Gently brushing fame

Well, its been one of those weeks where you wake up on Sunday and can’t remember a thing that happened since the last time you sat down and wrote and not for good (alcohol, drugs) reasons but because the week was filled with a thousand little things, each absorbing, none really noteworthy.

I did have a brush with fame though, a very light touch to be fair.  I was contacted by famed The Mittani.com Space Pravda Imperium News author Vulxanis Viceroy.   Vulxanis wanted to schedule an interview with me due to my last blog post in which I had made some critical comments about the state of wormholes and the usefulness of Alphas. So, Vulx and I agreed to a few times and I was sweatily anticipating my 15minutes of fame.  I double checked my post in expectations of the hundreds of thousands of hits that this would surely evoke.  Did I insult Noobman?  Will HK evict me?

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Impulse buying and other stories

It is an interesting time in EVE Online at the moment, with alpha clones supporting consistently high log-in numbers, citadels and engineering complexes sprouting faster than they can be destroyed and solid wars keeping players and main stream media engaged.  Yes, EVE has never been in a better place; our generation’s lament “EVE is dying” is dead.

It does beg to question what comes next.  The engineering complexes came out late last year and collectively we gave CCP a well-deserved Christmas break, not expecting any serious updates.  Sure, we now anticipate the release of drilling platforms that will serve as the end of the maligned (or loved) POS.  The death of pulsing, blue ball is neigh and while I fully understand the reasons behind the move, I will also be a little sad to see it go.  The whimsical soap bubble of safety, floating by itself in a J-system has always had the appearance of a makeshift hunter or logging camp promising safety and vulnerability at the same time.  Instead we get solid looking structures, mega cities that we can imagine filled with thousands of hopeful humans living at the mercy of us godlike capsuleers.  Especially in J-space, where would the survivors go when an Astrahus finally succumbs to an onslaught of foes?  It is not in human nature not to prepare for these events and I imagine the Sisters of EVE organizing caravans of rescue ships every time one citadel goes into structure.

Alright, enough philosophy.  How about my last weeks?

Well, its been one of those periods where not a single specific event shaped my online time but rather a bunch of little things that are individually amusing and collectively a mirror of what is possible in EVE, maybe even representative of the breadth of the game itself.

Here follows the summary of a few events in no particular order.

Mythbusting

EVE more than any other online hobby has a fantastically strong community borne from the game’s inherent complexity and the constant need to evaluate risk v. reward.  Inevitably with communities, group-think develops and members love to associate with each other by repeating each other, thus creating a) cohesion internally and b) separation externally. Case in point was this month’s random EVE-is-dying meme which – thankfully died as quickly as it flared up.  Consensus is, EVE is not dying.  It can be improved – it needs to improve, it needs to attract new players but it ain’t dead by a long shot.

While we are there, lets bust a few other myths.