EVE General Discussion

DUST runs on the UNREAL engine, not Carbon. WoD runs on its own branch of Carbon now, quite possibly because avatar gameplay doesn't work well on an RTS engine with a 1 second tick.

In that case, we're looking at the completion of the WoD code branch, followed by the merging of that branch back into the EVE codebase (what could possibly go wrong, amirite?), followed by the inevitable round of server hardware upgrades that the new Carbon code will require. I'm not even going to try to put a timeline on that. But it makes sense: EVE developers concentrate on EVE-as-is, which is ships and stations, and WoD concentrates on WoD-as-is, which is avatar gameplay, and then when both teams have spiffy, fully functional codebases, the merge happens and EVE gets avatar gameplay (but WoD, presumably, does not get spaceships, unless CCP is really thinking big).

On the plus side, if this is what's actually going to happen, then the flying-in-space game will, in all, likelihood, become less soupy. Imagine your ship firing when you tell it to fire, and turning when you tell it to turn!

ok, 35 pages, i cant honestly say i read them all, just wanted to leave my two cents

i dont have a clue how many people agree with me, but personally, i'm more interested in WiS then ANY other content

WiS made the game a lot more immersive for me, the egg, or ever changing space ship hulls dont do it for immersion of any kind of me
i cheered when WiS was announced, loved it when it appeared,
and am severely disappointed that nothing further is planned

also quite annoyed that dust is PS3 only, i dont own a PS3, and dont plan to buy one, even used
console games are STUPID expensive where i live(can get several NEW pc games for the price of ONE console game), even if i liked the idea of the PS3, i do not have more money then sence
as much as i love the idea of dust, i will never see it while it's console exclusive

It is most certainly possible. While I am not programmer, I am familiar with QM/MM (theoretical only - never done it myself). That is simulation method where part of the simulated system (for example an enzyme) is handled with quantum mechanics (in the enzyme that would be the active site) and rest of it is handled with molecular mechanics (rest of the protein, water, ions and whatever else is put in the system). Now, both QM and MM both have different time step lengths and yet the method is able to handle them both quite well. I don't see any reason why EVE could not be programmed to handle different lengths when it has been done elsewhere for years.

Nice shifting of goalposts there. You spoke about something being possible, not whether CCP programmers are able to do it or not. I merely mentioned that yes, it has been done before and thus is possible, but I did not comment on the ability of CCP's programmers (because I don't know). No more, no less.

The great thing about the new bounty system is that it provides a basis for some fun game play in stations, namely being able to track down and shoot your quarry.

Maybe with great difficulty we should even be able to track down and enter their captains quarters and kill them in their sleep (whilst their offline).

WTB. Up-gradable "door" with built in Claymore to take care of pesky bounty hunters.

Like so many others in this thread, I want no other feature greater than I want WiS. I've long committed to myself that the first game to successfully integrate Starship gameplay and Avatar gameplay in meaningful ways will have my money forever.I desperately hope CCP are the pioneers to pull it off, but other developers seem to be approaching this feat.

It's my view that CCP needs to add something new to EVE... something that re-invigorates people's interest in paying for it. Over the past 8 years, the gaming community as a whole has grown by millions of players - and being a gamer is becoming highly mainstream - yet EVE's population has remained more of less the same for much of it's life. EVE is a very appealing game for PVPers, but PVP players tend to be amongst the *tiniest* demographic of gamers. If CCP added Avatar gameplay, it would be one of the first additions to reach out to a new audience.

And they were SO close, too.

Get rid of the stupidly-high prices on vanity items, open the doors, add meangful reasons to play an Avatar, and deliver on the features that have been discussed for years... and I'm very confident there would be a surge of renewed interest in EVE.

You must have missed a lot of discussions threads about WIS ,were the devs were asking for ideas themselves.

Only CCP decided to go silent after all those threads and promising blogs that never were published.
Instead of continuing the discussion,they are giving that privilege to some drunk participants on some festival ,instead putting the info in the discussion threads .

You got very high hopes for a 10 year old game that does not evolve ,but i hope for EvE you are right.
And if not ,missed chance from CCP, i guess

We are left with quite a big conundrum.

The more content CCP add to Eve, the more stuff there is to take up development time. If they fix POSes and SOV, we will moan that WiS has been left abandoned. If they work on WiS, the opposite will happen. If they do both eventually, people will start to moan that PI has been abandoned, or that Incursions have been abandoned, and that WHs have been abandoned, and then eventually it gets full circle and people start to complain that FW has been abandoned, and then that the new bounty system has been abandoned.

WiS really does need some iteration. If I had my way, they would work on new POSes and WiS together for the next expansion. And leave SOV to another time, because the POS update will be a significant update to SOV space and WH anyway. I don't know if that's feasible, because I am sure new POSes will take up a significant amount of development time.

They really need to think carefully about what each new feature means for both future development time and potential increase in subs. They've been smart, redoing loads of stuff. Because it doesn't really add to future development requirements, but it also isn't really that likely to bring in that many new subs. POSes and SOV do need to get done, and eventually so will PI (But PI will get a small boost hopefully when Dust comes out).

I can actually see another Incarna on our hands soon, because CCP are going to need to integrate DUST with Eve fully at some point, which is going to take a lot of time from the Eve devs even though the Eve players probably wont see a massive boost to any of their gameplay elements.

It's going to an interesting year I think. Fingers crossed for some WiS.

Actually Eve almost precisely fits the definition of 'evolve', in that it makes slow, incremental changes that are barely noticeable over short periods of time.


The last three expansions have been pretty successful in themselves given the circumstances - following the collapse of Incarna and the exposure of CCP's hopelessly flawed development planning (aka "the playerbase will lap up whatever unfinished junk we throw at them, so make it up as we go along based on the whims of rotten-shark-inhaling management and a good dose of Icelandic hubris to carry it all through"), an approach of making modest promises and mostly delivering them has been a breath of fresh air. To be honest, post Incarna CCP will have needed some time to get their house in order and restore some confidence and competence. Hopefully that era has passed now and we can expect more ambitious expansions (which actually deliver what they promise) from now on.

And purely from looking at the bottom line, 'no significant growth' with 20% fewer staff is progress!


The whole mess that led up to Incarna are aspects of the same problem, not separate issues. I've said this before, pre-Incarna CCP had underdelivered for several expansion cycles because they'd assumed the subscriber base was a captive audience and that Eve's player-driven sandbox nature meant they could continue to serve up any old half-baked crap, whilst the users worried about generating the meaningful content and cracked open our credit cards to buy pretty monocles and boots to fund $1000 jeans purchases for management. Greed Is Good leaking exposed the whole sorry mess (and also clearly exposed the side-fact that some staff members at CCP were unhappy with the direction the company was being taken in), but the underlying issues at CCP were responsible for all parts (18 months, Greed Is Good, NeX, the $99 development licence, Captain's Quarters) of the perfect storm that was the Summer 2011 trainwreck.


From who? You said it yourself above - there was no gameplay, and there hadn't even been significant attempts to design any until Team Avatar's efforts over the spring and summer of 2012.


What the last few 'thousand little things' expansions look to have done, however, is a better job of converting trial accounts into subscribers, ridding the game of some of the frustrations that led players to quit, and tempting back some of those previous quitters for another try. NPE and UI fixes, Time Dilation, and T1 ship rebalancing are all prime examples of that.

You don't expect a hospital patient who just had a major operation to jump back into work at full pace straight away, and you wouldn't expect CCP to completely restructure and shed 100 jobs then immediately hit out a new Apocrypha every 6 months. The company needed time to find their feet and get their confidence back. Hopefully, we're nearing that stage now where big meaningful expansions, whether that be industry, lowsec, 0.0 sov, WiS, or whatever else, can be back on the agenda.