Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing

As I mentioned yesterday, I want to take some time this week and wrap up some posts about the controversies that plagued EVE Online in 2013 with an eye toward next year. The one that I'm not going to take on (yet) is the whole issue of how CCP should support community websites. That one is going to stretch well into 2014, into the CSM Winter Summit and beyond. So there's going to be lots of time to talk about that one.

But I do want to wrap up my thinking on the ghost site live event that took place in early November. My original piece on this event was one of the most widely-read posts on the blog this year, and was also one of the most commented-upon pieces I wrote this year, garnering hundreds of comments both here and in my Twitter feed, EVE mail, and e-mail. I read every single one even if I didn't respond to very many of them -- what I would have said in response to most was covered in my original post. And opinion on my post was just as sharply divided as the opinion of the event itself was.

But I'm getting slightly ahead of myself so let's back up a bit.

In the aftermath of the event, lots and lots of other people weighed in on it. I was particularly intrigued by this take from a RAZOR player (FC?) in Doril from the "defender's" point of view and this take from Mangala Solaris of the CSM (who FC'ed a fleet that crashed through Doril) on the "attacker's" side. Not too surprisingly, both had a lot of fun with the event -- likely because they represented the most organized responses to it. And since my own take was rather negative I got a number of direct or indirect versions of the question "couldn't you have been more positive about it?"

And that's probably a fair criticism. So real quick, here are some things that I think were positive about this live event:

1. The build-up for it was handled really well;
2. the idea of splitting it in two in an attempt to prevent null-sec alliances from overwhelming it was a good one in concept; and,
3. I did appreciate that theoretically, the outcome of this event was something that would depend on player action.

We have that last from CCP Goliath, who organized the event and did his own wrap-up post about it a week after it was over. I have absolutely no reason to doubt his sincerity, though I noted with amusement in his piece he expected the high-sec "attackers" to win. In one of my earliest pieces on this blog, I wrote about a conflict in 2011 between high-sec and null-sec players. I can't find the piece today, but one of the responses to it has stuck with me since then: a prominent PL FC called it "charming in its naivete."

Yeah. That. ;-)

So yeah, I was mostly unhappy with the event (after being quite happy with the Luminaire one), but it did have its positive aspects. I certainly wasn't as negative about it as, say, Gevlon was. But my original piece, nor any of what's above, didn't address the main point: was it any good?

To my mind, a good EVE live event has to simultaneously address three issues:

• it has to in some way advance the EVE lore;
• it has to be memorable; and,
• it has to be fun for the participants.

And while I didn't make this point clear enough in my original piece, I don't think this event qualified on the first or last fronts -- though it was certainly memorable! Yes, some of the most organized EVE players involved in it had a good time. But the majority of players involved did not. And now having given it a month of Rubicon's release to breathe and to see some follow-up efforts, I don't believe this event has significantly advanced the EVE lore. Remember, when this event was originally pushed, it was as a major event, the first cooperation between all four Empire factions in years. In the Rubicon trailer(1), we have CONCORD pretty much specifically ordering capsuleers to stay out of the ghost sites. In short, we should feel like we have one of those "common enemy" situations on which many many stories over the years have been based.

Do you feel that way?

After the Incursion expansion dropped, we had a whole series of live events supporting that expansion. One was big enough and important enough that it caused one of the biggest spikes in the PCU count in EVE history. As I've mentioned once before and will probably be mentioning again, in a lot of way's CCP Seagull's vision of capsuleer ownership of space is potentially the biggest change to the lore in EVE's history, far outstripping incursions and the faction wars. In a very real sense, we're all going to be dragged into EVE's lore whether we want to be or not.

This is therefore a big opportunity for the Community team to put together some really fun, memorable live events in support of the next few expansions. I continue to believe in 2013, they went one for two on this effort. Let's hope the score improves in 2014...


(1) Not a fan of it, BTW, but that's a topic for another time. Short version: "Play EVE! Succeed at your efforts! Die anyway!" 8/10 for style, and the visual of the Sentry drones was fantastic, but it's not exactly a game-seller.
Source: I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing