CCP announced their new help center today, the latest improvement to EVE Online’s aging game experience. CCP has been busy planning, announcing and implementing huge changes to EVE.
The first decade focused on making a cool game with cool features, but over time the gameplay was painted into a corner. The collapse of the model came when the much-hyped ambulation, known as “Walking in Stations”, failed to deliver in the Incarna expansion (2011). Players were unimpressed, but turned angry when a series of business practice missteps leaked out of CCP. That angered the players into rioting, which culminated in the destruction of the statue outside of Jita. It is still destroyed to this day, as a monument to players.
Then CCP turned released DUST 514 which further upset players because it was restricted to Playstation, and it failed to catch fire and languished as the focus was put back on EVE, fixing broken gameplay. The other EVE-like game that CCP was building, “World of Darkness” was stopped.
CCP changed its whole direction: Instead trying to attract new players by giving them humanoid avatars or tie-ins to First Person Shooter, they opted to make overhaul EVE to make barriers of entry lower. To get untangled from the past, CCP had to recreate the game without shutting it off. Sony Online Entertainment tried to revamp Star Wars Galaxies but the changes were too abrupt and the game died.
CCP is taking their time, improving one system after another until ultimately the familiar game sits on a new codebase that allows the developers new latitude to mutate the game as needed.
The first, most important barrier of entry is the new player experience. CCP rise and the team responsible for it have changed the tutorial system, an active notification system, and now a new help center. The help center sits on a popular web software called Zendesk. There are many advantages to this system as explained in the devblog.”Introducing the New Customer Support Help Center.”
New Help Center
Search “Research”
Help Page with Video
The new help center has concise and well design information, as well as embedded video’s, links, breadcrumb navigation and icons that will be familiar ingame. It is in English for now but will be translated into local languages (French, German, Russian). There is still no Spanish localization support for EVE Online.
The ingame help menu no longer takes tickets. Instead it redirects you to an out of game browser and brings up the new site. Perhaps Zendesk could not fully function in the ingame browser. Could this be another decision point where CCP has changed their development direction. Executive Director CCP Seagull announced CCP would shore-up core gameplay and offload other systems to 3rd party developers. There probably won’t be any more improvements to accessories like; calculator, notepad, browser, but you will have help-ticket information linked to your notifications ingame.
Helping new players stick around is paramount to the health of EVE. Bringing back old players is also important. By revamping the look and feel of EVE, the game feels new after 12 years, but the gameplay has stagnated in null-sec space over the last year. Players fled null, opting to use alts in newbie corporations to fight in low-sec, wormholes or faction war. All those areas saw an increase in activity as null-sec slowed. The revamp of null-sec was already on the table but the schedule was pushed up and broken into 3 upgrades.
The first was a jump travel restriction, the second is due next week; FozzieSov, and the third was dissolved into “every tweak after.” Still on the horizon is changes to structures and capital ships – those are in essence phase three because they impact Sov significantly, but they also affect much more the null-sec.
FozzieSov also lowers the barriers of entry for null-sec, which are currently dominated by blobs of players. When the blobs alone are not big enough to win, the blobs blob together. Ultimately, Sov is a blobber’s game, meaning individuals and small groups are barred.
Another barrier being lowered is corporation based. Towers can now be put up in high-sec without the high standings required. The corporate control panel is also being streamlined, making it easier for new players to build their own corp. Structures will be revamped to work like ships, making comprehension easier for newer players. Clone punishment (for forgetting to clone) has been eliminated. Thinking back, there is a trail of barriers that were lowered. Some players call this “dumbing down EVE.”
An old way of thinking is to label software in terms of versions. EVE was expanding for many years with added features like outposts, capital ships, T2, T3 ships, wormholes, faction war, incursions, walking in stations–Stop. Now the game is mutating within its own game systems, creating modest new features like Ghost sites, Drifters, Thera. The majority of the development is focused on mutating EVE into a new EVE, a 2.0, that works better and can scale better.
By years end most, if not all, the AI for NPCs will be remapped to the TALE system (see CSM notes), which will revamp the environment.
The Tale system essentially allows them to create conditions and then create actions based on those conditions. The range of conditions to monitor and actions that can be taken are quite extensive… — CSM Notes 2015
“EVE Fanfest 2015: Behaving Like a Boss with AI” by CCP Frellicus, Senior Software Engineer. Skip to Q&A: 45 minute mark)
At the same time FozzieSov will revamp the null-sec sov system. Soon after, destructible structures will enter the scene, affecting all sectors of space including wormholes. Then Capital ships are changing to adapt to new roles (although they will still be needed to kill each other and towers). The new roles will probably be some kind of hybrid between ships, stations, and wormhole effects. Maybe metaphorically becoming the “war machines” that to sieged castles. The only promise given from CCP is that capitals will be worth having, beyond that we don’t know what CCP is up to.
EVE is very much changing from the inside and the result will be an empowered CCP, able to create a living world full of things to build and shoot. To better understand it all is a new player experience, complete with a new help center that should help the new players stick around, while reeducating returning players.
