About Those Rumors About Google Buying Twitch TV...

I'll have to admit I'm trying to spend a little more time in EVE these days.  That means less time blogging.  But I do watch a lot of YouTube videos about video games, Gamebreaker TV when a new episode of a show pops up, and a couple of Twitch streams when something interesting catches my eye.  So let's just say the latest news about Twitch caught my eye.  Let me just quote the piece from PC Gamer's Hayden Dingman:

Well, if YouTube/Google did actually solidify its purchase of Twitch.tv last week, it certainly didn't take long for things to change at the notoriously laissez-faire (one-eyed, one-horned, flying) purple streaming giant. 

Twitch, which in the past has been very lax when it came to copyright enforcement, is now scanning archived stream videos for infringing content with the help of a company called Audible Magic—infringing content including in-game music. Like, for instance, any of the radio music in Fallout 3. Valve's own official videos of the recent Dota 2 tournament The International were briefly silenced for containing music from—wait for it—Dota 2.

This Audible Magic software is pretty strict, as it even flagged a Twitch TV show.

The whole show isn't muted, just a 30 minute block that probably contained a video game clip.

Now, none of this is news to me.  Google is pretty strict on YouTube about copyrighted music and other content.  Violations can result in not just a portion of a video muted, but a person's whole YouTube channel taken down.  The rule for YouTube is: don't play the audio from video games.

That advice is kind of hard for Twitch streamers to accept, since the reason they are on Twitch is to stream video games.  But I guess a lot of streamers don't just stream the game music, but the music they listen to while playing.  Or, like Mad Ani used to do, he'd just put up the stream and a playlist and walk off for hours at a time.  I have the feeling it's the Mad Ani's of the world that have brought the wrath of the music industry down on Twitch, YouTube, etc.

Copyright-free music does exist for streamers to use and people are passing the information around now.

@Powersv2 @wilhelm2451 @noizygamer There's a few places to get general royalty music and they'll cut you a certificate to say you have perm.
— Sean Conover (@seanconover) August 7, 2014

I just hope that CCP has made sure for the Alliance Tournament that, if they have submitted any EVE music for copyright protection, that they've cleared its use with Twitch.  Hopefully they don't have a Valve moment.

Datacores: One More To Go

Last night I stayed up late and finished my latest standings grind with Carthum Conglomerate on an alt.  I'm making another industrial alt and so far I have her up to flying a blockade runner, flying mining barges and exhumers, best refining of high sec ore out of some Caldari stations, and some production skills up to level 5.  But I had a hole in my datacore farming that I chose this alt to fill.  Namely, my main characters don't get along with the Caldari or Amarr very well, so I needed to get access to level 4 R&D agents for those two factions.  I finished that up last night.  Now all I need to do is complete her training.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of datacore farming, EVE University has a class on its wiki on the subject, which as far as I can tell only needs updating with the changes that were introduced in Incarna.  For those not involved in factional warfare, datacores are obtained from research agents found within four main NPC factions and the minor factions of the Ammatar Mandate, Khanid Kingdom, and Thukker Tribe.  After the initial training and standings grinding, CCP considers datacore farming (except when done through factional warfare) a passive activity, although players can double the output of the agents by running daily missions.  I did that on my alt when she could only use a level 2 agent and after a couple of months she raised the amount of research points earned with the agent up to 50/day, which is half the amount needed for a datacore.

Why the need for a level 4 Amarr research agent?  Tech 2 mining crystals.  I may not wind up selling them, but I do use them.  I plan to make a Prospect, equip it with Modulated Deep Core Miner IIs, and go exploring.  Also, since low sec activity has died down a bit, I might take my Procurer traveling around looking for the small null sec ore sites I've seen spawn.  Crystals for those null sec ores, even the tech 1 versions, are kind of rare in my area of space.  Having a secure supply would help.  What's more secure than making my own?

I now have access to level 4 agents for all the major factions except Gallente, which I only have access to level 3.  Due to the way that access to R&D agents works, both Wandering Rose and Rosewalker, who both have great standings with the Gallente, don't have access to the level 4 agents.  I actually need to get my personal standings with each of the three Gallente R&D corporations up to 3.0 in order to do so.  That's not a high bar to clear, since I've got all the relevant social skills up to 5 and doing one mission for a corp gets my standings over 2.  Compared to a lot of the standings grinds I've done, including the one I just finished, those grinds will go quickly when I do them.

I consider myself a casual type of player, but looking back, the grinding I've done so far doesn't look that casual.  Then again, I have worked on my corporation and faction standings off and on for almost 5 years, working on one project or another.  A lot of serious industrialists involved with invention will probably say I've wasted my time and I should just buy the datacores off the market and include the price in the finished goods.  Fair enough.  But having a good datacore farm gives me something to do in EVE.

As much as I like flying around in EVE, going out and collecting datacores every 2-4 weeks gives me a chance to see some areas of EVE I usually don't frequent.  So if you see me flying around apparently doing nothing, I'm not wasting time.  I'm working.  Honest!

The Digital Dozen: 5 August 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 3 August 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	40.9	6,157	-2.8
2	2	Guild Wars 2	16.0	2,403	+13.8
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	9.0	1,360	-14.6
4	6	EVE Online	5.7	853	+10.6
5	5	Final Fantasy XIV	5.3	797	-0.5
6	7	Tera	4.9	741	-3.4
7	8	Aion	4.1	613	-11.4
8	4	Wildstar	4.0	597	-26.2
9	9	Runescape	3.4	510	-4.0
10	10	Lord of the Rings Online	3.1	470	+1.1
11	12	Neverwinter	1.9	287	+2.9
12	11	Elder Scrolls Online	1.8	273	-6.8

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 15,061

After a couple of weeks following the World Cup with large swings in playtime, the Xfire community's interest in MMORPGs once again experienced a small drop.  The 2.5% drop in playtime on Sunday was led by Star Wars: The Old Republic (-233 hours) and Wildstar (-212 hours) while the game seeing the biggest gain in interest was Guild Wars 2 (+291 hours).

The Story Continues - The second season of Guild Wars 2's Living Story continued with the release of episode 3, The Dragon's Reach: Part 1.  ArenaNet counts on the bi-weekly releases of the Living Story to keep player interest alive and this week's installment apparently did the job.

A Disappointing Release - Usually a new content release means increased interest from Xfire members, but not where Wildstar is concerned.  On 31 July, Carbine released Sabotage, a 15 vs 15 PvP battleground called Daggerstone Pass.  But that did not keep the Xfire community from wandering away from the game, at least this weekend.

Hanging On - Elder Scrolls Online barely hung on to the final spot on The Digital Dozen last week, barely edging out Need For Speed World.  Will yesterday's deployment of patch 1.3.3 manage to stop the fall in interest?  Or will ESO fall off the list 20 weeks after launch?

July Ship Losses In EVE Online

July traditionally is a time in EVE Online when player activity slows down and 2014 was no exception.  The main Tranquility shard saw a 6% drop from June to July in the average concurrent user mark¹ and a 7% drop in the number of ships lost by players.  The drop in the ship losses in high sec (5.2%) and low sec (5.5%) were similar, with null sec witnessing a double-digit percentage drop (11.1%).  

Wasting Time

Last night I watched Ashterothi continue streaming his adventures learning about industry, this time with his partner from the Hydrostatic Podcast, Lockefox, giving advice and explaining how things work. During one exchange, Lockefox pointed out that for industrialists, or at least the serious ones, the loss of time is a bigger danger than the loss of ISK.  Players can never regain time.

That's one of the reasons I'm a casual manufacturer.  Some days all I do is click on the icon to start the launcher so I can make sure I've downloaded the latest patch.  Other days, like yesterday, I'll grind standings while watching someone stream on Twitch or listen to the latest podcast or Eve Radio.

I have a bad habit of not switching tasks to do everything I need to in EVE.  I should have stopped my standings grind to get Amarrian datacores once I hit 4.00 with the corp, but I was watching the stream so I kept going and wound up with a corp standing of 4.22 and standings with Amarr of 3.99.  The Amarr are the only major faction I don't have access to level 4 research agents and I want to fill that hole.  But that meant I let a lot of my research slots¹ go unused.

For a serious industrialist, that's horrible.  Of course, a serious industrialist is probably also working out of a POS, and not using all the jobs available to a player on all his characters is a waste of POS fuel.  But I don't have a POS because that would mean moving to high sec.  I want to stick it out in low.

Another reason for not wasting time is the low margins that the industrialist typically works with.  From listening to Lockefox², I gather those margins are particularly thin for tech 1 items.  The industrialist can make up for small margins by selling lots of items.  That's one reason that so many people watch the concurrent user counts.  The more people playing, the more stuff that is used and destroyed.  Or, in other words, the more people shopping, buying what the industrialist is selling.

Of course, because the serious industrialist needs to sell in volume, they will gravitate toward the major trade hubs.  That knowledge makes me feel better.  I'm out selling in a low sec station with low volumes.  Actually, if I ramped up my current production, I'd have a lot of unsold products.  What I'm looking at doing now is diversifying my product line to make some more ISK.  Due to the way I play I'm pretty comfortable now, but making new stuff is just more interesting.

That's probably why I'll always fall on the casual end of the industrialist spectrum.  I do industrial stuff because I find it interesting.  I try to do as many steps in the process as possible because I find industry in EVE fascinating.  Yes, that includes mining in low sec.  The serious people have everything figured out and a plan.  I'm just doing a little tinkering, nosing around the process trying to understand more of the universe.

NOTES:

1.  Yes, I know that technically CCP got rid of all slots.  But I still think of the jobs I run as taking up slots.

2.  Any factual errors linked to Lockefox in this post are due to my lack of listening skills, not his knowledge of industry in EVE.

What Should I Look For?

Things are getting a bit ridiculous here in the EVE community.  The latest case involves a pilot named wheniaminspace, who was banned for exploiting a temporary condition that was introduced in the Crius release.  I'd go into the case in great detail, but I don't want to run afoul of point 23 of the Terms of Service.   Suffice it to say that a lot of people are white knighting someone who clearly deserves a permanent ban.  The pilot in question is the one who used the exploit the most.  Of the 31 times I detected the exploit used, wheniaminspace was involved 22 times.

Unfortunately, the article on TheMittani.com covering the exploit was pretty bad.  The explanation of the exploit itself was good, but the author used a lot of filler to meet the word count in order to get paid.  The article jammed two good story ideas into one.  Too bad they didn't really mix well.  I'd go into more detail and even link to the article, but the article did break the EVE Online Terms of Service, so I won't link it until I know that the exploit is either fixed or the condition no longer applies.  Which, when I think about the subjects I've covered and pages I've linked to over the years, is pretty weird to type.  However, even I have boundaries I won't cross and jeopardizing my EVE accounts is one.

That brings me to the planned topic for today.  I track and write about a lot of metrics about EVE.  But those metrics are usually about illicit ISK or concurrent user counts.  I really need to start paying more attention to what is occurring in the game, especially in New Eden's above-ground economy.  EVE's economy is probably the best of any MMORPG on the market.  I should at least make one graph and chart porn filled post every month.

The Crius release is the perfect opportunity to begin.  CCP revamped industry (except invention, which is coming soon) and I can start monitoring the markets to see how the changes are impacting the economy.  But what to monitor?

Right now the PLEX market is obvious and I have data for Jita going back to the beginning of Crucible and for all of EVE going back to 1 June 2013.  Another obvious target is veldspar and tritanium.  The changes to ore and mineral compression along with reprocessing will definitely have an impact.  The question is: how big?

As far as low sec is concerned, I really wonder about the impact of the new ore sites that were released in Kronos.  I wonder how hard trying to track the amount of hedbergite, hemorphite, and jaspet mined in low is?  Since one of the goals of spawning those sites in low sec was to draw people in to low sec, I how much of those ores players are willing to haul to market.

But writing about just economic matters is a little dry.  I need to add something into the mix for other players.  Perhaps I should add in some of the stats that Wollari provides at Dotlan Maps.   People love graphs about exploding spaceships.

I'm still playing around with a way to present the data in an interesting fashion.  Since I'm just a casual type of carebear, I'll put out a call for help.  What should I look for in order to put together something intelligent?  I'm sure I'm missing a lot of interesting tidbits that would give me a greater understanding of New Eden's economy.  So please leave any ideas in the comments to this post.  I may not use them because I'm not that good at automatically extracting information, but I'd appreciate the advice.

Happy EVE Is Dying! Day

One of the recurring themes in EVE Online is that "EVE is dying."  We see it today with the declining ACU number.  We saw it a few years ago during the Summer of Rage.  Actually, we hear someone bring up the idea all the time.  But how long has EVE been dying?

The answer may surprise people.  Chribba did a search of the forums and discovered the first mention of "EVE is dying" was posted by Madox on 30 July 2003:

Posted - 2003.07.30 19:45:00 - [8]

---

i think people forget that we are paying for a service here.

if you were at a restaurant and they told you your food would be ready in an hour then 15 minutes after the hour they told you it would instead take an additional hour AND THEN they don't bring your meal out for another two hours without telling you, something would be seriously wrong.

now image that restaurant has 5000 people in it.

we are the customers here. we are paying for a service. we have every right to question what is going on. now granted, isk refunds for missed productivity and asking for some sort of public appology that all the devs signed is just plain silly. however, a dev CAN take 35 seconds out of their busy schedule and make a small post on the devblog letting the paying customers know what is going on.

i think that is all anybody is really asking for.

*eve is dying*

That's right.  The players began proclaiming that EVE is dying 11 years ago today.  Apparently EVE is afflicted with a long, lingering, illness.

The Digital Dozen: 28 July 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 27 July 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	41.0	6,332	-22.0
2	2	Guild Wars 2	13.7	2,112	-16.8
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.3	1,593	-1.7
4	5	Wildstar	5.2	809	-24.5
5	4	Final Fantasy XIV	5.2	801	-35.1
6	6	EVE Online	5.0	771	-3.0
7	7	Tera	5.0	767	-3.0
8	8	Aion	4.5	692	-11.4
9	9	Runescape	3.4	531	-19.2
10	10	Lord of the Rings Online	3.0	465	-9.2
11	12	Elder Scrolls Online	1.9	293	-9.6
12	--	Neverwinter	1.8	279	-12.3

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 15,445

Sunday saw a dramatic drop in the amount of time the Xfire community spent playing MMORPGs.  The 18% decrease in the amount of hours logged into the most popular games was lead by World of Warcraft (-1784 hours) with no game seeing an increase in playtime on Sunday.  RIFT fell off the list, replaced by Neverwinter.

Falling Back Down To Earth - Last weekend WoW surprised me with a 25.3% increase in time played by Xfire members.  Apparently, Blizzard sent out invitations to unsubscribed players to come back and try the game out again.  The offer expired and Sunday saw the number of hours fall 22% this week.  That drop accounted for over half the overall decrease on Sunday.

Technical Difficulties, Part 1 - I do have to wonder if Xfire experienced some technical difficulties that prevented hours from registering on Sunday.  Exibit A: Tera.  The game held an event over the weekend in which players received a 20% XP boost from killing mobs, an increase in the number of quests that players could do in a day, and a stamina increase.  Yet the number of hours played decreased by 3%.  Very strange, considering part of the event was allowing players to do more content.

Technical Difficulties, Part 2 - Exibit B: EVE Online.  With the release of the Crius patch last Tuesday, EVE should have seen an increase in the number of hours played.  Indeed, the maximum peak concurrent user mark was up over 10% Sunday compared to the weekend before.  Yet the number of hours played also decreased by 3%.  I know that Xfire does not always faithfully record an increase or decrease every time the actual PCU increases or decreases, but combined with the facts that not only should Tera's hours have increased but no game saw an increase in hours makes me suspicious.  We'll have to watch what the results are next week.

A Little Bit About EVE Online's New Executive Producer

On Friday, CCP announced the promotion of Andie Nordgren (aka CCP Seagull) to become the next Executive Producer for EVE Online.  Despite releasing the news on a Friday, CCP was not trying to hide her promotion as the marketing department set up embargoed interviews with PCGamer, Polygon, and Massively as well as an AMA¹ on Reddit.  TheMittani.com published an article covering the AMA while Eve News 24's coverage was limited to reposting CCP Seagull's dev blog.  Responses from EVE's blogosphere was quiet, although Susan Black's post on Nordgren's AMA was superior to that found in the EVE media.

The official CCP press release contained a paragraph I found rather interesting:

"'It gives me great joy and confidence that Andie has accepted this challenge. Over the years I have watched her go from strength to strength at CCP and believe her deep understanding of how communities thrive and grow will benefit EVE even more in this new role,' said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP. 'As senior producer, Andie developed and communicated a tremendously inspiring path forward for EVE which, now that she’s at the helm, we are confident will deliver EVE Online to new and exciting places in its second decade.'"

Following the departure of John Lander from the role of executive producer following Fanfest 2013, I had the feeling that Hilmar wanted to hire some big name figure like Scott Hartsman to fill the position.²  In its coverage of Nordgren's promotion, Gamasutra pointed out a dev blog in which Hilmar stated that CCP was already interviewing candidates to replace Lander and that the transition would occur in the summer.  In fairness, he did not indicate the summer of which year.

I can't get inside Hilmar's mind to say definitively why he changed his mind about bringing in someone from outside CCP to fill the position.  But what I can do is try to examine CCP Seagull's background.  What about Nordgren made Hilmar decide that while she is not the candidate he originally wanted, she is the executive producer that EVE Online needs?

The Worst Swordsman

Last night I watched Ashterothi, a co-host on the High Drag and Hydrostatic Podcasts, stream his initial experiences in industry after Crius.  By the time I got home, he was doing mission 6 of the industry tutorial.  When he tweeted that he knew less about industry than the newest newb, he wasn't kidding.

I learned a couple of tricks with the new UI that I hadn't known about, mostly because I already have all of my blueprints in stations and he wanted to start playing with his new BPOs right away.  Also because I have so many minerals in my factory station and a new character doesn't have a lot.  He mentioned on the stream that he wanted to discuss the UI on High Drag to another co-host, Random McNally, and I'll be checking for when the podcast comes out.  I think that should fall sometime in the second week of August.

After the stream ended, I was reminded of a quote from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:

"The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him."

I get the feeling that CCP has just put the sword of industry into the hands of a lot of people who have never heard of opportunity costs and believe that minerals you mine yourself are free.  I'm not saying that Ashterothi is that type, since one of the co-hosts on the Hydrostatic Podcast is Lockefox, who will educate him as necessary.  And if Lockefox doesn't do it, I expect Random will.  But a lot of the complexity of industry in EVE was fighting the old UI.  I just wonder how many people will try industry out now that the UI makes the task so much simpler.