The Mythical Social Wall

This is a response to Ripard Teg's "Prepare for Staging"

I suspect the "social wall" is an imaginary construct created by an economist to explain psychology which he doesn't understand.

As a casual gamer (sure, I'm logged in to EVE for several hours a day some days, but I'm rarely at the keyboard for three hours nonstop) I play in fits and spurts. This is anathema to forming lasting social connections: the best WoW guilds and EVE groups I've been part of had a core of social people with a retinue of coconspirators who would provide the necessary "social inertia" to keep the group running when the core were temporarily away.

My main examples of "overcoming the social wall" are casual and hardcore raiding guilds from World of Warcraft: you'd start conversations with people in the area that you were questing, people you were running PUGs with, or met through other means. Then you'd find that you have a similar interest and playtime, so you'd start looking for them the next time you played. Eventually you'd end up recruiting them for your guild.

Odyssey Exploration Hacking Is Broken By Design

Here's the official feedback thread for exploration hacking. This is a rare case where the players are actually better at game design than the CCP devs.

CCP vs Mercenary Corporations

Scenario: you are a small industrial corp. You have a couple of research POSes set up in some hisec systems. You get wardecced by a small PvP corp.

Scenario: you are a small industrial corp. You have a couple of research POSes set up in some hisec systems. You get wardecced by a huge PvP corp.

In which scenario would you hire mercenaries? From an industrial corp's perspective: neither.

Blog Banter 34: Spaceship Politics

"How would you like to see the CSM grow, both in terms of player interaction and CCP interaction?"
 — Freebooted's Blog Banter 34

Blog Banter 33: The Capsuleer Experience

"...we want to make the first days, weeks and months in EVE enjoyable and not just something ‘you have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff’" and the newly formed Player Experience team will focus on"...where and why people lose interest in EVE...".

"We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems."


Here are my thoughts on the New Player Experience, as part of Blog Banter #33.

The EVE Rookie

My partner has almost reached the end of her 60 day trial. She has taken up the option of the $20 for 60 days subscription, and currently has about 400M ISK net worth. She is happily flying a Noctis and sailing the skies of Sinq Laison picking up good deals all over the place. So far she has not paid list price for anything: all her skill books, salvagers, tractor beams etc have been bought on buy orders significantly below "market value". She is absolutely ruthless.

The Noctis? It was a gift from me seeing as I haven't flown it for a year. She didn't need the gift though, since her net worth at the time was about 200M ISK. At present she is capable of salvaging about as fast as I can run missions. So I have to pick up my part of the effort! Time for some DPS implants?