Jita Park Speakers Corner

Mr. Chairman,
How do you get so many kills per match in World of Tanks? I noticed you getting 4-6 kills per match. What is your strategy? Do you hang near the base and pick people off as they approach? Or do you have a favorite sniping position for each map? Is there anything CCP could learn from other indie companies like Wargaming.net?

I'm not really a fleet composition expert, I'll just go with whatever my FCs tell me once the stats settle down. The Tornado looks interesting.

I don't think you're going to see fleet comps revolving around the t3s often, as they presently are set up, because their tanks are so weak. Most null warfleets involve significant amount of logistics repping, and that will only matter more in a TiDi environment. But who knows - I'm a spy guy and a political leader, not a EFT wizard.

Not only is this a bad analogy, it ignores the overarching point of risk/reward imbalance in 0.0. Nullsec, as the riskiest territory, should offer the most profits from localized production. You also don't know what you're talking about, if you think that null has the 'most profitable resources' at its hands - technetium isn't exclusive to nullsec, and beyond that just about everything in null is less profitable than grinding L4s with a Tengu bot, thanks to Greyscale's anomaly nerf.

Null is little more than a high-risk novelty zone at the moment for people who like combat and feel a need to see their alliance's name on a map. That's bad for EVE, as we've seen in the last year or so.

Indeed, death to all supercaps. Supercaps are stupid ships that should never have been added to the game, and the best way to balance them is to find a completely noncombat role for the things, taking them off the battlefield entirely.

Sadly, I'll have to settle for several incremental nerfs, which is much easier to implement than an across-the-board re-imagining of their roles.

I haven't seen a subs chart since the May Summit, though we saw loss numbers at the June Summit. I'd be pretty curious to see a full graph in December to see Exactly How Bad Things Got. (mental note: ask xhagen about this)

I will refrain from predicting CCP's future course until the summit. I have heard some encouraging things, but we always hear encouraging noises; I need to get some of the principals drunk and watch their body language like a hawk and listen to their tones and how they pause awkwardly when I ask a question they can't answer, etc etc. There's a whole host of social information that you flat out cannot get until you can talk to someone face to face in an informal context.

An example: "So, did X person get demoted, or did they step down willingly?" You don't expect an actual /answer/ to this question - but the way they react to the question and how they choose to back away from it usually tells you everything you wanted to know and then some.

This nuance is partially why CSMing can be frustrating, as there's a lot of near-autistic EVE players for whom the concept of social nuance might as well be an alien language.

Anyway, to me, the connection between war and murder and EVE's success is clear. The major 'interest' peaks of EVE have been Istvaan and GHSC pulling off the first major heist and having it covered in PC Gamer, and later the three year genocidal drama of the Great War, which got a ton of repeated press. You don't have people signing up to EVE and saying 'yeah i heard i could mine rocks for hours in hisec in EVE so i came running!!!!'.

The question is if the higher-ups understand this. I don't doubt that Soundwave 'gets it', but he's not management; we have seen repeatedly that CCP goes off-course when upper management gets ~visions~, like Tyrannis or Incarna.

Short answer: vOv we'll see!

Ask me again with an actual character rather than a throwaway NPC corp alt.

I'm in a similar mental place; most of my pvp these days is ganking or gatecamping or World of Tanks. I don't like waiting for hours on major fleet ops to fight a fight; I'm lazy. This is a common problem for veterans, who have been playing for ages - this is also why vets end up in cap ships, because you can play a game in another window until it's cyno time, and then you either fight or die or go back to playing in another window. Less 'schlepping'.

It's extremely controversial and the CSM is divided on it, but personally I'd like to see some kind of an arena or instanced PvP setup which would allow professionals with busy lives to log in, blow some dudes up, and log off. The actual mechanics of such a device don't interest me much - it could be a gladiatorial arena with spectators who can place bets, a 'combat simulator', an arranged 4v4 team game, whatever.

The macro-level issue is what concerns me: the fact that, as a PvPer, it's very hard to get a PvP experience within a short time of logging in. Missionrunners and miners can boot up EVE and begin slaving away at their PvE in moments, PvPers not so much.

One of the reasons you see EVE's PvP population in BF3, LoL/HoN and WoT is precisely that they allow us to get PvP fixes on demand. It sure would be nice if we could get an on-demand PvP experience involving spaceships, too.

However, some are hostile to the very idea of arenas or instanced combat or even 'quick PvP'. I haven't focused on this as a 'CSM Issue' because it doesn't much matter if we get on-demand PvP or not while the Sucking Chest Wounds need to be patched. Once the game is not being driven off a cliff hopefully I can step back and push for stuff like this.

If you gave me ultimate power over the fate of supercaps, I'd mash the delete button and remove all of them from the game entirely. They are dumb, one of the worst design decisions CCP has made. Mudflation is a basic concept in game design, and yet there were some devs who were ~shocked, shocked~ that we now have 50+ Titan fleets.

Actually, that's not true. I'd redesign them to have a completely noncombat role, since from a business perspective we're stuck with the accursed things. Titans could be bridges and leadership-bonus givers, sort of a mobile stargate/command nexus; Motherships could be more like 'Motherships' rather than supercarriers (a dumb name. a dumb ship. a dumb concept.) which act as mobile strategic bases with truly vast SMAs for fleet resupply.

Watching people with Raiden tickers cry about how 'Mittani got his way' with Crucible because of some minor EHP nerfs have no idea what they're talking about. If I had my way, supercaps wouldn't be a battlefield combat ship at all.

Death to all supercaps.

Marry all three of them, make it into an internet reality TV show, like Big Brother but with marriage and space-autocrats.

Thieves guild helps me steal everything in the Mage's Guild, then the Dark Brotherhood teaches me to kill all of them off.

Thought I would jump in here to point out that w-space has even more risks, in that the POS you are living out of can be completely destroyed, and all your stuff blown up or stolen. The reward is certainly higher than most other activities though.