Interesting Weekend Commentary – Eve Open / CSM Review

Out of Game Perspective

First off, if you haven’t dropped over to Eveoganda yet, do so ASAP.  The reason is pretty simple.  Rixx decided to do something that I suspect no one at CCP tried to do (in fact, not to many of us other blokes tried it either), and that was to mimic some completely uninitiated-to-Eve sports nut see if he could enjoy the Eve Open Tournament. 

Here is his response.  Go ahead and read it.

You’ll notice quite a few things that, frankly, are “duh!”, and there were three points that absolutely need to be address before CCP tries something like this again.

No.1 Point – No women.  At all.  Sorry, but when you are trying to entertain a crowd of geeks, having female geeks reporting would be a sure bonus.  Smart, female game geeks are rare, and getting one or two of them as commentators would have been a huge plus to a game already dominated by men.  In addition, remember that geek chicks are hot right now even among the normal populace.. so take advantage of that for bringing in new players.  Second, don’t make women the ONLY commentators.  For women commentators to do well, they need to be on equal footing with male commentators.

No. 2 Point - This is one I commented on in an earlier post.  Dark spaceships in dark space does not equal easy to see excitement.  That coupled with the “spreadsheets-in-space” lingo that ever serious Eve player knows instinctively, don’t make an Eve Online Tournament easy to see or follow.

No. 3 Point – This third point, that being once a team got two or more kills above the other side the match was already decided, is a good one.  To be honest, I am not sure if its because these guys are so focused that any mistake on either side can be effectively capitalized on or if it is because of how the match was set up.  Still, it is a good point.  How can there be any suspense or excitement when there is no potential for a “Hail Mary” (an American Football Term) win?

CSM Strikes Again

The CSM was busy again on reddit recently and put forward this paper on some overall goals they were planning on with CCP.  The good news is that the CSM is really pushing for maintaining the current Tiercide project, getting POSes revamped, getting the Mittani’s “Farms and Fields” underway along with getting Ring-Mining delved into.

The bad news?  Doesn’t appear that Supercap Proliferation is being talked about.  To me, you can’t address soverignty successfully until you remove supercaps from being the “I Win” button of null-sec sov.  I made a comment on the reddit post, and hopefully we’ll see some traction.  I know the CSM is wildly divided about this issue, with Seleene and Elise sort of the side of “What Problem?” to Aleks, Hans, and Greene Lee who are on the opposite end.

Also, Hans has put out a blog post on his recent communications here, which I am still reading up on.

The Town Hall Meeting Topic: Capital Ship Proliferation

I really like the fact that both the CSM and CCP stepped up to doing this Town Hall meeting.  You can listen to the whole thing here:  http://www.eve-radio.com/csmtownhall.

Now, the Town Hall Meeting covered a large variety of subjects.  The one subject that I was focused on was the problem of Capital Ship Proliferation.  It was one of the questions that had come up multiple times, by both forum writers and bloggers (see Jester’s Trek and the Forum Thread, and was mainly due to a conversation between CSMs Greene Lee, Elise Randolph, and Seleene.

[Greene Lee] raised the issue of remote reps on super carriers as one factor making super-cap combat “not fun. You have 50 super carriers, and you can do nothing.”
Elise Randolph: “You bring titans and you volley through them. It doesn’t matter how many reps you have if you have titans.”
Greene Lee: “You need how many titans?”
Seleene/Elise: “16, 16-17 to go through an Aeon. Not a lot.”

 

Now, let’s be clear.. I thought a lot of Greene Lee’s views on several things were daft but he hit it right on the nail here.  And after hearing the Town Hall meeting, I am even more concerned about this issue.  First off, Seleene said essentially that yes, there is a problem, we know its a problem, but the cat is out of the bag sooo… that’s the situation.  The discussion led to a bit of a roundtable where the CSM discussed the ease of making supercapital ships.   The big problem, according to those in attendance was that supercaps were just simply too easy to make.. requiring only 3 or 4 people (One person with three or more alts) could easily make one.. and this was mainly because of material compression.  The end of the discussion really didn’t produce any solution and I didn’t hear anyone from CCP speak up (despite there being two CCP developers in the meeting), so it seems like they are just making words in the hope that this will go away.

 

The only difference to this was from Elise Randolph.  Elise’s stand on this issue bordered on a strange combination of ignorance and wishful thinking coupled with a “purposeful” misunderstanding of how people think in game.  Elise said that he thought the best way to counter the problem of super capital ship proliferation was to give them back their usefulness.  Elise wanted to make Supercapital ships more powerful than they are now.  Yes, you heard that correctly.  Elise continued this and proposed that by bringing back their usefulness, Supercaps would be used more in combat and thus because more were in combat, more would get killed.  The only redeeming point Elise made here was that no one else on the CSM agreed with his position.

 

Elise’s argument is awful on several levels.  The first response to this flawed thinking is that the biggest CURRENT problem is that there are far too many supercaps in the game already.  The alliances that Seleene and Elise belong to, both use entire FLEETs of supercapitals ships in combat, which increases their battlefield survivability by orders of magnitude.  If Elise were to be believed, their use of giant supercapital fleets should have caused more supercap deaths.  However, Elise’s wishful thinking had met up with hard, recorded fact. The past few years, when Titans and Supercarriers were more useful, has been PROVEN that this argument is false.  Absolutely False.  Hear that Elise?  There is NO way you can make that argument, none, zero.  This is because at the height of Supercapital usefulness, supercapital construction outpaced destruction by no less than 2:1 for Supercarriers and 4:1 for Titans IN THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE OF MONTHS.  I calculated some of the numbers in an earlier post here.

 

The second response to Elise’s argument is the fact that he left out one critical truth about supercapital proliferation.  One that Elise should also know well, and potentially hid on purpose.  And that is:  If Supercaps get more useful, more people will buy them, which means that more people will build them to make isk.  And who will get most of those new supercaps?  You guessed it!  The only ones who could buy and purchase those numbers are the massive alliances that already have strangleholds on game resources.  So no Elise, all your plan does is push more supercaps into the hands of alliances that are already too powerful in this game and increases the grip that the major null-sec alliances have on system soverignty.

 

Sorry CSM7, you have dropped the ball and it seem clear that you  intend to let this topic slide by without any effort to address it.  I am disappointed.  Perhaps it was time to add more variety to the CSM.