So it's been a busy week....

As most of the eve-verse now knows Kelduum Revaan, stepped down from his role of heading the Ivy League after 3 years so he can start playing some Eve again.

So where does leave leave DUST University?

Well, with me in charge of course.

I'd known for a about a week that Kelduum was stepping down and he'd appointed me as his successor. So some things had to be done.

Our forums are more tidy with less glue. I've made a start on creating a dedicated and departmentalised management team to run a 650 Merc corporation. And I've been thinking about the longer term plans of DUST University and how this weeks Planetary Conquest is going to play into that.

On the whole I think that its going to be a great new feature of the game. Like a game of Slay or Risk wrote large with even larger guns. The placement of the 250 districts is going to be a crucial matter. I mean some of us corps are rather big, we'd like a bit more room than most and D-UNI would like to own some real estate.

After all, what's the good of a University if it doesn't have a Campus?

The Screaming Leporids and Dust 514 corp UI

This week saw the creation of the DUST University 101st 'The Screaming Leporids'.

Not an elite battalion. More a volunteer force to represent D-UNI against select corporations. Players who want the challenge that these opponents will give us. But more importantly than that, it will provide a pool of disciplined Merc's willing and able to pass on what they've learnt in corp matches to the rest of the UNI in the pub games and the soon™ to be arriving Training Room.

But Dust 514 doesn't make this easy to do.

At all.

I am by no means an expert in Eve Online Corp UI, and buried in amongst the menus and sub-menus, right clicking and window collapsing might be the means to do we want to do in Dust and more. But even my inexperience tells me an important fact.

This Eve corp UI shouldn't be allowed anywhere near Dust. Ever.

We have seen little in the way of what to expect in terms of a finished UI in Dust or even where they are goings with it. That's not surprising, CCP have rightly been showing of the shiny in the gaming press and let's face it, OB's are just cool to watch. But as fun as the game play is, as cool as OB's are to watch this isn't what's going to make this game a success.

The Eve/Dust link is what will sell it. Well, duh I hear you say. Thanks for that pearl of wisdom Captain Obvious!!!!

But the UI controlling that link is notable by its absence in the Dust Client. It. Just isn't there. The crux of the matter is this. EVERY feature that a CEO in Eve has at their disposal must be at the finger tips and joypad of a CEO in Dust. EVERY feature that a Merc needs to exist in New Eden, marketplace, ISK transfer, contracts, contacts, mailing lists, email, etc etc needs to on the PS3.

CCP Nullabor, a man who I believe truly understands what's needed in a Dust UI, tweeted me a few weeks back in answer to some of these concerns that Dust's corp UI needs to be 'less clumsy than Eve'. Well that's true. But first of all it needs to be there in the first place.

The longer our wait for an improved corp UI and Dust/eve link UI in the PS3 or even a glimpse of its then the more likely my nightmare scenario will come to pass. What is that scenario?

An 'Eve-lite' PC client or a app on iOS, Android or the Sony failVita just for corp use.

Because it means that the Eve/Dust link is a fail at birth. Even if its just a 'stop gap', Dust is already dead if this happens. CCP may as well pack up Shanghai and go home.

CCP needs to start getting proactive in this matter. We need dev blogs, videos, imagery, anything that will tell us SOMETHING of what to expect. They need to start doing all that now. It's two months to Fanfest and nearly two since the Chromosome build. Operating a 400+ member corp in Eve with its clumsy but working Corp UI is not easy. Operating one with a truncated UI..... well, as Sandy B says to Keanu after he punches a hole in the fuel tank 'What? Were you feeling you needed another challenge or something??!!'

So days shy of month since joining TQ....

And as of last night DUST University has 315 Bunnies..

Crikey!!!

I'd like to thank all off them for showing faith in D-UNI and what we hope to achieve in the future.

As to the speed of that achievement, well that's up to CCP.

Running a corp of such size is a second job with the tools one has to use at the moment. I'd like to delegate a bit, I really would. But as a couple of recent incidents prove, corp theft is going to be as much of a problem in Dust as it is in Eve.

It's not that I don't trust anyone you understand. But with DUST University being the sister corporation of one of the more famous and respected corporations in New Eden I feel a great sense of responsibility to do this right.

I want Personal Officers to accept applicants when I'm not able, without making them a Director, Be be able to send a corp mail from my PS3 without messing up everyone else's mail inbox. And I'd like to do it all from my PS3 without the need of firing up my laptop to use the Eve client.

We now have the return of the Player Corporation forums on the official Dust 514 website. This is a start in the right direction but serves as a reminder of how much further we have to go.

But we'll make it. I'm sure off it.

I sit here a hopeful Merc....

I was present during one of Eve University's regular Q&A last night.

I was pleased and gratified at the number of questions we had about Dust and Dust University itself. I tried to answer as best as I could while dancing on the edges of the NDA. What was being asked genuinely encouraged me that Dust has the interest of many players of Eve and the increasing member numbers of Dust University delights me no end. I feel that I'm a part of the beginning of something special.

But......

There is a group of folks that no amount of numbers or happy talk is going to convince them of the merits of Dust and what it can bring to New Eden. They are entrenched in a dogma that will not let them see beyond their gaming mouse and keyboard.

That dogma is PC gamer elitism.

The refusal to believe that gaming on any format other than PC has any form of merit and is to sneered at. In a word, snobs.

I'd like to believe that it's just sour grapes that CCP decided to go down the populist route and make Dust 514 for consoles and not for their precious PC's. But it's deeper than that. The fact that it makes perfect financial sense for CCP to go for an untapped source of income and introduce a new audience to the wonders of New Eden makes no dent in the mindset of such players.

The increasing of the population of the world they like to play in and the opportunities that will bring them in the long term doesn't seem to interest them. They think Dust is something that isn't going to effect them. It's new form of PI.

And for the moment they may be correct. But not for long.

It was very telling that in the first section of the freshly released minutes of the recent CSM winter summit that CCP Unifix, Jon Lander, pointed at an iPad and wondered out loud why PI wasn't being done on that rather than being tied to using an Eve client.

Increasingly in the mind of CCP, New Eden is a destination for players to make a trip to do things they couldn't do anywhere else. And CCP want to enable them to get there as quickly as possible and more importantly however they want to get there. The mode of transport is increasingly irrelevant to CCP. It's what Crest and the new generation of api is all about, enabling access to New Eden via browsers, smartphones, tablets and other mobile platforms.

Oh, the quintessential way to play Eve is always going to be on a desktop, don't get me wrong on that. But the influence of those players that stubbornly refuse to embrace the new ways is going to diminish over time. What's the point of cornering the market in a secluded section of the galaxy, sticking to the model thats served you well in the first 10 years of Eve when someone can hire PS3 Merc's to destabilise the sovereignty of your trade routes or play the stock market to your disadvantage from the comfort of an app on their iPhone. That's what's the second ten years of Eve is going to be about.

Ditch your snobbish prejudices now. They're going to get you creamed in New Eden soon.

Corp and squad UI needs a TOTAL overhaul CCP!!

Well, this getting silly now..

The current UI in Dust has always been inadequate for these two tasks but as Dust University starts to approach 100 members, it's now becoming a major problem.

I've needed to start dual boxing. Not to do OB but just to run the corporation. This is not good news for Dust in general.

Why?

Well this is a fundamental point that goes to the heart of the whole Dust/Eve link and the way the two games interact. And it's something that I think, CCP have yet to realise themselves as yet.

Dust 514 is a console game.
Eve is a desktop PC game.

Read that again and you'll see the enormity of what the problem is.

With the way the UI currently is within Dust it's clear that CCP seem to think that anyone running a corp in Dust is going to fire up Eve and use the corp UI in Eve.

However...... once the game launches and takes off the way I expect it to, console players are going to demand a fully working corp UI in Dust 514. You should able to run a corp in Dust without going anywhere near a PC.

And this again raises an issue that has irked me a little about Dust from the day I first played it at Harpa in Reykjavik back in March.

CCP can't seem to cut the umbilical cord between the PC origin of Dust's genesis and the game as it stands at the moment on the console.

It's a console game. Lets say it out loud again..

It's a CONSOLE game.

You see the point I'm making here I hope. There are elements of Dust that so clearly aimed at he PC FPS market that have NO place in a console game. I understand why they have made it like that. It's only natural to want to placate those fans that may have been upset when CCP decided to go the console exclusive route but keyboard and mouse control have no place on a console game. It should be a level playing field for all Dust Players because its a CONSOLE game!

KB&M is a superior control system. It immediately gives a huge advantage to those using it over the base control system of the PS3 controller. CCP should ditch it right away. Oh you'll get a hardcore of the Dust beta crowd complaining but once this goes open beta and then launches the number of people using the KB&M will be so, so small as a percentile that it would make no sense to spend resources on its development. Better ditch it now and spend the time saved on making the default PS3 controller feel better to use in the game. After all, it comes in the box with every PS3.

This reminds me a rather lively and interesting conversation I had with CCP Flying Scotsman in a bar, in the Iceland capital. The beta that I had played that day, I told him, felt like a PC game being operated by a poorly configured cheap third party PC game pad. That there was reason why the control system for Halo was still considered the gold standard for console FPS was because Bungie build it from the ground up for the controller the Xbox would be using. The one that came in the box with the console. Not one you could by later at PC World.

And in many ways, Dust STILL feels like a PC game controlled by a poorly configured cheap PC game pad....

It's time to cut the apron strings CCP. You made a choice, now go all the way with it..

Stuck in Geneva Airport and away from the PS3

All things considered I'd rather have been snowboarding but I've been away while CCP flicked the switch.

Dust 514 and Eve are one.

Dust University is taking applications in game. Thank you Kelduum for doing that by the way.

I'll be soon joining you and shooting peeps a lot.

See you soon and shoot true.

Dust 514: Lone Wolves need not apply

So I'm back after a Christmas break..

Not really, just been playing Dust a lot. Chromosome really is the point where the game has hit it's stride. Not just in the game play but in the back office too, where communication between Eve and Dust players has become easier to do. Still not up to the full Eve corp experience but its now possible to control and govern your team.

On the test server Singularity I've now left the comforts of Eve University to join Kevall's Uni Dust Bunnies. I'm in the process of fitting out the appropriate ships for OB and then joining the Mercs in their home system. So it's all beginning to move up a gear.

But with chromosome there is one thing that is now becoming clear. Dust 514 is going to be a hard game.

A very hard game.

And it's is going to present a problem that needs to be addressed. Lone Wolves.

You know the sort of player I'm talking about. They likely represent the majority of console FPS players out there today. Despite what Activision and EA may claim about the social interaction of their respective franchises we know from our own experiences that most players rarely form up in groups and play as a team. There are the exceptions that prove the rule of course and if you've ever gone up against those guys you know that humiliation is sure to follow.

But Dust is different. By its design and the way the game is now balanced, it presents players with real options of working as a team. Players really become the greater of the sum of their parts. So much so that even a competent team of 8 could easily take on twice that number and own the battlefield. This is of course a well known scenario in Eve. Not so much in Call of Duty.

The average Lone Wolf COD player is going to rage quit pretty quickly after getting their ass kicked repeatedly and these are the players that CCP are after.

It's also the players that Dust University will be after. In Eve, the majority that join Eve University have usually graduated and gone onto bigger things within six weeks. And they usually stay on in the game. It's why CCP LOVE the player training corps in Eve and try to point new players to them. Players that join a training corp have a much higher subscription retention than other players. They get past the learning cliff quickly and stick around.

There is a similar cliff in Dust 514 but its not educational in nature, it's in terms of play style.

Dust University is not going to be the best Kill/Death ratio corp in Dust and New Eden. It's not going to have the largest amount of WP and its not going to be hardest to play against. I also expect the turn around of those that join to be less than a couple of weeks before they move on and join other corps.

What it will be is where these Lone Wolves will come and find out about the myriad ways of playing this game and how they all have one thing in common. Teams hunt wolves and kill them.

Best be in a team then.