EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Saturday, the main event of EVE Vegas begins at 10 AM. I show up an hour late and stare at the iced coffee I snagged from Starbucks with bleary certitude, head pounding. We're back in the dingy conference room at the Imperial Palace, but the crowd is much larger than Friday and Oveur and the other devs have a projector; Oveur was giving a presentation about the various development ideas that were mocked up and then discarded over the years. It was probably fascinating for people who do not have sharp stabbing pain behind their eyes.

During the lunch break I desperately tried to clear my head with greasy hashbrowns from a stereotypical Vegas buffet. Oveur mentioned something about a game design workshop we'd be participating in, some sort of group brainstorming session. I informed him that I'll be terrible at this because the only game design advice I can think of is "remove doomsdays," then I went back to shoveling overpriced breakfast food down my throat.

The idea of the game design workshop was to teach us something of what the devs themselves do when thinking of an expansion. If we didn't come up with something good, Oveur warned us, the devs will inflict the dreaded 'Space Monster' expansion on the playerbase. The participants were given a number and separated into groups to prevent friends clustering together; we are told to appoint a spokesman for each group. Despite my raging hangover and exceedingly cranky demeanor, I ended up as spokesman. Then they tell me that at the end of the process there will be a presentation that I'll have to give, and - even better - a vote as to which group designed the best expansion.

At first, our methods of brainstorming were halting. We began from the premise of 'what sucks about EVE', from the perspective of a table full of PvP addicts and one erstwhile spy. PvE sucks. Missions suck. Maybe we should do something about that. No one has any idea. Lowsec sucks. It's full of pirates but they're only ganking people passing through to 0.0 or Empire; the space has no purpose. There's no reason at all to go to lowsec for its own merits. Wouldn't it be cool if it was actually kind of criminal? Sort of a Han Solo thing, a place for smugglers? Star Wars Galaxies got everyone all excited about smuggling but Sony Online never did anything with the class and it was a disaster. EVE has pirates and 'anti-pirates' but they don't really have anything to fight over, or do. Why don't we try to make Lowsec unique? Give it a reason to be there, turn it into a hive of scum and villany, a focus for criminality. A unique resource for it, some items that can only be used there?

Within minutes, our table - full of players who had nothing but contempt for lowsec - was in a frenzy of creativity. "If this ever actually gets made, I would live in lowsec and never leave," several of us vowed. The Corruption expansion was sketched out - and proceeded to easily win the competition as a crowd favorite.