Dr. Monacallove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Game

You may have noted a certain lack of content and activity here at Finders and Keepers during the recent CCP Monacal-Gate debacle in which CCP decided that their best business strategy in tough times was to light themselves on fire and and run through plate-glass windows to put out the flames. Essentially, I had three reasons for this:

1.) I’m not an alarmist. When the shit hits the fan, I’m the guy making sure he’s not getting any of it on his face rather than screaming at everyone in the room “hey look there’s poo flying everywhere!!”.

B) Virtually every other Eve-related blog, twitter feed, news outlet, and  publication was already handling it (to various degrees of success) and I figured one more clamoring voice in the angry pitchfork mob was just adding to the chaos. (That said, there was some GREAT writing that came out of the Eve blogging community during this time, and if you get a free day and haven’t yet, take a look back at the Eve Online Blog Pack over the past 2-3 weeks for some pretty awesome op-eds and even some great “monacal-gate” related fiction). I decided to sit this one out for the duration.

3.) I’ve decided after all this that Eve has this cosmic way of balancing out, and also that investing the degree of emotional energy that I witnessed over the course of this debacle into what is at its heart, a GAME, is unhealthy.

Of course, Eve is more than “just” a game. There is a lot of time and energy and even a bit of yourself that has been invested into your experience, and I don’t mean to trivialize that. But above all else, you need to be having fun in Eve, and as I’m more than a little fond of saying, if you aren’t then you’re doing it wrong. Take a break, take a walk, try something else if you have to; point is, when the game starts to drag you down instead of letting you loose to do what you want, it’s time to walk away.

Sadly, I do have some good friends who did decide to walk away after the recent drama. I wish them all the best in their new directions (whether that be flying, magic-spelling, robot-crawling, or even RL-delving), and hope to see them come back sometime.

So what did I do with this time instead? I set some long skills and explored other interests; sitting inside ranting and pulling your own hair out with 50,000 other spaceship nerds is nowhere you should be on a nice summer day.

So, I ended up doing what every other pissed off and slightly curious Eve player did: I tried Perpetuum.

As the Eve-debacle started to unfold, word got out that there was another MMO out there that was “Eve with Robots”, and the best part was, it seemed to still be in its nieve, pristine, griefer-free newborn state. Queue up the Darth Vadar music and giant grin on my face. After bantering around twitter about it with the likes of Helicity Boson and company, I was all set to give it a shot and start groundwork on Suddenly Robot-Ninjas.

Basic character creation, intro screen, and even the music was all absurdly similar to Eve. After finally creating my spider-mecha-bot (or whatever it is), I decided to move into the Eve-Refugees channel and say hi with my new robot self. The locals however seemed oddly suspicious and…dubious of my intentions:

Basic interface, in short, sucked. To avoid a potentially embarrassing Mac-gamer rant, suffice to say, the usability and playability is downright laughable with the Mac client. With no “shift-click to right-click” functionality al la Eve, I soon learned the Perpetuum is all but unplayable to us Mac users. Someone found me humping a wall trying to turn the camera around, whilst simultaneously trying to target both myself and a tree and decided to be a smart-ass in “local”. Spreading vicious lies is also something I would not abide in Robot-Eve:

So, I walked around a bit more, got some more love (read: hate. It couldn’t be the name could it?) in local, bumped into (literally) some other Eve n00bs who also couldn’t figure out how where the stargate was, and even met some friends!

Overall, I was pretty thoroughly unimpressed with Perpetuum as a viable Eve-substitute, especially after reading the “Code of Conduct” and seeing that griefing of any kind is strictly forbidden (although currently there are Suddenly Ninjas agents HARD at work in Perpetuum seeing exactly how far you can take things before getting the hammer). Mac-usability aside, as much grief as we give Eve for its UI and controls, you forget how absolutely terrible other games are, and that in fact, Eve’s UI is MILES above most of MMOs.

So I’m still here. I will admit that I was as despondent and skeptical of the future of Eve as the best of them, but I have hope. The CSM emergency summit (bless you Trebor and Mittens), which should have been completely unnecessary with even a trained monkey running PR, turned out to be the glue that Eve and CCP needed to bring the players back together. With the basic gist of CCP’s message being “we have no plans for game-breaking items or golden ammo for sale for RL$”, I’ve decided to stop worrying and see what happens.

Have I forgiven CCP like a good little fanboy, swallowed the kool-aid, and absolved them of all wrongdoings? Hardly; this was a fuck-up they’re lucky they walked away from (and I still want my hanger view back damnit). But, until the sky falls down, I’ll be in my favorite game, CQ turned off, flying around and having fun.

Internet spaceships, I’m still yours baby.

o7,

-Aiden

~ by Aiden Mourn on July 8, 2011.