Ecliptic Rift

Massively has a good review of the community backlash regarding the CSM. I know I wanted to stay away from this topic, but I at least thought I’d sum up my comments from the article here. For future reference, if any of you hang out on Massively, I’m “Darkdust” over there.

CCP assigns their developers to spend 20% of the time on bug fixes. This does not include design defects, situations in which balance issues and other game decisions come under review. Bugs are situations in which the actual implementation does not match the intended design.

Players may not like the answers they get through the CSM, but clearly the transparency (if not the accountability) has improved. This means a lot, since CCP formed the CSM explicitly as part of the response to the T20 in an attempt to increase transparency.

And I don’t understand the folks that complain that CCP focuses on the “vocal minority” of nullsec and lowsec PVPers. By the end of this year, three of the last four expansions (Apocrypha, Tyrannis (Planetville), and the “invasions” coming in the Winter 2011 expansion) will have had large PVE components. And I’d like to see what constitutes giving attention to lowsec. Just because 0.0 folks speak up more vocally doesn’t mean that’s what the CSM focuses on to the exclusion of all else. Read their minutes and issues and you’ll see that they take a broad view, because they understand that all aspects of EVE need to work for the game to flourish. Ankh had other problems beyond just preferring to engage in PVE, certainly.

EVE isn’t dying. It’s just going through a transition right now, and in the end I believe our “lifestyle” will have improved for it.

New pilots frequently mention “getting podded” as one of the risks they fear in lowsec. Losing implants can indeed get very expensive, especially if you’ve got hardwirings in your head.

Fortunately, you can take steps to reduce your risk significantly. Experienced pilots generally already know these, and don’t have any world-altering advice. Keep reading, though, if you worry about this happening to you.

In general, only two circumstances will lead to getting podded and lay completely outside your control: lag and bubbles. Every pilot knows about the former. Latency in system response happens to the best of us, and if it strikes you, then just be sure you have the ISK to update your clone. And if you lose your ship in a bubble, then the enemy has an excellent chance of warp scrambling your pod before you can get away due to the nature of the tactical environment.

However, outside of these two situations, you can normally avoid losing your pod. Let’s say you’ve gotten into a fight and you realize you’re going to lose. The enemy has broken your tank (putting on more damage than you can repair) and you will definitely go down in flames before he does. But he’s got a point on you (“you are unable to warp because you are warp scrambled”) , so you can’t get away.

Understand that, while he has your ship pinned down, he does not have your pod. When he destroys your ship, your pod will initially not have any tackle on it. So before your ship actually explodes — when you’ve already dropped into low armor or structure — select an off-grid celestial (e.g. star, planet, gate, station) and start repeatedly issuing a ‘warp to’ command. At first, of course, this won’t work due to the enemy tackle. But as soon as you end up in your pod, it will have the command in queue. Due to the incredibly high agility of your pod, your pod will warp away instantly. The pod’s very low signature radius also means that the enemy will have great difficulty locking you before you get out of sight.

Don’t wait foolishly at the target celestial, though, because someone may follow you. As soon as you land, warp to a safe spot. If you don’t already have one in that system, start making one while you warp your pod away the first time. Create several spots and bounce around the system while you gather your wits and figure out what to do next. I don’t recommend automatically docking until you can evaluate the situation. Depending on the situation, you might warp to a stargate and leave the system, or you might swap to a new ship in a station (watch out for camps, though), or you might just dock up and wait until they leave.

If you have questions, please post them here, or of course ask your favorite experienced pilot who isn’t me…

With great pride and anticipation, I’d like to point my readers toward the new Copernicus Coalition. From our coordinator (for lack of a better word), Rettic:

The Copernicus Coalition is a network of independent pilots and small corporations working to make low-sec livable for the common player. Joining the Coalition grants you access to an in-game channel and an online forum where we share intelligence and resources, request help when in need, plan operations, share teachings and learnings and general musings about EVE. We are not a formal Alliance, yet, because we are committed to remaining fully casual as an organization, and equal as pilots. There is no hierarchy. There are no formal commitments or required ops. No obligations, just good company.

This started when I talked to Rettic several months ago about an idea for an unofficial network for solo pilots, since several of us flew in the same general area of space at the time (e.g. Metropolis / Sinq Liaison lowsec). No intent to place real obligations upon anyone, but we just wanted a way to share information on exploration, industry, and related topics for the area. We could perhaps collaborate on operations once in a while. But while anybody can have an idea, Rettic has done tremendous work to get things going. This week marks the public launch, but we’ve actually had this going for a bit, working out the details and forming initial bonds with other friends like Jorshan and Mark726, not to mention Denovin Zyrinax and Nocipe. Others have started the process for themselves and their corporations, but I’ll have more good things to say about that once they’ve committed.

So if you have an interest in living in lowsec or NPC nullsec, want to stay fairly independent, and don’t intend to pirate¹, then give us a look. We’d love to have more friends.

1: What happens in nullsec stays in nullsec.

I don’t think I’m a carebear. Or perhaps, not completely.

Sure, most of my gameplay has little to do with direct combat PVP. I mostly explore, trade, possibly run some missions, or go about some science & industry (invention, manufacturing, etc.) I don’t seek combat PVP, at least not with my main character, and in fact I believe she has zero kills.

But the majority of that activity I just listed occurs in lowsec and, these days, increasingly in nullsec (usually NPC sovereignty). I don’t complain when I get hit — rewards require risk, and that thrill of danger makes the game fun for me. I make most of my ISK from setting buy orders in lowsec and moving the results to highsec to sell. Rens works great for this. This funds the rest of what I like to do, honestly, and if I didn’t do that, I don’t think I’d really stop much in highsec at all.

The reasons why I don’t PVP much have more to do with meatspace than my desire. I have little kids who need (and deserve) attention, and they don’t quite understand “Daddy’s scouting right now, he can’t come see your new drawing / Lego construction / squirrel face”. And frankly, even if they did, I enjoy that latter stuff even more than I enjoy Internet spaceships. Voice chat (a clear requirement for almost any real combat PVP) also suffers because of the background noise from my household. I don’t like the noise very much, honestly, but it goes with the territory. I don’t get to choose one without the other.

So I don’t call myself a “carebear”. I don’t even call myself a PvE player, because running missions in nullsec while having to evade bubble camps and keep a close eye on the D-scan for combat probes seems to me to have lots of PvP to it. I suppose I could say, at most, that I play with a “non-aggressive” style.

I know that others out there feel the same way: they seek out dangerous situations and accept the risk happily, don’t whine when things don’t go their way, but they don’t specifically look for combat against other players, either.

We should stop accepting the false dichotomy of “PvPer versus carebear”, because EVE doesn’t work that way.

CCP Chronotis published a dev blog today titled “The Circle of Life“. First, a quick summary of the coming changes:

• Tech 1 Meta 0 loot drops from NPCs will be nerfed, replaced with scrap metal and tags.
• Rogue drone compounds will increase both in quantity and in mineral yield when reprocessed.
• Low-sec space will get additional low-end (e.g. veldspar) and null-sec (e.g. arkonor) ores.
• Ship insurance will now pay out based on a defined percentage of the market value of the construction cost.
• Tech 1 ship payout will receive a slight nerf.
• Tech 2 (and faction) ship payout will get boosted, depending on the role of the ship (e.g. higher payouts for tackler classes).
• Tech 3 ship payout will get boosted based on the hull cost (not subsystems).
• Supercap ship payout will receive a heavy nerf.

These increased payouts will remain significantly lower in proportion to ship cost than those for tech 1. For example, Vagabond payout will increase from about 12m to about 33m.

Suicide ganking will not receive additional nerfing in this iteration beyond the reduction in tech 1 payout. However, CCP would like to do something more about this in the future.

Payouts dependent on role changes get tweaked manually. As an example comparison, covops ships should die infrequently and thus receive less than tacklers, which will die more frequently. This is counter-intuitive from an immersion point of view but makes much more sense in terms of game mechanics. (I suspect the details here will end up causing lots of controversy and rethinking by pilots.)

Chronotis made a vague statement about fixed moon mineral supply not causing a spike in T2 ship prices. (I speculate that this has something to do with the resultant materials and components from planetary interaction.)

They’d also like feedback on automatic insurance rather than having to manually insure ships individually.

If you have specific feedback for CCP, you’d better go participate while you can!

So CCP T0rfi gave an interview in which he discussed the summer 2010 expansion, Tyrannis, in somewhat greater detail. You should probably read it before pressing on with my thoughts… And note that I’ve intentionally avoided any discussion about DUST 514, mostly because the idea still frustrates me.

You can build infrastructure and interact with almost every planet in the game, regardless of whether someone has something there, already.

I sort of hope that the capital planets (Matar, Caldari Prime, etc.) remain off-limits. That just seems odd to me.

The problem is that the planets are going to have limited resources. So if too many people are harvesting a planet at the same time, there will be diminishing returns. So what you will find is that it will be much more enriching to travel to the more remote planets in the more remote systems, for planets which haven’t got infrastructure built up, yet. But of course that takes you away from the key trade hubs to which you want to deliver your manufacturables.

Now we can talk turkey… Planetary output seems to have a fixed cap, and so as the number of pilots exploiting it increases, the share of resources they get from it will decrease. I suspect they’ll use a lot system similar to the economic system in Pirates of the Burning Sea, where you have ten lots available to you and must decide how (and where) to allocate them: vertically integrate for an entire production chain? Specialize in a given resource or particular process, and thus increase your risk? Not too dissimilar from the current design allowing up to 11 research and 11 manufacturing jobs simultaneously, depending on your skill training. This implies lots of strategic choices for players, and I have every confidence that CCP can surpass the design that PotBS implemented.

And of course there are over 65,000 planets in the game. And you can interact with each and every one of them. Including those that are in wormhole space, which can actually be quite challenging.

This intrigues me to no end, both from a gameplay perspective (more profits in W-space and more activities out there for the residents) as well as from a “prime fiction” (canon lore) perspective. Do these planets have residents? If not, will we learn more about the automation and technology in EVE? This could potentially imply resources for tech III frigates as well. Back here in K-space, we should get much more information about who lives in low-sec and null-sec, and of course some areas could have potentially unique interest (e.g. COSMOS constellations or systems like Intaki).

We’re making really interesting manufacturing and resource trees here, right now. Going over ‘what materials are you extracting from gas giants, what are you getting from planets which are pretty much just molten magma. You will actually be able to put down facilities, arcologies, and cloud cities, or really tough units that you can place on very hostile worlds, to extract and manufacture from them. And then rocket the stuff off of them, or move it out with a space elevator. In general, of course, with more risk comes more reward.

This really grabs my attention, both for the gameplay as well as the fiction. What will we make? Will it be awesomely cool? And the fiction possibilities multiply exponentially here. Generally, when new resources become available, we get new end products as well, so even those folks not interested in the industrial gameplay benefit (cf. tech III strategic cruiser production).

Your ability to master a planet, to manufacture, build up, and manage it, will be bound by skills.

Guess I’ll sit on that neural remap until we know more about this. Industrial and exploration gameplay that results in passive income, with tons of fiction possibilities? I really want to immerse myself in this, and so I intend to focus largely on the new gameplay as I’ve done with other science & industry skills. But until we at least know whether they’ll largely focus on intelligence and memory (my current estimate) or even include charisma in some way, I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’ll have trouble keeping up.

One of our goals with planetary interaction is to phase out these NPC created commodities, because we want to put the power into the hands of the players and make EVE even more sandbox-y than it is.

There are elements of EVE which we feel can use some iteration based on the experiences that we have learned, running EVE for seven years. The NPC market is definitely one of them. It’s been with us for a long time. It hasn’t changed much. We want to take these commodities and move them into the hands of the players.

We are not giving out publicly yet which commodities these are. Even once we put it on the public test server, you will not be able to see what these final commodities are going to be.

I hope hope HOPE this includes implants (or meta 1-4 modules) and not just commodities like robotics and oxygen and trade goods. That said, I applaud this sort of thing, as it allows for continued emergent gameplay. The implications will have such a major impact on the economy that reserving more information on that until Tyrannis goes onto the production cluster really becomes a de rigeur decision.