And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

So it has been an interesting week in eve.

It all started with the release of Incarna, and the player base doing its best "What is this, I don't even..."

CCP of course exacerbated the situation with an unfeeling, uncaring, and generally unwise Dev blog that will forever live in the halls of infamy as one of the most terrible answers to honest questions we'll ever see.

Prior to that dev blog, the forums exploded in rage and real riots took place all over New Eden, as more haughty, arrogant bullshit was released by CCP that only served to piss everyone off even further.

Bullshit like the fearless newsletter that dowsed everything in gasoline and lit the match, and later the leaked email that confirmed it.  To me the timing was perfect.  Several of Eve's Leaders were talking live on Eve Radio and trying to make sense of it when the leaked email was published.

And so, Eve burned.  Eventually, CCP decided to do something about it, and sent out a martyr in the form of CCP Pann.  That'll work.  A little while later, the now infamous insensitive Dev blog was released, and Eve Burned harder.  It was like throwing pure racing octane on the fire and hoping it would somehow put it out.

Honestly CCP deserves the Pulitzer.  Never in my life of reading/writing have I ever seen someone so artfully taken the two words "fuck you" and stretched them across 8 paragraphs.  And not only had they stretched it across 8 paragraphs, but never once did I lose the "fuck you" feeling.  My college writing professor would have been impressed.  I'm going to nominate them.

So now CCP had taken a small PR disaster that had they gotten in front of at the beginning would not have been such a big deal, into a nuclear disaster sized escalation wave.  Apparently CCP thought it was a phase or maybe we'd just burn ourselves out.  But the community did not, and CCP felt they should probably do their jobs and figure out how to answer it.

Two days later.

And not even a promise of answers.  Just a, we're flying CSM in here to talk.  So at the Reykjavik Peace Talks, CSM and CCP made like warring countries and made peace.  Kind of.  Those of us in the EVE universe didn't get an update until again, a few days later.  What we got was a joint dev blog written by both the CSM and CCP outlining the situation.  Oh and a video.  Shiny.

So now after the smoke has settled, we are back into an easy, suspicious holding pattern.  Most EVE players will never trust CCP again.  Some have never stopped.  Regardless, Perpetuum has never seen better days.  Which is really funny when you think about it.  Or sad.  Depends on your own personal perspective.

Some interesting thoughts about the situation were made from the man himself, Mittens.  If you haven't read these by now, you might want to take a look.

Mittens on the brewing PR disaster
Mittens state of the union address to the goons
Mittens personal trip report after the peace talks

Where do we stand?

I for one haven't cancelled my accounts.  I did combine one of them, down from 3 to 2.  I don't think I'll go any lower but I'm tempted.  With TOR coming out later this year I just may, but I was probably going to do that anyway.  The Dark Side is strong with this one.  CCP has a long road to hoe to get the trust of the community back.  I get some are already willing to hug them but others are not so quick to forgive.

I did load up and try Perpetuum.  Its an interesting game, and I can see this as what EVE was back in the day when it first started.  Seems promising, but I reserve the right to judge it after a play it for a few months.  No guarantees I'll stick around, however.

I may even start doing some articles/guides/experiences with Perpetuum in this here blog.  But for the most part, this blog will return to my regularly schedule wormhole goodness for the unforeseen future.