A couple of weeks ago, I was tidying up files on my media server, when I stumbled across an old Eve Video that I’d previously downloaded but never watched, it was the Incursion trailer. I watched it through and whilst not blown away, I my interest was piqued and I headed over to Eve-Online to see if there were any better offerings from the game I once loved.

Sure enough the Video Downloads section was littered with offerings, and ones of much better quality too. I don’t know when CCP tried to move away from the phrase “All scenes in this trailer were captured from actual gameplay”, but I don’t think it did the game any good., so I was very pleased to see the later trailers getting back to the ‘no polishing’ ethos of older times and even more impressed to see that the graphics were back to the cutting edge.

It was the Crucible trailer in HD that got me and within 20 mins I’d activated a trial account and was pulling down a 4gb file with feverish anticipation. Really, I wanted to see what the ‘Walking in Stations’ stuff really looked like, just to see of course, I wasn’t really going to play.

3 Days later I’d activated Hygelac.

5 Days later I’d activated my other accounts.

Oops.

For all that time I’ve been paying 14.95 EUR times three accounts, about £39. It’s about time to do something else with that money. Like put it towards paying of credit cards or suchlike.

So, as of today, I’ve cancelled all of my Eve accounts. They won’t disappear into the ether and one day I might reactivate them but for now it’s a sad goodbye.

I’ve had a brilliant time in eve ever since I first subscribed on 11th January 2004, the high point was flying with the Mercenary Coalitionas members of both Sharks with Frickin’ Laser Beams [FRICK] and Body Count Inc [BDCI] and I’ll never forget the fun I had flying with Millennium [MLM] both in game and in Amsterdam. Ahh happy days.

Hygelac Total Skill Points: 87.9 million Kills ~918, Losses ~34 [Character Sheet]

Brynhild Total Skill Points: 64.0 million Kills n/a, Losses n/a [Character Sheet]

Hrethel Total Skill Points: 47.0 million Kills n/a, Losses n/a [Character Sheet]

I must say, I’m very happy with it and think it’s a slight improvement over my original attempt, but if you spot any broken bits or have feed-back then feel free to let me know.

In spite of that, it’s still a good job.

I thought I’d play cautious for my first time out so I jumped into my trusty Claw setup and stormed into Resbroko expecting to be right in the thick of things. alas, there was but one person of interest and he was friendly, or at least I’m assuming that’s what the little purple star meant.

As the ‘waiting for bad guys to fall on my guns’ plan didn’t seem to be working, I put an ear to the Militia channel and started following target reports. As a location was announced, I set the Autopilot and ran in that direction like a puppy wagging it’s tail enthusiastically running after a stick.

After about half an hour of this, having seen gaggles of ‘friendlies’, I was starting to think that this might not be the land of milk and honey I was promised. Just as such doubt was assailing my mood, I was proven wrong, the gate I’d just landed on had a target and a couple of militia engaging him. Hurrah!

With great abandon I turned on the micro warp and screamed towards him, with only the sharp report of my guns and rockets as company. It took but seconds to take him out, as I realized with disappointment that it was only a Rifter. At this point I glanced in local to see a comment along the lines of ‘I’m on your side!’ and such stuff. Clearly this guy had studied the works of Joseph Goebbels and Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, daring to issue such brazen lies.

So I podded him for good measure.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, this “Torothanax” guy was a -10 militia member, personally I have truck with not shooting people who are blinky red as some Sharks who went -10 in the past will tell you. He was suitably outraged but I wasn’t too fussed. But as ostensible CEO, I thought I should probably think about the rep of the Corp and make nice.

I threw him the value of his pods and the implants he claimed (2 x +3s, is that it?) and ignored the rest of his whinging. Another corpse for the freezer though, that put me in a much better mood.

I then spent another hour running around after phantoms from various target report to the other and saw NOT A SINGLE BLOODY target. In fact as the night wore on, I started to question my overview settings and then my eyes.

Clearly I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t want to just set AP for Amarr and lose a ship to NPCs, so I headed back to Amo and logged for the night.

Still, at least I did get to pod someone.

So please ignore the layout, it’ll take some time before I can get back to the way things used to look.

Doh!

The good news is that our broadband is scheduled for activation on Thursday 9th.

Can’t wait to get back in Eve and active again.

I think that part of the problem was that we traded too heavily on our past glory days. People were recruited into an ex-Mercenary Coalition corp rather than Sharks. So when they joined up they quickly became disgruntled that things weren’t as expected.

Hopefully the message is now getting across that we’re just a small corp trying to make our way and have fun with mates. No real politics, no territory holding, no stress and bullshit. Of course all that may change in the future.

In the short term it looks like I’m going to remain CEO of Sharks. Right now there’s no requirement for an uber active CEO, in fact the people who stepped up as directors are quite full of beans and helping things move along nicely. All of this is a bit of a relief really, I would have hated to see Sharks die.

I’m going to be offline shortly while I move house, and setup phone and broadband again, hopefully I’ll be active again before the end of July hopefully quicker.

As a side note if there are any old friends of the Corp out there, who might be interested in joining, then let me know. As I said, we’re going for a much more relaxed state of play, but those guys who are active seem to be having fun.

Per ardua ad astra!

Sharks has been adrift of the MC for a while and I guess it’s an indication that we’ve not really settled down to our role, when we keep going through times of turmoil. I swear, I’ve seen more ‘where do you want to go?’ polls in this corp than I’ve had hot dinners.

Anyhow, that time seems to have come again, these days I try to stay away from such things but in this particular instance, I’ve been thrust once again into the CEO role.

I logged in on Tuesday morning for a quick skill change before work, only to get dragged into a conversation with the leadership. Personally I thought I was about to get chewed out for being argumentative on the forums lately, that wasn’t the case and truth be told, I’d have preferred the ‘being chewed out’ option over what actually happened, I was handed CEO position and told that all the directors and CEO were leaving.

It wasn’t a cut and run type scenario, they’re all still in corp, helping people out of our 0.0 positions and ensuring that the corps assets are transitioned properly, but the plan is to be gone after the weekend.

I’ve said privately and I’ll say publicly that it’s a shame that they’re leaving and the efforts they’ve all put in to trying to re-vitalize the corp were nothing short of heroic. So, Krakatinny, Khan Akiro, Siicko, Lord Wilding, Talthrus and Constantinee, well done all and you’ll be missed.

Of course this leaves the corp in a bit of a conundrum for the moment. At first it looked like it was time to shut FRICK down and move along or retire gracefully. But after hinting at this on the forums, there were plenty of people wanting to remain in Sharks no matter what. In the face of that kind of loyalty and dedication, closing the corp doesn’t seem like an option any more.

Who knows what’s going to happen now, we’re going to wait for the people who want to leave, to leave and then assess who is still around and what we can make work with those remaining.

Interesting Times.

I put it in my hold, overloaded a few modules and spent the next few minutes fumbling around like a teenager with a bra-strap! I tried right-clicking the stuff, dragging it on to the modules and various parts of my UI … nothing.

Soime time later and slightly red-faced, I discovered how to actually use it :)

Right click on the heat damaged module and select: ‘Repair’!

It’s the simplest of things sometimes ….

One of the things most people notice about Sharks is the corp’s obsession with Haiku. It’s been around since I first joined the corp back in 2004 and it’s still there today.

I’m not entirely sure about the origin of this, but like most aspects of FRICK’s style, I imagine that it originated with Charity Regard. One of the long-time CEO’s who is still greatly missed today. I remember being forced to write Haiku’s as part of my application and that tradition still persists today.

Over the years, I developed a love of Haiku in terms of appreciation and clumsily writing my own. One of my favourite books being Japanese Death Poems compiled by some chap called Yoel Hoffmann.

I’ve just been reading through the applications for Sharks membership and can’t help but be disappointed that not only can the applicants not write Haikus very well, but they can’t even be bothered to look up what a Haiku actually is, before attempting to write one. I’m not saying that I’m Bragi’s gift to Haiku writing, but at least I can string one together without making myself look foolish.

I’m not sure that this is me being nostalgic for the good old days of Sharks, unable to change with the changing corp, but I really miss the haiku and the clever banter.

I miss the days when we said nothing on the Eve-O forums and were quieter still in the Local channel, at most, dropping a Haiku in our wake as we sped off from a camp after a newly spotted target.

“Clear Skies follows a trio of down-and-out misfits who’ve seen no end of bad luck. John Rourke is the obstinate captain of the Clear Skies, a Tempest class battleship manufactured by the downtrodden Minmatar race of New Eden. Rourke’s attitude toward his hazardous chosen lifestyle is cavalier, although this does not sit well with his friends among the crew. Solomon Burke is the pessimistic ship’s engineer, while Charlie Fodder — a gunner with an ironic name — does his best to keep the crew alive. Typical of life in New Eden, Fodder is doomed to remain a rather busy man.

If you liked the first one, this is well worth watching, displaying the same sense of comic timing as the first and impressive integration of the Half Life 2 SDK and Eve Online footage. In addition expect the Blackadder-esque uses of simile and metaphore to create some cracking one-liners that will have a smile tweaking the corners of your mouth all the way through and fondly thinking of Firefly.

This second instalment goes a bit further than the first, adding some character depth and poignancy that was missing from the first and even though some of the voice acting from the new female member of cast is a bit flaky it doesn’t really distract from the film. There’s a lot more action and Eve footage and I had a little cringe at how long it must have taken to line up all of those fleets for filming.

I really can’t wait to see what Ian Chrisholm can do when Ambulation finally comes into Eve.

Download it Now

Earlier ship names would all follow a convention of using words that evoke images of violence such as Slasher, Rupture, Bellicose, Scythe, Claw, Stabber and then Storm names such as Maelstrom, Tempest, Typhoon, Hurricane. Newer ship classes wandered briefly into predator territory with Wolf, Jaguar, Hound.

It has only been in the last few years that Minmatar ships have been coming off of the line with an ‘own up’ Norse bent, but as someone who always named his ships things like ‘Thor’ and ‘Odin’, I have no complaints!

The other races follow their own less interesting pattern (to my mind). The Amarrian ships are all of a religious bent i.e. Zealot, Prophecy, Crucifier. The Caldari ships seem to follow bird names, Raven, Merlin, Griffin, Buzzard etc. And finally the Gallente ships all favour classical mythology Deimos, Phobos, Hyperion, Ishtar etc.

So, I thought I’d take a few minutes to run through some of the more Nordic ship names and throw a bit of light on their background in myth, effectively combining two of my passions. I’ll try to go oldest first :

Muninn and Huginn

Muninn and Huginn (“Memory” and “Thought”), were Odin’s ravens. They would be sent out each day, returning at night to rest on Odin’s shoulder and report on everything they had observed, whispering the news into his ear. One of Odin’s many names (or kennings) is derived from this: Raven-God

Whilst naming the reconnaissance cruiser Huginn makes a kind of sense in this respect, I can’t help but think that the Muninn was somewhat misnamed. Retrospectively it would have been nice to use these names for the stealthier classes of ship, or simply replace the Rapier with the name Muninn and you have a much nicer symmetry.

Sleipnir

Sleipnir (“Glider”) was an eight legged horse who could travel over sea and air and faster than any other, Sleipnir carried Odin into battle. Sleipnir was the offspring of Loki and a stallion Svadilfari (“Unlucky Traveller”) a stallion of amazing strength. The full myth detailing the creation of Sleipnir is in the Prose Edda of which there’s a decent summary [Here] if you want more information.

Fenrir

Also known as Fenris, is the offspring of Loki and a giantess Angrboda. As you may have guessed, Fenris is a wolf but he was destined to keep growing and growing, by the time of Ragnarok Fenris’s Lower jaw scrapped the Earth whilst his Upper jaw scrapped the top of the sky. The Gods imprisoned Fenris under the Earth using special Dwarven-made bonds where he remains until Ragnarok,
Fenris is one of the key figures of Ragnarok, the doom of the Gods and well worth reading about. Fenris will kill Odin at Ragnarok.

Naglfar

Naglfar (Wraith/Nail Ferry), is a ship made entirely of the nail clippings of the dead. At Ragnarok, the ship is used to carry an army of giants to the site of the battle on the Vigrid plains. Nice eh? This is one of the more obscure references in Norse myth, so if anyone could point me at some more complete sources then I’d be happy to hear it.

Nidhoggur

There is no such thing in Norse myth but it’s close enough that we can look at “Nidhog” without stretching plausibility. I have no idea where the Eve variation comes from but a lot of the classic Norse names have variations such as Valhalla, Valhol etc.

Nidhogg is a serpent (Or a Dragon in Germanic myth) that lives at the base of the world tree (Yggdrasil) in Niflheim, feeding off of corpses. When not eating corpses it would gnaw at the roots of Yggdrasil.

It’s a nice name but you couldn’t help but wish they had calld the Dreadnaught “Nidhoggur” and the Carrier “Naglfar”.

Hel

Hel is another of Loki’s offspring, the ruler of Niflheim, the land of the dead (the netherworld basically) where she was banished by Odin. The word Hel is cited as the likely root of the Christian word for Hell.

Hel is said to be partly decomposed, having the face and body of of a woman but the thighs and legs of a corpse. The sick bed was known as “Hel’s throne” and it was said that all who died through sickness and old age would become her silent servitors in Niflheim. Hel will lead the armies of the dead against the God’s on the Vigrid Plains at Ragnarok.

Ragnarok

Ragnarok is the end of the nine worlds, the end of everything really. Some versions of Ragnarok are a little more sanitized and have an ‘afterwards’ but the truer tellings indicate that it is the end of everything.

A lot of myths and belief structures have an apocalyptic ending but the Norse one has always been the most powerful in my mind. It’s not enough that the end of the world is nigh, we hear that a lot. But in Norse myth, Ragnarok isn’t a surprise, it has been foretold by the norns and the God’s know that it’s coming and that they will die. To my mind this makes the God’s a little more mortal, after all the modern concept of godhead has immortality at it’s core.

Loki, a catalyst of evil, spawned three monsters with the Giantess Angrboda (“Distress Bringer”) against whom the gods were ultimately powerless. They were Fenris the Wolf, Jormungand the serpent and a daughter named Hel. When the God’s heard about these monsters, the broke into Angrbodr’s hall and stole her children back to Asgard to deal with them. Jormungand was hurled into the ocean by Odin where he grew so long that he encircled the oceans becoming known as the World Serpent, Hel was banished to the ‘world beneath the worlds’ and put in charge of the ‘inglorious dead’, and Fenrir was kept around until the God’s grew scared of him and he was imprisoned beneath the world.

On Ragnarok, Fenris will break his chains, the World serpent will come to the Earth and the dead will rise up from the underworld. The Frost giants (Jotun) will lead the battle. This is why Odin gathers the brave and mighty to him in Valhalla as they will be needed in the fight at the end of time to help fight the monsters and giants.

Ragnarok has to be the best named Titan in the game.

Loki

We’ve heard a lot about Loki at this point, and alongside Odin and Thor, he is probably one of the most well known Gods today. Loki was a shape-shifter, a trickster and general embodiment of all things bad in mankind but like man he has moments of heroism and courage, all the while sliding towards evil.

After Loki tricks Hodr into slaying the God Balder, the Gods punish Loki much as they did Fenris: he was chained to three large boulders; one under his shoulders, one under his loins and one under his knees. A poisonous snake was placed above his head to drip venom on his face. On the day of Ragnarok, Loki’s chains will break and he will lead the giants into battle against the Gods.

Again this is a very apt name for the new Tech 3 Strategic Cruiser, whose abilities and hard points are mutable depending on the subsystems selected.

Well that wraps it all up, I can heartily recommend getting your hands on a copy of ‘The Norse Myths’ by Kevin Crossley-Holland. But there’s plenty of reading on the web if you do a quick google for it.

I’ve changed jobs again and the 2 hour commute which I’m currently suffering through has done a lot to dent my enthusiasm as my days mostly seem to compose of Sleep, Work, Travel, Girlfriend, Repeat. In fact, I’ve made a pie chart of my current working day :

Geeky, I know, but it gives an idea. Of course there are weekends and the working from home days which have helped to keep me sane, but I find that the extra hours gained seem to get re-absorbed back into sleep. You can’t see it from the chart but I’m currently running on about 5.5 hours sleep on the average night. At the end of June, we’ll be moving significantly closer to work so that big chunk of travel time can get converted into some Eve time and extra sleep, with a bit of extra sleep I should need to work less hours!

Anyway, I digress.

Right now there’s a fortuitous combination of two events in my life, 1: My Girlfriend has just gone on holiday to the states, and 2: Two of my colleagues are getting quite addicted to Eve, Leo Deotto and Tom Brewer. And so I find myself logging on a bit more for the next fortnight at least. I find it quite motivating to field noob Eve related questions from my work chums and it certainly makes me want to get online more and help them out with their faltering steps in Eve. They are currently struggling their way through missions and trying to work out what they want to do with themselves, usually with comic results, but we all had to learn some time so I try not to laugh at them too much.

In recent days Leo has been running around <0.5 space around Everyshore to try and get some pvp experience. This apparently ended in disaster, as a newbie pirate in waiting came along and blew him to pieces, I’ve not quite gotten the story straight but there was mention of an ECM Burst thrown into the mix and somehow Tom ended up with Kill rights on Leo (queue Benny Hill music), so it was obviously a bit messy. The pirate in question was by the name of MollyJones.

Leo and Tom

Leo mentioned this to me so I set about gathering a bit of intel, explaining how tracking agents work and about hunting through Eve Kills on Battleclinic.com for intel, standard merc stuff that has been Shark’s bread and butter for the last 5 years really. Armed with a lot of intel about Molly’s habits and preferred ships, we set off in search of her.

We managed to catch up to her in Adriel, one of her preferred stomping grounds, and I poked an alt into System flying a covert ops to track her down. Sadly they’ve completely re-designed the scanning system since I last played in anger and whereas I could once find someone in around 20 seconds, I slowly came to the realization that I now had no idea how to work the scanner or even find a signal strong enough to warp to. Much more practice is now needed.

During this 30 minute interlude where I realized my neophyte status, it came up that nobody had a scrambler. I really do forget to tell things like this. So I went through ships and what we were fitting. It turns out that Leo was in a Thorax, Tom in a Ferox and I was in a Hound, eager to test the new Stealth bomber changes. I’d actually thought that we were all in small ships, but my bad for not thinking to check setups. So I sent Leo off to by a 20km Disruptor for his ‘Rax.

With a strong sense of irony, I found Molly about 30 seconds after Leo warped off. Through old school directional scanning rather than any of my high-trained scanning skills. She appeared to be roaming belts in a Celestis and dropping scan probes. I managed to lose her again as she jumped around. I played Covert Cat and mouse with our unsuspecting target for what must have been another 30 minutes. Giving Leo enough time to get back to the gate with a refitted Thorax … he’d had to turn off a gun to find the CPU to fit the disruptor but I figured that between all of us it wasn’t going to make much difference.

It was at this point that I noticed Molly had disappeared, I was worried that she had gone through a worm hole, no way we would be following her if that was the case, but considering that she was such a new player I didn’t think that likely, so I set a low sec route to Villore and started burning through systems with my alt, while the rest of us started following up.

I was rewarded when we found her in Ladister, she was roaming around still, doing god knows what. By the time the rest of use caught up she had jumped into Vifrevaert, but in a lucky break, she decided to double back on herself so whilst we were in warp to the Vifrevaert gate in Allamotte she had just jumped through. As we landed on the gate, she was holding cloak, hoping that we’d jump through on our merry way, not realizing that we were after her specifically.

I gave Leo instructions on tackling and to get the Disruptor on her before worrying about guns. Then she decloaked and Leo went in for the attack. Once the point was broadcast Tom and I opened up with our barrage, getting criminally flagged in the process, but this wouldn’t last long. Unfortunately I’d forgotten to mention to Leo about the webbing and bumping aspect, so Molly had managed to slow-boat back to the gate while we were pummelling her and she jumped through.

Luckily I had the guys on my watch list, Tom had been taking a beating from the sentries so I warped us to a station to dock up just as his Ferox hit hull. We were effectively out of combat for the next 15 mins. Leo was still eager to give chase and Molly was holding next door in Vifrevaert and had to come through us to get back to her home station. So Leo set off into system to chase molly around a bit while I tried to find her with my alts scanner.

After giving it some serious thought, it occurred to me that Molly was playing a lot smarter than her actual character age, how many noobs know to hold aggression and slow-boat back to a gate for example? With this in mind, it was going to be unlikely that Leo would be able to take her down on his own, especially with a gun switched off, 1600mm plate or not! So I took a risk and undocked. This almost turned out to be fatal as the Stations sentries had wiped half of my armour by the time my screen had loaded. I hit my mwd and warped off to the gate, jumping through and cloaking before they could finish the job properly. At this point I suggested to Tom that there was no way he’d survive undocking and that he’d have to wait.

Molly had just made a mistake, the directional scan was down to 100,000km and she was still on scan from the gate, sure enough, there she was sitting at the nearest planet to the incoming gate. I snuck the covert into position and told Leo to warp to me at 60km. He dropped within 10km of Molly and pointed her before she could make her escape. Then opened up. Her shields were dropping with painful slowness so I de-cloaked and sent a few Javelin Torps her way, two Target Painter 2s helped make up for the signature radius difference and they slammed into her armour for about 800. Just as Leo’s shields dropped.

At this point Molly set the drones on me but I slammed on the Micro Warp Drive and managed to keep my shields up, whilst slamming the Celestis with Torps. All the while, Leo was up close and personal with antimatter chewing through her ship.

Molly was friendly in local afterwards and a good sport about it all, admitting that hovering at the planet was a bit sloppy. Leo was needless to say, completely ecstatic, you never forget your first pvp kill and I was glad that I could help out. [Kill Board Link]

In other good news, it seems that Sharks have picked up a War dec from a nice little 15 man corp: Starfleet something or another. So there should be a little war dec for me to get involved in. Now All I have to do is the 20j freighter trip to get my stuff down there. Ahh well, gotta take the good with the bad!

Weapon Grouping, Speed and Stargate changes are changes to some very low level behaviours and functions that can’t help but impact the whole game. Everyone uses these parts of eve constantly.

I’m not going to talk much about the speed changes, I’ve not had enough time to really experience the impact on pvp yet. But I’m greatly in favour of the changes, it was funny back when the Speedy-Phoon first came out but just as the Dual AB/MWD trick of yore was bad for the game, so were nanos. Personally, I like my space combat to be more sedate and operatic. I wouldn’t complain if MWDs were restricted to Frigate classes and banned from anything upwards of an Assault Frig. If I were in charge you’d seriously hear some whinging :D

The problems I’ve encountered thus far are all client related rather than content related:

Very Poor Performance of Premium Client
Since upgrading to QR, I’ve found that my client is very laggy and choppy, compared to the Trinity version, this seems to get worse the longer you stay logged in. Fitting a ship, opening and closing windows and other database related items seem to be hitting a wall of lag even in non-laggy situations just as sitting in a station with 2 people in system during Pacific timezones. It’s obviously not a load issue but something at the back end that isn’t working.

In an act of desperation, I downgraded my graphics settings but to no avail.

Memory Leak
My rig has 3Gb of RAM, starting Eve leaves me at about 40%, after 3-4 hours the memory has leaked up to 60%. Memory leaks are a common problem in complicated systems and I’m sure this is causing problems for some people but luckily with enough RAM you can ignore these problems for the length of most gaming sessions.

I initially thought that this might be a cause of the poor client performance but 60% is a long way from hitting the hard drive so this can’t be the problem, just a minor irritation.

Textures failing to load
I’m running an ATI Sapphire X1600 Pro with 512mb of on board RAM, it’s not the greatest card in the universe but it does the job well. I mention this because it might be relevant to one of the most annoying problems with QR which seems to be caused by jumping from system to system very quickly (chasing targets for example). 1 out of 10 times, all the textures fail to load and you have to move through the whole system using nothing but the brackets as a guide.

Whilst eve is kinda playable, I wouldn’t want to PvP in this state, I imagine weapons and effects will all be missing along with the ships and objects. Jumping out of system or docking fixes this problem but it happens enough that I’m hitting it 3-4 times in a gaming session.

Summary
I’m hoping that these issues won’t take too long to fix, but I haven’t seen these kind of fundamental problems in Eve since the Red Moon Rising expansion, where they completely re-wrote the GUI and halved performance in the process. I don’t know what they’ve done in QR to cause these problems but my guess is pointing at stackless IO/weapon grouping as being the main causes of the lag and memory leakage followed by the updated stargates.

I’m also disappointed to hear that a lot of the problems people have reported on SISI are still present in this release. This is probably the most disappointing aspect of the patch. When players go through the effort to properly report a defect only to have it ignored or unfixed in the final patch, people get annoyed and frustrated. People are doing the job of Testing/QA here only to feel like they are being ignored and that’s not good for customer relations.

CCP will pull it together, they always do but this one feels like a step backwards towards the old days of Castor.

Checking through my feeds this morning, I found a really interesting article on Eve Network News, normally I skip most of their articles but this one was reporting a few things I’d missed elsewhere and covered a few interesting bits of gossip:

• Dev admits that Stealth Bombers are now broken in QR
• A Dev gets fired for abuse
• Weapon Grouping causing session change problems
• Memory Leak in Eve Client
• Many reported bugs not being fixed from the SISI version of QR

Anyway, Check out ENN for more

Eve is like sex, sure you can do it on your own if you have to, but it’s much more fun with other people, preferably a huge group of people all working together … ok, so the simile breaks down a bit once you scale it up, but I’m sure if I forced in a few references about the Thorax, you’d be vigorously nodding your heads right now! I digress.

The point of my introductory statement is to say that I’ve joined a new corp, well, technically rejoined an old one. Like an old duffer putting on my comfy slippers to sit in a well worn arm chair in front of the fire, I’ve rejoined Sharks with Frickin’ Laser Beams!

Basically, Eve is just not as much fun solo. The first month back, I enjoyed myself. Learning the new aspects of the game and updating some of my guides and such. I even went to town and created this blog and a kill board to go through it (which was a lot of work, I’ll go into it later). As I neared the ‘caught up’ stage, I gradually started logging on less and generally feeling quite lacklustre when I did.

Those No Salvation pirates who had taken up residence in my mission system were pretty much absent and the Turnur Defence Force went back to its quiet mission running. Pirating might not be my style of play but they certainly made things interesting and they were always smack free.

When it gets to this point, you either need to step the game up a level or down a level and play less, now it’s time to step up my game a bit and get social, so I started looking around for a corp to join.

Obviously I turned to friends first and asked their opinion. Waagaa and Siv suggested Bob but I’m not single anymore and I doubt I could play enough to be a worthwhile member, even though I’ve a lot of good friends there and I know there’d be plenty of fights. Another suggestion was KIA but having flown with them during the ERA debacle and later on when they assisted MC vs IAC, I was left distinctly unimpressed. Although from news reports they are still rattling cages and accounting well for themselves. So not being amazingly aware of who was out there, I decided to post on the Sharks forums:

—

So what do I want in a corp these days?

1.0 – Comradeship
No bones about it, flying solo is pretty lonely. You can have as many mates on MSN and a many chat channels as you like but ultimately I miss having someone alongside my ship who I trust and can banter with.

2.0 – PvP
“Hygelac, what is best in life?”
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”

My first and last love remains combat at all levels, small gang, 1v1, fleet, and uber capital fleet of doom. I’m a huge fan of all of it, even besieging POSes is fun for me. The problem with flying solo is that 1v1 PvP requires a meticulous personality and the patience of a tree. Sometimes I have these attributes and sometimes I really don’t.

I’m looking for trusted and able corp mates to fly with, people I can rely on not to warp off at the first sign of trouble or have to explain basic combat tactics to.

2.1 – Capital Usage
I don’t want my Capital Ships to gather dust. I’ve both a Naglfar and a Nidhoggur and they’ve been gathering dust since I came back to the game. I don’t want to live in these ships but I do want the opportunity to use them from time to time in combat otherwise I might as well sell them and my characters.

I’ve put years of investment into Capitals and I want to continue to reap the benefits of that. One day I wouldn’t mind getting Brynhild into a Hel, but that’s more of a side project these days than a serious ambition.

3.0 – Flexibility in Play time
It’s a sad fact that I can’t be relied on to be online every night as long as possible, my personal situation simply won’t allow that kind of commitment anymore. I need a corp who will understand that it comes second to RL now. I can’t commit to a minimum online time but I can say that I’ll be on whenever I can and I fancy it. I will promise to have a couple of non-Eve nights a week to my girlfriend and that needs to be ok wherever I end up.

4.0 – Structured Goals and Objectives
I think that part of having limited play time means that you want to get more out of the times that you actually can play and that relies on people and organization. I want to be in a corp that has goals and a plan on how to achieve those goals. I’m not really fussed what those goals are just as long as it’s not pirating or griefing, I want objectives that I can help towards, be they killing war targets, mining for a corp capital, taking down POS or pre-planned fleets.

I don’t want to be part of a corp just drifting or who are just wanting aimless fun. I think this is why I’m not interested in going back to BDCI. BDCI’s identity was so tied into the MC, that without the MC BDCI floundered.

This is something I’ve wondered about Sharks lately … “What do you want?” and how are you going to achieve it?

5.0 – Respect
I know it’s a bit corny to talk about it, but I wouldn’t want to be a part of a corp that is generally disrespected or that I couldn’t respect.

I don’t want to be the most famous person in Eve and I generally keep a low profile, I’m not about Ego but at the same time I need to be part of something I can be proud of. I’ve always been proud to have been in Sharks and the MC and I was proud to be part of Millennium.

This is why Burn Eden or Goon would never be an option for me, respect is important to me, being part of something that I can’t be proud of is not how I want to play this game. This is pretty much why I left Celestial Apocalypse after a month and also why I’m glad I wasn’t around during MC’s decline and disbanding as I’d probably been forced to leave the alliance.

6.0 – Corporate Sponsorship
I’m pretty self-sufficient and I can generally fund my own Pvp. But a consequence of Capital Warfare is that the average bloke cannot afford to self fund capital losses and I’m no exception to this. I need a corp who will provide fuel and logistics for my capitals and should the worst happen and I go down in a fight (not through my own stupidity!) then I want to know that the corp will if not replace them, then certainly go a long way towards helping replace the loss.

I’ve always believed in only flying ships you can afford to replace, and this is the only way I’ll ever be able to replace a Dread!

7.0 – 0.0 Access / Alliance Membership
These things used to be mandatory requirements for me, but the nature of the game I can play has changed. Once when I was fully active, 0.0 access and holding space was a must for me, but that’s because I wanted to play at the very top end of Eve, I made a very long post about this on the old forums that I can dig up if anyone is interested.

For me these are more nice to have rather than mandatory. I don’t feel a need to be directly involved in Alliance politics and 0.0 warfare anymore. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun but that sort of game play requires a serious investment of time which I don’t have any more. And without being online 12/7 I don’t think it could be as much fun as it once was.

I still believe you need 0.0 sov and an Alliance in order to be at the pinnacle of Eve, but that’s not for me these days and with all due respect, I don’t think it was ever for Sharks either.

8.0 – Activity
This is my final requirement. I need to be part of an active corp, there’s no point being in a corp if I never see anyone and the members barely log on. This is kind of the summation of all the points before it. I don’t want to log in only to find 2-3 people are the only one’s online and they are afk hauling or something.

———

So after some discussion, it seemed that the logical choice was to go back to Sharks. They are still having fun and have survived the collapse of the MC quite well. The only minor point here is that there probably won’t be as much Capital Combat as I’m used to, but there will still be capital involvement so that will slake my thirst at least.

It was nice to be able to come back, knowing that Sharks is the right place to be, lots of old friends and faces who I’ve missed flying with and plenty to keep me occupied and logging in to Eve more.

I do feel that CCP are probably holding something back so that they can announce it at the fanfest. I’m not 100% sure what that might be but I don’t think any fanfest announcement can ever be as seminal as the one where we saw the Titan’s Doomsday device for the first time back in 2005. A lot of people have opined that we will see ambulation, but everything I’ve seen disagrees with this. To my knowledge there will be a playable ambulation demo at Fanfest but the actual introduction to the game is still a long way off, perhaps even a year.

So what goodies are yet to be announced? In all honesty, I have no idea this time. I’m hoping that Fleet formations will be part of it but I’m sure that won’t be the bones of the patch.

The Stock Market is the sort of improvment that people have been begging for and would be suitable for a ‘big patch’ announcement but CCP have already expressed the difficulty of this sort of thing via the CSM and I’m sure it’ll be on the drawing board for a long time to come.

Alchemy has already been announced but after a talking it over with more industrial minded friends than I, it seems that the numbers really don’t add up and will only serve as an artificial cap to the moon market, one which we’re still a long way from reaching.

So what’s left? From my point of view, I’m wondering if the announcements that have been kept back are actually related to industry at all. I think we might see improvments to Faction Warfare, granting a benefit for flipping Sov. on systems. I think we might see the introduction of Fleet Formations and possible benefits for use of formations. I guess we’ll have to wait till the end of the week when word comes to us from Fanfest.

This is the first year I wont be going to Fanfest since 2005 and I’m a bit dissapointed, my bank balance is not dissapointed in the slightest, but I really didn’t have as much fun at the last one and I don’t think there was anything talked about that I couldn’t get the next week from the downloads on Eve TV. So time to test that theory!

If anyone is wondering what I’m talking about, you need only to refer to the latest Dev Blog about the Transport ship class. These are massive changes which are sure to cause a spike in the prices of Transports, especially the blockade runner class.

Personally I’ve always favoured blockade runners, spending a lot of time in low sec space, I find the +2 bonus to Warp Core strength to be a real boon. In fact when I came back to Eve, I put all of my worldy possessions (that would fit!) into a Prowler and embarked on the 30j trip back to Empire with nothing more than a sense of dread. And I managed to survive with 30% armour too.

Anyway, a quick executive summary of the changes :

Blockade Runners
- Remove Active Tanking Bonuses
- Remove +2 Warp Core Strength
+ Ability to Fit Covert Ops Cloaking Devices!!!
+ Can use Black Ops Jump Portals

Deep Space Transports
- Remove Active Tanking Bonus
+ Add bonus to Grid needs of Passive Tank Modules
+ Add +2 Warp Core Strength

As you can see the price of Transports is about to go through the roof and I’m feeling quite smug that I have a couple of each of the Prowler and Mastodon. They do say that these changes are not final but I think that they will be met with approval by people who use these ships regularly. In face I imagine the only whining we’ll see on this one will be from the PvPs who have come to rely on ‘dictors quite heavily since their introduction. Pirates as ever are still screwed but that’s status quo and I’m happy with that!

I can see the DSTs replacing the current blockade runners, i.e. being used heavily in low sec to move stuff around and in 0.0 for scouted routes, so their usage will increase a fair bit more but nothing economy shattering.

By far the winner here is the Blockade runner, there’s going to be a ready explosion of sales of this class of ship and it will be the new must have vessel for alts and industrial centric mains out there. My only worry is that this might be a bit too powerful, I think that there’s a small chance that CCP will renege on this change and replace it with some sort of stasis bubble immunity instead. It will certainly change the face of Eve as we know it.

Just off of the top of my head, I can use my blockade runner for :

- Scouting
- Actually running 0.0 blockades!
- Ninja Salvaging
- NPC Looting
- Loot Stealing and Can Flipping
- Combat? Don’t laugh, I can see myself taking out T1 haulers in my Prowler.

The Covert Jump bridge thing is a nice addition and may encourage more use of Black ops as part of the unnerfing package. Right now logistics are a problem with Black ops vessels but if you can jump a Blockade runner in with you, it could act as a fuel tanker to allow the team to jump out after the operations, not to mention carrying loot back out of the theatre.

There are also some minor balancing changes to barges but nothing major apart from the +2 Warp Core strength for the Skiff which has apparently always been in the game!

All in all these changes are pretty stunning from where I sit and I’m REALLY hoping they get put into the game.