Jita Park Speakers Corner

I want to go over the webhosts head? I have a personal vendetta? Sorry where are you getting any of this from? I think you're lost to delirium at this point.

Ripard made an argument against an entire group of players, except he was misinformed about who exactly these players even are and what they actually do and then used inflammatory comparisons to try and demonise them. That's simply a terrible way to approach any kind of issue, and not desirable for a CSM candidate.

No, my apologies for being rude. I was legitimately confused because you seemed to be answering questions in Ripard's CSM thread.

The more I think it about it... (I went back and read a little as much as I could tolerate) This whole debate about slavery reminds me of when Vice President Biden told a crowd of African Americans that Romney and Wallstreet was going to put them back in chains:

http://youtu.be/vYtEuuhFRPA

The republicans yelled and complained about being compared to slave owners and the talking heads on Fox news gnashed their teeth, but look how that campaign turned out. People moved on in a week and that wasn't a deciding issue in the election obviously.

Short of of a candidate saying that "Slavery was a great institution and the holocaust never happened, but if it did it would be awesome." (My girlfriend is Jewish and we take the holocaust seriously and holocaust denial pisses me off), you can't really make a big deal when they compare their opponents using such terminology to bad things.



I mean people on Fox news compare Obama to a certain Charlie Chaplin look a like dictator all the time and yet people still support that channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eF6vCv13bw

Yes, I did actually read the blog post in question. I have also read other blog posts that you have written.

The fact that you think that it is okay to use hateful language to "get people to talk" reflects a serious disconnect with the reality that these terrible experiences inflict on people. You are the one who said this in your interview. You said that it is okay to use things like sexual assault casually as a method to get people to talk.

I think you should not be trying to defend this inappropriate behaviour with the justification that since it gets people to talk then it is okay to say hateful and hurtful things. The fact that you didn't even address the issue and, instead, suggested that I didn't read the blog is telling.

Thank you for being very clear with how you stand on this.

They deserved it, and he only told the truth.

You just need to grow up and move on.

What about AFK cloaky camping. I'd like to know whether Ripard has any opinions on this.

Hello there!

I would like to name several situations that I feel are detrimental to the game. Give a solution and ask you for your stance on both. I do need answers to all the situations for my vote(s)

POS those three letters bring nightmares to just about anyone having the misfortune of having to operate one. The solution in the long term is obviously modular POS. Yet CCP seems to be backpedaling on implementing this despite the MANY benefits. What is your stance on the possibility of a near term bandage of a form of player POS that is only designed to be the equilivant of a Secure Container for ships until modular POS is ready?

Overpowered passive cloaking. It is now to the point where people are now beyond AFK cloaking but running Twitch.tv streams of enemy stations and systems! Would you support balancing cloaking to punish those who go AFK (Eventually able to be scanned down for decloak) while maintaining the benefits to people actively cloaking (Remaining at their keyboard)

Lack of Ring Mining. Again with the CCP backpedaling despite the many benefits for nullsec and other areas for the game. What is your stand on the crap that is moon mining?

The silly push by some in the community to end or delay "Local" or any effective means for those in a nullsec system to determine if a hostile or unknown is in system in them. This obviously needs no solution but I want your thoughts.

The horrible state of missions in hisec. The solution in my opinion is a complete rewrite to allow for a more incursion like approach that rewards those who want to train up logistic frigs and cruisers or be a specific role in a fleet. Also providing a way for newer players to experience group play in EVE.

Incursion suckage. With the nerfs to Incursions fleets have slowed to a trickle and it was sad to see CCP willing to spend more development time nerfing entire expansions instead of doing what was right being making other aspects of EVE better. Modular POS and Ring mining need dev time sooner so I will admit this ought to be looked at later however I wanted to get your views on them and have this to be some context to the next aspect of Logi.

Logi suckage. Logis do not have the tools to do their job. They need to be able to tell who is locked and taking damage and in large fleets the watchlist can't handle that leading to dependence on broadcasts that most of EVE seems to not know or refuse to use right. Look at any average HQ incursion fleet where people don't broadcast right stressing out logi or in fleet fights where following FCs orders makes it harder to broadcast properly. A solution is a logi only screen that is completely configurable to show who is taking the most DPS and who has the most locks in fleet.

Logi Suckage #2 Reps don't get you on mails? Wut? Solution obviously is to have repping those in fleet land you on killmails generated from fleet.

Yeah, you raise a good point. Still, sooner or later, whatever solution CCP is going to come up with is going to have to include the docking mechanic, for things like contracts and station trades. I know they want to incorporate docking into their POS revamp.

The words they used were "lurkers", "enablers", and "instigators". That said, I look forward to having CCP Unifex and CCP Seagull explain these words to me, because I think they've done a pretty poor job of it so far. In particular, Seagull says she thinks there are only about 2000 instigators in EVE Online. That strikes me a bit like Tom Watson Sr saying he saw a world market for maybe five computers.

My inclination is to define the terms more broadly than she did, but maybe she's got something in mind that only came out in the NDA'ed part of the session, or maybe it just wasn't explained clearly. Because I see a whole lot more than 2000 instigators in this game. To me, every small gang FC that takes a ten-man fleet out is an instigator on a small scale, and tools ought to be created to help them, too. In general, how I'd define the terms: Lurkers consume content. Instigators create content. And enablers make content possible. But again, maybe I'm just defining the terms too broadly and Seagull will set me straight. We'll see. Good question! Sorry I missed it, so thanks for reposting it.

So you see the space for its potential to make ISK. That's fair. But wouldn't CCP say that some regions of space should be worse than others, and if you don't like it, move? That sure seems to be the tack they're taking. While in general, I agree with this tack in practice it seems to be backfiring...

You've hit on one of the biggest reasons I want to be on the CSM. It's very clear from what CCP Unifex says in the minutes that he wants to greatly expand the audience of EVE Online. And to his credit, he wants to do it without taking away from what EVE Online is. I want to be there to keep them from making silly decisions while on that road.

So the direct answer to your first question is "no", whatever plans they have should not cater to new players at the expense of the soul of the game. It's gonna be a very difficult line to walk, but I believe the game can be made less complex for new players without hurting the fundamentals. Things like attributes, for instance: what do they add to the game? Very little. Yet choosing their character's attributes are one of the very first things we expect a new player to do before they have even the first clue what the importance of them are. They should either be trashed entirely (and we should all train at a flat 2500 or so SP per hour) or at least they should be set advantageously for a new player for their first few months so they don't have to worry about them. I think there are a half-dozen things like that that can be eliminated entirely from or muted within the early game, not take anything away from the vets, and still make EVE easier to learn.

That said, my answer to your second question is an unreserved "yes". I desperately want EVE to break out of this niche that it's in. More players in New Eden helps every single EVE player, no matter what your play style. It's more targets for everyone, more buyers for everyone, more sellers for everyone, more competition for everything. There's not really any downside to having 175,000 players logged into the game instead of 35,000, except that CCP would have to buy some mainframe-class servers and decide where to store all the money. At worst, they might have to adjust some spawn rates here and there.

I think it's a perfectly valid way of playing the game. I've heard about various ways of nerfing this play-style (including fuel for cloaks, for instance) and I don't really agree with any of them. I think AFK camping is fine the way it is. If I had the power to add a mod that affected this play style, though, it'd be a smartbomb that decloaked ships in its area of effect. I think it'd add some interesting variables to the game.

Yes. I'll be posting frequently in both places. That said, I'll probably post "official" stuff on my blog, with pointers to those blog posts here, on Scrapheap, and on Twitter, the same way Seleene did as Chair (though much more frequently).

As I've also stated, I'll also communicate through CSM Town Halls (which I believe there should be six of during CSM8's term) and I'd like to see a monthly text chat CSM meeting where we debate various submissions into the F&I threads, plus ideas brought by CSM members and other player suggestions. Then I'd make the text of those meetings public somewhere. I also have a very vague idea about co-opting Teadaze's old CSM database, though I'd probably co-opt it into the EVE wiki rather than try to host it somewhere.

Wow, Endeavour Starfleet, that's quite a list. Little questions first in one block since CCP will only let me quote you five times:

AFK cloaking: see above. I don't see anything wrong with this mechanic.

Local: I wrote a whole blog post on this one. Short version: what we have now ain't broke. Don't try to fix it.

Logis on mails: I agree. If -- for instance -- I'm Suspect flagging right next to the guy shooting the guns, and taking the same risks I should get the same reward of KMs as the guy shooting the guns. If I rep a guy or send him cap, I get on his KMs. End of story. The hard part would be how to code it.

Making logi easier: this one, though, I disagree with you. The current system is working. You have a watch list intended for more important, "squishier" targets. Use it! Everyone else needs to broadcast. If they don't brodcast, they die and hopefully they'll learn to broadcast next time. If you're just going to save their butt despite their lack of broadcasting, they're not going to learn how to play this game.

I think there are other ways that CCP can approach this issue. What I've suggested on my blog is that CCP just accept that there's going to be an overlap period between modular POSes and the current POSes, probably an overlap lasting a full year. I'd just accept that, and go ahead and start coding small pieces of the new POSes and release each piece one at a time. A possible first thing for the new POSes to give you is the ability to dock, store and trade ships and a small hangar for items, do item exchange contracts, and that's it. Give it the same timers as a POCO and get it out into the wild. Then expand it slowly over two or even three expansions gradually taking more and more stuff away from the current POSes (and deciding how you really want timers to work) until the new POSes can do it all. And only then delete the current POS code. Forget trying to do everything in one go.

I've written a dozen blog posts on this one. Moon mining needs to go away and be replaced with a bottoms up alliance income stream and associated bottoms up sovereignty system. How we get there, I don't much care as long as the bottoms up income stream is a conflict driver. I've suggested a tug-of-war sovereignty system as an alternative, too. Ring mining is also probably as good as the other solutions suggested (such as hiding moon goo in the existing belts), though if we go ring mining, then I'd want mining ships to have to siege to do it. It's too easy to protect mining ops today.

At the end of the day, moons provide two things: an alliance income source, and a conflict source. There's lots of ways of providing those things to the game without an enormous passive ISK dispenser.

In general, I agree with this approach. But there should still be a place for EVE's solo players to make a decent living, too. Some people just want to play this game casually and solo and I think the game should continue to let them.

I agree with this as well. Some incursion nerfs were needed, but CCP took it way too far, inflicting the game's first quadruple nerf. They nearly killed the incursion community as a result and I think they realize it. Fortunately, the community appears to be recovering though a lot of work remains to be done in this space.