Morphisat

Factional Warfare

Is a-coming ! The servers will go down in the night and might be up on wednesday, but don’t hold your breath. Already tried some FW on the testserver, and it was fun, but that’s also because of the cost of all modules being 100isk ;). I am thinking of dusting off an old account, I haven’t used since 2006 that holds my Minmatar freedom fighter and enlist him in the Minnie fleet. Otherwise, as both my characters are in an alliance and not willing to leave it, FW is not for me. Which is a shame as it would have been a fun sidegame.

Anyway, I have been busy in game, nothing very spectacular. Mainly ratting and a little mining in Wicked Creek. I build a Raven from recycled loot and some mining, which makes live somewhat easier. Jumped back to empire friday when it was a little hostile in WC and got some business done there. Flying around collecting datacores and selling them off.

I saved a few for my own invention stuff, and managed a 3 out of 3 attempt of an Invulnerability II Shield. If only I would have know (well I could have checked) that this thing needs quite a few expensive parts. Still hope to make a profit on them, they sell for around 2.2mil around Sivala. My stack of Ballistic Controls II is almost sold out now, and I am all out of Hammerheads II and HobGobs II. I even sold too many, when I needed a few I couldn’t find any anymore and had to invent a few BPCs for own use ;).

Met a few suicide camps on my travels around empire for the best deals, as you can see by this screenshot :).

!!! DONT FORGET TO SET A LONG SKILL !!!

Settling in 0.0

We have have been out here in Wicked Creek for six weeks or so and now that we’re more familiar with the area and it’s inhabitants, it’s getting a bit more comfortable. Having a few more ships to fly helps as well, my hulk is here now, and I got a cheap iteron IV to haul my stuff around. I also have been mining a bit, and the Arkanor, Dark Ochre and Gneiss is very nice. Combined with the recycled loot I almost have enough minerals for a Raven ! That will speed up the ratting a bit. The ratting is nice, as you can see in my wallet pic ;).

I have been mainly flying my Cerberus, and a Domi as well, but my skills arent geared towards that Domi so it was only a bit faster than the Cerb. Having a tractor beam is convenient though, the salvage is good. You get tritbars from the Angels, and I have been able to produce one Cargo Optimisation rig, and I am almost ready to make another one.

All in all, 0.0 is certainly growing on me, it has got me playing quite a lot more, though it’s getting a bit busy in our region now, so I am going to have to find a few more backwater systems for the ratting. Also there are still roaming gangs about. As I am writing this we have a DOOM gang outside the station :).

Warp Drive Active #37

When I am writing this it’s not yet published on Virginworlds, so I thought I’d mention it here. Episode #37 of the great Eve Podcast Warpdrive Active is now available for download. It’s a very long one, almost 3hrs and 80Mb epsiodes, to celebrate Eve’s fifth anniversary, but it’s well worth it. Besides the usual banter of the two hosts, you also get a bunch of interviews with people from Eve’s past and current times.

Eve-O Forum Thread

With EVE now five years (and 2 weeks) old we decided to put out a special show to celebrate the event and too look back to the dark days in 2003 when the game first launched.

Episode 37: download

# First up we have an interview with Valerie “Pann” Massey. Blinky should really turn his phone off in interviews though.
# Pann really liked the Little Bee’s movie
# Back in the early days of the game, the game was published by Simon & Schuster Interactive who had some weird ideas about marketing the game
# They thought making the box look like this was a good idea. They then filled it with garishly colored crap like the manual and finally put out some horrible movies like this one.
# Even though SSI has now shut down, we manage to snag Mike “Campion” Wallis to hear his side of things. He was the man who brought EVE to SSI and he also was EVE’s first producer. He is now the boss of Colony Studio.
# We then move onto talking to some of the important players in the early days of the game. First up we talked to Trey Ratcliff from John Galt Games. Old school players may remember him as Ragnar, the first boss of Taggart Transdimensional Inc.
# Just to remind you that Trey is the man in over-all charge of the Web Wars EVE Project.
# Sadly we can’t get him to talk about Ragnar’s Magic Hat, but its OK, Urban remembers!
# We then welcome two of the m0o veterans Stavros for about the 9 millionth time on the show and Vegeta.
# Incidentally, the background music we have used for the interview segments is “the shadow of the sun” by Alienhand. Thanks very much for letting us use the tune sir!

Empyrean Age on the Horizon

CCP had a huge surprise this week for us Eve Players. This weekend this upcoming expansion will be on the test server. It will mainly focus on factional warfare. I didn’t realise it was this close already to being released. Together with the expansion, the first eve novel will be out. There is a new page that includes wallpaper and a trailer over at http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/index.html.

Looking forward to even more stuff to do in Eve :).

Update: Oops forgot to include the Devblog !

Rakeriku is recruiting !

My corp is now recruiting new members. You can read more on the official forum or at our own forums.

A little teaser here:

What we offer:
– A launch pad for those wanting to learn.
– We wont exploit you and force you to work for free.
– 0.0 access to some of the best ores (Arkonor) and ratting.
– Regular mission runners (who don’t mind folks tagging along).
– Plenty of salvaging for those folks not ready to join in the mission running.
– Carrier support for getting your gear in/out of 0.0
– Jumpclone access (both in empire and 0.0)

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Looks like the feedburner feed is working again. The advantage of using this feed is that you also get the Flickr EveOnline screenshots in your reader. Otherwise you can just use the regular feed from this site.

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0.0 Revisited

This past week was a lot more fun in 0.0. Hardly any roaming gangs, think I only saw one or two reds (as we say in 0.0) in the system I was in. I made some nice isk ratting and scooping up loot and salvage. What is also great, is bringing the T2 modules I produce to 0.0. Prices are ofcourse higher, which is good for business. For example my Hammerhead II’s sell for 800k in empire (though recently I have seen prices as low as 750k), but I can get 1.2 – 1.3 mil in 0.0 :).

Went back to Empire this weekend for some invention and mission running. In the weekend the number of hostiles increase exponentionally in 0.0, so might as well dwell in empire and do some business there.

I am starting to like invention quite a bit, I am now looking for other T2 modules besides drones and BCUs that I might want to invent and was thinking Large Shield Extenders II or X-Large shield boosters. Or maybe T2 guns ? Will have to look a bit more into it, to see what’s profitable.

Life in 0.0

It’s definately different ! You have to keep a keen eye on local (no I am not using BACON), and even then it’s easy to get caught. Wicked Creek’s got a problem, roaming nano-gangs. Not just one or two ships, but sometimes even 20. I’ve seen a Bob gang, AAA, and a few other major alliances roaming about. Another problem is that RA is blue to TCF and TCZ, but red to most other people. We have been a victim of them a few times, and when thats reported in the security channel, people say ‘don’t report them they’re blue‘ ! Which then results in an interesting discussion ;).

What they do is trying to catch you in a belt with an inty or a rapier and then out of nowhere the rest shows up, blowing you to pieces. We’ve had a few skirmishes with them, but if you’re not jammed, your missiles hit for like 9 dmg, as they move so fast. I made a bit of money ratting, but that was offset (and then some) by the loss of a HAC, that Bela my alt was flying.

So for the weekend I am in Empire, the gangs get worse in the weekend as we saw last weekend. Just doing some trading and missions. If I go down there again, I am only going to fly something I can insure and equip it with some cheap looted modules, as you’re bound to loose your ship sooner or later.

What I don’t like at all in 0.0, is that you basically have to dock up as soon as there is a neutral or a ‘red’ in your system. He might be harmless, sitting in a safespot while making coffee, or he might be part of a larger gang out there to hunt you down. Other people dictating what I can or cant do in a game is no fun, so I wonder whether I am cut out for this. It’s been an interesting experience so far though.

Upon Wicked Creek

OMG I R IN THE 0.0 !

The ceo of Rakeriku and Otaku Invasion Carv stepped down due to being to busy a while back and the new Ceo Rag, wanted to blow some new life into our corp . The best way to do that was to go into 0.0 ! We have a close group of people in Eve, very skilled and knowledgable as well, but everybody was getting a bit bored and the corp was slowly dieing. So the move to 0.0 seem to be a logical one. Some people already had 0.0 experience and they’re helping us 0.0 noobs along, answering all our questions.

So yesterday we moved some of our stuff over by carrier jumps. I now have a sacrilige for Belautis and a cerberus for morph in 0.0. Have only done a little bit of ratting, and it looks good so far. Already made a few million and got my cargohold filled with loot (which isn’t too hard today). Wicked Creek has Angel rats, so explosive ammo seems to work best. Though on the cerb, due to bonuses, the kinetic missiles are nice. It takes a bit of time to take the big BS’s down, but as long as tanking isn’t a problem, it’s not too bad. Luckily Bela can help me out if I step into a 3 BS spawn, like I did today, they spawned right on top of me and had my heart skip a beat ;).

Ofcourse playstyle is a bit different out there. You have to keep your eye open on the security channel and local. And because you’re renting space, that doesn’t mean there are no pirates or people with ill-intend around. Already yesterday when I was just going to put up a Cyno for the last jump, two hostiles got into the system. But luckily they buggered off, so I was able to put the Cyno up in the end.

I am sure i’ll keep you all up to date on this new step in my Eve Career !

Trinity Patch 1.2

Training a long learning duration skill ending after the scheduled return to service is recommended.

Please note that we have added two hours to the downtime for deploying this patch, Tranquility is expected to be up at 1600 GMT and not 1400 GMT as originally reported.

As usual totally forgot / didn’t pay attention to the announcements and had a skill end right before the extended downtime. Found this out when I couldn’t log on to change my skill and found the new patchnotes ;). They seem to be testing stuff at the moment (16:00 Eve time). Seven players online, but the cluster is not accepting new logons.

The patchnotes can be found over here . Mainly bugfixes, though from what I read from the readme.txt after installation of the patch, a lof of cans in space will be removed after 30 days, which is ofcourse very nice.