I’ll call this last week busy and interesting if you have been keeping track of the Rhea release. It has also been a productive CSM week as well and there is more to do.
Rhea was released on Tuesday. The actual release went well. I was pleased to have it as a day off and woke up to a lot of changes. While the launch itself went well, Rhea is not without bugs.
On Tuesday night they had to take the server down due to a duplication bug. It is not common for CCP to do an emergency reboot. But this particular exploit was bad enough that they acted immediately. CCP Falcon released a news story detailing the exploit.
The UI is buggy. It is laggy. There is no gamma correction. There are no personal UI colors. CCP has regressed and gone back to modal windows after they said they were going away from them and had started to remove them. This is the Rhea issues page. This is the Rhea feedback thread. The developers have bundled the first few posts with the problems. Flip through the dev posts and post your feedback. Please.
There are some PBR issues. It was pointed out that the high resolution shots are much prettier but the low resolution shots are much worse. A lot of people play Eve on low graphics. I’d love to see a better middle ground for low graphics that are a bit less mushy looking. The thread has been very active. CCP Darwin is new to CCP but a long time player and he is very active in these threads as is the rest of the art team.
Trial accounts are not being wiped until Monday the 15th.
If you have been following the in game news or lore a press release from the Sister’s of Eve has admitted that they lost a colony on Rhea’s release date. Concord has followed up with an official statement reference the apparent super Nova and the Sister’s of Eve colony located in a previously unknown system named Thera. If you like the game lore keep your eyes and ears open. Daniel Jackson has been keeping track of the star and he has made an animated .gif of its expansion and explosion.
Opt ins: Remember, when trying out the new map you opt in under the escape menu. You will then get a new icon on your neocom that is the new map. F10 will still give you the old map. To opt into manual piloting you need to go to the escape menu -> shortcuts -> navigation -> assign the keys. I think we should opt in new players or at least some new players and see if they automatically use them when out in space.
There was an o7 show on Thursday. The link to the twitch recording is here. It is a recap of the last year with a lot of player interviews.
In general it is time to work on Rhea’s bug fixes and Christmas is around the corner. Things have been quiet on the CSM side of things with what CCP is up to. I’m happy to say that CCP Foxfour has heard some of the worries from people who are not comfortable with SSO and is looking into adding an official information page for third party developers to direct uncomfortable users to. This is something that came to me and I’m happy to see the work towards a resolution.
With four weeks until the summit I am shifting gears into information collection and documentation for the summit. I know that people will be out of the office over the holidays. Hopefully, player’s will be in game and I’ll continue to have the productive discussions that have been coming to me about things. It is an odd mix of working on current projects that will play out over the next few months and trying to write summaries for what I have done so far this session. There feels like that is so much more to do. More topics, reviews, the general health of low sec, PvE, new players, null, corps, POS, capitals, mining, industry, markets, contracts, writing the winter minutes on time, and more fill my thoughts going forward. It makes review harder than I expected even with the documentation that I’ve done since CSM9 was elected.
Corbexx and I had our Wormhole and General PvE soundboards. The method of these soundboards is for the players to sit down and discuss various topics. Do we agree? Do we disagree? Do we have a lot of different opinions? CCP Affinity listens to us work through our problems instead of guiding us and possibly not getting our reactions. My job was to bring up questions that I had and that had been sent to me by those who could not attend and to keep the conversation going. I slip a few of my own in there are well.
The recording for the wormhole PvE session can be found here. They discuss sites, life in wormhole space, how to have better sites, broken sites, scanning, and I ask questions about more shield love in wormhole space because someone asked me to ask.
The recording for the general PvE session can be found here. We talk standings corrections, lp stores improvement and decoupling from FW, we want group content, exploration, more access to npc nullsec, level five missions, more dynamic missions, don’t forget to leave content for people who are happy, spitball any idea that pops to mind and cover a damn good amount of ground in an hour.
Thanks goes to Silvonus of Sleeper Social Club for doing the recordings and putting them up on soundcloud.
We are looking into collecting some new players and having one for their impressions and thoughts on the game. Corbexx also has a clothing soundboard scheduled for tomorrow with some of the art team. Focused on hats? Tired of the same colors? So are other people and I expect this to be a lively discussion. It is both amusing, frustrating, and a very interesting fact that the clothing soundboard has received the most discussion and interaction so far.
Rhea was released on Tuesday. The actual release went well. I was pleased to have it as a day off and woke up to a lot of changes. While the launch itself went well, Rhea is not without bugs.
On Tuesday night they had to take the server down due to a duplication bug. It is not common for CCP to do an emergency reboot. But this particular exploit was bad enough that they acted immediately. CCP Falcon released a news story detailing the exploit.
The UI is buggy. It is laggy. There is no gamma correction. There are no personal UI colors. CCP has regressed and gone back to modal windows after they said they were going away from them and had started to remove them. This is the Rhea issues page. This is the Rhea feedback thread. The developers have bundled the first few posts with the problems. Flip through the dev posts and post your feedback. Please.
There are some PBR issues. It was pointed out that the high resolution shots are much prettier but the low resolution shots are much worse. A lot of people play Eve on low graphics. I’d love to see a better middle ground for low graphics that are a bit less mushy looking. The thread has been very active. CCP Darwin is new to CCP but a long time player and he is very active in these threads as is the rest of the art team.
Trial accounts are not being wiped until Monday the 15th.
If you have been following the in game news or lore a press release from the Sister’s of Eve has admitted that they lost a colony on Rhea’s release date. Concord has followed up with an official statement reference the apparent super Nova and the Sister’s of Eve colony located in a previously unknown system named Thera. If you like the game lore keep your eyes and ears open. Daniel Jackson has been keeping track of the star and he has made an animated .gif of its expansion and explosion.
Opt ins: Remember, when trying out the new map you opt in under the escape menu. You will then get a new icon on your neocom that is the new map. F10 will still give you the old map. To opt into manual piloting you need to go to the escape menu -> shortcuts -> navigation -> assign the keys. I think we should opt in new players or at least some new players and see if they automatically use them when out in space.
There was an o7 show on Thursday. The link to the twitch recording is here. It is a recap of the last year with a lot of player interviews.
In general it is time to work on Rhea’s bug fixes and Christmas is around the corner. Things have been quiet on the CSM side of things with what CCP is up to. I’m happy to say that CCP Foxfour has heard some of the worries from people who are not comfortable with SSO and is looking into adding an official information page for third party developers to direct uncomfortable users to. This is something that came to me and I’m happy to see the work towards a resolution.
With four weeks until the summit I am shifting gears into information collection and documentation for the summit. I know that people will be out of the office over the holidays. Hopefully, player’s will be in game and I’ll continue to have the productive discussions that have been coming to me about things. It is an odd mix of working on current projects that will play out over the next few months and trying to write summaries for what I have done so far this session. There feels like that is so much more to do. More topics, reviews, the general health of low sec, PvE, new players, null, corps, POS, capitals, mining, industry, markets, contracts, writing the winter minutes on time, and more fill my thoughts going forward. It makes review harder than I expected even with the documentation that I’ve done since CSM9 was elected.
Corbexx and I had our Wormhole and General PvE soundboards. The method of these soundboards is for the players to sit down and discuss various topics. Do we agree? Do we disagree? Do we have a lot of different opinions? CCP Affinity listens to us work through our problems instead of guiding us and possibly not getting our reactions. My job was to bring up questions that I had and that had been sent to me by those who could not attend and to keep the conversation going. I slip a few of my own in there are well.
The recording for the wormhole PvE session can be found here. They discuss sites, life in wormhole space, how to have better sites, broken sites, scanning, and I ask questions about more shield love in wormhole space because someone asked me to ask.
The recording for the general PvE session can be found here. We talk standings corrections, lp stores improvement and decoupling from FW, we want group content, exploration, more access to npc nullsec, level five missions, more dynamic missions, don’t forget to leave content for people who are happy, spitball any idea that pops to mind and cover a damn good amount of ground in an hour.
Thanks goes to Silvonus of Sleeper Social Club for doing the recordings and putting them up on soundcloud.
We are looking into collecting some new players and having one for their impressions and thoughts on the game. Corbexx also has a clothing soundboard scheduled for tomorrow with some of the art team. Focused on hats? Tired of the same colors? So are other people and I expect this to be a lively discussion. It is both amusing, frustrating, and a very interesting fact that the clothing soundboard has received the most discussion and interaction so far.
My Open Q&A will run today, December 14th, at 1500 and 2200 GMT. I need to get my access to the Eve Uni forums corrected so that the calendar reflect this properly. I am planning for another one January 12th to get one last session in before the Winter Summit.
"It is both amusing, frustrating, and a very interesting fact that the clothing soundboard has received the most discussion and interaction so far."
ReplyDeleteInteresting, yes. I thought the WiS community had been disassembled with the closure of the last official thread and the subsequent ISD censorship of new threads on the topic (errr, "closing redundant discussions").
Or maybe it's not the WiS community, but something new. A "Fashionista" community, maybe?
I don't think WiS will ever die. It's the churn rate of Eve. I know two people I consider friends that started Eve when I did that still play. A sizable portion of the people I interact with are post Monoclegate, and if I keep playing Eve that will only expand to a vast majority.
DeleteNew people keep the discussion going because they don't have the bad taste of how badly it was handled. In the lead up the Incarna the vast majority of players were for it, it's an amazing idea for the game. Only us ever diminishing oldies are weary of it because we have a healthy respect for the size of the task. To do WiS in a way that gives it justice is a similar undertaking in size to building a new MMO.
Maybe one day it'll make sense when Legion and Valkyrie come online that WiS could have a role as the glue that holds the three games together as a single super game. But that day isn't today.
I just now had time to listen to the PVE recordings and something that wasn't brought up that kinda irks me about PVE, and is a long standing issue I have with it. Ewar. Ewar is the crowd control abilities of Eve, and it has no place in PVE other than target painters. I know at this point it'd be a colossal undertaking to add it into PVE since every site would have to be rebalanced for it, but any time I step into group content, especially incursions, I feel it's absolutely horrible that an entire playstyle of combat is eliminated from the field. It's lack of inclusion actively hurts how dynamic encounters can be and keeps newer players from gaining experience with a role they may enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI also don't like the fact I can absolutely decimate entire squadrons of red crosses solo. When I started it made me feel empowered. Now it's just a chore to do all that clicking and when I think about it, it limits gameplay to a certain mindset of min/max. The burner missions are a good start toward moving players toward a different styles of combat by limiting the number of NPCs, but that's all they are. A good start.
Overall I thought the chat was good, but there are a few basic building block assumptions about how PVE should work that I didn't feel were addressed that should be. Very little time was spent on how CCP can make the combat, what should be the fun part, better. I did find it interesting, and thanks for having it and putting it here.