The last two months saw a lot of meetings and review of CCP proposals, including a number of major items that found their way into the game, including the ESS and dynamic bounty systems, the supercarrier changes and others. The CSM continued meeting with CCP throughout September and October, with ten meetings throughout this period.
As part of our continuing effort in transparency, here’s a brief synopsis of the meetings that were held.
The duration noted for the meeting is exact for those that were recorded, approximate for those that weren’t.
As with all of our review post, this information was reviewed by the whole CSM and cleared by CCP for release.
Meeting 17 – September 4 – CSM Week 11 meeting
Duration: ~1 hour
This was our CSM week 11 weekly meeting, and we were joined by members of Team Ra and CCP Karkur to talk about her little things list. The entire CSM was present. Team Ra walked through the creation of tier zero and tier six content for Abyssal Deadspace. The CSM spent much of the first half of the meeting walking through this new content and asking questions about what ship types would be permitted, what the loot tables would look like and the overall goal of the content. The lack of diversity in ship types being used in high-tier Abyssal Deadspace was discussed as well.
CCP Karkur met with the team at Brisc’s request to discuss on-going “little things” iterations and fixes. She walked through a number of specific changes she was working on, many of which have already been put in the game, including fixing of fleet advertisements (an Innominate request), default squads, and other refinements to the fleet window.
The CSM then pelted her with “little things” requests, including requests for warnings when undocking with no ammo, weapon sounds at any zoom, useable jump gates included in set-destination routing, watch list radial/clicking brings up target in selected items box, way to tell if you own a skin by looking at it, center probes on self-button, color from watch list applying in fleet chat window, typing in hours in PI rather than just the slider, delivery notification to both deliverer and deliveree, an E-warp off toggle, instant potato mode button and many others.
The meeting wrapped up with a discussion of existing meeting requests and timelines for future meetings.
Meeting 18 – September 11 – CSM Week 12 meeting
Duration: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Team Event Horizon met with the CSM after multiple requests to provide the CSM with details on the final part of the Triglavian Invasion content. The CSM had requested on a number of occasions prior to get a heads up before the final content went live with what the final results would look like and this request was finally granted. CCP Mimic, CCP Coyote, CCP Sledgehammer and a number of others from Team Event Horizon were present, as well as most of the CSM. Brisc was not at this meeting, due to a work conflict.
CCP confirmed that the final Triglavian results were player driven, and they confirmed that they did not alter the results that happened. CCP Mimic walked the CSM through Pochven and how it would work with a significant number of questions from the CSM, including questions about how travel, LP stores, standings and the like would all work. The CSM expressed concerns about standings, whether people would live there and what the income generation potential would be, PvP mechanics like the potential for delayed local and content in Pochven.
Meeting 19 – September 18 – CSM Week 13 Meeting – Q4 Roadmap Discussion
Duration: 1 hour, 31 minutes
CCP Goodfella, CCP Paradox and CCP Shreddy jointed the CSM for the meeting this week. The entire CSM except Maria Taylor was present. CCP Goodfella walked the CSM through the roadmap for Quadrant 4, which was named “Phoenix.” Goodfella walked through a list of the projects included so far in the 4th quarter, including resource redistribution, continued module tiericides, the second phase of the quantum core release, the ESS revamp and dynamic bounty system changes, the supercarrier vat clone bay changes, among others. There was discussion of one proposal that has not yet been made public.
CCP Shreddy walked through content for Quadrant Four, including the end of the Trig Invasion, Halloween and Q4 themed daily login campaigns, as well as the Crimson Harvest and some more proving grounds. Goodfella then talked about some other core experience changes they are working on, including some UI updates to jump clones and changes to the fonts.
At the end of the meeting the CSM met with the community team to talk about CSM related issues and some larger concerns about the development process.
Meeting 20 – September 25 – CSM Week 14 Meeting – Ecosystem Update and Mineral Redistribution
Duration: 1 hour, 26 minutes
The ecosystem team, with CCP Psych speaking on behalf of the team, met with the whole CSM to brief us on the mineral redistribution update. This was one of the more contentious meetings with the Ecosystem team, and the CSM had a lot of significant concerns with the changes, how the changes have been developed, the metrics for determining what is healthy and what isn’t and how the Ecosystem Team will know they’ve been successful. There was significant discussion over minerals being locked into specific regions of space and what the impact overall on the game would be, as well as how to determine what impacts could be attributed to this change, rather than to other outside causes (like the nullsec war).
The CSM expressed considerable frustration that these changes appeared set in stone and we did not have a chance to provide meaningful feedback.
Meeting 21 – October 2 – CSM Week 15 Meeting – CCP Muppet Hunter
Duration: 1 hour, 10 minutes
After last week’s contentious meeting, this week’s meeting was more laid back, a discussion with CCP Muppet Hunter on the status of various projects and which teams were focused on which projects. The entire CSM was present. Muppet Hunter discussed with the team where a number of projects were from the roadmap discussion, including the mineral redistribution and supercarrier changes. Most of the meeting was focused on more high level discussion about game production and development, and where the CSM can fit into that process with CCP.
Meeting 22 – October 9 – CSM Week 16 Meeting – Font Changes
Duration: 1 hour, 4 minutes
CCP Goodfella was back, along with CCP Mischief. Innominate and Gobbins were the only CSM members who were not present. The start of the meeting was based on the Phantomite’s request to discuss the font changes. Yes, the CSM spent fifteen minutes talking about kerning – KERNING - with Goodfella and Mischief, who confirmed they were making a number of changes based on CSM feedback to make the font changes better. The rest of the meeting was with the community team, who confirmed that we had broken the Guinness World Record in the FWST fight. There were also discussions about abyssal deadspace and the proving grounds, including concerns about the current ruleset regarding griefing and collusion. The CSM also expressed praise that the servers worked well during the FWST keepstar fight.
Meeting 23 – October 16 – CSM Week 17 Meeting – Team Ecosystem
Duration: 1 hour, 7 minutes
CCP Rise from Team Talos along with CCP Psych and CCP Bartender from the Ecosystem team joined the entire CSM for a discussion of balance updates that would be coming in the next month, including the introduction of the wubble and the supercarrier clone bay changes. There was also a discussion with the team over the failed Boson trap and issues with server performance in heavy TIDI.
Meeting 24 – October 23 – CSM Week 18 Meeting – Team Event Horizon
Duration: 1 hour, 12 minutes
Team Event Horizon joined the CSM to talk about the wrap up of the Triglavian invasion, and players concerns with the content on launch. The CSM expressed players frustration with much of the Pochven content, including issues with getting access to the system, the lack of content, and standings issues that were highlighted by the standings exploit. CCP confirmed that there would be a rollback of all standings, as there was no legitimate way for anyone to have successfully gained the needed standings in the time period between the launch and the exploit being declared an exploit. The CSM continued to provide feedback and express concern that players were unhappy that the region launched in the way that it did.
After the Team Event Horizon portion of the meeting, CCP Dopamine confirmed that CCP would be placing the nullsec war staging systems in Delve and NPC Delve on a dedicated node to improve server performance there after multiple requests. There was also discussion of CCP’s work on a new content creator partnership program.
Meeting 25 – October 28 – CCP Leadership Meeting
Duration: 1 hour, 22 minutes
A number of CSM members had requested a leadership meeting with the “Big Three” – CCP Burger, CCP Mannbjorn and CCP Orca, as we had not yet met with them as a group. This was a special meeting held during the week. Because of that, Merkelchen had a conflict and was not able to attend, but the rest of the CSM was present. In addition to Burger, Mannbjorn and Orca, CCP Muppet Hunter and CCP Goodfella, as well as the rest of the community team (Dopamine, Convict and Aurora) were in attendance. Because this was a high level meeting that went into detail on future plans and discussions, there’s not much non-NDA material I can go over here, other than to say that Brisc did bring up the red dot again.
Meeting 26 – October 30 – CSM Week 19 Meeting – Team Ecosystem
Duration: 1 hour, 6 minutes
The Week 19 meeting included a visit from some of the members of Team Ecosystem, including CCP Psych, to continue the discussions that have been on-going throughout this CSM term on CCP’s ecosystem changes to income, wealth generation and resource distribution. The entire CSM was present. The CSM went over in depth the mineral rebalance changes, as well as discussed the ESS and dynamic bounties systems. The CSM continued to provide feedback and express their concerns with the direction of the ecosystem changes and how players are perceiving those changes
Slack Conversations
As always, there were on-going discussions and debates via Slack during the last two months. Slack has been largely utilized over the last two months as a way for players to ask specific questions of specific groups and get answers they can provide back to players with CCP permission. We’ve also been able to highlight specific concerns with different proposals, including working to improve the new clone and implant UI, as well as concerns about the font changes, Triglavian invasion, and a number of server related issues and bugs.
If anybody has any specific questions about the info provided here, I’ll be happy to answer as many as I can within the NDA and COC.
