It is such a relief to finally share my heart with you, dear mirror-cam, who always look at me with such great admiration, respect, and even love. I must unburden myself, and who better than you? And you, dear adventurer, who find this recording carefully concealed, as I am sure one of you someday will – do not hesitate to weep for joy at the brilliance, the beauty, and the boldness of my plan.
My vision was inspired and the developers I shepherded were excellent, but the world was not yet ready for our VR experiences, nor was current hardware capable of supporting my vision for the ultimate world-changing experience represented by my DUST… Legion… Nova… FPS thing.
It struck me in the sauna, as so many of my most brilliant ideas have – the solution to our woes. With BoB gone, New Eden needs a villain, and who better than the architect himself? Everyone loves to be the golden child, but sometimes a true hero must seem to be the villain in order to give the people hope. In the end, you either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain. I have chosen to become the villain.
I began to execute my plan by boldly enraging the player base with Incarna, setting them on a trajectory of increasing anger and frustration. In their hubris, they never suspected my devious genius, ascribing my words and actions to incompetence. Over the years that followed, I continued the dismantling of their world, ultimately leveraging my army of bots to boost player counts in order to secure a buyout by Pearl Abyss, then retiring the bot army to make the player count plummet. The community team had to go, of course, and the CSM had to be relegated to irrelevance. It was a shame, really, but you can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.
And the developers, oh… the developers. Where I did not directly quash their suggestions and prototypes, my agents have persuaded them to sit on their best ideas. They think I don’t know how much time they’ve spent working on side projects for the love of the game. They think I haven’t seen their branches full of carefully crafted balance changes, new features, new ships, and, of course, cat ears.
My plan was audacious, but it has nearly reached fruition. EVE is at its nadir. A few short months, and the player count will fall far enough that the company can be purchased for the cost of its hardware’s recycle value.
On that great and glorious day, they will drive me from my seat of power, and appoint one of their own CEO as players and developer-players purchase EVE Online in the industry’s greatest crowd-funding success of all time. My legacy will be one of enduring passion and technical innovation like none that has come before me. My name will be whispered with awe by the few who know the true story of my ultimately benevolent scam.
To be a true hero, you have to be willing to save the day and have no one know you did it.
I am that hero.
