The MMORPG EVE Online celebrated its 18th birthday on May 6. MeinMMO spoke with Creative Director Bergur Finnbogasson and Brand Director Saemi Hermannsson about their game and their favorite memories.
What’s happening with EVE Online? EVE Online is one of the veterans of MMORPGs currently on the market. The game has been online for a solid 18 years now. It delights its fans with constantly new content and amazes outsiders and the gaming community with the enormous scale of its space battles.
To celebrate the 18th birthday of EVE, we from MeinMMO interviewed Creative Director Bergur Finnbogasson (on the title image left) and Brand Director Saemi Hermannsson (on the title image right). The two developers tell us about their experiences in the industry and especially with the very headstrong community of EVE Online.
What has changed, what has remained the same.
MeinMMO: You have been working in the gaming industry for over 10 years. What have been the biggest changes that have happened and affected EVE?
Bergur Finnbogasson: Yes, it is true that I have been working in the gaming industry for over 10 years now. I had no significant MMO experience before I joined CCP. I did play Ultima Online and Everquest back then, but in the years since my joining, there has been a tremendous shift away from games that were very hardcore, to casual. And then back to hardcore.
And I am also very happy that the world hasn’t shifted too far into casual gaming. At the same time, I think that many casual games have learned a lot, specifically from the growth of mobile games.
I feel that many players have a lower tolerance for overly complex user interfaces. Usability has become a much more important element in gaming. And that is something we are currently working on. The simplification and usefulness of the user interface in EVE. It is definitely one of the biggest changes.
Another notable thing is game streaming, which was a huge change. It has definitely changed the way people consume and play games. Ten years ago, you just played the game, but today even single-player games have this social element that comes from streaming and shared engagement as a community.
And lastly, I find that games have been “normalized.” It is no longer something exotic to play video games. It is not just a handful of people anymore. Games are now simply part of daily life, it is much more relaxed. It used to be a niche and now it is completely normal. It is almost strange if someone doesn’t play games.
MeinMMO: How have the community and players changed over the years?
Bergur Finnbogasson: EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online sandbox game. The game has changed significantly over the years. I often have to remind the developers that when the game was released, dial-up modems were still used. And if someone called the players at home, they would lose their connection to the game.
Most successful games have a lifespan of about 4 to 5 years. We have survived for about four times that. We have revamped the game completely 3 to 4 times over the years when looking at all the changes. But the core DNA of the product has remained intact. It is still this dark, grim, harsh world. It is hard to survive in it alone, and it’s better to fly in a group with other players to face all the challenges it throws at you.
For many years, we maintained the position that EVE should be hard to learn and even harder to master. Now we are working hard to make EVE easier to learn, but still very hard to master. It should always be hard to master.
What has not changed over the years is the community. The incredibly strong community that keeps the game alive, that develops the world further. The amazing alliances that shape the universe. And that is basically the one big thing that has kept the game alive, making it relevant and exciting.
Saemi Hermannsson: The one thing that I found extremely interesting in the last 2.5 years has been our conversations with the community about how important new players are for EVE. How important it is to not only attract new players to the game but also to nurture them.
Bergur made the point about mastering and easier understanding at the beginning. And it is amazing to see how much the community has embraced this concept. How they understand that it is important for us to invest a lot of time, effort, and focus to help new players find their footing in the game.
It is a blessing and sometimes also a curse how smart our players are. But that is one of those situations where it is definitely a blessing. They can understand the concept of the importance of new players, as Bergur said. More players mean more content, and more content means a better game. It is just the nature of things.
“We can only guess what will happen, and that is super scary”
MeinMMO: One of CCP’s main rules regarding EVE is that you try not to interfere in the events within the game as much as possible. What were the reasons for this decision?
Bergur Finnbogasson: Primarily, it is that we wanted to uphold the promise of a true sandbox. It is this idea that we are the stewards of this universe, and the players drive the game forward. Over the years, we had to adjust our views on this topic a bit. We had to establish certain rules.
Typically, we take the stance of “player control comes first,” but to develop successful systems, we need to put our fingers on certain things. But that is one of the great appeals of EVE Online, that it is so highly community-driven, and there are many things that are controlled by the players.
We can only guess what will happen, and it is super scary. We don’t know anything else, so we always do it this way. For most of my colleagues who work on MMOs, the first question always is: “How the hell can you trust that your players won’t just do terrible things?”
There is this crazy measurement used by many people in game development called “Time to Penis.” It is the time it takes for a new feature or a new player to have a penis drawn somewhere. And EVE is full of such elements. And in many cases, we just welcome it instead of fighting against it.
There have been so many features in the game that we planned in a certain way, and the players used them for something completely different. And this is the beauty of EVE Online. We give the players the tools to make the most of it.
MeinMMO: How do you decide when to intervene in the game?
Bergur Finnbogasson: That depends heavily on the case at hand and it is a very multidimensional decision. Of course, there are customer support-level issues where we have clear guidelines. And then we have things like the economy, where we do not intervene.
We have some levers that we can pull to, for example, change taxes. But we do not intervene when someone is manipulating the market. That is entirely in the players’ hands.
One thing that we have changed over the years is that we have become stricter with griefing new players. There were elements in the game that made it extremely easy to grief new players. And we have changed the game to make this activity harder. Of course, it still happens. But that’s about the strongest action we have taken to intervene in the ecosystem in EVE.
And then there are, of course, threats that transfer into real life. We have a very low tolerance for those.
“We have been at war with our community for 18 years.”
MeinMMO: One situation in which CCP intervened was the Battle of M2-XFE,which caused massive server lag. WWB2 is far from over, and players are expecting more huge battles. How do you plan to address the problem from the developer side?
Bergur Finnbogasson: That is an interesting and philosophical question. We are basically in an arms race with our players when it comes to epic battles in EVE Online. We are now in a situation where the number of players in a fight in EVE was around 4,000 or 5,000 players. And in M2 we had about 12,000 or 13,000 players trying to get into the system. And they were frustrated.
One of the problems that always arises is that we can rewrite the code. We do that constantly. But if we raise the limit to 8,000, the new fights will be at 9,000 players, and the game is bad.
If we raise it to 97,000 players, people on Twitter will complain that they showed up with 101,000 players and nothing worked, and the game is bad. It is a really tricky matter.
Through Time Dilation, the in-game time in EVE Online is greatly slowed down, allowing not all effects to occur at once and extremely quickly. This is to conserve server resources. In the Battle of M2-XFE, time was reduced to 10% of normal game speed.
We have, of course, features like Time Dilation and battle logging. But it will always remain an arms race, and it is also something that we continually test and optimize. It is a beautiful problem to fall in love with. It is a problem where the biggest companies in the world call us regularly and say: “Hey, we have a thing. Do you want to test it?”
When EVE first came out, we actually had to borrow servers from the Pentagon to get the game running. I hope we didn’t melt them completely. But right now we are in a situation where it is not a hardware problem but a software problem. We need to delve deeper into the software part of our servers and on the front, we are working on interesting things.
Saemi Hermannsson: To address what Bergur said: We have been at war with our community for 18 years, and for 18 years we have been losing. But we will keep pushing the boundaries. In the largest battles, all the world records in gaming history actually belong to us.
We keep discovering and experimenting with how this can be improved. But when the numbers get so high and the stakes get so great, it is like Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
What is very positive is when you compare the record of WWB2 with our record from 2018. The community has been super understanding and has educated new players and those who didn’t understand what was going on. They explain what was happening behind the scenes.
It has been good to discuss this with the community. There are great opinion leaders within the community who are best suited to explain to other players what is going on.
The war does not end with the game
MeinMMO: I have been following the battles on the site called New Eden Post and they provide very detailed reports about what is happening, explaining the different phases of the war, which is understandable even for people like me. What actions from the community have been your favorites so far in that regard?
Saemi Hermannsson: I don’t really have favorites, but I watch many different streams and they all have their positives. There are many meta shows on Sundays, I try to tune in to Talking in Stations, I follow the “Declaration of War” podcast and am on their Discord. Less than 10 is another podcast that I listen to.
I could keep listing more, it is a way for me to learn more about EVE and look into the minds of the players to understand their perspectives better. We are truly blessed with this community’s hardness.
There are reaction shows to new events in the game and there are even reaction shows to these reaction shows. A political cycle that keeps spinning. People put out controversial opinions about what is going on and what will happen. And the fascinating part is the diversity of the podcasts. You have some about fleet command, then focus on finance and economics, then there are people who talk about the lore and what is happening in the game.
Bergur Finnbogasson: The Twitch channels that Saemi mentioned are like TV stations. Their production value is incredibly high. But you have the TV station that belongs to different alliances and coalitions in EVE. They are highly political.
So you have a station that really tries to rally its side in the war. They present everything their side does in a positive light and try to keep morale high. While another is really working hard to bring it down and ensure that their side has the latest information and is ready for the upcoming tasks.
In some cases, these are not reactions to reactions, but a completely different game that takes place. You have the war in EVE and then you have this media war that takes place outside. People throw incredible amounts of crap.
The propaganda war is massive. Wars in EVE often revolve around rallying your own troops and keeping people engaged. It is about your own community having more endurance than the other corporation.
Imperium currently posts EVE songs on YouTube every few weeks. It is one of my favorite channels on YouTube. They have released some songs about what they did and called their troops together. It is incredible.
Saemi Hermannsson: The Goons released a song called “We didn’t crash the Server” and that is the epitome of the community content that is being released right now. It is political, but it is still good content. The skill behind it is so high, it cannot be ignored.
In EVE, players write the history
MeinMMO: On their birthdays, people often look back at the most important events in their lives. If you had to choose, what would they be for you in EVE Online?
Bergur Finnbogasson: That is a mean question. Who is your favorite child? Hmm… The Chappy Birthday Bash was a beautiful moment in the history of EVE. It is one of those moments when the game becomes so much more than what you have created. A player had a terminal illness, and he wanted to have one last birthday battle. You can’t even imagine.
Then of course Project Discovery. It was one of the projects that became much bigger than we originally hoped for. It was also beautiful that we were able to give something back to the community and science.
The monument for Katia Sae. She was a player who traveled to every system in the game and took screenshots there. It took years and years, and we built a statue for her.
Saemi Hermannsson: Katia! When you asked the question, I immediately thought of the moment when I had the most goosebumps. It is these individual achievements because everyone always focuses on the wars and fights, which are of course great.
But then you have the strong contrast of a single person who traveled to every single system in the game. You play as a pacifist and can create a moment like the celebration of Katia Sae’s massive achievement. It was fantastic.
Then there are moments like the world record we achieved. We had different streams turned on. It was Tuesday, and it was 5 PM, and the battle had already been going on for 5 hours. It continued for another 13 hours, and I remember the whole work, the efforts all flowing into that one moment. The madness.
It was 13 hours during which people streamed and talked about it. It was like during the elections. And the logistics behind it. Getting people to log in and fight. Ensuring enough people are there to apply pressure because you always have to deal constant damage. That is overwhelming.
MeinMMO thanks Bergur Finnbogasson and Saemi Hermannsson for the exciting interview. We wish EVE Online many more years and more world records with the biggest battles.
EVE Online is also on our list of 7 unique MMOs and multiplayer games that have no real alternative.
