f13.net

Mittens used a few less than flattering words about CCP in his last CEO update, telling us to be prepared for starting to play a bit more hardball with the CCP bigwigs regarding the game's state. It wasn't supposed to go off for another few weeks, but apparently it's started to get into the press already:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-05-eve-csm-chairman-breaks-the-peace
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/ccp-accused-running-eve-online-ground

I'm going to need a popcorn BPO. :awesome_for_real:

CCP ignoring the cows they have been milking for years, extra extra! :oh_i_see:

= "Verant/Mythic/SOE/NCSoft/Funcom/Blizzard hates us!"

Edit. Also:

- hi u shld rly follow my expert business advices
- Where are you from again?
- imaginary corporation in ur space game
- ...

Ya, the playerbase is pretty fucking stupid.  Crying over the corpse isn't going to bring it back.

Every game has people who have invested way too much of their self identity and ego into the game. Eve has a lot more than most.

... but really Eve is about watching the drama. It's better than the gameplay.

CCP will now blame Mittani and the bad press he's creating as the reason why they lost subscriptions and the game has died.

EDIT:  They can also lie and he won't be able to correct them because of the NDA.

Dear CCP - I have spent over 200 dollars on games, largely through Steam rather than subscribe my 3 accounts to Eve.

Did Mittens really think that CCP gave a shit about what the CSM or the playerbase thought?

The general audience can't differentiate between the developers working at CCP, of whom only a couple dozen currently get to twiddle on the spaceships related part of Eve Online, and the heads who are going full speed ahead with Dust 514 and Carbon and Vampire MMO and ~crowdsourcing~ and Excellence! and everything else neat they thought they should do before the Icelanding banking collapse smacked them in the face. Considering one of these bigwigs used to run a griefing corporation in his own game I'd be worried too. The developers actually do have enough dexterity to work on the game and listen to the players at the same time. However, knowing if and when the execs have decided if they want to keep Eve afloat or not can save a lot of people a lot of time. Incarna has proven to be a major failure, with subscription numbers flatlining. What decisions are made from this should become evident once winter arrives.

My forum account also came with a pitchfork for a reason.

EvE cows don't know there cows. They spend there time laughing at other cows

Talking of spending 200 dollars

http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=4717&tid=1

For those that need it. (http://www.wisc-online.com/Objects/ViewObject.aspx?ID=ESL1402)

$200 / 13 = $15.39.

I was struggling hard to not point out the there/they're and there/their heresy. :grin:

Meh, hovered over the link and the 'view object' thing made me think it'd lead to the out-of-EVE docked ship spinning emulator.

Disappoint.

So you can pay $11/month for a year of gametime, or over $15/month for thirteen months worth of PLEXes.  I'm thinking that the illusion of gametime=PLEX is wearing a little thin at this point.

Oh good, my math wasn't off.  I was thinking I had gone mental.

Mittens is a great man but he's a little insane. It's one thing to have views about which spaceship (class/whatever) is overpowered in your favourite MMO but quite another to have views on the long term business plan of the company behind it, which products they should be developing and what level of resources they should be investing in each product. Of course many of us like to sound off on forums, but we don't plan media campaigns designed to force the company to do what we want. We don't actually expect senior managers at some business of which we happen to be clients to change their entire long-term strategy because we tell them to.

It's quite possible, seriously, that Mittani knows how to run an Icelandic MMO business better than whoever is in charge at CCP, but CCP has to proceed on the basis that he doesn't. It's one thing for an MMO provider to accept that they really must nerf paladins because players say so, but if they ever reach the stage of downgrading funding for two new planned products because a player who leads a large guild demands it then they really will be screwed.

Let me ask one question: Why should I log in?

In 0.0 I could mine ABC ore, but I'd have to keep watch on intel and local, and it'd be mind-numbingly boring. I could rat, but that is also mindnumbingly boring. I could do incursions, and it's not too boring, but it's still just red crosses. I've tried a few roams and I completely suck at it, to the point where I think I might be endangering the whole gang. I'm not too shabby at the large blob warfare, but it's currently mostly POS shooting with no real drama or existential crisis behind it on either side, no real drama. So why should I log in?

It's getting old, and the 0.0 population is getting old. We need new and fresh blood, we need people who are enthusiastic and driven, we just plain need more people out in 0.0. And while what Stoffer has indicated of their 0.0 overhaul is sounding promising, 5 years is too long a time to spend on this. I don't give a flying fuck if they've got 2 other games in development, because I don't give a flying fuck about the upcoming games themselves. I'm not in the market for a vampires MMO, and I sure as fuck do not want to play an FPS on a fucking console. I want more internet spaceships.

It's at the point where I'm not sure if I should unsub everything and spend the money on other things, keep them all subbed and just skill them up until we're invaded or we invade someone, or keep them all subbed (in case of :frogsiren: invasion :frogsiren:) but make my empire char my main.

Yes, empire. Woo.

Rest of you folks finally catching on that EVE isn't a game, but a socioeconomic simulator?   :why_so_serious:

He won the game.  Now he's playing the meta-game.

independent of whether ccp should (or is even competently staffed enough to) follow mittani's advice, I think he is ... probably right about the misappropriation of resources that (I guess) has been strangling the game.

Which is sad, because it means the drama fountain shall remain dry.

No. You just need to remember that his primary goal is trying to convince goons the game is fun enough to keep logging in for. So seeing the game starved of resources is something he's concerned with. Starship balance not so much (CCP will remain bad at game design) but them being absent landlords is another thing and a new experience for the old veterans.

I suspect CCP doesn't really have a choice though. The development of Dust is probably consuming more time, talent and money than they expected (because they've proven their inability in estimation) and is starving Eve. But they don't really have a choice to keep going as they've now invested so many resources in getting the process ramped up.

It would be an unwise individual who bet against Mittens in this fight.  Watch and learn.

In the sense that he might get a few more guys assigned to eve sure. Though it rather seems like eve development is already below the level it was during walking in closets development, so I can't imagine much more than a token effort.

I have a huge problem seeing how walking in closet was anything even close to a huge undertaking, especially as it's just reuse of vampire tech. And to be honest, I thought the two teams (team gridlock and team bff) were still working on eve just like while they were making walking in closets (or as it is in my case, stare at rusty door).

Nobody will bet against him because he will argue very convincingly that he was right.

Eve dies - Mittens was right!
Eve becomes awesome - huzzah for Mittens and his game-saving input!

Just judging from the determination with which he and VR are going about this I'm going to repeat that I suspect that it would be unwise to bet against this one going well vOv

NDAs mean that you know as well as I do, but I do spend a lot of time reading Mittens' moods, and I think that he is (a) very fucking serious about this fight and (b) convinced that it is winnable.

This is very true.  One of the terrific things about Goonswarm is that it brings brand new players into 0.0.  I have mixed feelings about whether the proposed changes will really encourage new players to head out to 0.0.  I think the supercap nerf will probably help (at least psychologically).  I'm a little more skeptical about the removal of local as I forsee many newbie drakes lost to gank gangs unless they overhaul scanning an make it less painful.  Bots will continue as they always have, I give the botters 2 hours to figure out a way to jump out of trouble upon gate activation.

Didn't they mention they needed to change how local worked so they could integrate it with some other system (Dust maybe?). I don't remember reading anything about them removing local. And CCP are being unusually dumb if they are seriously considering it, the attacker already has enough advantages.

That said I figure "sov war" is on a back-burner until super-caps get nerfed or Deklein/Fountain get invaded. And even if they do a sensibly firm nerf I don't think that will be enough to refresh null-sec. Once some faction has a clear superiority that becomes the basis for attracting more allies and resources. Eventually they'll probably split or collapse from boredom but who is going to wait around for that if it takes a couple of years?

Are you saying that sov warfare isn't going on?  Because there's a pretty massive one happening in the south at the moment.

Do you think that the CSM will be disbanded now, or will they just not hold the next round of elections?

--Dave (what, you thought this might actually change something else?  You're so cute)

Dude, you're harshing on Endie's mancrush!

I'm gonna bet against Mittens, Endie, not out of hatred (the guy's ok, and so is Goonswarm), but rather because:

- I have a feeling that CCP is unable to reassign devs at this point in time because the suits want money via the new games rather than continuing to develop EVE.

- He's bound by an NDA that they're going to goad him into breaking, at which point they'll sue.

- They're going to blame EVE's failure solely on him and his actions (and hide the fact that CCP management has made the wrong decisions and that their devs are incompetent).

- All it takes is another 15k concurrent users one Sunday (see this past Sunday when they almost hit 50k, despite the fact that they were barely getting 30k for the whole week before that) to negate a large part of his argument, and CCP can fudge the numbers by creating and logging in their own "trial" users.

- It doesn't matter anymore.  I've already quit a month ago, and it'll take a lot more than some publicity to get me back.  It'll take real, sweeping changes and improvements to the game, followed by a month of good reviews on this forum, to get me back.  I really doubt that'll happen.

Well I love The Mittani, and he knows his stuff, he's going up against a multi-billionaire who was/is the richest man in the country. CCP is committed to DUST and Vampires in Closets, and if either were to fail, so would CCP's Bank Loans. CCP is in debt, and can only get a new loan by claiming all the money sunk into the bottomless pits as "R&D". If they commit less money to "R&D" and more money to "maintenance of Internet Spaceships", it all collapses like an Icelandinc Bank owned by the richest man in Iceland.

Then again, he's a smart guy, and probably knows more about CCP's finances that you can find out from following links in Wikipedia, if those chats with dev's in Iceland's gay bar's ever lead anywhere. Perhaps he's putting pressure on now, because after October(?) when CCP's loan gets rolled over, it will be too late to change course before Eve hits the Iceberg mid-crossing.

Maybe Sony will pick it up cheap or something. Or Hasbro, and we can play My Little Pony: Internet Spaceships editon. See you at the Drama.

I meant mainly from a goon perspective. But I'd also say you could classify the southern sov-war as a clean up operation. No one really expects -A- to win.

Which side is the Russian Mob on in this Mitt vs CCP fight.  :why_so_serious:

You just want me to post that picture again.  :awesome_for_real:

It's the best thing that came out of EVE.

I'm just going to leave this here post as a placeholder for now and I've saved my reply in c:\Documents and Settings\[my name]\My Documents\Eve\smugpost.txt for later enjoyment.

Anyhoo... you guys are probably right that you have a better read on this.  I'm just off to keep being the head of the GIA and to read the in- and out-of-game, indiscreet and very private correspondence of an eye-watering range of unaware but very highly placed individuals: later!

Holy shit double-posting like an amateur!

Endie, being a tease as always. :grin:

I will literally kill you for doing this

I agree with everyone who says there's no way this can work, but I'd put my money on Mittani. I've seen him pull too many rabbits out of his hat.

Betting against Mittani is a losing proposition.  Also all the folks who are strategizing what CCP will do in response to his posts as if they are remotely competent is cute.

We need to define victory, so we can decide whether Endie will ever be allowed to post smugpost.txt or whether he must post SHAMEPOST.txt, which I will happily ghost-write for him if need be.

Obviously at some point in the future CCP is going to announce some sort of new features involving flying in space, because they do this on a regular basis anyway. Attempts to portray this unremarkable event as a victory for Mittani and his followers must be resisted.

Mittani is demanding that CCP stop spending money developing Dust and World of Darkness and ambulation technology in general, and instead concentrate resources on Eve Online, and specifically on the bit of Eve that involves spaceships.

If he fails to achieve this goal then his campaign must be judged a failure.

Note that I would not be surprised if CCP announces that it intends to continue investing in Eve while developing new products at the same time. But this would not be a victory for Mittens. Rather, it would be a repudiation of his entire thesis, which is that CCP's resources are not sufficient to do both these things at once.

Remember that CCP has never admitted that it has stopped investment in Eve anyway, so a statement insisting that such investment will continue would only be a restatement of the position that exists today.

I suggest we look back in a year's time and consider this question - did CCP end development of Dust, WoD and ambulation technology or not? If the answer is not, as I predict it will be, then SHAMEPOST should follow.

Yes because what I suggested was definitely that they would write off several million pounds of the company value that is on their books (since they have been putting work on the new products as R&D on their books and asset valuation.  That stuff is here to stay and I expect to see the other Captain's Quarters and more rolled out.

No, what I am saying is that at the very least CCP will recognise the central position of Eve in their corporate strategy and start a greatly enhanced program of expenditure on Flying In Space features.  Funding and substantial numbers of team members will be shifted into key Eve Online functionality. The content covered in the last two devblogs will start to be implemented, although God knows that it amounted to a complete revision of the game so it won't be finished in a year by any means.

In short, Eve will be shifted from being in maintenance to seeing substantial investment and a conveyor belt of new, core functionality of the sort that was the case until Dominion hit.  That's my bet.  But i have to keep stressing that it is just based on interpolation and a degree of surreptitious analysis.

Also Mittens has been very careful not to say that CCP should stop spending money on Dust and the rest.  He is a realist and asking a company to throw away years of work isn't going to happen.  I'm not sure iof that is an intentional straw man or just misreading, but it's not the case.

What he and the rest of the CSM have demanded is that Eve Flying in Space gets attention, money, and developer time lavished on it: something which the last few releases have signally failed to involve, and which is currently scheduled to continue to be the case.

Oh dear, the goalposts are shifting. "CCP has a small number of feature teams, and before the WoD and DUST follies those teams would be allocated to Flying in Space" says Mittani. "Funding and substantial numbers of team members will be shifted into key Eve Online functionality", says Endie. But at the same time, "Mittens has been very careful not to say that CCP should stop spending money on Dust and the rest." Isn't the whole basis of the Mittani thesis that CCP doesn't have the resources to do everything at once - that it can't afford to keep up development of WoD and DUST while giving spaceships the resources they deserve at the same time? Otherwise, why would there be any need to "shift" resources?

Rather than trying to explain this muddle, which I suspect will prove futile, I suppose we must agree on a new definition of victory.

Of course CCP will tell anyone who asks that Eve is very important to them, that they have lots of exciting things planned, that they do of course have more than sufficient resources going in to the game to continue providing exciting new features, and that while ambulation is important they certainly aren't neglecting flying in space. We can surely agree that a statement like this will signify nothing.

I suppose, then, that we need to look at the numbers - to consider just how many staff get shifted to key Eve Online functionality, and how much funding gets shifted to it too. Endie, I do not wish to be unfair, so why don't you set down the marker and tell us how many people and how much cash would constitute a win? Think carefully, because there can be no smugpost.txt without victory.

It' absurd to even suggest that metric, no one outside of the company is going to have access to that type of information.  I think endie was pretty clear that the metric is increased focus on FiS, including implementation of systems they have been promising within a regular time frame (which they haven't been doing).

You are reading a bit much into Endie's and Mittani's post.  No one is suggesting that Mittani is running CCP now.

Is there even a winter "expansion" planned? We usually know what it is called by now don't we?

I fear the forces of Mittenhood plan to declare victory no matter what happens. An expansion will inevitably be announced at some point, with spaceships playing a role, and no doubt this will be seen as an excuse to unleash smugness on the forums. I shall not attempt to stand in their way.

The only way to win is not to play.

And with Eve, you can advance your character anyway!

Not anymore. You don't advance if you are not subbed. Your research agents don't gain research points either. Still I'm riding about in my Titan in X3 so I'm happy  :grin:

I don't doubt Mittens seriousness and he has the time to make this work, but he is enough of a laywer not to take on someone with bigger pockets than him, so if lawsuits get talked about he will back down. It will be a media campaign only.

The only way to win is to join forces with CCP under the delusion that Eve is running exactly the way it wasn't planned.

More press :words:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/14/feature/5582/EVE-Online-The-Mittani-Speaks-Out.html

Here's a post by CCP PrismX (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=27973#post27973) in the (new) General Discussion forum where he says that


So, whatever.  I guess we'll see who wins, if anyone.

BTW, Endie, you will have to link the various articles by Mittani here, because you said "watch and learn" not "search the internets for obscure Mittani posts and learn," and I'm lazy.

There'll be a winter expansion. They need to lay the groundwork for tying Dust into the Eve sov system so that winning in Eve depends on coddling and funding console gamers.

The sort of console gamers that would enjoy a game that plays as well as the station walking, besides.

Well we're hoping the big nullsec shakeout is coming this Winter aren't we? It will feel a bit anticlimactic if it doesn't.

What interests me is to see how far other vested interests will suffer to boost the attractiveness of nullsec.

- W-space losing ABC ore. Well, annoying but they import stuff from Jita anyway and are pretty well organised. Not really a reason for anyone to pull out of wormholes because it's become too hard. I'm sure this one will go through.

- high and low sec losing Ice. This will be interesting because of the way Ice is distributed. Ice fields are quite rare. You normally only get about 5-6 per region. This makes these eminently campable. I can see some unforeseen consequences here with ice denial being possibly becoming part of the nullsec territorial game. (Would that suit Goons? They have lots of subcaps and random people in their space so they would be quite hard to deny and good bombers so they would be quite good at inflicting this. So probably yes).

- high sec and low sec losing level 4s, low sec losing level 5s. This would be the most radical change. If this happens then I think mittani could say he has acquired enough sway over Eve's development that he can push through changes that cause hundreds of subscribers to quit.

In the long term I think the issue is less about some player bragging and more about systematic real world infiltration of CCP. The ex-head of the Euro Goons and the former head of the Goons now work at CCP in very responsible and powerful positions. Did they just fancy the job? Did they take the job out of a desire to see Goons win Eve? I think there's a real possibility that they are helping the Goons which is unprofessional. Goons may have inserted their own T20s.

Conspiracy theory on my blog here (http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/2011/09/eve-online-player-participation.html).

That's some powerful writing about the relationship between Goons, the Mittani and CCP (http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/2011/09/eve-online-player-participation.html). I don't buy it myself but judging from the comments on your site there are plenty of people who do. What might convince the average player that Goonswarm is secretly controlling CCP is if a new expansion is announced - and the Mittani and his allies claim it is actually a result of his demands. They could go further and boast that CCP have actually diverted resources away from two vital ongoing projects in order to ensure Goonswarm's leadership is kept happy. Mittens gives the impression he is trying to save Eve Online by forcing CCP to fund it properly, but I wonder if everything is as it appears.

Boosting null-sec by punishing the rest of the game doesn't seem very bright to me. The main problem with null-sec is that it is broken due to bad game mechanics (Sov mainly), imbalance (mainly super-caps) and the emergence of massively dominant political force with no practical opposition (which is possibly super-cap related too). It also lacks a line of progression towards it thanks to low-sec and faction war having their own issues.

Nor do I believe Mittani is particularly anti-high sec. He's not even terribly PvP active or "hard-core" about it. He wants to see the game flourish and goons in Eve have fun. The first of which puts him on the same side as pretty much all the active player-base.

The goon conspiracies are funny, but sort of miss the point. It's not like the CSM has any power other than :words: and any change in game mechanics should have lots of oversight in the development and testing phase so there's little chance of "stealth" changes. Indeed the main fear is just there being no changes.

Does Mittani even have an active game account? He's been puppet master for the goons for as long as I can remember now.

I'm pretty sure he does. I seem to remember comments on him messing around with "my saber" and I've been in a fleet he was FC for. That's never really been his gaming focus though, which is good because he probably spends most of his time talking to people.

He has an active account.

He's flown with me in some of the small gang incursion fights, definitely active.  Just not online-every-minute active.

Some more heat from Seleene's blog (http://seleenes-sandbox.blogspot.com/2011/09/reality-check.html). Quite well written and covering similar ground in a reasonable way.

In case anyone needs study notes, Palmer is trolling (oh God I hope he is trolling) and Stabs is actually wearing a tinfoil hat right now.  Literally.  It is made of three sheets of aluminium foil - as used when cooking poultry to keep in the juices - with tiny holes punched into it all over its surface to make a rudimentary Faraday cage.

I sit in jabber with Mittens and VR and talk to them both every day.  They can't go into specifics about CCP responses because of NDA stuff, but what we discuss most often right now is the CSM stuff, and the language is exactly that which Mittens uses in publis: "saving eve", "fixing the game", "stopping CCP killing Eve Online".  Mittens and Vile Rat - along with the rest of the CSM, most of whom are opposed to us in-game - stood on a very public platform and got elected.  They have a mandate.

If you want to see supercapitals maintained in their broken state then my suggestion is that you go back in time, somehow persuade more than the few hundred supercap-owning partisans to vote for you, get half a dozen like-minded self-before-all types elected with you, and go to town.

You might take this at face value, and those from both sides of the political divide who know my posting from Kugu and elsewhere will probably do so.  Alternatively, you may decide that Stabs is - against all the evidence - sane, and that we have been involved over the last four years in a methodical and long-term plan to insinuate agents into the company at every level with the intention of... I dunno, whatever he said was our reasoning.  Destroying eve, let's say, because Goons pay around a million dollars a year to CCP so that we can damage the game.  That'll be it.  It's been staring me in the fucking face.

I believe that the most apt emote available to me here is  :tinfoil:

Ahahahaha that was YOUR blog? I thought it was some random nutjob going full-on american redneck/the gubment is lying to us-style :tinfoil:.

You're funny. Keep writing.

Ok, but seriously, if people are going to bet on Mittani or bet against him, we should have an agreed definition of victory just for fun (but I don't know what it should be).

CCP are bound to announce some sort of expansion or planned new features for the core Eve game at some point, and if they're any good then some people will see it as evidence of the Mittani's campaign succeeding. But we won't know for sure if it was all going to happen anyway.

My feeling is that we'll know it when we see it.  That's not a cop-out: it'll be obvious and we'll get the flying in space stuff that simply isn't planned right now.

What is this?  I don't even...  Is this an elaborate troll?  Tell me you are not this crazy.

I'll claim victory if they improve the game. vov

Are you actually still playing? Most F13 newbies who don't join up with Bat Country right away would have burned out on the game weeks ago.

Who is this directed to?

I am.  A little less as my PvE corp was wardec'd by a griefer corp, DX3 was out, and I've been using my time off to do a lot of things I've been neglecting before the new job starts up.

I've still got my newbie out in Goonspace.  I may bring Ky out there though once she gets into ships that can cloak if my PvE corp doesn't get more active.  I'll be able to fit into a Jaguar tomorrow, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Ah but you have been in a PVE corp at least. Getting into a corp as soon as possible makes all the difference. Newbie soloers rarely last out the trial period.

Fake edit: Sorry for the derail. I'll be quiet now.  :grin:

Not sure if you are left or right coast, but George ocean has been running roams at around 2100-2200 EST.  Come out with us and pown some noobs!  We can always use fast tackle/scouts if you want to fly a rifter.  If you have a covops and decent scanning skills you will be a bat country hero!

That might work for me time-wise (CST, though my bed-time is coming much earlier due to the new job.).  I'm not very good utterly terrible at getting into groups.

I do love flying my Rifter.  Not a lot of skills because Ail is my alt though.  I'm going for covert ships after getting into my Jag.

I can see that.  Surly also gave me a very nice battleship, and someone else gave me a Navy Scorpion to get me to do incursions with them since I refused to risk what Surly gave me  (and then he disappeared with the start of the semester right after I fit into it...).  I'm pretty set after all the boosts f13ers have given me.  It's helped my enjoyment a lot to not have to scrounge at all.

I don't...just dude...wat?

 :tinfoil: is nowhere near expressive enough.

So, Mittani is pausing his media attack on CCP (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=37958#post37958) because CCP has decided to have meetings with the CSM, and while there are no details at all because of  :nda: everyone is feeling positive about this first meeting and looking forward to the next (few).

Another interview with mittens, this time at eurogamer:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-09-eurogamer-interviews-the-eve-council-chairman-interview

Ha ha, see I've touched a nerve.

I particularly like the contention that Mittens, the ex-spymaster, can't possibly be doing secret stuff because he would have said so on Jabber. Then again you can always trust a lawyer Goon CEO guy with a cuddly name.

I never played Eve, but Mittens sounds like a trustworthy name to me (http://www.matazone.co.uk/swffiles/kitty1.swf)  :awesome_for_real:

Yes. You've touched a nerve just like some old hobo sitting outside my apartment complex touches a nerve when he starts yelling about how the gubment is taking our lunch money. Or that there are aliens abducting people.

Who were you in-game again?

Goons infiltrated like every other group in Eve, why not CCP too?

They only infiltrate groups that are meaningful to Eve.

So, no reason for them to infiltrate CCP then...  :why_so_serious:

if you are going to peddle conspiracy theories a much more plausible one is that Mitten's has had enough of dealing with all the retards in our alliance is trying to destroy EvE in an attempt to :fuckgoons: in an even more spectacular fashion than Kartoon.  

Meanwhile, CCP creates the first Eve Online fashion show (http://kotaku.com/5838901/eve-online-now-just-one-fashionable-degree-of-separation-from-lady-gaga).

Add this to the blogpost, Stabs:

"EDIT: An interesting theory reaches me from a player who is a member of Goonswarm itself. He suggests (etc . . .)"

I'm pretty sure the gubment IS taking our lunch money. Or do you think this "tax" rumour is just a conspiracy theory.

The thing about aliens wouldn't surprise me, shifty they are, never trusted them.

In other news The Mittani posted this yesterday following discussions between the CSM and CCP Zulu (who is Senior Producer and content director for Eve):

This is either priceless, or a huge troll. I'm having a hard time deciding exactly which.
http://tagn.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/vast-goon-conspiracy-ensnares-even-its-foes/

This is just getting funnier and funnier.

Can't it be both?

That's an amazing avatar picture. Is there a story that goes with it?

I have basically CCP Sreegs' job at NCsoft. I guess that means I'm a spy there too!

(note that my input on design decisions on Aion/CoH/GW2/whatever is about as minimal as Sreegs' is on Eve.)

I have no idea if you're a spy Lum. Don't you know?

I accept that Sreegs has minimal control over design (but note that the other ex-Goon GM is in charge of design) but I don't accept that he has minimal control over the game. If you think that the guy who (potentially) decides which botters get banned and which botters get left in peace you are not up to speed with the state of nullsec Eve. Every space-holding alliance has largescale botting and RMT.

Meanwhile the focus of CCP's anti botter policy is : non-spaceholders.

Let me ask another question. Do you believe that CCP T20 was favouring BoB while he worked on Eve? If you do, how do you reconcile that with your No True Scotsman approach to game professional integrity?

Who are these botting non-spaceholders you speak of, and how would they affect nullsec?

And please, do tell how stoffer is going to ruin the game by making improvements to it.

I have an idea! (hint: answer is no)


If you think that I, or Sreegs, are going through and manually looking at every botter and saying "oh, we can ban him, I don't like them very much", well, you know, that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Not only is it playing fast and loose with the company's long term future for a really stupid reason (something we'll come back to presently), it's also a really shitty way to actually get the job done. If you were to actually make a dent in things you would need to work on processes that automate detection as much as possible, and have more than one person doing the actual action off that detection, which would mitigate favoritism. I suppose you could argue that *every* person at CCP is under the iron Goony thrall of Sreegs and acting on his political instructions but, well, um, that, again, is kind of ridiculous.

As for the other assertion, that Stoffer is a GOON SPY making design changes to Mittani's specifications - a few points here.

First - whether you like them or not, the Goons, whom Mittani speaks for, are a significant percentage of Eve's user base. It would be dumb *not* to listen to their input.

Second - it would be impossible to find a live team designer with experience with Eve's nullsec gameplay without being a member of a faction, since, well, that's kind of a requirement. If Stoffer had no nullsec gameplay experience, well, there would be considerably more screaming, wouldn't there.

Third - assuming that Stoffer is making rules changes to favor Goon gameplay (nerfing supercaps so that goony goonswarms aren't obliterated and Mittens can WINTEHGAME) as opposed to making rules changes for the long term health of the game (nerfing supercaps so that the game isn't caught in a rich-get-forever-richer-everyone-else-is-locked-out cascade) is assuming that Stoffer values the victory of Goonfleet in a spaceship game over the long term health of his own career. Because that's pretty much exactly what you're arguing - that he's selling out CCP for Mittens' favor.

To which you might respond:


Given that he admitted to it, I suppose I have to, don't I? And it was a completely stupid thing to do. Yet in the scale of things, feeding BoB blueprints is far, far less damaging than redesigning the game solely to benefit one particular alliance - literally mortgaging the future health of CCP, a company of several hundred people, so one alliance can make things blow up. If you are correct, Stoffer is the most stupid and corrupt game developer in the history of MMOs.

An assertion like that requires a bit of proof beyond the circumstantial.


You can drop the "game" right along with the implication that I am guilty of a logical fallacy because I argue that in the main most game developers, including those at CCP, have a smattering of ethics, self interest, and common sense.

How would NCsoft respond if the leader of a large Aion guild - let's say the largest - demanded it divert resources currently allocated to developing Wildstar into improving Aion instead, and threatened a publicity campaign to make them do as he wanted? I'm sure they'd respond in some way, but chances of a significant shift in money and dev time from one activity to the other?

Mitanni's remarkable chutzpah, as we industrialists say, does call for some gentle mockery I think, and I assume that's what Stabs is up to. I do accept Endie's point though that it's usually a mistake to bet against the Mittani. He's a great man. But if he does win then it's even funnier, surely? Even if the future of CCP is ultimately at steak.

Stabs, you have obviously hit a nerve with Lum.  It is your duty now to see how far down this rabbit hole goes....

What are the Goons overall goals?  They have infiltrated CCP, a relatively small company, but having a view from the inside I suspect leaderships goals are much grander.  They want nothing less than total control of all MMORPG's.  They then plan to use the money from RMT and gold farming to support a host of terrorist-related  hacking activities, with the singular goal of bringing down western style capitalism once and for all.

Once that is done, society will be ripe for the taking and they will unmask their true affiliation:  they are sleeper agents for a vast alien conspiracy who plans to breed humanity for food.  Goddamn it Stabs, make sure you tell the others, I think they are on to me...  Oh god.... Someone's at the door....

Lum, you're conflating things. The supercap nerf, which I and most Eve players support, is not the extent of the changes. Also on the table is removing ABC ores from W-space which most W-space players have said will be a massive pita with regard to keeping themselves supplied with ammo etc. Also on the table is "moving high value missions to nullsec" whatever that means. Also on the table is making ice mining a nullsec monopoly.

Also there's no need to conflate good changes with bad practices. Just because some of the changes are very welcome doesn't mean it's ok to see Mittens bragging about getting everything they want pushed through.

These changes, especially if level 4 missions move out of nullsec, hurt far more players than are in Goonwaffe (5k out of 350k players, about 1%).

Next where did I say anything about manually classifying individual botters? There are many things a person in charge of security could do. Simply focusing on high sec botters rather than nullsec botters is one. Privately warning his old mates before a crackdown is another. The guy most goons buy isk from got banned then got his ban rescinded not long ago. Who authorised that?


I argue that in the main most Goons, including perhaps those at CCP don't have a smattering of ethics towards pubbies which is you, me, most of the staff at CCP and 99% of Eve players.



Witness statements provided in links on my original blog post. Stoffer said he would always "remember where he came from". Aryth said "you got in and trolled from the inside". Mittani said "When dealing with someone like Stoffer, the power and influence of the CSM is obvious."

You're brilliant at this, want to take over after I've finished beating up Lum?

Oh, come on.

Now explain why those are bad changes.

I highly doubt they'll move L4s out of empire.

Having lived in a wormhole, I definitely don't support anything that makes life more difficult for people there.  Living in W-space is like living on a merry-go-round that randomly teleports to different countries at the drop of a hat; making people ferry more shit into their wormhole to keep things running is a step in the wrong direction.  Likewise, throwing all ice out of hisec is going to do pretty bad things to the small industrial players trying to maintain a POS in hisec.  Anyone sitting on the systems with ice is going to gouge the shit out of the market, unless ice becomes insanely common in nullsec to circumvent anyone's monopoly attempts.  Alternately, if they came out with a new POS that was small and shitty and only anchorable in hisec to run some construction or research and didn't require ice, that would work with removing the hisec ice.

I very much support changes in the game to make nullsec more lucrative for the players (the individual pilots, not the alliances) in line with the risk of people running over and blowing up your shit.  But it needs to be handled delicately to avoid crippling other player endeavors in the process.

Why not? If a change is good, does it become bad because Mittens likes it? I hear he likes puppies, too.


Incentivizing PvP by moving reward into risky areas is not unique to Eve, or to Goonfleet. When people talk about Eve's stickiness and compelling gameplay, they almost never are speaking of Empire gameplay, but in PvP faction v. faction conflict. Since CCP wants people to be involved in that and thus subscribe longer, it's in their interest to move more rewards into nullsec. (Also, Goonwaffe isn't the only fleet in Goonfleet, nor is Goonfleet the only alliance in nullsec.)


So, you're explicitly saying that CCP's head of internet security is corrupt and going to great lengths to abuse his position because.... you don't like him? Because Occam's Razor argues against your conspiracy theories. Generally when you toss around such complaints it helps to have SOME proof beyond "goons r bad hurrrrr"


You do know what 'circumstantial' means, correct?


http://forums.somethingawful.com/member.php?action=getinfo&userid=97867

I guess now you believe I have no ethics or standards, despite any body of work to the contrary, because association trumps everything.

You should ask him about grid-fu. :awesome_for_real:

I'm actually getting to the point where I'm pondering asking if he's republican, because the logic used seems to be pretty much the same at first glance.

For the record it was more than that. He was the DEV who was designing capital ships and was working as the head of BOBs capital ship preparation and construction program, telling people what skills to train months in advance of the knowledge making it through to the general playerbase, and telling BOB the REAL way t2 blueprints were distributed rather than the lie CCP told the playerbase. And setting up the various minerals needed to create a capital ship and the price of the blueprints, while stockpiling those very minerals and cash in game ready to go when they went live.

But T20 was really the tip of the iceberg. Bob had enough power to get people thrown off the ISD volunteer program if they refused to obey the orders of BOB, and that happened long after T20 was exposed and booted.

Ha ha ha if you really want to go down a rabbit hole then yes, bring that up!

But seriously, Lum makes a passionate and logical argument except that it flies in the face of what we all know about Eve's actual history. You can argue until you're blue in the face about how playing favorites as someone on the development staff hurts the long-term health of the game, can be bad for the career, is too much effort, etc etc, and it all sounds convincing until you realize that despite all those things that stuff can and does happen.

It's like arguing that nobody ever commits murder because you know there are severe punishments, it can be dangerous to try, it takes some effort, it's bad for your reputation - all fair points that in the end mean nothing in the face of reality.

Given that Eve has a history of corruption arguing that such corruption is unthinkable and besmirches the honorable name of devs everywhere is more than a little daft. Wether or not these allegations are true CCP has put themselves in a position where them being true is at least believable.

Do you know I'm not even going to continue. I've said my piece.

Lum, that was the worst piece of writing I've ever seen you do. You don't understand what we're talking about and you don't even understand how to talk about it. You haven't even figured out we're talking about two people.

I did some training on managing angry people a while back. It was explained to me that when people get really angry blood rushes to their head, their face goes red and they become incapable of reason. So you don't reason with them, you just neutralise the situation and let them wander off and vent it elsewhere.

So you're going to wander off and vent elsewhere for a while?   :popcorn:

You know, I think we should have Aryth post more blatantly obvious trolls. They seem to be super effective against some.

Yes, it must have been really bad writing if you honestly believe that and this isn't an attempt at a particularly crude troll on your part. (Anger management? Really?)

If you truly believe that Goons are infiltrating CCP to WIN TEH GAME, well, have fun with that.


Ironically, the CSM, which is one of the pegs of the Vast Goony Conspiracy, was put in place to combat exactly that perception of corruption.

Goons don't need to destroy Eve, CCP have proven more than capable of doing it themselves.

The goons are the most newbie-friendly alliance in the game, hands-down.  If any alliance did have a secret plot to puppetmaster the game into their image, goonswarm is the best one for the majority of players, as the goon combat doctrine hinges on easily-accessed ships for relatively low-SP pilots.  Most other alliances, in contrast, would try to make the dominance of their capital fleet untouchable so they could continue to build up their lead and prevent any contenders from rising to challenge them.

The idea that Goons in Eve Online despise pubbies in Eve Online is shocking to me too. As someone who also has a Something Awful account I'm pretty upset at the idea myself.

I'm pretty sure that Stabs' blog post which we're all so concerned about was actually ripped off from a post on the Eve-O forums. Think about that. It began on the Eve-O forums.

Lum, you are still like a god to me.

There's no conspiracy, but The Mittani and someone like Endie are playing a different game from most of us. I log in, and shoot things. I move ships and clones around.

He dosn't log in to play his game - his board is in chats and in emails. His pieces are 5000 man alliances, threats, promises and the game is a game of diplomacy and intrigue. CCP is both another player and makes up the board itself. You could make a pretty good card game or board game out of it.

I always sucked at playing Diplomacy.

Best part about it - you don't even have to be a subscriber to watch "season finale" .

Also, I should warn everyone that the following statement appeared in today's Daily Mail, one of Britain's leading newspapers, and it certainly made me a little afraid: "Trolling is an offence under the Malicious Communications Act, which carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2036935/Sean-Duffy-Internet-troll-taunted-teenager-deaths-jailed-18-WEEKS.html#ixzz1XuxgJbpy

SIX MONTHS

To be fair that guy was pretty reprehensible - sought out families who'd lost children to fuck with and he'd been cautioned(a lesser non-custodial "hey knock that shit off" conviction) about this behaviour before.  It's not as if his sentence came like a bolt from the blue over random internet shenanigans.

I think they are getting desperate, but they still have no fucking idea.


-----------------------
Dear EVE Online Team
I didn't unsub all 3 of my accounts because you forced your barbie-in-box on me with bullshit NeX store. I could quite happily have ignored this if you had given me the option. Instead, you gave me a picture of a fucking door. Ha ha, very fucking funny.

So I took it because you are a pack of arrogant pricks. Who is laughing now?

I unsubbed because you took away the option for me to NOT engage with your trite tech-demo, took away ship-spinning (remember ships, the only reason I played your shitty game) and made me stare at unfinished, poorly rendered WiS shit that I never wanted. What I did want was a fix to the spaceship game.

BTW CCP - FU, I've now spent over 300 bucks on other games that would have been reserved for my subs.

I will donate 10c so that you can buy a clue.

I would send you this response but I can't... because I am unsubbed

The tipping point comes when there's a lack of faith in the future development of the game. Even a "great things coming, trust us!" or some positive interviews can do a lot to coverup for lack of real effort since it is mostly based on perception. But CCP are both minimizing investment in Eve and abjectly terrible at hiding it. The atmosphere on the Eve forums, pits of stupidity that they are, is impressively negative.

It is only matter of short time until this law is used to silence corporate whistle blowers and all kinds of criticism. There are slander laws written just for this purpose.

CCP was doing this "We are working on this, trust us it will be fixed soon(tm)" shtick when I started playing eve back in the middle ages of Eve. It's served them well so far.

The problem with EVE is that its players don't find EVE itself fun. Players are used to "making up" reasons to play with themselves or others, usually independent of any action of CCP to encourage or discourage said behavior, modes of play, or interaction with the world. When you have a playerbase that mostly doesn't rely on much input from the game itself to have fun, why invest more money into the game? Even funnier the number one motivator to getting more money is the hope of attracting new clients. The problem? In a day and age where mmo's are expected to be accessible, "finding the fun" like all EVE players resign themselves to do, sounds less and less appealing the further we run away from 2004. Sure there is growth in EVE....because there is no churn rate, 1 or 2 players who already invested 3 accounts over the course of 2 years quite a month, sure thats 3-6 subs EVE is missing but thats piss from a fifty foot building compared to dozens or hundreds of subs being slashed every month.

Lum, you are filthy antisocial Pee Kaaay for supporting risk vs. reward concept!

Well something seems to have scared them. There's been a literal torrent of dev posting on the forums and ship-spinning, sensible weapon icons and possibly a new font + cyno effect are incoming. Of course all of these represent putting back old capabilities or a sudden attack of basic common sense but best not to look the gift horse in the mouth.  I suspect the motivation is probably more them seeing a clear negative slope in their subscription numbers than the actions of the Mittani, but who knows. Maybe they've even got Dust locked down and have free resources now... :awesome_for_real:

The winter expansion is still going to be a very important guide for people considering their commitment to Eve I think.

Yeah, they have mentioned all those in their dev blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2402).  However, they also mention repeatedly that they're "moving forward" after this, which I take to mean "Fine, here's some of the stuff you've asked for, now shut up and we're moving forward with the plan we previously had."

"Moving Forward" as a catch phrase makes my blood run cold. Mostly because our dumb-arse, left wing loonie Prime Minister used it to get re-relected on the platform of "we fucked up but we might fix things soon" right before she ran the country into the ground and blamed the electorate when she polled the lowest of any PM in history.


Hmmm - I wonder if Julia Gillard worked for CCP?

"Moving forward" probably has a lot to do with trying to scrape up enough changes and additions to make the winter expansion feel meaningful.

 ___ Politics is that way.
v

I'm not going to copy-pasta or rewrite reams of text but I just pulled a Stabs and wrote about the rather unfortunate hype-and-disappoint cycle of CCP's Big Week (http://www.endie.net/wordpress/?p=69) so far.  I rather hope that we'll see something substantive in terms of actual, substantive changes to the game of Eve: even if that is only confirmation of the changes due in the winter expansion pack.  It rather depends how CCP's internal struggles are playing out right now.


While I do log in rather more often than Mittens, you're right: this past week I've spent all of my time making half a dozen alliances spend a massive amount of effort and time doing something difficult that they really would rather not have to do, and have missed out on a supercap kill as a result.  But the received wisdom is that once you have become involved in that level of the game it is very, very hard to give up the information it gives one.

Tsk tsk, you bad person, you.

To be fair though it's a lot of hype for exceptionally meh changes.

My 2 cents for what its worth.

Its very possible that they are out of ideas for Eve at this point. Lets face it, Ship spinning (if you go to the right place in your cabin you can still see your ship btw) and non Battlestar Gallactica jumping are basically plugging in old code. And changing a font is not exactly labour intensive.

I have the impression, right or wrong, that they have basically written off Eve Online as a long term concern and are betting the long term future farm on WOD and Dust. That would certainly jive with the fact that they have just a small team on Eve right now, and are more or less doing "mollify the player base with no long term ideas" speeches.

The things that don't agree with this idea is the NEX stuff. That seems to be a serious focus of their strategy. That being said it is something that could translate to WOD as well. Of course its also possible that they are planning on moving Eve away from internet spaceships to a more social networking game. Yes that's a crazy idea but it would fit with what they have been doing. It also fits with CCPs lack of concern over nullsec basically getting taken over by one group. If people are going to be playing second space life in the future who cares about whats happening in space or that there's eleventy billion titans. In this they are right in that Eve is a very social game, but the social thing is centered around the internet spaceships.

My 5 day free experience was boring as fuck to be honest. I had the most fun playing with the character generation thing, but I'm pretty artistic. I can see why anyone else would find it bloody boring, and why most peoples avatars looked really silly. But even that was frustrating as the avatar kept bloody moving around to seem lifelike, so it was hard as hell to get the pose you wanted. After that playing the actual game was hopelessly dull. I said hi to some old friends, flew my ships around a bit, did one single mission which made me want to shoot myself to end the pain, and then basically watched the 5 days expire with no regrets.

So... was the Big Week just Monday and Tuesday?  They seem to have run out of amazing new announcements and it's only Wednesday.

I think they just got greedy.  Expanded super fast from a garage team to a 300 person behemoth(still managed as a garage team) and started a bunch of side projects then WELP credit crunch hits and now they've got one game supporting three dev teams and oh shit this debt mountain... we need to finish these shitty games yesterday and what the hell EVE players have always given us plenty of slack.

It's been obvious for a while that they've phased out EVE development; what people are up in arms about is that they're not even doing the general maintenance and upkeep work that you see other MMO's doing.  CoX, Everquest, etc, they still have (small) teams of devs fixing things and keeping the game going.

The NeX stuff doesn't seem like greed to me, it seems more like some suit panicking that CCP is running out of cash and trying to fix it with microtransactions.  I'm pretty sure that their long term plan for EVE would have been to leisurely phase it to "free" play + microtransactions, but their ongoing costs for developing WoD and Dust are just too big to be able to do a slow transition.

Eh, anyway...

Playing CoX has been enlightening, all these little clues the dev/management team are still into the game and its community in a way that the Eve management so obviously isn't. Most likely because it is as Sparky said.

I suspect the free to play thing is another hand me down from WoD and Dust. Dust is entirely funded by item shop sales and designer clothes would possibly work in a WoD community if such a thing existed. Dressing up your vampire could easily be considered important. Unlike Eve where dressing up your character is an invisible change to a tiny little icon picture in one corner of the UI.

Nor am I convinced Eve would work as free to play because Eve gameplay isn't something you'd get the urge to play every so often. Eve managed to survive because it had a dedicated player-base who had heavily invested themselves in long term goals like watching the skill trainer tick over, buying expensive ships and player corporations. Make skill training free and you've destroyed a lot of peoples reason to stay subscribed, sell ships and the whole player driven economy becomes a joke.

Seems like they noticed that they've AGAIN pissed off about everyone, and do damage control with some fuzzy wuzzy rhethoric.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2421

Which is bullshit for HOLY FUCK WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING PLAN!

Well come on guys, You gotta admit that promising too little and giving too little is at least a step up!

Winter expansion, photon torpedoes on shuttles!  :drillf:

Yeah, I read that as, "Oh shit guys please don't unsub for at least another month so we can pull more things out of our ass real quick."

I'm burning through my ISK to keep my sub going through PLEXes, and have enough for about three more months, assuming no major income or loss rocks the financial boat too hard.  But CCP isn't getting another penny from me until I see actual concrete improvement, not some half-assed quick bandaids and vague promises of more, which is a fair sight from the $30 a month they'd been getting for my accounts before.  And the sad thing is that if they had just manned up after monoclegate and said, 'Hey, we fucked up by treating our customers like idiot money pinatas, we're sorry.' they'd still be getting my money today.  Instead they spewed corporate bullshit about 'unfortunate misunderstandings' and never apologized for anything, so now they get no money until they either pony up a proper apology or significant improvements to the game.

FFS, its a game, not a way of life.

Only in Eve.

It is only a game.  I wouldn't accept shoddy treatment from any company that I purchase products from, and games are no different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWb3cxA4g_U

firstworldproblems.flv

That's just... wow.  The part of me that wants to point and laugh is having its mood harshed on by the part of me that doesn't consider it unlikely that she'll be found hanging from her ceiling the day after they shut down the servers.

Ha ha.

Few years too late. But that's literally like apocalypse seal.

(i still wonder who'd designed that font that was so fucking in love with it)

Making fonts is a pain in the ass, if I had to make one for a game I would totally be all "and you fuckers will use this till the end of time!" too.  :why_so_serious:

This campaign is to Dictate development. I personally find it hilarious that adding avatars would cause such drama, one patch not adding a new ship and the mob goes wild? Eve must have one of the most resistant to change player bases I have ever seen, likely because CCP gave the players so much fake ownership/investment. Now, some bastard version of fucked up real world politics is shaping up, and the target, the makers of the game.

Whats the outcome? Replace all of CCP with forum users who will "Make it the right way"?  :awesome_for_real:

Huh? I'm going to go wild here and assume you haven't paid close attention to what they've actually released the last 2 years.

The mob went wild because the avatars were stupid and useless while being hooked to a blatant money-grub and in some cases severely degrading a computer's performance.  Had the avatars been super-awesome and let people wander out into communal areas of a station to actually see the other pilots, people wouldn't have been rioting.

How much usable sci-fi spaceship MMOs are there exactly? So yeah, if you want to keep playing one, you have to take things more seriously, until there's a decent contender.

Have you followed all the drama?  CCP spent nearly 2 years barely developing the spaceships bit of EVE promising WiS would be so awesome it'd be worth the wait.  Couple of years of the game stagnating or getting worse(Dominion) while the players made their own fun and waited.  Well WiS eventually came out and it was crap - no interactivity, horrible system requirements and it removed functionality people enjoyed.  The players have been beyond patient precisely because they are so ridiculously invested but at some point CCP has to actually deliver and stop appearing like they take their cash cow completely for granted.

Well to be fair, Dominion was a huge change to sovereignty mechanics and some ship mechanics. That it was a total clusterfuck and badly thought out doesn't change the fact that SOME work was done.

Lets not forget that it also melted some people's graphics processors.

Thats an added feature, quit taking games so seriously and be grateful for the metagame experiance of buying a new video card.

Well its a feature upgrade from when they destroyed the Boot.ini file of computers with a patch, giving some of their customers the thrills and excitement of reinstalling their operating systems.   :oh_i_see:

You're right that the campaign is to dictate development, and that there's a lot of drama.  However, it's to dictate development away from "close down the EVE servers and develop two other games."  Personally, I've cancelled my two subscriptions a few months ago, no comments no drama, and judging by the subscription numbers so have ~50k other players.  In my personal opinion it's not worth the effort to resist CCP's suicidal changes.

Has any company ever had two successful MMOGs in a row? I can't think of any.

Now that you mention it... I can't think of any either.

It depends on how you term successful though. Lasting a year or more? X number of subscribers? Fun elements? Everquest is still running for example, as is Ultima online are those succesful? I still think Tabula Rasa was one of the most fun MMOs I've played but people would class that as a failure. How about Star Wars Galaxies?

So what makes a successful MMO?

Everquest 1 was a phenomenal success. Compared to it SWG and Everquest 2 had to be considered failures by SOE - although I'd never in a million years expect them to admit it.  NCSoft started with a bang with that hugely successful Korean MMO (whose title I currently forget).  Again, none of the games they've come out with since have equalled their first effort.  Asheron's Call 1 was a success. Asheron's Call 2 sank without a trace.

What I see is a whole group of companies who stumbled blindly into their first successful MMO and then were unable to do it  a second time.  I predict that CCP is going to fall into this same class of company.

ArenaNet is shaping up to be the first company to do two in a row, and we won't know for sure until we see the response.  (And people argue over whether GW1 even qualifies as an MMO, so maybe not even then.)

SOE or Turbine come closest.  They haven't exactly had spotless records, ended up doing major revamps, and have the advantage of putting out several MMOs.  Without the revamps?  No, I can't think of anyone doing two in a row.

Funcom? Anarchy Online and then Conan......

(Also every time I read this I think CCP is moving to somewhere in the Bahama's to save a lot of tax money)

Depends on what you mean by company. NCSoft had a pretty good run with:

1998: Lineage
2003: Lineage 2
2004: City of Heroes
2005: Guild Wars

None of those games were failures in an economic sense. Now, if you start adding qualifiers like 'in the western market' or 'all from the same development studio' it gets harder to find an example.

Ok so it's been 3 weeks since the media attack and stop, and since then CCP's promised many devblogs and delivered one, been excited about huge surprise features and revealed a new font, and the server numbers don't seem to be increasing much.  Mittens promised a full ongoing vicious attack, Endie a "watch and learn," and in general the situation seemed to be headed to a delicious conflict, but currently you can hear the crickets over the entire front line.

I love the silence on all sides, but I think I want my money back; this thread is no fun. What did we decide on page 2?  I don't think victory terms have been defined, so I guess we're waiting for the Winter Expansion contents to judge, then.

What's there to say? They've released a devblog which said fuck-all, it just said "we're doing things". We've raged on the official forums about how little tangible info there was, and now we're waiting to see what they actually do.

In the mean time, there are germans who are very angry, which we can shoot.

So Eve fails at creating drama from drama. Drama fail.

Soon people will be desperate enough to ask me to rejoin Goonfleet to create drama.  :drillf:

How you enjoy this game without being in the CFC (or PL if you are a cat-ass) escapes me. You really do need an alliance that gives a sense of virtual purpose, even if it needs to invent one.

That said I suspect CCP are pretty stressed. They've got to be in crunch-time for Dust, they still need to hook it into the Eve sov system (without causing a shit-storm) and now they're under pressure to release some meaningful content for the winter expansion. In practice i'm just not sure they have the time, talent or resources to make that happen. And it certainly won't happen fast or early.

A top hat to go with the monocle would be splendid choice, i reckon.

Dust won't affect the sov system, just planetary interaction.

It was a mistake to hook Dust to EVE live at launch.

How are they even going to hook it into something that's supposed to get an overhaul pretty soonish? Knowing CCP, it won't be abstracted properly, it'll break and Sony isn't exactly the fastest in approving game patches (at least what Eden tried to suggest to me with the TDU2 clusterfuck), assuming CCP fixes DUST in time.

It will.


(bolded for emphasis, from RockPaperShotgun (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/08/interview-ccp-on-dust-514-and-eve/))

If you think about it they have to do that. If Dust was just about destroying players PI setups none of the major alliances would care much. Maybe it would push the price of POS fuel up, and people would run less towers, but you wouldn't really care about forging deep connections with a DUST alliance. And the design depends on that sort of interaction happening. The real challenge will be how to make this "fun" for Eve players. And I cannot really think of a way in which having null-sec sov dependent on actions in an entirely separate game can possibly be made fun for both sides. When it comes to a conflict in design priorities then my money is that DUST will get the fun and Eve will get the "consequences".

A lot of stuff they promised the CSM, such as a sov revamp and "farms and fields" in null-sec is easily explained as being driven by the need to have things for Dust players to destroy. But they're not going to say that yet.

I just cant see any meaningfull Eve/Dust integration being accepted by the Eve playerbase.


e.g
If a group of Dust players is able to trash my PI and I can't do jack about it [without also playing Dust] I want to be able to destroy their [NPC?] transports wiping them all out before they even get to the planet without them being able to do jack about it!

I'd probably play Dust if it had been a proper PC-based FPS, but fuck using the 360 for that, and definitely (as it'll be released on PS3 only) fuck buying a PS3 specifically for that one game. So they've certainly managed to set themselves up for tapping into a ... different market.

My friend has a PS3. I go to his place every other weekend. We never play it.

As someone who does PI daily, nope, I'm not buying it either. Hell, they don't even like it if I use jump bridges to get to a fleet fight. It was said to become connected with PI yesterday and the sov system tomorrow, both of which are game features from the category of "hideously bad and unfun" (PI made some rich people into mega filthy rich people, so there's that). I mean, we're dealing with a process of design thought that I imagine went forward like "Hey, we have a chance to do something with planets inside an existing virtual world. Should we add X3 or similar turn based strategy mechanics? Maybe a Civ type thing or SimCity? I know! Let's make it like those banner ad plug-ins that promise you 0.01 cents for every mouse-click." and "You know what we should focus on? The part where people shoot a station millions upon millions of times in order to not to see it blow up. Yeah, let's have more of that."

I haven't interpreted their beating around the bush to anything concrete for a while now and I suggest taking an "I'll believe it when I see it" approach to everyone else as well. CCP hurfs mountains right up until blurfing out an anthill, then disregards everything about said anthill for years. Eve got off the ground because there wasn't any alternatives to an engaging sci-fi space MMO. If they plan on banking the existence of Eve's nullsec microclimate on throwing a first attempt console shooter into a sea of console shooters and seeing if it swims, well, it would make an amusing deathwatch.

Back on the topic of the Goons there was some feeling that it's ok if the Goons have undue influence as they're the good guys and everyone hates supercap fatties.

The point I was trying to make was that it's unhealthy in a play to win environment for one group to have design direction influence.

Today Mittens rather emphasised just how unhealthy this is:
http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?11617-Goonswarm-Shrugged-The-Gallente-Ice-Interdiction

For people who don't play enough Eve to quite see what this interdiction does let me explain. The CSM asked for changes including the removal of ice mining from high sec to make industry in nullsec more viable. Mitani's old mate CCP Soundwave agreed (possibly in a gay bar). Mittani's alliance have presumably been stockpiling that type of ice for a while and are now forcing the price up by making it almost impossible to mine in high sec over the next few months. In Winter we expect ice to be totally removed. So that means that many player owned structures and some ships won't work unless you buy ice products from the nullsec powers that control the flow. (Almost every moon mining tower is a Gallente tower for the 100% bonus to silo storage). It's a strategy straight out of Dune.

I don't have solid data on ice distribution in nullsec but I imagine that the Goons are doing this because Deklein, their home region, has a fair few Gallente ice belts. Which would make them one of the few powers in the game able to procure this shortage material. They could augment this monopoly by sitting afk stealth bombers cloaked in gallente ice systems outside their control to interdict enemy or neutral ice mining.

It's a very interesting development. I do think that perhaps it does make the game more interesting to have monopolies but I don't like the notion that the CSM and perhaps the development team are being used as pawns to win the game by anyone.

It wasn't mittens who first wrote all that. He just posted it to kugu. In fact, he's been quite busy actually playing the game himself, ganking bots.

Current Jita Oxygen Isotopes cheapest price: 1345
Yesterday's Jita Oxygen isotopes average price: 263.99

I'm up 1.4b and I didn't even know it was coming :)

Oh, btw, this isn't something which is exclusive to goons. This is something everyone could've started, and it could've had the exact same effect.

What is exclusive to Goons is the degree of control over the game's direction. The Goons were involved in a change in game design, scheduled to come into force this Winter, which they are in the process of profiting from massively and which will have a very significant effect on the economy.

Having said that I'm not opposed to players outside hi sec being able to penetrate the comfort zone there. It's more fun. In moderation.

But it could lead to something of a gamble for CCP which the CCP higher management has not initiated and may not even be aware of. We know something like 80% play in high sec. If, hypothetically, level 4s get moved out of high sec then those 80% can't ice mine and mostly won't want to mission. What if they all leave? What if, as a direct result of listening to the players Eve changes from a game with 350K subs to a game with 70K subs?

We know that wolf eat wolf pvp games die. We know that Eve has worked well for both wolves and sheep by allowing the sheep relatively enjoyable and secure pastures. My notion is that a collection of small measures, each individually defensible and fun, might collectively cause the sheep to stop playing. You won't force sheep to become wolves by putting them in danger. They just leave.

I guess what really bothers me as a former industry professional is that the lunatics appear to be running the asylum.

What will probably really happen in terms of accidental consequences is that the amount of Ice mined in general will collapse as the vast amount of ice is mined by bots in Highsec. I can safely say that from experience, as ice is by far the most boring of all types of mining. The thought of doing it hour upon hour is enough to drive you to suicide. There used to be 3 ice belts in Jita, and when it became the market hub of Eve CCP were forced to remove them as bots were as thick as flies around them to the extent that they were causing the system to crash. Availability of Ice was supposed to be one of the limiting factors of capital ships, but massive macro ice mining made that meaningless.

Bots could move to low and null sec of course, but the Rats in nullsec are extremely dangerous to mining barges and Pirates would have a field day in Low sec, so it would be impractical to leave them mining for hours without supervision.

I don't see any conspiracy or design influence here since no changes to ice have been made. Rather the economic side of goonswarm (which has some really clever guys on it) thought about how they would indulge in warfare and that's the result. Plus goons like making isk and ganking miners so it keeps the bulk of the membership happy.

There has been talk of moving all ice to 0.0, but there has also been talk of making fuel pellets for POSes which is producable through PI. iirc it would also mean that it would go towards reducing the rampant flying about of supers etc.

All of this is up in the air though, god knows what'll actually come to pass. CCP is certainly not telling.

I know, but I don't see a direct connection with this. Market manipulation like this isn't based on the change being in or even happening soon. It's just them picking something that's vital and volatile to cause a market panic.

Nor does it require secret knowledge since the possibility of a change to ice was made public by CCP months ago.

I was far from the only one that would read the tea leaves, make guesses about how CCP would implement a change and how that would affect the markets, and take a flyer on a big potential payday.  Sometimes paid off, sometimes not, but when it did it was usually *huge* (especially if I timed the late-arriving speculators just right).  CCP has been making noises about changing Ice mining forever, if I were still playing I would have been stocking up isotopes ever since it went onto the CSM agenda.

--Dave

Nice to see you like to keep up with the facts.




Though come to think of it why let inconvenient facts interfere with a good paranoid rant

Thread these quotes came from.
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1565827

Posts 55 and 291

To be fair, they probably would have to do changes to what is currently consuming fuel, before removing ice from hisec, so I can definitely see why they're rather looking towards making it depletable instead of removing it in its entirety. It's way too intertwined with the economy as it is to just suddenly remove it.

Just how do you interpret


as "facts?"

Um. What?

Slightly OT since it is about CoH/V, but even with the involvement of developers in the game community the game has still been losing subs for a long while. I'm interested to see what happens with the F2P transition.

And Paragon Studios' issue is that they have only one game that keeps everyone employed, so if CoH/V is considered no longer viable, that's it for the studio. (Unless they finally announce that other title(s) they've been working on for a few years now.)

Which is where CCP is - looking like it is transitioning not that well, but trying to not be 100% dependent on EvE for the survival of the company.

On the Sisi server, doomsdays can only be activated on capital ships   :drill:

Clearly an evil goonie plot! :tinfoil:

So you'll be changing your blog from "oh no the sky is falling" to "oh no, the sky might fall, but most likely not"?

Okay, you can share this now.  :awesome_for_real:

Like a dumbass I forgot that my work stores our "My Documents" area on a shared drive so I was quite confused for a bit there but I found it in the end:


OK it's not exactly Nostradamus: I seem to have got establishments dead wrong (which I am glad about) and I've not heard anything about rockets or fuel pellets mentioned (though I stick by the latter in particular).  But not bad all in all and the main point was that CCP were going to wake up and start to fix their shit.  Oh and that Mittens would be incredibly smug which, trust me, he is.  And if anyone thinks I'm just making this up post-facto to look good I actually blogged about most of it after a silly dev tweet a couple of weeks ago, too, so that's public domain.

I'm having an absolute blast watching manfred sideous wring his hands in consternation and anger over how we could possibly want to nerf supers, the one tool smaller groups had with which to combat ze blub.

Wait, what?  Someone out there still spouts that lie?

I think it basically begins at http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?11640-DD-Nerf-on-Sisi-arrived&p=309431&viewfull=1#post309431 and it just goes downhill from there.

I can't be arsed to copy/paste all of it, but in essense he's talking about how they're like a specops team in how they brawl down much bigger enemies due to ze titans, and that it is absolutely fine.

Completely neglecting the fact that titans are 1) grossly expensive, so it's hard to get hold of without doing market fuckery, botting or poopsocking missions for god knows how long. 2) just a huge step up in where these numbers stack up, so once all relevant players have titans, we're back to square 1 with huge blobs. vOv

And 3) He's Manfred Sideous and hasn't been relevant ever.

Titans should not have weapons in the traditional notion period.  If you simply change the role (supercommand, mobile tower, sov barrier etc) it becomes easier to 'balance' them.  Of course they should just remove them.  Yes, I know, not going to happen.

I have been against the idea from the beginning.  Remember when there was one titan?  Remember the chatter about how you could dominate with two or four?  The entry requirements for supercaps are in the wrong place.  Cost is not the problem either.  They are a bad idea that have seen a number of bad changes.  CCP must not have wanted to see the design flaw because there has been plenty of discussion on that very issue for years and the situation remains shitty. 

Pretty much. A super-weapon in a PvP game is just a bad idea period. And having a developer boosting them so that their combat stats justified their cost triggered a massive arms race. Now you've got to explain to the people who spent massive resources it's time to nerf them or watch them suffocate the game.

So how many super pilots do people think are in the game? 1000? 2000? Didn't ccp ban like 6000 accounts in their summer of rage? I find it hard to imagine that they'd flinch from possibly losing maybe 1/3 of the accounts they've banned previously just because because they might quit if their toys get nerfed. Surely someone in CCP marketing has run the numbers on cancellations after previous nerfs and they know how many actually quit as well.

Manfred's arguments are specious for a few reasons:

1.  The BFG analogy really doesn't make sense.  A BFG doesn't make you immortal, it just makes you do a lot of damage. 
2.  Most true (non-MMO) PvP centered games are balance obsessed, and something as unbalanced as an invulnerable superweapon would never have made it into the game.
3.  MMO PvP is "gear-centric."  But the entry level to become competitive is usually pretty low.  A skilled player in pvp blues will beat a noob in purples pretty consistently.  No 2 month old character in a Battleship would ever have a prayer of defeating a Titan, no matter how "skilled" the player is.
4.  His whole "skill" argument is facially ridiculous, this is an equipment argument.  We aren't talking about "navy seals vs regular army" here, we are talking about "guys in M-1 tanks vs. folks using bows and arrows."  No matter how skilled the bow and arrow user is, they are going to get pulverized by the tank.

The funniest thing is that not 10 hours ago he was commenting on how the southerners couldn't replace BSes etc, so they couldn't compete against the northerners:


I love it.

I'd be willing to make a fair bet that the amount of supercap capable pilots are a lot more than have ever sat in the cockpit of a supercapital. All the skills needed are time, the hull needs money and ability to build one. And the ability to effectively write off a character that is now permanently in the superhull.

I can technically sit in a nyx now, I think. I can't use it very well because I can't fire off fighterbombers, but it doesn't matter, I don't feel like putting in the time of going above capitals. I like docking.

I was kind of ignoring pilots like that as they are extremely unlikely to be rage unsubscribed if supers get nerfed. Never having flown one and all.

I'm a bit surprised that nobody's mentioned this dev blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2672) with Hellmar basically saying "oh god oh jesus I'm sorry please stop unsubbing".  I'm at odds with my natural cynicism here, but I actually appreciate his effort.  A decent apology's what I'd been wanting from them, after all, and not only was one provided, it came with a detailed breakdown of the specific things that were being apologized for, just so nobody could say that they didn't really know what they'd done to fuck up.

Whoops. Yeah, in my mind it had already been posted, but I was probably thinking of a different forum.

I posted it in the winter expansion thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeP6CpUnfc0

Actually I was kind of surprised, Mitten's broadside must have had a very real and visible impact on subs or it wouldn't have happened.  A mea culpa that clear usually doesn't come until well after the clusterfuck is unrecoverable and is usually more of the "Mistakes were made" sort.

--Dave

No, according to www.eve-offline.net (http://www.eve-offline.net), subs have pretty much stayed the same since Sept. 5 (look at the "1-month" graph which shows the past 2.5 months).

Their one-room expansion was released 6/21/2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansions_of_Eve_Online).

I don't remember when the 18 months statement was made, but it's googleable as far back as July 2010, which means we're currently at month 15, and, if their winter expansion gets delayed to Jan/Feb 2012, it'll be 18 months by then.

Maybe subs have stayed the same, but if you look at the number of people online during the day, you'll see that the graph is going up and up and up rom 2006 until june 2009 with around 29k users online, where it starts to flatten out, with a few spikes here and there (probably expansion releases), culminating with the final peak at the beginning of 2011, at which point it's sloping for the slope throne down to 27-28k users online on average.

Yeah, but with respect to Mittens specifically, which was Sept 5, there is no impact on the subs just before, during, or since, even with the blogs and CCP advertising their change of heart.

Changes in activity due to unsubscribing are always going to have a fair amount of latency, so it's hardly a precise metric. And no one really cares as long as it's enough to give CCP a shock.

Subs have a trailing effect. If someone quits the game then their sub will still be active until their current billing period expires. That could be a month, three months or even a year from the time that they throw the towel in. While a lot of bitter vets (who you'd expect to be heavily represented in rage-quitters) are paying with Plex which is a monthly subscription option, many of those will still have front-loaded their account by redeeming multiple Plex at once so as not to have to fuck with it every month.

Decreases in sub numbers, sure.  The charts are tracking daily logons, though.  We're assuming, per a statistic CCP published years ago, that sub numbers are 5x the Sunday peak concurrent users, but shrug.

In any case, sub number increases, which is what I think everyone is expecting to see as the result of the latest CCP blogs and promises, would be rather immediate, wouldn't they?  If 20k people are suddenly interested in logging in again, they won't wait months to do so.

I very much doubt anyone is going to re-subscribe on the basis of a blog, if they even notice it. If there's a surge it will happen when something new actually hits the servers.

And, you'll see it in the number of people being logged in first, then subscription numbers.

I'd assume most of them come back when they make changes to f.ex the SOV system, and maybe also add some social aspect to WiS.

Expansions bring people in.  Even Incarna before everyone saw what a pile of suck it was.  That blog is mainly about stemming the flow of angry cancellations.

There's also the other factor, that is has their brand new walking in a room and other stuff brought people back to playing? How many people were liked me, who wandered in for a 5 day free trial to see it, basically went *shrug* and wanders off again having never handed over any cash. If Ambulation was meant to kickstart a new wave of Eve and it didn't hold anyone's interest, that kind of has an effect on evaluating their whole long term strategy.

They know that one from looking at online activity. Pretty much every expansion has an activity surge as people log in to kick the tires. Incarna was the first expansion which had no surge whatever and then led into the current decline.

As others have said even if you like the concept of incarna the actual content delivered was unimpressive, pointless and gameplay free.

Well Hilmar said he was sorry. Which cost him nothing.

And we're about 3 months short of the "18 months of nothing being done", so he's close enough to his original plan to devote more resources now, which was the plan anyway.

Actually I know a few people who have resubscribed (admittedly additional) characters as a result of the blog: the GSF directorate.  As a result of the new attitude towards the game from CCP, and the resulting frissant of excitement he have about Eve, there are a bunch of people re-subbing: Laz has been totally unsubbed for months but is talking about FCing in Delve; Mittens and others are five-boxing gankers in empire; and the liveliest thread in illum is about pimpfit T3 gatecamping.

Speaking of which it is retardedly hard to get a proteus to be a better ship than any other Gallente ship.  And considering where Gallente ships currently stand, that is a pretty daming indictment.  I had EFTed a fairly affordable (c.4billion) long-tackle proteus with 170,000 EHP, the sig of a drone (70 before drugs) and the ability to active tank about 2600 DPS, but then mittens pointed out that an ishtar could do the same for not much over half the price.  I suspect I'll end up flying a lachesis again.

Mitten's is like a little kid with a new toy. He's found the combination of PvP and drama he's always wanted I think. But having a CEO who actually gets fun out of eve online is quite a resource.

I love people who casually describe 4 billion isk as "fairly affordable."  :why_so_serious:

Latest email from CCP: $4.95 for 30 days if I resub:


"Dear CCP, fix all of these things and then offer me the deal and I might resub one account to test the water. Sadly, your promises mean shit as you are untrustworthy and arrogant and I still have a picture of the door awaiting me if I resub right now. Currently I like the door and the world it allowed me to access where I have continued to spend my sub money on games that are not Eve. You had my money before you messed up, you need to prove yourself before you get another cent from me because your promises mean jack-shit"

I hate seeing mommy and daddy fight.

CCP are really keen on selling all those plex... but I think they'll find there's few people tempted to buy a super-capital now or buy into Eve to that extent. Need the cash I guess.

There are slight hints that they might be having financial troubles and the heft under their ambitions is starting to run out. The 5 EUR reactivation offer for old accounts, the PLEX bundle offer and Shattered Crystal putting timecodes on sale all at the same time are efforts from the sales department and rather normal, but the decision to stop dealing with "alliance hopping" (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=19881) may imply that even the GM department has begun to lack manpower.

Or it may mean one-sided wars were becoming a problem.  Allowing ganker guilds nearly free reign in high-sec space was poor design, and a good way to cost them subs.  I know it was a big factor in making the twenty-ish people in my PvE guild go inactive.  Even after it was over, people could no longer log in and find others around, so they'd log back out and perpetuate the cycle.

It's also part of null-sec being stagnant I think. Groups that ideally should be trying to stake a claim in null-sec look at the amount of resources, time and super-capitals required to get involved and just don't see enough fun to make the effort worth it. So they look for safer targets such as playing around with empire war-decs which end up being pretty much just gank licenses.

And we're starting to spill out into hisec as well.

And I can see why they are stopping the ban on corp swapping. Mission running corps, and missions can be fun socially even if you make sod all money doing them, will probably quit en masse if they don't have a way of dodging a war dec by griefers.

I'd suggest a compromise in that instance, making it so that individual pilots could dodge wardecs, but structures cannot.  That way if a bunch of pilots are afraid of getting ganked, fine, but their POSes can still be blown away if they don't step up to defend them.  If you park a POS out in space, there should be some risk involved, at least a minimum degree, that someone who dislikes you can come blow it up.

The war-dec mechanism is crap in general. It would be much better if they had a finer granularity on incentive versus risk. Get rid of the exploitable war-decs in empire (you still have suicide ganks) but add incentives for people who want to take some facet of Eve gameplay to the next level to enter riskier space.  In this case there should be enough NPC facilities that people can build their space empires in hi-sec but still some incentive to want a player POS that must be built in low or null-sec. Ideally combine it with some sort of system such that smaller entities can exist in low-sec and actually want to. The small PvP, faction war and industrial corps working together then become the seeding area for the next generation of null-sec claimants.

At the moment the path from empire to null-sec is just broken.

When I used to run high-value cargo (before the days of jump-freighters and CovOps cloaks on blockade runners) out to 0.0, I would actually *relax* when I hit null-sec.  I was safer out there than I was in low-sec.  If I had to deliver cargo to our low-sec capital staging station, I'd sometimes run it out to 0.0 first then carrier-jump it back to the low-sec station, rather than dodge pirates for 6 systems.

Yeah, low-sec is totally busted.

--Dave

You want more carebears playing the game (and paying to play!) ?  Simple!  Just two things need to change:

1. Eliminate wardec protections in hi-sec space. No immunity for griefers in high-sec.

2. Eliminate cargo scanners completely.  You want to suicide-gank, fine, roll the dice and take your chances on whether it's worth it.  There is NO risk in ganking someone you KNOW is hauling 100x the value of your ship.  You want the rewards, you need to take the risks, ESPECIALLY when you are playing a zero-sum game with other players.

All the ganker crybabies will QQ like little girls, but that is all they are anyway.  The wolves want sheep in their game? Stop giving ALL the advantage to the wolves.  Otherwise, have fun playing without any sheep as the world slowly goes dark and empty.

Elucidate? I don't really see what you mean by "wardec protections".

I'm assuming that means protection from concord intervention. Buying a "gank" license doesn't make that much sense.

To be honest, I've never really understood the point behind the whole wardec mechanic. All it means is I'm using nothing but neutral characters while in empire, because we're always (well, almost) wardecced. And they're always hanging out at the jita undock.

I admit I was wrong to doubt the great Mittani (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=21423.0)

If dumb-dumb carebears want to merrily haul hundreds of millions around afk in an unarmored t1 hauler they deserve to have their day ruined. Most forms of Ganking take patience & forethought, as opposed to afking around Empire like a pratt with silly money in your hold.

I'm mainly industrialist and the various mechanics that allow pvpers to interfere with industrial production add enormously to the richness of my experience.

1) I have to outwit them.
2) My competitors fall prey to them increasing my profits.
3) My game would become Farmville if there was zero risk.

When transporting valuables use secure containers and don't auto-pilot, and don't undock from a busy station when war-dec'd... that's about it for gameplay added?

Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about conducting PI in hostile space.

Not really, I thought you were talking about empire ganks and war-decs as per the previous comments.

Sorry for derailing the derail!

As someone who spent a considerable part of their Eve career war dec'ing people in empire I have to say that it's already far to easy to avoid war decs without further changes being made.

CCP were never very good at investigating/punishing alliance/corp jumpers (read the posts on eve-pirate by Freaky) and it's far too easy for someone to make a dummy alliance simply to push war fees up for solo corps (thus avoiding a good portion of them).

Coupled with the 3 war limit for solo corps this makes it very difficult to conduct a prolonged campaign against a target, which is necessary most of the time as people tend to either stay logged out/docked or blob you in the early days of a dec and things only become viable once the targets get bored and start going back to what they were doing when you decided to dec them!

As a guy that's ganked 100's of billions in shit, you still scan the contents inside it.  The secure container just handily drops outside the wreck (if it doesn't pop).  It does not help you at all.

Not autopiloting won't save ya from my 3 box technique. Thrawn had the best post. Transports with stabs.

The biggest lesson, really, is to just not fly with more than you are willing to lose. Don't put your life in a cargo expanded T1 hauler, or someone like me is gonna ruin your Eve career.

Can you still hide cargo in an Orcas ship bay? That's what I used to use to bring all my fat ganking loot to Jita undetected.

I think you mean the corporate cargohold. I'm fairly certain that's still a viable way of hiding things, and is my primary way of hauling what I think is going to be expensive stuff.

Not only does it hide it but I THINK that the contents are always destroyed, never dropped.

You mean the corp hanger? Yeah, I think you are right that anything in there is destroyed.

Ah yes the corporate hangar, sure it all gets destroyed but you'll probably never get ganked cause it's unscannable. If you are hauling expensive and not over 50km3 or whatever the limit on the hangar is the Orca is by far the safest way to move shit around.

And even if it is above the 40k m3 mark, you can tank the orca to around 250k ehp, which I think is twice the amount of a normal freighter, making you an expensive nut to crack.

Or you could invest in a jump freighter, those things are sturdy as hell.

A tanked orca is still (if I'm not wrong) almost twice as tanky as a JF

Just fiddling around in EFT, I get about 256k EHP out of an Orca.  An All Vs Ark pilot has 351k EHP, 253k of which is structure.  And my freighter guy has a structure HP implant, so that gets even meatier.

Uh. Yeah. I didn't see the skill bonus.

Excuse me Mr. moneybags, JF can't hide it's valuables and is 10 times the cost so err fuck that idea.

I thought JFs could hide junk in shrink wrapped containers?

Shrink wrapped containers are courier contracts aren't they? In that case no I ganked a guy once who was carrying two shrink wrapped Large Poses. He asked the same thing and then pleaded I return them cause he was like poor and couldn't afford the T2 hauler which would have saved him.

Shrink wrapping alone doesn't work, I had thought that putting shit in a container, then wrapping the container means you only see the container, not the shit, or the wrap.

Don't think you can shrink wrap containers.

Of course you can. Just make a courier contract to move a container with an alt.

That must be a new thing, last time I tried (long time ago) you couldn't put assembled containers into courier contracts.