Jumpgate Evolution: Forum Questions and Answers

How will the naming format be for players? Will we have 1 name, a given and a surname or a callsign? And will they be exclusive per server or can more than one "Maverick" exist?

Currently the player has a single name callsign as opposed to two names. This can be pretty much anything as long as it's within naming conventions. These are per shard so if you are called Maverick and manage to get in early enough you can be Maverick on each shard.

I am an Octavian pilot. If I constantly get in the way of other friendly pilots to block their shots (knowing I am immune), is this considered an exploit?

I suppose so. Basically, if you act in such a way to interfere with the play of others, that could be considered "griefing." It's a tricky barrier because on the one hand if you use something that we have written but on the other you don't want to start reducing the fun of the game in order to deal with outlier edge cases.

What I hope happens is that people are mature enough to not deliberately game systems in order to ruin the experience for others (assuming that is what you are referring to). Obviously there are always people who do that and all games have to deal with that. A lot of this has to do with intent and the effect it has on other players.

Post-launch, how much time do you speculate will be spent further developing the tools that were included in launch, and how much time do you speculate will instead be spent releasing basic new tools to keep those with short attentions happy?

One of the major gripes I had with AutoAssault was that post-launch not many steps were made to actually enhance the core of the game. Instead, the many months of post-launch development went mostly into releasing extra eye-candy and new systems to grant loot rewards for PvPers and left the rest of the game after stagnant, dull and unchanged. I'm a bit concerned it might happen again with JGE after Scorch recently mentioned in a article that their top priorities post-launch are adding ship visual customisation and multi-playerer ships to the game, and left out any mention of enhancing what was already there to be more then the basic launch grade stuff..

Understood. Post launch is a very stressful time usually. You have to consider that the act of getting to live usually requires an inhuman amount of effort which is then rewarded with an additional inhuman amount of effort to deal with all the issues that usually come up . Adding content is usually much easier than adding features which is why you see that trend. In general what you get is bug fixes and content additions and features later on. How much of what goes where has a lot to do with how well the game does, stability, player distribution and advancement speed and also what players would like to do next. We're hoping that by taking the time now to get as much of that correct as possible pre-launch we can avoid some of the more nasty problems you get at launch time which then, in theory, means we can immediately focus on making the game itself better.

How long does it take to cross an average sector in a mid speed ship and how many sectors are there? What i really want to know is; if I'm one side of the galaxy and a friend needs some help at the other how long does it take for me to get there? Are people switching to faster ships to get from a-b then switching to the ship they need at (or close to) that point?

Depending on ship speed crossing a sector at full travel speed can take a few minutes. We tried to avoid long, boring flight times, but still give players enough downtime to socialize and so on. Speed vs. size vs. time is a very difficult thing to get right so I'm sure we will be making adjustments

What is the Dev teams (or just your) preferred control method? Mouse and keyboard, joystick or game pad? Obviously you need to use all in testing but I'm talking at the end of the day if you sit down to have a bit of fun, are you always using one or does it depend what your flying and what your doing? Does this reflect data from F&F as well?

I'd say we're about 20-30% joystick, but it does vary some. That trend seems to be about reflective of players as a whole though it's difficult to say for sure since the profiles can vary widely. One thing that does seem to be the case is that the more hardcore players tend to use joystick although we do have reasonably hardcore FPS players that definitely prefer mouse/keyboard. One of the hardest things we have to deal with is multiple input issues.

So far what we've seen, JGE will have PvP system which is mix between JGC and WAR (including renown points) , control system that's mix between JGC and freelancer, etc.

I'd ike to hear about things that haven't been seen in MMOs before, could you name 3 such things in JGE?

1. Active mission updates on the fly - i.e. more like space games instead of MMOs.
2. Really large battles (100+ ships).
3. Action space combat instead of a dice roll or RPG style system (I know other MMOs have done this, but I think we're doing it better).

What will the split between safe zones and non safe be? 20/80 safe/non safe, or more like 80/20 safe/non safe ?

Currently it's almost 50/50. The "starter" zones are all safe, and beyond that PvE and PvP areas are mirrored.