Jita Park Speakers Corner

Recently I and a few others have been noticing a peculiar event while playing EVE. Ships are disappearing. Ships are no longer appearing in their natural habitat, the overview, and by extension my cross hairs. It can be 500 meters in front of me, wiggling its unshielded, poorly armored, nano fit ass at me in impunity. For some reason the coding in EVE will have some ships just not show up on overview, but they can be right in front of you, shooting you. Your forced to turn on all your brackets to locate your target. Suddenly its the equivalent of not having radar, flying a biplane against a Euro Fighter Typhoon. You have to manually target other ship, while our “Euro Fighter” simply holds down a key and clicks his mouse and boom your dead. Is this some new form of cloaking technology, electronic warfare or did you get cast as the new bad buy with no hope of shooting back in “Top Gun 2: Taking It In The Exhaust?” No, this is a horrible bug that seems to have someone how grown off a smaller one that we all kind of ignored. Remember jumping through a gate and an ally came up as being neutral? Well you would if you lived somewhere other than Hi Sec, where that matters and there are no safety blankets provided by CCP to put you back to sleep. Well now hostile ships simply are there to target at all on the overview.

Here is where your average player would start complaining about CCP. This is not that post. This is the post that explains why such a fundamental error like this and its continued existence in the game is actually a shared problem for both CCP and the player base. Everyone expects CCP to fix and tweak things in EVE, and when you have a game this massive that's expected. But where their attention goes and what they spend their time on is something the players have direct control over. That control comes in the form of complaints, calls for action, and meta gaming. Of course since EVE runs on subscriptions CCP does its best, most of the time, to answer those issues that it thinks will effect retention of its subscribers. On the one hand it can serve as a check and balance to things like monocles, on the other it can negatively effect the attention certain deserving issues get like a broken overview.

To put it to you another way, what good is a new destroyer if the ability to target rats, other players or structures is broken? We certainly have some neat looking ships coming out, but at the same time we have this massive bug still floating out there needing to be fixed. However its not going to get fixed because there has yet to be a separation on the responsibility of problem solving. Instead CCP has to play nanny to every tearful child that doesn't think they are “winning” in EVE. Some problems are incumbent on the players themselves to solve, like ganking, elections, overcoming fleet doctrines and others not requiring some change in coding to address. Others that require some paid programmer to sift through code to address why some ships show up neutral or not all on an overview is something only CCP can handle.

So that is how a small bug becomes a larger one overtime, because as CCP adds bells and whistles to molly coddle some of you, fundamental aspects of game play suffer. You can't win an election to save your life? Someone from CCP will be tasked with the Grail Quest of making a flawless election system. You want to make more money without taking any risks? Someone from CCP will invent entire lines of new code so you don't ever have to leave the safety of Hi Sec, and then they will assign another pour soul to fix that code when you yell that its not working they way you want. Someone come up with a fleet doctrine, not involving Dreadnaughts able to blow the wings of a fly, that you can't beat? Someone will get right on that and make those ships easier to kill, so you don't have to deal with being a failure at tactical and strategic warfare.

So when something like a bug in the overview comes up, it gets lost under the pile of fudged diapers some of you call posts. Remember monocles and walking in station closets and the complaints from the player base about other things needing to be addressed first? That's actual useful and worth CCP's time because it effects a game we all play together. Shouting about needing a gank free Hi Sec or an election system nerf are distractions. Pointless distractions when you can take control of it in game. They are also very telling about the nature of the player base and the health of the game. A player base constantly asking CCP to fix its problems that can be dealt with in game or the meta game, signals the end of emergent game play. If players aren't solving the problems they can handle, nothing new gets generated. Power never shifts, people never rise and fall. It becomes you sitting at your computer playing a game based on spreadsheets. It stops being EVE Online and crying children in space with a broken overview that needs fixing.

In closing, CCP would you kindly look at what is making the overview crap out. The rest of you take a deep breath and ask yourself: “Is this a Viking emergency? Do I need someone in Iceland to fix this or can I?” If you can handle it yourself, then do it and let the folks in Iceland handle the technical stuff. Oh and did I mention this was a post about an overview bug?