That’s exactly right private, wars over, we won, turns out you’re the big hero. They’re going to hold a parade in your honor. (Red versus Blue)

It’s probably an open secret now that the Northern Coalition has pulled back from its base in ROIR. Pure Blind has quieted down pretty significantly, and I just finished moving all my stuff back home to Tribute, the reverse of my trip a few weeks ago. I never really got settled there before the hostilities started, so it’s going to be a bit of a change of pace in my EVE-life to learn about how to make ISK in 0.0.

This was my first campaign, so it’s hard to really know if we won. I’m not even sure I know what winning would look or feel like. But at least internally, people are pretty happy with how the campaign went. There’s a lot to learn and practice for our next big fight, but there’s definitely some celebration and relief that we can get back to being the professional carebears everyone thinks we are.

For your amusement, I’ve embedded a bit of NC propaganda footage below. I think the message is pretty clear – don’t screw with people who have 40 titans at their disposal. I’m sure the NC haters (and they are legion) have plenty to say about how this is wishful thinking, but it’s still a pretty mighty thing to behold.

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.)

I put together a video from an operation I was on early last week. No combat this time, but it shows you a bit about how fleet commanders communicate with their fleets. You’ll see a friendly gatecamp, a failed bombing run exercise, a conversation about the strategic objectives of our mission, and a fleet of bombers cloaking up at a gate.

I really recommend clicking through to YouTube to watch this in decent resolution.

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.

I put together a quick video from what little footage I had of my first big battle. It shows what fleets look like, a little of how they’re organized, and you can hear the fleet commander giving orders.

Been learning to fly Stealth Bombers this weekend. Hoping to get my first real combat kills of this war the sneaky way.