Month: March 2014

Slippery Slopes

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Before we start:  I feel like half of my posts are just responses to Ripard Teg, but the guy writes so much and on so many topics that I find my self not caring.  Just a throwaway thought before I get down to it. Read this.  And then maybe the thread associated, and maybe some of the previous articles.  This is the internet, I can wait. Now we can start.  Most of the debaters in the the topic of what kind of players play Eve and how CCP should treat them seem to accept that both the “Bonus Room” scam and player perpetrating are despicable examples of human behavior.  If something like this happened in your work or your family life, you would cut ties with the person and tell others to avoid them.  That is a relief.  It means that, as I have long suspected and occasionally written, most players of Eve who also participate in the out of game community are either decent people, or are decent enough to recognize truly atrocious behavior.  What I find disturbing is that many of those same people think banning players who conduct “Bonus Room” style behavior will somehow start a slippery Continue Reading →

Facebook Rift

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Well.  This happened.  Surprising and disturbing.  I’ll keep it quick. The OR guys built a lot of support out of claiming the Oculus Rift was by gamers, for gamers.  They built up a fair amount of seed money through Kickstarter.  They secured additional funding from investors.  They pulled in John Carmack to buoy this image even more.  Then they turned around and sold to a platform whose most famous games include Farmville, scrabble-knockoffs, and other worst-in-breed (or maybe best-in-breed?) examples of micro-transaction fueled cash-grabing.  All of this backed by a corporate ethos dedicated to eroding privacy in the name of advertising revenue. There is a lot to discuss here.  The impact this might have on Kickstarter as a platform for small, innovative ideas.  The responsibility of developers to crowd-sourced projects.  The enormous power of a few large tech corporations to dictate the direction of multiple interwoven industries.  The fate of whatever the consumer version of the Rift looks like.  I may come back to those topics later.  Each of those sentences is a blog post or two. For now, I’ll leave two thoughts.  First, this might be a reasonable explanation for why Valkyrie suddenly stopped being an Oculus Rift Exclusive.  Continue Reading →

The Championship Tournament of Winners

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Reading through Jester’s posts about the recent New Eden Open got me thinking about competitive tournament play in Eve and in other games. I can think of a few broad types of ranked play in gaming. The DOTA/LoL approach, with lots of characters and a set map with set objectives. The FPS approach with identical classes and rankings based on K/D rates and what have you. The RTS approach of winning matches against other players. The WoT approach where you have either informal rankings based on metrics or Clan tournaments. The ad-hoc Eve tournaments with weird buy-ins, metagamey team composition mechanics and various win conditions that have varied. The WoW arena approach. All of these have strengths and drawbacks that are far too numerous to go into at any length. The point is there are a lot of ways to skin this cat. Coming from a rather uninvolved standpoint, I want to come up with a new way to do tourneys in Eve! In my experience the biggest problem to most competitive gaming formats is either a lack of depth, or so much depth that the mental barrier to entry is too high for most people to get into a Continue Reading →

BB54 – Grey Suits Me Better…

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Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 54th edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page. Today’s topic comes Diaries of a Space Noob blog and other sources: “Quick post. I was listening to a song and a question occurred to me. Where are the EVE heroes? Against a dark background surely all we have are anti-heroes? A lot of mockery is aimed at any who attempt to be white knights. EVE is a dark place and yet pretty much all other MMO’s try to place the player in the role of some form of hero, boosting the ego and taking the player out of the humdrum 1 in 7 billion that is RL. Why have I fitted into EVE? Did I never want to be that? So I guess my question is: “Do classic heroes exist in EVE? Is such heroism even possible in EVE? How would you go about being one without opening yourself wide open to scams? Is the nature of the game so dark that heroes can’t exist? How do you deal with that irony? What effect does this have on us and the psyche of new Continue Reading →

On Deck: Banished

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Well, I have to thank Mabrick for probably killing the next few weeks of my life.  He ran a few articles about Banished, and I’m going to give a try. Some background:  When I stopped playing Eve last year, it was not due to a lack of time, but a lack of time which I could safely play games without being interrupted.  This was due to living in a house with a very ill family member and the need to physically or emotionally support those I was with.  This put a damper of my foray into Faction Warfare.  So I started to look for games I could pause, leave, or otherwise abandon at any time.  I got back into Minecraft, specifically with the modded servers over at Ars Technica.  A good group of guys and gals over there, and we still have some mod servers going strong.  I also managed to get myself into Dwarf Fortress rather heavily, first in the normal mode and then into the heavily modded Masterwork version. If you like Eve, there is a good chance you like very complex games that have a steep learning cruve and that reward your efforts, more often than not, Continue Reading →

Diablo Loot 2.0 Review

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You might have guessed that I have been playing a bit of D3 lately.  You would be right.  I even went so far as to pre-order Reaper of Souls, because D3 is scratching a mindless kill-fest itch I have been having lately.  Since I’ve put a good chunk of time in over the last week, I decided I might as well give a snapshot review of D3 with Loot 2.0, as a bit of a baseline for when I play the expansion.   For the record, I started playing Loot 2.0 with a 60 Barbarian with no Paragon levels, leveled a Wizard from about 20 to 31, and started a Witch Doctor up to about 10. The Good Loot The biggest part of the patch/update/whatever was, by and large, a success.  On non-60 characters, the drops are wonderfully improved.  Items get replaced left and right.  Crafting yields lots of appropriate gear.  I never had the moment of thinking “I really need to check the Auction House”, which was a relief, considering that was half of every play session last time around.  On my 60, drops were ok.  And by I ok, I do mean a damn sight better than before.  But Continue Reading →

Trees vs Choices

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After spending some time with Diablo III, I was reminded of maybe the most fundamental change between D2 and D3, and in “old” Bizzard and “new” Blizzard.  Most of you are probably aware of the skill trees in Diablo 2.  Some of you may have played World of Warcraft.  Both had skill trees that looked like a flow chart: A Diablo II skill tree. An “old” WoW talent tree. Both operated on the idea that at various experience levels you gained points to spend in the trees.  These points either improved abilities or unlocked new ones.  Diablo 3 and the new WoW talent trees both dumped that approach in favor of unlocking core abilities at certain levels, and then providing a small number of choices.  In D3 this takes the form of glyphs that alter a given ability.  In WoW, the system is a little more convoluted, but at each talent tree level you generally get to choose between three additional abilities or modifications. Picking glyphs for a skill in Diablo 3. The “new” talent tree in WoW.  Another major change in the system was that in the old point-based system respeccing your skills was either impossible or incurred a Continue Reading →

Diablo III Loot 2.0 Impressions

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Blizzard completely revamped Diablo III a week or so ago, and I decided to take a look.  They made a lot of changes to the game, and most of them would have been amazing… at launch.  That is a very negative statement, and I think the changes are all very nice.  It is just sad to see it happen this way.  I’ll explain the changes briefly, what I think of them, and then why I’m being such a jerk about it. The Past I bought and played D3 shortly after it came out.  Long enough afterwards to not have to deal with the crazy login issues, but I did learn real quick about the joys of the D3 auction house.  The AH, which will soon be gone as we know it, was where everyone went to dump all the useful items they found that they had no use for.  It was full of stuff, and because there are not too many gold sinks in the game, inflation was nasty.  On the face of things, this might not have been so bad.  If there is no other real use for large sums of the gold you get, why not spend it Continue Reading →

Where did I leave my keys…

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Well.  I re-subscribed to Eve, on two accounts!  Being out of the loop for two expansions really does leave me with a lot to learn.  But life is better, if fundamentally different from nine months ago when I started winding down my time in Eve.  Luckily I have landed back pretty much where I was.  Both my old corps still have me on the roster, so I can take some time to figure out next steps. This will be a slow process for a variety of reasons. First is life.  If you look back a few posts, you’ll see that last summer and fall were pretty rough due to a death in the family and the end of the carefree life of being a student.  I am fully employed, no longer a student.  The family is recovering as best families can.  I am now an expecting father, as exciting as that is!  So much to do to prepare for the Grimmlet.  I am branching back out into tactile hobbies since I have space and money. Second is Eve.  A lot has changed.  Not in big ways, but in so many little ways that it is taking time to both get Continue Reading →