2003 - The Year of 'The Four'

Where did we come from?

I'm so curious about Eve! The mechanics, the JOVE, the sheer immensity of it all. How in the world do you manage something this big?

My brain has been forcing me to read old dev blog posts for the past week and it's starting to paint a rather together picture of how Eve has evolved from when those first few pilots took the leap into immortality and started shaping what we see as the modern universe.

Many growing pains, complaints, improvements and tears are documented here. I'm starting with 2003, the first ones I could find and will slowly be weaving my way closer and closer to the current day.

I am fairly new to Eve, maybe slightly over one year subbed. Reading back through the past has helped me tremendously when reading current dev blogs and with understanding the way things are done when responsible for developing a place that a lot of us depend on to be there when we need it.

It's also starting to make my previous complaints or petitions to CCP seem a bit mundane compared to the massive things happening at any given second.

But, as your reading, think back and remember all the little changes that come through and all of the hard work put in to these changes to make Eve even more fun than it already is. Thank a dev if you get a chance, especially if they help you out.

I may be a little pickier when complaining in the future.

For each one of these I'm going to pick my favorite one and this time it is the rise of the CCP dev as God. CCP employees took to Concord Special Ops ships and on Concord's behalf, did a brief taming of high sec, which of course today when this happens it's an event. Then it was a stab at helping out the local hi sec pubbies due to the fact that there weren't a lot of Concord mechanics set up yet. The tears did flow but it was the pirates this time. (From what I understand though, people were warned, for what that's worth).

Hence the mention of 'The Four'. (btw, if you were around at this time, it'd be a neat story to hear.) Hook us up.

Here's a write up of Eve circa 2003 by IGN: EVE Online The wait is over! Check out our full review.

Pics or it didn't happen!

Primer: The Beginning

(this is available on wikipedia)

CCP was founded in June 1997 by Reynir Harðarson, Þórólfur Beck and Ívar Kristjánsson for the purpose of making MMORPGs.

In order to finance the initial development of Eve Online, CCP developed and published a board game in Iceland called Hættuspil ("Danger Game") which is available in the new collectors edition Eve release.

In April 2000 the company, with Sigurður Arnljótsson as CEO, raised $2.6 million, through a closed offering organized by Kaupthing Bank (now Arion banki), from private investors in Iceland, including the Icelandic telephone company Síminn.

Approximately half of the initial 21 staff were drawn from the Icelandic dot-com company OZ Interactive, the makers of OZ Virtual.

2003 Dev Blog (Nutshelled)

Character Creation - Debate concerning limiting the amount of characters that you can create or delete per week per user to help fight muling and semi-exploits. Other side of argument states that this could possibly be better handled through in-game mechanics.

In-Game Forums - Discussion of moving the in-game forums from the news system to the in-game browser allowing the forums to be used in-flight. In addition, scrapping the in-station news facility.

Local Chat - Discussion on making the local chat channel solar system wide. This new system would include the players in the stations as well as players in space, in addition it would not cut off your chat channel when you dock or undock. (comment about how the local channel doesn't really get that much use, CCP expects private channels to bridge the communication gap in-game)

Pod Kills in High Sec - (lol) It is reported in this dev post that some players could be using some laxities in Concord's procedures to help them pod kill players in high sec. Warp Scrambling will be added to Concord's arsenal of tools to help prevent this practice in the future. Who knew that this would one day evolve into a science, but that's another story for another time...

Character Creation - Comments on the successful acceptance of proposal to add a 36 hour character deletion delay  when deleting characters.

This will affect:

1. Prevent accidental character deletion
2. Make exploiter tracking simpler

Unwelcome off-lining of nodes - A python bug was discovered and corrected that made the nodes die after ~6000 players had been playing continuously for an extended time. Node deaths would always occur during peak hour because of a build up in the alloc counters, patch issued.

Fixed a bug with censoring in the communication system that would use the escape characters provided to screw up the channel names. Replaced escape characters with spaces.

Stasis Web - The real reason for the stasis web was human error - related to porting from one server to the other during testing. Affects the previous alloc patch which will be delayed one more day to insure it is working properly.

Security Certificate - Finally had secure certificate installed on the web servers

Sliding Doors on the test server - A new backup from TQ has been installed to the test server. Think of it as a "save game" you can play to test out something you haven't got the guts for in real life (on TQ). They call it Chaos

Continuous reseeding - Added various reseeding of NPC stuff. It's mentioned that some players are already 'playing' the reseeds. Once this is out, one less reason for scheduled downtime each and every day (If only we could see the future)

Concord deploys special ops - Just a word of warning to the ones that want to make a name for themselves in the world of EVE. Empire controlled space, means that the space is controlled by the empires. If the police are not cutting it against players riding an obviously imbalanced module combination, reinforcements will be called, be it special NPCs or GM controlled NPCs (special-ops).

This is obviously in relation to some player related incident where some players were Concordokkened by Devs in Concord Special Ops ships. Here's a great little video I found on the subject: CONCORDOKKEN'd.

Dev blog made special reference to "The Four"

Gate Guns added to the test server - Gate guns have been added to the test server that act similar to station guns that are currently running in-game. They don't preemptively strike but are only triggered by combat in the vicinity. The guns at the stations and at the gates will work together to strike if a player's standings are out of line and if that player gets in range of the guns. They were also considering making gate jumps go strictly from gate to gate.

Delicate Delegation - Security roles in corporate station offices. Changes were made to the corp offices you can rent at stations. Each office is in effect 7 containers, 5 based on security clearance and 2 special, one for market activity by the corp and one for factory activity. 5 roles have been added, Security Clearance 1-5.

As the clearance "levels" are basically roles, then having clearance 5 doesn't imply that you have clearance 1, each lower clearance has to be assigned. It was just a lot simpler for us to implement this will(sp) the existing role system as all UI and tracking options could be used.

The role of pilot has been removed as it is determined that it is useless in game as everyone is a pilot. This is available on test server.

Suggestions Request - for the the new boards. (They had just gained the ability to sticky posts, so some discussion on that ensues in forums - am now feeling old.)

Patch delayed one day - I was going to skip this entry but saw at the last minute that here is when the CSPA fee was added to communicating with a stranger. So communicating now with someone you don't know will cost you iskies.

Quick fix was applied to server and downtime delayed due to a CTD problem, normally I would have skipped this but there was a great example of game mechanics explained here and I would like to include it. Essentially at the end of it all, a slingshot effect was happening to players warping into specific NPC situations that cause the game to glitch and slingshot you back the way you were going before you changed directions.

~Excerpt:

EVE is a deterministic distributed simulation; the server maintains a master state, which it evolved periodically. When a client enters a solar system the server calculates the set of data needed for that client to be able to run its subset of the simulation. This is the union of the spheres of influence of the objects that "touch" the client. This can be referred to as the causality bubble of the client.

Given how sparse space is this has proven to be a good way to partition up the data needed for the client to make a true simulated evolution of the state.

Once the client has received the initial state, it evolves to create a believable illusion of space flight. The server only sends the client the state patches needed to represent external actions of the world.

Flying in an asteroid field while avoiding the asteroids and being orbited by an Angel Hijacker is no client-server interaction but as soon as a player in the same belt changes direction the client gets a small time stamped packet notifying it of it and the client re-evaluates the state. If a state update involving ones own ship arrives late, because of lag for example, the determinism is wrong and then you notice the "bungee effect" as some call it, in most cases the re-eval is not noticeable). This is what makes EVE use comparably little bandwidth and relatively immune to "Radar hacks" (where a hacker creates an interface, showing information, that is know to the client but not displayed in the game's normal user interface).

This makes EVE a bit voulnerable(sp) to something which could be called a "Jovian precognition unit" and if someone creates such a unit before the Jove do, we’ll salute you

'Allo 'allo: Eve gets some wine and cheese action - Completed press tour in France. Game will be released in France by the end of the month. Got excellent feedback and hopefully an enthusiastic French audience.

Safer bids - market related changes suggested.

~Excerpt:

Many of the market scams we have seen rely on the fact that someone that is making a bid doesn't need to have the funds to back it up. We used to have a large penalty for anyone caught doing that, but players complained about this. Now what I would like to see is to have the money actually put in a special frozen account while the bid is active. This would be symmetrical to the asks, where the stuff offered is also taken away from the seller's custody while the order is active. I realize that this limits the possibilities for risk taking that some traders might do (basically trading on margin), but overall I think most people do have the funds necessary when putting out orders.

NEXT: 2004 Dev Blogs

Mind on my Iskies and my Iskies on my mind.