FanFest 2013: Thurday

My halting walk home last night resulted in a rather late arrival to my hotel. This was exacerbated by discovering the alliance server was broken and nobody had Teamspeak, Jabber or our forums to communicate with. An hour spent fixing that and then I could sleep... Five hour later and I was awake again getting ready for day one of the actual Fanfest event.

In case you forgot why you were there. This was at the top of the main stairs.

There was no snow today but a pretty strong wind was making itself felt. This was particularly unfortunate as I had elected to wear my kilt resulting in a rather brisk half hour walk. When I got to the Harpa there was no immediate relief from the wind as I joined the queue about 100 meters from the entrance. Kudos to CCP for effecting such an efficient method for getting people into the event. I was sure it was going to take at least three times longer than it actually did. To be honest, once I got inside the door and away from the cold wind I wasn't particularly bothered about the queue anymore. Once at the front it was pretty straightforward getting my swag-bag, t-shirt and entry pass and then I was free to wander around.

Efficient registration table is efficient

Inside, a few things were still being set up. There was no sign of the Steelseries guys to collect the free mouse mat. Razor had some things out on their display but nothing I wanted to buy. The relaunched EVE store was well stocked with a wonderful variety of t-shirts which I foolishly decided to buy once I got back home. Foolish in that the EVE store isn't selling them, D'Oh! After wandering around the crush for a while the corpmate I was with had to head off to meet his partner and I was left to wander around on my own. Not for long though as more corpmates magically appeared and we got some food and beers.

The first talk I went to was "Make EVE Real - Bringing FTL to IRL". This seemed odd to be going to an EVE Fanfest yet starting at a talk only loosely related to the game. It was a rather interesting talk from Dr. Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar (now there's a cool name for your CV). He presented his very ambition timeline to make interstellar travel a reality by 2100. Interstellar travel on the scale of a human lifetime requires faster than light travel. Dr. Obousy's talk was based around past examples of the speed humans exploit a new technology - on average it seems to be about 50 years from discovery to widespread use of some game-changing breakthrough. The main thing I though he was missing in his talk was that Icarus Interstellar is yet to find this breakthrough. I guess they have about 30 years before their schedule becomes tight though. Other than that point the talk was very enjoyable but didn't really tell me anything new.

After some wandering around, meeting up with more corpmates, watching people play the very cool, very R-type-like EVE arcade game, and drinking a few more beers, we headed up to queue for the Dust 514 keynote. I've played a little of Dust and have my character in Dust Uni but I don't really have that great an understanding of what's going on. I run at people, shoot them and die, rinse then repeat. They announced new drop suits, new weapons, new vehicles and a much needed new skill tree. The best thing they announced was the updates to the graphics. I was glad to see this because I find Dust looks a bit dated compared to other shooters like the new Halo. Hopefully these new graphics would polish it up a bit. Still there were enough bitter EVE players mooching around complaining about Dust 514 taking dev time away from EVE. You'd think that would make them happy as anytime CCP make changes in EVE the forums turn into a war of "how dare you change stuff".

After the keynote we headed back to the Celtic Cross to find it packed out the door. Someone made a very ill-advised comment to a corpmate about her height and received a well deserved kick to the shins. Deciding that it was too busy we went elsewhere for a quiet drink then actually had the early night I had planned for the previous evening.