Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Casiella]

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=825

[Amann Karris]

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=825

This actually looks like a very, very positive step forward, though I have my concerns.  The biggest problem I see is that the "consolidation" process will be handled by volunteers.  The fact that they're looking to integrate this into the UI is also kind of terrifying.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in those development meetings.

[Seriphyn]

This is what we've been waiting for. Comprehensive infodumps about every aspect of New Eden accessible in-game.

Bring it on.

[Jekaterine]

We need more not less.
On top of this I don't play this game in order to wank myself raw to anything other than pixels in space.
That means I seldom to never use the Wiki. I'm sure it's useful and people enjoy it but in the end it for me demystifies things to a level I dislike and only leads to [Citation needed] posts and endless rabble.

I know CCP has this vision of having an all encompassing gameworld where I use their Facebook version to keep in touch with friends and whatnot when out of game while browsing their Wiki to make a point log into DUST to get my FPS fix after buying a console I've no need for. Afterwards logging onto Eve and shoot I-Hubs or run missions in Rens.
This after feeling "Immersed" after reading about all the cool stuff that happened in the game universe during downtime. Perhaps I feel like "influencing" the world a bit and so grab my mission fit Raven and some friends and go shoot some NPC incursion.

I love the chronicles not so much for the hard facts and information but for the spark of imagination it awakes in me, making the world more real and thus makes it easier for me to put my actions in a better perspective.
I don't need nor want hard facts they get in the way of my IC interaction,should it be through the use of the whole keyboard in a channel or only the F buttons in space, as it solidifies things to much and leads to stagnation.

Thus endeth the rant.

[Silver Night]

I am cautiously optimistic. I always hope for tools, from PF that CCP provides, rather than walls, as it were.

That is, something like 'Casiellaism is a common religion in the Gallente Federation' - this is a tool, or at least a building block. It provides information about something in the game world that I can use if I'd like, or not.

Contrasted with

'Casiellaism is the Gallente religion' - this is more of a wall. It says the Federation has one religion, and this is it. You don't have much wiggle room. I see the most danger from this kind of thing from un-intentionally making the world simpler than it could and perhaps should be (Each empire has it's religion, each empire has it's x races, each empire has it's language (which is not to say there might not be a language that is spoken throughout (but I would hope for room for local dialects. But I drown in parentheses)))

Obviously that is an extreme (and I hope unlikely) example, but it comes down to 'this is a thing in the cluster or in this Empire or what have you', and there being the thing. I think 'the's should be saved for special occasions. It's a pretty big cluster, after all.


All of that being said, a brief encyclopedia of Eve animals would be lovely. A bit of flavor text on a few planets. Average crew and population numbers, for ships and stations (taking into account, one might hope, just how very large they are when you consider them in three dimensions). A ballpark figure for the cluster's population, perhaps.

All of these last few, it is to be hoped, calculated with an eye toward the scale of the thing, the thing being the cluster. In fact, I think that keeping in mind the scale of the cluster is a good idea in general, for the people writing the Eve fiction.

Anyway, I suppose we will see how it goes, and I certainly like the idea of there being an easy bridge into linked-together articles for people to access IG.

[Casiella]

Casiellaism should be everyone's religion.

[Seriphyn]

It basically seeks to add a "Codex" in-game...not having to dig up information from obscure mission texts or fiction, downmouth another RPer by linking the items and them then feeling like "Oh...".

That shall all cease.

Also, it means obscure races like Jin-Mei, Achur, Mannar etc. get love.

[Casiella]

Also, it means obscure races like Jin-Mei, Achur, Mannar etc. get love.

The first two? Probably. Not betting on the latter, though.

[Vikarion]

I'm going to rain on the parade here.

I don't think this is a good thing. I think this is CCP redirecting time and money from something that can be objectively measured (1 Chron every two weeks) to something that can't (we're adding fiction in different places). CCP hasn't exactly been known for a burning desire to maintain continuity or consistency across their universe (witness the in-game information on corporations or factions and the persons in them, as well as TEA, Ruthless, Theodicy...etc), and I think this is just an extension of that attitude into the Chronicles: "well, not many people read them, so why bother?".

And CCP's record hasn't been exactly brilliant when it comes to implementation of content that requires extended, consistent effort. Witness COSMOS, the FW storyline, other storylines, etc. Thus, I don't think that we're going to see a bunch of new content showing up in game because expecting that would be expecting CCP to break out of their normal pattern of behavior, which, I think I must note for the optimists here, is considered their normal pattern of behavior based on all the previous times we thought they were going to do something awesome.

I liked the Chronicles because I knew that, every two weeks, I'd get something new and interesting that I could mine for Eve info. Now, I expect that we'll get a few evelopedia articles, and then CCP will find other uses for their time.

And that's if they are sincere about this. Part of me just suspects that they're tired of paying people to write things and want to save the money, so their planning on simply updating a few item descriptions and calling it good.

[Qansh]

To me and my own little heretofore utterly hidden world-view on the Intakis (and my timing couldn't have been better, I must say so to myself), I think it would be great to have really solid information on things like the Intaki religion. I can then at least know if I want to imagine myself toward the center or come up with cultish attitudes that are peripheral to it. I think that a solid foundation on many things could lend towards role-play.

I've experienced this problem in other games. I find myself fearful of knitting myself into the presumed society because little of the real basis for that society is suggested. In that void, my thoughts get flown out into "guild-space" where I have no real sense of connection to the world, politics, etc.

Some stream-of-consciousness here, but I hope I'm making sense.

I also imagine that CCP's idea is perfectly in-line with the idea of a continuing series of books. I think it's a worthwhile and hopefully successful initiative.

[Silver Night]

I noticed, and I'm not sure whether it means anything or not, but Tony G doesn't seem to have been mentioned anywhere in there. Unless I missed it, anyway.

[Graelyn]

Hmm.

Mixed feelings on this.

But I do wish them luck.

[Ken]

To mine ears, among other things, this sounds like a good cover for laying the fertile fields of fiction fallow for a few...  f-fFFUUUUUUUUUU--- 

<< bashing through the wall of good ideas to get at the sweet chron filling

Aside from dev support we've made the decision to take Mercury (our volunteer fiction corp) off roleplayed news for the meantime, and they are now supporting this effort as well.

Is that why the last few months been a virtual wasteland in PF news?

Our plans for connecting this to actual gameplay, both in EVE and Incarna, are much longer-term, so you'll hear about them some other day.

So, what he means is 2015.

If you read a chronicle about some person working in a hisec space station, you should be able to meet him at some point in Incarna.

This particular good idea frightens me.  You want a future chron to be about an NPC we can all go harass with /dance or some such?  The thing I appreciate about "unaccessorized" game fiction is that the version of a character or event I've built in my imagination never has to be railroaded into whatever the computer is able to render or what the team of artists assigned to it were able to dream up.  I would prefer to remember characters for their meaningful actions, their words, and the emotions their stories evoked rather than be able to call up a screenshot of them perpetually perched at some stationside bar.

So, I met Tibus Heth today.  Guess what?  Just like us.

Overall, I think this has the potential to throw up walls (or maybe just fences) that will restrict rather than expand the fiction, like the chron series has been doing for years.  He's sitting down to focus (solely?) on categorizing and organizing and to me that says, "I'm running out of ideas."  And if so, that's understandable after having given us so much.  But that means it's time for CCP to find a new regular chron writer, not give up on the regular fiction releases for the sake of birthing a pfwiki.

Or maybe I'm just feeling particularly negative tonight.

[Wanoah]

I am cautiously optimistic, and this sounds like it could be a step in the right direction. My stance is that in a persistent world, the developers should provide the tools and the backdrop; the players should write the stories. This does happen in Eve, of course, but the fiction pipeline was never going to give people the accessible information they needed to play their characters and write their own stories to their satisfaction. Worse, some of the fiction actively militated against player creativity and introduced some hefty levels of conflict.

As someone who dabbled in a bit of fiction, I personally found the Eve setting harder and harder to write for with each passing month before I gave up on such endeavours. I'd humbly suggest that it perhaps should have been the reverse situation.

[Amann Karris]

I am cautiously optimistic, and this sounds like it could be a step in the right direction. My stance is that in a persistent world, the developers should provide the tools and the backdrop; the players should write the stories. This does happen in Eve, of course, but the fiction pipeline was never going to give people the accessible information they needed to play their characters and write their own stories to their satisfaction. Worse, some of the fiction actively militated against player creativity and introduced some hefty levels of conflict.

I agree 100% with this.  In fact:

I'm guessing there's a lot of people at CCP and their partners who are thinking the same thing.

As someone who dabbled in a bit of fiction, I personally found the Eve setting harder and harder to write for with each passing month before I gave up on such endeavours. I'd humbly suggest that it perhaps should have been the reverse situation.

I think it's actually easier to write for EVE now than it has in any time in the past, but that is solely from my interpretation of the setting.  We have many chronicles, two novels, and a ton of player fiction to look at for inspiration.

We have interactive events.

We have player blogs.

We have (Lord save us all) Twitter.

Plenty of places for players to interact - both in-character and out - to enrich the setting.  There's never been a better time for CCP to take a step back and let the players create their own fiction.  Now that they're planning on making a more consistent and believable universe (as opposed to a more consistent universe only), I've got some cautious optimism.

The misanthrope in me says that this is simply a "bottom line" decision, and unless the players (through the volunteer program and through E-ON/EVE forums) don't pick up the slack, it will truly become a fiction dead zone.

I for one don't intend on letting that happen.