Live Events Discussion

It happens, I do it sometimes because I speed read,and it was a wall of text but a necessary one, my post was more to make sure you saw that.

I also think that the fun part is that the Titan will be attractive to the 0.0 cartel minions on their KB so it has even more benefits then making travel easier.

One thing with Null is that hardly anything is "risk free". Even if you rat in a triple-warpstabbed ubertanked marauder in a cynojammed system, there may just be a dual-scram Arazu with a covert cyno and a black ops gang out for your killmail.

Similarily, fleets that engaged both forces put themselves at risk of an attack. As a member of one such fleet, I already mentioned that during our return home we were engaged by a BNI fleet twice our size. During the short lead-up to the engagement (read that: local spiking and gate flashing) we were told by our FC to "stay sharp, broadcast early and pay attention, don't be stupid or we'll all die". We managed to take advantage of our position on the gate and, if I remember things right, eliminate their fleet commander before he could coordinate his force and pull enough range to mitigate pulse laser damage.

There's always a bigger fish, or in this case fleet, that's largely disinterested in the smaller fish you're after but very interested in you. And believe me, CONCORD Bounty Payments weren't exactly high given a lot of people participated in each kill.

The amount of chat channels isn't really that big - considering most in our fleet had, besides local/corp/alliance/fleet a nice stack of intel channels (home, areas close to home, areas we're deployed to, areas we pass through and one or two we forgot to close). Add to that maybe some corp public channels, one or two private for you and a bunch of friends... it gets messy. If we go into out-of-game you have typical alliance comms. Peak for me would be when we were cooperating with both the HBC and CFC, rolling with 3 sets of forums + jabber + voice comms.

After that, the fact CCP dared to use Twitter to broadcast info is not really that much of an offense.

Guiding a herd of a thousand cats, with their legendary hatred to the sole notion of being herded is a tricky thing - even in "experienced" null coalitions, large fleets tend to trail stragglers that didn't align or crashed. Often they're picked off by opposing forces or opporutnists (who then laugh, "haha, look at that sheep domi/rokh/scorpion/mega").

TiDi being TiDi was probably predicted but not at the magnitude it occured. It's not a flawless system, while it makes things work well in situations that would result in crashes it does have certain charms. As it was mentioned earlier, gate jumping is known to cause it - slowing down travel while the fight rages on (or allowing faster travel while the fight is in tidi, depends on the circumstances). That said, if you're in a big damn fleet fight there's gonna be TiDi - no avoiding that.

And, yes, it was really fun on the side with guns. But it usually is, so I advise finding a fleet and doing your best to ensure you're the one doing the murderizing, it's really fun!

Oh, and since it was requested to be back, mandatory: HTFU!

.... Did CCP attend their own live event?

Who made it to Serpentis to fail and how in the almighty Jesus did they figure they would have "destroyed the target?" You don't have to play for very long to know that a nullsec gate camp will stop a fleet trickling in system. So we're really, honestly supposed to think CCP figured the nullsec alliances would ignore a bunch of highsec players flying PVE rigs and jump on the bandwagon?

Nobody should have thought that!

The gross incompetence of it all is that CCP is either outright lying or has absolutely no idea what their own game is like. Is that why the route went through a giant 0.0 warzone? We wanted to pick up a few nullsec alliances on the way through to join hands and skip down the road with the highseccers? For no rewards? And when you ran into a gatecamp, just let everyone jump through and, yeah, burn straight on through the gatecamp.

There was a guy I knew in high school, and he tended to be creepy. He would try his best, yet screw up every attempt to get into a relationship. He'd sit outside their houses, call and ask if they were at home since he saw their car in their driveway, pester them every chance he got, that sort of thing. And yet, despite the fact that everyone knows he was being creepy, was literally disgusting these girls, he never realized he was the problem. Obviously, these girls just didn't like nice guys.

I'm getting the same vibe here. CCP has itself to blame for essentially failing first grade dungeonmastering, yet just shrugged and said, "players failed to overcome my inadequacies and finish the campaign by themselves."

To be fair, I don't think they were being malicious, I just think they're grossly incompetent. If they, in any way, expected the players to destroy those objectives with the plan they had, they know less about the game than starting players do. There's a reason so many people were calling this FUBAR before they even knew where they were going.

I'm probably going to let my sub lapse whenever it does. The response confirmed exactly what I thought. CCP is completely clueless. I still don't know if they're really aware of why they failed and why people are angry at them.

Ah the venom just comes so easily. As you snipped my quote and admittedly it was long here is what you are commenting on so that you can read what it says:



'In that I mean' that in this event the "Kitchen Sink" fleet was trickled into the system whereby the Null Fleet picked the juiciest targets and insta-blapped them. I've watched the video on YouTube of the Null (I believe russian?) FC target calling and he states quite clearly "Don't worry about the bombers, I think we're the only ones who don't need to worry about the bombers here" or words to that effect. Think about that for a while...

I am not so naive to think that all or any part of Null is risk free, I'm not a resident and wouldn't claim so but from what I saw and heard Null Fleets were sat there just pot-shooting away at the "Event Fleet" without a care in the world. In fact the excitement was so great in that video the FC actually told people to shut-up, stop calling targets and just press F1. Must've been nerve-wracking...

And so take your HTFU and mix it with a STFU until you can actually look more closely than just surface level or reading what you want to read.

I didn't really find what I was hoping to find in the dev blog post mortem of the event. Most importantly what I was missing was the angle of taking an inherited audience from previous events, which was mostly high-sec people who aren't well versed in all things null-sec, and taking them into a null-sec event in a way that gives them a reasonable chance of success.
Taking the stance that people can choose to partake in the event or not doesn't work; you've inherited your audience and their expectations. Changing your format without managing those expectations first leads to angry people.
Plus, you could have your cake and eat it too if you designed your event such that even carebears have a function they can successfully complete while those more accustomed and willing to fight fleet battles do that portion of your event.

tldr; know your audience and their expectations and act accordingly.

P.S.: When CCP apologized after Incarna was poorly received, it showed character to do so. Apologizing isn't something to be avoided at all costs, it's a strength, not a weakness.

Epicurus, I think you're deluded.



For a company that systematically fails to deal with each and every crisis they face, they surely ask a lot of their customers.
So, we've got the lottery scandal, jita burning, somer blink, the TOS changes, and this, just off the top of my mind. Yet you say they've earned our support.

Nope, sorry. If I am to believe the dev blog, they're too incompetent to *play* this game, much less direct it.

Rest has already been said.

I think they might've expected us to rain on the pirate parade and literally kill everything flying instead of letting the pirates win.

EDIT: Yeah we also lost a few people that weren't in T2/T3 ships. Mostly ewar cruisers, definitely one Celestis and Arbitrator that managed to break out and warp off only to land in something way worse ;) Also in the initial fight a Maller and a Rupture later on.

Not any that are this large or have this scale. That's not a static state of affairs, though. Star Citizen is on the horizon, and That Company Which Shall Not Be Named are developing one.

This isn't really shooting themselves in the foot as much as walking out onto the pitch during a world cup semifinal where the other players are preparing to take the field, waving your hands to get attention, blowing their foot off with a shotgun, and then saying that they just wanted to see what happened and that things turned out in unanticipated ways.

Thoroughly disappointed in the CCP Dev Blog response to this. Others will nitpick their way through the post, but this was a cover-your-*ss post by a corporation (I know, I work in marketing for a 50k+ person service company).

The one ingredient missing is the acknowledgment of the frustration, anger, and disappointment thousands of customers experienced. It's PR 101 - the emotions won't be diffused and the issue resolved until people feel that their views/feelings are understood by the company. Without saying "we're sorry" or "we understand we've let some of you down" or even "we made mistakes that effected you", this comes across as a hollow restating (and in some cases, mis-stating) of facts already covered by players in this and other threads.

The part that got me was their comment about Empire capsuleers leaving the fleet when it was clear we were going into low/null sec. My own experience, and others based on forum posts, is that most people left when they had to make 15-20 jumps through high TDi and they perhaps didn't have 3 hours to spare.

The entire blog reeks of revisionism (rewriting history to make yourself look better and gloss over the negatives) and fails to address the very obvious trust issue that is apparent throught player posts about the event.

Companies can apologize. They can say sorry. Admit mistakes. Acknowledge a failure. Most do. All without risking bank-breaking lawsuits. An apology. A token reimbursement (zero value certificate or something). Anything to acknowledge the customer's viewpoint and leave them feeling treated fairly. It's what good companies, who care about their customers and public image, do when they screw up. It's Customer Support 101.

Did they address many of the questions players asked? Yes. Did they provide a summary of the event? Yes, though through rose-coloured glasses.

Did they address the underlying issues that caused hundreds of players to express outrage in the forums?
IMHO - not even close.

And as a long-time Eve player with multiple accounts (high, low, w, and null-based), I'm more disappointed in CCP than I was before the blog. It's not a rage-inducing disappointment. It's the sad, head-shaking disappointment you feel when you've spent years trying to help a drug-addicted friend through multiple rehabs and OD's, only to finally come to the realization that they're well-and-truly gone and nothing you can do will can help them help themselves.