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

Ten Ton Hammer: Dominion will also bring some pretty big changes to the Titan, EVE’s most powerful ship by far. It’s rare for developers and players to agree that a ship is ridiculously overpowered, but that a Titan breaks the game seems to have been the consensus for a while now. Why did it take so long to roll back the Titan to a more targeted attack, do you think?

Ólafsson: Everything is just done in order, I guess. Some things just take less time than others. Why did it take so long? Change can be scary - it can take you a while to man up to taking the leap. We realized with the Titan changes and with the Sovereignty changes that although a large portion of the community feels that the system could be improved or that it’s imbalanced, there’s tons of people using it right now. And we don’t want to be continuously changing these large systems, so we just wanted to do it right.

Ten Ton Hammer: How do these sorts of changes mess with the lore of the game, given Tony Gonzales’s novel and how the Doomsday weapon fits in there?

Ólafsson: It doesn’t make Tony happy, we’re going to have to buy all his books back and black out a few lines. (laughter) But I’m sure he’ll learn to live with it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Tell us a bit about how another great feature of Dominion, Fleet Finder, works. Is it essentially a looking for group system?

Ólafsson: Exactly. To begin with, you can only publicly advertize fleets within your own corporation, so the griefers are going to have to wait for the next iteration to fool people into their fleets and kill them at random places. Essentially we are taking a mechanic, just trying to take what people are already doing, and make it more accessible and more fun - so it’s easy for you at the moment you log in to see which fleets are going on in your corporation or alliance and join different task forces - somebody’s mining, somebody’s ratting, somebody’s off on a cap fleet - to join them.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will it be possible for players to selectively load their fleets or password-protect fleets just for an elite few?

Ólafsson: Closed fleets, definitely. But we are just iterating on the design of the system. We mostly see ourselves are providers of setting and mechanisms.  That’s our job; we create a cool setting, and we have mechanisms for you to use in your gameplay. This is just one of these mechanisms that we want to do well and we’re probably going to improve on it as we move further along. But mechanisms for bringing people together should be the goal of any MMO.

With Dominion, the Doomsday weapon has had its day.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything more you can tell us about Dominion that maybe hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage?

Ólafsson: We talked about the new capture system and upgrade system. The upgrade system actually requires you to live in your space and use it. It will probably - and note the word probably - result in zero-sec being less blobbed out by alliances that claim space and don’t do anything with it, allowing smaller alliances to have a stake in this sort of gameplay.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you considering any changes that will make it a little less daunting for new players to move into null sec space?

Ólafsson: Moving forward, after Dominion, we’re planning to do a treaty system that will allow a corporation or alliance to create treaties with other corporations or players, giving them rights of passage, mining rights, ratting rights within their own systems, even if they’re not members of the corporation or alliance. You could have a player that plays favorably with two rival corporations or alliances, playing Switzerland and making ISK not war.

Ten Ton Hammer: How will that work? Will players be limited in their ability to shoot players from other treaty corps for fear of sparking a war?

Ólafsson: You can always shoot, but there will be repercussions. That would be part of the contract. We’d never put in a system where you can’t shoot. You can shoot people in Jita; there’s just repercussions.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are these treaties enforced?

Ólafsson: To be defined. We just want you to, for example as a sovereign system in zero-sec, to be able to profit from bringing people into your system- people that may never have gone into zero-sec - having them do work and you taxing them, like a feudal lord.

Ten Ton Hammer: So it’ll be a little safer for someone that doesn’t have a corporation or alliance to venture into zero-sec.

Ólafsson: Exactly, that’s the idea. The alliances profit in keeping you safe, and would be at a loss for griefing you.

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Ten Ton Hammer thanks Torfi Frans Olafsson for taking some time to tell us about Dominion, Post-Dominion, and Incarna at FanFest 2009!