EVE Online players weren't happy with the high prices of virtual goods in the NeX store, and two leaked documents made things worse. We attended a press conference to get more details from CCP and the CSM.

What are CCP's plans in the near future with dealing with some of the hard feelings by the community?

Gylfason: CCP's plans to deal with the feelings of the community are the same they've always been. Keeping a close relationship with the CSM, keeping an eye on the forums, keeping an eye on the usage metrics on features in-game, and really just seeing what the real contention points are and addressing them. There's not really a strategy. As far as I know, we're resolved the biggest contention points that the community has right now. Anything else we'll have to deal with on a case by case basis.

Gianturco: I think that as far as the community's points of contention, the only thing that's really missing from the statements is a lot of people are looking for some sort of apology or acknowledgment from Himlar regarding his leaked mail. Politically that's very hard to get because he's the CEO and he probably sees no need to do that, but by and large judging the reaction of the player base, we've pretty much covered every issue that went into this in the statements that were released.

Have you identified the source of the leak? If so, what action has been taken?

Gylfason: I can't really speak directly to it. I'm not involved in whatever investigation may or may not be ongoing.

It is interesting that a CCP employee risked his or her job to leak Fearless and Hilmar's email. Is it possible that the employee deliberately did so in order to influence CCP's future plans?

Gylfason: I don't know what mindset the person who leaked this information was in.

Gianturco: The timing of the leaks was quite deliberate. I had access to a copy of Fearless about a month before it was leaked. I read it and said, “this is going to explode when it gets out if there's a leak,” but it's actually not that big of a deal if you read it line by line. What was intriguing to me was the timing of the leaks, the fact that they leaked to EVE News24 the day after Incarna had hit. Somebody was very much waiting poised to leak this at the most dangerous time in terms of the Incarna rollout. It seems clear to me that they do have an agenda, but that's my take.

Realizing that communication in the initial days of Incarna wasn’t the best, what has changed in how you’d respond to any similar occurrences going forward? Why didn’t CCP confirm the items were planned as vanity only right away?

Gylfason: It's kind of hard to say how we learned from this. The biggest amount of communication issues we had were surrounding the leaked information. They weren't really surrounding anything we said or did publicly, so it wasn't really something we could prepare for. How will we prepare for that in the future? I don't know if that's possible. I think having gone through this one allows us to understand ourselves better and understand our reactions to something like that better. So next time, while we may not be prepared for the specific issue at hand, we'll sort of understand better the internal communication paths that need to be activated for something that is so unusual and unorthodox for us as a company.

Though obviously hard numbers will not be available, is it safe to say that this was the largest example of players unsubscribing en masse during EVE Online's history?

Gylfason: One of, yes. I mean we certainly have had our share of controversy through the eight years of having the game live. Some of them have spiked cancellation trends, but even so, the EVE player base has never been bigger than it is today. We've seen a very positive trend coming out of the Incarna expansion, both in terms of subscribed users and trial users. I think that gives a pretty accurate image of what the real sentiment is.

Gianturco: From the CSM perspective, we saw very detailed metrics on all of the unsubbed statistics. Basically CCP has ways of trying to parse the data to see who is unsubbing and why. New players are always going to come to EVE. Incarna is basically an expansion based around the new player experience. In practice, Incarna revamps the tutorial and the Captain's Quarters is designed to make the game as attractive to newbies as possible, which is great. But the crisis could be summed up demographically and we knew this going into the process. People who are new to the game don't read the forums or care about micro-transcations. What we had to go to Reykjavik to try and do was prevent veteran players who are pillars of the community from fleeing the game, because those are the people who provide a lot of the content to everyone else. I think we have managed that judging from the forums and the aftermath of the crisis.

Where does this revolt rank in EVE's history?

Gylfason: Not to be dismissive, but I think EVE has seen more defining moments than this. The first Titan lost, the first alliance formed, the first proper full-scale alliance warfare, those are defining moments in EVE's history. This is a bit of noise.

Gianturco: I think this blows the t20 scandal out of the water in terms of messes that the players have been angry about with CCP. With the t20 scandal, we came out of that with a lot of reforms that really helped the game along. The formation of the internal affairs department, the creation of the CSM, the much heavier regulation of volunteers. Because it was just leaks and perception, this controversy was a much greater controversy with players being much angrier, but in terms of the actual supposed misdeeds was far less in terms of its significance to the sandbox. It's kind of a funny situation in that it was sort of all smoke and mirrors that needed to be cleared away with better communication.

Incarna and Captain's Quarters

What do you mean with "ship spinning" and bringing it back exactly?

Gylfason: The act of ship spinning is simply viewing your ship docked in a hangar and being able to spin it. It's as literal as it sounds. This a great case of a bit of misunderstanding between the community and CCP. We always believed this was a sound bite for players that were unhappy with Incarna or didn't want to see their avatar. It turns out when we sort of dig into it, people literally meant they have an emotional connection with their ship and they want to be able to flick their mouse and spin their ship.

In same cases, the ship-spinning was a euphemism for the lost functionality of being able to quickly swap ships or open cargo holds. That's functionality we're definitely bringing back.

CCP has made it clear that its current strategy involves forcing player to dock into the Captain's Quarters. Can you explain the reason behind that strategy? More specifically, would Incarna-only gameplay and incentives not be enough to get people to use it?

Gylfason: It's not so much about forcing people to dock into the Captain's Quarters or forcing people to use features. It's more about making it a fully integrated, seamless part of the world. I think through our discussions with the CSM last week we came to a very agreeable understanding of how to give people back the option of having the ship spinning, having this intermediate stage that still fits within this seamless fluid transition between flying in space and the Incarna bits. That's something we're going to expand on a bit through design and iteration over the next month and hopefully implement soon.

When is the next portion of Incarna going to roll out, and what can we expect?

Gylfason: We're going to see more racial variants of Captain's Quarters added in the next few months. The next phase of Incarna will be the multiplayer establishments and I really don't think I can give any solid timeline on that just yet. But we're definitely looking at this year for the next big evolution on that front.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief