I believe that your conclusion is valid, and to be honest possibly alarming, but that your premise is flawed. The issue here is not that there is collusion or inside information being leaked, but that the current lore team appear to have adopted a reactive method for implementing new lore and modifying the old - spot focus groups, in effect.
They are paying attention to what gets people talking, and that does include a large number of people who have little to no knowledge or interest in lore beside leaving a footprint in the sand (and attempting to pour concrete in it forever more). What we have here is an issue of inclusivity, which I feel is good, leading to a potential bad as CCP attempt to please everyone and only have a tiny team of people around which to form a fulcrum for lore development.
Having no inside knowledge nor desire to really get to know CCP staff (unless we just so happen to become friends over something that is not eve - and even then I would hope to respect their profession and my own distance from it), I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt. They have the best of intentions, in my head-space, and seek only to provide content to as many people as possible while staying true to their internal vision of the lore. They are, however, only human. They have their own motivations for lore (assumption: increased revenue generated by their successful 'players ARE the story' campaign).
As a result I do not believe anything as sweeping as Max Singularity having a sunlight duel to the death with Jamyl will become a thing - I already has suspicions that the Drifters are going to be used as the scalpel to cut out the elements of lore that have caused more outrage than content. The issue is the simmering under current of lore: the 5-10 year progression form now, as CCP inevitably move lore further towards 'capsuleers are the new sheriffs in town'. Managing this transition, and it is a transition I believe to already be in progress, is a herculean task before you even consider the conflicting desires of blocs, individuals and loyalists. Let me point back to the key issue CCP faces here: limited resources. A small room of dedicated people who, in this discussion, I assume to be above reproach. Being above reproach, however, does not make them infallible, and here we get to the issue of purchasing power.
Large blocs have immense power. A largely disinterested core base will follow their leaders because their leaders are the core of their game interest. Rightly so, they are largely loyal to these content providers. However, these content providers, like CCP, are reliant on 'players ARE the story' to maintain their size. Average subscription times indicate that large blocs likely suffer significant throughput in terms of membership at lower levels - a constant process of corp level requirement and renewal is always happening. And so a constant stream of marketing is required to keep this bandwidth going.
Common elements to attract new members will largely focus on kill board statistics given tiers of pvp (small, large etc), and wallowing in the blood of alliance slain. The usual fare. This directly ties into to the story, when the story becomes player driven, however, and the people running such large operations are by necessity perceptive and often clever. They see the integration of player and story as a supplementary avenue for recruitment. Crushing an 'enemy' (which is literally everyone not in the tribe) with words and getting it up on 3rd party sites is a supplement to their existing motivators for membership. 'Fuck all roleplayers' and similar sentiments do not exist as much more than redditor keyboard rage or discreet forum garbage. They are taglines for the menials to rally around while the real effect is to galvanize action - and only action that benefits the alliance.
My point, belabored as it has been, is that when we bring the story this close to players, I get excited. I love the concept, and honestly I don't mind the rise of the IMPERIUM or any other of it's kind to come, as the innovative nature of players and devs alike excites me. However, it turns the story into another IHUB to bash, another Outpost to grind. Without corruption or collusion, the story becomes a battleground. As a result, the CCP lore team have a hard job ahead of them, but not an impossible one, so long as our input into the process is adversarial only in the client and context of role play. In my opinion, the only way to really engage with this in a meaningful manner regarding our collective fears of what it might become, is to constructively point out that direct involvement in events above or below our purview might seem cool, but consistent intervention on our part will lead to it becoming a new PR battleground instead of a story. A carpet to be walked on instead of a conversation-piece Persian rug hung on a wall.
I doubt CCP will allow players to kill major NPCs except for in very specific instances (Hilen shows up at site one, someone in a Tornado field executes him, just as planned on CCP's part etc). But CCP may become drunk on their own success, Seagull has been a fantastic steers woman and captain of the CCP production team and I believe that success will continue - but unless CCP do want a full transition from living lore to player defined lore, with the current environment becoming more of a history for what we build ourselves, there is a danger.
We ARE the story, and the meta is as much of an influence as any chronicle or actor interaction. Analysis of that meta and concentrated, polite protest of potential abuse, not the people perceived as potential abusers of the lore, is the only real way to move forwards, in my opinion.
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Topic: My Paranoia - Buddyknowledge and Amarr (Read 10814 times)