Category: General

The usual category I will post under

Gratz to Pandemic Legion

For winning the Eve Alliance Tournament. They managed to change their setups and come out very aggressively in the half final and blow Evoke out of the water. The final was a lot closer, Navy Vexors against Navy Caracals, then at last when the cruiser were all gone, the Abaddon vs. two minnie Command ships. The minmatar ships were too much to handle for the abaddon, but very well done by RuR as well, thanks guys for an epic final !

All in all this weekend was a great experience. Chatting away on irc, and in game while watching the experts and the tourney matches.

Epic moments:

  • Hero Tanking by a Fleet issue Tempest
  • Hero nighthawk smartbombing and chasing an abaddon
  • Hero vigil
  • Hero tanking Curse from hell
  • Bennie Hill style Hero Vigil race, getting 100mil isk for self destruction
  • Tournament LolCat

Hero tanking and Hero Vigil are new terms in Eve’s vocabulary, I think first used by Crovan. Who did an overall excellent job at the commentary.

Will post some direct links to the youtube matches I liked the best, once they’re up on youtube !

All in all well done CCP and everyone involved. I can’t think of any other MMO company that would organise such an event. Oh btw. the new record for logged on players is 51600+. My guess of 51150 wasn’t too far off ;).

Casual Corp In Eve

As you might have read, the previous my corp Rakeriku had a revival when we went to 0.0, but slowly died again. Now most of us that still play went our separate ways, though we still have a nice chat channel where we meet. I haven’t been playing a lot for the past two month, but of course as usual the old Eve bug is coming back and have been running a few missions and done some small industrial activities again, but it’s still kinda sad to be the only one in corp chat all the time.

I was wondering if there is such a thing as a casual corp in eve. No mandatory mining ops, though I wouldn’t mind one every now and then, and maybe a bit of mission running, though I can easily do that by myself, I am of course willing to help people out. I am not much into pvp (shooting each other’s ships that is, industrial pvp is fine :)), but a war every now and then wouldn’t be too bad. I am currently based in Hentogarira, but I don’t mind clone jumping a bit. I got plenty of skills for most activities, like exploration, industry and I fly a mean Raven.

Have versatile character and alt, will travel (though only through hi-sec space)

Any of the other bloggers maybe have a suggestion where to look for such a corp ? Or any of the regular readers ? If not i’ll just start my own for me and my alts ;).

Update: I am in the EU-Timezone

Skill Queue

Thanks to CK’s Tweet I became aware of the upcoming skill training que article on massively. It’s based on the dev blog called more queue queue. It looks promising and it’s definately better than just running out of a skill to train. There is a caveat though:

The solution, or compromise, CCP is going with is limiting the skill queue to a 24-hour window — you can line up as many skills as you’d like, provided they can begin training in the next 24 hours.

What I get from this is that you can que a skill as long as the current one is ending within 24hrs. This still forces you to log on, but on a time that is convenient for you. I guess they didn’t want people to sign up, set a que for 3 months and then come back ;). Ah well, it’s a lot better than having to set your alarm clock for 2:00 AM at night. Not that I have ever done such a thing of course !

Blog Banter #4 – Adapt or Die

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. This is the first time I participate in the Eve Blog Banter, as I thought the subject was interesting.

This month’s EVE Blog Banter comes to us from Manasi of A Mule in EvE. Manasi asks “How do we, EVE bloggers, adapt to changes as they are thrust upon us (speed changes, no more ghost training, all the Dev blogs, etc), or as our lives make playing the game different (more time, less time) ?”

Let’s start off with the last part: just go with the flow ! If you have less time to play Eve, just play less. This is a problem if you’re in some 0.0 pvp corp that expects you to be online 23/7, but for most people this should be doable. Even if it’s not, go and find another corp or another activity in Eve that’s more suitable to your new time constraints ! Don’t let the game rule your life…

adapt

Continue reading Blog Banter #4 – Adapt or Die

Ghost Training

Ghost training was officially taken out of the game on a server side patch on Oct. 15th last year. CCP have claimed that it was an unintentional feature, but they took years to actually do something about it, and fix it.

And to be honest, I am starting to miss it. It was always nice to be able to let a second character (or 3rd of 4th if you’re into that sort of thing), train a long skill (like training for a hulk, battleship V, commandships that sort of thing), and be able to come back to him/her and finding the character more skilled then when you left them.

Ghost Training
Ghost Training

Continue reading Ghost Training

Looking back at 2008

Let’s look at my eve year at the start of a new one :). Can’t quite remember what was going on at the start of the year, probably just some mining and missioning. And I started invention around the time. Mainly T2 drones, later on T2 shields. The income of that wasn’t too bad. And with the mission running that landed quite a bit of ISK.

The rakeriku corp was getting a bit rusty though, and a lot of people either left or didn’t log on anymore, new leadership and some diplomatic actions got us a place in Wicked Creek to liven things up a bit. This was in April. Quite a few members logged on more and we got some new ones as well.

Life in Wicked Creek was nice at first, but it got ugly pretty quickly. The novelty also wore off, as 0.0 isn’t that exciting, if you don’t pvp a whole lot. It’s good for the wallet though, made quite a bit of isk out there. Until it was too unsafe to undock and found myself spending most of my time in empire again. I think by july or so we pulled out. Haven’t kept track of the situation there at the moment, but I doubt it has improved. Missioned quite a bit after that and started to do more invention around the summer.

Complex 1

Also my alt Qanatas joined the Factional Warfare ! For a few months this provided quite a bit of enjoyment (general Beanflicker deserves a mention here, he setup quite a few nice fleets and was a very funny FC). Flying in fleets for the first time was interesting. Roaming about in small gangs was nice as well, somewhat more stressful as you had less people to fall back on.

Unfortunately the amarr enemy was hard to find at times, and the whole complex capping mechanic is so boring you want to pull your eyes out. The people I usually flew with started to fade away, and the whole concept got a bit boring. The FW alt is now retired for the time being. CCP doesn’t seem to be interested in this side of the game anymore. Even though it was touted at first that this was just the start, there is no indication anywhere that they will be expanding or changing the factional warfare concept…

Fall of this year saw the definite demise of the Rakeriku corp. Just about everybody has left or stopped playing. I don’t play a whole lot any more, have the feeling at the moment that there isn’t much new I can do, and  I am a bit bored with what there is. I am not interested in some pvp 0.0 corp, with obligatory mining ops etc. Have plenty of ISK so no need to mission or mine at the moment.

So I am not sure what to do at the moment. Maybe tech 3 stuff will be interesting, and that should come in the march expansion. Though on CCP’s timetable it might be later. Hopefully it doesn’t need some extremely rare 0.0 components and it will be doable for regular empire dwellers as well. The wormhole exploration might be nice to do, but we’ll have to see how that game mechanic will be implemented.

Tagged !

Ok I get it, I have to post these seven facts about myself ;). Have been tagged several times now:

1man1ship

The rules:

Here are the rules (I’m just cuttin’ & pastin’ here):

  • Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
  • Share 7 facts about myself in the post – some random, some weird.
  • Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

I am never comfortable talking about myself, but here we go !

Seven Facts:

1. In the eighties I wore black clothes and listened to the cure
2. Also had the Bono hairdo late 80s, early 90s
3. In 2001 I cut off my pony tail as my hair was getting a bit too thin to pull off the look
4. I also have a wow-blog at http://www.wow-blog.net
5. Got 2 cats named felix and streep (which is dutch for stripe)
6. Studied social history for two years, then later on ended up in software engineering
7. Used to be a big tape (you know TDK SA MAXELL XLS) live music collector

I am supposed to tag 7 other people here, but I think just about everybody I know has been tagged already ;). If you want to volunteer, let me know !

Navy Raven

And here it is. I finally bought a Navy Raven. Always thought it was a little too expensive, but now that the prices have dropped below 300mil (!), I just had to get one ;).

First Test Flight Navy Raven II
First Test Flight Navy Raven II

It looks nicer than the run of the mill Raven, and adds a bit of DPS with it’s seventh missiles launcher. Also it provides more of a buffer as it has a lot more shields ! You do go through ammo pretty fast now though, good thing I can build my own missiles !

Navy Raven 1

Naming your ships

The Ancient Gaming Noob brought up an interesting subject: do you name your ship ?

From what I remember I have always named my ships, except maybe some disposable shuttles. I started out naming them (or at least the bigger ones) after star trek ships. There is some wiki out there that lists quite a few. Then I used a list of uss aircraft carrier ships (USS Kitty Hawk is kinda cool), but that got a bit lame as well.

Now I just use whatever comes up :). My raven is still named Phoenix, most of my haulers something silly like The AFK Hauler. Omber Homber, or NomNomNom for Hulk or Retriever.