What you missed this week

Welcome back to ‘What you missed this week’, the weekly summary of the beating heart and soul of the Eve community! My GoogleDoc file is full of links for this week, since quite a bit happened during the last seven days, so sit back, grab a cold or hot one, and let’s get this started!

As the CSM official candidacy submission period is hastily approaching, forum threads of candidates are starting to flow right in, and judging by previous years, a lot of them will come quite late in the race. For the moment we have a few new folks to talk about.

Starting off with the big names, we have Suitonia stepping into the political ring. He’s one of the most active and, subjectively speaking, one of the best solo PVPers in the game. His candidacy is naturally based heavily on that, but he also seems to want to speak to alphas and all walks of life in Eve, for when you have played this game for 10 years it’s virtually impossible that you haven’t dipped your fingers in almost all the pots. He also mentions being politically independent, and his previous allegiances are a testament to that. A solid candidate with a solid reputation… and a 47 page manual on how to fly the Kestrel.

Next up in the decade-old-players list, we have Thermal Damage. While his thread is mostly linked to ‘what I want to do as a CSM’ instead of ‘which qualifications I may have’, he won me over by uttering a concept that I’m a firm believer in: Eve is safe. Too safe. He also mentions about wanting to get more highsec bears out of highsec and working on community interaction. Lofty goals but I feel very few of these are something that the CSM can affect. (Disclaimer: I am commenting purely on his candidacy thread, like i have for any other candidate, and i am not endorsing anyone on a personal level. Neither should any comments made by me in these be drawn as compliments or snuffs reflected on the personality of the people involved. Just some detached and impartial-by-being-blissfully-unaware commentary on what i read in the threads.)

Dancul1001, known for being a PL FC, a standing Alliance Tournament Captain, and another flyer of the ’10 year’ club, has also thrown his hat into the ring. His thread is pretty skinny, most of it focusing around what he wants done. However, the CSM’s role – as former members can attest – is mostly to try to raise problems that are critical to the game and may be underexposed, as well as acting as a sounding board for unreleased features. The only way those ideas every candidate raises in their candidacy thread get to be done is if CCP wants to do it. The CSM can have a bit of sway, but it can’t enforce any execution. So, no ‘Server Hardware’ is not something you should put on your candidacy.

Moving on, we have Vic Jefferson, a real life PhD research scientist, his candidacy thread coming close to something approaching a small essay. He speaks of general concepts and how they evolved over his four-year experience with the game: interaction, mechanics, risk and reward, ship balance. The thread speaks to me of him as a generalist and someone who cares about all the corners of space and can appreciate them equally. Not a bad thing, but a platform that hardly any prior candidate succeeded with. I wish him the best though.

Finishing up we have Toxic Yaken, representing the proud nation of highsec! Jokes aside, it’s great to have a ‘highsec’ representative, but I’m sceptical whether he has much of a base in highsec to support him. Not after he awoxed and ganked a good part of it anyway. His thread is pretty balanced and sensible, and it shows that he has put a lot of work and though into not only his platform, but also what expectations he and other players can have from the CSM. He seems knowledgeable on his corner of the map and doesn’t assume to cover all of New Eden. A good candidate to vote for on your ballot, even if you’re not a highsec player. 

Since we were speaking of the CSM, I’d just like to continue with reminding everyone that the final summit of CSM XI will happen next week, and CCP will give (have given, by the time you read this) a live stream of the ‘reception’ and promised daily Facebook updates on the proceedings as well as wrap-up highlights. This is interesting, seeing as before the only thing we’d have gotten were the redacted minutes a few weeks after. 

The Alliance Tournament isn’t the only tournament game in town, and possibly not even the best format anymore, given the large leaps and bounds done by EveNT with their own tournament, the EVE_NT Championship. This week the minor’s competition finished with Nasty Boyz taking the win after facing worthy enemies such as Exodunks, Power Ducks, Sudden Otters and Make Amarr Great Again. If you don’t recognize any of the names, that’s fine, since one of the rules of the cup is that team names have to be different than TQ alliances/corps. I like the result. You can find videos of the matches on EveNT’s youtube, and the breakdown of the fights on the Arena site.

A bit late reporting on this, but you still have three days to stretch your writing muscles for the “Amore Tank Your Hearts” writing competition focusing on creative works featuring the sentiment that shrouds everyone on the 14th of February, love. There are some decent prizes in store and not a lot of entries yet so if you can simmer up a small romantic comedy or even a true-blood love story within a few thousand words, give it a shot!

CCP continues to push forward with the development of the ESI new API interface, now pushing EveMails as well. While jokes of CSPA charges spam abound, there should be more talk of the ESI itself. The ESI will aim to replace the current XML API as well as supersede the CREST API. Ashilta, the dev of Evemon, also lists his woes and thoughts on the matter and warns other devs about the scale of the incoming changes. It’s weird and interesting if you know a bit of context that comes with the word ‘replace’. CREST, as far as I know it, was CCP Foxfour’s baby, a man who has left CCP a while back. CREST continued developing, but it appears that internal factors have switched the project off in favour of something that will aim to take over all the attributions.

Given CREST itself has not managed to get to a ‘good place’ and has barely just now managed to be usable for what we used to do via the ingame-browser before, like personal and fleet composition tracking. It’s sad, especially for me as a wormhole resident with a tenuous relation to trackers, that we will have to look forward to another few months of buggy performance given the new ‘all singing, all dancing ESI’. And that’s aside from so many apps that have been on life support and which will end up unusable if the devs don’t care to update them.

Still, development and ideas continue to surge on. Heimdallr made its appearance as a much-needed, but still very basic, way of filtering killmails. I was always bugged by the limitation of searching through killmails, given the huge amount of information present, but in a raw form. That’s why I see such projects like Heimdallr and Eve Prism as fantastic resources to get the most out of what can currently be found if you have the will to search.

Moving down to slightly less palatable news, there was a fair bit of community drama this week surrounding a good will effort made by Mass Collapse’s Lucius Kalari. While there was a larger ‘wormhole’ townhall not too long ago, he wanted to run a final and quick one focusing on low class C1-C4 wormholes. He even had CSM member and representative Noobman sign on right before he’d be flying out to Iceland for the CSM Summit. For his transgression of proposing and organizing the townhall, Lucius was hanged and burned at the stake, culminating in real life threats and moving the discussion as far as his personal Facebook page. The reasons were petty for such an attack and a day later, he shut down the effort. Not long after, meme-threads started appearing, and even a genuine new townhall initiative on the same subject, but ran by someone else and without Noobman. That took place on last Friday and lead to about 2 hours of chatting about the subject, but without a hard agenda. CSM members Jin’Taan and The Judge were presiding.

Drama didn’t avoid CCP themselves this week when a marketing picture created by the developer of Star Citizen appeared, which used an Eve Online nebula as part of the composite image. What followed was a shitstorm covering the Eve and Star Citizen subreddits which somehow even managed to drag No Man’s Sky in as well. It was great.

War-wise, there haven’t been any serious engagements or deployments this week. The ScootyDooty war is now reaching the post-combat phase, with WalkingInCirclesPleaseIgnore taking system after system almost uncontested, given Goon’s retreat as well as Stainwagon’s staging burning down. Alternatively we have also had LUMPY (League of Unaligned Master Pilots) invading Tenal, Perrigen Falls being harassed by Out of Sight and Red Menace and Cloud Ring seeing the shadow of Brave Collective falling over it, with supposed backup that didn’t arrive from Escalating Entropy, who are facing down the Initiative. All in all, just skirmishes, and you can find all of them and more in EN24’s weekly roundup here.

The art showings for this week was relatively shallow but you were a fan of Cymek’s cute dinos, someone is now making them and selling them as plushies on Etsy.

And the proficient CptBlastahoe pushed out another hit this week called Level V.

Looking to the past for answers to the problems of the future has long been a field of study for thinkers. Humans are part of nature, and no matter how high our skyscrapers or our goals, we are stuck in the same cycles as our ancestors. We are subject to making the same mistakes as they have and are prone to the same fallacies. 

Then there are those who completely ignore the past, their gaze squarely focused on the future. The present be damned, it’s just a stepping stone to be climbed on. These are the men and women who end up as the exceptions. The ones that push the boundaries and allow the ones that look back to our ancestors to do so from said higher skyscrapers.

Highsec is a magical place. It’s a place where people feel safe and as such where horrible mistakes get made. In the following case, the mistake was highlighted by the brave Ostingele Tectum, revealing an officer-fit Vindicator that apparently was on his way to an Incursion but forgot to fit stabs to get there, just had forgotten to broadcast for reps. 

Highsec is also a place where buffaloes roam free to graze on the lands. That’s unless someone wardecs said buffalo, as happened in this case with Renegade from Marmite catching and slaughtering an Obelisk. You’d think the buffalo would learn his lesson and stay away from lion-lands, right? Or at least move their shit with an out-of-corp alt? But apparently the proper response is to get an even fatter buffalo. Renegade obliges.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I also carry my super fit in a no-tank Bestower as shown to us by Ozzy Black.

But you guys came here for reks, not the highsec hauler kills. You want disastrous fails of basic competency in Eve Online. You want to see fits that are blingy and that should have never even been put on a Secret Santa Thunderdome event. You want horribleness? you want sickening displays of wasted ISK? Here you are. From igotyoulast12. Starting with a poor Rokh.

Continuing with a ridiculous Malediction.

And finishing with a mess of a Harbinger Navy Issue, with SIX 100mm Citadella storyline plates. Boom.

Starting you guys off soft we have a cool little video put to cinematic music of a Thanatos exploding gloriously.

Often enough when showcasing videos you find that one video that’s ‘real’, and ‘raw’. Where the dude makes mistakes that you may have made. Where he plays in such a way that you can’t say whether he’s elite enough that it’s untouchable. And a video in which such a man wins. This video by Alasdair Sharp is one of them

Moving on we have Mira Chieve showing us that a Heron can do more than just do relic sites.

The slightly uninspired-but-on-point-named channel EvE PvP showing us how a Dramiel can dismantle foes bigger than itself with relative ease.

Closing up with some smallgang and thirdpartying, we have Meowtiger of Adversity showing us just some of the great content that can be found in Pure Blind for those with the stones to seek it out.

A subject that’s been heavily weighing on my mind and which I’ve yet to expand into a full article has been the matter of information. I touched on it briefly in my first article for Crossing Zebras here, but that’s far from fleshing out the concept of informational filtering and density. So of course I got really interested in Squizz’s decision to not impose an obligatory delay in processing killmails on Zkillboard.

Zkillboard at this moment is the primary killboard for Eve Online players and a source for many apps that pull information and process it, so a delay put on that would be a direct blow to the ability of those apps, let alone Zkill itself, to provide up-to-date meaningful intel.

I can understand Squizz’s decision, forcing the choice upon CCP since, in the end, if it isn’t Zkill it’s a new killboard called UpToDateKillboard which will do what Zkill doesn’t. The Eve community is nothing if not productive and able to cover niches that are untapped. But in any case we’re left with the stinking bag of dead puppies at CCP’s door.

CCP doesn’t have, and more to the point never had, an actual design following how information should be presented and propagated in the game, let alone set it on a kind of progressive gradient to create opportunities for players to engage in how much they want to work for getting it. I just have to mention the Siphons, a stealthy options designed to sneakily steel POS loot which can be easily spotted via the API, and the matter of when wormholers insisted on having a way to indicate whether there is activity in a Citadel, immitating the POS mechanics it’d be replacing, CCP having had completely glanced over that bit.

We have settled into our little way of fighting the intel battles, based on the upload of raw information presented and sometimes even “stolen” from Eve, and we are content it seems. So it’s not strange to me to see threads such as this popping up, asking for some stats to be made public and accessible which so far haven’t been thrown out via the API, no doubt for whatever ridiculous and super-smart app that could be developed on the basis of such information as “Average people in space in the last 30 minutes”. 

The core of the matter is that fixing the current issues requires rethinking and redesigning from the ground up how information is treated, how it is displayed and even which bits are offered. And judging by the lack awareness and the lack of sensitivity it has had in dealing with information, not to mention the mammoth amount of work, we will probably never see CCP working on it.

And it’s a shame since when assessed with any kind of design in mind, this can be a source of awesome, balanced and interesting gameplay experience.

~Cosmo

Thank you for reading this edition of ‘What you missed this week’. If you think we missed something, share it in the comments section, i’m sure a lot of people still want to check out more things. Also please leave any suggestions and ideas you may have in the comments as well, and as always, if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, please toss a nickle or an iskcent into our real or virtual wallets to keep this going with the same aplomb and quality.

PS: Eve players are weird.