good morning friends and foes alike. yesternight turned out to be quite filled with stuff to talk about so this might become quite the wall of text. today i will share my take on life in the center of our beloved sandbox, some points of the gamemechanics, good and bad alike. and i will have a shot at the gibberish that james dropped on his blog about his plans for csm. i will try to be objective and fair there, though i cant guarantee anything.

[15:34:38] ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ > Er, anyway. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the whole point of the New Order is the interaction and reaction. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do something. The only way they can lose is if you don’t react at all.

what most of the people tend to forget is that we are talking about a game here. it is a quite immersive game of course, and thats part of why i do in fact really like it, but it is a game nonetheless. so, the center of the sandbox, home of the peace-bears. these fluffy sorts of people are living a mostly risk-averse lifestyle. and why shouldnt they? whats wrong with actually liking to mine for example? watching asteroids crumble and looking at ones cargohold (and wallet) filling up at a steady and easily monitorable way? maybe just flying a spaceship and admiring its shinyness is enough for some people. all of that shouldnt and in fact doesnt matter. its the majority of the people that get to “decide” the right way for “their” corner of space.

‘Well, home, they say, is where the heart is.’

about ice-mining in particular: having tried it for some days now, i still cant say it is that much fun. but i can accept the fact that people like to do it. its like building something up, plan for it, train for it, finally putting it out there and watch it work. of course there is a sense of satisfaction to it. that however does not change the fact that mining ice does technically require no attention at all, one mouseclick per hour and having the eve sound on in the background to hear the oh so smoothe voice of the eve lady warn you about your full cargohold are actually enough. so this situation is far from perfect and of course does lead to afk mining being popular among the people. but, contrary to the so called “order”s believe, that is a problem of the games mechanics and has little to do with the actual player.

‘dont hate the player, hate the game’

changing those mechanics however and trying to please the vision of the players is a responsibility of ccp. and i might add that they are doing quite a good job with that. of course there are people that disagree. that in itself is a good thing. and happily there is a place in new eden for almost everyone. if you like the pirate lifestyle, go low- or nullsec. if you like to grief players, stay in highsec and work out ways to trick the games mechanics or use the inexperiency of new players if you roll like that. of course that is fine too in the sandbox. but what you cant do is to be a complete asshole that walks up into people with your big ass visions and punch “ADAPT TO MY DELUSIONS!” into their faces until they yield, because that is not how humans work. at least not in a game, where people can come and go whenever they want to and where, in reality, they dont have a gun pointed to their head.

thoughts are free

and here comes the best bridge into my next subject ever. because luckily, we do have that completely delusioned asshole right at hand. yup. jamessomething has laid down his “way to campaign for CSM” and, unsurprisingly, it is a bag of bullshit. well, nothing new here you might say. still, it might be worth to take somewhat of a closer look at it, perhaps we can find the slightest spark of light somewhere in it.

The overpopulation of highsec stifles gameplay across the board, and it threatens to send EVE further along the theme park trajectory.

a little bit of a slow start but wrong nonetheless. if a player doesnt like to go to the themepark, he doesnt have to. grow some balls, cut the strings to highsec life by smartbombing the jita undock and go with a blast, sporting your shiny new outlaw tag.

By giving PvE’ers ample incentive to leave highsec, and by buffing low/null, we can breathe life into lowsec and encourage more small/medium-scale PvP in nullsec.

this might very well be a part in where human james managed to scratch at the surface of god james and somehow managing to leave some sense there. some people might like it to be more crowded. some people, solo pvpers perhaps, might like it just the way it is. thats a question that just the numbers of ccp can show and nothing that can be simply decided.

The first step is making highsec PvE much more unattractive.

wave good bye to common sense. try to make the game more unattractive to new players. maybe help them not dying the first week and then throw them out into a hostile wasteland where they of course will find fun and motivation to continue the game all by themselves. brilliant. just … oh for fuck sake get it out of my sight!

Highsec mining will be nerfed into oblivion. We’ll have one or possibly two different types of ore available, just so new players can learn how to distinguish between them on the overview.

another nobrainer. i have written about the peacebears somewhere above this so i dont really want to repeat myself. all i have to say is that its just disturbing how one person can be so detached to everything around.

Concord and faction police will take twice as long to respond, effectively making it twice as easy to be ganked.

The firepower of sentry guns in highsec will be cut in half. I think it’s excessive at the moment.

again, one direct swing at the new players, or even players with a lot of knowledge about the game but not enough skillpoints or spacedollars to be able to avoid griefing at any rate at all. these points just stretch the fact that this pamphlet was not writen with more than one player in mind.

Low/null mining and ratting will be buffed. Wonks can work out the details, but mining and ratting should be boosted enough to become worth it.

another spark of light. but its easily noticeable on how “buffing lowsec” is not exactly the same as “killing highsec”.

Nullsec mining will be buffed to the point where it’s not only possible to produce nearly everything for an alliance–it should be economically desirable to do so.

i can kind of go with that. just to the point where the only thing it would do would be to further fatten up the allready big bloc alliances of nullsec and leave the rest of new eden with nothing but thin air.

Ratting is automatically taxed, but mining isn’t.

you, sir, need to get your facts straight.

Buffing low/null PvE goes a long way toward enhancing PvP in those areas. Remember the “food chain” theory of PvP: Miners/industrials provide targets for small-scale pirates, who provide targets for roaming gangs, who provide targets for defense fleets, who provide targets for big blobs.

now this is a theme that keeps repeating itself throughout the whole dreary and painful read of this … creative outpouring. take the small players and feed them to the big ones. i wouldnt even be that much of an opponent to that one if i could see just the tiny bit of help for new players to actually get to a level on where they would have even the slightest chance of surviving in that environment. oh wait, we allready have that, its called highsec. and its fucking well thought out as it now.

I don’t like anomalies

oh yeah? well i dont like milk in my coffee. lets kill all the cows!

i wont go into the rest of it because the sheer thought of that makes me want to repeatedly bang my head against a wall in the futile attempt of stopping the pain it would bring. so i will leave it be at this point and just close out with a summary of sorts. this “platform” of sir jamessomething is the most egocentric, heedless and naive piece of literature i have read in quite a while and if any of this would become true to eve space, this game is over and done with. no thinking of different play styles. no thinking about real economy. no thinking about new players. no thinking in any direction at all, except from what would be best and most fun for just one complete maniac. the good thing is that ccp overall is not stupid. and that running for csm doesnt mean becoming ceo of ccp in case of actually getting in. another good thing to see is that i can witness more and more “order” members seem to awake from their bad dreams all by themselves now. lets just hope more people have enough common sense left to see that griefing cant make a game a better game, and that one needs carebears and happy newbies to have something to actually grief.

[ 2013.02.06 21:10:18 ] ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ > Alonzo Harris i don’t think cults need to be killed

[ 2013.02.06 21:10:29 ] ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ > they usually self destruct

im sure i have missed a lot i wanted to say but thats got to do, im off washing my eyes with some diluter. you fly safe o/

Alonzo Harris of Elbflorenz Industries