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Showing posts from August, 2015

Perspectives

It is often amazing how badly travelling plans can go. Our return trip home has bumped into some unfortunate delays. Those delays are irritating, true. Still, one rolls with the punches and keeps going. Or at least, that is my outlook. I've checked in on things twice. We wound up not spending the money for service on the ship. I found myself not particularly unhappy with that in the end. I wanted internet but not the Eve drama that woukd have come with it. It seems that stuff has happened over the last week that made me happy to have a bit of distance from the game. This was my first away from Eve vacation since I started the CSM. Time and distance both bring perspectives. I didn't write much about the game. I instead observed my surroundings and came up with a colossal amount to chew over in the next few weeks. The part I did think about was the people. I spent a bit of my time discussing people and their motivations with my husband. We have very different views of peop

CSMX - Post #25

Hi there! Welcome to the weekend. In this week stuff has happened and will be happening and we're going to go over most of it before I run off to my vacation. It is patch week. There will be some sov tweaks.  I don't get the feeling that this is going to make people utterly happy  and Agis sov the sov of out hearts.  It is a step and hopefully we can get to a better place. The null talks continue. Red makes it go faster.  More skins have been added buy they don't belong to a shipyard. Instead CCP had listened and is trying out designed for the sake of it.  This heavily focuses on Calder and Minmatar this time around giving them a few more choices than red, reddish, red brown...etc. I'm pleased with this direction. Im not atill sold on prices but I am happy to see the more open minded  approch to ship SKINs. The lore is moving along. The Empress seems to be dead and there are fascinating  events on SiSi. I deem this good. Last week Corbexx and I held a structure

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz!

Somewhere between tonight and tomorrow I will write my weekend post. Hopefully. I guess I should get to work on that tonight now that I think of it. My plane leaves tomorrow morning and I am going to leave my laptop at home for the first time in forever. But do not despair. I'm not leaving my technology behind. I'm going to use my tablet as my writing platform and see how that functions. If it works well enough with my writing for Downtime Hours , I may do so again in the future. My laptop is quite heavy for it is a gaming laptop but I have not had as much time for games on my travels as I used to. This is one of the first times that I have not prewritten a lot of stuff for my blog when I go on vacation. I've been busy! Busy, busy, busy! Writing other things. I've discovered that there are but so many hours in the day. I'm somewhat horrified at that discovery and that I've managed to be busier than last year but I have. For those who have been looking the re

In Which I Mix My Parables

During our soundboard about structures for a moment we wandered into the topic of small groups attacking larger groups. For a moment I thought of the well worn example of David and Goliath. However, I didn't like it. It did not feel particularly creative. Also, as I spun the topic around I saw that the analogy didn't fit. David after all killed Goliath against the odds and I wasn't thinking about the simple formula of small group taking out larger as if it is a divine right. My thoughts revolved around the small groups having the ability to bite chunks out of the large ones. To use the strengths of small numbers to make an impact. During my time in Molden Heath this often happened. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed fighting draws with familiar locals. It was often frightening. I regularly had to take a deep breath and tell myself that not even the loss of every ship in my hangar would make me back down. Defiance has an appeal to me that few other things do. I don't w

Repainting

Once a year I normally change the face of my blog. I do so because I like playing with the colors and themes. Occasionally, I try to improve the look and clean things up. I tried stopped doing that when I ran for the CSM so that my blog would stay familiar. While familiar I've not been happy with how its been laid out for a while. I waffle between something simpler and something more modern. Maybe modern and simple. I've not tried anything because I've not wanted to face backlash. It is a somewhat artistic thing for me so negative reactions is a bit disappointing. I've stuck with what I have for a few reasons. I've tried not to create a click bait template. You log into the main page and you get the entire post. In many ways the goal has been to be hands off but I wonder if I should craft more of an identity. Self reflection is what it is. I've been writing about Eve for almost four years now. I've written 1,732 published posts and I have 138 drafts si

CSMX - Post #24

The structure development blogs exited translation limbo and were released on Thursday. There are two. One about assets and one about sieges . Read them please. These are not the final words they are just the direction that we are headed. Feedback is super important here with the timers and the treatment of assets. At Rob Kaichin's request I have created  a condensed fact sheet about what we currently know about structures. This is not everything that will happen. My goal was to take the common questions that are answered in the dev blog and bring them out into the open with simple questions and trains of thought. This project took a bit to write up and get ready for the public. I've gotten it approved by CCP Nullarbor and CCP Yitterbium who worked with me on fact checking and cleaning up outdated information. I'm super pleased with it. It has had the side effect of opening up some new areas to discuss whole highlighting areas that we still have very little public knowl

The Past's Future

These days with the weight of the CSM tag over my head I often avoid contentious topics for fear that someone will scream that the sky is falling because the CSM said so. But wow, anger just clears the mind! Today, I don't care. I'm going to indulge myself. Last night, after everything, I came back from my appointment and chatted with some of the people that were still hanging around. I was asked, "Sugar what do you think about supers and links just being deleted from the game." The topic comes up sometimes. Can these things be fixed? Can they ever be balanced? Should they just be deleted? Twelve years ago, a game called Eve Online was created. It was created with a persistent universe with a vertical balance that quickly tilted towards the horizontal. It had many grand visions of epic battles fielded by thousands of players on a single server. It would be a place of persistence. A world with real history. It would evolve into a player driven story unlike any ot

Background Noise

This isn't about the actual Q&A. It is about the background work so that people know what I've been up to the last week. Why? Because this type of thing took an enormous amount of work from several people. It is a new expierence for me and thats what I write about. That was an experience. I'm not really thrilled with how it went. An hour before the Jump Fatigue talk, I opened the server with the teamspeak details. Around fifteen minutes till we had about twenty people and there was a moment when we wondered if this would be a small talk where we could have an open floor. Nope. Turns out that is not what happened. This talk was planned about two weeks ago. It came up during a talk with CCP that they were ready to look at jump fatigue again and would like to have a soundboard. However, for a topic like jump fatigue it was too big to have the normal type soundboard that Corbexx and I have been holding. What we came up with was a date and time and a forum post of qu

Should Lore be Fair?

On Sisi there is a suggestion of the next phase of the Drifter lore. If one compares it to the actions that have happened of late in Amarr and the Empress Jamyl's reemergence into the public light, it looks as if she has done pissed someone off now. I find the lore stuff in game cool. I've been making a bit of an effort to follow it in game or to at least see the things going on. I am a spectator and it seems a shame to let a chunk of Eve's history pass me by. But, not everyone finds the lore as interesting as I do. One of the complaints made in the Faction Warfare room on Tweetfleet Slack was that this may put unfair pressure on the Amarr LP stores. Pressure was fine as long as it happened to the other empire's as well and it was fair. While I believe in balance in game play, should the lore be fair? Should the story line be written to evenly move across all four empires equally spread out what is happening? Is it bad if the Drifter's rampage across one Empir

CSMX - Post #23

Unfortunately, this week did not leave us with any development dev blogs. That has not stopped things from progressing, but first about that downtime from right after Aegis Sov was released. CCP Goliath and CCP Masterplan wrote up a dev blog about what happened on July 15th when Eve broke. Many people requested a summary and this was backed by some voices on the CSM. It is the type of behind the scenes information that has fascinated me about the relationship between CCP and its player base. Jump Fatigue The Jump Fatigue Town Soundboard Hall: August 12th, 2015 at 1700 GMT Forum Thread:  https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=439364 CCP said that they are ready to talk about Jump Fatigue and asked us to coordinate public opinion about it. Hence the soundboard. However, its a large topic and many players are very invested in it. Instead of trying to have an open floor where everyone just said what they wanted we are attempting to create a hybrid of the Town Hall

Maybe one day!

 [15:32:10] Trig Vaulter > Sugar Kyle Nice bio - so carebear sweet - oh you have a 50m ISK bounty - so someday more grizzly  [15:32:38 ] Sugar Kyle > /emote raises an eyebrow to Trig  [15:32:40 ] Sugar Kyle > okay :)  [15:32:52 ] Sugar Kyle > maybe one day I will try PvP out When I logged in one of the first things I did was answer a question in Eve Uni Public Help. It was a random question that I knew the answer of. I have 'Sugar' as a keyword so it highlights green and catches my attention. This made me chuckle. Maybe I'll have to go and see what it is like to shoot a ship one day? I could not help but smile. Basi suggested that I put my Titan killmail in my bio and assert my badassery. I figure, naw. It was a roll of the dice that landed me that kill mail. It doesn't define me as a person. Bios are interesting. The idea of a biography is a way to personalize your account. You can learn a lot about a person by what they choose to put in their bio

Ripples Returning

There I was. I was debating my future PvE attempts. I've come up with a few ideas. I have a mission boat for trying to grind Sister's of Eve. I'm late to the party by two or three years but I'm okay with that. I've never been the ground breaking type. I also want to try shattered wormholes, maybe? I figure at the most I lose a ship and POD. I've been looking at ships and making some choices as to what to fly. I realize that I can do whatever I want. It is pretty great. I can fit it how I want. I can fly what I want. I can screw up and no one is there to yell at me, ridicule me, or complain about the loss on the board. It is freeing and I'm starting to realize that I only have to answer to me which means that I can fall back into my normal gaming habits and stop worrying. That is how I found myself looking at the cargo hold capacity of various potential smaller ships and pondering the purpose of the MTU in today's age. Long time ago, in an Eve far f

Umbrella

I have decided that Avatar's are umbrellas. My shocking moment of pure awesome logic says that we need to have their umbrellas close so that they can go inside of structures. This makes perfect sense. Brought to you by the letter: And:

CSMX - Post #22 : A Call for Structure Questions

There is a delay to the Structure Development blogs that are on their way. Delays are frustrating things and patience wears thin. I sat down with CCP Nullarbor to discuss creating a condensed list of notes from the recent conversations on tweetfleet slack as a way to fill in some of the void. However, as we discussed it the plan evolved a bit. The primary goal is to bring answers to questions that players have developed over the last few months. The secondary is to address concerns that players have developed that may not be answered in the development blogs or may be created by the development blogs. The Summit is in six weeks. We are in a perfect moment to condense some of this information, so where is what we are going to do. Corbexx and I are putting together a Soundboard for Structures that will occur before the September Summit. From our date hashing it looks like we will put it together in two weeks, but I'll announce that date on Sunday since we are still merging t

Deserving

When you log into a game what do you expect? What do you deserve? What basic things should be in place for an engaging game session? I often walk around the edge of a swirling mass of thoughts, opinions, concepts, hopes, wants, dreams. At times certain things surface more than others. Often from this I collect bits and pieces that connect all over the game. At other times I am given ideas and concepts that I find distasteful. I rarely write about the distasteful things. I could drown my blog in the darkness. But that has little value. I prefer to fight against the negativity even as it attempts to drag me under. So, I avoid it. But this one... this one I am tired of. It is unfortunate that I can no longer count the amount of times that I have been told another player group does not deserve to be treated well in Eve. They do not deserve gameplay. They do not deserve development time. They do not deserve the ISK that they can gain. That they do not deserve the ships the fly, th

Perspectives

I've been thinking about ships in a somewhat utilitarian way. I've also discovered that I find that to be interesting. Chella needs a ship for my exploration of the Amarr story line. I've moved her to Amarr for now and she has been puttering around in a blockade runner. But, I think I'd like to put her in something else for her explorations but I don't know what. Ships have always been eyed for their value surviving combat or getting me around low sec. With Chella following about the high sec stuff I find that I can fly whatever I want. Something fast and agile with enough tank not to pop to a random artillery Thrasher on a gate if I stop paying attention. I'm debating Daredevils just because, why not. I don't know if they will fill all of that. I have no idea if Chella can fly interceptors. Maybe? I'm to lazy to look right now. But maybe there is something better?  It's been a long time since I just sat down and looked at ships. I've

CSMX - Post #21

It is a week without dev blogs. However, the CSM has been reviewing some that will hopefully make their way to you very soon. We have also sat down with CCP on Thursday and discussed null sec and the current impacts the Aegis changes have brought and the game that players are currently playing. The floor is open to share your stories, thoughts, and opinions. As always, I suggest using explanations and descriptions instead of, "It sucks" or the term "cancer". Those are not productive complaints that I can use to argue for what you want. J ump Clone changes are staying . This came up when the bug was noticed. The cause of the bug was found quickly and we had a lot of back and forth about the feature and if it should stay or not. I reached out for feedback here as well as receiving it from the game and such. I've made a lot of clones for people with my Rorqual but I don't think that that's the best reason to keep standings as they were. I think that it