“The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.” – Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
The wolf eats the deer. The wolf is sated and, for a while, suffers no sensation of hunger. The deer is destroyed utterly, and suffers pain and terror in the process. This is not a zero-sum game. The pleasure in the moment is vastly outweighed by the pain.
Any experienced player in Eve will recognise the parallels in the game, Continue reading Loss Teaches Us the Worth of Things →
I don’t want to play into cliched preconceptions about the Wild East but Russians – and their “near abroad” – do seem to play Eve a little differently from the rest of us. This week, however, the Russian Eve forums are aflame with accusations over black-hat hacking of alliance members by its own leadership.
I’ve been director of the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency for almost four years, so I’m reasonably-well-placed to talk about this subject. Amongst Euro-Americans, the intel conflict is played out within certain bounds. Whether it is the GIA or N3’s Jean Leaner or PL’s very effective (if slightly more devolved) spying set-up, we all play the old-fashioned Cold War-era spying game. We attempt to insert agents into each other’s blocs and alliances. Continue reading Crazy Ivan – Russians Spying on Their Own Members →
Last week, I posted about the need for Eve’s nullsec Sovereignty system to be redesigned in order to break up blocs, shrink alliances and give a chance to younger players to strike out into nullsec without the risk of being stamped upon. The key post with the vision and reasoning behind this is found here.
I also posted an example of a sovereignty system that would reward small groups who turned up to fight for their space and offer little encouragement or reward for grouping up into vast coalitions as happens now. Importantly, I showed how such a system could be created using only existing mechanics that already exist in the game: mechanics stolen from wormholes, from Factional War complexes, and from the sovereignty index system. Continue reading The Evil Behind the Thousand Megathrons →
I've been GIA director and a senior Goonswarm leader for over five years and eminence gris of Bat Country for seven.