Author: Morphisat

Apocrypha 1.5 Downtime

Enough of all the DUST discussions, let’s focus on the upcoming patch (which is taking a little longer to deploy due to database issues). We’ll see what DUST will bring and what kind of impact it will have on the game.

Looking forward to:

– Small and med rigs. Sniper trashers, speedier rifters / better falloff. The list goes on ;). Also it will be cheaper to rig BCs, which is nice. Ships like a Myrm, Drake and the Cane are so much nicer when they’re equiped with rigs.

– Extra 5ok m3 Ore hold for the Orca

– Factional Warfare lp store. Though it seems the lp rewards for pvp kills are mediocre at best. I assume this is ‘prenerfed’. But running FW missions with the corp might give a lot more lps for goodies from the store.

– FW lag fixes. The ksequencer fix already worked very well for me, but not for all, and not for new players that didn’t know about it. Now that it will be built into the client, I hope it works even better, also considering they extensively tested it on the testserver.

– Mission Story Epic Arc – more content is always nice ! I’ll be starting the caldari arc this weekend I think, will keep an eye on the bug reports though. Hope it works right out of the gate.

Well that’s my summary of patch 1.5 :). Let’s hope the servers will be up soon !

Thoughts on DUST 514

As any eve player with an internet connection already heard, CCP have announced their upcoming FPS/RTS/MMO console game DUST 514. First of all, I don’t own a console, nor am I planning on getting one in the near or distant future.

At first I thought, ok that’s nice, it’s in the eve universe, fine by me. But then the german site Golem.de announced that the game will rely heavily on interaction between the ‘dusties’ and the eve pod pilots.

And that is where I think this game is bound to fail. Will there be enough dust players in the first place to have an impact on the eve universe ? Will these players be interested to make a commitment for months to a corp / alliance ? Will the DUST game be fun if they stay in their starter corp ? And what impact will that have ? Will there be mutual chat channels, and if so, will they be different from the rookie help channel ?

Will this interaction, the merge of communities really happen ? It seems to me that the game will fall or succeed depending on that concept.

dust514

To have an outside game have an impact on the Eve universe (and a console game at that) is just a bad idea. But maybe it will all work out and I will have to write a blog post saying that I am wrong in the future ;).

Links:

Jon Shute’s Blogpost

Massively announcement

Forum Thread (the main one, there are plenty of others)

CrazyKinux Blog

Keith Neilson’s Blogpost(s)

Interview with CCP Ceo

Unholy Rage

What I posted earlier about farmers leaving Eve, has now been officially confirmed in a new CCP blog post by GM Grimmi.

During scheduled downtime on June 22nd a little over 6200 paying accounts were banned in one go.

Wow, that’s a lot more than I could have imagined. That’s a great and bold move by CCP. And it certainly has improved gameplay ! More roids in the belts, more value for your LP and no longer bumping into 12 ravens when undocking in Sivala !

The war against the RMT element continues. We strive towards driving their operating costs to unsustainable levels. Our objective is to get rid of them, plain and simple. They are a heinous nuisance and a serious drawback on our systems and resources. Credit card fraud and account hacking is their game – the recent hacking troubles have been the work of the ISK sellers. They must be driven out and kept out.

Very well said :). Seems like the are determined to keep em out. Let’s hope they will succeed !

Two Screenshots

This first one is from the Fleet Test on the test server. It was an interesting fight. With several caps on the field, and a lot of battleships shooting each other :). The lag wasn’t too bad at all, hope CCP got some useful data.
Fleet Test

 

This one is a minmatar warfare fleet undocking.
Minmatar fleet 2
I am the one in the hurricane ;).

Factional Warfare Test and Rigging

As you might have read on the news or on the forums, there will be a fleet battle test on the test server coming Wednesday.

Apocrypha 1.5 is just around the corner and it brings plenty of improvements and fixes with it. We think you’ll be happy with the changes we’ve made; of course now we need to put it to the test in a “live-like” situation! To that end we will be running a series of fleet fights and other mass-tests on our main test server, Singularity.

I updated my test client today and did some testing. I put the T3 ship skills in both Bela and Morph’s queue. So I can test both caldari and amarr T3 ships, before I commit myself to a big purchase !

Rigs in all sizes

The new rigs are also on the test server. The small ones will be very cheap. You only need a few parts of salvage to make one (like 5 or 6, and that was on an unresearched bpo, not that that matter much with such small quantities). So I am sure just about every frig and cruiser will be rigged once this patch hits tranquility.  On the one hand it will give for more interesting setups, like  speed or armor rigs on your rifter, or double ambits ! Or a double trimarked trasher ! But it will be obligatory to rig your ships, otherwise you’re bound to loose it when you come up against rigged ships.

Originally Rigging was supposed to give your ship a bit of extra oompf. For a price that is ! So if you wanted to you could rig your battlecruiser or assault frig. But now, it will become mandatory for the above mentioned reasons. Well it’ll be interesting to see how it all will work out. I’ll be buying all the new bpos when I first logon after this patch comes out.

pink_ship

By the way, some graphics and icons changed as well. Bela’s command ship is now pink :(, though it’s not as obvious on the screenshot. Not exactly an improvement. The Guardian looks similar. Hope that will be changed.

UPDATE: The pinkish color is because I was using medium shaders at the time, apparently a known problem that hasn’t been fixed yet.

The Universe Is Yours

A new video has emerged for Eve Online, it’s called the Butterfly Effect !

This time, showing actual gameplay, and the emphasizing the impact, one player can have on the Universe, because we all play in a sandbox \o/.

www.eve-online.com/butterfly has yet another video, that is more of the usual space ship flying around, though not as spectacular as some of the earlier ones, it’s very nice nevertheless.

T3 Dropping in price

When T3 came out first, I never thought I’d be interested in buying one. But now that the prices are dropping, it’s becoming a lot more interesting. The Tengu hull now dropped below 400mil, and most of the submodules are now available at around 100mil, except for some of the more desirable ones.

I have been playing around with some Loki and Tengu setups in EFT and I must say there are a lot of interesting possibilities. You can go full out dps, create a cloaking blockade runner, or an allround exploration boat, like this one.

[Tengu, TenguExpl]
Power Diagnostic System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

10MN Afterburner II
Codebreaker I
Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron
Large Shield Booster II
Shield Boost Amplifier II
Invulnerability Field II

Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Scourge Heavy Missile
Salvager I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I

Bay Loading Accelerator I
Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Core Defence Capacitor Safeguard I

Tengu Defensive – Adaptive Shielding
Tengu Electronics – Emergent Locus Analyzer
Tengu Engineering – Augmented Capacitor Reservoir
Tengu Offensive – Rifling Launcher Pattern
Tengu Propulsion – Gravitational Capacitor

I just bought the T3 strategic cruisers skills, so I’ll be keeping my eye on the Tengu prices. Thing is with waiting, that sometimes you can keep on waiting. Sometimes you just gotta spend some isk, which I don’t do a whole lot of, as I am a bit cheap ;).

To be continued !

Update: Interesting thread on Scrapheal Challenge

Ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more

Ever since China banned trading virtual currency for ‘real currency’ it’s been a lot less crowded in some mission hubs. The one I am the most familiar with, Sivala, has seen a drop of over 100 pilots in local. No more bumping into a dozen Navy Ravens when you undock !

It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on the economy. Navy Ravens have already gone up in price quite a bit. Raising from 300mil (or less) to 500 – 600mil at the moment. I am sure other modules will follow. So your hard earned Loyalty Points will be worth a lot more. But on the other hand there is a smaller market for t2 shields and other mission related modules. Although judging from the ganked mission runners ship’s killboard kills, their mission ships were very oddly fitted, so I am not sure we’ll be missing them much as customers.

There have also been reports of less Ice Macro miners, so the price of Ice Products might go up as well. Haven’t seen that yet, but maybe people are still selling their old stash and the price raise might be coming soon.

China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency

Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !

This month’s blog banter is a special one, as it is also a contest ! It even made the news on the Eve Online front page. You can read more about it at ck’s blog.

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, 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 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 here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

"Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

It wasn’t very easy to come up with something. I know a lot of things in the game could use some improvement or changes, but totally removed ? Even the things I don’t bother with in game, but other people might like, I wouldn’t want to remove.

roll_dice_small Then one Saturday morning when I checked my invention jobs, and 6 out of 7 Hammerhead II jobs had failed, it came to me: RANDOMNESS in invention ! Wikipedia says (amongst other things) : there is the sense of lack of predictability. And that is exactly why I hate it.

Sometimes you’re doing great and 4 out of 5 jobs succeed, then you hit a bad streak and you get one bpc for seven tries. Especially with things like HACs it is really a downer when three jobs, even with expensive decryptors fail in a row !

Of course the cost of invention would have to be changed. Six datacores for a hammerhead invention job, maybe up to 30 for a HAC (from 8 now) and so on. I am sure someone smart at CCP could figure out the economics. But at least you would know what you’re getting and how much it is going to cost ! Especially that last part is important, you can now estimate how much an invention job costs using the online tools, but it’s not ideal.

The title of this blogpost might suggest that I would want to remove all randomness in the game. Well, some of it is needed. Like officer spawns, exploration sites etc. Ecm as well, as loosing control over your targeting really sucks, especially when you would just totally get locked out in a fight, and you know it’s going to stay that way for as long as the falcon or blackbird is on the field. But I guess that could be the subject of another blog banter ;).

So there you have it, my blog banter #9 contribution ! Other participants:

  1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE! (ah just noticed someone else uses this phrase)
  2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
  3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
  5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
  6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
  7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
  8. EVE’s Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
  9. Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  10. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won’t You Die?
  11. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
  12. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
  13. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
  14. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
  15. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
  16. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
  17. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
  18. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
  19. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
  20. Facepalm’s Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
  21. Memoires of New Eden, You’re Fired
  22. Kyle Langdon’s Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What’s a Titan?
  23. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
  24. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
  25. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
  26. Ripe Lacunae, The UI… Where do I begin… (Eve Blog Banter #9)
  27. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
  28. Estel Arador Corp Services, You’ve got mail
  29. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
  30. Deaf Plasma’s EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 – Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
  31. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 – Do we really need to go AFK?
  32. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
  33. More articles as they are posted

Setting up an Ishtar

A few weeks back I built some of these Ishtars, they’re still one of the more expensive HACs on the market, with a nice profit margin. I gave one of them to Bela so she can use it to assist me in lvl 4 missions for example.

Before you say OMG Just buy a domi, they have a bigger tank and are much cheaper !!111!!, yes I know, it’s just a lot of fun flying HACs with their nice resistances and cruiser agility, and I had one at hand anyway ;).

There is a guide on the evelopedia that suggests setting up a passive tank. I guess it would look something like this (screen shot from EFT), though that guide suggests (way) more Shield Power Relays. I didn’t actually try this one out, so you should experiment with this one yourself, in case you would try it.

Ishtar - Isht_Shield

It does look decent, but I decided to go with a traditional armor tank. This leaves the mid slots for some nice extra modules like the Drone Navigation Computer and the Omnidirectional Tracking Link.

Ishtar - Bela_Ish

Also don’t forget the small remote armor repairer module to rep up your drones in case they get hurt !

Tried this setup a few times now, and mission frigs get melted very quickly by the warriors or hobgobs, then it’s onto cruisers with hammerheads II, and if there are any battleships left, the Ogre IIs mob them up. In case of aggro, I just orbit something with the AB on and don’t get hit very hard.

Only tough thing to figure out a decent setup, is the lack of cpu on this ship, it’s all pretty tight !

If you have any comments or suggestions, leave a comment…