Shitstorm dreadnaught, CCP, and communicating with your customers.

I've been a bit busy with work the past few days. Since Incarna basically, so I haven't been able to really get into the nitty gritty of the current drama ongoing with CCP.

Highlights that I have caught so far are the volte face on "power up" MT controversy and the Jita siege that is as far as I know still happening as I write. Nice way to show a bit of protest in the latter I guess.

The whole thing, and CCP in general sort of confuses me. I've played plenty of other MMOs and CCP is by far the worst communicator in recent years of the large corps. Their devblogs are a great idea, but half of them are only mildly more interesting than watching paint dry, a quarter are so full of techno babble as to be incomprehensible to all but the most interested of fellow coders and the others seem to be so poorly written and executed as to have me suspecting that they're actually the work of a professional troll and that the entire game is some kind of meta-level psych experiment to see just how far you can fuck something up before alienating your fans.

:ccp:

Incarna

Is... uninpspiring. I don't mind it, I just don't think they should have released it until it was a bit more expansive. It feels like a tech demo, which is fine and dandy, but that's all there is going to be for a long time. I honestly doubt we'll get to interact in our avatars until next year, so releasing this now is premature. But it is pretty, I guess.

Not a whole lot of interest in the patch otherwise. The new turrets are neat, they could renamed the release Eyecandya between the turrets and Captains Quarters.

I've only scanned the release notes briefly but one thing stuck out, there are going to be some unhappy pilots who can't make themselves unprobeable. Well, it's not as if it was the only, or even a common, use for T3s anyway. Suck it up people.

I can't wait to get a $45 monocle for pennies once the scamming starts on the new store purchases though.

Argh! My Caracal!

Took a breeze down Rezbroko way looking for some action tonight. Found some, but was on the recieving end rather than dishing out some mass destruction of my own.
I was hunting a flashy RF Firetail in and out of the belts and flyby'd a Vagabond a time or two. That really should have been my cue to leave, but I wanted that Firetail!
I had the Firetail pinpointed on a belt and hit warp. When I get there however, the Vagabond was waiting at 2k. Got scrammed before I could warp and that was that. T2 Vulcan ACs are going to kick the shit out of a Caracal on a bad day and he wasn't having a bad day.
Kudos to Ridlaw Az.

And here we go again...

So, another DDOS attack is underway as we speak, but CCP seem to have learned a little something since yesterday since the game is still up. I'm currently sitting in 'Drat.
Lots of people on Mumble can't get online though, so I'm guessing that CCP has blocked large swathes of ips from even connecting to the login server.
Sucks to be you (maybe).

Lulzsec vs CCP

So... someone has an axe to grind with CCP allegedly.

There was a DDOS attack, or a SQL injection, depending on who you talk to a few hours ago. I'm guessing that it's over by now, but that CCP is keeping things turned off for the moment, checking over their backsides to make sure nothing was left behind in the initial crash.

Boo! I had plans to get a few wolfpacks roaming tonight. Hopefully the game will be back up tomorrow since I'm off for the day and the weather is nasty here in Ireland.

Insert gratutious comic here:

First FC in a long while.

So, a few of us were bored and decided to head out. I ended up as FC, more or less by default than anything else, thought there was only five of us so it was quite informal.
Didn't see much action until we hit Evati, where the Bastards drew us in and hit, taking a Vexor out. It was... interesting. I haven't FC'd or really pvp'd at all since last year. Met an ex-Unista and got to say hello after him and his crew finished blowing up part of my fleet. :D

DUST 514

So an interesting interview was published by rockpapershotgun today, you can find the full article here and thanks also to Kelduum Revann for linking it over at EVE Uni forums or I wouldn't have read it.

I'm not sure what to think of their plans. I did find the following part interesting.

If you look at Modern Warfare or games like that, you see players dedicating enormous amounts of time, and what we’re offering players is that they’re not just going to be endlessly fighting the same battle and moving up and down some abstract leaderboard and unlocking gear. You’re actually going to be part of a universe. It’s not just another battle. It’s actually your planet and this bugger over here is trying to take it. You didn’t just spend the last two weeks moving up to position 58 and unlocking this gear. You spent it investing in this space! And these other guys over here, if you lose, they’re going to lose! And they’re not even involved, they just happened to be there. So there’s more at stake. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of player it is going to attract. We were really interested in this idea. We thought, this is the kind of game that I’d like to play. We feel that there’s got to be other people out there too.

This really is the kind of game that I'd like to play. The experience of shooters on consoles has always been less than overwhelming for me so it'll be interesting to see just how different this one will be.

I need a plan!

So, I have a re-map coming up, which is good since my stats on Nevore are a little wishy-washy right now. If you don't play EVE none of this is going to make much sense by the by, all I can say is, get it and play it!

I'm trying to draw up a list of ships that I want to fly, and more importantly races sinces there's a few in every race that I like the look of. That's not really practical though, so a continued focus on Minmatar and Caldari is probably the best thing. Looking down the list of things I want to be able to do now throws up a pretty long list however: Fly SBs well, partake in WHs at the highest level, fly combat BS well, fly force recon well aaaand, that's about it really. If I could do all of those I'd be a happy man.

So, a Raven, a Drake, a Hound/Manticore and a Falcon/Rapier.

Time to get into evemon and eft and see what I can come up with.

Imperian Age/Apocrypha Tour

Being in the Uni has a lot of perks. Skillbook reimbursements, free ship hulls during wartime and of course the friendly learning environment are all brilliant of course, but one thing that stands out is the events that the corp organizes for us all.

Last night we had a lore tour through some of the more interesting areas around Metropolis and was courtesy of the inestimable Rhavas who writes over at Interstellar Privateer and Mark 726 of EVE Travel, both of whos blogs I can now heartily recommend after giving them a read. We also had a handful of boats from the Corporation of Noble Sentiments along and an ILN escort since we'd be plunging in and out of lowsec.

Quoting from Ravas' AAR here,

We visited:

* Barkrik (The Hyperbole Nexus)
* Crielere (The Crielere Project)
* Malkalen (Ishukone Station, home of the Malkalen Incident)
* Sarum Prime III (The Mekhios Graveyard)
* Vitrauze (The first wormhole)
* Yulai (Concord Bureau & Yulai Graveyard)
* Seyllin (Seyllin I Shattered Planet)


We also briefly discussed the Titan at Luminaire, the graveyard at T-IPZB, the shuttle in Geztic, and the Traumark Installation in Saminer.

I had hoped to get some pictures taken, alas I was for but I did get to snap one at the tail end. This is Seyllin 1, a planet that was shattered, if I was following along properly, when the Empress of Amarr activated a super-weapon that somehow used isogen-5 isotopes to rip/bend space-time. A major consequence of this desperate action, which had been forced due to the heavy losses the Minmatar Elder fleet was inflicting on the Empire, was the creation of the wormholes that lead to w-space



Not a great shot since I was in a hurry to keep moving, but you can see the planet, the debris and the Uni/TORAH fleet to the right. I've not dabbled in PI but apparently this is a dead planet. No factories or whatever it is they use can be set up on it, and presumably the same can be said for all of the shattered planets. Interestingly, Rhavas or Mark726, can't remember which, said they crunched the numbers from the planets information and apparently it has a very low mass to volume ratio, such that it has an almost neglible gravity well. You could literally take off from the planets surface with nothing more than a standard jet engine.

The whole tour was full of interesting little tidbits like that, another one is that all the Shattered Planets orbit a particular class of blue star. So presumably there's some interaction between those stars and isogen-5? I don't know, but I do love lore and I've never really immersed myself in EVEs. My plan, when I get the time, is to re-trace the tours footsteps and take some new pictures of everything that I missed.

Where have all the cowboys C1 wormholes gone?

So... I resubbed, and have been back in game for about a week. I decided I wanted to go wormholing and though I'd go it alone, at least to try. To Hek then, where a shiny new Drake was purchased along with the required explody and shieldy things to make it work, and of course the skillbook to, you know, actually train Battlecruisers, since I'd never bothered previously.

Easy peasy, I thought. The next part should be even easier, since I actually like scanning and exploring. Drake into the parking lot (after getting her cherry popped against some evil scum Gallente Navy :D) and out comes the Heron. Oh the anticipation! Not one signature did I find, but five! Lords of Kobol, two of them are WHs, I'm going to be rich!

No. Not nearly. A C3 and a C4. Now I'm told that a C3 is maybe, just maybe doable in a Drake with omni-V skills, but I ain't got them.

To date, I've scanned down 11 WHs, all of which have been either over and above my capabilities or were occupied, or both.

Woe is me, and my poor Drake, whos talents are squandered hunting mission rats instead of ridding the universe of Sleeper scum.