Sock Puppet

In his latest Eve Evolved column, Brendan Drain over at Massively leaps to the defense of CCP's recent buff to supercapitals. 

Now, I had pretty well knocked the dust of that decision from my sandals. I'd put the matter behind me and moved on. Normally, I would take the high road; be and let be and all that. After all, I've said my peace on the matter. Water under the bridge. Done is done, right? 

Unfortunately, Brendan linked to my recent Fiddler's Edge post on the matter by way of illustrating the opinions of those with whom he disagreed. Worse yet, he didn't have the good grace to mount a meaningful counter-argument. Now it's personal.

*cracks knuckles*

If you follow Brendan's column, you'll note he gets a lot of interviews with and information from the Eve Online design and development teams. They seem on good terms. He has, as they say, access.

For those of you not familiar with how western journalism works, this sort of access is almost never free. It’s usually paid for by way of an informal tit for tat arrangement. Such arrangements are rarely explicitly laid out and are often cultivated by the source over time. In exchange for interviews, scoops and insider tidbits, the journalist in question is expected to avoid embarrassing the source.

It’s assumed a journalist with the privilege of access will not ask tough questions or publish embarrassing facts about the source. On occasion the journalist is expected to act as a mouthpiece for the source when said source wants to express an opinion or leak information without doing so directly. When bad press about the source does surface, the journalist with access generally contributes to the subject by delivering the source’s side of the story or stands mute, delivering nothing at all.

In short, journalists who get too close to their source become apologists for the source; unpaid members of the source’s public relations staff rather than actual journalists.

They become, as I like to call them, media sock puppets.

I suspect Brendan Drain may have turned the corner into sock-puppetdom.  His language in the column suggests he and CCP have discussed and are of one mind on the subject matter. In expressing their intents with regard to jump bridges and force projection he speaks on CCP's behalf without needing to reference interviews, papers or devblogs. It would also explain why Brendan comes to this subject so late in the game, well after the change has been put in place. This suggests that CCP is still getting a lot of churn from the user base on the subject and Brendan is acting as a surrogate to help them calm the waters.

Besides, sock-puppetdom is the only excuse I can come up with for the tortured logic that comprises his latest column.

A central assertion in Brendan’s argument is that jump bridges needed to be nerfed because they were causing a decline in the amount of PvP occurring in Eve Online.

“One of the strange revelations to come out of the last big CSM summit was the fact that the amount of PvP going on in EVE is declining. A big culprit behind this could be jump bridges, which currently provide a completely safe way to move ships across huge distances.”

Now, Brendan duly supplies a link to the “strange revelations” that underpin his argument. However the provided link leads only to an interview he conducted during the CSM summit and published on January 23 on Massively. In that interview Brendan himself reveals the aforementioned revelations, incorporating them into his questions as givens. In other words, the only source Brendan cites as evidence in support of this assertion is Brendan.   

To the best of my knowledge CCP has not made available to the public the source data or analysis methods used to describe the decline of PvP that has them so worried. Likewise, Brendan provides no data analysis, even at the highest levels, to support the supposed falloff of PvP in Eve Online; the very lynchpin of his argument for hobbling jump bridges.

For the sake of argument, let's give that a pass and accept a falloff of PvP in Eve as a given. Even then CCP and their sock puppet require a second leap of faith from us. Neither CCP nor Brendan has provided any evidence of a causal relationship between Jump Bridges and PvP falloff. In fact there is not, to my knowledge, evidence showing even a reasonable correlation between the two.

Jump bridges have been a part of Eve Online since the Revelations II release in June of 2007. Thus, they’ve been a part of nullsec for almost four years. CCP Greyscale should be more aware of this than most as he authored a devblog entry on July 7 of that year providing clarifications on the use of the “new toy”. 

Now, nearly four years after jump bridges were introduced, we are expected to accept on blind faith that they are suddenly a major contributor to a relatively recent phenomenon. The reasoning on this point is so weak that Brendan is left with nothing to offer the reader but the limp assessment that jump bridges “could be a big culprit” behind the supposed decline in PvP.

In other words, CCP is making a wild-assed guess and Brendan Drain doesn’t have the journalistic chops to call them on it.  

Much of Brendan’s article occupies itself with a discussion on force projection, and argues several times that jump bridges are a component of CCP's force projection problem. However, he dismisses his own point when he states that the nerf of jump bridges has nothing to do with addressing the force projection problem.

"The sentiment that has been ringing throughout EVE's blogging community is that changing jump bridges without changing other force-projection abilities is a massive mistake. However, these jump bridge changes aren't designed to tackle the issue of force projection. They're specifically dealing with a travel safety factor that should never have been built into the system in the first place. Force projection is case for another time and place, and when viewed in isolation, the jump bridge changes look a lot more reasonable."

Oy

Having spent the bulk of his column associating jump bridges with force projection, Brendan is now stating that nerfing jump bridges has nothing to do with force projection because the intent of the change had to do with making travel less safe. This utterly ignores the fact that, by Brendan's own definition, altering jump bridges will impact force projection. With supercapital force projection left unhindered in any practical way, nerfing jump bridges has tilted the balance of power even further toward those alliances with the most supercapitals. CCP's intended outcomes are rather beside the point. 

Brendan seems to think that, as long as CCP's intentions are good, outcomes don't matter. In fact the opposite is true.

Brendan seems to assume that the primary reason for using jump bridges is the "safety factor" - to move in safety within an alliance's space. If he or the CCP gang believe that they haven't done their homework. Safety comes from a good intel network that detects and quickly reports enemy gangs so they can be either avoided or expunged. 

While jump bridges can be used for safety's sake, they are more commonly used to reduce onerous travel time within alliance space. This allows players to spend time playing the game rather than dragging ass through 20 jumps in order to pick up new fittings for their Zealot. This change, in and of itself, will have minimal impact the safety of a player while in alliance territory. If Brendan or CCP took the time to survey nullsec players regarding how they use jump bridges rather than simply assuming their suppositions to be correct, they'd know this. 

I've held forth elsewhere regarding the notion that nullsec, by definition, should be less safe than lowsec. Nullsec doesn't mean security can't be had. Rather, it means that the only security you have is the security you yourselves can enforce. That is pure sandbox. 

Finally, Brendan holds that the jump bridge changes are reasonable if viewed in isolation. If jump bridges functioned in isolation, that would be a sensible approach. However, they do not. They are a component in a larger system and changes to them have to be viewed in a systemic context. You can't simply ignore part of that system because it doesn't fit with your desired game play paradigm. 

That's not design. That's called going to your happy place.

I understand the lure of sock-puppetdom. Nobody wants to shred their own meal ticket. If Brendan speaks unpleasant truths in his column to the folks at CCP they may respond by reducing his access. He may no longer be given routine interviews with their employees or be as well received at summits and fan fests (assuming they invite him at all). Reporters and columnists, as much as anyone else, like to be liked by those with access to useful information.

Having access is nice. However one should never forget that it comes at a price that can only be paid with one's integrity.