Holy Shit I see local spiking, ladies and gents, it’s technoviking ! :).
Cosmos and the new browser
On the test server amongst a lot of other new goodies, you can preview the new in game browser.
As you can see, it actually displays this blog exactly like it should :). I assume they took some rendering engine like webkit and used that to pull it off. The new blog on cosmos is interesting. Cosmos doesn’t interest me all that much, but the new email client will be such a blessing. The current one is so horrible, it’s not even funny any more ;).
UPDATE : Link to technical devblog on the new browser.
UPDATE2: The new browser presentation @ fanfest : EveOnlineFan Blog
AT7 – Congratulations Pandemic Legion
The last weekend of Alliance Tournament 7 was very enjoyable. I was sitting in a few chat channels discussing the games, and watching Eve TV. The commentary was excellent (except for one match ahum) and the studio guests were interesting.
Pandemic Legion basically wiped the floor, with their stealth bomber, double rook setup, with the competiotion. In the semi final, which lasted a mere 4 minutes, though, they fielded a totally different team. A speed minmatar based DPS heavy team and blew the shield tanked Manifest Destiny to space dust. It was my favorite of the weekend.
The first day had a few too many total helldeath games, not making it too exciting, except for the last two matches of the day. Make sure to check those out on http://www.youtube.com/ccpgames. Most of the second day matches were close and interesting to watch. The final was a bit predictable but executed almost to perfection by PL. Congrats to them !
Update: A writeup by the PL Team on the forum, describing their setups and choices for each match.
AT7 – A mixed bag
Although plagued by some server issues (caused by elephants in the CCP office apparently), the seventh alliance tournament was a big success so far. We saw a mixed bag of awesomeness with a touch of failsauce the past two weekends.
Shield tanked Sins and Megathrons, hero tengus, nighthawks, a lot of destroyers, bombers that failed and bombers that succeeded and drakes slowly dieing. A lot of ISK turning into spacedust.
I followed the matches through new eden radio and their ingame chat channel, and had a lot of fun. People cracking jokes, commenting on the matches, predicting outcome of the games etc. Well done new eden radio team !
Here is a list of some of my favorite matches:
Laconian Syndicate vs The Important Internet Spaceship League
My absolute favorite from this weekend, and maybe of the tournament so far. A real nailbiter ! Kanagawa in his Hero Tengu takes on 4 battlecruisers.
Pandemic Legion vs Indecisive Certainty
When the PL setup was announced against 2 nightmares, I thought they’d be pulverised. But PL showed their piloting skills by locking down the opposition with two rooks and let two manticores and brutixes pound on the nightmares. Very well skilled match
A very close match, 2 Kronos and a damnation vs. 5 T3 ships plus an Oneiros.
Two Rattlesnakes beating up a bunch of marauders
The Fourth District vs Agony Empire
A battlecruiser show down. This one shows why battlecruisers were so successful in this tournament so far.
A very exciting match, showing the power assault frigs can have in capable hands
And that’s it. Check out CCP’s youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/ccpgames. Very much looking forward to next week’s final.
Market Square Heroes
So you trained up your industrial skill, got that production efficiency to 4 or even 5 and bought a few nice BPOs or BPC for your hard earned isk. Or maybe you’re going into the invention field and picked up some datacores from your agents. Now you’ll have to sell your goods otherwise all your efforts would have been futile. And that’s when the time comes that you have to study the market.
Actually the ‘buying the bpos’ might have been a bit too early. You might want to study the market for a niche you can fill before that time.
So far in EVE I have distinguished a few different type of markets. There are the trade hubs, mission hubs and ‘off markets’. Those aren’t really hubs of any kind, but more for people that happen to be in system, or live near that system.
The hubs tend to have slimmer margins but higher volume. Even the difference between two close by hubs can be significant though. For example Rens and Hek and only a few jumps from each other. Yet Hek tends to have higher prices. Also there are more 0.01 market warriors out in Rens. When you put up ammo there, don’t be surprised to find some one else undercutting you by 0.01 within an hour. Jita is the ultimate 0.01 undercutters paradise, unless you want to do daytrading, I wouldn’t go there, unless you want to sell your goods very fast and dump them there on the market.
Pvp gear tends to shift quickly near low sec areas / hubs. I assume these are pirates or Factional Warfare soldiers picking up the goods, like 220mm cannons, T2 ammo, warp disruptors II, warriors II etc. Of course if you’re really gutsy, you can bring your goods to low sec and sell there for higher profits. Fit your industrial with warp stabbers, or buy a blockade runner, and don’t forget to scout for gatecamps ahead ;).
What this all comes down to, is where do you want to sell your goods ? If you’re making a high volume of products, you might want to settle for lower margins and try to sell your stuff at hubs. If your gear is mission oriented, like T2 shield hardeners, ravens, cruise missile launcher II, or ammo, you can settle for lesser volume, but higher margins at a mission hub.
Or you can find an area that doesn’t have a lot of your particular product and try and sell it there for higher margins, and less volume. Or spread your goods around and make a trip in your industrial or freighter ! It all comes down to a good study of the numbers, especially the screen above, will tell you a lot about prices and the volumes that are being sold in your region.
Learn from Joe’s mistakes
Thought this one was blog worthy ;). It’s the log on ad for plexes, part of the ongoing Unholy Rage campaign !
Apocrypha 1.5 Downtime
Enough of all the DUST discussions, let’s focus on the upcoming patch (which is taking a little longer to deploy due to database issues). We’ll see what DUST will bring and what kind of impact it will have on the game.
Looking forward to:
– Small and med rigs. Sniper trashers, speedier rifters / better falloff. The list goes on ;). Also it will be cheaper to rig BCs, which is nice. Ships like a Myrm, Drake and the Cane are so much nicer when they’re equiped with rigs.
– Extra 5ok m3 Ore hold for the Orca
– Factional Warfare lp store. Though it seems the lp rewards for pvp kills are mediocre at best. I assume this is ‘prenerfed’. But running FW missions with the corp might give a lot more lps for goodies from the store.
– FW lag fixes. The ksequencer fix already worked very well for me, but not for all, and not for new players that didn’t know about it. Now that it will be built into the client, I hope it works even better, also considering they extensively tested it on the testserver.
– Mission Story Epic Arc – more content is always nice ! I’ll be starting the caldari arc this weekend I think, will keep an eye on the bug reports though. Hope it works right out of the gate.
Well that’s my summary of patch 1.5 :). Let’s hope the servers will be up soon !
Thoughts on DUST 514
As any eve player with an internet connection already heard, CCP have announced their upcoming FPS/RTS/MMO console game DUST 514. First of all, I don’t own a console, nor am I planning on getting one in the near or distant future.
At first I thought, ok that’s nice, it’s in the eve universe, fine by me. But then the german site Golem.de announced that the game will rely heavily on interaction between the ‘dusties’ and the eve pod pilots.
And that is where I think this game is bound to fail. Will there be enough dust players in the first place to have an impact on the eve universe ? Will these players be interested to make a commitment for months to a corp / alliance ? Will the DUST game be fun if they stay in their starter corp ? And what impact will that have ? Will there be mutual chat channels, and if so, will they be different from the rookie help channel ?
Will this interaction, the merge of communities really happen ? It seems to me that the game will fall or succeed depending on that concept.
To have an outside game have an impact on the Eve universe (and a console game at that) is just a bad idea. But maybe it will all work out and I will have to write a blog post saying that I am wrong in the future ;).
Links:
Forum Thread (the main one, there are plenty of others)
Unholy Rage
What I posted earlier about farmers leaving Eve, has now been officially confirmed in a new CCP blog post by GM Grimmi.
During scheduled downtime on June 22nd a little over 6200 paying accounts were banned in one go.
Wow, that’s a lot more than I could have imagined. That’s a great and bold move by CCP. And it certainly has improved gameplay ! More roids in the belts, more value for your LP and no longer bumping into 12 ravens when undocking in Sivala !
The war against the RMT element continues. We strive towards driving their operating costs to unsustainable levels. Our objective is to get rid of them, plain and simple. They are a heinous nuisance and a serious drawback on our systems and resources. Credit card fraud and account hacking is their game – the recent hacking troubles have been the work of the ISK sellers. They must be driven out and kept out.
Very well said :). Seems like the are determined to keep em out. Let’s hope they will succeed !
Two Screenshots
This first one is from the Fleet Test on the test server. It was an interesting fight. With several caps on the field, and a lot of battleships shooting each other :). The lag wasn’t too bad at all, hope CCP got some useful data. 
This one is a minmatar warfare fleet undocking. 
I am the one in the hurricane ;).