Like most his (sane) readers, I find Gevlon’s blog a great source of comedy. His tinfoil-based discussions, his refusal to accept reality, and the insane ways he twists himself around to get to his viewpoint are all more often than not very entertaining. That, however, is the extend of the value, and most people that aren’t Gevlon-level dumb see that for just that.

So its no surprise that even small developers ignore his demands about changing their game design. It would be a massive negative for most players if a developer did listen to someone like Gevlon, because if you are dumb enough to listen to someone like him, what are the chances you are smart enough to make a good game?

And just how dumb is Gevlon when it comes to game design? See this as just the most recent example. In Gevlon’s mind he sees demons as being a selling point for drawing in anti-social elite PvPers to play/pay his game. How would his design play out in reality? All smart and organized groups (which include the elite managing the casuals) like Goons would play Swarm (because based on what Gevlon wrote, they would be stupidly powerful compared to the other factions), and those groups would also of course have demon alts. As soon as an organized swarm group needed to fight demons, they would log their alts in to debuff the enemy, making them useless, and winning by default. Bonus points in total failure that Gevlon also allows those demon alts to assist in fighting the other demons! It’s not hard to see that demons would soon be a non-existent faction, and once one faction is out, the balance of the entire system falls apart (to say nothing about the fact that you just lost a chunk of players due to terrible game design).

And that’s just one aspect of one faction; we could spend a whole week breaking down all the other crippling design flaws of the other factions and design choices, but that’s not really the point here. The point is any reasonable developer just needs to take one glace at what he suggests and they can safely dismiss it for the nonsense that it truly is.

The other entertaining thing about Gevlon’s blog of late is his struggle to replace EVE. It’s an impossible goal for a few reasons. One being that EVE is unique in it’s scale, culture, and history. Even a game with identical mechanics, which alone would be nearly impossible to create given how much iteration EVE has gone through, wouldn’t have important and established groups like Goons, PL, or EveUni that give EVE a unique background and storyline hooks that make it worth playing and buying into (whether you buy into it yourself, are have content provided for you by others aware of it).

But perhaps the bigger challenge in Gevlon finding a replacement is personal. He failed in EVE and ragequit when, despite doing nothing but trying to gather wealth for 4 years of no-life playing (if he was doing this in LoL, a game he didn’t really enjoy, what do you think he was doing in a game he was enjoying?) , he still wasn’t anywhere close to rich enough to influence the game (to say nothing about his total failures on the equally-important social side). That’s the reality, but here is Gevlon’s perception of it:

The only game where I was anywhere near #1 is EVE (I was probably the richest in EVE without EULA violation). – Gevlon

Gevlon truly believes he had more ISK than someone like Chribba or this individual (note: by his own admission, he spent a total of 700b vs Goons, and to my knowledge never posted a screenshot showing more than 1t+ ISK). To any EVE player, such a statement is amazingly laughable, especially in the context of the Casino War costing Lenny alone 1t ISK a week, an amount he payed for months, but again, Gevlon truly believes what he wrote above. He truly and honestly thinks he was the richest person not selling ISK for real money in EVE. (Bonus comedy: If you are involved in RMT, selling in-game money for real money, that means you would have LESS ISK in game, not more, but such details don’t exist in the alternate facts world that Gevlon lives in).

So you have someone who is greatly detached from reality, searching for EVE, but being unable to return to EVE because they know they can’t compete at that level (Something I stated back when Gevlon was just starting up and hitting the gold cap in WoW as if that was some worthwhile accomplishment). It’s a great setting for the comedy happening right now, and that has been going on since his departure from EVE.

Gevlon quit LoL for basically the same reason, with the same sad excuse at the end. Originally he set a very modest goal of reaching the top 10%, yet despite playing hours that would put him in the .01% of time played, he never came close to the top 10%. For someone with a history of having a very thin skin, and the desperate need for acceptance from others, that was a massive and embarrassing failure, made all that much worse by the fact that it was very public. Anyone that wanted a laugh could look Gevlon’s account up, or watch a replay to see him making first-10-games mistakes by someone playing their 1000^th game.

And much like his terrible game design suggestions, his excuse for quitting LoL was just as sad. In a game where team selection happens prior to champion selection, Gevlon convinced himself that the game was rigged around purchasing and subsequently playing a champion. If you need more explanation around why that is absurdly flawed, you might be a Gevlon-level moron, and for that I’m sorry.

So I’m excited so see where he goes next, and ultimately what he cooks up to explain his next failure. My one hope is that it’s a game that’s well-known. One of the joys in his LoL failure was that it was easy to track and understand, as anyone can see that someone not making progress despite playing a thousand games is someone who is truly struggling. If his next attempt is some small game, perhaps the jokes won’t be as obvious, and that would be far less entertaining. Luckily, knowing Gevlon, he won’t go that route, because it would mean less traffic, and above anything, Gevlon is driven by the need for acceptance, which he misunderstands as people coming to his blog.

“But Syn, you just let Gevlon know of the joke, isn’t he going to stop doing what everyone is laughing at him for now that he knows?” Oh dear reader, you don’t know Gevlon. Fear not, he won’t change, because he doesn’t accept facts in his reality. It truly is a wonderful gift, one we can all continue to enjoy.