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.

Catching Up On Things

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging. Okay, sometimes playing video games takes precedence over writing. But writing about video games requires playing them, right? Still, real life does get in the way. Instead of composing four or five posts, this post will have to do.

The real-world project, apart from work, which will cut into my gaming time is I decided to get serious about learning Python. I signed up for an online course that is part of a three-course series that leads to a certificate that will look good on my resume/CV/LinkedIn page. My hobbies often spur me to learn about subjects I then translate into work skills. Why not do it one more time?

One doesn’t need to know a scripting language to do the types of economic analysis seen on the blog, though. My latest EVE-related project involves creating my own price indexes to help evaluate changes CCP makes to the game. On Saturday I finally created a Google sheet that recreates the Consumer Price Index found in some of the older Monthly Economic Reports. I tried using the MER released in April, but the file was missing information about tech 3 items. Now I just need to learn how to make decent looking graphs in one of the Google programs, so I don’t need to export the results into Excel.

I hear a lot of hype surrounding a game coming to Steam this month called Bless Online. Not seeing the game released yet, and wanting to play something with a humanoid avatar, I decided to update a game I hadn’t played in two years, Elder Scrolls Online. For some reason I woke up at 3:30am Sunday morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I created a new character and started playing. I think I played 4-5 hours, which I never did before. I heard the game changed over the years, and so far, I think for the better. I’m still on the newbie island, and every time I create a character, I never reach level 20. With my goals in EVE, the same fate likely awaits my new character as well.

Returning to EVE, I forgot about the big 15^th year anniversary. Hard to believe with the latest event putting a beacon in every system I travel through, but after awhile all beacons look alike. I only managed to fill my Procurer’s ore hold with hedbergite once before company arrived in system Saturday night. The rest of the time I spent playing Project Discovery. I’m currently on pace to reach my goal of obtaining the Marshall blueprint copy before the launch of Into the Abyss on 29 May.

Finally, I did a little work on my CSM Google site, CSMWire, adding the latest interviews of Xenuria, Mawderator, and Sullen Decimus conducted by Kael Decadence of The Mind Clash Podcast. Just in time, too, as CCP Guard a dev blog announcing the dates of the CSM 13 election as 4-11 June. CCP Guard was kind enough to link to CSM Wire in the dev blog, which means I should see some traffic coming soon. I also need to watch social media and the official forums for candidate activity for the next month, so I know when to update the site.

Hopefully I can tear myself away from the class work and play some video games. Last night I did all the homework for the week, but I discovered I enjoyed working with python. I may need to resist the urge to race ahead so I can work on other things.

Bless Online - Pay To PvE

One of the subjects that often swirls around the EVE media around the time of the elections for the Council of Stellar Management is war decs. The war declaration system provides a way for player groups in EVE Online to place a PvP tag on each other, so they can fight in high security space or avoid gate and station guns in low security space. The slight twist compared to other MMORPGs is that the tagging in the vast majority of cases is non-consensual. The situation often leads to entire groups of players just not logging into EVE for a week at a time. A game system that encourages players not to log into the game is sub-optimal and in need of change. Yet, that is the state of affairs in EVE today.

While many believe that the war dec system is an affront to those who prefer player verses environment play, another system currently is Asia debuts in North America and Europe this spring.  Bless Online, a PvP-centric title once eagerly awaited in the West, will limp onto Steam in May. I could go into details such as the game failing in South Korea or how during the western localization process the number of classes dropped from 8 down to 5. Instead, I will focus on the business model of the game and its direct impact on those who do not like to PvP.

Neowiz, the developers of Bless Online, last week announced the game will be a buy-to-play game with a cash shop. Pretty basic stuff. One of the items, however, quickly grabbed my interest and I did a quick search of the internet to make sure the information was correct. Part of the business model is to make players pay real life money if they wish immunity from PvP.

In my nine years of writing about MMORPGs on The Nosy Gamer, I don’t recall ever seeing the Pay-to-PvE model implemented before. I imagine the model resembles boiling a frog by slowly raising the temperature of the water in the pot. At the lowest levels, players will run around in zones worry free. Once past the newbie zones, players can obtain a consumable which grants some sort of PvE flag that lasts a limited amount of time, like 10-15 minutes. Players obtain the consumable either from the cash shop or a source in the game. Finally, once the player reaches the level cap, the PvE buff is only available through the cash shop.

I can’t honestly state the idea of players paying to exempt themselves from PvP shocks me. A couple of years ago I came up with an idea for changing the war dec system that allowed players and corporations to pay a fee to an NPC that would grant immunity from war decs within a certain area. Knowing EVE players, a small percentage of the player base would wind up paying for war dec immunity by whipping out their credit cards and purchasing PLEX to turn into ISK.

I should add that CCP does charge players a fee of 11% on all bounties and mission rewards for staying in NPC corporations are immune from war decs. Still, the chutzpah of the developers at Neowiz charging players for the ability to engage in uninterrupted PvE in a PvP-centric game is astounding. In the case of EVE, players just receive a reduced ISK payout for PvE activity. I much prefer a system in which a corporation could somehow immunize itself from war decs by not building structures than by purchasing immunity with real world money. But what do I know? Maybe charging players to engage in PvE is the new normal. And perhaps pigs can fly.