey

It’s been a long time coming, but CCP is about to make good on the promise of an integrated MMO and FPS this coming Thursday, January 10th 2013.

On Thursday the 10th of January, following a slightly longer than usual scheduled downtime, we will be migrating over players currently participating in the DUST 514 closed beta from Singularity to Tranquility.

This is not only significant for those of us who’ve been playing EVE, but for the gaming industry as a whole. This simply has never really been done before, and in true CCP style they are taking slow baby steps to make sure the delicate balance of both games aren’t going to be totally ruined.

While you won’t be able to send billions of ISK to your DUST characters yet, you will be able to drop truckloads of searing hot plasma on them from orbit. Bombardment is a go folks, for now limited to low security systems involved with faction warfare.

Personally I wish I didn’t have to coordinate with DUST soldiers at all, and just be able to pull into orbit and provide random gameplay enhancement to the soldiers on the ground. There’s a weird quote from the dev blog where they mention “the first flavor being the Tactical Strike”. That implies other flavors, and I hope one of those flavors is Random EVE Asshole Messing With DUST Players.

With local chat integration, ISK sellers will be able to reach more people now since we can openly communicate with DUST mercenaries.

Actually that alone should make things interesting since the beta is still closed and the NDA is still technically in effect.  They will be dealing with NDA violations left and right so I can only imagine that it will be lifted soon. I’d love to post my thoughts about DUST.

With this integration now happening so soon, how are you going to participate in DUST related activities – PC or PS3?

Source:

• DUST 514 Enters the EVE Universe

Now, when CCP first introduced the concept of their ship revamps months back, I was a bit skeptical they’d be able to pull it off properly.  EVE’s delicious soup of ships allowed for creative fittings to be employed by pilots. This sometimes resulted in some really interesting uses for some ships, and hilariously shit ones as well.

In a shocking feat of organization and forward thinking, a team of monkeys at CCP has been sorting the ship pile into the following buckets:

• Combat – killing things
• Attack – killing things… too
• Disruption – stop killing me and my friends
• Support – the wind beneath your wings
• Exploration – finding new places to die
• Mining – everyone’s dirty little secret

After working their way up from the smaller supporting type ships for the Retribution expansion, CCP’s rebalancing meatshield Ytterbium details their plans for battlecruisers and battleships.  (Yes, I’m getting caught up on oldish dev blogs.)  The major details of this can be found in the dev blog itself, but there’s a couple of parts that bear attention.

Refactoring Skills

Throughout the entire series of ship tier related changes over the past year, CCP has been messing around with related skills. As we get into 2013, these changes start to take form in a really interesting way.

Historically, new players have bitched and moaned about not being able to catch up to veteran players that have years of skill training advantage over them. Truth, as the Vorlons say, is a three-edged sword:

1. They’re right, it will take them years to acquire the skills veteran players have built up, surely the game must be changed to accommodate them
2. They’re wrong, because they’re new players and too uneducated in the ways of EVE to understand that the game relies more on player skill rather than character skill
3. They’re both right and wrong. Because.

CCP being CCP has chosen to run with the third option because it’s their game and can do with it what they please.

• Make ship progression more consistent over all sizes, instead of having a mix of racial and generic skills
• Allowing for faster tech2 specialization, and slower multi-racial diversification. In EVE Online, while you as a new player will never catch up with the total amount of skill points a veteran has, you can still be on the same level by specializing. This is precisely what we want to promote here. For instance, currently one needs Amarr Cruiser and Battlecruisers 5 to fly an Absolution, after the change the same pilot will only need Amarr Battlecruisers 5 (on top of the other skill requirements).

This is actually not a bad solution, at least on paper. Everyone currently flying nicer ships can still do so, and anyone getting their asses blown off by a veteran flying a ship can fly that one themselves sooner (in some cases). I’m a big fan of Tech 2 ships myself, and while I’d love to have more people flying them faster, CCP runs the risk of once again marginalizing Tech 1 ships — things they’ve just spent a considerable amount of time and effort making interesting again.

Tech 3 Confusion?

I remember when the Tech 3 ship concept was pitched to players for the first time. It was basically the metaship, the thing you could make into whatever matched your play style, with bojillions of combinations of everything available to you for an arm and a leg, constructed from a totally new and interesting economy of its own. While this is certainly not changed, the focus this time is on bonuses to warfare links.

• Tech 3 ships to be able to carry more gang links at once than Command Ships, but with less effect
• Tech 3 ships to be able to carry some gang links while still maintaining some combat capability
• Command Ships to carry fewer types of gang links than Tech 3, but with stronger effects (specialization over generalization) – if fitted with gang links, they have less combat capability than Tech3 hulls.
• All Command Ships to have a combat role on the field on top of having the possibility to be fit for a pure fleet commanding platform.

The focus of this particular effort is in battlecruisers and battleships. The fact that Tech 3 stuff is being talked about at all while they manhandle the warfare bonuses of Tech 2 battlecruisers tells me two things:

1. Tech 3 stuff is so awesome in its current state that they’re more appealing than Tech 2 battlecruisers for warfare link related tasks.
2. CCP doesn’t know what the fuck to do with these ships.

The reason I say the latter is that with the complexities of Tech 1 and Tech 2 ships alone, it’s a bloody miracle that CCP won’t completely break the game’s delicate balance. Well, Tech 3 ships are designed to be wildcards. In my opinion, they need to have their own separate and well-thought-out attention devoted to them but only after the rest of the ships have had their roles defined and tested to be appropriate.

Anywho, in general I welcome the proposed changes to battlecruisers and battleships. They make a lot of sense with the previous changes, and definitely do a lot to unify ship styles with their overall category and race traits.

Source:

• Back to the Balancing Future

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