Gandhi On The BoB/Goonswarm Wars

I read with great concern yesterday about the shortage of Sun Tzu quotes facing EVE Online.  So in an effort to help out, I thought I'd share a quote I first heard yesterday.  The quote is from an unexpected source, though.  Not Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, or even The Mittani.¹ No, this quote comes from Gandhi and I think is perhaps the ultimate TL,DR on the Band of Brothers/Goonswarm wars, at least from the Goonswarm perspective.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Now, some may dispute that Gandhi ever said this and attribute the quote to U.S. trade unionist Nicholas Klein.  But as yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of Gandhi, I thought I'd give those who credit the Indian leader with the quote.  Besides, who's going to credit something intelligent to someone in an NPC corp? ²


NOTES:

1.  The text version is found here.

2.  Artistic license abused.

Countdown To ... What?

In all the excitement over the Battle of B-R5RB, I don't know how many people missed the appearance of a countdown clock over on the EVE Online community site.  The burning question is many minds is: countdown to what?  What will CCP unveil on 5 February at 1500 GMT?

Of course, the intrepid explorers of Tweetfleet (led by the most intrepid explorer, Mark726) had answers and tweeted them out yesterday.

Patch Day

Yesterday was the launch of Rubicon 1.1.  Admittedly I don't think the patch will affect me at all, although I haven't seen the new UI changes yet.  The feature that adds the training time to reach a certain mastery level for a ship is pretty cool, but nothing that would make me log in and have to see right away.  After finding out that the display of pilots' status in the chat channels was broken, I decided I'd wait until today to log in since CCP Explorer tweeted that a hotfix installed during downtime today would fix the issue.  While I'm happy that bots were broken for a day, I just figured I'd make sure no blues tried to shoot me.

I should add that I know what the issue is. Since the only difference between the Singularity test shard and Tranquility is that CCP Punkturis has pink chat text on Singularity and not on Tranquility, the answer is obvious.  Give CCP Punkturis pink chat text on Tranquility.  I think you could persuade her to make the sacrifice.

That doesn't mean I didn't do anything EVE-related yesterday.  I listened to Big Country's EVE Radio show on my iPhone until I could get home and log into Twitch.  That got me caught up with the latest on the patch and with the aftermath of the B-R fight Monday.  Today I'll find out what really happened (maybe), as Goonswarm fleet commander Lazarus Telraven and Pandemic Legion's Manfred Sideous were intereviewed yesterday by the Crossing Zebras podcast.  The podcast is available now, which impresses me.  I guess that's why they are the CCP-certified #1 podcast in EVE history.

So if I didn't log into EVE, what did I do?  After looking at the secondary ISK market (which is leaking sellers again) I switched from the EVE Radio Twitch stream to Funky Bacon's Twitch stream and watched him play The Secret World.  I know that watching someone play a video game isn't as fun as playing yourself, but the handful of us watching and helping Funky out when the going got tough was fun.  So much fun that afterward I updated my client and rolled a new character.  I stopped when I got inside Solomon Island because of the time, but with a new computer since I last played, the game looked great.  Now if the Templars didn't have the best looking clothing rewards for completing decks.  Oh well, I guess I can't have everything.

So that's a quick rundown on my day when CCP releases a new patch for EVE Online.  Probably not what non-EVE players expect.  But that's why we always set long skills before a patch.  While we didn't need it this time, something always seems to happen.  I realize that's the case with every MMORPG I've ever played, but maybe when CCP finally gets rid of all the legacy spaghetti code we can have nice things with less pain.  Both for us and for the poor programmers who have to work with that ...

The Digital Dozen: 28 January 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 26 January 2014.  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	45.1	13,071	-3.6
2	2	Guild Wars 2	14.7	4,245	+17.2
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.4	3,022	-2.5
4	4	Final Fantasy XIV	6.1	1,780	-4.1
5	6	EVE Online	4.3	1,247	+1.5
6	5	Tera	4.0	1,148	-7.8
7	7	Aion	3.5	1,000	-4.1
8	9	Neverwinter	2.9	852	-12.5
9	11	Lord of the Rings Online	2.6	745	-16.4
10	10	RIFT	2.4	703	-21.5
11	8	Planetside 2	2.3	659	-32.5
12	--	Maple Story	1.7	482	+72.8

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 28,954

The Xfire community continued its slow decline Sunday, with members playing MMORPGs 3% less hours than the week before.  The games suffering the biggest loss in playtime were World of Warcraft (-495 hours) and Planetside 2 (-318 hours).  The game with the biggest gain was Guild Wars 2 (+623 hours).  Need for Speed World dropped from the list after a one week stay and was replaced by Maple Story.

The Living Story Returns - Guild Wars 2 posted a 17.2% increase in playtime Sunday as ArenaNet began releasing the last installments of the Living Story last Tuesday.  After a few months the impact of the every other week patches lessened, but after a six week absence players were definitely waiting for new content.

A Ban Wave - Last week Blizzard launched a ban wave against users of a bot used both in PvP and by raiders.  Many of the bans were for 72 hours, meaning that players were able to log in on Sunday.  From the numbers posted, not many in the Xfire community were affected.

A Blizzard Of Tears: Botters Banned In World Of Warcraft

"I got a 72hr on my main. But if it makes you feel any better i've lost about 30 accounts over the last 2 years."

Gentoo, WoW botter

I originally planned on trying to make a scholarly post using the words of botters to illustrate the differences between CCP's and Blizzard's methods of dealing with botters and hackers.  But after reading Blizzard's ban policy, I gave up on that thought.

The Penalty Volcano: Blizzard's Ban Policy

The reason that I bring up the ban policy is to prepare those reading this post for the confusion that ensued.  For example, in EVE Online, CCP will ban botters 30 days for a first offense and issue a permanent ban for a second offense.  Blizzard is a little more flexible, with no set penalties and with nothing between 3 days and permanent.  The confusion begins below the cut.

Blizzard Kills A Bot

I don't know how much the mainstream gaming media has covered the story, but apparently Blizzard dropped the ban hammer on quite a few botters in World of Warcraft over the past two days.  Well, WoW players are calling PQR, which I believe is the application in question, a bot.  I would call it a macro, but as macros are legal in WoW, I believe bot gets used to avoid confusion.

Image edited to show the last edit date.

According to the official description on the OwnedCore forums, PQR was:

"PQR is a bot designed to perform complex DPS, healing and tanking rotations for the player. It was mainly designed to reduce the tediousness of performing a complex rotation for hours on end, which for many can be a huge relief and provide them with a better WoW experience where they may have wanted to quit in other cases."

Note that I indicated "was"?  That is because, as the graphic above shows, that the download link was removed from OwnedCore's forums, probably at 4:02pm yesterday, Central Standard Time (GMT -6).  Since the application was freeware, Blizzard can't go after the developer's wallet, but if the lawyers were able to track down Xelper, perhaps he was persuaded to cooperate.

Someone posted a rumor that 510 thousand accounts were banned.  The users of PQR apparently believe that people who used the application in PvE were receiving 72 hour bans and those using the hack in PvP were receiving permanent bans.  The fact that Xelper took down the link has led to some conspiracy theories on the forums similar to ones seen when the EVE bot RoidRipper closed down due to aggressive action by CCP.

The story is ongoing, and the MGM will need to cover the story if highly ranked Arena players were caught in the ban wave.  I'll go through all the information I have and post something more comprehensive on Monday.  And for those of you who want to read some tears, I'll leave a link to the official ban wave thread.

Click here to read bot tears

UPDATE: I'm not so sure PQR is permanently dead.  I tracked down the statement people were using to say it was.

"I'm going out for the night, and I just want to be clear: I am not sure if PQI was the reason for detection. I am just saying that listening on that addon channel was a bad idea, and a potential avenue for detection. There are others. If people were banned for using PE (and have never touched PQR/PQI) There is certainly another. Another thought is that Blizzard may be able to see what addons are running, but these are all guesses for now. I highly suggest people do not continue to use PQR."

Exploration And Tranquility Concurrency Numbers

In yesterday's post I forgot to mention my experience with exploration in Odyssey and how it could impact the average concurrent user number.

Rhavas put my thoughts into something intelligible yesterday.

@noizygamer Right. Put another way anom "explorers" no longer needed to dual box. Thus less accounts logged in.
— Rhavas (@EVE_Rhavas) January 22, 2014

Before Odyssey, when I ran anomalies I used two accounts.  One would scan down the sites and hack the cans while the other stood overwatch and killed all the rats that appeared.   That did tend to limit the area I would cover, because moving a non-cloaky ship around low sec does entail some risk.  If CCP hadn't announced the exploration changes, I probably would have purchased a Tengu or a Loki to run around in.

Because of Odyssey, I didn't need to train up, and then save up, for an all-purpose exploration ship.  I was free to cut loose and roam around in a singe ship.  While I only roamed through Heimatar, I was able to rake in more loot, even if I needed to visit more sites to do so.  So I may have spent more time exploring, but as I was only logged on with one account, I counted less toward the average concurrent user numbers because I no longer used two accounts.  So, even though I played more right after the release of Odyssey, I contributed to that sharp drop following the expansion's launch.

I really have the feeling that mine is not an isolated story.  I also believe that CCP made a conscious design decision to try to open up exploration to more people.  In addition to making probing a lot easier, the devs also decreased the ship requirements so tech 3 cruisers or multi-boxing was a significant advantage. 

Of course, many people didn't like the changes to exploration and went off to do other things in game.  I wonder how many of those people started doing things that required less accounts logged into EVE than they were using in exploration.  So in addition to the ice belt and null sec anomaly changes, we can add exploration to the changes designed to lower the concurrent user number.

CCP's War On Bots: The Graph And Speaking For The Devil

I know that a lot of discussion is occurring withing the EVE blogosphere about what the average concurrent users graph on EVE-Offline.net actually means for the future of EVE Online.  Some view the 24.2% decline in the average concurrent user number in the 15 weeks following the launch of Odyssey with alarm.  They see the expansion as a failure and even a sign that EVE has finally reached its peak and is doomed to decline.  Some news outlets have even confused the ACU graph with subscription numbers, thus contributing to the alarm.  At the point, all but the most optimistic only see a best case scenario that EVE will hold onto its current numbers and the ACU graph will continue to show a plateau.

Let me play devil's advocate for a bit.  Did that big drop occur because players abandoned the game, or because CCP made some decisions that they intended to produce a drop in the number of accounts logged into the game at the same time?  I believe that CCP did intentionally did two things that resulted in lower concurrent user numbers.

The Digital Dozen: 21 January 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 19 January 2014.  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	45.4	13,566	-6.9
2	2	Guild Wars 2	12.1	3,622	-5.3
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.4	3,098	+13.1
4	4	Final Fantasy XIV	6.2	1,857	-16.6
5	7	Tera	4.2	1,245	+11.9
6	5	EVE Online	4.1	1,229	+5.3
7	6	Aion	3.5	1,043	-0.8
8	10	Planetside 2	3.3	977	+32.7
9	9	Neverwinter	3.3	974	+2.3
10	11	RIFT	3.0	895	+27.7
11	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.0	891	-8.3
12	--	Need For Speed World	1.5	456	+1.5

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 29,853

I'm running out of ways to state that the Xfire community spent less time playing MMORPGs on Sunday than it did the week before.  Sunday's decline of 2.5% was led in absolute terms by World of Warcraft, which witnessed a decline of 1002 hours.  The games experiencing the biggest gains were Star Wars: The Old Republic (+358 hours) and Planetside 2 (+241 hours).  Runescape fell off the list after a two week run and was supplanted by Need For Speed World.

Galactic Starfighter, Phase 2 -  Star Wars: The Old Republic experienced a 13.1% increase in time spent in the Star Wars universe following the release of patch 2.5.2.  This is the patch that granted Preferred players access to the Galactic Starfighter content as well as introduced new ships and the return of Bounty Contract Week, which ends today.  However, Galactic Starfighter has not proven to be the EVE killer, as EVE Online experienced a 5.3% increase in play time on Sunday.  Perhaps when the feature is made available to F2P players on 4 February.

A Reasonable Explanation, But... - Final Fantasy XIV saw a 16.6% decline in the number of hours the Xfire community spent playing the Square Enix product.  While tempting to blame the expiration of a one-week offer to inactive players to try the game again, that's not the whole reason.  In the week before that, Xfire activity in the game decreased by 8%.

Another Way Of Looking At The Numbers - The Digital Dozen looks at the number of hours the Xfire community spends playing games, not at the number of people actually playing.  But what would I find if I had the time to manually go through the games (and Xfire remained reliable enough) and also record the number of players?  I didn't go through all of the games, just the ones on this week's list, and found that ranking by players would make the list look a bit different.

Game	DD Rank	Players	Avg Hours Played
World of Warcraft	1	2663	5.1
Guild Wars 2	2	971	3.7
Star Wars: The Old Republic	3	626	4.9
Planetside 2	8	335	2.9
EVE Online	6	306	4.0
Neverwinter	9	288	3.4
Final Fantasy XIV	4	285	6.5
Tera	5	268	4.6
Need For Speed World	12	265	1.7
Lord of the Rings Online	11	220	4.0
Aion	7	197	5.3
RIFT	10	188	4.8

The Digital Dozen is purposefully designed to weight a player's activity based on the hours spent in game.  If I just counted whether a person logged into a game on Sunday, then the EVE Online player who just logged in for 2 minutes to update his skill queue would count the same as the World of Warcraft player who spent 6 hours raiding. 

Trying To Stay Non-Political (In-Game)

Has anyone noticed the trend in which game companies really want player feedback?  SOE is pretty visible with its weekly Round Table polls asking about how players about EverQuest Next development issues.  Back in August, ArenaNet held an in-game "election" to the Captain's Council to determine the course of Guild Wars 2's Living Story.  But the most frequent model is the game devs trying to form what is, in effect, a focus group.  Turbine created a player council in Lord of the Rings Online in April and are in the process of creating one for Dungeons and Dragons Online now.  The members of those councils are selected by Turbine.  Bioware went one step further and actually held elections for a group of class representatives back in July.

Of course, EVE Online has had such a group of player advisers, the Council of Stellar Management, in existence since May 2008.  Currently in its eighth incarnation, the CSM brings another layer of reality to the virtual world, albeit with a lot of detractors.  Some people want to lead while others cover the election process with a greater professionalism than we've seen in MSM muster in recent U.S. presidential elections.  After all, internet spaceships is serious business.

I listened to the latest CSM town hall on EVE Radio yesterday and discovered that EVE's next silly, er, I mean election season basically begins after the Winter Summit, which begins Wednesday and ends on Friday.  Normally, internet spaceship politics is an amusing aspect of EVE that I sit back and enjoy.  Well, except for last year when the new election rules left me baffled.  But I'm starting to get a bad feeling about this election cycle.

Normally, I wouldn't worry about what I might post about the CSM election.  This blog is small enough, and my knowledge of EVE is noobish enough, that what I think and type about the CSM and the great issues of the day really doesn't matter.  I really only have one specialty concerning EVE: the study of CCP's efforts to combat botting and the selling of ISK on the secondary markets.  Given some of the events of the past year though (i.e. SOMERblink), the subject might come up and people might pay attention to my opinions.  Yikes!

I'm also starting to get a bad feeling about some of the issues that may arise.  Yes, I know that I can see bots and RMT where others don't, but what happens if I begin to point that out?  One of the worst accusations to throw around is that someone either favors or actually approves of botting and illicit RMT.  Sure, I know that the people throwing around some of the ideas have no clue of the implications their ideas may have on EVE's shadow economy, but do you think people engaged in a political campaign are going to care?  I know, I know.  I really should stop asking rhetorical questions.

I'm beginning to think I should just avoid this whole CSM election thing.  I have the feeling I may wind up posting about some of the issues anyway, but maybe I can couch my writing into something that isn't EVE-specific.  When are the elections again?