This past week has brought a bunch of attention to Jump On Contact. On Monday, the blog was announced as a new member of the long running and prestigious EVE blog pack managed by CrazyKinux. I’m really thrilled to be included. When I was first thinking about starting an EVE blog, I spent a lot of time reading blog pack members in Capsuleer (an iPhone EVE app, which includes a handy RSS reader for EVE blogs), trying to get a sense of how people wrote, what kinds of topics might be interesting. It’s crazy that only a few months later I can read my own blog in Capsuleer. We’ve also been recently the subject of a Metafilter post, and another Massively post. It’s been a fun week.

So I’d just like to welcome new readers and point out some of my favorite bits from the archives that you might not otherwise discover. First off, this is kind of a different EVE blog. I think of it more as a documentary project than a diary. I’m trying to capture perspectives on how and why the world works, and what it means to be part of it. There’s more on my larger goals and perspective in the introduction.

As part of my documentary mission, I do a bunch of different kinds of posts. There are some story-like articles describing a particular event or task like my first combat experience or liquidation of Empire-based assets. There are posts explaining fundamental game mechanics like death or the organization of the galaxy. I also keep up with current events, and try to explain how an alliance failing to pay its bills is likely to change my life halfway across the galaxy. From time to time I do larger-scale projects like explanatory videos of how fleets communicate or a visualization of how much common ships cost and what they do. I’m also pretty proud of my first pass at trying to describe why I love EVE, not in spite of its tediousness, but because of it.

Thanks for reading! Please do feel free to ask questions or leave comments. I’m still figuring out what’s interesting to people, so pointers or suggestions about stuff that you want to hear more or less about are always welcome. Perhaps at some point getting an industrialist to pitch in and cover that side of the world would be a useful compliment to my more-combat-focused experiences?

NThraller, Morsus Mihi pilot, wins a silver medal. He's the guy on the left.

Think you know who plays MMOs? Pasty-faced teenagers in their parents’ basements, right? Or maybe disaffected college students looking for lulz? How does Olympic Medalist fit into your picture?

NThraller, a Norwegian pilot in hirr (a corporation in Morsus Mihi, my alliance) took home a silver medal from the Vancouver Olympics in the Giant Slalom last week. Don’t let his sparse killboard history fool you. He’s been super active in the RAWR forums for the last few years, even when Olympic training and competition have taken over most of his time. He even provided support on a Vagabond kill the day after he placed second in the world. Now he just needs a matching medal in-game.

Contrary to the stereotype, most MMO players are older. The data’s old, but the last time CCP talked about their player base, they claimed that the average age was 27 and most players had “some kind of degree”. This is broadly similar to World of Warcraft’s demograhpics (although that data is quite old and I suspect skews older now). The one big way that EVE diverges from other MMOs is gender: 95% of EVE players are men, compared to less than 85% (depending on who you ask and when the data was taken) for WoW.

I’ve also been taken with this recent EVE-Space campaign started at Chocolate Heaven. EVE Bloggers have started posting lots of pictures of the spaces in which they play EVE. There’s a huge amount of variety (and I’ve posted a bunch of them below), and I think you can get a bit of a window into the way that EVE pilots live and play. I think they might not look how you expect.

You can find a full list back at CrazyKinux’s blog.

There seem to be a few core issues here that I want to tease apart. First, the issue of the Capsuleer user experience seems to be Roc’s main concern. He doesn’t want to deprive his users of their easy connection to the blogs they love. If, when the block pack updates people all of a sudden lose their connection to blogs they’ve been enthusiastically reading, it looks like Capsuleer isn’t doing its job properly. I’m really sensitive to this issue, but I don’t know that it’s CK’s responsibility to keep Capsuleer’s users happy. Capsuleer pulls the blog pack because it’s a great set of blogs that are interesting to a wide audience. If they want to maintain their own list, they totally can. In fact, I would say that Capsuleer probably should decouple its headlines feature from the blog pack. Letting someone else control the content of your app is always a risky bet. Maybe Capsuleer defaults to showing the blog pack, but can consume other OPML files and create other folders of blogs so other people can curate their own sets.

There are also some arguments (in Roc’s comments, in particular) about the utility of having this kind of list at all. I’m firmly in the pro-blog-pack camp. Pretty much regardless of how they’re selected, having a listing of “top blogs” is really useful for people new to both the EVE community and new to EVE blogging in general. It serves as an incentive for new bloggers to get engaged, provides examples of what effective EVE blogs do, and provide clear venues to engage in discussions with other bloggers that will get your blog noticed. Focusing attention and traffic on some blogs is a totally reasonable and effective way to promote a sense of community. If it feels a little bit exclusive, that’s the point.

There are inclusive alternatives – evebloggers.com syndicates pretty much everyone, but as a result, there isn’t really much of an effect. I’ve only gotten about 50 hits from eve bloggers this month so far, fewer than I received from one mention on Mynxee’s blog (which is in the current blog pack). By comparison, I’ve gotten more than 700 hits this month from Google, out of about 25,000 visits this month. I imagine blogs in the blog pack see quite a bit more daily traffic from their inclusion, and a much broader readership. So a totally non-selective approach makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but doesn’t actually accomplish any of the things that a blog pack is supposed to accomplish. Indeed, diluting the blog pack to include even more blogs decreases its efficacy pretty substantially, and I would urge CrazyKinux to avoid doing that. Twenty to thirty strikes me as a really good balance between size and focus.

But beyond arguing over whether CK should pick the blogs himself versus some sort of popularity contest (which I think is kind of a red herring, anyway – I bet both lists would look reasonably similar in the end, with perhaps a more diverse set if CK curates manually) I think there are a few concrete things CK can do to make the blog pack a more effective community tool. I know he’s a busy guy and this shouldn’t be too much work, so I’ve tried to limit this to stuff that’s not too much extra continuing work:

• Organize the list better. EVE blogs tend to fall into certain categories – newbie, 0.0, pirate, industrialist, fiction, politics, etc. It would be great to show those tags on the blogs themselves. You could even let blog authors choose which tags they want associated with their blog. This would help a lot with the discovery, especially if the list stays long. As it is, the names of blogs are totally not helpful for figuring out what blogs are about. This process might reveal some blind spots in the blog pack lineup, too.
• More religiously police inactivity. There should be a hard upper limit on how long a blog can go inactive before getting pulled increases the turnover in included blogs. This helps new bloggers feel like getting included in the blog pack is something they might attain. I think seeing lots of inactive blogs on the list breeds some of the frustration – you might be a really active engaging blogger but know you’ll never make it on the list because it’s not frequently cleaned out. Administering this is tricky, but perhaps CK could deputize some helpers to check once a month if blogs in the pack are sufficiently active. Adding replacements would be tricky, but since CK has stepped up the curate the list, we probably just have to trust his instincts.
• Have 1-3 monthly guest-spots. It can be really hard to start a new blog, and it would be great if the pack had a monthly focus on a new blog. Maybe it’s open only to blogs that have started in the last month or two. So instead of asking to be in the blog pack, new bloggers can get in the new-blog queue by just emailing CK. There might be a bit of a need for filtering here, but if you limited it to recently created blogs that have posted regularly for a few weeks, there probably wouldn’t be many more eligible blogs than there are spots. This would really help new blogs get noticed and build an audience. (this suggestion inspired from a comment on CK’s post)

I hope this moves the conversation a bit more towards what the blog pack’s role actually is, instead of focusing just on how it’s chosen. I think it can be a really powerful force for fostering a great community if it’s tended well and we think about how it can be more than just a list of links.

Background

For people who aren’t following the debate here’s the situation: CrazyKinux created and has managed the EVE Blog Pack, a list of 40 EVE blogs that are nominally active and which are supposed to form the backbone of the EVE blogging community. They get a lot of attention because CrazyKinux’s blog is the most widely read blog in the EVE world, and is at the top of a google search for “eve blog”. So when you’re on the list, you’re guaranteed a certain amount of traffic, attention, and prestige. The other component to this system is Capsuleer – an iPhone app that, among other things, provides an easy way to read blogs that are in the blog pack (but no mechanism for reading/finding non-blog-pack blogs). All in all, being on the blog roll is great for the people who are on it, but jealousy-inducing for people who aren’t.

So when CrazyKinux proposed a remake of the blog pack that contains only 20 blogs, and opened his comments for suggestions about which 20 they should be, the stakes are clearly high. The main opposition to his proposal comes from Roc’s Ramblings, who is incidentally one of the developers on Capsuleer.

I’ve put my visualization of EVE ship prices onto Imagekind, a graphics printing service. You can find it here. You can choose the size you want, but I think I’m going to buy a Large-sized one for my room.

I’ve also uploaded the source file for the graphics, in case you want to print it (or otherwise manipulate it) yourself. You can get the resolution independent PDF here.

Enjoy!

One important bit of their argument is that “Jita” is doing fine, and that CCP has gotten complacent. Jita is trading hub of EVE, and the usually the single highest population system in the galaxy. You might remember it from my early discussion about selling stuff. So in the video, which is made by people from 0.0 (like me), they’re claiming that CCP fixed the lag in Jita but aren’t addressing the lag in 0.0 battles because there are more people who use Jita regularly than participate in fleet battles.

This is a pretty common claim; that CCP cares more about “Empire Carebears” (ie people who stay in empire space and avoid combat) than it does about 0.0 pilots. Even though this video is well over a year old, lag is still an issue and 0.0 players are still talking about bringing huge fleets to Jita to crash it and inconvenience Empire players. Supposedly this will force CCP to address lag issues, since they care more about Empire players. I’m pretty skeptical of that, myself. CCP is having frequent testing sessions with hundreds of pilots on their development server to try and isolate their lag issues. These things take time and data, and solving problems that only appear when 300+ people try to do something at the same time is a bit of a software engineering nightmare.

Fleet waiting next to an Erebus to bridge back home.

“Wait, can you go back and explain exactly which part of this is fun?”

Pretty much every conversation about EVE ends up here at some point. Maybe I was talking about how players mine, station trade, or run missions. Is waiting for strip mining lasers to cycle really that much fun? I mean, this is something I pay CCP to let me do, but to anyone watching me “play” it looks about as tedious as mining in the real world.

The problem is, I still don’t have a good answer. A big part of why I write this blog is to try to answer the question for myself. Where, in all this tedium, loss, and betrayal is the element that I love?

There are, I think, easier and harder ways answer the question. The moment when your overview starts flashing red tickles your brain in the same way hundreds of other multiplayer action games do. Outwitting and outplaying an opponent feels good in a way we all understand from sports.

It’s harder to explain why I love sitting at a friendly tower waiting for a Titan to bridge me somewhere. Or why I sat in a Battleship configured for electronic warfare for 3 hours yesterday during a tower bash. It turned out they didn’t even need me; my ship was essentially useless against the tower, and we didn’t run into any serious opposition where I could have done something helpful. Hanging out in Stealth Bomber fleets is often similarly boring – I’ve spent probably 6 hours doing that recently and not run into a single good target. I don’t think it’s enough to say that we do these boring things because they’re prerequisites for doing other, more fun things. I don’t think love is about balancing the good with the bad. Even when I’m camping at a gate, getting seasick from staring at interdictor bubbles, I still love EVE.

For me, the key is that what happens in EVE means something. It means a lot of different things to different people, but in the end, everything I do has some significance in a larger context. Even compared to other multiplayer games, this is a big difference. It doesn’t matter if the blue team wins on a Team Fortress server. If I’m the star player in a Halo game, it doesn’t have much of an impact on anyone once the game ends. Just being in a fleet, even when I don’t do anything particularly helpful, means something. I know I’m part of this larger whole trying to achieve something, and if I do my job right, fewer of my fleet-mates will die. Or maybe we won’t even have to fight, because our fleet looks too strong to an enemy scout. That’s really satisfying for me.

So when I’m nuzzling up to a Titan, waiting for a fleet to form, I’m thinking about what’s going on that I’m not seeing, and what it means. I know there are scouts around the system watching for reds. I know there’s a cyno pilot somewhere getting into position. I know there’s chatter on the command channel negotiating where to drop the fleet. I know there’s a flurry of activity in the station, where people are fitting fresh battleships for combat. I know the ship I’m sitting in was manufactured in a station somewhere, and shipped into Pure Blind in a Jump Freighter. All around me, there are people doing something that makes it possible for me to be where I am, doing what I’m doing.

EVE is a detail-oriented world. Precisely how you do something matters. Align in the wrong direction for a fleet warp and you might get left behind and get caught by an enemy Interceptor. Accidentally shooting a neutral might trigger a diplomatic incident. Approaching a Titan for a bridge from the wrong direction might make you miss the bridge and be left out of the operation. This gives EVE a texture that I love. Nothing happens the same way twice. This gives EVE a rich and detailed beauty that no other game has. I love watching a fleet de-cloak around a gate. I love seeing the tight bubble of fleet-mates in warp with me. I love seeing a friendly fleet drop out of warp across the grid from me. I know similar things have happened a thousand times before, but they’ve never happened precisely this way before, and there might be something about the way it’s happening this time that changes the future.

Because what I love is about the context and meaning of the world, it’s a really hard thing to explain to people. To explain why I appreciate waiting for an op to start, I have to explain all the other pieces of the world that are moving into place at the same time, and why all that work matters. While it’s a much larger project to explain all the facets of EVE that I love, I put together a small montage of the kinds of in-between moments that I’ve been talking about. Nothing momentous is happening in any of them. They’re just the moments where something might happen soon. Or it might not. But I still love them for what made them possible and what they might become. I hope you like it.

(As always, 720p version available if you click through to YouTube, which I highly recommend.)