Evidently this is the week for stories of consumer woe on my blog, but in contrast to the CCP case, this story is really 90% my fault for not listening to the warnings and not being careful enough. However, this experience has basically soured the entire process of buying a new car for me, and I don't want anyone I know to go through this this if they don't have to. I have learned a very expensive lesson, but there's no reason anyone else has to.
The Setup
The story begins last weekend when I went to O'Brien Auto Park (and no, I'm not going to link to their website, but I will happily link to their largely lackluster Yelp reviews for sure). I had heard warnings about them before, but I also had friends who had bought cars there and not found them to be particularly horrible -- plus they own the dealerships for like half the car brands in town, so unless I wanted to go to Bloomington to test drive cars, I didn't have a whole lot of choice. So I went there Saturday and test drove a bunch of cars. Despite the fact that I ate up three and a half hours of his time, the salesperson I was with never tried to rush me, we seemed to get along pretty well (though that's kind of his job, so it was unsurprising), and he seemed genuinely helpful about finding me what I wanted, and not just what was most expensive. Honestly, after Saturday I had a fairly good impression of the place, which shocked me.
Monday, I sent mail to the salesman and asked what the Elantra would run me with the standard package of features with a manual transmission, and he got back to me with a quote pretty fast. Again, this impressed me, but he was trying to sell me a car, so this was not entirely unexpected. Later that day he sent me mail saying that they actually had gotten a manual transmission Elantra with the features I wanted in a dealer trade, and if I was interested to let him know and he'd save the car for me. After thinking about it overnight and comparing the prices and features of the cars I'd looked at, I sent him mail yesterday morning and told him I was interested. He told me to come by that night and they'd set me up.
So I got to the dealership around 1815 (they closed at 2000), and he took me to see the car; I took a look at it and it looked fine, and then he took me and had me look over the buyer's agreement and everything after they'd decided my Saturn was worth $500 (which was a perfectly fair assessment of the old girl). He showed me the price, which was what we'd agreed on in email on Monday, showed me how much tax, title, and license was, and then gave me the final price, which was a little over $18,000. He said someone would be with me to deal with financing and finish all the final paperwork after that, and he left me in the lobby to wait for that while he went to go take care of another customer who'd come in to get his car. Up until this point, I was pretty happy with the experience and looking forward to driving my car. I admit I was excited, impatient and not thinking straight as I should have been. I had had a pretty busy day and was eager to get home and just relax before I had to get up at 0530 this morning for another hectic day before I had to catch a flight to San Francisco on Thursday.
The Shenanigans Begin
They kept me waiting for a while, which didn't bother me too much at the time, but now I can't help but feel like it was a deliberate tactic done to take advantage of the fact that it was late, I was getting impatient, and I really did like the car. After a while, the salesman came by to ask if they'd talked to me yet, and I said no -- and he said he'd just start showing me the features of the car and how to work everything while I was waiting then, since there was no point in having me just sit there. Again, this seemed innocent at the time, even considerate, but now I wonder if it wasn't just another deliberate tactic to keep me off balance.
After we got about halfway through, the finance guy comes in and I go with him to start going over the other stuff with the car, and this is where the problems really begin. The first thing he did was to ask me if I wanted to get the undercoating and that sort of junk that you always hear them push. To be fair, he talked about it in very specific terms and told me exactly what the price would be and when I said no he didn't really push it. I suspect because this is the most common type of extra nonsense you hear about, they call it out specifically so that you think they are going to be as straightforward with everything else. Au contraire.
After that, then he started going over the financing, asking me what terms I wanted and how much I was going to put down. I was going to be putting $5000 down on the car, and I wanted a 36 month loan, on which Hyundai was offering 1.9% financing. He took that and then came back, and presented me with four options -- extended warranty options, though he never said that's what they were, making them sound like the most basic option, which I've since realized added about $4000 to the cost of the car, was the cheapest option I could get. However, it wasn't -- it was the most expensive extended warranty I could get with a few small options I didn't need (like gap insurance, disability coverage, and something else I didn't need which I can't remember) taken out. I was never presented with what the payments would be if I didn't want the warranty at all. Instead of having payments that should have worked out to about $350 a month, they were just short of $500, which should have made me realize something was wrong right away. Unfortunately, I was still not thinking straight and distracted about everything else going on right now, and I signed the paperwork without reading it carefully or thinking too hard about it.
After that, I went with the salesman again, finished going over the car, and I went home -- it was already after their closing time at this point, nearly 2030. However, on the way home, I also noticed that the digital odometer, which I hadn't seen before driving the car off obviously, clearly did not match what the forms I'd signed in the finance guy's office had said. They had read 15 miles -- the odometer read just over 500. When I realized this about halfway home, I began thinking about everything else, and started to get seriously angry, realizing I'd just been taken for a sucker.
Buyer's Remorse
So, after I got home last night I just spent a bunch of time stewing about this and talking to friends and family about getting stuck with a bunch of charges I didn't want, and mileage that was way out of whack with what I'd been told. I spent about two hours talking to my dad and trying to figure out what to do, and rereading the contracts (only 3 hours too late) I realized I could cancel them, and at least get most of the extra money back. I was pretty much resigned to having a car I could never feel really good about though, and didn't look forward to dealing with it in the morning -- especially since I had 0530 maintenance to start out the day.
So, this morning, bright and early, I went in and asked to speak to the manager about my problems, and told the sales manager how I felt about what had happened -- how there was a discrepancy with the mileage, how I felt I had been taken advantage of, how I didn't want to pay an extra four or five grand for the car. He went through everything they'd thrown on the car and I told him I didn't want it, he asked how he could make it right, and I said I didn't know. By that point, I just felt like I could never trust the car, even if they took everything off and I could get it for the base price. After going through this, he offered to take the car back entirely, void all the paperwork, and give me back my down payment and my Saturn.
It was a tough decision. I really did like the Elantra, and for all the crap that had happened I still felt like the salesman I had originally dealt with had really been good with me, so screwing him entirely out of a commission seemed a lousy way to thank him. However, if I could never trust the car again, if I'd always be waiting for the other shoe to drop, if I'd always be wondering if it was worth it, even if I had gotten a decent deal, I think I'd always be unhappy with the car, even if it ran perfectly for the next 20 years. Eventually, I told him I just wanted my money and my Saturn back and the paperwork voided. To be fair, he accepted my decision, said they'd keep the car around for 24 hours in case I changed my mind, and then the finance manager came out and showed me the voided paperwork.
They let me keep my copies of the paperwork, they gave me back my key for the Saturn and the title, and I went on my way.
The Aftermath
There may have been nothing sinister about the mileage; they had said it was a dealer trade, and they said it was a screwup where they mixed up the mileage on my Elantra and another one that was being delivered at the same time. I might have actually wanted some of the parts of the limited warranty, if they had presented it to me with all the options and with the full cost up front, instead of the sketchy way with only the payments on an option sheet. I may have been as happy with the car for the next 15 years as I have been with the Saturn. Unfortunately, because they tried to obscure things and foist thousands of dollars in extra crap on me, I just really felt taken advantage of, and now they lost a sale, I don't have a new car, and I have a bad taste in my mouth just from dealing with them. My dad, who was looking at buying a Toyota truck to replace his aging Ford in the near future, certainly won't be buying from them either.
Every time I think back to this experience now, I'm going to see everything in a bad light -- suspicious of every time I got left to sit and wait for a while, wondering if my salesman's friendliness was just a ploy, wondering if that 500 extra miles was something more sinister than just an innocent error, wondering if they had the car I wanted all along and were stringing me along with false scarcity to keep me from looking too closely at the price. Honestly, that is the biggest problem with this whole thing, because it's hard for me to even say "well, at least it wasn't all bad." I got lucky, and managed to get it taken care of before I really got screwed, but my outlook on the whole car buying process is now even more cynical than it was, and I'm probably never going to enjoy that again, even in the future. That loss of innocence (or maybe naivety is a better word) is the real price of this whole mess. I've learned my lesson, I guess, and the good thing is that I barely dodged an expensive mistake to do it.
I do still feel bad for my salesman, really; I really did get the feeling that he was being honest and truly trying to help me find the car that was right for me. Part of me hopes he was just as cynical as I feel like the finance guy was because I really don't want to think that he got screwed by some other jerk at his dealership. I'm not willing to pay thousands of dollars more for a car just to help a guy out though, and I hope that if he really was honest that he gets out of that place and finds a better dealership to work at.
I've played Eve since beta (with a few breaks here and there) and this sort of thing has happened before -- people threw shitfits over T20 and other such scandals, but for me the big difference with this is that it is getting such traction, snowballing so fast, AND -- most importantly -- it is so one sided. There are very few people trying to defend CCP at this point, especially after it was confirmed that the newsletter was the real deal, when before there's always been a fair number of people defending game changes (like removing jump bridges or the carrier changes or sovereignty changes or whatever).
I think, after the last year, people are just sensing a real change in the way CCP is running things. I don't think anyone is under the delusion that CCP doesn't want to make money, but the problem is that it seems like CCP has changed from being focused on making money through providing a strong game attracting players through word of mouth and customer loyalty to making as much money as possible while they churn and burn the player base. They've forgotten the lessons Eve should have taught everyone else -- that starting small and building your numbers slowly is the way to go, that making a game focused on providing a quality experience players can't find anywhere else is the key to maintaining profitability. The last year has shown that CCP seems to be more concerned about using Eve as a means to an end, milking it for as much cash as they can so they can get Dust and WoDO out the door, rather than making Eve a good product with a loyal following that brings in consistent revenue. Between the "18 months" fiasco of last year, the $99 dollar licensing fee for community tools, the completely underwhelming delivery of Incarna which has been hyped for more than half a decade, and now the completely two-faced discussion of microtransactions (if you can call a $70 monocle a "microtransaction) and their relation to gameplay, CCP just seems to be making a series of decisions that are completely contradictory to how the game was being run until around 2008-2009.
Even the tone at this year's FanFest seemed completely off to me, very different from the two years previous. Everything was focused on how great they were as a company, but the discussion of how this was good for Eve and good for players almost seemed to be an afterthought. The Permaband video this year wasn't about how awesome Eve was, it was about how much bank CCP was pulling down. The party was swollen with Icelandic locals to the point that a lot of Eve players just felt unwelcome at their own party, and left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of the players. Instead of FanFest being a celebration of Eve and focused on how great the Eve community is (and it is great, despite the backstabbing and vitriol you sometimes see on forums and in game), it was more like a party CCP threw to show off. It was really disappointing, and I say that as someone who thought her first FanFest was literally one of the best experiences of her life.
I've poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into Eve over the last 6 years. Eve has been the only MMO I've ever been interested in playing because it was the only one that seemed to be committed to delivering on the promise of the genre, making a true virtual world, and I know there are people at the company that still see that kind of promise in the game and want it to be all the things that people imagined for it. The problem seems to be that the money men have become the ones in charge -- and the same way Bobby Kotick and his people from the packaged goods industry turned Activision into a CoD and GH churning machine, they seem to be turning CCP into a company focused on squeezing as much money out of the player base in the short term without regard to the company's long term profits or reputation. For a company like CCP, which basically got its start by winning the hearts and minds of its players by building a strong brand and a player-focused game, and thrived on word of mouth and good press, this seems like suicide. I don't even understand a lot of their decisions from the "get money above all else" standpoint -- surely you'd sell more than ten times as many of those monocles at $7 than you would at $70. That's what's just baffling.
The newsletter is problematic because, at least to me, it clearly comes across as an attempt to socialize an idea that may be very unpopular among the rank and file in the company. If you look at it, the people on the pro-MT side are Principal Game Designers, Lead Game Designers, Directors of Content...people in management who are going to be driving those policies. Who is speaking against it? One person who is in the Research and Statistics group. If it was meant to provoke discussion, it is not providing a very balanced view, or a feeling that dissenting opinions are going to be welcome -- so either it's a very poorly made internal publication or it's piece of propaganda, neither of which reflects well on the company.
And then to see Pann's post that started that thread completely ignore the newsletter is even more baffling. When the problem with your image is that people think the company is lying to its customers, why would you ignore what is clearly the root of the problem? It is only going to reinforce the belief that you are being disingenuous. At least acknowledge it, even if you have to say "a further statement on that issue will be forthcoming." I just don't get it.
CCP thrived on being as open and honest with the player base as it could be in the early days, and had a lot of customer interaction up and down the management chain. Obviously, as the company grows, that becomes infeasible, and no one wants to see another T20 debacle. But CSM exists for a reason, and CCP appears to have completely cut them out of the loop, and I don't understand why -- or rather, the only reason I can see why they would do it just makes them look like cowards. I don't think most of the player base is so opposed to MT to completely rule it out, and I don't think most people have anything against CCP making more money from Eve, as long as the health of the game is maintained. If CCP wanted to have an open and honest discussion of microtransactions, up and down the spectrum, I am sure that would have given them a great deal of ire, but I can almost guarantee that it would have gone better than hiding their true intentions from the player base until it was too late. Now they've not only lost the lunatic fringe, they lost the trust and goodwill of the players who may have been uneasy with microtransactions but were willing to work to a solution that benefited everyone. The loss of that trust and goodwill is something that will hurt CCP more than any number of ragequits, because the more they make it look like nothing they say can be trusted, that the CSM is as much of a sham as its biggest detractors claim, and that they are focused only on what they can squeeze out of the game in the short term, no one is going to buy an apology or any sort of reforms as anything more than damage control, not a sincere effort to make things better.
And in the long run, that's bad for the game. And that's bad for those of us who really love it, even if we don't have time to play as much anymore, because we want to see it succeed and show that there's a better way to do business than the churn-and-burn model.
As my parents would say, I'm not angry; I'm just disappointed.
With much fanfare, the Mariner Revenant set off today for the west under Captain Nichols' guidance. With any luck, in a few weeks, he will reach an Imperial outpost and manage to bring word of our plight and our new colony, and bring back some much needed help. Before he set off, though, we had quite the party on the docks and Captain Nichols' crew gave everyone a tour of the ship, so we could see the hard work he and his men had put into building her these last few months.
The sterncastle of the ship is where we started, and I got to see the crews' mess, where they'd be having their meals. While cramped, they will hopefully have many of the comforts of home, at least as long as the supplies last. They have been loaded with plenty of dried pork and other provisions, but hopefully their first week or so at least they will have some nice fresh produce as well. The skeleton crew of the ship -- only about twenty men, since that is really all we can spare right now -- will hopefully be supplemented later by men Captain Nichols can hire wherever he ends up.
Above the crews' mess are the two officers' quarters and the captain's quarters for the ship. There are only three separate staterooms on the ship, with the rest of the crew in bunks in the forecastle and below deck. The officers' quarters are smaller than the captain's quarters, obviously, and don't have quite so much of the charm of home, but they looked well-built and cozy.
The captain's quarters, at the rearmost part of the ship, was a bit larger, and featured a bigger bed and some chairs, a place for Captain Nichols to retire and relax for at least a short while.
In the forecastle, there are a few bunks for the petty officers and other senior members of the crew; they have a bit more private space than the rest of the crewmen, but still share a single large room at the fore of the ship. Still more comfortable than the cramped quarters we all lived with in those first few days on the butte, though!
Most of the first section below the main deck of the ship is set aside from cargo storage and the crew's bunks, though much of it is still empty right now, to make space for whatever supplies the crew will be bringing back on their eventual return trip. This is where most of the crew will sleep.
Below the crew deck is the main cargo deck, which contains most of the ship's dry goods, packed away in chests and barrels for the voyage. There was not much to see here, but I was quite amazed by how much they'd managed to pack away into what was quite a small area. More than enough for the crew to make their journey, I am assured, especially if they can catch any fish to supplement their other provisions.
As the afternoon drew towards evening though, Captain Nichols made it clear he wanted to be underway, and we all left the ship. I took one last look at her from the bridge, to see her stretch out before me -- finally, our months of work had come together, to give us a strong ship and renewed hope for the future.
Not long after we finally made our way down the gangplank, the crew set off with some tearful goodbyes and the ship slid out of the harbor, to make its way out to sea for the first time. While we waved from the docks, I felt Duncan's arms around me again and thought that we had finally secured for ourselves a sound future.
Last week was Eve Online's FanFest 2011, the third FanFest in a row I've been to, and it was, as usual, a great time -- perhaps my favorite FanFest yet, though that has less to do with the organization of the FanFest itself and more the fact that I was finally not the only CAIN member hanging out there.
I got in on Tuesday morning, like I did back for FanFest 2008, and managed to get in my hotel room right away, which was a nice change from my first FanFest when I had to wait until noon to get in. After a short nap and a quick shower, I was feeling almost human and spent the rest of the day hanging out in the Nordica, just catching up with people I hadn't seen in a while (and a few people I'd only talked to online). Since the rest of CAIN wasn't getting in until Wednesday afternoon for the most part, that gave me some time to talk with everyone else, since I suspected I would be hanging out with CAIN most of the rest of the time.
After an early night, I got up early Wednesday morning and went on a jeep tour of Thórsmörk, an area southeast of Reykjavik near Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that erupted last year. We had the same guide this year as we did on 2009's tour of the Golden Circle, and he didn't disappoint this year either. Though most of Iceland was covered with snow (for the first time I've been there), the sights here were still spectacular. There are several large waterfalls in the valley between the two glaciers that bound it, as well as some amazing looking mountains. We also went out along the southern coast, where the beach is completely made up of volcanic ash from previous eruptions.
The formation behind me in that picture was probably one of the most amazing sights on the trip; the giant crack in the rocks you can see there was made because last year's eruption was trapped under the glacier on top of the volcano, and the pressure it created shattered the rock here. It's kind of amazing to see something like that and know that it was created a little less than a year ago, and the kind of power that must have been required to do that. Just so you have some idea of the size there, that crack is probably a few stories high, since I am a few hundred feet from it on a ridge in that picture.
Like last year, it was an all-day tour, so that ate up pretty much all of Wednesday, and by Thursday morning it was time for the main event. The two previous years I'd been to FanFest, in 2008 and 2009, had been great experiences, and I'd really been looking forward to this one for a while. Despite the fact that my desire to play Eve had been waning somewhat, the player community here at FanFest is one of the things I really miss about the game. It's one of the few places you can go where there is no shortage people who are passionately interested in something I feel the same way about. Even better, this year a number of CAIN members managed to make the trek to Iceland (mostly from Scandinavia), and it was really nice to put some faces to the names I'd only seen on the computer screen for the last five years.
Since they weren't staying at the Nordica where I was, I had breakfast with some other friends I'd made on previous trips to Iceland and then headed over to the venue, and after a short search I managed to link up with them at the EON booth, where they were hanging out -- thanks to some snazzy hoodies that Kenji had gotten made. I had missed out, unfortunately (that'll teach me not to read the forums), but it wasn't hard to find the rest of them. After a short bit of catching up, we headed downstairs, since a few of them wanted to sign up for the PvP tournament this year. While about half of us went off to sign up for that, the rest of us took a look at the schedule to figure out what we wanted to check out next.
Perhaps I should have known better than to let those guys go off on their own (just kidding, guys :), but when they came back, they told us that CAIN wasn't just going to be entering one team in the tournament, but two, since they had signed us up for it as well. I hadn't even been on a patrol in a few months, so I was pretty sure it wasn't going to go anywhere and we'd be out in the first round or two, but I figured what the hell, it might be fun. That didn't start until Friday though, so we had plenty of time to see the opening ceremony, complete with a bit of an awkward speech by Reykjavik's mayor and a new music video from Permaband (they of "HTFU" fame) -- more on that later.
After that, we sat at the Design Democracy presentation, where one of CCP's concept artists made a (really ugly) Caldari battlecruiser with the "help" of the audience, and then I stayed in Tranquility for the Alliance and CSM panels. The Alliance panel was...well, the presentation from one of Systematic Chaos' leaders on why they had suddenly collapsed in the last month or two and from Noir on their mercenary operation were both pretty interesting and showed that some thought had gone into the presentation, and I have to admit the presentation by the Mittani on the Goons had it's good points, but I suppose I was a bit to "serious business" to enjoy the Test and Dirt Nap Squad presentations -- neither is particularly known for being, well, especially mature, and I'm fairly sure both presenters were quite drunk by this point.
The CSM panel, on the other hand, was a lot more my speed, and I was really interested to hear how they felt their role was evolving in the wake of the uproar last summer after their June summit in Iceland and the fallout from that. Based on other stuff I heard during FanFest, it sounds like that might have been a bit of a wake up call for some of the people at CCP, though how much of that was just to placate the players and how much it signaled a real change from the company, only time will tell. The addition of the new "small fixes" team led by CCP Soundwave was a welcome change though, and whether that was ignited by the CSM or their open letter only encouraged it to go forward, I think for many people that has been one of the best things to see for the game lately.
By the time those two panels were over, we were ready to get some dinner and go over our strategy for tomorrow's PvP activities. One of us had to peel off and head back to his hotel, but the rest of us went out to one of the bars downtown that was offering a FanFest discount. While we sat there talking about Eve, FanFest, and everything else, it turns out we were sitting right next to a bunch of WoD Online devs, who (unsurprisingly) had overheard us talking. They asked if this was everyone's first trip to Iceland (which for everyone but me, it was) and asked if we'd had the local spirit, Brennivin.
Now, I stay away from shots (I don't drink to get drunk, generally, and I don't understand why you would have a drink where the entire idea was not to taste any of it), and I certainly wasn't really in a hurry to make my first one a liquor known as "the black death." However, after the WoD guys bought us all a round, peer pressure set in. Now, when the principle use for something is to wash the taste of rotten shark from your mouth, you can sort of expect that it is going to be strong, but damn. It tasted like superstrong mouthwash -- not disgusting, but definitely not something I would be having again.
After dinner, we headed to the hotel most of the CAIN folks were staying at (Hotel Bjork) and spent a few hours going over fittings for the next day. Mostly, we were looking at high-damage cruisers, especially the Rupture, with an assault frigate to tackle. We came up with a few different options as we took over the tiny lobby of the hotel, chatting with 5-6 other Eve players who happened to stop by and overhear us. The rules for the tournament -- no tech 2 tanks, no electronic warfare, no remote logistics -- made it clear that the order of the day was going to be mostly about who could kill the other team the fastest, but just how much that was the case wouldn't become clear until the next afternoon.
Friday we all met back up at the venue and got ready for our PvP matches. Unfortunately, the tournament was running a bit late, so we ended up spending most of the morning waiting for the first team's match to start. Unfortunately, this meant that we missed a lot of presentations I wanted to see -- the Content panel, TonyG's IP presentation (which is always interesting, regardless of how I feel about some of the Eve fiction), and the women in Eve roundtable. However, around 1315 or so, our first team finally went up to fight.
They were up against a team of Goons who had appropriated the name of Pandemic Legion for their team (winners of the previous few Alliance tournaments), and after a short but hard fought battle, the CAIN team went down in flames, unable to capture the point after getting soundly defeated during the first engagement at the capture point. It was disappointing, but the Goons were a strong team, and I have little doubt that they had put a fair bit of thought into their fitting as well, and I have no doubt they were well-coordinated. Losing that first engagement really breaks up momentum, and that is what ended up killing our team.
However, that first battle gave our second team -- me, Derrys, Saiva, and Swed X -- a leg up on the other competitors. We spent the next hour planning, discussing what did and didn't work, and trying to figure out how to make our next chance better. We realized a few things pretty quickly:
Assault frigates were largely worthless. They were too squishy, especially without a T2 tank and remote logistics, and drones just ate them for lunch. The only way they could survive was to avoid engagement and stay at longer range, which meant they couldn't be used to hold the control point, which was key.
Staying in a group was important. Our first team, after losing the initial engagement, returned to the point in dribs and drabs, trying to get on top of the point in order to keep it from counting down. This just meant that they died faster. It was better to let the other team get a free 2-3 minutes on the counter than to try and engage them without a full team; you'd never be able to push them off the point like that anyway. The majority of the teams that lost, I think, ended up making this exact same mistake.
Tanking was an afterthought; putting as much gank as possible on your ships gave you a huge edge in being able to win that first engagement, get a few extra minutes of time on the point, and chase away any future aggressors much faster, and time was the name of the game. The lack of a T2 tank against T2 weapons meant that even the strongest tanks, like the Moas we kept seeing during the course of the tournament, merely died a few seconds slower than the weaker ones, and put out much less damage. As a result, we filled our low slots with gyros and tracking enhancers for the most part, and our only low slot tank was a Damage Control.
Range was also largely worthless. One of the counters to the high-damage close range setup was to have a bunch of long-range Caracal missile cruisers; however, we figured out that even if they managed to wipe the field, it would take several minutes (giving us free time on the clock). Even then, it would take them time to get to the middle of the map and take the point, giving us time to reship and return, after which our higher damage output would quickly wipe out anything at the point.
The medium neutralizer we'd planned to put in the high slot wasn't really worthwhile; a lot of teams were fielding Ruptures, which didn't need their capacitor for much of anything, and assault frigates died quickly to drones anyway. So we replaced that with another missile launcher.
Tackling wasn't really worthwhile either -- since you had to stay close to the point in order to capture, maneuverability was of limited use and even fast ships would likely get taken down by drones or taking fire from multiple angles.
Bookmarking the capture point was important -- we needed to do it right away after getting into the middle. It gave you a critical advantage coming back into the fight from reshipping; a lot of other teams would have to warp in at 20-50 km from the beacon, exposing them to fire for a critical 20-30 seconds before they were actually keeping us from holding the point.
Armed with that information, we went into our first tournament battle, and six minutes later, we had won the first round after hammering the hell out of the other team in the first engagement, and then picking off their second wave as it slowly came into the arena piecemeal. I think we lost two ships in the first engagement, and those were our only losses. A lot of the credit for this goes to the members of our A-team that didn't make it -- Kenji, Demion, Calder, and Alexande -- who helped us refine the fittings and cheered us on to victory.
The experience gave us more information to work with; we realized that our assault launchers weren't really necessary (mostly because of the fact that range and assault frigates weren't an issue), so we decided to swap them out for heavy assault launchers for the next battle, giving us some additional short-range firepower. We also realized that one of the beacons near the capture point was much closer than the others, giving us a few extra second head start on a team that didn't warp in there.
The only bad thing about winning our match meant I was going to miss even more presentations -- we managed to sneak away from the PvP room to see at least part of the keynote, but shortly before it was over we slipped out and headed back downstairs for our next match.
I have to admit, I still felt like our chances were pretty slim, considering how rusty I was and how many pretty notable corps I was seeing were in the tournament; the Goons had already proven how dangerous they were against our A-team, and I saw tshirts for some of the Rooks and Kings as well (if you've seen the Clarion Call videos, that's them), among others, so I knew there were plenty of experienced PvPers in the mix. I was starting to get back in my groove, though, and CAIN has always been pretty focused on small-gang, lighter ship PvP, so I figured we might make it another round or two at least.
Things went better than I expected, to say the least. We won the next battle, and the next, and so on until we found ourselves in the semifinals at the end of the day -- up against the Goon team that had given our first team so much trouble. We knew that this would probably be our toughest battle yet -- like us, they'd been using four close-range Ruptures the whole time, and doing a good job putting their opponents down in good order. They'd even come back from behind in their quarterfinal match, something I don't think any other team had managed to really do -- for most of them, the team with the early advantage ended up winning. We decided to modify our setup one last time before the semifinal match, getting rid of our afterburner and replacing it with an invulnerability field, to give us a little extra tank; without the afterburner, we'd only lose maybe 10-20 seconds, but the extra tank would let us pour on the damage that much longer.
After a bit of good-natured shit-talking between the two teams, battle commenced, and we got to the point fairly quickly, even without our afterburners -- right about the same time all but one of the Goons warped in almost 120 km off the beacon. One of them, unfortunately, had warped in much closer, and we turned our guns on him right away. As the three ships farther away warped in right on the point (a tricky maneuver that was pretty clever, but I think it was probably not as efficient as warping to the closest beacon), their first ship was almost dead, giving us a big advantage in the ensuing melee. We lost two ships, but managed to hold the field and destroy or chase off the rest of the Goons. Our two losses went to reship as we waited for the second wave, the counter on the capture point slowly counting more towards our side.
Knowing that the Goons had managed to come back from a similar loss in their last match, though, we knew we weren't out of the woods yet. Luckily, our reinforcements arrived almost simultaneously with their second wave, and again we managed to fend them off and hold the point, by which time they couldn't stop us from getting the five minutes we needed to win the match. When I talked to one of the Goon players later at Saturday's party, it was clear what had given us the advantage; their setup had been very similar to ours, though they'd kept an afterburner in the mids and loaded it up with armor in the lows, instead of the damage and tracking mods we'd put in. The extra damage, multiplied by our four ships on the field, had given us the upper hand; their armor had only given them a few extra seconds, and it wasn't enough to keep us from finishing them off.
With our toughest match so far out of the way, we were through into the finals, and no one was more surprised than I was. I'd missed pretty much everything else on Friday because of it, which was disappointing (and I hope next year, the tournament keeps closer to the schedule so participants can do more stuff outside of the tournament), but we were going to be having the finals in the main room the next day, and we'd already taken second place at the very least, which meant we were leaving FanFest with a new video card, if nothing else.
There wasn't much left of Friday after that; most of the other guys had signed up for one of the pub crawls with a dev, so they were taking off for downtown to do that, and I headed back to the Nordica and met up with some other friends of mine, and hung out with them most of the evening, before finally making my way back to bed to get ready for the next day.
Saturday morning we reconvened at the Nordica at a little before 1100, and you could tell that not everyone had quite survived the pub crawl intact; Derrys and I had skipped out on that, and it looked like Saiva and Swed had survived it in decent shape, but Alexande was definitely looking a little green around the gills (a lot more green a little later at the venue), but hopefully we'd still be in fighting shape for the finals at 1300. We spent another hour or so hanging out in a very sparsely-filled event hall (evidently Alexande wasn't the only one still trying to recover from the pub crawl) and then went on over to Tranquility to get ready for our match.
Despite the fact that Derrys and I kept telling everyone it was just another match, and that we should just focus on what we had to do, I can't deny the thought of getting up on stage in front of a few hundred people, where our prowess (or lack there of) would be visible for all to see, was a mite bit intimidating. When they marched us up on stage and we started taking our places, I think that's when the nervousness really took hold. We must have sat on the stage for 15 minutes or so, just waiting to log in and start fitting, and that was the worst. Once we could log in and start fitting, at least then there was something to focus on to distract me from the rapidly-filling hall. The commentators started their spiel on stage and in just a few minutes we were undocking to begin the fight. You can see for yourself what happened here:
It seems like the other team had tried to come in with three artillery-fit Ruptures and a tanked Moa to hold the point, but one of them had accidentally warped in on the beacon with the Moa. As discussed before, this wasn't really the optimal strategy, but the miswarp pretty much condemned them to a quick death, and like so many of the teams we'd faced before, that first engagement set the tone for the rest. We lost one ship even so, and Derrys had to warp back to the station afterward with very little structure left, but that pretty much decided the match right there. Since he only had to repair, Derrys got back to the point just as the first ships from the other team started to trickle back into the arena. Coming in only one or two at a time pretty much doomed them, and we tore them apart (though I almost went down at the end).
After that, we went up to get interviewed by StevieSG, though that ended up waiting until after the third place match, when the team we beat in the semifinals, the "Pandemic Legion" Goon team, took a win with a rather comedic laser-and-smartbomb party. I think we were all pretty surprised they won with that, but I think it had a lot to do with the fact that the Goons were pretty well coordinated, even with a comedy fit, and that the other team, through a fluke of teams not showing up, had only fought one battle in the tournament -- their semifinal -- and they had lost it, so they hadn't had the opportunity to refine their strategy that most of the other teams had had. If you want to skip right to our interview in that video, by the way, you can fast forward to 26:10.
After the PvP finals, they cleared the room to get ready for what is usually the main showcase of FanFest, CCP Presents. In previous years, this has been used to announce the content of upcoming expansions -- in 2008, it was used to reveal Apocrypha to great acclaim, for instance. This year, though, it was a little lackluster. Honestly, it felt a little like it was more of a presentation for potential investors or for industry folks and a lot less for the fans, though. A lot of the presentation was taken up by a discussion of Carbon, CCP's distilled framework that is forming the new "guts" of Eve, WoD Online, Dust 514, and presumably most of their other projects going forward, and a significant chunk of the rest was them bringing Nvidia guys up on stage to talk about the stuff CCP is working on in partnership with them.
From a technical point of view, Carbon is really an interesting project, but because it's mostly infrastructure, there's not a lot of red meat for fans to sink their teeth into (as indicated by the skit about a CarbonFest during the presentation) and the Nvidia stuff tended to come off as a lot of technology marketing wankery. Telling players that the current technology could only render a few characters on screen at once, but in five years we'd be able to have hundreds of character on screen at once, isn't really something to get excited about -- after the last year's troubles with CSM being told that Eve is going to be stagnant for 18 months, you'd think they'd be very wary of the "just wait a while" line of discussion.
As far as new stuff for Eve goes, all we really got were a few glimpses of the Captain's Quarters stuff for Incarna that is supposed to be rolled out this summer, some new turret graphics and animations -- admittedly they looked cool, but most PvPers tend to turn off turret effects anyway, so response was somewhat muted -- and a new trailer for the "future vision" of Eve, which, while really cool, didn't really show players what they would be getting in the next year or two, and quite frankly I think a lot of people are skeptical can ever really be pulled off. CCP seems very confident about it, to be sure, and the idea of a seamless transition from ship combat, to walking in stations, to boots-on-the-ground combat in Dust is a really amazing concept, but the proof is in the execution, and CCP has had a little trouble with that as of late. A lot of people I talked to were a little upset to see CCP shooting for the moon when they thought there was a lot of major stuff in the game right now -- sovereignty, planetary interaction, and factional warfare, for instance -- which still need a lot of work before they really live up to people's expectations. I guess we'll just have to see how it goes, but here's the trailer with a taste of what CCP sees for the future of Eve:
With that out of the way, we all went to get some dinner before coming back to the venue for the Party at the Top of the World, which is what closes out the FanFest every year. It's one of the biggest parties in Iceland each year, I'm told, which has ended up being both a bit of a blessing and a curse.
On the good side, it's a great party with some pretty good musical acts (though nothing this year came close to the DJ with the full orchestra last year, which was amazing) and a lot of hanging out with a thousand of your closest Eve compatriots. Our tournament win (and the fact that I'm one of a small -- but growing -- number of women Eve players at the FanFest) made our small group a pretty visible one, I guess, and I had a lot of great conversations with players and a few devs over the course of the night, and I really enjoyed myself -- I stayed until the party wrapped up at 0200.
Unfortunately, like last year, CCP decided to open up the party to the general public. I don't have anything against Icelanders -- in fact, I've found the country to be really great and welcoming -- but opening up the party to 2000 outsiders changes the tone of the party a great deal, especially since a lot of the people coming in don't seem to have any idea what the party is actually for and seem to treat a lot of the Eve folks with a bit of disdain. The party changes from one celebrating Eve players to one where we're merely tolerated, and barely at that. I can understand why some of the women coming in might not really enjoy being the center of attention, but complaining about how many "nerds" are at the party (as one of my friends there over heard them saying last year) does not really make any of us who flew thousands of miles and paid thousands of dollars just to be there feel too great about them. I can't say for sure, either, but I suspect a lot of the theft at the party was not by Eve players either -- one woman I talked to at the Nordica Sunday morning said she'd lost her coat, cardigan, and everything else at the (unmanned) coat check, which sort of sucks if you're no where near home.
I understand why CCP decided to do this -- they are Icelanders at heart, and I think they want to give their hometown a good party, and god knows it'd be nice if it wasn't such a sausage fest, but I really think that for a FanFest party, it's really important to make sure the party is for the fans who have come so far to be there. Next year, I hope they give Eve players some place that they can call their own -- either a nice big lounge near the main hall where we can just hang out and talk, without worrying about the locals or another hall or something. This, along with the more marketing-style pandering spiel at CCP Presents and even the new Permaband video, which had almost nothing to do with Eve and a lot more to do with how e-famous the last video made them, gave a lot of the previously best parts of FanFest a bit of an icky feeling that I hope is just a temporary blip.
As it was, I spent most of my time at the party outside in the cafeteria area, hanging out and talking to folks, since the main room was just too loud and too crowded to find anyone, let alone really talk to anyone. There were a lot of folks who I'd have loved to spend some time talking to, but I could barely hear them and my voice was already going, so I had to just sort of cut the conversation short. I was really glad to get the chance to talk to those I did talk to, and I look forward to seeing them all again next year, when hopefully the atmosphere will be a bit more conducive to hanging out and chatting.
Sunday and Monday were recovery days, and I spent most of those days just hanging out in the Nordica bar -- the rest of the CAIN folks went out on a Golden Circle bus tour, so I was on my own for most of the day. We got back together for one last dinner though, and then said our goodbyes and took one last group photo (which, unfortunately, I don't have, since my camera ran out of batteries). Monday's flight back was pretty much without incident, and I happened to sit right next to Ned Coker, one of the Eve PR guys, and had a really interesting talk with him for the first half of the flight, which hopefully wasn't too boring for him (I am known to ramble at times). I also met Kyoko Sakoda on the flight back (he the ex-Omerta, now-Veto guy who did some amazing movies like this one) and chatted with a few other Eve folks at the baggage claim in Boston.
Overall, I had a great time, and it really reminded me what I love about Eve -- not just the scope of its vision but the great community, and I really look forward to going next year. It's even managed to inject a bit of Eve fervor back into my bittervet bones, so I've been logging back in for the first time in a while this week, looking forward to some more good action with all my old buddies in CAIN. Hopefully, next year will be even better and we'll have an even bigger presence!
The first real construction within the mountain has been going on for the past few days, while scouting parties are scouring the forest for the ships' two other masts. The excavations made to get stone for building the harbor building carved out a great deal of space, and that has been augmented with a number of wooden and stone additions; the first phase is just a large room where we can put down bedrolls and have some shelter.
As a bit of an extravagance, they have also added a small wooden deck on top of an outcropping on the mountain, complete with a fire pit.
I slept in the hall last night, where there was enough space to sprawl out a little and get comfortable, a luxury not available atop the mountain in our crude shelters. This morning I woke up early, just before sunrise, and walked out onto the deck, where I watched the moon set over the harbor. The touch of silver on the waters with the clouds drifting just above my head was a beautiful sight, only improved by the comforting heat of the fire. Mr. Yancy, who had been sitting watch on the deck and tending the fire overnight, was likewise spellbound by the view.
It is nice to have somewhere here in our new home that seems...permanent, suppose, is the best word for it; I suppose the harbor building is permanent as well, but it is not somewhere I spend a great deal of my time, nor does it seem particularly homey. This place is different; no tools scattered all over the place, no piles of construction supplies, the crackle and warmth of a nice fire, even the smell of food cooking. Soon, hopefully, everyone will have a place like this.
Recent Comments