It’s Just a Flesh Wound

So somehow something escaped my notice the first time I read through the CSM notes.  I came home from work determined to find something worth posting on well after everyone else has already ripped it to chunks, and somehow just noticed this “gem”

Ytterbium informed the CSM that supercap rebalancing was not on the immediate horizon and that there was no concrete vision for changes to them. Fozzie added that, while they wouldn’t promise to rebalance supercaps balance in 2013, they wouldn’t exclude it either. Fozzie continued by saying that supercap balance was an issue, but that they believe other
balance issues had a higher priority. Alek, Seleene, and Elise disagreed.

Fozzie has abruptly gone from being the shining savior of EvE to the Black Knight.

It’s just a flesh wound!

Seriously.  Supercap issues are the widest ranging, most crippling issue in the game outside of Highsec.  Fights do not happen, alliances do not move, and EvE does not grow because of two shiptypes, and it’s at the bottom of Fozzie’s totem pole.

Another staggering fact?  The word Technetium shows up once.  ONCE!  Not even talking about a fix for it, whether it’s reformulating advanced materials to limit the need for it to something less than… well…. everything; or maybe redistributing the moons themselves (more a patch than a fix really) or maybe creating a whole new source of moon mud.  But no instead we get this:

Alek noted that Technetium income was not a faucet, but did represent a transfer of wealth. Dr.EyjoG
commented that this increases the velocity of money in the system. Alek reiterated that Tech is wildly
unbalanced and needs to be addressed quickly.

At which point EyjoG sidesteps because it’s a game design issue.  Well FFS was it brought up with a dev?  I know the CSM has a very limited ability to force CCP to talk about certain topics, but I would think that getting Supercaps, Tech, and the head of Greyscale on a Tupperware Crisper should have been easy to work in at some point.

Now I’m not all gloom and doom.  Some of the discussion was enlightening.  It’s nice to know blackops are being looked at.  It’s good for CCP to really engage the CSM as high level idea sources when it comes to null, and I liked some of the concepts that emerged.  EvE Achievements sound like they could be neat, and any discussion of paint jobs on spaceships gets all 12 of my thumbs up.  Also amusing was this:

Sisyphus mentioned he is considering making improvements to the Science and Industry UI. Two step
suggested he would gain a lot of beers next FanFest if he did.

He’s well named to take on that task.  I think it has to happen, and the sooner the better because I hate it and I barely build anything, but DAMN son.  Making it more interesting to look at than spaceships “Oh look, there’s my Archon building, you can actually watch the skeleton take place, the armor plates being installed” or “Man those scientists are taking that Neutron Blaster apart.  Should be interesting to see what they come up with” would be a lot more fun than “Pick the blueprint, pick the installation, damnit misclicked.”  In fact It’s so bad CCP did a Chronicle on how boring invention is.  As someone who used to build T2 things all the time:  I can say it’s 100% true.

The biggest takeaway is still that CCP is simply not working on the biggest problems of the game.  Whatever neat and shiny things they are developing will be stunted and limited in their impact until and unless they can effectively kill the elephants in the room.

It’s like This. With Two Elephants.

And these aren’t tiny elephants.  They take up a simply staggering amount of space and they squeeze out a lot of good in the game, and the directions it’s going.  You can only walk so far in a room with two elephants in it.  With supercaps on one side and Tech on the other the nullsec power-broker alliances have crowded the room to the point where anyone else trying to enter and grow really has to kill an elephant to do it.  Normally I’m against CCP changing the way things work to make life easier for players.  In fact I’ve railed against it, but this time I will admit that my normally rabid stance would be wrong.  I say this knowing full well that as a member of CFC it could crush my alliance and coalition, but the vicious cycle of “Tech to fund supers, supers to defend tech” doesn’t seem to have a way to break it that wouldn’t require a herculean effort.  Admittedly it’s hard to imagine a paradigm that doesn’t involve the rich getting richer, but damnit that’s what CCP gets 15 bucks per player per month to solve!  They need to get on it, these issues need to be #1 and #1a and we can skip numbers 3-18 and put Greyscale at #19.

But enough of my ranting.  I will probably return to these elephants soon.  I’m not as dissatisfied as some bloggers are by this CSM, although they are hardly “Exciting,” or “Inspiring.”  I’m jaded when it comes to excitement.  I like my politics to be a bit more boring.  I’d like them to do more.  I’d like them to push CCP in the right direction, but they have limited tools, and limited leverage.  The players are generally happy.  There may be clouds in the sky, but there’s no thunder and lightning.  No monuments are being wrecked, there’s no clear mandate from the players for the CSM to use as a lever and without that they cannot force the issues as effectively as the last CSM did.  Maybe a new CSM with new members would help, maybe not.  Hopefully CCP takes a good look and starts talking more about the elephants.

I’m using it every time I can