Quote of the Day – The PCU Will Crater

As you can see, going free-to-play and increased botting activity could only stabilize them for one year, the concurrent logins are exactly where they were a year ago and the summer dip is just coming. Unless they have one more “free to play” level stunt in their sleeves, a year from now they’ll be under 20K concurrent players.

Gevlon, Seems I was right about New Jita

More proof that EVE Online is a special game, Gevlon cannot stop writing about it.  And not just derisive comments in the flow of a narrative about another game, as he does with World of Warcraft, but full on posts about New Eden.

Anyway, he is on the “EVE is dying” path, ever popular with those who dislike the game, with what can be construed as a very specific claim.  He is saying that the average concurrent player logins will be 20k in a year.  (Data source: EVE Offline)

PCU for the last 12 months with avg at 35K

In a post rife with abductive reasoning, unsupported declarations about RMT and botting, and an ongoing tendency to strip facts of their context in order to give them new meaning, he has foreseen the death of EVE Online.  Or, if not death, then a state of decline well beyond anything witnessed previously.

But you cannot argue with him, because he won’t admit any possibility beyond his own conclusions.  His world view is set in stone.  So I’ll just put this post up and we’ll come back to it in a year and see how things have played out.  It is very easy to apply your own narrative to things that have already happened, to claim that CCP “knew” things.  It is altogether a different beast to be able to predict the future.

Finally, I borrowed the term “crater” in the title from Dinsdale.  He likes to say that the PCU has already cratered, while Gevlon is saying that is a coming event. It amuses me that two people who are so angry about the game differ on that front.

Quote of the Day – CCP Picks Winners

Goons were untouchable until they failed to deliver the $150K. Then they became outcasts overnight and the IWI RMT block became above the law – until they met with real life gambling law. Then IWI got banned overnight and the devs found their next “winner”: whoever controls the trillions-for-nothing Perimiter citadels.

Gevlon, You can’t compare reality with a dream

So there you have it, the Imperium lost the Casino War because it failed to raise a $150,000 payoff for CCP.

Signs of a vast Goon conspiracy

I love me a good conspiracy theory, and here is Gevlon continuing to justify his leaving EVE Online… so long after he left that you have to wonder who he is really addressing here… the goblin doth protest too much methinks… by claiming that CCP picks winners.  It also seems to invalidate his claim that he beat Goons by funding Mordus Angels.   If CCP picked the winner, then I guess he didn’t really enter into it.  After the failed Kickstarter, Goons were doomed already.

This is especially timely as the CSM 12 elections are going on right now and CCP is working to try and get the non-null sec part of the game to actually give a shit and vote.  CCP isn’t actively campaigning against null sec.  But getting out the vote clearly works against null sec sweeping the election yet again.  Is this how one picks winners? (Cue “CCP could be doing more!” comment)

I would actually like to put Gevlon’s conspiracy up against Dinsdale Pirannha’s, because the Din/Vin spin is that Goons run CCP and that every thing they do is strictly to benefit them.  In his world, Goons were slated to win the war (quote on record), banning IWI was just removing an RMT competitor, and Goons really own whatever citadel is making money one jump from Jita. (Also something about fellatio now and again because Din is so angry he has to personify the imagined collusion into a sexual relationship.)

My own observation of the current “winners,” which is anecdotal, but which has persisted over months, is that citadels one jump from Jita do not have all that much impact on the market.  I extract and sell a skill injector every week at the Caldari Navy Assembly Plant at Jita Planet IV moon 4, and the prices listed in Perimeter have no bearing on what I can get for the injector.   I look at the market, sort the prices low to high, scroll past all the low ball Perimeter listings to where the Jita price stands, list in that range, and the injector sells within hours despite being priced as much as 20% above the Perimeter citadel price.

I am sure some people buy in Perimeter.  I would if it were my ISK.  But clearly the habit and the implied safety of Jita 4-4 is strong enough to be worth a bonus.  Plus it is still the place to buy everything else.  Perimeter is really only trying to corner the PLEX and skill injector market.  Nobody is hauling all of their production to a third party citadel.

And those citadels are not even that safe.  A reader sent me a PLEX in game for answering some questions, contracted to me from a citadel in Perimeter. (Thank you, btw!)  Only when I went to collect it, I found it was in the safety tab of my assets window with a timer before it would appear in an NPC station.  The citadel it was in had been destroyed.  Oops.  Now I have to wait until I can buy it out of hock.

Anyway, this sounds like a classic choice of malice over ignorance.  Do you think CCP is picking winners?  Is CCP just bad at predicting consequences?  (Or believing when players point them out in advance?)  Or is this just along the lines of Malcanis’ law (another Gevlon favorite), where anything aimed at helping newer players ends up helping the entrenched older players even more so?

Looking forward to the inevitable Gevlon and Dinsdale comments on this.

Quote of the Day – The End of Legends

Within the Daybreak family, LoN seemed to be that uncle that, while still part of the family, no one ever talked about. He was always just hanging around creepily, standing in the corner sipping on a bottle of who-knows-what out of a brown paper bag.

Dellmon, Guest Post at EQ2 Wire

Legends of Norrath went dark last week and, despite a previous post about its imminent demise, I totally missed the date.  I suppose next year, when I do the month in review post, being off by ten days won’t matter much.  And frankly, to me the game itself didn’t matter much.  It was a convoluted game in a genre I don’t care for in any case.

Dellmon puts the game’s “players” into three categories in the post linked at the top, and I clearly fell into the third of the three.  I tried the game for a bit early on, then just collected the free card packs that being a Station Access subscriber got me, opening them up in hope of finding a loot card or two.

I will admit that I did get a few nice housing items out of those packs.  But it wasn’t enough for me to bend my mind to the task of opening up those card packs on a regular basis.  I think I had 80 or so sitting around unopened as the game went away.

There was a momentary glimmer of hope for the game when Smed, seeing Blizzard make a quick success out of its card game, Hearthstone, figured SOE (soon to be Daybreak) could do something like that too with Legends of Norrath.

Of course, nothing came of that.  The studio had just announced the closure of four titles in what looks like, in hindsight, pre-acquisistion house cleaning.

And so it is gone, like so many online titles before it.  I still think the high point of the game for me was when Brent from VirginWorlds was used for a card in one of the expansions.

Brent on his card

That is likely to be the only card I will remember.

 

Quote of the Day – Competing Against the Outside World

Meanwhile, VR devs are going, “But what about sticking blinders on people’s faces and making them stay at home?”

-Syp, on Twitter

In sudden surge, the augmented reality game Pokemon GO does seem to have gotten more press over the last few days than virtual reality has gotten over the last few months.  It has gone from the gaming press (I think half the stories at Polygon this week have been about the game) to the general press to showing up on the local news.  When your local news anchor is saying “Pokemon GO” a couple times an evening, it is a sign.  And then there was word of a movie based on the game as well.

This has been very much a perfect storm event, with a launch that managed to combine summer, when kids are off from school, have free time, and an inclination to go outside and do something, a free app for the smart phone so many people already own, and the immense popularity of Pokemon.

Meanwhile, the biggest VR news I have seen this week is that the Occulus Rift pre-orders from the beginning of the year have all finally shipped, but that the Touch motion controllers still do not have a firm date as yet.  Go team.

Of course, a phone app and VR aren’t really comparable, but it is a reminder that there hasn’t really been a killer app for VR yet that would get the average person interested in buying an expensive headset and a high end PC or console to go with it.  Right now it is still a niche product for enthusiasts.

Quote of the Day – Goons Will Win the War

We all know how this is going to end. goons will buy off the key people against them, or the allies will simply run out of ISK and /or interest, or CCP will come to the rescue of the RMT cartel.

Any way you cut it, goons powerbase will remain intact, and they will be as stronger than ever once the latest ISK printing press is installed one jump from Jita.

Dinsdale Pirannha, comment on Betrayal at M-OEE8 post

Not actually an April Fools joke, yet it feels like it belongs on this day.

Probably not the person you expected me to be quoting either.

There is something surreal in finding that the person most sure of victory for The Imperium, or at least victory for Goonswarm, is one of its constant critics.  But what of his statements?

The first is that the all powerful Goons will outspend IWant ISK, an online ISK casino that can afford to blow 1.8 trillion ISK on skill injectors just to say they did so.

Also showing off with that wallet balance

Oh, and they are giving away titans during a video stream today.

#slooFlirpA #tweetfleet – 4 titans will be given away tonight on stream.

— 1RonBank (@1Ronbank) April 1, 2016

I am not sure even Goons have the ISK reserves to do that, not to mention that the war against The Imperium has gone past mere rhetorical forum posts along the lines or “Ceterum autem censeo Gooninem esse delendam.”  The war appears to have achieved a life of its own, with or without ISK, with a goal to burn down Deklein and salt its fields so that no Goon may ever flourish there again.  Anybody who swapped sides to join The Imperium now would be savaged almost immediately and be ruined in reputation.  That likely isn’t worth any amount of ISK.

So, since a buy out seems to be out of the question, The Mittani will just Bat phone Reykjavik and tell Hilmar to win the war for him and his team.  “I’ve promised my people we would have that XXL citadel in VFK-IV before the next timer, so make it happen!”

Okay, that is way over the top, but I cannot come up with something that would both win the war for us yet wouldn’t totally destroy the game by making people quit in droves.

I will give Dinsdale credit.  His middle option isn’t at right angles to the situation.  I am not sure the “running out of ISK” aspect is going to happen, given the prodigious amount of in game currency IWI is able the throw around, but running out of interest… getting bored with the mechanics of total war, tired of forming for big fights, frustrated with tidi and the annoying sovereignty mechanics of the moment… that is pretty much how Goons, then the CFC, then The Imperium took and kept their holdings in the first place.

That is pretty much The Imperium plan now, the old stand-by of weaponized boredom.  But to get there we first have to get the war into a stalemate.  Winning fights and objectives, making progress, cancels out boredom.  And in a situation where the enemy can sneak in and reinforce VFK-IV, the one-time heart of the empire and a symbolic location for The Imperium, stalemate might not even be within our grasp right now.

Who did this? (said in angry Snape voice)

So barring the forces of the Moneybadge Coalition getting tired and wandering off, things look pretty bad for The Imperium.

Yet I wonder if there is any outcome that would cause Dinsdale to reconsider his view of Goons and CCP and EVE Online?

I didn’t write this post to be mean to Dinsdale, but he has a long standing reputation in the comment threads of many blogs and has pressed home his views time and again over the years.  He clearly wants to talk about them, and he keeps coming back for more, so I am going to guess he won’t be deterred by any of this.

But is there anything that could shake his views on this topic?

He might be so wed to those views that no set of events could change them.  I don’t know.

But the bigger problem… or at least the problem one can rationally discuss… is that I am not sure that the game would allow our foes a victory near complete enough for him to even consider changing his views.  The problem… if you consider it a problem… with New Eden is that you can never extinguish your foes.  They have to leave the game of their own accord.

So even if the Moneybadgers win a complete victory, take every Imperium system, win every battle, and hell camp any evacuation, some aspect of the coalition will remain.  Enough angry Goons can go on making people mad in New Eden for ages.  Even if the Moneybadgers band together in a permanent alliance and knock Goons down and keep them from ever holding sovereignty anywhere in New Eden again, they can still be a pain in the ass, another Mordus Angels group that can’t do anything on its own but which can sting annoyingly by shooting ratters or reinforcing a tower now and again.  And it would take a lot of work to knock Goons down to that level.

We are now facing a number of foes whom we have beaten in various wars over the years… sometimes on multiple occasions… yet there they are, back at it again, attacking Goons.  And so I suspect that no matter the outcome of the war, some form of The Imperium… maybe rebranded, maybe just flying under the Fat Bee flag, maybe with some leader besides The Mittani… will exist and will flourish and reassert some portion of its power again.

And then Dinsdale could say, “I told you so!  They won in the end!”

Is this a problem?  Or is EVE Online already savage enough?

Quote of the Day – The Optics of VR

The games with peripherals that do the best are highly social games that demo well at parties – think Rock Band or the Wii.  Both were compelling experiences that made observers immediately want to rush home and buy their own.  VR, on the other hand, makes you look like an idiot to observers.

Damion Schubert, I’m Still Skeptical of VR

GDC came and went last week up the road in SF and Virtual Reality was a major topic (and gimmick fest) at the event.  Mr. Schubert was there and came back with a few bullet points for one post and then a whole post about the harassment potential of VR in multiplayer experience that needs to be addressed.

Out of all of that, probably the most trivial bit, how VR looks to other people that tickled me.  It isn’t as bad as made out by that Time magazine cover…

Time Magazine

…which became such a meme that my Google search to find a copy of the cover was almost nothing but parodies.

Feel the Bern… erm… Burn!

Nothing right now is going to get you up and running around and jumping in your living room with that tethered headset.  Not without some lawsuits.  VR right now is about your head being in the game, so to speak, with the player being able to orient their view in the way we do in the real world.  It will be a long time before it is something akin to bad interpretive dance.

But even then VR is something that you cannot really get a sense of until you are the person sitting there in the sensory deprivation mask and headphones actually experiencing it.  Watching somebody else don the equipment and begin to play is a bit eerie or comical or silly as you watch them move and react to things to which you are not privy.  Having the mask on, being the person in the gear, is a very solo experience.

Quote of the Day – CSM members have no agency

CSM members have no agency.

-Sion Kumitomo, Now We Got Bad Blood

The quote was so small that I put it in the title of the post.  Saved you a click… unless you’re already here.  Ah well.

The post from which I took it however is somewhere in the 4,500 word range, or about double the number of words at which I start thinking that I might be rambling too much.  So many words in order to build up a context, set the story, explain the machinations, and try to tease out some of the nuances of the whole saga. (And then there is the comment section which seeks to compete on the total words front.)

The words of Citizen Sion

Yes, the post was put out there to tell a story and justify an resulting action, and that can require many words.  Sion gets to have his say.  Yet, for me, the essence of the whole issue was delivered in five words nestled deep in the heart of that enormous post.  This all came about essentially because members of the CSM, for all their hard work and devotion to the game, cannot make things happen.  They cannot make CCP listen to them.  They cannot make CCP like them.  They cannot make CCP disclose information to them.  They cannot make CCP fly them to Iceland.  They cannot make CCP acknowledge their existence.

The members of the CSM hold almost no power in their relationship with CCP unless they take the game out of school, so to speak, and start getting players riled up directly.  And even that has worked exactly once, back during the Incarna brouhaha.  Going out of school mostly just gets you ignored or ridiculed or excluded from the proceedings so far as I can tell.

School is, of course, the apt metaphor.  I called the whole thing the Galactic Student Council back in 2008… and I am not going to let that piratical Rixx Javix steal my lead on that insight either with his 2011 observations!

Not that I begrudge CCP their hold over things.  They have a business to run, and adding a bunch of well meaning outsiders to the development process can be a hindrance to getting things done.

But CCP also set this whole CSM system up.  They have encouraged players to step up and pitch in, on their time, and generally work at what I once described as essentially a “horrible middle-management job,” all for the love of the game.  It is not unreasonable to expect that, if you’re going to ask people to put in the effort, that you not jerk them around.  You don’t tell people they matter, that the whole process matters, and then consistently prove to them that they really don’t without some blowback.

And so Sion boycotted the latest CSM summit.

I am boycotting the entirety of the #csmx winter summit. #tweetfleet #eveonline

— Sion Kumitomo (@siggonK) February 15, 2016

Part of me doesn’t agree with his choice.  After all, what does a boycott of one accomplish?  And doubly so, how effective is a boycott when you’re alleged to be the member that CCP changed the whitepaper, without consulting the CSM, just to exclude from running for CSM again?  Staying away seems to be giving CCP exactly what they desire.  It would be better, to my mind, to show up and bang your shoe on the table like a latter day Khrushchev just to let people know you’re there and won’t be ignored.

Then again, I haven’t been in Sion’s shoes.  After his experiences, it may be that exercising about the only agency he has left within the confines of the CSM Whitepaper seemed like the better plan.  In the end, he made the choice and gets to live with the consequences.

Anyway, the management of the CSM at CCP has traded hands, with CCP Logibro, a friend to all fan sites, and the perennially popular CCP Guard taking over the helm.  Perhaps that will change things a bit for CSM 11.  Putting one of the most well known and well liked members of the CCP team on the case does send a message.  But CCP Guard also seems like one of the busier people on the CCP team, at least when looking in from the outside, so I hope he and CCP Logibro have the time to do something with the CSM.