Progress Update: 8/31/21

Spoiler Warning

Hello everyone, apologies for the belated progress update. Much has been done since I last wrote.

First, I've managed to speak with a number of people about the history and current state of EVE Online. Just this morning, I spoke with someone who performs margin trading in Jita, the trade hub of New Eden, buying and selling large quantities of goods. It's fascinating to hear about the way that the market has sprung up and created jobs like this, where people use their liquidity to move assets from one place to another and make some money off of the top.

I also have spoken with Dan Crone, one of the community developers who has been working at the company for a couple of years. He spent some of his early days digging into old files and discovering forgotten things, and he's agreed to go digging a bit more to find curiosities for me to help me understand where the game has been and how it's evolved. Of particular interest to me were the e-mails from people excited to try out the beta all the way in the early 2000s; obviously, people who played games like Elite were excited for EVE Online, which still hasn't quite found proper competition after almost 20 years.

Tomorrow, I'm scheduled to speak with the CEO of CCP Games, the Icelandic company that launched and develops EVE Online. He's been at the company since it began, and I'm excited to hear about the stories from long ago.

As for my time in the game, a lot has happened. I'm still on the Wormhole campus with EVE University, and I've been able to run in multiple fleets, from PvP to harvesting PvE to scanning down the chain. There is a lot of requisite knowledge in order to simply function in a fleet, and even more knowledge that can only properly be gleaned through experience; the proper choice isn't always the obvious one, and it's clear that an encyclopedic knowledge of the different ships will be necessary to make split-second decisions. Maybe one day I'll be a fleet commander, but it won't be for quite some time. I'm gradually building up the skills to do the sort of things that I want to do, but I'm already considering creating more specialized alts to try new and different things. However, I'm reaching the point that further time in the game will grant me diminishing returns, and now that I have a basic working knowledge of the game, I'll be able to parse what's happening in my research well enough that I won't be wasting my time doing so.

The largest hurdle I've had to face is time management; it's not enough to simply chip away at the large pile of information as I have done in the past, since comprehension is often locked behind game knowledge and a more complete understanding isn't possible without other information. And so, choosing to focus on the right things in the right order has proven to be the most important decision I can make. Up until now, I've prioritized game time quite a bit, but this is gradually giving way to research. I'm still learning what questions I need to ask, but those questions are becoming easier to manifest with time.

I'm considering writing the script a bit more piecemeal this time as I research and later slotting things together. Historically, I've waited to conclude research before writing, but in this case, I think it may be less feasible. Instead, I'll write about important chunks of the game's history and then build the script around those chunks. It may prove a bit difficult and this method is liable to create a lot of unused writing, but it is the most realistic way to go about it, and it may help me discover what things I need to research next and organize my time properly, which, as I mentioned, is the most difficult and important part of this process.

I also want to apologize for the late audiobooks. I intended to record them last week, but unfortunately, my throat was giving me quite a bit of trouble. It's doing better now, and I'm looking to record later this week.

-Fredrik