Low Sec Lifestyle

Hyperion Launched and it came with a huge overview bug. I came home from work and just decided not to log in for the day. My overviews are not great but I didn't feel like dealing with the fix to get them to save so I had a skip day. The shareable overview was not everyone's hopes and dreams. There have been some updates to the thread  with more advanced features to be used. I advise the overview feedback be placed here. The release also came with a bug that made the fins on the Thrasher and Cyclone vanish. This caused people to think that CCP had cut off Minmatar frills again without thinking about how players would react. However, it was fixed as CCP Sledgehammer announced . The wormhole changes are in a state of incredible flux right now. Corbexx has reported that many groups have left. People have started commenting on the changes already. We had our Sprint Review and keeping track of these changes and the effects they are having on wormholes, their populations, and t

One day, long ago, I purchased Demon Eyeball on a whim. I quickly realized that my frigate skills were not up to par to use him and I put him away. During that time I was musing trying more expensive things. I had been in a position where I did not feel that my skills and abilities justified modules on my ship more expensive than the hull. My Jaguar's set me back enough. Still. I knew that one day I'd grow up and fly fancy things. Somewhere along the line that changed. Some was my improved finical stability where I knew that I could easily replace an expensive loss even if I would not enjoy it. Perhaps I have managed to grasp more do  to my play. Or maybe I stopped worrying about justifying my losses to others. The Machariel is one of my love interests in Eve. I so fondly remember my early days with Lue in his Machariel and Chimera doing level five missions as I salvaged during the early morning hours when I had gotten in from my midnight shift. Back when torpedo l

Sometime in the last week www.evevegas2.com has turned into vegas.eveonline.com . A little digging around on the site brought up the FAQ where it says: Is EVE Vegas supposed to be Fanfest USA? No. EVE Vegas is a different event in another part of the world, established by EVE players who still make up large part of presentations. The event has enjoyed support from CCP Games throughout the years and is now run and managed by the company, with the programming being conducted in close cooperation with EVE players. This was a surprise. Eve Vegas is a player run event started by Zapawork. I first attended in 2012 where we had six developers that we had to fly in to do presentation. There was a good turn out of around a hundred and seventy people or so (I think). This was followed in 2013 by Eve Vegas growing. Almost three hundred people went and CCP sent an entire Developer team to do tournaments, streaming, Valkyrie demos and give our goodies and toys. It was a lot of fun and much m

I will admit that the concept of spying and intrigue was one of the many things that drew me to Eve. It was not until I started to play that I discovered that I had no stomach for what seemed to be a very romantic idea. I like people. I've met very few people that I'd wish to never have known existed and for those, they are normally surrounded by a group of incredible people. At the end of the day I found other ways to keep myself occupied. That does not mean I do not love the idea. The social interactions of Eve are amazing. I understand how people can spy. I have a deep loyalty to some people in the game. As I've moved around and gameplay has changed I've developed a core of people who I'd never want to betray.  Betrayal and Honor are interesting concepts in Eve. I consider myself honorable due to my loyalty to my friends and that I keep my promises. I consider betrayal harming someone that one considers a friend. Other's define honor by the style in w

Over the weekend I was able to attend a few PvP ops. One was third/fourth/sixteenth partying into a faction warfare takeover of a system. It was a scheduled fleet and I do love scheduled fleets. I died for such is life. A few minutes later someone paraded my loss mail in front of me in a chat room. My response was, "Yes?" Kaeda commented yesterday : "Because nobody ridicules losses in Minecraft & Space Engineers. It doesn't have the ultra toxic culture of losses being a shameful thing that dishonours your space family and is a blemish that can never be forgotten about. Loss is one thing. Being made to feel terrible just because you lost something is far far worse." It was a simple and lovely comment for its truth. In Eve, we do teach people that losing things is bad. "But, what about going and losing 50 frigates until you somehow learn by random osmosis?" you may ask. That is true and few people will berate someone for learning but they will

TL;DR: How do we communicate what we understand but cannot define?

This is a short post for a long week. On Tuesday, Hyperion will arrive. I’ve spent the last several weeks going over the basics. I advise everyone to read the patch notes for details as to what is happening on Tuesday. The Burner Missions are on Sisi . Yes, they were released very late. However, testing has been hot and heavy on them and tweaks have been happening to adjust the strength. There should be a patch going in today that will be their released state. To sum up the dev posts from the test server feedback: CCP Fozzie has said that they will continue to adjust them as needed. The rewards are not correct on SiSi due to how the mission system works. He has also been able to solo them in a T2 frigate with T2 modules. They do not need a fleet to kill but yes, they are very hard and require a lot of thought into fitting. That is the point. The incursion changes are also live on Sisi and seem to be going well. The incursion community has been fantastic about testing and giving

"Sugar, you are so serious!" I've been accused of said seriousness a few times in the last week. It is a true thing. I am serious. I take questions serious. I take promises seriously. I play serious internet spaceships, what can I say? I'm a pretty serious person. I am also a very tired person. I realized that my mind was a bit empty of what I'd consider interesting enough topics to write about. I've spent the bulk of the week very focused and engaged. I'm a little low in the ways of energy. It is something that I find amusing. I'm to tired of think of new things. I'm still processing to many other things in the back of my mind. I pull my writing from my day to day experiences. When ones week is consumed by only one thing that tends to limit everything else. Somewhere under there, what else have I been doing? I know I was busy but was I productively busy? Does it matter? Probably not. Mostly, now, I'm curled up and unwinding. In other,

In the end I took down my office in Bosena. It was a mix of disappointment and relief. While I learned a lot about cost savings and becoming more mentally flexible in my logistics while trying to circumvent the office ISK problem, it was nice not to just pour over a hundred million ISK out the window every month as well. I know that my logistics problem didn't make sense to some. Why not raise my prices? Why not ship this way or that? I think some of the confusion simple comes from the fact that my market is a major piece of my game but it is not my entire game. In many ways I have no single thing that I do for my game of Eve. Because my market is a piece, I must slot it in as I can depending on other priorities. I've also learned that I can handle two markets. My abilities and understanding as to what I want to do with a market now is better. I can now paint the entire picture, not just the outline. The success of Bosena means that I can stock it about twice a week. Normal

Last night I joked that I'd wake up and check to see if there was an early morning meeting for the CSM reference Somer. It turns out that it was not a joke. I woke up at six and was pinged with a meeting invite to meet with CCP and the VP of Sales over the e-mails that have been released and to where the entire topic sits today. We ended our meeting so that they could go have more meetings over this, meet with legal, and make decisions. CCP Falcon will start responding to the thread. I said yesterday that this entire thing spells out RMT to me. My opinion is that it looks like money laundering . Money laundering is commonly defined as occurring in three steps: the first step involves introducing cash into the financial system by some means ("placement"); the second involves carrying out complex financial transactions to camouflage the illegal source ("layering"); and the final step entails acquiring wealth generated from the transactions of the illici

@Sugar_Kyle If you have some time, could you please read this? http://t.co/EHWOmqWkGW Interested in your thoughts. :) Thanks! — Sakaane Eionell (@Sakaane) August 17, 2014 Of course. Here you go.

Quick preliminary meeting on the somer thing concluded, thanks @CCP_Falcon and @ccp_leeloo #tweetfleet #csm9 #morecoffeeforcsm — Ellen McManis (@ali_of_space) August 18, 2014 Not everyone uses Twitter. CSM9 had an early morning (USTZ) prelimiary meeting with CCP Leeloo and CCP Falcon over Somer Blink's new program. Stay tuned. Update: We have spent the day talking with CCP. It has been back and forth and back and forth. I realized that I didn't put my personal opinion up here earlier so here it is: I don't like this. I don't feel that it is okay. I also really, really want to know what is going on and get this stuff hammered out so that it is not happening over and over again. I find the rules clear but it seems that I lack a particular type of creativity for this. Several of us have asked questions in the thread of CCP Falcon. We've repeated the concerns that have been expressed to us. And we'll keep this going. CCP Falcon released a statement he

On Monday, CCP Seagull was kind enough to post a Coming Soon in Hyperion Dev Blog and release some of the changes coming. They also had a little live twitch feed to go over some of the features and discuss it with various developers. FIrst is a change that was dropped as a teaser by another CSM member some weeks ago. It instantly caused fear in some members of the wormhole community that CCP was changing PI (Planetary interaction) on them. In fact, CCP is simply removing a restriction where you currently cannot drop PI Command Centers in Sov unless you belong to the alliance that owns the system. This was a request by the null sec CSM members. I did not even know there was that restriction on null sec PI when it comes to who dropped command centers. Now, it will be the same everywhere. CCP MasterPlan let out the fact that he has been working on making signatures persistent after downtime on Twitter.  Most people were happy but I found one complaint that now new signatures will be

Just in case you don't read the forums: Corbexx is running a Wormhole Town Hall on August 16th (today) at 2200 UTC (eve time). It is to discuss the wormhole changes and wormholes in general. CCP Fozzie will be there.

There have been a lot of changes in my little Eve world. I undock to dark, velvety blue-black space under an orange star. I cannot pronounce the system names. Somewhere along the way my processing gives out and random garbled sounds flow for a bit before stopping. Things are the same, but different. Random people come through spamming contract ads and ISK doubling. I'm greeted by people and sometimes engage in local conversations with names I have never before met. Change. It can be overwhelming. The desire to run back to the familiar sometimes surfaces. Other times, I start to act upon things I had loosely planned for the future that I no longer need to do. I no longer need a second deployment carrier. Which is a good thing because, T2 large rigs. The familiar is comfortable and I get somewhat homesick. After all, over two and a half years and most of that was in Molden Heath where I could fly to any system without thinking and had safes and bookmarks yards deep. An

Today, Snuff took out a shield fleet which, from comments and reactions it appears that it is an event close to the coming of the four horsemen for such a situation to happen. While everyone else was puzzled, or buzzing off into space at full speed in random directions enjoying the sweet taste of speed and agility, I felt at home. I know what to do in a shield ship. Or, for the most part. This wasn't a five man fleet situation. But, it felt good. It felt familiar. And maybe that is bad. I was reading a conversation the other day. Or, I was skimming a rant to be truthful. It was a familiar rant. Said person likes to get onto this particular soapbox and beat it like a dead horse. Anyway, it was a familiar rant about the place of certain types of ships, namely supers in low sec. It was one full of frustration and irritation. And "They don't belong here," was said about a particular group and their habits not meshing with the what they defined as 'low sec' com

I was excited. I logged in Haibisukasu and undocked her Reaper. Deftly she twisted in space as I aligned her towards the Heild gate and accelerated into warp. Haibi is not my most experienced pilot. It took a bit longer than normal for her Reaper to reach warp but it dropped out of warp space onto the Heild gate. Gates need much less skill. A few commands and she was through and accelerating towards the Pator Tech School in Heild that sits on Moon 1 of Planet X. The cause for this excitement was that Haibi could now plug in Cynosural Field Theory. It was the culmination of a few weeks of planning. Being a market alt, she had very few skills trained. Because of this, when I moved out of Molden Heath a few weeks ago I found myself up a creek without a cyno when it came to TCS. Like many pilots who spend their time in a capital ship rich environment, I have cynosural field theory trained on all of my active pilots. This allows anyone that I have logged in to light an emergency cynosur

This is going to be a very predictable post... but... One of my co-workers told me that they made an Eve account yesterday. I promptly lost my mind in hysterical joy and almost scared him away. He had been told by another co-worker that games (we're some of the only non-FPS gamers that we know of) that I played Eve so he should get in touch with me. He did and I about turned into a packet of Starburst (strawberry best, then orange). Of course, I was late home from work. It was not a big deal but you know it is going to happen on days when you have things to do in Eve. I staggered inside almost an hour late, got myself sorted, discovered the AC was broken again, took a cold shower and logged in. My co-worker had picked Gallente. I wasn't surprised. Gallente is very appealing and he is an experienced gamer and player of MMOs. However, will he like Eve? Well, he enjoys DayZ. He'll be fine. This is what we decided to do. He was on a normal 14 day trial. I told him that

Risk is a very popular buzzword in Eve these days. Often, it is pair with reward. I looked it up because I was arguing about the cloak microwardrive trick. I'm told that it is risk free because they escape the tackle or gatecamp. I disagree with it. Because someone successfully evades and escapes that does not mean they were not at risk. It does not mean that they do not take a risk. No where does 'risk' mean 'they automaticlly die to me when I do the pewpew at them'. And then I asked myself, "Do we even know what the word we are using means?" I asked myself that because we have reached the point of throwing it down and asking it to stand for itself and carry the weight of the conversation. I went and looked up the definition of RISK : possibility of loss or injury :  peril someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard to put (something) in a situation in which it could be lost, damaged, etc. to do something that could result in (someth

TL;DR: I was sent an Eve mail that made me debate where the boundaries are to others dictating what I may or may not do as a 'public' figure.

A Look at the History of Expansions Previous Entry: Revelations III It is December 11th, 2007. The next day, Eve Online: Trinity will be released. But before we get there take a moment to remember Steve, the first Titan who was destroyed on December 11th, 2007 only a few months after his birth. Eve Online: Trinity is released December 12th, 2007. While originally billed as Revelations III somewhere along the way the expansion picked up the name of its primary feature. The Trinity graphics engine that was giving Eve Online it's first visual update since its launch in 2003. However, the Trinity release was still the third part of the Revelations release arc with its war featured theme. With Trinity, we received advertised fleets that members could join instead of every member being invited one by one. Eve's battles had grown and what might work for a twenty man fleet quickly staggered under the weight of several hundred players going to battle. This is aided by corpse

This was wormhole week. First, Wormholes have some changes coming to them. CCP Fozzie wrote a dev blog that not only details the changes but details CCP’s view for wormholes. The purpose of this dev blog is to explain to the players how CCP feels about wormholes, in official words. Early in the week someone loaded up SiSi and discovered that the spawn range for ships had changed when they came out of a wormhole. This caused some questions, a lot of anger , and a threadnought . At the same time, there appeared to be changes in the polarization effect of wormholes . There was a lot of anger. I was told that people were going to unsub because CCP was changing wormholes and not engaging the community. Others said that because Corbexx is the only wormhole member terrible things were happening due to under representing. There was a lot of reaction and almost none of that reaction remembered that the CSM is under an NDA and we don’t get to discuss changes until CCP releases that infor

This isn't a battle report. It's just the story of my first Titan kill the first time I took my Revelation out. This is my first week as a member of Snuff Box. Back in the end of 2012 I decided to try to take down inactive high sec POS to steal the mods. I quickly discovered that this was incredibly boring. However, I had trained a set of perfect Oracle alts with T2 guns for this. A few months later, I decided to use this alt as a level 4 mission pilot. I trained her into Amarr Battleships and set her up to grind level 4 missions.  I never did that. I have a nice, T2 NaPoc all fit out for her to use. I had more fun doing exploration in low sec and just never convinced myself to go to high sec and grind missions. Sometime later, I started to train her into a Dreadnought so that I could help with the POCO and POS take downs for planning fights. She was a T2 laser user. The jump from T2 Iarge guns to capital lasers was simple. While I was at it, I  trained her into T

"What would I have become if I had followed a different path in Eve?" such was a question I asked about myself. I've had a lot of changes of late. Sometimes I wonder who and what I am. I am not the newbie that I was. I am not the bitter veteran that I may become. But, what would I have become if THC2 had not picked me up and taken me in? Who would I have been without the guidance of three, veteran pirates in a quiet low sec region who taught me how to play? There are always paths not taken. Sometimes we stumble onto the path as we thrash around in the forest. Other's have always been where they wanted to be. They lay their path before them. I might have stayed a loner with my bad fits and habit of not spending a lot of time searching for how to do things in the game. I understand those people who don't search for fits, duel tank, and have six types of guns on their ship. That would have been me. That was how I always played games and how I played Eve before

There have been many changes of late. Tonight, if I were to imagine my hangar, I'd walk down the line of my ships. I'd see the familiar, battered, well used hulls of my Jaguars, Sleipnirs, Omens, and Stabbers nestled in their docks. I'd pass my Stilettos and Ares, their paint worn and flaked away. I'd walk past those dim lights and the steady hum as they wait, ready for me to make my way to the end where a stack of new ships wait for me. They are my future. Unknown and untouched by time and familiarity. These vast battleships and heavily armored Ishtar. My crew would load massive projectiles and enormous, vibrant crystals. Drones would buzz around as systems checks organized and programmed them to their new homes. And I'd stand among them with my past and future tangled into one, confused thread. Kaeda and I were talking about how quickly you become rusty with PvP. I found myself nervous as I made my way home from work. I was excited. It has been a bit since