Eve is Easy... lame

Well Eve is Easy of my earlier post (that is now completely wrong), has just gone to a subscription model. Incidentally it's more expensive than a single month of Eve, coming in at $19.99 a month, or a cool $199 for a lifetime membership.

Garmon and friends must be joking me. If you sign up for that and willing pay THAT? For that kind of money you could do so much in Eve that you wouldn't need their "tips" if you can call overpaying for basic guidelines that. Save that money over two months and you could buy two plexes and sell them for close to 1bn isk, and then use that money to get into fights and learn this stuff yourself. OR you could go find a training corp or go and join a corp that gets into these kinds of fights and learn these techniques directly.

Free to $20 a month is extreme. I recommend against EiE no matter how useful their site.

Hey, isn't this also a breach of the EULA? (It's not, or at least hasn't been in the past.)

B. Selling Items and Objects 
You may not transfer, sell or auction, or buy or accept any offer to transfer, sell or auction (or offer to do any of the foregoing), any content appearing within the Game environment, including without limitation characters, character attributes, items, currency, and objects, other than via a permitted Character Transfer as described in section 3 above. You may not encourage or induce any other person to participate in such a prohibited transaction. The buying, selling or auctioning (or any attempt at doing so) of characters, character attributes, items, currency, or objects, whether through online auctions (such as ebay), newsgroups, postings on message boards or any other means is prohibited by the EULA and a violation of CCP's proprietary rights in the Game.

Okay maybe a bit of a stretch, but let's look at that a bit. "You may not... sell or auction ... any content appearing within the Game environment." And that's without the nice little catchall of "including without limitation."

I guess there are all kinds of guides out there for other games, Eve included, that teach you how to play better, so it's not likely to be a EULA breach as far as I can tell.

Either way

Month - $19.99???
Lifetime - $199????

...

Eve is easy vs Web exploit

Over at Jester's Trek, Jester wrote a post about the Web exploit, tying in a reference to the new site "Eve is Easy." It is true that one of the contributors for the site is Garmon, but he is doing his "thing" over there with the co-support of two other successful PvPers, Willl Adama and Duncan Tanner.

While the exploit certainly drags Garmon's name in the dirt let me respond to certain parts and implications of Jester's post.

Jester says - "The website, http://www.eveiseasy.com/, includes a box to put in your e-mail address.  Once you do, you're given access to several initial videos.

One can only assume that further videos will follow, but that those videos won't be so freely available."

How can I put this... WRONG! As a subscriber to Eve Is Easy, I can say that two more video's have been released, one about 0.0 Shield Rupture soloing and the second about 0.0 Wolf soloing. These video's, contrary to Jester's statement, were also made freely available to the public and were released March 17th, before the webbing "scandal" broke. Not likely that they were completed as a damage control move by Garmon.

The focal point of these 'instructional' video's is actually learning how to deal with, and engage certain types of situations from people who have evolved tactics to do just that. The instructors disclose their use of boosting alts when it happens, but the more important focus of the video's is showing the method they use to engage camps and up engage against superior numbers. If you are watching those video's and thinking that you can't do that without those advantages then you are missing the entire point of the video's in the first place. Learn how they separate out tacklers, see the mistakes that other pilots made to get put into those situations, learn from those mistakes. Get better.

The singular complaint about Garmon's "Garmonation" video's seems to be "He uses boosting alts and 5 bil isk fitting and faction/t2/expensive ships to be successful. That's not 'real' solo! QQQQQQ"

So it's not your definition of solo, and if that makes it less impressive, then don't watch it. The assumption seems to be that any "above average" player could, with the boosting alt, the overpriced ship, and everything else, do what Garmon does(or any other soloer) is equal parts insanity and stupidity. Garmon is a skilled pilot and player, exploiting weaknesses and strengths of in game mechanics, his fit, his support, and psychological nuances in ways that most of the rest of the player base can only hope to. 

In one way, Garmon is identical to the rest of us his mistakes are fatal, often times the error margin is even smaller for him. The following point can't be stressed enough. For each of the "good fights" that make it into a Garmonation video, there are tens, if not more, of fights that go badly and end up with Garmon dead. Not every fight he gets into, is he successful. Usually it is a high-octane mix of skill and opponent stupidity that allows any soloer, including Prom, Willl, Duncan, Sard Caid, Garm, etc, to be out classed, out manned, out gunned, and still end up with a victory. Not nearly as linked to "fit" as it is linked to decision to engage, and how to go about engaging.

In this case Jester comes off a bit like a gossip columnist. Claiming loudly that Eve is Easy is a for-profit venture (it's not yet and shows no signs of becoming one, just seemingly tracking who is interested in their video's to see if the time is worth it). Second, damning Garmon for an exploit used to kill Jump Freighters. Failing to pass the same judgement on PL, or maybe it is expected from PL? But just not from an upstanding member of the community like Garmon?

To put it plainly in reference to the exploit, am I defending Garmon's use of the exploit to get kills? No. It is underhanded, an unintentional mechanic, wrong and a exploit, not to mention down-right mean? Yes, but seriously? If your belief is "oh god that never happens in MY EVE" You're clearly a little out of touch with this game! Is this actually a CCP issue, YES. They should (have) fix(ed) it and(or) in the mean time, have declared it an exploit as soon as it was discovered(months ago), not waited until the noise level on the exploit got past a certain point. Bug report failure.