Ecliptic Rift

I don’t think I’m a carebear. Or perhaps, not completely.

Sure, most of my gameplay has little to do with direct combat PVP. I mostly explore, trade, possibly run some missions, or go about some science & industry (invention, manufacturing, etc.) I don’t seek combat PVP, at least not with my main character, and in fact I believe she has zero kills.

But the majority of that activity I just listed occurs in lowsec and, these days, increasingly in nullsec (usually NPC sovereignty). I don’t complain when I get hit — rewards require risk, and that thrill of danger makes the game fun for me. I make most of my ISK from setting buy orders in lowsec and moving the results to highsec to sell. Rens works great for this. This funds the rest of what I like to do, honestly, and if I didn’t do that, I don’t think I’d really stop much in highsec at all.

The reasons why I don’t PVP much have more to do with meatspace than my desire. I have little kids who need (and deserve) attention, and they don’t quite understand “Daddy’s scouting right now, he can’t come see your new drawing / Lego construction / squirrel face”. And frankly, even if they did, I enjoy that latter stuff even more than I enjoy Internet spaceships. Voice chat (a clear requirement for almost any real combat PVP) also suffers because of the background noise from my household. I don’t like the noise very much, honestly, but it goes with the territory. I don’t get to choose one without the other.

So I don’t call myself a “carebear”. I don’t even call myself a PvE player, because running missions in nullsec while having to evade bubble camps and keep a close eye on the D-scan for combat probes seems to me to have lots of PvP to it. I suppose I could say, at most, that I play with a “non-aggressive” style.

I know that others out there feel the same way: they seek out dangerous situations and accept the risk happily, don’t whine when things don’t go their way, but they don’t specifically look for combat against other players, either.

We should stop accepting the false dichotomy of “PvPer versus carebear”, because EVE doesn’t work that way.

When I play RPGs, I always struggle with choice. So many options from which we can choose. Think about the career options in EVE, for example. You have pirates, nullsec warriors, explorers, miners, traders, researchers, builders, mission runners, militia, smugglers, diplomats, salvagers, haulers, and more. Each of those has specialties as well: fleet commanders, scouts, capital ship pilots, inventors, high-sec research starbase operators, station traders, and so forth.

In EVE, of course, those choices generally don’t mutually exclude each other. You don’t get locked into a “class” from which you’d have to respecialize and lose all your prior abilities A pilot who starts out mining can decide to start training combat skills, go pirate, and end up as the CEO of a nullsec corp that specializes in small-squadron warfare, and he could still go mine if (for some odd reason) he decided to do so. Some choices might not work simultaneously, of course, but over the course of your career trajectory, you can do anything.

I find myself at a crossroads right now. Primarily, of course, I am an EVE blogger — a freelance writer who just blathers on and on, writing about whatever strikes my fancy. But I also do a good bit of trading / exploration / hauling, sometimes with some research and manufacturing or even mission running in the mix. In the past, I have engaged in factional warfare, scouting and tackling for an anti-pirate alliance, a wee bit of piracy, salvaging, W-space living, running roleplay corporations, fiction writing, EVElopedia editing, and mining.

Lately, though, I’ve started to think I want to grow in another direction. I feel like I might have something to contribute towards PvP. It takes essentially no training time for a pilot to scout and tackle effectively, and not much more to provide effective electronic warfare support. I have a number of alts that could easily become mains, moving Casiella to a background character for fiction writing and semi-passive income via datacores, trading, and perhaps some science and industriy.

This doesn’t contract my thoughts on nonviolent play, I should note. I have a character dedicated to truly nonviolent play who will start to see more action next week, but he primarily exists for roleplay (in a solo corporation) and planetary management. Some press releases on the Intergalactic Summit, checking on my planetary production networks every four days or so, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so maybe I just can’t easily decide. I don’t know whether that’s wrong… see? I did it again!

I have done some reading on Gandhi recently, beyond the “sound bite” version we get in Western culture. I’m actually really interested in the opportunity to discuss some of these ideas about nonviolence within the context of EVE Online, as opposed to real life.

Personal views

I don’t have a good way yet to express how I actually feel about it IRL: sort of “I wish I could be the sort of man that practices that belief”, or maybe “I aspire to that”. This concept of satyagraha, or “civil resistance” (not really a good English word for the concept) strikes incredibly close to what I think I should be, and it builds upon the concept of ahimsa. It’s just hard. I’ve had Gandhi on my mind for some time now, and I’ve experienced my own “crisis of faith”. Please note that I don’t really like that phrase, as it sounds overly dramatic for what I feel at the moment. I’ve simply taken some time to re-examine the expressions of my values in an effort to get to the core of them, not necessarily to change the foundations but to focus on them. This helps me do that, in a sense.

Note, I definitely don’t mean to say that games cause violence, nor that how one chooses to play EVE clearly reflects one’s RL values. A player who engages in piracy within the game probably does not kill and steal in real life. However, I personally would like to explore the possibility of a truly nonviolent play style, particularly within a PvP-focused game like EVE.

In-game background

EVE has no “good guys” in its background lore. Despite some efforts by individuals on the staff there, we’ve managed to preserve a fictional universe that, in terms of the human motivations and qualities, looks realistic. Some individuals may overall act with greater humanity, ethics, or morality, but in general no particular faction can lay a broad claim to “heroes” or “villains”.

With that said, certainly some act with less violence than others. The Sisters of EVE come to mind on one end of the spectrum, for example, and I don’t doubt that at least some religious orders within the Amarr Empire have similar humanitarian goals and efforts. (Even the Amarrians have more than one dimension to them.) And, given the extreme variance within the Gallente Federation and their overall adherence to what we would think of as modern Western ideals of classical liberalism, certainly some within that faction probably also follow this sort of path. I don’t know as much as I wish I did about the Intaki, but they have potential in this direction as well.

So, despite the endless warfare within the cluster, or perhaps even because of it, one can see small corners within it that fit characters who wish to follow that path. This only really matters in terms of fiction, roleplay, and character development, but those things matter to me and quite a few other players.

This really only addresses the question of non-violence, however, and not the civil resistance philosophy for which Gandhi became so well-known. I’ll probably have to address that in the future separately.

Mechanics

This actually gets a little more complicated. After all, one who makes claims in opposition of violent solutions before facilitating them directly acts with hypocrisy and inconsistency. So while “industry” sounds like a simple answer, we have to look a little more closely.

Miners typically can do so without ever having to destroy someone else’s ships, although belt pirates can present an issue in some locations. And selling materials on the open market resolves most of the ethical issues I’d foresee, though some might prefer instead to provide them via contract directly to producers whose ethics match their own.

In manufacturing and research, though, things can get a little murkier. Clearly the bulk of the market serves combat pilots: most ship hulls, for example, and quite a bit of the modules and equipment. Industrial pilots not wishing to contribute to that part of the market can choose to produce industrial and engineering equipment. The same goes for those of us focusing on trade.

The Tyrannis expansion should open up more possibilities in planetary management. The analogues to current industrial activities look fairly clear for the purposes discussed here.

While discussing some related matters with a friend, another idea occurred to me. Ironically, the actual inspiration comes from the Python Cartel, a group of pirates and (dare I say) griefers. But their Amamake Defense Force initiative actually shows how combat pilots could use their electronic warfare skills to try to neutralize opposing forces without firing upon them. What would happen if groups dedicated to that sort of engagement began to show up more often?

Conclusion

I’ve explored the OOC and IC motivations behind an interest in a truly nonviolent play style within EVE. And clearly our shared pastime offers enough variety in game activities to support many different pilots. Therefore, my readers and friends can expect to see Casiella shifting back in this direction, complete with (hopefully) appropriate internal character development to reflect the sort of person she’s been for some time as well.

Since re-re-joining New Eden Research, I haven’t seen much research business. Not any, actually. I have plenty of labs available, and I’m burning something on the order of 50m ISK/week in fuel costs for my large tower. Before the disasters that befell NER, alliance chat stayed very active, with quite a few regular folks talking about trade, science, industry, and the news of the cluster. Now, my greetings rarely get any response, and when they do, I think only other lab operators respond. For various personal reasons, then, I hope things pick up. As much as I love life in a solo corp, I also like having occasional backup and such as needed, plus conversation with other pilots who have similar interests and expertise. No doubt, the lack of the reporting infrastructure and whatnot has had an effect, and I understand the executor has plans in that regard. I hope we see those things soon.

So, in the meantime, I think I may shake things up a little. Instead of continuing to operate a large research base in high-sec, I think I’ll put up a small tower with a few labs as (hopefully) alliance business ramps up. I can use the invention and copy slots myself, at any rate. CONCORD and local regulations don’t allow most industrial operations in high-sec, or at least not the ones for which I have equipment, so I expect to redeploy the current large tower to low-sec and engage in some reactions and such to explore some new market segments.

What about you? Any plans you’ve had to alter lately when things didn’t work out as intended?

So CCP T0rfi gave an interview in which he discussed the summer 2010 expansion, Tyrannis, in somewhat greater detail. You should probably read it before pressing on with my thoughts… And note that I’ve intentionally avoided any discussion about DUST 514, mostly because the idea still frustrates me.

You can build infrastructure and interact with almost every planet in the game, regardless of whether someone has something there, already.

I sort of hope that the capital planets (Matar, Caldari Prime, etc.) remain off-limits. That just seems odd to me.

The problem is that the planets are going to have limited resources. So if too many people are harvesting a planet at the same time, there will be diminishing returns. So what you will find is that it will be much more enriching to travel to the more remote planets in the more remote systems, for planets which haven’t got infrastructure built up, yet. But of course that takes you away from the key trade hubs to which you want to deliver your manufacturables.

Now we can talk turkey… Planetary output seems to have a fixed cap, and so as the number of pilots exploiting it increases, the share of resources they get from it will decrease. I suspect they’ll use a lot system similar to the economic system in Pirates of the Burning Sea, where you have ten lots available to you and must decide how (and where) to allocate them: vertically integrate for an entire production chain? Specialize in a given resource or particular process, and thus increase your risk? Not too dissimilar from the current design allowing up to 11 research and 11 manufacturing jobs simultaneously, depending on your skill training. This implies lots of strategic choices for players, and I have every confidence that CCP can surpass the design that PotBS implemented.

And of course there are over 65,000 planets in the game. And you can interact with each and every one of them. Including those that are in wormhole space, which can actually be quite challenging.

This intrigues me to no end, both from a gameplay perspective (more profits in W-space and more activities out there for the residents) as well as from a “prime fiction” (canon lore) perspective. Do these planets have residents? If not, will we learn more about the automation and technology in EVE? This could potentially imply resources for tech III frigates as well. Back here in K-space, we should get much more information about who lives in low-sec and null-sec, and of course some areas could have potentially unique interest (e.g. COSMOS constellations or systems like Intaki).

We’re making really interesting manufacturing and resource trees here, right now. Going over ‘what materials are you extracting from gas giants, what are you getting from planets which are pretty much just molten magma. You will actually be able to put down facilities, arcologies, and cloud cities, or really tough units that you can place on very hostile worlds, to extract and manufacture from them. And then rocket the stuff off of them, or move it out with a space elevator. In general, of course, with more risk comes more reward.

This really grabs my attention, both for the gameplay as well as the fiction. What will we make? Will it be awesomely cool? And the fiction possibilities multiply exponentially here. Generally, when new resources become available, we get new end products as well, so even those folks not interested in the industrial gameplay benefit (cf. tech III strategic cruiser production).

Your ability to master a planet, to manufacture, build up, and manage it, will be bound by skills.

Guess I’ll sit on that neural remap until we know more about this. Industrial and exploration gameplay that results in passive income, with tons of fiction possibilities? I really want to immerse myself in this, and so I intend to focus largely on the new gameplay as I’ve done with other science & industry skills. But until we at least know whether they’ll largely focus on intelligence and memory (my current estimate) or even include charisma in some way, I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’ll have trouble keeping up.

One of our goals with planetary interaction is to phase out these NPC created commodities, because we want to put the power into the hands of the players and make EVE even more sandbox-y than it is.

There are elements of EVE which we feel can use some iteration based on the experiences that we have learned, running EVE for seven years. The NPC market is definitely one of them. It’s been with us for a long time. It hasn’t changed much. We want to take these commodities and move them into the hands of the players.

We are not giving out publicly yet which commodities these are. Even once we put it on the public test server, you will not be able to see what these final commodities are going to be.

I hope hope HOPE this includes implants (or meta 1-4 modules) and not just commodities like robotics and oxygen and trade goods. That said, I applaud this sort of thing, as it allows for continued emergent gameplay. The implications will have such a major impact on the economy that reserving more information on that until Tyrannis goes onto the production cluster really becomes a de rigeur decision.