The Lowdown on Lowsec

And we’re back from a bit of a break in blog posts.



And we’re back from a bit of a break in blog posts.

Let’s talk about lowsec. Now, the general consensus is that it somewhat sucks. Living in lowsec a good bit of the time as I do, I have to agree – in fact, it sucking is why I don’t live in lowsec more than I do. I’d love to spend most all of my time in lowsec, I think it could be a really cool place to try and build a mid sized cartel, not quite like the big 0.0 alliances, but a group that still manages to control the area through economic, military, and political influence, even though the sovereignty mechanisms of 0.0 don’t exist. I personally think that has the potential to be a cooler endgame than 0.0 POS warfare and lagfests. Not that I have anything against 0.0, I just personally think I might find lowsec more interesting.

Except for that one little thing about lowsec sucking. It’s not worth the effort of all that right now. So, being enough of a pragmatist to realize when it would just be plain silly and dumb to totally devote my energy to that, and waste corporate and alliance resources for little gain, my dream remains largely unfulfilled.

Oh, sure, I do run a coalition of alliances and corporations that have all signed NAPs with each other and try to work together in a small area of lowsec. But that’s really just a taste of what I wish I could accomplish in lowsec, and the reward so often doesn’t justify the effort that it’s only my devotion to the idea that has kept me going with it as often as not.

So let’s identify a few specific things that could be done.

First, I think we need to promote rewards for industrial efforts in lowsec. Lowsec needs to be worth it in terms of industry, or else the only reason people will go there, for the most part, is for combat, maybe to get to 0.0 or to take a shortcut, and once a month to fuel their POS. And that doesn’t really give the pirates enough to shoot at. Mission runners and ratters have some reason to go to lowsec, and people that want to run a POS, but miners? Lowsec ores are a joke, and this is in urgent need of attention.

Researchers do have some reason to take shuttles in once every so often to get shorter waiting times on ME research slots, but there currently exists no reason for industrialists to do the same with manufacturing slots. Now, I’m normally the last to advocate a nerf, but I think we need to consider all options here when it comes to making lowsec manufacturing slots advantageous over highsec ones, and advantageous enough to be worth the effort of securing a supply line. If this were done, we might see industry corps start to try to use lowsec a bit more – the clever ones would prosper over both ones that were not so clever and fell prey to pirates, and over those who remain in highsec – which is as it should be. And certain friends of mine who operate on the other side of the law tell me that this would make things much more fun for them, too.

See? Improve industry, and everyone profits!

While improving industry and mining, I think it might be a good idea to look at a few other things in lowsec as well. Missions are better in lowsec than highsec, yes – but still most people choose to do them in highsec, rather than lowsec (despite it being a relatively safe activity to engage in in lowsec). Perhaps we should look at farther boosts to lowsec missions – though this is purely speculative, of course. Any changes need to be carefully considered.

Now, if highsec is considered the home of the ‘carebears,’ and 0.0 the home of the great alliances, lowsec is generally considered the home of pirates. While I would like it to be home to clever industrial groups as well, I’m not adverse to it maintaining something of a reputation for shadiness – in fact, I’m very much for this reputation for shadiness, and think it would be great if some of the industry groups that become successful in lowsec acquired a similar reputation for perhaps bending the law every so often. So perhaps we should put more (or any?) pirate agents in lowsec, so that people can run mission for them there, and gain standings. And then let’s make those standings mean something, like standings to the empires do – say, if you have positive standings, or standings over a certain amount with a pirate group, rats of that faction won’t shoot at you. This might be of some interest to miners if they can’t get someone to tank the rats for them. . . .

Let’s also give traders a little something, and make NPC buy and sell orders for various illegal commodities – drugs and the like – in lowsec. Arrange things so that long risky journeys through lowsec to trade these goods will be very profitable, as will trips that require smuggling through highsec to reach an isolated pocket of lowsec. Traders will have fun with this, and pirates who prey on them will as well.

Now, simply improving reasons to go to lowsec isn’t the only thing that needs to be done. It’s very hard to control and defend, unlike 0.0, or at least so I understand. While I think this is part of it’s charm, and I would never want lowsec to be as easy to control as 0.0 is, or as broken up into power blocks, I do believe it should be a bit easier than it is now – and that their should be rewards for managing such a difficult feat (besides the fame of course). How? Well, I’ll be honest with you here – I’m not sure. This part of the plan needs a bit of work. I know at least one of my fellow CSM candidates has some plans regarding this, and I hope that this is something we will have the chance to work on together. And you can be assured that I’m thinking carefully about this. But I also want your thoughts and opinions on this. So tell me:

Lowsec sucks. How can we make it better?

Industrial Improvement

Apologies for the lateness of this blog post, I meant to have it posted yesterday evening, however, various circumstances conspired that this was not so.

On to business. Let's start with ways to improve industry and trade.

First Point:
Currently, a large amount of tech one modules are fairly useless to produce, at least if you intend to sell them, because no one really buys them. There are various reasons for this, I believe, and it needs more investigation, but I suspect that module drops off of NPC ships are largely to blame. This can be seen in a number of cases where the sell prices on the market for modules available only as loot (meta level one and two items) is less than the sell prices for the same type of item that was manufactured (meta level zero varieties). The sell prices for any manufactured item are of course limited by the mineral cost to produce it, people selling looted items might not use this as a consideration. Thus, while buy orders for all meta level zero items exist, they are for prices below the mineral worth of items, and sell orders for many meta level zero items have very low rates of sale. One of the net effects of this is that manufacturing is somewhat more difficult to get into for a new player than combat or mining, as one needs some experience and knowledge of how to read Eve's market to figure out what modules will actually provide a profit when manufactured, and even then the competition for limited sales can be daunting for the budding industrialist.

There is, of course, no easy solution for this problem. Simply turning off all loot is not really an option here, it is a part of the game, and while there is room for adjustment, I do not believe such a big change should be made without very careful consideration of all the potential implications, and a plan to deal with them. However, there is room for change. As a possible – and I stress possible, it needs a good deal of thinking through – solution or partial solution, perhaps a reduction in the amount of meta level loot, coupled with the ability to produce meta level items. Details obviously need to be worked out – would these be produceable from BPOs buyable from NPCs, or would some form of invention be required? Special components, or just minerals? Would you need skills to make them or not? But that brings me to my next point:

Point Two:
We need more midlevel manufacturing opportunities – something between tech one and tech two manufacturing. To some extent, tech two component manufacturing helps, it's something you can do that requires more skills and resources than tech one manufacturing, but not as much as tech two research and production requires. Production of meta level items has the potential to fill this niche.

Point Three:
Speaking of niches, it would be nice to see a manufacturer be better able to build a brand identity. Now, there are two problems with doing this currently: one, your items are exactly the same as someone else's that produces the same type of module. You can't say “we make the most reliable ones” or “we make the most powerful ones.” I remain cautiously optimistic about tech three items in regards to this, but I'm not holding my breath. Second, the market doesn't allow for people to choose who to buy from based upon who's selling it. More on this farther down. So I'd like to see some way to establish a brand identity, and I'd like to see specialization rewarded. Perhaps more advanced industry skills that make it faster to build certain groups of modules, maybe tech three will allow other things. We'll see.

Point Four:
I'd like to explore the idea of having components for most all items, even tech one items. This could give newer manufacturers something to produce that would always be in demand, be another thing people could specialize in, and make manufacturing of tech one items slightly more interesting that just putting in minerals – you actually put in the parts to assemble the item, which makes a little more sense. But perhaps not – it's an idea to explore, not something that I'm completely sure of. And maybe tech three will give something like that, I'm waiting to see.

Point Five:
The market! I think we should take a look at potential changes to the market. The current market is fine for some things, but it has some noticeable failings – you can't pick and choose who to buy from, nor do you know who you're buying from, making it impossible to boycott a specific company, or be loyal to a specific brand name – in fact, it makes the building of a brand name rather hard, and makes advertising rather less important for many corporations (speaking of which – I'd love to be able to rent ad space on the CONCORD billboards). It also encourages undercutting by .01ISK, in fact, it makes anything else rather dumb in most cases (obviously not in all cases – but in most). Personally, I'd like for someone to buy my goods because my goods are the best, or because I have a good relationship with the customer, or something like that, rather than because I managed to lower my sale order or raise my by order by a tiny amount more recently that anyone else.

I think I'll end this here for now, I plan to have more in the next couple days. Be sure to tune into Eve Radio tomorrow, myself and other candidates will be speaking between 1800-2100.

Campaign Promises, oh boy.

For my blog post today, I’d like to detail some issues that, if elected, I would work to address – though even if not elected, I still hope to bring them before the CSM, and hopefully they will deal with them. Running for election is turning out to be a great experience, I’ve had the chance to get to know some of the other candidates, and while I hope I get the chance to work with them on the CSM, I’m sure we’ll be able to work together on some of the issues we have in common. Being a member of the CSM, however, will be of great help to me in bringing these to CCP's attention.

Now, in no particular order:

– General Forum Improvements
CCP has been changing the forums around a little lately, trying to improve them. I’m reserving comment on whether these changes really improve things or not, but we need some other changes that I haven’t seen any indication CCP has planned. As in, the best way to do it would be throwing out the current forums and just replacing it with better forum software – though if that would be difficult due to linking forum accounts to Eve and the rest of the site (I’m unsure of the technical side of this), just a few simple improvements like increasing the post length limit (4000 characters? Maybe I just like to talk, but personally I find this a bit low), adding a PM ability, and a better search function. And doing away with the profanity filter, which doesn’t screen a lot of profanities, and screens a lot of things that aren’t profanities (granted, a number of them can be, but not in the context they’re most commonly used in – and certainly not when they’re simply part of a larger word). Making it In Game Browser friendly would be really nifty, too. I’m sure there are other things, too, maybe you can suggest some!

– While we’re talking about increasing the character limit on forum posts, what about increasing the limit in Eve-mails? I routinely find myself having to break up a mailing into two or more parts, which is extremely annoying, and creates unneeded clutter in mailboxes everywhere in Eve.

– Also in regards to Eve Mail, the ability to dump it to a text file on one’s computer would be nifty, and make archiving things much easier. We have chat logs – why not mail logs?

– Not just more space for Eve Mails, but in bios, too.

– Ability to kick players from a corp while they are in space
Oddly enough, you can’t kick players from a corp while they are in space. Which opens the door to all sorts of griefing, as players can enter a corp under false pretenses, open fire on corpmates without CONCORD repercussions, and remain in space as members of the corp to shoot any other corp members who happen to undock. I doubt this happens every day, but it’s something that I’d like to see fixed, and that should be fairly easy to do if nothing else.

– Some more icons for corps to choose from in their logos would be nice, especially some more obviously industrial, mining, research, and trade related ones. There are some, true, but . . . we could do with more. I can’t imagine this would be terribly difficult to do, either.

– On that same topic, given the recent changes to alliance logo submission, give alliances that don’t qualify for custom logos the ability to choose predefined ones like corps can. Also, expand what alliances are eligible for custom logos.

– Moving on to the topic of roleplay and immersion: it has been rightly said that most of the content in Eve is player created. The entire ‘0.0 endgame,’ for example (as an aside – I personally believe the endgame is what each player makes of it, and that 0.0 does not, and should not, hold exclusive claim to be Eve’s endgame). When it comes to immersion and Eve’s storyline, things are no different – most of the content and story is driven by the players. I’d like to see CCP get involved and acknowledge the player-driven storyline more. Capsuleers are the most powerful beings in Eve. The things we do should have an effect on Eve, and I’d like to see more acknowledgment of that from CCP, see player driven storyline impact the ‘official’ storyline more, and see CCP controlled NPCs interact with players much more. Opening things up again for players to submit stories to be made official chronicles would also be great.

– At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with CCP created content. Let’s have more of it. Maybe some more frequent chrons, perhaps ones in a different style than Abraxas – I dearly love his work, but don’t want to overwork him, and variety is good – as well as more events. Especially events not related to Factional Warfare, some dealing with industry and trade would be nice. And some just pure freeform roleplay. Of course, it could be that we have more than I think we do now, in which case what’s needed is a bit more publicity.

– Nothing wrong with combining player driven content and events, though. Giving players tools to better create events would be pure win and awesome.

– Back to official content here, I recall that at one point there was an effort to harmonize the Prime Fiction of Eve, to find the various things that don’t agree with each other and ninja-edit that all out. To the best of my knowledge, though, nothing ever came of this. I’m sure there would be players willing to volunteer to find most of the discrepancies, all CCP would have to do is decide what the official line for each of them is and make the edits.


Well, I suppose that should do for today. A few bigger changes, mostly littlish things, all of them would (I feel) be improvements in Eve. I’ll try to blog about a few other improvements in the next couple days, either lowsec, industry, or both. I’d like to improve them together, after all.

Hmm, that could make a good slogan – “Lowsec and Industry, together at last.”

It's Official, and Sigs

Well, the moment all the candidates have been waiting for is here, CCP has sent out the notices to each applicant telling them if their application has been approved or not. I didn't have any real doubts that mine would be approved, but it's still nice to hear from them that I did indeed remember to cross all my 't's and dot all my 'i's on the form. They expect to have an official list of all candidates published tomorrow.


Moving on, I've been working on a few different signature graphics for anyone that wants to show support for my candidacy. Simply copy and paste the code for the image you want to display into your sig -- even better is if you make the image a link to my blog or my campaign thread. I'll include instructions for each at the end.

And if you have a sig you want to submit to be listed here, or a slogan you think I should make a sig out of, or any other ideas to promote the campaign, please let me know! You'll recieve credit here for any sigs or slogans you come up with, of course.


Sig 1:


BBCode:
[IMG]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p181/Galvorte/CSMsig1.jpg[/IMG]

Sig 2:


BBCode:
[IMG]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p181/Galvorte/CSMsig2.jpg[/IMG]

Sig 3:


BBCode:
[IMG]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p181/Galvorte/CSMsig3.jpg[/IMG]

Sig 4, Slogan inspired by Athas Darksun:


BBCode:
[IMG]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p181/Galvorte/CSMsig4.jpg[/IMG]

Sig 5:


BBCode:
[IMG]http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p181/Galvorte/CSMsig5.jpg[/IMG]


To create an image that links to this blog:
[url=http://garionavarr.blogspot.com/][imgcode][/url]

To create an image that links to my campaign thread:
[url=http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=901209][imgcode][/url]

Please note that the Eve forums requote quote marks around the URL, other forums using BBCode don't like that.

Formal Announcent of Candidacy

As of about fifteen minutes ago, I have made my formal announcement of candidacy on the Eve Online forums, in this post.

The text is reproduced below:

I’ve been thinking, lately. Thinking about what I think could be better about this game. I figured that now that we have this CSM, maybe I should tell my ideas to them. And then I realized that the CSM elections were coming soon. Maybe I should not only present some ideas to the CSM – maybe I should run for the CSM. After all, we have two expansions coming that focus on things that I have ideas about – even if my ideas wouldn’t make it into those expansions, it’s a good time to raise them, when topics of industry and roleplay are brought into the spotlight.

So here I am, running for election.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

In Eve, my primary jobs are to be an industrialist, a diplomat, and an administrator – I run a corp, take part in alliance leadership, and administer a mutual NAP treaty between several alliance and a number of corporations in several lowsec systems. My hobbies include mission running, racing, exploration, and PvP, and I also spend quite a bit of time roleplaying and immersing myself in the Eve universe. My alt, Thulla Icin, is a member of Eve University, a corporation that teaches newer players more about Eve, and helps them find their feet in this game.

In real life, I have served on the Student Senate in college, which I believe is an experience that will be of great value in preparing me to represent the players of this game to CCP. In the Student Senate I helped represent the concerns and issues of the student body to the college administration – now I shall help represent the concerns and issues of the players to CCP. And any of my fellow Senators can tell you that I am an asset to any meeting!

Let me also say a little about my ideas.

My slogan is “Industry, Lowsec, and Roleplay (oh my),” which should give an indication of the kinds of things I intend to focus on – though I hardly intend to exclude other issues.

In regards to industry, I feel that we must make sure that our attention to industry includes not only something for those who produce the goods, but those who use them – the combat players. Changes to industry will affect them as well, and we should be sure we have input from the consumer – and new things for industrialists to make means new things for combat players to use and destroy.

I also believe lowsec needs a boost. Recently, we had an update, the Empyrean Age, which made lowsec a battleground for the forces of factional warfare. What we have not seen, however, is meaningful improvements to low security space that would give non-PvP oriented players more of a reason to spend time in lowsec. Offering rich industrial oriented rewards in lowsec would be good both for those brave and cunning enough to exploit its riches – and for the pirates who prey upon the less cunning.

Finally, the coming of Ambulation puts the immersion aspect of Eve into the spotlight. While I understand that this is not important to everyone, it is very important to a number of players, and, I suspect that while it is not the most important aspect of the game for the majority of players, I think the majority would agree that it adds something to the game. I intend to be an advocate for this aspect of the game, while keeping efforts balanced with other aspects of game development, and ensuring, as always, that there is something for everyone to enjoy – more events, for example, that will lend a sense of immersion for those to whom it is important, but that might still offer some interesting combat – or interesting rewards – for those less interested in immersion.


If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I have a blog for the election that can be found here, please tell your friends, I hope that you will support me, but regardless of who you vote for, I encourage you to get involved, find out about the candidates, and VOTE.

Thank you.

Episode IV: A New Blog

Yes, it's that time again. No, I don't mean time for nerdy jokes in blog titles, it's always time for that. But it is time for a new blog. In keeping with the title of this post, it is vaguely possible that it is the fourth, I'm not too sure about that.

So what occasions a new blog? Deciding to run for the CSM. When looking at the application screen when I was first deciding if I really wanted to run or not, I noticed it had a place to submit the URL for your campaign website. While I thought that perhaps a full-fledged campaign site for an election that is essentially taking place in an internet game might be a bit too meta, it did seem like a good idea to have a place aside from a forum thread where I could present my message to voters. So, like a good CSM candidate, I researched the issue and found -- ah! some of the other candidates and current reps have blogs! How perfect! Blogs are the hip thing on the internet these days, if I am to be anyone, I must have one myself!

So here I am, shiny new blog in hand (metaphorically). In it, I shall talk about running for the CSM, why I decided to do so, what I'll do if elected, and, if elected, what I actually end up doing once elected (and then when what I promised and what I do differ, I shall edit the posts with my promises. Mwhaha).