f13.net forums - Council Of Stellar Management Meeting Minutes from CCP

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0001 Skill Queue Functionality
0002 Bombs need a Boost
0003 Problems with Aggression Timer
0004 Black Ops Improvements
0005 CSM voting for own Chairman
0006 Destructible Outposts
XXXX Various UI improvements

Day 2

0009 Alliances and Factional Warfare
0010 5% Voting issues
0008 Cargo Hold size of ships in hangar
0016 Switch ammo for all weapons at once
0028 Forum issues and fixes
0023 Sell Order availability standing, seller name listing
0018 0.0 Sovereignty Issues
0019 Contract Improvements
0020 Public POS Arrays
0021 Assembly Array Issues
0017 Empire War Dec Mechanics
0022 Shares, Dividends and stock market

Day 3

0024 Experimental Industry Issues, Long-Term Industry plans
0025 Game Time Code Concerns
0026 Suicide Ganking
0027 Drone Implants
0036 Small Freighters
0034 Linux Client

XXXX Changes to alternates
0010 5% Voting issues (continued)

0001 Skill Queue Functionality

Noah (CCP) indicated CCP’s awareness of the player frustrations with the ~6 hour duration skill trainings. However, CCP strongly believes that switching skill training is an activity that encourages players to log into the game and play. A skill queue would be a possible solution, if there would be limitations, such as a limited amount of skills being trained, or that only skills of a total up to a certain duration can be stacked into the queue.

Alex (CSM Bane Glorious) noted that players have also suggested a dual training mechanic, where players can pick a primary and secondary skill, which both train at half speed. As soon as the skill with the shortest duration is finished, the other skill will train at full speed.

It was concluded that CCP will look into a solution for this issue.

0002 Bombs need a Boost

Noah (CCP) informed the CSM that it was the intention for bombs to be used to break up on-grid blobs. CCP is aware that the current system is not entirely balanced out, but that it was better to introduce bombs in a pre-nerfed state and boost them later rather than implementing them in an overpowered fashion.

Alex (CSM Bane Glorious) suggested that one of the main issues with bombs is the cost of these weapons, and that the cost should be reduced, while the required cargo space should be unaffected so that people cannot carry huge amounts of these weapons. Another suggestion was to increase damage done to large targets.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) pointed out that stealth bomber vulnerability was an issue as well, and that it might be necessary to improve the range of bombs.

Noah (CCP) agreed to hand this issue to the CCP balancing team.

0003 Problems with Aggression Timer

CCP is aware of the issue, and noted that there currently exists a whack-a-mole type of play, where players repeatedly undock, fire a few shots, and redock. This is undesirable, but will have to be carefully balanced to account for various situations and possible exploitive strategies.

[CCP Addition: This subject is about the ‘dock/jump after aggression’ timer (60 seconds), not criminal flagging/thief timer (15 minutes).]

Alison (CSM Inanna Zuni) observed that ships of all sizes have the same time limits, and that it is generally harder to destroy a large ship opposed to a small one. Alision (CSM Inanna Zuni) and Valentijn (CSM Dierdra Vaal) suggested that the timer should be changed based on ship type.

Alex (CSM Bane Glorious) was also concerned with remove-repair alts, whose actions currently have no impact on the aggression timer.

CCP is aware of the issues and heard the CSM concerns, and will work towards developing a solution.

0004 Black Ops Improvements

Noah (CCP) indicated that CCP was aware that battleships with jumpdrives would become the ultimate ship, and to this end Black Ops ships were pre-nerfed.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) noted that the range of the drive and the presence of cynojammers made the jumpdrive capability virtually useless. Another problem is the limited amount of fuel that can be carried.

Bane (CSM Bane Glorioius) added to this that due to the fuel taking up large amounts of cargo space, loot from successful operations often cannot be hauled back to friendly territory.

Noah (CCP) commented that a Fuel Bay can be added, so that fuel no longer takes up cargo space, or that specialized haulers could perhaps be used to haul the loot back or bring in supplies. CCP will also look at the issue with cynojammers. Jump range might be looked into but is of a lower concern, otherwise Black Ops ships might become too competitive with capital ships.

0005 CSM should vote for own Chairman

Pétur (CCP) started off by saying that the CSM should come up with solutions if the existing rules do not work, and write a guide for the next CSM how problems were overcome. It will be allowed for the chairman to stand down, and as a side note, Pétur (CCP) noted that changes will be made to the way alternates are handled under the current system, so that their participation does not count as a term.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) wished to have the chairman role electable, as he believed that all the roles should be agreed on by the majority of the council.

Sean (CSM Darius JOHNSON) said that he had no problem with the current way the chairman is elected, but rather with the roles and responsibilities assigned to the chairman.

CCP also indicated that there were concerns with the continuity of the CSM, and would like a system put in place where the next CSM can easily pick up where the previous one left off. Knowledge and experience would need to be passed on and everything would need to be properly documented. Current CSM members should advise the next CSM.

Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) expressed concern with the lack of a proper medium to record knowledge and urged for a CSM forum, subversion or wiki to be set up as soon as possible to contain and preserve all information, and make it easy for the next CSM to continue running projects.

0006 Destructible Outposts

CCP made it clear that there are technical issues in the way of destroying outposts (running science/industry jobs, market, players and property in station, etc), and that it would require a major overhaul to a lot of aspects of the game to make destructible outposts possible. Therefore it will not be feasible to destroy outposts.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) said that there should be more risk associated to 0.0 presence, and that it currently is too hard to remove an established 0.0 entity. It is too hard to inflict lasting damage.

CCP replied that the CSM should look at other ways to accomplish what destructible outposts would.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) continued that instead of a total removal of outposts, they could be put into a 'derelict' mode, where normal processes would finish and all items and players would remain onboard, but no new services could be initiated.

Various CSM members said that there currently are a lot of useless outposts littering 0.0, and that it would be nice to destroy or disable the outposts and raid them for supplies, so that land could be left fallow, and a reward is gained from pillaging these outposts.

0007 0011-0015 0033 Various UI Issues

CCP informed the CSM that they have a game designer and 3 programmers currently dedicated to implementing UI improvements and cut down on the 'excel in space' appearance of the UI. CCP is also interested in making the in-space view more usable, as currently almost all space-based interaction is done through the overview list.

The standard behavior for double-clicking avatars is something that can easily be implemented, and will be looked into. Regarding Electronic Warfare icons in the overview, CCP indicated that they would want a more dynamic solution, where information is only displayed when it becomes relevant to the player and does not take up space otherwise.

As for the minimum size of the various windows in the game, it will be hard to change this in the short-term. Individual windows can be changed one at a time, but changes across the board will not be possible.

CCP will look into changing the skill page to clearly display the currently trained skill.

The personal assets page was set up as it is by design, the data is not available locally, and loading everything would be heavy on the database. This will probably not be changed. Sorting items by subcategory and general category will be something CCP is going to look into.

Regarding the display of pilot avatars in the side bar of the chat channel, CCP will look into making this a toggleable feature. The CSM noted that the reason behind this is that people want to see as much names as possible in the list, and that avatars take up a lot of space.

Making icons stand out better for people affected by color-deficiency, CCP is aware of the concerns but it will consume a lot of resources to replace the current textures and thus it will likely be surpassed by issues with a higher priority. They will keep it in mind to make future icons stand out better to people affected by this condition.

0009 Alliances and Factional Warfare

Matt (CCP) explained that CCP's goal of Factional Warfare was to introduce more players to PVP, and that it was not intended as end-game PVP, which they believe is 0.0 warfare. Factional Warfare is to prepare players for 0.0 warfare. Alliances partaking in Factional Warfare would open a can of worms to them, for instance, that Factional Warfare would move inter-Alliance conflicts out of 0.0 where they belong, and into sovereign Empire space, and that experienced Alliance pilots would gank new players that want to learn about PVP in Factional Warfare.

From a technical aspect, it is impossible for an Alliance as a whole to join Factional Warfare. It is possible to allow Corporations in an Alliance to sign up, as this feature is currently blocked and this block could be lifted.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) reacted that there are disadvantages for a whole Alliance to sign up, as their industrialist part could no longer enter certain parts of Empire Space and that they are free to shoot at by the enemy militias, while griefers that want to gank new players in Factional Warfare easily get around the limitations by just setting up a separate Corporation. On the other hand, Roleplaying Alliances, which might not have 0.0 assets, are currently left out while they would benefit greatly from Factional Warfare.

Matt (CCP) argued that if Corporations in Alliances would be allowed to join Factional Warfare, individual Corporations might sign up with opposing Factions, making them each other's enemy through Factional Warfare and each other's ally through the Alliance, which would result in a logical paradox.

CCP said that they would rather want to make the 'shiny features' of Factional Warfare available to Alliances and 0.0 combat(this would include a rank system for Corporations) and make 0.0 warfare more interesting by having strategic locations to fight over like in Factional Warfare rather than using the resources to make Factional Warfare available for Alliances.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) noted that just quick-fixing Factional Warfare and allowing Corporations in Alliances to participate would be enough to please a lot of people. Matt (CCP) replied that CCP will first look how Factional Warfare will develop in the future before making any rushed adjustments, but that they will look into making Factional Warfare available to Corporations in Alliances, with the limitation that Corporations in the same Alliance can only sign up with one and the same Faction.

0010 5% Voting Issues

Pétur (CCP) explained that the current 5% amount of players to bring an issue to the CSM was to ensure that not a single Alliance could force their issues through, but that 5,000 votes would be a more practical number at the moment. CCP wants to keep this democratic mechanism in place, but understands that either the percentage will be too high so that it would never be obtained or too low so that a single Alliance can force all its issues through.

The CSM conferred on its own and changed the required percentage to 25% of the amount of people that voted in the election.

0008 Cargo Hold size of ships in Hangar

Currently ships in the hangar do not display the effects of modules, rigs and skills. This did occur in the past, but was removed due to people exploiting the mechanics by off-lining cargo expanders so that they would not suffer the drawbacks but kept the passive bonus of the module. Thus the cargo space increase is now an active effect which required the module to be online. When not boarded, all modules on a ship will go offline, resulting in less cargo space being available.

Alison (CSM Inanna Zuni) indicated that the 30 second time delay between swapping ships was the reason behind the frustration that this issue caused. CCP is currently looking at decreasing this session change timer, but cannot change the cargo hold issue.

0016 Switching ammo for all weapons at once

CCP said that this issue has been brought up in the past, but has been rejected due to performance reasons. Moving items around causes a heavy load on the servers and making guns easier to reload might encourage players to do it even more frequently. There are concerns that during large fleet battles, all ammunition will be changed at the call of a fleet commander, which would cause an enormous spike on the servers.

However due to the popularity of this feature, CCP will confer with the server/database teams to see if this feature can be implemented and how it would affect performance.

0028 Forum Issues and Fixes

CCP recognizes the issues with the forums, and devs suffer from them as well. The problems originate from some server-side limitations because of the use of .asp instead of .aspx, but there are also session limitations in browsers, which cause problems. There are also issues with the load balancer, which occasionally sends people to a different node which does not recognize the user's authentication, which is an issue that can be looked at. CCP would like to move the forum to another database, and will change the entire forum in the long run but a final decision and plan has not been finalized yet. The CSM and the players will be kept up to date on the developments.

Regarding the forum not being readable in the ingame browser, there are no plans to address this as the current ingame browser is no longer being developed. There are plans to replace the ingame browser with different software.

0023 Sell Order availability based on standing, seller name listing

CCP quickly dismissed this as a possibility for the market system, as performance will be drastically impacted, and the market was designed to match a buy order with the lowest sell order. This is a highly optimized system capable of handling the large amounts of transactions in Eve.

Eyjó (CCP) commented that Eve's market was designed to be totally open, and limiting access to certain orders would destroy this open market principle.

Rather than changing the market, improvements should be made to the contract system. The CSM will submit suggestions for this in a future meeting.

0018 0.0 Sovereignty Issues

CCP has been discussing 0.0 and sovereignty internally for the past year and discussed many issues already. They found that Player Owned Station (POS) warfare is a very limited mechanic, and that it revolves around the amount of dreadnoughts and other capital ships in the fleet, while small ships only serve as support instead of being able to accomplish small objectives on their own. The long-term plan for 0.0 warfare is to have multiple layers of goals and objectives instead of all fighting occurring over stations. This would allow small groups to have an impact on the game, instead of needing hundreds of ships to have influence in 0.0.

Nathan (CCP) said that he does not believe that current large-scale fleet combat is interesting for the participants, mainly due to focus fire.

Andrew (CSM Jade Constantine) commented that current 0.0 PVP is siege warfare, people stick to established fortresses and do not venture beyond the gates. His suggestion was to include mechanics that encouraged sovereignty holders to patrol their space, and have ways for roaming gangs to peck at undefended systems and steal resources there.

The issue of logistics was also discussed. Alex stated that current POS logistics required an alliance to have powergamers that managed them around the clock. He proposed to make 0.0 appeal to a wider audience by removing these repetitive activities that required powergaming. Shayne urged CCP to consider mechanics that would provide more synergy between the industrial and combat aspects of 0.0.

CCP said that they would have to balance short term achievements to the long term empire building. If people could easily destroy in a day what took months to build up, this would be unfair. But on the other hand, it should not be too hard to smoke out established entities. They agreed however, that the current time sinks in POS warfare are too long.

This issue has been put on the rolling agenda, and CCP asked the CSM and the players to come up with concrete suggestions how to improve 0.0 warfare and sovereignty.

0019 Contract Improvements

CCP stated that they have a dilemma, where contracting can on one hand be more effective where people have more options and better deals, or can be a back-alley trading system, where people can scam each other in the worst case on the other hand. CCP believes that the contract system could use some more utility, but should not grant players much more information, as a fully transparent and effective system would also limit the opportunities for players to make a profit. They want the CSM and the players to think about the direction the contract system should take, and are open to suggestions and improvements.

The 10% increment in bids is agreed to be too high a percentage, but it should not be too low either otherwise it would turn into 0.01 warfare. The CSM is tasked to determine the appropriate percentage and relay it back to CCP, who will analyze it and adjust the percentage.

0020 Public POS arrays

According to CCP, making POS arrays public is technically impossible because the jobs require a local hanger and this would interfere with station ownership of the structures themselves. Shayne (CSM Serenity Steele) asked for different ways to address the lack of public slots.

CCP plans to add more slots to NPC stations, but with restrictions such as maximum job time to prevent people from easily clogging up all the available slots. Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) commented that there are a lot of industrial corporations that have set up a POS to get around the limited amount of slots and that they should not be robbed of their investments. According to her, an increase to the slots in NPC stations would be welcome, but not by huge amounts.

CCP said that price dynamics were removed when the new S&I system was implemented; they will look at reinstating it. In the distant future, more personalized structures might be added to the game that might also have a lab function.

0021 Assembly Array Issues

Colin (CCP) researched the balance in assembly arrays, and could report that Efficient Equipment Assembly Arrays will definitely receive an increase to slots with possible minor adjustments for other arrays as well, while all the material multipliers will be looked at.

0017 Empire War Dec Mechanics

Noah (CCP) believes that the current wardec system amounts to a pay-to-grief system, and that CCP is interested in making war declarations deeper by adding mechanics such as victory conditions that would eventually end wars. Valentijn (CSM Dierdra Vaal) commented that under the current system, the defender has no control over the war and the attacker can keep it up indefinitely as long as they keep paying the bills. He also observed that there currently is no determined end goal to the war itself.

Matt (CCP) stated that wardecs are necessary so corporations can attack each other’s logistic chains in Empire, but that there are often wars started without reason, simply to get random victims to gank and grief. The system should be balanced so that the first aspect is not hindered while the second aspect is deterred.

Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) said that in any MMO, players should be allowed to group and organize in relative safety, while in Eve this is deterred as grouping up makes you a target to attack. There is no safe way for players to get started in small scale groups this way. Sean (CSM Darius Johnson) suggested that it might be an option to scale consequences based on the sizes of the warring corporations.

Various CSM members suggested to allow corporations to auction off the war to mercenaries, who would from that point on participate in the war. CCP understands that the current system needs work and thinks that involving mercenaries shows promise. No solid solution has been come up with but the issue is on the agenda.

0022 Shares, Dividends and Stock Market

Eyjó (CCP) understood the need for improving stock trading, but setting up the underlying infrastructure would be complex. He strongly believes that financial auditing and reporting should be dealt with by the players. However, this would result in problems with alts and accountability, as it would be hard to provide consequences to fraudulent characters.

In Eve, trust would also be a problem, as players are discouraged to trust other people with their investments as precedented by other game mechanics. This might mean that the whole stock market would ended up to be controlled by only a few individuals with sufficient reputation, while it would be impossible for new parties to get any kind of position in this system. CCP does not plan to build this system if only a few people will benefit from it.

CCP encourages the CSM and players to think about these issues and how players can be held accountable for financial audits and records, as well as come up with possible mechanics and solutions.

0024 Experimental Industry Issues, Long-Term Industry plans

CCP started off that they currently have plans to improve the interface for the science and industry windows, and that they are seriously considering more skills being available for the industry and manufacturing character types. They also plan to add skill requirements to blueprints. The new skills will allow characters to specialize down several branches and yield benefits to specific areas of manufacturing. Hopefully we will see some of these features being implemented this winter.

Later on, CCP wants to have more item customizability, and bring meta-level into the equation, where special components could be included in the manufacturing process to give a boost to the produced item. Fully dynamic items are a problem, because all item stats are static in the database so variations are impossible.

Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) said that to have variations to ships, the special ship variant could come standard with a rig that influences the stats, a rig which cannot be produced separately and cannot be removed from the specific ship. This avoids a lot of balancing problems as specific rigs would only have to be available on specific ships, and would solve the database problem as all these rigs can be precreated and then applied to the ships to give them variable stats.

Charlie (CSM LaVista Vista) was concerned with the introduction of new skill requirements; the barrier to entry might become too high and suggested this to be smoothened out.

CCP also considered to break up T1 manufacture into individual components, as creating all these objects out of raw minerals is unrealistic.

Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) commented that research should also be a lot more dynamic, as research is currently too static and predictable. She suggested having a more variable outcome, as well as unique and special rewards that could be obtained through researching. An example was to add Tech 2 Blue Print Originals as a very rare outcome of an R&D process, as well as other new and unique items.

CCP noted that a large percentage of players never leaves high-sec, and wants to know from the CSM how these players should be approached and if they should allocate more resources to create content for this type of player.

0025 Game Time Code Concerns

CCP told the CSM that pricing of the game time codes is a business issue, and that Eve might be more expensive than other MMOs on the market because it is a premium product.

The CSM explained that there were three main concerns, the lack of the 30 day game time codes so that players were forced to make larger purchases at once, the price increase compared to the old game time codes, and the communication between Marketing and the players (players did not buy the story). Furthermore, Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) requested CCP to consider lowering the price of their 60 day game time code to 29.95, instead of 34.95 as it is now.

CCP replied that the current 60 day game time code will likely become the standard in the near future, and that supporting separate products is more expensive. Nevertheless, they will relay the complaints about the removal of the 30 day game time code to the Marketing department. They are working on making more payment methods available for subscribers, so that players that previously used game time codes can use these methods to pay for Eve instead.

0026 Suicide Ganking

CCP realized that even though they do not plan to remove suicide ganking completely, today's suicide gank mechanics are too biased in the ganker's favor, and they have set up a task force to look into suicide ganking and crime and punishment in general.

For the short term, they plan to increase the security hit for crime in high-sec space and make sure that all ship kills will be counted as kills, with the matching sec hit, for everyone that participated. CCP also considers influencing the sec hit penalty based on the security status of the victim.

Mid term, the plans are to look into suicide ganking and the insurance payout, once they have made sure that new players are not impacted by this too much and have extra security in place so that accidents should not be punished.

In the long term, they plan to have criminal records for players, with the appropriate consequences. Tradable killrights are also on the table, to let players deal with criminals instead of just CONCORD being responsible for security.

Alex (CSM Bane Glorious) said that most suicide gankers already thought of ratting to regain security status as painful.

Because a lot of suicide ganking occurs from NPC corporations, it was considered to move criminal offenders out of the NPC corporations into Pirate NPC corporations if they committed too many crimes.

Eva (CSM Ankhesentapemkah) reacted to this that it could be standing based, like Factional Warfare, where a player would be ejected out of the militia if their standing with the faction became too low. Various people added to this that criminals could lose standing with the faction where they committed their crimes in addition to the security status hit. As for the bounty system, it was suggested that the bounty could be paid out in parts, with the amount being paid out at a moment depending on the damage inflicted on the criminal, so that a criminal could still have bounty remaining after the first time he was killed.

0027 Drone Implants

CCP is aware that there are no drone implants. The reason behind this is that there are only a few skills available to drone users, and that implants are often tied to skills. Due to the demand, they will look into this and are likely to implement these implants in the future.

0036 Small Freighters

A spaceship type that is somewhere between an industrial and a freighter is currently in development. Abilities may include the use of cans and capital tractor beams, but design features are subject to change.

0034 Linux Client

The prior information was not accurate, CCP is considering a closed beta for the Linux client at some point in the future.

Changes to Alternates

It was suggested to involve more alternates in the CSM or to discharge uninterested alternates and appoint new ones, but the CSM voted against these proposals, and no change was made to alternates.

0010 5% voting issues (continued)

After discussing and evaluating several options, the CSM voted to change the amount of required votes to bring a proposal to the CSM from 5% of the playerbase to 25% of the amount of people that voted in the election, effectively lowering it to 2.75%.