9 Months In A Nutshell (Babies/PayPal/SWG/Eve)

Yes its been 9 months since my last post, no I'm not going to apologise and heres why....

For those of you who don't have children allow me to let you in on a little secret, you've no doubt heard all the jokes about sleepless night and so on, not only is this all true but [at least in my experience] its much much worse than you would ever expect (which is probably why no one really tries to warn you, either you'd never believe them or they wouldn't be able to explain just how bad it can be)

I'll try and keep this short (yeah right!) because we have alot of ground to cover

Being a parent is very very very hard and very very time consuming

Short enough? Good!

Moving swiftly on, some of you may remember my ongoing beef with Paypal here http://ash-ridley.blogspot.com/2006/02/and-now-for-something-completely.html well having gone round the houses with them I ended up complaining to the Financial Services Ombudsman, while the main thrust of my complaint was either ignored, misunderstood or overlooked they did managed to get PayPal to agree to refund the money _IF_ I took the item to an independant 3rd party for a repair quote, if the item was economically repairable PayPal would pay for the repair or, in the event the item was worth repairing, they'd give me the 'full value of the item'

So off I trot and get a repair quote, unsurprisingly the item is beyond repair and a new one will cost £1174.99, I fax this to PayPal and they agree to refund the original eBay purchase price of £316.00 once I fax them confirmation that the item have been handed to Trading Standards for destruction.

The first problem is that £316.00 is not the 'full value of the item' but rather the 'eBay purchase price of the item' needless to say that I don't make any headway on that front.

So I give Trading Standards a ring.......only to find that they don't actually do what PayPal are telling me they do (this takes me back to their handling of the complaint which was to tell me to get a stamped statement from the Police......only to find the Police had no interest in a civil matter) so I'm currently waiting for the Ombudsman/PayPal to decide the next hoop I need to jump through - I was hoping to have the refund within 1 year of the original sale but I guess thats just gone out the window.....

SWG's NGE had its first birthday, as far as I can tell the player count is lower than its ever been, most of the devs have gone (either jumped or been pushed) but SOE still aren't (at least publically)talking about giving us either a rollback (personally can't see that ever happening) or classic servers (and I doubt they'd do a character transfer and if they did it would probably be crap).

Interestingly the Traders are still getting the short end of the stick because the game keeps moving further and further away from the one in which Traders were designed to exists (the game is now hugely loot based and the new younger-twitch-happy-lightsabre-wielding players can't stomach the prospect of having to intereact with another player in any capacity other than grouping with them (to get more xp) or killing them - thus the thought of having to pay a non-combatant for a service is totally abhorrent to them!

The only good news is, despite a number of set backs, the emulator team seem to be making some good progress and I'm still hopefully the old SWG will become available again - unfortunately you just can't expect a 'virtual world' to work very well on private servers with only a few [hundred tops?] people playing - though population wise I'm guessing this would be like playing on the official NGE servers :-)

Been back in Eve almost a year now and I'll admit I'm starting to burn out (mainly because theres alot of 'work' and not much 'game' right now).

We joined one of the major alliances with the intention of getting a foothold in 0.0 space but unfortunately, due to a number of issues (not all of which were aliances fault) most of us ended up in empire (with alts most of the time to avoid war targets) and 0.0 was more hassle than it was worth (i.e. was costing us more than we were making). This unfortunately caused problems between the players of my corp (all of which are interestingly RL friends) and we have subsequently left the alliance and the corp and joined 2 different member corps or another alliance - hopefully the new corp(s)/alliance (since its a different area of 0.0 space) will renew my interest (especially if I start making more money than I'm spending)

Unfortunately there aren't any MMORPG's on the radar for a while that I can see getting my interest, Warhammer online is a way off (and since moving to Mythic holds less interest for me than previously - I'm expecting another DAOC grind fest with little to no RP), Huxley is looking weaker the more I learn about it (instanced PvP areas with low headcounts) & Pirates of the Burning Sea is a way off.

There are a couple of free games that I'll try out (Archlord, BOTS & Exteel for starters) but reviews of Archlord are almost universally negative (but hey its free) and the other 2 are currently in beta and employ micropayment systems (so yes its free but you resign yourself to being worse than all the other guys unless you put your hand in your pocket) on and BOTS is pegged as being a huge grind (unless you pay!) and you should know that I personally hate grinds - don't get me wrong its not that I object to having to 'work' (relative term) for a reward but the amount of 'work' needs to be acceptable, Eve is the only game where this doesn't present me with this problem as skill training (levellign up) is time based

Interestingly Anarchy Online just gave previous subscribers a free 30 day subscription and (once the 'first MMORP nostalgia' wore off) while the game hasn't changed enough for me to pay-to-play it again (for too grindy, [hard to obtain] loot orientated and pitched mostly at the uber-guilds) it did make me realise I should probably log my free AO account in more often - but then thats true of any free game I have (such as Planetside) but the problem is that, when I'm online but not playing a/the game I'm currently paying for I kinda feel that I'm wasting my money paying for something I'm not playing.

It's a boy!

I think I've mentioned previously that my wife and I were expecting our first child shortly, well he finally arrived over the weekend.

He was supposed to join us on the March 16th but, in tribute to his fathers inability to be on time for just about anything, the wife ended up being induced on Saturday (18th) and he finally arrived at 1:23am on the 19th weighing 7 pounds 12.

Major credit to my wife, despite (or quite probably because of) all the doctors and midwives we've seen telling us the pregnancy wouldn't go full term, or be a natural birth (being induced notwithstanding) because of her blood pressure. Not only did she go full term (and over) she managed a normal delivery on just TENS and Gas & Air (and Epidural was on the cards but the speed of the labour prevented this from occuring).

The of course completely trashed all the plans I had for playing Eve all weekend but I guess I can cut the pair a little slack in this regard since its not every day this kind of thing happens (yes I am joking here!)

Now I just need to catch up on some sleep before she comes home with the baby and the sleepless nights begin........

And now for something completely different

In a departure from my previous rants today I'm going to bitch about Paypal.....

I've been a Paypal user since, well since they came into being. 99% of my Paypal usage is to pay for stuff I got off eBay. While I've sold stuff on eBay before I always got paid by cheque, recently I decided to allow Paypal payments. If I knew now what I knew then I'd never have bothered, and I never will again.

I sold a rather high value item on eBay, the buyer decided I hadn't described the item correctly (something I disagree with but thats a story for another time) and logged a Paypal dispute, I wasn't concerned about this because, to my mind, the case was open and shut but nothing could have been further from the truth.

I'll open with the following: Paypals dispute policy/process is biased in favour of the buyer!

If the seller doesn't reply to the dispute within something like 10 days the buyer automatically wins. I don't have a problem with this (hell I've won one dispute because of it) but its the start of something bigger.

The number of characters the seller is given to respond to the dispute is very small, and its a web form so no email or attachments or anything.

The buyer is given [multiple] opporunities to respond to, and expand on, the sellers reply to the dispute (in my base the buyer even changed his complaint when I proved his original statement to be incorrect), the seller is not given any further opportunity to respond until the dispute has been resolved by Paypal.

The buyer is given a full refund once confirmation has been received that the item has been returned to the seller - interestingly Paypal [at this point] don't care if the item is incomplete or (as in my case) damaged, they just care that the seller has received 'something' when they give the buyer his money back.

If the item is incomplete or damaged (or you are just unhappy with the result) you can appeal - to appeal an incomplete or damaged item Paypal instruct you to get a stamped Police statement to forward to them, unfortunately the Police treat this kind of thing as a civil matter (and not criminal) and don't want to know.

At that point Paypal ask you to send the item, by tracked delivery, to them in the Netherlands (so by international courier) so they can inspect the damage - all of this at your expense despite already being out of pocket on the deal already and with no guarantee of getting anything in return.

But here's the best bit, _if_ Paypal were to reverse the decision you will only get your money back _if_ the buyers Paypal account has enough funds in it to cover the price!

Unfortunately it doesn't stop there, during the refund Paypal managed to put my account into a negative balance and despite being told on the 2nd of February that this would be rectified I'm still waiting for this to be resolved (and am now being charged interest on the negative balance)

I have to say that thanks to this incident and the extensive communication I've had with Paypal because of it I can confidently say that Paypal are quite possibly the most unprofessional, faceless, unorganised pile of shit on the Internet and I will never accept another Payment through their service again!

I'll admit I've neglected the blog for a bit (in my defence things have been very busy)

Christmas came and went, notable gifts were a copy of Battlefield 2 from the wife (thanks hun) and the entire hitchhikers guide to the galaxy radio series on CD (I already had the original broadcasts on tape but asked for the complete set on CD to bring me up to date)

The wife is getting very sick of being pregnant (theres a part of me that will be glad when the little 'un is out) and I've spent a small fortunate on baby stuff in the last week or so (praise be to overtime and christmas bonus!)

So I guess you're wondering what I'm going to bitch about this time?..... well its Eve Online.

I think I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I'd resubscribed in December because I was bored and because of the whole SWG situation. Well in some ways Eve is still as boring and unfriendly as it always was and yet I still find myself wanting to login and play (very odd)

A recent dev blog http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=304 attempts to tackle the subjet of 'Real Money Trading' (RMT) for in game items and money. Now issues with the legality or the licence agreement aside (thats a whole other mess) there are two things that perhaps CCP should have thought about before jumping on the RMT bandwagon with pitchforks and burning torches at the ready.

Unlike other games Eve doesn't have a tradition 'maximum level' and because of this it is essentially impossible for a newer player to catch up with the veterans. Now while some may counter this by saying that the only thing the vets can now do is specialize, and that this specialization doesn't give a huge boost over players without this.

While I disagree in this its not really the issue. Veteran players have had plenty of opportunity to take advantages of the inbalances of Eves past, they have had ample opportunity to join one of the 0.0 based corps/alliances and have probably collected a large amount of cash, this is obviously something the new player now cannot do.

Since Eves skills are real time gated a new player is still restricted in what he can do even if given a large sum of cash - I guess you can see where I'm going with this with reference to the earlier link.

While I can see RMT as being a [potential] problem in online games I just dont see it ever being as big a problem as in Eve. Cash in Eve is a barrier to fun and on this side of the barrier is simply boredom and tedium - would you rather be mining/NPC'ing/Missioning for the cash to clone/insure/upgrade or would you rather be out there exploring the gameworld and blasting other people to tiny bits?)

The second thing CCP should have thought about is their own policy on selling game time cards. CCP allow game time cards to be traded (i.e. sold) to other players for in game cash - I personally dont have an issue with this but many players do and think its a little hypocritical of CCP to ban one kind of RMT while allowing another (the timecard was obviously purchased with real money) and its difficult to ignore the fact that CCP obviously make money from one of these but not the other..... Best case scenario is that all RMT turns into timecard trading (which will be a major pain in the butt because the 'seller' would have accept 'payment' in timecards (not very desirable or practical for an eBay sale)

I also wonder how they go about proving that in game transactions were paid for with real world money?..........