Tag Archive: pliction


The Ashimmu Build.

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November 4, 2023

The Ashimmu Manifest was complete and in the hangar the next stage of the build was to start the intermediate composite reactions. Along with this there was a series of composite reactions to build. Most of this wouldn’t take very long and built didn’t look too complicated to her. The end result however was an interesting ship. A hybrid. The bonuses it had, depending on skills of course, were:

20% bonus to Stasis Webifier range

15% bonus to Energy Nosferatu and Energy Neutralizer drain amount

100% bonus to Medium Energy Turret damage

This would be a handy ship for ESS defence or on some of the home defence fleets.

She needed to get in place Carbon polymers, sulphuric acid, Oxy-organic solvents, carbon fibre, and thermosetting polymers. Most of this would only take a small part of the day. At the same time she could start pressurised oxidisers and the reinforced carbon fibre reactions. Again these would not take very long. Then there were the hypnagogic neural link enhancers, the ultradian cycling neuro link stabilisers, the sense-heuristic neuro link enhancers and finally goal-orienting neuro link stabilisers.

All of these materials were needed before the advanced components could be built. She looked at the blueprints most of the materials were self-explanatory, I mean most of these ships utilised carbon polymers and various solvents along with carbon fibre. What she found particularly interesting is the biochem materials in particular. Take the Hypnagogic Neurolink Enhancers these bad boys typically used by the Imperial Navy enabled the capsuleer to more quickly link to the ship systems. This is the stuff that makes the capsuleer godlike.

Looking at these builds it was incredible just how much they enhanced the pod pilot. Extending awareness to ship components, speeding up reactions and enabling the extensive use of multimodal processing. No wonder pod pilots outperformed conventional ships controlled only by a crew and single mode commands from a captain. By the time commands had relayed from a ships systems to a captain and then commands relayed back it would delay ship systems responses by minutes. A pod pilot could initiate the most important subroutines much more quickly. As a consequence crew were only needed for very peripheral maintenance, often referred to as passive jobs, and jobs that were not central to a ships core sub routines.

To build just one unit, and most ships needed dozens. You needed helium fuel blocks, lime mykoserocin along with malachite mykoserocin which was quite hard to locate. This is why someone like Ekloke was so useful. He had a network of agents running throughout New Eden able to locate anything that was required for one of her builds. Nothing could be built without spending a lot of time sourcing materials and moving them around. You could source everything yourself but that would take far too long, besides other pod pilots had specialised in the gathering, sourcing and trade of everything you needed. The time spent looking for stuff you were not well equipped to source would be wasted time.

Karen entered her pod, travelled through the station’s inner core and down to her Deep Space Transport Capernaum. She instructed the AI systems in the station to load the reaction materials into the fleet hangar and undocked. The reactions station was a short hop across the Goonswarms Economic Zone (GEZ). The ship entered warp smoothly and arrived within minutes. The materials were unloaded and she accessed the reaction formulas from the corporation hangar and set everything to build. The longest was going to be less than a day so she remained in place while the reactions completed. Picked up the newly composed materials and flew them over to where she could assemble them into advanced components. These included:

U-C Trigger Neurolink Conduit Blueprint x 4

G-O Trigger Neurolink Conduit Blueprint x 4

Auto-Integrity Preservation Seal Blueprint x 19

Life Support Backup Unit Blueprint x 10

Two days later and the final build was delivered to Xanden in 1DQ. It was a thing of beauty.

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Pliction – an explanation

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February 10, 2022

What does the term ‘pliction’ refer to?

Pliction is the narration of a player’s experience in a game in the form of a story. It differs from fiction in that fiction is more or less story telling for the pure joy of story telling, usually around non-real events and designed to fill out a world or perspective on the world. Fiction is the picture from the inside. Pliction on the other hand fiction focused on the interaction between social worlds. The internal world of the game and the player experience.

Now of course fiction can be based on real events but often the intention is to more or less change facts and adjust these to build a great story focused on a fantasy world or series of events based in the real world. Pliction contrasts with this kind of storytelling because it is much more realist. It is a way of directly exploring the content and meaning of one’s own interaction with the medium of the game. It is designed to take one’s own experience and turn it into a narrative and ‘ground’ this experience in the game as a game. Pliction therefore crosses mixes creative writing with the game content and the player experience. It is effectively a form of autoethnography with added creative writing.

What does this mean? Autoethnography is effectively the use of one’s own experience to critically explore aspects of daily life and experience. You write from your own point of view and critically evaluate it that experience from various different perspectives. For example, you can write about free swimming or jazz music from your own experience as someone who takes part in these social worlds. What is a social world?

A social world is described as a unit of social organisation that is meaningfully important for those who interact in it. It is composed of the things they say, the activities they engage in as well as the technologies and routines they become involved with (1). As a concept it covers the social arrangements that are studied by symbolic interactionists – effectively social organisations that are not formal bureaucracies but which we can discern fairly easily by looking at everyday life. Eve is one such social world. Dog walking is another, as is cycling and running. All of these are effectively social worlds.

Pliction is basically turning your interaction with the social world into a story, engaging with your in game experiences through creative writing. It gives you time to reflect on what the game is about, how it works and most of all what its key dynamics are. In my last few posts, for example, I was able to reflect on my experience as an old player returning to the game after 9 years away. You can see I noticed through the writing that there is an awful lot of ‘mansplaining’ in Eve. I only noticed that when narrating the interaction between Karen and Moriarity, I didn’t intend that really to happen. It just did and it seemed appropriate at the time.

I didn’t intend initially to do pliction when I started this blog, the blog is after all a bit of fun. But I do think it is working to help me see something new about the game I did not anticipate when I had started at first. I don’t even think pliction as an idea is that new either. I have played MMO’s since they first hit the universe (Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft and many many others). There has been plenty of this this kind of narration before. But sometimes it is better to give something a name. Then people will know what you are about eh! I remember lots of fictional stories based on gameplay in Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft (though I never quite got into the story of the latter). I think many of the roleplaying fraternity are very familiar with this kind of thing. But I am not entirely sure they really care about the idea as a form of social criticism or exploration.

Let’s see where it leads.

References

(1) Unruh, D. 1979. Characteristics and Types of Participation in Social Worlds. Symbolic Interaction, 2, 115-130.

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Pliction: The debate

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January 31, 2022

He had a cold swagger about him. His hair was dark brown, cut short. His mouth was firmly closed and his jaw set square. He was browsing through something on his holo-tab, she could see the light flickering across the glasses as the screen scrolled up and then flickered through different tabs. He settled on a post. Looked up at her and smirked.

“Yes?”

“You look like fresh meat. Did someone ‘Gank’ you?” His head tilted to the side, inviting a comment.

She frowned. From the Voluval on his face she knew he was a Kanenald from somewhere near Rens. One of those smug metropolitan types that think they are better than everyone else. ”Bakheth’ scum.’ She thought. She sighed looked down at the bar, thought ‘Mehar! What the hell’.

“Yes. Someone destroyed my ship and pod.”

“You need to do something about your fit.”

‘You need to do something about your manners’ she thought. There was a short pause and without any invitation he continued.

“I mean look. From this readout you didn’t even have a multispec hardener fitted. I’m surprised you survived ‘belt rats’ let alone a ‘Ganker’.”

It was true, she had struggled to control the shields when Gurista’s attacked but she didn’t think it was THAT bad. Johnny had told her to invest in a shield hardener, preferably tech II. But obviously she was focused on getting the skills to handle tech II crystals to boost yield. She hadn’t thought about the vulnerability of the ship. She was getting irritated now. ‘What a wanker!’

“Johnny did say we needed one of those. And excuse me, but what the hell is a ‘Ganker’?”

“You don’t know what a Ganker is?” Behind the glasses she could see the eyebrows rising.

“Err no.”

‘But I bet I am about to find out’. She thought as she shifted her leather clad butt uneasily in the stool. There was an uncomfortable squeaking noise of new leather/butt on leather.

He looked up, seemingly exasperated and then shook his head.

“Gankers are pod pilots who enjoy ‘podding’. They get off on destroying your ship and pod before CONCORD can save you.”

“What?”

“Yup, there are people who get off on podding you. Kinda like jerking off on you or dry humping you while you wait in a queue.” He glanced sideways as if half expecting someone to start jerking off on him.

“Why? Why would anyone…..”

“Because they can. It’s that simple. There are all sorts of arguments about it. You could argue that they love their name flashing up in lights on the kill boards. Gives them some sort of notoriety or something. I think that it is really just ’cause they can.”

“What a bunch of morons!”

“Hmmm… you could say that, but you could also say someone who doesn’t bother equipping their ship properly is the real moron.”

“Are you calling me a moron?” Now she really was getting angry. She could feel the heat building at the back of her neck.

“No, no! Look I’m sorry. It’s just that is what ‘they’ would say!”

“I can’t believe you just called me a moron! Twat!” She couldn’t help herself. Usually if a thought came into her head it would eventually find its way out ….and become ‘a thing’.

“Steady on now. No need to get your knickers in a twist! I’m just sayin’….”

“What exactly? Just what are you sayin’? That Johnny’s death is my fault? That somehow I am the one who pulled the trigger on the neutron blasters? I mean what sort of stoopid is that?”

“Of course not. Gay Pride what’s-his-face, or whatever, is responsible for his own behaviour. But HE would argue that YOU are responsible for begging to be killed. Half asleep floating around on a belt with your ass hanging out.”

“I was only mining. I mean how the fuck does someone make a big deal out of that? What sort of moron would….” She was getting increasingly frustrated with this conversation, had a banging headache and just wanted to go to sleep.

“I know, I know. Maybe look at it another way – I mean some of these people have kinda turned this into an art form.”

“What-the-fuck, are you on? An art form. Do you want me to put that in the letter to Johnny’s family? Sorry Johnny died the way he did, my ass was hanging out and Gay Pride Boooom wanted to make some art – the explosion made a pretty picture if that helps.”

“No no of course not. But they think that managing to ‘gank’ you effectively is somehow. ‘Winning a game’.” He was getting into this now, she could tell. But there was nothing worse than being ‘mansplained’ to, especially after a ‘gank’. He wasn’t stopping either.

“Think about it, CONCORD’s response can be pretty much timed. You only have so many seconds to cut through a ship’s shields, armour and structure.”

“You admire these Mathera fucker’s don’t you?”

“Of course not. But as you say they are Mathera fuckkas!” With that he flicked off his holo-tab, stood up and went to leave. “I have sent through a fit you might like to think about for your ship. Maybe think about it eh?”

“Yeah right Mathera fuckka!” She stood and stomped off from the bar before he could reply. Her holo-tab blinked with the message.

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