The Red Pill Is Light Blue

So how did Kathy spend her saturday afternoon?

Why in an enormous fleet battle.

I've been playing this game Eve Online for quite some time. It's a space combat and trading game. If people ever played Elite, it's rather like massive multiplayer Elite. I've sort of kept the game at arms length. For one thing, only 6% of players are women, which is really low even by the standards of gaming. Also, I've just never hooked up with the right corporation. I had a fantastic transport company at one point, but it was all Europeans and I only saw them on weekends. And the real joy of this is the way the player controlled corporations and alliances run the game, control territory and economy. I could always see this potential for something huge, but I just never got involved.

So a few weeks ago the bug bit me again and I joined a training corporation for PVP fighting, which I've never done before. And I've had a few runs into lawless space (0.0 in the terms of the game) to kill NPC pirates. And that was fun, since we ended up dodging PC pirates to get home. And we have a little frigate dueling thing going. But friday a note appearance in alliance and corporate mail to get ready for something big. And this was it. Exactly what I'd always seen in other people's writeups of Eve. An enormous space battle, with four different fleets, three different sides, and I guess based on our fleet of over 100, probably between 300 and 400 ships all counted.

I was in a little frigate (smallest ship in the game) doing what's called tackling. Head in at the main target and hit it with a little widget that jams its warp engines so it can't get away. I heard the target over Ventrillo. I found it quickly, hit the icon to home in on it, hit the microwarp drive, and started to lock. It takes me about five seconds to lock a target and my ship didn't quite last that long. Which is more or less the life of a tackler. I floated around and took some screenshots and then got killed a few more times by blockades trying to get back to the battle.

Oh, we won!

( Screenies below )

Two years ago give or take a few days the Wanderhome server opened on Star Wars Galaxies. I'd been playing on Starsider, the official unofficial roleplaying server, but the server was frequently crashing or full or both. And I wanted to try a crafting profession. I logged on within a few hours of Wanderhome coming up, started a crafting Twilek, Karai the tailor, and never looked back. I spent the next month or so gathering, mining, and crafting, working my way up to become the second master tailor on the server, second only to Omek, who got there mainly through factory xp. (At launch factories gave 100% xp) I had a great rep. When I logged in, I had clients messaging me before I the screen could load.

It's really hard to remember how big a deal SWG was. Now it's pretty much reckoned a complete failure. Many of the servers are ghost towns. The last time I played, there was a buliding outside of a Coronet named "SWG sux see you in Vana'diel." But when it was released it was ludicrously ambitious and had everything going for it. This was going to be the game that hit the mllion mark.

I remember logging in and seeing the whole matchmaking system. Now that was something i'd never seen before. It hinted at a really grandiose design. It was obvious that the game wasn't done and that it wasn't stable. But we looked at so many of the extra features and thought "oh wow, when they flesh this out it will be incredible."

But they never did.

No vehicles? Surely those aren't more than a few weeks away. Turned out to be six months. After a month, things were worse than launch. Things disappeared from inventories. Tailors didn't have primary colors available. Entire systems didn't work. There are bugs in the game today two years later that were introduced in the first month after launch and never fixed.

I gave up when my factories didn't work for a week and they couldn't fix them. You could demolish and rebuild them as a workaround, so they removed the cost for doing so, until they could fix them. The fix to remove the cost didn't work either. They tried again and that didn't work. I cancelled.

I still look back with sadness. It was a great design for a game. Not so good for Star Wars, but for a game it was most of what I wanted. I'd had such optomism and I actually for once did the achiever thing and made it to the top of my profession.

If it had worked and they hadn't been starved for funds by lucasarts so they could fix things in a timely manner, it would have been incredible. Instead we have WOW as the first western game to break a million, a great game, but one that's pretty simplistic. And very far from the grand virtual world design of SWG.

/mourn