Gamasutra also got a chance to sit down with Pétursson and discuss the fanfest, why it's OK for gamers to hate EVE, the formation of the Council of Stellar Management, developing (and redeveloping) a scalable MMO, and more.

There are a lot of people here who've come to Iceland in November -- over a thousand -- from many different countries to participate in this fan convention.

Hilmar Pétursson: We've been quite amazed ever since we held the first fanfest back in 2004 -- the willingness of people to come to Iceland in November -- which almost is the worst time to come here. But I think nobody has ever come without feeling the trip more than worth it. We see people coming back year after year, and as the player has grown -- EVE has been growing about 80% per year since we launched it -- the fanfest has been growing in a similar way. I think a lot of that has to do with repeat visitors: people who have come for every year.

Initially they might have come here to sort of listen to what we were saying about the future development of the game. But I'm seeing people coming here more and more to meet each other and to participate in various... even player organized events during the fanfest while they're over here which we definitely celebrate and want to continue to support.

Let's go back a bit and talk about the history of your game and your company. You said you've had pretty active year upon year growth in your community. It's obviously not as mass as something like World of Warcraft, nor do you try to be a mass-market property. But somehow you've managed to maintain your success being in some ways what could be called a niche property.

HP: Initially, we wanted to create a space fighting/trading game. We wanted to found the company in Iceland and do it from here. The company was founded in 1997, and we started developing the game in 2000. Up until then, we were focusing on professional service work and building up the company -- recruiting the team and all that.

Even though we said that we're doing a game, we wanted to do it in a way that the game would really be there for the players to build. Not in the terms that they would be modeling the content themselves in Maya, but that everything interesting in the game would be emergent from systems that we would have created, that the players would really have built upon.

That theory was maybe very similar to what you see now in social networking websites and things like that. There are a lot of fancy terms for these things now, but we sort of intuitively had the idea of building a product that was more like a service and more for all the players.

When you think of it, we always thought we were planting a seed that would grow to a tree. Exactly how tall the tree would become wasn't necessarily something we aimed for. So when we see the game grow from 50 to 100 to 200 thousand players, it isn't necessarily a surprise. It's more sort of realizing the vision that we have created fertile enough ground for the tree to grow this tall. We will continue to focus on fertile ground for the tree to grow rather than trying to force it to happen. And our vision for that has been to create a product that people love... but not like. We want people to love or hate it. People shouldn't play it because they like it, they should play it because they love it.

What that implicitly requires is that your community puts a lot of work into the game because they're as much stewards of the game's direction as you, who create it. What were some of the mechanisms that you thought of when you envisioned the game, and have those mechanisms followed in good stead since you've enacted them?

HP: I would say what ties it all together is the economy. The economy of the game is very much controlled by the players. All prices are decided on the market, CCP doesn't set a price on it. It's freely traded on an open market and people price it based on how they value their time or the scarcity of what they have to sell. And then we have systems built around the market: we have a manufacturing system, we have a resource-gathering system.

And then the game very much focuses on [the fact] that you're always at risk in terms of all the players attacking you or taking something away from you. So that creates very interesting interactions between war and the economy. And war and economy is something that has created a lot of events in human history. That is essentially what we maybe have put in place to drive the storyline. But then, the players have used those systems to create something much more spectacular than we could ever have envisioned in the beginning. So I would say, the economy is the tool to create this.

For soliciting community feedback, we have used various methods throughout the four years. And we're trying to evolve those as our world has evolved. You use different methods for a community of 50,000 players than you do for a community of 200,000 players. Especially when all those players live in the same world. It's different when you have sharded worlds down to smaller shards, and you just have more shards. And you have to tackle the community of each shard. Then you can use the same method, but scale it up.

But when the community fundamentally grows as it has in our case, then you have to adapt and evolve your method of soliciting community feedback. And we're now, at this fanfest, introducing a new idea which we call the Council of Stellar Management which involves allowing the community to elect representatives for a council. And we'll do this through voting. So this council will then be a venue for exchange between the community and CCP so that it is a more meaningful discussion than us talking in a non-structured way with 200,000 people which... um, achieves very little in its current form.