Quote of the Day – Cat Ears in Space

My ideal patch would be one where they fix vuln timers on citadels, heavily nerf or remove void bombs on citadels, make sov nodes a damage capped structure not entosis based, make refineries mirror 90% of PoS mechanics, and add cat ears and an option to replace my engine trails with a stream of hundred dollar bills.

CSM 12 member Jin’taan,  Reddit Post

In one blow Jin’taan has hit on quite a few issues I fully support.

The CXM 12 Member from Provi Bloc

And not all of them are strictly null sec focused.  In fact, only ditching entosis is applicable directly to null sec.  The rest are pretty universal.  And cat ears… that could be the back door to getting hats to be a thing in New Eden.  I am glad he was on our ballot.

 

Quote of the Day – Playing the Meta Game

The MER [Monthly Economic Report] is the best recruiting in the history of EVE

-Aryth, Talking in Stations May 13, 2016

Catching up on some podcasts over the weekend, one of which was Talking in Stations episode where host Matterall spoke to CCP Larrikin and GSF Director and CSM 11 & 12 member Aryth.

Aryth has the up front part of the show where he talks about an Imperium attempt to play the meta to their advantage.

You may recall some months back Aryth and Innominate, the Imperium CSM members, asked that CCP not display, or obfuscate, or delay the section of CCP Quant’s monthly economic report that shows the amount of mining done in each region.  I am pretty sure I even mentioned this in passing at the time, though I cannot find the post at the moment.  Either way, this was mentioned in the March 2017 Monthly Economic Report and the chart did not appear that month.

However, in the long term chart was not changed and resumed its position in the Monthly Economic Report lineup for April.

April 2017 – Mining value by region

There it highlight once again that in Delve we were ratting and mining like crazy.

On the show Aryth revealed/claimed that the request to suppress the information was done in order to bring attention to the report… after all, if Goons want to hide it, it must contain something good… to spread the word that if you want to mine (or rat) in null sec, then the Imperium is a destination you should consider.

Whether or not you believe this is really a “now it can be told” example of Goons playing the meta game, membership has been up.

Of course, we will see how well mining survives the next round of null sec directed nerfs.

If you are interested in hearing Aryth opine on the meta or CCP Larrikin talk about the Blood Raiders Shipyard before the event wentlive, you can find Talking in Stations linked above or over on SoundCloud.

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?