Sunday, December 11, 2011

What Do You Mean, Jesus Is Dead?

In his most recent blog, CSM Member Trebor Daehdoow (Robert Woodhead) made special note of Hilmar's declaration that "The era of the Jesus feature is over.” Since the minutes aren’t out yet, I'll speculate for a bit; what CCP learned lesson is encompassed by Hilmar’s statement?

What counts as a Jesus Feature? I think we can call the self-referenced Incursions, alongside Apocrypha’s Wormholes, to be examples of Jesus Features, and relatively successful ones at that; they are, and have been, generally enjoyed by most player participants. On the other side of the coin, Tyrannis’ Planetary Interaction and Incarna’s Walking in Stations flopped for, among other reasons, being dull, tedious and devoid of entertainment value.

If these four features are examples of Jesus Features, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with making a big "Jesus Feature" the focus for an expansion. However, a big feature focus only really works if other components of the game that players like, or have, to use are not broken and not in need of work; unusable, unenjoyable or unworkable content seriously damages the appeal of the game. When big problems are neglected in favor of shiny new things, what might have been a good feature is immediately tarnished by what its introduction took the place of repairing. If the big feature just plain sucks, the results can be, and have been, absolutely devastating.

If CCP learned that big features have to be good features - for the game and for the player alike - and can’t take the place of fixing what’s currently broken, we should be in good shape for the future. If CCP has learned to not try to make big features, we’re probably in for some rough spots ahead. Time will tell what lies further down the road.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Painful but Necessary

The changes to PI taxation haven't been particularly popular; it's now substantially more expensive than it once was to import and export PI goods, dramatically increasing the overhead costs of maintaining a PI installation.

The increased pain is a good thing; there are not nearly enough ISK sinks in Eve Online. After PI was introduced, the biggest ISK sinks in the game after skills and blueprints - POS fuel, starbase structures and new outposts - no longer existed in this role. Since then, the amount of ISK entering the game has increased substantially.

Inflation is never good for the long term health of a game economy. Adding more sinks, including the 10% market rate surcharge on P.I. goods, will help the game in the long run.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Now Comes The Hard Part

Crucible is a monster of an expansion. With new ships, the desire for new tools to blow other people to smithereens has been filled for the first time since Apocrypha. With engine trails and nebula, everything old is new again. Combined with V3, the game is beginning to genuinely resemble the rosiest of nostalgia tinted glasses. With dozens of interface tweaks and minor gameplay changes, Eve Online is gaining the most client functionality in ages. When the new balance factors are thrown into the mix, the dreaded era of Super Capital Ships Online might finally be coming to a close. Meanwhile, Dreadnoughts are returning to viability through more DPS and shorter siege timers. All told, Crucible is one of, if not the most, welcome, feature packed expansions in years and it's just days from being deployed. Congratulations on creating such a wonderful expansion, CCP; this is the first time I've felt excited for an expansion in years!

However, with the low hanging fruit out of the way, now comes the hard part.

While Crucible packs an amazing quantity of new features that improve the experience of playing Eve Online, it does not, nor was it ever capable of, dealing with some of the deep, underlying flaws of current game mechanics; there simply was not enough time to do so. The task that lies ahead for the task masters and game designers is to address the underlying causes of Eve's economic woes, the non-existence of Risk vs Reward, the ease of force projection, the doldrums of daily life in null security space, the limitations of modern player made infrastructure, the proliferation of outposts, and the difficulties in finding meaningful PVP across much of New Eden, among other problems.

These are not easy problems to solve. The community has been wrestling with most of these issues, in some form or another, for several years. Many potential solutions have been discussed ad-nausea, but there has not been an environment conducive towards putting new ideas for revised game mechanics into production at CCP for many years. Fortunately after the fallout of Monoclegate and the related dramas, the main stumbling blocks appear to have been pushed aside, allowing the designers a shot at delivering what they, and players alike, have all wanted to see done to make Eve Online the best game it can be. I'm looking forward to, and sincerely hope everyone's up to the challenge of, seeing CCP addressing the hard parts.

Good luck and God speed in this endeavor; it's not going to be easy!

Saturday, November 12, 2011

A Counter-Argument To A Case For Keeping High-Sec

This particular blog entry is a response to Black Arturus' latest blog entry, which you can read here:
My Case For Keeping High-Sec, by Black Arcturus

In a sense, Black Arcturs' blog post is somewhere along the right track; forcing anyone into nullsec is a moot point and a pointless endeavor; it always has been and always will be, as what attracts a player to high security space is the general safety it provides. The problem with high security space is the various things that discourage a player from venturing further. Level 4 missions and Incursions provide a safety blanket of easy, low risk ISK. It's a universal human trait to fear losing what you have.

The argument has been made that the solution to encouraging people to enter 0.0 space is to increase the rewards it offers rather than reduce the rewards in High Security space. You can’t rely on power scaling 0.0 to attempt to attract more people to 0.0 space; ISK is rarely the reward, in and of itself, but income is a necessity to living in null security space, much like anywhere else. I don’t think it’s possible to generate more currency than with Incursion farming. This is a fundamental flaw with the current state of Eve Game Design, as Incursions and Level 4 missions are utterly skewing the risk/reward ratio in favor of high security space. Balancing upwards is not a valid method to balance out this equation due to the already persistent and massive problems mudflation has introduced to Eve Online.

Ultimately, I disagree with the assessment that high security space is fine as it is; it is not. The current state of High Security Space introduces far too much currency into the economy and invalidates one of the major motivators for prospective pilots to go out and explore the deep end of the game through its safe, easy, ludicrous quantities of money minted each day.

Highsec doesn’t generate the stories that draw players to Eve Online. High security Space does not create the deep social connections that hold people in game for the long term. The only thing High Security Space provides is a safety net which, by all established player accounts, is only getting safer and more lucrative with each expansion. While safe cash and easy access to replacement toys are what every player wants in the short term, all that catering to these desires accomplishes is the degradation of the long term viability of Eve Online's sandbox and ever more rapid churn of players that burn through the limited content Eve Online has at its disposal.

Eve Online is at it’s best when players interact with other players. It’s far past time that players stop lobbying CCP for even more barriers between themselves and the player vs player experience.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

An anger two years in the making

What really chaffed our collective player asses for the past two years of expansions before finally blowing up in Incarna was the common thread of squandered potential that the past two years of expansions have had. Eve Gate, Incarna, Planetary Interaction, the revamped Sovereignty System, etc. all had good shots at being really, really cool features. What we ended up with was material that was not thought through with regards to game impact. All of these features, with their gaps in gameplay, serviceability and enjoyability left a distinct impression that someone at the top of the feature development food chain didn’t give a rat’s ass about the end user experience. The background of CCP's top management is no secret; a lot of them come from a technical background; the features with the most squandered potential were all developed on the grounds and basis of being a technical showcase, rather than genuinely improving the game for the consumer, before they were dropped completely after delivery.

The development teams are incredibly passionate about the game; I have no doubt about that. However, between the meetings with the CSMs, the feature deliveries, and the multitude of flaws known well in advance of PI and Incarna’s arrival on Tranquility, what makes itself clear is that the management wasn’t willing to fix things because they just didn’t give a fuck; the retention of long time players was taken as a given, regardless of the quality of features or what long time players had to say.

The last straw came in the form of FEARLESS and Incarna’s perceived purpose as a vehicle for psychotically overpriced virtual “goods.” The various communications missteps, on top of the previous years of neglect and a newly seen intent to fleece existing customers for more money drove players to leave Eve Online. Two years of misguided intent ultimately culminated in a terrific loss of players, a dramatic 180 turn in the direction of EVE Development and the layoff of 20% of CCP’s global work force; a very heavy price to pay.

This general summary skips a great many details about attitudes and cultures, but the features themselves, the front end of what we have to experience, are what cultivated the mass Incarna exodus from Eve Online. It's no surprise that delivering high quality features that satisfy long term gripes, even if they don't fix the botched jobs of the previous two years, have done wonders to stabilize the bleeding of subscribers. I just hope the right people recognize that many people consider the winter expansion's feature set to be a down payment on additional, long overdue repairs.

Monday, November 7, 2011

It's Time For a Blanket Nerf

Power creep is a bad thing since it makes things harder on newbies, creates a cycle of complaints about boosting, makes everything that wasn't boosted almost useless, and we jumped off that cliff years ago. Making things right is probably going to make everyone mad; everyone's favorite ships will have to suffer for it.

Before I tick you off to the point that you stop reading, let me explain the perceived problems in the current state of affairs and apologize for the slight ramblings; this blog post tries to cover a lot of ground.

Power creep, a gradual increase in the power of the tools (ships, weapons, modes of transportation, etc) over time, is fundamentally bad for the game's organically grown collection of ships, modules, game play systems and other features. It is fundamentally impossible to boost something into parity with another something without eventually making them into the same thing; inequalities in performance are something that we are going to need to learn to accept. This doesn't mean accepting the status quo; some features need to be adjusted to be more or less effective than they are today. From the beginning, people have cried "don't nerf, boost!" It's an unsustainable practice; reductions in power are just as valid a tool as boosts in power, and they can be more effective as well.

The obvious form of power creep comes in the aforementioned form of boosting, a prime example of which was the recent changes to tracking enhancers and projectile turrets. One of the most insidious forms of all is stealth boosting; reductions in the performance of modules that increases the effective power of others by removing the viability of their established counter. Slightly less obvious is the introduction of new ships, which often carry exceptional capacities to fit modules over their predecessors.

Ships that can easily fit idealized load outs without making compromise are one of the ugliest forms of power creep that have made themselves manifest in Eve Online. In light of this I propose a Nerf to the CPU and or grid of every ship that can comfortably fit 90% Tech 2 modules of the right size and doesn't leave you in strong want of another module slot in order to force players to choose what their ship is optimized towards, invest in more tech 1 modules, or to invest in faction/deadspace gear.

Most of you probably realize that this proposal impacts ships like the Drake, Hurricane, Harbinger, Myrmidon, Oracle, Tornado, Tempest, Armageddon, and Tengu. Unfortunately, I think this is a necessary evil; these ships, some of the most popular in the game, do not have to make a real choice in how they’re fit; they can be optimized in tank and damage output with ease, taking away a significant portion of innovation in ship fittings while robbing the game of potential depth and complexity. Tech 2 is too much of a linear upgrade over most t1 and meta level N gear to allow Tech 2 modules to constitute a super majority (90% or more) of a ship’s equipment.

So what would a post nerf world look like? Well, let’s look at the Drake. The Drake is a ship that can readily fit a full T2 tank, full rack of tech 2 damage modules, and a full load out of tech 2 missile launchers. With a little less CPU, the Drake can no longer load up a full T2 set of all three. Most of a Drake’s preferred T2 equipment does not have a meta level tech 1 counterpart, which forces the pilot to pick and choose where he’s going to invest his fittings. A subtle change, but the little changes add up over time.

This is no quick fix for all of the game’s ills, but it does begin to address the problem of ships that can equip full tech 2 load outs being inherently better than ships that cannot. There was a time that this wouldn’t have been an advantage, but that day was when the only way you could get Tech 2 gear was to have a Tech 2 Original Blueprint; those days are long gone. Right now, a natural optimum emerges from modules that are a linear upgrade in performance without penalty. To bring opportunities for tactical exploration, those optimums need to stop being viable. What freedom is there in methods and tactics when there’s a defined right way to fit your ship?

It almost seems paradoxical that removing ability increases possibility. What a funny little world we live in, isn't it?

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The Heart of the Matter

Advanced apologies for any rambling or grammatical shortcoming in this post; today's news makes for some raw emotions.

In my last blog post, I lamented the difficulties in communicating with CCP. Today's bleak news cuts to the why that composes the heart of the matter; when we players seek out to converse with CCP (that means two way dialogue, not pats on the back or circlejerks that go nowhere), the goal is to try to avoid these no win scenarios. We've strived and struggled for years to try to reach out and talk to CCP about where their course of actions will lead from a player perspective, and it's situations like this that we desperately wanted to avoid.

For everyone's sake, player and developer alike, we need to stop for a minute and talk to each other more. Nobody benefits from a standoff that results in people losing their livelihoods. To that end of improved communication, the removal of community management staff from North America is exceptionally mind boggling, to say nothing about the dozens upon dozens of others who are now out of work.

Please, managers of CCP, from the bottom of my heart, I beg you to pay heed to the good points that the community has had to offer over the years and continues to provide! If you only leave us with the power to vote with our wallets, everyone suffers - and nobody wins. There are very few of us who want anything less than to see EVE Online succeed. Success and mutual enjoyment are the heart and soul of the matter, and we really need to talk.

Friday, October 14, 2011

How can I talk to you, CCP?

One problem that continues to make itself known when trying to talk to CCP, as a collective organization, is that of reception.

If you talk about CCP positively, the positive message will be embraced and proudly displayed. The circles of validation in use within the company, which many employees have embraced, result in a cycle of clinging to the positive messages and a pattern of reinforcement. These validations become a shield against criticism that is extremely difficult to breach.

If you talk to CCP in a neutral manner, the message is generally ignored for being too bland to write home about.

If you're negative about the message, well, your opinion tends to be dismissed. It's all but impossible to address points of concern with EVE Online or the company. Anything said that is negative seems to be treated as a personal point of contention with the workers, rather than the work itself; trenches are dug, and it becomes a situation of Us Versus Them.

I want to talk about the potential EVE Online has to be truly great. I want to speak gushingly about how cool the things players do in the game are. I want to be able to share a positive experience with other players and would-be players. With the state the game has been in since Dominion, I couldn't do it.

The last two years have distressing to behold; features that add little value to the end user experience were added in bulk. The balance of the game was left to languish while development resources were poured into pet projects. Bad things were happening, and the shields held until Incarna delivered a catastrophic blow to CCP's subscriber counts and the development of the Winter Expansion shifted into full on appeasement mode. Good things are finally coming, but these measures, which we have suffered long for, strike us as just that; a temporary bump in the road before the company goes back to the same bullshit that took us here in the first place.

How do I talk to you, CCP? What am I to do if the truth is not all roses? How can I talk to you about the game I, and many others, want EVE Online to be without being vilified or ignored by the men in charge of EVE's destiny? I can’t figure it out.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Ideas

After playing EVE Online for five+ years, it’s hard not to come up with a few ideas for making the game bigger and better. If you've kept tabs on the EVE Online forums and Failheap Challenge, you've probably seen many of these ideas before.

  1. Modular starbases for performing industrial activities in an ordered workflow process style. Easy to set up, hard to destroy, and readily disrupted by small gang activities while just as quickly being rebuilt. A potential hub for planetary interaction based manufacturing, with NPCs providing traffic between planetary infrastructure and 0.0 processing and manufacturing facilities.

  2. Titan jump drives dragging everything along with them in a 2500 meter wake.

  3. Enormous fields of ancient wreckage located deep inside of Sleeper Space; a dumping ground for spare parts and ruins for intrepid pilots to explore.

  4. Artificial Intelligence systems, guiding and controlling each faction it represents with compartmentalized information. They harvest resources, conduction operations, build ships and provide a living, breathing PVE experience within a system of nigh limitless complexity.

  5. Robot Combat spectator sports in the throes of deep space; something to do in your free time and loads of spare ISK. This is the birth of an entire industry.

  6. Infiltrating pirate bases and secure installations with remote controlled, disposable bodies, done in the hope of looting those installations of valuable goods, blueprints, and data sets.

  7. A modification to reprocessing mechanics which makes use of refining slots and time, changing the game of reprocessing to be similar to manufacturing; a task that takes time and rewards the creation of player built infrastructure.

  8. A removal of permanence by introducing destructibility to Outposts; a reduction of player built stations to smoldering hangar bays and shredded girders via liberal application of gun. All is not lost on destruction; it’s simply left in storage as you made it. However, the station’s services are all offline and anyone and everyone can dock at the hulk if they want to.

There is no shortage of ideas on how to enrich the experience EVE Online has to offer. Granted, they are merely concepts with thought invested in the requirements of implementing them within EVE. While not all of these concepts may be feasible, possible, or any fun in practice, there’s still a limitless fountain of opportunity to innovate, iterate, and improve on spaceships.

What ideas do you have for improving EVE Online?

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Barriers to Entry

Some things in EVE Online are not easy to get into.

Capitals and Super Capitals constitute the highest end of content that EVE Online has to offer. With over a year of dedicated skill training required to pilot them and costs ranging between the hundreds of millions or tens of billions, this is the acme of flying in space; there is nothing bigger or more powerful. Once you fly super capitals, you've achieved the ultimate level that a pilot can expect to achieve in his or her career.

It makes sense that capital ships take the most time to get into. EVE Online is a subscription based MMORPG; the longer the game holds onto your interest, the more money CCP makes. The time taken towards getting into a ship like a Dreadnought or Carrier or Super Carrier can be delayed or further extended with detours like Heavy Assault Ships, Recons, Command Ships, and other, similarly high end toys. With lots of interesting ships to fly, it's hard to run out of things to want to try out in EVE Online.

But what happens when you get to the top?

What happens when those other ship classes or other races of ships don't gain and hold your interest?

Super Capitals have come to be known to a few of my friends as account coffins. They are juicy targets that leave you a prime target for ganks and hot drops. Eventually, most players who acquire super capital ships simply stop logging in after awhile, because their pilots have become tools of alliance warfare. The Super Capital's role in combat is largely limited, albeit not exclusively, to combat against large ships; they are tools for alliance warfare. Unfortunately, they are also unequaled as alliance warfare tools, which has created further pressure to start flying these beasts of burden. The Dominion sovereignty design and the desire to acquire the highest end content in game is highly counterproductive to the enjoyment of EVE Online as well as CCP's bottom line.

Something I've noticed over the years of playing EVE is that the more things you acquire, the greater my compulsion has been to hold on to the vast stores of wealth that I have earned in the game. My adversity to loss had increased. Even though I could afford to replace dozens of battleships, I feared losing even one. The compulsion to hoard was doing a number on my ability to enjoy PVP in game which is, arguably, EVE's one true strength in conjunction with the game economy. The biggest ship I had was merely a Nidhoggur.

To keep enjoying EVE Online, there needs to be value in flying a ship along every step of the way. When it's a race to the top to crush everyone on the bottom, there are no winners; the gears of the sandbox only stop turning.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Some Thoughts With Regards to Incarna

For whatever reason, CCP's culture does not take criticism well. It responds positively to positive messaging, which can be seen when Hilmar responds to tweets.

The aftermath of the roll out of Incarna has been anything but smooth sailing. CCP is working hard to bridge the gulf that has formed between them and the community after much wrath and gnashing of teeth and no small number of lost subscriptions. CCP has fallen on the sword before, and some humility goes a long way, but it is far from a fix or a product.

The apology for Incarna basically summarizes to "We're sorry that we did a bad job deploying it; it made you not love it as much as we do." Incarna is an interesting idea, the motivation behind it isn't fundamentally bad. However, the approach, in pretty much all regards, needs to be re-evaluated. There was no consideration made towards creating game play or getting stories out of the feature, nor was any forethought placed into the creation of the NEX store. There is no motivation of a better experience behind the NEX; it was made in the pursuit of profit. But hey, it's business, so we can't be angry about CCP wanting to make money. What we can be upset over is the pricing model, which remains terrible; the NEX store could be much better, more profitable, and not leave prospective customers feeling shafted.

So with an eye towards making EVE Online more profitable for CCP through Incarna and more desirable to players alike, what would I do to make walking in stations a better experience?

The first step is to stop the real body shenanigans; it creates an immediate cap on what can be done with gameplay. Meat puppets are the way to go, since it allows all sorts of possibilities; what would you do with an indefinite number of expendable, fleshy bodies? The most, probably too obvious route is first person shooters, but there are other possibilities. Smuggling and bar operations become much more interesting when other player's puppets feel no reservations about giving or taking a beating.

The NEX store should be redesigned to offer extraordinarily cheap goods compared to the current offerings; 5 cent goods, but without persistence. The goods offered in the NEX store should be destroyed when you get podded, as well as when your fleshy puppet characters get killed off. Making these goods expendable and insanely cheap makes the impulse to go through those goods much stronger, compensating for the lower income with high volume.

To remove remaining reservations about the NEX store, Aurum, the currency of the NEX store itself, should be available for purchase in pure ISK. The trick to making this work is by offering Aurum at unfavorable exchange rates in comparison to PLEX; at present PLEX prices, one Aurum costs approximately 115,000 ISK. Pricing Aurum at 1 million ISK each will encourage the use of PLEX for this purpose.

The greatest and most immediate gain to be had in altering the real body model Incarna has lies in Meat puppets allowing CCP to leverage Incarna's greatest strength; the character creator. Giving players more bodies means more excuses to play with it.