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[Silas Vitalia]

http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/world-news/court-chamberlain-confirms-death-of-empress-jamyl-i/

Well that only took a few years. Bravo ccp for finally getting it done. No sarcasm, well done.

[Mizhara]

Should have done something about the fact locator agents still find her in Chaven though, heh.

[Silas Vitalia]

Hehe! Scope: https://youtu.be/46aRYr0IZi0

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Honestly... in my opinion it's not always a good thing to change a situation just because it came about by some good measure of derp. Especially if the change is done itself in a derpy fashion. We still have to see how this works out exactly, but the way how players were entirely unable to even pretend to have had influence in what is happening is a bad omen for how this will play out.

Sandbox? Not so much, here.

[Mizhara]

Given that the Succession Trials will be done by players, I'd say this is about as sandboxy as a game can get.

I'll grant you, the actual event (all forty seconds of it) was kind of shit and would have been infinitely better presented by simply making a youtube video with a couple of cheap voice actors and footage from the test server.

[Aria Jenneth]

I'll grant you, the actual event (all forty seconds of it) was kind of shit and would have been infinitely better presented by simply making a youtube video with a couple of cheap voice actors and footage from the test server.

Eh. As with most things, depends on point of view.

The Drifters have been shown all along adopting capsuleer tactics and doing them with better coordination than we do. This was the culmination of that pattern. To my eye, that's pretty neat.

It also produced a "when Kennedy was killed" moment with a good percentage of Amarr roleplayers as the Secret Service. Nice traumatic RP catalyst.

Maybe I'm unusual in that I don't mind at all when bad stuff happens to my character, but that's a gift that's going to keep on giving for years.

[Silas Vitalia]

Doing the succession at Fanfest for all the house reps sounds interesting in theory, but this will 100% depend on how the champions are selected, and if we end up with 'lord derpaderp00885' as the champion for House Kor-Azor or whatever let's not kid ourselves it's going to look sort of stupid.

In my head it sounds like a cool plot and event where some of the long term loyalists get to wave their house flags and have an awesome storyline, in reality I imagine more of a CSM popularity contest with some pilots who don't care about RP getting to do a fun tournament.

 

[Samira Kernher]

Maybe I'm unusual in that I don't mind at all when bad stuff happens to my character, but that's a gift that's going to keep on giving for years.

This wasn't about bad stuff happening to the character.

This was about players spending a week getting people informed, taking off work, and waiting for five hours, only to be treated to a short, four minute spectator event.

Killing Jamyl was fine. The event itself on the other hand left a lot to be desired.

[Silas Vitalia]

Maybe I'm unusual in that I don't mind at all when bad stuff happens to my character, but that's a gift that's going to keep on giving for years.

This wasn't about bad stuff happening to the character.

This was about players spending a week getting people informed, taking off work, and waiting for five hours, only to be treated to a short, four minute spectator event.

Killing Jamyl was fine. The event itself on the other hand left a lot to be desired.

Is that actually how long the event went down?

Good lord.  :/

[Samira Kernher]

It was a bit longer than that, but not by much. They warped in, said a few lines, got insta-blapped by drifters, then they said a few more things, then event over.

[Silas Vitalia]

Remember when they had a huge hours long thing for the last titan they killed and everyone got involved?

[Nicoletta Mithra]

Doing the succession at Fanfest for all the house reps sounds interesting in theory, but this will 100% depend on how the champions are selected, and if we end up with 'lord derpaderp00885' as the champion for House Kor-Azor or whatever let's not kid ourselves it's going to look sort of stupid.

In my head it sounds like a cool plot and event where some of the long term loyalists get to wave their house flags and have an awesome storyline, in reality I imagine more of a CSM popularity contest with some pilots who don't care about RP getting to do a fun tournament.

I suspect this, pretty much. We will have to see, but so far I've not the 'optimism' of Mizhara that CCP is treating everyone but the Minmatar 'great', story-wise.

[Mathra Hiede]

For me, who was up from about 2:30am till 5:00am to be at this 'Epic Drifter Fight for the Empress' event.
I was pretty f*cking pissed at how it went down.

That being said I am glad the last of TonyG is gone, It was one of the reasons I left was his derpalicious stuff.

Now however, I am really keen to see what they do with the Succession trials and while I hope to gods that Khanid will be involved I am not holding my breath haha

[Lyn Farel]

Given that the Succession Trials will be done by players, I'd say this is about as sandboxy as a game can get.

For every rule, always a few exceptions I guess.

It's nice though, if only they could do that for everything else like proper GMs...

Doing the succession at Fanfest for all the house reps sounds interesting in theory, but this will 100% depend on how the champions are selected, and if we end up with 'lord derpaderp00885' as the champion for House Kor-Azor or whatever let's not kid ourselves it's going to look sort of stupid.

In my head it sounds like a cool plot and event where some of the long term loyalists get to wave their house flags and have an awesome storyline, in reality I imagine more of a CSM popularity contest with some pilots who don't care about RP getting to do a fun tournament.

That was my initial fear too when Affinity talked about it with Falcon and Delegate Zero...

Now though, they promised to show the rules after the AT, so i'm holding my breath for now and criticize after if needs be.

[Esna Pitoojee]

So, I held off posting this a bit in the hopes that the hydrostatic podcast would hold some revelations that would change my opinion. So far, no luck - so here goes.

Issue #1: The cascading negation of storylines.

Simply put, killing Jamyl negates a lot of other ongoing storylines. The clone/not-a-clone debate appears to be at an end for one, but more importantly 4/5 of the heirs are going to have to die. That's a lot of characters to purge at once, and a lot of storylines abruptly dead-ended. Catiz' shenanigans with Khanid? Articio's turnaround? Ardishapur's excellent chessmaster handling? Come tournament completion, 80% of those excellent storylines are going to have to end.

And... for what? Shock value? Getting rid of a character some people didn't like, because they'd been written badly in some cases? That's a lot of collateral damage for what could have been done with a much smaller impact. Worse yet, it was abundantly clear from news stories and chronicles both that Jamyl was not an unsalvageable character - she just needed to be written reasonably well enough.

Understand, this isn't purely an Amarr issue either. It was an issue when CCP dropped a Sansha-themed hammer on Heth's head instead of having the State catch him, and it was an issue when Midular was abruptly killed and seemingly brought an end to the Minmatar cooperate-or-fight divide.


Overuse of 'shock' and 'epic' tropes.

It's been said elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating: If you pound a button long enough, that button becomes broken. CCP's been pounding the 'epic' button for several years now, and it's pretty much shattered into a thousand pieces by now. I can't go 'OMG, the empress is dead' when how I really feel is 'Well, the empress is dead. Again. And the last emperor too. And the guy before him. And a good half-dozen other heads of state in recent times.'

Simply put, SHOCKING BIG DRAMATIC DEVELOPMENTS have become the norm... at which point I can no longer enjoy the shock of them.

You know what would have been truly impressive, but lacked the problematic storyline issues in the first point? Have the Drifters blow up the station. We've been conditioned to accept stations as immovable, indestructable monoliths of EVE topography. CCP's wanting to shake that up with Citadels, so why not have them start off by nuking that station to begin with?


Use of pre-programmed AI as an excuse

This is more of a minor quibble compared to the other stuff, CCP have repeatedly claimed that they "did not control the Drifters" at the event, that they were "entirely run by AI" - and that as a result, Jamyl's death shouldn't be considered "dev intervention". I really don't think that counts as an excuse - if you code it so that they blap and warp off immediately on firing, so you only have to /spawn a huge number of them and sit back, you are still directing the situation.

For that matter, I will be frankly shocked if we ever see the point where Drifters display this same behavior against player-owned titans.