Just wanted to let everyone know that I'll be monitoring this thread for further ideas on what to do with the Immersion Project (and I'm incredibly happy that everyone seems to like what we've done so far! ). You can always add more ideas in the coming weeks or months by posting on the Fiction forum.

TorfiFrans, our Creative Director, called me into a room, pointed to a whiteboard and proceeded to draw a sprawling green web on its surface. He explained that we needed to refocus our fiction efforts so that they'd be more accessible to our playerbase

(Except, ahaha, most of you can't do that at the moment because the logon for the wiki just broke and keeps tossing up an SSL error. We'll fix that.)

In other words, if I go to the in-world info portal and look at, say, the new tier 3 battlecruisers, I should see see info about them and their development history, but not that they were added in the Crucible expansion in 2011. That info should be available somewhere, but not from within the "immersion" portal. I'd also like in-world news articles and all sorts of things, but not "extended downtime" or whatever mixed in. Basically, any link I click from inside the "immersion" portal should only ever take me to another "immersion-safe" page. Also, any stories there should be info that a regular person with GalNet access should be able to find out, not things that only two people in the (EVE) universe know about.

But now that this is out there.. when can we expect moar chronicles? I know you just released a quick sucession of chronicles, but the "final" one ended on a cliffhanger

Please please please, fill in the religion for gallente if you can

I would add... maybe some technical stuff... but I dont know if it is your domain

Some pages are now their two times like "Emperor" and "Amarr Emperor"

Very sad to hear it is a deliberate dumbing down

The Empire pages for the four factions (GAllente, Caldari, Minmatar, Amarr) have not received much love. In fact, it does look like they're giant copypastes from the previous EVElopedia, with no new content.

-1 for RP Infoportal and a big +1 for one singular "Immersion Portal", such as it currently is, which includes RP stuff and RL stuff about CCP/Eve too.

Oh, one more thing: An in-game connection is definitely on our to-do list. But it will require careful design and programming support, so we won't be rushing it. What I can promise you is regular wiki updates, along with a sloooow but certain push toward a more integrated in-game presence.

This point - that an in-game connection is desirable but not a necessity for the Immersion Project - is actually a rather important one once you realize that it works both ways: Anything not purely wiki-based (in-game interfaces, added functionality, images (sorry, Riffix)) requires more effort from more people and is thus harder to push through ... but by the same token, anything that's purely a textual update, such as more wiki articles, requires no support at all other than editing. I was very careful when designing the Immersion Project to separate the text work as much as possible from everything else, which means that once we've gotten a bit more cohesion in the Storyline team (some people are moving to Iceland, and we're still sorting out our future projects), we'll be in a position where we can release more official lore in less time than ever before. We don't have to wait for someone in Art to draw a picture, or someone in Programming to fix up an interface, or someone in Web to work out the kinks in our site backend.

-1 to that, I'm afraid. We made a conscious decision not to mix lore and out-of-game info (item stats, gameplay info, CCP stuff). The reason is that intertwining the two will simply not work for most readers, who will be looking either for involved, deep lore, or for clear, concise gameplay info. If we mix them up, we'll confuse and annoy everyone. We're pushing for the same approach in-game, where we want to separate basic facts from deeper lore.

It might please you to know that half of what has been suggested so far is actually already on our drawing board, in one version or another. For instance, Kyra Felann's idea about an immersion portal might -- might -- one day find its way into reality through your monitors in the CQs. And the ideas about providing everything with info - planets, systems, etc - is something I've been strongly pushing for. No guarantees, but y'know.

So one of the things we'll have to decide in the near-ish future is what part of the lore to tackle next. What do you guys want to see?

Go from THIS

to something that works like THIS

Definitely something I'd like to see. Quite a comprehensive project but one worth the effort.

C.

Real brief followup to this thread: I'm still on Christmas vacation, and am running on rather little sleep thanks to having gotten a puppy (OMG!), and trying to raise him in a three-cat house. There is never a single moment here, not even the briefest of momentary breaths, when all five organisms are asleep at any one time. Never.

Once I get back to work I'll comb through the responses in this and the dev blog thread and figure out where to go next.

Since it has been brought up a few times, though, note that any comments on articles (including 'this is broken' flags) can always be entered under said articles' Discussion tabs. I will continually monitor those.

I suspect I may put up a sticky thread or two in this forum section for people to add comments, but the Discussion tabs are and will remain your primary method of quick-flagging things.

Also, I'm digging your idea about in-game linkage. It's very much along the lines of what I'd like to do. Just keep in mind that in-game changes will take longer than purely wiki-based ones, for all sorts of reasons, so we may not see this right away - but I'm certain we can figure out something like it later on.