EVE Faction Warfare a Success, Certificates and Industrial Update Next

By Paul Munn | August 28, 2008

With the Empyrean Age expansion deployed to the world of EVE the developer reports that a new wave of players have jumped into low-requirements PVP in a big way. This has spurred a number of gamers in Empire space (0.5 and up) to give faction warfare a try — something the Drone Bay guys recommend you do with an alt instead of your main character since you can only be part of one corp at a time and the faction army is considered a corp. The resulting carnage has also energized the market for Tech-1 ships and modules to replace those lost in the conflict, and it also has driven an increase in mission running using PVE content. All of these things have been noticed by CCP and will see upgrades within the next 9 months or so.

Empyrean age will get tweaked with a 1.1 release and then 1.2 will launch a large number of new PVE missions and add in certificates. Following that will be a December expansion currently internally nicknamed Midas that will focus completely on the industrial and research side of the game. Certificates are an interesting extra layer on the skill point system designed to make corporate recruiting and identification much easier. Certificates will have multiple grades and will give new players a role to reach towards. For example, a tackler certificate — tackling is immobilizing your enemy and preventing them from fleeing so others in your fleet can more easily attack them — would be granted when the player earns a certian set of skills. The idea is that the certificates will be publicly shareable so that a prospective corporate employee can show a corporate recruiter they have the skills the recruiter wants.

For all the details, check out the video at mmorpg.com. Seen on Massively.

One other interview over at mmorpg.com talks about their Walking In Stations upgrade that has no firm time frame. The amount of work they’re trying to do — getting different architectures designed for each race — sounds like overkill to me. Why not go with a 1.0 which would involve clicking on a map and having separate 2d chat rooms, game rooms, vendors, whatever to interact with and if it takes off go 3d later. I think there’s a strong case for doing more than just ship maintenance and shopping on the wider market in stations today, but going straight to 3d without knowing how popular it might be sounds awfully risky.