Showing Their Sting

Today Goonswarm leadership “leaked” what amounts for a bid to win EvE.  Having extended their military might as far as is profitable then are pressing to more profitable Venues.  The three most revealing are Burn Jita, OTEC and the Death Squad, of lesser importance, but still of note is the leadership shuffle and the Tengu Fleet announcement.

Burn Jita

For anyone living under a rock, or willfully ignorant of what is about to start, Goons are about to launch a 2 (or 3) day hellcamp of Jita. The goal of this camp is to either remind everyone else that they enjoy EvE at the sufferance of the swarm, or that Goons can shut down any system, any time, any where.  Both are pretty startling messages if they pull it off.

OTEC

OTEC is a concerted effort by Goons, in concert with Burn Jita to dominate the economic sphere of New Eden.  It is the focal point of T2 components, the Spice of New Eden.  Wars are fought over single moons and much scheming and back-stabbing has happened.  Goons wants to make as much as possible before the far-off specter of “Ring Mining” shakes up their hold on New Eden’s gold.  To do this they will form a consortium between themselves and the other major players holding tech moons, restricting or loosening supply in order to profit the most from this death grip on key production resources.

The Death Squad

The Death Squad is a broadside aimed at the metagame.  Anyone who thinks goons will limit themselves to the forums is out of his mind.  Write a blog post about how shitty you think Goons are?  Welcome to the list.  Host a news site with a perceived anti-goon cant?  Expect friends in local.  Your podcast not supportive enough of Papa Mittens during “Suicide gate?” might want to stay docked up.  This is a means to quiet voices set against the goons, either through intimidating them into silence, or by chasing them clear out of the game.

All this combines into one vicious stinger.  Goons are unsheathing their sword and declaring war on EvE.  I’m a little surprised they didn’t use Seleene’s “TotalHellDeath” expansion poster from his speech a few years back.  This represents a bid to display what Goons clearly feel to be their dominance in all aspects of EvE. Even while they do this.  Even while they burn thousands of Tornadoes and countless thrashers, they are creating a new fleet doctrine.  The Tengu swarm.  Expect these ships to be brought to lots of fights and lost in large numbers.  Goons will be the first to tell you they whelp fleets with occasionally hilarious regularity, and they feel they have the wallet and warchest to do it.  I believe them.

The final note is the leadership shuffle.  Goons are taking the most comprehensive, broad-based offensive, economic, metagame, and plenty of military action, and doing it at the same time as 5 leadership moves.  There’s alliances where this would amount to a complete changeover in leadership, and Goons are doing it in the midst of major operations.  Whatever you feel about Goons, Mittens or their method of operations you have to admire their ability to think big.  If they pull this off they will have demonstrated that not only can they control the game in their own territories, but that they can dominate the game at the heart of the highsec “empire” and beyond the bounds of the game itself.

Fly dangerous, and watch yourself.

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Storm Warning

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning;Red sky at night, sailors delight

There are some key signs that should tell you your alliance is in big trouble.  Other than recruiting any corp with Corelin in it there’s a few things that should put out BIG FLASHING LETTERS that things are about to go batshit.

1. More people show up to meetings than to defend alliance structures.  Meetings often cause more problems than they solve.
2. No one can agree on who should be FCing ops.  FCs are far more important than CEOs in PvP ops.
3. Leadership (FCs or CEOs) that don’t understand why people need isk.
4. People not understanding the point of fleet doctrines / trolling in leadership forums

These are all things that can hit pretty much any alliance, and they are bad, but not “abandon ship” bad.  This is where it starts getting panic-inducing.

1. People are shipping up to fight you.  Because they know you aren’t a threat.
2. People are roaming your territory during their off-peak times.
3. All those neutral booster alts are starting to log out in your systems.

On an unrelated note.  S I L E N T. is down 140 members in the last couple days.

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Eras of EvE: The Setting

Today EvE is shaped mostly by the immediate past.  What I like to call the Rise of Nations.  The first sign that times were changing was the downfall of the southern Superpower alliances.  Atlas lost its pets and shortly thereafter was destroyed in a deal RIFE with RMT Scandal.   While these allegations are nearly impossible to prove, they certainly account for a lot of the decisions that seem head scratching when you realize that to this point ATLAS was still in a defensible position and had allies.

IT and AAA suffered next.  IT had fallen a long way during its current incarnation and suffered for it when goons came a-knockin’ to finish the job they had wanted to finish for sooooo long.  AAA barely put up any resistance, opting to follow the model shown by other survivors of putting up a fight but only as long as it made sense to do so.  Wolves were not so much howling at their door so much as sitting in the hallway taking off their boots and putting on their “srs bizness” stompers.

This left the NC/Goon coalition in the north and northwest areas ascendant and the Drone Russians in near unbroken control of the south of EvE.  In the north, NC was busy constructing supercaps by the dozen.  In the south the drone Russians were doing the same.  The showdown was inevitable.  For a while it even looked like Goons were going to support the NC in their fight for survival, however the expected NC supercap blobs never showed up.  I attribute this to the “business models” the two sides used.  Where the Drone Russians seem to have engaged in lots of small sales to many customers, the NC seems to have focused on supercap sales.  This made a certain amount of sense, it allowed leaders to pay off those they wanted to pay for example, but it also meant that they didn’t have the reserve of ready supercaps needed to be able to sustain a supercap fleet in the field.  This made them extremely sensitive to losses, to the point where they never committed their supercaps, instead watching impotently as their enemies savaged their territory.

Where the Russians or Goons would have had the ability to reform their strength due to their unity out of game, the NC didn’t have that option.  From a point of seeming invulnerability, their literal corruption doomed them to be spectators to their own destruction at the hands of their hated foes.  Out of the ashes sprang several types of powers, built on different models.

The first are the “Nations” of EvE, dominated by two factions whose existence in EvE dates back to some of the earliest days of nullsec.  Goonswarm and Red Alliance.  These two alliances are dominated by something completely separate from what held together the previously dominant alliances.  They existed because of a unifying factor out of game.  Goons by their anti-establishment culture and its attendant “Us vs. Them” philosophy with regards to… well…. everything.  Red Alliance by the fact that they are homogeneously Russian.

These monolithic blocs are a stark contrast to the previously disjointed groups that existed before.  With a common culture and creed they represented a much tougher foe as they were unlikely to fragment under harsh opposition.  Indeed throughout their history they had been beaten, battered and pummeled only to emerge stronger for it.  Their unity, their sense of “nationalism” echoes that of the Russians and French in the Napoleonic wars, who threw massive armies around the continent and often suffered shattering losses only to draw on nearly limitless reserves of strength to replenish their losses after licking their wounds.

The second are the specialists.  PL, and the new and improved AAA who I can force into the Napoleonic European mold without too much difficulty.  PL fits into the UK slot rather easily.  A much smaller, more “professional” force whose capabilities lie not in numbers but in the commanders and fleets they can field.  Their sensibilities are almost entirely mercenary and they seem to get treated like a rabid dog even today.  At the time of the fall of NC they were the kingmakers, with subcap, capital, and supercap tactics that defined the bleeding edge of warfare in New Eden.  Even camped in lowsec and possibly deeply wounded by the latest RMT clearout PL represents a clearinghouse of mercenary power.

AAA reminds me more of Prussia, although it is a rougher fit.  A power in between greatness and empire.  Possessed of a reputation for greatness, but rebuilding and attempting to go from NPC space back into the ranks of Sov holders for much of the post NC era, they exploded recently, shattering much of the Drone Russian alliances power and have chased Red Alliance into another period of exile.

Currently the Russians are going through a rough spot.  Fragmented along alliance lines, these habitual allies are fighting each other and outsiders and in general losing.  Solar and ROL are doing well for themselves, and their northern allies are not affected by this at all.  While I see some restructuring between these factions the Russian “Nation” in EvE seems nearly unaffected on the strategic level.  This is not a situation where power is lost, merely transferred.  Goons and the rest of CFC are, well, the two largest alliances in EvE and bigger than the next 5 combined.

Next time I’ll talk about where I see things going from here, and what I see killing the Nations of EvE

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One of These Things…

Mittens made a humble, abject apology.

The Mittani went on a rant.

I like how he talks about his apology and implies that it means that EvE has fundamentally changed.  EvE has changed, but it has nothing to do with The Mittani and his enormous ego.

He has the gall to say “I have been fucked… and it is shitty”

Eula says otherwise.  Your own apology says otherwise.  There are a few possibilities here.  One is that mittani is an unabashed liar in his apology and that he is in no way sorry and feel justified in his actions.  One is that he thinks his pubbies are morons who don’t see that one of those has to be true and one has to be false.  Another is that his ego is SO BIG that he really thinks he knows the ins and outs of CCP Games, a company that has a culture and value system based in an entirely different country, with it’s own traditions and history better than they do themselves.

Finally there’s the chance that he is still manipulating the system.  That his apology was an attempt to pull CCPs teeth and to keep his CSM7 seat, and to pre-empt whatever punishment CCP was mulling over.  That his bold declaration is an appeal to the anger and rage bubbling within goons to draw more attention and attendance to the jitahellcamp.

That sounds like The Mittani.  Trying to play everyone while appearing as the white robed genius.  Let me explain why.

I don’t know Alex Gianturco at all.  I don’t know if this was the demons escaping, his mask slipping or a drunken aberration.  I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that truly “I myself, as Alex Gianturco, feel utterly ashamed and sickened by my behavior.” as he says in his apology.  That still leaves his rant toward his pubbies.  He could have cast it as a party.  He could have told them they were going to blast every industrial and mission boat into dust.  He could have cast it however he wanted, but he picked the “Us vs. Them” line.  He went with the propaganda line.  He knows that Americans love to see themselves as underdogs and that by casting it as a “Goons vs. CCP” event he will get a response far larger than any other response he could expect.

However there is a price for this.  The CSM is trying very hard to ensure that the 10k get a voice on the council.  By publicly announcing that he feels that CCP has “fucked” him he makes their job VERY difficult.  It makes him appear unrepentant and his apology filled with crocodile tears; because, like I said, the apology and the video are mutually exclusive.  This gives CCP an out.  They can point to the video and say “This guy has chosen his fats.  So be it.”  With this move they have ammunition to bring UAXdeath in and tell the CSM to vote in whoever they want as chairman.  Also, Hans is one step closer to a free trip or two to Iceland!

I actually think the jitahellcamp is a great idea.  I think it will be a ton of fun and I am planning on being around for the laughs, tears, and shenanigans that are sure to wreck my overview and crash my computer at least once.  My issue is with his wording, with his grandstanding, with the blatant “I think you are stupid enough to not see how two-faced I am” attitude.  I don’t like being treated like I’m stupid.  Someday the goons might decide they are tired of the act too.  Maybe.  Yeah I don’t really see it happening either.

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Mittens and Bullying

The Mittani is one of the most clever people in EvE.  He seems to be the kind of person who can turn anything to his advantage.  I was too tired to blog this after we whelped a fleet last night and I was worried I’d get sniped by Ripard Teg, but I wasn’t.  HAH!

I already know how Mittens is going to turn this to his advantage because it’s already working.

He publicly fell on his sword.  He offered to sacrifice himself in a tremendously public and noble fashion.  10.7 Bill isn’t a ginormous amount of isk these days.  He can replace that.  Heck he can even replace The Mittani character pretty quickly.  The chair would be a lot harder, but right now he still has it.  He’s offered to resign.  He hasn’t done it yet, and currently bloggers are lining up to say why he should or shouldn’t do it.  Most of them are saying he shouldn’t.  I myself think that he shouldn’t.  And that’s part of why he is being SO public, and SO shame-faced.  He now has a clear mandate from the community to hold the chair.  Even people who didn’t vote for him have shown their support.

Now I want to take this on to another stage.  Mittens needs to work, and work hard to create a wall in EvE culture between things people NEED to HTFU about, and things that we, as a community need to be more sensitive about.  There’s a difference between griefing someone in-game and driving them to the brink of despair, or even driving them out of the game.  Yeah some people aren’t hard enough for the game, but deliberately targeting people just to see if you can force them to quit has no place in EvE.  If someone can’t handle the “drive by violence” of EvE, this may not be the game for them, but even tougher souls will quit if they spend their first three weeks routinely getting blasted in the belts.

There’s other things that could go in here, hate speech, rape speech.  We have a chairman who pays at least some attention to the players, and who wants to make the game greater.  I think one way to do this that I will put money on CCP paying attention to is calling on the community he directly controls (goons) to curb activities that hurt others and don’t provide benefit to the game.

Also:  Brendan Drain is another person I constantly wonder how he has a job.  There’s better EvE writing on half the blogs in the community.  I am not a huge Mittani fan myself, but having a hatchet job go up like that on a very publicly-facing website with content for all MMOs makes EvE players look like buffoons.  Especially when they find out that in our highly-touted public elections he got the highest vote total ever, with more than 10,000 votes.

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Ranking Alliances

There’s many alliances out there, and there’s not been a whole lot of effort to quantify them.  Alliances are the biggest structured group of players in EvE.  They range from the 7800+ goonswarm to little 1 and 2 man defensive huddles for lone industrialists.

Today i’m going to talk a bit about what I think the ranging and criteria should be:

AAA – Who:  The Elite, Goons, xxxdeathxxx,
Why:  They can and have taken and held space.  They have the ability to enforce their will anywhere and  can act independently to wreak havoc on nearly anyone.  Ability to influence the meta-game counts big here too.  Think ice interdiction, minerals prices etc.  Has the leadership, willpower, monetary resources, numbers, and culture to endure tough times and bounce back.

AA – Who:  The Big Boys, PL, -A-
Why:  As with AAA status they can and do take and hold space, but their ability to do so is dependent on  careful target selection, or coalition efforts.  Can sustain efforts over the long term, but simply don’t have the resources to stand unaided against “the big boys”  Still has the leadership, will etc. to endure rough times, but has a lower “max effort” capability.

A- Who:  Wild Cards:  Rooks and Kings, AHARM
Why:  They neither can, nor care to move into null,  they focus and specialize on one aspect of warfare and establish a dominance in it that makes them a factor to be considered in any campaign, but they limit their influence (deliberately or not) and generally will not pursue long campaigns without good reason.

B- Who:  Bit Players:  CVA on a good day, Renter alliances, the non-elite lowsec alliances,
Why:  They have the ability to run short campaigns, they don’t have the ability to sustain beyond a couple of days without logistical support.  Leadership and willpower tend to be much lower than higher ranking alliances and key resources might be missing.  This rating doesn’t mean that there’s an actual issue, just that the alliance is not really capable of standing toe-to-toe with people.

C – Who:  The rest:  Rebuilding alliances, alliances with serious deficiencies.
Why:  This rating can afflict alliances for many reasons, but few of them are good.  Some alliance get it because they just never get their act together.   Some have expanded or contracted recently, either way the alliance has issues focusing and gathering resources to use, and might not be aware of their actual capabilities and over or under reach.  These alliances can still pull of a shocker,

D – Who:  The junkheap:  Alliances that simply aren’t competitive and will likely require a major effort to become so.
Why:  This can be pure highsec alliances with no pvp experience,   industrial alliances that lack the kind of resources needed to participate on any stage.  Most of the alliances are remnants of older, better alliances, or defensive huddles of industrialists hiding from wardecs.

Obviously there’s a lot of room for discussion here, and there’s a lot of potential for argument over who gets ranked where.  I thought it would be interesting to look at.

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Meetings!

Alliance and Corp meetings are often a fucking disaster.  As an Army vet I’ve been through meetings that had me longing for the roads of Baghdad and the whistle of incoming mortars or the screech of rockets.  I’ve been to meetings so bad they should have had us hand over all sharp objects to keep us from taking the cowards way out.

EvE meetings rarely get that bad.  Some of them do get deadly though.  Most bad meetings are bad because they are WAY too fucking long. Others wander pointlessly, some just don’t have anyone taking charge to keep things on-topic.  I’m going to talk about a few ways to make your meetings not painful.

• Have a reason for the meeting.  It doesn’t have to be profound, but it should be fairly specific.  a “weekly update” meeting shouldn’t take more than a half hour.
• Have a facilitator.  Someone has to be in charge of the meeting, with the ability to tell people to STFU, and generally keep things moving.  A GOOD facilitator has the ability to get people on-task and keep the sidebars to a minimum without despotically controlling the dialogue.  The main job of the facilitator is to focus the discussion, not drive it.
• Have an agenda.  Lock it in ahead of time.  A new issue that someone “just brings up” had better have become an issue after the meeting starts.  Don’t let people raise issues that aren’t on the agenda before time.  A good general rule is have items for the agenda to whoever is running the meeting 36-48 hours before the meeting.  No later than 24 hours before the meeting starts everyone expected to attend should have an agenda available to them in evemail, forums, wherever.
• Encourage people to use real data.  Discourage “Well I was told” arguments.  Don’t be afraid to table issues for further research
• Assign tasks to people to be completed for future meetings.
• Recap old business (fast) to make sure everyone is on the same page.
• Take notes, report proceedings for people who were there, have a public reporting as well.

Lets put this together into a format:

 

MEETING AGENDA - Weekly Alliance Update
Facilitator - CEO A
Attendees - B, C, D, E, F
Recorder - G
Old Business:  CEO C reports on progress on ship replacement wallet and inventory, D reports on status of NAPs
New Business:  A, D, E requesting ops to clear moons for POS emplacement.  
D reports on new neutrals operating in the area
Recruiting update
Leadership Comments
Summary

Now this is a VERY simplified, quick and dirty agenda.  However it allows leadership to see what they need to be ready to talk about, what issues are currently important, and if they feel something is being overshadowed they can request for it to be addressed.  One of the most important things that needs to happen is specific assignments for tasks.  Saying “Someone should take care of that” is worthless.  Someone is not in your corp.  Assign tasks to people.

Meetings will still be onerous, nothing can really fix that.  The idea is to get as much done with as little pain as possible.  Setting an agenda, naming a facilitator, sticking to the topic and assigning tasks to individuals or working groups to avoid cluttering up the meeting with business that isn’t of interest to the entire group will make meetings far less painful and let you get back to important matters.  Like blue explosions.

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THIS! This is what I was talking about!

So EN24 put up a story today, that would have been interpreted as part of it’s rather normal anti-goon bent and more or less chuckled at or ignored.

http://www.evenews24.com/2012/02/23/dirty-csm7-war-heat-up-in-the-twitters/

Look at the byline.  Well, now it’s something else.  It is political propaganda between The Mittani and Riverini because both are competing for CSM seats.  However their seats of power differ significantly.  Any news source has a duty to be open and transparent if not in their reporting, than in their bias.  I don’t have a problem with people who are biased one way or the other, it is when they attempt to be disingenuous about it that it bugs me.  At the end of the piece Riverini links the following bit of propoganda

http://www.whiteroseconventicle.com/politics/csm-7/1185-one-eve-one-vote-one-chairman.html

Now I myself am Jewish, and certainly am no great supporter of Mittani, but hyperbole tends to curve back on itself.  This is a case where a legitimate point is brought up not by someone offended on a deep, personal basis, in which case they’d have brought it up last year, or upon first encountering goonwaffe, but by a political opponent during the campaign season.  Nowhere in the article does Riverini give any disclaimer that he and Mittani are competitors for a CSM seat.

There is legitimacy to Mittens using an alliance he has helped to build and led to acquire a CSM seat.  He is open about it and even open that he will use that seat to better himself and the goons.  Riverini has built a news site for EvE.  I happen to think it’s a good one and I have even contributed in the past.  However to use it as a political tool for his own aggrandizement is fundamentally different from using an alliance.  It ruins the credibility of the site, especially when Riverini himself posts articles attacking other CSM candidates.  When he wasn’t a candidate they were merely part of his bias against the candidate, now they are attempts to raise his own flag.

Riverini is destroying his campaign, and the credibility of the site he has built.  I hope he stops this kind of attack, especially on an alleged news site.  I hope he withdraws from the campaign and uses his ability to create a news site to establish himself in a position as a respected source of information, not a screaming supporter/detractor buried in bias.

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The Value of Leadership

Give me your trust, said the king on high…

Give me your trust, said the lady and lord…

Give me your trust, said the love of your life…
…
Trust is the taste of death.

This is a message for CEOs and alliance leaders, or people who want to be in those positions.

$14.95 a month per account in your corp.  If you are a leader, especially a CEO, this is the value you owe to the people in your corp.  Depending on the activities your corp members pursue there may or may not be a varying level of responsibility for it, but the people in your corp are trusting you to make their game, which they pay for every month, more enjoyable.  I’m going to look at this from my perspective.

Tomorrow I will have 15 people with around 17 accounts in Fancy Hats.  Yes we have a bunch of alts.  It bugs me a little.  That’s around $254 dollars a month.  Now certainly I am not on the hook for ALL of that.  I expect my minions PILOTS to have some fun on their own.  However as a leader I am always on the lookout for exciting opportunities and activities to keep us occupied and enjoying the game.  The more there is to do the more corp members play, the more they play, the more they accomplish, and the more they accomplish the more they have fun.  There’s tools I can use to spread the responsibility, but ultimately the buck stops with ME.

Lets look at the tools

1. Forums/Blogs:  The EvE Community is a wonderful savory stew filled with.  Well.  Let’s not go into detail there, some of us have delicate stomachs.  I can usually find ideas for some kind of roam, group activity, and the background information needed to properly plan it on the forums or the blogs.  When I got into Incursions the wealth of information available made getting my corpmates into the right ships, channels and techniques a snap.
2. Delegation:  People misuse this term a lot.  It does not mean absolving yourself of responsibility for what happens.  It means picking people to work on tasks under less restrictive supervision.  I can tell someone they are in charge of recruiting.  By the way if anyone wants to help me with recruiting I will love you forever, I suck at it.  Even if I find someone, recruiting is MY responsibility.  I need to make sure the person I delegate to has the resources, ability, and drive to do it because it comes back on me to make sure we get new people.  If someone isn’t doing their job it falls on me to replace them.  Don’t use delegation as an excuse to not take any stand in the issue.  It doesn’t work that way.  This is a powerful tool, but a three-edged sword.  It is still my job.  I have help to do it.  Credit goes down, blame goes up.
3. Alliances:  An alliance should make CEOs tasks easier.  Many don’t.  Part of the reason is alliance leaders delegate down and CEOs get extra tasks.  Alliances should provide substantially easier planning for major ops, and a good rotation of leadership with regards to FCs and “special task” pilots like logis and scouts to make sure people stay fresh and don’t burn out.  I poke a lot of fun at Mittens but the man juggles chainsaws, daggers and grenades with the pins out and makes it look like he’s not even trying most days.  I struggle to run a 15 man corp.  Fancy Hats off to the man.
4. Planning and Communication:  I am not kidding, get some planning done ahead of time.  Have meetings to plan out key events like moving bases, or joining/leaving alliances.  Communicate in an effective, timely manner.  No one cares if someone messed up a recruiting drive 6 months ago.  Communication about that isn’t effective right now.  Plan ahead, review the immediate past, let the rest burn.

As a leader I need to make sure my friends and corpmates are having fun.  I can keep them informed of things going on even when I am not at the height of my own participation.  I can participate as much as practical to show them that I am invested in our success.  I owe it to them, because they choose to trust me.

MMO Players’ Bill of Rights

This post was inspired in part by Ripard Teg’s “Influence” post and my own ruminations this morning on the T20 scandal.  Yeah I’m old.  Get over it.

As gamers we should have rights to knowledge beyond the bare facts in the EULA.  This summer EvE players fought the good fight and won considerable concessions in the area of game development priority from CCP.  It didn’t have to come to that, and while the CSM seems to have dumped enough new sand on an old fire to smother it, I worry that the embers still lurk beneath.

As a player, especially in a sandbox game, but also in the theme parks, you are a stakeholder in events taking place.  As a player of EvE I do not just pay to run incursions, pvp, do whatever.  I create content.  Players who join my guild or alliance have opportunities because of me that they wouldn’t otherwise have.  In my case this is very small scale.  Someone like Ripard Teg, Mittani, Helicity Boson, or any major alliance leader can make a serious argument that their activities add so much to the game that EvE would lose significantly more than 15 bucks a month per account if they quit.

More specifically, if Mittens quits many goons will quit either immediately or over time due to reduced activity, he is a key leader and a vital force that adds to the gaming experience of EvE simply by doing what he does.  To a lesser degree every single player adds a lot to the game simply by getting on and doing whatever it is they do, whether it’s the PvP FC who leads fleets day in and day out, the logi pilot holding his friends up, the can miner providing targets to fancy hats, or the industrialist / market guru who only undocks haulers moving my beloved Barrage M to market so I can blow people up with shiny ammo.  CCP has more or less acknowledged this with its “Butterfly Effect” and “Causality” trailers.

As such I think we have certain rights, or at least we should have certain rights, that naturally flow from our status not only as paying customers, but as content creators within CCP’s game.  To start with there are a few dealing with Devs playing the game, that should have already come from past events, like the T20 scandal.

1. How many Devs play the game, broken down by hours in game
2. Which corps/alliances have CCP toons in them
3. What Dev Team has members in what alliance
4. Open Communication with the CSM under a less restrictive NDA on how Devs interact with their alliances

#1 is pretty self-explanatory, and it lets us know as stakeholders just how invested CCP folks are in their own game.  #2 is a disclosure of information aimed more or less directly at the T20 scandal.  For those who don’t remember it, look it up, one summary found here.  #3/4 could be critical.  Let’s say Team TANSTAAFL forms up and starts working on wormholes.  We find out that TANSTAAFL has 5 members in a small wormhole alliance, that exclusively farms Cataclysmic Variable systems.  I am willing to trust to some extent that the integrity of most people is such that they wouldn’t deliberately cheat just to help out themselves and their buddies, however “Trust, but Verify” will be written on all of my tombstones I leave behind in EvE.  And there’s been a few.  By providing reports to the CSM with not just the understanding that they can be reported on more freely than typical CSM reports, but with the EXPECTATION that the information will be distributed, CCP will have to monitor its employees more stringently.  In this case let’s go with the happy ending and say that the report from TANSTAAFL is all lollipops and rainbows and that their only work on CV systems is to replace EWAR effects that were discovered to be working incorrectly a while back.

Next we have some future development information that simply must exist.

1. Roadmap to the Future
2. Priority List of Iterative Content
3. Priority List of minor Issues
4. Formula Table
5. What have you done for me lately page
6. Community Page listing blogs, fansites, possible even with endorsements for sites or specific posts that ring true with CCP

#1 is something every MMO should have.  It would be a page listing the “Jesus Features” in broad terms.  I realize this runs the risk of giving away trade secrets, but frankly they will copy your shit eventually anyway, have confidence that you will do it best, HTFU or GTFO.  This would be best with some dates, and should at least have the broad strokes of the next two patches with a crystal ball view of the third one down the road.  And yes this sucker needs to be kept updated.

#2.  Again this needs to happen, CCP knows they need to iterate and seems to be taking it more seriously as they have admitted that they probably won’t do many major features for the next patch or two.  Fine, let us know where our particular niche is on your priority list, again no details need be mentioned, but is WH/T3 ships ahead of FW?  Is FW significantly ahead of or behind general lowsec improvements?  Where do docking timers and balance issues come in on the chart?  This will be a BEAST to set up, but both as an internal referral to guide resource management and a PR tool to tell gamers where their issue stands I think it offers an enormous boon to the game.

#3.  Bugs, Glitches, Lag, maybe even the docking timers and balance issues.  This is the “What order we take out the trash” list, and again is not as big a priority as the lists above it.

#4.  Let’s get a page with all the formulas on it.  Please.  For the love of God.  I know they are all out there but I don’t want to have to hunt through the EvE wiki for each individual formula.  One Page.  Everything.  I can use Ctrl-F to find the specific one fast.

5.  Give credit where it’s due.  Let the teams brag about what they have done when they do it.  Heck let the players have some input towards rewards for teams that consistently make great changes!  You say you value our feedback, give your guys a reason to REALLY find it!

6.  We value YOUR feedback too.  If you want to see how important it is go to the SW:TOR forums and look at how many people are DESPERATE for information from their dev team.  We also want the opportunity to micro-analyze the blogs you like follow your breadcrumbs to see what kind of information CCP is looking at to see which way the wind is blowing.  And of course Ripard wouldn’t mind scoring some accolades there

Ok that’s the first 11.  In my dream world it would happen, and happen fast.

What do you think sirs?

 

I'm using it every time I can