December CSM Minutes

There's a whole 113 pages of stuff in the recently released CSM Minutes. I've just finished reading all of it and as a whole it looks good. Just doing a quick summary for myself as many other bloggers will cover this soon*. I mostly only care about the ship balancing section.

• The Next Decade
  - Looks good to me. I like long term goals and plans.
   
• CSM Stakeholder, Whitepaper and Election process
  -I dont really care about.
   
• Null Sec
  -Sov grinding sucks, bottom-to-top incomes for corps/alliances.
  -Industrial should have more benefits in null, never being able to reach 100% refine rates and only reach close to it at an upgraded outpost in null sec.
  -More resources for industry needed in null.
  -Most CSM agreed in wanting small alliances or roaming gangs to affect and disrupt the large entities if they dont respond or defend their space.
  -Adding custom effects to the system owned, such as wormhole effects.
  -Tools for Alliance level and possibly Coalition level ease of use items, such as consistent standings. Fozzie suggest CREST would help alleviate some of these issues.
  -Worthless space being turned into worthwhile space so that people will want to take control of it. Greyscale has terrible ideas, Fozzie and Trebor both have great ones in this regard.
  - Soundwave in general has good ideas for null it seems, but limited info was given due to NDA
  -Instead of building a new, taller tower; go tear down someone else's tower and replace it.
  -POS's revamp will be done in iterations, as its too big of a project to tackle in one go, similar to FW has been adjusted in 2012.
  -SOV revamp falls under this category as well, too big to tackle in one go.
  -Several CSM want the "unknown" to return to Null and WH space. Undocumentable is a must for it to remain "unknown"
   
• Ship Balancing
  -Making the differences between all t1 and t2 ships similar to the differences between t1 frigs and Assault Frigates now.
  -Fozzie mentioned a change to armor ships, but is low in priority due to other things in the pipeline.
  - Also, a buff to the jump range, fuel useage and capacity of Black Ops looks interesting.
  - Fleet Boosts UI sucks, off grid boosting is hated by everyone at CCP and in CSM.
  -Skill point reimbursement is not an option CCP devs want to pursue, although the CSM disagreed.
  -Supercaps will not be rebalanced anytime soon and when they do get rebalanced, it will be more of a role rebalance. Soundwave has said multiple times (New Eden Open, 2012 Fan Fest, ect) that he wants more variety of Capital ships, with ideas of adding new ones for specialized roles.
  -Capitals should not deploy without a subcapital support fleet when engaging and wanting to kill other capitals.~Elise, I like you.
  -Greyscale uses the Tengu as a base point to balance T3's. He's a bad. I dislike many of his ideas he has presented for EvE since I started paying attention to them.
  -Ytterbium has great ideas for Command ships and T3's. I like and support many of his ideas; such as Command Ships being very specialized and give the best bonuses but be limited in their other areas of play such as combat while T3's will be able to fit ganglinks while still being able to do other things like ewar or combat.
  -Covert Ops cynos dont work on T3's due to the bonuses needed for it being tied to a ship bonus instead of Subsystem bonus. Technical limitations prevent adding this.
   
• Faction Warfare
  -Mostly done. Modifications to UI and tools being created to help in ease of use.
  -Turning Faction Navy control over to the players
  -Giving more LP for PvP related actions instead of PvE, but also trying to prevent exploiting via PvP.
  -Militia success or failure affect High Sec space
   
• Bounty Hunting
  -Possible change to wanted labels depending on sec of person with bounty
  -Private bounties/killrights affected by standings or other specifications
  -Forcing players to be interactive in SOME way, whether positive or negative. This is preventing them from having a single player experience in a multiplayer universe. I like this.
  -Conquering High Sec POCO's was mentioned, much enthusiasm around the room.
   
• Mercs, Wars, and Crimewatch
  -Standings with Concord and Sec Status rating will be split. This will be a mostly invisible change and most likely result in a standings reset to zero for people with Concord Standings.
  -Tags4Sec to assist in security status repairs instead of the mentioned blizting of sec status repairing in 8 hours. Where the fuck do you rat to get sec repaired from -10 to high than -2.0 in 8 hours!?
  -Loss of 1 and 2 ded complexes affecting PvP in low sec is expected to be countered with more belt ratting due to the uncommon spawning of the rats who drop tags for sec increases.
  -Bunch of Wardec banter that I care little about.
  -Proposed 12 hour warmup for wardecs instead of 24 hours.
  -Wardec system is for formalizing the aggression.
   
• Eve UI
  -Plenty of nice changes, mostly usability ones.
  -Only 22% of players use the CQ over Hangar views when docked.
  -Session and Wormhole jump timers to be made more prevelant/visible.
  -Filtering for Notifications
  -Ship Tree, similar to a tech tree soon to be added.
  -Drone UI universally disliked, prodded to be updated as modules. Or just, you know, use hotkeys.
   
• Live Events-Now has its own full team and support of CCP.
  -Stories planned for events with custom made characters/accounts. Created by Internal Affairs to prevent dev corruption.
   
• Crest
  -Technical stuff that enhances the API tools available to 3rd party devs. Dont really care about it til tools are available for it I can use.
   
• Out of Game
  -Making available information thats is in game, out of client viable in a web browser. Uses Crest.
   
• Player Experience
  -Changes to the radial, right click menu to be more of a left click, mouse gesture system. I dislike this, but agree that nested items deep in the right click menu is annoying to navigate.
  -Looking at a ship shows the effects and ewar on it wanted.
  -Client defaults for settings and overview want to be changed slightly.
  -UI changes to drone UI, recruitment UI, ect.
   
• Art-Many updates to ships with V3 and other shading/lighting throughout coming
  -Ship skins, such as Khanid, are in the client already, but waiting on the features/game design teams to give the go ahead
  -Art is not the bottleneck
   
• Economy
  -PLEX is like gold. Without the terrible ads we see on t.v.
  -Hans cares about losses, some other CSM does not and can have their coalition lose a trillion isk in assets and think of it as pocket change.
  -600 Trillion isk total isk in EvE, 400 trillion of which is in active characters.
  -More stuff I dont care about.
   
• Marketing
  -Stuff about possible deals for resubbing, similar to power of 2, but with unsubbed accounts
  -More stuff I dont care about.
• Customer Loyalty-Plans for veteran rewards.
  -Possible discounts for long term subscribers mentioned. Nothing else too exciting.

So there is my quick summary of the CSM minutes. TBH, I wish the actual minutes were similar to this because I truly dont give two fucks about the conversations had. Transparency is good, so add names next to each bullet, but there truly is no need for a word by word play of every single session.