Jita Park Speakers Corner

The Mittani,

As Chairman of the CSM and King of Space, you must get many letters from irate pubbie constituents. Can you please publish a blog of the most entertaining complaints you have received? I am particularly interested in reading letters written in-character by Very Serious Roleplayers. Also any letters threatening legal action.

Sincerely,
Nubs McIbis, Concerned Voter

Any politician when asked 'will you stand for re-election', no matter what their intentions, will always be advised by his or her sleezie advisors to say yes!!- lest the politician seems lacking in staying power or committment.

Mittani -You are very good at this sh*t and have done well for us all in the last year. Thank you. Not read anywhere that you intend to stand down, however I may be mistaken. The question many will be asking is this: Will you say now that you intend to stand again for the CSM?

also BTW - Are you gaye?? Or do you just like the look?

I wrote this to a reader of this thread who liked my post on the previous page:

"The only way to get a foothold in null these days (which I'm not entirely opposed of) is to align yourself to a powerbloc that has a set of interests you and your friends can relate to.

Null sec alliances are not your friends. However, building bonds with alliances in null can help build relationships that can last years. These relationships create content for members and with current game mechanics, content + members logging on = win.

If you're able to surround yourself with people who share similar interests, you're likely to have more content for you and your friends to enjoy.

Young/New alliances have an open door to nullsec. However, nullsec is comprised of empires, just as high sec is, where aligning yourself allows for the perks. In high sec or low, you can do missions which get you hated by other factions and liked by the ones you work for. Null sec is no different where you need to use actual person to person diplomacy and not just train an in-game skill to succeed."

EVE has never been a game where the smaller or weak can get an advantage. It does have the ability for the small and strong to, however the alliances who are small and strong (militarily) are few and far between. With my experience thus far in null sec, I've been aligned with many power blocs. Some I've had fun, others I've absolutely hated. The thing is that I understand is current mechanics prohibit small entities to gain an advantage in sovereign null space and I don't see this changing any time soon without CCP intervention and in a sandbox, you'll lose players as the ability to create empires is important to some while tearing them down is important to others. Not only that, but some entities band together for the sole purpose to stop new power blocs from forming. In all,I don't see this as "bad". The successful blocs aren't opposed to new people coming on board, provided you're capable of not being dead weight and bring something of value to the table.

Where was that keen eye when, over a year ago, someone in Goonchat wrote "Hey, Mittens, you should run for the CSM."



Kidding. You've been a pretty good King of Space.

That was sort of a holding action on the part of CSM6, and our first major battle.

First of all, the very idea that bridges were 'safe' was something only a fool believes in. As we've seen though, until CSM6 took office, many foolish ideas about nullsec were espoused. As anyone who lives in null knows, you can camp a bridge with a dictor or hictor simply by parking your bubbler 300km off the bridge in line with the other bridge, safely outside of the range of any pos-guns.

So there was a lot of howling from 'small gang pvp experts' who have never run a bridge network that had no clue how to interdict bridges despite their 'expertise'; these are the sort of rabble that clog up forums like Failheap. They were pathetic, but they made a lot of noise and so our 'start point' of negotiations in CSM6 was from CSM5's laughably uninformed 'removing bridges would be fine' idea.

Since our start point was mired in ignorance, going from "remove bridges" to "one bridge per system plus a 300% fuel bay buff" is a success. Now the simpletons who never figured out how to camp a bridge with a dictor 300km off a pos can be on a gate instead, which is a lot easier and more obvious than a in-situ cloaking bridge-camp.

Did I include enough dismissive contempt for the 'remove bridges' wretches in this post? I can probably add more if needed.

Answer thy good gentleman's query, scoundrel! A pox upon your protestant soul!

I care more about balanced game mechanics than the 'coherence of the universe', since not many of my constituents pay attention to EVE's schizophrenic fluff anyway. Because of this, I'm not too interested in relating the pricing of paint vis a vis actual ingame 'fluff' paint value.

I don't know what 'players of a subscription based MMO' expect in an industry shifting from subs from microtransactions. I don't really give a crap about what they price vanity items so long as pay-to-win never shows up in EVE. The $70 monocle was stupid and doomed the NeX to failure, but my constituents are mostly nullsec warriors who don't care about fashion. I'd prefer their pricing strategy to be actually successful so CCP stops firing their employees, though.



A solo player finds a game designed to be played in a group tedious and boring? Quick, let's redesign the social game to accommodate him!

Go play X3. It's a much better singleplayer space game than 'solo EVE'.



Sounds like a trivial semantic distinction between vague abstractions, and thus meaningless.



I don't go there often. The Assembly Hall has the odd good idea in it, but I think it should be merged with 'Features and Ideas'. The AH subforum is a relic of the first couple of CSMs when the CSM was considered a parliamentary organization rather than an advocacy group, and it deludes the players who go to the AH with the false hope that the CSM is like a 'space congress' where votes on proposals result in game changes being 'passed'. The CSM isn't parliamentary at all, which is why years worth of upvoted AH proposals rot on a backlog, ignored by CCP.



5. Something between "lol" and "suck my ****". Take your pick.

6. I got a minor in Ancient Law and learned Akkadian back in college. We studied the Amarna Letters which had a lot to do with discourse between Egypt, Mittani and Akkad. The name was cool so I named a Malkavian Elder in a WoD game 'The Mittani', and recyled the name when I came to EVE.

Since I believe you did not exude enough dismissive contempt in your last post on the subject:

The argument could be made that a space setting requires a strong sense of vast distances, and thus, in EVE, distances should matter a lot. Now, some would feel that this illusion is negatively impacted on by JBs (as well as by jump drives, jump clones and, not least, warp to zero). Due to these conveniences, treks from the fringe to jita are felt to have turned into trips, and power is much too easily projected across swathes of space.

I gather you do not share these feelings. What disadvantage do you feel has been removed by this development, aside from inconvenience? Wouldn't you say that locality and strategy have suffered from it?

Edit: thanks for your frank answers to my other post. Therein, it seems you use a limited view of your constituency as your null-sec voters. I think in other instances, you regard the whole of (at least the fundamentally sane) Eve playerdom as your constituents. What'll it be?

You can do your own research. There's a ton of threads related to this, including the comments in the supercap nerf blog itself.

Distributable/Incapacitated outposts in my opinion don't provide enough incentive for an attacking alliance to hit someone.

An idea I've been trying to push/develop is the activity in held space = reward. The more active a system is, the higher the resistances on the sov infrastructure thus increasing it's hp.

If an alliance decides to abandon it's space, the resistances drop, thus the EHP drops and making "cleanup" easier. However, current infrastructure would need an HP nerf.

When you're at Sov1 the HP is low enough that a fleet of 100 people can hit a system and reinforce it with battleships in < 30 minutes time. As it stands now, this is not possible due to the insane hp sov structures + stations have.

When we went to provi to hit a smaller alliance, they hid. This made creating fleets to go harass them dull and boring. Burning someone smaller to the ground should be fun and engaging. Keeping participation up to be involved with this activity should be enjoyable for the attacker but currently isn't as all you need to do as a defender is spam a station throughout your constellation. If you come under attack, hide for 2 weeks till the attackers leave.

Hiding behind the shield of HP shouldn't be a viable defense. I don't believe distributable outposts solve the problem.