An interview with CCP’s Arend Stuhrmann, Associate Producer of EVE Online.

Nothing here that EVE veterans will not already know, though I do find it interesting at the care he takes giving the reason’s for the existence of the CSM. No mention is made of the blueprint scandal of a couple of years ago which I believe to have played a large part in the adoption of the CSM.

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I’m blogging this whilst I wait in a 20 minute queue to get on to my server, and I’m on the side of Order, I hate to think what the queues are like for destruction players. The queues are a minor niggle though and are seriously worth it for what I believe to be a near perfect MMO.

EVE has its scale, scope and depth. Warcraft has its PvE and grind (some people like that, takes al sorts I suppose). WAR is just that; War. Unbridled, unfettered, unending war. and let me tell you its bloody good fun and I haven’t even reached the endgame yet. I’ve not even touched the PvE stuff really (and I can’t go back to the lower level stuff now, not on an open RvR server, I’ll be doing it with an alt though.) the PvP is just soo good.

GOA have yet to get their act together with regards to Realm pages on the website (we were told we’d have them last week but still no joy.) and they really need to completely re-work their website. So despite GOA’s continued ineptitude, I’m enjoying WAR immensely.

War may be hell, but its more fun that way

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I remember when first reading the Otherland quadrilogy by Tad Williams that it would make a great, if difficult, project for an MMO developer. I’ll be watching this one closely.

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All I have to say about this is: “About bloody time!”

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Yeah, trust a lawyer to give unbiased advice. Its money in the bank for them either way.

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EA are at it again. With the furore over Spore’s DRM and the resulting one star rating on Amazon.com you’d think that they would take a hint. I noticed the above mentioned EULA and ToC shenanigans when I was playing the WAR Open Beta and dismissed it as just a beta thing. What did I care, I was getting to play the game for free. If they’re making paying customers do this every time they log in I may have to think about whether I want ot buy it or not. (I was seriously considering it.)

EA treating its customers like shit in every game they release is nothing new , Spore’s draconian ‘3 installs’ is probably the most high profile example but the inclusion of spyware in Battlfield 2142 is my biggest gripe with them to date (that an the fact that they produce derivative license based games with little or no creative integrity, Spore aside).

They’re big, rich and arrogant and they can get away with it because people will still buy their games! I hope Gabe Newel uses the cash from the (rumoured) sale of Valve to Google to buy up EA and tear it to shreds. I can always live in hope that Ricctello will see the light and realise that money in the bank is less important that customers who like you and don’t pirate your games out of sheer spite, which is what’s happening at the moment.

The reason Spore is (allegedly, I haven’t seen any figures and would doubt their reliability if I had) the most pirated game ever is simply because EA expects their customers to take it up the ass and like it. The majority of gamers (true gamers that is, not the 12 year old girls and gay guys that play The Sims) will quite rightly turn around and kick EA where it hurts the most, their sales, by pirating the game and playing it for free.

What EA seems to be failing to realise is that if you treat someone like they’re a criminal, then they will more often then not become one. The reasoning being that it doesn’t matter if your a good boy and obey the rules you get treated as if you’ve broken them no matter what so why bother?

EA is the one company that gives gaming a bad name at the moment. They’re obviously just in it for the money and have no qualms about how they get it. And I thought they were getting better, more fool me.

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I was in the open beta and enjoyed it immensely, I would now like to take part in the full game when it hits on the 18th. I don’t want a pre-order, I don’t have to redownload the client as I already have it, and I don’t want any extra goodies, I just want an activation code for a new account. but the only place to get one is from EA (£34.99) or Direct2Drive (£29.95, but comes with all the pre-order crap that I don’t want and a download that I don’t need.)

I’ve also noticed that there are no high street retailers (in my town anyway) that are carrying or plan to carry the boxed edition of the game. Is this due to their reluctance to carry PC games (as in GAME who I hear are planning to drop the PC completely fairly soon or down to a GOA marketing bod deciding that having to organised the distribution of retail boxes and POS and all the other stuff that goes with a big game release was too much like hard work and wasn’t really necessary. I suspect its a bit of both but I would have hoped that GOA would have put a bit more effort into it. There are a whole load of people out there who would buy and play the game but haven’t had it all up in their face so subsequently aren’t going to bother.

What would really make my day is for there to be an opiton to buy an account on the actual WAR-Europe website rather than have to go through an intermediary, though to be frank I’d rather Mythic and EA were running the show over here and GOA had nothing to do with it.

On another unrelated topic: does anyone know of a better anti-spam plugin for wordpress than Akismet? I’ve begun notcing that some spammers are regularly fooling it and require manual spamming and legit commenters are being marked as spam. Any suggestions welcome.

Rant over, I’m going to kill some time in Spore (more about that once I’ve had a good run at it)

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Not so chuffing has been GOA’s handling of the situation that arose over the last few days. I downloaded the client without much fuss (except for it being in 7 chunks totalling 8.5 gigabytes, why?) and went to the site to authenticate my key. This is where the problems started.

Apparently GOA’s authentication servers melted. Here’s what GOA had to say after a few hours of them being down:

Our registration and authentication servers have been taken offline for maintenance. This means that it is currently not possible to create new accounts or authenticate Open Beta keys. During this maintenance we are processing all queued account registrations and key authentications. These services will be available as soon as this work is complete.

This was at 4:30pm CET yesterday, after I’d been trying to get my key authenticated all day and after the actual game servers went online. No apology, no “Sorry, we’re having some problems.”  An apology at this point may have defused alot of the invective that was beginning to flow, though not from me but we’ll get to that momentarily.

The next update was at 2:30am CET:

We have encountered serious problems with the authentication system since this morning, while the stability of the game servers, the speed of the patcher and the performance of the downloader have all been satisfactory. This issue, combined with an exceptional amount of traffic and a fault which was not identified during the extensive tests we ran on our platform has unfortunately limited the access to our servers to only a few of you along with our closed beta testers who had already been a part of the closed beta.

During the day, we have reconfigured authentication and database servers several times, both of which suffered under the huge number of simultaneous connections. The investigations and corrections we have done so far were essentially targeting the parts of the system which didn’t require a complete stop of the writing process in the database. This means we preferred to keep the database turned on during the day to let it work on the huge number of accounts that were in the process of being handled. This operation will continue through the night and when complete, we will shut down the database and reconfigure it.

If the operation works as anticipated, we can once again give you access to the account page and let you register your code for the open beta. We expect the whole maintenance to be finished late Monday morning.

Naturally, we will keep you informed of the development of this maintenance and we expect to give you an update mid-morning.

We thank you for your understanding at this very impatient time and we sincerely apologize for the situation.

There, at the end, is a sincere apology. Almost as if it is an afterthought, so maybe not quite as sincere as it could be. Insults, threats and slurs of varying flavour were now being thrown around in the Warhammer Alliance forums. Then, this morning, the CEO of GOA (or someone writing as him) post this:

Dear all,

I rarely address players directly, but I wanted to write you as too few of you have been able to access the open beta today.

As my team explained in the previous post, although we have opened the servers and corrected numerous issues during the last 24 hours but we have not yet solved the issue of saturated Open Beta key activations that we’re currently experiencing. I am sincerely sorry for this, and I understand all the frustration the situation has spawned.

Today was a dark day. We expected a massive influx of players, but reality was even harsher.
I personally commit that we will communicate to you as clearly as possible on the resolution of these current issues. My goal is to give Warhammer Online the success it deserves. Be ensured that all GOA teams, with Mythic’s support, are working hard to bring you the best possible game experience.

Best regards,
Ghislaine Le Rhun
GOA CEO

Off screen, a discussion was held between the gentleman above and Mythic’s CEO, Mark Jacobs, which he mentions in passing here. What follows is the entirety of that mention:

We had a number of conversations with them today about everything that happened. GOA messed up and their CEO has apologized and promised to do better going forward. While this isn’t enough to mollify everyone it’s still a good start.

Its not much, but enough to give me the impression that Mythic are not happy with GOA. This is not surprising in the least, but again more on that later.

The majority of that post, linked above, was aimed at the invective being posted on the forums. Which I think Scott Jennings has done a fairly decent analysis of over at Broken Toys.  I’m inclined to agree with a couple of comments on Mark’s post, its not his job to tackle things like this, he pays people to do that, unless of course that Mythic doesn’t have a community management team and that is also being handled by GOA. In which case he was quite right to voice his take on events.

Between the message from GOA’s CEO and the latest post there were a couple of updates telling us nothing new and apologizing alot more. Then, finally we are told that we can register our beta keys and will be informed by email when they’re authorised. I’ve been waiting 5 hours for that email.

There is a history to this tale, a background which really makes you wonder why it happened at all. When Mythic first started developing WAR they were independent. They started developement and signed a deal with GOA which gave them responsibility for the European management and publication of WAR. Then EA came along and bought Mythic, turning it into EA Mythic. EA were given the responsibility for the US and Oceania management and publication of WAR. GOA were kept on to do the European side of things. The US and Oceania open betas are running fine and a great time is being had by all. The European open beta is in the situation described above.

GOA has a history of mismanaging MMO’s. The European servers for Dark Ages of Camelot gradually emptied as their mismanagement of that title lost them players to the US servers. That says alot, EU players were willing to put up with lag and queues simply so they could play the game, rather than play under the auspices of GOA. Mythic were warned of this on many occasions, with the example of DAoC being used in alot of cases. The fans, and future players of WAR voiced their concerns and were ignored it would seem.

GOA als has a history of ignoring the players of the games they manage, made evident by the calls for them to redesign the WAR-Europe website so it wasn’t so heavily reliant on Flash and also to open registration of open beta keys much earlier than the day of launch (of the beta that is, not the full game). These calls were ignored.

This from a company which describes itself thusly:

GOA is the videogames department of France Telecom’s “Content Division”, and benefits from seven years experience in the management of multiplayer online role-playing games.

A forerunner of this activity in Europe, its teams reconcile expertise with a passion for games and take advantage of France Telecom’s technical platform to offer the best of online games to European players.

You’d think they’d have learned from their seven years experience, wouldn’t you? And you have to wonder about the competence of France Telecom’s technical people if this is result of their expertise. They may offer the best of games but as has been seen in the past they often don’t deliver.

My suggestion to Mythic? Get rid of GOA and hand the whole thing over to EA. At this stage it looks like the only damage control that is going to work. Players have already lost what little faith they had in GOA and to ditch them now in not only in the best interests of Mythic and EA (guilt by association is not fair but it does matter) but it is in the best interests of the players (we who pay the bills.) and the franchise.

Warhammer deserves better. Its been part of alot of people’s lives for a long time, more so in Europe than in the US, if managed well and treated with respect this could make EA and Mythic an awful lot of money. Games Workshop (where do they stand on this debacle I wonder) have a following numbering in the millions in Europe and the reason that we put up with price hikes and almost annual reissues and revisions of the rules is because we know that they love what they do as much as we do. GOA has no such record, neither do Mythic or EA. If this is not fixed and fixed quickly Warhammer Online in Europe will die and its biggest market will be underexploited.

Sort it out Mr Jacobs, you will carry the can if you don’t

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Interesting, There are a few things about this UI that I like and a few that are questionable. I’m guessing that its the one that the devs are busily tweaking for the release of the expansion (currently codenamed ‘Midus’) due in December and we shouldn’t expect to see it in this form in game, if we ever see it in game at all. There are also likely to be things visible in these screnshots that are toys which are solely for the Devs and always will be.

Likes:

• The lack of Neocom at the edge of the screen, it takes up valuable real estate even when minimized and the option to hide it altogether would be nice.
• The 3d scanner in the bottom left. Means you can see what’s going on around you without having to zoom out incredible distances or pan the camera through 360 degrees in 3 directions. Its a nice colour too.
• The bar along the bottom, with a little zoom and if you peer at it from an odd angle, has what are recognizable as jukebox controls on the left, and a clock on the far right. judging from the fact that the contents change from image to image I’m guessing that the rest are not unlike tabs in the windows taskbar. The fourth image has on labeled ‘Your Chat’, no prizes for guessing what that is. I’m willing to put money on the fact that this part of the UI is a dev toy however and won’t be seeing the light of day on player clients. (A big clue to this is that the timestamp doesn’t seem to be in a recognizable time format)

Questionable:

• The change in the format of the main ship control panel. People are used to the way it works at the moment and shifting modules into the middle of what currently holds the sheild/armour/hull readouts may be a little confusing.
• It looks like the way information is displayed to the left and right of the main console is fully customizable. The images above differ in where the sheild/armour/hull and speed readouts appear (left or right) and other things like active/inactive module information also appears here.
• I don’t know what the portrait in the top right corner is for, whether its your target, you, or who is talking in EVE Voice (though that may prove useful)
• The UI designers also seem to have neglected the fair proportion of players who are red/green colour blind, unless it available as an option to change the colour of the selected target, hostile targets and active modules, and the dev who took these shots simply hasn’t used it.

All in all it look like the look of EVE might be changing, which is unsurprising considering the forthcoming Ambulation (I refuse to call it ‘Walking in Stations’ that’s a crap name) feature and the desire CCP has to appeal to a wider player base. The UI of EVE has remained basically the same since it started with only minor tweaks and additions, this looks more like a complete revamp (assuming that its coming to the player client at all and isnt just a dev toy) and its long overdue in my opinion.

(Edit: I’ve had more time to look the images and have consulted with others (Thanks go out to James Egan of  Massively especially). More importantly I’ve done a side by side comparison with shots from the current Trinity 2.0 engine and have reached the conclusion that the screenshots used to illustrate that interview are old. How long would it have taken someone at Strategy Informer to login, fly about a bit, and take a few screenies? They do EVE’s current incarnation a disservice by using ancient screenshots of an old engine when the new one looks so damned good. That being said; I was fooled, which says alot for the quality of the old engine. SOrry to get everyone’s hopes up.)

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The minutes of the first meeting (held in Reykjavik, at CCP’s expense) are now on the web. and they make for some interesting reading. Players have been invited to discuss all the issues raised on the EVE forums. I’ll be having a more detailed read of a couple later in the week.

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