[QT]omghax0r: Welcome to the first devchat for EVE-Online in 2006, hosted by eve.coldfront.net. Here's how it works:

[QT]omghax0r: The main channel (#eve) will be moderated. If you can think of a good question, please PM it to one of the ops that is prefixed with [QT].

[QT]omghax0r: #eve-kibbitz is the commentary and free-for-all channel to freely discuss the questions and answers. It is not moderated, and devs will not be on call for questions there.

[QT]omghax0r: Not all questions will be answered. If they're repeats of questions answered in recent blogs, in past dev chats, or official responses in forum threads, they are less likely to be answered.

[QT]omghax0r: Specific questions are better than vague handwaving, whines or vague calls for nerfs or boosts.

[QT]omghax0r: And welcome all. :D

[QT]omghax0r: Today we have many people in attendance, and a few developers and even those semi-helpful ISD types.

kieron: I'd like to thank the Coldfront staff and OMGRawr team for hosting the chat.

Oveur: Harro!

kieron: Plus the players are here. 300 is one of the more populated chats we've had

Oveur: That's just because I'm naked

Oveur: i said that out loud didn't i?

Nebulai: Really ?

kieron: Yes, that was your outside voice again, Oveur

kieron: The questions are coming in, the Devs are looking at them and will start with the Q&A in a few moments

Oveur: Not at this point in time, Kali public testing is just starting and I think we'd like to see it in play on TQ too before we start changing that. Don't rule it out though.

tuxford: Personally I like the idea of the possibility of running out of charges in a fight. Cap boosters have come something of a must have module and its come up to the point that the one with bigger cargo hold wins. Well ok not quite but still you should see my point. Ammo is a different story its well possible that we'd reduce the volume of those

Oveur: Nope, the paintshop might show up sometime after the graphics upgrades but currently, we're still focusing on performance and the paintshop wouldn't help in that effort.

Oveur: Passengers, well, I can see them making more sense as population of planets, where we have dynamics controlling the "supply" and "demand" of passengers from and to other planets, based on their tyran... uhm, governors

Oveur: but not really just as "passengers". But as population of planets, thats been a longstanding dream of ours

kieron: We've taken steps against those involved in the leak to ensure they won't duplicate it again. We are changing some internal security points and re-vamping the arc itself

kieron: It will occur, just in an evolved fashion.

tuxford: No its not confirmed but we have had talks about it. The crystal implant are for obvious reasons always compared to the slave implant but the fact of the matter is that they are not directly comparable. In some situations Slave is better and some Crystal. Its just with the current stats by the time slave is better you're already looking at survival time of seconds. I for one thing the implants can be balanced without changing the behaviour but just by tuning st

tuxford: We have had quite a bit of conversations about this

tuxford: no chairs were injured

Oveur: yes there were

tuxford: ok my chair wasn't injured, which is really all that matters

Oveur: * the last letters there are stuff

Oveur: or stiff

Oveur: nm

Oveur: next!

LeMonde: I know for a lot of people this can make or break the next tournament, and finding the best and simplest solution for that is something I've spent a lot of time on.

LeMonde: If you have input, dont hesitate to post on the events forum :)

Oveur: do you know of anyone that hesitates to post on our forums?

Oveur: anyways

Oveur: Well, if we had all evening, we could cover all the areas

Oveur: I made a dev blog once with a nice animated picture showing where it all could occur

Oveur: and currently, it's happening all over the place for different reasons

Oveur: for example, wednesday the 1st of november, we're addressing internet connections, we're adding more capacity and multi-homing

Oveur: this both helps you find better routes and ensures we're far from a congestion point there

Oveur: we're also adding more RAMSAN capacity, which means more of our database tables can be moved from old spindle hard disks to RAM

Oveur: the hardware capacity we're facing is per sol node problems, which is pr CPU

Oveur: so we're bringing in more hardware to lessen the number of solar systems pr. CPU on average, decreaseing the number of solar systems pr. CPU and thus gives more headroom, like for fleet battles and such

Oveur: we're also working on more factors taken into loadbalancing, we'er seeing new pattern we could utilize to better predict load, like player infrastructure (starbases, outposts etc)

*Sadie gives thumbs up for shooting eachother btw YARRRR

Oveur: and that's where we've been focusing our software team

Oveur: well, anyways, for short, we're attacking the problem, as always, on multiple fronts

Oveur: we have the people, we have the finance, we have the capacity

Oveur: and we also have professionals coming from outside the company and abroad looking at specific areas which our expertise doesn't cover (like, really low level stuff)

tuxford: like gerbiltologists

Oveur: yup

Oveur: oh - and here is the blog - http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=286

Oveur: hope, I answered your question, just post a followup if you were asking for something specific

*omghax0r WINS the race!

Oveur: Capital Mining Ships, yes, we want a m*********** industrial ship like in aliens

Oveur: what it'll do exactly, we'll shed light on at a later date, but probably "industrial" would be more correct than "mining", but still not like a industrial as in hauler

LeMonde: We have considered adding a neverending Veldspar roid in Amarr for Chribba's dreadnought.

Oveur: Yeah, that too

Oveur: just so people can see it, you know, as a landmark

tuxford: heretics

Oveur: "so this is what blasphemy on epic scales looks like, huh?"

kieron: Yes, the eight new regions will be renamed to Bree, Oveur's Pink Wig, Coconuts, Bree II, CCP RoxoR, Sirkis, Beer in a Sodastream? and F-4rt. We will entertain bids to have some renamed after that. Opening bids start at 500 billion ISK.

kieron: On a more serious note, there will be some EVE Chronicles introducing the new regions coming in the near future.

Oveur: They will also be renamed, except the Oveur one, I like that

Oveur: but we're thinking about a spin on the naming, we'd like players doing their part in that

Oveur: It's doing well, still to early to tell though, but if anything, we're seeing how big a part the strong player infrastructure plays a big part for the players on Tranquility

Oveur: The Singularity is so young and the infrastructure present shows that. But amazing things happening, we're seeing alliances pretty strongly there with starbase warfare already

Oveur: uhm - Serenity that should be :D

Oveur: Now, I'm assuming you're talking about client side here since youre talking about sli and such

Oveur: our graphics engine upgraded and the client optimizations are all in the direction of supporting that, it's just a question of when

Oveur: Short answer is yes, we'll be revamping a lot on myeve

Oveur: forums being first in line, then we'll be adding other sections which are based around ingame data and such

tuxford: Fleet battles are very much about bigger is better now. Mostly because of obscene range and damage they do on that range. Making fleet battles fun is very much a focus for after Kali 1 and I for one would like to see role for more ships than snipers consisting mostly of battleships.

kieron: tux is typing away madly

tuxford: So yeah you might say that that is the plan

tuxford: I like to think sometime as well

Oveur: and get tuxford typing lessons :P

tuxford: blob breaking is something we want to take a closer look at

tuxford: AT LEAST ITS SPEELED CORRECTLY

tuxford: spelled*

Oveur: rofl

Pann: At least he's faster than Solaris. *duck*

Oveur: but yeah, we've even looked seriously at some very extreme range-changing across the board

Oveur: (read=nerf)

tuxford: antiboost

Oveur: bringing the love closer together

*omghax0r loves close in love.

Oveur: and also gangs could play a big role in this

Sadie: Recently we are using more and more triggers when it comes to missions and dungeon design, with triggers there missions and dungeons have become a lot more unpredictable

Sadie: even the npc groups you can encounter may change slightly

Oveur: yeah, unpredictability and variation, more dynamic focus on the encounters

Sadie: an extreme example will be that you warp somewhere and you see an empty field with a gate and on your way to the gate you will set off triggers and the npc?s appear all around you

Sadie: i recommend making a lot of friends and invite them to explore some of the newer missions

Oveur: this is also part of exploration coming in the next Kali release, you have some fun encounters there but it's also more risky - and rewarding

Oveur: regarding level 5 specifically, we started implementing those, we have a lot of work to do with improving current ones, more dynamic

Oveur: *we haven't started should that be

Oveur: but for groups, yeah

Oveur: most certainly

Oveur: It very well could, but not in the first release, we'd first like to see how exploration work, tune it and see how it pans out before moving content over there

Zrakor: We are also thinking of eventually putting in hidden agents in the exploration system, basically Exploration is our big PVE project right now (that along with COSMOS). We have plans to improve the mission system (by adding in some new missions) in Kali 2 though (the next patch after Kali release).

Oveur: But if we move the current ones into exploration, they would be more limited to the space they are already in, they wouldn't be as extremely distributed as the current stuff, but you might have to search for them within the samce constellation

Zrakor: We will be adding in more complexes into Exploration, so the people who can't access the static complexes which are over-farmed will be able to find similarly rewarding and difficult content via exploration.

Oveur: And regarding ratting specifically, we're considering moving that into the same system we create all encounters in, so you might have to explore for them and they have more challenging encounters with them

Oveur: This actually works to solve a couple of problems in the bigger scheme of things :)

Oveur: so i would consider it likely

Oveur: (as in ratting, asteroid belts)

Oveur: Oh, I forgot earlier, system wide belts could be a realization as part of this change

tuxford: I'm typing not ignoring you

Oveur: tuxford is still typing, he's not ignoring you

tuxford: Ah yes the Amarrians. Now bear with me apparantly I don't play Amarr or have ever heard of them, I read it on the forums. The problem is that there are some problems with Amarr but aren't really fixed by changing Amarr.

tuxford: One problem is damage types and eanm. The problem isn't fixed by boosting laser damage but changing EANM. How has yet to be decided on.

tuxford: Another problem is how hard it is to fit beams but tbh other races have that as well like Minmatar

tuxford: The third is that Amarr is missing something extra special, some flavor.

tuxford: we do indeed talk about these things but in general I think certain people tend to overexaggerate the problem

Oveur: it's not a new trend, it's always been around

Oveur: also, removing insurance payout would really help this alot, it would certainly increase the lower end of what you select as a target

Oveur: but with people flying around with 100s of millions of ISK, it'll be profitable, insurance payout or not

Oveur: so far it's been a part of EVE, as long as you take the consequences

Oveur: if you're recycling alts or trial accounts though, to bypass the consequences, we'll ban those and your mains

Oveur: with much pleasure, i might add

Oveur: yeah, wings, squads and fleets is coming in next kali release

Oveur: the full changes to how the gang bonuses are applied isn't in this version, but it's a start

tuxford: hammer farted

Oveur: and i'll keep the details out of this so you will go on Singularity during the weekend to test out the first Kali public builds

Oveur: but we can say that squads are coming in strong and the squad leaders too

Oveur: sorry, next kali = kali 1 :)

Oveur: i'm typing a bit slower, i'm sick and i was just brought dinner so excuse me a bit :D

Oveur: and yes, you need invention slots for it

Oveur: the chances varie heavily depending on what tools, equipment and such you have for it

Oveur: but in general, it's hard

Oveur: We're keeping these areas secret, the only stuff we'll be divulging was in Kelis blog on invention

Oveur: we're sure it'll be reverse engineered over time, but lets wait till that happens :)

Oveur: yes, we have some UI overhauls, especially since we're beefing up gangs, which will be coming

Oveur: more customization and we'll most likely take drones through a bit at the same time

Oveur: but that's after kali 1

*omghax0r listens to the sound of furious typing.

Oveur: We've considered allowing ISD into creating baselines, which we then take and finalize, for example for events, we'd take and apply loot and review it

Oveur: but that takes a lot of technical work to enable due to our content infrastructure

Oveur: but that's not happening in the near future

Oveur: I can say "no" while tuxford is typing

tuxford: Not really no. Its making that kind of PvP more of a grind and very very hard for the little man to have a fighting chance. There isn't really anything concrete on how we're gonna "fix" it but we know of the problems and are discussing it.

tuxford: so in reality "no" like Over said

Oveur: I can say that this is one of the big focus of Kali 2

kieron: The recent communication issues with www.eve-online.com and the myeve pages are a router issue that we are confident will be resolved after tomorrow's downtime.

Oveur: Congratulations DigitalCommunist! You were person number 1000 to ask a question about instajumps!

Oveur: You win this nice iPod!!! Next question please?

Oveur: Anyways

Oveur: Instajumps is something we've been talking a whole lot the last weeks

Oveur: and getting feedback from all around about what to do

Oveur: personally, I'm standing between in two camps, the "warp to 0 with autopilot on 15" and the "remove them and use the tools you got to begin with, mwd's and ab's to move"

Oveur: pretty much lost faith in any thing between that, but i'm not the only one with an opinion on this and in this case, much more than chairs have been broken

LeMonde: (Redundancy has cost the comany over $10,000 in chair expenses)

Oveur: but they all have drawbacks and positives, but I'm actually a bit optimistic that we'll see something in Kali 1

Oveur: if not there, shortly thereafter

Oveur: especially with the hitpoint changes coming in Kali 1, they are a big part of this discussion, so are empire wars and so on and so forth

Oveur: the short answer, they will be changed, they are not only passionately hated, they are also wrecking our servers

Oveur: so the pressure is not only from gameplay, the server performance pressure is huge, so there will be a change

Oveur: This is a big part of the discussions around factional warfare. In any case, if they should be claimable, it shouldn't be without a fight, be that a player that fights for the NPC sovereign or not (preferably a player)

tuxford: Everything is under constant revision all the time. Another look at the hitpoint increase is the possibility that cap using turrets run out of cap before its target is dead. Actually thats exactly what happened to a fellow dev that was trying out the Rokh. Of course I'd wager that the minmatar ship would be out of ammo as well

tuxford: Of course the chances that you'll end up shooting at a target alone is pretty slim, I don't see many sniper duels o.O

tuxford: We're definitly considering lowering the volume of projectile ammo. I haven't taken a look at the damage over time recently but iirc it did a bit less than both tachyon and 425mm rails but then I was looking at it with emp fitted which does less damage other turret most high damage ammo, which does not hold true for t2 charges

tuxford: and another thing when you're comparing damage consider the ships they are going to be fitted on. You can assume that a minmatar ship will definitly get a rate of fire bonus

tuxford: gallente usually a damage and amarr cap need one

Oveur: Time goes by, so slowly ...

Oveur: I'm sure she wrote that song after playing EVE about the skill system

Oveur: For older characters, their advantage is either those last % they gain with level 5s or their versatility by training many paths

Oveur: There'll be more paths coming in over time, not necessarily combat based, like with new mini-professions, especially when we add more pvp into them

Oveur: like hacking into starbases :P

Oveur: and salvaging tuxfords typing skills

Oveur: i don's see us going endlessly in all paths, at a certain point it stops to make sense

Oveur: but if anything, we could see skills which require more # of skills at level 4 (like 4 x 4

Oveur: which would give combined bonuses and not require 18 months to train that single rank 98 skill to level 5

Oveur: for short, new paths which are early accessible, even for new players which can expand and compliment your playstyles

Oveur: Yes, our infrastructure should never be in a position to have to queue, it's implemented to prevent node deaths, which means the node is already on it's path to destruction anyways

Oveur: The problem we see today is the number of solarsystems on the same node, for example one CPU has 6 constellations, 5 of them are hardly used but one suddenly gets a fleet battle

Oveur: and voila, you have 6 constellations bleeding for it

Oveur: this case works well if we have Jita on the brink of destructoin because solar systems like that have their own node, so it's only jita that gets queues

Oveur: so the solution is through many things, one is the ability to move the nodes that suddenly start getting huge load from the node with the 6 constellations, preventing any need for queus

Oveur: it's in bringing in more # of nodes so that the collateral damage to other constellations is far less because with more nodes there are fewer constellations per node

Oveur: and it's in improving our loadbalancing to predict the "6 constellations and one gets a fleet battle" syndrome, by measures i told you earlier, so that likely fleet battle systems are put to nodes which are more prepared for it

Oveur: and of course fixing teh bugs which take down nodes today when fleets are attacking starbases and outposts

Oveur: but today, for example doing the system movement isn't possible, but it's on our roadmap

Oveur: so rest assured, we have people on all fronts preventing queus from happening, not being necessary at all

Oveur: *and not being necessary at all

omghax0r: That's all the time and energy that the devs have for today. :( However, we still have a LOT of questions. We're going to do what happened at the last devchat, and that's bundle the questions up and have Oveur and the others answer them inteview-style, and post the answers as well as the log for this chat.

Oveur: why do i always get them all :)

omghax0r: cause you can deal with them. :D

Oveur: my finger hurst :P

[QT]omghax0r: all the other devs are too wimpeh.

[QT]omghax0r: The log should be up later tonight, and the interview portion a short while after we get the answers.

Oveur: ok - hope I answered your questions

Oveur: we have to get back to work, kali public testing this weekend

tuxford: o/

[QT]omghax0r: Thanks for coming out, all! Enjoy eve, and enjoy eve.coldfront.net!