CSM11 2nd Summit Minutes Summary (guest starring Jin’taan)

The CSM minutes are out for CSM 11’s second and last summit and we’re here on the frontlines taking a look at the things that might have slipped through the cracks as well as summarising the 52 pages of raw info. The presence has been great with 13 out of the 14 managing to take time out of their IRL lives to do space-paperwork, the only one missing being Fafer. SHAME DING DONG SHAME

We’re joined today by the local fly-on-the-wall Jin’taan which will pop in once in a while during my analysis to tell me how wrong I am or to proclaim the strength of his non-disclosure-agreement bond to his CCP overlords.

(I’ll be talking in the spooky text – Jin)

The summit starts with a welcome meet and greet, and before they even got their foot in the door, Xenuria grabbed the nearest CCP member and asked “Who in CCP is looking out for new technology to integrate into CCP?”. Seagull told him to sit his ass down and continued stating the obvious, that senior members in charge of departments are in charge of making sweeping implementations of new tech.

That out of the way, we then get all the members reinforcing their agendas when asked ‘what do is your dream change to EVE’. Nashh talks of player events, Hyde of balance, Gorski of lowsec PvP and Xenuria of social mediums. Nothing mindblowing.

We move into the ‘big one’ with the Production meeting. We find out CCP considers Ascension a success and we find out they have their sights on the next expansion, but given we’re set until 2020 with Drilling Platforms, Observation Arrays – which we still don’t know what they will do – and Player Built Stargates, I don’t know what’s there to talk about.

Hyde then took the reins and said something to the effect of ‘but muh balance frequency’, and CCP said ‘suck it up, we’re doing what we can’. However, it continued for what I expect was the next hour discussing balance, all of which can be summarised in ‘yes we know, yes we try, yes we’re doing the best we can, no we won’t dedicate a permanent number of CCP staff devs to making sure this game is achieves the impossible standard of balance that Hyde wants from the game’. Though you have to admit he’s fighting tooth and nail for it, props.

(It was also a discussion on what the overall worth/benefit of balance is to the game)

Moving on to the Web Services meeting, we find out that the Eve Forums will be prettied up by moving them to Discourse, which I don’t have enough info to proclaim good or bad, but which I’m sure everyone will hate.

Still, the main issue here is that it’ll be a normal ‘account’, unrelated to characters in game. That will completely mess up the Character Bazaar, introduce issues of impersonation, and various other stupid matters and all to change something that I don’t know if it’s really needed. For all the forum’s flaws, it works. The CSM did a good job highlighting all the issues and CCP didn’t have much defence against them.

(Lots of issues, but the new forum base is a lot better for making things readable. In general the mood regarding a forum improvement was positive. EvE is about communities and communication after all.)

I mean, this should settle how that discussion went: “Aryth asked if there was an RSS feed, to which CCP replied there isn’t, but you can get posts via JSON. “ Gee… thanks. Lemme load up my custom JSON parser on my phone to read forum posts notifications.

Noobman did make a mention during this forum debate on grouping accounts in the launcher so you have an easier organization but CCP shrugged.

They then moved on to the Engagement Events session. “CCP started by explaining that there isn’t any dedicated Engagement team right now.”

With that settled, they all broke for brunch and went for coffee and donuts. 

(Note to self: Get doughnuts for meetings if re-elected. Preferably blue.)

Ok, not really what they did.

In short we have Team Astro Sparkle and Team Genesis as the ‘lore’ and ‘events’ teams. They worked heavily on the NPE previously, and CCP is aiming at hiring another team to take over the Scope Network bits (tl;dr dailies/missions/stuff to do). Given Genesis is contributing to events, I assume Astro Sparkle was left on the NPE and the evolution of the concept to Career Agents and polishing up the existing experience.

Coming back to Scope Network, the tiny matter of killing Drifters as dailies was discussed and agreed that it was silly, and Gorski made the point that Operation Frostline was successful just because it was very ‘pick up and go’, as a contrast to pre-planned dailies. As the first event that I /really/ got into, i fully agree. It was great, accessible, rewarding and also provided decent impromptu PvP.

We were told that the current Guardian’s Gala is aimed at Alpha characters, so expect Omegas to be able to run them in pimped out T3Ds again. The next event will be around Easter, mid-April, and the new team should be starting to support events after April.

Jin’taan then brought up the most well-received set of events, the “Thrill of the Log In”, 10k SP per killing an NPC mob per day. To which i assume CCP went like “Yeah, that was cool, let’s never do it again.” Still, there’s a lot to work out there and there are ways of making it work for Eve without just being a handout for nothing and without making it a huge gameplay element. I think Eve should look at Warframe for how to manage daily bonuses/boosts.

(It was more of us looking at the problems with that kind of structure and how to avoid it with future ‘engagement events’.)

Jin’taan didn’t waste any time and mentioned making the random events two-sided. CCP dodged by overthinking it, in terms of either doubling the amount of sites or making it a larger gameplay feature and thus having to hand it over to design. I just want skins that are given when you kill the guy that is doing the site. That’s enough ‘sides’ for me. It only takes recognizing action to create the sense of agency.

(Having two acceleration gates to allow you to choose to kill either, say Angel Cartel or Thukker and get corresponding rewards would drive involvement in the universe of EVE IMO. But I digress~)

They squabbled for a bit on how to improve these events, using better AI, changing the distribution so there would be less gathering in dead-end empty systems, and various ways it can go in terms of design.

CCP asked if the CSM thought the sites needed to be harder. The CSM’s exact reply should have been “the very reason these are successful is that they /DON’T/ need specialized fits to be done even semi-efficiently and making them harder will make them be run less.” CCP also asked how much skill, SP, time and knowledge a new player should need to gather to be able to do the top-tier PVE content. The CSM’s reply should have been “three to six months solo, but since this is a multiplayer game, there should be greater concessions made for allowing weaker 2-4 groups to do said high level content sites, like making the NPC’s equally split up their damage and focus, instead of getting insta-blapped”.

(This became less about site specific content and more about PvE in general. We said that we thought the option for challenging PvE was important but that it shouldn’t replace the existing ‘easy’ content, as it is enjoyed by a subsection of players, believe it or not.)

The Judge drove the point home in saying that “it’s never been about skill as a player as much as knowledge of how the mission is structured, and how missions are structured has been a known quantity for a long time. “

The Inception meeting was up next and CCP was wrong. “As players that have a negative experience and wash out generally don’t come back for another go.”

Without hijacking this, how people leave the game matters more than them actually leaving. Having players leave bewildered and scared after a month is a much better option than having them leave content and bored after ‘themeparking and highseccing’ for four months. Eve is full of ‘played it, didn’t get it, left, came back two years later, now I lead a wormhole corp’ types of stories. And those only happen if Eve doesn’t put a pretty dress on and makeup to be something it’s not.

(I’d have to get statistics to prove this, but it feels like confirmation bias to me)

In any case, we were shown the completion rates for the tutorial, with 24% of the players finishing it, which, I would assume is a very low ball number, and Xenuria did as well, but given it’s not your standard avatar MMO i guess it makes sense; it also made sense for CCP apparently, calling it ‘normal’. We also got to see that 8% of the people quit the tutorial. Counting out 7% as alts, I salute the balls-of-steel-bearing or blissfully-unaware poor-sods that make up the 1%.

The CSM engaged CCP on various fixes and solutions to the NPE and tutorial. CCP asks the CSM to send them a list. Three months after the feature went live.

Bobmon suggested the widely-used option of hideable UI elements to not overwhelm. I’m still waiting for an explanation on why that wasn’t done to begin with, especially in a game as UI-heavy as Eve.

The next session is the one I’m usually hyped for since UI/UX is such a large part of Eve. CCP wanted to know for a better way for the community to give feedback on UI features. I was going to write exactly what I read in the minutes from Xenuria, “a tool inside the game client that would allow people to highlight a part of the client and send that back with a comment.” CCP went full :thinking: on this groundbreaking idea.

Jin and Noobman tag-teamed offering other suggestions, like contacting the people that actually use the UI and making them fill out questionnaires. CCP continued :thinking:. This apparently is a large issue for CCP seeing that outside of reddit and the forums, there is no way to talk to the people using their product. While in-game Clippy would be horrible, the solution still remains interacting directly with people in the game.

(They do have questionnaires that they send out, but this tends to not lead to a high quality of feedback)

There was much talk of wireframes, of CSM using Chaos or some ‘nightly’ server to test features way before they even hit SiSi, and of recording video of use. While this would cover top-tier use, the people that will be screaming that the D-scan cone stutters while fixed camera is used, this will not do much for fresh players or the ‘not that advanced’ players who may have different requirements of the system.

“The CSM asked what Psycho Sisters’ next task would be after Scanning. “ Hey, fly-Jin, what was the answer here? The minutes don’t show anything.

(3 letters, N, D, A.)

Either way, they moved on to the galaxy map, something that CCP, the CSM and the players at large judge to be still insufficient to take over the currently loved F10 map. It’ll be team Psycho Sister’s, the UI/UX guys, next focus after finishing the scanning interface.

Mentions of UI scaling, a forgotten feature that CCP will prolly make go away soon enough, dual overviews at the same time and how the UI deals with high load were all tossed at CCP.

“Finally, there was discussion around how CCP would like to move further towards not needing players to find external sources to teach them to use parts of the UI.“

Make them better, more intuitive and better integrated, or just integrate the necessary help. TIA.

(I’d like to note that this session is missing some of the smaller concerns we raised, such as Logistics UI not being equipped to provide feedback in a rep-falloff world.)

Then came the Customer Support bit with all the ‘big’ heads, including GM Arcade.

Nothing much was really said here that you can’t guess. The rubber-banding was fixed and no further occurrences have been seen, November and December was a hell of a time for support due to Ascension, ship compensation is geared towards newer players though gank targets sometimes use it to great effect to get their ships back as well.

There was also a mention that there is little to no automation of replies, though to be fair, copy-pasting pre-defined messages isn’t really ‘manual’ either. A computer parsing or a human skimming a message is in the end the same thing. I think we were more concerned whether tickets get a ‘human touch’, not whether the copy paste is machine or man-made.

At this point the customer service is splurging missed, post 36 hours, first-response ticket times and any issues with SKINS and omega time, literally whatever it takes aside from actually helping you with the issue. To be fair, I think Valve will have less issues with customer support if they started giving out free games too.

CCP said they will reach out to social medias to take in more customer support and route them to proper ticketing. Apparently they also want to do blogs and ‘competitions with players’, I mean that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days right?

I don’t mean to be excessively mean here, GM’s have a hard time as it is, it just seems to feel like they are still fighting in the muck instead of pushing for changing how the system works itself to streamline the process. Also, I saw no mentions of the new staff they were wanting to train since the last summit.

(Honestly just wait until they show the graph. The scale of uptick with Ascension shocked all of us.)

Beep boop, AI, NPC’s and mining ops session.

In a nutshell: “CCP started the session by asking about what the CSM thought about the mining ops. Noobman replied that they’re cool because they kill people.”

Nothing huge was said, CCP continues down their path of eventually replacing all NPC AI’s with these new ones. They also mention not wanting to remove too much at a time to not delete any ‘mastery’ grinding experience players have attained over the years.

This bit of the Minutes is incomplete as “some further discussion of plans for the near future with Team Phenomenon that will be added to the Minutes at a later time,“ which leads me to believe we’ll have a dev blog or something akin to a reveal soon enough, not far enough to be at Fanfest, but not soon enough to be in this month, so something in March.

CCP and the CSM then got into the thick goo of it in the moon mining and drilling platforms meeting which also functioned as a general ‘structures’ meeting. Seeing as “A dev blog covering this topic is being written and these parts of the Minutes will be made public at a later date,“ the quantity of info was limited here.

For in-structure services, insurance was mentioned as committed to, as we know from the recent patch, but also repair services. The CSM made a lot of mentions on having more intricate logging of various activities related to structures, as any WH corp that uses a ‘modules’ division knows they desperately need.

Various bits and bobs like blueprint locking, 0% tax logging, fueling role flexibility as well as T2 structure rig prices were gone over. CCP mentioned that they kinda wanted them to be god-awful expensive and any wiggle room they might work on might be coming at this from the salvaging angle. This I assume meant getting more out of salvaging than the actual structure wreck itself. ‘Looting the field’ and having extensive post-op support sounds to me like a really cool way to create gameplay.

A hardline answer was given to Mercoxit drones, in the shape of CCP going “GTFO.” and the topic of capital ship highwaying safely across space was brought up by Bobmon. CCP said “our bad, but didn’t get around to it.” CCP then suggested CSM members make a list.

(This is a list we’ve been curating for a while. If you have problems with things missing for Outpost/PoS parity, throw it at us.)

The team security meeting was up next. Here is what was said.

“Cook 250g of macaroni, or other small tubular pasta, for 2 minutes less than the packaging says to. Preheat your oven to 200 degrees centigrade Melt 2oz of butter in a saucepan (a big one. it’ll need to take the pasta too). Add 1.5 oz of plain flour, stirring to mix evenly. This forms what’s known as a roux (pronounced roo). let it cook for a couple of minutes.”

Enlightening as always. Security summit meetings are never revealed in minutes.

(I can say that I brought up the topic of how bans were handled by Team Security and the level of information provided to those banned/appeals process in general, given my own experiences.)

Next up, NEX store, and when CCP itself opens up with “are aware that the store UI needs work,” you know they know.

Steve, being the third party dev that he is asked for moar endpoints, so someone can make a web app to monitor SKIN prices and push alerts to your phone when that dank Hyperion SKIN gets a price slash.

Jin’taan, being the weeaboo that he is, asked for cat-ears.

(I’ll find something more PC for this but like, I can only express my response in anime pictures)

Xenuria talked about the psychological reasoning behind impulse buying.

Noobman was a hero and asked CCP, yet again, about alliance and corporation SKINs. Of course the answer isn’t in the Minutes but I can surmise it was “we’ll get to it after we finish injecting a mixture of morphine and speed into our eyeballs so we can work faster.” Aryth brought up citadel SKINs, since we all want off-pink hued citadels or just flat out solid gold ones.

The the fabled, cool-looking Serenity SKINs were once again brought up, but CCP is confident they can release good-looking SKINs with the new projection technology now in place. There were also various mentions of specific AT ship SKINs, E-sport SKINs, limited edition SKINs – all left in the ‘it’d be cool if’ bin.

(Specifically I wanted a Compendium/Signatures/Championship substitute SKIN that would be used to directly show support for the AT, as I feel that CCP really underestimate player investment & interest in it. Plus I’m a massive eSports nerd.)

Xenuria pushed for ‘joke’ SKINs but CCP shut that shit down instantly using long-winded excuses such as “lore”, “setting” and “mood”, so they don’t have to outright say “nah brah, we just won’t do it, srsly, stop asking”.

Staying in the same silly sphere, “Aryth asked (on behalf of his wife) if CCP could add pets to captain’s quarters. Jin’taan was delighted to think that he might be able to run a eugenics program when breeding slaver hounds. “

(Remember kids, it’s not unethical if you say it’s selective breeding!)

Speaking to monetisation, sound packs were talked about. “Nashh agreed with some of the points Xenuria made.“ I’m going to go pack my bug-out bag for the impending apocalypse.

Apparently, the scanning and D-scan UI deserved to have a completely different meeting and it was shaping up to be fantas—- “The meeting started with the meeting room computer crashing. “

Oh well.

(At least they didn’t delete boot.ini)

In any case, we get a release date on the redesigned scanning UI, which is somewhere around the middle of March, with the SiSi release hitting at the end of the month.

While you can find most of the details in the already released dev blog, here, it’s interesting to see that “the CSM also made some comments on a new ‘Presence Detected’ part that flashed up when the D‐scanner was used.”

That would be a mistake. It’d be too easy to shut down the bit of awareness and skill needed to make sure you catch that Sabre blip on your D-scan. “CCP replied that that function was still an early prototype, and doesn’t reflect the actual final idea.“ Well, OK then.

(The presence detected was basically a visual indicator of what you can see on all of your D-scan, sorry to burst your tinfoil. We were mainly concerned with the visual noise/intended use of it.)

We also have a section in the Minutes with the Phenomenal Phenomenon team which — “Due to the far future nature of this session, details of the meeting are not included in the public Minutes.”

Well, I guess they’re tasked with early drafting some future concepts. Whatever that may be, only the CSM and CCP knows, but I can guess nothing at all was set in stone.

Carrying on quickly through, we get to the EVE Brand discussion.

We find out yet again that the Eve Gate will go offline, Eve’s completely unused space-Facebook closing down. As expected given the forums also migrating away from its integration.

CCP Orca also showed the CSM members a future new intro video for the game. I always felt this was needed since the ‘far-Earth’ intro was really non-contextual and unhelpful for anyone to understand what’s even going on in Eve right now, both game and lore related. Apparently they’re planning on more video material anyway.

“CCP then moved onto the topic of billboards. Soon in the future, players will be able to click on a billboard and it would open up something based on what the playing video is.“

Dickbutt.

No but really while I’m glad for in-game linking, it would be nice, though I know almost impossible to police, to have out-of-game links. Say to recruitment ads, CrossingZebras.com, or what have you.

In any case, ‘soon in the future’ is almost code for Valve-time for CCP so it’ll be announced at this year’s Fanfest and dismissed by next Fanfest, only to be reannounced to be implemented at another one.

Xenuria didn’t waste any time and jumped to “pay to force a video to be played in a specific area for the purpose of psychological warfare,” which, if you thought I’d mock, I actually don’t. Wars can start over the smallest things, it’d be cool for this to be one of them.

CCP also mentioned there will be a cost to keeping ads in rotation in the future. While this will really solve the matter of expired ads with no context, I wonder if it’ll be ISK or real money. At the very least the mention that “you would add them through account management” should streamline the current ‘send via email and wait 3 weeks’ process.

They also talk of having wrecks stick around for longer, maybe killmail-linked as well. Special wrecks, like Jamyl’s would also link to the Scope News item. It was pretty cool to find out that they’re thinking in this direction, since it will help create more lasting history and give user-created context to the galaxy. I highly support this.

There was a lot of Fanfest talk as well, with an interesting bit about CCP wanting to add ARG/LARPers at Fanfest to work on the ‘players coming to Fanfest will be part of a story that will go into the lore’ bit. I’m… skeptical.

I won’t go too much here into the Fanfest bits because I’m still bitter that it costs as much as a Russian black-market kidney to haul my 65kg ass to Iceland for Fanfest.

And now, moving on to the subject of much imbalanced debate, Balance.

Straight off the bat, CCP Fozzie gives us a quick one-two punch with mentioning and showing the CSM members the Fanfest CONCORD ships, as well as going over the future concept of reworking T3 cruisers.

Nullification on T3Cs and combat ships was touched upon as well as the merits of static bubbles. It’s very much in flux, but there will be changes made there. I’m just gonna say that there are people that use T3Cs for high-tier explo content and gamestyle, and removing those options would be a huge disservice as there is nothing to realistically replace the options an explo T3C gives.

But this rampant conceptual discussion triggered Hyde into action, moving the conversation over to Alpha-player-specific balancing – which is a real cause for concern, and he had the right to bring it up. The issues moved around T2 ammo and its options, the concept of changing T2 ammo and turrets themselves also surfacing, but I hope the matter of drone availability also had a voice.

Hyde then moved on to the elephants in the room, rapid light missile launchers, heavy missiles, as well as quickly running through heavy interdictor scrams and issues of armor plates and shield extenders in regards to ‘slot economy’, battleships and their cargo hold and large cap batteries. He also brought up Battle Rorquals, Entosis and module usage as well as PANIC.

CCP said “how about they have to be hugging an asteroid to panic.” Apparently the CSM thought this was a valid option. Why yes, I WOULD like more obtuse gameplay limitations that probably won’t be written anywhere but in tiny font in the lore description of the module. This is how you make people lose their minds, ships and keyboards..

(When ‘proximity’ is mentioned, think closer to “on the same grid as” than “molesting the asteroid’s mineral goodness”)

In any case, I’m sure you can find most of Hyde’s views and opinions on such matters on the recent Crossing Zebras podcast on which he was a guest, fresh off the boat from Iceland.

When Hyde was done, Aryth brought up the slight matter of how shield capitals are shit, and CCP retorted with “git gud and grab the new shield slave implants when we get around to releasing them.” They also told the CSM that said implants would also nerf shield recharge, as to not create a compounding effect. Aryth wasn’t dissuaded, and then asked for the Wyvern to get a larger fighter bay.

Gorski then revealed his Minmatar-love roots as he brought up the matter of medium autocannons and suggested a lower reload time for them as a matter of making more use of its selectable damage type, in order to bring them up in capability to competing weapon systems.

Jin’taan brought up the matter of having a dedicated FC ship since Damnations get boring AWESOME, cruisers with double medium optimal bonuses and more types of EWAR bombs.

Noobman pushed that WH agenda with asking about the OPness of FAXes in wormholes. There was some go-between, but both sides agreed it was a matter of the capital capacitor booster.

Xenuria wants the Noctis to have a larger cargo hold.

NPE was next on the block.

CCP started things off telling of the promise to continue reworking career agents to the current NPE storyline standard as well as working on the first parts of the Operations Center – the hub of activity for people starting in Eve.

The CSM pushed for early PvP immersion but CCP is set on the path of making players super comfortable and taking them really easy. CCP instead asked what level of difficulty should the career agents’ missions have as well as how much repetition of actions is needed in order for the players to learn from them efficiently. The discussion moved to having ‘repeatable’ tasks, but here I wonder, why don’t you just let players loose on the existing content to repeat as necessary. I mean, highsec data sites and combat anomalies aren’t ‘hard’, and you can change the difficulty by engaging in harder content as you can right now.

Stop themeparking newbies.

CCP moved on to asking the CSM about how to more organically teach players things outside of dedicated methods. Aside from ‘fake ganks’ and having the player attacked on highsec gates the CSM responded with the concept of a boss.

I tell them we already have Dagan and the Sisters Epic arc already has enough visibility. Enough people are hitting into Dagan and dying to him not knowing why and not knowing how to even beat him. Do we want more of that?

(Yes, because asking for help or teaming up with others or doing out of game research is a key behaviour pattern to teach newbros.)

The rest of the Minutes devolve into discussing how to make empire choices more visible and expose more of the choices of the empire locks you in. Also they talked of milestones/achievements.

By this point the CSM was yearning for some juicy stats and in came CCP Quant with the Eve metrics meeting.

This was the dreaded scene of the Eve’s version of the Red Wedding when Aryth requested the stop of regional data in the monthly economic reports. “Aryth explained that some of this information was unobtainable by any other means, and that it was providing too much free intelligence by allowing people to see when groups were ramping up and down their industrial capacities,” and “some members of the CSM agreed.”

(At this point, our fly on the wall was feeling very hungover and decided to go sleep on the o7 show couch)

Noobman asked for commodities in the economic reports to be split between blue loot and other commodity types. Of course he did. It showed a slight increase. Then he also asked to look at the said overall wormhole loot value for commodities. Unsatisfied, he then asked about wormhole mining figures.

“CCP Quant finally showed a breakdown comparing ore and gas harvesting in wormholes.“

I like to imagine that scene with Quant just tossing his arms into the air going “FINE!”

There are a lot of stats, nothing surprising, and for the moment a lot of unworking chart links in the CSM Minutes themselves, so have a look at them later on.

Moving on quickly to the Eve mobile and Third Party Dev chat, we got to meet a new CCPer, CCP Argent.

It was a bit of a boring read until “CCP asked if they would want self‐destructing messages as part of the mail system, to which the CSM replied yes.” Well, that’s something.

The mobile app took up a bit of the conversation that followed with CCP asking the CSM what would they want to see in it:

Gorski: “Changing skill queue from the app, even being able to see the whole skill queue. “

Aryth: “Seeing assets, with search and price appraisal”

Xenuria: “See clothing items on character when looking at your character, even if only text based ‐ “My character was fit with the following” “

(Still passed out)

They moved on to APIs after this and Noobman wanted an endpoint to find out whether a corp member is online or not. Totes not suspicious. CCP Chimichanga, which has an awesome nickname btw, mentioned how CCP will turn over and kill XML and CREST over the next few months and move Eve apps over to ESI. They also want to kill as many redundant or low-use endpoints as possible.

There were various discussions also had about auditing and security of API keys, information exposed and Aryth mentioned something about 0% tax again. Apparently that was all he needed as the motion was passed through game design and Team Tech Co by this point.

(Rejoined the summit after chugging Red Bull)

After all that, they had a party with the community guys, most of the forward-facing and forward-supporting people that capsuleers interact with, as well as the ‘head’ of the ISDs.

“Steve mentioned (jokingly) that the EVE community sucks.“ NO U!

CCP is shown talking in the Minutes about the ISDs in no particular terms that mean anything, but can be summarised as “we reshuffled stuff around and made a website.”

The Alliance Tournament was brought up and interestingly, CCP said it will have a much higher profile in marketing moving forward, but while still being staffed by volunteers and with the code still just maintained by CCP Logibro & whoeverhecansuckerintohelphimwithit.

Hyde wanted to stop the practice of giving out AT ships for the AT, and if CCP does want to continue the tradition, they should allow them to be got outside of the AT. Hyde also mentioned some sensible rule changes to the AT, like dropping pilot numbers, banning AT ships and removing the concept of flagships. At this point CCP should just let EVE_NT run the AT with their custom ruleset.

(The idea of changes to the AT were contentious amongst the CSM)

Moving on to spooky space, the wormholes meeting; which I can imagine it was literally Larrikin, Fozzie, Nagual, Logibro and Noobman having a pint in a bar.

Noobman told CCP how Wingspan’s fears of persistent Alpha scouts didn’t pan out as viable in game and how it wasn’t an issue. Showing the stats he wrestled earlier from a barely-willing Quant, Fozzie confirmed that Ascension apparently created an increase in C2 and C3 activity and krabbing. Mining was brought up as needing a buff in wormholes as well as the large issue of Bhargests FOF missling Sleepers outside of their lock and activation range.

Sullen brought up the matter of Drifters getting killed by Citadels and CCP replied “we’ll try making them not dumb, kthxbye.” Noobman also shared the bubble and snatch method to ‘fish’ drifters. DELETE THIS.

There was a fair bit of chatting around site spawning as well as sites even working correctly, “Sullen asked if CCP still were spawning less sites in a system that had lots of completed sites, to which CCP replied that the site distribution system had never worked in that way,”; not that CCP was in a rush how it actually worked . I kind of bet none of them really know and are afraid to touch said code.

Noobman also brought up the wish for C4-null and null-C4 connections, with smaller mass, but I see no mention of C6 dual statics, so it has to be a cunning trick of some kind!

There really were a lot of bits and bobs about wormholes, none of them mind blowing, but check out the full Minutes for them.

Getting closer to the end here, but Project Discovery also had a slot.

In short, Eve players are OP, CCP ran out of datasets way before they thought they would, results are already used in research papers and we might be getting more stuff to do soon enough, even if not cytoplasm related.

Oh, and apparently we discovered something called ‘rods and rings’. I guess that’s cool. I’ll be waiting for the comment on this article which thoroughly explains why it’s important and why I’m bad for not knowing. I’ll be glad to read it and stop being ignorant.

(It’s something super cool to do with how cells work that I don’t understand. I too look forwards to the breakdown from someone who understands biology)

The last bit on the sheet was related to CSM organisation, featuring whoever was still awake and alert at that point.

Permanent attendee’s are going out the window. Not physically, but the actual status. CCP dropped the number of members to 10 for CSM 12 and when asked, replied that it had nothing to do with the finances involved. They danced around the issues of how many summits before sticking to the current two, though I would expect remote attendance to be something they will want to solve since it can be an issue, even if CSM 11 had great attendance.

(The fact that we were all able to meet and interact physically felt like a great benefit to the CSM as a whole. Plus it helped prevent the infighting that having a certain subsection of the CSM be treated as ‘better’ by CCP and flown to Iceland lead to.)

“The CSM also brought up a section titled ‘Open Debate’, and were worried about the statement about the CSM being expected to debate and call out CCP or disagree with them. They believed that the section was too strongly worded. After much debate, a section was removed.“

Aside from that, nothing really big, though the mention that we’ll have 14 slots still instead of 10 for the CSM 12 elections does cause confusions. Point to Xenuria for pointing it out.

And with that we’re closing down this ‘summary’, skinning down 52 pages into 15. It’s something! Brought to you with love from Crossing Zebras. Don’t forget to support us if you want us to keep writing and editing five thousands words worth of this kind of stuff. 🙂