Low Sec Lifestyle

I was asked earlier this week if the sov changes are really going to come in June and July. My answer was, "Hopefully." It was hopefully because the Icelandic Office Workers Union was voting to go on strike and a huge number of the employee's at CCP are a member of this union. If they went on strike, depending on how long they struck for, it could have done horrible things to the development plans. However, on Friday they announced that they have comet o a deal . This means that CCP's stuff will not have to strike and everyone gets to eat waffles. Then there was the launcher news article. It first came out saying that the exe file would no longer launch the game. This caused a lot of rage . There are several reasons for this. The launcher itself has constant problems for some players. It does not allow log ins and needs to be repaired. I had one of these earlier this year and had to do a full reinstall. It is also a very limited tool. Many players with multiple acco

My post counts have dropped a bit in recent weeks and I decided to address it because it is an easy subject on a day when I can barely string a thought together. Right now, I'm ill. I came home Thursday and couldn't put a coherent thought together. Friday, I spent the day sleeping through waves of fever. Today, I just woke up and I'm doped up on Dayquill. It is almost eighty(26c) in the house and I have goose bumps and sweatpants on. I'm rather irritated with being ill again. I came back from Fanfest with six weeks of misery and ate my weight in cough drops. The other reason has simply been that work has been busy and the CSM has been fairly active. I can't write about the CSM in a blow by blow fashion and I've been coming home from work tired or just late. I work 12 hours a day and I get up at 0500. I try to get to bed or at least be on the way to bed and taking a shower by 2200. Over the last few weeks I've been getting home one to two hours late. Th

Yesterday, I commented that I don't see Eve as a PvP game. Some people agree. Some disagree. Some have their own definitions. I do know that when I say things like that I worry some people who are deeply involved in PvP. Have I gone crazy? Will I rise up to cast down PvP? My own inactivity in recent months may fuel such worries. I've been approached more than once in public venues and interrogated as to why I have become, 'inactive' and no longer play the game. One of the most fascinating snide comments I have received in the last few months was being called a freedom fighter. Like napalm, I burst into flames and won't go out if I see someone making suggestions or attempting to walk across the individuality of another player. The reason I have embraced the idea of being a true neutral is because I strongly believe in personal choice and direction. This means for me and for others. If I try to force anything on people it is the ability to choose. I don't pa

There goes that plan. A quarter of a billion ISK for an office for TCS? Nope. Just no. Office prices get so insane. Wex had been politely prodding me and today I crawled out of bed after a forty hour work weekend and decided to start tackling what I have been avoiding. Moving. I figured that if I went chunk by disorganized chunk I could get it done. I'll start with TCS and my industry and maybe tack on a carrier jump just to get my assets moving. With my gameplan roughly fleshed out in the dark reaches of my mind I gathered together left over salad and cold fried chicken. Braced with a mug of dark, fragrant black tea I was ready to meet the day. Moving isn't pleasant. I have too much stuff. I recently sat down, looked at my assets, and started to par them down as I did my accounts. I was not selling things off but stacks, and stacks of hulls that I have not touched in what is going on years I dismantled and sent to storage. I also shut down alt accounts which had the sid

Monday had a structure meeting with Team Game of Drones. While we talk in Skype and have many comments in confluence meetings have also been requested for face time on details. I missed this one because like almost every meeting so far this term it has been on a work day. The one next week will also be on a work day. I get to review the video later. I can say that people are covering all the topics that are coming up. Cagali even alarm clocks for the meetings. Corbexx has also set up a soundboard for next Wednesday with CCP Nullarbor. A question from me: What Faction Warfare Warzone bonuses would people like to see on structures in this new system? Turamarth Elrandir pointed out on his blog that a lot of questions are answered in the dev posts of the structure blog. You may hate the forums but love the dev posts. In the middle of the controversy over SKINS there is the V5++ initiative. This is a technical blog from the art team which explains the current status of the visual

Many times over the last year, and I note with greater frequency, people have suggested NPCs fill in particular tasks in Eve. I, at first thought that this was a random and rare wish. Yet, I've seen it more and more from various places and for different reasons. It is not something I think that I would ever propose. It is not something that I think I want. Seeing it cropping up has left me to at least wish to talk about it. Perhaps it was the early exposure to missions that left me with the idea that the NPC empires 'hire' the players to do things and not the other way around. It just feels right. I swagger into their office like a bad ass and they thank me for coming and offer to pay me to help with their problem. This seemed to be the natural cycle to me. But the latest suggestion of Wex and Dire to have NPC escorts for freighters has left me pondering the topic. Not because I am in live with it. I'm not. It is more to find out if this is something people find com

Earlier this month I started the process of asset consolidation in high security space. It is the type of thing that I can do piecemeal and this has been a month for piecemeal projects. I tend to contract assets to two separate accounts. They both fly fully trained haulers which makes moving things easier. Things get sent to wherever I make my high security system 'home' base. Right now, that base is somewhat scattered. I decided to do some cleanup. I looked at my low sec assets and just pretended I didn't own any of that stuff and stuck to condensing high sec. Over a weekend I wrote about a dozen contracts to Red Frog. I've written about my attempts at using different hauling services. At the end of the day, I've tried Red Frog, PushX, and public services as well as a few starter groups that have gone defunct. I've stuck with Red Frog, especially when it comes to things that are a bit out of the main travel pathways. I've had one problem with Red Frog s

A Look at the History of Expansions Previous Entry: Incursion November 30th, 2010 CCP released Eve Online: Incursion. It was a partially completed expansion. The game mechanics the expansion was named after did not arrive with the expansion. The expansion page for Incursion is one of the most interesting that I have seen as it covers a very large expansion but it is released in several parts over several months. In the Incursion the release is full of what would be considered quality of life improvements. These are small changes to the game that have a large impact on the day to day mechanics the players work with. In the first section of the page the CSM is given credit for bringing several tools and improvements into the game. The release feels light. UI customization has been added. Faction ships are on the market. Visuals have been changed. The war against lag is being fought and the Noctis, a dedicated salvage ship enters the game. But even a quiet expansion can be very l

I sit in Faction Warfare space and watch the militias heckle each other. In between a neutral may comment. I read posts and listen to discussions as people yell insults at each other in local. I've watched gankers and miners exchange in high sec. The word propaganda has gained a sour taste for me due to the wars of information waged in null sec. I wonder if I am odd in that I do not find anyone to be my enemy. I do not love everyone. Oh no. I am not some creature of pure and sweet cored soul. I dislike my fare share of people in Eve but I have never felt that they were my enemy. I have never had the desire to go and 'get' them or in some way make their life hard. One of the most interesting things that I read early in my time in Eve was a post by Susan Black that I am to lazy to find in which she liked the walls that Faction Warfare gave the game. There was a bit of a reason to do the things you do. At that time I examined myself and discovered that I enjoyed doing thi

I had a dream on Sunday morning. It was not a nightmare. It was a stressmare. I was supposed to be at work but came home for something and wound up going through a portal to another city where work could not contact me. My communications equipment then died and I spent the entire time worried that they'd try to reach me and not be able to and I'd get in trouble. So stressful! Ugh. I woke up quite frazzled and crawled from the bed to start tea, check my garden (the Zucchini needed pollination) and logged in. Wex appeared and told me that we had solved the freighter problem. The freighter problem was that we use a freighter to move things from the station to the POS for the capitals. Components are huge. Mineral volumes are huge. We built the freighter in Sujarento  because it was cheaper then buying one on the market. It is also less of a risk then a jump freighter for those times when you forget to enter the POS password and find yourself sitting in the darkness waiting for

I've been commenting on the ongoing discussion on structures. The structure update development blog was released on Tuesday.  There is good. There is bad. There is change. If you go back to January of 2013 Two Step posted on the forums about his disagreement with CCP's perception of Player Owned Starbases and their need for attention. Two Step was a member of CSM7 at the time. It's been a long path to move from the threadnought created to looking at Team Game of Drones lay out a massive concept that will change how we do many things in the game. Two years and five months but we're here now. It hasn't been a smooth road and it still is not. I've sat down with a lot of people over the past year+ and asked what they wanted from structures. We've gotten CCP Nullarbor into  small soundboards. We've done surveys, filled out data sheets both internally and in public. We've written essays about this stuff and now we're starting to close in one the f

Snuff has changed its home system for a bit. Maybe forever. I'm not in leadership. That means moving. Ugh. So, I've kind of stalled out because of it. These days it takes me weeks to get settled and set up somewhere. POS, market orders, moving my things, new bookmarks, moving my alts, resetting up my cyno chains. Plus, I've condensed accounts and one of the inactive accounts as a primary cyno alt. That in itself is not a big deal. I can move another character to take over for her easily enough. Once I started managing my own capitals I started taking the month to train all of my characters into capable cyno ships. With my general play activity low, moving my stuff is not appealing. With having to move my stuff stocking and restocking isn't appealing. So, I've just gone into a bit of a pause because of it. I'll snap out of it at some point. Mostly, I need to do something a tad bit different then ship spin Sugar for a while. Today, I decided to be productive

In the last week I've received three mails asking me about starting up a market. I get excited when I get these mails and I do my best to share my thoughts and ideas with people. Getting three in a week is a bit more than usual. I decided to handle this by just writing a general update about my market ideas. I have a tendency to think, "I've written about that before," and I worry about rehashing. So, this may be a rehash. The main question is "What will I stock?" That seems to be a simple question but it is actually pretty complicated. What people will buy outside of high sec is going to differ. I'm not, for instance, going to do a lot of work in selling ore and moon minerals. They will sell. People hunt down bargains and you need the damnedest things. But for a solo person it just won't work. What I've been doing is giving people my original market list for Bosena. It hasn't been updated since I started running my market but it gives

Eve Online was placed on exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 . I'm not an art type. I like or I don't like things. For the Museum of Modern Art to take our game and call it art was a lovely thing. There is some argument if video games can be considered artistic. I think the entire argument is dumb. If someone can splash paint on a board and call it art, pile up sand and make a temporary sculpture, or exactly replicate a structure in the second or third dimension, the art is still in the eye of the beholder. I'm the simple type. The basic state of art is for someone to create something. It may not be hard or complex. It may not inspire. That doesn't stop it from being art. Unless someone is a snob. But then, I like the movies that the critics don't and I have a Minecraft axe on my wall as a decoration. My first Fanfest was 2013. A lot of things caught my attention and the time is flooded with memories, experiences, and reflections. Few things caught my at

I may have to reassess my understanding of things. I doubt that I will but the thought is great enough to consider. I wonder how small my soapbox is at times. Perhaps it is only as wide as my feet and it is my perception that makes it feel bigger. Every time I enter into a conversation that moves into the direction of min/maxing I become exhausting. I do the things that I find interesting in the game. I do not do the things that I do not find interesting in the game. In this simple formula, I have found a reasonable measure of successful endeavors and forward momentum. I'm not the best Eve player. I often take on situations with very little broad thought about what I am doing. It just seems to be a good idea. It may be fun. It is why I am a poor business person. I'll throw away my profits. I don't consider the value of the time I spent doing things. I, in fact, play most of the game just for the fun of playing it. ISK per hour is one of my most hated terms in the game

I am struggling with what I believe to be pride. I've always wanted to be self sufficient in Eve. I did not come into the game expecting to play with anyone else. I was going to make it in the world by myself. I, however, wound up making friends. At the same time, I was determine not to be a liability. I wanted to be an asset. Such was my start and it has led me down several paths and many adventures both pleasant and not. However, I'm suborn. The other day, while discussing alts, someone left a comment that said they enjoyed reaching new abilities and doing new things. Alts spoiled that feeling. On one hand I can easily see where they are coming from. On the other hand is my life in Eve. I've spent most of my time trying to hang out with people above my skill and knowledge level. I used alts for two reasons. One: I wanted new avatars. Two: To expand my abilities and reinforce my independence. The most painful things that have been said to me in this game are all rela

It's been a bit busy on Slack during the day. I think it was Wednesday morning that I sat down around 0700 and looked up at 1100 to wonder where the morning went. Being knee deep in discussion is a good thing. It is not a very tangible thing but it has been absorbing my game time. Eve turned twelve this week. It is quite a milestone and CCP released the Genolution C3 and C4 implants as a gift . This made some people mad as free stuff always will. Remember to redeem yours. Use them or shove them in a can for later market speculation that may be ruined by CCP releasing them again. Don't let them expire. CCP also had a special Birthday o7 show  for those that enjoy the video updates. The SKIN bug was patched on Monday. There were still a few known cases of improperly skinned ships floating around. I think its mostly been resolved. I've received a good number of eve-mails and e-mails and even a few conversations about how people feel about the skin rollout, the bug, and the

I find it to be clever that the capital rotation beacon is directly under the undock of the station on 6-CZ49 on the test server. Why was I there? I heard that the icons changed again. I didn't pay attention to them when I was checking skins. Perhaps, they had not changed then. But, sure enough, the icon shapes that CCP Arrow went over in his UI Modernization: Icon Strategy dev blog. This particular dev blog was released before fan fest and there was a lot of discussion about it being to busy and in space the icons not being easy to separate from each other. CCP Arrow received a lot of feedback and now the icons have changed again. They are a bit calmer and a bit easier to separate from each other. For players, I don't think it is that bad. I'd like NPCs to stay red crosses. Containers are still triangles. An empty triangle with a slit for empty and a circle on top of a triangle for full. Battleships look like chevrons for a uniform sleeve, while cruisers at pentago

It is Eve's 12th Birthday and CCP has given out their yearly gifts. As always, this has caused anger and complaints. I am fascinated by this cycle. CCP gives players stuff. Someone complains. The stuff is not good enough. The stuff is released and crashed market speculation happens and that's bad. I've not yet seen a gift giving from CCP that was not full of complaints somewhere. This time they are giving out C3 and C4 genolution implants. Like when they rereleased the C1 and C2's people's market speculations have caused great loss and expensive stock devalued. I got C3and C4's with my collector's edition and I sold them because I can't have nice things. My inability to have nice implants started when I was a newbie. I received the first set of C1 and C2 genos from Crucible's release or maybe it was Christmas? I was new and they were implants so I put them in my head. My urge was to hoard them but I felt that I should use them instead. I had hoar

I came home and Tikktokk beat me about the head with mathematical equations. It was an interesting entry to the game considering my thoughts earlier today. I've never been ashamed of admitting that I am bad at Eve. I'm not technical. I'm not an engineer. I don't see the game in its numeric forms. I do things by feel, and sense, and touch. I fly the ships that feel right to me in the fits that feel right. I could not tell you why I like one more than other. The closest I have come is that they best support my reactions and interpretation of the game. There are things that I can do in Eve but I could not explain or teach. Sometimes, I wonder if I am behind for the length of time that I have played. Seeing that Chella had ticked over 70 million skill points has left me wondering. I still find that I expect to feel something with each skill point level. Seventy million was an unheard of number at one time. It was not something that I'd ever achieve. If it is even ac

The first thing that I did was the hardest. That was taking my 70 million skill point character and pausing her training. I made the decision to use the account easily. I had opened up a free slot by deleting a holding alt. I was determined to downsize and not just start up yet another account. However, it was when I logged in and stared at Chella that I realized stopping the skill Queue was a harder task then I had realized. Skill Queue Online, one of Eve's most powerful controls had me firmly in its grip. I found myself feeling doubt. I felt the urge to just give in an open another account. I could taste the very bad decisions all centered around me allowing Chella to continue to train. But, what does she do? She mostly sits logged out. She is a well trained logistics, carrier, industrial, and mining character. But I don't play her. I haven't been playing her. Her queue is full of support skills. She is currently topping off her armor compensation skills. I don'

Mosaic has been a bumpy ride. The ugliest thing was the reversion of the corporation role interface. It was an emergency reversion do to a defect . Take access was granting view access and view access take access. The news article  outlines the fact that CCP will be reimbursing any corporation theft during that thirty hour window. There was an emergency CSM meeting to update the CSM on what was happening and resolution plans on Wednesday when it was discovered. I was at work so got to miss that one as well but we still discussed it in channels. The other revision is the Title and Roles changes. The goal of theses is to have public titles and private roles. Right now there needs to be more work on the way these are viewed externally and internally. If you want everyone to know that Xerses is a POS Manager for instance that is fine but it should not be the default as it is now. Titles so that everyone knows Xerses 'loves cabbage' should not be created in the same function th

Memories are weird things. I'm a stuff hoarder in Eve. Not because I cannot stand to get rid of things but because things remain useful. But, I find that I scatter things about the universe and wind up with memories spread all over the place. My recent spring cleaning has unearthed some. I didn't realize I had any other Hurricane's left. I was so mad at the battlecruiser nerf that I reprocessed most of mine. While no longer angry I am still deeply disappointed in the changes and find no satisfactions in flying what I once flew. The Hurricane Fleet Issue didn't fill the gap and because of its cost it wasn't worth taking out. It was immediately primared because the ISK war is important to people and it is an expensive ship. The battlecruiser nerf is probably one of the things I am persistently disappointed about when I look back over my time so far in Eve. I have one in Klingt that was given to me by CraftyCroc when we went to avenge someone killing me. That on

I was thinking of Eve's spy culture the other day. That part of the game where people find out information about other people. It has its simple forms where public information is sifted and researched. Then it has its more complex forms where people gain information they'd not normally have access to. It is both fascinating and disturbing. I once thought I wanted to be a part of it. It feels clever. It demands intelligence. It takes cunning. I think spying is very glamorous from the outside. But then there is the inside.  I'd be a crappy spy. I'm prone to honesty. I also don't have the competitive nature to desire to 'beat' others nor do I have the personality where people are enemies that I want to see fall. I discovered that I didn't care. If someone wanted my downfall that badly they are welcome to it. It seems odd to me but I can gather that I might make someone that mad. The problem with playing with others is that I can't just do