Are you eager to deliver some payback in your favorite spacefaring MMO? Executive Producer Jon Lander and Lead Game Designer Kristoffer Tuoborg take us through their packed winter 2012 expansion.

Destruction Demystified

Tuoborg then went on to take us through the most radical shake-up of the expansion – streamlining the incredibly complex aggression system. He explained that “it’s super complex, and once you know the mechanics it’s fairly easy to abuse it to grief new players, and in general it’s a bit of a mess.” Tuoborg later added that his desire is for players to blow up because of their actions, not because they’ve skipped a 40-page explanation on aggression mechanics.

Lander agreed. “This is one of those things that made EVE hard for the sake of being hard, as opposed to being an enjoyable experience. EVE is not an entry level game, we fully accept that and actually we embrace that. But this was just hard because it was just hard, and basically mean to our own players.”

Lander detailed how overhauling the aggression system also delivered some significant performance boosts. “It was also one of those systems that grows up over nine years, and was actually causing a huge amount of lag for us. In a single sharded world where you’ve got up to 400,000 people who are all playing the game, and we’ve had over 60,000 people logged into our game at any one particular time, all fighting in the same world, anything you can do to improve lag is a major win for us. And this was a massive problem toward large fleet fights, or even medium fleet fights in places like High Sec and Low Sec, where the vast majority of our players actually live.” 

The new aggression system works in two parts, with the first being a move to three simple icons. The first introduces a new log off timer indicating when it’s safe to exit, and replacing the old ‘log off and hope’ that existed previously. 

The second icon indicates the danger that you’re in, with an amber skull meaning that other players can shoot you, and a red skull showing that both players and NPCs can attack you. For example, stealing from someone’s mining can will earn you an amber skull, while shooting the miner takes you straight to red. In this way, a complex 40-page rules set has been condensed to two colored skulls. The third ‘linked chain’ icon is there to show if it’s possible to jump, and the circles around them act as timers. 

The second half of the system shake-up was introducing a weapon safety system. When engaged, this new system will prevent you from performing actions that will earn you a red or amber skull. If you try to trigger one of these actions, the icon will blink red or amber. The safety also has three states; fully on, allowing amber actions and fully off. It guarantees that if you mess up, it’s highly likely to be your own fault. Lander also explicitly stated that it’s not intended to cut down on the amount of PvP or multiplayer combat going on, but just reduce the number of times players shoot themselves in their virtual feet.