First CSM Summit Meeting Minutes

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302

I think you’re missing my point - it doesn’t matter whether the person is a threat or not. There are activities that can be disrupted simply by somebody not being blue in the system. There are people who are that risk averse and they relied on that information to know when it was safe to rat and mine and when it wasn’t. They would always know who was in the system with them. That’s why cloaky camping is something people complain about.

Your presence and the fact that you’re not blue to them. That’s what they know. And if they see a local spike of a bunch of people, you can pretty much guarantee that’s a roaming gang and your intent is obvious. Hell, just knowing your name means they can look up your killboard, see what you like to do, and determine if you’re just some random guy in a taxi ceptor, or whether you’re a blops hunter about to drop stuff on them.

What I mean by meta is the “most efficient/effective tactic available,” which is what meta stands for. What I mean is that people figured out how to min max things, how to stay safe, how to avoid the bad guys, and the like and that made nullsec in a variety of areas extremely safe for them to make a lot of money. One of CCP’s goals was to disrupt that meta and force people to figure out a new way of doing things. They did that, for a time.

There’s nothing contradictory about changing things - CCP does it literally all the time. Every balance change, every new ship added, every expansion, they all add things that change stuff up. This time, instead of adding something, they took something away.

Your entire argument - that BO was bad - is your opinion, my friend.

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I always said BO was wrong but that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. My opinion is that as exercise of doing things that can be good for the game and at the same time easier, it was Op Success.

Anything needed or wanted to be done to the game can be tackled piece by piece which in my opinion takes way longer, or by mimicking the environmental switch flipped for BO but for other purposes. I’m a constant advocate of that because EVE needs more practical, less resource consuming ways to develop because when they say that people who actually pay for the game are not near the 20 top priorities and everything is dumped on the effort of retention, something is wrong.
At such pace, nothing good will ever reach us.

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No, it really isn’t. Because the faucets had already been dropping. But then Rise goes and says it’s all fixed and they may need to look at opening the faucets up wider. Without any actual change to the underlying conditions (and no, the BO didn’t really amount to one), that’s a ridiculous thing to say.

Yes, some people—not a huge percentage of the super-ratting population, mind you—changed behaviors to use cheaper, less profitable, and far more easily-killed Rattlesnakes. More people in small groups left. More people in large groups completely ignored it and kept going. Even now, with the cyno changes, supers are safer than rattles. They’re a better ratting option. Just follow best practices, and stay alive. Or go rat in a Rattlesnake, and when you get dropped, die quietly.

But open the faucets up again, and watch the Rattlesnake pilots switch back. At the same time, a chunk of those people whose activity has completely stopped… come back. And while that’s good for activity, it’s bad for the way CCP’s reading their data. Because now the faucets are open wider, so they’re making more money than ever before. And then the MER shows massive spike in faucets, leading again to CCP completely misreading the data.

So no, Brisc, it’s not a legit strategy. A few cosmetic changes that push the overall needle down by depressing player activity isn’t helping. It’s just treating symptoms. And, y’know, sure, Tylenol’s great for a headache, but using it as your primary treatment for a brain tumor? Not legit.

They need to address the underlying issues. Not the symptoms.

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What do you identify those as being?

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I apologize, too much info. I shall flash the flashy thing.

Nothing happened.

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Unless I have fced along and flown with many CSM previously or actively to know to have discerning powers of words vs actions. Anyhow. Sure thing, CCP will do whatever they want, but the people also has leverage over the media (eg. INN, etc.), you should know better. With CCP brats doing whatever they want to our universe (though they own it, yeah), I believe the CSM also have some ability to shape the game (via controlled media) to the will of the people. We cannot invest years of time, money and dedication into shaping this universe and CCP’s the one having all the final say. CSM has to go beyond just being consultants and yes-men, they have to use whatever leverage the have to influence CCP. Now more that ever.

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The same thing they’ve been every other time I’ve gone over this in the last 3 months (and far longer, really):

The faucets need to be tightened, yes. They are not the primary problem, though, so we’ll come back to them.

The primary problem is that destruction’s too low. The big things don’t blow up. If destruction was more in-line with the faucets, the faucets wouldn’t be a problem at all. So destruction needs to come up. Destruction specifically needs to come up in the supercapital range, and it needs to come up in terms of actual warfare being waged.

Without that, you can’t keep rewards at a reasonable level for the risk that exists in null. And before anyone decides to trot out the bullshittery of ‘null is too safe’, STFU and lemme 'splain:

Null is dangerous. There’s no CONCORD. There’s no faction navies. Bubbles work. Hot-drops work. Bombs work. What safety there is comes from players. And players are very good at providing that safety. As a result, the faucets get out of balance for a static, relatively safe environment with no appreciable levels of destruction. But the only reason the environment is safe is because the faucets are open enough to make the effort of providing that safety, day in and day out, worthwhile.

If you remove those faucets, you remove the people. We saw that in the Blackout. If you remove the people, you remove the safety. At which point, the cycle feeds back on itself and you lose more people, and on and on. And, since opening the faucets in order to offset this creates more problems along the way, you have to be careful about how you engineer the tightening.

So you need more destruction. You need more destruction in the form of war. Not the asinine skirmishing we’ve got going on, not the ‘one side might put up a little resistance, but then they just up and run away’ we’ve had basically since 2014, if not longer. You need war. Real war. Committed, bloody, no-quarter-asked-and-none-given war.

Which means you need to fix the root causes for why nobody actually commits to a war unless they know they can win.

Which means fixing supercapitals, because we’re right back to:

  1. If you want to hold space, you need enough of a supercapital fleet to beat the hell out of any subcap fleet that tries to take it from you.
  2. If you want to have a supercapital fleet, you need to have space.
  3. If you want to take space, you need enough of a supercapital fleet to beat the hell out of the defenders’ supercapital fleet.

People want to go to war. We like wars. But nobody is willing to lose their supercapital fleet, because losing your supercapital fleet loses the war. And then it loses you the ability to even be in the next war or two. At this point, it might put you in a position you can never recover from.

Fix that[1], and wars happen. So destruction comes up. Which means the faucets aren’t so badly out of line. And to fix where they are… (told you we’d come back to this)

Excavators. Excavators make as much as they do because they cost so much. Make the rogue drone controller thing drop more often. So they become cheaper. And then reduce the Excavator yield so a max-yield Rorq makes about 80% what a max-yield Hulk w/full boosts gets. Make it the damned boosting ship it’s supposed to be.

On the ratting side, you adopt a very simple premise: you don’t go building massive amounts of high-value, high-tech infrastructure in a godforsaken post-apocalyptic anarchist hell. You want to build up your industrial base, that doesn’t jive with ‘look, endless hordes of rats to kill’. Make the mining upgrades and ratting upgrades mutually exclusive. It forces either a widening of the umbrella (which weakens it), or people have to pick one or the other, which reduces the faucets.

Like I said: ain’t brain surgery. More like… ecology. Or economics. The non-voodoo kind.

1. Hell, fix supers—fix them in a way that means you don’t need a massive supercapital fleet just to take and hold space in null—and you open the door to smaller groups being more viable. Fix them in a way that makes them less of an uncontestable apex force, and they become part of the Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock that we’re supposed to have out here, but we all know breaks down as soon as the meta solidifies, because it stays solidified for years. The more the uber-dominance of supercapitals can be shattered, the better it is for the game across the board. Large groups don’t have to be so risk-averse. Small groups aren’t automatically without even a shred of a prayer. The potential to drop supers doesn’t squat like an angry Buddha over literally everything in null and low. More destruction means more construction to replace it, meaning more economic movement in highsec.

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310

Thank you for writing my next campaign speech.

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311

Feel free.

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312

Can I still believe in the environment?
And dream about my bleeding SOV?

It’s just an idea but it might work… And IMO, it would be easier.

Ok it will not work for everything but could fix a bit here or there…

Ok, nvm.

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Why do I even try… Now if I could only get CCP to read this.

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How do you “fix that”?

More destruction is literally everyone’s consensus about what this game needs. The problem is how do you achieve that. Until anyone has anything in mind about that preaching destruction is moot.

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Well, @Olmeca_Gold, here’s the issue: the CSM can either say ‘how do you fix it?’ or they can say ‘CCP has heard every idea. Our job is to push them on priorities’. Because those two messages are directly contradictory.

You want ‘how you fix supers’? Sure, I can give you that, too. After all, I wrote it up in the same damned article I already quoted:

Seriously. There are ways to fix supers. But they require actually fixing supers. You have to make them not what they are. You can’t just twist some knobs, tweak some numbers, or whatever other boilerplate phrase is going to come out of CCP’s mouth before they decide that, like carving out ‘Same Fleet, Same War’ exemptions from CONCORDOKKEN, it’s ‘too hard’.

Break what they are now. It’s necessary. Because what they are now is poison.

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And for the record, @Olmeca_Gold: If you want greater expansion on this, actually going into it in depth and detail, I can give you that.

However, I do, personally, tend to at least hope that CCP already has the ‘ideas’. They just need to be pushed on priorities.

And right now, the priorities should be: Break supers horribly so they can be fixed with a clean goddamned slate, and make Faction Warfare something that actually encourages loyalty to a faction, provides solid engagement for players when other players aren’t around, and pushes back against the nonsense of hostile structure spam. (Points 2 and 3 of that, btw? Diamond Rats. Let the bastards clear structures if they’re not owned by the right Militia. Use what amounts to Navy FOBs to provide PvPers with PvE that isn’t complexes, where coordination and social play helps, and a few capsuleers can help out the Navy to seriously oppose much larger numbers.)

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317

The problem is to get people risk and lose expensive stuff. None of the 4 approaches you just quoted achieve this. The first one would make them nonexpensive. The second, third and fourth approaches remove the need of undocking/risking them.

I’m just saying that too many minds are already working on the problem of how to fix capital menace and the problem of nondestruction. Imho this is a situation CCP entrapped themselves with injectors/Rorquals. They know it might as well be the most important problem of Eve. So unless anyone has an original idea people pointing at the problem adds nothing to the conversation.

The issue is really really deep and complex. For 5 years CCP has selected toward players who play to own assets, over people playing for doing things in assets. Now that the asset acquirers reach to the endgame (of owning most stuff they want), they are bored. The assets they own are extremely anti-content and are stagnating the game.

If CCP invalidated capitals today, the people who play to own assets would be upset and some would leave. If they don’t do anything, the people who play to do things in assets and the people who play to own assets but who have reached that gameplay’s ending will keep being bored. I haven’t seen “ideas” neither from CCP nor from CSM or anyone else that can significantly address this issue.

I don’t agree with the statement that CSMs only job is pointing at priorities.

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Well, here’s the thing: As long as they’re strategic assets that the group cannot afford to risk, they will not risk them. Because people do not risk the thing they can’t affort to risk. “Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose”, you know? This is that, writ large.

And because the only thing that can oppose these things when they do undock is more of them… you just get into a feedback loop where they keep getting built, they keep not dying, so you always need to be getting more.

So, if you want people to risk and lose expensive stuff? We risk and lose ‘expensive’ stuff all the damned time. What we don’t risk and lose is large numbers of supercapitals. And that’s what’s needed: supercapitals need to die. They need to die in numbers. Wars need to be committed to, and that’s not going to happen if you can only oppose supers with supers.

It’s been longer than that. And the people who play to own the assets do want to do things with those assets. But they want the things they’re doing to be worth the effort it took to get those assets. People don’t want to feel like ‘I spent 8 years getting to this point, and I just lost it all’. They don’t want to feel like they wasted that time. Because the more effort they had to put in to getting the thing, the more they value the thing. That’s human nature.

They would. But if they get compensated in some way, some experience that says ‘hey, this thing you spent all that time and effort getting into, here’s the payoff’, then they’re not going to be as upset. It’s never going to satisfy everyone, but that’s what happens when you go 10+ years of just ‘twisting knobs’ and letting the game develop in ways the developers themselves don’t actually understand.

And while the way the issue presents itself now is complex… the very core of it isn’t. Supercapitals cannot remain as they are. That’s the bottom line. If they remain as they are, they smother all attempts to do anything else to fix the game.

People want reasons to use their stuff. They need reasons to lose their stuff. And that means those things cannot be something they can’t afford to lose. Because the things groups can’t afford to lose, they won’t risk.

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That is why there must be a cap and upkeep for them. They must be vulnerable to anything below BS. They mustn’t be injected, CCP made them end game content and this should never happen. They should be strategic in conquering space (rock, paper, scissors) it would be easier to take down structures with them but they would be vulnerable to smaller hulls so they need protection.

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Except they’re not endgame content. There is no endgame. I have a supercapital. It’s not my ‘endgame’. I use it when I need to, but I far prefer to use my Zarmazd, Logi-Loki/Legion, and a number of other ships that are more active, more kinetic. Supercapitals, rather than being ‘endgame’ are really more… a necessary evil.

In the larger scheme of things, they move slow, they align slow, they generate a massive amount of TiDi when they fight… it all adds up to ‘they’re boring’. I’ve done endgame content in other MMOs. If your endgame is boring, you might as well just close up shop.

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What we need is new gameplay everyone wants to play which requires to expose supercaps with lots of supercaps dying, either from PvE or PvP … e.g. have a weather effect in that play which allows bombers to one shot a super with their bombs.

Make it so you lose sov, when you don’t sacrifice supers to bob … whatever. The more sov, the more risk (uber-linear). A small sov area should require only a few supers (or none, if it’s only one system) with low risk of dying.

Combined with efforts to reduce benefits of coalitions, like making ansiblex gates sov/alliance local only. Don’t allow alliances to set standings to each other ingame, etc.

Next: game designers go to work. :wink:

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CCP thought even if people inject into them capital will be used, generating content and ecosystem will autobalance somehow which nothing like this happen. There is still mindset that bigger is better. There won’t be good solution without bloody either to assets or playerbase. How do you think CCP should act knowing that Imperium alone has 10k of them and new are in build? There are no good solution to the problem other than flipping the table. It’s not like ad 5% here and there.