Low Sec Lifestyle

I am beaming from ear to ear. It is too bad that I am at work and cannot explain to my co-workers that I achieved something and I am thrilled about it. Today, CCP Fozzie put up a new post about a change coming to Rubicon . At Fanfest this year a player chatting with CCP Masterplan mentioned that there was a lack of good exploration content for new players who decide to go pirate early in their EVE careers. Being locked out of high sec means being locked out of most new player friendly combat exploration. It's something the team has been thinking about since. So for Rubicon we're making a fairly simple change that will expand most of the highsec combat exploration content (combat anoms, DED complexes and unrated complexes) into lowsec as well. This content will exist alongside the existing lowsec stuff. The new sites will not replace any existing lowsec content or reduce the spawn rate of any existing sites. They will be in addition to the existing spawns. That was me. I w...

I've never been to an Eve event if one discounts the random live event that happened in Oddelulf one day that I just happened to bump into. I've never been to a player event. They tend to be free for alls and that has never been an  environment  I have wanted to indulge in. I'm also to shy to randomly join a fleet of strangers. However, tonight, I joined the fleet that was going to the Nightmare in New Eden event. I had debated avoiding it but I decided that it had been too long since I had flown so I would give it a try. Altaen called for a pure, Aurgoror rep fleet to go and participate in the event. I died four jumps out of a Shadow Cartel Hac fleet. I managed to decloak early. One click. Two... whoops. Aurgoror down. I made my way back to our Solitude base and docked up. After all, it was a work night. The boys went off to kill things  with some people Altaen picked up in local as we moved through. In other games, with holidays or events they tend to be run by th...

7-2 is absorbing a lot of the active THC2 and THC2 is going to sleep. It is an odd time. There isn't drama involved. There is very little change involved. We have all flown together so much and for so long that it makes sense. We work well together. We like each other. I doubt that I should be surprised by it, but I am. Not in a bad way. It does prove that I am terrible at predicting the future. Yet, the deep selfish part of me is pleased. Having my boys under one roof is always pleasant. I've leaned forward and asked someone in a gentle voice, "Do you even like your corporation or alliance?" This comes after long discussions with never a single positive. It isn't the same thing as when you like them but disagree. Some people are with a group of people and I cannot figure out why they spend their time together. Not finding a home is not an uncommon end for people in this game. Sometimes the corporate history is a long story of a lack of a place to call home. ...

It is fiction day. That is a warning for those who don't like such things. There will be a few more over the next two weeks. At the moment I am writing for the Pod and Planet Fiction Contest. I'm very excited about this contest but slightly miffed that it came in the middle of Eve Vegas and my Vacation. Thankfully, my main serious entry was completed before I left for Vegas. I have a few more up my sleeve and about two weeks to produce them. That may mean a few skipped blog days. Gasp. Will it burst into flames from neglect? This particular entry is going into the humor category which is also labeled, " Other Things Just Make You Swear and Curse ". It is a fun story and very short. It bubbled up thanks to Altaen being silly in Jabber, composed itself and I spat it out. Because it is simple and short I decided to start with it. I feel that my writing and storytelling abilities are more solid this year. Last year was a learning experience. This year I am trying to b...

Written for the YC115  Pod and Planet Fiction Contest Category: Other Things Just Make You Swear and Curse ECM Nightmare  “I had a dream last night.” “Did you write it down as we have discussed?” “Yeah. But it was so clear. I can still see it.” “Do you want to talk about it?” “You’ll think I’m crazy.” “I’ve told you before that I don’t think you are crazy. The mind is only capable of handling but so much emotional stress. The trauma of what you have been through has to heal. Dreams are how they heal.” “But this nightmare. It was real. I can't escape it. When I walk down the hallway I remember it. When I dream I remember it. Sometimes its okay. Like, when I eat. I take blue pill you know, to get through the work day in the asteroid fields. I get the shakes when I pass the low sec gate. I lived there. I would dive into that gate without a second thought and now just seeing it on scan gets me shaking.” “Tell me your dream.” “Okay. It went like this.” ...

I've hated everything I've written today so I am working on my Pod and Planet entries.  However, my Battleships arrived from Vegas (I shipped them home.)  Everyone can stare at my somewhat blurred cellphone picture of the bookshelves behind my desk and play find the battleships. Some people might call me a gamer. Enjoy!

I must announce that the emperor has no clothes . I hate to bring this to the forefront of thought and communication but it appears that CCP has mislabeled the Golden Pod also known as Capsule - Genolution 'Auroral' 197-variant. If CCP had come forward and labeled the so called Golden Pod as Capsule - Genolution 'Auroral' 197-variant, I'd not be writing this today. Instead, I stand before you feeling a bit hurt. Has CCP foisted a Bronze pod upon us and labeled it a Golden Pod? The evidence suggests that this may be so. Of course, the title Golden is but a marketing term. The real name, above, does not state that the pod is gold. Nor does the implant description or the casual description itself contain the word 'gold'. This hydrostatic capsule is a unique variant on the standard model. Its golden sheen is nominally decorative material, whose role and purpose are highly classified and which dissipates entirely upon reprocessing. It is known that ...

Sometimes the world must spin down and one must address their industrial focus. My POS is a slow pay off. In the world of comparing one activity to another for ISK making POS stuff has to rank rather low. It is enjoyable to accomplish it but I would not call it fun. There is a lot of puttering involved with the POS. I try to keep my POS reacting constantly. This builds up a backlog of the material that I react into boosters. I had built up a huge supply and started letting that chew down while I spent some time entering into the synth booster market as a potential future income source. I've also been quite irritated with the blueprint prices. People tend to control that particular market and often times I will see ridiculous fluctuations in the prices of things. Earlier this year Vov pointed out that I was whining and suggested that I stop whining and buy a pack of 10 BPCs when my normal habit was to buy one or two. I have to thank him for that because they came in use late...

Forward: I wrote this in March and never posted it. I don't know why. I may have forgotten or lost it in draft spam or some other topic that captured my attention. I'm super tired today and decided to pour my limited energy into finishing some of the sixty some drafts I have half built in this here pool of writing. I decided to leave it as is. I rather startled at the number of almost finished posts I have. The single shard nature of Eve is fantastic.  The game is large enough that not knowing people is normal but the possibility of bumping into them still exists.   I have had a few such situations of late. Cynide Jester wrote a blog post about being ransomed.  The following day, Druur comments that associates of his ransomed someone for a song.  He found Cynide Jester's blog and connected the dots.  For me, it was amusing because I know them both. A second was when Lain soloed (good job there!) someone from another corp.  That corp happens...

I have always found market trading to be exhausting. The push and pull of the various sides as they shift and maneuver their prices made my eyes glaze. I'd watch Detta sweep in and sweep out hundred of millions of ISK richer as we talked while I stared at my deadspace modules that I needed to sell. With caution I'd place them on the market only to watch myself instantly undercut and my items sit for weeks while I leaked tears and rarely remembered to adjust the prices. Over in Solitude, I've been fighting a market battle. The market is manipulated over there by a few (one?) individuals. I found myself saying, "the entire market" but that is a frustrated over exaggeration. As with any area not attached to the major, populated regions of high sec Empire, there are a selection of semi-common goods missing from the market. Most of these items are what I consider more specialized T2 items such as long range T2 ammunition which one would most commonly use in the Nag...

A few weeks ago  Kaeda dragged me into a twitter discussion about my enjoyment of logistics and taking care of "my boys" as I label the inclusive circle of 7-2, THC2, and most of the pirate circle that I am social with in Molden Heath. 7-2 recently moved the entire house across the game and we managed to forget everything that we needed while we moved everything. There has been a lot of logistics activity from the membership getting ourselves up to 100% speed. However, we did it and got the machine that is our corporation up and running with very little true interruption in service. That was a very satisfying accomplishment to me. For one person I do a lot of logistics. Or so it feels to me. I may not be doing much in the scale of those that do logistics. I know that there are people with massive fleets of haulers moving huge hoards of supplies around. They are more amazing than I am. But, I feel rather amazing most of the time. I do a lot of supply for people and I get ...

I was looking at my Aura app and my market alt had to much cash in her wallet. Much, to much cash. I needed to restock our little home in solitude with a seriousness. The only problem is that I didn't take the time to load up all of my tools and set up my accounts on my laptop to manage and monitor the store. Nor did I want to desync my home system to badly. The only answer was to wing it and randomly buy what I thought I needed. That made complete sense to me. I carry around a general idea of what my store needs in my mind. It is thanks to the icons. I'm a fairly visual person in some ways. I also know what is needed and I can look over the market history to see what is selling. This gives me a general goal of restocking highly used things. The first thing is that I have not been stocking everything that I have. The other people who are not 'us' in Solitude have a bad habit of buying out my stacks of reasonably priced modules and restocking them for a higher pric...

I was driving back to Vegas from the Grand Canyon last night and I had a little moment where I wondered, "Where are my battleships?" I felt as if I was driving home, as I sped through that inky darkness. I had somehow not packed my stuff from Eve Vegas. I got over it and was laughed at but my little moment of panic was amusing. After all, my battleships are my stuff and I will soon be returning back to the game and my stuff there. I have a list of topics to (maybe) write about now that things are back to normal. As I skimmed the edges of crowds and talked to people or just ease dropped on conversations I saw a lot of fascinating interaction. I met a lot of different in game cultures. Some that I cannot understand. I was also presented with the complex and unanswered question of "What is a pirate?" and "What is low sec." It is easy for me, and I often do, fall into the comfortable mold that Eve is what you make on it. Each person will play the same game...

Yes, Eve Vegas is worth it. Even for quiet wall flowers like myself. The last thing I did was check to see what the plans are for next year. The same time frame of the third week of October is already on the table. Hotels are not yet decided but he hopes to have stuff up by January. If you want to come and didn't come, do some planning. Come if you can. It is a lot of fun and worth the time. Mark726 and the NASA speaker (I have to figure out what his name) were both amazing presentations today. CCP Rise did a PvP thing but he used poker to relate to PvP. I have no idea about poker or any card game. The topic went over my head. I sat in on the Community Round Table and did some of the UI Round Table. I then secured an extra battleship to send to a corpmate and chatted with Zapawork over next years plans. Although I am in Vegas until Wednesday, I'll be returning the blog to its regularly scheduled, less desert focused, schedule. If I have something to write about. I'd l...

Today, up and down to lunch with my husband before I abandoned him to do more Eve stuff. Mark726 started off with a fantastic presentation about Eve's Lore. He has written a major lore guide that players follow. I'm using it for my fiction contest entries. His presentation is very interesting and he is a good speaker with a lot of passion about what he is doing. The Gentleman from NASA was spectacular and if you enjoy a good science program watch him. Off I went to the Community Round Table with CCP Guard, CCP Saberwing and CCP Gargant. They really wanted to talk about the community. However, players will wander off topic and have to be dragged back on topic. It was funny at the start even if it was busy at the end. Guard started off with a bit of a chat about: How they want to work on giving Fansites more support. They want to give Fan projects more support. They have been doing traditional support for years now but they want to open that up to things that do not fall un...

I will leave this here. The following post is my fleshing out an idea I presented at the Community Round Table at Fanfest to CCP Saberwing. I am still writing a summary of that and the UI round table chats and will have that up later tonight. A question that Saberwing, who is the Dust head community manager, asked was what does the Dust community want from their community team? For the most part there was silence. After all, this was a room of Eve players. They had been bombarding them with "things we want" questions and the topic was having a hard time staying on community focused events. I am terrible about interrupting. At one point Guard said,  "I'm a terrible moderator" as I waited for a turn. I could have spoken up but, meh, its not my thing in most forums. Plus, I was taking notes. However, this particular thing struck a cord with me and I had one of those moments when something is very obvious but it seems that no one else notices it. For anyone ...

I am in general bad at wandering. After my lunch I went back and and sat through some presentations waiting for the Keynote at 1600. It was presented by David Reid who is also CCP Pokethulhu (hope I got that right). The Keynote I am sure will be available on YouTube so I won't wander into details. It was a vague murmur of a possible future with a lot of hope. Like the CCP Seagull thing at Fanfest but better done. CCP is trying to sell the player base on the idea of a far reaching goal that will span several years of development instead of six month spurts. The general goal is consistency within the Eve universe as they integrate Dust and Valkyrie into it and even maybe more stuff in the future. The door isn't closed on the Captains Quarters but that is not their direction. It is just another way to cleanly link the various things together. The most interesting bit to me was the note of "Death is a serious Concept" (I may be misquoting it a bit) which was the fir...

First of all CCP is streaming everything on their twitch stream. It looks a bit more chaotic there because they are able to switch between their two rooms to do interviews with their own developers during the down time between talks. I am sure that it will eventually go up on YouTube. Right now I am taking a lunch break and getting caught up with my words. I was up early, put myself together and went to meet Hong for breakfast. There is a Cafe right in the convention hall area. It was interesting to watch the wave of people start to arrive super early. Around 0900 when registration started we meandered down only to find lines and the organizers laughing at the massive early morning turnout. I felt like a slacker. In line we got our choice of a Tempest or an Apocalypse. Then the pass and a core came in. I don't know what is in the code. I'll check tonight. I know it is at least the Eve Vegas shirt which had some fucked up looking spaceship on it that I'm told is the Ga...