Category Archives: Eve Online

Marking Milestones

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Sometime last night I hit 60m skillpoints on my oldest Eve character. For some reason, this milestone seems bigger than others I have passed. There are simple reasons. In the last few months I have finished training all T2 cruisers and medium weapons, and all T3 hulls. That is not completely true, I cannot fly Interdictors, Heavy Interdictors, or T2 industrials, but it is close enough. My main also has moderate competency in mining, industry, research, and a fair portion of invention, as well as the skills to fly an Orca.   He can scan. He can lead a moderately sized corporation. He can anchor and operate any POS array. All in all, he has a very competent skill set across most facets of the game. Training has turned into a question of “What do I want?” not “What do I need?” So how long did this take? My Eve career has been punctuated by long gaps without active subscription time. Averaged out, over 3.75 years Grimmash has accumulated 1800sp per hour. At this rough rate, I should break the 100m barrier sometime late in year 5. It will probably happen faster if I stick to training skills that align with Continue Reading →

Time Rolls On

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So I launched the new website, then a lot happened! I became a director, then a ceo, drama happened between and after those things, moves occurred, restructuring, all that stuff. Out of game I had my first child and lost my only uncle. So all of my grand posting drafts kept falling to the wayside. Life in and out of Eve seems to be normalizing for a given quantity of normal. Time to write! Inside Eve, I like the new release cycle. Crius was great and all the changes to industry have so far been fairly useful. Well, the new isk sink of arcane fees is a bit annoying, especially since CCP refuses to recognize it as such. The new interface and simplified ME/TE are welcome changes. Living in a wormhole, our fees are pretty low, so there is also that. Hyperion was a bit of a mixed bag. I live in wormhole space, and I find a lot of the changes feel mostly like change for the sake of change. Some things I find surprisingly useful, such as the scatter dynamic. Since our group lives in WHs that rarely if ever get capital sized connections, this mostly has resulted in Continue Reading →

The Joy of Hunting

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Since moving to wormhole life, a lot has happened.  A big part of what I do now is logistics, planning, and helping run the day to day corp stuff as I have joined the leadership of my new corporation.  Just to prove I still actually play Eve, I will recount my second completely solo kill. I logged in, not sure of what I was going to do.  Check on the POS?  Run my PI?  Oh, wait, there is an Imicus on d-scan.  I hop into my Loki (overkill, to be sure), and start looking for my prey.  I assume he has no cloak, as I see probes in space and he is still on d-scan.  I narrow him down to a particular planet, and warp over. My approach was good, but he was just outside of point range, and moving.  Moving in a direction that gave no good warp in, as it was towards the edge of the system.  I really need to make perches around each planet.  I start flying in the opposite direction, and the phone rings.  I have to help carry up groceries!  This is ok, though, as I can burn away for a minute or two, and use the distance to warp on him. One sprint of the stairs Continue Reading →

Account Sharing

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Sugar Kyle put up a post about account sharing. Reading the comments, I saw a few pain points that cause account sharing: -Titan and supercapital sharing -Managing corp assets, roles etc… -Skill queue issues for mobile individuals or individuals with life schedules that cause long periods away from a computer to access the character -Family/Friend account sharing I may be naïve, but two and a half of these have game mechanics or EULA conditions that are being ignored, or that directly forbid the activity. Sharing any hull in the game is possible. You can do it in a couple of ways. Set up a POS and park an undockable ship inside. Set up SMAs in a POS with access levels. Use corporate hangars in a station. I understand that those first two are not popular, but they exist. If your concern is sharing the hull, you can do so. If your concern is sharing the character that can fly the hull, that’s too bad. Saying it is ok to share accounts to share pilots that can fly titans is like saying I can share my account with Bob because we want to trade skillsets. That’s not how the game is Continue Reading →

Tragic Tayra

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The night started out rather slow, as many nights do.  No new sigs were to be found, but as luck would have it we had a chain of C2 to high sec, a few jumps out from Jita.  Time to sell some loot and goo.  But as I prepared to do so, we noticed a Procurer appear on dscan.  With only one ore site in system, I hopped into the Proteus and went to go get a nice perch and maybe pounce.  Sure enough, the mining barge was there, with the sole high slot obviously filled with a mining laser. I started to maneuver, and checked who was in system with me to help.  I have a Procurer, and you can fit a rather sizeable tank on those.  I wanted some back up in case this was a trap.  Of course, no one was in system with me.  Then the Procurer warped off, and left the system.  Time to move cargo I guess. I had second thoughts about my original plan of taking everything in one expanded hauler, and piled my sleeper goodies into a covops, and dropped it off safe and sound in the HS system.  I came back Continue Reading →

A Liberating Lack of Local

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I am a few weeks into full-time wormhole life.  It’s becoming quite enjoyable.  Aside from the fun of popping around and exploding all sorts of things in all sorts of spaces, so far the biggest appeal of wormhole life has been the sheer variety. Many ways of playing Eve kind of prod you down a path of specialization.  The skill system rewards this.  Focusing intensely on one thing is usually the most effective way to structure a play session.  Usually splitting your attention between various flavors of Eve dilutes the whole experience.  Wormhole space forces variety, though.  The random nature of what sites spawn in the hole has a huge impact on what each day will bring.  Your statics and your K162s might bring treasures hidden inside tentacled Sleeper shells or PvP just waiting to happen.  You never know, and you usually have a few options to choose from.  Logging in and launching probes is the first step to finding out what the game is bringing you on any given day. In the last few days I have mined gas and ore, cleared sites, avoided bubbles, run PI, and started planning some low-intensity industry, all with a friendly group of Continue Reading →

Fanfest 2014: TwitchTV

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So, it has been a busy few weeks.  I moved, again.  I am refinishing multiple pieces of furniture.  And in Eve I am making a lot of transitions that have left me with a bunch of half written articles, but no time to edit them into postable stuff.  But I did follow FanFest pretty closely. There were a lot of things announced: Legion, new ships, the “new” dev cycle, and other stuff I am forgetting.  I tried to follow it as close I can, and I bought the HD Stream through Twitch TV. While the content of FanFest was great, I have been rather disappointed by the stream.  I work during normal business hours in the US EST timezone. Because of this I was hoping to use the mobile app on my iPhone to listen while working as I could, and then come home and watch the other panels while unpacking the new place.  This did not really work out so well. The mobile app for Twitch is pretty awful.  Laggy, drops connections all the time even with good data signals, and worst of all, it plays advertisements on a stream I paid for access to.  That last bit is Continue Reading →

Iterating Better Worlds

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First, a minor point before I get started.  The dev blog “Building Better Worlds” could have lifted the quote either from the Weiland Yutani Corporation logo from the Alien mythos, or the Operative from Serenity.  In that movie the line is uttered by a character who believes he is helping create better worlds, but then finds out that his whole ideology was based on a naïve understanding of what his superiors were actually doing.  I hope that was not what CCP was implying with the title… title from a few places. Ok, that out of the way, let’s get into it.  After thinking and reading about the new industry changes that are coming I think there are a few sides to the topic that have not been talked about all that much.  It all boils down to getting new players while holding on to the old ones.  That is, after all, CCP’s business model. Access First, we don’t know exactly what the new cost will be for the new slot-less industry design.  We know the range (0%-14%) and we know it is based on the price of the finished good (derived from the rolling average?).  But we do not know Continue Reading →

Greedy Little Pig

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As is often the case when learning a new part of Eve, I did many things right the last week and half, but the last thing I did, I did about as wrong as you can. Wormhole life has been teaching me routines.  Log, scan, bookmark, jump the holes, scan, keep going until I find the exits I want or decide that I have looked far enough.  Check neighbors for towers.  Bookmark them.  Come home.  Use the directional scanner.  Always use the D-scan. Our rolls have been getting more interesting of late, seemingly escalating up the series of W-Space system classes.  Tonight we rolled a C4, with some company.  The C4 led to a C1.  That C1 had some company too.  It also gave me the high sec opening I was looking for, to bring in a few more ships to use against anyone who came to visit.  So I followed the chain out, fitted up some ships, and started the process of ferrying them in. I was warping along nicely and jumped into the C1.  Then I landed on the C1 to C4 wormhole and saw a Crow.  Somehow I hit the target button, which was silly.  I immediately Continue Reading →

Industry Expansions Will Never Happen…

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Well, I was going to write something about wormholes, but that can wait.  This happened.  That industry expansion everyone assumed would just never come is coming this summer.  Or at least round one.  I can’t wait for the NDA’d minutes to come out and see what level of involvement the CSM had. There is a lot said in the dev blog linked above, and more to come.  I don’t have much to say at this point, because it looks like it will take some time to find out how all of the changes are going to fit together. Off the top of my head the most exciting parts are: Removing wait times on all manufacturing and research. POSes in HS will no longer require god-awful standings grinds. That interface. Again, how this all plays out will be interesting to see, but I think the changes to research waiting will really open up the field to players looking to get into industry.  Now you can trade isk for time without building a POS, something that is currently a pretty big advantage for older players with the skills to research outside HS, or set up POSes to research, or who had stacks Continue Reading →