EVE is broken (AcD mix)

Just because.

2011-07-05T08:24:00.000Z

…it's worth remembering: a community manager should not be just a mouthpiece.
Some actually have a clue about 'non relevant stuff', like business, sensible balancing, and how they tie.

Veni, vedi…

2011-07-03T05:13:00.005Z

Vici ?

So went the CSM to the land of melting glaciers and anti-airliners volcanoes, had a sit-down with :teamawesome:, smoked the peace calumet, and returned happy enough to tell their people the sky is not falling, after all.

"How do I tell Hilmar he looks like a fool in this costume ?"

Although CCP has both clarified and mollified their position relative to for-pay content, it's all very contrived and timid — we're a far cry from the kind of heart-to-heart rendezvous with the community that would have been required to turn the situation around.

I can't say for sure what the CSM agenda was, going in, but if they got what they hoped for, they missed the mark by a mile and a hair, imo.

The video they posted along with their joint Dev Blog / declaration illustrates perfectly why I believe the CSM is wrong not to push CCP to address the root of the issue. What's worse, they're allowing themselves to fall in line with the overly cautious, indecisive tone set by CCP.

It looks more like they're playing nice at a custody hearing,

rather than having a spirited debate about how to raise their kids…

From the CSM part of the Dev Blog:

The Fearless "Greed is Good?" Leak: We accept CCP's position that Fearless is a deliberately controversial internal publication and does not represent the policy of CCP Management or of CCP Zulu, the Senior Producer of EVE Online, nor the direction of game design.

That's utter horsecrap, as anyone who's read the reference material can tell: you'd have to be a pushover or an idiot to fall for this poor spin.

Furthermore, endorsing the "hypothetically…" justification undermines the CSM credibility: expecting the players to buy it is not only insulting to their intelligence, it makes the CSM look like CCP's lapdog.

The Leaked Hilmar Global Email: We were appalled by the leaked Hilmar email and the atrocious and out-of-touch messaging it contained. We sympathize and agree with those players offended and disgusted by it.

That's it ?

Seriously… you people had to take three days off, cross an ocean or two (probably in coach) in order to slap some sense into CCP and get answers to the "why are you trying to commit corporate suicide ?" question, and you end up sympathetic with the people who didn't like that the CEO of CCP is channeling Jack 'Douchebag' Tretton ? That's so far off, it hurts.

I understand that's a polite way to say "we are offended and disgusted, too", but what's damning here is you didn't report on your efforts to get some sort of explication or apology from the guy who pissed in your soup. At least something like "unfortunately, Hilmar locked himself in the ladies' for the duration of our stay at CCP HQ and wouldn't come out to talk to us…" would have given us a hint.

And yes, I grok you don't want to make things worse, but while it may be your burden to give CCP pointers on how to not shoot themselves in the foot, it's not on you to save them from their own stupidity if they insist on doing so.

When in doubt about whether CCP's shafting its customers, the CSM loyalty should go to the players first, the game second, and CCP third.

Don't drink Quafe ultra before writing on dual-currency economics.*

The real issue here, beyond jeopardizing the CSM credibility with the community (which was hard enough to gain in first place) is that the players won't settle for less spin anymore, and demand a strict "no bullshit !" policy be established if any semblance of trust is to be restored between CCP and its patrons.

I usually enter a restaurant reasonably confident I'm not going to get food poisoning for my temerity of eating there, but if I'm nice enough to return after being sick once, I sure won't be cool with the cook cracking an uneasy smile and announcing most of their products are fresh, nowadays.

As pointed in the first entry in this series, CCP has to commit to end the spin-fu, and talk to their player community (also their only source of income) as trusted partners, ideally using the CSM as filter and relay.

Since they really, really suck at it, they should stop posting any public communique altogether at this stage, and just ring he CSM guys on skype whenever they want to talk to the people, then let the CSM write their copy, and just stamp the company logo on it once they're happy with it.

Not that this first joint dev blog was glorious, but if the CSM grows some nads, and CCP let them, I can see that working.

As parting words, let me give you an example of the kind of tone I'd expect from a reformed CCP.

Remember this sorry excuse of an excuse, that summoned the CCP to Iceland a few days ago ?
Here's how it should have read, if CCP meant it:

"We spat in your face, and we deserve everything that's been coming at us since for failing to apologize in a timely fashion. That we were intending to spit in the wind is immaterial.

Just now that we are deeply, truly sorry, and we're going to do everything we can to sort our mess, and show you that you can trust us with your playtime and monies.

We expect the CSM to arrive momentarily in our offices, with some meds and a clear head, because obviously something got into the water here at CCP HQ, that made us lose all common sense for a bit, and neither you nor us want that to happen again.

We'll keep our trap shut now, for everybody's sanity sake, talk to you after the pow wow."

That's how you apologize for broken family glassware without looking like a weasel.

***

[*No hard feelings, I love your logo. And I'll get back to that Plex=P2W misconception.]

Escape from the black hole

2011-07-01T04:22:00.010Z

In recent entries I covered how CCP had little choice but to try and restore customer trust pronto, before the monetization failure cascade they've thrown themselves into proves terminal.

We have to assume a week's worth of clue-by-four bashing by the community and media, then a bit of quiet time with the CSM drove that point home, or the whole discussion is moot, and it's time for a postmortem.

Obviously, neither the CSM nor anybody (but possibly their major shareholders and creditors) can force CCP to do what is suggested below, and :teamawesome:'s reluctance to admit to any mistake or fault is the stuff of legends.

Thus, the only question now is whether CCP prefers to die in a freakish gasoline accident, or surrender to reason, and live to fight another day.

"If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it's that a male model's life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident. "

The first step into the program

…is admitting you have a problem.

Whatever is happening to CCP, they brought on themselves, not just by being spectacularly inept at strategizing and propaganda in the past few months, but by creating the initial conditions for those shortcomings to potentially prove fatal to the company.

Once upon a time, CCP set out to build a game catering to a very hardcore, dedicated, confrontational and self-selecting species of players. Against all odds, they largely succeeded.
As a result, EVE's user community shows a very strong sense of ownership of the playground, is prepared to act with purpose when it deems necessary, and routinely outwits and outguns CCP in the metagame of PR and crowd control. [If you fail to see how that could backfire, please click the pic above.]
At the end of the day, not only do EVE players pay for CCP's rent, they are in a position to dictate the agenda and expectations of investors and creditors about EVE's parent company.

Flash-forward to now, where CCP's single biggest problem is their being in denial about the very nature of their own product, and insisting on a mass-market makeover attempt that is entirely unrealistic, and from a business standpoint, self-destructive.

Everything points to CCP trying to turn EVE into an impulse-buyer addiction machine, in pursuit of the fabled riches of F2P, P2W, WGS and content-by-the-meter, and they're happy to trade their current niche customer base for a speculative crowd of ready-to-shear consumers.

All vet bitterness and el33tism aside, this warrants the 'are you for real ?' response of the players, who happen to know first-hand that EVE makes for a terribad ride on the 'displease no one' route, because it's a bitch of a game, whose sole appeal lies in its spunk and quirkiness.

Mainstreaming EVE is, simply put, akin to force a racing sloop into the role of a ferryboat: you'd have to sit far inland and away from the docks to even contemplate the idea.

Bullets and points.

Yesterday I highlighted what I reckon are regretfully inevitable steps to be taken asap, if CCP is to rebuild said trust, and I'd like to expand on that a bit.

1 • Come clean.

Over the past few years, CCP has been growing more defensive and wary of its own players. Being careful around rabid nerds is prudent, but CCP is way too nervous around their fans, which are trained (by EVE itself) to smell fear. Protip: it's not good.
The only way out of that is to cut through the piles of botched damage control and insultingly clumsy spin attempts that have been the norm ever since the T20 incident, once and for all.

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

How CCP could ever dream this macrotransactions/P2W plan would work out is beyond me, but no matter how embarrassing or vexing the truth behind the monetization frenzy, CCP must lay it out on the table. Anything short of full disclosure will leave them vulnerable to more damning leaks and exposure (which will happen).

Frox Niston

The CSM is the perfect conduit to handle that. Call EVE TV in, sit the CSM and CCP brass in the lunch room, and stream a live Q&A for as long as takes, until the CSM and community are content they got all the answers they need, and believe what they hear.

Will it butthurt ? Quite a bit, for sure. It will also make for insanely great PR, provided CCP manages to get out of bullshit mode — if just for a moment, even around the hour 5 mark, it will be worth it.
Besides, it's not like CCP had anything to lose at this point: not to ham-fist it, but they have no face left to save by now, and they're down and bleeding out as it is.

Catharsis is needed on both sides, I reckon. The players obviously need some sort of special gesture to mark a turning point in CCP's attitude, and I suspect once they start to unbottle, CCP staffers will feel a weight come off their shoulders, possibly allowing them to move past the unease and re-connect with their player base.
It won't be all peaches and sparkly ponies after that (see 'Shake hands', below), but it will lay the groundwork for a healthy coexistence, which is worlds better than what they have now.

2 • Pay the price, in blood.

Unless everybody on the top floor of CCP HQ has been smoking crack, it seems likely the urge to introduce dubious income generating schemes without regard for general business sanity stems from a (perceived or real) urgent need for moar monies by CCP.

There aren't ten possible causes for that:

CCP, at the behest of its major shareholders has been prodded into hyping growth and revenue potential in view of some cash-out scheme like an IPO or a sell-out to some major company.
CCP needs a cash infusion, and fast, to carry on with Dust/WoD development, and depends on making potential creditors or current investors hard for CCP by painting very optimistic figures of projected revenue for 2011-2012.
CCP has been cooking the books like crazy, and much less than 360k subscriptions are really paid for by actual customers, the rest being covered by CCP and hidden as Operating Expenses and R&D, meaning their burn rate is way worse than 10 million USD annual, and they can't keep the ponzi scheme going without an elephant-sized helping of cash.

At least that's the most sensible explanations for the recent AtAllCostsByAnyMeansKillYourHorse 'strategy'… Regardless, hype-based cash-injection plans are busted now, thanks to the PR shitstorm CCP just reaped.

The only hope of damage mitigation for CCP's investors and creditors is to bring the company in the black mom'n'pop style, lest they're prepared to cut their losses and sell for a song (if they can find a sucker to buy that melon).

Looking at the bright side.

Assuming CCP is not running a straight-on ponzi scheme (I'd give that a 74% vote of confidence and make it my working assumption for now), EVE on its own still looks like a nicely profitable operation, with enough earning capacity to fund projects like Carbon and possibly Incarna above and beyond EVE operations and iterative development expenses.

What can not be realistically funded from EVE ongoing revenues alone is two AAA games, one being a full-fledged MMORPG with a yet-to-figure income model. Once again, the options are limited, and something must give.

Based on 2010 published figures, CCP burns through about 63 million USD vs 53 million income, and shows a 6.5 million operating profit by filing 16.8 million in salaries as capitalization (sic). [Also of note is a whooping 9.8 million in marketing, a figure that's probably going up in 2011, like most other expenses, but we'll get back to that.]

At this writing, CCP has five major projects on the workbench, each of which costs money:

EVE (ongoing development and operations)
Dust 514 (development)
WoD MMO (devlopment)
Carbon (core technology below EVE and presumably everything else to come)
Incarna (avatar/graphics engine for WoD, using EVE as testbed)

Only one of those is generating income in the short term, to which the development costs associated with Dust 514, WoD and Incarna bring no added value as of yet, despite CCP attempts at shoehorning Incarna into EVE as a 'core feature' (which so far amounts to creative accounting, at best).

"Axe Twilight, Dust and Incarna tomorrow, and odds are we make money not just in the books but in the bank, too."

[Anonymous Coward — CCP employee]

Without going that far, something has to be done to bring expenses in the ballpark of revenue, and it opens an opportunity to regain some level of credibility with the spacenerds crowd:

At a time where EVE players have been given every reason to believe CCP is ready to "suck their customers dry and leave their shriveled corpses by the side of the road", slaughtering one of the rival siblings may be the single best way for CCP to prove EVErs its commitment to the continued development and success of EVE.

It goes beyond nerdrage-induced bloodlust, as CCP and the community will share both the memory and the responsibility for that sacrifice, which may very well be the price to pay to earn back the trust and loyalty CCP squandered over the last couple years.
EVE players have learned by now that every time they've forgiven CCP for screwups and breaches of trust, they've only made the company bolder and more confident it could get away with anything, and bullshit their way out of trouble with dev blogs about integrity, excellence and other e-honor nonsense.

CCP was delusional in thinking their feeble spin-fu fooled the players, yet the players were fools, indeed, for thinking CCP would learn from simply being called out and admonested: not until it fears for its very existence will CCP learn not to bite the hand that feeds it.
As an added bonus, the CCPers who care most for EVE and its community may get a chance to shine.

One for the team… anyone ?

All reliable indicators point in the same direction regarding Dust 514: CCP is too deep in already to back down without potentially fatal consequences. Not being privy to the details of their partnership with Sony, I can't say for sure, but I suspect SOE would have no qualms suing CCP into oblivion, were they to default on whatever Faustian pact they're bound by.

White Wolf, though, sits at the other end of the spectrum, being wholly-owned by CCP (or 'merged' if you want to be nice about it), and while the WoD MMO can depend on an established and eager Vampire fanbase to help reach profitability (if it's even half-decent), it's also the easiest branch to trim to balance the books.

EVE and Dust are designed to benefit from each other as they share IP and brand recognition. Dust has the potential to reach to a different and much larger audience than EVE, thanks to its (hopefully) pick up'n'play experience, while leveraging EVE's e-cred of hardcore-ness and extr3me sandboxery, the latter offering a natural end game option to the most eager of Dust players.

Whether axing/pinning WoD would be enough to keep both EVE and Dust on track financially, I obviously can't say, but the opportunity cost seems bearable, assuming Dust 514 starts making decent money fast enough after launch, and launch happens before 2014.

3 • Shake hands.

This is the tricky part, really — the rest is merely painful.
Once CCP has repented and bled a pint of blood for the cause (see what I did here ?), time will come to carry on, and make the best of this second chance, both for CCP, EVE players, and the games.

"The situation between CCP and the EVE player base is so rotten… salvaging the relationship requires more than CCP getting their act together and catering to their base: they'll have to learn to actually speak the truth when they have unpopular news to break, and to ensure the buy-in of their stakeholders.
When you have only one product on the market, and all your customers belong to a single, opinionated community, you don't alienate that community, and you recognize they are, indeed, stakeholders.
The love story is over, there's no pretending otherwise: it's time to move on and learn how to be 'just friends'."

EVE doesn't need to grow to 5 million customers and treat them like braindead popcorn gobblers to be good bizns for CCP — exactly the opposite.

EVE has a reputation for being hardcore, challenging, and epicly sandboxy.
It also has a reputation for cheating devs, haxploits, botched ergonomics, inconsistent design (and now, attempting to ransom its users).

Only one of these sets is made of stuff that needs fixing.

Were EVE the total sum of CCP's product line, its extreme aspects could be limiting, business wise, but as a mythos locomotive for a wider franchise, it's precisely what it should be: the narrow end of the wedge, making way for the softer, larger pieces. [Mixing metaphors to the power of :awesome: I am.]

Figure the EVE out.

With EVE's role clearly defined and followed through, CCP could save about 4 million bucks yearly on marketing alone. EVE is enough of a drama engine and media-magnet that it could keep growing its userbase by 15% yearly without a dime spent on advertising, provided the word-of-mouth was good more often than not.
When Dust is ready to roll out, it can piggyback that fametrain to supercharge the bang for every advertising buck thrown at its promotion.

The way to achieve that is simple: focus on making what's already in game work as it should, and ban SCRUMM from the game design floor. …also get people on the game design floor.

As stated repeatedly (not just by me): rapid-iterative design and agile programming is good for balancing rockets, not sovereignty warfare.

EVE needs a holistic master plan, and this plan needs to be run by the community, the CSM, and re-drawn until it's deemed workable and beneficial to the game as a whole.
Only then is it worth coding.

Tool up, work smart.

Create (or buy) a decent and accessible way for players to report bugs with feedback, tracking and rewards for bughunters built-in. Commit HR to QA.
Add a tiered 'crowd sourcing' toolset to figure what players need/want the most added next, have them pledge ISK to weigh the votes (you should put that to a vote, too).
You don't want to design by committee, or rule the game through universal suffrage, but taking advice and co-opting ideas from people who know your game better than you do is not surrendering to the mob, or admitting incompetence: it's being a smart game designer.
When you need a wheel, don't try to grind the angles off a square: get a wheelmaker aboard.

Integrate Dust and EVE at the design level.

You know you want Dust players to fight on planets, and somehow tie that to EVE sovereignty system: great !
Now iron out the precise game mechanics and rules before you code anything.

Let my people go.

I understand CCP fancies itself a family, I understand you have an elder's circle "the magic nine" (or something). That's cute, but it's time to send some of them chase rabbits on the farm upstate. As much as I like quirky clubs, being ginger and having a name with a lot of consonants is not a good benchmark for aptitude: give them an associate producer plaque, pick up their pub tab and wipe out their access pass to the srs bzns floors at the HQ, you'll thank me later.
Also, contrary to documentation and sex, bad economists are worse than no economists. Having statisticians, economists and academics on board is a GoodIdea™, but I suspect you'd be better off with gun-for-hire consults than your village idiot (hit me up for pointers if you don't know who to hire).

In a few words: stop fearing your community, embrace the fact you depend on each other (but you more than they), and accept once and for all you do have mutual ownership of the playground, in different capacities.

ttfn, but more to come.

***

[PSupdate: no, I have nothing against WoD, and I reckon it could make a great game, if done right, something CCP obviously can't manage in its present state of disarray.]

Biting your hand.

2011-06-30T01:22:00.008Z

Working assumption: CCP needs more than they currently get from EVE to keep the freight load of WoD and Dust development rolling, and reckon just overheating a tad the old locomotive boiler won't do it.

In short, they need to borrow money, and they're fine with selling their coal-car to buy a new suit and enough bubbly, leather seats and drapes to impress the bankers — hoping EVE will be nice enough to keep running on its momentum and look the part until moar funds are secured.

The sad thing is they probably are going to drive their entire train off the rails and into the ground before even they run out of coal, when they could still save the entire operation by showing the least bit of common sense — although I'm not entirely sure to which extent it's still up to them by now.

I'm not privy to the secrets of the gods, and not even to those of Icelandic blowhards, so I obviously can't say for sure why CCP figured it was a good idea to slaughter their lone cash cow in the name of overpriced carpaccio.

On its face, it seems pretty clear they want to make more money like, yesterday, but it could be a tad more twisted, because CCP is far from a family shop nowadays, and the majority of shares in no longer in the hands of CCP founders or current directors and employees.

The garage studio that could now has to answer to VCs, like most startup with fuzzy business plan, and not much of a revenue model beyond IPO day.

At that could be the root of all ebil here, that CCP doesn't need money as much as it wants to look like it could make a lot of money, leading them to jump with two feet into 'it' stuff like VGS on dual currency and macrotransactions, because that's what's touted as the new Eldorado of games profitability.

It would go a long way toward explaining why they're going at it like they're chasing a bus, flailing their way into disaster and embarrassment: they've no clue how to retrofit those fancy monetization schemes onto their old locomotive, and try to compensate for their obvious insecurity with clingy assertiveness.

Local in Jita.

Whether the entire monetization is sound business doesn't really concern CCP directorate, because what they're presumably going for is really a quick scam: leverage their exceptional track record for cheap and lasting customer acquisition and retention, and pretend it can mix nicely with overpriced handjobs for tourists.

How does this make sense ? Because on paper, to a clueless banker, it would.

Here's the elevator pitch:

"We've been growing our paying customer base non stop for 8 years, and we manage to retain more of them, longer than about anyone in the business, and now we want to take it to the next level !
With VGS and microtransactions, we can basically print money… a lot of it, considering we own a devout fanbase that will pay anything to be part of the EVE experience."

I want to believe they know it's bullshit, but hey, in a void it could look good enough to persuade a banker to hand over a few dozen million dollars to see it through.

And then what ?

I'm glad you asked, but I'm afraid you might be sorry I answered: brace yourselves.

In CCP twisted analysis, it doesn't matter if they kill EVE in the process of securing funds to make Dust and WoD, because they believe it's their shot at making it big.

CCP wants to go global, and somehow believe VGS, microtransactions and bazillion users are the one path to infinite profit, something EVE is terribly ill-suited to, with being too niche and full of an entrenched player base of annoying bittervets.

From their perspective, either EVE adapts and reaches to a wider audience of more docile customers ready to gobble for-pay content, or it dies, taking down with it the annoying noises of its contrarian old user base.

While CCP would obviously prefer the former, the relief of being rid of the naggy old wife would make it worth losing money in the divorce.

We didn't want those subscriptions anyway.

Unfortunately, financial and empirical reality sometimes intersect, and EVE is haemorrhaging susbscribers as we speak, making a mess of the place that will be hard to hide from the would-be loaners, bringing the very survival of CCP and EVE into question.

After the two-day emergency session starting in a few hours, the CSM will be able to report on :teamawesome: mental state (I'm quite confident CCP lacked the foresight to include a provision in the NDA stopping CSM members from expressing honest opinions about CCP turning batshit insane), and judging from recent public statements from prominent members, the CSM is bringing more loaded briefcases than hugs and strawberries to the reunion.

And that's the healthiest thing that can happen to CCP directorate at this point, assuming they manage to get their heads out of the hákarl-stinking sand for a minute: connect with the reality that EVE is close to die on them, and that it means curtains for CCP, as nobody's coming to the rescue.

The only valuable assets CCP ever held were talent, vision, track record, a solid established user base and a crazy level of customer goodwill. That's quite a lot, come to think of it, yet CCP has gone out of its way to prove nothing (actionable) remains of the former, and to squander the latter through hubris, aloofness and incompetence.

Gnawing your leg off the steel-jaw.

CCP doesn't have any serious source of income but EVE until Dust and/or WoD hit the market, and nobody will trust the CCP-that-killed-EVE with the cash injection they'd need to complete either of their other projects, much less both.

Any way you look at it, if EVE doesn't pull through, CCP is done — even :teamawesome: must be starting to get the clue by now.

The only way out for CCP starts with regaining the trust of the very customers they were looking forward to dump (and who know it too well by now).

Yeah, that's a tall order but it can still be done, in just a few, however painful, steps.

Come clean.
Pay the price, in blood (preferably CCP's, the players have been sucked dry already).
Shake hands.

Short of that, EVE is very much likely to be a goner, or at least too weak to subsidize a 600-person company beyond 2011, by which time CCP may find itself circling too close to the drain to realistically hope regain escape velocity.

***

[To be continued.]

A quick reminder.

2011-06-29T15:53:00.004Z

We're shooting pixels at pixels.

At face value this is an activity devoid of both purpose and meaning.

The one reason it matters to us is because we agree to believe others care for the same thing(s) we do.

In that sense we're sharing some essential values, and thusly create worth out of nothing.

The divorce between CCP and its players is the consequence of the company making painfully clear they don't share any values but $$ with their make-believe world's denizens.
This makes us feel silly, and therefore upset for being made fools of.

In EVE parlance, it's a fair scam, and we're the suckers for falling for it.

At the end of the day, CCP, I'm afraid we can't have each other's stuff anymore.

Good luck with your future endeavours.

Oh, and this.

The Perpetuum temptation

2011-06-28T23:41:00.003Z

Time and time over I've had to justify to others (and occasionally to myself) my lasting involvement with EVE online, considering how frequently it may seem I scorn EVE, its parent company CCP and even the EVE player community, parts or whole.

I could write walls of text about the many things that make it all interesting to me (and I have the walls of text to prove it), but it can be boiled down to a simple choice of nothing vs something, however unsatisfying:

CCP may be a greedy, unfriendly, obnoxious shopkeeper with a bad temper and a family of inbreds for staff, and sure, they tend to drop cigar ash and the occasional gravel-for-capers on the pizza, and sure, you have to suffer redneck patrons chanting klu-klox anthems and puking in the dining dining room during happy hour, but New Eden's the only pizza place in this sad town, where you can't import a wood oven for under 60 million bucks.

Once upon a time, CCP bottled lightning by creating a game that was going precisely against everything the MMO industry of then deemed sound business for anything bigger and costlier than a hobbyist-ran MU*.

Not only did they consistently show the industry 'common wisdom' for what it's worth by not going under, they endured for about 8 years while growing their user base and paying subs every single quarter.
What is better is they managed to do so for a good long while without paying any significant tribute to the highway robbers of the online games industry (no-value-added retail chain and PR/ad noisemakers), instead relying on their players to promote, educate and support newcomers, thus creating the perfect soil for a niche game: a proselyte, self-selecting community of rabid fans, willing to cope with anything for the cause.

Until…

At some point in the last 3-5 years, CCP apparently lost sight of the fact most of the things that went right until then, they owed to their players handling for CCP most of everything not directly code-related (PR, advertising, CS, QA, community building), on top of paying the rent.

Increasingly, both in community management, marketing and game design, CCP came to shit on their fans' heads, betraying their trust too often and in too many ways to list here, thus squandering the biggest asset they'd built until then (and seemingly failed to fully grasp the value of): customer goodwill.

As it went on, players naturally started looking for a plan B: another game to pour their time, love and money in, rather than EVE, and they found there was none.

Seeing that, CCP throughly missed the point, and figured everything was peachy since the numbers were looking good, and the subs kept rising.
Sure, the suckers were making weird noises once in a while, but apparently they were willing and able to take anything thrown at them, and presumably liked it rough.

What CCP failed to see is how their main accomplishment to date had been to raise the bar of expectations for their player niche, while consistently falling short of the goals they'd set for themselves (CCP, not the players).

As a result, CCP now reigned over a quasi-captive market of people who certainly wouldn't settle for anything less than EVE in terms of core features (PvP, sandbox, territorial warfare, freeform competition, no power-leveling grind, etc.), but who found increasingly hard to cope with EVE and CCP's shortcomings.

Flash forward to now, when CCP has managed to botch things so severely on so many fronts it's not certain they can come back from the edge of the cliff they're sliding toward — CCP legendary smooth handling on slippery grounds being in full play…

For the first time in EVE history, because things are worse than ever in EVE and because there is now a tentative alternative offer on the market, spacenerds are fleeing New Eden in droves.

Not just rage-quitting (or claiming to), but migrating en-masse to another game that boasts most of EVE's core features, minus the suck. Also it's a new game, from a debuting company (thus no bad history), so hope is permitted.

Perpetuum, the soon-to-be-imploded game that coulda.

I believe this will end in tears, due to the gap between what players coming from 6-year-old EVE (dismissing all the terribad design decisions of the last couple years) expect to be the bare minimum, and what a just-outta-beta game, presumably developed on the MMO equivalent a shoestring as a labour of love can realistically deliver.

Also because just 10% of the EVE population moving into Perpetuum on short notice would out-demographic the pants off its existing player community, and that's never easy to deal with.

Is there something for the EVE player in Perpetuum ? Presumably yes, since it's essentially a reformulation of EVE, with mechas in place of spaceships, which retains most of the defining elements and a good chunk of the familiar UI/content features, and makes generally about as much (or as little) sense as its inspiration.

Of course they hate it over there when you say EVE with Mechas, but it really is, in many ways, and I don't see a problem with that: I have the utmost respect for the work Blizzard has done with WoW, which design-wise is nothing but a better version of all PvE-centric pointy-eared theme park MMORPGs that came before it, all rolled into one and with better make-up and 'do.

Will I take the plunge ? Probably not, because I don't play much (anymore) already due to RL reasons, and because Perpetuum design elements include a few personal deal-breakers that I couldn't get past from a pure gameplay perspective.

…but I digress.

My point was/is: people who will stick with EVE in the next weeks and months won't do it out of love, they'll do it because of lack of alternative.

If Perpetuum somehow survives the first mass invasion of EVEtards (which I hope they will, but doubt), I predict they'll make a killing, as long as they don't pull a CCP and expose their soft parts with blunders such as the T20 excursion, Titan Doomsdays, Dominion sovereignty, or FearlessGate.

To address that, CCP will probably adjust their platinum monocle, plug their ears with their fingers and chant:

"We're awesome ! Fearless ! United ! Nobody can touch us !"

…until the repo men start pulling hardware from TQ… but just in case they want to salvage their relationship with the suckers who pay the rent, they should take stock of that.

This girl isn't just being moody, the only reason she's still here is because she's chained to a cinderblock, in your hut, on a glacier.
Also, the chain is getting rusty, and if climate change is not 'just a theory' she may be able to hike it out of here by the end of summer, and you'll have to learn to cook for yourself.

***

[Come to think of it, since I'm nice that way, I may give Perpetuum another try (it's been a while) if only to tell you what I think of the game in its present state.]

Food, not filler.

2011-06-27T04:14:00.004Z

In case you feel like reading more about CCP's suicide attempt (still bleeding as we speak), here's a pretty decent write up of the situation with some nice background from Brendan Brain, over at Massively.com.

Don't be put off by the doomsayer title, because: 1) the content is better than the cover in this case, and 2) it could actually be spot on.

Biting the hand.

2011-06-26T11:00:00.008Z

tl;dr

EVE is not a global brand, it's a niche game that gets a lot of media attention, as a result of which its parent company is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

More accurately, EVE is a cult, meaning it matters quite a lot to a very small subset of the general population, everyone involved tends to suffers from chronic cognitive bias and the occasional hallucinatory excursion, and sane people either laugh at you, avoid you, or both — but you make great gossip material.

Words of wisdom for CCP: it's freakishly hard to transition from a barn-sized cult to a mainstream church: secret societies typically don't survive an open-door policy.

My suggestion: keep EVE players happy as pigs in the mud, EVE is the PR machine that will give to any 'mainstream' spinoff you churn that edgy shine kids love so much.

Army of ghosts: how EVE is niche-er than CCP acknowledges.

A couple years ago, EVE online's subscriptions count crossed the 320k mark, and CCP and fans everywhere can't stop bragging since, about how EVE is now bigger than its home country. That's cute, and also a reminder that EVE is a very niche game, something CCP seems to have mixed feelings about, as they're now trying to go big with Dust 514, their next title and first attempt at the console market.

To be fair, EVE has been an undisputed success, possibly the only subscription based MMO to grow steadily since its launch, which happened eight full years ago. It also takes the lead among MMOs in terms of how much the gameplay has transformed over the years, with some now-core elements such as territorial warfare introduced years after launch and overhauled twice since (arguably for the worst, but what killed SWG, EVE survived).

No other MMO has generated as much noise and commentary both in the gaming and mainstream media (results for "EVE Online" and "World of Warcraft" in Google News) ; even the once-media darling that is Second Life (despite Linden's protestations that SL is 'not a game') never came close to the slightly creepy fascination EVE can evoke in people who don't even play it.

You precious, unique snowflake…

EVE is very much of a homegrown species, created by a first-timer studio from Iceland, a locale that until then wasn't exactly known for its gaming industry might.

Numbers-wise, EVE is also an oddity:

While its subscribers base puts it in the lowest bracket of the big-name MMOs, it's by a long shot the largest subs-based game in terms of how many players can be present at once and interact in one shard, with PCU routinely hovering between 25k and 45k depending on time of the day, and single 'rooms' (solar systems) hosting upwards of a thousand players shooting each other in the face.

So yeah, EVE is special, in more than one way, but it's all in the past, or at least some of it is.

Strong of about 600 staffers across offices in the UK, US and China in addition to Reykjavik, with a profitable franchise/joint-venture for distribution of EVE online on the Chinese market, and two new titles underway, CCP means srs bzns now, and won't take any shit from the fat nerds that got'em there.

CCP now fancies itself a global powerhouse, may very well be on its way to become one indeed, and its players' sense of entitlement and ownership of the game are starting to get on the company brass nerves, nevermind the fact it's those same fans devotion to the game that carried CCP and its flagship product through 8 years of sometimes rough terrain and oft-amateurish operations.

Could it be that the whole drama is nothing but a classic case of early fans turning against their old flame as they feel betrayed, watching the band leave them behind them as it sells out ?

Sure, there's a bit of that, I suppose, but everyone involved could be in for a rude awakening, because today, CCP would be a sellout for nothing.

The wannabe global empire rests on a single title, CCP's sole source of income to date: EVE Online, the spreadsheet simulator.

It takes a special kind of twisted nerd to play such a monster, and pay for the privilege.

Familiarity breeds contempt…

In one shape or another, many among CCP senior staff have been around EVE for over half a decade, and are more excited about moving on to the new than sticking with the old and its community: bitter vets who know them all too well, and whiny noobs who don't know jack about how it was back then.

Worse even, due to CCP long-standing tradition of recruiting from within its fanbase, many staffers have been forced by the realities of business to distance themselves from the player community — which they slowly came to resent for it — all the while pretending they're still one of them, resulting in schizophrenic levels of doublespeak and perpetual stumbling from corporate dronetalk to unnatural brosef soundbites.

Again, part of that files under growing pains, a problem of corporate culture in the making faced by every boutique shop turning into a multi-offices, hundreds of employee mass-market company.

Except here too, EVE is special.

A rock band that gets its break and starts to make it big doesn't have to keep it close and personal with the fans from its garage days but for the few they bring along as roadies and pets. Those early groupies soon fade in the faceless stadium crowds, and become a non-quantity — but not so with EVE.

Old EVErs are now the movers and shakers of the player community, and talking with the fans is much trickier when they have a say about how you should tune your axe, and call you on it when you phone in a song.

On top of that, while EVE may have started making money around 40k subs, and the accounts may have increased tenfold since, the player base most likely hasn't grown in proportion.

This doesn't add up.

CCP doesn't publish such numbers, so it's all guesstimates, but from hanging-at-the-pub statistics, I'd expect the ratio of accounts to players to average circa 4 to 1, maybe even 5 to 1. Lots of people may have just the one lone account, yet while I don't exactly cultivate a social network of old timers in EVE, I still know more people with 10+ accounts than I have fingers, and fewer with less than 2 than I have nostrils.

Simple maths tell me, conservatively, that (10*fingers+1*nostril-1)/parts=9.19, but I should factor in a bunch of peeps I know with 3-5 accounts, and that gets me to 4.94 accts per player.

Whichever way I look at it, I doubt the total number of paid-for subs in EVE splits wider than 80k or 100k people, which goes a long way towards explaining why CCP doesn't release these numbers, as it doesn't look very impressive to fall in the same bracket as, say PotBS or AO (pre-F2P).

This gets worse when you consider how many people pay their subs from PLEX bought with ISK and wouldn't dream of forking RL$ to play EVE: the final headcount of people who actually pick the tab for the whole may turn out to fit in the FanFest big partey venue (more on that in next episode).

CCP doesn't have the numbers, either, and that may be part of why they handle their customer loyalty with so little care, because they fail to realize the fate of the company may hinge on the goodwill of much fewer people than it looks.

How many tears before you can tell it's ruined ?

This is not the first time CCP and its players have gone at each other's throat in a dance of betrayal, mistrust and accusations of cheating and greed, mind you…

The whole culture of EVE is one which encourages distrust, paranoia and selfishness, and the border between in-game evildoing and corporate or civil malfeasance (not to mention the occasional felony) is often crossed, at least in people's minds.

That some at CCP have come to nurture a cold hatred for their players is par for the course, considering the abuse and accusations thrown their way daily for years on end, yet players have every reason to doubt the word of a company which has proven more than once not to be above self-complacency, nepotism, gross negligence and generally lacking ethics as a game manager.

From PvP to PvD

The original breach of trust, the Watergate of New Eden was probably the one incident where a CCP employee was publicly exposed by a third party as giving out free strategic resources to his 'former' in-game alliance (which happened to be the biggest powerbloc of the time and frequently accused of cheating and developer favoritism).

Some fishy stuff happened before, and since, but this one was as clear cut as murky businesses can come, and CCP botched their crisis management in :awesome: proportions, giving credit to every half-baked conspiracy theory of yore, and fueling those to come.

What damaged the relationship with the playerbase, more even than the event itself, was the proverbial coverup, with CCP handling the situation late, reluctantly, killing the messenger first thing (ie: permabanning) and starting a "committee" as only response (whether they should have sacked the employee is not for me to judge, but that they didn't certainly contributed to the appearance of his misconduct being endorsed by the company).

The T20 crisis, as it would come to be known, and a damage control which roughly amounted to "Sorry we got caught" marked a turning point in CCP-players relationship. Up until then, the players' working assumption in case of a cockup had been "shit happens", but after that shifted to "what are they hiding now ?".

It is in this light that other events that could have been attributed to reasonable incompetence have ever since been deemed outright malicious by the EVE player community — occasionally they were right, but mostly they weren't, and wrongful accusations encouraged CCP neither toward competence nor honesty.

Recent major examples include:

The end of ghost training.
Changes to T2 recipes making Techtenium the new pink and turning northern 0.0 from crap to goldmines (suspicions of favoritism and collusions with the northern political block).
Changes in sovereignty rules/mechanics right before or after the fall of some territorial power block (too many to count).
Nerfing/not nerfing supercapitals, jump bridges, sovereignty immunity (pick your consipracy).
The shuffling of 0.0 PVE resources (with truesec refactoring).
And now: pay2win and dry-bleeding of EVE…

…presumably to fund st00pid Dust 514, according to the tinfoil brigade — and can you blame them ?

***

Next episode will show you why Dust, AUR and VGS are good for EVE — no kidding.

My name is Hilmar,

2011-06-25T22:12:00.004Z

…and I have no clue why people pay for EVE online.

I postponed my followup post about 'how to do virtual sales right' (in the context of EVE online) because the proverbial feces scattered through the revolving contraption in the meantime, specifically as this went public.

Long story short, we're led to believe an internal email from CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson to "ccp global list" (which we have to assume is the general mailing list read by many to most employees — at least on the EVE front) has been leaked to EVEnews24.

There's no bulletproof certainty about the source, and EVEnews24 editor's confidence is not entirely reassuring considering their track record, but it looks solid enough for the community to have gone up in arms over it. [Update: it has been confirmed since to really be Hilmar's.]

I'm going to play along and comment the thing under the assumption it's the real deal, because while I'm not entirely sure the community outrage is as well-placed as it should, there is cause for concern, here.

"We live in interesting times; in fact CCP is the kind of company that if things get repetitive we instinctively crank it up a notch. That, we certainly have done this week. First of we have Incarna, an amazing technological and artistic achievement. A vision from years ago realized to a point that no one could have imaged but a few months ago. It rolls out without a hitch, is in some cases faster than what we had before, this is the pinnacle of professional achievement. For all the noise in the channel we should all stand proud, years from now this is what people will remember.

But we have done more, not only have we redefined the production quality one can apply to virtual worlds with the beautiful Incarna but we have also defined what it really means to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life when it comes to launching our new virtual goods currency, Aurum.

Naturally, we have caught the attention of the world. Only a few weeks ago we revealed more information about DUST 514 and now we have done it again by committing to our core purpose as a company by redefining assumptions. After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles, generating more revenue than any of the other items in the store.

This we have done after months of research by a group of highly competent professionals, soliciting input and perspective from thought leaders and experts in and around our industry. We have communicated our intention here internally in very wide circles through the Virtual Economy Summit presentation at the GSM, our Fearless newsletter, sprint reviews, email lists and multiple other channels. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say. Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change.

We went out with a decisive strategy on pricing and we will stay the course and not flip flop around or knee jerk react to the predictable. That is not saying nothing will change, on the contrary, in fact we know that success in this space is through learning and adapting to _what is actually happening_ and new knowledge gained in addition to what we knew before and expected.

All that said, I couldn't be prouder of what we have accomplished as a company, changing the world is hard and we are doing it as so many times before! Stay the course, we have done this many times before."

Now, half of this is internal cheertalk and not worth commenting beyond calling it what it is: CCP has not "defined what it really means to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life", because 1) that sentence doesn't make any sense in any known language out of the Church of Scientology, and 2) if it did, they haven't.

Dual currency has been done, better before, and Hilmar's just trying to claim CCP invented drinking as they're launching a line of glassware.

Then there's the meat of the communication.

Where Hilmar is right: actions speak louder than words.

Users don't know what they want until they get it, they also don't know what's good for them half the time.

More often than not, polling is an exercise in self-deception as people lie or misinterpret the questions and what's expected of them, and (mis)react accordingly.

So yes, a threadnaught was to be expected, and yes, looking at sales figures in the NeX may tell a lot about how people really feel about the price point, and so would a close monitoring of actual cancellations of subs, to see how they match (or not) the public outrage expressed by EVE players.

Where Hilmar is wrong: this duck is crossing the road, with a flamethrower.

What's happening is not run'o'the mill stuff unfolding exactly as predicted by the "highly competent professionals, […] thought leaders and experts in and around our industry", in three different ways:

There have been a few twists since the battle plan was drawn, starting with the leakage of Fearless (which interestingly enough is not mentioned here), and, in alluring meta-fashion, in the release of this very email where Hilmar handwaves the issue.
Most so-called experts in the field are quacks. Seriously, anyone who claims they know what they're doing in this business is at least embellishing, or is too dumb to rely on.
There is no game on the market that compares to EVE from a business and social dynamics standpoint, making hardly transposable whatever expertise has been garnered in the field of tomato sauce consumer studies.

Whether Hilmar himself is suffering from severe confirmation bias or smoothtalking his readers is hard to tell, but when he dances a gig about selling 3 grand of virtual monocles in 40 hours, presumably expecting it to be only the beginning, or at least not the end, of the virtual items shop-a-looza, he's not so subtly circling the elephant in the room: how much customer goodwill CCP could be losing in this adventure.

Assuming more than 52 fools are willing to shell $60 for half a pair of virtual shades, or the same fools are repeat offenders, the launch sales are projecting into a whooping $ 56,160 monthly revenue for CCP, to put next to the roughly 6 million bucks brought home by subs every month.

It takes only 3744 accounts less to offset completely this profit, and that's not even starting to factor whatever resources were spent creating the shop and virtual goods on sale there, which can't have been cheap — we're talking about a company that burned 72,000 developers hours to fail at skinning an open source forum package.

So, will CCP lose three to four thousand subs to this debacle, and will monocles sales keep up or falter ?

My bet is yes, eventually, and neither: they'll plummet just a bit from 31 to about 2-ish a day (because someone will have both a fetish, role-play twins, an a gift to get podded daily).

And that's the core of the issue: the pleb outrage will subside after a while, replaced by apathy, but what will be lost for the long haul is yet-another chunk of customer loyalty, something which CCP doesn't seem to understand is (or was) EVE's single most valuable asset, especially at a time when they're trying to leverage the EVE brand, universe and mythos to gain traction for their next big thing.

What we're seeing right now is people up in arms because they feel betrayed by a company that Surprise! is in for the money after all, and sucks at hiding it, yet also because they fear this is only the beginning of a pay2win model which is heresy to the blood, sweat & tears mythos of EVE.

The suckers are only half wrong, in that the pay2win thing is a very real possibility (albeit more likely through incompetence than malice), while the heartbreak over CCP revealing themselves as greedy whores goes to show the reason people were happy to pay CCP's fees, once upon a time, rooted at least in part in the players' belief that CCP wasn't in 'just for the money'.

Coming back from this is gonna be tough, and worse the longer it takes to CCP to take the first step into the program.

***

Slight bump.

2011-06-25T20:00:00.001Z

Some stuff happened around the issue raised yesterday, and forced me to reconsider today's post.

Meanwhile, some people are getting a bit hissy about the whole mess.

Livecam from Jita protest (people took to shoot the Jita Memorial en masse as a way of shouting their discontent).

Greed is good, needy is bad.

2011-06-24T07:00:00.011Z

Hello all (three of you),

it's been a while, but this week's lineup of EVE things gone wrong is just too massive to let pass without comment.

First, there was the release of Incarna 1.0, soon followed by patches 1, 2 and 3 in as many days.

This went about as smoothly as any major patch does: extended-extended downtimes, black screens and melted graphic cards — business as usual, by CCP standards.

Things got a bit worse when people figured the conversion rates on vanity items in the new 'Noble' shop expected them to burn more cash on their avatars wardrobe than the average EVE player spends to cover his XXL meatspace self.
The most forgiving souls will want to believe somebody @CCP fubared a decimal separator… alas.

1 AUR = half a U$D cent, do the math.

My first response was to point'n'laugh, but for some reason, there was much outrage about that.

I came around shortly after my calendar informed me we were effectively not the first of April, at which point I had to acknowledge the obvious: CCP's marketing department is too far removed from Planet Reality to pick it with their onboard scanner, despite the recent changes.

Some of the hysteria at this stage became preciously ironic, considering it was expressed in large proportions by people who claimed they didn't care one bit for all the Incarna / barbie doll stuff, and therefore should not take issue with vanity items price gouging. Then again, it doesn't speak well of CCP's marketing acumen for them to run that far off the field.

So… I wasn't entirely surprised, although naturally a little worried this kind of crazy could eventually impact srs spaceship bzns, right before this little gem went viral.

Then CCP spent two days procrastinating in the face of a threadnaught before they sent Valerie 'Pann' Massey into the meatgrinder to (not even) answer… everything else about Incarna that people didn't care about anymore.

Where to start ?

How about a good glass of warm milk, for starters, because honestly it's kinda chilly for late June, and because "Fearless, Vol 1/2011" should be put in perspective.

It's a corporate publication, meant for internal consumption only, which can mean either of two things:

a) it's genuinely meant to encourage an open discussion inside CCP about microtransactions/payment and monetization of content ;

b) it's an internal PR attempt at selling employees to the idea that milking this cow through the eyes is perfectly alright, get over it.

While b) seems more likely (I'll show why in a minute), it certainly wasn't meant to be made public and read by the cow's tits or eyes, which could explain why the breaking of bad news lacked in bedside manners.

What's worrying here, is that the same brainiacs who came up with the pricing plan for Noble store articles are probably involved in some decisive capacity. I'll let that sink in for a minute…

Which brings me 10 seconds late to why b) above is more likely than a).

But first, a disclaimer:

DISCLAIMER: The views put forward in this magazine do not reflect general CCP company policies or decisions and are strictly individual opinions, written by CCPers or about CCPers who feel strongly about these issues. This is confidential internal information. Please respect that every company has its trade secrets and that you are privy to those at CCP.

And I'm not being sarcastic here, the fluff about 'not reflecting CCP's policies' should not be dismissed outright.

On the other hand, and still taken from page 1:

However, as a subscription based golden goose, EVE needs to incorporate the virtual goods sales model to allow for further revenue – revenue to fund our other titles, revenue for its developer: you. […]
So tell me what you think. As a CCPer, sharing an opinion is the least of your worries.

Yeah, I can't tell which it is, between poorly-worded encouragement and thinly veiled warning to dissenters. Maybe that's the answer: in classic CCP style they're boldly surging …in a random direction.

The main feature "What does CCP sell ?" is penned by none other than Kjartan Emilsson, one of the old-guard EVE wizards, whom I do personally regard as a fairly sharp guy, considering what I know of his part in the early concepts behind EVE design and some other stuff.

Also, for the record, I have no prevention against virtual goods sales and other alternative sources of revenue (done right), and thus was eager to read his take on the issue.

In fairness, it was a mixed bag.

The four introduction paragraphs are embarrassingly fuzzy, as he's sweating to establish CCP is in the business of selling content, yet not quite, since players are making the best content in a sandbox, but still, value is in CCP-created content, eventually and painfully making his way to the core point that our beautifully crafted content has value and we shouldn't give it away for free.

Follows a clever, if broken, analogy with golfing, where KPE argues how only half the average golfer's 3k $ budget goes to access fees, while the rest is spent on shoes, clubs and other trinkets.

The bullet points and conclusion are much less terribad, and worth quoting:

CCP is selling people experiences and identity
In this, we are in competition with people’s limited time for other experiences and identities
Consumerism can, up to a certain level, improve experience and strengthen identity, making us more competitive
Too much consumerism will ruin the experience (think tourist traps)
A balanced approach should acknowledge consumerism as a powerful game design tool (amongst others) that we need to get familiar with and that should be used carefully and with respect to create more enjoyable experiences and stronger identities for our players. If successful, this will result in their increased emotional attachment to our product and services for the benefit of all. If not, we run the risk of sucking our customers dry and leaving their shriveled corpses by the side of the road to the benefit of none.

Now, what to take from that, except for the fact KPE is a terrible salesman ?

First, the intended readership (aka CCPer) should infer that CCP is currently missing out on about 65 million USD yearly* just because some cavemen are unwilling to get on with the program.

Second, virtual goods and for-pay content are open for discussion, for a "how" and possibly "how much" value of discussion, but not "if".

Hint #1: Golf courses typically aren't where people shop for their golfing gear, which don't see much of that business.
Hint #2: chances are EVE players already burn close to the yearly per capita $ 360 you seemingly hope to milk them for, just keeping up with hardware requirements for their gaming rig ; whether they're ready to up their budget 50% is highly debatable.

In short, I believe virtual goods sales should be part of the EVE business equation, and I'm confident CCP is on its way to prove :awesome: at botching it, possibly to the extent of killing the proverbial golden goose.

Why ?

The three-feet-long ant problem.

MMOs are freakishly expensive to operate and costs scale up to revenue roughly like volume to surface, going cubic for every square, so every venue of profit that isn't hurting the core of the business is good news.

CCP is in a slightly better than average position with EVE being a sandbox, as the content burn rate (and associated production costs) is not as huge a problem here than in theme park games, but they face other challenges because CCP can't scale up subscribers count (and revenue) by simply throwing more shards at the problem: coding for more players in a 'seamless' single server environment gets exponentially tricky as it grows, and every mistake carries the potential for epic disasters, driving costs up.

The toll booth problem.

Getting people to pay for MMOs is getting more complicated by the minute, and CCP knows it.

As KPE points out, EVE is in competition not just for $$, but primarily for time and attention with a variety of other experiences. The contenders for attention range from watching porn on youtube (seemingly free) to playing golf (seriously fringe for fat nerds), but include other, possibly F2P online games, some of which are freakishly accessible, such as the latest generation of 'client less' in-browser games.

20 bucks for a 15 bucks bottle ?

Classic MMOs such as EVE face a price point problem: the established price tag for subscription MMOs has been stuck around $ 15 for a decade, and upping that will make any marketing drone shriek in horror, shit his pants, and shriek some more.

Many MMOs partly worked around the issue by billing people for massive releases of new content with for-pay expansions, but you can only force the idiots to pay sizeable amounts of money for fun every so often (by making them feel inadequate) before they figure out the kind of dirty whore of a girlfriend you are, and break up with you altogether.

As a result, more and more MMOs are now flirting more or less openly with microtransactions, virtual goods sales and for-pay content.

'spare a copper ?

The issue then becomes, where to find more money ?

Despite what the massively crass Scott Holden seems to believe (see P.8), some players do value the notion that they have something special going on with EVE, and she's not just a two-bit whore trying to milk them for every penny they got, while they also recognize a girl needs to make a living, and are willing to help her out, out of love.

For most of EVE's history, CCP has gone out of its way to position their game as a labor of love undertaken by a passion-fueled company, and it has informed business decisions such as never billing for expansions, which has proven to be a strong selling and PR point, and something the players are both well aware of and grateful for.

Starting now would be a mistake, not just because EVE players haven't been groomed for that, but because it could lead to a lot of embarrassment for CCP, depending on how many among existing players would opt to shell 10 or 25 $ for the typical expansion content.

Hold a sec, while I wipe the drink I just sneezed all over myself at the thought of shelling RL$ for Captain Quarters or 'new turrets'.

All better, let's move on.

Trading an old one for two of half the age.

From CCP's perspective there are only so many ways to make more money from EVE, and the history between EVE and its playerbase seems to cockblock most venues.

How I suspect CCP is about to run their boat ashore in explosive fashion is by attempting to solve what they increasingly seem to perceive at the root of all ebil: their installed player base.

Which puts them in the paradoxical state of both lacking imagination and living in fantasyland.

Simply put, EVE is an old, cranky and capricious mistress, but that's something its existing users are willing to cope with because she does really weird and kinky stuff they happen to be into.

Slapping lots of makeup on her and tying her to the bed won't fool anyone new into paying for a lay, it will just make CCP an old-person's molester and get everybody to leave in disgust before the cops arrive.

Want to make more money off the franchise with a slew of new johns ? Dust is the way to go: leverage the EVE mythos with a new demographic, in a decidedly different experience, with another business model, but don't abuse the old maid, because she's the iconic goddess of your cult, you dumb arses.

But then, what of EVE ?

Assuming CCP isn't dumb enough to ignore the value of EVE as a PR/mythos generator, they'll want to keep EVE in business, growing at its own pace, and make it the flagship and endgame for all their products set in the same universe.

Dust has the potential to be a great cash cow, and having EVE around to provide both context and a second career for experienced Dust players would be great.

Planetary-based industry offers room to develop tycoon style games, and once EVE players start ferrying Dust players across space, the bridge will be thrown between planet-bound and space borne dimensions. Ship/POS/outpost commandeering and asteroid colonization are the next logical step to bind both sides of the gameplay together in the 'ultimate sci-fi experience'.

As for EVE Online, the game: yes, there is way to make more money off it, and yes, virtual goods sales and for-pay content can play a part in it, but CCP is going about it the wrong way.

Because I'm nice like that, I'll tell you how in tomorrow's episode.

***

* [Back of the envelope: 360k paying subs averaging $15/m add up to $ 64,800,000 in yearly access fees, implicitly half of what EVErs would be expected to be willing to shell for their hobby if the golfing metaphor was apt.]

New tires.

2011-04-15T13:25:00.001Z

Went faster than I expected, and nothing blew in my face.
Feel free to trash the new look in comments and let me know if you find broken stuff I may have missed.

Side note: I couldn't figure how to make the new, blogger-provided template scale gracefully in width (ie use % instead of pixel width for the main gadget), please let me know if you have a tip for that.

Changing tires.

2011-04-15T12:10:00.002Z

Redoing the layout/template to take advantage of a few new features of blogger/blogspot.

Expect the site to be a tad messy for the next couple hours.

No apologies, it should be for the better, eventually.

Lucky me…

2011-04-12T14:37:00.006Z

…I'm sitting poolside, next to the sea, enjoying a good coffee on the terrace.

Oh, and also: I barely ever use EVE-O boards, thanks to the goodness that is eve-search.

That doesn't make what happened with the new forum any less wrong, mind you — so much so that the words are failing me, but not this guy, so go there for a very good expose on the very bad things that CCP did to itself and its community, this time around.

Here's CCP early public response, which is not bad, considering. Timely, yet dev blog only: apparently not news headlines worthy.

Then the news iteration, downplaying that trainwreck as a standard issue:

"We're experiencing technical difficulties, please hold."

And take two of the same, this time reluctantly acknowledging the elephant-sized cat out of the bag…

Then the inevitable very sad dev blog, dripping of the knee-jerk induced cold sweats we've come to expect from CCP in such situations, mixing signals, downplaying the actual threat, excusing massive failure under the "that's a good lesson for the future, I'm sure" umbrella, and attempting to both cajole and threaten the user base into sitting tight and holding hands while shit rains across their collective face.

To be fair, I'm not unsympathetic to CCP's situation, here: industrial accidents happens anywhere.

Still, this one this one is especially egregious and embarrassing, reeks of olympic levels in carelessness and incompetence, and shines a very gloomy light on the apparent change of course from Committing to Excellence (by standards you plebeians can't relate to) and toward Committing to Deliver (regardless of condition).

If it wasn't for the half-assed attempt at blame-the-victim tactics, believe it or not, I'd actually been cool with their handling of the crisis — although obviously not with the meat of the issue: shipping without fixing critical faults that had been reported during testing.

In other news, Incursion 1.4.2 just in, and so is the "Hey, it's we, the CSM6" introductory letter — I'll get back to this last bit, it sounds like fun.

--

Update: Kudos to CCP Sreegs for his awesome* tenacity in the dev blog comments threadnaught.

[*No sarcasm, for once.]

What's in a ballot ?

2011-03-11T05:27:00.009Z

The booths are open, and as usual, half the debate surrounding the election process is about the very purpose and usefulness of the CSM, and mainly the following two questions:

What can a CSM delegate (or the CSM as a whole) hope to achieve, really ?
What (if anything) will CCP listen to ?

The CSM as an entity has been growing older and wiser, starting with CSM 3, and quite a few among this year candidates already have some first hand experience of the process, as full members or alternates in previous councils, or as ex-CCP employees now running as 'simple' denizens.

Most of these seem in agreement about at least one thing: "Be realistic, people !", and they make a case for both voters and prospective delegates to be lucid about what to expect from the CCP/CSM tandem.
…convincingly so, for any hope roused by earnest (or manipulative) candidates during campaign will turn to tears and disappointment upon meeting CCP's :awesomeness: in the flesh.

Of course, this seems like a self-serving argument from those who can claim some prior experience, maybe an attempt to discourage new blood and fresh faces from joining the party, but I reckon it goes beyond that.

Even current delegates who don't seek re-election and confess their personal mixed feelings about the whole process argue for a sanity check.

The facts of life about the CSM go like this:

CSM members are not consultants/guests game designers.

No matter how bad anyone would want it, or delude themselves in believing, CCP expects the CSM to act as a relay to the player-base, a sounding board, a focus group, a marketing gadget, but certainly not peers or by any stretch of imagination the stakeholders they're advertised to be.

CSM delegates who fail to wisen up to this reality will squander their energy and the trust of whoever voted them in trying to achieve something they can't.

CCP is CCP.

…and has many faces.

Some among the devs welcome the input from the players in principle, and the CSM's especially, as it is a more civilized, constructive way to have a sit down with users than the usual brouhaha of the forums.

And then there's the rest, who see the CSM as a curse cast upon them by some PR demon, who trust the whole thing to be nothing but an act, and will begrudgingly waste a few hours of their time every other month making nice with the delegates of the pleb they not-so-secretly despise.

People who wing it oftentimes aren't so comfortable with being called on their shortcomings, which is unfortunate for the CCP-CSM relationship, considering CCP tends to ride without a map, fueled only by beer and :awesomess: while the CSM is typically not in the bring-good-news business.

Short of killing the whole thing however, CCP will have to get smart about this, because the CSM is not waiting on them, and gains political weight with every cycle.

Either CCP finds a way to make productive use of the CSM by embracing the monster they've created, or it could end up biting them hard enough to cause serious bleeding, both on the PR front and internally.

With that said…

If you don't know who to vote for this year, here are my suggestions (in alphabetical order):

Alexander Gianturco, a.k.a Mittens.
Goonswarm spymaster, retired lawyer and all-around weasel. If anyone can metagame CCP into ~~self-destruction~~ doing right by the players, he's your best bet — assuming he can put make the player-base interests his own.
Will be good fun to watch if, as is his stated goal for the election, he manages to grab chairmanship of the 6th CSM.

Iain Compton, a.k.a Helen Highwater.
He's so perfect for the job that the only reason CCP didn't hire him yet is because they feel queasy and inadequate around him — also possibly because he knows he wouldn't have half as much fun if he was working for them compared to being a free agent as CSM delegate.
Iain was on CSM 4 and 5 as an (active) alternate where by all acounts he did a pretty good job, and he doesn't look like he's running for CSM as way to land a job in Reykjavik (see above).

Mark Heard, a.k.a Seleene.
(In)famous for his past as leader of Mercenary Coalition (in game), and as CCP Abathur (out of game), Mark is a veteran of all things EVE on a grand scale.
Although he suffers from an adorable crush on himself, he's been through enough to have a fairly good sense of what he can get away with in a position of CSM delegate, and he's on a first-name basis with most of the playas in Team Awesome, which can be decisive when playing in CCP's frat-house.
Also, Mark and Mittens on the same team, comedy gold.

Robert Woodhead, a.k.a Trebor Daehdoow.
Suffice to say the guy fathered Wizardry and builds combat bots in his spare time, but in case that wasn't enough, he's proven himself through CSM 5 by picking battles he knew were worth the effort, and — as importantly — he figured the CSM could win.
He's got the just the right amount of crazy and speaks the voice of reason. Also he's old enough to impose some measure of respect to the other nerds.

Stephan Pirson a.k.a Meissa Anunthiel.
Stephan brings the longest CSM experience of the lot to the table with 4 terms behind him. Smart, knowledgeable and even tempered. Despite a stupid tolkienish character name, he could act as a voice of moderation amidst the highest-voltage types in CSM 6.

If none of the above does it for you, if you still believe you should pick your candidate based on their announced pet issues with EVE, or just for the hell of it, may I suggest you go check Dierdra's ever useful Vote Match site.

As for me ? I more or less evenly split the two-dozen-or-so votes at my disposal between the 5 above candidates, so if you feel lazy, here are their names again, with direct links to their respective voting pages.

[Meta]

If you have lapsed accounts, you can take advantage of the 5 free days reactivation offer to get back in just long enough to vote.
Intentional ? Surely not, but I'm all in favor of bitter vets stuffing the boxes.

[/Meta]

CSM, the out of pod experience.

2011-02-11T11:00:00.081Z

As mentioned yesterday, I don't like much that the CSM members have to divulge their meatspace ID to the whole intarwebs, starting with the rabid EVE fanbase.

My argument is simple, CSM is not a job, you get in the seat on a part-time, extracurricular basis, and on the merits of your in-game persona (in the loosest meaning of in-game, including OOC/meta stuff, obviously).
Furthermore, nobody expects you to shed your in-game affiliations for the duration of your CSM mandate (contrary to what CCP employees are supposed to do).

In short, you're elected as a player and mainly for who you are in (and around) the game.

Thus, I don't see any benefits for the community or for the election process in divulging the CSM candidates/members out of game ID to the general public, and since the potential for trouble is obvious, it is a no-brainer that it should be up to the individual CSM delegates to decide whether they feel comfortable getting out of the closet in that way.

Some may object that the CSM role is a public one, and it is likely that any CSM delegate's face (and other body parts) could end up plastered across the intarwebs as a result of partaking in meetings, fanfest events and other photo shoots or alcohol-fueled embarrassing tapes.

Maybe so, but then again, if all there is to tie to these images is a spacenerd nickname, and one is not a public figure in his/her non-EVE activities, the odds are pretty good some separation can be maintained (if one chooses to).

CCP will still know who CSM delegates are, on account of their filling the plane and hotel tickets reservations, and they can therefore ensure nobody is entering under three different nicknames into the election.

As far as I can tell, the current rule only prevents people who are mildly wary of being stalked and harassed by mouthbreathers over in-game grudges from running for CSM, with no discernable upside for CCP, the CSM delegates or the community at large.

Am I missing something obvious ?

CSM 6 race: ze application period, it is now !

2011-02-10T11:00:00.005Z

It's that time of the year.

In the previous elections, I've more or less vocally endorsed a shortlist of candidates, among those who seemed to me like they both had a decent shot at getting elected, and at making a positive contribution, were they to be, but this year I've also toyed with the idea of running for a CSM seat myself, after a friend suggested I put my posterior where my mouth is, instead of the usual converse.

Some of the CSM application rules are giving me pause, however:

The requirements to be able to run as a candidate in the CSM6 elections are as follows:
You must have an active EVE Online account that is older than 30 days.
You must be aged 21 years or older as of April 6, 2011.
You must provide your address and an e-mail address where you can be reached, which will not be made public.
You must provide a scan or reasonable quality photograph of a valid passport to verify your identity and that you can travel internationally to the CCP HQ in Reykjavik, Iceland.
You must be willing and able to sign a non-disclosure agreement with CCP as the CSM are very often provided with information that is not for public release.

So far, so good, but there's more…

You must be willing for your real name and country of residence to be made public alongside your character name on the EVE Online website. Other personal details required for candidacy will not be made public.
You must provide a campaign message stating your reasons for running, in no more than 200 words.
You must have up to date and accurate account ownership information on all of your EVE Online accounts.

Summing up my reasons for running in less than 200 words is a bit tricky, but I can manage… as for the other two ?

Is it worth the trouble of exposing my meatspace ID to the ~~spacetards~~ constituency ? I happen to like my privacy and, no disrespect to those who ran for CSM thus far, but the user base of EVE is not the most well-adjusted crowd I've met in my life, to which I'm not sure I want to expose my family.

Of note: many a CCP employee seem to agree with me on this, and they are allowed to stick to their CCP handle and not put out their TrueName™ out there for all the interweb crazies.

Up to date and accurate account ownership information on all of your EVE Online accounts… boy, I do I want to go there ?

Let's, for the lulz:

I've been keeping accounts alive for friends, managing corporate drones herds, and generally playing fast and loose with the no-account-sharing part of the EULA from roughly day 20 of my stay in New Eden. …but then again, so have most of the CSM past and present to the best of my knowledge (which amounts to 100% certainty about several of them), so I shouldn't care, right ?

So it's a case of starting off the wrong foot, and lie through my teeth, or boldly put myself out there as an ebil EULA defiler.

I don't like these odds.

So this year, I'm going to offer suggestions about the best and worst candidates I can see on the ballot, and add to my lobby-your-CSM grocery list a suggestion to change the CSM election rules about ID divulgation by next session.

Woot, I have my next two posts cut out for me.

EVE Online: What are your reasons?

2011-01-31T11:19:00.015Z

I received a bunch of these recently, shortly after I celebrated the recent release of Incursion by letting another couple accounts lapse:

Dear Anonymous Coward,

We've noticed your account has not been active lately. If you stopped playing, we would like to learn what were your reasons for leaving. Please take this survey to help us to improve our service. It will take approximately 5 minutes to complete.

Your participation in this survey is completely voluntary, however, we'd be grateful if you could give us your feedback.

Your survey responses will remain confidential and data from this research will be reported only in the aggregate. If you have questions at any time about the survey, you may contact the research team at the email address survey@eveonline.com.

Thank you very much for your time and support. And you are always welcome back.

Please Start the survey now.
CCP Research Team

Because I'm a peach, I took the survey, if only to copy-paste here what I wrote over there.

[I'll spare you the rest of the MCQ, I equally distributed the votes of the various accounts for which I received the exit survey email across the the highlighted selections below.]

Please choose the option that best fits your reason for leaving:

[Man, do I wish you could choose more than one and weight your answers, there, but the wording and selection of choices offered will tell you a lot about the purpose and usefulness of this quizz, already.]

Lost a ship
Player harassment
Game imbalance
Lag
Lack of content
EVE client is not available in my language
Lack of goals within the game
Last patch
The game is too difficult
Slow character advancement
Tired of the game
Other, please specify: CCP is an army of headless poultry ?

Please provide more information on your reason for leaving:

I'm an old fart player, tried everything but mining and Planetary interaction.

The only interesting part remaining for me was 0.0 politics and PvP, from which everything else (industry, empire noobie training, you name it) drew purpose — but no more.

Unfortunately, Dominion and beyond changed the sovereignty rules and the cost/benefits of holding space in 0.0 for the worst (and that's saying something considering how bad POS warfare used to be).

Holding space is now a meaningless, losing proposition unless you already are in so large an entity that you can't contemplate forgoing your painfully acquired sovereign space.
Meanwhile the changes to territorial warfare mechanics have reinforced the long established trend of blob-trumps-all, showing that either CCP doesn't understand how their own game plays out, or they're happy bullshitting about "giving a fair shake to the small guy" while enacting changes that foster the exact opposite — neither of which is really reassuring about what's to come next.

NPC incursions look cute, but I did not get into to EVE to bash mobs: I want to play EVE with (and against) actual players, and see smarts, teamwork and (player)skills matter more than blob size and oober gear.

So, there…what about you ?

New expansion: Granularity !

2011-01-31T10:05:00.006Z

Good news, for a change, API keys overhaul.
This has been a long pet peeve of mine, and I wrote a bunch of stuff in the past, mostly on other venues, and never got around to populate the stub for it on this blog, dating back to Oct '08, because there was so much to rant about at the time I lost track of this particular item.

Anyhow, the changes look good and, together with the other recent reworks, clearly show that CCP finally gets how much players care about better usability and user control over information services in and around EVE.

A summary of promising (some of it already delivering somewhat) stuff:

EVEgate is looking good.

(much, much) better evemail that is actually useful.
Next logical step would be imap, which I don't see happening, unfortunately, but expect some community made API gadget to fill the gap soon enough, to enable at least evemail => realmail forwarding.

Calendar is promising, too, and I can see how over time (once the contracts system is properly redone), it could eventually enable player-created missions. As for mail, one can only hope to see the thing tied through API gadgets with more popular third-party calendars, such as Google/iCal/yfoc.

EVE Voice in EVEgate: Woot woot !

This is a big one, obviously.
Ever since EVE voice got added to the game (back in 2006), its adoption by the players has been hindered by a fatal flaw in its implementation: it's integrated into the EVE client.

Integrated voice/fleet management is sweet, and comes with lots of side benefits, but none of it is worth the price of losing your voice comms at the worst possible time (ie: during a client lockup/crash/disco), so anyone using voice comms anything mission critical in the srs bzns of interweb spaceships is sticking to TS or Ventrilo or iChat conference call… anything but EVE voice.

Now, if Vivox is running in your browser, and you still get the benefits of seamless user/channel management in-game (via the fleet interface)…

Generally speaking, the last crop of tools is already a tremendous improvement, especially for small corps/alliances that don't have their own IT department to manage private forum/TS/calendar, etc.

This was a warm and fuzzy-feeling only post, so I'll wrap this one up, and return to the normal rant program in our next installment: EVE Online: What are your reasons?

No promises, but…

2010-09-01T17:48:00.013Z

I am back in net-friendly parts of the world, presumably for a while, with a reasonably roaring computer at hand, and presumably a bit of time and inclination to look at games again.

What does it mean for EVEisBroken, then ?

Although my interest in EVE as a player is not exactly peaking, it remains a one-of-a-kind animal in the MMO* market to date, and worth some time and attention, if only to learn from the spectacle of CCP's fumbling around.

Of note, the recent boon of very much worth reading DevBlogs, a tad on the technical side, which are encouraging.

Now if only they'd figure how to put the same energy in game design proper, I may have to rename this blog, but I don't see any tells of that happening anytime soon.

Still…

Err…

2010-04-01T11:00:00.000Z

[I was drunk earlier, and now I'm at a Takeshi Kitano expo, don't wait on me.]

***

Wish granted !

2010-03-31T11:00:00.005Z

…almost.

Just two days ago, I posted about what changes I thought the insurance system could benefit from, and here's what CCP released yesterday.

I, for once, can't complain: most of the changes outlined there seem healthy and sound, and largely match what I had in mind after a bit of pondering on the ISK and minerals in, outs and distribution relative to insurance and loot reprocessing.

The changes on loot reprocessability and distribution as well as the drone alloys recipes balancing, I can certainly endorse. Increasing the mineral self-sufficiency of drone regions especially is in tune with this part of the map intended design and will not adversely affect the empire-bourne mineral market, although making the other 0.0 regions more self-sufficient on low-end minerals may be more of a mixed bag, yet not a bad move overall.

To be entirely fair, CCP is apparently committed to reach way beyond my expectations by including market value of materials even for T2 and T3 ships, which supposes they actually intend to write a new, all-encompassing insurance system — as opposed to merely tweak and hack onto the existing mechanics.

If they do it and don't get sidetracked: kudos.

A bit of a mystery to me is why CCP seems so shy to approach the issue of self-destruction and suicide ganks/Concordokkage… although I'm fine with suicide attacks remaining a viable tactic, I wouldn't expect my insurance to ever cover me ramming on purpose into a schoolbus with my moped.

Checking the horse's dental work…

One thing I'm a bit more ambivalent, however, is the idea of weighting insurance payouts by the life expectancy of a ship's class. I can see the reasoning, and from a 'gamey' standpoint, it may seem sensible, but it's also totally nonsensical in the context of simulating an insurance system: no company in their right mind will ever consider giving their better payout on stuff that is most likely to go boom, unless the premiums are raised in proportion.

A more sensible approach, in my opinion, could be to reduce the cost of Kleenex-class boats at the production recipe level.

Provided the insurance premiums and payouts are indeed marked on materials value, making cheap boats cheaper, yet with a poor insurance payout, achieves the same results from a player perspective in terms of usability, and isn't likely to imbalance the mineral or material market by much, although it would decrease the per-unit profitability of some ships.

This could possibly be balanced by cutting a bit (2/3 of the materials reduction should do) on the base production time for said boats at the blueprint level.

Why, oh why, do you ask ?

Assuming I read correctly into CCP's intentions, the general goal here is to phase out insurance from its current unwanted role of an artificial floor for minerals/materials prices (which marking insurance premiums and payouts should achieve neatly), without sending the mineral prices into a plummet fall (which is what would happen, were loot reprocessing to remain the major source of minerals that trumps mining low end ores).

With that in mind, cutting on the material needs for the shorter-lived, die-a-lot ship classes would make the hulls themselves less expensive without devaluation of their materials' unitary price.

So what ?

Among my last post's suggestions, one is not to be found in this devblog, and that's the idea of increasing premiums (or diminishing payouts) based on a pilot's track record in terms of losing ships — I can see how this reform could prove unpopular, but bear with me for a minute, please.

Another angle, which I suggested in my original post would be to cut on the length of insurance policies: the most likely the ship class to die young, the shorter the policy.

Make the insurance on a tackler last 2 weeks, a T1 BS last 4, and cut the premiums roughly in proportion, with the premium cost for that ship type adjusting up or down with every death or policy renewal that passes by without losing the boat, repsectively.

Starting at 100% payout (market adjusted) for a given T1 ship type, each loss would hit your premium and increase it, while each term passed without loss would bring your premium down by a few % (with a bottom, ofc).

Pilots who die a lot in cheap ships typically keep replacements fitted and ready to roll in order to get back in battle quickly after a loss. Assuming all these boats are insured, the spares would contribute to keep the premium price in check until they're used, while encouraging pilots to have more disposable ships ready, which encourages impulsive returns to the battlefield after a spanking, hence more pew-pew, hence more bizness for shipmakers and miners.

…and I still like the idea of making part of a killed ship minerals salvageable in the form of reprocessable debris: although it would typically benefit whoever holds the field at the end of a battle, it would also encourage the victors to linger a bit after the fight, in order to grab all those mins, thus giving the spankees a chance to come back for more.

What did I miss ?

***

Rest insured, dear players…

2010-03-29T11:00:00.003Z

…wow, that was a nasty one ! Let's move on, quick.

There has been a bit of excitement lately about a possible insurance tweak/nerf to come (maybe), and while I didn't bother go and check for myself on SiSi, it's not hard to believe and agree with this guy when he claims to be appalled.

"I ran the numbers on this, and I must say I am appalled. Instead of refining the insurance formula, they simply reduced the base price of the ships by 31.7%. The net insurance rates are identical."

…told you he was — appalled.

Insurance has been a bone of contention for a while, and more so since CCP went out of its way to progressively phase out the sale of reprocess-able goods by NPC corporations.

Like almost everybody in EVE, I have an opinion on the matter, and you won't be surprised to find out I think insurance is broken.

State-endorsed civilian sociopaths ?

From a RP standpoint, the notion of a unique, worldwide insurance company seemingly running at a loss seriously lacks a justification in the pretend-Objectivist, dog-eats-dog setting of New Eden. Beyond RP, insurance Base Prices, computed from NPC Mineral Values constitute an artificial price-fixing device for minerals, which gets in the way of the much-hyped player-driven, hardcore capitalistic model of EVE's universe.

More importantly, the ability to repeatedly abuse insurance to lose ships at little or no cost in kamikaze attacks (regardless of high or lowsec) seems ludicrous and detracts from the tactical depth of the game - waging war and losing ships should always be expensive, if not prohibitively so.

I'm well-aware insurance typically covers only a fraction of a total ship's worth, once fitting and rigs are accounted for: most PvP kits and almost all PvE fittings pack way more ISK value in modules than in hull, with the notable exception of some fleet capitals and battleships, but speaking of ISK worth…

Isn't currency getting in the way ?

One interesting trait of insurance payouts is how they constitute the only entirely risk-free PvE ISK extracting source in EVE — making ISK usually involves exchanging with other players who have it, as the only direct sources of ISK from the CCP bank are NPC rewards (bounties, NPC trade or missions).

Even while mining roids, hauling trade goods, or running lowbie missions in high sec, there's a chance to get attacked by NPC or players and lose a ship, but what is losing his ship within docking range of a station to a pilot who undocked for the sole purpose of self-destructing ?

In extreme cases, self-destructing is the ATM of forlorn 0.0: need a few dozen millions real quick an no juicy NPC or player to ransom or scam in sight ? Just undock and crash a spare BS on the station's hull, and presto ! You got ca$h !

Play on less-easy mode ? 

From a broader view, PvE resource distribution is in serious need of an overhaul, but just for starters, in the narrow perspective of insurance:

Reduce the duration of insurance policies to 4 weeks, divide the cost of premiums by as much.
Make insurance premiums payment a regular, auto-payable bill.
Add a steep incremental % penalty on premiums for frequent-crashers (with a decay, ofc).
Deny or halve insurance payoff in the event of self-destruction or Concord-kills.
Make wrecks salvageable for 10% to 50% of the original materials of the ship (random)*.
Remove meta 0 drops from tables, nerf reprocessing yield/recipes on Meta 1+ (except T2-3).
Adjust Base Prices for the purposes of premiums and payoffs calculations every day during dt for the next 23h, based on NPC Mineral Values (see below).
Compute daily NPC Mineral Values on the universe-wide market history for this mineral/material, based on actual transactions average for the last 4 weeks.
Remove (or nerf by half) NPC insurance on capitals.

[* just make the salvaged debris bulky enough not to offer more than 1/20 compression ratio over raw minerals.]

Sounds harsh ?

Well, it should be: those who currently benefit most from the insurance nanny-state are the internet tough men, so let'em suck it up, and watch the market sort out the worthy from the meek. ;)

Seriously though, player-driven insurance is not only possible, it's already there, more or less: many corps and alliances have (in)formal replacement programs in place for ships lost during wars or corp ops.
Taking the training wheels off is a chance for corps and new businesses to step up: EVE has player-driven banks precisely because CCP doesn't provide NPC ones, and look at all the cool drama they've supplied us with over the years…

I can't wait to see player-operated insurance companies.

***

Back

2010-03-28T09:51:00.001Z

-ish.

I'm finally back in broadband-friendly parts of the world, with some spare time on my hands, and I hear rumors that could get me to care a wee bit about EVE again, notably:

CCP is slowly realizing how fucked up Dominion sovereignty system is,
Mark/Abathur/Seleene is no longer in charge of making things worse in 0.0,
a do-over of sovereignty, roles and other niceties is a not-so-distant possibility,
CSM seems to be growing in influence, at least in the "get your head out of your arse alert" department.

…expect new ramblings sooner than SOON™.

Interruption of service.

2009-12-23T19:33:00.003Z

For reasons that may not be entirely mysterious to the three of you familiar with my current locale, my internet access is fubar in extreme proportions these days.

This is mostly due to the local power grid being out of whack to such a point that continuity of power supply to telco routers in town can no longer be taken for granted… to give you an idea, our house is rigged tri-phased (aussie-style), and thus the nominal entry voltage at the meter (for everything to work smoothly) is expected to hover around 400v, while anything below 350v at the meter will prompt the whines of the UPSes in the office.

Right now, I get circa 320v at the meter, and rarely above 330v at any time close to local peak-consumption hours — it ain't good enuff for anything except laptops, which can somewhat surf this light air.

The laser printer/copier is useless, and so are the desktop computers unless you want to run them without a backup UPS (bad, bad idea). Even the wireless router/modem fails to milk enough juice from the wall socket to stay alive when the grid power is so low, thus our only hope is the diesel generator… which happens to have gone tits up every other day for the past month (replacement underway, but etatbd).

To sum up: an average of 3 power outages a day, at non-predictable hours, each lasting 2 to 5 hours (averaging 3h), sub-standard juice when the grid is not down, plus dead-ish generator translate in me being offline most of the time, which means no EVE-ing of the in-game sort, and by association, a much decreased interest in EVE Offline™, too.

I'm still toying around with some new content for 'EVE is broken', but at back burner intensity, so don't hold your breath: it may last up to two months before I regain access to reliable inet.

Tomorrow is Xmas, luckily the oven and stoves here are gas-powered all, so we're looking at a feast, even if it's by candlelight: enjoy yours, too, if you're into that sort of thing.

DevBlog #722 — Xmas Gift

2009-12-16T11:00:00.001Z

New Dev Blog , about this season's gift: the Zephyr.

Normally I wouldn't post about the yearly holiday gift, but I'm making an exception because: a) this one is actually a cool gift as it has in-game purpose, which makes it both a collectible and a nice (eventually) rare in one's inventory ; b) it does look like almost like an actual spaceship could/would which is a nice surprise in itself ; and c) because I'm still working in the background and I really don't have much handy to fill this downtime.

The Zephyr does look so totally cool, it's not in the item db yet.

So, make sure to at least pretend to log in once on each account, sometime from December 18th to no later than January 6th, hit the Redeem Items button on the character selection screen (seriously, you don't even need to actually get in game), select which toon on the account you want to gratify with this goodie, et voila: your character of choice is now the proud owner of a NPC-invisible wormhole probe-ship (unless it's bugged, in which case you still got yourself a cool looking vanity frigate).

Trainwreckspotting.

2009-12-14T16:16:00.000Z

Updates have been few and far between the past few days, sorry about that: I'm working on a couple series, tidying up and putting things together in a less rambling format than the recent large ones.

Meanwhile, CCP is releasing patch 0.3 for Dominion, which apparently doesn't include fixes for the SBU glitch:

Due to an issue making outposts and infrastructure hubs vulnerable to attack without the attacker having adequate SBU units it is considered an exploit to attack if you do not have enough SBU units in the system, please see this forum thread for more information.

I don't really feel like going 'I told you so' about the current sovereignty mechanics woes, because predicting Dominion sov would be a mess deserves about as much credit as foreseeing the coming of night after dusk. …besides, there isn't much to observe just yet about the impact of this new design on the map: whatever effects we see so far result from the combo of bugs and post-expansion fever you'd expect of any rushed release, thus Dominion as a ruleset can't be fairly judged on track record for now.

Capital Ship Maintenance Bays

2009-12-12T11:00:00.005Z

[Editor's note: I'm back after a few days off, sorry about the lack of advance notice, RL happens.]

***

As previously mentioned in the entry about supercapitals overhaul, and in the Canned Heroes series, one of the limiting factors to the adoption and use of (super)capitals as ship-carriers is how unwieldy Ship Maintenance Bays (SMB) are. This is also true of POS-bound Ship Maintenance Arrays (SMA), which suffer from most of the same restrictions.

What I'd like to propose here is rather simple: treat SMB and SMA much like stations' ship hangars, and whenever applicable, make the same features and services available.

Here's what one could expect to find in a SMB/SMA:

Ability to park one's ship as-is, with all cargo, and secure it: within the limits of the bay/array capacity.
Ability to board/debark: while inside the bay/array.
Ability to fit/unfit: likewise, from within the bay/array.
Ability to load/unload ships: that's cargo, ammo, fuel, drones, whatever — without having to launch first.
Ability to unpack/pack ships: seriously…

***

Ability to park one's ship as-is: …and secure it.

Because there are no personal hangars in Capital ships and POSes, the ability to lockdown a parked ship for the benefit of its owner should be added. Ownership of a ship should be conserved after docking in a bay/array, and the owner of the ship and/or the installation should have the option to edit the boat ownership and lockdown status, thus restricting who is allowed to board and take/launch/repack this vessel (by right-click menu). [More on Ownership is avaialble in the Commandeering series.]

The other big-item issue is that all of a ship's cargo should be allowed to remain aboard while parking, within the limits of the bay/array capacity.

In order to prevent abuse of Carriers' ship maintenance bays and their exploitation as a jump freighter alternative, and possibly to reduce the stress on the server/client caused by nested containers, it is currently not possible to park a ship inside a SMB with anything but ammo and (I believe) a limited selection of goods types such as ice products, but certainly not while carrying cargo containers.

The fact is, cargo cans are critical to many ship types and roles, as a way to segregate cargo, stash more stuff, or make supplies available to other players by jettisoning or anchoring the cans in space.

The ability to keep ships at the ready, available to jump into action right after boarding is a defining quality of a military-grade carrier vessel, which is exactly what Carriers and Supercaps are meant to be — it should not be dispensed with lightly.

Solution A: Nerf cargo containers.
…adjusting the capacity and external size of ships if needed.
Cargo cans grant a 20% capacity bonus, except for giant cans that give a 30% extra carry hold: blanket-boost the cargo capacity (and unpacked size) of all ships whose capacity is currently less than 2000 cubics (with relevant skills at lvl4) by 20%, and all transports ships by 30%, while removing the capacity bonus on cargo cans (don't bother 'fixing' those presently in game and full, they can stay overfilled until stuff is taken out, this doesn't confer any significant lasting advantage).
[Caveat: Pilots skills can greatly affect a ship capacity, especially a hauler or barge, potentially turning it into a Tardis — much bigger on the inside than outside. Hence solution B below should be preferred, barring technical showstoppers.]
Solution B: Compute the total volume taken by a ship inside a SMB/SMA based on its cargo load.
…without changing the cargo containers capacity bonus: attach a new attribute to ships that sums up their total cargo load volume, including what's inside cans (but not the cans themselves) then subtract the cargo bay capacity. If the result is positive, add it to the ship's nominal unpacked volume to resolve how much space it will really take inside the bay/array when parked. [Note: For that purpose, using the ship's base cargo capacity and ignoring the pilot skills (but not rigs/expanders) is perfectly alright in my book.]

As for other cargo types, they should all be allowed to safely rest inside a ship's cargo bay while she's parked in a SMB/SMA. Using the Solution B proposed above would prevent any sort of abuse, as a ship inside a bay/array would never hold significantly more volume than is accounted for by its own size (plus any 'excess cargo').

Ability to board/debark: while inside the bay/array.

Somewhat connected to the introduction of Cloning 2.0 and Walking in Stations features, it would certainly make sense to be able to crane your capsule in / out of a ship parked inside a SMB/SMA.

An obvious corollary is you should be able to swap ships without launching, while in the bay/array.

Ability to fit/unfit: likewise, from within the bay/array.

As mentioned above, you should be able to board ships inside a SMB/SMA. Since those installations provide fitting services as a matter of course, fitting should be available from within, just as it is in a station (provided your privileges include use of the fitting service, ofc).

The one difference, since you won't have a personal hangar handy to fit your ship from, is you can only fit modules and ammo taken from your active ship cargo bay.

Ability to load/unload: that's cargo, ammo, fuel, drones, whatever — without having to launch first.

Pretty much self-explanatory: a ship's various bays are containers, it should be possible to drag'n'drop contents in and out of them from and to other accessible storage arrays while in range of the ship maintenance bay/array (or while inside it).

Ability to unpack/pack: seriously…

This one may seem minor, but the clutter buildup in Corporate Hangar Bays and SMB/SMA makes kudzu look like a fragile orchid.
Most objects are typically smaller or of equal size when packaged compared to their unpacked state, so it's fairly practical to prevent abuse: require a ship is empty of cargo, containers, fuel and drones before it can be repackaged (made easier by the new ability to load/unload a ship in situ, as mentioned above), and eject the fitted modules and ammo into a jet can on repackaging (a sub-capital can't possibly overflow a jet can just with its complement of modules and ammo).

***

ttfn

CSM up, TQ down.

2009-12-09T11:00:00.032Z

The 4th CSM has started.

…actually it has started about a week ago, but I only just noticed the news item on EVE-O today.

From what I can tell this isn't the worse coucil composition ever, although I'm a bit sorry Helen Highwater / Iain Compton didn't make it, and by a hair at that… knowing my fellow EVE players, there's reasonable hope one of the presently elected will be stupid enough to abuse his CSM seat *and* get caught.

The general turnout was pretty low at 7.36%, Finland stole the participation ribbon at a measly 13.32% turnout, from 3rd CSM election Bulgaria's 38.10%, itself following 1st (38.19%) and 2nd (40.5%) CSM Hungary's. Make of that what you want.

Don't hold your breath for the CSM minutes being published, btw: as far as I can tell, they're not yet done catching up with the CSM 3's as it is.

Meanwhile, Tranquility broke a new record last night, with 54,181 spacenerds logged simultaneously, which was celebrated with enough enthusiasm — and presumably booze of some kind — to see TQ repeatedly puke its db guts out, taking down the EVE API service with it (still not back up last time I checked).

This last bit didn't make the news, for some reason.

I don't know about you, but the weather is glorious today, so I'm out for a stroll.

***

Cloning 2.0

2009-12-08T09:30:00.001Z

[Editor's note: Wrapping up on the Canned Heroes series, I realized the obvious: not only is it a friggin Chinese wall'o'txt, but that kind of freewheeling exercise tends to bring up the best and most important bits at the end of the ride, so I hope this feature post will help you get through it with minimal pain.

Enjoy, if you can.]

Cloning 2.0

…a.k.a Canned Heroes, is a series about new mechanics for clone management and especially cloning on ships, such as supercapital and rorqual medical bays enable — there is also a bit of Walking in Stations and capsules-centric fun in there, because why not.

I suggest you start with part 1 (uncanny !) to get the big picture, then skip ahead to the 4th (and final) episode to see how it should play out with Motherships, Titans and (to a slightly lesser extent) Rorquals.
Part 4 also includes some design notes at the end.

Part 2 and part 3 are worth reading if you're interested in the minutiae of game mechanics, or if you want further details on stuff brought up in the two main installments.

Future material related to Cloning will/would be listed below, and tagged thusly:

• Everything Cloning 2.0

***

Canned Heroes (part 4)

2009-12-08T06:22:00.005Z

[Continued from part 3]

Cloning on ships.

Today's installment covers the issue that originally prompted my thinking about the whole Canned Heroes thing, namely the fact Clone Vat Bays in their current implementation are of very limited usefulness, due to the fact their cloning goodness is a one-shot feature.

The capacity of Clone Vat Bays on supercapitals as they are now is plenty (35 to 60 clones on a Mothership, 75 to 130 on a Titan, depending on Cloning Facility Operation skill), and doesn't need tweaking. The problem comes from the fact they are limited to jump cloning.

I don't know about you, but when I think Mothership plus Clone Vat Bay, I see this:

Mothership, served with prawns.

…and this:

Ass-kicking to the plural form.

…but certainly not this.

Underwhelming, to put it mildly.

The last one is unfortunately how "supercapital with clone vat bay" plays out in the present in-game reality: a cumbersome one-way transport of cannon fodder to the battlefield, that supports neither reinforcements nor the option of a return trip for the potential survivors. We sure stand a far cry from a Cylon basestar, here.

Upgrading the Mothership and Titans personnel carrier capacity from that of a landing barge to an actual respawn point, more like a Home Station, would dramatically affect the dynamics of nullsec warfare, and allow supercaps to live up to their hype without unbalancing the game.

Obviously, this could be done without departing from the already-present medical and jump clones system: just adding the ability to flag a jump clone (pre-installed on a supercapital) as default rebirth point, and allowing pilots to manage their medical clone while sitting in range of a Clone Vat Bay-equipped capital would to the trick nicely.

What with the Cloning 2.0 thing, then ?

Glad you asked: because Canned Heroes make for better gameplay.

The way medical and jump clones work atm is ludicrous: one can create those almost anywhere by gaming the ability to remotely insta-spawn a medical clone in any random station their corp has offices in, or wherever they left stuff laying about in a personal hangar.

Add the ability to leave behind a functional jump-clone in any station (even without a medical service available) by jump-cloning out, yet not being able to jump to a different clone while in space (although medical clones rely on exactly that) and you get a seriously abuse-friendly pile of nonsense.

Under the Apocrypha/Dominion ruleset, granting supercapitals the power to behave as Home Stations for medical clones would also hold a serious potential for imbalances, by enabling unlimited on-field respawns at no additional risk.

With Cloning 2.0 and CryoCanning, this new power bestowed upon supercapitals comes with strings attached: greater responsibility and risk, and built-in limitations.

Calling port on a Mothership or Titan entails keeping enough CryoCanned clones in the 'Home ship' so that replacements can be installed by the supercap pilot as you die and respawn.

CryoCanned clones are reasonably priced (about 10% of the base price of a medical clone grade matching your current SP count per spare 'blank' clone to go), easy to transport and store (only 3 cubic meters volume, and cargo bay — but not container — compatible), yet they still have to be brought to the supercapital to be installed, and can therefore be stolen en route, or looted from the wreck of your 'Home ship' if it goes down.

Additionally, you must entrust the supercapital pilot to not pull dirty tricks on your frozen selves while in her care, and yes, there are ways for somebody holding CryoCanned yous hostage to make your life interesting… [See "Fun with clones" section below.]

Clone-friendly ships, an overview.

Rorquals and Supercapitals both can equip Clone Vat Bays.

Although Rorquals medical bays can only support 'generic' clones, Supercapitals can manage both 'generic' and 'backup' types, due to their much greater onboard "tech".

Installing a clone on a capital ship can be done in a few different ways:

Haul in a CryoCan (with your frozen 'blank' clone in it), and drop it in the Corporate Hangar bay of the capital vessel, or eject it for the capital vessel to scoop, then:
- ask the capital pilot to install the CryoCanned clone in her vessel's medical bay,
- or dock into the capital in your pod, unpod (by Walking in Stations) and cart the CryoCan to the medical bay yourself.
Alternatively, if you don't have any canned clone handy, you can turn your current body and capsule into a canned jump clone. Close in on the capital ship while flying your pod, select either the "Dock" or "Dock & Freeze" option by right-clicking on the supercap, and your pod will be transferred to the capital's Ship Maintenance bay and secured there.
- If you select "Dock", you'll end up inside the capital SMB, in your capsule.
  You can then debark for a stroll around the ship (once WIS is implemented), or you can stay in there, right-click your pod to select "Freeze me !" and your body will go into cryo-stasis while you're presented with a selection of your remote clones to jump to. After that, the capital ship captain can move your capsule to the ship's medical bay and hook it up like a regular CryoCanned clone.
- The "Dock & Freeze" option (also available while flying in your pod in docking range of a CVB-equipped capital) is a shortcut to the above procedure. When selected, it will dock your pod, prompt you to select a jump clone for your exit, freeze your body, and hook your capsule and frozen self to the ship's medical bay, all in one go.
After it's hooked to the medical bay, your capsule will no longer show in the SMB (although it will still eat 1k cubic space from the ship maintenance bay), and will be accessible only to you and the ship pilot, from the Cloning Service interface on the ship.

As when using station-based cloning facilities, the bring-your-CryoCan method is intended as the 'regular' way to store and install clones on a capital ship: individual pilots can install their clones themselves, or leave for the supercapital pilot to install canned clones as needed from the stock brought aboard by corporate or alliance personnel managers, allowing for efficient use of the limited cloning slots on the vessel.

The alternative method of using one's current body and pod as a CryoCanned clone — while functional — is of limited use, as it entails your clone-jumping 'out' as you to install your body-as-clone in the ship's medical bay. That means potentially a lot of travel, plus a 24h jump timer for each jump clone created that way.
[Note: A capsule can only be transferred to a medical bay from within a SMB, not a cargo bay. If someone clone-jumped 'out' from their capsule while inside a ship cargo bay, the capsule will have to be moved to the SMB before it can be installed in the medical-bay.]

Scooping Eggs.

To the difference of regular ships, capsules can be scooped into the cargo/ship maintenance bay of any ship with sufficient spare room (1000 cubics) while floating in space. This is justified by the newfound ability of players to dock into a capital ship while in a capsule, and effectively get aboard the ship (looks better with Ambulation, obviously).
This means you can effectively be 'kidnapped' if you fly around in a capsule like a dickhead.

If scooped into a ship's cargo bay, your view will switch to display the very dull insides of the cargo bay, you can't leave your pod (under penalty of death without SP insurance), and you can't see outside anymore as long as you're held in.
If scooped into a ship's maintenance bay, your view will switch to display the slightly-less dull insides of the maintenance bay, you can leave your pod and go for a stroll (with walking in stations), and you can even launch at will (or board another ship if you have enough privileges).

Note that although you can't properly launch in that case, you can always escape a cargo bay by clone-jumping out from your pod, or even activate self-destruct while held in the brig… comedy ensues if the capturing boat can't take the direct-to-structure 800 HP damage (modified by your Energy Pulse Weapons skill at 50% per level).

Cylon Basestars, or close enough.

The biggest change from Apocrypha/Dominion comes from the ability to bind backup/medical clones to supercapitals, not just jump clones.

As a result, a Mothership or Titan can become your acting Home station for the duration of an operation or campaign, enabling you to get right back into action after losing a ship, even if you got podded‚ as long as you have spare clones on the 'Home Ship' and remember to reset your backup clone contract there after each respawn, that is.

Since each CryoCan is only 3 cubics in volume, a Mothership or Titan can afford to carry ample stocks of clones ready to install, and possibly more than one per pilot.

Selecting a supercapital-based clone as your 'Home Ship' doesn't entail a transfer fee payment to DED, as it is basically an illegal redirection of your ultimate mind-scan while on its way to your legitimate contracted backup clone medical facility. You therefore can not have a supercapital-based clone as your only and 'real' designated backup clone, since DED doesn't even register its existence as such.

Installing, binding or unplugging clones on a supercapital vessel requires a Clone Vat Bay fitted and online, but doesn't call for the Clone Vat Bay to be active at the time. Keeping the clone vat bay activated is however a requirement for pilots to clone jump or respawn at the ship's medical bay.

While a Clone Vat Bay is active, the supercapital vessel remains mostly functional except it can't warp or jump out for the 300s cycle duration — a supercap pilot can thus trade mobility for the perk of acting as a respawn point for his wing or squad — not too bad a deal, especially considering it can be done under the cover of a POS or Titan forcefield.

In practical terms, a noticeable gameplay change when you clone jump to a supercapital medical bay, or respawn in one is you'll actually end up aboard the supercapital/rorqual in your freshly-thawed clone, just as if you'd docked with your capsule and disembarked inside the (super)capital ship (this could lend itself to a stop by the captain's quarters for a drink, once Walking in Stations is implemented).

There will be no fucking macarena dancing aboard my ship, goddammit !

In practical terms, you'll soon find yourself in the Ship Maintenance Bay, where you can pick a ship to board and refit (from the contents of the active ship cargo bay) before you launch, almost as if you were in a station.

While aboard (or outside in close range), you'll also be able to access the ship's Cloning Services to install one of your CryoCanned clones as a replacement for the one you just transferred to, update your mind-backup insurance, and bind your backup contract (in the case of a supercapital) to the ship's medical facility if you so choose. [Have a looksee at the "Backup Clone fail-safe" section, in part 3 of this series, for an in-depth view of the applicable procedures in case your Home Ship fails you.]

Fun with clones.

CryoCanned clones, in addition to balancing the power of ship-bound medical cloning, offer a wealth of possibilities for creative abuse, compared to the discarnate and instant-on cloning system currently in game.
Below are a couple examples of weird stuff one can do with CryoCanned clones:

• Forced relocation:

It is technically possible to deprive somebody of their clone-jumping freedom, although only under extreme circumstances and for a limited duration.

Taking advantage of the possibility to install somebody else's CryoCanned clones on their behalf (without a need to ask for consent) you can max out a third-party character's active clones count (against their Informorph Psychology skill), and prevent them from installing clones at their locations of choice, unless they first unplug or use up those you've set for them.

From a strategic standpoint, the main benefit is to bench some enemy pilots out of action for up to a day or two, by forcing them to clone jump a few times under penalty of XP loss, and possibly sending them on the other side of the map.

One can somewhat work around the requirement to clone-jump or travel to already-installed clones to unplug them from the local medical facilities: provided you have access to backup cloning services in the distant station where your 'generic' clone is set, you could remotely upgrade it to become your 'backup' clone, then fail to pay the weekly bill, which could get the contract cancelled and automatically transfered to another of your remaining installed clones, as the previous backup clone is unplugged from the medical facility, thus freeing up an active clone slot.
Although workable, this takes a week of delay per clone (to reach a maintenance payday each time), and works only under the provision the unwanted clone's medical facility owners like you well enough to let you upgrade the clone to a backup one in first place.
It can also get expensive, considering the potentially high transfer fees to pay for each successive clone unplugged in that way.

• Amusing tricks
…can also be played on the enemy, especially invaders in your own space:

By installing a good supply of enemy clones into one of your Outposts, set to allow the use of backup clones (and nothing else) to negative standings pilots, then hitting one of their 'Home Stations' medical services, you can ensure any of them podded in your space without a readily available backup clone will see their backup clone contract transfer instantly and automatically to the nearest available station medical service where one of their jump clones is already installed… Hint: it doesn't have to be in a friendly (to them) station.

Although not fatal, this can be crippling while it lasts, and/or rather expensive for the victims to fix, especially if you managed to get your hands on a large stack of enemy CryoCanned clones, (say by looting the wreck of a fully-loaded 'Home Ship' supercapital), and did set your 'hospitable' outpost transfer fees to stupid-high levels for negative standings pilots.

A good preventive defense against that kind of trick is to keep your active clone count under control: as long as you keep your jump clones maxxed out and make sure to select a safe backup 'Home Station' when you travel away from your home (especially when invading) it shouldn't be too easy to force you to respawn at infortunate locales.

Cloning woes.

As hinted above, getting podded or kicked out of medical facilities too frequently can potentially dry your wallet out. Whenever your backup clone contract is forcibly transferred to a new clone-facility pair (as a result of eviction), it will attempt to re-bind your backup contract to another locale and clone, with matching transfer fee (and possibly the bill for a new clone growth). If your wallet can't take it, the DED portion will still be syphoned out, dragging your balance in the red in the process.

Warning: The station owners part of the bill for a transfer/clone growth will be debited only within the limits of funds available on a positive wallet to prevent ISK-creation exploits. DED, on the other hand, will take its share even if it brings the user's wallet down to a negative balance — as it is a 'real' ISK sink and can't abused by players to gain magic monies.
Increasing the transfer fee on your outpost medical services as a griefing method still works, insofar as depleting wallets, and beyond as higher fees will increase at least the forcibly-payable DED fraction of the bill in proportion.

Design notes(applicable to all four parts of this series).

• Because of the new fail-safe on backup clones, it is no longer possible to permanently lock someone's respawn point into an hostile station, and force them to risk XP loss by having to flee the place with an undersized backup clone. People allowed to respawn in a station now have access to backup cloning services and therefore backup clone contract management as a matter of course.
It is still possible however, to grief them financially (over transfer fees and clone growth bills) and wasted time imposed by clone-jumping or clone growth delay.

• The serious-yet-not-so-commonly-applicable potential for griefing over CryoCanned clones is meant to act as a balancing device against their proliferation: canned clones are reasonably cheap to procure and store, but can be dangerous if they fall in the wrong hands, turning into Damocles' swords — powerful tools in the psychological warfare arsenal more than anything else.

• Manually switching your designated backup clone to a new station requires you already have a generic clone hooked up to the target medical facility: you can no longer remotely install a Medical Clone in some random station across the galaxy, sorry.

• Yes, 'blank' clones are more expensive the more skillpoints you have at the time you order them, this is intended, live with it if — like me — you've broken the 92M SP line: you should be prepared to pay for it, or to use a less 00ber toon for your pew-pew.

• The kidnapping option enabled by capsules being scoop-able in space is there for 3 reasons:

fun and giggles ;
'roleplay' support (as a mean to bring someone 'blindfolded' to your ebil overlord HQ for 'negotiations') ;
as a way to get rid of pesky alts scouting POSes in capsules, especially in empire (scooping is not an aggression, detonating a pod inside a ship is).

…it also saves coding an exception case for capsules being scoop-able only when the pilot mind has left the building.

• Station-owners control over unwanted clones is generally in line with Apocrypha/Dominion rulesets, where a station owner can selectively revoke Medical Clones contracts but not Jump Clones, short of disabling the service entirely. The main change here is that 'illegitimate' Medical/backup Clones can now be automatically purged after a week, as a result of not meeting the contract conditions, come rent time.

Famous last words.

This has been a very long series of posts, and while I won't apologize for the rambling, this being a blog an all, I'll turn it into a feature, as I realize it's probably easier to start with this last episode and work one's way through the rest with a good perspective on what it builds up to.

I may also have overlooked some stuff, this is a fresher idea to me than most design features proposed elsewhere on EVE is broken, so it probably can use some maturing. Poke me if you have ideas about that.

Also, if someone could find me a good pic of the guys pushing cryo-stasis coffins through the medical lab starbase in Aliens 4: Resurrection… I couldn't find one to illustrate cryocans goodness, and I don't have the DVDs handy here.

***

Copy-proofing.

2009-12-07T11:00:00.000Z

Hopefully last silent day.

Part 4 of the Canned Heroes series is almost done — I'll push it as soon as I'm done, possibly even before next downtime.

***

Stay tuned.

Backgrounding…

2009-12-06T11:00:00.000Z

Sorry, no post today.

I'm working on part 4 of the Canned Heroes series, which should be ready within a day or two at most.

***

Stay tuned.

Canned Heroes (part 3)

2009-12-05T11:00:00.137Z

[Continued from part 2]

Understanding backup clones.

The four major changes in cloning 2.0 relative to medical/backup clones are:

You can no longer remotely spawn your medical clone in any station you've ever visited or your corp has an office in. To install a medical clone, you need at least proper standings with the medical facility owners (1.0 with most NPC corps), and to bring a CryoCanned clone on location.
Backup/medical clone are no longer different in nature from jump/generic clones. Any installed clone can potentially act as a backup clone by being bound to the character's mind-backup contract.
Backup clone contracts are now subject to a weekly fee proportional to the grade of your backup clone contract (about 1% base price) without which you'll enjoy only a reduced protection against skill point loss in case of podding — backup clone upgrades become less expensive, though.
The potential loss of skill points on death without sufficient coverage is much harsher than it used to be — this is partly eased by new ways to help ensure your backup clone protection remains sufficient at all times.

• To somewhat atone for the addition of a weekly maintenance fee on backup clone contracts, and for much more expensive transfer fees when switching to a different backup clone, Cloning 2.0 is more forgiving than previous rulesets about the price you have to pay for your backup clone upgrades:

You will only pay the difference between your current backup clone grade and the one you want to move up into, as opposed to the old way of paying the full price of an upper-grade clone on each successive upgrade.

The one case you'll pay full price for a backup clone is when you need a new contract, after you've used up your security deposit by activating a backup clone.

• On the other hand, death penalty for those failing to keep their clone up to date and maintained is significantly harsher in Cloning 2.0:

On getting podded, you will now lose 50% of the non-protected SP count, shaving off from your highest ranking level 5 skills and downward until all the lost SP are deducted from your character sheet.

Other stuff worth knowing:

Only individuals can subscribe a backup clone contract, solely for their own clones and in their own name.

A pilot can have only one backup clone contract at any one time, which is bound to a specific clone inside a station's medical facility, but the mind-scan transfer meant for the backup clone can optionally be re-routed and fed to a generic clone installed aboard a supercapital medical facility instead.

Switching which clone is to act as your backup clone doesn't void your backup contract on the whole, it simply transfers it to a different clone-facility pair (for a transfer fee), while demoting the previous backup clone down to generic status, but leaving it hooked up to the medical facility, accessible as a jump clone.

Every time a backup clone contract is transferred to a different clone-facility pair (intentionally, or as part of an automatic procedure), the applicable opening fee for that facility and clone grade will have to be paid, and it will reset the weekly maintenance bill start to the date of the transfer.

Managing clones:

• Locally:

While sitting at the same station or near the supercapital ship where your clone of interest is, you can do any of the following (provided the station manager lets you):

Hook or unplug a CryoCanned clone with the local medical facility (Infomorph Psychology limits allowing).
- Hooking up can be done by a third party on your behalf, as long as somebody is present at the medical facility with your CryoCanned clone in her possession.
- Unplugging a generic clone can only be done by you personally, either by jump cloning into the meat popsicle, or by getting on location and pulling the plug.
- Backup clones can be indirectly unplugged by medical facility operators as a consequence of them un-binding the backup clone contract (see "Revoking Clones" below).
Capital ship-based clones are the exception to that rule:
The ship pilot has the ability to unplug even generic clones, and can see who's the owner of any clone connected to the ship's medical bay (the limited number of slots warrants this, plus capital ship-based clone services are barely legal at best, so there's no complaining about the breach of privacy).
Bind a CryoCanned 'blank' clone to your backup clone contract.
Your physical presence may be required, in the case where you have good enough standings with the medical facility owners to access the backup cloning service but not the generic cloning service. In that situation, you may lack a generic clone already connected the local medical facility network, yet still have enough privilege to install your canned clone directly, as part of a backup contract.

Everything you can do remotely you can do locally, to the possible exception of a station that wouldn't let you dock, yet still allows you to use their medical facility services (weird, creative station settings).

• Remotely:

Managing your installed clones can partly be done remotely: you can select which of your currently installed clones is to act as your backup clone, and optionally flag another already installed clone on a mothership or titan as your primary backup clone choice.

Upgrading your backup clone grade can be done remotely and doesn't require you to be in the station where the target clone is (or even a station owned by the same entity), but you need to have sufficient privileges to access cloning services both where you stand (to access the interface), and in the facility the target clone is installed in (for the changes to take effect).

Note that you can not remotely unplug or destroy clones that are currently hooked to a medical facility: if you need to free up active clone slots, you'll have to jump to the unwanted clones first, and either fly away or wait 24h to put that meat back in the freezer before jump-cloning out (without re-attaching the CryoCan to the local medical facility).

Revoking clones:

A revoked contract doesn't really cancel your mind-backup deal with DED as the ultimate supplier. What is really revoked is the bond between your mind-backup contract and a specific clone-facility pair. This usually happens as a result of the medical facility suddenly denying you services, or because you willingly transferred the bond to a different clone-facility pair yourself.

Generic clones can not be manually unplugged by station owners, although the clone service can be temporarily disabled as a whole, at their discretion.

The captain of a Capital ship pilot however can plug/unplug generic clones installed on her ship at will, and revoke backup clone bindings to her ship, all without formal permission from the clone owner.

Backup clones require a contract, which can be unbound at any time by the client or the station owners if they so choose, and may be frozen and/or revoked as a result of failing to pay the weekly backup contract fee on that clone.

When a backup clone contract is unilaterally revoked by the station owners (manually or by default of payment), the clone is unplugged from the station medical services and dropped back in the client's personal hangar (in its CryoCan), demoting it to 'blank' clone ; meanwhile a new clone-facility pair is picked automatically for your contract to be transferred to — you are of course to be billed for the transfer.
Transferring your own backup clone contract from a clone-facility pair to another doesn't unplug the demoted clone from its local medical facility, it simply returns it to a status of generic, anonymous, jump clone.

How many of my SP are protected ?

As long as your backup contract clone grade is good enough to cover your current skill points count, and you're paying its weekly maintenance fees, you enjoy 100% protection on your skill points total.
Even with a high-enough grade backup clone, failing to pay your weekly fee may still lead DED to freeze your coverage, resulting in 100% protection of the skill points you had at the time you defaulted on your maintenance fee, while any points above that will remain uninsured until you resume weekly payments.
If your backup clone grade is inferior to your current SP count requirements, assuming you paid your fees at least until you overgrew your backup clone grade, any points exceeding your backup contract clone grade capacity will be exposed to death penalty.

After your backup clone is activated, it is up to you to upgrade the default newbie backup contract to the proper clone grade to cover your current SP count, lest you fly largely uninsured and exposed to much painful loss on next podding.

In order to reduce the odds of mishaps, you will get regular warnings and optional automatic assistance to save you from your own foolishness.

An alert will pop up every time you try to undock with an insufficient backup clone coverage for your current SP count.
If your backup clone isn't up to speed with your current SP count (as a result of undersized backup clone grade, or frozen coverage), it will show on your character sheet with the backup clone SP count highlighted in red.
You'll get a mail warning you about your insufficient and frozen backup clone SP coverage every week while you fail to pay your maintenance fee.
Using the automatic payments options of the wallet, it is possible to ensure one's backup clone grade is nearly-always good enough: every week, just before paying the backup clone maintenance fee, the service will check for you that your current backup clone grade exceeds your current SP count, and will automatically upgrade your backup clone subscription if needed, billing you automatically for it.
[If you are really broke, this system ensures you'll get at least the protection you can afford, by incrementally upgrading your backup clone weekly as your wallet allows.]

Backup clone fail-safe:

It is not possible to not have at least a basic clone insurance: if you don't currently have a backup clone, the cheapest grade backup clone will be automatically picked up for you (and billed) by DED.

The check for the presence of a functional backup clone will be performed twice every time you die: once as your pod actually goes pop, to figure where you're supposed to end up, and a second time right after you respawn into a new clone.

As you die, it first checks whether you already have a backup clone-facility pair set, then if the clone is available, respawns you there.
It will then try to offer you to get you a new clone contract at the same location, if possible.
If either or these checks return a false result, the backup clone system will go to fail-safe mode.

Fallback plan.

• The automatic clone backup selection will first go through the list of your installed generic clones to try and find one in a facility that allows you to bind your backup contract.
Failing that, it will automatically order a a backup clone grown for you in the fastest and closest (in that order) suitable medical facility (one that will welcome your business), and bill you accordingly (automatically syphoned from your wallet, so you could potentially end up in red over this).

[Note: It is still possible to respawn after a podding in a station where you don't have access to medical services (say because the new owners don't like you very much, yet haven't bothered to revoke your old backup clone contract yet), but the fail-safe will ensure you can't get permanently stuck there, by auto-selecting a different clone-facility pair for your new default backup contract, since you can't do it yourself for lack of access to the medical services interface.]

• If the cloning service of a station is disabled, as a result of it being temporarily incapacitated or switched off, local backup clone contracts will automatically get transferred according to the above rules, on a per-user, need-basis (ie transfer to the next-in-line clone will happen as pilots get podded and the designated facility is not found, but not before).

Since the 'main' backup clone always defaults to a station-based one, the temporary absence of a supercapital designated as Home station will be of limited consequence, simply respawning podded pilots at their respective 'real' Home station without additional transfer fee (if available).

Stuck in limbo, the horror.

Failing a suitable clone to welcome your recently podded self, your mind-scan will be redirected to the fastest and nearest (in that order) clone-breeding vat-equipped station where your standings allow you to use the backup cloning service ; a fresh clone will be emergency-grown on location for your mind to transfer into, which can take anywhere from 18h to 30h depending on the station type. You will be billed by DED directly for the vat-growth and transfer service, at applicable prices, with your wallet possibly going negative in the process.

Worst-case scenario, if you were to prove so unpopular everywhere that no other player or NPC station will have your filthy soul, you will end up in the nearest DED office with clone-vat medical facilities, where you will wake up 24h later in a freshly-baked clone, as explained above.

Special note:
The only thing that can hold your mind in limbo is the lack of a ready and suitable 'blank' clone to receive your mind-scan. In a bit of ugly metagaming, and although you'll be unable to do anything with this disembodied character in the meantime, you'll still get to log on and watch the mesmerizing dance of nano-assemblers knitting a new you from cadavers' biomass, learn in which station your brain-scan is currently buffered, and how long until your new clone is done.

Protip:
If a friendly party was to haul a CryoCan with one of your blank clones to this station and install it for you (you most likely will have a free clone slot at this stage), you'd suddenly find yourself with a suitable clone at the ready, which the medical facility would then instantly use to dump your mind and memories into. You'd still be billed for the locally-grown blank clone and backup transfer, but you'd get to be back in action sooner than if you waited for the clone vat to finish cooking you a new meat bag.

***

[The next, and hopefully last episode in this series will focus on Cloning 2.0 applied to Rorquals and Supercapitals, and on new and interesting ways to enjoy your bodies.]

Canned Heroes (part 2)

2009-12-04T11:00:00.009Z

[Continued from part 1]

Generic clones vs Backup clones.

All clones are grown generic, and are exact replicas of their original at the time of cloning.

Whether a given clone is upgraded to the status of 'backup' clone depends solely on the arrangement between the pod-pilot and a specific medical facility to be the default recipient of the pilot's ultimate mind-scan after a freaky pod malfunction.

A 'blank' clone is a frozen clone (with or without implants), stored in a CryoCan or Pod.
A 'generic' clone (a.k.a Jump clone) is a 'blank' clone hooked up to a medical facility, ready to be thawed out on short notice.
A 'backup' clone (a.k.a Medical clone) is a 'generic' clone hooked up to a medical facility with whom owners the pod pilot has subscribed a 'backup' contract in the event of his death.

To prevent contestations over which medical facility claims the (often hefty) rebirthing fee, and the legal nightmarish complications of multiple freshly activated clones all claiming to be the legitimate 'self' concurrently, pilots are allowed only one such 'backup' contract with a unique station's medical facility at any one time — medical facilities on supercapital ships being a recent and largely outlaw-ish development fall in a grey area.

As long as the uniqueness of a pilot's body-mind association is maintained, the law sees no issue with keeping more than one spare clone handy:

Pod pilots are allowed to grow and store in CryoCans an unlimited amount of 'blank' generic clones.
Pod pilots are allowed to have a total of up to 6 ready-to-roll clones, including both 'generic' and 'backup' clones (based on Infomorph Psychology skill level).
Pod pilots are allowed a single 'backup' clone subscription with station-bound medical facilities at any one time.

Bodysnatching for dummies.

The process of mind/consciouness transfer from a clone to another works roughly like this:

Deep-freeze the currently active clone, or otherwise bring it to a halt.
Brain-map it thoroughly, either quickly and destructively (the way a pod ultimately reaps your mind, right before going pop), or slightly less quickly and harmfully (the way a CryoCan hooked to a medical facility does)*.
Send the brain-scan to a pre-defined remote medical facility, either aboard a ship or in a station, where a suitable generic clone awaits in its CryoCan/Capsule.
At the destination facility, thaw the target clone while feeding the mind-scan data into its malleable brains, then give it a good shot of epinephrine for the road, and set it free.
Congratulations, a doppelgänger is you !

[*Bringing the body to cryostasis before brain-mapping it limits the damage to the brain tissue and allows the left-behind clone to 'heal' back to a usable-yet-blank state within approximately 24h, as opposed to irreparably turning it to snot, the way an emergency pod brain-reap does.]

Jump different.

A special-use case of mind-transfer is clone-hopping without the support of a medical facility at the departure point. While this is not new as such, and is basically what happens when one gets podded, this can now be done voluntarily and with possibly lesser consequences than the old-school 'blow my pod up' method.

As long as you sit in a capsule, be it in a station or in space, you can opt to clone jump into a generic clone waiting for you at a remote medical facility, without destroying your left-behind clone in the process: given a bit of quiet time, your pod has the means to get you into proper cryostasis to do a 'soft' brain-mapping of your noggin, CryoCan style, instead of reaping your dying brains off in the emergency fashion of a regular podding.

In this case, your old clone will be left behind in your capsule, deep-frozen and preserved, either floating in space or stored in the station or supercapital you docked in, prior to clone jumping.
[Note: this will not create a clone you can jump back to later, unless someone hooks it to a medical facility first.]

Things that could, thus eventually will, go wrong.

• Growing a clone, despite being a relatively slow process is unlikely to go wrong once it's started. Unless the station explodes (really, really unlikely) or the cloning vats are temporarily disabled (which would only suspend the production) your clone will be completed and delivered to you as long as you have an empty CryoCan at the ready in your personal hangar.

• Actually transferring your memories and mind into a different clone is almost instantaneous, yet could not go as smoothly as planned.

A typical thing that can go wrong is if your target clone is inaccessible for any reason, such as being plugged to a currently offline medical facility, being not plugged into the designated facility, or because the target clone or facility has been destroyed.

If you're attempting a clone jump, you'll see this coming, as your clone/facility of choice will appear greyed out (if disabled) or will simply not show (if destroyed or unplugged) in your potential destinations list.
In the event of an emergency clone jump into your backup clone, as a result of somebody cracking your pod open for a breath of fresh, deadly void, you don't get to nitpick about the actual availability of your planned destination until you wake up in a new meat bag, possibly way out from the location you expected — where exactly, depends on who's willing and able to take over your backup clone contract after you've been evicted from your first choice facility.

It is possible to find yourself in the unenviable position to have to jump to your backup clone instead of a generic one, say because you forgot to train Infomorph Psychology, or because none of your generic clones are suitable ; this is not recommended, as activating your backup clone by jump-cloning to it will cost you your security deposit and terminate your current backup clone contract — it still beats self-podding when you have a bunch of implants stuck in your soon-too-be frozen head.

The worst thing that can happen to your backup clone contract is to be forcibly relocated to a faraway station, where you could wake up much later to find a negative wallet balance as a result of imposed opening fees for the contract transfer. [See "Backup clone fail safe" in next episode for details]

Meatpacking District

As the operator of the subnet over which every mind-scan data travels to its destination, DED maintains an iron grip on the licensing of most things cloning, which royalties it uses to fund its law-enforcing fleets.

Despite the obvious capacity to do so, DED doesn't deny services even to the most hardened criminals in the galaxy… wether it's the result of strong work ethics, a desire to prevent the development of black market cloning services, or because that enables DED to easily track wanted outlaws remains uncertain, but it certainly can come in handy for those who've burned the bridges with every significant political entity in the game.

While privately-owned medical facilities operators must concede a significant cut to DED on every backup contract they sell, there's still plenty of good ISK for them to make in the business of extortionist healthcare service.

• Growing clones:

The base cost to get a 'blank' clone built-to order is 10% of the price of your current clone class contract, and that's what DED will bill to the medical facility owner.

How much the facility bills you as a customer for the privilege is entirely up to their greed and how good a standing you enjoy with them.

The required CryoCan to take away your new meat popsicle is not included, and is for you to supply on delivery.

Standings requirements to order a clone grown in a NPC station are non-negative (-0.4 or higher), with the exception of DED and SoE stations, which will allow anyone who can dock to grow a clone in their medical facilities.

• Installing a generic clone:

Hooking up a CryoCanned clone to a medical facility is subject to a DED one-time fee of 100k ISK or 50% of the billed price (whichever the higher) per installation.

Again, medical facility operators are free to bill you pretty much whatever they want to let you use their installations, or to turn you down if you look at them funny. On the plus side, this is a mostly 'blind' transaction, and you can always ask someone in good standing with the facility owners to plug in one of your CryoCanned clones for you.

Only the installation is subject to a fee in the case of a generic clone, the running costs being limited to cheap energy supply, but it is a non-refundable sunk cost, even if you never activate the clone and later decide to uninstall it.

Personal or Corp standings of 8.0 or better with the station owners are required to install a generic clone in a NPC medical facility.

• Backup clone contracts:

Generic clones can be upgraded to Backup clones (read 'medical') by subscribing a contract with the facility owners, at extra cost:

Security deposit (fixed price, same as current price of medical clones) paid directly to DED upon entering a backup contract.
Transfer fee (DED base price 10% of current medical clone cost) paid to facility owners on upgrading a generic clone to backup (as a result of a new contract, or of the transfer of an exiting one to their facilities).
Weekly bill (DED base price 1% of current medical clone cost).

Security deposits are held by DED, are non-refundable and meant to cover for the arduous restoration of your mind into a new body on activation of the backup clone. Medical facilities operators can't bill you extra for that service (at least officially), but rumors of med-ops asking for kickbacks abound.

As with generic clones, the DED base price is the bare minimum DED expects to receive in royalties on transfer and weekly maintenance fees, while facility owners are free to add a profit margin on top of that (DED will grab 50% of what's billed on top of the base price).

Medical facilities owners get billed by DED on the basis of known contracts subscribed for the clones they host, regardless of whether the facility owners manage to get paid by the final clients, which is left up to them. Medical facility owners have the option (from station services management), to automatically revoke and suspend contracts with unpaid subscriptions.

You don't get billed a transfer fee for up-classing your backup clone contract to a higher bracket, but it will proportionally increase your following weekly and transfer fees.

Failing to keep up with your weekly fees may result in your backup contract being suspended: DED will still honor its obligation to restore your memories in the event of your being podded, but only up to the SP count you held at the time you stopped paying (provided, of course, you had a good enough contract to cover up and above your SP count to begin with).

Personal or Corp standings of 1.0 or better with the station owners are required to bind a backup clone in a NPC medical facility, except by DED, which will allow anyone who can dock to set up their backup clone in its medical facilities.

***

[In tomorrow's episode, we'll look at how to manage your clones in practical terms, and what happens when you get podded as your 'home station' has gone MIA.]

Canned Heroes

2009-12-03T23:00:00.007Z

[Editor's note: Wow, the wall'o'txt struck back, so I added a short version as intro, then you can dig in if you feel like more.]

Teh Skinny:

Clones become actual bodies (like corpses, but slightly less dead), which you can move around in ~~coffins~~ cryostatis containers. They are grown-on-demand in medical facilities for about 10% of the price of a matching medical clone, and it takes time to bake one (about a day).
MedClones and JumpClones are no longer different animals: a 'backup' clone is a regular clone that you bind to your brain-insurance.
Medical/backup clones can now be bound to Clone Vat Bay-capable ships, potentially turning those into your respawn point as long as they are in space, Clone Vat Bay active, and you have enough fresh clones in their medical bay.
Medical/backup clone contracts are now billed to you on a weekly basis, to the tune of roughly 1% of your medical clone grade price.
New death penalty for the uncaring: stuck in limbo !
You get to play in new and creative ways with your body(ies) — other people too.

See below for the non reading-averse version.

Problem: Clones are shallow.

Clone Vat Bays are one of the most exciting ideas introduced with SuperCapitals. Unfortunately, their adoption and use have been limited by several factors:

Only Jump Clones (not Medical Clones) can be installed on ships.
Managing Jump Clones on ships is unduly cumbersome.
SuperCapital ship maintenance bays don't do such a great job as mobile ship hangars.

The last point is no less important than the two others, yet I'll save it for another post, as it ties into a different set of capital ships features.

Meanwhile, the two main issues can be tackled with some changes in how clones work.

Canned heroes.

Strangely enough, in a game where we have actual corpses floating in space, ripe for the scooping and subsequent mounting on a trophy wall, which act as reminders of both our fragile condition and the fact EVE is a space-op fantasy game (frozen fucking corpses really ?), our clones have no in-game presence or reality, despite their defining place in the lifestyle of pod-pilots.

I say this needs fixing, not only because it would be awesome to haul a MrFreeze twin of myself in my space-trunk, but because it makes for good gameplay, and notably for Clone Vat Bays to finally see some use, thus helping motherships fit their intended role.

Solution: Clones 2.0.

Clones are now physical objects in game, of about 2 m3 size, and 200kg, and since I don't think they gain mass when they turn into corpses, I have to assume at least female pod pilots are strangely overweight yet have a body density of 0.1… that, or somebody skipped a decimal on the volume and we're just regular obese nerds, even in space — could be interesting if Walking in stations reflected that.

Walking in Stations, realistic to a fault.

Assuming your clones are grown without the body fat index of junk food-addicted walruses, they should fit in a standard-issue 3-cubics cryo-container until such time you decide to upload your mind into their frozen zombie brains and transfer your reasonably trim butt into a pod, where it can comfortably fatten up to its fully oversized potential.

What's new ?

• Clones can no longer be instantly summoned out of thin air, they must be grown in vats. It takes time (about 24h), money (about 10% of your current medical clone ISK price), and requires top-notch medical facilities, usually found only in NPC stations and Gallente Outposts (although other outposts types can offer the service by installing upgrades).

• Once grown, clones can be packaged into CryoCans for safe and compact storage and transportation.

CryoCans are also useful to transfer the mind-scan of a pilot into a previously 'blank' clone of hers, as they sport the necessary interfaces to hook up to any medical facility memory banks.

• While held in a CryoCan, a clone is kept in stasis, and can be preserved for several decades without maintenance, as long as the can remains sheltered and powered (suitable power sources are available in any ship, POS or station hangar, at no cost worth mentioning).
Left to drift in space, however, a CryoCan can keep the meat inside from going bad for a few hours to a couple days at best, while its accumulator and weak radiation shielding last.

• Until a CryoCan is properly hooked up to a medical facility, the clone inside is essentially frozen meat, and is unsuited to the purposes of uploading or downloading its owner mind-scan.

You can own as many CryoCanned 'blank' clones as you wish, but you are limited in how many clones you can hook up to medical facilities by your Infomorph Psychology skill level.

• The medical facilities aboard supercapital vessels have been upgraded and can now manage the retrieval and transfer of an ultimate mind-scan as performed by a capsule onboard equipment at the time of death. As a result, medical/backup clones can now be made available aboard supercapitals, in addition to generic/jump clones.

• From a client's standpoint, the only difference between a generic/jump clone and a medical/backup one is that the latter is bound to a mind-backup contract that guarantees the client's ultimate mind-scan will be transferred to that specific clone and facility in the event of the client's death while aboard a capsule.

• While generic clones in CryoCans can be hooked up to a medical facility in essentially anonymous fashion, behaving much like a numbered safe deposit box, upgrading them to the role of a backup/medical clone entails full disclosure of the clone owner's identity, and is subject to approval by the station medical services operators.

• Because legal concerns forbid to have one's consciousness loaded into more than one clone at any one time (there have been nasty precedents of clones fighting over who's the 'real' one through lawyers and assassination attempts), only one such mind-backup contract can be subscribed per pilot, attached to a single station's medical facility and clearly identified clone of their choice.

• The nature of supercapital mind-backup links puts them in a grey area: since they basically intercept the mind upload originally meant for a station by posing as a communication relay, unbeknownst to the station's medical facility operators, the arrangements to maintain a backup/medical clone on a supercapital come as an additional, largely separate, and dubiously legal contract.

***

[Editor's note 2: I really can't post this as one entry in good conscience, so consider this Part 1. The rest is coming.]

Real-time tactics

2009-12-02T23:00:00.000Z

Here be everything about Tactical Maps, and general improvements to the UI and features relative to the management of real-time-tactics aspects of EVE

Everything Real-time Tactics:

Fleet Dynamics: Why they suck, Part 1 and Part 2
Fleet Management: because poor fleet management results in retarded tactics.
The nature of PvP in EVE, Part 1 and Part 2.
Intelligence Services: a possible implementation of fog-of-war and real-time intel distribution in TacMaps.
See also Exegesis (feature).

Everything TacMaps

A flash from the past: Wargames and maps go together like gum and hair, so tightly is their history entangled… except in EVE.
Tactical Maps: an ongoing series on putting gum in EVE's hair (Part 1, …).
Strategic overview: reading the territory on the sovereignty map (and CCP's first baby-step in that direction)
CCP is all over it ! (as of 2007, then it fell in a crackpipe, seemingly)

Toll booths

2009-12-01T11:00:00.001Z

[Editor's note: Well, TQ is dead by now, and the announced dt is to be at best 19h long… I'll go check how EVE looks in a couple days after the inevitable post-patch kinks are worked out.

No big posts until then, I'm afraid, as I'm doing non-EVE stuff in the next two days, unless I find time to spare to go for a full breakdown of the patch notes, which I've read and researched a bit by now, and I must say there is a majority of nice-smelling stuff in there — botched sovereignty mechanics aside.

In the meantime, I have this old bit of fodder I exhumed, and which would fit nicely in the new ~~pet-heavy~~ resident-friendly landscape of Dominion sovereignty system.]

Jump Bridges 

…are a cool feature,

and one of the few places where holding sovereignty actually makes a difference in the relationship one has to the environment, compared even to cyno-jammers, whose raison d'être is to help defend sovereignty, thus echoing the pre-Dominion circular joke of fuel discount on POSes that are deployed only to hold sov.

Problem.

As interesting as the ability to basically create your own custom gate network may be, jumpbridges are also a royal pain to operate and maintain for their owners.

One of the main grudges logisticians and officers hold against bridges is the lack of control over who can use them: anyone with + standings and the knowledge of a unique shared password per bridge (ergo anyone with + standings, really) can jump through at will as long as the bridge has fuel in the tank.

Which brings us to the second and most frequently sore spot: fueling and attached costs and workload.

Long story short, only members of the alliance owning the POS/bridge can be allowed to top up a bridge fuel tank with Liquid Ozone, but since they have very little control over who can use the bridge, these tend to run out quick. This is made worse by the absence of any logs stored or relayed by the bridge about who jumped through when and in what ship class.

Solution: 

Toll booths.

Without even considering — for now — changing the access management system that rules over bridge use, simply add the option for the bridge to demand fuel before activating.

Either you have enough fuel, or you pay in ISK.

In practical terms, on right-clicking to jump through a bridge, you'll see a dialog pop up with a warning and two quotes, going roughly like this.

Warning: 

This installation needs fuel to displace

your ship through the magic spacetubes.

Do you want to allow this bridge to take Liquid Ozone

from your cargo bay, or do you prefer to pay in cash ?

Liquid Ozone required: {insert number} units 

Cash price: {insert number} ISK

[Rape my bay !] [Rape my wallet !]

If you don't have enough LO or ISK at the ready, the number will be red-colored and the [Rape my…] button will be greyed-out.
Assuming you click on either available option while sitting in activation range, your cargo bay or wallet will be syphoned for the required amount of fuel or ISK, and you'll jump through.
If both buttons are greyed-out, you can't jump until you beg somebody for ISK, or get enough Liquid Ozone in your cargo bay.

The base ISK price per Liquid Ozone unit should be defined on a per-bridge basis, and a profit margin could discretionarily be added at the POS owners discretion, to compute the quote from ActualFuelRequirements+Margin(%).

Standings and alliance affiliation could be used to compute a discount or mitigate the overtax, much like is done on Outposts' station services.

Simple way to limit abuse of bridges, stop them from running dry, and maybe even make a buck on them to recoup the operation costs.

ttfn,

Happy expansion all !

***

Soft hat on.

2009-11-30T11:00:00.005Z

No filler today, I'll be busy watching clouds.

If you have nothing better to do, go read the patch notes for Dominion, that should keep you awake at night until the expansion hits the fan.

See you after the bang.

DevBlog #718 — New EVEmail in Dominion

2009-11-29T11:00:00.000Z

This a Dev Blog, about EVEmail finally becoming usable. That's pretty much it.

OK, ok: that's a big deal, for we're coming a long way on this one. So here's the skinny:

The new EVEmail, barring overlooked bugs, will do what you'd have expected it to do from about day one of EVE, but not just that.

Through linking to API and client-side storage, it will make EVEmails, mail alerts and mailing lists a convenient enough exchange medium that we may actually use them.

It's like getting tap water versus a crank-and-bucket well in the backyard: it's only a few paces closer to home, but that's a huge difference.

So, all together: Yay for new EVEmail !

***

Drone herding

2009-11-28T11:00:00.007Z

Droonies are the reason many a EVE player has found himself mumbling in his sleep or waking up in cold sweats, as they're probably the most fickle, hard to balance and messy factor in EVE combat, ever since mines and missile splash damage have been removed from the game.

Fighters epitomize the drone problem. They cost an arm, or at least a good cruiser worth of ISK and minerals, deal and soak about as much damage as a NPC cruiser, and have the AI of a 1980 digital alarm clock for brains, and yet, they're overpowered.

At the heart of the issue lies the fact a single pilot finds himself in command of a disproportionate total sum of firepower, not because drones are 'too good' as such, but because the drone paradigm has been 'One ~~Ring~~ nerd to bring them all and in the darkness bind them' since the beginnings of EVE.

This mixes badly with the nature and mythos behind Carriers and Motherships which call for the ability to deploy not one or two lonely drones, no matter how tough and full of teeth they are, but swarms of them.

Drone control, new generation.

As often, the answer is in the question: "How can we allow carrier and MS to launch lots of drones, without granting excessive power to the carrier pilot ?".

Yes, you've got it too: separate the ability to carry and launch drones from that to control them effectively.

And the tools are almost there, too: delegating drones has been available in game for a long time now, yet is seldom taken advantage of, because there's little incentive to do so.

I'll spare you the numbers (that's the new cool thing around here,) but the general spirit is: Carriers/MS can still launch lots of drones/fighters, but they only enjoy full bonus from skills/mods on a limited subset of that number. Meanwhile, delegated drones and fighters now can benefit both from their shepherd ship skills/mods bonus, and/or from cascading bonus granted by their owner.

• Carrier:

Can deploy:
- 5 drones/Fighters
- +1 per Racial Carrier skill level
- +1 per DCU module
Full bonus on:
- +1 per Racial Carrier skill level
- +1 per Advanced Drone Interfacing skill level.

• Mothership:

Can deploy:
- 5 drones/Fighters
- +3 per Racial Carrier skill level
- +1 per DCU module
Full bonus on:
- +2 per Racial Carrier skill level
- +1 per Advanced Drone Interfacing skill level.

Thus a Carrier pilot with lvl4 in both Racial Carrier skill level and Advanced Drone Interfacing skills will be able to field/command the following drone/fighter amounts (assuming no DCU equipped):

Carrier: field 9 (5+4), command 8 (4+4).
Mothership: field 17 (5+12), command 12 (8+4).

Fitting DCUs on top of that will only increase the count of deployable drones by up to 4 or 5, but the number of drones/Fighters the Carrier pilot can efficiently command on her own will remain the same.
It is still possible for the Carrier pilot to order all the drones she can field, but any drone(s) deployed beyond the limit of what she can efficiently command will operate at their base attributes, with zero modifiers from skills, ship bonus or fitted modules/rigs — unless assigned to another pilot.

Thus it is better to delegate drones to…

Drone Herders.

A drone herder is a sub-capital pilot that has good enough skills and a properly fitted ship to make good use of the drones/Fighters entrusted to her by a Carrier/MS.

To be delegated regular drones is easy: all you need is the basic Drone skill trained to decide how many drones you can handle.

For Fighter-type drones, your Drone Interfacing skill must be trained at least at lvl1, and your level decides how many Fighters can be included in your total drone herd.

These basic requirements only allows drones/Fighters to be delegated to you, but are not enough for you to make the best of them.

Drones and fighters modifiers work much like leadership bonus:

in order for a bonus to cascade, the Herder must have at least lvl1 in the primary skill requirement for that drone type.
for every bonus that can cascade to a drone-herder, the best one among available modifiers is selected between the Owner carrier ship/pilot and the Herder ship/pilot.

Example:

You fly a Ceptor, and have Drone Interfacing lvl4, you can be assigned up to 4 Fighters (say one of each race) and one other drone type (let's say a T2 Heavy Repper Drone).

Assuming you have Repair Drone Operation trained only to lvl 1, you will benefit from the lvl5 skill of the Owner on your assigned T2 repper drone, since Repair Drone Operation is the primary skill requirement for that drone type.
On the other hand, if you don't have Fighters at least lvl 1 trained, you won't inherit the modifiers from the Owner pilot/ship, and will operate the Fighters with their base attributes.

Notes:

Unless flying a Carrier/MS or a very special ship, one can never control more than 5 drones / Fighters are once, combining self-deployed and assigned droonies.
Drones or Fighters set to Guard or Assist a target remain under the command of the pilot that ordered them so, since there is no transfer of control. As such they count against their Owner total command count, unless they have been ordered to guard/assist a target by a Drone Herder.

Why, oh why ? 

The benefits of this model are multiple:

It encourages Carriers and Mothership pilots to delegate their drones/Fighters, rather than use their boat as a SoloPWNmachine. This is up to the pilot, but not delegating means lesser efficiency on the whole.
It creates a new specialist role: Drone Herder, which somewhat helps smoothing the path (training wise) for wannabe Carrier pilots, while offering a viable career development to sub-capital drone specialists who don't want to make the switch to capital ships (yet). As a result, drones become a platform to bring more players into the action, instead of stealing frigate/cruisers jobs.
It allows more flexibility in balancing: by deciding which modifiers apply to specific types of drones, which can cascade down from a Carrier ship/pilot to Drone Herders, etc, much finer granularity is available to balance drones/Fighters.
As a corollary of the above, it makes easier to introduce new drone types or rework exiting ones, and to allow Carriers and Motherships to deploy fair numbers of drones/Fighters at once, since they're more likely to be spread across more than a single grid at once.

Final notes.

Drone Herding works best with decent ergonomics for drone management, such as an improved Drone Control interface, the ability to save drone sets and to easily identify and team up with Drone Herders for Carrier/MS pilots. This is beyond the scope of this introduction to Drone Herding, and will be covered in followups.

The first draft of that model was much simpler, and harsher on the self-sufficient urges of Carrier pilots: it called for the straightforward removal of all bonus and modifiers on drones/fighters deployed from a Carrier/MS unless they were assigned to a Drone Herder… I kind of liked the idea myself (and yes, I've some experience flying drone carriers), but the hurt seemed at bit too much in retrospect.
Thoughts ?

***

Judgement day, or something.

2009-11-27T13:00:00.001Z

This is it: the Dominion expansion page is up, and the official deployment news, too.

Not that's it a big surprise, obviously, but I'm curious about what will really make it through the initial release, or be held back at last minute, and you certainly can't trust the features page for that, since half the dev blogs linked there are obsolete already.

My plans ? I'm checking out the NPC sovereignty pockets in otherwise conquerable 0.0 regions, and I'm prepping to go all UO on the simpletons that will throw ISK at upgrading their space. EVE is taking a turn for the stupidest, and I shall embrace it as long as I bother to log in.

Enjoy your last weekend of pre-arena EVE, folks: you'll want to hang on to the memories.

Supercapitals overhaul

2009-11-26T23:00:00.015Z

[Editor's note: I'm going to try a new format today: I'm sparing you the usual wall'o'txt by boiling down this entry to the key changes… The important details you'll either have to trust are covered, ask about, or wait for followup entries to address.

That saves you headaches, and leaves me with stock material for next time I run dry on inspiration for the daily filler.]

Problem:

Titans and Motherships are sexy on paper, everybody can see the shine of supercapital vessels in a space-op' — they're a standard feature of the genre.

Unfortunately CCP released those with nothing but very nice art to support their existence, and have since then been groping around like eggnog-plastered tweens haphazardly trying to reach second base during the carols on Xmas eve. The results have been predictably messy and embarrassing for all involved.

Defining Supercapitals:

To begin with, they must be huge: that's a given.

Part of being super is they must be rare, different, and exotic compared to more pedestrian merely-capital boats.

They are intended as GiantDicks, flagships for the pride of their fleet.

Flagships.
By nature, a flagship is a morale booster, a spectacular display of your fleet's confidence in its might, and a frightening wonder for the enemy to behold and quiver before. They should also, as the crown of the enemy's military might, be what your own admirals and fleet commanders look forward to topple, sending the signal to the troops under their fallen standard that this battle is lost to them.

Because there are, to date, only two classes of SuperCapitals, with no new ones in sight, it isn't too much to ask that each get their own unique-yet-complementary flavor, and aren't just large-and-superlarge variations on the same design, or on 'regular' capitals.

Another requisite of flagships is that they must make a difference in the battlefield, beyond just being ostentatiously large, yet must not put other ship classes out of a job by doing the same-stuff-only-more that non-super boats do.

Solution:

Titans and Motherships must certainly help win battles, but not as main weapons. They will act as enablers to support conventional and capital vessels, and help make a better use of fleet ships.

***

Titans are War Trains …in spaace !

Train, of war (not in space).

Titans gain a new feat to fulfill the role of a mobile HQ/fortress that befits their name, with the Mobile Forecefield Generator (MFG).

Long story short, a MFG generates a forcefield not unlike that of a POS, roughly 30km in diameter, under which fleet ships can take cover to regroup, repair and reload.

Activating the MFG causes it to burn fuel (most likely stront, racial isotopes or both) for cycles of 5-10 minutes during which the titan can't warp or jump. Add to that a 30' re-activation delay after the MFG is manually de-activated (or runs out of fuel) to make things interesting.

An active MFG disables the titan's Death Ray super-weapon for the duration, and until the end of the subsequent re-activation delay.

To prevent weirdness, forcefields can't overlap: a MFG can only be activated while standing far enough from the closest forcefield (POS or MFG).

Two possible modes are envisioned for the MFG shielding effect (those are not selectable, only one should make it to TQ after testing):

• Mode A, a.k.a Captain Obvious.

Works roughly like a POS forcefield: everything inside the forcefield, titan included, is invulnerable to any sort of damage, and locking can't cross through the forcefield envelope.

While the MFG is active, the titan's shields and armor are capped to 50% and 70% of their normal hitpoints, respectively. On MFG deactivation (voluntary or as a result of damage), the normal maximum hitpoints are restored, resulting in the MFG titan appearing 'pre-damaged'.

Skills:
The Mobile Forcefield Generation Skill (Science, rank 8) reduces that penalty by 5% per level, resulting at lvl4 in 'only' 30% and 10% 'pre-damage' on shields and armor, respectively.

Porosity: when reduced to 25% or less, the forcefield becomes porous.

At 25% FF shields and below, anything inside it can be locked but benefits from a dual bonus of signature and damage reduction equal to the % of FF shield remaining.

During porous phase, Missiles aimed at targets in the forcefield deal full damage but have a 25%-1% probability to just explode against the forcefield without crossing its membrane (but still deal full damage to the FF, instead of hitting their intended target).

Likewise, drones may 'bump against the windshield' a couple times before they manage to make it through, but wouldn't be damaged b the experience, and only slowed down.

Ships taking cover inside a porous forcefield suffer a similar 25%-1% penalty to their scan resolution (proportional to the FF level), but without penalties to the damage their guns deal to targets out of the FF, nor missile/drone 'malfunctions'.

• Mode B, a.k.a Chinese 'Interesting'.

Works not-quite-like a POS forcefield: everything inside the field is protected except the MFG'ing titan itself.

The titan can still lock and shoot beyond the forcefield, which can't be locked or damaged — the titan itself can be locked and damaged from outside the FF, however.

Titans shields and armor aren't capped by MFG activation in this model, but the forcefield becomes porous the instant the titan starts taking structural damage.

Skills:
The Mobile Forcefield Generation Skill (Science, rank 8) grants a 10% base resistance to structure across the board while the MFG is active, resulting at lvl4 in 40% base structure resistance to all damage types.

Porosity in mode B follows the same logic as mode A, but locking across the forcefield is penalized proportionally to the % of structure remaining on the Titan, instead of relatively to forcefield remaining hitpoints:

Signature and scanning resolution reduction are applied on all ships inside the forcefield, except the MFG'ing titan.
Damage coming from the outside in is subject to the same penalty, while drones and missiles roll a dice to cross into the membrane.
[Note: Missiles failing to cross, and smashing against the forcefield damage neither the forcefield nor the titan in this case.]
As in mode A, guns, missiles and drones can be sent without penalty from the inside out through the forcefield while in porous phase.

This last bit is intended to entice titan pilots into standing their ground on the battlefield past the point they've hit structure, as it provides their fleet ships with the spectacular advantage of being able to shoot while taking at least partial cover behind the forcefield.

[Note: yes, I realize this can be gamed by fielding titans with full shields/armor and 90% structure. Maybe porous mode could depend on a secondary check that the MFG'ing titan is also below 50% armor and shields to kick in, although I'm unsure about that.]

There's more, believe me, but thats enough to get the general idea, and we still have to cover the other half of the supercapitals tandem…

***

Motherships are… well, not SuperCarriers™. 

"In sci-fi, the Mothership name conjures images of gigantic beehives unleashing swarms of fighters and bombers, wasp-like combat vessels and drones leaking from their swollen hulls to cloud the stellar skies with omens of inescapable fury and death…"

…or this.

The problem when translating that vision in game terms is that the simplest way to get there is to use lots and lots of droonies, which may look cool in trailers but in game reality are essentially a killjoy, for all but the lone spacenerd jerking off at the helm of his private 00berWTFsoloPWNmachineOfD00m™.

In order for them to be game-worthy, Motherships should really be support platforms that enable actual player pilots to do the fighting, not drone-spamming machines that put cruisers and BS pilots out of a job.

The new superpower of Motherships — like the Titans' — is AoE based, and non-lethal in nature… quite the opposite.

Replacing the utterly useless Remote ECM Burst, behold the Omnidirectional Soothing Spray I (patent pending) !

Feel free to come up with a better name, I suck at this game.

What the OSS does is simple: it heals structure/armor and to a lesser extent shields and capacitor of all ships caught within its radius. I mean *all* ships: friends, foes, neutrals, wandering crazy prophets, space wheelbarrows, whatever. It also costs a limb to operate, and is better done in Triage mode, to be frank.

Oh, and contrary to remote boosters/reppers, OSS can be activated while inside a forcefield… any forcefield. *wink*

The attributes of the OSS really only define its peak output: in reality, how much resources and capacitor will be sucked away from the OSS'ing Mothership depends on the ships caught in its AoE, and how badly they need it.

Conceptually, an OSS is a structure and armor repairer, a remote shield booster and an energy transfer array all rolled into one and sprayed as a fine, healing mist over 25km, but because it's a game, how wet one gets depends on how many other people sit under its shower of love (conservation of Ninjutsu at work).

Once activated (30-60 seconds cycle, tbd), the OSS does a check at the beginning of each cycle for any ships (within its 25km diameter AoE) that are less than 95% full on structure, armor, shields or capacitor, and will try to fix them at the end of the cycle by spreading love in a reasonably sensible fashion, within the limits of its peak output, available Nanite paste and capacitor.

[Note: if a ship exits the OSS AoE after the cycle starting check but before the cycle completes, the resources aimed at her will be burned all the same, but the ship won't benefit from the soothing. Please stay still while the doctor fiddles with your innards.]

Triage mode affects OSS the same way it affects the remote modules that perform the same kind of remote boosts, which makes triage a very desirable circumstance to run an OSS. In fact, under the overhauled Repair system, a Triaged Mothership running an OSS is probably the only thing that can beat the efficiency of a Station Repair services, on a HP per Nanite paste unit basis.

[Note: While it is possible for the AoE of two or more Motherships' OSS to overlap, the re-balancing of remote energy transfer makes it sub-optimal, as each MS will likely waste some capacitor, trying to boost its neighbors.]

Skills:
Omnidirectional Spraying is the skill you're looking for, and it will seamlessly replace the 'Remote ECM Burst' one, to finally give you compensation for the ISK and time you've already wasted on that sorry excuse of a feature.

Wait ! There's more…

For all their newfound nursing goodness, motherships are clearly meant to be drone boats, and that should inform their feature set. To preserve the offensive role of other ship classes, motherships shall focus on logistics and support-themed drones, without stomping on logistics cruisers' turf.

So, a few new — and motherships-only — drone types:

Repair Fighters:
Those can escort their assigned target around the system to repair its armor and/or structural damage, or boost its shields.
They have a high peak output compared even to a logistics cruiser, but very limited reserves, making them more suited to EMT-like roles than continuous life support. Their main purpose is to buy time so that logistics ships find a still-rescuable ship rather than a wreck by the time they arrive on scene.
To the difference of normal Fighter Droonies, they sport their own cargo bay, which can be filled (by right-clicking on the drone) with Cap Booster Charges and/or Nanite Repair Paste to supplement their limited capacitor and spare their structural HP.
Jumper Fighters:
A variation on Repair Fighters, these slightly smaller ships are fast and nimble, and can pack a decent stack of Cap Booster Charges in their cargo bay, which they'll spend… boosting the capacitor of their target. Their name comes from the fact they are intended as jumper-cables to jolt back up a capital ship capacitor to allow it to emergency jump out, but they can also be used as 'external battery packs' attached to a logistics cruiser or regular carrier.
The size of Cap Booster Charges loaded in a Repair Fighter will directly affect how much cap they transfer per 5s cycle, after they've depleted their own capacitor.

Both types follow the new logistics drones rules, and can be set to automatically return to their carrier ship after they run out of reserves. Compared to regular combat fighters, those new support drones are slightly less bulky (about 30%) and use half the bandwidth per unit, allowing to carry and deploy more of them simultaneously.

***

Stuff that could have been here

…but obviously isn't.

Some changes to the whole Cloning Facility thingie, which is a brilliant idea with a botched implementation, and definitely deserves salvaging, both on Motherships and Titans.
Changes to the mechanics of ship bays on supercapitals, to finally allow them to play the wasp-nest part that should be theirs.
A full rewrite of Fighter drones handling, which has been sitting in my drawers for ages, but must be user-friendlized a bit before I can post it here, and which is intended to help carriers and motherships make more sense, while creating a real Drone Herder specialist role for sub-capital pilots.

…all of which will be the meat of future downtime fillers. Stay tuned.

***

Repair systems overhaul.

2009-11-25T12:13:00.105Z

I know there are a lot of things in EVE gameverse that fail the basic common sense test, and I can live at peace with lore and backstory inconsistencies in a game where the most interesting stories are those the players write through their actions, rather than by roleplaying on a script. Some design misses however are enough to damage the gameplay, in addition to their being ridiculous.

Problem(s):

…arise when major game mechanics simply fail internal consistency tests, and Repair systems are among the worst offenders.

If cheap tech 1 modules can readily convert energy from ships' capacitors into engineered matter (to remotely or locally repair structural damage suffered by armor and hull), and can restore a ship integrity without any source of raw materials, not only are we far past the point where technology is indistinguishable from magic (which could be OK), but one must wonder why industry still needs to bother with any raw materials, when ship reactors provide a readily-available, seemingly infinite and everlasting supply of energy-and-thus-matter at low cost.

Plainly said: magick matter-generators are cause for serious cognitive dissonance in the face of the need to mine asteroids.

Solution: 

…already there: it's called nanite paste, a NPC repairing material source, and a very nice ISK sink that can be reused in a myriad of interesting ways.

No more free rides.

• Station Repair Services.

Under the current ruleset, you pay for those in Empire, but one of the perks of owning or being welcome in an outpost is you can repair a capital ship from 1% structure to 100% serviceable at absolutely zero cost shouldered by anyone. Magick !

Simply add a nanite paste hangar/tank to an outpost, and burn nanite from there or/and from the corporate/personal hangar of pilots to fuel repairs.

Outpost owners should obviously have the option to offer repairs for free if they so choose, but just as a drink 'on the house' is still coming out of a paid-for bottle, 'free' repairs should come out of the outpost's operators pocket.

Providing cheaper than NPC market nanite paste sources (in cash costs anyway) could be done through planetary trade in sovereign space, missions, PvE gathering of resources and home brew manufacturing… whatever fits.

• Remote/local reppers on ships.

Nanite paste again, either pure, or in player-manufactured compounds/charges.

Nanite paste (or nanite based compound/charges) would be used both for local and remote repairer modules of the structure or armor flavors.

To maintain the incentive for remote repairing roles, remote-repper modules should be slightly more efficient than local repairers but still much less efficient (from an ISK-per-HP perspective) than a Station repair services operating at cost.

• Logistics drones.

Change the way they work: instead of beaming free armor HP through the viscous ether of EVE intarweb space, have them eat away their own structural HP as a fuel source for remote repping. Drones could be preset to either burn through their Structure HP until they go pop (or the target is fully repaired, whichever comes first), or to return to their carrier ship once they reach a bottom level of structure HP (like 2%).

Structure damage on drones could be healed from inside the ship drone bay, at the expense of some nanite paste (or the usual nanite paste-based repair compound) normally used for local/remote reppers — or done on drones in space, using remote structure reppers (also using standard repair fuel).

The need to 'fuel' repairers serves three main purposes.

It ousts nonsensical magick out of the game.
It adds tactical depth to repairing: "Do I want to remote-rep teammates at every opportunity, or do I save my limited on-board stock of nanite paste for critical situations ?"
[Choosing to keep flying while damaged ties in nicely with Commandeering mechanics, and attrition wars over nanite paste also become a realistic option.]
It asks of players to handle the balance between cost and convenience, which adds a level of challenge and decision-making to the mix (the assumption is maxxed skills and the best ship-fitted equipement will never beat the repairing efficiency of a station-bound repair service).

Other boosters.

In a similar spirit, shield and energy transfers should be tweaked, such that remote boosting shield/cap is more efficient than using local shield boosters in many cases, yet not so much that you can create energy or shields out of nothing by spider-boosting.

The 'fuel' here comes in capacitor cost, which typically should require to use Cap Booster charges to keep a remote booster's capacitor in the black.

Shield/Energy transfer drones' boosting abilities could be limited by a low cap recharge rate compared to the needs of their boosting output, which would therefore be reduced to a trickle after they eat through their capacitor buffer, warranting a recharge trip to the drone carrier.

Scooping dried out drones would instantaneously drain the drone carrier for about 50% of the required capacitor needed to recharge drones, or alternatively the return of a drone to bay could temporarily boost its cap recharge rate by x2 to x5 of its normal.

Either solution trades capacitor charge for elapsed time, which is consistent with the way capacitors work in the game (ship grid reactors supply an infinite amount of energy, but at a limited rate).

Notes and caveat:

Balance should account for the necessity of ship-mounted repairer modules to remain attractive.
While this is currently a no-brainer (free matter-generation !), the question will arise when the 'free as beer' factor is ditched.
The fitting and capacitor costs of structure and armor repairers should be significantly reduced (especially on remote modules), as the price for fitting them would be paid in reduced utility (due to charge limitation), running costs (nanite paste isn't cheap), in addition to the expense of ship fitting slots.

Most ships may not need cargo bay adjustments to accommodate the extra load of repair fuel, provided the used compounds are compact enough: a ship should have sufficient spare room in cargo bay under normal circumstances to near-entirely rebuild 3 to 10 same-class ships with repair fuel if they so choose.
The limiting factor on total amount of repair fuel loaded ought to come instead from the potentially higher cost of loosing the ship, considering the added total value of repair fuel in cargo bay.

***

The action figure gap.

2009-11-24T11:16:00.003Z

Through all the sources I skim/surf/browse/read on a daily basis about R-POWs and the making thereof, there is a constant divide I couldn't help but notice: any given writer, critic, academic, pontificating game designer or wannabee will refer to EVE-Online either very frequently or absolutely never.

I'm not talking about reviews of Marshmallow Cluedo Online™, the puzzle game, here. My eye is on bona fide MMO design discussion platforms, where you can read massive articles and opinion pieces about issues such as player-driven economy, dual-currency systems, or large scale PvP warfare without so much as a passing wink at EVE.

Conversely, many EVE-centric sites — and not just the fanboyish ones — will ignore a large selection of fairly well-known and significant titles when doing comparative analysis of features across MMO*.

At first, I chalked that on the widely shared preconception that PvE-oriented players and hardcore PvP nerds don't mix unless forced to, and plainly said, on the notion that each consider the other group as an aberration of nature not fit to mention in polite company.

But as even the blogs from well-know advocates of hardcore PvP in MMO*, famous for their massive rants in favor of unforgiving games that give players something chewy to bite on, manage to simply leave EVE out of the picture 99% of the time*, I must admit I got stumped for a while…

Then it hit me…

It's the avatar, stupid !

The great divide is not between hardcore PvP sandboxes and theme-parks railed rides, it's between men-in-tights and mechazoids. Some people will simply not acknowledge as part of the same ecosystem worlds where you run around with an action figure representation of your in-game self, and those where your game presence is embodied in a spaceship, giant mecha, or race car.

I'm not sure what it says about the meandering and crafty ways of immersion in game worlds, just yet, but I'm willing to bet the introduction of ragdolls in EVE online will make it more relatable overnight for the fraction of game designers and critics who up to then couldn't see it as a proper MMO*.

***

[* Yes, that's a grand total of 7 results on a search for "EVE Online" in entries between 2004 and now on Psychochild's blog, I'm not making this up…]

EVE is broken, yet…

2009-11-24T11:05:00.006Z

With me being back in the proverbial armchair and buttocks-deep into game design again, I've come to remember how grateful I've been over the years for the very existence of EVE, and how I still should remain grateful for it to this day.

Sure, EVE has it wrong on a grocery list of levels, the gameplay is terrible (at least relative to its stated ambitions), the community is an embarrassment of Palin-esque proportions for the human species, and the public faces of CCP, through its developers and PR mouthpieces don't do much to help it, yet…

My perpetual concern that the failings of CCP are somehow poisoning the well for future PvP sandbox MMO* aside, EVE has one great feat going for itself and the genre: it exists, and is alive, profitable and steadily growing 6 years after public release — and that has to count for something.

Whenever one gets into a discussion about the viability of design concepts tied to the whole sandbox-PvP thing, EVE provides the likes of me with a simple point-and-smirk, one-click rebuttal to the boilerplate argument that 'PvP games are doomed to fail, period'.

So…

My heartfelt thanks to the people @CCP for making, running, maintaining this game. For being a bunch of clueless monkeys and overall asshats griefer frattards, you're still family. Despite everything, you're the living proof we don't belong in museums just yet — we just are a bit slow to evolve.

With love,
AcD.

Late to the party ?

2009-11-24T11:00:00.004Z

A friend pointed me to this, which somehow had escaped my attention until now — thanks, B.

It's basically a starting EVE-like game, only with mechas, and on the ground, done by a Hungarian team.

This looks interesting, if only because it offers another, and fresh perspective on the same defining elements as EVE, which very few games have really tried to tackle, to date.

Also… mechas !

On a bright note, compared to EVE's, Perpetuum's gameverse and backstory make perfectly good sense, and earnestly avoid some of the most ridiculous non sequiturs clichés of space op'.

Not that it matters so much in a pew-pew game, but there's always that.

On the downside, the character's portraits should not be gazed upon if you have a weak stomach… they are uncannily (and not on purpose I suspect) disturbing.

***

Will Perpetuum make it ? I don't think so, unless it gets a massive injection of capital and/or talent to help it reach critical mass and differentiate from what is comparatively the 800 pound gorilla in that small niche.

WTF!?

Before you go all internet lawyery on those guys for the blatant ripoff of your favorite intarweb spaceship game, read this first, take a walk around the block breathing through your nose a few times, then go check your game design history (about UO and BattleMechs/Tech, notably) to get some perspective on how much of EVE is truly unique, original IP.

***

DevBlog #717 — Capital ships in Dominion.

2009-11-23T11:00:00.009Z

Let's be fair, one can't bash CCP for coming up with utterly stupid designs they bullheadedly rush towards Tranquility, and not salute the comparatively sensible decision to put a pin in at least some of it, and go back to the drawing board.

So… watch me while I laud CCP Nozh for his feat of un-retardedness in Dev Blogging.

Yes, the very good news is: broken Motherships will not be replacing Apocrypha-era Titans as the WTFsoloPWNmachine 2.0 of Dominion (although there's a good chance they'll still be re-christened SuperCarriers, for the LULz).

The other good-looking news is: the re-balancing of XL weapons seems sensible, at least on paper — Minnie dreads with their dual weaponry will probably remain slightly behind the DPS curve compared to their peers when sieged (although even that remains to be seen in the light of late/post-release fixes), but they enjoy a slight advantage in flexibility, compared at least to Amarr, when engaging moving targets.

Finally, Titans figure how to use those XLs gun slots that until now were shelved in favor of utility modules, with a hefty enough damage multiplier to warrant locking non-blues. Combined with the new death-ray superweapons replacing Doomsday devices, this turns titans into extremely expensive yet not entirely pointless gunboats with logistical superpowers, which isn't so bad a placeholder to wait until they get re-written for good, hopefully (optimist hat on).

***

Droonies

2009-11-23T10:45:00.031Z

Hello y'all… my name is Largely Irrelevant, and I am a pet-lover.

Phew… that sure feels good.

Ever since my early days in MU* and P&P RPGs, and through my time in CRPGs and MMO*, I've kept a fond spot for the critters.

Pets make for for cool player-toys and handy roleplay props, while GMs and writers can use them as crafty devices to steer back players on course in much less anvilicious ways than the insufferable NPC-in-party would allow.

[Featured articles linked at the end of this post]

Pets rock !

The appeal of semi-autonomous tools/toys/weapons/sidekicks is both obvious and subtle: pets extend the player's character reach, enable to probe and explore otherwise inaccessible or overly dangerous areas, and often are the ace up one's sleeve in combat, but just as importantly — if done right — they connect player characters to the environment and gameverse.

Pets are half-player, half-NPC by nature, and as such they can convey information and immersive clues a PC hardly could — without robbing the players from control over their in-game self, at least in part.

A pet can sense danger and refuse to advance further down a path way before players can spot the enemy, or rush for a waterhole after a long hike through desert terrain, leading you to feel your own character parched lips for a second… the list is endless.

They can also go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye if not kept on a short leash…

See what I did here ?

Moving on. 

In computer games, and especially MMO*, pets have fantastic potential, but also open a huge can of worms, the kind that makes balancing PvP between ranged and melee characters look like a 'tie your shoes with your eyes open' sort of dare.

How pets are gained, lost, raised, healed, developed over time, their philosophical nature and the mathematical minutiae of their handling, all are nightmare fuel for designers and coders.

Make the pets too good, and their master player character soon vanishes behind its limited role as a remote-control interface for a CritterOfDoom™. Make the pet suck, and you'll see no end to the whine of people whose class is otherwise gimped to balance for a useless feat.

In short, pets in computer games, MMO especially, tend to file under awesome but impractical, and thus are often relegated to the vanity trinkets category, much like an epic mount that couldn't run and is afraid of crossing shallow creeks.

Droonies… 

In EVE, believable pets are an exclusive of major 0.0 alliances, and mostly played in the metagame space. The closest to familiar critters we get would be with drones, the no-name, brain-damaged, cannon-fodder-lag-generating scourge of EVE.

Because I'm such a pet-lover, I still like drones quite a bit. In fact, my oldest EVE toon is/was a drone specialist, thanks to a happy coincidence of me rolling the toon based on the comical racial description for Intaki, and ending up with ridiculously high memory. Being a roleplayer and all, I figured it was a sign, and made my way to lvl 5 on every drone skill available over the years.

…are vermin.

Even though they're about the simplest form of pet one can imagine, EVE drones share many of the qualities and liabilities of their kind: mainly, they clog the server pipes while failing repeatedly to do what they're supposed to.

Meanwhile, they steal player jobs by filling roles suited for light ships, and easily eat enough processor cycles and bandwidth to support another session or two, but to the difference of a player multi-boxing, they don't bring another subscription revenue in the coffers to make up for it.

Why CCP bothers with them at all would be a mystery, if not for the aforementioned fact that pets (and thus drones) are inherently desirable and cool — end of story.

Making a niche for droonies.

For all their misfortunes, drones are a long standing feature of the EVE arsenal, and they even are a defining element for one of the 4 main racial playstyles. Entire classes of ships, not just Gallente, and ranging from frigates to SuperCarriers™ are built around the purpose of carrying and deploying drones.

Although the entire drone interface and control scheme is in dire need of a serious makeover, the worst issues with drones are found on the side of capital and supercapital ships built as drone-boats, namely Carriers and SuperCarriers.

Defining the exact role of those ships and balancing them has always been problematic: being drone-centric, they are automatically gimped or overpowered in direct proportion to the drones they pack, and the most obvious ways to make drones useful overlap with roles that coulda-oughta-shoulda been filled by player pilots.

Articles.

In the posts linked below, you'll find proposals to make a niche for droonies and drone boats (of capital and regular size), and to improve both the gameplay and relevance of drone-shepherds in ways that don't put frigates and cruisers pilots out of employment.

***

Everything Droonies: all the articles tagged as Droonies-related, to date.

Drone Herding: a first look at drone management overhaul.
Supercapitals Overhaul: Introducing new support Fighter types (Mothership section)
Repair Systems Overhaul: a glimpse at revamped Logistics Drones.

DevBlog #714 — dominion upkeep and upgrades

2009-11-22T11:00:00.019Z

Catching up on Dev Blogs, I found the mouth for Dominion's sovereignty overhaul has spoken again, although no cute flowcharts this time…

After the giant whinethread, the Upkeep costs have suffered a big hit of the nerfbat, in addition to a healthy boost granted to the weakest type of PvE upgrade (more mini-plexes spawns) both of which were obviously things to do, and arguably the right reaction (although it's still pouring fresh water down a leaking barrel, design-wise).

A welcome — if overdue — change is the announced reduced price of tier 2-3 upgrades for Outposts: the tier 3 are currently so stupidly pricey that spawning another tier 2-upgraded outpost is actually running cheaper than upgrading from tier 2 to tier 3, limiting the instances of tier 3 upgrades to a count of roughly 0 to date. Only question being: who'd want to sink more ISK in high end outposts when they basically can't be defensible anymore ?

Other changes are less enlightened: the halving of the online time of SBUs (from 6 to 3 hours) is not so bad, as it hastes a bit the pace of Stargate contests, but the reduction on the random factor variation applied to reinforcement timers (for Outposts and HUBs) fosters blobbery even more than before.

Where CCP designs smarts really shine however, is with the "Usage indices": now decoupled from the actual Infrastructure Upgrades that support the boosts on PvE/industry resources.

The intended goal of this significant change to the model is to allow the conquerors of a well-developed solar system to be able to readily deploy their own Infrastructure HUB and PvE upgrades to replace those they've just destroyed, as the Usage Indices that determine which PvE/Industry upgrades can be installed/onlined will persist for a little while (couple days at most) after the previous landlords's HUB has been wiped out.

This is… wait for it… ~~awesome !~~ Broken™ !

As I pointed in my very first look at Dominion's planned overhaul of sovereignty benefits:

Interestingly, assuming CCP goes for the option of not allowing capture of the 'Upgrade center' and instead decides to have it go poof on sovereignty shift, it may be more interesting for an invader to entirely ignore sovereignty and be content to focus on seizing outposts, leaving for the defender to pay Upkeep bills while the attackers milk the juicy NPCs and roids attracted by the now-homeless defenders' system upgrades.

Unless I missed something, this approach would remain entirely viable in this last revision.

Although the invaders have to somewhat 'suspend' sovereignty immunities in order to seize an Outpost (by spamming SBUs on 51% of the gates long enough for the Outposts to be captured) there is no indication (from the published Dev Blogs) this would magically destroy or disable the Defender's TCU or Infrastructure HUB permanently, until they actually get shot at.

There's a giant and obvious loophole here: it looks like it's perfectly practical to invade en masse, scare the lemmings away by stealing their outposts, but leave sovereignty and HUB alone, then for the squatters-conquerors to reap the benefits of the upgraded space at zero cost, while leaving for the evicted faction to pick up the tab of Upkeep Costs… Or did I miss something ?

Yes, I know there's this line in Seleene's previous Dev Blog:

Sovereignty is a requirement to have an Infrastructure Hub and it is not be possible to have a scenario where a system has an Infrastructure Hub and no sovereignty.

But unless the actual game mechanics support Abathur's statement, it's about as imperative and effective as asking ore-stealers to "Leave my cans alone !".

Assuming I fail reading comprehension, or it's just something that didn't make it into Dev Blogs, but really is addressed in the ruleset, that still leaves the possibility to invade a system with 800 peeps, not bother with capturing shit (maybe just screw a bit with gates and SBUs for dramatic effect), and mine / rat away at no Upkeep Costs, then head back home (say NPC 0.0 stations nearby).

I'm sure this is CCP's idea of 'dynamic, cerebral sovereignty warfare', and people will just jump at the irresistible opportunity to spend bazillions of ISK developing and maintaining infrastructure for others to (ab)use, when they could more easily go rape the small-alliance neighbours instead — because we know how kindhearted and caring blobbing alliances are.

Quoting myself once again:

Strong defensive and industrial benefits should come from developing high levels of sovereignty and infrastructure, which should incur heavy penalties for local PvE resources.

Keep true-sec as it is, significantly boost base wealth in conquerable null-sec, make loot/spawn tables adjust dynamically (downward) based on local infrastructure, average population, local and surrounding sovereignty 'score' (which conversely boost and enable industry/defense perks), and you have a system that gives the edge to small-medium alliances built on a well-coordinated mix of PvPers and industrialists over sprawling herds of PvE hunter-gatherers, while forcing codependency between both styles, and creating interesting friction areas in the interstitial, richer wild lands.

Funny-in-a-sad way, how easily this doomed race against design cracks could have been avoided by simply having local PvE resources adjust the other way around relative to player sovereignty and infrastructure, but have no fear: slapping patch after patch over leaky pipes is a proven way to make spaceships fly happily forevah.

Madness, baby, madness.

Gaah.

2009-11-21T11:00:00.000Z

I didn't really fluke yesterday… I was sort of late to begin with — which I saw coming a mile away — then… this happened.

Even the most devious compulsive spacenerds among the five of you shall admit that's enough eye-bleeding content for two dowmtimes, at least ?

*sinks hands in bowl of ice chips*

Commandeering (part 2)

2009-11-20T23:00:00.005Z

In part 1, I covered the essentials of Commandeering and FoF Tuning mechanics, the various states Of Ownership (Owned, Abandoned) and Tuning (Controlled, Neutralized, Challenged), and delved into some specifics about Ship Commandeering, which the main use most players would have for this feature.

This entry is about understanding how Tuning contests are resolved, complete with some examples of the typical targets for Commandeering. If you haven't read part 1 of Commandeering, now may be a good time, and likewise you may want to have a glance at the FoF Tuners article, or at least keep it handy in case things get too hairy.

Anatomy of a target.

Tuning Strength Modifier (TSM): It modifies the base NTC (to compute ETC), boosts Passive Tuning Recharge (if available) and increases the output of FoF Tuner modules.
Defaults to x1.00, can be increased by skills, sovereignty benefits, special rigs and upgrades, etc.
TSM suffers from no stacking penalties of various sources applying to the same object.

All potential targets for Commandeering share a base set of attributes, many of which are subject to TSM.

Nominal Tuning Charge (NTC): Expressed in Tuning signal points (Ts), it is defined by the item type and can't be modified. NTC is used as base score to compute the ETC below and sets the threshold that must be reached to Challenge or gain Control over an object.
Effective Tuning Capacity (ETC): Basically the NTC plus applicable Tuning Strength Modifiers, this is the maximum charge the object can hold while Controlled — default value is equal to NTC.
Formula: ETC=NTC*TSM
Base Passive Tuning Recharge (bPTR): Expressed as n% of the NTC, with n defined by item type, it is used as base value to compute the PTR below.
Passive Tuning Recharge Rate (PTRr or PTR): expressed in % of the object ETC or in absolute Ts/cycle, it indicates how much an object will self-recharge per PTR cycle while between 0.0 Ts and ETC.
Its value in absolute Tuning Charge output is indirectly modified by Tuning Strength modifiers as they increase the object ETC (constant percentile of a larger quantity), and directly as they increase the % value (higher fraction at constant quantity).
PTR may be activated or inhibited by the Sovereignty/Ownership/Control status of the object.
Formula: PTRr(ETC%)=bPTR*(ETC/NTC)*TSM (or bPTR*TSM^2)
Formula: PTR(Ts/cycle)=bPTR*ETC*TSM (or bPTR*NTC*TSM^2)
Passive Tuning Recharge Cycle (PTRc): expressed in seconds, it is set by the item type and can't be modified.
PTRc is used to resolve the Control state of an object, in addition to the potential change in Tuning charge from PTR.
[Note: since PTR(r) is a per-cycle value, PTRc directly affects its Ts/sec output, which is calculated thus: PTR/PTRc=PTR/s]

PTR boost is applied at the beginning of each cycle, while the Control state check of an object and the effect of FoF Tuners apply at the end of their respective cycles. This means if an object reaches its NTC (or is brought to 0.00 Ts) within its cycle, the Control state change will kick in right before the beginning of the next PTR cycle, possibly canceling (or enabling) Passive Tuning Recharge for the new cycle.

Control state changes.

The Control states of an object reflect which (if any) entity currently is in position to use it, and possibly Own it.
There are three possible Control states (Controlled, Neutralized, Challenged), and three potential contest types allowing to transition between Control states.

As can be seen above, it is possible to transition between any two Control states both ways, except between Challenged and Controlled.
Moving from a Challenged state to a Controlled one can be done through a single transition/contest, but a move from a Controlled state to a Challenged one will require a first transition to a Neutralized state, then another from Neutralized to Challenged.

From a Neutralized state, the current Defender/Owner of the object (if any) may regain Control through a single transition/contest, while a Contender must first tune up the target to its NTC once to Challenge it (which resets the target's tuning charge to 25% NTC), then up again to change its state from Challenged to Controlled for the Challenger's benefit.

Here's the breakdown of transitions:

Controlled => Neutralized: reduce the target's tuning charge to -0.00 Ts (any party but Controller)
Neutralized => Controlled: tune up the target to NTC (Defender/Owner only)
Neutralized => Challenged: tune up the target to NTC (current Contender only) — resets the charge to 25% NTC in favor of the new Challenger.
Challenged => Neutralized: reduce the target's tuning charge to -0.00 Ts (any party but Challenger)
Challenged => Controlled: tune up the target to NTC (Challenger only)

From a practical standpoint, Commandeering a currently foreign-Controlled target requires to feed it roughly 3-4 times its NTC worth of FoF Tuning signal of your frequency (not accounting for PTR, and assuming no active interference from other parties): 1x to 2x NTC to Neutralize it (depending on applicable TSM), then 1x NTC to Challenge it, and finally 0.75x NTC to win the challenge and takeover Control.

For the Defender of an object under attack, successfully tuning the object up to its NTC once while still Controlled or Neutralized will be enough to regain full Control over it. Once the object is Challenged however, the Defender (if Ownership hasn't been lost already) will first have to change its state back to Neutralized before attempting to re-claim it, typically without the help of PTR (disabled by the Challenged Control state).

Commandeering Targets.

[Editor's note: NTC for many structures are expressed in xDreadnoughts NTC as an indicator. Those are provisional numbers meant to give a rough feel of relative NTCs, and are very much still in the air at this stage.]

Ships

Vulnerable:
- Defender FoF Frequency: always.
- Attacker FoF Frequency: anywhere, while Structure≤95%, Shields<15%, Armor<15%;
State changes: Ownership inherited from Controller, with provisions (see The fine Print).
- Abandoned: after 3min without a pilot.
- Challenged: disables modules and jump drive (if any).
NTC: Based on ship class, variation between classes roughly proportional to Capacitor size.
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: always on, except while in a Challenged or Abandoned state, set to the current ship Defender FoF frequency.
- PTRr: 3 to 15% ETC/cycle, based on ship class, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: Frigs, Dessie, Cruiser (T1, T2, Fc): 20s. BC, BS (T1,T2, Fc): 30s. T3 Cruisers: 30s. Freighters (T1/T2): 45s. Capitals: 60s. Supercaps: 90s.
- -PTR: While Abandoned, -0.1% NTC/cycle.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- FoF Tuning skill: +5% per level.
- Sovereignty: all sovereignty TSM apply.
- Rigs: yes, tbd.

POS control Towers

Vulnerable:
- POS Defender FoF Frequency: always but while Reinforced.
- Neutralization: while Shields<50%, post-Reinforced mode. Requires to be Planetary Defender or for the Planet to be Abandoned.
- Commandeering: While Structure≤95%, Shields<50%, Armor<15%, post-Reinforced mode. Requires to be Planetary Defender, or Solar Defender (if the Planet is Abandoned). If both Planet and Solar are Abandoned, Commandeering is FFA.
- NPC space: Requires the POS Defender to be a valid War Target of the Attackers to lift sovereignty immunities. Rest is similar to 0.0 POS.
State changes: Ownership inherited from Controller, with provisions.
- Controlled: Enables Strategic Modules (subject to sov requisistes).
- Abandoned: triggered on entering Challenged Control state.
- Challenged: disables (Offlines) Strategic Modules (if any).
NTC: ≈ 10x Dreadnought NTC.
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: always on, except while in a Challenged/Reinforced state, set to the current POS Defender FoF frequency.
- PTRr: 1% to 3% ETC/cycle, based on Tower Type, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 300s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: requires Planetary Sovereignty to enable Sovereignty TSM from other tiers.
- Tuning Array: +20% TSM

POS Modules

Vulnerable:
- POS Defender FoF Frequency: always but while Reinforced.
- Neutralization: while Modules Shields<50%, Armor<50%, or anytime while the POS tower is Abandoned, offline or destroyed.
- Commandeering: While Modules Shields<50%, Armor<50%, post-Reinforced mode.
  If the POS tower is destroyed, offline or Abandoned, Commandeering is FFA.
- NPC space: Requires the POS Defender to be a valid War Target of the Attackers to lift sovereignty immunities. Rest is similar to 0.0 POS.
State changes: Ownership inherited from POS control tower.
- Controlled: Allows to use/access/take the module and its contents, as if rightfully Owned.
- Owned: Allows to use/access/take the module and its contents, while not Controlled by a third-party.
- Challenged: disables (Offline) if the module is of a Strategic type (tied to Sovereignty), or simply denies use/access/take to everyone.
NTC: ≈ 1-8x Dreadnought NTC (depends on type).
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: status inherited from control tower if present. Disabled if tower is offline, Abandoned or Destroyed, or if the module itself is offline or incapacitated.
- PTRr: 1% to 5% ETC/cycle, based on module Type, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 100s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: requires Planetary Sovereignty to enable Sovereignty TSM from other tiers.
- Tuning Array: +20% TSM

Stargates

Vulnerable:
- Neutralization: always. A Stargate doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Neutralize it.
- Commandeering: Requires the sister gate on the other side of the jump to be either Neutralized (and fed the same FoF Frequency) or positively charged (for the same FoF frequency) for Tuning Up to work on the target Stargate, unless one is the Owner of the target Stargate, in which case the sister gate being in any state but Controlled by a third-party is enough.
  A Stargate doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Commandeer it.
- NPC space: Requires the Stargate Owner to be a valid War Target of the Attackers to lift sovereignty immunities. Rest is similar to 0.0.
State changes: Ownership inherited from Solar/Constellar Sovereign, with provisions.
- Controlled: Builds Occupancy requirements, also enables TacticalDataStreams for the Controller, and modifies the Stargate PTR.
- Neutralized: Disables SearchlightEffect for the Defender.
- Challenged: Denies all Occupancy/Ownership benefits to the Owner.
NTC: ≈ 10x Dreadnought NTC.
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: requires Solar sovereignty to benefit the Stargate Controller, or Constellation Sovereignty (if the Solar is Abandoned) — PTR depends on Ownership. PTR is also disabled while the Stargate is Challenged, and halved while it is Controlled by another Faction than the DCC Defender.
- PTRr: 1% ETC/cycle, based on Tower Type, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 90s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: System Sovereignty is required to receive other Sovereignty TSM, or Constellation Sovereignty with Neighborhood rules active if the System is Abandoned.

Dungeon Control Centers (Planetary/Solar)

Vulnerable:
- Neutralization: while Occupancy requisites are met, barring Sovereignty immunities.
  A DCC doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Neutralize it.
- Commandeering: while Occupancy requisites are met, barring Sovereignty immunities.
  A DCC doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Commandeer it.
- NPC space: Requires the Dungeon Defender to be a valid Factional War Target of the Attackers. Rest is similar to 0.0.
State changes: Ownership is decided by Controller of the Dungeon Control Center.
- Controlled: Grants DCC and Dungeon Ownership, with attached benefits.
- Owned: Grants Planetary or Solar sovereignty, respectively.
  Planetary Ownership reduces Occupancy requirements to Neutralize or Commandeer the local Outpost while the DCC is Controlled by its Owner, and grants an exclusive to the DCC Owner on Commandeering the Oupost while the DCC remains Controlled or Neutralized.
  Ownership allows to access/take/manage the DCC, and may also tame local NPC drones (with sufficient sovereignty benefits).
- Neutralized: Planetary DCC, while Neutralized, open their respective Outpost to Neutralization by attackers (barring Capital Sovereignty Immunity). Neutralizing a DCC also disables SearchlightEffect for its Defender.
- Challenged: Lifts DCC, Dungeon and Planetary or Solar Ownership/Sovereignty and attached benefits, switching the respective Ownership/Sovereignty to Abandoned.
- Abandoned: Allows any party to vie for sovereignty on equal Occupancy footing.
  An Abandoned Planetary DCC opens the local outpost to Neutralization/Commandeering by any party that meets Occupancy requirements minus Planetary Sovereignty.
NTC: ≈ 10x/20x Dreadnought NTC (Planetary/Solar).
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: PTR is active while the DCC is Owned plus Controlled or Neutralized, and disabled while the DCC is Challenged or Abandoned.
- PTRr: 2% (Planetary), 1% (Solar) ETC/cycle, modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 300s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: requires Dungeon Ownership to enable Sovereignty TSM from other tiers.

Dungeon Mass Drivers (Planetary/Solar)

Vulnerable:
- Neutralization: while Occupancy requisites are met, barring Sovereignty immunities.
  A DMD doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Neutralize it.
- Commandeering: while Occupancy requisites are met, barring Sovereignty immunities.
  A DMD doesn't require to be damaged for any party to Commandeer it.
- NPC space: Requires the Dungeon Defender to be a valid Factional War Target of the Attackers. Rest is similar to 0.0.
State changes: Ownership inherited from Dungeon Control Center.
- Controlled: Allows to use the DMD as if rightfully Owned but at the expense of its Tuning charge (based on mass) if not the Owner (subject to ship class restrictions based on possible Sovereignty Immunities). Also renders the attached Defensive structures susceptible to Commandeering by the Controller if not also the Owner.
- Owned: Allows to use the DMD at all times at no cost and without restrictions, may also tame local NPC drones (with sufficient sovereignty benefits), and allows to Tune Up or Neutralize attached Defensive structures.
- Challenged: disables TacticalDataStreams, and prevents manual control of the attached Defensive structures by the Defender (but not their FoF Tuning).
NTC: ≈ 5x/10x Dreadnought NTC (Planetary/Solar).
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: status partly inherited from Dungeon Control Center. PTR is disabled while the DMD is Challenged, or Abandoned (as a result of the DCC being lost), and halved while the DMD is Controlled by another Faction than the DCC Defender.
- PTRr: 2% (Planetary), 1% (Solar) ETC/cycle, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 300s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: requires Dungeon Ownership to enable Sovereignty TSM from other tiers.

Dungeon Defensive Structures

Vulnerable:
- Neutralization: By any faction while Modules Shields<50%, Armor<50%, or while the structure itself is Abandoned, or the DMD/DCC it's attached to is Abandoned (or destroyed).
  By the Dungeon Defender at any time, while charged positively for a foreign Faction FoF frequency.
- Commandeering: By the Controller of their DMD/DCC — a Commandeered DSS will revert to Neutralized if the state of the DMD it's attached to changes to Neutralized, Challenged or Abandoned.
  DDS don't require to be damaged for any party to Commandeer them.
- NPC space: Requires the Dungeon Defender to be a valid Factional War Target of the Attackers. Rest is similar to 0.0, except DDS can't be stolen.
State changes: Ownership inherited from Dungeon Control Center.
- Controlled: Allows to use/access/take the DDS as if rightfully Owned, burning the DCC fuel reserves all the while. If the DSS Controller is not the Dungeon Defender, it will only attack in self-defense unless manually operated by a Pilot.
- Owned: Allows to use the DDS in automatic mode, or manually operated by a Pilot, while the DDS is Controlled (or Neutralized) by its Owner.
- Challenged: disables TacticalDataStreams, and prevents manual control of the DDS by the Defender (but not their FoF Tuning). The DDS will still operate in automatic mode for the Owner benefit while Challenged, however.
- Abandoned: Can only happen as a result of the DCC being lost and brings the structure offline. The DCC can then be Neutralized and Commandeered by any party, and subsequently unanchored, or re-onlined for the new Dungen Defender's benefit.
NTC: ≈ 1-8x Dreadnought NTC (depends on type).
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: status partly inherited from Dungeon Control Center. DDS' PTR is disabled while their DMD is Challenged, or Abandoned (as a result of the DCC being lost), and halved while the DMD is Controlled by another Faction than the DCC Defender.
- PTRr: 1% to 5% ETC/cycle, based on module Type, further modified by TSM.
- PTRc: 100s.
TSM: affect ETC and PTR.
- Sovereignty: requires Dungeon Ownership to enable Sovereignty TSM from other tiers.

Misc.Anchorables

Include: Anchorable Bubbles, Secure Cans, Freighter Cans, Construction and Upgrade Platforms

Vulnerable:
- Neutralization: By any party while Structure≤95%, Shields<15%, Armor<15%.
  By the current Controller/Owner at any time, or by anyone while Abandoned, both regardless of damaged state.
- Commandeering: By any party while Structure≤95%, Shields<15%, Armor<15%.
  By the current Controller/Owner at any time, or by anyone while Abandoned, both regardless of damaged state.
- NPC space: Is a Criminal Act unless the object Defender is a valid (Factional )War Target , falls under Kill Rights, or belongs to the same Corp/Faction as the FoF Tuning frequency applied. Legality is generally the same as for ships Commandeering.
State changes: Ownership set by Control state.
- Controlled: Grants Ownership to the Controller, unless the last Owner was a Corporation belonging to the Faction that Commandeered the Anchorable, in which case Ownership is left intact.
- Owned: Allows to Neutralize a foreign FoF Tuning, or Tune Up the object at all times.
- Challenged: Lifts Ownership under the same rules as Control does grant it (see above) resulting either in conservation of Ownership or Abandonment of the object.
- Abandoned: Allows anyone to Neutralize or Commandeer the object.
NTC: ≈ varies wildly (depends on type).
- ETC: NTC*TSM
PTR: Special — Misc.Anchorables can't benefit from PTR, but indefinitely conserve their tuning, Ownership and Control state unless Abandoned.
- PTRc: 100s.
- -PTR: While Abandoned, -0.1% NTC/cycle, exempt from TSM modifiers.
TSM: affect ETC.
- Sovereignty: any Sovereignty TSM that applies to ships applies to Misc.Anchorables belonging to that Faction.

***

I left out Outposts from this one, because: it's already an insane wall'o'text and me fingers hurt ; Outposts call for diagramms (you got one today already, and I hate making those) ; I am the starving.
So this will be for Part 3, with other stuff I may have forgot/left out.

Lunch out.

2009-11-20T11:00:00.004Z

There will be a filler today, but due to me lunching out, it may be closer to the end of pre-Dominion temp downtime than to the usual 11.00 UTC, so hang on, or use the dt to take that weekly shower, you need it.

***

[Update 2009/11/20 —23.00h:

Better late than never, I guess… it's there, and ma'am, I don't know how to put it in a way that won't scare you away, but… it's a whale !

Be strong, now.]

Sturgeon, Warring Pandas and Carrion Poultry.

2009-11-19T11:00:00.035Z

What makes you tough is not how much hurt you can inflict: that makes you threatening, maybe dangerous, but not tough.
What makes you tough is how much you can endure before you quit trying.

The same way packing heat may sometimes deter aggressors, but doesn't actually protect (unless you're a deity-level marksman, and can stop bullets by shooting them mid-flight), there's a world of difference between being ready to impose pain on others and being prepared to personally pay the equivalent price in blood — even virtual.

Which is why, as hinted in a previous entry, most pretend-warriors in EVE are really chicken-hawks, who croak at carebears to toughen up !, while themselves making sure their metaphorical balls are safely stored in a locked drawer before they log in.

The problem with carebears is not that they lack the toughness, or need to grow a pair ; it's that they — as the name implies — don't shy away from caring, and do put their balls on the line in their gaming.

"C'mon, it's just a game…"

It is just a game indeed, yet the oft-uttered zinger above is no less of a cop out for it.
No joke is truly innocent, and pretend games only work as long as the participants are willing to buy in the fiction that this broom really is a white stallion, the pop-cap gun really is a gunslinger's six-shots, and cousin Lucy with a mop for a wig makes a convincing Redcoat lieutenant.

Roleplayers and carebears buy in, and that's what makes their game engaging and meaningful.
It's also what makes some of them obnoxious D&D nerds when they take the game too seriously, but there's plenty of wiggle room between the Diablo-esque chicken-hawks bullies and the guy who writes an infuriated 3-page rant about some non-canon bit of Amarr empire lore in the latest EVE Chronicle.

Not really meaning to make a case for roleplaying in EVE, which would be a bit disingenuous of me, I still contend the space-thingie theme is more than mere dressing for game mechanics, or we wouldn't care about the shiney and eye-candy in EVE: I know I'm not alone to think a fantastic PvP sandbox game could be released tomorrow and I still wouldn't go anywhere near it, if it involved elves in tights. But I digress, as a matter of course…

To sum up, we need to somewhat believe in the game premises to relate and enjoy the experience, and that implies to care at least a little: if you don't care, you're not playing pretend games, you're pretending to play, which makes you a pitiable kind of spacenerd.

So, why is it most carebears hate PvP ?

The unique attraction of PvP'ing in sandbox R-POWs revolves around the fact it has meaningful consequences, and is directly tied to the potential for high-stakes battles. Unless you're competing in a world championship or play money on it, winning or losing a round of Quake or Counter-Strike can be fun, but is ultimately inconsequential for all involved. Not such in games like EVE, where a relatively poor action game can provide rare thrills and tension, thanks to the meta-context provided by the larger game goals.

That many among the ill-defined carebear/RP crowd are very keenly aware of the meta-context of their gaming sharpens the multi-pronged blade in their backs when it comes to PvP.

They obviously care 'more' about anything happening, which means PvP can be both a better and worse experience for them than for a player who's less engaged in the fiction — if things go wrong at first, they'll feel the burn, hard, and may not willingly come back for seconds.
Because they believe 'more' in the gameverse, they're more likely to spend a lot of time early on delving in stuff like PvE, exploration, and cooperative gameplay, and only later-if-ever get around to try their hand at PvP, which makes many of them 3-years-in-game n00bs when it comes to combat — being in a n00b without realizing it makes it this much harder to cope with the steep learning curve involved in mastering the basics of PvP in EVE.
PvE in EVE basically teaches people to suck at PvP. Arguably true of any MMO on the market today, but less of an issue in those where PvP is entirely optional and/or non-consequential.

The first two points may not be obvious if you're not a carebear yourself, but they're self-explanatory. The third warrants a little 'splaining, though.

PvE trains you to work under three basic assumptions:

you choose when to get in a fight with NPCs,
you know (more or less) what you'll be faced with, ahead of time, and can prepare accordingly,
you can (in most cases) opt out, if things don't look like they're going to go your way.

Compare to PvP… yeah, symmetry is beautiful.
PvP is likely to be the exact opposite of PvE, unless you play The gank (as described in yesterday's filler), which is basically the equivalent of ratting harmless players. As luck would have it, and as hinted above, most carebears early experience with PvP happens to be in the role of the gankee, which shows them how much it sucks to be a belt NPC, and hammers in the lesson that being on the losing end of PvP (gank really, but that's all they know at this stage) also sucks immensely.

Why would they make such a big deal of losing a ship to a couple lowsec pirates jumping them in the middle of a mission ? Hmm, let's see:

Maybe because they've entered the mission with a mind set to optimize a run through deadspace in the cleanest, most efficient and bump-less way, with every angle covered and complete information about the situation they get in, something all their PvE experience has taught them to do very well, while un-preparing them for the unexpected, which is therefore perceived not as an exciting opportunity for some good spirited skirmish, but as a nuisance akin to patent griefing.
This is the common root of the "Why wouldn't they leave me alone ?" syndrome, and of the absolute lack of mutual empathy between many pirates and carebears.
Or maybe, because of the aforementioned flawed assumption that they should be reasonably safe from interference (as a result of them not interfering with anyone) they boarded their very best (and most expensive) T2 or faction BS, rigged with the best gear l00t and ISK can afford, and they just lost the raw equivalent of a small capital fleet to a pair of '09ers T1 cruisers — it's certainly part of the beauty of EVE that such a feat is at all possible, but if you look at it from the wrong perspective, it can really seem ugly.
Or maybe, because once the reds showed up on overview it was over in a few agonizing seconds, just long enough to fully measure how defenseless and irrelevant the prey is to how this is going to end. Yes, that's why some of them just log off in disgust with half-shields still up.
Losing is one thing, being denied the ability to play is another, and for most PvE-bred players, PvP, from experience, is a strictly one-sided game where only the aggressors get to play, which is the absolute zero degree of fun for the guy on the receiving end of the bashing.

Are carebears really sad pandas ?

…to be protected and segregated in natural parks where they would be left alone to chew roids and bamboo ?

Obviously not, but they're not a species of sheep either, only meant to feed the self-proclaimed wolves of EVE, most of whom really are more carrion-pecking poultry than super-predators to begin with.

I'm a carebear who digs PvP, most of the best and brightest FCs and combat spacenerds I've met in over 5 years in EVE are either carebears, roleplayers or competitive-sports types who're unlikely to be found ganking a mining op (unless repeatedly asked to), yet almost any of those have harassed 0.0 complex-runners at a point or another… so where's the difference ?

Context is: they did so in order to deny the enemy the ISK that would otherwise fund their capital fleet, and to remove the perceived incentive for clinging to a specific portion of space — and if you got to steal ph4t l00t from expensive ships' wrecks in the process, all the better.

For those with a problem discerning the obvious: this is not mere post-facto rationalization for piracy (which needs no apologizing anyway), this is PvP with meaning, and believe it or not, many carebears will jump into that kind of stuff with two feet, the moment they realize they can actually participate.

There is a world of difference between going only after random easy prey because that's all your inadequate e-cojones will let you, versus targeting the weak spots of a formidable opponent because that's a part of how to win a war. This may be putting too fine a point for some, but that subtlety isn't lost on warring pandas.

Panning for fangs.

Do I really believe all Empire carebears are beasts-of-war waiting to happen, and anyone with a positive kill/loss ratio is a cowardly shithead not worth the carbon expense ? Naah. Just let me find my Sturgeon abacus and you'll see why I seem to favor the fluffy ones: it'll all make sense in a minute.

[For the sake of argument, I'll assume the actual hot bodies/accounts ratio is sensibly the same on either side of the PvP—carebear divide (almost all PvPers have reason to own 'safe' alts for practical purposes, and many PvE activities lend themselves to easy multiboxing).]

Pulling stats out of thin air, I can make a (very conservative) bet that people who currently avoid PvP combat (if given the choice) outnumber other EVE players at least 3 to 1, but just to be safe, I'll go with 2-to-1, and assume 1/4 of EVE playerbase will never leave a station, or quit the game altogether before they have to enter a fight against anything remotely sentient.

That gives us (again, conservatively) something like 150k accounts controlled by actively-non-PvPing players, 75k dead-for-the-pool accounts that are beyond salvaging, and 75k actively-PvPing (anywhere from occasional to primary playstyle).

By Sturgeon Law, that's about 7.5k players/accounts who engage in what I'd call interesting PvP combat, focusing on challenging/dangerous targets as a rule (the sportsman described in yesterday's filler), and/or whose pew-pew fits a higher purpose than raking stats, and is directly informed by a strategic take on the game (that doesn't apply to faceless grunts forced into blobs as the price to keep their ratting/mining privileges in alliances, btw, only the fraction who willingly plays the wargame, regardless of role).
It also translates in at least 15k players who are not currently engaging in PvP combat as a significant part of their playstyle, yet aren't in EVE because they took a wrong turn and thought it was WoW, only in spaace.

If even half of that untapped reserve of potential werebears could be successfully converted, we'd double the population of PvPers worth the name. That's a prospect I find exciting, and so should you — if you like your fights interesting.

Sending out a calling.

PvErs are used to play low-risk/high stakes, and their natural drive to high stakes plays a large part in keeping them away from PvP, where the lack of control they have over chances mixes badly with their tendency to always bet big.

The first step in learning PvP is that you can't control the risk but you can mitigate its consequences by being smart about how much you put on the line. A common saying in EVE is "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose", and for once that piece of common wisdom is not just posturing bullshit.
Translated for carebears it should be understood as "Don't fly what you aren't prepared to lose".

Once you've got that part down, all you need to do is practice living at higher risk. Go, dare, die, you'll be surprised to find you have more balls attached than most -10 retards you run into.

At some point, it'll get mildly boring… that just means you're finally ready to up the ante to high-risk/high-stakes PvP: the part of the game less than 4% of the playerbase, and less than one in ten 'PvPers' will ever dare experience — it simply pwns.
Congratulations: a Warring Panda is you.

Parting words of dubious wisdom.

• If you're a carebear reading this, take my word for it:
I'm one of you, and I know there is more fun and sense of accomplishment for you to gain from interesting PvP combat than you'll ever get mastering the subtleties of the perfect run through a lvl 5 mission.
Also make your peace with the fact you don't know jack about PvP yet, that none of your PvE experience and 00ber gear really translates into making you combat-ready.
Enroll in some PvP classes, start your baby-piewate alt corp and go out looking for trouble in T1 kits, die a lot, try to kill something with guns and half a brain fitted while you do… Play high risks but low-stakes for a bit — I know it's counter-intuitive for you, but that's how you start in a new game, and PvP is another game entirely.

• If you're a pirate or PvP corp looking for a challenge and new blood to add to your crew, unlock the drawer, put on your e-balls, and go after big game.
You may die more than you kill, at least for a while, but you'll get thrills like you never felt since your first fights. Also consider spreading the love: run PvP classes, answer the convo of the guy you just killed, and if he's not smacking, take a moment to explain how you trapped him and what he could do better next time. In short, try and play in ways that lead you to care more, you'll thank me later.

• If you're running an Empire carebear corp, think about going on low/nullsec hikes in expendable ships, once in a while.
Don't be afraid of it blowing back. Nullsec alliances won't bother retaliating with empire wars against another no-name piratic band roaming through their space: it keeps their miners and patrols on their toes, which is only healthy.
You have no idea of the effect sharing the thrill of battle can have on your carebears' cohesion and loyalty until you try.

• If you're a dev at CCP, a CSM, or anyone with the will and time to lobby for changes in the game:
Help CCP make PvE less of a brainwashing machine towards victimhood.
Have it teach players to deal with the unexpected as par for the course, upgrade rats so they chase players who run away, and break engagement when kited. We all know AIs don't have to suck so much, they come pre-nerfed to make things easy on the lazy and dim-witted, and those aren't helping EVE get any better.
You may lose a few lemmings to WoW, but you'll attract and breed fanged bears, and those will make EVE a much more exciting PvP sandbox than the hordes of part-time sociopathic brats who currently make the bulk of your PvP l33t.

***

Paper tigers, roleplayers with fangs, the carebear paradox.

2009-11-18T11:00:00.029Z

[Editor's note: I'm well aware PvP in EVE goes beyond mere pew-pew, and extends to other fields that don't necessarily involve explosions. This entry is mostly about the ka-boomey kind of PvP, yet also about how it ties to the bigger picture, so there's something to love for everybody in there.]

***

I wouldn't call myself a typical PvP'er, at least not in the sense most die-hard fighters in EVE understand it.

My kind is coming from the ages of old-school, to-the-bone PvP: I'm a no-frills, permadeath roleplayer, of the sort who had to be explained that retiring his main and rolling a new toon after losing his first pod on a 2 years old character (in mid-2005 that made you a veteran) is *not* the way EVE is intended to be played.

That's right, I find the death penalty too easy and forgiving, in a game that proudly claims to be home to the most obnoxious griefers and hardcore PvP scumbags in the history of gaming — this side of Ultima Online, that is. That puts me in a favorable position to look down my nose at the internet tough men gesticulations of so-called hardcore PvP'ers in EVE, because I know how easy we have it, what with cheap clones and insurance, and no XP loss unless you really demand it…

On the plus side, if the death penalty is nothing worth quivering in my trendy-yet-affordable roleplayer boots, dramatic consequences can potentially hinge on the fate of a single ship, which occasionally makes for truly knuckle-whitening fights.

The fact of EVE is a single boat's cargo bay can carry the hopes and future of an entire corporation or alliance, be it a stack of rare blueprints, a few cans of very expensive resupply of faction modules for your entire fleet, or the egg-shaped hulk of an outpost about to be launched.
Thus, if and when the outcome of a PvP confrontation in EVE means srs bzns, it has everything to do with the bigger picture, all about what may (or won't) happen as a consequence of who lives or 'dies' through the battle, above and beyond the mere tally of killmails and corpses.

And this, if you followed me thus far, shall lead you to the same shocking conclusion I've reached:

The only 'true' PvPers in EVE-Online are carebears.

Need help connecting those dots, do you ?
Always happy to help…

On a broad scale there are three kinds of PvP combat in EVE:

• The contest of skill:

Best seen in FPS and RTS games: players start on a relatively even playing field, and the best(s) win. This is competition in the sporting sense, where players go toe-to-toe and measure their skill against each other. This is rarely if ever to be seen in sandbox MMO*, due to limitations in game mechanics (PvE centric games) or to uneven matching of contestants (see The gank below).

Also attempted in many PvE-centric MMOs that offer some kind of 'PvP arena', typically with moderate success (as player skills usually are less of a factor than the respective 00berness of the gear packed by competitors).

• The gank:

The most frequent kind of PvP encountered in freeform games such as EVE, where your average fight is grossly biased in favor of the attacker, while the other party qualifies more as a victim than a contestant. Happens as a natural side-effect of the freedom enjoyed by players to only seek the brand of trouble they know they easily can handle, and by the willingness/candor of some players who expose themselves to surprise rape. It is characterized by its own-sided nature, and the fact the 'winner' satisfaction doesn't come from besting a worthy foe, but merely from the thrill of inflicting PK-pain for its own sake.
Although some consider this frequent imbalance a necessary price to pay for the unique excitement coming from a 'sandbox' PvP game, others call it institutionalized bullying — both views are arguably valid.

• The carebear/roleplayer PvP:

…a.k.a 'pew-pew with a cause'. This is the sort of PvP players engage in to further an objective of a larger order than the advance of a ranking on some killboard ladder, or the cheap thrills gained from licking the delicious tears of outrage of griefed noobs. These players don't play '4 teh LULz' or for 'easy killmails', they play with a plan. For them war is indeed the natural continuation of politics, and they get to experience the full available breadth of PvPness EVE has to offer.

And that's the bone of it: no matter how good one's kill/loss ratio looks, it doesn't amount to squat unless you really mean it.
Players who set out to prey on easy targets for the win aren't PvP'ing more than people grinding lvl4 missions in Empire are PvP'ing the rats… By not fully committing to the fight, overly minimizing risks taken and potential consequences to live with, and by making sure one's prey is not threatening enough to be acknowledged as a real 'player' opponent, the majority of so-called PvPers are denying themselves the opportunity to fully engage in actual PvP play.

The only people left to play 'serious PvP'… well, they are the roleplayers and carebears, the very groups our wimpy intarweb spacenerds posturing as hardened warriors love to scorn and paint as the opposite of PvPers.

***

[This all started with a conversation I had yesterday with a fellow long-time EVE player.
A self-proclaimed carebear, if not much of a roleplayer, he never got around to really jump into PvP and enjoy it, despite seeing the obvious attraction and the potential for meaningful PvP in EVE.
I'll expand in the next downtime filler on why it is so many carebears hate PvP, and how to help it.]