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

Thank you for the responses.

Why is it not convincing? As you said, lots of people run the old missions, me included every now and then. This means people like these missions or at least that other or new content is not interesting for them or not feasible. Which then means that more missions like the old one, just with slight tweaks or changes to NPC behavior or wave triggering and things like that could introduce new facets without repelling those or other people. The value proposition cannot be worse than that of FOBs which are literally run by 10 people in the entire game.

I also know that the mission creator tool is old and hard to use. Didn’t CCP say many years ago that they changed it or wanted to change it? I guess something else distracted again.

The problem with that is that the existing advances for new missions have been not doable alone with a single character, which is an issue for me personally and many other people I would say. I don’t see why I should risk an expensive frigate or cruiser in every mission, or lose it just because the server hickuped, which then ruins the entire income. Not to mention that I have no way to replenish my ships in NPC null sec as a solo player without being part of a bigger group, which I do not want. These may sound like very specific scenarios; however, if “revamping the mission system” turns into more Burner like missions, this is not a good change at all in my opinion.

IMO wardecs just the ability of a group trying to force another group to PvP in highsec without concord intervention.
What factions own highsec and would they really allow persons to shoot each other. I would think not.
So really the Isk is bribery to turn the other and this should be a significant cost to pay the corrupt law enforces/politicians. So yes there should be a economical balance. IMO

So let me get this straight… Since mission runners are running the old missions no matter what, that’s a good reason to not add new missions because they already work fine…

Of course, not adding new missions means that those players get exactly zero new content for years, but, hey, they’re happy to oblige! If some customers are suckers, just let them suck it, right? :tipping_hand_woman:

Well, it is convincing. Cynical and disrespectful, but convincing.

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“Everyone” as in “everybody who thinks that missions are perfectly fine as they are and the only issue with them is that the pool never is expanded with new missions”?

Or “everyone” as in “everyone who thought that the PvE concepts implemented in the last years with apparently dubious success were fine ideas as there is no need to talk to PvErs before developing PvE”?

@CCP_Guard I love you man but I am going to have to pull somethings up here.

How about we keep all things about the state of the game on the game forums huh? This is one of my biggest frustrations lately, official subjects (even if not official they are seen as coming from people with the CCP tag) are scattered over Twitter / Facebook / reddit. All of that stuff should be here on the forums.

This is a MAJOR issue for CCP lately, the quantity (as well as quality) of communication coming from you (CCP) has reduced SIGNIFICANTLY over this last year.

Which WE TOLD YOU ABOUT IN THE TEST SERVER THREAD BEFORE THESE HIT TQ. Its not so much that the feature has failed that we are unhappy about its that we told you so and how to fix it before it went live!

The trouble with this view is that when you look at the features coming from this new tech and tools

  • Null NPC shipyards
  • NPC mining teams
  • Resource Wars
  • Forward Operating Bases

I rather suspect that the number of players interacting with them is LESS than do missions, in fact I would say it is a LOT LESS. Actually I dare CCP to publish numbers of (unique) characters that run the new content vs the old.

New stuff is great IF people use it, otherwise the time taken to develop it is also wasted and if that time had been spent creating new missions / exploration sites etc I bet the participation numbers would be higher.

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But wait, you said people had been asking to stronger NPCs. And, just for the record, when you say ‘more engaging’, could you please explain what you mean?

I said we run ‘profitable’ anoms. Are you saying you don’t make a profit ratting? You’re just doing it because those anoms are so darned fun?

So you’re saying ‘stronger’ would indicate behavioral changes you think they should make, and then… saying they don’t need a new AI. That’s what a new AI is: how you make behavioral changes to NPCs whose code wasn’t properly documented (which is something they’ve admitted to, and you know what? Pretty damned common among coders in small, niche startups), and was the pet project of 1-2 specific devs (also not uncommon for a company the size of CCP when the first couple of generations of NPC AIs were being written) who aren’t with the company anymore.

Or is that not a ‘logical explanation’? Because it’s all stuff CCP’s openly copped to in the past.

In effect, you’re telling modern Egyptians to fix up those crumbling pyramids and get all of the limestone surfacing back in place, but don’t waste your time working out the modern tools for it, just use the ones they used the first time… and ignoring the fact that they don’t have those tools anymore.

My response wasn’t anything, I wasn’t there. Nor is a bunch of nullsec guys who don’t run FOBs or deal with NPC miners saying ‘hey, we don’t deal with that stuff, sorry’ at all relevant to whether or not people who play in both highsec and nullsec should be counted as ‘nullbears’ but not ‘highsec players’.

They’re both, but just because they exist, that doesn’t mean that everyone out here does both. I don’t play, coach, or watch basketball. Do you think I’m the guy the NY Knicks should be asking for advice?

Because it means that there’s a chunk of people already making use of that content. Adding new stuff will have an impact on them. Even if it doesn’t actually impact the old missions, it changes the mix of missions that are available. That could seriously (and potentially negatively) impact their gameplay.

If CCP adds 5% more missions, and they all suck, then the people who enjoy missioning now will enjoy it 5% less. How many of them will decide that’s crossing a level of annoyance they don’t want to deal with, and stop?

You have a feature that’s working, to a measurable degree. It’s consistent. And altering it is slow, time-consuming work. Do you want to spend the long hours invested in making small changes to it that may well piss people off and make it not work as well, or do you want to put those hours toward exploring 2-3 other options that might not pan out in the short term, but give them much better data points to look at when considering the big picture?

Many of us have said for a long time that wardec mechanics are just evidence of CONCORD’s inherent corruption, yes. :wink: This doesn’t mean that balancing a game mechanic around economic costs hasn’t been shown again and again and again to be a horrible idea that never works.

I really can’t understand that, it looks like you just said “lots of people do this so there is no point in updating it”. Surely if lots of people do something it is worth expanding and improving. Or at the very least learning from.

My take on this is that people want quick, variable but relatively easy content, with a consistent reward and the chance of occasionally getting a big reward. I think spending an hour looking for a DED site or trying to get an escalation that often turns out to be in low sec puts them off. Waiting on a space in an incursion fleet takes up their time so they get nothing done. They have an hour so a mission or two fits perfectly.

People don’t want to lose a ship every time they unlock, they want to feel powerful and crush their enemies. They become attached to they ships and invest time and isk into making them special. I’ve never understood why you don’t sell more pirate battleship skins, incursion runners will gladly throw a billion at a fancy skin for their pimped ride.

They are in high-sec because if your spending an hour mission running a mission you want to be able to focus on the task, rather than look over your shoulder every 5 seconds - it’s just not relaxing and that’s what people want after a long day at work, to relax.

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Yes please. Sugar on top.

Burner missions were known to be Advanced mission content that would not have the adoption level of the other types. So they weren’t the best metric for judging if it’s worth making new general pool missions.

Consider adding a like button! (mission turn-in UI) I know every added button is an expensive design proposition, and this one requires a new column in a database to hold the like-count. But the results could help inform future design decisions, more effectively than completion rates from a randomly assigned pool. If a “like” button is added before new content, a baseline can be established.

I explained that already in the same post. And what I described creates more need for attention to details so that you don’t screw yourself on the NPCs, more need for coordination so that you don’t trigger too much stuff in advance, more need for simply being on your keyboard instead of wandering off.

If they add only missions that suck, then maybe CCP losing customers is justified. That aside, Dread Pirate Scarlet does not suck. It was in fact quite entertaining because it allowed for a short cut if you met certain conditions in the mission. That’s the kind of stuff that can make missions more engaging while they retain lots of their old behaviors.

You can do that at the same time. You can create new missions, content that you can actually and reliably use, and explore new avenues to NPC AI behavior for the future. You can create content that people can use and content that is experimental. CCP only goes for experimental. Yes, that generates data for future projects, but right now it creates an overall unsatisfying state.

No it doesn’t. Oh no, the rats are faster. Fit another drone nav. Don’t even begin to flatter yourself with the idea that you’ll suggest one little change that will outsmart hundreds of people trying to minmax their effort/isk work.

No, you can’t. You can’t build new missions into an existing system while exploring new avenues for NPC AI behavior without those changes effecting the existing content. You especially can’t do it at the same time with a small number of devs. Now, if your argument hinges on ‘CCP needs to hire more devs’ then sure, more becomes possible when you have more devs, but at that same time, you need to actually say ‘and CCP needs to hire more devs’.

Otherwise, you’re asking people to add more hours of work onto an existing workload.

CCP Larrikin understands this subject very well.

I don’t see a problem. CCP has no issues moving features into later releases, they just did with the HAC rebalance and did it in the recent past with citadels when they were not ready (and still weren’t ready when they were released). That flexibility is after all what the faster release cadence was all about. That devs had more time to do things and weren’t pressured by their ego to make their baby into the twice-per-year big expansion. Hence, a dev team works on missions and on the new AI. They make progress with a mission and the AI. The missions makes it into release one, the AI maybe into release two. The next time the AI got far enough that it can be used in a specific setting, which makes it into release 3 but only one small new mission makes it in release 3. And release 4 is some missions again and iteration on the AI.

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It wouldn’t solve nothing, just adds another way to avoid war decs to the current numerous ways. As said above we’re not afraid to switch to constant ganking if required to get to our targets.

This is my problem, war decs are so easily avoidable so why do people feel theyre such an Issue yet ganking is absolutely fine?

CCP has shafted us in everyway possible on war mechanics through scan res nerf, watchlist, locates, even citadels. It’s never been such a harder time to be a mercenary.

It’s funny as I believe the war mechanics are broken as it’s so easily avoided, yet all the arguments I see on here are there isn’t enough ways to avoid them.

My idea to fix war mechanics

  • Add watch list again, this was previously removed as titan pilots where crying. Titans can now dock and tether and no longer log on in space.
  • Sort locate agents, with introduction of citadels if the pilot your looking for is docked it will come back their in space.

These small fixes will completely change the current blanket war meta and return to the old focus hunting ways.

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What I mean is that there isn’t necessarily an urgent and obvious reason to prioritize adding content to a system that a lot of people seem to like with the content that exists in it now.

Now, I’m not saying that’s THE argument we’re going on or that nothing will be changed in the future, but it’s a factor to consider along many other factors.

New systems are always an unknown, but we need to try new things to keep the game evolving. Not all of them will work but we won’t find the ones that do if we don’t try.

Your last point is salient I think and sort of goes back to mine. Shaking up the current missions too much would probably make a bunch of people unhappy :slight_smile:. It would be cool though (in my opinion) if the interfaces got a touch up. I’d like it if they were more like Inception, others might disagree.

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May I give you a concrete advice … focus on event like content in the agency, themed, short time, recurring, changing, solo-able, pvp-facilitating, booster/accelerator/skin rewards. This stuff works, and you can experiment with new puzzles easily.

You see how there are large NDAed sections?

And what do you want on botting at the summit? We’ve already talked to CCP about it. An hour of us saying “Botting is bad, K?” and CCP saying “We know.” umm, that’s less than a minute? They’re not going to publicly say how they’ll deal with it, because it’s an arms race. always is. WOW with their eleventy billion dollars of susbscription money still haven’t ‘solved’ it.

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:frowning: yes and there were no videos of kittens playing piano…

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But again, by putting in new missions, you’re inevitably upsetting the balance of the existing mission system. So it’s not ‘work on missions, then the AI, then a few more missions, then more on the AI’. It’s ‘work on missions, then crapcrapcrap unforseen consequences at full-scale quick we need to address that and ok, now let’s work on the new A-why did all the mission runners quit in a rage because we screwed up their stuff?’

You have a ‘known good’. While you work on something to improve on it… don’t screw with what you already know works. No previously-established car company looked at the first fully-electric said ‘hey, look, electric cars are a thing now. They work. We’ve demonstrated it. So we’re shutting down production of fossil fuel engines now’. It took years for elements of the electric cars’ braking and powertrain systems to start to be implemented in normal cars. Because when you’ve got something that works, something your customers expect to work just the way it’s always worked, until you can offer them a clear and proven ‘this is better’, you don’t screw with it.

Sorry, the kittens were under NDA.

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Data and surveys are certainly 2 useful tools, but it’s pretty clear that CCP has a gap in understanding of player behaviour and needs/wants. The role of user research is to understand the ‘Why’ of user behaviour BEFORE months of development. Why are players not interested/engaged with different parts of the game? Why are they struggling to use the features they want to engage with?

Anything from low fidelity prototypes to a live public product can be tested. So ideally CCP would be testing long before large amounts of time and resource have been sunk into a particular feature, and then continually testing during development. Test before a feature is released, falls on its face, and everyone is left asking ‘What happened?’.

User research allows you to learn quickly through smaller scale, rapid testing, observation and analysis. User research is NOT just collecting feedback on what players want and then acting on that. CCP Arrow even referenced this at Fanfest a few years ago (the Henry Ford quote “building faster horses”).

There is a lot of published information out there about user-centred practice and user research. More and more its an integral part of the development of digital products and services. There are creative ways of doing this and just because EVE is complex and CCP is in Iceland, should not prevent user research from taking place.