Category Archives: CSM

Summer Summit – Day 1

As some of you might well be unsurprised to hear, just from the topic list for today, this is going to be very light on details. Because a great deal of this will fall under the NDA. I’m hopeful that you’ll hear about it all fairly soon, but there’s some potentially contentious stuff in there, and other stuff which just isn’t ready for public consumption.

Anyway, with that said, let’s begin.

The meeting with Hilmar went pretty well, with us focusing mostly on how we see things going, and how we think CCP can communicated better with you, the average player base. There’s been a great deal of focus on things like Gunjack, and Valkyrie in the gaming press, with Eve sometimes seeming like the poor step sister, hidden away in the wings. In part, that’s due to it being ‘old news’, the game that’s been around for 13 years, without any major changes or new features which would be understood by the average person who reads the gaming press. Pandas are easy to understand. A new way to take space, not so much. It’s obvious when you actually talk to the people, that the passion is still there, but it’s not always well communicated.

Also, he fed us Sandwich Cake (Brauðterta) which was a somewhat novel experience. tasted pretty good.

Then we moved onto the 3rd party session. Nothing new to report here, other than we asked for a bunch of things, some which will be dependant on the other team developing the feature, and some which Foxfour said he’d look at. I’d like to say a little more, but forgot to check what the NDA coverage was, so what I’ll say is, read the minutes. Hopefully it’ll be in there, if not, sorry folks, that’s NDA for you. (It’s a technical point, rather than a new feature)

Then I fell asleep. 😉

Well, no, but we moved onto some long, and very very talky sessions about Sov, Cap changes and power projection. Some of it was a bit above my head, some of it seemed counter intuitive, but I guess that’s mostly because I don’t spend a great deal of time in Null, and I don’t move in the upper echelons of power there. Unfortunately, a great deal of that comes under NDA. Some minutes were taken, but I’m expecting another cat picture. (Sorry, no recipes from me this year) Hopefully you’ll hear about it fairly soon, but with some of the changes being talked about, I can understand serious NDA protection. I did like what I heard about Caps and Supercaps (from my admittedly less educated perspective)

And that’s the end of the day. We spent a lot of time talking about Sov. And, I’m glad to say, things remained civil. Which is nice, considering how high tempers could have run.

CSM X Ballot

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I really should post here more. But you know how it is, when you don’t have anything in particular to say.

Anyhoo, The election is here, and I thought it would be worth name checking a few people who you should consider having on your ballot. Of course, the first person should be me, Steve Ronuken. I’d be an idiot to say otherwise. But if you decide that you prefer someone else, just stick me somewhere lower down. Every little helps.

I’m not going to be listing positions on the ballot (other than me first 😉 ), because you should vote for people who you think will represent your space and play style best. So someone in Wormholes should probably have Corbexxx second on the list, where as someone in Low should have Sugar Kyle. I’m going to keep the blurbs pretty short, but I do suggest looking them up some more in other media. Shamelessly lifted from Sugar’s blog:

Steve Ronuken

Vote for me, please 🙂 This term’s been great for getting stuff out to the third-party community, then onto everyone else. And industry is in a healthier (if not perfect) place than it used to be. More to do though. Next term, I’m expecting to see more coming out for CREST, which can be a real game changer.

Sugar Kyle

As has been stated by pretty much every other candidate, Sugar’s been doing a wonderful job on CSM 9. Approachable, diligent, and a hard worker. She’s not one for drama either, which I’m a fan of. While she’s spending her time mostly in lowsec, she’s got a good head on her shoulders, and a good understanding of other spaces.

Corbexxx

Not the most prolific writer, but a good communicator, and always going to the wider community for feedback and research.

Bam Stroker

Some people talk about helping the community. Bam’s involved in it. Just look at Eve Down Under. I think he’s going to be useful. Sure, he’s in PL, but you can’t have everything.

Jayne Fillon

NPSI is important. Jayne’s been a good representative for it. He’s a touch abrasive, but a chunk of that comes from not suffering fools gladly. NPSI leads to better player retention, as it draws people into wider social groups, and more activities.

Ashterothi

Another candidate with good lowsec (FW in this case) experience. And has just branched into wormholes 🙂 Which is handy, for an alternate viewpoint. And Lore!

Psianh Auvyander

Psianh’s a mercenary. And a trainer of mercenaries. I think that brings a useful perspective.

Cagali Cagali

BNI Education, Recruiting and HR. Newbies are important. Cagali² has to work with them on a regular basis. And a degree of nullsec experience is handy, from the non-incumbent perspective.

I have this terrible feeling I’m missing someone. Anyway, go vote (when it opens). You don’t need to fill in all the positions, but do at least 5.

CREST market data

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This has been out for a while, but I’ve now got something public ( https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/market/viewer2/ ) out there, I thought I’d write some words.

Of all the things which have happened in my CSM term, the availability of ‘live’ market data is one of the ones I’m happiest about. It might not seem like a big step, but we now have access to data directly from Tranquility, in a way that has a very low cache time. (I’m expecting some future ones to be even smaller, but that’s more specific data) It’s been a long time coming, and is a step towards removing the ‘requirement’ for the grey area of cache scraping. (Along with the dgmExpressions table being added to the SDE). Grey areas are bad, because they lead people to push the boundaries, and I don’t want to see someone banned for that.

But enough electioneering (Vote for me! 🙂 ), I thought I’d write a little about what it’s doing. I had help in the form of Capt Out’s Crest Explorer which gave me a head start, rather than needing to implement the core ‘Log into the SSO’ bit. After that, it’s just a matter of:

Grab the region list. (filtering out the Wormholes)
Grab the base market groups.
Wait for the user to click something
- If it’s a market group, grab that specific group, and loop through it for direct children
- If it’s an item, if a region is selected, grab buy and sell orders, before cramming them into tables
- If it’s a region, grab the region data for where to get buy and sell order data

That’s pretty much it. There are some twiddly bits (like languages) but the rest of it is just AJAX calls, and looping through the result sets for display. I’d hope the code is fairly simple to understand (if you know any javascript/jquery) but if you have any questions, feel free to throw them my way.

https://github.com/fuzzysteve/CREST-Market-Viewer for the source. MIT licensed.

Why medical clone costs needed to go.

The short version:

It was a mechanic which discouraged people from actually flying ships. That is, discouraged them from playing the game.

The longer version:

While clone costs aren’t really high, until you start getting into the really high levels of SP, they form a mental block for people. ‘You’re flying a Rifter. Your Pod costs more than the ship’. You don’t get any benefit from upgrading your clone. You just don’t get smacked with a penalty.

It’s a tax on PvP, which gets worse the longer you play. The better you get, the more you lose when you die. Sure, you’ll find PvPers who say that they rarely lose their pod. You’ll find that these people spend the vast majority of their time in, probably, Lowsec. While it’s possible to lose a pod there, you have to be pretty bad to do so. Wormholes and null, however, are the land of bubbles. Pity the poor Sabre pilot, who is almost certain to lose his Pod, as he’s probably going to be inside his own bubble when he dies.

If there was actually a meaningful choice with Clone upgrades, that would be another matter. But there isn’t. You either upgrade your clone, or you’re an idiot (disclaimer: I miss Minmatar Battleship 5)

So, CCP removing medical clone levels is a good thing. They’ve stated that they’re not finished there, that the removal is a quality of life change, which opens up more possibilities for future changes. Sure, they could have waited. Some people have said they should have. I disagree. Removing a gangrenous limb, without having a prosthetic available, isn’t a mistake. Remove it now. Put something better in, when it’s ready.

Is it making Eve easier? A little. But if you’re really complaining about someone not needing to remember something before undocking, well, there’s nothing I can say which you’re going to listen to. Hardness, here, is nothing to do with skill. It’s just annoying crap.

Being Podded still has consequences. Death still matters. Someone with a full snake set isn’t going to brush off a death. But they got to make a choice there. They chose to risk the implants, and got a reward for it. Clone grade doesn’t really enter into the risk/reward there. You can choose to risk a skill. Your reward is, you pay a little less. Not really meaningful against the penalty of losing a great deal of skill points.

Oh, and yes, you’ll no longer be able to get someone to pod themselves down to no skills. My tear bucket is over there. Go fill it.

Eve Vegas

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I know I’ve been light on posting. Sorry about that, I’ve just not had much to talk about that I can talk about publicly. At least, not that hasn’t been covered in detail by other people. Sugar Kyle has been great at this. Lots of writing. 🙂

However, I’ve been poked by people that think I should be communicating more (Thanks Sugar) so I’m trying to pick my writing up again.

By now, you’ve probably read a bunch about Eve Vegas, and the shenanigans people got up to there. I enjoyed myself greatly there, and spent a fair quantity of time talking with people, getting a general feeling for how things are going down. With Phoebe, the general feel I got was resignation that, while the jump changes might impact on gameplay they liked, it was for the good of the game in general. While not the most upbeat feel, sometimes you just have to rip the plaster off.

For those that watched the stream, yes, they called my name for a prize. Unfortunately, I was in the roundtable room, where I thought I would be more useful (I caught the presentations later) so I didn’t hear. Oh well, didn’t want those headphones anyway 😉

From a 3rd party dev standpoint, Foxfour’s presentation and roundtable didn’t really reveal particularly much. However, it did point to a renewed appetite within CCP for getting us the tools which we need, to be able to do stuff. While we don’t yet have a timescale for getting authenticated CREST on TQ, he announced that we should be getting it on SiSi in the nearish future, first as part of a trial much like the SSO trial, and then moving onto an automated version. And SSO on TQ, for most people, should be out very soon indeed. Just waiting on a few crossed i’s and dotted t’s.

Capt Out’s CREST presentation is worth a watch. you can find it on Youtube. It’s not a recording of the one from Eve Vegas, instead being a redone one, with better production values. The roundtable room wasn’t good for recordings.

One of the big things I came away with, from talking with people, was a reinforced understanding that Discoverability is one of Eve’s key weaknesses. From ‘how do I find a community to be part of’ to ‘How do I change my own market orders, without going via the order screen’. So many options, with google often being the easiest way to find an answer. The NPE talk from Rise did touch on this, but it’s a little more endemic than that. It’s something that CCP will need to focus on, over time. For both New players, and Veterans.

Oh, and I’m running for CSM X. And I’m calling it that for a host of good reasons, not just because it let me update the ‘Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM 9’ tshirt that I have, with a sharpie. It’s an early announcement, but I’m hoping that people read the minutes which should be out shortly, and think I’m doing what they voted for.

Zoom zoom 😉

Finally, a CSM post

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I kept meaning to write something, but there was always something new coming up. Or I was recovering from the night before.

Well, here it is. Thank you, to everyone that voted for me, and showed some faith in the system. I’ll try not to let you down. From the chat’s I’ve had with the other CSM members, I think we’ll do pretty well this year. They’re an engaging bunch, and opinionated. Which is always good.

You may have seen that we’ve decided not to elect any of the positions. This isn’t an attempt to get out of doing any work, or to stop Ali from getting the Chairman position. In part, it’s due to CCP saying that positions wouldn’t be elected until the summer summit, and also from the fact that we think we won’t actually need them.

The newcomers amongst us will still listen to the people who have been around before, and we’ll just designate people to do tasks as needed. The net effect is the same, with no e-peen waving required. Lets us get down to business.

Anyway, I’ve not yet had any serious conversations with CCP, and only just signed my NDA. The transition’s going fairly smoothly.

I’m not sure how often I’ll be blogging, mostly because the stuff I’m going to be most interested in will be behind NDA, or released on the forums shortly there after. But I’ll try to keep up.

In other news, I’ve added a CSM section to evebloggers.com, and you can find it in the navbar. Right now, it’s kind of sparse, because I had to add categorization for posts, and that requires reprocessing. Mostly I chose to do it with Mynnna’s as it had the fewest posts overall, so I could just dump them all, rather than everything past a certain date. I’ll get to the other people’s soon enough.

CSM 9 voting list

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The Election is almost on us, and that means suggested voting lists. As you can’t just put me 14 times, I have a number of suggested candidates. Other than myself, I’m not really suggesting any particular order (me first!). Pick people that are appropriate for your play style, or where you live.

If you’re an industrialist, consider voting for the wormhole candidates, as they’ll have a clue about the pain involved with working with POS, as they live out of them.

Me! Steve Ronuken.
Mangala Solaris – A good understanding of small gang warfare
Jayne Fillion – Another good understanding of small gang warfare, with good theory crafting skills.
Ali Aras – An incumbent who’s done a good job keeping lines of communication open.
Sugar Kyle – A low sec trader. Lowsec needs work, and Sugar knows.
Proclus Diadochu – Wormhole candidate. Wants to hit on POS and corp management.
James Arget – An incumbent wormhole candidate.
Mynnna – Yes, he’s a goon, but he knows his stuff. Incumbent.
Mike Azariah – An incumbent for the ‘casual’ player.
Xander Phoena – Another goon, yes. He’s, on the other hand, loud and opinionated. Which isn’t a bad thing.
Psianh Auvyander – More small gang warfare, and the merc perspective.
Matias Otero – BNI is a wonderful concept.
DJ FunkyBacon – I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s not generally /that/ wrong. And he’s another Lowsec advocate.

Yes, I know that’s only 13 people. can’t expect me to do all your work 😉

Vote match may be of interest.

CSM – NPC Corporations

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I’ve had someone asking me about my feelings about NPC corporations, on Twitter, and while I answered him, I thought I’d give a fuller answer here.

NPC corporations are fine. But there should always be an advantage of not being in one. Also, you shouldn’t be able to use one to avoid consequences.

So, let’s go through various play styles, and see how I’d like to change things.

Mission Runners

I’m fairly happy with the current settings for them. Possibly add an LP tax, which converts LP into LP for their NPC corp. Perhaps slightly lower standings gains for other corporations or ‘opposing’ factions. Those are pretty minor though.

Miners

Right now, there’s little reason for miners to leave an NPC corporation. It exposes them to war decs, but other than social aspects, they gain little. This is less than ideal. However, I have other plans that I’d like to implement for mining, involving the removal of static belts, a prospecting system, and the ability to stake a claim on discovered sites, for your corporation. Mine in a claimed site, go suspect. So, NPC corp members can only claim for the NPC corporation, which means any other NPC member can come along and take the ore you spent time finding. It’s a similar downside to now, so it’s not exactly a nerf, with the benefit of additional game play. As an associated idea, I’d like for Mining missions to have regular ore, where you pay a tithe to the corporation, for the right to mine at their claim.

Gankers and Greifers

I know they’re not the same. But they get the same benefits from being in an NPC corporation. Someone can’t get help to retaliate. In this, there’s no way to do it without an ability nerf. I’d suggest automatically shunting people to the faction warfare corporation, when they drop below security status -1.0, maybe -2.0. Allows for mistakes, doesn’t allow for evading consequences so much. Military service for ‘hooligans’.

Industrialists

As long as you do all your industry in station, there is no reason to leave an NPC corporation. I’d like to see limitations on all industrialists in NPC run stations, capping the number of slots you can use per station (3 perhaps) with the addition of an industrial array you can anchor in space, for easier slots, with a lower entry cost than POS. Renting would also be good.

Haulers

I can’t think of a way to incentivize PC corp haulers over NPC corp ones. Everything that came to mind also came with a simple way to bypass.

Dedicated PvPers

No real benefit from being in an NPC corp. No real downside.

tl;dr: I’m not a fan of people staying in NPC corporations because it’s the best idea for what they do. So there need to be bigger changes than just taxes and the ability to anchor a POS.

Retooling Industry in EVE. Blue Sky

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Industry in EVE needs work. It’s not been touched, save for the addition of new things to make, in quite a while. When people talk about it, they tend to talk about things like changes to the UI, to make it simpler to put in jobs in batches, or adding a queue. What I’m going to suggest here is more involved than that. It’s not a ‘This should happen’ piece, but more a discussion point, to see if it sparks any ideas with people.

Industry in EVE, except for big multistage projects like capitals, can be very reactive to market shifts. It’d be interesting to introduce something which interferes with this. Which promotes longer term planning. The easiest, and simplest, way to do this is to introduce a retooling delay. So to install a job, you’re going to have to wait a little time for the facility to get ready to produce your things.

You could probably get away with having the ability to ‘prototype’ a thing, reducing the retooling delay, for an increased cost and time per unit. So if you just want one thing, you can get it made custom, for double the cost of mass production, but quicker.

It would be wise have a cost involved with the retooling as well. Materials, rather than ISK. Another use for R.A.M. and some PI things perhaps.

This would favour long runs, over short ones.

It would probably be worthwhile to change the process to get away from the ‘Put a job in to cook, come back a week later and hit deliver’, and move to the ‘set up the production line, make sure it’s kept fed, and you can retrieve the product when you want’ that you have with PI. You can always leave it for a long time, but you don’t need to. beneficial from a cash-flow perspective, as you don’t need to tie up your isk for a very long run.

This would impact of the use of low run BPCs. So you’d use those as a material in the production line. As long as you can keep it fed with new BPCs, you can keep it running. Run out, and the line comes to a halt, waiting for you to reload it.

We’d have to move to personal production facilities, as station lines would become clogged. With the code in place for personal structures, I don’t think that’s a major issue. Though you’d want to be able to chain facilities together. Say, a central storage facility, that nearby manufacturing facilities can pull from, at a corp level (Ideally something with a decent permissions model)

The PI model really would work quite well, as long as you could reduce everything to a drag and drop. Having to set up routes for 15 odd materials would be a pain. Being able to drag and drop multiple at a time from a storage facility would be easier.

Multipart ships could become a more complex thing, instead of the ‘make all the parts, then make the ship’ you could do ‘make the parts, and have them feed into the ship building as they’re made, requiring X of each part to get past each milestone. With each milestone taking a minimum length of time.

So, for milestone 1, you’d need X capital construction parts, and takes a minimum of 4 days.
Milestone 2 would up the requirements to an additional X capital construction parts, Y cargo bays and Z engines, and take a minimum of 5 days.
Milestone 3 would take the rest of the parts, and another 5 days.

You could just build all the parts at once, then build the ship, but then you’d be looking at the time to make the parts + 15 days. Or you could set up the lines to feed the ship build. If you’re making multiple ships at once, then you can change it to flow differently. So you have lots of lines doing capital construction parts, and not many on engines and armour.

T2 already does this in places, with the requirement of the T1 module/ship. Some T1 things could have their complexity increased.

It would be important to have ‘running a production line’ and ‘owning a production line’ being different things. Players who don’t use their own/corporate facilities have to pay the retooling cost, or a fee to keep a line inactive. Personal lines could be set up then mothballed (Materials fee after it’s been inactive for an extended period, to bring it back up to spec), or left running.

The entry fee would have to be fairly low, in terms of skill and material costs, so as not to disadvantage dedicated new players. Add a skill to cover how many lines you can manage inactive?

So, thoughts?

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Steve Ronuken

Sugar Kyle

Corbexxx

Bam Stroker

Jayne Fillon

Ashterothi

Psianh Auvyander

Cagali Cagali

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The short version:

The longer version:

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Mission Runners

Miners

Gankers and Greifers

Industrialists

Haulers

Dedicated PvPers

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