Vic Jefferson
Country: United States
Character Created: 2012/12/11
Corp/Alliance: Knights of Poitot/Rote Kapelle
Reddit: VicJefferson
Eve-Who: Link
EVE-O Forum Posts: Link
zKillboard: Link
Media Appearances
Statecraft CSM Debates - Day 2, Session 3
Ballot Standings
A player of this game, for players of this game.
Please check out my CSM thread:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=509170&find=unread
I am Vic Jefferson. I have been playing this game for 4 years, and have tried almost every aspect of this game extensively except for wormholes. I believe myself to be a strong candidate for many reasons. First, no matter what particular aspect of this game captivates you the most, there is a good chance I have been there and done that as a player, and thus can both relate and understand the issues that affect you as a player. Many CSM positions are filled by 'empty suits' which do not play the same game you do, and are given out by large power blocs, effectively depriving you of a voice and giving it to power blocs over players, when the CSM itself is supposed to be representing players. Second, I am not squeamish to criticism and have no issues fully listening to players and their concerns, where playing the game as extensively as I do tends to put me in contact with many play styles and people. Third, my professional career (Research Scientist, PhD) mandates that I am able to work collaboratively with world class experts of many disciplines and from many backgrounds – one is never graced with infinite time and resources, so one must be able to communicate quickly and with minimal friction to accomplish anything, where I would take a CSM position with the same seriousness and professionalism as my real job.
I will touch on a few key points to try and persuade you that I am no different than you – a player hungry for content, whether that is clawing my way closer to industrial supremacy or perpetually roaming in search of the mythical good fight. I only want more opportunities and a better environment for those to happen in on every login, and am willing to go one step further and try to voice our player concerns to those that author the world we play in.
A) Interaction is the only thing that really powers this game.
B) Mechanics that deplete the available player content should be looked at first and foremost.
C)A few smaller tournaments would grow some newer competitors and enliven this aspect of the game.
D)Risk and reward should be at the heart of every mechanic.
E)A sample of ship balance.
A) Interaction is the only thing that really powers this game.
What makes you and I log in? For some of us, our content is meted out to us like a rat in a Skinner box - turn off DotA or Overwatch when you get that ping, and get in fleet to receive content in small kill-mail fortified granules. For others, we chase content, look for the adrenaline rush, try to increase our ever tenuous grasp of part of the economy, or tend to our errands of individual concern. However, most of the persistent and good reasons to log in, regardless of how you play EvE, are because players are allowed to plant and nurture the seeds of content – every new mechanic and revision of old mechanic should consider how much the change will enable players to interact more with other players, or increase the strength and importance of existing interactions.
There have been great improvements to this area of the game recently. Citadels themselves are a great example – players may now own pseudo-stations in areas they previously could not and control their own markets and docking rights. The industrial arrays likewise emphasize player control with added risk – with NPCs out of the way, these open up avenues for player interaction. Not requiring standings for jump clones and the security tag system are also recent examples, where the former gutted one of the last legitimate uses of NPC standings, and the latter meant you could recover security status without having to shoot red things for hours, while also adding a tiny economy around the tags.
The station advertising may seem trivial, but in addition to providing much needed immersion, it adds something that is vastly needed – a community reach out in game. Now, surely experienced players know there's a hundred good ways to get roped into a particular corp or alliance, or NPSI group, etc, i.e. finding stuff to do in game. As of late, especially with the ghost fitting utility, EvE is becoming less reliant on having a small arsenal of third party programs to even attempt to progressing, but what it could really use a revamp of its in game method of exposure to things like NPSI, public roams, various activities, and corp and alliance recruitment. Slowly but surely, there's more to fight over, and CCP seems to get the idea of giving the players control, now you just have to find a way to get people excited and involved with things, without excessively leaning on the community; reliance on third party software is slowly being replaced, when will community stuff follow suit?
B)Mechanics that deplete the available player content should be looked at first and foremost.
Take high-sec incursions versus null-sec anomalies. Objectively you could say they are both anachronistic dinosaurs of a bygone age in video game design, and you would be correct. However, null-sec anomalies let players plant the seeds of player content, whereas high-sec incursions just distort a delicate risk/reward ecosystem while adding nothing to the total player content available. For example, if a player is out ratting in null-sec, she or he is providing something to hunt for would be antagonists. This in turn creates a need and a job for people to defend the ratters, and this in turn can sprout into good set ups for small gang and fleet fights. Conversely, a high-sec incursion runner would be at considerably less risk, spawn no chances for player interactions, and be making comparable or more ISK than the nullsec ratter. This would be an example that needs addressing badly – riskier activities that add to the player content pool should be vastly more profitable than ones that do not – carrots not sticks need to motivate people to participate in New Eden. Incursions should get groups on their feet, an impetus to work together for a common goal in a more controlled environment, not sustain them indefinitely and outshine all other options.
Some of the latest changes have been going in this direction. The new structures definitely let people take chances at things, and put things at risk to seek bigger rewards – this is fantastic, good game design for groups of all sizes. Rewarding risk-taking and specialization to the point where it is worth doing is driving a lot of content. Faction warfare sort of gives and takes – the militias offer a ton of pick up and go content and nudge player hands toward a ton of destruction and creation. However, the reverse side of this is the sheer amount of farming that goes on via the missions and stabbed farmers, coupled with the size of the warzone and number of plexes; because the ways and means of farming LP are neither in short or in any way limited supply, nor are they actually gated with a need to even be at risk from other player activity, the optimal strategy is to avoid fighting in a warzone.
Sovereignty in general right now is a mixed bag – by and large the same old players with the scale and organizational largess are still the big consumers of sov content. Despite AegisSov mechanics letting anyone take systems quickly, it still doesn't quite offer as much as it could to medium size groups, either in terms of the content or income it can grant line-members. The entry barrier to sov is very low, but there needs to be more compelling and obvious reasons to want sov in the first place.
Standings are probably the most obvious thing in need of revision here – whether it is missions or faction warfare, or who knows what, the horrible penalties one incurs via these activities make no sense and have no place in the game currently, but are absolutely characteristic of many of the artificial entry barriers the game was previously fraught with. Either that, or add a tag system similar to the security status system for repairing faction standings quickly – take out the vintage MUD era NPC standings grind and let players be the freelancers they wish. Too many players end up victimized by standings which have ceased to offer many perks, take away the penalties, or offer ways around them.
C)A few smaller tournaments would grow some newer competitors and enliven this aspect of the game.
Now, many people brush off the AT. I don't blame you. When the same groups, or derivatives of them, keep winning time and time again, and there aren't actual good ways to gradually up your game, and it is hard to build an interest. As tournaments become fewer and further between, this will only serve to prevent the sort of smooth inclines of interest and effort that could allow newer groups to to grow as competitors. AT is sort of a big ticket, high entry barrier, high impact event for everyone involved, because it is the only real tournament around. It's a real simple idea – more frequent smaller tournaments would really do good stuff for the game.
D)Risk and reward should be at the heart of every mechanic.
Wardecs are probably one of the mechanics with the highest potential for generating engaging content, but largely fail to do so because of the asymmetry of it all. I.E. they could actually plant lots of great content seeds to get things rolling, but do not currently. Most of the larger wardec alliances can just blanket war-dec the entire game as there are no actual consequences to this other than token ISK costs, and no real risk to them due to high sec mechanics. If the wardeccers had to actually play a game of how many alliances and entities they can safely dec at once, say, by actually having ante on the table, things would be vastly more engaging. Right now there's nothing for defenders to actually attack to end the war, and no actual liabilities for the attacker, so the best strategy is just to dec everyone and take the easy pickings. However, numerous people have proposed structures or citadel modules/rigs that would be required to declare and wage war in high-sec – these would be a great addition to the game because they would turn wardecs into an actual game; how many and which things can I safely dec? The rest of the game has a very interesting approach to content. Someone gets attacked, somewhere, for some reason. Suddenly they talk to their friends for help defending….and suddenly the attackers also find allies, thus the escalation begins. Before you know it, EvE’s twisted and Byzantine alliances all work out who’s side they are going to fight for over a given, initially small, conflict. This right here is the essence of EvE – there are social consequences beyond one episodic instance, the game fosters these like no other, and conflict is rich with many different concurrent dimensions.People could actually get involved in the war once the attacker actually has some skin in the game. Now players could actually fight back – fantastic, an actual risk and reward paradigm for wardeccers!
I have feeling that a lot of the forced mechanics and entry barriers in early EvE design reached for this philosophically – opening one door comes at the cost of closing another door, like standings etc., but they failed in implementation because it punished players for just playing, not for ‘bad’ decisions. There is no current way to be bad at wardeccing, because there is nothing at risk.
E)A sample of Ship Balance
Blops are one of the last classes on the teircide agenda. To infer what is on CCP's mind with TII ships, one merely has to follow what they say, i.e. TII ships of all sorts represent specialization, along with the work they have already done on some of the TII ship lines. The TII cruiser line, while there could be a good deal of smoothing to make some ships more viable, does give a good philosophical paradigm. You can get more tank and raw combat prowess with the aptly named Heavy Assault Cruiser line, or you could forgo these in favor of more finesse in the Recon lines, trading raw tank and such for utility and EWAR. This continues on to the TII battleships so far – you can get damage, application, and tank at the cost of mobility in the Marauder line, or you can trade the tank and some of the application for a very unique ability among sub-capitals – a jump drive.
That's all well and good on paper, but they really do leave something to be desired for the price, both ISK and SP. Currently, there are few good ways to use them – looking for easy pick-offs with a few friends, as tackle and damage supported by triage for ganking large targets, or as an entire fleet supported by t3c logi if you have massive numbers. There are those that think giving them TII resists would be a good idea – this would be a horrible idea for a few reasons. First, it violates the teiricide paradigm – they aren't supposed to be progression from the t1 variant, they are supposed to be a specialization – not simply just a better more expensive ship. Second, this would give larger groups something that would come to be reviled – a jump fatigue reduced TII battleship fleet, pushing us a little back to the pre-Pheobe age, where content and power is only in the hands of the few. With a few triage pre-staged, these would come to asphyxiate any reasonable fights in very little time. What they need is specialization. If they are meant to be highly mobile platforms for quick strikes into heavily populated or defended systems, they need the tools to do so. Right now the only appreciable reason to drop them, in this particular context, is to showboat honestly. Why would you jump in a minimum 2b ship that starts the drop at 30% capacitor, requires at least one sensor booster to lock something in a reasonable time frame, cannot align quickly, and cannot warp while cloaked, when you could use any of the other options that do comparable damage at a faction of the cost and risk? Granted I like blops, a lot. I have more ISK invested in their fits than anything. This doesn't change them being bad at ambush tactics when every second counts. To make them specialists, Blops need a temporary bonus upon jumping that will make them 'show time' ships, highly capable for at most 60s, such that they excel at their specialization, without offering a simply better, jump capable, battleship. It could be anything – 300% scan resolution, heat damage reduction, agility, speed, application, etc. Furthermore, a revised bridge mechanic, preferably configurable on the module, where you could jump your blops and it's gang, similar to the area effect of command destroyers, would make them far less clunky and more like the 'specialists' they were meant to be.