Eve Blog Pack Feed

Time for a Shopping Spree

Kirith Kodachi — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:53:08 PDT

So Sunday night I lost my Ishkur when I tried to pop a Rifter lounging off a gate. Sentry guns still hurt, FYI. I asked on twitter for guides to low sec piracy (although I think of myself as more of an anarchist rather than a pirate) but most suggestions were to Wensley's excellent Rifter guide and the issue I have with that is that I want to be able to fight on gates as well as belts since low sec belt ratters are a dead breed for all intents and purposes.

That means, as I was brutally reminded Sunday, I need something able to tank sentry guns for a bit for when I'm feeling aggressive/opportunistic, yet mobile enough to get around.

So first the list of ships able to meet these criteria is the utilitarian Battlecruiser class. I've got a lot of options since I cross trained all four races and the tech II medium weapons, but the first ship that comes to mind is the popular Hurricane. (I considered going back to my old standby Myrmidon but I would like something a little less pokey.)

[Hurricane, low sec]
Gyrostabilizer II
Gyrostabilizer II
Gyrostabilizer II
Tracking Enhancer II
Damage Control II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Invulnerability Field II
Warp Disruptor II
Large Shield Extender II
Y-T8 Overcharged Hydrocarbon I Microwarpdrive

425mm AutoCannon II
425mm AutoCannon II
425mm AutoCannon II
425mm AutoCannon II
425mm AutoCannon II
425mm AutoCannon II
Medium Energy Neutralizer II
Medium Energy Neutralizer II

Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Warrior II

I'm thinking of buying 5 of these and just going to town until they are all gone and I learn something for a change.

The other, more expensive option is to look at the tech II HACs and command ships, or event Tech III strategic cruisers. For HACs, the Vagabond and Ishtar appeal, and I even have an Ishtar down in Tash Murkon space I used a bit on Sunday, but the cost of such ships while I'm still trying to regain my low sec pvp legs would be high.

I could look at battleships, but the mobility issue raises its head as well as locking times and higher cost.

Opinions are welcome.

2 Year Anniversary Wormhole Prize Hunt Giveaway Bonanza

Blake — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:34:26 PDT

Two years ago a corpmate responded to my boredom comments in corp chat with an offer to come join him in the new frontier known as Wormhole space. I dove in headfirst with nothing to my name but a Covetor, a Dominix, and some 50 M in ISK.

At this time there were a lot of mechanics and logistical challenges to be figured out. We started this blog to help share some of our discoveries, shenanigans, and encounters in the unknown land of Wormhole space with the Eve community. Though we are currently not active in Wormhole space, I still keep the original mission of openly sharing information and experiences with the community alive.

So cheers to you, the Eve community, for being readers of our discourse. We would like to offer up prizes to everyone that has helped us stay passionately involved over the past two years.

As in true k162space fashion, we’re not going to simply give away a prize to the best comment, worst fit, or hold a lottery (thanks to CCP_OhWell for the wonderful suggestion).

Anchored in J124654, J212203, and J235219 around a planet is a can with a Bookmark. Comment on this post with the Bookmark codename as the comment will serve as your timestamp. Prizes will be given out based on discovery time.

1st Prize – PLEX
2nd Prize – Pirate Frigate of your choice with T1 rigs and T2 modules
3rd Prize – Sisters Scanning Set

Fire up the scanning probes and get hunting!

Again, thanks everyone for the experiences so far and cheers to another two years!

Know Your Low Sec Corps: Immortalis Inc.

Rixx Javix — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 08:08:16 PDT

IMMORTALIS Inc. [10101]

Forum / Killboard

Battleclinic rank: #190 (15,564 - 2,861, 164 - 10 This Week)
Member of the Shadow Cartel Alliance (#74)

Corp Members: 107

Home System: Goinard

For the last six months I've made many friends in Shadow Cartel, of which Immortalis is the largest Corporation - and from now on I'll just call the whole thing "Shadow" ok? Makes it easier and that's what we all call them anyway.

Shadow is a great group led by Wowbagger, who also happens to be a avid reader of this blog - so you know he has great taste. Shadow is probably best known and feared for their crazy, insane medium sized (10-20) fleets, but that doesn't mean they don't also fly small gang and solo. In fact, a quick glance at their killboard would confirm that, since the first 12 kills are all solo at the time I'm writing this.

So what is so famous about their fleets? Sadly, if I told you I'd have to kill you. It is an ever-changing trade secret often made up on the spot, or during formation. They are unique fleets composed of ships and tactics not normally seen in any fleets I was familiar with before flying with Shadow. I mean, don't get me wrong here, some of the foundational tactics and strategies are the same. Universal truth being universal. But the execution is the thing. And while I cannot share with you the details, I can say that I often end up flying ships fit in ways that would've made me hurl back in my Null Sec days.

Like a Rokh without guns and only sporting large neuts? Yeah, like that. Amazingly it worked great that day, I think I got like 10 kills in that thing. And I don't normally fly Rokhs.

Yes Shadow is part of the Axis of Essence Evil Brotherhood, which includes Burn Away, Tuskers and Shadow among a few others. (I made that up btw, no such "Axis" exists, although it does help to explain the general idea.) While none of us are blue to each other and we can (and do) often shoot at each other, we also often fly together or join up in system for opportunities as they knock.

This is the spirit I enjoy about low sec and Shadow is a big part of that. Great people who have fun, don't take the game seriously and know how to kill.

More to come in this on-going series.

Traditional Portraits : Asayanami Dei

Lea — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:13:48 PDT

Asayanami Dei... ruthless killer, patient teacher, couldn't ask for a better pilot to have my back out there in the unknown!

A Pod Pilot Must Never Have Fleas

Mord Fiddle — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:44:27 PDT

This one's from a house of ill repute (of the best reputation) in Teonusude.

You may slurp at your soup
Wear pink ballet boots
Or fart just as loud as you please
But whatever you do
Bear in mind this taboo:
A pod pilot must never have fleas

Chorus:
For a pod’s not a place for your fleas
They bite and they transmit disease
Your ship yaws and pitches
When you get the itches
Pod pilots must never have fleas

You may juggle five cats
Or wear Twitter hats
You may sup on malodorous cheese
You can snigger and burble
Make loincloths of gerbils
But pod pilots must never have fleas

You may eat unripe fruit
Dressed in your birthday suit
You can pick at the scabs on your knees
Grow hair from your nose
‘Til it tickles your toes
But pod pilots must never have fleas

(Feel free to add a verse or two of your own)

Capital Industry Calendar

Blake — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:15:34 PDT

The industry posts at Eve fail have inspired me to start producing Capitals and this has spawned some new requirements out of our Wallet Manager program.

Problem: Expensive Capital BPOs that are idle mean that they are not producing profitable items

Solution: Use the Corporation Industry Jobs API to display a visual aid of capital job production progress as to easily tell when BPOs will be idle

As always, James and I start off with a quick sketch on paper of what we think the final layout should look like. After some scribbling, debates about tables/CSS/javascript, and layout design we settled on a design.

Here is a shot of our paper sketch.

My knowledge of javascript is rather limited and James is usually the one spearheading new and innovative solutions when I present a design challenges.

Notes from James:

Blake often comes to me with a “I need this thing. Can you make this thing?”, to which I often pause and perform what I like to call shriveled programmer stare. This maneuver involves me scrunching my face as much as possible, raising one eyebrow, and giving a bit of a pained look. I’m quite sure I gave this look when the idea was first proposed. The basic idea actually is just a Gantt chart. I have x number of capital ships in production at any given time and I would like to know exactly, at a quick glance, when they come out of the oven so the next batch of parts will be ready. Simple enough, on paper. The real question is implementation.

A first idea was to use a table, and just change the background color if the job is still running on that day. However, we decided we would like to have the chart auto-scale, so that it would always display far enough out to have the end of the longest job on the chart. Doing this as a pure table would have been inelegant at best, with quite possibly a ludicrous amount of table columns needed for very long jobs. Instead, I took a more difficult, but ultimately more elegant approach; use a single row per job and utilize the margin-left and width css properties to control the positioning and length of each bar.

This, however, required that we have non-table-based vertical lines to delineate our days. For this I used Raphael. Raphael is a nifty little SVG canvas library with decent documentation and a good community base.


//Initialize our variables
var width = $this.width();
var height = $this.children('.industry-job-calendar-table').height();
var offset = globals.headerOffset;

var canvasDiv = $this.children('.industry-job-calendar-table').children('.industry-job-calendar-canvas')[0];

//Create the canvas
var paper = Raphael(canvasDiv, width, height + offset);

A lot of work went into getting our start and end dates, and anyone who’s worked with the JS Date object knows how painful operating in the non-native timezone (even if it is UTC) can be. After our fancy date math, we set the job bar properties, draw the canvas object behind the table rows, attach our tooltip hover() events to the bars, then do a pretty animation of the bars to their final widths.

All in all, a nice little idea that came in at around 325 lines of JS and 20 lines of PHP. And to use it is quite simple:

$('#industry-calendar').phdIndustryCalendar({url: './getCapitalJobs.php'});

And the final result is a clean looking display of our Capital production line.

Blog Pack: Actions Taken

Rixx Javix — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:57:19 PDT

First of all I can assure my readers that it would be highly unlikely that Eveoganda is spreading Malware or is otherwise corrupted. Since we accept zero outside advertisements, sponsorships or third-party applications (other than a few Google-approved mods like the Twitter feed in the left sidebar) it would be difficult to imagine this happening.

However, since several browsers seemed to think this was the case this morning I have taken some action. It appears that Chrome/Google believes one of the blogs on the Blog Pack was harboring such Malware. Since I am unable to confirm the validity of that belief on my own, I have taken the liberty of removing the offending blog from the Blog Pack (and all links to it as well) until such a time as it no longer is being reported as corrupted.

It is my hope that this will be corrected shortly and the blog in question will be returned to the Blog Pack quickly.

I apologize for any inconvenience but as always my goal is a problem free existence.

Also, look for a new Blog Pack update in a few days!

Staying out of trouble

pjharvey — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:43:30 PDT

It’s been slim pickings of late, my roams only culminating in a couple of near misses. Maybe today will be luckier for me. I have to cope with a couple of stray signatures in the home system first, one of which is naturally a wormhole. A second wormhole in our class 4 system is the first sign of activity and a positive indicator, even if it means possible intruders. I resolve the final unfamiliar signature as a ladar site and warp to the two wormholes, finding our static connection and a K162 from class 5 w-space. I go where the action is and jump to the C5.

A visit to this class 5 w-space system only a month ago has my notes give me positions of three towers here, two of which are visible on my directional scanner from the wormhole. I also see some ships, and warping to the towers finds a Nightmare battleship and a pod piloted, the Fenrir freighter, three Orca industrial command ships, and Covetor mining barge empty. A Moros dreadnought turns up at the tower with the two pilots but does little more. I am interested by the presence of shield maintenance bots in the system but, like the last time I saw some, they appear to be happily floating alone in space.

I warp to the third tower, out of d-scan range of the other two towers, to find it still there but empty. Returning to the first tower has the Nightmare gone, and I’ll be buggered if I’m sitting here watching a Moros do nothing, particularly when I have a class 3 w-space system to explore. I leave this populated but boring system behind me, warp across our home system, and jump to the connecting C3. D-scan is clear on my entry, and launching probes and performing a blanket scan of the system reveals no ships, a tower on-line but empty on the outskirts of the system. I start scanning the handful of signatures here.

A gravimetric site is first resolved, then the system’s static exit to high-sec empire space, followed by two more wormholes and a radar site. The second wormhole is an outbound connection to more class 3 w-space, which would be dandy if it weren’t reaching the end of its natural lifetime, leaving me with a K162 from low-sec empire space to complete my exploration here. I check the exit to high-sec and am happy to see myself out in Caldari space, in The Citadel region no less, but rather less pleased to have a Nighthawk command ship and Guardian logistics ship sitting right on top of the wormhole with me.

It’s possible that the Nighthawk and Guardian were preparing to enter the C3 and shoot some Sleepers until I appeared in their midst. Possible, but unlikely, and not just because the pilots are from a Russian PvP corporation. The Guardian repairs armour and feeds capacitor to ships, the Nighthawk has a formidable and generally passive shield tank. The two are like oil and water in fleet operations. Whatever they are doing there, they are no immediate threat in high-sec, and they don’t follow my Tengu strategic cruiser back in to the C3. I warp away from the wormhole and check the low-sec system on the other side of the K162.

The low-sec exit looks to be better situated than the high-sec one, a mere six jumps from our stored assets. There may be a low-sec system or two to navigate to get there and back, but my Crane transport ship will be able to cross that with no difficulties. And with w-space still quiet it looks like a good opportunity to get my utitily ship back home, along with some more sundries we exported as part of our evacuation. It’s settled, then. I’ll bring my Crane home.

I drop off the Tengu at our tower, grab a shuttle, and make my way through w-space, to low-sec, and then high-sec. Travel is easy and quick, and I dock and load my Crane. I stuff a couple of giant secure containers in the hold, letting me carry almost all of the modules and some of the ammunition that I brought out previously, leaving only some ammunition and a few modules that I may want to keep for the ships still stowed here. I undock, make my way peacefully back through high- and low-sec to the wormhole, and jump in to the C3. No one’s waiting for me, but I can see two Badger haulers on d-scan now. Just my luck to miss some soft targets as I peform logistics myself.

I warp the Crane home, throw the returned modules in to our hangar, and get in to my Manticore stealth bomber, wanting to get back to the C3 as quick as I can. I return to see a Crane on d-scan, apparently picking up planet goo, but I only follow in its agile shadow until I chase it back to the local tower, where its pilot takes a nap. Three Drake battlecruisers are also now at the previously empty tower, all piloted along with a Heron frigate. My interest in the now-active system wanes somewhat when the Drakes disappear in a puff of disconnection smoke, leaving only the Heron.

At least I have a chance of catching a Heron, it being a scanning boat that cannot warp cloaked. And it even warps around, launching probes and scanning, but I’m always one step behind. The appearance of a Proteus on d-scan has me chasing two ships with d-scan, and I am finally able to get eyes on the strategic cruiser when I warp to the N968 connection, still there and awfully wobbly. The Proteus isn’t local, but nor is it a particular threat to us. Well, it is, as the pilot’s corporation is red to us, but the Proteus doesn’t seem to be taking an interest in our system. In fact, he appears to be muscle for his own logistics operation, ships moving between the now-EOL connection to high-sec and and this N968, aided briefly by Absolution and Nighthawk command ships at different times.

A local ship is stalking the system too, a stealth bomber lurking on the wormhole to high-sec and perhaps protecting their own ships’ passage. I consider trying to engage him, confident I can win a stealth bomber duel, but the exit to high-sec makes it a futile endeavour. This leaves me chasing the Heron again. The problem, though, is that the Heron is using a safe spot when he isn’t at a wormhole, and I don’t seem to be quick enough with d-scan to find him when he’s vulnerable on a wormhole. I think I catch sight of him visiting our K162 and wait patiently for him to jump back to the C3, on the assumption that he went in to explore our home system, but his reappearance on d-scan in the C3 shows he never left, damn him.

I make one final attempt at provoking a confrontation this evening, in a horribly mis-matched—in my favour—hunt for the Heron in my Tengu. Warping around has put the frigate’s safe spot under 0·1 AU from the system’s star, which will make scanning his position trivial, but I’ll definitely need the Tengu to do it. I stow my Manticore to bring my strategic cruiser in to the C3, and launch probes and cloak as quickly as I can, throwing my probes out of the system. But the Heron’s combat scanning probes likely picked up my presence as I did this, and his ship cloaks. I get one attempt at scanning the Heron when he reappears, but my tightly clustered probes pick up no ship. Rather than continue this frustrating chase I recall my probes and head home for the night, knowing only too well what can happen if I press for combat. I’ll get a good opportunity again soon enough.

Twitter Tuesday: Twits from Tweetfleet

Rixx Javix — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:26:24 PDT

Welcome to Twitter Tuesday! The semi-sorta-regular feature where I ask my fellow Tweetfleeters to ask me any question, serious, silly or absurd, and I have to answer it here on Eveoganda.

So let's see what they come up with today shall we?

@BuckyOhair Why am I always the first one to ask a question?

This is very sad, poor Bucky. All of us in the Tweetfleet have tried to help this guy, but he is so sad and lonely, all he has is his Tweetfleet account to keep him going. Seriously, if you have a heart, please try to help. A cousin, or a friend of yours that can spend some time with Bucky would be a great help. Even if it is only for a few hours. Visit BuckyBuddy.com to learn more.

@d347hm4n Why do people blob? How can they be dissuaded.

I wondered this as well, so I contacted a buddy of mine who works in the Center for Blobbing Studies outside Washington DC and I learned some interesting things. For instance, Blobbers flock mainly in response to a genetic marker they all share, this marker became apparent as a result of the Human Genome Project and has recently been the subject of great debate. Humans who share this marker seem to respond primarily via air-borne phermones that smell like coffee or baking bread, hence the popularity of coffee shops and fresh bread makers. How this translates into Eve-online is the subject of some tests they have coming up soon, so look for more information in the near future.

@CozmikR5 when are you gonna add this unrepentant non-conformist to the blog pack? My longevity qualifies me :))

Well longevity isn't the only criteria, but look for some updates later this week to the Blog Pack. I can't promise your blog will be on there, but it might. I had a neurosurgeon friend of mine tinker around in my brain and lock off the part that works on the Blog Pack, so I'll be just as surprised as the rest of you.

@MarcScaurus Why do I have balls on my head?

(Check out the Twitter Hats page to see what Marc is referring to) Marc is sporting the Ancient Chinese Traditional Hat of Courage and Fierce-some Fighting Spirit, which is little understood in the West. It is easy to see why he may be confused into thinking it is simply balls he is wearing. Each "sphere" contains mystical powers that assist the wearer in times of trouble. Wearing such a hat in Ancient times was a symbol of great respect and power. Of course, in the modern world, it's just silly.

@TG_3 My question: "Why?"

My answer: "Why the Hell not?"

@Capital_Murder How many licks does it take to make it to tootsie roll center of tootsie pop?

Very good question. I just happen to have one here... so let me get it opened. Hold on. Ok, yum, it does look good. So here we go. A one. (lick) A two. (lick) A three. (CRUNCH!) A three!

@HarlonMathuin Why is pie so damn awesome?

Pie is truth and cake is a lie, but why? Why is the sky blue, well I cannot tell you. The cake is a lie it holds deep and false, like the orchestrated dance at a fancy waltz. The beginning sprang from revolution, but the answers are extreme and Confucian. A tangled puzzle in a locked box, to get at it you must make like a fox. I'll start you on the path of truth from lies, by telling you it all begins with your eyes. I know, this can be exhausting, so look no further than the frosting.

Pie is truth. Hence the secret to its awesomeness.

@Acute_Dragonis If 30 planes a year are lost in the Bermuda triangle, then why do people continue to fly though that area???

Little known fact and please don't pass this around at dinner parties, but that area of the ocean is the ritual breeding ground of airplanes. The male airplane spreads his seed amongst the clouds and the female, if one has responded to the male call, scoops the seed into her intake manifold. The male, then spent, crashes into the waves and dives deeply to the ocean floor where he finds a locked door. The door opens and within is the male plane gentleman's club, where he lives out his days smoking cigars and eating cheese on the couch watching whatever the hell he wants on the telly!

@BuckyOhair How do all those clowns fit in that tiny car?

Clown car maker, Acme Clown Car International, also makes the world-famous Tardis for the BBC television series Doctor Who. Not many people know this, but this explains the shared Tardis Drive Effect in which apparent space is actually much larger than it appears. This technology was developed specifically for clown usage in the late 1800's.

@Acute_Dragonis Why does @BuckyOhair have a fetish about a bunch of clowns in a tiny car?

See the earlier mention and visit BuckyBuddy.com. Unlike most humans Bucky's innate fear of clowns has been replaced by a deep longing to mimic their close knit community and a desire to "fit in" to a family, even one as horrible and demeaning as a clown based one.

@HarlonMathuin How can clowns drive in such massive shoes?

They can't obviously, which is why clowns kidnap young children that don't listen to their parents and force them to live a life of slavery and depravation as slaves to the clowns. Driving their little Tardis Drive endowed cars is only one of the many humiliations such children face on the daily basis.

Blog Banter: Arena

Toterra — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:05:18 PDT

So someone has kicked off the post Crazy Kinux era blog banter with the idea of having an arena to create the opportunity for quick combat.:

EVE Quick Matches

Kirith Kodachi recently discussed the idea of what a World of Tanks style quick-match element would bring to EVE Online. Would the opportunity for a quick combat interest you? How could it be implemented? Could it be done without having a negative impact on existing gameplay elements? Or does such a concept have no place in EVE?

Personally I think that it is a fantastic idea. We seriously need in this game a way for solo pilots to get into arranged fights. Here are my two great ideas that really should be added to the game:

1. High-population Low-sec system with Belts: Wouldn't it be great if you could take a frigate to a low-sec system and, simply by using the directional scanner check out all of the belts looking for a similar frigate. If you see one odds are great that they would be looking for the same thing so warp to the belt at zero and presto... a 1 on 1. Naturally there is no real guarantee that the enemy will neither run nor call for backup, but, this being EVE and this being lowsec 90% of the time you will get a 1v1. I suggest we call this special system Amamake.

2. Organized 1v1 tournament: If only CCP could think of a way that a blog or a magazine could sponsor and organize a 1v1 frigate tournament. That would be great! Players could sign up and organize fights. Maybe they could even have the organizers setup an in-game channel to help with the coordination. If only this were possible. Pity.

In all seriousness I think that an arena feature could work.... I just don't think 1) CCP could pull it off in a non-fail fashion and 2) it would not get boring real fast. The whole point of player created content is that, since it can evolve naturally, it is better then what can be imagines by a game designer. Yes, I played WOT, and eventually got bored and gave it up. No arranged 1v1 can compare to setting out in a T1 frig and hunting down a T2 frigate. Two hours of roaming ... two minutes of excitement = what EVE is all about.

Other opinions:
Kuro Mayuri: Exploring all New Eden has to offer
Kirith Kodachi: World of Tanks - lessons to be learned
Seismic Stan: Suddenly Combat: World of Spaceships
Arydanika: Blog Banter: Competition Arenas
Harrigan Vonstudly: Blog Banter: Quick matches. Eveharmony?
Drackarn: Eve Blog Banter - Quick Matches
Rhavas: NECL Season One
Noise: Arena PvP
Ender Black: Blog Banter: Quick Matches
Mike Azariah: Blog Banter: Pinks
Mabricks Mumblings: Chivalry, not cage fights.

Still Tanking

Kirith Kodachi — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 06:11:18 PDT

I'm still jumping into World of Tanks when I get little chances and feel I'm getting better in the random battles to the point where I'm confident of getting a kill almost every match in my Tank Destroyer and Artillery tanks, but still struggling with the concept of the light tank scout.

My "main" tank, the one I play most often to get the most experience for, is my tier III Marder II tank destroyer. With upgraded gun and some binoculars for longer viewing range, I can act like a nice sniper. I typically find a spot forward from our base but not as front line as our battle tanks and support the engagement from afar. I might lost some punching power, but even at half a kilometer I can punch through tier III and IV tanks easily and threaten tier Vs. I like to pick a spot in a bush near some hard cover for ducking behind and with a view of two likely approach routes.

I'm getting to the point where I can get one kill at least with a couple damages on others every match, and getting 2 kills is more common every day. Sometimes I get on fire (I mean figuratively as you can literally get on fire in your tank) and get 3 or 4 kills and once I picked up 5 kills.

My secondary tank flips between the artillery and the light tank, but I have more fun with my artillery (aka self propelled gun or SPG), currently a tier III Sturmpanzer II. Its not a well liked version of SPG due to limitations but I enjoy the ability to have a bird's eye view and drop little packets of doom on targets heads. Unfortunately, artillery tends to get matched up against a wider tier range and I have to be careful not to target the big tier 7 tanks as I can barely hurt them.

The rest of the time I run around in my light tank, a tier III PzKpfw 38(t). I have not got a good handle on scouting as I tend to end up dead a lot with few kills, damages, or even spotting. I'm too weak for the first two and often too cautious for the last, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. Just this morning I put eyes on a flank, spotted a rusher trying to flank to our artillery position and chased him until my damage and a friendly TD killed him. Then I did an end round run into their artillery and killed two before I was finally put down.

As you can see, I'm all tier III right now but I do have the tier IV tank destroyer unlocked, the popular Hetzer, but I'm short credits to afford it yet. Another gaming session will get me enough to buy one assuming I sell my sweet Marder II in the process.

Rumours of my Demise were greatly exaggerated?

Helicity Boson — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:41:03 PDT

Hello gentle readers,

It has been a while has it? Just popping in to confirm I was mysteriously unbanned as of this morning.

I suspect the many people who loving petitioned my ban on my behalf had something to do with that, so thanks to all of you and much love!

Will I play EVE again? I’m really not sure, CCP has gone quite rotten IMHO and I’m rather “meh” about the notion of providing free content for them and paying for the privilege of doing so.

I have missed the people, but not the game.

EVE remains a rather poor game, and it does not look like this will change in the forseeable future.

What this means for Hulkageddon? I don’t know right now, I’ll have to think on it and see if I have any desire to play a ruined game just for the sake of socializing with certain people (most of which I can hang with on twitter/G+/FB anyways).

Also, for the haters out there:

HATERS GONNA HATE, BUT I’M STILL NOT BANNED ANYMORE NYAH NYAH!

Even the action is feeble

pjharvey — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:34:52 PDT

Back from my break and all is still quiet. I can take a shufti at what the locals in the neighbouring class 3 w-space system are up to now, having waited in vain to catch a scanning scout of theirs earlier. I take my covert Tengu strategic cruiser through the connecting wormhole and warp across to the tower, finding the scout now in his own Tengu and joined by two colleagues, another in a Tengu and the third pilot in a Viator transport ship. This is pretty much how I left them a couple of hours ago, making me suspect that they will not coincidentally become active all of a sudden. I scan the system instead of waiting for movement.

A new anomaly has spawned since earlier but there remain seven signatures. A wormhole leaps out at me on a general scan, resolving to be the system’s static exit to low-sec empire space but reaching the end of its natural lifetime. How dull. There is also to be found a gravimetric site, a ladar site, a second ladar site, a magnetometric site, and a third ladar site. There really isn’t much to do here, and I see no benefit in risking the connection to low-sec collapsing behind me, so I simply head home and take another break.

And coming back again still finds space deader than tank tops. Undeterred, and wanting to entertain myself, I grab my stealth bomber and warp out to the C3 once more. It’s actually kind of fun to be in the smaller ship once more. As convenient and powerful as the scanning Tengu is there is a certain simplicity in piloting the stealth bomber, agile and fast-locking, with a hull only just able to survive the expansion pressures of one atmosphere out in space. I hope after all this time I can remember what each button does.

Jumping in to the C3 sees eight ships on my directional scanner this time, along with an exciting-looking jet-can. I don’t remember that being here before and maybe a ship has gone mining, but sweeping d-scan around places it at the tower, so maybe it was here all along. Also at the tower is the piloted Viator transport ship and Tengu, the only change being the disappearance of one pilot. Maybe there’s a time dilation effect inside the force field of their tower, and it’s only been five minutes perceived time since I first saw them several hours ago.

Activity! The Tengu moves! The strategic cruiser moves just far enough to swap in to a Drake, but the new battlecruiser keeps on moving, engines surging it forwards. I’m keen to see what happens next and try to get a bearing on which direction it will enter warp, but it remains under normal engine power. The Drake approaches the Viator, chomps the jet-can, which I suppose must have been new after all, and then sits still again, contemplating the contents of the can. Thus ends the excitement of the Drake.

Still simply watching ships, I stir a little when the Blackbird from earlier resurfaces. The pilot swaps the cruiser for an Onyx, the heavy interdictor a curious choice for a system apparently devoid of activity, and surely it isn’t warping out to engage Sleepers. I try to follow him, only finding him back at his tower a minute later, but on my little trip around the system I pay a visit to where the exit wormhole was and has now died. Good, I can scan for the new one. I warp homewards, get back in to my covert Tengu, and return to the C3 to scan for the replacement static wormhole.

A standard examination of d-scan when entering the C3 has a new contact, a Tengu in the system again. Warping to the tower doesn’t find him, but sweeping d-scan around shows we must have passed each other, as the local Tengu is now sitting on the K162 home. And as I find this out the Onyx warps out of the tower to join him. Whether my movements have been detected, or actively monitored, or they are being purely speculative in their camp I don’t know, but I can’t see anything to worry about. I’m probably safer now that I’m back in my Tengu too. The Onyx bubbles the K162, the Tengu jumps in to our C4. I warp away, having lost interest in them already.

Ignoring the two aggressive ships for now I launch probes and scan, resolving the new static exit to low-sec, and then wonder why I did it. It’s getting late enough that I don’t feel like scanning low-sec for more wormholes, and even if it weren’t late and the exit were close to some stowed ships I don’t think I’d want to bring them home through an Onyx’s warp bubble. I recall my probes and head home for the night, just needing to navigate my way past an unintentionally feeble blockade.

Rather than throw caution to the wind I drop short of the wormhole, outside the Onyx’s bubble, prefering to better control my approach. It’s a simple matter to avoid the single ship in order to keep my cloak intact, and I jump through the wormhole. In the home system I ignore the session change timer and move away from the wormhole and cloak, although the Onyx doesn’t appear to be in any rush to follow behind me. The hostile Tengu makes himself known, but only to decloak a second after I am once again hidden, giving him little option but to cloak again himself. The Onyx turns up but too late, making it all rather anticlimatic. I warp away, leaving the two ships to their own devices, and settle down for the night.

Minecraft Diary

Xeross — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 09:26:52 PDT

This is a diary I started on a single-player world quite some time ago, but eventually lost motivation for. Regardless, I hope you enjoy reading it.

Day 1

I woke up in this strange unknown world, not sure how I got here, but the thing I did know was I was gonna be here for a while.

I started gathering some wood as I needed some tools, while walking around I saw some burning trees a bit further away. I decided to investigate and as I suspected the trees grew too closely to lava setting them ablaze

After gathering some materials I decided to find a place were to start building shelter, or at least some storage. After walking a while I encountered a cave that was very steeply going downwards, so I decided to mark it with a big pile of dirt for later investigation.

After finding a nice spot on an open plane to put down a working bench I quickly crafted some basic wooden tools, and went on to get some stone after that to get some decent tools to work with.

I spotted what looked like a small cavern not too far away and decided to get some stone there. However upon investigation it turned out to be a rather large open cave of which most was hidden under ground level. I gathered some stone, and also some coal I found and decided to head back to make new tools.

After creating some stone tools I decided to gather some more stone from my now designated mine, however as I got there night was setting in.

Night

I was stupid to decide to just make a lighted area around my workbench and that I would be fine that way, before I knew it a skeleton was attacking me, eventually knocking me out.

Strangely I woke up again at the place I woke up when I got here, devoid of all my gear, luckily I made a small wooden tower at the location of my workbench so I could easily find it back.

I managed to kill the skeleton this time and quickly decided to craft a stone sword, just in time as suddenly multiple skeletons and zombies started approaching, luckily I managed to kill most of ‘em, before being knocked out yet again.

The night continued on like this, I’ve been knocked out for 3 times now, luckily when dawn finally struck it seemed our neighbourhood skeletons, zombies and spiders left a good amount of resources, so I can now make a bow and have some arrows for it.

Now time to start building an actual shelter…

Day 2

I’ve survived the night, well sort of, now day has dawned I saw the landscape was damaged thanks to these exploding green creatures, I’ll have to restore that sometime soon.

There were still a few spiders left so I took care of them swiftly with my sword, and then went to gather resources for the house.

Spent the entire day collecting resources for the house, finished it just as darkness hit.

Night

Safely inside the house, I’ve constructed a furnace and used the little coal I had left to cook some meat and smelt some iron. Finally a good meal.

Now we wait until dawn comes…

I’m hearing plenty of zombies and skeletons outside, I hope dawn comes soon, I don’t like this. Well at least I now have a safe shelter, but I should get some glass tomorrow for windows, as this hole I look out through doesn’t protect me very well from arrows.

The sun is finally starting to rise, soon the zombies and skeletons will meet a fiery death, though it seems that these green exploding things (Or creepers as I now call them) are resistant to sunlight, so I’ll have to get rid of them the old fashioned way.

Day 3

A zombie suddenly appeared in my house, but there’s no way he could’ve gotten in here, hmm this strange land sure has its quirks.

As soon as dawn struck I decided to go gather sand for the windows, and on the way back I gathered some coal, and coincidentally found some iron. After having mined this I headed back to my house to start smelting the sand.

While the sand was smelting I headed out to gather more wood to expand the house a bit, as it was quite small and I had enough of sleeping on the floor.

When I came back I started expanding the house and placed the windows, I also smelted the iron and created some iron tools from it.

Night

I continued building the expansion in the evening but found myself out of cobblestone quickly, I figured not having a roof wouldn’t be a problem as long as the walls were up.

Fuck, I completely forgot spiders can climb walls, I have quickly lined the ceiling with dirt and will replace it with stone the following morning.

Now sleep and wait ’till dawn…

Day 4

Feeling quite hungry, so my first priority was to find myself some food, luckily some pigs had somehow formed a group so I butchered them and took the meat.

After cooking it all, eating part of it and storing the rest I headed on out to the mine to get some more stone to finish the roof.

After finishing the roof it already started to become night again, luckily due to random annoying sheep I had enough wool to make a bed, so now I finally have a bed woo, anyway, off to bed.

Night

Zzz…

Day 5

Today I decided the house needed some decent flooring instead of fucking grass, I set out to the forest to gather some wood, replanting every tree I chopped down.

After laying the floors for the house I decided to start working on the roof a bit, I managed to finish the outlines of the sloped roof before running out of wood.

After this I filled up some of the holes the explosions of the creepers left with the sand I had now gathered, and then night fell.

Night

Zzz…

Day 6

Started working on a pathway to the mine, so I can get there in the night too, even though the pathway won’t be safe for spiders everything else can’t get on it, though I’m gonna need a lot of stone/wood for this project.

Well more work tomorrow…

Night

Zzz…

Uwu, for some reason I keep getting woken up by skeletons and zombies somehow being inside my house, this doesn’t make sense at all.

Day 7

More work on the walkway to the mine, so far the actual path is done, now for the fencing and lighting posts tomorrow.

Night

Somehow the zombies/skeletons are still able to get into my house, this is seriously impacting my night’s rest.

Day 8

Spent the entire day working on the walkway to the mine again

Night

Waited too long before heading home, had to fend off quite a lot of monsters in result, anyway back home now, time for sleep.

Day 9

Pretty uneventful, finished the lighting next to the walkway, and started working on sealing off the entire mine.

Due to sealing off the mine it became somewhat darker so I had to add some lighting, and a zombie managed to scare me shitless, better look more carefully next time.

Night

Seems moving my bed has solved the problem with the monsters finding their way in, odd.

Zzz…

Day 10

Worked on the mine the entire day again, sealed off most of it now, still need to add windows.

Night

Part of the fence is now finished, need some more wood, spent the entire night mining, sealing off the mine and working on the pathway

Nation incursion in New Caldari

Myrhial Arkenath — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:33:37 PDT

I don’t usually go this far out of my way when I see an incursion report, but this time it was different. The location, for starters, happened to be right where I keep a clone with stronger implants. It’s a convenient location to jump to and disappear into the masses while transporting planetside or simply somewhere in Empire space that will take me away from home for a good while. Nobody asks questions here. There’s so many people, and the people who may ask questions simply look the other way. And they know they won’t get found out either, because nobody is going to check records that appear clear as day.

But I digress. Yesterday I decided to respond to some intel that Nation may strike at New Caldari, which came from a pretty reliable source. So after pulling some strings I got myself set up with a Dramiel, while Velarra, who happened to be nearby as well, met me in system in a Hawk. Not the best ships for a response fleet, I realized afterwards, but better than nothing.

When I arrived from the pickup location, jumping through the Jita gate back into New Caldari, there was an absolutely mind-blowing amount of Sansha battleships on the gate. Several wormholes had opened nearby from which they all poured out. It didn’t take long before the fighting began. Knowing full well that my Dramiel wouldn’t be a match for the battleships I waited, until frigate reinforcements came through. Those perished quite easily under the firepower of the smaller defense force.

The various wormholes through which Nation ships entered the system

Sansha opening fire upon capsuleer defence force

A closer look at the defence fleet

The defence fleet from another angle

A shot from the back of the Nation fleet

After a good hour of fighting wave after wave, eventually seeing the ordinary hulls replaced by the newer technology used in “regular” incursions, Citizen Astur decided to take on us capsuleers in the Revenant mothership. What a frightening piece of technology. Not only is it massive in scale, and adorned with the spikes they so love, but the whole form of it is just plain … well, creepy. It’s almost like they took the organic design that the Jove were known for, and then twisted it. It makes the Nightmare hull look almost friendly. Hah, and to think if I obtained one more skill book, I could in theory interface with one. The idea sends shivers down my spine. I’ve once interfaced with a Nightmare hull, just to see it from the eyes of the camera drones, and I just felt constantly disturbed. I’ve been assured it is supposed to be safe, but I’m still not totally convinced.

My dramiel had no trouble staying out of harms way. Activating the afterburner I circled around and around trying my best to shoot where it hurts. I’ve still got a ways to go in terms of perfecting my skill with Cartel ships, but all in all I wasn’t doing too bad. Right up until the very end where Citizen Astur aimed the weapon systems at me. Shields slowly but surely started to drop, and having the ship on loan, I decided to retreat from the scene. A bit of a moot point afterwards as the moment I left the scene the hull started to explode. Ah well, no Sansha podding for me then.

Firing freely upon the Revenant mothership

Outtake from the combat log

As soon as the attack had came, as soon peace returned to the system. Or well, the bulk of capsuleers returned to their daily activities, with some staying behind to discuss the events on the local channel. Realizing I was in a rather pricy hull, and do still carry a small bounty, I decided to dock up and reship into a harmlessly looking Ibis, to go and collect some skill books I had long wanted before taking some station-side rest.

OOC: Here are some bonus screenshots, as this was in fact a demonstration of live events at PAX. I gathered these from Twitter. Would be really nice if there was a recording if this too, because I’m mighty curious about audience reaction and what was commentated about. Not to mention I’m curious if the getting shot at in the end was intentional or not (hi Dropbear!).

Photo provided by @CCP_TonyG

Photo provided by @mread

End of an Era - Fly Safe m3

Kirith Kodachi — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:09:49 PDT

RIP

This weekend our CEO put into words on our forums what everyone kind of already knew.

As of today m3 and m3w are no longer effective corporations within Eve. We will close recruitment and I will be mothballing the corporations for the foreseeable future until CCP decide to make eve worth playing again. This might be 6 months this might be a year. What I would like is for the pilots of m3 to find homes they can enjoy and keep an eye on m3 public to see what’s happening with us. We will continue to maintain the forum so we can keep in touch and play other games together and prove that the community we have created can survive beyond the confines of New Eden.

Last night I left the corp for my own alt corp, Ninveah Enterprises, so I could partake in a little low sec (fail) piracy without besmirching the corp's name. (FYI: assault ships don't tank sentry guns so good... still.)

I've spent one month short of 3 years in this corp, and it hurt to watch it decline these past few months. Truth be told, we never really reached the heights of enjoyment and synergy we felt in the heady days of old Providence as part of Paxton Federation, before idiots in CVA allowed everything thousands of pilots worked towards be tore down in a month. But let's not rehash those old wounds again.

We tried several times to recapture the lightning in a bottle and we might have succeeded in FCON had the war with the Supercarriers of DRF not killed the Northern Coalition and the only recourse to the alliance, being vassals of the Goons, had not rubbed most of the leadership of m3 the wrong way.

Disillusioned by null sec warfare and CCPs constant null sec nerfs and missteps (anom nerf, jump bridges, bots and supercaps getting out of control, etc), the bitter old vet disease took control of the corp leadership and took the wind out of the sails, going into a spiral of not enough people logging in because no fleets were up because no one was leading them because no one was logging in. You know the drill.

Perhaps m3 Corp will rise again someday in New Eden. Only time will tell.

* * * * *
Personally, I will be continuing my weekly logging in and trying to get my PvP fix. Look for me in Placid region for the time being as I try to figure out where I am going to land after this period of transition.

Interview: Voices from the Void

Roc Wieler — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 06:00:15 PDT

I’ve always enjoyed interviews. Not just for the publicity, nor for the arrogance that I get to be the center of attention once again for the duration of the podcast, but simply because I enjoy intelligent banter.

Voices from the Void provided that in abundance. They aren’t like one of those morning shows I’ve done where my entire guest appearance is a ten minute segment on the best way to cook eggs in zero gravity, but rather a genuine interest in me as a person, a personality, an icon, and a target for Hallan Turrek’s quick wit.

I’m sure every one of their guests feels this way, including the part about Hallan.

The entire podcast was professionally done, flowed naturally with few edits from what I’ve heard (aside from what came after the whole “tickling” discussion), was produced and turned around in only a few days, and overall was something I would gladly do again.

Some of these things I wanted to post directly on the Voices from the Void site, but sadly they have comments disabled; I’m sure with good reason.

Just the same, if you’re interested in finding out more about me, my opinions on everything from CCP to snot filled envelopes to Roc being accused of Amarr spying, and everything in between, tune in and give a listen.

The interview runs 1h30m in length. Didn’t realize I was so full of myself…

VOICES FROM THE VOID: ROC WIELER

a bit of poetry

Rixx Javix — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:21:55 PDT

am i here
or am i there
sitting here
ghost in the dark

am i there
or am i here
invisible
to my own self

am i real
or am i smoke
i cannot see
for i am cloaked

Sightseeing - The Golgothan Fields

Toterra — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:40:31 PDT

The Minmatar Rebellion saw many battles, both on the ground and in space. The largest of the space battles took place in the Ennur system just a few weeks after the start of the rebellion. The main Amarr battle fleet had returned from Jovian space and intended to break the power of the rebels once and for all by sweeping through their core systems. The Minmatar met the Amarr with every ship they could muster. The battle was fierce and lasted for hours. In the end, the Minmatar withdrew and the Amarrians claimed victory; however, the Minmatar had succeeded in disabling or destroying the best capital ships in the Amarr fleet, thus reducing their offensive strength dramatically. Today the old battlefield, commonly known as the Golgothan Fields, is littered with old shipwrecks and infested with pirates who have taken refuge in the giant hulks. They defend their outposts fiercely, but daring scavengers can still sneak in and rummage around.

Bored running missions I thought I would do a bit of sightseeing... I decided to check out the Golgothan Fields... an historic site in the EVE back-story where the Minmattar Rebbelion lost a battle to the Amarrians, but set themselves up to eventually win their independence. Located in the Ennur System within Molden Heath Low-sec it was a quick march to this interesting ancient battlefield.

Upon arriving at the pocket I was immediately set upon by an Angel Cartel force that seems to inhabit this location. I decided to simply ignore them and have a look around. What I saw was what must have been the result of some a serious battle. Numerous debris fields of Minmatar and Ammarian ships. Importantly (for the back story) there is a cluster of Ammarian dreadnaught wrecks whose loss devastated the Ammarian response to the Minmattar rebellion.

Anyways this site is definitely worth the pilgrimage for any Matari pilot. Be advised though, the local capsuleer population is not above wrecking your vacation plans.

Local Angel Cartel Ships Saying 'Hello' (about 2 million total bounty)

Ammarian Dreadnaught Wrecks

Not Just Ammar Wrecks! Minmattar Technically Lost this Fight

Unknown Ship Floating Withing The Carnage

Of course after this I proceeded to fly into 0.0 where I lost a fight to a sabre/drake where I would have been able to kill the sabre if I had only been smart enough to turn on my warp scrambler/webifier. Oh well this carebear stuff is sure making me rusty :(

Bug Analysis

Xeross — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 09:54:00 PDT

Recently there was a problem with a website that is still in development (That will remain unnamed). For some reason, when you logged in on the admin, everything worked, but when you refreshed the page the tabs that were loaded through ajax would somehow have you logged out (And another refresh after that you were completely logged out).

Someone else had already been trying to figure out this problem for more than a day and was breaking his head over it. Nowhere did the session get destroyed in the admin, or during the ajax requests, and the only location were it got destroyed was in the logout call and on the website when you tried to access a page that doesn’t exist.

I decided to take a look at it, with a mentality of, anything can happen, even if it doesn’t make sense. So first thing I tried was commenting out the session_destroy call in the index, which indeed seemed to resolve the problem.

But the index should never be loaded in the first place. So time to fire-up firebug and let it log all requests made by a single admin page load.

For some reason the admin was indeed loading the website for some odd reason. Now to my surprise as someone suggested, Internet Explorer (Yes you are reading that right) shows where the request originated. Turned out it was being requested through a <script> tag somehow. Coincidentally it seemed that that same script was also erroring.

So after commenting that out (And having the session_destroy enabled again) I tested it again, and yep you remained logged in. Now of course still not satisfied, I had to figure out why it was loading the front-page.

So opening the script there was nothing in there that did even attempt to make a request, so it couldn’t be in the script (This was an exception to the everything is possible rule because this really was too impossible). So then I tried opening the script in the browser, and hey I was redirected to the frontpage.

Okay, I’m getting redirected, but why. Ah yes perhaps the .htaccess will tell me. Upon opening the .htaccess file I found out that it would redirect requests to any folder or file that didn’t exist to the frontpage (With the path of the file as page to request).

So after disabling this rewrite rule the file did indeed not exist, for some reason it got deleted on the dev server. So upon re-upload it worked again. After this to prevent this in the future I also added an exception for js/css files into the htaccess so that those missing would be easier to detect.

Of course I could’ve made more rigorous changes to the project to make this problem impossible to happen, but I was asked to help debug and the way it was built was decided by a team that probably had reasons for why they did it the way they did it (I made suggestions and they’d discuss them).

Conclusion

Go in with an ‘anything can happen’ mentality, even if it seems impossible it might just not be
If you’ve been trying to figure out a bug for quite some time, ask someone else to take a look, he/she might have a different viewpoint that’ll help solve the issue
Internet Explorer can actually be useful
Why the fuck didn’t other browsers implement the request origin feature (Or why did they make them hard to find I might have overlooked them).

it was a fun challenge to solve this bug, and it made me learn a good deal about solving issues that you wouldn’t get if you were always working on projects you are the sole developer of.

~Xeross