CCP to Create More Dead Links on My Blog

After careful consideration whilst planning upgrades and changes to Tranquility, we have decided to discontinue the EVElopedia as of the announced extended downtime on Monday February 29th, 2016.

CCP Falcon, EVE News Update

Well, that sucks.

The final featured article?

Not that I thought EVElopedia was the be-all, end-all of New Eden knowledge.  In fact, it was lacking in many respects, often being out of date or incomplete on many fronts.  CCP made a wiki and then didn’t make keeping it up to date anybody’s primary job I would guess.  But I often found it useful, especially since it used the same hierarchy for things like ships and modules and the like as gets used in the game itself.

I probably refer to the site once a week at least when I want to figure out what ships the Angel Cartel has or something of that sort.

There are alternatives of course.  CCP is suggesting the Brave Newbies and EVE University wikis as alternatives in their post about the shut down.  And, of course, being in The Imperium, I have access to the Goon wiki as well.

And, one of the charms of EVElopedia is its wealth of somewhat outdated information.  There is still, as an example, a history lesson in how Domain sovereignty worked.  That information, while no longer relevant in the age of Fozzie Sov, is part of the rich history of New Eden, and I am loathe to see it disappear merely because it doesn’t reflect today’s reality.  There is also a host of items on the site related to the lore of New Eden, also part of the threads that have been spun together in order to create the fabric of the game as it stands today.

According to the post, some of the “prime” fiction and backstory will be archived to and put on another site at some future date

But I am primarily annoyed because, as noted in the title, I have tended to link out to EVElopedia quite a bit over the years, so a lot of links on the site are going to go dead.  This is the World Wide Web at its worst.

All the more so because I had alternatives, but I chose to link to the official EVE Online wiki because I thought that was less likely to just up and disappear with little notice than a user created site.  I guess CCP has made a fool out of me on that front.

Finally, I am more than a bit cheesed off about the seeming indecent haste in making the whole thing disappear.  Is there a reason it needs to be remove right fucking now?  Is there some fee due on March 1st if it remains?

Seriously, inviting people to save off what they might want with four days notice is a serious dick move.  I’m tempted to go try and rile up Jason Scott to see if we could get the internet archive team to save a copy of the whole thing.

And that idea is all the more compelling as I took a peek over at the Internet Archive and found that while the Wayback Machine has archived most of the top level items on the EVElopedia site, when you attempt to drill down to the actual articles, nothing is there.

There is a .sql file you can download, which promises it has all of the “player content” currently hosted.  But I am not sure what that really means.  It probably doesn’t include the wide array of classic graphics screen shots and the like, weighing in at only 102MB. (Also, DBVisualizer ran out of memory trying to open up the file.)

So I am pretty pissed about the whole thing.  Yes, this is old stuff and likely doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me… and there is not much I can do about it.

A Strange Time to Shoot Monkeys on Auraxis

These are great days we’re living, bros. We are jolly green giants, walking the Earth… with guns. These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we’re gonna miss not having anyone around that’s worth shooting.

Crazy Earl, Full Metal Jacket

Life is heating up in the north end of null sec space.  As noted elsewhere, what has been dubbed the Casino War between SpaceMonkey’s Alliance and the gambling site I Want ISK has escalated into a concentrated attack on SMA’s home in the Fade region by groups hired by the gambling site to attack our Imperium allies.  SMA has abandoned their foothold in Cloud Ring and, after some of there own internal drama, set about to defend their space.

Of course The Imperium is there to stand by and defend SMA.  Reavers were recalled to the north.  Forces have been focused to help cover their space.

Suggestions by our foes that we reset or otherwise abandon SMA in the middle of this fight are beyond ludicrous.  Nobody gets reset in the middle of a war.  That is a recipe for disaster.  If anybody deserves to get cut, they’ll get cut when things settle down.

Besides, a war, one with regular action right in the middle of our home space, one that has fleets going up every night, with kill mails to be had, along with a brand new shiny doctrine to fly… well, is that made-to-order content or what?

So with that pot boiling, it seems like an absolutely perfect time to… tell the coalition to go play another game!

Yes, The Mittani is monetizing his followers in conjunction with Daybreak and/or/by (pick the one that suits your narrative) encouraging a team building expedition to PlanetSide 2! 

As with the H1Z1 invasion last year, there is a code you can get from the site to collect a few exclusive items.

Official graphic or something

I think the “and more” is the title Imperator.

Members of The Imperium are being encouraged to run off and play… in the middle of our war… as part of the Vanu Sovereignty on the Emerald server.

On the upside of all of this PlanetSide 2 (unlike H1Z1) is free (to the point of being problematic for Daybreak), relatively stable (though we broke the server on the first night), and being a shooter, is easy enough to jump into and out of quickly if there are no fleet ops going on at the moment.

So, good line member that I am, I went and downloaded the PlanetSide 2 client again and started trying to figure out how to play over the weekend.  It is a shooter, but it is also an MMO with advancement and upgrades and a cash shop and blah blah blah… plus, while I played it for a bit when it launched, that was a couple years back.

I think I’ve sort of got a handle on the medic role at this point.  The graphics, and thus the world, as somewhat bland.  But for a shooter where you can get a hundred people in a pretty small area killing each other, that is probably a requirement just to keep frame rates up.  The cash shop is as confusing as ever.  I have nearly 12K in what was once Station Cash on my account from subscribing to EQ and EQ2 over the last few years and I couldn’t tell you want I should spend it on.  So it just sits in my wallet.

I’m also a little less impressed with the game’s Guinness Book record.  Not only was the number (1,158 players) something of a yawn compared to EVE (4,070 at 6VDT-H) but it is clear that it was an all effort staged event because there is a hard population limit… a limit which seems to be considerably lower than the record…  and a queue for continents when that number is reached.

But those are minor gripes.  The game is fun enough in that frantic way that shooters are.  A decent distraction.  And aim bots, often the bane of such games, seem to be under control.  It is hard to tell with snipers… and I get sniped often enough… but with combat in visual range nobody seems to magically hitting their targets, a situation even I have been able to detect in the past when playing shooters.

The small yet ironic twist to all of this is that our SMA allies in The Imperium were already active on the Emerald server in PlanetSide 2.  According to their Dead Monkey Gaming site, they were headed there last October.  However, they went to the New Conglomerate on the Emerald server while, as noted, the call from TMC has been to join the Vanu Sovereignty.

So we appear to be shooting Monkeys in our own way on Auraxis, the world on which PlanetSide 2 takes place.  I know I’ve been killed by a couple.  The timing of this is interesting, even if it is accidental.