Planetary interaction links
Where I begin my PLANETARY DOMINATION!!!
I’ve started posting all links I find regarding Tyrannis and planetary interaction up on my Delicious account with the tag “tyrannis”. You can browse them or subscribe to them. And feel free to send me more links via Delicious (“for:internetspaceships”) or comment here!
(Props to Ga’len for giving me the idea with his excellent use of Google Reader.)
Dominion has succeeded
I got a lot of really interesting feedback and conversation when I suggested on Twitter that Dominion has experienced wild success. We’ve seen major shake-ups, lots of fights, and an evolving sovereignty map. Okay, I’ll admit it hasn’t seen unalloyed success, but the problems we’ve seen are natural in system performance tuning.
Essentially, when you want to improve the performance of a system, you find the major bottleneck and remove it. This only means that the system performance improves up to the next bottleneck. (Note here that the actual method of bottlenecks will vary, so that a given problem could actually crash the system rather than slow it down.) You keep iterating through this process until the effort needed for the next iteration is larger than what you’ll gain from the performance increase. That is, when you reach the point of diminishing returns in cost and benefit, you stop.
Prior to Dominion, the bottlenecks largely came from design. POS spam, area-of-effect doomsday weapons, relative ease of maintaining Sov 4 (and thus cynojammers) everywhere, all that jazz. Once that went away, we started seeing even more massive fleet fights and all the shakeups. Plus, some alliances either couldn’t afford the sov bills or couldn’t manage their wallets appropriately. As far as I’m concerned, that amounts to the inability to properly direct your alliance.
After that, though, we found out that node capacity is the next bottleneck. While CCP does deserve some criticism for their initial handling of the problem (right after I commended them for riding the Cluetrain, sigh), they’ve finally made substantial improvements so that these fights can actually occur. They still need to do more, of course, but even once they’ve done that, we’ll just run into the next bottleneck. Unfortunately — actually, not — such is our voracious love for this world that fights and struggles will just expand to fill available capacity up to the next bottleneck.
But we’ll have lots of fun in the meantime.
8 ways to publicize your EVE Online blog
The other day, I got a conversation request in-game. Due to circumstances of the moment, plus not recognizing the character name, I rejected the request. (Nothing personal, but like many pilots, I just can’t always chat.) The other player later sent me an EVEmail letting me know that they sought advice on EVE blogging, particularly in attracting readership and getting a bit of attention from other EVE bloggers.
After apologizing for my inadvertent rudeness, I sent a list of advice. But I thought that maybe it might assist some other folks getting involved in the EVE blogging world. Most of the advice is EVE-specific, but bloggers can apply it in other areas as well.
(Please note that this list only covers blog publicity. The specifics of how and what to write, site design, and all that jazz lie slightly outside the scope of this particular post.)
Killboard security discussion
(NB: IANAL but I am a licensed investigator working in computer forensics and incident response.)
Galen started a great discussion on a recent killboard security incident. Go read his post and think about it.
I’ll just paraphrase and restate here the core of what I said in the comments on his post:
This isn’t “hacking” or intrusion of any sort. One could alternately view this as a web site that allows posting by the public, and it so happens that the site owners decided (after the fact) that they didn’t like all the content posted by the public. If they haven’t established a password, then they have a hard case to make that authorized access was exceeded or that the section was restricted. In my professional opinion, putting a killboard online with no authentication whatsoever equates to providing a computer service to the public for the purpose of discussion. I cannot imagine any prosecutor choosing to pursue this case in good faith, given the facts as we know them.
Galen provides some excellent food for thought as well, so go join in the discussion. To promote that, I’m closing comments on this post so that we can discuss things more coherently. Feel free to pingback this post with your own if you don’t want to use Intense Debate, as I know some EVE players don’t like it for their own reasons.
Image credit Thomas Hawk via Flickr
Let’s get connected: Guide to EVE social media
Staying connected keeps you healthy
So you like EVE. And you evidently like social media, or at least don’t mind using it (or why would you read an EVE blog?)
If so, you might also want to know about some other great ways to get connected with other EVE players with similar interests.
Come join the in-game channel EVE-Bloggers, for one. We usually number more than a dozen in there, sometimes close to twenty. Generally speaking, this channel contains some of the most intelligent discussion about current topics of interest in EVE with a huge variety of perspectives, not to mention pointers and tips about blogging, podcasting, tweeting, and other EVE-related social media.
Also, check out The Tweet Fleet, a list maintained by 00sage00 of EVE-related Twitter accounts. Of course you can find my EVE Twitter account on there, but you’ll also find a lot of others with other viewpoints and styles (and frequently a lot better conversation!)
Of course, you probably want to read more EVE blogs than just mine. Ga’len puts a lot of effort into keeping a listing of all active (and some inactive) EVE blogs, then making them available in the EVE Player Blogs OPML Download. At this moment, the listing includes 437 (!) EVE blogs, so clearly it includes a lot of great sites. If all you read is the CrazyKinux EVE Blog Pack, you will miss a lot of outstanding articles and writers.
Alexia Morgan also maintains the EVE Bloggers aggregator. This includes all the (known) EVE blogs as well as podcasts, videos, Flickr images, and EVE-related stories from Massively.
Image credit gmayster01 via Flickr
