MMORPG.com's Jon Wood writes this look at how CCP is expanding their game and its marketing to highlight the social aspects of their sandbox, including the introduction of a new social tool known as New Eden.

EVE Online has an image as a hardcore, dog eat dog, sandbox, PvP MMORPG. While that is certainly a part of what EVE Online is, it's not everything and at this year's EVE Fan Fest, CCP seemed determined to show the world that social activity and friends are actually at the heart of the game.

The developers really started trying to show the new face of EVE back at the end of July when they publicly launched a new game trailer titled, "The Butterfly Effect." Instead of highlighting the hardcore nature of the game (though the video certainly makes reference to it), the video talks about the choices that players will make within the game and how that all plays in to the friends that can and will be made by players as the fly through EVE's universe.

Read EVE As A Social Game - New Eden

CCP never stops, they keep adding more and more to the game.

It's almost as if they're ones with the 13 million subscribers.

I agree, CCP keeps improving EVE like it was just released last year, and they certainly show no signs of "retiring" the game any time soon.

I like to joke that WOW will never die, and someday my grandkids will be telling me all about their level 245 Orc Paladin, but I'm thinking perhaps EVE will have even greater longevity and might just outlive me.

I like the new social networking aspect, the video was a nice touch and actually true in a lot of respects, I've experienced the butterfly effect and some of my most innocent choices led to great adventures in EVE.

It just amazes me what CCP can do and is capable of doing to make a game more interesting after all these years.

This is why i call CCP a game design making leader, because of things like this that just make you want to see it happen.

The innovation that CCP has shown makes me wonder what will EVE bee in another 10 years.

Its amazing how CCP can be light years ahead of the competition in almost every way they choose to be. How come Blizzard that is so much bigger and makes so much more money dont come up with stuff like this?

Innovation at its finest.

 and THE only game with one server for their whole gaming community

wich im happy to say is a big plus for any mmo 

i wish all game had only 1 big server a la eve 

but unless im wrong ,this is the only game that have the technology to 

be hable to cram all their player on 1 server

CCP does nothing short of an outstanding job!  In every expansion theres something for everyone. Cant wait for Dust 514 to come out!

Originally posted by Securion

Its amazing how CCP can be light years ahead of the competition in almost every way they choose to be. How come Blizzard that is so much bigger and makes so much more money dont come up with stuff like this?

 

Innovation at its finest.

mm yep your right ,blizzard should cram all their 12 million player on one server when cataclysm lunch !

lol ya right unless microsoft release their new techno about the modded ut they ve been working on i doubt this will ever happen even then ,not sure even with ms new toy soon to be released (6 month)it will be enough to cram all player on 1 server

oh game like aion or gw will be able but top title like wow wont 

but then its not a big issue since even if it would work wow still would need 3 kind of server

rp

pvp

veteran

so 12 million player / by say 3 make 4 million /server maybe microsoft new techno will help 

but i doubt it

the way ms spoke their new toy is mainly aimed at the max cap of say a place like wintergrap

so they could raise cap from 200 to say 2000 and still play smoothly 

but srever cap is more on the server side ,like what techno they use ,and in that regard it would be probably intel 

or even better ibm that could help- them

yes some doubt ibm but let me tell you ibm is still the top dog 

you ask for it very often they can accomplish what even intel cant accomplish

they are still at the forfront of techno ingeniousness,1 exemple 45 nm processor for ps3 

yep ibm ,amd miniaturisation yep ibm again ,they might have stopped doing it themselves 

but the guys that had idea at ibm still work for them

Actually, It may very well turn out into a very in-debth and informative "Spacebook". Not to say that would be a bad thing, quite the contrary, especially in EvE's vast universe that really would serve it's purpose of bringing the community even closer.

I enjoy Eve as much as the next player but some of the enthusiasm here is a bit much. CCP is a good company and they certainly do try and listen to their customers and they are trying to evolve the game to keep it interesting but there are a lot of things in Eve that could use some major work things that have been pretty much the same since the game launched.

The single server/shard thing is a bit of a joke though. Yes it is a single universe and the game has 300k players but what is the record for the most users being online at anyone time? 51K or so and many of these are people with 2 or 3 accounts. Right now I just checked and there are about 30k users online which is certainly respectable but considering the size of the Eve universe these people are spread out all over the place and are basically on different servers even if the servers are interconnected and to prevent over crowding the servers can and regularly do control the flow of users and put traffic restrictions in place.

I am NOT saying that this is a bad thing as there needs to be a balance between having a single universe and having a playable game. The simple fact of the matter though is that if the number of people playing Eve was to double CCP would have some major problems handling the load.

But, I'm just as happy not to have millions of other people playing the game with me as I'm sad to say too many gamers simply want instant gratification from their entertainment and have no interest in enjoying the long term development of their character and the universe around them.
 

My one big issue with EvE right now is the lack of being able to walk around in stations and being social.    The rest of the game rocks, but to me, having an avatar that is a person is important and that sorta kills it for me.    I think if CCP finally does add the ability to walk around in stations, go to clubs, meet with others in a social area on stations to make deals, play mini-games like gambling for instance and what not EvE will finally be the game it should have been when it was released.

I know some will flame me for thinking this way, but I think that is the one thing that keeps EvE from taking off.   Without the human avatar there it keeps a lot of potential players from joining thegame.

Think about what people could do other than just see their ship flying from point a to point be or watching your ship mine.  

Wouldn't it be fun to be able to board wrecks in EVA suits to explore them.  What about exploring ruins on the surface of a planet and adding some PvE aspects of game play?   The potential is there if CCP had some designers there with the vision to see just how wonderful a game this really could be.

Originally posted by Teala

My one big issue with EvE right now is the lack of being able to walk around in stations and being social.    The rest of the game rocks, but to me, having an avatar that is a person is important and that sorta kills it for me.    I think if CCP finally does add the ability to walk around in stations, go to clubs, meet with others in a social area on stations to make deals, play mini-games like gambling for instance and what not EvE will finally be the game it should have been when it was released.

I know some will flame me for thinking this way, but I think that is the one thing that keeps EvE from taking off.   Without the human avatar there it keeps a lot of potential players from joining thegame.

Think about what people could do other than just see their ship flying from point a to point be or watching your ship mine.  

Wouldn't it be fun to be able to board wrecks in EVA suits to explore them.  What about exploring ruins on the surface of a planet and adding some PvE aspects of game play?   The potential is there if CCP had some designers there with the vision to see just how wonderful a game this really could be.

I think your ideas all have merit Teala, but I think there are financial and technical design issues which prevent CCP from pursing a course of development as you've suggested.

Hence they're going to give us ground combat a la Dust514, rather than try to incorporate it into the original game.  Also, ambulation may one day come out, but I doubt outside of it being some light hearted fun that it will evolve into something like planetary exploration and ship boarding.

SWG tried to be everything to everyone, and SOE never was able to really come to grasp with it and get all elements of the game working correctly, it was just too much to coordinate.

Originally posted by rwmiller

I am NOT saying that this is a bad thing as there needs to be a balance between having a single universe and having a playable game. The simple fact of the matter though is that if the number of people playing Eve was to double CCP would have some major problems handling the load.
 

It was recently stated by one of the devs (at Fanfest 2009?) that the servers can already handle twice the existing concurrency. At the time of this writing the current players ingame is 41k and there are 1100 people in Jita alone. Regarding multiple accounts, many do have them but it seems you are assuming that most people have multiple accounts logged in at the same time. That's not necessarily the case. Only one character can gain skill points at a time on an account, thus it is more efficient to have additional characters on other accounts than to have them on the same one.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by rwmiller

I am NOT saying that this is a bad thing as there needs to be a balance between having a single universe and having a playable game. The simple fact of the matter though is that if the number of people playing Eve was to double CCP would have some major problems handling the load.
 

 

It was recently stated by one of the devs (at Fanfest 2009?) that the servers can already handle twice the existing concurrency. At the time of this writing the current players ingame is 41k and there are 1100 people in Jita alone. Regarding multiple accounts, many do have them but it seems you are assuming that most people have multiple accounts logged in at the same time. That's not necessarily the case. Only one character can gain skill points at a time on an account, thus it is more efficient to have additional characters on other accounts than to have them on the same one.

I can't speak for most people, but I always have at least 2/3 accounts logged in at all times.

That way I don't have to be social, I can just talk to myself. 

Actually Kyleran you're wrong. They are going to do exactly what he asked for. Suppose to be out already in fact. The devs have told us for several years they were going to do exactly that. And in a recent interview they stated it WOULD be done very soon. Supposedly this year around late November or early December. But like most good things it may not show up till early 2010. I'm keeping my eyes open for it and hope the devs keep their word

BTW Just wanted to add I've played EVE since beta but quit for awhile then came back. I'm currently not playing. Great game but I'm just burnt out. Now I'm waiting for on station to come. And to be honest if it doesn't then I'll probably never play again. I don't think I'm alone on that one either. Well thats my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.

Originally posted by drbaltazar

 and THE only game with one server for their whole gaming community

wich im happy to say is a big plus for any mmo 

i wish all game had only 1 big server a la eve 

but unless im wrong ,this is the only game that have the technology to 

be hable to cram all their player on 1 server

 

Not so. Eve wasn't the first to do "all one world", and even Eve's world is broken up into regions. Eve's economy is region based, not universe based, and every zone is a single instance seperate from the others outside of jumpgates and the like, with only chat channels and (inside regions) the economy being visible.

WW2 Online is a single "world", with no zones, that all the players reside in.

Every game has the technology to do what Eve does. Heck EQ1 was doing it way back when. Its just that most games can't get away with a simple routine to generate an entire zone. Since Eve's "zones" are practically empty except for stations, gates, and belts, it doesn't take much to generate a few thousand more. Eve suffers the same problems other games do when too many players enter one "zone" (Jita, anyone?). There's nothing technologically special about Eve. And in fact, its downtime every day says they didn't code it right in the first place. What other game gets away with having an hour of downtime every day?

Imagine that you are flying through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you decide to help him out...

This humored me. The real EVE version would go like this:

Imagine that you are AFKing through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly warp out and then look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you sigh and wish the barge hadn't exploded in 5.7 seconds and could have been able to do something about it if you'd had your 17 friends with you all outfitted for PvP, while you sigh in relief that you weren't ganked as well.

Originally posted by Securion

Its amazing how CCP can be light years ahead of the competition in almost every way they choose to be. How come Blizzard that is so much bigger and makes so much more money dont come up with stuff like this?

 

Innovation at its finest.

Its funny on this site, bloody whiners and blizzard haters just say wow is nothing more than an online social tool for frinds, then somehow CCP implements a fuucking facebook style carebear system and its called innovation????  Get a bloody grip please.

---

Originally posted by eric_w66
Imagine that you are flying through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you decide to help him out...
This humored me. The real EVE version would go like this:
Imagine that you are AFKing through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly warp out and then look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you sigh and wish the barge hadn't exploded in 5.7 seconds and could have been able to do something about it if you'd had your 17 friends with you all outfitted for PvP, while you sigh in relief that you weren't ganked as well.

---

Pretty much.

A whole lot of EVE teet sucking going on around here.

Originally posted by eric_w66

Imagine that you are flying through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you decide to help him out...

This humored me. The real EVE version would go like this:

Imagine that you are AFKing through space, and you see a helpless mining barge under attack from pirates. You quickly warp out and then look at the barge's info and find that you share a friend in common. While this guy doesn't mean anything to you, obviously he's got some kind of attachment to a guy who helped you out of a jam once, so you sigh and wish the barge hadn't exploded in 5.7 seconds and could have been able to do something about it if you'd had your 17 friends with you all outfitted for PvP, while you sigh in relief that you weren't ganked as well.

who would run from a fight in 0.0 or lowsec? How could you see the barge in a belt if you're afking through space? Why would you go through a belt or lowsec/0.0 on autopilot? You wish you had a clue of what you were talking about.