So I was at the Newcastle meet last night.

CCP Unifex and many of the dev's from the Newcastle office and a couple from Iceland were there and much beer was drunk and tongues were looser than usual. If you've ever been to one of these meets or Fanfest you'll know CCP devs are rather good guys to be out drinking with.

So this will not be a who said what and who about post. There was a free and frank exchange of idea from players and the devs and I'm NOT going to tell tales on people because the last thing I want is the devs thinking they have to keep their mouths shut at the events. If you want all the gossip then make the effort to get to one of the meets.

That said I will give proper Kudos to Unifex as he is the guy that specifically said that Stealth Bombers shouldn't uncloak each other in wing formation and told the dev's to make it so. Cool.

So, onto the rest of the night.

They know they screwed up with the UI. And they are determined to get it fixed and don't care how much dev time it takes away from other things to do so. And I believed them. They have to. They know players are unhappy with it and they have the data to show it, feedback like the forums, petitions, bug reports and feedback from un-subbing players.

The old UI is NOT coming back or being rolled back. It is genuinely impossible to do so as so much other cool stuff in Inferno is built upon it. There was some other stuff mentioned about UI development which for the reasons I've already said I'm not going to repeat here. But I'm now confident that UI will be a suitable replacement for what we had before. It's just a matter of how long it will take.

It is also not an attempt to make botting harder. CCP have for more effective tools for that sort of thing. Nor is it a result of Dust 514's menu structure.

One other thing as well. The Dev's ain't too fond of trolls on these forums and they tend to ignore the 'stop whining' brigade that pop's up on them because a lot of them aren't very helpful. The complaints about features is how they know there is a problem to fix. They just ask they we keep it polite and not get personal. And use the bug report system too. It's also impossible to check on every post on every forum. There just isn't enough hours in the day for that. But they read as much as they can.

Everyone was loving Dust and were making sure the Dev's knew it. E3 was a major success for CCP and word in the industry is that the established 'dinosaurs' in FPS's as someone put it last night are very disturbed about how good it is and that it will be free to play. Long established revenue streams are going to take a kicking as a result of CCP entering the game.

There was also a small presentation with some slides that demonstrated how important us brits are to CCP.

Basically, we're the oldest, most skill pointed, richest and deadliest cross-dressers in EVE.

Oh and google 'Jon Lander'. He was trying to be apologetic as to the top hit but I think he loves it really.