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Showing posts from September, 2012

Character Update: 10 Months In

I spend a lot of my time writing about everything but my characters technical bits. However, ignoring them completely would be silly. I am a duel to triboxer most days (I'm so sorry Hong please still talk to me at Eve Vegas and don't hide from me for being evil) . When I speak of myself it should also be noted that my I is spread across multiple me. It matters because I can accomplish the tasks of a small group. The other day, after debating my little episode with the live event and my gank and revenge situation I started to think that my 'outlaw' security status may be a good thing for me. I've lost the mild protection of the gates and station guns. People will now shoot me because it is free. There will be no more hesitation as they debate if they want to deal with gateguns or GCC. It is an enviormental push. Its moved me from debating my probability of escaping a situation to expecting every situation to end up in conflict. That puts me into a dif

The Tools of Forethought

It is a gorgious day outside. Again. I can't remember a fall quite this lovely. Then I remembered that I have spent the last ten years working at night. Noon, where I am now, choking down a terrible lunch while taking a moment to myself to ponder Eve, is something I'm not used to seeing. It's pretty. It makes working weekends suck a little bit more. But, Eve. As part of my pondering and momentary escape from my work day, I was reading a thread where someone else whines about gankers ganking haulers being unfair in high sec . The Eve Online Forums, as always, are an interesting and terrible place. However, after the mining barge changes I am no longer so glib as to believe that HTFU is the tune that is sung . This isn't about the ganks themselves. I do personally approve of them. In the many long conversations about avoiding ganks the use of the MAP feature is pointed out over and over again. It reminded me that I managed to fix an issue with my maps

Morning Antics

I logged on as I ate breakfast, something I am wont to do. There is a fleet sitting on an alliance and a bait drake sniffing around. They've had a pretty good hot dropping evening and I hope maybe I can grab some action before I headed to work. Nothing comes out of the hunting, but a small fleet does enter the system our titan is sitting in. A Raven enters the system accompanied by a falcon and a hurricane. It's like someone rang the dinner bell. Heads swivel and pupils constrict into tunnel vision and we bolt for the gate that the Raven has headed to. The Raven jumps. He had a hurricane and a falcon to accompany him. Our fleet lands, 2 tornaods, 2 hurricanes, a sleipnir, some smaller things. They were planning to jump into null sec. The chase takes three systems before our inty pilot gets in front of the Raven and tackles him on the gate. The rest of us jump in. The falcon and hurricane with the Raven take off. The Raven manages to crash the gate. The inty

Interconnectivity

[TL;DR: Sugar = Moody Today] In a way I am gearing up for Eve Vegas. I was having a girl moment as I pack my bags and realized that my straightening iron is totally broken all to hell and financially order another one from Amazon. Somehow it snuck up on me. A week from now and I get to meet people. Sadly, one of my corpmates has had his work schedule changed and can no longer make it. It is disappointing but there will be other opportunities in the future. I've spent some time debating how I wanted to capture things in my blog. Then I decided to get over it and stop fretting and let it happen as it happens. I do expect there to be a bit of a change to the general tone and information that I normally babble about due to the intermingling of my daily life with a saturation of internet spaceships and Vegas. Hopefully, it will be interesting. Eve is having a thing . It makes me sad. I barely have the energy or tolerance to deal with the AT. My game has been inva

Don't Get Mad. Get Even.

When you are jammed, it is such a terribly painful thing to watch your ship burn. For those who do not participate in Eve or PvP let me explain what a 'jam' is. ECM is a module for electronic warfare. It is perhaps, one of the most hated of the various electronic warfare types due to its ability to remove all locks on ships and stop you from getting anymore locks on any ships while it cycles. A 'jamming' ship can have multiple modules that jam a target thus putting the victim into a cycle where they can not shoot anything. You flounder, helpless in space as your ship burns around you and there is nothing that you can do. Normally you are also pointed (unable to warp away) webbed (unable to use speed to your advantage) and being shot (therefore dying). Not being able to shoot back, or use ecm drones or do anything but sit and die sucks a lot. The other electronic warfare modules interrupt your pewpew abilities. They lower the range that you can shoot at. T

Live Event: Angel Cartel conduct planetary attack in Oddelulf!

BREAKING NEWS: MOLDEN HEATH PIRATES REPRESENT AND KILL ALL THE THINGS! It seems that CCP had a live event today. I logged in and in one channel some of the guys were chattering about an event going on in Oddelulf . I was not sure if serious. A live event, in low sec and in Molden Heath? Wat?! This is the 'news' story of the event . I jumped into a Jaguar to go and see if this was a real thing or random lies. As I ran towards Oddelulf I got this link to a forum thread about it . And a website about Tech 4 News ? How cool. Masty and Crafty were killing all the things . I pushed my Jag and hopped into system while asking for a fleet invite. I decided to land far out so that I had some room to take in what was going on. Local was crazy with 45 people in it. All sorts of stuff was on the field and I think people were killing NPCs. Whatever. Pewpew! I decided to try to chase down a rifter that I hoped was not paying attention. However, he noticed

The Dense Weights of Responsibility

Of late I have wondered what makes a good FC? When does one step into that? What ratio of losing your fleet for your own learning is acceptable and when does it become unacceptable? I don't have any answers. These are just some of the thoughts based off of interactions I have had and and my own thoughts. I have a lot of respect for FCs. It is a weighty responsibility. It isn't something I am trying for. At the moment, my desire to do so does not exist. However, of late, I have seen people discuss learning to FC when they are very new to the game. Very new. Only a few weeks in. It does not seem as if FCing is something that you try out like a shield or armor fit on your ship. The trust that MacG gives me when we go out and do PvE is amazing. Sometimes I live up to it and other times I fail cascade all over the place. While that is Fleet Commanding I don't consider it 'FC'ing. I will blame CCP for this one . Fleet Command is one of th

The Days in the Life of Low Sec

I don't always get to be the predator. Command Ships IV has been learned. MacG asked me out to do a Minor Angel Annex with him. I decided to give it a try. I can say that it went quite well. The faction spawn did appear and he was nice enough to drop a shiny. However, it was a cheap worthless thing valued at about 3mil ISK. Damn. With a large number of large wrecks on the field, I decided to dust off my Noctis and undock it to clean up the area and make a little bit of ISK in the process. Like many things I have done in Eve, I haven't given up salvaging because I dislike it. I just have not had the opportunities to do it as often as I would like. My biggest mistake was using Sugar to fly the Noctis. Every one of my characters can fly it. I even have it set up so that it can flip between all of them without any fitting changes. I am just used to salvaging in low sec with Sugar. The problem is, Sugar is my only combat toon. Eventually my others will catch up

MacG's Story: Wormhole Days

Dher decided to pull me out of my comfort zone some and I let myself be pulled. The results were... mixed. The day would turn out to be about Null and Wormholes. Dher feels that I need to be pushed some to see that these areas are not all that bad and worth investing time in. I'm well known to turtle up when I am comfortable so as a compromise I attempt to go and do things with people that I trust to see if I'm just having bad experiences on my own. MacG found a C3 wormhole in our home system. With the call of iskies on the for front I was lured into our little carebear fleet. Its like bait. An isk left in the hanger. An isk left on the floor of my hurricane. An isk leading to the keyboard of my logistic account. Next thing I know we're in a wormhole, doing anomalies in a little cane and drake fleet with scimitar support. The NPCs like to switch aggression and such things. Hurricanes are not the best choice of this but its what we decided

Our Total Destruction?

"Who has leadership five?" Obviously, that wasn't me. It sounded fancy and skilled. It turns out that I do have leadership five. Whoops. It wasn't a big thing. Razor spoke up and was given control of the wing so that we could handle the invites for our alliance mates. It was a group op. The original was was for hacs , ruptures , and SFI . I went with a SFI. While I was afk waiting for a moment during the waiting time it turned into a fleet or ruptures. Mine was eight jumps away and oh well. I felt bad. Like I broke the look of things. But whatever. I was a bit faster so I'd hang behind and if they decided to come for me they'd run right into the face eating wall of ruptures. That would be a good day. We were taking down a POS and a POCO about 10 systems out. They were both coming out of reinforcement and the goal was to get fights. We were not going to take down the POS hopefully just fight the people trying to repair it. I think.

The Answer is: Yes

I can't resist. Scanning my blog search words I came across this. The answer is, "Yes." :P (technical answer is know your aggression mechanics first so that GCC and gate/station guns do not blap you from the shadows.) Whoever searched that, I wish they'd send me an in game message. It's fantastic. As for the what to do, the answer is whatever you want to do or would normally do. But, big giggles over here.

What Does One Do in Eve?

TSO Requiem (The Fifth) Beethoven's Last Night I have been having one of those little days of doing lots of random things that are all geared towards doing stuff on various levels. However, they are so scattered and seemingly interconnected and in a way seemingly unproductive that I pondered: What does a player do in Eve? One of Eve's most confusing characteristics is that there is nothing that has to be done. Aion is my newest and latest comparison tool (I have never played Wow). When I log in, I have little quests to do. I can do random things to improve my character but I always have my little quests to do. There is none of that in Eve. Optional will be the word of the day. Eve's mission running is the closest resemblence to a classic MMO's or games questing system that the game has. But Eve's missions are for the most part single instance things. You can go to any agent that you can access, ask for a mission, complete it, turn it in, and walk

Improvement of the New Player Experience

After writing a long, long rant , back to my normally scheduled random posting. Today, I decided to approach a probable terrible idea. Yesterday, after some time in a thread with a self entitled ' everything is wrong in eve and tis a terrible game ' person, I decided to write up an opinion/review of the new player experience. The above player used other games to base their opinion on why eve's tutorial was terrible. I decided to use my own recent experience in another successful MMO to compare the two. I've been playing Aion (not successfully, I just made it to level eight after 2 weeks). I also used it for comparison because it is a themepark MMO and that is where a lot of eve's player base is going to have gotten their feet wet in playing. As I typed up this review I wrote something that struck me. I was writing about how I was mindlessly running around and I wrote that, "I could see that the NPC titled 'general goods trader' was a merchan

Mission NPC changes = Fleet, New Players and Lowsec hit Hardest

There is a dev blog out as to changes in the mission AI . It has already wrung tears out of me. I have a lot of problems with the change. It is not that I think that there should not be change. I believe that this fix is not going to do it as people think it will. This is a lot of long reasons on why I don't see the aggression change as a fix to making PvE more engaging but a sideways nerf to fleets, lowsec, lotsa nullsec and new players. This blog is called low sec lifestyle because I live in low sec. it is not called pewpew lifestyle because pewpew is not all I do. I live in low sec like people live in high sec. I do everything here but sell my goods. I am one of a small group of people that like here. Of late low has had some interest n the areas. Improvement. It seemed like people were starting to care about the imbalances in the various areas. However, I fully believe at this time that a flat introduction of NPC mechanic changes as stated in the dev blog will o