Jita Park Speakers Corner

One often hears that there is no reason to leave the hi-sec 'bubble' as it has missions, wardecs, decent asteroids to mine, good manufacturing facilities etc.

Might it not be the case that if null-sec were to get decent manufacturing slots etc, that it might also become a self-contained 'bubble' in the Eve universe, with no need for the different 'bubbles' to interact?

I ask this, not because I do not think null-sec needs to be seriously buffed/overhauled, but because whatever is done, it needs to ensure that the different security levels need to interact as much as possible.

If I may ask Malcanis, how would you ensure that the interaction between the different security levels develop?

He gets my vote.

I don't have the time to put into 0.0 play but would like something more meaningful than missions and industry to do in high sec.

It is no larger secret that i almost always agree with you on the overarching theorem of this game. The abstract.

I would like to learn of your opinion on something very concrete though: Bottom-up economy.

You, like me and many other voices in the spatial chatter right now, are a champion of "bottom up economy" (Farms and fields etc.).

However, what is your perspective on the "warchest economy" or the financial balance of the ship classes in the game?

I've argued, more and more recently, that the most severe issue in EVE is ramping up to be the malbalance of economy, as CCP set out to re-balance more and more ship classes without attention to economy at all.

If i am a moderately high SP player today, in a moderately sized alliance, i can fly a larger Tech I hull even with Tech I fitting and meet the demands of most things in EVE at the moment. I can take my BC or BS and meet most PvE challenges or slip it into a 100-man fleet and be incredibly effective on the PvP-side at large, while effectively erasing the ISK factor. This makes number of pilots and size of ships scale arbitrarily, which is what drives the profileration of upscaling to Coalitions and Capitals, that later deadlock.

Obviously, going completely bottomed-out is not what most players in the game do... but that's where the "powerbase" lie that allow subsiding resources at a whim and still remain cost-effective. The powerbase lie in the bottom, where bottomed-out Subcapitals free up resources for accumulation of Supercapitals, or where bottomed-out PvE-ships free up resources for accumulation of PvP-ships, and so forth.

How do you see these reservations in light of the "bottom up perspective"?

Do a Tech I subcapital ship with Tech I fitting present the meaningful small-gang target we want it to be?

Do you see the implications of this when compared to taking risks at undermanned engagement?

Do you see the further implications of how this feed the up-scaling that ultimately lead us to the Supercapital deadlock?


Ultimately i would argue that this is a scaling-issue and a form of "handed-" or "placating" non-interactive perspective that both you and i are champions against. It's rooted in the inability to see that eg., Tech II Cruisers should not just be balanced to Cruisers, but also to larger ship classes. It interacts not only with Cruisers, but also with other classes that have a different financial scale. This is a perspective CCP have still not aknowledged despite allocating a fair amount resources to the current very ambitious re-balance initiative. It is also non-interactive in the sense that it stifles interaction between groups of different scales, when economy no longer provides a balanced resource-factor to volume.

They are "handed down" in the sense that it feels like it's ships designed for a specific player group or use. It's guided design meant to appease concerns within certain groups of players or styles of gameplay, without attention to how it's meant to fit in interactively with everything else (eg., encouraging new players to go out and risk small ships in small-scale PvP environments; as promoted by initiatives like Bring solo back; yet by application of any Malcanis' or Noisrevbus' law lead to long-term profileration of high-volume use: older players in larger gangs that stifle interaction).

I predicted that problem when BC3 were first revealed, i am following it's evolution now with the new Cruisers and i expect the same when it comes to the new non-tier balance of BC.

I am all for moving content from infrastructure to ships in space, but the importance of those ships is also an important question that is often overlooked in the "bottom up economy" discourse. Many ships are not important at all, in the same way that alot of infrastructure is not important, at all.

A bottom-up economy with imbalanced creation-to-destruction would presumtively render a similar situation to that of Tech today, where the structures holding the moons are tedious but relatively cost-free and thus risk-free in themselves.

What is your perspective on this?

... and how would you prioritize it next to more resource-heavy and time-consuming issues commonly brought up (such as POS-rework, SOV-infra rework and Ring Mining) or artificial, non-interactive or punitive restrictions to the scaling issue (such as Wormholes, Capital spool-up, mass-limiters, local removal and Super nerfs)?

With this perspective in mind, it's not too hard to understand why so much focus and attention constantly end up on Coalitions, Capitals and Infrastructure. Not only the self-perpetuating small-gang marginalizer, but the the self-perpetuating all-gang marginalizer since even among each conceptual grouping of the playerbase (eg., "small-gang roaming PvP") being handed down, there is little incentive to engage more of the same and we are discouraged to raise the stakes and risk more against a bottomed-out gang, especially if that gang comes with a numerical superiority you wish to bridge the gap to (in any other way than bringing a larger ship size, until you hit Supercapital scale).

You're seriously not on Twitter? A candidate who is not on Twitter is a candidate with no intention of communicating with the players.

It's a little early to be breaking my campaign promises. Suffice it to say that you have your notions and I have mine, and mine do not include Twitter. Nor am I going to have my own website. I will communicate with the players about EVE & the CSM right here on the EVE-O website, not require them to go hunting about over the internet.

I'm also against trying to force complex questions and concepts into a 140 character limit. If you want soundbite politics, you can look elsewhere.

You'd know if you didn't have a 2012 birthday.

As a tech geek from a simpler time, I want to personally thank you for this. I myself would argue that this is a key part of keeping communication with the playerbase simple and effective.

He's got twenty pages here - more than any other candidate so far, although he was one of the first to post - of him replying to questions. You could try not being disingenuous or making sweeping and absurd assertions every once in awhile, you know.

Twitter and its character limits are a huge barrier to actual non-one-liner communication. I'd take a forum presence over Twitter any day of the week.

Yes. It's entirely absurd to be on the forums and Twitter. You're so absurd, Mynnna. Every major candidate, but Malcanis, is so damned absurd.