We recieved a mail on the 27th of july (as all others likely did when www.eveisreal.net went live.

Knowing that all new things comes with “toddlerchallenges”, we didn’t really looked at it till it was safely launched and fairly bug-free.

So, what are the plans moving forward to improve this first ever “museum of internetspaceshippilots”?

We were given the opportunity to ask the man in charge; Daniel Block, Senior Director of Customer Acquisition.

So Daniel. Lets face it. Your title is WAY too long for our poor illitterate readers (actually its just me that has comprehension problems but don’t tell them!). Can you tell us a little bit about what you are normally doing and how you have been involved in this particular project?

Pretty much anything that helps bring new players to EVE. Advertising, Buddy stuff, working with the Web team, etc. A bunch of us got together in January to try and find something new that we can use to explain EVE. EVE is really big, super big. It’s hard to give an “elevator pitch” about EVE, a 20 second pitch. When we’re advertising we’ve usually got 10 words. Thus, the issue. So the process to try and get new players is pretty simple; condense an hour long demo into 10 words that work. We needed three; “EVE is Real.”

 

Not because it’s a real world with real people, but because it is a virtual world that evoke real emotion in really unique ways. It sounds trite and overdone, but EVE is real thing. 375,000 people living and competing in this environment, building , existing, pew pew-ing. It’s all very real, in a virtual sense.

There is a long way from Medicine to Marketing though, why the change of scenery?

Marketing first, back in the days of White Wolf (the group that merged with CCP). After about 10 years of that came Nuclear Medicine; where else do you get to mix cyclotron’s and willing human subjects? When I got the invitation to interview, it was a bit out of left field. I love actually working in the science end of healthcare, but it’s hard to say no to getting back together with people you’ve known for 20 years and working on games.

Right, so youre basically in the business of getting more people to play EVE so we in turn can blow them up. You have a solid background in Marketing and have been wanting to expand into more technical stuff. Is that about right?

I’ve always been into the technical stuff. We advertise a lot, if we can advertise less for the same result that frees up the ability (i.e. people resources and money) to do other stuff to recruit players.

Now, looking at your story the past 18 years – if I didn’t know better I’d propably make the assumption that eveisreal is your baby. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the process that you guys went through, from idea to fruitition? Has the CSM been involved or did CCP get inspiration from players to create it from the recent Fan Fest?

This one program is the baby of many people; including CCP T0rfiFrans, CCP Hammer, CCP Zulu, CCP DarthBeta, and lots of other old hands from EVE. We always have a hard time communicating what EVE is; mostly because of the size and scope of EVE. EVE is a unique: virtual world, PvP, PVE, sandbox, murder box, intrigue filled, helpful playground. There are so many stories in EVE you’ll never get to tell them all. So, instead of us trying yet again to sum up what EVE is (yet again) we decided to create a conduit that collected player stories; basically “show, don’t tell.”

 

We started in January getting everyone on the same page about ‘EVE is Real.” Focusing on real player emotions that EVE brings out. We carried some of it into Fanfest to get feedback from the fans who travel to Iceland in the winter for a show about EVE. We refined it and started work on the site in June for our July launch. Along the way we found a good external partner to work with; our web team is tied up in the revamp of eveonline.com for later this year. We’re adding some basic functionality in another bump early next month to add more text/written word entries and a better way to display websites within the framework of this site.

 

We also set a goal to help inform us on what level of content is out there for the new eveonline.com site we’re working on in Reykjavik. The EVE site is largely unchanged on broad strokes after 8 years, we aim to divide that massive amount of content into two pieces; main eveonline.com for people new to the idea of EVE and a strong support site that has all of the existing pieces needed by players. It helps us by allowing us to focus more on what goes where, instead of just adding to the stack of 50K+ pages that make up eveonline.com.

Ok, now that we’re warmed up, lets get down to business. As you propably are aware of we’ve been looking at player feedback from the around the forums, ingame and through other external sources. There seems to be a few topics that keep popping up. We’ve listed 3 very common ones:

Are you aware that eveisreal.net does not actually work from the In-game browser? Can you explain a little behind the reasoning for not opening up the dynamic content for this particular website in the very same game you advertise?

Actually the in-game browser is quite limited for security reasons. We made a decision to use Flash for speed of execution; getting the site done just after Incarna. That means limits (no Ipad viewing, etc.). Also, the site itself is really about new users getting a glimpse of player generated content. The offline museum functionality for EVE players is there also, but the site has a goal of being interesting to new players first, and they obiously won’t be using the IGB.

What is the logic behind the site navigation? It seems almost impossible to locate specific content. Kinda like seeing the forrest, but not being able to look at “that tree over there” – if that makes sense. Are there any plans to implement some kind of search feature to explore the various user submitted contents (probably also with search tags, etc)? The inclusion of a search feature would make the database of user-submitted contents much more meaningful, be it to allow players to share certain contents and moment, or search for for specific contents among the multitudes of submissions, and so on.

It is a browsing site in its format right now, pure and simple. We’ll be adding tags as we move forward that enable some more granular browsing (beyond the 5 that are there now). It is part of the migration from being about showing new players something now and becoming a true museum later on. Long term goal (more than 6 months out) is to migrate it onto site structure and behind our firewall.

How long into the future are you going to be giving out rewards or are these ‘milestones’ just a way to get the museum going?

It’s a jumpstart and intended to carry over through the end of the year. The contest portion runs from Aug18th to Sep1st; that was to help gain velocity on submissions. We’ll likely do another round of contests later in the year.

Looking at the future for this online museum, if there is such a thing as a museum with a future, heh. I noticed a few things during my tinkering around the website. The “text” bits on the navigation wheel doesn’t seem to lead to any submissions. What are you hoping players will submit under this category now and in the future?

 

We plan to add written word pieces; fiction, battle reports whatever. We also plan to add a simple snapshot of player fansites that link back. After that audio; there are plenty of podcasts that should be here.

It would be fantastic to have more categories ready for real player events by the time that the next Fan Fest hits the street. What are the plans on including real life player events into the submission categories? If anyting, that is something that brings EVE to life, wouldn’t you say? Are we looking at a reasonable 3-month timeline?

Those categories will be added as we go, you’ll likely see more categories before the end of the year, and again before Fanfest. They may be smaller categories in terms of scope, but again, EVE is made up of tons of individual stories some big some small.

Ok, its been a long interview and I’d like to thank you for taking the time to actually sit down and answer these questions. I know that you only recently came back from holliday so hopefully I wasn’t too hard on you!

Nope, not hard at all. Very few people actually take the time to ask about the “why?” with this stuff. It’s nice people actually care about it.

 

 

A few interesting replies there, and a few not so surprising ones. Looks like we’re up to +350k subs and still having challenges with the flash bit of the IGB due to security reasons. Feel free to pop in on our forums to comment. Link in the right side of the screen. Also feel free to share this article via facebook, twitter and whatnot.