f13.net

Vote for me! (http://www.eveonline.com/council/voting/Vote.asp?c=305)

And when endie votes, "int64 overflow" :why_so_serious:

EVE Tribune says "HELL NO" to Ankhesentapemkah. (http://www.eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=5_19&page=13)

The comments below the article are pretty awesome.  This almost deserves being posted in the Politics forum instead of Eve.

It's not just that PVP is central to EVE-no, without EVE's PVP system the game simply would not be worth playing. EVE's PVE is mind-numbingly boring, and frankly when I want entertaining PVE content I play World of Warcraft or a single-player game. POS mechanics and, for that matter, most industry mechanics are a grind. The user interface is appallingly bad. The game itself is terribly buggy, and littered with half-finished, partially implemented content. The only other thing that EVE really has going for it to attract players is its radical, brutal free market. This free market, as Herschel Yamamoto explained, is essentially fueled by the broken window fallacy. Most of the demand for new ships and modules exists because old ships and modules are constantly being destroyed, mostly through PVP. Simply put, without PVP there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever to play EVE. It is what makes the sandbox a sandbox. It is why so many players put up with CCP's manifest incompetence, poor support, and terrible design. It is in fact the only reason why EVE  has not gone the way of Asheron's Call 2.

I like this guy  :grin:

BTW - I had to clear my browser cache after voting each time otherwise i would tell me I'd already voted despite having a different pilot logged in - did anyone else experience this?

Tried to give you a second vote, but couldn't because the account isn't 30 days old. Sorry Thor :(

whole lot of guys who have done nothing but put forwards terrible idea after terrible idea and then sulk when everyone else told them how awful they were (Sokratesz, Korvin).

Nope.

Didn't get one last year either.

I'm pretty gutted at this tbh. At least as first alternate I had a better than average chance of getting to do something as there was always one person missing (usually Trzzbk). Third Alternate on the other hand is unlikely to get a look in. There were 6 votes in total between me and Mazz  and 88 votes short of a full spot despite being the only official Goon candidate.

I think this will be a terrible CSM for anyone that cares about the game. The candidates are the populist 'vote for me to fix lag' types with no properly thought through ideas. People have voted for personalities and boobs rather than anything more concrete.

Z0D thought the important thing was the end result perceived by the players and suggested working
together on this as a group as that was really the end goal here. Mynxee agreed. Ankhesentapemkah
believed this was hard to do with the anti-ankh sentiments.

Ankhesentapemkah asked when CSM5 would get their medals.

I've read a couple of accounts and the summit seems to have consisted of them saying fix existing problems and CCP saying no, we need to let people walk around in stations.

Today Eva "Ankhesentapemkah" Jobse was removed from the Council of Stellar Management due to a breach of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). We are deeply saddened but feel that it was the only possible solution in order to protect the integrity of the Council of Stellar Management. As this is a matter regarding confidential data we do consider this to be a private issue between Eva and CCP, therefore we are unable to comment further.

Congrats Iain!  :drill:

Its not about the blog posts. Its about something else.

"Another important issue discussed were the unfinished expansions CCP has been churning out. Unfortunately, Nathan, CCPs producer, became very defensive and attempted to justify CCPs development process. The CSM posed an united front, and said that the players are not happy with the current state of affairs and many are losing faith in CCP. When several CCP members said that EVE has never been better from a technical aspect, they were mocked and laughed at by the CSM, who relayed that 0.0 is currently not enjoyable at all due to lag issues."

Which is nonsense of course.  Back when they were still talking about walking in stations CCP claimed an entirely different team was working on it.  That development should not impact the fixing of bugs, answering of petitions and whatever else.  There is a substantial backlog of fixes and features that get ignored.  Every time I think of running for CSM that catalog comes to mind.  Among other things. 

She posted some CSM meetings on her blog and forum. Oh, the humanity.

Take Care - Party for EVE CSM
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Written by Ankhesentapemkah   
We have delivered !

The first CSM Summit has taken place in Reyjavik, Iceland. Nine player-elected representatives did an outstanding job taking your views and issues to CCP.

Disclaimer: This is a summary of the events that took place, and is written from the perspective and memory of only a single council member. For a detailled and official report of the CSM summit, please read the meeting minutes once these become available.

 

Day One

- The Morning -

This year, there are some notable differences in procedure compared to previous CSM. CCP has decided to grant the Council of Stellar Management a stakeholder role in the company. The first task of the CSM was to ensure that it will receive all the information it needs to undertake actions. While previous CSM had the right to raise player issues to CCP, most of these unfortunately disappeared into CCPs backlog, meaning that CCP wants to develop them at some point, but does not assign a development slot for them. The CSM had no insight into the backlog, and could never see which issues were being worked on, or how CCP prioritized them.

In CSM5, this will change. The CSM urged CCP to provide insight into the backlog, and means to track our issues. Pétur Óskarsson, from the Research and Statistics department, will act as our ambassador within CCP. He will also use the CSM's stakeholder position to take part in internal discussions and make sure that the CSM issues are fully represented face-to-face, while the CSM is not in Iceland. From now on, the CSM will be able to see the status of an issue, and interfere if required. This way, the CSM does not have to raise the same issue again, and has more insight in what past CSM have been doing. This is important, as it provides a degree of accountability, and means to keep CCP to their promises.

The CSM can also call on statistics now, and use this data to better prepare new issues, or provide meaningful discussion when working on plans for EVE's future. Better issues = higher priority!

- The Afternoon -

During the afternoon, we discussed what we thought of as our most important issue: The quality level of the expansions that CCP has been churning out lately. The CSM believes that CCP's recent expansions do not meet their very own "Excellence" standards, favoring working on a next expansion before finishing the previous one, as well as ignoring old content that is bugged and broken for years. Unfortunately, Nathan, CCPs producer, became very defensive and attempted to justify CCPs development process. He also said that CCP cannot commit to big issues right now, as a lot of their developers are tied down building Incarna and Dust. The CSM posed an united front, and said that the players are not happy with the current state of affairs and many are losing faith in CCP if nothing changes. Fortunately, things got a bit brighter later in the meeting, with Nathan assuring us that Planetary Interaction will get several iterations over the coming month and won't be abandoned in its current state. Most importantly, I think the message of the players did finally come across: We don't want more shiny stuff while most of the previous shinies are not finished and buggy.

Later that day, the CSM had a live video conference with the Content team in Atlanta. This department is mostly responsible for the PVE side of EVE. The CSM discussed several mission-related issues with them, such as the placement of agents and the factions left out in the cold.

 

Day Two

- The Morning -

The first big issue the CSM had on the agenda was Planetary Interaction. CCP immediately told us that they are not satisfied with the state PI is in right now, and will work hard on making improvements. Planned improvements include adding more depth and unpredictability to the current game mechanics (possibly through features such as population management and pollution), improving overall usability and drastically reducing the amount of clicks required to perform mundane tasks, adding social interaction so players can cooperate or compete with eachother on the surface.

- The Afternoon -

First, CCP consulted the CSM regarding the reimbursement for players due to the extended downtime. An option was to credit players their lost playtime, but in actual value that would just amount to < $1, thus an alternative was proposed. All players affected would be credited in skillpoints instead. Find out more here.

CCP's technical team gave the CSM a presentation about lag. CCP considers lag a serious issue, as it affects mostl players to some degree sooner or later. The presentation focussed on the sources of lag and the architecture that can be employed to deal with it, and its limitations. CCP explained that current lag in 0.0 is often caused by a node that is already under strain being pushed over their capacity due to a sudden fight breaking out. This is because nodes are designed for handling many solarsystems at once, so even if your system has only a few people in there, the node might actually be busy with things happening in other systems. CCP is planning to address the most serious lag problems by letting nodes transfer troublesome solarsystems to other nodes which do have capacity left over to deal with a sudden fight.

At first, this will cause all players to suffer a disconnect, but CCP is designing a system which allows this process to happen dynamically. Now THAT would really put the lagmonster back in its cage! Another thing CCP is working on to reduce the ill-effects of lag is moving the stargate jump sequence to the origin system, not the destination system. This prevents players from getting stuck upon loading the new system and shot up while they are defenseless, and will likely introduce a mechanic that allows players to cancel their jump.

The tech team also learned about several lag-related issues from the CSM which they were not aware of, making the session productive for both sides of the table. If you experience issues in-game, be sure to always report a bug !

The most important thing discussed on the second day was the state of 0.0. The CSM generally was not satisfied with the state left behind by Dominion. While boring POS warfare was done away with, the current combat centered around Territorial Claim Units has little depth and favors blobbing. While each CSM had their own vision of how 0.0 should be, the general consensus was that there should be more opportunities for small gang warfare, and more ways to obtaining system ownership. CCP said that the current 0.0 situation is monoculture where all sov-holding alliances right now are basically the same in structure and approach. CCP does not like this situation. Unfortunately, I think it will be a long time before CCP has the time to look at fixing the current situation.

As last issue, CCP's Customer Support department gave the CSM a presentation about their procedures, and how the support has improved over time. Overall, the CSM was impressed, and suggested that CCP should publish more information about the things going on behind the scenes. CCP agreed publishing several devblogs, of which the first one can be read here. The CSM encourages you to make use of the new survey should you have any open petitions, and provide CCP with your view of the Customer Support procedure.

 

Day Three

- The Morning -

The day started with our big Low Sec discussion. This is a pet issue for several members of the CSM, and CCP agreed that the current state of Low Sec leaves a lot to be desired. The CSM would like to see more opportunity for criminals or other shady persons that would like to stay on the bad side of the law. Not only does this apply to pirates, but also entrepreneurs and industrials which deal in contraband products. CCP said that the downside of Low Sec is that besides putting up POSes it is very hard to actually lay claim to Low Sec space, and that they would like to see "homestead" mechanics which allows players to band together. When CCP could give no actual commitment to fixing Low Sec, the CSM urged strongly to look at the issues related to Low Sec. The CSM asked CCP to make small improvements to this area of EVE over time instead, so at least something is done to provide incentives for the players that like to venture to this area.

What came next is my own pet issue, Factional Warfare. The CSM said they still had a lot of open issues in the backlog regarding this area of the game, and were wondering if CCP has any plans to address these problems. When confronted with the many problems, CCP took notes and basically agreed with all of them as issues. Unfortunately, Nathan previously stated that he did not want to commit to fixing Factional Warfare as a whole, despite his own developers thinking of many of these issues as serious. The CSM asked for a compromise, to focus on address the so-called "Low-hanging Fruit" issues which are relatively easy to address and will significantly improve gameplay, such as fixing the way FW complexes spawn.

- The Afternoon -

The CSM met with the team responsible for the User Interface during this afternoon. The CSM stated that the UI is the first impression players get of EVE, and that many players are overwhelmed by it, or annoyed by the poor usability. Overhauling the UI would help retaining a lot of the new players, so the CSM claimed. Disappointingly enough, CCP does not want to commit to a UI overhaul. The CSM proceeded to list smaller problems in the current UI, which were noted by the dev team.

The end of the last day was filled with many smaller issues. Unfortunately, the CSM heard time and again that CCP simply does not have any resources to commit to anything. This frustrated the CSM, which said that some of the issues have been brought up by every CSM to date (Corp Roles review, Alliances in FW), and were not closer to being addressed than they were two years ago. CCP developers said that many of their own issues have not made it in-game either and called the CSM to be realistic. The CSM openly questioned their purpose at this point, as they said there was little point in raising player issues if they were never going to get addressed, no matter how small they were or how highly they prioritized them, as CCP would just run off doing its own thing.

While the end of the summit left most of the CSM with a bit of a bitter taste in their mouth, we generally agreed that the CSM as a player-elected body has been making progress and is gradually earning respect and influence within CCP. Of course, most CSM would like this process to go faster. Nevertheless, the new stakeholder position and access to statistics is a major step forward. I personally believe that our CSM summit has been a wake-up call for CCPs executives, and warned them not to get out of touch with the expectations of the actual players, and perhaps not to get out of touch with the lowly developers actually producing EVE Online.

In my opinion, the current CSM is the best and most productive so far, and I look forward to working with the other council members the coming year!

Sauce?

That Chatlog Pezzle

While boring POS warfare was done away with

I often wonder if other people are playing a different space themed MMO where this has happened.

The minutes of the summit (http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2010/CSM_CCP_Meetings_23-25_06_2010.pdf) are up and available.

I commented to Mynxee that they were rather sterile and tense "like two surgeons looking for a lump." Her response was that clinical seemed better than just putting "you gotta be fucking kidding me?!"

Sir T 2010. I'd vote just to watch the awesome drama.

They don't know how to fix their game or just think resources are better spent betting the farm on console MMOs and sparkly vampires.

Too bad console MMOs never work and by the time World of Darkness comes out tweens will have moved on to pirates or yetis or something.

Hmm, tween yeti romantic fiction, sounds great.

:words:

If there are any publishers here who want more I can churn out 200 pages a day of that stuff.

CSM you say?

Like many of you, I have read the meeting minutes from the CSM 5 meetings in Reykjavik last month. To be completely up-front about it, I have to say I‘m quite taken aback by the difference in the meeting minutes compared to my firsthand experience from attending the meetings.

For my part, I felt the discussions were very constructive and I had great dialogue with the council members.

Maybe I‘m completely delusional and it didn‘t go that way at all, but there‘s definitely something broken in the feedback loop we have with the CSM and I will be working closely with them to enhance our collaboration. When two parties have such vastly different perceptions of the same event, something is wrong and needs to be fixed. We have some suggestions in mind and we will be exploring them in the fall. I‘m confident that with the CSM‘s help we can take this to the next level.

To be fair, that is technically correct. It's just that it got replaced by something worse

Heroically pointless station avatars : 70 developers
Shitty Console FPS integration : 7 developers
EVE Online the space themed MMO : 22 developers
Facebook but in space : 10 developers
Infrastructure and internal tools : 15 developers

I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced that only having one team working on lag is a bad thing. It's a matter of quite delicate fine tuning and close communication at this stage, no? How does throwing more bodies at it help?

No PvP in Incarna.

... in the short term.

In the longer term they're planning to make the complete sci fi experience where you can do anything.

What the CCP devs are missing with Incarna is that the people who say they don’t like Eve because they don’t feel like a person aren’t asking for an add on to the game where they can walk around. They’re saying they don’t like the basic content of the game. It’s a way of summing up all of what Eve is about: Internet Spaceships.]What the CCP devs are missing with Incarna is that the people who say they don’t like Eve because they don’t feel like a person aren’t asking for an add on to the game where they can walk around. They’re saying they don’t like the basic content of the game. It’s a way of summing up all of what Eve is about: Internet Spaceships.

The last thing eve needs is to stagnate and turn into a pool of jaded 'play since beta, own 15 accounts, didn't have fun since Quantum Rise, but still hang around bitching' vets.

Cala

• Dynamic and transparent moves of fleet fight solar systems between nodes
• More throttling client-side
• Proxy-authoritative state propagation
• Major work being planned on our networking and session management infrastructure

And I realized I've read this all before: Incarna is Second Life for Eve.

I've been reading all sorts of stuff about the possibilities of Incarna. People who never leave station and command vast empires without actually engaging in ship to ship warfare. Barons of industry who turn the wheels of production.

The only exception would probably be if they did do a proper warroom where you could see (or update) where your forces and resources were etc, and which targets to hit next, I wouldn't mind that too much actually.

I can think of a lot of stuff like this, but they shouldn't really be part of Incarna, they should be part of Evegate.

The potential there is huge, but I want to sit in my real office and have access to things on my real computer, not sit in a virtual office and type on a virtual computer.

Once battles got over the 1500-ship level, even before Dominion, it was always getting dodgy.  Which is probably pretty acceptable to be honest: 1500 people is an awful lot.

I don't know why the technically capable people in this thread are complaining so much about there being ten times as many people working on the Incarna sprint as what I think is largely the "fix lag" one.  More people need to read The Mythical Man Month.

I wouldn't be susprised if only 2 or 3 developers, with some testing resource, were actually working on fixing lag.  Quite right, too.  Throwing an extra 20 people at it would not help matters or make it get fixed faster.  They don't need a whole new engine, after all, for this: just to find what went wrong with a specific release.  I'm more interested in why it is proving so difficult given the limited problem space they are dealing with: how good are the profiling tools for python?

AFAIK it's still growing, didn't they just have a new all time concurrent high recently?

Incarna it seems to me is the work of a very shrewd game management who would like to find 300 000 guinea pigs to test a new avatar-based gameplay engine. Once we've QAed all the bugs for them and agreed it looks good they'll stick on the fangs, dim the lights, and release what we thought of as Incarna as World of Darkness to a million cheering Twilight fans.

Hats off to them for business sense if that really is what they're doing.

Incarna it seems to me is the work of a very shrewd game management who would like to find 300 000 guinea pigs to test a new avatar-based gameplay engine. Once we've QAed all the bugs for them and agreed it looks good they'll stick on the fangs, dim the lights, and release what we thought of as Incarna as World of Darkness to a million cheering Twilight fans.

Hats off to them for business sense if that really is what they're doing.

Now you guys are over-thinking this. My take on this all is that to CCP first Incarna was a really cool idea, and DUST 514 too, and then suddenly those cool projects started sucking up more and more resources and still take longer than expected. And we should have started hiring a lot more people a lot earlier. And this Lag thing wasn't supposed to happen either. But now we are committed with everything and can't stop or the tide will catch us.

Cala

ROFL, the EVE Playerbase is exactly the wrong set of guinea pigs to do this with.  We don't sit and QA bugs; look at how Sisi is used.  Look at the Sphere thing and the sophistication of the bots/macros, and at the myriad ways in which we meta-game and exploit the game mechanics.  If CCP's relying on us for the polish for their next avatar game, they're screwed. 

I'm sure CCP have been sucked into the tar pit in terms of their new projects taking more time, money and manpower than they planned for. While at the same time being too far advanced that they can easily consider slowing or stopping either of the projects. The only surprise is that they didn't realise saying Eve is effectively on the back-burner for 18 months was going to infuriate their player base.

Additionally when you have an alliance leader saying "Sov war has essentially stalled across EVE" that's something that should have the game designers taking a concerned look at what is going on and being able to get resources if fixes are needed. Even if Sov war doesn't directly account for a majority of the playerbase (the mission runners probably out-number them) it is what provides Eve with consumption of resources, drama and a sense of direction. The fact that another major alliance is simply handing over space because it is too much effort to maintain it should also be ringing alarm bells.

When walking in stations was first demoed I vaguely recall CCP reassuring us that it was worthwhile because they were making the engine for WoD anyway and integrating it into Eve would be a relatively simple task.  I could well be mistaken though, it happens a lot.

Is there a better way to QA than to give it to people who meta-game and exploit the game mechanics?

The devblog confirms grim fate of issues raised by the CSM, with no teams assigned to cover player-raised game defects. 

"I asked straight out in the Summit during one particularly frustrating moment, "You can't commit to doing even one single small fix out of all of the issues we've submitted? As a show of goodwill, to demonstrate that CSM can make a difference and to aid in our credibility in that regard?"

The answer was no. Said with nods of sympathy and understanding at our frustration, but still no."

So the CSM is little more the a PR stunt?

Yeah, give it to people who will report the bugs, rather than keep them hidden for profit when live.

Once they told people it was a stakeholder (when it obviously isn't and can't be) they were bound to disappoint people. The reason it can't be a stakeholder like Marketing, Accounts, Art etc is because of its stridency and the amount of stuff it wants. A guy from marketing might ask can you do shinier titans please? get told No and say ho hum no worries we'll just spruce them up in photoshop. The CSM, if given the same access, will send hundreds of pages of design ideas and fixes per week. It can never back down on anything (unless given reasons so persuasive they cause the players who broached the issue to withdraw). You simply can't treat all their output like the suggestions from CCP staff because if you did their volume would drown out all the other stakeholders.

If you ignore the silly stakeholder statement CSM is actually doing pretty well as a player council. They get to raise issues with devs and even 3 days explaining in depth what is wrong with the game to devs isn't something any other MMO fans get.

CSM is a whitewash and is functioning as intended.

The reason it can't be a stakeholder like Marketing, Accounts, Art etc is because of its stridency and the amount of stuff it wants. ... The CSM, if given the same access, will send hundreds of pages of design ideas and fixes per week. It can never back down on anything (unless given reasons so persuasive they cause the players who broached the issue to withdraw). You simply can't treat all their output like the suggestions from CCP staff because if you did their volume would drown out all the other stakeholders.

How can they fix something when its working by design. This assessment is just as bad as the post at SHC about CCP turning assault ships into AB interceptors as if they didn't intentionally do this.

People shouldn't insinuate to CCP their game design might not be fun and is ruining appeal when such remarks will just go over their heads just like the reaction of the CSM and subsequently the vets after reading the minutes.

It was agreed that CCP formally recognizes the CSM as a stakeholder in EVE development on equal footing with stakeholder departments within CCP, allowing the CSM much greater influence on development prioritization.