The Allure of the Damsel

THE ALLURE OF THE DAMSEL

by

Abavus Durden

An entry in the YC117 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest

Category:  Other Things Just Make You Swear and Curse

Edit:  My submission was selected for FIRST PRIZE!

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[MEANWHILE... at a secret enemy hideout....]

Zor strode triumphantly into the conference room, throwing both doors wide and not breaking stride as he entered.  He loved making an entrance and he knew he'd be silhouetted against the bright background, ominous and intrusive.  Those assembled stifled their conversations mid-syllable and turned their heads at him.  They blinked briefly, and then the doors behind him slid closed and the room returned to its normal dim.

He soaked in the moment, standing motionless at the head of the table, eyes half closed and chin down.  He took a deep breath through his nose.

Finally, he looked around at his assembled crew, acknowledging a few with a nod before beginning.  He was in his elder statesman mode, genuine and approachable. A salesman.  "Gentlemen, I have a mission for us," he said with a smile.  "Good money, and acceptable risk."

"Good," said Kruul, interrupting.  "Have you seen the price of PLEX?  If things get much worse, I'm going to have to go run incursions."  Kruul bounced back in his chair and laughed at his own joke, while a few others snorted.

"Kruul, you're so poor," said Elena Gazky, "the guys in Jita actually WILL double your isk."  Elena winked at Zor while the others cackled with laughter.

"Hey, it's tough for a pirate to live off of insurance money," Kruul countered lamely.

Just like that, Zor's moment had ended.  Those around the table took Kruul's bait and the room descended into banter.  A half dozen side conversations erupted.  Elena got up from her chair to fetch a cup of coffee from the dispenser along the wall.  Schmidt wadded up a piece of paper and threw it playfully at Dread Pirate Scarlet.  She deflected it, then flipped him the bird.  A Seven Deathguard was pantomiming two ships dogfighting with  his hands to the Seven Thug next to him.

But Zor was patience.  Minutes passed, but Zor remained standing at the head of the table, rolling his eyes at the ceiling.  Amatuers, I am working with friggin' amateurs, he thought.  He grabbed the bridge of his nose, attempting to ward off the headache that was brewing and then slowly raised his other hand for silence.

Anire Scarlet noticed first.  "Sorry Zor.  What's the job?" she asked.

"Settle down, everyone," Zor said .  "C'mon, put the chair down Oluf.  Seriously. Sit down."

Scarlet persisted, "What's the job?"

Zor sighed.  He had practiced the speech, and this was NOT how this was supposed to go. He'd need to win over the group.  Anire Scarlet would be the strongest opposition and might bolt solo, hoping to draw the others away. He'd need to tackle her first.  "Now Scarlet, look, before you start..."  The room grew quiet.

"Don't tell me.  It's a snatch and grab, then a ransom," she said. The room groaned.  "I simply don't understand the allure of the damsel."

"Scarlet, it's not that simple.  This intel is solid." Zor said.

"Gah, you're not denying it.  Which damsel is it this time?  How many times have we run this scam, and how many times has it paid out?"

Zor snorted, "Ok, fine.  I'll say it.  It's a snatch and grab, then a ransom.  It's respectable bad guy work, and a solid gig.  It works once, and we're all made."

Kruul turned to face Zor squarely, looking surly.  "With respect boss ... No, Serously, no. Here's what happens.  We get the girl, take her to wait for a ransom, and make her scrub some dishes at the pleasure hub.  Half a minute later, there will be some chucklehead in a Caldari Navy Raven knocking on our door, and he'll blow our crap up."

Zor shrugged, deciding to let this play out, "Well, I suppose I understand how you can feel that way.  But you're jumping to conclusions. Let me back up and tell you the whole plan."

"Go on then," Kruul said.

Zor chewed his lip for a minute, then said, "Ok, it'll go like this.  We have a brief window where we will have access to the daughter of a senior executive within Joint Harvesting...."

Kioran Jeraulek elbowed Yarl Uzbeki and said under his breath,  "JOINT Harvesting.  Always cracks me up.  And gives me the munchies."

"They have the best stuff," Yarl agreed.

"Gentlemen, please," Zor said.  "... a daughter of a senior executive.  We grab her..."

"... and take her to the Pleasure Hub." Kruul completed slapping the table in anger.  "Krikey, Zor. At least try a little."

"It will work this time," Zor insisted, shrugging.

"How are you getting around the door?" Schmidt asked.

"What door?"

"WHAT door??" Schmidt fumed. "You know what door... we dock up at the station, you get shoved in your captain's quarters, and I in mine, Kruul's in his.  To link up, we have to get past that damned door that's always locked to get out into the station hallways."

"Oh, that door," said Zor.

Schmidt responded only by batting his eyelashes.

"Don't worry about the door," said Zor.  "We'll hack our way in."

The room groaned again. Oluf said, "Gawd Zor, I hate that mini-game. I always get my ass blown up."

Zor smiled, "Then don't suck."

"Frikkin' hacking.  Frikkin' Incarna," muttered Schmidt.

Zor was suddenly very serious.  "Schmidt. Don't utter that word around me. Ever."

"What? Incarna?"

"That's twice. I beg you to stop," pleaded Zor.  Schmidt sat back in his chair, puzzled.

Elena explained quietly, "Dude. Everyone knows... it's like Beetlejuice.  Say the I-word 3 times and 500 forum warriors show up and troll your thread. Pipe down, we don't need that kind of visibility."

"Oh, sorry.  I thought people were finally over it.  That was like, years ago."

"You'd think ... but no."  Elana looked up "Zor, I have a dumb question.  Why not get one of those Anomic Taloses to cover our six for this op?  Or that anomic Guristas Worm that has been working these systems?"

"They're dead. Word is, Sisters of Eve put out a hit and that guy from Dog's Breath dropped them."

"Poor bastards."  There was a quiet pause for fallen comrades.

Zor continued,  "Ok, so to review.  We grab the young lady, retreat to Kruul's Pleasure Hub and contact Joint Harvesting ... stop giggling Kioran ... and collect the ransom.  Any questions?"

Kruul raised his hand, "Can I fly the raven this time?"

"No."

"No? Come on."

"No. Standard doctrine applies.  You provide close support in your your cruiser and signal the rest of the fleet if there's trouble."

"You just like flying the raven, orbiting out there."  He pantomimed, "Look at me, I'm Zor. I'm orbiting you and I'm immune to target painters."

"Careful, Mr. Kruul.  Or you might find yourself waking up in a clone bay," said Zor with a grin.  Kruul responded with a chuckle and a waive of his hand.  He'd won Kruul back.

Scarlet jumped up, "Look guys. Respectfully, I'm out.  I have to go deal with some Pithum.  I've got a bounty on my head and an implant to deliver.  Wish me luck."

"Fine Scarlet," Zor said unsurprised. "We'll get you in on the next one.  Fly safe."

"Always do," Scarlet said as she was heading to the door.

"What about the rest of you?" Zor asked.

Kruul looked around the room, eyeing each of his compatriots.  Finally, he looked at Zor and said "We're in.  When do we start?"

"X up for fleet, we undock in ten minutes."

Blizzcon Day 2

Sitting at the airport waiting for our flight back to cold dark November reality (as I type it is 28 deg F back home), trying to wrap my thoughts and feelings around what we just experienced.

I am running on 3-4 hrs of sleep and the Starbucks is only marginally helping so don't expect any long winded dissertations just yet.

I will say that I am leaving happy. WoW's evolution is swinging back to my preferred play style, with more emphasis on real world content and questing instead of instances. Things that I said wow needed years ago are now being implemented. It's not all love and hugs for wow, but I feel vindicated in many ways.

The past 4 days have been so full and so busy that I feel like we've been gone for two weeks instead of a few days.  We turned in the rental car this morning and it hit me that our arrival at LAX on Wednesday feels so very long ago.

I did want to correct something from yesterday (or whenever).  Our last trip to Blizzcon was in 2008 and according to Wikipedia had 15,000 attendees.  More recent years, and presumably 2015 included, are listed at 25,000 attendees. I kept saying the event felt bigger, and I was right. ;).

That many people requires a different approach or bad things happen. The biggest shift we noticed was that instead of Blizzcon being a homegrown house party of an event, it has gotten serious. Gone are the Blizzard staff "volunteers" running everything. In their place are hired security and professional temporary workers manning all posts. Staff were good with supervisors magically appearing anywhere there were issues. All staff we encountered knew their schiznit and had well rehearsed answers. When changes like this happen, often the result can be a very "corporate" feel, but the overall event retained most of its charm. When we weren't looking, Blizzcon became a professionally run event, and for the $$ we're forking out, it had to.

We are done travelling for awhile and I am thankful. After the past few weeks I am looking forward to the relative calm of the holidays. (Which is saying a lot, as our holidays are always too busy to truly enjoy).

More later on this topic... // Aba

Blizzcon Day 1

Day 1 of Blizzcon is done.  The movie trailer is out. We attended several panels but didn't walk the show floor very much.  Today we'll remedy that as I want to demo a few of the games and Onyx wants a few more trinkets from the Darkmoon Faire area.

I am here as a former hardcore Wow raider. Currently, I dabble in Hearthstone.  I play Diablo3 in spurts, but actually haven't messed with it in awhile. I poke WoW with a stick but cant call myself active. I am rubbish at RTS and didn't buy the last StarCraft expac and probably won't buy the upcoming one.

I am interested in where they take WoW. It's far too late for big risky innovation on that title, and they'll continue to milk it for cash while they can. That's not me being bitter, that's just where the title is in its lifespan.  I actually liked what I heard in some of the talk - in particular wow is getting GW2 style dynamic level scaling for the new continent.  Monsters and quests will scale to you and you can just go play where you want without ever worrying about getting off track. I like dynamic stuff, and I really like this.

The D3 presence here was small, and the one panel on it we missed. We did walk past it and it was PACKED. Like, all chairs full and people standing 5 deep all around the perimeter, call the fire Marshall PACKED. I was happy to see so much interest in D3. I hope Blizzard was watching.

The big focus is on esports (bleh) and Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch in particular. Next year will be a big year for Blizzard on this front, they recognize it and I wish them well, but my days of being halfway decent at fast paced shooters and clicky games are long over.

The last time we were here was 2008. They say the crowd is about the same size at 25,000, but I don't believe it. It feels much much larger than it did before. The venue is the same but there are more stages and more vendors and people just absolutely everywhere.

We are having a good time. Blizzards management of the crowd has been superb. There are so many flat panel screens around that as you walk or wait on a line your not really missing anything. As I mentioned, my gig was EVE Vegas and this was Onyx's.  But I'm finding things to check out and get excited about and that's why we come.

Blizzcon Day 0

Back on the road already, this time to Anaheim and Blizzcon. We got in yesterday and went straight from LAX to Randy's Donuts, which is made famous of course in Iron Man 2. The donuts were great and the local landmark was fun.  But yesterday was a 20-21 hour day, and we collapsed early LA time. I slept for 11 hours.

Badge pickup is today, and I assume underway as I type.  We are up the street waiting for entry into Disneyland.  We'll walk around a bit, then get badges, then decide if we want to come back for fireworks. 

Surreal moment of the day was standing in line for Disney (and now in full Star Wars toy onslaught), on a trip for Blizzard, talking about EVE.

Nerds rule.

EVE Economic Data Dev Blog

Attempting to link from my phone. Bear with me.

One of the sessions at Vegas that I personally enjoyed most was the economic report.  The corresponding dev blog is now up. A quick scan suggests this is the same data and dialog as presented in Vegas (I.e. not updated data).  But its an interesting read, and I'm sure will stoke the fires on some of our "favorite" debates.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-update-eve-vegas-2015-report/

Happy Monday

It was a good EVE weekend.  One of our rare weekends off and an oddity in that we traveled less than a handful of miles.  Saturday was  a day of yard work, but I mildly overdid it and declared Sunday to be a no-work zone.

And thus, aside from a brief foray into Hearthstone, Sunday was an EVE day.

Mrs. Durden (aka Onyx) resub'd her account to chat with EVE Vegas friends and I lured her into the world of Burners -- we dropped the Blood Ashimmu anomic together a couple of times.

We also found the Blood Raider gauntlet for her and managed to get the BR skin for her before the event expired.  We kept it in highsec (she'd been back ingame all of 15 minutes after a ~4 year absence), and roaming around as a small pack was fun and made me pine for the good ol' days.

I moved a few things around, but mostly I ran missions and had a very healthy spawn rate of Burners.  Sansha and Angel (single) frigate were offered several times each.  Team Jaguar, Team Enyo, and Team Jaguar again.  I had the new Guristas Mothership Burner offered a couple of times, but it was late and I was half-watching TV (Dr. Who, new episode) and decided it wasn't a good time to play with a new fits and I punted it.

Last night I docked up for the night after almost losing my Golem to World's Collide.  My large orange tabby decided it was time to sit on my lap.  I had no vote in the matter, and was only half paying attention to the encounter anyway.  With his fuzzball blocking part of the UI, I lost track of both capacitor and the fact that I was aggro'ing the entire pocket.  Incoming damage got away from me at the same time that I noticed I had one pie sliver of capacitor left.  I was able to use a delicate touch on the shield booster and kept it out of armor.  Phew.

We leave at o'dark early on Wednesday for Anaheim and Blizzcon.  You may get a few Blizzcon posts, but I've done my best to keep this an EVE blog.  Will be interesting being there -- Onyx (Mrs. Durden) is more of the Blizzard fan these days than I am.  (Vegas was my event, Blizzcon was hers.)

I bought a couple shirts at EVE Vegas to wear at Blizzcon to see if I get any sort of a response from the crowd.  If you're there (long shot, I know), look for EVE shirts and say hi to me.

CCP (finally) Sells White Wolf Publishing

Funny.  If only there had been a big fan gathering where this could have been announced.  Oh wait, there was.  /sigh.

Anyway, it appears that CCP has finally divested itself from the World of Darkness brand after having fully cancelled the WoD MMO many months ago.

Having been to GenCon the past two years, and many game stores in between 'Con visits, it's been sad for me to see basically no WoD content for sale.  Tabletop stuff seems to be booming, but although it was a giant 20 years ago, the WoD brand is notably absent.  (Despite a pretty big insurgence of Vampire angst at the box office and TV.).

It's probably best that CCP focus on computer games and let someone else run the tabletop stuff.

“At CCP, we have great admiration for the White Wolf brands and communities, and it was extremely important to us that the acquiring company share the same respect and understanding,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. “With Paradox, we know we are leaving the brands in good hands.”

Full article at TGN.

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.

EVE Vegas Day 3

And EVE Vegas 2015 is all done.  We'll head to the airport in an hour or so. Vegas is always such a surreal experience and it is very much Fall at home, so I'm somewhat expecting my mental soundtrack to make that skipping record sound at some point today.

The big deal yesterday for me was the PVE roundtable session. I went in not expecting to hear a lot, and was happily surprised at the amount of content that got discussed.  CCP Infinity Affinity (thanks VoV!) promised a dev blog when she returns, so I'll not try to transcribe my notes here on the phone.  Bottom line is that I am happy with the direction CCP is going, and hope that the resources required can be applied so that we can see steady progress. 

I should be able to go through my "what I want from highsec" post from a few days back and annotate most of my wish list as "in progress."  Which is pretty cool. It looks like 2016 will be a good year for PVE content, resulting in an EVE that feels more alive than ever.

The rest of the day went too quickly. The Econ brief was good, and like most I'm looking forward to seeing the return of regular Econ updates. We were told the monthly updates would start next month and would likely be available ingame and somewhat in character, which is a nice touch even for non roleplayers.

Time to pack and find some coffee, and make the trip back to the real world.

EVE Vegas Day 2

One day of EVE Vegas remains.

Yesterday was about providing more details on Citadels and the capship overhaul, though most of what was in the respective presentations were mostly repeated from the keynote.  I didn't attend either round tables that followed the main briefs, but most of the attendees blobbed them, so any additional tidbits will make their way out.

I apparently missed the detail in the first pass that Citadels could be anchored in highsec.  I wonder who the first corp will be that's bold enough to put an XL Citadel 600km from Jita 4-4 ... and who will be the first to blow it up. ;)

We also heard that the sickle doomsday (titan laser sword) will pull cap from surrounding ships, making it impossible to set off 50 of them at once and burning a patch of sky to the ground. Tho I am sure some FCs are already plotting clever things with the mechanics. 

Ghostbuster (dont cross the streams!) and Jedi references abound around the sickle doomsday.  It's good to be a nerd.  ;)

We also heard that existing doomsdays are getting nerfed considerably.  This caused me to remark that "they may as well change the name from Doomsday to Wednesday" as suddenly they didn't sound so special.

We hung out more with Dire and VoV and swapped more stories and history.  There was a session on the First Great War that I initially though might have been about the First Great Northern War that Pukin' Dogs participated in circa 2004. Turns out I am bad at null history and was off by a couple years. The session was more around 2006 events between BoB, Goons, and the other empires of that era.  It made for a better story with the first titans getting to play.

The t20 incident came up 2 or 3 times that I saw. Is interesting to look back at that and realize what a defining moment that was for the game. It's also interesting that I still have a strong negative emotional response about it. (The sense of betrayal is still there after almost a decade, wow.)

We also hopped into the Valkyrie demo and I was blown away by the tech.  I don't really plan to buy a VR rig, but after the demo I was tempted to price check.  To quote Darth Vader, Valkyrie is impressive. Most impressive.

We didn't go to the party last night. I am still mostly on east coast time (hence why I am pecking on the phone at 5:30am) and have been collapsing early each night.  Such a party animal.

Today is the last day. I'll attend the PVE round table, and hope to get another go at Valkyrie. A couple more agenda items of personal interest, and we'll be thinking about going home.  It is 45 degrees there as I type with colder weather on the way.

Time to find the Starbucks.

EVE Vegas Day 1

Day 1 is complete.

As an overall schedule, Day 1 was the simplest.  We had 2 tasks - get badges, attend keynote.  Today will be a little more involved from that aspect. 

At its core, EVE is about People, and Day 1 is arranged to reflect that.  There was a big gap between badge pickup and the store opening; this was time for mingling and wandering.  I met many random people; most were very friendly and since we shared a common EVE vocabulary, conversations were fun once they got going.

We spent more time with Sugar, and though I am forgetting many of the names and faces we encountered, I must give a shout to a few:  VoV, Epigene, Dire, and NoizyGamer are super folks in person.  Mynxee of Signal Cartel is funny and genuine, and we chatted a bit in a group though I realized after that I didn't manage to actually introduce myself.  We likewise spoke briefly to Mike Azriah (spelling his name wrong no doubt) but he got pulled away before we got to trade names, and I found out later who he was.

Badges: the line to get badges initially looked daunting but moved reasonably well once it got started.  We showed up just after 11 and were thru in under an hour.  We figured out that we were in line behind Noizy about 25 minutes in, weird coincidence.  Behind us were a few guys from EVE-Uni, so we got to hear a few things from their point of view and some interesting details if how "personal dancers" work on the Vegas strip.

The Keynote:  I am not a null/capship player, but the Citadel brief had me smiling and cheering.  "But Aba," you say, "you're the guy that wants more PVE content, you should be angry that CCP is spending yet more dev time on other stuff. Wtf?"

Well, I am a PVE guy, sure. But I'm also realistic enough to know that ALL aspects of EVE must be singing in grand harmony. Capship play has been broken a good long time, and CCP has made no secret that there's a roadmap established to move the game forward. The end of that roadmap is player made gates and new star systems.  I'm neither surprised or upset that capships play a role in that future.  It was a good pitch and the changes look fun. EVE needs a nullsec that looks fun. (Said another way: There are plenty of people actively lobbying for null/cap changes, the role I play/represent is different but that doesn't mean I disagree with the need for change).

Oh, and there's a PVE segment today (EDIT: oops, I meant tomorrow). I plan to attend and see what gets said, so I'm reserving nerdrage until after that. ;)

(PS: posting from phone, I'm sure that the capship keynote details are out there, don't have a good way to link them.  I do know that MassivelyOP sent a delegate, so that's where I would check first for stuff.)