Quick note for today: I’ve implemented communism in our wormhole.
Basically all drops/products that actually make it to market and get sold go into the Corporate wallet, and once the wallet reach a certain amount, all active WH residence get an equal share. Clean, simple, and hopefully effective.
Any WH dwellers try/do something similar?
Rumors of WH life being slow and boring are greatly exaggerated, at least based on our first weekend. Holy crap did a lot happen.
After the previously reported POS setup failure, the EVE gods smiled on us and opened up a perfect exit for us to move everything inside Friday night. Orcas, Industrials, and PvP ships all come inside, as did most of the goods we immediately needed. We literally had most of the Corp going in and out for hours, all while trying to line up who needs to buy what and where to store things. The whole thing looked like a busy ant colony doing work. Very cool stuff.
We onlined the POS and started setting up the defenses. I had a bit of a fail-fit moment with my placement of guns/ECM, but the next day, and after a humorous forum post, corrected things. As with most things in EVE, the first time you try to anchor structures you don’t really ‘get’ it, and will likely fail. Once you figure out wtf you are doing, the system is actually not that bad. It’s easy to call this bad UI design, but given the complexity and the freedom, it’s likely the best system without totally making things too easy. Learning curve; EVE has one, even after two years of playing.
Saturday night we cleared the available Sleeper sites, and after just a few hours, collected about one billion ISK worth of loot that was successfully delivered to market. This was a rather nice haul, and hopefully the Sleepers keep coming back and bringing their toys with them.
While this was happening, we also started working on a grav site, mining ABC ores. It’s at this point that we discovered one of the challenges with mining in a WH: the refinery you can online at the POS only refines with a 75% yield, and that’s assuming you can get 25% yield from skills. Oh, and that refinery takes three hours to run a cycle, and the maximum volume for a cycle is just 200,000m3, plus you can only refine one ore type per cycle. And speaking of maximum volume, it did not take long to fill the Corporate hanger with ore as well, meaning we had to stop mining until we refined some ore down into the much smaller minerals. Perfecting this whole dance will take some time, but it makes normally dull crafting very interesting.
Sunday was a bit of a shitshow, as we had a high-sec entrance open up on us. Initially this was a huge boon, as we moved a bunch of goods out to market and get more stuff inside. The downside is that we had some visitors, and they did not play nice with the locals. We made some pretty serious tactical mistakes, but total losses were not huge and valuable lessons were learned. I expect us to continue learning such things the hard way as we go, and so long as moral stays up and we keep learning, everything will be fine.
Looking back on the weekend, I can honestly say that WH life is even more interesting and challenging than I had initially expected. There are hundreds of little details that demand attention, and any one of them could result in disaster, be it financial or combat. At the same time, the potential for income is ridiculous, and almost everything encourages your Corp to band together and tackle it as a team.
Oh, and it’s also a hell of a lot of fun in the purest of MMO terms. Cyndre covers some of it in this post, and he also has a post similar to this one about the weekend. It’s been since DF with Inq that I’ve felt this connected to an MMO, the immediate community I have within it, and the overall community as a whole. It’s that connection that I believe is the ultimate selling point of the genre; it sucks you in and makes you care more than any other game possibly could.
EVE-related blog post notice: If you would like to join us, comment here or shoot me an email. If you don’t have an EVE account, I’m more than happy to send a 21-day trial invite, and split the PLEX-related profit if you decide to sign up. Again just comment or email me.
Last night INQ-E purchased a wormhole and established ourselves in our new home.
Oh wait that was just the plan.
In a very impressive showing, we had the majority of the Corp online and ready for the move. Haulers filled up their ships, PvP escorts were ready to go, and everything was looking good. We got the entrance location from the seller, made our way to it without incident, and got everyone inside the wormhole and to the POS we were set to purchase.
Then things went a bit south. Or more accurately, did not go anywhere.
Our seller, the current owner of the POS, did not leave a pilot with anchoring III behind (the skill needed to unanchor a POS, so that it would be traded). His alt only had anchoring II, but was training towards III and only had ‘about an hour’ to go. About an hour turned out to be closer to two. Oh and after those two hours, he was at anchoring II, not III. Wheee.
Since we were buying the POS, we did not bring our own. Had we done so, we would have been up and running in plenty of time. Lesson learned.
During the initial wait for the transfer, we probed down the entire system, and along with a nice collection of grav and ladar sites, found two additional wormholes. The first lead to a C4, which contained an active POS and a few capital ships inside it. Not wanting to stay connected to our temporary neighbors, we took our first shot at collapsing a hole, moving battleships back and forth in order to destabilize it. Once critical, we left it alone. The other hole was to null-sec, and in our attempt to destabilize that hole, the last battleship to jump back inside actually closed it. This was met with cheers in vent.
Once the seller realized his mistake, he was nice enough to simply give us the WH rather than sell it, which I felt was a pretty standup move by him. We had one of our trailing members buy a POS in Jita and haul it down, but as luck would have it, he got scanned down and suicide-ganked along the way. The truly comical part of this is right before that happened, I was saying on vent how I doubt anyone would suicide a hauler with just a POS inside, considering it’s only worth 300m and its 50/50 whether it survives the wreck. A goonswarm member confirmed that yes, suicide-gankers will take that risk.
One of those “this is EVE” moments happened a few days ago, when I discovered that there is an entire Corporation that runs a WH selling/brokerage service. If there is a demand for some service, you can be sure someone in EVE will do it for a price. The broker’s side of this entire thing went very smoothly. I transferred the ISK to him, along with a 10% fee, and he held the ISK until I had control of the POS. Once it became apparent that the trade was not going to happen, he returned the ISK minus his fee as we had agreed. Considering the whole fiasco took more than three hours, his prompt service and response times were highly appreciated.
While the actual result of the night was not what we had planned for or expected, the whole experience was still very memorable, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. Experiencing something that new as a large group is a lot of fun, and seeing the whole Corp working towards one goal like that was great. ‘Epic’ moments in an MMO don’t always end with a dead dragon. Sometimes, ‘nothing’ happening can be just as, if not more, exciting.
Tonight is round two of actually putting the POS online and setting everything up. What could possibly go wrong?
EVE is not the only game that people say stupid things about. From everyone’s favorite comments section, I give you this gem:
Linking apparent server populations to subscriber numbers might be an indicator, but in reality, it’s really just conjecture, voodoo science, guesswork.
For example, my SWTOR sub is good thru May, but I’ve been doing other things and have barely been logged in for a full hour in weeks . Mild winter/early spring also moves folk to spend less time at the computer.
That’s right folks. SW:TOR numbers are WAY DOWN not because the game sucks as an MMO (and seemingly, as a game overall), but because.
Wait for it.
The winter was mild.
And have you noticed that, in particular, Sunday’s have been mild? EAWare can’t compete with mild winter Sunday’s. Sometimes you make a great game with amazing retention, and god deals you a rough hand and strings a bunch of warn Sunday’s together to foil your master plan.
This also further proves that EVE players are all sociopaths. Look at this chart. Clearly despite warn Sunday’s, EVE players would rather participate in torture (play EVE) than get a tan or do some yard work. Losers.
PS: Wormhole for 800m should make for some interesting blog posts coming up.
Edit: Suicide watch update.
You will get to hear it from the horses mouth in May that is the next investor call …try not to fling yourself off a building or anything after the announcement.
I’m sure Massively have contacted the police to ensure everyone that comment was aimed at has not killed themselves, and will perma-ban Dunraven_. I also fully expect EG, RPS, CNN, and Obama to address the issue later tonight.
In the hotly contested “Say the absolute stupidest thing about EVE” category, we have a new winner. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present:
Congratulations. You somehow managed to make Massively trolls look like rocket scientists with just one short sentence. /hat-tip.
I believe this might be a first, but I fully disagree with Jester on what impact the Goons “Jita Burns” event might have, and what CCP’s reaction will be. Simply put, Jita Burns might be the single most entertaining day in MMO history if the Goons and their buddies actually pull this off.
Will GMs be pages? Yes.
Will tears be shed? Oh yes.
Will gaming media cover the story? Like you read about.
Will EVE accounts be cancelled, and thousands of potential players turned away? Hell no.
Imagine you are new to EVE, and while flying your little Ibis, you jump into Jita on April 28th, wonder why it’s taking so long to load, and then die in a fiery wreck. As you look around, you see hundreds of wrecks, dozens of ships of all sizes, and thousands of players in local. If you are someone who is the type to potentially enjoy EVE, are you going to rage because you lost a rookie ship, or be amazed at the event going on around you?
“I was there” is a sales pitch for EVE, right? How many people, new pilot or bittervet, are going to be able to say “I was there” for Jita Burns?
You know who will be turned away by this whole thing? Non-factors. The type who were never going to be EVE players anyway. Those who state, with 100% seriousness, that they would love to play EVE on a PvE server. Who believe that this year’s Hulkageddon is going to be the final straw for CCP to swoop in and save them, despite the past 6 years of inactivity. The trolls who hunt down every EVE news item and profess how horrible the community is, and how any day now the wolves are finally going to run out of sheep. Any… day… now.
Jita Burns will not drive these people away from EVE and hurt CCP because these people were NEVER going to be part of EVE in the first place. The only time they factor into New Eden is when they refill the tear buckets, and they will do exactly that come April 28th, only we will need a reservoir and have to pace ourselves. Otherwise we might die from laughter.
The media frenzy over this event will do what the media covered of any great EVE event did in the past; raise interest from potential players, remind past players what they left behind, and give current players more motivation to continue playing. The ultimate indicator of success here will be how outrageous the coverage of this will be (which will likely be somewhat tempered given the backpedaling of the whole ‘suicide’ coverage debacle), and how far non-factors will go to call THIS the deathblow.
And assuming The Mittani pulls this off; he will have created more content in one day than Blizzard creates in an entire year. The market speculation, the aftershock, and new or renewed bitterness; all the things that drive EVE players to log in and do what they do. CCP should not be dreading this day (other than their hardware team), they should be preparing to send a “Thank you” card to Mittens, along with a promise to buy the first beer at next year’s FanFest.
Corp Update: Growth has continued, and daily activity is up. Our regular Ops have been changing up a bit, as we are able to field an Incursion-capable fleet now and opted for that over mining on Sunday. Our mining efficiency has also greatly increased, as we now field a near-perfect Orca along with better mining ships (more hulks). PvP-wise we have more than a few very capable pilots, along with access to a wide variety of ships. Most members are settling into training plans and overall we can simply “do more”.
Recently we have been working on getting Wormhole-ready, but the reality is that with new members joining all the time, and many of them totally new to EVE, we will most likely never reach a point where everyone is 100% ready. And the more I consider things, the more I realize that being 100% ready is not a requirement. People can drift in/out as they need, and so long as we have enough pilots in the hole to make it worthwhile (and we do), we can go ahead and give this a shot. More on that as it develops.
One amusing recent event has been a war-dec by a Corp we have fought before. I say amusing because the war went live Sunday morning, yet more than two days later we have yet to see a single enemy log in, and two pilots have already left their Corp. On top of this, I’m fairly confident that if they ever do decide to log on and undock, they would get slaughtered. Hopefully more on this as it develops, although I doubt it will.
We have also been poking our heads into wormholes we find in our area. Most trips end with us hauling out a ton of Sleeper loot. One recent trip ended with us getting jumped and two ships and a pod going pop. This happened because I got greedy, and rather than leaving the hole as soon as we spotted a scout ship, I decided to press on and sure enough, the scout ship brought a nice little PvP gang on top of us 20 minutes later. Luckily our salvager got out, along with two other ships, but the whole thing could have been avoided.
Personally I’ve been working on two things. One is finishing the skills needed to fly my Incursion Tengu, and the other is messing around with high-sec anomalies. These two things go well together, as I’ve been using my Tengu to clear out those anons, and it does the job with scary efficiency.
Notably clearing anons is far less ISK/hr than lvl 4 missions, even when I get a True Sansha spawn, but they are a bit more varied and easier to jump into/out, plus its more relaxing thanks to the over-powered Tengu. ISK-wise I have ‘enough’ right now to not need to grind 4s, though I still do run a few just to keep the dust off my CNR.
I also got my first escalation site recently, which took me into low-sec. No issues with low-sec itself, but I did have to switch into my Caracal as I was not about to fly 1b worth of ship into low-sec solo. The Caracal cleared out the site, but the loot gods were not with me and all I got was a near-worthless deadspace small cap recharger. Still, the whole experience was interesting, and provided good motivation to continue and hope for more escalations. A Corp member recently cleared one and got a 500m ISK drop, so the potential rewards are indeed high.
EVE-related blog post notice: If you would like to join us, comment here or shoot me an email. If you don’t have an EVE account, I’m more than happy to send a 21-day trial invite, and split the PLEX-related profit if you decide to sign up. Again just comment or email me.
Quick thought on this post from Werit about a GW2 siege video, and the comment from Snafzg that sieging in DAOC, WAR, and (potentially) GW2) suck: sieges in Darkfall don’t suck. They don’t display the same “bang a door” pattern, and they are indeed the highlight or pinnacle of PvP encounters between two rival forces.
The key difference is the combat system. Darkfall is not a hotbar spam-fest, and relies more on player-skill than character-abilities. GW2 (from my brief time with it at PAX) is very much a hotbar spam-fest, and so it’s not a surprise that sieges are what they are.
Does this mean the game as a whole won’t be fun? No. Hopefully it will be (although the more things roll in EVE, the less I’m beginning to care about GW2, especially after watching a bunch of these recent beta videos), but it would be silly to expect anything beyond what we have seen in DAOC/WAR in terms of a keep siege.
Oh another impact on my fading interest in GW2; DF2 might actually happen before I turn 100. I keep meaning to post about the recent Darkfall updated, but honestly at this point Aventurine needs to start the DF2 beta or show something very legit (like a long movie) to make me really believe. I feel better about it now than I did 6 months ago, but not good-enough to jump back on the hype train. But with that said, zero point zero chance GW2 PvP holds a candle to DF2, and nothing about GW2 PvE has me excited beyond a meh.
50/50 on pre-ordering right now, with the 50% for being mainly that INQ is going to play.
Now that Massively has apologized (warning: Massively comments hilarity in full effect),after getting worked over by Mittens on-air, I believe the unofficial “who can make the least-informed EVE post” competition has come to a close. To all the blogs that participated, thank you for your deeply insightful commentary. Good work was performed, awareness was raised, babies were saved, and most importantly, lulz were had aplenty.
One theme (aside from idiocy) that was displayed was that, to many, the line that can’t be crossed is attacking the person behind the character. That anything you do in-game is fair (so long as it’s within said games rules), but going beyond the game is not. This, of course, is rather tricky.
For instance, if I make a forum post about a pilot, is that going outside the game? What if in that forum post I state when said pilot logs on, when he logs off, and what his in-game activities are? What if I also include that he speaks poor English, but fluent Russian? Is it the pilot who can speak Russian, or the player behind the pilot?
What if I know the pilot can’t log in on a specific day at a specific time for religious reasons, and I use that information to attack his POS at that time? If I infiltrate a Corp using Vent to talk to them, have I taken things too far and too “out of game”?
My point is that very quickly, that hard-and-fast line we drew gets real blurry. As I pointed out before, what if anytime I’m about to die in PvP I state I’m suicidal? God-mode right? If the whole Mittens thing was a forum post instead of during FanFest, does Massively even notice? Would you care to bet that the Goon forums have things much, much worse than what Mittens said? Where is the Massively/EG/White-Knight post on that?
If someone kills themselves IRL because they received an in-game threat (Corp ransom for instance) through in-game mail, was the line crossed?
One other point: Notice it’s only non-EVE players who believe the community has a sociopath/reputation problem? Even better, notice it’s only non-EVE players who believe the community has gotten worse ‘of late’?
Either EVE players are just that awesome at coordinating the same message, or what you see from the outside does not occur inside. Are there bad apples? Of course. I’d love to see a group of 300k+ without some. But take a random 300k sample of LoL players, WoW players, EQ2/Rift players, and SW:TOR players, put them up against 300k EVE players in a new, random real MMO, and guess which group is going to form the best community? Which group is going to offer the most help, organize the most in-game content, and do things other communities try to later emulate?
Today does not make your otherwise unfunny blog funny.
Hardcore Casual 