Friday, October 30, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Saturday, October 17, 2015
EVE Online players and the CSM make horrible game designers
(This was a reddit post in response to the complaints from people about CCP's current direction in game design)
You know this entire topic is really starting to aggravate me. CCP has done nothing for the past two years but listen to the constant whining and complaining from the vocal minority on how they should design their game.
The CSM and the player base are not customers, they are at best active investors and at times hostile investors. Almost all of the anger and rage you seen over the past few years has been the Carl Ichans of the eve community trying to protect their sandcastles in game.
This is does not allow sane and rational design implementation to be put forward. Then when CCP does make changes based on the vocal minority community's desires we have to sit around and hear a month of complaining from the same people on how CCP didn't get it right.
Instead of having a vision and coming up with what CCP feels is a direction they should head in, they have been compelled and brow beaten to listen to these horrible "game designers" inside the CSM and the vocal minority player base on how and why they are somehow qualified to design an MMO.
During the summer of Rage a few years ago, CCP was trying to find alternative income streams and go the direction of literally every other single MMO in the genre by bringing in microtransactions to the community. Instead the player base was whipped up into a frenzy by a few people screaming from the hilltop that there was going to be gold plated ammo, which was never CCP's intent. They were just looking for income stream via things like skins so that they could potentially move their product to a different subscriber model.
All that came out of the summer of Rage, which there was a few shining points as CCP went back to work on some of the game aspects that were broken, is a cultural shift in the company to listen to the unqualified masses on what they should do, as if any if these people have a microsecond of experience running a company, being an entrepreneur or designing a successful mmo.
As a result what we seen in the past 3 years is a continual slide down the hill that in my opinion is directly a result of bad game design decisions that I can only blame squarely on CCP for listening to the ignorance being spewed forth by people who consider themselves important. I don't think CCP should ignore its customers, on the contrary please take their ideas into consideration, but they certainly should not have let them basically run the show. All the community has managed to do is wrongly force them down paths of "improvements" which instead nearly crashed and burned the game and company.
CCP has did pretty damn well themselves in making smart business decisions and by finding a niche in the market. We do not need design by committee, we need another Soundwave / Hilmar to walk in and say this is what we're doing like it or gtfo.
If it dies it dies based on a clear leadership structure instead of this round table decision-making, were really at the end nothing ever gets really done and we get half measures because she see if he doesn't have the time or resources to keep going back over some of these very dramatic and fast changes.
Long story short let's let CCP tell us what their design is going to be and the CSM / community keep their mouth shut and only advise on small iterations, instead of trying to be game designers.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
If your going to be blamed for it, be fully in charge or not at all!
(This is a story on the drone wars in 2012-2013 that saw the Drone Coalition / Solar Alliance being evicted out of the drone regions by PL and NCDOT. I posted this a while back on Reddit, but felt it made a good blog post and life lesson).
If your going to be blamed for it, be fully in charge or not at all!
So this is a very interesting story on why you shouldn't let politicians and armchair quarterbacks run strategic fleet operations.
Here is a spreadsheet of most of the fleets I either personally fc'ed or was there for. I left out most of the Armageddon fleets for reasons I explain below.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ate_vz0fcMsfdDhlSXVsaUxGVXp6M0VEWS01WTRWY3c&usp=docslist_api (I only tracked participation in mainline doctrine ships, and only tried logging kills and losses based on the same method.)
In the 1st few battles of the drone wars the ragtag fleets of the English speaking alliances were actually doing very well. Solar Fleet was at full strength back then and on the English side we were fielding 250 in fleets regularly.
Maelstroms were doing great, alpha was and still is king and I was pretty confident we could at least make PL / NCDOT bleed heavily for the region.
However it was a Coalition of like 6 plus alliances who all felt they deserved to comment on fleets. Nevermind most of these people never attended operations or even PVP, but there biggest complaint was that T1 maelstroms were too expensive and we should switch to a cheaper ship.
I shit you not the consensus was T2 Zealots. I flat out argued, yelled and eventually gave up, nothing I said mattered .... I was only the guy who was told to FC this mess, but really never allowed to pick the right tools for the job.
So we switched to Zealots and as you can see our k/d ratio dropped dramatically and we started to lose the war.
Solar, then seeing that combat by democracy was a horrible idea, hired Black Legion to come bail out the USTZ. This is how I found out that the famous Elo Knight's entire war plan was to be as risk adverse as possible while padding his own killboard.
He ordered all of us to fly Drakes and Hurricanes while Black Legion would sit at range sniping. Complete disaster and after a few fights he either quit or got fired by Solar.
Now at this point the wheels are coming off the bus. Alliances are in a panic, major systems are starting to fall and political hacks are scrambling to find a solution.
So, I'm like "hey guys remember Alpha" and promptly told to shut up. We are instead going to listen to Lord Ravhin (another FC back then) and fly.... Wait for it...
Pulse Armageddon's (pre-neut / drone change).
So at best we could field 100-150 of these. We flew them maybe 3-4 fleets. WE NEVER GOT A SINGLE KILL. All that PL had to do was bring in a few triage Chimeras and use Target Spectrum Breaker modules, it made Geddons in the number we could field completely ineffective and finally broke the will of the English alliances after losing probably 400 of them.
This was also before Micro Jump Drives were in game yet, so extracting battleship fleets was pretty hard once bubbled.
Solar continued to fight for another month? after the collapse of the USTZ but even with fielding close to 900 pilot's solo on major timers, you had all of N3 and PL attending in Slowcats, proving to be too much for Solar alone to hold back.
And that children is why you don't let your alliances political hacks dictate fleet management, if your going to be tasked with being the FC you tell them what will be run, not the other way around.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Light into the Void Ep .5 - Fixing Blobs and Logistics in EVE Online
LegacyEVE.blogspot.com
LegacyofaCapsuleer.com
https://soundcloud.com/op-success/opsuccess-ep-2-excited-about-that-roadmap
http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/67559/1/Structurestates-04_550.png
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Light into the Void - Ep.4 - Cheaters in the Alliance Tournament
How AT's are not "EVE" & Newflash, people cheat! ATXIII Reversal
https://www.themittani.com/news/was-atxiii-staged
http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-tournament-play-eve.html
http://legacyeve.blogspot.com/2015/02/eve-needs-battle-arenas.html
Monday, October 5, 2015
Light into the Void - Ep. 3 who cares?!
Show Notes
Legacyeve.blogspot.com
LegacyofaCapsuleer.com
AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE, OI OI OI!
http://www.rugbyworldcup.com/
http://isksinkdotcom.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/september-plex-review.html
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2015/10/weekend-minipost-nothing-to-see-here.html
http://www.vegaspubcrawler.com/
http://www.atomicvegas.com/
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Light into the Void Ep. 2 - CCP Roadmap, Now to Spring 2016
Light into the Void Ep. 2 - EVE Online Update 2015 to Spring 2016
Show Notes
CCP Seagull’s Update 2015 to Spring 2016
Wingspantt Probe Scanning
LegacyofaCapsuleer.com
Stainwagon vs Borderlands Syndicate [02.10.2015]
CCP - To encourage streaming you need to create some features to help out...
http://t.co/F3pBgNG7XA
Friday, October 2, 2015
You cant' handle the truth! (EVE Players make horrible devs)
(Originally posted to Reddit, I felt strongly about this topic that it needs to be spun out as a separate blog post)
This entire topic is really starting to aggravate me (Players stating that CCP doesnt listen to them).
CCP has done nothing for the past two years but listen to the constant whining and complaining from the vocal minority on how they should design their game.
The CSM and the player base are not customers, they are at best active investors and at times hostile investors. Almost all of the anger and rage you seen over the past few years has been the Carl Ichans of the eve community trying to protect their sandcastles in game.
This is does not allow sane and rational design implementation to be put forward. Then when CCP does make changes based on the vocal minority community's desires we have to sit around in here month of complaining from the same God and people on how CCP didn't get it right.
Instead of having a vision and coming up with what CCP feels is a direction they should head in, they have been compelled and brow beaten to listen to these horrible "game designers" inside the CSM and the vocal minority player base on how and why they are somehow qualified to design an MMO.
During the summer of Rage a few years ago,
CCP was trying to find alternative income streams and go the direction of literally every other single MMO in the genre by bringing in microtransactions to the community.
CCP was trying to find alternative income streams and go the direction of literally every other single MMO in the genre by bringing in microtransactions to the community.
Instead the player base was whipped up into a frenzy by a few people screaming from the hilltop that there was going to be gold plated ammo, which was never CCP's intent. They were just looking for income stream via things like skins so that they could potentially move their product to a different subscriber model.
All that came out of the summer of Rage, which there was a few shining points as CCP went back to work on some of the game aspects that were broken, is a cultural shift in the company to listen to the unqualified masses on what they should do, as if any if these people have a microsecond of experience running a company, being an entrepreneur or designing a successful mmo.
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As a result what we seen in the past 3 years is a continual slide down the hill that in my opinion is directly a result of bad game design decisions that I can only blame squarely on CCP for listening to the ignorance being spewed forth by people who consider themselves important. I don't think CCP should ignore its customers, on the contrary please take their ideas into consideration, but they certainly should not have let them basically run the show. All the community has managed to do is wrongly force them down paths of "improvements" which instead nearly crashed and burned the game and company.
CCP has did pretty damn well themselves in making smart business decisions and by finding a niche in the market. We do not need design by committee, we need another Soundwave / Hilmar to walk in and say this is what we're doing like it or gtfo.
If it dies it dies based on a clear leadership structure instead of this round table decision-making, were really at the end nothing ever gets really done and we get half measures because she see if he doesn't have the time or resources to keep going back over some of these very dramatic and fast changes.
CCP - To encourage streaming you need to create some features to help out...
Time to make EVE Stream-able
An example would be a video feed out to OBS or Stream that blocks a lot of the information on the screen (system location, overview etc)
its clunky and not user friendly for people to try and create overlays which ends up blocking 2/3's of the stream.
The example from Twitch streamer http://www.twitch.tv/spenjer1 isnt him wanting to add a bunch of cool stuff to his stream, its him blocking key information from nefarious people who might be watching...
Instead provide some features so that streamers can be in real time but lower their risk of getting ganked.
It's not a perfect fix (locator agents for example are a problem for streamers) but it would really raise the bar.
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