So the new trailer for Apocrypha is out now, and you can go and download hit here.  It certainly is a pretty trailer, but it’s been a recent trend in EVE trailers to deliberately avoid what they used to do: showcase the fact that 100% of the footage is from in game.

Planets don’t explode in EVE.  Fleets don’t fly in formation doing 50 m/s during combat, NPCs don’t do slow methodical turns.  Most importantly, when I turn on the EVE client it’s not showing me a lavish production of CG, it’s a game.  And a damn impressive one at that, one which doesn’t actually need a ton of fakery to show the epic scale of itself.

Apocrypha is a huge expansion in EVE, and the trailer does not convey that.  There’s no dialogue, nothing to explain to the audience of people who aren’t playing EVE what the big deal is.  It doesn’t explain a single solitary thing about the game at all actually, much less about the expansion.  How is this marketing anything?

If CCP is trying to show us it can produce gorgeous trailers, they’ve been doing that since day one.  We get that, the world gets that.  But the impressive nature of those trailers was due, in large part, to the fact that they were showing things happening in the actual game client.  Remember the Empyrean Age trailer showing Jamyl Sarum’s fleet decimating a Minmatar capital fleet with a single shot?  It looked great, but you can’t ever do that in the game, and knowing that it takes a lot out of the trailer.

The most impressive trailers to date, CCP or player created, have been with cunning use of the in game camera to capture incredible moments in gameplay.  There are dozens of such efforts which far surpass anything done recently by CCP’s marketing department.

Things need to be brought back to a time when we can be proud to show a trailer that starts with “The Footage You Are About to See is 100% In Game”, because that is *real* marketing.  It’s something that no other game can do as impressively as EVE, and CCP is really selling itself short by not taking advantage of their best assets.

For those who don’t know, the third EON Awards are on right now, with voting in progress.   There’s been some discussion on the EVE forums here about how some of the nominees were chosen for the various categories, so I figure I’d shed some light on the subject.  Hopefully it will clear up some questions folks have been having.

First off you’ll ask yourself: what does he know about it?  Lets just get this bit out of the way now: I was a member of the group involved in choosing the nominees.  I realize some of the things I do for the community have ended up on the list, and I can tell you right now that I did not nominate myself or anything I was involved in, for any of the categories, with one exception: Player of the Year.  Now, I did this as a joke and even made note of it in my submission.  The reason was I personally didn’t think I could single out a single person who really stood out as a player of the year.  Anyway, apparently someone else tossed my name in too so it got in on the ballot.  For the record, there were 17 other candidates in that category alone.

I know you only have my word on this right now, but you’ll have to accept it unless someone else involved in the group comes forward to corroborate.  Anyway, that’s all the ass-covering I’m interested in getting into right now, and it’s not why you’re here anyway.  On to the process.

Things started with a list of ten judges, of which you now know one of them.  No, I’m not about to expose the identities of the others so don’t even ask (publicly or privately).  You’ll have to take it from me that each of them is a member of the EVE community, and don’t have any particular bias as a group.  By that I mean that it’s not like half of us are in Band of Brothers, or something.  Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at there.

Each of us were asked to provide six candidates for each category.  For myself, decided on coming up with one or two that really excelled in each category (the aforementioned Me for Player of the Year thing notwithstanding) instead of coming up with one and picking five more based on some sort of arbitrary means.

Once the nominee list was submitted, it was compiled into a master list of everyone’s selections per category.  Each of the people involved then voted on what six in each category they preferred.  For the record, no, I didn’t vote for anything my name was attached to.  The top six in each by votes ended up as the ones which you see on the voting site now.

So to summarize the process:

1. We each came up with six nominees per category
2. A full list of all selections was presented
3. We each picked six from each category in the full list
4. The top six picked ended up as final nominees

That’s all.

As to why it was done this way, I’m not 100% sure because I wasn’t involved in coming up with the concept.  I do know however that it sounded a lot better than player-submitted choices, because those inevitably are more biased, easier for a large enough corp/alliance to skew nominations, and generally speaking a much larger target for whining from the community.

Anyway I hope that answers some of the questions on this.  Whether this affects the way you vote is entirely up to each individual, I just figured it was good to have a bit of transparency.  The reason why I don’t give up the names of the others involved is not because it’s some super secret conspiracy, but it’s just not my place to do so.

Slowly getting back to my regular EVE routines, starting off with getting the podcast back on to a regular schedule of recording and editing.  New comic’s out, I’m this close to getting out a long-promised new set of parts for Nature Vraie, and I’m almost caught up on my backlog of evemails.

Coming back to EVE after a few weeks or months worth of less-than-average play time is always somewhat interesting.  It’s not exactly like riding a bike, I mean if you’re not used to how a particular ship flies you can end up dead really fast.

For me it usually entails first dragging out my Kronos for some level four missions.  It lets me make a few bucks, get reacquainted with my overview settings, and most importantly lets me get into the general flow of corp and alliance chatter.

Maybe I’ll make this a topic for tomorrow’s Massive Gamer Magazine article.. hmm 🙂