Dev blog: CSM Winter Summit Minutes & changes to election process

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CCP set up a representative focus group for customer feedback. It’s democratic. One of the pitfalls of democracy is that organized groups will outperform the disorganized mob when it comes to getting their interests represented. This is why political parties exist. So, when you have focused advocates of large chunks of the player base who all have similar issues and all have similar solutions, it tends to reinforce things.

The things we hear often get greater purchase in our minds. Even if we consciously reject them, they’re still in there, influencing how we think. Sometimes it’s by being a persistent nagging whisper. Sometimes, it’s pushing us away from that idea reflexively.

Where high-sec PvP (and, let’s face it, all PvE) run into problems isn’t just in the idea that the null blocs are more organized and get their people onto the CSM. It’s also the fact that once they get there… they’re cohesive. That’s not because ‘screw highsec’, either. That’s because you’ve got a bunch of people who have similar issues and have had all the same discussions among their own people. They’ve even spent months calling one another idiots for proposing the EXACT SAME THING BUT GREEN NOT BLUE YOU FOOL WHY DID YOU WANT IT BLUE?!!?!?

The null blocs aren’t friends. But they are peers, and they do talk to one another. That’s something that seems to be very much lacking in highsec PvP. Do the merc groups have constant dialogs with one another about the issues in highsec? Do they commiserate about mechanics? Do they form coherent, consistent ideas about the best way to fix the problems after thousands of hours of discussion?

Or do they come up with tiny little solutions discussed for a little while among small groups in a half-hearted ‘that’d be cool, but you know they’ll never do it’ way? This is what I mean when I say we need to filter through the ideas we come up with and present the really good ones to CCP. Think of it like a labor union. You may have 90,000 non-union workers in an industry, but the 10,000 union guys, with a cohesive position and unified action… they’re the ones management responds to.

Highsec and PvE players don’t need to be part of some big in-game blue donut to work. But if they want to have the kind of influence their numbers should command… they need to at least present some kind of consistent position to CCP. Otherwise… you get the arguments over ‘make it more random’ ‘no, make it just exactly more missions just like now’ just like we’ve seen in just this thread. And that… that makes CCP sigh and say ‘ok, so we do either one, we’re pissing people off. Let’s just punt for now and see what we can come up with later’.

Edit: I’m not saying it’s a perfect system, either. In fact, I’m saying Churchill was right: Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the others that have been tried.

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That sigh is exactly what I’m seeing in CCP. It’s that incarna-level depression. Kind of a weird connection, but I’ve been watching the show “West Wing” and in one episode a couple of top politicians get stranded in a rural town, and for the first time get to actually talk to people without surveys or metrics or political filters or anything like that. It’s not just that the characters get to hear what matters to people, but that the encounter gets them excited about serving the people they are meant to serve.

The minutes mention that devs are afraid to actually play the game in case they get in trouble. That’s a problem. They aren’t talking to people outside of the CSM. They aren’t engaging with run-of-the-mill players on the level where those players live. Instead of being individual stories, it’s a big formula to be balanced, and no matter what they do the numbers don’t line up. Which is depressing, and it’s why CCP features have been bombing, one after the other.

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Ideas I wish CCP would concentrate their limited resources on:

  1. Require double authentication of account on sign in so that account stealing reduced, allowing for…
  2. Stop the damn botting. You claim you have access to all sorts of in game metrics and you cannot see which people are botting?! After watching this complaint go on and on after 10+ years, it makes us wonder if there is some form of collusion/agreement between CCP and SOME corps/alliances. You cannot claim to be almost “all knowing” about game metrics/mechanics and then shrug your shoulders and say “we are doing our best” in regards to botting.
  3. Stop “fixing” parts of EVE that don’t need to be fixed, i.e., Agent Finder. Use your resources to fix those things people are complaining about. )Stop trying a “Gold” style of mechanic/feature when a plain old “Steel” feature would do. For example, Resource Wars is a failure. WE ALL SAID IT WAS GOING TO BE A FAILURE. You insisted you knew what we wanted. We told you we wanted NEW missions and perhaps, if you wanted to use that creativity, a mission/site generator. CCP always seems to waste time/effort on features neither asked for or supported by the EVE community.
  4. Get out of your long term echo chamber of alliance chat/mumble and community get togethers. They consist mostly of people that think like you do and support the game style you want to promote. Any idea brought up tends to be molded and shaped by those from NS; not a problem for NS concerns, but deadly/poor for HS or LS needs. Talking to HS alts of NS players doesn’t mean you are talking to the HS community. Please reread that last sentence.
  5. Communicate more effectively and far more frequently. This thread has more interaction than I can remember between CCP and the players in a long time.
  6. Focus on improving the game, not your pocketbook. Yes, we know you need to make a nice profit, profit is good! However, despite what Helmar says, greed is not good. When we see a ratio of money making “improvements” to game mechanic improvements reach a high number, the player base begin to wonder if their opinions matter any more than static in a wire transaction.
  7. Try not to be a game for all people/playstyles. Some aspects of gameplay just cannot be accommodated. The majority of the community understands that.

The next 4-6 months will be critical. Several of my friends have been playing 10+ years and they are getting ready to leave. Probably 25% of all my contacts have already left in the last year,50% are actively talking on leaving, while 25% will stay with EVE till you turn out the lights. ALL of them were passionate about EVE and the community at sometime. I think you could rekindle that excitement, but CCP will need to change their priorities.

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No doubt that the next 6 months will be critical, as eve is the type of game where people leave the game for vast periods of time and only come back to it years later to see if it has made some progress.

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Raising the price of wars is not a solution, this would cut down blanket war decs but will leave the issues still there that i listed above. Quite frankly the amount of ways to avoid war decs or dying i’m surprised I even have any content anymore.

If this whole issue is surrounding the newbros then why is war decs coming above ganking?

  • Ganking requires no war dec fee’s
  • No warning or notifications
  • No safe zone (NPC corps etc…)
  • Cheap to gank
  • Targets usually miners (which are usually new players getting into the game)

I can promise now, if wars are hit too harshly then we will probably direct our resources towards ganking (alot already are)

We haven’t got the numbers to push anyone into CSM, quite frankly mercenaries are hated in this game, only takes one post on reddit to work that out. As I said in an earlier post even some of the CSM members are highly against war decs just because they don’t like our gameplay, everyone is entitled to opinions and its been argued over and over mainly times.

We have dialog between mercenaries and the subject has been brought up many times by @Lord_Razpataz amongst other respected people in our community yet its fallen on deaf ears.

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No, but would making it easier to identify and cheaper to dec people who can fight back change how you find targets?

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“20 Hours in America”. Two of the best episodes in the entire series. So good, an ESPN broadcaster got fired for stealing part of Jed’s speech at the end, on-air.

The devs engage with players. They talk to people outside of the CSM. @CCP_Guard was doing it just 8 hrs ago (and I’m sure he’ll do it more later, too). They go to EVE meets like EVEsterdam. Hell, they go to all the EVE meets they can, but you know, travel time and expense is a thing for them, just like it is for us.

But see, they know we’re frustrated. They hear it, constantly. We’re not allowed to hear how frustrated they are, not the same way, not as bluntly. Because they’re not really allowed to tell us. That whole ‘you don’t tell the customer they’re idiots’ thing, I guess. So we need to keep that frustration in mind and not turn everything into an angry screed and finger-pointing at them, at one another, at different totally artificial ‘enemies’ among the player base. Hard to believe, but ‘nullbears’ want highsec and lowsec healthy, too. Every part of the game supports and influences every other part of the game. Except wormholes. Screw those guys. (JUST KIDDING, WORMHOLERS.)

If we stay constructive, they’ll stay motivated. The more we can approach the situation as ‘hey guys! I thought of something helpful for you!’ the more they’ll pick up on that energy, too. It’s not an easy ask, especially in a game like EVE, where we’re kind of institutionally paranoid. But that atmosphere bleeds into their work, hence ‘afraid to actually play the game’.

We’ve gotten so paranoid, we’re making them paranoid, which makes us trust them less because why would they think they’d get into trouble if they weren’t doing something bad, which makes us look at one another and wonder who the devs are helping* which starts the cycle all over again…

We can make that work in the other direction, too. It just takes a bit of optimism and determination.

  • Seriously, everyone’s convinced ‘The Other Guy’ is getting help. Half of /r/EVE is sure CCP is out to help Goons. Half of Goonswarm is convinced CCP is trying to murder us in our sleep. Life’s already short and brutally ambivalent to our survival. We don’t need to make our entertainment drive us nuts, too.

Ugh. God, no. Two-factor authentification’s wonderful, until something goes wrong. I just had to deal with another game where I’d let my sub lapse. I wanted to fire it up and check out how things were going. Only, my phone melted down last summer, and I had to reset to factory settings and reinstall all my apps.

Including my authenticator. Which then wasn’t synched to the account. Ok, so, go to synch it up… have to login.

Which requires the authenticator I have registered to the account.

Which doesn’t exist anymore, because I had to reinstall.

How does the website tell me to fix this? Login and open a trouble ticket! I CAN’T LOGIN DAMMIT THAT’S THE PROBLEM. Ok, call them up. ‘Customer service is for subscribers only’. And yes, actually had an operator tell me that. AFTER I explained that the entire reason I’m going through all that is that I want to resub.

Don’t make 2FA mandatory. Holy carp, no.

(Side note: Also had to reinstall the authenticator for SWTOR. All the same issues about login and ‘subscriber only’ applied there, too. First person I got on the phone? ‘Oh. Hang on… ok, it’s removed, you should be able to login on the website and synch up now. Thanks for calling!’. 5 minutes. Total. Including hold time.)

The problem there is: the HS community isn’t talking. Not the same way. The most disconnected players, the ones who aren’t involved in the community, who don’t vote for the CSM, who don’t read the forums, who don’t go to social meetings, are from highsec. How can CCP listen to people who aren’t talking to them?

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Not really, would just waste more ISK war deccing people for them to leave corporation again.

Most of the targets that have fought back caught us by surprise, anyone who we think ‘may’ fight back are pretty much perma dec’d (Marmite, RIOT etc…)

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Reading the minutes kills all illusions about EvE’s future. There is no vision, no idea about what EvE should be, just life support measures. Everything requiring dev capacity is questioned, are there actually any devs left working fulltime for EvE? CSM … nullification the biggest issue in the game?! … lol.

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I have a feeling that CCP is looking for something simply does not exist. There is no one magic feature that can retain players. No player is dumb enough to play just one kind of activities - be it mission, exploration, anonymous, mining, pi, manufacturing, hauling, ganking, trading, faction warfare, incursion or sov. warfare, exclusively. 99.9% of players will switch from one activity to another in accordance with their moods or the needs of their organization when they login. Null sec main will login high sec alt to run missions. High sec main may login wormhole alt to explore.

It is the combination of all of the existing game elements that built up a vast, complex, rich universe that retains players. CCP can set priority in development direction because of limited development resources, but CCP should not bias to one or few areas and completely ignore the others. No need to reinvent the wheel. No need to search for holy grail. Fix bugs and improve existing gameplays, one bit at a time, without bias, will win the hearts of players.

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Those minutes being written different way than in the past, intended or not.
RW and FOB the so called high sec stuff being a “total failure” or a tleast not doing good.
Nothing is know after the Upwell 2.0
Hope Fanfest will show something good and actually interesting that will be a thing and not just hype for FF2018.

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So we know wars are bad, we know structures are in a difficult spot why would we trade one media I’d and the it to another that is having problems?

CCP here’s the problems with wars.
Defensive win conditions: *crickets as they are all playing pubg waiting for the war to end.

Offensive win conditions: lol cheap Frags anywhere in high sec. Content gained.

When The best solution is to not play it’s not a good mechanic.

Some solutions.

Limit wars to home constellations or regions. Allowing fights to happen but disinterested parties to avoid the fight and keep playing the game. Mining groups would have raging h… it would go over really with with a lot of people.

Or fix locator agents to allow for effective hunting and effective defence.

Set win conditions for both sides. Give defence a way to win. Some how. There’s a lot of good ideas out there butr defence should get some credit for fleeting up and the agressors backing down to a rival fleet.

Give an actual reason to fight. Currently it’s lol green killboard for one side and the other side is just hoping not to loose anything to the enemy doesn’t keep the war going another week. No incentive to engage in a fight. Or even a close or fair fight.

Fix ally mechanics to allow for logistics to work fleet wide for all groups involved.

Some other fixes. Concord neutral logi (war dec roundtable almost unanimously agreed on this)

Look at creating social corps that cone with a penalty of some kind but also allow people to opt out of wars possibly an npc tax

Raise war costs. Currently concord costs about as much as a good gumball to buy off for a week of savage beating a small Corp. 50 million isk… just saying yes groups can afford more they will admit they can pay more or they will charge more for contracts. Think I’m joking it’s roughly 47cents to war dec a 50 man Corp. Cheapest hooker I’ve ever heard of.

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That’s because Guard’s writing them now, not Logibro, for obvious reasons.

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This extends to more than just highsec. Balancing offense and defense in PvP is the big issue with anything you can put out in space. If defense is too strong, nobody attacks. If defense is too weak, why bother building any infrastructure, you’re just going to lose it?

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Agreed but this is Exacerbated when it falls down to why build a Corp when it’s just going to destroy the gameplay I want. When we know people who are in player corps stay for longer.

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I agree with this, when my group gets wardecced most of us have just decided that we’re better off playing in areas not in highsec. We have a few members that thats not their thing so they just don’t play at all while we’re under dec. Or they leave corp during the decs. When the solution is to not play/leave corp/leave highsec/have out of corp alts to make trade runs for you, doesn’t that sound slightly off.

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Yea we used to run to our money hole (c2 with a hs static) or just go play other games

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19 Keepstars.

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Exacerbated. When things get exacerbated, then for all intenst and purposes, it’s extremely exasperating. :wink:

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All your points go down against a simpel fact.

Never, in the last 7 years, NEVER, CCP has tried to just add “more of the same” and see what happens with player retention.

Even now, while CCP are producing SKINs like crazy, they haven’t figured that maybe PvE players would like to have a “PvE only” SKIN. It would cost them a neglectable extra work in their workflow. And if it worked, they could consider making the players jump through a small hoop to get them. Maybe a specific mission, so players ran more missions just to get the SKIN one?

I mean, they’ve tried COMPLEX, EXPENSIVE things that mostly failed, and all the time they’ve had a tiny bee droning on their ear “maybe you should try the easy, cheap stuff first”, and they STILL won’t do it.

But not because we’re not telling them.

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