Picture Time!

Inferno Hit today! Here’s pretty pictures!

Others have said, I have said, but EVE still impresses me as the best looking game in the MMO market. Maybe I’m just a sci-fi nerd (I am), maybe I just have a hard-on for the beautiful vastness of space (I do), but years of continual graphical updates and continual content to this game has won me over too.

I didn’t think I liked the Manticore from the previews I saw of it, but I was wrong. Very wrong.

It’s not me, it’s you

Massively, this is, well, just abysmal. I thought Syncaine was just being his typical pot-stirring, self.

I was wrong.

It became clear to me that the author has fuck-all of a clue about the full breadth of the Burn Jita event when I read this reply of his too a commenter:

The thing that gets lost whenever people talk about the goons is that they’re a drop in the bucket. They may be the biggest alliance in EVE, but they’re largely insignificant in terms of individual gameplay.

I played EVE heavily all weekend and much of last week, both with my corp (which was missioning and mining one jump away from Jita) and solo, and never once did I catch even the faintest whiff of those guys.

CCP likes to highlight their larger fleet activities because it shows how impressive the game’s tech and hardware is. And some of the more clueless gaming websites that don’t actually play EVE go “oooh wow, Burn Jita, let’s write that up because it sounds cool and we’ll get page hits,” but the net effect on EVE’s gameplay is minimal. I’m not really trying to convince anyone to play, you either like it enough or you don’t, but not playing because of goons or players like them is making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

I emphasized the portion I found particularly humorous. His reply was about equal in length to the actual article he wrote. An article on what is arguably the biggest event in MMOs that will happen all year, and he dismisses it because he’s either unwilling to go into the reality of the long-term repercussions of this event, or too short-sighted to see it. I like to believe it’s the former, because the myopia would have to be enormous for the later to be true considering the plan has been plastered openly in multiple places, and a reporter for the site should not have any excuse to miss the information.

The bigness of this event is more than just the awesome, and I use that word in the traditional sense, implication of a game studio giving freedom to players and letting us do our own thing within the rules of the world they created. It’s even more than just the ideological impressiveness of a fully realized sandbox game. At the bare-bones, base, individualy-impacting reality of it, it’s part of a large devious plan to make tons of money by driving up prices of highly-sought goods (that means you pay more). I’ve read before that if you dig deep enough, all motives for war are economically driven. In EVE, you just don’t have to dig very far, or even at all. *cough* OTEC *cough*

A devious, multi-headed plot that includes massive warfare in outer-regions, sneaky back-room deals with dubious partners to corner a market, mixed with a declared bounty on all people outside of your group to create a high-demand for your soon to be sole-supply of necessary production goods.

But hey, people are making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

Edit: Here’s a link to give you an idea of the worth of the tech-moon war to the victor, and what a sudden high demand for it’s goods will do. (also fixed a major DERP)

Important Lessons

Last night, I went out to scout some systems in my Buzzard for a corp-mate going to hi-sec with shopping list. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Beach, this is an event similar to when Leonardo DiCaprio and Tilda Swinton go out to pick up the necessities for the inhabitants of their jungle paradise home. Well, in one system I was going ahead to scout, I came out of the gate, in my default cloak.

Some things I was not aware of:

1. Gate cloaks only last 30 seconds.
2. You cannot use a cloaking device once you are targeted.
3. You cannot use a cloaking device to override the gate cloak with your own.

Oh, how three small pieces of information could have made a world of difference for my poor carion-eater-inspired ship. You see, as I was relaying the information to the corp mate who was waiting to see what the status was, my gate cloak dropped, and the enemy sitting on the gate had a sensor booster to insta-lock me and then take me out in just a few short volleys. By the time I realized what was going on, I was into structure, and then quickly saying good-night to my pretty, pretty ship.

After a few moments of cursing and vitriol, I asked in vent what went wrong, and the three listed information points were made clear to me. As well as a good method of (more) safely traveling in a cloaked ship.

Eve is a harsh teacher, and as frustrating as it can be at times, you can usually learn something from every encounter.

 

Molification

Content

Love is a burnin’ thing,
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire

I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher,
And it burns, burn, burns, the ring of fire,
The ring of fire

The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet
I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire ran wild

I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher
And it burns, burn, burns, the ring of fire
The ring of fire

I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire
I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher
And it burns, burn, burns, the ring of fire
The ring of fire

Kill Report

Psh.

I’ll always remember you as killmail, no matter how the world tries to change you.

All about the dubya

“Goblin silly.“

That’s what my daughter would say. If she understood what was going on. Or even if she didn’t. She’s two and inevitably thinks everything is silly.

Having a goal in EVE is good. Some would even say necessary. Playing EVE without a plan is like investing in that property deal your wife’s second cousin told you about at that wedding that time. Possible, but probably not a good idea. Gevlon knows how to aim for a goal and work towards it, with machine-like efficiency and no regard for human needs of decompression and levity. Hell, there’s a lot I agree with the guy on, and truth be told, I think it would be amazing if something like this really happened. Not because I think it would be fun, or even good for the game, but because it would be amazing just to see.

Much as the Jita Burns escapade is interesting because it highlights the greatness of what you can do in a sandbox, universal space Empire of Null Sec is of the same ilk, only with more grandeur. It’s the aspiration of the Roman empire, in digital spaceship form. A Pax Goblina across all current null-sec space. But we all know what happened to Rome in the end.

Best of luck Gev, best of luck.

P.S. – It will never happen

I did the unthinkable

I mined ore.

I did it poorly by any and all measures.

• I used Miner 1′s.
• In an Osprey.
• With no skills for it except Mining III

There’s something to be said about the oppressive and pervasive boredom that bears down on you inside a wormhole that leads you to try new things. My previous endeavor to learn PI and suck the life juices from a planet has succeeded and the task seems old-hat now. A 10 minute chore to re-do extractor positioning every-day and then maybe 20 minutes to go out and retrieve the results every other day.

I’ve also started to explore the world of scanning. That’s something I’m trying to get faster at. It’s difficult to improve speed in an environment where speed isn’t important, but when it is, you want the speed. A catch-22 situation. It also doesn’t help (me) that we have a crew who are able to scan down sites basically first thing after the server comes back up. It is very helpful to the corporation though, and I’m thankful for their efforts. Still, I’m learning the interface and at least using the corp bookmarks to verify that I’m finding the same things they are at times.

I keep saying it, but you learn more about EVE every day. Yesterday’s lesson: the term “Static Wormhole” is used because as soon as you destabilize it and cause it to collapse, a new one immediately spawns. There’s only one static per WH as far as I know, but others can spawn that lead to other WH’s (maybe other K-space as well – not sure). As a group, we’ve been pretty good so far at “rolling” wormholes to the critical collapse point, and trying to maintain control of our own private space bubble.

Humorously, a corporation who are a self-proclaimed ”High-Sec Nemesis Group” war-dec’d us. A mostly WH space corporation. Pretty humorous.

Sooner than soon

Soon turned into right-fucking-now.

We had a fortuitous worhmhole open up that made moving stuff in extremely simple. So last night I dived head first into the physics-bending reality of wormhole life. I made a little rat-next of things in K(known)-space, and then blitz-rushed it all in. It went smooth as butter, but the potential for a cluster-fuck was high. Traveling through lo-sec to get into W-space where anyone could be waiting on the other side was pretty thrilling. Turning what would be a dull transport run anywhere else, into an enjoyable experience. Amazing what can happen when you allow genuine emergent behavior in a game.

So after settling in, I start to peek into the depths of this particular rabbit hole in EVE. Your base of operations is your POS. That is surrounded by a big bubble of a force-field keeping your shit safe. Within the bubble are lots of various structures, most of which I don’t know what they do. Two important ones though are the hangar and an items bay. One for ships, and the other for stuffs™. There is no more ship-spinning or captain’s quarters in W-space that I can tell, you swap ships in the cold vastness of space, with only your pod to give you comfort. Outside of the bubble are lots of things with symbols I’m not really sure of, but I’m guessing are guns to keep would-be interlopers off your spot.

So, my near future includes spartan living in a bubble of sequestered space, dealing with intruders and finding ways to optimize profitability under the sickle and hammer of communist rule, while learning new facets of a deeply complex game-system.

What are you doing?

Enter wormhole, stop learning pewpew

Shamelessly pilfered image.

Recently, I joined the corporation of the evil one. I’ve been in for about a week now and I can tell the taint is spreading…

If you read his blog, you’ll know that the corporation has recently made the jump into wormhole space. This is what is known to most people as a “pretty big deal”. It requires an entire adjustment to the way you approach the game, and a monumental amount of work. For the unfamiliar, these are areas or “zones” that are tied off from any other area of space, except by random “zone lines” that connect to random areas. Inside physics can go haywire and cause strange effects on the properties of, well, anything. Choosing to live in one of these means having physical stations to dock/fit/basic life functions of a person. Planets need to be consumed, and clouds/asteroids need to be harvested to maintain a function space-structure. There are a lot of other activities that require a slew of different skill sets as well. For example: scanning.

When I first started playing this game (nigh three years back), I did do some scanning. Just enough to finish the tutorial. It was neat, but, meh, I wanted to blow stuff up. I never pursued it more, probably to my detriment. Turns out, it’s kinda useful. Lets you find other players in space, and super secret locations in dead space that haz phat lewts.

See, when I first heard about moving into a wormhole, my immediate thought was of epic battles to fight off invaders and maintain our hold on space. Turns out the invaders part is kinda true, but it’s more…tactical a situation. So, I’m finding that there are a number of things I need to learn, both in terms of skill queue and personal game ability, so that I can be an asset to the corporation. Scanning being one of those things.

I hope to actually move into the wormhole in the near future, but beyond the skill barrier, there are logistics I need to sort. Like how to get my important shit there with enough supplies to last a while. Seeing as it’s an island in the ocean perpetually cut-off from outside shipments.