Ship Spinning, Ratting Up and CCP Job Cuts

A triple blog here looking at the return of ship spinning, my attempts to rat up from -10 and the news that CCP is cutting 20% of it's global workforce.

 

Yay! Ship spinning is back!

And as I thought, the forums, Facebook and Twitter have people moaning about it. There is never a more true saying than "You can please some of the people some of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time".

Why am I happy ship spinning is back? Well it's not so I can spin my ship. Ship spinning has been taken as the generic term for the "old" hanger view. The one where your ship is floating in the hanger and you can interact with it easily.

When PvPing you want to be able to work fast in your hanger. You may have friends nearby who need your help and messing about in station is not be helping them.

I want to be able to dock, repair, rearm, dump loot and undock in the shortest time possible. Now that bloody door has gone it's so much easier. I can double click my ship to open cargo to drop off the loot and stick some more ammo in there. I can right click my ship and get a repair quote without having to go through the repair service menue that lists not only all of my ships (30+) but also the ones in the corp hanger. "Where is the ship I'm in now???" /scroll /scroll /scroll. If I want to swap ships I just drag and drop.

So the return of ship spinning has really speeded up the repair and rearm process. Just like pitstops in Formula 1 racing, an extra few seconds can make the difference between winning and losing.

+1 to CCP for listening to players and putting it right. I hope that in the future an "Undock to CQ" will be added. However I won't be using this until Incarna is fully deployed and we have establishments, player interaction and the other CQ's. You know.... a reason to use Incarna. However I'm happy to wait for all of this whilst CCP fix, debug, adjust and improve FiS.

But you know what the real issue is for me? The same day ship spinning comes back to make my PvP easier... is the same day I had to start ratting to get my security status back up so that Shadows of the Federation are 100% flashy free in November. Our Great and Glorious Leader - Gallactica, also known in corp as OGAGLG (or the one who wears PVC maids outfits), has decided that the faction standing bug is too much of a PITA. Therefore whilst we are still NBSI, we need to be above -5 in order to get reps in militia fleets. I was -10 when this announcement was made Monday night. Damn!

 

So rather than patrolling around Black Rise in a nice Hurricane, Thrasher, Falcon or other PvP ship, I'm floating around NPC null-sec killing BS rats and hiding from anyone who appears in system as I'm in a PvE boat.

My usual Eve time would be undock, roam the pipes, shoot squids with friends and have a laugh. Now I'm having to do this....

 

And finally onto the announcement that CCP are cutting 20% of their staff (crappy news!), putting WoD on a back burner (good news) and concentrating on Eve Online and Dust514 (most excellent news!).

 

I feel sorry for the people who are losing their jobs. But lets be fair, who hasn't had to deal with this, or at least the threat of it, over the last few years? I personally have, hence my relocation to the Middle East, my wife has too, ex-colleagues and friends back home have been out of a job for over a year and I've lost count of the number of corpies who have posted on the forums that their Eve time will be effected as they have lost their job. It's a crappy situation worldwide, but lets not forget - subscription numbers are down, therefore CCP's income is down, so they are doing what every other company in the world has been doing in this situation... cutting staff numbers.

 

There is some disquiet in the Eve-O community about the job cuts, especially that the cuts appear at this time to be hitting the community team hardest. CCP need to tread carefully here. There is logic in their decision. Should the cuts be applied to the artists? No way! The art department has been highlighted as a bottleneck that is holding back development of new content (see CSM minutes). How about the coders and bug hunters? The game designers? All important people. I'm not saying the community team are not important people, they are, but to a smaller audience than the others. I love the Eve community team and I am horrified to see some of them losing their jobs. But I am biased... I am an Eve blogger, Twitterer(?) and I am part of that fantastic OOG Eve community. Therefore these are important CCP people to me and people like me (people like you in fact as you are reading this blog and therefore part of that OOG community). But looking at the wider Eve player-base.... I wonder how many of these people in the community team are known to them. CCP needs to cut staff, but how they can do that? I don't know. I can see the under laying logic of hitting the community team, and I wish they hadn't. But I don't know what else they could have done.

 

Sad times just when the Eve outlook was so positive. Not an Eve related video, but a good song....