Toxic Yaken
Character Created: 2014/03/12
Corp/Alliance: The Dickwad Squad/Rabble Alliance
Twitter: @Toxic_Yaken
Eve Who: Link
Eve-O Forums: Link
zKillboard: Link
CSM Watch Interview: Link
EVE-Guardian.net: Link
Greetings fellow pilots!
My name is Toxic Yaken, and I want to represent Highsec for CSM XI.
I have been playing EVE Online for the better part of two years, almost entirely based in Highsec. I am a ganker, wardeccer, scammer, and former awoxer, and I make my living as such. At the moment I am flying with The Dickwad Squad, a small corporation in Rabble Alliance, and losing all my ships in the process has been my specialty.
The CSM is meant to connect the player base to CCP, and so I have been trying to do just that. Rather than only letting players come to me, I’ve been taking time to reach out to players to try and capture better opinions and ideas of issues facing Highsec residents. While I can’t make promises for change, these are some points that I am interested in raising or continuing in discussion with CCP and other members of the CSM:
New Player Experience
For players who take the time to try every career agent and see everything that EVE has to offer, the NPE is extremely PVE focused. I know that I and many others would like to see more early game training on concepts such as basic combat tactics, fittings, and how to use a d-scan. Providing career missions for new players to try PVP combat of some variation would be ideal.
Wars
There are quite a few problems with wars in general, and simply changing the cost to declare war on a corporation or alliance aren’t going to fix them. The biggest issue with wars is that a lot of Highsec corporations or alliances don’t want to fight. There are also a lot of corporations that have no reason to fight. There needs to be better incentives to combatting a war than weaponized boredom or dropping out of corporations and reforming an hour later. I know that some players are very adamant that they want to play the game a certain way and have no interest in learning how to PVP, and I think that those players will continue to struggle under any wardec system, but providing those who simply feel they cannot fight back with more options and incentives could help improve wars.
NPE: I’m repeating myself, but obviously providing those that are interested in learning PVP, fittings, and so on, early in their lives will at least have some idea of how to fight back.
Mercenaries: Mercenaries have been around for a long time, but a lot of them exist far above the possible incomes of newer players - create a board similar to corporate adverts for mercenaries so they can provide services, price points, where they primarily operate, and so on. This concept could be used for other services such as hauling as well.
Surrenders: Provide more surrender options for negotiation, such as a surrender cost in addition to a surrender offer, length of peacetime before any new wars can be declared, or even an exchange of assets.
Costs: I think that the cost of wardecs could use some review in the case of wardeccing smaller, newer players. I don’t want to see new players being farmed for kills and being scared out of the game. That said I don’t want to see new players being protected from PVP, because it’s a huge part of the game that they need to be aware of. Highsec isn’t safe.
Redefining Wars: Unless a corporation has structures in Highsec to defend or are confident in their PVP capabilities, there is usually little reason for them to turn out and fight a wardeccer. Steve Ronuken suggested the idea of attackers setting up structures to declare war that could be destroyed and end the war, but against large mercenary and wardec corporations I feel like smaller corporations would stand no real chance to destroy them under their noses. Similar to the idea of providing corporations with more beneficial structures worth defending, it still leaves a lot of smaller corporations who can’t afford them no reason to fight. I’m also interested in seeing more information about Citadels and how they might change living in Highsec and if if they might make wars more worth fighting.
Defender Incentives: Another avenue is to provide defenders with additional bonuses considering there is no real way to win a war as a defender. Some ideas include an increased insurance payout for lower SP characters to encourage defenders to actually turn out and fight, or rewarding the defender with the wardec fee if they come out of the war on top. There could also be an incentive given to corporations that promote longevity and activity in Highsec, so there is at least a reason not to disband a corporation at the moment’s notice of a wardec.
Missions
I’ve personally not spent a lot of time running missions, but at a recent EVEMeet, I was told that mission runners would love to see a greater variation of missions, (I guess you can get bored blowing up the same pirate or saving some scientists so many times) but also provide some form of scaling difficulties for missions based on how many players would enter a mission pocket, so that missions could be more challenging and fun to run in groups.
Corporations & Societies
I know that over the last year, a lot of fear in my community was generated over the proposed idea of Social Corporations, a construct that would allow players to start a corporation protected from wardecs at the expense of not being able to anchor structures. I'm completely against this concept, but I don’t think enough people know Jayne Fillion's update about the development of this idea to Societies and wanted to repost this:
Quote:
CCP Fozzie asked if the CSM had any further ideas for functionality that social clubs could use. Ali brought up the idea of a organizational unit within a corporation with things like independent group chats only accessible to group members. CCP Fozzie replied that this could be part of the rework of things like groups.
Mike brought up that highsec wardeccers were worried that social clubs would discourage more people from staying in corporations. Sugar Kyle pointed out that people can already stay in an NPC corp and create a common chat channel. CCP Fozzie talked about how they wanted to provide more incentives to join corporations such as structure usage, and that this would be more desirable.
Mike brought up the idea of calling corp lites "Societies". CCP Fozzie approved of that name and suggest that they have a checkbox to set your society secret or not. The topic then did turn to seriously having the option to keep these groups membership secret. Access control was also discussed.
Though I think that a better name for Societies might be Communities, (hue) I am whole-heartedly in favour of the development of Societies to provide better cross-corporate/alliance communication and organizational tools than the current channels and out of game methods in place currently. Giving groups such as Bombers Bar, Anti-Ganking, Incursion Runners, and so on, better means to communicate and organize themselves outside of corporate structure can only make the game better. It would also be a nice way to show your support and pride for groups such as PLEX FOR GOOD and Broadcast 4 Reps!
Ganking & Bumping
I have zero issues with the state of ganking in Highsec as it is right now. I also realize that bumping is a point of contention, but bumping still exists outside of ganking, and serves important purposes in bumping capitals, suspect baiters, and others. I also don’t want to see bumping in Highsec altered to much because I see freighter ganking as a fun, low skill requirement PVP experience that is pretty heavily dependant on bumping. I’m interested in hearing feedback on bumping though.
Bounties and Bounty Hunting
In the time that I've been playing, bounties haven't served much a purpose. For Highsec criminals, they have become badges of honour, rather than a cause for concern, and unless you catch someone with a decent bounty flying something big and shiny, your payout will generally be very small. I want to see more incentives to go after the bad guys. One option is to give the pilots that put up for a bounty the option to pay out the full amount if they are satisfied with the kill. Another could be to remove faction police and instead requiring players to handle criminals, suspects, and faction warfare targets with rewards for doing so. This is another subject I would love to hear more feedback on.
And On A Lighter Note…
Piracy!
I love being a pirate, but my pool of activities has grown smaller since I started. I would like to see more piracy that doesn’t break the game but lets me plunder.
Harpoon Highslot Module: Because harpoons, but also… Let’s say your small gang catches a legal target, brings them down to extremely low hull, but instead of popping them, fires a harpoon into the opposing ship. As long as the ship doesn’t manage to break a certain range, reach a speed that would cause the harpoon’s rope to break, or repair its hull/armor/shields over a certain amount of time, the target’s pod would pop out, be unable to reboard for some time, and allow the gang to board and steal the ship. Essentially you would need to have the target webbed, neuted, and nearly dead already, but it would actually create some real piracy instead of just blowing up everything that comes by and scavenging the wrecks.
EVEMeet!
I’m very fortunate to live close to Toronto where there is already a decent sized and well organized EVEMeet, and would love to see more of them pop up with CCP support because they are really fun. The first one I attended about seven months ago was privileged to have CCP Terminus visit us, and he gave out some really cool swag in addition to some PLEX prizes handed out by our local ISD member. I’ve made a bunch of friends, drank a lot of good beer, and found a great deal of support from everyone at the Toronto EVEMeet. I would highly recommend checking out any EVEMeets that may be happening near you at http://www.evemeet.net, or maybe even try to setup one of your own!
Thank you for taking the time to read my platform. If you have any comments, concerns, questions, etc. feel free to post in this thread or contact me:
Ingame: Toxic Yaken
Email: Toxicyaken@gmail.com
Twitter: @Toxic_Yaken