The CCP Connection

The infamous CCP Nerf Wheel

Might as well get this out of the way early on.  The questions I get asked the most are:

1. What was your job title at CCP?
2. What was your Dev name?
3. What did you work on?
4. Why are you no longer employed by CCP?

I was a Game Designer at CCP, one of the first in a new wave of hirings conducted at the time.  Game Designers are responsible for implementing the 'vision' of EVE, coming up with ideas for the same and working with all the other departments to keep the game moving forward. When I was brought on board, CCP was just starting to expand the design team and were recruiting people from both the professional world and within the EVE community.  

My dev name was CCP Abathur.

Over the course of three years I touched on nearly every aspect of EVE game play in some form.  Here is a list of the feature specific design work I was involved with:

Revelations 2

·         Sovereignty 2.0 Evolution

·         Starbase Warfare Improvements

·         Tech 2 Battleships

Trinity

·         Ship Balancing work

·         Situational Awareness Improvements (broadcasts, etc…)

·         Overview Improvements

Empyrean Age

·         Factional Militias

·         Ranks

·         World Shaping

Quantum Rise

·         Alchemy

·         User Interface Changes

·         Weapon Grouping

·         Certificates

Apocrypha

·         Wormholes

·         New & Improved Scanning system

Dominion

·         Sovereignty 3.0 Evolution

·         Sovereignty Infrastructure System

·         New Doomsday Devices and Capital Ship Changes

·         Improved Fleet Tools

Tyrannis

·         Planetary Interaction

Each one of those bullet points could easily be expanded upon into at least a paragraph of their own (maybe I'll do that later). Even when designers are assigned to work on a specific feature, they still do sanity checks and peer review with other designers (most of the time anyway) to make sure something doesn't get completely screwed up. Checking email is a 24/7 job because you never know when someone might try to suggest the next carrier nerf or something.

There's also a lot of stuff missing such as 'bugs' that get fixed and end up being seen by players as major game play changes.  One example of this would be late one Sunday afternoon, in a fit of rage, I filed a bug report and fired off a couple emails explaining that the anchoring and un-anchoring times of POS modules and towers were 'soul sucking time vampires' and not the least bit fun.  Lo and behold, a few hours later, I got to cut them all in half and the change made it into the next patch.  There are hundreds of examples like this that have been done in the past and I wish we would see more of a focus on in the future; just day to day balancing fixes based upon player feedback.

As to why I am no longer there, I was originally hired as a contractor and I worked off-site from my either my home in Germany or the United States. 'Off-site' still meant that I spent 4-6 months out of the year in the main office in Reykjavík. My departure from the company came about as a series of events that constituted a 'perfect storm' of issues in my life.  CCP wanted me to move to Iceland effectively full time but with a house and family in Germany plus additional family responsibilities in the States such a move was just impossible to accommodate.  I briefly considered giving it a try by getting an apartment in Iceland and commuting a lot, but trying to split my life in such a way would not have worked.

As a random fact someone in HR told me once that I was hired when there were less than 120 people at CCP.  When I left it was approaching 500, so I was there during a period of very explosive growth and rapid change. It was a very exciting time and :awesome: to be part of something so unique.  I miss the people there and am looking forward to working with them from the other side of the fence!