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[Lyn Farel]

Since when have the developers (outside of the story team) known anything about the lore of their game? The little bitter vet in me would probably remind people that a given random developer doesn't probably reach the level of knowledge of a dedicated player, and some have been outright clueless about relatively basic mechanics. (Such as the famous case of suggesting to target paint sieged dreadnoughts as a solution to citadel torpedoes not hitting them at full damage.)

That.

Except if it's a game designer or a dedicated player, developers insight on their own game mechanisms is not always very trustworthy.

[Rok-Yuni]

Most CCP staff are apparently eve players...

Perhaps the one in question in the earlier statement regarding dreads, had never flown one.
like, oh.. the vast majority of capsuleers...

just a thought.

[Morwen Lagann]

Playing EVE, and having a working knowledge of the in-universe science, lore and story, are two entirely different things.

Trailers are made to look cool first and foremost and to drag people in, above all else. Not to be nitpickingly consistent with lore. (In fact, one of the devs - who shall remain nameless - who saw it for the first time at the same time the rest of us did at Fanfest, commented they'd already found several things that had been done wrong just from that first viewing.)

The art teams have, at minimum, an understanding of the aesthetic of different factions and races in EVE. They wouldn't be able to do their job properly if they didn't. But that doesn't mean they know anything about the rest of the game universe. You're reading way too deeply into an art guy's devblog than is merited.

[Lyn Farel]

Most CCP staff are apparently eve players...

Really ? That's... impressive. Do they really all play as players or do they just use their CCP toons for professional work ?

[Silas Vitalia]

Most CCP staff are apparently eve players...

Really ? That's... impressive. Do they really all play as players or do they just use their CCP toons for professional work ?

Many many of them play regular EVE with alts. 

This has led to 'issues' in the past with some things

But them playing the game is a good thing for us, as they can get a good perspective sometimes on the problems we face

[Makkal]

I can't speak for CCP, but I have a friend who worked on TOR and not only were all the employees given life time subs but most of them were avid players. It's not unusual for MMO devs to be enthusiastic about their game. Typically, they'll work on a part of a game and so only experience it in a 'finished' state by playing the release.

QA is an exception.

[Morwen Lagann]

If I remember right, all CCP employees are given three accounts to play with as players after joining the company, in addition to whatever development accounts they need for work. Any accounts they owned as players are suspended (read: banned).

After working for the company for six months, if they played the game prior to working for CCP (often the case), they are permitted to have some (all? one? not sure exactly) of their old characters cloned (assets and SP) into a fresh character that they can use, or if IA believes there's no chance of them being outed, they can have their original characters back. (If you get outed, you need to get the characters cloned -again-. IA is very serious about it - this is why you're supposed to keep quiet about it if you think a player character belongs to someone who works for CCP.)


Mind, this is all from memory from conversations with a few devs at Fanfest, so it might not be 100% accurate.

[Iwan Terpalen]

I understand the situation at CCP is about the same. Heard something about three company-paid accounts for core developers?

I don't exactly have a ton of game development experience, but if I were involved in a team where a signifiant fraction of members didn't care to actually play the game they're working on, I'd be seriously worried.

Edit: ah, Morlag confirms it. I don't quite recall where I heard the three company-sponsored account thing - Falcon explaining things in OOC? A player meet?

[Lyn Farel]

I understand the situation at CCP is about the same. Heard something about three company-paid accounts for core developers?

I don't exactly have a ton of game development experience, but if I were involved in a team where a signifiant fraction of members didn't care to actually play the game they're working on, I'd be seriously worried.

You "play" the game when you develop it, but it is a whole different experience than playing it as a player, it can mostly consist of starting the game editor or whatever and trying a few things here and there, but that's not the game engine with the actual game running.

Only QA does that, and a few others.

[Mithfindel]

I do indeed understand that there are a lot of CCP people recruited from the playerbase. There at least used to be a fair amount of people recruited amongst the roleplayer community, too - but, logic would say that as people roleplaying in EVE are the minority, so probably are roleplayers-turned-devs. And even further, players-turned-devs at positions with any power would probably limit these to very early hires, except for players with a very long experience in the business.

What counts is that the people who care of specific things get hired in the right places, I'd say. Eterne, Falcon, Fozzie and Rise are all looking like sitting on exactly the right chairs. If the trend continues, future looks quite bright, even if some lines get ordered by the rule of cool.

[Horatius Caul]

So much strange discussion based on just a bluepost.

Here's the new sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyvAh6a6HEw

[Iwan Terpalen]

Ten seconds and then a blackscreen when the station still has to load? That's.. suboptimal.

[kalaratiri]

Apparently, that video must have glitched. Yhe actual effect is, "The screen goes white as you die and it's like a jump effect to your new clone".

[Andreus Ixiris]

They're nice little touches. Nothing wrong with them. The pod death sequence is competently executed but slightly underwhelming. That's all there really is for me to say on the matter.

[Tryaz]

I dunno. I've always disagreed with extended "defeat" scenes. You already know that you've been defeated, and Eve rubs defeat in through the loss of ships, isk and implants pretty well, already.

Think about the death scenes in, say, the Mass Effect series. Do they add anything to your experience other than 30 seconds of irritated "Dammit, I know I just lost. Hurry up so that I can keep playing my game"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dArnf2xwv5w that's the sequence being demo'd on Sisi. I think it's cool to be given a second or two to appraise the tactical environment that you lost your pod in