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I can’t believe I am writing this. I had hoped that CCP SoniClover had any idea of how to design features, or how to communicate, or indeed any ability to read and comprehend criticism. It’s appalling that players have to lecture CCP on how to do stuff like this.
This post will be written from some common sense and from my almost 10 years experience as storyteller and game master in various forms of role playing games and LARP. I’m not a game designer by profession, but I do political science for a living (And study). When I ran for office, my ability to respond to other candidates criticism in debates wouldn’t really change their minds, but the audience might be swayed – but only if I actually answered the questions, comprehensively, clearly, with some kind of relevance to the election, the office and my party’s politics.

First, when designing features in a game, you should set a goal. That goal might be “we want to increase/decrease activity X”, or maybe “we want to introduce activity Y”, or perhaps even “we want to promote social interaction Z”. Setting a goal, and being open about it, will not just help yourself keep on track and your internal evaluation; it will also help constructive criticism from your customers to reach that goal. If your goal is to “increase activity X”, and those with great experience in that particular activity can explain how your proposed feature will decrease activity X, you are in a much better position to make positive changes than if your feedback is on how this will decrease social interaction Z.
This also means that if you have two central goals, you need to be sure they are compatible. “Increasing activity X” and “promote social interaction anti-X” may be compatible, but chances are it isn’t. Then either drop one of the goals, or only increase or promote one to keep it in balance.

Now, with a goal, you can see if there are already incentives to do or avoid activity X, a basis for activity Y or if social interaction Z is already happening. If yes, you should see to those first. Sometimes you can improve an activity simply by making it easier to get into, get an overview, manage... Something as “simple” as an interface improvement can incentivise activity X or enable activity Y.
The rest of the time you have to do something new. If it’s an activity that currently provides rewards, you can up the rewards, and if it doesn’t, you can introduce them. If it is associated with risks or costs, you can decrease those. If you want to decrease an activity, you can decrease rewards or increase risks or costs.

If you don’t have these “buttons to push, screws to tighten/loosen” you need to get creative. Can activity X use a new tool? What kind of tool, what kind of effects will it have? Can activity Y be enabled by a new skill or (If it already happens on a small, free-form basis) a demand for that activity elsewhere? What other implications would that have, and would to enable activity Y mean an effective decrease in incentive to activity X? If you promote social interaction Z, will that make activity X easier or maybe harder? Will enabling activity Y make social interaction Z redundant?

When you have your rough outline of the feature or changes to features you are introducing, you need to take a good look at it. Essentially, what you need to identify is 1) if the feature is in accordance with your goal, 2) if it impacts on or is impacted by any other part of the game and 3) if there are more than one possible way to achieve your goal.
It’s important because you should never design blind. It’s not just a quick way to waste resources and customer goodwill, but it is also very likely to be an overall detrimental thing to the game.

About half a year ago, CSM member Malcanis made a list of 8 things that would help the CSM promote ideas to CCP. I think you would gain something from reading that list, since your idea would not have passed muster:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3178202#post3178202

Now, that was some ground rules for how to design. It’s a lot of common sense and some experiences I have had from designing role playing games, both tabletop campaigns that have endured for years and weekend live action role plays for up to 250 participants. I haven’t had to sell my ideas to customers the way you must, but I still had to show why a thing or a change was necessary, how it would work, what it would effect, if the participants overall would find it enjoyable – if nothing else then to myself: “Will A amount of effort translate into adequate amount of enjoyment for my players?” is a central question.

With these helpful pointers I hope you get the gist of designing new stuff in a game. Introducing new content needs a justification, and needs to live up to that justification.

Moving on to your communication, I am not sure where to start.
Some parts of it scream of avoidance of tough questions. You seem to ignore all but the most accepting and innocent questions, and to many of the participants in the tread, it’s clearly because you don’t want to be told what we think of the ESS.
There are a good amount of problems with that, some in general and some specific to CCP.
A general theme is that any complainer that feels ignored will either increase attempts to be heard, or will become apathetic to the issue as a whole. To CCP, that will either mean massive thread noughts and Player Versus Structure in Jita, or it will mean fewer participants in tests, less feedback, less activity – in specific areas or in general – and if it’s bad enough, falling subscription numbers. Adding to this is the justified and reasonable expectation of CCP to drop the ball, sooner or later, and this has all the signs of being ball-drop worthy.
Honestly, I don’t think any of your communication through this thread has been done properly.
(to be continued)

The whole concept should be scrapped, take the art and go make something else with it. In low or particularly high sec this could be interesting, in null it just wont be used. Even the suggestions of Marlona sky and other about how to make this work are still excessively complicated and flawed with things like the requirement that null dwellers cash in tags in empire. The whole idea is badly thought out and poorly implemented. Probably one of the worst examples of game design i've seen in several years: appalling understanding of risk/reward, excessively complicated and terrible understanding of existing game mechanics.

Null sec income needs a major rethink and a major buff, it costs more in effort and isk to live there than any other section of space (possibly barring WH space) and the rewards are lower. You could start resolving this using deployables, this is so far from the way to do it that its like a bad joke.

Trolling post removed.

How do people STILL not get this. (oh, I know, you admitted to not even reading the thread you are commenting in, THAT's how you have no clue what you are talking about)

When there is a hostile in system, you don't rat. If the hostile stays in system you either form up or don't. If the hostile leaves system, you go back to your regular scheduled activities.

Literally ZERO change from how things are now, with the one exception of a 3-minute structure shoot for the 'carebears' (hint: the majority of people ratting in nullsec don't do it for enjoyment but to cover their pvp expenses).

Something that I am still quite curious about (and has not been answered yet):

Was the ESS the feature referred to in the CSM8 Summer Summit Minutes?

Soniclover moved on to discuss an additional disruption feature. This feature was
shelved due to CCP and CSM concerns expressed during the summit, until a more
satisfactory solution could be found.


If yes, what changes were made that are considered to be "a more satisfactory solution"? What concerns were expressed? How and why did this feature make it to singularity (and a dev blog) without further review?

If no, (I am trying really, really hard to write this post so it cannot possibly be construed as "inflammatory") did you discuss the ESS at the CSM8 Summer Summit? What feature was "shelved due to CCP and CSM concerns"? If the feature shelved was not the ESS, just how bad of an idea was it, to get shelved, while such a fundamentally flawed concept (the ESS) managed to "pass muster"?

Thank you in advance for answering any of these questions you can, SoniClover. I look forward to seeing if any other DEVs chime in, as well. This thread has turned into "SoniClover vs. EVE".

Meanwhile, in my dreams:


CCP - Hey guys, we need to balance our sheets so we decided to nerf rat bounties in null sec to 95% hoping we can get a few more sales in the future.

Community: Well, **** happens.. if CCP has no cash we can't play anyway, so thats fair. Game on.

CCP - Thanks for your understanding guys, meanwhile we're going to make use of our time by fixing the POS legacy code.

.. but then I woke up

Except for, as stated dozens of times in this thread, by people with backgrounds and experience in all areas of eve, this does not do that. The idea is so fundamentally flawed that it would never do that.

I dont think there is anyway to mitigate the large amount of risk of this item the way interceptors work now.

If they nerf bounties to lets say 60% or lower without ess all you will do is completely drive people from 0.0 because it wont be worth it. ( a lot of people have high sec alts already this will just cause all pve to move out of 0.0 into highsec or low sec fw alts)

On the other had lets say you make the carrot bigger and you get like 50-60% more isk for deploying this. Whats to stop awoxers from stealing all your isk or random douchbags from doing it? This will cause way too much drama for any isk gain that's worth it.

I read the writing on the wall a long time ago...CCP will nerf 0.0 to the ground before they fix any real issue we care about in fixing sov. I have made myself a new account for fw site running.

I just hope they never release this for other areas of space because this item is a done deal. CCP never backs down from any idea they have, sure they tweak them a little but never fix the major glaring flaws in them.

They would never put it up in the first place, it requires far too much reward to ever offset the cost of having it around while you pve.