Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

CCP Appoint a Lead Economist

Some things CCP do very well.  They sometimes might be shifty on the ethics side, but when it comes to world design, they're really awfully smart at times.

Their latest move is to hire a lead economist (as in leading, not as in the dense metal denoted by the letters Pb on the periodic table).  I'm impressed that they've gone for someone with a degree of academic achievement behind him, rather than picking up someone working on a doctorate in the field. He blogs about his appointment on their site, but his key roles seem to be to gather and disseminate economic information to the player-base and to CCP, and to interface with academics who are interested in research into the Eve economic model.

Eve has a wonderfully complex economy: many MMOs, while fascinating for researchers, are fairly simple in terms of the economic tools and options available.  Eve has thousands of complex and discrete regional markets, with a large range of in- and out-of-character skills needed to successfully trade on them.  There are a huge array of tradable products, from commodities to ships and fittings.  Substantial market analysis is already offered in-game, and I use that, myself, to decide what to trade in: I have no intention of publishing the secrets that make me sufficient profit in a few days to never have to rat or run missions or mine like most players do (and, should I wish, to play the game itself for free), but suffice to say that the figures I need on trading volumes, spread, trends, market liquidity and more are all available to me, while my character has trained skills that cut transaction costs and brokerage charges dramatically, allowing me to trade fine margins profitably.

Use of (Video) Weapons - Goonfleet

While I'm on the subject of Goonfleet videos, it's interesting to watch the changes in their style and composition.

If you look at a Goonfleet recruitment video from a year ago, it is mainly advertising the game.  The theme is pretty much how shiny Eve-Online is, with lots of pictures of ships, stars and the like.  Production values are not brilliant, and framing in particular tends to be too centred on one ship in space, with the camera rotating around it on one axis.

One theme that has already started is Goonfleet's eschatological approach to Eve: our presentation of ourselves as a revolutionary force, sometimes destructive, sometimes cleansing.  The use of Johnny Cash's gospel song "When The Man Comes Around", with vivid imagery of the end times, is picked to reinforce this.  Each video continues this theme, whether through snippets and samples of Dr Strangelove, or imagery of thermonuclear explosions.

Move on six months and production values are massively enhanced.  The humour has developed, the digital editing is worlds away from the original.  And as an aside, the size of the ships has got a lot bigger, as Goonfleet pilots get more experienced and richer.  For all the obscurity of the narrative to an outsider, there is a story here: Goonfleet has helped take down the faux-neutral mercantile empire of ISS, who had placed an IPO and invested a fortune in a grand, money-making scheme, discussed by Nate Combs on Terra Nova at the time.  There is an increasing tendency to intermix existing film stock with Eve footage, to use shakeycam and better use of close-ups and off-center placement.  The March video ("Galaxy in Flames") continues, once more, the developing trend of using industrial or darkwave music, imagery of nukes, and increasingly impressive camerawork (look, for instance, at the zoom out at around the 2:20 mark).

Another, fairly unique use of video by Goonfleet is for training videos.  Goonfleet looks after new pilots in a way that almost nobody else does.  Many corporations give their newbies a helping hand, so long as somebody notices their arrival.  But this tends to be done on an ad-hoc basis.  Goonfleet has directors in charge of assiging one of our volunteer mentors to each Newbee [sic], to help them through the difficult first weeks.  They are given free ships and equipment from hangars set aside for the purpose, and assigned to a squad of pilots, rather than simply being one of the four thousand people in the swarm.   A pilot who mentions that they are new will be vilified and scorned in chat, accused of being a pubbie spy, and told to get out.  But so long as they laugh and join in, then they will find themselves with donations pouring in from their new squad members: more money than most new pilots will see in months, freely donated.  And almost all do pass this hazing, since the culture of Goonfleet is so cohesive: you need to already be a Something Awful board member with a longish posting history, so applicants are self-selecting to fit in with the overarching ethos of the swarm.

Goonfleet has for some time declared that they want to make 0.0 (high risk, high gain) space available to more pilots rather than the Bob-sponsored elite, and even experimented with the Goon Free Trade Zone as a way of doing this.  The South-Eastern Goonfleet Co-Prosperity Sphere...

Anyway, one upshot of this aim, combined with our support of our own new pilots, is that Goonfleet makes publically available some of our training videos intended for new pilots.  There are few better ways for newbies to pick up the skills described, be  they 0.0 mining, tackling, fleet operations and more (look at the related videos on the right in youtube to see more from Goonfleet Educational Services).

Finally, individual pilots post "fraps" (video captures) of fights and kills on an ad-hoc basis.  To see a single Goonswarm member (James315) slaughtering dozens of Bob members, there is this, "Kill Bobby".  Relatively technically unskilled but well-scripted (if sloooow on the textual passages) use of video for pure, propagandistic narrative.

Bob Titan Down: The Videos

I notice that I've had about five and a bit thousand hits on the destruction of the Bob Titan in Eve Online, just thanks to an atmospheric, but rather lmiited teamspeak recording.

So, pandering to our MTV-jump-cut-video age, here are some film versions of the same event.

Easiest to access is the YouTube version of Stahlregen's film of the event, which has predictably limited resolution, but a rather nice industrial soundtrack including some Trent Reznor later on, just for Dragon*.  You can find the youtube version here.

If you want a higher resolution version of the same thing, download it from Eve-Files.  This is the version you really want.  This shows off how pretty the game is.  Remember, when watching it, that those red and green and blue dots are all ships controlled by real people (there are a bunch of fighter drones out at smoe points, but those are set up differently on the player's overview), so this is a moderately big fleet action of over three hundred people..  And when the titan (the big, mushroom-headed thing) is surrounded by shimmering blue spheres, those are set up to prevent him getting away.

Rather less stylish, but probably more informative, is this youtube video, which has another version of the teamspeak soundtrack playing over it.  You can hear Sesfan, our glorious Fuhrer, controlling the fleet and calmly ordering the support fleet to scrub attackers off our vital interdictors (the tiny ships needed to hold the titan down while the capital fleet killed it).

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*NiN also turn up on whati think is otherwise one of the weaker GF recruitment videos.  Nice imagery, nice sound, not enough apocalypse.

Bob Titan Dies

Warning, very geeky, Eve-Only post.

For those who have not read about Eve Online - or who have only read the ongoing trainwreck that is their internal improper conduct - "titans", as the name suggests, are the biggest ships in the game.  In-game, they are hundreds of times the size of battleships.  In meta-gaming terms, the hours they take, together with the expenditure in in-game currency (pricable at a pretty accurate exchange rate), makes them worth about fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars each, and means that they require the concentrated efforts of a large alliance in order to build.  Less than ten have ever been built, and none have ever been killed while finished building and being piloted.

Until now.

This morning, between about 7.30am and 7.45am GMT, the Band of Brothers alliance (closely associated with CCP, the game developers) lost the first ever titan to be blown up in action, when its pilot (very possibly BoB leader SirMolle at that point) got cocky, and entered combat without a sufficient support fleet.

The closing stages of the combat can be heard on this Teamspeak recording, which is taken from our private server that we use for fleet communications (compressed to shorten it from several minutes to a listenable length).  Most of the people you hear speaking there are fleet commanders and wing commanders: several hundred goons are also in the channel, but discipline is pretty good until the end.  Particularly impressive is that TS discipline is maintained until the primary is killed and his capsule is dispatched (which it is, almost certainly at yet more vast cost to the account-holder, due to the implants in his character's head).   Some explanation of the technical terms used include:

"He's going to cyno out" - he is going to have another character in another area open a "cyno gate", which is a sort of beacon that he can jump to almost immediately, thus rendering him safe.  This was a major concern.  Then Sesfan, our CEO and the finest FC in the game, asks for a cyno in order to jump in our terrifying Russian allies, Red Alliance.

"Bubble" - this is a sphere, several kilometres across, which prevents the target jumping away so long as he is caught within it.  The interdictors who launch such items are high priority targets (the first time I lost a ship, facing 20-to-1 odds, I made sure to cripple the attacking gang by taking out their interdictor), and dropping a bubble has to be done quickly before virtually inevitable destruction.

"if anybody steals that can, I will kill you" - The wreck dropped by the titan turned out to contain more than enough value for us to afford the single biggest item we need right now, a new outpost (space station).  This was a warning that if anyone ninja-looted it their ship would be blown up.  This would be a goony thing to do, and a goony reaction.

"zero armour", "he's into structure" etc... - Ships have shields.  Once those are gone, they have armour for protection.  Finally, the ship's own structure is ground down.

"recall your fighters" - Expensive, hard-hitting but relatively fragile swarms of attack drones.

"Shrike's pod is primary" - By now, the titan is about to die and Sesfan is focussingthe attackers on the capsule containing the pilot, which survives the initial explosion of a ship and can warp away very quickly.  It is often more valuable than the ship it is in (although not this time!)

"[various sounds as if from the abyss]" - This is what happens when an era of months of absolutely guaranteed losses at the hands of the huge developer mistakes which were BoB's invulnerable titans ends in a very large bang.

You can tell that this is very serious business because of the relative lack of profanity on a goon teamspeak channel.  Until the job is done, at any rate.

George Bush Discovers Albanian Crime Problem First Hand

My father, who, having worked there, is rather fond of Albania and many its people, may not approve of me saying so but Albanians have a reputation in certain quarters for their extremely free-market attitude towards property.  By which I mean that some of them have a notoriously  relaxed attitude to ownership rights.  If a bit of Bulgaria goes missing then they know where to look first: an Albanian will already be trying to sell it to some Germans as spare Lebensraum. But the guts it takes to mug the president of the United States in front of a full security detail of secret service officers is impressive.  When I say that this could only happen in Albania, I am semi-serious.

Watch this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKDdF6vfjoo

If you look at it at around the 45-50 second mark, you'll see Bush wearing a dark-strapped watch. If you watch at about 1:03, he is no longer wearing it. And if you look really carefull at about the 57-second point, I think you see the watch deftly removed.

Chancers...

Edit: The comments on that Youtube page, which rapidly developed into Greeks, Serbs and Albanians hurling abuse at each other (mainly centring around each others' taste in sexual partners), are hilarious.  It is sweet that English is the universal language that allows such an exchange of brotherly understanding between each group.  I was tempted to heal the rift and join them together in universal condemnation by pretending to be a Macedonian.

Second Edit: The response by one of the President's minders is that he took the watch off, himself.  I've watched this pretty closely, and the only way this could have happened is if he actually took it off with his left hand (which diappears for just over a second and a half around the 0:58ish point).  Of course, since it is on his left wrist, he'd be doing bloody well.

Chinese cut Pirates 3, Prove Superiority of Communism

The BBC website tells us that the Chinese censors cut enough of the third Pirates of the Carribean film to make the plot difficult to follow.

Chalk one up for communism.  I'd have gladly handed over the means of production to the glorious communes of the peasants and workers if the result had been less time watching that awful, awful movie.

Also, I wonder if the journalist had tried watching it in the unexpurgated version.  I very much doubt if he would have been struck by the brilliance and clarity of the plot which was thus revealed, even if he had drunk lots of coffee and slept through only a few scenes.  His confusion may, just may, have had something to do with the fact that no finished screenplay existed when filming started.  Just a thought.

While I'm on the subject, there is no excuse nor justification, in a certificate 12 movie, for starting with several minutes of grimly realistic mass executions and concentration-camp-like piles of bodies and shoes, culminating in the death by hanging not just of men and women, but of a small child.  The audience for a Pirates of the Carribean movie are not there to see Schindler's List.  Nor, come to that, is the film making the sort of commentary or statement that would justify such grotesque and explicit allusions to the holocaust.  It is, very simply, a plot device, albeit for a section of plot (and I use that word in its loosest possible sense) that was apparently discarded in editing, as it is referred to but once, and fleetingly.

And Another CCP Scandal Breaks!

You cannot make this stuff up.  One of CCP's community managers, a volunteer no less, forwarded (or allowed to be forwarded) huge numbers of logs of emails and petitions handled by the company to notorious French-Indonesian hacker Kugutsumen*, who gleefully posted them for a while on his site.  For long enough, at any rate, for a substantial percentage of the internet to download them.

Edit: here is a link to CCP's take on it.

There is no way that I am quoting substantial portions, hosting it or otherwise opening myself up to a CCP cease-and-desist letter (or worse).  But I know enough law (and have the letters to prove it) to be happy to repeat a few select snippets.

Real life identities are compromised.  Some of the most infamous individuals in the game should be justifiably horrified that ninety-thousand SA goons know their real-life names, where they work and so on.  One particularly reviled individual, DB Preacher, works a couple of blocks from my house.  Mr A., as we'll call him, will probably be upset to learn that he is as unpopular in work as in Eve (where he is a lead diplomat for Bob, a spectacular mis-match of abilties and career), and that his colleagues were delighted when he broke his leg playing footie recently.  He has every right to be embarrassed and angry at CCP and their incompetence in allowing someone like me to find this out.

We are allowed a glimpse into the relationship between CCP and senior Bob members like leader Sir Molle, a 40-year old heating and lighting engineer from Sweden.  Molle has eight warnings, and arguably should be permabanned by now.  Ironically, one is for publishing real-life names and phone numbers of opposing players, so he deserves what he got in these latest revalations.  The emails to and from him are a study in a company treating a serious, repeat offender with kid gloves.

Oh, and if you want some quality sci-fi, don't read Dark Shikari's ripping yarn.  It begins: "It was morning in Kladconia, a province of Rotor, the second planet of the Aksonian system."  It might not be the Isaac Asimov story it rips off, but give that lad a few years and he'll have his own, terrifying religion.  Hail Xenu!

There is strategic info on in-game alliances, too.  GF were interested to hear just how badly they had been beating the BoB pet-alliance Fix.  I liked the email from James Don (Fix Chairman), saying that they needed the loot from a complex in their territory fixed because they were "under immense pressure" and "really needed the income", quick.

Incompetent CCP idiots, keeping private info where it can be so easily compromised by an unpaid volunteer.  Bob and pets seem to be those most affected, though, so I doubt if they'll sue their pals at CCP (which they'd be quite entitled to do, under EU law at least). I guess the trouble with being down with the devs is that the devs take you down with them.

*As usual, no direct link to Kugutsumen's site, because he is teh l33t haxxor, logs IPs, and your computer probably isn't as secure as you think it is.  But it's not hard to find if you really want to.

Work and Relaxation

As an aside from the ongoing CCP dramabombs, I just got back from five days staying at Hownam again.  It's the second time I've been there this year, and the timing couldn't have been better: Friday saw me with a deadline for a  product launch to user acceptance testing, and saw me do my first hand-in on my new masters course.  All of which rather conspired to see me reach new heights of stress.

Comparing this with my two full-time courses of study is quite a contrast: I had no idea how lucky I was to have so much time to squander during my first degree in particular.  But, on the upside, I didn't have the option of renting a big house in the borders when it all seemed too much pressure!

Anyway, every morning I would get up at 7.30 or so, walk the dogs a bit, eat a light breakfast then head out into the hills for four or five hours.  The collies - Sunny and Seleighe - love the place, not least since they spend most of every day running about outside, much of it on hillsides smelling of sheep and rabbits.  I'd climb a few hills, visit iron-age stone circles and barrows,  climb to millennias-old hill-forts, trace out the walls of Roman marching encampments, and sometimes follow Dere Street - a Roman road, but on a route that predates even them, and which is still in use in places.  The landscape in the Cheviots is packed with stone-age and Roman archaeology: literally every hillside has one or more features, be they watchposts, terracing, entrenchments or even abandoned medieval villages.

I'd return and shower, then eat lunch around four or so - chorizo, a chicken I'd roasted on the first evening, fresh and sunblush tomatoes, half a dozen cheeses, grapes, bananas, various north-african cous-cous and rice dishes, tabouleh, humuus, stuffed olives and vine leaves, tzatziki, pate, smoked mackerel and salmon.  And a lot of it.  I'd eat that outside, in the gardens.  It only rained once, for a few hours late at night: the central Cheviots have a wonderful, dry, sheltered microclimate that makes them one of the dryest places in Scotland as well as keeping away the midges!

After that, more tiring of the dogs in the gardens, teaching them new commands (always a delight to collies) and tempting them into the Kale Water at the foot of the lawn.  Then inside, clear and light the wood fire in the living room and read for hours while the exhausted pups - they're still only 11 months old - sleep, fight then sleep some more.  Having been immersed in reading papers, articles and books on requirements engineering I decided on history for this week, and read one book each on Edwards II and III, Simon Sebag Montefiore's excellent "The Young Stalin" (utterly rewriting everything I thought I knew of his early life, and debunking the traditional Trotskyite version), as well as most of "The Grand Alliance", the third volume of Churchill's memoir of the Second World War.

CCP - Movement and Paralysis

It increasingly looks like Goonfleet may have managed to wring some concessions from CCP after all.  Obviously, they've been publicly defensive of their devs' right to rank highly in a certain player alliance, to play BF1942 with a small group of players and so on, but there are some cracks beginning to show.  The NY Times covered the GF protest, and reports that CCP are going to set up an elected, player-oversight committee.  The dynamics of what that can do will be important, particularly given the numbers involved.  Will it be one-account-one-vote, I wonder, working on a PR-list system?  Will they have any powers beyond being flown to Iceland and getting a powerpoint presentation and a nice tour of the offices?  I massively doubt it.  But to be fair to CCP, at least their PR seems to have improved.

I wonder if the large numbers of players who comprise Goonfleet, IAC and other such anti-CCP organisations might lead to some embarassingly outspoken appointments.  We, in Goonfleet are notoriously good at getting out the vote, after all.  Will terms of membership include highly restrictive gagging clauses?  How will CCP deal with a series of infuriated resignations carried out amidst claims of inadequate access?

The CCP individual who was at the heart of the inappropriate-contact-with-elite-players scandal, and who seems to have got one of the long-standing volunteers fired, has been defended by CCP.  Yet he has also had his character deleted or renamed, which at least points to the fact that he was seen as irretrievably tainted.  If only CCP would swallow their pride and spin what they are doing as confession-and reparation instead of trying to hush them up then they might actually salvage some goodwill.

An interesting aside from the NYT article is the continued assertion by the head of the Band of Brothers alliance (deeply implicated in most of the scandals to have been unearthed) that they intend to take over the entire game.  Allowing for a bit of tongue-in-cheek roleplaying, the fact is that this is a fair possibility in the long run.  It has happened in China, where the game seems to be suffering as a result: all of the player-conquerable systems have been controlled by a single alliance since early in the game (oh, those wacky Chinese and their one-party states).

As Timothy Burke pointed out in his comments on a previous posting, CCP seem not to have mechanisms in place to handle such a contingency.  Rather than having "natural" factors within the game fiction that limit the growth of an alliance, it seems to be the case that it becomes easier and easier to conquer as an alliance grows, so long as that growth is managed carefully.  Empires traditionally butt up against limits of control: the Roman Empire in the third century could conquer Mesopotamia, but not hold it; Syracuse was over-reach by the Athenians; the British were simply incapable of holding the American colonies and so on.  But with instantaneous communications and structural constraints such as logistics that are necessarily limited in their onerousness by the nature of the world-as-game, those limits do not seem to apply within Eve.

As Tim mentions, this is a real problem for MMOs in general, and for Eve in particular: it would be far from the first time that a player-vs-player conflict driven world has suffered due to the runaway dominance of one "side" once a tipping point is reached, whether this be in something as complex as Shadowbane or as simple as Travian.

In most MMOs, someone who thought that they perceived developer bias in favour of one player group could simply move to another server or "shard", and play where those individuals are not to be found.  Entrenched but fair dominance can be similarly, if temporarily, escaped.  This is not the case in Eve.  At least, not without a knowledge of Mandarin and a Chinese proxy server.   I know many ex-players who would immediately sign up for a clean start, and from years of experience with MMOs I am quite certain that this would be a huge success for CCP.  But CCP assert that this is simply not possible.

Thus, one of Eve's proudest boasts and biggest selling points - the single, unsharded world (sotto voce: for all those not speaking moon-languages) - risks becoming its greatest flaw, unless CCP can bring themselves to eschew their A Tale In The Desert-style fascination with what might happen regarding such dominance (obligatory whine: such dominance by their admitted friends!), and instead introduce game mechanics which act strongly to prevent it.