"Mainly ’cause Mittens ain’t a bitter vet. He is beyond that. Dunno what ta call the ones who get that far but they are legends in their own minds. Half of them don’t even bother piloting anymore. They move and shake on an entirely other level than we poor immortals. He is not playin' the same game we is, and that is what sometimes worries me."
The Mittani has led a storied career in Eve Online but I've always thought he was aiming for something higher. Over the course of my seven years playing MMORPGs I witnessed many players, bloggers, podcasters and games journalists move toward their ultimate goal: a job with a studio in the games industry. Observing The Mittani I always thought he desired the status of the godhood many give to developers without becoming absorbed by the collective that are studios like Blizzard, SOE and EA. From being quoted by the BBC over his role in the disbanding of the Band of Brothers to becoming the first player to speak at GDC to a successful long-running column on Ten Ton Hammer The Mittani made his mark as one of the most famous, if not notorious, players in the MMO world.
What is next? Media mogul. I saw on Twitter that The Mittani is now working with a site called, believe it or not, The Mittani Dot Com. The site promises to compete with Eve News 24.
"Welcome to your numbered, collector’s first edition of TheMittani.com, a gaming site with a particular focus on Eve Online. Our goal is to create a combination of news and commentary for you that is both up-to-date and insightful, and one which combines old-fashioned fact-checking with a broad range of contributors in order to provide an authoritative source of updates for Eve Online and everything that interests Eve Online players. We have by far the largest team working on any Eve-related site - currently over twenty people both behind the scenes and producing content, and we hope that that breadth of talent will show in the quality of what you read."The site looks slick and The Mittani and friends definitely have some good content up to lure readers in. Will TheMittani.com establish itself as the high-brow alternative to the tabloid Eve News 24? More importantly, will TheMittani.com have a soul or will the site just become a soulless corporate type of place soaking up hits and ad revenue from Google Ads? I hope the site is successful because I love the community of bloggers, podcasters, radio stations and newsites surrounding Eve. Having competing news sites up and running before the influx of DUST players arrive would make the world feel more real and alive and perhaps help retain those players longer.
I read through all their current items in the last couple of days; I was very impressed by them citing sources, going out of the way to provide balanced reports even when they're coming from one side in a conflict and editing articles to conform to a shared style.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately yesterday they posted "The Truth Behind the Exhumer Rebalancing" which is a tinfoil hat opinion piece claiming the mining barge changes are the first step in turning EVE into a themepark MMO. It lacks any evidence other than CCP nerfing suicide ganking/buffing barges and is completely one sided - the author, James 315, basically makes his living in EVE trolling and griefing miners.
So yeah, hopefully that's just going to be a minor black spot on otherwise good reportage, but we'll have to wait and see whether they wind up turning to sensationalist reportage like that to get pageviews.
That piece by James 315 was actually a copy of a post he made on the Eve-O forums.
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