A week full of big EVE news occurred while I was away in the wilds of northern Michigan on vacation, sans internet. Nothing provides entertainment in New Eden quite like wondering what the beer-addled Devs are going to pull out of their hats next, and between Unholy Rage and Dust 514, alliance leaders across the galaxy are bracing for the unknown – or, more accurately, grabbing their ankles.
First, Unholy Rage. At last, the much desired pogrom against macroers and RMT abusers has occurred! Says CCP: “The war against the RMT element continues. We strive towards driving their operating costs to unsustainable levels. Our objective is to get rid of them, plain and simple. They are a heinous nuisance and a serious drawback on our systems and resources.” All well and good – except that, as best as we can tell, these efforts are largely confined to empire space, and haven’t impacted the rampant RMT that explicitly funds certain eastern bloc alliances, such as Red.Overlord, home of SerLordex the aluminium magnate. I expected to return to hear reports of multiple Titan characters banned and the balance of power in 0.0 radically altered, but either CCP hasn’t focused on the outer segment of the galaxy yet, or there simply aren’t any RMT activities in nullsec.
Aside from the massive improvement in CPU cycles, the biggest impact from Unholy Rage has been in the isotopes market, which temporarily seized up in a bout of speculative terror. It’s important to note that CCP is attacking RMT isk-sellers while simultaneously pushing their own ‘legitimate’ alternative, the PLEX timecard system. Unholy Rage is a method of enforcing the use of PLEX, but not a general attack on all those who cheat. Macro-miners and macro-ratters still infest the game at every level, and I think it’s unlikely that we will see CCP take mass action against them. While RMT traders cause CCP a headache with fraud and liability implications, the non-RMT macroer is the foundation of the low-level economy in New Eden. 0.0 is absolutely full of macro-ratters, and if CCP actually enforced the regulations against macro-miners in empire, the price of tritanium would double overnight. No one sane wants to manually mine veldspar for hours on end.
One day later, we’re gifted with the announcement of Dust 514 at GDC Europe. Information first leaked when enterprising EVE-players noticed CCP’s filing for a series of trademarks with the US Patent and Trademark Office in early August, complete with silly logo and mysterious name. An extremely sexy trailer showed a Planetside-esque console FPS set in the EVE universe, apparently developed by the Shanghai office over the past three years. All well and good, so far. The chaos began during his presentation when Hilmar (CEO of CCP) broadly stated that what happens in Dust 514 will have an appreciable, significant impact on what happens in EVE. EVE, of course, is a PC-only game; Dust 514 is presently console-only. Unless that platform restriction changes by release, EVE players will need to purchase a console and practice their FPS skills if they want to safeguard their assets against the Halo crowd, since the explicit intention of CCP is to merge two disparate gamer communities (console FPS and strategy MMO) in one galaxy.
Needless to say, this has aroused skepticism in the EVE community, especially among alliance leaders. As one critic put it: “Imagine you’re playing chess on one table. On the other table beside you, a few kids are playing Ludo. Suddenly, the kid who won at Ludo comes over to your table and takes your queen.” It’s no secret that CCP has been mulling over some sort of 0.0 sovereignty revamp, since by and large sovereignty wars are an exercise in frustration and hair-pulling, but no one could guess that CCP would solve these problems through a FPS on a platform many EVE players do not own.
Of course, these worries are all very premature, as we don’t know much about Dust besides wild speculation and a five minute presentation. Yet worries and wild speculation have a tremendous impact on the politics of New Eden. If you find yourself thinking that nullsec has become abruptly stagnant in the last week, that stagnation is likely to continue until the Fanfest in the beginning of October, when CCP is set to announce more details about how Dust will improve and/or ruin our current gameplay.
Is my level of cynicism unfair? EVE rewards a ‘prepare for the worst’ mentality, and CCP has a track record of breaking the game and fixing it later. The T2 BPO lottery system and Titans both threw game balance out the window and it took many months (years, in the case of T2 BPOs) before CCP fixed the balance. The current nightmare scenario is that DUST will run roughshod over conquests in EVE, since a round of FPS tomfoolery takes far less than an hour, and a sovereignty contest in EVE can take weeks for control of a single system. To prepare for the unknown, many alliances will be hunkering down, hoarding their resources and throwing down additional outposts – just in case, of course. Meanwhile, the market ramifications of the Unholy Rage purge aren’t yet clear. The upshot? Until October, New Eden is going to be very, very quiet.
Commentary
Unholy Rage ended up being a flash in the pan, because CCP didn’t seem to have much of an organized security process; later they hired CCP Sreegs and moved to a more iterative bot-hunting process instead of flashy mass-bannings. I’ll have to wait a few more months before judging my early cynicism about Dust 514; it’s rather ironic that I refer to the game as a ‘Planetside-esque’ FPS when Dust is now about to release directly against the stunning Planetside 2.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by The Mittani.
