Warlords of Draenor Thoughts

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I just hit the new level cap in World of Warcraft. I think WoW has become an interesting game as a way to see a decade of evolving game design on display. There are a few things I want to look at. Quest Design In the beginning, quests were repetitive tasks where you start at point A, go to point B, kill/take/harvest something, and either return to point A or move on to point C. This structure is still what WoW, and every other game uses, but a few things have been updated. WoW is sliding ever closer to a mobile quest system. In modern and sci-fi games, this is easy, you just use a communicator of some sort to tell the quest giver you did what was required. A great example of this is Wildstar. In practice, a mobile quest system reduces the zone ping pong effect of running each path twice. I think it is a much better method of questing than the quest hub model. However, WoW generally doesn’t have cell phones, so there must be a magical or mechanical item to do this. Blizzard is in a bind if they want to keep immersion going, so Continue Reading →

PI Guide Up

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I finally pulled together something that has been posted by me in various places at various points and put it into my guides, now plural.  Behold, a basic guide to PI extraction!  It only covers the most effective way to get P1s and briefly talks about running those P1s into bigger PI chains.  You can click the link above, or use the nav bar to get there.  Enjoy!

Watching the Procession

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Lights blinked on the control console, illuminating the dark cabin with a staccato pattern of various colors. Various displays fed constant streams of information to a pilot sitting alone in the sole chair in the cabin. For his part the pilot glanced at the screens occasionally, but mostly he stared out of the viewport that dominated the bulkhead before him. A single star shone, flanked by a deep blue nebula. In the near ground a planet was slowly spinning, complete with attendant moons. The vista had a cold, majestic beauty which seemed to be distracting the pilot. Of course this was all an illusion. The pilot sitting in the command chair was not actually sitting in beaten leather seat. The pilot was suspended in a pool of shock-absorbing and life sustaining fluid, connected to the powerful computers of the ship he piloted via a series of cables and leads connected to his central nervous system. The chair and command center it occupied were simply a nifty piece of software that modeled a real environment, and fed that information into the pilot’s optic, aural, and haptic nerve centers. The chair, the view out of the cabin into space, and the blinking Continue Reading →

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 →

Moving Day

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Dear readers, It is with some excitement that I have a big announcement.  Warp to Zero is moving to a new home!  All of my future posts, guides and articles will be posted at Grimmash on Gaming, at www.grimmash.com.  I am moving from the Blogger platform to a hosted WordPress.org platform. Not much is changing for now, besides the visual layout of the blog.  But I felt it was time to move for a variety of reasons.   While Blogger is wonderful platform, I want more freedom to really edit the nuts and bolts of the site.  Along with that, I want more experience running a website from the ground up.  My family has always been involved in using the internet to promote our hobbies and businesses.  As the resident tech “Expert”, I decided that learning more managing my hobby website would be a good way to learn how to help my family reduce their dependency on limited platforms. Regarding my blog, it was started to be all about Eve.  As my life and gaming habits adjust I find myself still wanting to write about Eve, but also about other games, and other types of gaming, more extensively.  I thought about Continue Reading →

More Changes!

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Hello! I’ve been so busy playing Eve and working on stuff for me new corp that I haven’t had time to polish up any of my articles.  I guess that is a good thing… Since I have a bit of a backlog, and a tentpole series as Jester would call it, I am going to hold of on posting the longer articles until I get them finished up.  I am also going to wait a bit, as I am finalizing a relaunch of my site. Yep!  Pretty soon I will migrate to a newer, cleaner, more controllable website.  All the old stuff here and comments will port over, but I will have better tools to share pictures, archive guides and resources, and some of the other stuff I am looking to try out.  So keep an eye on this space, as a belated spring cleaning is on the way! Fly smart!