Category: General

The usual category I will post under

Eve Recall Program

It’s like the scroll of resurrection, but for Eve ;). You can read all about it here.

If you want to go back to New Eden for 7 days to see what it’s like these days, you can use my referral link below !

Yes gimme 7 free days in Eve on an account I haven’t played in a while !

Update : Thanks for using my link, I got my free plex ;). Update the above one to another account, since you can only get rewards for the very first three people that use the link.

Update II : Unfortunately the program has ended, Eve-O forum thread.

Update III: Only thing I can offer at the moment is a 21 day trial, the Buddy Program.

Real Life Harassment

It’s nice to see CCP finally draw a line regarding this ‘Bonus Room’ nonsense, and who knows what else is happening what we don’t know about yet.

[stextbox id=”black”]CCP, in collaboration with the CSM, have agreed and would like to state in the strongest possible terms and in accordance with our existing Terms of Service and End User License Agreement, that real life harassment is morally reprehensible, and verifiable examples of such behavior will be met with disciplinary action against game accounts in accordance with our Terms of Service.[/stextbox]

It turns out Eve Blogging is still relevant. It was Ripard Tag who got the ball rolling. Well done, sir. Eve already has a, uhm, certain reputation, we don’t really need any more of this.

B-R5RB Marketing

So many new players joining #eveonline that a career agent system is in tidi so we’re remapping other systems off its node. #tweetfleet CCP_FOZZY

It seems the big battle in B-R5RB was the best thing that could happen to Eve Marketing ! All major news sites reported the battle (especially the $$$ value that went up in smoke), and it seemed to attract a lot of new players. Now let’s hope these new / resubbed people can stick around long enough.

Related:

Capitolstorm: the BR effect

TAGN : B-RRB in numbers

Dev Blog : Bloodbath

BlogBanter 52 – Over the hills and far away

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 52nd edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

* * * * *
Go to the always useful EVE-Offline.net (http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility) and take a look at the All Time (weekly average) graph for concurrent accounts logged in.

Eve subs history Plateau
Eve subs history
For the past four and a half years, the graph has hovered around that 30,000 mark; it is, for all intents and purposes, a plateau. But everything must come to an end sooner or later and that is what this blog banter is about.
 
What’s on the other side of that plateau? 
 
Is there any path for CCP to follow to raise those numbers upwards for a sustained period, or is EVE going to enter a decline to lower logged in numbers from this point? How soon will we see an end to this plateau? Months? Years? Or will you argue that ‘never’ is a possibility? Or you can look at the root causes of the plateau and tackle the question if it could have been avoided or shortened if CCP had taken different actions in the past.
My response :

The past few years Eve has had an equilibrium between people leaving and people new and/or returning to the game. Hence the ‘plateau’ mentioned above. Probably somewhere in the future this plateau will start to slope down. When this is going to happen is anyone’s guess.

People might leave for the next  Big SF Game. The only thing that could be considered an Eve killer on the horizon at the moment is Star Citizen, we’ll have to see about that. Maybe some other MMO or SF game will come along and steal it’s players ! But people can play multiple games, so I seriously doubt it.

Probably the only thing that can kill Eve is Eve itself. The game has been getting a bit stale lately. The last few expansions didn’t really add much to the game, it did make it better with bugfixes and all though. There has to come a point where more people leave (or cancel their second and third account, big thing in Eve) then there are coming in. I don’t know how long CCP can get away with these minimalist ‘expansions’  before the players are really starting to get bored.

And once that happens there will be a tipping point where Eve gets a serious overhaul and Bob from Marketing decides a new, bigger playersbase that wants to spent cash in a cash shop is worth more than the current playersbase. And that’s where free to play etc.comes in.

Let’s hope it’ll take a while before we get there ;).

Other participants at Kirith’s Inner Sanctum.

Happy Holidays

Not that much interesting has happened in Eve the past few weeks. I was shot at twice I think while doing PI, but my warp stabilizers helped getting me back to my tower. Sold a bunch of PI and some extra fuelblocks. Shot some sleepers … Ah I can see you dozing off already.

The Yule lads were nice to me. Quite a fun holiday gift. And I think I only saw a few posts on the Eve-O forums how CCP is ruining the economy by giving away free stuff.

The Yule Lads

The leopard shuttle sure is speedy, with it’s 20 au/s warp speed. If you ever need to be somewhere in a hurry, it’s the shuttle to take. Other nice gifts included expanded probe launcher II, Warp Stabs II and whole bunch of other (sometimes not so useful) stuff.

Thanks Yule Lads !

And with that I bid you all a merry Christmas and a very happy new year !

Blogbanter #51 Courage

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 51st edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
* * * * *
EVE Online can be a game of heart-pounding, palm-sweating, adrenaline-fuelled ecstasy or agony. Sometimes over the years those reactions dim and what was once a panic inducing situation becomes commonplace routine. For some, the shakes never go away.

From Druur Monakh (Twitter: @DruurMonakh) we get the topic of this banter: what was your most nail-biting experience in EVE Online so far? It could be PvP in a 1v1 or 1000v1000, your first fight or your latest one, a scam so close to being uncovered too soon, a trap almost sprung on an unsuspecting victim or the roles reversed and you desperately try to escape.

After all these years it is kind of hard to single out a single experience. In general though I am in the ‘shakes never go away’ camp. I did a lot more pvp when Factional Warfare first started out and when I got back into it a few times after that. Somehow the magic that was in those first few months, the atmosphere, the comradely never returned. We roamed around in decent sized fleets and had quite a few nail biters, my best time in the game PVP wise by far. The taking down of a Bhaalgorn, which was a big deal back then was quite exciting. Also one of my better blog posts, if I may say so myself. And I can handle myself in a fleet. Once solo though I get so nervous, I forget to turn on my armor reppers. Overheating ? Might as well never have trained it… And so forth.

confidence

By some sort of miracle I have never been caught in our wormhole doing sites. Sometimes I am really on the edge of my seat, pressing the scanner every couple of seconds and feeling the pressure of the unknown that might be lurking out there. Other times I get very relaxed and forget about the scanner and just pretend it’s a level 4 mission in hisec. Which is not what I should be doing, but hey it happens Winking smile.

Once something does pop up on the scanner though, usually probes, but if I remember well, I have seen a Proteus, Loki and a Pilgrim on scan, the feeling of panic and or shock I have never experienced in any other game. I usually just scramble to my tower and hide. It’s really weird to be worried about my character and my 40mil isk drake. Someone should do a psychological study about that !

May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young

– Bob Dylan

Other participants can be found at The Shakes

Evebloggers.com Reset Again

Evebloggers.com is back ! It got a restart a couple of months ago, but soon thereafter it stopped updating and then disappeared. The visitors would be redirected to a ‘domain for sale’ page.

Apparently someone picked up the domain and now renewed the site (edit: it’s @fuzzysteve). You get the top 5 headlines from a lot of eve-blogs (frontpage), or all blogposts of the last 7 days in chronological order. Very nice ! The layout is a bit minimalistic at the moment, but it works fine.

The old eve bloggers site
The old eve bloggers site

 

BB #50–Where are you going

With the Rubicon expansion being announced and the SOMER Blink scandals (or non-scandals depending on your point of view) that have erupted on the community at the same time, it truly feels like an age of EVE has passed and a new one is dawning.

But which direction is it going? This blog banter can be about several different topics:

– where do you think EVE is going? Is it a good or bad vision ahead?

– if you were EVE’s new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?

– What comes (or should come) after Rubicon in terms of the mechanics and ship balancing we’ve seen? (CSM8 not allowed to answer this one!)

– Is there anything in EVE’s ten year past that should be resurrected? Or buried and forgotten?

– What is the future of the community? What should or should not change?

First of all, let’s stop endorsing Eve gambling sites and let the community itself decide what sites and/or services they like. The PR department has too much power, let them leave the game alone.

Having said that, let’s focus on the game. One of the big problems I see with Eve is that there are a few separate games going. There is the 0.0 power blocks / politics game, and there is highsec PVE / industry, wormhole exploration and PVP (including Factional Warfare) in losec. Somehow these should be more united. Maybe make it easier for smaller entities to enter 0.0, make losec more worthwhile to go there, and give pirates something to shoot at. Problems is, I don’t really see the answer. But that is where I would like to take the game. This is about as vague as CCP approach though.

We got the very vague speech on where we’re going from the senior producer a few times now, about more player build things and going where no one has gone before, but I am not quite sure she even knows what that means. The player constructed POCOs are apparently a first step in this direction… I’ll take a  ‘wait and we’ll see’ approach there.

The community is fine, though the time where blogs were king and we initially had the blogpack going was fun. Every pilot and their dog had a blog, and it felt like a happy family of bloggers. Fun times ! But that won’t come back. #tweetfleet on twitter has the same sort of feeling to it, so that’s nice. Times change Winking smile.

The other participants can be found at BB#50 – Changes

Blog Banter Page