Jita Park Speakers Corner

o/ Hans
I've read your latest blog post and have a scenario/question(s). I will likely expand on this on my blog later. If I do I'll shoot you a Tweet.

Leaving out null sec: Given the current "drab" state of warfare in New Eden including Faction Warfare ,since you have the backing of all the militia's leadership, can you currently speak to or get a consensus from the other leaders if you all in FW would be willing to:

Allow FW to be used as a starting ground for new pilots coming in to the game who want to go the route of PvP and warfare? Where new pilots can be steered out of NPC corps, a major complaint by many veterans. Where new pilots can begin to assimilate in to corps. run by players and begin a learning phase of fittings, techniques, etc... In essence using FW as a beefed up Eve Uni?

Not to delve in to rumors, opinions, and politics of the Ivy League but if some of what is being said is true then perhaps it is time to steer new players in to more "warfare oriented" areas. While Agony is very excellent it also requires a lot of what brand new players just do not have or can not afford.

There seems to be a hole to be filled and/or lack of a "boot camp" to train war soldiers in the game where new players are not being scammed by a bunch of Mountain Dew saturated dweeb trolls.

Unfortunately, the only way that this could have a shot at working is for CCP to take out the NPC FW corps. If players HAVE to join FW through an existing player corp, it would help alleviate a lot of the SPY Paranoia that currently takes place.

And speaking of the SPY Paranoia, it isn't as if people ACTIVELY ignore new FW pilots or ignore the general militia chat, it's just they have their own corpmates/friends to fly with and their own secure intel channels to utilize. A lot of the work of changing FW into a more newb-friendly environment would have to come from the FW pilots themselves, which there isn't a lot CCP can do about changing the actual habits of current players.

Academic questions are great! My concern with changes in this direction lies in the ways they can blur the line between 0.0 and low sec in terms of game play diversity. "Lite" infrastructure hubs, or the faction-wide leadership and resource management (militia tax) proposed in the recent summit minutes, are so similar to experiences players can already enjoy in 0.0 space I would rather see CCP put effort into fixing those systems first, and allow Faction Warfare to have its own unique identity.

I think one of the strong appeals to a Factional Warfare system is the drop-in drop-out nature of the conflict, the potential for movement of sovereignty at a pace faster than players will find in 0.0 space, and mechanics that revolve around ship-to-ship combat instead of installment of more structures to shoot. I think we have plenty of structure shoots already between POS's and POCO's, I know for a fact the FW community does not enjoy the prospect of more buildings being involved in whatever changes are to come.

System-wide modifications could certainly deepen Faction Warfare, but they have two major risks. The first is as I've said, culturally I don't think we want to move in a direction where a small corp is being hurt game-play wise by a structure or consequence that it takes a faction-wide unified effort to undo. We don't want to be forced into this scale of meta-game near as much as we want a steady stream of diverse PvP opportunities.

The second risk pertains to balance. Some players have mentioned Incursion-style system effects, CCP could certainly recycle some code and link it to plexing and implement this rather easily I would imagine. This was an idea I personally pushed for heavily when I first started working with the community, . However, the more I've spoken to players I realized that most are concerned that if life was too difficult for the "losing" party, pilots would simply jump ship to stay wherever the reward was the greatest. I've had to shelve that personal vision and respect the fact that especially in the other front between the Caldari and the Gallente, there already exists enough imbalance that if the winning side could gain even greater advantage it would break almost immediately.

We all want more value and meaning added to plexing and system occupancy, but the best mechanics are going to be ones that do not force militia-wide cooperation in the way one relies on an alliance to hold territory in 0.0 space. I think adding rewards and penalties at the individual pilot level will fit far better with militia culture, and CCP will serve themselves if they shape the coming changes such that occupancy is still won by ship-to ship fighting instead of structural installations.

0.0 space is where you can build a fighting force, harden and temper it with time only to watch it shatter. Faction Warfare should be the opposite - resilient and responsive enough that total "victory" by one militia doesn't inherently discourage PvP itself by providing imbalanced advantages. Any system-wide effects considered by the developers must keep these principles in mind if they are to be well-received by the community.

If you're asking who I think players should vote for, the answer is simple. Hans Jagerblitzen! This is a grassroots campaign effort, even the united militias that are supporting me are doing so because they believe in my capability as a representative and leader, not because I hold any of the "whipping power" that a null bloc candidate wields.

I hope everyone reading this gives me a vote with each of their accounts and asks their friends and corpmates to do the same, because I believe I continue to stand the best chance of getting elected to a travelling seat amongst the various candidates claiming to represent empire space. Null bloc voting power should never be underestimated, and we can't afford to spread votes around and weaken our chance at obtaining diverse representation at every one of the summits.

Many candidates primarily focus on one or two core issues, bank on an alliance to win them a seat, or even worse put themselves forward without much to say when questioned. While I am not ashamed to ask for all your votes, if I win I will still have 13 others to work with in a cooperative fashion. I can only hope I will be serving alongside individuals like myself that have demonstrated a history of working with the player community and advocating on their behalf.

this is not a bump.

After speaking to Hans for a while in the CSM channel, I feel like he's a pretty grounded person who deserves a shot to change what he loves, low sec.

Obviously, you will not be getting my vote, but you have my best wishes and hopes that you will make it to the CSM.

I absolutely agree that all of these should be included as part of the New Player Experience.

As a booster manufacturer, I have definitely spent my fair share of hours working with probes, and made a lot of income off exploration. I mine gas, loot blueprints and reactions, and generally have a lot of fun with exploration despite the rewards not being as enticing as they could be.

I would LOVE to see this taught to newer players so they have more interesting content available to them early in their careers. The more diversity of income sources new players are empowered to take advantage of, the better we can retain them as long-term customers. The current system where new players are forced into two revenue streams (mining and missioning) is boring and washes many players out.

Newbie scamming is another issue that can be taken care of through some tutorial efforts, I have no problem holding players responsible for their own safety as long as they’ve been educated about the rules. If the game isn’t teaching a player about aggression mechanics and which actions will allow them to be killed in high sec space, we can’t blame them for being upset and frustrated when someone takes advantage of their naivete. A simple agent designed to teach about theft, aggression, salvaging, and security status would be extremely useful here. New players have a right to know about which dangers lurk in the sandbox alongside them.

It also kills me to see fundamental safety tools like the directional scanner go unmentioned in the tutorials. D-Scan is perhaps the single most powerful self-defense tool a ship has, even more than its speed, weapons, shields, armor, or hull strength combined. Knowing when an enemy is about to strike will always be the key to making an informed fight-or-flight response, and D-scans open up worlds of travel to pilots looking to explore more dangerous territory.

It’s a shame this is something you get taught only once you network with other players, when new players could be taking advantage of it immediately. I hope those of us elected to CSM7 can jointly encourage CCP to place this teaching into the tutorials, or provide players with video resources at the very least.

I’m glad you mentioned these, they certainly would have made it into my blog post if I wasn’t trying to keep it somewhat concise, but these tools are just as valuable as ship fitting and clone use in preparing new pilots for the wars to come!

The tutorial does teach exploration, the modules involved and such, but not as well as it could... I remember having to look up an EVE-Uni guide to learn what I now consider essential information. I actually read the mission primers, too. ;) The message of the day at the top of the newbie help channel (placed there by the ISDs) screams to newbies that they must scan a site with four probes to 100 percent to get a warpin. Probing questions are common there, and the most common response is someone hotlinking a YouTube probing guide with several others saying, "yes, watch that, it helped me out so much". Hell, the ISDs link the YouTube probing guide.

Actually, if you want to know how to improve the tutorial and make the learning 'cliff' a little easier to scale, make a new character and spend a while helping out on the newbie help channel. Some questions are born of the player not reading the tutorial text, some because the tutorial doesn't adequately describe a game mechanic. There are some very common questions in there, or there were a few months ago when I was in there, and those questions are where to start when improving the system.

Kinda like this fight?

^^This.^^

(Although I don't know if it's necessarily because the "he" you refer to is bad--it takes practise, a very fast ship, and a bit of luck to do consistently. That said, it still can be done.)

I think the MWD/Cloak mechanic works because the server/client goes in 1-second ticks--it's also why there is no such thing as true insta-lock, despite EFT/PyFA saying you can lock certain things in certain ships in less than 0.5 seconds, no matter how fast your connection is.