Welcome to talking in stations, a podcast about ebb online. Today we are happy to welcome hill mar back to the program. How's it going? Hilmar it's going great. Great to be back. And with him we have CCP, Falcon, a mom and a CCP. Goodfellow who's new to CCP if I'm not mistaken. I've been here for two and a half years, but I'm new to talking in stations. Thank you for having me and Eve online. That is definitely a new bro, but it's nice to meet you for the first time. So for talking in stations, we have Carneros. Hello everyone. Good to be here. At least Randolph. Hey, how's it going? And off screen we have Caleb around Ya. All right. So the last time that we talked with you heal mart, it was just before the invasion, um, tour and also expansion. And that was about March, the end of March. And since then, um, a lot of things have happened and we'll just start with the most suppressant wine, which is the blackout and null sec. So it's been 13 days since Nell sec has been blacked out. And we're wondering if the players have surprised you with some of their behavior.

So, um, I think, um, sort of based on my own experience of, of playing through boredom hall can play quite a bit last year. And the Watsi of, we say the prototype of the blackout when we had the broken chest system of last year, uh, that we had enough data to extrapolate from what would happen. Uh, and I would just say, why do we estimate it with, and actually happened to us to a greater extent than we estimated, which is usually, uh, often what happens with Eve [inaudible] saying something will have a small effect too, some direction and it just has had a massive effect to a, to, to a similar direction. Uh, but just a motor amplitude. Um, it's definitely driven AARP activity across the board. Some people were worried that this would most make everyone crapper and nobody would do anything. That has not been the case where a, you're actually experiencing right now, this month of July, we have the highest Mau and Dau, uh, in the past five years, just to give you a sense. So, uh, if I turned to look across our matrixx even online has not been nice, my vibrant over the summer in the past five years. Can I just chime in and say Mau is monthly active users and d

a u is daily active users. These are the two key statistics across games. Thank you.

Yup. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Of names.

And I mean, it has also created so much discussion, Eh, Farrakhan, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time that the stroke in our forum threat.

Yeah. We, uh, I didn't actually realize that that limit was there, but I'm not, for him, software discourse actually has a hard limit of 10,000 posts per thread. And there was a, there was that much, let's say a quote unquote discussion going on, on the forums that we actually fill the thread and how to open a second one. So it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's kept people pretty active. The, uh, the responses obviously been very, really, really polarized on this and people love it. Some people who hear it is, and some people who just don't care because they don't really, uh, they don't really interact with Nall Sec, but, uh, we've seen some, uh, we've definitely seen some interest in metrics and, uh, it's, it's pretty interesting to see how things have changed over the course of the last 13 days.

That's amazing. I remember the first time I had a stack limit for titanium. I had no idea that there would be a stack limit. I was shocked. Yeah, I can imagine that would be a surprise. No. Excellent. Are there, uh, now you're seeing more people logging in and more people playing? Are, is there a part of the activity of the game that's really surprised you about the change either up or down a is like, for example, did PV behave like you thought it would?

Um, well, I mean there, there definitely has been like a change to it in various different direction. Like eve today, 13 days in is quite a different game than it was before. Um, but it's just all with all this increased amount of vibrancy, uh, which I, I think, uh, it relates both to the, the, the change itself, which is exciting. Um, and it's aligned with, um, goals. We have set ourselves, um, a for this year, which I think I talked to some extent in March when I was here, uh, is that overall we want to decrease the challenge for new players and we want to increase the challenge for veterans. They named my line, uh, even online, uh, has so many super smart players that to some extent that game has already been solved. The game was slowly turning into the purple donut. Everyone was fearing.

Um, and that is like the end game solution. State of like the chaos of human line has just been drained into, into Arthur and everyone is slowly reaching a consensus on how things should be. Uh, and that is a clear signal to us that we need to increase the talent and we need to shake things up. Um, and, uh, sort of with that challenge in mind, we walked into some of these things we've been doing over the summer and we'll continue to be doing is that we tend to over think, we sometimes think we're so smart. We sit there on the paper and start to think through all the ankles. Uh, and we've been taking a very different approach, uh, with these changes is that we're going to do more, um, I called them experiments, but obviously these are, uh, calculated experiments. Um, and there are a lot built on.

We have a very clear direction on what we want to do. We want to increase the challenge for, for veterans, decreased the challenge for new players. Um, and we have such more ropers data infrastructure so that it's much easier for us to, to do experiments which are quote unquote not fully thought through and then track the changes and then come off as a hypothesis built on that. Um, when you have such a complicated system like eve, which is so throw polo, chick economical socioeconomical I mean there's so many variants nobody like is they're smart enough to think through all the ankles. So, uh, we often get lost in our own thinking about it because we have so much access to what's going on that we feel like we should be able to. But I'm frankly into the given up on that line of thinking. It's just too slow a and, and to some extent we've just been too slow because we are, uh, trying to do the perfect thing.

Uh, and as I often say, excellence in our perfection is the enemy of excellent. So, uh, uh, I hope that you will see us do more like this where we are making moves, we're making changes, we're tracking the progress. We have, our overall hypothesis. Sometimes it works out something. Sometimes I think even more inspiring happens. Sometimes it doesn't work out, then we need to tweak it. So, um, I am hoping the tone, we have sat over the summer, which as some of you know is like getting something done in Iceland in the summer is uh, is a miracle. Uh, everyone needs to go and take care of the sheep over the summer. Um, yeah.

Yeah. It looks actually we Koch during the winter and take care of sheep during summer. Uh, it's basically I spend three, uh, then, uh, uh, I hope once we get people back from the vacation you will see even more of that. Uh, and in one line bill at the end to a very exciting sort of chaos era. There are fairly stable situation, which I think is started turning into as I sometimes say our sandbox. It's turning into some math. Mm. Okay. So chaos era. One second before the chaos area. I just want to clear up that the purple donut is very interesting. I haven't heard that before. Um, but that doughnut represents outlaws space, which circles empire space. So the donut hole is actually controlled empire space. The donut is the outside. That's lawless space. And that's where players kind of take over sovereignty. For those of you that don't understand what the donut references are, whether either a blue doughnut or now a purple donut. Yeah, it didn't say purple. I thought I said blue.

What'd you guys hear anyway? I thought it was purple and I thought, I thought that, that's brilliant. And of course that's mar like fourth dimension thinking because purple represents kill everybody outside your fleet. So it actually works the same way. Everybody's friends. You're killing everybody outside your, uh, your

friend circle. Let's roll with that. It's also the color we have chosen, uh, for the product development model we introduced earlier in the year called the eve high gift needs. Uh, well it's, uh, it starts with blue, purple dream, Ahrendts and yellow, and it's kind of modeled after the master. I've had a calf needs, uh, and the, and the purple, a rim and the pyramid. There's called cruel but fair with my sister, safety and unlucky of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But obviously there's no safety in eve. So we call it corporate fair. So in a way we're going to be increasing cruelty. Uh, I tell them system more politically correct, but I also like cruelty, uh, each to be crude but fair and, uh, and it's neither cruel Perth or fair right now. Uh, and it needs a major attachment chaos era.

We kind of used to a cat, a Sarah, we were 13 days into this blackout and we feel like players still feel like they're experimenting with a, trying to find solutions to the state of what they are experiencing in eve. And it still feels like there's more change coming. Does it, does I, I'm hearing the word experiments. Does it sound too, should we be expecting more experiments and more change coming to eve?

Yes. Uh, if we took Jopwell, uh, some things would be changing every week. Uh, we want you on your toes. We want you to feel like lip blanket is being pulled underneath you every single week. So we are panicking all the time. The heartaches costs are a, you need to take stress medicine to keep focused. Ah, that is the case or etc. And, uh, it is on,

that's actually pretty nifty because I'm, at least in, in no sec, a lot of the players like the, the veteran players that you mentioned, and even some newer players that moved out there, it felt like the pendulum of like danger to safety has been like firmly in the, in the direction of safety and instead of letting it swing back gently, you guys just seem to be throwing it against the wall, into the, you know, into the side of danger and chaos.

Yes, absolutely. Um, if you're wrapped the, uh, very good sifo book three potty problem, uh, written by our Chinese author, it's phenomenal. And go to some of the best cyto ref in recent times. Uh, they talk about, uh, the trade Libyans but actually not take Naviance, but Trey Solartis went through where that comes from. It's a live in, uh, uh, uh, triple star system and, uh, uh, the tipple starts this once in a while aligns and that

introduces a k or Sarah to the place a lot. I try to try solariums not the PRAC avms [inaudible] in my head. Um, and, uh, and, uh, there is a bit the inspiration we're now entering a k or so.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I'm from, from my point of view, you know, coming up on and being a 17 year old out of for the last sort of, Oh God, it's three, four, maybe five years. Um, we've been in a position where at least it's entirely right. The, the pendulum has swung to the safety side of things and it's just sort of stopped. Um, and obviously when I, when I go down the avenue that I'm going, when I'm about to speak, I mean no disrespect to the guys who spend all the time doing the leadership and logistics side of things. But, um, for me, I look at null sec and I just, I just see it as kind of a wasteland of people who've bettered in and they're just happy in their little bubble, making a shit load of ESC generally gone about their day to day life in quite frankly, conditions.

Then a lot of instances, they're a lot safer than empire because they have a big capitol umbrella that sit under, they're very safe. They can, you know, FK a mine or they can FK rod or they can just sit in an asteroid belt and do what the hell they want all day. They have, you know, people patrol in this fear state and carry with them and they have a, they have the ability to travel over large distances pretty quickly with the infrastructure been set open. I just think that, um, we need to be in a position where there's a lot more unpredictable living thrown into things, but of course for no Saigon philosophy as well. Um, I really think we need to shake things up substantially and like, and just rattle the cage and, and, and see who survives and who doesn't.

A Falcon, you were in the a Metis fear news recently with a post that you put on reddit talking about, uh, some of the stuff that you would have envisioned. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on what you wrote and uh, if you have any comments on it. Because I got a really good reception from a lot of players that looked like,

yeah, I actually learned one and a half years. I've read a premium out of that. Uh, as I go up folded and guilt that much, I was very surprised, uh, because, um, I was actually talking to a couple of guys internally and, uh, and we were talking about things that we, that we'd like to do to eat. Um, and so a couple of the guys were like, wow, you're, you're a lot more kind of hardcore thinking, uh, than, than the rest of us than I was. I kind of took that as a little bit of a badge of honor because I mean, if, if, if it was up to me, it would be a horrible, harsh staff Dystopian, nasty place where bad things happen. Um, and I really try and keep people on their toes as much as possible. I mean, you know, the, uh, and really on what I say or that, you know what I mean? I mean, no disrespect to the guys in Dev. Uh, they've got a very hard job keeping the, keeping the scales balanced in terms of keeping things running. Um, and they're, they're very busy doing a lot of good stuff for eve. Um, but yeah, I think, uh, to put it as a, I can't remember who who said it, but, uh, if, if, if, if it was up to me, eve would be a, an absolute hell scamp of just holler and terribleness. Um, so, so

yeah. I, I eat very, very harshly shake things up.

Yeah. And, and, and over your CBO, what is hard to do? This is not when we sort of procedurally generated the puzzle that was one line in the beginning and not even us knew what the universe was like. It was made by a computer. Um, one of the elements we did not, uh, fully factor in, uh, is, um, it's something that I call procedural regeneration is that, uh, the, the, the worlds does, we built it [inaudible] static. Um, because we never foresee we will be running the game for decades are wildly streams. Where's the run? He maligned for five years and then two, uh, or something else. Um, and now when we're 16 years in, we, we are limited a little bit by the, uh, sort of initial conditions of the game. So, um, this kind of, uh, what ideally would be procedural, the regeneration and hopefully we will be able to build that in.

Nice. We go. But, uh, given the, uh, the, the, the state of the infrastructure, there's some of this needs to be done manually and it has to be done with a few kicks and uh, and a few sort of as I call it, chaos center. Uh, but, uh, with, uh, once we kind of moved through that, then we may be reached another degree of stability. Whenever that happens that we sort of empowered him on line with the ability to procedurally regenerate itself. Um, and there are virus tools and technologies today you can do to achieve that. And then we will keep the game, uh, much more like nature on planet earth where, where there is an element of not too old chaos built into the system. Even if at some point we might be able to calculate all the weather patterns, all the carbon dynamics or the things that go into making a our planet, but still we're a long ways off so it's kept, it's kept live interesting for a four by 300,000 tears that homosapiens have has been here. Uh, and uh, so while it's going to be some of what we're doing now, it's manual tweaks, it's a, it's a using tools we have but more operated by humans. Then I would like to be, I hope at some point we ant up in this state where even online procedurally regenerate itself to the point where we are like freaked out about what's going on.

Just a small comment on that because you're pointing back to early Eve history and being a veteran myself, I was also around when, when all this was conceptualized and then you put this into play and it was pretty much what hooked a lot of us back then. We used to have a lot of training wheels. You put in a lot of training wheels in the form of NPC stuff to actually get the ecosystem started and then you started rolling them back, removing them. So we could pretty much run the whole ecosystem as player versus player. And I'm just wondering what went wrong because it feels to me as if at some point you stopped trusting the simulation, I kind of put in new training wheels and we're suffering from this today. Are you thinking of removing those training wheels again and getting us back to being proper player versus player centric ecosystems?

Uh, so I think there are parts of the game where people have too many training wheels and there are parts of the game where people need more training wheels. Uh, there, there's a certain, uh, by free cation two by two we need to do. Um, uh, interestingly enough, we've made the situation for new players coming into eve in 2019 worse than ever. And it's worse than ever because the game has increased in complexity. Uh, so it's just more to learn and there's a, you leave me a lot more to learn. Um, and, and also, frankly, our latest iteration on the MP is, uh, performs worse than what we had before. What we had before, uh, was pretty good, but it had a lot of technical issues. It was hard to maintain. It was very monolithic and hard to improve upon. So we needed to put into place a, uh, a better system to iterate on. Uh, but right now the content of the system meets improvement. So, so we have done the reverse of what we should have done. We've made the life for new players harder and we've made the plan the life of veterans easier.

I was thinking of the ecosystem in the form of resources and resource gathering. Um, not so much in PE stuff.

Yes. So, uh, the, the, the problem that the resource gathering goes back and into, uh, uh, procedural regeneration is that the algorithms behind the scene are fairly static, uh, fairly. It's probably even a compliment to them. Uh, and, and those, the landscape is not shifting underneath and nothing behaves like that. I mean, when you're strip mining and nature, you ruin the earth beneath you. Uh, and, uh, I personally have always had this fantasy about like, if you're straight my name, uh, you, you, you'll have scored stars. But if you're like manually mining in your little, uh, mentor, then okay, then it's maybe environmentally safe, uh, which will then turn into offensive mining where you were going mine in your enemies territory too, to ruin their territory, which again is what people do in war. Like people go and burn corn fields, destroy, uh, infrastructure, et cetera.

Uh, and if the just doesn't have enough off that because the, the, the [inaudible] distribution system is just too static and it doesn't take, um, input from the play at auction enough into account doing something like that would, who's even more into like the weather system on planet earth, which would make it more naturally unpredictable. Um, yeah. So, uh, to your point, um, we have kind of in a way made everyone self sufficient. Uh, at some point the mineral distribution was very as symmetric. So we had to build alliances across the board to get everything to piece everything together than a no. We made it symmetry, which was rather ridiculous. But whatever, uh, not everything you do, uh, is, is, uh, is going to work out. Um, and, and we need to, uh, not spoil that back, but we need to sort of, and Pune Eve with its own ability to, to req chaos on some of these kind of fundamental input to audio pools into what drives the rest of the economy.

Yeah. Because fundamentally you brought in anomalies which flattened everything and then you brought in movie mining, which was potentially the most unique invention ever in node respond mechanics, but it doesn't really have the effect yet because the other one is still running.

Yes. Ah, you are correct.

Yeah. I mean when you, um, when you look at sort of, when you look at the complexity of evil over the years, I mean Hamas entirely, right. I can remember when, uh, when I joined back in the day and it was, it was full classes of ships. It was frigging crews of allyship and industrial. Uh, that's what you had to choose from full races. Uh, there's nothing you could fly that was pirate. There was no T2. Um, and, but back then, I mean, there was also no tutorial. You got dumped into space in a, in a rookie ship with a, with a Concorde drawn all that new and an asteroid belt. And you basically had to figure out how to kill a Kong called draw me for it, killed you. Um, and that was, that was basically the tutorial. It was, you know, was, is there's a station go on.

You were a young whippersnapper. Um, and that was how things worked. Um, and yeah, I mean, I totally agree that we've, we've added so many systems in over the last 16 years that, uh, even just become, it's become the sprawl and web of, uh, of games within games effectively. I mean, you have PII, you have the soft system, you have, I mean, you could, you could conceptually you can think of shift fit and then chip simulation a entirely as its own game. Um, so this, there's so many different facets to eve and, uh, and I do agree that to, we've made life way too easy for those players that also, that already have the, uh, sort of the institutionalized established knowledge. And we made it very difficult for new players to come into the game and actually, uh, to compete at the same level. So we definitely need to look at the, at how we onboard people and how we bring in and the numbers show that.

Uh, but in terms of, uh, in terms of shaking things up, I mean, I couldn't agree more. Um, I'd love to see a situation where, uh, you know, we have, we have diminishing depletable resources where, for instance, if you want to corner the tech to market, you can't necessarily, you know, find an area of space and get everything you want from that area of space to be able to build T2 shifts. You're gonna need to trade, you're going to need to borrow. You're going to need to deal with other people in all areas of space, on the opposite side of the map. In order to get everything you need to build the ship. Um, I think it's just, it's natural. It, uh, when you compare reef to, to FIU, compare it to the wider, you know, the wider solar system, the different resources are going to be located in different areas. Different people are going to have different graphs, some things you, uh, it really, really strengthens the economy in its strength. It strengthens a player to player interaction if you actually have the ability to, to rely on others to be able to get the job done.

We see what you're doing with the making work, trying to make things easier to onboard for new players. You've also got longterm players, people who've been around a long time, and you can break those players down in to some that are more risk. Aversives may be more conservative, some that are more aggressive and willing to try new stuff and, and don't care if their shit blows up or, uh, there are different personalities behind that. If Eve, if new Eden is going to become a more dangerous place, uh, if an era of chaos is coming in, uh, to us, we're going to want to bring along some of the more conservative ones of a bit and, and maybe a coax them along the way. So we don't scare them off immediately. Is that, is this part of your plan to, or is it more part of like you'll, you're using some of the upcoming events to portray maybe some of the vision and get them on board that way?

Motion. So, um, okay. Um, I mean I actually thought a lot about this. Uh, maybe it's just time to just let it slip into being a country for old men like myself. Uh, and maybe it's just time. Um, and a wife actually gave me a, um, an interesting signal in that it wasn't time for that is, um, well one is that we've been doing experiments, uh, on the customer acquisition side and marketing and we have an on tremend there's among have an ability to generate interest in the game. We are now off to a part 16,000 people lock in for the first time every week. Uh, which is a lot for a 16 year old MMO. It's a lot. It is. And uh, and these are people that like go through the signup forum, download alarms, her, download the download on demand, go and create a character and God knows what, 16,000 people per week, new players.

Um, so that's one variable. And then the adoption rate of the 64 bit client [inaudible] surprised me. We've got 40% of if players to, uh, adopt it as an optional Beta, uh, with very sort of obscured concrete benefit, uh, other than it really performs better in fleet fights and, and, and elements like that, which is maybe not the everyday activity for everyone all the time, but 40% of players duct jump on something like this, which is a, a new technology, um, Eh, indicates that we have a higher degree of innovators over kind of late adopters, uh, than I estimated to be the case at this point in time. Um, so that gave me sort of a, a different way to think about it. Maybe it's time, maybe it's not time, maybe there is a, there is a growth ahead of a for even line. Uh, and, uh, based on the influence, based on how the response has been to the, a relatively crazy sayings, I wouldn't call them crazy, but there may be crazy in line with what we usually do, uh, over the summer.

Uh, and the response has been generally good and both in terms of the anecdotal response, but also in terms of the data. Uh, so I just think we have a lot less conservative people than uh, you might maybe say, yeah, Kim in a game. I this, uh, [inaudible] but, uh, I mean obviously the, the main element that's like eve is designed like a difficulty mountain, which is a set of our game design theory of like you just allow people to go up the difficulty mountain as how as high as he want to. I actually want to call in. Then you just find your knees. So in a way the difficulty mountain is broke and it doesn't go high enough and it doesn't go low enough. So it's about like meat three. Now the difficulty curve in a different way, like reducing it for new players, mid core players and maybe some people also just wanna chill out in.

If I do a lot of that, believe me, like listening to science podcast, mining and high sac and doing planet, they play, uh, protech discovery. I sometimes do that on Sundays when I just, my brain needs a break from life. Uh, so I mean that's also fine, but I do that even though I've been playing it for 16 years, I just still out in high second do mildly idol mining with uh, with science podcasts and protect discovery. I love it. And like finding planets and listen to Neil to Jerry's talk about something at the empire. Um, so, um, due to this sort of difficulty mountain design, it's more about like pulling off like okay, we used to build Mount Everest as a difficult mountain. Uh, that is now a queue of people waiting to get to the top. Kind of that emits is kind of the good image for eem online.

And now we need to mark the lip base on March, which is like, like the biggest mountain in the solar system. Like it just needs to be a lot more challenging and a lot bigger. But it doesn't mean that you're removing all the karate and from the top down to the down to the bottom. So I hope I just like making the difficulty mouth then polar and the garage DMT in the beginning I little a milder, we will get everyone into what we call floats, flow state and in game design where you are kind of in your sort of scale versus challenge, uh, ratio. Uh, and, and, and it's more about that. It's not like raining Kay or something. All of you online. It is about like making parts of IEM Online, extremely challenging. Um, and uh, and then people pick that rim and they live in our risk reward dynamic as a result.

And also to Hillman's point, uh, the stagnation sometimes although just makes people more risk averse than they are in their natural habitat. Uh, by saying things after they see that we are shaking things up. And I mean if players in general are hardcore and I'm sure they will let up to, uh, the chaos as well. And the second point is, uh, we also just seeing the players, players coming back because of these chaotic changes because if players seem to love chaos,

and that's interesting. The, the risk averse thing that you just brought up. I saw a video where if some, if you ask somebody, I'll give you $10. Uh, if you, uh, if I flip the coin and you actually call what it is, heads or tails, um, and if you lose all, take only $1, that people still wouldn't take that bet because it's a onetime event and they feel like it's too risky. But if you say, we'll do it a hundred times, they're totally willing to do that a hundred times because the frequency of, of it means the frequency of it happening a hundred times means they'll get a chance at least to win a few times and that gets them to, to go over that risk aversion. And so I wonder if all this chaos does the same thing in that there's so many people dying that you won't be humiliated or lose really, uh, badly. Uh, because there's just so many things going on. Everybody's losing and therefore it's okay to lose.

Ah, interesting that you bring up this example because what you're describing is the human learning law. Like humans learn the most from failure and if anyone has got an aggregator anywhere in the mullein is mostly through failure. Uh, and uh, if you have a one time air experiment which has a failure state and uh, and there is no follow on, there's nothing to learn. Like you kind of master it and obviously I'm Tom Coin Tarsus, you cannot master. Uh, but still the learning low low of a human isn't sophisticated enough that if we see a puff then we try to learn it even if we know it's random. Uh, so that's why like people would do it if it is, if you offer multiple chances, because extremely instinctually we, we sank. Okay. I will be able to master it through trial and error until I, I do.

And, and if you end up in a interstate with him online where people have mastered the chaos so well that there is no failure state laugh, there's nothing left to learn. And there's even, Elaine is no longer engaging. If you align it through juices, a m, uh, um, a heightened failure state, like making a difficulty mountain polar, there are more ways for people to fail, which are currently only succeeding. And if you're only succeeding to become bored, uh, nobody likes, uh, uh, a wind button, press this button. And when, uh, you, you, you just lose interest in you and you leave. So you need to introduce elements for people too, to be able to fail. Otherwise it, Dontre, and if you're any for not learning, you won't play any computer game or any parcel or anything. Uh, usually all games. It's a, it's a fun math, Dale Mammalian instinct to play, to learn. All mammals operate like that.

And after we, I love, I love the how that works, but it is incredibly interesting that, um, another book that I read not long ago was the, uh, I think it was called the attention merchants by Wu. I think professor from Princeton talking about how, how people work together, our attention and how that's evolved from radio all the way up into the Internet. And one of the things he talks about is a video games in the arcades and how those popped up and that people played this incredibly tough game called, um, space invaders. And the tougher it was, the more quarters they would put into that thing and it ended up making billions, uh, I believe it was billions, but anyway, more than, uh, the films that were being released that summer, like I think jaws or whatever. So it was a blockbuster success and it was incredibly difficult.

[inaudible]

yeah,

yeah. Uh, oh, sorry. If online is closing in on a billion and uh, and getting to a billion, it's gonna involve making it harder for veterans and easier for notes

closing in on a billion. Wow.

Yes. Wow.

Well, just a, it would just leave that there back into gypsum.

Yeah. I mean, just when we were talking about sort of the, um, the state of things in terms of difficulty and when we're talking about the blackout in particular, um, I mean it's, it's pretty evident what Hilmar has seen when you look at activity since the blackout started. I mean, um, but yes, the, the monthly economic report for four July and probably into August as well as going to look very bizarre because there's certain metrics that are going to change drastically, uh, based on player activity. But, um, it's interesting that even when you separate out, uh, sort of the, um, the, uh, daily log and event that we've had around our, uh, around the Clement skill points and then obviously the, the of the stuff in the season of skills as well. Uh, that's just started to deal with the, um, with the, um, the Clayman, uh, NPC boundary skill based stuff.

Um, it's just, it's incredible to see when you separate that out, that the activity is still there. Um, you've, you know, we've seen things like, uh, the s closet from bounties dropped drastically. Um, because people are like, always, I don't want to go in my anomalies if I can't see what's in local. And I'm scared because there's, you know, there's a recon chips out there that aren't gonna appear on d scan. And I don't know whether I'm going to get jumped in my expensive shit, but guess what? Shit's still blowing up. People are still jumping through stargates things are still happening, ships are still dying, things are still being mined, resources are still flowing and it's not the end of the world. Um, the activity is still there. Um, it's just the activity is shifted. Um, and people are moving on to doing different things and they're adapting and they're trying new things.

And if we can share, you can sort of like shake the sandbox up a little bit and get people to try new things and try and, uh, and realize that hey, you know, that risk of [inaudible] necessarily need to prevent you from, from trying out new things in eve. And I think it's a good thing for everyone. It exposes people to different types of game play at x. X exposes people to more risk. Um, and from me, even 13 years in, um, I mean I'm a bit biased as a don't remember of Eve, but that in days under the blackout, I'd say so far it's been like an enormous success. And I'm very happy, we're looking at metrics to see how things have gone. So yeah, it's a, it's, it's, it's produced some very, very interesting results so far and it's, it's nowhere near over so it's going to be interesting to see how it goes.

How long do you think it'll take to stabilize? Based on our current trajectory,

I am turned off or anything just stabilize where the players have their head around what to do.

It's eight, eight, hard to run that emulation based on your 13 days of data. Yeah. A and we're also kind of in summer and, and there's also a lot of other things going on so there won't really just be this one event to deal with. Uh, there will be a lot of things going on. So, um, while you might try to throw some trajectory onto stability based on 13 days, then there's, there's going to be a lot of different things happening in the coming weeks, which are gonna he stabilized the system further so people will have constantly new things to deal with.

Yeah. I mean, you've also got to get a handle on what do you mean by stability? I mean, do you mean, do you, you do you mean CCU? Do you mean stable? Mau? Do you mean activity in the game? In terms of people getting out and doing stuff? It's, it's really, I mean, for the nearly 17 years now, even as always been treading new ground, I mean there's, there's no game that has a similar sort of economy as there's no title out there that has similar sorts of player interactions where everyone's in the same environment utilizing the same resources, you know? Um, so it's, it's, it's kind of unprecedented and we're always treading new ground and we do stuff like this. So it is really difficult to predict things. I mean, you can predict, play a behavior, but you can never predict how things are going to go beyond sort of like, uh, beyond kind of making an educated guess. So it's, um, yeah, for me it's a, it's a very, very interesting social experiment.

Yeah, it's definitely, like you guys were saying that it's hard to figure out what's going to happen. Um, and that you guys in a way kind

of gave up trying to extrapolate all human behavior, but the players of Eve online actually kind of do the same thing. So a lot of the players have been saying, oh, what do you think? What do you think their end result is going to be? A blah, blah, blah. And it's so funny to hear a CSV Falcon say that the metrics are saying that people are still out in space because from the, in my sphere of influence I guess, um, it seemed like a lot of players when the no psych blackout happened and then z hill board turned everything off and then doll and turn everything off. They were like, Oh shit, what did we do? Um, and so they were kind of like looking side to side, looking to their peers to see what their peers were doing. Um, and then eventually they were just like, you don't want to screw it.

Like I don't want to be sitting here in limbo. I'm just going to be the, I'm going to be the guy that goes out and makes that money. And then kind of their peers started saying, oh shit, okay, well he's doing it. I'll do it too. And it does kind of feel like we're entering that stage where people are kind of getting off the pot a little bit and then kind of putting their foot in the deep end just to see what would happen. Um, I guess one of my main questions is I was chatting with CCB Berger who is incredibly fascinating. If you ever go to an eve meet and Susan B Burger is there, I suggest you get them up here and talk to them for a little bit. Um, but he was saying, yeah, what my, my background is in hardware and when you make a mistake in hardware, things completely break and explode. So moving to a software environment, he just eat out at the idea of being able to try new stuff. And he's like, well, the worst case that happens is we get to see like the effects of it. Like nothing fundamentally breaks, nothing explodes. Um, and I was wondering, is that sort of the mindset that you guys have going into this whole chaos era thing?

Ah, yeah. The mindset is definitely just acting more and thinking less. Um, it doesn't mean that we're not going to sink anything through, but it still, it's more valuable, uh, to make a change and um, and track the impact it's having rather than try to go into your sort of Asperger mind and tried to extrapolate all the moving variables, uh, until the cows come home. Um, and uh, and, and that is just a mold of monitoring things. So, um, uh, and I, I'm not really sort of criticizing per se what we have done in the past. It is not like both we were doing before it was all bad and it's nothing like that. It's just, it feels like now's the time for this now is the time for uh, k or Sarah and the K or Xero involves a lot of experimentation. It involves a lot of changes in law, evolves a lot of frequency, much more rapid fire oxygen from CTP. Then you're used to, uh, ideally or something to be changing every week. Uh, some of them are bakes Wathen chain says, uh, some of them will be violently unpopular. Um, some of them will be wildly popular, listic unpopular, a bit popular, uh, behind the scenes. Like it's going to be any Bates way of this, this, and uh, and we have just, um,

uh, well we, we've done little of that in the past years, but now we're going to do more and that's gonna bring about the different state. Uh, but I very strongly believe that is what eve needs right now. Uh, and then we just sort of move through it as we move through it altogether as we have. And we will enter or bully 18 months from now and a in a place which is a much more exciting and dynamic place than, uh, what we were in, uh, at the beginning of the year.

And I mean, we are closely monitoring what this happening. It's not like we're running around turning screws and then run into the next one and just pull up being pliant. These are costs collated the risks that we are watching?

Yeah, I mean, like I, like I said, sort of a, during my slight right at Ron page earlier in the week, um,

I've been of the firm view for a long time that the matter, any, no sec loss like on high seq, just all over the map needs a really, really good chicken. The asks to get things moving again to get people driven into conflict. Um, I feel like people have sort of, you know, they built the castles and they're happy to sit behind the walls, uh, under the protection of a mold and just see if this is my stuff, this is where I'm staying, you know, kind of fuck the rest of you guys like this. This is my empire. Um, and like I want us to be in a position where we can promote conflict. And, uh, the way that I've been looking at it is, I mean, obviously, you know, no one knows everything about each other. There's no one that, uh, that has the, the old CNI.

But when I've been thinking about suggestions of what we could do to shake the box up, I've just been sort of listening to something, thinking about a problem that we have, thinking about a solution, three bullet points that are approved that are pearless three bullet points that are cons. And if the pros outweigh the cons, I'm thinking, Yep, I'm going to float this as an idea and then we'll see what happens. Um, and then, you know, as both Hilmar and good feller have said, like we were looking at things super carefully and everyone's constantly got their eye on metrics. We constantly look at how players are reacting to the changes that are being made. Um, and there's no saying that, you know, we couldn't go back and tweak things if we feel that we pulled the step something or if we feel that we've, you know, impacted the metro in a way that we don't feel as is, is positive in nature.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm hoping that sort of, I'm, I'm in the simple part of your Sylmar I hope is in like 12 to eight months, we've got, uh, an a chaos written, you know, hellscape on lunatics that are, they're all having fun together and blowing shit all up. I mean, it would be wonderful to see eve go back to sort of, you know, the, the 2007 to 2009, he rests. So many games right now are, are focusing on, hey, we're going to release a classic version of our title product and I'm firmly of the view that we don't need an eve classic or an Eve too. We have an incredible, with unbelievable cornerstones, a fantastic community and we just need to make the right set of changes that are going to drive it back into where just to know a golden area of glorious carnage again. And that's all we, that's all we need. We just need a few tweaks a year, a few changes. The, um, and we'll be in a position where he was just kicking ass again and it's at the front page of every new site because you guys are doing crazy fun shit. I'm not see your objective in my eyes at least.

I'd just like to comment a little bit on what Bras, how can and homos pointed out and pointing back to the old days, whether or not people are, especially in CDP, are aware of how the things changed in the unmentionable year. That suddenly it feels as if we shifted from where organizations were actively trying to get more warm hands into their corporations to actually work because the new player had extremely high value because of the resource system. But now because of the new resource system, especially with things like anomalies, you can laterally just extend with, uh, all the counts and multi boxing and the value of the individual player has dropped, right? So now it's the individual new player that has to, uh, try to get into the big organizations instead of the other way around. Back in the day, we used to compete for new players because they had such a high value. And I'm just thinking back when we were struggle, but when the game was really growing because new players had an actual value.

Yes, absolutely. You are in a way, uh, describe in a situation which people are worried about in reality. So is AI and robots gonna take our jobs? Uh, yes, it happened to him online and it happened the way you described it. The work of humans has been devalued against the work of a robots and power tool playing, uh, like you were describing. And this needs to be adjusted such that the work of humans in one line is as a higher value and the work of robots. And that, that's a lot to do with what I was saying before, the difficulty mountain because the best way to, uh, ah, make work for humans is to make a real puzzle solving creativity based social work, uh, rather than, but for robot, this Matano knows protectable, uh, uh, maybe low reward and low risk. But, uh, if you can automate it and you can do it at scale, then you can and it can gain a lot. And even online unfortunately just isn't a place where this balance is off.

Just the small followup because I don't know if people are aware that in many other games out there, there's a lot of attempts to design AI or algorithms around this, but eve is in a very unique position where it's got enough capacity actually pull out a lot of those training wheels when it comes to these things. So again, trusting the simulation because then vaulting and ais, whether it's AI from players in the case of balling, which is illegal, or in the case of a, an algorithm from CCP, these will all be broken potentially, unless they are extremely high and right. But if it's player versus player activity, without any of those training wheels, you can't really gain it. You can't predict which a mooning platform is going to be attack. You can't predict which field is going to be followed. All of these things are unpredictable if it's players doing it.

Yes. A you're absolutely correct. Uh, I have no argument. You're almost a sprouting out the design principles of Everlane, so,

okay.

He's been here awhile.

Yeah. Um,

one of the things I wanted to ask is there was a, again, this whole blackout, uh, I assume as part of the chaos theory, um, is that um, information went away, right? No people in local, but one of the bigger things that were, was more disruptive was actually the effect that turning off the third party calculators, we'll call them websites that give you information about eve online went off as well. And in solidarity with what you were up to, uh, one of the main ones was a.land, but also is he kill board, which shows you how many kills your fleet is doing almost real time. And I heard that that was more disruptive than actually not knowing who was in the same system with you. Does, does that tell you something about the nature of how much information you're giving out, um, that players can use to have advantage when they're fighting?

Yeah, I, I think, um, uh, again, when I said cruel but fair is the, is that rim number two in the hierarchy of needs is that in some ways the, the game is not fair, uh, because some people have made an industry out of the data we provide. Um, and some of the, some people have even closed them off and have their own special sauce, uh, to build protection through sort of, um, it powers a, for lack of a better word, uh, I thought it was amazingly inspiring that uh, the, these sites were playing along with the black gout. I like speaking of the same, so you wouldn't expect, as we were talking about before, I did not expect that. And, uh, I, I have warmed my heart when I, when I saw that sort of spontaneously happen. Uh, and also, uh, it did surprise me how much those sites I play a part in, in, in the op sec environment we have today. Uh, and I think that is something we need to look into. How do we, how do we, um, sort of limits on what they're perfect traceability because there is like if you just think about like warfare in the future, there would always be ways to offer you skate by you're doing, uh, eh, man would come up with ways to be more covert than what these things allow for a, nobody has perfect information like this in any warfare. So there is something that needs to be addressed there too.

Yeah, I mean I would agree it was uh, just just for the record, um, we had no idea that a, that both squares and a will, Ari, we're going to turn off the hotline and a and z kill a is actually came to me I think like 36 hours before we was going to do it. And he was like, by the way, see is going to go offline for like the first weekend. And I'm like, that's super awesome. Like it's really nice, but I'm only on the topic of intelligence tools and how much we expose. I mean, I think the, I think there's a blackout as really, at least for me personally, it's highlighted the fact that guess what, you don't need to have an a, an unquestionable intelligence source. I need to be able to have fun. Um, I mean, I'd love to see us be in the position where, you know, intelligence brokering and intelligence gathering was an actual career and then when you can make money out of it, and it was a, it was a skill set that you could acquire like a diplomat or a fleet commander where you could be an actual intelligence specialists.

I'd love to see a world where there was no local, where you didn't get information on what's to jumps out and you actually had to have people who are specialized in gathered information broker and information broker and intelligence. You know, finding out where a hostile alliance is starting to build up a build up a cup fleet somewhere. Being able to actually also hide your tracks. I mean, this goes back right through the history of modern warfare where you know, where before the allies invaded Europe, they were putting big piles of inflatable tanks and aircraft and fields to try and confuse German intelligence, um, and wants to see it there in the future. There wouldn't be an eve online where were, you know, intelligence gathering was a, was a sport or an actual career where you would fly you're drone into an area or space and find out what's going on.

Or you, we send a probe into an area space and look at a look to see what hostiles are doing before you went in and in via div. I think it could be really, really interested in them then. And I think that, uh, you know, we've, we've proven over the course of the last 30 days that it can, it can kind of throw a little bit of chaos into the mix and the, it can give people a lot of fun to try not to think outside of the box when you know, when the fog of war descends and you've got to, you've got to sort of think about exactly how you're going to approach a situation. Tactically. It's a, it's a really, really refreshing a breath of fresh air. Um, and it's even had me thinking as well. I mean, I, I went out and I started hunting people for the first time in call it six years I think.

Um, I actually did piracy for the first time since I've come to CCP, um, over the course of this blackout. And it's been absolutely incredible. It felt, it felt like all eve again for that there was fleet and few hours and, uh, and it was absolutely incredible. I just enjoyed it. Um, and that's what I love to get back to. I love to see dirty, old rough around the edges. Eve again, where you can, where you can have some fun and you've got these awesome stories or you know, I'm, I'm all follower. Did you ransom anyone? Anyone? I actually run some to 18 people in 13 days. Sign up different Silva. Did you honor your answer? That's what I want to know. Absolutely.

Just when she kill went in the placket, what was the most amazing to me was to see the positive discussion about it online, like players who are really enjoying this new mystery about, uh, locking in and roaming around.

Yeah. I mean to tobacco it was, it was more, it was, it was funny that like, um, it was unintentional but both seek kill and um, on Dotlan turn this around on us where they turned all these services off and then, and then the community was sort of like, CCV, why aren't you guys doing this? Like, why didn't you guys do this? Why didn't you turn everything off along with a local and like really put us in the dark. Um, and there's, I, I love this how there's always the hardcore element of the community who are like, we're like full turn and local off. This is gonna really rustle some jimmies and then there's this group within the community here. Like, no, we want it harder. Really, really make this painful. Like make this hurt. Like I want to be like bleeding from my ears and my eyes when I'm done with this. Yeah. It's, it's, it's awesome to see that, that drive, that the hard core element of our community is still there and that people just, you know, they get kicked in the nuts and they're like, right, I'm standing up, let's do it again. And it's, it's wonderful. It's it, it just gives me hope.

Yeah. But Dan Paul is Paul Politics Saki mentioning like a difficulty mountain. There are people that want to go and climb mount the live bus on Mars. They're tired of Mount Everest and there are people that just want to walk up the hill. Like the, the, the, the element of, of, of eve is that it is some and some extent like, okay, it's not falling off, but it's also too homogenous. Like there isn't like a natural landscape where we can kind of pick your difficulty brain like that. Some people want to bleed from the eyes and ears. Where is that place in eve? And okay, maybe it's in bottom holes, but still we can go even deeper than that.

And I mean, this is the perfect analogy, right? Because like people are, you know, 50 years ago, climate Everest was the peak of the, it was the peak of the pin mountain. But now people die in the queue. We, and to take a Selfie at the summit and it's like, oh, this is what it's become. And I think this is a perfect parallel to what eve has become where 10 years ago it was a bastard to tick and all sovereignty. It was terrible. It was grueling. You had to go through all of this stuff and now you take sovereignty and you can sit down and it's, it's just a fun thing that people have. And there's a supercap umbrella. And once you've got solved and your, you know, you're in a really comfortable position, your, you're doing fine. Um, so yeah, it's become, it's almost become like Everest and now people want to take one step further. And I think, I think tipping the skills a little bit and then messing with people is, as you know, is gone from Everest to, uh, to, you know, climbing Mount Limbus on Mars. I think that's a good analogy.

That first weekend I was one of the people that was surprised that hill board turning off had just as much impact, maybe more as no local I that happened. I felt that as the weekend progressed, but there's another source of Intel that's very powerful that we're not talking about so far. And that is the espionage thing when, when people have ears on your coms and are relaying everything going on in your fleet, uh, when they're relaying your targets, when you have people in their comms telling you exactly how many, uh, they formed up who their backup fc is, who their lodgey anchor is, that takes a lot out of a, uh, fight. Uh, in my opinion. You, you now have to talk to your fleet, assuming they can hear everything you're saying so you can't explain anything to the new Bros as you go. You have to just sort of go bark orders cryptically have them, uh, have them followed, uh, uh, slavishly and then and just try to, um, in your experience, people know what's going on and your newbies are, are lost half the time. Uh, are there any thoughts about making espionage counter play more supported in eve?

Okay. So and so, but they skew or ear, I'm describing a very human condition of trust and uh, and who you fly with and things like that. I think it is hard to build. So the staple system to allow people to organize with perfect trust of other humans that scale. So, um, I think before we start to topple in those kinds of things, we have more sort of fundamental elements in the, in the more basic aspects of it. Uh, but I would love like one of the great thing about the is that we offer people tools to achieve social organization at scale. Uh, like we were talking about last time, uh, it was so well described in the book Sapiens, uh, by Harati where he describes the unique ability of humans to organize at scale. We have insects we can organize at scale but not flexibly.

And we can have all the primates which can organize but knockout scale and humans can flexibly organize that scale. And that is our ability to build memes, religions, control structures, et cetera. And that is in a way where we want to keep him on lines, challenges. And that's to the point we were talking about earlier, that it's an infinity scalable challenge when you're organizing groups of people, all the groups of people. So, so these kind of aspects like you're describing, I, yeah, they're not a priority right now. There's more basic stuff you need to do. But uh, developing some of those aspects of Eve, uh, I I think is a, uh, there is a point in time where we need to get going on those. But for the next, well at least for the remainder of this year, you will be seeing us in this, uh, in the hierarchy of needs.

It's their physical Rayer but says if 64 operational stability and new launcher that index 12 these kinds of technical foundations, it's the cruel but fair, which we have not been talking about for an hour. Then it's the friendship machine, which we talked about in March where even line, how has this amazing ability to generate new friendships than it's esteem, which goes into a lot of these kind of high end elements where in one line it's the hardest game in the world that has the most stories. It has like a, there's a lot of esteem that comes from being an a player. And then this, the self actualization where people transcend themselves and become the best version of themselves grow up to can be better people. I've seen a lot of people go through hotline and come out, uh, the best version of themselves as a result. Um, and I would love to kind of build it up, uh, in a way again, but we need to go to the bottom, like shore up the technical foundation, shore up the with fair the economy, all these elements we have been talking about. Then harness the friendship insane. Then built out the in steam layer, even bore and then a oxidization. And then we probably have got ITTO another circle because a whole decade has passed and now we're setting even on line off for the fourth and fifth packet.

Yeah, I mean it's, um, it's NC and just to think, uh, you know, what's happened over the last sort of 16, 17 years. I mean, I'm, I'm one of those guys almost often around where I started playing Nvidia Julene and, uh, I was quiet as guy in the world. Uh, and now I can get up on stage in front of thousands of people at fun fest and, and Vegas and whatnot on and be out there and actually speaking publicly that would have terrified me. Uh, before we started playing eve. It's entirely changed who I am as a person. But I think, um, we also, when we're talking about, you know, cruel and fair, um, and we're talking about the friendship machine, um, I often fall down on the side of the more hardcore side of game play where I'm like to make everything be horrible and make everything be nasty.

No demoted, death kill, kill. Uh, that generally tends to be my mantra bubble. We also need to understand as well at some of these friendships also don't come from destroying things. They come from building things together. I mean, perfect example of this was a, uh, one, one example that I look to use is ISS back in the day. Um, all they did was when an IP, you one particular, the most incredible network of stations in the early years of eve, there's so many positive things that come out of also, I'm not taking away intelligence tools and making people guess and not making things crazy and chaotic and hard, but giving people the ability to harness the friendships that you've as an a and given the me an ability to build something together. So while we were definitely looking to make more areas of the game challenging and to really challenge our vets as well, we need to, you know, there needs to be caring in other areas of the game as well.

It needs to be out on the PV side of the game, the industrial side of the game too. Um, and I think that everyone agrees that those areas of the game all over the place that have a, that haven't been prioritized for a long time, that, uh, that really need some love. So, yeah, it's um, I think it's, um, it's looking at eve as a whole really and looking at a little bit of a renaissance, uh, across the board. Um, and while I do tend to stick to the hardcore side of the game purely because of the fact that that's what I enjoy in terms of game and this a, there has to be a balance right? There has to be a, there has to be, um, a cycle of destruction, uh, and rejuvenation. Um, and, and those friendships that we're talking about building and that, that layer of the, the hierarchy of needs, that's all about the friendship machine needs to be, it needs to be really strong. And some of that strength comes from collaboration, not just blowing the shit out of each of us or it's a definitely as, as, as a scale a and you've got to look at balance in it really nice.

Yeah. Balance is a, it's a tricky thing. It's actually funny you saying that the like you were looking at certain areas of the game. Uh, I was talking to Rick [inaudible] the other day and he was like, just out of his mind excited because a Hilmar had tweeted something about, oh, I hate workhorse stabs and it just eat them out. It's something that he loved for, or something that he had loved to hate for, like as long as he's played eve and just this one little simple tweet. Uh, and he just, his world is blown up. And then we were talking to another guy in the factional warfare community and he was like, oh, Jamar, join my discord channel. Like, Holy Shit, what do we do? This is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me. And Eve, uh, maybe like this is gonna get some love.

And it's just really funny to hear you have a similar, um, a similar take on that. But what I wanted to jump back to really quick quickly was about the social structures of eve. Um, for the last, I think four years or so, it felt like at least a high end game play of Eve was balanced on what kind of I call the complexity creep. You know, just making, just kind of incentive making ships more powerful or anything just making you need to have more organizational structure in order to grow. And it kind of led to one of these like unofficial axioms called mal canisters law by a player, former CSM. I'll kindness and it's kind of the crux of it is the more complex things get, the more the larger groups have an advantage because they have that like human potential there to deal with that complexity.

Um, and kind of seemed like the knock off effect of the complexity creep, which by all accounts, like if you thought about it as a thought experiment, they would kind of shake things up a lot. It kind of just homogenize the, a lot of the player base and kind of made them all kind of group up together. Um, is there a fear that that swapping from the complexity creep to the chaos creep I guess, and pulling that mountain up higher? Um, is there a fear that that's going to have a similar effect that the players just going to say, Oh shit, the world is falling. I need to get to my closest friends and just stay friends forever. Um, or do you think the, that kind of, that effect was more caused by stagnation than anything else?

Uh, so you actually touched upon a thing which was related to what rape was talking about, uh, with the op sec and the fleet. So the, the, um, um, the more tools to give to players. I went in there trust amongst people away. The more large gauged impersonal groups you can organize and he could call it complexity creep, but it actually is more of a reducing the need for trust creep through tolls. Um, and you can see this in reality as small startup is more engaging and endearing than a huge conglomerate because we've got huge conglomerate relies on control structures and mechanisms and chain of commands and things like that to organize humans that skate. And that becomes very impersonal. And the more tools we give to people to do that, the more you will have this complexity creep you're talking about. So there are ways to force that not to be possible through the environment.

Um, again, we were talking about climbing Mount Everest. Okay. [inaudible] done by two people. Uh, and now it's an half. The price of getting, uh, people with means that are demand the up to the kill to take a selfie. Um, and we can through the environment, uh, make it such that you will have to trust people more because the cost of somebody stopping in the park becomes so high that you naturally, I have to shrink down your trust circle because you really want the people with you that you can really rely on because now you're doing something super dangerous. And if somebody isn't either worthy of their trust because it's not good enough or he is playing for the other side, the devastation is soul horse that you will not take them unless you, I really their friends. And that's why this aspect of the friendship I say now, I was talking about earlier, it's so important we've even made, uh, there's even a formula on how you make a friend that's like proximity to ratio on frequency intensity.

It takes about four hours, 400 hours to make an acquaintance. It takes about 800 hours to make a certain type of friends. It takes a certain amount of intensity. That's why people that go to board together are have accelerated in terms of their friends who exam many backgrounds, described him online to similar effects. So when we get to that moment where we are enhancing the friendship machine, now we're still in the physical and grouped with fair layer. Let's say next up is the friendship machine there we will start to engineer aspects of the way where trust becomes the fundamental currency. It needs to be an eve because what you're describing as this and this effect, I've never heard about a, um, it is just the tip of an iceberg that has to do with the fact if you give people tools to engineer trust away, you will leverage the people that are able to, uh, create complexity structure where they don't need to.

My relationship to host them together. Uh, and uh, and, and we want eve to be the game where you will always win through like an insanely tight knit group that I've really build trust together. They will always stand a chance against larger conglomerate because that is what happens in reality. That's why startups disrupt the status quo. Because our startup, uh, of, of young kids is able to run circles around all the established companies because they have higher amount of trust, faster ability to move and those state disrupt the status quo and my name online does not have these qualities naturally built in. Then you will just enter it with this technician where like people have so much ability to legit defy him personally. There, there, there, there, there mechanisms that you will enter up in this where the stagnation, that's how the stagnation sets in.

Is there any kind of balancing that with um, stranger's playing together that, is there anything like new players that are coming, how hard is it for them to get? Yeah, so obviously now we're talking climbing mountain online, personal march. That's where that needs to be the affair. But now if you will, back to your first year of your online, uh, then obviously we need more ways to, um, to create proximity and duration where people have the ability to meet with strangers in a non tricky way and do something together. And then, hey, say maybe we're always here flying together, but, uh, do you like to do lots of, if, let's take the next step in our relationship exactly. A Sierra secret, which is usually the, the, the, the, the milestone and a Franzia for your c or something, uh, personnel in secret about yourself. Uh, I again, there is an extremely good roadmap on how you make friends.

Um, and, and you want to learn. It's phenomenally good at it because it's a, uh, I mean still cruel but fair even if he need to make it cruel a bit fairer. And the natural instinct in, in such an environment is to bond together with others. Like people bond together, terrain theK  or sort of the environment. So, so the fact the eve is huge Dystopian, you're alone, you're small. The world is and nor most what you do. That's why you reached out to another person more so in Eve than in all the games, which are just seems like you can play them alone. You get a very distinct feeling, the one line that you should not do this alone. Okay. And that is extremely intentional. That's great. Uh, we're joined by aster Arthi who's jumped in late. How are you doing ash?

I'm doing pretty good. This is pretty awesome.

Great. Uh, you wanted to ask question about faction war.

Yeah. So all this talk about the friendship machine is super exciting to me. I think that you are correct. Uh, Eve has a very unique way to make strangers turn into friends. As you described. Uh, often I have observed that faction warfare has been one of those really, really good ways to take a new player who's by themselves, who doesn't really know what to do and give them a low pressure way to get into things like pvp and more risky pve that allows them to then get sucked up by one of the corpse within the militia to go from an individual to a more organized group. So I've always seen fashion warfare as being like a really important aspect, a to e for, for various reasons. And yet recently in a tweet, you suggested that you would be spinning it down. Uh, how does all of, how does faction warfare relate to the friendship machine and, and are there plans?

Uh, I think I suggested that he verse in a tweet. Uh,

did I misunderstand it then?

Uh, you'll probably debt probably my communication skills and my English is my second language. Uh, in any case there, there is no, uh, plans to spin it down. I think it is, I think it does serve a purpose like you're saying. I think it has always. Um, even before we had fractional warfare, we had these kinds of role play events. That's where it's kind of organized, um, by community volunteers, which are kind of the manual version of factional warfare at some point in ancient times. Um, is that it became like this sort of, for lack of a better word, gateway drug into the, into the whole madness of, of, of the player politics. So, um, and, and there there's a lot of people inside TCP which are passionate about, uh, doing some, uh, fixes to factional warfare. And now that I've joined the factional warfare days, court become famous and read some of the improvement lists. Um, I, I think there is a slew of things which are, are not that complicated to slot in with everything else. And I think it does fit our focus of cleaning up the first 30 days because I say at the end of your 30 days you are probably ready for in worker sort of by day 20. You might be a candidate for that. Someone I've written.

I agree. And that makes me very excited. Thank you.

Yeah. All right. Um, let's actually talk about the state,

their new Eden. Now we've been talking about it this whole time, but I wanted to bring up a, if you haven't seen the previous a Hilmar interview with Falcon, uh, that happened in March, check it out on talking and stations.com. And where are we were, uh, when we left it, you said that you were working on some things and that was the 30 day cleanup, which is basically making the first 30 days of Eve online for a new player, something that needs to be cleaned up and made easier and more confined so that they have better retention rates. And, uh, and then there was also a major technical foundational work that you were doing. And then there was also addressing some of the economical issues in the game right now. So I'd like to take those three things and go back to them and see what's changed since then. So the first part is cleaning up the first 30 days. Uh, do you have anything to say about that?

Uh, yeah. So, um, uh, uh, I think the, the biggest mall for cleaning off the first 30 days was the new agency. We released an innovation, uh, well that is probably more your a seven plus 30 days rather than your minus two plus seven days, uh, which is probably where we need the, the most amount of cleanup. Um, that was our pretty good staff. I think the new agency is a really good, uh, tool to discover content, uh, in Eve I think the ATC and the activity tracker or some of the best sort of road maps of what to do in Eve, uh, where it is, which is quite complicated to figure out when you come into the game. Uh, for the first time, uh, we also did some changes to the new player experience, which actually weren't as successful as the new AT&T. Uh, what we're now focusing on is that the, according toward data, uh, there are more people dropping off in Catia creation and, and the steps leading up to that, which then we thought there were even some errors in our town lump on demand configuration.

So people were experiencing some, uh, uh, defects in the very early minutes. Uh, if you're on a slow connection. So there's been a lot of cleanup like that. There's been a lot of journey improvement in signups and other things, like I said earlier in the podcast, then, uh, we have about 16,000 people per week that, uh, lock into it for their first time. And these are people that have gone through all the funnel and download and then caught into the cut out the creator state. We have about 800 people per day that drop out just during characterization. And if you go through the journey, there's a lot of bad UX in that journey. A confusing part on layout, um, false decision making. Like we're having you read about space ships, uh, when you're picking a race, when Eamonn line, I mean it doesn't matter what race you are, you can fly any space.

If he was like reality, Germans can drive Toyota cars and Japanese can drive BMWs. So why I probably confused you by making false decisions. Um, so, so there's a lot of these sort of a booby traps throughout the earlier experience, which may be were fine a decade ago when life was different and the, and all that. But they just aren't fine today. People have very low tolerance is for UX in the world today. No matter if they're a carceral or hardcore, uh, you can see people trying about bad UX in, in, in all types of games. Uh, and you've just asked a lot of, of those cleanups you need to do. Uh, we have made some progress, but we will continue that. It is the, by far the biggest priority we're working on. And that's just by virtue of the fact. Um, I, I use the word 16,000 per week, but to give you a sense, last year we got 600,000 people to look into it for the first time.

Uh, and uh, we lose 90% of them in the first seven days. And we have generally sort of taken the stance that, yeah, those are not worthy for Eve online. Even online is a hardcore game. The, these are people are not hardcore enough. Uh, but we have just started it and it's not the case. Uh, we have tried to various versions of the MP and it just matters a lot. Uh, uh, certain types of new player experiences retain a lot better and those become productive, productive citizens of new Eden. Uh, so, uh, there's going to be a big, continue to be a bit pushed on that front, on catering off the first 30 days. So, uh, the progress so far has been on these, uh, uh, there's been a lot more user testing done to identify where do we need to improve the most. It's been a lot more telemetric added into the journey.

There have been some short fixes and linter fixes added in. We have added sort of fundamental changes like the new ATMC, um, an hour. Hopefully at some point we'll be able to marry the agency on the activity tracker to just make the law much clearer to people how, what is the early sort of treadmill you're on? It's quite difficult and need to find the sort of early treadmill years of go on, uh, in the game. And uh, and we owe it to the 600,000 people that tried to be members of the friendship machine seen last year to just do a better job on, on introducing that in non obscured ways. They will do fine after that. They will join Fox in old warfare, uh, uh, brave new new piece fleet or something and, and then move on. But we just have to shore up that experience a lot. And there is the massive potential for ease in doing that. The wheel we have to turn there is massive. We can easily get a million people per year into eve and retain half of them.

And just so we see so many people playing eve again and again and again like the show. Many people really wants to play eve and we somehow to stop malice to show them the wonders of new Eden.

Yeah. I often take John Smedley who used to run Sony Online. He tried 11 times to play him online and finally he got it and he became like a pretty hardcore player. Came to fanfest two times and God knows what uh, and but it took him 11 times over the period of eight years just to figure it out, what to do and that guy, that guy makes games for a living and memos for a living. That's fine. I tense, soften it down. Test a little bit in the beginning.

This is why I constantly think that there's something wrong with me. Like I'm a masochist or something cause I logged in for the first time and got hooked. Hey, this is just for me, I worry about my mental state sometimes.

Yeah. But Paul, when you did it, it was so simpler. It was, yeah. It was like cool shit. Yeah. It was so easy. Like when I was playing eve back in the early days, it was that simple. The UAA was like one 10th of where it is now. The, the complexity sprawling Martinez we have today. It was a kid's game compared to what we have.

Yeah. It was remarkably a lot more brutal, but it was, it was a lot more simple as well. So you could, you could handle a harshness because there wasn't so many choices that you had to make. It was, you know, on the meadow was a lot more simple. So yeah, it really has come a long way and it's, it's just trying to try to adapt to those differences and the new challenges that we have now. It's me and her.

It also seems like one of the things that you're wrestling with is the reputation that eve has now in addition to the game mechanics itself. It has a reputation that if, and I'm sure players kind of make this worse by saying, if you're not doing null sec, you're not doing anything. Like they discount all the other ways of gameplay that are a little more, I should say, shallower water. They say you need to get into the deep end right away. So I wonder if that pressure makes it hard.

So I, I actually think Eve's reputation is amazing and it's a massive strength to the game. Um, I mean we who live on these all day long, we have a certain impression of the a reputation, but the reputation is super like positive. It's just like the actual early, early experience leaves a lot to be desired. So the people come in with the impression based on the reputation, but then their map with just a lot of confusing, uh, uh, thanks. Which we need to fix off. And by doing that, I think, uh, it's on the reputation that people like Simon are able to pull in 600,000 people to lock into the game. It's just based on Elaine is legendary. It's like the most game ever made. And everyone needs to try it at some point in their life or it's just not the proper gamer. Uh, we just like all those hordes of people that are coming in. We just need to embrace them and less, more, again, life harder for veterans, easier for new players, not the rivers. Like

try it 11 times, she'll get hooked.

I told Time. Uh, you know, that's something that was told to me recently. There was an article of the drifter article when the drifters invaded recently PC Gamer, put that article out. I think it got three times the amount of interest at any other article had that month.

Yeah, exactly. People love reading about the online as they would love playing it as much as reading about it. If we could make a product out of reading about it. Yeah. We try, we try it novels and, okay. They were pretty good, but it's, it's, I like this.

I love those. And the optical on Kotaku about the a year long undercover plot to blow up even lines, most notorious space station to read this title has like 400,000 threats.

Wow. Yeah. It's, it's massive. It's huge. It just needs to be a little better in the first 30 days.

First 30 days. Okay. Anything else on the first 30 days? Guys?

Somebody had a question

on the topic of the agency. Uh, the agency itself actually spun out of the agency events, which were originally pretty wildly popular, but by last February were more controversial. Um, at the same time, the agency drugs are frequently used by, uh, base runners and others as a means of allowing themselves to push things even further. We haven't gotten any agency events since February and the summer of skills seems to be a replacement for those kinds of events. Is there any plan to get back to something closer to what we had and if not, what is the future of those drugs?

Yeah, I, I think there is something in law in factional warfare and in new fleet roams and didn't see sons overall with a all gamers. By now there's no, what are, uh, everyone expects seasons. Um, so I, I think there is something in this sort of Trifecta we need to organize better and make better use of, um, and, uh, we have actually been doing a lot of experiments in the close Beta in China where we maybe we actually have a lot more freedom. There's to do crazy things, um, because it's a closed Beta and it's going to be wiped. And we have actually learned a lot about like, uh, what really drives engagement in these kinds of way minds and uh, uh, and I'm hoping we can leverage some of that, uh, those ticks into, uh, bringing some of this park in, in force. Awesome.

So the second part of, uh, some of the things that you were working on was the technological foundations of Eve online. What's happened there?

Okay. Yeah. So in March then we had just finished, uh, well patching up the test system, uh, which has held up pretty good, obviously led to the blackout. Uh, and, uh, the new launch term, uh, and eve 64 was a big project. Uh, and that has been going amazingly well. The team has done amazing work. The fact that we rolled it out as an optional add on, uh, was, uh, engineers in my opinion and that allowed it what kind of Shimmer in the, in the natural way where we could, uh, just allow people that want it to be brave, go in and, and all those things. Um, uh, we are about to roll that out to everyone, but, uh, uh, there's still some snacks we found out. And again, just to poll the thing with the Z ops and I'll roll out of it, I hope to do more of that, uh, on that front in the, in the future.

Uh, then we're continuing to work on the [inaudible] 12 client. Uh, we have a internal worsened sort of operation of, uh, but it's going to take the remainder of the year to, um, uh, to sort of clean out all the stuff that can be cleaned out once we have just made that 12 tactics towards the baseline. And then of course, reaping all the benefits from them. And the benefits are massive. Uh, uh, that there's 12 is super powerful and there's a lot of different things we can do with that, but that will probably take well into next year of bring all of that about and hopefully we'll can do that in an optional rollout that we did with the a 64 bit client. Uh, then we're doing a lot of sort of back end infrastructure improvements. Uh, we've been doing massive change this to the competition and Eve called Dogma a, it's actually its own sort of process t Touro programmatic engine.

We've simplified that a lot, which, uh, allows us to do some more interesting things and hopefully bring four months, uh, even more performance through that. Uh, we're doing some experiments on the networking site. Uh, potentially. Yeah, upgrading the protocol transport player underneath the game massively, uh, with a would be a game changer to a fleet fights and all the things, uh, that is an extremely sort of a speculative project. It could be also, Murray could just not work out a, but it's something we were posting on a lender are grading oral compilers to a visual studio 219, uh, which is a massive project that you've called basis, like millions, tens of millions of lines. So like doing upgrades like that, there's a massive amount of upgrading all the middleware, doing all the compiles to upgrading all the linking infrastructure that they have, a environment and all those things, uh, that hopefully brings, uh, maybe a tiny bit of improvements, performance improvement and definitely cleaned softer life of developers quite a bit.

Gives them better tools to develop faster. So it's been a lot going on on, on the, on the tech front, and that is kind of the bottom rim of the Yves hierarchy of needs. And now we believe we're sort of mostly out of the woods there. We don't need to as much focus as we named it earlier, part of the year. So now we're in the cruel but fair tier. It's just this is a lot to do with the nol out with the drifters, with a is faucets and sinks. They are out of whack. The, there's way too much ice. K in the system. Velocity of money is not high enough. There's a lot of Phantom Atallah economy problems which we're going to be addressing. Uh, so I expect a lot of changes on that front coming out, um, that you to actually normalize. It's, it's usually good to look at the plex process because the, the plex prices if the, if it's actually, um, people are are often saying like the plex places of rising.

It's actually, but it's happening. It's currency devaluation of ice, k a n I s k is the, is that representative of the value of any one lane. And that actually means when the eye is k two plexis falling. Um, then working in one lane is not valuable enough and that goes a lot into the biting issues. But we were taken about like risk reward Amanex and OSA. So we need to post so that this gets more valuable and that's kind of a health indicator of the overall economy and it's out of whack and ugly. Uh, we both have just done overall out of whack issue. And then we have like a teeny coefficient issue. Some people are too rich, the richest 1%, the name online is way too wealthy and way too powerful, too vastly out of market's worse than reality. And the reality is pretty bad.

Um, and that goes into this sort of, as I say, the [inaudible] fair, a tier of the hierarchy of needs. So, uh, the, the focus has shifted from the attack infrastructure, which is now I would say on rails and into this. So the later six months will be a lot about the, uh, about the economy. Uh, then once you're on there, hopefully we can act to enhancing the friendship and scene that then goes into these elements of Fox in old warfare, new fleet fined 38 TMC, social discovery tools and those kinds of things. So there's a lot going on as like a t. Yeah, that's fascinating though. The explanation of, um, the plex prices actually reflect on the ESC value. Oh. Rather than the other way around. Yes, it is exactly like that. It's plex that is accurate. Like plexus, the anchor is liquid gold. In reality it is. I use K, which is volatize. It's the, the plex prices are not tinted. It's the ink getting BYU and it's getting devalued because it's too easy to come by. Especially for some people that then evaluate against the plex. They want the plaques because they have so much [inaudible] of course it's so easy to come by. This is the of the problem.

Yeah. And then the people that have a harder time getting his cow how to time buying plex because of the increase of plex, because of the ease of access over ACEC. So like this is like a vicious circle. Yes. Used to be broken. So how are you going to break it?

Uh, it is, uh, taken away the comfort of people that have an easy time of getting ice k either through, uh, uh, actual security sense of security or they're, there's not playing the game because they're having robots do it.

Did the darkness or the blackout effect 'em daughters. Do you, can you talk about that?

Yeah. It affected boaters massively. Okay. They were quick to recover though. But, uh, you definitely saw a, an impact models coming. Um, uh, it's a huge problem. Uh, and it's kind of get, uh, moved on and uh, their life is going to be very uncomfortable.

They ain't seen nothing yet.

One of the things that I, that I noticed was, um, when the blackout here without warning, I'm actually a 48 hour warning, maybe, maybe a little longer than that cause you said you were going to do it, then you gave a 48 hour warning and then it hit. But it was relatively quick that it really paralyzed a lot of the income generating models. Um, that had happened before. Not everybody was paralyzed in their raw oracle usage players will know what I'm talking about. Um, but they did stop using excavators because they were easy to kill. And uh, that meant that the radicals were actually mining a great deal less so. The income generation at least was nerf dramatically.

I don't feel that it paralyzed anything. People allowed it to paralyze them out of fear of not wanting to take the risk of being out in space when they didn't know what was around them and they have less facial awareness. Um, I mean this is something that we spoke about. Um, Atlanta internally. I mean we sort of sat down and were like, what effect is this going to have? Um, and it was no surprise to see people, um, kind of turtle up and see I'm not going to go out in space. Uh, then we saw exactly what Elise said, uh, earlier what he touched on where we have, um, people who, you know, the, the first brave few souls who are risk adverse, take the step and this staff go out and they start hitting NPCs again. The Stop Mine and again, and then the friends see them doing it.

And slowly things started to open up. More people start to take the risk and get out in space. I mean, it's, it's just one of those things where, you know, when you get pushed outside of your comfort zone, I mean, you go, some people are terrified of heights, right? But you strap them to someone in tandem and you say, okay, we're going to go and jump out of an airplane. And they see that it's not that terrify. And after they get used to it a little bit, you know, they're modern, like it's more than likely they'll go for round two if you ask them. You know what I mean? Um, it's, it's very, um, it's just pushing people outside of their comfort zone, redefining their comfort, um, and then allowing them to play the game in a different way because of realized that, you know, things aren't so big and Bartow in there when they don't have the spatial awareness that they used to have. Um, and we've seen that in metrics or it's, yeah, it's a very, it's an interesting lesson in psychology, but it's, it's one that the, um, the, the metrics and the data proved to be very, very true.

I had to at least his point also, and I'm Paul, sir, if you're not willing to go out, guess what? There's a principle other people ready to go out.

And if you're not willing to go out in the Nosek and actually take a risk, then you don't belong in old sac, you should move back to empire and you should mind an empire because if you're not willing to be at risk when you're out in a lawless area or space, you don't belong there. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. It's as simple as that.

Yeah, it's a, it's super tricky. I'm sure it's even trickier for you guys because you have these people who are a huge group group of players that are used to making these obscene amounts of money. It relatively obscene amounts of money and you know, I think everyone's always played a game where they've been the overpowered guy and then they've been nerves and that feeling just, it just sours you for for weeks and weeks and you're like, ah, screw these guys. They don't know what they're doing. They're breaking the game. Are you expecting that sort of like visceral reaction to calm or is it as I'd like come in past already.

We've already seen that, right? I mean it's, it's already come. It's a, we had immediately when we announced this seven days before the blackout happened, we announced that it was going to happen soon and we, we saw that knee jerk reaction where people panicked and they said, I'm quitting. I'm unsubscribing my 50 accounts. Like I'm never going to do this again. I've never been to play your game again. CCP. Um, and, and then we saw things stabilize immediately after that. We saw obviously, you know, you get a downturn and activity because people are sort of, uh, really, really scared to go out when they don't have the special awareness. They used to have exactly what you said earlier is slowly people want to, it's slowly people get, they are just a comfort zone and they realize that hey, it's uh, it's not as frightening as people make it out to be. I'm worried about nothing. Um, and I can actually get out there and I can still make money. It just means that this potentially the risk that, uh, that I'm going to end up with a net loss. That I do something silly or I get too complacent.

It is a, it does actually feel like a, I know we were saying, or even when we're saying like, we don't need any classic, right. We can just iterate on, on Eve that exists. But it does feel like a, this add an element of chaos. The blackout, it does kind of remind you if you've played the game for a very long time of the earlier days in Eve online. And I don't know if it's true for everyone or if it's just me, but I've had, you know, dozens and dozens of people that have quit eve online, um, over the last five or 10 years. And they're coming back saying, hey, like I'm playing for the weekend. This is really fun. Like, let's go on roams, let's do this. And it does seem like the, the blackout has caused a trickle on effect of a lot of older returning. And that's something you guys are seeing? Or is that just me being an old man with like 10 years of steam friends lists?

No, uh, we definitely [inaudible]. Um, and I, and I think it's often interesting with this eve, with this classic thing. Um, I always ask people, what are you looking for in the classic? Are you looking for like death row graphics? Are you looking for Old UX? Are you're looking for nostalgia, you're looking for a sense of exploration and wonder, are you looking for something pertained terrace? And usually people don't really know. Are there one of the your power for all of the above? Uh, so I, I have not been a big fan of making an eve classic, uh, like some MMOs have done. Uh, because I think what needs to happen to, to for eve is good for everyone. I don't think we have this sort of um, traditionalist group that just wants it like this. I, I frankly think you've looked at some of the MMOs which have gone the classic route.

They, they en have it very bifurcated, a RDM segment in them. And I think that is a bit of a cough bout from building an ecosystem that can allow for all of these things to coexist. So in a bit of the sort of single shared mantra, it is more just a about like designing the difficulty multi sites that you can find your rim, where you, where you want to exist. And when you're talking about eve players that have left and are now coming back, they are a comic. They did leave because they had just climbed Mount Everest 20 times. Why would you go there 21 times? It's just like what's new. You've done it, uh, the normal route, the north face without oxygen, uh, without pants like what's left to do. Uh, and uh, and now we just kind of art did a little mountain on top of a mountain. It's not quite that Manto live posts yet, but hopefully it will become there and thus people are excited to come back because they past that sense of challenge, sense of uncertainty, sense of mastery in terms of learning, growing, failing, succeeding, uh, which we are. We're kind of, uh, at the, at the final status of losing, um, because the, the, the, the stability, what's, how high it was turning into the purple donut that I know call it. Apparently,

yeah, I mean it's, um, it's exactly what you, what you're seeing then. And then what's been said earlier when we've been discussing like what are you really is a, I mean, it's great for further Raymond moles to come out with. So if the, the classic and the Red Roll versions, but uh, I mean for me they'll only have a view on eve. For me that's the way that I see it. It single shot. It's persistent. That's the way that it runs. Um, but it's um, yeah, I mean you can, you can find different levels of comfort, right? You can find, uh, you can find different levels of difficulty and you can find different levels of, of, of whatever type of game play that you want and eve just by visiting different areas of space. I mean, there are so many games within a game. When you play Eve, I mean, you can dive into pve, you can dive into Pvp, you can dive into a doing punishing direction.

You can just school complete the industrialist route. You can go the complete diplomat route. You don't even need to indoctrinate aliens in the gamma. And it's um, yeah, it's, it's, it's one of those beautiful things where if we keep adding, we keep tweaking, we keep playing around with this. Um, and in, in a sense sometimes looking backwards and seeing what worked in the past. Um, you can always find a place to, to create eve classic for all those people who want it without even having to launch a new VM or a new server or a new version of the game, you've constantly adapts. Um, and I think it's always going to ebb and flow and go through these states of change where things sort of like quiet and down and stagnate and build again. Then, I mean, we see this year on, yeah, we see the build up in the window.

Then the, you know, then the, the, the little dream in the summer. Then they build a begin and anyone who's a CEO and evil know that it's an absolute nightmare. Even a corporation of an alliance active over the course of the summer. That's just the way that it is. I used to dread it every year for 10 years when I ran my own corporation. Because you would run into this brick wall, it like sort of the end of me where it's like, bye guys, I'm off on vacation. You would find that fleet commanders, directors, that kind of stuff would go after care. So I think it's, it's just a matter of looking at the evidence full of eve and then looking at what we can do to, uh, to make sure that it constantly stays vibrant. Um, and I think a lot of the changes that are coming open, a lot of what we've been doing, all the sort of the last few weeks a of have spurred a lot of old vets to come and back.

I mean, I've seen probably 30 or 40 people, uh, personally that I know who have said home, fuck me, no local and they'll sack, I'm going to come back and sort of poke the bear a little bit and have some fun and see if I can rack up a few kills. Then people log in after 10 years away and they're like, what the hell happened to my megatron and why can't I fly it anymore? So it's a, it's, it's super interesting, you know, and it's, and welcoming those vets back with open arms is a, it's definitely a good thing.

I have a little bit of a followup to that because one of the things we saw during the blackout was that suddenly CQO decided to take off their service and make it completely black out. Right. And this ties into one of the things about classical II that someone seem to have forgotten. It's how much perfect knowledge destroys the game. Back in the day we used to scrape the mockups or suddenly you could have universal information and eventually CCP opened it up with the ESI. So we had a very controversial discussion. What would happen if CCP actually decided to delay the ESI so you could not actually have access to perfect universal knowledge of the market or the kills because suddenly you have to then put real warm hands back into the game. Someone needs to be in the regents. Actressy the market. Someone needs to actually be on great to see the pills being made.

Yeah, I mean from a, from my point of view, um, I, I think the top of the API is great and having all these third party tools is fantastic and the creativity of the community is absolutely awesome and design and so many awesome, you know, what happened to kitchens for disseminating this information and making it feel a little butch. I definitely fail in, this is not as credit to, you know, the guys who work on the API or uh, all the guys who make the third party tools in the community. But I, I'm putting my hardcore hat on again. I feel like we spoonfeed too much information. We give out too much intelligence. I think people should have to work for it. It should be a career in game and it should be something that as a player you are skilled at doing. You are a skilled intelligence gathered, you know, you know what matters to an FC.

You as a scout, you know what information people want to give out. And I can remember sort of back in or six or seven or eight years when having a, you know, you'd be even just rolling through law sec with a 20 man gang, you are relying on a scout, saw that and a tail scout as well behind you to make sure that you weren't going to get caught with your pants down and you weren't going to sit on your own balls because you jumped into another fleet and you've got your assets under two, you and, and, and back then it was, uh, it was an incredibly fun thing to, to act as a scout. I can remember doing it many, many times for a corporation and it was so much fun. And Yeah, I do think, uh, I do think it's a, it's a contributing factor to that safety umbrella and it's a contributing factor to why so many people are of sort of, uh, and doing the whole Middlesex get rich quick thing, uh, because they just have so much CFT and most instances where we're going to live in a no can be safer than high tech if you're in the right area.

So, yeah, I mean, I definitely think that a lot of intelligence system should go where

and just, uh, like I said before with the sequel blackout, all the discussion on line about how some players, at least we're loving it. At the very least. There's something interesting there to look into further.

Right? Another thing that comes up because we're talking about the massive Maldistribution of wealth. Some people being super, super rich compared to, um, most players or other players. Uh, it seems like the, the risk has been heightened. The, uh, the chaos is, uh, trying to destabilize the easy money basically that I think, um, fucking was just alluding to. What about assets safety? That seems like a huge, huge change. Huge, huge. A possibility.

I've been very direct around this. I completely kill it for 100%. It would go away and it would never be a thing ever again. Um, I believe if you put something in space, you work for the, you, um, you put it down and you put it at risk, it should be at risk of destroyed. Um, from my point of view, I would, uh, I would have asset safety, like exactly the same as if you destroy your ship massively and Yada, and what drops out of it drops out of it. What the loose ferry gives you, she gives you and what you don't get out of it, you don't get out of it. Just that's the way that I would work at. Um, and I know a lot of people disagree with that. A lot. Know a lot of people think it's too harsh, especially when you've got the, you know, in a 80 billion risk, uh, an 80 billion s KeepStar and then potentially trillions of it's worth the stuff inside of it. But you roll the dice when you live in [inaudible]. That's the way that it is and that's exactly how I'd want the game to be.

Okay. So play, so players who day, it's actually at, just to kind of build on that, uh, he, the, the fact we have an MPC stations with [inaudible] amount of storage space is that designed cop out, uh, from the beginning. Like we, we had extraordinarily elaborate designs in place, which we had three pounds because of database performance to limit how much you could store on NBC stations and there was going to be Aki, there was going to be like a free slot then. I Dunno, I remember I wrote like acres of coat in the market service so that you couldn't use the market as a cheating storage by just keeping everything in your Arthur's fake storage space. So, so this fog that you have, uh, well starting with NBC stations and there's the amount of free storage space and now with our seat safety and set of towels where you can just have a billion tight that's in your state of Delaware, there's no, we all keep, there's nothing where, where are they all like it just doesn't make any physical sense.

Even, uh, it is something we need to tackle. It's not the way, uh, that game was meant to be, uh, to, to allow you to accumulate so many things there. There's a lot of elements, like for example, with the tie times, which don't really fully function. It's like two half sets, massive happened, so forth. You need fuel to, to power them. Like the Germans lost because they, they're out of fuel. Like they had massive times, but no fjord like the, the, the fact you can just sit these things around. It's just, it's not natural and it's not how to be, whether it is going as extreme as quickly as poly saying just ripping it out immediately. Um, uh, uh, maybe that's not the approach, but something needs to be done. Uh, this is not natural. It causes a lot of, uh, a misaligned, uh, behavior to what, if soupy.

Will it make it harder to encourage all players to come back to the game? Cause they'll have to start all over from scratch.

Uh, it will definitely make some things harder. Like nothing is without a tradeoff, but when you are faced with a tough choice and you don't know which way to go, you have to have some principles to guide you. And, uh, and this is just not how the world works. It's not how eve was meant to work. Nothing is perfectly safe anywhere. It's just not the thing. Uh, it's, it never has been a thing. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a law of the universe. Um, whatever, whatever believe you hold, nothing is permanent. It's just what it is. Except assets, safety and MPC station to anyone. Line is permanent. It's the only permanent thing. Uh, we know Lethemon money and Icelandic backs, they safe there is that, let's say if only you could take your real money and put it in NPC station and we'd be honest.

Exactly. Huh? No, there is a business model, common story or assets and even lion that stay forever. Sure. When all the work you're doing with blockchain are looking at blockchain as models and stuff. Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's something there. We're onto something. We certainly have a better operating record than Icelandic banks for example. Right. And you have goes to enforce things if need be. Indeed. Indeed we have coast. So there's a, there is something though. The, um, you've been looking at every time I talk to you, I'm just fascinated with the stuff that you're looking at and one of the things is blockchain and how they organize themselves and you were thinking at some point, not anytime soon, but you would take some of those principles and relate them to the marketplace of you online and give it more complexity. Uh, yes. Uh, so I love tracking plot and I've been doing it for a decade and uh, my hobby is going to blockchain game conferences.

There you find some of the best economic thinking in all of the game industry because the constraint of the blockchain is so high. There's so little you can use it for that people come with sets a lab, but it's theories and people have built such amazing technology, like the lightning network for Beta coin and the all side changed solutions for theory and all that. It's fascinating to see the economic prowers that are brought to bear to try to make this useful for something. And it's current and it's kind of a forum because, just to give you a sense like the Dau, if you want to, it's more than all of blockchain combined. Like a, if you look at the Da, you on ethereum and, and, and, and Bitcoin, e Marlena is higher daily active usage than, than all blocked in industry combined. Um, and it's mainly just because if you were to put something like him online, on, on, on a block, gender or two male isn't enough power in the universe to power that.

Uh, but because of those constraints, they have to CSL their thinking so sharply and really boil it down to the essential. Uh, I find some of those chat-based economic thinkers, uh, are, are gaming blocked in conferences, which is an actual nice, and they, and they have many of them. And, and I love going there and just being inspired. A lot of them had raf friends in my, as the first blockchain game that didn't use a blockchain. I've never been to one. Yeah. Everyone wants to build som version of Eve online. Uh, uh, and, and that's, that, that's the extent of their, uh, imagination like sort of creativity, Tilly and, but they're, uh, extent of their implementation powers are immense because the constraints are so high. You have to be so precise in what you do. Yeah. One of the things that attracted me eve online was how complex the economy could get at.

It felt like that was a whole half of the game. The other part was the vampiric pvp. Yeah. One last question. Uh, this is the last question and then we'll wrap up. There was an article that came out and I think it was polygon where you talked about some of the technology underpinnings of Eve online and how if in the future, and this is an if you needed to migrate all of eve players onto new technology that you could do it in some way through story. And, and I hope this is accurate and that means like maybe some kind of voyage that, uh, like new Eden was created by a pilgrimage from our current solar system. And W it might look like, for instance, a second pilgrimage out of new Eden. On into a new space, uh, and that transition in the Lauren and the game would actually be underpinned by changes in technology.

Does that sound accurate? Uh, yeah, it sounds very accurate. It's totally something I would say at least. So, uh, um, so, uh, I mean, you, you, you are watching us now doing experiments, for example, with uh, uh, ether wars on the hiding an engine, uh, which is, uh, a kind of a research spike in what is a very different way to do a space game in the, in the modern era. And you're also seeing us do something like an empty cell touch space. We actually have changed the comment Anchel like flight dynamics. We've done a lot of experimentation on Mathrani. Uh, and I hope that we will do more of these kinds of spikes into different directions. Uh, and I would encourage everyone to join the next beat in the ether of our story, which is happening around Gamescom. Um, yeah, we've kind of taken ether worse into the abyss.

You kind of see it when you watch the trailer. Uh, and it's a, it's going summer out of that. I hope we learn something about like what is a way to address some of the fundamental issues in Yves fleet fights, um, has to do with fact that the competition is mostly one dimensional. Um, when you, when you look at it, the reason why people block off us they too into two balls is because that is the mathematical solution to the underlying fundamentals of the physics and Aviv. As soon you have introduce elements like line of sight, an orientation of spaceships, you'll not truly create formations, flax, uh, and, and all those sort of systems of large scale warfare where not only the naturally happening, we don't have to game design it, but also there they're immediately comprehensible to other humans. You understand why the pick ships are in front of the small ships.

You understand why protecting the flank is an issue because those ships can turn very quickly and they're weak on the left side and not the right side. And to do this and are currently six engine, uh, would be major surgery and probably not even worth it. But doing this in a youth gym is quite doable. And then you've fundamentally changed the, the potential of warfare, not only from a lack perspective and things like that, but also from pack dicks and, and uh, and then this just becomes so much more engaging than the current one. The mission of system, which is mostly a function of this done and fall off and, and just like we have to play with a attached gate. Um, so, um, learn ones who have done that and okay, how do we introduce that into the world where you cannot just completely re all the muscle memory away from people.

People have trained do fleet fights for 16 years. It's not like just turning off local. It's a little more fundamental than that. It's embedded into your nervous system. Then you have to make a migrating pattern over to this new, uh, technology platform. And then it's not the heart [inaudible] Martin two to make. Okay. If people are able to migrate the new Ethan in the first place, why can't they migrate somewhere else? Whether the Varoma holds that open door. When that opened up again, maybe there were other people from earth that have another way because another, uh, Vermel has open because timeline on earth, the Terrence are still there. They're up to something, maybe another or a model has opened and that that led to somewhere else. Um, so there are just so many dynamics to how you could throw this out once we have executed all that.

And that's one of the things we're now allowing ourselves is just to take these like insanely long leading projects like this either war thing which will lead somewhere. We're not entirely sure why or if it's going to work out. And that's why recruiting the players to join us along for the journey once where a piece to gather all these things, shore up some of the fundamentals for fixing this years and eve itself, then you can imagine a much more exciting world, very you where you have these kind of mostly dimensional versions of the game kind of coexisting in one social economy.

Yup. That's um, it's super exciting stuff. And, uh, just got to do the, the daddy community Guy Plug for either was actually, cause I was, uh, I was super surprised at how many people signed up the first time around for the first test. And it, it won't my, my dead heart to see so many easy flares embrace it and really want to be compatible. Um, so for everyone who's, uh, who's going to be listening, um, you should definitely sign up for phase two. Um, it's happening on the 18th of August at, uh, 800 ADT or 1700 UBC, 1800 pst. Um, and you need to sign up for it so you can in Gorda, alien.com/e visa laws, um, and just sign up with your email address that you use for eve online so you verify an email address. Um, and yeah, come and be part of it because while it's something that's still in the super early sort of exploratory phases, it's very exciting. Um, and it could do a lot for the future stability in the future. Uh, so future technological advancement of eve. So something that's very, very exciting for us.

This is for the future of, and like the, the, it's still [inaudible] but it's, the build is looking super cool also. Like it's, it's, it's amazing what the guys are doing

also the EMS for 10,000 players and a single fight and just seeing what if we get more than a 6,142, I think it is. Then we'll break a Guinness world record again and who doesn't want to be part of that?

Yup. Breaking our own world record or your once record. Well that's something we'll look forward to. Thank you guys very much for this uh, exciting two hours of conversation, uh, totally blown away by some of the stuff that I heard today. It's um, uh, it's always surprising that even after playing this game for more than a decade and nonstop, that it's a, there's still things to learn. Okay. So I want to say, um, thank you to uh, Hilmar for joining us with CCP Falcon NCCP Goodfella. Thank you guys very much. And Astro, Cathy, Caleb, Carneros and Elise. Thanks guys for being here with me and also want to thank McCloud for putting the engineering together. That's all that we have time for this time. So we will see you next time on talking in stations.

[inaudible].