Category: General

The usual category I will post under

SomerGate

Everybody is probably tired to hear about the most recent drama in the world of Eve, but I will blog about it, albeit a little late, anyway. If only so I can read it back it later on ! I have been collecting interesting links or interesting opinions, so I will include those as well. In case you haven’t seen enough about it.

In my opinion this all started (in hindsight) with the Community spotlight on Markee Dragon. Why there was a spotlight on someone who hardly played Eve and ‘only’ seemed to sell Timecodes, where there are dozens of other players and player organisation that deserve such a spotlight more was very odd. In case you don’t know, MD is the ETC code seller on Somer Blink.

Then the first oproar started once CCP announced a lottery held by Somer featuring rare ships. The rewards were changed to other unique ships due to players like Chribba who said it wasn’t right  to rerelease these old ships.

Links:

Forum post by @EVEAndski

Akely on twitter loosing faith in CCP

The ancient gaming noob posted a very interested link

Then this happened: a private mail leaked in which it was revealed that all members of Somer Blink had received Special Edition Scorpions. This very much resembled the T20 incident, years ago. Which led to the CSM and an Internal Affairs institution. Somehow this apparently passed by the IA. CSM wasn’t consulted at all. CCP does not seem to consult the CSM in things that matter, we have seen this before.

so it’s just a relationship that we wanted to explore and which we will continue exploring – CCP_Guard

It took quite a while before an official response was posted. Due to vacation of half the CCP staff apparently. Once the response did come, it was in my opinion very underwhelming. You can read my response and one of my questions was answered in the thread, but I didn’t find it very satisfactory. Even worse, CCP apparently want to keep on exploring these ‘relationships’. For now these giveaways are on hold. I just read that as ‘once this blows over, we’ll continue what we have been doing’.

This whole situation is all about trust. CCP mingling in our sandbox. The PR department supporting a shady Eve gambling site that makes (IRL) money by commissioning ETC sales. You can read about that in this excellent forum post. I know this situation doesn’t affect my game play directly, but it leaves a very foul taste in my mouth and it makes me slowly loose faith in CCP and the direction they’re heading.

Some more links:

Crossing Zebras -  Conflict of interest

Forum post – Baron VonDoom

Icelandic law regarding supporting gambling

DNSblack’s article on Eve24

BB #49 Ballad Of A Rich Man

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 49th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

What is “rich” in EVE? Is it simply having more ISK than most everyone else, is it measured in raw numbers of some other ethereal quality? Can you actually be poor? Have you ever lost nearly everything and had to claw your way back? If you are rich, how do you know and how did you get rich?

There are two types of players, those who see Isk as a means to get to their goal, and those that see Isk as the ultimate goal in game. They play to see their wallet / assets grow, the other group uses said Isk to buy ships and blow them up.

Ok it’s probably not that black and white, but most players would probably fit on one of these two groups. Rich for me in Eve is when you can easily afford the equipment you would like to buy and can replace all your gear without breaking your own bank.

Bitter old vet swimming in Isk

If you have been playing for quite a while, ISK starts piling up. So do all the assets to be honest. I mainly kill sleepers and do PI in our wormhole to get my income these days. Before that I ran missions, and made a bit of isk on the side, inventing T2 drones and various modules. Never on a large scale though. Think the largest run of drones I made was about 100. There are people out there who have several production / invention alts and produce 1000. So those people will be richer than I am.

However it’s still gratifying to see your stuff being sold, and see your wallet grow, even after all these years. When I started out back in 2005, everybody was pretty much poor, compared to today’s standard. People had to save for a battleship, think I had to run endless Level 3 missions to finally be able to afford a raven and so on. Never lost it all though, I might have lost a mission ship once and had to drop down a level in order to replace it, but that’s about it.

Reading the various participants entries it seems Isk and being rich is very relative in Eve. And that’s probably the only conclusion you can make from this blog banter Winking smile.

All Along The Angel Tower

It’s about two weeks ago, our wormhole had it’s hisec out in one of the remote systems of the Heimatar regions, Klir. Together with the neighboring dead end system Jorus, there were about 8 data and relic sites. Even though there 4 people in local, no one seems to be going after these so I decided to give them a go.

I got me a few goodies off the first few sites (Still not a big fan of the loot piñata and the mini hacking game that’s pretty silly). A large mini jump drive BPC, and some invention related items. I didn’t scan the cans first so it was a surprise what I would grab from the cans. The other sites didn’t drop much of value up to the point I didn’t even check my inventory any more what I did get.

angel_towerSomewhat disappointed I headed back to our K162 entrance in Klir and checked my inventory and lo and behold, a faction tower BPC ! It turned out to be the Angel Control Tower BPC, the large one.

I brought it back in a tanky ship to Uedama  where most of my industry stuff is, and decided to put it together there, grabbing the remaining ores and a large minmatar tower from Jita, to give it a bit more value, instead of just selling the BPC. It’s still on the market now for 1.4 Bil. I have been checking the prices and they’re a bit weird. I don’t think these towers are in high demand, only a few are being sold every now and then. There were a handful on sale in Jita for 1.2 bil. Those disappeared and reappeared for over 2 bil ! Someone reselling them perhaps ?

Angel_tower2

If it’s not sold by the end of this month I might have to move it to Jita to give it a bit more exposure, but I don’t really feel much like moving such a high value item. Probably will be alright in a well tanked Orca.

So if you have always wanted that fancy faction tower, head over to Uedama and grab it off the market Winking smile.

BB #47–Wise men say

Intro:

Ripard Teg over at Jester’s Trek wrote a post called Don’t Do Anything Stupid and offered it as the basis of a Blog Banter as he is curious what others feel on the subject. Personally, I’m restarting manufacturing that I haven’t done in years and finding myself having forgotten almost as much as I knew the first time around.

So this month’s Blog Banter will gravitate around knowledge, specifically EVE knowledge. Some examples of topics to cover: Is EVE too complex for one person to know everything? Is it, in fact, too complex for one person to know everything about one topic? How do you maintain any knowledge or skills related to EVE over time with breaks and expansions? Does CCP do a sufficient job documenting the features of the game, and if not, what could they do better? How does one determine where the gaps in their knowledge even are?

My response 

We all know that famous pic of Eve’s learning curve. The thing with Eve in my opinion is that it’s it more overwhelming than it is difficult. There are many things to do and a lot of things to learn so as a new player (and more so in the past than it is now with the new tutorials) that you just don’t know where to start.

Once you learn the basics though, common sense does take you a long way. Fitting ships for example is not too hard once you grasp the basics of shield and armor tanking. Of course there are some specialist roles / ships that need some more knowledge, but that’s what blogs, the eve forums, and the wiki are for. Eve is indeed too complex to know it all. But it’s not necessary to know it all to be honest. I do think after more than 7 years in the game I do know quite a bit, but it’s more general knowledge. I don’t know the first thing about capital ships for example, since I never use them, nor do I have a need for one.

Getting back to that learning curve pic, when you start you feel as if you need to know it all in order to properly play the game and to enjoy it more. But once you start carving out your niche, like industry, mining and maybe a pvp’er, playing tackle in a bigger corp, you start to find out that you don’t need to know it all. Just know your particular area of the game, use some common sense, use the wiki, blogs etc. and you’ll be alright.

Regarding the question how do you determine there are gaps in your knowledge: That is a hard one. I do try to keep up with Dev Blogs on what’s coming and reading Eve Blogs, but sometimes a new module or a new game mechanic does escape me. When people in alliance chat discuss the new thing I do ask what they’re talking about and try to read up on the subject.

Links to the other participants at :

http://www.ninveah.com/2013/07/blog-banter-47.html

MMO Blogging

Two very interesting posts appeared the last few days, I first read the Ancient Gaming Noob’s post and he pointed to Psychochild’s blog. We have covered this subject a while back, also somewhat more Eve specific in the eve blogosphere. The general concensus, or at least how I remembered it, was that blogging wasn’t dead, it’s just past it’s prime time where almost every other Pod pilot seemed to have a blog. Blogs are still a great source of info and a serve a very different purpose from twitter and G+.

How often do you google for something and find the info you were looking for on a blog post ? And how often do you find it by searching on Twitter ? I can hardly find what I tweeted 2 months ago, let along find info from longer ago, 140 characters isn’t enough to express your opinion or explain some new gaming mechanic.

The new thing to do is Let’s Play on youtube. When I started blogging that sort of thing would have been very hard to pull off, bandwidth was limited, let alone processing power to encode a video in a reasonable amount of time. This new trend will probably go the same way as blogging did, a handful of interesting Let’s Players will survive, the rest will slowly fade. It takes a very special personality to pull an engaging let’s play video off. Usually when I try to watch one, I get turned off in the very first minute. Only Beef and Kurtjmac I find very entertaining and a Totalbiscuit video now and then (not really a let’s play but hey I’ll throw him in here).

Anyway, I am getting off track ;). What did struck me was a comment on Psychochild’s blog, that said that the magic was gone. We lost that child like AWE I HAVE TO BLOG ABOUT THIS NOW feeling we had when we started out playing MMOs. I’ll never forget my first walk at level 11 in the night from Thunderbluff to Crossroads surrounded by scary beasts, death lurking at every corner in my first days in WoW. There just is less to write about enthusiastically. When I look at my Eve gameplay nowadays, that is certainly hardly anything to write about, so it’s more metagame posts. How many times can you write about Ice mining, killing some sleepers and doing a bit of PI ?

The two posts mentioned above had a focus on community. I still feel that Eve has a community of bloggers who are then part of a larger community of MMO bloggers. Our numbers might not be as big as they once were, but I feel the quality is better than it once was. We have grown as writers and there is less noise to wade through now.

Tranquility’s Hardware

In case you missed it, there is a great article on the hardware CCP runs their Eve Universe on at PC Gamer !

The funny thing was that, at the time, the technology only existed in the military so we had to get military clearance to go into a bunker in Texas to evaluate the hardware because the company, back then, had only just started looking into commercializing this thing that they made for the US army

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/06/15/eve-online/

Server Outtage

Sunday, just as I was about to embark on a journey in my trusty Bustard to our wormhole’s HiSec entrance, I was hit by a Socket Closed error. I have had those more regularly lately, but this time it was a server wide crash.

As it turned out later CCP’s servers were under a DDOS attack. The monday after, the servers returned.

Links:

CCP details DDOS attacks

Massively had two articles (at least) : No threat to customers and the initial news article.

And of course the official post by CCP_Spielmann.

10 year anniversary

Hooray, Eve is 10 years old ! And I have been a part of it for over seven years now ! Well with a break here and there. Last sunday we broke the record (I helped, my Ice Miner was logged on). There is a nice article on Massively as well.

EVE smashed its previous Peak Concurrent User total during the festivities by a clear margin, replacing 2011’s record of 63,170 with a new figure of 65,303 players logged in simultaneously.