The Spaces In Between

Just a quickie today.  As I was reading Sugar Kyle’s recent post about her thoughts when choosing a character's race, I thought the idea that your Eve race might say something about your personality was so intriguing that I started to write my own post.

Unfortunately, this turned into a massive tangle of segues that spoke more to philosophy, history, and psychology than Eve.  So, I decided to junk the whole thing.

Tl;dr of that post was: Slavery as a component of theocracy doesn’t turn my stomach immediately.  I suck at sales too, and would join the Guristas if I was born into the Caldari.  The idea of the Gallente being “defenders of the downtrodden” and a “Bastion for liberty” has to either be hilariously ironic or hopelessly naïve.  AI is the only threat to humanity guaranteed to destroy us and everyone seeking to bring it about should be rooted out and eradicated, whatever that cost.  Like, right now.  Minmatar are close enough to their liberation that they still remember that growth and progress requires strife and hardship, so that'd be the place for me.

I’m sure you can imagine all the ways this article went wrong and can join me in delighting over the fact that I strangled it in the cradle.

But it did get me thinking about some of the lore in Eve.  Not as much what we’ve seen, but what we’re missing.

Where are the slave revolts in the Amarr Empire?  History teaches us that anytime you have a slave population – of which there are trillions – you have slave revolts.  It’s inevitable.  Something in the human spirit yeans for self-determination.  I’d have expected small uprisings to happen all the time.  These might be interesting ways to open up new ares of faction warfare, perhaps even insurrections – incursions of other kinds of rats who are supporting the revolt for their own gain.  I can see a lot of fun from these kinds of disruptions.

As to the Caldari, what the hell, man?  We’re just coming out of a recession that has taken 6-7 years to clear.  I can’t imagine a society built upon corporate dominance could possibly have a steady amount of power when they’d be so dependent upon market forces.  I wand a depression to shake up the Caldari.  Perhaps market PvP against the Caldari State itself?  That’d be awesome.

And the Gallente… where is the inherent centrifugal force in democracy, the tendency for it to rip itself apart?  Democracies begin dying from the moment they’re born as more and more differences between citizens begin to pop up.  We haven’t effectively solved the problem of how to keep a democracy together when you have widely disparate populations.  It’s an overly idealistic system that has never worked long-term (I’m just waiting for someone to claim any “democracy” in the modern age is either a) a real democracy, or b) not unraveling!  It’s cute!).  I want to see factions at loggerheads causing crippling inaction.  I want to see government shut-downs and stalemates.  I want to see a protest culture, and who portions of populations simply saying, “Well, I’m not gonna do that.”  Democracy is messy, inefficient and resource-focusing, and blunted.  I want that chaos, and opportunities for capsuleers to use their form of government against the Gallente for fun and profit.

And, to top it off… are you seriously telling me the Gallente haven’t had a single AI decide that humanity wasn’t worth the bother and nuke a whole planet?  Any AI in existence would likely conclude that a partnership with the sleepers makes infinitely more sense than working with a messy bunch of free-thinking humans.  Hell, even the Sansha would seem like a remarkably wonderful step in the right direction.  Here’s another incursion opportunity!  Spontaneous AI sabotage!

And the Minmatar… they’re billed as a coalition of tribes, but I don’t really see much in the way of capsuleer-interactive stress between the tribes.  I’d love for some kind of zone control that capsuleers could participate in.  The Minmatar remind me of the ancient Greeks… constantly whomping on each other until an outside threat manifests, at which point they focused all their efforts at working together.  I’m sure there’s an opportunity for something exciting there!

Whatever the results, the Eve universe seems a bit too clean for me.  Where’s the dirt?  Where are the disparate and divergent social forces at play?  I really feel like CCP is leaving a lot on the table by ignoring the cracks within the empires.  And all of it would give us a good opportunity for content… not PvE, yet not exclusively PvP either.  Perhaps something in the middle?

And it seems like low-sec is the perfect place for it.  The systems where the empires’ influence is weakest.  The area of space that can use a few more reasons for occupancy.

I don’t know how those reasons would manifest, but I think there are places CCP can go beyond just “out there” to Jove space (which seems to be the goal of Caroline’s Star, strange sleeper activity, and player-built stargates.  Don’t just open up more space for people to go, utilize the space we have now.