CSM Campaigns

Greetings fellow pilots!

My name is Toxic Yaken, and I want to represent Highsec for CSM XI.

I have been playing EVE Online for the better part of two years, almost entirely based in Highsec. I am a ganker, wardeccer, scammer, and former awoxer, and I make my living as such. At the moment I am flying with The Dickwad Squad, a small corporation in Rabble Alliance, and losing all my ships in the process has been my specialty.

The CSM is meant to connect the player base to CCP, and so I have been trying to do just that. Rather than only letting players come to me, I’ve been taking time to reach out to players to try and capture better opinions and ideas of issues facing Highsec residents. While I can’t make promises for change, these are some points that I am interested in raising or continuing in discussion with CCP and other members of the CSM:

New Player Experience

For players who take the time to try every career agent and see everything that EVE has to offer, the NPE is extremely PVE focused. I know that I and many others would like to see more early game training on concepts such as basic combat tactics, fittings, and how to use a d-scan. Providing career missions for new players to try PVP combat of some variation would be ideal.

Wars

There are quite a few problems with wars in general, and simply changing the cost to declare war on a corporation or alliance aren’t going to fix them. The biggest issue with wars is that a lot of Highsec corporations or alliances don’t want to fight. There are also a lot of corporations that have no reason to fight. There needs to be better incentives to combatting a war than weaponized boredom or dropping out of corporations and reforming an hour later. I know that some players are very adamant that they want to play the game a certain way and have no interest in learning how to PVP, and I think that those players will continue to struggle under any wardec system, but providing those who simply feel they cannot fight back with more options and incentives could help improve wars.

NPE: I’m repeating myself, but obviously providing those that are interested in learning PVP, fittings, and so on, early in their lives will at least have some idea of how to fight back.

Mercenaries: Mercenaries have been around for a long time, but a lot of them exist far above the possible incomes of newer players - create a board similar to corporate adverts for mercenaries so they can provide services, price points, where they primarily operate, and so on. This concept could be used for other services such as hauling as well.

Surrenders: Provide more surrender options for negotiation, such as a surrender cost in addition to a surrender offer, length of peacetime before any new wars can be declared, or even an exchange of assets.

Costs: I think that the cost of wardecs could use some review in the case of wardeccing smaller, newer players. I don’t want to see new players being farmed for kills and being scared out of the game. That said I don’t want to see new players being protected from PVP, because it’s a huge part of the game that they need to be aware of. Highsec isn’t safe.

Redefining Wars: Unless a corporation has structures in Highsec to defend or are confident in their PVP capabilities, there is usually little reason for them to turn out and fight a wardeccer. Steve Ronuken suggested the idea of attackers setting up structures to declare war that could be destroyed and end the war, but against large mercenary and wardec corporations I feel like smaller corporations would stand no real chance to destroy them under their noses. Similar to the idea of providing corporations with more beneficial structures worth defending, it still leaves a lot of smaller corporations who can’t afford them no reason to fight. I’m also interested in seeing more information about Citadels and how they might change living in Highsec and if if they might make wars more worth fighting.

Defender Incentives: Another avenue is to provide defenders with additional bonuses considering there is no real way to win a war as a defender. Some ideas include an increased insurance payout for lower SP characters to encourage defenders to actually turn out and fight, or rewarding the defender with the wardec fee if they come out of the war on top. There could also be an incentive given to corporations that promote longevity and activity in Highsec, so there is at least a reason not to disband a corporation at the moment’s notice of a wardec.

Missions

I’ve personally not spent a lot of time running missions, but at a recent EVEMeet, I was told that mission runners would love to see a greater variation of missions, (I guess you can get bored blowing up the same pirate or saving some scientists so many times) but also provide some form of scaling difficulties for missions based on how many players would enter a mission pocket, so that missions could be more challenging and fun to run in groups.

[Cont.]

Toxic and I have talked quite a bit about the changes he'd like to make to highsec. I like almost everything he has to say on the subject, and want to point out a few things about his platform:

- While his background is more to the "villain" side of things, he's interested in making highsec a more compelling experience for all involved. When people like us have run in the past, they've been accused of only wanting to make highsec friendlier to their specific playstyle. Toxic's ideas as I understand them are much broader than that.

- A lot of his focus is on creating more player-driven content in highsec, which is definitely in short supply.

- The changes we've discussed either have no impact on life outside highsec, or would benefit all players together. Of particular note is his model for adding Communities to the game: that system would be of great use to coalitions and regional organizations in null and w-space.

There is a lot i like in here i must agree.

But...there is Always a but :)

High sec shouldn't be safer, bumping is fine as it is. I can agree with that. The trouble I see is that high sec ganking is indeed a very low skill PvP. But when i see the people doing it they surely aint all low PvP skilled people.

My guess is that the high sec ganking is a sign of boredom of the player base. How can one really say its exiting to sit to kill a ship that will not defend and mostly is even at AP?

So not against the principle of ganking but think we need more (player driven) content in all secs to make live more interesting then shooting for 30 secs at a ship that flows in space. low sec should be more dangerous and zero even more....I am afraid that there are more care bears today there then in high sec:p

And then we can still kill a freighter or two in high sec to sharpen skills or have something to do when we are so drun^&', I mean distracted, that we better not fight a titan in low/zero :)

Regards,
Space

More Player-created content in High sec? Wasn't it important to get people out of High sec into areas of space where they can live out their visions and create their empires? So, what is it now?

You do not need to remove anything from High sec to make it more boring and less interesting than Low sec/Null sec as long as you add new things only to these areas. As long as CCP adds every single new mechanic of the game also to High sec, there will never be a drag pulling on players in High sec to venture out of the safer space to find new things to do, experience unknown mechanics and be able to use something that add activities/opportunities to your portfolio instead of mere small iterations on already known activities.

In my opinion, space lacks distinguishing characteristics, something that you can look forward to when you want to move on to other areas of space. For instance, when I want to have boring ISK grind there is virtually no difference between L4 running in High sec and anomaly running in most Null sec areas. Just a thought, but what is your opinion on freezing content additions to High sec and concentrate on other areas of space instead?

In my opinion, the best way to make it more enticing to leave highsec is to make people feel more connected to nullsec. I can wander around highsec all day every day and never know that nullsec exists unless local chat goes to it. If you start up a new account, make a character, and jump into the game without reading lore and all the rest first, you're dropped into highsec with little understanding of the existence of nullsec and the non-empire politics going on out there.

So how to draw players' attention to leaving empire? Build it into the lore. It should be in agent dialogs and corporation descriptions and on billboards and so on. Find ways to present the notion of leaving the relative safety to find your fortune. Make it feel like a gold rush into the wild west.

Thanks for the interview!

A few quick questions to Rabble Alliances First CSM candidate

1 What do you think could make wars more interesting to non predator types and something worth engaging in (obviously some people won't want to fight but I mean more groups like ours of which there are a few)

2 Villainy is important for without it we can't have hero's . But being a hero doesn't really pay the bills well. What kind of incentives could be offered to players for playing the Hero of Highsec and killing those evil -10's?

3 (Troll Question) Would my 'package' fit into your corp?

1 - It would be nice to see some sort of reward for Highsecers to stay active during war to some capacity, maybe even provide some corporate benefits if they can meet thresholds for activity in Highsec, similar to indexes in Null. If they manage to maintain X activity they get a day free of the war, shorten the overall length of the war, or something else of that nature. New feature ideas aside, players that don't want to hop into a combat ship can always try flying logisitics, scouting, spying, or stalking as well. Wars can have as many dimensions as you want to put into them, and you can make some fun out of it.

2 - I feel like you're alluding to some sort of FUNCTIONAL BOUNTY SYSTEM or something. Personally I'd also like to see FACPOL no longer chasing criminals so that players could do that themselves and provide standings/LP/isk for successfully destroying criminals in Highsec. The obvious flip side of that is that the payout can't be so excessive that players can kill their criminal characters with alts and reap insurance/criminal killing rewards that exceed the value of ships. Perhaps there could be some sort of diminishing returns for destroying the same character over and over to prevent that.

3 - Isn't your package that big thing I always see Cyclo flying around with? As far as I'm concerned it's already an 'honorary member.'

I am REALLY enjoying your ideas on bounty hunting!!!
I do have one idea for a mechanic that might make the system.... I dunno... work?
If we had a bounty mission agent this would solve 95% of all bounty scams that would happen. The mission agent gives you a particular target and if you manage to hunt them down perhaps you become able to collect the full bounty for the kill as well as some sweet LP and a bonus. These of course would have to be week long missions. The flip side is avoiding getting caught in hisec is rediculously easy for anyone who isnt a ganker. So this mechanic would mostly apply to catching gankers. I support this in conjunction with removing faction police so that the bounty and the bounty hunter have a meaningful fight and not just "pointed you, waiting for faction police now to do my job for me".

Thoughts?