Faster than the speed of light
2008-05-15T09:55+00:00
This blog was meant to go out some time ago but due to a Ginger being busier than a stag in rutting season it hasn’t. Now however I am more than glad to present to you our latest ISD division to go under the spotlight, The Interstellar Correspondents (IC). Basically, the IC are journalists and like any journalists half the galaxy think they present good considered news and the other half think they are biased aliens for the planet zeta centauri. They are however extremely hard working individuals who try their best to bring you the news about your exploits to the big page which is not an easy task. To talk more about the IC and what they do I present to you Serathu, Vice Admiral of IC.
--- Serathu ---
"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Throughout my life, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase "Who are they?" used more than when the Interstellar Correspondents have been brought up in conversation, and given the relative obscurity of the division in the limelight shared by (former) divisions such as Aurora and CRC, I can understand why. Times change, however.
So who are we?
IC is a group of players who have given some of their time and energy to the EVE Volunteer Program known as ISD to bring a wealth of news to the universe of EVE, surrounding anything and everything to do with player-driven events. From fleet battles through racing leagues to alliance tournaments, we aim to bring a broad spectrum of news coverage straight to your screen. Our reporters, working under strict NDAs and bias rules, find stories, research them, interview relevant parties and produce the player news that can be found in the Player News Center, on the login screen and in-game. In more general terms, it is IC’s goal to become *the* source of player-driven news within the universe of EVE and a news organisation that stands out from that which exists in any other MMORPG, past, present and future. I’ve been given this rather grandiose title of "Editor In Chief", or "Vice Admiral" to those who know the ISD innards, of this small division with big ambitions and as such it is my responsibility to turn that dream into a reality.
Those who keep an eye on the RSS feeds and news pages may have noticed that we’ve recently started adding images to articles, bringing depth and accessibility to what some considered to be a wall of text that takes up space on the login screen. This will continue with more and more articles benefiting from this valuable addition to their content. As the division grows, we are interested in taking this a step further with a view to including audio and video in articles to provide yet more engaging and dynamic news to our readers whilst dramatically increasing the range of coverage so that there are more articles relevant to *your* life in EVE.
Our goal of expanding our team along with our internal development work will see major improvements in the kind of news that is delivered to players; from a greater variety of coverage (including the upcoming Factional Warfare feature in our Empyrean Age expansion) through to new and exciting output formats. The division is an amazing, vibrant, friendly, team-oriented place to be in and if you wish to be a part of this I encourage you to apply without delay; you won’t regret it.
Come help us bring the marvelous unknown to the entire universe of EVE, faster than the speed of light.
--- Serathu ---
So there you have it. IC are now actively expanding and recruiting and if you think you have what it takes to be a journalist in the most harsh and unforgiving, but ultimately very exciting, universe known to mankind then please apply now
In addition the IC needs you for news leads, and while they scour the forums looking for such things that can only dish up so much, the very best way to bring news to the eyes of the IC is to submit news leads which I can only encourage you all to do. They may not be able to report on every piece submitted but will try their hardest to bring you the most interesting news from EVE straight to your Login Screen/Player News Centre/In game browser.
Best of luck to all the future journalists of EVE.
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Empyrean Age and all that – An overview
2008-05-14T10:40+00:00
So, we have this expansion coming out this summer called Empyrean Age. It's going to be pretty neat, and it's going to include this thing called Factional Warfare, which is a feature we've been talking about for a fair while now and is generally regarded as something of a big deal. Over the course of the next week or so I'm going to thrash out the fundamentals of the entire design in a series of blogs, starting with this one.
What is Factional Warfare?
This, in a way, is the biggest question of the lot, so we'll start here!
There are a lot of things that Factional Warfare could be. What it is, right now, is in its most basic form a gameplay bridge from high sec to null sec – from the safety of Empire to the wild lands of Alliance space. High sec and null sec have very differing communities of players with very divergent play styles, and while moving from one to the other is obviously possible, it's harder than it should be.
Factional Warfare provides a halfway house for players from Empire to get into the sandbox at the shallow end. It serves other functions too, for other types of player, but this is its primary function.
How does it work?
The core gameplay element of Factional Warfare is small-scale PvP combat. We believe that rounding up your posse, rolling out into contested space and having a healthy exchange of opinions and weapons fire with your sworn enemies is fun. Factional Warfare is designed to make this kind of experience accessible, with low entry requirements and a target-rich environment.
There will be two core drivers for this sort of combat. For those looking for direction, missions will be available, sending you on surgical strikes deep into enemy territory, battling through or sneaking past enemy players to reach the objective. For those who prefer to set their own goals, combat sites will be distributed throughout the warzones. Each site will be contestable by all sides involved in the conflict, with the winning side scoring both immediate rewards and points for their faction.
And what do points mean? Systems! As your faction racks up points in hostile systems, control will slowly swing into your favor, until eventually you're given the opportunity to occupy the system outright. Of course, the enemy's trying to do the same to your systems, so a good defense as well as well as a strong offense will be needed if you want your adopted faction to prevail and dominate!
Is that all?
Pfah! Is that not enough? But no, that's not everything. Ranks, intel screens, a lot of NPC tags and so on are all part of the design. But that's all for future blogs, so watch this space…
Oh, and Black Rise
One last little thing, when we were sketching out the combat areas for all this stuff, we kept running into one brick wall in particular: Caldari low sec space, well, kind of sucks.
Specifically, there isn't much of it, and what there is, is mostly in the wrong place (i.e. well away from the Gallente border). This is, for a system which needs decent expanses of lowsec space between the Empires, a problem. So we looked at the map and decided that there was room for a bit more.
It seemed like a picture would do most of the explaining for me, so there we go. It's Caldari-owned and mostly low sec, some new stations, some new agents, asteroid belts, some ice fields, all the gubbins. The Cloud Ring system just off-screen is W-4NUU, the other connections you should be able to figure out yourselves. For more details, keep an eye out for news on Singularity updates, as you should be able to explore it all yourselves in the near future.
This is incidentally, as some of you will realize, the first actual region we've added since the original universe was generated, which made it an, uh, interesting project. Most of the actual work was done by Prism X, who took the pile of spreadsheets we generated, did a whole load of wizardry which I don't claim to begin to understand, and gave us some new space to play in. Please direct all praise regarding this rather fine achievement in his general direction.
Has anyone seen my barber?
It's traditional now that we get a quote in somewhere for blogs about Factional Warfare, so I'll leave you with this little gem from Russell.
"War does not determine who is right, only who is left."
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What is this Council of Stellar Management anyway?
2008-05-09T17:15+00:00
Links to important sections:
The Council forum
The design idea and the summary paper
The voting booth
Candidates are campaigning for a seat in this council and sometimes heated discussions can be seen on the forums, either between the candidates or between the candidates and voters. Things are pondered, the past is brought into the light with words such as "...but here you said something that could be interpreted as contradictory to your current statement..." In other places candidates and voters share the ideas conversed and the atmosphere can only be described as 'harmonious'. This is exactly what we wish to go gain from the Council of Stellar Management: discussions, arguments and progress via talks are our goals.
Eligibility for voting is simple, if your account is 30 days or older, you can vote. There is one vote per account – meaning that those with multiple accounts have multiple votes.
A short rundown of what the CSM will do:
- All players can propose a topic to be handled by the Council.
- A topic can consist of anything, and deal with any EVE related matter.
- Players have to convince one, or more, of the Council members to bring the topic up at a Council meeting.
- A 'support' system is in place to allow players to declare support for a topic in a CSM forum channel which will be opened after the election.
- This 'support' system will make it easy for the Council members to get an overview of which topics players are concerned about.
- If 5% of the voters support a topic, the Council is required to bring it up. This is done to accommodate the voters, not the Council.
- All Council meeting minutes will be documented by the Council members and published for all players.
- Topics, reaching the Council, have to receive a majority vote from the Council members before the Council can escalate the topic to the CCP council.
- The minimum time a topic has to stay open on the public forum is 7 days before it can be brought up by the Council – this applies to topics put forth by the Council members, or the voters.
- A topic is brought up in the Council if a Council member decides to bring it up there, yet never before the 7 day discussion period is up.
Each Council is elected for a mandate period of 6 months; no representative can be elected more than two mandate periods.
The Council will meet with the CCP Council in Iceland once per mandate period. They will also be able to send in topics, via mail, twice during that time. The topics sent in will be replied to by CCP and the answers will be made public.
CCP commits to give honest and transparent answers to as many of the topics brought up by the Council of Stellar Management as possible. While the Council does not have any formal powers within CCP, it is a very important communication conduit between CCP and the players which is why we encourage you to see what the candidates have to say. Our players are why we make this game after all.
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CSM candidate applications breakdown.
2008-04-18T16:28+00:00
These are interesting times we live in. Setting up a democratic structure in EVE has not been the easiest process we have undertaken, but we truly feel it is well worth the effort because of the interest you have shown in the project.
Now, this blog is to tell you a thing or two about the statistics of the applications received and the approved applicants, now lovingly referred to as candidates.*
But on to the statistics.
The list of applicants will be published soon and will be viewable from this section.
We wish everybody the best of luck in the upcoming elections which will be open between the 5th of May and 19th of May 2008.
* I would like to refer to them as being between a rock (players) and a hard place (CCP), or the other way around.
Information on the CSM:
CSM pdf
CSM Summary pdf
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Postcards from a bloody cold country
2008-04-18T11:25+00:00
This is not going to be a "here are your new features, go forth and pontificate" blog, so if you're just after hard details, you may be disappointed, sorry. Instead, I'm going to take the opportunity to just talk about some things that may or may not be interesting to some of you.
The first and most important thing I wanted to talk about is the weather (can you tell that I'm British?). We had several inches of snow on Sunday, IN APRIL!?! Clearly this is ridiculous – I'm thinking about starting an online petition, but I'm not sure who to send it to. This kind of thing shouldn't be allowed though, and I feel it's time someone made a stand for sensible weather, particularly with the First Day of Summer (hah!) coming up next week or so.
Moving away from the weather a bit, this week I have been mostly working on (CENSORED), which we're not talking about quite yet – expect to hear more in the next couple of weeks though. I can however talk about some of the stuff I've been up to, in a non-specific way.
For example, this morning we were running another small playtest of some of the new systems with the help of the GMs. This is turning out to be very productive – we've found some things that need tweaking, and there were explosions, so everyone's happy. Last week I spent a fair amount of time getting to grips with the procedures needed for adding new stations and stuff, which it turns out involves an awful lot of staring-at-the-map and jumping-around-looking-at-stuff. It's less fun than you'd think, to be honest.
What else? I've been working with our Mercury volunteers on and off, reading over news submissions and talking in IRC and generally making sure that everything is heading in the right direction for (CENSORED). Oh, and translating for Ginger when he's having one of his 'moments'.
Another neat thing I found this week – we have an automatic name generator built into our authoring tools. Not sure who's responsible for it, but it's handy – you just pick a faction and it'll throw out fifty character or system/constellation names. Occasionally tools like this just pop out of the woodwork; the rest of the time huge Excel files do the job well enough, particularly when they're nice and colorful…
That's it for now, anyway!
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