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Eve Vegas - Fleshing out a Dust Community Idea

I will leave this here.

The following post is my fleshing out an idea I presented at the Community Round Table at Fanfest to CCP Saberwing. I am still writing a summary of that and the UI round table chats and will have that up later tonight.

A question that Saberwing, who is the Dust head community manager, asked was what does the Dust community want from their community team? For the most part there was silence. After all, this was a room of Eve players. They had been bombarding them with "things we want" questions and the topic was having a hard time staying on community focused events.

I am terrible about interrupting. At one point Guard said,  "I'm a terrible moderator" as I waited for a turn. I could have spoken up but, meh, its not my thing in most forums. Plus, I was taking notes. However, this particular thing struck a cord with me and I had one of those moments when something is very obvious but it seems that no one else notices it.

For anyone that has read through my blog over the last two years they know that I live in Molden Heath. Also, that we suspected we'd be picked for Planetary Conquest when it came to Dust. There was some irritation in our community over that announcement. THC2 wound up fully moving out of Klingt when ROFL moved in. Faction Warfare focused Dust corporations appeared everywhere and after Fanfest Molden Heath changed.

Noir. ROFL. The others that I don't remember. For a few months Molden Heath was ridiculously busy and full of blobs. It also became a target rich environment and instead of complaining about Dust we embraced it and started to kill all of the things. Eventually planetary conquest died down some and we don't see the action that we did for that time period. ROFL moved out of Klingt but THC2 is rather established in Bosena now.

For months we fought people attempting to do planetary conquest. We killed fleets. We blopsed them. We chased them. We learned how to hunt for cloaked destroyers. We paid attention to the Dust tools to find out where the fights are. We adapted to our new situation and life was business as normal. Killing all of the things, erryday.

However, there has been no feedback from this. I've found myself very interested in the Eve to Dust connection because of my writing. I wrote Fallen Immortal which is a Dust themed bit of Fan Fiction because I may not enjoy playing Dust (or any FPS) but I love the lore. I'm a fan of solider focused science fiction and Dust fits that to a T. That is why I started to write about it. I love the feel of it. As an aspiring fiction writer Dust has all of the pieces fo create fantastic stories. Mix that with Spaceship Eve and you have a stew of concepts.

Why haven't we heard about anything? I know stuff is happening. I know that we stop bombardments. Yet there is no connection or Focus.

I told CCP Saberwing to give us numbers. We kill Dust ships in Districts. We kill Dust Corps. Why not show us what we are doing. Give us some graphs, a chart,a dev blog. Show how fights in Molden Heath appear to be related to Dust. Show us how many bombardments we have potentially stopped. Show us how Dust and Eve are related to each other in the very material that CCP has put into the game and then walked away from.

At the same time I realize that CCP Saberwing is sixweekss into working at CCP. Planetary Conquest is six months old. I can see why this particular link might not have hit his Radar yet. He has focuses on the Dust side of things. But there is an Eve side too.

Most than once I have heard milita folk say that they have had problems taking systems because of the Dust presence. Show them their numbers. Show them what they are pushing against. Give comparisons. Don't look for interest. Create interest. Create teh information that people can flip through and go, "huh. Interesting." That is going to draw more eyes than trying to wave Dust at a disinterested player base.

Because we are disinterested. We want to fly spaceships and fight spaceships. Dust is over on my PS3 and I play all of my non-eve games with my corp through Steam. As long as Dust is on the PS3 the pool of potential Dust players is smaller. Often I hear the, "It isn't on the PC so I am not going to care". Beyond that there is the negative outlooks and the general anti-dust movement that has to be overcome.

So approach from the other side. Don't expect the Eve players to come running to Dust. Bring Dust to them by how they are affecting the Dust world. Give them something to catch their interest in the medium that they are already are in. We love information. Feed it to us.

Comments

  1. I think less bombardments were stopped than you think. Most of the groups that came to Molden Heath for dust didn't have proper EVE pilots. Being and ex ROFL pilot, I would fly around looking for orbitals to stop even when I had the intel of where fights were taking place and I would find no one.

    When a corp in the alliance would ask for orbitals, we would try to rally a small gang to support them and hope that the enemy would bring a fleet to fight so we could have some fun. Sadly that only happened a couple times and we got some juicy kills.

    Dust won't be relevant to most EVE entities until it moves into Sov space, and if you think the hate is bad on the EVE side, go to the DUST forum, the war room more specifically and you will see why DUST is failing in a lot of ways. It's not just CCP and the troubles they are having, but the fanbase is terrible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This in a way is an excellent example of why numbers would be nice. I have no idea what our impact is/was. We are on two sides of this particular thing. I know we have stopped them. What does that mean thou? Give people something to find interesting to create some type of foundation work.

      I don't play Dust. I don't visit the forums. I love reading but reading the internal bickering of a game I do not play is going to fail to hold my attention.

      I also have no experience to step into an argument about why Dust is failing. I can also not step into a conversation about why an alliance is losing Sov. I don't have the experience or background to form an educated opinion.

      That is why I present possibilities of creating some foundation connections that might interest people. It may be for naught but because I am not related to the core issues I'm going to present things from a somewhat different perspective. It may be of use or it may just be murky thoughts in a muddy pool.

      Delete
  2. I /think/ saberwing's actually 6 weeks, not months.

    ReplyDelete

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