About those Live Events

At least to some players, the Battle of Caldari Prime had an awful reception. “The population cap was awful!” “They screwed up with CONCORD!” “It was in Euro time, why does CCP hate USTZ players?” “The outcome was predetermined!”

And so on.

So let’s back up a moment here and inject some reality into the discussion. Think back to the CSM 7 Winter minutes. It’s abundantly clear from them that the existing Live Events team, as recently as around a year ago, was basically a “one guy in his spare time” affair. It’s equally clear that the team is growing and getting more resources, becoming “Team Illuminati”, but that they’re got plenty of room to grow. And perhaps less abundantly clear, a ‘between the lines’ sort of thing, is the assumption that the only reason the team exists at all is because of the efforts of CCP employees who enjoy the story and enjoy the RP to prove to the rest of the company that, fiascos of the past aside, it’s worth doing. And so far they’ve been rather successful, I’d say.

Even today. Maybe even especially today. All the problems aside, CCP’s official stream of the event got some fairly substantial viewership, apparently peaking just shy of 9000 people. And, oh yes, did we forget that a certain major gaming event is on this weekend, which CCP is attending? No doubt they were showing off both EVE and DUST there. Anyone want to bet they had the battle streaming? Anyone want also want to bet that they had stations setup to play DUST at, and that the players playing at those stations were actively participating in the battle on the ground? Oh and, for that matter, those DUST players probably had more of an effect on the outcome of the battle than we did in space. It may take some time for that to manifest itself, but you can bet they’ll call attention to it when it does.

So, yeah. From a marketing perspective, today was probably a success, which makes a certain blogger’s joke at the expense of David Reid, aka CCP Pokethulhu, aka chief marketing officer of CCP, sort of amusing. (And yes, Ripard, we all know you were just trying to demonstrate how activist you can be. Spare us the indignant blog post, please.) And that means it will be that much easier for CCP Falcon and CCP Goliath to get more resources to do bigger and better things.

What sort of things? Things like expanding the team to the Atlanta office to allow for more USTZ events. And do more events, and borrow assets (like, say, time from the CCP Shanghai art team to make two skyboxes for a certain new map…) outside the team to create events without predetermined outcomes. And further improve their netcode and tidi and whatnot so as to allow these events to get even bigger. Well, okay, that last one is more of a general interest than a specific live event thing. But all three are things CCP Falcon said they want to be able to do. Hell, he said them again on the stream today.

Back to the intro, yes, there were some issues with this event. It was predetermined… but they don’t yet have the assets to do something this large in an undetermined way, something that will hopefully change sooner rather than later. Their mistake there, if anything, was the accidental leak of the DUST map, advertising its predetermined nature. And the player cap sucked… but then again, so would something like restricting it to FW pilots only (if that’s even possible.) So they’d have complaints there regardless. And there was that little glitch with CONCORD. Not sure what was behind that, though from an RP perspective the real mistake there was turning them back off. After all, why would CONCORD have backed off after apparently re-establishing control?

Besides, the tears if virtually every person in the system had been CONCORDed would have been awesome.

But I digress. I don’t really roleplay (much) but the story & lore are of interest to me, so I like the live events. And mishaps aside, CCP has been learning, and expanding, and getting better, so I’m not going to hold their feet to the fire over it. Even if I did, I don’t think I’d blame Team Illuminati. They want to do cool things too. I’d blame the people who aren’t giving them resources fast enough!