More updates on the noob's plight

Following the woes described in my last post, I have made a couple of new purchases. They've just arrived, yesterday, and I've just about got my machine back up and running. As of now, the only issue is getting the new setup to read my SATA devices properly, including the HDD with my EVE installation directory.

Jet lag caused me to sleep through the scheduled Drone Bay recording, but we are planning to get back on course, Soon (tm). Also, stay tuned for some guest appearances by your favorite Drone Bay stars in the near future.

With the lack of an EVE-capable computer, I've gotten hooked on the browser-based game, Goal Line Blitz. It's a free-to-play game with microtransactions based on American football. If you are a fan of football, give it a look. It has a lot of EVE-like elements, in that everything is player owned and controlled, including the teams. If you decide to sign up (via my shameless referral link above, or through other means), drop me a PM. My user name should be easy enough to guess. If there's enough interest, we might be able to get a Drone Bay team. I'm already on a team from the Scrapheap Challenge forums that won its league last year.

Docking Request Accepted: The Noob Comes Home

I once again find myself in the land of apple pie and the Dallas Cowboys. It's good to be back, but the jet lag has been a bit rough. The USPS once again succeeded in destroying some of the more delicate bits of my PC, despite careful packing on my part, so EVE is still on hold.

I do plan to return to The Drone Bay this week, however, as well as to Massively.com.

Thanks to everyone who got in touch to wish me safe travels!

Of EVE, RL, and Tabula Rasa

This week saw me explode in spectacular fashion in the alliance tourney match against Pandemic Legion (I was the second Dominix to go down for MC on Day 3), and not too much else for me in EVE. BoB's attempt to re-take QY6 is going only marginally worse than their propaganda campaign, and Tyrrax Thorrk is making a general moron of himself on the forums. Me dying, check. BoB losing, check. TT being an attention-seeking drama queen, check. Yup, looks like EVE is much the same as it was four months ago.

In other news, The Drone Bay, Episode 1 (yes, it is the second show, but the first was technically Episode 0 or 0.1 or something as it was the pilot) is edited, converted, and the link is sent to Brent. Hopefully it will be up in the next day or so. As always, give us loads of feedback. Feel free to flame us, too, but know that if you do, we'll mock you on air. Also, The Drone Bay has a new GAX Group, so be sure to check that out. If you're not on GAX, you should be. Think MySpace with more gamers and fewer emo high schoolers and crappy bands.

I've been playing a bit of Tabula Rasa again,lately, and it is dangerously close to supplanting WoW as my non-EVE MMO of choice. They've done a lot to the game since the weeks after release when I played, most of it good.

On a semi-related note, I'll be likely moving back to the States from Japan in the next couple months, so there will be a stint where there may be no podcast or blog updates for a few weeks. I'll give warning when this is getting closer. On a note related to the semi-related note, I'm looking for a job stateside, so if you want to throw buckets of cash at me to prognosticate and give opinions born of an inflated ego, please send me an e-mail, or simply make out checks to cash and send them to me.

Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008: Why You Should Care

For non-Americans out there, this is slightly less relevant, but not entirely unremarkable, as your country may soon implement something like this as well. It's called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, and it is important to you, whether you know it or not. While, on the whole, I am incredibly skeptical about any regulation of the internet, this is something that I feel is increasingly necessary.

Lake gives a nice summary of the bill, which follows:

The full text is actually very short so I encourage you to read its entirety.

It has three main points:

First to amend the 1934 Communications Act to include some policies which state that "to maintain the freedom to use for lawful purposes broadband telecommunications networks, including the Internet, without unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators" is a good thing. And similar statements.

Second to require the FCC to assess various things such as how harmful the restrictions providers apply to a user's network connection are. F'ex Comcast forging 'reset' packets to break BitTorrent.

Third to require the FCC to hold multiple summits on the topic, include a wide range of input (including on the internet as well as live events), and report the results to congress.

This has impact on us, the gamers and downloaders, in a couple of key ways. First, it will presumably preclude ISPs from shutting down torrent transfers. I know that many game clients (WoW, for one) and other legal software use torrent downloads to get their product to their market. As Lake mentions, there are ISPs out there who will force these downloads to stop using forged reset packets. In my personal opinion, even if the claim is to stop illegal software and media transfer, the blocking of this by the ISP itself represents a stripping of privileges that they frankly should not be allowed to undertake. Additionally, if you've tried to mail me at my eve-mail.net address and I haven't gotten back to you, I apologize, but I think my ISP is blocking port 25, preventing me from accessing my SMTP server. Finally, I have heard many cases from friends in the UK of ISPs throttling connections to game servers, including EVE.

While this bill would not help my immediate e-mail issue (since I am in Japan at the moment) or those gamers in the UK, it will have an impact on preventing these things from happening to American internet users in the future. Please, read the full text, and, should you feel so inclined, write your congressional representative and sign up on OpenCongress to vote the bill up.

MMOs as Real Life Practice and Networking Tools

With the amount of time that many gamers spend playing online games, along with the combination of various demographics and professions that we gamers constitute, it is hardly surprising that our online communities are beginning to not only resemble our real life social structures and networks, but can actually provide a means to test various management styles and interaction techniques in an environment with very little real world consequence.

When I was in high school and pumping hours and hours of my time into Ultima Online and various MUDs, my parents would always ask me what purpose all of that orc killing and dragon taming was going to serve later in life. I didn't have a good answer back then. It was just fun. Now, however, I have discovered that some good really has come from countless hours in fantasy worlds. Back then, I saw people who took the game very seriously doing rather well, for the most part. I was part of different guilds, and eventually rose to different managerial tasks in those guilds. This was literally my first experience in a leadership position over real people. Better yet, even if I screwed up, all that was lost were 1's and 0's and a bit of time.

While I am by no means advocating that MMOs are a replacement for healthy real-world interpersonal interaction (they aren't, sorry), there are some potential real life XP points by leading raids, coordinating PvP activities and handling equipment and logistics in virtual worlds. My most poignant example of this comes from my two-years-plus in EVE. In that time, I have gone from a peon to the CEO of one of the largest mercenary corps in the game, before retiring back to the "CEO Emeritus" (read: lazy director) position. I did not realize the impact that leading fleets into combat and organizing and delegating corporate activites would have on my real world ability to lead. Since college, I've had a few opportunities to be put in charge of other people in real life. After the initial urge to have everyone align to the door so we could all enter the meetings together, I realized that the coordination, leadership and delegation in EVE bear a striking resemblance to what my subordinates were seeking from me in real life.

I may be a bit late coming to this epiphany, as I'm sure others have considered (and probably blogged) it before, but it really is striking the difference that those risk-free chances to lead have made in my real world leadership confidence. Perhaps MMOs represent that leap in gaming that my parents always heckled me about. Gaming is no longer a solitary time-sink. It is still a time-sink, but it also now represents a cross-cultural and cross-demographic societal experience that is actually hard to replicate in most real life scenarios. Growing up in small town Texas, I would not have met nearly as many non-Americans without MMOs. Additionally, the contacts I have made over the years have provided me with a network of friends and potential business contacts that easily rival those that I made in college. I feel that EVE has given me a much broader base of potential career contacts than college itself ever did, given that most of the people I met in college were also seeking out that entry-level.

Again, I'm going to reiterate that MMOs are NOT a replacement for real world interaction. If you still live at home, don't tell your parents that you don't have to go outside or talk to real people because some Bitter Old Noob told you that MMOs will make your dreams come true. The point I am making is that we might be at a point as a society where online gaming can really be accepted as an inextricable part of social interaction. Brave new world, indeed.