EVE Popularity Contests

(Okay, this is a silly rant, and to be honest, on the night I wrote this (last night), I was looking for something to rant about. lol. So don't pay it too much mind hey?) hehe 

There's one thing I'm starting to realise about EVE Online, that isn't so pleasant to be honest.

As much as I love this game, it is becoming more apparent that the bigger your corp is, the more power it has, and therefore, it has more of a say/effect on the development of this game. The more EVE-famous you are, the more attention you get... (and seemingly, the likelihood of you starting a blog goes up incredibly quickly).

While I understand this is the way of the game and even, indeed, the world, it doesn't make it any less pleasant. This small niggling has been triggered into full-scale annoyance by this new 'EVE True Stories'.

I get the concept, and its a good one. I really, really like the idea. As a writer, player and incredibly small-time blogger, I appreciate when people tell their stories, and write their ideas and thoughts down. Sometimes, if they're really good, I read them myself. But this has got to a new level of annoying.

Of course I submitted a story, in fact, I submitted two after I decided the first one was boring and not nearly as interesting. This second one I love. It was one of the best nights of my EVE life- the day I first tried out my beloved Jaguar. The Fleet of Awesome. I like to think my writing is pretty good too, and at least somewhat entertaining.

But here's the thing- this is a tiny blog. In its lifetime its had ~450 views. To ~14 posts (I can't be bothered counting). I'm not EVE-famous, I'm a 6 month old character who has a trigger happy mouse and a passion for shooting people. And apparently I'm not a bad pilot- which is always good. I'm not in a massive corp, and I'm one pirate in low sec in one of the slowly decreasing in traffic areas of New Eden- Molden Heath.

It's going to be the people with the lots of followers, the sweet-talkers, the people with lots of blog readers... they're the ones who are going to win. The ones with the big corps and alliances, with people who vote for corp mates just out of principle. And you know what? CCP wants the voting to be fair. I see the point, but its not gonna do a very good job.

You can vote up, or you can vote down. Voting down in the first place is just all bad. Who's to say someone I shot randomly one day isn't gonna come to the page (which I have linked in my bio) and vote it down just out of spite. So there's an up for the carebears and 'good' people already. The popular people, who are not hated, have bunches of ISK and have a well-established place in this game. As a wiser corp mate said earlier in the day, soon EVE is just going to be a mining simulator if they're not careful.

It's all a popularity contest, and whichever way you look at it, that's not really fair.

My other nit-pick with this particular site is- who's gonna go through 75 pages of stories, with about 10 stories on each page. No one. If you've got a good story that happens to load on the front page, you're set. It's sucky. No one will ever take that story away from me, but it'd be nice if the littler people got heard sometimes you know?

I'm nobody in this massive game that spans countries and languages and cultures. I'm one tiny little pixel-y dot. But I have things I can say, and they could be heard too.

And that makes me sound narcissistic. Go figure :P But you know what I mean....