Editors Note: This article was first published on TheMittani.com by Endie
Welcome to your numbered, collector’s first edition of TheMittani.com, a gaming site with a particular focus on Eve Online. Our goal is to create a combination of news and commentary for you that is both up-to-date and insightful, and one which combines old-fashioned fact-checking with a broad range of contributors in order to provide an authoritative source of updates for Eve Online and everything that interests Eve Online players. We have by far the largest team working on any Eve-related site – currently over twenty people both behind the scenes and producing content, and we hope that that breadth of talent will show in the quality of what you read.
IS THIS A MITTANI VANITY SITE?
First off, the name. Nobody who knows much about Eve Online thinks that The Mittani himself is a shy or retiring individual who has to be coaxed into offering his opinion, nor one who is reluctant to step out of the shadows. As such, I imagine that there is a natural presumption that the site name was his decision, and that it is an example of the industrial-scale hubris that led to Goonswarm’s capital system being renamed “Mittaningrad”. In fact, I chose the name despite his concerns. Mittani himself wanted the site to be called something very worthy and descriptive like “Internet Spaceship News” or the like: dull enough that I genuinely can’t remember.
“The Mittani” has become a brand: one of the most recognisable and googled phrases or labels in Eve, it simply has recognition value that we would have struggled to create with anything else. I wanted us to profit from the better part of a decade of work and history that many new websites would give their right arm to possess. Although I admit that the would-be customers of, say, a travel site start-up might be a bit confused by the name. And the consequences of seeking to piggyback on that history for a sensitivity-training and human resources dotcom would be downright disastrous.
I remember reading, several years ago now, one of our enemies sagely informing his alliance that there was no “The Mittani”: that it was a shadowy group who used the fictional character of “The Mittani” as a nom de plume through which to speak to Goons and Eve. I think that we have all seen that gelled hair often enough now to know that he was wrong at the time, but in the end he wasn’t that far off.
BALANCE, OR WHAT PASSES FOR IT
If there is one thing that we have learned from Noam Chomsky, it’s that there is real money to be made from blaming America for everything. But if there is a second thing that we have learned, it is that every news source has an agenda and is shaded by the biases of its owners and staff. We are aware of this. We already have writers from Pandemic Legion and The Initiative. signed up to provide alternative views, and we hope to broaden that post-launch as as the site establishes itself and begins to attract new staff from an even broader variety of alliances.
EVE ONLINE, NOT FINAL FANTASY XXV
Our core remit is Eve Online, and everyone on the staff comes from that background. It’s what we know best. That said, we have people on the staff who are enthusiastic about the whole gaming industry, and in MMOs in particular, and some of those are natural fits with Eve players. Planetside 2 looks phenomenally exciting right now; World of Tanks continues to enjoy a strong crossover with Eve community; and Mechwarrior Online is also making waves. Clearly, Dust 514 can’t be ignored by any site that grows out of Eve. Eve players have a shifting set of shared games that are played together between bouts of Eve Online: if you know the right place to look, you can find yourself in a game of League of Legends with FCs from Pandemic Legion, Goonswarm, NCdot and others, while DayZ has been a hit within many Eve corporations and Alliances. We recognise that our audience cares about more than just Eve, and we want to service that need.
FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS POST ARTICLES IN GIBBERISH
At the moment, there are places you can go to find out about Eve. But the ones with intelligent commentary tend to be forums, and those tend to be daunting for the non-member, while even those immersed in their communities can struggle to find out information quickly. Complicating this is the fact that the best forums for information are also extremely lightly unmoderated as a matter of policy, which can make finding specific information even more challenging amidst the catty in-jokes and the gloriously skewed propagandising. We want to be a place where you can reliably come to find out what’s happening in Eve.
There are other news sites for Eve, too, but the level of quality tends to be awful. With a few exceptions, articles tend to be scrawled in a patois only vaguely related to any written language known to man, while desperation for content means that badly-disguised sock-puppet pieces explaining the links between Test Alliance and the Knights Templar appear with alarming regularity. Syndicated blogs tend to be of mixed quality at best, and bias is not just tolerated but celebrated.
Our goal at TheMittani.com is to set a high standard for the quality of writing on this site. We hope to provide as balanced a view as possible, so that those on all sides of Eve’s conflicts can come here for information, even if they sometimes disagree with the analysis of one writer or another. And most importantly, we hope to give you something far more interesting than work to do on a Monday morning in that awkward gap between getting that first cup of coffee and fictionalising your timesheets.
THE FUTURE
If you have the ability to write clearly and informatively about Eve – and if you almost never do so in green crayon – then we’re interested to hear from you. The same thing is true if you can produce articles on areas of gaming which you believe Eve players will enjoy (I’m sure your creepy Japanese dating game is engrossing, but it’s a little outside our core demographic). You may work in the gaming industry; you may have a particular interest and level of knowledge on a specific area, whether it is Eve-related (such as industry, wormholes, PvP, finance or the life); or you may want to provide a different slant on what is happening in Eve from the one you see here. Contact us via the site and we’ll discuss your break into gaming journalism!