Maneuvering thrusters, Mister Sulu

It seemed appropriate. Plus it's just awesome starship porn.

So, after almost half a year away, I decided to give myself a little Christmas present and buy a couple months' worth of EVE. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick around past that; part of it is because of money, and part of it is because, to be honest, while I'm eager to try out some new things (*cough*Naga*cough*), I don't know if it'll be enough to keep me interested. Plus, one of these days I'd actually like to get past level 15 on Skyrim, and of course there's The Old Republic, which, for its flaws, has managed to work the old Bioware storytellin' magic on me.

So, what will I do when I get back into the pod? That's a good question. When I walked away last, I was in Caldari Provisions, and was stomping my way through L2 missions in either a HAC, a battlecruiser, or a Tengu. While I really do want to try out the Naga - and just the fact that there was apparently some sort of hybrid rebalancing done in Crucible was enough to make me giddy on that - I don't know what my "long-term" (read: what-I-want-to-do-in-three-months) goals are. I'd been kind of mulling possibly checking out w-space, but I also am leery about joining a corp - any corp - when it's more than likely I'll be gone again in a couple months. And God knows, with my luck and relative lack of skills (plus the extreme rust on said skills), trying to go solo pirate in k-space, let alone w-space, would be a quick way to run myself out of money and ships.

Ah, well. We'll see what we shall see.

Too little, too late.

(Yes, I'm still alive. Just not playing, still, thanks to crappy job market.)

So, we have the much-cried-for supercap nerf happening with the winter expansion (EVE Online: Restitution?) and my take right now is a resounding "meh." I can't point to any one thing. Each individual step is a good one, I think - I'm no expert at capital warfare, I will readily admit. But it seems like it doesn't go far enough.

In my ideal vision of EVE Online and how capital ships "should be," yes, they're powerful, yes, their presence can turn the battle. But they should still be threatened by sufficient subcapital forces (especially and specifically battleships operating in strength), and they should be hard enough to acquire and replace that you're not going to be seeing people out f@*$ing ratting in them. Deploying them should be as much a "political" and "diplomatic" statement as it is a strategic one. When the United States Navy deploys a carrier group to a region, that's a significant move to tell people to calm down and/or that we're ready to back up our allies. When United States Navy carriers start sending their fighters out, that's the hammer being dropped. This is what I would like to see in EVE. Most combat, and again, this is in my mind, should be between fleets of subcapital ships, with the occasional handful of capital and supercapital vessels. It shouldn't just be "HERP DERP SUPERCAP BLOB HOTROP LOL."

Granted, I would rather see combat where tactics and strategy win out against pure blob warfare (yes, I know it can, but that's really really rare - most battles, especially in nullsec, just devolve to blob-on-blob). And I freely admit that I severely doubt that we'll see any sort of combat like this in EVE ever - I just don't think that the game could support what I would like.

But making it so alliances don't just throw supercaps at every single problem? That's doable. That should be CCP's goal in the long term, insofar as rebalancing capital and supercapital ships, especially if they want to give small alliances a chance to break into nullsec as something other than a renter-pet or a pubbie. I just don't think they're willing to go far enough.

Not a collector, really...

So, pre-orders for The Old Republic are up. I haven't preordered mine, mostly because I'm broke as hell - short version: Michigan job market sucks and I don't have the money to move.

I'm interested in the game, don't get me wrong, and if nothing else I plan on putting it at the top of my Christmas list this year, if I don't take my PS3, which I never use anymore, honestly, in to GameStop and hopefully cover a pre-order for TOR. Not planning on getting the Collector's Edition, honestly, and I'll tell you why.

Collectors' editions are getting more and more gimmicky. Halo Reach is a perfect example. I dropped the extra... $30? $40?... however-many bucks to get the Legendary Edition as opposed to the Heroic. The Noble Team statue is kind of cool, but honestly it sits on top of a cabinet in the corner of my room. I barely even look at it. I get more enjoyment out of Halsey's journal, mostly because I'm a sucker for backstory in any game.

The Collector's Edition for TOR has the same issue. The Darth Malgus statue would end up shoved off in a corner and barely noticed afterwards. The authenticator... meh. I've never had a problem with account security for any of my games, so maybe I don't see the need. I understand the logic of offering it, though.

The rest of the stuff in the Collector's Edition is interesting, and I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't say I'd probably end up stealing them - at least temporarily - from my brother's copy of the Collector's Edition, especially to copy the soundtrack to my own computer and iPod. But since I can get access to that stuff anyway, without forking over the extra $90 bucks for the Collector's Edition....

Of course, the problem with getting rid of my PS3 is that then I won't be able to beta test DUST 514 when it comes out. So there's a dilemma there...

Anyway, that's my babble on the subject. You may now continue scrolling through your reader software of choice, assuming you stopped at all to read my drivel.

Stole the words from my mouth.

So, as you all are undoubtedly aware by now, CCP Zulu posted a much more agreeable dev blog today.

To be fair to the man, yeah, there's got to be a bit of an internal hunt going on to find out who leaked that "Fearless" issue, and who forwarded out the Hilmar email. But CCP is going to sit down with the CSM next week to cover their plans for Aurum and the Noble Exchange in more detail.

For the love of God, CCP, make sure that the CSM isn't gagged by NDAs to where they can't tell us stuff. I know you don't want your business plans leaked all over the Internet. I'm cool with that. But at the same time, bringing in the CSM, who are your link to us and our link to you, and then not letting them communicate with us will not help your situation. In fact, it will pretty much be the final straw for a lot of folks in your credibility, and in that of the CSM as the players' voice. You already have too many players who think it's just a PR stunt, that you bring them up to Iceland every few months, wine them and dine them, dazzle them with shinies, and then ignore everything they have to say. I don't think that's true, and I hope you don't either. But I digress.

Also in this latest dev blog, Zulu said, and I quote:

However, just to prove the point of the Fearless newsletter and give you a further understanding of what it is then there are no and never have been plans to sell "gold ammo" for Aurum. In Fearless people are arguing a point, which doesn't even have to be their view, they are debating an issue. This is another example of how information out of context is no information at all.

I vaguely suspected something like this would happen, and my only complaint here is that it shouldn't have taken three days to get this message out. As has been pointed out elsewhere (I can't find the post, if someone knows what I'm talking about and can provide me the link I will be more than happy to edit it in here), you cannot be reactive to things like this. You must plan ahead and have ideas of what to do when a situation like this happens. As soon as EveNews 24 posted their version of "Fearless" you should have had someone basically send them that paragraph I just quoted so that they would have your side of the story, and all of this hue and cry - well, at least some of it - would have been avoided.

Anyway, I also wanted to touch on this post from player "michael boltonIII". The full thread can be found here but I wanted to give his post some extra screen time, as it were.

Some of you may know me as the ****** from the Alliance Tournament, but in my spare time I'm a diplomat for Test Alliance Please Ignore.

In the past week I've seen the forums go to hell in a hand-basket, and I think that maybe the mob mentality has gone a little overboard. People are demanding the total removal of Incarna and a ban on even Vanity Micro-transactions. This **** has got to stop.

What CCP should do:
1. Reinstate the old hangar as the view for those who have turned off Captains Quarters. The new system makes traditional fitting, especially for capital pilots, more difficult.

2. Ensure that Incarna works with an acceptable range of modern graphics cards, and does not launch with graphics cards that will be damaged by it.

3. Add some lower priced Items to the NeX store. $60 monocles are fine, as long as you provide a lower price option. There is just as much a market for plastic Mickey Mouse watches as there is for Rolex watches.

4. CCP has already promised that there will be “no-gold ammo” so the pay-to win front has been covered

That's all that CCP really needs to do, only one of those items is truly difficult to deal with, and I'm sure they've already got a team working on it

Now for all you wonderful protesting pubbies out there,

Here's what all you protesters need to do/realize:

1. CCP is a business, they are a corporate entity designed to earn capital that they can then use to create more capital earning ventures. CCP's product is fun, to many people fun is flying around PVP'ing or mining, and to others fun is collecting unique ships and now dressing up their character. If they have an option to make more money, while providing something that a group of people find fun, they'll ****ing do it. Nobody is forcing you to give them more money than your subscription fee.

2. You can already pay to win. Any person with real life wealth, can purchase plex and then use the isk from those plex to buy a super capital pilot off the Character Bazaar and A brand new Avatar with all the fittings. He can do this on his very first day in EVE. The Plex<->Isk link cuts down on RMT and makes it so that a large percentage of EVE players don't pay a dime to subscribe, but inherent in that idea is that you can “Pay2Win”

3. All your canceled accounts, aren't really gone. In protest a large group of EVE players have “canceled their account”, but in reality all they have done is to turn of the Auto-repeat on their account charges. You're all still playing. If you really want to make a statement, then send me all of your assets and delete your actual characters, then I'll believe you as I fire-sale all your **** on the market.

4. CCP actually gives a **** about this game, they're trying to make it viable both financially and gameplay wise for the foreseeable future. That means having new ways to make money, new ways for people to play, and new ways to attract more customers. The downside of this is that not everything they do will be to make you happy. If all of 0.0 decided to protest in Jita every time something we wanted got passed over for some change to highsec, you would all be getting smartbombed ALL THE TIME. Aside from those people who's graphics cards were damaged or who couldn't run Incarna, how many of you have been truly negatively impacted by this new expansion, I bet the number is only a fraction of the actual protesters.

I may only be a fresh faced 21 year-old, but after reading a large percentage of the posts in these massive threadnaughts, I feel like I'm in the top 10% of mature EVE players. That is a ****ing scary thought, considering that I am borderline ******ed. The CSM is getting pulled in for an emergency meeting, and will hear exactly the same things I heard while at CCP, and all their nerd apprehension will be assuaged.

TL;DR-The sky isn't falling, CCP gets the message, shut the **** up you sheeple pubbies. Also, we should eat our young

Now, about the only thing here I would disagree with is his assertion that ISK generated from PLEX sales is the same thing as Aurum. It's not. Granted, I am talking theoretically here, but part of the concern wasn't "pay-to-win" so much as the damage that items bought from the Noble Exchange would do to the market.

Let's say I have a time code. I redeem it for PLEX in game, and then turn around and sell those in Jita. Yes, now I have 700-800 million more ISK, that I can turn around and, say, use to buy and outfit a Tengu.

In a general sense, yes, I just used real-world money to get a new, very expensive ship. But that Tengu, in all likelihood, has had the virtual fingers of who knows how many dozens of people on it in the construction of it and the subsystems, modules, and charges. Miners, mission runners, haulers, manufacturers - the list could literally be dozens of people.

In an alternate universe, I take the PLEX from the time code, redeem them for Aurum, and then magically I have a new Tengu in my hangar. Nobody built it. Nobody hauled parts for it. Nobody mined minerals for it. It's just there. More clicks, and Noble Store elves deliver the parts I need - functionally identical, no way to distinguish them from what the other me bought with ISK, but still, they're just appearing. And if I can do that with a ship that can easily head towards a billion credits in cost, why not capital ships? I bet nullsec alliances would love to cut out the manufacturing steps in maintaining their capital blobs.

Hopefully that cleared up my feelings on the matter.

Overall, I think a lot of folks at CCP want to do the right thing, and maintain the sandbox universe we all know and love. Lord knows they don't want to lose thousands of subscribers - near on 5,000 last I checked - to other games, such as Perpetuum.

I just hope those CCPers are the ones guiding EVE's development, not just Johnny Codemonkey sitting at a desk and plugging in numbers.

Hey, Jon Stewart, do you have a message for CCP?

God. I want to help, CCP, I really do. But unless you're willing to bring me to Iceland, give me the access I need to your people to sit down and talk with them, and, oh yeah, pay my room and board (since I'm broke and all), it's not happening. (And if you were willing to do so, then why aren't you doing it for Mittens and the rest of the CSM?! That's what they're for, not some geek with too much time on his hands and a blog that a dozen or so people read!)

I wasn't holding out a lot of hope as it was. But I figured that it wasn't hard to sit down, have a guy type out something along the lines of "Fearless is a tool for a discussion, we assign topics for people to discuss, there is not any intention to bring non-cosmetic items to the Noble Store, things that will be added to the Noble Store will cover a greater range of prices than just the few things we have now."

And then CCP Zulu posted this dev blog. And it's worse than I feared.

The ONLY good point to come from it was that there would be a greater range of priced stuff on the NEX. But your logic on where those prices go still sucks. Items that cost more than $5 do not qualify as micro-transactions.

But that's a debate for another time, and since it seems that you've already decided what direction you're going with, I won't try and fight that battle. Like a lot of folks, I don't really care about vanity micro-transactions (or macro-transactions, or mega-transactions, or whatever clever name the community has for them now).

What we wanted was a clear message from CCP: "Regardless of what it said in our internal discussion memo, we have NO PLANS to introduce non-vanity items to the Noble Store."

That's all. Heck, have someone throw that out on their Twitter while they're sitting on the toilet, possibly adding "More details to follow in dev blog soonish." I don't think that would magically cause us all to settle down, but things would be a damn sight more peaceful than they are now; 200-page threadnaughts and internet spaceship riots clogging up major trade hubs.

Mark my words, CCP (assuming any of you read this). We had the Summer of Rage last year with the "18 months" fiasco; this is the Tech 2 version. Unless you handle this clearly, effectively, and openly, this is the end of EVE as we know it, and in more ways than one. You will lose major portions of your player base, and God alone knows how that will impact development of EVE, DUST, and WoD.

Good luck. You're going to need it.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force...

...as if a million subscriptions suddenly cried out in terror,
and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

First off, and in no particular order, read this from Meissa Anunthiel, this from Tippia, this from Seleene, and this from Dierdra Vaal. I would imagine a lot of you have already read those, but just in case you haven't, we'll wait for you.

...

Back? Okay then.

CCP, I'm going to say this as gently as I possibly can right now. You done fucked up, son. I give full props to CCP Pann for actually being willing to take one for the team and be the first one to step into the line of fire this week. Heck, I even respect her for owning up to her decision to not make an immediate response to the community. I'm not angry that the decision was made - waiting and seeing what happens can be a legitimate strategy at times, and it takes a good bit of intestinal fortitude to go into a community that's as riled as the EVE community is right now and admit that the decision was a mistake.

But you still don't get it. Yes, there's annoyance at the technical aspects of Captain's Closet. Yes, people want ship spinning back. Yes, people are angry that you've apparently misunderstood how microtransactions work in the first place.


Obligatory image of Morbo from Futurama.
(Mostly to try and keep things at least somewhat lighthearted.)

But that's not the main source of FORUM/TWITTER/BLOG RAGE right now. It's that issue of "Fearless" that got leaked.

Most of us, I assume, have gotten their hands on the full version of this particular issue of "Fearless." If not, I have helpfully re-uploaded it. And right there on the first page, it says, and I quote, "The views put forward in this magazine do not reflect general CCP company policies or decisions and are strictly individual opinions, written by CCPers or about CCPers who feel strongly about these issues."

But here's where you done goofed. Even though you never intended to have the rest of the world see this document, you are openly discussing the pros, cons, and possibilities of micro macro-transactions for non-vanity items... AFTER YOU SAID THAT YOU WOULD BE DOING NO SUCH THING.

And now you're wondering why the community is up in arms.

Honestly, right now, what you need to do is have someone - Hilmar himself would be a good choice - do a dev blog, or better a dev video blog - and explain that the newsletter's articles were written before you made the decision to shelve all plans for non-vanity micro-transactions, you still have no intent to do so for EVE (micro-transactions in DUST 514 - and I mean actual micro-transactions, not the sort of stuff we have now! - you have more wiggle room on, since, insofar as I can tell, there are no plans to have a subscription fee for DUST), and to apologize for the confusion and anger the release of the document has spawned in the community.

I could also suggest spawning a free PLEX on every account as a way to show that apology would be nice (and would probably also help to depress PLEX prices), but I admit that's pretty unlikely. It would be a nice gesture, but still.

You've well and truly shot yourselves in the foot, CCP, if not in a much more vital area. I'm not unsubbing - my account is, if memory serves, paid up through September - and at this point I still plan to see if I can afford to renew my subscription at that point. But you're bleeding players, and if it's not an arterial wound, it's also not a paper cut.

You need to do something to renew our faith, or this game that we all love will go out with a whimper. And you need to do it soon.

Getting sucked back in

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is why I specifically said a while back "no, you can not has my stuff."

Anyway, Incarna. This initial rollout is impressive, and yet unimpressive. It's impressive in that it is, in my opinion, the biggest overall change to how the game can be played since the introduction of capital ships. (Not that I was around then, but you get my point.) The actual ability to walk around and see fellow players in something other than starships is frickin' huge. Moreover, visually, it's impressive; EVE continues to set the bar for graphics in an MMO. Pure and simple. And the new agent finder is just frickin' awesome.


Obligatory character in quarters shot is obligatory.
Click to embiggen.

But there are also the unimpressive bits. The door that leads to the rest of the station is locked. Every station uses Minmatar quarters, and as yet, there's no customization for those quarters. I know racial quarters are coming Soon(TM), and I would imagine that, eventually, there may be a way to customize your quarters, at least in terms of decorations. But the fact that it's still just me, in the same tiny room, with a couch, a bed, and no (visible) bathroom... yeah. I'll get more excited when I can go out and see folks. And I've already said that I'll see about organizing a TweetFleet Incarna Meet & Greet & Roam once we have the opportunity to do so.

And then there's the fails, and honestly, I lay both of them at the feet of CCP's BizDev team.

Fail #1: NEX store pricing.

One theory I've seen for NEX store pricing, and it's the one that I think makes most sense, is that those prices are there to prevent PLEX prices from skyrocketing. Guess what, guys - literally as soon as you announced the whole "PLEX for Aurum" scheme, PLEX prices shot up somewhere between fifty to a hundred million ISK. I'm not sure they're not done spiking, because with this kind of demand on PLEX, people will jack up their sell order prices. Period. Do what you did with the licensing idea, and say that they were draft prices that you intended all along to adjust as the market reacted, and drop them by half, at least. Especially since for the foreseeable future, the buyer will be the only one to see them, and they get lost as soon as you get podded. (And I thought we were nekkid in those pods, anyhow!) And speaking of the licensing thing...

Fail #2: Forcing people to pay $99 a year for API usage.

(Yes, I know I'm late to the party on this one.)

I get it, honestly. It costs you money to run and maintain the API, and even though some argue that that cost should be covered by our subscriptions, you also need to provide legal protection so that someone else isn't making money off of your hard work without you getting a fair share. That's perfectly understandable. But... seriously? Any public sites have to pay the fee? Anyone who gets real-world money or ISK for a service has to pay that fee? That's where the logic kind of runs out of steam.

I know, you already said it was a draft of the general ideas you were looking at, nothing's been finalized, et cetera. Personally, I'd only charge if someone was charging real money for a service or product - such as a paid version of a smartphone app, or the like. Folks that have ad exchanges on their blogs or sites... honestly, that'd be a case-by-case thing. Corps, for example, probably do that only to defray server costs if their members don't cover it out of pocket. But if, for example, I put ads on this blog, which I have at no cost to me, then I might see the argument. Folks who provide in-game services (merc corps, for example) or free-but-accepting-ISK-donations-ware like EFT? Leave them alone.

Anyway... I'm still stuck in Caldari Provisions, and on some levels it's relaxing not to have to worry about reds/neuts swanning through, plus the other stress points of living in nullsec. It's also boring, since I'm reduced to running L1 missions that I can almost just faceroll, but that problem should (eventually) fix itself. My budget, for now, is essentially nil, so I don't know if I'll be able to resub come my account expiration date (early September, IIRC) so we'll see how long this lasts.

---

Also, just randomly, I stumbled over this image online and I had to share.


The Doctor is the Batman. This explains SO MUCH.