pvp (podcast versus podcast)

I can’t help it – I’m a “journalist”. A very particular type of journalist, in fact: A critic (the very worst kind). It’s part of my very soul to compare things, even when comparing them is unfair, trite or just plain wrong. You want a thousand words on apples versus oranges? Sure, send me a commission. My rates are quite competitive. Just don’t ask for any kind of scientific analysis. Critics don’t do science. We are the priests of the journalist fraternity. Subjectivity is our faith – and all who question it are unbelievers and heretics. Objectivism is for gods.

Sorry, where was I…?

Err, yeah, so anyway, the first CrovanKinux show has come out (The Drone Bay), making it the second EVE podcast to hit VirginWorlds, and one can’t help but compare it to the now well-established WinterMongrel show (Warp Drive Active), simply because both are from well respected EVE names and happen to be about the same game. A comparison is just begging to be made:

…Yet it’s hard to choose between them in terms of the interaction between their respective cast members. Urb and Blinky work well together because they have the Atlantic between them (they are also the Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison of EVE, but don’t tell them that) . Crovan and his allies have chemistry because between the three of them they can cover the great divide between carebear and combateer, veteran and noob. In such a small space as EVE broadcasting is, it’s a welcome diversity that makes both shows listenable in very different ways. The only downside is that both are just too long for my tastes. I like to give something my full attention (which is insufferable being a miner, let me assure you), so I would prefer both to stay below 60 minutes, but that’s just me. That said, I will certainly be listening in to the next episode of The Drone Bay – before the arrival of which I will be catching up on the last few WDAs that I’ve missed (again, don’t tell Urban, he only tut at me and start fluffing up the cushions or something).

no accounting for waste

There comes a time when you just have to put aside all the fun things in life, make a strong pot of coffee (in my case tea) and go through the accounts. After watching the bills pile up and after ignoring the calls from the administrators, I could ignore the problem no longer. No matter which angle I looked at it from, regardless of lighting conditions or use of heavy make-up, the evidence pointed to the same conclusion – E·ON was in need of a hot injection of in-game ice-bucks!

All of E·ON’s in-game revenue comes from advertising. Until last issue the cost to advertisers per page was 350m ISK, with E·ON writers getting 50m ISK per page for their efforts – which meant that one page of advertising paid for seven pages of editorial. (Just to note here, the ratio of ads-per-editorial page is much lower than 1:7, but the books should balance out because not every contributor gets paid – Zapatero being the main one.) Of course 50m per page isn’t going to get you much these days, so I doubled the rate to 100m and so obviously had to double the ad costs to compensate. I’m no mathematician, but anyone would assume that the transition should be a smooth one, but that has not been the case.

In actuality, the dip into the red hasn’t arisen due to increases in cost (700m is a small price to pay, I think, for the permanence of being in print), but due to two reasons: One is that I haven’t gone out there to tempt corps or alliances to advertise, and the other is that two advertisers have not paid their bill – two very big advertisers, I might add, high-profile alliances run by salt-of-the-earth types who probably have more ISK than they know what to do with. If those two paid up E·ON’s in-game financial obligations would be fulfilled. I’m considering hiring mercenaries or thugs to recover the debt, but the bastard thing is that one debtor is a mercenary organization and the other are thugs. Maybe I should set one on the other, write-off the debt and enjoy the firework display :)

Anyway, regardless of how the payment in entertainment in lieu of owed monies turns out, a change in policy will be required: Firstly I will attempt to be more organized (which may involve putting aside the fun things more often) and secondly I shall insist upon up-front payment of ad charges prior to publication. Third I need to find a way to get three Tech-2 strip miners and some hardcore expanders on my shuttle, and sharpish. Needs must when there are hungry alts to feed!

clash of the titans

The 5th Alliance Tournament is almost upon us and I predict it will be the best yet. I have no scientific evidence on which to base this assumption, nor any kind of foresight or behind-the-scenes knowledge, just an old-fashioned hunch. Sadly I will have to miss most of the fun and games due to prior arrangements across both weekends of the broadcast (a small matter of an F.A. Cup showdown between Manchester United and the mightyness of Pompey), but I hope to be able to tune in for the final day… some of it, at least.

Picking a winner is hard – there are lots of new teams I know little about. My safe-hands choice to take home the £5 book token will have to be Pandemic Legion, although I do hope The Star Fraction goes at least as far as it did before. Regardless, I expect some good battles, controversial decisions and enraged tears in equal measure and the usual attempts at mimetic engineering. (And, of course, Pompey through to the semi-finals on April 5th… which will clash with another EVE event, sadly.)

when worlds collide

It’s been mildly irksome to me that developers don’t cooperative with each other as much as they could. It’s a process I’m sure wouldn’t just be advantageous for the collaborators creatively, but perhaps commercially too. CCP especially could benefit from some kind of binary-shop conjugation. I’m not suggesting they should join forces with Valve and create some kind of EVE / Portal hybrid – intriguing though the possibility might be, all I am suggesting is that where there’s obvious synergy between two games, why not re-create one in the image of the other for the benefit of the communities of both (hopefully initiating some cross-pollination into the process)? Publishers do it all the time, only when they want to cash-in on the work of a star studio, they invariably press-gang one of their lesser able teams into the role and results are usually not good.

Reading up on and playing Sins of a Solar Empire has inspired this train of thought; a space game which I still haven’t fully explored and one of obvious depth and beauty. By an absolute stroke of luck Sins also happens to be highly modifiable. With this in mind my question goes thus: Why, when there is so much potential to get something so right, don’t games studios mod something between themselves rather than leave it to chance, or have some mod team attempt the task and lose interest half-way through? CCP are probably never going to attempt a 4X game and Ironclad won’t be all that keen to embark on making a space MMO, so why not do the best for fans of both games and get together to mod Sins of New Eden together? More EVE players would play Sins, more Sinners would try EVE, and if you have both, you get the mod – professionally constructed – for free! Yeah, I know, it’ll never happen. Oh well, I can dream can’t I?

over the edge

People may wonder why this blog is called what it is. No? Ok, fine. I shall enlighten you all anyway: As readers to the mag may know we have a couple of pages called “Postcards From The Edge”, for which people are invited to email beautiful and interesting EVE screenshots along with a bit of text detailing what’s going on within. Unfortunately, since naming this blog to cleverly reference this wondrous editorial nugget (a feat I congratulated myself for, naturally), I have come to realize that the postings I make are more likely to come from my arse rather than the fringes of anything culturally significant. So, in desperation to work in some “edge” that I can reach for, I have decided to allow myself the luxury of commenting on other games beyond EVE Online (which is also done in E·ON under the guise of “Downtime”, by the way).

This week the game that has caught my attention is Sins of a Solar Empire, the box to which sits right next to me now, taunting me into installing the damn thing. I have actually volunteered to review the game for PCZone magazine (who, incidentally, stole the “Postcards From The Edge” idea, for which they have already been forgiven), and as a consequence, when the game arrived in the mail this morning it came packaged with a “Reviewer’s Guide” – which is not something I’ve not had the pleasure of receiving in all my years as a rent-a-quote.

Those who’ve had the fortune to write a review for a magazine or a prominent gaming site will know that most “reviewable” games come via PR departments in a padded envelope, usually with no documentation and on a silver disc with the words “beta version – do not review unless you are corrupt” scrawled across it (or words less overt but written to cover any publisher throw back). In this case, not only was I sent the Collector’s Edition of the game (whose contents, naturally, would be left wanting were you to compare them to those of a typical mid-1990s Microprose release), but also a full-color, 28-page, idiot’s… I mean, “reviewer’s guide”. It has actually made me feel very special indeed to be able to get a game that the rest of the world can play, with a pre-manual that won’t require me to squint over the dense version that, as a reviewer, I’m obliged to avoid anyway.

An enclosed voucher to blag free pizza would have topped things off rather nicely. Alas, this missed opportunity to secure a top score will mean I’ll have to remain my usual impartial self when, over the coming weekend, I throw myself beyond EVE’s edge and into a new universe.

the 1.0 experiment, anyone?

Many I’m sure have fond memories of the “0.0 Experiment” by EVE player Innominate Nightmare (I must resist the full-caps version of his name as I have a headache this morning): It was, over the course of a few months, the consistently lively journal of an unknown character as he tried to explore the murky backwaters of civilized space, gradually making himself more well-known by shining his indomitable wit into the gloom and discovering it’s even murkier out there than some of us had suspected. If you missed his superbly-crafted musings, I suggest you go and read through them over the course of a few days (it’s a fine coffee-break read if nothing else). Among the dozens of diary entries there is much to learn about how 0.0 space works, how much of the time it just doesn’t, and, whilst many of the alliances mentioned within are no longer active, the activities of their successors are much the same.

So I was wondering, since there has been a recent “official” tribute to the works of the dearly-departed Inno, whether it was time for someone to become properly inspired by his endeavors: Not to jump in a shuttle and go exploring nullsec – since it’s kinda been done already and unlikely to be done much better – but rather for someone to sit in a station and try to earn a few billion by trading, fleecing, begging and betting. The “1.0 Experiment“, if you will. Just a thought.

let primary voting commence

From the EVE Player News Center:

The voting page for the E-ON Awards is now up. For anyone who doesn’t know what the awards are all about, just think of them like you would any collective backslap, except the nominees were all suggested by the players rather than some obscure academy council. Bear in mind that whilst we call them the 2008 awards, you are voting for the best corps, alliances, sites and personalities from last year.

Voting will stay open until March 2nd (midnight GMT) with the winners announced on April 5th at two player meets, one in London the other in Philadelphia. Results will of course be published in the next issue of the magazine and the winners will, should they desire it, receive one of these really very gorgeous laser-etched trophies. Here’s a reminder of who won first time around.

Good luck to the nominees – and please vote safe.

The E·ON hype train rumbles on. Next stop… who knows :)

cast aside

Sadly, I never got around to mentioning EVECAST in the mag. …Or rather, I did, but after some necessary deadline-day re-jiggery just before Xmas, it was decided to make room for another story and mark a mental note to make good the decision in another issue. Unfortunately EVECAST has since gone the way of EVE TV Weekly, which it was doing a decent-enough job of replacing. Rather less tragically it seems that after just four irregular episodes, tribute in print will elude the fledgling game station a while longer… a mention here in the blathering online footnotes of the real thing will have to do for now:

Hosted by the immobile VampireZIM, EVECAST.TV seemed to pretty-much do what EVE TV Weekly did; namely put together news, interviews and regular bits into the tried-and-tested TV magazine format. Some of these it did very well and some of these it didn’t, but considering it had a couple of big and very expensive shoes to fill, it’s perhaps not so surprising that the dark-glassed host (and director / producer / pretty-much everything else) had to call it a day.

Premature endings are not exclusive to TV broadcasts (insert Firefly reference here). The EVE community is littered with the half-built skeletons of fan projects that didn’t quite get off the production line. EVECAST got further than most and for that deserves much appluase. Mr. ZIM managed to hit the nail on the head however in his video eulogy when he said that crafting the show was a little too much work for one person (which perhaps explained the need to shade the eyes). Frequently, no matter how many people you enlist, it is always one person that drives such projects, especially when the good-intentioned volunteers drop back into their real lives. Ambition is a great motivator, but one big TV show is a beast of a project, and without the resources to fuel it, the tanks will quickly run dry. Perhaps a number of smaller shows might have worked – we may never know. I’m borrowing from my old EVE TV notebook here, but how about “The 0.0 Show” or “Carebear Corner” – shorter pieces that wouldn’t have needed a host to read to camera, or that could have been as irregular as real-life permitted.

I still hope to see a regular EVE videocast being made, but it may have to come directly from CCP in light of the work and costs required. Given the talent that has passed by both sides of the cameras to end up there, it would be remiss of Iceland’s top codeshop not to make use of the resources that it has so diligently acquired. Still, at least there is the Alliance Tournament to look forward to…. which is where EVE’s TV ambitions originated, after all.

surveying monkey

I recently started up a discussion with regard to the possibility, desirability and consequences of one single power being able to dominate EVE, or, rather, the lawless expanse known as 0.0 space. Rather pleasingly there have been some very interesting responses so far, but now that the chat seems to be drying up, now seems as good a time as any to get more opinion – this time about what players think of their own alliances and how they operate.

Rather than collect this extra info via a discussion (far too unwieldy given the nebulous subject matter), I’ve put together a survey that I hope will bring about a good number of responses over the course of the next few days. The final grand aim is to help us come up with a cracking article for the next issue. Should the survey prove successful, I’m sure more will follow. In fact, I’m starting to think that I should have arranged for the Awards to have been voted for through the same site. Maybe next year.

the crystal method

Welcome to the first entry in probably the 37th blog site I’ve started. This one should persist beyond a few weeks though, because whereas the others would meander dangerously into pointless obscurity, this one has a purpose in life – to inform and excite and generally spread the word of EVE, E·ON and other allied space-fictions.

To rush through the TLA-infested introductions; EVE is an MMO computer game made by CCP, E·ON is a magazine produced by MMM based on EVE, Zapatero is a character in EVE who edits E·ON for MMM (with lots of help from CCP), and I, RJS (Richie Shoemaker), have an AKA in EVE called Zapatero. Phew, I hope that clears things up. If not, over the course of a few weeks (at least), it will become like crystal. F’sure. Maybe.