[CSM 15] Gobbins

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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Pandemic Horde alliance leader and founder.

Background/Expertise

Played since 2004, background in FCing, spying and alliance tourneys (4 gold, 1 silver, 3 bronze medals).
Founded Pandemic Horde in 2015, now the biggest new player corp in the game and the third biggest alliance overall.
I run one of the biggest alliances in the game and manage the thousands of people in it.

Why apply for CSM

The way the CSM works it is a genuine handicap for a nullsec group not to have a person inside the council. That’s how it is. I am here to ensure my people’s concerns are addressed.

Work done in CSM14 and what players can expect

So I’ve seen a lot of people talk about conflict drivers.
I -am- the conflict drivers guy.
I am the one who asked for an entire session with CCP leadership be dedicated to the topic (see minutes), then hammered on the subject again with Hilmar in QnA session and the final dinner. And I think we are making progress but there is still a big knowledge gap between what the top thinks eve players get out of bed for, and what actually happens in 2020 Tranquility (see my minutes comments).

I am also the guy who had the playstiles session organized at the first summit and started bringing passive income back on CCP’s radar (see minutes). A work which has continued through the year as CCP dedicated a special team to ecosystems and resources.

Now while we’re here I think its important to clarify something that will be useful to the public as well as newcomer candidates: CCP is not short of ideas. They have a million ideas, and various parts of CCP will have different ideas about the same topic.

The path to getting something done in the CSM is finding buy-in at 3 levels:
1- the leadership
2- the producers
3- the individual teams

As I said each of those layers already have their own solutions in their minds and a large backlog of stuff they’d like to take care of but it’s just not the priority right now. They’re not just sitting on their asses waiting for you to walk in and lay down the blueprint.
As a CSM what you do isn’t show up and pitch features, but rather explain problems and explain why a certain issue needs more or less priority. If those 3 layers are convinced, then they might start working on the issue and come up with their own solution. At this point they might or might not ask for your feedback on that solution. Then it goes through their QA and makes it into the game.

This brings us back to conflict drivers and the importance of ingraining a firm understanding of this concept and its importance at all 3 layers above. This is ongoing work that must continue during the CSM15’s tenure.

Other CSM14 accomplishments

We pushed pretty hard for supercap rebalance and fixing citadels. You can go check the patch notes to see extensive changes in those areas. There was also a lot of work done between ccp and the newbie corp groups which resulted in much higher tutorial completion and higher overall retention to the game (see minutes and CCP’s presentations).

What about the non blocs???

Yeah one more thing I’ve spent a lot of time this year connecting CCP to various representative from FW, lowsec, roaming FCs, and other small groups so that they had a chance to directly voice with CCP devs and raise their concerns. These aren’t people that voted for me but I helped them when needed. Hopefully these niches can organize and get their own candidate elected this year, but if not I’ll try to help out again.

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Congratulations on your re-election. Will you make a campaign video, I have found it’s very helpful in terms of connecting to the voter base.

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I’m looking forward to working with you, assuming I can get reelected. :slight_smile:

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Coalition of Sovereignty Mechanics is more like it.

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I wish we could get them to do something about the sov mechanics.

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LOL. Suuuure you do.

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Everybody in nullsec hates the sov mechanics.

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:roll_eyes: Then why are they there?

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Because they haven’t really been touched since 2015, and there have been bigger priorities since then.

You want to argue about sov, take it to my thread. Let’s not ■■■■ up Gobbins’.

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It is more relevant here, for the “Founder of Pandemic Horde”

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Hey, i love conflicts

I would like to know your opinion about “conflict driver” and what are your ideas

i have a specific question aswell about something who existed before and was removed : Passive moon, what are your position about that, bad/good does active moon are more beneficial than passive and if you would like to see them’ come back what you think CCP should change about 'em ?

i strongly believe Active Moon was a total mistake just like Rorqual, when Rorqual encouraged Supercap meta Active Moon encouraged stagnation and “krabbing meta” i’m a bit pissed to see a small minority of people realizing that, actually a lot CSM candidate like Phantomite Blazzingbunny, brisc, villy, innominate seem to care about conflict driver that’s why i would like to ask other candidate in order to turn Eve “krab meta” into a “perpetual war” just like it should be

as a NS bloc leader your opinion is even more valuable

thanks

I am also the guy who had the playstiles session organized at the first summit and started bringing passive income back on CCP’s radar (see minutes). A work which has continued through the year as CCP dedicated a special team to ecosystems and resources.

EDIT: after a second reading i noticed that, can you elaborate about how it should be changed with the current Meta (Jump Bridge, Sov, etc) and the difference between a passive POS back then and a potentiel passive structure (more timer=more difficult to take) a lot of people seem to forget that part and forget at this time Jump fatigue wasn’t a thing for exemple, thanks again

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Thanks, that is a good suggestion. I never learned to make videos but I probably should at some point.

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Likewise!

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The TL DR is at this stage its more important to get CCP to fully understand conflict drivers, than it is to pitch personal ideas.

For example, why was a dyspro moon a conflict driver, but a xeno athanor is not?
Having said that my answer to that has to do with mechanics, granularity and stakes:

  • Mechanics as in simply the mechanics that govern how the players fight over the valuable moon, ie. old pos vs current citadel. And some work already went into addressing the anti-conflict outcomes of current citadel mechanics during CSM14.

  • Granularity as in there has to be conflict drivers designed for various sizes of player groups. Where a smaller fleet can cause a comparative small trouble which leads to conflict, especially if uncontested. A good example of this is the work done towards new ESS mechanics (see minutes) where if you ignore a small fleet in your space and leave it uncontested, it starts stealing your resources.

  • Stakes as in there has to be valuable stuff to fight over, with clearly coded rewards for winning objectives, and penalties for losing objectives, especially losing objectives without trying to fight for them. In the current design it just makes too much sense to let citadels and sov die and then rebuild later. There is also very little reward to killing enemy citadels, even moon miners. One of many solutions that ccp seems interested in is adding more value to each citadel and having that value drop for the attackers if the citadel is destroyed. As an extra here, some parts of space especially low-sec need to have something valuable at all to begin with that people can fight over.

We got the JB nerfed to where it is out of range of the doomsday. I think more work should go on the JB balance but aimed at how easy/hard it is to disable bridges rather than adding fatigue. Play and counterplay.

As for passive income, I don’t think it should come from moons, but rather something new. In my presentation to CCP I explained there can be at least 3 basic approaches to passive income. The model of the egg, the well or the tree.

  • The egg model is something that pops up around the map every now and then and whoever wins the objective harvests all the resource instantly (ie NPC sotios).
  • The well model is something that generates steady passive income for whoever acquires control of the well (ie Old passive POS miners). Unlike previous iterations, the well should eventually deplete and a new one spawns elsewhere.
  • The tree model is like the well, but the amount of resource it generates ramps up slowly after it is conquered. That rewards holding the tree for a longer period of time and makes it non-viable to just passively claim trees all over the map and run around flipping them back if lost (one of the problem old passive moons had).
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Thanks

i love those ideas, after the removal of passive income the immediate effect was the death of every PvP Alliance, those ideas seem great for daily content (egg) and war (well, tree) and will certainly bring back PvP alliance aswell

As for passive income, I don’t think it should come from moons, but rather something new. In my presentation to CCP I explained there can be at least 3 basic approaches to passive income. The model of the egg, the well or the tree.

it’s more a curiosity than a real question but : do you think moon is too much time-consuming?

and if CCP implement a ressource depletion (probably soon :p) would you like to see them changing the time needed to mine / cycle time to suit the new “nomadic” playstyle that are included with a ressource depletion mechanic? afterall those less-farmed region will probably be a warzone

Thanks again for your response, it’s a good thing to see a lot of CSM candidate value conflict driver and more important to see Big-bloc leader wanting to see their gameplay changed

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Gobbins probably doesn’t need my vote, but I’ll support the conflict driver guy (and not just because I was in fleet with him earlier today and will probably soon be encouraged to vote for him).

While my corp has been part of your alliance since November and I can’t think of an alliance that would be a better fit for us, I’ve always felt like Low-Sec was my home more than any other area of space. That didn’t change when I moved into wormholes, nor when I joined the alliance to try out Null after it became time to leave my C5 corp (not long after my corp joined PH). I’ve been happy to see you talking about connecting CCP with smaller groups before and I’m happy to see you bring it up again.

I haven’t been playing for very long (a bit over 13 months) so I haven’t experienced the previous sources of passive income. With your three categories of passive income, Tree sounds most like how the present sovereignty mechanics work and the issues with that are a full discussion of their own. Unfortunately, I can’t see trees being practical for anything but large, stable groups which can reasonably expect to hold onto the tree for long enough to pay off. I quite like the idea of depleting wells instead of reinstating passive moons, though.

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Trollolol … you are the prototype of being anti-conflict if it comes to secure your precious wallet influx. Remember folks Gobbins was the driving part behind TTT being uncontestable.

Don’t vote for this guy. He doesn’t represent you, just his wallet.

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We already saw their current plans in this regard and already gave our feedback. Specifically about some of the stuff that you asked about. If it’s not in the minutes or the blogs, then it is NDA sorry.
Just as a note I think it will take more than resource depletion to foster nomadic playstyles. Resource depletion only leads to crop rotation. To enable nomads, you need more looting dynamics (as in pillaging a rich empire and running away sort of mechanic).

The problem with old passive incomes is some very mobile alliance would hold valuable moons across large swathes of land and simply flip them back when the local contested them. This wack a mole actually made it very hard for smaller groups to keep good moons.

The way the Tree works, sure someone can come bash your tree and reset the ramp-up, but they will be no richer for it. Because by the time they leave, the locals can flip it back, before any real income is harvested from the tree. This gives an innate advantage to the groups living close to the Tree, regardless of size.

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“I -am- the conflict drivers guy.”

What if ccp would invent the biggest conflict-driver possible in this game. Lets say a structure that passively generates trillions of isk each month.

What if ccp made it even more easy to fight over this structure by putting it next to a staging with nearly unlimited supply of ships and modules.

We would see unlimited fun fights over this giga conflict driver wouldnt we?

Guess what this structure already exists and is called the TTT Tranq Trade Tower 1 sys next to Jita.

Guess what noone fights over it, cause Pandemic Horde (You are the leader), Test and Imperium signed a no content deal and just share the money.

The problem is not contentdrivers, the problem is alliance leaders like you.

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Except there is no mechanic to fight over TTT due to how Azbel spam interacts with hisec wardec mechanics. An issue I had raised back when Horde first held hisec and the public mostly laughed as ‘Gobbins just wants it easy’.

The same broken mechanic now makes a TTT deal inevitable, to our benefit. Who got the last laugh clowns?

Oh one more note. Before the deal there had been incessant fighting around the keepstar. Or perhaps you think test would just cut in their enemies into the profits out of the kindness of their hearts?

Why don’t you put in some work yourself?

You can go ahead and attempt the same harassment against the keepstar that Horde has undertaken. Until then the profits will belong to those who have fought to earn them.

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