Oh, just one more thing...

When planetary interaction materials became the method for constructing POSs and POS mods, there was a very quiet change made at the same time: faction POS BPCs no longer dropped as rewards from exploration sites.  These BPCs can be used to build faction POSs, which have been beloved forever because they require less POS fuel than the standard towers.  This makes them particularly well-loved in wormhole space, where every cubic meter into the holes is weighed and measured.

It took a while for the word to get out about the change.  CCP didn't announce it in advance so far as I can tell.  It just slowly got out among the anomaly runners that they weren't getting the BPCs any longer.  There was a mini threadnaught created two years ago about it.  And for a month, various players bumped that thread and bumped it and bumped it, with no response.  Finally, in a "Devs Answer Everything" thread created by CCP, CCP Greyscale responded to the issue thus (it's post 38 in the thread):

We're looking at adjusting the supply of these at some point in the reasonably near future, possibly

Needless to say, this answer was kind of unsatisfying so the threadnaught slowly continued.  About a month later (presumably after a few dozen bug reports), CCP Dropbear put out a much more explanatory response (it's post #204):

So...we are already aware of it. No need to file bug reports.

Faction towers will go back in someday if we can ensure a better distribution of them. That's the issue here, and as others noted, it's exacerbated by high-sec (low-risk) POS, and so on. End of the day it's a distribution method that wasn't working as intended and needs a fix, if one is even possible (hence the "possibly" in Greyscale's reply).

I'm sorry we can't provide more details right now, but that's where this particular thing is at right now. BFF has much bigger fish to fry, I think you'd all agree, so it'll get some attention, but only once other priorities are dealt with. :)

And two years later, here we are.

In the time since, the number of faction towers and mods has been going down slowly month by month as some of the limited number of them have been destroyed.  And of course as this has happened, the price has gone slowly up and up and up.  A full size Dread Guristas POS peaked well over four billion ISK before settling down to its slightly more sane price of 3.2 billion.  The others aren't that expensive, but they're pretty expensive, with mediums and smalls at comparable relative prices.  And because they were none too common before the change, some types of faction POSes aren't available at any price.

So given that the removal of the BPCs was pretty much a stealth change to the game, I think it's entirely appropriate that CCP Soundwave casually mentioned yesterday, in his dev-post about the new sites, that faction towers are coming back:

Have you played it after Sisi was deployed today? We've doubled the loot in each site (to account for cans you don't get), added new types (the faction towers are back in) and cut the number of cans in half. This should be in much better shape now (if it's not, we'll continue making changes of course).

Emphasis mine.  The other hidden message?  Loot from these sites is doubled.  That has the potential to be very lucrative... but given what we saw of these sites at Fanfest, it's going to be impossible to get all the cans by yourself.  Early tip?  Don't expect to scoop those cans alone.  Bring a friend!

Or you potentially leave what is initially going to be a multi-billion ISK BPC on the table.

For the time being, the faction tower market hasn't reacted to the stealth announcement.  It'll be interesting to see how the market reacts...  In the meantime, kudos to CCP for this change!  It's yet another great reason to try out the new sites and the new hacking mini-game.  I should write a blog post about that mini-game.

Fit of the Week: Starter Moros

In honor of the XL blaster nerf, I thought it'd be fun to go with a capital ship FOTW.  So here's a standard starter Moros for those of you thinking about one:

[Moros, Starter]
Damage Control II
Federation Navy Magnetic Field Stabilizer
Federation Navy Magnetic Field Stabilizer
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Capital Armor Repairer I
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script
Tracking Computer II, Optimal Range Script
Tracking Computer II, Optimal Range Script
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Cap Booster 800
Heavy Capacitor Booster II, Cap Booster 800

Ion Siege Blaster Cannon I, Antimatter Charge XL
Ion Siege Blaster Cannon I, Antimatter Charge XL
Ion Siege Blaster Cannon I, Antimatter Charge XL
Siege Module II

Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I


This is about as basic as it gets for a dreadnought fit.  You can obviously start with a T1 siege module as you train up for T2, but the T2 module is so much better than T1, you should definitely make training for it a priority.  It adds about a 15% damage bonus.  As a result, in terms of training order, I recommend Gallente Dreadnought III, then Tactical Weapon Reconfiguration II, then Capital Hybrid Turret III.  That will get you very basic competence.  Then Dread IV (adding 11% DPS or so), then Tactical Weapon Reconfiguration V (adding 15%), then Capital Hybrid Turret IV (adding 5%), then Dread V (adding 11%), then finally Capital Hybrid Turret V (adding the last 5%).  All of that assumes you want a perfect dread pilot.  If you want to be a bit more balanced, you can stop at Dread IV and Capital Hybrid Turret IV.

But if you do take it all the way, then in this fitting, you'll be doing about 11500 DPS with standard ammo and 12700 DPS with faction ammo.  A third faction MFS adds about 250 DPS.  CONCORD guns add about 400 DPS per gun.  In the end, it will come down to the amount of ISK you want to put at risk.  Since dreads rarely come under fire and those that do frequently die regardless of tank, you can even go with a damage rig if you like.  Fully maxed out, you'll approach 15500 DPS... not bad at all.

Dreadnoughts generally operate "in siege" which should be the topic of a separate blog entry.  But for the purposes of this one, siege lasts five minutes and is the only way you should operate dreads in serious combat.  During siege, you will be unable to move, jump out, or warp.  But your damage is hugely enhanced.  Outside of siege, you'll be reduced to about 1300 DPS... you may as well bring a battleship instead.

Tank is provided by two EANMs, a damage control, and a single capital self-repair module.  You cannot receive remote repairs while in siege.  This tank is primarily intended to provide sufficient buffer and self-rep to safely attack a POS defended by large guns.  It will provide you with some 2.0 million EHP of which about 350k HP is armor at an average resist of 66%.  While this sounds like a lot, it really isn't.  A single enemy Moros in seige can destroy you in about three minutes, and ten of them can wipe you out in 20 or 30 seconds, barely enough time to get a few cycles of this repper off.  So while it may make you feel better to have it, don't kid yourself that it's going to do much.  If you're put into this situation, the repper is there in case the additional seconds of life it provides are enough to get you out of siege and into the arms of a nearby (hopefully triaged) carrier.  You can extend these seconds fairly significantly by springing for faction EANMs for the extra resists or having a Damnation or the like in your fleet.  Otherwise, as I said, the repper primarily exists to mitigate POS gun damage during a POS bash.

A dread in siege can only lock a tiny number of targets (two with a T1 siege module, three with a T2 module), and locking targets takes forever without a Sebo (30 seconds to lock an enemy dread while in siege), so a Sensor Booster is more or less mandatory.  It will somewhat lessen your pain.  ;-)  Two Tracking Computers is more or less also a requirement for armor-tanking dreads.  The remainder of the mid slots are dual Heavy Capacitor Boosters.  These will keep your guns firing under the heavy neuting which often precedes you becoming the enemy fleet's primary target.  The Moros's cargo bay is enormous, so carry 800s and don't skimp on extra charges!  The cap boosters will also help tremendously during a capital fleet's egress process: you can use them to "cap back up" quickly after coming out of siege, since you won't be able to use your jump drive until your cap is above 70% or so (assuming Jump Drive Operation V).

It's a great idea in a Moros to keep boosters in cargo, as well as several hundred units of nanite repair paste.  Good choices for boosters are Mindflood (for additional cap), Frentix (for additional optimal range, though this one is going to become less important), Sooth Sayer (for additional fall-off; this one is going to become more important), and Drop (for tracking).  Since dreads operate exclusively in low, null, or w-space, if your dread pilot can handle them, I recommend Standard boosters, if not Improved boosters.  One of each of the ones you want to carry will probably be sufficient.

That's it for the basic fit.  Something that is quite useful for dread pilots is to keep alternate modules for your dread right in the dread's cargo bay.  Using these additional modules is quite reliant on having a carrier within refit range during dreadnought use (hint: this is a really good idea).  And you should always jump into any combat situation in a dread with your basic combat fit.  However, if you know you are attacking a POS that is unlikely to be defended, once the dreads are in siege and a carrier has moved into refitting position, you can adjust your fitting based on your needs.  Good spare modules to carry in cargo are:

• two Cap Rechargers;
• two or three Capacitor Power Relays;
• two or three additional T2 Magnetic Field Stabilizers;
• two T2 Tracking Enhancers; and,
• a full set of T2 active armor hardeners.

If you intend to attack an undefended POS, POCO, or similar structure, you can trade out your EANMs for the CPRs, the MFSs, or the TEs depending on the situation.  For instance, if attacking an undefended medium POS, take off your EANMs and fit one TE and one addition MFS.  Though certainly affected by the diminishing returns penalty, on a Moros a fourth MFS is worth 750 or more DPS... almost another battleship.  ;-)

Similarly, if attacking a POS or structure, you can remove the Heavy Cap Boosters and replace them with Cap Rechargers.  Once the operation is over and you're capping up for the jump out, replace two low slots with Cap Power Relays to cap up more quickly.  If your fleet comes under heavy attack and you become an enemy fleet's primary, trade out your MFSs and one EANM for the full set of hardeners to increase your chances of staying alive (or at least to slow the enemy fleet's DPS down).  With time and practice, you'll become quite good at swapping out modules on the fly and adjusting for the situation you find yourself in.  In particular, if your fleet is attacked, make sure you get some resists back into the lows and the cap boosters back into the mids.  You'll need them.

Finally, your first few fights in a dread are going to be somewhat nerve-wracking.  A well-fit dread can run up to three billion ISK... not small change in just about anyone's book!  Find a mentor to help you understand the rather specialized dread "battle language" and orders and to help guide you through your first few dread fleets.  With a mentor looking over your shoulder, you'll be much less likely to make the really common mistakes that cause new dread pilots to lose their dreads...

Siege green!

Mystery box

So here's a quickie that's also philosophical.  I'm in a philosophical mood this week.

EVE is often a bit of a "mystery box", or just a plain old black box.  To learn definitive things about the game, often the player has to feed it a lot of inputs, see what comes out, write the outputs down, and then try to reverse engineer what the game is actually doing based on this data.  There's certainly no documentation and because of game updates and the like, sometimes even the documentation that players have come up with is wrong.

A couple of good examples:

• I'm sketching out outlines for the next few PvP guides, one of which will be basic electronic warfare.  Those of us that do e-war have always had the impression that e-war strength drops very rapidly outside of optimal range.  But to my knowledge, it's never been officially documented just how much.
• In CCP Fozzie's XL guns thread that I referenced last night, CSM member mynnna and many other EVE players are having an argument about missile speed versus explosion velocity versus ship velocity versus explosion radius and how those factors interact.

In both cases, there's no definitive source that I'm aware of that has a canon answer.  So players end up endlessly debating these and other subjects that are tied to the underlying mechanics of the game, which exist in the black box but are otherwise undocumented.

Net it down to its most basic level and you get "EVE is hard to learn and is hard to explain."  This is just one of the reasons.

Here's the philosophical bit, and the bit that I'm very curious to get some player input on.  I've blogged endlessly on the difference between needless complexity in EVE and complexity that adds to EVE's rich game-play.  Which do you think this is?  When you have to endlessly debate how missile explosion radius interacts with ship signature, is that adding to the richness of the game?  Or is it complexity for the sake of complexity that should be simplified or removed?

In my opinion, someone very smart needs to take EVE's combat system, break it down and flow chart it, simplify it, and rebuild in a similar fashion to what was done with Crimewatch.  Again in my opinion, most of the rich complexity of EVE comes from how the combat system is applied, not the mechanics of the combat system itself.  It wouldn't reduce the richness of the game at all if I could explain EVE combat in simple terms.  Again... in my opinion.

But I want to hear what you think.

But wait just a second.  Before you answer, here's the really tough part... before you answer, remove from your head any thinking you have in terms of "EVE is hard, I had to learn it and it took a long time, and if newbies don't want to do the same, screw 'em."  Because I'd like to hear your answer outside of that tendency that EVE players have to want to torture other (particularly newer) EVE players.  Just look at the problem at its most basic, as if you were designing the game from the ground up.

Does EVE's black box nature add richness to the game?  Or needless complexity?  Discuss.

Bring out the big guns

First, the news of the day.  I don't have much to say about the launcher issues that happened today except these things happen.  Matter of fact, I had been telling CCP devs this past weekend how nifty I thought the new SSO launcher was on Singularity and playing with it there.  It didn't cause any issues getting it installed there and from what I'm seeing in CCP's news briefs today, it looks like the issues today were mostly coincidental.  Here's the forum thread if you want to read it.  It got to 103 pages in about 16 hours.

Am I going to rage to CCP about it?  Nope.  I'm sorry about all of the people impacted by this issue.  I was impacted by it myself and spent a while on a work-around before figuring it out.  Software has bugs and unforeseen problems from time to time.  While I understand the anger, I don't share it, and I'm not going to get on CCP's case about it.  If you're going to get annoyed with CCP, get annoyed with them for stuff they do on purpose.  ;-)  Onward.

Nope, what I thought it'd be fun to talk about today are the XL weapons re-balancing changes announced by CCP Fozzie just before the weekend.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking with players about it.  Let me start with the summary.  I think feihcsiM (I see what you did there) has the right of it in his post on Fozzie's thread about the issue. To summarize:

DREADS BEST TO WORST PRE-PATCH

1. Moros
2. Rev
3. Nag
4. Phoenix

DREADS BEST TO WORST POST-PATCH

1. Moros
2. Rev
3. Nag
4. Phoenix

I happen to disagree with his order.  I think the Naglfar will be passing the Revelation thanks to several factors which I'll get to presently.  But those of you posting "RIP Moros" or asking if you should still train the Moros aren't thinking the issue through.  The simple fact is that the Moros is so much better than the other three dreadnoughts right now that only a major top-down re-balance of the entire class is going to address the balance issues.  While, say, adding 25% to the damage of capital missiles would be satisfying to Phoenix pilots, without balancing the rest of the ship, the Phoenix is still going to be wildly sub-par to the other dreads in virtually every respect.

Give capital missiles a damage buff and there might be some in CCP that would say "That's good enough for another :18months:.  Let's turn our attention to other things."  I think we've all heard this before somewhere.  Silly as it sounds, I'd rather have the Phoenix still sitting there, being bad and embarrassing people as a way to motivate the ship balancing team to do this right.  This probably makes me a bad person.  ;-)

Fozzie, CCP Ytterbium and CCP Rise are smart guys and know about the problems.  Hell, I wouldn't put it past Fozzie to do it this way on purpose.  And no, I haven't asked him.  He's such a nice guy he might tell me the truth.

OK, why do I think the Naglfar is now second to the Moros?  Five reasons:

1. Better damage output for what a lot of people actually use dreads for, i.e. small-scale cap fights and structure bashes.
2. Opens up the terrifying possibility of blap dreads used against other capitals.
3. Tunable damage.
4. Few/no cap dependencies actually makes them tougher in combat.
5. (Once things settle down.) Cheaper.

In particular, in a good armor tanking configuration, a Naglfar has 1.9 million EHP on 326k armor HP, versus 2.0 million EHP on 310k armor EHP in a typical Moros.  But unlike the Moros, your guns can't be capped out and are tunable to whatever damage type you like -- that includes to the explosive hole that most POSes these days have.  The Nag has 82% resists against Revelations, and 70% resist against kinetic.  And finally, once hull prices stabilize, I predict Nag prices are going to settle down at something around 2.4 billion ISK... and if you fit CONCORD guns, you only need two of them.

But the Moros is still better.  Typically in EVE, dreads attack structures; a large POS attack takes place at 30km.  A typical Moros fit for this task with triple faction Magnetic Field Stabilizers, CONCORD guns, no Tracking Enhancers and an expert pilot aboard does about 15500 DPS at 30km.  His optimal with anti-matter will be 27km, meaning that the vast majority of shots at 30km are going to hit and hit hard.  With a 30km falloff, DPS drops to 5000 at 57km.  With this change, optimal will drop to 17km, but fall-off will be extended to 40km.  That means damage at 57km is going to be about the same and the DPS curve will drop more slowly.

Today with this ship, you lose about 2000 DPS 10km beyond optimal but with the longer fall-off I think we can expect the loss with anti-matter at 30km to be no more than 1000 DPS or so, to about 14500.  Yes, you can downshift to Plutonium and yes, that will certainly help.  But I think it's going to drop your DPS to about 14000 at 30km.  In short, anti-matter still looks to be the way to go.  Yes, more of your shots will miss.  But the percentage that will miss will be made up by the increased damage of those that hit and you'll still be coming out ahead in structure bashes.

And you're still going to be exceeding Naglfar and Rev damage except under very specialized situations.

I can't speak to capital-on-capital fights, having only been in a handful of them, but in my experience those take place at much closer ranges than 30km and so this change isn't going to affect the Moros at all.  What about tracking?  Obviously, the 15% tracking nerf that XL blasters is receiving is aimed at the famous "blap dread": Moroses fit with double tracking computers intended to slay webbed-down battleships in large fights.  Again, having run the numbers and thought about the situation, I conclude that the nerf is not going to be sufficient to end these tactics but can't be made any higher without impacting the occasional Erebus gun-fight.  In particular, the heavy webs often brought to bear in this situation have more of an impact on the targets than the tracking of the dreadnought itself does.

In short, it's not much of a nerf.  It addresses some of the issue and might cause a Moros pilot here or there to fit faction Tracking Computers.  But it's not going to put an end to the tactic.  A full rebalance of the dreadnought is going to be needed to address this issue as well, in my opinion.

So anyone breathing into a paper bag over this can relax.  The Moros is still the best dread and is likely to remain so for a while to come yet.  Anyone who spent a lot of time training them can be confident in their training, and anyone asking which dread to train?  There you go.

Kill of the Week: CSI: Tribal Band

So KOTW has to go to this interesting story:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17760057

There must have been a full moon or something this last week, because the nuts were out in force.  TMC covered this carrier loss in depth.  Only the version of the story they got appears to be complete fiction, a deliberate troll aimed at TMC.  Actual version of how this happened?  Player got called for a CTA, ejected from his carrier at a POS in a system with no station, attended the op, and when he got back, his carrier was a wreck outside the POS.  Password security breach?  Grid malfunction?  Nobody knows, and Tribal Band's CEOs are looking into it.  Needless to say, the bomber pilot isn't telling.

Sometimes this sort of thing is fun: how does it happen?  I myself was involved in a Paladin wreck in the last year that was POS-related.  We left the wreck outside the POS as a mystery for the owner to solve.  I'm not telling that story, and I don't blame the bomber pilot for not telling his.  But between the article and the amusing spectacle of a single bomber kill on a carrier, that has to be this week's KOTW.

Honorable mentions?  Sometimes even PL pilots forget an important step.  Sometimes it's fun to theme fleet a structure bash... it takes a little of the monotony out of the proceedings if you kill a structure with dozens of Vindicators.  After that, though?  Not a lot jumped out at me.  It was a pretty quiet week, all in all.  EVE seems to be holding its breath for Odyssey, as typically happens in the run-up to a new expansion.  And that also applied to the...


Number of dead super-caps last week: 0

That's right.  Big ol' doughnut.  Matter of fact, the only really expensive things that died this past week were a grand total of three assorted jump freighters, all in high-sec, killed by Freight Club or The Marmite Collective... plus this Heron:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17755752

Pull up the Sleeper Drone AI Nexus, and you'll find it's a piece of loot that is purchased by large numbers of NPCs for five million ISK each.  There's a running theory out there that this particular item is a great target for RMTers, who buy them slightly above cost in Jita, un-dock with them, get them ganked, scoop them with another character (assuming they survive), then sell them back to an NPC at a slight loss... only now theoretically they think CCP can't trace where the ISK went since it's now in the hands of some random character who scooped the NPC-purchased loot.  Any that are lost are a cost of doing the RMT business.

Can CCP track this sort of thing?  Haven't a clue.  But it sure seems silly to have this stuff in a character that can be tracked by API...

CSM8 status report: Week two

Reading reading reading reading reading.  Trying to stay ahead of EVE Online forum posts, private chats, Skypes, Twitter, EVE mail, pod-casts (though that's not reading, of course).  This CSM thing continues to be an enormous amount of work!  And thank you to all of you that have taken the time to drop me a line or send me a comment!  As always, there's some fun stuff to share.

Early this week, CCP Dolan announced that CSM8 had chosen our officers:

Chairman: Trebor Daehdoow
Vice Chair: Ripard Teg
Secretary: Kesper North
Vice Secretary: Ali Aras

Surprised?  I suspect a lot of people were.  Set's Chaos was surprised, for instance, and published a rather amusing article talking about his surprise on TMC.  He recognizes that we got this done in a single vote, and attributes it to apathy with a quote from mynnna.  The quote is accurate, but Set's caught mynnna at the end of a long work-day.  mynnna had forgotten his own Google document that listed who wanted what post.  For the record, there were a few candidates for each post.  No big deal.  It certainly wasn't anything like the biggest mistake made by a CSM member this week.  That was all mine, baby.  ;-)

The rest of the CSM has apparently started a pool: how long until Ripard NDA-blogs himself right off the CSM?  Let's hope it's next May.

Anyway, all of us on CSM8 had ourselves a grin at this initial TMC article, particularly because several of us had already been interviewed or contacted by Rhavas for a more definitive CSM8 officer article.  He was quick to reassure us that Set's article wasn't it.  I have to admit, though, I had a personal amused moment.  I suspect my feelings when I read Set's article were mirrored by Seleene, Alekseyev Karrde, and a few other members of CSM7 from time to time when I would write something.  Ah well.

Rhavas's article came out the 17th and is terrific.  I strongly encourage you to go out and give it a read.  It's the clearest possible picture you could get of how the officer selection process went.  There's pretty much nothing I would add to the article and the quotations from me are accurate and sum up how I feel the officer voting went.  So go give it a few minutes of your time.  I want to compliment Rhavas on a fine job here!

Currently going through the five stages of grief is Poetic Stanziel.  He's currently somewhere between "Anger" and "Bargaining."  His article "It is time to get rid of CSM titles" is an absolute riot!  This blog post can be roughly summed up as "Trebor won a Grammy?!  This proves the Grammies are freaking worthless.  End them.  Now."  At one point, Poe indicates there have been few or no CSM officers that have done anything worth a damn in the positions.  I dispute this in the strongest terms.  Anyone who doubts Mynxee owned that Chair title is flat wrong, and TeaDaze was the finest Secretary any CSM has ever had.  And that's just two people that jumped into my head reading his piece.

Onward.  I'm hoping to announce the date of the first CSM Town Hall in a couple of days.  Many of the CSM have agreed to my preliminary schedule for six town halls this year.  I want two town halls each on either side of the two summits, one during the mid-summer lull in CCP activities, and one during the run-up to the CSM9 election.  I'm also building up support for the monthly "Features and Ideas" meeting that I mentioned last week, with buy-in from a number of CSM members and (this week) a couple of CCP devs, interested to see what we up-vote.  Ali Aras has been running a series of "Space Hangouts".  Check out her G+ page for details on that, or it'll be on her blog very soon.  She also did a pretty interesting analysis on the CSM8 voting trends.

Note to self: get the CSM8 bloggers into the "Infrequent but Important" section of this blog.

Two step really stepped up this week (sorry, couldn't resist) and provided a ton of additional input for the CSM7 transition work.  Thanks very much, Two step!  My initial goals for transition were four-fold:

1. Document any open switches that CSM7 had with CCP in terms of promises made.
2. Document any issues that CCP had asked the CSM to follow up on.
3. Document anything either from CSM7 or from past CSMs that CSM8 should hold CCP accountable to.
4. Document names, CCP names, and titles for CCP devs and generally list which ones are good contacts and for what.

This is going slowly but well.  I need to push on it a little more.  Hans Jagerblitzen and Alek also continue to be a help here.  A bunch of us have also now been invited to an alumni CSM channel where we can chat with other past CSM members (and they can laugh at us).

Several CSM members appeared on pod-casts this week, and mynnna and I were invited to chat a little bit about CSM at the Syndicate Competitive League tournament.  My big pod-cast appearance this week was on Podside (Mike Azariah is a co-host there).  I'm pretty sure I was episode 104.  It was pretty late at night and by the end I was a bit punchy and profane.  Sorry about that... if you're looking for a totally classy CSM rep, it wasn't me.  ;-)  But it was a damn good time regardless and I got to talk about our activites a good bit.  Kesper North will soon be putting up a forum thread with contact info for all CSM members.

Lots of good discussion on the CSM Skype channels this week about various Odyssey topics!  You can probably guess the two items that took most of our time.

A decent number of CSM members and ex-CSM members got themselves killed in-game this week.  That prompted me to joke that I wanted to be the first CSM member to shoot and kill every other active CSM member.  Then I was reminded that the mains of two current CSM members are currently sitting in titans, which could make that problematic.  ;-)  Still, might be interesting to try for the record.  I wonder what the record is?

Finally, CSM got its first bit of homework over this weekend.  A CCP dev that shall remain nameless asked for information about how to learn how to do T2 manufacturing... in game.  I have to admit that this made me laugh and I teased the dev in question about it for about an hour while his screen filled up with info windows.  I finally took "pity" and pointed him at the little basic T2 manufacturing guide that I wrote earlier this year.  His response to it was quite amusing and probably under NDA; you T2 manufacturers like me can probably imagine it.  But he paid me back for the teasing and the wall of text with a homework assignment: give him some proposals for making T2 manufacturing more understandable, particularly in-game.  He's also given me permission to run a player round-table on the subject, so that's exactly what I'm gonna do.  Look for that to be set up in the next week or so.  Feel free to start commenting on it now, though!  First thing that occurred to me?  How about a random 2-run T2 BPC for completing the industry tutorial?  First thing that occurred to Alekseyev Karrde?  A "Variations" tab on T1 BPOs and BPCs, pointing to their T2 versions.  I think both are pretty good ideas: they show newer players what's possible.  But I'll be looking for other good ideas, from you.  Yes, you!

And that's it!  Another busy week!  I'm falling a bit behind on my EVE-O forum reading, so I need to devote more time to that this week.  We should also have another stake-holder meeting this week.  Hopefully it will be later than 4am...

Who what when where (how) why

Little bit of Sunday geek philosophy for you.

One of the most basic tenets of journalism used to be that you don't write a story without the "five Ws": who, what, when, where, and most importantly, why.  Who did it?  What did they do?  When did they do it?  Where?  How did it happen?  Why did it happen?

That last question speaks to motivation and is often the toughest question to answer, and usually takes the longest.  As a result, modern news organizations have gotten into the habit of going to press with as many of the questions answered as they can.  These days, Woodward and Bernstein are afraid of losing their access, and CNN doesn't want to lose the "breaking story" to MSNBC or Fox News, so journalists "go to press" as soon as they can string some kind of coherent narrative together.  This particularly applies to things like terrorist attacks.  When something awful like this happens, you will know where, when, and to whom it happened, but only usually will you know what happened, often you won't know how, and almost never during those initial few hours will you know why.  Those things come a lot later.  But in today's 24-hour news cycle, the five Ws have diminished in importance in the view of many journalists.

The slow degrade of respect the public has for the profession can probably be traced in part to this process.  There's just no time to get the full story if you want eyeballs in front of screens.  You go with what you have.

Sometimes the choices are even harder.  Sometimes you find out why a terrorist attack happens, and it's from the terrorist himself.  Do you go to press with that information?  Do you turn your entire media empire into a mouthpiece for the thoughts of someone motivated by hatred or revenge, even for a moment?  It's a tough call.  Journalism schools debate it.

It comes down to motivation: if someone has good information that answers a "W" but also clearly has an axe to grind, how much play do you give them?  Not all such motivations are negative, of course.  I'm sure we've all heard or read stories about someone committing a crime, only to have a family member come forward to defend that person or try to provide explanations, or information.  Or a government official comes forward and tries to bring clarity.  But often, the motivation is highly negative... revenge or contempt being quite high on the list.  Again, how much play do you give that?  It's another thing journalism schools debate.

Now suppose a journalist screws up.  Is that in itself a story?  If so, who covers it?  The journalist's employer?  Another media outlet?  How do you cover it?  There's a great scene in Tomorrow Never Dies with one cable outlet gloating at the misfortunes of another.  You don't want to do that!  But if a journalist leaves one media outlet and joins another, for cause... and wants to talk about his or her former employers.  Do you cover that?  I mean, it's news, right?

Yeah, let's tie this stuff to EVE Online.

For those not keeping track, there's a little slap-fight going down this weekend between EVE News 24 and themittani.com.  The genesis of the slap-fight was this article published on EN24, on May 13 (remember that date).  Make no mistake: the article itself is kind of a mess.  But it includes Jabber logs that seem to show CFC members -- including CSM8 member mynnna -- gained access to data on the EVE Online Chaos test server data on changes that were upcoming in Odyssey before those changes were announced.  Further, the logs included indicate that the CFC used that information for massive financial gain, buying materials like isotopes that Odyssey is going to make more rare.

Assuming the logs are legitimate, "what" and "where" is covered, and "who" is somewhat covered.  The files are dated in the three days before Fanfest -- before mynnna was even on the CSM -- so "when" is somewhat covered.  "How" and "why"?  Well, the source of the data is a muddled mess.  And the motivation for the original article goes back to Cerebral Wolf, who rather famously got himself blapped from Goonswarm for apparently trying to influence DUST 514's CPM through intimidation and blackmail.  Whoops!  And now he was providing Jabber logs about CFC activities related to EVE's Chaos server and Odyssey.  Oh dear Heaven... that source doesn't have credibility problems at all, does it?  It certainly raises a question about motivation.

Now let's be clear here: I don't have a dog in this fight, and anyone who thinks I do is wrong.  EN24 has agreements in place with six or eight bloggers, of which I am one.  From time to time, EN24 syndicates our stuff Huffington Post-style, and we get ISK for it.  I don't write for EN24, I don't do news for EN24, and I don't have access to any EN24 systems.  That's about the extent of my involvement here.  But I've talked with EN24 editor riverini on any number of occasions.  And his long-held bias against anything CFC is probably one of the worst-kept secrets in New Eden.  And here was Cerebral Wolf feeding it.

So riverini -- probably eagerly -- asked Incindir Mauser to look through the Jabber logs, see if there was anything interesting in them.  And apparently there was.  And Mauser wrote up most of that disjointed little article about it.  And then at that point, the story splits.  Remember the old saying about how there's three sides to every story?  This is where the slap-fight starts.  What actually happened?  Here's Mauser's version.  Here's riverini's version.

Yep, two whole featured news stories about who did what to whose EVE news website or news articles.  And the funny and sad thing is that this whole story is built on questionable motivations.  And the ironic thing is that everything that happened came down to a lack of communication.

Mauser says that riverini fished his article out of the trash.  How did it get into the trash?  As far as I can tell, Mauser used his access to the EN24 tools to publish the article, on May 11, on EVE News 24!  But then, because of cold feet or second thoughts or just a mis-click, then he deleted the article, then he apparently decided to talk to the Goons to validate the Jabber logs.  We have pretty good evidence of this because someone commented on the piece before Mauser could delete it.  It's still causing a glitch, right now, in the EN24 comments system: trying to read comments via the sidebar on the May 13 piece are getting redirected to the published, then deleted May 11 piece, where they obviously don't exist.

Mauser did the correct thing, and went back to Goons to get the Jabber logs validated.  Only first, he published his article.  Then he deleted his article.  Then he didn't send an e-mail to riverini saying "Hey riv, I've deleted the Chaos test server article because I want to fact-check some things.  I'll get back to you Monday."  But Mauser doesn't mention any of this in his slap-fight article because that clouds his motivations... the all-important why question.  If Mauser isn't the victim, that makes his "riverini wanted to promulgate his twisted, weird, little agenda" story a little bit... unwieldy.

riverini logs into EN24 whenever it is he does.  The comment on the non-existent May 11 piece is causing glitches in the comment sidebar.  He traces the comment to Mauser's deleted article, un-deletes it, edits it, republishes it.  Why?  riverini's motivations are also cloudy.  Maybe he thought Mauser made a mistake with a publishing system he was unfamiliar with.  Or maybe riverini just couldn't let a good article sliming the Goons go.  He says flat-out he wanted it published on Monday, a high traffic day... again, motivation.  Here's what riverini also didn't do: he didn't send an e-mail to Mauser saying "Hey Mauser, your deleted article is causing problems.  Did you mean to delete it?  What's going on?"  riverini has added an addendum to his piece making that clear.

So the motivations of all three people involved here are cloudy to say the least.  The lack of communications is manifest.  It isn't the first time that EN24 has jumped into the fray supporting someone with questionable motives.  And TMC has also jumped into the slap-fight with both feet, hiring Mauser to be a staff writer despite his first piece being full of anti-EN24 venom.  It'll be interesting to see what Mauser produces for TMC.

In the meantime, all of the spilled ink has clouded the issue of the Jabber logs themselves.  Remember them?  They're legitimate.  Neither side has disputed that.

Only they mean nothing.  It's the sort of thing that EVE players at all levels have done for years to gain advantage in-game.  From time to time, you've read stuff from me right here pointing to scrapes off the Chaos server.  You'll be reading another here before too long about capital rigs.  In the original piece, riverini points out quite correctly that for years, CCP has taken a necessarily blind eye to this sort of thing because they honestly have no other choice.  Even if mynnna did benefit from this, certainly he isn't going to be in a position to benefit from this sort of data for a while.  Not with CCP watching his every transaction like a hawk now that he's on CSM8.  ;-)

So the whole thing is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, IMO.  But interesting from a philosophical point of view, don't you think?  Discuss.