Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Mittani, Eve Online’s most famous and infamous player, has learned the hard way that the internet is serious business after all. The controversy arose at last week’s Eve Fanfest, where in a public talk he first mocked and then urged others to hound a player who was apparently suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. “Incidentally, if you want to make the guy kill himself, his [in-game] name is [REDACTED]“, Mittani declared. Unsurprisingly, this quickly spread beyond the Fanfest.

After initially appearing to shrug off complaints as he had been drunk at the time (which he acknowledges was entirely his own fault) and didn’t have total recall of what he’d done, Mittani offered a lengthy public apology a few days later, and promised his resignation as Eve Online Council chairman. Since then, Eve devs CCP have decided his actions were a breach of the EULA and are enforcing a harsher penalty.
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The denizens of space are gathering once again in Iceland, at one of the best fan festivals the gaming world has ever hosted. The Eve Fanfest 2012 going to present a bunch of news about Eve and DUST, so it’s worth tuning in live, if you didn’t make it. It’s just started, and you can watch it below. The full schedule is here.
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CCP might have sacked a bunch of their Eve Online staff, but they can still make a decent trailer, which they’ve just done to do a bit of promotion for the game. It has some woman with space hair explaining a newly cloned up pilot what lies ahead of them. Still nothing on the Butterfly Effect trailer (which I’ve also linked below) which I think is the only video CCP managed to create that came close to explaining what they are trying to do with the game.

If these glitzy marketing materials have done their work and fixed a tractor beam to your interest, then why not find some actual Eve players to play with? You won’t want to go in alone.
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There are a number of ways Jim and I are different. For instance, I like baked beans, while Jim is a seventy-foot super-robot that devours cities for food. Another way is that he has played EVE Online for over 40 million ours, whereas I have only ever stared at videos of it and then run away to play with Lego. But CCP are looking to welcome new players, not by simplifying the game, but rather by better explaining how to get started. That’s partly via a swishy new website, which is much easier to navigate, and presented in that modern collection of rectangles that the young people love so much these days. And it’s more directly via a new video aimed at brand new players. You can see it below.

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2011 has been an excellent year for videogames, I’d say – but one videogame it has not been an excellent year for is EVE Online. The space MMO has been through the wringer in recent months: leaked internal memos, poorly-received updates, a misguided move towards microtransactions, protests, fan-angering dev blogs… More recently, devs CCP announced they would be sadly pruning their ranks, refocusing on the core EVE game and trying to win back their fans’ ardour. Part of that, it transpires, involves occasionally notorious senior producer Arnar “CCP Zulu” Gylfason handing the captain’s chair to someone else.
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The latest Eve expansion switches on today, and includes a bunch of things that should please Eve players, such as new battlercruisers, and pretties such as new nebulae, and ephemera such as new captain’s quarters, and VITAL visual tweaks such as new engine trails. The most amazing thing, however, is the concept of slowing down time to deal with big fleet fights. I’ve no idea if that will work, but it’s the cleverest solution to the lag problem I’ve seen offered so far.

Thumping great spaceship battle trailer below.
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It’s on nights like this one, when sleep is denied me, that I miss Eve Online most of all. I would have spent it hunting, leading fleets, and indulging in the stuff that makes the game so special. It’s funny, because I realise that those who have never played Eve’s PvP game will never know what I am missing out on, now, let alone what they have missed out on, always. For all the writing I’ve done on the subject, I’ve never been able to capture quite what it all means in terms of a cerebral, tactical, persistent challenge. There is nothing quite like it. That singular nature means that videos like the one below – a forty-minute tale of sophisticated, high-level combat through Eve’s wormhole space – are possible. You should watch this video, even if you do not believe you will ever play Eve, because it captures the drama, the control, and the mathematics that are integral to the PvP game.

And it makes me acutely aware of what I am missing out on. The guys making this video are hardcore PvPers, even by my standards, and it’s impossible not to admire their dedication. Perhaps I was found lacking. Thanks, Roburky.
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After a year of controversy and bellyaching, it’s good to be able to report on what Eve does best – large, interesting expansions that are full of shiny space stuff. The next one of these, which is due to arrive on the 29th of November, apparently improves and updates “three dozen features”, which sounds like an awkwardly large amount, but in fact include combat and interface tweaks, changes to the all-important starbases, as well as bringing in the most important thing for many players: New spaceships. These are the tier 3 battlecruisers – large, shooter vessels – and they have me longing for Eve once again. I do love a good battlecruiser.

More information here.