What does it mean when an otherwise serious, highly respected EVE blogger, whose posts are usually full of the most insightful analysis and balanced, pragmatic suggestions for both playing and improving EVE, suddenly drops two columns wailing wildly about "problems" that are arguably not real problems -- just the bedrock nature of EVE as we've long known it? And when it comes to proposing solutions to these exaggerated problems ... nothing. Mr. Always Insightful falls strangely silent: "How to fix it? I haven't a clue."
We didn't have to wait long for the other foot to fall. Shortly comes another post in which he coyly announces himself (with shovelfuls of self-praise) as a maybe-yes, maybe-no -- oh dear, which way can true-blue-little-old-outsider me exercise the greater influence for the greater good? -- in short, he's come out as a non-candidate candidate for CSM 7.
This is vote pandering EVE style, in the worst way. And it's an embarrassment to read. I genuinely feel for the guy. Dreaming of greater glory, he's gone completely off the rails. And I'd let it go, except that what he's playing with, the kind of pandering he's indulging, is actually a threat to EVE as we know it. We don't need CSM candidates or non-candidate candidates engaging in demagoguery over this particular set of issues.
The respected blogger turned pandering EVE politico is Jester (Ripard Teg). The three pieces directly at issue are Mid-game problem (2012.01.25), Strangled in the crib (2012.01.27), and Influence (2012.01.27). And the issues on which he chooses to pander are the length of time it takes to accumulate skill points and the cost of skill books. Always sure-fire arrows ready in the demagogue's quiver: "gain without pain" and "lower taxes." His target voter population: "mid-game" insufficiently acculturated whiners looking for more console-like instant gratification and short-cuts to what they mistakenly suppose is EVE's "end-game."
[UPDATE: Aw... Jester pulled a "Sarah Palin" and decided not to run. Such a tease. Hope it wasn't something I said. (meow) Or was his a "Donald Trump" or a "Herman Cain"? So many inspiring non-candidate candidates from RL this US election cycle. Guess we can no longer accuse Jester of pandering for votes. We'll just have to leave it as pandering for attention. The objections stand.]
Mid-game problem
In the first of the pieces, Jester creates a "mid-game problem" by sleight of hand, endorsing the bogus idea that Nullsec mega-alliance fleet blob fights and the like constitute EVE's true "end game."
Anyone who has spent any amount of time chatting in High Sec knows this is simply false. High Sec is as densely populated as it is, with something approaching 80% of EVE players spending most of their time there according to most rough estimates, not because it is simply filled to the brim with "noobs" and "carebears" who have never been or are too afraid to venture out to Low Sec or Nullsec, but due to the large population of vets playing there for whom Low Sec and Nullsec are currently a matter of been there, done that.
It is one of EVE's great, most distinctive features that it is a game without an "end game," a game in which players are free to choose and re-choose their own ends. As splatus comments on Jester's post, "The beauty of EVE is that you are a) never done and b) never really useless. It's all midgame." And there's no problem with that.
Of course, there are those who do choose Nullsec mega-alliance fleet blob fights as their personal goal, their "end" in EVE. And if that's your goal, yes, it may well take you, as Jester calculates, three years and 40-50 million SP, and an awful lot of ISK made along the way, to be welcomed as a full equal, as a peer among peers, by the entrenched PvP aristocracy out there.
That EVE grants you the freedom to set your own goals, to chose your own "end game," doesn't guarantee you'll get there or mean that EVE must be "fixed" to make getting there easier, quicker, or even possible. That's like life. I once dreamed of being an astronaut...nuff said.
You may choose, as your EVE goal, founding the next Goonswarm or Red Alliance. Good luck. Go for it. Dig in for the long, long haul. And try to stand up and speak out for EVE still remaining EVE all the years you're at it, long enough for it to be worth it if you ever do get there.
The true "problem" is not how long it takes to attain any particular remote, difficult goal in EVE, but that most everything that might be done to short-cut such goals makes them the less worth attaining. Call it the Groucho Marx paradox:
PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION.
I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB
THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.
Though the depth of EVE's "skill tree" is distinctive, the shape of the "problem" here is all too common in maturing MMOs: how to accelerate new players to ever-receding veteran "end-game" content. And the all too common solutions tend to convert MMOs that once offered virtual landscapes for imaginative lived experience over considerable duration into something more approximating an instant-gratification arcade or console game.
These solutions, seeking more but inexorably chasing fewer and fewer new subscribers down the rat hole, turn once fun MMOs into places where it is not worth being a veteran player and, with no future as a veteran player, places barely worth being a new player after you've got the hang of it and chalked up a few levels and a few kills.
Jester doesn't want to advocate specifics for tampering with the bedrock of EVE's, in principle, infinitely long skill queue, knowing the howls it would set off, but too clearly he wants to flirt with the possibility for the votes it might get him:
How to fix it? I haven't a clue. Current players will be loath to change anything. As I've said a lot, they'll say "I had to fight my way up the learning cliff, and it was hard. You have to, too, newbie. No short-cuts." Maybe whatever loyalty program that eventually emerges from CCP will help.
"Will help" with what? As the ancient adage goes, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts." EVE's endless skill queue is the greatest veteran loyalty program ever devised, the greatest loyalty program any gaming vet could wish for. Kindly offers of something more than everything invariably amount to something much, much less. Jester suggesting vaguely that perhaps a CCP loyalty program "will help" sounds like he's speaking Greek to me.
The only good solution, in this case, is to refuse the "problem," and those who want to pretend it is a problem.
Most MMOs cannot do that, because they genuinely have "end game" content. EVE does not. It is available to CCP and the CSM -- and "within the sandbox," to the major corps and alliances though how they treat players of differing skill levels -- to address the desires of all players for exciting fun, content by improving the "lived experience" at every stage of an avatar's long, long life in New Eden.
But this requires something other than pandering to the unrealistic desire of new and even not-so-new unacculturated players to reach certain EVE content right now. It requires that respected veteran players like Jester, who should know better, not play to, stir up, or otherwise grant legitimacy to unrealistic expectations that can only be satisfied by making over EVE into something that is not EVE.
And make no mistake about it, the pressure is there and will become more intense to the extent DUST514 succeeds in bringing to EVE significantly more hard-core console players, with their instant-gratification, itchy trigger-finger expectations. The next CSM and those thereafter will have to be vigilant on this issue.
Strangled in the crib
"Let's suppose you're a brand new EVE player," Jester begins. He then proceeds to suppose this hypothetical brand new EVE player is singularly obsessed, like Ahab chasing the White Whale, with joining right now some 0.0 corp that "says you'll need an Interceptor, a shield HAC, shield BCs, an alpha battleship, and it will be handy to have a Tengu for ratting. After the corp learns you're nowhere near close to any of this, they suggest getting into L4 missions and someone points you at a Raven Navy Issue as a good ship to do these in. It's then mentioned that sooner or later, you're going to need a carrier." And Jester's brand new EVE player just loathes all PvE as "no fun."
Yes, indeed, Jester is perfectly correct. If you are exactly that kind of single-minded "brand new EVE player" and cannot find a way to become and enjoy being a more realistic EVE player, you are pretty much doomed to a life of endless frustration in New Eden -- a place all about "the ships you can't fly," not the ones you can -- until, at long last, you put yourself out of your pig-headed misery and unsubscribe. You'd probably have been better off "strangled in the crib." EVE is not TF2 with Spaceships.
Again, it is not that there aren't many players entering and even many a good while in EVE who don't at times, maybe even often, feel like Jester's hypothetical single-minded "brand new EVE player." That's the point. He's angling for their votes, playing to their most impatient, unrealistic, game-changing fantasies: If only there were gain without pain. If only skill books were cheaper. If only ships and ammo didn't cost so much. If only I were an ISK billionaire. If only I never had to PvE. If only I had enough RL money to afford and time to use multiple accounts. If only EVE were not EVE.
Jester tosses out the slogan "Skill books are the monkey on the back of the early EVE player." But to defend this, he throws about all the skill book costs a player will ever face, over years and years, through the billion to pilot a carrier, as if these costs were faced in aggregate, at once from the start or on a gruesome, tight schedule; as if these eventual expenses hung as immediately pending ISK outlays required of the "early EVE player."
Whereas, the fact is that, despite occasional cash shortfalls, meeting and preventing which are just part of the heavy planning and logistics dimension of EVE, a prudent, well-rounded EVE player can barely move skills through the queue fast enough not to be already a player of some means when the time comes to pay for the more costly books. CCP has actually done a fairly good job, honed over years, of pricing and spacing these out.
That you can make a mad bee-line to the point of purchasing the bare command skill to undock a big expensive hollow hull, which you are not yet skilled to defend or fight in, doesn't make it an imposition, a monkey on your back, that the cost of that command book is currently beyond your reach. We are all familiar with the easy kills out there, from bragging youtube videos: impressive ships that can be taken down like nothing, mostly because their under-skilled pilots prematurely flew them in harm's way.
In sum, Jester's argument that skill books are too expensive is of a piece with his pandering flirtation with short-cutting or otherwise accelerating skill queue times. For it is only if skill learning is significantly quickened that skill book prices weigh as a significantly increased burden on players' careers.
Influence
"I love technical people. They're completely unable to keep stuff that should be secret to themselves," crows Jester about CCP devs.
Myself, I love aspiring politicos. They're completely unable to keep stuff that should be secret to themselves, starting with their fond over-estimation of themselves and their willingness to stoop to rise to power.
Jester is right that EVE does need CSM representation from outside the massive 0.0 blocs. But not from those willing to pander for votes to the worst, most dangerous EVE-changing impulses among new players who don't yet understand EVE or "mid" established players just feeling cranky-impatient, as we all sometimes do, with EVE being EVE -- a complex, diverse virtual environment catering to many, many playing styles; many, many, often changing player-chosen short-term, intermediate, and long-term ends.
EVE's distinctiveness and greatest strength as a single-shard PvP universe is that, oddly, despite its infamous celebration of double-dealing, back-stabbing, spying, thieving, and griefing, EVE is more akin to Second Life than to the usual combat MMOs. EVE is a proliferation of niches, not a road or even set of roads to an end.
EVE is, like life, a manifestly "unfair place" where you must struggle to make and hold your place, wherever that may be, and join with others to forge whatever you can of justice. It's not a Horatio Alger theme park MMORPG, in which the whispered storyline promise to every starting player is that he/she is secretly "The One" fated to triumph, and triumph real soon. And in no way is EVE anything remotely resembling a "fair game" in which everyone is entitled to something approximating an equal start in a race to the top or a fight to the end.
Let's elect a CSM 7 that promises to keep it that way; to keep EVE alive, interesting, and different.
