Character Created: 2013/11/15
Corp/Alliance: Dirt 'n' Glitter/Local Is Primary
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Eve-O Forum Posts: Link
zKillboard: Link
CSM Watch Interview: Link
EVE_NT Profile: Link
Hey-o,
I'm Nikolai Agnon, an officer from Dirt 'n' Glitter - EVE's premier Amarr Lowsec FW Corporation. I aim to apply my knowledge and experience of both Factional Warfare and lowsec in general to CSM XI this year. In addition to my exploits in Lowsec, I have spent time in Sov-null both in the CFC (via Fweddit back in the day) and in TEST. I run two separate hisec carebear corps, one involved in industry and wormholes, and another dedicated to missions and mining. I’ve always gravitated towards leadership roles as I’m always looking for more ways to help other players better enjoy the game. Currently I'm the second-in-command of one of the largest alliances in the Amarr Militia, Local Is Primary.
Of course, I will step down as if I even reach the ballot - I’m fully aware of how time-intensive this CSM job is, and I have no delusions of running an alliance simultaneously.
Lowsec space has not recently seen strong enough representation on the CSM panel (aside from Sugar's amazing work), and I aim to help remedy the situation. Although my primary goal is to improve FW mechanics, I further aim to improve all of lowsec, which would include drastic lifeblood updates for non-FW space. I campaign for modernization of FW, improvements to small-gang gameplay and lifestyle, balance passes to hisec and lowsec risk-vs-reward, and additional opportunities for third-party development.
A brief clarification of my main campaign points, before I go into extensive detail (please see the follow-up posts):
My interest in Lowsec is to keep the entire ecosystem healthy, not just the parts most beneficial to my militia or even my warzone. All the changes that I will bring up as a CSM delegate will be slated towards the sandbox as a whole, not just to the Amarr Militia. I’ve always taken on logistical or analytical roles in EVE, trying to find the right balance between differing opinions to find what’s most efficient, newbro-friendly, or just plain fun, and I hope to apply this experience towards bettering everything that lowsec is designed to be. I ask that you vote for me this election season, so that Faction Warfare and lowsec in general might have a candidate on CSM XI who advocates for a more vibrant and exciting sandbox environment. Please read on below, where I have gone through extensive detail outlining my goals and visions that I’d like your help in bringing to EVE Online.
TL;DR :
Disclaimer: I'm fully aware that quite possibly nothing I'm campaigning for may even see a discussion if I'm elected. The details I provide are examples of what I would suggest at a round-table for improvements, and to give an idea of the sort of vision I have for lowsec's atmosphere in the balance of EVE. That said, a FW update is in the works to come soon(tm), and I hope to help in that discussion.
Updates to Factional Warfare
The current system has been around since 2012. That's coming up to almost being as old as Eve Dominion! The current system Ihub upgrades are worth even less now than they were four years ago, with their only real purpose today being their involvement in the archaic FW tier system, which ought to be revamped, if not removed entirely. These effects have also always applied to the benefit of all hostiles and unaffiliated neutral parties, which makes no sense.
Updating System Capture Mechanics
Meanwhile, the underlying mechanics in FW use almost the exact same mechanics as they did four years ago, despite numerous tech updates and balance passes. The DUST interaction leaves much to be desired for a cross-game tie-in, and could use an update. Undefended systems still require an approximate minimum of 48 hours to flip, and plexing payouts being coupled with the tier system drastically punishes the defending side. Constellation control is a hella rad idea that made its way into Aegis-sov, but it would make just as much, if not more sense in the back-and-forth tug of war in FW space. Owning a constellation or region should make defending it much easier, yet with citadels around the corner, one of the few remaining balancing factors is about to become irrelevant.
In order to address these issues, I would immediately seek conference with Team Space Glitter (yes, that’s actually their name!) to promote the following changes in a coming-due FW overhaul:
More Carrot, Less Stick: Benefits for Serving an Empire
Moving on to quality of life improvements and reasons to continue fighting for an Empire, I aim to remedy the disparity between the massive drawbacks and minimal benefits that come with allegiance to an Empire. I'll never be able to enter Minmatar hisec again in my life - and while that's perfectly fine by me, it should follow that the Amarr Empire would offer some assistance in my fight against their enemies and against neutral interlopers, as should the other empires for their respective militias. There are incredibly few rewards to make up for the penalties that Faction Warfare players receive, which leads to a high “graduation rate” amongst older players.
Why keep fighting only one side of the war, if you could go pirate, gain access to more space, be free from the danger of eviction, and gain even more targets to shoot at?
To address this playstyle retention issue, I propose the following “Empire-provided” bonuses for groups:
* Given how powerful these upgrades would be, as well as the potential abuse of “standings-shield” corps, I additionally propose a massive drawback be that any structures anchored and/or owned by a militia-affiliated entity would forbid both docking rights and service access to non-affiliates. This would prevent neutrals from anchoring structures with a FW holding corp, then granting exclusive access to the main corp or alliance, and the structure being shielded by standings from attack by an entire militia whilst gaining all the free benefits of association. In other words, you can’t shield your structures from and get the bonuses for being a part of a militia that you could otherwise aggress freely, even on the same grid.
FW needs both updates to previously existing mechanics as well as new quality-of-life updates and incentives for sticking with FW rather than “graduating”. There has not been a true FW-oriented candidate on the CSM in recent memory (Grrski Krab doesn’t count), leaving any tweaks and changes to be advocated for by the few non-null-bloc candidates. As a CSM member I plan to help bring excitement back to the FW scene.
Improvements to Small-Gang Lifestyles
Small, close-knit groups of players make lowsec great. Corps with thirty to forty members total, up to small alliances with not many more than just a hundred or so members, are where players feel the most at home and where they have the most fun doing whatever it is they do. Depending on the group, that might be elite micro-gang PVP like No Points Necessary, or in other cases it could be ownership of their own solar system (DBD / Giant Banana Legion in Kamela comes to mind, as does Kings of Lamaa). Part of my campaign is to promote more opportunities for small groups to be able to show their occupancy.
I'll recall a small example of how small groups can impact large ones, from a recent time in our FW warzone. My corporation is certainly on the larger side of lowsec corps, and I wouldn't call us a small group by any means. Nevertheless, just four or five devoted individuals were able to significantly impact our access to the war. During a few weeks in early October there was a group camping the most convenient gate through which our home system would access the most heated parts of the region at the time. Nothing too terribly fancy, just a simple gatecamp that would switch ship types, evade "real fights", and still blap dozens of frigates every day. Their devotion and resilience meant even our gatecamp-clearing fleets had little success in the long run, so we ended up resorting to taking a longer path to reach the Minmatar, which meant more time reshipping or in transit, which meant we were less effective at defending our systems at the time.
I want to see more of this kind of behaviour in lowsec. Small chunks of territorial ownership is super exciting - it's like a mini flag of ownership that you can plant in your own corner of the sandbox. It's not quite as grand as the looming sandcastles over in nullsec, but still, that little flag you planted is yours, and if anyone passes through your system, he ought to be quite aware of who its rightful owner is. Whether it's gatecamping or a stationcamping or being elite pirates that lock down the systems they live in, small gangs and localized pirate groups are what really make lowsec feel alive and vibrant. I envision even more cases of this becoming apparent, and for there to be additional mechanics and options available, even moreso than simply on stations/gates and in anomalies.
This brings me to the new, upcoming structures, which present powerful and exciting opportunities to reward groups that occupy (and protect) their space. It's also a perfect chance to balance how much lowsec space a single entity can sprawl around in before it reaches its critical mass. It should be infeasible for almost any alliance to quite easily defend three or more entire regions worth of resources in highly active and volatile space, preventing the locals from taking advantage of their systems' commodities (often in the form of moon goo and PI goods).
Similar to how a system's pocos are often a reflection of who "owns" a lowsec system, the local inhabitants, pirate or otherwise, should be able to leave their mark on their systems, and that includes taking ownership of valuable resources. Unfortunately, pocos are usually expensive isk-sinks, as most pirates aren't in the PI business, and they require attention to industry that often doesn't fit their playstyles. Meanwhile, moon goo is mostly inaccessible to smaller groups in its current state, as current structures are difficult to contest when the owner, perhaps eight or more jumps away, can bridge T3 fleets and triage onto. Resource structures should be significantly easier to contest or interfere with if the owners aren’t near your space. If you live in your system and can push other players out, you should be able to harvest its resources.
And for when you can’t simply evict the biggest fish in the pond, well, maybe it's time for us to see new toys with game designs similar to the Mobile Siphon Units - possibly with variants that are invisible to dscan, and which might not give away the thief’s identity.
I love the impact that small groups have in space, and structures and resource-ownership are just a couple of the many ways to further improve and reward them. More about this in my next point...
Hisec & Lowsec: Risk vs Reward
For the dangerous areas of lowsec to supposedly be highly profitable, there's very little PVE that appeals to your average hisec bear. Outside of tier-4/5 FW and level 5 missions, you can make better isk/hr in either hisec or nullsec by doing pretty much any form of PVE when compared to lowsec. Outside of FW territory, there's almost no appeal to lowsec industry, and in my entire Eve career, I've only once seen a mining corp interested in operating in lowsec space (and even that was a short-lived adventure). Lowsec has always been a fantastic source of PVP, however it's simply not lucrative in the slightest when compared to other spaces.
Income for most players comes from some form of PVE (unless you station trade, sell plex, or loot more wrecks than I do). I would like to solve part of this problem by shifting the value from hisec PVE to favor the same efforts but in more dangerous space. This would solve many of the problems caused by "safe hisec". Rather than nerf the safety of hisec, I would much rather see players moving to lowsec to make their money, which is closer in line with the risk-vs-reward theme in EVE. Activities that can be run in multiple security bands should be significantly more lucrative the lower you go. Having alts in nullsec might always be one of the best ways to make isk, but hisec incursions or missions should not be the de-facto alternative, and mining should gain a mentionable middleground.
As it currently stands, the two FW warzones are undeniably the most volatile areas in lowsec. FW has players orbiting buttons, means players in space, means targets to shoot, means explosions and content. Given this nature of FW, PVP entities will likely always gravitate towards these warzones. That being said, we should find ways to re-populate non-FW lowsec, and I propose making hisec activities more profitable when done in lowsec. PVE in lowsec systems is already extremely risky, as people WILL hunt you down for running that site or mission. The rewards should be boosted as compensation.
Towards this, I propose the following updates:
* This would be a perfect opportunity to see another Focus Group. Admittedly, my experience directly with mining is a bit more recent than the rest of hisec PVE.
Changes like these would pave the way for loose coalitions amongst pirates and tentative agreements between pirates and bears, in which one might gain via taxing the other for permission to operate in valuable belts or missionspaces. NPC-Null sees this fairly regularly, and even sov-null, where neighboring hostile alliances often form non-aggression or non-invasion pacts. Again with Code’s mining permit business, we can see that players with vastly differing interests will create arrangements with each-other for mutual benefit (oftentimes as payment for operational safety).
This already can and does exist in lowsec in some rare cases. When DNG lived in Egghelende (0.4sec), for a brief while a hisec mining corp paid us for mining rights in our system. Similarly, a few jumps out S I L E N T. ran a mining business and owned a few valuable moons in a pocket system that they kept locked down, and they probably did a good deal more there than I’m aware of. FW-space might never (or only rarely) see this activity, as fits for it being a heated warzone, but more interactions along these lines will bring more life and activity to non-FW lowsec.
While it’s up to players to develop these social interactions, I hope to update the lowsec environment so the interest is more favorable than it is now for the bears, that such interactions might become a more commonplace activity. Miners and missioners pairing up with pirates for protection would be a dream come true.
More bears in lowsec means more players in dangerous space. By incentivizing lowsec variants of similar activities available in hisec, non-FW space will see more players, actual piracy may see a return (not simply mere NBSI criminals), we can move towards a more balanced hisec, and, ultimately, there will be more targets for us to shoot at.
Fun fact: public hauling contracts create one of the few forms of PVE-PVP interaction other than belt-ratting that scales extremely well through all security bands. I didn’t mention this activity above, but my proposals would lead to an even greater logistical demand to, from, and throughout dangerous space.
Additional Endpoints for Third Party Developing
As I mentioned earlier, I'm a huge spreadsheet and API nerd. When I was one month old in Eve I was cruising through C2 wormholes shooting sleepers, and I started building spreadsheets to calculate which wormhole gasses were worth the most isk/hr to harvest. This continued on to lowsec gasses and eventually to process which boosters were the most profitable and how much a batch run would cost in various materials. Moving on, for DNG I've written a FW warzone-intel bot as well as a FW-plex counting program that our members love. I've made spreadsheets for PI and all scales of industry (t1, t2, t3d/c, capitals, boosters), as well as a spreadsheet-based XML detector against moon siphon units* (before the days of Slack and Slack-bots). Every nullsec alliance has a warnings bot for their leadership channels, and I've personally written the one that my alliance uses.
* I'd actually like to see buffs towards moon siphons and similar gameplay tools by reducing/eliminating API-based detection thereof. Surreptition, espionage, and general roguery lead to creative gameplay, especially when they go unnoticed for longer periods of time. While I support management tools while away from the desktop client, I will never suggest tools that could reduce the need to undock or that would threaten covert, clandestine activities.
With the introduction of CREST-Post endpoints, players can begin interacting with the game while away from their desktops for some of the more managerial aspects. A few additions I plan to immediately take to CCP Foxfour, if they’re not added before I’m elected:
Ultimately, it is my dream for anything visible from inside a station to be accessible through Crest and for more player stats to be available via the traditional XML API - though, anything that requires being in space still ought to be kept safely distant from the API. CEOs and directors everywhere would rejoice if they could check an app on their phone to make sure nobody's messing with their structures, but intel should be an even greater reward for those who log in, undock, and fly around. If you want your fancy new Gas Harvesting Array to operate at peak efficiency, you would do well to fly by it every once in awhile and check up on it to make sure nobody's tampered with it.