Magnus Bergsson is the Chief Marketing Officer at Iceland's CCP Games. Today, Dan Fortier interviews him on a range of subjects including upcoming changes, Path to Kali and more. The interview is joined by two exclusive screenshots that show off the new ships.
;) MMORPG.com: First off tell us more about the Voice Chat option you are adding in cooperation with Vivox. Have you decided what the additional monthly charge will be yet? Are you worried it may add to some lag issues when in use in the larger battles?
Magnus Bergsson: The new voice integration is more than simply a replacement for other third party voice clients like TeamSpeak or Ventrillo. It is directly integrated into the chat channels and more importantly the new gang features. It will offer functionality users simply don't have with other voice software and will offer gangs a strategic advantage in combat, and especially larger gangs. In addition the voice quality is leaps and bounds better than what users are used to. The voice support will not create any lag for two reasons. First, the voice traffic will go out on different pipes than those used by the EVE cluster and will run on dedicated servers at Vivox headquarters. Second, lag that sometimes occurs in large fleet battles is caused by tremendous pressure on the server CPU running the system that battle is enganged on, and has nothing to do with internet bandwidth. So the net effect is that the voice support will not have any effect on EVE Online. There are still discussions about how we will charge for the voice client. We are fully aware of the comments our users have made and are doing everything we can to bring this to them for as little as possible. The voice support is not a profit center in any form; we simply think it is a very cool feature but understandably there are operational costs that we need to cover. |
The whole interview is available here.
