Wilhelm Arcturus

Two Step, CSM6/7 vet, writes about the worrying similarities between the hype that preceded Derek Smart's Battlecruiser 3000AD and Chris Roberts' Star Citizen.

A priceless Revenant supercarrier, one of three in the game, is destroyed along with nine other Pandemic Legion supers by a Black Legion/Snuff Box/VOC gank.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	40.3	17,738	-1.7
2	2	Guild Wars 2	15.7	6,910	-2.0
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	11.5	5,046	-6.9
4	5	Neverwinter	5.3	2,315	-2.2
5	4	EVE Online	5.0	2,211	-12.0
6	8	Tera	4.5	1,964	+26.1
7	7	RIFT	4.1	1,803	-7.4
8	6	Aion	3.5	1,548	-22.5
9	9	Planetside 2	3.3	1,432	+14.7
10	12	Maple Story	2.6	1,132	+20.0
11	10	Lord of the Rings Online	2.2	971	-20.3
12	11	Star Trek Online	2.2	959	-2.1

 

You’re either in or you’re out! And by god, you don’t want to be out. That’s the gist of Alexia Morgan’s newest great blogging sensation, eveblogs.net. The new venture appears to be a mashup of Evebloggers.com (in that it nominally provides a listing to all EVE blogs) and Podlogs (in that it provides for blogging within its domain). Not a terrible idea, I’ll give him that.

However, over the past few days the EVE blogging community has had an inside look at the world of Alexia Morgan/Black Claw/whatever. The view isn’t that great. Seismic Stan/Mat Westhorpe summed it up nicely in the comments section of an interview conducted with Alexia at Winterblink’s blog (I encourage you to read the full interview at your leisure).

“I’ve had some independent bloggers complain that they don’t want to be known as ‘independent’ bloggers, compared to those blogs built and published within the portal. While I understand their issues, I don’t accept them.”

“…independent bloggers are ‘mostly’ clueless about their site security and administration.”

“…it’s probably silly of me to expect those who are engaging in irony to actually see it.”

“…the ‘change of focus’ is to, put it bluntly, tell them to go screw themselves.”

“I’m pondering on whether or not I should allow independent bloggers to use Eve Blogs Network to promote their blogs if they’re adamantly against the idea. If you’re an independent blogger wanting to have your blog listed on a community portal, I think it’s a bit ripe to sign up to have your blog updates presented on the portal, and then start blogging about your resistance to the concept of community and a community portal.”

In other words, this is the community now, you’re either in or you’re irrelevant. For someone who has accused me of being complicit in some asinine plan to ‘kill EVE blogging’ on the part of The Mittani, master of declaring things irrelevant to get his way, this is amusing. I’m not the only one to notice the parallels:

The current fight is over the status of evebloggers.com.  The popular aggregator of EVE blogs is down, according to some, because Marc Scaurus, acting at the behest of The Mittani, wishes to drive traffic to TheMittani.com.  Marc has posted that he has six people willing to take over the site, although I don’t know how many of them were aware that the blog feed would break when Google finally killed Google Reader.  Well, I guess some people will believe anything as long as anti-Goon hatred is added to the mix.

- Nosy Gamer (read full post here)

The real plan, for the record, is to get all the good writers in the EVE blogging community, not the traffic. Jeez, get with the program guys! Seriously though, there is a very real reason why I made the rules for the handover of Evebloggers and the Pack what they were. And yes, it was pretty much specifically to prohibit this guy from taking it over and changing it into something particularly shitty.

Now, some people believe that I handled this incorrectly. Okay, well, Ripard Teg does anyways. In his post, A right way and a wrong way, Ripard commends Seismic Stan for his handover of the Blog Banter to Kirith Kodachi, then condemns the handover of Evebloggers and the Pack. Specifically:

Included in Marc’s conditions is one that you cannot take over as custodian if you passed the role on to a new care-taker yourself at any point in the past… even ifyou’re the only person that wants the job!  Now fortunately, that isn’t the case — he’s received six volunteers to take it over — but the fact remains that while Marc might say “rules is rules”, this is also ridiculous.  Alexia Morgan, a former EVE Blog Pack care-taker who volunteered to take it back, ably makes the case for why that is.  Alexia also believes that the reason Marc wants the blogging community to move on is a conflict of interest: to establish the ascendancy of the new hotness, TMC, natch.

Given the rate that TMC is scooping up EVE bloggers and potential bloggers into its writing pool lately, it’s not that far-fetched.

Here’s the thing. Well, a couple things. I’ve had a lot of private interaction via email and chat with ‘Alexia’ since being the only person to volunteer to save Evebloggers.com when he decided to quit EVE. Throughout those interactions, a not very good picture of ‘Alexia’s character has formed in my mind. Others have expressed, both privately and publicly, similar ‘reads’ of his character. This is why I added the caveat that no previous custodian could take it up again.

Evebloggers.com is not a glorious job. It is low profile, it is high effort, and if you’re doing a good job literally no one would notice. It is a lot like IT work in general. Therefore, I couldn’t simply say ‘yes, you are eager to get on with things, here you go!’. Also, the hand off consists of substantially more than declaring my successor and said successor then sending out an email once a month. It is a tedious and time consuming job, which is why I needed to pass it off in the first place. Ensuring that the new owner had the means to support the site, the time to care for it, and the ability to tend to it without personal bias are not arbitrary constraints. They are a direct reflection of what is required for the job.

Of course, this wouldn’t be the first or last time Ripard speaks out on things without talking to anyone, doing basic fact checking, or generally behaving like anything but an EVE version of Rush Limbaugh. For someone who offers advice to others on how to behave with professionalism and grace, Ripard himself falls far short. But I digress.

The concept of corralling the EVE community all on to one site is about as delusional as it gets. We’re talking about EVE here, a sandbox game, a game that transcends the client it is played in every single day. However, there will never be an end to people attempting to do so, apparently. Just as there is a never ending supply of ‘Goonspiracy’ adherents in EVE, a never ending cry of ‘bias’ on TMC, a never ending supply of uninformed highsec residents who seek to change the game to suit their needs, a never ending supply of opinions, so on and so forth ad nauseam.

At the end of the day, I believe that we have all learned something from this experience. Well, everyone but Ripard, because he knows all anyways! I learned that the EVE community is, on the whole, a great and tumultuous collection of personalities, great and small, all of whom make EVE a great game to play and a great community to be a part of. I learned that there are such things as thankless tasks, and that if you don’t trumpet loudly how professional and graceful you are behaving you’ll never get credit for it. Thankfully, however, I also learned that I don’t really require anyones thanks, though I do appreciate it! I’m glad to have played my part in the community and my only regret is that I simply ran out of time to do all that I wanted to for it.

The Evebloggers.com domain is now in the process of being transferred to Cyberin. I wish him the best of luck and have every confidence that he will make a great custodian of Evebloggers.com and the EVE Blog Pack. I hope that you, too, can support him in his endeavors.

Marc out~

 

Keen, with whom I find myself agreeing on a disturbingly regular basis these days, had a post up a few days back commenting on one of Mark Kern's many pronouncements. Mark Kern's the man behind the soon-come MMOFPS Firefall, which I mentioned briefly last month and which J3w3l has covered extensively throughout its patchy beta progress, most recently here where she explains, as the game heads into Open Beta on July 9th, why she likes it.

Someone mention a Road-map?

Mark Kern's a busy man, what with heading Red5 Studios as they bring their big project to market but he still finds time to pen a series of columns for MMORPG.com, telling us How MMOs Should Be. (That's not the name of it, by the way, although it might as well be). The diatribe Keen quotes was actually entitled "Have MMOs Become Too Easy?", to which semi-rhetorical question the author's answer appears to be "Yes, when they aren't called Firefall".

His latest observation is the rather less snappy "Up to 90% of MMO Real Estate is Wasted". Again, this is apparently an indisputable fact, at least for MMOs other than his own. The ever-frisky MMORPG.com commenteriat takes issue with Mark over a number of details, such as where he gets his figures from, why he doesn't seem to have noticed some major development trends that could be said to invalidate most of his arguments and, most forcefully, why he gets to advertise his upcoming game for free in what's supposed to be an objective feature on game design.

I liked what little I saw of Firefall and I plan on giving it a run when it soft-launches this week. Like many commenters, however, I will be frikkin' amazed if it turns out to be the answer to all the myriad problems against which Mark Kern rails. Problems that, while they may have some basis in reality, arguably exist more in the imaginations of people who no longer play certain MMOs than in the day-to-day experience of those still enjoying them.

Is it me or does that merc look kinda jaded?

I played Everquest yesterday. Not some grey-market, time-warp Golden Age version but the current build. Now fourteen years old, EQ has released 19 Expansions giving Norrath something upward of 375 zones, a handful of which are "Hot". Recently, after more than a year of living with the same Hot Zones, someone decide to swap in a great new set. Since it was also a double XP extravaganza for the 4th of July weekend I thought I'd come home for the holidays.

Looking to ease back in gently after a few months away I picked a mid-30s Enchanter from my large pack of characters. I spoke to Franklin Teek in Plane of Knowledge and he recommended Dawnshroud Peaks, an old favorite where I must have spent many hundreds of hours over the years. I claimed my clockwork merc, summoned my idiot animation and set out for adventure.

It was a simple enough run, first by book to The Nexus then through Netherbian Lair to Dawnshroud. I'd been tasked with killing five Sambata Tribal Gatherers, harmless, inoffensive primitives that, in the way of MMOs in general and EQ in particular, needed to die for no reason other than someone was paying me. All our characters are sociopaths, that's the long and the short of it.

Hi. I'm Franklin Teek. I pick someone's name out of a hat and then you go kill them. It's all quite official. You let me worry about the paperwork.

I'd forgotten where they were, so on emerging from the tunnels of Netherbian Lair I was standing aimlessly looking around, when I spotted a lightcrawler and thought I'd warm up on him. He clearly had the same idea because a second later my entire screen had gone black. I'd forgotten lightcrawlers blind, which is why, in the old days, we stayed well away from them.

When a mob blinds you in EQ it's not just some flickering color filter around the edge of your screen and a missed auto-attack. Oh no, your entire monitor screen goes black and stays that way until the blindness wears off, which might not be so bad if lightcrawlers couldn't reapply it indefinitely.

As anyone who hasn't played since 2004 will tell you, EQ really has been dumbed down to the point that any toddler can level to cap in a couple of days so I didn't actually die. My animation finished the crawler while my merc kept us both alive (if an animated sword and shield can be said to be alive in the first place).

So, some monkeys died. Just look at that upgrade!

Suitably chastened I set off looking for Sambatas. After a run-in with a Zelniak (alright, I started that one) and a detour into Sanctus Seru to shake the half-dozen or so wolves that fancied a late afternoon Gnome snack I eventually found the Sambata pottering around their rocks outside the entrance to Maiden's Eye. Moving to pull one to what looked like a safe spot I triggered an invisible blood starved wolf, who chased me across the nearby zone line and then hung around outside in case I came back.

Eventually I got set up and successfully killed my five hapless monkey-men. Start to finish it had taken the best part of an hour to travel three zones from Plane of Knowledge and kill seven creatures. Was it easier than Back In The Day? No it flipping well was not. It was exactly the same - time-consuming, awkward, risky and enormously enjoyable. What had changed was the reward for all that effort. Because it was a Hot Zone I netted 8 plat and an extremely nice cloak.

One. More. Level. That's all I ask!

Flushed with this success I then made a foolish and rash decision to do something similar with my highest-level character, an 84th Beastlord. The level 80 Hot Zone is Hills of Shade, another Luclin zone but one largely unknown to me, my only previous acquaintance with it being a handful of nervy runs to a camp in the middle for a FedEx mission I did for a while a year or two back, during my last serious attempt to hit the then-level cap of 85.

I'll spare the details but more than an hour later I logged off having killed precisely nothing, gained exactly no xp, coin or loot and yet counting myself lucky things had gone as well as that. Everquest may not  be "I lost my level and my corpse and everything on it" hard these days but don't let anyone tell you that means it's easy.

Was it fun? Hell yes. Exasperating, frustrating, infuriating, irritating but always fun. Otherwise, after nearly a decade and a half, why would it still have seventeen servers running and general chat channels that scroll so fast you struggle to follow the conversation and fight at the same time?

Oh, and all that wasted real estate? Where I come from we call that a world.

Getting into capital construction has been humbling with showing me how much I've forgotten over the almost 7 years I've been playing this game.

I was training up my alt Korneilia to start the production and I thought I would be set after Production Efficiency V and Capital Construction I. Then remembered as that neared completion that the number of factories you can control is dependent on Mass Production and Advanced Mass Production skills. Sigh. Add those to the skill queue.

So I finished the first set of skills and got Mass Production to III and training IV and I figure that four factories is enough to get started, right? So I go to my selected production station with blueprints and minerals in hand and start setting up the jobs. But only three would go in.

Strange, I thought, I should be able to start four.

I bring up the Science and Industry window and look at my jobs.

Why, there already is four jobs! What is that last one... a Burst? What the hell... What's the date on that thing?
I swear I don't remember ever inserting this Burst job four years ago. That's insane. Why was I building a Burst? What was I going to do with it? It wasn't like I was learning manufacturing in 2009; I built, ran, made a fortune from, and closed a Tech II manufacturing project over a year before that. The only thing I can think off since that's around Korneilia's creation date is that I was doing it as a tutorial mission or something as I was working through the new player experience at the time.

My point is that Eve, being a simulation rather than a plain game, simulates real life very well.

I've worked at the same company for 11 years and the first 8 years I did nothing but Microsoft SQL development on the same software product. I knew the database and views and stored procedures and business rules inside and out, better than almost everyone else in the company. Then I had career change through some fortuitous events and practically started over as a .Net in C# working on a new product at the same company. I was a rocky ride at first having to go from subject matter expert to newbie, but I've grown into it and I'm doing fine now.

But every once in a while I get asked a database question about the old product or some new development and as time passes it gets harder and harder to recall the old subject matter. Sure, after a bit of digging it comes back, but sometimes I just have to give up and say "I don't know" or "I don't remember". Its humbling. Life moves on.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the Blog Banter question that Jester inspired I see more evidence that 'Eve is Real', to borrow a cliche. In real life you have to continually train and learn and investigate to remain at the top of any field, and know when to change fields to keep you happy and engaged. If you don't you become the albatross or dinosaur and get laid off. In Eve, you have to continually learn and experiment and keep up on changes in the areas you participate in or you get left behind by the crowd, outsold or outproduced or simply outmaneuvered and blown up.

And sometimes, when you look back, you'll see something and say to yourself "I don't even remember ever doing that."

And now, an EVE term definition for the newer EVE players.  You vets can move on to the next post.

I haven't done a definition in a while, because there hasn't been a common basic question asked frequently lately.  Or at least there hadn't until I started seeing some confusion about what "null-sec" means.  So, very briefly, a definition of null-sec.

High-sec is defined as space in EVE that has a security status of 0.5 to 1.0.  This is the so-called "safe" space, which of course isn't safe at all.  It's just the space that happens to be patrolled by CONCORD.  Low-sec is defined as space in EVE that has a security status of 0.1 to 0.4.  That leaves null-sec, which is defined as space with a security status of "less than 0.1".

Glanced at in-game and in the broadest possible terms, every part of null-sec looks identical to every other part.  But there are lots and lots of differences between the various types of null-sec.  In fact, you could say that there are almost as many types of null-sec as there are the rest of types of space in EVE.

In the broadest terms, null-sec is usually judged by regions and there are actually three types of regions in null-sec:

• the so-called "NPC null-sec";
• "sov null-sec"; and,
• null-sec that's actually a mix of the two.

And within these broad strokes, there are various "qualities" of null-sec, as well as null-sec which is the home space of various types of NPC pirates.  As usual, let's cover each in turn.

NPC null-sec is defined as a null-sec region that is not conquerable by players.  On the EVE influence map, these regions are easy to spot for the large black blotches they introduce into the middle of conquerable regions.  There are six fully NPC 0.0 regions in the game: Syndicate and Outer Ring in the west; Stain in the south; Curse in the southeast; Great Wildlands in the east; and Venal in the north.  Of these, only Syndicate is truly independent NPC null-sec, with multiple NPC corps operating there.  Outer Ring is owned by the ORE mining consortium, Stain is the home of the Sansha Nation, Curse is owned by the Angel Cartel, Great Wildlands is owned by the Thukker Tribe, and Venal is the home of the Guristas pirate faction.  Because the stations in NPC 0.0 cannot be conquered by players, anyone can dock there.  This makes NPC 0.0 a very common first destination for corps or alliances wanting to try out null-sec life.

The largest "black blotch" on the map is in the north and is made up of three regions: UUA-F4, A821-A, and J7HZ-F.  These three regions comprise Jove space, a part of New Eden that in the game's lore is owned by EVE's mysterious "fifth race".  In practice, Jove space is actually owned by CCP and is used for occasional testing and for the annual EVE Alliance Tournament and the occasional open PvP tournament.  It is otherwise not generally possible to visit these three regions.

On the other end of the spectrum is sovereign null-sec.  These are null-sec regions that can be fully conquered by players and exist primarily in deep null-sec.  Most of null-sec is sov null-sec and each part of sov null-sec is harassed by some group of NPC pirates.  In the southwest, it's Blood Raiders.  As you move north from there, the Serpentis pirate faction rats become common.  In the northwest and north, it's the Guristas pirate faction.  In the northeast and east, it's rogue drones.  In the far east, it's the Angel Cartel through much of the southeast until it borders on Sansha Nation space in the far south.  In sov null-sec, these NPC rat types will define the types of rats one will encounter in the sites and anomalies that will appear in that area of space, with one exception: rogue drone sites will appear in much of New Eden outside of drone space.  In sov null-sec space, each system can have a maximum of one station, and only those designated by the conquering alliance may dock there.  Attempts to dock by non-designated parties will fail.

In between these two types of space is mixed null-sec, which are regions that feature both NPC space and sov space.  Delve (in the southwest) is the most famous of these regions, and countless invasions of Delve have been launched from the few NPC stations in the east part of this region owned by Blood Raiders.  Other mixed regions include Fountain in the west (with NPC stations owned by the Serpentis pirate faction) and Pure Blind (with NPC stations owned by both the Sisters of EVE and Mordu's Legion).  Mixed space exists mainly to give those pirate factions that don't own an entire region a few stations in null-sec.  The purpose to these stations is primarily to give players the opportunity to run missions for these factions if they wish to.  However, like sov null-sec, sites and anomalies in these regions will feature the types of rats based nearby.  Players friendly to the owner of conquerable stations in mixed null-sec may dock there.  Otherwise, they will have to dock in the NPC stations in these mixed regions.

One point of confusion for new players: if the Guristas hate you (because you've killed countless numbers of their ships in missions), won't they prevent you from docking in a Guristas station null-sec?  The answer is no.  Killing Guristas ships makes you hostile to the Guristas "corporation", but not to the Guristas "faction", which actually owns the station.  This is a very non-intuitive distinction for the new player, but that's how these stations operate.

Each null-sec system has a security status that actually drops from 0.0 to -1.0.  Systems with lower security status, -1.0 especially, are more valuable than systems with "merely" 0.0 sec status.  In these lower sec status systems, higher numbers of higher quality sites will be found naturally.  In addition, the rats found in asteroid belts will also be higher quality rats with higher bounties.  Null-sec systems that can be conquered, either in sov regions or mixed regions, can be "upgraded" so that even more of these very valuable sites can be found.  There are many constellations in null-sec space where thousands of NPC rats are killed daily to provide the day-to-day working income for pilots living there.

You'll generally find four types of entities living in null-sec full time:

• major sovereignty-holding alliances of 2500 or more pilots;
• minor sovereignty-holding alliances of 1500 or pilots or so;
• renters of various sizes; and,
• independent null-sec dwelling alliances of various sizes.

If you've played EVE Online for any amount of time, you'll have heard of the major sov-holding alliances: these are the alliances whose names are sprayed across the influence map in 12- or 14- or 18-point font.  These alliances have large sweeping territories.  Around them are the smaller sov-holding alliances, usually represented in 6- or 8-point type.  If they are surrounded by a larger neighbor, such as Circle-Of-Two is surrounded by Goonswarm in the north, you can assume that they hold their space at the pleasure of their larger neighbor.  In the south, there are a few independent smaller alliances, but over the last few years, these have been hunted into extinction.  They exist in the regions of Catch and Providence primarily because these areas of space have very poor sec status and few natural resources.  The larger alliances therefore have a tendency to leave these regions alone... unless they get bored.

More and more common in null-sec is the concept of the renter, alliances of various sizes that usually do not appear on the influence map and instead are set blue by the actual owners of the space in which they live.  This gives these alliances the right to dock in their landlord's stations.  Renters are usually given a block of systems, or perhaps a constellation or two, and are beholden to their masters to farm sites, mine minerals, and otherwise exploit the natural resources in the area.  At the end of each month, the renters then pay fees set by the landlord for access to the space.  Failure to pay is an invitation to be evicted.  Renters are usually also required to form up when the landlord comes under attack.

There are a few independent alliances living in null-sec, usually not holding sovereignty.  Rote Kapelle, my own alliance, is an example of this type.  But of course Pandemic Legion is another (frequent) example.  Often, PL chooses not to hold space or stations, operating completely independently of the various sov alliances.  These independents are usually content to prey on their larger neighbors or act as wild-cards in major sovereignty fights.

Finally, in addition to missions, sites, anomalies, and other active sources of income, each region and system in null-sec has a variety of moons that can be mined for "moon goo" which are the base raw materials for part of the T2 manufacturing process.  These moons vary wildly from region to region, and the most valuable moons are of course jealously guarded by those who hold them.  Even the exact locations of valuable moons is a well-kept secret and it's usually safest not to trust any public information about what this or that moon contains, as it's in the best interests of the holders to provide misinformation on public sites about their sources of income.  If you want to know what a moon contains, you'll usually have to get out some moon survey probes and check them for yourself.  But moons are quite often the motivating force behind the wars between large sov-holding null-sec alliances...

Occasionally on Sundays, I will be defining a common EVE term for those who might not have heard it.  If you have a suggestion for such a term, please drop it into the comments.

When EA launched its online-only, always-connected SimCity game earlier this year, they insisted that the game just wouldn't work without the ability to let the cloud have access to all the game's data and computations. But if that's the case, then why is EA asking people about the possibility of an offline SimCity game?

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If you’ve been keeping an eye on social media over the last week, you may have noticed Alexia Morgan (@Alexia_Morgan) talking about a new initiative for current and aspiring EVE bloggers. Titled The EVE Online Blogging Community – A Network of EVE Online Blogs, this new site is intended to take over for the incumbent EVE Online Bloggers Portal.

I wanted to catch up with Alexia to find out some more information about the site and what he hopes it will provide the EVE community.

 

Winterblink: Maybe to start off, give us the sales pitch. A blog of blogs seems to be a bizarre concept to some.

Alexia Morgan: I hadn’t called it that before – a ‘blog of blogs’ is a great way of putting it. I had just seen it as a portal for Eve Online bloggers, allowing them to access blogs and resources from the one site. It’s still a work in progress, but there’s going to be integrated blogs that will be published and shared along with the sharing of independent blogs and their updates. There’s also Groups and Forums for sharing of common interests, activities and even focused discussions around individual blogs. The whole idea is to build up a single community focused on Eve Online bloggers and helping them communicate and share with each other, while presenting it to the world, inviting more to get involved.

Winterblink: You make the distinction between integrated and independent blogs. I’m assuming that means that you will not only host blogs for people who don’t have one of their own, and support some sort of aggregation of blogs that are privately hosted, correct?

Alexia Morgan: That’s right. I know there’s been some resistance in the community at the distinction, but I’m not sure why. I’ve had some independent bloggers complain that they don’t want to be known as ‘independent’ bloggers, compared to those blogs built and published within the portal. While I understand their issues, I don’t accept them. There’s no easy way of putting together internal and external blogs on the one site. Internal blogs are auto-published to the front page, while the external blogs are auto-displayed via RSS feeds. You can’t please everyone all the time, however, so I don’t bother trying. But yes, Eve Blogs is for all bloggers, and it’s doing its best to share everyone’s blogs that want to be involved.

Winterblink: Being an independent EVE blogger myself, I enjoy the freedom that a privately hosted solution can bring, especially from a technical perspective. What kind of features or services will your site provide that you think are competitive to an independent blog?

Alexia Morgan: Well, firstly, independent blogs don’t have integrated forums. Depending on their blogging platform, they can certainly set it up, but it’s a mighty pain in the butt to do so. I’ve already done it, so it’s available to integrated blogs without them needing to worry about it themselves. They just ‘plug in’ and start using.

Secondly, independent bloggers are ‘mostly’ clueless about their site security and administration. One of the first things I did was setup extensive security hardening protocols for the site, to mitigate risks of hacking and losing content. I’ve also got all content being auto-backed up every three days, so if there’s any issues I can restore from backup. The security and continuity of members and their content has to be an important element of this, and it is, and so I’ve done what most independent bloggers never do.

And finally, I am the administrator of the site, so that if any integrated blog owners have issues, they have me to help them with it.

I think that overall, it’s the ease of setup and administration of an integrated blog compared to having to setup a blog yourself that will make this an attractive and competitive option for new bloggers that don’t know how to get started, and don’t have the time or interest in learning. I suspect that there are many Eve Online players out there who would just LOVE to blog about their experiences, but are hampered by the daunting prospect of having to set up a blog and maintain it, when they know nothing about it, and all they want to do is start writing. I help them get over that hurdle.

Winterblink: I’ve not seen anything yet on your site with regards to content ownership policies; for example, sites such as Facebook and others infer ownership and usage rights to images uploaded to their service. After having a taste of how magical life as an EVE blogger can be, some users may decide to branch off and go independent. Is their content considered theirs with all rights reserved by the authors, and will their content be made available to them freely if they decide to move on?

Alexia Morgan: When it became clear that I wouldn’t be taking over evebloggers.com, I knew I had to create something to take over the responsibility that evebloggers.com had. I built that site, so I knew it was based on RSS feed outputs provided by Google Reader – which was completely shutting down on July 1st. The result would be that evebloggers.com would no longer be providing its service. So I worked hard to build a replacement, which was eveblogs.net. The site went live the same day Google Reader shut down (five days ago now), and has been a work in progress since then as of this interview, I haven’t had a chance to formalise the content ownership policies yet, but this is a good time to let it be known what those policies are going to be.

All blog content provided by any individual is theirs, and theirs alone. This includes text and images. There will be restrictions, however, on the size of individual files uploaded as part of their blog, so the use of external image hosting sites will be encouraged. There will be backup plugins in place that can automate backups of individual content and sent to their email for their own personal storage. At any time, blog owners have the right and the availability of exporting their content to be used on an independent blog, and to delete their internal, integrated blog. There will be no restrictions with this.

Winterblink: There is some element of controversy behind this site, specifically with regards to evebloggers.com. Can you give us your own perspective on what happened there, and why you ended up having to produce a whole new site instead of updating the old one?

Alexia Morgan: Now there’s a contentious issue, and one which I already discussed in detail here (http://eveblogs.net/tours/2013/06/the-evebloggers-com-conspiracy/). However, the quick summary is that I gave evebloggers.com to Marc Scaurus back in 2012, when I wanted to pass the mantle to someone else who would have the same passion for it as me, so that I could focus on some RL distractions. He gave me the impression he was dedicated, so I transitioned ownership over to him. But he did nothing with it, and then joined themittani.com as senior editor. He also took ownership of the Eve Blog Pack, and did nothing with that as well. And then, this year, when the evebloggers.com domain was coming up for renewal, he announced that he was letting go of it and would give it to someone who had never managed it before. Since I was the only one who had managed it before, it was clear he didn’t want me taking it over again, even though I had attempted to contact him numerous times over the past year to take it back, when I saw he was doing nothing with it.

Based on his actions, his words, and the background of his involvement with themittani.com, I came up with the conspiracy theory that themittani.com wanted to destroy the Eve blogging community, so that they could drive all traffic to their domain. It’s only a theory because there’s no direct evidence, but if there’s enough dots then a pretty clear picture can be seen.

So, because he wasn’t interested in giving it back to me, I had to create a new site to take on the responsibility of what I had started. I was extremely disappointed that he was engaging in actions to try and bring down the community portal, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from continuing what I’d started in 2009.

Winterblink: You recently blogged that you have a “change of focus” in mind for your site already, which seems pretty early in a site’s lifecycle to happen. Can you describe what the new focus is all about, and why you chose to do this so soon?

Alexia Morgan: There was a lot of controversy about the ‘internal and external’ labelling of Eve blogs and bloggers in the context of the community portal. Some bloggers felt that such labelling was actually ‘dividing’ the community by considering them as separate. I thought it was ironic that this was coming from an independent blogger who wanted to remain independent, while complaining about someone else commenting on their independence. As I said in a comment on their post, “I’m hearing the cries of independent bloggers who don’t want to be labelled as independent, even though they are, and who want to be known as members of the community, even though they’re struggling to remain separate.” It was sarcasm, trying to present the irony in their arguments. But they didn’t see it. And it’s probably silly of me to expect those who are engaging in irony to actually see it.

But a number of bloggers are talking about the same thing. The controversy is real and seems to enrage them. It’s not beneficial to me to try and bring a community together by enraging them. So the ‘change of focus’ is to, put it bluntly, tell them to go screw themselves. If they want to remain independent, they can. If they want to struggle against the concept of community, they can. If they think creating ‘competition’ amongst various community sites or blogs is a good thing, they’re entitled to their opinions. What’s left for me to do is simply focus on those that want to be in the community and support the community. Those that don’t, so be it.

However, I’m pondering on whether or not I should allow independent bloggers to use Eve Blogs Network to promote their blogs if they’re adamantly against the idea. If you’re an independent blogger wanting to have your blog listed on a community portal, I think it’s a bit ripe to sign up to have your blog updates presented on the portal, and then start blogging about your resistance to the concept of community and a community portal.

So the change of focus is going to take all this into consideration as I move forward. Community is community – those that don’t support it, well, you’re obviously not into community and shouldn’t be part of it. Rotten apples, and all that. I’ll instead focus on those that do support it and want to be part of it.

I think that this is going to bring a lot of ‘new blood’ into the scene, and I’m completely in favour of that.

Winterblink: Thanks for taking the time to speak to me about the new site, Alexia.

 

If anyone out there is interested in trying their hand at being the “new blood” of EVE bloggers, feel free to go to eveblogs.net/register to sign up.

I’m happy to say that Evebloggers and the EVE Blog Pack have a new owner in the form of Cyberin. Cyberin has been around a long time and has the resources (both in the form of webhosting and time) to do the job. I want to thank everyone who threw their hat in the ring – despite the naysaying of some and the generally negative response I received some months ago, more than a few people stepped up to the plate when the time came for it. I’m very pleased with the community as a whole.

There will be some technical hurdles to get over. The death of Google Reader effectively killed the feeds that powered Evebloggers and the Pack. However, I did make sure to back those feeds up into an XML file which has already been passed on to Cyberin. Cyberin also has full access to the sites. In an effort to transfer the domain and all files associated, backups have begun. This means that, if you are one of the faithful few that follow Evebloggers.com or the EVE Blog Pack on a regular basis, service will be somewhat interrupted for another day or two. When the dust settles, however, everything should be in place as it was before.

Thanks again to everybody! Evebloggers is dead, Long Live Evebloggers!

 

Everybody should be aware that there was a big-ass battle today in Z9PP-H in Fountain. It was all over the Twitters and forums and such. It was a battle that kept escalating for nearly six hours, at one point reaching 2200 pilots in system.

I was made aware of the battle about 4 hours into it. I figured it probably wasn't going to last much longer, and since it was three jumps from B-DBYQ, figured getting to it would be difficult. Running the gauntlet of gate camps, plus 10% TiDi. So I watched for awhile on Mad Ani's Twitch stream. He had 5000 viewers at one point and made it to the Twitch main page.

Z9PP-H was a fight that was reverberating across the gaming sphere. It was an Asakai level event, and it was drawing a lot of good attention to CCP and to EVE Online.

After about 45 minutes of watching the stream, I decided I needed to try to make it to the fight. Before logging in, I figured my best bet getting there unscathed would be in a stealth bomber. I'd bring a torp bomber. It would do good damage, if I got there alive. So I logged in. I needn't have bothered worrying about how to get to Z9PP, because there was a reinforcement fleet forming up. So I hopped into a Megathron and waited.

While formed up on a titan for a bridge, news came down that the Z9PP node had crashed. I tweeted:

Z9PP crashes. #tweetfleet

I just assumed that the node crashed due to load. Z9PP was not reinforced. These battles are usually organic, so there's really no predicting when they'll happen, thus submitting for reinforcement is usually a crap-shoot. Multiple timers are happening daily; most result in small fights; some result in no fight at all. You never really know if you're going to need it, and nobody wants to request reinforcement unnecessarily.

CCP, a lot of whom where watching the battle unfold from Iceland, decided to try to reinforce Z9PP live. Unfortunately, they made a boo-boo, as CCP Explorer admitted via Twitter:

Human error, forum thread incoming; we are very sorry for this mistake :(

I felt that was a brave admission. CCP could have just stayed mute and let everybody assume a load crash, but instead owned up to their mistake immediately. I wrote in their defense:

I give CCP credit for admitting human error. They could've said nothing and let us assume it crashed due to load.

As it turns out, they couldn't stay quiet, let us assume a load crash. The server message that appeared on the screens of those in Z9PP explained away the root cause of the crash:
CCP were trying to remap the node. And, well, they fucked up. Not only did they commit a spelling crime, they crashed their biggest bit of PR since Asakai. People don't decide to try EVE Online because of radial menus, they decide to try EVE when they see and hear of battles like this on the internet. Obviously CCP did not crash the node on purpose; CCP is not in the habit of shooting itself in the foot. (Besides, it is well-known that CCP will only crash a server to benefit the CFC, in this case it benefited Test Alliance. Obvious mistake is obvious.)

The tinfoiling is amusing as heck. Not for a minute do I suspect any foul play by CCP. They were simply trying to improve the battle, and they accidentally fucked it all up. Hell, I was going to poke fun at the tinfoil myself by photoshopping CCP Dolan turning off a server. (BTW, do not Google image search Michael BoltonIII, there are some very disturbing images out there of CCP Dolan, of which this is one [nsfw]. Yes, I am sharing my pain with you.)

Before CCP could get the full information into the public sphere, outrage was happening. Some comments by Darius Johnson were immediately interesting. He used to be CCP Sreegs, so he has some inside knowledge into how things work:

(6:58:56 PM) darius_johnson: you know you can't do that by mistake right?
(6:59:07 PM) darius_johnson: like it's not something you just do by misclicking

And then Mittens pinged the coalition:

Alright kids, that's the second time a hot node remapping has saved TEST in a fight. TEST has been ordered not to log back in, so they got away clean instead of losing their entire capfleet. We're going to grit our teeth and reach for our flaying knives, for now stay active in fleet until we figure out what just happened.

Needless to say, I am quite displeased, but I guess we'll just have to sate ourselves with 300+ BS kills, 30+ carrier kills, and fury. That was a fight bigger than Asakai, and CCP just ... stopped it.

*** This was a broadcast from the_mittani to all-all at 2013-07-04 22:55:06.751276 EVE, replies are not monitored ***

Even Montolio was annoyed (even though Test Alliance benefited):

This is fucked up CCP. I don't care if my side benefited this time, you've been doing shit like this the entire war and messing up the natural course of events for all sides.

You need to have some serious reviews to prevent these problems from impacting the sandbox gameplay you tout as a core feature.

Not long afterwards, CCP published their explanation of what went wrong:

We’d first like to explain the situation, and what exactly has happened so far.

Owing to the heavy load in Z9PP-H, caused by a fleet flight involving 2200+ pilots deeply embroiled in the Fountain War, the decision was made to remap all other systems away from the node on which Z9PP-H was located in order to improve responsiveness and playability. We were later than we wanted to be to try to reinforce the node (obviously) since it was a more organic-type battle without a fleet fight notification. Once we fully assessed the situation and what was at play, we figured it was time to go for it and the remap in preparation of what was set to be "Asakai 2.0".

This was put into play at 22:14 UTC, however due to an error in communication, all systems including Z9PP-H itself were moved from the node, which caused everyone who was in the system and was involved in the ongoing fleet fight to be disconnected from Tranquility.

The system of Z9PP-H was brought back online and made accessible as fast as possible, however we realize that the mass disconnect of everyone involved in the fight means that ships are potentially saved by their pilots not logging back in once they have been disconnected, or are lost due to other unforeseen consequences of the disconnect.

All pilots involved have our sincerest apologies for this error, and we are currently looking to review our policy of action in these types of situation to ensure that this is not repeated.

C'est la vie. Very unfortunate turn of events. There's no point dwelling on it too much, other than to make sure CCP implements some procedures to ensure that it never happens again. They screwed themselves as much as they screwed the players in Z9PP that day. This is going to be a bit of a black eye in the press for CCP, some press they'd rather not have.

So the war in Fountain will continue on. It could have very well ended today. Test Alliance were already down 300 battleships and 30 carriers. They had another 70+ carriers on field at very great risk of being lost. Many more battleships as well. If this fight had carried on to its expected conclusion, Test would have been decimated. Even if they could have afforded such a devastating loss, replacing that number of ships and getting them to the front line quickly? Crazy difficult. Replacing 100 carriers on short notice? Exceptionally difficult. Replacing 400 or so battleships? No small task. Test's ability to defend Fountain in the short-term would have been severely hampered.

The day wasn't a total loss. I did get this sweet killmail on the way over to Z9PP. Missed the big battle, but sometimes things still turn up roses..

A Circle-Of-Two Titan pilot tells his tale of mistakes, luck, and brown pants.

"Multiple, independent blogs calling themselves a community and using blogrolls and blog rings is really old fashioned. This once-popular method of trying to create a community of individual blogs seems so old-fashioned now, and I believe its' time is over."

Alexia Morgan, November 2012

Right now I'm glad I'm just someone who writes a lot about EVE Online and not an actual EVE blogger.  Maybe that standing will allow me to hide from the upcoming wars over those who wish to control the traffic and the hits so many pursue.

The current fight is over the status of evebloggers.com.  The popular aggregator of EVE blogs is down, according to some, because Marc Scaurus, acting at the behest of The Mittani, wishes to drive traffic to TheMittani.com.  Marc has posted that he has six people willing to take over the site, although I don't know how many of them were aware that the blog feed would break when Google finally killed Google Reader.  Well, I guess some people will believe anything as long as anti-Goon hatred is added to the mix.

I think the big issue is that Marc wants to hand both the reigns of evebloggers.com and the EVE Blog Pack to someone with a proven history of sticking with the blogging community.  Alexia Morgan, someone who wishes to become a leader, if not THE leader, doesn't like those conditions.  And I don't blame Alexia, because those conditions excluded Alexia from taking over those duties.

I did a quick background check of Alexia.  That name is associated with a blog, Punishment, that was very active from 4 January 2009 to 10 January 2010, went dark for 17 months until the last six posts were made between 19 May 2011 - 10 September 2011.  Alexia then took another year break from blogging before creating a new blog, Touring New Eden, in November 2012.

In November, Alexia came up with the idea that the EVE blogosphere needed to change.

"Back in.... gee, I don't know - a long time ago! I created www.evebloggers.com to bring together all the Eve Online bloggers under a common banner, so the Eve Online Bloggers Portal came into existence. It successfully aggregated blog posts by all active Eve Online bloggers, as well as podcasts, YouTube videos, and even related images on Flickr.

"It was so successful that it's still recognised today as a leading method of keeping up to date with Eve Online blogs.

"But that was SO 'last decade'.
"Eve blogging is changing, and that's been very obvious to me. It needs to change, it needs to evolve with these changing times we're living in."

Alexia's vision is to create a community site to host all the "blogs".

"All 'blogs', however, will be subdomains of the main community site, to promote the community. Once it's well established, I will probably allow integration of custom domains to be integrated into the community site, so that members can have www.mydomain.com while still using the communitysite.net features as their backend. But that will be a feature enabled down the road.

"It's a community site, and so it's going to have a very active presence which is likely to require various levels of support. There will be issues with new memberships, with profile and blog setups, or with various site functionality. All issues will need to be resolved in a timely manner. There will need to be moderators of the forums, even administrators of the site to help out with support issues."

And of course, Alexia thought about resistance from bloggers.

"I know there's going to be quite a few current bloggers who are so ingrained into being independent that they're not going to support this with their involvement, but I have to ask - if you really want a community that's going to take us into the next few years, why wouldn't you get involved in helping to build it?

"I can't do it alone, and I don't want to. I can't build a community by myself - that's not what a community is about. I need prominent Eve bloggers - all of them! - to get involved, to move away from their old-fashioned, independent blogs and set up a presence for themselves in this new community site."

The idea didn't get a lot of reaction and seemed to die at the end of November, and with it Alexia's posting.

Well, Alexia has the site up and running.  I don't have to worry about this because, since I'm not an EVE blogger, I couldn't participant even if I wanted to.  Which I don't.  I think anyone joining it for the purposes of blogging is making a poor long term decision.  The Eve blogosphere has seen hosting sites before go out of business overnight with no warning.  But I linked it anyway because I can always be wrong.  Besides, since I have no dog in this fight, I can just grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.

A major battle in 3WE-KY in Fountain over a trapped S2N Gila gang escalates into a massive, deliciously pointless brawl.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	39.8	18,037	-4.5
2	2	Guild Wars 2	15.6	7,050	-2.6
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	12.0	5,418	-2.9
4	4	EVE Online	5.6	2,513	-0.9
5	5	Neverwinter	5.2	2,366	-0.6
6	7	Aion	4.4	1,997	+20.7
7	6	RIFT	4.3	1,948	-9.9
8	8	Tera	3.4	1,557	+2.3
9	9	Planetside 2	2.8	1,249	-0.1
10	10	Lord of the Rings Online	2.7	1,219	+10.0
11	11	Star Trek Online	2.2	980	+4.3
12	--	Maple Story	2.1	943	+2.6

 
The Xfire community saw a slight decline in the time it spent playing its 12 most popular MMORPGs.  The 2% decline basically occurred among the top games with no game experiencing a 10% or greater loss in play time.  Partially off-setting the decline were increases in the interest in Aion (20.7%) and Lord of the Rings Online (10%).

Another Week, Another Expansion - Last week saw the launch of Aion's latest expansion, Dark Betrayal.  Two new classes should have brought people to try the game, and it did, at least in the Xfire community.

Natural Decline - RIFT lead all games in the percentage of playing time declining from the previous Sunday.  The Trion product's decline after hitting a peak with the launch of the F2P version three weeks ago is natural.  The thing to watch is whether RIFT has attracted new fans or if the game will slowly drop off the list again.

Mid-Year List - I was curious to see how games have performed now that 2013 is half over so I put together a list of games ranked by the average Digital Dozen scores so far this year.  If a game was not on the list for a given week, it received a score of 0, even if the game had not yet launched.

Rank	2012 Rank	Game	Avg Score
1	1	World of Warcraft	39.3
2	2	Guild Wars 2	17.9
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	10.9
4	NR	Tera	5.6
5	4	Aion	4.7
6	5	EVE Online	4.6
7	NR	Planetside 2	3.0
8	8	Lord of The Rings Online	2.8
9	NR	Neverwinter	2.3
10	7	APB: Reloaded	1.9
11	6	Metin 2	1.5
12	NR	The War Z	1.3

218 Sov Systems just went neutral as the Nulli Secunda rental alliance and holding corp are disbanded.

Handing over to Kirith also makes me feel a little better as I pretty much snatched the then dormant Blog Banter out from under his nose by relaunching with BB27 in August 2011 off the back of his blogpost comparing and contrasting EVE Online with World of Tanks. This feels like the right decision to me.
I think Kirith's broad experience and maturity makes him the perfect man for the job. It is important that the Blog Banter tradition remains a grassroots community service and I think Kirith's experience and conduct shows he would continue to steer the good ship BB in the right direction.
Put simply, the guy is EVE royalty and an all-round solid fellow - leaving the Blog Banters in his hands takes much of the sting out of the decision for me.

Thanks for the kind words, Stan.

With that said and the hand off happening already, I want to assure everyone that the Banters will continue to operate much like they have under Stan's regime: every month I'll send out a call for posts on blogs about a topic that are due out a particular day, I'll compile the posts into a list, and then get a volunteer to make a summary (with a reward of a PLEX if all goes well). Why change what isn't broken, right?

So what happens next is that I have Canada Day this weekend and I'm off work next week (but not going anywhere other than day trips) so I will work on setting everything up for the next Banter which I plan to have go live in the middle of July. I'll be emailing those bloggers on the list next week with the topic.

If you have ideas for topics, feel free to email me at kkodachi@gmail.com or find me on Twitter: @KirithKodachi.

I am playing Scribblenauts Unlimited, which is good. I discovered today that the game does not have “beer” in its dictionary. It does, however, have “shoggoth” and “parantha.” Guided by American standards for what is acceptable in children’s entertainment, you can kill people with rocket launchers, but alcohol is edgy. (“Naked” is an acceptable adjective. It puts a big mosaic over the object.)

: Zubon

Selective Vocabulary is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Today's image is a bit of agitprop from Test Alliance. I like it. It's amusing. It's well-done. It's clever. And it's true.

The CFC has stalled. We've even lost ground in the last two weeks.

Our bridgehead has remained unchanged since about June 14. The systems we were given when Mistakes Were Made [O7M8] left Fountain, we've lost all of that territory, except for 4-EP. Granted, the rest of that territory was deep inside Fountain, so our ability to hold it was going to be dependent on our ability to push into Fountain fast and hard.

We did come out guns a'blazing that first week of the war. By June 15, we'd captured and solidified our bridgehead in Fountain. Since then, though, we've gone no further. We flipped EI-O0O last week, taking a jump bridge system from Test, but then Test flipped it back. Although the value of that system was lost, it remained a moral victory for Test & Pals.

Without further inroads into Fountain, we'd given up trying to defend those O7M8 systems we were gifted. Even so, more moral victories to Test. We gained those systems effortlessly, Test retook them effortlessly. But they have every reason to crow about taking them from us. If the situation were flip-flopped, we'd be crowing about it as well.

As for the R64 moon situation, I have no idea. CFC leadership isn't talking about it much. And it's impossible to track. There are no API calls to determine who is mining moons. So the whole back-and-forth about whether we still own twenty moons, or whether Test has since liberated most of them, all of that is in the realm of pure propaganda. Without knowing where all the R64 moons are in Fountain, without flying around and checking out who has POSes anchored above those moons, that entire situation will remain a hazy mystery.

All that said, the war is going splendidly from a "having fun" perspective. The war so far has been a blast. If Test had pulled a Raiden or White Noise, that would have been a terrible outcome. Sure, it would have been great strategically and economically, for the health and longevity of the CFC. But it would have been a terrible, miserable bit of sovereignty grinding, that would not have been compelling gameplay. Much better that each side has lots of people to shoot at.

This will probably be my last post on the war for awhile. Even though big battles are still raging, there's just not much to write about. Lots of fighting, but not much to show for it. Seems to me, some major event, some significant flip of sovereignty is going to have to occur before there is anything interesting to tell. That might be 4-EP12 in a few days.

Kudos where they are deserved. Test & Pals are doing an excellent job turning the war into a quagmire for us.


Read more about the War in Fountain:
The War in Fountain - Battle For J5A-IX
The War in Fountain - What Are The Russians Doing For Us?
The War in Fountain - Fweddit Chooses a Side
The War in Fountain - Test Alliance Has a Bad Day
The War in Fountain - The Depth of Gameplay In Sovereignty Wars
War Poster - J5A-IX
The War in Fountain - The Importance of J5A-IX
The War in Fountain - Divide and Conquer
The War in Fountain - Gnrrr. History.
The War in Fountain - Cracking Down on Pornfleets
The War in Fountain - Blueballing
The War in Fountain - Old Montolio Had A Jump Bridge, EI-, EI-O0O
The War in Fountain - Hemorrhaging ISK
The War in Fountain - Fish or Cut Bait

So many plans, so many good intentions. So many projects. So many new MMOs.

So what happened?

• Project 5/5 - That was the Syp-inspired notion of playing ten unfamiliar MMOs in ten days. Several other bloggers picked up on it and there were a few posts. It looks as though Syp ran out of steam at seven. Did anyone actually play and blog about all ten? Not being able to see myself finding the time to join in I whimsically suggested I might try five then promptly forgot about the whole thing. As if I ever intended to go through with it in the first place... Then again, I've almost certainly played at least five new-to-me MMOs already just in the normal run of things.

• Playing GW2 Properly - As in leveling a character to 80 via a linear progression through contiguous maps. That lasted about two weeks until I discovered Asurans don't really have a clear line of progress to follow. They have Rata Sum, Metrica Province and Brisban Wildlands and then the map runs out. My new ranger decided the next logical step would be Lornar's Pass. He completed that and moved on to Dredgehaunt Cliffs but about halfway through one of the Living Story events blew in. He ended up first in Lion's Arch, then in Southsun and eventually, somehow, in the Borderlands upholding the Honor of the Yak in WvW. By then the whole thing was off the rails. He's currently level 64 and spending most of his time doing much the same as all my other characters i.e. aimlessly wandering about doing Dailies, Living Story, Dragon Events and WvW as the mood takes him. Project abandoned, on this character anyway. 

• All Eight GW2 Classes To Level 80 - Nearly there. If it hadn't been for the spare ranger it would have been done by now. The Guardian's sitting at Level 63 and so long as he only ever uses a Greatsword I can imagine playing him even after he tops out. The lack of any real ranged option still rankles and he's a weird mix of indestructible against some things and incapable against others but I've warmed to him.

• Playing GW2 with the UI Switched Off - Still on the drawing board. I want to get to this but I need to make a new character and I don't have a spare slot. 

•  Getting Creative - with Neverwinter's Foundry. That was the plan. See below for how well that went.

• Final Fantasy XIV:ARR - The big success story. It came from the back of the pack, half-forgotten, to gallop into a clear lead. So far there's very little about that I don't like and unless something unexpected happens this will most likely be the next MMO I play "seriously", especially if Mrs Bhagpuss comes on board. Her initial impressions were favorable. If housing was in at launch it would be a done deal. 

• Neverwinter - There was a moment when this might have been the Next Game, but that moment was before I'd actually played it. Didn't dislike it; just never got going. Made one character, got to about level nine or ten in maybe three or four sessions and then...nothing. Like a great many MMOs Neverwinter would be quite absorbing if it was the only game in town but as one of many it doesn't have the necessary hook. I keep meaning to give it another run - I'd still like a look at The Foundry -  but there's always something else I'd rather do instead. It's noticeable that the flood of blog posts about it that were filling my Feedly for a while have dried up. By all accounts it's doing well but no-one I read seems to be writing about it any more.

•  City of Steam - Playing this regularly despite feeling somewhat let-down by the direction it's taken.That deserves, and may even get, a post of its own. I log in every day for the bribes loyalty rewards, which they tweaked to the point where they are really too tasty to miss. The way they chose to stagger the Open Beta into three phases with the Human races in the first, then the Elves and finally the Greenskins was very irritating. I have a level 15 Heartlander that I'd probably never have made at all had all the races been available at the start. Now he's languishing unplayed while I level the Goblin I wanted all along through the same linear content. Not best pleased.

• Dragons Prophet - Haven't logged in for weeks, a situation unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. DP is another one that would probably have gotten some play in leaner times but was always going to struggle to gain attention in the current MMO glut.  Only having humans as a playable race is a massive disincentive. I can be a human anytime; I don't need to play MMOs for that. 

• The Secret World - Back to playing this sporadically but not infrequently. Got my chainsaw! That was fun. Went to Egypt to do some of the Indiana Jones missions then realized I never bought the pack. Danced with Said. Fought with a bunch of Aten cultists I'd had no trouble with at QL6 and died to them repeatedly at QL10. Either they've got a lot better or I've got a lot worse. Decided I'd enjoy TSW a whole lot more if Funcom took about 90% of the fighting out of it. Or just 90% of the mobs.

• Firefall - Waiting on the upcoming launch because I enjoyed my brief visit a lot. Realistically, though, I imagine I'll putz about for a session or two, write an enthusiastic but ill-informed blog post and then never play it again.

• Dino Storm - Although you never can tell, because against all odds I'm still playing this one, and not just to get my log-in rewards either. It seems to be doing very well. They announced recently that they'd hit three million registrations. It's always busy when I visit, with whomping great dinos stomping round Dinoville and a whole list of well-populated instances popping up as options any time I zone. I love the music, the colors, the ambience. The controls are comfortable. The gameplay is a weird mix - relaxing and stressful at the same time. Simple escort, FedEx and kill ten rats quests in a cartoon setting that allows unrestricted PvP is a very odd combination.  I don't make any great claims for it but it's a fun distraction.

• EQ2 - Still thinking about it every day. Might even get to playing this week. Said that last week. And the week before that.

• Rift - The MMO I had absolutely no plans to play again. And I wouldn't have if it hadn't been for you pesky kids if Trion hadn't filled my pockets with Free Money. Mrs Bhagpuss has been there full-time for the past week or so, spending her 20k credits on Dimensions in a building frenzy. She's also taken to fishing in a big way. I've tried to get back into the game but it's resisting me at every turn. I'm not just finding it hard to like now, I'm struggling to remember why I liked it so much the first time.

For a minute there I contemplated going through the long list of MMOs on the back-burner: Everquest, Vanguard, DCUO, even some that aren't published by SOE, but if life's too short to play an MMO it's surely too short to blog about it. Although I did play EQ last week, come to think of it...

I confess: I still don't get it.

We write about things that make people angry: sometimes on purpose (u mad bro?), sometimes because the topic interests us. But few topics are as consistent in their ability to draw anger and trolling and bizarre visitors as the issue of sexual harassment and responses to it.

If I talk about my experiences training clients' employees in how to avoid sexual harassment, I draw nutters. If I talk about sites that discuss bad behavior towards women in gaming culture — great sites like Fat, Ugly, or Slutty — people get angry. Discussions of outing and vigorous more-speech remedies seem to be more controversial when the target is chosen for being a creeper rather than, say, a racist. Even the abstract subject of this post — the meta-examination of why the subject of harassment is so incendiary to some — generates some of the most vituperative comments we ever see here.

This phenomenon — disproportionate anger at discussions of the topic of harassment — seems particularly pronounced when people discuss bad behavior within the wide spectrum of what I'll call "geek culture" — science fiction, computer gaming, pen-and-paper gaming. For some time I've talked about the thoroughly creepy undercurrents in that culture. I've observed them for decades. I remember going to gaming conventions as a teen in the early 1980s and seeing how some men, seemingly freed from manners by the context, openly leered and touched made comments that should have gotten them kicked in the nuts. I vividly remember a tournament pen-and-paper game (maybe Paranoia?) in which players' comments to the one woman got increasingly ugly until she pushed her chair away and left, leaving the remaining men to complain bitterly that she was a bitch with no sense of humor.³ When people discuss this sort of behavior on forums and blogs dedicated to the culture, the responses are salted with vicious and seemingly unbalanced anger, anger that I don't see in other contexts.

Like I said, I don't get it.

I was thinking about this over the weekend because an author talked about the process of reporting harassment at a convention, and out tumbled two things: anger, and stories of women putting up all the time in this subculture with creepers. The experiences are not new; perhaps the willingness to talk about it is only emerging, as is a willingness to speak up when women are classed as chainmail-bikini-chicks and "lady writers."

I'm not saying that every accusation of sexual harassment is truthful; no class of accusations should be treated as presumptively true. I'm not saying that every perception of sexism is fair-minded or rational; no class of human grievance is uniformly trustworthy. I'm not saying that people should shut up about emerging norms about public behavior towards women if they disagree with those norms; I'm a free speech advocate, and I think people should participate in the marketplace of ideas if they are willing to pay the toll of being disagreed with. I'm not calling for adherence to dogma; we should call out dogma when it conflicts with real values like due process. What I'm doing is questioning the disproportionate and, to be blunt, disturbed anger that arises over this particular subject. I'm questioning how easily the "criticism of my good-natured kidding is tyrannical censorship" trope is brought to bear when the issue is sexism or sexual harassment. I'm questioning why the — pardon me — hysterical terms like "lynch mob" are so quickly brought to bear when this is the subject. I'm questioning why on some issues — say, race — incoherent basement-stinking fury is relegated to places like Stormfront, but when it comes to sex it's alarmingly close to the mainstream. I'm asking why is it that if I write about racism, truly nutty and racist response are fairly rare, but if I talk about sexual harassment or sexism, I can count on being classified as a "white knight" or "mangina" or "pink shirt" or homosexual or something.

I'd like to know not just because I love and respect my wife and daughters and female colleagues and friends and relatives — though they are part of my motivation. I'd like to know not just because women are half the human race, yet discussion of how they are treated is regarded in some quarters as oddly parochial and extremist. I'd like to know because I plan to keep writing about this stuff, and I'm wondering: are these freaks going to keep jumping up and down on my lawn?

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