First, let me give you a quick overview of my current activities within KSS.

Step one of any day in the booster business will usually start with scan probing down the local area.  A few elements are at the heart of booster production: gas clouds (celadon mykoserocin and celadon cytoserocin mainly), reactions, and BPCs. Most of these need to be found through exploration in LADAR or RADAR sites.  Thus, a strong prober is crucial, and so every day I picked up my Helios and went on an epic quest for those elusive sites.  The rest of the day was largely dictated by what I found: either we would run the combat sites, or harvest the gas.  Once we had the necessary resources, we hauled them to our POS, stuffed them in our Chemical Labs, and waited.
Once we had the boosters, we found a buyer, sold them off, rinsed and repeated.

That’s fine.  It isn’t boring, although granted, it isn’t huge fun.  The main problem I’m finding is that, the more I log on, the more I realise that what I really enjoy in EVE is the PvP.  Sure, I take a sense of personal pride in finishing off a Core Runner Lab combat site, or harvesting a 3k cloud of gas by myself in the wee hours of the morning while local is calm and empty, but what I really enjoy doing is taking my ship out, getting a bunch of friends with equally aggresive tendencies together, and blowing up internet spaceships. KSS is a 3 CEO corporation, although in effect it functions largely as a 2 CEO corp.  Sadly, while one of our CEOs is himself a huge PvP advocate, the other, while being online far more consistently, is far too much of an industrialist for my liking, and recently, it seems the whole corp has been swaying in the industrialist direction. We haven’t had any decent PvP for a couple of weeks now, and without a solid alliance, we struggle to find a large enough fleet to really roam even when we do have a few PvP-centered members online.
Thus, I’ve decided it’s time to move on.  I live for the PvP, and it’s become apparent that KSS really isn’t a PVP corporation anymore.  We’re industrialists first, and PvPers when we have to be, while sadly, I’m at heart a PvPer who does some industry when he’s bored out of his brains and needs some ISK.

Don’t misunderstand me: the booster producing lifestyle has more than enough room for PvP.  As an organisation centered largely around lowsec and nulsec space, you’re going to make a lot of enemies, and opportunities to kick them in the shins abound.  You have to succeed in balancing that with production however, and that balance has shifted far too much for my liking.  In the future, when I’ve got more ISK to throw around, I’d love to return to booster production, maybe even as a CEO: if a well organised and balanced corporation wanted to, I’m convinced booster production could be on the most entertaining and diverse professions in the game. That balance is precarious however, so for now perhaps it’s best if I moved along.

The real question, as any EVE player who’s searched for a corporation before will know, is where to?

As in any job search in real life, you start by thinking about what you want to do, and then you have to reconcile that with what you can do.  What do I want to do?  Well, I’m a PvPer at heart.  That much I know! With that in mind, I initially oriented myself towards nulsec warfare, lowsec piracy, and mercenary work. All three sound appealing to me.
There is one small caveat to my job search however: a RL friend of mine has just joined EVE, and we’re planning on moving together.  Thus, I need to find a PvP corp that will accept me, with my limited PvP experience, as well my friend, an utter noob both to EVE and to PvP.
After quite a bit of searching, we narrowed our initial choices down to three options: the Privateers, a highsec wardeccing alliance who wardecs whoever it can or wants to, Mournival, the defense branch of an industrialist corporation, and Noir. Academy, the newly established training arm and feeder corp to the infamous Noir. mercenary corporation, of the Declarations of War podcast.

The second issue I ran into came into effect here, when I realised that I, in large part, hated making ISK.  I hate missioning and rating, and while I enjoy trading, I simply don’t do it enough for now to be able to fund my entire PvP operation in anything more expensive than a battlecruiser. That excluded Privateers pretty quickly: not only do members pay all their expenses, they’re also expected to donate to the corp wallet on a regular basis to pay for wardecs.  That doesn’t hugely appeal to me: I want a corporation that expects me to put work and will pay me back in the future, not simply a group of individuals whose sole goal is galaxy wide PvP.
My choices were further narrowed by the realisation that defending industrialists really doesn’t present many targets.  This isn’t lowsec: you defend your corp, and that’s it.  The rest of the time, you sit tight and try and make ISK.

For now then, my choices seem restricted to Noir. Academy. While I don’t hugely relish the idea of joining another training/feeder corporation, there are advantages: firstly, I’m still a noob in many ways.  I fail quite magnificently at making ISK, and my PvP experience is still relatively minute when compared to most experienced lowsec PvPers or nulsec warmongerers.  I also admire Noir. and their philosophy: accepting only PvPers, who expect to PvP a lot and get paid for it, sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.  Whole I have no illusions that I may not be allowed into Noir. proper for awhile, if at all, it’s a start.  More importantly, I need the practise.

I’m not quite set on Noir. Academy yet, so if you’ve got any cunning suggestions, feel free to drop me an EVE mail or reply in the comments…but for now, it looks like that’s what I’m aiming for.

Next week, I’m planning on writing up an essay on the incentives we give people to work for our corporation, and how the affect how much work members put in.  I’m looking forward to writing it frankly, as it’s what I’m looking into at uni currently…I’ll see you then!

The EVE universe is an incredible place, and I can’t help but be hopelessly in love with it.  It’s staggeringly vast, full of thousands of star systems, and players who inhabit them.  It’s stratospherically complex, a multifaceted universe which you could visit for years and still not understand in it’s totality.  Around every corner, after every jump, there is something new to discover, to learn, to experience.  Nearly most importantly of all, every action has consequence: every fleet movement and every trade, every PvP kill and every contract scam, each is  a a long term, well planned course of action you consider, and then reap the benefits or suffer the consequences.

That’s also why I hate EVE, and why, when  I can’t stand another minute of travelling through space looking for a lonely target to kill, or when I’ve harvested gas for hours and I’m bored out of my brain, I tend to come back to Quake Live.  It’s a game that’s as far away from EVE as humanly possible, both in terms of gaming philosophy and mechanics.

I absolutely love it.

When Quake 3 was first released, nearly ten years ago now, many would have argued the day of the bog standard, doom-like “shoot everything that looks at you funny” shooter was over.  Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike had changed the way people looked at First Person Shooters: people wanted sophisticated game modes, objective driven maps, complicated team work and tactical gameplay.

Then came Quake 3. It wasn’t complicated, or advanced, or difficult to grasp.  It had no complicated storyline, no daft new game mechanics.  It’s guns were bog standard, it’s single player lacking, and yet, it was as close to a perfect multiplayer experience as most people had ever known, the single best competitive shooter in the world.

Why?  Well, in hindsight, it’s relatively simple.  Quake is basic.  Not in a bad way: it just cut away all the elements it didn’t need to be great.  It focused on taking the shooter and slimming it down to it’s very core: fast, competitive twitch gameplay, with great maps, balanced weapons, and looking damn great in the process.  That was all it offered, but it did it so incredibly well, that it took the world by storm.  So well in fact, that it’s now be remade, and brought back to life, from the comfort of your browser.

It’s because of this minimalistic design philosophy that QL is such a great alternative to EVE.  CCP has concentrated on making EVE a game that’s huge.  So huge, in fact, that none of it is quite perfect.  Ask any EVE player, and they will be able to give you any number of game features that are broken, or unbalanced, or not quite right.  We accept them, look over them, deal with them as an unavoidably side-effect of such a complicated game.  EVE isn’t a game, it’s a simulation, and like with all simulations, when you create a world of that scale, some of it isn’t going to be quite right.

Quake Live however, has barely any flaws. It’s simple, yet perfect.  Quake Live is catch to EVE’s football.

Like EVE however, it isn’t for everybody.  It boils gameplay down to raw shooter skill, and if you don’t have it, prepare to suck.  A lot. Competition is balanced and fair, but the flipside of that is that a better player will continuously pound your face to the floor without breaking a sweat, wait for you to respawn, and then do it some more, just to watch you cry.  To a large degree, that’s been compensated for by QL’s matchmaking system, but still expect to have your gaming arse handed to you on a silver platter on a regular basis.

Stick with Quake however, and I’ll promise that just like me, you’ll improve, and you’ll fall in love.  You’ll love the maps, you’ll love the guns, you’ll love the adrenaline rush, you’ll love the fact that you can actually go and shoot stuff without spending ten minutes roaming the stars looking for a neutral.  You’ll love that you don’t have to activate modules, fit your ship, or deal with your corp.  All you do is log in, point, and shoot.

Oh, and don’t forget to move.

I’ve been on a small crusade against learning skills recently.  Don’t get me wrong, learning skills aren’t a huge problem for me: my main character has been around since late 2005, and so most of my skills are trained to 4-5.  As a game design concept however, I find them bizarre and pointless: one of the main appeals of EVE, at heart, like most other MMOs, is seeing your character evolve from a blubbering idiotic child with the skills and experience of a toothing baby, to an all-powerful demigod with enough firepower to put the Death Star to shame.  It’s a learning experience.  So why do we need to learn…how to learn?  Why do we need these all but mandatory 2 months of EVE training where all we have to look forward to is more training?

In the past, I always thought that learning skills were an accepted failure of EVE game design: a relic of the EVE beta, back when nobody was too sure how EVE was going to work out, that just like POS’ had been left in simply because CCP couldn’t think of any decent way to remove them without angering the entire world.  A necessary evil, simply because we hadn’t yet thought of a way of removing it that worked better than just ignoring the entire issue and maintaining the status quo.

Imagine my surprise then to find an enraged community reaction when I posted this thread in the CSM section of the forums.  I had expected the motion to be widely supported: I did not suggest any methods of solving the issue, and only mentioned that learning skills were an element of frankly horrible game design that should, preferably in the near future, be addressed.  Yet, in typical EVE community fashion, people suddenly took offense to the suggestion that I might want to “simplify” the game, and thus the argument continues.

There is an argument for forcing hard choices on the player, especially in a game like EVE where choice is always present and has huge repercussions on how you play.  It is crucially important to teach players that this isn’t World of Warcraft: you’re in this for the long run.  Expect to be poor, expect to have no friends, expect to die.  CCP even seems to have picked up on this, and is planning on introducing a forced death sequence in the next iteration of the new player tutorials to be released with Dominion, according to their presentation at fanfest.

Forcing you to make the choice between training your learning skills now, and thus boring yourself to death now, or training your skills later and getting bored then, isn’t a choice between option A and option B: it’s a choice between sucking now or sucking later.  The main issue being, there is always sucking involved.  Is this really the lesson we want to give new players?  Welcome to EVE, prepare to be bored out of your mind a lot?  Welcome to EVE!  It involves much sucking!

The crux of the argument is this: EVE is, at heart, still designed to be fun.  No matter which tough choices you make, who pops you, who you get scammed by, where you get your PLEX from, every choice is designed to promote you having fun.  You train skill X to get into your new ship, you rat to have money to get into your new ship, you get your ship to shoot people, etc.  Each element in this chain is an individual accomplishment.

What do you achieve from learning skills?  The ability to do more learning.  Well woop-di-do.  I’ve bored myself, so I can do more boring myself.

Learning skills are an outdated, malconstructed, pointless and anachronistic mess of a game mechanic.  Get them out of my game CCP.  I don’t care how you do it: reimburse the points, remove them altogether, or just remove the learning skills bonus and hope nobody notices.  It’s a horrible problem we’re all ignoring, and needs to be dealt with.

Quick status update: My first article was published on the Tribune today!  I hope you enjoy reading it…Let me know what you think!  As a quick sneak preview, expect an article on an incredibly interesting character in next week’s issue…

Thanks for reading!

I realise my blog has pretty much become a weekly column at this point, so I thought I’d return to a more familiar blogging format for a change , and give you a quick update as to how stuff was going, and maybe link a few interesting things.

First and foremost, I’m happy to announce I’m the latest addition to the EVE Tribune’s staff!  I’ve been a big fan of the Tribune ever since I started playing EVE, and my first article should appear this week.  I’ll link to it here when it gets published, so don’t worry, you’ll read my melodious words soon enough (oh, the joy)!  I’m still going to be writing for this blog, but expect a few of my posts to be direct links to the Tribune.

Also, the Tribune is always recruiting passionate and dedicated writers!  So if you’re interested in writing about EVE, and can mold words to your command like a venerable wizard on ritalin, then apply!  You even get paid in ISKies!  Sure, it isn’t real life money, but it’s damn good fun.

On a more EVE related note, you’ve probably noticed that considering this blog is about pills, I’ve barely mentioned boosters…This is due to the fact that our corp had recently suffered pretty badly in an epic war with a huge cartel (which I’ll cover at some point in the future), and has lost both our POSes, and thus our ability to produce boosters.  However, I’m glad to announce that we’re now back to full efficiency, and pumping out drugs more than ever before!  So if you need your fix of boosters, legal or otherwise, you know who to call (and I don’t mean that dodgy dude on your street corner either…)!

With these two new sources of income, I’ve started to pump out enough cash to fly a battle cruiser on a regular basis in PvP (!) with no fear of losing it!  So expect more exciting PvP videos to come out relatively soon.

Finally, you’ve probably noticed that the EVE fanfest just finished.  Thankfully, the Dust 514 info was everything I had hoped for and more.   So great job CCP.

Until next time!

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us fromCrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

It’s an interesting topic isn’t it?  I’ve been considering writing about how we might play EVE on-the-move post Dominion for a while now, and what better way to do that than with my first Blog Banter!  After all, the whole point of having a soapbox to shout from is that you get to loudly disagree with the idiot on the soapbox next to you!  Otherwise, there’s very little fun involved…

To discuss a topic like this, it’s important to define what we consider as playing EVE.  Do we only play EVE when we’ve got the client up and running? Do we play it when we sit and chat with our corp mates on ventrilo?  Do we play it while we’re sitting at the office, posting on our alliance forums?  What about AFK mining?

As far as I’m concerned, the client has become only a facet of the incredibly vast EVE experience, and probably one of the lesser ones at that! The true power of EVE as a game, and the reason why it’s been around so long, is precisely because it’s become so much more than just another icon on your desktop.  Consider what you do, outside of the EVE client, that relates to the way you play EVE, and I think you’ll find we’re all far closer to the EVE universe than a first inspection would seem to indicate.  I, for one, was thinking of my new Vexor fit in the shower this morning.   As soon as I was out, I did a quick search for something similar on BattleClinic, before going through my daily plodding of the EVE forums.  Before lunch, I flicked through the old issue of EON magazine that’s still lying around in my toilet.  And I’ve just swapped tab from writing this meaningless drivel to check my sell orders on EVE Commander.   Oh, and I’m currently writing an article on EVE.  I have no doubt a lot of older, more community involved EVE players “play” EVE a lot more!  Think about the lottery organisers parsing their data through excel, or the bankers at E-Bank frantically trying to recuperate lost cash, or the industrialists trawling through their market data on Google Docs or EVE Metrics.  Hell, I suspect Chribba is in fact an AI constantly plugged into all information relating to EVE ever, and is always playing EVE!

Eye opening, isn’t it?  The EVE experience extends far further than we assume it does, and thus, at least by my definition, we play far more EVE than we think we do!  More relevantly, a fair few of us now play EVE on the go, on the move, on iPhones, Blackberries, tablets, laptops, netbooks, bizarre futuristic cybernetic nano implants, and any number of other programs capable of browsing the web. We use these tools to access Capsuleer, EVE Metrics, and maybe even this very blog!  Okay, fine, probably not this blog (maybe that’s just me…), but you see where I’m going: once you have access to the web on the move, your access to the EVE universe can become nearly omnipresent.

Post Dominion however, I’m clinging to the hope that we’re going to see a radical reshape of how mobile users interact with the world of EVE, through the introduction of EVE’s brand new “social networking” site, COSMOS (aka. Spacebook.  See what I did there?)

Already, through the wonder of the EVE api, most of the information on your EVE character is available on the internet.  I briefly mentioned EVE Commander earlier in this post, and I highly recommend people check it out: as long as you trust it with your full API key, it will allow you to access your assets, ships, market orders, and transactions from anywhere, any time.  You can also plan alliance ops from the forums, plan your route using DOTLAN Maps, and consider the market using EVE Metrics.

There is very little however, that you can actually do from outside of the game.  You can look at your contracts and player skill queue, but there is, for now, no way to change skills from out of client, update market orders, or even send an EVE mail.  If CCP is to believed however, they aim to change all that, through the wonderful magic of COSMOS!

As you can see in that interview, as soon as COSMOS hits in Dominion, you’ll be able to send, receive and read EVE mails out of game.  It seems you’ll also be able to manage corporation and alliance recruitment, as well as god knows what else! If this dev blog by CCP Rhayge is to be believed, there is very little COSMOS cannot do theoretically.  Just like the rest of EVE, I have no doubt that COSMOS will continue to evolve as expansion after expansion is released by those crazy people up at CCP.  In the near future, COSMOS will be the main link you’ll be seeing between EVE in game, and EVE in your browser.  Don’t be too disappointed however, as I suspect this feature will become far more important if CCP succeeds in moving more people into 0.0, alliance politics, and sovereignty with the Dominion expansion, as is their stated goal.

One thing is for certain in Dominion: holding sovereignty will be a far more interesting and active job than it is currently.  CCP Abathur gave us some hints as to how this might work, and these changes are apparently going to appear in Singularity in the near future.  If these changes are anything like what I’ve imagined in my head, you’re suddenly going to have a lot more information available on your “sovereignty dashboard” than we do currently: the status of the upgrades in your system, how full of fuel and ammunition they are, and maybe even who is currently in system. I’m clinging to the hope all this information, and hopefully a lot more, will be visible, and maybe even modifiable, on the move, via COSMOS.

After that, the possibilities are all but endless.  Through COSMOS, we’ll hopefully one day be able to manage nearly all the facets of our EVE life!  Recruit corp members, modify industrial orders, manage system upgrades, set standings…EVE is often referred to spreadsheets in space after all.  Short of PvP, there is very little in EVE that we actually need the EVE  client for.  If EVE is spreadsheet in space, COSMOS could be our google documents: access it anywhere, modify it anywhere, and then share it with anyone.

So, in the relatively close future, I’m hoping for the ability to do everything we do in stations from your browser in COSMOS.  Chatting, organising, selling, buying, researching…do we really need a client?  Of course not!  So let’s hope we see them in COSMOS.  Maybe we’ll even get little animated gifs to let us spin our ships through a browser :P

Beyond that? Who knows.  The possibilities, in the long run, are endless for the world of EVE, and are only limited by CCP’s ability to code and our imagination.  Already, the iPhone and other smartphones are displaying graphics capabilities which can rival the most powerful portable gaming platforms.  What’s stopping us booting up EVE and joining fleet ops in the bus or on the train to work?  Not much at all.

Just as I finished writing this post, a new dev blog detailing exactly how COSMOS will work was published, and thankfully for me, it looks like CCP and I are following relatively similar trains of thought.  COSMOS will indeed, in the words of CCP, be “EVE away from EVE”.  The future is looking brilliant!

That’s all from me.  I’d like to thank CrazyKinux for organising such an awesome blogging spree from the community.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my first blog banter, and I’ll see you in New Eden!

Check out these links to other posts in this month’s Blog Banter:

• A Merry Life and a Short One: I Don’t Own a Working Phone
• Yarrbear Tales: EVE on Mobile Devices? Eh.
• Hands Off, My Loots!: EVE Mobile…Possibility?
• Achernar: Trapped on Planet Horror (I highly recommend this one… for it’s made of awesome and win)
• Rettic’s Log: The Cronofile – Blog Banter: EVE Mobile
• A Mule in EVE: EVE Mobility
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: EVE Mobile
• My Life in EVE: 12th Blog Banter
• My God, it’s Full of Stars!: 12th EVE Blog Banter
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: WOW, look at that ‘micro-Dust’
• Adventures in Mission Running: 12th EVE Blog Banter
• Ecliptic Rift: EVE Everywhere
• Roc’s Ramblings: EVE Mobile
• EVE Monkey: EVE on a Mobile Device?
• Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog: I-pod Capsuleer
• Escoce – EVE Trade: Dynamic System Security
• Break Vol: EVE Blog Banter 12
• Mikeazariah: EVE Mobility
• CrazyKinux’s Musing: Tying the Dots and Locking Me In!
• Zero Kelvin: EVE Blog Banter 12!
• Cle Demaari: Is That EVE in your Pocket or are You Just Happy to See Me?
• Corrupted Datacore: MyEVE
• Life in LowSec: Wormholes on the Go
• The Elitist: EVE on Mobile Devices
• Inanity and Doom: We’re Halfway There
• Into the Unknown with a Gun and a Camera: Glue
• Aether: A Little Something for Everyone
• Talk Unafraid: Mobile EVE

The new planets have been spotted on the test server, Singularity, and damn, are they sexy.  The real question they bring up though, is why the hell do we even need planets?  Hell, a lot of EVE players already play with a UI consisting of little more than little red crosses and some dials, so why do we care so much about pretty lumps of dust next to our internet spaceships?

EVE is an especially interesting game to think about immersion in.  Unlike most MMOs, immersion is completely irrelevant to most players: we play while alt-tabbing to google documents, we play in a window, we play while listening to EVE radio.  Yet, some elements of EVE are hugely immersive: I defy anybody to actively take part in a fleet PvP gang, and not feel the huge rush of adrenaline and stress as the first shots are fired, or find themselves yelling down into their headset in a frenzied panic as their structure points start to evaporate into fine dust.

It isn’t immersion in the usual sense: most of us don’t imagine ouselves as actual podpilots, flying through the ether (although there are those who do, as the large numbers of RP blogs who appear in my blogroll show).  We’re all immersed into the EVE game experience, one way or another, and yet seem to put as much effort as possible to distance ourselves from the game.

A key point in this argument is that the motivation of your character in game, and of your actual, real life self, are often very similar.  Unlike most conventional immersive games, in EVE, your goals are set by what you want to do, not the arbitrary trail of tasks that have been set up by the developers before you.  This is a huge step forward in game design and immersion, as it means the interests, and fears, of your character and yourself always align.  In Fallout 3, an award winning game often touted as one of the most immersive games of the previous years, when your character is abandoned by his father, the supposed sadness of your character will probably have very little effect on you, the player.  The fictional character has lost a lifelong mentor and close relative, while the player has lost a newly introduced NPC with an incredibly fatherlike voice.  The impact of the two are vastly different.

Not so in EVE.  Losing your brand new T2 fitted cruiser to a roaming gang matters only because of the work hours you, and your character put in.  For all intense and purposes, you’re one and the same person in terms of motivations, experience, and goals.  You want that shiny new battleship to follow on the goals of your character, as well as yours.  This is why I’ve always found the idea of RPing in EVE somewhat self-defeating: you and your character already have goals in life.  You aim to get rich, shoot stuff, and life happily ever after.  Why pretend you’re character is an escaped Amaar slave?  Why not simply be another capsuleer seeking fame and fortune?  Surely, adding motivations to your character that you have no actual reason for only distances it from your goals.

Nearly as importantly, what you see in your EVE window is exactly what, in theory, your pod pilot would see.  CCP has done a great job of providing fictional elements to bring the players even closer to their characters: when you spin your camera around your ship, you’re not simply rotating an imaginary camera, you’re moving your external camera drones.  When you chat to your corp mates, you’re not simply chatting to a group or guild of players with no purpose other than ingame, you’re chatting with other colleagues in your search for profit and fame, just as you would in any real life corporation.  Similarly, when you look down at that station you’re preparing to dock with, both your player and character are seeing and thinking the exact same thoughts, and that’s why planets are so important: they’re perhaps the most important and significant features of EVE space other than stations and other ships, and yet look absolutely ludicrous, with no activity or even a semblance of realism.  When I see a planet in game, the first thing I think is “Eurgh”.

When Dominion does finally get released though, and my character stares down at the beautiful planet below him, both he and I are going to be thinking the exact same thoughts.  I suspect those thoughts will be something along the lines of “Damn, that’s sexy”.

On a completely separate note, I apologise for the slightly messy and speculative nature of this post…I’ll try and go over it and clean it up a bit in the future.

Also, I now have 5 followers for my RSS feed, and my blog was graced with it’s first comment this week!   Wehey for progress!  I’ll also been participating in CrazyKinux’s 12th Blog Banter next week, so watch this space!

Adam Ridgway, known in game as Larkonis Trassler, used information divulged by CCP about an upcoming game change (speculated to be the titan doomsday changes) to heavily invest in a commodity in an attempt to resell it for profit post-patch, when demand had caused the prices to skyrocket.

CCP, at least in my opinion, have a record of being particularly clement towards people who abuse their power, and didn’t fail to prove that again, allowing him to resign instead of being kicked out, as well as allowing him to rerun in the future.  The 30 day ban that was issued to all his characters, while an annoyance to any EVE player, is still only a slap to the hand for  committing a real life crime.

The EVE community has shown similar nonchalance despite the fact that one of their representatives attempted real life contract fraud: while the CSM statement was largely greeted with requests from a permaban by the general public, Miyamoto Isoruku in the EVE Tribune advocated leniency, and Warchilde on the well known Podded Podcast in fact admired Larkonis, pointing out that this was only taking the scamming behaviour CCP has so fostered in game and applying it to the highest rank of the food chain.

Whether Larkonis’ behaviour was excusable, or in fact to be congratulated, has been discussed to hell, but I’m going to give a slightly more reasoned chat on what mentality this fosters, and what this might mean for the future.

The most important problem this causes, right now, is a huge lack of confidence in the CSM, a council that is widely disregarded enough as it is.  For what could be an incredibly important organ for player feedback, voter turnout has always been incredibly low for the CSM elections, especially considering the pitiful amount of effort it takes to vote (to quote CCP, the third CSM elections recorded ” a turnout of 9,74% compared to 11,08% in the first election and 8,61% in the second”). This sort of behaviour definitely won’t help, especially with the allegations made my Larkonis that other CSM members and even CCP employees told him they too would have attempted fraud had they been given the chance.  I have to give credit to Larkonis for admitting that this wasn’t some elaborate scam: it was a drunken mistake on his part that he regrets, especially considering it’s implications for the level of trust in the CSM in the future, an organisation he believed in.

Nearly as importantly, I think CCP should make it very clear that real life scamming, by mistake or otherwise, is not okay.  It does not follow the rules, it isn’t acceptable, and it will not be tolerated.  While I understand and sympathise with CCP showing Larkonis clemency when the context of the fraud is considered, as well as his feelings and cooperation following it, most of the EVE community does not: what they’ll see is a smug scammer being allowed to walk free, and CCP apparently not giving a damn, after breaking an NDA and abusing one of the most prestigious positions in the EVE universe.  This will only foster the view that this type of scamming is okay, low risk, and potentially extraordinarily profitable.

I’m not sure that’s the sort of thing we want people to think.  Even though I understand that Larkonis made a mistake, even though I’m sure he’s a nice guy and regrets it very much, I think it’s important CCP make a stand now, and make it very clear this sort of behaviour will be punished as strictly as it can be, both in game and out of it.  This was a great test of CCP’s Internal Affairs Bureau, and it passed with flying colours: in my opinion however, CCP still fails to understand the impact of allowing real life administrative power to spill over in game.

Hello again!   I’m going to cover some relatively old news I’m afraid, but I’m a blogger, so I can do that!  This is my soapbox, and that means I can happily talk about stuff nobody gives a rotting turd about.

The Q2 QEN for EVE was released recently (about a month ago to tell you the truth, but hey), and it’s one hell of a good read.  The quarterly economic newsletter, published by the CCP inhouse economist, Dr.EyjoG.  I highly recommend you read it, as it’s full of interesting statistics about pretty much everything in the game from subscriber numbers to T3 manufacturing, but in this post I’m going to be focusing on an interesting set of statistics that analyses the amount of money in player’s wallets according to their security status.  I’ll post a few graphs and his summary here, and then go into some analysis.

“By  observing  the  distribution  of  monetary wealth and location of characters, it becomes apparent  that  the  wealthier  the  player  is, the more likely that player resides in nullsec space.  In addition, examining login minutes and ISK per wallet tells us that more playing time generates more money and at an exponential  rate.  The  more  money  players  have, the more able they are to replace ships that are lost in combat. This allows more experienced players to venture into nullsec space, which in turn leads to our finding that there is more ISK per character in nullsec space than elsewhere on average. However, the majority of EVE players are located in hisec space, or 70% of the total number of characters. Thus, most ISK is located in hisec. The least amount of ISK is located in lowsec space, where only 13% of EVE characters reside.”

The basis of any capitalist economy is risk vs. reward, and that applies just in much in EVE as in real life, if not more.  Why do people move to nulsec?  For the iskies.  There’s more to it of course: EVE players aren’t economically rational creatures.  We are, after all, supposedly playing this thing to have fun (although, granted, we all forget that sometimes).  If we were all playing for the ISK, there would be absolutely no reason to sit in lowsec.  Risk versus reward wise, it just really isn’t worth the effort!

Consider the increase of risk incurred when taking a jump from highsec to lowsec: risk goes from being nearly entirely non-existent to being an omnipresent threat to any endeavour.  Sure, high-sec isn’t completely safe: Goonswarm happily proved that with Jihadswarm, and many aggrieved victims of suicide gankers on the forums will be more than glad to tell you how dangerous it can be.  It isn’t a huge part of everyday life however: if you go mining in 1.0 and take a cofee break for half an hour, you can happily expect your ship to still be there when you get back.  Take a half hour break in low-sec, and you’re damn lucky if you haven’t been podded.

So, why do we come to lowsec? Are we crazy people with no business sense?  Of course we aren’t.  Human beings are, generally speaking, pretty rational, and a whole branch of economics has developed behind that principal: if you’re interested, I heartily recommend The Logic of Life.  I won’t summarise it all here, but suffice to say that we’re good, with a bit of practise, of finding the optimal position for ourselves, be it in a market, in poker, in a classroom or in a business.  The EVE player who choses to live in lowsec then is one who actively enjoys his life in low sec, be it pirating, gas harvesting, lowsec mining, or whatever else he might be doing, more than the isk in lowsec, and more than the security of highsec.

The real question then, is why don’t we just move to nulsec?  Surely there’s more PvP?  Surely f the thrills are better, the rats are richer, the corporations are larger and people are generally better off, then why the hell are we here?

I’ll take a further look into this later on, but for now, let me know what you think in the comments (assuming somebody actually eventually reads this disjointed crap…)!

So, Dust 514.   It’s the word on everybodies mouth, the center of every conversation, the heart of every argument, and the crux of every intergalactic flame war on the forums right now, and rightly so.  Done well, it could radically rewrite the EVE sovereignty principles, while keeping the game enthralling, predictable, immersive, and forge tales of space opera the likes of which we haven’t seen since Star Wars.

If you’ve been hiding under a piece of intergalactic space rock for the last month or so, let me give you a quick recap: CCP are launching a massively multiplayer FPS for consoles, that will be linked and play an integral part in the PC version of EVE Online, and more specifically, in the new sovereignity mechanics, as part of the huge overhaul sovereignty will be getting starting with the next EVE expansion, Dominion.  In fact, it would appear that Dominion will usher in the first changes both in sovereignty mechanics, and in planet mechanics, and both of these will be deeply linked to Dust 514.

The exact meaning behind the name Dust 514 still hasn’t been revealed, but we do know that in Dust, you’ll play a mercenary, and you and your fellow mercenaries will be employed by corporations and alliances across the EVE universe to fight on a variety of planets and battlefields throughout the EVE universe. The action’s of EVE players will have repercussions for Dust players, and vice versa: the two playerbases will have to plan and organise themselves if they want to succeed in the long run.

One final, rather important note: as far as we know, currently Dust 514 is aimed to be an Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 exclusive.  You read that right: for now, there are no plans for a PC version of Dust 514.

Now, the EVE playerbase is rather divided as to how this is going to pan out, but the facts are, for now, we know very little about how this is going to be implemented and how significant the it is going to be, so instead of rambling on with largely useless speculation, I’m instead going to write two short stories on how the game might turn out.  One of these will be how I hope it’s going to turn out, and the othe will be how I’m worried it could turn out if it isn’t done properly.  I’ve faith in CCP in the long run, and I’ve no doubt that in 3 or so years time, Dust will be a lot closer to my dream than my nightmare (assuming it isn’t dead of course, which is entirely possible…but that’s a different problem altogether).

• The Dust 514 dream…

Jack loads up his PC, and loads up EVE…His alliance, the Platypie, are planning on launching an attack on another system.  As ground forces coordinator, he’s been put in charge of recruiting, ordering, and supplying the Dust mercensaries they’ll require to take over the hostile system.

He looks over the enemy system he plans to attack, focusing on the central planet, which he’ll need to take over with Dust mercenaries if his corp is to benefit from the buffs earnt after a succesful ground battle.  It’s a heavily populated system, with a largely urban landscape, and artic temperatures.  With the relevant information in hand, he opens up the brand new Dust 541 window on his overview, and takes a look at the mercenaries for hire section.  The overview quickly displays the list of all Dust mercenary alliances currently available for hire, as well as extensive statistics and information: their success rate in the past, employment history, membership level and equipment, as well as availability and special contract terms.  He quickly filters the statistics columns to artic and urban terrains, and looks over the most succesful mercenary corporations for that type of battlefield.  His alliance could never afford the most expensive mercenaries: they’re often either under long term employment to one of the more important nulsec alliances, or ludicrously expensive.  Lower down however, are the more affordable companies: mercenaries with more average success rates, but far more reasonable fares, as well as more sensible demands for equipment and fleet support.  Finding a possible match, he opens up their detailed view, only to discover they’ve been regularly employed by their enemies in the past: the risk of them swapping sides is too great, and he quickly looks to the others.

A couple minutes later, he has found a match: an experienced mercenary outfit, not amazingly talented but succesful enough for this incursion, and within his budget.  Their contracts are also very generous: they’re willing to work for a couple of weeks for only a couple hundred ISK, with no obligatory fleet support for supplies or otherwise.  Convinced he has found the corporation he is looking for, he drafts up an EVE mail, and sends it off via COSMOS to their commander.

***

Later that day, Timmy boots up his xbox 360, and loads up Dust 514.  His avatar appears in the command ship for his mercenary outfit: it is a sparse ship for now, small and dreary, but he hopes to be able to improve it along with the fortunes of his company.

There are three options for play in Dust 514: the story mode, which he’s completed, skirmish, a simple generic FPS mode, and EVE Link, the bulk of the game.  Each of these can be accessed from here, in his command ship.  Around him, other members of his corporation are either walking around and chatting, or linked up to the VR consoles that allow them to access skirmish mode, which he was about to access.

He’s interupted by a flashing message on his screen however, that warns him of a COSMOS message in his inbox.  He’s been offered a contract!  The COSMOS mail flashes up on screen, and after reviewing the contract tems, he quickly accepts: it isn’t the most generous of contract, but when you’re a band of freebooters like him and his friends, you take what you can get.  An automated message is automatically sent off to his other corpmembers letting them know the day on which the battle will be joined…

***

2 days later, on the scheduled start of the war, everything has worked out as planned.  Timmy and his friends are all waiting in the command ship, which has been automatically moved to overlook the planet they’re to engage today.  Through the glass, they can see its frozen artic wastes below them, as well as the command points they’ll need to capture.  Timmy and his lieutenants quickly run through basic strategy over voice, before running to the loading bays and to their ships, which have been filled to the brim with vehicles and weaponry sent down by the EVE fleet fighting above.Suddenly, their ships are launched, and impact a couple of minutes later into the ruined remains of a snow covered building.  Timmy and his friends leap out to battle, and the battle begins.

***

When Jack logs onto EVE later that day, he can’t help but crack a smile.  The opposing corp had gone cheap, hiring a mercernary outfit with terrible stats, and supplied them with no equipment whatsoever.  They were quickly overrun by Timmy’s troops, and the benefits were quickly felt up in EVE Online as all alliance ships were awarded a 5% damage bonus.  Not only that, but the enemy alliance’s pitiful support of their ground troops had earned them a bad rep with the Dust playerbase…they would struggle to hire anything but the most desperate of companies in the future.

This war wouldn’t last the week.

***

Well, there you go, my summary of how Dust is going to be awesome.  This is pretty much my ideal world of course, but I think the most important point of all this is that there needs to be a strong, visible link between the playerbases.  Dust mercenaries need to know who’s employing them, why, and what they’re fighting for, and EVE players need to know they’re hiring real people and not just pressing a button that starts a seemingly random ground battle.  Right now however, we know pretty much all of nothing whatsoever, so all we can do is hope for the best!  All will be revealed when we get to Fanfest!

I’ll go into more detail on this in a later segment.  Until then, fly safe!

All images are copyright CCP Games.

]]> http://podsandpills.baywords.com/2009/09/15/letting-the-dust514-settle-part-1/feed/ 0 http://podsandpills.baywords.com/2009/09/15/the-other-game-killing-floor/ http://podsandpills.baywords.com/2009/09/15/the-other-game-killing-floor/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:06:19 +0000 Crimsoneer http://podsandpills.baywords.com/?p=26 Once in a while, I’m going to cover another game, because any player who plays EVE, and only EVE, is really missing out.  I’m also going to try and stay away from the more convensional gaming fare, and perhaps let you find some hidden gems you may have otherwise missed out on.

So, without further ado, I give you… Killing Floor!

Killing floor is a cooperative online FPS with light RPG elements from Tripwire, the people who bought you Red Orchestra, the incredibly realistic WW2 FPS.  On your first playthrough, you’ll probably be reminded of L4D, Valve’s critically acclaimed zombie coop shooter realeased last year, but this is no mere clone: Killing Floor has been in development since long before L4D had even entered pre-production, although it was nothing but a Unreal Tournament 2k4 mod at the time, and they play and feel very different.  You know the survival mode in L4D?  Well, imagine that, but more intense, meatier, gorier, scarier, and all around gritter, then add weapon purchasing elements from Counter-Strike, then add a rudamentary levelling up system, and top it all off with a boss that would make the Tank shudder in fear, and you’ve got a pretty decent idea of what L4D feels like.

You control your member of a squad of up to 6 SAS servicemen, are dropped into a zombie (or “specimens” as the game refers to them) hotspot, and are tasked with clearing up ten waves of ever increasing difficulty, starting with 50 or so bog standard zombies all the way to the final waves of 300 or so chainsaw wielding crazies.  If, by some mirable, you do manage to survive till the tenth wave, you’re faced with the patriarch, a minigun wielding, invisible regenerating zombie.

Thankfully, while the challenge may be of a higher standard than L4D, so are the tools.  For every zombie you kill in your mass murdering spree of zombie slaughter, the Killing Floor powers that be will give you some cash.  With this cash, you can considerably expand your arsenal at the trader, and mysterious and incredibly frustrating lady who has the damnable habbit of being able to disappear and reappear at random spots all over the map at the end of every wave.  Thankfully, she’ll also stock you up with a hefty arsenal of weapons, as long as you can afford them and carry them.  From flamethrowers to rocket launcher, AK-47s, katanas and chainsaws, the teleporting hermit of a trader will fulfill all your testosterone filled, explosive dreams.

These are arguably the best part of Killing Floor: guns are Tripwires specialty, and they feel awesome.  Completely and utterly amazing.  From the pea shooting beretta, to the powerful hunting shotgun or the crossbow, each one of them feels heavy, meaty, and powerful.

They feel satisfying, they feel powerful, and even with the default pistol, decapitating a specimen with a well placed shot down your ironsights is a simple joy that will keep you coming back for more.  Once you’ve gotten addicted to the insane pleasure of puncturing a row of 10 specimens with your crossbow, or seeing them all burst into a cloud of fine red mist with a well placed grenade, you’l be just as addicted as I am.

KF also introduces the rather innovative, if slightly unrealistic, idea of welding.  Each of your team members has in addition to their weapons and their medical syringe, a welding gun.  While similar to the Natural Selection welding tool in principle, this really comes into it’s own in KF.  It allows you and your fellow team members to, for a limited time, lock down any door in the level, and weld it shut.  While a single player will only be able to lock down a door for a matter of minutes, a well coordinated team of players can take shifts to keep it shut for the entirety of the wave, or to keep it shut until the propicious moment (usually just before everybody throws their grenades).  Of course, a bad team of players can just as easily find themselves locked into a room with a patriarch, or completely forgetting the flood of specimens they had locked in the room down the hall until they come bursting out to munch on your ankles.

The list of enemies, while diverse, is not particularly innovative: it covers all the obligatory videogame enemy bases, with crawling enemies, tough enemies, grabbing enemies, exploding enemies, etc.  The main exception to this is the patriarch, the final boss who appears at the end of each level: a healing, cloaking monstruosity of a creature, who will happily tear your team apart with his gattling gun before cloaking up to regenerate health unless you deal with him quickly.

The perk system, while basic, is a stroke of genius.  Like the achievements or weapon unlocks of Team Fortress 2, these require you to fulfill certain characteristics, and eventually give your character certain long term benefits as he goes up his chosen skill path.  These aren’t hugely original, but when coupled with the choice of weapons within KF, make sure your player is different to the others you’ll encounter, as well as  giving you that primal satisfaction of levelling up whenever you reach the next stage of your chosen perk.

While the presentation of the overall package is functional at best, the intense thrills of KF, coupled with a netcode far superior to the frustrating lobby system of L4D, is an addictive combo that keeps me coming back for more.  It’s available now on Steam, and frequently goes on sale.  Go get it! My Steam name is Crimsoneer, so  hopefully, I’ll see you online!