Tag Archives: Equinox

Friday Bullet Points with Launches and Dates for Launches

SKINR and the Lime Green Harpy

I am a simple capsuleer and, as such, a lot of what went into the Equinox expansion that dropped last week is a bit over my head… either not described in simple enough terms for me to fully grasp or so outside of what I do regularly that I lack the context to understand or care. I’ll let people on r/eve argue about most of it until we start seeing some results.

Equinox is here – Seize the SKINS

But the SKINR, the ability to make your own ship SKINS, a key feature in Equinox… well, that seems overly complicated as well. I mean, anything that has 11 freaking skills to train around it is probably over my head, though I suspect you don’t need all 11 trained to level V to do something.

I don’t even know what these do yet

I base that on the fact that I have successfully created a SKIN, though that outcome was not obvious from the start.

I mean, the UI for creating SKINs is pretty straightforward and, as a capsuleer of simple taste, I wanted to start with a very basic outcome: A lime green Harpy. Getting that was a piece of cake. You get a lime green color by default and if you just apply it wherever possible, you get that outcome.

Just put green all over it and we’re good

The problem cropped up when I got to the price of production. In order to make one simple SKIN I was given this price.

The SKINR Toll

There is, of course, the PLEX price. That would make this simple SKIN cost about 250 million ISK to produce, given the approximate value of a single PLEX being 5 million ISK currently. For a hull I use a lot, I could swing that I guess.

But I also needed 2,000 Kerr Sequencers, and when I went to the market on day one to find some, I was greeted with an even bigger possible bill for this SKIN.

Day one pricing

Leaving aside that there were not even 2,000 on the market, at a going rate of 5 million ISK per, that would give me a 10 billion ISK bill for this SKIN.

That about made me toss the whole project and move on then and there. But then came the login campaign for the expansion and on the list was a stack of these sequencers.

Give it away, give it away, give it away now

Meanwhile, the market started to fill up and now they’re around 1,500 ISK each, so that adds 3 million ISK to the price. That I can deal with.

And now I had the supplies I needed… and had some PLEX on hand so I didn’t need to buy any… so I built up my Harpy again… I hadn’t bothered to save the design, given it barely rises to the level of design… and clicked the “Start Sequencing” button and began to wait.

I had to wait because there is a whole “cooking time” element to this which I am sure some of those skills will alleviate. I could look into that if I cared enough.

After some time passed… I think it was two days… the SKIN was done and I was able to collect it.

A new SKIN is born

The new SKIN doesn’t automatically appear in the personalization window of the ship fitting UI. That would be too easy. Now there is a button in there to open up the Paragon SKINR tool so you can go find your SKIN and apply it. First I had to find a ship, which led me to open the hangar window where I found out we got a new card view for the hangar, which confused me for a moment.

Card view, and some of my ship names…

I grabbed a Harpy, which were at the top because I guess we sort by ship class, and Assault Frigates come first on the list, and applied the SKIN, then undocked.

New SKIN out in space

So, op success I guess. I created a SKIN.

As noted, the UI for doing so was pretty straightforward and I can even see some of the elements they were showing us back at EVE Vegas 2016. This has been a while coming.

Apocalypse battleship with some pattern and color variations… could be a proto-SKINR model…

So creating SKINs, kind of simple. The problem looks like it is going to be the business model. I think I mentioned before that this looked like it would be a sticking point even as they announced the plan for SKINR.

On the one hand, cool new tool. On the other, SKINs are literally one of the few somewhat popular and non-game impacting items in the in-game cash shop. CCP would be pretty foolish to just hand us something this nice that totally undercut their business model while not having any plan about how to make that up.

So they will make it up by charging PLEX for stuff. So there is a PLEX charge per SKIN, a PLEX charge for new colors, a PLEX charge for new patterns, and, while it isn’t available yet, there will no doubt be a PLEX charge or other tax for the Paragon store where you will be able to sell the SKINs you create to other players.

Can I sell you some colors?

And I get it. CCP is cutting off a revenue stream so they need to make it up. But the pricing… well, I love the DayGlo orange of the Sunrise Matte above, but for 15 PLEX you can only use it three times. That doesn’t feel like enough uses to make it worthwhile.

Then again, I am just looking to fiddle with some SKIN options on my own. Maybe if you’re going to commit hard to producing high quality SKINs for sale when the marketplace arrives on the 20th that you’ll just price that PLEX into the business model. We shall see.

Still, it feels like the eternal war that is price elasticity. Would CCP end up selling more overall if that 15 PLEX got you 15 uses rather than 3?

Meanwhile, I am looking into what other hulls I should paint green.

Lime Mammoth anybody?

We’ll see what else I decide on. The bigger the hull, the more expensive it is to paint. But I do have my Harpy.

Lime Harpy warping off for adventure

We’ll see if it stands out in a fleet op. I am likely to have the only green Harpy, if anybody cares to look.

And, for those keep track at home, I did say in the past that player made SKINs were an honorable mention bad idea, so I do feel somewhat rebuked, even if I meant the more traditional “sold through the New Eden Store” path for that post.

Still, New Eden never disappoints so there is a flesh toned Thorax SKIN that looks like a penis coming to a Paragon Store near you. Look for it as a fleet comp soon. The TTP metric is always measured in minutes.

EVEOGANDA – A Week with SKINR
CCP – Using the SKINR Tool

Login Rewards Return to EVE Online to Celebrate the Equinox Expansion

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One of the “features” of the Equinox expansion on Tuesday was the removal of the daily login rewards.

Equinox is here – Seize Something

Login rewards showed up back in 2018, which doesn’t feel like that long ago until you look at the calendar and realize it is 2024. I think I mocked their arrival and now I guess I’ll turn around and mock their removal… if only because I didn’t get all the SKINs they were handing out.

Daily rewards have been rerouted to the AIR Daily tasks where you can now earn more rewards for more days of completing them. No SKINs to be had, but things for the SKINR stuff.

AIR Daily tasks get longer term goals…

So for a full day there were no login rewards. And then, after that brief pause, CCP sprang some new daily login rewards on us to help celebrate the Equinox expansion.

Equinox login rewards

In with the usual skill points and boosters are some items related to the new SKINR mechanics added to the game with Equinox. I’ll have more to say about that once my first SKIN is done cooking.

So login rewards are not dead and gone. Instead it looks like they will still show up for events. And first up is a seven day campaign… which lines up nicely with the 7 days of free Omega time currently available in the in-game store.

Seven Days of Free Omega Time

Unless, of course, you have an Alpha account and cashed in the Omega time on the first day, the day before the login campaign started. Then you’ll only get to claim six of the seven days as an Omega, causing you to miss out on that last 75K skill point injector.

That seems like a very New Eden trick to play on us.

I lucked out, if only because I was too lazy to login any of my Alpha accounts because the launcher lost all my account data a couple weeks back… again… and some minor amount of work was involved with getting them setup again. Once again, my lifestyle choice pays off, as my alphas will get all the Omega rewards.

The Equinox Expansion Arrives for EVE Online

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The day has arrived and the Equinox expansion has landed in/on New Eden. We got some release notes late last week as a warm up for the day, but how it will all play out in the galaxy of unintended consequences remains to be seen. So today I’m just going to skim over what is arriving with this hefty expansion. There are a lot of things going on.

Equinox is here – Seize Something

But first up, some stuff from the in-game store. The now common 7 Days of Omega for free offer is up, now with a bonus 10 EverMarks, so we will likely see a boost in players in the game for at least a week.

Seven Days of Free Omega Time… also, nice flag of Ukraine in this image!

That will be available until June 20th.

In addition, since there are new skills to be trained, there are some cheap cerebral accelerators in the store as well.

Think fast! Train fast!

And there are Twitch Drops events running that can earn you some special additions to the SKINR update I mention below.

There is also a launch trailer to see.

Also, login rewards seem to have gone away.

Finally, there are a ton of links at the end of the post that go into more detail about a lot of this. I am just, as noted, skimming the whole thing today.

The Skyhook and New Null Sec Resources

There are three new resources that will be used to supply/maintain null sec sovereignty. They are Power, Workforce, and Reagents, and they have different limitations.

Equinox Null sec Resources

Power – Power is provided by the sun, with larger blue suns giving the most power, and small white suns giving the least power, it is also provided by gas, storm and plasma planets. Power cannot be moved and is local to the solar system.
Workforce – Workforce is provided by the working population available on suitable planets, which are barren, oceanic and temperate planets. Workforce can be imported and exported via the Sov Hub through different solar systems that the same alliance controls, as long as the systems are directly connected together.
Reagents – Reagents come from ice and lava planets and have to be manually collected and moved.

On the reagents front, those will be collected by the Skyhook, which will also replace the customs office for PI if anchored at an appropriate planet. (PI will not be affected by Equinox from what I have read.)

The Skyhook in Equinox

The Sovereignty Hub

The Infrastructure Hub and Territorial Claim Units, left over from the Dominion sovereignty updates a decade and a half back, will be replaced by the Sovereignty Hub.

The Sovereignty Hub

All iHubs will be transitioned to Sov Hubs and moved to a standard location in each system where sovereignty is currently held. The location will be 2 million Km from the star in each system. This will undo some of the grandfathered iHub positions, such as the one in 1DQ1-A, which is on grid with a Fortizar, which greatly assisted in its defense during 2020’s World War Bee.

The Sov Hub upgrades will not be available until the iHub transitions are complete, which is expected to be by June 20th.

Sov Hub Upgrades Plan

The Dev Blog about the transition plan is linked at the end of this post.

Metenox Moon Drill

As mentioned before, passive moon mining will be a thing again with the new Metenox Moon Drill.

Passive Moon Mining Lives Again

While the expansion is going live today, it is not expected that the new moon drill will be available until later this week.

New Upwell Haulers and Freighters

As previously mentioned, we’re getting a range of new industrials from Upwell, all of which have launcher capabilities in their high slots, which should make for some fun.

Upwell, where X marks the spot?

There was a dev blog about this previously, linked at the end of the post, but further details about the ships are in the Equinox notes.

Making Carriers Great Again

The lowly carrier has been somewhat neglected over the last few years so CCP has come around to add some utility to them with Equinox

Carriers will now have the capability of using a Conduit jump to take 5-30 players in the jump tunnel with them. The Number of players which are passengers for the jump is increased by a new skill, Capital Jump Portal Generation, which increases the limit by 5 per level. This is built into Carriers and does not require a module to be fitted.

Capital Micro Jump Drives and Capital Micro Jump Field Generators

Carriers will gain the ability to fit new capital sized versions of the Micro Jump Drive and the Micro Jump Drive Field Generator, both of these modules will require a new skill, Capital Micro Jump Drive Operation.
The Capital Micro Jump Drive jumps a Carrier 250km in whatever direction it is facing.
The Capital Micro Jump Field Generator will jump a Carrier, 50 extra sub-capitals, and up to 4 capitals around it (Capitals are counted separately to sub-capitals) 250km in whatever direction it is facing.

There are also a range of new fighter available. Carriers will now have new and interesting… and likely unexpected… roles to fill after having been somewhat left on the bench for a couple of years.

Make Targeted Doomsdays Great Again

In order to keep up with past capital changes, the base damage for targeted doomsdays are being doubled, which means that a max skilled Titan Doomsday goes from 1.5m to 3m damage per shot.

Victorious Luxury Yacht Mass Reduction

J-space’s favorite hole rolling ride has apparently been abused long enough. It’s mass is being reduced from 10,000,000 to 1,000,000 with an accompanying change in agility to keep its align time the same. Wormholers will get over this one quickly enough. There are other options.

Auto-Targeting Missiles

Since the Avalanche will be bringing these to bear, the various faction versions are being renamed and will now fall solely under the domain of Mordu’s Legion and their LP store.

Factional Warfare and Insurgency Balance

I’m not even going to pretend I understand what this really means. Some people are mad about it, so it must mean something. There is a link at the end to some information about this.

SKINR Ship Personalization

Painting your own ship will now be a thing, and because this is EVE Online, it will all be much more complicated than you probably feel it should be. The fact that there are going to be 11 skills introduced to the game to go along with the feature should tell you I am not kidding on that front.

I don’t even know what these do yet

A very CCP thing to do, introduce a new thing and then throw a bunch of skills between you and doing anything with it… though I suspect the price in PLEX will be the main hurdle for many.

I do not pretend to understand it all, but you’ll be able to do it in space. Anyway, I’ll have a more solid opinion once I have seen it. Until then, a good section of the expansion notes are devoted to it.

Corporation Project Updates

CCP is introducing four new goals for corp projects that can theoretically handle the following:

- Create Automated Ship Replacement programs:
  Corporations can now automate SRPs using the Ship Loss contribution method in their projects, streamlining a previously manual process that often had to be handled outside of the game.

- Incentivize Loyalty Point activities:
  Corporations can incentivize activities that earn LP, particularly valuable for Factional Warfare (FW) corporations and their pilots.
- LP Buyback Programs:
  Corporations can set up LP buyback programs with ISK payouts by creating Earn LP projects and setting the LP tax to 100%.
Incentive Salvaging:
Corporations can now incentivize salvaging activities, offering a valuable income source for new players and promoting cooperation.

We’ll see how those play out.

C5 & C6 Cosmic Anomalies and Signatures

The one that has the wormhole people upset is the change to

A capital ship must be present in sites prior to the appearance of the Decloaked Transmission Relay to trigger the Arithmos Tyrannos spawn in C5/6 Cosmic Anomalies.
Any escalation waves, including the Arithmos Tyrannos, will despawn if capital ships leave the site, or strays further than 100KM of a site’s warp-in point.
Lancer Dreadnoughts will now trigger escalation waves in Cosmic Anomalies and Cosmic Signatures.

The grumbling is that Lazer Hawks drove this because they own the prime C5/C6 holes and this will keep outsiders from farming their goodies.

Other items on the list for updates today

At the end of the notes you will find changes applying to the following:

Graphics Updates
Ship interaction updates
Homefront operational changes
Paragon Missions
Incursions
Observatory Flashpoints in Pochven
Triglavian Minor Victory Systems
Concord Rogue Analysis Beacon
LP Stores

That last one is a big one because they are removing the ability to buy ship hulls from the LP stores. You will only be able to buy blueprint copies. So people with those BPCs rattling around in their hangars might have a shot at selling them on contract some day… or making some money manufacturing.

I asked Google’s AI Gemini to write me a Haiku about the expansion and what I found is that, among its other failings, Gemini doesn’t know how many syllables there are in many words. So I had to fix it.

Nullsec blooms anew,
Planetary riches abound
Conflict paints the sky

Will conflict paint the sky? Will there be war in null sec, or will there just be more timers to be set and more ops to form for where the other side does not show? We will know soon enough I suppose.

I will be starting off in my training pod working on some new skills.

CCP – The Equinox Expansion is Now Live
CCP – Equinox Expansion Notes
CCP – Updated Patch Notes
CCP – Sovereignty, Structures & Transition
CCP – Equinox in Focus: New Upwell Ships
Reddit – Equinox Expansion Notes Thread
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes: Orbital Skyhooks
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – SKINR Ship Personalization
TNG – EVE: Equinox – Homefront Operations
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – General Manufacturing
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – PVE
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Improved AIR Daily Goals
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Corporation Projects
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Factional Warfare and Insurgency Balance
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Other Ship And Weapons Balance Changes
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes: Sov Upgrades
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes: Orbital Skyhooks
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Carrier Balance Changes
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Upwell Haulers And Freighter
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – The Metenox Moon Drill
TNG – EVE: Equinox Patch Notes – Graphics (Other Than SKINR)
TNG – EVE: Equinox And A Surprising Amount Of Change
TNG – EVE’s Player Designed Ship SKINs And Monetization
TNG – The New Upwell Line Of Hauling Ships In Equinox
TNG – EVE: Equinox And CCP’s Plans For Null Sec

Friday Bullet Points about June Happenings as a Hot Summer Looms

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Summer is Coming!

I live in California, so I don’t worry too much about winter as even when it is bad… storms and rain… that is generally good for us. Summer though… it is going to be a hot one. It was already up in the 90s this week and the first official day of summer, June 20th, hasn’t even arrived yet.

On the good news front, we got a heat pump central forced air system for the house, so after 17 years in our place we will have air conditioning in the summer. We’ll be getting solar installed at last early next month so we’ll have the electricity to drive the heat pump which, while it is energy efficient, still draws power.

But that is neither here nor there for this post. I wanted to list out some things coming up in June. I know, isn’t that what the “Coming Up” section of my month in review post is for? Sure, but I forgot some things, found out about some new things, and I’ll put pictures and links in this post. So let’s go!

WoW: The War Within Beta – June 5th

Yeah, that was Wednesday, but you’re not too late if you want to participate. There is a whole page dedicated to the beta, what content will be available, and how to join here.

The War Within 30 minutes or it is free

The War Within is, of course, the next expansion due later this year for retail WoW. Being somewhat divorced from retail since early in Shadowlands, I have some mild interest in the expansion, but going to retail these days is like going to a foreign country… they do all the same stuff as us… or classic… but it is all slightly different and awkward for a naive traveler like myself. But I’ve been over all of that already, haven’t I?

But a beta… I haven’t done a retail WoW beta since Cataclysm, and we saw how that went.

Valheim on MacOS – June 10th

2021’s huge indy survival success, Valheim, will be making the move to MacOS as the developers look for new markets to conquer.

Are there apples in Valhalla?

I guess it will be on Steam. Does Microsoft Games even support MacOS? Maybe? I don’t know.

But Iron Gate assures us that it will support cross-play, so if you setup a server for you PC buddies and a friend with a Mac shows up, they can play too. I don’t have a Mac anymore… I mean, technically there are at least three MacOS computers in the house as I write this, but I do not actively work or play on the Mac these days.

EVE Online Equinox Expansion – June 11th

I suppose if I am listing things out I need to include this. The big old Equinox expansion is coming on Tuesday.

Equinox – Seize Control – June 11, 2024

We shall see then who exactly is seizing control and whether or not null sec will be upended or if it is a great big nothing burger. The ship SKINR should be neat, depending on how they plan to tax people to use it.

EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server – After June 13th

The jump back to a more authentic 2006 experience with the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server is slated to land this month. The beta is slated to end on June 13th… so maybe the following Tuesday, the 18th? Or maybe the 14th? We’ll have to see.

Anashti Sul is a mystery in her way

It may seem a bit odd to go back 18 years for a 20th anniversary celebration, but the 2006 experience marks the settling point for the game, where it finally decided what it was for the moment and moved forward with content. I wrote my views on this decision a while back, and plan to give it a peek when it shows up.

Pax Dei Early Access – June 18th

Pax Dei is entering Early Access. What does that mean? All sorts of things I suppose and they have a whole post about it.

Coming to Early Access

As a title it has been kind of on my watch list… I subscribe to their Discord server news channel so updates there show up in the blog’s Discord server… you can join if you like here… but given all the other stuff I have on my list for June, I feel like Pax Dei might not make the cut… especially since they want $40 to be a founder. I already have $40 unplayed games in Steam, I am not sure I need another.

Also, there will be pwipes. I don’t have time for that. Call me when it ships.

Steam Summer Sale – June 20th

The first day of summer, the summer solstice, and Steam is usually pretty good about kicking off the Steam Summer Sale on that day.

Will I buy anything? That is always the question. As noted above, I have my share of unplayed titles already, and I bought a bunch over the Winter Sale… and then ended up playing Valheim.

My Steam Played Stats

You can see your own Steam stats over at SteamDB.

Also, as it came out last week, when you cannot pass on your Steam titles. You die, your account is dead… unless your give your kids your password and have family sharing on or something. I am sure there is a work around, but it is just a reminder that nothing “digital” you buy is actually yours. (Word is GoG.com might let you pass things on to your heirs, but there is paperwork involved.)

You want to have access to something it needs a physical… though even that isn’t a guarantee. Sonus loves to brick their older sound systems and Spotify is bricking their car player later this year… though you might get a refund after a lot of outrage at their “fuck you” attitude about the whole thing… and all sorts of “smart” home devices end up getting bricked by Google or whoever buys the company then discontinues them.

Anyway, side rant there. But for our new heat pump I got a dumb Honeywell thermostat. No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no other connectivity or ability to host Russian bot nets, and no way for Honeywell to shut it down without showing up at my doorstep.

Tarisland Launch – June 21st

Tarisland, Tencent’s everybody-says-it-is-a-WoW-knockoff MMORPG title is set to go live on Windows, Android, and iOS on the second day of summer.

Coming soon and Free to Play

Tencent is promising all the things, diverse classes, challenging raids, a flexible talent system, excellent graphics, all in a free to play package with a cash shop that I am sure will have all the usual items in it.

Still, it is the first MMORPG from a big player to hit our market since maybe Lost Ark.

As with everything Tencent has a big post about joining in on the fun. We’ll see if I can find the time for it come launch day.

ICQ Shutting Down – June 26th

Children of the 90s… or maybe those of us who were young-ish adults of the 90s… hear me and weep. What might have been the first instant messenger platform I ever used, ICQ, is going away on June 26th!

ICQ Logo Evolution

This was one of those one-two punch bits of news where I was saddened to find that ICQ was going away, but first I was surprised it was even still around.

What to say? Way back in the day we used to use it to tell people to log in for a zone in TorilMUD. I kept the login going well into the 2000s with Trillian. Somewhere along the line I let it go, forgot the password, couldn’t remember my number, and basically moved on.

Still, it was quite a thing back in the day. I told somebody I had a 5 digit ICQ number… but it might have been a 6 digit number. This was like 25 years ago or more, right? I had it before I had a Yahoo account, and they sent me a 25 year anniversary notice last year. (I noted the 24th anniversary message they sent me, but decided that didn’t have to be an EVERY year thing.)

Anyway, that was all I had for June. Did I miss anything? I mean, at least anything there is a chance I might play? I am not really primed for things like the Elden Ring expansion of whatever is going on in FFXIV.

Friday Bullet Points from the EVE Online Extended Universe

Quote of the Day – Hilmar’s Ongoing Obsession

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We’ve been really releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes.

-Hilmar Petursson, VentureBeat Interview

This interview had to be over at VentureBeat because I don’t think any serious video game news site takes the idea of blockchain based video games seriously. But that is what VentureBeat is for, though even they have toned down the crypto puffery, having moved on to framing AI as the future of everything. That AI is little more than a scam relative to the promises being made is not a coincidence.

Just wake up already

Anyway, we knew that Hilmar was into the blockchain thing because he had been ostentatiously hobnobbing with the crypto bros and shoving NFTs down people’s throats at the Alliance Tournament, to the point that it created such a backlash that he had to promise that blockchain would not be part of EVE Online… for the foreseeable future at least. From a company that has a history of promises coming with unstated expiration dates, leaving the door open was ominous, but they have at least kept their word so far.

All of which is so much back story, but doesn’t really address the quote. And, on its own, it doesn’t seem like much of a quote to get me riled up enough to make a post. I mean, if I wanted wanted to get riled up I need go no further than the regular shitheel Mike Ybarra, who tried to inject himself into relevance again by declaring on Twitter that we should go easy on Microsoft Games/XBox head Phil Spencer after he killed more studios and laid off more staff because executives have feelings too.

Not to get too angry about this, but if you want to be the boss of a big organization that is going to close studios and lay people off, you better be up to the task of taking a bit of well warranted criticism because whatever in the hell else are you doing to earn that bloated compensation package. Because you don’t actually MAKE anything or do anything on a day to day basis but make high level decisions that other people will implement.

You want to be the boss? Then harden the fuck up. Certainly don’t be a whiny bitch like Mike Ybarra. Can we just put him in a ring with Mark Kern and have them battle over which “resting on extremely dubious laurels” contestant is the least relevant? I don’t even care who would win, I just want their ignorance to stop showing up in my timeline.

You think I’ve gone off on a tangent here, don’t you? Suddenly I’m all up about somebody who isn’t associated in any way with the quote at the top. But you’re wrong! It all ties together.

Because Hilmar is the head of CCP, so occupies that same role, being the captain who, if he isn’t actually steering the ship, is at least telling the helmsman the course to follow. And when Hilmar gets a bad idea stuck in his head, he won’t let it go.

Which brings us to Project Awakening, the cryto game that CCP is making, though at least they are spending Marc Andressen’s money to do it, as a16z is in for $40 million to make this blockchain fantasy real.

I have a whole rambling post about Project Awakening and its source and implications, the former being a Hilmar obsession, the latter being a financial disaster, but we’ll let history judge on that should it ship.

What I did NOT expect was that a past Hilmar obsession… at least what I thought was a “past” obsession… would make an appearance in Project Awakening. But there it is in that quote. Hilmar was really fascinated by the book Three-Body Problem.

Somewhere I have a quote from him about how that book really inspired him and set him on a course to what became the “chaos era” of New Eden. There is a whole tag dedicated to that and its effects if you click here and scroll down.

We got Drifters appearing and hitting player owned structures in null sec… mysteriously focusing on Delve at a time when we were burning down PanFam structures in Tribute… funny how that worked out… and then they were camping gates and then Hilmar wanted to stir the chaos era pot even further and initiated the null sec local blackout.

Local was delayed in null sec

That was a huge success… oh wait, I am holding the chart upside down… no, that led to the second lowest level of player logins in recent-ish memory.

Logins Crater with the Blackout Dip of 2019

The only bigger hit to player logins came with the industrial great leap forward when CCP absolutely wrecked the economy… once again, in the middle of a freaking war effectively ending by making capital ships too expensive to risk… leading to what I refer to as the Year of Disappointment, which was only broken when CCP relented a bit on the economy… though the mineral price index is still close to an all time high because their resource allocation program made certain minerals spawn only in low sec where miners are hunted relentlessly.

All of which you would think would be a lesson from which a company might learn.

But no, there is Hilmar up there referencing the Three-Body Problem again and, further on in the interview, talking about how the game takes place on a planet that is under the influence of three nearby black holes… something which he claims they are spending time modeling… which sounds to me like he is going whole hog on chaos again.

So if I wasn’t down enough on Project Awakening already for being blockchain based, which means it will, at a minimum, attract the type of people who like crypto due to the “get rich quick” allure of it, meaning even if it isn’t a scam, it will host scams before collapsing in on itself when it runs out of suckers, there is now the extra added level of Hilmar wanting to set things on fire right from the get-go.

There are currently zero crypto games that have been anything but brief successes before falling to the self-defeating logic of the idea that you can make money playing a video game over time.

But now the whole thing will be hamstrung by chaos.

Between that and EVE Vanguard, the fans of which have to keep saying “it’s only in alpha” as a defense of its lackluster showing so far, I wonder where CCP will be in five years. I hope they get the upcoming Equinox expansion right and don’t mess up EVE: Galaxy Conquest, the other title they have in development.