The usual category I will post under
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. 
This one is a minmatar warfare fleet undocking. 
I am the one in the hurricane ;).
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
There are places I remember all my life,
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
Thought I’d participate in the Internet Meme Kirth Kodachi started with his blog post The places I have been.
As you can see, I spend most of my time in Caldari HiSec and a bit of Sinq Liason. With an excursion every now and then to other places. The few red dots up north are interesting, apparently I spent some time there when I started out, I visited Torrino for the last time in December 2005 !
The bit of red in 0.0 is Wicked Creek where I spent a few months last year.
Just a simple post of some interesting news items:
And here it is, the Succubus I won ! It’s a very nice looking frig, if you like odd spikes coming off the front end. It’s got a bit of a cockroach vibe going ;). I armed it with 2x medium pulses and a bit of a shield tank, with quite a bit of power and cpu to spare. It’s very powerful due to the bonuses. At least the few belt rats I tried it on (in hisec mind you) dropped like flies.
Thanks to a tweet from CK I found this article on yougamers.com. Apparently Eve Online has now passed the 300.000 subscriber mark ! Very remarkable for a 6 year old game (gratz to CCP !). CCP keeps reinventing Eve and added a new graphical engine by the end of 2007 with the Trinity expansion to keep current players busy and attract new players.
Now of all those 300k subs, how many actual players would that be ? A lot of people have more than one character/account. But it’s still a very impressive feat, as it’s battling against games from bigger companies, like Age of Connan and Warhammer. Although one could argue those try to target a different audience. And there must be plenty of players that can actually afford more than one game. Eve seems to have somewhat older players with a higher income than your average teenagers.
Eve Online Beats Warhammer Online Subscription Numbers
That would put EVE Online as the number two western MMO on the market when you count by the number of active monthly subscriptions. EVE Online is surpassed only by a couple of Asian titles (Lineage, Lineage II, Final Fantasy IX and Runescape) and, naturally, by World of Warcraft.