BB 35: Being the Villain

Now approaching its tenth year, the EVE Online player community has matured into an intricate and multi-faceted society viewed with envy by other game developers, but is frequently regarded with suspicion by the wider gaming community. 

Is this perception deserved? Should "The Nation of EVE" be concerned by its public identity and if so how might that be improved? What influence will the integration of the DUST 514 community have on this culture in the future?

There's an old saying that perception is reality. And I was going to open with some long rambling philosophical discourse about that, but one of the first google searches on the subject is Jester's post by that title. That man is literally a machine. To return to my perception of this reality though, I think this month's blog banter is a pretty interesting question and one of the toughest ones we've seen in a while.

I'm not really one for political correctness at all. I think its more than silly. Someone will always be offended no matter what you said. Either you took a statement too far or it didn't go far enough. As I wrote about when Mittani-gate was ongoing, I think that those comments were out of line, but the 1 month ban and removal from the CSM was too strong and clearly indicative of a knee-jerk reaction by CCP. Mittani-gate spurred the conversation this month though. CCP has a clear need to protect its product's image in order to thrive. My simple response is that I think the image that has been cultivated over the last decade is exactly the one that we want -- Eve is a cold hard place where someone will scam you, kill you, pod you and enjoy your tears throughout the whole damn thing.

Enter Dust 514. To be honest, I felt that this year's Fanfest focused more around Dust than Eve in many respects, and that's fine (although not the way I'd prefer it). I read a review on initial game play via a tweet recently that can be summarized by saying, "The play isn't as good as something like Mass Effect 3, but there is potential." There sure is potential, but at this point, that's all we've got. It all depends how CCP integrates the Dusties into our world (and yes, I am saying our world for now, at least). It needs to be meaningful on both ends. Regardless, you can believe Sony put some pressure on CCP to clean up their little mess with the Mittani. Sony is the big time, and they don't want CCP's "missteps" flowing over into their business.

At the end of the day, I'm happy with our community. We are who we are, take it or leave it. So what if the perception is dark? Check out #tweetfleet or the blogging community and you'll see in a second that we're not all (completely) cold, dark bastards. Many of us, sure. But I wouldn't want Eve another way. I love the game where you have a month of destroying industrial ships kicked off by burning down the primary market hub. And I may shoot a Hulk this May just for good measure, but I'm not generally an active participant in Hulkageddon. But this type of sinister reality is a huge part of what makes Eve so great, and if Sony or the larger gaming community can't handle it, that's fine. We can always use some fresh blood in New Eden, but outside of that, take a hike. I think we're just fine with being the villains of the MMO community, and why not? Perception is reality, I suppose.

Fanfest 2012 -- Initial Impressions

Fanfest has come and gone at this point, and it certainly seemed like an experience. I was not able to go this year, and I actually had some difficulty even keeping up with the Twitter feed, let alone the live video from Eve TV. I had class Thursday, and I was on the shooting range all day Friday, so I missed a good deal of the coverage.

Here's what I picked up though. It seems like Fanfest is an awesome event for players. I think that CCP has done a great job creating an environment that gets players excited about the game and upcoming changes, and the Devs really reinforce this with such close interaction with the players. That said, I'm not sure I saw a ton of concrete information that I was excited about. I saw a lot of DUST coverage, which I expected. The game play does seem to be pretty cool, but I'm not sure its enough for me to run out and buy a PS3.

Other than the DUST link, the only things that I got to see directly were U/I and Art/Graphics coverage. Honestly, that doesn't do much for me. I play Eve on low settings to get the best possible performance. I don't need a pretty camera showing the ship I'm shooting. I understand that many people really do want the best possible graphics, and they should. I'm just saying its not a huge draw for me personally.

I'm eagerly awaiting CCP uploading all of the videos from Fanfest to YouTube. I still have a lot I want to review before giving a comprehensive breakdown of my thoughts. As it stands right now though, I'm a little underwhelmed. I've heard some murmurs of changes in Crime Watch and FW, and I'm not sure CCP is on track from what I understand. The jury is still out for me. As I said before, I think Fanfest is a great event for the players and the larger Eve community, I'm just not yet very excited about the actually changes to Eve that I saw out of it.

Fanfest Breakdown and Some Dust Concerns

Well Fanfest is rapidly approaching, and judging by the #tweetfleet, it looks like most people have arrived already. I'm thoroughly jealous at this point, but very happy for all who are able to attend. I was looking through the Fanfest Event Schedule, and here are some of the things that caught my eye:

• State of the Economy -- We're seeing a ton of inflation right now, and I'm not a big fan. I'm interested to see sources of the inflation (Incursions?) as well as CCP's plans to fix it (if there are any). Still wishing for those QENs to return.
• Ship Balancing -- This should be a very influential segment with Ytterbium's recent dev blog. I'd love to see what CCP has in mind for this role rebalancing, as well as if they make any reference to Titan rebalancing as well.
• Nullsec, FW, Starbases, Crime Watch, and Black Ops -- All cool topics, general interest in interesting things

And on the other side of the coin, there's plenty of things I have no interest in: Sound/Music, German/Russian Communities, Eve Uni, Virtual Goods, etc. No big deal, just not as high on my list.

The big thing that has drawn my attention is the huge focus on Dust 514 at Fanfest. I suppose its about time, given that the game is supposed to be rolled out by the end of the year, but I'm extremely leery. Now, I'm normally a pretty darn optimistic person, but I am very, very scared of Dust and its potential implications on Eve. I've been a console gamer. In fact, I've been a console gamer ever since  I picked up my Dad's Atari and Nintendo as a kid. Eve is my first and only MMO actually. I get console gamers to some extent.

What I'm getting at is that in all of my time playing console games, I've never hung onto a single game for more than a couple months. Recently, Call of Duty: Black Ops & MW2 have probably had the longest runs, being a few months, and Skyrim had a very intense 2 month run.  That's it. And that's the problem with console gamers. There is no commitment to a bigger end game like Eve players have. Playing first person shooters (FPS) is about firing up the system, shooting some baddies, and moving on. And Dust has to compete with all of the big names already out there. This seems like a world of trouble to me. We have a long-term commitment issue from players in a game that had a lot of its development resources cut in the year before it launched in a market already over-saturated with FPS games. Awesome.

The biggest question is how CCP intends to link the two games. If they are heavily co-dependent, this will be a crushing blow to Eve if/when the console players jump ship for the next great game. Think about a Nullsec where you can't get anything accomplished because there aren't enough Dust mercenaries to get the job done. Maybe CCP could press the reset button on the system and roll it back if it is extremely unsuccessful, but that seems really unlikely.

At the end of the day, I really hope CCP wows us with Dust and that they release it in continual expansions as they do with Eve to keep console players on board. The health of Eve as a game and CCP as a company both depend on it. I'd be more than happy to see CCP make me want to buy a PS3 to play Dust, but I'm just not sure that's the way its going to go right now. Another game of wait and see. I think its safe to say that everyone is intrigued to see what comes out of Fanfest. Enjoy it, my friends, and keep me posted.