CCP - Trion Trade Complete

Massively.com released the news yesterday that former Eve Online Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson is now working on Trion World's new MMORPG Defiance.  The man formerly known as CCP Oveur is not only the executive producer for the new game but also holds the title of Vice President of Development.

I guess that completes the trade that brought David Reid to CCP.  The man who adopted the name CCP Pokethulhu is currently CCP's chief marketing officer but at Trion served as senior vice president of marketing.  Many may remember Mr. Reid as the man who created Rift's "you're not in Azeroth" campaign.  Others may remember Mr. Reid's statement when he was at NC West that Tabula Rosa was "triple-A and here to stay" a month before the announcement that the game would close in February 2009.

One place where Trion is getting the better end of the trade is in YouTube videos.  So far we haven't seen any good entertainment videos from CCP Pokethulhu while CCP Oveur managed to appear in a couple of good ones.  Besides his cameo appearance in the YouTube hit HTFU, he appeared in a couple of other memorable videos that I'm including below.  Enjoy!

Sean "Vile Rat" Smith's Mother On CNN

I've felt a few emotions since I woke up on 12 September to the news that Sean "Vile Rat" Smith was among the four Americans murdered in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on 9/11/12.  Anger that it happened.  Disbelief that I had a connection to one of the victims through Eve Online.  But as the news came out about what really happened I had a sense of overwhelming disgust at our government who lied cover up politically inconvenient facts about its incompetence.  That incompetence extended to they clumsy lies it put forward, which fueled my disgust even further.  Do they really think the American people are THAT dumb?

But last night for the first time I cried.  Sean's mother was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN.  I didn't know Sean, but this video broke my heart.

Update:  There is a on-line fundraiser for Sean's family still open on You Caring.  If you haven't given yet, please consider going over and contributing.

Intrade For Eve?

Sometimes CCP Soundwave comes up with some wild ideas (like NPCs podding players) but this quote from Eve Vegas about in-game gamboling on wars made me smile:

"We don't have anything planned right now but what I'd like to do is I'd like to make a stock market that basically depends on how your alliance is doing.  So there would be some formula that says that if you have X number of systems your stock would be worth that much.  And I kind of want to do that so you'd be like, "I kind of think that alliance is going to do well in the future." And you can buy some stock and they take like five constellations and it basically goes up and you can sell it to someone else.  And then of course hopefully someone will find a way to game the system. That they make some alliance and have people invest in it and then it would basically be a fake thing and everyone's going to be like really mad and send petitions and then I'm just going to sit there and be really happy."

When I heard CCP Soundwave say this I immediately thought of Intrade.  Intrade is a prediction market in which you can make (or lose) money by predicting events.  I think of them like futures trading on commodities.  You basically place a bet on whether an event will occur, but you can trade your bet to someone else if you want to cash out early before the deadline or event occurs.  With Intrade, if you hold shares when the event occurs and it comes true, you receive $10 a share.  If you hold the shares and the event did not occur, you get nothing.

Of course, trading of shares is possible.  Here is an example from the Intrade site.

"If you buy shares and the price increases, you can sell these shares for a profit. For example:

"You buy shares at a price of $6.00. The next day the price has increased to $7.50. You can sell these shares and take a profit of $1.50 per share.

"If however you sell your shares for a lower price you will make a loss. For example:

"You buy shares at a price of $6.00. The next day the price has dropped to $4.90. If you sell these shares you will suffer a loss of $1.10 per share.

"(Why would you sell for a loss? You may want to sell your shares if you think the market will drop further, to help minimise your potential loss.)"

I don't know how CCP would set up such a system in game.  Perhaps automatically set up markets for the possibility of each side winning the isk war, plus the possibility of each side surrendering.  Maybe make another automatic market for how long the war will last.

I'm not sure how popular this feature would be considering the massive potential for fixing fights, but I'm sure lots of people who have too much isk in their wallets might start betting on wars.  And if such a market became popular, then it could turn into an isk sink, because CONCORD would impose a transaction fee on each purchase, right?

The Digital Dozen: 9 October 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 7 October 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	50.2	60,201	-11.1
2	2	Guild Wars 2	29.7	35,611	-12.7
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	3.7	4,428	-12.5
4	4	Aion	3.0	3,656	-10.8
5	5	Eve Online	2.8	3,351	-2.7
6	6	Metin 2	2.5	3,047	-3.6
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	1.9	2,230	+0.8
8	8	APB: Reloaded	1.6	1,860	-8.0
9	--	Planetside 2 (Beta)	1.3	1,606	--
10	9	Need For Speed World	1.2	1,494	-3.9
11	10	Star Trek Online	1.0	1,306	-5.6
12	11	Vindictus	1.0	1,198	-5.5

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 144,735  

The Xfire community sent 10.2% less time playing MMORPGs on Sunday than the week before.  The decline ran across the board with 11 of the 12 games seeing less playtime.  The only game that defied the trend was Lord of the Rings Online which saw a 0.8% gain in time played.

A technical glitch? I don't really have any proof to back this assertion up, but I think Xfire possibly had a glitch in its storing of data.  While the dip in Guild Wars 2 follows a trend and the drop for SW:TOR could indicate player dissatisfaction with patch 1.4, I find it a little hard to believe an 11% drop so soon for Mists of Pandaria.  Combine that with the fact that Eve Online experienced a 2.7% decline while seeing peak concurrent users rise by over 7% compared to the Sunday before and something may have happened.

Another beta.  In good news for Sony Online Entertainment Planetside 2 landed in the beta even though the game is still in closed beta.  The game is still unpolished with areas still unfinished but players are anxious to play.  For those interested in the game SOE President John Smedley is very active on Twitter responding to people.  His Twitter account is @j_smedley.

Sci-fi's gains.  With Planetside 2's debut science fiction games now hold four of the spots on The Digital Dozen.  PS2 may slip down again but its performance this early in the beta process indicates that the game will have a place on the list when it finally goes live.  With four sci-fi games and two driving games, the list shows that MMOs today are about more than elves and dwarves.

CCP's War On Bots: Accountability

"We will continue to expand the scope of this to include asset seizure in the coming days which will include reclamation of supercaps and actions against alliances if need be."

CCP Sreegs, April 2012

Eve Vegas was held this weekend and amongst the Eve developers speaking at the event was CCP Stillman.  Those who thought the event would provide little news did not forsee the bombshell tacked onto the end of CCP Stillman's presentation.  I missed large portions of that section of the talk but Sugar Kyle blogged from on-site and filled in the blanks.  CCP will now hold alliances responsible for some botting that occurs in their space.  According to the video which I didn't get to see, POS utilized by botters and illict RMTers belonging to alliances are subject to destruction.

CCP Stillman's presentation surprised many in Las Vegas, but CCP Sreegs for months signaled that he might consider holding alliances to account for their members' actions.  At the beginning of March CCP Sreegs wrote the following responses to comments to his dev blog announcing a new offensive in the War On Bots:

Q. What is the current policy with regard to ISK and assets on a proven botter's multiple accounts? Do you seize all their ISK, or some of it, or none? Do you asset strip them?

CCP Sreegs: "Today, as in like right now, assets aren't touched but I don't see it staying that way."

Q. If the decision is made to begin confiscating assets, will this include Supers and Titans bought with botting ISK?  And how soon will this begin?

CCP Sreegs: "I would say that however this is implemented the size of assets won't matter, but I can't speculate on time frames or even 100% guarantee it today. I'll just let you guys be pleasantly surprised if it happens."

CCP Sreegs went further in a dev blog on Team Security's anti-RMT operations in April, stating:

"Using the initial operation we enacted last Friday the procedure was to permanently ban all isk sellers and suppliers. No warnings given. People caught purchasing ISK found themselves with negative wallet balances due to the ISK being reversed back into the closed accounts which will eventually go into some magical space ISK burning facility or if you want to be really technical, be deleted from a database. We will continue to expand the scope of this to include asset seizure in the coming days which will include reclamation of supercaps and actions against alliances if need be. All actions will be retroactive to at LEAST February." [emphasis mine]

For observers of CCP's campaign against illicit RMT and botting, the question wasn't whether CCP Sreegs would begin "enlisting the help" of alliances, the question was when.  CCP Stillman's presentation provided a rough outline of the plans, although those plans are not finalized.

The questions raised were expected.  How do we stop botters if we have no tools?  Is CCP changing the EULA to allow corp and alliance leaders receive information on who is botting?  What are alliance leaders supposed to do if they find one of their members botting?  Policing the EULA is CCP's job so why do alliances have to do it?

Amongst all the people trying to argue that holding alliance members accountable for the actions of their members and/or renters, one man got up and asked if CCP had considered making botting legal.  That attitude that botting and illicit RMT are acceptable activites is unfortunately reflected amongst some alliance leaders.  At the CSM 7 Spring Summit, UAxDEATH pressed CCP about trying to track down alliances that rent null sec systems for real money.  And some CEOs go to botting forums to recruit botters.  I found two recent examples on the H-Bot forums.

Offering POS, logistics support to botters in null

Notice that one of the selling points to botting recruits in both posts is the availability of a POS to operate from.  Wonder why the video showed POS blowing up?  Because bots need a place to hide when a neutral or red show up in the system.  Without a POS, a null sec system is much less attractive.

CCP Sreegs has angered many players for what they consider a lax policy toward botters.  While many players wish to see a permanent ban upon a first offense for botting, the current penalties are 14 days for the first offense, 30 days for the second and a permanent ban for the third.  Of course, other penalties include confiscation of isk and revoking the rights for a banned account to trade characters.  But CCP Sreegs only implemented those penalties after his initial plan did not have the desired effect.

I don't believe that CCP Sreegs wants to bring the hammer down on any alliance that wants to follow the rules.  I can see the reasons for CCP Sreegs trying a cooperative approach working with alliance leaders first.  The job of Team Security is to enforce the EULA without banning or causing half the players to quit. Or, in the case of alliances, without causing sovereignty to change for significant portions of null sec.  But something tells me an alliance is going to test CCP to see just how serious the company is in fighting botting and illicit RMT. 

Cruising The Botting Forums: Septemeber

With Eve Vegas beginning today I decided to do a little surfing around the Eve botting forums.  I didn't really find enough to warrant a full "War on Bots" post, but I did find some amusing posts from September.  Before getting to the botting posts, I thought I'd bring to light an apparent scam occurring on the Public Demand forums.

4 September:  dubcomesaveme (Public Demand) -

Hi Guys,

Im looking to sell my EVE account. Its a caldari female with 62,000,000 sp. 7mil in drone skills, 6 mil in electronics, 3.5mil in engineering, 6.5mil in gunnery, 3.5 mil in indy, 2 mil in leadership, 3 mil in mechanic, very bad missile skills, 4.5 mil in nav, 6.5 mil in science and 17 mil in spaceship command.

Minmi, caldari and gallente frig and cruiser V, good projectile and hybrid skills. perfect shield and armor skills. recons V. Thanny pilot(comes with thanny). Perfect jamming skills. Can also fly black ops and build cap ships.

Owns many ships and assets including vigilant, cynabal, thanny, dedspace fitted ishtar, arazu, lachesis, falconjust to name a few of the ships off the top of my head. Been pretty busy since finishing uni so dont have time to play anymore. Comes with just under 1 month subscription and 1bil isk. I know off the top of my head that the current ship hangar is estimated at 3.5bil aswell.

Character and assets mentioned above are all in highsec/1 jump from highsec. If you have any questions then let me know and i will be happy to answer them.

Make me an offer! (GBP pls) 

25 September:  Bntyhunter (Public Domains)

I bought this account

2 weeks later he changed the account PW, and gave me false info. I lost 275 American dollars, so I am getting character banned unless he contacts me so if you were going to buy character I wouldnt as it seems to be a scam. 

Ever wonder why the Eve Online forums have a Character Baazar section?  The above is why.  Now for botting related matters.  Forgive me for including a post from August, but I liked it.

31 August: frblyes (H-Bot) - so are the bans still being given out like free candy from a pedafile to little school girls?

15 September: godles1 (Eve Pilot) - just got back playing eve started miner up did about 6 hours of ice minning. down time came went to eat came back to play and said was ban for macro.i was on my other guy doing mission so how is i use your program now and get baned now?

18 September:  Captain Obvious (Eve Pilot) - I agree with "the Eldest". Usually it takes another botter that reports a botter, yes sad but true. I've been doing the "bot while near my computer" just to see what kind of things go on. I get called out in local in which I respond to but still get reports.

I've had two accounts slapped with the 1 week sanction but that was a while ago. I generally don't bot now without myself being around, why? one players in EvE tend to be asses, two once you know how a bot works its not hard to spot others using some version of botting software. Three people report because you are their competition. Everyone says this and i believe its true... if you stay in the same system too long you WILL eventually get busted and reported.

20 September:  qvantum3 (Eve Pilot) -
User qvantum3 is banned
Last login: 2012.09.19 11:40
Number of visits: 249
Reason: EULA/TOS Violation - Macro use
Until: 2012.10.04

Админ рассказывай что теперь делать ?  (Admin, what do I do now?)

Note: Notice his character name is the same as his botting forum name.

30 September:  ashleydeals (Eve Pilot) - Had a late night and I accidentally left the courier on for too long I guess. Banned 14 days today. Warning to all.

Why The Hate For Asteroid Belts?

Sometimes I click on links that lead to threads in the Eve Online forums and my opinion about those forums is confirmed.  But when I read the ones about low security space, I keep reading the idea that removing asteroid belts would make the area more popular.  Really?

I guess the idea is that mining in gravimetric sites is safer than mining in asteroid belts and so putting all ore in gravimetric sites will make mining in low sec safer.  I don't like that idea.  Asteroid belts and the ores they contain give a system some character and identity.  I personally want to live in .1 and .2 security systems because they contain better quality ores.  Without that difference, what makes a .1 system different from a .3 system?

The thought that really boggles my mind is having to scan down a signature to mine some veldspar.  How is that a good idea?  Currently low sec is like grocery shopping.  If I want something nice at a cheap price, then I have to shop around.  But if I run out of ice cream in the middle of the night, I can just walk over to the corner 7-11 and pick up a pint.  The same principle applies to low sec.  Currently if I need a small amount of low-end minerals I just hop in my Procurer and mine for 15 minutes.  If I want the nicer ore like crokite and spodumain and don't want to travel to null sec and deal with bubbles, then I need to scan down sites.

Of course, I'm not a big miner.  For those people who require hours and hours of uninterrupted mining, they can make more in high sec or null sec.  But taking away the asteroid belts in an attempt to lure miners to low sec?  Is this just madness or am I missing something?

Loosing Track

I am confirming something I think I already knew; I can't play multiple MMOs.  I'm trying to play Guild Wars 2 and on Saturday I just couldn't remember the path I set in-game.  The fact that I'm only playing one day a week doesn't help.  Usually when I play a game I play every day.  I thought I had broken the cycle of depending on playing a game every day with Eve Online.  Over the course of the past two years I've taken business trips where I have not even logged into the game for 2 or 3 weeks.  When I got back I just picked up where I left off.

Is Eve special in some way?  I guess the advent of the skills queue and EveMon helps.  With EveMon I set up a training plan for a year at a time.  In other games skills advancement is based on actually playing the game, which in the case of GW2 has meant a lot of grinding.  Grinding breaks the flow of the quest trail (another feature missing in Eve) and then I forget where I am when I log back in a week later.

Another feature is the crafting system.  In Eve, everything ship and ship mod (excluding rigs) needs tritanium, the first mineral a new player in Eve can extract.  Other games make players collect different base metals depending on the tier of content.  Guild Wars 2 is even more complicated with its discovery system.  Don't get me wrong, I like it better than the crafting in other games.  The system actually reminds me of the tech 2 production chain, except less complicated.  But I keep forgetting what I want to accomplish.

I think the big difference is in Eve I don't have to worry about doing things to advance my characters abilities in-game.  That leaves me free to pursue things I want to do, like bookmark low security systems or scan down signatures, without feeling I'm somehow falling behind.  With every other game I almost have to log in every day just to keep the momentum up to advance my character.  Trying to only play once a week feels strange.  The only game I've really succeeded in doing that is Eve.

With no subscription fee, I can go back to Guild Wars 2 anytime I like.  I do want to continue the experiment to see if I can play a game for one 2-3 hour play session a week.  Maybe I can figure out how to yet.

The Digital Dozen: 2 October 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 30 September 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	2	World of Warcraft	50.6	67,659	+100.2
2	1	Guild Wars 2	30.5	40,773	-20.8
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	3.8	5,061	+2.2
4	4	Aion	3.1	4,097	-2.9
5	5	Eve Online	2.6	3,443	+7.3
6	6	Metin 2	2.4	3,161	+7.9
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	1.7	2,212	-9.3
8	8	APB: Reloaded	1.5	2,022	-5.1
9	9	Need For Speed World	1.2	1,555	-13.5
10	11	Star Trek Online	1.0	1,383	+9.7
11	10	Vindictus	0.9	1,267	-22.6
12	--	Mabinogi	0.9	1,160	+6.4

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 161,093  

Pandamonium broke out Sunday as the Xfire community spent 18% more hours playing MMORPGs than the week before.  The increase was led, unsurprisingly, by World of Warcraft whose Mists of Pandaria expansion led to a 100.2% increase in the number of hours spent playing the game over the previous Sunday.  While percentage-wise Vindictus saw the biggest decrease in play (-22.6%), the big loser was Guild Wars 2 as the Xfire community spent 20.8% time less playing the game compared to the week before.

Tobold Wins!  Apparently The Digital Dozen has attracted the attention of Tobold and his readers who are basing a bet on which game would be more popular, World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, on the listings here.  For the Sunday following the launch of the game, that was a sucker bet.  I'm beginning to wonder how much time Tobold spent in Jita when he played Eve Online.  A more interesting bet would be to compare the games on 4 November.  I still think that WoW will still have more hours played but I'm not sure of that conclusion.

A Genre Bucks The Trend.  This week as many games lost players to WoW's new expansion, the science-fiction games all saw increases in playtime.  Star Trek Online led in percentage terms (+9.7%) while Eve Online led in actual hours gained (233).  Even Star Wars: The Old Republic saw a gain of 2.2%.  I guess that shows that the EA/Bioware game has shed most of the players it is going to lose.  Either that or players of sci-fi games hate pandas.

Mabinogi's First Appearance.  The Korean-import Mabinogi makes its first appearance in The Digital Dozen this week.  I first heard of the Nexon game from Massively.com's Beau Hindman back when he was podcasting.  The game sounds interesting, with no class system and a death penalty that includes the loss of experience and possibly gear in PvE.  Throw in the fact that the world is loosely based on Irish mythology and if I didn't have enough games to play I might give the game a try.

The Need For A New Memorial In Eve Online

"We believe in making virtual worlds, and they don't have a shelf life. We want this game to be around in 10, 20, 30 years."

Jon Lander, Senior Producer, Eve Online

One of the distinguishing features of Eve Online is the physical mark the players make in the game world.  While game play features like POS and starbases dot the universe, New Eden contains objects that commemorate events that step partway out of the limiting constraints of the browser.  CCP has created monuments for events like alliance tournament victories and the riots that occurred in Jita that were the in-game manifestation of player discontent during the Summer of Rage.  Has the time come for a new type of memorial?

For noted artist and blogger Rixx Javix, the answer is yes.  Fresh off his successful campaign to return the trademark frill to the Vagabond, Rixx is now focused on establishing an in-game memorial for those players who die in real life.  Inspired by the tragic death of Sean "Vile Rat" Smith in the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi Rixx came up with a proposal that would not only honor those who have already died but those who will die in the future.

"What I'm driving at here is nothing short of a permanent massive memorial to the fallen in-game. Something that fits within the context of Eve, the universe, lore, and conventional mechanics.  If Capsuleers are the Gods of New Eden, then I think they deserve a God-like Memorial of significance. We humans, and I suspect Capsuleers as well, have historically erected large scale memorial systems to honor those that have passed away before us. I suspect that the future will not be all that different. Especially when it is an immortal Capsuleer that has passed into the great mystery.

"To my mind, nothing symbolizes the "great mystery" in New Eden more than the Eve Gate. It is where our ancestors came from and beyond which is nothing more than the great unknown.

"What I am suggesting is the creation of the opposite. A Great Ring of Fire on the opposite end of the universe from the Eve Gate. A dark hole that symbolizes the place where we go after death. The great beyond.

"A place where the mechanic exists to immortalize those Capsuleers of distinction that have left us forever. Not those that un-sub never to return, but those that have tied their lives in a significant way to our universe and that we know have left real life as well. A hall of heroes if you will, a Hall of Fame, a grand memorial to the fallen."

Given CCP's stated goal of the game running for decades, another tragic death to a player is inevitable.  As I thought about the situation, I remembered the current activity by the Council of Stellar Management.  As the CSM worries about the procedures to handle an event in which a CSM member cannot take office after an election I asked myself, "should the CSM and CCP prepare for the eventuality of a player who can no longer log into the game because of a real life death?"  While nothing can bring a player back from beyond the grave, such a memorial could help ease the pain of those left behind who play the game.

In support of his effort Rixx has created a forum thread on the official forums and has begun producing artwork and videos.  His latest video was a collaboration with Aiden Mourn that debuted yesterday on YouTube.  If we don't see a ring of fire, we should see something similar.  The game really could use some sort of memorial.