Daily miniteaser showing an avatar walking in a passageway.

Daily miniteaser showing a colonist firing a laser handgun.

Daily miniteaser showing a big teleporter.

Hello,

Starting today we will start showing some miniteasers, we call them. A miniteaser is a quick glimpse of Planet Calypso in VU10.0 mode. These are “quick-n-dirty” very short pieces, in order to keep productivity up and not bog down the process of getting VU10.0 out the door. Please don’t expect high production values or an “official” polished teaser or trailer. These are what they are – a short moment caught on video from Planet Calypso. These teasers will be between 5-10 seconds long.

The drama! The twists! The intrigue! The cloak-and-dagger conspiracies! The surprise! This year’s Landgrab is a historic turning point from my perspective. A crafty and well executed plan was organized which surprised most of us; including FPC I have to admit. The excitement this time around came from a completely different direction than previous years. The “mega-alliance” utilized the rules and found a strategy that worked. Even more, it brought in a very nice and evolved approach to the community as a whole – it introduced the basics of a working Calypso political system. It is history in the making and something I personally get really excited about. The colonists of Calypso joined together to work for a common goal. Unexpected, but very interesting. Congratulations to the winners!

On the other hand this is not what I really see as the essence of the Landgrab event. My take on Landgrab is that it is a showoff of firepower, tactics and strength of groups. A contest or even a “PvP Olympics” so to speak. We have analyzed the rules and we have some ideas to bring back the original battle-focused approach in the next Landgrab. Some ideas we have is to allocate societies beforehand to specific land areas, using a lottery mechanism, and have all battles transpire at the same time in order to keep people focused on the task at hand. Maybe it will be one-on-one or maybe three societies per land area will be allocated. We will also increase the value of the individual land areas by adding rare or unique DNA to it (and not have the DNA as a separate commodity).

Any suggestions or comments in general are of course valued. Until next Landgrab!