With the winter CSM 9 summit well underway, and in a CSM first, minutes have already been released for the first day.
You can read the CSM minutes for day 1 here.
For those of you who don’t want to read it, I have written a tl;dr to highlight some of the more interesting things discussed:
Session One – Roadmap & Release Cadence— This session was hosted mostly by CCP Seagull giving the CSM an update on how things have been going in the last year with the new Release Schedule.
- New release cadence is allowing the various teams much more flexibility to implement features, giving them more responsibility for team based projects.
- Marketing direction has changed from just targeting new players to the existing player base, on the understanding that they are the best people at getting new people into the game and keeping them.
- The trend for new players this year has shown a greater retention; the drop off of new players is lower now than in previous years.
Beta Features—such as the new map—introduced in Tranquility have a much better acceptance than on SiSi.
Session Two – New Player Experience— Not included due to being part of the Non Disclosure Agreement— but we expect a Dev blog soon regarding this.
Session Three – The Web Team— CCP Centurion gave the CSM an update on the web team’s activities including:
- An update to the EVE forums the team has been working on for a few months and will soon be going into Beta phase, which will include a full rework of the site and better mobile support.
- Some minor fixes have been made to EVE Gate. There are further fixes they wish to make but are unable to at this time, including future integration of CREST for mails.
- Additions to the developer site are in the works.
- The team is looking at release pages and they are looking to adopt a new format for these.
- There was a bit of discussion about updating the EVElopedia as it is out of date. While it is something to be looked at, it’s currently not a priority.
Session 4 – Team Size Matters— Team Size Matters deals with Growth and Monetization, some of the discussions included:
- Removing the trial account restriction notification for subscribed players about skills.
- The team is looking into removing buying PLEX directly and replacing it with buying AUR which can then be redeemed for a PLEX from the New Eden Store, reducing the current ISK/PLEX/AUR to simply ISK/AUR.
- With the upcoming change to ship skins, any skin that does not apply a stat change to the ship it is being applied to will probably be transferred over to a skin in the new system. Final list will be run by the CSM.
- While there are many barriers that need to be overcome before it can be implemented, player submitted skins that are approved by CCP could become a possibility using an in-game editor.
- A redeem-in-space option was being looked at to allow players that may not have easy access to a station (e.g. wormholes), to redeem items without having to dock.
- Early development is in the works for removing attributes. There is a lot of discussion and planing to be done, but it is something CCP is looking to implement.
Session 5 – Corporations and Alliances— A summary of new features being introduced for Tiamat to include:
- Increased capacity on mailing lists from 3000 to 5000.
- Filters for member lists.
- A Text Editor for Corp descriptions.
- Remote unrenting of offices.
- Custom Rejection Messages.
- Direct invites to Corporation.
Other items discussed were:
- Roles and titles are to get a facelift.
- Member cap to be increased as BRAVE is getting close to the cap, again.
- The Corp Aggression changes which will probably have a 24 hour switchover timer and give notifications to corp members.
A filter will be provided in the corporation search function for friendly fire.
- Corporation window is to also get a revamp.
- Role window to be simplified.
- Reduction in the number of screens for roles, station services and access options.
- Possible integration with CREST to help audit what people are doing with their roles.
- Early thoughts on Clubs which will allow people to subscribe to outside of corp or alliance groups. Example, incursions & NPSI groups (i.e. Bombers Bar, SPECTRE fleet). This may also include ‘societies’ which could be secret. (Illimittani!)
- Corp wallets and hangers to be reduced to one with the option to add additional divisions as required, to help simplify corp and role management; this also means potentially having more than the currently available number of wallets and hangers.
Session 6 – Team Homegrown— Centered around player retention.
- Referrals from existing players have been growing strong for a while now.
- Most new players drop out after 4-6 weeks.
- Some players find it hard to integrate into the Eve community.
- There was some early discussion around sharing screen shots and video clips via an in-game function.
- A corp recruitment buddy link was discussed, allowing referred players to be able to immediately join a corporation recommended by another player.
Some interesting points were raised in Day One. On a personal note, I am curious to see what happens with the ideas surounding attributes and how this develops. Additionally, the removal of directly buying PLEX and instead using AUR is somewhat similar to the current set up that DUST 514 uses, so it will be interesting to see how this is further developed.
