Real life has been busy, so I missed a meeting report, so the last two meetings are combined.
As always, there’s not any specific information to share due to the confidentiality of the discussions.
CSM Meeting – March 27th, 2020
Discussion of 2nd Quarter Announcement
Discussion with Ecosystem Team Brief review of the recent MER
Ship Balance discussion
April 3rd, 2020
Review of Development Team plans
Discussion on CSM Summit Minutes
Review of CSM Election plans
Discussion of future CSM Summit plans
A uncomfortable amount of anime talk
Dunk’s Corner
There’s a lot going on these days with the new quadrant plan ramping up.
The ship re-balance was released today with is a good step to help increase the chances that no one moonwalks out of a fight without a bloody nose. The changes aren’t perfect and don’t touch a lot of areas, but I do think they push toward having more destruction in fights. We will see if the changes to sub-capitals have any change on the dominate meta. I would like to have a bigger shakeup, but this is a good start.
The changes to moon ore extraction and reprocessing have gone into the game and a lot more information has been released from the Ecosystem team. Hopefully people have a better idea of what the path looks like.
I do have concerns that I have bought up with the Ecosystem team. There’s a bit of disconnect of messaging that is going to players. As an example, there are changes promoting the use of battleships that literally encourage their explosion at the same time as the ‘starvation’ mining mechanics go deeper into play.
I haven’t done the math myself, but as I understand it, mining an entire Colossal Anomaly doesn’t provide enough ore to build a single battleship. As an industrialist, I see the base minerals/ore going up in price and making myself and other industrialists make choices where to use them best.
It’s not a matter of choosing whether to build a supercapital or multiple battleships. It whether to choose to focus on ships that don’t rely as heavily on base minerals overall. Building Tech 2 and Tech 3 ships, especially cruiser size and below is far more efficient in terms of usage of minerals.
I expect fleet doctrines to begin shifting to take this kind of thinking into account, which means a move away from larger battleship usage, an idea that CCP is actively trying to promote. This seems to counterintuitive.
With the grids of New Eden already full of HACs and Kikimoras, it’s hard to see this behavior not reinforced. Why bring ships that are difficult to replace when you can bring ones that are as effective and don’t have their building supplies in “starvation”.
Add in the new changes to capitals & supercapitals, it’s my concern the groups will be more conservative in their use of larger ships, contrary to the goal of more ship explosions. Rather than leading to more war and destruction, my worry is that it will lead to groups conserving their resources and “turtle-ing up”, only sending out lower cost roaming fleets.
The cost of war is high and almost never a smart economic move. I want more war in EVE and remain concerned that it’s much easier to haul in materials from Jita than to have a war with your neighbor and THEN have to mine the conquered space. That’s what the spreadsheets say, at least…
I hope you are all doing well in the quarantimes. Call your loved ones, they want to hear from you.
