Brain Dump

Many thoughts have been swirling lately, so let me give you a brain dump.  Just for fun, I'll sort these by word-association.  These are in no particular order and are appearing just in the manner in which I begin typing them.

Behind:
Work sent me to the east coast this week for a series of meetings.  Productive and overall a good experience, but I really didn't have the time at home or at the office to be out of pocket that long.  Lugging the work laptop around, I didn't bring the gaming laptop and have been out of touch with most everything. A modern cell phone can do a lot, but only so much.  I got back to the house after 11pm on Thursday, was too wired from the trip home to sleep and was still awake at 1am.  Alarm clock went off at 5am and I did a full day at the office. Came home and crashed, then took Mrs. Durden for mexican at the local cantina since we hadn't really talked in almost a week.  There were a handful of things I should have done last night and I didn't do any of them.

As I type, I'm staring out the window at grass that's well beyond needing mowed.  So that's task 1 for today.

Discouraged:
Big Dumb Ride prep has again been interrupted.  When I signed up for the ride, I knew that I'd struggle to get the miles I needed in April and May.  The weather is unpredictable, and waffles between "super mega-nice" and "shitstorm rain."  I track all the miles I've ridden since 2013, and April is typically in my lowest mileage months, with some years recording a big fat zero.

Although I've hit some great high marks - longest unsupported ride, and a non-formal-event metric century (100km), I am not getting the less glamorous weekday rides in that I need to maintain and extend my base.  With the work trip this week, I'm behind on a thousand things at the house and the weather is again uncooperative - I may not ride at all this weekend.  The BDR event day is closing in and I'm now beginning to doubt my ability to hang on for the full Imperial Century (100 mile) goal.

Hopeful:
One bonus perk of the cold/windy/wet weather is that I might actually be able to undock this weekend and kill some Guristas or Sanshas.  It's been awhile....

Philosophical:
I've had a sequel post in my head for the previous "85%" bandwagoning, but will spare you the long dissertations and give a few thoughts with bullet points.  Bullet points are cool.

• No, I don't agree with everything in Neville's post.  But I do agree with the overall sentiment.
• I am not against Citadels.  I'm not personally interested in them, but I see the perks, and like the overall size/shape/flavor of the design.  For the past year or more, I've been pretty happy that CCP seemed to be balancing dev investments pretty well.  All corners of the community got something (sometimes big, sometimes small, but SOMETHING) in each patch.  
• My beef with the 2016 plan seems to be that CCP is banking on "trickle down economics" of null driving interactions in other areas of space.  And yah, they will.  But it's that feeling of being second class citizens that chafes.
• As a person pretty heavily invested in capship BPOs, I really do want to see capship Fleet warfare get fixed and come back to being en vogue.  But I wanted it alongside content directly focused at my preferred way to play.
• I am not upset with CCP Affinity.  I think she's done the PVE community a few favors over the past year.
• That being said, I stand behind my previous words about the lack of focus, clarity, and scope control from a project management perspective.  I'm not disappointed with any single hardworking dev; I'm disappointed with CCP as a whole for being unable to demonstrate reasonable management and having the balls to communicate directly with us.
• Is it the end of the world?  Bah, hardly.  I can still rain hot kinetic cruise missile death down upon my foes, save the damsel, and poke the occasional burner in the eye.  I've said before and I'll continue to say: EVE today is the most playable state we've ever enjoyed.  And that's pretty ok with me.

Aging:
Abavus quietly celebrated another birthday.  He was born just after midnight server time on May 10th, 2003.  That's a few days after the original launch.  In those early days, owning a battleship seemed like an impossible goal; having 1B isk in your wallet (let alone 20B) was a laughable thought.  I don't exactly how how I pictured spending my time in EVE, but at the time it probably involved a lot of Merlins and Kestrels.  Every time I think I've peaked in this game, I find another goal and another plateau to climb to.

Pukin' Dogs was actually born several months before EVE's launch, notionally in October of 2002 (though the exact day and even month are now fading with time).  We existed in EVE's beta7 but because of skills and cost didn't actually appear in EVE until 31 May 2003.  So, around Memorial Day in the US, I'll be hefting an icy cold beverage to the Dogs.

Back then, the notion of playing this silly space game in 2016 was absurd.  Perhaps just as absurd as playing the game in another 13 years in 2029.  But who knows?


And with that, it's time to go mow the lawn... fly safe!

I am the 85%

I've been trying to sum up my feelings on EVE lately.  After a generally surprisingly good EVE Vegas experience, some 'meh' things have happened.

• I was underwhelmed by fanfest, I have little use for citadels in their current incarnation, and while the capital ship changes are good follow-thru from Vegas, I was hoping for new and exciting things in 2016 beyond fixes for null.
• I've been largely disappointed by the non-announcement that PVE staff and devs had been redirected, or at best floundering.  Check the CSM minutes and read the Team Astro Sparkle entry (pg 32) and try to figure out wtf is going on with PVE.  If you can figure it out, you might want to explain it to CCP, because it appears they don't know either.  Best I can tell, "PVE" has been relabeled to "engagement" which is actually more about "holiday events."  It smells like a team with changing scope, poor management commitment, lack of clear goals, and no near-term deliverables.  In my day job, I call these "failed projects."
• The PVE roadmap that CCP Affinity talked about apparently never happened.  (Note, I remember CCP Affinity making a comment on Sugar's blog about providing a roadmap, but now I can't find it and the bitter in me makes me wonder if the promise were deleted or perhaps it was all a troll/hoax).

Lately, I have written pages and pages of draft blog posts that basically sound like "I'm Abavus Durden. I quit, but you can't have my stuff."  And then I delete them, because that's not the message.  I'm still here, I'm still a customer of CCP, but I'm not entirely sure where I'm going or what the future looks like for my part of the game.  So I've said nothing, waited patiently for clarity, and written more about bikes.

And then Neville Smitt comes and writes this post that almost entirely captures my current sentiment.  Go read and support if you're of a similar mindset.

Operation Frostline, Day 1

The Frostline patch hit yesterday, which means that Operation Frostline is now live on servers and grids are now crazy big (update your bookmarks, everyone).

Bottom line, Operation Frostline is a mild remake of the Halloween event; this time we're killing Serpentis at the random sites.

I happened across a Frostline site in highsec last night while going from Point A to B to tend to my industry system.  I was in my Sacrilege, not the best for dps, but certainly not the worst against frigates and cruisers, so decided to check it out.  I was in a busy highsec system and expected the site to get swarmed, but I was the first person on grid, and began destroying the Serpentis.

It works very similarly to the Halloween event -- you land on the beacon to a locked acceleration gate and some frigates.  Kill the frigates to unlock - from memory there are 4 waves.  Gate unlocks, go to the 2nd room.  Partway through the killing a Navy Apoc showed up, but I didn't relent in my killing spree and he was having trouble hitting the frigates with his large beams (not pulse, beams) and warped away just as I entered the 2nd room.

Second room has some structures and a mob of cruisers.  From memory there's 3 waves of cruisers and then a single battlecruiser that actually drops the loot.  My dual rep passive tank Sacri tanked this room at 95% or better the entire time.  On the 2nd wave, a Tengu arrived but didn't shoot anything, he simply waited for the end 'boss' to try to scrape the loot.

BC spawns, we both dps him down, but I got can rights to the loot and the Tengu chose not to flip the can.

For my trouble, I got the Male and Female Serpentis shirts and a can of Quafe.  I convo'd the Tengu and offered to give him the Female shirt (Aba being male and the Tengu char being female) but he declined.

From his initial response, I'm sure he expected me to yell at him or something, but I wasn't going to get upset about a shirt on the first day of the event.  He declined the offer, we chatted a bit, and we went our separate ways.

From the way the dev blog is written, I would expect the Frostline loot to improve as the event goes forward, so I'll figure out what ship I want to use for hunting these.

Happy Hunting everyone.

Through the Eyes of a Noob

It's been a long, long while since I helped a real life friend through his first evening in EVE, but I was able to last night.

One of my best friends surprised me and sought out the EVE client without any prodding from me, created an account and logged in.  I knew he was vaguely interested after my tales from EVE Vegas, but my surprise when he said he was getting the client was genuine.

He was almost through the character generation process when his internet died and he had to start over.  At that point he (jokingly) sent me a comment about having the hard part out of the way.  I replied with the infamous EVE Learning Curve chart, but I don't think it scared him much.

He rolled Gallente, and once he was ingame, I made my way to Cistuvaert to say hello.  He was part way through the first few tutorial steps, but undocked and met me at the gate.

"Ok, now what?" he asked.

Gah. I hadn't thought that far.  What do you do with a 20 minute old character sitting in his shiny noobship?  The player behind the keyboard is one of the smartest guys I know, but he's got no context for EVE, has no idea where anything is in the UI, and was barely able to undock and find me.

So I did two things.  I began to spam our convo channel with information, and got him into Sugar's public channel so he had help if I wasn't around.  Super high level instruction in terms of what EVE is and isn't; a conversation ensued about how I've chosen to play vs. how others play their particular game.  Topics included the market, system security status, gankers, the tutorial and SOE arc, and the fact that assets don't magically follow you through space (if you want it somewhere else, you gotta haul it).

Throughout this, I was answering questions.  Several times, things that are kneejerk muscle memory for me stumped him.  I'm effectively speaking multiplication and long division at him, and he is still at 3+3=6.  At one point we chatted for awhile before realizing he'd minimized his overview and therefore didn't see ANY of the buttons I was described.  This isn't a reflection on him (he's one of the smartest guys I know), or me (I'm pretty smart too, hah), or even the game (it's all there, really), but without being able to see his screen so I could point and grunt in the right direction, he was really stumped.

The second thing I did was get him in a Fleet and jumped to the system next door.  Basic activity of navigation.  We warped around a bit, and I got him to use autopilot to get home.  Back in Cist, a Serpentis Hideout appeared on scan, so I warped in to begin clearing it.  He came in and assisted, playing with combat, basic maneuvering, and targeting.  This went better, and he killed and looted a few pretty smoothly.

With the evil Serpentis vanquished, it was time for me to think about bed.  I felt guilty leaving him to his own devices and the boring ol' tutorial, but in many ways it'll be far better than I am at some of the nuances.

I don't know if he'll stay past the trial period.  I'm sure his next session will go more smoothly.  But it's certainly been interesting to see the game through his eyes.

Ahead We Grind

This post meanders a bit, but bare with me...

I have said before that one of the virtues that keeps me in EVE is the design philosophy of horizontal expansion.  Most of the time, new systems are added in parallel with existing ones.  Unlike games where there's a set of loot to earn or a lvlcap bump up another arbitrary 10 levels, EVE's content remains (more or less) balanced around the same basic combat and content engine.

This results in a stable economy and stable content (the capship bpos I bought in 2007 are still worth something and still useful, unlike the corresponding equipment my wow characters had in the same era). 

We've been talking a lot lately about new PVE content, new lvl4s, and gutting of old systems (incursions in particular).  And I am very much on board with that.

But its also struck me recently that it could also mean a phenomenal amount of change to parts of the game that have been untouched since the beginning.  (In fact, the code being so old and insupportable is part of what's driving the sweeping changes).  And it will be a unique day in EVE when it happens... Very rarely do we see the outright scrapping of an entire system.

I struggle to imagine a day when Aba couldn't login to silence the informant in the way he's known since 2004 or so.  The mission system, for all its warts and evils has been so fundamental a force for me in EVE that its absence will be noticed and perhaps even missed.

There will be a system to replace it, no doubt. CCP has said as much, and the improvements are much needed. But to make an analogy, we live on 10 acres in a 3200 sqft home today that is better in every way to the 1000 sqft starter home we came from.  But that doesn't mean I don't look back fondly at the old place, or sometimes think enviously of the young couple living there now, enjoying its simplicity.

And so ahead we grind, seeking our loyalty points and standings and salvage from a system that is in dire need of replacement.  May that patch day come soon, and may we appreciate the new system for the opportunity it presents and the significance of its existence considering the horizontal expansion philosophy of EVE.

New Player Acceleration

There's been a lot of stink about a particular dev blog. Before Vegas there was a lot of words written about it.  At Vegas there were eye rolls and groans from the crowd when it was brought up by CCP.

I had written the backbone of this post before going to Vegas, but got caught up with real life schtuff before I could finalize it.  Now that I'm back and have crashed on the couch after our return trip, I'll see if I can get an answer assembled.

Bottom line up front:  For the record, I don't like the idea of trading skill points.  Philosophically, I dislike things inserted into the game that devalue my time investment.  We talk about the economy having low inflation as being a good thing; I don't know why adding a feature that is effectively "skillpoint devaluation" could be argued as positive.  

Said another way:  I don't like the notion of giving the maximum benefit to the last guy to show up to the party.  

Moreover, I'm fearful that its a thought experiment gone wrong, that it won't actually solve the root cause to the retention problem.

Best I can tell, the logic goes like this: new player tries eve. New player trains a bit, skills complete fast, and things are fine.  Then, new player sees the (long) skill queue required to fly the "perfect skills" meta fit of the week, new player leaves in frustration.  Therefore long skill queues are bad and we should accelerate new players into competitive endgame capability.

It's that last logic leap that I take issue with.  That we should take a new player and accelerate them to catch everyone else.  So, I put forward two ideas:

1. Character progression and empire building is a core foundation of EVE; short circuiting that process is too high a price to pay.
2. There are other means to achieve the same retention goals.

To be fair, the word 'retention' doesn't actually appear in the Dev Blog in question.  That's me (and I guess the community) reading between the lines.  

But what to do with newer players as an MMO title ages is not a problem unique to EVE.  WoW has suffered from it, and sometimes dealt with it less than gracefully.  GW2 took great strides in its content to try to eliminate the gaps between maxlvl and lowlvl players where it could in its basic design.  Yes, comparing these games to EVE is apples and oranges in many respects, but the core problem is the same.

The approach I prefer is NOT to accelerate everyone to towards endgame.  Let character progression happen as intended.  Instead, I'd rather see attempts be made to pull endgame (however you define it) content to the left rather than pushing noobs to the right.  

This is kind of a subtle thing, so bear with me.  I want characters to grow and gain capability in the same way that they do today - but I also want the game to be more engaging and unfold in ways that newer players can tangibly participate and compete in.  Said another way:  give players ways to tackle content without pushing them to run missions and "level up and get ready" for whatever endgame they'd prefer to be playing.  See previous post about dynamic content and automatic difficulty scaling (and hopefully soon a Dev Blog regarding the same kind of content coming to an EVE near you) for examples of the type of Content the game could and should have.

Secondly, I'd rather see CCP spending some time looking at the social structures of the game and finding ways to support them.  Why do corps fail?  Why do people run content solo?  EVE has some amazingly engaged and active corps, but the successful few are the exception.  When I ran my own poll here, over half of responders said they are effectively in a 1-man corp.  In a massively-multi-player game.  Think about that.

If this change goes through, is it the end of the game?  No, probably not.  It's probably another feature I'll ignore and go about my normal business.  Some will take advantage of the feature, many will not. Maybe it'll be something I'll yammer at Dire about during breaks at EVE Vegas 2025 ... "remember before you could buy skill points??"  

And maybe that's ok.  But if that comes to pass, it might mean that CCP didn't actually solve anything, and introduced another feature (i.e. invested money) on the scrapheap of things that were supposed to ensure player retention, but didn't.  And until we can talk about "the Content problem" in past tense, I don't think we can talk about "the retention problem" either.  First things first.

What I Want from High Sec

It's been an interesting week; I've been meaning to assemble this post but haven't taken the time to really organize my thoughts.

Sugar kicked over an anthill in this post.  The comments started to balloon, and while I expected everyone to trot out the very tired risk/reward hate, on the whole the conversation was pretty constructive.  I chatted with her in game a bit and got out some semi-coherent thoughts.  But the question is still gnawing at me, so I'll take a stab at answering it here.

Sugar asks:  "What about high sec? When will CCP pay attention to high sec and those that cannot spend their time in dangerous space?  This is somewhat how the day started, sparked by a question from an anonymous poster."

My first, kneejerk reaction before I even read her post was to mentally shake my first at the sky and say "What do I want for High?krikey, stop treating high sec differently than other space!"

From ancient times called 2003 and forward, Players (and to a lesser extent CCP) have reinforced the attitude that highsec is for nubs, and the "real" endgame is in 0.0 (the "0.0" being the term many of us used in beta and after).  This is the notion that players (and corporations) should use high only as a holding pen until players are "ready" for the "harder" areas of the game.

As time went on, we (CCP and the playerbase both) differentiated further and created the terms high/low/null/nullsov/wh to describe the 5 basic areas of the game.  Certain parts of the game gained favor in terms of development time and game infrastructure, often at the cost of other areas of the game.  Carrots were added to lure people out of high, but yet the center of the star cluster remained populated.

These definitions/separations perhaps help us have constructive dialog, but they also serve as a mental barrier.  There's an invisible dotted line around the map segregating High from Low.  When you enter low for the first time, the game even has a clickthru warning that basically says: "Abandon all hope; here there be monsters."

Fast forward a decade, and today we have CSM candidates representing various blocks of the game's community, and forum personalities that gain influence by shredding players who prefer certain types of play.

Let's stop and think about all this for a second.  EVE is a fairly small niche game and I wonder if this divisiveness is entirely healthy.   Predicable, I guess, but probably not healthy.

CCP could, I think, set that aside and just generate good PVE content.  The vast majority of PVE is probably going to be done of course in High, but the kinds of things I'd advocate (scaling, dynamic, group and solo PVE) should be deployed across all zones.  High should not be some sort of playground set aside for PVE only activities, and I'd not advocate dev time into "high only" activities.  I wouldn't put more bricks in that Berlin Wall between 0.5 and 0.4 space.

So, what I want for the game (not just Highsec) is more Content.  Big 'C.'

With that rant out of the way, here's my wish list:

• More synergy between contents. Right now if I go blitzing explore points, I have a cruiser for that.  If I run lvl4s, I have a Battleship for that.  What if I undocked, went 2 jumps away to Silence the Informant, and then was still in a reasonable fit to drop in on a couple of exploration spots on my way back?  With align and lock times of the big ships, this isn't something I even think about doing today.  With better content synergy, I could (in theory) react more to opportunities in my environment rather than just be a drone buzzing to the next mission pocket and ignoring everything around me.
• More layers of content.  If the existing lvl4 content is that difficult to change, I'd advocate leaving it and expanding it both vertically and horizontally.  Horiztonal: keep the burners coming; bring on the lvl3 burners and battleship anomic agents.  Layer vertically into more difficult content, and Dynamic schtuff.
• Dynamic Content.  By that I mean content that scales in difficulty based on the number and type of players present.
• Dynamic Events.  By this I mean bad guys that spawn and go on a rampage allowing the local citizens to react.  Something much smaller scale than Incursions.  And in line with the Synergy comment above, the balance point should be fits that mission runners would realistically use, so that if I undock and see shenanigans afoot, I can just jump in.
• Better support for Fleets in PVE content.  Scaling bounties, payout bonuses for using smaller ships or more Fleet members, etc.  Give me a reason to run missions as a group.  I saw comments in Sugar's thread like "well, they're PVE'ers so they're going to be scattered all over the map."  Why is that something we accept as being true?
• Incidental Grouping.  I put this in the comments to Sugar's original post, but I'll repeat for completeness.  Right now in PVE content, people that wander into your pocket are seen as poachers or killstealers.  Loot and Bounties aren't split and aren't shared; in fact the idea of can flipping has its own art form.  Bottom line, when someone showes up near me, I have to assume that they are a competitor or griefer there to steal my resources (isk, whatever).  Barring any sort of pvp-type retaliation, I can escalate against them and try to out-blitz them or I can leave.  This is an early 2000's mentality.  Guild Wars 2 does a wonderful job of scaling content for difficulty and then providing payouts based on your own contribution.  When more people show up, they can certainly troll you or try to awox you, but most of the time folks just work together (surprising, I know) to get the job done.
• Flavor by Region.  EVE is a vast star cluster with a disappointingly low amount of variability  in content from system to system.  More attention to locality and local lore in and around a particular region or constellation would be welcome.  So, for example, if CCP is designing dynamic events, I'd rather that there be several permutations and certain mini-bosses be locked into a specific area of the game.  I am not a lore nerd, but this kind of detail is important to building nostalgia.  Thinking of various events in WoW, GW2, D3, or other games, I know exactly where people are at when they talk about a certain fight; nostalgia can be a very powerful motivator to keeping going in a game.

There, I guess that wraps up the post after a few aborted attempts. Better late than never, I guess.

This time next week, I'll be starting to get things around for EVE Vegas.  

Disenfranchising Core Playerbase ... On Purpose

Happened across this article about the Games Workshop AGM annual general meeting.  The whole thing is a good quick read, but will quote a few snippets here.

Background:  GW is a company name you may not recognize, but you probably recognize their primary product lines:  Warhammer and Warhammer 40k.  They're a niche tabletop miniatures company, with licenses for their IP across a wide range of tie in products (including a slew of PC games over the years).

As I've been reading more about the tabletop scene, I've noticed a large amount of angst with GW, and quite a few defectors who now swear to never buy their products again (in favor of most notably Warmachine, but honestly the tabletop market is simply exploding with neat games thanks to Kickstarter and the power of online internet shopping).  GW is the grand-daddy of these upstarts, but from my (very limited) exposure at GenCon and random local game stores, it appears that the upstarts are eating GW's lunch these days.

Part of this is an intentional strategy on the part of GW Management.  GW has been moving itself away from being a "tabletop game" company and towards a "hobby/model kit" company.   In other words - they view their primary audience as guys who assemble and paint but actually don't PLAY the games.  This comes at a time when gamers are pushing their local stores to offer more dedicated game nights but are being turned away because there's no time in the schedule to squeeze in more titles and no room for more tables.

This move isn't being unnoticed by the fan base, who a) actually enjoyed playing the games and b) are generally pissed off about being marginalized after supporting GW over the past couple of decades.

Here's the first quote:

I’ve got bad news for disenchanted gamers complaining on the Internet. The company’s attitude towards customers is as clinical as its attitude towards staff. If you don’t like what it’s selling. You’re not a customer. The company believes only a fraction of the population are potential hobbyists, and it’s not interested in the others. 

.... 

 When another shareholder asks if the company would sell games with pre-painted easy to assemble miniatures like the popular Star Wars themed X-Wing game, there’s a collective growl from the Games Workshop people. It wouldn’t be a hobby business then, it would be a toy company.

It's interesting, but not unexpected, that X-Wing came up in conversation.  Fantasy Flight's X-Wing tabletop game, in particular, appears to be simply printing money.  Expansions sell out before reprints can be shipped from China.  X-Wing is highly accessible to new gamers because, in part, the minis come pre-painted.  Clumsy guys like me can simply buy the ships and play. It's apparent that GW is dismissing this as "casual play" (in EVE terms), but that over-simplification saddens me.  X-wing has it's flaws, no doubt, but at the Club and National level is a nuanced game of strategy and ability to gauge an opponent. As my 4hr game at GenCon shows - it can scale from 3-4 ships to dozens for that 'epic' all-day gaming session that the serious guys love.  (And if X-Wing is too ezmode, its more complicated brother Armada is the X-Wing ruleset on crack.)

In response, GW is waiving their hands saying "Pah, noobs" and retreating from a tabletop market that is thriving.  This is truly puzzling ... I'm not saying that they should clone X-Wing, but simply dismissing the forces at work that is making X-Wing successful instead of trying to step in and grab market share when (not if, WHEN) X-Wing eventually cools down might be a better strategy...

I leave the Games Workshop fortress confident of one thing. Managment have set a course and they will not be deviated.  ... 

Niche businesses are often very profitable and the hard decisions they take is what makes them different, but they’re also vulnerable if unforeseen events reduce the attractiveness of the niche. ...

All of this reminds me of a certain small Icelandic video game company just before there were riots in Jita.  Niche game with a bunch of hard-headed leaders all hyping and reinforcing their own version of reality.  Sound familiar?

I hope it goes better for GW.

Despite the Wind

I was out on the bike this morning for a good long ride and as the miles ticked by, my mind turned to EVE.  Around mile 27, I had a fully fleshed out post that just sort of erupted into my brain faster than I could remember it.

The words I'll write here will in no way be as elegant or as insightful as the words in my head during that Gatorade fueled haze, but I'll try to reconstruct them.

As a biker, there are two constants in life:  hills and wind.  Hills you can predict and plan for (or plan around).  But wind is everywhere, on every route, and can't be avoided.  Wind is an ever present adversary that changes direction, gets stronger when you don't want it to, lulls you with false compassion and then grinds you into dust.  You'd can try to minimize it's impact on your ride, or ride with the wind and take advantage of the extra boost ... but it will eventually turn on you and make you pay for being clever.

Wind is greatly affected by the local geography.  The way it licks around a stand of trees, or the way it howls through a river valley, or pushes across a flat corn field are nuances few people truly understand.

Wind is relentless, always present, and inescapable in a suffocating sort of way.  It can be maddening if you let it get to you; otherwise it's best just to accept wind as a tax that must be paid on every ride.


The parallel to EVE is that our 'community' can be a lot like the wind on a long bike ride.  There are pockets of civility, but after years of slogging through it, eventually you'll hit your limit.  Being dispassionate enough about your gaming time to maintain a positive disposition through the onslaught of gankers, scammers, and other chuckleheads wears at me like the wind.  I can hear the howl of the wind in the constant chaos surrounding the ongoing patches - fozziesov, missile changes, WH spawn rate, people hating on Incursions, people hating on missioners.  Relentless, inescapable, and suffocating.

It makes me weary to my core.

There's no singular event that is causing me to write this.  And this isn't a hatemail aimed at the gankers and scammers, or CCP's desire to set up the game mechanics the way they have.  I'm no stranger to burnout, and this isn't that either.  But the tax I pay dealing with the negative experiences ingame and the background droning of complaining and conjecture adds up over time.  I just feel tired.

And so, yesterday, I had almost the entire day to waste on the PC.  I hovered over the EVE icon, hesitated, and then did something else.  I was logged in just now, finished what I needed, and bolted for the logout.  I'll do something different today too.

I enjoy biking and expect to continue, despite the wind.
I enjoy EVE and expect to continue, despite the whine.


What's Playing:  The Black Keys, Attack & Release, I Got Mine

Quality of Life for the Mission UI

I've been running lvl4's lately, enjoying the added variety of BC-sized Burners, Team Burners, Single Frigate Burners, and of course... Silence the Informant.

(Side note:  So far I'm still running about a 5:1 burner to vanilla ratio following the Carnyx patch but I really don't have all that much data).

Paying attention to LP payout, burner rates, and how often Buzz Kill seems to spawn (grrr, that mission), it reminded me that I wanted to do a post about the mission log and some Quality of Life UI improvements.

So here are three upgrades that I'd like to see....

Dog's Breath: Year 1 in Review

Friends, it has been a year already.

This is the post where I'm supposed to pretend I'm standing in front of a podium, thanking the Academy, and my mom, etc. etc..  I'll avoid all that, if I can.

I did want to pause and at least recognize the date, and thank all y'all for stopping in and reading my ramblings.

I'm a firm believer that in order to see where you're going, sometimes you have to look behind you and see where you've been.  It's the sum total of the parts of the journey that makes us who we are, looking at the end state of where we ended up only tells part of the story.

Better, Best, Bestest

First - blatent plug - the SURVEY is still active and will be for another day or three.  Responses have been good so far, and fairly interesting.  I do intend to share the results (figured out that I can export it from the Free version of the survey tool).  Please participate if you haven't already.

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Have seen a few conversations lately where the word BEST has been thrown around.  I see it, and I generally roll my eyes.

"Better is the Enemy of Good Enough" was a favorite quote of one of my early mentors.  It really aggravated me when he said it, but now that I'm older I find myself echoing him.

We players sometimes get trapped into the mindset of "X is better than Y when I'm doing Z."  The best hauler.  The best ship hull.  The best fit.  The best weapon type.  I could go on.  We're nerds, so we argue and fight and debate and at the end of it, there's no great insight, just a lot of scrolling text in a chat channel.

But somewhere, as a nerd culture, we transition from a whole slew of potential solutions into a mode where "X is the only acceptable way to do Z."  From there, it's a short trip to ridiculing anything other than X, as in "omg ur duing it rong, dude."

How Much is Enough

Just one more isk.

In bicycling culture, it's called the "N+1 Problem."  How many race bikes do you need?  Just one more.

As I've been gathering up my assets list, a thought resurfaced that I'd been trying to ignore:  EVE is no longer (only) about the isk for me.

I know! Heresy.

Reaching Out

I've had this post in my drafts folder for a couple months now.  I've been reluctant to publish it because doing so somewhat commits me to executing a change, and change is scary.

But wtf, let's pull the trigger.

I've maybe said before that I largely play the game from the sidelines.  I'm not a big name in null politics, I am not a FW hero burning up the killboards.  I'm fairly anonymous.  Time is limited, and I play the game on my own terms, even if some nights that means I sit in station and spin my ship while I chat a bit.

But, one of the things that I honestly struggle with is my empty Corp channel.

As I've said before:  I'm a mostly solo player.  By "mostly solo" I probably mean 99.9% solo.  So to be fair, "fiercely independent" is perhaps a better description.  But that doesn't mean that the corp channel doesn't feel a little empty.

There's an easy solution:  find a new corp.  Awhile back I posted to the blog banter with the advice: get involved.  I should maybe take my own advice.

To be honest, that scares the crap out of me.

Life on the Test Server

Over the past few weeks, this blog has been innundated with rapid fire updates on all things Burners.  I tried my best to keep a live feed rolling of things I was seeing on SISI as the new content was revealed and tested.

But I have a confession to make ... in general I'm not much of a test server kind of guy.  New content only gets added so often; I'd rather experience it on the live server, and savor it, and make it last.

One thing that helped kill my WoW experience was all the datamining that goes on.  New content is sliced and diced, deconstructed, debated ad nauseam.  By the time the content goes live, it's "old news" and the data miners are on to the next.

The term "spoilers" is overused, but it applies here, and is still a somewhat inadequate descriptor.  New content to me is like an expensive steak dinner - I want to sit down in my fancy duds, order a glass of wine, get an appetizer, and take the time to make a memorable experience of it all.  The entire process of consumption is part of the enjoyment.  The temptation is to snort down the new content like it's a trip through the Hardee's drive through for a greasy burger and overcooked fries.

And then there's the really annoying habit of devs to change stuff as soon as you get it figured out.  Test servers are a volatile place; while you're trying to get a sense of how to tackle the new bad guys, the bad guys are also learning how to tackle you.  That means a lot of starting over from scratch, resets, wipes, and the need to question every result (good or bad) with the question "okay, what just happened, and was X the same as yesterday?"

And for those two reasons, I generally don't beta test games that I'm actively playing.

In the case of the BC burner content, I felt a sense of responsibility to get in and understand the new challenges so that I can help all y'all complete the missions.  I also felt like I could help CCP flesh out the content and maybe therefore get better content down the road.  I don't fancy myself an expert, but I do feel like one of the champions of CCP investment in the lvl4 system - I'd whined and ranted about this stuff for awhile, the least I could do was show up and test it.

So, I did the testing on my own terms, threw away a lot of badly fit hulls, and something surprising happened - I had a good time.

The sense of duty became a sense of fun.  How unexpected.

Tweaking fits real time (for free) while sitting in a station is far better than using Pyfa.  Jumping into the pocket to test the results real time instead of theorycrafting was pretty powerful.  I tried ships I'd never flown, and fits I'd only read about, and came away (I think) smarter about EVE and mid-sized ships. And the quick turnaround from the first appearance on SISI to Mosaic launch meant that I'm not tired of the new content before it goes live.

Anyway, I doubt I'll become a permanent resident of SISI, but it's been fun to visit there the past few weeks.  Now it's time to make some isk.

Bug Hunting - Seeking the Seekers III

Last night I was finishing up an AE4 in the same system with the Jove Observation Post and decided to see if the CS were still home.  I was in the Golem, and I wanted to try the bigger ship against them.  I also wanted to salvage a few and see what kinds of crazy things they were made from.

Fight was pretty standard, I could still have used a web or two as the CS orbit at over 1km/s.  Against my volleys of cruise missiles, they were a little tougher to take down than a lvl4 NPC HAC (think: ~220k+ bounty).  They were hitting me for pretty good damage (100 to 200 per volley, each) but again, shields dropped at about the same rate as full pocket aggro in a good lvl4.  I didn't have to bastion and at no time was I in any great danger.  I did align to a gate in the event something surprising happened, but otherwise things went smoothly.

I ended up killing 3 CS.  They seemed to respawn after a short delay so I almost always had a full squad on me.  Got two more Antikythera Element.  Salvage yielded nothing exotic; all three had positive salvage results but all went into my existing pile of salvage mats from the AE4.

It's been fun to roam around and do things with content and not knowing with certainty what the result was going to be.  Putzing around in the system taunting the CS, in many ways, reminded me of my very earliest days in EVE when we still explored each moon, each belt, and each planet looking for untold fortunes.

Bug Hunting - Seeking the Seekers II

Back with another post.

Upon my return from chores, the Sacri and I found CS pretty quickly back at the Jove Outpost.  There were 7 total of them, and I picked a fight.

The Sacri soaked damage like a champ.  I killed a total of 7 CS and the group began to respawn while I was fighting (it seemed to be a group of 2 and another group of 5).  Damage for the group seemed to be about like an easier grade level 4 pocket.  Damage dealing with the PVE fit was slow but steady.  I'd likely have done better with a web, but I grabbed what I had handy.

After the 7th CS died, I was getting a little bored and decided to see how the new AI worked.  So I warped to an Ice Anom pocket (and probably annoyed the ice miner locals).  Five of the 7 CS followed me, reasonably quickly, and we had another fight.  After killing the 8th CS, I warped to a gate and it took a little longer, but the CS followed.  Warped to a belt and they followed.  Warped back to the gate, they eventually followed.  Unlike our initial encounter, the bugs were now aggressive - I was apparently now on their KOS list.  :)

I killed a 9th CS and switched systems.

As I type, I'm orbiting my home station to see if they'll track me down.

For my trouble, I got zero bounties, but did loot 4x Antikythera Element (seemed pretty consistent every-other wreck for about 50% drop rate).  I didn't salvage, though next time I'll install a salvager.

For now I'll put the strange materials in my hanger and hope the mystery compound doesn't kill The Damsel or my posse of Exotic Dancers.

(minutes pass)...  Has now been almost 20 minutes, I guess the bugs got bored too.  Time to dock up and go put shoes on so I can get some Fajitas!

Bug Hunting - Seeking the Seekers

It's time to go bug hunting.  Each patch seems to be adding more layers to the Seeker/Drifter lore.  I'd kind of like to get in on the ground floor of such changes, and looking back at the past few weeks I'm a little disappointed with myself that I didn't tackle this sooner.

It's time to kill some Seekers.

And no, not that Seeker.  I'm talking about Circadian Seekers.

Like any good internet nerd, I first googled for fits of what other folks are using to hunt the bugs.  Google failed me - results were basically just a repeat of the in-game news and general griping about how CS didn't drop loot.

I did find this page that gave some stats, but have no idea if it's accurate or not.  If true, the damage from CS aren't that bad.  I was warned that CS have an 11km orbit and like to fly at about 1km/s.  So I either need something with good web range or something quick.  And I really had no idea how much damage the bugs would put out, so I really wasn't wanting to risk one of my front line ships just for dorking around.

So, it was time to fit a ship with the full intention of not coming home.  What to pick?

Round 1 - Caracal.  Why?  I wanted something Tech1 for cost, and I haven't flown this hull in ages.  I went with a passive tank, HAM setup.  Why?  I haven't flown HAMs in forever either.

I found a Jove Observation post with 4x CS present.  Approached my first target, applied web, and started the fight.  I killed one CS but then had to abort.  Damage wasn't high but the passive tank wasn't holding nearly well enough to stick around.  The dead CS appeared to instantly respawn, and I got no loot.

No webs, nos, or warp disruption, so I went to get my trusty Sacri before the CS disappeared.  It was only one jump away and I went as quick as I could.

Alas, when I returned, they were gone.  I warped around a bit, checked dscan, but couldn't locate them.  I had chores to do, so this chapter ends in a draw.

Things I learned:
1. Bugs can be killed.
2. Damage isn't horribad, apparently compared to the Drifter Doomsday.

Flashbacks

As we get close to the CSMX election results announcement (and FanFest), I thought I'd put some text down about what kinds of things I'd like to see in the PVE-realm over the next many months.

When I got started, there were really 2 posts that I wanted to get written and published.

While sitting on the airport this week, I started thinking about what I'd change in PVE if I could just change ONE thing. This led in a few tangential ideas, which I'll hopefully be posting over the next few days.

But as a stepping stone, I wanted to rehash a couple ideas from these original posts.  Burners are very VERY similar to my Expert Missions proposal, but don't line up in a couple of important ways.

1. Manifesto
2. Expert Missions

I'd had these sentiments bottled up in my head for awhile, and I began this blog with full intent of working the ideas out into something presentable.  So I wrote, put them out there, and felt better.

And then a funny thing happened:  Burners.  At the point I started this blog to ramble about PVE, our friends at CCP were already well on their way to implement some frigate PVE, and a few short weeks after I set up shop here the content was being released.  Timing, as they say, is everything.

So queue up the flashback sequence....

Hooray for Daylight Savings

It's Daylight Savings clock changing day here in the U.S.  No idea if it's a worldwide clock changing day or not, but I got up, walked to my cell phone and realized I'd lost an hour.  Such a silly tradition.

A few things:
- There are a few days left to vote for CSMX if you somehow haven't.  Most of you have probably already run to the polls and done your thing.  If not, this link will take you there.

- I'm reading the Sov dev blogs again.  I'm not a Sov guy, so I'm keeping my opinions to myself.  It's going to be interesting to watch, at least from a game-philosophy-standpoint how things shake down.

- Mrs. Durden humored me and played a pretty good game of X-Wing miniatures (tabletop) on Friday night.  It's not her thing, but she'll play me once a week or so just to get me to shut up.  At the moment I'm testing a tournament list (squad roster) and trying to practice my maneuvering before I go to the local game store for nerd fun.  I'm proud to say that my wife kicks my ass most of the time; my win ratio is less than 50% at the moment.

The weather finally broke, so I've got stuff to do outside.  Enjoy your 23 hour day!