Low Sec Lifestyle

Next weekend there is a local gathering in falls Church VA for any who wish to attend . I will have goodies and some gifts striaght from Iceland. All players are welcome. I'm prepping for said event since I have things to give out. How I will give them out for fairness is always a concern of mine. I've come up with a method that I think will be fair and amusing and not overly complicated. I never know how many people will show up. Because I am a planner I will have backup stuff that I don't plan to give out but will have in case numbers are more than expected. I don't expect many people. My goal is normally one. That is an accomplishment for me. After all, I don't do parties and hanging out. It means that I have no way to judge this. And then there is publication. I'm bad at it. I'm uncomfortable with it. I feel annoying when I do it as if I am bothering and offending everyone around me. When do I start tweeting? Do I post channel things? Do I mail peopl...

I think that I will make January the first month since I started PvPing that I will not kill anything. I find it very interesting to do. It is a bit of rebellion that means nothing to anyone but myself. I've spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder trying to be productive by various standards that are not my own. There are a few reasons for it. One is that I am busy and the time needed to go out on a fleet is not time that I have at the moment. In a way, my time is ticking down. The new CSM comes into office in under two months. I need to finish some things up because there is always the chance that I will not be reelected. Then, there is the fact that I had the winter summit last week. Much of my time was spent prepping, travelling, and then doing. All in all, January has been a very busy Eve month. I feel a bit guilty and a bit rebellious. Silly emotions but ones that are there. But, I'm tired and distracted and PvP has never relaxed me. It just wears me out and that ...

[ TL;DR: I like Sci Fi and don't know why Eve is broken for girls. ]

I logged into Eve Mentat and received a notification that it had been 11 days since I last updated it. Eep. I logged in my Jita alt and my cyno alts and got my jump freighter out of low sec and into high sec to stage. Next, I leaned over and peeped into the corporate wallet to find seven billion ISK sitting in there. Not bad, not bad. Seven billion worth of stuff sold over the last eleven days. I've been draining that wallet dry. The good news is that both small Scorch and Dragoons were on this list. That decreases my massive small Scorch typoed to years ago pile further and takes the next step in sending my accidental Dragoon army out to battle. It means a lot of jumps and a lot of contracting. It is good activity for someone as tired as I am today and gives me a head start on gearing my activity levels back up. I wound up failing at this. I was to damn tired. I started the task around 0900 and at 2100 I was just doing my first cyno jump. I'd been moving like molasses all ...

Airplanes are good for watching bad movies. Robots was terrible. However I was glad to be watching it. After almost five hours of delays due to weather I was pathetically glad to be headed home.  I woke up early on Sunday so that I could have breakfast with Corbexx who had to leave at 0930. We hung around and drank tea and talked until nine when he went to collect his things and I went back to my room. I had packed the previous night. I put those last things away, like a brush, and set everything together to go leave my room. It was 0930 and I didn't have to leave until noon so I did the reasonable thing and went and had a nap until just after 1100. My body clock has not adjusted fully and I spent a lot of time very, very tired. With noon approaching and a late fee on the horizon, I gathered my stuff and went down to check out. This is an area where I struggle in Europe. I wait to be noticed and called to the desk so person after person just steps in front of me and catches the...

The week has been a busy one and an interesting one. The Winter Summit sessions were held this week and a few dev blogs of interest have also been released. The Summit has been long days and short nights but it was productive and the minutes have been released. Day One Day Two Day Three Day Four These are the minutes. There are no secondary set of minutes coming out.  It means we will be answering a lot of questions and fleshing out conversations that are condensed. Please remember that remote attendees did participate but their participation may not be equally represented because they mostly typed into the group chat vs spoke. The ship skin dev blog was released and it discusses the future of ship skins. Someone mailed the CSM to express that they are displeased with the plans for skinning ships due to valuable, collectors ships. I think that topic was immediately raised by several people. The need to keep unique, rare, collectible hulls and their history intact is a top...

Photo Album is updated. Everything caught up to me and I missed out on writing about Friday because I got back to my room at 0330 and I was exhausted. Day Three minutes. Day Four minutes. On Thursday night, Corbexx and I headed back early. We were tired and there was still another day of the Summit to go. I was a pile of nerves about having done my low session. The two of us had a nice dinner at a steakhouse that I enjoy and decided that we needed an early night. We both failed at going to bed early after working on Eve stuff and going back over minutes. I wound up working on sessions until midnight when I decided that I was to damn tired to be productive anymore. Back up at seven and down to breakfast at seven thirty where I met up with Corbexx. We then headed into the office for nine although we didn't start stuff till later. That hour was good for going over the minutes again and comparing our notes from the previous day. My low sec session stresses me out. How did I ...

It is early in the evening, just after 2100. I'm about to make some tea once my laptop charges a bit. The power in the room is keyed to the key-card which goes in a slot by the door. So, power is off when I am gone during the day. I'm in my pajamas and I decided that I was not going out. Today is day three of four and tomorrow is our group dinner with CCP which will be a long evening. I am quite tired. Yesterday's minutes have been released . The move from three days to four was good. We've pushed many sessions over time. We still have several more to go and long ones today. I started with the low sec session so I dumped all of my energy into the morning. I was up on time and down to have breakfast with corbexx by 0730. We got to CCP's office early and then sat down and did another review of the minutes. The new format does not catch how long conversations can be. That means less for people to read but it makes some sessions short. But more on that later. I ...

I woke up late. I woke up and realized that my alarm had not woken me up. I could not help but curse and check my clock to see that it was eight twenty and I needed to be at the office at nine. I'm glad I prepare everything and shower in the evenings. I rolled out,dressed, and made it out of the door by 0835 to make it to the office five minutes to nine. We hit the ground running and I talked a lot. I feel as if I don't shut up sometimes and I'm not used to talking like that. However, it is why I am here, so I bite down my discomfort and just charge ahead and hope for the best. We are pushing every session to the max and sometimes over the edge of time. It seems that the questions and thoughts just bubble up and up and up. Our new combined access should be good to help fill in some of the gaps after this. I've been writing a lot of notes to help me fill in bits and pieces after things. I was also super hungry at lunch and happily gorged after missing breakfast. It w...

I've been rolling an idea about in my head for a bit for, scary enough, faction warfare. In my information gathering over the past few months I've picked up a lot of the same issues across various factions. I've also listened to hops and dreams, frustration and dejection, and some very honest and open commentary on why things are needed in some ways. I had an idea slam into me the other week. I was responding to a question and writing up my low sec thoughts and everything coalesced at once to create an over arcing image that I will try to explain. I try to avoid having ideas but sometimes they happen and then I offer them up to others. It started with a mail that reminded me that PvPers would like to be paid for killing people. Faction Warfare currently does this. But, truly, being paid to kill and only kill is a dream that many have. Some people have this. Ship replacement programs or ship replacement programs that pay above and beyond the cost of the ship recreate thi...

Photo Album Today started early. I set my alarm for seven but I was awake by six. That turned out to be useful because I wound up in a conversation with someone about PLEX prices and the economy. I walked away with a stack of things to discuss and think about PLEX prices. It was a good start to the day and I met Sion and Corbexx at breakfast. We had planned to go down there about 0730 but we all arrived right around 0700. As we went outside I realized that I lost my hat. I don't know what I did with it but the poor thing is gone. Quite sad. This trip has been harder to adjust to then before. With the darkness it feels like one and two in the morning. But, it was a balmy pitch black with no sun or stars to get us started with the day. We made our way to the CCP offices across black ice and frozen sidewalks. It was not as cold as the previous day without the rain and winds. We made good time and finished off breakfast with CCP as they celebrated bacon and eggs as a hot breakfas...

Photo Album I woke up around 0600, an hour before my alarm was due to go off. I sighed because I had woken up a few other times during the night. However, I just cuddled into my mound of down duvets and wound up in a discussion on twitter about some points to make for the summit. Once up I wandered down to breakfast as it opened and chatted with Sion and Corbexx for a few hours before we made the walk to CCP's office to pick up our badges and have a photo taken so that people know who we are as we wander about the building. It was raining. A nice steady rain with wind behind it. Also the sidewalks are covered in ice and as we left the city center and headed towards CCP's office the ice just got thicker. It turned into a regular balance case as we slid across sidewalks, down little inclines, found dirt and snow to walk in, and tried not to get knocked sideways by the wind gusts or the rain smacking into you like pellets. It was pretty cool stuff I have to say and a few times...

I worry for the future of this trip. Do you believe in ill omens? It started with my nails.

 Last week I managed to forget to add in two things. One has been some tweets made by CCP Quant. He has made some graph porn to show the damage by ship and weapon groups in game . It is a very interesting bit of data. This type of information is utterly fascinating and engaging to Eve players and it is an area I would like CCP to continue to share with the community. The second was that CCP Sharq started a discussion about improving the fitting window . I have a list of fitting questions that have accumulated over the last few months that I will bring to the summit. I suggest participation in this thread so that the developers who have asked for the information, hear it. A few questions have popped up about the collectors edition with the new year and christmas presents being opened. To point at dev posts, there is one by CCP Falcon about the future of the mystery code from the collectors edition . “Going forward, the Community Team will be dealing with the mystery code an...

In three hours from the time that I start this post, I am off to the Winter Summit. I've spent the last few weeks planning and the last three days in a frantic frenzy of last minute plans and actions. I am also painting my nails. My book is done. I need to add tabs but I can do that at the airport or on the plane. I've packed. I have warm clothing. I've tamed my hair to something acceptable for the public. My nails won't dry due to the house being something similar to the interior of the refrigerator and that has me oddly fustrated. On Eve side, I've managed to get my last Archon into build. I didn't restock TCS but I ran out of time for today. I always have a weird excited apprehension when I travel for Eve. I'm excited. I'm also going to meet people that I have not met before. I've met Sion, Corbexx, Ali, and Xander before. Core and Progod will be new. It is not that I expect anything to happen. It is simply the act of meeting new people i...

I had a cat named Qwill. He was my first cat and I lost him much to soon. I never doubted that Qwill loved me. People often call cats aloof and not affectionate. Qwill was aloof but he is what I considered companionably aloof. "I'll love you from over there." You see, Qwill would cuddle but it would be short and he'd then set himself a few feet away. One might think he was off doing his own thing. Yet, if I left the room he followed. He was at the door when I came home. He'd sit on the sink when I took a bath. He'd come hang out in the rain when I got home from work and in the evening, he'd come and kneed me as I fell asleep and once I was sleep he'd slip away to lay on the other side of the room. But, he'd not leave the room. He was not a stupid cat. He knew how to open containers and use levers. We had to get a twisting, vacuumed sealed container to keep him out of the pet food. He could open doors and we once watched him pull a stack of containe...

Idle thoughts on a busy night... Strategics decisions are important when deploying assets. My POS for instance is in the same system as my corporation's home station. Because it is a usage POS instead of a money making POS, its location in my home system where it can be defended to our best advantage is a sensible one. What wandered through my mind however was wondering about the interaction that players have with other's when it comes to ransoms, defending assets, or working together. A request for blue status can often be met with a ridiculous price tag. It is understandable from a corporation that does not have blues, a regular thing in low security space. But, that type of price tag is often extended to everything. Some of it is the mixture of not wanting to deal with people. The high price tag causes them to not bother with you.  But often, it is a real number. A number that is rather high when one looks at what the person would be making if the deal was made. I...

It is Wednesday. I leave on Saturday afternoon and I'm becoming a little puttering mess to make sure I have what I need. Bags are packed. Documents are written. Blueprints are making copies. Archon hulls are cooking. I take my laptop when I travel. I For Eve related things I site down and write about my day. I'm around and available but not at the same level as if I was at home in my normal time zone doing things. But Eve does not stop just because we are silly enough to walk away from our normal schedule for a while and it can be a challenge to plan for it. I have a blueprint copying mill going. The blueprints copy over 2-3 days and I pick them up on my days off and set a new set to copy. However, I realized that copying and running the across space and jumping them are the last things that I will want to do as I travel. I decided to be generous and put my next runs in with enough time to consume two weeks, allowing them to finish on my next day off after I return home. Th...

"Sugar, when are you going to push for bombs in low sec? I want to bomb things." "Never." Such was a piece of my talk over the weekend. All space is not created identically with all other pieces of space. Ideally, we want them to be different so that we have different places to go. Fantasy games will have forests and rivers and oceans and hell and heaven and chocolate factories. Eve has different types of space. I had this argument several times this weekend. The four (and a half) types of space that we currently have all work together. They have their pros and their cons, giving players choices and distinct features that they do or do not enjoy. When you live and fly and have had your experience in playing Eve matters. Not because one is better than the other but because they are all different and those differences will dictate your game view. I once spent a lot of time bristling and growling when people bad mouthed low sec. How dare they call it a kiddy poo...

It is time for pondering. I'm finishing my Summit prep work. I ponder of my Eve life is empty of exciting adventures or if I've lost the ability to see what is going on. The true problem is that I struggle with the feeling of being boring to other people. It is one of the side effects of writing and knowing that people read my meandering thoughts at times. This same thing happened in September. Everything narrows down into information gathering and consumption and reproduction in a nice, neat package. Toss in the elections and I've spent more time writing then normal but it is not stuff for this blog. I've had verbal and written interview stuff to do. I've finished one and have another, largish one to come. I've gone through my mail, and comments, and discussions. I've had my monthly talk which, as always, is an absolute birthing ground for ideas, needs, problems, and concerns. The side effect is that I will probably spend more time thinking than doing e...

On Tuesday, Proteus will be released. It is the quickest and smallest release since the new cadence started. CCP Seagull’s dev blog from December 19th, 2014 covers the features. An In Development video starring CCP Rise goes over the various points of the release. The patch notes for Proteus have also been updated. It was noticed that fighters had been changed on the test server. I urged CCP Fozzie to share the exact reasons for the change because there was confusion about what and why. This was not about the current debate over fighter assist. CCP Fozzie said: "The primary goal of this change is to ensure that rapidly scooping and relaunching fighters and fighter bombers never gives a dps advantage. This practice has not been widespread thus far, but any possible advantage gained this way would both provide imbalanced DPS and cause significant server load so we want to nip it in the bud." For those that have been involved in discussions about the current use of assi...

The module fairy flies out of his Nebula and into the hangars of capsuleers all over Eve. There he delivers random things that they need but not enough to fit a ship in any reasonable way. In a burst of capacitor dust he appears and leaves some meta 3 rocket launchers and a pile of depleted uranium beside the Atron with 1% left to its hull structure and no repair facilities, with a few dusty inertia stabilizers for good luck. With his duties done, the module fairy opens a jump portal and without fatigue or limitations heads off to his next delivery to a needy Tengu that he has the perfect set of torpedoes for... A very common question I receive is, "Sugar do you go to people to get your goods for your market?" I often respond to this question by saying, "I wish that I did. I've tried and it rarely works out." It is a common enough question that although I have addressed it before, I will touch upon it again. I believe that Eve was originally sculpted aroun...

I often have days in game that are busy and full of things to do but I suspect, boring. I like them. I'm not an adrenaline junky. I don't play Eve to get a hit or a fix of excitement. Exciting things happen and that unpredictability is one of the appealing things. Today, I finished sorting through my eve-mail. I then started going through blog comments and picking things out of my weekly CSM posts. I assembled stories that people have given me into another document. Somewhere in between that I turned over a Capital build. But that part went slowly because it actually takes quite a bit of time for me to gather everything together for such things. I play Eve in an oddly focused, careless fashion. I have projects and I love working on them and keeping myself busy. But, I don't ever seek the optimal path or do things by the known best way. Over the years that I have been playing, I've learned that the fastest way to chase myself away from a situation is to try to do thi...

I'm sitting in chat and Tikktokktokk asked a damn good question. Tikktokk Tokkzikk > Could you ask CCP to add a pink colortag and background for newbros on the overview? Tikktokk Tokkzikk > Toggleable, of course. Sugar Kyle > pink? Tikktokk Tokkzikk > Pink is a fitting color for newbros, no? :p Sugar Kyle > why? Sugar Kyle > because its a boy color? Tikktokk Tokkzikk > No, it's a cute color. Tikktokk Tokkzikk > I think it's cute.  Like newbros. Tikktokk Tokkzikk > Also all other colors are taken. And so began our discussion into what each color of the overview is used for. It also was a discussion with several other questions. Is this something players want? In Eve you can make an effort to kill anyone you can get your weapons systems on. It is one of the core features of the game. Often times when newer players are killed they are upset. Why did they attack a new player? We do not have levels but we can see ages. Only, when out mo...

The results for the Pod and Planet Contest came in. To my surprise, I placed second in the lore category. I'm very happy. I'm not surprised in that, "I really wanted to win first and am writing the proper things because that is how society wishes me to conduct myself in public instead of going on about how I should have won," type of way. I am surprised that I placed at all. The story that I wrote was not exciting. It did not have a twist. I did not write the story to win. I wrote the story to write it and share a view of the game world. What I wrote was a moment in the flow of New Eden that I envisioned the day that I read the Dev Blog for teams.  I like stories and world building. I do not read suspense or horror. I'm more prone to drift into multiple book sagas and high fiction.  Heinlein fascinates me for the dialog of the characters. I hope to one day have that much control over the page and temperament of the story. That deep dive into the thoughts and ...