Lorkin went rogue and snagged some interesting interviews with CSM7 candidates Leboe and Prometheus Exenthal. How will you be voting for this year’s crop of CSMs? Don’t miss Ender’s description of the debate between The Mittani and Rivirini…it’s a classic.
We also talk the audiobook project and the downfall of botters during Bot Holocaust.
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After seeing this thread on EVE-O Forums about getting the EVE Chronicles in audiobook format I thought to myself, “I can read; I can record; how hard can this be?!?” Well, apparently pretty damn hard, but more of that later.
So far, EVE player Boffles and I have recorded five Chronicles – they are up there at the top of the page. We’ll be adding more up there as they get recorded and mastered. The point of this post is to draw attention to Audio Chronicles project and demand request participation from the rest of the community.
There are two reasons I’m seeking volunteers:
1) I am not that big of an egotist that I want you to listen to 50 or 60 hours of me reading.
2) New Eden is populated with perhaps the most cosmopolitan group of players of any MMO. I believe if we are going to take the Chronicles and convert them from the written word to the spoken voice, then that voice should reflect us; accents and all. I hope to have Chronicles recorded in as many accents as there are countries represented by the player base.
If you are interested in participating here are some insights I have found during the recording of the Torture Series.
) and her voice will need to change over the duration of the story. She’ll record the beginning in the evening and record the conclusion on a morning she was able to oversleep to get that froggy/groggy quality.
If you are interested in participating I am very indebted to you. The requirements are almost nil. Send me an email at ender@podgoo.com or IG with the title of the piece you are interested in. I would hate to receive four versions of “The Furrier” from as many narrators on the same week. We do not have a recording schedule nor do we want one. On some days you can record lines of text perfectly, other days you reading to your microphone whilst wearing your pantalones on your cabeza.
If you are only interested in consuming the audiobooks we’d like to Thank you for listening to them. Please, feel free to offer your criticism and complaints with regard to quality. We are learning and want to make this a great product.
Don’t ask me about iTunes or I’ll punch a dolphin in its anus and think of you fondly.
From Seismic Stan’s Freebooted Blog:
“We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems.”
Firstly, I think we should take the time to recognize CCP with the changes they have made in the new player experience. Compared to the new player experience when I first started EVE Online it is night and day better. In 2004, my experience was best described as, “Here’s a spaceship, now go f*** yourself.” I dropped EVE Online shortly after that, being the type of idiot that couldn’t wrap his head around this style of MMO.
Earlier this summer I began a new character to experience the changes with the new tutorials. I was very impressed. I felt like a champion of the heavens when my ship was brought through a parade of Amarr warships – it evoked feelings of the award presentations at the end of the first “Star Wars” movie (the real first one not the garbage with the kid and slug-like Jamaican.)
CCP’s remaining work is still a long row to hoe. At the end of the starter tutorials and various career tutorials the most asked question is probably, “OK, what’s next?” And this is an area that CCP will likely have little ability to address. What happens next after learning the mandatory functions of flying an internet spaceship is what to do with the teeming mass of people who want to kill you and take away your lunch money.
This is an area where we, the community, have the most impact on whether a new player stays or returns to the themeparks. Unfortunately, our own reputation proceeds us. I can remember being advised in both forums and in the various help channels not to accept just any corporation invite; it was likely a scam. This air of paranoia pervades New Eden as a type of blanket smothering the life out of the new pilots crib before he can even cry out for help.
If you come to EVE Online from reading about it on somethingawful.com or reddit.com you have a self-made community that will take you after you complete your tutorials to the deepest parts of nulsec and into the great space battles that will make the news on various gaming websites. What more do you need to figure out how great is this game? This is why a newbie flying under the banner of Dreddit or CONDI are likely to be still playing six months or even a year later.
Obviously, we don’t want a universe of TEST or Goonswarm Federation only pilots. So, how do we improve the game for new pilots who just see an advert or remember hearing a friend talk about it? How do we retain them after they finished the tutorials?
Corporations are the only real concrete answer. CCP has made finding a corporation even easier with the corporation recruitment search function. It was not very long ago that the best way a small corp recruited players was through random convos and spamming gates with secure containers. Most highly traveled routes in New Eden reminded me of I-75 between Macon and Atlanta, Georgia. For those of you not blessed to live in the southern United States, that stretch of road is nothing but farmland and billboards. Quite an eyesore actually.
CCP can improve this search function even more. Recently, I started playing “Vanguard: Saga of Heros” which isn’t a bad MMO as far as themeparks go. One of the features I really liked was their guild search function. In the Vanguard guild search it gave you list of the guild’s recruiters and whether they were online. I found the guild I joined by using this function to weed out guilds that were obviously dead or whose members played in different time zones than me. With a set of recruiters I knew were online I was able to convo several and shortly I accepted a guild invite.
The key to retaining new players is getting them into our corporations. Getting them involved and feeling they have a stake in their corporation’s future and outcome. Ultimately, it is up to the veterans to mentor the newbies. There are no tutorials that will help you understand what it means to be in a sandbox.
Tweaks
CCP is redesigning the models for the rookie ships and this is a good thing. As a new player, I want to feel heroic. I hate sword and board games that make me start out in stained underwear fighting fluffy bunnies with a broken shovel handle. I think that’s partly why “Skyrim” was so successful – you killed a dragon in the first hour of gameplay. Likewise, I believe the rookie ships need an statistical overhaul. Or at least enough of a buff that a new player can complete level 1 missions without much effort when they lose everything after flying a ship they couldn’t afford to lose.
In the end, I think EVE Online is always going to create a very polarized reaction with new players. On one side, you retain the players that understand the importance of social interactions within the game and lose the players that expect to be pushed in a certain direction. We can stem the tide of the latter by getting them in our corporations and giving them purpose. Otherwise, sitting back and waiting for CCP to make magic sauce is causing us so many future targets and leaders.
Ender’s Editorials is a new addition to the Pod Goo to address news that has a short shelf life or just stuff I want to talk about between Pod Goo Podcasts.
In this inaugural editorial, I let loose the dogs of the rants against incursions and sleeper PvE.
The Echochamber
http://splatus.wordpress.com/
- This is a response post to Episode 30. I like the subject being touched on and reminds me of one of the fatal RP flaws most people make: Not making a 3 dimensional character and depending entirely on their characters archetype to inform the player of the character’s likely decisions and actions. There is no duality of mankind.
http://conhodaily.blogspot.com/
- Humorous corp blog. All corps should have a humor blog for us to let off steam and have fun with each other. Would LSE’s humor blog be nothing but rundowns on the last T3 Ender loses in a PVE engagement in hisec?
http://tech4news.org
- New Eden’s premier news service. Written by non-capsuleers for non-capsuleers. I’m writing for these guys now…I’m not a fiction writer but I’m trying to be. What did everyone think of my first article, Kyavor Alexander – Caldari Traitor?
http://www.guildlaunch.com/blog/index.php/2012/01/eve-online-correspondent-contest-ender-black/
Self-plug…wasn’t expecting this to go public…let that be a lesson…
The Interviews
Lorkin’s interview with Mangala Solaris of RvB
Ender’s interview with Mechanoid Kryten of Griefergeddon
Click here for the Griefergeddon Website
WTF Kills
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12159160 Wait, wut
http://genos.killmail.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12151569
We are looking for a market/news blogger to add weekly/daily stories to the Pod Goo Website.
War College will return next week with visiting professor Krieg.
“Templar One” was not the EVE novel I was expecting when I saw it in the highlight row at my local Barnes & Nobles booksellers. To be honest I was expecting a gritty and action packed story of brotherly comradeship and the privations of men at war. I was expecting it to read more like a Mechwarrior series book than that of previous EVE Online based novels. Pleasantly, my expectations were completely wrong.
“Templar One” begins relatively soon after the ending of Tony Gonzales’ first book, “Empyrean Age.” The plot lines continue seamlessly from the initial book and continue into many of the discoveries found in w-space since the Apochrypha expansion. Yes, Dorothy, there are Sleepers and explanations for their terrible drones in w-space to be found in this book. I shall not give away spoilers but if you were wanting storylines explaining the relationship (if any) between the four factions and Jovians and sleepers, this book goes a long way in doing such a thing. As a matter of fact, during the course of this book I was momentarily struck with a sense of guilt for destroying as many Sleeper ships and sites as I have in my almost one year of w-space campaigning. It was momentary but it was real. You’ll definitely want to read this book if you are a wormholer.
Will a Playstation3 FPS player who’s excited about this upcoming scifi shooter want to read “Templar One”? I hope so. In this book are various QR codes that you scan with an android device or iOS device that will link you to interesting and well made videos that help bring an EVE greenhorn up to speed on what different ships are designed to do. Here’s the link to the second QR code you scan when you meet one of the heroes of the tale, Korvin Lears of the Gallente Federation Navy.
I cannot stress how surprised I was by the amount of internet spaceships and spaceship battles in this story; a story ostensibly about DUST 514. This may be one of the areas bittervets will attack Gonzales’ work because he takes some narrative freedom during his space battles to make them more interesting. Rather, instead of using EVE Online’s boring battle mechanics he tries to make them more plausible with realistic strategy – otherwise, N+1 makes for some stiff reading.
So by the end of the novel, Gonzales weaves a literal Gordian knot of plot lines concerning the Amarr royalty, President Roden of the Gallente Federation, Mordu’s Legion, intrigue in the Caldari State, and the Jovians. In spite of being the nexus of most of the fighting, the Minmatar do feel hollow in comparison to the other factions you read about.
I enjoyed the book and unlike the previous EVE novels there didn’t seem to be major periods of lull that made the book an analogue to EVE’s training system…long wait to get to the good stuff. It also seems that this book received better editing than previous novels and I only ran across a sentence or two that could have been written smoother or ended with a preposition. If I have a negative critique for “Templar One” it is the same critique I have for most science fiction and fantasy books: naming. Please, quit giving me megasyllabic words with no base I am familiar with to name things – it is annoying and your concocted semi-random groupings of vowels and consonants will become “bob” when I read them.
All in all, this a very enjoyable book that bridges the Empyrean Age and Aprochrypha Expansions nicely and does a great job of setting up DUST 514 to have a literary source for those warriors to begin carving their names in New Eden’s fabric.
