Concerning the council, I wanted to make sure that the developers had
explored what sort of communication that they would need to make the
democratic council decisions known to the entire player database. Just
like the forums, it’s hard to insure that players are going
to read everything, and I asked Nathan about that issue.
“We’re going to have a special section of the
website devoted to the player council,” Nathan said.
“It’s going to archive everything that the council
does.”



“It will all be very up front,” Val added.


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alt="ambulation1" title="ambulation1"
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The elected player
council will hear all of the developers thoughts on issues like the
implementation of ambulation.

“We want to make it much, much more than a feedback
channel,” Nathan continued. “We want it to really
revolutionize some of the ways of running virtual worlds. It will be
interesting to see how much this truly affects the world. Depending on
the number of people involved in the project, it will influence what we
fix, what we change, what we add, or even what we remove. Of course,
the process will have to work for them, and that’s what
we’re currently working on.”



From what I gathered in the interview, much of what the player council
will engage in are listening to the developers and learning exactly
what they were thinking when they addressed a certain issue, but the
council will also serve as a representative discussion group for the
players in EVE. “We just don’t want to find a more
efficient way to answer player concerns than simply jumping on the
message boards every day,” Nathan said. “Most of
the time, we’d simply be saying, ‘Yes, we
know.’ all day long. There isn’t enough time in the
day to respond to every player issue, and that’s what the
council is for.”



Even initially, the developers realize that the player council
won’t be perfect, and that it will take time for the process
to be absolutely finalized. “It’s an iterative
process,” Nathan explained. “It will probably take
a year or two to figure out the best process involved in getting this
done. The process won’t be fun, but it’s going to
be extremely valuable compared to the other more informal ways of
communicating.”



“For example, we have a large volunteer group that we talk to
quite regularly,” Nathan continued. “But that
doesn’t have any way to reach all the players. There are
200,000 people in our game! We have no way of knowing that this
individual will spread the word to more than his close friends, and
then you get no expansion of information. There’s no trickle
down effect.”


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In the short term,
Trinity 2 is the priority, but the Ambulation project is also high on
the CCP|WW priority list.

As the conversation headed towards its conclusion, Nathan wanted to
give a brief summary of exactly what CCP|WW’s focus was at
this juncture. “Trinity 2 is really our big focus right
now,” Nathan said. “Like I said, it took 50 man
years to create this overhaul, and that was only working on the
graphics and not on the engine itself.”



“On top of that, we’re still growing,”
Nathan continued. “As long as the players are there,
we’re going to be there. It’s as simple as that,
and that’s the way it’s been for a long time. And
there’s never been a time when the company has been bigger
than it is today. We have over 250 people worldwide. The style="font-style: italic;">World of Darkness MMOG
is still in pre-production, and there are a lot of long term goals
associated with that game – Ambulation and Need for Speed
being two of them – but we’re getting there with
that technology in EVE and we’re working on it all.
There’s no rush.”



At this point, I made a comment about that sort of attitude being
lacking in the general MMOG development sphere, and Nathan laughed.
“We’re here to make games and have fun, not kill
ourselves,” he said. “We don’t like to
crunch, so we don’t. There are periods when we’re
busy, but we don’t do 90 hours a week for months on end. It
was like that once – before we launched – but we
aren’t going to do that again. It’s bad for moral
and it’s bad for health. We don’t want to shorten
the lifespan of our workers.”



Thanks again to Nathan Richardsson for taking the time to chat with Ten
Ton Hammer about the upcoming events in style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online! We
always look forward to any news coming from the open-ended game, and I
can’t wait to hear about what’s next for EVE and
its players!


Ten Ton Hammer is your
unofficial source for EVE Online href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/43">news and
features!



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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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