Policy - Gameplay

When it comes to fundamental gameplay, Eve is an excellent game, and as far as I'm concerned it's easily the best MMO on the market today. However, as with all things human, it is still imperfect, and I see a few things about it that could be improved upon.

The first category of flaw is aspects of the game that ought to be well-used, but due to failures of implementation are not. The two most obvious of these are low security(0.1-0.4) space and the Charisma attribute.

Lowsec suffers from being at exactly the wrong place on the risk/reward curve. It is about as risky as 0.0, but with none of the profitability. As such, its primary uses are for people with specialized desires, such as factional warfare or small-scale piracy. There is nothing wrong with those uses, but they're not enough. A wide variety of things must be done to make lowsec more profitable on the whole, and if elected, I will propose a wide variety of ways of making lowsec more profitable including, but not limited to, more lowsec agents, better lowsec ores, better lowsec complexes, and boosts to level 5 missions.

The other problem lowsec suffers from is that the security mechanism is an impediment to people attempting to take and hold space, since any group that shoots intruders will rapidly see their sec status decay too far to enter highsec. In order to rectify this, I will look into a mechanism that allows for a corporation controlling a lowsec system to defend their system without security loss. This would use a control system similar in philosophy to sovereignty in 0.0 and system control in factional warfare, though different in specifics. I believe that this would encourage players to colonize lowsec, by removing one of the major penalties from it, as well as providing a transition to the ultimate endgame of player-controlled 0.0 space.

It is a maxim in roleplaying that charisma is the dump stat. If you want to play an effective, powerful character you should do as much as you can to avoid charisma, and instead put those attributes into things that help you more, which every other attribute generally does. Unfortunately, Eve falls into this trap just as badly as D&D ever did. I play an Achura character, not because I think that the backstory is cool or the faces look good, but because everyone around me when I started told me I'd have to be insane to play anything else. And they were right. That's great for me, but it's bad for the game.

The problem is that there simply aren't many charisma-using skills in the game. A trader can very naturally max charisma when he creates his character, and it will serve him very well until he has about 5 million SP, at which point he is out of things to train with charisma and those points drag him down for the rest of the game. This is bait-and-switch gameplay at its worst, and it needs to be rectified. As such, I will look for new Charisma-using skills to add to the game, and will propose new ones whenever possible.

I have some proposals for particular Charisma skills which could be added, such as POS gunnery damage skills, CEO skills affecting wardecs(have more, make them cheaper, etc.), skills that would increase your choice in which mission to take, and many others, but I will refrain from making definite proposals until a great deal of brainstorming and consultation has been done to ensure that the skills proposed are right for the game and that we're not missing any good paths for expansion.

As well, there are a few other issues of this sort that the past CSM has already dealt with, most notably improvements to the bounty hunter system. While these issues are probably settled as far as the CSM is concerned, I will ensure that these issues are dealt with properly if the previous submissions come across some unforeseen roadblock. We do not want the first Council's good work going to waste.

The second category of flaw is simple balance issues. As with any other game this complex, there's a lot of these. People have complained about everything from the Nighthawk to the Naglfar, from citadel torpedoes to defender missiles. Most of these concerns are valid and are worthy of attention. However, they are not the CSM's primary role. CCP has better data on ship usage and effectiveness than any player, and they are on the lookout for balance issues. As such, while I have no objection to bringing forward the players' opinions on balance issues, I consider most of them to be of secondary importance to more fundamental changes to the structure of the game. CCP wants the CSM to be more about vision than trivia, and I agree with them. As such, I will attempt to focus on far-reaching solutions to balance issues, such as my thread proposing a revamp of defender missiles, rather than simple "Add 37 CPU to it" fixes that CCP can come up with themselves. The goal for the CSM is to bring forward new ideas for how to balance ships properly, not just to fiddle with numbers.

The third category of gameplay issue that the CSM can address is the creation of new content, or large amendments to old content, and this is the one where we as a group can probably do the most for the game. Issues like balancing of Doomsday Devices, revamping of sovereignty, allowing alliances into Factional Warfare, fundamentally changing the nature of how rats drop loot, revamping the production cycle to include components, and dozens of others in this vein have been the primary job of the CSM for the first term of office, and this will not change in future. There are far too many of these issues for me to express an opinion on each of them here, but if you want to know about any of them, just ask me. However, I will outline my approach to these issues generally.

Firstly, my primary goal is to do what is best for the game as a whole. I'm not running to benefit one group at the expense of others, and even if I was, CCP wouldn't implement any such proposals. There are always winners and losers in a change, but I will do my best to ensure that every change I propose would create more winners.

Secondly, I will ensure that every proposal I make is careful and well-considered. I like to muse about many things on the forums, but when it comes time to do this as a responsibility and not a hobby, I will take it seriously and ensure that my advice to CCP is as good as I can make it. CCP operates under limits on time, money, programmers, public relations and player sentiment, and they are hemmed in by the consequences of their past actions. If the CSM does not respect these limitations and seek to work within them ourselves, we might as well be talking to a wall, because our suggestions will be useless to CCP. I will attempt to make proposals that respect the real limitations on CCP, and that work within those limitations to make a better game for everybody.

And thirdly, I will consult with players on proposed changes. I read a large swath of the forums, and I like to think that I generally know what's going on with the game, but I don't know Doomsdays as well as a Titan pilot, and I don't know manufacturing as well as a long-time T2 builder. If I'm proposing major changes to the way that these people play the game, I intend to talk with them first. That includes any other CSM reps with special knowledge of one aspect of the game, and it includes players at large. I will maintain an open-door policy when communicating with you, the player, and will take into consideration what the players tell me on issues. Nobody gets a veto, but if you have something to say I'll listen.

There is also one other way for the CSM to aid CCP on gameplay issues, aside from direct recommendation of issues. Currently, the Assembly Hall is the only way to conduct a fair poll of players with easy to interpret results, as evidenced by the pair of poll threads on the nano nerf. While such threads are not appropriate for all issues, and can choke out new ideas on the forum if too many are created, they are a valuable method of finding out the opinion of the players on especially contentious issues. Therefore, I will create poll threads from time to time to determine the opinion of the players on especially controversial topics.