TeaDaze.net

I apologise for not replying sooner but I’ve had a busy weekend with CSM focus groups (Thanks to Mynxee for running those) as well as it being a public holiday over here (thus needing to go outside for a bit ;)).

Nevertheless, your questions still need to be answered, so here we go.

1) It is true that Tech2 production requires a number of steps above Tech1 and I think that is a valid trade-off for the profits that can be made. Certainly if you put in the time to do the whole chain from reactions to invention to production you will make more profit and I see that as fairly well balanced. I’m not particularly industrially focussed (I just run a single reaction POS) so I’m not going to suggest ways to remove steps in the chain and remove their potential for profit.

2) Training times are long for newer players. From time to time CCP reduce the prerequisites for skills (such as thermodynamics) but I don’t see them speeding up training times any-time soon. It would be akin to just giving all players level boosted characters in other games.

3) Eve is 7 years old and an MMO, the other games you list are newer and single player. It is true that Bioware are implementing FMV etc in SW:TOR but that is a fairly new idea. I think CCP have enough trouble keeping up with the constant player requests without spending millions on FMV and voiceovers. We’ll see what happens with Incarna of course.

4) Tyrannis will see boosted insurance for T2 and T3 (hulls only). It will not be as high a payout as for T1, that is you won’t get 100% payouts.

5) UI issues are always being discussed in CSM. CSM5 will continue this trend. Small improvements are being made all the time, but at some point CCP will have to replace the main guts of the UI with something better.

6) The split in the markets was likely to encourage people to move goods between market hubs and make some profit in the process (plus buying something 5 regions away just because it is the cheapest would kinda suck). This would mean (for example) that regionally produced goods (such as ice products and various ore) would be cheaper in some areas than others. Sadly this hasn’t really happened thanks to the prevalence of Jita. There are out of game sites that provide combined market data and I wouldn’t put much priority on CCP making one market browser for the whole universe.

7) CCP were reluctant to implement any skill queue but CSM1 convinced them to do it. CCP want people to play the game and don’t see being able to queue up too many skills as being a good idea. I’m fairly happy with the current 24 hours, though I would like to be able to inject a new skill before all of the pre-requisites are met (i.e. if you are under 24 hours away from finishing cruiser 4 you should be able to inject and queue battleship 1)

8 ) Drones are pretty well balanced for ships where they are a secondary weapon system. A few ships could do with a bit more space or bandwidth but you’d need to discuss them individually.

9) Lag is a fact of life. CCP are already working on some fixes and we (as CSM4) had many discussions about it. With the exception of the grid loading issue which appeared with Dominion (and CCP have been working on as a priority) as fast as CCP improve their systems to support more players then players bring more numbers and lag it out again. A few years ago 700 people in system was unplayable, pre-dominion that went over 1000 players.

10) Security status gain depends on the level of missions or quality of rats you have available. If you are not gaining sec status fast enough then you’ll need to address that. CCP are unlikely to increase sec status gain because many people are already claiming it is too easy/fast to get back to positive standing from suicide ganking.

Agony do provide PVP training, check out http://www.agony-unleashed.com for details.

Thanks
Tea

I replied to the wormhole question on the EVE-O thread, but for completeness I’ll also copy it here.

As part of CSM4 I raised and/or supported a number of wormhole related proposals (refitting T3 ships in wspace, shared corp bookmarks, saving probe formations).

As I don’t live in a wormhole system I won’t try to second guess what issues players find while living there. However I will continue to support proposals raised by w-space residents and if you have any specific areas that you feel need to be looked at I would be happy to discuss various ideas.