With my minerals all finally rounded up and the Ravens built and sold, its on the road once again. While the initial ordering balls-up was indeed annoying, I don’t particularly regret my enforced stint as a mercantile ship-builder in EVE Online. It was a good opportunity to practice my marketeering and generally poke about in the guts of one of the more esoteric aspects of the game, and I’ve always been partial to a good spreadsheet on occasion.

The final tally for the episode was a profit of about 30 million ISK, which was about 4.5% of the capital I put into the endeavour in the first place. Given that it took me the best part of a month’s casual play to earn, with a lot of legwork, that’s hardly a record profit, but at least it was a profit, which was my main worry once the 670 million had evaporated into minerals. I put it down to simple lack of patience on the buys and sells, and a rather slack attitude toward book-keeping. Sir Alan Sugar would not be impressed.

30 million is also about the amount I’d earn on a good juicy Rogue Drones Agent 4 combat mission (Duration; aprox. 1.5 hours), and its no coincidence that I’ve now liquidated all my Tash-Murkon depot assets, shut up shop and I’ve now headed home, to The Citadel, and the smugly knowing grin, open arms and bottomless pocket-book of the Caldari Navy.

Its not just the cash mind you, and there’s a bigger goal I’m now finally getting around to; a Jump Clone. Available from any NPC corp once you’re well liked enough (8.0+ Standing), this miracle of modern science will allow me to quite literally be in two places at once. Once crated, I can swap my consciousness between either of my ‘versions’, on a 24hr cooldown timer, and these different selves can be anywhere. This is particularly handy in my situation, as most of my Corp are out in Rockpool, which is quite a pain to get to from Empire the Old Fashioned Way, and takes most of an evening’s session, just making the trip. Being able to park myself simultaneously in both the Rockpool office, and also in the heart of Empire, where all the decent amenities are, will make life in EVE go a lot more smoothly.

So it’s back on the mission circuit for me, and some serious knuckling down as an auxiliary of the Caldari Navy. Any corp would do, but Caldari Navy is my highest standing to date, at 5.77. Naturally, the bigger risks impress them the most, so its the Agent 4 missions, and for that, you really need a Battleship. (Some people have a great deal of success in Battlecruisers, but I’m not quite that brave!)

I’ve chosen the Megathron for this latest phase of my EVE-life, in defiance of my cultural heritage, and the mighty Raven. For some reason, I already have Gallente Battleships V trained, so it’d be a shame to waste those 60-odd days I once put in. Much shopping later, I’m all set and off to the first job.

The HMS Last Train To London, majestically powering up an ancient acceleration gate, on her way to bring a Victorian-style thrashing to a remote pocket of Blood Raider savagery!

I’ve always liked the Megathron, aesthetically. Most of the Gallente ships are an organic, blobby, asymmetrical mess, but the Megathron is practically symmetrical! It also really looks like a Battleship, particularly the raised bridge section on top of the stern. Much as it pains me to be so reliant on technology of French origin, it does feel very satisfying to fly, and anyway, CCP forgot to put a race of eccentric top-hat and monocle wearing boisterous imperialists in the game, so it’ll have to do!

I’ve never actually flown one in anger though, so the first mission was a bit dicey. Here’s the fitting:

•     High Slots: 6x 425 Railgun I (Antimatter L), 2x Heavy Missile Launcher I (Widowmaker)
•     Mid Slots: 100MN Afterburner, 3x Cap Recharger I
•     Low Slots: Large Armour Repairer I, Damage Control I, 2x Thermal Armour Hardener II, 2x EM Armour Hardener II, Co-processor I
•     Drone Bay: 5x Hammerhead II, 5x Hobgoblin II, plus spares of each
•     Rigs: None

The Co-pro is a bit embarrassing, and is the CPU fitting equivalent of a corset or truss, but the thing is really a tight fit and I didn’t want to drop down to 350 Railguns if at all possible. Eventually, I’ll be looking to replace most of the above with Tech 1 ‘Named’ variants. These are more powerful and use less Gird and CPU, allowing a seventh gun, but tend to be quite pricey, being found only as rare drops from NPC rats.

The top row is mostly really big guns, which given my largely drone and missile based past, are suitably noisy and it feels like I’m ‘doing it properly’ at last. Optimal is about 30km and fall-off to about 60km with that ammo, which is ideal for the kinds of ranges found in most missions. The guns have trouble tracking frigates once they start orbiting, even with the +37.5% tracking bonus my ship skill gives me, but this is as expected, and the two launchers carry Cruiser sized ammo, which does a fair number on frigates too.

The mids are just power regeneration for the rest of it, although the inclusion of an afterburner is a matter of preference. On the one hand, its hungry and is using a slot that could be used for another cap recharger, but on the other, I find the increased mobility a big plus, allowing the otherwise sitting duck of a Battleship to attempt some limited form of kiting if mobbed too heavily. Heading ‘away’ on full burn results in the big cloud of red crosses stringing out in order of max speed, allowing the Battleship to break the mob up into smaller chunks which can be more easily dealt with. (Its also handy for getting to the next gate in multi-pocket missions, a process that can be excruciating in an unaided Battleship!)

The low slots are the classic armour tank; Rep and Hardeners, which should be swapped as appropriate for the damage type you’ll be expecting. The Damage Control is a bit of a wimpey choice I suppose, but being able to double your effective structure HP when in a panic, shouldn’t be sniffed at, and it also adds extra bits of resistance to the shields and armour, all for the low low cost of 1cap/60s. Ideally, once I don’t need it anymore, the Co-pro can be replaced with either a large armour plate (for extra base armour HP), or a Magnetic Field Stabiliser (to make the guns do more damage).

One of my previous EVE Training Fads has been Drones, in which I am more than proficient, so the drone bay is a significant weapon in my own setup. Unlike it’s more specialised cousin, the Dominix, the Megathron can only just fit 5x Ogres in the bay (Heavy Drones, suitable for Battleship targets), but I already have that class of target covered by the Railguns, and instead, I’ve gone for Cruiser and Frigate sized drones, giving me flexible options for taking down the small-fry – something I’d have trouble with otherwise.

This is crucial, even in a Battleship, as at the Agent 4 level, most missions come complete with super-frigate NPCs with warp scramblers. This is the number one cause of lost Battleships at the Agent 4 end – an overconfident pilot plunges in, gets mobbed, their tank collapses and when they try to escape into warp, find that they’re scrambled and can’t, and worse still, they have nothing on board that can actually hit the tiny resilient scrambling ships orbiting them. At that point, the rest of the NPC fleet can take their time and dismantle the hapless and ill-prepared soon-to-be Ex-Battleship Owner, at their leisure, and the poor chap has to just sit there and watch it happen.

As I’m still rather rusty at this kind of thing, I’ve not bothered forking out for Rigs just yet, as they’re quite pricey things, and not covered by the Platinum Insurance I was foresighted enough to actually buy, this time…

It soon comes back to you though, and the mission went flawlessly. It wasn’t one of the handful of real nightmare missions, but was ideal for me, learning all over again how to handle multiple spawns of assorted pirates; the subtle psychology of aggro, the efficient management of energy, the delicate dance of spatial positioning and optimal range, the analytical prioritisation of targets. There were a lot less Cruisers since I last did these, and Battlecruisers instead, a change I think I prefer. The biggest problem I always had with these missions in the past was the huge number of Cruiser enemies; not dangerous in individually, but capable of a terrifying DPS en masse. The new Battlecruisers are quite fierce, but much more manageable.

I must admit, I did bounce the next mission offered; Enemies Abound (1 of 5), as I still have nightmares about my poor lost Dominix last time around; the flames, the klaxons, the screams of my crew as I callously ejected my pod and left them all to burn and suffocate in the cold uncaring vacuum of space, orbiting the tumbling, detonating wreck of my ship like so many frozen moons… Ahem! Yes! The (5 of 5) is a bitch! The next ‘normal grade’ mission went well though, and after only two of the things I’m now 6.0 with Caldari Navy.

As long as I watch for my old nemesis, Mr. Hubris Esq., stand up to my agent and say ‘No!’ when it looks like he’s actually trying to kill me, and don’t get too distracted by some other shiney aspect of gameplay I’ve not tried yet, I should be clone jumping in no time!

Just a quickie, and a reblog at that. Listeners to the most recent podcast may remember me grumbling about my lack of any kind of affinity for, and indeed, knowledge of, any of the nominations for EVE Online’s Council of Stellar Management. I’m being on best behaviour here and most certainly not assuming that this is just a prize lottery, the winners of which will receive a free holiday in Reykjavik, and instead find myself quite fascinated by the whole experiment in online democracy that it is.

Anyway, looks like Crazykinux, the hardest working man in EVE Blogging, has it covered:

Crazykinux’s Musing: The CSM, The Candidates and You!

In which he gathers together a quite comprehensive set of links to various forum threads covering all the candidates. Looking through it all, I can’t help but be a little frightened by the effort gone into it all, and its clear that most, if not all, of the candidates seem to be taking all very seriously indeed.

Plenty of campaign slogans there, from the sublime (“An average player, vigorous and fair.”) to the ridiculous (“Caring for bears since 2004″), and almost every candidate has a dedicated website (some impressive, some less so) and some have even gone further by creating campaign videos and even going on the lecture circuit! Internet Spaceships: SERIOUS BUSINESS!

An interesting variety of party platforms emerging. Pretty much everyone purports to be ‘the voice of the little guy’, a somewhat nebulous claim, but then I guess if you’re a candidate from a huge Alliance, you probably don’t need to be winning your own party members over, and it is very much going to be the much larger collection of little guys, little corps and little alliances; the ‘floating voters’ of the electorate, who will ultimately make the big decision.

Some candidates, in a move I personally applaud, have struck out in more specific directions; with issues like POS and Outpost Combat, Real Money Trade, Free Market Economics, Soloing and Mission Running, all finding more single-minded candidates to support them.

Looking at the list, there are a few names that even soloing sociopath me has seen before; Jade Constantine, a long time and quite vocal roleplayer type, Omber Zombie, who used to roll with M0o, back in the ‘frontier’ early days of the game, Lavista Vista, representing the Virgin Worlds Warp Drive Active Podcast Massive, Verone, notorious ‘proponent’ of the PvP aspects of the game, and TornSoul, an unusual choice of candidate, largely famous for being behind the ‘BIG Lottery’, Eve’s longest running and most successful in-game lottery.

I’ve never met any of these folks you understand, those are merely the names I’d actually seen prior to today, and you, dear reader can be sure of fair, balanced and impartial reporting of the ensuing campaigning and eventual vote from me, largely because I tend not to speak to anyone at all in my average EVE Online session!

I decided not to stand in the end (“Van Hemlock – Do Whatever You Like, I’m Busy Hauling…STILL!”), largely due to time commitments. Plus, they still have Imps and Pixies in Iceland, and I’m afraid of both.

Listeners of the podcast may also remember me grumbling about Tabula Rasa’s rather inadequate ‘LFG’ system (A chat channel in a different tab, that no-one reads). Well, Grumble And It Shall Be Seen To, and the chaps at TabulaCast have that covered

TabulaCast: Episode 18

In which Shawn and John interview ‘Critters’, the NCSoft Community Coordinator for the game. All sorts of interesting insights into what lies ahead for the title, including mention that Destination Games are aware of the inadequacy of the current LFG system, and are already working on something better. Lots of other gems in there too, and TR seems to be becoming one of those MMOs that starts off a bit short of expectations, but improves as the months go by. (See also, EQ2)

Its all rather taken the wind out of my whinging a bit, and although I’d like to imagine that it is that very same whinging that is making these things happen, I’m not quite that far up my own backside…yet, and the likelihood of this really being the case, is about the same as the likelihood of one misplaced, indifferent and barely-read mini-review of Auto Assault, killing it stone dead the very next day!

Anyone need anything whinging about next episode?

As listeners of the podcast will know, I’m currently spending a lot of my time in EVE Online paying the price for my somewhat cack-handed botching of a set of mineral purchase orders, which through a slight misunderstanding on my part, went spectacularly wrong. This all left me with about 670 million ISK tied up in what Financial Experts might call ‘non-liquid capital assets’, and what the rest of us call ’150 little piles of shiny minerals, distributed evenly across the whole of Tash-Murkon’.

It’s not a total disaster, I suppose – minerals are always worth money in that game, and most likely, by the time I’ve rounded them all up, they’ll be worth more than I paid for them, by sheer inflation! The money is still there – it’s just sort of…invested, creating for myself a sudden and huge amount of ‘content’ which previously wasn’t there, in the form of about forty ‘Courier’ missions, of a sort.

If I ever want to see that money again, however, the best bet is to see the original plan through, which is to round up enough minerals to build the ten Raven battleships on the blueprint copy that began this farce in the first place. Not the best of plans, and I could almost certainly earn more in any number of other, quicker, ways, but its the principle of the thing for me now, damnit! So, nothing for it but to hop in the Badger MkII and get truckin.

It’s not a bad life really, and right from the word go, all those years ago, I’ve had an enduring fondness for the lumpy old Caldari Industrial. My Cohost is is currently canvassing opinion on ‘Favourite EVE Ship’, and and the sexier Tech 2 Frigates seem to be going down well, but thinking back to through all my magpie-like phases of ship ownership in EVE, it’s probably the Badger MkII’s I’ve put the most flight time in, and an Industrial is a way of life, not just a ship. (If any CCP folks are reading, I’d love to see a ‘Hours Flown In’ type of list on the character sheet!)

EVE is a place of ferocity, adrenaline, tension and drama, but it can also be a place of great tranquility and serenity as well, and there’s definitely something very calming and soothing to simply flying about a region, doing pickups and dropoffs in an industrial. It leaves the mind free to think, or chat, or similar, and I begin to understand why so many players are content with just mining much of the time. Not the most exciting way to play an MMO, but then sometimes, that’s not what I’m looking for. It also gives me time to blog – many of my recent posts have been banged out with my feet on the dashboard of the Badger. EVE Online Liveblogging!

Costing a mere 700,000ISK, and taking only a day and a half to train for the new character, its a ship so potent, in its own way, that it has one of the few skill-books that a Trial Account is not allowed to learn. With a bit of market knowhow, and some startup capital, it’s easily possible to pay for the cost of the ship with only one single trade run; if you’re really lucky, in the same system! From there, its onward and upward to the Transport Ships and Freighters for the dedicated Space Trucker, but few other ships provide so much to the new player, so quickly and at such little cost.

Other Industrials are available, of course, but the Badger, being a Caldari ship, has a surprising capacity for Shielding in an Industrial ship, and for one memorable mad month, I was actually doing Agent 1 combat missions in one.

The Art of the Battlebadger has aficionados all over EVE. You get one gun, a smartbomb if you’re feeling saucy, six midslots and three lows. No launchers or drones at all. In an agent mission, the traditional Trucker’s low rack of ‘As Many Cargo Expanders As Will Fit’ is less of an issue, which is just as well, because it turns….eventually, and target locks….next Thursday, so those lows come in handy for Inertial Stabilisers and Tracking Enhancers! Mind you, few Agent 1 missions produce 10,000m3 of loot, so the base cargo of 6,000 or so should do just fine. The mid slots allow the Badger to carry a ridiculous amount of Shield HP though – the one I’m flying about in right now has about 3,500 HP with just junk I had lying around, which is twice that of the Moa, (the most beefy Caldari Cruiser), and 2/3rds that of the Ferox Battlecruiser, which is just silly, and tends to make most missions a matter of parking up and waiting for your single gun to whittle the enemy frigates away, while they sometimes scratch your paintwork with a ‘wrecking shot’.

Definitely a hobby for the patient, that, and I’m not sure I’d want to try an Agent 2 in it. At the moment though, I’m gradually assembling my missing minerals at the factory and turning them into shiny new Ravens, and taking on board trade goods where the routes come up. 4/10 built so far, and three sold.

It’s not all work though, and to break it up a bit, I’m also working up the local faction doing Agent 2 missions, a bit more seriously, in a Rupture that I bought and fitted with the proceeds of the trade good outbound trips. It’s nice to keep my hand in, and I think when this whole mess has been cleaned up, I might treat myself to a new Battleship and get back on the Agent 4 circuit again. (Probably not a Raven though…sick of those now.) I expect by then, I’ll be more than ready for yet another EVE career change. It’s funny really, but thinking back, I bought my very first Battleship much the same way. It’s probably The Circle of Life, or something.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get around to training Caldari Industrial V, but no matter who or what you are in EVE, everyone needs to move stuff about at some point or another, so I think its definitely worth putting in the days for. If everything else ends in flames and destruction, an Industrial ship and a 100k in your pocket is all you need to drag yourself back up to glory!

Ah, got to go…coming in to dock!

(Top Truckin Tip: Secure Containers are bigger on the inside than on the outside. A ‘Giant Secure Container’, assembled and placed in the hold will take up 3,000m3, but itself, will hold 3,900m3 of Stuff. Use the various sizes of these to fill the hold, then put the minerals inside those, giving you roughly 30% extra capacity. Does not work for Trade Goods, but just the job for largescale Mineral haulage!)

So there I was, doing my own thing in the low-sec region of “Rockpool”. Mostly, this is the occasional Agent II mission, when I had time to play at all, being the multi-game hopper that I am. The vague overall plan here is to increase my standing with the local agent to the point where I can mission grind on IIIs and even IVs, and yet still be on hand if I’m needed.

The whole ‘needed’ thing is turning out to be somewhat optimistic actually, and it seems most of the corp I’m in spends much of their EVE time (presumably) watching TV, and/or playing XBox, while waiting for their Strip Miners to complete the cycle. Either that, or they’re busy half a galaxy away, doing what I am, which is basically, soloing combat Agent Missions for personal profit and gain.

Domestic felicity, all round, which is nice and all, but we are actually operating in low-sec for much of the time, so it shouldn’t have been quite the surprise that it was, when some of our haulers started going missing. The corp runs several of the POS structures in the region, and these things need constant supply – a lot like being a hauler on a mining op, but with the crucial difference that a POS won’t ever get bored and call a halt to the endless racing about in a Badger MkII.

I’d been away for a few weeks and the first thing I saw when I got back was one of the Hauling Folks, (whom I have as much respect for as the Mining Folks – both vital chores that I’m glad I don’t have to do), grumbling in Corp Chat about the loss. Information was somewhat sketchy (always a bad sign), but enough umbrage was raised to cause a modest posse to form, in some half-hearted attempt at revenge.

Turns out that one of the many other corporations and alliances in the region which we had, for some reason, set as ‘Blue’, had gotten bored or something and just decided to go on a bit of a spree, and had come across one of our lot lumbering their way to the POS system in an Industrial. Considering their bored guy was in a Battlecruiser, things went about as badly as you might expect. I don’t know the details exactly, but it seems the BC managed to jump on the Industrial at a gate, despite the supposed defensive assistance of the sentry guns and billboard. I personally suspect Autopilot AFK, but couldn’t say for sure.

Living in Low-Sec, it’s probably quite important not to let that sort of thing go unpunished – once everyone else out there gets to hear about it, things probably get quite ugly quite quickly – blood in the water and all that.

So we dithered for quite a while, and eventually got a small gang together with the intention of going after the chap and giving him a good seeing too. Much of the dithering was spent getting the few people who were available down to the system in question, a tedious process involving jump clone timers. I happened to be next door, which was just as well, as I’m still about 3.0 faction short of a jump clone with anyone, after nearly five years of play. Slacker!

We finally assembled – a Hurricane (Me), another Battlecruiser, and a Battleship. It all seemed a bit of a hastily thrown together ensemble, with me having the only tackling fit, and none of us that well tanked for sentry gun fire, which seemed to be the plan.

Our quarry had been spotted in system, and the three of us split up to cover each of the gates out. Then the waiting. The enemy flashed me at my gate, flying a shuttle which was too small for me to lock on to before he could disappear, back into the system, rather than out past me.

Shortly afterward, he buzzed the other two gates in turn, then presumably docked. By now of course, he’d pretty much sussed us out and was busy fitting up a more suitable ship to have some ‘fun’ with us in, and was most likely also calling in corp-mate reinforcements. The longer we waited, the faster I could feel the situation slipping out of our control…

Sure enough, before long, he was spotted at one of the other gates, this time in a Battleship, and we were ordered to warp in and have at it. Not a straightforward assault, mind you, as we were not at war at all, and this was a 0.4 Sec system, meaning that us attacking him, made us pirates, criminals and worse, incurring a -0.5% personal security status hit each, (Which will take me weeks to work off), and more importantly, causing the sentry guns to open fire, much to the amusement of our nemesis, I’m sure.

Quite an education – the Sentry guns hit pretty damned hard, but it is possible to survive their withering hail for a few minutes in a decently set up BC or BS – longer too, if you throw out five drones each, as the guns randomly alternate targets, and that includes the fast moving and difficult to hit drones too.

So we got to work on the enemy Battleship, whittling away it’s shield and starting to dent it’s armour a bit. I managed to get my one point of warp scramble on him, which made me feel dead chuffed and like a real eve player and everything, and in the somewhat hectic confusion of it all, I don’t think any of us had noticed that he hadn’t actually fired back at all. We managed to get him down to perhaps two-thirds armour, and then he just casually hit ‘Jump’ and vanished to the next door system; afterall, he was a law-abiding citizen who hadn’t engaged in combat at all. We on the otherhand, were all flagged as the worst kind of blackguards, and so were not allowed to use the jumpgate ourselves – aggression timers and whatnot.

Which just left us all sitting there, feeling foolish, annoyed and oh yes, being beaten to near-death by the sentry guns, and our nemesis’s corp-mate, who’d shown up at 100km in some kind of sniping Cruiser to start taking potshots at us. Time for an orderly withdrawal!

I spent the next fifteen minutes warping about the planets, waiting for my status as evil pirate to expire, so I can be allowed to dock and not get shot at by the sentry guns again. The other two members of our Taskforce of Awesome were similarly engaged, when not responding to the exultant gleeful smacktalk that our enemy had quite rightly earned.

Embarrassing and quite disheartening all in all, although on the plus side, I didn’t lose my ship – my cowardice kicking long before that became a problem. Still, 3 vs 1, and we still ended up with a draw. Seems I have an awful lot to learn, and every step of the evening saw us basically toyed with by a foe who knew much better how to play the system to his own ends. If just one of us had gone after him, he’d have polished us off without breaking a sweat, but since there were three of us, he used the game’s mechanics faultlessly to beat us that way.

Unless actually involved in a proper War, or operating out in true lawless 0.0 space, it seems to me to be a much easier game of it being the wolf, the preemptive ambush aggressor. Call it ‘Pirate’ if you will, I think they’re just bored. Not sure I could bring myself to do it mind you – roll up a Rifter-flying newbie and start jumping on miners. But making the opening move like that, calling the shots, dictating the place and numbers of a fight, and simply fleeing if it looks like you won’t win…it all makes sense, and is a hard thing to react against – fighting on someone else’s terms and all. I think I’d prefer an outright War – at least you don’t have to dance around gate guns or grind sec status points to recover.

It was all made much harder by how little enthusiasm there was among our lot to put up any kind of counter-attack, (Three pilots willing and able to muster, out of a corp membership of 70-odd, and an Alliance of many more) and how difficult and time-consuming such a counter-attack was to arrange and coordinate, with the other two far enough away to necessitate using a jump clone.

I wonder what our corp is actually doing in Low Sec sometimes. There are POS opportunities, certainly, but they can’t be that good, and on the whole, it looks as if our corp manages to exist in Rockpool purely because no-one else out there has really noticed us yet. Keep up with these slapstick defensive actions, and that’s sure to change, and I dread to think what will happen when some other rival out there really wants us gone.

Before that day comes, we need to be a lot more numerous, a lot more active, a lot less scattered and a lot more willing, or we’re all going to find ourselves a lot more Empire Based…

Meanwhile, I seem to have found quite a niche for myself in the EVE Online corp. Life in ‘Rockpool’ isn’t nearly as fraught as I was expecting, and instead of the maelstrom of silent lonely ganking in the dark I was anticipating, things seem on the whole just as placid as back in my previous High-Sec region.

Partly, this is due to the geography of it all. Its a dead end that doesn’t go anywhere special, and not on any of the main bottleneck routes to the yawning vastness that is 0.0. This means that there’s not much to attract the more feisty spaceship warrior, and while the mining is (apparently) very good. There aren’t huge resources of Megacyte lying around, or lucrative NPC spawns and complexes to attract the more militaristic expansion of the bigger players of the Alliance Game, although we hear about fierce battles one region over, from passing soldiers, on their way back from the front.

Partly it’s also down to diplomacy, and I find myself a member of a surprisingly tight-knit, but sufficiently large community of locals, who are not exactly allies, but who all recognise the value of a mutual understanding. Blue icons fill the Local list, and this gives me a great sense of security, of not facing the stark badlands of Low-Sec alone. It’s in everyone’s interest to keep the lone troublemakers out. Not that I’d expect any of them to leap to my defence against a roving pirate mind you, but at least their CEO having to explain an attack to our CEO keeps the peace.

The biggest danger is complacency, I guess. Look out for an outraged and petulant post about how PvP sucks soon! But I’ve not let my guard down entirely, and keeping an eye on Local Chat is a new and fun subgame I’d not had to worry about before. Every time a new face appears in the list, it’s Yellow Alert, and a hasty inspection of their credentials; Sec Standing, Bounty, Corp, Bio, Corp Bio, all these go to make up a basic background check. You can’t believe everything you see there, of course, especially the Bio, but it all helps make an informed judgement about the newcomer – time to hide, or carry on as usual? All keeps things fresh.

The Directional Scanner is a handy tool also – a quick ping set to 360 degrees and 2,147,483,647km (14.3au) gives you an instant list of what ships are out and about nearby. And of course, the Star Map itself – Ships Destroyed in the Last Hour, Pods Killed in the Last Hour, Players in Space in the Last 30 mins – all essential tools for low-sec living.

I keep one eye over my shoulder, but its business as usual. This consists of grinding NPC corp standing from the ground up with a new corp I’d not worked for before – Agent 2 missions in a Battlecruiser! The new On-Board Cosmic Anomaly Scanner offers more challenging fare, for pure bounty work, and I’ve even had the odd valuable piece of faction loot out of those. The belt rats are often Battlecruiser class too, which is fun, and occasionally I even cover some of our mining barges as they try for these rarer minerals. Mostly though, they keep to the small high-sec bit of Rockpool for the day-to-day mining, where five light drones is more than enough cover.

No, turns out that my niche is in the Covert-Ops Frigate, which is fast turning out to be the more useful of the two ships I raced through the blockades. A little training got me the ability to use the Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, a module that changes the game in all sorts of ways. When active, I become invisible, which is always nice in an area where people can and will blow you up if they see you. The Covert Ops version is more expensive, and difficult to train for, but allows full-speed travel, and the ability to warp while cloaked, and lets you get screenshots like this:

If you can see this, you’re invisible, a member of the corp that owns it, in a Dreadnought about to open fire, or very lost and about to die!

The Covert Ops Frigate is not a terribly potent attack craft in its own right, but information is power, and I seem to be making myself very useful to the corp as a whole by using my stealth to scout out potential sites for their POS (Player Owned Structures) department, using the scan probe launcher to get resource data from the moons – a surprisingly tricky business that involves manually aiming the ship to fire the probe. Some of these moons are tiny! This is a dangerous business for the Visible, as turning up out of warp at a low-sec moon with a POS tower already in place is almost certainly asking to be kicked in the cockpit by a XL Artillery Battery – not good.

This data is them passed back to the corporate leadership, who make the decisions about POS expansion. The deployed tower and moon harvesters can then mine all sorts of goodies, which form the building blocks of a very long and involved manufacturing chain which ultimately leads to Tech 2 Components. The POS itself is a hungry thing and requires constant fuelling, and the materials need to be hauled out to a base for use, all of which is through potentially dangerous space. Thankfully, none of that is my department!

In times of war, my Cov-Ops can be put to similar use, scouting out enemy positions, movements and the like, and all the while I drift about serenely enveloped in my blanket of invisibility. The only thing I need to watch out for is proximity – the cloak fails if I move within 2000m of another object, and won’t re-engage if anything has you target-locked. I’ve been practicing by stalking neutrals as they unsuspectingly rat and mine in our neck of the woods.

All in all, it does seem a much more civilised way to take part in a conflict I’d probably be ill-equipped to take part in as a grunt – I just hope I’m up to speed in it all when something big does kick off!

The Cov-ops path isn’t a lot of use for the soloist in Empire, but I’m suddenly finding that it’s an invaluable all rounder for anyone who wants to be useful to a corp.

So Trinity came and went and was something of a mixed blessing, as it turned out, not least of all logging in for the last few days and seeing a stonking great ‘DO NOT REBOOT!’ Message of the Day. I gather there was some kind of troubles with it mucking about with critical Windows XP system files? For the first time since I got it, I find myself glad to own Vista, which by all counts was largely immune to the somewhat alarming boot sector destruction hijinks.

Mind you, it wasn’t just that, and there’s a pretty huge list of outstanding issues that seem to have arisen from what they’re calling EVE’s ‘Premium Content’, and associated server-end gubbins:

OGRank: EVE Online: Trinity Known Issues

In which CCP put out some rather frank build notes. Seems there’s a bit of work to go on it all then, and the fancy new graphics are only a fraction of the troubles. Mind you, I’d not noticed any of it myself, and the biggest problem I had with it all was that the upgrade lost me my hidden Anti-Aliasing settings. In the end I’m using the Catalyst Control Centre out in windows to force AA, and even that doesn’t work if you turn on EVE’s own new HDR lighting settings. Over-blown super-glow stars are nice enough, but I just can’t live with the Jaggies, so the HDR is off. The only other user fiddleable control for the new graphics is Shadow complexity. Since that’s the thing that hammers my FPS the most in all games, that’s all the way off too. Huh. Oh well, I’m sure a new graphics card isn’t too far off (I have a Radeon X1300, by the way), and with the Catalyst managing things form behind the scenes, the FPS is acceptably high, the edges sufficiently smooth, and the shininess nicely…er….shiny!

The move is halfway done. I managed to find a nice quiet long route to the new corp frontier, and a combination of luck, timing and careful study of the map saw me get my two main ships through; a Helios and a Hurricane. The other two ‘keepers’ from my previous collection, the Ishkur and the Tanaris, can come on down at a later date, as to be honest, both were mostly trophy items that I have no idea how to use properly! The rest of my fleet consisted mostly of Tech 1 Frigates and Cruisers I’d accumulated out of a kind of obsessive Pokemon-like collector’s impulse, rather than any real necessity. Still, travel light and all, and I sold and/or melted down most of the junk I’d previously had.

The new location is quite well chosen actually, a pocket of low-sec (0.4-0.1), with a buffer zone of high-sec (0.5-1.0) space between it and the rest of the galaxy, making it a bit of a rockpool, isolated from the dangerous seas of 0.0 proper. That won’t stop a capital ship with a Jump Drive getting in, although smaller gangs of -5 Sec Pirates won’t make it through the conventional High Sec jump gates intact without a lot of hastle, and to be honest, there isn’t an awful lot there for them anyway. It’s a quiet area, with most of the basics, but a much quieter market than in the core empire systems, meaning that a lot of what we’ll need, we’ll have to make for ourselves.

One thing that’s struck me is that the local chat lists in this area, are mostly occupied by people with little blue icons next to their names. Clearly our people have been talking to their people, and despite it being low-sec, and therefore a place were people can shoot at you and get away with it, I’m actually seeing friendlies in the local lists. Well, friends is a loose term – our diplomacy person doesn’t know every member of these blue corps personally, and there’s always one lurking psycho, but it’s nice to know that the folks around us are more inclined not to open fire than open fire.

I think that’s the big problem I’ve always had with PvP – I’ve always gone at it alone. This time it’s different, and with the expedient of shared channels for intel and that kind of thing, a surprising number of corps coexist in this area, with only such laws as that come to agree on, for protection. It blows on the dying embers of my faith in humanity, it really does! Meanwhile, back in Empire, a corp doesn’t really need to have allies, standings or diplomacy – its either ignore everyone, or WAAAAAAAR!

My own time in region I shall hereafter refer to as ‘Rockpool’, is mostly spent either scanning for Exploration Sites in the Helios, or Ratting in the low-sec asteroid belts with the Hurricane, which provide Cruiser and Battlecruiser targets, which is nice, particularly since the Agents of the area are only giving me Level 1 and 2 missions, making the belt rats a much more lucrative proposition. I really ought to work on the standings a bit though. Agent 1 Combat missions in a Battlecruiser are much like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and mostly I just park up and let the drones out to play.

I’ve never liked Asteroid Mining in EVE, in any shape or form, but quite a few in our corp do, and one of the things I hope to make myself useful with, is being on call in a decent PvP-fit ship, in case interlopers show up and start kicking off a fuss in this otherwise quite tranquil lagoon – a kind of roving militia. I hope its having an encouraging effect, if nothing else, as I have only the occasional and very staged in-corp PvP Tournament type of kill to my name so far. I’m not aggressive enough to go full-on pirate, but hopefully, by placing myself slightly in harms way, like this, I may get a chance to learn the ropes a bit, in the pursuit of a worthy cause; looking after our own. I don’t imagine the Battlecruiser will last long, and after that’s gone, it’ll be onto the Cruisers for a bit, I expect, until I can start to confidently expect at least a 50/50 chance of winning. We’ll see. Probably turn out that these mining folk are every bit as capable in combat as me, only better funded. Afterall, there’s only so many SP you can put into rocks, and all that mineral income has to go somewhere…

I quite like having this smaller playground to be honest. The Galaxy of EVE is a huge place, but very little of it matters, I’ve always found. Sure, my stuff is mostly in system X, and the corp office is in system Y, but one is much like another. With this smaller map of relevant systems, perhaps some of the sprawling universe of EVE might start to feel like a kind of home…

Once upon a time, I imagined myself a Scientist in EVE Online. This was the golden days of the Tech 2 Lottery, an ill-advised system all in all, and now recently replaced. After about 45 days of skill training in an otherwise useless skill, I got talking to an agent who would give me just under 50 ‘RPs’ a day. These Research Points would accumulate over time and each represented one ticket in a gamewide periodic lottery, which governed the distribution of the incredibly rare Tech 2 Blueprint Originals, licences to print money, in effect.

Suffice to say that the expected Ishtar BPo was not forthcoming in a hurry, and I largely forgot about the whole thing, probably in favour of some other shiny EVE Career Path instead – Long Distance Space-Trucking or something. Mind you, my agent didn’t forget about me, and for the past two and half years, has apparently been doing dubious things with Bunsen Burners, Van Der Graff Generators and forlornly hoping that I might actually get back in touch and do one of the daily fetch-and-carry missions, which result in double RP for that day. Fat chance! For all I know, I was even offered the Tech 2 BPo in the interim, but not actually playing for all that time, if I was, I missed my chance.

Fast forward to this week, and I’m back, pre-emptively signing up mostly to get patched and ready ahead of tomorrow’s big Super Dooper Prettification Patch. I did the usual ‘Who/What/Where The Hell Am I?’ round-up and one thing that caught my eye, was the little entry in the Journal mentioning that I now had about 41100 RPs, just sitting there, and now, it’s all different. There’s a new Invention system in palce that replaced the big Lottery some time ago, allowing people to make Tech 2 Blueprint Copies from Tech 1 items, and a whole bunch of Data Interfaces, Datacores, and so on. Wilhelm explores the basics of it here:

The Ancient Gaming Noob: The Road To Invention

Ouch! Seems that chance still has an awfully large part to play in Tech 2, which is a shame, and there also seems to be a rather large amount of expensive kit needed. I’m very much a glass is half empty kind of person, so paid a visit to my R&D agent, cleaned them out of the new Datacore consumable items you get in lieu of lottery tickets now, and with a bit of research, sold the lot for a hefty lump sum, and am now richer than I’ve ever been in-game. This isn’t especially bragging, mind you, and usually, I operate with just about enough spare cash to buy another battleship when (rather than ‘if’) my current one slips on a lag-spill, gets caught on a patch-mission-difficulty-tweak, or just plain falls victim to my own stupidity or tiredness. I’ve now got enough cash for six battleships, plus fitting, in reserve now!

My Scientist Agent is also apparently continuing to generate more RPs, at about the rate of just short of one fresh Datacore a day, in effect, giving me an EVE Online Salary. I think I may forget about it all again, making it a nest egg for the future. Alas, as in many MMO crafting systems, it seems that in this case, the real money is to be had be resource gatherers, only in this case there seems to be very little staring at asteroids involved. Mind you, it’s anyone’s guess what these Datacores will be worth in three months or a year.

This accidental trust-fund nest-egg, from my absent-minded past self, to my present day and greedy self, is half of a greatly revised outlook on the game for this current revisit, the other half being a revision of my expectations of the whole thing. ‘Don’t fly what you can’t afford’ is an often repeated truth, but I’m not sure I ever fully understood it’s import, and perhaps a better, if not as snappy, alternative should be ‘Don’t fly what it will take more than X to replace’, where X is the maximum length of time that you can be bothered to spend ‘working’ in EVE, rather than ‘playing’; mining, ratting, mission grinding, whichever is your own favourite. I mean sure, I can do Agent 4 Combat missions, but it is a bit stressful sometimes, and often a circular process; I earn the monies to buy the battleships to earn the monies… Spare cash I don’t have to spend on new Battleships is usually spent on rare modules, Tech 2 modules, to further refine the Battleship earning process.

Six Battleships in the bank is all very nice, but how many Battlecruisers would that buy? Or Crusiers? Hell, it’ll keep me in Frigates indefinitely, allowing me to explore the more dangerous aspects of the game, which I’d traditionally shied away from, not so much due to fear or pessimism, more a weary awareness that anything I get blown up in, I’ll have to then replace out of my own blood, sweat and tears. The less time I can spend doing that, the better, and the nest-egg is a good head start.

All this is just as well really. Turns out my corp has grown, changed and expanded a lot since I was last in it. They kept me on as ‘on leave’ and I’m seeing all sorts of new faces in chat, and old ones too. Part of the corp’s new direction seems to be a determined push on an area of ‘Low Sec’, a haven for pirates, criminals and assorted other unpleasant types; the outer rim, the periphery of civilisation, and the badlands. Modesty, and paranoia, forbid me to mention any names, locations or suchlike – I’m sure you understand. Participation in the settlement of this area is optional, but I’ve done the Carebear bit to death, frankly, and so have signed up to relocate down to the low-sec office and help out there however I can; exploration, covert-ops, and I’m sure, no small amount of ‘Pew-Pew’. I’m a lot less worried about the prospect, now that my tastes have been appropriately lowered to match my means, and it looks to be interesting times ahead, the first of which will involve me running my four favourite ships through a quite hectic pod-kill gauntlet to meet up with the new corp outpost!

Of course the real reason for my return is tomorrow’s big patch, although to be honest, I’d forgotten how good the thing looks even now as I do a bit of pre-emptive shuttling about to round up my junk and move it all yet again, and for a game that’s basically had the same graphics and models for the last four years or so, certainly doesn’t look too shabby. Time to set a long skill going and wait for the Rapture to arrive!

Quite without realising it, I seem to have drifted out of EVE Online again. It’s not a bitter thing, or an angry thing, unlike many of my previous flouncing hissy-fits. I just seem to have ‘had my fill’ for now. Clearly, an MMO that you buy, just about struggle through the first (free) month in and then abandon in disgust is Not Very Good, but as well as that, I start to see that the mark of a really good MMO, is that somewhat bizzarely, it’s good enough that you can amicably walk away when you’ve had enough, and that it doesn’t keep you playing and playing, long past the point it was last interesting or fun. A good MMO has to keep you in the first place, but I think, is mature enough to let you go too.

Very subjective, of course, and perhaps a bit of over anthromorphising on my part. Of course MMOs don’t have wills and desires of their own – it’s just a server, dum-dum, but I’ve sometimes played online games where it’s been actually quite difficult to cash in the chips, call it a day, and let it go, and from reading a lot of blogs, I don’t think I’m alone in this kind of dead-horse beating, this strange refusal to admit that perhaps “SuchAndSuch Online” isn’t quite as much fun as it used to be. We end up plodding on through the day-to-day, maybe afraid to acknowledge that it’s simply a thing of addiction now.

I’m older and wiser these days I expect, and it’s easier to just stop playing when I’ve had enough, and I can’t remember the last really awful MMO I’ve stormed out of, which is due in part, to me tending not to go for new-new MMOs these days, but instead revisit the ones I’ve liked in the past.

I’d just like to point out this particular resignation is nothing at all to do with the current ongoing CCP/BoB/Goons thing. It’s fascinating, and even I’ve had a bit of minor soapbox mileage out if it all, but being a bit of an Empire-Hugging Nobody, it doesn’t have much relevance to my everyday game.

I do wonder if the current plan, which seems to be to turn EVE Online into The Democratic Glorious People’s Republic of EVE, with elections and all the rest, will actually help matters much, mind you. Plenty more klever bloggers than me have been pointing out that in the end, those who don’t want to believe CCP are on the level, won’t, no matter what lengths they go to.

If it were me, I’d just take private, internal, measures to make it less likely to happen again, and then draw a line under the whole thing, leaving it to the individual players to decide if rampant cheating is ruining their own day to day game-lives. I expect in pretty much all cases, where the player happens NOT to be a fleet commander fighting tooth-and-nail for a bit of empty space in the arse-end of beyond, none of the events of the last few weeks are affecting them in the slightest. “Here is our game – take it or leave it.” The basic game of EVE is certainly strong enough to withstand that kind of scrutiny, and I doubt most subscribers care that much. I don’t, and although, yes I’m leaving, it’s not about this at all.

I wonder if a more distant, ‘professional’, and yes, even aloof, relationship with the players, such as we usually see elsewhere in the MMO world, might make things less awkward for CCP, rather than this current, ‘what else can we do to win you over?’ idea that’s in the works now, which frankly, is just likely to give fuel to the usual low-grade flames of the kinds of message-board rabble-rouser you get everywhere, and who basically get his or her ‘game’ from the forums, not the server. Some folks are never happy.

Anyway, it’s been a decent run this time though, with new things still being seen and uncovered, both on a purely game level, and in the social game. Exploration and Scanning, Salvage and Rigs, and the Tier 2 Battlecrusiers, my favourite of which is the Hurricane…so sleek, so pointy… The Factional Warfare I was hoping to see this time through didn’t seem to quite make it in, which was a shame, as I still think the game needs some form of ”PvP-Lite” – a way to get a bit more used to the ins and outs of that, very significant, yet brutally complex, aspect of the game without having quite such high stakes, security status hits and so on. I’ve also just missed ‘Heat’, a new feature that allows you to gamble with modules, overpowering them for improved performance, at the risk of them blowing up. It’s encouraging to see how much new stuff was in there since my previous season, and it’s this kind of tinkering about with new mechanics that makes the MMO more appealing than offline single-player games, which rarely change much past the first go.

Exciting times with EVE Inter-Corp War too, which was thoroughly enjoyable, although possibly because we were winning mostly. I expect it’s not quite so much fun if you’re outnumbered and unable to leave the station without getting insta-ganked, and in any event, I’m not sure I have the sheer nervous energy to keep at wars all the time. Again, the corp are good people, friendly and helpful, although like most of my online guild adventures, I didn’t really engage enough to be able to think of them as close friends. Amiable compatriots, one and all!

So once more, time to park up, and pick a really long skill to train – Battlecruiser V, probably. Because yes, I know I will be back – EVE is one of those few titles that I never really leave, merely take holidays from now and then. I’ve no idea when I’ll return, but the mid-long term future of EVE looks good, with a planned DirectX 10 upgrade, (screenshots of which look almost TV/Movie quality, and quite stunning), and a whole ‘walk about stations’ thing that will finally see us pilots getting out of the spaceships, for the first time in years. And between now and then, I’m sure there will be hundreds of smaller features, fixed and changes to make life interesting all over again.

But for now, time to fire up the Futurama-style stasis chamber, and get a good fourty-thousand winks…

All in all, I’m pretty much an Ordinary EVE Pilot, or at least like to think so. I put in about 6-9 hours a week, I do missions in Empire Space, I’m a member of the ubiqutous “small, friendly, mining, manufacturing, casual” player-corporation, who aren’t adverse to the occassional bout of ultra-violence when the need arises, or even internally, although conducted in a very sporting fashion, without the malice of strangers.

I know that I’m ordinary, because the various Galaxy Maps overlays show me that the majority of other players in EVE are in the same kinds of place I am – Empire Space 1.0 – 0.5 systems mostly, near the larger mercantile hubs. I know that they’re doing the same sort of things as me, as the population overlay maps onto the ‘Pirate Drones and Police Killed in The Last 24 Hours’ (NPC Ships, in other words) overlay quite closely. I know that a huge proportion like, or can at least stand, mining for hours on end, as the mineral and ship markets function and prices remain quite stable.

For me, the game, and game it still remains, is just a way to spend one of my evenings in a setting where no goblins need putting to the sword, so I must admit to being both amused and non-plussed by this whole CCP/BoB/Goonswarm thing currently blowing up on the more fashionable of blogs and messageboards just now. It does rather seem to the sort of drama you need to monitor hourly to stay on top of – useful references I’ve seen include Scott, Ethic and Alaph, but there are many others.

It’s also that rare kind of drama that, if you stare into it long enough, it stares back, and Michael seems to be under a lot of fire lately for being somehow in league with the forces of Anti-CCP Darkness, or something. I expect I’ll get dragged from my house in the night and executed for venturing opinions here in due course, but I love a good conspiracy, and this has the stink of the Illuminati all over it!

Anyway, one of the more recent loose threads, found via the bottom of Scott’s comments, is this gasping turn of events, worthy of the finest soap operas:

EVE Online “COAD” Fourm – Official Goonfleet Announcement

In which Goonfleet seem to decide to take their ball and go home. I say seem, because the purpose of the COAD is largely a platform form propaganda, misdirection, outright lies, and good old fashion trolling, so the first hurdle is deciding whether to believe it, or indeed, anything you read there. Nevermind the legislative conundrum of suing real people in imaginary spaceships in a different, and pretend, galaxy, using Icelandic law, for…well…not quite sure what the actual transgression itself is actually.

However, as the main corp behind the much larger Goonswarm Alliance, the disbanding of Goonfleet is a bit of a blow for anyone in the red bit of this map. BoB, the alliance under fire for alleged GM collusion, are the driving force behind the blue team on that map, so the quick among you will already see that this is going to affect the game quite dramatically. The war between the red lot and the blue lot is a thing of legend around the EVE community and has been for months. Even I’m mildly interested in seeing how it’s going, and if I were cynical, I’d say that the war is the motivation behind these various ‘incidents’ of clouded nature we’ve been seeing recently, most of which seem to involve the blue team in some manner.

In a game where cheating, lying, stealing and spying are all accepted, nay, condoned gameplay styles, and in a game where both those two power blocks will most likely do anything to win, I suspect this kind of thing was long overdue – one or more groups of disgruntled players crossing the already hazy and scuffed ‘line’ and taking it out to the metagame. One only has to skim through the replies that got in on the thread before the lock, to see the very real and very out of character levels of hatred and ill-will that perpetuate – talk of following people to other games and crushing them there, ‘don’t let the door hit you…’, a lot of name-calling, and so on. An effective swansong though, and quite calculated to cause the maximum disruption to the game – putting a stop The Great 0.0 War Adventure! and blaming it on cheating GMs and the Legal Banstick.

Mind you, I’m not sure I believe a word of it, and more distressingly, I seem to think of CCP with the…er…same brush nowadays. Depending on who you believe, we’ve either got an institutionally corrupt MMO company fixing all the fights, and disappearing event staff without warning or reason in a very sinister fashion, OR, we’ve got a really quite sizable proportion of the playerbase of the game – around 2500 players – conducting an orchestrated attack on the reputation, success and very operation of an MMO I quite like playing, and I don’t really believe any of them.

It would be an easy call if that whole BoB T20 Cheating GM thing hadn’t been exposed, and in a way, confirmed by CCP, some months back. Adding a Internal Affairs Department is all very well, but just knowing that it happened burst our little bubbles, thank you very much, and when BoB people start bragging about having GMs on speed-dial, well…you do have to wonder…

Whomever you believe, or whatever the truth, this whole situation is unlikely to end well. Of course EVE Online will keep going and of course most players, myself included, will just plod on with the mining and missions as usual. It doesn’t affect our game much – there will be new Goonswarms, and new BoBs, and in six months time, that map will look entirely different, and just as inaccessible for the common mortal player. If indeed Goonswarm are folding as suggested, the individual players will keep playing, no doubt, a new corp, a new alliance. There will not however, be a new CCP, who unlike us, have to carry their reputations with them. No reroll for the Devs…

It’s good gossip and scandal, but is it really worth quitting what is by now, likely to be a somewhat addicted obsession for these people? Still, I am terribly dissapointed – an entire alliance does the ‘I quit!’ post, and it takes until the bottom of page three for someone to ask for their stuff!