Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Silas Vitalia]

The fear is that, with a former EA marketing guy at a high level in CCP now, CCP will essentially 'forget' the lessons it learned so harshly before.

When EVE was started, corporate gaming hadn't yet been fully turned into a dlc/pay for things model ala EA's catalog just yet.  I think that original crop of CCP devs were of a completely different cloth.  EA are poison.

Those dlc marketing guys have a spreadsheet, they've really dialed-in how much they can charge for vanity items or isk or whatever and they know the exact ratio of subs to whales they need / whatever to get the spice to flow.  These guys are smart, they know just how much they can hollow out and bleed a property for x-years before they have to move on.

[Alex Hinkelmann]

I thought the EA guy was let go or quit?

[Ursa Dropsus]

I think that original crop of CCP devs were of a completely different cloth.

That was my impression too, both as an outsider, and also once I got on the inside (but I was in ATL, so nowhere near as valuable perspective on the old guard as if I was in RVK). CCP was almost anti-corporate at times, and proudly so. I used to say "I don't work in the games industry, I work for CCP". That feeling faded somewhat over time

With that said, employers had the ability to purchase stock in the company, and the older guard likely held quite a bit of it too, so that would certainly cultivate a bit more personal interest in pursuing financial gain more aggressively. I saw this a bit in ATL with older staff who'd been around longer (the amount of stock you could buy increased over time, and many folks bought the maximum they could each year). Even though they were wary of the pushback we saw at the time (Monocles and all that fun stuff) they were also hoping that this stuff (and also the ambitious expansion of the studio into other titles) would net them a nice retirement fund.

And since I'm here talking shit, I'll get this off my chest too. That whole "Greed is Good" debacle? Man that pissed me off, but probably not in the way you think. That newsletter (I forget its name) was so inconsequential and largely ignored, and it's purpose was singular - to promote discussions; to inform people in different disciplines what was happening more broadly in the company. It was so Jane in Accounting had some basic idea of what was going on, so that Melissa in the cafeteria could grasp the basic landscape of the development going on. That was its purpose, period. Thing is, nobody really read the first few versions of it, and it didn't get much traction internally.

The pursued solution? To hype it up and overplay things more, sex it up dramatically so that people might begin to pay attention and it could serve the purpose it was supposed to. Cue things like the "Greed is Good" release, which did a better job at sparking conversations with its overplayed, tongue-in-cheek approach to discussing the issues. Then, when it was leaked, it came across as as like...a serious document, some kind of blueprint, not the cheeky conversation starter it was intended to be.

I saw the forum thread that blew up about this almost the moment it began to get traction. I wrote a reply saying as much as I just have now, and almost posted it, but then decided the PR folks would probably crucify me for it, and I'd piss off the folks who were putting time into trying to make the project work. I begged the PR folks to just set the record straight and dismiss the importance of this project, but they took a different route (and fucked it up, imo). I wonder to what extent CCP could have minimized backlash if they just threw the whole thing under the bus as the overly-dramatic thought experiment it was. I don't have many regrets, but not just saying "fuckit" and posting my own 2c remains one. Maybe it could've helped. Ah well.

[Silver Night]

I got the impression at the time (and I think it might even have been mentioned here and there by PR folks) that it was meant as a discussion starter, not impending policy. I think that leadership in certain player groups were well aware of that but decided to take it and run with it to push their agenda and essentially leverage player outrage into allocating CCP resources the way that they wanted and it worked. I think the Monocle played into that - though really the other items being *somewhat* expensive didn't help, because as far as the infamous monocle goes, if other items had been more reasonable and the newsletter hadn't been leaked then the monocle would have been sort of a outlier status-symbol/joke thing instead of emblematic of all of CCP's 'evils'.

CCP's official response mostly made everything much worse. (Which Ciarente covered at the time, much better than I ever could: http://ciaooc.blogspot.com/2011/06/open-letter-to-ccp.html )

Anyway, that kind of put the spike in Walking In Stations, which is what the above-mentioned groups wanted. Unfortunately it also scared CCP off from even touching Captains Quarters again, like, ever until they finally got rid of them. 

[Ursa Dropsus]

Makes sense. Thanks for reply dude. Reading that blog post was a nice angry-nostalgia flashback. 

[Silver Night]

Makes sense. Thanks for reply dude. Reading that blog post was a nice angry-nostalgia flashback. 

'Angry-nostalgia' is a nice turn of phrase. I feel like it describes so much of what I feel when reviewing my Eve experience. 

[MakotoPriano]

Come on, guys. Let's stick to nostalgia-and-happy-memories. :p

[Ursa Dropsus]

Oooh, yes! Let me share one of my all-time favorite memories from CCP days!

So this is back in the Sansha's Nation Live Events era. A quick recap for those who missed it is basically, Sansha's Nation are invading capsuleer space and using wormholes to do so by sending their invasion fleets through them from some unknown location.

We (CCP Headfirst and I) know that at some point, inevitably, people are going to want to know where these ships are coming from - what's on the other side of the wormhole. So Headfirst (I think, perhaps one of our other level designers) starts on that. We build a dungeon/site on our internal servers to depict just a glimpse - but a scary one, we hope - of what lurks on the other side. He spends hours creating a mahoosive fleet. Shit is pretty laggy, I recall, and one of the DBAs in Iceland is like "Why is [internal server name] behaving like shit?". Good times. When it's completed, I take a screenshot, prettify it a little in Photoshop...

...and then, we wait.

In fact, as I type this, I realize that I can't recall if we poke and nudge a little, to imply that it's possible to send a camera probe through the wormhole, or if perhaps this whole idea is originally spurred by players roleplaying trying to send camera probes through. I really can't recall. One of the great things about running Live Events was that so often, we'd be inspired by player input and react to it, rather than go in with our own ideas (or alternatively, we go in with our own ideas, and then the input we get from players improves upon it or outright replaces our own, it was so cool letting things flow more or less organically).

Anyways, it eventually happens. We have this character called Mouse Nell trying to get a glimpse of the other side. We're about to make people's head spin. It's pretty exciting.

One thing about throwing it over to players though, is that it's also a little terrifying. There's so much you can't predict in terms of how they will react and what they will do. As a long time member of the RP community I'm able to counter this somewhat since I know a lot of the self-described roleplayers in EVE, and I can reasonably predict how they might react to things. But, as time goes on, and people of all kinds get involved in these events, it becomes important to involve as many as possible, and not just keep it to the RP community. This "Mouse Nell" person, I don't know who they are, and we have no idea how they're going to react when we send them the image. Will they keep it to themselves and hoard the knowledge? Will they run with it? Perhaps some other unforseen outcome?

The camera probe comes back with the image.


Image from here.

Mouse's first words are "...so many". Headfirst and I are cackling like schoolchildren. So far so good.

And then (I can't fully remember the words, so I'll paraphrase) Mouse says:

"So, I've got some good news and some bad news guys. The good news is that the image is really clear!"

We laughed for a solid five minutes. I'm grinning like an idiot now just thinking about that line. What a response / way to play it! We could've sat in a room with the entire storyline team for a week trying to script this, and wouldn't have come up with anything near as perfect.

[MakotoPriano]

Oh, now that's a story! AWESOME!

As a turbonerd in the lore community, Mouse Nell and the Prosper Vault image have always been one of those 'important points in recent Sansha/Jovian history,' so it's a story that pops up time and again. Amazing to hear the other side of it.

I wonder if the current team have similar things planned for us that we just haven't 'triggered,' yet. :x

So, not sure if it's an internal retcon or some embellishment, but since then there's been a bit more movement on the Jovian/Sansha/wormhole tech front that you might find entertaining.

The story as it goes is that the Sanctuary Sisters, creepy as they are, colonized a WH system that had previously been inaccessible, and they'd been studying Sleeper/Talocan stuff that we'd never seen before. Cut forward a bit (I'm going to skip over some details for brevity), and we end up with a sort of 'second Seyllin event' that further opens up these wormhole systems. In each of these utterly trashed systems, there's what's called an Epicenter-- a set of Talocan static gates and such things, with violent wormholes and such all around. And in one particular 'constellation' of these shattered systems, there aren't any Sleepers. It's all Sansha, all the way down.

Well, except you can find 'Silent Battlegrounds,' extremely difficult to find signatures where the wreckage of Sansha supercarriers and Sleeper enclaves can be found, along with unknown wreckage. And, of course, in the Sansha Epicenters, you find those same Talocan static gates, with Sansha control systems nearby.

Here's an EVE Travel article on the Silent Battleground.

[MakotoPriano]

Oh!

Also, Hilen Tukoss is dead.

Sorry. :x

[Ria Nieyli]

With Upwell releasing more and more structures, we need a Concord purge. It'd make more sense if Nullsec sov costs were closely associated with some sort of maintenance upkeep rather than the current flat tax.

Hell, make the ihubs and whatnot burn fuel and the likes.

[Ursa Dropsus]

Poor Hilen. He had it coming though (and on a meta-level the new team probably wanted a clean(er) state). How'd he go out?

[MakotoPriano]

Well, they definitely made good use of him.

The short: probably infomorph-kidnapped by the Drifters when they podded him, and shenanigans followed.

The long: we started seeing interesting* messages purporting to be from Hilen Tukoss on the IGS, which seemed to indicate something strange was afoot. He requested Jovian bits be brought to Site One for a receiving can that was dropped there. More shenanigans ensued, whereupon it seemed that the entity sending the original messages was likely an imposter, and-- then something? Nothing? In come the Drifters, an apparent Jovian or Sleeper successor group, sort of Jovian cyber-zombies whose exact origins we still don't know yet**, who appear to be attempting to salvage old Jovian hardware, collecting Sleeper corpses, and so on. What we discover, in the end, is that he was probably 'dead' the entire time, as the initial messages almost certainly came after he had his encounter with a Drifter Hive and its fleet.

There's been a lot in this arc, which has been long-running and sort of backburnered while CCP preps the final parts of it, as we guess it's tied to certain long-term development goals.

Probably the most entertaining one for you would be this. His part of the Drifter arc effectively spanned eight months. :3 Here's also a trailer CCP did for Fanfest 2015 that's still quite relevant. :3

*weird.

**Oh, but we have guesses. So many guesses.

[Ursa Dropsus]

Very cool they ran with the arc further! I have warm fuzzies now.

Also shivers. That Scope video (and the trailer) was more than a little creepy 

[MakotoPriano]

Quite so! Next to the Prophecy, it's my favorite trailer.

The Drifters are sort of the current (potential) existential threat. They were also originally deployed as a new AI test bed, for an NPC that can patrol systems, do non-combat actions, and so on. So, in systems where they operate, there are scouts roving about, scanning objects, salvaging equipment, so on. If they're engaged heavily, then reinforcements will come in, join the fight, and so on. It's been a major step for procedural content generation in EVE, and pretty nifty!

And, of course, happens to be attached to this creepy Jove/Sleeper successor group. The competing theories are that the Drifters are the awakened Sleepers/Others, are the remnants of the Jovian Second Empire Tyrants, or are perhaps the returned 'Caretakers/Enheduanni,' or Talocan.

From my perspective, they complete the Icarian story of the Jove, who flew too close to posthumanism, and so lost their humanity. In the case of the Drifters, they became golems, or the Greek Talos, instead of wasting away.