EVE Online's Torfi Frans Interview

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Eurogamer: There is a concern among some EVE players that, with Walking In Stations, they're just being used as a test-bed for World of Darkness.

Torfi Frans: As guinea-pigs... But the inverse has actually happened there, because with the office in Atlanta that has been built up by CCP to develop that particular MMO, CCP has hired a great amount of programmers and game designers who are working within our shared codebase, and their work actually contributes to Walking In Stations. So just as much as they're leeching off us, we are leeching off them.

So, true, the same technology is used for representing the avatars and the characters in the game, but to look at it as a beta test and players as guinea-pigs is a gross misinterpretation of the situation, because we would never abandon our strong player community of roughly a quarter million people who pay for our meals just to have an affair with another IP, it you catch my drift.

Eurogamer: In a lot of other MMOs, you find that social spaces like bars tend to be quite empty, and people congregate wherever's functional. But Walking In Stations seems to be designed almost entirely around social spaces. How do you expect to be able to turn that trend around?

Torfi Frans: We feel that by "marketising" the entire social experience within the game, we will alleviate some of that problem. My experience with places like Second Life and other virtual worlds that have been built since the mid-90s is that you would go into these spaces, and they would all be empty. You would roam around for hours and you'd see tons of custom-made content, you know, silly little houses that somebody built some day and they never came back. It's just swathes and swathes of emptiness. The social MMO game that was supposed to bring people closer to each other just does the inverse, and you never feel as alone as when you're in there. That's my experience in Second Life, plus that nobody wants to talk to me. Cos I'm not, like flirting with them. Anyway.

Games in the bars will allow gambling - with in-game currency, naturally.

The way we try to mitigate that is through content - you can build your own bar, you can run your own corporation office, you can have your own facilities, however, you must pay upkeep on all of these things and you pay rent for them. The rent is determined by the location of the service, so if it's in a popular and common system that's frequented by thousands of players every day, the rent is going to be much, much higher there than out in the border regions. And there's also a limited amount of sockets for the establishments.

If we did not have this system, every player in EVE would have their own bar, so we'd have 260,000 bars, and who would go to these bars? No-one. However, by using the free market and using rent, there's not going to be an incentive for someone to pay rent and pay upkeep on a bar that nobody every visits and they don't take any profit one. But those who have successful bars with popular games and events, in popular locations, they're going to be making money out of it.

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