Making Things Right

So, to get straight to the point, I did a bad, bad thing.

Actually, I did several bad things. I got a little stir crazy, and so developed an unhealthy taste for non-consensual PvP. What's so bad about that, you ask? Well, as you can see here (kill 1, kill 2, kill 3, kill 4), I was terrorizing carebears in Providence, which, I now freely admit, was behavior both low and unmanly, and wholly merited my inclusion on CVA's kill on sight list.

But I'm trying to make it right. I've been in touch with CVA's diplo, I've touched base with all of the individuals whose ships I so rudely destroyed, and I've reimbursed the first of those individuals, as you can see below:

In conclusion, score one for the courteous and efficient residents of Provi and diplos of CVA.

One down, three to go...

My Private War, Part IV

The following is the fourth part of an ill-conceived story arc chronicling Rolinthor's and the Applied Physics Institute's pathetic misadventures in the Derelik region. Read Part I here, II here, and III here, and check back soon(TM)* for the next episode (you know, if you're empire mining, and you're really, really bored).
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The afterlife wasn't at all like the Amarr said it would be.

As Roland Prideaux climbed the ladder of consciousness back to a state more befitting an advanced hominid, his eyes slowly focused on a face. The face belonged not to an angel but to his wife, Xanthippe.

Prime's "Ex", as he liked to call her, was a Sebiestor woman on the verge of crossing that fuzzy boundary into "peasant" country. But perhaps this requires some explanation: Everyone knows, of course, that Sebiestor are graceful and lithe, if a bit on the gaunt and pale side, and that they have a sensual attitude to match their looks. This is why many men throughout the cluster desire to take them for wives. But for those that do, one morning, when the woman reaches somewhen north of 35 years old (and, mind you, only after she's been married off), these husbands wake up to find that they're wedded not to a wild, tribal sex goddess but to a peasant woman with round face, plump figure and child-bearing hips.

In the looks department, Xanthippe was still years from crossing the peasant line, but in mindset she had crossed it long ago, or so Prime thought to himself, somewhat bitterly, as the clone vat emptied itself of pseudo-amniotic fluid and he stepped, dripping with slime, onto the cold linoleum of his family flat. Once he had coughed up the last of the fluid from his lungs, he grabbed the robe Xanthippe was holding out to him--how is it that she makes the simplest gesture seem like a reproach? he thought--and covered himself with it.

"I'm sorry, love, I'm not here for one of my regular visits," Prime said.

"'Regular'?" she said. "I'm sure I don't know what that word even means anymore. You haven't been making 'regular' visits for more than a month, since you and that Rolinthor fellow went off into w-space with that Amber-woman, to do who knows what."

"'Who knows what'? You know exactly what, Ex: making ISK. For us. For our future together." Prime stood up straight, arched his back, and adjusted his robe, gestures intended to restore his capsuleer dignity. His bathrobe trailing behind him, he walked like King Rouvenour himself to the shower.

"But we have enough already love," Ex cooed at him as she watched the blurred form of his body through the frosted glass of the shower door. She peeled off a layer of clothes alluringly. Prime thought for a moment that she looked like an impossibly graceful impressionist painting. The sight only made him feel worse about what he knew he had to do. He bowed his head under the stream of hot water.

"It's not money, love," Prime said softly, his voice halting. "I can't leave Rol right now. I think he needs me."

Prime watched the impressionist painting lose focus, diminish, and disappear just ahead of the sound of the bathroom door closing. He put even odds on Ex still being in the house by the time he got out of the shower.

Settling In

It's been some time since I've written here on a regular basis. Good times in RL (both work and family editions) tend to line up with blog posting according to the inverse law of the extremes: When life's really going well, or really going poorly, I'm not a "bored spaceman." And life has been really, really kind to me lately.

But I'm beginning to settle back in to something approaching a routine, so expect to see more content here in the coming weeks. Rolinthor, Roland, Amber, and the entire APHID crew have never been far from my mind while I've been away from this space, and in fact their antics are by now almost too numerous to recount in full.

But I'll do my best to tell their stories, starting with the one I left hanging way back in April (that long? really?). Expect weekly updates to that story arc every Saturday at a minimum, as well as occasional vignettes inspired by random bits of flotsam and jetsam I happen across in game. I'll also be breaking character when the mood strikes to follow-up on the story surrounding CCP's minor public relations snafu from earlier this year.

So that's my plan. I hope you'll stop by from time to time to hold me to it.

Battleflag of the Khanid Kingdom

Cool people will get the historical allusions (in-game and IRL). Otherwise, I think it speaks for itself:

Y'all can go to hell. I'm goin' to Khanid.

Well Said

This says about everything I tried and failed to say well the other day. It also says something I wish I had said, regarding CCP's apparently flawed approach to measuring success:

Players don't care that "memory usage on the server per user has decreased in the last 12 months". That is as relevant to them as "the brand of coffee in CCP Coffeemachine has been improved".

All that matters to them is the end result -- does the game play better now than it did a year ago?

From my worm's eye view of the situation, at least, the answer to this question is "no." My alliance mates and I have experienced all sorts of problems: increased session changeover times when jumping to another system, failure to dock/undock, client failure to activate/deactivate modules, items/trades that go missing, sov structure weirdness, and, of course, lag. For a while there, it was so bad that our alliance re-named our home station "Eve's Bermuda Triangle", on account of all the crap that just inexplicably vanished or otherwise didn't work right.

I understand that a certain amount of patience is in order with a game as complex as Eve Online, but these days, debilitating or extremely frustrating bugs are an almost nightly occurrence, and I find myself questioning why I log in at all if I can't have any confidence that I won't lose a HAC to belt rats because an armor repper mod refuses to online/offline inside of 20 minutes.

This is where Noob Starship Politician is spot on: CCP needs to keep track of the right metrics. Given that the devs probably don't have the time or inclination to actually play the game too intensively, or explore its ins and outs all that thoroughly, they need to listen intently to the people who are doing those things: the player base.

An Open Letter to CCP: Kick the Bucket!

When I started this blog, I never intended to do any out-of-character posts. Part of the reason for this was that the vast majority of out-of-character blogs, while they were mostly high-quality, all sounded the same to me. Another part of the reason was that the official CCP literature, including the books and the Chronicles, presented a pretty cramped, game-centric view of New Eden, which I wanted to flesh out. (I don't want to belabor this point, but the first section of an entire Chronicle consisted of a bunch of people sitting in a board room wondering, along with the readers, what the hell was going on. Note to CCP Abraxas: Having your characters exchange pleasantries does not constitute dialogue. Consult David Mamet.) The final reason I started this blog was that I was bored, and I had a lot of free time.

Obviously, I have a lot less free time these days. IRL work and family life are going well, meaning that my free time isn't. I intend to return to writing about the Applied Physics Institute eventually, but for the time being, frankly, I'm having too much fun just playing the game when I'm not enjoying life or working on other projects.

There is, however, an issue of great importance to CCP that's brought me back to the Diary to write this OOC post.

The above graph shows the subscription figures from the latest Quarterly Economic Update. Anyone notice the paradigm shift? A few months ago, you might have been able to chalk it up to other factors, but now, it seems clear that Eve has left behind an era of smooth, continuous growth and entered a more volatile period of oscillating deflation and expansion (pun intended). Figures like the above must be the "data" which CCP claimed in the minutes of the latest CSM summit as proof that quantity (i.e. new features, new releases) sells better than quality (fewer, fully-baked releases). Unfortunately, what CCP seems unaware of is that this strategy locks you into a self-inflating bubble: Subscriptions are down, you say? Then we need a new expansion! But the expansion is half-baked, so after an initial burst, subscriptions go down. Which becomes the impetus for rushing another half-baked expansion out the door. And so on and so forth until the game is so kludged with half-baked features that failure cascade is upon you.

This strategy even works, up to a point. (Part of my day job tangentially touches on the world of publishing and direct-mail marketing; in some ways, CCP's current predicament is eerily reminiscent.) We can analogize this strategy to a leaking boat. While the leak remains small, it's a simple matter for us to get the water out of the boat using a bucket. When the leak grows, however, we have to find a bigger bucket (i.e. a new expansion, with new features). But as a wise man once said, that which can't last, won't. As the size of the bucket approaches the size of the boat, our watery demise becomes inevitable. And the worst part of it is, once we've adopted the "bigger bucket" strategy, the skill-set we would normally use to make the leak smaller begins to atrophy.

I think the graph above suggests very strongly that CCP has adopted the "bucket strategy"; Dust 514/Incarna represent the newer, bigger buckets to bail out the leaking subscriber base. The longer they follow this strategy, the harder it will be for them to beat back bureaucratic inertia and return to a "fix the leaks" strategy.

I hope, for New Eden's sake, that it's not already to late for them to turn back.

This Is New Eden

A scrimmage in a Border Station

A canter down some dark defile

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

Congrats on the kill. Wish I'd been there.