Jita Park Speakers Corner

Fear not, they don't.

Be afraid: we do.

I disagree. Two examples of caring about the game as a whole... not for their big coalition.


CSM8 - August 2013 Summit Minutes

Trebor also noted a case where a player bought a character using approved methods, then got banned and hit with a huge ISK reversal that drained all his characters. Apparently the character he bought was being sold on after being used for RMT. It did
get resolved, but it took repeated petitions and a month. He suggested that such petitions be streamlined and more information / better tools should be made available to the GMs -- especially concerning character transfers.

Trebor: "As you get better about banning people, [the RMTers] are going to respond by laundering characters sooner, which means more innocent people are going to get caught in the crossfire."

Stillman noted that cases involving account ownership could be very complex.

Trebor replied that in this particular case, the victim actually got the seller to admit to the bad behavior in an in-game chat conversation, and it still took a long time to get resolved.




CSM8 - August 2013 Summit Minutes

Ali Aras said that the introduction to the game introduces you to the traditional PvE activities, but does not introduce you to the sandbox itself... Ali went back to her point, saying you learn all the basic mechanical things, but nothing in the NPE introduces you to or prepares you for interpersonal engagement. Even if someone is a solo lone wolf person, if they're doing something in the sandbox, that'll be more interesting than just interacting with a red plus.

The CSM called this the "social wall", that someone's coming through or not getting through.

The thing is that you just say that to sound edgy and cynical, when you actually know nothing.

Please feel free to disprove my assertion.

Please feel free to prove this assertion. (see, look. I can post with zero content like a CSM too!)

If you want some good examples of bias among CSM members, and them being completely utterly useless except to progress the agendas of the alliances/coalitions they work for, then all you have to do is read the minutes or watch their activity.

Ali Aras and Mynnna are the most obvious about it in terms of bias.

A CSM named Malcanis is most obvious about being completely useless. Known for posting with zero content, did not attend CSM summit or participate in any way.

Well, I am quite interested to know what does the CSM think of this blog entry by Ripard Teg:

Another way of saying 'never'

Should not be a surprise if I said that I see the issue way bleaker than him, but it's been interesting to learn that he starts doubting about the Hallelujah Plan, at least in terms of breaking the stagnation. Welcome to the club.

Stagnation is a transverse issue that spans through many demographics and content, and transverse issues can't be fixed with focused solutions. The Hallelujah Plan is one hell of a focused solution (your details sure are better than mine) but I guess that most CSM would concur that it is not meant to fix the game for everyone, rather to fix the game for just a small minority.

And so, I miss to see an effort to fix the width of the stagnation. Not surprisingly, I used to hope that avatar gameplay could be such a "a litte bit for everyone" transverse feature, but now that avatar content is out of the table and probably out of the client, I wonder wether CCP haves a plan to deal with stagnation.

What does the CSM think of this issue? Is stagnation good or bad? It's going to move up or down? Is it being dealt by CCP or don't?

A trivial answer: the default state for a 10 year old MMO is "shut down, maybe a few unofficial private servers running somewhere". Compared to that, stagnating at around half a million subscriptions and and average of 33k characters logged in at any one time on TQ (plus an unknown number on Serenity, probably in the 5-7.5k range) looks pretty good.

We could question whether it is necessary for EVE to grow much larger. Instinctively of course we want our chosen hobby to be successful and popular, but do we need it? What do we, the players, get from it exactly? That's a harder question to answer.

With respect to Ripard's excellent article a number of thoughts occurred to me in response. The main one is this: EVE is qualitatively different to other MMOs in that there are a very large number of people who are interested in what happens within the game (as Ripard mentions). In comparison, when was the last time that you say an unironic article about something that happened in SW:TOR or Runequest or WoW. I'm going to go with "never". No one who doesn't play those games gives the tiniest of dambs that someone completed a raid 30 seconds faster than the previous record or whatever.

In comparison, EVE has a large audience of people who are fascinated with what happens in game, and I'm pretty sure that this audience is larger than the number of people who are making those things happen. No one cares about what Empire Mission Runner #46,184 does unless he appears as the victim in an unusually spectacular gank, because he's not doing anything different that can be done in dozens of other MMOs. They care about what the big coalitions do, the space-politics, the wars, the treachery and alliances and the metagame; they care about the truly ingenious scammers and corp thieves, the social engineers and so forth. They care about the unique and dramatic player interactions that are only found in EVE.

The thing is that being one of these happeners, these movers and shakers, takes a lot of talent (for want of a better word), and also the time and the willingness to actually commit to do so. And that's a pretty small subset. It may be that pretty much all the people who are (1) interested in EVE and (2) have that talent/motivation are playing it already. Obviously there's some turnover as players "retire" and fresh young talent joins, but I think it's quite likely that the available players are pretty much fully employed.

In that case, there is an obvious opportunity for CCP to increase the size of the EVE business. And that is to focus not on increasing the number of "happening" players, but on developing and monetising EVE as consumable media - comics, fiction, anime, mini-series, figures, streaming big battles, interviewing perpatrators of spectacular crimes, etc. In short, to start mining that halo of "rather read about it than play it" for money directly, rather than trying to square the circle of getting sub money out of people who don't actually want to play EVE.

Of course, as you will immediately realise that also has some pretty dramatic implications for what direction EVE the game will take.

And that's the conclusion I'm leading up to. In my opinion EVE is stagnating because for the last half decade for so, CCP has been trying to have their cake and eat it. Rather than commiting to a direction for EVE and developing towards it, they've been trying to tell one story to Empire Mission Runner #46,184 and another story to the pirates who want to gank his officer-fitted Golem. They've been trying to develop the narrative of the dark, deadly, dramatic, player driven universe while at the same time they've been unable to resist trying to get some of that "but don't want to play it" money into their wallets by making it more and more possible to play EVE without actually playing it. (ie: by playing WoW in space).

So it's quite possible that CCP would be better off with a smaller, better focused player base that generates lots of exciting, monetisable media content and doesn't care a fig for expensive-to-develop PvE content. Or it may be that the commercial future lies in converting those millions of departing WoW players into WoW-in-space players. But just as it's rather difficult to get parents to bring their kids to a themepark that's advertised as having lots of pedophiles and pickpockets, it's also going to be difficult for CCP to grow EVE by trying to do both.

csms should not discuss any relevant or topical issues

apparently, even mentioning a ship class is an indisputable example of bias

When you do a bit of reading around and simply discover that each and every CSM is only arguing for the best interests of their own coalition/group -- rather than the game as a whole, these types of "mentions" carry a lot more weight.

He didn't ask about some other random ship, that is commonly used by most of the playerbase. Or even some other ship that is not commonly used, and needs help because it sucks -- like the Deep Space Transport.

No -- he brought up supercapitals. Ships that have zero relevance to most of the playerbase, and have particular relevance to the power balance between large coalitions...One of which he happens to be in.

1) are you disputing that supercaps have zero relevance to most of the playerbase?

2) i have no idea why you didn't read my entire post, or reply to it

3) i don't understand your "CSM's playing eve online" comment or what it has to do with this discussion

Basically: post better please.