Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Two inevitable failures

Sugar wrote a very open post. She wrote "I failed" in a culture of "I didn't want this anyway". She accepted being angry in the culture of "u mad?". She did so about something that would never get air, as no other party has reason to brag, so she could keep it hidden if she wanted. But she put everything out for us to learn from. This is why her blog is a must in the very pretentious EVE-"community".

But let's focus on the failures and see why they were inevitable:
  • "I failed at my urban renewal program in Molden Heath." Unsuccessful regions are unsuccessful for a reason. Their damaged state is merely a consequence of that. Fixing the buildings, painting the fences and picking up the garbage might conceal the failure that permeates the zone. There is simply no reason to live in Molden Heath, which is obvious from the fact that its greatest supporter, Sugar herself doesn't live there anymore. Fixing it could only happen by finding a way to make it profitable to live there.
  • "I failed to bring enough value as a neutral." Being neutral means being altruistic. You gain nothing from the project, which means it can only work as long as you can finance it from outside. While the store wasn't a financial loss, it was clearly a very time-consuming one and it clearly didn't pay enough for her time. Which leads to:
  • "I failed to get anyone else as vested in that project": without personal interest, not many capable people want to join. Why would they? However this one is not set in stone (hence the title). Running a market means competition to everyone else. Maybe now that Sugar moved out, someone will move in. Probably with higher prices, not with "urban renewal" attitude, but still as a better option than "go highsec".
So the failure was the inevitable failure of altruism. However it worked for a long time and continue to work in Sujarento, the new home of Sugar. Why? Because there it's not altruistic. Sugar lives there, she works for her own home. She lives there by choice, so there must be something attractive in that place. That "thing" will attract other people too, creating a bigger market, better results, more reason for others to trade there. The reborn TCS won't fail!


PS: CCP Mimic jumped on Amarr local chat and was greeted by the wonderful EVE player community:

5 comments:

maxim said...

At some point, Margaret Thatcher spoke about a territory occupied by 150+ mill people that only 30 mill people are justified there.

This was pretty disgusting. Your post somehow reminded me of that.

In the end, the only real failure i see here is failure number "3" - she failed to attract people to her cause. Failures "1" and "2" are just rationalizations of that.

Maybe it was impossible to attract people to her cause within Eve-verse. Like you said, Eve community is pretty rotten and also very pretentious in its rotten state.

The conclusion about altruism i don't buy, though. Altruism within Eve can't work not because of some fundamental issue of altruism, but because Eve-verse is a rotten money-grubbin' self-entitled universe, which is only fun to pretend-be in.

Altruism can only exist within a social structure where it is reciprocated in one way or another. Within that social structure, however, it can be highly effective as it eliminates a lot of transactional cost that egoism carries.

Sugar didn't succeed in building that social structure in Molden Heath. Probably because, instead of looking for people who think similarly to herself and banding together, she tried to cater to the crapsack Eve-world.

Druur Monakh said...

"Being neutral means being altruistic."

That is, in general, nonsense. Your faction affiliation has nothing to do with whether you're being altruistic or not.

For example: being neutral in a conflict can mean that you sell weapons to all sides alike, in order to maximize your own profits.

"War is good for business" - Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #34

Anonymous said...

"Being neutral means being altruistic"

And after reading your blog for years I *still* fail to understand why altruism is a bad thing.

Oh and being neutral doesn't automatically mean being altruistic. Being neutral means not taking either side.

Anonymous said...

Being neutral can be very good from a non-altruistic PoV.

It depends whether you think getting rich by helping people is altruistic ;)

Just because you do not expect to get anything in return does not mean that you do not get anything

Selling to both sides is definitely profitable, war is best for business when you are supplying both sides.

Druur Monakh said...

Altruism (in a tit-for-tat feedback loop) is a survival mechanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr6lsTgZKAQ

(Yeah, it's a popularized video, but the tit-for-tat game experiments I heard from other sources as well).