Blog Banter 36- Trial of Fire

  As many of you know, the blog banters have been taken over by Seismic Stan over at Freebooted. I'm glad they have been and Stan has been a great facilitator. I have not had the opportunity to actually sit down and participate in these until now, so here we go.

"With the Inferno expansion upon us, new seeds have been planted in the ongoing evolution of EVE Online. With every expansion comes new trials and challenges, game-changing mechanics and fresh ideas. After nine years and seventeen expansions, EVE has grown far more than most other MMOGs can hope for. Which expansions have brought the highs and lows, which have been the best and the worst for EVE Online?"

  First off, it always blows my mind to think about Eve's history. It's so easy to get caught up in the next big scam or laugh at null sec politics as they shift month by month. Eve has been going for nine years and that is a feat of brilliance in today's MMO market. We watch game after game come through with hopeful IPs, only to turn FtP within months of launch. Eve has not only driven on with the passion of an Amarr religious zealot but with the determination of a Minimatar ex-slave through the years. 

  Sappy analogies aside, I have been with Eve since the end of Dominion. I was just getting used to my implants when Tyrannis hit. As such I can't really speak on the majority of expansions since I don't really know what half of them brought in to the game. 

  So, in my experience, the worst expansion in terms of player reception and overall game enhancement was...Incarna. Although it made turrets a whole lot cooler in a cosmetic way, the debacle of launching Walking in Stations set a dark tone in Eve for months. Player backlash, CCP's PR fumbles, CCP employee let go's and the pure lack of Flying in Space content made a nasty combo that pushed many players to cancel their subscription. Not a shining moment for the game or developer but one that has been weathered and many lessons have been learned. 

  The Incursion expansion wasn't well liked either, but I think that the absolute ISK-mine that it became helped the initial bad-taste-in-mouth. But enough of bad, let's look at the good parts of Eve's evolution.

  First off, we will say Trinity was a great expansion for the game. It updated the games graphics and 20 ships got a face lift. Which was awesome, since when I got to the game I immediately thought the Scorpion was one of the sexiest ships ever. Still kinda do, but in a different way than before since...well I've seen what she can do if you know what I mean. :P

  The next great expansion, I'm not going to lie, I have to say would be Crucible. Now this isn't chronologically the next best, but as an expansion it helped the game in many ways. The developers showed the player base that they knew how to listen and knew how to task their priorities. Tier 3 BCs, time dilation, and so on made the game feel like a bottle of Febreeze had been poured all over the place  to make the game fresh as a daisy. You can't help but give CCP props on the amount of content additions as well as openness with which they developed those additions. SiSi has become used more and more not just as a playground with cheap toys, but as the platform for CCP to get player feedback on possible tweaks and additions. But as I said, this was not the best expansion in my opinion. 

  That would have to go to Apocrypha. Surprise, right? Now I may be rather biased about it, since it added the home I now love and want others to love. But it is for more than just my love of wormholes.  The expansion was seen as more of a mini-expansion since it had too much to be a patch but was not considered enough to be a full expansion. It added the training queue, which made everyone's lives far more convenient since they wouldn't have to wake up at 2 am to keep it going. 

  But, of course,  it also wormholes and with it Sleepers and T3 ships reverse engineered through Sleeper technology. But adding an entirely new space to the game was a bigger deal than I think CCP realized at the time. Players were never intended to live there, but to simply explore and traverse space through wormhole chains. Human initiative and determination being what it is, however, meant that this new environ was a whole new experience for living. It meant you live out of a communal POS and rely on those in the wormhole with you. You can harvest Sleeper loot and engage in true small gang combat, fighting for your space like no other place in Eve. There were no iHubs to break down, no security status to worry about and no titans to blob your space. Still aren't. And that's how we like it. 

  That's quite a bit more than I thought I had to say about all this so I'll leave it at that. What do my readers think? Best/worst of Eve and for yourselves?

-Mem

Resolving to Keep Resolutions...Resolute

  2011 was a pretty busy year. It started with the Create-A-Starship contest debacle, PI iterations, New Eden Chronicles starting and then sadly puttering out, PL forums leaks, PLEX for Good drives, moving on with the new Clear Skies, plenty of CCP blundering around, buying my first Vindi...and then losing it to Sleepers in an embarrassing situation I may never explain, Incarna, Crucible, CCP getting scarily understanding and smart(er), hitting my year with ADHC, and so much more. That's quite a list of things that 2012 will need to live up to in its time before we all explode.

  I didn't do any resolutions last year, so why not start this year off with some and see how far we get.

1. I will be working on breaking 250bil in damage done and/or having 200x more kills than deaths. As it stands now:

653 kills

40 deaths

188 billion damage done

   

  I admit, 250 bil isn't a huge goal, but it's attainable. Especially if I keep killing Nyx's ;) Having 800 kills and keeping 40 deaths would be pretty cool. Guess I'll just have to do what I do best and ECM the masses.

2. This goal is one I thought I would never want. I want to be able to fly capitals, both dreads and carriers with good skills. I never saw them in much use, except when I was helping kill one. But now the neighborhood is bigger and thus we play with bigger toys. Gotta adapt.

3. Less specifically, there are some other ships that I want to train into and getting my overall skill set stronger is a longterm goal.

4. Getting my wallet back to being somewhat healthy. For months now I've been riding the line between flat broke and ok, but with PLEX prices getting ridiculously (stupidly I think) high that is a hard thing. PLEXing is the only way I play since RL cash is taken by school, living, and now a new marriage and baby on the way. PLEXing is an awesome feature that I love about Eve. So any market manipulation to bring it down is quite fine by me. Maybe I could replace my Vindi one day :D

5. Going hand in hand with the PLEX thing, keeping both my account and my wife's account running. I just got her back into the game after a year or more of her being AFG. Her account ran dry as she was getting into cruisers, so we have a lot of training to work on with her. It's a whole other fun when you get to share your hobby and experiences with a significant other that enjoys it too.

6. Killing more supercaps. Taking down that Nyx, and FCing it as well, left me thirsty to try it again. Who knows, maybe a Titan falls prey to us, eh?

7. Giving Progression's Horizon a facelift finally. This will probably have to happen after I somehow survive my last semester of college.

8. Another year in Eve and ADHC. Eve has become a part of my routine; a hobby, a past-time, a fallback. Any game you can keep enjoying year after year is a good one, but it's the people that really make it worthwhile. I can't play Eve without ADHC.

  There's my list. How about you, now? What are some goals you want to set for the new year?

Anything's possible
-Mem

For Science! Eve Gets Better

  It seems crucibles aren't just for the laboratory anymore. No, my friends, interweb spaceships have them and boy does that mean a thing or two. The novelette of patch notes have been out for a bit and they are a read.

  So what's good about this expansion? The real question is closer to being what's not cool about it all. There's a metric tonne of information to go through and I have yet to really even run into the majority of it in game. Admittedly, a few other games have been taking my attention (looking at you BF3, Deus Ex, and Skyrim) and RL and all that. But the giant patching process went smoothly for me, not something all can say it seems, and getting in game was quite the experience. I'll just go through my impressions.

  Logging in, I was immediately presented with visual anarchy. My windows were all reset, so I took the time to put them all back where I like them. I found that I can no longer pin them, an issue that annoys me greatly. I was worried all my settings were gone, but thankfully they were all where I left them.

  I had one particular thing in mind that I could easily check, so I did. Holy moley, Batman. Corp Bookmarks are the sex and I will never let them go. Even with the time delay the server has the have, it's beyond amazing and useful in wormholes. Having the entire chain of bookmarks without much fuss for the entire fleet is going to alleviate so many headaches. Well...that is as long as nobody screws them up in the first place.

  But a problem I had immediately was the font. I almost want the old font back, it's so hideous. As a graphic designer I play with type a lot. When your font library is as big as your music library...yeah. There simply is no way that it looks good and the way it meshes, or doesn't in this case, with the entire UI just makes it all garish. CCP, please hire someone who knows what they are doing to choose or make a font for you. Please.

  The new tier 3 BCs will be quite fun toys to play around with once I get a chance. Couldn't get out to a good highsec exit while I was on, but it's for the best. Prices were a bit stupid around 200 mil or more and even though they quickly started dropping I won't touch them til they are around 60 mil ISK. I am pretty excited to try them out. It will be a bit more training to get T2 large guns in more races, but seems well worth it. Rumor has it the Naga can get around 500 dps out to 200 km. That's just nuts, I can only imagine the kind of dps these things can do with real weapons fit to them. Just don't let anyone sneeze at you or you'll lose it. And you don't want to lose that pod along with it, since everyone now gets to laugh at the way you mix +2s with +3s and the odd hardwirings you chose.

  Scanning also seems a bit borked, so I have heard. There have been signatures that multiple, well skilled players could not scan down so hopefully that gets resolved quickly.

  Cloaked ships don't decloak each other now. While this is cool, I would like to say "boo" as well. This should only have been implemented as it pertains to fleet members. Now I can't be cloaked, watch some idiot in a T1 frig cloak off a hole, motor over to him and surprise him with a nice warm cup of facemelt. It makes bombing runs easier, sure, but we've gotten some pretty hilarious kills with cloaky on cloaky action.

  And as a PI junky, I can tell you messing with POCOs (player owned customs offices) is going to be a real kick. They have the tank of a small POS but who knows what kind of action you can get if it generates a notification as well as a killmail. Oh the possibilities for trolling and shooting are endless.

  I will be finally making my way into a Proteus just in time to get in on the hybrid love. Ammo is smaller, dps is even better...hopefully. It's gonna be sweet. Too bad I still have to hump people to do it. Although I hear hail got its penalties removed entirely. *Looks at void* Thanks CCP...
I am also pretty sad I don't have my Vindi now to really enjoy it.

  There's time dilation, new captains quarters, new T2 modules and so much more. Look at the notes for it all, it'll be a good bedtime put-you-to-sleep light reading.

  Overall, I think this is one of the best expansions since Apocrypha. CCP did well to grab a ton of low hanging fruit that will make this game so much more fun. While there is more to be done, I think we will be chewing on this hunk for a while. I know it'll take me time to really digest it all and take advantage of all our new options. Yea, there's stuff that annoys me or I hate but it could be worse. You could have lost your boot.ini file...again.

I'll give it all a good test drive and let you know more of what I think later
-Mem

Ninja edit for the trailer

End Year Merriment

  These fall and winter seasons are turning out pretty interestingly with CCP. Sadly it is coupled with 120 people losing their jobs, luck to you all, but more and more content seems to be pouring out from the dev teams.

  The newest one is pod killmails. Finally we get to see what is plugged into our victim's head! This is something I've wanted for ages because in wspace, it is a regular practice to pod people out. I've nabbed quite a few myself, some of which were probably worth more than the faction battleship they were piloting moments before.

  The devblog is short and sweet, but I am definitely looking forward to it. Sadly I do not believe this change will be retroactive, but it simply means that I will have to pod all those people again so I can see what they use :P

  With small things like this eeking out before the Winter expansion....I am really curious to know what is coming for us. All the hush-hush makes me think epicness of epic proportions of which Eve has never seen before is headed our way. And I'm really hopeful that is true. But I will keep some reservations.

 Still...can't beat what's been happening lately. While I am sad people had to get fired, I think CCP might finally be moving in the right direction and realizing what they need to do and the priorities on which they need to focus. Which is not to say they shouldn't have aspirations or other places and ideas to play with non-Eve ever. Just...pace yourself.


  Anyways, I'm still alive and kicking somewhat so hopefully I can get some good topics written up soon. I think I'll have one on ECM. Odd that I love it and talk about it but have never dedicated a post to it. vOv

  Get pumped!
-Mem

EDIT: Leave it to me to speak too soon. Hot off the press:


"Let me give you guys a little more information on what is coming. Starting next week we will be producing a series of 'In Development' video blogs which will look at what the various teams are planning for Winter 2011. I want to stress that these videos will not contain release dates as we are aiming to provide a lot of stuff and do not want to commit to a date we cannot keep. These will include:
 Engine trails - Yes, that's right we are adding engine trails to EVE and we will show the work in progress so far.
 New ships - Recently we featured a shot of the Tornado, the Deviant Art contest winner, on the EVE Facebook page. We were not happy with just giving out one ship so we will be showcasing all four new ships.
 New nebulae - These new background sin the EVE universe are stunningly beautiful and will add to the immersion and feeling of being in deep space.
 Team BFF - This team should be Best Features Fullstop and CCP Soundwave will give an overview of what his team has in store. Capital ship balancing, balancing hybrids, assault ships bonuses and much more will be added during winter.
 Customer Relations - The Lead GM's will talk about changes to how petitions are handled, more options for Stuck petitions and how we aim to deal with your issues as fast as possible. We are not just going to stop there. We will bring you more video blogs about what is in development for EVE Online."

O.O Yes. Please. So look forward to those eh?

A Not So Distant Place

  As pilots continue to be disappointed and upset over CCP's botched responses and lack of proper promises or trust building action, more and more are choosing to leave New Eden altogether. This saddens me, but their vote goes with their dollar. I hope CCP truly understands that soon.

  But where to go? There are few if any MMOs that are like Eve. I would almost stretch to say none. So what can fill the void of internet spaceships?

  Mechs.

  If you are a fan of robots or mech type games, you'll love Perpetuum. There is already scores of Eve refugees that have subbed up and begun a new journey. And the game is not that different from Eve. Instead of spaceships, you have mechs. You have "Extension Points" that you are able to accrue simply by having an account and then apply to your character. Think of it as a more free form skill queue. You can only have 3 characters and your EPs count for all of them, but it seems quite simple.

  It's also a single shard, harsh, open Pvp world that offers much and has much more room to grow. The mining is actually more complicated and the economy seems to be exactly how Eve's is set up. If you must leave Eve, at least find a new home with Perpetuum. I immediately took to it and will be pursuing it, even though I am staying with Eve.

 There is an Eve channel, make sure to join and say hey. You'll find many familiar faces as well as strangers. I hear Helicity is haunting it already.

  In whatever universe you are, good luck. Also, canihazurstuff? :PP
-Mem

When Srs Gets Too Srs

  It seems that today, capsuleers have decided to respond to CCP Pann's PR post by staging a protest in Jita and the surrounding systems. There have reportedly been attempts to shoot the alliance tournament monument that is set outside of Jita 4-4.

  As I posted on Twitter, I find this to be getting ridiculous. If this kind of effort and outrage could be channeled into real life needs and causes, much could be accomplished. Instead, players are emoraging at a developer that they should be well accustomed to by now. They are people, people that are doing a job and are going to make mistakes. Yes, I'm sorry your internet spaceships isn't just the way you want it to be.

  Chill out.

  That is all.
-Mem

*NINJAEDIT* For the record, I agree with protesting for the right reasons so as long as this in response to the internal leak thing, I think I can be a bit more ok with it. Just make sure you protest intelligently and read the whole newsletter, not just part. MTs for benefit will never be ok with me.

*EDIT 2* Here's the new devblog. CCP, of course, gave a stand-offish non-apology that means just about nothing. Good job...

CCP Gets DDoSed

  At a random turn of events today, Eve's login and website got hit by Lulzsec. Just about everything is down according to Eve-Offline.  I am hardly the only one that is annoyed or upset about this.


  "We just wiped out the login server for Eve Online, and it accidentally took their website out at the same time: http://t.co/BgRuEoA."-Lulzsec




  Trying to get to the Eve O site just brings up errors and CCP has taken everything down to deal with the new intrusion. It seems Lulz is not happy with taking out Sony's networks and has moved on to pissed everyone off possible. 


  As more is made available or I am able to rangle up more info, I will update this post so make sure to check back. CCP is doing what they can so be patient, your pixels will be there when it comes back up.


*EDIT*


 "At 17:00 GMT today, CCP became aware of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack against the EVE Online cluster and web servers.

Immediately, these services were taken offline. As an added precaution all of CCP's infrastructure was disconnected from the public Internet. The CCP Security team is conducting a thorough investigation to determine exactly what happened and how, what the possible impact may be and, first and foremost, assuring that any personal information of our customers remains secure.

More information will be released as it’s available."

  Lulzsec has hit Minecraft, League of Legends, and more by now. Personally, I can't wait for the law to catch up with them.



*EDIT 2*


  Everything is in a bit of disarray still and there is no ETA on TQ's revival. So instead of hoping for it soon, just go outside and do something else for a day or so. CCP was good enough to big-red-button the situation and shut everything down instead of losing vital user info, a credit to them. 


Everything is pure conjecture at this stage of developments, but an look at Atlas' killboard shows an interesting possibility that they paid for it. Or that they have been hacked themselves. Rumblings in nullsec may point to Atlas members being burned out of Eve. Only time will tell at this point.


*EDIT3* It seems that whether or not the Atlas bit is true, the Eve community has taken it upon themselves to have a good ole' fashion purge of Atlas, complete with a Facebook event and all. This'll be quite interesting :popcorn:


*EDIT4* TQ has returned to service after an initial false start. CCP's COO gave a release to address 
this issue.

*FINAL EDIT* It seems Lulz is going for a second run at CCP today (June 15). While nothing is completely down, the login is having trouble so be careful and set long skills, folks.

Stay strong, capsuleers.
  -Mem

Incursion's Reveal

  This has certainly been an interesting patch, hasn't it? For myself, I was rather frustrated to begin. After a 12 hour day of moving apartments, ubercleaning the new on, and getting much needed supplies I was worn out and ready to see the new stuff. Well that would have been nice if CCP hadn't decided to screw Mac users over. It seems I got the least of the trouble, as my verification failed for the download only once. From what I saw on the forums, it seems quite a few files got corrupted for many users. I do understand patch days are impossible to predict and I do commend CCP on their vigilance in rectifying the problems. But I missed out on a massive fight as I was waiting to redownload. Oh well. I finally got it up and going and went straight to sculpting Memoo. You can get in game without doing this for 30 days, but after that you have to make your character. Besides, why wouldn't you want to?

  I started playing and seeing what they had done to polish the creator. Which is to say, it was basically the same as the SiSi version. No tattoos for Minmatar...? No difference between castes in races? Hmmmm....I also had a bit of trouble since the FPS was extremely low and my character moved, which made me angry when it messed up my work. On I trudged.

I was very tempted to go white guy corn rows, as I used to have dreads...but resisted. Mem didn't seem to like it much either :P

  I tried to use my SiSi model as a reference, but I just couldn't seem to sculpt it the way I had then and wanted him to look. My SiSi model looks young without looking like a child and has a look like he knows a joke that you don't know. Well....my new model looks slightly more anorexic and not so subtly coy. 

I tried..

and tried. Played with lighting and poses, I kinda like the seriousness here.

I reeeeally like this one. The dramatic lighting, pose, and background. It works, but too serious for Memoo?

  So, I finally got to where I wanted it and was happy to save. So I hit save. Then I hit save again. Frustrated, I mashed my mouse as fast as I could. Well dangit. For some reason, the idiotic editor decided to say "Screw you!" and I couldn't even save my model and pose. I went back and tried again, to no avail. I had to start over. 

  By this time I am tired and frustrated, so I fly through the remake and this time it takes. It left me with this...um...gem.

Still deciding on it.

  Not what I wanted...not sure how I like the look. But as I passed through Amarr, someone sent me a mail saying "Cool avatar"...that made me feel pretty good :) Corpie said he looks metro since you can't see his arms very well or something..whatever. The good news? We get a do over, so I may just redo Memoo. They are adding UI changes and a few things, so use your redo wisely. I will wait a bit, methinks. What do you think? Should I leave it or go for the dark and serious or something else entirely?

  Also, with ongoing communication and patching from CCP, it seems:

"We will be introducing the ability to repeatedly recustomize characters in a future release. The current plan is to introduce this at the same time as we release tattoos, scars and piercings so players can take advantage of these new assets. We are still in the early design phase, so we don't have any more details at present. Expect a devblog explaining more in the coming weeks"

  As for the rest of the patch, things are certainly changing. Sometimes that's great, sometimes I wonder if CCP is smoking crack. For instance, the game now measures a decloak range 2,000 km from the edge of an object, yet still measures distance from the center of an object. lolwut? Sleepers are now also harder to kill/kill you harder, so I anticipate T3 production costs rising quite a bit. That means we make more money if we get our Pve faces on. PI is now a bit of a different beast, it took some playing to figure it out too. Although most features are the same, extractors have had quite a work over, placing heads and extracting far more with time intervals that you choose. It can be anything from 15 minutes to days and day, chosen by the hour or half hour if you want. Time to finesse my production lines, it seems.

  By and large, this is an interesting and massive patch that has done quite a bit of good. But I still think there's polish needed and I am hardly the only one to think so if forums and conversations are any measure. Step in the right direction, anyhow.

  Oh yea, and while I was gone the whole day doing things? Yeah, I got Recons trained. I got my Falcon Viperous Strike home and fitted up. I am waiting for Recon IV before I really take it out, since fitting and flying are two entirely different things. I don't have all the mods on it that I want, but it's rigged and cloaky, so I'm excited. Time to jam some people into submission. One of my corpmate has also seen the light and loves his new Falcon as well. *evil chuckle*

  Anyways, there is still much RL for me to do. I am far behind already since profs are insane. Time to work and play catch up.

  Laters

-Mem

  

Create A Starship Redo

  As you may or may not have known, a second contest has been administered after the debacle with DeviantArt. It is in its final stages of entries and you can vote for 3 from your Facebook account...that is if you have one.

  Final Vote Link

  Now, my votes were a bit biased for a few reasons. The first being: Seriously? So many freakin' Amarr ships? I understand the design characteristics lend themselves well, but there really is no need for more Amarr...dirty slavers.

  My second was the fact that, for the love of everything pretty make something symmetrical!! I am not sure why CCP became so infatuated with lop sided hunks of ship, but it drives me insane...personal preference perhaps, but one I find many share. Symmetry is beautiful..nice and even..so yeah...

  My other thought is, why doesn't anyone design a decent Caldari HAC or similar vessel? CCP right out said they won't fix things like the Eagle because nobody uses them...as if that logic is something you want to use when shaping a game environment. *rolls eyes* The Cerberus can be outdone by a Caracal in many instances or a Drake. The only ships Caldari pilots really fly are the Drake, Tengu, Raven, Scorp, and of course my beloved Falcon. Ravens have largely been reduced to mission running or POS bashing, the Tengu is excellent at Pve and alright for Pvp, and the Scorp has to be primary with little tank if it wants to be able to have enough jammers.

  Anyways, I will withhold my votes so as not to bias anyone else, but I think I already let that ship sail with my previous points. Good luck to the incredible designers and I can't wait to see who gets voted to the top.

-Mem