After seeing Mynxee get some wheels in motion with CSM5, I felt a bit annoyed at my inability to contribute a lot to the workings of the CSM. At my age, I am not eligible to run for candidacy, as the drinking age is 21 in Iceland and CCP don’t want delegates they can’t take down to the pub (At least, I guess – the age of majority is 18, so it’s not a legal thing). Anyway, I decided to use my normal approach to fixing problems: There’s an app to be written for that…

So with the help of Selene from EOH Poker, we rallied a whole 3 CSM and ex-CSM people into a collaborative text editor, and wrote a spec. The tool in question was to manage proposals as they went through the CSM process – with the wiki and AH forums being identified as inadequate by both the CSM and CCP, but with no activity from CCP on providing a solution, I saw this as an opportunity to get the community involved and really push to get some CSM processes streamlined. We called it Nebula, and formed a new team of developers, with an open source codebase and instructions on how to contribute. We actively sought out new developers and tried to encourage other third party developers to get involved, and were met with mostly positive results. Team Excellence was born.

The CSM involvement we had was good. We ended up with a spec that was, as the title of this blog suggests, a little nebulous, but had most of the major concepts well sketched out and defined. We got to work.

It’s now been a fairly long time since we last had CSM contact, though those who have been trying to get involved in this (Mynxee and  Trebor to name a couple) have done so well, and continue to provide input; the main issue we have is that out of the 8 (since Ankh was removed) active CSM members and 5 reserves (or 9 and 4, depending how you look at it- either way, a total of 13 players), we’ve gotten in touch with and received input from three at most.  This is worrying for a number of reasons.

If the chairwoman of the CSM is having this much difficulty in managing to have some people meet and discuss matters for even a one-off meeting or event, then I start to wonder how well the communication works between meetings on other issues. For example; I posted a long while ago about the API in the assembly hall forum. The matter has been taken up by two CSM members, including Mynxee, and may be raised at a future meeting. I got an evemail from Dierdra Vaal a couple of weeks later, asking me if I thought anything was wrong with the API and if I’d support him raising an issue about it. This is the sort of thing that irks and worries me – if there’s no real communication between CSM members except during their meetings with CCP, then how the hell do they hope to present any sort of unified face to CCP or address issues that are concerns to the playerbase, and not individuals within the CSM? With no communication outside of those meetings, issues aren’t being discussed till it’s far too late to be discussing them, people are missing entire issues, and this all has a knock-on effect on how much the CSM actually achieves.

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine being a member of the CSM without there being a mandatory-usage CSM delegate IRC channel or some similar chat mechanism – heck, even a mailing list or forum – where the CSM can talk amongst itself, and get the ego trips out of the way before CCP gets involved. And I suspect that the fact that a lot of people on the CSM see no problem with the current state of affairs is a good indication of just where the priorities of those members lie – because it’s certainly not with the playerbase as a whole. The CSM is bigger than EVE’s petty squabbling of alliances and corporations; we’re talking about an elected council of people who can help steer the course of a company which is putting food on the table for hundreds, and innovating hugely. The CSM as an entity and as an idea does not deserve the majority of the people it has been saddled with so far.

Nebula as it stands is frozen, awaiting information from the CSM and the motivation of the developers to work on it. I know that myself and Makurid, who thus far have written the vast majority of the code, are having more and more difficulty finding the motivation to work on any EVE Online projects, let alone projects that involve such a depressing facet of EVE, and indeed force us to try and interact with it. Certainly for now, I will be stepping aside as a developer of Nebula, and reducing the amount of time I spend on my other EVE projects. Aside from anything else, as fun as it used to be, EVE apps don’t put food on the table, and wherever my career may go, developing the apps I’ve built further may not be the smartest move – there’s other projects, other opportunities. It’s just a shame that at the moment, EVE doesn’t seem to be working out for myself and other third party devs.

Now, that’s pretty important information. If I’m looking through BC to see someone’s kills, I’d like to see when those kills were. Say I’m crawling it for a corporate applicant’s kills- if the kills were a few years ago I don’t care about them as much as if they were last week. So, me being me, I looked around to work out how to file a bug report. Their forums looked like the place, so I registered with a non-me username and a mailinator address. I’m not a huge fan of spam so I try and keep my real email restricted to people rather than automatons.

All going well so far. I browsed to the ‘Bugs’ forum and made a new thread, then went to get a mug of tea. Then it got interesting.I refreshed the thread to see if any response had been made, and was met with the following message:

Sorry <my username>, you are banned from using this forum!
Email host not allowed, please use a real email address.
Your ban is not set to expire.

So, let’s see. I’ve been banned for using an email host they didn’t like. What? OK, so why didn’t they tell me this at registration so I could give them my ‘oh, if I must’ account? Why am I banned from using the forum, website and so on at an IP-address level (thus potentially blocking other people if I were on a dynamic IP) for a fickle detail?

That made me feel pretty pissed off, so I took a stab in the dark and joined the #BattleClinic IRC channel. Lo and behold, there was one channel owner there. Spotting he was in Battleclinic’s teamspeak AFK channel I decided to leave a message and await a response. I explained my situation and why I felt that ban was inappropriate. After 8 hours I looked at BC TS and saw the owner had moved to the WoW channel, and seeing no response in IRC decided to prod him.

[19:36:56] <Ix_Forres> MrCue: Given I can see you’re active on BC TS it’d be nice to at least have a response, even if it were to say ‘fuck off’.
[19:41:19] <MrCue> you may email chris@battleclinic.com
[19:42:46] <Ix_Forres> Do you not think that permabanning instantly without warning people who just don’t enjoy spam is perhaps a little overreaction?
[19:43:12] <MrCue> you may email chris@battleclinic.com

Well, that’s me told. I explained my account was there purely for bug reporting and that the other bugs I was going to report wouldn’t be reaching him. I decided not to bother emailing whoever ‘chris’ was.

Battleclinic’s modus operandi for being a large-scale killboard is simple aggregation. Quite heavy-handed aggregation at that, pulling in whatever feeds they find without asking and hitting them fairly often. Compare this to any other KB host- aggregation is typically done by one board operator submitting his feed to another. Apart from simply being friendlier it stops load from overwhelming small boards with little resources that may be hammered away at by Battleclinic.

But there’s a snag. Nearly every board in existence provides feeds; the few that don’t are typically private/closed boards that have no interest in syndicating or being syndicated. Battleclinic not only relentlessly scrapes other killboards, but requires users to register and pass a captcha test in order to view original killmails from their site, as well as not providing real feeds. This antisocial behaviour when it comes to sharing data is simply rude; to grab all your data from other websites and then to prevent those same websites from being able to benefit from your data is just bad nettiquete and serves no purpose. I know of many board operators who have banned BC’s server IP addresses to stop their boards being crawled.

The claim of course is that to provide a feed would impose too much load on Battleclinic’s servers. What? Their website is more or less a feed, simply comprising a hugely increased number of elements with additional data fed in from a large database and rendered in realtime. To generate a feed could involve a single data source, a single element (the original killmail) and could be write-through cached with ease, resulting in more or less a net zero load addition to their servers. It’d be like serving up a simple HTML page, such as the (invalid) HTML page I am served to notify me I am banned. And BC doesn’t seem to have much issue throwing those up.

BC has banned users in the past for merely bad-mouthing their website. So I’m pretty much guaranteed not to get unbanned after this, because heaven knows they won’t see it as a post of things they could improve. It’s difficult to see why they’d ban people who give feedback or criticism; without that information you’re not likely to improve your service, only detract from it.

As a response to Battleclinic’s lack of a kill feed, I’ve written my own generator, called Medikit. It’s still in development; as Battleclinic decided not to put a date on detail pages I’m rather stuffed when it comes to pulling complete sets of data from those pages, though I’ve gotten everything else working and rewritten in EVE’s killmail format, so I’m still rewriting the scanner to work off recent kills/losses for characters. With enough time I’ll be able to build more or less a complete dump of their killboard data and provide a realtime feed of my own derived from the data available on the website. Medikit will be making an appearance on Github soonish.

Oh, and a while ago I did a complete dump of the Battleclinic fitting database; I’m publishing the dump below to save time for those looking for a large collection of fittings. That said, I would strongly recommend using these as ‘bad’ training data if you plan on using these in neural network/decision tree fitting generators…

The changes to Scorp, Falcon and Rook assume that ECM pilots just fit ECM as a side benefit of their guns. This is simply not the case in the vast majority of situations. None of the EW ships are particularly strong with a decent quantity of ECM- using racial jammers you need 4 midslots of ECM, and trying to generate a tank out of your remaining mids doesn’t tend to work well. The goal of the ECM pilot is to reduce the damage output of the opposing force by disrupting target locks and removing one or more ships from the battle in terms of actually dealing damage to your team.

Now, there’s one situation and one ship that has received a lot of attention.

Falcons are fairly legendary for having the ability to lock out to ~200km and to jam from that distance with good strength. This is a great asset in fleet fights and smaller engagements like gate camps where having a few distributed ECM platforms around the place to break up hostile fire concentration can swing the battle to the defenders. However, in smaller fights it can lead to ‘problems’ where the hostiles will be set up for close range high DPS situations with a Falcon or two dotted around the battlefield at long range, well out of the attacker’s range. Problems like the attackers not being able to shoot anything.

What is the solution to this, you might ask? Well, CCP’s answer is to turn the Falcon- a paper-thin, untankable (This is a Caldari ship- shields are all about the midslots, which is where your ECM goes. One or the other, chaps) fairly nippy cruiser that can cloak- into a close-range brawler. Otherwise known as ‘primary’. Unless you jam 100% of the targets 100% of the time, you’ve popped already in 99% of situations. Your cloaking advantage is useless, your tank doesn’t exist, your DPS is tiny compared to, say, a HAC.

Then there’s the Rook, which CCP want to turn into a longish-range platform. But wait- drone bay? Why does a long-range platform need a frakking drone bay? It’s enough for one sentry drone, but that’s about all you could concieveably find useful as a Rook pilot. At 80k or thereabouts, you’ll still die nice and fast but you’ll at least be able to do some damage with your one sentry drone and heavy missiles.

No nerf would be complete without planned changes for every good ship, though- the Scorpion gets messed around with too! No more optimal range bonus for the Scorp- it’s getting brawlerfied too. Now, I’ve got a Scorpion set up for W-Space. Strong tank, a little ECM, and cruises for contributing to the longer-range targets DPS-wise. Now, a torpscorp might work well if there were some more hardpoints/highslots added, but your tank would again destroy your ECM. I’ve only got 3 multispecs fitted, along with two SDAs. It’s not a PvP-worthy fitting, by any means, and reduces the Scorp’s usefulness greatly.

Now- enough ranting. How do we fix ECM properly, to give smaller gangs a chance against these obviously overpowered ships? Fix ECCM. Give Remote ECCM a huge boost, either in strength or by making it an area-of-effect module. Of course RECCM is useless- RECCM providers will simply be jammed. Why not make RECCM a shield effect, similar to a heavy interdictor, and a highslot module instead of a midslot module? Pick a ship class that has a grey area in terms of it’s role and choose that as a specialist platform for RECCM. RECCM shielding could give all ships within the bubble a boost to their sensor strength, making them more resistant to ECM.

By making RECCM a more viable option for players and making it a clearly defined fun role to play, ECM gets more interesting, other pilots get jammed less and are happier, and balance can be restored to small gangs with the addition of a RECCM pilot or some extra ECCM modules on snipers. Nothing needs nerfing; the battlefield just needs evening up to give RECCM pilots a chance to swing the battle back to their side.

Edit: Dev update- they’re not going to nerf the Falcon to short range, and are making the Rook the brawler instead. Unfortunately they still seem to think Scorpions can survive at anything less than sniper range, and that they should not be able to fight beyond 140k. What the fuck?