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[lallara zhuul]

stuff

stuff

and

But ultimately it comes down to Lallara's vision for Eve being different from mine. I'm just saying that Lal isn't listening to what CCP is saying.

I'll have to disagree on that.
I'm listening exactly to what Crowd Control Productions is saying.

EVE is not solely an MMORPG, not solely an MMO, but a space-sim.

The chronicles in the beginning were meticulously crafted to portray the player as the capsuleer and the game as the interface of the capsuleer in New Eden.

Then the information coming from CCP itself started to veer away from the reality of the game.

Chronicles and vids released by CCP became more and more empowering and emotionally charged showing clearly different reality in New Eden than the one that the players had in game.

You can see exactly the same mechanisms being utilized to motivate the DUST players.

It won't take long until they will be 'more powerful than the empires'.

This is called Good Marketing.
Propaganda.

It is not a coincidence that the company is called Crowd Control Productions.

Yes, definitely a different view of the game.

[BloodBird]

Thanks. I had forgotten what CCP was short-hand for.

[Aria Jenneth]

You may be listening, lallara, but you're suffering a pile of confirmation bias.

Also I love how the trailer shot down all this 'being the ship' nonsense out of the capsuleer interface.

I suppose that jack in the back of the neck was a coat hanger.

And that the absense of a cloning rig, and pod goo, and a pod are also to be taken as gospel canon.

Also, that the instant fire in the eyes of the abruptly-cloned pilot (apparently podded in the same instant as ship destruction) means that the chronicle "Doppelganger," dealing with the cloning process is also retconned.

And that the descriptions of the combat boosters are talking about ... what, turbulence? ... when they talk about sensory input from ship systems.

Oh, wait.

This is called Good Marketing.

You already understood.

Oh, wait.

Propaganda.

Maybe not.

See, you seem to understand, basically, what CCP is doing. What I find puzzling is that (1) you seem to want to mine it to support your version of canon (even though it not only fails to fully support your claims but is also flagrantly uncanonical), and (2) you seem to take offense at the puffery common to marketing.

Now, I don't care for marketing, conceptually, myself-- it's a modern dark art, an applied social science whose effects, when well-handled, are so predictable as to make a mockery of our society's supposed belief in free will.

But I don't blame those who use it, and I don't expect purity and truth from an attractive fabric of shadows and dew-dappled cobwebs.

Why are you, bittervet, such an idealist about their marketing when you sneer at all they do?

[Morwen Lagann]

Why are you, bittervet, such an idealist about their marketing when you sneer at all they do?

Because, as an unsubbed bittervet, he is unable to post on the official forums, and instead directs his screeching and wailing here.

The ceaseless complaints of how anyone who treats or attempts to interact with the universe as anything more than only what we see on our computer screens is doing it wrong gets pretty fucking old, though.

[Saede Riordan]

I see hi sec in a time of diminishing npc empire power (with the player led nullsec barbarians on the periphery) as being similar to the scenario described in Asimovs Foundation series. We as players are in a role with privileged insight and perception of the break up and fading out of imperial power but these things will take generations.

Incidentally, this is one of the main premises of my corporation.

[lallara zhuul]

Try not to pay your pilot license extension and play the game.

And to extend on the perception of a capsuleer being a the player.

Then it means that all CCPs good marketing is IC propaganda.

Therefore all this demi-god powerful stuff is nothing but.

[Myyona]

The general rule is that only human matters, in this case the players.

Essentially, the empires do not matter because they are non-player, pretty simple. But, as long as the players either will not or cannot be trusted to take over certain game mechanics, the empires will not go away as they represent those game mechanics. As such, the players are already more important and powerful than the empires while the opposite is also true as you cannot play the game without following the game mechanics.

Stating that the players will become even more powerful in the future is just a fancy way of saying "we will implement new things for you to do in the future".

Maybe I can better formulate it as; without the player there is no game, without the game there is no player.

[Aria Jenneth]

Try not to pay your pilot license extension and play the game.

And to extend on the perception of a capsuleer being a the player.

Then it means that all CCPs good marketing is IC propaganda.

Therefore all this demi-god powerful stuff is nothing but.

When I was 12 years old, I ran into a couple of classmates with this fascinating red box with a picture of a dragon on the cover doing battle with a hero with a shining sword. The box cover read,

Dungeons & Dragons
Basic Rules

Naturally, I was enthralled.

Does that mean that the cover art was marketing?

Um. Yes, of course it was.

Does that mean that the promise of sword and sorcery heroism the box promised was somehow fraudulent because I never played a fighter, never personally played a character who fought a red dragon, and any character built using the rules provided in that box, which covered the first three levels of a typically twenty-level progression, would have died horribly in direct combat against even so teeny-weeny a red dragon as was portrayed on that box cover?

The three "Pathfinder" (the true heir to the D&D name, by my book) bestiaries within thirty feet of this chair I'm sitting in two and a half decades later say, "not so much."

Just because something is used as part of a marketing scheme doesn't mean it isn't a genuine thematic element. CCP has dwelled for a long time on the concept of capsuleers as demigods, and on the rise of a new and arguably monstrous class of humanity much to the distress of old orders.

Is it attractive? Yes. Is it, in fact, marketing? Conceptually, maybe not, but its attractiveness means that it's a good way to hook people who would like to feel powerful. That's a sizeable chunk of the population. Now-- is it puffery on account of giving players a sense of power and influence that is at least partially illusory? Yes.

Is it part of Eve's story? Yes.

Romance novels sell on their "good bits," as hinted at by their covers. Action novels sell on the excitement and adventure they contain, as hinted at by their covers. If one of these has more depth than the cover suggests, I applaud it, but I don't blame it for not wanting to market itself on its deep and sensitive examination of the human spirit-- or for failing to mention that it's not ALL "good bits" or zap zap ka-blam.

As for "IC propaganda" ... I don't think our characters got to see this trailer, lallara. It's largely eye candy-- a romance novel cover. It's there to display a Navy Slicer's shapely curves and hint at an intriguing story. That's it. That's all. And it can scarcely be blamed for failing to mention that the Navy Slicer spends most of the game fully clothed.

[Vincent Pryce]

  DAT SLICER

[lallara zhuul]

Now that I've had a while to actually think about this I'll have to Aria about the perfect example for this.

The red box, love it to bits, brought me to roleplaying, etc.

The picture on the red box is art, I was ten when I came across it and I never thought I would be running after dragons in the game. Mainly because I had had encounters with those adventure book thingies where you went by the numbers, I knew how perilous adventuring was.

There was also one of those in the Basic set, which gave a very good peek into the world of D&D and roleplaying, with betrayal, combat and death of a comrade.

I never came across any marketing connected to roleplaying games, there was the Atlantic ocean between me and all the hubbub with the Devil and all that. Roleplaying has always been an underground activity and even the age of internet has not dragged PnP out of cellars and living rooms.

Only Role-Playing that the common population knew was sexual until the twenty first century.

But I digress.

This is Dungeons and Dragons when it meets marketing.
It is a trailer to the godawful 2000 D&D movie where magic swords were lightsabers, elves were comic sidekicks and dragons were just weapons of mass destruction.

Another example that is the disparity between the game 'reality' and the stories within it is the Forgotten Realms setting.

R.A.Salvatore did pretty much the same to it as TonyG did to EVE, without the misogynistic bullshit and changing of the lore.

His characters are completely and utterly incapable of doing anything that they do within the rules of the game.

The disparity between the reality of the setting and the reality shown by stories and marketing linked to the setting is not a new thing.

All I am saying that it is there in EVE as well.

And it is as blatant as it is in other settings.

It is just, to me, more interesting to see EVE as the player being the capsuleer than actually believing that the characters are real entities.

A puppeteer creating meat puppets that he/she gives names to, who selects them from vats of capsule compatible gene materiel.
He/she sculpts them to his/her liking, poses them with a rictus on their face for a vanity photo and uses them to control ships within New Eden.
Through the interface given to us by CCP.
To pass time some of the puppeteers play their doll games with their meat puppets and pretend they have magical castles and sex with each other.
Filling the Destiny of a demented demi-god.

Jaysus, this is turning all kinds of meta now.
Better go find some brekkies.