Friday's Electric Lunch Hour - Burn Jita Edition

May the butt-hole of New Eden burn with the heat of a billion supernovas !!!

Fly hot

o7

Have a nice vacation Mittens!

And so it was that yesterday the ominous CCP BanHammer struck a blow to punish The Mittani for his drunken slip-up at FanFest during the Alliance Panel. While I was never a Goon and I didn't vote for Mittens, I find this whole drama-bomb really sad on a few levels. It's never been a huge secret that EVE Online attracts some of the meanest Internet trolls just because of its nature. You think that Something Awful denizens are the only ones to do "bad things" in EVE? Goons at least have a game plan and play the big game of space politics and conquest; some other corps and alliances do nothing but wardec noobs just to hear 'em cry. But I digress.

The sad things about The Mittani's ban from EVE and his eviction from the CSM7:

- Suddenly over ten thousand voters are without a representative. With all the stuff that got done during CSM6's tenure, you can bet your nuts/ovaries that Mitten's voters aren't Goonswarm only. Regardless of what he said or did, scrapping the chairman is tantamount to scrapping the entire CSM. Do I believe that the election should be rerun? Yes I do. Will it be? Probably not.

- The Alliance Panel as you know and love it is now a thing of the past. Let's shoot a bit wider: alcohol consumption during FanFest as you know it may be a thing of the past. Or at the very least, if CCP wants to entertain some serious business partners like, I don't know, Sony for example, Make sure they don't make decisions based on the actions of a couple thousand drunken Space Nerds. I'm not blaming alcohol for what Mittens said but I'm sure as hell it didn't help.

- One notorious clusterfuck of a coallition is now pissed off. This is a two-sided edged sword: if you want to play EVE to blow shit up, meet a bunch of crazies and have a huge laugh, this is the perfect time to play. If you want to play the game seriously with your industrial stuff, your P.I., or just your plain "minding your own business", You WILL have your game wrecked. Especially if you're among the thousands living in and around the shit-hole called Jita.

So as I've said a few times, even though I don't actually play the game anymore, EVE drama is still some of the best entertainment to be found anywhere on them Internets. I just didn't expect the drama bomb to be this big and this quick after leaving. I'll keep my eyes and ears peeled for more drama nukes to blow up.

To hell with flying safe !!!

o7

SuicideGate ?!!

You have got to be kidding me. Once again all the shit hits all the fans two weeks after I go on long-term leave. My buddy Pascal was right: EVE is more fun to talk about than to actually play! I'll let some water go under the bridge before I write a longer post about this cuz I need to cogitate a bit more.

To Mittens, I don't know if you'll read this but what the fuck. Yes you said something bad but I blame it more on EVE's "we're allowed to be bad so fuck you" mentality. And I must say that frankly I've heard things just as bad if not worse. But your apology is heart-felt and sincere so you're well on the way to redemption. Do I think you need to resign? OH HELL NO GODDAMMIT! You Alex Mittens Sir have done more with one CSM than all other CSM's combined. Your leadership has been proven and God knows this game needs it.

Let's see whether this slowly fizzles out, or turns into Summer of Rage #2.

o7

Friday's Electric Lunch Hour - 2011/12/09

Yes I have to bug you one more time with Maestro HevyDevy and with good reason. Next Wednesday at 7PM my buddy Letrange and I will go to Montreal's Foufounes Electriques to see and hear the Devin Townsend Project. It should be quite the show!

On the EVE front: finally got a bit of EVE done yesterday! I did a bit of exploration and found a Radar and a Magnetometric site, and then paid a visit to the hellhole known as Jita where I found that the Large Neutrons were the cheapest (!) at 7m ISK so I bought a full set for my upcoming Talos. But in my tiredness I sort of left 'em in the hangar in Jita 4-4 because I wanted to take a good look at this without being hassled:

All banged up!

Yes, this is the result of the bashing you can see in my header (excerpt from this video) Now the big question: should I change my header to reflect the change to the monument or do I leave my header as is to remind CCP that the player base will get angry if pushed?

... More stuff to be written cuz now I gotta leave my place XD

Aight back from work, but completely lost my train of thought. I'm a fail-blogger lately! Call it the pre-holidays syndrome, plus my brain is trying to go 20000 directions at once. And I have an ex to throw me curve balls (flaming ones of course). Oh well... I guess that's why there are first-person shooters :))

Fly hard and kill 'em all!

o7

Burning Eden, part Quattro

When I started my "Burning Eden" series of posts during my summer break I never thought I would have to add to it a few months down the road. But here we are four months after the infamous Jita Riots, and despite some efforts to reconnect with the community after letting it down in a big way with the Incarna/NEX/Greed debacle, CCP once again managed to hit a massive foul ball. 24 hours after bringing back a feature of EVE Online which had been basically a trademark of the game, and getting showered with shouts of relief, CCP announced that basically in order to survive as a company, it had to lay off 114 people. Most of these were working on World of Darkness, but the part that I'm still trying to understand is how they layed off the community team. After folding themselves in 4 saying "Incarna sucked, we're sorry, we'll listen to you a bit more now". If you fire a community team, one that did everything it possibly could to shovel water out of a clearly sinking boat earlier this summer, just how the hell do you think the community will react?

I understand the business part of having to lay off people. It is now clear that the wave of mass unsubs coupled with the way CCP had become over-stretched trying to juggle 4 monsters at once (EVE, Incarna, Dust, WoD) had the effect of the company suddenly not having enough income to keep everybody working. But further alienating the community, this I don't get, and I don't think I'll ever get it.

So, am I unsubbing come the 17th of December? So far, I don't think so. I like EVE enough to believe that CCP will not let crash into the ground if they remember the reason they created this awesome game. I asked myself all the "unsub" questions during my summer break and guess what, I even resubbed in advance of when I thought I would! But after the dust has cleared (no pun intended) I will be anxious to see how CCP directs its energies to make what is already a good game better. If EVE goes back to being the main focus as opposed to a test bed for other games then they might yet have redemption. But after so many foul balls I'm very afraid for the future; one missed swing and it's a strike out. In the meantime the winter expansion is coming soon... let's see what throw the pitcher serves...

o7

PS: Head on over to Rixx Javix's EVEOGANDA and listen to RockCalledSteve aka Moose's one-off podcast. It's worth a listen.

Burning Eden, part trois - The Fire Extinguisher

Alright, I said that the next time I would post about EVE Online it would be with a positive view, so here's the video from the CCP/CSM emergency summit. You can also read the full statements here.

So how does this change my own view of things? Well, not much at the moment because I'm already out of the game and enjoying a lengthy break. And before I come back I want to see a lot of things fixed in the game; basically, unless there is a return towards small-gang skirmish warfare PvP I don't have much interest in coming back, for now at least. But I will be watching any future developments very closely. But CCP better not screw with its player base again. For my part, if the vikings want my money again, they'll have to earn it. But one thing is certain, I'm never touching the NEX store. My Minnie ships will stay rusty, and as a matter of fact, providing that Incarna has been developed beyond the CQ if/when I come back, I fully intend to walk around trade hubs in my boxer shorts only, just to show that I don't give a flying fuck about pixel clothing. Wearing a Vagabond is more stylish anyway :)

In the meantime, I'd like to thank the CSM for a job well done, but make sure you keep holding the reins tight.

For once, fly safe

o7

PS: Do not get me started on the monocle-toting RP'ing twats; even if I'm out of game I'm gonna start a "to wardec" list... >:)

Burning Eden, part deux

iRabble at work... thx for the term Let :D

First of all, I will not go into the numerous reasons why just over a month ago I parked my Internet Spaceships for an indefinite amount of time. The links to my past blog posts are right there on the right ---->

So for the first time in 3.5 years I experienced an EVE expansion as an outsider. I had a rough idea of what would be new in Incarna but as of now I still haven't even seen it. So last week during Patch Day I paid a visit to the EVE-O forums... and already the uproar was starting. This was shortly followed by a post on Letrange's blog with a very short text: "15$ for a pixel skirt?!?! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL !!!". Because I know Letrange personally and also know he's usually a lot more eloquent than that, I immediately phoned him up for a "WTF?!", and that's when I learned about the 70$ monocle. I almost pissed myself laughing !!! Seriously, if you're one of those crazy rich fucks I love to hate, who have to buy every single toy they can lay their hands on just because you can, go ahead and blow your money, I couldn't care less. But this was the very tip of the iceberg.

First in my book were the reports of CCP's specialty: breaking what already works. Please stop hoping that someday they will learn something from past experiences, they never will. It's simple, when CCP patches EVE, something breaks. It's inevitable, like death and taxes. This time it wasn't just the game acting up though: reports of GPU meltdown were heard, especially from ATI card owners. Note to gamers: when a game is optimized for one brand of video cards, in this case nVidia, expect the other brand to work at an inferior level. But if the game also fried good nVidia cards, then CCP is simply full of fail.

But the most important thing that turned the masses into a lynch mob was CCP's laughable attempt at public relations. Citing designer jeans to justify the high-priced pixel goods only made CCP Zulu look stupid and disconnected from reality, but it's not as bad as avoiding critical questions the players had, mostly regarding the vague possibility of RMT for non-vanity items, the dreaded Pay2Win syndrome. The lack of respect and communication sent the mob into a frenzy, and that's when the trade hubs got blobbed by protesters. And to spill just a bit more fuel into an already raging fire, the message carried by Hilmar Petursson's internal mail that got leaked a few hours after the mayhem started fanned the flames to heights I've never even imagined possible for a video game. A. Fucking. VIDEO GAME !!!!!

So being the outsider and not able to participate directly in either a constructive solution or pointless demonstration I followed the events on Twitter (this was the first time I actually found Twitter useful), the EVE Radio special hosted by DJ Funky Bacon and the EVE-O forums where all hell was breaking loose; it's pretty much already loose when all is cool so this weekend was just over the top. At some point I was just happy I had pulled the plug before all this crazy shit started, and felt sorry for my friends who are still playing. And all of a sudden my Hate-Love relationship which caused my own retirement turned from 95%-5% to 99%-1%. Yeah, the chances of me getting back into EVE are very slim indeed. So my position in the various debates I was seeing was that of someone who had already made his peace; even though Tranquility will most probably be up forever and the CCP devs will die rich, to me EVE is dead, or if not dead then in a serious near-unrecoverable coma. I didn't encourage people to do like me and quit, but I didn't defend CCP's stupid PR skills either. Shit like this weekend's does not get my money. Period.

Of course on Sunday CCP Zulu promised a blog "with 100% more love" to the players. When I saw that I simply couldn't believe how thick-skulled vikings could be. I tweeted directly to him "How about a blog with 100% more answers?", not that I expected an answer. CCP, you guys need to hire PR people pronto. If you don't it will be just like with your wrecking ball expansions, you'll have learned nothing.

And to the rioting players, for the love of Frank Zappa, LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP !!! You guys get this angry about a pixel life in a pixel universe?! If you start hating EVE then do like me and unsub, and/or just don't log in. Want to play a game where the devs care? Play something smaller scaled. "But EVE is epic!" you say. EVE is what the players make of it, and this weekend it was anything BUT epic. Surprising yes, and as the videos showed spectacular to look at, but riots of any kind aren't epic. I should know, I'm a Montreal Canadiens fan!

Fly, or don't. You decide.

o7

PS: The next time I will cover something about EVE Online will have to be something positive or I simply will not cover it. There are many other things in life that are better.

Burning Eden

EVE Online is in turmoil, and weirdly enough it's never looked so damn good! I'll follow this post with my view on this crazy weekend when my brain cells are actually working... getting late here :)

Fly safe... if you're still flying.

o7