Sunday, May 5, 2013

Ten

Happy 10th Birthday EVE. No better way to celebrate than hanging out in Jita and enjoying 18% TiDi.

Also, CCP Gargant is my new favourite person.

[00:17:19] CCP Gargant > lag is a feature now
......
[00:30:46] CCP Gargant > MY FIREWORKS WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN

- Sam.

Fighting monotany

Every once in a while, boredom hits. You can only have the same fights against the same people so many times before you need a change. To shake things up, we war-decced an alliance more than ten times our size and started camping their high-sec home.

High-sec is such a different place to fight. There's no bubbles, plenty of stations to hide from pursurers in, and neutral scouts are everywhere. A lot of the wardec was spent in and near stations. We played station games because we got a laugh out of it, they played station games because it kept us hooked long enough for them to form a blob. If we docked up, it was either to find out where that sole red in local was hiding, or to wait out the blob.

The lack of bubbles helped the other side a lot more than it helped us. We eventually started using remote sensor boosted interceptors, but even that wasn't enough, since almost all of the people we tried to catch had warp stabilizers fitted. The percentage of people on Teamspeak who vocalized a desire for a bubble at least once? 100%. We missed a lot of frigates that simply aligned and warped off before we could get more than a couple points on them.

That said, industrials and mining ships made for great targets. I happened to get incredibly lucky one night, and caught a bunch of them in a row. The first was a Hoarder that I chased through a few gates until he warped to a POCO at zero. Being the nice guy I am, I held him there for five minutes while a couple corpies swung by to get in on the killmail. He managed to warp his pod off, but went straight for the station. Thanks to the docking delay that occurs when your ship pops, I caught up to him and popped the pod before his timer was up.

Industrial number two was a Noctis that blithely undocked from the station I was sitting on. He jumped a couple gates before running into the small camp on the other side that I'd called for when it became obvious where he was heading. He had a full cargo hold too: salvage, loot, random odds and ends. He must have been completely asleep at the helm to miss me chasing him into a bottleneck. The third industrial was actually rather sad. A Bestower warped to the gate I was sitting on, and I followed him through. When he decloaked, I was three thousand metres away. Lock, scram, shoot.

For a scout, I brought down a throw-away character who I'd trained to sit in a Venture and use Mining Laser 1s. Nothing like a little bit of camouflage to help stalk other miners. Even with their warp strength bonus, war target Ventures are an easy kill when you set up a warp-in at zero for a squad of frigates. Procurers, even with their impressive tanks, melt quickly when the same frigate ball lands on them at point-blank range. On the other hand, there were some miners who were impossible to catch napping. The moment a red showed up in system, they were in warp to a station. Some of us tried log-in traps to catch only particularily slippery Retriever, but the pilot had the good sense to never go back to the same belt.

The only time our war target ever gave us trouble was when we tried to upship to battlecruiser size or larger. Such was the price we paid for warring with someone so much larger than us. The largest fleet we managed all war was twelve, and it took fifteen minutes for things to end rather poorly. In the EVE variant of rock/paper/scissors, eight Vexors and four tackle frigates don't beat a thirty-some battlecruiser gang.

Since anything cruiser size or larger attracted a blob, I spent the wardec flying Rifters and Slashers. With my scout to provide warp-ins, I spent a lot of my time as the point man, both figuratively and literally. Add a number of cruiser and battlecruiser kills to my solo hunting, and April turned out to be my most violent month yet. Twenty-one kills more than doubled my total, and I managed it while only losing four Rifters and one Slasher.

Sadly, this means I'm no longer close to the worst PVPer in my corp. Now when I lose something expensive, people are actually going to make fun of me for it. *Sigh* Such is the price of success.

Yeah right. Like they didn't already do that.

- Sam

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Shinies

I bought a Fanfest stream, but didn't get to use it all that often for various reasons. That said, I did hear and see a few of the big things. A week later, here's the six things that stuck with me the most.


- Tags4sec

According to the available literature, the pirate ships bearing the special tags are going to spawn about as often as hauler rats spawn. Being a null-bear, I'd done a fair bit of ratting in belts, and I've seen exactly ZERO hauler spawns. Since January, the only hauler spawn I've come across is a hauler wreck an alliance mate advertised when he needed some help scooping the loot. I sure hope they spawn more frequently in low-sec, or the tags could be collector's items instead of a viable means of increasing security status. That said, best of luck to all those who mine in low-sec. At least you'll be less lonely.

- New gate travel effects

CCP Soundwave hates loading bars. I hate unnecessary flash that slows down my client. If the new gate-travel visual effects work just as smoothly under 60% TiDi and don't cause any extra slow-down, then I'm A-OK with the flash. If a 100-pilot fleet jumping a gate under 60% TiDi causes lag spikes and a 20% increase in TiDi, then no thank you. It's undeniably cool, but at what cost?

- Ice changes

To sum up: Belts will no longer be static, the ice will be in new scannable sites. Once depleted, the site will respawn in 4 hours. The total amount of ice in high-sec will be reduced, placing increased importance on the null-sec ice for maintaining fuel supplies. Cycle times for ice mining laser will be cut by 50%.

Personally, I could care less. However, I've been informed that I might very soon expect to be given a Retriever and told to go mine ice in our null territory. Hurray?

- VR dogfighting

Of all the things recorded at Fanfest, this video may have caused the most nerd-boners. A) It's a virtual-reality dogfighting game using EVE ships, and B) an attractive woman (maybe the only one at Fanfest) got almost as much screen-time as the people who made the game/tech demo.

Aside from the desperate attempt to look cool, the video does show off a great bit of concept work. Add a few more maps, and some more fighters, and you could have something that would really showcase the abilites of the Oculus Rift. With the attention it's been getting, the OR might be the first VR device to actually succeed in doing more than sounding like a cool idea, and getting in on it early could turn out to be a great thing for CCP, especially since they love their....

- Merchandising

That's right, CCP loves the idea of brand expansion. The EVE store is back, we're getting more books, and there's talk of a TV show.

Mel Brooks said it best. It's where the real money's at, after all.

- Colonization

I saw a fair few complaints leading up to Fanfest. The blog-o-sphere wanted Jesus features. Enough iteration was enough, CCP had been iterating since Incarna flopped. Well, I'm pretty sure the 'future vision' section of the EVE keynote counts as CCP delivering a massive backhand slap and telling all the whiners to shut their cakeholes.

Colonization was delivered as a future idea, but it seemed like CCP already has a few ideas of where to go with it. Player-constructed stargates, for example. We got to see a picture of Caldari industrials shooting orange beams at a half-constructed stargate. CCP Seagull also mentioned capsuleers taking over what the empires used to own. NPC null and parts of lowsec becoming sov nullsec?

The ships we saw leaving Earth in the EVE Origins trailer made an appearance in demo of the new archaeology demo, how about some more leftovers from the initial wave of colonization in New Eden? Could we drop a new gate in a system on the edge of the known territories, and find a forgotten colony that was destroyed during the dark times?

Me like.

- Sam.

The big winners

They held an election, and almost nobody came.

That doesn't really matter much to me though. Fewer people voted for CSM8 than voted for CSM7, but I could care less. Of the top five people I really wanted to see on CSM, I got five for five, so I can't complain. As expected, the wormhole candidates picked up a couple of seats, well-recognized names nabbed a few, and null-sec candidates filled up the rest.

Link to results for reference: https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/csm8-election-results/

Of the people I had on my voting list, here's the ones that made it:

1. Mangala Solaris
2. Kesper North
3. Mike Azariah
4. progodlegend
5. Ali Aras
....
7. Ripard Teg
8. Malcanis
....
14. Sala Cameron

... And the people I didn't vote for who made it:

Chitsa Jason
James Arget
Korvin
mynnna
Sort Dragon
Trebor Daehdoow

Not like any of those names are surprising. Chitsa and James were the top two wormhole candidates, and holers proved last year that they could get out the vote. Sort Dragon and mynnna were shoo-ins, and it seems that Korvin got the Russian vote. Trebor, well, I imagine any high-sec player motivated enough to vote stuck him either number one or two on their voting list.

I'm sure an all-star lineup like CSM8 will have plenty of bright ideas, but we'll have to wait and see how well things go, won't we?

- Sam.