Until now I never really realised that the Eve Newsletter CCP sends out every now and then is quite nice. I haven’t been playing much lately and didn’t follow the Eve news all that much, before that I always thought ‘meh, already knew that’.
It includes a summary of all the devblogs and some more headlines. Looks like I got some catching up to do !
The new EON has been released on Oct. 1st ! Looking forward to seeing my article on Eve Communications (an insider’s guide) in print and see what kind of graphics Richie has picked.
Last time I wrote a magazine article was years ago, an intro to Bob Dylan bootlegs for Gadfly magazine :).
CCP has sent out a press release today about the upcoming expansion ‘Incursion’. You can find it here.
So what do we get:
– Sansha’s invasions, which seem to be some sort of public quest. Along with that special rewards, wealthy bounties, earning loyalty rewards and high commendation as the press release put it. Rather vague but it sounds interesting.
– New ships, most noticeably a dedicated salvage boat. Since the bpc is only sourced in Outer Ring, it will be rather expensive, especially at first. I was hoping it would be targeted towards new players, since they benefit the most from salvaging their missions and don’t have a marauder yet. But it’s nice to see that very nice hull being used again
– Improvements the CSM came up with. Not quite sure what this will be, but we’ll see. (Update: there is a devblog about these).
– Hardware and infrastructure improvement. Of course these are welcome, but to mention them as part of an expansion is a bit ridiculous. They did this before as well, and I find this as silly now as I did then
– Improvements to EveGate, forums and such. Any improvement is welcome, and forums are nice to have for newer corporations that don’t have their own yet. This makes me wonder why EveGate can’t be improved gradually. Agile is all about releasing little things a time. And since EveGate doesn’t need a client side update, why not improve it gradually. It doesn’t make sense that it’s being improved on the same pace as expansions are released.
– New character avatar builder. Don’t really care about this.
– Improvements to PI. Too little, too late I am afraid. My planets have been withering away since two weeks after the expansion. Way too much clicking for very little reward. Maybe this will be reduced, but I have pretty much already lost interest in PI.
All in all, the pve part sounds interesting, and that’s about it. Nothing to get really excited about, but it’s always nice to have more PVE stuff to do.
Casiella at The Eclipse Rift is wondering about the grind in Eve. The first thing that came to my mind was YES, the grind for isk, so you can do other stuff ! When you start out you grind for standings to get better agents and more isk, so you can do higher level missions. Especially from level 3 to 4 was quite a long tedious run from what I can remember. This can be made more bearable if you can join other people’s missions in your corporation so you can standings faster.
These standings are also a requirement for miners, so you can get the best yield when refining. AFAIK these can’t be bought as suggested in the above mentioned blogpost (only corp standings can be boosted for a while, using such a service). And of course you can (legally !) buy isk in Eve using timecards, but I don’t really consider that a fun way to play as it doesn’t give much of a feeling of accomplishment. But it’s a way to get things done.
Any other grinds in Eve ? Well I guess shooting rats in belts can be considered a grind, though when there can be danger lurking in losec or 0.0, it probably doesn’t feel too grindy.
CCP has created a followup to the ‘butterfly effect‘ trailer, it’s called causality. You can find it at www.eveuniversalglory.com. According to the press release, it’s created to help our players explain to their the differences between EVE and virtually every other game on the market. There is also some talk about limitless choice…
Petter MÃ¥rtensson interviewed Arnar Gylfason from CCP Games, about the CSM / Lag controversy !
http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/4757/Geeky+EVE+Online+interview/
Eiran asked me kindly to promote his blog at http://www.eveonlinestrategy.com/. I took a look and it seems to be decent so I figured why not ;). The title is somewhat misleading as, at first, I thought it was one of those $25,- strategy guides that tell you nothing that you can’t find elsewhere for free.
Go and take a look, it’s got some interesting articles.
Inspired by the Eve Druid post ‘Let’s talk about lag, baby’ I decided to write something on the subject, it is the hottest topic in Eve at the moment it seems.
Let me sum up the recent events first : Eve did win the european game of the year contest by the way, despite the threadnaught of, as of now, 84 pages. Most of the concerns expressed in there and in the ‘18 month hiatus’ blog was about lag. A response (of sorts) came in the form of the dev blog called The Long Lag where a plan was laid out how ccp is going to go about trying to fix the now infamous 0.0 lag.
As there have been many forums posts and blog posts concerning lag, what I would like to talk about how have you actively changed your game play to avoid lag. I am not talking about tweaking to the game client or staging ships in a system before a fight, I am talking about a directly change in game play decisions to avoid lag .
In my game style, in hisec, missioning exploring and what not, you don’t encounter a lot of lag. There is the odd situation where you might have some module lag in a somewhat busy mission system, but it’s been a while since I suffered from that.
What I do remember and what seems to be very similar to what the current 0.0 players are experiencing, is the factional warfare ‘lag’ from about a year ago, that took quite a while to fix (investigations started early 2009). At first the problem wasn’t even acknowledged (the logs show nothing !).
This wasn’t your regular ‘oh it takes 3 secs to activate my guns’ lag, that’s why I put it in quotes. When there were more than 10 people or so involved in a battle, not only would you lag, but experience complete desyncs, still being shot after podded and being in station (very odd experience that one), and stuff like that. This certainly hampered my FW-alt gameplay, I simply gave up on it. It was unplayable and very frustrating. I don’t mind loosing ships (we’re talking ruptures, vexors and rifters here), but to loose them to technical problems is very annoying to say the least.
After all it turned out to be quite a complex bug and had to do with standings and such if I remember well. So it could very well be, the 0.0 issue is something similar. Let’s hope the recent mass tests and other data will result in a fix. Eve really needs this at the moment, as more of this lag monster will result in more bad press and dissatisfied customer. And the 18month development hiatus does not help people’s patience either.
It just so happens that the people who got this kill, were the ones we were at war with for a week. Nothing remarkable happened then. This kill proves that stupidity knows no boundaries … Moving 74 plex in a fragile Kestrel !
Thanks to the tweetfleet for spotting this one :).
http://ad0pt.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1539031
No no, not a post about busting CCP’s bunker, but one actually about gameplay. And the ‘broken’ factional warfare nevertheless. I reactivated my FW account when we got the 5 days back, and really liked the small fleet pvp again.
The last two weekends the minmatar recaptured 4 systems that were previously captured by the Amarr. We had three vulnerable systems the weekend before last, and a nice bunker buster fleet came in from Auga to blow up the bunkers, assisted by a few dreads and carriers.
Last weekend we had only one bunker to bust but it took a little longer as we had no capital support. Both weekends no Amarr counter fleet was formed, although they did cut off the pipe down into Minmatar lowsec, so anyone who wasn’t in a stealth bomber had a hard time coming down to help.
All in all it was good fun, though the busting itself is a bit boring. It’s basically like shooting a pos. BTW the domi seen here in the screenshots was lost this weekend unfortunately !