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 →

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 →

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 →