Jita Park Speakers Corner

Dear All,

I started playing Eve a month or so ago, after the battle of Asakai. I'm a member of Brave Newbies, and I have exactly one (1) kill to my name. I don't fully understand what a CSM is. I have no expectation of winning the election, and will not vote for myself. I'm nevertheless throwing my hat in the ring for the hell of it.

Why do I want to be CSM?
To the extent that I do, it's because everyone trying to make the game friendlier to new players is really going "buff the thing I do, nerf the thing the other guy does". New players are not high sec mining in a hulk with 20 alts. They're getting killed in lowsec in fail fits, or running around getting bored of the PvE within about fifteen minutes.

What do I bring to the table?
As a manager in a foreign exchange company, I have years of experience getting unethical sociopaths to work together.

Who do I represent
I represent the guy who heard about the battle of Asakai, thought that sounded awesome, and was blown away by the depth of EVE, and occasionally posted on Facebook my shock that there was an entire skill tree for buying and selling things. I also represent the guy who was blown away by how the PvE missions were both incredibly boring, and failed utterly to prepare me for the PvP meat of the game (One mission was literally touching a bunch of beacons in order, with no rats. Come on.)

What changes do I represent?
My goal is to keep the depth of complexity of EVE, while making the game do a better job explaining itself to newer players. I want more detailed descriptions of what things are, that are useful to me. I want a new player to see a cool ship, go "I wanna fly that", and be able to figure out a skill plan on his own to do what he wants to do. I do not wish to make the game easier, but I wish to make it easier to learn the game we currently have.

More specifically:
- The info window of ships, weapons, etc, should have a "recommended skills" tab, giving you info on what skills are useful to have if you want to fly that ship, but are not strictly recommended.
- Early PvE missions should be rewritten to make them more interesting to play, and more useful as a teaching tool. They should more aggressively punish dumb moves, and teach players how to think in PvP. For instance, I would like mission rats to try to scam players out of ISK. And succeed, if the player's an idiot.
- The login screen should have a random tip on it for new players, which bittervets can simply ignore.

What do I mean to bittervets?
I have no intention of making the game simpler in an attempt to cater to noobs. I have a policy of "Less qq, more pew pew". Null sec is where more advanced and/or foolish players go. My attention to nullsec will be to address community concerns to make it more interesting and more fun to play. I will make sovereignty require investment to maintain, causing it to take more effort to hold large swaths of nullsec, and allowing borders to shift more fluidly. At the same time, I'll make sovereignty more rewarding, to make it something worth fighting over even in less important systems.


- All infrastructure in a system causes the sovereignty holder to gain a certain amount of "sovereignty" per hour, up to a cap. This excess sovereignty will make it take longer for someone else to claim a system. The flip side of this, is that systems with no investment will be much more vulnerable to being taken by another alliance, as claiming sov will take less base time.

- There will be more tactical installations that require holding sov to set up. For instance, automatic turrets can be placed around a stargate, to auto-attack anyone you have wardecced.

What about the great highsec mining debate, as put forward by people like the New Order?
I respect the right of players to AFK mine. I also respect the right of players to prevent others from AFK mining. However, bumping a guy infinitely while in an NPC corp so you can't be wardecced is stupid. Therefore, I will push for the introduction of a "Killdec", which is like a Wardec, but only applies to one person. Like a Wardec, a Killdec will take 24 hours to take effect (otherwise freighting anything through hisec would be near impossible). This will allow the miners and the anti-miners to resolve their differences in a fair, just, and pew pew manner.

This change also makes high sec a little bit more dangerous for big miners, but not affect anything for newbies, who won't be worth the expense of killdeccing. The killdec system will also act as an ISK sink, potentially allowing for the inclusion of more ISK faucets in Nullsec.

Edit: My current thoughts is this would literally be "Wardecs, but for one dude". It would have a 24 hour spin-up time, and last a week with option for renewal. It would also be cheaper. It would be completely worthless against some random freighter, but great for people who were constantly bumping heads.

Where do you stand on nerfing high sec/buffing null sec?
I am in favor of making null sec for interesting, and more profitable for individuals (big alliances seem to be doing fine). I don't want to force anyone out of high, but I'd like to entice them to the lower secs. I want Null Sec to have more things to fight over, because big fights like Asakai are the best advertisements. I want Titans dying more often.

In conclusion?
A vote for Aiden Lynch is a vote for documentation and lasers.

Clicked on Jita park saw Lynch and my first thought was "What candidate are we forming a Lynch mob for"

It's an Irish name. My Congressman is named Lynch



Wouldn't I just log off? A six hour window is good against botters, but even the carebeariest of carebears can do other things.

I was thinking of having it last a week, and be something like 25 million ISK



I was thinking of just making it kind of expensive (but less so than a full wardec), and having it not be worth it to killdec someone unless you had a significant grudge against them, the way miners and bumpers dislike each other. Amusing as the thought of Goonfleet killdeccing everyone in Jita individually is (and that's absolutely the kind of silliness I like to see), it should be expensive enough that even they can't make Jita effectively lowsec for weeks on end.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/What_is_the_CSM

Customer Service Manager (oh, that happens to make the acronym CSM. I bet that's totally not on purpose).

Basically, I have to read the forums fairly regularly (as well as various Eve sites), and make summaries of the best points and ideas the community has, as per my judgement which has been endorsed by the fact I would've been elected. I make pages in the wiki about the issues raised that I feel are valid and/or worth discussion.

I'm not paid for this work directly, but I do get a trip to Iceland to sit in meetings trying to keep people from quitting a video game, which is a step up from my normal job of sitting in meetings trying to keep people from quitting a customer support desk.

It is actually pretty much exactly like my current real life job as a manager, except nerdier/more interesting, and with the potential to be funnier.

Edit: It also requires my account to be at least 60 days old by the candidate approval period, which is just barely isn't, so I guess that point's a little moot.

I bet he'd do a better job of representing new player issues than certain other candidates who have run or are running on "new player issues".

I think you need to be new to to talk about being new. So this Aiden guy would be a good representative for new players. Every week he'll have five new player experience things to ***** about to CCP.

I can't remember half the stuff that bugged me back when I was new.

The risk/reward balances or lack thereof between various types of space are an important debate, but this right here does get overlooked far too often, yes.

The issue you may run into with that skill idea is, what do you do on a skill that's required for multiple things? Look at a cruiser or frigate skill, for example, and you get this, which is rather clunky in its own right... imagine if they tried to describe every ship in there as well! Or even worse, the very basic Electronics skill, which scrolls off the page without even displaying all the items and skills it unlocks at level 1! So, the Required For tab you mentioned (which if I'm not mistaken is a relatively new addition) is trying to do what you're describing, without going into information overload.

Still, that sort of thing is good insight. Poe is an absolute youngin' compared to me, if you think he has trouble remembering things that bugged him as a newbie, imagine now I feel... I've been playing for seven years!

Firstly, good luck with your campaign

I like your killdec idea but looking at your subsequent comment of a suggested charge of 25mil for a week, well that seems pretty cheap to me. In real terms it's the income of a couple of L4 missions, you also need to consider a mechanism to ensure that it's not used purely to grief or harass, so perhaps having it renewable isn't such a good idea.

It is a tricky one to balance and I do realise that you are looking to help new players, but there are malicious vets that would happily use this to grief new players and force them out of the game.

Don't get me wrong I do like the idea, I just think you need to refine it a bit further to ensure that it's not abused, because in Eve it's axiomatic that if it can be abused it will be abused.

I log on to EVE at 20:00 EVE time. I see someone I don't like. I purchase a killdec against them.

I log off of EVE at 23:00 EVE time. I go to bed. The killdec activates as I leave. That sucks, but I've got school/work in the morning, so I can't stay online for too long.

The killdec finishes at 05:00 EVE time. I'm still asleep.

I get home and log on again at 20:00 EVE time. I paid 10 million for nothing.

No, I think it needs at least 24 hours of duration if you're going to have the ramp-up times that long.

I don't consider have more ISK to be "succeeding", for one. I just bought some Plex because I couldn't be bothered. AFK Mining is also its own nerf, anyway. The more people who do it, the more low-end minerals are in the game, and the less valuable hisec minig is.

More generally, though, I don't think it's CCP's job to decide who's The Most Real EVE Player. If you think miners are a scourge, you should have the tools to deal with that yourself.

And to some extent, you have that. If Goonswarm/TEST were really super concerned about highsec mining, they could just get a fleet together and suicide AFK gank miners by the thousand in a single Veldsparnacht,. They have the bank to replace and fit many thousands of Catalysts. And if some numbers need to be tweaked to make ganking a little more attractive, then we can tweak them. But we don't need to upend half the game to deal with this.

I want miners and anti-miners to shoot at each other more often, but if a guy wants to AFK mine knowing that even in Hisec he'll lose a ship every week or so, I'm not going to stop him.