So the Meeting Minutes for the June CSM Summit have been released, let’s go through a few of the interesting statements included
Web Based tracking tool for CSM proposals
Pétur showed a potential ready-made 3rd party web tool for issues management. This would not only be available to the CSM, but also players—who could use it to raise, support, and prioritize issues among other potential functionality.
Or in other words, we will have a sort of bug/feature tracker that will contain all CSM proposals and possibly player proposals, complete with tagging, prioritization and alike.
This is a good thing to finally see the results of the work the CSM puts in, which will raise the reputation for the CSM.
We can also see the statuses of bugs and feature instead of just hoping they fix something, and we can get a better idea of what they’re working on.
Free portrait recreation/New character creator
The winter expansion will focus on polish of existing features, mainly planetary interaction, and preparation for coming expansions. The aim is to include new character modeling, which involves new technology and new artwork.
Players will be required, when the new character creator will be released, to recreate all avatars in the new system. CCP will probably continue to provide the paid service of remaking avatars.
So the “Incarna” character creator will be included in the winter expansion, and we get to recreate our portraits with it for free.
Even though we already had the idea they would do this until now it was just a rumour, I’m happy we get it because my portrait sucks in my opinion.
Fixing EVE
The CSM proposed that CCP focus more on existing content, polishing it post-release until it is excellent.
Nathan pointed out that CCP is heavily focused on reducing lag and that resources are currently being applied to the problem.
Good to know the CSM agrees on the fix stuff before adding new stuff idea we’ve been raising on our blogs and forums for a long while.
And another confirmation that CCP is working to fix the lag.
CCP stated that once Incarna and Planetary Interaction/Dust 514 are fully implemented, focus will probably shift far more towards improvement of existing features.
Hmm, well good they want to shift their focus, but seems we’ll have to wait a while before they do, at least they’re saying they are going to shift focus.
CSM remained unconvinced of CCPs commitment to excellence, even after Nathan’s arguments were heard.
Well that means that either CCP will prove them wrong on the next summit, or that they will keep pushing for it, good to know.
Dynamic missions, eventually…
The CSM inquired about future development of missions, especially with regards to dynamic varied content. The mission team explained that all of its resources for the Winter expansion have been committed and because of that there would not be a lot of room for other matters.
The CSM is also pushing to make missions a bit more interesting, which is good because no one likes grinding, this way it will at least be a bit less boring, too bad it will take a while though, but it’s in the backlog atleast.
Incarna
CSM asked if Incarna will ever allow players to walk around in their ships. CCP stated that Incarna will at first be walking in stations and this could probably expand eventually to other structures but probably not to ships.
Something I was hoping for, being able to walk inside certain structures, perhaps in your POS and alike, would like to see possibility of walking inside a titan too though.
CCP committed to publishing a “state of the situation” dev blog.
More news about Incarna, finally, we haven’t heard about it for a while now.
Lag, Crashes and other technical stuff
Lag will always be an issue however EVE, but EVE is now, from a technical standpoint, in a better state than it has ever been.
- Memory usage on the server per user has decreased in the last 12 months
- CPU Per User on the server has remained constant for the last 6 months except for a short period in late January where it went up just a bit
- Server log lines have been decreasing significantly since February, meaning fewer errors are being generated by the server
- CCP also moitors the client health such as the memory and CPU usage at different stages in the game (login, char select, game exit)
Well technically it has apparently improved, but from a player perspective it seems worse than it was before Dominion hit, still there are improvements.
Other than that there were some other improvements listed, and some more lag related stuff, read the meeting notes for that.
Low-sec Improvements, not yet
Arnar, Matt and Guilhem responded that Low Sec is a bit broken, is not what it should be and CCP are aware of this. A specific Low Sec expansion is not on the 18 month plan; however CCP is looking into a combat expansion, where combat awareness and information regarding combat would be refined for the user (not the combat mechanics themselves), which would benefit every EVE player rather on focusing just on Low Sec.
So there’s something combat-related on the plan, but nothing low-sec specific in the coming 18 months, not that I hang around in low-sec a lot, but as I might join a pirate corp in the future I’d like to see this improved.
CCP and CSM agree Low Sec needs to evolve into something more fun and dynamic, with the criminal element as a key theme. Many ideas aligned with this theme were presented and discussed in a brainstorming session. Although CCP has no room for Low Sec changes for a minimum of 18 months, CSM was urged to put together a Low Sec foundation story with essential elements defined, then submit it as a proposal for future consideration.
With Mynxee as the head of the CSM I’m sure they’ll come up with something awesome for CCP to implement, I like the sound of this.
GUI Salvation
CCP gave a short presentation demonstrating changes to the UI that involve using keyboard shortcuts for ship actions (like warping) and PvP maneuvers. CCP stated that it is trying to move away from the endless right clicking.
Key bindings, finally, for stuff that requires fast handling, woohoo o/.
Erlendur says that there will never be a complete UI overhaul due to scheduling reasons but rather a gradual UI improvement. Rewriting would take an unreasonable amount of time since the UI codebase consists of some 200,000 lines of code. The CSM has been waiting for an UI overhaul for 2 years but concedes that even a series of small fixes would go a long way towards addressing player complaints, especially if that involved extending the current good functionalities to as many other UI elements as possible.
Okay too bad they aren’t rewriting it, but with 200k lines I can agree on that. Good to know they’re actually going to fix all the little annoyances the UI has and make gradual improvements.
Other stuff
The CSM was given a very informative presentation on MMO scaling issues and the related technical challenges by Jacky Mallett, Distributed Systems Architect. The CSM suggested that the player base would enjoy the information and requested that CCP publish a dev blog containing the information CSM was given, a suggestion with which Jacky agreed.
Another look behind the scenes us programmers/developers love, and perhaps the rest of the player base might also find it interesting.
CSM firmly stated its belief that CCP is on the wrong track in directing their development power into new things that the players have no faith in while acknowledging that the old things need attention. CSM truly believes that CCP needs to pay much more attention to what players are saying. There is a growing frustration among the CSM that CCP’s apparent refusal to tangibly address well supported player requests will never change.
And that goes on for 4 paragraphs, good that they’re pushing through on that, keep doing that 
Closing statements
So all in all there’s a lot of good things pushed by the CSM, and now with the persistent Mynxee on their side I’m sure EVE will be heading in the right direction again.
Also my apologies for this long write-up totalling 1400 words, there just was a lot of stuff that I felt had to be mentioned.
Even after reading this I recommend you read the meeting minutes there might be a lot of stuff that you find important that I haven’t listed.
~Xeross
