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Showing posts from October, 2015

Pod and Planet YC117 - Cortex

Cortex Written for Pod and Planet YC117 fiction contest Author: Sugar Kyle Todaki VI - Moon 1 - School of Applied Knowledge The door cycled open and Nikol was greeted by a wash of stagnant air. It was not foul but she still felt her nostrils flare as it wafted over her and left a bitter taste on the back of her tongue. "Contamination?" "The air is clean," responded the security officer. Vekosi, she reminded herself. She needed to know people not uniforms. "It's been on pure recycle for a while," he said, eyeing the notification by the portal. "No toxins. Normal organic composition. Oxygen is low but not hazardously so." "Someone needs a shower," she responded and stepped through the doorway into the room. "Pull a sample for a complete analysis and then start a full scrub. I am not going to breath in some pseudo-demigod's filth." Sterile, was how she would describe it. Silver, and silver again. A long c

Eve Vegas 2015 - Capital Round Table

This was well attended and well recorded. My notes are notes as always. Scrawled at full speed. I suggest you watch or listen to the Capital Session that preceded the round table. I missed some stuff. There were a staggering amount of questions. Please visit the dev blog: Reworking Capital Ships . From what I understand CCP is putting together a focus group similar to their one for tech 3 destroyers. It is not a CSM project. The CSM was going to put together a similar focus group before CCP decided to do so. That will allow us to share some ideas and potential participants if CCP wishes to accept any of those parties. I arrived early because I wanted a good seat. It had the side effect of allowing me to listen to the conversations in the room from other early arrivals. I wrote a list of complaints that I heard. Most held a frigid, bitter quality to them that was reinforced by a bit of posturing. “Oh! We have killed you forever!” says one group to another. It taints their conversa

Eve Vegas 2015 - PvE Round Table

I'm old fashioned and write notes for sessions. I noticed that there were all sorts of recordings at Eve Vegas. TMC had an entire recording stage out. CCP was recording some things. Players had cell phones and recorders on hand. I felt positively archaic. This was far from four years ago when I was one of the few people interested in recording what happened at these events. But, that didn't stop me. I didn't worry about getting the information out as fast as before. It takes me around two hours to transcribe the fast written sloppy reminders. I try to capture as much as I can. If I cannot understand what I wrote or cannot remember something, I skip over it. So much happens that it is easy to give credit and weight where it is not due. All told I attended the following round tables: Capitals, little things, structures, PvE, and the CSM. I understand that there was a last minute round table for skill training. It was not well announced or I would have attended it. For the

Eve Vegas 2015

This hotel room looks over the Bellaigo fountains.  At this time of night they go off every fifteen minutes. The larger shows where the foutnains shoot up high enough to top the hotel peak also start. It is a beautiful view. I just crawled out of a tub where I soaked my tired and sore legs and feet. Eve Vegas is over and unlike other times, I did not come home in the evenings and blog. Instead, I came home and curled up with my husband and slept. There was some debate to hang out until the late hours of the night but I decided not to. Fatigue does not feel particularly good. Last week I logged out of Eve and decided not to log back in for a while. Tonight, I have no way to log in but feel myself wishing to do so. I savor that thread desire. It means all is not lost and the negitivity and bitterness that has swamped me for weeks has not corrupted me to the core of my game play. Even at seven hundred tickets the event feels intimate. There is a tangable excitment in the

Pod and Planet FIction Contest YC117

Telegraph Sam has returned for another fiction contest. It has just started and ends November 19th, 2015. Go check out the rules ! For those that ask, this is a legitimate contest. I've entered each year and plan to do so again. Or, at least I will after Vegas. I have three stories that have been bopping around in my head and hopefully I'll be able to produce them all. As always, just give it a try. Don't spend a month fretting and wondering if you should or can. Just try it. There are multiple categories so you can write anything from lore to an amusing anecdote about one of your favorite moments in Eve. I like this contest because it pushes me out of my comfort zone with my creative writing. I don't think that it is my strength to write Eve fiction. It is a struggle to stay inside of someone else's rules and story. However, that struggle I believe improves me over all. I may never have won a grand prize but I do think that I've been improving each year. This c

CSMX - Post Some number or another

I guess things happened this week. The next release is November 3rd . There are changes coming to the sovereignty system. In those changes, we get some quality of life pieces that the sovereign owners have been waiting for. It also brings the first round of jump fatigue changes with a new maximum cap. At the top of the list, CCP released a design outline for a skill trading system they are looking into implementing. It has spawned a t hreadnought on the forums , one on reddit , and blogs and tweets and such reactions. Currently billed as a replacement for the character bazaar the reactions have been varied and loud. I'm not fond of the system. It will change a lot of Eve I do not think it is newbie friendly as is often suggested. The fact that the character bazaar is there has helped some people come to terms with it. "Why don't you have a problem with the character bazaar?" is a frequent question. The reason is because if CCP had not sanctioned character sales

Conflicted

Halycon said it quite well in a comment he left about the skill point trading proposal for skill point changes. He is conflicted in many different ways. So am I. Somedays, I don't want to be open minded. I do not want to see other points of view. I want to not like things and not feel good about them and it be okay. That is something that is denied me for now. I've stated my opinion about the first round of proposals to trade skills. I don't like them. That isn't good enough. I have to answer why. Others do not like it as well. I cannot escape over to their side and be unhappy with them. I am dragged away and challenged about my distaste.  Some of the people I like most think the change is good. Other's think it has little meaning. They want to know why I don't like it. When this was proposed at the CSM summit, I swiveled my chair and asked if they realized that they were undoing the basic structure that characters and game progression worked under. They said th

Mastery and Investment: A Ramble

Scanning is on its fourth major iteration (unless I have missed one). The original scanning involved some type of complex triangulation. The second one created an easier to use interface. The third was released with Odyssey and supported with the Discovery scanner that automatically told you where sites where. The fourth is underway as part of the new star map. It is very similar to the third. The first scanning interface I cannot speak to. It was complicated and like many of Eve's early features geared towards mathish folks. Much of that was on the back burner with the second change that improved accessibility. The second one, which I did use, required some knowledge. It required knowledge of where to even look for sites and combined information such as what signatures various sites had. That knowledge became irrelevant because the discover scanner told you where to look. Scanning became a matter of getting the exact coordinates and not so much looking for sites. Combat scanning

CSMX - Post #31

A lot of stuff has filled this week. The roadmap is now built into updates.eveonline.com . There are tabs at the top and dates at the bottom. Give it a look. Its visually very pretty and has a bit more detail here and there. Just don't fall in love with dates. These are goals but the entire 'don't push it out broken' means there is always the chance of flexibility. I am going to continue to stress this point becuase I do not want anyone to be brokenhearted at a release delay. How about that new launcher? A lot of people are in love with it and problems are being fixed by the moment. I advise you to read the thread before you play with it . Your settings will need to be copied over. An optional delay has been added so that computers don't die starting all 46 clients at once while screaming like courting bull moose. It is in beta but with a bit of setup work I'm hearing a lot of positive things. I have not converted over because I am lazy and the old launch

Looking at the Taboo

Last night I switched over to pen and paper. What I did was walk through the thread and take the themes out of it. I would add a check mark for multiple requests. Some subjects are near to each other. Those, I'd tend to break down into separate categories because they wandered in different development paths. At first I was going to skip the things that are not development from high sec. I started the post with the intent on finding out what high sec development was in the eye of the reader. Yet, nerfs and suggestions to get people to leave high sec kept coming up. They were so constant and discussed that I decided to add in two more sections.  High Sec Development - Condensed Dynamic - Mission, mining, and the world. Group - Group missions, tasks, and building great things loosely co-op Solo Content - Both missions and automated processes that are fiddly and easy to drop in and out of Exclusive - Changes that are only for high sec Creation - A job or missi

What to do with Taboos?

On Sunday, I put together a question that I'd been thinking about over the weekend about developing high sec. I didn't expect the response. As I write this I have eighty nine comments, three other blog posts, and a forum post chugging along. Sugar Kyle - Taboo Questions Eve Hermit - The Eve Themepark Greedy Goblin - The Two Extremes are not Mutually Exclusive Eve Online Forums - Response to Sugar Kyle Sorry of Eve - Eve Online Raids With this much energy, I've avoided writing anything else to detract people. The type and breadth of feedback has been amazing. I even went into the eve online forums and wrote what the goal of the original post was about to help people giving feedback to stay on topic if that is what they wanted. This is what I'm going to do with it. The CSM gives me the unique position of not having to let things fall into the void. When the comments started spawning and the forum thread burst into existence, I tapped the PvE team about i

Taboo Questions

Let us talk contentious things. What about high sec? When will CCP pay attention to high sec and those that cannot spend their time in dangerous space?  This is somewhat how the day started, sparked by a question from an anonymous poster. Speaking about high sec, in general, is one of the hardest things to do. The amount of emotion wrapped around the topic is staggering. There are people who want to stay in high sec and nothing will make them leave. There are people who want no one to stay in high sec and wish to cripple everything about it. There are people in between, but the two extremes are large and emotional in discussion. My belief is simple. If a player wishes to live in high sec, I do not believe that anything will make them leave that is not their own curiosity. I do not believe that we can beat people out of high sec or destroy it until they go to other areas of space. Sometimes, I think we forget that every player has the option to not log back in. We want them to log

CSMX - Post #30

Vanguard was released with a minor hiccup. Multibuy was disabled for a day or two thanks to a bug. Beyond that, the release was smooth and it was quickly over shadowed. CCP Seagull released a view of the roadmap into the expansion planned for the Spring of 2016. She promised to be more open with the future plans and projects and she delivered. Now you all are seeing a lot of what we have been looking at as it stretches towards Fanfest. The thing about this roadmap is that it is not set in stone. The features are planned for the times listed. Developers set their own release goals instead of their management setting them. Those goals can and may move. Something may move from one release to another so don't get 100% sold on dates. Releasing this general guide is part of that communication step where CCP let's us know what they are doing and what they envision in Eve's future instead of hiding in the corner scared because people got mad in Incarna. Personally, this is the

Immersion vs Information

It is a common discussion. Most of the players know nothing about what is going on in the game. They do not read the development blogs. They do not know that patch notes are listed. Expansions are introduced to them through the log in screen. The forums are populated by a very small percentage of the subscribed users. That includes alt posters. How do we get information out to people? We do not know if they want the information. We do not know if they would want it if they knew about it. And at the same time, we don't want to ruin their game play by forcing the information on them. What are we going to do? The launcher was supposed to solve much of this. One day it may do so. The hope was that as a player logs in they will notice some of the information on the launcher screen. It is a hope that works in some way. CCP can look at the page hits and see some rough statistics of information absorbed. But many will never notice. How do we fix that without huge popup ads? I noticed

Hullo Weekend

Some days are stranger then others. Some weeks busier. The last few nights I've wanted to write stuff but I had other things in the way. Last night for instance I brought work home. Tonight, I went on Dirk and Big Country's Open Coms show. Sometime at work today I had an idea for a blog post that promptly fell out of my head when I had to do some tasks before I could write it down. I may remember it. My weekend off hits. Tomorrow, I hope to finish doing my setup for my project for Dire. It turns out the staging system that I had planned to use may be out because a new pirate group has moved in and they enjoy camping the high sec gate. I'm going to have to research their activity and see if I can get my work done during their off hours. If not, I have a backup plan. For the second time since I have started playing Eve my work schedule will change. When I started playing I worked midnights. Working midnights made it very easy for me to hang out with the West Coast guys. H