Chocolate Heaven

…Stays in Iceland?

You’d be forgiven for thinking so. I’ve been back for a while now, and even though I made some notes for some of the presentations I went to, its taken me this long to write a new post. I could feel the onset of a rather nasty flu-bug on Saturday, but I was determined not to let it slow me down. But slow me down it did. At least it had the decency not to show up until Sunday, after all the Fanfestivities.

I spent my last day walking around Reykjavik. We had lunch at a nice place along Laugavegur called Fru Berglaug. We went there twice; I really recommend it, because the staff are friendly, the atmosphere is great and the food is awesome! I remember taking some pictures of places around the town, and generally feeling incredibly tired, but that’s about it. I’m still glad we stayed for that extra day – even if it did mean feeling wretched for the journey home on Monday – it was nice to have an extra day to just chill out after all the information bombing of various presentations.

I’m going to do Thursday in this one, then Friday and Saturday in the next entry. I didn’t really make notes from Saturday, because everything was big and guaranteed to be online before I had chance to report it, so I just sat around enjoying stuff.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I went with Kayleigh Jamieson – a long-time friend in EVE – and now a corp-mate. We met up with another corp-mate, Laria Raven, on the first day. Its really nice to see such enthusiasm from the youngens!

A lot of what I had as notes is now online in video form, but here’s my notes anyway. You lucky people.

Day 1 (Thursday)

The first day was busier for me than the others. It started later than the following two days, with the first roundtable at 1pm and the first presentation at 2:30pm in the form of the opening ceremony. From there on I had stuff earmarked until the end of the day though, so there’s was lots to do!

Incursions

• An overview of how they came into being
• Showing of the presentation they showed to the CSM when it was still in ideas stage
• CCP want to make the incursions last longer from 24h up to about 2 days as a goal
• Oddly, they hadn’t really thought about what the other pirate factions think about the Sansha being all RAWR
• They also hadn’t really thought about FW integration – flying ‘officially’ for the Sansha (as an example)
• Liked the idea of propaganda videos for Sansha – since all we’ve had is “onoes, Sansha are evil” from CONCORD, would be nice to see some of the other side, to show why some RPers believe in the cause of Sansha.

Character Creation

• Lots of complicated shader stuff that mostly went over my head
• Discussion about the difficulties of fluid animation when you bring height into the equation. Probably agree with this within the context – will be easier to ‘pretend’ a short character is short than put up with really poor animation if they need to do complex interactions with (f.ex) a hulking Brutor. We’ve had to pretend a whole lot more for the last 8 years, so I’ll let them off.
• There’s a guy who is in charge of making sure that certain races don’t have certain hair colours, clothes, etc. I didn’t manage to corner him to find out why Brutor can’t have red dreads when every other bloodline (that can have dreads at least) can.
• Body meshes are hidden under clothing layers (or removed, I forget), eliminating potential clipping issues during animation sequences.

Who Needs a CEO

• Presentation by the head of BattleClinic (I think)
• Basic overview bout the nitty-gritty of social networking, and being an influence broker
• Really just a very low-level look at social engineering. Might have been useful for some people, but its stuff I’ve been doing for years.

Nice People, Nasty Players

• Delivered by a Folklorist (not CCP), talking about his MA thesis on people that are nice but sometimes do a lot of nasty things in the game.
• Some of the quotes from interviewees were very funny, but he didn’t really delve into his findings about why these nice people are sometimes nasty players.
• Interesting subject, but it didn’t really deliver

I’ve been so busy with stuff lately, I didn’t see this come around so quickly. It seems like only a couple of weeks since New Year, and yet here we are!

My personal schedule for Fanfest looks a bit like this:

Thursday

14:00 – Opening ceremony (14:30) (TQ)
15:00 – Who Needs a CEO? (Multi)
16:00 – Incursions (SiSi)
17:00 – Nice People, Bad Players (Multi)
18:00 – Character Creation (SiSi)
19:00 – Open Mic Night (TQ)

Friday

10:00 – Dev Track 1 – Intro & IGB (Multi)
11:00 – Dev Track 2 – Static Data Dump (Multi)
12:00 -
13:00 – EVE Gate (Multi)
14:00 – Captain’s Quarters (Multi)
15:00 – EVE Keynote (TQ)
16:00 -
17:00 – Dev Beer Quiz (TQ)
18:00 -
19:00 -
20:00 – Chessboxing (TQ)

Saturday

10:00 – Dev Track 3 – EVE API (Multi)
11:00 – Dev Track 4 – Conclusion (Multi)
12:00 – Year in Review (SiSi)
13:00 – PVP Finals (TQ)
14:00 – Art Panel (SiSi)
15:00 – CCP Presents (TQ)
17:00 – CCP Panel (TQ)
18:00 -
19:00 -
20:00 – Party

You’ll notice a few gaps in the list there. Originally I was going to offer up these free spots for people who were interested in a specific topic, and I would go to those presentations and try to report back. I was struck with a reminder of last time though; I had gaps there too, and squandered them sitting around and chatting, eating the adequate-but-not-great food at the venue itself, and eventually leaving each night only to find most of the food places on the way back to the hotel shut for the night.

The first day ends fairly early, so that’s easy enough to work out. The second and third days have nice two-hour gaps where I can sneak off to find some proper munchies before returning for the last parts of the day.

The smaller gaps in the days I’m going to use for chatting with people and clarifying notes I’ve made in the presentations beforehand.

There’s a curious lack of roundtable action going on here. I’m quite shy, and I don’t really have many issues that I have strong feelings about these days. Not enough to be giving much in the way of input to the group at least. Subsequently, I tend to skip them and watch/read about anything interesting from them later on. I let those that do have strong opinions and ideas take those spots, because it’ll be more productive!

On Friday, the EVE Gate presentation is strategic. I like the idea of EVE Gate, this much is true, but last time I got to the ‘new planets’ presentation and you couldn’t get through the door for all the people, or even see the damned screen. It looks like the same thing happening all over again for Captain’s Quarters (same place), so I figure I will get in early to hopefully at least be able to be in the room!

By ‘easy’, I’m not meaning the over-abundance of tutorials in the New Player Experience, or some kind of realisation that the EVE UI is in fact genius. What I mean is loss.

Most modern MMOs shy away from the concept of loss as much as possible. In WoW for example, when your character dies, you are at worst landed with a ghost-walk back to the character’s dead body (in order to be resurrected on-the-spot) and some currency loss to pay for the durability damage on your armour later on. You don’t even take durability damage on your character’s armour in PvP, and while there are honour points for succeeding in ‘honourable’ PvP engagements, ‘dishonourable’ PvP engagements (such as going to <insert newb-ish town name here> and farming hapless newbies as they’re mid-quest) reaps no punishment at all. When you lose your ship in EVE, chances are you’re not going to see whatever survived the explosion again. Its not a simple ‘run back to your corpse’ affair. Your punishment for engaging in PvP – any PvP – and losing, is that you lose your shit as well.

Before EVE, I was playing Ultima Online (UO). Now, UO had the run-to-corpse dealy with the caveat that monsters as well as players could rummage through your character’s corpse and take your stuff. If somebody killed that monster before you could, your items were theirs without any repercussions. If you took too long to return to your corpse, it would decay and everything on the body would be a free-for-all for players and monsters.

But what about permanence? In UO – in the earlier days at least (disclaimer for the truly oldskool: 1999-2003) – there was the concept of perma-red and perma-grey. Characters with red names were murderers, and characters with grey names were criminals. My memory is a bit hazy since it was so long ago, but it was something along the lines of the following:

UO had the equivalent of the GCC: after a short amount of time your name would no longer be red/grey to everyone and would return to the normal blue. However, despite being safe from the town guards and the majority of other players, the person you committed the act against would still see you as grey and openly-killable without repercussion. As would all the previous people you had committed criminal acts against.

Being a ‘Red’ was somewhat of a status symbol, similar I suppose to the -10.0 of EVE. If you killed enough player characters, your name would become red to everyone, so all and sundry knew that you were (probably at least) going to try and kill them. Being ‘Grey’ however, was not such an easy task. The mechanics are similar, but while a pirate in EVE might go out of their way to become notorious – letting everyone know how badass they are – the corp-thief does not. Unfortunately, the path to five-finger-discount land is fraught with failure and disappointment; you couldn’t just rely on time, trust and stupidity to get away with your ill-gotten gains. You had to practice on real player characters, which meant that you ended up ‘grey’ to a lot of people.

But What About EVE?

Now, I’m sure its been covered before, but a tweet the other week from @EVE_Virt of the #tweetfleet linked back to an old Hellmar blog about a potential ‘perma-death’ option to run in parallel with the pod + clone technology we’ve all become accustomed to. Here’s the gist of it:

Anyone interested in a character creation option that allows you to train skills at double the time as normal character does. The flip side would be that such characters would suffer from perma-death (i.e. if podded, could never be played again).

The most common argument I’ve seen against this (on the forums at least) is that it would be open to abuse from those with the high-sec-dwelling carebear mentality of never entering any system with a security rating below 0.5.

But what if you were forced upon creating this character to choose a pirate faction after you’ve chosen race etc? You’d be an instant outlaw and confined to 0.4 and lower systems, and be politically aligned – officially politically aligned – to that pirate faction. The rats for that faction would not shoot you unless you shot first, and would carry no bounties. Rats from other factions would carry bounties, but because of your association with your chosen faction, no security status would ever be gained.

You’d be ‘doomed’ to wander the badlands of low and null sec for the rest of your days, getting into dog-fights and praying you come out as the victor.

Obviously there are certain restrictions to this. Because you’re not using pod + clone technology, you’d be restricted to frigate hulls, or specially adapted variations of smaller/industrial ships (just a tier 1 indy, nothing fancy).

Limiting the ships to within vague boundaries of the lore would put a heavy limit on the LP that could be earned from pirate faction missions as well. Unless you really trust a group of people not to kill you when you work together in a lesser level 3 mission in a fleet of fragile frigates. And that’s assuming you even survive the mission! So, its not open to LP farming abuse in the same way that FW has been.

I think as an optional path when creating a character, it has a lot of untapped potential which could make low sec more interesting if enough people make throw-away ‘splodey-alts. It would also make for some true piratey roleplay stuff, which I’m sure a lot of people would love, if only for the fact of them having a proper pirate alt to roleplay in-game or on the forums.

But what does everyone else think about this? Is it an interesting idea? Is EVE too easy? Or is it too hard?

Took me a while to get around to this, but here be my chars, excluding the few that still don’t have faces, and the one who looks like she got hit by a bus (Vherokior)…

Kala. Still can't work out what mood that is. Everyone tells me something different.

Adri. EVeryone seems to love this one, but its the one I most often wonder if I failed on. I have no idea why.

You've seen this one before if you follow the industry character posts. Eilean Siar.

And so begins the mostly-anonymous alt brigade. This is a Civire female.

A female Brutor (like its not obvious...)

Brutor female. Again...

Joasia Lodzik. Not so secret, since I bought her with a bucket of ISK. I found Achura females incredibly easy to work with.

Dr Serenity. Achura again. This time puchased with a small jug of ISK.

Aryadnah; Sebiestor. She may still be slow, but at least she looks good while doing it!

Its too obvious. But she's very angry about something.

My attempt at making a youngish looking Brutor girl. She's gone totally OTT on the makeup, which I suppose is pretty accurate for a teenager.

Last of the secret characters, and last of the whole lot. Khanid female. I actually found Khanid to be very tough to do well. Similarly tough were Vherokior. Its odd since I found Achura such a breeze...

You may be wondering why all the characters I play are female. The answer is pretty simple. All of them are from before the new character generator, when almost all bloodlines offered us grotesque monstrosities (yes, I’m looking at you Sebiestor and Ni-Kunni) rather than anything I’d actually want to be in control of for years upon years. The choice was clear. Current male avatars I think are pretty amazing, and in a lot of cases look better than their female counterparts. I think this is mostly due to people going massively over the top with the makeup on female avatars, resulting in something that looks more like a clown than a srs-bzns capsuleer.

But what about Eilean’s exploits!? Yeah, I know; I’ve been lazy with the updates on industry characters. It’ll get done though, I promise!

Casi, over on Eclyptic Rift (which you shouldn’t need the link for because you read it anyway. Right!?) is once again going all meta on us. I actually enjoy these posts immensely, because an exploration of MMOs on a social, psychological and even ethical level is an exploration into the psyches of the players of said games, and in a broader sense, human nature at large.

Today, I specifically want to look at this:

EVE, the original seductress… wait, wrong EVE. But still: she’s that incredibly intelligent girl I once knew who had a mind second to none, a darkly attractive style all her own, and an attitude to match. Difficult, but for anyone fortunate enough to get her attention, a supernova couldn’t even hold a candle to her. Unfortunately, that could also hold true for her acerbic wit and anger.

WoW certainly is. She’s that hot girl who treated everyone with a dazzling smile, who maintained a style that easily blended cutting-edge fashion with simple classics, and looked great on your arm. But she knew nothing about anything of great significance, so while the sparks might fly at first, eventually the whole thing fizzled.

And here is where I offer up my own analogy along the same lines. If WoW was a cheerleader; a stereotype of a blonde bimbo who’s great for a laugh and for a fun time, but has all the charisma and wit of a grapefruit, then EVE is that deliciously different, clever cyberpunk girl you always had the hots for, but didn’t have the foggiest where to begin.

Back in reality, successful polygamous relationships are very hard work, and 9 times out of 10 they don’t work at all due to individual preferences, emotional needs and other such things. If you know anyone who does have a successful polygamous relationship (out of choice rather than religious doctrine – though I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with how anyone lives their life), then you know that all parties are incredibly happy. The chances of you finding a hot cheerleader who is that cyberpunk chick on the side is incredibly unlikely, so we look elsewhere to satisfy the id, ego or super-ego; whichever is needing the attention (if you happen to follow Freud’s structural model of the psyche anyway).

Playing WoW and EVE together (or at least having active, played subscriptions for both) is on a basic level the act of having your cake and eating it too. You get all the thrills of instant gratification, with bright colours, fast-paced action and limited thinking required (id/ego), coupled with the deep-thought, long-term goal-centric sandbox of patience and cunning (ego/super-ego). Its polygamy, but in a totally geeky non-committal kind of way.

There’s a lot of animosity between the EVE community and WoW. I think the preconceived notion is that Warcraft is for idiots, twelve year olds, or idiot twelve year olds, but that’s not exactly true. Its also for people that want to unwind. Using yet another analogy (*groan*) Warcraft is a soap opera, or a sitcom, and EVE is a gritty drama.

Avoiding further use of analogies, I shall leave with a simple statement of fact. You can like both, despite what your peers may say.