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At yesterdays devchat we were literally inundated with questions. We were also sent a fair few via email beforehand.
Because of this we were unable to get all the questions answered at the chat... but all is not lost! CCP’s Senior Producer, Nathan Richardsson, agreed to answer a selection of those questions for us, so here we are.
Because of this we were unable to get all the questions answered at the chat... but all is not lost! CCP’s Senior Producer, Nathan Richardsson, agreed to answer a selection of those questions for us, so here we are.
Richardsson: Currently it’s still point-and-click, but we’re far from prototype stage of planetary flight itself, we’re at a concept stage so I wouldn’t exclude manual control since we have flight inside huge asteroids planned too which is based on manual flight.
Richardsson: Yes, this is part of the Gang overhaul, which will include new measures for fleet and squad leaders to both order around pilots and squads. In our designs, we have a fleet which consists of a number of squads which is essentially today’s gang. I should also note that the evolution of leadership will also start limiting gang size but to counter that we will enable fleets.
Richardsson: Yes, the Turret & Effect system rewrite, which can be seen in the Development section, will enable us to more visibly show what you are doing to others, what is being done to you, what your gang mates are doing to others and what’s being done to them. How much of this information will be displayed simultaneously is determined by performance, so at this stage we only expect this to be viewable on the item you have active selected.
Richardsson: It’s something we’ve been contemplating for a long time. The ingame handling of the billboards is now ready to receive external image files, we now have to implement the external management and submission.
Richardsson: Stealth Bombers are being revised for the next patch release, check them out on Singularity.
Richardsson: The changes will work for all modules that are currently get penalized for stacking.
Richardsson: The first batch of 0.0 COSMOS Constellations are based on Combat Boosters and they will be player manufactured. The various Constellations will have their standard mix of booster materials in addition to their own unique variant of ingredient, which are all harvested with mini-professions, the high end booster then requiring unique ingredients from a number of Constellations. Note also that a 0.0 COSMOS constellation resources bleed into the whole region, they just most condensed in the core Constellation.
Richardsson: This was taken quite early on as one of the drawbacks of being inside a Deadspace and it will remain like that. Note that afterburners were boosted considerably after Deadspace Complexes were introduced, requiring only one to get a considerable boost. There will be more Interactive Environments like Deadspace which has other benefits and drawbacks.
Richardsson: We decided not to proceed with those changes. They might get revisited at a later date, but we’re focusing on Tech level 2 ammunition and missiles right now.
Richardsson: No, Tech 2+ items will never be dropped as loot, they are and will remain player manufactured. However, as can be seen there is loot which is already better than Tech 2 and there will be new loot types which will be different and in many cases better than player manufactured.
Richardsson: Caldari ships are in many cases much better than they were in PVP after the changes, especially Battleship vs Battleship. There are specific cases, such as smaller equal sized ships and we’re constantly looking into that. Submit some good examples of Damage Over Time (DOT) on specific setups vs. specific setups in the Ships & Modules forums. We follow that quite closely.
Richardsson: Yes, more implants are certainly coming, investigating new modules are also planned but not for the next release.
Richardsson: Nope, CONCORD is a common Empire police keeping force. For it to take sides against some of the Empires is not happening in the near future.
Richardsson: Contracts will be the next big thing in “content creation” from the player aspect, but short term we’ll see more infrastructure coming in, improvements to Starbases and Outposts, changes and additions to Sovereignty and long term we’ll see more leasing of assets and territory.
Future developments are aiming at Deadspace and other Interactive Environments being controllable by players which would in essence be creating “dungeons” for other players. In such cases, other players are the risk of running such installations instead of NPC infestation and harassment.
Free roaming PVP corps will be able to prosper even more when there are more tangible assets available to assault. To survive you simply need to restock regulary and lately it’s been made easier to move large scale bases of operations with Freighters.
Future developments are aiming at Deadspace and other Interactive Environments being controllable by players which would in essence be creating “dungeons” for other players. In such cases, other players are the risk of running such installations instead of NPC infestation and harassment.
Free roaming PVP corps will be able to prosper even more when there are more tangible assets available to assault. To survive you simply need to restock regulary and lately it’s been made easier to move large scale bases of operations with Freighters.
Richardsson: The Gallente Elections was an event, which required far too much time of internal resources which were already overloaded. All positions and titles such as Senator or General will eventually be accessible via ingame support of rewarding achievements through systems like Factional Warfare or other means of furthering your factions/corporations agenda.
Richardsson: We have 8 Carriers and 4 Titans in addition to 4 Fighters (XL Drones) and a big line of Tech 2 ships consisting of 2 new Cruisers, 1 Destroyer and 1, possibly 2 Battlecruisers.
Richardsson: No, no plans for anything bigger than a Titan at this point in time, although we keep our minds open for any clever suggestions. We want to do another Destroyer, at least one more Battlecruiser and a new Battleship. We also have Science Vessels on the horizon and possibly an capital mining ship.
Richardsson: We are currently only considering the Tier 3 Battleship, we don’t see any more roles available I this size right now after Tier 3 comes in.
Richardsson: The only thing we have determined is the Caldari rail platform, others are still being thrown back and forth. There was a thread about it, you can check that out for some good suggestions and inspiration. Some of them wanted omgwtfpwnge for their own race and usually most were afraid of Minmatar getting the roflomglol.
Richardsson: This is listed in the Drawingboard section of our website. Modding and evolving your blueprint is planned and we’d very much like to see the effect of the modding on the ship itself. This would be visible to yourself and when you do look-at on another ship so that it will not affect the usual ship scenes.
Richardsson: Currently they will be boosted like Hammer stated in the thread. I’d personally like to see those changes pan out before going further.
Richardsson: We will enable more means to access Tech 2 through a Next-Gen Research, we also have a number of other stopgap solution but I think it’s healthy to keep up the pressure for the final solution than alleviate it with some stopgaps. No blog planned until we have Next-Gen fleshed out.
Richardsson: The last stats I had about a Dread assault on TQ, which I believe was indeed a BoB operation, it was three Dreadnoughts taking down a tower within 4 hours, I even think that was a Large Tower? I think that’s pretty acceptable decrease of a siege compared to possible losses and the time it used to take. I do however agree that they have too short a range and the logistics for fuelling them may be a on the higher end so we’ll take a look at that. The bug about them being affected by external stuff like EW is already listed under Known Issues and will be hotfixed on the server next week.
Richardsson: The news item is simply to point out to thousands of newer players what may be quite obvious for veterans, informing about agents in lower security – like 0.7 and down, which also give bigger rewards – and to move out of high traffic systems. The real work being done to alleviate this is distributing the agents, getting more hardware and further code optimizations which. The distribution and further optimizations are in the next patch.
Richardsson: As can be seen in that thread and under the Testing section of our website (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=198489) you can see the “Needful Things for Mining” is already in testing. Regarding further extensions, they are indeed on the horizon and have been since Shiva as can be seen on the Drawingboard section. (http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/plannedfeat.asp)
Richardsson: It’s all on hold for Next-Gen Research implementation, which focuses far more on active gameplay, furthering of the blueprints themselves, rewarding limited-run blueprints, reverse engineering and new mini-professions which support R&D.
Richardsson: The components get cheaper, the Moon Miners are already struggling to be profitable so I’d say the supply of the Tech 2 specific components are there. The production time is one thing though and the demand is rising so there is need for more blueprints. One thing to alleviate Tech 2 production times are the Next-Gen manufacturing facilities, they will enable you to shave of the production times.
Richardsson: Tech 2 research, Tech 3 everything, Booster manufacturing and processing, possibly limiting high end research to Starbases too.
Richardsson: Although it is serial lines which manufacture, very much similar to today’s slots, you will have a number of parallel lines manufacturing in each facility. This especially applies to Empire facilities where you should see even less lead time than before when the system has matured and more people are doing manufacturing and research in private facilities, such as in Starbases and Outposts.
Richardsson: The last thing I want to do is to give away more free BPO’s through the agent lottery than we do today. Each ship is seeded about 20 times each, meaning that in some cases we’re giving away 100’s of billions compared to what the blueprints are selling on the market for. We’d rather do the final solution, where people can utilize their RP’s more directly, control what they use it for and even settle for getting a reward faster but in the form of limited-run tech 2 blueprints.
Richardsson: That depends on a number of things. We think we need a number of other supportive changes to addressing the instajump bookmarks in addition exchanging them with a proper system which gives you drawbacks. Rebirth is a good example of such a system and so is the Increased Defenses track of the Combat Revisited.
Richardsson: There are actual changes planned, there have been blogs, a number of forum threads where we have discussed it and it is also listed on the Drawingboard section of our website. (http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/plannedfeat.asp)
Richardsson: There are more than enough systems in Empire space which are not crowded, this can easily be seen by taking a look at the pilots-in-space average map during peak times. In addition to that, we believe the players should be the next empires and as such, they should provide the new territory for expansion.