No word as yet from CCP, and the forum theories range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Update 09/06/08 :Still no comment from CCP, nothing in the fictional news feeds from New Eden about the incident and there has been no further movement in the forum threads about it. Leading me to believe that its not a big part of the EA patch release build up and merely someone deciding to exploit a known bug to highlight the problem that Jita has become. It would be nice to have something from CCP on this though.

Hat Tip: Massively

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You may wonder what I’m blathering about, well its this. I’ve been following CAD for some time now (if you like a good chuckle and a well written webcomic check out the archives) and honestly didn’t see this coming. The subject matter is a difficult one and as a away of breaking out of the pigeonhole of ‘Gaming Comic’ its one of the most effective plot twists I’ve seen. Tim sums up his reasons for it here, and I stand behind him wholeheartedly.

Gamers are people too with all the baggage and emotional turmoil that that entails, its about time someone said so. I salute you Tim and will continue to read CAD as long as you continue to write it.

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Until someone codes a widget type thing which displays selected details of a character automatically from the xml you’ll have to put up with my own muddled summary, lovingly hand typed and formatted.

This is Mandrilllus Rex (the extra l is a typo I didn’t notice till after I was floating in space), hes a Brutor Slave Child of the Minmatar Faction (with a slight squint it would seem). At under 900k skill points he’s not really anywhere near needing to perform his first clone upgrade, but I’m working on that.

Starting out as a soldier, he is severely lacking in the ancillary skills required to be an effective combat pilot such as electronics, hull and shield upgrades and other more esoteric specialities. He can shoot guns and fire missiles though, which is the main thing.

I’m currently speed tanking, and relying on my guns to take out the opposition before they can do too much damage. It has been suggested to me that Minmatar should hull tank, which at first glance reads like an insane idea so I’m going to avoid that route for the moment and concentrate on speed and shields.

Even though I’ve been playing EVE since very nearly the beginning (on and off) I still haven’t got that embroiled in PvP. I’ve been in a couple of 0.0 gangs and participated in some fleet actions but have yet to score a solo PvP kill. The latest expansion is an attempt to draw more of those players who never stray beyond the borders of Empire space into the wider world of deep space combat (more details here.)

With the new focus in many upcoming MMOGs on whats being called RvR combat, where the factions of the MMO fight to determine the fate of the wider world of the game(s), EVE looks like its coming late to the party. This is not the case. RvR combat has been a part of EVE since very early on, what are alliances if not player created factions? All that’s being added is that the NPC factions are finally getting to play.

What intrigues me most about factional warfare in EVE is where it might lead. There is a possibility that the NPC factions will finally be dissolved, or taken over by players, becoming alliances themselves. If that day comes, players in the factional militias will have to be prepared to defend empire space from attack and predation from the player alliances. EVE may yet become a fully player driven game.

So if your in the Pator area and want to say hi, do some ratting, or run a couple of missions, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do. Amarr and Caldari need not apply

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First Some Background.

With Ambulation on the horizon, the addition of walking, talking human shaped avatars to EVE Online is one which promises to change the game dramatically for those that decide to use it (it will be optional.) My wife for one doesn’t want to use it, which is a bit odd as the main reason that CCP have decided to do this is because they’ve found that women relate better to a humanoid avatar than they do to a ship.

Initially, Ambulation will a combat free part of EVE, allowing players to walk around stations and deepen the social interactions with each other by meeting up in bars (run by players), buying clothes and other accessories (made by players) and actually having a Corp Office they can sit in and plot galactic domination from.

The developers have decide to leave combat out of Ambulation to begin with because of something they call ‘the teaspoon effect’. This is basically a hypothetical scenario where the leader of one of the player alliances is killed in a station by an assassin stabbing him in the eye with a teaspoon. The way things currently work in EVE, the cloning system (by which players are resurrected with their skills and such intact) only works when a character is in their Pod. Killing a character outside of their pod would result in permanent death, something which CCP will have to find a workaround for if AvA combat is to become a reality.

In the future I fully expect AvA combat to become and integral part of the EVE experience and here’s some ideas for what it might be like.

Some of what follows is born of an incomplete understanding of how outposts are managed and minimal experience of actually taking on an outpost or POS, so forgive any glaring errors and feel free to correct them in the comments. Read on to see some of my ideas.

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Flat Out 2 is a racing game. In the single player career mode you drive in race after race, building up your cash reserves till you can afford a better car, unlocking special events and the aforementioned better cars as you go. At first glance there’s not much scope for a story there, and you’d be right. The game makers haven’t even tried to tack on any kind of plotline and have only provided brief bios pf those you are driving against. So why do I find myself reacting as if I was a player in a larger tale?

Flat Out 2 is not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, its a full throttle arcade racer with some physics thrown in to make the crashes entertaining. There’s nowhere near the depth of customisation offered by the Need For Speed titles and none of the realism of Project Gotham or Gran Turismo. It is the Spiderman to the more refined racing games’ Dancer in the Dark, if you want to use a movie analogy. Obviously the story of the game has no significance whatsoever. It is however an example of how an entertaining yet shallow game experience prompts the player to build their own stories.

Throughout your career, from your first races in clapped out bangers to the grand finals where you should have reached the stage where you can afford the cream of automotive technology, you are racing against the same 7 drivers. Some of these drivers are destined to be your nemeses, beating you time and again on tracks you know backwards. I hate them with a passion.

For the first few races I didn’t pay that much attention to who the other drivers were as I was beating them fairly easily. The Derby class of races (for the clapped out bangers) was completed with out me breaking a sweat. Then I hit the Race series. Faster cars, new tracks, and slightly harder bots. I still beat them without much fuss but it wasn’t as easy as it had been. I found myself going back to the derby class and re-racing some of the cups available to build up enough cash to get the best upgrades for that little extra edge over my competitors. I was beginning to want to beat two or three specific drivers who were proving to be thorns in my side.

By the time I hit the Street series I knew who my rivals were and could name them. Sofia Martinez in her shining silver pickup and Jack Benton in his waspish black and yellow sports coupe. They are now people to me, rivals worthy of the name. And this is in a game with no literary pretensions, how has this happened?

Game makers can learn a lot from this phenomenon, with little or no influence in the way of plot and/or characterisation from them, a player of their game has been prompted to make an emotional investment. The game is far better for it, not because of anything that they have added to the game, more because of what they have left out. Deliberately or not, Bugbear, the developers of Flat Out 2, have made me want to complete it. Not through the promise of uber unlockables or some other mechanic, but by getting me emotionally involved.

Call of Duty 4 did this as well, though there was more thought put into the plot and such in that game. I actually had a bit of a lump in my throat at the end and a few times in the middle (I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t played it). Here was an all action shooter which pulled at the heartstrings and got an emotional response from the player. So my advice (whatever that’s worth) to game developers is to get the player emotionally involved, give them something to give a damn about and your game will be more enjoyable for it.

So when deciding how to get the player invested in a game you have two options: If you’re going to run the plot on rails then you’d better make it a damn good one (a’ la CoD4)which doesn’t overpower the gameplay, or if you don’t want the burden of a plot tailor the AI so that the player feels they have a worthy opponent. Mindless cannon fodder are not fun to beat, neither are totally predictable driving bots.

Don’t just tell me a story, I can read a book for that.

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I have a lot of games at my disposal, available to play at any time on either my PC or my 360, but none seem to be hittng the right buttons any more. I yearn for something different, something new and innovative. All the RTS’s I play seem very samey at the moment; build a base, build an army, attack, repeat as needed. It doesn’t matter what extra frippery is tacked on the basic premise is the same. The same with FPS’s; the scenery is different but the motions are identical.

The stories are still, for the most part, tacked on and half thought out; with plots and characters which would tax the credulity of a child. A notable exception being Call of Duty 4. I want depth, drama and emotion in my games and not simply a series of explosions, gunfights and clichés.

MMO’s are not the breeding grounds of innovation that many think they are, maybe when they first appeared but now it seems that its the same old mechanics being reused over and over. Leveling, grinding, collect x of y from monster z quests and crafting were all great things when they were new but now that everyone is doing them they’ve lost their shine. I want to create believable characters, not superhuman, super-attractive, perfect specimens of whatever race I happen to choose.

I want real choices, which I don’t know I’m making. I want my actions to have a wider impact than the next thirty seconds of gameplay. i want more flexibility, no more simply choosing a side, race or class and letting that define how I play the game. If I want to field an army of rabid exploding ferrets in my RTS then I should be able to. Balance be damned.

I’m not asking for greater realism, that would be silly. The point of games is to be unreal, flights of fancy which let us escape from our humdrum lives for a few brief minutes. There is a need in me for unrestricted freedom in the games that I play. I want choice and variety in spades. For example, in an FPS I’d like to be able to break down any door, climb any mountain, hop over that irritating barbed wire fence, which even though it is only waist height, I can’t get over. Most of all I want something different.

There is only one game on the horizon which seems to promise this kind of freedom but using the inverse law of video game hype, I don’t think that it’s going to deliver. Spore is the name of the game and its due out in September.

If anyone has any suggestions of games which might rekindle my interest and give new life to the gamer within, let me know in the comments.

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Now blocking filesharing is nothing new, most ISPs throttle the ports which software like BitTorrent uses simply because the infrastructure can’t handle the volume of traffic which filesharing generates, but Virgin blocking Skype is alot more sinister and smacks of anti-competitive behaviour. Added to this the fact that an unwanted side effect of these practices is that online games also get blocked (currently EVE, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Call of Duty 4, and World of Warcraft on Tiscali and Virgin) and you’ve got a situation which will see alot of unhappy internet users.

Skype is a VoIP service which allows users to make phone calls through their computer at a fraction of the cost of using the phone. Virgin obviously feels that this is cutting into their profits as they offer a phone service as well as cable TV and broadband. Basically Virgin would rather you paid to use their phone line to talk to your mates than spoke to them for free (If they’ve got Skype) or paid Skype (If you’re calling a normal phone line). Virgin have decided that they can’t beat Skype in a fair fight and so have done the equivalent of kneecapping the other competitor.

Now I’m the last person to be saying that the government should get involved in what is basically a business arrangement between the ISPs and their customers but we keep being told that the government wants everyone online (their motives for this aside), if this is the case then they need to give the ISPs a slap and make sure that internet access is available for all to use as they want. I’m of the opinion that unless its kiddie porn or some other unsavoury nastiness, then its none of the ISPs business what I use my internet connection for.

I’ll be updating this post with links to relevant info as I get it (I’ve got my trusty researcher on the case as we speak, collating information and such.) Though if you guys have any useful links feel free to post them in the comments.

Keep the Net Free (not as in beer, that would be unreasonable)

Out

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