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The Stretch of the Hozien

In a way I wondered how I would step back into my Eve life when I got home yesterday. I realized that I had an interesting division of time for the future. My normal Eve life was getting out of control. I have things to restock and new doctrines to buy. On the other hand I have the minutes to do and they pretty much trump everything in game.

Yet, I cling to my in game activities. They ground me. Any time I wonder who am I and what am I spending some game time playing helps. After curling up and dumping my brain and concepts out over the last few days and dredging through my own thoughts as well as the ideas and opinions handed to me I felt very drained and very tired. I had this thought, "Will I have anything to write about again?"

It seems that the cure for soul crushing exhaustion is to get angry. Such was my state of mind when I wound up in an argument with someone that I have become quite fond of over one of the latest changes. And the argument was not about change insomuch as it was about our greater views of the game and what is and is not valuable focuses for the future.

I'm often amused at the shocked reactions of my 'youth' in Eve. Maybe when I am give that type of reaction will change. Still, I've spent many an evening sorting through the differences of player generations. It is not just a matter of personality and past experiences but it is also a matter of when we started playing that makes us up. My argument with him was no different from the argument I read as I wrote this post in Eve Uni between the PvPers and the Industry focused people.

What is Eve? My view of Eve does not match everyone's view of Eve. The things I find important are not things that everyone will find important. I try not to dismiss others views but sometimes we will clash and such was a clash over changes in what he considered complexity and I considered exclusion barriers.

One of my greatest loves of Eve is the horizontal aspect of it. Maybe it is because I am bad at Eve and tend to seek odd paths to reach common points. It may be a quirk of my personality that causes me to often not enjoy the most celebrated aspects of things. I feel that the lack of a laddered paths frees me even as it leaves me frustrated. Yet, my frustrations are my own. They are caused by me and they are solved by me.

I dislike exclusion for the sake of exclusion. It is not something that I forget. I see beauty in inclusion. I love that the value can be in the person being there and deciding to do something. I wonder if I was older in the game, or better at the game, if I'd understand the desire to exclude people more. Even as I wonder it I doubt it. I to often play games for the pleasure of playing them. Eve is no different. It may mean that I will never fully mentally align with someone with a goal of winning when I'm saturated in happiness just playing.

It may be that the argument was just the edge of a storm. I'm pretty comfortable with who and what I am but when I talk to people at times it seems that they do not see me. And now that I spend more time in the public eye it makes me wonder what people see. Have I lost my ability to clearly explain who I am? Or, have I become something that I do not even know without noticing it?

The chances are more likely that I'm over thinking everything. A little bit of organization will go a long way. So! I shall sleep. Then, I shall wake and go to work. Once my days of hit I shall work at catching up on my Eve life while starting to write my first summit sessions. And somewhere along the way Sugar Kyle the player and Sugar Kyle the CSM member should realign themselves properly with whatever new changes this last week have wrought on me. For, this path has not been one without change. Both wanted and unwanted the relentlessness of it cannot be denied. But I refuse to lose my view of the horizon during this process. And sunrise is a beautiful thing.

Comments

  1. I assume your argument was, at least in part, over the deep complexity of EVE and how that complexity, in and of itself, can be seen as excluding newer players... but we need to ask, what kind of player does it exclude? and the corollary… should EVE be ‘all’ inclusive?

    The simple fact that noobs have so much to learn gives vets a strong advantage... and this is not necessarily 'good' for NPE/NPR... yet to lower the bar, to simplify EVE 'just' to make NPE/NPR better is a serious slap in the face to all veteran players who struggled and fought with an even steeper learning curve than now exists and it changes the game in ways that lessen and detract from the time and effort they put in, and that they have every right to be proud of.

    EVE is a niche game, it is not, nor was it ever supposed to be for EVERYONE.

    It is for those who are willing to accept something very different... something vastly more difficult than any other MMO out there. And vets have a right to be proud of the hours, days and months they have invested in the game... to be proud that they stayed and played in the days before changes like the gods awful Discovery Scanner (TM).

    But I do not see EVE’s hard harsh learning curve as 'exclusive'... it is simply what it is, like physics or the laws of nature in RL... (except for that little fact that man created the Laws of Nature in EVE and all of our arguing is about that other little fact… that unlike the gods of yore, the gods of EVE have email…)

    You can rage at the gods of the RW or at faceless nature when hurricanes and tornadoes descend upon us, leaving destruction and death in their paths... and we, enlightened and technologically advanced 21st century humans, can do no more about them today than our cave dwelling, goat sacrificing ancestors could...

    We all just buckle down and dig in and do what has to be done to keep on. This is, to me, the same as in EVE... This is why ‘what’ we do in EVE matters to us so much... and it is why I love this game so much. It is so very much more like RL in this way than any other MMO I have even seen... and I revel in everything I have done BECAUSE I didn't give in... because I STAYED and fought and LEARNED and won out against the incredible adversity that you risk by simply undocking...

    If EVE's harsh hard steep learning curve and smart, implacable veterans 'exclude' some from playing this game... then, TBH, maybe they need to play some other game and again, TBH, maybe EVE is not for players who want an easier, safer more inclusive game.

    But, if they hang in there, if they have the balls and willpower to say, "Eff THIS! I am NOT gonna give up!! I am NOT gonna let this or them beat ME!!" Those are the players that EVE needs... Those are the players that thrive in this fantastic sandpit with such steep walls and filled with pit vipers... what we need to do is show them it you CAN do it... and not just survive, but thrive.

    And keep in mind, I am not crusading the cause of the griefer and the scammer... I am not one and I fly with people who are willing to warp in and give all for their fellows... I just want it to be actually WORTH it when we do so... and in EVE, it is.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your assumption of the argument is incorrect in this.

      Delete
    2. OK, sorry... you did not state exactly what it as you argued about... I made an assumption. Please to correct?

      Delete
  2. I'll disagree TurAmarth.

    - I liked when I could scan down a grav site. I treated this as advanced mining like Incursions are advanced PvE. So I maxed out all of the skills for probing to be able to swiftly locate these sites for mining fleets. Should my learning curve be defended and the status quo maintained.

    - I have level 4 in almost all of the ores for refining. Firstly compression is slowly superseding refining in "direct to market" mining ops. It will be a significant time sink to get the Level 5 in refining. Because if I don't, my competitor will. Should I revile against progressive changes that devalue my strategy and abilities? That looks bitter vet to me.

    changes to large turrets no longer require training in small.

    I could go on. But the point is, making the game easier for a new player to adjust or to learn is an improvement that I welcome.

    Hearing from my parents "well in MY day we had to" (insert a quote from four yorkshiremen). and now for me to say to my own child; well in MY day I had to. Is not too far a stretch reading from an eve bitter vet to be posting "well, when I first learned eve we had to". viva la revolution!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have to go with Esky here. I had it much easier than the people before me, but I still hope--and even work--to make sure that today's newbie has it better than I did. The difference is exactly what Sugar pointed out in a post a while back: there's good complexity, which is deep and dynamic gameplay of the minute-to-learn-lifetime-to-master variety, and there's bad complexity, which is just obstacles and bad documentation and bad design.

    EVE has a lot of bad complexity, both in their UI and in their back-end code, and CCP Seagull has wisely made it a top priority to clear it all out. The new industry UI trades bad complexity (so many dialogs) for good complexity (dynamic, competitive gameplay), for the most part.

    Now, there are certainly people who pride themselves in their mastery of bad complexity, especially in geekdom, and those people are mad. But they are also few relative to the larger population.

    As to what EVE is, it's a virtual world that exists in tension between what CCP envisions and what the players do. So talking about what it "is" in terms of simple genre seems to me to miss the point.

    ReplyDelete
  4. EVE has a lot of bad complexity...

    Bad as defined by who? You? Me? 'Bad' is a subjective term, not an objective definitive. One man's bad complexity is another man's fascinating intricacy...

    This, to me, is the crux of the issue... Bad or good as defined by who? No matter who it is, it affects us all.

    ReplyDelete

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