In today’s tweetfleet we’ll feature what seems to be a gripe among most non-CFC players. Our good friend Mabrick posted a short but striking article at his EVE blog (which we recommend you to bookmark), in it he made a comparison between these two images and added a rhetoric question, which I took the liberty into compositing into a single .gif file.
So far, nothing to raise an eyebrow for; Mabrick has never been in the CFC’s good side and this short and piece could be considered an oportunistic stab, and so I thought until I rolled down to the comments, where reader “Dinsdale Pirannha” (great username btw) rolled the dice and made a few interesting points:
The second image is the natural evolution of the game, if CCP does not step in and wipe out the mechanics that have allowed Eve to reach the point it has. goons have played the meta-game and the actual game better than anyone else ever has before. Bravo to them for that. At this point, the only thing stopping goons from eventually absorbing all of sov null is CCP ending it, or goons themselves reining themselves in, likely because CCP whispered a friendly word in the goon leadership’s collective ear, saying “stop your advance, or we will.”
If we buy into the propaganda spewed by the cartels about how Eve is all about blowing up each other’s ships, then an all blue sov null sec is really bad for CCP’s business. And they will have to change that, if they want to maintain their sub base. Unless you are part of the cartel leadership RMT’ing their utility bills or house payments, you can only make so much ISK and eventually get bored because there is nothing left to shoot.
Oh, incidentally, goons announced on their Pravda site today that they want all their members into Titans, or failing that, supercarriers. If that is not a sign of having way too much ISK, and trying to create artificial goals to keep your playerbase engaged, because they are getting bored, nothing is.
evehermit added:
I think Dinsdale is right – the blue donut is the natural progression given the current rules of the Null Sec game. While I am impressed by the efforts of those players, I don’t think it is a good thing for the game long term.
I think however artificial fight clubs where lots of people have a system or four here and there won’t be any better. There needs to be the scope for empire building and almost total domination. I think the problem lies in the fact it is impossible (it would seem) for new groups to develop and join this level of game play. They will either get swallowed up or curb-stomped by those groups already there.
Finally I’ll add Rammstein’s final contribution to the conversation, which I found it as a good counterpoint for the whole thing:
The question is ill posed. You could color in the graphic that way right now, if you felt like it. The problem occurs when you try to map political realities of EVE onto the graphic. The dynamics of nullsec are much too complicated to be represented by a giant blue donut with any accuracy. E.g.: For a long time, the CFC and Test were ‘blue’ to each other, while they were in actuality plotting each other’s destruction, and they remained blue to each other on many influence maps even after Test had formed the HBC, in what is now clear represented the conquest by subversion of 3 entire regions of nullsec from the CFC. Undoubtedly the same is true now: coalitions which people believe to be blue or NIP’d are making moves against each other which require careful study to see from the outside. Heck, look at the Chinese EVE server, years of stasis just turned into a massive war of conquest there.
You can read the rest of the comments in the original thread.
I hope you enjoyed this highlight, also feel free to comment on below what do you think of all this. Good or bad?
– R
