All in all, I'm pretty much an Ordinary EVE Pilot, or at least like to think so. I put in about 6-9 hours a week, I do missions in Empire Space, I'm a member of the ubiqutous "small, friendly, mining, manufacturing, casual" player-corporation, who aren't adverse to the occassional bout of ultra-violence when the need arises, or even internally, although conducted in a very sporting fashion, without the malice of strangers.
I know that I'm ordinary, because the various Galaxy Maps overlays show me that the majority of other players in EVE are in the same kinds of place I am - Empire Space 1.0 - 0.5 systems mostly, near the larger mercantile hubs. I know that they're doing the same sort of things as me, as the population overlay maps onto the 'Pirate Drones and Police Killed in The Last 24 Hours' (NPC Ships, in other words) overlay quite closely. I know that a huge proportion like, or can at least stand, mining for hours on end, as the mineral and ship markets function and prices remain quite stable.
For me, the game, and game it still remains, is just a way to spend one of my evenings in a setting where no goblins need putting to the sword, so I must admit to being both amused and non-plussed by this whole CCP/BoB/Goonswarm thing currently blowing up on the more fashionable of blogs and messageboards just now. It does rather seem to the sort of drama you need to monitor hourly to stay on top of - useful references I've seen include
Scott,
Ethic and
Alaph, but there are many others.
It's also that rare kind of drama that, if you stare into it long enough, it stares back, and
Michael seems to be under a lot of fire lately for being somehow in league with the forces of Anti-CCP Darkness, or something. I expect I'll get dragged from my house in the night and executed for venturing opinions here in due course, but I love a good conspiracy, and this has the stink of the Illuminati all over it!
Anyway, one of the more recent loose threads, found via the bottom of Scott's comments, is this gasping turn of events, worthy of the finest soap operas:
EVE Online "COAD" Fourm - Official Goonfleet Announcement
In which Goonfleet
seem to decide to take their ball and go home. I say seem, because the purpose of the COAD is largely a platform form propaganda, misdirection, outright lies, and good old fashion trolling, so the first hurdle is deciding whether to believe it, or indeed, anything you read there. Nevermind the legislative conundrum of suing real people in imaginary spaceships in a different, and pretend, galaxy, using Icelandic law, for...well...not quite sure what the actual transgression itself is actually.
However, as the main corp behind the much larger Goonswarm Alliance, the disbanding of Goonfleet is a bit of a blow for anyone in the red bit of
this map. BoB, the alliance under fire for alleged GM collusion, are the driving force behind the blue team on that map, so the quick among you will already see that this is going to affect the game quite dramatically. The war between the red lot and the blue lot is a thing of legend around the EVE community and has been for months. Even
I'm mildly interested in seeing how it's going, and if I were cynical, I'd say that the war is the motivation behind these various 'incidents' of clouded nature we've been seeing recently, most of which seem to involve the blue team in some manner.
In a game where cheating, lying, stealing and spying are all accepted, nay, condoned gameplay styles, and in a game where both those two power blocks will most likely do
anything to win, I suspect this kind of thing was long overdue - one or more groups of disgruntled players crossing the already hazy and scuffed 'line' and taking it out to the metagame. One only has to skim through the replies that got in on the thread before the lock, to see the very real and very out of character levels of hatred and ill-will that perpetuate - talk of following people to other games and crushing them there, 'don't let the door hit you...', a lot of name-calling, and so on. An effective swansong though, and quite calculated to cause the maximum disruption to the game - putting a stop The Great 0.0 War Adventure! and blaming it on cheating GMs and the Legal Banstick.
Mind you, I'm not sure I believe a word of it, and more distressingly, I seem to think of CCP with the...er...same brush nowadays. Depending on who you believe, we've either got an institutionally corrupt MMO company fixing all the fights, and disappearing event staff without warning or reason in a very sinister fashion, OR, we've got a really quite sizable proportion of the playerbase of the game - around 2500 players - conducting an orchestrated attack on the reputation, success and very operation of an MMO I quite like playing, and I don't really believe
any of them.
It would be an easy call if that whole BoB T20 Cheating GM thing hadn't been exposed, and in a way,
confirmed by CCP, some months back. Adding a Internal Affairs Department is all very well, but just knowing that it happened burst our little bubbles, thank you very much, and when BoB people start bragging about having GMs on speed-dial, well...you do have to wonder...
Whomever you believe, or whatever the truth, this whole situation is unlikely to end well. Of course EVE Online will keep going and of course most players, myself included, will just plod on with the mining and missions as usual. It doesn't affect our game much - there will be new Goonswarms, and new BoBs, and in six months time, that map will look entirely different, and just as inaccessible for the common mortal player. If indeed Goonswarm are folding as suggested, the individual players will keep playing, no doubt, a new corp, a new alliance. There will not however, be a new CCP, who unlike us, have to carry their reputations with them. No reroll for the Devs...
It's good gossip and scandal, but is it really worth quitting what is by now, likely to be a somewhat addicted obsession for these people? Still, I am terribly dissapointed - an entire alliance does the 'I quit!' post, and it takes until the bottom of page three for someone to ask for their stuff!