EVE Online's Viridian expansion brings with it new tools to help corporations manage their members and provide direction as to what to do in the vast universe of New Eden.
Viridian is getting quite a few new features, from the SKINR structure dye system that finally allows Corporations personalize fully their Upwell Structures, to powerful new Tech II Lancer Dreadnoughts, and everything inbetween. The core pitch of Viridian when CCP Games first announced it was putting more tools and power in the hands of corporations, and many of the expansions updates are aimed squarely at that target, especially the ability to tax EverMarks as well as the new Corporation Goals feature.
"The way they seem to me is it essentially enables a CEO or director or senior person in a corporation with the correct roles to essentially be a mission giver," CCP's Community Developer Dan "CCP Convict" Crone mentioned when talking about Corporation Goals in an interview earlier this week.
Effectively as CCP told us me during our interview, this new system allows for corporation leaders to set goals for their corporation members that can directly help and impact the corporation itself. This could mean a corporation can set up goals for miners to bring back a certain amount of ore can throw up a goal in the Corporation panel and set their members on the task. Or maybe you're at war with another faction and you want your members to focus on dealing a certain amount of damage to that alliance - now you can literally give your corporation members a tangible goal to work towards versus just going out and getting the kills.
Gamifying the game, so to speak.
Dan mentions that there is a special Hangar in corporation structures for players to deposit say minerals or refined materials, or whatever the task might have had them collect. From there, and across the breadth of goals that are possible, there is a ledger the CEO can look at to see who contributed to the goal, and by how much.
From there, these CEOs can decide whether to give a reward out, or not and when those rewards are handed down.
"So at any given time, a player can log in and instead of spinning their ship and wondering what to do next, they can look at the jobs board and see a list of things that will directly benefit their corporation," Convict says.
Game Director Snorri "CCP Rattati" Árnason points out that there won't be a need to use any third-party tools to view this, either. Rather everything is handled in the client. This is huge in that it levels the playing field from a data standpoint between the larger alliances and the smaller player groups.
As to why this feature would be wanted, CCP's creative director Bergur Finnbogason and Snorri say that this was brought to life based on discussions with many of the top corporation leaders in the MMO to figure out what the issues they were facing were and what the CCP team could do to make their in-game life better.
"We went on a bit of a...I'm not going to say roadshow, but more of a listening show," Bergur tells us. "We sat down with corporation leaders and, I mean, we were doing three or four every week December, January, February. And it's really kind of digging into the issues they were facing anywhere."
Bergur says that these conversations were with small corporations, huge corps, alliances, and coalitions - from null, low and highsec space, as well as wormholers. These conversations would reinforce the goal of doing something with the social constructs of EVE and bolstering the tools corporations had to bring players together, but also help influence updates coming beyond even Viridian.
Snorri mentions that the breakthrough came particularly when talking about NPSI, or basically PUG fleets in EVE. While EVE Online has long had a problem both teaching new players and retaining them beyond those first moments, the new player experience dropped a while back was a start down the road to turning that corner. However, Snorri says they didn't feel that it was "doing enough."
"We basically started talking about like, 'What if we just help corporations and other players teach other players? Like, all the focus just goes into connecting people, they will teach it better than we do."[...]Let's just make good content that people can do together, and then they teach and have conversations. And I think that we're getting stronger and stronger in that for the moment."
One cool aspect of the new Corporation Projects system is that leaders can organize them by the type of project they are using the AIR career paths EVE introduces to players. Tasks that have a mining focus can be filtered by the Miner path, while those that see capsuleers undock and hunt other ships, be they NPC or another player, can be set in the Soldier of Fortune spec.
Homefront Operations
Along the vein of players teaching players, the new Homefront Operations dungeons provide the perfect playing ground for players to learn the ropes in a fleet. The sites, which will be the first to use the new volumetric fog feature EVE Online is bringing into the game with Viridian.
Set up in the AIR Opportunities portal, the new Homefront Operations will be playable by any player in highsec. These are small fleets meant to teach aspects of gameplay through these repeatable dungeons built for four to five players.
"It's aimed for the people who know how to fly their ship, but this is more like, 'Okay, you know how to fly your ship. But here's some practical lessons on what you'll be doing in a corporation," Dan mentions.
The new Homefront Dungeons will only take about fifteen minutes to complete, meaning they are a great quick fleet activity for your corporation, especially since they still have the EVE factor to deal with. These are not instanced dungeons, but rather they are accessible to any player at any time - friendly or otherwise.
So basically, you can be doing the dungeon that is helping to teach fleet mining operations where your combat players are fending off NPC attacks while you mine, only for it to get all too real as a fleet of real players warp in to spoil the fun.
These allow for repeatable missions that still afford the same emergent gameplay that EVE Online is known for while providing a foundation for the developers to build on for future corporation-focused content.
"We were also trying to create the static content that we can tap into going forward with more complex, impactful activities down the line," Snorri says. "So if we set up these repeatable evergreen things that are just interesting and fun and good to do, we can start treating them as potential...like the small objectives and factional warfare, like they are actually contributing to some kind of master index of the universe."
