And here it is, the Succubus I won ! It’s a very nice looking frig, if you like odd spikes coming off the front end. It’s got a bit of a cockroach vibe going ;). I armed it with 2x medium pulses and a bit of a shield tank, with quite a bit of power and cpu to spare. It’s very powerful due to the bonuses. At least the few belt rats I tried it on (in hisec mind you) dropped like flies.
We had a sunday night of corp activities. It started of with the always fun Free For All in frigs and destroyers. Last time my kestrel got popped very fast, and the rifter in the second round only did a little bit better (at least I took someone with me). This time I decided to leave Morph at home and go with Belautis in a punisher. And this time I was more successful. Lasted a lot longer in the FFA, after taken two tristans and tanking a destroyer I finally went down.
Next up was a 6 vs 6 cruiser fight ! Our side won after a very nice battle. I used a tanked Arbitrator, which worked reasonably well, but I was a bit out of range for the start of the fight and had trouble to catch up. But it was enjoyable nevertheless.
The last part of the night was a ladder frigate tournament, with about 18 people, the other main corp in our alliance joined us. And surprisingly I made it to the final ;). The most intense fight was with a blaster fit incursus. It was a pretty fast fight, both speeding to the center and taking each other head on ! I made it with about 20% armor left.
The final unfortunately was a bit of a snoozefest for the spectators. It was punisher vs. punisher, and I couldn’t reach the other one, as I had a afterburner and he used an mdw (i assume). As I figured it would be fair to let him win, as I was the one who couldn’t reach him, I conceded and took the second price, a faction frig, the succubus !
All in all a very enjoyable evening. And thanks to the people in Hidden Agenda and Iniquitous Technologies for making it happen !
And the prices keep coming in, I won 1st place in the fanfiction contest, goddlesswanderer organized on his blog !
So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to Dal
It was late last year, when I got tired of war. Of killing. Of podpilots around me being killed. Of the life of a minmatar freedom fighter. I enlisted to help my people, and to be honest some part of me also was looking for recognition. Trying to make a name for myself.
After months of fighting though, I felt empty inside. We took over some systems, killed quite a few Amarr religious zealots, but still… It didn’t seem to make a difference.
It was then that I decided this wasn’t the life for me. I contemplated about going back to my old job, a mammoth freighter trucker. Maybe do some missions for the Republic Fleet every now and then and use my combat skills for at least a somewhat good cause.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but late in the fall of last year, that’s what I did. One day I silently left Dal, my war homebase and picked up my old trusty Mammoth in Rens and never looked back. Or at least that’s what I thought.
And that’s when it started, the nightmares. Visions even more horrible than what I ever saw in the war. Not sure how my mind came up with those ! It started with only one a week, but it got worse as time went slowly by.
Till it got to the point where I didn’t dare to go to sleep again. And during the day it was like there was a dark cloud over me. I couldn’t find any joy in whatever I did, and kept thinking of the friends I left behind. Roc Wieler, Angry Fist, Stoogie. What happened to them ? And how were they coping ? The thought that I let my people down, and betrayed my heritage kept popping up in my mind.
Then it struck me:
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way
This was not my purpose as a pod pilot ! I had to get back to Dal and back into the war.
And that’s what I did. And weird enough from the moment I signed on again, the nightmares were gone. Some sort of inner peace came over me inside the turmoil of the war. I found my destiny again, and hope I will never loose it.
Disclaimer: My first effort at fanfiction for Godlesswanderer’s contest, please be gentle :).
The regular Eve Production life was getting a bit stale again, you can get excited about Hammerhead II sales only so many times. So to spice things up a bit I reactivated my Factional Warfare Character Q.
And I must say things have changed a bit since I left in the fall of last year. FW on the amarr – minmatar side is still pretty active. There certainly arent a lack of targets like when I left last year. The amarr put together a pretty large fleet Sunday night. It was amusing, as there were about three minnie fleets roaming around. But a few times we crossed paths and that’s when we were spotted I think. They must have thought that we were one big blob and decided to all group up.
Anyway I was in a few fights over the weekend, nothing spectacular, and dodged at least one camp in my vexor. I saw some old familiar faces and quite a few new ones. Learned some new terms (I am being yellowboxed was one of ‘em). And found out that battleships are more common in FW now.
Then it sort of struck me what a different game this is, compared to running a few missions and mining a few hours in an Orca. The fights are exciting. The banter on EveSpeak is amusing. Adrenaline rush when you jump into a camp and manage to loose ‘em. I am glad I took this step, it was fun to be back again, and hope it will stay that way ;).
Thanks to a tweet from CK I found this article on yougamers.com. Apparently Eve Online has now passed the 300.000 subscriber mark ! Very remarkable for a 6 year old game (gratz to CCP !). CCP keeps reinventing Eve and added a new graphical engine by the end of 2007 with the Trinity expansion to keep current players busy and attract new players.
Now of all those 300k subs, how many actual players would that be ? A lot of people have more than one character/account. But it’s still a very impressive feat, as it’s battling against games from bigger companies, like Age of Connan and Warhammer. Although one could argue those try to target a different audience. And there must be plenty of players that can actually afford more than one game. Eve seems to have somewhat older players with a higher income than your average teenagers.
Eve Online Beats Warhammer Online Subscription Numbers
That would put EVE Online as the number two western MMO on the market when you count by the number of active monthly subscriptions. EVE Online is surpassed only by a couple of Asian titles (Lineage, Lineage II, Final Fantasy IX and Runescape) and, naturally, by World of Warcraft.
The eveblog banter couldn’t come at a better time. I felt like posting something the past few days but couldn’t come up with a proper subject to write about.
The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read!
This month’s topic comes to us from CrazyKinux, and he asks: “What 3 things haven’t you done in EVE and why? Would you be willing to try one day? Why so? Why not?â€
1) Flying capital ships. The Orca is the biggest one I can fly at the moment, and I don’t thin that will ever change. I almost exclusively live in Hisec, and have no plans to change that soon, so I have no use for them at all. Also they are quite expensive, and so are the skills. I got isk, but can’t be bothered to spend that much on something I will probably never use.
2) Fleet warfare in 0.0. Which is probably just hanging around a lot, or jumping from system to system for hours, only to fight for about 5mins. No thanks.
3) Invent / produce something bigger than a T2 cruiser. I might do this someday, maybe invent and produce a marauder. Don’t have any immediate plans to do this at the moment, but I might some day :).
From what I read so far, no. 1 is pretty common, so is no. 2. Are there any bloggers actually involved in 0.0 wars ? Don’t read a lot about that, maybe the eve bloggers are a different kind :).
People participating in blog banter #7:
This past week I finally found a few useful radar sites. The magnometric ones are very crappy. If you’re lucky you get 50k of bounties and a few salvage bits and pieces. The radar ones are handy though, you get the invention decryptors that you can either sell, or use for your own invention jobs. The gravimetric ones can be nice, as long as it’s not a small belt, the rocks are so tiny in there, they pop with almost one hulk cycle.
As you can see below on the somewhat spooky image, I also found a large kernite / omber belt that we mined clean ! And when I say large I am not kidding. The omber rocks were of the gold and silver variety and all had 30k omber in them. The kernite wasn’t too bad either.
Now with Apocrypha 1.1 though, scanning has become a bit of a chore. The new sphere graphics literally make my eyes hurt after a while :(. That’s a shame, because the other improvements, like the id tag, are very nice. I hope they reverse that decision. How that ever made it past Q&A is beyond me to be honest. Just use it for a while and you’ll see that it’s not exactly an improment. Same goes for the POS shields by the way…
This is going live on April 16th ! Huge list of fixes and ‘enhancements’. The ECM change is coming as well. I am curious how that is going to work out.
Stealth Bombers are changed too :
So stealth bomber become anti – battleship / battlecruiser. You’d need quite a few to take one down though ? I wonder if they’re going to be used more, to be honest I seriously doubt it.
There are a few sound fixes, but I don’t think that’s going to fix the real issue, which is that the entire sound system is seriously broken. I much prefer it, if they would just put the old sound engine back in. At least I could hear my mining lasers !
Patchnotes are here and the discussion thread is over here.
Update Oops, there is a fix to turrent sounds and the like:
Sound levels for turret fire, explosions, jumpgates and effects have had their levels adjusted and will be heard in all their glory.
At the moment I don’t have a lot of exciting adventures to blog about. Or any exciting news, like taking over the Eve Galaxy ;). But in response to Eve’s weekend warrior’s weekend’s summary, I thought I’d write something like that as well.
Mainly I have been doing production ! And not the very exciting wormhole T3 kind. I did my first dabbling into T2 ship production. My first few Cerberuses I produced sold like hotcakes for 125mil, right after apocrypha. Enthusiastically I produced some more, inventions were a big success, using a prototype diagram helps ! It also gets you a better bpc as the ME get to –2 instead of –4 and saving a lot of materials needed. Unfortunately the next batch didn’t sell that well, but I got rid of em in the past few weeks at lower prices. I have put that project on hold for now. It’s quite a bit of work getting all the parts (and subparts I also produce some of them myself now), and with margins getting slimmer, it’s not that interesting anymore.
Also still producing Hammerhead IIs and Ogre drones. There always seems to be a demand for those. And I still mine and produce some drakes and ravens. These days I cruise around in my hawk to find decent belts. I have moved my orca and hulk to Sinq Laison as Caldari space has it’s belts usually cleared out very fast.
Haven’t seen a lot of wormhole action yet, though I still scan from time to time, but haven’t had much luck lately. Only found a few Deadspace plexes that were good for a few million bounties and not much else.
So that’s it, not very exciting, but I am still out there, playing the game in a very relaxed way. Thats what I love about Eve, you can make it as exciting as you want :).
One more comment on Apocrypha:
As we all know, this is one tool every ‘serious’ eve player (and even the non serious ones) can’t do without ! Even though it’s numbered a minor update (1.26 –> 1.27), it looks like a good upgrade.
Two nice new features:
CCP announced that there will be api support for the skill queue, so I hope that will make it into an upcoming release of Evemon as well.
You can find evemon at http://evemon.battleclinic.com/changelog.html