Diary of a Pod Pilot

Is this satirical image just the work of a bitter vet, or does it really mark the "beginning of the end"?

Well, damn.

That is pretty much my summarized feelings on the release of Incarna and the days after. This sure isn’t how I had imagined -the- expansion to be. Although, to be fair, Incarna is just an expansion, and I should really adopt the term “Walking in Stations” for the bigger picture. Wouldn’t suggest using that for an expansion name though!

But I digress. We have gotten some pretty awesome stuff. New turret models. Holy hell are they nice or what? ….what do you mean you’ve not even looked at them? Yes, sadly, the whole awesomeness has been gone obscured by the gigantic clusterfuck – for lack of better words – that has been the last few days.

It started with the release day. Fair enough, server down some longer, extra optional patch, whatever. CCP is handling things. Not even other MMO companies run out perfect patch cycles all the time. We’re the EVE community, so we suck it up and we deal with it (and spam Tweetfleet while waiting). But uh oh, what is this! I log in and hello there performance lag. Yep, should have known better really, CQ as it was did not run smoothly on SiSi, and likewise does not on TQ. I admit I hadn’t been on the test server in a while, because I’ve been busy way over my ears lately, but this isn’t quite what I’d expect from a finished product. Fair enough, some tuning and tinkering done, take off SLI, and I have two client running at 20-30 FPS. Q9600 and 9800 GX2, so not bad for something a little dated, eh? Maybe we’ll see a performance patch if everyone is indeed having such terrible issues. Until then, suck it up and keep going!

Oh yes, new clothes! Let’s go to the Noble Exchange- JUMPING JESUS ON A POGO STICK you want how much for a monocle? *faint* So ok, I did see those prices on the test server. And I did notice you got three PLEX to work with. But never did it occur to me that the pricing they had on there would be anywhere remotely near the real deal.

So I get to thinking, maybe it is because I am poor, or maybe it is because these are exclusive items, even though it really sucks that they not moving with your jump clone (for the price, even when exclusive, they should go on all clones). But I’m not the only one who’s going “WTF MACRO-TRANSACTIONS?!?!”. Well meh. Ok, maybe if enough people dislike it the prices will go down, or we’ll see some other changes. If everyone disliking boycots it, CCP will be forced to lower prices, right? That’s how how them evil marketing dudes, who are probably behind all these shenanigans, work, right? Riiiiight?

So, by that point I was already a bit miffed. So I pull up a turret ship in my hangar and go watch it spin to console myself with. Except there are a lot of poor suckers out there who cannot do that. And what did you give them? No, not the hangar view, like was requested, you gave them a door to stare at. Ok, fine, so it’s a nice door. But I don’t think someone thought it through that this can also be seen as pretty damn insulting or slap-in-the-face. Staring at a closed door. That’s just taunting people. And at this point, you’re taunting players who are about to overheat as bad as their video cards.

And sure enough, when the first video cards fall, so go the first player subscriptions. The former I am still apt to write off on user error, a card under heavy stress should not melt unless your system is not ready to be under stress. And no, I don’t care it runs Crysis 2 fine and you don’t have heat issues. Because Crysis 2 is probably properly fine-tuned, just asks for very high specs to squeeze out pretties + performance.

But moving on. Now here is where things got bad. Like really bad. Because someone thought it was a good idea to leak “Fearless”, CCP’s internal newsletter. EVE News 24 claims they had it for a while already, yet what we get from them is a version that is missing a few vital pages, like the clause saying that these are not CCP’s views. Good going, you wanted to get a community that is already grumbling to grab the pitchforks and torches and go on an all out revolution? This here is exactly how you do it. Now, I am not saying EN24 is alone in this (even though I find they really thrive on sensationalism). Someone on the inside did decide to leak this. Not sure with what intentions, but without the whole context, which we only got in a devblog late today, this newsletter can really be seen as something different than it really is. So whoever is responsible either did this knowing what it could unchain or did it to warn us of what might just be but did not realize we lack context. Not that it really matters. Ever since it’s seen daylight it’s spread like a wildfire and left a trail of destruction and emo in its wake.

I’ll quickly state my personal opinion here, it is my blog after all: I do not feel that straight PLEX to ship / ammo / modules is a good idea, as it takes industrialists out of the equation. I’m neutral on the idea of selling faction standings. If you have them, you still need to make them work for you, and well, faction boosting services did really die when CCP had to go and break the displaying of them My opinion on clothes and other vanity articles is found earlier, I couldn’t care less, because I can just not buy them. So my personal biggest gripe is the potentially taking both the sandbox and the economy away from the player. And if that were to happen, that is where the line is for me. I love creating things, even knowing someone will sooner or later blow it up. I love the idea that the hull I dropped off to the market today might tomorrow be the one that turns the tides of battle somewhere. It pleases me to see the market go wild with speculation, even more when I can profit from it. But I will not stand for it being taken away so someone can pull out their credit card, buy a GTC, get two PLEX, and turn it instantly into whatever the hell they fancy flying today. The PLEX should always go to another player in turn for the ship that you wanted and they have for sale. We, the players, make the EVE market. Not the EVE marketing department.

Good, now that’s off my chest, let’s see at what it is doing to everyone else. Or actually, wait, let’s not do that. Last morning, after taking an hesitant look at Twitter, I just had to close it. I couldn’t bear it anymore. It’s damn everywhere all the damn time. Everyone is going crazy. Now, this morning we did not have the dev blog yet, so people were riled up that is was taking a while. Fair enough, I am a veteran EVE player, and I had plenty to do yesterday, so suck it up and keep going. Taken care of everything and log back in during the evening. Oh. My. God. My entire alliance chat, our public chat, every other OOC channel I’m part off, it’s all on fire about the newsletter and the content and EVE IS DYING and RAEGQUIT and EMO and WAAAAAAH. Goodness.

And then my good friend Casiella tells me he’s leaving EVE. Now I am a pretty sentimental person, I can cry over a movie, so no surprise that a little tear ran down my cheek when he told me. Because it’s just so damn sad. He’s one of the most awesome bloggers out there, he covers interesting topics both of what is hot in EVE as well as personal ideas and views. And always written in such a way there’s never really one word too many, or you get bored halfway wondering what the point is. Well, fuck, it sucked to see other bloggers and tweeters throw down the hat but it sure as hell sucks even more when all this recent herp-derp saps the energy out of someone who days ago was sharing the awesome ideas he had for a future within EVE.

And he’s not alone. Well, granted, most people are still up on the fence. Wait a little longer, see what CCP brings. Or let subscription lapse and take a break. And they are not alone. I, too, am up on the fence. Now I admit I am on a short fuse as of late, but even then. I am finding myself with suddenly a lot less willpower to log in and get things done. Just now when everything is going so well. I have notes on my desk scribbled with ideas and all I need to do is turn them into forum posts so we can begin working on them as an alliance. But guess what. This whole combined clusterfuck has shaken my faith.

Now I know this could all end well. I can ask people in our channels to lay off the issue and remain calm. It seems absurd to me that CCP would pour proverbial concrete over the sandbox and take the sandcastles away from the players. But I also notice a recurring trend where CCP seems to be in monetary trouble. Asking $99 for third-party licensing, so-called because a contract needs a monetary charge to be bound? Ridiculous prices for clothing? Even the mere consideration of selling “game advantages”? Now I might be seeing patterns where there are none, it’s human to search for patterns in everything and it can be a true curse, but what if I’m right? We know that Dust requires a heavy money investment, and that Iceland got hit pretty damn hard by the credit crunch. So what if that is at the root of this all? Money? It sounds so simple, and even if I am wrong, it’s probably still a deciding factor somewhere. CCP is needing money for something. And the usual ways are not sufficient.

But I will say this: Having spent a fair bit of my game time trading, one of the core principles I learned is that many small profits can make you rich, yet one bad investment can bankrupt you. Buyers too, are pretty naive. Feed us several small chucks, and we’re likely to buy more, due to the feeling of free will. Yet ask someone to drop down one big sum, and the same person will suddenly be far more hesitant. Dear CCP, if you really need money, why did you not do something else. Raise everyone’s subscription by one euro, perhaps even for just one month. Or give us many cheap clothes to buy. They didn’t even need to be all that fancy. Perhaps faction t-shirt, or replicas from the EVE store. I bet you they’d have sold. You’d have gotten your ISK. I was fully planning on buying clothes for my character. But right now I’m just not even sure I want to anymore.

Yep, that sounds pretty emo too, but that’s how I am feeling right now. I see my alliance members being sad, upset, angry, or any combination. And depending on what you decide somewhere in the future, as we are not being given any more guarantees anymore, I may or may not lose them over something that is completely outside of my power. If I make a shitty call, or if I am not careful and recruit a bad apple, it will be my fault that things implode. If others decide to raze us to the ground, it will be their fault and I can accept that, as that is what makes EVE into the game it is. But when you, the company I’ve held in such high admiration for being bold and defiant, for saying bring it on to the larger studios, and for proving an experience which is until this day wholly unique, do this, well, that stings. Because it is you, really, who has the power to decide if EVE lives or dies. And we, the community, might be critical, and really would you want it any other way? But now, you are pushing us over the edge, and people are responding. Attacking the Caldari memorial, moving from trade hub to trade hub to protest, because even threadnaughts will not do any longer. No, I am not saying it is all right and justified, some people are taking it too far, a community representative should not get spammed on Twitter for example (leave CCP Fallout alone, she’s a dear <3 and the rest of the Tweeting employees for that matter). But I am saying that we, your community, are worried and afraid. Because this reminds us of something in which Sony too was involved, and it ain’t too hard to point at Dust then.

So, in conclusion, I too feel struck by recent events. I keep hoping, but I also worry. I care about my favorite pastime. Because as you said it, EVE is real. I think a whole lot of things could already have been done better. But unless you deliver what I and many others consider the final blow with taking the sandbox away from us, I will be here to see how things work out, and perhaps in a few months we will laugh about this. But let it be said, that should it come to a point where I see so many people leave there is hardly an alliance left to run, or I look at my friends list and all the people who I really cared for are gone, well, then I will leave too and a small miracle will need to take place to ever gain me back. Because I’m not the kind of person to half-ass things. It’s all or nothing. Please prove me wrong and make internet spaceships into the glorious vision it could be

PS: You know what is really damn ironic? Check Valnurana’s bio ingame. When I created her to be my trader, way before she’d be the alliance holder, I had just seen Wall Steet and admired the character that is Gordon Gecko, wanted to do some light roleplay with her inspired on that. Yet with the whole newsletter thing, those words and the whole movie reference feels pretty damn bad all of a sudden.

I’ve installed the WordPress Mobile Pack in order to make blog reading quite a bit friendlier on our mobile visitors. Not seeing a great many in Google Analytics (about 3% of the traffic) but perhaps that just is because the desktop theme is quite terrible on mobile browsers. Casiella suggested a mobile theme in the past, and now that I have my own smartphone I actually enjoy keeping up with comments or draft a quick post outline while on the road. The theme is one of the default ones, perhaps at some points I’ll add something prettier.

For more mobile browsing goodness the Naraka forums have also been pimped out with phpBB Mobile, which while still under development does the trick quite well (new posts cannot be made yet, and mobile / desktop switching is a little tedious). Depending on user feedback I may get rid of it again and just offer a mobile theme + a theme switcher, as I’ve seen on other forums.

Please leave a comment if you’ve used the new mobile version of this site to let me know what you think of it!

It’s time to vote for CSM6, and with having two accounts, I’ve decided that one vote will go to a candidate that best aligns with my personal interests, and the second one is going to go to a more generalist kind of person.

As per usual, since I don’t really have to time to keep up with the details, I’ve pulled out the vote matcher again. It’s an OK tool but make sure to read the candidates full campaign as well as the explanation for their answers. Some questions are really strong opinions, such as “this or that are the most important”. For those I picked that I don’t know or don’t have an opinion,  because some of them are indeed pressing issues, but I do not agree with them getting a full expansion assigned to them, at least no exclusively. Lowsec, piracy, faction war and industry all deserve some love in my book, and roleplay a little as well, but I like my expansions to address several issues where possible. And even when choosing one favorite I doubt a single expansion is going to magically fix a single issue. These things are all rather big.

So, the candidate who best aligns with my views according to the vote matcher is Roc Wieler. I filled in the questionnaire twice on different days, and twice he came out at the top with a 60% match. Makes sense, he is after all a fellow blogger, roleplay enthusiast, the person who spoke up about not being able to run for CSM while having had a media account, and also the person who revealed that us recent fansite program additions should have received said media account. Which CCP Adida did in fact personally mail me about after I commented on Roc’s blog, and got me sorted with, all within a matter of hours. I’m still impressed about that, cause they could have just ignored that!

But back to Roc and his candidacy. Roc as a character and blogger is an interesting phenomena. He’s got self-promotion down to an art, this powerful image that combines both character and player. Casiella, who’s opinion I value, recommended to vote against him. I can understand why he feels as such but I don’t agree. As I started this post with, I think there are two kinds of candidates needed to make a good CSM rather than just one: Strong views on pressing issues, and generalists to even things out and help find a middle ground. My second vote is the latter, and I’ll get to that in a bit. I’m not familiar with the past history for exclusion and disdain, but I can’t see why monetizing one’s blog is a bad thing. As much as we should all write for the fun of it, we all need income, and if you can do that through doing something you enjoy doing then why not?

As for Roc’s campaign trail, I don’t agree on every solution exclusively as he outlines it. I do agree however that the issues brought up are things the CSM should talk about, even the unpleasant ones or those who are deeply ingrained into the core of EVE, and making a suggestion on how to possibly fix things is a good way to get a discussion going. If a suggestion is met with a lot of “DO NOT WANT!” then you at least know what might not be the way to go about it and that helps with narrowing down the possibilities.

But enough on Roc. My second vote is going to Gehen Sealbreaker, a soon to be member of PRELI, who came out with a much lower 49%. It’s an underdog vote, but due to him talking quite a bit in our public channel ‘Naraka OOC’ he’s the only candidate who I’ve been able to ask questions real-time. He is a generalist, with some love towards the roleplayers, but even about that he seeks for solutions that benefit everyone. If you look at his campaign site, he’s doing quite well for a newcomer, certain things like examples on how he is a social person and how that benefits his campaign are basic tools of the trade when selling oneself to a larger audience and he’s using them right. If I am honest however I fear the basics may not enough to compete with the more experienced people, who both have the name and the tools, but he’s doing well for a beginner and that has merit. Do take a look at his stuff please, especially if the vote matcher brings him up in your personal top 5.

You may notice that both my votes are going to candidates who support roleplay. If you know me a little, then you know I am not your standard RP elitist and in fact very much loathe that crowd. Roleplay does not make you a better player and does not entitle you to any special treatment by CCP, let that be clear. But EVE being a MMORPG, and having a solid base for roleplay and a driven storyline and backstory team, I do think it has in it what other MMORPG’s cannot make true. EVE is a single shard game, meaning that roleplayers and non-roleplayers all share the same world, and I wouldn’t want to have it otherwise. RP shards / servers in other games are this constant fight over “who should be allowed to play here” and “how should the rules be enforced” with a whole lot of crying about “developer X does not care about RP /tears”. I’ve also found that during my entire carreer in EVE I have roleplayed more, felt less forced into having to do it because of a server ruleset, and by extension has a lot better RP experience. I’m in fact more in character than in other MMO’s where I chose an RP server and put more work into character development.

On the subject of roleplay, I also feel that by involving roleplay into aspects of the game, such as factional warfare or incursions you create a richer experience for all players. It makes things make sense in the greater whole, and it provides motivations to do them. The whole buildup to the incursions gives you a reason to shoot Sansha, or to defend them (sadly game mechanics do not support that so well, but player creativity goes a long way). If it was just added without background, just rats randomly showing up and being annoying till you get rid of them, it would be a whole lot less bland. Yes, even for the true opposite of the RP elitist, the people who scoff on anything RP because it is “stupid” or “for geeks” (we’re all playing with internet spaceships here!). It is not a base requirement for candidates, in the past I have voted for candidates who didn’t have this as part of their campaign or carried no real opinion on it, but it sure is a nice to have something I do care about receiving some candidate love.

Lastly I want to give a small shoutout to Mynxee, she was well worth my vote on the last CSM and it is a shame she will not run again. I totally understand her desire to focus on other matters and she is allowed a rest after all the work she did. She isn’t afraid to speak up or offend but she also balances that with being this listening mother figure. Add to that my personal bias for her being a blogging pirate lady. The rest of CSM5 also deserves praise, there was lots of building and improving upon previous efforts and achievements, and that’s just how it should be. Kuddos to CCP as well, I was one of those feeling skeptical in the beginning on just where this CSM thing would strand, but as this dev blog reminds us much good has come from it, as well as important learning experiences from the bad. Not something to be taken for granted.

In response to Casiella’s post about the patch notes, here’s a selection of patch note items that stood out to me, with commentary:

• A dedicated salvaging ship, the Noctis, has been added to EVE Online: It’s about time, Marcus’ salvage drake always did make me cry. Wonder what the price tag will end up being.
• The Hawk assault frigate has had its bonus to kinetic missile damage changed from 5% to 10%. It also has an additional 2MW added to its powergrid. Rockets have had an explosion velocity boost. It means they will inflict more damage on faster moving targets whilst also gaining a straight damage boost through changes to rocket damage and rocket launcher rate of fire.: Rockets FINALLY get the love the deserve, and so does the Hawk. One of those things I’ve much wanted to see realized.
• Javelin has had its velocity penalty removed. Void has had its tracking penalty reduced and its damage increased. (+ the other T2 ammo stuff):  Never made sense to me that T2 ammo was either very situational or just useless. Sounds like this stuff might be worth it for dipping one’s toes into the T2 production market now as well.
• Need for speed: While I do not participate in large fleet battles, I do rejoice about the rest of the cluster not feeling the effects of mass battles that much anymore.
• Market & Contracts: Faction ships on the market should give margin traders some high cost high demand items to invest in, will remain to be seen just what the margins will end up looking like however. It would be nice if this were eventually done for all faction and deadspace goodies. As for loan contracts, good riddance. I echo Cas’ sentiments that scams due to poor design are bleh.
• A new option, “Horizontal offset” has been added to the settings menu. It allows the player to have all menus on one monitor and focus on his ship in another monitor.: Interesting, as I do happen to have two monitors. Different size / resolution though, will remain to be seen if this works then.
• EVE now supports anti-aliasing. The beauty of virtual space has never been more… beautiful.: Yay, no more unofficial AA through the nvidia control panel.
• Microwarpdrives now have their own brand new icon.: Always handy when quickly swapping modules out.
• A “Volume” column has been added to the hangar view by default; “Category”, “Meta Level” and “Tech Level” have been added as optional columns. Individual columns now can be toggled on and off through the right click menu.: Nice! Hope this works on the cargo hold too, to make selecting which big items of loot to leave behind when the hold is full.
• The order of options in right click menus has been changed and grouped to make it more consistent. This means that the more dangerous options like ‘Trash’ appear towards the bottom of the menus with more useful options such as ‘Show Info’ appearing at the top.: Having trashed all my assets some months back and having to contact a GM to restore them, I’m glad this is in now.
• Deadspace, faction, officer, and storyline items now have an overlay icon like the Tech II and III items.: Handy when looting the spoils of combat. And then I don’t just mean rats.
• Probes can now be added to the overview.: I never did dare to do this the unofficial way. At least now it is fair use for everyone.
• You can now rename ships in your hangar without making them active.: This really annoyed me when having to rename them for a carrier move, i.e. give them your own name so the carrier pilot knew what to hand back to you.
• You can now receive client updates through the login window without actually logging in. This means you will be prompted about a client update as soon as you boot your client rather than waiting to input your username and password.: One annoyance less.
• Wrecks will no longer jump around in space, when a tractor beam is activated on them.: And another annoyance less.

As you can tell, that’s a large percentage of the actual notes covered. Of course, the real goodies we are still waiting for, but it’s nice to get what is ready released already, while additional polish is added to Incursions and the new portrait generator. Hope the female portraits will be on SiSi again soon, I’m dying to play with all the possible settings and check out the clothes.

Please bear with me

-10.0 points of sec status to burn, -10.0 points of sec.

You shoot a rat, bam it’s dead.
-9.9 points of sec status to burn, -9.9 points of sec…

Yes, that is right, I am losing that beloved -10. “But Myrhial, weren’t you like restarting Ghost Festival and stuff?”, I can hear you think. Yes, indeed, I am — with help from Casiella I got to say, who really deserves a mention, and my old friend and advisor Aria Jenneth. Oh and all the fine folk in PRELI, and our outside supporters. But I digress.

So what this is all about? All part of our MasterPlan(tm). Does that mean no more yarr? Hell no! We’re simply expanding our scope / playfield, just like the Cartel itself has a finger in every pie. I’d love to tell all about it already but for the sake of operational security I have to wait just a wee bit longer. Please bear with me (pun intended).