The Nosy Gamer: June 2018

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Looking Under The Cushions

On Saturday I took the final for my online Python class, meaning that I am free to play video games once again. So, what did I spend a large part of my time doing? Trying to load the historical market data CCP Quant posted back in March into a database on my computer. Based on my years of experience, I can tell from the error messages the file contains some lines concatenated together but still displays visually in a text editor as two separate lines. Given I can’t just dump the entire 250 million plus lines into SQL, I have to come up with another solution. I guess that’s why I’m paid the big ISK.

I tried to play Elder Scrolls Online. ESO has a couple of mechanics designed to get players to log in every day. The first is a daily reward just for logging in. Some of the prizes, like the 2-hour experience and stat boost items, are useful. Others, not so much. The second involves making your mount more powerful. Each day, for a nominal fee in gold, players can buff their mount’s speed, stamina, or strength by 1%, up to a maximum of 60% in each category. I guess that’s one way to get someone to log in everyday for 6 months. Perhaps if I found the game more engaging, I would do so. But I’m at level 17 and don’t really have the desire to adventure in Tameriel. Will I give up my quest to 50?

That returns me to EVE. For some reason, I decided to check the journal on one of my characters Sunday. Looking at the research tab, I had a lot of research points earned on 5 agents. I hadn’t visited those agents to pick up datacores in 623 days. Needless to say, I decided to dig the coins out from between the cushions and away I went. According to the display in my cargohold, I picked up 256 million ISK worth of datacores. I then logged onto another character and found he only had three research agents active but hadn’t picked up any datacores in 5 years. Forty-five minutes later I had another 250 million ISK in datacores sitting in the low sec station I use to perform all my invention activity. I stopped the datacore farming activity when I saw the agents on my third character were 30 jumps away. But I did go and pick them up Monday night. Picking up 3 1/2 years worth of datacores from 3 level 4 research agents generated another 345 million ISK in goods.

With all the travel complete, I now have to take stock of what I have and what I can build. I hear heavy assault cruisers are popular with the Abyssal deadspace set. I still need to build my CONCORD ships, so I may have a ninja mining expedition or two planned for a wormhole coming soon. Or maybe I'll just get sidetracked again and start running data and relic sites. I probably need to get focused on a goal, but for now I'm just flying around taking in the sights.

Friday, June 22, 2018

A Final Look At The CSM 13 Election

Last week, CCP announced the results of the election for the 13th Council of Stellar Management. Real life, in the form of illness, interfered with publishing a timely post, but I still needed to write one to look back upon next year.

The year of the incumbent: In 2018, seven of the ten members of CSM 12 chose to run for re-election. All seven won. Here is a list.

Steve Ronuken (5th term)
Sort Dragon (4th term)
Aryth (3rd term)
Innominate (3rd term)
Jin'taan (3rd term)
The Judge (3rd term)
Suitonia (2nd term)

The Imperium Gets Half: A lot of people are freaking out about the fact that The Imperium managed to place five candidates on the CSM. Although the single-transferrable vote system used in the CSM voting favors the large null sec alliances by making sure they don't "waste" any votes, a lot of other factors contributed to the election result. But the domination does lend a handy hook on which to hang all the other themes of the election.

The power of the GSF ballot: The official ballot put out by Goonswarm Federation is the single most powerful force in CSM voting, and the 2018 election continued the trend. The turnout I was able to track in the voting file rose from 4273 ballots cast that contained some combination of the original six candidate slate in 2017 to 6564 ballots that had some combination of the 10 official candidates in 2018. To put the number into perspective, the official Imperium ballot made up 22.6% of all ballots cast in the CSM 13 election. Contrast that with the 22.3% of all ballots that mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy leader Sort Dragon, who won his fourth term this year.

The growth of the Imperium's share of the vote total was greatly enhanced by the coalition's growth as seen in its largest organization, Goonswarm Federation. In January 2017, two months before voting for CSM 12 began, GSF had approximately 21,000 members. When I looked at the beginning of June 2018, the number had swelled to 30,800. Still, the growth of turnout for the official ballot did increase faster than the size of the coalition.

The Creecher Effect: Even with a dominant share of ballots cast, Goonswarm Federation and The Imperium as a whole should only have won 3 seats at most. So, what explains the other two wins? The first involved the controversy and ultimate removal of Creecher Viprio from the ballot during the voting period.

Creecher, the capital director of Test Alliance Please Ignore, is a vociferous proponent of shield-tanked supercapital-class ships. Members of Pandemic Legion, an alliance heavily invested in armor-tanked supercapitals, moved to block Creecher's almost assured spot on the CSM, from which he could argue for improvements in shield capital and supercapital ships. So members of Pandemic Legion did a little digging and found logs on Pastebin showing Creecher using racial epithats in a private chat in-game, a violation of EVE Online's EULA and Terms of Service. Since the conversation occurred using CCP's communication channels, CCP could verify that the logs were not doctored and Creecher was removed from the voting.

As the STV system used in the election is a form of ranked voting, the computer algorithm used to tally the votes just ignored Creecher's votes and produced a list of the winners. The released voting files show that Creecher would have won a spot on the CSM. The candidate who benefited from Creecher's disqualification was The Judge, thus making four members from Goonswarm Federation on CSM 13.

The Ringer: The official Imperium ballot usually looks more impactful than it actually is with the inclusion of extremely strong candidates in the fourth and fifth slots. This year's candidate came out of one of The Imperium's smaller member alliances, The Initiative.. Brisc Rubal, a real-life politician from Virginia who works as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill for a maritime union, threw his hat into the CSM ring and treated the election like the real thing, including a slick, meme-filled advertisement. When the votes were counted, Brisc had 1990 first place ballots at the start of round 1 of the simulation. While not meeting the quota at the time, Brisc's vote total guaranteed victory as the 11th place candidate, Tikktock Tocktikk, only received 1661 votes when he was eliminated in the final round.

Vote buying: Rumor at Fanfest held that The Judge was attempting to buy his way onto CSM 13 by paying skill point farmers to vote for him. The rumors continued up through the end of the election, as a story emerged of The Judge buying approximately 550 votes. Did people have proof that The Judge bought votes? I don't believe so. And the vote total was suspiciously near the total required to knock The Judge into 11th place and award the final seat to Tikktock Tocktikk by 8 votes. However, even if The Judge did purchase that many votes, the rules allowed it.

A very settled election: Unlike last year when Yukiko Kamo skated at or below 10th place in every round, this year's election was basically settled after the first round. At the beginning of round 1, four candidates: Aryth, Sort Dragon, Jin'taan, and Brisc Rubal, had more votes than Tikktock Tocktikk would up with at elimination, thus securing the victory. Three other candidates, Merkelchen, Innominate, and Killah Bee, had guarenteed victory at the end of round one. The other three eventual winners, Suitonia, Steve Ronuken, and The Judge, rounded out the top 10 at the end of round one.

The lack of major voting slates: Apart from The Imperium, the only other major power that seemed to exert any effort to electing people was Guardians of the Galaxy. Due to their preferred candidate not making it to the final ballot, Pandemic Horde wound up voting for the GotG ticket of Sort Dragon and Killah Bee. Voters placed Sort Dragon and Killah Bee at the top of their ballots 1546 times, with the order reversed an additional 110 times. In contrast, the slate of Northern Coalition. of Killah Bee, Malakai Asamov, Sort Dragon, and Winter duFallen only appears 467 times. That's right, the final trickle that Killah Bee received from Sort Dragon of 1320 votes was nearly three times the support he received from his own coalition's official ballot.

Friday, June 8, 2018

I'll Get To Abyssal Space Eventually

At Fanfest, I had a conversation with CCP Fozzie where I told him I probably wouldn’t participate in the Abyssal space content for the first couple of months. At the time, I though all my attention would focus on building CONCORD ships, with the Marshal at the top of the list. I still haven’t run a site on Tranquility, but not because I’m busy mining in low security space. I’m currently taking an online introductory Python class offered by MIT. I’m getting all the solutions and received a perfect score on the mid-term, but the coursework is taking up more time than expected.

Having real life get in the way of gaming probably will help in the end. I planned for the lack of time, which is one of the reasons I chose to jump into Elder Scrolls Online instead of trying out Bless Online. From all reports, Neowiz tried to copy Funcon’s launch of Anarchy Online. Apparently, the launch of Bless went over so well, Guild Wars 2 experienced a massive influx of new players.

I felt pretty smug about the choice until I heard Zenimax slipped spyware into ESO. The game company claimed they never activated the code, but why was the code in the client in the first place? From what I heard, the code performed a location tracking function. But what else did it do? EVE has had a geo-tracking function based on IP address for years designed to let players know if someone else had accessed their accounts. The IP addresses are available to players in Account Management. I wonder what else was in the spyware.

That returns me to EVE. My EVE related activities have fallen into three main types. The first is updating my CSM Wire site for the election running through downtime next Monday. I wish candidates would stop moving between corps and alliances. After CCP announces the results, I’ll reconfigure the site to reflect the makeup of the CSM and turn my attention towards other things until next year.

The second is the continues monitoring of the black market and botting. The ban wave that began on 23 May was amusing to watch as CCP began deleting the characters involved in market botting. My monitoring activities require recording the price of PLEX, skill injectors, and skill extractors, and that routine changed with the end of the CREST and XML APIs. I had used a third-party site that allowed me to do a quick copy/paste into my spreadsheet, but the site changed and no longer offers the information I need. After asking around, I now just log into a trade alt in The Forge and record the daily market data from the game client. Maybe when I finish my coding class, I’ll play around with the ESI and save myself a few clicks each day.

First recorded deletion of market bots

My final type of EVE activity maybe doesn’t really qualify as a real EVE activity. When I get a block of an hour or so of free time, I hop on Singularity and lose ships running tier 2 Abyssal sites. I’m convinced the sites have gotten harder since I first started running them. I can run the tier 1 sites just fine in a tech 1 cruiser. But I would really like to be able to complete a tier 2 site. I may give up and just borrow a fit or two and see how they do. Those pairs of Triglavian ships are tough.

I eventually will have time to play video games again. I only have two more weeks left in my programming course. I also traditionally take a couple of weeks to a month playing another MMO a lot after the CSM election season. But given what a chore I find playing ESO, I may cancel my sub and just play EVE. The whole spyware drama makes that choice a lot easier. But tonight I don't have any coursework to do, so perhaps I'll finally run some data sites and get some filaments for when I have time to dive into Abyssal deadspace.

Friday, June 1, 2018

CSM 13 Elections - A Collection Of Interviews

The election to populate EVE Online's 13th Council of Stellar Management will take place starting next week on 4 June, ending on 11 June. For those interested, I collected some information about the candidates on a Google site called CSM Wire. Each candidate has a page, with the links running down the left-hand site of the site.

I know that some people enjoy listening to podcasters doing interviews with the candidates. This year, 18 of the 48 candidates appeared on at least one of EVE Online's many podcasts to talk about the election. Since a lot of people like listening to podcasts, I thought I'd also post the list here.

After Hours With Rixx Javix