Voici un petit lien de la dernière interview des Dev help c'est en anglais ^^.

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When I started out my time here in Perpetuum I was amazed that I had missed this game. I'm obviously getting old! What grabbed me from the forums was the level of interaction the developers had with the community and that was very refreshing. It won't last forever of course, as games evolve and grow in size the developers become more distant but right now, we have some of the best DEV interaction I have seen in a long time and it is extremely welcome. In this interview, I asked DEV Zoom a number of questions back in February which seemed apt at the time. Nearly 2 months have passed since then, but Zoom has graciously answered my questions with greater knowledge of how things have progressed from that time and has reflected back. As ever, please comment and add further questions on the forums! 1) For possible readers out there who may not be so familiar with your reputation or accomplishments, can you provide us with a brief introduction of yourself and how you came to be part of the Perpetuum dev team.. Hello, my name is Zoltán Szabó, but you probably know me better as DEV Zoom. I became part of the development team back in 2006 I think, when Perpetuum wasn't even planned to be an MMO yet, but a strategy game. I knew some of the others like BoyC and Gargaj from way earlier through the demoscene (and our group Conspiracy - http://www.conspiracy.hu) and basically I got into Perpetuum through them too. Being a small team many of us are responsible for many things, my part is the GUI design and icons, some environmental assets like the lighting, terrain textures and the sky, the website design and general quality assurance. I'm also taking some part in game mechanics design, for example most recently I worked out the details of the artifact system, and I'm also overseeing our issue tracking system. 2) Many comparisons have been made to EVE Online in terms of the overall style of the game and the approach players are encouraged to take. How influential was EVE Online in the design process and which areas did the development team feel needed to be approached differently for Perpetuum? Ah, my favorite question Contrary to popular belief EVE had way less influence during the development than many would think. We just wanted to make a sci-fi sandbox MMO with modular robots, and this combination coupled with the architectural/genre limitations kinda set the base concepts and brought many logical solutions which, you know, just work like how they do in many other games as well. The target locking with fire&forget module activation system is an example for architectural limitations, since we would have rather made a Mechwarrior-like aim&shoot system, but when you have 200+ robots moving on the field this is not very feasible due to lag issues. Also, it's not like the select enemy, activate firestorm spell, wait for cooldown system is that much different... The modular windows-based GUI system is another thing that's just proven and works (not just in games obviously) and is the simplest way of handling data (and we do have lots of that). What else... there are all the health/armor/damagetype/resistance/range concepts which pretty much every fantasy-based game has too, but the thing is when you move these over to a sci-fi setting, they become energy drainers instead of mana vampires, missiles instead of fireballs, remote repairers instead of heal party spells, and so on. The base idea of the game simply determined our core mechanics and the rest is building upon these concepts. So to answer your question, we didn't feel we had to approach things differently, there was simply no other way than to do many things differently. It's enough to mention that we have a terrain, which obviously needs a completely different approach compared to a solar system where you just drop a few planets and some space stations and you have a working environment. 3) It has been stated many times that the intention is to let Perpetuum develop in an organic manner with as little developer involvement as possible. How succesful has this been since release and has it met your own anticipations? There are two kinds of players (and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings here): the consumer type, and the creator type. Unfortunately for us - being a sandbox game - the consumer type players are the vast majority. Those are the ones who just want to ride a scenic railway and just want to be entertained. And you can't blame them really, this is a game after all. We have a few creative players in the game too, who do their own arena events or treasure hunts and generally take initiative, but we'd need much more of them. And we probably would have much more of them too, with a larger playerbase, but for that we have to appeal to the consumer players too, so it's an evil circle. 4) No MMO has lasted too long without a scandal or major news item and Perpetuum is no exception. It is certainly not an overstatement to say the insurance fraud activities have been a major topic of discussion and contention over the past week. How has the past few days/weeks affected the team? Has there been a notable change in attitude towards features and community interaction? We certainly had our "what now?" moments, but the decision was made fairly quickly that we had to intervene to not make things even worse than they were already. At the time I'm writing this almost 2 months passed already since the frauds, but I don't feel like this had a lasting effect on us developers. Of course, we have learnt from it and we have to work on our communication, but we moved on already and are doing what we like, continuously improving the game. 5) You have been a very visible presence on the forums throughout the insurance fraud issue and have come under intense pressure from the community in relation to the actions taken and fallout which has occurred from the corrective actions taken. What lessons have you personally taken away from these events and how do you think it will affect how similar events or incidents will be handled in the future? I think there was no right or wrong here, we simply had to do what we did to save the economy and prevent that certain players gain an unfair advantage over the others. Some came with the example of EVE again, where they had a pretty similar insurance issue. The difference is, that to my knowledge it happened not too long ago, when EVE already had an established and stable economy and the developers didn't have to intervene, just simply fix the issue. But we have a very young and vulnerable economy on our hands and anything happening to it now could have an exponential influence on it later. It is of course very unfortunate if we have to play sandbox police, and tell the kids to play nice, since this is obviously what a sandbox is about, finding opportunities. I think the lesson in this case is that we have to be very strict and clear on what players can or can't do within the game while still keeping the loose feeling of a free sandbox environment - not an easy thing to do. 6) Finally on the insurance events. Numerous posters on the official forums have questioned the actions of the development team, and how the who issue was handled. Perpetuum is notable in not having a community manager which is a common post in many MMO's and multiplayer game communities. Have recent events influenced any changes in this area or in community interaction in general? A dedicated community manager is something that we admittedly are lacking. However for these significant issues we always discuss our response together and act accordingly. The downside is that this takes time, during which all the conspiracy theories are born, players get impatient or disappointed and this can have a lasting impact on the community. So far we always tried to be very direct and connected with the players, and while sometimes I personally have my doubts, I think this is overall a good thing and some of the players are even amazed because they've never seen this in other games. Sadly Interplay's motto is already taken, but it very much fits our philosophy: "By gamers, for gamers." - we're just a bunch of guys who want to create a lasting world where we can all play together. 7) The recent dev blog posts have been extremely revealing of the features which the development team are looking to bring in over coming months. Will the community continue to see monthly updates or is the intention to move to a longer patch period to provide larger segments of content in one go? For the moment we are definitely sticking to the smaller but more frequent updates, at least until we have a solid base and a working economy. This also has the advantage that if something breaks after a patch, it's not too hard to find what went wrong, compared to the case when we would push out a big expansion with hundreds of changes and new features. Currently we are not in the position to do that, and don't have the manpower to even perform quality assurance on such a grand scale. There have been many discussion relating to the apparent lack of PvE in the game compared to many other MMO's. The recent blog has provided insight into mechanics which appear to bridge a portion of the gap between PvP and PvE aspects of the community which is extremely refreshing to see. Can you explain the thought processes behind this direction and will we see ever more crossover mechanics such as this going forward? The reason is quite simple: if you want PvP content, you just give a few guns to the players and something to fight over, then lean back and watch the pew-pew each other. There isn't too much content involved, you just need to code a few mechanics based on what you already have and you're set. PvE content on the other hand is very tedious and needs a lot of manpower to create all the theme parks. Unfortunately for us, the vast majority of the players are lone-wolf carebears who need this type of content, so if we want to evolve, we need to welcome them too. The PvP part of the game is in good shape already (although that one is also lacking some goals), but the PvE part has really fallen behind, so we had to make a move. 9) Last question! What are your hopes for Perpetuum as we move through 2011? The team has set some ambitious goals for itself but what would you like to look back on in 2012 if we get an interview a year from now? In 2012 (unless the Mayans were right) I'd like to tell you that our player-built structures and terraforming expansion was a great success and gave a huge boost to what you can do and aim for in the game. I'd like to see players feel like they have a second home in the game to which they can always happily return. I would like to thank Zoom personally for taking the time out to complete my interview questions and I really hope that at some point in the future we can get one of the DEVs onto the podcast for an open discussion about topics you want to hear about.

Source: http://www.perpetuum-intelligence.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=37