.5 or Higher!

New Blog

2010-05-14T15:21:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine just started his blog. You can check it out here. Not sure if it will be any good, but I figured it didn't hurt to give him some press.

The Hits Keep Coming!

2010-05-14T00:43:00.000-04:00

Have you heard the news? Live events are coming back to Eve! Not that I was around for the good old days, but I'm glad to catch the revival. This is just another example of what I think Eve needed being implemented. The idea of bring back these epic storyline driven even events that can change the shape of our universe is a wonderful thing. I know that in Eve we love the fact that much of what goes on in the world is entirely planet controlled, but it also means that we are beholden to ourselves. And while there are small battles that rage on every day throughout null sec we don't see the larger wheels turn. The Gallente and Amarr simply go on being Gallente and Amarr. We see hints of it in the fiction, but we don't see it in action.

This is about more than just developers jumping in ships, this is a chance for CCP to do some driving in terms of storyline. Imagine a dev fleet laying siege to various systems under the guise of a new pirate or NPC group that is going to have a larger part in an upcoming expansion. Or perhaps a group of planet dwellers take offense to planetary interaction and rise up in opposition either hiring pirates to do their work or taking to vessels themselves, forming blockades around their planets and actively hunting down those who attempt to steal the riches of their land.

There are so many possibilities for the developers to help make this universe even richer. One thing Eve lacks is that major change. Patches introduce new concepts and features and mechanics, but to have in game events to go with them, that would be amazing. For those who played WoW, remember when Naxx floated above the Azeroth in the days of L60 Cap? Who saw the opening of AQ on their server? These events are fantastic and wonderful and I think Eve should steal what is good from WoW while leaving what is bad. Hopefully these live events will do just that.

Hiding in Plain Sight

2010-05-08T11:37:00.009-04:00

This post is an installment of Friday Flash Fiction - something that is run by Ecliptic Rift. Here is this weeks prompt: "This week, we turn our attention to the Syndicate region.“Formed by a handful of Intaki exiles in the wake of the first Caldari-Gallente war, the Syndicate today runs a thriving region of the same name on the fringes of Gallente space, providing a useful haven for less savory Federal citizens and outright outlaws. Denied the right to colonize planets in the region, the Syndicate instead operates exclusively from its network of autonomous stations, each of which is run by a station manager who is undisputed master of his own fief.” Here is my submission. I hope you enjoy.

**************

"They say you can run but you can't hide. I say fuck running, and I say fuck hiding too."

Alehandra's Hulk pulled into station along Jamal's Orca. Disengaging from her pod she made her way off the ship. "Get these unloaded and into my storage." She gestured to both ships as she talked to Neelan. "Just the ore and the salvage, leave the drones and the crystals. The dock worker nodded. Alehandra started to walk away when Neelan called out to her. "Hey, there was someone here earlier looking for you."

Alehandra froze, turning around slowly. She was not used to unexpected visitors. "Who?" was all she could manage to ask. Her face a blank mask trying to cover the apprehension dancing in her eyes.

"I don't remember his name. Some Gallente, Harke-something I think. Said he had some news about your sister Illyena. He said he'd be around the station and he'd just track you down later." Neelan cocked his head slightly to one side, "

Alehandra turned and started to walk away muttering under her breath. "That was a long time ago."

*******

"Damn it Illyena! What do you think you are doing?" Herkan's voice rang through her head. "There is no way through that blockade!" The sphere of Gallente militia ships was almost perfect. Whoever was in charge of this blockade knew how to thwart smugglers. Ships or cans spread out every 3500 to 4000 km, no way to push a ship, even a cloaked ship, through the blockade. The area was littered with drag bubbles and warp bubbles, enough fire power to eat through her shields in a matter of seconds. It looked perfect, it had taken her almost an hour of circling to find a chink in their armor.

She punched the coordinates over the private relay to Herkan's overview. "See that hole?" It was less than a 5km miscalculation, threading her ships through window like that would be like trying to spit through a pinhole. "I'm just going to slide through, jump, and be gone before they even think about locking onto me."

"Great plan." Herkan's voice was sarcastic. "Except you forgot about the point where I'm supposed to watch your back and call the shots. It's too risky, we abort." He ordered a fleet warp and Alehandra's Helios started to align to a nearby planet. She quickly gave the override command.

"No way! We are one jump out from a huge pay day, and I'm not going to run with my tail tucked just because of a few militia ships." She began to move slowly towards the window, easing the controls carefully.

Herkan's tone was full of controlled anger. "Stand down Illyena! You've got over a billion in cargo! You get caught and The Syndicate will lynch us both!" She ignored his command, "I doubt they wouldn't take to kindly to us telling them we were a bunch of cowards either. We were hired to get a job done, that's what I'm doing." She held her breath as she started to push through the narrow window. "I wouldn't recommend trying to order my ship around, I turn the wrong way now and we are both screwed."

"Damn it Illyena!" His voice came angrily over the comsys, but no more fleet orders were issued, at least he was smart enough to realize she was telling the truth. She pushed the ship forward slowly making it through the hole safely and dragging her ship to a halt just outside 2000km of the gate. "You coming through?"

"Negative. Too risky, I make a mistake and we risk both getting caught. Just get through that gate and get to the station. I'll monitor from here." Illyena smirked and gave a soft chuckle, "Aye, aye Captain." She dropped her cloak and accessed the gate's jump sequence within a second of each other. She laughed as her overview started to scream as over a dozen ships attempted to lock onto her before the gate could complete the jump cycle.

Her laughter was short lived. As she appeared on the other side of the gate she was faced with a much smaller fleet, but the area was littered with cargo containers. Her warp dropped almost instantly. Panicked she found the closest planet and started to drive towards it. She punched her microwarp, the other ships were ready for her though as her overview lit up with locking traces, a few getting a solid lock. Her display flashed even more warnings at her as warp scramblers began to disable her ship. All her hopes were squashed as a webifier locked onto her ship, dragging her speed to the point where escape was impossible.

"Well crap." She started the ships self destruct sequence and waited for the countdown.

"Illyena! Illyena! What the hell is happening?" Herkan screamed at her over the comsys.

"Sorry Herkan, you were rig.."

*******

Back in Habu, Alehandra sighed as she thought through the hell that followed. The mad dash of fleeing syndicate space, the efforts and isk it had taken to fake her own death with a clone malfunction. The ensuing elimination of the doctor she had paid to make it happen. She thought she had covered her tracks well enough, and everything she had heard from the Syndicate chatter she had. But it seems Herkan had a personal score to settle. Not surprising, lovers tend to be the jealous type.

She checked the station guest list and dropped a message to the only Herkan in the register with a time and a place for a meet. She slid back into her ship, unloading a weapon from behind the hidden panel near the entry hatch and went back out to wait.

A short while later in an isolated corner of the station's service corridors Herkan stepped out into the light. "Well Illyena, long time. Or should I call you Alehandra now?" She let out a sigh, "Alehandra will do just fine. I never was one for having two names at once. What are you doing here Herkan?"

The man stepped towards her angrily. "Do you know what your little stunt cost me? When you went on the run I was the only one left to pin the blame on. I can't get work. None of my contacts want to talk to me. I can't ever afford to keep my license and clone! I had to ride here on the damned Interbus! I have nothing now and it is all your fault!"

"It isn't my fault you didn't run Herkan. I lost everything too, couldn't assess my old accounts once I faked my death. Even had to lose a bunch of what I learned in faking the clone botch, damn doctor couldn't get a high enough grade clone through the black market. So don't talk to me about loss." She stared the other Intaki down. "So what now? You call up the Syndicate and let them know where they can come and find me, or did you already tell them and they just sent you to do their dirty work?"

"Oh no, they wouldn't have believe me if I told them. I didn't even believe it myself at first." He laughed. "You really should think about how you name your ships. But I guess old habits die hard. It was a long shot hunch, but when you have nothing to lose any hunch is worth it."

"That's it? That is how you found me? A hunch?" She didn't wait for an answer drawing her weapon and firing in one smooth motion. The smile was still on Herkan's face when his body hit the floor. "Well at least you don't have a clone for me to worry about. Thanks for making it easy." She pushed the body into the airlock, glad she had the foresight to choose this location. With no ship, no clone, and no real amount of isk to his name Herkan's death would probably go unnoticed. She punched the release sequence and then began to make her way back to the docking bay.

"Ships are unloaded and ready to go ma'am." She smiled to Neelan, "Thanks, I think we'll be taking them back out." She punched a message to Jamal and within seconds he had confirmed. "So what did that guy want to tell you about your sister?" Neelan asked casually. Alehandra smiled sadly, "Just came to tell me that she had died."

A little smugness never hurt...

2010-05-05T14:09:00.000-04:00

So if you haven't seen the Tyrannis trailer by now you need to watch it. I recommend viewing it in HD if possible with the sound way up and the lights way down. You might need a cigarette afterwards, or a cold shower. Go ahead, I'll wait.

(YouTube Link Here)

I'd like to think that trailer accomplishes exactly what a trailer should accomplish. It made me salivate a bit and very excited to play the next expansion. Obviously, the game play isn't going to be exactly like the trailer on the screen, but that is what it is going to be like in my mind. I can already picture Alehandra mapping out worlds and setting up remote stations on planets, controlling the harvest from afar. It oozed polish and awesomeness.

While it would be extremely arrogant to take any credit for the new trailer I will take a bit of smug validation. In the recent blog banter about women in Eve I stated in my submission, "What Women Want (in Eve)", I had stated that one of the biggest problems with pulling in new players in general, and especially women, was the poor job Eve did of advertising elements of the game other than combat. I had said that CCP needed broaden and retool their tutorial system to highlight the diversity of gameplay options, they also have to broaden their ad campaign to include other elements such as roleplay, industrialization, player run corps, mining, etc.

Less than a month after I penned those words (or typed I guess) CCP releases a trailer where the primary focus is creation and industrialization. Obviously they have been working on that trailer for months and they didn't have someone in their marketing department running down the halls screaming "Stop everything! We are doing it all wrong! Quick read what this amazing intelligent blogger has to say!" However, it does make me feel as if my observations are being somewhat validated by CCP's trailer choice. They could have easily gone for a trailer that focused just on the space combat element, they obviously had that bookending their trailer already, but to devote the majority to mining, industrialization, and planetary interaction shows their willingness to highlight the other parts of the game.

I hope that the banner ads that seem to flood the internet have the same angle in the near future. I think CCP should also consider an ad campaign that uses real player events in game, and perhaps real players, to help sell their product. Imagine if select [AAA] members were allowed to tell the story of the massacre in Providence, or imagine the victors being allowed to talk about their righteous victory, driving back the invaders from their domain.

Heck, even do both and have a whole "There are two sides to every war, but only one victor" as a slogan. Have another campaign where a market mogul talks about her rise to power, a pirate who speaks out on the honor of piracy, a miner who shares the tranquility of an asteroid belt. There is a veritable gold mine of PR representatives in the game itself that CCP could tap, most of whom would be willing to work for free - or at most a PLEX.

So if you marketing gurus ARE reading my blog, feel free to hit me up for that miner spot. I look forward to working with you.

Uneven is not Unfair

2010-05-05T00:31:00.000-04:00

The topic of asymmetric gameplay came up recently in a blogger who has gained a bit of notoriety in the Eve circles. Tobold has recently been posting about Eve and the problems he has with Eve's mechanics. From the tenor of most of his posts I have come to the conclusion he doesn't like Eve, but I also believe he has some pretty backwards notions about game play mechanics and game theory.

He's made analogies such as:

Much is being made of EVE being a sandbox game, but in reality the new players are just playing in the dirt on the outskirts of the playground. The sandbox with the fine sand and the nice toys is occupied by bullies, and if you even get close they are going to beat you up and kick you out. So the goal in life for EVE players is to become strong, gather friends, and be able to beat up the bullies, kick them out of the sandbox, and become the bigger bully.

This over simplification of null-sec combat is really idiotic. He makes several assumptions about how battles are won and lost. Anyone who follows the chronicles of some of the fights in null-sec and low-sec space can easily come to the following conclusion, it is not just about numbers and it is not just about gear. A smaller fleet with superior strategy can take down a larger foe. Numbers help, and if all else is equal number can carry a day. But with sloppy intel and poor fleet command entire battles can be lost. The carving out of null-sec space by large corporations involves far more negotiation and political intrigue than anything else I've seen in an MMORPG. Furthermore, Tobold assumes that you need to be a big bully to enter nullsec. What you need is to join a corp in null-sec and there are plenty of options there.

In other posts Tobold said:

That is a principal problem of PvP MMORPGs: MMORPGs by definition have character advancement, in one form or another. Whether it is time played, gear gathered, real time skill training, or skills used, a player of a MMORPG is always getting better with time. Which doesn't matter all that much if he is facing PvE challenges, which can be scaled to his current power level. But if he is facing PvP challenges, the new player is at a fundamental disadvantage versus the veteran player.

and:

The point of flying into nulsec was to show that this asymmetric PvP in EVE is the rule, not the exception. And just about every EVE player commenting on that thread confirmed that in different words: Being ganked when entering nulsec is "normal". EVE is institutionalized bullying. There is no fair PvP in EVE

Here we truly get into the idea of symmetric vs. asymmetric gameplay. In a symmetric gameplay system all players are operating with the same advantages and disadvantages. There are plenty of games you could use as an example from Chess to a standard FPS Deathmatch. All players, typically, have the same traits and what determines the winner is luck, strategy, and physical ability. Most sports, board, and card games follow this model (poker, football, etc).

Other games are based of an asymmetric model. In an asymmetric model all players are not created equal, they have unique traits, talents, characteristics, or rules that do not apply to the other players. An example of this would be games like Team Fortress, Dune, or even Wow (racial traits make an Orc and a Tauren Warrior different). Pandemic is another great example where depending on the players role in the game they have unique rules that apply only to them.

Frankly, game theorists both love and hate asymmetric gameplay. It is much harder to model because the rules and conditions can be so varied. But Tobold doesn't seem to quite grasp what asymmetric gameplay is entirely, and he certainly doesn't grasp how it can impact all gameplay in Eve.

The first error Tobold makes is in his understanding of the skill system. I am obviously a miner, I have over 17,000,000 skill points and the majority of them fall in non-combat skills. Even through I have been playing Eve for over a year I could be taken out by a pirate who has been playing the game for less that 4 months. If Tobold's thesis was correct then I should easily be in the awesome sandbox with the bullies after playing the game as long as I have with my skill points, but he forgot a fundamental point of the design of Eve.

There are so many skill paths and options that the game requires you to specialize. Unlike WoW where all characters of an equal class level and gear level have the same access (primarily) to spells and talents, Eve is based off the idea of having countless options. Skill points, which equates roughly to character age, has no bearing on player ability within a specific skill set.

The second huge mistake Tobold makes is in his understanding of the combat mechanics of the game. When I mentioned Eve was asymmetric I meant it, in countless ways. Every single ship you can fly in the game has benefits and weaknesses. I am not just talking about the fact that different ships are weak against different types of damage and if you don't know what charge your enemy is using it is hard to pick out hardeners. I mean that even through I may be flying a battle cruiser I could be in a tight spot in I get swarmed by a bunch of frigates who can beat my tracking speed.

Sure, Tobold got popped at a gate camp, so what? I've been ganked outside of Southshore in WoW countless times. It certainly doesn't prove his point about the nature of asymmetric game play in Eve. That would be like if he sat down to play chess with Kasporov and was surprised when he lost, or if he marched in to Ulduar and was surprised when his raid didn't take down Freya on their first try. Getting podded in null sec was not a result of asymmetric game play, it was a result of lack of skill and knowledge about how to safely negotiate null-sec.

In closing Tobold said

Personally I don't like unfair fights. There is a deeper philosophical discussion to be had about the moral dimension of liking unfair fights in your favor against other players. But for now it suffices to say that I think it isn't very good game design, based on the assumption that good game design produces a maximum amount of fun for a maximum number of players.

The notion that fights must be 'fair' is a strange one. Games have always been about a meeting of luck with wits and skill and knowledge. As I've demonstrated above Eve is not about Fair Fights any more than any other game. If you want a game that has 'fair fights' then stick to games like death match and go fish. These games have one thing in common, like most symmetric games they are simple. However, when you want to get into more complicated, more engaging, and more interesting game play then you need to enter into the realm of asymmetric games.

While Tobold may not find Eve 'fun' I think that is due to a lack of appreciation and understanding or an inability to the more complex concepts of the gameplay. But to the many people who play Eve the challenge of perfecting small skill sets and developing an understanding of game tactics that extend beyond "stay out of the fire" and "mash these buttons in this order" this is fun.

Faster than a Gallente Shuttle

2010-05-04T08:51:00.002-04:00

I didn't get much time to either play Eve or blog on Friday evening because I was busy building my new computer. It is a massive beast, and while it isn't top of the line (I can never justify the cost) it is pretty close. Here is the spec sheet of what I got:

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL
EVGA P55 FTW 200 SLI 141-LF-E658-KR LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard
EVGA 012-P3-1472-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) SuperClocked 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
Antec TruePower Quattro TPQ-1000 1000W Continuous Power ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80605I5750
LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer Black SATA Model iHAS424-98 LightScribe Support
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (For Storage and non-gaming installs)
Crucial CT128M225 2.5" 128GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (for OS and select Games)
Antec Twelve Hundred Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case

All said and done the build was just over $2000.00 USD with shipping included (I'll actually get a bit more back when I fill out rebate forms.) And holy hell is it a wonderful machine.

After getting Windows 7 running I downloaded Eve (among other crucial apps). I took it for a test spin and was able to run two copies of Eve at max settings while still IMing, transferring files from my old computer via the home network, downloading ME2 through Steam, and watching some videos on Hulu. I haven't even started to consider over clocking potential, and this rig is made to be over clocked. We've had a bit of a heat and humidity spike here, so I might hold off on the overclocking till I break out the air conditioners or if the heat drops back down to respectable Spring levels again.

I promise to post some pictures of my gaming space later this week to show you my setup. I'm rather proud.

Descent into madness...

2010-05-02T20:51:00.000-04:00

I was reading through my Capsuleer feed when I came across this post from The Planet Risk Show. It seems that their corp is looking for miners to join them in null sec. As I read through the post I found myself thinking, "I wonder what that would be like." I've been spinning my wheels in my current corp. Many of them have been exploring wormhole space and I'm not sure if I want to go that route.

So I talked to Merinid Dormer last night and the conversation went well. He gave me a brief rundown of what null sec mining is like. The only thing that might stop me is the inability to go out and handle mining on my own. With high sec mining I'm find with just my Hulk and my Orca. With the null sec mining fleet Merinid was talking about involved scouts doing recon, dedicated haulers, etc. It really sounds grand.

I've already talked to one of the CEOs of my current corp and let them know I might be making the move to Null sec. They are a great bunch of guys and I'd definitely miss shooting the shit with them in corp chat. I do also have a few real life friends in the corp as well. Also it would be kinda funny to go from high sec to null when the title of my blog is .5 or Higher!, but several bloggers have had the same issue before.

I guess I'll just have to mull it over. So what do you think? Any other null sec miners out there who can shoot me a few words of wisdom or encouragement, or perhaps a horror story or two to make me cry?

I cheat by following the rules...

2010-04-28T02:06:00.000-04:00

The other night in the blogger channel the subject came up as to whether or not people use alts are cheaters. I didn't realize this was even a matter for debate, but apparently some hardcore players think you aren't a real Eve player if you have a second account. I wanted to address my views on this very briefly.

I personally think the notion that someone is a cheater because they have more than one account is bogus. There is one very simple reason for this.

It is allowed in the rules of the game, therefore, not cheating!

Throughout the course of my conversation I felt like I was dealing with someone who creates house rules to make the game favor them. It was like when I was told during a game of checkers that I wasn't allowed to simply leave my back pieces in place, or when playing baseball the winning team wasn't allowed to take more than a double. Similar to the people who create these arbitrary rules that differer from the established rules of a game this gentleman had all sorts of weak arguments, many of them the same as the arguments used by vindictive school children.

Argument #1 - "It unbalances the game."
First off, I would challenge anyone to provide proof that this is so. It may affect the game, Ore prices may be depressed because it is easier to mine if you have an Orca alt. Or Salavage prices might plummet, because having a salvager follow you around on missions saves you time and nets you more salvage. However, these are simply economic pressures that change the balance of the game. Or prices most likely fell when T2 mining vessels and Orcas were first introduced because they changed the balance of the game. Likewise, the upcoming planetary interaction may cause a huge market upheaval in terms of what is going to happen to established trade centers. There is a difference between altering the balance and unbalancing something. Furthermore, if the game is so unbalanced and broken, why keep playing?

Argument #2 - "It is not what the original intent of the game was."
This very well may be, but that doesn't change the fact that it is what the game is today. The game didn't originally have skill queuing. Does that mean that skill queuing broke the game? No. As I mentioned in another post, when you create a game there are always going to be unintended events. As a game designer you have to decide whether these effects reflect where you want your game to go or whether they are bugs. By creating PLEX and even promoting deals for people to open second accounts CCP has taken a very firm stance on how they feel about multiple accounts. If they wanted to restrict this practice they could do so, but they choose not to, which brings us to the next argument.

Argument #3 - "CCP only allows it because they want your extra money."
Okay, so? The question isn't why the rule exists, it is whether or not the rule exists. The entire purpose of Eve PERIOD is to make money for CCP. So to state that just because CCP may make an additional $15 off a multiple account holder is irrelevant. Are people who buy PLEX to sell them for ISK cheaters as well? Whether or not you agree with these game mechanics, they exist.

Argument #4 - "It lets people who have more money to spend have an unfair advantage!"
Frankly I think if anything it merely balances the advantage that someone else may have had because they had no disposable income and lots of time. Just because I have an alt doesn't mean I can skill up any faster. Yes, I can spread some of the responsibilities among two characters if I choose. I can make one focus on mining while the other focuses on production. Or I could have one focus on trade while the other focuses on piracy. Ironically on his own blog the gentleman who was arguing against me conceded in a post on the topic that he didn't mind people multiaccounting if their characters didn't interact with each other. Why is this so important? Well, there is his last argument.

Argument #5 - "It eliminates the need for people to work together in the game."
I disagree sharply. No one has ever engaged in large fleet combat with nothing but alts. No one has ever created an epic empire solely on their own. Yes, in small ways it may make me self sufficient, but I am hardly hiding in a corner just playing the game alone. I have corp mates who I sometimes work with, mission with, mine with. I am still interacting with other people and having them build things that are beyond my capability. Eve is such a diverse game that while you could potentially create accounts to fill every single role you desire filled, (trading, hauling, mining, combat, piracy, production, probing, etc) it would be ultimately futile. While I agree there is a social element to Eve I don't feel that should be forced upon players anymore than players are forced to become pirates or forced to become miners. The effort it would take for me to find another pilot who keeps my erratic hours and schedule who is interested in working with me as one of us flies and Orca and the other mines would be monumental and would detract from my enjoyment of the game.

Interestingly this quote is taken from the blog of the other player

"I am one of those of the opinion that multiple accounts do take away from the game. Do I feel like forcing this posture on other players? No not really, but I would hope to encourage other players who do have multiple accounts to use them for different purposes."

The other night his words were more to the extent of "people who can't play the game for real have to cheat and use alts." That hardly sounds like the words of someone who doesn't want to 'force their posture on other players.'

A Tale of T2 Crystals

2010-04-23T17:29:00.002-04:00

To use T2 Crystals or to not use T2 Crystals, that is the question. Actually, it is more likely an intensely debated subject. I've seen a lot of miners who fly their own Orca alongside their Hulk and have countless hours grinding the rocks who say T2 Crystals are useless. I've also seen countless people who think they are better than sex on a summer afternoon. I've typically fallen into the previous camp. I looked at the cost, the extra training time and heard about the break rates and decided they aren't for me. But now that I'm getting myself maxed out on pretty much everything that has to do with mining I find I need to revisit the issue.

It is kind of hard to complain about the cost of T2 crystals when I'm flying a Hulk next to an Orca I also own, I have an Obelisk in the hanger, and a Highwall mining implant shoved in my head. So here is an in-depth analysis based on nothing but the math. My apologies if I'm repeating information found elsewhere, but no where have I seen people really take the issue to the bottom of the well. They tend to merely harp on one or two things and ignore the larger issue. So dive with me into math and statistical analysis as I explore whether or note T1 or T2 crystal are the better choice.

The Problem with T2
The main two problems that most people cite with T2 crystals is the cost and fact that they break so quickly. Really these are the same issue - the faster the crystals break the more often you have to replace them, and replacing them is really just a matter of cost. So how often do they break?

T1 crystals have a volatility of .1 this means that 10 out of ever 100 cycles (on average) will cause volatility damage to the crystal. T1 crystals 1hp and the volatility damage is .025, so after 40 damaging cycles the crystal breaks. This means an average of 400 cycles in the life of a crystal. For the T2 crystals all that changes is the volatility, which doubles to .2 this means that 20 out of ever 100 cycles (on average) will cause the damage, so your life span goes down to an average of 200 cycles.

This math is not perfect due to the nature of probability. T1 crystals are more likely to live beyond the average lifespan than T2 crystals. If you imagine a crystal with 1.0 volatility would always take damage and then never live beyond 40 cycles. However, for a rough and dirty estimate it makes sense to assume that you need two T2 crystals for ever T1 crystal.

The average cost for T1 Kernite Crystal when I looked was around 30,000ISK. The average cost of a T2 Kernite Crystal was over 300,000ISK. Factor in that you need two T2 crystals for the cycle life of a T1 and you are looking at 600,000 vs 30,000. That is quite the difference. It is easy to see why many people look at the T2 mining crystals and wince in pain. So what are the benefits?

Why T2 Crystals Rock
The main benefit that people exclaim when they are talking about the virtues of T2 Crystals is the increased mining yield. T1 crystals multiply the yield of your strip miners by 1.625 (or 62.5% more than without a crystal). T2 crystals multiply the yield of your strip miners by 1.75 (or 75% more than without a crystal). So you can see that on paper it looks like a 12.5% increase. Sound good right?

Everyone knows that Time = ISK and in mining the higher your yield % the more you get for your time. I just finished a mining run with my T1 crystals. In that run I took in enough Scordite to net me about 16,000,000ISK if I just refined and sold the minerals to existing buy orders. Not a bad haul if I may say so myself. So lets assume that I bothered to shell out for the T2 Crystals. On paper if I did the math and took in 12.5% more minerals I should get 12.5% more profit. That would have meant almost an extra 2 million ISK!

That extra ISK would more than pay for the cost of my T2 crystals, and that is assuming they even broke. My T1 crystals go a long time without breaking, so over the life of a crystal a T2 would mean at least an extra 4 to 10 million ISK. So it seems obvious that T2 crystals are the way to go right?

Arg... There be Math!
Perhaps not. One thing that a lot of people tend to forget is that mining is not just measured in percentages. It is measured in cycles. So what we have to really figure out is whether or not these crystals will saves us cycles. Take a look at this data.

The yield was calculated based of my yield, which is pretty close to maximum. I have all of the requisite skills to 5 and I have the Highwall Implant for an extra 5% yield. You can clearly see the 12.5% difference between what my yield would be with T2 Crystals instead of T1 Crystals. What I then did was survey a number of rocks to get a feel for what the average size of an asteroid is. Using those sizes I calculated how many cycles of the strip miners it would take to eat the rock.

These numbers have to be rounded up for partial cycles, because even if an asteroid only has 10 veldspar left in it, the game will not inform me of this until I completely deplete the asteroid. Looking across the chart you see that a lot of the time the rocks take the same amount of cycles to deplete. In fact what you would find if you looked at the range of cycles is that the majority of the time (regardless of rock size) it is going to take the same number of cycles to deplete. There is a mathematical point at which it will always see a benefit from using T2 cycles, but it doesn't kick in for a long time, as in you wouldn't notice the difference unless you are running across 40,000 units of kernite or 1,000,000 units of Veldspar.

But wait! There's more!
However, rocks come in all shapes and sizes, so I needed to do a better analysis. I took rocks of every size within a range (2000, 2001, 2002, etc) and calculated how many times the T2 lasers would save me a cycle. I tried to use realistic ranges for asteroid sizes. It would be foolish to calculate the cycles for 40,000 units of Kernite or for 5000 units of Veldspar. The results were quite interesting.

I found the result for Scordite to be quite surprising, but it is a combination of the smaller size of the rocks and the larger yield of the Crystals.So what does this mean? It means that depending on the rock I have anywhere from a 7% to a 33% chance of saving a cycle. If we disregard Scordite and just concede that it probably isn't worth mining Scordite with T2 Crystals we can get an average 29.30% of all rocks will save us a cycle. But what does that mean really?

It takes me an average of 40 to 50 asteroids to fill an Orca to the brim. If I assume that out of the 50 rocks it takes I will save 1 cycle on 30% of them then I'm looking at saving a total 15 cycles. That is going to save me over 10 minutes of real time in filling my Orca (15 cycles divided by 3 strip miners times 2 minutes per cycle). That is a decent savings I suppose, but is it worth the investment?

Remember my earlier hypothetical mining trip where I filled my Orca for the tune of 16,000,000 ISK? That took me roughly 90 minutes. That comes out to roughly 177,777 ISK per minute. That means that the 10 minutes of saved time could equate to roughly 1.7 million ISK.

So what I'm really saying...
In the end I guess the T2 crystals are a value (except in the case of Scordite). Though when you get into them you are dealing with probability and chances. It isn't like the jump from a Retriever to the Hulk or from flying solo to flying with an Orca. When you get up to highest levels of mining the benefits come in the margins. It is easy for me to justify the expense of a Highwall implant, because unless I get podded that will have months upon months to pay for itself a little at a time. T2 crystals are a riskier prospect. They definitely can increase your minerals/time ratio but they also won't do you a damn bit of good 60% of the time.

I suppose I could create a spreadsheet where I can enter the value of the rock and it will tell me if the roid is worth using a T2 crystal on, but that would be a bit insane. Also, I know that you can constantly hammer your survey scanner and stop your lasers halfway through to save time if they are chewing on a small rock, but that again is a bit to actively engaging for me. I enjoy the zen of mining. Crunching numbers is fun, but I don't want to do it constantly for each individual asteroid.

Having gone over the numbers I have to admit that despite my initial reaction to T2 Crystals I really will have to try them out and see. I can admit when I've been wrong, and I think I was wrong about T2 Crystals. Hopefully I'll see the type of increase I was able to find on paper when I actually put it into practice.

I hope you enjoyed this little guide. It is probably the most technical post I've done yet so my apologies if it is rambling. But I hope that this can somewhat definitively answer the question as to whether to go for T2 Crystals or not.

But what about...
This afterword is to address a couple of issues that people may have with the analysis I made. If I don't address your concern please leave me a comment. If I still don't address your concern assume it is either because I hate you or I don't want to look stupid when you point out my mistakes.

Why did you only do Veld, Scor, Kern, and Pyrox?
Where I mine that is what is around. I stuck with what I knew so that I could give accurate sizes for the asteroids. Also, while I hope others find this useful the process was mostly for me to work out what I wanted to do next with my character. If you want you can apply the same methodology to any ore type to figure out what T2 crystals are worth investing in. I can tell you that I probably won't bother with Scordite.

My numbers for mining yield and cycle time are different. Does this change anything?
A math major can correct me if I'm wrong, but yes. The percentages of rocks that you will benefit from having T2 crystals will go down based on your base yield since crystals just multiply this base number. The larger the difference between the two yields will increase the cases where having a T2 will result in few cycles. Don't trust me? Do your own math!

You are crazy, it makes sense even for Scordite!
Yes, I am crazy. Yes, it may make sense, but the benefits drop significantly. We are talking about saving 3 minutes as opposed to 10, and that only means an extra 500,000+ isk. Figure that 3 T2 Scordite crystals can easily can cost 1.2-1.5 million isk and suddenly the benefits don't seem quite as meaningful. Plus, remember a 10% chance will occur less than 1/3 of the time of a 30% chance due to deviation.

Where the hell did you get your numbers?
Info on mining yield and crystals was pulled directly from in game. Information that was used to calculate my earnings was based on Eve-Central prices pulled from their API into a spreadsheet I run. Information on rock sizes was based on flying around to a couple belts and doing some quick estimates. For more information on probability take a higher math course, that stuff hurts my brain.

When I look at mining crystals the probability is listed as .1%, not 10%. What gives?
This, I think, is just a typo on CCPs part. If it were .1% then you'd get an average lifespan 40,000 cycles instead of 400. That would mean a crystal would last roughly 80,000-120,000 minutes of use. This works about to 55 days of constantly mining. I doubt I've spend that much time in the game since getting my Hulk, let alone that much mining, and I've burned through crystals already. The figure of .1 meaning 10% is far more reasonable.

What women want (in Eve) - Blog Banter

2010-04-22T02:14:00.004-04:00

**DISCLAIMER** I am not a woman, I have no intrinsic knowledge as to what they want or don't want in a game. I am basing this entire article off what my experience with other female gamers has been.

This entry is part of Crazy Kinux's 17th Blog Banter where he asked "What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game?" This is a pretty heavy subject, so lets get down to it.

With women making up less that 5% of the total Eve player base it is understandable why CCP might want to tap into this under represented market. One thing is clear, the must not sacrifice their current player base to do this. Even if they were able to increase the number of women playing the game by 300% it would be catastrophic if those same changes caused the male player base to drop by even 1/3. So the question shouldn't just be "How can CCP attract, and retain, more female players?" It should be "How can CCP attract and retain more female players while not diminishing it's current player base?"

The easy answer, and one that several people are likely to point to is Incarna. Give women a station to walk around in, an avatar to play with, and they will flock to your game like it is a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I think this answer is far to simplistic and sells women short. Plenty of women have played games that were Avatarless. When I used to play text line MUDs over 30% of the players were women, several of them good friends of mine. Incarna may be a good vehicle to roll out other changes that could make women want to come, but just the idea of station walking is not enough. In fact, if it is done poorly Incarna could greatly damage the attractiveness of the game to all groups.

So if not station walking, what can bring women to Eve? In discussing gaming with female players what comes up again and again is the idea of character. I think that women don't use games merely as a social mechanism, they use it as a form of social escapism. They love flying the cool ships, they may love the pewpew as much as the guys. When I talk to women about gaming, though, they tell me "My character did this," or, "My character did that." Men typically say, "I did this." So there is some attachment to this character as a person that women seem to have. This is partially while I think so many people think Incarna is the answer. To women it is about developing a sense of character and enjoying the immersion that roleplay can bring.

Because they are more interested in this immersion one could argue that women would be more interested in the diverse game play opportunities the Eve provides. In all of the online advertisements I've seen CCP rarely makes it clear how player driven Eve is. Additionally the game itself does a poor job of making this unique aspect clear during the tutorial phase.

I think that in the end the biggest hurdle keeping women out of Eve is the first 30 days. I've talked multiple times about the learning curve of the game, it is brutal. Men are not more willing to plow through the game, but men are more interested by the easier mechanics of the game. Running missions and blowing things up is simple, anyone can do it with relative ease. But perhaps women want more out of the game than a space fighter simulation.

If CCP is serious about bringing more women into Eve they do not need to change much of the content of the game, they simply need to make the open ended and expansive nature of Eve more obvious and accessible in the beginning of the game. I know they have put a lot of effort into revising and revisiting those opening tutorials, but I think they still haven't honed it enough. It is not about dumbing down the mechanics of the game, it is simply about explaining them in greater detail to new players.

So what should CCP do?

If they want to bring in more women the first thing must be the tutorial system. Thread the opening tutorials into different sections. Currently the game marches you through a process of learning basic flight skills first, then you learn combat, and then eventually the game gets you into the industrial aspects of the game, many aspect of the game are completely ignored. By the time the get around to teaching about some of the aspects female gamers may enjoy more they have already put the game aside.

Instead, CCP should structure the opening tutorials in more of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style. This less linear style of tutorial can introduce players to the career paths that interest them the most and allow them to get a glimpse of how to potentially train higher levels of skill in their chosen career path. This would almost combine the tutorial system with the Certificate system. I understand this is a major undertaking, but refining the tutorial system further would help keep players of both genders in the game.

Beyond that, there are a few other options CCP can explore.

Focus on the presence of roleplay in the game. Unless you happen across one of the RP channels or are brought into the RP scene by another player you may never realize it exists. I know I didn't. It would be easy to give it a passing mention in the tutorial. I don't think that CCP needs to give rewards to capsulleers who roleplay, and I don't think they all need Incarna. In fact, Incarna might hurt the roleplay scene since I can currently be mining in Habu while I am in the Last Gate Bar chatting with people. Incarna may force roleplayers to devote large amounts of time to physically being in a roleplay space, and I'm not sure that is a good thing.

Explore the idea of ship customization in terms of skinning. Perhaps ships could have an area where a player designed logo could be affixed. Even if this was just something where players chose from a list of 50 to 100 simple logos and a color scheme it would help. I think even male players could enjoy this feature, if nothing else it would be cool to have my Hulk look different than someone else's, even if it is just a minor (miner) difference.

You could even make entire skill sets that revolve around this element of the game. CCP could create skills that allow players to create these ship decals and they could be sold via the existing market mechanics. I don't imagine the skill sets would have to go that deep like some of the career paths, but it would make an interesting side grab.

Retool character missions and agent interaction. Make agents appear more real and allow characters to form a relationship with them. This would take a major overhaul, but perhaps agents could issue storyline missions that presented in a logical sequence (like a quest chain) where characters felt that they were accomplishing something meaningful rather than pulling a random quest out of a hat. I know I have mentioned this before in other posts and I will probably mention it again in the future. I really feel this is one of the biggest things CCP has failed to do in Eve and it is to the detriment of all players.

In conclusion (finally), I know that a lot of this post reads more as to if the question had been "What can CCP make better?" However, that is what CCP needs to do to attract more women. CCP's biggest problem is that they fail to sell themselves to women. The tutorial, though better, is still painful. Some of the most interesting elements of the game are ones I seem to stumble across after playing for 6 months. CCP has designed Eve like a microwave with a poorly written manual. I may discover after 4 months that I can program it to automatically do my laundry while I'm walking the dog, but damned if the manual was going to tell me about it.

The old joke in programming is "that isn't a bug, it's a feature!" CCP needs to sit down and decide whether the lack of a well structured and exhaustive tutorial system is a feature or a bug. If it is something that they have created intentionally to help convey the "do whatever you want, but man you are screwed if you mess up" feeling Eve has that is fine, but it will cost them subscribers. If they decide that it isn't what they wanted and they don't want to drive new players to either quit or go on exhaustive internet searches to figure out what the hell they should be doing, then they need to buckle down and change the first 30 days of gameplay. In short, CCP doesn't need to change the game, they just need to do a better job showing their game to new players.

Think my opinion sucks? Well here are some other opinions:
Is Eve a Man's World? by astral dominix
Sorry, No Pink Spaceship Here Please! by Banear
Chicks 'N Ships by Rixx Javix
The Girls who Fly Spaceships by Ztikara
It's not about Fluffy Bloody Kittens by EVE SOB
Tech 2 Stilettos by The Hydrostatic Capsule
Making Eve more Casual by Garhead
Where are all the Wenches? by Eve Chick
You'd Rather be Playing 'The Sims', Right? by a merry life and a short one
more to come...

New Name, Same Author

2010-04-19T16:04:00.002-04:00

Just to clarify things - this is the same person who has been posting all along. I decided to create an email account and blog profile for my in game character using that name an avatar. This may confuse people, but I figured it was less confusing than the previous setting where I was posting under a pseudonym (David E. Talvoces is not my real name) about an avatar I play in a game... I just thought this would be easier.

It all comes down to nepotism - Alternate History Meme

2010-04-14T23:56:00.001-04:00

Last night I was chatting with the lovely people in the Eve-Bloggers channel. Jerran Ragnar (author of Victoria Aut Mors) spoke up. "We should all do a post on the same topic tomorrow!" Silence ensued. I offered up that I thought that could be interested and asked what Jerran had in mind. More silence ensued. Someone else pointed out "I thought that what CK's Blog Banter was for?" This time the silence was tinged with that wonderful aura of "Yeah, moron." I came to Jerran's defense saying that just because CK did it didn't meant that we couldn't play Newton to his Hooke and claim it for our own. Sadly we were still without a good idea, but then Mike Azaria spoke up and said "Well, the blog banter tends to usually be forward looking. So why don't we do something looking into the past?" (Please note I am paraphrasing, so Mike - don't pod me.)

Through a quick round of "pass the buck" Jerran was selected to lead us off and has done so with his latest post. He went ahead and summed up the meme as thus -

“What would you change about Eve if you could go back in time?”. It can be something about the world itself, game play, or anything else you can think of.

He went the route of exploring the setting of the game and thought about taking capsuleers out of the capsule. My entry is a bit more focused on a game mechanic that annoys me and I'd like to explore through a short work of fiction with a summary at the end (so if you don't like the fiction you can fast forward.) Enjoy!

The Forgotten Casualties

A string of curses preceded Alehandra by at least ten seconds before she finally appeared in the hatchway of her Hulk, Pendereski, and stormed down the ramp into the bustling landing bay. "Neelan!" her voice called out with a piercing intensity that caused to techer to cringe from across the bay. He turned around, forcing a smile onto his face as Alehandra pulled up in front of him, her face painted with a plethora of scowls, glares, and other unsavory features. "What can I do for ya Ms. Dvemko?" He asked, trying in all reality to sound as pleasant and as helpful as possible. The last technician who had squared off against this irate miner hadn't walked quite right for weeks after the encounter.

"I have... a favor to ask." Alehandra's voice dropped at least 20 decibels, though that could have just been because her voice was now having to work her way past a solid wall of clenched teeth. She wrapped an arm around the man's back and her fingers began to dig heavily into his flesh of his shoulder causing him to wince slightly. "My drones.... they have sensors... little bits of technology built into them... these little bits of technology give me feedback as to how much damage they have taken, their shield strength, their armor, their structure... all these little sensors. Right?"

Neelan nodded as gently as he could, one does not make sudden movements around wild animals. "Yes..." His answer was as cautious as possible.

"So why is it, Neelan, that in all of this wonderful technology we could not insert a tiny bit of hardware or software that would tell the drones that when they are attacked and take damage to return immediately to the ship?" Her voice was slow and cool, but Neelan wasn't fooled. Alehandra was almost famous for the amount of mining drones she could go through in a week. He thought carefully before wording his reply. "Well... ummm... Ms. Dvemoko... the problem is that the drones are constantly taking slight amounts of shield damage from cosmic rays and other particles in space, you just never notice because of the regeneration rate. So that code would constantly be sending your drones back to the bay unnecessarily."

Alehandra moved to run her hands through her hair in exasperation, Neelan took this chance to extract himself from the pilots grasp, moving to put a console terminal between them. "Well, couldn't we just set up a threshold for the damage amount then? Or perhaps we could just set it up when they took armor damage! Wouldn't that work?" Neelan chewed his lip for a second. "Well they did try that once, but the drones were prone to lock up, no one was able to ever figure out why. I mean, I could access the old protocols and install them on your drones, but chances are your entire fleet would be dead in a week."

The scowl across her face deepened. "Fine then! I want you to install a damn alarm in my capsule. It is bad enough I get a siren going off in my head whenever my own shields reach 75% damage, why don't we just install that protocol for the drones?" Her voice grew louder again as her frustration started to reach a boiling point. She stared Neelan down, as if daring him to find a problem with her latest idea.

"Well, those sirens are wired directly into the shield systems you see. It is meant to be as an additional safety protocol in case the instrumentation or data feed became corrupt. So unless you are planning on running over 10km of line out to each droid, not to mention the signal lag and degradation, or if the lines get tangled.." His voice was cut off by a howl of frustration as Alehandra slammed her hands down on the console between them. She gripped the sides tightly, and it must have been his imagination but he would have sworn he heard the reinforced glass of the display creak beneath her hands.

"Okay. Fine." It wasn't a good sign when her sentences degraded to single syllables. "The meathead who Orca's for me, Jamal, he's got drones. I want you to mod them. He usually sets one to defend me, I want you to fix it so he can just make them orbit my mining drones and defend them. Got it?" Neelan stepped back from the enraged woman and the control console. "Woah, no way!" He exclaimed.

"What do you mean 'no way'?" Alehandra growled, her voice barely audible.

"You want me to get in deep with CONCORD? Making a drone that can protect another drone? If I do that there is a chance that the drones might start to gain sentience and think of themselves as people. They could turn against that then. Modifying core drone AI is strictly regulated!" He shook his head, "I can't do that. No way am I risking drone Armageddon!" Alehandra looked at him with rage and disbelief. Then she turned without a word and stormed off into the station proper.

Once she was safely out of sight Devan walked over to where Neelan was still bent over the console recovering from the encounter. "Umm... Neelan, you just made all of that up didn't you?" The techie looked up from the console with a slight grin across his face. "Yeah, pretty much."

"Why would you do that? She could have crushed you! Do you remember what she did to Allerat? Why would you feed her such a crazy line?" Devan looked as Neelan with amazement.

With a shrug Neelan replied casually, "My wife's cousin is the one who sells her the mining drones."

=End Transmission=

Afterword

So yes, I am sure it is rather trivial but I hate when my mining drones get popped before I realize what is going on. Before you tell me that I shouldn't AFK mine I'm not even really AFK I'm just not 100% in the game. The other evening I was looking over the Certificate Planner on my Alt, my market window was open on my main, and I was focusing on the blogger chat window. I was playing the game, but since there is no audio alert when my drones are targeted or attacked I didn't even realize what was happening till I glanced to my drone window and saw I had no drones in space.

To bring up another point, why the hell do pirates even bother shooting my mining drones? They give them no salvage, they can't attack the pirates, and they are wasting valuable time they could be spending kill me. It makes absolutely no in game sense. I understand that from a mechanic standpoint this may be in place by CCP entirely with the intention to punish AFK miners, but it doesn't really fit in smoothly. Secondly, they could add a small audio alert and it wouldn't really benefit AFK miners, but it would help distracted miners like me save a few ISK.

So there you have it, my submission to this little meme. Be sure to check out Jerran's and Mike's contributions. As I stated before Jerran has already gone a very different direction than mine and I can't wait to see what Mike comes up with. As always, comments are welcome.

edit: Paritybit has hopped on board and posted his own take here, and boy did he go controversial

Wait... I won what?

2010-04-13T00:48:00.000-04:00

So I am not sure whether my college English professor would be ecstatic or dismayed. This is the woman once graded a piece of my fiction A+++ for content, D- for grammar and gave me and average of a C. I tried to argue with her that really the average of an A triple plus and a D minus should be a B. She was unamused.

Apparently my grammar has either improved or CrazyKinux was able to look past such mortal trappings. My story "Abyssus in Terra" was able to land me a PLEX in his recent Tyrannis Contest. While I did not win the grand honor of interviewing a CCP developer I am still beside myself with happiness. It is probably a good thing that the interview went to someone else as I am not the most experienced player and the most probing question I could ask would involve the developers favorite color.

I would like to give congratulations to Cailais who won the interview with Let the Gods be Gods! as well as Mandrill over at I Am Keith Nelson, Illectro with It's Not Just About Planets You Know, and KailJoric with Nothing Personal, It's just Business, as well as the 26 other entries (I will admit I have not yet had time to read them all.) I would also like to thank CrazyKinux for putting together this contest as well as CCP for donating some really amazing prizes.

For Prize Confirmation CK can contact holyyakker[at]gmail[dot]com - in game name is not author name.

Hanger Update

2010-04-12T14:04:00.000-04:00

I realized that in my previous hanger update I missed a couple boats.

Angry Phallus - My Iteron IV was my move it boat before I got my Orca and then my Obelisk.
Jamal's Folly - This is the Retriever after "The Flying Dutchman" was lost due to pilot stupidity.

I've been impressed reading all the other posts about peoples hangars. I find it fascinating just how many different ships there are. I'm glad I've never had the pokemon mentality of "Gotta Catch em All!" because this game would drive me batshit crazy if I did.

Blog Readership

2010-04-11T17:38:00.001-04:00

Over at Ecliptic Rift casiella put up a great post on how to drive some traffic to your blog. I thought that I would throw my own $0.02 into the mix.

I suppose an article from me on how to drive traffic to your blog seems a bit like a one-legged man writing a "How To" guide for ass kicking contests. ".5 or Higher!" has a grand has a grand total of 9 followers and less than 50 posts, but this is not my first time to a rodeo. I actually run a website for a small local group and it is a blog based medium. The average readership is about 200 to 300 unique visitors a month, which for a local news site is relatively high. So here are my insights into blogging in general.

The one thing I can say from pouring over the site statistics for my other blog that casiella didn't mention in her post over at Ecliptic Rift was this: Content is King.

Whenever you have consistent new posts readship will go up. Whenever you have fewer news posts readship will go down. Being in the huge blog feed lists is important, but people quickly develop favorites. I know that when I shoot up Capsuleer there are certain feeds that I scroll to first and there are certain ones that I just pass by. Not to mention, there are some people who don't use RSS feeds or readers and just go directly to the blog sites. If you update frequently you give them a reason to check back frequently. If you update sporadically they will be less likely to get infrequent traffic.

This is why a lot of websites and web comics set up schedules, and it isn't a bad idea for blogs as well. If you have a string of great ideas don't post them all at once. Use the schedule feature and set them to spread out over a week or two. It is better to have a post every two days for two weeks than having 14 posts in one day.

One final piece of advice is to write often even if you don't post often. Writing is an art, like painting, drawing, or music. Everyone can create on a basic level, but the more you practice the skill and take in the work of others the more you will hone your art. Lets face it, an artist who can create beautiful masterpieces is more likely to get an audience than a series of crayon drawings on construction paper.

I hope my suggestions have helped out in a little way. The Eve blogging community is very diverse group, I think that almost any could find a niche, be it fiction, expertise, humor, or a grab bag (like this one).

What's in MY Hanger you ask?

2010-04-10T09:04:00.002-04:00

Over at Evoganda Rixx asked us "What is in your hanger?"

Well, technically Rixx also asked us if we had a specific naming convention so I'll skip the boring "no" answer and get to the important part.

Sadly, I also have a very boring hanger.

Catalyst - "Repoman" used for salvaging with 4 tractor beams and 4 salvagers
Hulk - "Pendereski" used for mining (duh) and named after a Polish composer, I'm a music major
Myrmidon - "Monkey Lover" used for mission running, I chew through L2 and I can't wait to have enough standing to try my hand at some L3s.
Gallente Shuttle - "Puddle Jumper" "Run Rabbit Run" used for what shuttles are used for, quickly getting from one homebase to another
Orca - "Mobile Meth Lab" is a name that I inherited when I bought the ship off a corpmate, he asked me to keep the name and I said sure.
Obelisk - "Footlocker" is my move all my shit from here to there.

I think I have another couple small vessels, but that is my overall hanger. Nothing that impressive, I was very proud when I bought my Orca and my Obelisk though. I am currently training up for a Hyperion and while I can fly a Megathron I'm thinking the Hyperion might be a better choice. If you have an opinion on Hyperion vs. Megathron or if you want to suggest a name for either vessel hit me up in the comments.

Abyssus in Terra

2010-04-09T16:21:00.005-04:00

This entry is written for the contest posted on CrazyKinux's site found here. I wrote it before looking at any other submissions and was relieved to see that I was not the only one writing fiction. I tried to make my fiction reflect the realities of both what this will mean for game play and for what it will mean for the Eve Universe as game setting. My apologies if any of my tech or in game mechanics seem fudges as I am a relatively new player, though I will tell you that I broke out EFT for Part 3. I hope you enjoy.

Part One

“Thank heavens for scientific research. I would have made a terrible farmer!” – Dr. Amiel Tsling, Professor of Physics and Theoretician behind the Space Elevator

Safanan Ature furrowed her brow and looked narrowly at the man standing before her. “A rocket? You seriously are merely going to launch a rocket into space for any pirate to come and scoop up?” The man withered a bit beneath her gaze and pushed his glasses a bit further up his nose. He was fidgeting like a small dog cornered by a large butcher. He was afraid for his life, but at the same time he knew that Assembly Manager Ature could give him everything he ever dreamed of, possibly more.

“For now, for now! There is work on a space elevator much more secure, and we could easily wait to shoot the rockets until the coast was clear, or perhaps encrypted rockets… yes…” His voice deteriorated into mumbles before he shook his head violently. “That’s so trivial though! It is the big picture that matters!”

“We’ve been spending so much time sending out our mining teams into asteroid fields looking for rare minerals, or out harvesting ice, we’ve even been mining from the surface of moons with orbital mining arrays. But all that time we’ve been sitting on a fortune, quite literally sitting on it! If we could effectively harvest the resources of the planet with ground based installations we would save loads in supply costs.”

“I think the Amarrians might have a problem with it if we start undermining their cities, Dr. Everet.” Safanan looked at the man skeptically, but now that the idea was in her brain it was slowly being turned over, refined, honed, and clarified.

“We obviously can’t do the industrialized planets, but have you looked our initial survey reports? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of planets that are completely barren, even more have small communities practicing subsistence agriculture. They could hardly stand in the way if we wanted to industrialize their planet.” The doctor continued even more excited now, practically bouncing in his chair. “Think about the science! This is the next huge industrial revolution. This will bring to industrial science and manufacturing what the modulated strip miner did for mining!”

A chuckle escaped from the powerful woman’s lips as she regarded the rabid scientist. “Settle down Doctor, settle down.” She leaned back in her chair where she sat across from the older man. She took her mug from her desk and sipped slowly. “There are... considerations. We don’t want to be seen as oppressors. I’ll need to talk to Metmeon and Essid before we take this to Ardamad.”

Some of the color and exuberance flushed out of Doctor Everet’s face as the name trigged a flight response deep within his psyche. “Ar.. Ar.. Ardamad Zoar? CEO Madame Zoar?”

“Well of course,” Safanan replied casually with a wave of her hand. “I can’t simply authorize us to go into a completely unproven and experimental field her approval. You, of course, will have to present your ideas to her as well.”

“I’m not very good at presenting,” the Doctor offered up weakly, looking decidedly more pale with each passing moment.

“Yes, it is clearly a matter of spin,” Sarafan said to herself as she turned her chair to peer out the station windows at the vastness of space. “Word it carefully and we will seem to be the saviors of these forgotten worlds. Bringing progress and security to unsafe worlds. Providing those with nothing hope for a better tomorrow for their children. Economic prosperity for everyone.” She chuckled darkly, “But most importantly, economic prosperity for us.”

Part Two

“Them devils were bad enough in space, now they got to go and mess up our home too?” – Anonymous

“Move it, the wreckers aren’t going to wait much longer and if you are still here when they crush your home I’m going to have to fill out an incident report to explain the bodies.” The fat man smiled, there was no warmth behind the gesture, just callous inhumanity. “I hate paperwork.” The woman struggled to carry as many bags as possible while herding two small children from the hovel they had called home. Outside, her husband pushed a cart loaded with basic farming supplies. His two older sons carried loads similar to the one being hauled by their mother.

The worn path that served as a road, winding through the small community, was full of families just like their own. Every few homes was a man with a gun, ensuring that the evacuation was thorough enough to minimize the need for ‘incident reports’. The men with the guns weren’t being violent, at least not yet. There was no need, these people had already heard about the fate of the last community that had tried to defend themselves and what they had thought was their land. The bastards didn’t even bother fighting back with their men on the ground. At the first sign of real trouble, trouble that wasn’t going to be put down with single killing, they pulled their troops back. The village had thought they had won. It was a little later in the day when a loud humming filled the air. A single ship with a few missles was all it took to completely decimate the town.

The story spread fast, the few survivors who had been out in the field saw to that. So when they came to the next town, and the next, the people didn’t dare rise up. They simply packed up and moved on, settling down with neighboring communities where they had friends or family. If there wasn’t enough room they would just move on to the next town, so far there was still plenty of space on planet.

“Dad, where are we going to live now?” The young boy looked at his father. His face was tight and set firmly against the tears that were welling up within his eyes. The man looked down at his son, proud that his boy was trying to bear the heartbreak with a maturity beyond his years. It was a maturity beyond anyone’s years; there isn’t a man alive who can walk from his home at gunpoint and lead his family into the unknown without feeling that sense of pain and of failure. But like his son, the father put on a stoic face, even trying to smile weakly.

“We go down the road son. I figure there’s someone who can use a sturdy farmer whose good with his hands, and if not we’ll find another patch of open land and start over.” Even as he said it the words felt hollow in his ears. “Until they come and take that land too.” He thought bitterly. These corporations and the capsuleers who ran them would never stop until the whole planet was as efficient and barren as the ships they withered away in.

It had all started when some hotshot capsuleer had discovered that planet 8RL-OG VII had potential for excavation since it was rich in the minerals needed for so many of the high end implants and modules that the spacers had an endless appetite for. He quickly sold the information to a large industrial corporation. At first they had been all smiles, offering the world, great jobs, the comforts of modern life. What they didn’t understand is that the people had no desire for such things. They liked their land and they liked their autonomy. Those who were interested wanted far more than the corporation was willing to give. So instead they showed in force, they brought in troops and they brought in their own workers by the shipload. They began to clear out village after village, town after town. Where there had once stood rolling fields of hand planted grain there were now automated factories, digging deep into the earth, extracting what they wanted and spitting out the remains.

“And that will be the fate of the entire planet” the man thought to himself as he pushed his cart roughly down the road. The corporation would push and grab and steal until the people were trapped, squeezed onto the few tracts of land that the corporation didn’t want for themselves. Then the day would come when those were the only places left to expand onto. But by then they would be a broken people, they would gladly take whatever work the corporation will offer them for whatever scraps of compensation the corporation decides to bless them with. And as he walked down the road thinking of the fate of his children and grandchildren the man didn’t even try to stop the flood of tears that poured down his weathered cheeks.

Part 3

“What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours. Until I take it of course, then it’s mine.” – Unknown Pirate

Tetz sat in the cockpit looking out at the stars. “You ever notice how screwed up the world looks through the cloak Kiogi?” There was a pause and Tetz looked at his console, waiting for the response.

“Nope.” Kiogi’s voice came back without any additional commentary. Tetz let out a sigh in the solitary confines of his Crane. He really hated being partnered with Kiogi. His partner sat about 2AUs off the jump gate monitoring the incoming traffic and probing out the system. At least it would be over soon, this was the last pickup and then they could get the hell out of the system and back to home space.

“How does it look?” Tetz asked. They’d been sitting here for the better part of an hour, it never hurts to be too cautious. After all that time though, Tetz had been getting impatient. He couldn’t wait for them to finally perfect the Space Elevator so the minerals could be lifted from planet side to an orbital station rather than the almost archaic rocket system they were using.

Kiogi ran a few more checks and then came back over the comm. “All clear as far as I can tell. Be careful.” Tetz nodded and went to work. He signaled the planet station to initiate the launch. Once the code was given there was no time to abort, so no matter what happened now it was go time. There was a visible flare as the rocket blazed out of the lower atmosphere. It shot into low planetary orbit and hung there, waiting for someone to pick it up. Tetz turned his nose towards to cargo rocket and made his way towards it. This was the dangerous time, there could be another rogue Crane out there, just waiting to snap up what was not theirs. It happened once a few weeks ago, the thief made off with an entire rockets worth of cargo. That is when they started being sent out in twos. Kiogi would watch the gates into the system for incoming vessels. Once they thought they were reasonably alone Tetz would order the launch and grab the cargo.

Tetz positioned himself just at the edge of transfer range, not wanting his cloak to drop early and prepared for the tricky bit. Suddenly his cloaking field dissolved. “What the hell?” he said to no one in particular. Warning lights flooded the cabin a deep crimson and sirens began to shriek in his ears. “What’s going on Tetz?” Kiogi’s voice for once showed genuine concern.

“Shit, shit, shit!” shouted Tetz as he tried to turn to his combat console. The first volley of missiles hit before he could even bring up his overview. “Oh fuck, Widow Kiogi, it’s a fucking Widow!” He tried to bring himself in to warp, but the computer informed him the warp bubble could not form. “And he’s got me locked! I’m fried!”

Kiogi’s voice was tinged with a hint of panic, “Aligning now.” Just then two more blips appeared on Tetz’s screen. “Don’t bother Kiogi,” Tetz replied with a sigh, “Two more Rooks just uncloaked.” He watched as his shields started to buckle as volley after volley of missiles slammed against them. There was no chatter on his comm. other than Kiogi, no ransom requests today. He could hear the missiles tearing into his armor now as his shield gave way under the assault.

“Hey Kiogi, do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“If they pop my pod buy my clone a few rounds and give him a message for me.”

“Sure, what’s the message?”

“Tell him I slept with his wife.” Tetz laughed with Kiogi as the volley caused his ship to rupture into nothing but wreckage. He thought to himself, “That joke never gets old.”

Part Four

“War is hell.” – General Sherman

The following excerpt was recovered from an unknown soldier after the great planet wars.

=Begin Transmission=

No one said it would be like this. The technology was supposed to improve our planets. We were supposed to be better off than before. When the corporations first came to our planets with the promise of a better tomorrow. We believed them. We would all live with the comfort of gods. They said they were going bring us great cities.

Instead they brought us battlefields.

Endless battlefields are all we know now. Battlefields where the unfortunate few who stayed behind or who weren’t killed when the first wave of fighting erupted wage an endless war. They made us immortal, but they also made us cannon fodder. A capsuleer may die once, twice a year if they are unfortunate. There isn’t a day that goes by it seems when I don’t wake up choking and gasping in the darkness of a medivat.

At first it was almost like they promised... almost. The corporations came and there were plenty of worlds for all. There was no need to squabble over resources when the planets were seemingly endless. Why fight over a planet when you can just move onto the next one? But as the resource rich planets became fewer and fewer the competition became more and more fierce. The corporations started offering more and more to the citizens to woo them one way or another, but that didn’t last long.

Eventually some bean counter in a corporate office figured out it would be more cost efficient to simply drop a garrison of troops and take over an already claimed planet than it would be to scout out another operation that wouldn’t bear as rich of a fruit. It was a PR disaster at first, corporations and governments were outraged at one another, but it was an easy problem to solve. The invasions became liberation movements. Show enough holovids of the terrible working conditions on these planets, and they were terrible, and you could convince anyone that whichever corporation was being invaded that day deserved it.

It slowly got to the point where every single planetary installation had a full garrison and war was constant. Some companies would hold strong enough footholds in a system to keep the others at bay for a little while, but soon a rival faction would tear them down again. It was a living nightmare. It has gotten to the point where the planets don’t even have names, just combat designations, and they all look the same. Sure, one has two moons and one has three. The skies may be green on one but yellow on the next, but the fighting is the same everywhere, and by now most of the ground is stained red with blood.

But up in space the corps keep plugging away, so it must still be profitable, at least to someone, damned if it is me. They keep saying we can earn up enough and retire, go to the stars and be a capsuleer if we want. But somehow that goal is always just out of reach, the eternal carrot that I can never grasp. I don’t know if I’d want it even if I could get it now. The smell of Med-gel hangs around me constantly, that and the smell of death.

So I finally found my way out of it. Tonight I am going to break into the Medlab, I’m going to shoot my clone, then I’m going to shoot myself. Who knows, perhaps I’ll end up in the stars once I’m dead.

=End Transmission=

Thank you for reading. When I envisioned this story I only had imagined parts 2-4. As I was writing I felt there needed to be a Part 1 to set the stage, to show what put the wheels into motion. Part 1 and 2 were meant to show the possible development of this new mechanic through the eyes of the non-player denizens of Eve. Part 3 was my brief homage to a new potential breed of piracy, the planet camp instead of the gate camp. Part 4 was my hopes for what Dust 514 will eventually bring us. As always, comments welcome.

Chatting it up with Celebrates

2010-04-09T11:03:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting here listening to The Drone Bay podcast, checking out Eve Blogs on Capusleer, and now posting on my own blog. If my mother could see me now I don't think pride would be the first thing that comes through her head, quite the opposite. I would make a big deal about The Drone Bay being back, but I've never knew about them before. I just heard about them in the Eve Blogger channel in game last night and started to check it out. I probably won't do them justice, since I won't be going back and listening to the old episodes, and I'm sure that means I'll miss out on some of the inside jokes, but I have enough trouble keeping up on my blogs and real life without having to find time for over 20 hours of old Eve News. I will say that the show that went up last night was informative and entertaining, so a great job to Kinux, Crovan, Alsedrech, and Maeve.

It was fun hanging out in the Eve Blogger channel last night. I've lurked for a bit in the past, but last night I chatted a little. I don't really know the people yet so I kinda feel like that guy who shows up when you are eating with your friends and takes the one empty seat at the table because there is no other room and then tries to interject themselves into your conversation. I hate that guy, I hate being that guy. I did realize something though, when it finally donned on me that Crovan was posting about the podcast as self promotion, not just as a junkie who was glad the crack dealer was back in town, it brought home how cool the single server experience of Eve is.

Other web celebrates play MMORPGs, both the creators of Ctrl+Atl+Delete Comics and Penny Arcade Comics have WoW Guilds. But if you wanted to play the game with them you'd have to first be on their server, then you'd probably have to be in their guild, or you'd have to be in the same general area as they are. Since Eve is a single server and allows for server wide channels it is completely conceivable that I could chat with Kinux or Kirith. Hell, last night I was chatting with Maeve and Crovan. Just another reason Eve is cool.

I have a lot of blog post ideas brewing, so stay tuned. Hopefully I'll be able to get my submission done in time for Kinux's contest.

Burnt Offerings and other terrible metaphors

2010-04-09T01:21:00.000-04:00

I like games. I've played CCG (Collectible Card Games), Tabletop RPGs (more systems than I'm willing to list), board games (both American and "German" style), video games on systems dating back to ColecoVision, MMORPGS in limited varieties, FPS games, Turn Based Strategy, Tabletop Wargames (if I never paint another stinking Eldar I can die a happy man), I've even LARPed (if you don't know what LARP is I'm not going to explain it and if you do know about it you can't laugh because you are probably as pathetic a soul a me. So when I say "I like games" I am not just talking about one small corner of the genre. And while this is an Eve Blog please indulge my brief moment of exposition on gaming in general (or just don't read the post, it isn't like I'll know the difference.)

There are three main reasons I enjoy playing a game. They are as follows:

The story latches onto me like a pitbull convinced I'm smuggling prime rib in my trousers.
There is some element of social interaction that just makes the game compelling to play, in essence the game is merely a vehicle for me and my friends to have a good time.
The intellectual puzzle the game provides gives me hours of endless amusement, either a puzzle I must master on my own or a chance for me to grind my brain against an opponents till one of use emerges victorious.
Or there is an element of prowess, either through hand eye coordination, effective use of real time strategy, or some other measurable skill that exists in the moment

(the main difference between 2 and 3 is the immediacy of 3. I'm allowed to mull over a move in Scrabble or a turn of Civilization for a long time, or at least until my opponent brains me. But I can't ponder the mysteries of a Zerg rush and live, its is a matter of skillful reaction.)

Theses four elements are what a game must bring to the table. I then sit down to this scrumptious feast, and it was as if I were a god demanding tribute. For a game to win my favor it must give until I am no longer hungry. I don't require games to stuff me full of each element, certainly some games bring more of one than another. Chess has no engaging story beyond the basic imagination of the pieces as man at arms, but it gives me quite a healthy dose of brain bashing and in tournament play an extra generous helping of quick thinking to boot. Apples to Apples (if you aren't familiar shame on you) has very little in terms of prowess or puzzle, but it continues to ram social interaction with friends down my throat until I choke.

Video/Computer games, logically, follow the same formula. A game like Civ has a modestly rich story and decent bit of brain bashing, though it doesn't bring much in terms of prowess. The wonderful Half Life series gives us a very large plateful of story and prowess with a nice side of problem solving. Portal tends to flip the prowess and problem solving around on us, and I'd argue it has as much story if not more - who do you think is quoted more, the G man or GLaDOS? Other games like Mario Brother and Megaman gave us a small taste of story and a bucket of prowess, though in two player mode it also gave us a good deal of social interaction, while Tetris was purely a drop down Jello filled pool of skill and prowess.

MMORPGs were an interesting addition to the fold. In many ways they were the first game that pretty much forced social interaction and teamwork down your throat. Sure, bridge or monopoly might bring four people together to play a game and socialize, but Molten Core brought you and 39 people together and told you to work out your differences or be Ragnaros's toothpick. Yes, I know that there were social gaming groups before, clans in Team Fortress, MUDs and other such games, there was even Chess and War Games that were played by mail. But the MMORPG took teamwork with strangers to a new gaming level that was even larger than any regulation sports team I can think of, realistically most WoW guilds have more members than your average bullpen.

And MMORPGs brought other tasty treats to the table for me to devour. The knowledge of combing over gear sets for the ideal pairing, the timing of getting down a combat rotation, the puzzle of figuring out what the hell you were going to do to defeat this next boss. One thing WoW had in spades was the story. Love it or hate it, there is a rich lore to World of Warcraft. It started in the RTS games and it has just grown like a beautiful oak in the MMORPG. The story of Arthas' fall from grace is epic, and I mean that in the literal sense. Some of the stories Blizzard has crafted are as epic as the plight of Oedipus or the story of Jason and Argonauts.

So this brings me to Eve (and for those of you still with me I applaud your tenacity) and what does Eve offer me at my feast of gaming delights. Clearly it is a social game, corps are made to be social and I would argue that almost any game with a chat window anywhere in it was trying to be somewhat social. Eve definitely gives me a whooping does of brain bashing. The skill system, as I've commented before, made my eyes bleed when I first looked at it and even today it still gives me a headache. It also dishes out a healthy dessert of skill, the combat system is more forgiving than Megaman, but there have definitely been panic moments when all that saved me was my ability to identify the critical targets, get out of range, and run like a coward before I was popped. But as a high sec miner there isn't a whole lot of prowess needed to hunt down my veldspar, it moves slow and it has trouble cloaking.

There is one area where Eve has given me very little to digest, and that is in terms of immersive, grab you by the short hairs, compelling story. Now before I'm crucified allow me to explain. In other MMORPGs the quests are pretty basic, kill 30 bears, have a shiny sword. These are the drill and kill quest lines that help you get from lvl 1 to lvl MAX. But in WoW they also included some pretty amazing quest lines. I enjoyed working my way to becoming Queen of the Ogres (as a Nightelf) I gasped when I first saw Lady Prestor turn into Onyxia. And I loved the end of those epic Boss fights, it is hard to choose a favorite, but I think it might have to be Archimonde in the battle of Mount Hyjal. Yes, they diminished slightly with repetition, but there was always the expanding content, the next dungeon, the next boss, the next expansion. Even some of the lowly grind and kill quest lines had great writing when you bothered to read the flavor text.

Eve, in contrast, has some of the most boring quests in the world. Grinding standing with Zoars and Sons I have been informed that idiot miners have forgotten their drills again and they want me to play FedEx. Even the combat missions don't have very great stories (except for a few) and those grow tired extremely fast. Even the storyline missions are mundane and very everyday like. Yes, some of the combat missions are challenging, but that is Eve trying to serve me another helping of prowess with a few jimmies of story on top and hoping I don't notice the difference. That said, it does fit perfectly into the setting of Eve, the systems in Eve are built around real economies, real mining, real manufacturing, and that means real missions. But the opening cinematic mentioned me being an Immortal a God among men, apparently I'm a god of delivery services.

Perhaps I just haven't gotten deep enough into the game to hit upon the nugget of great story in the core, but close to or over a year in (I honestly don't know) and I feel I should be finding something. Eve, the game, constantly seems to come up dry in terms of story.

The funny thing is that Eve the Community doesn't. If I want compelling and fascinating stories, both fact and fiction, all I need to do is cruise the blogs. The writing of the players is pretty good if you find the right sources, and even if the writing isn't amazing prose the sheer hilarity of what happens to some people is enough to make up for it. So how should I judge Eve, by the game as packaged or by the community? In some ways to say the community makes up for what the game lacks would be like saying I shouldn't judge Super Mario Brothers till I read this great fanfic this guy wrote. So while the Eve Community does some of the most enjoyable game based writing I've seen I can only say I wish CCP had put more of it into the game itself.

Now this isn't a post where I'm trashing Eve, like I said before I love chess and Eve clearly has more story than a chessboard, but what I'm trying to express is a bit of woeful regret. Eve is game that I have grown to love. It is by far the best overall MMORPG I have played. It pulls together so many elements into a pleasurable package that works and I applaud CCP and their amazing developers for that. I merely lament that it couldn't have been the Holy Grail of MMORPGdom that I am waiting to see. Who knows, I am hoping that with Dust 514 I'll get that missing piece. If CCP could make the Eve universe explode into bright technicolor dreams of imagination for me beyond the opening movies and a few isolated beautiful moments in space I would be a very happy capsuleer.

Everyone does it once...

2010-03-14T11:48:00.000-04:00

At least I'm going to tell myself that is the case. If I am deluding myself, well, let me have my delusions.

We all know the advice that everyone tells us. "Check your flight route, don't use autopilot in or around low-sec, make sure your route isn't going through low sec, etc." And this is a practice that I live by pretty rigidly... except for yesterday. I was busy flying around fitting up my Myrm for missioning - something that I've been waiting to do for a while now. I browse the market for cheap mods in a close general area, set up my way points, undock, hit AP and then go to change my sons diaper.

I failed to check my flightpath, I think it was because I was sticking to the general area that I know very well. But as it happened I mixed up two similarly named systems in my head. One is .6, the other is .4. Guess where I ended up? By the time I returned from the aforementioned diaper change had ended up back at my clone station staring at the clone tutorial. All said and done it was probably a 100mil ISK lesson to learn, but I learned it the hard way and now I'm better for it.

So I will repeat the oft heard advice: "Don't autopilot through or to lowsec. Always check your flight path before you hit that auto-pilot button."

But most importantly, don't worry about it too much when you fuck up and learn the lesson the hard way. I think we all have to do it at least once.

OMG IT'S FULL OF STARS!!!

2010-03-12T00:12:00.000-05:00

I was again overwhelmed by the sheer massiveness of Eve Online yet again today. As I mentioned in an earlier post, some friends and I are looking to expand into running a POS. Again, I am not sure what the endgame of all of this is going to play out to be, but it gives us something to do. I've started looking into just the basic information and I find myself flooded with issues like Faction, Charters, Fuel, Configuration, Skills, and so forth. Even just getting a handle on one miner/minor (pun intended) aspect of the game is rather awe inspiring. I will say there are some aspects of the game that don't play out as evenly as other games more concerned about 'balance' would need. However, in Eve you don't need entirely balanced game play in order to create a vibrant world. In fact I would argue that the world is more vibrant because it isn't balanced. Yes, I have a friend who is essentially and Eve day trader. He spends most of his time as a dock walker managing buy and sell orders. He has more ISK that is healthy and will probably be the primary bankroll to our POS adventure. I don't make nearly as much of him with mining and in many ways my role takes a bit more attention. But this is okay, because in the end not everyone in a world has to earn the same amount of ISK to enjoy the game.

In a related note, my alt is almost maxed out as a Mining Director/support character. He also has a plethora of combat skills, so I'm now looking to start him running some missions while my main plays Salvage monkey. That way both can start to sweep up some reputation and the benefits that brings. The universe is truly full of starts, and I'm going to enjoy picking one and hitting my jump drive.

NERD RAGE GO!

2010-03-11T15:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, bit a nerd rage moment here. Downloading the update for Heavy Rain so I can play. This is a 226MB upload, not a huge download, but something that takes more than a minute or two. Halfway through the download my internet burps. I'm signed out of the PS network and the download fails. Go back in, it starts AT THE BEGINNING and gets 71% done before giving me a repeat performance.

Why is it that the PS3 can't use a BitTorrentesque download structure so failed downloads can be resumed? Yes, grand total I probably lost less than 15 minutes of my life to this annoyance, but it is an avoidable one.

Oh well.

Life and such

2010-03-11T15:56:00.000-05:00

So, being a stay at home father has not translated directly into the amount of Eve time I thought it might. This isn't so much because the needs of the baby but because I'm looking to put my house on the market and the needed repairs and cleaning are monumental. That aside, I have been getting back into Eve and a few friends of mine are looking to set up our own POS - a huge undertaking, but something new and fun for us.

Hopefully I'll be able to blog a bit more about that undertaking and how it is going but right now I'm going to go try to slide through some of Heavy Rain.

Epic Fail

2010-01-03T03:32:00.000-05:00

I've fallen drastically behind on my posting due to a large influx of real life. In the past month I have done the following:

Witnessed the birth of my first child
Survived the holiday madness including transporting said child to several family gatherings
Gotten back into Eve as mining makes for a good profession while waiting for a baby to cry
Managed to avoid joining the ranks of the many unemployed for now

So with my return to Eve I can say fairly certainly that not too much has changed for me with the release of Apocrypha. Mining wasn't touched too much by the last expansion, though since I stick to high-sec I also haven't seen the changes that have been brought about by sovereignty. I have, however, reached many of my short term goals for both of my accounts. So now I get to start to head down some new paths.

Before I begin to venture too aggressively into the world of potentially doing low-sec mining I think I'm going to explore missioning. Fortunately one of my characters is already well on his way to being able to handle some serious missioning. The other character is going to work on raising his drone skills and exploring some more defensive skill sets. I have seen some pretty impressive examples of what a properly fitted Hulk can withstand. I need to explore this more before taking my baby into risky waters.

All in all I'm looking forward to a good year in Eve. It will probably be vastly different from my past year.

From a Carebear to all Assholes

2009-09-29T00:42:00.000-04:00

You know, I'm sick of hearing people shit on "Carebears" and talk about them in such a derogatory term. The vast majority of human society is made up of "carebears" if you take the standard PvP definition. Because I don't enjoy hunting down people who are minding their own business, perhaps missioning or mining, and blowing them up or stealing their crap I'm a "carebear."

Since when is not being a dick a bad thing? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't people who whine and complain far too much in the game. If your Orca or your Hulk gets blown up you are undoubtedly going to be pissed, and yes, chances are the guy who just popped you is a raging asshole. Venting a bit and complaining about how much that asshole is an ass does not, in my opinion, make you a overly cuddly person. People, however, take it to far and fail to realize that ship loss and PvP are part of the game.

But, on the other hand, there are a fair number of "pirates" who are just childish assholes in the game. Suicide ganking a hulk just to piss someone off? You are an asshole. Flying around popping people in newbie ships just because they are a fun target? You are an asshole. If you fly around baiting people merely so you can blow up their ship, you are an asshole.

I have no problem with pirates who make piracy their way of life. They do it for salvage, they do it for cargo, they do it for ransom, they do it for whatever reason they want, that is fine. But people who log on just to be a dick to other players in the game are assholes. Remind me to call you a "carebear" next time someone beats you to a pulp for being an asshole and you go complaining to the police.

(Note - this isn't a response to http://alexiamorgan.blogspot.com/2009/09/carebears-need-to-harden-fuck-up.html and while the post by Alexia was meant more as Satire than as opinion it unleashed my Carebear Rage)

Fun vs. Addictive: a reply

2009-09-26T15:22:00.000-04:00

Recently Rakanishu over at Level Cap posted an article about games being fun vs. addictive. I found it rather amusing considering my last post was about how thought, jokingly, that I might be addicted to Eve. Certainly online games have an addictive quality to them. They provide constant and on going challenges, there isn't a specific ending in mind for characters so there is always more to do if you so choose. I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing or if this takes away from the fun of a game.

In his article Raknishu said:

"World of Warcraft is crafted around keeping people playing the game. Loot, skills, bosses, and achievements are all cheap tools for getting people to play more. I feel that developers have become too dependent on these tools and are forgetting to throw in challenge, innovation and immersion...."

"It’s hard to remove things like loot from a game. I like finding loot and customizing my character. But it should not be the driving force when playing a game. Loot, leveling, and achievements should all be secondary to fun. "

I have to respectfully disagree on most of these points. As I stated in an earlier post, Blizzard has put several innovations into their games. They also have added a great deal to provide greater levels of challenges to all of those who want them. The most recent method is by creating hard and normal versions of raiding dungeons. This gives players even more options to challenge their abilities and skills.

Likewise, skills and loot are merely elements of the game, not the core of the game. They are a secondary element, a means to an end. Regardless of gear or level, a player still needs to bring a personal level of skill to the table. I have seen players with the best gear who don't know how to play their class do terribly. The argument, however, that skills, level, and loot should be removed from a game is very alarming to me, especially in a fantasy setting.

I have had extensive experience as a tabletop game player and have played in overwhelmingly immersive games. I have had characters who I have played for many years, building and developing into a rich full personalities with backgrounds and life stories that I could expand on ad nausea. When playing these characters I was excited to level up, or to recover a new and fantastic piece of equipment because it meant even more avenues and adventures were now available to my character.

Rikanishu and I agree on one point, however, immersion is something that many MMORPGs and games in general lack today. However, I disagree as to whose responsibility it is. In a single player game it is entirely the job of the developer to craft a game that will draw me in and keep me interested. In that media the game developer is almost like an author of a novel. They want me to keep playing just like an author wants me to keep reading, so the burden of the effort is upon the story provider.

This relationship changes when you make the jump to a MMORPG because of the multi-player aspect. In WoW, for example, Blizzard is responsible for creating the world. They are the ones who have written the lore behind Archimonde and what he is doing on Mount Hyjal or how Yogg-Saron came to be in the lower chambers of Ulduar. For their part they have written a very detailed story arch and they have only gotten better since the first game. There are still quests that are simply grinds, but many of the quest lines in WotLK relate to the main story and a player who stops to read the text Blizzard has put in place will find a very engaging story with a great deal of subtle twists and turns.

However, the game is massively multiplayer, and with that comes a problem. When I sit down with a gaming group to play Dungeons and Dragons or Call of Cthulu I know, for the most part, that they aren't going to be jerks. They want to have an enjoyable immersive experience where they get to weave rich interactive stories together. If I tried to sit down and do the same thing with a group of 2000 people the chances of having a rich and immersive experience goes right out the window. Blizzard, for their credit, has attempted to combat this - they have created RP servers, and while you still get jerks I have a friend who plays on one and enjoys it immensely. She writes fiction based off her interactions and has a large group of friends who she roleplays with on a weekly basis.

Eve, in a way, has also accomplished the same thing. They have created a world that is moderately immersive, though in their game there is far less story provided. In this respect Eve is a giant sandbox game with mechanics and rules and the bare minimum of a story - my apologies to CCP who is doing more with storyline arches, but in general the approach is hands off. Out of that sandbox you can see countless fantastic stories and interactions being produced on a daily basis.

In short, in terms of immersion in an online game what you get out of it depends a great deal on what you bring into it. I could see creating a system that was different than the current paradigm of games where you could truly experience immersion and hopefully "fun" but this post is already far to long so I'll save that for a separate time.

I think that online gaming is fun, otherwise I wouldn't do it. People claim WoW is addictive, I would say for the most part it is merely engaging. I used to play it quite a deal, I've stepped back for reasons that run a gambit from family and other commitments, but that doesn't change the fact that while I did play I was having fun and I don't think any game would succeed if players did not have fun while playing it.

I'm not sure that loot and character customization are necessarily the driving force of the game.

I might be addicted...

2009-09-22T11:38:00.001-04:00

You know you might have an Eve problem when you have this phone conversation:

Me: Hey man what's up?
Friend: Not much, watching tv with my wife. Why'd you call?
Me: Ummm I'm out at rehearsal till 10:30 and I just checked and I only have 2 hours left on a skill and nothing queued.
Friend: Okay....
Me: You mind logging in on my account and queuing up Exhumers 5 for me?
Friend: *sigh* Sure... hold on...

Yeah, you know it's a problem when missing 4 or 5 hours of skill training time upsets you enough to call in backup. At least $15/month is cheaper than heroin.

Multi-Tasking while Mining

2009-09-21T23:17:00.021-04:00

So, I'm sure if you are a miner you've done it. You've dumped your cargo hold into a waiting jetcan or Orca and then run to get a soda, or use the bathroom, or take a shower. In fact, I have many daily routines now worked down to the point where I can effectively accomplish them between cycles. I'm sure when my wife gives birth I'll be able to prep a bottle or change the baby in the same time span in short order.

The point is that mining doesn't always require undivided attention. Now, there is always the chance that a two minute distraction will lead to far more than two minutes and you'll return to this. But the chances are that most of the time you are safe. Pull in your mining drones, set the drones on the Orca to protect you and your danger is minimal.

But even I'm actively at the computer I'm doing things in the foreground while I mine waiting for the sounds of turrets to rouse me from my slumber, or the computer informing me it's time to target another rock. I've posted to this blog, I've shot the shit in Corp Chat, I've worked on websites. And then I discovered the joys of Hulu. I can run two Eve clients, one on each monitor and staple Hulu in the upper left hand corner of one monitor and watch episode after episode of shows from Dead Like Me or Death Note to simply classics like Highlander.

So what do you do while you grind the rocks?

ISK for ObelISK

2009-09-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

Well, I've almost gotten to the point where I can fly an Obelisk. Now the one thing stopping me is ISK. As we speak I am training up Advanced Spaceship Command and then I have to drop 90,000,000 on Gallente Freighter. Once that is out of the way I merely have to scrape up the 800,000,000 for the Obelisk itself. Fortunately, one of my Corp mates builds them and has one he said he'd hold onto until I could get the cash together. I'm starting to get to the point in the game where accumulating large stockpiles of wealth are possible.

Soon I'm going to have to turn to missioning for standings. Any recommendations on that front will be welcome. Are you familiar with Zoars and Sons? Give me some pointers!

Dust in the wind

2009-09-18T21:10:00.001-04:00

"Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky" - Kansas "Dust in the Wind"

... And apparently gamers complaining.

When CCP announced the release of Dust 514 there were many bloggers posted in open rebellion. "How dare they not intend to release a PC version?" "What do you mean my game will be influenced by a bunch of low life console monkeys?" "Great, now I need two accounts just to affect sovereignty." On and on went the litany of complaints. There were also a number of people who seemed genuinely excited about the prospects of this new game, and I have to admit that I fall in with them.

For the record, I am not a console gamer. I own a PS3 purchased primarily to serve as a media center in my house, a DVD and Blue Ray player, and it lets me play Rock Band (and I love me some Rock Band). I never fell in with the Halo crowd, if I'm going to play a FPS I want a keyboard under one hand while my other hand lovingly grips my mouse. Even then I'm not crazy for FPS games. I enjoyed them, I've played the litany from Quake and Doom through Serious Sam, No One Lifes Forever, UT, and of course every game the people who brought us Half-Life even glanced at. So I can't say I'm adverse to the notion of the FPS, but I'm hardly an expert - more of a casual gamer who likes to hang out with friends.

I can't understand why people are so upset about Dust. Yes, it will affect Sov. Yes it will be on a console. But it also has the potential giving Eve players another game to love and it has the chance to draw in some new blood to Eve Online. And to those who think new players in Eve Online is a bad thing, I have nothing to say to you.

I think that the men and women of CCP have proven they can deliver a unique and rewarding product in the MMORPG genre, why not let them have a go at the FPS genre as well? Perhaps they will bring some new ideas to the table that will make the game far more rewarding. Here are some things that I would like to see (let me preface by saying I've only really watched the trailer - so if these ideas are already in, great, if they have already been ruled out then boo.)

Skill System for Weapons and Vehicles - Much like what we have in Eve Online, create a skill system that allows a character to improve over time as a player. Whether they use the same real time training of Eve or whether they require you to be active in the game to improve is up in the air - however, it should not be based solely on in game performance because it would skew the field. The good players would get stronger while the less skilled grow weaker, this is not very Eveian. Real time skill training could mean Older players get more use of support vehicles, better armor, and weapon improvements such as firing rate, increased range, etc. These should be make or break skills, but it would definitely give people and edge.

Give Me Another Way to Play - Let's face it, FPS games are pretty standard. You shoot a gun, climb in a vehicle, you do something, and then you die. Even Team Fortress and Team Fortress Two have only limited class roles. What I really love about Eve is the fact that I can play the game so many ways. I would love Dust to be like that. Sure, it is fun to sometimes bust skulls in FPS glory, but ever since reading Ender's Game I have dreamed of sitting in a commander chair orchestrating the movements of squads, even whole armies. RTS games aren't as fun because the AI is very limited. I don't want a squad of mindless drones, but a team of players who will react independently to changing situations. I would love to lead individuals who could either follow my orders or thing for themselves. Creating a interface to facilitate this role and this style of play would encourage me to plop down the cash for Dust.

Tactics Must be Key - This ties into the skill system, but create tactical roles for players and make tactics important. Create an interface where team mates can clearly and quickly communicate targets without the use of microphones and voice chat. Target labeling, squad and unit formations, etc. Create a "Briefing period before all missions where players can develop strategies. Players with certain skill sets can serve as tactical advisors, given access to overview maps and advanced unit command options while newer players can serve as grunt soldiers, scouts, and other roles.

Variable Terrain and Maps - There are ways to create dynamic shifting maps that would require players to be far more adaptive and would eliminate the edge of map memorization that exists in other FPS games. Easy? Probably not, but imagine the results! It opens up the potential for a scout class that is actually useful, again giving a skill path and variable play styles a role in a genre that has been fairly homogeneous.

Make Death Carry a Meaningful Penalty - No, I don't want this game to be an RPG and I understand that the FPS genre is all about running around and dying a lot while killing people. But the problem is it creates a game devoid of tactics and realism in many cases. If you encourage players to fall back and stay alive rather than suicide Zerg then that would be good. Possible ideas include gear loss, skill loss, clone spawn cooldown. This will have to be carefully balance, too steep and people won't want to play, too weak and people won't care. While it will be hard to get this right it would be completely worth doing.

Create Linked Accounts - If Dust 514 is going to go into the realm of subscription based play (another potential first with an FPS) then they need to allow dedicated Eve Players a discount of some sort. If Dust costs $10 per month then active Eve Accounts should get it for $5. Hell, even better, send all subscribers a $10 off coupon on the release. Basically, if CCP extends an olive branch to the current players they might not feel as hurt.

These are just a few of the things that I think could make Dust an amazing unique game. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the FPS that CCP puts out will be amazing regardless of the specific features. But I don't just want amazing from CCP. They have to push the envelope, redefine the genre, and deliver a product the likes of which we have never seen. That is what they get for setting the bar so high in the first place.

The Cold Calm of Space

2009-09-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

"The Asteroid has been depeleted."

The soothing tone of the computer filled the cabin, the only sound other than the gentle humming whirl of the mining lasers and machinery deep within the ship, the subtle vibrations that play up and down and outer hull, and the soft and distant hiss of airlocks opening and closing as mining drones repeat their endless dance to and from the large rock floating in nothingness.

The soft moan of cushions as the chair moves, a few commands and the lasers shift to the next rock. Another touch and the targetting computers lock onto a new victim, placing the rock into queue for oblivion. A few more quick checks show that the cargohold is nearing capacity. A typed command informs the crew to intiate another transfer to the Orca that looms nearby.

All of the lights are turned low, that is how I like it. The dim readouts on the control panel provide all the needed illumination without taking away from the spendid kalediscope of space. The Orca hangs over my ship, filling up a portion of my view with the steady pulsing glow of her shields playing up and down the ship. I watch as the cargo containers drift from one bay effortlessly to the other, no tractors for guidance, just a simple push and physics to take care of the rest.

My lasers cut across the field of vision, adding their own bands of light to the fireworks display, and all set against the milky green blackness of Abhan's solar system. The sensation of just hanging in the maw of nothingness, a few feet of hull between me and complete emptiness beyond human comprehension is such a powerful feeling. For hours I will sit in the captain's chair and just wonder what it would be like to enter the airlock and hit eject without an egg, without a suit, with nothing but my nakedness touching the cold unfeeling soul of space.

Apparently I tried it once. I don't remember. Sure, I remember getting into the airlock and overriding the safety, but I don't remember what it felt like, to be truly alone in space. The MedLab techs said that it was too quick of a death for their to be any sensation, that my body would have merely vaporized from the depressurization. Another told me that it isn't uncommon to lose those last few minutes, especially if the ordeal is too traumatic for the mind. "Perhaps," she said, "We just aren't programmed to remember what death feels like."

I think it is something else though. Space is outraged at our audacity. We probe and prod and reach beyond all natural limits. We defy space, we defy death, we defy everything in our quest for power and understanding. Space holds tight to her secrets, she holds fast to whatever she can keep from us, making us tear the mysteries from her breast. But what space doesn't understand is I don't want her knowledge, I don't want her mysteries, I don't want her secrets. I just want her embrace.

"The Asteroid has been depleted."

Oh well, perhaps another day.

(My humblest of offerings to the great works of Fiction that Eve has inspired. Please let me know if you enjoyed this installment and I'll be sure to include more in the future.)

Why is Eve Online a good game?

2009-09-14T01:29:00.000-04:00

(This is part two of my mini-series comparing World of Warcraft and Eve Online and highlighting the merits of both. My entry "Why is World of Warcraft a good game?" can be found here.)

So, now that I've alienated myself from some pretty fierce Eve Supporters I thought I'd share what I like about Eve as well. Just for background I've been playing Eve for less than a year. I've never been a pirate, never flown a battle cruiser, never ran a level four mission (though I have salvaged a few), I've never engaged in a duel, and I've never even set foot in a wormhole. My interests in the game have been more in the realm of mining, trade, and industry. I know that there are vast amounts of the game that I haven't even thought about let alone experienced. Which brings me to one of the first things I really like about Eve.

The Universe Awaits
Eve contains, by far, one of the most expansive universes I've ever seen in a game. Yes, a lot of it is just empty space, but that is realistic. In space there is a lot of nothing in between the small pockets of something. Yet that isn't all, New Eden is huge, but the scope of Eve is broader. A character can be built around so many roles and aspects that Eve is almost like several hundred games crammed into one. Much like Second Life, it is more a reality simulator than a 'game'. It allows for styles of play that would never be enjoyable in other games. I could manipulate and affect the in game markets of World of Warcraft through the Auction House, but that isn't what the game is about and it wouldn't be fun. However, the same character type could have a blast on Eve and find many resources that would help him enjoy that role.

You Can't Do That Yet
To go with such an expansive universe Eve created one of the most elaborate skill systems I have ever seen (and I've played Rifts.) Everything you can do in the game is based off the skill system, and it is a system that rewards time as a character more than anything else. The longer you have been around in Eve the chances are the more you can do. While this would never work in a more single focused game such as WoW or Everquest, it works splendidly in Eve, because while an older player may be better than a younger player at a specific set of tasks, a younger player with a more focused set of skills probably would do better than an older player who too a different path. Case in point, there may be a number of older players who have taken a more combat oriented route. Chances are that they would utterly destroy me in any combat situation, but if the job at hand is clearing out an asteroid belt my Hulk will do the job damn quick. I also love the fact that skill training occurs in real time. This gives a more even footing to all players while other games heavily favor those who can sit and just grind all day.

You Can't Always Get What You Want
But in Eve, you typically can, if you earn it. I knew that I wanted an Orca for my alt, so I mined minerals and gathered ISK and got enough to purchase it. I earned it through my own hard work and dumb luck. In WoW I can find myself killing the same boss week after week, hoping that the piece of gear I want will drop and then that I will win it. This is so arbitrary that most guilds have put in artificial merit systems so that players can "earn" loot when it does finally drop. These systems include DKP, Suicide King, and Loot Councils. Eve doesn't have these systems and it doesn't need it. If I want it, chances are I can buy it. The only exceptions are some items that only appear on a rare basis. Unlike the gear in WoW these rare items serve more as status symbols than they do as a way to get ahead. I find that when I play Eve I feel like my time is rewarded, there are times in WoW where I've ended the night with nothing more than annoyance that my loot didn't drop.

Where's the Fracken Manual??!!??
One source of enjoyment and frustration in Eve is the lack of explanation. It is a game that relies heavily on outside research or asking around. Knowing that I wanted to perhaps mine wouldn't be enough. I wouldn't have known what ships to train for, or how to go about maximizing my skills without my corp mates or the internet. While this is very frustrating at times it is also very engaging. I find that when I learn something knew or when I begin to understand how specific skills work in tandem that I'm excited and can't wait to help others out.

On the flip side, there are times when I wish there was a little more in game help, like explaining exactly how the corporate hangers on the Orca works. I know that this has greatly improved since the dawn of Eve and that the tutorial system they have now is leaps and bounds ahead of what the first players experienced. But there are times when the accessibility makes even a nerd like me cringe. I can only imagine the amount of kicking myself I would have done if someone hand bothered explaining learning skills to me early on.

It's Gone... It's All Gone!
Along with a brutal learning curve the game almost carries some pretty stiff penalties for dying. Yes, the skills are the important part of your character, and assuming you keep your clone updated you won't ever lose that. But you will lose your ships, your implants, your modules. A simple mistake can set you back 200,000,000 ISK or more. Lessons come at a price in Eve and that price can often be very steep.

If that sounds like a complaint, however, it really isn't. Yes, you can lose lots in Eve, but that makes the rewards more meaningful. When I have to spend several hundred million on a ship then I'm going to be attached to it, if I lose that is a catastrophic blunder on my part then I am going to remember it. The severity of the losses make themselves meaningful in Eve. Dying in WoW means nothing; it is, at worst, a minor inconvenience. Getting podded in Eve, on the other hand, is a monumental event.

The Stories and the Community
This sense of involvement creates one of the most interesting communities of players. Just reading the blog feeds I get in Capsuleer shows how much people can take from this game. There are brilliant pieces of fiction, news reports, and so forth being written based on this game. Even those who just write about the day to day affairs as a player and not "in character" at all have such great stories. The fights and battles can take on epic proportions, and they are all original, there is no going back and having the same exact fight next week. When Larkonis sullied his good name last week it was news, both in game and out among the community of players.

This is something that WoW will never have. Yes, a few people may be in the top guilds and accomplish world and server first kills, but that fame is fleeting because next week the challenge hasn't changed for them. Eve is a game that is created predominantly by the players and their interactions, while CCP has created loads of Agent Missions and is including more and more Story Line Missions the majority of what I think makes Eve special is the player to player interaction.

So What Does It All Mean?
I hate trying to decide which is "better." Yes, both are MMORPGs, but that is like saying Casablanca, Ghost Busters, and Debbie Does Dallas are all movies and so I should be able to pick on that is the "best." Ghost Busters would make a terrible porno and Casablanca far less comedic than either. So even though many movie critics might want to say Casablanca is the best out of those three it really depends what you are looking for. I think Eve players need to stop worrying so much about how their game is the best one going and focus instead on just enjoying their game. There is more than enough room for both, as has been proven over the past few years. So hopefully there will be a little less WoW hate in Eve, but I won't hold my breath.

Did you enjoy this article? Did you have an opinion to share? Do you think I was way off base? Please let me know. Comment and share your own thoughts.

Apologies

2009-09-13T20:20:00.001-04:00

My severe apologies if my constant edits and reposts of my last article caused any sort of spam notifications in feeds, it was not my intent. Still learning to adapt to the Blogger.com software as it is vastly different from Wordpress, which I use in other sites I manage.

Why is World of Warcraft a good game?

2009-09-13T17:22:00.000-04:00

I know that this admission might make me a pariah in the Eve blogging community, but I am a long time World of Warcraft player. Allow me to be perfectly clear. I am not a reformed WoW player. I am not a converted WoW player. I still maintain an active World of Warcraft account. I have a level 80 character who is in a sizable guild that has completed most of the end game content including Yogg-Saron, Trial of Champions, etc. Before a server transfer with friends, I was a guild master in one of the oldest guilds on my old server. I still enjoy World of Warcraft and try to attend one or two of the three major raiding nights each week.

Now I am ‘less of a player’ in the eyes of some citizens of New Eden, and I can live with that. I have seen the trash talk of WoW in the Eve Radio channel and among various people in the more populated Local Channels as well as people within my own corp. However, I think that both games deserve a great deal of credit for what they have created, and I wanted to expound a bit on what I think Blizzard has done right with World of Warcraft and what I think CCP has done right with Eve Online.

Over 11 Million Served
Yes, numbers are not everything, but let that number sink in. 11 million people shell out $15 per month for World of Warcraft. This is compared to the much smaller number of approximately 250,000 Eve subscribers. Perhaps it is the type of game, perhaps it is the accessibility, perhaps it is superior marketing, but World of Warcraft is doing something right. Now, many people say “McDonalds serves billions of burgers, but it doesn’t mean they have the best burger in the world” and they are right. However, most people try to compare a McDonald’s burger to a steak house burger and miss the issue of price point and scope. No other business than McDonald’s serves as many $1.00 cheeseburgers daily, so in that regard they are doing something right. In comparison, Eve is like Wendy’s, similar product, similar price, not as popular. That does not mean that Wendy’s is bad, but they are definitely not the same corporation as McDonalds.

Responding to the Wishes of the Players
This is something I think both Eve and World of Warcraft have done rather well. I have not played Eve as long, but it seems to me from the developer blog and from the forums that the people down at CCP maintain a very bidirectional flow of communication. This is something that Blizzard has perhaps done too well. The belief of many in the WoW community is that he who complains most gets buffed. There are exceptions to this, the paladin class had issues for over a year before it was addressed, and warriors still have problems.

Nevertheless, no one can rightfully accuse the Blizz developers of not adjusting and tweaking their game to put more shine on it. Final Fantasy 11 failed because it was too slow to adapt and change, Everquest never really changed at all. Yes, there are things to be said for consistency, but it takes a much braver set of developers to release something that may have issues and then fix them afterwards. This development style is actually something that another “evil” corporation is famous for, and that is Microsoft. They would knowingly release a version of Windows before it was 100% tested and then just patch the bugs afterwards. This is predominantly becoming the norm in the industry as evident by Apple’s latest OS release.

New Content
Yes, World of Warcraft makes you pay for expansions. This is often cited as a “sin” of Blizzard and hailed as something that makes Eve better than all. I am going to be direct and make a few more enemies by calling bullshit on this count. The average expansion costs about $60 and lasts for about 30 months. If you play the game regularly that comes out to about $2 per month, it really is not a huge additional cost when you think that the average player is dropping $180 on subscription fees a year for either game. The people who it hurts the most is those who maintain multiple accounts, however WoW is not a game that is designed around the idea of players having multiple accounts while in Eve it seems more the rule rather than the exception.

Even outside of the expansions, Blizzard is constantly adding new content in terms of Festivals, new Dungeons, New Quest lines with every major patch. Wrath of the Lich King has had 2 entirely new Raiding Dungeons added since its release. The previous expansion saw several raid Dungeons that were approached in a systematic order as well as the addition of a new raid dungeon right towards the end of the expansion.

With each expansion and patch World of Warcraft is not only creating new content, they are fundamentally changing the nature of the game. Here is just a short list of things that have been added to the game since its original release.

Hard Mode Encounters
Arena Teams
Battle Grounds for PvP
RP PvP Servers (originally all RP servers were PvE)
Tier Tokens
Raid and Dungeon Instancing (huge idea that made WoW better right off the bat)
10 Man and 25 Man dungeons to make end game content more accessible to different guilds.
Vehicles
Flying Mounts
Duel Specs
Two New Player Races (soon to be 2 more as well)
Death Knights as a Heroic Class
Glyphs
Two New Professions – Socketted Gear for Gems
Over 10 different season events
Duel Spec Sheets to allow for more character versatility
Badge Gear
An Honor system and Honor Gear

I’m sure I’m missing quite a few, but you can see why I find it somewhat foolish for people to say that we have to pay for expansions. To me it seems similar to complaining when you go to see Rush Hour Two that you have to pay again, because you already paid for Rush Hour. Personally, I think we get our money’s worth.

To Wrap it All Up
I don’t think that World of Warcraft, or any other game, is perfect. There are plenty of flaws with WoW. The level gain can be a grind. The loot system is very arbitrary (though they’ve worked to improve that with Badge and Honor gear.) The reputation system and faction grinding can make you want to punch kittens (not that Eve players would know anything about that.) However, at the end of the day World of Warcraft is one of the most successful MMORPGs ever both in terms of player base and financial success. When you are at the top of the heap you tend to draw a lot of hate from smaller groups. For examples of this look at rabid Mac users get towards a PC user or how a Linux user scoffs at someone running Windows. Watch how defensive people who feel they belong to a niche group can become towards others. Eve is a tight knit community that is vastly different from World of Warcraft, but to say WoW is a terrible game is just very narrow minded

Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll share with you some of the things that I really think Eve has done well – it probably won’t be as detailed as this, I’m a vet player of WoW and a newb in Eve, but I hope you enjoy my perspective.

Pictures of my baby

2009-09-12T23:32:00.000-04:00

Well, I was able to get all three cargo optimization rigs - amazing how much easier it is to secure large amounts of ISK when I can somewhat quickly move 7,000,000 tritanium to the highest price area in the region.

So there she is. I'm very happy with her - currently fitting Salvagers and a Tractor Beam because I can't use my gang links yet, but by the end of the week those will be online and ready to go. It is definitely a milestone for me as a Citizen of New Eden. It is bigger than getting my Hulk. I hope that I have as much love for my Obelisk when I'm finally cruising in that.

A Whale of a Ship

2009-09-12T08:08:00.000-04:00

I apologize for the post title, I'm sure the pun has been used before, but if it has it is only because it is so bloody accurate. My alt got into their Orca for the first time today, and it is a beautiful thing. I'm now 5 days out from training Leadership 5 so I can start using all the Ganglink modules. Two quick impressions, and then I have to run to a Saturday morning workshop (stupid real life).

1. Holy cubic fuckton of space. I could pretty much fit almost everything I own in every station in my Orca (and I'm not even running 3 cargo rigs yet.) I know this probably means I just don't own a lot, but it is still impressive.

2. Dear god it warps slow. It is like watching my grandmother trying to parallel park a huge Oldsmobile, just slowly turning and inching along.

I'm sure I will post more about this later and let you all know what type of rigging I come up with for it (probably cookie cutter) but, man, good times so far.

Where do we go from here?

2009-09-09T21:13:00.000-04:00

So, I find myself closing in a few benchmarks. On my main character I have the short term goal of training to fly an Obelisk. On my alt I have the short term goal of training and Orca (less than 3 days away) and the slightly more long term goal of training all the skills to use Mindlinks and other modules to essentially pimp out my Orca.

But where to next? I see my main character working on refining skills and trade skills to go along with the fact that I'll be able to move massive amounts of cargo in my Obelisk for higher rates of return. However I'm at a loss over what to do with the alt. I have him relatively trained to run some level two missions, and I'm sure I could get him running threes and fours in his Myrmidon. But to what end? Extensive PvP holds little interest to me at the time, and while shooting rocks is a lot of fun (yeah, I'm sick) I'm not sure where to take my "end game" for it.

What do you people enjoy? I know there is far more to the game then what meager scraps I take from it right now, but I'm wondering what pool to wet my toes in next.

Loose Lips (and Wives) Pod Ships.

2009-09-07T11:57:00.000-04:00

I've been rather busy this past week and a half. I'm a teacher and school just went back into session after summer vacation. That means that I've been back to work and trying to get a classroom set up, student names learned, lesson plans created, so forth and so on. Needless to say that the job that pays for Eve has to take some precedence over Eve itself so my time mining has been woefully limited.

Finally I get a chance to play with the holiday weekend, so this morning I fire up my two copies of Eve (what good miner doesn't have an alt account training an orca?) and head out to grind some roids. Cue wife who needs a few moments of my time. Thinking that she means "a few moments" in the sense of a regular human I decide not to bother docking both my ships and run downstairs to see what is up.

I'm sure now all the vet players are shaking their heads or beating it against the edge of their desk.

Needless to say, "a few seconds" turns into several minutes - it isn't like I could tell my wife "Hold on hon, I need to check on how my ships are doing since you are talking too much." During which rats show up, eat my mining drones, and pop my retty (fortunately my Hulk is much sturdier and they didn't get that). I come back to them chewing on my Hulk's shields. End result I lost the following:

5x Mining Drone 1
1x Retriever
2x Expanded Cargohold 1
2x Hobgoblin 1
1x Survey Scanner 1

After the payout from insurance I really didn't lose that much ISK (less than a 1M overall) but I did lose valuable mining time getting a replacement. This probably never have happened had I launched all my combat drones, or if I had realized that my wife's definition of "a few seconds" was considerably longer than that of a normal humans.

Lesson learned, isk payed.Definitely glad I always insure my ships though.

Capsuleer for the iPhone

2009-08-30T14:35:00.000-04:00

For those who have an iPhone and play Eve and haven't bothered checking into iPhone related Eve apps allow me to point you to Capsuleer. It is an extremely useful app that contains lots of great features, here are just a few of the things it offers:

Skill Training Queues for all your characters
A complete skill library, look up any skill in the game.
Server status (not terribly useful, but not bad to have)
*NEW* Push Notifications for when your current skill dips below 24 hours training time!

And my favorite feature of all -

A partially customizable blog pack including CCP updates as well as over 20 popular Eve Blogs.

I can't begin to tell you how much I love this app and how much my wife hates it. I can read up on the latest Eve news as well as a wide range of very interesting blogs including CrazyKinux, Eve Druid, and more. If you have an iPhone and play Eve then this app is clearly a no brainer.

One Final Amusement

2009-08-29T15:35:00.000-04:00

So, one of the things about being a miner is you are always looking for ways to pass the time between cycles. Some people have NetFlix, some use TV, me I run Hulu or YouTube on my second monitor. So I'm often hotlinking some movies into corp chat while I slowly grind out roids. I came across this the other day:

I shared it in corp and our CEO lost it. He thought it was the funniest thing ever and watched it about 15 times back to back. That is when I joking mention my 20mil ISK finder's fee. Next thing I know my wallet is flashing and I'm 20mil richer. I told him that I was kidding, but his response "It was worth the 20mil." Just another bit to put into my "Buy an Orca" fund.

Enough Ice for 10,000 highballs

2009-08-29T15:10:00.000-04:00

So, what does a high sec miner do on Saturday when the fields are ripe with roids? Typically the corp I'm in runs a mining op every few weeks (it depends highly on whether officers want to bother and whether there is interest from the other members.) One thing I loved about these Saturday morning operations is that you were given an equal share of the haul based on how long you mined for. That meant that when I was flying around in my Navitas (oh god I remember those days) that I would potentially walk away from a Saturday Op with 10 to 20 mil in ISK or minerals. This was huge for me, I could never have hauled that much rock on my own. Now that I'm flying a Hulk when I participate it is a way to give back. It helps newer members getting to the bigger ships faster and as a new player I knew it was impressive to be in a fleet with 15 other miners, watching the lasers crisscross and devour all that is before them.

But this Saturday was something different. As the fleet formed up we rolled out to Sigga and pointed our Retrievers, Hulks, Mackinaws, and Orcas towards the Ice Fields. We were going to to try to take down an ice cube. Now, for those of you who have never bothered much with the dirty details of ice harvesting let me walk you through it. In the middle of the ice field there are over a dozen floating chunks of ice, just like asteroids. These rocks can range from anywhere around 30,000 units to 110,000 units of ice. Ice harvesting lasers take a much longer time to cycle than traditional strip miners. I don't have maxed skills, but as an example, in my hulk the lasers take 342 seconds to cycle with an Orca Boosting (that is over 5 minutes).

Now this is the frustrating part, every cycle from a laser only gives you 1 unit of ice - the exception being a Mackinaw, which will give you two. So if you want to take down a ice cube you are talking about generating enough man hours to power through 30,000 cycles. This was a pretty might undertaking and while I doubt were are going to make our goal it was still an impressive sight to see. I decided to include an image for you to enjoy:

A new start

2009-08-29T14:29:00.000-04:00

There are lots of EvE Blogs out there, so why add my own to the pile? I'm a newb, I have less than 8 million SP. I don't run missions, I rarely flying anything other than a Hulk, I believe I have ventures out of High Sec a grand total of once in my entire Eve Life. So why would anyone want to read about a player who spends most of his days shooting at rocks?

Honestly, I don't know. But I thought that perhaps there is a niche for players like me in the blog-o-sphere just like there is room for players like me in the game. Eve seems to be all about opening up world of opportunities in which players can find a game they like to play and still have an active part in the overall universe. I don't get to experience the thrill of having 12 battle cruisers barring down on me hoping to pop my tender hull, but I do get the thrill of watching local (yes, even in high sec) and hoping that can flippers won't make off with my delicious mountains of Veldspar.

I'm sure that eventually I will venture out into new fields of exploration. I read about probing, bombing runs, wormhole space, and epic battles and it makes me want to experience that aspect of the game as well. So perhaps this blog will just be about that journey, making my way from a simple miner just scraping out a living in this massive universe that we all know and love.