Recently, I started using Raptr to better engage with the games I play and connect with my friends. I could say a lot about the convergence of social networking and gaming, not to mention the specifics of Raptr’s implementation.
The time tracking, though, has really grabbed my attention. Without spending a lot of energy analyzing the data, the fact that I spend a lot of time playing EVE jumped out at me. This obviously doesn’t count the time I spend blogging, planning, and communicating with other players via Twitter, email/IM and variousEVEforums.
My EVE habit strikes me as a little unhealthy. It’s pretty much a second full-time job, I think, and that comes in addition to my real full-time job (obviously), plus my family and other interests outside of Internet spaceships. I did try shifting things over the weekend. But, as an initial response, I ended up just playing Mass Effect, a single-player game which I hadn’t played previously for a number of good reasons. I don’t know whether that actually improved things any for me.
So I need to re-examine the balance here again. In the past, both with SWG and EVE Online, I’ve gotten way out of balance and had to deal with related consequences. I will not allow myself to get into that situation again. But neither do I feel the need to totally leave EVE (or gaming in general). That strikes me as extremist in the other direction. I just need to find a way to treat it a little more casually.
(side note: I have so many “musings” posts here that I should move them into their own category…)
Well, another Alliance Tournament has reached its end. Congratulations to Pandemic Legion on their three-peat. I heard a rumor that they lost voice communications due to a DDoS attack on their voice server during the quarterfinals match, which makes things even more impressive.
As for my picks: I did decently in the Round of 32 on Saturday, but terribly in the Sweet Sixteen, which screwed me from there forward. But I had a blast watching it, tweeting (I hope you followed the #at8 hashtag), and in various channels IG. I really think this event represents something special. CCP and the community will undoubtedly follow this up with something even better for AT9 — it just gets more spectacular every year.
I seriously hope some of the developer spots will make it to YouTube, particularly the discussion with CCP T0rfi about Incarna and the hints from CCP Hammer about the group PVE content they have planned for the next expansion. And I’d like to grab some of the video bumpers like the ship displays, both the engine graphics and the fitting models. I don’t know for what purpose, but I want them anyway.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may know I had some RL health events over the previous few days. I did not have a heart attack or similar, as my wife and sister-in-law originally feared. I do have some health problems, though, and unfortunately typical ones: way out of shape, over-stressed, hypertension, that sort of thing. Without going into far too much detail, I need to get my life back in balance.
No, I don’t intend to leave EVE or blogging or anything like that. My problems here don’t center around gaming, really. But I do think I need to re-evaluate my specific plans for EVE Online: maybe continue to focus on low-intensity, non-aggressive play, staying away from the heavy pew stuff? Maybe avoid things that involve heavy time commitments? I don’t know yet, and I’d appreciate any advice from other players who’ve dealt with similar issues.
Apart from blogging and maybe YouTube, Twitter might be perhaps the most popular form of social media among EVE players. Setting it up doesn’t take any special skills or knowledge, and we’ve formed a small and incredibly supportive community we affectionately call the “Tweet Fleet”. We egg each other on, help spread the word about what everyone else has going, discuss and debate, and generally provide the right sort of online friends and community.
I thought I’d share with you a few ideas from my years using Twitter, and I hope more of you who already participate in our thriving, growing group will join in with your own ideas in the comments. And of course, please follow me on @casiella and send me an @-reply to let me know!
Create an account specifically for EVE-related tweeting. Twitter doesn’t require you to only use one account, and many clients like Tweetdeck (my personal favorite) explicitly support the use of multiple accounts. So if you use Twitter for personal or professional purposes, just create another account for EVE. You will also avoid annoying your non-EVE playing friends with constant discussions of killmails, ISK, and patches…
Use your EVE avatar for your profile picture. This immediately creates an obvious connection to the game, letting anyone you follow know that you’re not a spammer.
Set up your Twitter profile. Once you’ve created your account, choose a design or, better yet, upload your own background picture. Fill out the fields, especially the “bio” section” and maybe a URL if you have one. Don’t just use your Twitter profile as your URL, though, because that sort of defeats the purpose. If you don’t have any other EVE-related profile anywhere, at least use your EVE Search URL, like mine (except with your own character name, naturally).
Tweet about EVE. By this, I mean not to tweet regularly about non-EVE stuff. Not to say you should never mention RL, but the bulk of your tweets should revolve around EVE in some way. And don’t just tweet your blog posts, though nobody will mind if you do this as part of general participation. Twitter is about conversations, not broadcasts.
Follow the Tweet Fleet. The easiest way to do this is to follow @00sage00/tweetfleet using your preferred Twitter client or at the link I just provided. He runs the most popular EVE-related list on Twitter, though far from the only one, so this will automatically get you following the bulk of EVE-focused Twittereans. Right now, he has 225 people on the list, and you’ll also get @ccpgames and other CCP Twitter accounts this way.
Get on the Tweet Fleet list. Just send an @-reply to @00sage00 and ask him to add you to the list. Assuming you’ve sent a few game-related tweets and don’t look like a spammer, he’s pretty easy-going about it.
Use the #tweetfleet hashtag. At the end of some of your game-related tweets, particularly those you’d like to get some sort of response, just add “#tweetfleet” and perhaps “#eveonline”. (A hashtag is just a way of marking a tweet for a particular topic.) Lots of folks have a running search in their Twitter client for those hashtags and you’ll get lots of new conversations that way. In fact, be sure to keep a search for the #tweetfleet hashtag yourself for discussion specifically thrown out there for the community.
Respond to the “questions of the day.” Occasionally, somebody will send a tweet with “QOTD” and the #tweetfleet hashtag. This means “question of the day”, and so you should respond and generally join in the chatter. Be sure to include the hashtag yourself!
Participate in Follow Friday. Every Friday, you’ll see a bunch of tweets tagged “#followfriday” or maybe just “#ff”. This is just a way of people recommending other folks you might want to follow. Look in particular for tweets also tagged “#tweetfleet”, of course. And share the love: if you found somebody particularly interesting or worthy of attention, throw it out yourself. They’ll notice it in their mentions/replies, and probably reply back to you, too. It’s a great way of establishing a little deeper connection.
Retweet other people if they say something cool. You might just want to help get the word out about an announcement. Or maybe you really liked something somebody just said. A retweet is sort of like a QFE on forums. You can either do it old-school (copy the tweet into a new message, then preface it with “RT @username”), or new-school which just reshares the tweet to your followers with a special bit that shows who retweeted it. Either way, nearly all up-to-date Twitter clients support this, sometimes with one click.
Obviously, you shouldn’t consider any of this some sort of “requirement”, and you can do lots of other things to increase your participation and maybe even reputation. But the more of this you follow, the more conversations and interactions you’ll have!
And, by the by, what about you existing Tweetfleeters? Any additional thoughts or suggestions?
To start things off: I have no intentions of leaving EVE or this blog, so no, you cannot haz my stuffz. I still needz them.
As I’ve mentioned on Twitter and in EVE-Bloggers, this summer I will resume my education by going back to university. I’ll obviously do this part-time, since I have a full-time job and a family to support. And the time I’ll use for this will come directly from the “EVE budget,” as it were. Even before classes start on May 24th, I’ve planned some refreshing of some core skills needed for the computer science track as I haven’t touched C++ in a couple of years. I will almost certainly keep some sort of related blog that I’ll link here when the time comes.
Fortunately for me, my preferred playstyle lends itself fairly well to a more casual approach. Trading, industry, and occasional exploration work much better for this sort of situation than does actively leading a corporation, engaging in a sustained PvP campaign, or participating in the sort of metagaming shenanigans that look like a lot of fun but take a lot of dedication, too.
Tyrannis should help this, too, I think, so that I can do my whole planetary domination erm management thing when I log in every couple of days or so. And obviously my interest in EVE fiction and lore shouldn’t take a heavy hit.
So you won’t see me spamming quite as often on Twitter, or blogging 3 times a day, or annoying people in EVE-Bloggers by pretending like I know what I’m doing, I’m not dead yet!
This post kicks off a new, weekly series here at Ecliptic Rift, Social Sunday, in which we’ll look at the best ways to use social media related to EVE Online. Feel free to jump in with your own comments, constructive criticism, suggestions, and questions.
Birds of a feather, and all that.
Most of us don’t write EVE blogs for fame and fortune. Okay, a few people might do it for fame, but certainly not fortune. Personally, I write this blog for two basic, interrelated reasons: I enjoy it, and I like talking with other EVE players with somewhat similar interests and outlooks. Not too similar, though, otherwise the conversations will get real boring, real fast. That means that comments matter just as much to blogs as good posts do. So today, I want to talk about encouraging commenting on your blog.
Make some decisions about who can comment. You could allow fully anonymous comments, or perhaps require commentators just to specify their name, URL, and maybe an email address. (Get ready for a good bit of moderation to avoid spam and whatnot.) Beyond that, you could require them to have an identity from another site like Google, Twitter, or OpenID. This latter system basically allows users to log into another site, like WordPress or Yahoo!, and use that ID elsewhere. This way, they can prove their identity without having yet another password to remember.
Don’t require only one specific sort of ID. This will just discourage comments. Some blogs only allow you to comment with your Google ID, for example, and for those of us whose EVE identity doesn’t reside in the Googleverse, we frequently just won’t comment even if we’d like to do so. You should allow multiple forms of authentication, which with both allow visitors to comment easily as well as reduce spam and sock puppets.
I seriously recommend using some form of commenting system, like Disqus or IntenseDebate. Both work well, integrate with multiple blog platforms, and only have fairly minor differences between them. Whichever you choose will do the job pretty well. This sort of system will allow your commentators to retain ownership of their words. They can have a record of what they write on different sites and can easily keep up with ongoing conversations, rather than comment and disappear. They can also choose to publicize their comments (e.g. via Twitter), which will encourage more people to come check out the conversation.
A side benefit: since switching to a system, I’ve stopped receiving any comment spam whatsoever. I just don’t see it appear at all. Even if I didn’t get any other benefit, that alone would make the whole thing worthwhile. Allowing comment spam not only discourages readers, it will end up causing your site to get dropped from search engines. And you could end up allowing all sorts of malware, including keyloggers and other account stealing programs, to use your blog to attack fellow players — or yourself.
Allow users to choose to receive future replies to the same post via email. Even if you don’t use this sort of system, you want to encourage your visitors to come back and continue to participate in the conversation. Otherwise, they’ll come and say something, then someone else will respond and the first commentator will never know. Some people won’t want to use the option, but many will.
When folks do comment, reply to them. Engage in conversation with them, and sound like yourself. After all, they took the time to come tell you what they think, so be friendly and polite. Personally, I find this one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of blogging.
What other suggestions do you have to encourage commenting?
Cailais wrote an awesome post on A new archetype: The Socialite that is really worth your time to read. I wanted to comment there but it would have grown too long, so I wrote this instead.
We’ve known about social players for a long time, particularly via Dr. Richard Bartle‘s research. Dr. Bartle wrote the first MUD over thirty years ago and has stayed active in this area for a long time. You might even have taken the famous Bartle Test at some point.
That test scores players for four different playstyles: Killer, Achiever, Socializer, and Explorer. (For what it’s worth, I score Explorer 93%, Achiever 47%, Socializer 33%, and Killer 27%. My results have stayed fairly consistent across various attempts for the last several years.) The Socializer playstyle obviously lends itself fairly well to this discussion. From the Wikipedia article:
There are a multitude of gamers who choose to play games for the social aspect, rather than the actual game itself. These players are known as Socializers or “Hearts.” They gain the most enjoyment from a game by interacting with other players, and on some occasions, computer-controlled characters with personality. The game is merely a tool they use to meet others in-game or outside of it.
And from the GamerDNA test:
It’s not what you do, but who you know, how you are known and who loves you. People with high Socializer scores enjoy interacting with other people, forming bonds and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the virtual world.
I think we already have these folks to various degrees. Think about forum warriors, for example: they have a much greater interest in the community than the actual game (though some of them will obviously deny that). Or think about folks whose playtime primarily focuses on organizing their corporation, alliance, or coalition. I suppose that, to varying degrees, active EVE bloggers and twittereans fall into this degree somewhat as well.
Cailais believes that the advent of EVE Gate and Incarna will only add to this. As for whether EVE Gate will change this, I don’t know. We already have forums (official and otherwise), Twitter, blogs, videos, and more.
But given CCP’s vision for Incarna, I tend to agree there:
That doesn’t mean that such players will never undock, but that their power will tend to accrue based on who and what they know rather than what they have or what they can destroy. I don’t know how much access we’ll have to our existing abilities while out-of-pod: can traders still do their thing while sitting in a bar? Will we have full access to chat channels and all the NEOCOM bits? This could turn a social player of this sort into quite an information broker.
I don’t doubt we’ll see some characters delve into providing other sorts of, erm, interpersonal services for ISK as well. EVE has had this sort of thing for a long time, and we already know how prevalent such “intimacy for a price” is in the world of EVE. Missions, passenger types, Chronicles, and clothing demos for Incarna have all highlighted this quite well. We’ll see quite a few players running “pleasure hubs” when Incarna comes, no doubt.
On the other hand, I don’t think any of this will take away from EVE. PVPers won’t find fewer fights, for example, partly because many of these players won’t actively seek out PVP (not all Socializers are Killers), and partly because many of these players will continue to do what they enjoy (some Socializers are Killers, after all).
Personally, I look forward to Incarna a great deal. I don’t intend for all my gameplay to involve pretending to drink in a space bar, of course, but then I already spend a lot of my time trading and trying to dodge pirates while I go into the dark little corners of space to get what I want and need.
I want to rename my Twitter account for a number of reasons, primarily due to my desire to slightly alter my persona. I’m not going to turn into a gaming newsbot or anything, but originally I intended to tweet and blog entirely in-character. That didn’t happen, so here we are.
I’d love your suggestions. I want to work in the term “skald” somehow (Viking warrior-poets) but give it a little more futuristic / tech feel. After all, I really have started to focus on SF roleplaying and fiction writing in our favorite post-cyberpunk Internet spaceship world full of space Vikings. Any pointers?
(To clarify: Twitter has a rename function, this will be seamless to my followers.)
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.)
Because he is win, Rettic created a cool little badge for Tweetfleet members, which you can see in the upper left of my site. Give him lots of link love and support him in every way.
Maybe I should even set him blue, we’ll see… or not, I wouldn’t want to take away his fun of dodging incoming fire, right?
Recently, I started using Raptr to better engage with the games I play and connect with my friends. I could say a lot about the convergence of social networking and gaming, not to mention the specifics of Raptr’s implementation.!['H5N1 virus [snag]' by Quiplash!](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/28/61424646_d1120dd12a_m.jpg "'H5N1 virus [snag]' by Quiplash!")
Follow the Tweet Fleet. The easiest way to do this is to follow 
