CCP heading for hotter water

[tgr]

Oh, come on.

[Simond]

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.

Now explain why those are bad changes.

[tgr]

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

[Kitsune]

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.

[Lum]

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.

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

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%).

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.)

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?

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"

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

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 do know what 'circumstantial' means, correct?

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.

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.

[tgr]

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 should ask him about grid-fu.

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 do know what 'circumstantial' means, correct?

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.

[Sir T]

Let me ask another question. Do you believe that CCP T20 was favouring BoB while he worked on Eve?

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.

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.

[Margalis]

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.

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.

[Stabs]

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.

[Phildo]

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

[tgr]

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

[Lum]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Amarr HM]

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

[Kitsune]

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

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.

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.

[Comstar]

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.

[sinij]

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

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

[palmer_eldritch]

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

[Sparky]

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.

[Setanta]

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

[Kageru]

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.

[sinij]

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.

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.

[Sir T]

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.

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.

[DLRiley]

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.

[sinij]

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.)

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

[Kageru]

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...

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

[ajax34i]

Yeah, they have mentioned all those in their dev blog.  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."

[Setanta]

"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?

[Kageru]

"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

[Endie]

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'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 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.

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.

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.

[Stabs]

I just pulled a Stabs

Tsk tsk, you bad person, you.

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

[Sir T]

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.

[Kitsune]

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

[Sparky]

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.

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.

[ajax34i]

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...