So, I’ve still not amanged to get an awful lot of time in-game under my belt this week. However there ahve been some interesting developements in the meta-world surrounding eve which merit some mention.
First off, EBank (which I am a customer of, I tell you this in the interests of full disclosure) has been the victim of embezzlement. It turns out that Ricdic, the main character used for recieving depostis has been involved in some shady dealings including scamming in-game and RMT. EBank has a forum thread here about it which has been getting quite alot of attention and clears up some of the questions which are no-doubt being asked.
This issue raises a bigger question regarding financial services in New Eden; namely should they be based on the same free-market approach as everything esle or should CCP step in and regulate them so that such investements are protected and secure. Personally I don’t think CCP should get involved, these complex financial products should be based on risk, return, trust and all the other factors that such things are based on in the real world if they are to be of any value.
The calls for CCP to step in and regulate are similar in many ways to the calls in the real world for governments to regulate everything that has the slightest risk attached to it. I don’t think that New Eden would benefit from such behaviour on CCP’s part and we would lose some of the sandbox style freedom of the game if every such call was acted upon. ‘Caveat Emptor’ is the watchword here I would think, as are many pother appropriate aphorisms, such as ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ and ‘Trust no-one’.
What people do with their ISK is not CCP’s problem as long as it doesn’t break the EULA, they are not obligated to protect and investment of <em>imaginary</em> money you make, or bail you out if your invesments turn sour. The parallels with the current real world economic situation are striking as many people believe that the cause of the crash (in RL) was excessive gov’t intervention in markets. I can only hope that CCP sees this and is not tempted to give in to the QQ’ing of the people who can’t stand a little risk in their online lives.
Anyway enough about Ebank and dry economic stuff. There have been other things happening in the world of EVE over the last week or so.
The rules for the 7th Alliance tournament have been published and sign-ups are open. The allowed ships list has had some tweaks this year with Logistics Cruisers being allowed back in the tourney and the new Tech 3 ships added (along with haulers, I’m not quite sure what that’s about). For the full lowdown check out the Alliance Tournament Section of the EVE website, along with CCP Claw’s Dev Blog.
Lots of Dev Blogs this week, including this one from CCP Valar (named for a race of godlike beings from Tolkiens middle earth) regarding the latest software and hardware upgrades to the database server. Its quite dry and technical, sure to appeal to the uber-geeks among you, and there are claims that if you read it all you get a cookie (I’m still waiting for mine).
I’m still working on some sort of directory/feed aggregator for the 500 or so EVE blogs that are out there. The EVE Directory Project has been scrapped as it was pointed out that there is already a well established directory website for EVE out there. Check out eve-places.com, for quite a comprehensive list of EVE sites and resources. I’m still looking for some sort of feed aggregation script that will allow me to present categorised feeds of all the blogs that are springing up, if anyone has any ideas, I’m opne to suggestions. In the mean time I’m preparing categorised OPML files for download and will have them up fairly shortly.
I managed to squeeze in a 0.0 inty/frigate roam with the Bastards and Hellcats on Sunday night but haven’t really had the opportunity to log in since. I had a Ju-Jitsu grading on tuesday night and gained my orange belt (and a fair few bruises), and to top it all I’ve quit smoking. RL is still taking priority for the time being, though I will be making an appearance in new eden in the near future, promise 
. I have also been remiss in posting episodes of Vertical Slice, my apologies for that Alphaxion, a catch-up post is imminent.
Till next time, good hunting and don’t let the reds get you down.
