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Eve Vegas 2013 - Day Two - Round Table Rehash

I am in general bad at wandering. After my lunch I went back and and sat through some presentations waiting for the Keynote at 1600. It was presented by David Reid who is also CCP Pokethulhu (hope I got that right).

The Keynote I am sure will be available on YouTube so I won't wander into details. It was a vague murmur of a possible future with a lot of hope. Like the CCP Seagull thing at Fanfest but better done. CCP is trying to sell the player base on the idea of a far reaching goal that will span several years of development instead of six month spurts.

The general goal is consistency within the Eve universe as they integrate Dust and Valkyrie into it and even maybe more stuff in the future. The door isn't closed on the Captains Quarters but that is not their direction. It is just another way to cleanly link the various things together.

The most interesting bit to me was the note of "Death is a serious Concept" (I may be misquoting it a bit) which was the first line written down for Eve Online and still a very focal statement that they have. Then he promoted the collectors edition for a bit and I lost interest and didn't stay for the Q&A. CCP Fozzie and CCP Rise had a round table next and I assumed it would be packed full of people. It wound up full but not packed to sweaty hot mess like Fanfest.

There is no agenda to Round Tables. It went on for an hour and a half. I will attempt to decipher my own notes. I have 5 pages front and back of notes.

Then I went to the Party thing and sat with Ender and his Wife for a few hours chatting. Lots of drunk people. Lots of smoking. Amazing how bad smoke can be outside. My eyes burn and my hair and skin and clothing reek. At one point a dude sat on Ender's wife and another dude head locked him and it was a mess. However, at 1000 they told us the couches become 'bottle service' whatever that is. I was tired anyway so took my leave. I think this will be the last time I try one of these social parties. They are well done but just not my thing.

Round Table Q and A - This is as they questions came in.

Deployables should have bounties and kill rights that are attached to their owners. The Depot will last the longest in space. Right now it is about a month but that is still changing.

Siphons and Cyno Jammers will explode when they expire. They have the shortest life spans.

Auto tractor should have about a day or so. All of these things are still up for tweaks and changes.

The depot should have the capacity of a Giant Secure Container or so for holding stuff. There are two more that will be available. Their BPCs are found in the new Ghost Sites. One will be common. One rare. Their stats are related to how hard they are to probe down.

They should be about 50 m3 in size. Very small so everyone can take one somewhere. Once they are scooped they will spit their contents out into a can that is then scooped. They are reusable.

CCP seems to like the disposable structure idea. Fozzie said that he sees this as something that more various disposable and single use deployables may come out each expansion.

There was a discussion about the Siphons from someone from a wormhole. He was unhappy that the siphons cannot be dropped and drain a tower and scooped before a wormhole despawns. He feels that it stops wormhole people from doing attacks in sov. Fozzie said that they don't want it to always work all of the time for anyone that uses it. That it won't work well for some situations is a good balance. The cost has not yet been fully decided but the 10 million ISK per silo number is tossed around. He said that they have been out of the loop for the last few days.

The mobile homes will be super cheap to the tune of 500 to 600k ISK cheap. The tractors around five million or so. Cyno jammers maybe 20ish million or so. None of these numbers are in stone.

They are still working with the anchoring time when deployed but its about 45 seconds.

They cannot be placed in shields. They cannot be placed before the POS and then the POS put up with them inside. They think they closed all of these loopholes. The loot drop will probably be 50% but the loot drop on the Siphon and Tractor units may be a higher roll.

Siphon does not belong to the POS or the POS code.

Fozzie called the new SOE cruiser "one of his new cruisers" about Rise. I guess that is his baby.

People also kept asking if there was a limit to how many siphons you can deploy. The answer is no. But the question was asked three times in about 15 minutes by different people.

Are the deployables the next evolution of the POS? They don't want to say that but they feel that it is the first steps. They want to get rid of the POS code completely by the end of the future POS vision.

Will the other deployables found in the new Ghost sites allow others to refit off of your deployable? No.

What about a decoy ship? They have a huge list of ideas of deployable things. They have brainstormed with CSM over this as well. Fozzie seemed to like the decoy ship deployable idea.

What is the time frame for implementing the reasonable things list? Fozzie pointed out that several things have already been implemented. They will keep looking to pull stuff in as resources allow.

Switching characters without logging off and out of the client has turned out to be a much more difficult thing than expected. It will take a lot of resources to do and they have limited resources. They look at what they have and they have shelved it not because it is a bad idea but there are so many more quality of life improvements they can make in the time it would take to fix that one thing. It is being looked at but it is a bigger problem then it seems.

They have discussed mines before. They are a serious lag issue and messy. It is not a forgotten idea.

They were asked about integration into Eve for Valkery. Fozzie explained that he and Rise are dedicated to Eve Online and not involved in the other projects.

Will SMA's start dropping ships again? They do want them to drop ships again. No promises. They do know how important it is to wormhole dwellers especially.

The personal SMA were discussed that didn't get implemented from Odyssey. They are hoping that this happens.

Do they have plans to improve the non ECM E-War drones? Vague aspirations to do a comprehensive drone rework. When is up in the air. Drones need to be ripped out and redone from the bottom up with the interface and such.

Drone assist? No plans to do away with drone assist. No plans in Rubicon. They have many ideas bouncing around. Part of it is that they are an aspect of a larger discussion over how much control someone should have of someone elses ship. This covers the various fleet commands and even fleet warp.

This turned into a mild argument by one person who says that the future is nice but we are playing now. Fozzie tried to elegantly explain resource management and development paths and how quick fixes can't just happen considering the fact that someone has to do them.

Plans to let players impact local? This is a big personal thing for CCP Greyscale who wants better intel and less intel in local. Fozzie said that local changes come up a lot. A suggestion/question was why do people popping out of wormholes show up in local since they did not enter through a stargate. Fozzie believes that is mostly a technical problem.

Logistics ships on kill mails? This is CCP Masterplans baby. He wants to bring this to us (<3 CCP Masterplan) and it is his personal project he is dedicated to per Fozzie.

Ghost Sites - They are different from the current sites. That is all they can say when someone asked if they were just a return to the old data/relic sites. They can't say how different but they are different. Live events and the Rubicon trailer are focused around these in the near future.

Better d-scan interface? Fozzie says that is his per project and something he is working towards.

Are there plans to have an integrated FRAPS? They went through it before and realized they'd do a lot of work building something that wasn't better than fraps.  So they are not going to build something. The goal with the integrated twitch is to focus on more privacy controls for the streamer.

Rise wants a complete rework of ECM. That is his pet project but he has no finished plan laid out to present yet.

Client side battle reports? This was attempted two years ago. The server side stuff works but the way things go making it client side is a big problem. It is a possibility with CREST but no promises.

Reworking the in game map? This hasn't been discussed recently. Rise would like it but it seems that no one owns the map as a project and its kinda sitting there working but needing to be better and updated.

What is next on the short rebalance list? Recons, the entire pirate faction lineup, Blops, past them T3s and Capitals... capitals will not be in Rubicon. I get the feeling that T3s will not be as well but I didn't hear it explicitly said for Rubicon or a Rubicon

How do they feel about the ship rebalance? It has had the effect that they want to see. They are pretty happy with how the changes in ship usage looks.

There are many possibilities to the Blops lineup. They were touched but they are due for a comprehensive look.

A complaint that the Amarr T2 ship weapons systems are not consistent with the T1 versions. He feels you have to learn three weapons types with Amarr unlike the other races. Fozzie said he wants interesting mixups in the T2 ships and that the Amarr are a poster child for how he wants it to be. He wants more fun flavors for T2 ships.

The technical stuff for changing how links work is going well. Fozzie wants it to be something like an area effect bubble and when the ship leaves that bubble they will retain their effect but the command ship is on grid.

Are they done with mining changes? No. They want to do another pass of the barges. The Procurer and Skiff are not as useful as they want. The Retriever and the Mackinaw are to strong with being good in two out of three areas.

How about the ore belts moving to anoms? Maybe? Maybe super belts? They are always looking at things. The asteroid belt spawn is old archaic crazy code and works weird. They know that the ice anoms spawn with down time. It is something they are looking at to break the schedule to be consistent through downtime.

Making the Orca more interesting: They will look at mining links in the POS after they find the spot for the Orca and Rorqual in game play. The Rorqual was created from the ground up to work inside of POS shields. They want to make these ships more interesting in the belts and the Rorqual able to defend itself. CCP Bittek has idea for them.

At this point a little fleet of Devs came in.

There was some discussion about clone bays and a desire to revamp them.

Have they thought about other sizes of Microjump drive? They like it being a battleship only thing and would prefer to give smaller ships something else unique and interesting for tehm.

Some discussion about fixing ship sizes to build costs of minerals. This is an art team thing and a maybe. The art team is fixated on scale it seems.

The art department is thinking about/looking at having more control over the way the ship looks. Things like if you add armor palates to your ship the ship looks like it has more armor added. I found this a simple but sensible idea that you see in other games when it comes to how equipment looks.

Corpse locator agents so people can kill people who have their corpses or something? Rise wanted to know WTF was wrong with people and their corpse obsession. Fozzie is a corpse collector. It seems that 2/3 of the game design department is obsessed with corpse collections and have discussions about how corpses can be more important. Fozzie has suggested a corpse launcher. Rise stared at him as if he was insane.

The corpse discussion led into harvesting corpses for implants. Fozzie called Eve a surgeon simulator. While funny I wondered to myself if this had mini-game potential when it came time to implement this feature if it ever happens.

In general they suggested improving the account management system. It has ridiculous credit card handling habits now.

Can we get a warning when we jump into high sec like the warning when we jump into low sec?

Slave sets for shields, crystals for armor, etc? They are not fans of everything having a pirate implant available for everything. It would also be ridiculously OP.

How are bounties doing? They are in a better place. Not sure how to make bounty hunting a viable profession without breaking the game and causing exploits. They'd still like to have bounties that are claimable by an individual group.

Improve multi client login? This group is working on it. They don't have to release with the expansions. They are working to make it a better experience.

When are they bringing mother ships back as a new ship class that is a mother ship? Maybe one day.

Mac Client bugs. It hasn't been touched in forever on the forums. This is because it is not something owned by anyone since they out source their mac client and resources are distributed elsewhere.

Corp Management is a huge, important thing that they want and need to fix. Getting to CCP Seagulls vision requires a rework of the corp role management system. No time for it. It is a priority. Not an if it is a when.

Chat Channel system having a search feature for people's chat rooms. The chat stuff has not been touched in a long time and it is due for a make over and that type of utility would be good.

CREST legal stuff? Legal stuff still happening.

SOE going to get a battleship? Rise says "yes, probably."

Plans to introduce a ship int eh near future that is of interest to freighter pilots.

How long to do art turn around for ships? Around four months or so.

How about the cashe scraping stuff? They won't replace it until they can give the same functionality in another way to places like Eve-Central. They only broke it accidentally and while they want it gone they absolutely do not want to take away the way we use it with those third party sites.

FW is heavy on beacons and not PvP. Problem is exploiting PvP LP awards.

T3's get more subsystems? First priority is to make all of the current subsystems useful.

Eve on a cellphone? Sky is the limit with crest but PvP would suck, says Fozzie.

I had a vision of eve on a cellphone that I drew in MS paint as I wrote this.

And that is it for this post.


  1. I am enjoying your feedback on EVE Vegas. I suspect I would have some of the same social issues as you do - so am impressed you push yourself out of your comfort zone and get involved anyway.

  2. Nice writeups and very informative. Thank you!


  4. BAH !! I'm raging against the proposed changes to BS/BC warp times. It's a not a positive game change. Adding an implant set might be nice for transport pilots, but not PVPers. I cannot fathom the concept of creating a "features & idea" post where they release details of a new change and then simply walk away from it. Ten pages into the player discussion a CCP post stating something bland like "back from vacation... all caught up" - yet not addressing any of the player comments. It makes me RAGE sugar.

  5. Hehehe... "butt hat"...

    1. I bet you've never had a typo in YOUR blog, right?

  6. Your roundtable sounds like it was a better time than Java's deal. Not because he's a bad speaker or anything, but I was kinda hoping for a lil more "how-to" and a lil less "This is how bad-ass we are, look at our neat webtool. Anything you can do, Gewns can do better," rah-rah stuff. :-/

    1. Having seen some of that web tool in the past, it really is as cool as he says it is.

      That said, it did feel more like a presentation of "here's how the logistics organization with the largest field of responsibility in the game does its job" and not "here's how you can make your organization's logistics better."


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