CSM Campaigns

I didn't get involved in that discussion because, while I sympathise with Dave's idea about starting the character off with sufficient skills for T1 ships, I'd prefer CCP procedurally granted individual skills in the course of the tutorial, pointing it out and saying "now you can use this module, now lets do that in your next mission". This grants a feeling of "earning it"; it means that it is not instant; and it means that the player has to do the tutorial to get these small-but-important boosts to new player ability, which will hopefully aid retention.

That said, Dave's idea would not be a huge issue, and I don't believe that the perennial bittervet fear of being swamped with newbies in mauluses is justified: for most of the history of the game, players started off with about 750,000 skill points, and could be in, for instance, a T1 ewar cruiser in a matter of hours if they chose the right starting build. The game did not collapse.

Regarding the Capstable discussion of CSM players' real identities, it is not relevant: CCP have decided to drop the need to publicise real identities and I welcome that (although my own name and information is easily found out and has been circulated in the past, and another senior member of Goonswarm suffered a Swatting attempt in the past couple of weeks). I heard nothing at all in that podcast that even began to form any valid "public interest" in the IRL identities of individuals that run for the CSM and, short of ensuring that Charles Manson or Abubakar Shekau cannot stand, I cannot imagine one, either.

what's your favourite anime?

Anime is cartoons.

works for me

Cap Stable's Lanctharus recently sat down with Endie for an Interview: http://capstable.net/2015/02/08/endie-von-posts/

It is your duty to make controversial statements now.

It may as well be your pleasure too.

My play for the PL/Habit vote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhvXST1Rc3g

That's a bad remix.

Hi Endie,

I've been looking into CSM candidates, and your interview, posts in this thread, and prior writings are incredibly impressive. I've meditated a lot on sov mechanics ever since running PFR through the sov meatgrinder after Phoebe launched, and everything you say echoes my (admittedly limited) experience.

Two questions, if only because I find the discussion fascinating: First, what aspects of Dominion sov do you think actually work, or even work well? Something that surprised me about PFR's misadventures in Etherium Reach and Scalding Pass was how much fun the timer system could occasionally be. I expected the entire thing to be a death march, but only most of it was - some nights mucking about with SBUs or sweating out the last few moments on a grind was actually kind of thrilling. I suspect that was mostly due to the small-scale nature of things though - there was never more than one super on the field - but I'm curious what (if any) aspects of the current system people with vastly more experience think might be worth salvaging.

Second, what do you think about the pacing of the changes - it's now more than three months after Phoebe we still have no concrete information about what comes next for sov. One of your blogs discuss a concern that jump drive nerfs being the stick without the carrot needed to make things work - something I agreed with at the time, and am getting more concerned about each day that passes without more news...

I agree, yes: I think that CCP were in "do something, do anything!" mode and that they brought in one element of a potential solution before the rest were even written-down, let alone on the table. From speaking to ex-employees of CCP I can tell you that the jump fatigue idea had been rattilng around for a very long time: I suspect that the clamour for action pushed them over the line to implementing it.

It's not a bad system in itself - I gave it a cautious welcome while suggesting that iteration would be needed - but making it harder to travel while leaving in place a system in which fights are still a long way away was rash, and I am confident that the initial bump in PvP stats has dissipated since then.

And to those CCP devs who have said to their customers (!) "don't complain that you are a long way from enemies when you blue everyone nearby" I would suggest that part of the job of game dev is to understand player nature and psychology, and not just to be good at balancing modules and ships. If you have a measure of success and prestige - holding sovereignty in the case of nullsec - then you cannot afford to be shocked and surprised and snarky when MMO players hit on the optimal approach to achieve the best "score" they can.

Don't blame the players: blame the game.