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Links: Politics, Fleet Skills, & Piracy

drew — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:18:50 +0000

Got another flurry of links I wanted to share. Not really a theme here, so I’ll just jump right in.

0.0 Politics Update

The 0.0 political updates written by Murr over at Kugutsumen are really phenomenally good. I know I linked to these last week, too, but since then he’s written another one. They’re super dense and might be overkill for non-players, but they’re well researched and detailed and give at least a flavor of the high level geopolitics that I don’t really see that well.

The chunk of the report about Providence is particularly interesting. Providence is a region owned by an alliance called CVA, and it’s run by role-players, and has a pretty solid role-playing base. This may seem like a sort of weird notion if you’re not familiar with it, but being a role-player in a world like EVE means you talk from the perspective of your player and strive to maintain the fiction of the world as much as possible. I have no idea how this works in practice. In World of Warcraft, role players get segregated onto their own servers, but in EVE’s single shard, role players have to coexist with everyone else. What complicates this role-playing perspective is that CVA is role playing racist, slave-owning, expansionist, religious zealots. Their stated goal is to annex all of the known EVE universe for their religious dynasty. We can only assume that the CVA leadership holds their meetings in-character, so playing the role of Hitler-denying-his-imminent-fall feels entirely appropriate.

They can’t expect their non-role-playing allies to put up with it though, and it looks like they’re hemorrhaging member corps faster than they’re losing systems.

Scouting and Fleet Communication

Very much enjoyed a pair of articles at A Scouts Domain this week. The first was about how to be an effective fleet commander over voice-chat. There’s a lot of practice advice there for people thinking about trying to FC. It’s also a window into what that role is like for people who don’t play.

The second article was a similar treatment of the role of the scout. Scouts are critical to a fleet’s success, and the article does a great job clearly deconstructing what a scout needs to do and how. More than most roles in fleets, scouts don’t rely on having a great ship. For scouts, it’s all about their skills and knowledge and instincts. It’s a tough and often thankless job, but a fascinating and challenging one.

“Asset Liberation”

Mynxee put together a wonderful story about a heist she pulled, stealing a freighter and command ship from an unsuspecting corporation who were storing them inside a player-owned-structure. It’s a great story, and she does a wonderful job of capturing the emotions and worries of these kinds of pseudo-criminal activities. She may well convert me to piracy yet.

Miners’ Tears

drew — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:53:11 +0000

In EVE, both those kinds of players have to co-exist, and sometimes it’s not pretty.

The most-made-fun-of chunk of the “don’t bother me” crowd are miners. They sit in asteroid belts (pretty much every system has some) and slowly convert the asteroids there into asteroid ore, which they then refine into minerals and sell on the open market. The mining part of this process is incredibly hands-off. If you want to be reallllly lazy about it, you probably don’t need to touch EVE more than once every few minutes. You can more or less AFK your way to a decent pile of money.

Unsurprisingly, this drives the more combat oriented players a little nuts. Some of them, particularly pirates, will do anything that messes up the experience of so-called “carebears”. Carebears tend to hang out in the relative safety of systems with security levels of 0.5 or greater. The presence of CONCORD — EVE’s computer-controlled police force — gives them a feeling of safety. As the pirate are fond to point out, though, CONCORD punishes, it does not protect. If you start shooting someone in a system with security status > 0.5, CONCORD arrives in well under a minute and blows the criminals to bits with overwhelming force. The problem for miners is that their ships have essentially no defensive capabilities, and a small dedicated crew of pirates can easily blow up a 200M+ ISK mining ship before the police arrive. To make it worse, insurance pays out even on ships blown up by the police for criminal behavior, so pirates lose only 30%-40% of their investment (the up front insurance cost) in the ships they’re using. This is usually a tiny fraction of the money lost by the miner. The handwringing and moaning by carebears about how unfair it is that pirates can do this (known as “suicide ganking”) to them is easily worth this investment for lots of pirates.

We’re in the midst of an organized pirate campaign of miner destruction called “Hulkageddon II“. There’s a running competition among pirates to see who can suicide gank the most miners. This is predictably causing major consternation among the carebear community, since this seems to becoming a more frequent thing. GoonSwarm ran their own mini-campaign last year named “JihadSwarm” (which produced this totally fantastic video), plus the previous Hulkageddon.

My absolute favorite thing to come out of this campaign is a Downfall dubbing of Hitler learning about Hulkageddon (if you’ve never seen this kind of thing, this is a good background):

There’s tons of EVE-vocab loaded fast and furious in the vid, but really all you need to know to appreciate this is that Hulks are the best mining ships (Retrievers kinda suck in comparison) and macroing is to use a program to mine for you without your intervention, which is the height of lame carebearing.

I’m particularly interested in the rhetoric of both sides in these conflicts. Part of miners’ frustration is that their identity is wrapped up in providing the necessary resources to support the mischief of pirates; if they didn’t mine, the cost of pirates’ (as well as everyone else, too) ships and modules would go up. They conceive of their role as supporting everyone else, and getting paid relatively low wages for their hard work compared to other similarly complicated jobs like running missions. Pirates, on the other hand, are much more concerned with talent – from their perspective, mining is too easy and safe, while their chosen profession involves substantial risk. In their minds, EVE is all about risk/reward tradeoffs, and miners are doing something so low risk and low talent that a bot can do it. In some significant ways, the pirates are right – EVE is not designed to create truly safe places, and they proved it by sending a 278B ISK reminder to high sec miners.