The New Blogger Initiative

Unless mine is the only MMO blog you read (Hi mom!), you might have seen something about a New Blogger Initiative event thing going on this month.

I am not sure why it had to be “newbie,” which I find a bit condescending, especially when trying to be encouraging.  So I am changing it, thus making my initial statement about blogging: Do what you want!

So what is this event about?

It is an attempt to encourage others to join in the obsession addiction Sisyphean nightmare fun hobby of blogging about online gaming.  And link whoring.

The Plan

A group of blowhards egomaniacs argumentative know-it-alls dangerous intellectuals sanctimonious bastards esteemed elder bloggers has gathered together with the idea of dispensing contradictory self-serving obvious obtuse simply bad hard learned advice along with a bit encouragement.  And link whoring.

This will go on for the month of May, by the end of which half of of us won’t be speaking to the other half most of us will have dropped due to apathy you’ll be sick to death of us we will all be the best of friends and you’ll know nothing more than you do right now all about blogging. And link whoring.

What do YOU have to do?

Start a new blog.  The old hands recommend, almost unanimously, using some sort of blogging software for this.

Then go to register at the NBI Central forums and post “Hey, I started a new blog!” along the the URL to the blog.  Make sure you post in the right forum or prepare to be flamed. (and don’t sign your post, we can all see your damn name in the side bar!)

Finally, post something on your blog, pace around in circles, pretend to read our advice, and await fame and fortune.  Oh, and link us.

You have nothing to lose… since 78% of you are going give up within six months anyway.  So link us right away please.

What is in it for You?

This cadre of old blogging hands will introduce you to such beloved blogging concepts such as:

• link whoring
• blogroll whoring
• pingback whoring
• Twitter whoring
• obsessing about page rank
• What ever happened to Orkut?
• using your blog to run your own 419 scam
• actually writing something

We will offer up a myriad of confusing opinions on the topics of:

• spam comments
• obscene comments
• trolling comments
• off-topic comments
• foreign language comments
• hostile comments
• sarcastic comments
• SynCaine’s comments
• comments with typos
• comments appended to the wrong post
• comments from your mother
• and how to get more people to comment on your blog!

Finally, we will help you answer the question every blogger asks themselves:

• Why the hell is nobody reading my blog?

We’ll have plenty of answers, and we promise you won’t like any of them!

Plus, if you act now, every participant will put a link to your new blog on their own site. (But only if you promise to link us back.  Actually, now that I think of it, you first.)

Who is participating in this shambles?

Link whoring after the cut because the list is too damn long.

Finally! A Guild Wars 2 Video I Can Get Behind… I Think…

Starfleet Dental is/was/will be the Something Awful guild in Star Trek Online, infamous for the Bridge of Death event.

Later, they moved to SWTOR where they confused people (“This is Star Wars! There is no Starfleet!” -a comment I read somewhere), made a music video, annoyed some elite PvP guy, and generally wasted time.

Now though, Starfleet Dental has a Guild Wars 2 video up.

(Direct link to video.)

I am not sure I understand it, but I feel compelled to repost it.

I aspire to some day make such a video.

I think I need something better than Windows Live Movie Maker though….

Claiming Victory in Jita!

We’ll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
We’ll make the mayor and sheriffs run
We are the boys no man dares dun
If he regards a whole skin.

-Verse from the Garryowen, a traditional Irish air

The “Burn Jita” event is officially over.

The thing about an event like “Burn Jita” is that it lacks any real, concrete goals.

Nobody, aside from the devs at CCP, can actually “burn” Jita.  Likewise, there is nothing any player can do to “save” Jita either.  Jita is a static element of virtual universe.  Players in the game have no ability to affect the virtual manifestation of the location in EVE Online known as Jita.  You cannot actually burn Jita.

So for the event, you can pretty much craft your own victory conditions.

Certainly The Mittani, back from his ban, is claiming total victory.  But his victory is a macro-economic victory bound up with the control of the technetium needed to replace all the ships blown up in Jita and the subsequent Hulkageddon event, leading to economic dominance.  To mis-quote Mao, power comes from the barrel of a Goon.

Others, such as the EVE Morning podcast seem dubious, though they seem to be focused on one aspect of the plan and only in the short term.  They are claiming victory for the opposition, I suppose.

Then there is the gank fleet.  The certainly blew up some freighters.  In the 12 months previous to the event, 23 freighters and 3 jump freighters had been destroyed in Jita.  The event took down 38 freighters and 9 jump freighters.  More than a year’s worth of carnage in just three days, plus a few more in the surrounding systems as well.  Jester has a “Butcher’s Bill” and some analysis on the big kills.

Freighters Destroyed

The Save Jita folks are certainly claiming victory.  They flew in Jita and sought out the gank fleet.  Having declared war on Goonswarm and other alliances, they were free to engage in combat.  And they definitely blew up their share of gank ships.

But the presence of the “Save Jita” forces, clear for CONCORD free combat, brought an additional group of players into the mix in the form of the gank defense fleets.  CFC players who had no real interest in suicide ganking got to come out to Jita and engage in fleet PvP fights.  And so they got to show up, PVP, kill stuff, and have a good time.  Another victory!

All of this adds up.  You can go to DOTLAN and see that jumps in and out of Jita seemed close to the normal pattern. (Though Burn Jita even hit DOTLAN hard, causing some data loss.)  Jita interdiction fail!  But the total number of ship and pod kills in the system, which usually sits between 2,500 and 4,000 on any given month, spiked to almost 13,000.  And that number was heavily weighted towards the last three days of the month.

Jita Jumps and Ship Kills in April

Then there are the other players, those in system neither to gank nor defend.  Some clearly “lost,” in that their ship was blown up.  But every hauler who entered the war zone, loaded or unloaded, and made the run back out, can claim a victory of sorts.  They lived while others perished.

And for those of us who were just there as spectators, it was a chance to see and be, if only in a small way, a part of one of those great EVE Online events.  Burn Jita will be one of those things mentioned for years afterwards, and we were there to see it and to suck up system resources.  We helped lock down Jita at times by sending it to the limit of its capacity.  I claim victory for myself.  And I have some video to prove it. (The most popular “Burn Jita” video in all of Poland!)

And finally, there is CCP.  They got a clear victory with the press coverage.  And, in an interview with EuroGamer, they got to make their stance on the whole event quite clear.

“Do you want to play a 15 minute match of Call of Duty that you won’t remember the next day, or do you want to spend four months manufacturing 14,000 Thrashers to do this? It’s just so big and awesome.”

“We want people to be able to do this. If Goonswarm want to do it, we want them to do it and we want them to have a great time doing it.

“The worst thing we could do is to stop it happening. It would be appalling for the game. It would be against everything we stand for.”

Not a lot of ambiguity in that.  CCP digs this sort of thing.

So there are many out there who can claim a victory.  That, in itself, is probably a pretty good sign that the event was a success.

Of course, one sign of victory is the desire to do it again.  And I think that will happen.

The musical question might just be, “How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve burned Jita?”

What do you think?  Who can claim victory in Jita?

And what will you do when it comes time for Jita (or maybe Amarr) to burn again?