My Vision for POSes

Anyone that has interacted with a POS right now has a long list of what is wrong with the current system. Rather than spending lots of time and effort patching the existing system, CCP should spend their time creating a new POS system that satisfies the following needs:

• Dockable. New POSes (lets call them nPOSes), should be dockable, so that all the work CCP does on the in-station UI is available to all, including ship spinning and Incarna.

• Scalable. nPOSes need to scale all the way from a single person to a large nullsec alliance.

• Secure. Any possiblity for theft should come from people trusting people they shouldn't, not from terrible UI or a lack of a workable permissions system.

• Vulnerable. nPOSes should have some targets that are vulnerable to small-medium gangs, as well as entirely vulnerable with some sort of reinforcement timer system.

• Useful. nPOSes should be able to fully replace NPC manufacturing and research, and be scalable enough to allow for complex industry in space of any security level.

Dockable

CCP has put a lot of functionality into the UI and capabilities when players are docked, including reprocessing, repackaging, ship spinning, accessing personal and corporate storage, and assembling/reconfiguring Tech 3 ships, plus many more. There is also the (currently) limited content provided in Incarna, which probably would be expanded in the future. It also doesn't make sense for CCP to work on two seperate UIs, one for docking and one for nPOS hangar functionality.

Scalable

In order to be able to scale from a single person to a 5,000 person alliance, nPOSes should follow some sort of modular system, allowing for in-place upgrades without the need to tear down the whole thing and start over. A modular system would allow players to choose to expand based on demand for services, including storage, manufacturing and research. A fully modular system does require a fair amount of art effort, but would also allow people to customize the look of their homes/factories/labs.

Secure

The current POS security model is terrible and makes multiple people place enitrely too much trust in too many people. EVE should not become a place that is safe from scammers, but plenty of scams happen in stations, and there is no reason for people to assume any more scamming risk because they live in nPOSes, especially if nPOSes eventually replace player built outposts.

Vulnerable

New POSes are a perfect place to create small gang targets that would encourage people to defend their space or lose time or ISK to repair damages. In nullsec and w-space, destroying a nPOS should be the same as the current POS, where some of the contents drop on destruction and some are destroyed. In highsec and lowsec, Interbus could move some or all of the nPOS contents to a safe place (perhaps in lowsec some portion of the contents drop based on the security status of the system). nPOSes would probably still have the same reinforcement system that current POSes have, though something new could be done here, such as making some portion of the nPOS vulnerable after some time, or even have the nPOS slowly become vulnerable over time after some invulnerable period.

Useful

New POSes are also a great opportunity to phase out even more NPC involvement in EVE, especially on the industrial/research side. nPOSes should have better manufacturing, reprocessing and research than can be found in NPC stations, and NPC stations should signifigantly raise the prices for their services, so that players will be able to compete with them for manufacturing (and be better and cheaper than they will be).

It's the economy, stupid

So I started wondering a bit about the state of the economy in EVE right now. There were some posts on FHC musing about the amount of ISK flowing into the economy right now, and since CCP Diagoras was kind enough to tweet a bunch of stats, I decided to do some math and add it all up. Here it is:

Item	Source/Sink	Monthly Amount
Wormhole blue books	Source	$10,430,000,000,000
Incursions Rewards	Source	$8,566,015,400,900
Mission Rewards	Source	$2,470,815,985,076
Misson Bonuses	Source	$2,346,410,541,970
Insurance Payouts	Source	$3,366,455,121,035
Insurance Costs	Sink	-$1,618,888,782,680
NPC Bounties	Source	$32,083,329,999,805
NPC Sell Orders	Sink	-$13,000,000,000,000
Transaction Taxes*	Sink	-$2,375,100,000,000
Broker Fees*	Sink	-$2,607,100,000,000
LP Store*	Sink	-$6,331,570,000,000
PI Construction*	Sink	-$627,850,000,000
Clones*	Sink	-$910,600,000,000
Office Rental*	Sink	-$488,650,000,000
War Fees*	Sink	-$149,350,000,000
Repair Bills*	Sink	-$287,100,000,000
PI NPC Taxes*	Sink	-$741,820,000,000
Sov Bills*	Sink	-$809,100,000,000
Contract Brokers Fee*	Sink	-$301,600,000,000
Contract Sales Tax*	Sink	-$324,800,000,000
Total		$28,689,498,266,106

Anything with a * is based on a single day for February, everything else is a full month's data from Diagoras.

Since there were 29 days in February this year, this comes out to almost exactly 1 trillion ISK per day entering the economy. Because CCP no longer publishes QENs, we don't have any recent data to compare this to, but in the last published QEN (for the 4th quarter of 2010), the rate was 0.38 trilion ISK per day, or a little over 1/3 of the current rate. Subscriber numbers were lower then, but not by much. The QEN puts the monthly NPC bounty amounts at about 24 trillion ISK, compared to 32 trillion now. This accounts for about 0.27 trillion ISK per day, or about half of the difference. The rest is accounted for by Incursions.

Voting is now open!

Voting has begun, the link to directly vote for me is http://community.eveonline.com/council/voting/Vote.asp?c=427

Thanks for all the support!

Lost In Eve Debate

On Sunday, I was in a debate over on Lost In Eve. The recording has just been posted here, go give it a listen! Jade and his co-hosts did a great job, as well as my fellow guests, who were a lot of fun.

Q &A Session Recording

Talocan United kindly offered to organize a Q&A session with me about my CSM 7 candidacy. We just finished it, and the recording is here (mp3 format). Hopefully we will organize another of these in the future, so if you missed out, don't worry.

As always, if you have questions for me, feel free to ask in the comments here, or in my eve-o thread, or via eve mail or convo.

Re-Elect Two step

Reposted from my Jita Park candidacy thread

Over the last year, I have been one of the hardest working members of CSM 6 (Trebor says so here). My main focus has been on representing wormhole residents, but I also have been contributing to discussions on topics like ship balancing, microtransactions and all the rest of the topics we discuss with CCP (see this wiki page)

Accomplishments as a CSM 6 member

While ultimately it is CCP that actually does the work, I did push hard on several specific features and bug fixes. The main one is Corporation Bookmarks. CCP has long wanted to get them done, but I think that continued pressure from me and the other CSM members pushed their priority up significantly. I brought up CPU usage on capital shield transporters, which was fixed in Crucible. I had significant input on POS fuel blocks, POCOs, pods on killmails, the Tier 3 BCs and several other topics.

I also read and respond to all the EVE Mails and conversations I get, and pass on feedback to CCP. I spend a lot of time on the forums, including the EVE official forums, Failheap Challenge, and Kugu (which I requested CCP unblock).

What still needs to be done

Firstly, I haven't gotten everything done yet. While we do have corp bookmarks, POS life is still difficult and we still get our own special "features" (aka bugs) after every patch. For example, we have the wormhole mass bug mentioned in this thread.

Secondly, the talk about the wormhole stabilizer (My blog post on the topic) just goes to prove that folks who live in w-space cannot see having a CSM rep as just a nice to have, but it is an absolute requirement. Without someone to speak up, CCP and other CSMs might ruin everything we have all worked so long and hard for.

Thirdly, this year will really matter. This is the time CCP will be fixing all the broken stuff and starting to look at designs for longer term fixes, and I expect that POSes may show up on that list (later in the year). CCP is doing a ton of ship balancing at long last, and I love having input into that, especially since we certainly fit ships differently in w-space.

Who I am in game

I started playing EVE in 2005. After a brief (2 month) stay in empire, I moved out to 0.0 space, in Tribute as part of the Forsaken Empire alliance. I did a bunch of stuff in 0.0, mostly PvP, but some POS management and industry stuff as well. I stuck with the same corp though a corp merger and a bunch of different alliances, most of which I don't even remember anymore. After a couple of years in 0.0, I basically got bored of 0.0 life and moved back to empire to try my hand at invention, which had just come out. I fairly quickly made a bunch of ISK, but eventually got bored and ended up taking a break from EVE for a year or so.

I came back to EVE shortly after the release of Apocrypha, in 2009. I had heard about the new wormhole content, and it sounded interesting to me. I joined a medium sized (at the time) wormhole corporation named Aperture Harmonics. Fairly soon after joining AHARM, I was made the US timezone director, and did a bunch of recruiting. AHARM was, and still is, a PvP corporation. We run sleeper sites in order to pay for new toys to kill stuff with. About 6 months after joining, I was made CEO, and ran the corp for a few months. Running a wormhole corporation was a lot of fun, but it does tend to burn folks out, and I took a short break from EVE in mid 2010. I came back just before our invasion of CCRES, which was the 2nd largest wormhole corp (behind us), and have been back ever since, though no longer as CEO.

Who I am IRL

My name is Josh Goldshlag, I am 34 years old, and live near Boston, MA. I am a computer programmer in my day job, and have previously worked in the game industry. My hobbies include cooking, photography and making my own maple syrup.

You can find a lot more details in my blog – http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com
I am on twitter as @two_step_eve
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

My take on the December CSM summit - Wormholes

I haven't really been keeping up with the blogging, but I wanted to make clear my views on some of the stuff brought up at the December CSM summit.

Firstly, I want to note that I was not present at the summit. I am the 4th alternate, and while the 1st (Elise) and 2nd (Prom) alternates went to the summit, enough full CSM members were able to be there so I didn't get to go.

When I heard that CCP wanted to have a session on little things in wormholes and FW, I spent some time talking to folks and came up with my list of smaller issues that most folks wanted fixed. My list is:
1) Shields on ships out of a SMA/entering a Pulsar/joining a fleet (this applies also to after jumping shield caps, and is one of the reasons they suck)
2) Better system than POS passwords for POS access (same UI as chat channels would be awesome)
3) Capital SMAs allowed in w-space (hard to store large numbers of capitals... :) )
4) Cans in corp hangers. Should be able to name them, open them, put stuff in them. Also would be great to be able to repackage stuff in corp hangars
5) Rename all POS structures. Currently, you cannot rename SMAs and corp hangars
6) Randomness in sleeper spawns (same for incursions. At least make triggers random)
7) Don't change sig ids after downtime (not done after crucible)
8) Capital ship SD timers. One other suggestion I heard was that SD should force on overheating of all your mods, so you can't just run hardeners and SD.
9) Swapping T3 subs at a SMA. I (Two step) don't actually care about this that much, but lots of people complain about it a lot.
10) More wormholes. It would be great if C5s or C4s or something had dual statics. Right now, our w-space map looks a lot like a single line, and this makes w-space more boring.

That list was presented to CCP, and the discussion turned to basically talking about AHARM. Both CCP Soundwave (the only CCP person present) and one of the CSM members (going to leave him nameless until he speaks up), said that they were concerned about the difficulty of taking over "fortress" wormholes. AHARM's home system (we call it "Nova") was presented as one of these systems. The CSM member explained the difficulty of invading such a system, including an explanation of the math of chain-collapsing (there are only 113 class 6 wormholes, so if you have a static C6, you have around a 1% chance of getting the correct one). Once you do find the correct one, you can only put 3 capital ships into the system at a time, and then the wormhole will collapse again and you need to start all over. At past summits, there was some very brief discussion of having a "wormhole stabilizing" ship or module, and this was brought up again. The idea would be that the ship/mod would prevent a wormhole from collapsing due to the total mass that had passed through (but not change the maximum mass that could jump at a time, to prevent supercaps from getting into w-space). Some of the other CSM members though this wasn't a good idea, and presented several of the reasons I will discuss below. The final result was that CCP would be looking into the issue in the future, though probably not all that soon.

Since I wasn't attending the meeting, I only heard about the discussion a day later when I watched the video of the session. I immediately posted on the CSM forums about why I think the discussion wasn't correct, and I will reproduce some of those points here:

1) Built up wormholes aren't nearly as "impossible to invade" as was presented at the summit. I would point folks to AHARM's invasion of CCRES, AHARM's invasion of Firebird Squadron (see this killmail, for example), and Brotherhood of Starbridge's attempted invasion of Aquila, Inc (described here). In the case of the two AHARM invasions, we infiltrated at least 9 (I think 12+ in CCRES, 11 in FBS) capitals into the system before we invaded. Starbridge managed to get 80+ subcaps into Aquila's home system, and would have won had several other groups stepped in to save Aquila.
2) It is a good thing that built up wormholes are hard to invade. It took people a long time to get capitals/POSes/ships into the wormhole in the first place, why should wiping them out not take considerable effort and determination?
3) The removal of the Jumps API from w-space makes it hard to know when people are after you. Previously, we could tell when R&K were trying to chain collapse to us, as we would see the number of jumps in a system spike. We could then make sure to watch for incoming K162s at those times. With the API now gone, this cannot be done, and nobody can watch for incoming wormholes 24/7.
4) A wormhole stabilizer would just allow groups like AHARM (and Narwhals, Starbridge and others) to further dominate high class wormhole space. Right now, we don't bother to invade small groups in C5s because it is a lot of effort for us to move capitals in and move them back out when we are done. If there was a way for us to move large numbers through a wormhole, we would easily be able to attack these groups. It would also allow large nullsec groups to rampage through w-space.

One thing that was pointed out at the summit is that w-space is basically the least broken part of the game right now. There are some fantastic small gang engagements happening often, and most w-space folks really enjoy it. I would hate to see that changed by removing one of the key restrictions that makes w-space what it is.

Discussions like this one just make it clearer to me that I need to run for CSM 7, and I need to secure a full seat, which will be even tougher than it was for CSM 6. Hopefully issues like this make it clear to all w-space residents that we need a seat at the table, or our entire playstyle is at risk.