Is there any “official” explanation why asteroids reappear in belts at 11:00 EST every day?
In my in-character blog post Hunting Asteroids where I was running Industry Career missions I had to explain this phenomenon, so I came up with this:
Every day the surveyors inspect asteroid belts looking for mineral rich areas. The survey report is published every day at 11:00. At the same time, the coordinates of asteroid belts are adjusted on star system maps to point to the new area.
Does it make sense? Is it in conflict with the lore?
You might notice a following 15 minute period where all ships in space magically stop whatever they are doing and warp off to some random spot 1m km away, and all the markets come to a halt.
I am not saying an explanation isn’t possible, but many things relating to downtime are better handwaved than explained.
In this particular instance though, I think what you came up with is a feasible explanation.
We can always create some where it is not too much of a stretch. This mechanic introduced an intrigue into what otherwise would have been a rather ordinary industry career mission.
Perhaps it’s a terminology thing.
I consider Lore to be official things.
While for something I have created to fill in a blank spot in the lore or handwave a mechanic I would use the term Headcanon for. As in it is something I believe but others may have their own explanation.
Does that make sense for what language I am using? Though I do find your explanation a believable idea.
Or we can call it folklore to distinguish from the official view. Good thing about it is that it’s not expected to be consistent as every village (planet, station) may have it’s own explanation.
Generally “lore” refers to all in-character reasoning. The official, CCP-written / CCP-approved things are Prime Fiction, while anything written by players and more or less accepted by other players is Player-Created Fiction (or just Player Fiction).
So, I understand, Prime Fiction is like a gospel and if one fails to abide by the CCP-approved view, one falls into apocryphal state, potentially gathering followers of one’s particular sect but never becoming mainstream. On the other hand, if there is a gap in Prime Fiction then a player may fill it with his/her own explanation and hope that it will garner popular support and eventually become the “official” viewpoint.
I guess, we just need to work out the terms, as Nevyn suggested, and ask more pointed questions distinguishing the Prime Fiction and the Player Fiction. From the variety of responses I’ve got so far there doesn’t seem to be a uniform view on terms and corresponding levels of acceptance.
Actually, the lore reason for downtime was the maintenance and reset of our NEOCOMs. This is explicitly mentioned in the Empyrean Age. I’ll put a spoiler alert at the bottom of this post that covers that.
Edit: I fumbled this. What I was trying to say is that the exact moment the NEOCOM went down in the Empyrean Age novel is the exact in-game time our NEOCOM/EVE went offline for maintenance. What was “explicitly stated” in the novel and the news articles I linked are the time frame it was down for which is our server reset window.
My ‘head-canon’ explanation for asteroids is that as our NEOCOMs go down and the in-game fictional ‘survey report’ is published, when our NEOCOMS come back online, we now have access to all the new survey information which includes sites, belts, etc. The only reason we see them in the exact same location, which is the tough one to explain, is because the game mechanics don’t allow for too much moving about. All celestial objects in EVE are static; planets don’t orbit anything, stars don’t move relative to each other, asteroid belts don’t orbit anything. So there isn’t much you can do to explain this particular issue. I guess you have to pretend they are orbiting and you’re not in the exact same position. You’re slightly off-set.
Spoiler Alert for Empyrean Age Novel:
Blockquote
In the Empyrean Age novel, two empires make large scale attacks/invasions and half the reason they are able to take the initiative is because capsuleers are unable to respond during the 1 hour NEOCOM downtime. It was 1 hour as at the time the novel was written the servers never came back online as fast as they do now. Especially when an expansion pack was deployed to the server, as was this particular case.
Tavin, thanks for the quote. It, however, appears to be about the novel, not from the novel. Can you please clarify its source and status? Also, the reason for the empires’ ability to launch the strikes was not a regular Neocom downtime, it was a one-off CONCORD communications shutdown.
It’s a bit of a broad reference cause the part I’m talking about, especially around Chapters 60 onwards, take place over many chapters. CONCORD is attacked in Yulai and the NEOCOM network goes down, which was the deployment of Empyrean Age. It also explains why the downtime was extended, because the NEOCOM network was sabotaged in addition to other DED systems.
It’s the same way that the deployment of Apochrypha took place. We have an extended downtime, which coincides with the news articles detailing Seylin’s destruction. We log back in to our NECOMs and everything has changed to reflect the news.
Tavin, what you say about game downtime imitating one-off CONCORD shutdown described in the lore makes sense. But I can’t recall any lore explanation of regular downtime in Empyrean Age. Do you have a specific quote which refers to that explanation or, at least, a chapter that I could reread?