Morphisat

The R In RPG

Intro:

Welcome to the twenty-fourth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s Banter topic comes to us from the ever helpful Eelis Kiy, capsuleer behind the "Where the frack is my ship" blog. She asks: How does your real life personality compare to who you are as a character in EVE? Does a good leader of people in the real world make a good leader of pilots in game? Or vice-versa? Do your real-life skills help you with the roles you fulfill in your corporation or alliance? Or do you behave completely differently? Does the anonymity of the Internet allow you to thrive on the tears of others in New Eden whilst you work as a good Samaritan away from your keyboard? Or are you as mean outside of your pod as you are inside it? Have experiences in EVE Online affected your behavior, skills or attitudes outside of the game?

In a world such as EVE Online, with endless possibilities, it’s easy to see why the attraction of developing an alter ego would be there. Let’s try to answer Eelis’ questions!
How does your real life personality compare to who you are as a character in EVE?

Morphisat:

This isnâ€™t very hard for me to answer: I am pretty much myself in MMOs ! Helpful and somewhat funny (some people might disagree with my sense of humor). I tried to do the pirate thing in Eve with my alter ego Belautis, but that failed miserably. Never could get myself to shoot some helpless new player in a belt, accidently mining in an 0.4 system. I can see the attracting of rping someone totally opposite, but I couldnâ€™t never really get into it.

So whatâ€™s the point of playing an MMORPG when you donâ€™t really do the R thing ? Well, itâ€™s still a bit of mild role playing when youâ€™re pretending to be capsuleer in Eve. Or a Tauren or an Orc in Warcraft. Factional warfare brought out the role player mostly in me in Eve, and I really started to dislike the Amarr. Them shooting me didnâ€™t help of course.

List of participants:

Eve Bumper Sticker

The #tweetfleet is having some fun the last few days, people are posting eve related Bumperstickers on twitter. Especially @buckyohair had a few good ones. Like this one:

If you can read this, your Primary!

Or this one by BioChrome

My other car got primaried

You can find them by searching twitter.

What MMO

There is a new site out there that can help you decide what other MMOs besides Eve you’d like to play. It’s called What MMORPG. It’s got a lot of mmorpgs (didn’t even know there were that many out there) sorted by all sorts of categories and whether they’re free to play or not. There is a short review and some indicators, like grind, crafting etc for each mmo.

You can find the site at http://www.whatmmorpg.com/.

Best Wishes for 2011

To all my readers, corporation colleagues, #tweetfleet and whoever I forgot ;). May your Ore all be dense and all your kills be sweet !

Hidden Agenda Dibs Race

On Sunday night we had a fun corp event, a dibs race around the galaxy in shuttles ! At each location there was a nice price to be had, of course you would only find out after winning the Dibs on a location. Clicking on a contract never was so much fun !

The way it was set up, was that the 15 or so that participated undocked and sprinted to the nearest location. About half way a new location would be announced and shortly after that a third. There would be three active locations almost all the time. So you had to make the decision whether you kept on going to your original destination or change half way. A few times a destination was announced that everybody passed through a bit before, ensuing in lots of cursing in chat and vent !

It was quite hilarious when someone yelled DIBS as they arrived in a station as first, other people would go â€˜omg I was 2j away !â€™ and so forth. Once DIBS was called you had to wait in the station for the second round. So everybody won something in the end. The last person in round 1 had to make 26j to Berta to claim a price which was extremely funny and left me plenty of time to get me some coffee !

So how did I do ? I arrived first at Gelfiven IX and won me an Amarr transport ship. Which is nice as Belautis can almost fly it, only need amarr industrial V, and with the learning skill reset coming up that shouldnâ€™t be too hard. For round 2 I just waited until a destination in Minmatar space was announced so I could be there fast. At Anstard VI I won a set of Battlecruiser blueprints, which is always good to have.

Thanks to Ruffio and Cattis for setting this up and making this a fun corp event ! It must have been a lot of work preparing this, hope you enjoyed it as much as most of the corporation members who participated did Smile .

Fifth Anniversary

Exactly five years ago, Morphisat started his career as a pod pilot. Now 67 mil skill points and a few corporations later I am posting about his fifth anniversary. Lots has changed since when I started, we didn’t have drakes, hulks, but we had learning skills :). Speaking of skill points, I haven’t much of a clue what to spend them on these days, so I am doing level 5s of stuff like gunnery-related skills and invention skills. I guess this is the point where you start investing your skills into Capital ships, but since I will probably never use one it seems kind of pointless to go that route.

I haven’t been playing much lately, I hope the upcoming Sansha’s invasions will be interesting enough to log on every now and then. I have a bit of a ‘been there, done that’ feeling towards Eve at the moment and only have the Morphisat account active.

Starcraft II and Wow are keeping me busy, amongst other things right now. I am still following all the Eve news though, through twitter and blogs.

ps. Incursion 1.0 is coming next tuesday !

Incursion Trailer

And it’s out ! You can find it on youtube as you can see below. It focuses on the upcoming Sansha’s invasion. Nice to see the Nightmares and Succubi (sp!) in their full glory ! The final music as the Incursion logo comes on screen reminded me of Warcraft though :).

Eve Report

A few posts ago I wrote a small post on catching up with the news. Well there is another very nice website called The Eve Report that has a lot of good news and interesting articles. Check it out at http://www.evereport.com.

The EVE Report is a test for what I am calling a â€œCommunity Blogâ€, the idea is that anyone can signup and post on this blog. The only requirements are that the content be related to EVE Online.

The website even looks very appealing :). The first eve reports podcast went up early november. Caroline sure seems to be a busy person !

You can also follow the eve report on twitter to get updates when something new is up.

November Bugfix Release

As we can read in yet another new devblog Incursion will be released in parts. The first part that will be released in November will contain mainly balance and bug fixes it seems :

80 new story line courier missions
Rocket balancing
Tech 2 ammo balancing
Adding faction ships to the market
Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
Anti-aliasing support
Window resizing, camera offset
Meta-item indicator icons
UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
Toggling probes in overview
POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Mind you, this isnâ€™t written in stone, so some things might not be in it. To be honest, although it is a bit disappointing to not see real new stuff until January when the second part is supposed to be released, itâ€™s better that the new stuff actually works ;). Wonder how the CCP PR machine will spin this though. The lack of a trailer so far makes me think they will start promoting the January release rather than the November one.

Public Quests In Eve

In the latest blogpost, called the nation strikes back, CCP Ytterbium explains a bit how the Sansha Invasions in the upcoming Incursion expansion will work. It looks somewhat interesting and it reminds me a lot of Warhammer’s public quests. Only there is one big exception:

To players in the fleet that participated the most in the site in question; if there is more than one fleet in a site, others won’t be paid. CONCORD only rewards the most effective capsuleers. If you are not ready to face the competition, we recommend you either merge your fleets together, or spread out to other unchecked sites.

The fun of the public quests in warhammer (if I remember correctly, it’s been a while) was that you could just join in and everybody got rewarded according to some sort of formula of who did the most damage and a random draw. In the Eve system, the fleet that did the most damage will be rewarded, other people who happened to join won’t get anything. So basically your fleet has to be there first, other wise there is no point to participate. I don’t really like that design descision.

On the other hand, I never thought an experience in Warhammer Online would be relevant to Eve. The rewards will likely be interesting, a Concorde LP store ! Only capital mod blueprints are mentioned in the blogpost.

This was one of the first blogposts that actually dealt with incursion gameplay. I assume more will follow as the release is getting closer (soon ?).