Category Archives: Eve Online

Down the Rabbit Hole

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After wrapping up affairs in Black Rise, selling off a lot of assets, and moving others, I am ready for my next step in Eve.  I am moving into a wormhole.  Or I should say I have already moved into a wormhole.  I moved in earlier in the week. This is pretty exciting, and I hope a good number of the tricks and skills I learned in FW will come in useful.  At least I know how to use the directional scanner! About one week in, I am reminded of this quote: Reports that say there’s — that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. —Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense You might not like Donald Rumsfeld, but that is not the point of the quote.  The point is that you never realize the third category of unknown unknowns until it decloaks one top of you, Continue Reading →

Have a Little Faith

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Just a super quick post tonight.  There is a lot of serious business in Eve.  Lots of serious topics, in game and out.  We rage about the game, we rage about what people do in game.  We rage about what people do out of game.  We take everything so damn seriously. Despite all the seriousness, two things have happened recently that I think highlight how positive the Eve community is despite all the negative press. First, when I came back from about six months or so of complete absence from the game, I was a bit worried about what I would find waiting for me on the first log in.  Much to my relief, I was still in my old corps on both accounts.  When I logged in, instead of bitching about me be gone or having been kicked (a common occurrence of being gone for even a week in some other MMOs I have played), the players simply said hello and welcomed me back.  No drama, no bullshit, just a few “Hey, welcome back!” posts. Second, in the midst of some evemails with people who don’t know me from Adam, and who I have been hounding a little bit, Continue Reading →

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 →

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 →

Odyssey Skill Reminder

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Just a quick reminder, although it might me a bit late or irrelevant to you.  Skills for flying a lot of ships are changing come June 4, and you should be ready by doing a few things: If you have Destroyers V and Battlecruisers V update your clone to hold about 6-7 million more skill points. If you don’t have those skill trained, that sucks, but train them as far as you can. If you have BC V, train all the racial cruisers to at least III, and inject Command Ships so as to get the racial Command Ship skills receive ranks in the skill (Edited based on comment 5/18/13). Look at the links posted further down in this post to see if there are other ships that you can essentially skill into come patch day. Here is a nice picture that illustrates some of the changes, stolen from a very useful Eve University forum post: This dev blog has more details. If you are a player who is fairly well along the way to a lot of T2 ships, command ships, or who remembered to train Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V, but forgot about the other requirements, you should Continue Reading →

The Value of (In)security

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I got to reading a bit of the forum thread for the SVT ballot dev blog.  There are some wonderful quotes such as “TEST vote, please ignore.”  (I love that.  Sorry TEST.  It’s just funny, in a dark sort of way.)  There is the usual tinfoil hat-ery going on, even though null blocs didn’t sweep the elections.  There is the important idea that no voting system can represent people who cannot vote.  Most interesting to me is the sentiment that null bloc candidates are bad.  I’m not a null bloc guy, and don’t currently want to be one.  But I don’t understand the sentiment. Sharing time:  I’ve had the fun experience of talking with a wide range of Eve players, with some serious conversations with people from all areas of the game aside from WH space.  But I’ve dipped into that area enough to know a thing or two about it.  There seem to be a few major types of players.  High sec carebears, in the bad way.  High sec carebears in the “I can’t be bothered with that paranoia” camp.  Low sec FW.  Low sec Pirates.  Null players.  Give-no-shits pvpers. Out of all of these groups, one particular mindset Continue Reading →

PI: The Second Month

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In my earlier wrap up of my PI challenge, I noted that I was considering running PI on all three characters on one account.  I did this.  Mainly because I though Mabrick’s claims might have a silver lining if I ran it that way. There’s more posts over there, you should read them.  He has some interesting views on Eve. Back to the follow up.  As a reminder, here were the results from the first month.  The key point is that I netted about 134m in profits. Across three characters on the same account, with 4s in Command Center Upgrades and Planetary Consolidation, I ended up netting this: Not quite triple the total, but I had to run 2 factory planets.  And 334m isk ain’t bad.  A few thoughts on this. I didn’t even have CCU 4 and IC 4 trained at the outset.  That took about two weeks or so.  So that’s lost income.   I was also much less serious this time around, and missed more than a few updates by margins of hours or days.  Also failed to move some ECUs when I knew I should have.  That’s also money lost.  Due to resource imbalances, sometimes I Continue Reading →

CSM 8 Results, Fanfest, Stuff

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10 for 14 on my picks.  Not bad, even if a few were shoe-ins.  What surprised me more was the balance of who got in outside the bloc vote.  Mike Azariah but not Unforgiven Storm?  To me that was the biggest shock.  Nice to see Mike get a seat after so much time, though.  Apparently persistence pays off, even in spite of the Null Bloc ballots. So this thing called Fanfest happened.  I didn’t go.  I followed the news as best I could.  Lots to talk about.  Too much to talk about, really.  So I’ll spin out some threads in my head. Mining This was at the same time awesome and disappointing.  Removing grav sites to a simple system scan is a small boon to finding the things, but a huge smack in the face to anyone who wants to mine in them, especially in non-HS space.  CCP has essentially turned grav sites into FW plexes, and that will not entice any miners who want to keep their ships for long.  The one nice thing about signature-based sites in LS is the small window of obfuscation they provide for ships that are designed for some sort of PvE instead of Continue Reading →

Some Closing Thoughts on PI

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A few final thoughts of Planetary Interaction before I stop talking about it, at least for a while, are in order: Characters and Accounts Something was nagging me after finishing the PI challenge.  Just to be sure about it, I asked Mabrick if his approach was just for one character, or for an entire account.  He told me that his play-style was to focus on one character.  Take that as you will, I’ll take it at face value.  But I started playing around with my alts (I have 2 accounts that are active), and found a nice string of systems that I could feed into one final production planet.  So I started building and mapping out logistics.  Turns out you make up for a lot of holes in a production line this way. I now have 2 characters feeding a PI chain, with a third who will be added to that in a few days.  Already the profits are increasing a fair bit, more than double what I was making per day with the one character.  The logistics are also tighter, but the string of systems is helping with this.  I simply unload everything via contract into one central station, Continue Reading →