Inanity and Doom

Maneuvering thrusters, Mister Sulu

2011-12-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

It seemed appropriate. Plus it's just awesome starship porn.

So, after almost half a year away, I decided to give myself a little Christmas present and buy a couple months' worth of EVE. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick around past that; part of it is because of money, and part of it is because, to be honest, while I'm eager to try out some new things (*cough*Naga*cough*), I don't know if it'll be enough to keep me interested. Plus, one of these days I'd actually like to get past level 15 on Skyrim, and of course there's The Old Republic, which, for its flaws, has managed to work the old Bioware storytellin' magic on me.

So, what will I do when I get back into the pod? That's a good question. When I walked away last, I was in Caldari Provisions, and was stomping my way through L2 missions in either a HAC, a battlecruiser, or a Tengu. While I really do want to try out the Naga - and just the fact that there was apparently some sort of hybrid rebalancing done in Crucible was enough to make me giddy on that - I don't know what my "long-term" (read: what-I-want-to-do-in-three-months) goals are. I'd been kind of mulling possibly checking out w-space, but I also am leery about joining a corp - any corp - when it's more than likely I'll be gone again in a couple months. And God knows, with my luck and relative lack of skills (plus the extreme rust on said skills), trying to go solo pirate in k-space, let alone w-space, would be a quick way to run myself out of money and ships.

Ah, well. We'll see what we shall see.

Too little, too late.

2011-10-13T16:41:00.002-06:00

(Yes, I'm still alive. Just not playing, still, thanks to crappy job market.)

So, we have the much-cried-for supercap nerf happening with the winter expansion (EVE Online: Restitution?) and my take right now is a resounding "meh." I can't point to any one thing. Each individual step is a good one, I think - I'm no expert at capital warfare, I will readily admit. But it seems like it doesn't go far enough.

In my ideal vision of EVE Online and how capital ships "should be," yes, they're powerful, yes, their presence can turn the battle. But they should still be threatened by sufficient subcapital forces (especially and specifically battleships operating in strength), and they should be hard enough to acquire and replace that you're not going to be seeing people out f@*$ing ratting in them. Deploying them should be as much a "political" and "diplomatic" statement as it is a strategic one. When the United States Navy deploys a carrier group to a region, that's a significant move to tell people to calm down and/or that we're ready to back up our allies. When United States Navy carriers start sending their fighters out, that's the hammer being dropped. This is what I would like to see in EVE. Most combat, and again, this is in my mind, should be between fleets of subcapital ships, with the occasional handful of capital and supercapital vessels. It shouldn't just be "HERP DERP SUPERCAP BLOB HOTROP LOL."

Granted, I would rather see combat where tactics and strategy win out against pure blob warfare (yes, I know it can, but that's really really rare - most battles, especially in nullsec, just devolve to blob-on-blob). And I freely admit that I severely doubt that we'll see any sort of combat like this in EVE ever - I just don't think that the game could support what I would like.

But making it so alliances don't just throw supercaps at every single problem? That's doable. That should be CCP's goal in the long term, insofar as rebalancing capital and supercapital ships, especially if they want to give small alliances a chance to break into nullsec as something other than a renter-pet or a pubbie. I just don't think they're willing to go far enough.

Not a collector, really...

2011-07-22T00:29:00.000-06:00

So, pre-orders for The Old Republic are up. I haven't preordered mine, mostly because I'm broke as hell - short version: Michigan job market sucks and I don't have the money to move.

I'm interested in the game, don't get me wrong, and if nothing else I plan on putting it at the top of my Christmas list this year, if I don't take my PS3, which I never use anymore, honestly, in to GameStop and hopefully cover a pre-order for TOR. Not planning on getting the Collector's Edition, honestly, and I'll tell you why.

Collectors' editions are getting more and more gimmicky. Halo Reach is a perfect example. I dropped the extra... $30? $40?... however-many bucks to get the Legendary Edition as opposed to the Heroic. The Noble Team statue is kind of cool, but honestly it sits on top of a cabinet in the corner of my room. I barely even look at it. I get more enjoyment out of Halsey's journal, mostly because I'm a sucker for backstory in any game.

The Collector's Edition for TOR has the same issue. The Darth Malgus statue would end up shoved off in a corner and barely noticed afterwards. The authenticator... meh. I've never had a problem with account security for any of my games, so maybe I don't see the need. I understand the logic of offering it, though.

The rest of the stuff in the Collector's Edition is interesting, and I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't say I'd probably end up stealing them - at least temporarily - from my brother's copy of the Collector's Edition, especially to copy the soundtrack to my own computer and iPod. But since I can get access to that stuff anyway, without forking over the extra $90 bucks for the Collector's Edition....

Of course, the problem with getting rid of my PS3 is that then I won't be able to beta test DUST 514 when it comes out. So there's a dilemma there...

Anyway, that's my babble on the subject. You may now continue scrolling through your reader software of choice, assuming you stopped at all to read my drivel.

Stole the words from my mouth.

2011-06-26T19:46:00.001-06:00

So, as you all are undoubtedly aware by now, CCP Zulu posted a much more agreeable dev blog today.

To be fair to the man, yeah, there's got to be a bit of an internal hunt going on to find out who leaked that "Fearless" issue, and who forwarded out the Hilmar email. But CCP is going to sit down with the CSM next week to cover their plans for Aurum and the Noble Exchange in more detail.

For the love of God, CCP, make sure that the CSM isn't gagged by NDAs to where they can't tell us stuff. I know you don't want your business plans leaked all over the Internet. I'm cool with that. But at the same time, bringing in the CSM, who are your link to us and our link to you, and then not letting them communicate with us will not help your situation. In fact, it will pretty much be the final straw for a lot of folks in your credibility, and in that of the CSM as the players' voice. You already have too many players who think it's just a PR stunt, that you bring them up to Iceland every few months, wine them and dine them, dazzle them with shinies, and then ignore everything they have to say. I don't think that's true, and I hope you don't either. But I digress.

Also in this latest dev blog, Zulu said, and I quote:

However, just to prove the point of the Fearless newsletter and give you a further understanding of what it is then there are no and never have been plans to sell "gold ammo" for Aurum. In Fearless people are arguing a point, which doesn't even have to be their view, they are debating an issue. This is another example of how information out of context is no information at all.

I vaguely suspected something like this would happen, and my only complaint here is that it shouldn't have taken three days to get this message out. As has been pointed out elsewhere (I can't find the post, if someone knows what I'm talking about and can provide me the link I will be more than happy to edit it in here), you cannot be reactive to things like this. You must plan ahead and have ideas of what to do when a situation like this happens. As soon as EveNews 24 posted their version of "Fearless" you should have had someone basically send them that paragraph I just quoted so that they would have your side of the story, and all of this hue and cry - well, at least some of it - would have been avoided.

Anyway, I also wanted to touch on this post from player "michael boltonIII". The full thread can be found here but I wanted to give his post some extra screen time, as it were.

Some of you may know me as the ****** from the Alliance Tournament, but in my spare time I'm a diplomat for Test Alliance Please Ignore.

In the past week I've seen the forums go to hell in a hand-basket, and I think that maybe the mob mentality has gone a little overboard. People are demanding the total removal of Incarna and a ban on even Vanity Micro-transactions. This **** has got to stop.

What CCP should do:
1. Reinstate the old hangar as the view for those who have turned off Captains Quarters. The new system makes traditional fitting, especially for capital pilots, more difficult.

2. Ensure that Incarna works with an acceptable range of modern graphics cards, and does not launch with graphics cards that will be damaged by it.

3. Add some lower priced Items to the NeX store. $60 monocles are fine, as long as you provide a lower price option. There is just as much a market for plastic Mickey Mouse watches as there is for Rolex watches.

4. CCP has already promised that there will be “no-gold ammo” so the pay-to win front has been covered

That's all that CCP really needs to do, only one of those items is truly difficult to deal with, and I'm sure they've already got a team working on it

Now for all you wonderful protesting pubbies out there,

Here's what all you protesters need to do/realize:

1. CCP is a business, they are a corporate entity designed to earn capital that they can then use to create more capital earning ventures. CCP's product is fun, to many people fun is flying around PVP'ing or mining, and to others fun is collecting unique ships and now dressing up their character. If they have an option to make more money, while providing something that a group of people find fun, they'll ****ing do it. Nobody is forcing you to give them more money than your subscription fee.

2. You can already pay to win. Any person with real life wealth, can purchase plex and then use the isk from those plex to buy a super capital pilot off the Character Bazaar and A brand new Avatar with all the fittings. He can do this on his very first day in EVE. The Plex<->Isk link cuts down on RMT and makes it so that a large percentage of EVE players don't pay a dime to subscribe, but inherent in that idea is that you can “Pay2Win”

3. All your canceled accounts, aren't really gone. In protest a large group of EVE players have “canceled their account”, but in reality all they have done is to turn of the Auto-repeat on their account charges. You're all still playing. If you really want to make a statement, then send me all of your assets and delete your actual characters, then I'll believe you as I fire-sale all your **** on the market.

4. CCP actually gives a **** about this game, they're trying to make it viable both financially and gameplay wise for the foreseeable future. That means having new ways to make money, new ways for people to play, and new ways to attract more customers. The downside of this is that not everything they do will be to make you happy. If all of 0.0 decided to protest in Jita every time something we wanted got passed over for some change to highsec, you would all be getting smartbombed ALL THE TIME. Aside from those people who's graphics cards were damaged or who couldn't run Incarna, how many of you have been truly negatively impacted by this new expansion, I bet the number is only a fraction of the actual protesters.

I may only be a fresh faced 21 year-old, but after reading a large percentage of the posts in these massive threadnaughts, I feel like I'm in the top 10% of mature EVE players. That is a ****ing scary thought, considering that I am borderline ******ed. The CSM is getting pulled in for an emergency meeting, and will hear exactly the same things I heard while at CCP, and all their nerd apprehension will be assuaged.

TL;DR-The sky isn't falling, CCP gets the message, shut the **** up you sheeple pubbies. Also, we should eat our young

Now, about the only thing here I would disagree with is his assertion that ISK generated from PLEX sales is the same thing as Aurum. It's not. Granted, I am talking theoretically here, but part of the concern wasn't "pay-to-win" so much as the damage that items bought from the Noble Exchange would do to the market.

Let's say I have a time code. I redeem it for PLEX in game, and then turn around and sell those in Jita. Yes, now I have 700-800 million more ISK, that I can turn around and, say, use to buy and outfit a Tengu.

In a general sense, yes, I just used real-world money to get a new, very expensive ship. But that Tengu, in all likelihood, has had the virtual fingers of who knows how many dozens of people on it in the construction of it and the subsystems, modules, and charges. Miners, mission runners, haulers, manufacturers - the list could literally be dozens of people.

In an alternate universe, I take the PLEX from the time code, redeem them for Aurum, and then magically I have a new Tengu in my hangar. Nobody built it. Nobody hauled parts for it. Nobody mined minerals for it. It's just there. More clicks, and Noble Store elves deliver the parts I need - functionally identical, no way to distinguish them from what the other me bought with ISK, but still, they're just appearing. And if I can do that with a ship that can easily head towards a billion credits in cost, why not capital ships? I bet nullsec alliances would love to cut out the manufacturing steps in maintaining their capital blobs.

Hopefully that cleared up my feelings on the matter.

Overall, I think a lot of folks at CCP want to do the right thing, and maintain the sandbox universe we all know and love. Lord knows they don't want to lose thousands of subscribers - near on 5,000 last I checked - to other games, such as Perpetuum.

I just hope those CCPers are the ones guiding EVE's development, not just Johnny Codemonkey sitting at a desk and plugging in numbers.

Hey, Jon Stewart, do you have a message for CCP?

2011-06-24T15:28:00.000-06:00

God. I want to help, CCP, I really do. But unless you're willing to bring me to Iceland, give me the access I need to your people to sit down and talk with them, and, oh yeah, pay my room and board (since I'm broke and all), it's not happening. (And if you were willing to do so, then why aren't you doing it for Mittens and the rest of the CSM?! That's what they're for, not some geek with too much time on his hands and a blog that a dozen or so people read!)

I wasn't holding out a lot of hope as it was. But I figured that it wasn't hard to sit down, have a guy type out something along the lines of "Fearless is a tool for a discussion, we assign topics for people to discuss, there is not any intention to bring non-cosmetic items to the Noble Store, things that will be added to the Noble Store will cover a greater range of prices than just the few things we have now."

And then CCP Zulu posted this dev blog. And it's worse than I feared.

The ONLY good point to come from it was that there would be a greater range of priced stuff on the NEX. But your logic on where those prices go still sucks. Items that cost more than $5 do not qualify as micro-transactions.

But that's a debate for another time, and since it seems that you've already decided what direction you're going with, I won't try and fight that battle. Like a lot of folks, I don't really care about vanity micro-transactions (or macro-transactions, or mega-transactions, or whatever clever name the community has for them now).

What we wanted was a clear message from CCP: "Regardless of what it said in our internal discussion memo, we have NO PLANS to introduce non-vanity items to the Noble Store."

That's all. Heck, have someone throw that out on their Twitter while they're sitting on the toilet, possibly adding "More details to follow in dev blog soonish." I don't think that would magically cause us all to settle down, but things would be a damn sight more peaceful than they are now; 200-page threadnaughts and internet spaceship riots clogging up major trade hubs.

Mark my words, CCP (assuming any of you read this). We had the Summer of Rage last year with the "18 months" fiasco; this is the Tech 2 version. Unless you handle this clearly, effectively, and openly, this is the end of EVE as we know it, and in more ways than one. You will lose major portions of your player base, and God alone knows how that will impact development of EVE, DUST, and WoD.

Good luck. You're going to need it.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force...

2011-06-24T09:04:00.000-06:00

...as if a million subscriptions suddenly cried out in terror,
and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

First off, and in no particular order, read this from Meissa Anunthiel, this from Tippia, this from Seleene, and this from Dierdra Vaal. I would imagine a lot of you have already read those, but just in case you haven't, we'll wait for you.

...

Back? Okay then.

CCP, I'm going to say this as gently as I possibly can right now. You done fucked up, son. I give full props to CCP Pann for actually being willing to take one for the team and be the first one to step into the line of fire this week. Heck, I even respect her for owning up to her decision to not make an immediate response to the community. I'm not angry that the decision was made - waiting and seeing what happens can be a legitimate strategy at times, and it takes a good bit of intestinal fortitude to go into a community that's as riled as the EVE community is right now and admit that the decision was a mistake.

But you still don't get it. Yes, there's annoyance at the technical aspects of Captain's Closet. Yes, people want ship spinning back. Yes, people are angry that you've apparently misunderstood how microtransactions work in the first place.

Obligatory image of Morbo from Futurama.
(Mostly to try and keep things at least somewhat lighthearted.)

But that's not the main source of FORUM/TWITTER/BLOG RAGE right now. It's that issue of "Fearless" that got leaked.

Most of us, I assume, have gotten their hands on the full version of this particular issue of "Fearless." If not, I have helpfully re-uploaded it. And right there on the first page, it says, and I quote, "The views put forward in this magazine do not reflect general CCP company policies or decisions and are strictly individual opinions, written by CCPers or about CCPers who feel strongly about these issues."

But here's where you done goofed. Even though you never intended to have the rest of the world see this document, you are openly discussing the pros, cons, and possibilities of ~~micro~~ macro-transactions for non-vanity items... AFTER YOU SAID THAT YOU WOULD BE DOING NO SUCH THING.

And now you're wondering why the community is up in arms.

Honestly, right now, what you need to do is have someone - Hilmar himself would be a good choice - do a dev blog, or better a dev video blog - and explain that the newsletter's articles were written before you made the decision to shelve all plans for non-vanity micro-transactions, you still have no intent to do so for EVE (micro-transactions in DUST 514 - and I mean actual micro-transactions, not the sort of stuff we have now! - you have more wiggle room on, since, insofar as I can tell, there are no plans to have a subscription fee for DUST), and to apologize for the confusion and anger the release of the document has spawned in the community.

I could also suggest spawning a free PLEX on every account as a way to show that apology would be nice (and would probably also help to depress PLEX prices), but I admit that's pretty unlikely. It would be a nice gesture, but still.

You've well and truly shot yourselves in the foot, CCP, if not in a much more vital area. I'm not unsubbing - my account is, if memory serves, paid up through September - and at this point I still plan to see if I can afford to renew my subscription at that point. But you're bleeding players, and if it's not an arterial wound, it's also not a paper cut.

You need to do something to renew our faith, or this game that we all love will go out with a whimper. And you need to do it soon.

Getting sucked back in

2011-06-22T13:19:00.001-06:00

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is why I specifically said a while back "no, you can not has my stuff."

Anyway, Incarna. This initial rollout is impressive, and yet unimpressive. It's impressive in that it is, in my opinion, the biggest overall change to how the game can be played since the introduction of capital ships. (Not that I was around then, but you get my point.) The actual ability to walk around and see fellow players in something other than starships is frickin' huge. Moreover, visually, it's impressive; EVE continues to set the bar for graphics in an MMO. Pure and simple. And the new agent finder is just frickin' awesome.

Obligatory character in quarters shot is obligatory.
Click to embiggen.

But there are also the unimpressive bits. The door that leads to the rest of the station is locked. Every station uses Minmatar quarters, and as yet, there's no customization for those quarters. I know racial quarters are coming Soon(TM), and I would imagine that, eventually, there may be a way to customize your quarters, at least in terms of decorations. But the fact that it's still just me, in the same tiny room, with a couch, a bed, and no (visible) bathroom... yeah. I'll get more excited when I can go out and see folks. And I've already said that I'll see about organizing a TweetFleet Incarna Meet & Greet & Roam once we have the opportunity to do so.

And then there's the fails, and honestly, I lay both of them at the feet of CCP's BizDev team.

Fail #1: NEX store pricing.

One theory I've seen for NEX store pricing, and it's the one that I think makes most sense, is that those prices are there to prevent PLEX prices from skyrocketing. Guess what, guys - literally as soon as you announced the whole "PLEX for Aurum" scheme, PLEX prices shot up somewhere between fifty to a hundred million ISK. I'm not sure they're not done spiking, because with this kind of demand on PLEX, people will jack up their sell order prices. Period. Do what you did with the licensing idea, and say that they were draft prices that you intended all along to adjust as the market reacted, and drop them by half, at least. Especially since for the foreseeable future, the buyer will be the only one to see them, and they get lost as soon as you get podded. (And I thought we were nekkid in those pods, anyhow!) And speaking of the licensing thing...

Fail #2: Forcing people to pay $99 a year for API usage.

(Yes, I know I'm late to the party on this one.)

I get it, honestly. It costs you money to run and maintain the API, and even though some argue that that cost should be covered by our subscriptions, you also need to provide legal protection so that someone else isn't making money off of your hard work without you getting a fair share. That's perfectly understandable. But... seriously? Any public sites have to pay the fee? Anyone who gets real-world money or ISK for a service has to pay that fee? That's where the logic kind of runs out of steam.

I know, you already said it was a draft of the general ideas you were looking at, nothing's been finalized, et cetera. Personally, I'd only charge if someone was charging real money for a service or product - such as a paid version of a smartphone app, or the like. Folks that have ad exchanges on their blogs or sites... honestly, that'd be a case-by-case thing. Corps, for example, probably do that only to defray server costs if their members don't cover it out of pocket. But if, for example, I put ads on this blog, which I have at no cost to me, then I might see the argument. Folks who provide in-game services (merc corps, for example) or free-but-accepting-ISK-donations-ware like EFT? Leave them alone.

Anyway... I'm still stuck in Caldari Provisions, and on some levels it's relaxing not to have to worry about reds/neuts swanning through, plus the other stress points of living in nullsec. It's also boring, since I'm reduced to running L1 missions that I can almost just faceroll, but that problem should (eventually) fix itself. My budget, for now, is essentially nil, so I don't know if I'll be able to resub come my account expiration date (early September, IIRC) so we'll see how long this lasts.

Also, just randomly, I stumbled over this image online and I had to share.

The Doctor is the Batman. This explains SO MUCH.

This may not end well.

2011-06-07T09:21:00.000-06:00

(Hah, and here I thought that leaving EVE would lead to me not blogging anymore. Shoulda known.)

First off, go read Roc's post about DUST 514 being a PS3 exclusive. I agree with most of what he said, and the points raised in the comments. About the only thing I didn't agree with is his position on Blu-ray being a non-starter; the only reason my family has a Netflix subscription at this point is because it was a Christmas gift last year. Sure, it's handy, but I don't think it will replace having physical media for a long time, especially when the quality is so dependent on your local network connection.

But there's one other thing that's been bugging me about making DUST 514 a console exclusive, and I don't know if this has even crossed the rabbity little things that CCP's collective brains tend to be: Console audiences are nowhere near as permanent as PC audiences.

Granted, this is just my point of view, and given that I'm not any sort of expert on the gaming industry, everything I say is pure conjecture. But bear with me.

Being a fairly ecumenical gamer - I have an Xbox 360 and a PS3 sitting next to me at this very moment - I have no issues with this being on any console. In point of fact, for FPS games, I prefer a controller to a mouse-and-keyboard setup. And the points you and others bring up are well-taken. But in this day and age of being able to just wander out to the closest Gamestop or wherever, and trade in old games for credit towards new, any console game has a limited shelf life, and CCP doesn't seem to understand that, especially since they've said (if memory serves) that they want to tie DUST 514 into EVE's sovereignty game.

Console gamers - and to a lesser extent, PC gamers - have a tendency to be distracted by the shiny. I would guarantee that there are few folks out there that, for example, maintain a collection of every year's release of [insert sport game title of choice here], and, after a while of not playing a game, console gamers - myself included - tend to trade those old games in for new ones. There are exceptions - I have all six Halo games, for example - but by and large, after a year or so, most console gamers will trade in their old games for the new must-have game of the year. If they didn't, Gamestop's trade-in service wouldn't meet with such resistance from certain publishers who want to eliminate the secondary game sales market.

So while, overall, I'm not unhappy with the decision by CCP to make DUST 514 a PS3 exclusive - especially given the hardware and third-party-network points raised by Roc and his readers - I don't think CCP has thought things through to their conclusion. I don't think we'll see a period where everybody can get their hands on DUSTies and then suddenly they all disappear, I think that, after a while, they'll get more and more scarce, and if you can't take sovereignty in a system without ground troops, you'll see nullsec wars go from full-scale combat to simple roams looking for "good fights" and the borders of various alliances becoming almost, but not quite, as static as the borders in Empire space. After that... well, either we'll see some more EVE players start picking up controllers, or we'll see DUST combat becoming secondary to the sov game, or we may see DUST getting ported to the PC.

Either way, the next year or so is going to be interesting.

So, this is goodbye.

2011-05-09T19:18:00.000-06:00

Well, probably.

Those of you that remember some of my previous posts will read this and say "You're still here?" But it didn't really hit home until I was flipping through the latest issue of EON, which hit my mailbox today, that I was really going to do it. Come August 12, 2011, I will allow my subscription to EVE Online lapse. About the only thing that I might log in for, if I'm still around when it happens (I think I will be) is the deployment of Incarna, but past that... I just don't have anything to do to log in for, besides maybe skill training. And if I'm going to let my account lapse, I don't see much of a point of keeping skills training.

It's probably mostly my fault. After Primary. started getting out of the nullsec game, which wasn't something I wanted to do, I had nowhere to go. I briefly joined EUNI - and then promptly went inactive again, getting kicked out. And so far, none of the corps I've seen have been that interesting (renters, carebears, missioners) or would turn me down (pretty much all the big sov-space alliances) for one reason or another (no experience as anything but a shooter, don't have skills in non-Caldari ships). So my motivation to log in has gone from "little to none" to just plain "none." And then earlier, I was reading EON - specifically, I think it was Colonel Wieler's writeup on FanFest 2011, and as I realized that it was an awesome thing that I'd probably never make it to, my mind segued into "same thing with just about anything cool in EVE." I guess, subconsciously, I'd made the decision, and unless something happens to pull me back into EVE (unlikely), I'm going to just quietly pull my stakes and wander off.

I haven't decided what this means for the blog. Obviously, it's going to be dropped from the EVE Blogroll and OMPL, and in all probability CCP's going to drop me from their fansite listing (unless that's something I have to do myself). And that's all fair - if I'm not writing about EVE anymore, why should I still be listed as such, right? I don't really do much in other MMOs - by and large, I suck and fail at the social aspect of games and usually end up just killing stuff on my own, rather than finding a team for anything, much less a guild/league/fellowship/supergroup/fleet/insert-synonym-here. So it's entirely likely that, one day, I'll just quietly click the "delete blog" button on Blogger and all will vanish into the mists of time.

Regardless, I would like to thank everyone who read the blog (all three of you), the fine folks in the #TweetFleet, and, obviously, CCP, for creating the sandbox that we all know and love.

Good hunting, capsuleers.

Edging Ever Closer

2011-04-22T08:42:00.002-06:00

I can't point to one single thing. Part of it is gradual disillusionment in CCP and the various gripes people have about their production style - features are never fully fleshed out, communication with the player base can be spotty at best, et cetera. Part of it is sheer boredom and can't-be-arsed-ness to log in - my ability to make ISK is majorly cramped out of nullsec - I have essentially no standing with any NPC groups in Empire space, so missioning would basically be me going back to square one and the bad old days of zipping about in a frigate or cruiser while wondering how the hell I'll know when I can do higher-level stuff. And part of it is ADD on my part - I've got a half-dozen other games I could play and actually feel like I'm making progress, be I in a guild/supergroup/fleet/whatever or no.

And then I read this from DaiTengu. And while he's not wrong, I think it's not as simple as he seems to think.

Being former military, I always tend to give the demon Murphy and his Laws probably more credit than they really deserve for things that go wrong. But two of Murpy's Laws of Combat sprang to mind when I read that post.

The important things are simple.
The simple things are very hard.

I don't think of myself as particularly anti-social. That being said, my track record for finding player organizations in the half-dozen MMOs I have active accounts on is something like 3 and 8 or something like that - groups fold, groups go inactive, groups kick me out - usually for inactivity, I admit, groups get folded into other groups and don't bother to let the new guy know, et cetera ad nauseaum. My point is, there are those of us who can't just turn around and find a group like DaiTengu talks about. God knows if I could, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And maybe my problem is I'm just stretched across too many games. (The beauty of lifetime subscriptions - I can quit and come back any time long as the servers stay open.)

But more, and perhaps worse, I'm starting to get jaded regarding the things coming out of Iceland. I've been looking at the pictures people are posting of Captain's Quarters, and I'm underwhelmed. Yes, I know it's nowhere near done. Yes, I know that Incarna is supposed to have a hell of a lot more to it than just a room with a view. All I have to do is remember the "Future Vision" video that came from Fanfest and I'd know that. And I fully admit - I would give a kidney to play the game CCP showed us in that video.

But it's not here. I don't know if it ever will be - CCP's track record with not iterating on old features when they get distracted by new and shinier things is horrid. Sov warfare is broken, sov-space economics are a joke, and short of figuring out some harsh limits on the use of capitals and supercapitals, things are only going to get worse.

I have no interest in playing the economic side of EVE, I wouldn't know the first thing about becoming a lowsec pirate, my PVP skills are, in short, "follow FC instructions" and "press F-keys in rapid succession." Oh, and even better, even if I did have a chance to get back into the sov warfare part of things, I'd have a good couple of months to train before most folks would let me go out and cause explosions.

It's possible I'm just overtired - my insomnia kicked in last night so I spent most of the last 12 hours sitting in bed reading on my Kindle - but I think Bitter Vet Syndrome has its hooks in me pretty damn bad, I don't have the first clue how to treat it, and at this rate, I think it may be a terminal condition for my EVE account.

I'm a bit fed up.

2011-04-03T03:57:00.000-06:00

Warning: Rant Ahead! This stems from a conversation I had in-game, wherein player "Dax Jr" apparently came to the conclusion that I'm not suited for life in nullsec, because I don't like to be told what to fly and how to fit it. And I don't - my usual reaction is "If you want to play the game for me, you can pay for my subscription, too." Apparently this is not a popular position.

Let me preface this rant with a statement: I GET IT. I know why FCs - especially nullsec FCs - prefer to run a 100% homogenous fleet. It's the same logic as to why NATO countries use standardized small arms ammunition. I completely understand it and I even, to a point, agree with it.

HOWEVER.

What I disagree with is FCs saying "fly this ship with this fit or GTFO." All that does is prevent pilots who can't fly that ship, or use that precise fit, be it because they don't have the SP for it or they don't have the money to afford it, from being able to participate - and especially in CTA ops, that pisses them off because they don't get a chance to help, and are often penalized if they try to do other things while the CTA is occurring, and pisses off the guys who do show up for the CTA, because it looks like the guys who aren't in it don't care.

For example, I'm in the Random Fake Alliance, out in some random portion of nullsec. I see an email saying that there's a CTA going on, and we need armor-tanked sniper battleships, fit for combat at 100km, MWDs, and an armor repper. As it stands now, I can't fly any non-Caldari ships. I've had other things to spend my SP on, rather than crosstrain Gallente hybrid ships, or, worse, start essentially from scratch with Minmatar or Amarr boats and weapons.

So anyway, for this hypothetical CTA, I grab one of my Rokhs, slap rails on it, grab a cargo bay full of lead rounds - which gives me plenty of reach, more than I need, but also makes it so I can sustain my fire longer before screaming for cap - slap some extra armor in my lows to give me a bit more survivability - and make it slightly more likely that I'll survive under fire long enough for reps to hit me, which, in larger fleet fights, is an iffy question at best - trade a gun for an armor repper, and head to the RV point.

Now, most FCs would see someone flying up in a Rokh and tell them to leave and come back when they can fly something else. But, gorrammit, this makes no sense to me. Yes, it's quite possible that I'll stick out like a sore thumb and be primaried first. Yes, it's quite probable that, when I am primaried and start taking hits to the armor, even with an armor plate on I won't survive long enough to get reppers on me. But, dammit, the best I have is the best I have, and I think an FC that turns away someone in a situation like I described above - shield tanked in an armor fleet - is a damn fool.

Moreover, EVE is a game. I play it to have fun, and I prefer to do that by seeing explosions. Yes, I prefer that the explosions are someone else's ships and not mine, but if worse comes to worse, I fully agree and live by the dictum that you fly only what you can afford to lose. Hell, every roam, every fleet I ever joined, I said to myself that I fully expected to lose my ship. On the occasions I came back with the same ship I started with after contact with whatever enemy we'd found, it was a nice surprise. FCs who are all about the K/D ratio, rather than the objectives, are, to my mind, taking the game way too seriously.

Mock me if you wish - I'm not an überplayer, and I actually prefer it that way. I have enough stresses in my life without trying to live, breathe, eat, and sleep EVE. But at least now I understand a bit more as to why exactly I tend to have problems finding a nullsec alliance to join.

Ironically enough, this revelation came out after discovering I'd been booted from EUNI - likely because I hadn't had a chance or motivation to log in for a while. So, back to the hell of Caldari Provisions for me. Perhaps this time I'll find a decent alliance to join, and is willing to put up with me being stubborn about flying Caldari combat ships. Or perhaps I'll get bored, poke about in a desultory fashion every now and again, and finally elect not to renew my subscription to EVE this fall and let my account lapse while I uninstall the client.

No, you cannot have my stuff. If I quit EVE, dammit, I'm taking it all with me. Because I'm bitter and mean like that.

Missing the point.

2011-02-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing some people asking what the point is of Incarna and the Captain's Quarters. It seems like nobody's happy, neither the social butterflies, the roleplayers, or those of us who just want to make stuff explode. The chorus at this point is "why care about a 3D interface to do what I can do now in the NeoCom?"

The answer, to me, is quite simple: We don't. What we should care about is what comes after Captain's Quarters. The devs have already said they're planning an incremental release for Incarna, a la Incursion. And it makes sense; why try and introduce several new features that may cause the servers to die a fiery, melty death? Instead, add one thing at a time - basic 3D avatar space - to see if that breaks stuff, then let the animals out of their cages and see how much everyone walking around in a shared location affects things. It's much like a scientific experiment - you want to deal with as few variables at a time as you can.

Here's the problem: all we know about is CQ. We know nothing about what may come after, what forms it will take, and what Incarna-based features we're going to gain during those months of the Incarna deployment. CCP has - presumably - told the CSM, but all those discussions are veiled behind a non-disclosure agreement.

I quote from the December 2010 CSM minutes:

CSM explained that, given historical precedents, players want the first Incarna release to have a reason for existing that is more than a platform for future awesomeness. Furthermore, CSM cautioned that there was a real risk of a Catch-22 situation, where anything CCP did would result in a troubled reception for Incarna.

Hilmar stated that he hoped that the messaging for Incarna and its initial release, as well as the longer-term roadmap, would become much clearer by FanFest. The CSM cautioned, however, that this might be too late.

First, I think the CSM totally called it on the Catch-22 part. (Obvious, I know.) And as much as I agree that the devs may have been better served (in terms of minimizing backlash, if nothing else) by getting more information out to the playerbase faster - if, indeed, there was anything that was carved-in-stone enough to put in a devblog. I admit it's very possible that there are a lot of things in flux enough that they don't want to go on record with it, lest things change between now and Incarna dropping. But at this point, I think we're going to just have to resign ourselves to waiting until FanFest to get more information about how things will work in the coming months. But I have a warning for CCP (Yeah, like anyone at CCP reads this. *snerk*) and I'll put it in nice bold, capital letters so it stands out:

ANY INFORMATION RELEASED DURING FANFEST NEEDS TO BE CONCURRENTLY RELEASED ON THE WEBSITE.

Now, I was deployed to Kuwait during the last Fanfest, so I - understandably, I think - had other things on my mind at that point than EVE. So I don't know how well CCP has done on this front in the past. But I think it still needs saying, regardless, given how sensitive the playerbase is being over what little we know to date about Incarna. This year, perhaps more than any other year, what goes on at FanFest is going to be of major import and interest to all of us, not just the small percentage of us who can afford a weekend getaway to Iceland. What exactly needs to be done and can be done, I'll not presume to dictate - my own preference would be webcasting at least some headline panels, or at least taping them and then tossing them onto YouTube at night.

Don't leap to judgements.

2011-02-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

I was going to talk a bit about my reaction to the Captain's Quarters blog post and my reaction to it. (In short: not exactly overwhelmed by what I'm seeing, but I hope that there's going to be a bit more information in the coming months.) But I'm seeing indications of a disturbing trend, and I feel like I should speak up a bit.

It didn't start here - the forum asplosion against the Neo-NeoCom and CCP's decision to pull even its optional beta form from Incursion Part III: Revenge of the Avatars was where I think it really started to pick up steam. But for whatever reason, a vocal portion of the playerbase is having a "CHANGE BAD!" reaction to anything new.

What it boils down to is that there seems to be a lot of what Manasi called "old vet syndrome" going around. And I think as a playerbase (and especially those who would run for CSM, hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) we need to be vigilant against it. Veteran players shouldn't have to make unreasonable sacrifices for new players, but at the same time, veteran players should be considerate of improvements to the game, both those for themselves and for newer players.

Personally, I think that, in a year's time, most of us will have adapted to Incarna, accepted it as part of our daily EVE lives, and some of the concepts floating out of CCP - usually via the CSM - as to what Incarna can become are actually pretty fascinating. One thing I'm really looking forward to seeing is how much our interactions change in-game when we're seeing other people as actual, fully-fledged people, and not just text on a screen with a tiny little avatar attached in our chat boxes.

To be clear, I'm not talking about TeaDaze's decision to leave when it was revealed that Incarna wouldn't be optional - though it is, partly. Tea, if you're reading, please understand: I'm not saying you're wrong. At most, I'm saying that I hope to see you back, at least for one of the inevitable five-free-days offers CCP's going to put out when Incarna hits to at least give it an honest try. And even if you don't, I won't tell you you're wrong for leaving. But I think it's a shame that the community is losing you to OVS. Either way, best of luck to you, in real life, or whatever electronic environs you inhabit in the future.

It lives!

2011-02-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

I have some catching up to do here.

After electing to leave Primary. Alliance, as the way it was heading didn't really match what I wanted to do, I spent a bit of time looking for a new corporation to join - missioning underwhelms me (of course, that may be because I don't have access to even level two missions), and I can't sit still long enough to go mining or become an economic baron.

I made mention of my search on Twitter, and @CaptainFranklen mentioned he ran a mercenary corporation. Now, I've always kinda wanted to try the mercenary life (see the galaxy, meet new people, and blow shit up), so I accepted his invitation. Sadly, for whatever reason, I never saw us do an actual contract, and eventually got an EVE mail from Franklen that he was looking for help in setting up a POS for the corp to provide a secondary means of income via booster production and sales.

Shortly after receiving that - and I can understand wanting to have that secondary but steady revenue stream - and a lot of time spent being the only guy in the corp online, I looked at the corp membership list, and was disappointed, if not exactly unsurprised, to see that I was the only one that had logged into the game in over a month. So, 24 hours later, I was again on the hunt for a new home in which to break stuff and kill people.

One thing I'd considered doing was setting up a page here sort of as my "EVE resume". I still might. But while putting things together in OpenOffice, I realized that, while I have a good amount of experience, I really didn't have many meta-game skills (by which I mean scouting, fleet command experience, that sort of thing) besides being able to take orders well, and being a trained intelligence analyst. So, after a couple of minutes of consideration (mostly thinking "oh crap, now what?") I decided that perhaps I should go join EVE University. And so, after doing a bit of research as to what I was letting myself in for, I started the process and as of about 36 hours ago, I was accepted as a member of EUNI.

I've already started cementing myself, inasmuch as I tend to - shortly after I joined and flew my shiny new Cerberus HAC to EUNI's home base, a very casual escort fleet was thrown together to move a freighter full of Tech II gear to Hek to sell it off. (There have been a lot of suicide gankers in the area, possibly practicing up for Hulkageddon IV.) Absolutely nothing happened, but it was a nice way to introduce myself, I think. Then last night, I jumped in the deep end on a 25-man low-sec roam. After struggling to get my permissions on the forums and Mumble server fixed (it turns out usergroups on the EUNI forums are tied to Mumble permissions), I rendezvoused with the fleet and we were off to Molden Heath. Despite my hopes to give my Cerberus it's baptism of fire, the only thing we shot at was a single gate rat that was where we wanted to be. I suspect word got out of our rumbling through and people were docking and jumping into safe spots ahead of us. Still, it felt good to be in a fleet again.

While I'm in EUNI, I plan on focusing mostly on learning how to run a fleet. The basics I like to think I've pretty much picked up via osmosis, but I'm certain my tactical decisions would leave a lot to be desired. Regardless, expect more posts from me in the coming days, to include my own thoughts on what's going to happen with IT Alliance out of the picture and my own reaction to Hulkageddon.

Sansha Incursions

2011-01-26T07:39:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one who reads stuff from Kuvakei (props to Calathea Sata for compiling and posting that, BTW) and can't help but think of these guys?

Okay, I know there are a lot of differences beteween the Borg and the Nation (for one, Alice Krige is hotter than Kuvakei) but still. The similarities in what they do and how they do it consistently make me chuckle. And wish that we had Sir Patrick Stewart to give a speech for folks to rally around. But regardless... with any luck, with the actual scripted incursions live, I'll actually be able to get in on one of these things. My luck hearing about and catching the live events has been pretty well uniformly bad, so...

I just hope that the pick-up-groups that I find for these are actually pretty decent. That's all I ask!

Supercapitals aren't anymore.

2010-12-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

Supercapital ships are the new battleship.

It's sad, it's wrong, but sadly, it's true.

I've pointed out before that the sheer numbers of capital ships even small alliances can put together are somewhat unrealistic - the United States Navy, arguably the most powerful and best-funded naval force on the face of the planet, doesn't field a dozen supercarriers. (Though some consider ballistic missile submarines to be a modern capital ship, but that's another argument.) And still, granted, we're talking about alliances that work together and span dozens of solar systems, with all the natural resources and personnel that that implies, but at the end of the day, we still ignore the fact that, if they really wanted to, and CCP turned off the game mechanics that forbid cynosural fields to be lit in low-sec and high-sec, the null-sec alliances could probably field enough ships to start taking huge bites off of Empire space.

(To be honest, I'd love to see an organized event for that on Singularity. It'd be fascinating to watch. But that's beside the point.)

I was prepared to ignore it; I recently joined a mercenary corporation, so my prospects of getting my hands on a capital ship of my own have become even lower than they were before, even ignoring the fact that I'll probably put off getting into capital ships until after I've got all the skills I could want for any and all sub-capital ships for all four races.

And then White Noise lost a titan... which had been out ratting.

Why, for the love of everything holy, would you be fighting any NPCs with a gorram titan?!. I mean, I know some guys take carriers out to clear anomalies - okay, fine, whatever. But a titan? Really? What in the name of hell could you possibly need a titan to kill in an anomaly? Seriously, I'm asking here.

*sigh*

And it just feeds into a point that I, among many others, have been making in various places in EVE's online presence. Supercapitals have not become the game-changing, look-upon-me-and-despair, latter half of the saying "walk softly and carry a big stick" that they should be. The sov game - and this is one of the reasons I have become disillusioned with sov warfare lately - has become less about tactics, and strategy, and cunning - it's become a simple matter of who has the biggest pockets and who can blob bigger ships.

I've had a couple of ideas on how to fix it: One, have capitals and/or supercapitals be tagged with an owning corporation, like an outpost, and then charge an upkeep on each and every ship (equivalent to, say, 50% of an unimproved star system, just off the cuff), thus placing an artificial limit on the number of capital ships that an alliance can maintain and tying it to their internal economy. Two, recode the fleet organization so that only a certian number of capital ships can be in a fleet at one time. That idea is a bit rougher, and would probably just mean that instead of one big giant blob-o-capships you'll have a bunch of smaller bits that form into a blob. Of the two, I'd say the economic drain for capital ships would be the easier solution, and, in the long run, more effective. (Of course, that also doesn't address the issue of alliances who may or may not run bots to fund their Ginormous Fleets O' Doom, but that's another issue entirely and one I don't really know a hell of a lot about.)

But I think, regardless of how the problem of Capital Ships Online becomes solved, we can all agree there is a problem. Now, it's just up to CCP and the CSM to try and figure out a solution, and hopefully one that will piss off the fewest people.

Non-EVE: 2011 is shaping up to be an awesome year.

2010-12-11T21:20:00.000-07:00

I don't normally post non-EVE stuff here, but the trailers coming from the 2010 Video Game Awards today just blew me out of the water.

Batman: Arkham City Video Game, VGA 10: Exclusive Hugo Strange Reveal Trailer HD | Video Clip | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com - Not much about the actual gameplay here, but let's be honest, after Arkham Asylum, are there any doubts that this game will be awesome? And the facts that Hugo Strange (the main nemesis in Arkham City) lets drop at the end of the trailer hints that the story is going to be a bit more complex than previously expected.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Video Game, VGA 10: Exclusive Debut Trailer HD | Video Clip | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com - Elder Scrolls V? Yes please! (Okay, I'll be a bit more excited if/when it turns out that Bethesda is actually replacing the engine that they've been using since Elder Scrolls IV, then re-used for Fallout 3, and again for Fallout: New Vegas. Don't get me wrong, they're still good games, but the engine is starting to show its age, plus it has its own issues that even today lay unresolved. But still, the RPG gamer in me has a happy at the thought of a new Elder Scrolls game.)

Mass Effect 3 Video Game, VGA 10: Exclusive Debut Trailer HD | Video Clip | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com - We knew this one would be coming. Sooner or later, it had to. Some folks were wondering if BioWare was waiting for the next generation of consoles to run it, but this teaser has effectively nullified that option. And now, looking back at some of the choices you got to make in Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, you can see how parts of this may play out - or at least effect the story of how you save the galaxy once again.

So yeah, I'm excited.

I think it's vacation time.

2010-11-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me just recently that I haven't logged into EVE for a month or so - however long it took me to train Caldari Cruisers V, I think. And I finished training that a few days ago, and haven't bothered to log in since.

So now I have a decision to make. Am I just not interested in moving back into null-sec? Maybe. (When I logged in last, the remnants of my alliance were consolidating and joining up with some old friends in another alliance.) The problem is, I'm not sure what I want to do - or what would be a good change from being a ratter and occasional PVP line pilot in a null-sec alliance. I'm okay at taking orders, but I've no training and less experience at any roles besides subcap shooter - I've bait-scouted in a Drake once or twice, and that's about the only real special role I've done in gangs. Pretty much all my skills are aimed at flying Drakes, Ravens and Rokhs, so I don't think I'd be much good at trying to be a pirate.

The whole incursion mechanic has me fairly interested, and I do recall a couple of mentions in the Tweetfleet about possibly setting up an incursion-busting corp - I don't know. Maybe I should go back to an NPC corp, consolidate all the crap I have scattered across Empire space, and sell most of it off and go back to missioning for a while - though that'd be annoying as I basically have no standings with anyone, so I'd have to start from scratch, no matter who I decided to go work for.

Hell, maybe I should sell all my crap and start literally from square one - new character, new face, new race, and then just dump all the old money I can on him/her. (I don't think I'll do that - I've got enough SP stored up that it'd get annoying as hell to start all over again.)

Or maybe I just need to take a break. Who knows?

I'll go one better...

2010-10-11T14:25:00.001-06:00

Rixx Javix over at EVEOGANDA made an interesting point in his post Death to Titans. I highly recommend giving it a read, but in short, he suggested, at the least, giving titans a severe nerf, or getting rid of them entirely. In the latter case, he suggested replacing them with what amounted to a mobile station, providing some services such as repairing ships, clone storage, and limited hangar space for ship and ammo storage for subcapital ships.

Now, me, personally, I've never seen a titan. I've never tried to fight one, I've never done a titan bridge, so were I to see one in my overview I'd probably need to change my underwear. But Rixx identified a problem that I think actually runs rather larger than he made mention of in his post. I think capital ships have gotten too numerous, and it seems that unless you have a carrier or a dreadnought, in larger fleet battles you're almost incidental.

Granted, I've been in exactly one large-scale fleet, and the enemy declined to engage us, which meant we just flew around and killed SBUs for an hour. I was in a sniper-fit Rokh-class battleship, and it felt like we were flying cover for the capital fleet. Don't get me wrong, I understand why, and it makes good tactical sense. But we had several dozen long-range battleships covering an equal, if not greater, number of mixed dreadnoughts and carriers, with a smattering of smaller ships covering the gates as scouts and tacklers, mostly.

Perhaps I'm too hung up on real life, but a group of private individuals, even organzied, shouldn't have that many capital ships. Hell, the United States Navy only has ten Nimitz-class and one Enterprise-class supercarriers currently in operation - what most navies consider capital ships. More, the Gerald R. Ford-class, slated to replace the Nimitz-class carriers (there is no plan to replace the Enterprise, either numerically or in name), cost $14 billion in research and development costs, and each carrier will cost another $9 billion and construction on the Ford itself started in 2007 and isn't scheduled to end until 2015.

Since I've thrown all those numbers at you, there has to be a point, right? Sure. It's this: capital ships and supercapital ships are too accessible. Just for me, it'd take about a year (and I don't even want to know how many millions of ISK) to train just the bare skills needed to fly a Phoenix-class DN. And, granted, most of the time it takes the resources of an alliance to afford a supercapital or a titan, but there's nothing stopping someone from building dozens of the damn things. CCP's even said that they hadn't planned on having as many titans as there are in the game.

Capital ships, supercapitals, and titans shouldn't be commonplace on the battlefield. There should be major time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears to even build one, let alone deploy one. Destruction of one of these ships should hurt, not be a common thing. Make them threats on the field, not targets.

Therefore I say, CCP, jack up the requirements. Make those skills take longer. Make it cost much more to build the damn things. Make them own the goddamn battlefield in response. But you shouldn't see hundreds of capitals and supercapitals fielded at a time by just one alliance. If capsuleers, who hold non-capsuleers' lives in as little regard as you say they do, had that much firepower, we'd own the goddamn cluster. We'd just roll right over the fleets of the Empires with sheer weight of numbers, especially if people banded together like the Northern Coalition did, or as BoB and the Goons for their wars lo those many moons ago.

Yes, I know none of this will ever happen. I'm just saying.

EVE Online: Incursion announced, and sparks thought.

2010-09-22T10:16:00.000-06:00

I haven't logged in much lately, partially from a lack of real desire to - the last few times I've logged in I've consistently been losing ships, thanks to my relative unfamiliarity with the ins and outs of how things work in NPC null-sec, where Primary. Alliance has reborn itself in the past couple of months. (Part of it also comes from prepping to go back to school for the first time in years, a car accident, City of Heroes: Going Rogue, and Halo: Reach.) But I'm thinking I may do my damnedest to get back in-game.

And when I looked over the press release on the Incursion web site a few things jumped out at me. First, it sounds like the Sansha's invasion which CCP's been setting up through their public storyline events will start to spread - a good thing, as I'd like to get involved in that. Sadly, most of the time when I hear about them I'm either unable to log in or it's halfway across the damn cluster.

More, the release talks about "improvements as suggested by the Council for Stellar Management" being a part of Incursion, as well as various hardware and software upgrades, presumably to address the lag situation. This is the part I'm most interested in, and to be honest doesn't really surprise me after the now-infamous "18 months" and "numbers do not support polished content" comments made by CCP. Of course, they don't really go into anything really specific, and I'm certain I'm not the only one who will be watching for more information coming down the pipe like a gorram hawk.

Overall, this looks like it's a primarily PVE-oriented expansion, adding the titular action by Sansha, new items and ships, more storyline events, improvements to EVE Gate and PI, and the rollout of CCP's new character tech (a prelude to the deployment of Incarna), the only thing that really will affect folks in low-sec and null-sec really seems to be the anti-lag upgrades. But I know a lot of folks will be interested in that alone, so yeah.

I'm a Loyal Pony

2010-08-12T22:41:00.001-06:00

After seeing a few other folks take this little test, I figured "what the hell" and took it myself. The results are pretty much where I expected.

James's Result: Loyal Pony

on quiz: EVE Online - Are you an emo rage quitter?

You most likely have been playing EVE for quite some time.
You have stuck by this game despite all the lag, bugs, imbalances and other
crap CCP never get around to fixing. You may not always be happy with the way
CCP prioritizes things, but you still think EVE is best MMO out there and there
is nothing quite like it. You consist of the majority of players in EVE,
somewhat unhappy with many things, yet you are committed to stay and hope
things get better.

Quiz Maker

Take this quiz & get your result

EVE Online - Are you an emo rage quitter? » Quiz School

I may drop sub from time to time, and call CCP's decision-making process into question from time to time, but overall I think EVE isn't in imminent danger of collapse.

Though sometimes I do want CCP to tell us what the hell the point of Incarna is going to be, either at launch or even if/when DUST launches, besides just providing something for us to do in stations besides spin ships.

PLEX Aid Program

2010-08-09T01:33:00.000-06:00

I can't take credit for this idea. I really really wish I could, but I can't. That 22-billion-plus ISK Kestrel kill that I blogged about, and Massively.com mentioned, plus several others?

Well, apparently, Anitta Blake of IT Alliance had an idea of what CCP should do with the money they get from all these destroyed PLEXs - in a manner similar to the PLEX Aid for Haiti program, donate "a percentage" of the profits from these destroyed - and thus unusable - PLEXs to a charitable organization. During a discussion on this via TeamSpeak earlier tonight, an alliance-mate suggested Child's Play as the most apropos charity.

So yeah. Go post on the thread. Even IT Alliance can come up with good ideas.

I knew this would happen sooner or later...

2010-08-08T02:38:00.002-06:00

Reference this killmail. How many ways does this fail?

You undock in Jita with reds in system... in a Kestrel.
Your Kestrel isn't even combat-fit... it's fit with a cyno generator.
You undock with reds in system with multiple PLEX's in your cargo hold.
You undock anywhere in space with seventy-four PLEX's in your cargo hold.
You don't immediately de-ass the area with a quickness when two battleships start targeting your Kestrel with 18 to 22 ~~million~~ billion (edited 9 Aug 2010, per Cesar's comment below) credits' worth of cargo in the bay.

At least the PLEX's didn't drop - or those two battleship pilots would be having a field day on this guy's tab.

Are Incarna and Dust 514 EVE's NGE?

2010-07-31T13:30:00.001-06:00

Obligatory Threadnaught link.

I've been having a vague sense of doom since I saw the last set of CSM minutes, wherein CCP basically said that they wouldn't be doing any serious bug-fixing for about eighteen months. That's three more expansions of stuff that may break other stuff - assuming the new stuff isn't itself broken.

I try not to bash on CCP too hard. I know that their first goal has to be to make money. And up until about a year ago, I'd have called EVE one of my favorite MMOs. But Dominion and Tyrannis have caused so many issues, and really done nothing for me, that I couldn't help but grow concerned. I've said before that I mostly fly around looking to blow up stuff, be that rats or people. I don't have the patience it takes to become an industrialist - hell, I barely have the patience to train skills to be effective in PvP! But I figure anything that makes our industrialists better is a good thing, so I figured Tyrannis and Planetary Interaction would be good things, and waited for the lag experienced by major fleets to go away.

Then CCP dropped their little bombshell of data on what their guys are working on at the CSM meeting. CCP, I'm sure Incarna is great and all, and up until about a year ago I'd have pre-ordered Dust 514 without a second thought (well, maybe one if I needed another subscription for Dust, but that's another conversation). But while just tossing new stuff at us may increase your immediate cash flow, leaving broken stuff broken, and not even doing some minor-but-visible work to fix it, will send players packing again.

Let's face it - the average Warcraft geek would come into EvE and get horribly lost. There is no major quest line, no overarching story, nothing to move a player along from one point to the next. It's just "here's a basic tutorial, go do stuff."

Don't get me wrong, I like it - it places much more control to shape our experience in our hands, rather than keeping us running around and killing little minion dudes and harvesting organs from woodland creatures ad nauseaum sprinkled with the occasional instanced quest and slightly tougher boss monster. Only in EVE could one single player, with a few clicks of a mouse, steal billions of credits' worth of stuff, disband a major alliance, and run off laughing. Only in EVE (pre-Dominion, anyway) could a thousand players on each side meet in one system, sending enough firepower back and forth to glass a planet's surface. As it is now, well... I've heard reports of systems lagging with only a couple dozen people in-system while ratting. This is not a good thing.

I'm not leaving EVE, at least, not yet. Perhaps the fanboy in me just is too stubborn to entirely lose faith in the vision CCP kindled in him lo those many moons ago when I first launched that little Ibis-class frigate. But, if nothing else, heed this, CCP: While new content and features may bring new players into your game, the only thing that will keep them there is if all those features and content work as advertised, and continue to do so. I don't think anybody's expecting you to just refine a few lines of code and have everything fixed. But ignoring your players - no. Ignoring your paying customers, not even acknowledging there are issues that need to be resolved, instead of simply tossing out lines about how your figures show this, that, and the other, will force us to vote with our wallets and leave. You don't want that, and, I think, the vast majority of the player base doesn't want that. But we will. You set high standards for yourself, and even brought in our elected representatives to help keep high-quality content that we wanted coming. Please, for your sake as well as ours, follow through.

Who says ratting can't be dramatic?

2010-07-13T22:06:00.000-06:00

Yes, I'm back in game. I got some GI bill money a bit early, and decided to treat myself by getting back in EVE now, instead of in a couple of months. So, after discovering that I couldn't do a direct bank transfer from my account to CCP without my debit card (damn thing demagnetized somewhere along the line and, once my bank said a new one would be sent out, I shredded the old one - oops), I found I had a couple more days to wait while PayPal got a transfer from my bank. No biggie, but that night I got a "free five day reactivation" email from CCP. Thus, I'm back.

Leaving Scalding Pass was... fairly painless. What didn't sell immediately got put on market or in an auction. I doubt any of it will actually sell, as Primary. has already left the Pass (thus the drama that started the collapse of the Pass alliances) and merged with The Spire Collective out in, well, The Spire. After Primary. left the Pass, however, apparently there was more drama, and Cult of War is folding, and there are rumors that Gentlemen's Club is moving out of Scalding Pass into NPC-held Great Wildlands, and no longer being a sovereignty holding alliance. I can't speak to the accuracy of those rumors, but COW's disbanding/folding/renaming/reorganizing/shattering is plain fact. The net result is that the Pass is now more a ghost town than anything else. Given that my stuff likely won't sell, and that I forgot I had more stuff in another station that I won't be able to sell off at all, I just decided to fill up a ship and head for the new home of First Flying Wing. I got there seeing nary a neut, and started setting up shop.

Today I threw together a Raven and started taking advantage of the fact that we now live in drone space. Monies were made, lulz were had, and today (despite finding out that my brother's computer had contracted a virus that will necessitate reformatting the disk drive and starting from square one) I was about to head back to base, sell the drone poop I'd collected, and bask in my income.

About halfway out, however, I ran into a neutral Rapier on an out gate. Glancing at local showed no other neutrals, and I heard nothing about a gang moving through on intel, so I shrugged, figured he wouldn't bother trying to aggress a battleship solo, and jumped. He jumped through, I waited in cloak for him to warp off. He instead dropped his drones and started to look for me. I aligned to the out gate, activating my tank as a precaution - it didn't help that my shields were still recharging a bit from taking on more drone battleships than likely had been prudent - and made to escape. The Rapier pilot, however, locked, scrammed, and webbed me before my warp drive finished spooling up.

I started to lock him back, but the Raven locks nothing quickly. I also dropped my T1 drones, and once I could, I started launching torpedoes downrange. (Yeah, I know, but it's what I had.) I was low on reloads, and ended up saving my last hundred rounds, just in case, since I wasn't doing crap for damage as he darted in and out of my range while his guns and drones kept chipping oh-so-slowly at my shields. His drones blew up one of mine while I tried to disengage and get out of his web range, but I had called for backup and managed to slip away while a friendly Dramiel played tag. The Rapier pilot ended up burning away, and I used what little cap I'd had left - I'd popped my MWD for a couple cycles after getting out of his webber range to try and clear his scrambler - to warp to a gate, figuring to use the resulting location where my warp drive shut down as an emergency safespot. I waited for him to leave, but a friend of his came in and the two of them were likely hunting me while I sat, letting my shields and cap recover.

I decided to chance running and warped off right as the Rapier warped in on my position, and I stumbled across the Rapier's friend - a Deimos - on my out gate. (If I'd been smart, I'd have run for a different gate, then jumped back and forth a bit to try and shake them before heading for my out gate. But hindsight's always 20/20, and it may not have helped in any case.) The Demios jumped through with me, and caught me as I tried to align to the next gate and try to get deeper into friendly territory. I had thought that the difference between warp disruptors and warp scramblers was range - I didn't kow that disruptors did nothing to MWDs - something I then took advantage of as both the Demios and the Rapier aggressed me. I ducked back into the previous system as more blues landed on the gate, and watched in intel (while jumping around in-system making safes and cycling through them) as the Rapier died. The Demios made it through the gate, but after a while he eventually gave up on waiting for me.

No, I didn't get a kill out of this, but I also managed to evade and escape, losing only some torpedoes and a single tech 1 drone. Personally, I don't mind losing out on getting a killmail if it means staying off one myself.