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Showing posts from June, 2014

An Unhappy Reevaluation

I think I've lost a battle that I was waging all alone, off to the side. Although I have my corporation and find a lot of my anchor in Eve many of my activities outside of PvP are done alone. They are things that I do simply because I wanted to do them. Others have been my way of justifying myself and making myself a valuable and useful person. This is a game where you can leverage your personal skills to make something for and of yourself. Being a mediocre pilot and lacking the talents of those around me when it comes to fighting and flying solo, I've struck out on a path to still bring something to the table. I've commented that I stopped selling boosters earlier this year. Someone else slipped into my market, undercut me, and started to stock. It happened before but never anything overly permanent. This time, whomever is filling the market is doing well. They are doing better than I am. I was changing out the last of my reactions the other day. I need to buy some

CSM9 - Day 56

Month two and summer is into full swing. That means it is quiet on the Skype and forum horizon. Not that we do not talk to each other and those members of CCP that are around. We had a meeting on Friday and I was well pleased that I was home to make it. I simply cannot call in from work and being there and listening to recordings are very different things. Most of my CSM duties right now are self made. My PvE little things project goes well. Other little things are being tossed my way too. I gather them all up and file them. We’ve moved a step closer to our CSM9 little things initiative. We are just under a month from Crius. In a way its detachment from Kronos really overshadowed what a large, game shaking expansion this is going to be. This is the industry expansion that Eve has been waiting for and I don’t think that is going to sink in until after it is released. I've been joining in random teaching sessions in high sec on my alt about the fact that industry and refining

A Broken Contract - Conclusion

The need for auditing is never clearer than when there is a mistake and you are the one on the short end of the stick and you are worried about things being a scam. Part two of today's adventure left me with a lot of communications and some missing items en-route. My little contract fiasco wound up with me invited to their freighter channel. These guys appear to be legitimate freighters. He said that he has been out of the game for eight months. He had grabbed my ships and sent one of his corpmates down from Jita to Teon with them. It meant another few hours so I went out again. When I came back I had a convo that the new contract was up and everything should be settled. I did another audit and I discovered that I was short three Comets. I didn't notice them the first time around. While a Comet is about 17 million ISK I wasn't going to let three of them just slip away into the void. I felt a bit bad. I should have noticed those Comets the first time around. However, I

A Broken Contract - Part Two

I am probably supposed to wait till tomorrow to continue these posts and stretch it out and such to build suspension and readership. However, that's never been my style. After I wrote A Broken Contract - Part One I went and ran errands. When I returned I discovered that my courier had finally answered my Eve Mail. Re: Mistake made From: Haibisukasu Sent: 2014.06.27 14:04 To: xxxx   There are 3 Stiletto, 2 Dramiel and 2 Taranis missing. ---------------------------------  Re: Re: Mistake made From: xxxx Sent: 2014.06.27 17:36 To: Haibisukasu,   Really? I'm so sorry I will go back and they to find it. I feel really bad about the mistake. --------------------------- Re: Re: Re: Mistake made From: Haibisukasu Sent: 2014.06.27 18:08 To: xxxx   The ships are going to be sitting in Teonusude still in your ship hangar. I advise you to cancel the contract and recreate it with the ships included. Make sure to check all the little boxes or just do it from the asset win

A Broken Contract - Part One

What a morning quandary I woke up to. Last night I decided to write some public contracts to move items for TCS. The middle week went well and I rolled about 1.2 billion worth of items in two and a half days. Pleased, I decided that I'd use the overnight hours and my occupied early morning hours to see how the public courier contract system might go. I also decided that I would write my contracts as I normally did but lower the reward a bit and see how that went. I kept them below a billion ISK. One was for about 920 million ISK of random TCS needs and the other was about 600 million ISK in hulls. It went well. Both contracts were picked up and delivered when I got up.  The contract that was just hulls was completed. The other contract had a mail waiting for me. Mistake made From: xxxx Sent: 2014.06.27 12:29 To: Haibisukasu,   Hi Haibisukasu, I accidently openned the wrong create as I was carrying another crate along with yours and accidently openned yours. I had to rp

A Look at the History of Expansions - Part Eleven

A Look at the History of Expansions - The Series Previous Post: Revelations in Pieces Spring is in the air and along with it comes to promise of Revelations II's launch in June. But, it is not yet June of 2007 and we have just worked our way out of a winter fraught with scandals that will follow Eve into its next decade. Eve has 160,000 subscribers . Faction Warfare is one of the big promises on the horizon but it has not yet been released. Eve Voice is active and still going through its release pains and a major mission overhaul and expansion is underway. There is a very interesting statistic tossed casually into this developers blog by CCP Oveur: We're also overhauling the top 70 mission encounters in the first Need for Speed agent initiative. It might not sound as much, but if you think that 1 encounter might have itself spawned 5000 times over a day, there's considerable "bang for the bucks" in making them more fun, challenging and perform better on th

A Day in Space

It started the night before when I found myself in an Ishtar in null sec. "That's why we fly Ishtars. We can't afford ammo," was Floyde's deadpan response when I was teasing (myself included) about our PvE. KD had asked if anyone wanted to do some Besieged sites and I had turned Vov down on a twisted wormhole journey to a 5/10 only to assist Floyde and Robinton on a 10/10 in null sec. The state of low sec has been good. All of the new exploration sites and wormholes are downright intoxicating. Where huge swaths of space would be empty and you'd jump into a system and sigh, now we're slamming face first into stuff. The corporation has started to use Siggy . These are wormhole mapping programs that we are now using to chart pathways using the increased k-space to k-space wormholes that were introduced with Kronos. This now means that four jumps can land you in a back end region halfway through Minmatar space to run a 5/10 complex instead of running the

3 Months of a 3% POCOpire

The idea of owning items in space is appealing. It helps us sink deeper into the world of Eve. In any game, owning stuff draws people in. There is something appealing about this place being my own, be it a system, a POS, or a POCO. Player Owned Customs Offices are one of those interesting items in Eve. It is easy to never deal with or interact with them at all. Yet, they are landscape features and bits of the terrain. They are warpable objects in space. They are sources of revenue. They are a reason for combat. My acquisition of a POCOpire was accidental. I started with Bosean simply because it was where I had Established the Cougar Store. Without banners, I thought that having the POCO labeled would be a mini advertisement for me. I could ‘own’ the system in a way. I had no idea if it would be worth owning but I decided to give it a try.

Pod Journal: Point

This has been floating around in my head for about two weeks. It is why I haven't drawn anything else. Now, hopefully, I can move on. It didn't turn out half bad.

The Corporate Individual

I was reading Serpentine Logic 's reddit response to my weekly summary where I discuss taxes. He says: "Taxes is a philosophical/organisational issue as well as a logistical one. Corp taxes makes it easier to administer a corporation from the top down, since it's a bottom up wealth transfer." I liked this response a lot. It made me go, "Ah. That's what is bothering me. What is a corporation in this game?" When the original subject of corporate taxes was broached to me as a CSM member I had to hold back my knee jerk reaction. My knee jerk reaction was, "No! How dare you tax me! I'm free! Freeeeeeeee! I'll participate because I want to!" However, my rebellion is not always well thought and the topic of corporate taxes was much larger than my little burst of independence. Also when discussing corporate taxes people go, "Ship Replacement". Now, as someone who has never had ship replace and does not desire ship replaceme

The Ore I Mine is Free

I noticed today that the price of Tritanium in Jita is just over 6 ISK a unit. Wow. When I started it was around two. Just in case I was having dreams of a past long remembered, I searched around and wandered upon Eve Market Data's price history graphs . With a few clicks I made it look as if I knew what I was doing. The last price spike for Trit was Odyssey. That made sense because the material requirements were changing on a lot of ships . People were building now to save money and hopefully make money, later. It also somewhat explains the crash. There was a huge backlog of ships. Prices for many T1 hulls were depressed for quite a while. I earned my first hundred million ISK mining my heart out in a poorly skilled retriever in Derelik . I never disliked mining. I quite enjoyed it. There was a time that I figured out how much ore I made per cycle. I did learn to do things that made more ISK and mining became a side project. I stopped it when ganking became a very p

Stuff Spread

I had to run Chella to Rens the other day. I was building things and Rens happened to have a particular piece at a very good price. When she got there, to my astonishment, there was an Orca sitting in my hangar. And, I found myself staring at this Orca. This Orca in my hangar. It was a while until my lips moved and I asked myself, "Where did this come from?" It turns out that I purchased that Orca in December. I did it as a favor to someone who needed ISK. I wanted another Orca for a project I was going to do over the winter. Instead, I ran for CSM and that project fell to the wayside and the Orca sat in its hangar under a dust cover until I stumbled upon it again. My asset list needs cleaning. I used to clean it regularly. But, sometime over the last year or so I've fallen out of the habit. I got more and more into PvP and I just dumped things in stations as I went. That stuff has accumulated and it is not as bad as many others, it is still much, much messier than

CSM9 - Day 49

This evening will be the first CSM9 Town Hall at 1900 GMT  today, the 22nd of June 2014. I believe about half of the CSM will be in attendance. I will be at work. With communication at the forefront of the post I will add that my next Open Q&A will be July 13th at 1500 and 2200 . I am also planning a local meet for August and one for September. It’s summer and that means CCP goes on vacation. That creates a change in the rhythm of things. With Crius a month away the dev team is working on getting it where it needs to be. For those on Sisi keep submitting bug reports. I don’t want something to get missed because you assume someone else has already reported it. Thank you everyone for the hard work. The feedback coming through has been fantastic. I’ve really climbed aboard the “split the build UI from the blueprint list UI train.” CCP going on vacation does not mean Eve grinds to a halt. There are several smaller scale projects that are being mapped out. I hope they are all feas

Ramblings: Crusades of Balance

This is a continuation of last nights thought. I was going to write something about absolute statements. I don't like them and try to avoid them. They are unproductive. People like to argue them just because they are there. But, I also feel that they tend to be incorrect. As someone who often refuses the labels others try to stick to me I try not to label others in absolutes. I'm sure that I fail. Instead, in another conversation I looked not at the absolute statements but at the reason the statements were being said. And, mixed with my pondering over the nature of Eve I started to think that the statements were themselves a side effect of the most touted aspect of Eve. The sandbox. This is the game where you step in and make what you want to happen happen. That very thing that is so amazing about Eve is frustrating. And it does not seem unreasonable for people to attempt to define the world around them because the virtual world is not defined. The problem is that we ca

A Non-Bitter Sip

I started to write an angry post. It was a result of my just logging off due to unending arguments. I was tired of absolute statements and people demanding that their way is the only one of reason. There are times when I wonder if people realize how ugly they make their own point. There are moments when it is easy to sink into the bitter, spiteful, vicious language and lose track of anything but pure negativity. Negativity is catching I've found. Thank god for chat logs, eh? I have two of them to remind me of sanity today. Things that happen because people decided not to reach down and find the biggest asshole that they could be and share that with the world. Instead they decided that hey, why not treat someone else decently just because they could. Refreshing stuff. I was contacted by one of my regular chatroom members about a market mistake. We discussed the market interface some. There are bad things in it there is no doubt. But, he discovered that he had made an error a

Ripples

I have a completely unsubstantiated theory about manufacturing and players. It may not be completely unsubstantiated but I do not have the abilities to gather the data. That turns everything into conjecture and thought based only by observations. Eve's layout was, for the most part randomly generated. Over the years connections have been added and taken away. But those are rather few. For the most part, Eve was thrown out and shaken to see where it settled. In many games you start at point A and move to point B. You move to C and off to D. With a spring you head to  E, hop to F, go back to D, look at G and start to wonder what is down around O and Y. But, rarely do you go back to A. As sandbox style games have evolved going back to areas becomes more common. You develop a base or home, a set of tasks and a place to go. You get places to leave your items and you head back there to resupply or store whatever goodies you have gathered. Eve in many way violates that. We have s

To Fit a Rorqual

Poor Buttered Scone. He has no clothes. Altaen asked if I was interested in expecting TCS into a free clothing service for locals. I told him, why yes, that was something I had been thinking about myself. On some type of small scale at least. The nature of Eve causes me to assume that someone will make an attempt to kill me if I do such a  thing casually. But that is a later task to figure out. For now I need to fit this beautiful monster and I wondered if I could convince someone else to make something amazing for me. Then I thought, well I could make it a thing and see if people wanted to make fits. This Rorqual needs new clothes. And if you do decide to make a fit and dress this Rorqual oh so nice, be so kind as to explain the method behind the madness. There is a lot to learn in a fitting discussion. Instead of the blogger telling the audience how they should fit a ship, I'm interested in the audience creating the fit instead. There are many, many ways to fit a shi

TCS: Office Woes

While not a problem that is native to a low sec market, my office fees are for the most part directly related to the The Cougar Store. I have two offices in Eve. One belongs to my alt that runs my POS. That office fee is around 30k ISK a month. I have a few million in the wallet that pays for the office and I ignore it from there. The reason I have an office is to use blueprints remotely. I may no longer need this office when the POS changes come and I can no longer use my blueprints remotely. It is Bosena where my office matters. I use an office to manage the supply of my store across multiple accounts in a similar fashion to using my wallet. I can hand off deliveries (for I deliver my own items) to whichever TCS Employee I have logged in. I then drop the items into the proper hangars (I split them for easy, visual inventory) and then each account can sell from the hangars. As one order fills I can log on another and keep going. This is how I have created a 'store' in E

Why oh Why?

"Why do you even play this game?" It is quite a large sentence to contain only seven short words. It can be answered in so many ways. It can be asked in even more. It can be an expression of disgust insult or a bright eyed quest for information. It may be one of the hardest questions to answer and one of the easiest ones to respond to. Dersen Lowery commented: I wonder about people who profess a complete detachment from everything in game. If you aren't creating memories and narratives and making associations, then what are you doing? No activity is more fundamentally human than that. I've often argued against Eve popular culture. My stubbornness caused me to embrace my own desires whenever what I did was questioned.   What is the point of having ISK if you do not spend it?  That is a question so often asked to me. I want it . That is my answer and I need no other reason. The same goes for why do I play this game. Because I want to. But that, in itself, is

Hangars Full of Memories

This is about something that I do very wrong in Eve. Susan black tweeted that she discovered a large rigged Falcon and it made me think of my special ships. I say special because people make sure that I know I'm to new to have anything that is old. But, for my short time in game, I have a collection of oddities with little, meaningful stories attached to them. The other day, I decided that I wanted to try out the Machariel and an XXL-Jaguar. I have a Machariel . I've had one since I was six months old. I purchased it from LR when he decided to give up battleships. I have never flown it. The Machariel was a dream ship for me for a long time and the acquisition of this one and my eventual flight would signify my adulthood. Or so I convinced myself. I decided a few days ago to ship it to high sec to retire as a hangar ornament and perhaps one day become a PvE boat. Some would ask why? The answer is simple enough. I like to collect spaceships to a certain extent. Just as I l

Crisis Management: Step One

The foundation kernel of my concept of help is a Crisis Management team. In truth, I need my own club concept for this. But for now, I will start small. I decided that I need resources. Whenever you contact a Crisis Hotline they have help for you. People to talk to, doctors to see, shelters to go to, emergency services to call. I decided, for now, as I work through creating and founding this idea to start there. I need to create a list of new player teaching corporations. Not a list of people who will take new players on. There are corporations in all areas of space that will take new or newer players and teach them the basics of the game. It is a pain knowing who these groups are. It means I'd have to put some energy into (or deputize some of my volunteers) to do some basic vetting. But, I don't think that'd be but so hard. I already have a handful of groups in mind, but I know there are more out there. It'd be a mix of bringing them to light and starting some ty

W to the D

"How will you save the world, Sugar?" "One thing at a time." It may be that I won't save the world. I'm not in the mood to deny myself the opportunity. War Decs are a topic that come up over and over again. The forums, the blogs, my campaign, my candidacy, in chats, in mails, war decs are a never ending topic. "War decs are broken, Sugar." I think war itself is broken, at least by the terms of civilized society. I've pondered in the past that the very term war has a deep, visceral meaning for us. To declare war on another group is more than saying, "Gonna come fight you!" No. You've planted your flag and said that this is war. This thing is war. This is the time when we come to end these things. I don't think war can be something that isn't broken in the end. It is formed of so many things and then you swirl a game with no ending and no beginning into it. "We need to fix them, Sugar." Maybe we just

Polar and Non-Polar Natures

I felt clever earlier today. I was thinking about the stories in and of Eve. It was a after echo of a thought left over from a discussion that was not quite an argument. It mixed with a topic I once thought to write but never finished and combined with some things that I've read of late. There are two stories in Eve. There are the player stories and the lore. There should be one story. The lore should be a pillar and the player population should wrap and weave around it. Supported by it and with it. Instead, the two are oil and water. Both liquids sitting in the same cup but they do not mix. In a world of dreams and wishes, I wish that Eve's story was not so much better developed, for it is a very good story, but more important. I've said it before but I'm in the mood to say it again. The odd thing is that I don't want to be a player in Eve's story. I want to be a player in Eve's universe and the story flow around me. It is like the villagers in Skyrim

Little Stories

There is something about being helpless that kicks another part of your survival instincts into gear. Life is different in a defenseless ship and I found myself scowling when I realized I could not log off due to my freighter being targeted. The Machariel bumped me and irritated, I started scanning space for an answer to my problem. Why, oh why, had I jumped out of my ascendancy set? Oh yes, someone was shooting my jump freighter and I needed to go get my Rorqual. Right. Damn it. However, I think my bumpers were just bumping to bump and maybe take time to get a really good cargo scan. I had three T2 bulkheads and 800 million in cargo. There are better ganks out there. I stopped worrying when I noticed I had aligned to war. The Machariel was busy bumping more than one freighter and I was at the keyboard even if autopiloting. What were my options beyond not autopiloting? Working with only defense is a challenge. I was scarmbling a webbing alt when I warped. I like to think that I w

CSM9 - Day 42

I would say that this week has been the first one that I would label as quiet. That does not mean we were not doing things. I just feel that I detached my phone from my hand a bit more than I have been. But I read a lot. Reading the invention conversations have been educational. But CSM stuff isn’t all about talking to CCP. On the outreach and communication front I feel that things have accelerated. I’m pleased. My talk with Eve Uni on Sunday went well. I received a lot of feedback and eve-mails and the occasional e-mail have been coming in. It is leaving me a lot of information to filter. Some I can present now, some will have to wait for other things to happen first. Some are hopes and others are dreams but all of it is valuable. It helps me form an image of what the players want and how they see things. I think I’ve also developed that player vs CSM balance. I’m still not out and about as I was, but I’m joining fleets again and doing my normal player stuff. On the flip side my c

Baggage

For the last week, in random places, I have been asking a question. What if kill rights never expired?  The idea came from Art Hornbie . I've been rolling it around in my head and listening to other people react to it for a few days now. Over time, I've read a lot of proposals about dealing with the bad people of Eve Online. A lot of them say that people who PvP should be cast out of high sec and never allowed to return after their first act of violence. Never ever, ever, ever, ever. Grr. I've never agreed with that. I might not have thought about the kill right thing as much if we were not post- crimewatch . But, we are. Kill rights used to be gained for sneezing wrong in empire. Now they are gained two ways. A criminal action in high security space and podding in low security space. Kill rights can be made public . Currently they expire in thirty days. At the end of the day that isn't a long time. One call to war, a few busy weeks IRL, and poof the kill right