Eve Online: the controversy, the economy and the coming Inferno

Today, gritty science fiction MMO Eve Online is famous for many things: its player-driven, emergent gameplay, its complex virtual economy, and, perhaps most of all, its daytime telly quality drama. But nine years ago today, Eve Online was famous for nothing. It was a fledgling persistent world made by a little known Icelandic developer with big ideas but no guarantees. Since then, every year, it has grown. And now, Eve is on the cusp of becoming something even greater: a PC MMO that interacts with a console first-person shooter spin-off.How CCP has maintained its nine-year old MMO - and keep veteran players interested - is one of gaming's most compelling success stories. At a time when publishers are struggling with subscriber numbers after pumping hundreds of million dollars into high profile alternatives, Eve's slow but stead rise continues.Here, in this detailed interview, Eurogamer talks to senior producer Jon Lander, lead game designer Kristoffer Touborg, and community developer Sveinn Kjarval about pissing players off, the upcoming Inferno expansion and the state of play in 2012 - the most pivotal year in Eve's history.Eve Online is a virtual playground in which players pretty much do what they want in. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it must be pretty scary for you as developers.Jon Lander: I don't see it as scary though. It's easy.Sveinn Kjarval: It's comforting in a way, because you have all these expert advisers telling you what you should do and giving you all this great feedback.Jon Lander: I would be much more worried if I woke up every morning thinking, s**t, what have I got to do to entertain these guys now for the next six months? I was having a chat with Hilmar [Veigar Pétursson, CEO] the other day, and, as ever, he came out with one of these great sound-bites, which was, we're the janitors of Eve. We gave up being in charge of Eve a long time ago, like when we first let the players in. So, it's the players' game.This is why you see such strong reactions when people play it. They are the owners of it. They're the people who create all the good stuff. They're the people who are massively invested in this. All we do is provide some good content, throw a stone in to muck everything up every now and again with a new release, and we enforce real world legality, the terms of service and the EULA.As we got to the end of last year, you could see Eve had started stagnating because we hadn't messed up the balance. You could see the number of PvP kills per person per day was tailing off. It was going down. People weren't engaging in the game any more. So we did Crucible, which was to throw in some new ships to change the mix up and fix a whole load of stuff people had been telling us about.We did that, and then we saw the PvP kills start going up again. Escalation [the the recent update that prepares the game for the Inferno expansion], has thrown a big stone into the pond, and you can feel the ripples already happening. The reason we called it Escalation was it's destabilising the Eve universe for 22nd May, when the big Inferno release comes out.We're changing war decs, we're making Mercenary being a more viable profession to be in Eve. We're throwing in a ton of new modules. We haven't thrown new modules in in about eight years. It's going to change everything. Everybody will ask, how am I going to make the best out of these things, as opposed to us saying, you now have a gold shield and everybody shall have one. People say, I don't want that. I'm going to use this and use it in a really weird way no-one else has thought of, and that will be brilliant, and then everybody will be talking about it on the forums, and they'll all copy me, and then they'll all come up with a counter.So all we do is keep things ever so slightly out of balance, make people think and let people make the content.Do you deliberately go out of your way with new content to try and create issues that will revitalise the player base?Jon Lander: Absolutely. If you sit down and play Eve you'll never play all of it. I've been playing since 2005, I've played about half the game in terms of things you can do. So we don't need to make a ton of new stuff. All we need to do is keep mixing that stuff around. There's more content in this game than in most other games, and you could constantly be playing it, because it's not level capped, or it's not, this is inappropriate if you're a level 60, this is only for level 10. That doesn't exist in Eve. There's a huge amount of opportunity for us to mix it up.Dust 514, coming in later this year, that's the biggest expansion we could do to Eve. All of a sudden there's a free-to-play first-person shooter where these guys are running around on the planet, and I'm in my spaceship up here, and they can call in. It's not like in Call of Duty where they say, air strike, bang. They go, are you up there? Yeah I'm here, but I'm getting shot at by a load of other people because they don't want me to air strike you, so, can you get a move on please? You have a real interaction.So the biggest new thing we've done and will do this year is Dust. But then all we need to do is add all of this additional stuff. It's easy for us to keep mixing things up.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...coming-inferno