The first subject involved the upcoming redistribution of resources throughout New Eden. I'm not sure this will appear in the summer expansion but I found the segment interesting nonetheless. CCP Soundwave stated that he believed that the current sov mechanics were just a small part of the problem with null sec. I think that some people will get a shock from hearing what may about to descend on players...
CCP Soundwave - “We’re going to be tinkering around with minerals. Personally I’d like to see some changes to ice, for example. There’s a lot of interesting opportunities there. I think ice is very underplayed as a very tactical resource. Like it should essentially be the oil of Eve Online... It would be good if it was something that people thought about instead of something you get from endless mining barges in Empire that may or may not be piloted by people.”Like I wrote above, I'm not sure this will appear in a few months. But one topic that definitely will not see changes before the winter expansion are outposts. Are destructible outposts about to become a reality?
CCP Solomon - “One of the key drivers for this work we’re doing, and this come a lot from the CSM Summit, is people are looking for resource contention and acquisition to involve more people. They were concerned that it was too static and it was in the hands of the few. And rather -- we don’t necessarily want to stop that -- but rather encourage large-scale organizers to lobby more people in terms of gathering and exploiting these resources and working the space. So just systems have more of a feeling that they are busy and there’s activity going on there. That’s very much been a driver when we’ve been looking at this resource work and kind of the high-level goals we want to hit.”
CCP Soundwave - “It’s a little bit boring now but it’s also prohibitive for industrial gameplay. Being able to go out and drop an outpost is really interesting five years ago, but today space is just littered with outposts. So I think that if we get to a point where putting up outposts is something that you do frequently then I think we have a higher tier of industrial gameplay that I find really interesting, but because they’re not destructible we can’t really do that. So I think we need to find some solution where outposts can be phased out and then rebuilt. Whether you can kind of wreck it so you can repair it or destroy it, we need to get something going so that part of the gameplay gets really interesting. And I think there is a consensus with the players, the CSM, and within CCP that we need to do it, we just haven’t really gotten to it yet. Although I suspect that once we start picking up 0.0 it will be one of the early things.”Those who wish to see high sec nerfed, or at least not as good as null sec, received some hope with part of the discussion...
CCP Soundwave - “Right now the outposts in Empire I think are too good compared to the 0.0 ones, especially factoring in upgrade costs and stuff like that. It would be nice if they were better but also a bit more fragile. So you don’t have to grind through systems if you just want to go on a campaign and burn everything. Then why the hell not? If you want to do that then go for it.”I exclusively fly Minmatar and ORE ships, but I found the discussion of the user interface for drones interesting...
CCP Solomon - “Drones is actually an interesting subject and it’s gaining more momentum, certainly internally, as something we want to look at and address, both because we’ve heard some concepts about how drones can be manipulated and used more like modules but also because frankly our content designers and design people are raising concerns about some of the restrictions of making new drone types and changing attributes on drones. It’s an internal tool that needs a lot more work and something we want to address. And there are certain restrictions that has to do with the velocity of the drone vs. its ability to track its target that produces undesirable effects in-game so they are somewhat restricted in how they can improve and tweak drones. So this would be a good opportunity to both refactor that system so its more usable, all the tools are better for authoring and making design changes to drones and looking at how we can update the UI as well.”A revamp of the drone UI sounds like an extensive undertaking and I'll be interested to hear what CCP has to say about the subject at Fanfest.
The last subject concerned Tech 3 ships. After telling CCP Guard that we'd see no more Tech 3 ships and that CCP was skipping directly to Tech 5, CCP Soundwave said...
CCP Soundwave - “I really like Tech 3 ships. I like that they’re different. My biggest beef with them is that the subsystems aren’t really competitive enough compared to how many there are. But that is something we’ll get to balance-wise because there’s essentially one configuration for each race. Which I think is a little bit terrible.”I personally won't hold my breath on this as I don't see CCP making any moves in this direction until after the ship re-balancing is complete. But when complete maybe a clear role for new ships, including Tech 3 and even Tech 4, may emerge.
CCP Guard - “That was not the intention of the system.”
CCP Soundwave - “No it was absolutely not the intention of the system. So if we can get them to do something different I think it would be fun. What I keep thinking about is: do we want to have that modular configuration Tech 3 and then have ships that play differently as Tech 4 for example? Do we want to say, oh well, Tech 3 frigates aren’t modular, they play differently. Will that be weird? I don’t know. But we’ll get a different line of ships. I mean, I’d like to have modular battleships, for example. I think that’d be really cool. I think that would be high on my wish list.”
I should point out one final thing I noticed. The CSM received a few mentions, and not just in the "get out and vote" segment at the end of the stream. I didn't have time to transcribe any more of the Q&A, but the developers apparently actually do listen to the CSM's input on things. With an apparent revamp of null sec coming up and what looks like a null sec dominated CSM 8, things look like they may get interesting over the next year.
