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.

A Plasma-scorched City on a Hill

People of Palas I, I bring you the new city of Asstastica, now producing the finest enriched uranium and consumer electronics products to be found in the cluster (and at a fraction of the going price)!

Gold Rush?

So I'm stationside in Amarr right now, practicing my remote sensing skills and seeing how the scan results line up with the production trees for resources produced planetside. I'm frankly a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities. Consider this interesting discussion about planetside industry and control-tower fuel; that's just a single dimension of the many-faceted market that will open up to the capsuleer population once the first command center modules come off the production lines.

The big question, to my mind, is what will all this do to the market? Will we see a big gold rush like we did when Sleeper space was discovered and T3 goods started to make their way on the market? Perhaps, but at the moment, I'm inclined to think it won't. Unlike the case with the Sleeper gold rush, there's no "must have" item at the end of the planetary resources production chain--no shiny new sexy toy for capsuleers to satisfy the urges of their mid-life crisis. And for the time being, capsuleers won't have a lock on the planetary resources market: the empire corporations plan to continue offering their POS-fuel wares for now, so they--with significantly larger stocks of goods which they can bring on to the capsuleer market at a moment's notice--will effectively set an upper limit to prices.

I also wonder if the portion of the capsuleer population that is naturally inclined to these sorts of supply chain management puzzles is large enough to sustain the demand for POS-fuel without help from the empire corporations. At the moment, I'm not sure it is, although it certainly could be in the future.

But I admit I'm really just casting about in the dark for predictions. I'm not much of an economic oracle. We'll all see how things shake out in the coming months.

--A. Macx

UPDATE: One of the problems with guessing what's going to happen in New Eden's economy is the lack of transparency in the decision-making processes of Concord and the empire corporations. You can set yourself up for what you think is going to be an efficient operation moving forward, and--yoink!--some corporate bigwigs can render your business model obsolete and ruin your day. Case in point: decisions like this could change everything, or nothing, and you have few ways to protect yourself. Mind you, I'm not really complaining; those are just the rules of the game.

Overheard in Jita

As if you hadn't figured it out by now, posting has been light (i.e. non-existent) for the past month, as I'm disembarking from the capusle for a few weeks to get married and go an all-too-brief honeymoon in Everyshore.

But so as not to leave you entirely without entertainment, herewith Episode One of "Overheard in Jita", with names redacted to protect the politically incorrect:

Jita Jockey #1: You ever hear what they eat in the Minmatar Republic?

Jita Jockey #2: No, what?

JJ #1: They eat dog.

JJ #2: Really? That's gross. They must be really poor to have to eat dog.

JJ #1: Yup. But not as poor as they are in Heimatar.

JJ #2: Oh yeah? What do they eat there?

JJ #1: In Heimatar, they're too poor to eat dog; they only eat bark. [Rimshot.]

[Crickets chirping.]

Friday Flash Fiction 14: Crielere*

Friday Flash Fiction is an EVE Flash Fiction initiative hosted by Casiella Truza from Ecliptic Rift. Each Friday a prompt is presented, and the next Tuesday links to all stories are added to the original post. This week's prompt is Crielere.
______________________________________
"Clier—", says Prime, grimacing. "Creelerier—"

He purses his lips and gives it one more try: "Creerlier—"

"Don't worry, old boy," says Rolinthor, appearing suddenly behind Prime and clasping his shoulder roughly with one arm. "You don't have to pronounce it! You just have to make it!"

My Private War, Part III

The following is the third 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 and II here, and check back soon(TM)* for the next episode (you know, if you're empire mining, and you're really, really bored).
______________________________________
Roland Prideaux is committing suicide in less than two minutes, and he's beginning to feel anxious.

It's not that he's lost his zest for life; far from it. Nonetheless he's still eager to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Roland is ashamed by these conflicting feelings. He's pure Gallente, the proud son of a society liberated from the backward ways of priests, princes, and tribal potentates. More important, he's a scientist and an empiricist, with degrees in psychology, infomorph psychology, quantum physics, cosmology, and countless other certificates attesting to the fact that he knows there's nothing sacred in the flesh, nothing that can't be represented as a series of ones and zeroes, and flung across the cosmos on quantum-entangled comm bands, and re-assembled in a new body.

What a Load of Garbage

"What a load of garbage!" said Amber, looking at a cargo manifest on her datapad.

 She was right. There was, quite literally, a large collection of refuse in the cargohold of the Beekeeper III, an Arbitrator-class cruiser I had just recovered from a Minmatar station near Rens. The Beekeeper and its fetid cargo had been rotting away for more than a year after I had taken a sightseeing cruise around Heimatar, looking for salvage from the garbage dumps strewn across that failing state.

My Private War, Part II

The following is the second part of an ill-conceived story arc chronicling Rolinthor's and the Applied Physics Institute's pathetic solo misadventures in the Derelik region. Read Part I here, and check back this Sunday for the next episode (you know, if you're empire mining, and you're really, really bored).
______________________________________

Most people find lying in the coffin-like alcove of an autodoc to be an unnerving experience. They say that, beyond the intimations of death brought on by being surrounded by a long, narrow box, it's just a creepy experience. Moments after you first crawl in and lie down, innumerable sensor ganglia extend from the walls, floor, and ceiling of the box to sweep across the skin in a gentle, undulating rhythm. Here and there, an individual ganglion will pause over the skin and burrow into a particular pore or prana point, to diagnose, to administer medicines, or to inject a few billion tissue-repair nanites. The ganglia punctures are utterly painless. Only for the briefest of moments, before the anti-inflammatory meds kick in, you might feel a series of slight itches or a tickling sensation, but that's it. Still, it just freaks people out.

Personally, seeing a body surrounded by the ghostly translucent filaments of a 'doc reminds me of the tropical fish that hide in the sea anemone back home on KP IV. Maybe that's why being in the 'doc, as I am now, doesn't bother me: I don't draw a bright line between man and machine. We're all God's refuse.

My Private War, Part I

I feel the embrace of the Universe Entire as a pitch-black swaddling shroud. It's a feeling of incredible power, as if all time and space were one great cynosural field, calling out to me to reach out and go to any point I care to choose in its infinite expanse. A host of long-forgotten names pass through my awareness as potential destinations: Soekheviti, Athra, Epsilon Eridani, the Great Attractor.

There is an infernal paradox to this awareness of omnipresence: In a cosmos in which I can travel anywhere, infinite though it may be, I can go nowhere. To see all that is or can be, as I am now,  is to know that choice and action are pointless. There must be more than this, but this strange awareness tells me there is not!

EVE Blog Banter #16: Past Imperfect

Welcome to the sixteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The third Blog Banter of 2010 comes to us from ChainTrap of the Into the unknown with gun and camera EVE Blog. He asks us: “Eve University turns six years old on March 15th; six years spent helping the new pilots of New Eden gain experience and understanding in a supportive environment. Eve is clearly a complicated game, with a ton to learn, so much that you never stop learning. So, the question is; What do you wish that someone had taken the time to tell you when you were first starting out? Or what have you learned in the interim that you’d like to share with the wider Eve community?”

A couple of years ago, when it had been only a few months since I had graduated from the Royal Amarr Institute*, I was facing a bit of a crisis. The hi-sec mining corporation I was a part of had been effectively disbanded as the result of a mini-Haargoth incident, and none of us knew what to do. Most of us were still mining in cruisers and didn't really know enough to run a mining op, much less a corp.

"Hey, I know a guy in Strife Mercenaries," said one guy, Gwendion I think his name was. "They might let us in." He always struck me as a bit noobish, having lost his first battlecruiser less than 24 hours after he bought it, but then again, I sure as hell was no better. And I have to admit, the idea of Concord-sanctioned violence for profit made something stir in my then-carebearish loins. Other corpmates' loins were not so stirred, however. And so half of us merged into Strife Mercenaries, while the other half said their farewells and sought out another mining concern.

When Success Breeds Failure

Minigzen at K162space has discovered the trend that has finally pushed the Applied Physics Institute out of the wormhole mining business and back into the tender embrace of hi-sec space for the time being:

After Mr. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun had essentially reduced the sleeper population into little flying bags of ISK with Hadoken beams, Mr. Industrialist perked up his ears at the mentions of ABC. And so the miners who were given a choice between working for peanuts and working for nullsec alliances chose….rapture I mean WH mining. . . .

Unfortunatley, the WH miners, being unable to focus on making ships because of lack of stations, safety, ectera, couldn’t make ships, so they carted their mega and zydrine to Jita and sold it, possibly more than the market could handle . . .

In other words, that noise you've been hearing over the past year is the sound of megacyte and zydrine prices plunging off the cliff of abundance. (Pyerite, meanwhile, has been riding the rocket upward.) When we first started this business several months ago APHID was raking in about 50 million ISK/hour from our twin-barge mining operations. Today those same operations net us only a bit more than 30 million ISK/hour—an unhappy 40% drop in income.

A Sneak Peek at a Planetary Scan

Last night, an unnamed official from the Directive Enforcement Division's Technology Review Board slipped me a picture that appears to show how the spherical harmonics I alluded to yesterday relate to planetary scans (h/t Anonymous). Here it is:

A planetary scan result, appearing to show the concentrations of argon gas on Tash-Murkon Prime I, a storm world in the Amarr Empire.

I'm sure this image is part of a work-in-progress and may thus be a far cry from the final release. (The scan window, for instance, would seem to be superfluous given that scan results show across the entire planet's surface.) Nevertheless this pic suggests to me a few possibilities:

• Scanning skills may directly influence a capsuleer's ability to resolve an accurate planetary scan.
• Location, location, location! Where you plop down your extractor PINs will likely determine your rate of resource extraction. And I expect there will be limits on the amount of PINs that can be placed by any capsuleer in a given area.
• Temperature, pressure, and surface gravity. These readouts might be important to know for a planetary developer. As we've seen from this Eve University video (h/t Crazy Kinux), launching resources into orbit will incur a cost in ISK. It stands to reason that that cost will be higher for the more massive planets. And temperature and pressure may affect operational costs for planetside facilities.

So that's it. Some tantalizing possibilities for planetary scans but few concrete facts thus far. If you're interested in a closer look at the interface for operating planetside PINs, I recommend you have a look at Crazy Kinux's post linked above, as well as Eve Online Wormholes, which has a rundown of the process in text and pictures.

Planetary Interaction

The entire Applied Physics crew and I have been following the latest developments in planetary industrial automation with great interest. You'll find the full rundown here, but if you'd rather look at the "tl;dr," bullet-point version, look no further.

The Watchers

Received: from 126.46.13.600 by EXVBE010-1.exch010.XSN.galnet via ImproTech Exchange Server;

 Mon,  8 Mar YC 112 17:19:26 +0000

User-Agent: Clienne Asier

Date: Mon, 08 Mar YC 112 12:20:25 -0500

Subject: Applied Physics Institute surveillance

From: Clienne.Asier

To: <*Masked Recipient*>

Message-ID:

Thread-Topic: Academy of Aggressive Behavior research on capsuleer population of New Eden

Thread-Index: Acq+4X0lu8nmSirUEd+3UF452HGWAVyzCAAAyXeQ=

In-Reply-To: <*Masked Sender*>

Mime-version: 1.0

Content-type: multipart/alternative;

boundary="B_3350895624_111039346"

Dear Sir,

Pursuant to Directorate reconnaissance and surveillance policy, I submit to you the following transcript from a recording made by one of our self-assembling spyweb video units, hidden aboard an Amarrian shuttlecraft in the Applied Physics Institute's Ship Maintenance Array in w-space system J124654:

[Rolinthor enters shuttle, followed by Rol Prime]

Rolinthor (R): What's this all about, Prime? And why do we have to do this in a shuttle? You know my feelings on skullduggery.

Rol Prime: (RP): I understand, sir. It's just that...well, I found something: a spycam, I think.

R: A spy, eh? Ok, ok, I follow you. Best not to let on to the crew we know, and all that. I wouldn't be too concerned about it, though. We've got safeguards against corporate theft.

RP: I'm afraid it's not so simple as that. I was cleaning out some of the hardware in the refinery control room today when I spotted a whole heap of cobwebs on one of the motherboards in the CPU cases. I didn't really think much about it. Just removed it and threw it in the dustbin. And then it hit me: spiders make cobwebs, and ...

R: ...and how the hell would a spider get aboard the refinery? We did a clean "anchor and install" in interstellar vacuum. Total sterility protocols.

RP: Right, which is why I got suspicious too. So I took it into the lab and had a look at it. They're not cobwebs at all. Not even a biologic, or at least not what we would think of as organic. As best I can make out, it's a byproduct of a nanoscale self-assembler of some kind. Highly advanced.

R: Like how "advanced"?

RP: As in none of the four empires could put something like this together.

R: As in Jove?

RP: Bingo. But remember, you said it, not me. And if that news isn't enough to disturb your delicate sense of calm, then get a load of this: It's broadcasting a quantum-band signal that I still can't figure out how to trace.

R: Trace it? Rex's blood! Whatever you do, don't try to trace it!

[Sir, forgive the intrusion, but at this point you may find it interesting to note the changes in vocal and maxillofacial characteristics affecting Rolinthor in the accompanying video and audio file.]

RP: Why not?

R: If the Jovians want to spy on APHID, they can bloody well spy on APHID. It's none of our concern. In fact, just flash-fry all that stuff in the lab, delete the records, and hell, throw out and destroy any storage medium that had any contact whatsoever with those webs.

RP: But sir. I can't be so sure about my analysis. Aren't we being a little paranoid?

R: Stop thinking, Prime. Start doing. Just get it done.

[Rolinthor leaves shuttle. Rol Prime remains silently for a few more moments and then exits the shuttle as well.]

As you can see, sir, we may now find it necessary to accelerate the schedule. Our team stands ready. I await only your orders. I remain as always,

Your Trusted Servant,
Clienne

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 Mon,  8 Mar YC 112 12:29:26 +0500

User-Agent Hidden

Date: Mon, 08 Mar YC 112 17:30:24 +0000

Subject: Applied Physics Institute surveillance

From: <*Masked Recipient*> 

To: Clienne.Asier

Message-ID:

Thread-Topic: Academy of Aggressive Behavior research on capsuleer population of New Eden

Thread-Index: Acq+4X0lu8nmSirUEd+3UF452HGWAVyzCAAAyXeQ=

In-Reply-To: Clienne.Asier

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My Dear Clienne,

Maintain surveillance. Take no action.

-D