"EVE is more like a city than it is a game. If you are doing urban planning in a city, getting feedback from the inhabitants is important."
-Hilmar Viegar Petursson shares how CCP keeps EVE Online's 'residents' involved in the game's development.
In an insightful interview with Develop Online, CCP CEO Hilmar Viegar Petursson explains exactly how vital open channels of community communication have been to the ongoing development of EVE Online.
One way the developer keeps those channels open is by likening the game development process to city planning. With any live game, implementing changes often risks removing something used regularly by some players or altering the game in a way they may not like.
Petursson says that the 'city planning' approach and other communication efforts like community events and in-game elected community representatives help the developer team stay in touch with the general thoughts of the game's hundreds of thousands of players.
“EVE is more like a city than it is a game. If you are doing urban planning in a city, getting feedback from the inhabitants is important. You might have to bulldoze away some houses to make a highway, or you might have a garbage collection problem, and it’s impossible to know all this. We have no way of knowing all the things in EVE Online that the hundreds and thousands of people who live there every day do. They have way more information about it," he explains."So factoring in all the information about the game, their input on where the game needs improvement, putting those two things together is what the EVE team does every year.”
The full interview over on Develop Online touches on this idea a little more, in addition to offering a look at how EVE Online's first 300 player meetup eventually grew to two worldwide events.