Interviews// EVE Online: The Interview - Part 1

SPOnG: Is there a limit? A line that players could cross where you feel you must step in and take action?

Jon Lander: That’s just happened recently, actually. One of the highest profile people in the game made some pretty ill-advised comments about a player in a public forum, sponsored by us, encouraging the audience to basically harass this other guy. When things spill out into the real world - on our time, if you like - we enforce our Terms of Service and EULA pretty strongly.

It was interesting. So back in 2005 - when the game was two years old - we had one of the most game-defining scams we’ve ever witnessed. These guys spent about nine months infiltrating an in-game corporation, got to the very highest levels, robbed everything. They assassinated the head of the alliance, who had this cool ship and all this stuff... all because they were hired by someone in the game to do this infiltration. They completely wiped it.

At the time, there was a conversation amongst the developers, asking ‘should we revert this?’ You know, change the database back and give this player all of her stuff back? Because some people will leave the game over this. Or do we say, ‘This is brilliant! Player-made content, this is great.’ Thankfully the studio went with the second option, and that set the tone really: if you don’t break our EULA or Terms of Service, anything goes. So long as you’re not exploiting a bug or something.


SPOnG: It’s curious to think that, you guys mentioned that people could be notorious for being a spy, a thief or a hero... are these parameters and job descriptions that are created by players, or is that something you set?

Jon Lander: Player-set, completely. It’s a key part of our game really, which is... when creating a character, you don’t click a button that says, ‘You shall be a mercenary.’ You’re basically given an open world, you chart your own course and your own path. People find a niche and they exploit it.

I’ve been playing since 2005, I’ve had about seven or eight different roles ranging from leading an alliance to being a solo mission runner, to being the guy who goes behind enemy lines to screw with their equipment whilst at war. You make your own life there, and a lot of people out there find that a difficult concept to grasp. Most people in other MMOs are happy to say, ‘I’m a rogue. I know what to do.’ In EVE, you work out what you want to do. A lot of people freeze up on that prospect.

Kristoffer Touborg: It’s difficult for some people to wrap their head around the freedom they have. Those that do, they do very well.

Sveinn Johannesson Kjarval: There’s no end game and there’s no wall. Your role is defined by you and is fluid. There’s no level cap. You can play another MMO as a rogue, reach Level 70 and that’s it. You’re done. Here, someone comes in and says, ‘I want to lead an alliance,’ and the dynamics of how you do and define that just changes constantly. So there’s really no... I guess the player-defined rules really have no end point.

Jon Lander: That’s a great one. A few years ago, there was a player called Innominate Nightmare. I have no idea if he was an experienced player, pretending to be a new player or what, but he basically decided to spend his time traveling the galaxy, seeing the sights and meeting the people who make this great stuff happen. He wrote a blog about his adventures, just chronicling what he did every day.

He basically ended up becoming a celebrity, and when he arrived in this particular Frontier one of the biggest alliances in the game brought all their capital ships out and did a fly-by. Just for this little guy, who made something of a profession out of being a tourist within the game.


SPOnG: You had your own little Michael Palin, then.

Jon Lander: Yeah! He did this for a long time - some people blew him up, others protected him. The thing is, he made up this role completely by himself. None of us would have had the first clue that someone would do that!


SPOnG: The game is nearly ten years old. How difficult is it to keep building on it and ensure it stays fresh for all that time?

Kristoffer Touborg: We have about a hundred years’ worth of ideas. We’re not lacking in that department.

Jon Lander: The difficult thing is limiting what we’re going to try and do. We could... ugh, I could just look at the list of things we have on my wall in my office right now, and think, ‘Shit, this could keep us happy for five years!’


SPOnG: Is there a level of realism that you’d like to stick to in EVE? You look at what World of Warcraft is doing with Mists of Pandaria...

Kristoffer Touborg: Yeah! [Laughs]


SPOnG: ...which seems a bit abstract from their core approach, wouldn’t you say?

Kristoffer Touborg: [Laughs]

Jon Lander: And Stoffer cried a tear! [Laughs]


SPOnG: [Laughs] Would you ever consider going quite so far away from your design roots in such a way?

Jon Lander: No. If only for one reason - the art director would literally just explode and kill everyone. When you’re employed in this company for ten years, you get a Viking sword, and it’s a real fucking proper, sharp brutal thing. And he would run amok with it, if we ever suggested something like that.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our mammoth EVE Online interview!