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[Wanoah]

You start playing Eve in 2003 or 2004 or so. You glance at the setting and it seems like so much cliché, but you enjoy the game and it reminds you of Elite and its successors, so it's all good. Over time, you find that, actually, the setting is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. There's all those little details in the game that serve to drive your curiosity. Those original developers put so much of themselves into this thing and it shows. There's no big overarching story as such, just a myriad of small stories in all sorts of formats that help bring the world to life. There are the chronicles, which barely hint at some of the machinations of the powerful, but mostly deal with the little guys. They help set the scene for you, the player. They emphasise that there are no real heroes or villains, just people doing their thing; and all of that is only right for a sandbox MMO.

Furthermore, the world is vast, which allows all sorts of latitude for players to create their own niches. Aside from Battlestar Galactica roleplayers, it's almost impossible to go too badly wrong. In many ways it's the gaps that lead to the richest speculation. Still, it becomes apparent that the background material has largely been abandoned over time, and people yearn for more short stories and factual material to keep fleshing out the game world. Some people have great ideas. Ideas that build on the existing material. Some people are pretty damn good at writing and gain recognition among their peers. Some even get jobs at CCP. There is hope.

There are other people, though, that have rather different ideas about what Eve should be. Subtlety and nuance are all very well, and served the game admirably at the beginning, but Epic and Awesome are way more exciting, right? Epic and Awesome are words that have cachet in marketing circles too. Think Big. Think Grand Conspiracy Theories, and Enheduanni and Deus Ex Machina, and monetization of your IP. Eve can be bigger! Better! Bolder! And now with novel tie-ins and movies and, and, and.

Everything changes and there's less and less to hold you. Still, much is promised, so there's always hope for the future. Then it's 2011 and you've been an ex-Eve player longer than you were an active Eve player and you know that you're probably never coming back now.

Now, I don't think that Tony Gonzales is a bad person or anything. I think he's probably a very nice chap. I do think, however, that he was part of a ruinous trend at CCP that led to a culture of empty promises and the triumph of hype over content. I think that he had far too much say in the direction of content delivery. I think that there were a bunch of people hired for all the wrong reasons: people that could talk a good game but couldn't deliver the sort of quality that the product deserved. We've seen how that's worked out.

I think that the real shame of it is that there were plenty of people that could have delivered, but they were honing their craft and engaging with the community instead of busily networking with the right people to get a foot in the door.

[Graelyn]

One of the biggest disconnects, for me, is the Capsuleer.

The game tells you every step of the way "you are the Ubermench, you are unbound, untouchable, feared, needed, etc etc etc."

The fiction tells you "You are faffing off in the corner, the REAL story is happening over here in these places you can't go, to these people you can't meet, in crazy occurrances that you're not even allowed to know happened."

The Fiction and the Game are two very different things, and seem to have only a tenuous connection, like one is some alternate 'shard' of the other.

"All of these crappy other worlds are yours, I guess."

[Silas Vitalia]

One of the biggest disconnects, for me, is the Capsuleer.

The game tells you every step of the way "you are the Ubermench, you are unbound, untouchable, feared, needed, etc etc etc."

The fiction tells you "You are faffing off in the corner, the REAL story is happening over here in these places you can't go, to these people you can't meet, in crazy occurrances that you're not even allowed to know happened."

The Fiction and the Game are two very different things, and seem to have only a tenuous connection, like one is some alternate 'shard' of the other.

"All of these crappy other worlds are yours, I guess."

I agree. I think one of the great opportunities of these novels is to tell a far-reaching story about capsuleers. We've had 'characters' in these novels that are capsuleers but they are generally low-ranking militia pilots, etc. Not exactly setting the galaxy ablaze with ambition. 

Would be easy to set up a great story about even just a few capsuleers.  Maybe we follow two pilots who both went through training together as friends, and watch them drift apart as one stays a 'loyalist' trying to help his faction and the other branches off to start his/her own group in direct opposition.  The career parallels as one maintains a relationship with the original faction and as the other builds a 'criminal' or independent organization would be great reading. They could clash over time at various points and be in direct confrontation, and weave that story in and out of the PF goings-on

Fun!

Some of what makes the universe great are the far-reaching scheming of the capsuleers, weaving their webs of relationships and plots against each other, and the ripples of those actions that effect the baseliners.  You could then easily start inserting chapters from the baseliner 'crew' of each side of the conflict. Fun!

[Svetlana Scarlet]

I pretty much agree with Wanoah and Bloodbird at this point. I started playing Eve because I really liked the backstory, and I stuck with it (the second time) because I found a great group of RPers who had found a niche and we were getting better at it all the time.

Kyoko says to play for the game and not the story, and I admit the game part of Eve sounds like it's getting better all the time. But I have put so much effort into the RP, world-building, and storytelling parts of the game that seeing them all dashed upon the rocks just drains me of the enthusiasm I once I had for this game and this world. It frustrates me that someone being paid to write content for the game had less interest in maintaining consistency and providing an interesting world for people to play in than I did as someone doing it for free. I liked the game and loved the people I played with, but the thing that kept me with Eve for so long was the setting and the metaplot, both of which I have basically lost interest in.

I tried coming back when Crucible came out, but it just feels empty to me. It's not a world immerse myself in anymore. It's a world loosely hung on a couple of "iconic" characters I'll never see and never interact with and I can't have any part in changing its course. There's the player stories out in 0.0 -- and for a game that's something that is really great, but I need more than bragging rights to play a game that requires so much investment to really get anything out of it.

[Seriphyn]

Has the new content on the Fiction Portal not really excited anyone, or are people more thinking about Chronicles that are less 'space opera'? There's a great Gallente religion article around somewhere.

[Matariki Rain]

Has the new content on the Fiction Portal not really excited anyone, or are people more thinking about Chronicles that are less 'space opera'? There's a great Gallente religion article around somewhere.

The Gallente religious practices article is pretty cool. It has lots of potential without being prescriptive, and almost enough that makes me go "Hmmm" to get me moving to show how I think parts of it should be, without being so far away from my preconceptions that there's no room to meet. That's a balance which I tend to value as a roleplayer.

If it were my baby I'd probably refocus it as "Belief systems and cultural practices within the Gallente Federation". The article seems to start from a godly perspective, mentions as it goes that some of the god references are cultural rather than religious, and also touches on atheism and apathy. I tend to see it the other way around: that Gallente civil society is primarily secular, with a religious cultural history that survives mostly as part of its metaphors and cultural stories: more an aesthetic choice than what we'd think of these days as a religious choice.

Given the relatively-recent incorporation into the Federation of a number of cultures which have distinct and distinctive religious belief systems, though, freedom of religion and freedom from religion are both issues for the Gallente. What happens when the kids don't want to be part of their parents' religion? When a religion clashes with the freedoms of individuals? And how much is the Federation an actual federation of states with very different laws and perspectives? The recent information suggests this might be more of a factor than I'd previously thought, which I find interesting.

[Mierin Raine]

What happened to Marius (Falek)? They gave him a lot of schemes in the new book but you don't see him.

I liked the NC reference >.>

"Capable of filling space with inordinate amounts of destruction, the Drake was a formidably armed marvel of Caldari engineering, which was, in the words of its present owner and captain, 'largely underutilized.'" - Direct quote, bolded part is mine for emphasis

PS Do you now feel terrible every time you fly a Strategic Cruiser?

[Svetlana Scarlet]

Has the new content on the Fiction Portal not really excited anyone, or are people more thinking about Chronicles that are less 'space opera'? There's a great Gallente religion article around somewhere.

If any of that stuff ever came up in the game, I'd probably be more excited. Instead it's either Abraxas' torture porn or Tony's...whatever. The game has come down to capsuleers being the TEH AWESOEM except not really because they don't affect anything and the rest of the universe being filled with characters I hate (and not in the good way). So...yeah. From the sound of Templar One, the casual misogyny I gritted my teeth through in TEA appears to be alive and well too, which makes me think I'm just not part of the intended audience for this game anymore either.

[Seriphyn]

The game has come down to capsuleers being the TEH AWESOEM except not really because they don't affect anything and the rest of the universe being filled with characters I hate (and not in the good way).

One of the problems I had with the fiction as well, though baselining article relieved many of my issues.

the casual misogyny

Did you know, the imprisoned and bound-on-a-chair former CEO of KK decided to piss herself in a bold defiance of not giving into Tibus Heth's interrogation? It's because, clearly, women make terrible leaders of society, are prone to dramatic emotions, and can't possibly express their viewpoints without doing something immature and neurotic like...pissing all over their chair.

True story.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

Did you know, the imprisoned and bound-on-a-chair former CEO of KK decided to piss herself in a bold defiance of not giving into Tibus Heth's interrogation? It's because, clearly, women make terrible leaders of society, are prone to dramatic emotions, and can't possibly express their viewpoints without doing something immature and neurotic like...pissing all over their chair.

True story.

Please tell me this is an exaggeration.

[Seriphyn]

Unfortunately, no...

Haatakan, dressed in nothing but undergarments, sat with her arms bound behind her, her head listed to one side, with eyes unfocused and a blank expression on her face.

She hadn't uttered a single word in days.

Heth glared at her for a few moments.

"So you're a masochist now?" he asked. "You know I'm going to find out everything anyway, right?"

Her eyes remained blank as drops of urine began falling from the chair.

"Fine," the dictator said. "The hard way it is"

Good thing TonyG's gone, hmm?

[Svetlana Scarlet]

Ugh. That is...disgusting. And not because of the urine.

[Louella Dougans]

the gallente admiral, is also a recurring character from the empyrean age.

it is flat out written in the text that people suspect she slept her way to her position, which accounts for her less than perfect abilities in it.

and given what we know of her from the empyrean age, (that she likes one-night zero-g stands), then it is clear that those persons suspicions are more than likely to be the "truth".

which then provides an "answer" to why so many female authority figures are less than capable of doing their jobs, including megacorp CEOs, Karin Midular, various Caldari Navy Admirals, Republic Fleet Admirals, the FIO chief and others.

they all slept their way there.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

There's literally no female character in TEA, at the very least, who was not portrayed as a semi-helpless sex object. Even Jamyl Sarum was portrayed as a scared little girl and anything forceful she did was as a result of her possessor or whatever. Karin Midular, head of state of one of the largest nations in the cluster, was briefly given a moment of backbone when she told Shakor to go fuck himself, though only after she'd been saved by a near-rape by some big strong mens. Everything that's been posted here about Templar One has only reinforced that particular portrayal.

I can't think of one female character in the entire Eve pantheon I have even the least bit of respect for at this point, frankly. It's fucking insulting to me as a woman and as a thinking human being. It's hard for me to care about a story when the people writing it make it clear they don't think women have a place in it as anything other than victims and whores. I'm not the world's biggest feminist and I wouldn't be bothered so much if it was just one or two characters and if there were just as many men who were also portrayed in such a light, but that isn't the case.

As I said in my TEA review:

...if you are baffled why women don't seem to be interested in a lot of games, it's writing like this that turns them off, folks.  Most of these scenes read like something you'd see from someone in a first or second year writing course who is trying way too hard to be "adult" or "edgy" (and boy, did I sit through a lot of those in college) and ends up coming off as fake and empty.

So yeah, when Kyoko says people who have grown to dislike the story should put that aside and just play the game, this is part of why I can't just put that aside. I pour a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into Eve for a long time (7 years plus at this point) and I've finally reached the point where I really just can't do that anymore.

[Senn Typhos]

I can't think of one female character in the entire Eve pantheon I have even the least bit of respect for at this point, frankly.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Silphy_en_Diabel

Single-handedly took over the Syndicate, if that impresses anyone.