I’ve now been waiting for my interview with EVE university for more than a week. Today, I checked my queue position again (between 9 and 11 early in the evening), and found a talkative PO (interviewer) in the public E-UNI channel, who I proceeded to ask for some stats about the workload. Here’s what I got:
Qvar Dar’Zanar > Interview average duration: 20-30 min
Average interviews amount per day: 20-25
Average interviews amount per week: 150-200
Average number of new applications per day: 50-150
Amount of applicants being rejected: around 10% Tabala Raschidis > wow Tabala Raschidis > awesome, thanks 🙂 Mekkai Nabali > And this is split between how many galley slaves…er, POs? Qvar Dar’Zanar > I don’t know… If i had to guess, I would say 20
(I’m Tabala Raschidis, btw)
Wow. That is pretty impressive. I hate recruiting, it’s the one job I always managed to avoid in other guilds. 200 interviews a week?!
You can also see in those numbers that a lot more people apply than are interviewed. I guess many people lose their patience eventually. At the moment, the queue is about 2 weeks long. I would say the waiting time is self-regulating: if more people apply, the queue gets longer, you’ll have to wait longer for you interview, which leads to more dropouts before that, which reduces queue waiting time. So 2 weeks probably is some sort of “sweet spot”. EVE is a slower kind of MMO, alright.
I’ll survive the waiting. I got more long-running skills to train anyway!
Good things first: I tried out a few characters, and brought an imperial agent to level 10, and a Sith sorcerer to 14. I liked the stories for the most part, playing full-of-themselves characters. The dark/light mechanic is a bit strange though, it seems quite random at times what qualifies as dark or light; as an effect, I ended up with a relatively even distribution, which seems to be a bad thing, stat-wise.
The game is also quite polished. It didn’t crash on me at all during the weekend, though I had to close it manually once when I got disconnected and the game didn’t recover properly. My server lagged badly for some time on Sunday, though; not sure whether they were overloaded by the amount of people during the trial weekend. Then again, there were a lot of people, but not that many that it should influence the server like that.
Performance is a bit of a problem overall. I heard in December that responsiveness was pretty bad, and I still had problems with that and the spell animations at some points. In addition, SW:TOR seems to use the same engine as Rift (Hero, or something like that), which… I’m not a huge fan of. My GPU fans go crazy during the game, not only, but especially during the cut scenes. Not sure why the cut scenes are that demanding. During “normal” play, the Hero engine has these weird lighting effects, where every character and much of the fauna seems to have this strange glow around the outer edges, which looks very out of place, like things were sprinkled with fairy dust. Then again, I could complain about most other engines used for MMOs, too, so eh.
I’ve already talked about the huge distraction that the alien gibberish is for me. That seriously degrades my enjoyment of the game. I hate to make this such a big deal, but it is for me.
Finally, EA puts a massive limitation on trial characters: they can neither whisper other players nor talk in chat channels. Grrreeeat. Especially if you are a healer, and see a group looking for one in General for 30 minutes, and you can’t do anything about it because you can’t contact them. I understand that EA probably wants to reduce chat channel spamming from bots, but there must be some other way. Put a severe rate limit on how often you can talk on trial accounts if you think you need to (though I don’t see how this is a big problem with a game that doesn’t even have a free trial yet, outside of friend passes and weekend events), but having no way of communicating with people unless you happen to stand right next to them is quite silly. I wasn’t able to test any of the group content because of that. It further underlines the lingering notion that SW:TOR is more of a single-player game that happens to run on a server so you can be charged 15 units of your local currency every month.
Overall, I have to say it is a cute little game, and I’d probably continue playing it if either 1) it was box-price only and no subscription (preferred), or 2) the other way round. I probably would see this differently if I cared about Star Wars, but whatever little interest I had in that series died with Jar Jar Binks long ago (I was young enough when I first saw the Ewoks that they didn’t ruin it for me). That pretty much leaves me with a slightly boring vanilla gameplay, with story line elements that seem nice enough that I would play through the game once or twice to see a couple.
If EVE doesn’t work out, I might pick up the game after all to tide me over until TSW is released. If I can find a good deal. I’m not keen on paying more than 30 Euros or so for the box, considering I’ll also have to pay the monthly subscription. Even if I don’t buy the game, I might pick up my good friend Thuul on the offer to play another 7 days on a new EA account at some point. I’m still a bit embarrassed I totally forgot to ask him before or during this weekend trial, seeing how I told him in January I might get the game at some point to play with him for a bit. Sorry Thuul!
…and I don’t mean more elves, pointy ears or not. I mean somebody with a fundamental understanding of languages. Tolkien was a linguist, and it shows in the languages he created for his world (or, as some say, the world he created for his languages).
I can’t sugarcoat it in any way: the “alien” languages in Star Wars are just stupid. They don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason. It’s just a gibberish of random syllables. They don’t even have to start from scratch with a grammar, but if somebody talks about a place or a person, chances are you should be able to hear the names in the flow of language. “Berlin” in English is “Berlin”, and “New York” in German is “New York”. A sentence that is translated as “See you on Dromund Kaas” should contain the words “Dromund Kaas”, because it’s a proper name.They might be pronounced a bit differently, and every now and then, another language might have a historically grown name that is totally different, but those are rare exceptions. If you can never, ever make out any name, it makes you think somebody just rolled their face over the keyboard to create random gibberish.
In that respect, SW:TOR would have been a lot better off without voice-overs. They just make me cringe. Not that the movies were any better, if I remember correctly…
Downloading, downloading, downloading. 21 GB for a demo, yay. Full voiceovers and all, I get it, but 21GB? Alright, it just looks like you download the whole game, so oh well.
Oh, I’m ready to start. Ah, an intro video. With some talking, and then, immediately the Sith attack. Lots of fighting. And more fighting. Shooting and lightsabre battles. And more of them. And more. This video is quite long *twiddling thumbs* I want to play finally!
Ah, finally. I get to choose my allegiance. Oh… another intro video… for my faction. More lightsabre-fighting ad nauseam *yawn*. I’ll get a drink. Alright, I’m back with my drink, and they’re still not done fencing it out? Now I know why this game is 21 gigs.
Ah, time to create my character. Cute options overall, though 90% of the faces are kinda ugly, and the scars are mostly so overdone they don’t look useable. But I’m ok with the result. Oh look, another cutscene! At least it’s in-game and not another video. Right, “agent, go infiltrate the planet”, yadda yadda. Alright, finally, off I go!
“The servers will be shut down in 10 minutes for a 2-hour maintenance.”
… and probably for a bunch of days, I’ll use EA’s offer to test-drive SW:TOR this weekend for free. I’m skeptic, because I’m neither a big Star Wars fan, nor eager for another hyper-streamlined theme-park MMO, but a free chance to see the best parts of the game (the low-level areas and first two instances)? I’ll take that and then probably walk away again.
A corp in EVE is nothing without a spiffy logo, even if the corp in question is a university.
…let’s see how that goes. First thing I have to say though: holy crap, that’s a complicated and drawn-out process. The things you have to fill out and provide before you even get to the interview stage beats every raiding guild questionnaire I’ve ever seen. I guess it has something to do with really X-raying people in the game whose populace consists mostly of scammers, griefers, and lying, backstabbing bastards.
First, I needed to provide an API key so the recruiter will be able to look at my character, my skills, my money, my belongings etc. Then I needed to do that for my alt, too. Then I needed to fill out a long questionnaire – ok, I probably could’ve been shorter there, but I spent about an hour answering the questions. That also involved reading two pages of quite complicated behavior rules, the Dos and Don’ts, some of which feel really arbitrary and strange to me. But I suppose they have their reasons for that. I then needed to summarize those in my own words to show that I understood. Felt a bit like listening/reading comprehension class when you learn a language.
Sadly, I'll lose my private corp's logo, which I really liked.
Oh well. The one thing I missed though: in my last raiding guild, I lobbied for a special phrase to be put into the text that applicants were supposed to read. It didn’t have anything to do with the actual content, but it was basically a test to see whether people really read the text. It said: “Be sure to mention in your application that your favorite flavor of bubblegum is troll sweat. Congratulations, you passed the test.” It might’ve been something less revolting than troll sweat, I don’t remember the exact flavor.
EVE University, I’m disappoint. Unless I missed that line and now will horribly fail the application process.
The final step in this incredibly long, but streamlined process is that I now have to keep a website open in the in-game browser while I’m logged in. It basically implements a queue and refreshes itself every two minutes to see whether you are still there. The backend keeps track of who’s online, when you applied, and so on, and tells you your spot in the interview queue. Last night, I was in spot 33. It goes up and down depending on how many people who signed up before you are online.
It might take some time until I actually get to the interview part. I sure hope it’s worth all that hassle! Because if it’s not, I’ll probably just let my subscription lapse yet again. EVE gets really boring as a solo game after some time.
EVE is one of those games that always fascinates me, but then when I try it, I don’t really know what to do with it. A couple of weeks ago, CCP had one of their ever-so-often “get two months for one” promotional offers. Wilhelm’s recent posts about EVE at TAGN left me in a state interested for the game again, so I resubscribed. Discount skill training time, if anything, right?
The first two weeks I did… nothing. I learned various Level V skills on both my characters, but that’s all I logged in for. The “return fatigue” was a bit too much. My private corp had long lost its office, so all the items were dumped into my personal inventory, which was too much to stomach for me at the time. I vaguely remembered I had bought a Drake last time before my subscription ran out, but it sat there without any fittings, and refitting was more complicated than I remembered. In short, I logged in, enqueued skills, looked bewildered at my ships and inventories, and logged off in confusion.
On Friday, I finally bit the bullet and decided to try EVE again, for real.I tried to figure out what I could do on my own in this game.
Planetary Interaction: I remembered I had trained PI skills on one of my characters last time, but never used them. My private corp has its home turf in Isanamo, which has mostly Barren planets, so I decided to set up a chain that would produce mechanical parts. I duly watched the video tutorial, then went off, and got it nearly right the first time (I think).
Two extractors, for base and noble metals, two base refineries, and an advanced factory to produce the final product: mechanical parts. It probably would’ve been smarter to use the storage facility as hub instead of the command center, but oh well, doesn’t matter too much.
My first PI setup.
Only afterwards did I realize that there probably would’ve been smarter choices to make money from PI:
D’oh.
Story of my life. Suffice to say it will take a long time to make back the money I dumped into PI.
Mission running: So I had this brand-new Drake sitting in the hangar, but without any fittings or idea how to fly it. I went around and tried to figure out what a good fit was from sources like Battleclinic, but if you’re a noob like me, that’s harder than it sounds. I have the skills to fit most stuff by now (most of the relevant skills are IV or V), but there are so many opinions, and… how to put it… EVE players are very vocal when they consider a fit inferior.
In the end, I manage to put something together that seemed to make sense. A short look at my standings showed that I was above +7 with Nurtura, an Amarr corporation, and I decided to go and push for +8. I remembered there was something good waiting at +8, jump clones I think. Not that I had any use for that right now, or in fact any idea what to use them for exactly (something with PvP?), but it sounded like a plan.
Level 3 missions in a Drake were simple enough: warp in, switch on Shield Hardeners, and shoot everything with Heavy missiles until it dies. I managed to hit +8 in a couple of hours. Nice. Also a good money-maker, I managed to make about 20 million ISK in that time. And now what?
What are my goals in EVE, exactly?
If I knew, this would be so much easier. So far, I basically played EVE as a glorious single player game. I did mission running, PI, and mining mostly, and I like that, but it’s just boring on your own after a while. Maybe I should go look for a real corp. What could I do with them?
Mission running: I guess that will still be a single-player activity, and that’s fine. I like mission running, if it isn’t the only thing I do.
Mining: I like mining, I really do. One of my characters has very developed mining skills. (The only down is she doesn’t have any refining skills to speak of, because I oh-so-intelligently trained those on the other character. Then I realized you’ll need them down the road for real mining perfection. Did it wrong again. That’s so EVE!) I could fly a hulk within half a day, and a Mackinaw with decent skills in about two days, if I had the money to buy the skillbook and the ships+fittings. But solo mining gets boring. A mining squad would at least mean you’d have people to talk to.
Hauling: I’m not sure that’s a real stand-alone occupation, but I could also fly a freighter within half a day. Same caveat: no money for skill book + ship. But hauling ore for a mining squad would also be viable, or transporting large amounts of goods for a corp. Somehow I like the idea of being a space trucker.
Refining, development, and production: I mention them together because, frankly, I have no clue how this works when you’re serious about it. I did refining and have the skills to do that flawlessly, but I always shied away from research and production, because it feels like you’ll never be able to compete with the people who know what they’re doing and have the skills trained for it. I’d sure would like to learn how that actually works in reality, though.
PvP: When you’ve read this blog, you know that I’m not a big fan of PvP. Nevertheless, I would be interested in at least trying out PvP in EVE, in its blob version. I’m not interested at all in small-scale PvP.
Hmm… maybe I should try and find a corp based on that. I’ve been thinking about EVE University for some time. I would imagine I would have people around to do some stuff together, and learn about fields of EVE that maybe aren’t even on the list above, because I don’t even know they exist.
They don’t do PvP, obviously, at least not the kind I’m interested in. When it comes to that, I’d need a corp that’s looking for Drake blobbers, because frankly, that’s the only thing I can fly, skill-wise, that would make sense in a blob, I think. But I can’t even name more than three or four corps: Goonswarm, Raiden, Pandemic Legion. And I’m not even sure whether those are corporations or alliances. Shows you how much I’m invested in PvP warfare in EVE.
So, to wrap this up: Does anybody have any suggestions what might fit me and how to go about it?
This week, I hit 1000 page views since the blog started (or whatever WordPress’ Jetpack defines as “views”). Well, not quite, the statistics only go back to 6th of August, but not much happened before then anyway. So it took me almost exactly 7 months. It’s gotten a lot faster recently though. Around New Years, I had just a bit less than 500. Apart from Blogroll links on other websites, the main contributor has been MMO Melting Pot, which mentioned me for the first time six weeks ago, and twice more since then. It’s not a huge number, but I’m quite happy with this little milestone.
I hope I’ll be able to get back to a schedule of two posts a week, which seems to fit me best. Thanks to all my readers, many or not, long-time or new, faithful or passers-by!
So let’s get the terminology straight first: What is Heimweh? As with Vorfreude, it’s a term that seemingly has an English translation, but one that falls short of the meaning the German term encompasses. The most straightforward translation is “homesickness”, and it certainly also applies to kids going on a summer camp for the first time in their life. But it’s certainly more. It is an intense, inconsolable longing (or “Sensucht”, another hard-to-translate term; C.S. Lewis tried and failed, so I’ll not even try) for a place, but that place doesn’t necessarily have to exist any more. In fact, the most poignant form of Heimweh is “Sehnsucht for a place that never was”. In this respect, it is more related to nostalgia than homesickness. I will stick with Heimweh for this post, though, because it means feelings bound to a place, even if it is unreachable, rather than feelings bound to a time.
Why do I want to talk about this? I’m a quite reactive blogger. Sometimes, I come up with my own ideas from scratch, but most of the time I write because I read about something, and then can’t get stop thinking about it until I write down my thoughts. This time, the trigger was Wilhelm starting to post WoW movies, and a link to an Everquest nostalgia video. When I looked at the EQ video, the Heimweh feeling that was being evoked was obvious to me. Despite the blurry pictures, despite the clipped and sometimes distorted music, and despite the fact that I never even played EQ much. I only very rarely pass through the lands of old Norrath as a tourist, so there is not much connection to these places.
Heimweh for virtual places
It occurred to me that Heimweh for computer games at first sounds silly, but if you look at them in the context of virtual worlds, it is quite a natural thing. We “lived” in many of these places like in a second home, for months or even years, so they grew on us. If these memories and feelings are in our head, does it even matter whether the places we long for exist out in the real world, or in a virtual one? It doesn’t, because we do not only long for a place, but also the feelings, experiences, and memories we tie to it. I think Heimweh is an important factor in the problem of “first game experience”, the fact that many of us can’t find a game to live up to what our first game was like. When we remember those times and places, we remember the awe of doing things for the first time, before they became a daily activity. Other games will have a hard time living up to those memories.
So why don’t people just go back when they feel like it? The problem is, they can’t. They can physically (well, physically as in “with their avatar in the virtual world”), but the places have changed. Bustling trade hubs will be deserted, dungeons overwhelming to enter alone without other people around, cities dead except for a few NPCs. In short, they can’t go back to the place as they remember it. There are two typical outcomes: closure, that is, realizing that things have changed and it is time to move on, or idealized nostalgia for the things that were.
But at least you can go back and see whether that gives you closure? Lucky if you can. If the game closed down, that’s out, too. Or if your game company decides to destroy half a continent and rebuild everything from scratch. Hello Cataclysm! At least for me, that’s one of the reasons I disliked that expansion. The world as I know it is gone, and there is no way to go back. I didn’t realize it at that time, but I think I felt disconnected from the world because it had changed, and I hadn’t.
P.S.: For an MMO company, Heimweh also can drive an interesting business model. Anecdotal evidence has it that EQ’s two time-locked progression servers have the highest population of all servers. And for at least 2 years I’ve heard people asking Blizzard for something similar for WoW. Of course, EQ’s progressions servers are anything but a faithful representation of how things were, but it seems the feelings of nostalgia attracted many many people.
P.P.S.: I just realized I started this post about Heimweh with a mention of a move from an old home to a new one. Oops. Hope that’s not a bad omen…
As a wise man once said (it might’ve been Einstein, but I don’t believe that; it probably was Melmoth): “Only two things are infinite, WoW’s subscriber numbers and SOE’s stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former”. We’ve seen that the former indeed are not infinite, because a non-infinite number of people left the game, and we could see the result in Blizzard’s quarterly reports. Had it been an infinite number of people leaving, then SW:TOR would have infinite subscribers by now, because it’s a known fact that 23.42% of ex-WoW subscribers subscribe to the flavor-of-the-month game after they leave, and SW:TOR’s numbers are far from infinite. In fact, they have such pitifully low subscriber numbers (some say not even a full million!) that they are barely profitable.
But as always, I digress. SOE has given a remarkable proof of their stupidity yet again. And what a proof that is. Because, you see, doing things wrong does not make you stupid. In fact, doing things wrong the first time and better the next time is sign of intelligence. True to that, SOE did the best thing they could manage: take one of the few things they always did right, and change it for the worse.
Region lockouts are a big thing in MMOs. I’m passionate on that topic because it bit me before. When I started playing WoW, I bought a box in Japan and ended up on the US realms. That meant weird playing times when I got back to Europe, or finding one of the approximately 5 EU guilds on US realms. There was no way to transfer anything over the Atlantic, and I believe there still isn’t. In the end, I bit the bullet and rerolled on EU servers, leaving everything I had behind. It was a scarring experience.
There is absolutely nothing that region lockouts improve. Localization is no excuse. What happens is that game companies pay the cheapest company they can find to hack together a bad translation at breakneck speed and call it a day. There are very few exceptions. And even if localization is important to you, they are no reason for region lockouts. Just release a base game and language packs. That will be enough, because I can’t remember ever seeing a game where the localization went further than a simple translation.
But, true to their stupidity, SOE did something even worse than launching a game with region lockouts. They’re introducing them to EQ2 retroactively. One of the great things about EQ2 and other SOE games was that there were no region lockouts whatsoever. Now they decided that they will hand over the “EU-designated” EQ2 servers to a company with quite shady history. From that moment on, EU players won’t be able to play on the US servers any more. and vice versa. SOE hinted at a half-assed grandfather clause for EU players to stay on the US servers, but there is no solution in sight for US players with characters on to-be-EU servers. And with SOE’s history of implementing anything more complicated that an ice cream scoop, it’s a safe bet that things will go wrong during the transition anyway. Especially since they have no experienced partner to help them.
It’s a shame. I had felt the EQ2 itch recently and was close to playing again. Now I can’t imagine doing that. I also thought about subscribing again for a month to try out Vanguard, but I’m not sure I can reconcile my conscience with that. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Rewarding stupidity makes you look stupid, and I’d rather not be seen with the MMO village idiot right now.
