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An Interview with Hilmar Petursson, CCP CEO
Recently, Managing Editor Jon Wood caught up with Hilmar Petursson, the CEO of CCP. During the interview, the two talked about EVE Online, the new office in Atlanta and the future of the company.
While 2008 Game Developer's Conference I had the opportunity to talk to Hilmar Petursson, the CEO of Crowd Control Productions, better known to the world as CCP, the makers of EVE Online. While Keith and Laura each had interviews on specific aspects of EVE Online, I took this opportunity to ask the tall, red-haired CEO about the company in general while my colleagues talked to others about specific aspects of EVE.
For those who might not know, CCP is currently running three offices: one in Iceland, one in Shanghai, China and one in Georgia here in the United States. The most recent addition is the American branch, opened after the MMO company merged with White Wolf, the company behind such games as Vampire, Werewolf and other games set in the proprietary World of Darkness. I had hoped that this GDC would be the show where someone from CCP could be coaxed into talking a little bit about the upcoming (though still officially unannounced) MMO based in that universe. Unfortunately, San Francisco in February is still not the place, and even though many of the CCP devs were walking around in World of Darkness shirts, nobody was talking, including the CEO.
With the subject of the Atlanta office already on the table, I asked how the company had fared in integrating the new office into their international family. Hilmar told me that while they (CCP) had been expecting and bracing for a difficult assimilation, the process went very smoothly for which Petursson credits the "strong people and managers" that joined the company with the White Wolf merger.
Next, I asked how much influence the integration of a Pen and Paper company has had over the way that CCP develops games. The answer was that it hasn't had as much influence as it's going to have over the next year. The EVE team has plans to start integrating more "missions and story stuff", although they are also being mindful that EVE is a sandbox-style MMORPG, and that while the addition of new story and mission content is important, it is also important that they are careful to keep the original feeling intact.
Personally, I suspect that there is a concern that too much story will lead to "railroading" players through content at the expense of the rich and deep player-created political world that has been evolved since EVE's launch and that keeps players coming back for more. So long as the developers are aware of the possibility of this problem, I think that adding to the story of the game and adding a few missions won't disturb the sandbox so much as add a few more toys to it.
Still, on the subject of the White Wolf merger, Hilmar said something to me that came as a little bit of a surprise:
"There are more similarities," he said, "between Pen and Paper worlds and virtual worlds than single player games and virtual worlds."
Those similarities have allowed CCP to continue to thrive as they build and grow. On that note, I asked about the seemingly continuous rounds of hiring that the company has been doing. While they are still actively hiring, the CEO feels that the company, in all of its offices, is slowly getting to the point that they are happy with and he feels that by the end of this year, they will have settled into a state of cooling off.
With that thought fresh in my mind, I asked what we could expect from CCP over the next year and was met with a short, but far from complete list:
First, Hilmar told me that we should expect to see two new expansions coming out, following the success of their most recent Trinity expansion which garnered the game 20,000 new accounts virtually overnight, taking the game from 200,000 players to 220,000. Trinity, it turns out, was much larger and more work and time-intensive than any other EVE expansion and the development team learned some lessons from its launch.
"Trinity was so big," Hilmar told me, "when you release all of that at once, it can be overwhelming for the player."
As a result of this, we should expect to see more intermediary releases between the two expected expansions, taking some of the burden off of a sudden launch.
Beyond expansions we are told that in this coming summer, the dev team will be looking "aggressively" at the idea of story-based factional warfare that would see players be given PvE quests that would lead players into PvP. The hope is that this will get more players more excited about joining the living, breathing political world of Corps, PvP, territory control and more. All of this, we are told, will be done with the idea of maintaining the sandbox in mind. Once again, the company has recognized the potential threat that adding PvE content can have on a sandbox and is taking steps to prevent it.
Finally, Hilmar tolked breifly about Ambulation, or "walking on stations" as they have been calling it. This feature will take EVE from a ship-only game to a more involved universe that sees characters gain new avatars as well as the ships that they pilot. While there was no new information that he could give me, he did point out the enormity of that particular task. While Trinity was a huge expansion, both in terms of content and dev team effort, Petursson predicts that this new initiative will be "Trinity times two".
Speaking with the CCP CEO always has me walking away musing on the success of CCP and EVE Online. In a world where so many MMOs are steadfastly sticking to a genre formula, this company continues to fly in the face of convention and yet continues to thrive. Where many other studios are closing or slowing down production, CCP continues to grow. The conclusion that I always come to is that CCP's success comes from: an understanding of their player base, a willingness to make and address mistakes, careful attention to what is added to the game and how it will affect the players' world, and a real sense of fun that becomes obvious when you speak with anyone from the company from the CEO to the most junior designer.
indeed trinity was a good expasion, alltough the lag issues haven't still been solved.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, Trinity is phenomal as is the performance. I play constantly and experience very little if any lag, though I have heard that some people who set their cache too high experience a lot of stuttering. You might want to lower the cache setting in the esc menu, that might help with your lag. Turning off HDR might help too i've heard, it's a very GPU intensive function.
0.0 Fleet and Pos warfare are still very laggy.
as they will be untill they up the hardware or re-write the database
I think that's more the amount of models your vid card has to render than the throughput of their servers.
when you move items from one container/hold to another and you have to wait for it to actually happen - that is lag
when you activate a module and you have to wait for it to actually occur - that is lag
that is EVE - but mostly on Saturday evening and all day on Sunday (U.S.) or if a fleet battle is happening anywhere in the EVE universe
They were wearing World of Darkness shirts? Deliciously cruel.
CCP is The Best MMO Developer out there atm.
And to all Complaining about lag, PLZ stop Dragging 300 People Each side in to the combat. Thats why there is lag....
Yes, with more people there is lag, but bringing more numbers is always going to get used. It's an easy advantage for some alliances, and as some alliances have shown numerous times, sometimes lag plays to your advantage through node crashes.
I don't think numbers should ever be limited, but what I wouldn't mind seeing is more logistics required. Where bringing more and more pilots takes an increasing amount of preparation, not just one more x to pick up. That way if you really wanted / needed the pilots, you could bring them, but it adds more inconvineince which encourages smaller fleets.
Also cynojammed deathstar Poses with capital blobs... they encourage bigger and bigger fleets as well...
Don't get me wrong, I love CCP, I just think there's a lot more to be done so lag does not play as big of part in 0.0 fleet fights.
I remember, when jita had the same amount of lag with 300 ppl, as nowdays with 7-800 ppl. CCP tried to upgrade hardware, and software, but they cant keep up with the speed of growth...
I think it would be wise of CCP to keep their lips sealed until beta is ready, if they can. Otherwise, tremendously entertaining, but utterly useless drama will ensue. Oh, wait. That'll happen anyway...
"Hilmar tolked breifly about Ambulation" Spell checker broken or proof-reader's day off?
I'm thinking it should read: "Hilmar toked briefly, then talked about Ambulation".
One of the best MMOs out there on the market that doesnt slave to games like WOW or SOE (SWG crapfest that does major changes to the game every 6 months)..
Great reading,
a quote . . .
The EVE team has plans to start integrating more "missions and story stuff", although they are also being mindful that EVE is a sandbox-style MMORPG, and that while the addition of new story and mission content is important, it is also important that they are careful to keep the original feeling intact.
Hmmm ok well it is nice to hear that CCP have started work on a NEW MMO but with the problems that EVE is currently having I would have personally liked to hear how they are now working on fixing the lag issues that are sweeping across the EVE server.
Yes thats right lately there has been a lot of lag and other hic ups happening from the server and it isn't making playing the game any better at all.
For those people that say they have not had any lag during their time of playing EVE all I can say is either you have been really really lucky OR you are playing the game in a system that must have a lack of other players and items in it.
I still think that EVE has a lot to offer it's players and I like the game a lot, but the problems can not be pushed to the back or not acknowledged as doing this will just start the game on the road to it's own destruction and personally I don't want to see that happen to a game with as much potential.
Anyway hopefully CCP will do some work on fixing the lag and other issues ASAP, oh and lets not forget that the minmatar ships could do with some work also. As it seems all the other races are getting boosts but minmatar are left with things as they are and that isn't good as it is just going to make them even less attractive to new players.
What I am really encouraging hearing is that they will put more PvE questing content into the game. I am ALREADY very interested to make Eve my alt game to play (the main is WOW) but I am a bit hesitant because of the heavy PvP aspect. This may push me over.
I really like tactical space ship combat and a vibrant economy with crafting.
Eve isn't laggy. Really, I don't know why people always say it is.... It simply isn't laggy. Of course theres a few burps here and there for maybe, MAYBE, a half a second, but man, you guys just like to complain.
Lag, the bane of all online entertainment.
EVE has lag. It has always had lag, and it will always have lag. It's really worth butchering the old quote: "We will always have Lag". But, and it is a big but(t): Every other game has lag as well.
Consider: Lag, as experienced by player, can be from several sources. The game server may be busy (and when this happens in most of the games, it's called 'disconnect' or 'CTD', really) or waiting input from some other player (their lag becomes players lag).The network tunnel from the game server to the ISP may be cloggy, laggy or have high latency (high turnaround time between signals). The pipe from the ISP to the player can be laggy, due to neighbour downloading porn (or seasons of Lost or Friends. And, finally, the players computer can be processing the datastream from the server, reading/writing to harddrive, rendering graphics, having a nervous breakdown etc.)
With all these being a part of lag, contributing to the total of laggyness in games, and compounding whenever more players are within an area close enough together to interact in a meaningful fashion (pew pew), there is probably no way to eliminate lag entirely. EVE's servers are the most powerful game servers in the world today. CCP has already sufficiently proven, at least to my mind, that if the problem had a single fix, hardware patch or code implementation, they would do whatever it takes to implement it, as long as it doesn't break their game and its core idea: Single world, all players in same server.
In the meanwhile, while there's a coding group that's undoubtedly working around the clock (knowing coders, more then likely) on optimizations and code streamlining of the internal and external network interfaces and data searches, there'll also be a big group of people who need something else to do.
They aren't experts in optimization and code analysis, they are UI, game system, graphics, etc masters. Their job is to make content, make new things for us to look at, and to improve the game experience from another point of view. Most likely, they're working hard on new expansions, Ambulation, and starting to put together ideas for the WoD MMO. It's not two code monkeys in a basement anymore, and to imply that 'if CCP is doing something not lagkilling, it means they're not doing lagkilling at all' is shortsighted at best.
I'm happy to hear that CCP-WW merger did infact go so well, and I'm even happier to hear that there's going to be more PVE content, more things to do, and maybe Factional Warfare which blurs the PVP-PVE line and gives new groups of players PVP experience. Maybe we'll see another Goonswarm rise up from the Empire spaces before long.
EDIT: Oh, and before anyone says anything: Yes, I know how it gets. I've been to Jita. I've done fleet warfare, and I've experienced about as bag a lag as it can get in EVE (45 minutes before I got anything on my screen, and I do have a high-end comp and high-speed net connection). It doesn't matter. Lag is something you deal with.
a game that has trailers that show off tons of ships fighting each other.
effectivly bililng its game as a huge universe and huge battles
and when you go into those types of battles, only to realize the server can't handle it... is very distressing.
30 second - 10 minute wait times on module activation is really crappy.
the big powers in eve have thousands of players on each side... your in the UNIVERSE
Until they expanded the hardware side of it with their new "super computer" plan, the game will always suffer in fleet combat.
and that's a shame.
you must be on a private server then
you can be in the the middle of frikkin nowhere in a system all by yourself and experience painful lag - again, such as long module activation or lengthy movement of inventory among other things - these are server side problems
@Poopy: They already have a supercomputer-level server. That's what makes it possible for over 40 000 people to be online at the same time.
Ask yourself this: How many players can there be on one location in, say, WoW or LOTRO before it starts to affect fps or cause lag? I have been in 300+ player fleet battles that didn't have much lag (much being a relative, of course), with hundreds of players in the same grid (on same screen-area) shooting at each other. It is an awe-inspiring sight. Jita always has 600-800 people online all the time nowadays, and it's less laggy then you'd expect from the numbers.
True, with so many new players, and so high online numbers, it is getting congested, and that is a shame. However, if it was possible to resolve this by throwing hardware at it, CCP would have done so long ago. Heck, it's in their marketing best interests to get their server into as high a power category as they can.
As for lag, 30 seconds is playable, completely. 10 minutes, well, that's a little nasty. The worse problem with lag in fleet fights is how it shapes the tactics of the fleets. Jumping into a gate defense becomes almost suicide, since your enemy will have free potshots at your ships while they are loading into the system. You can lose a big chunk of fleet that way.
If there was a solution to making the lag disappear, I believe CCP would be implementing it right now.
Lol! this guy looks like a pimp
actually the computer they have now consists of many different nodes strung together
the speed issues come into play with the bottlenecks between the nodes
the super computer they are working with IBM on now eliminates the transfer between nodes issues that are currently present
and with trinity now being out on a new engine with more network layers its their hope the new system will eliminate a lot of the lag.
Actually that's not entirely accurate. The current problem with lagging nodes is due to too many players on a single node, not with the transfer of data between nodes. The problem comes from the fact that the most cpu's that can be assigned to any node is 1, so in huge fleet battles the node gets overloaded.
CCP is curently working on two things to combat lag, the first being that they are rewriting their backend code to work with ibm's HTPC?(not sure if the acronym is right) technology and the second is they are involved in a joint research project with microsoft AND ibm to develope a new supercomputer cluster to run the game on that will allow them to perform dynamic load balancing. These two things should help with lag immensly but neither are trival to do and will take some time to implement.
Hell they are having to work with both M$ and IBM because no-one has attempted to do anything of this nature in gaming before.
Trinity was an amazing expansion.
Re: Lag - I know that CCP is working on infiniband server technology. It was posted on the official forums some time ago. If anything, I'd like to hear how that project is going.
I also love the fact that CCP is its own independent corporation, and not a mere subsidiary of another. Especially in that respect, they have done phenomenal work. I hope the company prospers with the White Wolf merger.
Keep up the great work, CCP!
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Played a lot of MMOS. The only interesting choice is Eve Online. Diplomacy, economy, strategy. For mature players. Thx to CCP.
Got to agree with this, it's so unlike anything else on the market. And best is that it's as shallow or as deep as you wish to make it.
a correction, its Werewolf: the Forsaken, awakening is the mage game...
I hope they are rethinking the Titan. It sucks having to go into a system that has a cyno jammer and 3 titans online 23/7. What's it going to be like when there is 10 titans on one side? Something has to give, for the good of the game.
Why? there are after all over 200,000 players and something like 6 titans in game [each titan is owned by ONE player so that's 6 out of 200,000]. Considering what it takes and costs to build a titan and the number that exist id say they are just fine.
The lag is server side. When all 400 of a systems inhabitants start talking in local about guns that haven't fired in 5 minutes (and it happens every weekend [most of the day on Sunday]), that is nothing but server side lag. If you don't run lv 4 missions for the navy in Caldari space, fly through Jita, or frequent big fleet battles, you are not experiencing the lag people in this thread are talking about.
In my opinion, the lag is the biggest issue right now for CCP. EVE has really taken off lately and I'm glad they're reaping the rewards of doing something different, but they really need to fix the lag. I'm sure they're trying. I just hope they bring something online sooner rather than later. Which reminds me: I wonder how that supercomputer project is coming along. The one they are grouping up with IBM on.
I also wouldn't be at all surprised to find out a lot of the lag is code based. Usually this kind of lag is.
There are far more then 6 titans in game, even at the time you posted. BoB alone has that many titans now. { Mod Edit }
Now look, it's farther down the line and there are titans everywhere. DDD's need reworking. They aren't hard to build anymore.
Really then why dont you set up your own corp and build a fleet of them yourself. The reason such people dont find it hard to build them now is because over time they have set up systems and corperations that constantly set things up to build such ships so now it takes less effort to build them as they have pre-existing systems to build them where before they had nothing and needed to build systems from scratch.
Also who on earth necroed this old news item