riverini’s note: I didn’t got to Eve Vegas but Sugar Kyle from The Humbleless Crew did and wrote an extensive summary on the presentation which I totally encourage you to read. Also feel free to visit her Low Sec LifeStyle blog.
Please keep in mind these are mere “summaries” and “notes” of the presentations, written in haste and with a very vague sense of specificity on the mentioned subjects.
Eve Vegas – CCP Soundwave Discusses The Upcoming Winter Expansion
Eve Vegas 2013 is already planned in case anyone is wondering. Next year they are going to try to have more sponsors and lower the ticket prices.
The first speaker is Soundwave. I watched him walk down the hallway on the way to the convention hall with his shirt that says, “Dev Team” across the back. Starting time was supposed to be 1000 hours but the trickle of people and the continue trickle in of people things didn’t get started until around 1030. I found myself sitting beside a lady from RVB and listening to an argument about wormholes.
“This Winter in EVE-Online” by CCP Soundwave
The first thing was the $10,000 tournament. There is already a Dev Blog about this event about this. He is hoping that we will have something like the 10k tournament every month or two if he has his way. He commented about how Starcraft and League of Legions has a them, and he’d love us to be that point.
“This winter Justice will be done. If not by their laws then by ours.”
That is the tag line for retribution.
Soundwave says that he does not like NPCs governing the game and he would prefer to have players take care of the law enforcement. This winter is the first step to this. This is a bit of an experimental steps and if it works out when more should be coming.
- What is it about?
- Giving players the tools to police space so that one day concord doesn’t have to.
- Player to player content with more meaningful then player to environment.
- You know what owns? people getting blown up. That’s what owns.
- Or also known as the cycle of dickery
(from the slide)
The Bounty Hunting.
Three things are to the county. People have no faith in the current system. They want to make a system where it means that if you put someone on that person they will lose something. So if you put a large bounty on someone it will pay out in small pieces. If you keep killing them you keep getting rewards until they are dead (example was kill a player with a bil isk bounty in a Raven get 20 mil until the bounty is drained). It creates more content with bounties or everything, anyone, at anytime.
They are taking away the notion of CCP judging people based off of game mechanics and if you don’t like someone you can kill them. They also want something that makes it very noticeable that people have bounties to help with incentives to kill them. Along with the fact that if you don’t like someone you can bounty their corporation and alliance.
Sharing kill rights
You can basically rent out your kill rights to people. ANYONE can pick up the kill rights and go and kill that person. You can pick it up on your alt but its a rental situation. It will cost money and have a time limit.
They outsourced the aggression mechanics to a Q&A company and a month later got a 40 page document explaining it. He said they were amazed by how terrible it was and wondered how they did that. This led to the simplification of crime watch.
With the new warning box you can turn it off. He said that petitions for ‘accidental clicked box!’ will be answered with, “You are probably dumb”. If your safety is green you won’t be able to shoot people in empire. If you set it to orange you can do mild things like can flipping. If you put your setting to red then you can do whatever whenever with no warning anymore. So if you set it to red, its your own fault.
Red skull means players and concord will kill you. Yellow means players will be able to kill you. The yellow exclamation point means that you can not log off safely.
A new focus on Eve
He said they have spent time working on eve around the edges. He wants Eve to be a better game to fly around an do stuff. He is focused on the core. One of these things is the buff bar. They want the in flight UI to be better. They are adding tooltips for every customization module in the game. However they are going to let you turn that off.
The path that he is going on. He wants it to be easier to get information to make hard choices. This is not for the winter but its a goal. Example, he wants there to be a way for someone to know why things happened such as a target exists from your view line. He wants the game to be difficult because the game is hard not because the UI is bad.
Faction Warfare
No more speedtanking. New NPCS and less space between warpin and capture point. Changing upgrades, quicker industry POS fuel reduction and different territorial bonus system. The NPC stations will be the best ones to do things at. (Faction Warfare is his baby. He sounds like he loves it.)
Next summer will be battlecruisers and battleships next summer. Then the little new ore frigate and the new destroyers. He said the minnie dessie comes from another game that the artiest liked a ship in and used that as inspiration. There is admission that the new amarr dessie looks like the old one. Then a commentary on the vagabond having frills again which led to clapping and cheers.
They will be updating a lot of the lore art. Its been neglected for years and they want to catch up so that all the artwork reflections how lovely the game is.
Soundwave feels that this one feels like Crucible. Lots of small things that make sense and feel good.
Q&A time
New Bounty System: Who gets the payout?
Its like a regular bounty. The entire fleet will get a piece of the payout. The person who paid for the bounty will also get a kill mail when it happened.
Streamlined UI About hard choices
Will this be for the market to? Yes, the market is hard to touch because it is very old and works well. He wants the spaceships to be able to give better data about the market. He wants the market to give everything.
In game gambling?
In game gambling?
He’d like to build a stockmarket that depends on how the alliances is doing. Then you can buy stock and sell it from how alliances are doing. And then hopefully people will make all sorts of scams that he can enjoy.
Kill rights and I want to rent them out how many people can he rent them out to?
Its public and anyone can pick it up. Limited time only. If someone has a kill right a popup can come up you can click claim and then go and rent them. If someone wants to rent them to themselves they will pay out the ass.
Reinvigorat the nag?
Soundwave says… well… yeah… but he expects that size sihp to be next winter or the summer after.
Salvage Drones
They are for December.
Logoff for NPC aggression is that to hurt people?
Its a sixty second logoff timer for NPC aggression not 15 minutes.
Kill rights do you know who wants to kill you will he know?
He will be notified about it. But he is the first person on the cycle of dickery and such but Soundwave wants players to have more of an edge and cat and mouse game going on. So the person will know that someone is after them.
Bounty system anon?
No. They will know you did it.
New aggression timers: I can jump gate and it resets logoff timer?
It will be fixed and correct time applied.
How will new thing affect cyno jumps?
You will still be aggressed if you jump out on a cyno. And TIDI will affect it somehow.
Elaborate on the bounty UI? Tied to local? Notification?
Soundwave says that he wants it to be super visible. They are discussing a popup like the new tutorial or an icon change or something that is very visible so that you can find out that they have the bounty.
AFK Campers! Does soundwave like it or will they be able to do something about it?
No changes in the AFK cloaking. Cloaking mechanic is very difficult right now. He said that maybe next year something about AFK Cloakers. He does not like how it works but they are looking for a solution for it.
[EDIT: Hong says Soundwave is happy with AFK cloaking. I heard it as AFK Cloaking is going to change and they are looking into Solo PvP or something. So not sure which way this went cuz we heard different things. Someone who has Eve Radio can hopefully clarify]
Bounties… is there a way to harm them without killing them… like a ransom type situation where the ship isn’t blown up?
Nothing like that has been discussed. He really wants people to blow up.
Current mining barge changes and how they each specialize and how everyone using the Mack now and so its not balanced. Are they going to nerf the Mack?
They are reviewing it right now to see what they need to change.
Logis on Killmails? (lots of cheering and clapping).
Soundwave says: Soon with a little chuckle. (I dont think that means soon 
)
Bounty stuff: Can I grief someone out the game?
Pretty much. If they want to keep dropping cash on someone and going after them. Forum posters who alt post Soundwave does not like. He wants social consequences and for people to debate what they are doing that brought it down. People thinking about the enemies that they make.
Are there people in empire angry with Goons that are going to pour cash onto them? Yes. And he wants that to happen. He wants people to decide who the bad guys are based off of social things. Not for him to figure out but for players to figure out.
- Sugar Kyle