Fireside Chat Transcript 7 Aug 2k22

Apparently we have to wait a few minutes for everybody to come in here.
So I will start talking in like 2-3 minutes.
So, and then Kassandar will take over.
Is this thing on? Give it another minute or two.
Yes, it's on.
Okay, I have waited long enough.
I don't want to wait longer anymore with this.
First, let's start with the war.
Oh yeah, for people wondering where is Asher.
I think he told it in many places already.
He had a pre-planned vacation before he took over.
So he's on vacation. He will be back in a few days.
And then we'll think.
So that's why me and Kassandar are now today talking here to you all.
Let's start talking about the war.
That's...
...Immensia.
We have done a lot of work here.
Yesterday we started the week pretty much with killing the M-Tech set.
Fortizar and breaking in there.
Then we took a lot of IHOPs there.
And then continued taking IHOPs in this constellation.
We killed the M-Tech set Fortizar.
We killed Fortizar in FRTC.
We put the W4E Fortizar in Hull.
This is a main staging Fortizar of the Seiza group.
Yesterday everybody did an amazing job there.
And today we continued with shooting more...
...killing more Shov, shooting more Fortizars and other structures and all those kind of things.
Getting fights. Yesterday we got a nice fight also.
So yeah, this is a lot of work.
Yes, I know IHOPs are not the most fun of things that happen.
But like yesterday when we did the IHOP timer, we got a nice fight out of it anyway.
So these are things that give us fights.
And it was good to see. So I was quite happy about yesterday.
So that's what we're doing.
We now have since today also a jump gate from ZMV towards Delft.
So the route to get here is a bit shorter.
So this is the quick TLDR about the war.
Also concurrent with the war, since Monday we have a new application that does Paplinks.
It's new. It has...
DevilCrafter says I'm not allowed to say ****, but it has a lot of features to be added.
But it has ****.
This is the new thing.
Just sometimes it takes a few hours for Paplinks to show up.
Sometimes it takes a lot. Please don't PM PM FCs about it.
They're just getting the hang of it also.
So just stand with it and everything will be okay.
JuliePaps will not show up also.
That's also in the old system.
So don't worry about it. It all starts from August.
That's when the data will be correct.
So that's the new PAP thing.
If you have trouble, just ask to your Corp CO. Don't PM FCs.
Thank you very much.
Then GSF Logistics and Poaching Reserve.
That is our new Logistics Corp.
And that's also the Corp you have to do fuel contracts to now.
Now I'm not going to link topics for that, because those topics are in CAHPS form.
And all those kind of things that not everybody can look at.
So just make sure you read the new topic and how to do fueling.
Also, please follow the rules, because we don't want people to get annoyed with things.
They're just going to... If you don't follow the rules, they're just going to cancel your contract.
And you have to do the contract again with following the rules.
And if they keep cancelling the contract, you're doing something wrong.
So just be aware of that.
Then what we have more.
We need more people scouting.
And we need more people doing scouting stuff.
Help scout stagings, follow enemy fleets, give us more information.
So for that we have Scouts is open for business.
Please go to the link, apply to SCOUTS,
be helpful for the military.
And the last thing I need to talk about,
and then I'm going to give two minutes for people to ask questions
that I might want to answer, I might not.
The last thing I need to talk about is from our friend Ranger,
P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I., P.I.
Everybody needs to do P.I.
We need P.I.
Please do P.I.
So that's basically it.
If you have questions, you have two minutes,
and then I might answer them, I might not,
and then Kazanir is going to take over.
Capital training at one point.
We had a capital training up a few days ago
when we sent fighters to the gate to avoid our friend Mist coming into ZMV.
So we had a training up a few days ago.
What's the question about Alt Corps?
If we have more information of Alt Corps next week,
until then, just wait until things happen.
And that's something we're going to announce to Kremlin first
before we announce it to everybody here.
So just that will not be any information about that until next week for sure,
and maybe a bit longer.
People are working on it.
Yes, there's still a move up post-fireside.
Yes.
So in 20 minutes, there's a move up.
So now I'm done with answering questions,
and now Kazanir is going to talk about many things he has prepared.
Prepared? That's a wild exaggeration.
I've just been sitting here smoking a lot of weed.
Hey, how is everybody?
It is the color of money, right?
Hey, DBRB.
So yeah, it's hard to know where to start.
This is such a great game, right?
And yet it's so terrible in so many ways,
and we all want to keep playing it,
and we get together every week to talk about it
because we want to play it so bad.
In fact, when we think about skipping a week of firesides,
everyone complains because we all like talking about spaceships so much.
Am I getting this right?
I don't think it's a Led Zeppelin song.
My name is Turkish.
My spaceship's name.
So the state of the game is super interesting, right?
Obviously, we did pretty well.
We won the war.
We had a ton of super capitals,
and yet nothing seems to be happening.
And so going on to the CSM, I start trying to figure out why,
like what was going on and what exactly about Eve was broken, right?
We're in this weird state where CSP did a lot of what they called scarcity,
and what ended up happening is they sort of brought the gates down
on top of capital production and progression for the whole game, right?
Which left us in pole position, right?
That's pretty much why we won the war.
We were sitting for many months in Delve with a whole one constellation,
but because of a lot of these changes, the game couldn't outproduce us, right?
And we were richer than everybody else, and here we are.
We still own our space.
Yay.
So it's all good, right?
What's the problem with that?
Well, we need a few more keepstarts.
That's true.
It is.
It's not hypothetical, right?
This is what actually happened, right?
And this is the big misunderstanding that really is my goal to convince people of on the CSM,
but the rest of the game and CCP is that everything backfired, right?
What everyone looked at is they looked at several years of Rorquals, right?
And Rorquals are the big thing that's in everyone's head.
But I don't actually, in going back and looking at the whole game,
I don't think Rorquals were the problem.
But for several years, everyone that could used super ratting,
and they used Rorqual mining to build as many super capitals as they could,
and they used skill injectors to burn through the whole skill curve as fast as they could,
and really burned out the game's whole power curve, right?
That's why we won, is we had the most people in position at the end of that power curve
with the most wealth and resources, and all of a sudden the faucet was turned off,
and it was a contest of who was already richer, right?
So the question is what to do about that, right?
No one wants to go back to the sort of capital proliferation numbers we saw,
or they think they didn't, but the question I think that no one has answered is
what do you do about Rorquals in 2019 or 2020 that isn't scarcity, right?
Skill injectors are definitely part of it. We're going to talk about this.
So what I did is I went back as far as I could to try and understand what exactly is broken.
You look at the PCU and it seems like half of the damn game is missing,
and I really wanted to understand why.
And what really surprised me—yeah, I mean, they did their best.
I mean, man, 4508, he said, "Austerity did wonders for Greece."
I went back all the way—it surprised me how far back I had to go.
I went all the way back in the patch notes all the way to Exodus,
which is the patches in 2004 and 2005.
There's three of them. There's Exodus and then Cold War and Red Moon Rising,
where finally Titans are introduced. All of that happens, you know, by the end of 2005.
What surprised me is that the whole game of EVE that made EVE great is already there right in those patch notes, right?
By the time those patches are done, you have the whole capital progression system, right?
You have that sort of endgame. You have a system of resources and conquest, right?
Moons are already in the game. They have star bases.
They have this concept of controlling them, and they already have Tech 2 in the game, right?
They have this concept of, "Here's your Moongoo,"
and so whoever controls the space is going to have access to this Moongoo and derive the value from that.
All of that already exists long before the vast majority of us are playing,
so that was really surprising to me.
So I sat down and started to try and say, "Okay, what broke this?"
And the answer is, like, probably a dozen different things over the course of the last almost 20 years,
but it wasn't just CCP. Someone in chat said CCP, right?
But it wasn't just CCP. What I realized is that CCP follows this pattern.
It's not like they don't listen to player feedback. They do.
Frequently, they listen to it in a bad way, right?
They listen to it, and they'll go and say, "Okay, players are behaving badly. People are mad about X, Y, and Z."
The monkey's paw, that's right. Someone in the chat said the monkey's paw.
And they'll look at it, and they'll try and conceive of a way, a game design for EVE,
where the players couldn't do that bad thing and implement it as if the players had never done the bad thing
and without actually looking at the state of the sandbox.
And we'll talk about this when we come back to scarcity, because that's exactly what happened.
But the players are also responsible for this in, like, multiple respects.
Some of these things that got changed. Scarcity is the most recent example, right?
A lot of the game was against rock walls and was against air quotes, capital proliferation,
and was against steel injectors, right?
And so CCP acted to nerf that stuff without really understanding what would happen
or where they were going or what needed to happen as a solution.
All they knew was that people were mad, they had to do something, and so they did stuff.
And so my goal was to try and avoid repeating this.
Unfortunately, we need them, because otherwise the game is just going to stay this way.
Someone asked, "Can we nerf the CCP devs?"
I don't know if incompetence is the right way. I think the players also—
what has impressed me researching this is that the players have also, like,
borne responsibility for this at multiple points, right?
And behind changes that, like I said, everyone thought that scarcity was just going to nerf goons.
And by accident, they ended up winning us the war, right? In various ways.
You know, you have these old town halls from during the war, people like Billy and Gobbins out there
taking credit for some of these changes that changed the air quotes for Warclaw era
without really grokking it, without understanding it, and without understanding what they were breaking.
Trying to read a few questions here. And I'm sorry, I'm terrible at actually reading the questions out loud.
So the big thing that happened, I think, is several things have gotten broken, right?
The one big thing that is broken is the progression curve, right?
With the combination of Warclaws in Lifeblood with Moons and Citadel with the capital rebalance,
allowing capitals to produce substantially more money on the field in PBE,
and with skill injectors, Ascension, which was in the middle,
it allowed players to get through the power curve of the game super fast.
You could get to the point where you had one or two or three Titans,
and now with the gates come down, there is no more power curve for you.
The problem is that there's no way to get out of that by nerfing stuff.
Once a game gets into that position, they don't have a solution other than somehow expanding the power curve,
which everyone in EVE is against that, right?
No one wants to see EVE Online become like a theme park MMO where you have to continually do mudflation, right?
We'll talk about skill injectors in a second. Someone asked about that.
But by the time they decided to nerf all of that stuff in 2019, 2020, and do air quotes "scarcity," right,
they were in a position where they do now need to extend the power curve, right?
And this is the mistake.
And this is what I realized this looking at their big old chart of super capital builds and capital builds over the course of time, right?
Once the Warclaw era has happened, it's too late.
You've let it go on several years.
Now a thousand people on each side have Titans.
You have to expand, right?
But what should have happened is, had they not done that, the existing Tech 1 capital power curve would have lasted them not three years,
but an additional five, ten, maybe even fifteen, right?
It was going pretty good.
Slowly, the rate was increasing.
But now they're at a point where they do have to somehow expand, and they have the framework for it, right?
They have the potential to do, you know, Navy capitals, faction capitals, Tech 2 capitals, supers, more than they have done now.
What they've got to do is not screw it up again, right?
Any expansion to use power curve, like I said, the whole player base, you ask them, they don't want another World of Warcraft.
Nobody wants that, right?
Whatever they do for expansion has to take a lot longer time.
We can't be in a position where people are building those in a one or a two or a three year time span.
But at the same time, you do need it in a situation where it is possible to outproduce your enemy, right?
That eventually, if you have them pinned down, or if your econ is better, or if you have a better grasp on game mechanics,
that you will be able to win a war of attrition.
And right now, that's just impossible, right?
There's not enough income in Nelsec.
There's not enough ability to replace the key hardware, right?
That element of the progression curve is just broken.
I don't know about classic.
So we'll talk about this.
Some of the stuff that they broke and can't get back, right?
So someone asked, no new content in two years.
Another thing that impressed me is that while CCP made a ton of changes,
the core EVE game is actually pretty resilient, and that's what I'm going to talk about, right?
The way that moons worked for the longest time made moons...
First of all, they were the source of a ton of economic value.
They were the only way for you to get tech 2 Moongoo, right?
And since everyone wants tech 2 to attack the game's power curve, right?
To be better in PvP, to be better in PvE.
A ton of value had to flow through moons, right?
That was where you got Moongoo.
And because of that, and because of how moons were laid out, moons were the value accessed for conquering space, right?
Well, sure.
Sorry, I keep responding to things without saying them out loud. I apologize.
This is something that ended up also breaking with Warp Walls, right?
By accident. And we have partly ourselves to blame here.
Of course, we're super in favor of farms and fields as a mechanic, right?
We want people to be out in space farming, and that's not what moons were like.
The original moons were, you put a star base on them, and that's it.
All you have to do is maintain the star base, and you, air quotes, "passively" get value, right?
But the problem is that by replacing those with actively fracked moons,
they deleted the way that space was given value, right?
With Lifeblood and the transition to extraction moons, all of a sudden,
if you didn't have someone to mine the space, the space was probably worthless,
even if you claimed it and took Sob on it, right?
Previously, all you had to do was tower a moon and have someone run that.
That was a lot of work to run a large moon farm in the old days, right?
Someone was saying in chat. But compared to what it takes to mine them now,
you couldn't have a moon up and running lickety-split and be getting that money from it, right?
So this is a giant problem. Not that we want to get away from farms and fields.
Obviously, we're super in favor, right?
But what is missing is something that gives space value just for claiming it.
It used to be that the first thing that happened in a war was you would go and try and conquer a bunch of moons.
Costs a person money, supposing side money, get some of your own, and it was immediately valuable.
Now it takes a month and a half for a moon to come online, right?
The other thing they provided was just a lot of back and forth, right?
They were smaller objectives than a citadel is.
They only had one timer on a star base, and the original Sovereign even functioned on top of that.
It was based on how many moons you would claim.
Of course, you go back and look at 2008 and 2009,
and you'll find our forums and the e-forums full of people complaining about POS warfare because they hated it, right?
But it produced a lot more smaller back and forth conflict than the citadel warfare or the infrastructure hub warfare that we sometimes see today.
So this is why I'm saying we can't just go back, right?
There's no way they're just going to go back to harvester moons, right?
We don't want that. I don't think they want that.
But what is missing is something that grants value to space just for holding it, right?
The idea that you should be able to conquer some small section of your opponent's space and have that be worth doing.
So I don't know what they're going to do to fix that, right?
But this is the other big thing, is that Yves originally was a game of conquest, right?
It mattered who held the space, who controlled it, not just because of who was farming it, but who didn't have, right?
And we accidentally lost that.
And again, I blame ourselves just a little bit because we love farms and fields so bad.
But this is an important piece of Yves that's missing.
I think it's probably the biggest piece is making the conquest map important again,
where right now, the last time someone went and tried to conquer space because the space itself was super valuable,
I don't know. That is what's missing.
And it hurts small groups, right?
Because it means it's not worth it to just go conquer a small piece of outlying territory that the big group can't defend, right?
And we see that. It also removed what you could do just to get value from that space if you're a small PvP group.
And we see that in the aftermath, the larger groups, the landlords, are even more powerful, right?
I have bad habits.
So this is sort of the preview is my—the big two things that are wrong is Yves' progression game is broken, right?
We're out of a progression curve. Something needs to happen to expand it.
And the Yves as a conquest game is also broken.
Values are all out of whack, and space itself is not valuable enough to take and to hold.
So someone asked again about skills. That's sort of—that's part of the progression curve topic, right?
Skill injectors are a problem because it's hard to nerf them, right?
They're super valuable, and we need something for people to catch up.
But it's obviously—they're very powerful, and they have made it so people can advance through a curve that previously took many years
and had a lot of sandbox interplay with pilot sales.
They've really obviated that, and so it's hard to know what to do there.
I—sorry, Kazunair. I need to leak something.
Uh-oh. Uh-oh, yes.
Horde just pinged to their alliance that they're going to deploy next Friday to Detheroid.
So everyone who—not sure, should I come on this move up?
Should I bring my capital ship and all those kind of things?
Please be ready in five minutes and join the move up for SetMV so you can be ready to fight Horde.
So I'll answer one final question before we go on this.
Uh, Pline and Dashi asked about, "Would this only fix Null and Sub warfare? The large majority of players are Null."
Basically, my working theory is that with Null being what's broken,
it's us and the outsized demand for resources that capitals present to the economy that's missing.
It's our support alts that are missing from the PCU and for people who are subbed, right?
It's our people that are missing from in-game space, right?
And it's our demand for that huge amount of resources to constantly be building caps,
to be building super caps that's missing from the game's economy.
But I actually think that potentially a power curve expansion can address that.
Can you imagine what it would take and how much Moongu would be in demand
if people were building a Tech 2 Dreadnought or a Tech 2 Fax, right?
So I think there is potential. There is hope there, right?
Even though it's just NullSec, the numbers involved drive a huge amount of activity in the rest of the game, I hope.
So this is something that should take a long time.
I'm not saying that as a CSM I'm here to push for Tech 2 Titans next year. That's ridiculous, right?
But some expansion has to be in cards, and we have to understand how to do that
without Eve turning into just another theme park MMO.
I think—well, the rest of the questions qualify as no future plans.
Let's go to this Moobop. Broadcasts are incoming. Thanks for listening, fam.