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 In fact, it was lacking in many respects, often being out of date or incomplete on many fronts.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And, one of the charms of EVElopedia is its wealth of somewhat outdated information.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.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 