EVE Echoes Facebook page posted a video this morning titled: EVE Echoes One Month Dev Recap. Wei Su, aka Exile, an EVE Echoes Producer voiced the first part of the video apologizing for the inconvenience and discussing the work the team is doing to fight Real Money Trading (RMT) within the game, noting that 150,000 accounts had been banned at the time the video released. Kia, EVE Echoes’ Lead Programmer discussed the complexity of the game and the challenges presented to the team not seen in the testing or betas. He pledged to fight against the desync and traffic congestion issues. Making a final mention about improvements to the way ships were loaded and rendered in hopes of improving large scale PvP. A key feature, Time Dilation, talked about is staled for release in December.
For anyone not wanting to visit Facebook to watch a video, a full transcript of the video can be found below:
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude. Recently, we have been working on resolving issues that emerged post-launch, as well as working on the development roadmap. Therefore, we didn’t have much time to communicate with you – the pilots. With this video, we will show you what we have been working on during this period.
First of all, I want to apologize for the inconvenience caused by maintenance during the second week, and compensation will be delivered shortly. Second, we encountered a bug that caused issues with skill points. We’re happy to report that we have squashed this bug. A series of compensations will be issued in September to players who suffered losses due to this bug. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience. One of our primary tasks after launch is implementing anti-cheat measures. Our economic system is inherited from EVE Online so we are more vulnerable to plug-ins, scripts, and RMT (Real Money Trading) groups compared to other games.
So far, we have banned approximately 150,000 accounts. These accounts were involved with using exploits for profit, including the use of plug-ins and scripts, as well as abusing the refund system. We will continue our fight against such players to maintain a healthy economy and provide you with great gaming experience.
We will also issue severe penalties to players involved in RMT. For Buyers, we will seize the resources of such purchases. For sellers, we will issue the most severe bans. If any Corporation is discovered to have been involved in RMT, we will be giving out more severe penalties including, but not limited to, game access restrictions, account bans, forced disbandment, and banning all members.
Also we will be reporting websites holding RMT to defend our rights. This is a long-term task and is by no means an easy one. We will continue the fight against such groups on both technical and legal levels. If any player gets banned and penalized without violating any rules, please contact us as soon as possible. We will investigate and resolve the issue.
Again, thank you for your support and understanding. We hope that every pilot can aid us in this fight against exploits and steer clear of third-party tools and RMT so that they could no longer use the game as a means for their personal gain. Please help us keep New Eden a nice place to stay.
Next up, our programmer, Kai, will answer your questions regarding the technical aspect of the game and the future optimizations.
Wei Su – Exile – EVE Echoes Producer
Hello, I’,m Kai. I’m glad to take this opportunity to share with you the state of EVE Echoes during its first month.
EVE Echoes is a very complex game, and its launch posed several new challenges we haven’t seen during development. And our server team spent the first month working on overcoming these challenges. One of the notable examples is the frequent congestion in many systems, like Kaaputenen. To reduce such occurrences, we made several improvements to the allocation of server resources, as well as stargate efficiency. At the same time, we plan to increase the pilot limit of systems and the time dilation update to further reduce congestion.
Another main problem reported by pilots is the desync issue between game client and server, which causes many inconveniences, including failure to loot or hit target. We are currently looking into the cause of this problem. Meanwhile, we have implemented a countermeasure to detect desynchronizations in hopes of correcting them and reducing the impact.
As for the game itself, the dev team is focusing on performance optimization. The performance issue is especially pronounced in large scale PvP battles. We plan to increase the ship loading/rendering efficiency further to reduce lag caused by the presence of large numbers of units. There will also be other optimizations coming with the time dilation update. After the client and server’s optimization work is finished, the dev team will shift focus to developing new content and working towards enriching the EVE universe.
Kai – Kai – Lead Programmer
