by Cody
“Micajah” Bye




The following article is the conclusion to our interview with Nathan
Richardsson, the executive producer of style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online, that
was conducted at the Austin Game Developers Conference. In
yesterday’s
interview
, we talked with Nathan about Trinity 2,
parts of Revelations 3, and a bit about the concept of Empire building.
You can read the entirety of that interview by href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/11835">clicking here.




Once you’ve finished up there, come on back and read the rest
of the interview that we’ve posted for you. In
today’s conclusion, Nathan and I discuss testing the 20 new
ships that they’re building for Revelations 3, the upcoming
democratic council that CCP|White Wolf is putting together, and we even
touch on the World of
Darkness
MMOG. Continue reading to find out more!



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Nathan Richardsson
tells us what's next for EVE Online.

Other than factional warfare, players on the EVE Online forums seem
most interested in the twenty new ships that are coming down the
pipeline. When creating those new ships, I asked Nathan what sort of
testing and balancing went into implementing those new vessels and how
much time that actually took. “It starts with internal
design, simply looking at the roles we’d like the ships to
fill and what the players are looking for,” Nathan began.
“We take those thoughts into consideration when
we’re building the classes that we’re looking at.
After that we take the ships into small focus groups where we have a
select number of people who are highly talented in certain areas of the
game, and we let them test out the ship.”



“That process usually takes a couple months,”
Nathan continued. “We then release the ship to public
testing, which goes all the way up until release. That’s
where the real polishing gets done. Obviously with 20 ships,
we’re putting a lot more people onto these ships to see how
they function. There’s a lot of new, shiny stuff coming for
the players.”



Another new aspect that is coming just around the corner is the
democracy system that the EVE developers are trying to implement. The
player council is certainly something that CCP is trying to implement
into the game, but from other interviews that have been published the
whole process is still in a fledgling state. “We’re
putting in a bigger infrastructure that will allow the EVE community to
actually vote in players to this council,” Nathan said.
“Those players voted in will have direct access to us and
we’ll fly them out to Iceland. On top of that,
we’ll have public meetings where they’ll bring up
issues, and I think that will bring a lot of transparency to the whole
process.”



“For instance, there’s a lot of people upset about
the idea of implementing factional warfare, because it’s
against our core principle of giving power to the players,”
Nathan continued. “It’s kind of us putting
semi-control over what the players are doing, and we want to get as far
away from that as possible. We’d rather put in tools to build
Empires so players have the control themselves.”


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On top of the Trinity
2 graphics upgrade, the developers are also introducing 20 new ships to
the game.

A this point, Valerie “Pann” Massey ( style="font-style: italic;">EVE Online’s
communication director) interjected a bit of information into the mix
and tried to clarify exactly what this democratic council was all
about. “We’ll be talking more about the council at
FanFest,” Val said. “As Nathan mentioned, we really
want to emphasize that the transparency issue is not about looking at
CCP the business; this just pertains to EVE Online and what goes on
inside the game. We’re not going to let players make HR
decisions for us.”



Nathan laughed and added, “It’s not about auditing
our books.”



“The intent is to clarify the real issues that are out
there,” Nathan continued. “Forums and other venues
have their own problems, so its really about getting issues addressed
by allowing players to see that we’ve thought – and
what we’ve thought – about particular problems. You
may see and answer one forum thread on the message board, but
there’s no way to guarantee that 200,000 people are going to
see that thread. In fact, there’s often a post on that exact
issue a few days down the road. Creating this framework for the
democratic council, hopefully, is going to be a pretty awesome
feat.”


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our EVE Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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