The usual category I will post under
This wouldn’t be much of an eveblog if I wouldn’t pay any attention to the Alliance Tournament. I really liked this fight, coming out with 10 ruptures was very nice :).
Other exciting matches:
Kia vs. Triumvate Quarter Finale
Triumvate – Pandemic Legion Semi Finale
The Finale
Today I found a newsletter (#18) in my mailbox ! Apparently I haven’t been keeping up on the news, as I was surprised to read about patch 1.1.
The Amarr Empire has long boasted about its powerful ships and a fervent willingness to destroy all that opposes them. Finally, the Omen, Zealot and Apocalypse class ships are getting a boost to reflect that devastating potential.
That’s great news ! My combat alt (who is slowly catching up on Morphisat, she’s got 20mil skill points now) is mainly Amarr and has a hangar filled with Amarr ships. Recently she has been training up missile skills and can now fly a T2 Raven to assist my Level 4 mission running. She has already been doing that in a Guardian and a Zealot (to take care of frigs and cruisers on specific missions). Also have been using a Sacrilige for that purpose. It’s an amazing tank and now with my upped missile skills it does a fine job.
Anyway it seems CCP have finally heard the numerous cries over the past years that Amarr was gimped. I hope this patch will put things right.
Some other underused ships have gotten a boost as well.
In order to satisfy your lust for carnage, modifications have also come for the Eagle, Moa, Raptor and Ferox class vessels.
Some love for the Amarr (Eve-O Forum)
The Drone Bay is a new Eve-Online podcast, and is a part of the virginworld podcast collective. The first episode is now up ! I’ll update this post with my opinion on the show, when I have listened to it. Definitely looking forward to that :).
Some interesting eve articles popped up the last few days. Easy to keep track off through Virginworlds.com !
First is a little piece on Eurogame with CCP’s Reynir Hadarson :
Asked if Eve Online could still achieve new things, he said “Absolutely, we will just keep building on top of it. MMOs do not have to age. The nature of a game like Eve is that there is no need for sequels – why shouldn’t it run for fifty years?”
Second is an article on the BBC website mainly focusing on the economic side of Eve.
Science fiction trading game Eve Online is one of the most dynamic worlds, with its own economists helping players get to grips with the intricacies.
Enjoy ;).
Lately I haven’t been very active in Eve, just been doing some missions for the La Dai Corporation to gain standings in order to get access to better research agents. Just like The Ancient Gaming Noob I decided to give Invention a try. Though the cost to get into it, is still pretty high, it has lowered quite a bit since the racial encryption skill books, like Caldari Encryption methods have become more common drops and thus are a lot cheaper these days.
I decided to not start too ambitious and just tried a few Tech II missile BPC’s. And out of 5 tries, I got 3 BPC’s and my hacking / related research skills were at II. After that I tried my hands on Tech 2 drones, but both tries failed, even though according to the failure message I was really close. I have no clue whether those messages are even serious though, think I saw a forum thread about that once and what different messages people got. No one seems to be sure whether they are just random or have some meaning.
After the two failures I decided to skill up the related hacking and science skills and then try my hands on a Drone T2 BPC and maybe some other parts, like Ballistic Control II. And since I can use some datacores now, I will also get the skill to use more than one research agent. Shame it’s 40 Million though :(.
In case you’re wondering how Invention in Eve works or want to know more details, there is a great guide at eve-production.org: Invention Guide and the Eve-O forum thread on the Invention Guide.
May I wish all of you out there a prosperous 2008, may you mine many roids, may your research be fruitful, may you sell a lot of ships and also blow em up :).
For the last week I have been playing a bit and my first thoughts on the Graphics Upgrade seems to be right, the new graphics dont really add much to the gameplay is probably geared towards new players and making a good impression on them. Though the Drone Parasites (the ones that use the Domi model) look awesome with their tentacles ;). The Drone changes are nice, they now attack in a group and it actually seems to work. Unfortunetely one of the things in the patchnotes, 100 new missions, was a bit of a disappointment. These all seem to be lower level and Mining Mission. The Level 4s so far all were the same as before.
Performance of the Eve client seems to be fine. Even when running two instances. Alt-Tabbing between them is pretty smooth with 2Gb of RAM. What isn’t fine though is the User Interface. The new feature that lets you detach the drone and (new) fleet windows in itself is nice, but where to put them ? And why not incorporate the Fleet Message window in the other fleet window ? I am just flying about with my alt (the whole convert to fleet bla bla thing is already cumbersome) and once the ‘fleet’ is setup I dont really care about these two windows. I ended up putting them on the left side above the chat window. You can’t let it sit where it used to be (down right) because it now also shows up while docked.
Then there is the drone window. Still not very handy to order your drones around, I am sure some UI expert could come up with some thing much better than the right click action menu. But where to put this window ? Tried first to put it upper right next to the overview, but that is ofcourse the space where your targets appear. Upper left wasn’t very practical, that’s where your current system info is, so it ended up under the target next to the overview, leaving my screen very cluttered.
All in all not very practical, and I pity the people that do not play Eve on a widescreen monitor. How do they handle all the various windows ? I am glad I got a 19″ widescreen monitor, even 1280×1024 would not be enough I think. CCP should have also invested some time / money in making the UI of Eve a lot better. This would also be nice for the new players that might want to check Eve out. What we have now, is shiny new graphics and a very cumbersome, outdated UI, that sort of works if you have been playing for a while, but is very hard to grasp if you just start out.
Links:
A Forum Thread suggesting a better UI from early 2007.
Blog about UI + screenshots
What a nice mission :). This week I am milking the omber from this one. It has 6 huge 90k Omber roids in the first room, that take about an hour per laser to take down in my hulk. Very nice bonus reward ! The isogen from these I use to either build some ships or sell some on the market. And since it’s in a mission pocket, no nasty can flippers in sight.
Some modules like the cap recharger II and Invulnerability field II, had not passed my mind lately. I remember the times when these costs like 15 – 20 mil., which I refused to pay even though I could afford them. But the past few weeks I purchased a few of these. It seems Invention is finally doing what it was supposed to do (I assume this was ccp’s intention) and the price of these modules have dropped considerably to 2-3 mil or there abouts. So my mission Raven got a little better lately ;).
Also the T2 ships like the Cerb have dropped a lot. It’s actually affordable now (though I lack the skill for now to fly one, my alt flies Amarr HACs) at 80mil instead of 200+. Most notably is the price drop on the Hulk. I am currently learning the skills (about a week to go) for the exhumers and checked the price again. A drop from 450mil to 130 or even lower. Probably everyone that can / want to use one already purchased one, so demand is getting lower as well.
All in all a good thing, if you werent in the T2 business :).