EVE Online Forging A Brave New World

News Feature By Greg McNevin

While people are constructing elaborate fantasies in Second Life and chasing carrots in World of Warcraft (WoW), one MMO is evolving into something else altogether...

Unlike other MMOs such as WoW, EVE Online has only one, persistent online world which all players inhabit. While WoW guilds may have 50 members, EVE alliances can have thousands, and while WoW may boast 8.5 million subscribers to EVE’s 200,000, only 5,000 or so can be on any given server at a time compared to EVE’s 30,000.

Because of this unique world stability, EVE has evolved differently to other MMO’s, paralleling the real world in many ways. Wars are fought to capture territory, players create banks - which they have been known to defraud before escaping to the EVE equivalent of Mallorca - and one in-game player corporation is even preparing an IPO.

So, with this in mind, when CCP, the Icelandic company behind EVE, was accused of favouritism and fiddling in the player-generated world, the controversy pushed in-game politics to new heights.

In an open letter to CCP, members of the Goonsquad alliance alleged that CCP staff members have, in this instance, been using their positions to rig the game in favour of a rival alliance, the Band of Brothers.

Without going into the saga in depth, the drawn out and bitter controversy damaged player confidence in CCP, leading the company to take unusual steps to regain the communities trust.

“Perception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, told The New York Times. “Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.

“A government can’t just keep saying, ‘We are not corrupt.’ No one will believe them. Instead you have to create transparency and robust institutions and oversight in order to maintain the confidence of the population.”

To restore confidence, CCP is preparing an election in which nine players from the community will be selected by the community to act as ombudsmen. They will then fly to Reykjavik, grill the company and check out how things are run at the office first hand before reporting back to the community.

“They come here to Iceland, and they can look at every nook and cranny and get to see that we are here to run this company on a professional basis,” added Petursson according to New York Times, “They can see that we did not make this game to win it.”

Leaving the controversy now, CCP has announced a new expansion for the game is imminent, with the free Revelations II expansion set to hit the company’s Tranquility supercomputer cluster on Tuesday, June 19th.

Revelations II marks the seventh expansion for the game, and comes just one year after the last. Naturally a host of improvements, additions and fixes will be included, with rookie pilots scoring a protected start area so they don’t get immediately nailed by veterans, and improved Corporation and Alliance management for more seasoned players for starters.

In celebration of the release, CCP will also be offering a free two-week trial of the game.