Interview with Mazzilliu

What is your ingame name?
Mazzilliu

Links to your forum thread and site.
www.mazzilliu.com is the main site. It links to the eve-o thread and everything else about me.

So, how long have you been playing?
A bit over 3 years

What have you done in Eve during that time?
After about a month in an empire carebear corp just starting the game, I saw an ad for Sniggwaffe(Sniggerdly's recruiting corp) and decided I like killing stuff more then I like mining asteroids. So I joined that corp and I've been in the same circle of people ever since. During that time I've done just about every sort of PVP imaginable. My fondest memories are of my smartbombing faction nanophoon that could solo interceptor fleets until the first speed nerf ruined that idea. Most of my PVP time after that has been spent in interdictors and rooks. I also used to spend a lot of time stealing ships out of deep safes, and putting alts in enemy alliances and stealing stuff from them too. I guess the majority of my eve career could be summed up in one word- greifing.

What real life experiences do you have that will aid you in your elected position?
Maybe prior experience finding my way around the airport so I can get on the plane to Iceland...

Seriously though.... it's a video game council. I cant think of a single way this will relate to real life except in getting personal exposure. So long as you know how to play the game you know what needs work and what doesn't.

What do you think of the recent Bob/Goonswarm fiasco, including the renaming of Kenzoku?
Pretty funny the first time, but would like for it not to happen again. The root of the problem is the CEO interface, which has been an issue ever since there were CEOs. The rights to disband the alliance(and a lot of other nasty things) is bundled with the rights to set standings. When you deal with people that can walk away from the corp at any moment with no repercussions, a system like this is bound to cause drama. It needs a complete overhaul, or in the VERY LEAST there needs to be new roles added that used to be relegated only to directors- setting standings for example- so you don't need a full director to get some relatively menial tedious work done. And for a large alliance with a lot of standings, it IS really menial, tedious work.

What do you think of the re balancing of ECM?
Went way overboard. By doing something so drastic they make an entire class of ship and a skilltree instantly worthless in medium to large sized fleet battles. That's a lot of wasted skillpoints.

What do you think of the re balancing of Stealth Bombers?
Looks like they are finally fun to fly. I see PL guys going out on stealth bomber ops pretty often, and they aren't particularly overpowered, just a fun ship to fly now. I think CCP hit the mark on that one. They never had any use before this buff except as highsec suicide gankers.

How much of an effect should players have on the broader Eve storyline?
Really don't care about RP. I know if you gave storyline control to me and my corp a lot of the characters would get killed off pretty quickly, and the rest of the story would talk about how much their loot sold for and how much they cried about losing their stuff.

Does it bother you that Veldspar is more profitable than any low sec minerals?
Not like I'm a mining expert, but I'm guessing that probably has something to do with how much of a pain it is to haul that crap anywhere. I'm just glad a lot of minerals come from mission loot, because most people are not going to be willing to suck on roids all day as a prerequisite to flying ships.

What's your opinion on current war declaration mechanics?
I kind of liked Privateer's idea of wardeccing all of EVE. But to me, wardecs aren't a huge issue because on the small scale people can just disband corp or join noob corps if they REALLY want to avoid it, and on the large scale alliances move their empire logistics out of the alliance as a general practice. And there's not really a good way of getting past this problem, because you are wardeccing an entity when the people behind it can always join or leave as they please, or divide operations between different entities.

What is the single largest imbalance in game, and how would you fix it?
What I take issue with the most is how nerfs and buffs are implemented on the live server. From what it's looked like, after they do all their testing on singularity and playing around in EFT all day they figure out what is the “most balanced” thing, and then impose it, in its entirety, on the live server. That might be fine if you're trying to create balanced level 4 missions, but PVP in large organized fleets with hundreds of people, with an experienced FC and the ensuing lag cannot be replicated on the test server, no matter how many calls bug hunters will make to encourage participation. The only way to reliably determine the outcome of a change in that environment will be to simply make an educated guess, and observe the outcome. Because at the end of the day, most players don't spend their time on the test server.

Some specific examples:

I'm sure in EFT the “new” rook and falcon are awesome jamming with missile DPS machines, but in every real fleet battle, they aren't going to survive 5 minutes into the fight. CCP should have first tried only putting in, say, a third of the actual range nerf they implemented and studied the outcome- do people fly the ships less often? Does the usage rates and market price fall in line with other ships in a mixed fleet? Has the forum whining died down any?

Same with the recent speed nerf- did the people who did ship balance realize interdictors generally won't survive past one bubble in a large fleet fight, and huginn/rapiers were nerfed into worthlessness despite not being an overpowered ship to begin with? This has huge repurcussions for large fleet battles. It's a lot harder to tackle a lot of battleships when they can just kill all your dictors and MWD out of the remaining bubbles- and in heavy lag, warp disruptors don't even cycle so there's no way to tackle anything reliably. Webbing specialized ships, with their current bonuses, are resigned to being worthless at a longer range then regular ships with webs on them.

And speaking for nerfs even further in the past... when they added scripts and effectively nerfed a handful of modules, they made no concessions for ships that specialized in those modules that would be made less effective. Nobody flys an arazu or lachesis in fleets seriously now for its sensor dampening abilities. And the few people that did fly curses or pilgrims in fleets for their tracking disrupting, don't anymore.

In summary, I just want there to be a more active monitoring of ship usage on the live server by the devs that do the game balance, and smaller changes made more often. Forum whining isn't an accurate measure of what needs to be balanced, and responding to it with a drastic measure that's only been studied on singularity is even less productive.

Anything to add?
Vote for me please.