EVE Online’s latest dev blog has a few teases and backpats in store for denizens of the biggest sci-fi sandbox MMORPG in town. CCP Games is touting the success of the game’s latest new player experience, which has apparently led to a “30% increase to the average length of a player’s first session in EVE, and a massive uptick in NPE completion rates.”
The studio is promising further updates to the newbie experience with animated guides and more content, as well as a new mining mission. It’s also planning additions to opportunities, including landmark-oriented ops, to help young pilots get their bearings, in addition to further revamping of EVE Academy. Veterans, meanwhile, can expect the planned skill plan upgrades: “In the November release, look forward to being able to drag ship fittings into a Skill Plan to automatically populate it with the fitting’s required skills. Corporation Skill Plans are coming to players in December, along with a new Skill Plan Manager role that enables corporations to create, save and share specialized plans with their members – providing a strong foundation and framework for new recruits.”
In other CCP Games news ahead of the weekend, Alliance Tournament XVII begins tomorrow, and it introduces NFT collectible kills. ” Each death that occurs during the tournament will be minted into an NFT (non-fungible token) of the killmail to be memorialized on the Tezos blockchain. The killer will be the listed owner of this NFT and what they want to do with the NFT is entirely up to them; sell and trade these limited edition images, or hoard them as trophies as they see fit.”
In case you’re wondering whether CCP Games knows how this looks… yes, it knows.
“We are keenly aware of the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, and for this reason, we opted to partner with Tezos for this project. Tezos’s Proof of Stake, the mechanism by which blockchain transactions are validated, is an extremely energy-efficient approach that uses two million times less energy than similar Proof of Work networks. In regards to the power consumption of the AT NFTs, with an estimated power draw of only 200mWh per token and a maximum of 4000 NFTs being minted, the total consumption of the entire production process will equal less than it takes to run a mid-tier gaming PC for 3 hours – less than a single viewer watching only a tenth of the Alliance Tournament would be using.”
