Just like almost every EveBlogger, I have to express the sadness I feel over the death of Sean Smith aka. Vile Rat. I never met him, but knew him as CSM 6 member and Goon diplomat. He had a big hand in shaping Eve, as it is now.
And the circumstances under which he died makes his death all the more tragic. I hadn’t expected to feel so sad as I do now, I got this weird ‘One of us died‘ feeling that I didn’t expect to have.
A big devblog was posted today on the upcoming winter balance update ! It’s too much to go through all of these, all I am saying is, the new Stabber and Vagabond models look awesome :). Oh and will the new Griffin be overpowered ? It looks very strong especially compared to it’s tier brethren. Also logi frigs will be fun, though they’ll always be the 1st to go down in a fight.
Anyway, the Eve opportunist did a nice write-up, check it out !
Time flies when you’re having fun ! It’s a little less than 2 months since I joined the 20 minuters and started moving into a wormhole. It’s got it’s pros and cons, but so far, it has certainly revived my Eve-Play ! There is so much more to do, more sites to run, more jumping around (think our exit has been in all 4 corners of hisec now) etc etc..
Anyway, this weekend I discovered a new way (well for me anyway) to make isk in a wormhole. I wanted to run a few sites this weekend in the hole and when I started scanning I noticed some activity near our C4 entrance. I saw an iteron V and a hoarder jumping through. They were using our hole to pass through to hisec ! I scanned down the hisec exit, and sat there cloaked. Another industrial jumped back into our hole, I uncloaked and took a pot-shot at it, but it warped off before I hit anything. I logged on an alt who was in a ship with a point and planted her near the entrance.
You would think that the one pilot that was shot at warned his corp mates, but strangely enough not short there after an Itty V entered the system. This time I could tackle it, and it of course jumped back to hisec. Suddenly in local, a guy with a similar name appeared, obviously a cloaky alt who asked for a deal to pass through since they had some stuff ‘of no value to you‘ to pass through our system to their C4. Needless to say I responded with ‘make me an offer I can’t refuse’. Well he did and we even had a nice chat while they were transporting their stuff through our hole. I made more than what I would have made had I run a few sites.
As I mentioned earlier we also have do excursions into other holes. Last night we entered a C5 for the first time. It was definitely doable with 3 outstanding Basilisk pilots, a few battleships and a handful of drakes. The C5 had a lot of active POSes in it, but the inhabitants were probably from the US timezone also indicated by http://www.wormhol.es (great intel site btw). Only saw a legion briefly on scan, but that was about it. This morning I checked the wormhole system again on dotlan and apparently there had been some brawl in that very hole later that night. Glad we didn’t run into that merry band of T3 cruisers :).
“Some say a man’s home is his castle. For others it is wherever they lay their hat. The concept is just as nebulous in the New Eden sandbox.
In EVE Online, what does the concept of “home” mean to you?”
In my Eve life there are a few spots I have considered my home over the past almost seven years. First the system I started in, close to Sobaseki. But when you start out you don’t really have a lot of stuff yet, though you think you do ;).
I can’t quite remember what we based out of when I was in Eve Uni, but I don’t think it mattered much. You just moved your frig and cruiser somewhere and that was that. When I joined Rakeriku, we were based out of Kaunokka. This was the first place I would consider my home in Eve. We did missions and mining ops from here (although dot.lan claims it has no belts ?). We build our very first freighter there. And I think we had our first war there as well.
Old school mining op – Kaunokka (?)
Later on we moved to Sivala, it wasn’t busy there at the time, and there was an excellent level 4 mission agent for Sukuuvestaa Corporation down there. Years later there would be at least 100 people in local at peak times ! And most of ships and gear is still there after all these years, and using the station / lab / production facilities next door in Uedama, which you might know for it’s infamous gankers at the Sivala gate.
The few months I lived in 0.0 we rented out in Wicked Creek. It never felt like home though, was overrun way too many times.
Lightning up a cyno in Wicked Creek
When I joined Hidden Agenda, there wasn’t really a need to move all my stuff. Their HQ for events was not that far off, and mining ops and mission running and other activities weren’t always at the same spot, so I had just some gear scattered around.
And now since about a month I also live in a wormhole ! It’s amazing how fast that started to feel like home. I am liking it more than I had expected. But I still have the need every now and then to truck back to Uedama, do some industry stuff, and head back into our little hole. It’s nice to have two homes actually !
Inferno 1.2 was released about 2 weeks ago and we can see the huge impact the revamped mining barges have had on Ice prices. Apparently this is a much ‘faster’ market as the price of Trit and other ore has not moved much.
As you can see, Caldari Ice is especially tanking, with some Ice Belt systems have over 250 in local. Everybody and their uncle seems to have an alt in the icebelts now ;). Our enthusiastic iceminers and / or consumers are also trying to use the isotopes to build fuel blocks. Most POS fuel related PI products are steadily climbing in price.
The machinaw is now the miner’s choice of ship. Of course the Hulks that are out in the game won’t instantly disappear, but people are keen on getting a flying 35 m2 ore bay !
It’ll take some time before the markets settle, and the other ores will start dropping as well. Unless something happens that will make the demand for trit and the lower ores go up.
Regular readers of this blog probably wonder ‘wtf is Morph doing in the Drone Regions !‘. Well it just so happens it was an involuntary roam through 2 wormholes and we ended up in Perrigen Falls.
But let me start at the beginning. The alliance does wormhole ops, usually sites in a neighboring C4 on Sunday nights. I have been participating for over a month now, and these usually go by uneventfully, except maybe a probe or two on dscan, or someone sitting at a POS in an Iteron III. But last night we saw some activity before the op went down. Two cov ops scanning ships and a scan frig. But we decided to give it a try anyway and then once we hit the third site, a Dominix, Scorpion and an Apocalypse popped up on the directional scanner. My first instinct was to immediately warp towards our exit hole, but our FC shouted ‘STAY STAY’, so I managed to stop my warp just in time. Which was a good thing, as it turned out, they were collapsing our exit hole to our home system !
This links is a link to a post by Tigerears from November 2011, and early this week I somehow came across this excellent tutorial. I feel a bit noobish that I didn’t know about the ALT key earlier ! Tried it out last night and it saves so much time ! So here we go :
Yes yes I know Inferno 1.2 is out now, but I had this one planned after I read the CSM minutes last week.
In the CSM 7 minutes of last week we can read about CCP’s new ideas for Starbases. Starbases will be replacing the current POSes. The current POS code is very buggy (oh rly ?) and the new code will replace that codebase. There will be a transient periode where POSes and starbases will coexist, but the current POSes will be removed at some point.
So what ideas did CCP have ? Here we go:
New POS structures
1) A sense of ownership. New POSes should be “space housing”, with players feeling that, “a starbase is their starbase, not a generic starbase.” This includes some form of customization
2) Scalability. They need to scale from individual to alliance sized.
3) Get rid of the force field bubble, partly for technical reasons.
4) A single structure. This doesn’t preclude some sort of modular system, but they want a
single actual object in space, partly for technical reasons, partly for usability.
5) They want a path to retire the current starbase system. This may not happen in the first
release, but eventually a new starbase system should comple ely replace the current starbase system. This means that everything that current starbases can do either needs to be replicated in the new system or removed from the game.
6) (added later on by CCP Masterplan) The current starbase system code is not the best, full of lots of edge cases, and the new one is a chance to greatly simplify things, similar to what CCP is currently doing with Crimewatch.
A lot of interesting ideas here ! And maybe some not so well thought out ones. These are just concepts though, nothing is set in stone yet, it’s still very early in the design stage. I really like the concept behind the new starbases, a home away from home, sort of like player housing in LOTRO or EQ2, but in space. Modular and scalable sounds good as well of course.
However, no shields and a docking module sounds like bad news. As also mentioned in the minutes, there has to be a way to see / check what’s happening outside your starbase. In case you’re camped with no shields, you’re just stuck in your station with no where to go. And who wants docking games at POSes ?
The other idea to being able to plant these where ever in space (with the exception of stargates and stations) will need some rethinking. Remember in Star Wars Galaxies you could plant houses anywhere. Every big city (Mos Eisley, Naboo) was surrounded by a big ring of houses, people wanted to live close to where the action is. Imagine this in the space near Amarr, Jita, Dodixie ! Think we’ll lag to hell and back again ;).
So I’d say overall it’s a nice new direction, but back to the drawing board on some issues !
Patchnotes for Inferno 1.2 – very lengthy patch notes. Besides the mining barges change, ‘attack frigates’ are changed as well amongst a lot of other things
In his recent “That’s just the way it is” post on Jester’s Trek, blogger Ripard Teg posits that the established EVE player-base has come to accept many of EVE’s design idiosyncrasies, rarely questioning their purpose or benefit. Conversely, he also suggests that new players might not be so forgiving of these “quirks”. In an interview with Gamasutra, Senior Producer CCP Unifex describes EVE Online’s developers as “relatively hands-off janitors of the virtual world”, underlining that he has only four content developers but “a lot” of programmers and engineers.
Has a culture developed where CCP has started to take player effort for granted – expecting the “social engine” to fulfil tasks that might otherwise be CCP’s responsibility? Or should this culture be embraced as part of “emergent gameplay” with these quirks accepted as the catalyst for interaction?
Eve’s idiosyncrasies are part of it’s charm. Whether they are appreciated by new players I don’t know. There are still players coming and going so I guess there are still people who can get over the learning curve. And let’s face it, a lot has been done over the past years to make Eve a more comfortable place for the new player. The new wiki is also very nice. I don’t see anything wrong with players turning to player created info (like blogs or the excellent Eve Uni Wiki) for extra info. Hell, eve warcraft has Wowhead. I don’t see anything wrong with that. It also leads to players looking for Player Run Corporations sooner since that’s where you learn the most.
A lot of these infamous Eve idiosyncrasies are being fixed in the past two expansion, and there is team papercuts. Also some effort is being made to make some things in Eve more convenient (like the inventory hehe). Market search will improve in the next major update for example.
