Today’s roundtable by CCP was broadcast on Twitch, and you can watch the video of that here, but the best questions and answers of the day came from CCP Rise in the chat stream after the broadcast itself. We have gathered these questions together and formatted them for easier reading. Minor edits have been made to syntax and grammar, but nothing that would change the tone of the questions or answers. Read on for some great insight!
Any chance of looking at making rorquals and vni/ishtars more active like carriers so they are harder to scale across alts?
I really like that idea generally, but there isn’t any specific plans for it. VNIs and drones in general have always been a really tough problem when it comes to attention requirement.
But with ship and mod changes, is there any indirect effect to market balance as well?
Yes definitely, we have to keep impact from our changes in mind so much, we just want to have ships and modules as the starting point for us for now, rather than starting from some other area like economy.
Will you introduce marketing tools so that we may sell futures and options?
Most economic tools that rely on credit really don’t work in EVE since there’s no way of holding anyone accountable – CCP Quant has been excited about trying to do asset backed securities, which could work, but probably there isn’t a lot of real demand for that
Are you wearing pants?
No
As a member of ships and modules team, can you make bowhead required skills list Advanced Spaceship Command V? (It lists lvl 1 although the ship needs lvl 5.)
That just sounds like a bug I think? Submit a report and it will get fixed eventually.
You were one of the first to utilize streaming platforms, does CCP have any more plans for reaching out to the community via twitch, or utilizing the current streamers for different things?
Yeah community team is actually in the middle of working on their streaming support and trying to do a lot more direct work with community streamers as far as I know.
Are Observatory Arrays still planned, and are they near completion?
Still planned, not near completion, they will be up next after winter release I believe.
What was the goal of that stream?
The goal was originally to address questions that came directly from the video blog at the end of last week, then it got expanded to q and a which made it too large so we tried to loop in questions from the q and a thread with questions from the video blog.
And was that goal achieved in that twenty minute sound byte?
Not sure but I take it you don’t think so
Still no answer when shield slaves finally coming. We need them!!
I don’t know exactly apple but I asked the folks who would know and I’m waiting to hear back 🙂
Any word on shield slaves or the state or shield supercapital and capitals? ie do you all see any issues with it or do you like where its at?
Apparently shield slaves were meant to be in the next patch but the same team had to do emergency balance work on carriers so it felt back unfortunately
With the influx of carrier, supercarrier, and titan pilots do we need to start looking at T2 supers/titans to help balance out the meta?
That sounds like a scary strategy heh.
Why have you nerfed or excluded any love to the hunter tengu? What will solo blops people do who do not wish to be part of the massive alliances? U effectively have killed the solo play as well as killing the small public gangs like BB and spectres.
Don’t think that is intended, we will have to do a lot of looking at the state of t3c after they are released and make changes to try and preserve roles like that if needed, but lets see what actually happens first.
Have you seen the recent Reddit suggestions about using mobile siphon units to drain fuel from POSs? what are your thoughts on this?
I haven’t seen it but I’ll try and find it
I know its not your department but please give factions supers and titans a unique hull model – otherwise you are paying 280b for basically the same old ereboos
Yeah that’s a tough one, we would love to have that but capital models are extremely costly and we want those art resources to go somewhere that lots of pilots can enjoy, though I do think I saw some angel capital concepts somewhere…..
I’m interested in module and upcoming ship balance. Is there going to be a new focus for CCP on doing more regular ship and module balance passes in the future?
Yes, we’re dedicating most of my team’s bandwidth to ships and modules starting very soon so hopefully there will be more balance and more new ships and modules.
CCP’s response to the Q&A was that of someone hearing about a problem for the first time. Most of these issues were brought up before these features left Sisi. The delay is what concerns me the most. See – Ghost Training
Ghost training was a special kind of slow and we are changing internal processes so that doesn’t happen again.
I really hope the constant negativity about changes and direction really do not get you guys discouraged. People seem to understand that you cannot just shoehorn in an update like most MMO’s. Since assets from 6 years ago can still have a large effect on the economy.
We try to stay positive.
I think it would be easier if you would try to answer the questions on the forums.
Yeah forums or even an AMA might be a good idea.
Thank you for taking the time to engage with us and answer questions, by the way. I know a lot of folks are frustrated there wasn’t more active Q&A from the studio, but we appreciate what you’re doing.
No prob, we didn’t mean to be evasive on the stream, we just also didn’t want to spend 20 minutes on stream saying things we’ve said elsewhere or that we can’t comment on yet :/
How much work will your team create for the art dept?
I hope a lot 🙂
Are you fine with t3c hull cost being 650 mil higher for over 80 mil SP pilot than under 50 mil SP pilot? (due injector mechanics)
Yes… but we have been taking a look at the diminishing returns scale and changes to that may come up at some point
Any chance of including some Valkyrie info and updates into the o7 show?
That might be possible, maybe send a mail to the community team and ask if they would be up for doing that kind of thing
Are you planning any discussion or blog posts about what your teams plans or goals?
We will be doing that once folks are back from vacation and we settle into our own agenda a little more, then we will come to you guys and discuss roadmap and priorities
When are you going to fix industry tax in citadels (The tax is being applied to system index cost instead of item value)
Ahhh yes. CCP Nagual has actually a proposal for changing that. I’m not sure what the timeline looks like but we know it’s an issue
As a ~10year eve gamer im unhappy about the changes.. they brought nothing good, nobody is happy about it and you still smile.. how can we be calm and still pay for the game ? Also asking highec people about nullsec isnt a good idea.. just saying..
What changes aren’t you happy with?
Have you considered applying resistance bonuses depending on Wormhole, nullsec, lowsec, or highsec for T3C balance?
No, not as part of the t3c re balance, but we have talked about more environment specific effects like that. Maybe something for the future.
People general see Void bombs and the spammability of Astrahuses as the most broken parts, specificall that they also take 3 bashes over a whole week.
Yes, I believe void bombs will be one of the first things to get changed.
When are we getting Factional Warfare fixed please?
I don’t have an answer for you. We have wanted to do another round of rework on FW for some time and it almost made it high enough on priority for this release cycle but not quite. Sorry I can’t say when it will happen.
So what is your over all goal with t3c n the end? And ATM until things are “fixed” which takes ccp a Lot of time in general what do u expect us to use? Or what can we as a community do to show u how this change effects a great many players in a negative way??
Overall goal is to have more balanced representation of all the different configurations and a less oppressive role in the meta generally
Thanks.. I been testing T3C on sisi.. still so many better options for running C3 wormhole sites after patch then risking a T3C for Solo.. For being Sleeper Wormhole tech it seams extremely under-powered and a two much concept then application.
Okay that’s good feedback, I’ll pass it along
Goal of T3C was to let the art team make skins for them, that’s it?
That’s not true of course, but it was important for the art team to redo the modularity implementation so that it would be less overhead for us to continue to maintain them, skins are just a bonus we get out of doing that work.
Why alpha clone can used strip miner I but there is no ship that would allow it to be put on?
Are you sure there isn’t one that can use it? I remember the CSM asking specifically to have that skill added but I can’t remember why
Thank you ccp for all the content you provide. I think I speak for most when I ask, when will Exotic Dancers be a view able NPC in our stations?
We do have a mature audience anyway, I’ll put a pitch together.
I know it’s not your area currently, but I’d like to suggest pirate faction warfare be something that is looked into for null content generation.
That sounds interesting, how would you see that working?
Is there a way that ship SKINS could be set for a corporation and/or alliance? It would be cool to see a fleet of ships flying the same colors, IMO.
Yes, we love that idea and are working towards it, hopefully not too long in the future.
It would be kind of cool if on SISI each player had his own system J_PLayerName .. and in that system he could edit any ship stat he wanted to help craft better game balance.
That sounds extremely complicated to make but it would be awesome to see what people figured out.
I am bored of mindless “gudfites”. Are there any plans for new objectives to fight over (like old static 2/10s)?
Yeah, there are ideas, the blood raider ship yard was a narrow but good example. look for more stuff like that, probably coming out first through events where we can test without having to commit to the game long term. If we find good stuff through events then we can move into a permanent place hopefully.
Are there any upcoming new PvE sort of scenarios in the pipeline accessible to the solo player rather than huge bloodraider shipyards or different than current anomalies or signatures?
Yes, I can’t talk about them in detail but absolutely.
Is there a patch planned for fixing cloaky campers like maybe a new probe type to scan them down or a timer on how long you can be cloak its one of the few things in the game that there is no counter to.
Cloaky campers is always a tough question – I think when the structure team gets to working on observatories and other intel focused structures we will reevaluate cloaky camping and see if we want to make changes, which means sometime early next year I guess.
Are there any plans to make Null rat anoms more difficult depending on what you bring to kill the rats?
There aren’t plans to change null anoms specifically at the moment but we are developing more dynamic content and tools for making it and if that goes well then eventually we may be able to apply it to anoms and missions and other content.
Are you planing to return pictures on the character sheet? Instead of them we have animated forehead. Another question – when will you fix the skill list and skill queue. The previous one was more intuitive and convenient – Please redesign both to vertical layout
No plans that I know of, we really like the animated forehead. Sorry to hear you don’t. I’m not sure about the skill queue section though, we look at improving that often but I don’t think there’s any immediately plans for change.
Have there been considerations of a lowsec moon mining platform that is automated when the rest become unautomated to generate content?
I’m not sure about automated for players but we have talked about giving them to NPCs as a way to generate content… we’ll see
Can players install Agents in Citadels that buy items using a corp wallet? It would be cool to setup a corp mission system using agents. Example the agent could buy Moon Minerals at a Medium citadel without needing a Market hub.
Yeah we love this idea but a lot of the function can be handled by contracts so it may need to wait until a contract rework of some kind.
Why have you nerfed Rorquals so much (which finally made all of the miners happy, before the nerfs of course) Why instead you have not increased a demand for ore and minerals by providing new lines of ships, t2 dreads, t3 battlecruisers, new faction line of ships, new modules and so on .. and why you hadn’t had a plan about it upfront as it was obvious what is going to happen?
You’re right. we are looking a lot now at trying to improve demand side for resources. that’s a big part of why this ship and module team is coming together. it’s just difficult to develop new demand to match new generation at the same time in all cases and I think we underestimated the production from Rorquals at release
You need to change sov or in any other way make wars more frequent as current state of things makes huge accumulation of welt which can be dangerous for the game itself.
Agreed, we are always trying to figure out how to increase conflict and change. it’s hard to get right every time though.
Make one region some big alliance owns something all will want and change the sov and I think you will be on your way :))) Cheers
Changing the sov is the tricky part but we will keep trying to improve it.
Are there plans to allow the pheonix/Levi use XL rail/blaster guns?
No I don’t think so. we talked about that as a way of getting out from under the complication of missiles but now that we went with missles I don’t think we will give them hybrids.
Are there any plans in the works for fixing Planetary interaction? Something as Simple as being able to reset all extractors to same previous setting with 1 click?
There has been tons of work on making a plan for how to improve it, but I don’t know of a timeline yet for getting the work done. there’s just so much to do :/
Have you thought about adding a navy line of caps – with a little more base hp and nicer bonuses but would cost 3-5x as much as the regular version?
No but that sounds pretty cool.
Thank you for answering my question; you just mentioned complications with missiles, is there a concern with missiles you’d like to take a look at in the future?
Hmm, probably nothing overarching to all of them. they just have bizarre and unique math for application that makes it a special task to handle capital scale versions – we do want to keep looking at balance of course but on an individual level, like with RLML only or something, it’s not quite as complicated
Aah, makes sense, thank you. Now that you bring up RLMLs, have you thought about bringing that concept to other weapon types, i.e. dual 180mm autocannons on a Rupture being an equivalent “antisupport” weapon with high tracking but low damage thoroughout?
We did talk about that at some point, doing a burst version for turrets, I think we backed off from it because balance is so hard when DPS numbers go really high, even for a burst.
When will the ships and modules team be put together and start working on stuff?
Once vacation ends for most folks, probably around 4-6 weeks from now.
Any chance we’ll see a T2 BS similar in design to HACs?
Almost certainly no, HACs are one of the hardest classes to balance and I don’t think we want a bigger version of that.
Will we see a assault frigate change?
Definitely at some point.
Will you change wormhole content in future?
Yes I think so, but I don’t have any specific plans I can tell you about.
Do you think moon mining will generate more content in lowsec? Is that your goal? Do you see ‘old money’ moons finally going to small corps and organizations?
I don’t really have an answer on that since I’m not on the structure team. I’m sure the hope is that there will be new content but I don’t know about their expectations for specific regions or sec bands.
Is it intended that the new ship balance team is able to make number changes (ie, launcher damage reduced by x%) on a much faster pace than we have seen previously?
Partly yes, but it’s also to be able to take on more ‘new’ things like unique mechanics which require programmers and in the past would have been difficult for the balance design team to do alone.
In 3 months will the AC Cynabal be a viable kite platform?
When I read that question for some reason in my head it said ‘will the AC cynabal be a vertical kite platform’ and now i realize how much I want a vertical cynabal. don’t know the answer to your actual quesiton though 🙂 it’s possible, I think medium ACs are a likely candidate for an alpha-oriented balance pass
What does alpha-oriented balance pass actually mean?
It just means a balance pass that focuses on ships and modules available to alpha players (frigs/dessie/cruiser with non-t2 weapons) – for example not having scorch is an issue that would be good to deal with for alphas.
I thought the alpha accounts could not fly cynabals… anyway.. just make falloff 25% then i will be happy.
They can’t fly cynabals but if we changed medium ACs for alpha ruptures and stabbers it would help your cynabal.
Make a new race 🙂 and a new region
I would love that. I even have a plan for it.
Any opinions you could share now about general alpha balance?
It’s okay but there’s room to improve. especially for Minmatar and Amarr. hopefully we can start sharing a plan for improving it pretty soon
Would you say that is more due to skill constraints or ship/mod balancing? For example everyone seems to love the vexor, and the arbitrator is very similar yet hardly used.
It’s both. arbitrator is similar but kind of worse at everything unless you are making use of the ewar, vexor is too good.
AT ship rebalance when? #FrekiLivesMatter
Rough life, I wish I had a frekki.
Amarr Alphas desperately need some love to be able to fly in shield fleets. Currently, it’s almost impossible to fit Amarr Alphas in shield comps.
Yeah, really good point, kind of hard to fix but I’m sure we can make it a bit easier
Do you ever play the game for the sake of playing it? What other games do you play?
Yes definitely, also play pubg like everyone else because its awesome, I’ll always play eve though as well.
Pursuant to the shield super issues raised, how would you feel about restoring the passive resistance bonuses to the Adaptive Invulnerability fields? Do you think that would be unbalancing?
I’m not sure about fully restoring but bringing back some of the passive element could work I’m sure.
What’s the issue with RLMLs that the upcoming nerf will solve?
They are op.
When will citadels get the jumpbridge/cyno gen function or will they be a new type of “gate” or cynogen” type of citadel?
That isn’t figured out yet but it will all be incorporated somehow with new structures. look for plans on that happening sometime around new years.
So after refineries are deployed and no “Oh God we killed T2 Mats Market” event?
Definitely after.
Hey.. Why does the battleship XL guns take XL ammo when the Phonex take regular size Torps? That always didn’t make sense for the dreads.
After 15 years of dev we accumulate quite a bit of weird inconsistency like that. you’re right it doesn’t make sense.
Will we be able to change nickname for isks in future?
Maybe! we almost went for that a year ago but it’s pretty tricky to do. Need to make sure people can’t use it to hide or steal identity or any other exploit type things, but it might be a good change.
This question might be completely out of the current conversation, but is there any thought on adding another mid slot on the Dragoon?
Nothing that specific, but we do know it’s in a pretty weird spot and is a good candidate for some change in an alpha balance pass I think.
I dunno, missiles in general feel like a very… braindead weapon? When they’re good, they’re very good. When they’re bad, nobody uses them. It’s tough to get that middle ground.
I don’t know about braindead. I like that you get to manage positioning much differently as a missile user than a turret user. And balance right now, though not perfect, is in a pretty good place compared to the old days, with rlml being the biggest stand out I think.
Do you think giving the orca strip miners rather than drones would be possible?
Hmm not sure, interesting though, I’ll bring it up with other balance designers
Do you think your team will be jumping from ship to ship for updates or are you guys going to take it ship size by ship size?
Not sure yet! I hope we can do whole classes or module groups at a time rather than ships 1 by 1 but I also hope we can be very flexible and fast so if we want to just make a change to one specific ship we are able to quickly.
With the recent nerf to carriers, can you tell us if a similar one is in the works for VNI / Ishtars please?
No plans this second, though I do think we want to take a look at them. the scale of the problem is very different though. the carrier income was going to a much smaller group of players while VNI income is spread across a huge huge portion of the player base, which just means we need to approach it a bit differently I think.
Have you considered heavily increasing the fitting cost of RLMLs instead? The biggest problem with RLMLs right now is the ability to fix maximum tank while being able effectively “box”. If RLML fits had to make sacrifices similar to artillery, they would no longer be able to brawl other cruisers, but still excel at their intended role as anti-support.
Yes, I actually love that idea, it breaks a lot of consistency with other weapons though where smaller charges = less fitting – I still think it might be the most interesting path forward though. Rather than just nerfing it down to being not as good, give it some big tradeoff.
Hope you enjoyed. Do you have any thoughts or feedback from today’s session? Let us know.
-Ishtar
