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Please don't allow Greyscale to hurt my lowsec Mr Soundwave sir, I love it so very much.

You didn't say it was a testbed.

But someone else tried to make it sound like you did in the minutes.

Seems like they win ;p


I don't think the plex grinding is going to go over well for a lot of reasons in null sec obviously. However, there are somethings to learn about sov control from FW "control".


Major things I'd like to see for sov control are just alternate methods of "take over" besides constant structure grinds. Yes, let a military option exist, but also others. ;p

Also, I think you need to have a 2 tiered social structure in null sec, especially with the advent of ring mining. I think you need to have a "citizen" level access, and then a "military/government" level of access. So the military doctrines can move around and take over whole populations of a region, without completely forcing logistical overhauls.

This will take a lot of course, but you're already seeming to have a few things on the table to make this happen.

A) Alliance refactoring - make "Real" alliances.

B) Sovereignty Redesign.

The state of EvE

Page 85
"Ytterbium wanted to hear some reasons why null sec was viewed as so dead."

I can say it pretty short: There is nothing at stake and there is nothing to hunt.
It is 50 people sitting on a Titan bridge with a bait ship running around.
"We killed a Hurricane or two with our 50 man fleet, how clever we are, what fun we achieve, come join us.".

Also as Seleene puts it on page 47:
"– everyone is so filthy rich that losses really don’t matter... The sense of loss has turned from ‘damn, now I have to go and mine to afford all this stuff again’ to ‘man, now I have to go to the market and spend money.’"

I have a few more observations:

We have broken the immersion because the ships are no longer valuable.
Loosing my first battleship in 0.0 really hurt. I had spent HOURS on saving up for it and it had just earned it self in.
Now was the time to reap the rewards but a 8.000 m/s vagabond ended that.

We have broken the danger of earning in 0.0.
Besides a lot of empire stuff being more profittable, it was at some point desided to move people out of the belts and into these anomalies.
This removed the prey of the small gangs and their impact and value as a tool of hurting enemies.
I have been both the hunter and the prey and undocking and go belt ratting was exciting but why run the risk when you can safely just go into an anomali and be protected by the scan mechanics.

We have broken the travel and feeling of space with Jump gates.
When I made my way into 0.0 it was in my brand new Caracal. What powers I had at my finger tips with a fine ship like that.
It was before jumpbridges and before warp to 0. Warp to 0 is an ok mechanism but jumpgates made travel effortless.
Titans are fine as a means of travel but when people jump give it a 30 sec cool down before they can target or move but can be shot at.

We broke fleets for the average player.
I know I "try to talk on other people behalf", however...
Super cap game has ruined a lot of the elements of warfare.
New players joining will find their way to 0.0 and then find they are completely useless unless they can sit in a super cap.
Greed (which used to be good) brought about the need to have an alt to keep the super capital active. It could be overlooked.
From a money perspective it also made sense to get the vets to use an extra alt or two for super capitals.
However CCP should have kept to batteships as the ship of the line and caps in general as something else entirely.
Instead Titans are the ship of the line and only a handfull of players can dedicate the time it takes to run.
Objections will arise about how many titans there are in game and I agree but it is still just a small handfull of players that own and are able to influence the game.
Imagine a cap that could only kill the upgrades in a system and make a system vulnerable but the final battle had to be played out in "regular ships".
The current solution "super Caps Online" indeed limit number of pilots and therefore lag but it is a race against time before everyone that have the money for a super alt will have one.

Why should an average player go fight in 0.0 when he wont make a difference unless he gets an alt and put him in a Super?
Why should an average player go hunting in 0.0 when there is no prey but people in anomalies who have way too much time to get safe?

EvE is not dying, it is just very different from what attracted me to it in the first place.
I would pay for a reset of the database (many did by going to the chinese server) and going back to the time around when Titans were introduced but without the titans and with the first speed nerf.
I want back to earning for a battleship for a week and then loosing it or killing someone who I know have invested a decent amount of time in it.

I dont have the answers and we cant remove the isk we all have in large quantities.
Still my observations can maybe help some designer or developer.
EvE currently is boring, it is stale, it is risk free and CCP is not sole to blame. We have also been driving for these "optimisations".

Oh my. That was a lot of words. Thanks to everyone involved for these.

Generally CCP seems to be on the right track but a few points got stuck in my mind for attention.

Ship rebalancing: Mostly a good guideline but the heavy missile changes are a bit worrisome. Changing a weapon because one hull (two if you count tengu with the right subsystem) overperforms seems a bit heavyhanded. Changing the launcher has to be timed correctly or you will end up having up to 3 ships with subpar performance as there are 4 ships that use them as the primary system and all of them will be rebalanced on their own wave. But the specifics are a topic for a thread of its own, not here.

Skillpoint remapping: Even if it is for new players only this is a Bad Thing. We've had enough of these threads for endless arguments for and against but in short: It removes consequence and history from your character, and it can give a false picture of the game if you can do that. And it can give more ammo for the annual / for a cost arguments when you have a system set up for that.

Mission nerf / difficulty rebalancing in highsec: Increase the challenge please if these are the only choices. These can be dualboxed while reading the interwebs. A good challenging content is always preferable over dull low-reward one.

Inties usable in lowsec: Even if it's for a few cycles, scrambling a cloaky can be critical for the gatecamp to succeed. The loss of traffic when more ships get caught vs promoting small-ship combat has to be researched with care. Scrambler / web inty with a few tornadoes will rise the entrance barier.

On the positive side the rest looks like they'll be great when they get implemented. POSes, contracts, crimewatch, sniping, NPE, UI, fitting improvements, effects...

As for the full transcript, it was a little longer than necessary. I could see it as a valuable addition for those meetings that require precision but for the entire thing it just balloons the length and less people will bother with it. Notification (combat): Fully transcribed wall of text hits you for 250 pages of damage.

FYI, Seleene, Hans, Aleks and I were on the TEN podcast talking and taking questions on the minutes. It is up in 2 parts, at:
http://tacticalentertainment.tv/archives/2310 and
http://tacticalentertainment.tv/archives/2313

I agree, especially since you can just find a quiet wh, drop a bubble, and have your "safe" arena fight.
If you wanted to have "safe" fun pvp, just talk to people and get it setup, it's not that hard.

Once and for all - FW AS A 0.0 TESTBED IS A RUNNING JOKE AMONGST CCP AND THE CSM.

I can't believe people are taking this seriously still. Every time this is mentioned in the minutes, it was with laughter and intense sarcasm.

Everyone needs to get over this, ASAP. We're six months past the initial quote that was taken out of context, and we still have people ranting about this, its ridiculous.

Also, Veshta - grow up. You continually complain the game isn't up to your satisfaction, but resort to base insults at the developers on a continual basis. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe these two might be related?

* Back to our regularly scheduled comments *

NO!!!!

Slapping a covert ops cloak on a ships is not a way to 'fix' it. Not only would it send that ship well beyond in the the over powered zone, it would hardly give it a role. There is far too much cloaking going on in this game to begin with. I would much rather see local gone and the black ops battleship have something special about it to give a small fleet a slight advantage over a larger fleet to enable it to do some damage to the blob or something.

Really tired of this 'slap a covert cloak on it to fix it' mentality.

Note to Ytterbium -

Upping the Brutix/Hyperion's active tanking bonus will do absolutely nothing to make people fly the ships more. Active local tanks aren't exactly FOTM.

I liked both Seleene and Soundwave's quotes on the problem with conflict drivers "Currently things are like a bunch of fat people fighting over how gets to eat first at the ‘all you can eat’ buffet, no one will starve, it is just the question of who is first in the line." and "it sounded like if everyone lived in complete misery in EVE, it would be a better game?" But I didn't see much evidence of CCP/CCP being prepared to look at making the misery necessary to get conflict moving again.

I generally liked the Starbase discussion, and especially the jump drive concept. Mobile bases for small raiding entities is something the game has needed for a very very long time.

I liked the CSM approach to UI / Unified inventory discussion. They did a good job of representing player concerns there.

Nullsec discussions were a bit depressing, mainly because it appears there is no will (resources) or imagination to actually do anything about the stasis and boring endgame.

Crimewatch stuff (for heavens sake just make it happen already.)

Wardec discussion was universally terrible - mainly due to lack of experience / bias on the part of CSM reps (though CCP side of things was generally pretty boring with a lack of ideas and vision for the wardec system)

Seems the paid allied deal was Two Steps while Karde/Hans wanted limited ally slots. In this respect seems that earlier reports of the CSM completely disagreeing with Soundwave's "solution" were false. Though it does appear that the "unlimited / paid" allies delivered by Inferno 1.1 melds the most unpopular aspects of both sides! Ah well, handled all this stuff previously in numerous other threads - best thing to be said about this section in the minutes is I know who I definitely won't be voting for in the next CSM elections.

On Faction Warfare - Soundwave wanting one size fits all plexes was poor, good to see it was argued against. In general though the discussion was decent, Hans did a fair job. Elise was terrible (as expected though, and should really stick to nullsec blobfest only feedback). Good stuff later on the FW UI improvements.

I had to laugh at Soundwave's comment about the FW feature only being live for a week so morale issues had to wait for more data after the knee-jerk agreement to nerf the heck out of wardec allies after the same period mind.

Surprisingly Two Step said something I agreed with on the bonus LP for pvp kills for the losing faction though. I to think that would be a good idea.

With regard to Soundwave's "dreamy idea" of non-aligned players being able to remove FW systems I have to say: please leave it alone. After the fiasco of the wardec function in Inferno 1.0 / 1.1 - I don't think Soundwave should have anything to do with the design on FW - leave it to Ytterbium.

Art discussion was okay - Kelduum was a dog for suggesting Aurum payment for corp logos on ships though.

Ship balance discussion was decent. On the whole I continue to be impressed by CCP Ytterbium.

Rest of it pretty reasonable.

***

Most disappointing aspect of the minutes for me is the way they show there seems to be relatively little actually on the table for the winter 2012 release with some very important things seeming to retreat into the misty distance of some time next year. These including the extremely vital issues of technetium, 0.0 stasis and even potentially crimewatch and lowsec boosting. I got the impression that core eve development still doesn't have that much manpower devoted to it and while CCP is doing a much better job of marketing the few assets they have on Eve this year there is still an unspoken impression of massive development priority elsewhere on non-core-eve projects.

Winter 2013 for ring mining seems ridiculously far in the future for such an important issue.

On the whole though.

Two Step and Trebor worked hard and while I don't have a great deal of time for some of Two Step's positions he is at least engaged. I thought everyone was pretty horrible on the wardec discussion so its difficult to single anyone out there - perhaps the blame does need to rest on Soundwave because he did seem to join two bad solutions together to make a super bad solution, but he certainly wasn't helped by short-sighted and selfish CSM feedback on the issue.

Hans tried pretty hard on FW issues (which almost makes up for my criticism of him on wardecs).

Seleene actually did a decent job as chair I think.

Still I can't shake the nagging feeling that whats in the pipeline for winter is not actually that much or particularly exciting. Seleene said it best in the opening section about waiting for the "money shot". I didn't really see it.

Perhaps the starbase feature will be absolutely incredible and change a whole lot of gameplay at various levels of eve and make it all worth while. Perhaps. But after seeing "war" trumpeted as the centerpiece for Inferno only to be represented by increased dec fees and a nerfed ally system I'm a bit doubtful.

Still, it was good to see all this detail end of the day, and it will definitely help people to make a more informed choice of who to vote for in the next CSM elections. So that's a positive. Shame really we can't elect who from CCP we'd like to make chief designer at the same time /joking.