At 6:40 CCP Rattati says he’s throwing wide nets on the forums to gather information. Where are these nets? I have not seen a single net thrown out on the forums that asked for feedback at all since Rattati took over. The #technology-research:upcoming-features-changes forum is devoid of any new content or feedback request topics.
At 8:00 CCP Rattati says that features go in Sisi for testing and some/many never make it to TQ due to outrage. Which features are those? The only example that I can think of are the Compression changes that were actively delayed. What other feature was not pushed to TQ despite the tons of negative feedback (see new Skill Window, events, balancing). The opposite feels more like it: Things don’t land on Sisi and then suddenly appear on TQ (see Marauder Bastion changes last year).
At 9:00 CCP Swift starts to ramble about how “certain player groups” received the Rorqual nerfs very unfavorably and wanted Prosperity to happen for them as well and how a few hundred Rorquals outmined the entire rest of the game. And then says “we can make a few tweaks” and how Rorquals scaling with n+1 isn’t healthy and how CCP develops in a data driven manner. That insight comes a tad bit late after CCP willfully ignored ALL that data for years despite player feedback and let the economy drive against a wall with seeing eyes. And to fix that, CCP wanted to nerf Rorquals in ways that make the ship itself completely unrewarding and turn it into a massive click-fest-tedium.
Somewhere after 12:00 CCP Swift and Rattati talk about how, for instance, Compression numbers on Sisi were blown out of proportion for testing purposes and would have never landed like this on TQ and would have been tweaked based on player feedback. This was never mentioned at all anywhere, to my knowledge, in any of the devblogs, forum responses, test server feedback topic. If CCP had clarified that CLEARLY and when they released these numbers, this would have prevented a lot of negative sentiments towards these changes.
At this point I should probably not continue… I skipped everything about NFT and Whovians because … well, waste of time.
At 1:35h a Wardec host talks about how destroyers in your fleet with defender missiles could be a counter against bombers to make BS work better against bombers. The thing with that is that, especially in Tidi, these defenders don’t work. And another thing is how defenders work. They don’t spread on different bombs, they all go to the same bomb unless you launch them in a slow, staggered way – but that limits the number of bombs that you can destroy and it makes it easy to just bring more bombers than you need to ignore those few defender missiles. The Wardec host goes on about lack of trust in players that these things are worthwhile … looking at the mechanics, who can blame them? The only reasonable way to make bombing harder is a hic.
At 1:39h some Marauder talk happens and Swift is superhappy with Marauders. Rattati says that Marauders are an aspirational goal and that they are were easy targets before … after CCP nerfed Marauders by nerfing the Bastion Module. Weird take, if you ask me.