EVE General Discussion

Publicly admitting you're wrong about something is never easy, because it not only involves taking a dent to your ego, it involves doing it in front of other people. Publicly admitting you're wrong about something on the internet is even harder, because it involves doing it to a bunch of people who have little to no social obligation to be nice to you.

But I think I was totally wrong for hating Goonswarm, The Mittani and James 315, and I'm going to tell you why that is.

I won't bore you with excessive personal history about myself, but I've lived the majority of my EVE career in, or close to, hi-sec. I've gone out to null-sec occasionally but it's never really held my interest, and low-sec has never really held solid appeal for me either. I'd have to say, on the whole, my favourite place to live is wormhole space, but that's beside the point, because I don't always have the manpower in my corp to live there, so most of the time I just run missions in hi-sec. I've never really been that good at PvP because I couldn't really grasp the meta, so I generally avoided it if it was possible to do so.

I think the reason that I got so upset about James 315 making dismissive comments about people who don't really interact with the game (I think his words were somewhere along the lines of "they're barely even human") is because they struck pretty close to home - he was, of course, talking about miners, but in actuality there wasn't really very much difference between the miners and myself. I was a little more interactive with the game than them - I had friends and enemies, I had corpmates - but really, there wasn't anything I was actually doing in the game except making my numbers go up, and occasionally down when I purchased more Scourge Fury.

I would get angry at The Mittani, James 315 and Goonswarm because of their opinion that the residents of hi-sec as ruining the game. "What do they know?" I asked myself. "I don't want to ruin the game. I love playing this game!" But did I? A hard night's grind of missioning would net me about 100m ISK, so in about a week I could grind myself enough money to buy a PLEX and have enough left over for my next 50k batch of Scourge Fury. In the words of Celeste from Mirror's Edge, I wasn't living, I was just surviving. When a member of Goonswarm would accuse me of being a "bitter, techless peasant," I'd get angry. I'd tell myself it was because it was false, but really, it was because it was true. Or, it was partially true - I wasn't, and am still not jealous of Goonswarm's technetium in specificity, I was just jealous of their ability to influence the game as compared to my own.

OK, so there were also those comments about furries and bronies that I didn't like, but seriously, why should I base my opinion on that? That's irrelevant to EVE Online, and besides, TEST is part of CFC and they all love ponies, so what the hell.

But then things started changing. I experienced a genuine desire to address my lack of PvP knowledge, and I started a blog about my adventures in doing so. My corp ranks swelled due to the return of one of my old friends, and along with another corporation, I moved into wormhole space, where there was far more danger and tight co-operation with other players was neccessary - but I started making a hell of a lot more money. Slowly, my attitude to the entire game changed. At first, it happened at such a slow pace at first that I didn't even realise it. I started to question my beliefs about The Mittani and James 315 - if I believed in emergent, freeform gameplay and the ruthlessness of EVE Online's world, why was their expression and interpretation of that belief any less valid than my own? If I didn't believe in it, why was I continuing to spend time out of my day playing the game?

I've never even been personally affected by anything that James 315, The Mittani, the New Order or Goonswarm have ever done - I don't own anything that requires oxygen isotopes, I don't habitually shop at or sell in Jita and I don't mine in hi-sec, and the more I think about it, the more I realise that stagnation is what made my life in EVE Online boring, and whatever else Goonswarm, James 315 and The Mittani are, they're most definitely enemies of stagnation - when they're in hi-sec, at least.

Have Goonswarm raised the prices on ships and commodities? Possibly, possibly not. Even if they have, it means making more money actually means something to me now.

Has James 315 destroyed hi-sec? No. Has he saved it? No to that, as well. What he's done is created turbulance - he has unbalanced the equation. He has got people thinking, and asking questions, and re-examining their opinions. Regardless of what else he's done, that is a Good Thing.

Has The Mittani ruined EVE? No, that's quite beyond his power. Even as the de-facto leader of the largest conglomerate entity in EVE Online and a member of the CSM he can't possibly have such a large effect on EVE as to conclusively ruin or save it. No-one can but CCP themselves.

So I was wrong about you, guys. I know my opinion doesn't matter a single iota to you anyway, but I apologise for thinking you guys were ruining EVE. Whether or not I like what you're doing, as long as you continue to oppose stagnation and complacency in EVE Online, I will henceforth respect it.

OP 'gets' EVE. You win.

I used the think bumping sounded hilarious...

..now bumping posts are just self congradulation spam that make my eyes glaze over.

1+

You have successfully understood EVE. Even more worthy is that you've publicly admitted it; most dissenters just fade away...

You may only change the subject of my thread if you pay me 10 million ISK.

can i get a tl;dr?

Don't you think that you might be reading a little bit too much into Mittani's and James' agenda?

I mean, hell yeah, they have a pretty good point- but we are still just talking about a video game that people are playing for fun.
Mittens and James found a way to have fun in this game and at the same time heavily influence the playstyle of other players.
But I don't think that there is a deep philosophical concept behind their behavior or the intention to enlighten other players or save eve.

But I could be wrong about this...

Oh, I don't think there's a deep philosophical concept behind their behaviour, but I do believe they genuinely want to preserve EVE Online. The idea that Goonswarm would actively seek to ruin a videogame seems abusrd to me now that I actually have a proper think about it - especially given that CFC accounts for around 20,000 players, which, at $15 per head, accounts for $300,000 a month. You wouldn't feed that much money into a game you wanted to fail. No, they play this game and they want it to succeed - they want CCP to succeed - because if the game fails, they'd lose the ability to slap people in the face with giant dildoes made of frozen technetium and bank notes.

This is surprisingly well written. Good job!

I'm very happy that you're starting to break out of your comfort zone in EVE. I wish you luck in all your future spaceship adventures.

Thank you for writing this up.

As an autistic socially awkward nerd I take offence to that statement.