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CSMX - Post #31

A lot of stuff has filled this week.

The roadmap is now built into updates.eveonline.com. There are tabs at the top and dates at the bottom. Give it a look. Its visually very pretty and has a bit more detail here and there. Just don't fall in love with dates. These are goals but the entire 'don't push it out broken' means there is always the chance of flexibility. I am going to continue to stress this point becuase I do not want anyone to be brokenhearted at a release delay.

How about that new launcher? A lot of people are in love with it and problems are being fixed by the moment. I advise you to read the thread before you play with it. Your settings will need to be copied over. An optional delay has been added so that computers don't die starting all 46 clients at once while screaming like courting bull moose. It is in beta but with a bit of setup work I'm hearing a lot of positive things. I have not converted over because I am lazy and the old launcher doesn't bother me.

Scanning changes are coming to a test server near you. CCP Golliath has laid out the latest round of changes to the scanning UI based off of feedback. Everything is changing in good ways. I'd suggest you look at it. Tucked in the bottom he reminds everyone that a dscan button also means a dscan hot key for your future, paranoid checking. He is interacting on the official forums and reddit as well.

One question that appeared on reddit was from White Orchid:
"Maybe I'm alone in this, but is it possible to have somewhere that remembers your 'ignored' sigs when jumping out of and back into a system again? So it doesn't completely reset."
This is a very common request. CCP Goliath responded:
"Not for our team, sorry, and possibly not at all. We're a UI/UX focused team and that's a weighty technical issue to do with how session changes work."
CCP Fozzie noted that the insurance prices for T3D will be adjusted. This was a complaint that Gorski has worked on and I've supported as well. Their insurance payout was ridiculously high. High enough that most of the ship's price was covered in the insurance payout. Now they will pay out more like T2 ships do. A token payment and that is all.

I've been asked about CCP Fozzie's focus group selections. A few others have also received messages expressing dissatisfaction. CCP Fozzie's focus group project belongs to him. It is not a CSM run project. People keep asking for developers to interact with them. CCP Fozzie has chosen this path. While Gorski applied and was accepted I believed Mike requested the ability to view the discussion but not participate.

Let's talk about policy and game rules. Back in December I commented that access to policy is bad. Basically, at the September Summit in 2014 I begged Customer Service to create a condensed policy page. I wrote a forum post about it as well a bit before the summit. I begged, I pleaded, and I did it again in January. The start of this was during the banning of pilots for bumping a Titan out of a shield not using the scatter cyno bumping trick. It had been declared an exploit some years before and the declaration of the exploit was in the Eve Online News section of the News Section of the News. That section also has dev blogs, patch notes, and the in game news. While the complaint at the time was about a ban, I saw the problem was access.

I'm a rules following type of person. I don't care for shady activities that skirt the line of what is and what is not allowed. Everyone isn't like me. It's easy to stand on a moral high ground and say they should have known better and if you have to work that hard to defeat the game mechanics you shouldn't wonder what it is an exploit. That, however, is not a productive place to be. The problem was that things had been declared against the rules and players didn't know where to find them. They where sometimes on the forums. Sometimes they where on the news. Sometimes in development blogs. In my opinion, if people were going to be punished for it, they needed to have a central area that they could inform themselves of what may not be the best idea. Hence, a condensed policy page was needed to create a reasonable expectation of player knowledge.

At the September Summit for CSMX, Customer Service revealed that they had developed that exact thing as part of their new help desk. They dug up the exploits and put them in an area people can see and find in a way that is reasonable. I am delighted.

Eve Vegas's schedule has been announced. One of the notes in the topic is that it will not be streamed. I was surprised by this and went to check with CCP Manifest to see if it was true. He said that it was but they had back up plans to get the content from the event to the rest of the game. From tweetfleet slack:

"We're recording  sessions and will put the stuff up on YouTube (should be quicker than last year for YT). Keynotes are obviously of particular importance and will be prioritized. Right now we're not planning on livestreaming  BUT will make sure social media is filled with proper information about announcements, pretty pictures, and devblogs when appropriate--all in a timely fashion."
There is a lot of expectation that the event will be streamed. Hopefully, this helps as an early warning that it will be twitter and reddit that announce most of what happens, first. I gave up live blogging after my first attempt and I will stick to evening summaries of the days and roundtable notes as I have done the past three years.

Also the floating Nyx has gone on pre-order and costs almost two thousand USD. That was an ouch. When the idea of a large model of the ship was first shared, I was thinking something I could maybe put on the wall. The floating aspect sounded cool but I didn't have a place for it. The price is to high for my casual budget. It does bring back a regular discussion that CCP needs to get us real items with normal prices that we can casually buy with little to no justification and fill our lives with game reminders. I'm still waiting for my key chain.

One of my on going goals during my CSM time has been to share with my voters what I do on the CSM. I'm not sure if I have accomplished this as well as I envisioned. I'll keep trying. As part of this task, Ive shared a bit of how I think and process information. This started last week when I wrote a post about Developing High Sec. It is a post where I try to get answers to the statements  people often make to me about CCP ignoring/hating high sec. The response was overwhelming so I decided to grab all of that information and see what came from it for future discussion.

This is one of those non-sexy CSM tasks that I don't really have to do and isn't defined anywhere. I would probably have done it if I was not on the CSM and had a response like I did. But, I believe in picking up as much as I can carry. I'll add, there is no conspiracy going around. I'm not hinting at a future I know.

However, when I discuss the future I was asked what happens after the Spring during my Open Q&A last week. The answer is, I don't know. The current list of things will run up to the end of my term. We have a lot on the plate and still see in release cycles. I'm sure, before I leave office, we will get a glimpse and have a discussion into the future beyond the Spring. But for now, the spring is keeping my plate full.

Comments

  1. "Hopefully, this helps as an early warning that it will be twitter and reddit that announce most of what happens, first."

    I wonder how this will fall with the people opposing that the official forums are the last place to get the cool information bits, since CCP devs are in love to Reddit, Twitter and so...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Because players are going to tweet and write reddit posts as things happen, Onions. It will hit that media before official forum posts are made or videos are posted by CCP. That is the nature of social media. It has nothing to do with CCP posting it to that area. I'm sorry that was such an unclear statement. I, for example, will post pictures and funny activities to twitter and not the official forums.

      Delete
    2. I think he was lamenting the fact that if you want to get news on what's changing in CCP policy, the last place you go is the forums...

      Delete
    3. Not me, just noted a thread and it was quite active, people complaining about how the devs are more active out of the forums than in them.

      Frankly, i rely a lot on blogs, don't follow reddit nor twitter but bloggers usually keep the pace, and also the forums and devblogs and other official media... may not be the most up to date sometimes (dev answers in unnoticed threads are hard to track) but it's easy to spend the time reading about EVE without actually playing it or paying CCP... ;-)

      Delete
  2. Oh Sugar,

    When you wrote a ‘developing hisec’ post and it generated numerous thoughtful responses on your blog, other blogs and Eve forums to be followed by you collecting the information searching for themes, you revealing both the process and results of that search as well as you announcing what you were doing with the collected information . . . that was SEXY AS HELL!

    It was revealing and useful and pleasurable to take part in . . . sexy. Very sexy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I will repeat my thanks to Sugar for engaging the highsec demographic. It's been itneresting and revealing to a point, specilaly at her blog, since the forums thread easily devolved into "nerf highsec, grrr".

      The answer to her question shows that "ask and you shall be answered" is the o.p. for highseccers. If don't engaged, they just quit.

      Delete
  3. It's great that d-scan can help you figure out what belt you want to warp to, but is there any real value in knowing so much exact information about the target?

    Wouldn't it be better to only have it be known that you are a gallente frigate in a belt rather than an Ares pilot specifically? Does it add to gameplay or is it logical that you can pick up ship insignia on ftldar?

    Wouldn't it better if we moved to generic information? What about miners though. They are prey ships, but what is the value of knowing exactly what's out there for the low, low price of carpel tunnel and hypervigilance?

    What if information was so generic or so vague that the system could even pick up on false positives, especially when faint signals are easily mistaken for background noise and vice versa? Would that only be acceptable in some sort of deep w-space systems? I know the community is more risk averse than hermit crabs, but at some point some of this has to start making sense.

    If opposed, why do you wanna know everything all the time? I've never seen anyone explain this point of view. Why is it that even mobile scan inhibitors show up on d-scan? I don't get it. Playing with your cards on the table is how you learn poker, but not a fun way to play.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Playing with your cards on the table is how you learn poker, but not a fun way to play."

    Quite possibly one of the absolute BEST statements I have ever read on intel in EVE.

    Local and dscan and probing should not be 'perfect' as they will not be perfect if we ever have anything like them IRL... there needs to be grey areas and some fog out there in the black... some uncertainty and the excitement and thrill, and yes, the risk, of discovery...

    Sugar I know the DIscovery scanner was a CSM idea and one you backed n all... and the idea was to open exploration for noobs n all... but I feel it did more damage than good for the whole playerbase...

    Exploration should be the act of EXPLORING for stuff you don't KNOW is out there... not a 'verse full of huge neon signs saying "--> Warp here for bacon!<---" or worse "--> Probe here for bacon!<---"... sheesh...

    EVE needs moar MYSTERY and a hint of the UNKNOWN...

    ReplyDelete
  5. The discovery scanner was releaed with Odyssey in 2013 before I was on the CSM. I have expressed my fustration with it and how it changed exploration several times. I'd not consider myself a backer. My scanning work has been with the new map's scanning interface.

    ReplyDelete
  6. About Hisec, it is impossible for CCP games to make enough "content" because gamers will always consume that much faster then the company can make up.

    Instead perhaps CCP should look at something called "The Bandwagon" again.
    source: http://bit.ly/1Osmvsw

    Meaning, joining a growing movement in support of someone or something, often in an opportunist way, when that movement is seen to have become successful.

    Before Incursions were introduced to Hisec, we had live events were many capsuleers in hisec jumped on that Bandwagon and interacted outside of their box.

    Regards, a Freelancer

    PS: pre-incursion live event staff at the company had the gist of it, after the expansion launched, and with the lay-offs no doubt, it was dismal to say to least.
    source: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=293869

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, the issue is not that CCP can't generate highsec content fast enough. The issue is that players can't generate it neither, at least not the kind of content that could enjoy every highseccer.

      Delete
    2. " One hundred Drifter battleships warped on the field. They all simultaneously fired their doomsday weapons at the EF Seraph. It died. The Drifters locked the pod. Jamyl Sarum died. There was a brief panic as more calm and rational people than I gave orders to try and scoop Jamyl’s corpse as the Drifters warped away to safety. To my knowledge not a single one of the fleet was able to even get a shot off. The hundreds of players that had gathered for an epic battle were ignored and left helpless to do anything.

      I sat stunned behind my computer screen. I refused to believe what I had just seen. I think that I managed to murmur a “no” in meek protest to my screen in a helpless attempt to change the outcome. Twenty minutes later, I finally sorted out my emotions and realized that I had felt this way before. Empress Jamyl I had been killed in EVE’s version of an improvised explosive device (IED) attack. I didn not really have to think hard about it; the memory is seared into my mind. "

      source: https://www.themittani.com/features/why-story-matters

      The two paragraphs show why The Bandwagon idea could work IF implemented well by CCP and not half arsed or to tightly scripted.

      Regards, a Freelancer

      PS: The point of proper implemented live events is to give Hisec capsuleers the right Push :)

      Delete
  7. I don't get it .You harp on greater communications between CCP and players, yet you were deathly silent on November 25th. This is just pandering to attempt to seem relevant again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You what?

      November the 25th hasn't happened yet, unless you're talking about last year.

      In any case, what happened?

      Looking at Google, you're possibly talking about Multiboxing changes. CCP gave a pretty clear policy change. Looks like they communicated pretty well to me.

      Delete
    2. @Kat Tazinas: Would Sugar gain "relevance" in your eyes by advocating for the return of Input Automation? Is a lack of single-player-controlled mining and incursion fleets ruining highsec, and EVE?

      I think players were grumbling about highsec while input automation was still a thing.

      Delete

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