Iceland-based CCP Games (World of Darkness), creators of sci-fi MMORPG EVE Online, announced that they're appointing Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson to the role of in-world economist for EVE, making them the first to commission a real-world pro to work in-world on such a level.

Dr. Guðmundsson will publish quarterly reports on the state of the EVE Online economy, coordinate research initiatives with academic institutions, and perform ongoing analysis of economic indicators like inflation, economic growth and price trends. Not only is his research intended to inform players' strategic decisions, but it's geared to impact EVE Online's future development. His research is designed to provide players with information necessary to make strategic decisions, but is also expected to have an impact on future development of the game.

"EVE Online may be set in the future, but the skills needed to play are rooted in the real world of today," said Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. "Players operate vast corporations whose shares are traded in-game among players so economic strength and agility is key to their success. Just as entrepreneurs and executives rely on real-world economic indicators, EVE Online players need timely information and analysis of the in-game economy."

Dr. Guðmundsson's already gotten started exploring the EVE Online world and getting to know the community, and he's started a blog on the site to share more info about his background and continue integrating with the locals. No word yet on how to pronounce his name, though!

[Via MPOGD.com]

The UK's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, set for August 12-14, 2007 at the Royal College of Physicians, is focused on "expanding the creative culture of games." To that end, they're planning keynotes, debates, panel sessions and cross media industry discussions to examine gaming's impact on consumers and entertainment companies as well as traditional media.

Recently, the Festival's lineup has been expanded to include virtual worlds, with EVE Online creator Hilmar Petersson and Linden Lab's Jim Purbick joining the discussions. Purbick will participate in a 'Developing for Second Life' strand of panels on the 14th, while Petersson will head up ‘Exploring EVE Online’ on the 13th, and will also contribute to the ‘Virtual Societies’ discussion on the 14th.

In his welcome statement on the Festival's homepage, Chairman Chris Deering said, "For our delegates, partners and speakers, Edinburgh offers one thing in particular above all other industry events - a unique networking opportunity for those who are truly passionate about games. It also offers a stimulating and challenging two days of conference, debate and discussion that brings together people from all tiers of the worldwide games and interactive industries."

[Via MCV]

At this year's Edinburgh Interactive Festival, EVE Online CCP Hilmar Petursson gave a session all about the future of his space-age MMO. According to an article in GamesDigest, EVE's growth has been slow, but steady -- currently at 200,000 players, it aims to reach 300,000 in the next couple of years. Those are not ambitious numbers in terms of userbase size or rate of growth -- consider worlds like BarbieGirls or Nicktropolis that garnered millions in months, and EVE's been running for four years now.

But Petursson's vision for EVE is a world of content heavily dependent on a strong community -- Petursson wants to keep everyone in the same play world, or "shard," as opposed to most other MMOs that separates users into different areas, or onto separate servers, not necessarily allowing them to regularly share the same experience. It makes sense that slower and more gradual development would be key to achieving this strategy, especially as hardware standards advance and EVE players can anticipate a new DirectX graphical update this year.

Still, Petursson continues dreaming big, with the hopes of EVE “being the first game with more players than the population of the developer’s home country." This might be somewhat of a challenge, as EVE enjoys a particularly "hardcore" gamer audience. According to GamesDigest, 95% of EVE in-worlders are men, and very few of them are in the "sweet spot" under-18 audience that helps 'tween-targeted worlds flourish so quickly.

How to attract a broader userbase, then? Well, for one thing, avatars in EVE aren't people; they're space ships. Given the popularity of avatar personalization, clothing and other human-like peripherals particularly among the young female audiences that flock in droves to worlds based on fashion dolls, pets or home design, it's a little bit easier to see why EVE's demographic is still a little more limited than Petursson would like.

With that in mind, Petursson unveiled a new development at the EIF, giving an early look at character avatars to be introduced next year. Petursson hopes that allowing EVE users to personify people instead of merely hardware will attract a wider audience and create a deeper experience, adding a human element to the economics-heavy world (EVE even hired its own economist to work with the extensive in-world transaction system).

With the ever-present specter of the MMO's traditionally short lifecycle starting to breathe down EVE's neck after four active years, it looks like Petursson is focusing on keeping the upward climb going! Complete coverage of Peterssun's comments at EIF can be found at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.

[Via GamesDigest]

A new article in MIT Technology review discusses the benefits and challenges of "sharding," the process by which large userbases in online worlds are distributed across smaller copies of the world to evenly distribute server load and prevent overcrowding. This process means that users of the same virtual world aren't always able to play together -- something not all companies feel is the best situation for their users.

One such company is CCP, who strives to keep its entire userbase integrated in EVE Online. CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson told MIT Technology review that, given EVE's sci-fi futuristic setting, keeping everyone together has additional significance. "When you watch a typical sci-fi movie, you have the sense that you're watching a small part of a larger world," he said, adding that a single-shard environment also makes for more cultural diversity within the game, creating a more precise simulation of a large-scale economy. EVE Online in particular has prized a realistic in-world economy, even hiring a real-world economist to manage EVE's transactions this year. Now, according to the article, up to 400 of EVE's 200,000 users can do battle together in a single location; contrast this with World of Warcraft, whose 9 million users max out at 40-on-40 brawls.

It hasn't been easy for CCP to accomplish this; it recently announced it will shift its clusters to IBM blade servers in search of more storage density. CCP has deployed a cluster of more than 420 CPU cores housed in IBM System x and BladeCenter servers to position it for further rapid growth; EVE Online launched in 2003 and has seen that 200,000 user growth only in the period since then. IBM has said CCP's supercomputing cluster manages more than 150 million daily database transactions, and Petursson tells MIT Technology Review that he hopes the company's new supercomputing clusters will add enough capacity for 70,000 concurrent users.

MIT Technology Review elaborates further on this trend of shard-aversion:

But the problem of avoiding shards isn't specific to EVE Online. Wu-chang Feng, an associate professor of computer science at Portland State University, says, "I would say it's something most MMOs will go to, if they can." The challenge, he believes, is to create an elegant experience for users at the front end while constructing and managing servers on the back end that can keep up with the pressure of large numbers of players online at once. Other companies working on the problem include IBM, which works with EVE Online and other MMOs; Australian game developer BigWorld Technology; and Linden Lab, makers of Second Life.

IBM global technical lead for games and interactive entertainment George Dolbier chimes in:

To scale up to support millions of concurrent users, MMOs will need to make use of the technologies behind Visa's database, or those that support the NASDAQ stock market. NASDAQ, he says, can actually be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of "players" performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard.

Dolbier says that it's not a one-way street: other industries could learn from the technology that's being developed for MMOs. For example, he says, a common problem for game companies is how to recognize and manage "hot spots": small areas that suddenly attract large numbers of players, such as a battleground. To keep the game running smoothly, the servers need to detect movement toward the hot spot and react in real time, rezoning the area of activity so that more servers are responsible for supporting it. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, Dolbier says, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."

[Via MIT Technology Review]

Chinese online game developer CDC Games announced that the company has joined with CCP Games (EVE Online), Ons On Soft (Shine) Sonokong (Shaiya) T3 Entertainment, developers of Audition, and Wemade (Mir II) in founding the Online Game Alliance Against Piracy (OGAAP) to fight the piracy of online games in China.

The goals of OGAAP are to establish a platform for industry participants and stakeholders to exchange ideas and share experiences; conduct market and technology research; propose industry-wide policies and practices; and lobby relevant government bodies and lawmakers to enact anti-piracy legislation.

The alliance will also actively promote public awareness of copyrighted online game usage, educate online game players about copyrighted content and vigorously pursue the continued shutdown of pirated online games as well as the arrest and conviction of their operators.

Piracy has been a major issue for the Chinese gaming market, encompassing activities like operators running private servers, and macro programs that imitate popular online games.

CDC says OPTIC Communications, which is now one of its business units, has helped the Chinese government convict two operators of "piracy for profit" of one of their online fantasy games, Mir II. These two landmark cases both resulted in criminal convictions versus private server operators; one received a three-year prison sentence, and the other paid a fine of $67,000 and was sentenced to six years.

In the latter case, the operator was running an illegal macro program that allowed players to purchase online game merchandise, such as special powers and weapons. With over 20 million users currently registered as players of Mir II, the revenue impact was "substantial," CDC says, before the illegal operation was shut down.

OGAAP is to be a non-profit organization headquartered in Beijing, and says it's already in discussions with several of China's governmental organizations that oversee the games industry to seek their support for the initiative.

"At CDC Games, we have long recognized the potential severity of illicit piracy activities, and have achieved success in individual campaigns against piracy," said Peter Yip, CEO of CDC Games. "The formation of OGAAP is a milestone achievement for the online game industry and will seek to leverage the combined power, experience and efforts of many key industry players."

He continued: "Like other segments in the entertainment industry, we have experienced an increase in piracy, especially with some of our more popular online games. Our primary objective is to reduce, and if possible, eliminate these piracy challenges so our industry can continue its vibrant growth throughout China. This alliance and the recent successful convictions of illegal operators are major steps in achieving our objectives."

It's a tough call when trying to determine which MMO games are relevant to the virtual worlds space, but EVE Online is definitely one of those. PC gaming-focused Rock, Paper, Shotgun agrees, and in an in-depth interview with senior developer Nathan 'Oveur' Richardsson, veteran game journalist Jim Rossignol says, "It’s the one online game that is actually a ‘virtual world’ in any sense, and I feel as if every single player has left a mark on it in some way. Just like real life, we all have something to add, no matter how inconceivably microscopic that contribution might be."

To get the idea, you need only hear it from Richardsson's mouth, as he explains some very virtual world-y elements of EVE:

"It’s about creating a stronger foundation for the role-playing and social elements of EVE and to embrace the emergent gameplay. Okay, sorry for the buzzword soup! In more human terms, EVE is built upon social networks and we wanted to create a setting where that could be taken even further. It’s hugely player-driven, where all establishments are owned by players, including corporate offices for meeting, planning and recruiting, plus we hope to have venues like bars for karaoke or gambling. We then want to see what patterns emerge, what one really uses the in-station tools, props, scriptable NPCs, rooms and establishments for. Then we go with the flow. There is no combat there though, that happens outside the stations."

To that end, Richardsson also comments on past allegations of corruption in the game's administration:

"We’ve always considered ourselves more as janitors than gods and feel that the power should be in the hands of the players to create empires, nations even. This is another (big) step towards realization of that vision and we sincerely hope it evolves into something great.

In a virtual society like EVE, there will always be differences of opinions, allegations of abuse of power (real or perceived) and an outcry for change. It’s a bit of a slippery slope in that while it validates the legitimacy of an online game’s value as a virtual society, it also presents us with some very real issues that have to be addressed."

[Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

CCP has announced an upcoming expansion of its EVE Online MMO. Titled 'Trinity', it will incorporate a new graphics engine, CCP's efforts to angle EVE for a market leadership position as its competition also ramps up; just one day previously, Entropia Universe also announced a graphical update.

The new graphics engine uses Shader Model 3.0 technology, and the visual changes include remodeled and retextured ships, stations and stargates. Also new with the upgrade are environmental effects, such as shadows and nebula-based lighting models, tying graphical assets into the different solar systems of EVE Online.

In addition to the graphical tune-up, the Trinity expansion also adds a variety of new content and gameplay modification, including advancements in combat tactics and battlefield management, additional capabilities for the pilot experience and multiple new Tech II class ships. Other combat add-ons include heat damage attenuation and repair while in space, improved drone management capabilities, and the ability to deploy bombs mid-flight along forward trajectories, among others. EVE has also added content for its PvE gameplay, including new kill missions and the re-introduction of mining missions.

“CCP has been on a continuous quest to offer cutting-edge virtual world experiences to engage the most advanced users on the Internet,” said Halldor Guðjónsson, chief technology officer of CCP. “With the launch of our next-generation graphics engine and gameplay improvements, we aim not only to enhance the in-world experience of our dedicated EVE players, but also to capture the interest of new gamers. While EVE Online has been arguably one of the most visually appealing MMOGs, the quality of the images enabled by our advanced graphics engine sets a precedent for visuals that blurs the line between a computer game and a movie.”

In an official statement on the EVE Online website,CCP chief of operations Jón Hörðdal explained that a database anomoly indicative of a potential exploit recently caused both the EVE Online game servers and its website to be temporarily brought down.

Explained Hörðdal, "What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation."

Hörðdal said that the taskforce concluded that going completely dark so that an exhaustive scan could be performed was the best course of action. "While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to protect the players," he said.

"Our taskforce quickly found the security breach and prevented that from being used," added Hörðdal. "We can also confirm that no personal details such as users’ credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident."

According to the website, EVE's servers were brought back online at 22:00 GMT, and the EVE team will continue to monitor the situation in the coming week. Said Hörðdal "We of course understand the effect and disruption this has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of the problem."

Crime in virtual worlds is ever an emerging topic, and an interesting article in the UK List talked to some key players in persistent worlds, including EVE Online's Hilmar Pétursson and Linden Lab's Marcel Kay about the fine line they're now having to tread between policing user behavior and protecting its virtual society and economy. When a user breaks the rules -- counterfeiting items, buying black-market goods or gold -- it's a clear-cut case, but what if user crime is committed within the concept of the world's rules?

In the article, Pétursson told the List about how EVE handled that gray area:

Space piracy is an intrinsic part of Eve Online. But a recent coup and a series of high level assassinations by the Guiding Hand Social Club rocked the world of Eve, with literally billions of in game credits changing hands or being destroyed. Several users petitioned for CCP to effectively hit ‘reset’, but they stuck by their guns. "It was a simple decision but not necessarily an easy one as there were hundreds of people hurt by this action," says Pétursson. "By not doing anything, in this case, it opened people’s eyes to the fact they were really living in a virtual world where anything could happen and it’s left up to the citizens of that world to deal with the negatives and positives."

Interesting story -- crime and economic disruptions, along with the idea of financial power in the hands of a few, are concepts that are part of the real world, so it follows that they will happen in virtual spaces too, as they evolve. It begs the question -- are virtual worlds a game, where companies should preserve their userbase's fun factor at the expense of realism? Or do people want them to behave like a lifelike society?

[Via The List]

Speaking as part of an in-depth report on EVE Online's Fanfest held in Reykjavik, Iceland, CCP executive Hilmar Pétursson has been discussing how the complex economy and new elected 'Council of Stellar Management' bring structure (and therefore focus) to the PC space trading MMO.

When discussing why the EVE Online community, which has grown steadily to over 200,000 active subscribers, is so invested in the game, Pétursson suggested:

"I would say what ties it all together is the economy. The economy of the game is very much controlled by the players. All prices are decided on the market, CCP doesn't set a price on it... And then the game very much focuses on [the fact] that you're always at risk in terms of all the players attacking you or taking something away from you. So that creates very interesting interactions between war and the economy."

Though the economy in EVE Online is much more complex and modeled than many other MMOs, Pétursson suggests this leads to a more interesting and competitive game:

"War and economy is something that has created a lot of events in human history. That is essentially what we maybe have put in place to drive the storyline. But then, the players have used those systems to create something much more spectacular than we could ever have envisioned in the beginning. So I would say, the economy is the tool to create this."

Interestingly, Pétursson also discussed how to easily garner feedback from the increasingly large player base of the game, revealing that the company is adding an officially elected council to exchange feedback between CCP and the community:

"For soliciting community feedback, we have used various methods throughout the four years. And we're trying to evolve those as our world has evolved. You use different methods for a community of 50,000 players than you do for a community of 200,000 players. Especially when all those players live in the same world. It's different when you have sharded worlds down to smaller shards, and you just have more shards. And you have to tackle the community of each shard. Then you can use the same method, but scale it up.

But when the community fundamentally grows as it has in our case, then you have to adapt and evolve your method of soliciting community feedback. And we're now, at this Fanfest, introducing a new idea which we call the Council of Stellar Management which involves allowing the community to elect representatives for a council. And we'll do this through voting. So this council will then be a venue for exchange between the community and CCP so that it is a more meaningful discussion than us talking in a non-structured way with 200,000 people which... um, achieves very little in its current form."

You can now read the full report on the subject at Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra, including full coverage of the Fanfest itself, as well as more comments from the CCP CEO on the state of the game and technical and design plans for the future.

Dr. EyjoG says the QEN "is intended to help inform pilots in EVE about the status of the economy and to make it easier for others to understand the level of complexity in the EVE universe."

He adds, "In fact, with more than 200,000 players, the economic system of EVE is becoming so vast and complex that it is possible for the virtual world of EVE and the real world to learn from each other."

This issue of the QEN covers three key areas this time around: demographics, which covers population, skill points and security status; the macroeconomics of EVE Online, which focuses on the monetary supply, and price levels, including measurement of inflation/deflation in the EVE world.

Some interesting findings in the report: it claims 195,000 accounts, representing 433,000 characters, or 2.2 characters per account. It also estimates EVE will reach 200,000 by mid-Q4 2007 and will be well into 210,000 by Q1 2008. 40 percent of characters are female, and 60 percent are male -- although EVE's player base was pegged at about 95 percent real-world males in early-to-mid 2007, and the character demographics don't indicate whether this has changed. This gender divide was believed to be one of the key reasons driving EVE's decision to add human-form avatars, as opposed to just ships, in an effort to appeal to both sexes. (*)

Says Dr. EyjoG, "CCP was among the first companies in the world to offer a single-shard solution, placing it at the forefront of computer game technology. With this first Quarterly Economic Newsletter, CCP is once again a leader in gaming innovation by offering an unprecedented level of detailed universe information that players can use to enhance their online experience."

[*CORRECTION: The article originally confused in-game character demographics with real-world user demographics.]

Iceland-based CCP has announced that its massive "Trinity" graphical upgrade to EVE Online will be available as a free download on December 5th, 2007. Along with the announcement, the company also revealed that 200,000 users now subscribe to the EVE universe, which features a player-run economy and a single-shard server.

CCP explains it has developed a new graphics engine, and in this first showcase, all ships, stations and stargates have been reconstructed to appear more realistic through the use of advanced lighting techniques.

Said Hilmar Petursson, CCP CEO, “EVE Online players always inspire and amaze everyone at CCP, and it is invigorating to see our subscription numbers surpass 200,000 as we prepare for the Trinity release. We’re pleased that advances in graphics technology allow us to present the world of EVE Online as we had always envisioned it. We look forward to sharing the Trinity edition with the fast-growing, dedicated community that shares our passion to remove the barriers that constrain virtual worlds from meeting their full potential.”

EVE Online's recently-announced Trinity upgrade seems not to have gotten off to a smooth start. True to its usual form of being transparent with its players about technical issues, EVE parent CCP Games released a statement explaining what happened:

Trinity was released for download at 22:00 GMT on Tuesday, December 5. Shortly after the deployment of the update, CCP became aware of an issue involving the Premium graphics content download whereby a small percentage of our users may have been affected and now need to make repairs to system files. We immediately set to work to identify the cause and resolve it. A new build is now available and is safe for all users to download and install. Users who are running Microsoft Windows versions other than Vista, with multiple hard drives (or multiple partitions on any hard drive) and began downloading the Premium graphics content before 04:00 GMT on Wednesday, December 6, should visit this link and follow the instructions given to correct any potential system issues.

Speak to any EVE community member and they'll tell you that this sort of communication from CCP is highly appreciated, and adds value to their experience. Earlier this year, EVE's game servers went down for a bit because of a security breach, and at the time CCP went into full-disclosure mode, also.

Uptime is always the priority, and of course it's preferable that a program doesn't damage the operating system on which it runs. Resolving issues quickly is key -- and letting users, who have lots of time (and often, lots of money) invested in that world, know what's going on is another essential component.

CCP has announced that its EVE Online MMO will be made available through Valve's content delivery platform, Steam. Concurrent with the launch, EVE Online will offer a 21-day free trial period for all Steam users, with a discount for those who join.

EVE Online, set in a futuristic space world, recently claimed some 200,000 players, all of them residing on the same single-shard server system. Its most recent update introduced significant graphical upgrades.

Valve business development director Jason Holtman says that EVE is the first MMO to become available through steam. "The team at CCP continues to expand EVE's universe and gameplay for the legions logging in to play each month, just as we continue to expand Steam's consumer and developer features," he said.

CCP VP of sales Magnus Bergsson commented, "We are immensely excited and honored that EVE Online will be the first MMO on Steam. Steam has been the leading online distribution platform for a long time and home to some of the most dedicated gamers around, so we couldn´t think of a better fit for EVE Online."

EVE Online will elect a governing body through an in-world democratic process, called the Council of Stellar Management. Nine representatives and five alternates were elected by popular vote from EVE's player base, which CCP says has reached about 225,000.

The next step is a two-week long election period beginning May 5th and ending May 19th. Each elected council member will serve a six-month term, during which they will discuss issues important to the community and liase with the game's operators at CCP on the future evolution of the world.

Said CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson, "EVE Online has evolved from an MMORPG to a virtual world with a virtual society. It is our role as its caretakers to evolve our approach as well, through economics research, political science or other aspects of operations or development. A democratic election process of representatives is one of mankind's greatest inventions. We are bringing a version of that to EVE now with hope of it allowing us to expand EVE Online in a similar way to what we've seen on Earth."

It's a fascinating move -- with one foot in MMO community management tactics and the other in the social replication attempted in non-gaming virtual worlds, it stands to be a move that benefits not only EVE players, but the game's operators, who will get feedback from community-elected representatives. It's also a furtherance of the viability of online communities -- if an online game can elect a council to deal with matters of gameplay and economics, perhaps virtual worlds can develop complex democracies for self-governance.

Following reports of its Eve Online client source code appearing on torrent tracking sites, developer CCP has put out a statement to calm information privacy worries, asserting that access to the source code should not impose any security risks to players or the game.

"CCP is aware that an individual claims to have access to the source code of the EVE client. This access is not a security risk to CCP in any way," CCP told Slashdot.

Though the science fiction-themed MMORPG records customers' billing information, the "server-side interface" is safeguarded so that it never transmits personal or abusive data.

CCP added, "Nothing the EVE client can do can affect the game state, no advantage can be gained by manipulating the EVE client, no advantageous or disadvantageous information can be transmitted to other EVE users by altering the EVE client," added the company.

CCP declined to comment on how the source code could have been made available to the public.

Reykjavík, Iceland-based developer CCP has announced the election results for MMORPG EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management, a democratically-elected committee of nine delegates chosen by EVE Online players to represent their interests and exchange ideas for the game's evolution with its developer.

Players voted for the Council of Stellar Management's candidates over a two-week voting period ending on May 16th. Dozens of EVE Online players campaigned for the honor with slogans, dedicated web sites, and specific platforms.

The elected councilors will travel from their homes in the United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands and Denmark to Iceland in June for its first face-to-face summit with CCP representatives at the developer's corporate headquarters. They will discuss EVE-related issues on behalf of the player community, offering suggestions for the game's direction.

Said CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson: "Since the earliest days of EVE's development, we have relied heavily on collaboration with our playerbase regarding world issues. CCP has followed and nurtured what governing and organizational structures emerge within EVE and also brought best practices from the real world into the virtual world."

He continued: "The formation of the Council of Stellar Management signifies to us that EVE has extended beyond the parameters of being 'just a game' into something more meaningful. As this first group of councilors works with us over the course of the next six months, we look forward to seeing how our combined efforts can further expand the potential for virtual worlds to entertain, educate, and inspire."

Reykjavik, Iceland-based MMOG developer CCP has announced Empyrean Age, an EVE Online expansion promising new content and features, available for free to subscribers starting June 10.

The expansion's announcement comes at the heels of EVE Online's fifth anniversary since it first launched and the recently announced formation of the Council of Stellar Management, a democratically-elected committee of nine delegates chosen by EVE Online players to represent their interests and exchange ideas for the game's evolution with its developer.

EVE Online: Empyrean Age will introduce a faction ranking system, new militias, and a dynamic new structure of system occupancy to the sci-fi MMO. The summer expansion will also debut a new region in space, "Black Rise."

The expansion incorporates elements of fiction introduced in a novel by the same name by author Tony Gonzales. Scheduled to release on June 19th, the novel covers New Eden's transition from a somewhat harmonious setting to a world of broken alliances on the bring of war.

Space trading and combat-based PC MMO EVE Online has just passed its fifth anniversary, with that rarest of things for an online subscription game, year on year growth - with 220,000 active subscribers as of the end of 2007.

The game's Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson joined developer CCP in 2004 when they were "were just about 30 people in Reykjavik" – the studio now has 350 people, with additional offices in Atlanta and Shanghai, and 50 more people expected to be added by the end of 2008.

In this wide-ranging interview with Worlds In Motion, Richardsson looks at EVE's progress to date, gameplay comparisons with starkly different market leader World Of Warcraft, the lack of female players in the game, and much more.

What is it that makes EVE Online specifically different from your average MMO?

Nathan Richardsson: We believe that EVE has some fundamental foundations that differentiate it from other games. First and foremost is the single-shard world where everyone is part of the same universe. This enables a player-driven economy because we achieve the world scale required to make it effective.

In turn, the economy is the foundation for all interaction -- well, mostly for conflict -- but let’s call it interaction. You need players to gather and defend resources, to process them and manufacture ships and weapons out of them which are in high demand on the market since it’s so costly to defend the resources.

With such a large world, very large player organizations can flourish -- EVE has as many as 3,000 pilots in some organizations working towards common goals against other organizations of the same scale.

There's an intense political atmosphere and social networks are an important part of the game -- EVE is free-form, you set your own goals and it’s “class”-less too.

As economists struggle to come up with answers to the mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, developer CCP's lead economist Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson oversees a very different, yet surprisingly complex, kind of financial market: the persistent, single-server online world of spacefaring MMO EVE Online.

"By 2008, the market has become completely player-driven, and that's where I came in," says Guðmundsson during an Edinburgh International Festival session. "The whole economic structure has become so complex, the data so vast, that a specialist was needed."

He has 15 years of non-virtual experience in his field, and holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island. When hired last year, he described himself as "a sort of Alan Greenspan for...EVE Online," referring to the United States' former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Players, designers, and CCP executives alike benefit from real economic analysis of the in-game world, he argues.

After all, Gudmundsson says, EVE is a "pure capitalist" market -- its economy is emergent, not constrained to a fixed state like those of most MMO games. It was not always that way.

Massively multiplayer online developer CCP is considering leaving its home country of Iceland, due to the growing economic crisis which has hit the small island country hard.

One of the first global economics to feel the full effects of the global financial crisis, Iceland’s banking sector is left with debts that have risen to as much as $14 billion - 10 times the country’s GDP.

All three of the country’s major banks have had to be nationalized, with inflation now at 17 percent and unemployment in double digits.

As reported by British newspaper The Guardian, restrictions on access to foreign currency have proven disastrous for EVE Online developer CCP, which also runs offices in Atlanta and Shanghai.

Sci-fi themed massively multiplayer online game EVE Online has 300,000 subscribers worldwide –- as much as the actual population of Iceland.

"To make new games, we need foreign investors," said CCP’s Eyjolfur Gudmundsson. "The present currency restrictions are putting us in a straitjacket. We are in talks with the government, but if we can't let capital in, we might be compelled to leave Iceland, even though this would be against our wishes."

CCP's PC online space trading/combat game EVE Online has reached a milestone, reporting a record peak of 45,186 concurrent users on its single-shard server.

"It is truly a testament to our loyal fans that 5 years into EVE's existence we are still breaking records and more people are flying in New Eden than ever before," said the company, announcing the record via EVE's official blog.

EVE Online, which launched in 2003, exceeded 240,000 active subscribers earlier in 2008 as it celebrated its fifth anniversary with year-over-year gains in its userbase.

The game now features a player-driven democratic society via its elected Council of Stellar Management, and an elaborate in-game economy watched over by former real-world economist Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmundsson.

In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Gudmundsson said the EVE's single-shard server is essential to the nature of the game, likening it to a "nation state, with all the institutions that come along with that."

[The preceding article by Leigh Alexander also appeared on Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra.]

CCP has announced the launch date of the tenth expansion for its MMOG Eve Online. Eve Online: Apocrypha is to be "the most ambitious EVE expansion in the game’s over five year history" and is to coincide with the March 10th release of Eve Online as a boxed product in partnership with Atari.

Though this probably won't make a whole lot of sense to any players who aren't already very familiar with Eve Online's lore, the plot of Apocrypha is that " vast, unpredictable wormholes" have opened in the universe, and players who choose to explore them can find new technology within which will allow them to produce new "Tech 3 modular ships" with heightened customizability.

In addition, NPCs will be able to assign "Epic Mission Arcs" to players, which are "full of meaningful stories and more intelligent and deadly adversaries," possibly offering more to the kinds of players who like a more "scripted" MMOG experience rather than the vast and (daunting!) player versus player possibilities traditionally offered by the game.

Finally, for players who find the whole thing daunting anyway, they are also offering an entirely new "New Player Experience" for players joining the game.

“Just this past week we broke our concurrent user record with 45,186 people flying unbound in the same game world at the same time—a huge percentage of our quarter of a million current subscribers and a true testament to EVE in our sixth year of operation,” said EVE Online Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson. “Today is an unprecedented time to start playing, as you can get ahead of the curve before Apocrypha releases in stores and our hard work hits the server cluster. It’ll be easier than ever to get ‘lost in the wormhole’ that is EVE with what we have planned for the future of our expanding universe.”