CSM9: Week Two

And onward we march. CSM8’s term is officially over; that council has been dissolved permanently, their last remnants swept away forever. CSM9 have tags and forum access, granting direct controls over their territories. How and if they keep their local constituents in line, however, is up to them.

*ahem*

Anyway, that second “thing” from last week’s post is this week’s first thing – the announcement that the CCP will be taking advantage of their new expansion model (sidenote: If you’re not familiar with that new model, read that post) to allow them to delay the industry changes and push them back to the following release, July 22nd. Plenty of good feedback during and immediately after Fanfest prompted the decision; they want to ensure the revamp is as perfect as they can get it, and only having to delay six weeks instead of six months allows them to do that. Obviously everyone hopes CCP doesn’t make a habit of it, but having the option for a small delay when necessary to ensure a patch comes off the best way possible is a big, big deal.

The industry features were the largest part of Kronos and their delay certainly guts out the largest set of features for the patch. I’m still not entirely sure that there’s a comprehensive list of what was delayed, but in a nutshell, it’s everything from the series of six industry devblogs. Still, CCP has pivoted, and the theme of Kronos will be more pirate & lowsec oriented now, with a full feature list here. Well, mostly full. There may be still a few surprises in store ;)

Time from an interlude from patch discussion. CCP Dolan‘s departure is public knowledge if not official these days. When CSM8 was told he was leaving, to be replaced by CCP Leeloo, the news was met with a bit of trepidation. While many in the community are not fans of Dolan, to the CSM he was a known quantity who had (on the whole) done a pretty decent job. As a reuslt, it makes me extremely happy to say that CCP Leeloo has been proving herself right out of the gate. CSM9 has meetings scheduled with what I’m reasonably certain is every single development team in CCP over the next week and a half or so, a mini-summit of “get to know you’s”. That ought to save us a bit of time at the Summits, as first order of business with every new team has always been “who are you, what do you do.” So, kudos to CCP Leeloo. I think I speak for all five incumbents when I say you’ve erased any uncertainty we might have had.

To echo, just a touch, something Sugar Kyle talked about over in her blog, there have definitely been some heated arguments over new features. That shouldn’t really be any surprise, and hell, it’s actually a good thing. Going against a common opinion, I’ve argued more than a few times lately that any given CSM member isn’t there to represent the game as a whole. How can they? No one knows everything. We all work from our respective experiences with our preferred playstyle or styles, and do our best to convince everyone else our viewpoint is correct. Sometimes that’s not necessary because we actually agree despite diverging experiences, sometimes it’s not necessary because even though we don’t agree, it doesn’t actually matter because the change has little to no actual impact. But sometimes it does matter, and that’s where you want someone who can present their arguments well. And at this point I think I’ll cut this line of reasoning short before it turns into a post about what to look for in a CSM candidate. Back to this week!

The Mordu’s Legion faction ships everyone already knows about from Fanfest, of course, but CCP Rise posted their stats on Monday. I already wrote about those, so I won’t belabor them too much other than to point out that they’re one of many Lowsec focused elements for Kronos. The main source of supply (hopefully!) will be belt rats found in Lowsec belts. More people in lowsec hunting valuables and getting in fights? One can only hope. Not much argument internally about these – we’re all as excited to get our hands on them as most everyone else is.
Continuing attention to lowsec, we’ve got more K-K wormholes. Low to highsec movement isn’t changed here, but low to null is increased a lot and low to low, a hell of a lot. Again, no arguments amongst ourselves here, and by this point I’m considering putting one of my spare PvP pilots out in lowsec just to take part in all the new action!Tooltips! Okay, general player reaction doesn’t actually warrant the “!” just yet, I think. There’s been a lot of backlash over them, and some of it is even warranted. CCP is working on it. I’m pretty positive on them overall, though, so if you’ve got suggestions to tweak and adjust them I’m all ears; if you want the CSM to push for their removal, look elsewhere.

Blockade Runners got their revamp posted, along with Deep Space Transports. Not a whole lot of argument over the former – they got exactly what they needed, with the nice bonus of a fat boost to warp speed on top. DSTs on the other hand, well… I’m less than impressed by them. I think their escape mechanics are a bit of a trap, which makes their tanking abilities overrated. Most of the rest of the CSM disagrees, though. I had a lively debate about their merits with Sugar Kyle, but at the end of the day this is one of those areas mentioned earlier where disagreeing doesn’t really matter. On the other hand, their weapon slots might make them fun to use as Q-Ships.

In conjunction with Deep Space Transports are Medium Micro Jump Drives, which have a lot of PvPers throwing a fit. You know what? Suck it up and adapt. Might help your case to stop being so hyperbolic in feedback, and trashing on the devs responsible isn’t really going to convince them either.

Last up is Freighters and Jump Freighters. CCP Fozzie nerfed several stats as well as introducing rigs, and so the net effect is that pilots can choose to do better than current in one area, at the cost of others. As most people no doubt expected to be able to buff all of their stats a little bit or one stat a lot with rigs, this is quite a surprise and most people aren’t happy. For my part, I like there being elements of choice involved in using the freighter, which in turn means that I like the fact that it’s not “okay your freighters are as-is except with rigs.” Where’s the choice there?

What I’m a great deal less certain about, having thought about it, is just how absolute it is. You can’t unfit rigs, so if you want to suit your ship to your task, you eat the cost of destroying them or maintain extra ships. While any other ship has that problem as well, any other ship also has fitting slots and so most of the time can perform with most of their efficiency, even with the wrong rigs. My other concern, which I’m less sure of is how all or nothing the corresponding nerfs make it. You can get to about 105% in one aspect and suffer greatly in all others, or mix and match and just kind of suck at everything due to the nerfs. At least, I think so – I desperately need to sit down and crunch out the numbers, but I do have an idea rolling around based on this concept. We’ll see where it goes.

That just about wraps it up for this week. Kronos is on SiSi and slated to launch June 3rd, so we’re getting close. That doesn’t mean, however, that all the changes are out – CCP still has a few things in store. Stay tuned!