EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

*Drone Bounties/Mining Buff: Mining has been dead in nullsec as a profession since the Drone Regions were introduced. The rats there drop alloys which are refined into high-end minerals instead of having isk bounties; this flooded the high end market with drone minerals and A/B/C mining across EVE flatlined, except for a tiny minority of dedicated or foolish miners. Since miners were once a primary form of prey in 0.0, we need to revitalize the A/B/C ore - get rid of drone rat alloy drops, replace them with a traditional isk bounty. Voila, arkonor has value once more.

*The Bot Problem: Something is wrong in New Eden, despite all the Fanfest-era sturm und drang about cracking down on bots. As a matter of raw speculation, I suspect that CCP's security team has mostly been focused on plugging holes in the still-shaky new forum software and/or chasing internal leaks rather than working on in-game automated isk generation. This is a huge issue for the playerbase; not only is inflation getting out of control, but bots ruin the low-level PvP - ratter hunting - that sustains all more advanced forms of PvP up the food chain.

*Ditch Aurum: Almost everyone involved in the Noble Exchange debacle appears to have been sacked during the 20% purge. The most ideal solution to the problem of microtransactions and Aurum is for CCP to back away slowly from Aurum and act like it never happened. Keep it to Incarna clothes, and convert any plans for additional microtransactions to flat isk. The economy needs isk sinks, and isk sinks drive PLEX sales without the controversy (and riots) of the sort Aurum inspires. Aurum should be a clothing-only currency. Every 'convenience microtransaction' or 'vanity microtransaction' makes more sense when sold to the players for isk than through aurum - a currency so loathed that even when given away en masse during the 'Eve is Real' promotion, most players ignored it entirely or unsubscribed.

*Neglected Features: Remember Faction Warfare, which was going to provide an introductory taste of PvP to newer players? Yeah, me neither - and CCP hasn't touched FW since its release in 2008 during the 'Empyrean Age' expansion. Amusingly, CCP released a companion novel to help sell the concept of FW, then never iterated on FW again. The feature stagnated and is at best comatose. With Incarna dead, there are now no more excuses - FW must get some love, even if it's a few basic 'little things' balance passes.

*Sov with a Purpose: Right now the optimal form of alliance in EVE is a stateless, sovless supercap blob that relies on Technetium moon income - the ‘Iceberg’ type of alliance I predicted years ago, like NCdot before they took Tribute and Pandemic Legion today. Sov war drives the narrative and content of EVE and that has suffered under the twin threats of Technetium and Greyscale’s tinkering with anomaly values. To make sovholding have a purpose beyond pride, we must first rebalance moon minerals such that technetium is not the end-all of alliance income, probably by adding r32 alchemy. Then there must be new and more useful upgrades to Infrastructure Hubs to boost the value of holding sov. The issue with technetium isn’t merely its imbalance vis a vis other moon products, but the fact that moon income is completely independent of sovholding. In an ideal EVE, the primary form of alliance income would be tied directly to that alliance’s territorial control, perhaps via a greater emphasis on Planetary Interaction.

---

The 'daylight' is over, as is my lunch; I have been at this cafe for barely an hour, and Reykjavik begins its slide into darkness. As ever, much of these CSM summits take place in the interstitial and unofficial hours; you can learn more from a dev in five minutes over beer at Islenski Barinn than you could at a day of meetings, which are recorded as part of an official record. We have arrived here on Tuesday, mostly from the States, mostly at 7am local time on a redeye; everyone passed out until lunch, trying to acclimate to local time. Now the real work begins - the bars beckon, and then eight hours of meetings with more lobbying between Wednesday and Friday. Yay, Iceland.