Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: Why are the “Need for Speed” optimizations, as you call them, important? I’ve never considered EVE a resource hog, so why do these sort of enhancements need to be done?

Magnus: We actually have the “Need for Speed” in almost every one of our expansions, and “Need for Speed” is almost entirely server based, it doesn’t change the client much, if at all. As we grow the user base, we always have to be one step ahead of it. As we plan for growth from now until the next expansions we need to make sure that we can service all the players at the proper speeds. Almost all of the speed enhancements are being done on the server side of things, rather than the client side. A lot of it has to do with how the player’s client and the servers talk to one another.

Ten Ton Hammer: Does the player actually see a performance increase whenever a Need for Speed enhancement is implemented? Or is it mainly getting ready for the next batch of users?

Magnus: In the past, we’ve always seen an improvement with these upgrades. Previously, we would be right on the edge along with our growth, but due to our previous enhancements to the speed we’re now ahead of the curve, so the actual performance boost may be less than what we’re used to. However, these enhancements are always necessary to support our projected growth numbers.

Magnus is shooting for 300,000 EVE subscribers by the end of the year.

Ten Ton Hammer: Which could definitely help if you make you’re 300,000 subscribers by the end of the year. You’re still shooting for that many subscribers by the end of the year, correct?

Magnus: I may be the only person in the company that still believes we can reach that mark, but EVE is headed in that direction. We’re currently at 174,000 actives and 35,000 trials, so there are right around 210,000 people playing the game. That’s still a decent amount of ground to pick up, but we have two large expansions coming out, and they always generate quite a bit of publicity for us. We’re still on track.

However, even if we don’t reach that 300,000 mark, our operation plan actually assumes a much lower number than 300,000 players. So, even if we don’t make it, the company will be doing fine. Personally, I’m still shooting for 300,000 this year, and that’s what I’m going for.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why did you decide to add an element like “heat” to the EVE space combat? Aren’t there enough variables for players to worry about already?

Magnus: Heat definitely adds more things to worry about, but it also gives the player more things to work with on the ship that could benefit them in combat. This comes down to the idea that PvP should be really skill based and not skill points based. So a person that’s really good at managing things like this would definitely be at an advantage in a PvP encounter.

We wanted to make combat even more engaging and more based upon a player’s actual skill rather than his equipment or skill points.

Ten Ton Hammer: If a player overheats a certain module, is that heat damage random or is there a way for players to know how much output they’re going to get from overheating?

Overclocking and "heat" are new elements added to EVE combat.

Magnus: What players will do is activate the overclocking and that will start to heat up the modules. You will actually see the damage, and it goes by rack. For example, if you start overheating high rack modules, all those modules begin heating up. The same thing goes for all the low slots as well. You have to really think about what you want to overclock and when you should do it.

It really allows you to do a lot of fancy stuff in the game. It’s really, really interesting, but you never know how the players are going to use it until you actually get the feature in the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Jumping to ships, you’ve mentioned some work is being done to Motherships in this iteration. What was done and why was it necessary?

Magnus: Really, the only thing that has been changed in the Mothership is the addition of the ECM burst.