Low Sec Lifestyle

I expect this to be deleted once CCP catches up to it. ( Update it was locked ) However, the level of derp with some people is amazing. We can sell character's in Eve on the Character Bazaar for ISK. "In an effort to reduce the amount of character scams, GM workload and player frustration, the following changes are being made to the announcements concerning character sales or auctions for ISK. No other form of trade is sanctioned or supported." Oh, I can smell the ban coming.

I realized that I was doing something wrong. With Marc Scaurus ending his care of the Eve Blog pack I found myself waiting, worried, about who would take it over. Would they actually run it or would it die? Would it be updated? How would it change? What would be lost? What would be gained? I found myself fretting over these things and waiting and watching. Waiting and watching. Wondering. And I realized, I was an idiot. Disgusted, I sat up, did a few web searches, and decided to do something about the situation. Why was I waiting for someone else to take care of the situation? I felt that to lose the blog roll would be detrimental to the community. We barely have any places that list comprehensive lists of blogs. Most are based off of individual tastes or interests. We tend to prune off dead blogs or blogs that change in ways that are no longer compatible for us. EveBloggers.Com is just a resource. It isn't personal. And that is very important. For good or for bad, all of t

People coming to low sec looking for fights. They say, "let's go on a roam into low sec for some PvP." Ships are selected, fleets are assembled, and the group gathers at the high sec to low sec gate. Do they take a deep breath? Do they glance around them at their comrades and flick a tongue across suddenly dry lips? Does the flow of adrenaline start even as the gate flickers and the sec status flickers from the ranges of blue to green to a richer, more somber orange? When they sit on the edge of their wormhole and peer into the depth of named space... When the last highway sign says, "No Bubbles From Here On Out..." The predator and prey relationship of PvP in Eve is, for the most part, not clear. There is an entire art form to baiting for fights. Is that seemingly harmless ship, harmless? Is he AFK? Is that battleship stupid or bait? Cyno? Who is the hunter and who is the hunted? Low Sec, especially, is a place where people go looking for trouble. The

I often feel as if I have not been playing Eve for as long as I have. While I may not be new, I'm not a deep well of experience or knowledge. I'm ignorant of many things. I'm easily stomped by most people that I meet. I'm not particularly good at the game. Sometimes people tell me that they forget how young I am in the game. I have no idea why. It is not as if I have vast amounts of anything but text to unleash upon anyone. This is Sugar. I put Sugar's information out there so that someone reading this can see where I have gotten myself to since I started playing. Sugar is only one piece of me. I consider my primary 4 alts to be 'me' but Sugar is the face of me. She is a combat character focused towards PvP. I can now fly up to two racial battleships correctly (meaning T2 large guns in both T2 specializations. This is my idea of correct.) and several types of T2 frigates to cruisers. I still have massive holes in my ability. I don't have T2

I live in low sec. I engage in spaceship violence another other players. I do this in a way that brakes the virtual NPC laws of Eve and because of this I lose security status. The loss of security status comes with some penalties. These penalties are inconvenient to me. The bulk of them involve restrictions to high security space travel without being engaged in a hostile manner by NPCs. The other parts have to do with players being able to engage me without any assistance by NPC spaceships or structures in various parts of the game. People with negative security status enter high security space all of the time. With a fast ship or in a pod one is able to avoid the negative and hostile interactions of the NPC police. This allows one to engage in business in high security space. This business may be moving from one place to another (there are low sec pockets in high sec space and low sec islands separated by high sec bridges), buying and selling, or more unlawful spaceship violence.

I'm full of opinions today. Enough to break my, "try to keep it to only three posts a day" rule. Marc Scaurus posted on his blog today that he is giving away custody of EveBloggers.Com and the Eve Blog Pack. I've been waiting for him to do so for a while and to see what happened. Between TMDC and IRL his interest in other Eve Blogs and such, including his own, has waned. It happens. Life, the Universe and Everything else. Etc, etc. He poses a thought at the end of his post: "Now, I’m personally still of the opinion that we should probably just let these things go. They are a remnant of a time when blogging was the next big thing on the internet. And no offense to any bloggers out there (I still read a lot of you and appreciate the work you put into your projects), that’s just not the case anymore. One could argue that blogging has become, for many (but not all) in the EVE community, simply a point of reference that you can tweet to in conversations that re

[ TL;DR: I am content with my video game and online focused life and chew over why it is not a 'real' life in the defines of 'having' a life ] This time I woke up with a cat hacking up a hair ball on my back. I was able to eject her from that position before she accomplished her task. But the sunlight filtered in through my blinds, and I stared out at a deep blue sky and rich, green foliage. Summer is here in the USA. Real summer where it gets hot and the sun is up a lot and its quite beautiful from an air conditioned window. And I mean real summer, like real spring and not an Icelandic Summer which is probably like a US late Fall considering what an Icelandic Spring/First Day of Summer is like... anyway... With warm 'good' weather (I'm a fall/cool but not Icelandic cool weather person) people often go off to do other things. This is at times called, having a life. While I understand this longing for a life and do not begrudge anyone their lifetime adven

[ TL;DR: A morning rant ] Communication is about giving information to someone or something else. It seems a simply enough concept. We communicate through words, through writing, through pictures, body language, hand gestures, signs, symbols, and anything else that works for us. We may do it in many, many different ways but its is there to exchange information between people. We start at birth with our parents and improve and expand upon this until we have created languages, imagery, mathematics and complex, theoretical sciences. I am, therefore, constantly boggled at how terrible people are at it. So, some thoughts and words for poor communicators. Eve lacks magic and I think sometimes people forget that. When I am in the station I cannot click on your name and 'teleport to group member'. Therefore, the only was I know what you are doing when you scream for help is for you to tell me. "Can I get some help here?" is a good start but it is not also an ending

In television, an often seen plot is to some how have the cast interact with a dimension or world where everything is the reverse of what it is in the real world. The good guys are evil and the evil guys good. Governments that are free are oppressed. Sometimes the landscape and scenery are different. Sometimes the technology. It is a well used and ancient plot line. And one that I found myself in. Or at least, it felt that way when I realize that I was in a discussion about how my TCS alts had swamped the market with cheap goods. Goods so cheap in comparison to the area that the person I was speaking with thought that my TCS employee was making all of the items herself. I explained that they were just a bit over Jita prices. I often comment that this is well under regional prices and that is still true, a lot of the time. Although, it is more and more common for me to see lower prices on more and more items these days. Slowly but steadily, TCS is pushing the region's general pric

I was reading a very angry rage quitting post on the forums . I'm always fascinated by theses posts. They seem motivated by the extreme need to vent frustration with the liquid courage of quitting allowing the person to transcend from sadness into a being of pure ranting power. I do like to read these to figure out why people are quitting. They may announce the reason, but it is often more complex. If they continue to post, which they almost always do, eventually, the kernels of truth start to fall out. While the rage post itself may not be particularly constructive, figuring out why people are upset allows various aspects of the game to be looked at. It does not mean that things have to be changed just because one person has loudly thrown in the towel. I am just a believer of finding out the core of a situation. The owner of this particular thread decided to start posting in caps to be a terrible troll to everyone on his way out. That is the emotion and rage talking. He wants

I woke up, bleary eyed, with a cat on my back purring in my ear and was thankful that today was a day off. I managed to leave the warm, shelter of my bed, make some tea and try to log into Eve as the kettle started the liquid of gods, aka tea. My launcher was already up from last night and when I asked it to log me in, it gave me the old log in screen and told me that I was running an incompatible version. Oh.  I've learned that one must close and reopen the launcher for it to start its update in these situations, when an update has gone through. I might as well skim the patch notes as it updates. The update only takes a moment or two but I'm not moving quickly this morning. If one has not been following the patch notes for Odyssey I've found them interesting. Lots of character creator bugs are being nipped, something I'm thankful for. I often don't have all of the hairstyles load and that is very stressful when I am playing avatar barbie and designing a look for

As one of my work weekends, and what turned out to be a hellaciously busy one, my Eve time was reduced to some store stocking and early bedtimes. I was presented with a lovely little link to the Character Bazaar on the Eve Online forums. By the time I got around to sharing it it had been deleted. However, Chribba runs Eve Search which is a mirror forum of the Eve Online Forums. It is a useful place to find out what happened before the ISD edits and various edit and deletions that happen on the forums. Here is the link.  http://www.eve-search.com/thread/251285-1/page/1 I understand why it was deleted. While of great amusement, CCP tends not to want EULA breaking things sitting on the forums. The seller, when approached by the buyers, offered the character not for the 35 billion ISK he had advertised on the forums but for 1,100 IRL ISKies and not the Icelandic kind I suspect. Within 15 minutes he had three conversations with three separate buyers where he told them that he was Ru

Anyone notice that a lot of gates got a bit bigger with Odyssey? The gate changes came in many ways. We got new, V3d gates with a more exciting and interesting animation. These gates also came with a new jump animation that is driving some people crazy as this 37 page thread might suggest . They came with new gate flashes. Some, gates, the flash is very subtle. People complained. We were told there was a gate flash. And then, there started to be a gate flash. It is still subtle but it is more noticeable then the first few days. I believe it was, at the very least broken, for a moment or improved upon because we stared and stared at gates and suddenly, one day, a visible animation. Some gates are brighter than others as well. Of course, I live in Minmatar space where the gate flashes are normally a dull pulse. Whatever. The flashes have improved somewhat. We move on. What is most noticeable is that everything above the system to system gates has become bigger. Constellation ga

I took this photograph at Fanfest and I hadn't yet commented on it beyond putting it in a post for people to look at. This particular graph is a useful one because the question of, "What is wealthy?" in Eve comes up a lot. When I first started. I was told that under a billion was space poor and you did not start getting space rich until you averaged around twenty billion ISK. Of course, if one listens to this conversation it tends to mutate around its audience. For some, tens of billions of ISK is meaningless and they quickly lose their perspective and begin to think of Super Capitals as reasonable, affordable purchases for the average player. We tend to be surrounded by our social group. From that group we develop a normal and a reflection of that normal. The first million ISK wonder of a new player, with round eyes as their wallet ticks up and they are able to afford that first Destroyer to replace their free one is lost. The sweetness of that first cruiser purch

Discussing a fleet where our planned tactics and our execution of said tactics were of great differences, resulting of the loss of the bulk of the fleet it was said "that is a big victory for them." Victory in this case was defined by the ISK calculation placed on the field. While it is common and true to say that there are different ways to determine who wins and loses it is also common to use ISK as a basic measurement. A group may kill five hundred ships of their enemy and loose twenty over the course of a war. However, the twenty ships lost might easily be worth twice the cost of the five hundred destroyed. Who is winning there? Both? None? Most of the fighting in Eve is full of these moments. Outside of sov war and wormhole evictions how does one judge these things? How does one judge what does not matter? For as much as I enjoy PvP for the sake of PvP, very little of our general fighting is done for a reason. We do have plenty of fights for tangible objecti

I've been remarkably unmotivated this last week. A bit of a mental hiatus it would seem. I let a lot of my workload, outside of my store slack off for a little bit and spent my time reading for the most part. I even watched a few episodes of game of thrones and as a book reader walked away with a list of random complaints. Anyway, mostly I have been thinking about ISK. I've made very little of it this month, personally. I like to point out that TCS's income and my own are two separate things. I made about 600 mil right after Odyssey deployed, days before the decryptor and salvage markets crashed under the bulk of vast, new riches. I've made about 100mil off of blink (it hasn't been a good blink month for me) and that is about it. Most of what I have done is spend my ISK on ships. I have a tendency to build 2-4 of any particular fit which tends to spiral my cost rather quickly. I have a tendency to fly somewhat fancier ships these days. Jaguars are a T2 ship and

Like a cold, startling plunge into a pool on a hot day I docked into a Concord station and stripped away my outlaw security status. It actually took a bit more than that. I purchased some tags. I farmed some of my own. I dropped some ISK and finally I adjusted my security status up. I figured that I might as well use the feature I had talked about so often. I felt no different. However, people are not as prone to shooting me all of a sudden. Surprise, surprise. One of my newest fun things to do is sit on the station while my cyno alt winds down and see if someone will go suspect by shooting her so that I can shoot them back. Not being flashy red means they don't get a freebee to shoot me anymore. My cynos are lasting much, much longer. Now to talk about consequences.

In a game about spaceships blowing up other spaceships in vast galactic wars that spawn enough excitement and amazement to bring the internet's eye, one would think that guns would be the key. And, in a way, it would seem that way. Even the names of our ships, battlecurisers and battleships, marauders and recons invoke the image of weaponization of such a scale as to cause the collective conscious of the watcher to catch its breath in amazement. It is the streaks of prismatic light across the battlefield, the shattering explosion of the spaceship, the trails of the missiles as they streak across the darkness and collide in a brilliance that draws our heart and mind that so often define this game. But that is not all that there is. For some, weapons are the last thing that they consider. The use of them, the need for them, it is not shunned. It is just not their place. Instead, they trust in others to bring these items of destruction forward and for them, they embrace a d

Sunday was a sleepy, lazy day. I spent most of the weekend slumped in my chair, wallowing in extreme laziness. I barely wrote anything. I sat over draft after draft and left the pages empty. If Saturday had not had my adventure in being ransomed I would have gone postless all weekend. Not that I do not have ideas. The drafts I've created will filter out over the next week I suspect. I had ideas but no motivation. Instead, I spent Sunday floating around space, participating in various fleets for various objectives. I flew a battleship out into glorious battle. I can't say that I am in love with it. Its slow. I hate slow ships. I'll save them for when they are called for. I felt really useful as well, until someone called for an Oracle fleet. Sigh. Its a lose, lose battle still to be able to join all the fleets.  Later, for a change of pace I flew a Cynabal into glorious battle. I fucked up and died. But I learned a lot about the ship. I like it a lot more than I

It was my own fault for not paying attention. Multiboxing and travelling can be bad for you. I didn't actually go AFK. I started to warp to the next gate and was waiting for my screen to flicker on my other monitor and tell me that I had arrived at the next system. Because I was doing something with another alt I lost track of time. I eventually looked over at my main screen to see my account warping but not going anywhere. How strange. As I look at my screen, I see a Machariel heading for me and bumping me. I realize that I am 100k off of the gate and being bumped. Dread hits. I'm about to be ganked. I assume I am being knocked out of the range of gate and station guns. It is Udema after all and today was my day to pay the piper. I try to avoid Udema and Jita on the weekend but I hadn't been paying attention. Well this sucks. I like this Orca. I made it after all. I've been killed plenty of times but never ganked in high sec. This would be new. I turned on my DCU

Odyssey was bound to bring changes. However, in my relative inexperience and ignorance I didn't expect the market to do all the terrible things that it did. I expected some of it. I flirted with speculation and stockpiled on various things. I understood that some prices would change but I didn't expect to stare at the window of 30+ million is CovOps frigates. The Laws of Supply and Demand are simple: If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price. If demand decreases and supply remains unchanged, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price. If demand remains unchanged and supply increases, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price. If demand remains unchanged and supply decreases, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price. Eve lives under these laws. Players make the items and place them on the market. Items are only worth what people will pay for them. People will

[ Where Sugar mulls over aspects of negative interactions] SCORN open dislike and disrespect or derision often mixed with indignation an expression of contempt or derision an object of extreme disdain, contempt, or derision : something contemptible There is a lot of scorn in Eve. It is multilayered with dozens of textures. It exists all over the world of PvP and enough of it is hypocritical to boot that it makes me shake my head. I don't speak of smack talk. I understand the banter of sides against each other and the desire to rile people up. I see enough people lose their cool over it. I've done so myself. Not insomuch PvP situations but more in deciding to no longer speak with some who cannot communicate without cupping their hands to share a bit of scorn-filled derision. And quite often, it is directed at someone who is doing something in a way that they do not agree with. "Doing it wrong." In a game with so many ways to do things it is fascinating