CCP heading for hotter water

[TripleDES]

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.

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.

[Kageru]

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

It will.

The main touchpoint upon the launch of DUST, will be in nulsec, will be in sovereignty, will be in inflicting damage and destruction and death upon your enemies, destroying their infrastructure and their means to survive, either by means or scorched earth or by stealing their installations on the surfaces of planets. There will be more going on on the surfaces of planets. We’ve introduced mechanics allowing people to manufacture goods on the planets, but planets will play a more pivotal role in sovereignty mechanics further down the line.

(bolded for emphasis, from RockPaperShotgun)

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.

[5150]

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!

[tgr]

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.

[Gets]

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.

[Stabs]

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.

[tgr]

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.

[Stabs]

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 :)

[tgr]

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.

[Stabs]

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[tgr]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Phred]

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).

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

CCP Greyscale wrote:
Thinking about it a bit, not sure where we're going to go. We might not change it at all, we might just make hisec belts deplete (and regen as normal) so they can roughly meet hisec demand.

CCP Greyscale wrote:
Also for anyone who's not following we're leaning towards just making ice in empire non-infinite rather than removing it, but I realize most people coming in to post aren't actually reading the thread first, I just wanted to say this so people couldn't say we hadn't said it.

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

[tgr]

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.

[Stabs]

Just how do you interpret

not sure where we're going to go....we're leaning towards

as "facts?"

[tgr]

Um. What?

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[Gets]

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

[Simond]

Clearly an evil goonie plot!

[Phred]

Just how do you interpret

not sure where we're going to go....we're leaning towards

as "facts?"

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"?

[Simond]

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.

Okay, you can share this now. 

[Endie]

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.

Okay, you can share this now. 

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:

As I'm saying Mittens and Vile Rat, frustratingly, don't break the NDA so I don't know anything specific, but I do know that they have become increasingly upbeat over the last couple of weeks.  Mittens has stopped talking about finding us all a new game to migrate to and has started saying "CCP get it" and discussing how smug he feels.  I suspect that there are internal battles going on within CCP but that the Eve/Flying in Space faction has, with the CSM's help, won their case.  Well, that and cancellation levels.

And I share a jabber channel with several non-Goon CSMs as well as the two Goonswarm ones, and it doesn't take a degree in Kremlin Watching to see the change in mood: I bet CCP have already told them "fuck, ok, we've got it wrong for a long time, but we're going to fix this.  It's going to take a few weeks to come up with a plan because developing MMOs is complicated so give us a month or so's grace, please."

If I were to bet on something in particular it would be three great, old school Eve releases over the next 15 months or so, packed with Flying in Space stuff.  due to schedules the first one will be largely fixes: rebalancing and the like because new POSes, ships, sov mechanics etc are hard to do and new systems take a lot of testing.  But I bet supercaps will be nerfed, gallente buffed, rockets and assault ships "rebalanced" (which means "made usable" in most cases) and time dilation rolled out (though I think that will be less popular in practise). Stuff like fuel pellets maybe, for logisticians.  There might be some incarna stuff, because Icelanders are stubborn, so most likely the other CQs and establishments.  Whatever those are.  Spacebars I guess.  The two after that will be Big Deals and will radically restructure nullsec in particular.

In all, I bet that we're going to see a radical change of direction by CCP back towards their core product - with associated investment - and Mittens is going to have a new subject to be unbearably smug about besides house-paid-for-in-cash, wolf-dog and sabre.  His leadership and advocacy will have been key in saving eve and by God he won't let you forget it in a hurry.

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.

[tgr]

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.

[Pezzle]

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?

[tgr]

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

[IainC]

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

[Pezzle]

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. 

[Kageru]

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.

[Phred]

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.

[amiable]

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.

[tgr]

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:

Tell that to the people who live in the south. While you guys fly maelstroms they are forced to use subpar fleets because its all alliances can afford to replace.

I love it.

[Sir T]

So how many super pilots do people think are in the game? 1000? 2000?

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.