Game Design is Hard

I posed a question to the #tweetfleet (the EVE twitter community) yesterday, about cloaking devices:

Hey #tweetfleet what's wrong with cloaking devices using some sort of fuel? #EveOnline

I was curious how people would respond to a feature change that would significantly alter a security blanket in EVE, and overall, the responses were what I expected. @bel_amar provided a perfect response for this discussion:

Because most complaints about cloaking is really about AFK cloaking. And the real issue with AFK cloaking is suddenly hotdrop

And that's about all I have to say about cloaking devices and fuel. I'm not for or against it as a feature. My question was more about how hard it is to gather feedback about a game feature (or change).

Game design is hard.
CCP relearns this every time they add or change a feature or function in EVE. CCP has some very talented folks on their payroll, but (like the rest of us) they are only human, and make mistakes. The advantage they have (as developers first and players second) is that they aren't trying to design or modify a feature to their benefit. They (hopefully) are making changes to improve the game as a whole. The problem they face is that for any single feature or function in EVE, there are hundreds (or thousands) of people who use it and rely on it, one way or another, and people detest change. Realizing that any change they make will piss someone off, CCP does what any smart developer does, they filter out (or ignore) most comments or discussion once a feature is in development. This is (usually) a good plan, to keep them focused and on target. However, when a feature actually makes it to Sisi, CCP needs to take the earplugs back out.

On any given day, there are 30-40 thousand people logged into Tranquility, and maybe 200 on Singularity. That's a very small group. Those people study the impacts of changes long before they make it to Tranquility, and are in a position to take advantage of any new features. They are also in a position to discover glaring exploits long before they go live. CCP needs to find a way to channel the knowledge of these players, a way to utilize them to minimize the glaring errors that should never see Traquility.

Things like the Technetium bottleneck, Faction War LP manipulation, Planetary Interaction exploits, could all have been avoided if CCP was listening to the players on Sisi, and took into account the fact that a player on Sisi is more invested in EVE and might even know more about a feature than the developers. Let's face it - there are some very smart people playing this game, and some of those smart people are smarter than the people writing the code (side note - I am not one of them). If CCP were to channel the experience and knowledge of the players on Sisi, it might make a better game for all of us.

Back to the question in the beginning. Of the 17 individual replies, one of them addressed the question. There was a good smattering of why AFK cloaking isn't a problem, but no direct response to the question (the one that addressed the problem mentioned that it had been discussed and would be hard to do). I'd be surprised if responses in the official EVE forums were any different. The signal to noise ratio (16:1) suggests that any general discussion with the community at large about a feature will produce very little quality information. By reducing the pool of responses (focusing on Sisi players), one might hope to reduce the noise level, and increase the signal response, to a useful level.

The Gentrification of the Western Hemisphere

As I write this, the other "writing on the wall" is the fall of Fortress Delve and the IT Alliance. Let me be clear on the first point: I am not a part of any of the alliances involved in this, the end of the "Forever War" in EVE. I have never been in IT. I have never been in an IT renter or pet, and I have never been a member of any of the alliances that make up the so-called "Northern Coalition." However, I have been aligned with forces against IT pets, when a resident of Syndicate and Outer Ring, and I have been aligned against the NC during "Max 2" - the northern invasion of Winter/Spring 2010.

The Verite Rendition map is a brilliant map of the various alliances holding sovereignty in EVE. Unfortunately, it does not have the ability to take into account the meta-blocs of the game, like the DRF, ASWagon or the Northern Coalition.

From Vale of the Silent in the Northeast,across the entire northern hemisphere to Cloud Ring, all of those alliances can be treated as one group. This is the current "Northern Coalition" founded to stand against the threat of the now two-years dead Band of Brothers (BOB), and any iteration of alliance formed from the corporations that comprised BOB, including the now-mortally wounded IT Alliance. If you assume that IT Alliance, and it's pet/renters Black Star Alliance, HUN Reloaded and BLADE are merely dead men walking in Fountain and Delve, you see that over half of Nullsec will soon be held by the (now perhaps incorrectly named) Northern Coalition. I will not make broad future assumptions about changes to the NC - instead I assume that inertia will hold the NC alliances together with blue status for the foreseeable future. Examining the map with that in mind, it becomes quite clear that the Northern Coalition of alliances (which contains upwards of 50 thousand pilots) has created a vast safe haven for the individual members to earn ISK. This, in my humble opinion, is the straw that may break the proverbial camel's back in EVE.

Nullsec has long been held up as "high-risk high-reward" and for some time, this was true in many places, but in this gentrified western hemisphere, that will no longer be true. As far as the Carrier can jump, vast ISK fields stretch before the average NC pilot, with little true threat within striking distance.

The western hemisphere of EVE has the potential to completely destroy any hope of balance in game, far beyond the damage already done by the T20, PI reprocessing, or the moon-goo fiascos of the past. Where Technetium lined the pockets of corporation and alliance leaders within the NC (and for some, trickled down to the average pilot), the vast resources of risk-free nullsec have the potential to change the wallet balance of the average NC pilot from the hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions in a short time. Safe from Black Ops hotdrops (4.5 LY max distance) and with the vast resources of the supercapital rich NC a deterrent to any smaller alliance with delusions of invasion, pilots will be free to farm Sanctums, Havens, and of course to chain multi-million ISK Battleship rats in the true nullsec systems far from any real threat. This means that rather than earning a few hundred million ISK in income per month, these pilots can make billions. By turning the entire western hemisphere of EVE into a giant ISK faucet, the average NC pilot will be able to shrug off losing carriers or faction battleships the way empire carebears shug off Drake losses in missions.

Add to that the lack of available sovereign space for a new entity to grow large enough or rich enough to even consider threatening the NC bloc, then the solidification of the NC as the sole superpower in EVE is practically a foregone conclusion. The "problem" if it is to be considered one, is that the risk-to-isk ratio in nullsec is negated in this brave new world. Even today, with the ISK or even the stockpiles of ships that the NC has at it's disposal, no entity could sustain an assault upon this group long enough to break it. The average NC alliance can replace supercapitals without hesitation, while other alliances hesitate to replace any ships that do not exactly match fitting standards.

Is there a solution? Maybe, but not one that would actually change the game for years. CCP would have to change the costs of sovereignty modules and upgrades, they would have to dynamically change the value/quality of rats in systems based on the sovereignty levels or upgrades, re-adjust the T2 moon mineral balance for ship construction (again), all of which are artificial ways of constricting this vast meta-alliance. Even with changes to those items, it would literally take years (if not longer) to cause any significant dent in the wallets of these alliances. In addition, it's likely that with CCP's track record, any changes to costs would be even more detrimental to small alliances hoping to get a start in nullsec, making that activity even more of a non-starter.

The reality is, it's time to get a character into an NC alliance, and start farming. Although it's unlikely that your wallet will reach the pinnacles of ISK that the existing farmers have (after all, they are farming ISK as you read this from your empire mission hub), the imbalance at least moves up on a sliding scale, enabling you to maintain your position in this new, vastly unbalanced world. Those who aren't able to keep their position on the sliding scale (I'm looking at you, L4 mission runners) won't be affected until they join an alliance with delusions of grandeur and nullsec sovereignty.