FanFest 2013: Friday

Most of today's events that I was interested in were scheduled to happen in the main 'Tranquility' hall. The morning started with a talk on a decade of Eve's economy. It's taken me so long to write this up that I can't remember any specifics though. What I do remember is that the amount of analysis done on the economy of New Eden is impressive. Dr. EyjoG clearly enjoys his job and that came across well in the presentation he gave. I went to the talk on merging econonmies on Thurday as well and he gave a good talk then. I wish he put more stuff out in dev blogs but I can understand why he doesn't.

Around after the economics talk were scheduled two talks on Dust - Planetary Conquest and Advancing the core. The whole planetary conquest looked really interesting. This could be a great hook to differentiate Dust from all the other FPS shooters out there. The galaxy map they made for the PS3 also looks really sweet and a few EVE players were asking when we would get it on the EVE client. All in all, a lot of cool stuff going into Dust.

After two hours of sitting in TQ I really needed food and a beer and it was time to wander the halls again. Having seen it all the day before meant there were no real surprises. I'm sure the EVE Store was putting more, different t-shirts out which were testing my resolve. I held my will restating to myself that I would buy some when I got home. This decision is still haunting me as the EVE store still doesn't have them for sale.

The "Make EVE Real - Asteroid Mining" talk was another good talk. I'd not read anything about real world asteroid mining so everything I heard here was new. It was fascinating to learn about the abundance of what we consider scarce metals we could acquire from mining real asteroids. I particularly liked their design for sending out swarms of probes which would autonomously function together to scan and return data on asteroid compositions. I'd love to work somewhere involved in designing such systems. Something for EVE to consider bringing into the game? A mining scanner mini-game perhaps which increases or decreases asteroid yield depending on how well you scan?

The final event of the day was, of course, the EVE Keynote. Having watched this on a stream in the past there was something special about actually being in the audience. And, oh my the shiny eye candy. I think it's all out now in Odyssey but if you haven't seen the presentation, here's the Youtube video for your enjoyment.