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CSM9 - Day 63

My weekly posts have finally developed a bit of a style. I’m trying to bring forward relevant news such as dev blogs and CCP posts. I try to give my opinion and thoughts on them. I also try to comment on what I am doing and what other CSM members are doing as I can. I’m happy to listen to any feedback about content for these weekly posts.

Crius continues forward. It is due July 22nd. Several major bug fixes have hit the test server.

CCP Greyscale wrote a dev blog about his ideas and concepts with industries. These types of dev blogs used to be common and they faded away for more serious and technical dev blogs with the occasional greater statement. I hope that this is the start of a new era where the developers again share their conceptual goals with these huge releases and changes to the game.

A lot of SSO has happened. This has put Steve to serious work which he eats up with a spoon. It is quite impressive. For those that do not understand the SSO projects it would be good to go to this dev blog and read about them. You can also post how much you like or hate SSO. Steve’s been a true professional in that thread and getting the work done he came here to do.

This is very good for our little things project. I’m looking over Steve’s shoulder while being very energetically hopeful at him. Hopefully that is a useful contribution. I’d love to say that I’m doing useful things but that would be a complete lie. He Is doing the heavy lifting with getting this off the ground.

Mike’s incursion thread has gone pretty well. A lot of good information has been suggested. I'm sourcing for low sec incursion runners to give feedback.

Corbexx also has a wormholes little things thread up.

Mangala is pushing ahead with social clubs.

I will be making a PvE little things thread. I’m going to wait until Monday when I am home to respond to the posts. I’ll be posting it in the missions subforum and hopefully I will continue to grab some of the small problems and help them get resolved sooner.

A bit of history:

While working on my history series I found an article from the New York Times about the start of the CSM back in June of 2007. For those interested in the CSM’s history I suggest reading it. Related content would be the t20 apology dev blog and Hilmar’s response to the situation. I don’t bring them up for people to wallow and splash in past mistakes. I bring them up so that people can read the actual pieces of information and not just what they have heard someone say.

The development of the CSM to CCP relationship has reached the point where the CSM heads off a lot of potential drama just by being a first line of communication. It is very clear to me that Eve is CCP’s job. it does not mean they do not love Eve and want Eve to be great but there is a difference between it being their job to create, tend, and move Eve forward and it being our passion to play.

The CSM is still an oversight committee still but that has expanded over the years. The incorrect term ‘junior game designer’ is often used. Focus and Feedback would be a bit better. And even when it is said in a negative tone the desire of the player base for the CSM to be included in game design is huge. The CSM brings with it the player voice. Beyond that the CSM is asked by the players to engage itself in all areas of Eve. The office has simply matured.

Social Outreach:

My Open Q&A hosted by Eve Uni public mumble is next Sunday, July 13th. It will be two one-hour long sessions. One at 15:00 Eve time and one at 22:00 Eve time. These are open comms talks where you can ask questions in chat or just talk to us. I’ll try to drag along some other CSM members to up the potential excitement.

Eve Vegas is in October, don’t forget to buy a ticket, book a flight and get a hotel room.

I’m thinking either August 9th or August 23rd for the next local VA/MD/DC meetup. Give me some feedback or I’ll pick the one I like the most. I have been picking Saturday because people work on Friday and people have work on Monday.

And that is about it for week nine.

Comments

  1. Talking about design devblogs, it would be nice that CCP Seagull explained whether we are right or wrong to guess that the player built stargates and the space colonization shit will be accesible only from nullsec, thus barring the access to everyone not willing to go to nullsec.

    If that is just a matter of wrong/bad communication, it should be sorted ASAP.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please help me out - other than the single image where some badgers build a stargate, has there been _anything_ from CCP about this topic? Is all whining of "nullsec only" based on anything?

      Delete
    2. Well, the impression I got from the Fanfest presentation (as well as that new trailer), and some subsequent comments from their new Marketing guy lead me to believe that these new gates will be null only. If you think about it, it really does make sense for them to be null-only.

      Delete
    3. @Heretic. Thanks for confirming that we have zero _hard_ information on this other than 1 picture. Let the CSM do their job, under NDA view possible expansions and steer accordingly.

      Delete
    4. @splatus: the evidence available, albeit circumstantial, points exactly in that direction. It certianly looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck despite we don't have proof on CCP saying "we're developing a duck".

      This is why I ask for a devblog telling whether they're developing a duck or don't.

      As for CCP Seagull's answer to TurAmarth... well, wormhole content is used everywhere in the game, but it is exclusive to WH nonetheless. Opening the gates could influence the whole game even if only nullsec had access to the new space.

      But the issue would remain: a tiny minority would get the lion's share of the first game expansion since Apochrypha and the majority of the game would be left with minor shit and whatever the keepers of that content graciously shared with them.

      As Ripard Teg stated, unless you buy the "space colonization" stuff, there's not much coming your way until 2016 at least.

      Delete
  2. Thanks for the link to Corbexx's thread, Sugar. Alas, it's too full of silliness and stupidity to be really worth commenting on :(

    Plus, and this is a real request, could the CSM stop emulating CSM8 with the "little things" requests? Just put out a request and let CCP decide what's little and what isn't. Not every players knows what CCP considers little or not, so how about letting the devs decide instead of having players not post what might be little things because the players mistakenly believes it's a large thing?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If the name bothers you I could change it. However that has not decreased the scope of what people send.

      We could indeed just dump into into a big huge pile and let CCP sift through it. However different groups have different areas they work on. This prefilters.

      These little projects are things we can own. Things we can distill down and inject. Its our responsibility to filter. The breakdown and ownership has been productive on our end. I'm sorry you find it emulative to CSM8 and something that we should not do. I don't know what to tell you to their then that we are doing it this way for a reason that is working.

      Im sorry that you find it badly structured.

      Delete
    2. Heretic,

      I understand chafing at the title “little things” because it seems to put players in the position of deciding, sans coding experience, what’s “little.” Still, Sugar has to define her project somehow and one powerful advantage of “little things” is that it tends to produce specific, concrete suggestions.

      I won’t speak for Sugar but seems to me that weeding out less specific, less concrete “needs more . . . psssshhhh” right from the get go is decent approach.

      Delete
    3. Also, Corbexx's thread started out good.

      Delete
    4. I was never objecting to a request for more specific over less. Devs always want specific over the general, and I don't blame them. I also don't think "little things" is just words. Words have power and meaning. Look at Corbexx's thread - the first post was an admonition to only post things that could get done quickly. The average player has no way to know what is or isn't major s far as EvE coding goes. For example, I would have thought alliance bookmarks to be a minor thing, but have heard from several players that it's really a major thing due to the way the code is written.

      All I was really saying is that by asking players to make the determination as to what is and what isn't low-hanging fruit probably results in a bit too much self-censorship.

      I get the reason for wanting to bring low-hanging fruit to the table; it can get addressed now(ish) and is very hard to say no to with the resource allocation argument. In fact, we've already had 1 (or was it 2) low-hanging fruit updates and I sincerely believe we need more. So I applaud the initiative. All the little things do need to be addressed (or at least parsed for appropriateness) and it's good we're doing it.

      Delete
    5. Steve just said out big project will have size categories. The problem with just asking for stuff on.my end is that I want things such as "this Ded complex has x". If I put no limits I get "revamp PvE."

      Mike's is just called things.

      I'm sorry that my attempt to define what i am tryinhg to acomplish has stood poorly in tour eyes. I did not realize the naming would be so negative.

      Delete
    6. @Heretic, yes, words have meaning. I personally, really like the designation "little things". I - and surely you too - have lived through the "Jesus Feature" that almost brought EVE down. Those were "big things" and I want CCP to steer well clear of them for quite some time.

      There is no point now wanting "walking in station" and make a 800 word blog post about it. It wont happen. CCP has knuckled down to try to fix their existing platform and we should applaud them. "Little things" speak to me since they force me to focus on changes I would like to see that are reasonable. And while I am not a coder per se, I would assume that changing scanning mechanic back to where it was (and thats all what WHers want) is easier than making WiS work. But feel free to interpret "little things" as much as you want. Or, even better, make a list of "big things" and submit them to CSM.

      Delete
    7. I would be interested in hearing about how the Medium Micro-Jump Drive has been received. It was somewhat controversial in Kronos, and a lot of people liked the concept, but not the attributes.

      I think it would make more sense to have the line like this:
      LMJD Spool: 12, Range: 100Km (already current)
      MMJD Spool: 8, Range 50-75Km
      SMJD Spool: 4, Range 25-30Km

      Hopeful for good comments,
      Sjaandi

      Delete
    8. @Heretic - If you go back in history, you will see that one of the reasons CCP was able to recover from the Summer of Rage was that Crucible addressed many of the issues in the list that Trebor maintained. The "little things" initiative that Trebor started in CSM 8 was a followup to earlier efforts as CCP had addressed many of the issues on CSM's list going back to at least CSM 4, if not earlier.

      The term "little things" was originally coined by Soundwave during the time CCP was diverting resources to Walking in Stations and he was trying to do the most with the resources available. I think the concept was so useful that CCP Karkur started up her own little things thread on the forums. I know that she tweeted about missing the list that CSM 8 compiled and stored on their website until the domain ran out.

      So what I guess I'm saying is that all of these "little things" initiatives is just CSM getting back to its roots.

      Delete
  3. Moving to non-sub reply:
    I would be interested in hearing about how the Medium Micro-Jump Drive has been received. It was somewhat controversial in Kronos, and a lot of people liked the concept, but not the attributes.

    I think it would make more sense to have the line like this:
    LMJD Spool: 12, Range: 100Km (already current)
    MMJD Spool: 8, Range 50-75Km
    SMJD Spool: 4, Range 25-30Km

    Hopeful for good comments,
    Sjaandi

    ReplyDelete

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