What Happens in Iceland…

…Stays in Iceland?

You’d be forgiven for thinking so. I’ve been back for a while now, and even though I made some notes for some of the presentations I went to, its taken me this long to write a new post. I could feel the onset of a rather nasty flu-bug on Saturday, but I was determined not to let it slow me down. But slow me down it did. At least it had the decency not to show up until Sunday, after all the Fanfestivities.

I spent my last day walking around Reykjavik. We had lunch at a nice place along Laugavegur called Fru Berglaug. We went there twice; I really recommend it, because the staff are friendly, the atmosphere is great and the food is awesome! I remember taking some pictures of places around the town, and generally feeling incredibly tired, but that’s about it. I’m still glad we stayed for that extra day – even if it did mean feeling wretched for the journey home on Monday – it was nice to have an extra day to just chill out after all the information bombing of various presentations.

I’m going to do Thursday in this one, then Friday and Saturday in the next entry. I didn’t really make notes from Saturday, because everything was big and guaranteed to be online before I had chance to report it, so I just sat around enjoying stuff. 🙂

As I mentioned in my last entry, I went with Kayleigh Jamieson – a long-time friend in EVE – and now a corp-mate. We met up with another corp-mate, Laria Raven, on the first day. Its really nice to see such enthusiasm from the youngens! 😀

A lot of what I had as notes is now online in video form, but here’s my notes anyway. You lucky people. 😛

Day 1 (Thursday)

The first day was busier for me than the others. It started later than the following two days, with the first roundtable at 1pm and the first presentation at 2:30pm in the form of the opening ceremony. From there on I had stuff earmarked until the end of the day though, so there’s was lots to do!

Incursions

  • An overview of how they came into being
  • Showing of the presentation they showed to the CSM when it was still in ideas stage
  • CCP want to make the incursions last longer from 24h up to about 2 days as a goal
  • Oddly, they hadn’t really thought about what the other pirate factions think about the Sansha being all RAWR
  • They also hadn’t really thought about FW integration – flying ‘officially’ for the Sansha (as an example)
  • Liked the idea of propaganda videos for Sansha – since all we’ve had is “onoes, Sansha are evil” from CONCORD, would be nice to see some of the other side, to show why some RPers believe in the cause of Sansha.

Character Creation

  • Lots of complicated shader stuff that mostly went over my head
  • Discussion about the difficulties of fluid animation when you bring height into the equation. Probably agree with this within the context – will be easier to ‘pretend’ a short character is short than put up with really poor animation if they need to do complex interactions with (f.ex) a hulking Brutor. We’ve had to pretend a whole lot more for the last 8 years, so I’ll let them off.
  • There’s a guy who is in charge of making sure that certain races don’t have certain hair colours, clothes, etc. I didn’t manage to corner him to find out why Brutor can’t have red dreads when every other bloodline (that can have dreads at least) can.
  • Body meshes are hidden under clothing layers (or removed, I forget), eliminating potential clipping issues during animation sequences.

Who Needs a CEO

  • Presentation by the head of BattleClinic (I think)
  • Basic overview bout the nitty-gritty of social networking, and being an influence broker
  • Really just a very low-level look at social engineering. Might have been useful for some people, but its stuff I’ve been doing for years. 😛

Nice People, Nasty Players

  • Delivered by a Folklorist (not CCP), talking about his MA thesis on people that are nice but sometimes do a lot of nasty things in the game.
  • Some of the quotes from interviewees were very funny, but he didn’t really delve into his findings about why these nice people are sometimes nasty players.
  • Interesting subject, but it didn’t really deliver

Comments for this Post

0 thoughts on “What Happens in Iceland…”

  1. 02nd Apr '11 at 2:12 pm

    Interesting sessions. I’d love to hear more about the “Who Needs a CEO” session, or at least your thoughts / experiences with the general subject. 🙂

    • 02nd Apr '11 at 7:51 pm

      I shall put that down for a future entry. Thanks. 🙂

  2. 02nd Apr '11 at 6:34 pm

    When the wormhole collapsed and we lost the path “home” the specifics of ochre dye was lost on the other side. Brutor have been angry ever since. True story*

    * – and there was that Amarr thing too… but the dye, that was the biggie, I mean, have you seen my dreads? A pale imitation to dreads of yore… /frown.

    • 02nd Apr '11 at 7:50 pm

      Yup, exactly. But its not quite right, because Vherokior, Sebiestor, heck, even Gallente CAN have red dreadlocks. But the original rasta mastahs? Nope, not allowed!

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