Alliance Tournament X Wrap-up

The Tenth Alliance Tournament has come and gone, and it was quite a show. In my opinion, there isn't an event more representative of the best parts of Eve. The AT runs the full gamut of planning, meta-gaming, and small gang pvp execution. From the first match to the last, it was an impressive display.

My initial impression is that this is the closest Alliance Tournament I've ever seen. There was a bit of a cookie-cutter feel to some matches with all of the Vindicators, Sleipnirs and Vargurs, but match outcomes were determined far more by skill than simply by bringing the right setup. Speaking of setups, there were a few noteworthy ones. The first one that has to be mentioned is the HUN Reloaded Vargur team. This one general team anchored around the two or three Vargurs pushed them all the way to the final round. The team was well put together and even more so, well piloted. 

My other noteworthy setups both belong to Pandemic Legion. I've already discussed the team with the flagship Bhaalgorn and the four Malices. PL failed to disappoint on the final day as well, packing a very impressive ECM team, anchored by three Widows. This team absolutely handled Darkside in a near-flawless victory. A part of me wonders if they should have saved it for the HUN match against that Vargur team, but I suppose you have to make it to that semifinals before you can use it there. And Darkside was not to be taken lightly after last year.

Rather not be on the receiving end of this one

I have to say, I'm damn proud of both PL and RvB. I thought the latter was performing especially well despite many people not taking them as serious contenders. As Raivi commented, I'm a bit disappoined PL couldn't manage to find their way through just one more match, as that would have at least secured 50 Cambions. I have a feeling that we may be able to get our hands on either Cambions or Etanas somehow though ;-)

Out of the Alliance Tournament, I have two new goals for my own career, and they're both a bit ambitious. The first is to own an AT prize ship of my own. I'm especially partial to the Freki, being a Rifter hull. My second choice would be an Adrestia, the Thorax-inspired HAC. I make enough isk that its plausible to procure one of these little treasures at some point. 

The second goal is to someday fly in the Alliance Tournament. The AT is a "fair" fight with everything on the line and everyone watching. That's something special. I've got some work to do over the next couple years, but that's the next step for me. I can't think of a more rewarding experience.

As a final wrap-up, CCP and all of the commentators who put in their hard work deserve a great deal of thanks. These people gave up their weekends for a month straight and put on one hell of a show. Congratulations as well to all of the competitors, especially Verge of Collapse and HUN Reloaded. Enjoy the new toys.

Three Quick Fixes For Eve

I'm no CCP Dev, but there are a few quick things that Eve needs to have implemented. There would be almost zero opposition to them. My points aren't complex, but they make sense.

Recently I've been doing a lot of logistics over two accounts. I finally started moving my Carrier about to get some ships across the universe quicker. With that comes both cyno alts and for me, different jump clones. All of these points fall under making life easier for alts and jump clones.

The first thing that needs to be changed is the jumpclone timer. Twenty four hours is just too darn long. If you log on the same time every day, wait a bit, and then jump clone somewhere, you're going to be constantly fighting the jump clone timer as it gets pushed back. The overarching idea with the timer makes sense though. If there were no restriction, you could take off in a fresh clone whenever someone camped you into a station. What about twenty hours though? Or twelve? Either of those timers, or even less, would make the mechanic a lot more useful. It would never put a damper on getting into the action, and it leaves no room for abuse. I missed out on a couple of corp fleets because I was in another jump clone, and that's not a fun part of the game.

The other changes are related to characters on the same account. I realized once I wanted to start jumping the Carrier that I didn't have a dedicated cyno alt I wanted to use. There's no need to muddy up the killboard for a developed character, so I rolled another one as a cyno alt. In doing this there was a lot of flipping skill training and switching between characters. This process is too tedious at the moment. Switching skills involves logging in on one character, logging off, logging back in to the other, and starting the skill. Painful.

Here are the changes. First, let skill training be interrupted by another character on the same account. If Character A tries to start training a skill while Character B is already training, just pop up a window that says "Do you want to pause skill training on Character B?" If you click yes, the skill should start right away. My borderline OCD tendencies had me going off the wall when I had no skill training for a minute or two. Its not a huge deal, but its a pain in the ass and presumably an easy fix.

The last fix is the general switching between characters on accounts. A switch character function would be much appreciated. I tweeted about this in the #tweetfleetbacklog hashtag a while ago and it was one of the most popular RT's according to CCP. Again, its the logging out, logging back in with full-credentials-again deal. Why can't you switch more seamlessly? Most people would have no problem with a session change timer or something similar for switching between characters, but the current format is not useful.

These changes aren't monumental in any way, and its not the first time they've been suggested. But seriously, in ALTs Online, we need better functionality with multiple characters and moving around. None of these are absurd, nor absurdly difficult, but they'd make a world of difference in using multiple characters. End Rant.

Recruiting My Roommate

Settling into my new place IRL, I was chatting with my new roommate about Eve. He's a big time gamer, but had never taken part in our lovely little universe. On the first day we got down here I tried to sell him on it, but he refused, saying he had never really gotten into MMOs. "Just wait," I thought. Its been a little under two weeks, and I got him to fire up the client and log in the other day. Man, its a different take on the New Player Experience when you actually have a new player in front of you.

When he first logged on, the character creator was the first part that popped up, naturally. He'd never really been interested in creating characters in previous games and so he decided to randomize until he saw an option he liked. Then he got to the screen where you have to take a picture of the character and was amazed by the level of detail in facial expression. After a "Wow," he was back to the previous screen, making sure his character was done exactly how he wanted. Hooked already.

Once he got in game, I directed him towards the tutorial missions. He's generally been PvE focused in other games, and I told him that it would be a great way to learn general controls. Its pretty funny watching him buzz around in a Velator doing approximately 45 DPS. He's enjoying it though. He turned the graphics up to high and fell in love. I'm surprised that two things I take for granted (character creator and graphics) were two big selling points for him as a new player. As a side note, the one thing he hasn't liked so far is the general UI. Fair point.

I have to say, its been an experience for me so far, and I can't imagine what he's thinking. Questions like how do I warp and how do I train a skill are beyond foreign to me, but that's the level he's at. I think my biggest problem is trying to get him involved in too much. I want to get him set up with EFT/PyFa, Evemon and iPhone apps. I want to get him into Pvp. Its a bit frustrating for me because he's just not ready yet. Hopefully he can get it relatively figured out soon and I can take him out on a roam or at least point him in the right direction. Regardless, it could be a lot of fun having some more RL friends get hooked on Eve. Let's hope CCP's work on the NPE works like a charm this time.

Credit Where Credit is Due

We all know Eve is supposed to be a cold, harsh universe, and both the players and CCP have embraced that fact fully. Players have absolutely no problem telling CCP when they messed something up. In fact, we're coming up on the year anniversary of Incarna and the Jita riots (Incarna dropped June 21, 2011). I'd like to take a minute and actually commend CCP for all they've been doing recently though. Let's look at the trajectory.

This time last year, CCP was just about ready to give players a room that could fry GPU's, cause massive unsubs, and make players spend their in-game time shooting a statue. We were about 12 months into the legendary "18 months" of no spaceship iteration. They kept true to their word on that one, by the way, failing to do anything remotely significant for combat-oriented spaceships until Crucible. And then, of course, there was the "Greed is Good" publication. Can't forget that one. The best part about this ongoing fiasco was that  CCP had no clue what they were doing wrong. "Why don't you guys like the pretty room with the door?" It makes me shiver just writing about this.

Let's take a look at now. A year later, I think we have an almost entirely different CCP. Let's start with the releases: Crucible and Inferno. Please raise your hand if you had a problem with Crucible. I'm not holding my breath for any takers. In my opinion, all of the Inferno features are neutral at worst, with the exception of the unified inventory. Personally, I don't think that the UI is that bad. Its different, but not inherently terrible. Regardless, CCP committed to a very aggressive release cycle in order to rectify the issue, including two more releases over the next 2-3 weeks. Plain and simple, this would not have happened last year. Its an extremely positive step.

Another important factor that says great things for CCP is the CSM interaction. It appears that the CSM is being well utilized and the the summit was at least relatively successful. Even through strict NDA, Seleene and the rest of the delegates seem optimistic about the state of things. Again, this is a drastic contrast from CSM 5's open letter to the public and CSM 6's public opposition to CCP. The CSM is no longer fighting against, but instead defending CCP. They have no reason to be lap dogs, which therefore leads me to believe this is genuine.

The overarching theme is more communication and transparency. Look at Twitter for example. CCP devs are constantly chatting with players. The environment is laid back and friendly, but these people care. If you're interested in getting something done in game, it can't hurt to poke one of the devs on Twitter. The answer to requests is not always yes, but a lot of times its "Hmm interesting, I'll look into it." That's a nice start. A special shout-out goes to CCP Punkturis, who is arguably #tweetfleet's favorite dev.

Overall its just nice to see positive change. Before Crucible, I told my girlfriend that I was worried about the state of Eve and the impact Dust would have. I'm still a little bit apprehensive about Dust until more details come out, but Eve is most certainly going in the right direction. CCP still isn't perfect, but its nice to give credit where credit is due. To everyone at CCP, thanks for all of the hard work over the past year and keep it up!

Fanfest 2012 -- Initial Impressions

Fanfest has come and gone at this point, and it certainly seemed like an experience. I was not able to go this year, and I actually had some difficulty even keeping up with the Twitter feed, let alone the live video from Eve TV. I had class Thursday, and I was on the shooting range all day Friday, so I missed a good deal of the coverage.

Here's what I picked up though. It seems like Fanfest is an awesome event for players. I think that CCP has done a great job creating an environment that gets players excited about the game and upcoming changes, and the Devs really reinforce this with such close interaction with the players. That said, I'm not sure I saw a ton of concrete information that I was excited about. I saw a lot of DUST coverage, which I expected. The game play does seem to be pretty cool, but I'm not sure its enough for me to run out and buy a PS3.

Other than the DUST link, the only things that I got to see directly were U/I and Art/Graphics coverage. Honestly, that doesn't do much for me. I play Eve on low settings to get the best possible performance. I don't need a pretty camera showing the ship I'm shooting. I understand that many people really do want the best possible graphics, and they should. I'm just saying its not a huge draw for me personally.

I'm eagerly awaiting CCP uploading all of the videos from Fanfest to YouTube. I still have a lot I want to review before giving a comprehensive breakdown of my thoughts. As it stands right now though, I'm a little underwhelmed. I've heard some murmurs of changes in Crime Watch and FW, and I'm not sure CCP is on track from what I understand. The jury is still out for me. As I said before, I think Fanfest is a great event for the players and the larger Eve community, I'm just not yet very excited about the actually changes to Eve that I saw out of it.

BB 34: CSM Growth

The polls have just opened for the election of candidates to occupy the 14 seats on the 7th Council of Stellar Management. To kick-start a topical CSM-themed banter, CCP Xhagen - fierce champion of freedom of speech and in his words, "the guy that gets yelled at when the CSM dudes do booboos" - has offered this question:

"How would you like to see the CSM grow, both in terms of player interaction and CCP interaction?"

__________________________________

This one seems like a softball to me. I'm going to go ahead and spoil the rest of this entry by saying the CSM should be more involved in pretty much everything Eve. Let's kick it off with the CCP point of view.


CCP is far from a perfect organization. I love Eve, but I'm not really sure what gets in the developers' heads sometimes. I would honestly like to meet the team of guys who sat across the table from each other and said, "You know what, I think we've got something really great with this Incarna expansion." I think Seismic Stan pretty much hit the nail on the head with Incarna: The Text Adventure when it comes to how awesome walking in stations is. At the end of the day though, that's not even close to the end of bone-headed things that CCP has done. Do the words "18 months" mean anything to anyone? Even as recently as the past month with the skill rebalancing dev blog that set out to turn Battlecruiser and Destroyer skills into 4 racial variants, we're seeing a lack of vision from CCP sometimes, even if its only in communication as opposed to actual ideas.

This is the importance of the CSM to CCP. As an independent corporation, CCP has no obligation to the CSM in any way. That's all well and good, but evidence shows they need to make the CSM part of the regular process in terms of new ideas. I understand that it is logistically impossible to involve the CSM in every little detail of development. Eve is an enormously complex game, and that's why most of us are still here. But the CSM doesn't need to be a part of every minute detail. They need to be an efficient sounding board for significant changes. Before CCP devotes resources to extensively developing an area of the game, somebody should make an effort to figure out if the players want or need it. The team of 7+ veteran players, chosen by their peers to be representative of the community might be a decent place to start.

The CSM has taken on the role it needs to. I think all of the members of CSM6 did a great job fielding the Summer of Rage and ushering us into Crucible. Mynxee and the CSM5 crew even foreshadowed the lack of vision and cooperation from CCP heading into Incarna. The CSM has accepted its role in the process and is waiting for CCP to acknowledge them consistently. The key word there is consistently. When CCP Ytterbium says that he forgot to consider running ideas by the CSM, that shows me that the CSM is not a focus within CCP. That's fine if that is the route they want to go down, but I'm pretty sure that history has shown its not.

On the other side of the coin, the CSM has to be a bit more vocal and forward with the player base. CSM 6 was a bit mixed bag on this one. I didn't catch either of them, but I heard the Mittani's Fireside Chats were very well attended and received. These disappeared after the first two though, never to be heard from again. The blogging from CSM members can be a bit scarce too. I understand they're probably gagged pretty badly by NDA, but interaction with other players is still allowed from what I understand. I'd much rather hear "Sorry, NDA" than nothing. It would be nice to hear that some things are being addressed and concerns are taken into account. Maybe that type of information is covered under NDA, but if its not, it would be great to hear. Roc Wieler brought this notion up on the Lost in Eve debate he was on, and even though I'm not the biggest Roc proponent, I've got to agree with him on that one.

The CSM is a great institution, and I think at this point, CCP cannot shelf it. It seemed over the course of the winter expansion process that some of the higher-ups didn't like a few aspects of the CSM, but at this point, I think its too integrated to lower their responsibilities and privileges. Honestly, there is no reason to draw back the reigns on the CSM. The current group did make a few power plays by using the player base to make points, but this was done for a reason. I know CCP doesn't want to feel hijacked by their own creation, but the simple point is the CSM has put forth a lot of good points and responses. The TLDR is that the CSM is integral in showing CCP what needs to get done and the player base appreciates and looks to the CSM for a lot of feedback. The more fluid the exchange between CCP, the CSM and the players, the better. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the voting has shaken out, and I hope that CSM7 will continue to be an effective force for positive change within CCP.

Titan Tracking Issues Revisited (Changes Announced)

Looks like I got that Titan tracking post out just in time. CCP released the official changes today via CCP Greyscale in this forum post. The changes were a pretty short list, but it seems like it could be effective.

• Base Titan tracking is halved
• Scan Resolution dropped to 5
• Max locked targets changed to 3

 I can't really knock any of these changes. I like that CCP decided to combat the issue not by nerfing the tracking all to hell but also by affecting targeting matters. A scan resolution of 5 is really, really low. CCP intelligently based this number on officer grade Sensor Boosters, which makes sense given that Titan pilots don't normally object too strongly to pimping these ships a bit. The maximum of 3 locked targets seems a bit weird to me in terms of immersion, but I understand it from a technical point of view (Immersion-wise, the most advanced ship in the game can only lock up 3 ships? Ehh). So CCP's general thought was "cut the tracking, but let's also cut down on how quickly they are able to lock up sub-capitals." I can't really argue with that. Let's look at the numbers.

I'm not going to run through the full analysis from yesterday, but here's a couple side-by-sides.

Pre-Nerf

Post Nerf

Its pretty darn clear that Drakes have a much better shot at survival now. The lock time is going go up as well, so hopefully this gives a fleet of Drakes a chance. 

The Tornado saw similar increases as well. And if you remember from yesterday's post, they weren't in too terrible of shape already.

Pre Nerf

Post Nerf

The Tornado now looks almost like the AB Thorax from yesterday. Tier 3 BC's could be really effective in anti-capital fleets, especially with the new changes in mind. Just keep moving.

The changes that CCP Greyscale proposed look pretty solid to me. The primary use of Titans probably shouldn't be to rip apart cruisers and battlecruisers. With these changes, they won't be able to do that. The occasional tracking fit Titan will still be able to one shot some BC's, but it should be much less of a regular occurrence. With the 3 target max, I'd also think they'd be more inclined to shoot larger targets, but we'll see how that works out. I've got to applaud CCP for these changes. Titans are still mega powerful, but they're more in balance with the role they're supposed to have. 

I'd also like to applaud CCP for knowing when to throw out the bad ideas. Check out some of Greyscale's potential "rebalancing" ideas in that forum thread. Example: Titans can't lock subcapitals. Wtf? I don't know if there was any CSM involvement in this whole discussion, but either way I'm glad that some of these terrible ideas got taken off the table.