IT BUSINESS EDGE: NEED MONEY FOR DATA MANAGEMENT TECH? TRY OPERATIONS BUDGET

Last week I talked to Craig Carpenter, marketing VP and general counsel at information management technology vendor Recommind. The company’s recent survey found that employees at many large companies can’t efficiently find what they need to do their jobs. The recession is exacerbating the problem, he said, because those same employees are having to do more with less.

The obvious answer, according to Recommind and others, is technology that will help those companies manage and easily retrieve their information. But we’re in a recession. Companies are dealing with layoffs and cutbacks. How can they buy more technology? Carpenter’s answer: the operational expenditures budget. He says:

Typically, an enterprise software company charges x number of dollars per seat for software, and it’s paid all up front. But what they can do is work with customers within the operating expenditure budget. Maybe they pay monthly, or quarterly, over the course of a year or two… Maybe they pay as they use it, kind of like a software-as-a-service model.

After all, software vendors are as affected by the economy as their customers are. They’re being forced to get creative — not to mention more aggressive — with their pricing options. They are more willing to work within customer constraints to get the business. A pay-as-you-use it arrangement is better than no arrangement at all.

But that doesn’t mean justifying the purchase is suddenly easy. Carpenter says even working within the operational expenditures budget, such projects don’t get the “green light” unless they can demonstrate some improvement in the bottom line.

IT BUSINESS EDGE: RECESSION EXACERBATES DATA MANAGEMENT ISSUES, BUT COULD MAKE INVESTIGATIONS A NIGHTMARE

Lora Bentley spoke with Craig Carpenter, general counsel and marketing VP at information management technology provider Recommind. Results of a recent Recommind survey reveal that many companies could be in trouble once the federal government makes good on its promise of more aggressive regulatory enforcement.

Bentley: What did Recommind’s recent records management survey reveal?
Carpenter: From 50,000 feet, the survey found that employees of enterprises can’t find information they need efficiently. It takes them way too long to find documents, and they can’t begin to find expertise and foster relationships either.

Bentley: So what does that mean? What are the implications?
Carpenter: It’s bad enough for a company that’s trying to be efficient and effective when employees can’t find what they need to do their jobs. It’s worse in a situation like now when the recession is exacerbating the problem. Somewhere around half of the companies responding to our survey had experienced layoffs. So the people who are left are needing to do more work more efficiently, at the exact time the systems that they use to do their work are failing them.

And when you’re talking about finding experts and location, it’s exacerbated a step further because, say, for instance there was someone to whom you would go to ask a question or to find out about a particular topic. Now [after layoffs] that person might be gone. Once that person’s gone, if you don’t have some sort of system to help you find someone else you can ask, you’re in trouble. So it hurts these folks when they’re trying to help the company generate revenue and have greater profitability.

Bentley: What about when the recovery comes?
Carpenter: When you project forward … those same companies aren’t going to be able to grow nearly as quickly as they otherwise would because they don’t have the systems in place so that when they start hiring again and doing new projects and making new investments, they can’t disseminate information in any sort of effective fashion. That’s the productivity side.

Bentley: And the other side?
Carpenter: Again, the high-level conclusion is that companies are not doing a good job of handling their data. If you have a company that can’t handle its data for knowledge management purposes, what are they going to do when it comes to regulatory investigations and litigation? I’m sure you saw the fine that Intel was hit with by the European Commission, right? That is a wakeup call, certainly to everyone in this country, if not all over the world, that governments and regulators are getting much more active. They are literally getting on the record … saying, “There are going to be more investigations and there are going to be more fines … You need to be quick and accurate in your cooperation with us.” In the vast majority of investigations, what that means is “we want to start looking at data immediately.”

Going back to the initial problem of companies not doing a good job with their data … if [a company] can’t respond to a regulator effectively, the problem becomes even worse. You end up with angry regulators. You don’t know whether the investigation will turn out well or poorly for you, you have no ability to negotiate with the other side, and it ends up costing more money. As opposed to being able to handle most of it in house, with systems and people and workflow and processes, you have to call in very expensive consultants — the KPMGs and the PwCs and folks like that — who charge you much more because it’s the last minute and you’re under the gun and you don’t have a choice at that point.

CIO: HAVE YOU EVER SPENT 38 MINUTES LOOKING FOR A DOCUMENT?

In this age of sub-one-second Google search queries, modern networking and T1 Internet connections, it seems ludicrous that any type of information-based search would take even 38 seconds to complete.

A new survey, however, finds that employees at big companies (with more than 10,000 employees) spend, on average, 38 minutes searching for one document — whether that’s on their own computers or their organization’s networks, databases or intranet.

In addition, the survey of 200 respondents from companies in a wide range of industries found that employees are having trouble finding the most efficient and appropriate technology tools to locate documents or internal expertise. To find in-house experts, for instance, 71 percent of the respondents said they “ask around”; 46 percent said they use the company directory; 34 percent use the company website or intranet; and 30 percent said they send a companywide e-mail (and we all know how annoying those can be).

Just 9 percent of the companies responding to the survey have an automated system in place for locating experts. The survey was completed by Osterman Research and commissioned by Recommind, a maker of information risk-management software, so take the results with a grain of salt.

But still, the results have to be unsettling to higher-ups who have any concern regarding employee productivity in these times of “doing more with less,” plus the hyper-litigious and regulatory environment in which we now live. According to the survey, 86 percent of employees expressed concern about how prepared their organizations are to deal with information risk.

“In spite of a heightened risk of litigation and regulatory investigation,” notes the survey write-up, “most enterprises aren’t more stringently enforcing, or even updating, data-retention policies.” (For more on data management, see these articles on how companies are struggling to get to one version of the truth with BI and master data management (MDM) efforts, why less than half of data management plans are effective, and why MDM initiatives are still buzzworthy but a back-breaker for many organizations.)

Overall, the findings, states the survey report, “illustrate a dangerous, recession-induced trend of overreliance on outdated technology and an inability to provide workers with the most current tools available.”

Do you Tweet? Follow me on Twitter @twailgum. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

FIERCECONTENTMANAGEMENT: HOW EFFECTIVE IS ENTERPRISE SEARCH?

When you follow an industry as closely as we do here at FierceContentManagement, you begin to recognize patterns. One of the areas we look at closely is Enterprise Search because what good is managing content if you can’t find it and use it?

To me, search is really the key piece of the content management puzzle. It’s what AIIM called ‘findability’ in a study of search last year. What AIIM found was that enterprise search still had a ways to go to help users find content wherever it is (as I wrote in an EContent article called AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking). Now comes a study from search vendor Recommind that suggests the situation does not appear to have improved very much since AIIM released its study last June.

Key findings

The study was conducted by Osterman Research and looked at 200 people from companies averaging 10,000+ employees using questions written by Recommind. Let’s look at three key findings in the study:

• Of the companies represented in the survey, only 42% have an enterprise search solution in place

Think about that. It would mean that 58 percent of the companies in the survey don’t have an enterprise search solution. My guess is they do and the people surveyed don’t realize that what they are using to find information is in fact an enterprise search tool, even if they don’t label or understand it as such. I just cannot believe that a company with 10,000 employees could be operating at this point without some sort of search tool in place to help them find information (even if it weren’t a good one).

• Employees in companies with 10,000+ workers spend 38 minutes per search

I would be surprised if most people spend 38 seconds searching for something, never mind 38 minutes. We are trained and spoiled by Google searches which give us something to work with almost immediately. It’s not as easy to find a specific document in the enterprise, but if you know something–title, keywords, author, anything–you should either find it or find someone who can help you get a better grip on what you are looking for. If after say 10 minutes, you’re still looking, you’re probably lost in the wilderness and need help.

• 29% of employees say that they haven’t been briefed–either by an IT manager or GC–about the potential role that email could play in a lawsuit or eDiscovery event.

This one is easier to swallow. Findability is one part of the search issue and governance is another. It’s entirely possible or even likely that companies have failed to train employees about the role of governance in content policy.

So what’s it mean?

I asked Craig Carpenter, Vice President of Marketing and General Counsel at Recommind to help me interpret these findings. He says his initial reaction to the 38 minute search was similar to mine, but he points out that with layoffs and staff reductions, it entirely possible that employees are being asked to find documents written by employees who no longer work for the company. They might know little about the document and people who are paid to manage the system are overworked and can’t help.

But overall Carpenter says beyond the 38 minute search average, he’s not surprised by these results. “Other than the 38 minute result, which I will agree with you is pretty darn high, the rest of these results aren’t terribly shocking.” But he says this isn’t about presenting findings in a way to sell search tools. “The message isn’t ‘hey you’re not spending money on infrastructure you need to–oh by the way, we sell infrastructure.’ The message is that companies are being penny wise and pound foolish.” What he means is that without search tools in place, you aren’t empowering your users to work more efficiently and be more effective (which saves money and raises morale in the long run). And Carpenter says this is even more profound on the governance side where a little investment today, especially in a time where litigation costs are rising and stricter regulatory costs are on the horizon, could save tons of money in the long run.

While search companies sell search services, and the numbers I pulled out of this survey may be hard to swallow, the fact is that end users clearly have issues with enterprise search and vendors need to be doing a better job of resolving fundamental findability issues in the enterprise. As Carpenter pointed out, in a time of reduced staffing, it’s more critical than ever that technology help, not hinder employees in performing their jobs. – Ron

GAMESRADAR: 5 REASONS TO ENTER EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA

EVE Online may have been around since 2003 (today marks its six-year anniversary), but developer CCP hopes to attract new players with its recent expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha. The game takes place in the New Eden solar system, run by empires of different races all working towards peace and progress within the galaxy. You emerge as a newly graduated capsuleer, an elite pilot who can control a ship from a special pod. But it’s your ship – not your pilot – that takes the center stage in EVE, and customizing it with various upgrades is key to surviving and thriving in the game.That means making lots of money, so get ready to take up a profession, tune up your craft, start buying and selling materials and build a corporation with friends so you can take a shot at cornering the market in EVE’s ever-changing economy.

EVE Online has always had a bad reputation for being overly complex. But with Apocrypha’s “New Player Experience,” CCP plans to ease in players put off by the game’s steep learning curve. Now, getting into the game is easier than ever.

Before, players were forever stuck with the attributes they first selected for their character. Finding out that the character build you were going for just isn’t working out as you intended after investing hours in the game was frustrating, to say the least. Now, players can change their attribute skills once a year. It sounds like a minor fix for a major problem, but the end result is a more streamlined and straightforward character creation system that gives you an avatar that complements how you play the game more closely.

After you launch into New Eden with your race-specific ship, you must undergo a newly redesigned tutorial that will teach you how to navigate through space and shoot down your enemies. New players now have the advantage of having their first million skill points gained at an accelerated pace, so they can get their hands on a broader range of equipment with much less space-grinding.

New in Apocrypha are wormholes that provide random pathways to uncharted areas of space, giving you a true sense of exploration. By scanning areas of space, you’ll find these wormholes swirling open for an undisclosed amount of time, letting only a few ships pass through before they close.

Not all wormholes lead you to unknown territory.Some will lead to known space and could prove helpful in finding new trade or smuggling routes. Entering unstable wormholes is best tackled with a crew, since you never know what could be waiting for you on the other end. Who knows? You might run into some Sleepers, Apocrypha’s deadly new NPC race.

The Sleepers hold the most advanced and sought-after technological resources outside of wormhole space, and while your first thought may be to shoot them up for the loot, they are far more lethal than your average space pirate. Engaging a Sleeper is more like a deadly PvP battle, and forces you to think carefully about every move in order to make it out alive. That’s because CCP created the Sleepers to mimic PvP actions. They can switch targets, heal each other and use evasive maneuvers. Sleepers can also determine what level of threat you represent, and will aggressively target a well-fitted ship instead of wasting time with weaker ones.

Apocrypha also introduces a new class of ship called Tech-3. This class allows for a ton of customization options, helping you tailor your ship’s defenses, as well as its overall look, to your liking. Each Tech-3 ship is composed of five new subsystems: defensive, offensive, electronic, engineering and propulsion.

Almost all materials needed to build Tech-3 ships can only be found by traveling through wormholes. For example, the blueprints needed to construct the chassis and hull of your Tech-3 ship can only be obtained by reverse-engineering ancient relics found in wormhole space.

Epic mission arcs are EVE’s answer to branching storylines like the ones found in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Throughout your time in New Eden, you will encounter agents who will offer you missions, which in turn are part of an ongoing storyline in which your decisions will affect the outcome, as well as your progress in the game.

The missions are all about introducing the world of EVE Online, familiarizing you with everything you learned,and giving you a choice on how to leave your mark on the universe. In future expansions, CCP plans to expand on the mission arcs by including some of the EVE lore to set up future events, giving veteran players a reason to tackle Apocrypha’s epic missions even though they’re meant for beginners.

So if you’ve grown tired of elves and goblins and are looking for a change of scenery (or just a new MMO experience), Apocrypha’s added features mean a lot of cool new reasons for newbies and vets alike to enter the fray. You can try EVE Online: Apocrypha for free by downloading a 21-day trial from Steam.

FIERCECONTENTMANAGEMENT: RECOMMIND’S LATEST SEARCH MODULE HELPS YOU FIND EXPERTS

Social media tools in the enterprise help you connect with people to do your job better. They help build team work and provide a natural way to capture and share knowledge and expertise. Recommind has taken this idea a step further with their new Expertise module, which allows you to check for experts along with your other search result types.

When users conduct a search, they can see a list of experts that can help them learn more. Recommind uses information found in online resumes–and it’s even possible to connect to LinkedIn profiles. It also looks for documents written by individuals that would denote them as an expert based on their body of work.

It could work well with social media tools and provide a new means for enterprise employees to find the right the people to connect within the organization. While the social media tools offer a great way to work within a team, they don’t necessarily help you find the right people to place on your team. Using this tool can help you pinpoint the right people you need in your organization.

This can be particularly useful in knowledge-intensive environments like law firms, consultancies and government agencies, but it could prove useful for just about any type of organization.

For more information:
- see the Recommind website

CMSWIRE: THE CONVERGING PATHS OF SEARCH, EDISCOVERY AND ENTERPRISE CMS

Enterprise content management is always a hot topic. It gets even hotter when you start talking about mergers and acquisitions. This is why the Autonomy / Interwoven deal got so much attention in January. One of the biggest ECM vendors is snapped up by one of the biggest Search vendors — and in the name of eDiscovery and compliance.

Is this acquisition a sign that we can no longer look at these three areas as separate and individual? That the tools are converging and perhaps becoming secondary to the mindshare that sits behind that technology?

Craig Carpenter, Vice President of Marketing and General Counsel at Recommind, a provider of Search and Information Access solutions, took some time to talk with us about what the Autonomy/Interwoven deal means for the search and eDiscovery markets and how enterprise content management can’t escape the inevitable ties to either one.

The Autonomy / Interwoven Deal

Autonomy may be a very smart company. They appear to be working very hard towards gaining major exposure in the eDiscovery market. With their acquisition of Zantaz, they gained a strong tool set for the eDiscovery space. With Merido, they picked Records Management capabilities.

The move to acquire Interwoven has fit nicely into their patchwork quilt of capabilities for the eDiscovery market. This, of course, is not because Interwoven is strong in enterprise content management or offers a top notch eDiscovery technology. But because they have a big piece of the legal market — the people who constantly look for compliance and eDiscovery solutions.

Autonomy has seen the light. That light is the growing need for strong eDiscovery solutions. The problem is, eDiscovery is as much about the people who know it well, as it is about the technology. And this is where Autonomy may fall short.

Growing your technology and expertise organically takes a lot of time. Maybe too much time to keep ahead of the pack in a market like eDiscovery. The challenge with acquiring other vendors with established market presence though is the risk of losing the mindshare that built that market presence.

This is what happened with Zantaz. Much of the knowledge in that company walked away when Autonomy acquired them. Many have said the Autonomy culture is a tough one, so the question for the Interwoven deal is — will we see the same thing?

If Autonomy really did buy Interwoven for its legal market connections, don’t they need to keep Interwoven brain pool to continue to build those relationships? If the Interwoven mindshare walks away, what will this do to Autonomy’s plans?

It’s About Trusted Relationships

Craig Carpenter says Recommind’s M.O. is different from Autonomy’s. They have placed a premium on trust and longevity in the market. And on satisfied customers. With search as their sweet spot, they have a legacy of supporting professional service markets for high-end knowledge workers — like lawyers and accountants.

These deep relationships are what led them to eDiscovery a few years ago. Law firms and legal departments have strong inter-communication. These guys really talk to each other, so relationships mean a lot in the eDiscovery market.

Carpenter says the most important part of eDiscovery is not the technology. The most important part is a solid understanding of the processes, the workflow and the people. Any solution must be able to solve the problem and be easy to use.

So much data is being generated and the media used to generate it is so diverse, that organizations don’t have a choice when it comes to implementing eDiscovery solutions. And it’s not going to go away — increased regulations are coming. Add the problems with the economy to that pile and you see that strong solutions are required.

Integration with Enterprise CMS

eDiscovery solutions do not stand on their own. Carpenter says they are seeing a convergence of tools in the areas of search, eDiscovery and Enterprise Content Management. Add to that Records Management and Archiving and you can imagine what it means for the Enterprise Content Management industry.

ECM vendors are typically very large and often slower to adapt to new technologies and needs. At the same time, they need to continue to grow to survive. These vendors are looking for new markets to sell their solutions to. They often do this by partnering with other technology providers to reach new markets faster.

Open Text’s relationship with Recommind is a prime example of this. Open Text’s new eDiscovery Early Case Assessment is built upon Recommind’s Insite Legal Hold application. Carpenter says that working with Open Text has also given them access to a new install base, so it’s been a win-win situation.

Predictions on the Future

Open Text is just one example of the growing move to partner to bring new eDiscovery solutions to market quickly. The question is, will this trend continue? Or will Enterprise Content Management vendors start working on their own solutions in-house? Craig Carpenter thinks ECMs will choose to partner first with an established eDiscovery partner – at least for the short term (12-24 months).

Why? Because as we said earlier, eDiscovery is not just about the technology. The eDiscovery market is different — the risk profile is different.  It’ is important to have domain expertise and that is what vendors like Recommind have. It’s also what Autonomy is going to need to truly gain a foothold in the market.

Long-term you will see ECMs build this functionality into their solutions more closely, but it will be by a combination of building, buying and partnering.

Craig Carpenter believes Recommind is positioned to do well. They are a software company first, but they have also worked diligently to understand the needs of their customers and built their solution based on those needs. Where necessary, they too, will partner to build the right stuff.

As for Autonomy, well they haven’t finalized the Interwoven acquisition so it may be some time before we see what happens to the Interwoven team and technology. What we are seeing though, is Autonomy’s continued presence in the compliance and eDiscovery market with solutions such as the Conceptual Search Module and ControlPoint for Multimedia for SharePoint.

The convergence of search, eDiscovery and Enterprise Content Management will continue. Carpenter says he expects to see more acquisitions this year that will demonstrate this. We watch to see what happens. Who do you think will make the next move.

WIRED: EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA LURES NEW PLAYERS INTO HARSH, CRUEL VIRTUAL UNIVERSE

There’s a new massively multiplayer online RPG on store shelves this week: EVE Online Apocrypha.

Well, it’s not technically new. EVE Online has been running since 2003. But with the expansion pack released Tuesday, the MMORPG will experience an inevitable influx of new players. How will the gamemaker introduce them into a complex world that’s been explored by loyal veterans for nearly six years?

Since its launch, EVE Online has earned a reputation for being dull, with a steep learning curve that has so far scared off all but the most patient gamers — and stubborn griefers. Apocrypha could change all that with its “new player experience,” which is designed to give guidance to fledgling space pilots and empower them with new mechanics designed to take some of the edge off the game’s tantalizingly cruel universe.

“Hopefully it’s a lot easier for [new players] to just get up to speed without feeling like they’re slogging through a mountain of manuals,” says the game’s lead designer Noah Ward. “It’s more of a crash course than a three-hour tour.”

EVE Online is appealing because it is a far cry from the typical MMORPG. In a game like World of Warcraft, a player improves his character by increasing physical attributes like strength or intellect. It doesn’t take many leaps of logic to understand which attribute would be best for a warrior versus a mage. Kill enemies, and you’ll gain experience points and levels, allowing you to improve your base attribute and grind your way toward the game’s tougher content.

But in EVE Online there are no classes, and your character’s abilities are determined by a combination of skills, the spaceship you’re flying, and where your own interests lie. The same battleship might serve with equal effectiveness as a hulking war machine, a support craft for repairing allies or even a humble mining vessel — provided you’ve trained the right skills and packed the right equipment for the given job. Skills are trained in real-time even if you’re not logged in, so players with busy schedules can still make progress.

But if you’d like to fly that shiny new cruiser or upgrade its guns, be prepared to wait. Attributes determine how quickly your character accumulates skill points, and choosing the “wrong” attributes at the start will seriously disadvantage new players.

One of EVE Online’s problems was that neophytes had to choose these important character attributes with no information about why they should pick them.

“They really had no business making those choices,” Ward explains. “Spaceship Command IV? Gunnery IV? Is IV good?”

Players who hadn’t done their homework were likely to create a character whose skill set was at odds with their play style. If, for example, a player was interested in fleet warfare, but happened to create a character that excelled at manufacturing or trading, he would face a long wait before he got to play the game as he intended.

In Apocrypha, a revamped tutorial will familiarize players with basic stellar navigation, mining, trade and the nuances of EVE’s complex combat system. That’s Ward’s “crash course.” The three-hour tour comes later, in the form of an Epic Mission Arc. This new quest for rookies spans the game’s massive universe, introducing them to the various factions that populate EVE while testing the lessons they learned in the tutorial.

A skill queue has been implemented, so players are now able to schedule a limited number of skills to train in succession — no more getting up at four in the morning to start a new skill. And Apocrypha also adds the ability to reassign a character’s attribute points once a year, so players young and old who have rethought their personal goals aren’t completely out of luck.

As a gamers’ stimulus package, new players will train their first million skill points twice as fast as normal players. With faster training times, rookies will be able to access a wider variety of equipment sooner, allowing them to quickly get out and contribute to one of EVE’s player-run corporations — or just shoot at other players a bit more effectively.

In the past, skill points were hand-picked by the game’s designers. Rookies might not have understood what a particular skill did, but it was likely there for a reason. Players now have full reign over their characters, but those who haven’t paid attention to the tutorial are likely to make costly mistakes.

“It gives them more control, but it also gives them the ability to screw up,” says Ward.

Of course, costly mistakes are fundamental to the EVE Online experience. EVE remains an unforgiving place. It is notorious for including nonconsensual player-versus-player combat. Rookie pilots are still likely to be ambushed by unscrupulous veterans.

Speaking of veterans, the Apocrypha expansion also adds loads of new content for older players to come to grips with — from modular, customizable strategic cruisers to wormholes and the intelligent, brutally difficult sleeper drones that now lurk within new, uncharted solar systems.

There are new challenges, and the learning curve remains steep, but the barrier to entry has plummeted. If you’re at all interested in MMOs, and don’t mind putting on your thinking cap from time to time, you’ve officially run out of reasons to avoid trying EVE Online.

Images courtesy CCP

IGN: A LOOK AT EVE ONLINE’S APOCRYPHA EXPANSION

With nearly 300,000 users and a single game world for the whole base, CCP’s EVE Online stands out in the MMOG space. The game recently reached its highest peak concurrent users ever at 51,675, which represents the number of players simultaneously logged into the game. So how has CCP managed to grow since the game was launched in 2003? Considering all the players log into the same universe and that a majority of the gameplay is player-driven, EVE’s world has a different kind of flavor than many of its competitors that require users interact repeatedly with scripted content. Those who dive into EVE can eventually join up by the game’s sizable, player-run corporations that own vast tracts of space to battle for additional assets, engage in subterfuge within the game and on message boards to nab enemy intelligence and dramatically alter the make-up and organization of the world, and grapple with an ever-changing marketplace.

CCP has regularly released new content geared toward both seasoned players and new ones since launch. The next expansion, Apocrypha, which as of today should be appearing in stores as a new retail box and delivered free to any current subscriber, comes with a number of features. If you’ve never tried out EVE, then the added “new player experience” would probably be of interest to you. Lead designer Noah Ward told us the way new players get into the game has been streamlined in an effort to better ease them in. Now you won’t have to deal with as many character-building decisions up-front, many of which previously required research and understanding of the game, which, if you’re new, you don’t have. With Apocrypha, these kinds of choices are embedded further into the creation process so you’ll have a better base of knowledge.

The character development system is also being given more flexibility, allowing for redistributions of attributes if you want to switch things up. Skill development has been made more convenient, as CCP has added a 24-hour skill queue. Of course if you’re a new player that probably doesn’t mean much of anything to you, so here’s how it works in EVE. To get new skills in the game, you trigger them to start training, which will take a certain amount of time to finish and proceeds in real-time whether you’re online or off. After one skill is finished training, you start up another, and so on. The 24-hour queue allows people to string together multiple skills, meaning if you’re trying to be as efficient as possible with upgrades, you won’t have to log on at odd hours of the day or night to start up the next training process. The reason this queue is limited to 24-hours is because CCP didn’t want to create a queuing system that allowed people to queue up a year’s worth of skill training then walk away from the game until everything was finished. With the setup in Apocrypha, CCP feels it’s just the right amount of time to keep players active while introducing an element of convenience.

After you take your first steps into EVE, you’re bound to be overwhelmed by the size of it all and the apparent lack of structure, so CCP is building in more player-versus-environment quest arcs to offer more structure. While before there were simple missions, Apocrypha’s epic quest arcs can branch and, according to CCP, incorporate more storylines and reward structures. Sometimes these will lead to totally new space, like the unstable wormholes that the expansion is adding to EVE’s already sizable universe of 5,000 solar systems. These wormholes will pop up randomly, and can be detected using a new scanning mechanic. Once accessed, they open up spaces to discover new enemies and technologies. Just as randomly as the wormholes appear, they can also disappear, adding a whole new kind of dynamic element to trade routes and lines of assault within New Eden.

Often while traversing this wormhole space it seems you’ll run into an ancient race known as the Sleepers. By pummeling and snatching components from their vessels, seasoned players will unlock the options to construct Tech 3 strategic cruisers. These highly customizable ships can be fitted in myriad ways, and with different subsystem configurations the overall look of the ship will change, adding more of a sense of variety and individuality to the world.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, then by all means give it a shot. It’s certainly a game that represents a change of pace from the standard fantasy MMOG, with an emphasis on social support and networking, and the sharp visuals are certainly appealing.

KOTAKU: THE SECRET TO CCP’S SUCCESS

During a recent visit, CCP North America president Mike Tinney explained how the EVE Online developers continue to expand in an economic environment where many online gaming companies are cutting back.

The recession hasn’t been kind to online game developers, with companies like Mythic, Nexon America, Funcom, and NCsoft all experiencing job cuts and studio closings over the past few months, yet EVE Online creator CCP is growing strong. Mike Tinney explains that it’s all a matter of self-sufficiency.

While all these other companies are doing layoffs and scaling back, because we’re pretty self-contained – we’re not a developer beholden to a publisher; we’re not a publisher waiting for a developer. We self-publish EVE Online and support it in its entirety, so we have a lot more ability to react as the world economy shifts, and that’s allowed us to retool focus on the core drivers for our business, and steadily grow while a lot of other companies are shrinking.

Growing while other companies are shrinking also gives CCP the benefit of a rather large pool of talented individuals who suddenly find themselves looking for work, as well as developers who are employed, but losing confidence in the way their employees are handling the harsh economic times.

It’s given us an opportunity to go into a rapidly filling job market and open up new positions at all three of our locations and start looking for the next round of industry like-minded professionals.

Between EVE Online’s steady growth and the development of the World of Darkness online title with its built-in audience of dedicated fans of White Wolf’s Vampire role-playing game, CCP has all the pieces in place to continue its growth well into the next decade.