**Update**

I will no longer be available for contact ingame as I have been re-hired.

Any and all updates on this blog should be taken as personal opinion only; all fiction pieces should be considered precisely what they are: fan-fiction.

I intend to remain close to the community. Feel free to stalk my twitter feed if you want @HellcatBeth. It's not an official feed by any stretch of the imiagination, though I may see about reawakening @CCP_MaidenSteel under my new dev name.

That is all.

Recent Events

My, it's been a while, hasn't it? In my defence, I was hired by CCP at FanFest and shortly thereafter required to go to radio silence.

I am one of the 20%. Last Wednesday, I lost a job I loved, working for a noble cause with people I came to care for dearly.

All any of us wanted was to help make EVE, Dust, and WoD the best they could be. And you better believe I'm still playing the game now. The people, the community and the team behind it all mean a hell of a lot to me.

I am now going to be very blunt and give you an insider's perspective on the events of the past few months.

Let's start with Monoclegate: the massive, public flap over the introduction of the NeX store and several corporate communications being leaked.

I don't like the Noble Exchange. Pricing aside, the contents are ugly and not worth paying money for. I'm perfectly of the mind that if you don't like it, you don't buy it. The threat of including items that would actively affect the game, however, is something I can get onboard protesting. Here's why:

Many MMOs have gone free to play with microtransactions providing goods and services: access to expansion content, gear, shiny things to decorate ingame houses, whatever. A lot of these things have an effect on your ingame stats; I shall call these things "Bonussed Gear" beacause "Gold Ammo" is misleading. Yet nowhere has there been such an outcry against these until it was a possible addition to EVE. The reasoning behind this is simple. Most MMOs provide PVP on a selective, optional basis. Many players never touch the PVP zones; their Bonussed Gear is used against NPCs. Those people who do PVP are guaranteed to be on an even standing with other PVPers there because they have all bought Bonussed Gear. There is no inequality.

EVE, on the other hand, was built on the concept of all PVP all the time. By clicking that Undock button, you're accepting the risk of nonconsensual PVP. Every time you open the market window or contracts, you're accepting the risk of being scammed. Every time you talk to another player, you're accepting the risk that they might not be playing nice. Bonussed Gear, paid for with real money in EVE, would be used against players who had not made the same investment; conversely, it can be lost as easily as anything else if the other, non-bonussed players are better or get the drop on you. EVE's balance is such that a pack of newbies can overwhelm an experienced player, and unlike in other games, Bonussed Gear in EVE would not be as much of an automatic win-button. The loss would not only be time and effort -- as with all current losses in EVE -- but also a paycheque.

(As an aside, I am aware of the MT uses in World of Tanks, APB: Reloaded and other PVP-based games; these games were designed/redesigned around a MT model that puts all players on an even standing and the only thing you can potentially "lose" is bonussed ammo.)

I felt -- still feel -- that the EVE is Real motto does not need to be boulstered by costing players real money to enjoy it. EVE is already Real: the loss I felt when I was unable to play the game as I have done since 2007, unable to socialise with the ingame family I've become a part of, made that abundantly clear. Every time someone rages after losing a ship, or being scammed, or having their corp swept out from under their feet because they trusted the wrong person, it proves EVE is Real.

Now that that's out of the way with, let's talk about the players' reaction to all of this.

You people are rude, when your ire is up. You're so eager to shoot the messengers, you seem to forget that they're only messengers; the message is coming from higher up, from people you never interact with avatar-to-avatar. Raging at the GMs, insulting the Community team, blasting vitriol at Content developers who are trying to create something fun for you with spontaneous live events... this is not the behaviour of adults. It hurts us, it makes us wonder why we try to do good things for you with a game we all love.

Contrary to popular belief, the developers do play EVE. We just can't tell you who our characters are, for very good reasons. I logged into EVE almost every day, for at least an hour or two. For over a month, I had to maintain my silence, close chat windows, and run the game like a solo RPG because I could not in good conscience join a conversation anywhere. Try to put yourselves in our shoes: we're just people, trying to improve a game we love, and we're being abused verbally for it.

The layoffs worry me.

Let me put this in perspective: after all the shit heaped on us over the summer, things were beginning to look up. We'd had an internal reshuffle which was frustrating but gave us hope that the new teams would be able to deliver what we were promising. There were new initiatives that had everyone thinking positively. I felt that, if we could pull all of this off the way we were planning, it could completely revitalise EVE and bring back at least a little of the old game I started playing four years ago. Morale was high, people were really putting their backs into it again. It was going to be Apocrypha 2.0.

And then the sucker-punch was delivered.

I was just an intern with the Content department; I knew if the shit hit the fan, I was expendable, but I was willing to take that risk because EVE means a lot to me. What makes me sad, and angry and worried is that many others who were let go were counting on that job security. We were told we were alright only a few weeks ago, people were getting ready for the office move by buying new houses closer to Decatur, moving to new apartments, getting their kids' schools sorted out. And all of a sudden, the company we poured heart and soul into has told us it can't keep us on.

Some of these people have been here for YEARS and were right in the middle of important projects for the upcoming expansions. They know more about their part of game development than anyone else in the company. I've seen a lot of, "Great! CCP should stop working on WoD and focus more on EVE." I've got a news flash for you: the WoD teams, EVE teams and Dust teams were almost entirely separated from each other. Letting go of dedicated WoD devs won't improve EVE or Dust. It'll just push WoD development back by a significant margin.

Telling CCP to drop WoD for EVE is like asking the Content team at DragonCon when hybrid turrets are going to be fixed. One does not affect the other.

Speaking of the Content team, it's been decimated. They (not I, I wasn't offered this) were told they had to either move to Iceland or accept severance. Most took severance because they have responsibilities here: children in school, spouses with careers, rental agreements and bills and car payments. These are people who were working on the most content-heavy drive CCP has ever pursued. Now they're gone, and everyone's happy that CCP is refocussing? The mechanics end of the game may be in good shape for a while yet, but anything requiring more multi-disciplinary work will suffer.

Will I continue to play EVE? Yes.

Will I continue to check CCP's hiring lists for Content Writer openings? Damn straight.

Will I worry that, because of this last setback, CCP won't be able to pick up the pieces?

Unfortunately, yes. Only time will tell if they can pull through it.

You can cancel your paid accounts, switch only to PLEX, get rid of unnecessary alt accounts, boycott the NeX. I don't care if you're paying money or not.

But please, if nothing else, try to support the people who are working on EVE, Dust and WoD. If you truly care about the future of any of these games, don't rage at the people who only want the same as you do. The support of the community is integral to the success of the game.

And keep blogging. They hear you.

Status Update

I'm in Reykjavik, settling in for some fun before Fanfest next week. If you're going to be around, come say hi! ^_^

Just a Quick Little Note...

My arm's been twisted enough to convince me to hit up the Eve Barbecue in Copenhagen for at least the weekend (I have other stuff to deal with in the UK, or I'd try for the full week).

The weekend after that, I'll be in Reykjavik for a couple days' layover.

Really looking forward to this summer, should be awesome fun ^_^

Evespaces

Meme time! Why not?


...The camera wasn't actually tilted. The desk is tucked into a small angled window niche. It's... cramped. If I need the extra room, I put the laptop and tablet down on the bed. And yes, that's a figurine of Guan Yin on top of the tower. The tower itself won't fit in the floorspace. My setup in my old place in Scotland was much more spacious and comfortable -- and I didn't need massive curtains to keep the cold out. The sound system was better too, but that's in storage. I have to make do with what I can get, these days.

Too long

Real Life has dealt me probably the worst hand yet. All I can say is I'm not happy to have to leave Scotland, my boyfriend and all our friends and the familiar places behind. And I'm really lucky my parents were willing to take me in while I try to restart my life. The last month or so killed a lot of my actual playing time, and then there were a couple weeks wherein my PC was in separate components waiting to be installed in a new case in the US.

It's been hellish. At least Eve looks pretty, and I was able to get my PC together in time for the first Hellcats bomber roam.

Picture time! I'm taking sov map pictures every day to track the changes, so for right now, you get a shot of Shae's homeworld. I was kind of paranoid that it'd turn out to be an inhospitable lump of rock in the new planetary graphics, and I was so incredibly happy to see that it's still a pretty, temperate world with cities.

Delayed by Steampunk and Amanda Palmer

Yes, the third part of Space Captain Starke is overdue by a day. This is because I've had to re-write part of it, and then the last two days were interrupted by this thing called a 'Social Life', also known as 'dressing up, going out and having fun'.

Space Captain Starke will be up later today.

When Worlds Collide

My boyfriend, Churches, recently came back to playing Eve a few months ago, after being unsubbed for longer than I've been playing. I'll admit, it was mostly my fault: I dragged him to Utrecht to meet Phelaen, Creesch and Dark Sinister from my first corp, then met with Randgris from The Bastards in Amsterdam. I guess the hours spent geeking out lit the fires again, because he resubbed and hopped back into his mission-running ships.

I've even started to get my darling career carebear considering pvp. He's started thinking about fighting rather than running if he gets caught in lowsec, and he recently took a chance and blew up a Retriever which was afk-piloting around. Bless, the guy even hate-mailed him, til Chu asked why he was afk in lowsec and the other guy admitted that, okay, it was dumb, he wasn't thinking, and he'd have done the same if their roles had been reversed.

*sniffles* I'm so proud of him ^_^

At any rate, he has a great way of looking at the world. We had lunch today, and in amongst the idle chat as we sat in the sun in the park behind his office, Chu had an interesting thought about the perspective in Eve:

'There's all these people toiling away on planets to make ends meet, and they know that, way above them in space, there are these capsuleers who are fabulously rich and fly ships that can blow up moons. They seem so heroic and powerful to all those people stuck on the planets, and everyone wants to be those capsuleers, it's something to really aspire to.

'And then you look at the conversation between two of these massively powerful pilots and they're saying:
'You're gay!'
'No, you're gay!'
'Aw, yer mum!'...

I laughed so hard, because it is so true.

Triple Digits

Hot damn.

I've been trying to think up what to do for my hundredth blog post here. It's not the first time I've hit a big number; I still have a LiveJournal I keep for RL stuff which is edging on the 2000 mark. As far as I can recall, I didn't even notice number 1000 going by, there.

If that says one thing about me, it's that I write a lot. A lot of those LJ posts are the usual angst and babble, but amongst those, there are stories of varying lengths, even transcripts of dreams which inspired story concepts, and a lot of old artwork. It's both fun and cringe-worthy to look back at all that old stuff.

One of the biggest problems any writer -- or artist, for that matter -- faces is the simple situation of being too close to their own work. By this, I mean that while we know what's going on and how it should be interpreted, our readers(/viewers) might not; unfortunately, without telling at least one outsider all the secrets, the creator won't know this. This is why professional copyeditors exist, and I'm lucky to know a few personally, but at the end of the day I'm more likely to email my mum asking, 'Does this make sense?'

Blogging is a unique way of writing, in that most bloggers don't send their work to editors before publishing. Blogs are personal, potentially inflammatory, and largely seem to work best when given thought, written in a stream-of-consciousness rush, and only run through a spell-checker before the Publish button gets pushed. When bloggers get messages enthusing about our work, the standard reactions are a combination of pride, surprised pleasure and bemusement, because while we enjoy what we do, we don't necessarily expect people to read it or enjoy it.

If there is one question every writer wants to ask their audience in hopes of recieving a wholly truthful and thought-out answer, it is: 'What did you think of it?' What struck the reader as being good and bad about the work? What did they like; what was confusing; what didn't seem to work? And most importantly: why? The writer can't answer these questions; not unless they are prepared to let a piece sit wholly untouched for months until the memory of writing dims enough to let them create afresh. I have done this a few times, out of necessity, and it's not the most productive way to work. But it's often difficult to obtain honest and concise answers; too many people are afraid to criticise someone else's work, even constructively.

This is my hundredth post on this blog, and as the creator I would like to know what you think. Which posts were your favourites? Which did you like the least? Why? Moreover, why do you read this stuff, this random Eve-fangirl chatter of mine? How did you stumble across it? (I do tend to forget I'm on the Eve Blog Pack, now, but some people got here from other places.) Are there any questions or requests you have for me?

I'm not expecting an essay, mind; just a few thoughts that might help me make my work even a little bit better. Blogs rarely live long without an audience, after all, and while the content is entirely the writer's choice, the audience has the right to respond.

Thank you all for reading; here's a funny cat ^_^

(Soon to be) AFK for a week

My boyfriend and I will be off in the Netherlands from the 11th to the 18th this month. It's essentially a 'Meet the Family' visit (Chu is Dutch), but we will undoubtably have some free time, so if anyone wants to meet for drinks in Amsterdam, give me a shout ingame ^_^

I hear they have some good parties there...

A lot of other people have begun broadcasting their intentions regarding FanFest 2009, so I might as well, too.

I've missed the last two FanFests since I started playing, due mainly to being a student. The kind of courses I'm taking are the sort where it's incredibly difficult to catch up if you miss one day. BUT with any luck, I'll have a job by that time this year and will be able to grab a few days' holiday. My bf and I have already discussed the possibility of making it a week in Iceland to walk around and take pictures -- I'm pretty certain I could cajole him into attending FF, too, since he's a former player.

Looking forward to it!

Eve Life Meets Real Life, Round Two

One of the guys my boyfriend and I run around City of Villains with added us as friends on Facebook earlier this evening. When I went to confirm, somebody else had added me, some total stranger.

He'd left a message, saying he was an Eve player, himself, living in Scotland as well, and that I could drop him a message if I ever felt like flying together.

My first reaction was a fiendish hurrhurrhurr laugh... but since there's nothing I've left visible to strangers on Facebook that indicates I'm an unrepentant rogue (apart from a little comment of 'Flyin' Hellcat, rawr!'), I added him back and responded that if he didn't mind losing sec, he'd be more than welcome to join us in lowsec....

To be continued, eh? ^_^

Eve Life Meets Real Life

So I was in the local games shop today, and got talking with a friend I don't see very often. He's just recently broke his WoW addiction and gone on to Warhammer. I was attempting to lure him towards Eve (we have cookies!), and a random guy nearby said, 'Who's the Eve geek over here?' So, yeah, I said, 'Me,' and waited for him to say more, maybe mention what he does or some such. He was clearly waiting for me to do the same, because he said something about people saying who they fly with and what alliance they support and other people going either 'Urgh!' or 'Yay!' I suggested that I'm relatively neutral and that I'm in the Hellcats, and he responds, 'Yeah, I've heard of them.'

And then he edged away rather quickly...

When RL attacks

I've just received some news which, for me, is incredibly depressing.

Dunno how many of you know this, but I'm an American living in the UK. I've been here as a student for the last five years, and until a few minutes ago, I thought I would be able to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain after the 27th of September (my 5-year anniversary).

What ILR means is, essentially, I'd get all the rights of a citizen to come and go as I willed from the UK, for the rest of my life.

Great thing, right? Unfortunately, I don't qualify for this.

See, I've been living here as a student, in the interests of finally obtaining qualifications of some sort which will allow me to actually get a job. In all the time I've been here, I've never been accepted even for the piddly part-time summer cafe-waitress jobs I've applied for (I have a long list of reasons why nobody will hire a 20-something foreigner with previous work experience, living under a student visa, but I'm not going to go into that here).

But living under a student visa gives me all the rights of, say, that moth you just swatted on your wool coat. Despite the last five years costing a shocking amount in tuition, bills, rent, food, clothing and yes, taxes (because the City Council will leech me for property tax and there's not much I can do about it) - none of which has come from external funding (there is no agency in the world that will pay for this sort of thing) - I get to be viewed as a virtual parasite on society, attempting to take a job away from some hard-working National.

What I get to look forward to now is paying for an extension on my student visa so I can finish this degree, then whoring myself out to the first company which will acquire a work visa for me, with the potential worst outcome of being a virtual slave for a further five years, unable to leave a horrible workplace without losing my right to live in the UK.

Well, no. The absolute worst outcome would be never getting a job at all and being kicked out of the UK, losing everything I have built for myself here. My life, my friends, my home. I've been at the mercy of a capricious and quixotic bureaucracy most of my adult life, and every time I seem to have gained a little victory over the system, it turns and swats me down again.

I dunno what else to say.