Tuskers Frigate FFA

This week I decided to take part in the Tusker’s FFA. I always liked the ones we had in the Hidden Agenda corp, and this promised to be much more massive. Free frigs were given away, which made the logistics thing a bit easier. I still spent much of the Saturday morning shopping for some destroyers and fittings and flying over to the starter system.

pvp meme

Things didn’t start out very well. I warped to a belt in an incursus, and died in a matter of seconds I think. Not quite sure what happened, I hardly had time to activate my modules. “This isn’t going to be a lot of fun, if it’s going to be like this” I muttered underneath my breath. But things turned around and had a lot more fun with missile boats. The breacher I brought myself did reasonable well, and i managed to stay alive a little longer. A few ships later I was handed my favorite ship of the night, a Condor ! The fittings the Tuskers gave us were quite good. Armed with 3 missile launchers and an MDW you can very easily keep distance and keep hitting your adversaries. Only downside was that it wasn’t fitted with a long point, so quite a few targets escaped, but since they probably were shot down elsewhere later you still appear on the killmail :).

top belt
A carrier (and a few wrecks) in the Top Belt

There were also a few events, for one a carrier appeared in the top belt, which was quite fun. I was in my condor, and couldn’t resist picking off a few people on the fringes of the battle, which made me feel kinda bad, but in a good way ;).

FFA2
The carrier under heavy fire from all frigs

After 21:00 Eve time, all frigs and destroyers were allowed. I did pretty good in the new Caldari destroyer, which armed with 7 launchers packed quite a punch and I managed to get a few kills out of it. Also tried the new Amarr and Gallente ones, but both died pretty fast. By that time there were a number of groups on the field and you’d get instantly smashed once you warped in. I decided to leave around that time, since I had my fun anyway. I even made about 5 million isk in collected bounties. I also noticed there were quite a few young characters, who tried PVP for the 1st time. Hope they got the right impression and had as much fun as I had.

Thanks to the Tuskers for setting this up and providing us with free frigs to blow up !

Favorite kill of the evening

Best wishes for 2013

Hey it’s 2013 already ! 2012 has been quite an interesting year for me in Eve. Was a bit eved out at the start of the year, played a bit more later on, but it was usually just the bit of mining and missioning I always used to do. Joining an alliance and living in a wormhole since July or so sure breathed new life in my  Eve career :). Thanks to all 20 minuters for putting up with me, haha. To all Eve pilots out there and whoever might read this, best wishes for 2013, may it be a good one.

BB 42 – Eve In Review – Exploration

From the Freebooted BB 42 initial post:

“A gaming universe as vast and unique as EVE Online is constantly evolving and the experience is different for every participant. Conventional games review techniques cannot possibly hope to provide an accurate measure of every aspect of EVE’s gameplay. However, with a community initiative like the Blog Banters, we have the resources to deliver the most thorough and up-to-date review ever.

By combining the experiences of contributors from across the EVE metasphere, we get a wealth of opinions from veterans and rookies alike. We’ll be able to combine input from faction warfare specialists, wormhole residents, null-sec warriors, missioners, pirates, industrialists, roleplayers, politicians and more to paint a complete picture of the health and progress of EVE Online in its current Retribution incarnation.

Who better to review EVE Online than those who know it best?”

For this review I’ll be focusing on one of my favorite aspects of Eve: Exploration. By any means would I consider myself an expert on the subject, but it’s something I got a lot of experience in, especially the last six months or so when I moved into a C2 wormhole. This is by no means a tutorial, but a review of sorts of this fascinating side of Eve.

What is exploration

From the Eve Wiki : Exploration is the art of scanning a solar system for Deadspace signatures that do not normally appear on a ship’s scanners or overview. These Deadspace zones are designed to reward players for the additional work required to reveal them.

An explorer searches for sites in space, these can be gas clouds, archeology sites, a hidden belt filled with valuable ore, waiting to be mined, or a combat site. They all need different tools to be exploited, so an explorer needs quite a few skills (in game as real life) needs to be diverse. All sites need some combat skills, the lower you get in security status (not your own, but the system’s sec stat), the harder these sites and the ‘rats’ in them become. And since Retribution the enhanced AI also applies to complexes found with exploration.

Continue reading BB 42 – Eve In Review – Exploration

Seven Year Anniversary

And today Morphisat reached the ripe Eve age of Seven ! And what a long strange trip it’s been ;). Don’t have that many skill points for a character this old, a mere 87million. I never used very expensive implants, and I took a few breaks along the way. Since I am not into capital ships (got nothing against them, just have no use for them), it has become a challenge to pick the next skill to train at times. I have started on Amarr ships, since that is the only race I am not skilled at. My alt Belautis is though, so I already had that covered a long time ago.

Below is my a link to my skill list, maybe I am missing something very essential ! Let me know in the comments !

http://eveboard.com/pilot/Morphisat

Halp The Eve Blogosphere Is Dying

Lately there has been a discussion amongst some prominent Eve Bloggers about the future of the Eve Blogging community. The MMOmelting pot has a nice summary with some interesting comments. The whole issue came to my attention when Ryxxx’ post showed up on EveBloggers, ironically enough where he claims that The Mittani.com has killed the Eve Community.

Then I started to realize that I do indeed see less activity amongst Eve Bloggers. There used to be a time when you refreshed EveBloggers every now and then, a whole page of new stuff came up. Now not so much. Some blogs I frequently read are fading away or posting a lot less frequently. I am probably amongst a minority, but I don’t visit TheMittani.com very often. I do like some of the articles, for example when they take a look at the upcoming destroyers or review other games. The book reviews are pretty good. I don’t give a hoot for the 0.0 news though, which makes up a big part of the site (at least in my mind).

Apparently though a lot of people seem to like the site, it has lots of content all tucked in a nice place. I do believe there is still more than enough room for personal blogs like this one. Would an article appear on The Mittani’s front page where a small gang kills a retriever on a sunday night ops in a C4 system ? I don’t think so. So where else would I post such an article ? You might argue that no one cares about it, so write about it ? That is an interesting  questions. It all comes down to a blogger’s personal motivation.

Is the Eve Blogosphere doomed ?

The intention for this blog (from 2005 on !) has always been to make it a bit of a  diary of an ‘ordinary’ pod pilot. There are no glorious articles here, not very often very revealing insights, just tales of what can happen or what people do in Eve. And from time to time comments on what direction CCP is going or what I do like about an expansion or hate about it. There is still a lof of room for blogging in Eve. Maybe blogging in general isn’t as popular as in the best days of the Eve Blog Pack. Maybe there are less people now than back then that care to start a blog and write about their experiences. It would be a shame to see the Blog Pack go though, but maybe it has served it’s purpose and it’s time to move on. I do think that EveBloggers.com still serves great service though, I sure hope that will continue to exist in some form. I would have to have to fire up the old Google reader again !

BB 40 : eSports and Eve

We got an interesting subject for this blog banter :

Fresh from publishing the community spotlight on the EVE blogosphere and Blog Banters, CCP Phantom has suggested a banter focus on competitive tournaments.

There is no finer spectacle in the universe of EVE Online than the explosive dance of weapon-laden spaceships in combat. The yearly Alliance Tournament is the jewel in EVE Online’s eSports crown and the upcoming New Eden Open should deliver the same gladiatorial entertainment showcase.

Given the scope of the sandbox, what part should eSports play in EVE Online and what other formats could provide internet spaceship entertainment for spectators and participants alike?

First let’s take a look at what is eSports to me. With eSports I think of FPSes like Counter Strike, League of Legends and my personal favourite Starcraft II. Especially League of Legends is growing very rapidly. That is probably mainly because it is sich a low threshold game. Anyone with a half decent PC can download it and play. Which gives them at least a basic understanding of what is going on in the game.

Starcraft was eSports no. 1, but it might be dwindling a little lately, not in the least because of a lot of drama in that scene, and the game becoming a little stagnant. I am not very familiar with the FPS eSport scene, but if you do it’s not very hard to follow what the point is, it is to shoot each other with guns.

Starcraft 2 Pros

To be honest I don’t think Eve belongs in the eSports category. It’s very hard to follow for an outsider. What is the fun of the Eve tournament ? It’s the various setups and fittings teams will bring to the arena, the variety (or lack thereof), the speculation, what if Team A brought eWar instead of DPS etc etc.. Believe me when I say that I love the Alliance Tournament to bits, and it’s always a fun period in Eve around that time. Hanging around in various chat channels and the last few years on Twitter is great. And I guess it’s as close to eSports as Eve has to offer, but it’s such a niche game and not very accessible to the general public, nor is it that great to watch (orbiting spaceships and / or blue and red pluses) that I don’t think Eve has much to do with eSports.

Having said that, the question was what part should eSports play in EVE Online. Besides the yearly Alliance Tournament, my very short answer would be None. I don’t really see the point of the $10.000 tournament. I might be watching it a little, but I don’t really care about it, and I am not really opposed to it either. The pretty high threshold to enter, using an auction and all that doesn’t seem very fair to me, but if they want to go that route, it’s up to CCP. I guess they want to remove some plex out of the economy.

Some other form of eSports would be a wow battleground type of thing I guess ? Arenas and the like ? Well that kind of thing wouldn’t fit at all in Eve, it just doesn’t feel right to me and I hope it will never get to that.

Here are some more blog banters:

E-Sports Punditry to follow:

Cat and Mouse

It was an interesting evening in our wormhole last night. A corporation in our Static C4 was moving out their stuff through our hole into hisec. Unfortunately they already killed one of our pilgrims. It seemed to be a corporation with relatively new pilots. Slowly people on our side started to log  on, as it was about the time we were supposed to get ready for our C4 excursion into the C4, but it turned out to be a pvp night.

We had some kind of plan to lure them out. I can’t remember the exact details, but it worked as a (new) pilgrim engaged them on our side of the C4. But coms were somewhat confusing, and people weren’t in the right place at the right time. Furthermore they suddenly had a few new ships on the field we didn’t expect, and that added to the confusing. Only the before mentioned fresh pilgrim died.

After this we reorganized a little better and set up on the hisec hole. Three more engagements followed, but they stayed on the hole and jumped back, a few times it was pretty close and ships jumped backed into hisec well into armor. Including mine, as I was being called primary in the second engagement. We did kill an executioner and a slasher, unfortunately the rest got away, the wormhole collapsed a little later.

In their C4 there was only the tower left (with it’s forcefields still turned on) and the ship hangar. We switched to battleships and decided to take some shots at the tower, just to see what would happen. Well nothing much happened, they managed to get some more stuff out using a Crane and a few other cloaky ships. One really weird thing though, one guy started self destructing his ships. Apparently he thought their pos would be destroyed any minute and started to blow up all of his own ships. Two brutixes, two Thalos, and an assortment of smaller stuff. Even a CovOps cloaky that he could have easily used to scan himself out. Rather odd behavior indeed ! Once the shields were at 90% we called it a day.

All in all an entertaining evening. I never shot at a POS before so that’s one more thing I can scratch off the list :). A C2 with a hisec exit is convenient, and it does bring in some interestting traffic at times. I wouldn’t pick a weekend to move stuff through a hole though, chances are a lot higher that people will notice you and want to shoot at you.

Eve Is Pretty

There was some Eve News this week, most notably the blogpost on the new flag / aggression system aka. Crime Watch. It already has a 37 page thread (as I write this) of comments on the forums, with some sensible and some not so sensible feedback ! A nice article on these changes is on the Mittani’s website.

At the moment I don’t have that much to blog about, everything is going well in our hole (and my small industrial endeavors outside) ! So I’ll just post these pretty shots :). Can’t go wrong with screen shots !

Drakes prior to the missile nerf

Mining some sweet Arkanor
One of the prettiest ships in all of Eve (imho) the Legion

Economics of video games

There is  a very interesting article on the economics of video games in the Washington Post.

For all intents and purposes, this is an economy that has activity equal to a small country in real life,” Guðmundsson says. “There’s nothing ‘virtual’ about this world.

Nothing really new, but it’s a nice read anyway.

Mining Revisited

Ever since the Mining barges were revamped, I have been (afk) mining quite a bit. There is something tranquil about mining and later on, selling ships you have build with rocks you mined yourself is quite satisfying. Not to mention the fact you can catch up with tv episodes you missed while doing so.

With rocks like these, I cannot NOT mine them !

Shame the iceprices took such a dive. But I am using the ice to produce fuel blocks with PI farmed from the wormhole. If you sell these at places where you don’t have that many competitors, you can ask a bit more than Jita prices, but sales are a little slower.

Ice Fields can be beautiful !

Since there are quite a few miners about now, you have to study dot.lan a bit to find decent belts. It’s not uncommon to only see a few pieces of plag and veld left in a belt these days.

Happy mining all :).