Morphisat's Blog

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 51st edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
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EVE Online can be a game of heart-pounding, palm-sweating, adrenaline-fuelled ecstasy or agony. Sometimes over the years those reactions dim and what was once a panic inducing situation becomes commonplace routine. For some, the shakes never go away.

From Druur Monakh (Twitter: @DruurMonakh) we get the topic of this banter: what was your most nail-biting experience in EVE Online so far? It could be PvP in a 1v1 or 1000v1000, your first fight or your latest one, a scam so close to being uncovered too soon, a trap almost sprung on an unsuspecting victim or the roles reversed and you desperately try to escape.

After all these years it is kind of hard to single out a single experience. In general though I am in the ‘shakes never go away’ camp. I did a lot more pvp when Factional Warfare first started out and when I got back into it a few times after that. Somehow the magic that was in those first few months, the atmosphere, the comradely never returned. We roamed around in decent sized fleets and had quite a few nail biters, my best time in the game PVP wise by far. The taking down of a Bhaalgorn, which was a big deal back then was quite exciting. Also one of my better blog posts, if I may say so myself. And I can handle myself in a fleet. Once solo though I get so nervous, I forget to turn on my armor reppers. Overheating ? Might as well never have trained it… And so forth.

By some sort of miracle I have never been caught in our wormhole doing sites. Sometimes I am really on the edge of my seat, pressing the scanner every couple of seconds and feeling the pressure of the unknown that might be lurking out there. Other times I get very relaxed and forget about the scanner and just pretend it’s a level 4 mission in hisec. Which is not what I should be doing, but hey it happens .

Once something does pop up on the scanner though, usually probes, but if I remember well, I have seen a Proteus, Loki and a Pilgrim on scan, the feeling of panic and or shock I have never experienced in any other game. I usually just scramble to my tower and hide. It’s really weird to be worried about my character and my 40mil isk drake. Someone should do a psychological study about that !

May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young

– Bob Dylan

Other participants can be found at The Shakes

With the Rubicon expansion being announced and the SOMER Blink scandals (or non-scandals depending on your point of view) that have erupted on the community at the same time, it truly feels like an age of EVE has passed and a new one is dawning.

But which direction is it going? This blog banter can be about several different topics:

– where do you think EVE is going? Is it a good or bad vision ahead?

– if you were EVE’s new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?

– What comes (or should come) after Rubicon in terms of the mechanics and ship balancing we’ve seen? (CSM8 not allowed to answer this one!)

– Is there anything in EVE’s ten year past that should be resurrected? Or buried and forgotten?

– What is the future of the community? What should or should not change?

First of all, let’s stop endorsing Eve gambling sites and let the community itself decide what sites and/or services they like. The PR department has too much power, let them leave the game alone.

Having said that, let’s focus on the game. One of the big problems I see with Eve is that there are a few separate games going. There is the 0.0 power blocks / politics game, and there is highsec PVE / industry, wormhole exploration and PVP (including Factional Warfare) in losec. Somehow these should be more united. Maybe make it easier for smaller entities to enter 0.0, make losec more worthwhile to go there, and give pirates something to shoot at. Problems is, I don’t really see the answer. But that is where I would like to take the game. This is about as vague as CCP approach though.

We got the very vague speech on where we’re going from the senior producer a few times now, about more player build things and going where no one has gone before, but I am not quite sure she even knows what that means. The player constructed POCOs are apparently a first step in this direction… I’ll take a  ‘wait and we’ll see’ approach there.

The community is fine, though the time where blogs were king and we initially had the blogpack going was fun. Every pilot and their dog had a blog, and it felt like a happy family of bloggers. Fun times ! But that won’t come back. #tweetfleet on twitter has the same sort of feeling to it, so that’s nice. Times change .

The other participants can be found at BB#50 – Changes

Blog Banter Page

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 49th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.

What is “rich” in EVE? Is it simply having more ISK than most everyone else, is it measured in raw numbers of some other ethereal quality? Can you actually be poor? Have you ever lost nearly everything and had to claw your way back? If you are rich, how do you know and how did you get rich?

There are two types of players, those who see Isk as a means to get to their goal, and those that see Isk as the ultimate goal in game. They play to see their wallet / assets grow, the other group uses said Isk to buy ships and blow them up.

Ok it’s probably not that black and white, but most players would probably fit on one of these two groups. Rich for me in Eve is when you can easily afford the equipment you would like to buy and can replace all your gear without breaking your own bank.

If you have been playing for quite a while, ISK starts piling up. So do all the assets to be honest. I mainly kill sleepers and do PI in our wormhole to get my income these days. Before that I ran missions, and made a bit of isk on the side, inventing T2 drones and various modules. Never on a large scale though. Think the largest run of drones I made was about 100. There are people out there who have several production / invention alts and produce 1000. So those people will be richer than I am.

However it’s still gratifying to see your stuff being sold, and see your wallet grow, even after all these years. When I started out back in 2005, everybody was pretty much poor, compared to today’s standard. People had to save for a battleship, think I had to run endless Level 3 missions to finally be able to afford a raven and so on. Never lost it all though, I might have lost a mission ship once and had to drop down a level in order to replace it, but that’s about it.

Reading the various participants entries it seems Isk and being rich is very relative in Eve. And that’s probably the only conclusion you can make from this blog banter .