DOTLAN EveMaps

It’s hard to describe the Eve Online Fanfest with only a few words. But the most simple and best matching way would be to quote the answer of a CCP Dev when I asked him, what I could improve on the DOTLAN EveMaps.

“Keep Beeing Awesome!”

I’ve seen so many new things, met so many exciting people and talked about uncountable things in (mostly) the API/IGB roundtables that it’s hard to clear my head and realize that everything is already over. But I’ll try to summarize a few things.

After my uneventful arrival on Wednesday, we chilled out in the hotel and went early to bed. I still was tired from the night before fixing the performance issues in the very last moment before leaving to the fanfest.

The Thursday started slowly with a long queue on the registration point but that was something everyone was expecting. In the big entrance hall was a nice bigscreen with a life stream of the Jita 4-4 station. It was hilarious to watch people trying to navigate their Ibis in front on the camera on watching privateers playing undocking games with their war targets.
The rest of the Thursday was pretty chilling. The timetable wasn’t quite exciting for me, so I took the opertunity to find the Devs I wanted to talk while watching the goons arguing with CCP Navigator about the possibility to put “Period Basis” on the silent action list. The first day ended with a funny talk from Darius Johnson on the alliance leadership panel telling everybody that they won’t destroy “The Game” but instead they want to destroy “Your Game” after watching you how you spin around your newly bought ship 😀

Compared to Thursday, the Friday was quite packed with tons of interesting talks. I would have liked to seen more but it was not possible to divide myself. So I jumped from the Opening, to the 3rd Party Tools Roundtable,  then IGB Browser Presentation, then Cosmos/API Rountable, then IGB Roundtable, then Dominion Presentation and finally leaving for the Pub Crawl. In the meantime talking with more people and meeting more faces from people which blog I’m reading or flown with them. The 3rd Party Tools roundtable was quite funny. Initially it was canceled by CCP but someone forgot to remove the subscription sheet. So we had a small nice group of developers sitting on a table, talking together, exchanging tips/experience and bashing over the various API issues in the near past.

When waiting of the depature of our Pub Crawl group, I bumbed into Mittani and we had a lot of talks about all kind of stuff, expecially the amout of paper he used during the recent Delve War when printing out the Delve/Querious Maps every day. Finally our group made it into the old german !?! double decker and started to raid Reykjavik’s nightlife. In the 2nd bar I found Dierdra Vaal from the Eve University then teached me during the whole rest of the fanfest (Saturday included), that I should run around, introducing myself to everybody I found and then ask for free beer. At least it worked with Dierda 🙂 Thanks!

@CCP: Cosmos (End User) and API (Developer) thematics doesn’t fit together for a roundtable. It would make more sense to combine it the API roundtable with the 3rd Party Tools and give Cosmos their own one.
@Myself: Bring my backpack, laptop and camera to the hotel before leaving for the pub crawl.

When I fall asleep at 4:30am in my bed and realizing after a very short slept that I was still kinda drunk on the upcoming saturday morning, but the show must go on! With that motivation I finally arrived back at the fanfest and was getting more and more sober and ready for the upcoming events, but most of the time it was more chilling around and searching for people to talk to. So I found my competitor Serenity Steele and had some interesting talks with him too. After writing numerous emails with Ombey we could arranged a meeting to and I could some nice suggestions too, what I could add to my page. Finally I had a small little presentation to give CCP’s IGB Devs a lockout and demo on the new upcoming version for the InGame Browser. Overall a quite successful weekend.

I just hope that CCP will release more and more Videos on Youtube, especially from the great “PARTY AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD” event. Can’t say more then “awesome”.

Finally I wanna thank everybody, who I met:
Numerous CCP Devs/GMs, Mittani, Dierdra Vaal, Ombey, Serenity Steele, Elissen, Guy from EVE Uni who overslept his flight back on sunday (sorry forgot your name), SghnDubh, Scarlett2004, Amy Frost, Zufu, Roc Wieler, Darius Johnson, Omber Zombie, Lavista, Shae Tiann, Mazilu, PyjamaSam and many many more their names I can’t remember anymore … Memory overflow 🙂

Thank you all and and see you next year!