Hidden Agenda Dibs Race

On Sunday night we had a fun corp event, a dibs race around the galaxy in shuttles ! At each location there was a nice price to be had, of course you would only find out after winning the Dibs on a location. Clicking on a contract never was so much fun !

The way it was set up, was that the 15 or so that participated undocked and sprinted to the nearest location. About half way a new location would be announced and shortly after that a third. There would be three active locations almost all the time. So you had to make the decision whether you kept on going to your original destination or change half way. A few times a destination was announced that everybody passed through a bit before, ensuing in lots of cursing in chat and vent !

dibs_race

It was quite hilarious when someone yelled DIBS as they arrived in a station as first, other people would go ‘omg I was 2j away !’ and so forth. Once DIBS was called you had to wait in the station for the second round. So everybody won something in the end. The last person in round 1 had to make 26j to Berta to claim a price which was extremely funny and left me plenty of time to get me some coffee !

So how did I do ? I arrived first at Gelfiven IX and won me an Amarr transport ship. Which is nice as Belautis can almost fly it, only need amarr industrial V, and with the learning skill reset coming up that shouldn’t be too hard. For round 2 I just waited until a destination in Minmatar space was announced so I could be there fast. At Anstard VI I won a set of Battlecruiser blueprints, which is always good to have.

Thanks to Ruffio and Cattis for setting this up and making this a fun corp event ! It must have been a lot of work preparing this, hope you enjoyed it as much as most of the corporation members who participated did Smile.

Fifth Anniversary

Exactly five years ago, Morphisat started his career as a pod pilot. Now 67 mil skill points and a few corporations later I am posting about his fifth anniversary. Lots has changed since when I started, we didn’t have drakes, hulks, but we had learning skills :). Speaking of skill points, I haven’t much of a clue what to spend them on these days, so I am doing level 5s of stuff like gunnery-related skills and invention skills. I guess this is the point where you start investing your skills into Capital ships, but since I will probably never use one it seems kind of pointless to go that route.

I haven’t been playing much lately, I hope the upcoming Sansha’s invasions will be interesting enough to log on every now and then. I have a bit of a ‘been there, done that’ feeling towards Eve at the moment and only have the Morphisat account active.

Starcraft II and Wow are keeping me busy, amongst other things right now. I am still following all the Eve news though, through twitter and blogs.

ps. Incursion 1.0 is coming next tuesday !

Eve Report

A few posts ago I wrote a small post on catching up with the news. Well there is another very nice website called The Eve Report that has a lot of good news and interesting articles. Check it out at http://www.evereport.com.

The EVE Report is a test for what I am calling a “Community Blog”, the idea is that anyone can signup and post on this blog. The only requirements are that the content be related to EVE Online.

The website even looks very appealing :). The first eve reports podcast went up early november. Caroline sure seems to be a busy person !

You can also follow the eve report on twitter to get updates when something new is up.

November Bugfix Release

As we can read in yet another new devblog Incursion will be released in parts. The first part that will be released in November will contain mainly balance and bug fixes it seems :

  • 80 new story line courier missions
  • Rocket balancing
  • Tech 2 ammo balancing
  • Adding faction ships to the market
  • Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
  • Anti-aliasing support
  • Window resizing, camera offset
  • Meta-item indicator icons
  • UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
  • Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
  • Toggling probes in overview
  • POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
  • Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
  • Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Mind you, this isn’t written in stone, so some things might not be in it. To be honest, although it is a bit disappointing to not see real new stuff until January when the second part is supposed to be released, it’s better that the new stuff actually works ;). Wonder how the CCP PR machine will spin this though. The lack of a trailer so far makes me think they will start promoting the January release rather than the November one.

Public Quests In Eve

In the latest blogpost, called the nation strikes back, CCP Ytterbium explains a bit how the Sansha Invasions in the upcoming Incursion expansion will work. It looks somewhat interesting and it reminds me a lot of Warhammer’s public quests. Only there is one big exception:

To players in the fleet that participated the most in the site in question; if there is more than one fleet in a site, others won’t be paid. CONCORD only rewards the most effective capsuleers. If you are not ready to face the competition, we recommend you either merge your fleets together, or spread out to other unchecked sites.

The fun of the public quests in warhammer (if I remember correctly, it’s been a while) was that you could just join in and everybody got rewarded according to some sort of formula of who did the most damage and a random draw. In the Eve system, the fleet that did the most damage will be rewarded, other people who happened to join won’t get anything. So basically your fleet has to be there first, other wise there is no point to participate. I don’t really like that design descision.

On the other hand, I never thought an experience in Warhammer Online would be relevant to Eve. The rewards will likely be interesting, a Concorde LP store ! Only capital mod blueprints are mentioned in the blogpost.

This was one of the first blogposts that actually dealt with incursion gameplay. I assume more will follow as the release is getting closer (soon ?).

Catching up on the news

Until now I never really realised that the Eve Newsletter CCP sends out every now and then is quite nice. I haven’t been playing much lately and didn’t follow the Eve news all that much, before that I always thought ‘meh, already knew that’.

It includes a summary of all the devblogs and some more headlines. Looks like I got some catching up to do !

http://www.eveonline.com/community/newsletters/vol048.html

Incursion

CCP has sent out a press release today about the upcoming expansion ‘Incursion’. You can find it here.

So what do we get:

– Sansha’s invasions, which seem to be some sort of public quest. Along with that special rewards, wealthy bounties, earning loyalty rewards and high commendation as the press release put it. Rather vague but it sounds interesting.

– New ships, most noticeably a dedicated salvage boat. Since the bpc is only sourced in Outer Ring, it will be rather expensive, especially at first. I was hoping it would be targeted towards new players, since they benefit the most from salvaging their missions and don’t have a marauder yet. But it’s nice to see that very nice hull being used again

– Improvements the CSM came up with. Not quite sure what this will be, but we’ll see. (Update: there is a devblog about these).

– Hardware and infrastructure improvement. Of course these are welcome, but to mention them as part of an expansion is a bit ridiculous. They did this before as well, and I find this as silly now as I did then

– Improvements to EveGate, forums and such. Any improvement is welcome, and forums are nice to have for newer corporations that don’t have their own yet. This makes me wonder why EveGate can’t be improved gradually. Agile is all about releasing little things a time. And since EveGate doesn’t need a client side update, why not improve it gradually. It doesn’t make sense that it’s being improved on the same pace as expansions are released.

– New character avatar builder. Don’t really care about this.

– Improvements to PI. Too little, too late I am afraid. My planets have been withering away since two weeks after the expansion. Way too much clicking for very little reward. Maybe this will be reduced, but I have pretty much already lost interest in PI.

All in all, the pve part sounds interesting, and that’s about it. Nothing to get really excited about, but it’s always nice to have more PVE stuff to do.

The Grind

Casiella at The Eclipse Rift is wondering about the grind in Eve. The first thing that came to my mind was YES, the grind for isk, so you can do other stuff ! When you start out you grind for standings to get better agents and more isk, so you can do higher level missions. Especially from level 3 to 4 was quite a long tedious run from what I can remember. This can be made more bearable if you can join other people’s missions in your corporation so you can standings faster.

These standings are also a requirement for miners, so you can get the best yield when refining. AFAIK these can’t be bought as suggested in the above mentioned blogpost (only corp standings can be boosted for a while, using such a service). And of course you can (legally !) buy isk in Eve using timecards, but I don’t really consider that a fun way to play as it doesn’t give much of a feeling of accomplishment. But it’s a way to get things done.

Any other grinds in Eve ? Well I guess shooting rats in belts can be considered a grind, though when there can be danger lurking in losec or 0.0, it probably doesn’t feel too grindy.