It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows my background that I am extremely interested in this system, both as a keen player of Eve Online and also as an industry professional who has worked in community and evangelises for community involvement in games design. For the last two sessions, I’ve been an alternate – a stand-in delegate who is allowed to take part in the discussions, is privy to the internal workings but doesn’t get to raise proposals directly nor to travel to Reykjavik for the regular developer summits (as it happens I was at the last summit but only because a full delegate couldn’t make the trip).

This time around, I am pitching for a third term and hopefully as a full delegate. If you are an Eve player with an account over 30 days old I would appreciate your vote for Helen Highwater, my main character in the game.

You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

By now the latest EvE dramaquake is old news but the discussions are still happening. Scott Jennings gives a pretty flippant account which then turns into a threadnought in the comments as is usual. The actual story is pretty simple once all the extraneous bits are trimmed away – guy gets fed up with life in one gigantic power bloc, defects to different gigantic power bloc and turns the lights out as he leaves the building.

People have argued the morality of the issue and whether or not that should be cheating but I’d like to concentrate solely on the question of how much power should a game invest in a single player?

EvE is something of a contradiction to established MMO wisdom. Players are very much in the driving seat when it comes to the big political movements in the game. Because of the almost complete freedom for players to interact with each other, players have a lot of individual power and, the more players they are associated with, the greater the scope for issues. Add to this CCPs very hands-off stance on intervention in player interactions and the stage is set for some industrial grade drama. Some people hold the belief that CCP actively encourages this kind of thing, personally I believe it’s simple pragmatism that drawing a line and upholding it is hard work and open to misinterpretation. In any case, it is possible for EvE players to amass a staggering amount of ingame power and responsibility – which translates into a gold plated opportunity to shaft a huge number of people at once.

For many EvE players (myself included), this freedom is precisely what attracts us to EvE in the first place and thus any attempt to restrict player power needs to be approached carefully by CCP in order not to alienate a very large chunk of the playerbase. This very open and abusable framework is not found in other games, limits are placed to prevent the damage that a single player can do to his ‘friends’.

I’ve advocated before for greater freedom in player interactions, I’ve also been fairly open in my conviction that players cannot be trusted to run important parts of the game so where is the happy medium?

For EvE, I don’t think there is one. Checks and balances can be put in place to prevent this particular issue from arising again, but enterprising players will always find ways around them or entirely new ways to be jerks to each other. For a hypothetical new game though, I think this should underline why community systems and player accountability should be at the core of the design and not simply a fancy LFG UI and some chat tabs.

Back in the old days skill was very easy to measure. In a game such as Space Invaders or Pacman whoever had the reflexes, muscle memory and hand-eye co-ordination to rack up the highest score had the most skill. Pretty straightforward stuff. Everyone starts off with the same baseline against a constant opponent, the highest score on the board was the guy who could play the best. Add in more options and a PvP element however and it becomes less clear cut. If you can beat Raiden with Sub Zero every time does that mean you are better at Mortal Kombat then me, does it just mean you’re more proficient with that particular character than I am with mine or does it mean that Sub Zero needs a big fat nerf?

Fast forward a few generations of computer games until we reach the current crop of MMOs. Now you have a complex system where the game takes place on many levels. There’s playing your character in the raw mechanics of casting spells, attacking monsters etc and then there are all the nested metagames on top of that. So now we have many more ways of playing the game and different ways in which we can be considered to have ‘won’. The Mittani in the article linked above may or may not be a twitch gamer, his character skills may or may not suck, he may still be flying an Ibis with civilian modules and it’s possible that he might not be very good at hitting the right buttons in the right order or, then again, maybe he isn’t – but the important thing is that he is good at Eve regardless of his personal skill at actually operating his vessel in the game.

In other areas too there are opportunities for skill to manifest in different ways. If I can persuade 40 friends to raid a dungeon for me and give me the uber loot that comes from there and you cant, then I’ve outskilled you. My social skillz pwn yours. If I bring 20 friends to combat your 5 or 6 consistently then my tactical planning skills are superior to yours regardless of how good I am at playing my character.

At the moment skill based MMOs are the hot topic. I wonder when the twitch gamers will realise that all MMOs already are skill based?