Friday Bullet Points about Maps, Asteroid Belts, and Player Safety in EVE Online

It is Friday again and I have several items about EVE Online rattling around in my drafts folder.  I could have worked each and every one into a blog post I am sure, but it is hot, I am tired, and it is the end of the week, so I am just going to lump them all into a bullet points blog.

Future me will me angry about me being lazy and doing a single post on all of this a year from now, but who cares about that guy?

• Addressing Community Safety

After last week’s events where a female player who was being stalked and harassed both in and out of game blew up in the Imperium’s face and led to the downfall of The Mittani as its leader, CCP has followed up with a dev blog about community safety and its own policies on harassment in game and at CCP sponsored events.

The forum thread opened up to discuss this dev blog saw… its own sort of discussion.  I suppose it was once again proof that you don’t have to go to r/eve to find bad opinions.  It isn’t a real New Eden forum thread unless somebody brings up Ayn Rand I guess.

CCP said that anybody found in violation of its terms of service or code of conduct would not be allowed to be a part of any CCP sponsored activities, including events and things like the partnership program, with a promise that this was only the start of their initiatives to ensure player safety.  That prompted more than a few, “Wait, you’re not doing that now?” responses, but maybe they are just warming up to some bigger plan.

Related:

• CCP – Addressing Community Safety
• CCP – Real Life Harassment and Threats Policy
• CCP – Official Forum Thread Discussion
• Reddit – Thread Discussing the Dev Blog

We shall see if this ends up going anywhere.

• The Imperium Gets a Harassment Policy

Meanwhile, the caretaker leadership of the Imperium posted the new harassment policy last weekend based on the events of the previous week and feedback from its membership.  I cannot link you to it, as it is on an internal site, but it sets forth behavior not allowed, includes a reporting system designed to keep the identities of those using it confidential, and will be staffed by an appointed group of volunteers (now called the “Bee Keepers”) who will review complaints.  Included in the announcement is a primer on what evidence would be helpful and how to find and submit things like logs and screen shots.

Why does a space guild, even one with ~7K people in it, need an HR department?  Because CCP has not been historically fair or consistent when policing its own game, often depending on unpaid volunteers to do the investigation.  And, let’s face it, it took them a week longer than the Imperium to even acknowledge something happened, and that included a strong statement that rule breakers wouldn’t be allowed in the partnership program.  Oh noes!

As for whether or not the new Imperium policy and reporting mechanism will work as hoped… we’ll only know the next time something happens, and likely then only if the system fails.  Hopefully it will not fail the next person who needs support.

• Desolate Asteroid Belts

In addition to depressing the in-game economy and making capital ships too expensive to build, CCP’s great economic disruption plan led to a number of strange circumstances in New Eden.  One of them was the removal of asteroid belts from null sec, which gave NPCs no place to spawn.  Since those NPCs included some officer drops, CCP did a quick fix and move NPC spawns to jump gates in null sec.

This has not made people happy.  Gate rates are fine if you’re in battleships or HACs, but if you have a frigate gang on a gate looking to tackle somebody the gate rats can ruin your plan.

CCP put up a forum post outlining their plan to spread out the rats in null sec by introducing desolate asteroid belts.  The summary:

• This means that it will be possible for players to raise ADMs in systems in nullsec with no regular asteroid belts present without having to rely on random anomalies and gate rats.
• This means that players will be able to find the highest tier officers in this location in Curse which currently has no asteroid belts.
• Players should encounter NPCs on gates far less frequently.
• There should be no more instances of ‘hell spawned’ gates where an asteroid belt NPC spawn could share the same gate as a gate rat spawn.

This is currently available for testing on Singularity, the test server, and will likely move to the main server in the next few weeks.

• NetEase and the New Map for Serenity

Meanwhile, over on Reddit, CSM17 member Angry Mustache posted a summary of some changes that NetEase, which runs the Serenity server in China, has planned for a major revamp of the game.  The summary for what is being called the New Dawn update:

• Map is a donut, with empire on the outside, sov null in the middle, and NPC/lowsec inbetween
• Number of systems have been roughly cut in half to increase player density
• Topology of the map is maintained closely, regions will still have the same neighbors but they are arranged differently in space.
• A bunch of other shit that completely changes how the game is played

The “other shit” includes alliances being limited to 4 corporations of 255 players each and safeties being locked in the green state in high sec to prevent new players accidentally losing their ships due to ignorance of the game.

There is a lot to digest in that post, but the map is the wild bit for me.

The proposed New Eden map for Serenity

For those eager for some of these changes, they are all being developed by NetEase and are strictly for the Serenity server at this time.

• Battle of the Bricks Results Today

The Star Citizen development team challenged the EVE Online team to see which community could create the best LEGO based models of in-game ships as a way to money for the Extra Life charity.

A LEGO Noctis

The results of the competition will be announced today… in about 45 minutes from when this posts… on the Star Citizen official Twitch channel.

If you want to read about the challenge, though it is too late to enter, go here.  Otherwise, tune in if you can to see what people came up with.

• Team Security 2021 Update

The security team at CCP posted a dev blog about their performance in 2021.

There are charts and bullet points full of details about who Team Security is and what they get up to and how you can help fight the bot menace.  But, in the end, you want to know the big number, which is 70,492.

That is how many accounts Team Security banned in 2021.

And that is what I have for this Friday.