Quite a few people have asked where I stand on a few different things, so I went though http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/and put some responses together. If you want more info, or something I haven’t covered, feel free to ask your question via my formspring account.

Covered in this section is the Corp interface and Customizable UI.

Corp Interface

Its clear for anyone who has tried to use this that it requires a massive amount of reworking, from titles to hangars and wallet divisions. This would obviously be a major project, and touch on many areas of EVE, and proper and logical documentation would go some way toward making social groups at least appear somewhat safer.

Customisable UI

Customizable UI stuff, I’m not certain on – it really depends just how much work would be involved for CCP vs the result, especially as it would generate more bug reports for UI things as everything has to work with English, German, Russian and Japanese now, plus improving the UI for everyone would probably be quicker and easier.

Covered in this section are the various Industry aspects: Belt Mining, Moon Mining, Planetary Interaction, Market, Contracts, Research and Production

Belt Mining

The old suggestion that belts may be moved to require some level of exploration may be worth CCP revisiting as a way to balance mineral availability as well as a way of dealing with macro miners and bots, which is still an issue, and something I strongly expect CCP to continue fighting against.

Moon Mining

CCP are apparently already moving in this direction, but to would make sense for moons in nullsec to have semi-limited resources. Something like ‘layers’ of the moon which change over time, meaning that the most valuable moon resources are randomly redistributed based on heavy usage.

Planetary Interaction

PI with the recent changes is pretty much OK, but more information is obviously needed as to how this will interact with DUST 514 and just what the results of the combat on the planet will/won’t be.

Market

There was an early version of a ‘Corp Market’ shown on Singularity some time ago, and while it didn’t function, it would be nice to be able to tie standings and corp/alliance status into the market, allowing things like reduced prices for corp members, and ‘trade sanctions’ against hostile parties. While this could be bypassed with alts, it would add more depth to the market.

Contracts

The recent rework of the contracts UI is a vast improvement, but there are rooms for further additions, such as the ability to check ‘closed contracts’ to see how much an uncommon item was last sold for, as well as improving the auction mechanics to be more in-line with common online auction sites such as eBay. Similarly, high value and low volume items should be kept off the market and be limited to contracts, providing more opportunities for the seedier side of EVE.

Research and Production

Clearly, the UI needs some massive work for production, and simple (from the users perspective) things the ability to ‘select all and manufacture’ would be nice. However, a revamp of corp and POS mechanics in general would also be welcome, finally allowing public research/production to work as intended, and corporations to properly use each others services in an alliance while not opening up security issues. Similarly, NPC research should probably scale in cost based on usage the same way corporation offices do, or otherwise be completely removed once corporation public research is updated.

Covered in this section are the various PvE aspects: Missions, Incursions, Ratting, Wormholes & Exploration, Static Complexes & Cosmos

Missions

EVE needs more mission content, that is quite clear. However, it also needs something to make the missions more interesting, for example dynamic missions with randomly generated locations, rats, objectives and Sleeper/Incursion AI. Similarly, something like player-generated missions could really help with adding new content, but would need player-friendly tools, and its not clear how the content team in CCP construct missions.

Incursions

These are generally OK, but could likely use a little balancing at the moment. Things like adding more separate but shorter incursions and adding gates restricting ship types could help, as well as boosting rewards for losec/nullsec to improve the traffic there. I would also expect CCP to perform some kind of ‘balancing’ at some point which would limit the amount of time the mothership sticks around once it spawns.

Ratting

Ratting needs some work, as its pretty much only very casual PVE. Going back some years, rats used to drop mission logs, which vaguely pointed to deadspace sites, so having exploration-style ‘escalations’ drop from rats would be a good way to iterate on this, and make ratting useful for something other than raising sec status in losec and null.

Wormholes & Exploration

Exploration has had a fair bit of work recently, but like most other things could use more varied content including more difficult sites, and boosting the rewards for normal exploration sites in losec, could help improve usage there. Wormholes in general are fine barring needing more content and corp/POS mechanic issues, but improving Sleeper AI could make sites more challenging.

Static Complexes & Cosmos

Again, these could use some iteration, Cosmos especially as nothing has happened for far too long with it and the rewards are no longer worthwhile. For example, making Static Complexes act more like exploration sites (so they despawn/respawn once completed), however they should still be located in the same general area.

Covered in this section are the various PvP aspects: Faction Warfare, Losec & Piracy, Nullsec, Wardecs, Scamming, Grief/Ganking.

Faction Warfare

Like wardecs below, I’m pleased to see this is getting some work. Its impossible to say what CCP plan to do with it, but adjustments to make it more friendly to ‘casual’ or ‘entry-level’ PVP would be a good move. There have been a few suggestions about reducing/removing/restricting the opposing faction loss from the structures, which may be a nice incentive.

Losec & Piracy

Piracy needs targets, and said targets need a reason to go to losec other than people wanting them to so they get blown up. Increasing the rewards overall in losec (rats, missions, Incursions) would promote traffic, and fixing the bounty/kill rights systems would help also.

Nullsec

At present nullsec does need a little work, specifically something to drive conflict and keep things moving, preventing space becoming stagnant – a few suggestions I agree with (in principal) are shifting resources, depleting moons, or sovereignty based simply on usage. Overall however, I feel the mechanics are okay and I don’t see any major problems with it other than the ongoing supercap proliferation, which is another problem altogether.

Wardecs

The wardec systems clearly need a rewrite, both eliminate the existing loopholes in them as well as encourage PvP against groups who can/will fight. I’m pleased to hear that this is something which is being worked on by CCP.

Scamming

Scamming is fine, and one of the things which makes EVE what it is. It would be nice to see mechanics which allow more interesting and involved scams, but these are always hard to ‘support’ while fixing UI problems.

Grief/Ganking

Like scamming, griefing and ganking are things which makes EVE what it is. The recent changes to insurance for suicide ganking have balanced that pretty well, so I don’t see any need to change how those mechanics work at the moment.