LeMU.waterbottle

The “Dis­graced” Mittani

The Eve Fan­fest, hosted by CCP, is a yearly offline gath­er­ing (and drink­ing) event in the city of Reyk­javik, Ice­land.  It’s always been sur­pris­ing for me, given CCP’s record of gen­er­at­ing “con­tro­ver­sies” among its play­ers, yet each year’s Fan­fest turned out to be a fab­u­lous expe­ri­ence for all: CCP, the atten­ders, and the ordi­nary play­ers and other media out­lets.  There was no real-life ver­sion of rant­ing thread­naughts at inter­ac­tions between the devel­op­ers and atten­ders, nor there was equiv­a­lence of Jita Protest at the con­ven­tion cen­ter (that I know of any­way).  It kinda makes sense, as who would really pay for a round trip to Ice­land to protest about a game that they would have stopped play­ing already.  Instead of the ten­sion between CCP and us Eve play­ers, we get excit­ing news about what’s com­ing to our beloved game–for exam­ple, Fan­fest 2012 has brought us one of the best Eve con­cept trail­ers.

The frag­ile tran­quil­ity has been bro­ken at this year’s Fan­fest.  To my sur­prise, though, not by a group of “bit­ter­vets” vent­ing their anger at CCP.  The offender is The Mit­tani, chair­man of the newly elected CSM mem­ber who received more votes than the next three can­di­dates com­bined, for his gross mis­con­duct  as he dis­played the other extreme neg­a­tiv­ity that this game’s com­mu­nity is often accused of–the sadis­tic wish onto another Eve player.

con­tinue reading…

DUST 514 Video Game, GDC 2012: Game To Game Inter­ac­tion Inter­view HD | Video Clip | Game Trail­ers & Videos | GameTrailers.com.

Damn.  Even though I don’t plan to get a PS3 but this game indeed excites me.  I don’t know how many free-to-play FPS games are on PS3 but I would def­i­nitely check it out if I have a PS3.  And as an Eve fan, I’m oblig­ated to demand a PC release of this game some­time within a year of its con­sole debut :p

As the late CCP RP fiasco calms down, July 2011 Pri­or­i­ti­za­tion Crowd­sourc­ing is open for votes from all cur­rent Eve play­ers.  The list of issues stays rather sim­i­lar from the pre­vi­ous Crowd­sourc­ing, just with a slightly dif­fer­ent set of rules.  The essence is still the same: choose only the “top/major” issues and leave the rel­a­tive minor ones alone to not dilute the strength of the votes.   Per­son­ally I don’t think the sys­tem is per­fect… but just like the rea­son why dif­fer­ent play­ers need to vote is every­one has their own per­cep­tion of what is better…

Although it is now pos­si­ble to sub­mit neg­a­tive vote on issues that one objects, I haven’t find any of the entries needs to be voted down.  In the end the fol­low­ing 9 issues have made it to my top list.

46. Funky POS rec­om­men­da­tion
68. Make guns con­tinue fir­ing at pre­vi­ous tar­get after reload
73. Mis­sions under review
85. Pos­si­bly Prac­ti­cal POS Per­for­mance Pro­posal
99. Save and Reuse Scan Probe Pat­terns
121. Sui­cide Gank­ing Part 3
141. User Inter­face — Big Wins, Fan Favorites and Low Hang­ing Fruit
143. War-dec Mechan­ics
166. Ship Crews

The list is a healthy mix of prac­ti­cal needed, log­i­cally pre­ferred, and immer­sion extend­ing changes which deserve some pri­or­i­tiz­ing.  Use this forum thread to sub­mit your vote!

update: It has con­cluded, and the results are posted.  Noth­ing is really sur­pris­ing other than “His­tory of who added/kick char­ac­ter from Cor­po­ra­tion” made it to top 10, which should be part of Cor­po­ra­tion and Alliance tool over­haul (CSM) pro­posal but for what­ever rea­son is not included.  The upcom­ing Mass Test­ing on Sin­gu­lar­ity server con­tains changes to dock­ing and undock­ing code, which is cer­tainly a response to the issue being on top of the vot­ing result.

Time has come again.  CCP became cen­ter point of neg­a­tive online gam­ing media atten­tion after a series of events.  It is not news that Eve Online has a unique player base, which con­tains a sub­set of indi­vid­u­als whose favorite past time is to troll and bash CCP with an excelling pro­fes­sion­al­ism.  The news is: there seems to be an unhealthy amount of play­ers who reli­giously the idea of micro­trans­ac­tion turn out to belong to the pre­vi­ous men­tioned subset.

Look­ing at the whole sit­u­a­tion from a higher ground… what does it mean to future of Eve Online and CCP?

Now let’s ana­lyze things in chrono­log­i­cal order.  First the $70 vir­tual mon­o­cle being sold in Eve’s new cash shop, named Nobel Exchange, after the Incarna update… the price is ridicu­lous and war­rant its own media atten­tion.  But it didn’t quite hap­pen right away.  Then there’s the leaked inter­nal newslet­ter hint­ing future cash shop items may include ammo, ships, mod­ules, and fac­tion stand­ings.  It caused a pre­dictable reac­tion on the offi­cial forum: peo­ple cried foul and damn­ing CCP employ­ees in breach­ing an early promise that no non-vanity items will be sold through cash shop.

Despite the alarm­ing nature of “leak­ing” of the newslet­ter, the fire could still be con­tained at this point.  Unfor­tu­nately for CCP, a devblog sup­pos­edly in defense of the newslet­ter and the prices of items in the Nobel Exchange ended in what I would call “anti-intelligent”, and many have felt that they have been trolled by CCP.

Then some­thing else was “leaked” to the pub­lic.  An email sent to CCP employee mail­ing list claims 50 some­thing mon­o­cles were sold in the first 4 hours after Incarna has gone live, and advices the mail’s recip­i­ents to not to lis­ten to what play­ers say but what they do.  Of course, more fierce reac­tions ensued; play­ers start mak­ing threats of unsub­scrib­ing, protests in game etc, which frankly was unex­pected to me once again.

The authen­tic­ity of the newslet­ter was con­firmed by offi­cial CCP state­ment, while the email was not, but after all these days with­out offi­cial denial, can now be assumed is legit.  These leaks are essen­tial to fuel this drama into a new height that a pesky devblog alone could not achieve.  But what does it really mean?  To me it appears some­one within CCP are really unhappy the company’s plan on imple­ment­ing micro­trans­ac­tion to Eve.

Now going back to the ques­tion, what does this good doze of drama mean to Eve and CCP.  The CSM is said to have been press­ing CCP to release a solid state­ment on whether the feared non-vanity item will ever be imple­mented; they are/will be in an emer­gency meet­ing with CCP rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Ice­land to dis­cuss this mat­ter… but given the fact that CCP’s atti­tude toward micro­trans­ac­tion, it is hard to believe what CSM has to say (which essen­tially is “we don’t want micro­trans­ac­tion, espe­cially no non-vanity items”) could mat­ter much to CCP’s deci­sion mak­ing body, aka, the “higher ups”.  How­ever, the dis­senters within the com­pany itself who ini­tially leaked those doc­u­ments might have made a move that, if in time will have proven, may be an impor­tant fac­tor alter­ing the direc­tion of which CCP is cur­rently head­ing to.

Mean­while, let me go back to my pop­corn.  Micro­trans­ac­tion or not I won’t be among those peo­ple who pur­posely crash Jita node and spam new player help chan­nel in the name of protest­ing, and then spam “I unsub­scribed” posts rag­ing and bawwing on the offi­cial forum.  Life and inter­net space­ship game goes on, and I have a sus­pi­ciously strong feel­ing that many of those rage quit­ters are a good rid­dance to CCP and their future plans to the game.

CCP has announced the begin­ning of  PLEX for Good char­ity drive in response to the recent havoc.  Eve Online play­ers may use ISK to buy and donate PLEX to a CCP char­ac­ter in-game, and for each PLEX donated this way, CCP will give the equiv­a­lent amount of USD to the Red Cross that will ulti­mately become relief aid in the disaster-struck zones in Japan.  CCP will absorb all tax and trans­ac­tion fees for orga­niz­ing this pro­gram, ensur­ing 100% of the real-life value of each PLEX goes to the needed.

30-day Pilot’s License EXten­sions (PLEX) are in-game items in Eve Online which once redeemed, will add 30 days worth of game time to the player’s account.  They can be pur­chased online through CCP’s web­site as a legit­i­mate (as oppose to pay­ing 3rd-party enti­ties, thus vio­lat­ing the game’s EULA) way of con­vert­ing real-life cash into in-game perks, most often in ISK, the cur­rency in Eve Online.  The PLEX sys­tem is nov­elty against unsanc­tioned RMT that has plagued most pop­u­lar MMO games.  Play­ers who want to keep play­ing the game with­out pay­ing for sub­scrip­tion may opt to spend ISK to buy PLEXes in game, while those who have much cash in real-life can have their needs meet, too.

Each PLEX is about 350 mil­lion ISK on the mar­ket in game, cur­rently.  For $35 one could buy two PLEXes, which puts the price at $17.5 per PLEX, or 20,000,000 ISK/USD.  As I am spend­ing less time on Eve Online, I started to fuel my game time through this won­der­ful sys­tem.  It only takes a few hours of doing L4 mis­sions to get enough ISK for a PLEX… although this month it’ll be a bit more mis­sion­ing for me than the usual to cover the amount went to the char­ity.  At last I’d like to thank CCP to give the play­ers to oppor­tu­nity to enjoy the game and con­tribute to the relief aid at the same time!

Update: The drive con­cluded as end of March.  In total, 2549 PLEX were col­lected, equat­ing $44,607.50 USD.  Nice work everyone.

I’m happy to announce that the polls for the sixth Coun­cil of Stel­lar Man­age­ment elec­tions are now open. There has been an unprece­dented level of cam­paign­ing going on, much of which can be seen in the Jita Park Speak­ers Cor­ner on the EVE Online forums. We cer­tainly encour­age you all to take a look and ques­tion the can­di­dates on the issues that mat­ter to you.

You can also see the sum­mary cam­paign mes­sages from each can­di­date on the vot­ing page. When you’re ready to vote or you want to see these sum­maries, head on over to the vot­ing page!

In the words of the leg­endary CCP Oveur:

“I don’t think any sin­gle exter­nal group has had such a strong influ­ence on CCP, EVE and how we work as a com­pany. And they are made stronger by your vote.”

The polls will be open for two weeks and will close at 23:59 on the 22^nd of March. All pay­ing accounts that are older than 30 days at the time they vote are enti­tled to place a vote. Don’t miss your oppor­tu­nity to get your vote in, make sure your voice is heard!

- CCP Diagoras

Source

As a denizen of an MMO as large as Eve Online, never a prouder moment shall I now par­tic­i­pate in the most civil and con­struc­tive activ­ity to project my thoughts to the devel­op­ment of the game.  Real-life polit­i­cal views apart, Eve Online’s unique cul­ture man­i­fested a best solu­tion pos­si­ble to all play­ers who wish to have their voice heard.

To make things eas­ier, take a sur­vey here to find the can­di­date who share views on issue that are close to your answers.  Due to lim­i­ta­tion of ques­tion­naire itself, you should look at the first few “best match” can­di­dates and find those who marked a ques­tion as “impor­tant ques­tion” matches your own.  Some can­di­dates have ded­i­cated web­site for their cam­paign, so be sure to check that out as well.

To qual­ify for vot­ing I believe one’s account has to be a sub­scriber for over 30 days, or some­thing like that.