Instead Of Pandas

One of the arguments we heard in favor of the Aurum store in Eve Online last year was that CCP needed the capability to keep up with the competition in the area of cash shops.  I don't think CCP has too much to fear in that department anymore with a cash shop providing the major revenue source for DUST 514, but the fallout from the controversy around Incarna left the Icelandic company seriously behind in a critical technology for today's MMORPGs: pandas.

So how is CCP trying to compete with Blizzard, whose release of Mists of Pandaria this week mocks CCP's technological backwardness?  They are reaching back in time and running a live event in advance of Eve Online's winter expansion and the integration of DUST 514 into the New Eden universe.  CCP's live events tend to run for weeks as the player base experienced in the run-up to the Incursion expansion released in November 2010. 

CCP doesn't just come out and state a live event is planned or underway.  They tend to leak the news out to various outlets.  I know that one place was Tech 4 News, which published clues that a live event was about to begin.  A few hours later the Angel Cartel conducted a raid on the Genesis Vaults on Oddelulf III in Molden Heath.  During the fighting capsuleer pirates aided the Angel Cartel and the anti-Angel forces were unable to thwart the raid.

Defending forces began to plan for the next Angel attack on the second of the Genesis Vaults sites.  The site originally was believed to be on Yishinoon II in Derelik, but that information was questioned as why would the Matar Society for Natural Preservation run a site in Ammatar space?  Further inquiries discovered the true second location on Bogelek II.

For those unaware of the planet, Bogelek II is a temperate planet in the Akaimamur constellation of Heimatar.  Located in a system with a security status of .4, the system boasts one station operated by the Gallente Aliastra corporation.  The station 4 jumps from the nearest outlet to high security space only has refining and repair facilities.  At this time I can't tell you if the station has a celestial object suitable for use as a destination for an instawarp destination when leaving the station.  While I've operated in the area, that was a couple of months ago and I've forgotten because I just went ahead and made a bookmark for the purpose.

If past history holds form then Oddelulf and Bogelek are just the first shots fired in the live event.  I expect the live event to extend through the launch of the winter expansion, which historically is the last week in November or in early December.  If CCP wanted to integrate DUST into Eve, then I can't think of a more epic way to do so than through a live event.

Shawn Schuster Leaves Massively.com

In a bit of news I missed, Massively.com Editor-In-Chief Shawn Schuster is leaving Massively.com and handing over his duties to Brianna Royce on 30 September.  Shawn took over the reigns in 2009, succeeding Michael Zenke when the man formerly identified as one of the top 50 gaming journalists moved on to work on SOE's DC Universe Online.

I got to know Shawn's work when I covered podcasting; first when he teamed up with Zonk as the original hosts of Massively Speaking and then later when he partnered with Jonathan Morris to produce Through The Aftermath.  I enjoyed both podcasts immensely and stopped listening to Massively Speaking when Shawn gave up his hosting duties.  For those wanting to listen to him one more time, he hosted this week's edition of Massively Speaking.  On the podcast Shawn indicated that the transistion to Brianna should be smooth as she had been running more and more things behind the scenes over the past few months.

I'm not sure exactly how the Eve community will take the news of Brianna taking the reigns of Massively.  Oh, who am I kidding, I know exactly what is going to happen.  The tin-foil hats are going to come out because of Brianna's open declaration that she doesn't like Eve, and more particularly the Eve community, although she may get points from many because she really doesn't like Goons.  I do have to be careful, because not only was the post written on 1 April, but she did mention me, although without attribution or linkage, in an unfavorable light due to my conclusion in the post "The Rise of Eve's Pajamahadeen?" I do have to admit that the thought of Arydanika driving around beating up gaming journalists is kind of funny.

I will say that Shawn will be missed and I wish him the best of luck as he moves on to take care of his farm full-time.

Leftovers

Sometimes I get home from work at a decent hour and get a chance to play Eve.  Last night not only could I play but I found six signatures to scan down in a nearby system.  Good thing I had time to spend more than a half hour logged in.

I wasn't interested in wormholes or combat sites, so that left me with one radar and two gravimetric sites to visit.  And while gneiss is nice, I decided the small gneiss site I found didn't warrant any attention because I also found an Average Crokite, Dark Ocrhe and Gneiss site.  But my first target was the radar site.

Radar sites are nice.  I can just pop into the site with a stealth bomber, pick off the initial rats from long range, then bring in a ship equipped with a codebreaker and a salvager and clean up the site.  So far in low sec I've used a Jaguar to do the dirty work with a Hound on overwatch.  Why a Jaguar?  Because sometimes opening a container with the codebreaker spawns rats and they are barely able to scratch the Jaguar.  Speed tanking FTW.

The big problem with using an assault frigate is the lack of cargo space.  I ran into that problem last night as lots of items dropped for me.  In addition to some tasty salvage from the rats I killed, including an Angel Brass Tag, the first two containers gave me a one-run Cryptic Tuner Data Interface blueprint copy and two Calibration Data decryptors.  Those are nice because they give a +10% probability multiplier to invention attempts as well as giving a +3 ME and PE modifier to tech 2 blueprint copies.  I filled up the cargo hold of the Jaguar so I ran back to the station to drop off the load.

Perhaps I should have uncloaked the Hound first.  Because the site despawned before I could get back in the Jaguar.  I really hope that meant that the other 4 containers were empty because I would hate to think I lost a bunch of ISK just because I didn't decloak.  But the wrecks I hadn't salvaged were still present so I finished that up before moving on to mining.

The gravimetric site promised riches in a nice safe location.  I actually needed to use seven probes to scan out the site, which was a first for me.  I figured I would have plenty of time to warp off to a safe spot if I saw probes on the directional scanner.

The one thing I didn't count on is that someone would find the site before I did.  I was alone but all of the crokite was already mined.  So no piles of zydrine for me.  I had to settle for the dark ochre which contains massive amounts of nocxium.  Darn.

I stayed up a little later than planned to finish scooping up all of the dark ochre and then headed back to the station.  I learned that I need to get another ship to run a code breaker or analyzer.  Right now I'm leaning toward the Muninn because of its cargo hold and tank.  I just like the tech 2 ships and their resistances against the Angel rats I run up against, although on second thought maybe a Minmatar armor HAC is not a good choice.  Perhaps the time has come to finally break down a buy a Loki.  Or maybe I can wait a bit until my hauling alt can fly a Viator.  That would solve a lot of issues.

The more I play Eve, the more I learn just how much I don't know.  That is part of why the game is fun.

The Digital Dozen: 25 September 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 23 September 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	Guild Wars 2	46.4	51,481	-25.4
2	2	World of Warcraft	30.5	33,794	+31.7
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	4.5	4,950	-5.5
4	4	Aion	3.8	4,220	+0.9
5	5	Eve Online	2.9	3,210	-9.3
6	6	Metin 2	2.6	2,931	-6.2
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	2.2	2,440	-0.0
8	8	APB: Reloaded	1.9	2,130	+1.7
9	9	Need For Speed World	1.6	1,798	-1.1
10	11	Vindictus	1.5	1,637	+14.3
11	10	Star Trek Online	1.1	1,261	-12.6
12	--	Cabal Online	1.0	1,100	+36.4

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 136,554  

Last Sunday saw another 7.3% drop in the amount of time spent playing MMORPGs by the Xfire community.  The big losers in percentage terms were Guild Wars 2 (-25.4%) and Maple Story (-20.1%).  The loss in playtime for Maple Story dropped the game off the list.  The big gainers were Cabal Online, making it into The Digital Dozen for the first time with a 36.4% gain and World of Warcraft (+31.7%).

No big deal.  Guild Wars 2 has seen a decline in play time of 44.6% over the past 3 weeks.  But unlike all of the subscription games that have debuted since December, GW2's business model of buying the game and not paying a subscription means that ArenaNet has probably collected all of the money it planned to collect from the players who have left the game.  Of course, those players may come back to visit, which is another element of the business model.

Pandas, pandas, pandas.  World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion goes live today and players apparently returned to the game Sunday to start preparing for the new content.  I expect WoW to vault back to the top of the list next week.

Goonswarm = CIA

I originally intended to ignore the latest claims by Glenn Beck that Goonswarm is a node in the CIA's communications network but I have to get this out of my system.  Glenn Beck is a professional conspiracy theorist.  Some people think it is an act; I don't believe so.  He naturally comes up and believes in conspiracy theories and has turned that talent into a paying career.  And he is a non-partisan conspiracy theorist.  I believe his advice to buy gold came during the Bush 43 administration.

One thing about conspiracy theories is that they do not have to be 100% accurate in all details in order for the conspiracy theorist to get credit for uncovering a hidden truth.  Which is good for Mr. Beck since as far as I can tell everything he said about Sean "Vile Rat" Smith was utter b***s***.  Please tell me if I got something wrong...

1.  Sean was IT support, not security, not an agent looking for missing U.S. weapons.

2.  Sean served six years in the Air Force before joining the State Department.  Last I heard, becoming a Navy SEAL requires being in the Navy.  The Air Force has their own special operations units.

3.  Sean talking to friends via Jabber is totally believable.   If one is in a location where going out at night is dangerous, saying in and talking to the folks back home if the option is available is a natural and understandable activity.

4.  The story about Sean posting to a gaming website originated on TheMittani.com.  Here is the actual quote reported.

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures

That quote, I believe, came from Jabber logs.  Unless Sean posted on internal Goonswarm forums that I do not have access to or on the Something Awful forums (not a gaming website) then Mr. Beck misrepresented the source and the contents of the quote.

Now, let me make a comment about why conspiracy theories originate and become popular.  Most of them arise when government attempts to hide something and does so badly.  Notice that Mr. Beck did not offer his theory until after UN Ambassador Susan Rice made her rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows on 16 September flat out stating that there was no evidence that the assault on the consulate and the murders of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs.  Instead, the events of 9/11/12 occurred because people were upset with a film trailer that was posted on YouTube in June.  Really?  I was writing about possible links to al-Qaeda on 13 September and The Nosy Gamer is a gaming blog.  In fact, the Obama administration repudiated the story Ambassdor Rice peddled to the public a few days later, with White House press secretary Jay Carney stating, “It is self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

Instead of coming out and saying the matter was still under investigation, the Obama administration tried to feed the American public an alternative version of reality designed to help his re-election chances.  One of the requirements for modern conspiracy theories is that the government is doing something it does not want the public to know about.  Handing out a story that is unbelievable after someone does a couple of Google searches will draw conspiracy theorists like a moth to a flame.  Or to put the sentiment less politely, b***s*** tends to breed more b***s***. 

Now, for those who think that Mr. Beck will shut up now that Goons have swarmed to his website and pointed out his factual errors, don't hold your breaths.  Yesterday Mr. Beck received some validation for his theories from, of all places, the New York Times.

"The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation. 

"Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city."

...

"American intelligence operatives also assisted State Department contractors and Libyan officials in tracking shoulder-fired missiles taken from the former arsenals of the former Libyan Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces; they aided in efforts to secure Libya’s chemical weapons stockpiles; and they helped train Libya’s new intelligence service, officials said. "

Mr. Beck's main point in his conspiracy theory is that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi in order to help track down U.S. weapons before they fell into possibly unfriendly hands.  The New York Times is now reporting that the consulate was performing exactly that function.  Mr. Beck's story now goes from bats*** crazy to plausible, although requiring a lot of incompetence.  Conspiracy theorists don't need to have all their facts correct if significant potions of their theories are proved true.  They will receive credit and acclaim even if some of the actors are portrayed incorrectly and family and friends of those involved are hurt in the process.

Changing Directions - What To Do With My Alt

With my move to low sec, a question I failed to address is what to do with my resource harvesting alt?  I actually have three accounts and I alternate the training time between a PI/mining alt and a hauling alt.  I just finished a skill plan for my harvesting alt and I'm now concentrating on turning my hauling alt into my favorite type of pilot: cloaky.

The question I now have is what to do with my harvesting alt.  It has a nice set of skills for high sec, but probably not so good for low.  Looking at the certificates earned (yes, I use certificates) I think I didn't do too badly.

General
Core Competency - Standard
High-Velocity Helmsman - Standard

Science
Research Manager - Standard

Planetary Interaction
Colony Management - Improved
Planetology - Standard

Mining
Resource Harvester - Improved
Ice Specialist - Improved
Amarr Industry - Prospector - Basic
Drone Control - Basic
Combat Drone Control - Standard
Specialist Drone Operator - Basic

Active Shield Tanking - Standard
Passive Shield Tanking - Basic

I included all of the combat related certificates in with mining because those are the skills needed to operate mining barges effectively.  And if I had remained I would spend another two months and earn the following certs:

Science

Research Manager - Improved

Planetary Interaction
Planetology - Improved

Mining
Resource Harvester - Elite
Ice Specialist - Elite
Passive Shield Tanking - Standard
Amarr Industry - Prospector - Elite
Armor Tanking -Standard

But with my attention on low sec now, I need a pilot that can fly a cloaky hauler with a larger cargo capacity that a Prowler.  Ideally I would like to fly a ship capable of moving packaged cruisers around low sec, like a Viator.  My hauling pilot is a lot closer to that goal.

So what do I do with my harvesting alt?  I stopped doing planetary interaction in high sec because the time spent maintaining colonies was taking away from my fun time.  For mining in low sec I don't want to multi-box and Wandering Rose does a much better job.  The best use I've come up with is to find either a Caldari or a Amarr corporation in my area of low sec and raise standings enough to get perfect refining in even more stations.  I can run mining missions (?!) while I make bookmarks in new low sec systems.

CCP Fozzie, Lore Dev?

I don't normally cruise the Eve Online forums.  I'll stick my head in every once in a while to see if anyone is talking about bots but normally I only read the dev blogs and the reactions.  But watching Twitter I've heard about some of CCP Fozzie's forum posts as he gathers up player feedback on the frigate and cruiser changes.  I really liked his response to some outrage over the changes to the Tristan.

Outrages player 1:  

NO NO and again NO

i will NOT support that dicision

i am willing to support the idea where the --> Kestrel, Iquisitor, Breacher and my favorite hull-design the Tristan <-- are rocket-/light missile platforms obviously because they are the tech 1 variations of the Covertt-Ops-Bombers and seriously ... what is a drone tracking bonus for when u use small drones??? and as simple as that: DO NOT MAKE THEM INTO SOME OTHER STRANGE STUFF

Outraged player 2:  

Are you ********? It doesn't make sense, so simply put, they should fix it. It does not make ANY SENSE AT ALL. WHY THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING THIS IS A GOOD THING?

I like the drone boat thing and love the look of the new Tristan... it's just too bad it doesn't make one ******* shred of sense for the Tristan to be the Tech 1 drone boat frigate, while an Incursus hull gets to be the Tech 2 version. This is common sense that a five year old possesses, it's called a pattern, and the way they're proposing this stuff right now, that pattern is GARBAGE.

That is unless they are planning some major changes with the Gallente Assault Ships.

CCP Fozzie:  

Well you see there's a funny story about all this.

Back in YC 105 when CreoDron was beginning the design process for their new Ishkur-class Assault Ship, they naturally looked first to the (retroactively) drone-centric Tristan as a base hull. The project lead Masalle Ambrette acquired a large number of Tristan hulls for prototyping and set her team to work.

However two major technical challenges quickly arose. Roni Darieux himself had given them their design targets, and he was adamant that the new ship had to be the pinnacle of drone carrier technology. The Ishkur must be able to field a 50m3 dronebay as well as top of the line armor plating for a Frigate.

These goals proved difficult to meet using the Tristan as a base hull. Although it had the largest dronebay of any existing Frigate at the time the Tristan's hull layout did not allow for easy expansion of the already significant bay. In particular, the port side bulkhead quickly lost structural integrity when the internal supports were scaled back in order to expand the bay. Attempts to meet the armor plating requirements also ran into difficulties as the Tristan thruster systems struggled to keep up under the heavier load. The classic thruster pod design of the Tristan hull did not provide easy expansion room to upgrade the thrusters either.

After numerous failures in the prototyping process the CreoDron team decided to change course and build the Ishkur using a completely different hull. They eventually settled on the Incursus hull as the next logical choice. Although the Incursus did not have the same base dronebay that the Tristan offered, it was more easily modified and the conversion from the Incursus' advanced armor repair systems to the Ishkur's superior resistance and plating systems proceeded relatively smoothly. As a bonus, the team was able to carry over the Incursus' superior hybrid weapon damage boosting technology and create another strong selling point for their new Assault Ship.

Although the Ishkur project resulted in what would prove to be an extremely successful ship (in both direct ship sales and additional profits from increased use of CreoDron's advanced drone portfolio), Masalle Ambrette was left afterwards with thousands of mangled Tristan hulls that had failed the prototyping process. In order to recoup some of the development costs, CreoDron sold the hulls cheap as scrap to the highest bidder.

They say one woman's trash is another woman's treasure, and when CreoDron put the 'scrap' onto the market one smart scientist saw a diamond in the rough. Ruborraude Eyghelet, a rising star at Duvolle Laboratories, had just been recently put in charge of a top secret development project on contract from the Federation Navy. Her team was designing what would eventually come to be known as the Nemesis stealth bomber, a dramatic departure from normal Gallente battle doctrines that would help keep them competitive in the battlefields of the future. Eyghelet knew that the Nemesis would need to be a radical departure from previous frigate designs, but building a new hull design completely from scratch would take a portion of her limited budget that she could not afford to lose. When the report of the mangled Tristan fire-sale crossed her desk she immediately saw an opportunity to cut her costs.

The damaged Tristan hulls were reformed into a barely recognizable state during the prototyping process to accommodate the battleship sized missile launchers and bomb deployment system, with only the iconic front plating remaining to visually connect it to the frigate it had once been. The dronebay was converted into a bomb and missile storage bay, and the Duvolle team also managed to ingeniously convert the advanced tracking computer on the Tristan into an efficient missile guidance system. In the end Duvolle and Eyghelet managed to create the Nemesis while keeping costs down to only 14% overbudget, easily beating the market predictions and sending Duvolle stock to the highest it had reached in years.

It just goes to prove that the world of spaceship construction is more complicated and fascinating than any of us would expect.

Is CCP developing lore for all the changes?  Probably not but I really enjoyed Kirith Kodachi's Project Athena and would love to see CCP give us some background on all the ships we fly.

Monty's Minute And DUST 514

I always tell people that I'm not an Eve blogger, just someone who writes a lot about the game.  Like about 80% of my posts.  But for my Tuesday column I spend time looking around for information about other games. One of those sources is Gamebreaker TV because I can let the shows run minimized as I do important internet spaceship stuff.

Last night I watched the premier of a new show called Monty's Minute.  The star of the show is Monty Sharma, one of the co-founders of Vivox and currently the managing director of the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute.  Interestingly enough Vivox's first MMORPG client was CCP back in 2006.  The premise is that Monty will answer questions about the video game business based on his years of business related background.

The show ran 35 minutes and despite a lot of "um" and "you knows" I got some interesting insights, especially into free-to-play games.  One interesting answer was in response to a question on whether free-to-play games can thrive on consoles.

Monty:  "That's a really interesting question.  We've seen some of that start to happen, like XBLA and PSN.  The interesting thing was the rise of these small arcade games and so the game industry really took notice of that.  We saw a number of developers rushing to build for that.  The systems aren't elegantly in place on those platforms yet to do free-to-play well.  They're coming, they're coming quickly and I think probably the biggest test of that in the next year is going to be DUST 514.  

"So here is a game that is going to sell maybe a million units which would be huge. And be free-to-play; its a hard core game that takes advantage of all the great stuff you can do on a console.  It's a gorgeous game and I think that is going to sort of set the high water mark and it will be interesting to see what console developers do.  I know they are all watching DUST."

Considering that CCP changed DUST 514 from buy-to-play to free-to-play, I think we can forget about the units sold.  But is one million the industry expectation for how many people intend to play the game?  And how many players will visit the cash shop?  If the going rate of five percent holds true, that could be a lot of money.  Raph Koster wrote an excellent blog post earlier this year explaining the F2P business model.

The one million number brings to mind a couple of other questions.  Can the servers handle the load?  If the peak concurrent user mark follows the pattern in Eve, CCP might need to handle 100,000 - 125,000 concurrent DUST 514 users.  Perhaps more importantly, where will they all go?  My understanding is that DUST combat is initially slated for factional warfare systems.  Instead of failing because of not enough interest, could CCP face too much interest?  A nice problem to have, unless players get frustrated and leave, never to come back.

I had one more thought that could impact Eve.  In free-to-play games players that game makers refer to as whales make up a huge percentage of a game's revenue.  But with DUST 514's connection to New Eden, how many of these types of players may wind up flying spaceships?  I'm already seeing pilots in local who belong to DUST related corporations.  Are we about to see a surge in subscriptions to Eve?

The Digital Dozen: 18 September 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 16 September 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	Guild Wars 2	56.9	68,968	-13.2
2	2	World of Warcraft	21.2	25,665	+1.0
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	4.3	5,238	-4.1
4	4	Aion	3.4	4,181	-1.9
5	5	Eve Online	2.9	3,538	+9.4
6	6	Metin 2	2.6	3,125	+2.3
7	7	Lord of the Rings Online	2.0	2,441	-7.6
8	8	APB: Reloaded	1.7	2,094	-16.4
9	9	Need For Speed World	1.5	1,817	-9.4
10	12	Star Trek Online	1.2	1,442	+0.1
11	11	Vindictus	1.2	1,432	-10.8
12	10	Maple Story	1.1	1,307	-24.4

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 147,368  

Sunday saw another drop in the amount of hours spent playing MMORPGs by the Xfire community.  The 7.6% decrease was lead by Guild Wars 2 in actual hours (-10,439) and Maple Story in percentage terms (-24.4%).  Eve Online led the way for the games bucking the downwards trend with an increase of 9.4%.

The 800 lb gorilla.  Next week is the last weekend before the launch of Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.  Today Blizzard releases the Battle of Theramore scenario.  With a lifespan of one week we may see a big increase next Sunday before the expansion actually launches.

Server Merges for SW:TOR.  Star Wars: The Old Republic instituted server merges onto servers that are supposed to handle higher populations.  Is this setting up for an anticipated spike in interest once the Bioware title goes free-to-play in November?

Two million for Guild Wars 2.  Despite seeing a drop of 13.2% in hours played Sunday, ArenaNet is celebrating as GW2 has now sold over 2 million copies.  The mark is more impressive when the fact that digital download sales were suspended for 10 days due to the servers having too much load.

Fundraiser for Sean "Vile Rat" Smith's Family

I just saw a re-tweet from Seleene spreading the word that the fundraiser for the family of Sean "Vile Rat" Smith is now up and running on YouCaring.  Here is the description from the donations page.

Sean Smith was a veteran Foreign Service Officer of the US State Department. His life ended tragically on September 11, 2012 when the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya came under attack.

He was known to his many friends in EVE Online and the Something Awful forums as Vilerat. His intelligence, patience and good humor were the cornerstones of Sean's life and those traits moved everyone he came in contact with. Sean was a devoted husband to his wife and he was a proud parent of two children.

To show our love for him and for his family we hope to raise money to help with their current expenses and his children's college expenses.

Update: Because we are over halfway to our initial goal of $50,000 in less than 12 hours, we have doubled the goal to $100,000. Thank you so much for your donations. Every donation, large or small, will help Sean's family.

For those wishing to contribute, please click here to go to the site.