When we last left off Eve was about to get a massive facelift with the release of Trinity, but the patch notes reveal a whole lot of other changes, and they also didn't mention (because they didn't know) about the infamous 'boot.ini' problem.
(As I understand it builds 45017 and 45018 are essentially the same thing.)
45017 - CONCORD will now respond to aggressing drones during criminal acts by deactivating a pilot's capability to control them.
- Once upon a time it was possible that a suicide gank would succeed after the aggressing ship had been concorded as the drones continued their attack like mindless errrr drones.
45018 - Trinity Expansion
- a graphics update of gargantuan proportions
- The Trinity Trailer wins the prize for 'Most Accurate Depiction of Eve Online in an Eve Online Trailer'
- Jump Freighters, Heavy Interdictors, Marauders, Black Ops, Electronic Attack Ships
- Listed in order of importance IMHO
- Tip of the day
- Here's a tip - Vote For Me!
- Drone bandwidth is a new additional constraint on drones
- Because fielding a full wing of heavy drones from a Myrmidon was considered overpowered.
- Sansha faction ships now focus exclusively on energy turrets exclusively and shield tanking.
- and the Nightmare became truly awesome, shame they didn't go and change Sansha faction modules to align with this new vision.
- Bomb manufacturing will output 2 bombs per batch
- Later batches would increase this to 3 per batch and now 10 per batch. Now stealth bombers are *everywhere*.
45943 - EVE Voice should now work under Mac OS Leopard. Now ransomers can hear their victims sing "Dancing Queen".
- All Mac Users are Abba fans.
49137 - An issue which caused some users to be unable to type their username and password in the login window has been fixed.
- That's one way to fix lag.
51200 -Electronic Warfare Effects shown in Overview
- This was a big update with lots of ship rebalancing and a big boost for Amarr, but this small change, tucked away in the corner of the patch notes is probably the most essential thing they added.
53162 - NPC corporations will no longer be selling shuttles
- Essentially removing the price cap on Tritanium and making the mineral markets more of a market.
56866 - Empyrean Age Expansion
- You can sign up for Factional Warfare on behalf of the four main Empires
- We'll even make it worth your while... eventually.
- Black Rise, a new mainly lowsec region.
- Because we need a place to send Gallente mission runners when we add those experimental storyline missions.
- The since-long missing 6th Amarr frigate, the Magnate, has been released.
- The Gold and Silver Magnates were super rare prizes given out in 2003, now, anyone can own a cheap copy.
- Osprey Navy Issue
- At the height of Nano-Fever the Caldari were given their fastest ship yet! (Just wait for the NanoNerf - coming soon)
61817 - CONCORD have gone through multiple changes in organization and effectiveness.
- And so the current version of Condord appeared, response times were shortened, and security hits increased. Suicide ganking will surely be finally put to rest.
64311 - A new autopilot feature has been added: Avoid System.
- The 'please don't go to Jita' release, along with a new interstellar bypass system to let you navigate around The Forge without worrying about getting stuck loading Jita.
64451 - The autopilot avoidance system has been updated.
- Because the autopilot was telling everyone that Jita was 2,147,483,647 jumps away.
And so we'll pause here again, the next release was Quantum Rise... possibly the least popular expansion to date.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 3)
When we last left our epic voyage through the patch notes we'd just come to the foot of a giant 20,000 point leap in build numbers brought forth by the new build system. We were on the Dragon branch, presumably tied into the release of Eve in China, so sometime between Blood Lines and Revelations, in the middle of 2006.
25245 - Deadspace acceleration gates no longer permit the entry of carriers, freighters, dreadnoughts, motherships and titans.
- Because it just wasn't fair on the pirates.
27121 - If you decline more than 1 mission, per agent, every 4 hours you will now take a standing hit to the faction that the agent works for.
- There was a reason for this limitation, the devs managed to forget it when they removed the limitation from Factional Warfare missions.
27912 - Revelations - Another biggie with a whole lot of stuff we take for granted these days
- "New areas of space have been discovered but are under the control of the first self-aware drone, Orphyx, and his Rogue Drone descendants"
- Let the mineralpocalypse begin!
- "Rigs And Salvaging" & "Exploration"
- Ninja Salvaging!
- "Invention will open wider access to the Tech Level II industry"
- But it won't stop people complaining about TII BPO's
- "The Contracts System is a player-driven mechanism for characters and corporations to formalize work agreements with each other"
- The contracts system is a great new feature to help people scam each other.
- "New Tier 2 Battlecruisers and Tier 3 Battleships to wreak more havoc on your enemies."
- for people who hate Drakes, this is the moment the game went downhill
But most important of all we have
- "'Warp to 0 km' will be added as an option to the 'Warp' menu."
- And millions of instawarp bookmarks were deleted from the DB
28028 - You can now leave your ship while docked, resulting in you appearing in the station in a pod and your ship in your shipbay.
- there was a time when you had to keep buying shuttles when moving 'your stuffs' from one place to another.
28296 -A new probe, the Multispectral Frequency Probe
- This is the only thing that people miss from the old scanning system, the ability to drop one probe and in 5 minutes know whether there are grav/mag/radar/ladar sites worth scanning down.
29239 -The Asteroid Belts in the following systems have been mined out (removed)...
- The universe of New Eden was restructured to try and break up trade/mission hubs. It didn't work.
29316, 29630, 29969 were a bunch of client bug fixes, the kind of thing we like to see and nothing to laugh about.
30636 - Logging off inside a warp disrupt bubble (mobile warp disrupt or interdictor bubble) no longer triggers an emergency warp.
- immediately followed by a bunch of killmails from logoffski fans who didn't/couldn't read the patchnotes.
31081 - Russian UI has been revoked from the client
- but it didn't stop Russians playing the game better than your average native english speaker.
31460 - Concord war fees have changed
- AKA the Privateer nerf
32517 - It is no longer possible to create courier contracts with a duration of 0 days
- CCP doing their bit to reduce the 'Stupidity Tax'
33752 - Revelations II - Added new features to sov warfare
- Jump Bridges/Cyno Beacons/Cyno Jammers
- These are so important in 0.0 that alliance pay billions in Sov fees to keep them running.
- Outpost and Starbase warfare
- Introduced levels of boredom into PVP which were unsurpassed until the arrival of Dominion.
- Heat
- Sov warfare makes news outside of Eve, but the introduction of Thermodynamics had a much wider effect on on combat and is an essential PVP skill to have.
- The EVE Data Export project will allow players to view information about the game world, their characters, corporations and more.
- The API appeared with Revelations II, making all sorts of indispensible apps possible.
- The existing LP/Offers system has been replaced with the new “LP Store” feature.
- Prior to this you couldn't really choose what you were getting for your continued loyalty, this has had a profound effect on the prices of faction gear on contracts. And helped make mission grinding even more profitable.
34381 - Font size in chat windows can now be increased to considerably larger than before.
- And we're still waiting on the ability to do this for the rest of the UI
35106 - Cowbell
- More cowbell
36191 - Rorqual ORE Capital Ship introduced
- One day I shall be flying one.
36800 - Starbase towers, whose damage states are changing and below 95% shield are now persisted periodically in the DB.
- When can we do the same thing for outposts?
37549 - CONCORD officers will now drop the donuts and immediately deploy with the intention of smoking your criminal derrière if you remote repair criminal NPCs.
- Of course, you can still remote rep some empire faction NPC's if you want to pretend that you're roleplaying and not griefing.
41736 - EVE will now run on Mac OS X and Linux.
- it won't necessarily run well...
Next time - the release of the new graphics engine In Trinity.
25245 - Deadspace acceleration gates no longer permit the entry of carriers, freighters, dreadnoughts, motherships and titans.
- Because it just wasn't fair on the pirates.
27121 - If you decline more than 1 mission, per agent, every 4 hours you will now take a standing hit to the faction that the agent works for.
- There was a reason for this limitation, the devs managed to forget it when they removed the limitation from Factional Warfare missions.
27912 - Revelations - Another biggie with a whole lot of stuff we take for granted these days
- "New areas of space have been discovered but are under the control of the first self-aware drone, Orphyx, and his Rogue Drone descendants"
- Let the mineralpocalypse begin!
- "Rigs And Salvaging" & "Exploration"
- Ninja Salvaging!
- "Invention will open wider access to the Tech Level II industry"
- But it won't stop people complaining about TII BPO's
- "The Contracts System is a player-driven mechanism for characters and corporations to formalize work agreements with each other"
- The contracts system is a great new feature to help people scam each other.
- "New Tier 2 Battlecruisers and Tier 3 Battleships to wreak more havoc on your enemies."
- for people who hate Drakes, this is the moment the game went downhill
But most important of all we have
- "'Warp to 0 km' will be added as an option to the 'Warp' menu."
- And millions of instawarp bookmarks were deleted from the DB
28028 - You can now leave your ship while docked, resulting in you appearing in the station in a pod and your ship in your shipbay.
- there was a time when you had to keep buying shuttles when moving 'your stuffs' from one place to another.
28296 -A new probe, the Multispectral Frequency Probe
- This is the only thing that people miss from the old scanning system, the ability to drop one probe and in 5 minutes know whether there are grav/mag/radar/ladar sites worth scanning down.
29239 -The Asteroid Belts in the following systems have been mined out (removed)...
- The universe of New Eden was restructured to try and break up trade/mission hubs. It didn't work.
29316, 29630, 29969 were a bunch of client bug fixes, the kind of thing we like to see and nothing to laugh about.
30636 - Logging off inside a warp disrupt bubble (mobile warp disrupt or interdictor bubble) no longer triggers an emergency warp.
- immediately followed by a bunch of killmails from logoffski fans who didn't/couldn't read the patchnotes.
31081 - Russian UI has been revoked from the client
- but it didn't stop Russians playing the game better than your average native english speaker.
31460 - Concord war fees have changed
- AKA the Privateer nerf
32517 - It is no longer possible to create courier contracts with a duration of 0 days
- CCP doing their bit to reduce the 'Stupidity Tax'
33752 - Revelations II - Added new features to sov warfare
- Jump Bridges/Cyno Beacons/Cyno Jammers
- These are so important in 0.0 that alliance pay billions in Sov fees to keep them running.
- Outpost and Starbase warfare
- Introduced levels of boredom into PVP which were unsurpassed until the arrival of Dominion.
- Heat
- Sov warfare makes news outside of Eve, but the introduction of Thermodynamics had a much wider effect on on combat and is an essential PVP skill to have.
- The EVE Data Export project will allow players to view information about the game world, their characters, corporations and more.
- The API appeared with Revelations II, making all sorts of indispensible apps possible.
- The existing LP/Offers system has been replaced with the new “LP Store” feature.
- Prior to this you couldn't really choose what you were getting for your continued loyalty, this has had a profound effect on the prices of faction gear on contracts. And helped make mission grinding even more profitable.
34381 - Font size in chat windows can now be increased to considerably larger than before.
- And we're still waiting on the ability to do this for the rest of the UI
35106 - Cowbell
- More cowbell
36191 - Rorqual ORE Capital Ship introduced
- One day I shall be flying one.
36800 - Starbase towers, whose damage states are changing and below 95% shield are now persisted periodically in the DB.
- When can we do the same thing for outposts?
37549 - CONCORD officers will now drop the donuts and immediately deploy with the intention of smoking your criminal derrière if you remote repair criminal NPCs.
- Of course, you can still remote rep some empire faction NPC's if you want to pretend that you're roleplaying and not griefing.
41736 - EVE will now run on Mac OS X and Linux.
- it won't necessarily run well...
Next time - the release of the new graphics engine In Trinity.
7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 2)
So far I've covered the changes from the initial release in May 2003, through the addition of Tech II ships and gear in the Castor expansion in December 2003. The next major release was Exodus in November 2004 - Build # 2942, now this covers a whole lot of important stuff
2942 -Starbase Structures, System Sovereignty, Deadspace Complexes, Mining Barges, Destroyers, Battlecruisers, Ice Mining, System Scanning, Rogue Drones, Level 4 Missions, Player Alliances, War Declarations
- Eve became Eve as we know it with the release of exodus.
3004 - The Global chat channel has been closed.
- There was a time when the whole of New Eden could hang out in a single chat channel
3106 - It is no longer possible to complete a mission in space. You must talk to the agent to complete the mission.
- And in Dominion one of the new features was being able to complete some missions in space.
3211 - Transport Ship skill for advanced Industrials....
- Introduction of the t2 industrials, long before blockade runners got Covert cloaks
3364 - Stealth Bombers are now available from Research agents
- Stealth bombers sucked until the redesign of a year ago, now they are officially Awsome
3772 -Red Moon Rising Expansion
- Titans, Carriers, Motherships and 23 other Tech 2 ships.
- CCP expected only a couple of Titans to every be built, after all they're just giant epeens
- Tech level 1 ships have received an overhaul.
- This is where we really see racial frigate and cruiser roles crystalize with miners, tacklers, combat, missile Ewar and Scanning ships appearing. (although the amarr still lacked a scanning ship at this time)
- Drones are more robust and able to deal more damage, but players can control less numbers
- The epic drone nerf that left the Guardian Vexor as the only sub-capital capable of fielding more then 5 drones.
- Players are able to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves and their resources with the 'Eye for an Eye' and JetCan flagging changes
- Can stealing turns into can flipping
3805 - Added agent offers which dish out Empire charters needed to build starbases in Empire space.
- and within 5 minutes of the servers starting up all the moons near Jita were claimed.
3807 - Deployment of 70 dual-core, dual-CPU AMD Opteron LS20 Blades
- Fixing teh lag by throwing hardware at the problem.
3896 - Four new player race bloodlines are now available.
- And the Caldari Achura plague began.
3900 - Creating a second bloodline character on the same account no longer breaks the client window
- because it would suck to be limited to only one achura per account
3910 - Added a Reimbursement category in petitions
- so that it's easier to dash people's hopes when 'the logs show nothing'
3913 - The issue with the "your banned" window on login and session changes has been resolved.
- An issue beyond the incorrect use of the word 'your' I hope.
4557 - Windows 98/ME is no longer supported.
- and to think people whined about losing Eve Classic graphics
4561 - Bookmark copying is now limited to 5 bookmarks at a time
- A futile attempt to nerf the use of instawarp bookmarks?
After this the build number tracking system changes so, it's a good place to pause
2942 -Starbase Structures, System Sovereignty, Deadspace Complexes, Mining Barges, Destroyers, Battlecruisers, Ice Mining, System Scanning, Rogue Drones, Level 4 Missions, Player Alliances, War Declarations
- Eve became Eve as we know it with the release of exodus.
3004 - The Global chat channel has been closed.
- There was a time when the whole of New Eden could hang out in a single chat channel
3106 - It is no longer possible to complete a mission in space. You must talk to the agent to complete the mission.
- And in Dominion one of the new features was being able to complete some missions in space.
3211 - Transport Ship skill for advanced Industrials....
- Introduction of the t2 industrials, long before blockade runners got Covert cloaks
3364 - Stealth Bombers are now available from Research agents
- Stealth bombers sucked until the redesign of a year ago, now they are officially Awsome
3772 -Red Moon Rising Expansion
- Titans, Carriers, Motherships and 23 other Tech 2 ships.
- CCP expected only a couple of Titans to every be built, after all they're just giant epeens
- Tech level 1 ships have received an overhaul.
- This is where we really see racial frigate and cruiser roles crystalize with miners, tacklers, combat, missile Ewar and Scanning ships appearing. (although the amarr still lacked a scanning ship at this time)
- Drones are more robust and able to deal more damage, but players can control less numbers
- The epic drone nerf that left the Guardian Vexor as the only sub-capital capable of fielding more then 5 drones.
- Players are able to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves and their resources with the 'Eye for an Eye' and JetCan flagging changes
- Can stealing turns into can flipping
3805 - Added agent offers which dish out Empire charters needed to build starbases in Empire space.
- and within 5 minutes of the servers starting up all the moons near Jita were claimed.
3807 - Deployment of 70 dual-core, dual-CPU AMD Opteron LS20 Blades
- Fixing teh lag by throwing hardware at the problem.
3896 - Four new player race bloodlines are now available.
- And the Caldari Achura plague began.
3900 - Creating a second bloodline character on the same account no longer breaks the client window
- because it would suck to be limited to only one achura per account
3910 - Added a Reimbursement category in petitions
- so that it's easier to dash people's hopes when 'the logs show nothing'
3913 - The issue with the "your banned" window on login and session changes has been resolved.
- An issue beyond the incorrect use of the word 'your' I hope.
4557 - Windows 98/ME is no longer supported.
- and to think people whined about losing Eve Classic graphics
4561 - Bookmark copying is now limited to 5 bookmarks at a time
- A futile attempt to nerf the use of instawarp bookmarks?
After this the build number tracking system changes so, it's a good place to pause
7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 1)
If you didn't know already, Eve is 7 years old and so In celebration of this anniversary I present 7 years of Highlights from the Eve patch notes.
1002 - Chance of pirates to warp scramble has been added
- vast amounts of carebear pain hinge on this change in the very first Eve patch.
1031 - Added a warp to gang member option, which allows a gang member to warp to a fellow gang member if they are in the same system, regardless of visibility.
- could you imagine PVP without this?
1054 - The response time for empire police, faction militaries and CONCORD in 0.5 - 1.0 security space has been increased.
- Even in the early days suicide ganking was a valid tactic.
1058 - Anti warp scrambler AKA warp core stabilizer is now available on the market
- warp core stabilizers make their debut in the ongoing tackle arms race
1077 - Sentry guns are now deployed near stargates
- Lowsec gatecamping gets nerfed
1105 - Minmatar cruisers and battleships have had their speed bonus removed...
- Even before Nano whines there were speed nerfs
1113 - Billboards are now stationed beside stargates in empire space.
- And everyone had one more thing to remove from their overview
1128 - Advancements in Planck Bubble Generation Technologies have allowed for the creation of containers that have higher capacity than volume. All containers can now contain 20% more than the space they occupy.
- Oh well that explains everything
1165 - If you have recently participated in combat (if you attack someone or fight back if attacked) then you will from now on not be allowed to dock or jump for a period of time.
- Station games get nerfed, just a little, people still whine
1215 - The duration of insurance coverage has been expanded from one week to three weeks with no price increase.
- yet even today I don't insure anything unless I expect it to die within a week
1238 - Something about fixing mission exploits, nothing anyone cares about today.
1246 - A new "Look at" feature which allows for the camera to focus on a new object, is now available on most objects/entities in space.
- CCP boosting the Eve movie makers before Youtube had even launched.
1254 - Preferences are correctly persisted upon shutdown of the client.
- Or so they thought.... still working on this problem the last I looked.
1352 - Tech Level 2.... The blueprints will be introduced via Research Agents.
- And so the epic saga of Tech 2 BPO's is launched.
1378 - HUD Markers fade out if they are further away
- Funnily enough we were just talking in the CSM channel about proposing this as a feature...
1389 - Conquerable stations are in. & Anchorable warp disruptors are in.
- 0.0 became a more interesting place
1403 - Area of effect damage caused by missiles has been removed
- If this was still in I'd bet that Caldari wouldn't have become the carebears race of choice.
1413 - Insurance payments made on Elite Frigates that were destroyed will now use the base price of materials when a payment is made
- T2 Insurance was a hot issue even back then.
1424 - A second test server named "Entropy" has been added to the login window. This server is used for reproducing bugs and testing release candidates.
- Before Singularity was the test server, and before you had to install a patched client.
1549 - A new criminal flagging system has been added into the game
- prior to this you didn't retain GCC's for 15 minutes, and friend could still rep a criminal without getting a GCC themselves.
1618 - The person that did the most damage to an opponent after combat encounter now also receives a kill mail.
- And so the seeds of the killboard are sown.
1724 - "Cloaking now has a 30 second reactivation delay", "The cloaking proximity range has been changed to 2000m", "It is no longer possible to change or reload ammunition when cloaked."
- Cloaking had been in the game for a while already but a whole bunch of exploits had arisen, and so the modern day cloaking mechanics where introduced to nerf these.
1754 - Remote Armor Repair System modules are now available
- Spidertanking FTW
1755 - Advanced Learning Skills that boost character attributes are now available on the market.
- Because forcing everyone to train basic learning skills wasn't bad enough.
I don't have dates for these, but that brings us up just prior to the release of Exodus where CCP intended to make 0.0 really awesome and make people leave hi-sec in search of riches.
1002 - Chance of pirates to warp scramble has been added
- vast amounts of carebear pain hinge on this change in the very first Eve patch.
1031 - Added a warp to gang member option, which allows a gang member to warp to a fellow gang member if they are in the same system, regardless of visibility.
- could you imagine PVP without this?
1054 - The response time for empire police, faction militaries and CONCORD in 0.5 - 1.0 security space has been increased.
- Even in the early days suicide ganking was a valid tactic.
1058 - Anti warp scrambler AKA warp core stabilizer is now available on the market
- warp core stabilizers make their debut in the ongoing tackle arms race
1077 - Sentry guns are now deployed near stargates
- Lowsec gatecamping gets nerfed
1105 - Minmatar cruisers and battleships have had their speed bonus removed...
- Even before Nano whines there were speed nerfs
1113 - Billboards are now stationed beside stargates in empire space.
- And everyone had one more thing to remove from their overview
1128 - Advancements in Planck Bubble Generation Technologies have allowed for the creation of containers that have higher capacity than volume. All containers can now contain 20% more than the space they occupy.
- Oh well that explains everything
1165 - If you have recently participated in combat (if you attack someone or fight back if attacked) then you will from now on not be allowed to dock or jump for a period of time.
- Station games get nerfed, just a little, people still whine
1215 - The duration of insurance coverage has been expanded from one week to three weeks with no price increase.
- yet even today I don't insure anything unless I expect it to die within a week
1238 - Something about fixing mission exploits, nothing anyone cares about today.
1246 - A new "Look at" feature which allows for the camera to focus on a new object, is now available on most objects/entities in space.
- CCP boosting the Eve movie makers before Youtube had even launched.
1254 - Preferences are correctly persisted upon shutdown of the client.
- Or so they thought.... still working on this problem the last I looked.
1352 - Tech Level 2.... The blueprints will be introduced via Research Agents.
- And so the epic saga of Tech 2 BPO's is launched.
1378 - HUD Markers fade out if they are further away
- Funnily enough we were just talking in the CSM channel about proposing this as a feature...
1389 - Conquerable stations are in. & Anchorable warp disruptors are in.
- 0.0 became a more interesting place
1403 - Area of effect damage caused by missiles has been removed
- If this was still in I'd bet that Caldari wouldn't have become the carebears race of choice.
1413 - Insurance payments made on Elite Frigates that were destroyed will now use the base price of materials when a payment is made
- T2 Insurance was a hot issue even back then.
1424 - A second test server named "Entropy" has been added to the login window. This server is used for reproducing bugs and testing release candidates.
- Before Singularity was the test server, and before you had to install a patched client.
1549 - A new criminal flagging system has been added into the game
- prior to this you didn't retain GCC's for 15 minutes, and friend could still rep a criminal without getting a GCC themselves.
1618 - The person that did the most damage to an opponent after combat encounter now also receives a kill mail.
- And so the seeds of the killboard are sown.
1724 - "Cloaking now has a 30 second reactivation delay", "The cloaking proximity range has been changed to 2000m", "It is no longer possible to change or reload ammunition when cloaked."
- Cloaking had been in the game for a while already but a whole bunch of exploits had arisen, and so the modern day cloaking mechanics where introduced to nerf these.
1754 - Remote Armor Repair System modules are now available
- Spidertanking FTW
1755 - Advanced Learning Skills that boost character attributes are now available on the market.
- Because forcing everyone to train basic learning skills wasn't bad enough.
I don't have dates for these, but that brings us up just prior to the release of Exodus where CCP intended to make 0.0 really awesome and make people leave hi-sec in search of riches.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The Official 'Vote For Me!' Link
Voting is now open, should you feel that I'm the best person to represent your interests I'd be honoured to accept your vote of confidence - and maybe I'll owe you a drink one day
Please Submit Your Vote Of Support Here
Please Submit Your Vote Of Support Here
Monday, May 3, 2010
MY CSM Candidacy Summed Up
Why do I want to serve on the CSM?
* Because I love Eve, it's the spiritual successor to Elite, the favourite game from my youth, it's unlike almost any other game out there and plays by its own rules. I want to see it continue to thrive, and believe that I have qualifications that would make me a clear asset to the CSM.
Why I'm Qualified for CSM
* 2 years of Eve, an encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics and history.
* I know all about real space science, I spent a decade in astronomical research, specificly in the field of asteroids, comets and the kind of mess they make when they hit planets.
* I'm a software developer by trade so I understand all the technical stuff that makes Eve work, and what goes on to make the technical stuff that makes Eve work.
* I've been a sci-fi fan since I was taken to see Star Wars when I was 4 years old. I'm a big fan of Iain M Banks.
* More than just a consumer of Sci-Fi, I've provided technical assistance to authors: in particular I provided technical details for a comet impact on Pern to Anne McCaffrey for the bestselling book 'Skies Of Pern'.
* I do everything in the game - 0.0 PVP, hi-sec mining, missioning, exploring, trading, theorycrafting and dreaming up cunning plans. I generally suck at all these things.
* I can be a serious player, cooking up spreadsheets for my industrial endeavours to
maximize my profits.
* I can be a sneaky player, roaming around undetected and scouting stuff.
* I fly every T1 sub capital in the game, so when people whine about ships sucking
I can say I have first hand experience.
* I can be stupid, running missions in a hulk, spelling out song lyrics using ship wrecks,
or just creating fireworks for new years eve.
* I like going back to noob characters, doing noob things and answering questions in
the rookie channel.
* I can detect a forum troll at 50AU.
* I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter, so I'm supremely capable of dealing with people who think they know everything and act like children until they get their way. I imagine this is an invaluable skill for CSM duties.
What kind of issues would I like to see addressed. (In My Wildest Dreams)
* Local Chat as an Intel Source: This is broken in many ways and many reasons, regardless of whether malicious clients can mask themselves or not the mechanic of using the chat channel as a source of intel generally detracts from the game. Proper system level intel systems should be developed for players, alliance members with correct 'permissions' should be able to open the starmap and be able to see residents across space. The data comes from various sources, in 0.0 space monitoring structures can be anchored, and of course disabled. If an alliance has sov they can control who places these, it provides another much needed reason to claim sov, and also a target for attack by enemy gangs.
* Bookmarks visible in space and on the overview: my daughter has a great deal of trouble using cascading right click menus to warp to mission spaces, I find myself engaging targets on a gate and would like to see my bookmarks around the gate so I can fully exploit my sniper ships and warp across grid. Bookmarks are already visible on the solar system map, making them visible on the overview and in space shouldn't be too hard and is a change that benefits everyone.
* Server Side Storage for all those client side settings that keep getting lost: Seriously, I've written enough client-server systems to know how difficult this isn't. I just reinstalled a system recently and find myself having to setup everything again, and re-organize all my bookmarks. Overview, ship fittings, bookmark folders and gameplay settings should be something I can backup on the server as easily as hitting escape and pressing a 'store settings on server' button and then later retrive with the 'import settings from server' button.
* Group/Ungroup Weapons Button: You've done it before I'm sure, fit your ship, loaded ammo launched, and them had to unload all 8 guns and then shift drag them together to group them before reloading. We just need a simple right click option that'll do this for us, it'll match up gun types with the same ammo, adjust the amount of ammo and do the grouping for you with no hassle.
* Simple drone controls: If you're in cruiser just learning to control drones you don't need the full drone grouping and sorting UI, you just need a button to launch everything you have and buttons to attack and return to bay. Once you're in a bigger ship you can learn the full joy of sorting your hammerheads from your hobgoblins, but lets not inflict it on anyone who's still figuring out other things.
* UI Font Resizing, now we have 1080p displays on 10" laptop screens people really do need a magnifying glass to read the screen in places. This is directly affecting the ability of people to play now and we need some effort to be made in accommodating those players without perfect vision. Rebuilding the Whole UI to accommodate larger text may not be possible overnight, but even partial updates to easy things would help.
* Visuals - with the right amount of poking and tweaking people can get anti-aliasing enabled on some graphics hardware, how much of a leap is it to get this mess of backend graphics driven configuration into a checkbox or two in the graphics quality settings? I know there's a ton of gameplay bugs that are in need of even more urgent fixes, but I would imagine that the skills and experience needed to make Eve look prettier are orthogonal to those needed to fix the ever present gameplay bugs. As such I strongly advocate that CCP make their MMO of the year 2009 look like a game from 2009
* Noob Ships: people forever debate ship balance, so I'm going to champion the plight of the noob ships. Right now there's no decent source of civilian Afterburners or Civilian armour repair systems so you can't fit them decently. The Caldari Ibis can't use missiles, the Impairor gets a laser cap bonus but can't fit enough laser firepower to make that matter and then the velator can pwn everything with it's epic 100% bonus to drone bay size on top of it's weapon bonus. Seriously, everyone owns a rookie ship, in fact, if you've ever abandoned one in space there's a good chance it's now sitting in my hangar.
* T2 Ammo: T2 ammo needs some serious love, precision missiles don't offer any advantage against small targets compares with faction versions, short range high damage ammo offers such a miniscule advantage over faction that the drawbacks essentially make it useless.
* Gallente: I never understood why an armour tanking race would use weapons that require the ship to be right on top of the target. Flying Gallente generally either means using drones, or getting a friend to hold a target down while you neutron it to death. Retooling the Hyperion into a railgun sniper is one of many changes I'd like to see considered.
* The Belicose: It's so obvious that this could benefit from having more missile hardpoints, and with it's target painters it becomes a great anti frigate cruiser, something that minmatar are lacking right now. (Caldari have AML Caracal, Amarr the Arbitrator & Gallente The Vexor). I like the look of this ship.
* Assault Frigates: Still wondering when these are going to get some more fixing after the AB bonus was pulled.
* Structure hitpoints need to be logged every periodicly: Because it sucks when a server crash resets the damage status on a 350million HP station, we don't need that kind of pain.
* Give small gangs more things to do: Current structures take too much firepower, create goals that are achievable by small gangs - killing intel beacons for example, or interfering with planetary production. Dominion's military/industry indices actually provide something that can be interfered with by small numbers of reds camping a system, but it's not something that 'feels' like success.
* Missions: Less grind, more fun. While everyone hates the new gallente storyline missions in low-sec for giving crap rewards in return for travelling 30 jumps across empire and the risk of getting shot they do exhibit some interesting features and they certainly break up the mission grind. I especially liked the fact that the ones I tried could be completed with two pilots in fast ships, one would warp in and create a diversion, getting the ships to follow her, while the second would then warp in and kill the now vulnerable haulers. Cosmos has a lot of nice bits and pieces but it needs cleaned up and the 0.0 cosmos constellations are inaccessible to most players because they're in territory controlled and protected by alliances.
* Sound Effects that Do your ship Justice: Seriously, I wrote a program that detects the creation of a new gamelog and plays a really loud explosion sound when your ship dies, and the Wilhelm Scream when you get podded . Can't we get better sounds for something as simple as the demise of your own ship? (I do think the alert sounds add quite a good feeling of urgency when things start going wrong though, good work adding those.)
* Bug Fixes vs New Features: New features bring new players, bug fixes help keep old ones, I was in D-GMTI with 1600 in local, and the lack of grid loading wasn't pretty.
* Player Bounties: when you pod a pilot with a bounty on his/her head the bounty payout should be capped at 90% of the clone cost, any cash left in the bounty stays on the pilot. If you kill their ship then then a payout is a function of the ship value. Insurance might also be restricted if you have a large bounty on your head? Bottom line, there should be no way for a pilot with a bounty on their head to conspire with another player or alt to profit from the desire of another player to see them dead.
* Ship Scan Signature & Sensor Mechanics: The current calculation of signature radius/sensor strength allows for pilots operating in hostile territory to nerf their combat effectiveness in exchange for being unprobable. This feature is a good thing, I am however uncomfortable with the fact that the mechanic is more a side effect of the ECM mechanics, as opposed to any of the other myriad measurments of how awesome your ships electronic systems are. Rationalising all this - locking speed, range, sensore strength, ECM, sensor dampeners and probe visibility is a worthy goal.
* NPC Ewar: broke broke broke, players should be able to use Ewar in PVE for more than just making an entire sleeper fleet primary them.
* Lowsec: I really liked that 'Corruption' idea, someone should work on it.
I like to play the game with my daughter, she's a pretty smart girl but even then I like to use her as an example of how the whole 'Eve is difficult' thing is a myth. Eve is complicated, yes, but it's not difficult, it may be difficult to beat pilot X in PVP, but that's not because Eve is difficult it's because he's better and more experienced than you. The difficulty of Eve is largely because of other players, if you want to build stuff in eve you don't need to resort to spreadsheets, but you'll find that the other players who do spend the effort to crunch the numbers will out compete you. Balancing the game doesn't make it easier, since everyone is subject to the new 'rules'.
Eve however has UI features and idiosyncracies that make it less *accessible* than it could be and it's in CCP's interest to deal with these oddities that inhibit uptake. The bookmarks thing is one example, another is the effort it takes to manage buy and sell orders, switching back and forth between 2 windows is just annoying. Organizing drones and linking guns could be simplified to a automagic 'organize drones' and 'group guns' button, taking a little bit of pain out but still retaining flexibility when it's asked for. Planetary interaction is introducing a whole new mess of UI concepts that we can only hope will crystalize into something that doesn't drive casual players away while other players grit their teeth and bear it only because of the profits or needs of the alliance.
TL;DR
I'm a smart guy, I do lots of stuff in Eve, so I have experience of almost everything, I'm not affiliated with any massive power block, my alliance is red to almost everyone around us now, so I'm essentially independent. I don't want to give advantages to one particular play style, I'm not looking out for the industrialists, or the missioners or the PVPers, I'm looking out for the people who like flying big spaceships and using them to blow up other ships or build more of them.
And I'm a nice guy who knows when to help rookies making noob mistakes and when to lol at veterans making noob mistakes.
Vote Illectoculus Defined for CSM 5.
* Because I love Eve, it's the spiritual successor to Elite, the favourite game from my youth, it's unlike almost any other game out there and plays by its own rules. I want to see it continue to thrive, and believe that I have qualifications that would make me a clear asset to the CSM.
Why I'm Qualified for CSM
* 2 years of Eve, an encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics and history.
* I know all about real space science, I spent a decade in astronomical research, specificly in the field of asteroids, comets and the kind of mess they make when they hit planets.
* I'm a software developer by trade so I understand all the technical stuff that makes Eve work, and what goes on to make the technical stuff that makes Eve work.
* I've been a sci-fi fan since I was taken to see Star Wars when I was 4 years old. I'm a big fan of Iain M Banks.
* More than just a consumer of Sci-Fi, I've provided technical assistance to authors: in particular I provided technical details for a comet impact on Pern to Anne McCaffrey for the bestselling book 'Skies Of Pern'.
* I do everything in the game - 0.0 PVP, hi-sec mining, missioning, exploring, trading, theorycrafting and dreaming up cunning plans. I generally suck at all these things.
* I can be a serious player, cooking up spreadsheets for my industrial endeavours to
maximize my profits.
* I can be a sneaky player, roaming around undetected and scouting stuff.
* I fly every T1 sub capital in the game, so when people whine about ships sucking
I can say I have first hand experience.
* I can be stupid, running missions in a hulk, spelling out song lyrics using ship wrecks,
or just creating fireworks for new years eve.
* I like going back to noob characters, doing noob things and answering questions in
the rookie channel.
* I can detect a forum troll at 50AU.
* I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter, so I'm supremely capable of dealing with people who think they know everything and act like children until they get their way. I imagine this is an invaluable skill for CSM duties.
What kind of issues would I like to see addressed. (In My Wildest Dreams)
* Local Chat as an Intel Source: This is broken in many ways and many reasons, regardless of whether malicious clients can mask themselves or not the mechanic of using the chat channel as a source of intel generally detracts from the game. Proper system level intel systems should be developed for players, alliance members with correct 'permissions' should be able to open the starmap and be able to see residents across space. The data comes from various sources, in 0.0 space monitoring structures can be anchored, and of course disabled. If an alliance has sov they can control who places these, it provides another much needed reason to claim sov, and also a target for attack by enemy gangs.
* Bookmarks visible in space and on the overview: my daughter has a great deal of trouble using cascading right click menus to warp to mission spaces, I find myself engaging targets on a gate and would like to see my bookmarks around the gate so I can fully exploit my sniper ships and warp across grid. Bookmarks are already visible on the solar system map, making them visible on the overview and in space shouldn't be too hard and is a change that benefits everyone.
* Server Side Storage for all those client side settings that keep getting lost: Seriously, I've written enough client-server systems to know how difficult this isn't. I just reinstalled a system recently and find myself having to setup everything again, and re-organize all my bookmarks. Overview, ship fittings, bookmark folders and gameplay settings should be something I can backup on the server as easily as hitting escape and pressing a 'store settings on server' button and then later retrive with the 'import settings from server' button.
* Group/Ungroup Weapons Button: You've done it before I'm sure, fit your ship, loaded ammo launched, and them had to unload all 8 guns and then shift drag them together to group them before reloading. We just need a simple right click option that'll do this for us, it'll match up gun types with the same ammo, adjust the amount of ammo and do the grouping for you with no hassle.
* Simple drone controls: If you're in cruiser just learning to control drones you don't need the full drone grouping and sorting UI, you just need a button to launch everything you have and buttons to attack and return to bay. Once you're in a bigger ship you can learn the full joy of sorting your hammerheads from your hobgoblins, but lets not inflict it on anyone who's still figuring out other things.
* UI Font Resizing, now we have 1080p displays on 10" laptop screens people really do need a magnifying glass to read the screen in places. This is directly affecting the ability of people to play now and we need some effort to be made in accommodating those players without perfect vision. Rebuilding the Whole UI to accommodate larger text may not be possible overnight, but even partial updates to easy things would help.
* Visuals - with the right amount of poking and tweaking people can get anti-aliasing enabled on some graphics hardware, how much of a leap is it to get this mess of backend graphics driven configuration into a checkbox or two in the graphics quality settings? I know there's a ton of gameplay bugs that are in need of even more urgent fixes, but I would imagine that the skills and experience needed to make Eve look prettier are orthogonal to those needed to fix the ever present gameplay bugs. As such I strongly advocate that CCP make their MMO of the year 2009 look like a game from 2009
* Noob Ships: people forever debate ship balance, so I'm going to champion the plight of the noob ships. Right now there's no decent source of civilian Afterburners or Civilian armour repair systems so you can't fit them decently. The Caldari Ibis can't use missiles, the Impairor gets a laser cap bonus but can't fit enough laser firepower to make that matter and then the velator can pwn everything with it's epic 100% bonus to drone bay size on top of it's weapon bonus. Seriously, everyone owns a rookie ship, in fact, if you've ever abandoned one in space there's a good chance it's now sitting in my hangar.
* T2 Ammo: T2 ammo needs some serious love, precision missiles don't offer any advantage against small targets compares with faction versions, short range high damage ammo offers such a miniscule advantage over faction that the drawbacks essentially make it useless.
* Gallente: I never understood why an armour tanking race would use weapons that require the ship to be right on top of the target. Flying Gallente generally either means using drones, or getting a friend to hold a target down while you neutron it to death. Retooling the Hyperion into a railgun sniper is one of many changes I'd like to see considered.
* The Belicose: It's so obvious that this could benefit from having more missile hardpoints, and with it's target painters it becomes a great anti frigate cruiser, something that minmatar are lacking right now. (Caldari have AML Caracal, Amarr the Arbitrator & Gallente The Vexor). I like the look of this ship.
* Assault Frigates: Still wondering when these are going to get some more fixing after the AB bonus was pulled.
* Structure hitpoints need to be logged every periodicly: Because it sucks when a server crash resets the damage status on a 350million HP station, we don't need that kind of pain.
* Give small gangs more things to do: Current structures take too much firepower, create goals that are achievable by small gangs - killing intel beacons for example, or interfering with planetary production. Dominion's military/industry indices actually provide something that can be interfered with by small numbers of reds camping a system, but it's not something that 'feels' like success.
* Missions: Less grind, more fun. While everyone hates the new gallente storyline missions in low-sec for giving crap rewards in return for travelling 30 jumps across empire and the risk of getting shot they do exhibit some interesting features and they certainly break up the mission grind. I especially liked the fact that the ones I tried could be completed with two pilots in fast ships, one would warp in and create a diversion, getting the ships to follow her, while the second would then warp in and kill the now vulnerable haulers. Cosmos has a lot of nice bits and pieces but it needs cleaned up and the 0.0 cosmos constellations are inaccessible to most players because they're in territory controlled and protected by alliances.
* Sound Effects that Do your ship Justice: Seriously, I wrote a program that detects the creation of a new gamelog and plays a really loud explosion sound when your ship dies, and the Wilhelm Scream when you get podded . Can't we get better sounds for something as simple as the demise of your own ship? (I do think the alert sounds add quite a good feeling of urgency when things start going wrong though, good work adding those.)
* Bug Fixes vs New Features: New features bring new players, bug fixes help keep old ones, I was in D-GMTI with 1600 in local, and the lack of grid loading wasn't pretty.
* Player Bounties: when you pod a pilot with a bounty on his/her head the bounty payout should be capped at 90% of the clone cost, any cash left in the bounty stays on the pilot. If you kill their ship then then a payout is a function of the ship value. Insurance might also be restricted if you have a large bounty on your head? Bottom line, there should be no way for a pilot with a bounty on their head to conspire with another player or alt to profit from the desire of another player to see them dead.
* Ship Scan Signature & Sensor Mechanics: The current calculation of signature radius/sensor strength allows for pilots operating in hostile territory to nerf their combat effectiveness in exchange for being unprobable. This feature is a good thing, I am however uncomfortable with the fact that the mechanic is more a side effect of the ECM mechanics, as opposed to any of the other myriad measurments of how awesome your ships electronic systems are. Rationalising all this - locking speed, range, sensore strength, ECM, sensor dampeners and probe visibility is a worthy goal.
* NPC Ewar: broke broke broke, players should be able to use Ewar in PVE for more than just making an entire sleeper fleet primary them.
* Lowsec: I really liked that 'Corruption' idea, someone should work on it.
I like to play the game with my daughter, she's a pretty smart girl but even then I like to use her as an example of how the whole 'Eve is difficult' thing is a myth. Eve is complicated, yes, but it's not difficult, it may be difficult to beat pilot X in PVP, but that's not because Eve is difficult it's because he's better and more experienced than you. The difficulty of Eve is largely because of other players, if you want to build stuff in eve you don't need to resort to spreadsheets, but you'll find that the other players who do spend the effort to crunch the numbers will out compete you. Balancing the game doesn't make it easier, since everyone is subject to the new 'rules'.
Eve however has UI features and idiosyncracies that make it less *accessible* than it could be and it's in CCP's interest to deal with these oddities that inhibit uptake. The bookmarks thing is one example, another is the effort it takes to manage buy and sell orders, switching back and forth between 2 windows is just annoying. Organizing drones and linking guns could be simplified to a automagic 'organize drones' and 'group guns' button, taking a little bit of pain out but still retaining flexibility when it's asked for. Planetary interaction is introducing a whole new mess of UI concepts that we can only hope will crystalize into something that doesn't drive casual players away while other players grit their teeth and bear it only because of the profits or needs of the alliance.
TL;DR
I'm a smart guy, I do lots of stuff in Eve, so I have experience of almost everything, I'm not affiliated with any massive power block, my alliance is red to almost everyone around us now, so I'm essentially independent. I don't want to give advantages to one particular play style, I'm not looking out for the industrialists, or the missioners or the PVPers, I'm looking out for the people who like flying big spaceships and using them to blow up other ships or build more of them.
And I'm a nice guy who knows when to help rookies making noob mistakes and when to lol at veterans making noob mistakes.
Vote Illectoculus Defined for CSM 5.
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