This totally caught me off guard, as I haven’t been following things very closely lately, but a quite significant patch has been deployed today ! Just looking at the patchnotes there are quite a few interesting things there: Battlecruiser updates and the new armor repair module ! Furtermore UI changes and a Crimewatch / Duel flag.
Patchnotes are at http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp.
An excellent summary of this year’s awards of Blog Banter 43 can be found at the Sand, Cider and Spaceships blog : http://sandciderandspaceships.blogspot.nl/2013/02/bb43-summary-podars.html
Realising I am coming a bit late to the party, as this all started about three weeks ago when the CSM minutes were released, I still want to throw in my two cents on the subject ! Let me recap the situation first.
In August last year a POS revamp was on the table, or at least thought about. This revamp was going a lot further than just fixes to the current system. There used to be this old thread on the forums called Flogging a dead horse which points out exactly what the shortcomings are. The POS code is old though and I assume no one at CCP dares to touch it so they unsurprisingly came up with the idea to redo that segment of the codebase and decided to make it a bit like player housing in other MMOs and design a modular POS revamp.
Apparently someone had been looking into how to handle this and how many time it would take and soon CCP realised they bit off more than they could chew with this idea and deemed it ‘not beneficial for a lot of players’ as we can read in the Minutes from january 2012. This then let to CSM member two step’s campaign to try and change CCP’s plans for this year. He posted a blogpost and started a forum thread which as of now is 132 pages long.
Luckily there was light at the end of the tunnel, CCP Gargant responded in the above mentioned thread stating that the OVERHAIL CANNOT HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. I didn’t even know people were expecting that to be honest. They came up with the modualr thing themselves AFAIK. Then realised it would be rather complicated, also graphically wise. Which I totally understand, but would anyone care if they’d fix the most important issues first and expand later ? Most important are imho the rights management and the lack thereof for the ships maintenance array.
Especially for Wormhole corporation that pretty much live out of a POS it’s very hard to recruit people. You give them either access or you don’t. Since most people in a wormhole will have a nice array of shiny ships at their disposal, you can see how it is a problem to give access to all of that to a new player who’s strapped for cash ;).
Making POSes better is in the benefit of all players. Most people when they come to Eve would love to have a space station of their own some day, it’s a nice goal to have. Also POSes are the backbone of a lot of activities in Eve. Make that better and you have a much better game. But I assume I am preaching for the choir here, we all know how much better it could be, I am glad CCP realises that as well (albeit with a little nudging in the right direction). I hope it’s not just words but that it will result in a better POS system sooner rather than later !
It’s once again Blog Banter time !
For Blog Banter 43 I would like to invite every participant to nominate their peers for whatever awards you think they deserve. Let’s start the year with some EVE-flavoured altruism and celebrate the best and the worst of us, the funniest or the most bizarre, the most heroic of the most tragic of the past year. They could be corpmates, adversaries, bloggers, podcasters, developers, journalists or inanimate objects. Go nuts.
I had some time to think about this one and a came up with quite a few awards. I have decided that the five mentioned here will be my definite list !
Without further ado, here we go
Award #1 – Module of the year: The Ancillary Shield booster. This module really changed gameplay, especially PVP. I can’t quite remember what other newly introduced module actually changed things and had some people up in arms about it being OP. I am sure there have been, but none come to mind that were introduced in recent history. Ninveah did a nice write-up on them when they were introduced in may.
Award #2 – Wormhole menace of the year – Akely and his family of alts ! This was an easy one. You simply don’t want to have this guy hidden in your wormhole. No mining op or site running is safe, once the Akelies have infested your hole. And once he’s in, it’s very hard to kick him out.
Award #3 – Commentator on this blog of the year : Strazdas
I have known Strazdas since my days in Hidden Agenda, and he kept on reading this blog since then. Always has a nice word, or a funny comment. Very much appreciated so this one is for him, Congratz !
Award #4 – Most interesting / funny / nice ccp employee to follow on Twitter : @CCP_Punkturis
Actually the name of the award already gave away why she received this much coveted award for CCP employees, she not only tweets about the game but about other (personal) things as well, which makes her more of a real person than most of the other CCP twitter accounts. Follow her at @ccp_punkturis.
And then finally the 5th award (tension building up, *drumroll*)
Award #5 – Eve related website of the year – evebloggers.com
Actually I pulled a bit of a Rixx Javix here, who gave the eve blogging community an award. It’s very hard to single out one particular website. I frequently visit tigersears, mabrick’s mumbling, eveoganda, freebooted, Ninveah’s blog and some others. But the one site that I refresh a few times a day is still the one, that links them all together evebloggers.com.
So that’s it, the Morphisat 2012 Eve Awards, all winners can claim a Steam Dota2 key in the comments 
.
This week I decided to take part in the Tusker’s FFA. I always liked the ones we had in the Hidden Agenda corp, and this promised to be much more massive. Free frigs were given away, which made the logistics thing a bit easier. I still spent much of the Saturday morning shopping for some destroyers and fittings and flying over to the starter system.
Things didn’t start out very well. I warped to a belt in an incursus, and died in a matter of seconds I think. Not quite sure what happened, I hardly had time to activate my modules. “This isn’t going to be a lot of fun, if it’s going to be like this” I muttered underneath my breath. But things turned around and had a lot more fun with missile boats. The breacher I brought myself did reasonable well, and i managed to stay alive a little longer. A few ships later I was handed my favorite ship of the night, a Condor ! The fittings the Tuskers gave us were quite good. Armed with 3 missile launchers and an MDW you can very easily keep distance and keep hitting your adversaries. Only downside was that it wasn’t fitted with a long point, so quite a few targets escaped, but since they probably were shot down elsewhere later you still appear on the killmail :).
There were also a few events, for one a carrier appeared in the top belt, which was quite fun. I was in my condor, and couldn’t resist picking off a few people on the fringes of the battle, which made me feel kinda bad, but in a good way ;).
After 21:00 Eve time, all frigs and destroyers were allowed. I did pretty good in the new Caldari destroyer, which armed with 7 launchers packed quite a punch and I managed to get a few kills out of it. Also tried the new Amarr and Gallente ones, but both died pretty fast. By that time there were a number of groups on the field and you’d get instantly smashed once you warped in. I decided to leave around that time, since I had my fun anyway. I even made about 5 million isk in collected bounties. I also noticed there were quite a few young characters, who tried PVP for the 1st time. Hope they got the right impression and had as much fun as I had.
Thanks to the Tuskers for setting this up and providing us with free frigs to blow up !
Hey it’s 2013 already ! 2012 has been quite an interesting year for me in Eve. Was a bit eved out at the start of the year, played a bit more later on, but it was usually just the bit of mining and missioning I always used to do. Joining an alliance and living in a wormhole since July or so sure breathed new life in my Eve career :). Thanks to all 20 minuters for putting up with me, haha. To all Eve pilots out there and whoever might read this, best wishes for 2013, may it be a good one.
From the Freebooted BB 42 initial post:
“A gaming universe as vast and unique as EVE Online is constantly evolving and the experience is different for every participant. Conventional games review techniques cannot possibly hope to provide an accurate measure of every aspect of EVE’s gameplay. However, with a community initiative like the Blog Banters, we have the resources to deliver the most thorough and up-to-date review ever.
By combining the experiences of contributors from across the EVE metasphere, we get a wealth of opinions from veterans and rookies alike. We’ll be able to combine input from faction warfare specialists, wormhole residents, null-sec warriors, missioners, pirates, industrialists, roleplayers, politicians and more to paint a complete picture of the health and progress of EVE Online in its current Retribution incarnation.
Who better to review EVE Online than those who know it best?”
For this review I’ll be focusing on one of my favorite aspects of Eve: Exploration. By any means would I consider myself an expert on the subject, but it’s something I got a lot of experience in, especially the last six months or so when I moved into a C2 wormhole. This is by no means a tutorial, but a review of sorts of this fascinating side of Eve.
What is exploration
From the Eve Wiki : Exploration is the art of scanning a solar system for Deadspace signatures that do not normally appear on a ship’s scanners or overview. These Deadspace zones are designed to reward players for the additional work required to reveal them.
An explorer searches for sites in space, these can be gas clouds, archeology sites, a hidden belt filled with valuable ore, waiting to be mined, or a combat site. They all need different tools to be exploited, so an explorer needs quite a few skills (in game as real life) needs to be diverse. All sites need some combat skills, the lower you get in security status (not your own, but the system’s sec stat), the harder these sites and the ‘rats’ in them become. And since Retribution the enhanced AI also applies to complexes found with exploration.
And today Morphisat reached the ripe Eve age of Seven ! And what a long strange trip it’s been ;). Don’t have that many skill points for a character this old, a mere 87million. I never used very expensive implants, and I took a few breaks along the way. Since I am not into capital ships (got nothing against them, just have no use for them), it has become a challenge to pick the next skill to train at times. I have started on Amarr ships, since that is the only race I am not skilled at. My alt Belautis is though, so I already had that covered a long time ago.
Below is my a link to my skill list, maybe I am missing something very essential ! Let me know in the comments !
Lately there has been a discussion amongst some prominent Eve Bloggers about the future of the Eve Blogging community. The MMOmelting pot has a nice summary with some interesting comments. The whole issue came to my attention when Ryxxx’ post showed up on EveBloggers, ironically enough where he claims that The Mittani.com has killed the Eve Community.
Then I started to realize that I do indeed see less activity amongst Eve Bloggers. There used to be a time when you refreshed EveBloggers every now and then, a whole page of new stuff came up. Now not so much. Some blogs I frequently read are fading away or posting a lot less frequently. I am probably amongst a minority, but I don’t visit TheMittani.com very often. I do like some of the articles, for example when they take a look at the upcoming destroyers or review other games. The book reviews are pretty good. I don’t give a hoot for the 0.0 news though, which makes up a big part of the site (at least in my mind).
Apparently though a lot of people seem to like the site, it has lots of content all tucked in a nice place. I do believe there is still more than enough room for personal blogs like this one. Would an article appear on The Mittani’s front page where a small gang kills a retriever on a sunday night ops in a C4 system ? I don’t think so. So where else would I post such an article ? You might argue that no one cares about it, so write about it ? That is an interesting questions. It all comes down to a blogger’s personal motivation.
The intention for this blog (from 2005 on !) has always been to make it a bit of a diary of an ‘ordinary’ pod pilot. There are no glorious articles here, not very often very revealing insights, just tales of what can happen or what people do in Eve. And from time to time comments on what direction CCP is going or what I do like about an expansion or hate about it. There is still a lof of room for blogging in Eve. Maybe blogging in general isn’t as popular as in the best days of the Eve Blog Pack. Maybe there are less people now than back then that care to start a blog and write about their experiences. It would be a shame to see the Blog Pack go though, but maybe it has served it’s purpose and it’s time to move on. I do think that EveBloggers.com still serves great service though, I sure hope that will continue to exist in some form. I would have to have to fire up the old Google reader again !
We got an interesting subject for this blog banter :
Fresh from publishing the community spotlight on the EVE blogosphere and Blog Banters, CCP Phantom has suggested a banter focus on competitive tournaments.
There is no finer spectacle in the universe of EVE Online than the explosive dance of weapon-laden spaceships in combat. The yearly Alliance Tournament is the jewel in EVE Online’s eSports crown and the upcoming New Eden Open should deliver the same gladiatorial entertainment showcase.
Given the scope of the sandbox, what part should eSports play in EVE Online and what other formats could provide internet spaceship entertainment for spectators and participants alike?
First let’s take a look at what is eSports to me. With eSports I think of FPSes like Counter Strike, League of Legends and my personal favourite Starcraft II. Especially League of Legends is growing very rapidly. That is probably mainly because it is sich a low threshold game. Anyone with a half decent PC can download it and play. Which gives them at least a basic understanding of what is going on in the game.
Starcraft was eSports no. 1, but it might be dwindling a little lately, not in the least because of a lot of drama in that scene, and the game becoming a little stagnant. I am not very familiar with the FPS eSport scene, but if you do it’s not very hard to follow what the point is, it is to shoot each other with guns.
To be honest I don’t think Eve belongs in the eSports category. It’s very hard to follow for an outsider. What is the fun of the Eve tournament ? It’s the various setups and fittings teams will bring to the arena, the variety (or lack thereof), the speculation, what if Team A brought eWar instead of DPS etc etc.. Believe me when I say that I love the Alliance Tournament to bits, and it’s always a fun period in Eve around that time. Hanging around in various chat channels and the last few years on Twitter is great. And I guess it’s as close to eSports as Eve has to offer, but it’s such a niche game and not very accessible to the general public, nor is it that great to watch (orbiting spaceships and / or blue and red pluses) that I don’t think Eve has much to do with eSports.
Having said that, the question was what part should eSports play in EVE Online. Besides the yearly Alliance Tournament, my very short answer would be None. I don’t really see the point of the $10.000 tournament. I might be watching it a little, but I don’t really care about it, and I am not really opposed to it either. The pretty high threshold to enter, using an auction and all that doesn’t seem very fair to me, but if they want to go that route, it’s up to CCP. I guess they want to remove some plex out of the economy.
Some other form of eSports would be a wow battleground type of thing I guess ? Arenas and the like ? Well that kind of thing wouldn’t fit at all in Eve, it just doesn’t feel right to me and I hope it will never get to that.
Here are some more blog banters:
E-Sports Punditry to follow:
