The Dev Blog has EVE Developers talking about ideas and the current state of the game in an informal manner. Player comments are viewable on EVE Insider (http://www.eveonline.com). The blog may contain links that do not work in the ingame browser.
It's a tradition: every time summer rolls around, Europeans take nice, long vacations. As an American, I tend to become overly amused by this; my Puritanical (pure tyrannical?) self cannot fathom the idea of taking three or four weeks off at a time, and secretly, I envy my co-workers, those lucky, loveable bastards!
Another tradition: during the summer months, EVE Online players become anxious for more news and information about their favorite game. Vacation time, for the average capsuleer, is EVE time. Capsuleers rarely take time off from flying around in space, pulling the latest, greatest, ever-larger scams, or engaging in massive fleet battles that make CCP Veritas salivate with glee.
But what is going on at CCP when so many are on holiday? Does everything stop while holidays and return trips home occur? Does further development for EVE take a back seat to tanning oil and proper English breakfasts? Not at all! Even though many of my co-workers are on holidays, work towards improving the game and fighting the war on lag continues.
Now that you are better familiar with how work progresses on EVE Online during the summer months, it's time to talk about EVE Online: Incarna, and its future. A number of players have been asking me, both on the forums and on Twitter when the remainder of the Captain's Quarters will be released. Since the release of Incarna, we have continued to iterate and improve the Minmatar CQ while pushing forward with the development of the remaining racial quarters, as well as working apace on establishments. Incarna 1.1 will see the results of our progress on improving the existing CQ, and later this year we plan on deploying the remaining racial quarters to Tranquility as well as the next Incarna feature, establishments.
Racial Captain's Quarters and Establishments... coming soon to a door near you!
We also currently plan on releasing Incarna 1.1 on August 30. Detailed information will be provided in our patch notes, which will be released before Incarna 1.1's deployment. We look forward to sharing our work with you and hearing your feedback!
- CCP Fallout
The EVE Security Taskforce & Report a bot reported by: CCP Pollux | 2011.08.16 11:42:30
Hello EVE Community,
Since this is my first post I would like to use this opportunity to introduce myself to the community. Some of you may already know me from the Security Presentation CCP Sreegs and I did this year at Fanfest. For those who don't, my name is CCP Pollux, and I am a Senior Security Specialist and a member of the EVE Security Task Force. I joined CCP in February, and my job since then has been to identify and address software vulnerabilities and to design and implement various kinds of security related software functionalities/solutions into the EVE Server and EVE Client.
In the past months the EVE Security Task Force has been assigned various tasks related to security issues, but one of the main tasks this team has been given was to develop new systems and tools to identify, classify and track various kind of unfair player activity. The goal was to simplify and improve the daily mission of hunting down those who, for one reason or another, disobey the rules of EVE and cheat.
One particular type of cheating that the ESTF has been focusing its attention on is programs that automate EVE's gameplay on behalf of a player, or bots. In the past months of our war against the bots, we have been constantly identifying and tracking players using different types of bots, enforcing our policies and giving them their time off from New Eden.
In this blog, we will present you with how to use the Report Bot feature we have recently added to the EVE client.
| The Report Bot Feature
We recently added the Report Bot feature into the EVE Client. This feature should provide everyone with a straight forward way of reporting Bots right from within the game.
| How to report a bot ? In order to report a player as being a bot you will have to carry out three simple steps.
Open the Character Information Window (Fig.1).
Select the Report Bot entry from the Actions Menu (Fig.2)
Confirm the submission of the report (Fig.3)
To bring up the Character Information Window, right-click on the Character you want to report and select "Show Info" from the Menu. You should now see the Character Information Page as shown in the picture below (Fig.1):
Fig.1
Click on the Actions Menu on the upper-left side of the Character Information Window, and select "Report Bot" from the Menu as shown in the next picture (Fig.2):
Fig.2
By now you should see the Confirmation Window as shown in the picture below (Fig.3), asking you to confirm the submission of the report. Click "Yes" to confirm or "No" to cancel the submission.
Fig.3
That is all you have to do to report someone as a bot, all from within the game! Easy isn't it? We surely hope it is.
Now, the players reported using this feature are automatically investigated. If a reported player is identified as being a bot, the following policies are enforced:
First offense: 14 days ban
Second offense: 30 days ban
Third offense: Permanent ban
Note that updated policies regarding botting and other various types of cheating can be found on the policies page available on our forum.
| When to report a bot?
Bots are all about rules (events, states, conditions, transitions, actions) and goals! A bot reacts to events according to a predetermined limited set of rules, triggering appropriate actions in response in order to meet its goals. In a world otherwise driven by human players, most of the times this rule based behavior can be observed under close investigation.
Therefore, before submitting a report, we encourage players to perform a brief but structured investigation.
Observe the behavior of the player and break it down into stages of processing (States, Conditions and Actions)
Break down the behaviour into states
What is each individual phase of the activity a subject carries on ?
Consider each phase a "State"
Example of states : "Idle, Docked, Warping, Mining, Hunting, etc"
Break down the behaviour into conditions
When does the activity of a subject change ?
Consider each change one or several "Conditions" that has been met and a transition to another "State"
Example of conditions : "if state is mining and cargo is not empty then; if state is mining and ship is targeted and enemy is not NPC then; etc"
Break down the behaviour into actions
How does the subject carry on his activity ?
Consider each individual operation or group of operations carried out by a subject as an Action
Example of an action in a certain state when a certain condition has been met : "if state is mining and ship is targeted and enemy is not NPC then warp (to safe spot); etc"
Try to determine if the player you are observing seems to act repetitively according to a strict set of rules (for example, executing the same steps over and over for an extended period of time)
Try to determine its goals
Challenge the rules (try to think of possible triggers that would cause it to respond in a certain way if it is truly automated)
Trigger events and perceive reactions (does it respond to communication? How does it react to being locked or being warped in on? Does it react the same every time, for example by warping always in the same direction before returning to the exact same spot minutes later?)
Finally, use your human intelligence to determine whether it is a soulless automaton or simply a fellow, single-minded player.
* Note There are different types of bots, each type having other rules according to which they carry on their activity. Try to adapt your investigation to the type of bot you are observing.
| Abuse and consequences?
By the time of writing this blog, we have received more than 500 reports from players using this feature. While some players successfully managed to report players who were bots, some players used this feature to report players who were far from being bots. There is a difference between not being able to distinguish a bot from a human and the clear intent to report players out of any other interests.
We strongly recommend against using the Report Bot Feature with any other intent than the one it has been designed for. Abuse of this feature will have consequences.
More to Come
In addition to this blog, we will soon release a dev blog about Automations that we encourage everyone to read. It describes Automated Game Agents such as Bots and Macros in much greater detail, including the principles, concepts and techniques used to bring them into existence, how they work and what their limitations are. It is meant to give everyone hints on how to differentiate Automated Game Agents from human players right from within the game.
In the LAST BLOG, we explained the background for our current nullsec design efforts, and the high-level rules for all of nullsec. I'd recommend going back and reading that one first if you haven't already, as it lays the groundwork for this blog too.
The bulk of that blog was about defining things that should be true - in an ideal world - for everything that goes on in nullsec. That gives us a general framework to work within, but doesn't do a lot to explain where we're going with the different parts that make up nullsec today, and the things we'll be adding in the near future.
For this next bit, we had several brainstorming sessions, both internally and with the CSM, to define both what major areas of gameplay should exist in nullsec, and what the guiding principles for those individual areas or features should be. Again, we harvested the results, analyzed them, broke them down, built them up, and tried to pull them together into a unified vision of where we want to go. This all coalesced into a whiteboard covered in text, which I have reproduced below for your viewing pleasure.
Click image to enlarge.
(You will note here that my handwriting is in fact not very good. Also, the "money chart" is a future thing we'd like to look at where we map out how much money you should be making in different areas of the game - that's just a reminder to make a note about it. You may also find that some stuff was changed/dropped/added/condensed in the post-whiteboard refinement stages. Also also, "U I HAVE" is in permanent marker and we haven't got round to cleaning it off yet. Also also also, the Planets stuff still needs finalizing so it's blanked out for now, sorry.)
We then moved this over to our internal wiki, fleshed out the various areas, and then tweaked and refined for a while to get it into a position where we were pretty comfortable with it.
Spill the beans!
Rather than trying to talk about this further, I'm just going to copypasta it in here so you can have a gander. Once again, please be very clear in your mind that this is where we want to go in the long term, and the caveats about how much we're likely to get done in five years etc still apply. Hopefully the amount of stuff in here will also make it clearer why we're saying "more than five years": for example, those few bullet points under "exploration" mean replacing all of the exploration content that's been developed in the past five years.
We are creating a separate feedback thread in the Feature and Ideas forum for each of these sections, which are linked from the headers here and again at the bottom of the page. Please take specific feedback for each section there - one comments thread can't carry twelve separate conversations like this!
Mining in nullsec should make you a "good" amount of money, ie trending slightly above the average for nullsec professions. A good supply of minerals is necessary for our industrial goals, and ensuring payouts are good is one tool to encourage this.
Motivational
Mining should be something that you do because you know you're achieving something, not just because it makes you money - the minerals created should be contributing towards larger goals.
Sole source of ice and high-end minerals
For further discussion. Nullsec should be the only place we're injecting (at least some of the) ices, zydrine, megacyte and morphite into the game. This ensures that nullsec mining retains a unique value proposition, and guarantees that mining time for these types is priced according the risk and effort involved in nullsec extraction.
Investable
It should be possible (at most if not all levels of power) and desirable to invest directly in mining activities in a given area. We want mining to be something that requires settling down and investing in space if you want to maximize efficiency. (Ninja mining is still desirable and should also be supported.)
For further discussion. People building things in nullsec should only need to travel to empire (or more than a couple of regions across nullsec) for low-volume supplies. This requires that industrialists have a ready supply of low-end minerals available nearby in nullsec, without breaking other systems or goals. (Likely means some way of mining low-ends in a massively more rapid manner compared to current tools.)
Geared towards T2
Our current proposal is that hisec is for volume T1 goods, lowsec will be for meta/faction gear eventually, nullsec is for T2, and wormholes are for T3
Lucrative
Building T2 modules/ships in nullsec should be a good way to make a lot of money. There are many inherent drawbacks in doing industry in nullsec and we need to balance out these hidden costs.
Requires investment
Again, we want the real wealth-generation machines to require people to settle down and spend some money, because it encourages concentration of effort and makes for interesting targets to attack or defend.
Accessible to all in small volumes
Anyone should be able to build enough bits and bobs to support a reasonably frugal lifestyle, anywhere in nullsec. This allows small groups to feel self-sufficient provided they're all prepared to work for it, while still encouraging specialization efficiency for larger groups.
Logistics should be a weakness for larger organizations of players. It should avoid being tedious, but it should remain a major point of concern as size increases, and be one of the primary drawbacks of growing beyond a certain size.
Bigger ships/fleets travel slower
As the amount of power your fleet can deploy increases, its mobility should decrease. Small, flimsy fleets should always maintain a mobility advantage over big, dangerous ones. This ensures that a wider range of fleet compositions and sizes remain valuable, catering to more preferences and playstyles. It also makes fleet composition more a case of selecting the right tools, and less of just dumping the whole toolbox onto the floor, encouraging players to innovate tactically and strategically.
Good reasons to trade
Any investable activity (ie, one where we want people to consider settling down and developing some space to do it) should have clear reasons and opportunities to trade with nearby nullsec regions to increase efficiency. This needs to be balanced with other mechanics such that simply conquering five regions is not the clearly optimal solution, while remaining a viable option.
Should be easier with investment
It should be possible to ease the logistical burden within a given area of space by investing in that area. This again encourages investment and settling down, and reduces logistical load in safe areas where it adds little gameplay value without reducing it outside safe areas where the value is more apparent.
Moving large volumes should be a group effort
High-volume shipments should be a special occasion, and as much as possible we should encourage them to be a group activity. These tend to be high-value shipments also, and bringing players together to appreciate and protect the value created, and put them in a position where they're likely to interact with other groups, is a positive thing.
Exploration needs to give a strong sense of mystery, exploring unknown areas and so on, without completely negating its other key role as a steady source of income for many players.
For further discussion. "Deep space" exploration (ie, more than 10AU from celestials) should be geared towards mystery, problem-solving and the unknown, while "near space" exploration (less than 5AU from celestials) focuses more on delivering reliable content.
Not just combat
There should be the option to be engaged in exploration in smaller, more agile (or even non-combat) ships and achieve something. You should not need a battleship or similar on hand to get something out of exploration.
Nomadic option
Exploration should cater towards (among others) those wishing to live in nullsec on a more nomadic basis. Players should be able to feel like they're getting value out of exploration without committing to a fixed base of operation.
Chance-based income
Particularly for more mystery-oriented exploration, but to a lesser extent for the other sort as well, income should be more hit-and-miss - large periods of relatively low income can be balanced out with the occasional jackpot. This provides more possible variations in gameplay motivation without ruining exploration's financial competitiveness, and works thematically and in terms of the sort of players we want to attract with "exploration."
Dynamic and challenging
Even more so than other PvE, exploration content should provide a new experience every time, and should offer up all kinds of challenge (thinking as well as shooting). "Exploration" is meant to evoke ideas of freshness, unexpected events and the danger of the unknown.
It is critical that some low-effort, decent-reward solo activities are available to players in nullsec. This class of content gives players a reason to stay online if nobody else is around, and it's only by getting people to stay logged on that it stops being the case that nobody else is around.
Challenge and reward
Nullsec PvE should offer increased challenge compared to empire, and the rewards should be commensurably greater. This should be one of the lures that entices players to leave empire and move to nullsec.
Best loot
The best loot in the game should come from nullsec. High-end loot's enforced rarity gives a strong "jackpot" moment and tends towards extremely high values, and nullsec should be where you go to get high-value payouts.
Many ship classes
PvE in nullsec should cater to as many classes of ship as we can think up interesting scenarios for, from interceptors to dreadnaughts. Different players prefer the playstyles offered by different ship classes, and they should not feel the need to specialize in certain classes just to remain fiscally stable.
Best agents
For further discussion. The best agents in the game should all be in nullsec, in keeping with the "richest area in the game" theme. There should be a clear margin of value for nullsec agents that acts as an enticement for mission runners to move there.
Best PvE pay
In a broader sense, for all PvE activities nullsec should be the most lucrative place to go, both because it encourages players to move out there, and because the additional risks and effort required needs to be balanced out.
Groups best
While solo support is critical, it should still be the case that it's always better to group up with other players. High-value content should be designed with the express intent that players working together earn more individually than they would working alone with this or other content. If the content can support diverse ship types within the same group, even better.
At a strategic level, NPC nullsec should provide a safer base of operations than the rest of nullsec. It should not make you feel hugely safer while in space, but sacrificing control and the ability to invest as deeply should buy you some measure of stability.
Owners should matter
Players living in NPC nullsec should always want to be mindful of whose space they're living in. If you live in a given faction's space, you should be consistently made aware that you're someone else's guest and that you want to stay on their good side to avoid problems.
Story and setting
NPC nullsec should provide a particularly rich vein of insight into EVE's story and setting. It should not be rubbed in players' faces, but those interested in the setting should find plenty of material to entertain them here.
Local connections yield benefits
Players who take time to settle down in NPC space and cultivate a relationship with the owner should be rewarded with various perks and benefits. This counteracts the negatives introduced by making it clear that they're effectively tenants, and provides them with interesting home-field advantages that make them less vulnerable to raiders.
Collective admin
For further discussion. To the extent that players have influence or control over the goings-on in NPC nullsec, they exercise this power collectively - all corps living in a given area have a say in policy. This provides an interesting alternative political dynamic, and encourages multiple corps with diverse objectives to live in the same bit of space and play nicely with their neighbours, which in turn prevents a small group of powerful corps from easily taking control and shaping policy to drive others out.
Targeted
NPC nullsec should appeal strongly to a few specific groups of players: people who want to have a nullsec experience that's more immersed in the EVE setting; people who want to start out in nullsec but don't feel ready to risk building their own home yet; people who want to establish a stable, long-term commercial presence in nullsec and are happy to accept some inefficiencies; and people who want to prey on other NPC nullsec dwellers. Everyone else should find that NPC nullsec is only very weakly appealing to them, and should find it more beneficial to base out of non-NPC nullsec.
Groups running regular small fleets should find it pretty straightforward to move their base of operations. This allows them to "go where the action is", and allows any given part of the cluster to get a much more regular rotation of "local gangs", which in turn should lead to more combat variety for the average player on both sides of the fence (ie roaming groups and defense gangs).
Objectives and incentives
Smaller fleets moving through enemy space should always have something to do, and doing that something should make them feel like they've achieved something worthwhile even if they didn't get any actual fights. This means having things to do that are both satisfying and deliver some kind of long-term value (ideally things with tangible ISK-relative value as well as intangible strategic value) to offset the opportunity cost of a roam. We want people out PvPing, and if they're thinking "I wish I'd stayed at home and run missions" then something is wrong.
Interfere with larger ops
Smaller fleets should have some avenue via which they can have some impact on larger fleets, without just getting killed. There should be some sensible way to defend against this with some sensible amount of effort on the larger fleet's part. A smaller fleet should not feel that it simply has to run away from a larger one, but neither should it be able to have a disproportionate impact on a larger one.
Disrupt, not destroy
When interfering with infrastructure, smaller fleets should as a rule be causing damage that can be brought back to its pre-damage state in a short timeframe, and without costing that much money. A single small-scale roam is not a large investment, and it should not require a large investment to undo the damage. A sustained harassment campaign should be possible to disrupt activities for longer periods, if the harasser puts in the hours to do so.
Constant
Small-scale combat should be going on all the damn time. Set in the context of ongoing nullsec struggles, it's one of our strong points as a game, and we should be trying hard to enable it as much as possible.
Reward local knowledge
Doing research on and scouting of the area you're running fleets in, and getting a feel for the layout and the local quirks, should give you a small but noticeable advantage over other fleets without this knowledge. This tilts the advantage slightly in favor of the defender against random gangs, but allows aggressors to negate that advantage with some work. Furthermore, using this sort of knowledge makes people feel smart, which in turn makes them enjoy themselves more.
A lot of players enjoy large-scale battles, and it remains one of our bigger draws in marketing terms. Large battles should be happening regularly (an average nullsec player should be able to get involved in at least a couple of fights this size each month, on average), and they should be big enough that players feel like they're involved in something really big (500+ a side).
Diverse fleets
There should be good reasons to field a diverse fleet at this scale, with as many ship classes as possible having a clear reason to be fielded. Diversity here allows more players to fly the sorts of ships that they prefer in large fights; it allows players to specialize more and have that specialization mark them out from others; and it creates more tactical options which should make the fights more interesting. Homogeneous fleets are workable but bland.
Value for all
Everyone involved in this sort of fight should feel like they're glad they took the time and effort to get involved, and that it left them feeling satisfied. People should not be sitting at a starbase for three hours, warping into a fight and getting instapopped before they've really done anything. Winning and losing should matter, but taking part should be valuable too.
Distributed command
It should be desirable to delegate and sub-delegate fleet command to as granular a level as possible, and with as much autonomy for the lower-level commanders as possible. This allows for more interesting tactical variety within a given battle, and also builds in a much more accessible way to learn command skills. The dearth of trained FCs is a major weakness of the game currently, both in terms of the game experience (reduces the number of big fights happening and encourages coalitions) and of the game's overall health (a few key FCs leaving at once would be very bad news). This should not, however, be mandated or forced in any way.
Decisions beat numbers
It should always be the case that inferior numbers can win with superior decision-making. Large fleets should be much less about who has the most ships and much more about who has the smartest commanders and sub-commanders.
Pretty much anyone with a little seed capital (~10m ISK) should be able to establish some small, semi-permanent presence in nullsec. Not everyone wants to get involved in nullsec, but every player that feels even a slight interest but never quite takes the plunge represents a failure of design that we should fix.
Predictable security
People with small-scale investments in nullsec should know from week to week what the security situation of their investments is. Everything in nullsec should be vulnerable, but for smaller-scale stuff it should be easy to see the end coming, and either deal with it or plan for it. It should be possible for the bigger players to evict the smaller ones without too much investment, but it should take time to do so. This makes evicting or otherwise clearing out people more of a chore and thus a less trivial decision; it makes smaller investments less risky by ensuring an attentive owner has time to pull down their stuff and move it elsewhere; and it gives a needed sense of safety and stability to people who are concerned about the risks. The larger the investment becomes and the more functionality or power it affords, the less this should be the case, moving towards less time but more investment to remove it.
Mostly self-sufficient
For non-trivial investments, the day-to-day running of operations in smallholdings should be more-or-less self-sufficient. Something akin to a bi-weekly supply run (bi-weekly because then the investment gives you a "weekend off" every other weekend, which is rewarding) is desirable for a number of reasons - adds interaction, creates weaknesses, removes the need for high-value manufacturing in smallholdings, and prevents players from feeling totally isolated - but it should not be a massive amount of work, nor should it be that often. Smallholdings should make players feel like intrepid pioneers, living off the land of the frontier and hoping the bi-weekly mail coach gets through safely.
Scales badly
The various protections and benefits and so on afforded to smallholders should not scale well. People looking to run more extensive operations should find that, as their ambitions get bigger, so do their problems. Anything that's designed to help out the small guy needs to make sure that it's not also helping the big guy screw the small guy (or other big guys) over.
Reward investment, commitment
Smallholders should always be thinking "in another few weeks, we'll be able to do X", and "if we had a bit more money, we could buy Y". This gives them goals to work towards, and provides a seamless path from smallholder to major player, for those that find themselves interested; staying small should always be a viable decision, but it should be a real decision with both pros and cons. This should be achieved in as organic a manner as possible (ie, with minimal "mechanics").
Similar but distinct
Smallholding should be similar enough to serious territorial control that the majority of the skills and tools learned are transferrable, but distinct enough that different scales of investment in nullsec (smallholding vs sov) can be balanced in different ways, with different weaknesses. The experiences delivered by these two different playstyles need to be unique both because as long-term decisions they're intended to be aimed at different playstyles, and because our ability to deliver on this distinctiveness of experience relies on us not having to worry about tools intended for one group being used by the other.
Being big should bring drawbacks as well as benefits, and getting big should be a lifestyle choice or a chosen specialization, rather than a necessity. Some sorts of operations should benefit a little more than others from being larger, but it should not be the case that being big is a straight-up advantage. You get diminishing returns in terms of social value above a certain point, and anecdotally trying to grow quickly to remain competitive is a leading cause of corps and alliances failing.
Descriptive ownership
Mechanical ownership of an area should be something that's awarded to the organization which already has de-facto control of that area, rather than something that's fought over as a necessary precondition of de-facto control. This allows us to award it as a "prize" to the winner; it gives us the opportunity to mechanically determine warzones rather than having ownership be entirely binary; and most importantly it opens the door to letting players win in their own way, rather than prescribing the steps that must be taken to achieve victory. In a game that relies on every war being different for its lasting appeal, the fewer constraints and requirements we place on players regarding the way they fight their wars, the better.
Shoot people, not structures
Extensive empirical testing has shown that shooting at structures is in-and-of-itself boring, and even when it results in a good fight, it generally does so in spite of the structure-shooting mechanic rather than because of it. There are other ways to achieve the upsides of sitting in front of a stationary object with your weapons cycling for half an hour that don't make it indescribably tedious if the other side doesn't show up.
Vulnerabilities
Every organization's specific circumstances and setup should have its own distinct set of vulnerabilities, and they should always exist. It should be possible with effort to mask them, but a diligent foe should be able to discover and exploit them. An organizational playstyle with no serious vulnerabilities is a broken playstyle.
Many dimensions of value
When assessing the value of a given area of space, there should be many different possible measures of "good", and each area of space should have a different combination of "good" and "bad" measures, to as fine a granularity as is practical. This should ensure that all bits of space are good for something and therefore worth fighting over; that for any given measure of good there's a "best" bit of space that people after that particular thing will want to fight over and hold; and that there are many different "best bits" corresponding to different specific requirements, so there's no clear "best overall" bit of space that allows one organization holding it to dominate everyone else. (Note that there still need to be areas of space that are good at being accessible to newer players, which means that people should be moving out of them on a regular basis.)
Grunts involved throughout
Corp and alliance leadership are very important to the game because they often do a lot of work to make sure that thousands of other players are having a good time. We should be careful not to put the cart before the horse, though. Wherever possible we should make sure that interesting tools and decisions are being given to all rather than just the few leaders. If a feature is trying to make the often-thankless job of leadership easier, it should be aimed at the leaders. If it's trying to add something new and interesting to the game, it should be aimed at the "grunts".
Emergent "terrain"
The "playing field" of territory and conquest should be shaped by players. Further, each adjustment they make should have consequences to other nearby areas, and those consequences might not always be intended, and when multiple adjustments begin to overlap in space they should interact in interesting ways. Every location should have a different character based on the unique combination of natural features and player-made alterations that surround it. This helps make every fight and every campaign different and interesting.
Reward investment with value, control
At these scales, investments should scale in two directions. The first is investing to increase the value of your space. This sort of thing pays for itself if you can hold the space long enough for it to pay off. The second is to increase your influence/control over your space, including existing objects like stargates and map statistics and so on. This does not pay for itself directly, but increases security and so on so that value investments have a chance to pay off. Both types of investment are necessary in order to build a good environment for players to really put down roots and develop areas of space, which increases the gameplay value for residents and raiders alike, and means there's more on the line when a big war rolls around, making it more emotionally intense.
TZ-safe
Up for removal. Still thinking about how much we should try and mitigate time zone issues for people, and how much we should leave them to figure out the problem themselves.
Reward time, localism, thought, investment, teamwork
Time - gathering intelligence should not be quick. People who take the time to really do their homework should be rewarded.
Localism - there should be a clear advantage to specializing in a particular area, allowing players to build up local knowledge and use it against their enemies.
Thought - intel-gathering should not be a rote activity, it should require people to make plans and then adjust them as they go.
Investment - those who are willing to make investments in intel-gathering, either in static or mobile tools, should be rewarded, as this further encourages specialization.
Teamwork - working together should be more efficient than working separately, because getting people to interact always brings value of one sort or another.
Pervasive concern
Intel should not be a thing that you think about occasionally, or that can be worked on a bit and then checked off on a list as "done". Decision-makers should always be thinking about their intel and how up-to-date it is. This ensures that intel-gathering is a useful specialization, and further implies that there are lots of decisions that other players could be making that will disrupt your plans. A game that requires constantly updating intelligence for optimal gameplay is a game where there's a lot going on and a lot of interesting decisions to be made.
Strong tools for collecting and sharing
To support the other goals here, tools should be available for collecting and sharing intel that minimize the amount of rote work, particularly documentation, that players need to engage in. This frees up their attention for collaboration, analysis and decision-making.
Moving target
New information should become old information on the shortest delay sensible for a given thing. This serves to make intel an ongoing concern and a regular occupation, gives people space to take action before their opponents are ready for it, and adds an edge of urgency to decision-making. People should not be asking if their intel is up-to-date, they should be asking how out-of-date it is.
Active components
Intelligence-gathering should not be a purely passive occupation. There should be plenty of opportunities for gatherers to take a more active stance, either to take shortcuts in gathering the intel, or to act on it right away and sabotage or otherwise mess with the enemy's stuff. There should though always be the risk of getting caught, and having your patrol cut short on top of the usual drawbacks of eg getting shot. This serves to make intel-gathering a little more interesting and engaging.
Everyone in nullsec should have a place that they can call home, and really mean it. From the lone guy living in a dead-end system on his own, to the small corp in NPC nullsec, to every member of a giant alliance claiming three regions, they should all have somewhere they can go that feels familiar and safe, at least for the short term. People in nullsec should feel like they live in nullsec, rather than just hanging out there from time to time.
Opportunity for expression
When a player has a place called "home", that feeling should be reinforced by a sense of ownership. A very strong way to achieve this is to allow the player to customize their home, adding their own unique details to the whole which in turn makes them identify with it much more strongly.
Investment
Players should be able to invest in their homes, both because spending time and resources on something they already like generally makes people happy, and because it further raises the stakes when they're fighting for their home.
Your feedback here!
As noted above, we want to move feedback into a bunch of separate threads, so we don't have twelve discussions in one thread. Here are the links again in one convenient place:
We're doing these blogs now so we can get as much clear, well-argued feedback as possible before we commit to anything. Please feed us back!
Also, to repeat a thing from earlier in big letters, THIS WILL ALL TAKE A LONG-ASS TIME TO HAPPEN. Some of it will be changed or dropped before it ever gets implemented. Some of it will never happen. This is a roadmap, not a production schedule.
-Greyscale, on behalf of Team BFF (WHO ARE CURRENTLY CCP AFFINITY, CCP FRELLICUS, CCP GREYSCALE, CCP SOUNDWAVE, CCP PUNKTURIS, CCP GILSEV, CCP BETTIK, CCP DROPBEAR AND CCP TALLEST, and who thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.)
tl;dr This is a theory blog, there is no tl;dr. Sorry!
The top bit
So as you may or may not have heard, Team BFF are thinking about nullsec again, with an eye to making some improvements over the next year or so.
In the past we've often started thinking about nullsec again because we were unhappy with our sovereignty mechanics (again), which leads into a nice self-contained area of work. This time our initial discussions were about resources and industry in nullsec, which are things that we've not really tackled "for a while" and "in forever" respectively. Asking ourselves "so, uh... how should industry work in nullsec" set us off down a rather interesting path of putting aside the sovereignty mechanics (for the most part, for now) and looking at everything else.
It quickly became apparent that we needed to take a more structured approach to deciding exactly where our focus should be, leading to the resuscitation of an old project which you could somewhat-charitably describe as a Grand Unified Theory of nullsec design - a proper ground-up breakdown of how nullsec as a whole should work. This project meshed nicely with an internal drive we've been having recently in EVE Development to create and refine more robust roadmaps for where we want to be five years from now and how we'd like to get there, so it quickly got greenlit and we got to work.
What followed were several rounds of brainstorming, filtering, analysis and discussion. We formed an internal group of about twenty CCP employees with an interest in nullsec and held a series of brainstorming sessions; we got feedback from the CSM and ran an open session with them during the spring summit; we even consulted with a few of the Alliance Tournament experts while they were over here, because it seemed like a useful opportunity. All this input was condensed down into two large wiki pages and one very crowded whiteboard, and then refined into a sizable collection of "Epic Stories" for our Scrum backlog.
We've done extensive private refinement and we're reasonably happy with what we have, so the next obvious step is some public discussion. There will therefore be (at least) two theory blogs over the summer, of which this is the first.
The bit where I add some disclaimers
Before getting into the actual details, here are the parameters we're working from:
This is all still in pre-production. We've spent some time fleshing out some very high-level "epic" user stories to improve our understanding of what we want, but there's been minimal design and zero implementation work undertaken as of yet.
As a consequence of the above, a lot of it is deliberately light on detail. Everything listed here is subject to development, refinement and/or eventual rejection. We're trying to see the forest here, not the trees.
We're trying to create a long-term plan rather than a single-expansion feature list. Some of this will probably never actually happen. Some of it will take a loooong time to get done. If we finish the majority of this plan in the next five years I'd be extremely happy. The biggest win here in the meantime is having a clear overall direction that we can use to determine what to work on first and how those things should function.
The bit with the actual information
This first blog is covering "nullsec as a whole". The work informing this blog was driven by three main questions:
What is nullsec "for"? This is attempting to outline the functional role of nullsec in EVE Online, ie why it is worth doing in the first place in systemic terms. Once we have an understanding of how nullsec is positioned in this regard, we have an easier time drilling down to how it should work. This section lists all the things that we believe /should/ be true in an ideal world.
How should nullsec work? This lays down universal rules for nullsec: every single feature that has a nullsec component should, in an ideal world, follow all of these rules. This means there is deliberately nothing specific about individual parts of the game in here.
What have we learned? This is a handy section I created to stockpile various "non-obvious" things that we have discovered turn out to be very obviously a bad thing with the benefit of hindsight. We would like to be avoiding all of these in future. Some of them will still happen regardless, because the reality is that we can't always have nice things - but we will frown mightily when we release them, and vow to do better next time.
Finally, please note that what we're trying to outline here are things specific to, or specifically important in, nullsec. There's a raft of EVE (and CCP) design principles that are assumed and left unspecified throughout this work, such as "getting people to interact with one another is good".
Ok, so with all that out of the way, here are some bullet points which we made earlier.
The functional role of Nullsec
Nullsec is the land of opportunity and adventure
Nullsec is an area which brings people together in a very strong way
Nullsec acts as a rich source of aspirational goals for players of all levels of experience
Nullsec provides an area in which players can amass and exercise power over other players
Nullsec provides an area in which players can develop a rich, player-centric shared history
Nullsec permits extremely rich PvP experiences at all fleet sizes
Nullsec allows players to build a home and make a lasting mark on the world
Nullsec generates isolated events and on-going stories which energize the playerbase and help drive interest in the game
Nullsec conflict destroys large amounts of manufactured goods, which drives the EVE market
Nullsec is a place that allows us to distribute high-value resources in a balanced way
Nullsec is one of the things that makes EVE interesting and unique
Nullsec design rules
EVE turned up to 11
Nullsec features should always reward teamwork, organization and interaction in every feature
Nullsec features should always support the core fantasy that we're offering
Maximize "can", minimize "must"
Nullsec features should always maximize the amount of valuable options available to the player, and minimize the number of mandatory tasks they must complete
Nullsec features should always encourage players to solve their own problems rather than using mechanics to regulate things
Keep a careful eye on economic balance
Nullsec moneymaking activities should be generally competitive with one another, and therefore pay out more than equivalent activities elsewhere
Nullsec should always remain economically linked to other areas of the game, but this link should be carefully balanced
Everyone should be able to see how to get involved
For a given nullsec feature or activity, any player should be able to figure out a plan that ends with them participating in that activity/feature
Players should be able to mitigate danger, but not eliminate it - nobody should be safe in space, everything that's built should be destroyable
Nullsec features can (and often should) allow players to mitigate the inherent danger of Nullsec with effort, teamwork and organization, but they should never make a player feel safe while in space, or secure in their investments from month to month: every organization should have a discoverable weakness, and anything that can be built up in should be possible to tear down again
Nullsec should feel big and uneven
Nullsec features should support and enhance the perception that Nullsec is a big place
Nullsec features and content should support and enhance a clear perception that some areas of space are "better" than others, measured by a given metric, but the hierarchy does not need to be uniform across different metrics
Nullsec features and content should support and enhance the perception that every area of nullsec space is different, in as many ways and to as fine a granularity as is practical
Everyone should have a reason to be friends and a reason to fight
Nullsec features and content should support and enhance an overall landscape where there's always a rational reason to co-operate with other groups, and a rational reason to fight them (and supply the tools to do both)
Support multiple sizes and styles of organizations across multiple timezones
Nullsec features and content should actively support a landscape where organizations of all different sizes and structures/styles maintain a healthy presence
Nullsec features and content should avoid disadvantaging someone because of the timezone they happen to live in
The interests of players and their leaders should align
Nullsec features should thoroughly consider the interests of players at all levels of corp/alliance heirarchies, and ensure that their interests all align
There should always be another hill to climb, and players should never want to look back
Nullsec features and content should actively support the perception that, for all playstyles, there's always another hill to climb
Nullsec features and content should always remind players why they left safe space, and never make them think about going back
Don't make lag
Nullsec features and content should actively attempt to reduce or remove the likelihood of unmanageable server load
Lessons learned
Shooting at stationary structures is boring
See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. Even the good fights that do happen around such objectives could be improved by having better objectives.
Shooting at things with hitpoints scales very efficiently with fleet size, which encourages lag-producing behavior
Having to spend significant amounts of effort defeating an enemy which isn't even fighting back is really boring
See: Starbase warfare, Dominion sov warfare. See in particular how long it took to clear IT Alliance's ownership out of Delve, as a recent example
Waking up every morning and having to clean up the mess made while you were asleep is boring
See: station ping-pong pre-sov, repairing station services. Having to do something tedious every day before you can actually play the game is not cool
Doing something just "because it would be cool/neat/awesome" is always a bad idea and will come back to bite you later
See: Jump bridges, cyno jammers, Sov 4, AoE doomsdays, titans in general, supercarrier boost... Note that we should still obviously strive to make everything cool/neat/awesome, but when we start off with an awesome idea rather than an actual problem we want to fix or a feature that has a clear, functional and necessary goal, it generally requires painful fixes further down the road
Cost is a useful variable to tune but an unwise thing to rely on to enforce scarcity or balance - players will always be richer than you think
See: outposts, titans, supercarriers
Making something tedious will not stop players doing it if it's very clearly the best option. They'll do it, and they'll hate it
See: everything involving starbases. As a counterpoint though, things like the one-per-corp-per-system-per-day starbase rule demonstrate that if something doesn't make a big difference but is sufficiently awkward to do, then any theoretical "exploit" scenarios tend to fall out of favor quickly as they're just not worth the effort.
People like to do one-stop shopping, and will "go to Jita" for everything unless doing so is comparatively very inconvenient
See: moon mineral distribution, high-strength booster resource distribution, neither of which achieved much in the way of the nullsec-to-nullsec trade that they hoped to encourage
The bit where we ask for feedback
The reason we're talking about this now rather than in three or four months' time is that we're making it a clear policy with this work to collect as much feedback as possible, as early as possible. We do actually want to hear your opinions on this. If there are things that you disagree with or would like to see added here (particularly in the "lessons learned" section as it relates specifically to nullsec), please list them - and explain them! - in the comments thread in as clear, constructive and succinct a manner as you can. We will be reading and thinking about the points raised, with a view to making any necessary alterations, in the near future.
The bottom bit
There will be another blog in the near future, in which we will be explaining where we're thinking about going for all the major areas of nullsec design (I think we have twelve sections there). In the meantime, comment away!
-Greyscale, on behalf of Team BFF
Contracts in the API reported by: CCP Elerhino | 2011.07.29 14:36:35
Hello!
We have been working on a new set of API pages that will give you access to Contract information. This functionality is due for a late August deployment but we wanted to get an early devblog out there to introduce our ideas and get some feedback from the experts on the other end.
The Problem
Contracts and Market Orders are very similar, and have caused us similar headaches, in terms of how do we give API consumers usable information without causing too much strain on the EVE datastore. What we wanted to do was conceptually simple, we wanted to give you non-expired items as well as items that expired less than X time ago. But it turns out we can't do this without taking an axe to the datastore because, without getting into details, the datasets simply aren't optimized for this kind of a query.
A Solution
So we decided to try a different approach and fetch only active non-expired items. This is what we did with the Market Orders to limit the amount of un-needed information the API needs to query for and forward to clients. This greatly improved the query for the datastore but shot API clients in the foot because we took away vital information.
One issue is that orders that are issued and processed within the API Orders cache period never appear in the API. To bridge this gap we want to include recently issued orders in the list. We're thinking a week's worth of orders would not only fix the problem but also come in handy if you only want to get the list once a day or every few days.
Another issue is that when an old order gets processed it disappears off the list without any mention of what happened to it. To fix this we'll add an API page, or perhaps an orderID parameter to the Market Order page, so that you can look up the missing order and find out what happened to it.
Contracts
Similar to the Market Orders, the Contract list will contain contracts that are outstanding or in progress, as well as recently issued contracts. We'll also have a separate page or a contractID parameter so that you can look up a single contract.
Actually there will be two sets of Contract pages, one for characters and another one for corporations. The character version will give you contracts that the character is attached to in one way or another. The corporation version will show you contracts that your corporation or alliance is attached to and you'll need a corporation key to access it. This is something we wanted to get your opinion on, the corporation contracts are visible in-game to any member of the corporation but in the API we're locking it behind a corporation key which only directors and CEOs can create. This is a kind of a security measure in the sense that it prevents members from accidentally giving corporate information to a 3rd party.
The contract lists themselves will not include items, bids or notifications. We'll have separate pages for items and bids but most likely completely skip notifications. The item page will display a list of items for a specified contract, the information will contain things like type ID, quantity and whether the item is being asked for or is included.
The bids page will be a bit different. It will display a list of recent bids on a character/corporation basis. Each time the cache is refreshed you'll get a list of bids that have been made on contracts issued by your character/for your corporation since the last time the cache was refreshed. The first time you request the bid list it will give you all bids since yesterday (relatively speaking).
A quick note on the deployment schedule - we wanted to get the Market Order fixes out ASAP but currently we don't have a deployment scheduled before the late August one. To take an API build from a development stage to deployment involves a number of people in a number of departments and it's very difficult to get anything like that coordinated during holiday seasons. So most likely you'll have to wait for that one.
- CCP Elerhino
Telemetry on Tranquility reported by: CCP Veritas | 2011.07.27 14:04:50
Kids like to show off their new toys. I fancy myself a large kid, and we got a new performance analysis toy on TQ recently, so I want to show it off to you. This is a very handy tool that we use during fleet fights and other high-load situations to see exactly what the server is spending its time on.
I put together a quick little video at home with my crappy webcam about a month ago to show it off to you. Without further ado, I present: Telemetry on Tranquility.
Hope you enjoyed it. As always, if you have any questions for me on this or anything related to the War on Lag, hit me up in the comments thread.
Fly True, ~ CCP Veritas
Price Indices - June 2011 reported by: CCP Recurve | 2011.07.25 11:17:12
Price Indices - June 2011
The four price indices of New Eden have been calculated for June 2011. For more detail on the indices, please refer to the price level chapter of the QEN.
Mineral prices fall considerably for the second month in a row. Mineral volume traded and used in ship production is falling. The market seems to be cooling off after a period of expansion and inflation around the EVE Online: Incursion release.
Datacore prices have fallen sharply since May, when changes were made to the agent system. Improved agent quality and lower requirements for use have increased datacore production, so prices have been pressed downwards. Anticipation of this fall may also have lead players with stockpiles to sell them quickly, thus increasing the effect.
The most interesting development this month was the development of the PLEX price, which only grew by 0.4% from May to June, despite the launch of the Noble Exchange and the ability to convert PLEXes to AURUM for such transactions. Admittedly, the price rose throughout May, spiking around June 1, but it has since fallen back to previous levels, making the monthly average prices in May and June roughly equal.
The values for June are:
June 2011
1 Month Change
12 Month Change
Mineral Price Index
72.2
-4.7%
15.3%
Primary Producer Price Index
78.4
-3.0%
50.2%
Secondary Producer Price Index
108.8
3.1%
51.3%
Consumer Price Index
66.1
-0.4%
15.3%
The graph shows the development of the indices since October 2003.
The CSM has just started their latest round of prioritization crowdsourcing, here's what they have to say:
Several times a year, the CSM enlists the aid of the community in helping us prioritize the issues that CSM has raised with CCP. The results of this crowdsourcing effort helps guide the CSM's efforts during not only our regular summit meetings, but also the all-important CCP release planning process. This is your chance to tell us which CSM issues you think are the most important and deserving of CCP's attention.
To make your voice heard, look at the list of issues on the Prioritization Wiki Page and then cast your votes in the associated Assembly Hall thread. Complete instructions on how to vote are available in both places.
Please help us push for more improvements by voting for what you think is important. We greatly appreciate your time and attention.
Sincerely, The Members of the 6th Council of Stellar Management
Live Events: Only the Beginning reported by: CCP Headfirst | 2011.07.18 17:06:26
Without going into too much detail about how much fun we had doing the Sansha Reborn live events last year or how pleased we are with the overwhelmingly positive reaction to them (you can watch/listen to CCP Dropbear and me whining about all that here, here, here, here, here, here and here), we'd just like to say thank you to the EVE Online community for once again amazing us with your input and helping us define one of the game's most iconic expansions. Seriously, without the dynamic storyline that evolved largely due to player activity, live events and Incursion wouldn't have been nearly as exciting. Nobody wants to sit around chatting about the good old days for hours on end, though, so on with the new stuff!
As some of you have already noticed, Sansha is back (uhm… again) with a vengeance (uhm… another vengeance), having switched his focus from abducting civilians off of planets to hunting down the people who worked to thwart that operation: capsuleers. He's upgraded his armada to include the types of ships found in incursions and he's no longer going to just sit around and wait for capsuleers to interfere with his plans, so he's never been more dangerous than he is now. If you're heading into incursion systems thinking you know what to expect, think again.
Beyond that, there are entirely new live event plot lines in the works, with at least one of them already in its initial stages of deployment. As both CCP Dropbear and I have advanced onset ADD, permanent insomnia, chronic workaholism, we're going to roll them all out simultaneously. There are going to be several stories unfolding, hopefully enough to appeal to a wide array of play styles. We’re aiming to please you lore hounds with some in-depth historical revelations, but everything we learned from the Sansha events let us know that players love to fight as well, so be ready for more of that, too.
The most important thing we learned, though, is that we're only half of the live event team; without a heavy involvement by the players, it's just static content, and that’s not what we want out of this. If you really want to get involved in the story of EVE Online, there’s never been a better opportunity!
It’s going to be one hell of a summer.
CSM May summit - meeting minutes are out reported by: CCP Xhagen | 2011.07.12 16:37:08
The CSM 6 and CCP had their first summit from Wednesday, May 18 to Friday, May 20, 2011. During this summit they discussed Flying in Space with Team BFF, the future of EVE with CCP t0rfifrans and CCP Zulu, the EVE-Dust 514 link with CCP TomB and much more. Full meeting minutes are available at this link. A table of contents are as follows:
CSM Intro
Team BFF and the ‘Little Things'
EVE: Flying in Space
EVE Future
The EVE-Dust link
EVE Marketing
Quality Assurance
Game Masters - Policies, Petitions and Large Fleet Lag
EVE Security Task Force
Team Gridlock - The War on Lag
ISD and Community Matters
EVE User Interface Issues
Starbase Issues
Feature Abandonment
Nullsec Industrialization
Incarna and the NPE
EVE Art
Meeting with Hilmar
EVE Economics
Ship Balancing
We understand that there is a lot of information in one document and there are sure to be a lot of comments from players on many of the issues. We would ask that you place your comments in this thread as it will be actively monitored by the CSM and CCP.
