CSM Campaigns

Re your second question: as it was, we were stood on and shoved-around by the major powers in 2006, and the disparity we faced back then was only one of being in cruisers while facing HACs and battleships. We didn’t succeed because of ability or ships: I suspect that the leadership and the resilient culture that saw us through would probably have had a chance today, too. But it would have been desperately hard, and we would have been faced with paying rent* or protection money to one of the hegemons. Not a glorious story.

I think that adding more, conventional K-Space systems would be inviting more renting by the same dominant blocs who would snap it up in a matter of days. I suggested on my blog that the solution was to make groups require less space: to allow for more dense occupation of space and to make it far harder to hold large tracts of space. I think that the Phoebe changes, although a trifle cart-before-horse in implementing the power projection changes before the profitable-nullsec changes, were at least a step in that direction.

*Technically we rented some belts in a system in Syndicate as it was!

I wish that I had put it this concisely!

It is easy for the established powers to take sov from younger powers. The most recent example I can cite is the recent PL vs HERO war, in which PL managed to take a half-dozen systems from us, threatened an important gateway system, and nearly aborted one of our supers. Now note that all that was them playing with us; if they really wanted to, they would've held a half-week bashathon and conquered all of Catch, driving out the several thousand active BRAVE players. Once they did, they could essentially control Catch without actually living there. They could just fall back to NPC NullSec and just show up for timers to dissuade us from recapturing Catch and essentially turn it into a ghost region.

Thought experiment: if PL, CFC, or NC. wanted to, they could form a marauding band of supers, smash into every younger NullSec coalition that couldn't fight back, drive them from sov they had occupied for several months, and immediately move on, leaving desolated NullSec in their wake. It is feasible the supergroups could depopulate vast swaths of NullSec (albeit not practical, because they could make more ISK from renting it out) without putting a dent in their own resources.

The chances of them falling into a Vietnam War-like situation, where a superior force takes expensive losses trying to conquer territory from inferior-but-persistent defenders, is very slim. It is far more likely the defenders in this situation take crippling ISK losses while a more-expensive attacking force takes almost none because the defenders can't break through their reps.

Here I will reference the December 5th battle for HED-GP, which in my opinion should be mandatory study for anyone interested in supers vs subcaps balance, or the power struggles between older and newer coalitions. There, PL's subcap fleet got wiped out, leaving a few dozen capitals & supers at the mercy of 800 bloodthirsty BRAVE defenders. BRAVE had enough firepower to wipe out the capitals' drones, effectively neutering them. In response, PL's capitals turtled up, repping each other. BRAVE couldn't break through the reps, so what followed was a 2-hour fight to keep PL's supers tackled while we batphoned Black Legion to bring enough firepower to crack through their reps. In the end, we only managed to kill 1 super before NC warped in its own group of supers to reinforce PL's fleet, once again making them nigh-unbreakable.

Actually, Endie, I would like to hear your thoughts on that Battle for HED-GP, since it is (in my opinion) the best example of an all-out supers vs subcaps brawl in the game thus far.

In addition, what other fights over the past year do you think should be studied by the CSM?

Isn't that what battleships are meant to be? Well, perhaps could be; I know they've fallen out of favor in the current meta, and it'd be nice to give them a bit more love.

But there is still the underlying problem of breaking through capital reps. The biggest issue with supers isn't the DPS, it's the reps, because once you reach a critical mass of supers repping each other you can survive forever against most fleets. (Players will argue capacitor draining is the solution to that, but since you can install Capital-grade remote cap transmitters that is no longer a problem once you reach a critical mass as well.) We'd need to make it so if you field a group of X supers, you could still lose a few to a slightly inferior force, rather than forcing your opponent to bring X+10 supers just to put a dent in your reps, but that would probably require redoing reps entirely.

Sadly, the only experience I have with capitals is on the frustrating receiving end, so I mainly know them as these nigh-unstoppable juggernauts rather than being familiar with what weaknesses they already have.

You should have seen some of the things that were said about Goonswarm when they were at a similar stage in their evolution.

Endie, I've asked this question of other candidates so I feel its only fair to ask you.

As someone who hails from a community that lauds itself as pro-newbie with its members and developed its own newbie education program internally, what are your thoughts on the New Player Experience in EVE in general? What do you think can be improved upon and adjusted to better incentivize players into subscribing etc.?

One point of contention I have with it is, it does a very poor job introducing and preparing players for the concept of permanent loss when undocked and attacked by other players (or when their ship is destroyed by NPCs). There is also the problem regularly stated that a new player "has no clue what there is to do" when starting out. It could be said this is because the "sandbox gameplay" doesn't open up for the player until several hours into the game and beginners tutorial is completed.

That being said, the New Player Experience does get rid of the people who are not prepared to find other games to play while waiting around for Eve to let them have fun. You cannot get a more realistic training experience for Eve than that.

I think that vastly accelerated training for the first few hours and days of the character's existence might be one aspect of it (this has been done before with implants), but I think that there is a need for a more guided and rewarding new player experience, and one that occurs somewhere that the rest of us cannot get at them: the equivalent of other games' "Newbie Zones".

I don't know if that's really an issue; Mauluses can be trained extremely quickly as-is.

The most egregious part of new player skills to me is that you need to wait 6 hours to train into MWD, which is one of the most basic modules to me. It also requires knowing how useful it is and exactly what to train into, which isn't apparent to newbros. I wonder if it would be more useful to just let newbros fit neatly every T1 module from Minute 1.

So that's my question to you: Do you think newbros should be able to fit every T1 module from Minute 1? (I'll leave out extremely specialized modules like bomb launchers and triage. On the fence whether to include cloaking devices or not.)

I think you're grossly overestimating how much time it takes to train into those in the first place. Aside from specialized T1 modules like Gas Harvesters or Bomb Launchers or (perhaps) the Cloaking Device, I think it would only take 2-3 days to train all the skills necessary, which isn't that much of a difference... if you know which skill books to buy, which things are useful, which things aren't, etc. Automatically giving those skills to a newbro wouldn't give newbro organizations a larger mass of useful pilots than they already have because we already get them with a bit of advice & investment in skill books.

Note: Just realized that also lumped in T1 modules of more advanced weapons, like Heavy Launchers or Large Railguns, which was unintended. I meant the frigate-level versions of potential modules, like Shield Hardeners, Smartbombs, Weapon Upgrades, etc. The goal is to let new players fit a variant of every potential build off the bat, rather than giving them a partial toolbox and forcing them to look up what skills they need for modules they're not even sure they need.