Je pars pour les Caraïbes pendant quelque temps, mais rassurez-vous: je serai de retour d’ici peu, et je prendrai le temps de faire le point sur les évènements qui entourent notre vie dans Eve.

Bonne Année Grand Nez!
Toi pareillement Grand’ Dents!
Que l’bon Dieu vous bénisse, grosses cuisses!

Gavri’el

C’est que c’est fête, ici comme chez vous! Le temps des Fêtes, on prend un p’tit coup, on s’amuse, on rit, on mange… et surtout, on oublie des fois certaines choses importantes comme Eve.

Personnellement, j’aimerais pouvoir écrire sur une base plus régulière dans ce blog. Je me suis même fait reprocher (bah pas vraiment, plutôt questionner) sur le pourquoi du fait que je n’écris plus souvent. Mais, faute de temps, ça ne peut être évité. J’espère que l’année prochaine ce sera plus simple de mettre un peu plus de temps dans mes articles, mais jusqu’ici ça n’a pas été facile de pondre des articles.

Je vais en profiter pour faire le point sur mon expérience dans Epsilon-Lyr jusqu’à maintenant. La Wing Caribou m’a bien acceptée jusqu’ici, et je suis bien content de voir mes amis de l’ancienne Québec-Coalition venir nous rejoindre: je pense à Kusher, Wizardz, Nighblow, et récemment Akhilus (en fait, il est toujours en processus d’entrevue, mais tout devrait bien se passer pour lui, j’en suis très confiant). Aussi, je crois me trouver dans une bonne position en ce moment puisque j’ai réussi à débloquer certains skills dont j’avais vraiment besoin et que je commence à utiliser beaucoup plus:

• Covert Ops (pour mon Nemesis)
• Electronic Attack Ships (pour mon Keres futur)
• Interceptors (pour mon Taranis, que je n’ai toujours pas eu la chance d’essayer)
• Astrometrics (et toutes les skills y étant reliées)
• Archaeology
• Hacking
• High Speed Maneuvering IV (pour les MWD T2)

J’ai aussi bien hâte de finalement pouvoir acheter 2 ships dont j’ai besoin: un Kronos (un Marauder, pour ratter) et un Anshar (Jump Freighter, pour finalement me mettre à hauler toute ma merde moi-même). Mais ces 2 ships-là, c’est au moins 1B chaque, et ce sans le fit. Alors j’en ai pour longtemps à faire du transport.

Surtout pour le Kronos, j’ai bien hâte. J’aspirais déjà en hi-sec de m’acheter un tel ship pour missionner et augmenter ma fortune. Maintenant, en 0.0, je vois le potentiel pour ratter ou même faire des plex par moi-même, ce qui peut potentiellement extraire du jeu beaucoup plus de ISK à l’heure. Mais c’est toujours le problème de se RENDRE à 1B pour enfin l’acheter ce foutu ship. Étant dans la vague déferlante de Dominion, les effets se font sentir sur le portefeuille – il faudrait vendre beaucoup beaucoup beaucoup de matos pour arriver à faire 1B de ISK – mais comment y arriver lorsqu’on doit défendre le territoire? Impossible de ratter, impossible de miner… tout le monde au front! Donc, dernièrement, les choses sont pas si simples.

Je considère de plus en plus me lancer dans la vente d’items lootés pendant mon ratting, surtout Meta 3 ou 4. Mais certainement, ce qui serait intéressant serait de produire moi-même des items. J’ai plusieurs blueprints stocké dans un “Audit Log Secure Container”, mais étant très noob en ce qui a trait à la prod, me faudrait trouver le temps pour parler avec ceux qui en font régulièrement pour savoir me diriger. Ceux qui ont des bonnes suggestions en termes de sites avec tutoriels pour la recherche et production, SVP ne vous gênez pas – laissez des commentaires sur le blog!

Avec ça, je vous souhaite, à tous et toutes, de très Joyeuses Fêtes et une meilleure année 2010 que celle que nous venons de traverser!

Peace,

Gavri’el

Merde… toujours pas reçu mon cargo de Hulk, Mackinaw et Tristan. Bah, tant pis, je vais alors prendre mon main (Gavri’el) et aller voir si j’ai des copains sur Mumble.

Ô joie – larasou est là, et Kusher aussi! Kusher, ça faisait longtemps que je t’attendais ici. Allez, on fait un carnage et on va faire un peu de ratting!

Je saute dans mon Brutix. On part à la chasse de NPC. Larasou a déjà validé avec d’autres collègues où se trouvent les meilleures belts pour le ratting, on on se rend tous là-bas. Kusher fait des zigzags autour de nous avec son MicroWarpDrive, et se surprend de ne pas pouvoir atteindre avec plus de dommages les BS NPC. Néanmoins, on finit par faire quelques kills et l’argent des bountys commence à rentrer. Je décide alors, après quelques voyages vers une station, de sortir mon alt et de m’en servir pour hauler tout le loot et le salvage ramassé. On passe à travers toutes les belts en un peu plus de 20 minutes.

“Neutre en local!”

Quelqu’un nous avertit dans Mumble. Tout le monde se planque, je trouve refuge à une POS pas trop loin. On effectue des scans, et ceux-ci révèlent un Manticore.

Merde – je déteste les Manticore. Le foutu cloak leur permet de s’échapper trop vite trop bien. Mais comme dit Illi, un Manticore, c’est fait en papier mâché. Donc, même en “rat-boat”, on a des chances.

Un autre se loggue, et se retrouve non-loin de nous. Avec quelques messages, on coordonne une offensive rapide. Notre copain contourne notre système et va se planter à l’autre bout de la “pipe-line” pour buller cet aventureux suicidaire. Notre part – on devra le rabattre sur la bulle.

Je suis le premier devant. Mon Brutix a quand même une bonne force de frappe — 6x 200mm Railgun II, un Sensor Booster II et un Tracking Computer II. Je devrais être en état de la chasser. Ou du moins, il devrait avoir peur.

3 systèmes en ligne, et pas de neutre. Le salop, il a déguerpi. Je me risque dans  un 4e système, celui avant la bulle de notre copain. Dès mon jump, je me rends compte de 2 choses: 1, le chan Local est occupé par notre neutre en question, et 2, je suis pris dans 5 bulles anti-warp.

Le temps de me déprendre, je me stationne le plus près possible des bulles, j’active mes sensors, et j’attends avec impatience que cet énergumène revienne se suicider dans mon “bain à bulles”.

Patience. Le tout est patience. Il faut rester tout de même aux aguets – la concentration est primordiale. Si on n’est pas attentif –

Il est là.

Mon Targeting scanner s’active instantanément avec CTRL CLICK.  Tu vas payer ton insolence, toi mon petit.

Feu à volonté. Mes rails se déchaînent. En seulement 6 salves, je réussis à lui arracher au moins 60% de son armure. En effet — du papier mâché. Mais un imprévu survient: comme je suis dans mon “rat-boat”, je n’ai pas de Warp Disruptor. Donc, pas un seul point sur lui. Et boum, il engage son warp et décampe vers la seule station du système.

Je calle les infos sur Mumble, espérant que quelqu’un sera assez vigilant à la prochaine gate. Peut-être qu’il reviendra vers moi, on ne sait jamais – ya que 2 sorties de ce système.

30 secondes s’écoulent. 1 minute s’écoule. 2. Puis rien. Il a disparu, ou alors il se cache – c’est pas comme s’il pouvait entrer dans la station, après tout.

“Merde, il est passé.
-Quoi?
-Oui, il s’est décloaké quelques mètres de la gate, et il a jumpé aussitôt. J’ai rien pu faire. Maintenant, il est loin, l’autre côté il a 5 sorties.

Et une autre chance en or ratée. Avoir eu le bon ship… on aurait sans doute mangé du Manticore ce soir

Eh bien “too bad”… je retourne à mon ratting, et je finis par séparer le loot de notre petite flotte. Quelques modules Meta 4, un bon lot de salvage, et peu de matos reprocessé, le tout divisé. Quand même, c’est vraiment les bountys qui sont payants, mais… rien ne bat l’excitation qu’on vit en gang!

À la prochaine, mon p’tit…. ne t’aventure plus ici, je ne te manquerai pas la prochaine fois!

En arrivant, les “compadres” de corpo m’ont invité immédiatement en flotte – un “roaming gang” était en cours. La Wing Caribou. J’ai sauté dans mon Brutix de ratting (puisque je n’avais rien d’autre de prêt et testé) et je me suis rendu où mes potes étaient.

Tout en me rendant, j’entends Hasiti ordonner “rends-toi ici”, ” scanne-moi ça”, “quel type de ship?”. Des bonnes nouvelles apparaissent enfin.

Un Armageddon est spotté.

J’accours et je rejoins la flotte. Le groupe est prêt à l’assaut – et nous sommes au moins 10.

On retrouve enfin les vaisseaux ennemis dans le système avoisinant. Notre éclaireur nous informe de qui est là – un Crusader, le Arma et quelques autres destroyers et frigs.

“Ils m’engagent… et ils me bouffent, me webbent et me scramblent!”

“Jumpez, on y va!!”

Je jump. Les quelques 6 secondes durant lesquelles mon targeting computer ne fonctionne pas sont interminables. Je voit Mort se faire tirer dessus, mais heureusement il réussit à tanker l’assaut, et Hasiti commence immédiatement à le Remote Repair. Mon targeting débloque – je lock.

Je vide les railguns en me plongeant directement sur le Crusader, mais seulement de 2 salves — il explose sous les coups répétés de Strangeape. Lui aussi a son battlecruiser, mais beaucoup mieux monté que le mien, et il ne fait qu’une bouchée du Crus.

Nous nous retournons tous deux vers le Armageddon lorsque plusieurs avisent qu’ils ont 2 points de scram et de web sur lui. Strange et moi vidons instantanément toute la gomme sur lui.

Quelques 22 secondes s’écoulent durant lesquelles le Arma se dirige désespérément vers la gate… mais à quelques mètres de son jump distance, Strangeape lui lance sa dernière salve. Le Armageddon est maintenant une “Arma-guidoune”.

Rapidement, nous nous affairons à tout ramasser – je salvage le Arma (malheureusement, rien du tout). On se regroupe en quelques secondes, et on jump vers un autre système. Le truc, c’est de ne pas attendre que les renforts arrivent.

Peu après, Strange et moi rentrons au bercail, il me partage son secret et je vois un link vers son fit. 3 Mag-Stab II, 7x des rails 200, un Sensor Boost II… pas mal. En tout cas, beaucoup plus violent que le mien – celui-là est pure DPS.

Je vais donc passer une commande… on va bien voir qui obtient le plus haut pourcentage de kill.

À+ tous!

Mais le déménagement… pfffouh.

J’ai laissé plusieurs choses derrière moi, notamment un beau Mégathron fitté avec rigs et bourré de railguns jusqu’aux amygdales. Et ça m’a pris du temps pour rendre aux point où je voulais en être avec lui, j’ai dù apprendre bien des skills pour l’utiliser à fond. Je n’étais donc pas pour le laisser derrière.

Ce Mega est en fait édition 8 du “Signs of Supremacy” original. Bientôt, je devrai me procurer une version 9, puisque par une STUPIDITÉ de ma part, je me suis fait embusquer et débusquer juste avant hier.

En me rendant au jump bridge que j’utilise pour emmener mes vaisseaux dans notre secteur 0.0, je me suis rendu compte une fois au jump bridge que je manquais de Liquid Ozone. J’ai rapidement regardé le marché pour en trouver — 2 jumps plus loin.

J’ai jumpé. 3 frégates et une foule de drones m’attendaient l’autre côté avec leur @*(!&$\ de bulle. Je leur ai donné une bonne bataille, mais étant l’énervé que je suis, je me suis simplement enfoncé plus dans la bulle, et je me suis fait prendre. Quand même, le méga leur a résisté presque 4 minutes… mais en voulant sortir de la bulle, une autre a pris sa place, et j’ai vite compris que je ne pourrais m’en sortir.

Ce qui m’amène donc au point de mon histoire. NE PARTEZ JAMAIS SANS LIQUID OZONE ET SANS SCOUT. Vous perdrez votre ship à coup sùr.

Je recommence donc mon apprentissage et je ne piloterai que des Frégates pour les prochains 3-4 mois – je veux apprendre à manipuler un petit vaisseau avant d’en perdre un autre gros. D’ailleurs, le temps de m’habituer au 0.0, c’est mieux de rester avec les petits ships, car les gros coûtent trop cher.

Live and learn.

La configuration de l’overview est très poussée, et je crois fermement qu’il faudrait demander à CCP de réviser son outil. Le tableau et les onglets de sélection sont bien, mais les onglets sont au nombre de 5 seulement. En supposant qu’un joueur est capable de configurer un “preset”, il est tout de même difficile de sélectionner un preset qui n’est pas déjà pré-chargé dans un des onglets. De plus, pour les joueurs en 0.0, il est extrêmement risqué de dédocker et ENSUITE de régler l’overview. Si on minait avant et qu’on laisse la config en mode minage, on ressort d’un docking en config minage– et on manque à coup sùr le rouge qui campe la station.

Il faudrait instaurer un outil où il est possible de prérégler un preset de sortie pour chaque ship lors d’un dédock. Ça pourrait déjà éviter des situations fâcheuses.

Un autre truc: peut-être faudrait-il considérer changer le libellé de certaines options d’affichage. Certains noms sont quelquefois confondants.

De mon côté je vais devoir aller me planquer quelque part et vraiment me familiariser avec les réglages. Ça sera impératif… Surtoutétant dans une flotte de 300 ships qui se fondent en combat contre une autre armada.

Qu’en pensez vous?

Je prends le temps, assis ici entre mes 2 chiens qui font dodo, durant le petit répit que j’ai durant la semaine provenant de mon épouse (que j’aime tant ), pour vous parler de ma toute dernière expérience dans le monde de Eve-Online.

Jusqu’à récemment, j’ai été partie intégrante de la corporation Québec-Coalition, qui a bien su faire parler d’elle, même dans les plus lointains confins de l’espace. Je dis intégrante puisque j’ai été moi-même responsable pour passer le mot plusieurs fois pour y recruter des gens, les aider à commencer dans le jeu, leur montrer la base. Quelques-uns d’entre nous en ont sans doute fait plus que moi, et je comprends que ceci devient un fardeau éventuellement — on se sent comme un papa qui prends fiston par la main.

Or, nous n’avons le mérite que d’être humain – notre ambition a eu le dessus. Notre groupe d’anciens du “Empire space” s’est séparé, et c’est là que j’ai patienté pendant 1 semaine pour que mes potes se décident à faire un choix. Et comme je n’ai pas vu de messages passer à l’effet qu’ils désiraient rendre leur choix public, je me suis lancé en disant “Qui m’aime me suit”. Et ce fut toute une procession.

En effet, nous sommes maintenant plus de 10 de l’ancienne Québec Coalition à avoir rejoint les rangs d’une corpo élite en 0.0 nommée Epsilon Lyr. Epsilon Lyr est majoritairement composée d’européens (des cousins français pour la plupart), mais s’est aussi récemment dotée d’une aile qu’on surnomme affectueusement “Wing Caribou”.

Le caribou étant plutôt une emblême Canadienne, j’en ai pas fait de cas. Mais je crois qu’on aurait pu appeler ça “la Légion Du Lys”, ou un truc poche du genre (LOL )

Première des choses: simplement le voyage jusqu’en 0.0 fut “trippant”. Les gens dans cette corp sont différents, il sont tous beaucoup plus responsables de leurs actions, ils sont plutôt ouverts, partageurs, et ne sont pas réservés et timides. Certes, il y a des “cliques”, mais ça m’enchante de voir à quel point les gens participent à tout ça.

Bref, revenons à l’expérience. J’ai récemment eu l’occasion de participer à un “roaming gang”, qui consistait d’une escorte lourdement armée pour trimballer un vaisseau industriel vers un autre secteur où il était demandé. J’ai donc fait office de scout, et j’ai pu commencer à utiliser mes skills de scanner intégré (dont je ne me suis jamais servi). Bien que mon voyage là fut écourté, ce fut toute une expérience. J’ai vraiment hâte d’en refaire plus d’une fois.

Hier, je me suis loggé et j’ai reçu l’appel du CTA (Call To Arms, ou l’appel aux postes de combats). J’ai donc pirs le premier ship que j’ai vu, et je me suis dirigé, tant bien que mal, vers le combat.

HOLY SHIT — QUELLE BATAILLE!

Environ 200 vaisseaux, dont PLUSIEURS Dreadnoughts (les plus gros vaisseaux de guerre) sont au même endroit, et deux flottes s’affrontent. On dirait carrément une scène sortie tout droit de Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Incroyable de voir tous ces gens se battre en même temps… je crois que je n’aurais jamais vu ça dans un autre jeu…

J’ai pas fait grand chose (quelque 4-500 damage à une POS.. pas mal pour un Myrmidon moyennement équipé)… j’ai plutôt été un observateur. Mais que de choses à observer!

Le leader savait vraiment ce qu’il faisait, et j’ignore comment il voit les stratégies se former devant lui, ni comment il lit dans les plans de l’ennemi. Mais franchement, pour une seule personne, il fait tout un travail, et j’ose espérer qu’un jour ma présence fera une différence. Pour l’instant, ça ne fait que 5 jours que j’y suis… alors faut pas trop en demander

Mais je suis heureux ici, ya de l’action et c’est ce que je voulais. Alors je continuerai de vous rapporter les histoires, tant que je pourrai le faire. Rendez-vous ici… bientôt!

Gavri’el

It’s been a while! I think I need to apologize for not keeping you updated on all that’s been happening lately on the Eve-front of my life. However, since I kinda took the summer off from Eve… there wouldn’t have been a lot to talk about.

So here’s the thing. Today, I’m officially moving from Empire life to Nullsec.

Yes, after 14 months of being called a carebear, I am now joining the “real” game

So, because I do want to keep this blog alive, I figured this would be the first place to start making changes. Therefore, this will be my final post in english. Today, EVEolutions.net becomes the first Eve blog en français.

Au plaisir de nous revoir dans l’espace! (”See you in space!”)

After having spent most of my afternoon running level 4 missions not far from base, I decided I’d go watch some hockey. I’m a huge Montreal Canadiens Fan, and they were playing the best team in the league tonight (an what a win it was for Montreal! Woot!) Then, when it got late enough, I went back online, and found one of my corpmates alone, mining nearby our Corp HQ. He’d been complaining all afternoon about some annoying rats inside his belt of choice, so I went ahead and offered assistance. I figured, since someone helped me once, I’d do the same for a change.

Little did I know this was gonna be my lucky night.

Trying to make a choice of what ship to take for mining purposes was a hard task. My skills aren’t developed enough for the Hulk, and even though I do have a Procurer, I just wanted to see 4-5 lasers going at it at the same time. So I thought of my Gallente Destroyer, but somehow that didn’t work – I couldn’t fit more than 2 Miner II modules on it, so I started thinking… and I remembered I had an old Battlecruiser lying around – a Myrmidon. I’d used one of those in early mining ops before, so I figured – why not?

Loaded it with 4 Miner II’s, one tractor beam and one all important 200mm Railgun II. For self-defense. Hey… not a bad idea.

My mid racks got suddenly loaded with a Warp Scrambler, a Stasis Webifier, 2 Cap Recharger II’s, and my lows had 2 Cap Power Relays and a Cargo Expander II module. I also got 4 mining drones and like, 10 Hammerhead drones. I wanted to be able to go PvP on whoever was trying to loot my corpmate’s stuff.

We mined for about 2 hours straight, me helping out noobs in the corp chan, chatting up the fleet chan as usual, and just really relaxing. My wife called me around midnight, telling me she was coming home from her parents’ house, and as I hung up I raised my eyes…

Flashing Red.

I saw that rat that had been there in the early hours of the work day, harassing my corpmate. I dropped every thing, targeted him right away, locked on the warp scram and webber, launched the drones and literally screamed “FIIIIRRRRRRE!!!” I saw his ship slow down, and the dps got progressively bigger and faster… and all of a sudden, BOOM — fireworks.

I got my first kill.

I whipped back to the fleet chan, knowing full well that someone might retaliate, waiting in the shadow of a cloak… so I told my bud “pack up go to base now”. He warped out promptly to avoid any backfire. I quickly logged in my alt and scrambled to his hauler ship to get the rest of our stuff outta there. As he was coming out of warp, the bastard showed up again. This time, he wasn’t in his pod. He was in a small ship, but he came back to loot his wreck. I targeted him again, but he never aggroed us after that.  He went to the first gate he saw, where I followed him, but not quick enough. I never got to find out whether he jumped or not, so I warped both my ships to base.

And then I sat there.

I got my first kill.

And a righteous kill it was. I was defending our territory, I didn’t pirate my way through to someone. It was exhilarating, to say the least. I didn’t think I had him, but he blew up. I thought for a second he slef-destructed, but now I don’t think he did – he got the big part of the damage in the hull, and that’s when all the drones reached him. To me, it looked like he self-destructed, but he actually got so much dps we just skipped the hull part.

It was great.

I want more.

Screw those ninja looters. They should have known the day of my coming was at hand.

Finally a chance to sit down and log in.

Armed with 4 hot dogs, 2 real dogs and a cold one, I sat at my chair and logged in. Immediately I noticed how our numbers have grown since the last month, when we were only a few who started this whole corp. This, right there, is a recipe for fun.

Sent out a message in the corp channel, following the usual “wazzaaaap” and such, asking who would like to join me in a little level 4 missioning? I figured with all the new players, this would help out a bit and give every participants a chance to not have to go through 3 months of lower-level missions.

Finally hooked up with Alder and Mak. Both of them were on their way to my system, so I logged in my alt and got him ready for some looting. I’d just finished training Salvaging III and Science IV, so a Small Tractor Beam I and Salvager I both were setup on my Iteron mk III, and out he went.

Everybody was there, so I called the mission – a Drone mission. Dammit. I was hoping for some heavy loot mission like Angel Extravaganza, but hey, I took it anyway – this is for the standing and helping out others, right?

So out we went, and after a single jump we were there. I love that feeling of having to go in myself before everybody else, so that I can take the aggro completely and defend the others. With my trusty Megathron, armor-tanked and heavily armed, I went in, and as soon as I saw the 40+_drone ships, I figured I’d call on my fleet to help out a bit. The drones were pretty distant, so we made quick work of all the frigates (I’m equipped with railguns all the way, so I managed to insta-pop several before they were even a threat).

A few ammo boxes later, were done, and my alt moved in to run the cleanup session. Once he was done, the tally was a nice 11M worth of refined mineral – not bad.

Everybody was up for seconds, so we went at it again – this time, real action. Sansha Nation. Once again, we setup the same way — I warpin and aggro everything, then they come in and surprise the hell out of the Sansha. Boom.

We cleaned house in a few measly minutes. Cleanup was again alt-driven, but as everybody was heading out, I looked at my alt’s overview and found a flashing red line.

A pirate.

I even got an eve-mail saying “My Wrecks!!!” Not on my watch. I needed that loot/salvo to pay for the help I got. So I quickly warped out my Mega, and warped back into the first pocket – but saw nothing. Damn – he’s in the second pocket. And I’m in a Megathron. And I have no Afterburner. And 101m/s is my top speed.

Alder, equipped with a MWD, caught up with me in a flash, and just as he was about to jump into the second pocket, the looter escaped.

That led me to think there was probably someone out there checking the pockets – probably cloaked – probably armed. Immediately – right-click/Lvl4Missions Bookmark/DOCK.

Our fleet disbanded soon after I sold the hottest loot and refined the rest… another 4M. Split it up in 2 parts (Mak had already left, even before getting the standing) and I logged out.

Conclusion.

I realize that doing things as a team is really much more interesting than running missions by ourselves. I will definitely setup camp in that system, and run missions as long as I can with anyone interested. I think, from having gone through about 50-odd blog entries from my subs in Google Reader, that I now understand what Kirith and Manasi are saying about teamwork – it’s really the be-all-end-all in Eve.

Fleet is the only way to play Eve.

Now you can follow me on Twitter…  Be advised, I will not use this very often, but when I do my info will be very personal!

Spread the word!

Alright, I’ll admit it’s not the most recent post there – I only have myself to blame for the delays, and to all my readers I apologize for it. Nevertheless, if you have read this devBlog, then you’ve seen the concept art, you’ve read the information about the ships… and that alone should prove enough to sustain all Eve players’ chatter for about a year.

I, on the other hand, have one comment to make about that last line: FINALLY!!!

I can’t remember how many times I’ve emptied my client’s cache in the last MONTH and had to re-fit my entire tab overview wardrobe with new settings… all over again. Configuration of the Overview has been clunky, at best, ever since it’s been introduced. With the promise of an ”Import/Export Overview Settings” function, this will finally be less of a hassle. It’s my hope that players will start to use it much more and personalize the view settings properly for a more… let’s say mature… game play experience.

I’d like to go back to a post put up by Mule from the “A Mule In Eve” blog, and try to revisit his explanation of the Overview Setup. Many have read his post before; so please understand that while I know I’m essentially repeating what he already said, I just wanna try and make it clearer, and bring it back into the spotlight of the current events.

Overview Setup

The Overview window

To start, here’s an explanation of how things work: If you look at the Overview screen when you begin, you have one tab only and it is filled with pre-arranged selections. There’s a way to setup the Tabs, and a way to setup each Tab’s Preset. You can have up to 5 tabs displayed in the Overview at the same time (only one at a time, though, please) but there’s no limit to the number of presets you can have. For each Tab you choose to have in the Overview, you must determine which Preset will be associated to it – both for the Types and States.

So that means, “In this situation, I want to see this type of item in my Overview, but it must be in this state for it to show up“.

Here’s how you set it up. Start by opening the Overview Settings (the small arrow, upper-left corner of you Overview window).

Open the Overview Settings.

Tabs

The "Overview Tab" tab

In the Overview Tabs tab, you will find 5 rows and 3 columns. The first column you must name yourself: this is the name you want to give to each Tab. I named mine like so (but please feel free to name yours as you wish):

• PvE
• PvP
• Mining
• PODSAFE
• SHOWALL

I admit this is much like Mule’s setup. It’s also a very generalized name scheme, and should work for most of you.

In the second column you’ll have to choose which Preset you want to associate to it; this means you’ll need to setup each Preset with a Filter Type and a Filter State (explained further).

The third column determines the Bracket filtering – Bracket filtering is another thing entirely, which I find has been poorly explained in previous blogs, so I will attempt to demystify it and make it clear for all of you. More on that later; for now, just know that you must choose a Bracket filtering preset for each Tab.

Presets

OK, here’s the long part.

I say this because up ’til now, the Eve client has been devoid of a permanent Save option, which means that every time you empty your cache, you lose the presets, which sucks big-time. In the upcoming Apocrypha expansion, this will be fixed, as we will be blessed with 2 new functions: Import Overview Settings and Export Overview Settings. Check this blog for more on that as the info becomes available.

Filters

Filter by Types of objects

Go to the Filter sub-tab. From here, you’ll find a scrollable/expandable menu that shows every single type of object you can see in space. Simply put a checkmark besides those you wish to see in each Tab. For example, in my Mining Tab, I will want to see Asteroids, Asteroid Belts, Drones, Pirates, jetcans, and for different types of mining I want to see Ice debris, Harvestable Gas Clouds… and maybe my mining pals. So I add a check to each of these. Every other item can be de-selected (easily done by right-clicking the main item category and choosing de-select all).

You need to repeat this for each situation. For example, in PvE, I’ll want almost everything to show up, except for actual Planets, Moons, Asteroid belts, asteroids… but everything else I will probably need. In PODSAFE, I show only Planets and Stargates. And so on.

So start with one Preset. Choose all your Filtering Types options. Then we move on to States.

States

Filtering by status

Go to the State sub-tab. States are, essentially, the possible conditions in which you find each object. This has more to do with standing and allegiance than anything else. Some people like to take out certain states, leaving most of them there. Mule takes out anything “positive”, such as high standing, neutral standing, good standing, in your corp, in your fleet, in your alliance, etc. Because there are really a lot glitches and confusion with this, I leave everything checked. This way, if I’m mining, I’ll be able to see my pals, their cans, and I’ll be able to use my Remote Repair modules/drones on them if need be. And when I switch bracket filtering (right-click the Overview menu and choose Apply Bracket Filtering), I can take out all of these, leaving only pirates, rats, and the asteroids I’m mining, in such a way as to avoid erroneous targeting.

Anyone playing a support role will be greatly helped by this, but I guess you have to know how this works before it can be effective. I will only mention what Mule mentioned before me: if you play around with this section, weird things will happen – unless you know what you’re doing.

Appearance, Ships & Columns

You can setup your appearance to have a certain background color...

... by ColorTag (which we see less)...

... and by what electronic warfare module your opponent uses (essential!).

This is mostly for setting up the looks of things. The Appearance tab lets you set up colors, background colors, color icons to identify the states properly and rapidly. Set it up to be representative.

Display the ships' names and other useful info.

The ships tab is there to help you identify each ship on screen. For each ship in the screen, you’ll see an icon on top of it, the ship’s name, and its distance. You can configure this further to include the corp to which it belongs, its alliance, adn other id points. Note that beside each of the id points are some kind of bracket – you can click on these to change them and add text. Here’s how I’ve setup mine:

+ Name - type ( Corp ticker [Alliance ticker])  distance

This will give you a result such as:

+ Senpai – Velator (QCLL [QCCA])  3,095m

Also be aware that you can move these IDs up and down the list. very practical to know who you’re fighting with, and if they have a BIG gang waiting for you in their cloaks.

The Columns tab

The columns tab is to see what information you will be getting from the Overview window. This is heavily related to how much screen real estate you can spare. In my case, I have a 4:3 laptop screen, and a 16:9 desktop monitor. In each case, you have either more or less space on screen to display info; so choose wisely. I’ve setup my columns to have Icons, Distance, Name, Type, and Velocity. If you must take one out, choose the type – I can somwhat recognize if the ship is small, medium, or large just by looking at the icon. But I suggest you keep all 5, in every circumstance.

A quick note on this and the EWAR setting: If you put a checkmark in the Appearance – Ewar setting, your Overview will display an icon of the type of module affecting your ship; this will always be layered on top and to the right of the overview, even if you have 1 column or 9 columns. Very useful!

Overview Tabs

This is where it all comes together. Once you have setup all your Filtering options by Type and State, all your Appearance options as well, then you can setup your Overview to have all 5 tabs of your choice, each with its own Filter (or Type) and its own Bracket (or State).  During gameplay, you can quickly click on one tab when you change jobs, such as going from PvE missioning to a corp Mining op. There is also further filtering, which is to turn on or off each tab’s Bracket filter.

Brackets

For each Tab you select in your Overview window, you can choose to enable/disable further filtering, this time by State. It’s a quick way to take your friends/corpmates/those-who-don’t-deserve-to-get-shot-at out of the Overview quickly. Simply go to the top-left arrow, right-click and select Apply Bracket Filtering. Only the items you’ve checked in the State sub-tab will appear — the rest will vanish from the Overview. (If you know what you’re doing, this can be a very powerful feature in the Overview tab.)

When you "Apply bracket filtering", you automatically take out everything that is left unchecked in the State sub-tab filter.

When you click "Show All Brackets", you disable any "state" sub-tab filtering, thus showing you everyone in the vicinity in your Overview.

Practical applications of the Overview

As you can clearly see, the practical uses for these are enormous. You can avoid having too much clutter in your Overview if you set everything just right. I use the PvE tab view most of the time, unless I am travelling to other systems in a shuttle – then I use the PODSAFE tab view. Or, when I mine (which is pretty rare, but for some is quite often), I switch to Mining. It’s a good idea to also setup bracket filtering properly so that when you’re mining (for example) you can avoid shooting your mining buddies by switching on the bracket filter and eliminating them from Overview, leaving only NPC rats, PC pirates and enemy drones in the window. Your reaction time will then be quicker, and your aim will not need to be as sharp when nervously scanning the window with your eyes looking for enemy ships. Even better – with less in the screen, you won’t have to scroll down to find the bad guys.

Many Thanks

I have to thank Mule for his original post. He helped me understand the whole concept better, and some of his screenshots are actually used here – without direct permission. I just hope he finds my explanation a little more in-depth, a little clearer.

And thanks to all who read this. Please feel absolutely free to post your comments and modification suggestions; I always love to read them, and I will add anything you feel is missing or correct anything not explained properly.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Although I’m a carebear, and I’ve never even dealt with anything remotely related to BoB, I thought I’d share what little info I got.

Thanks to Geaux Tiger’s blog (Tiger’s Space Journeys), I am today able to provide all those who didn’t get the audio recording of Mittani’s GoonFleet briefing, a full transcript of the recording. (I figured ‘hey, what the hell, it’s for posterity’s sake’).

February 3rd, 2009

Bob is DEAD

Hi everyone!

I would like to introduce you to one of the newest members of Goonswarm, he goes by the name of Harkone.  He was, I believe, recruited by Igne just a couple days ago. He… failed the security test because apparently… I’m not sure, were you hired as a part of a scam, were they doing a recruitment scam? (He can’t talk, he doesn’t have a mic, so) yeah, he was hired as part of a recruitment scam. And, um… he ends up talking to the guy, and they try to get rid of him, they’re saying they’ve gotta kick him out or whatever, and he’s like “Well, you know… I’m a… I’m a BoB director. I don’t really *like* BoB because they’re kind of a bunch of f****ts…”

So, this comes to my ears because they’re like, they tell Aaron Static, and Aaron Static is like “WTF Skidman’s on…” So I’m like “Well… I don’t believe them. This is ridicuolus” I figure it’s “Put up or Shut up” time. So I’m like “All right…Have him give us the login to BNC Swarms”. And he claimed he was… well – first he said he was a BoB director, so I’m like “get the BoB director in channel”. The Goon hero, who will be joining Goonfleet (well, actually he’ll be in Igne) and is more than welcome here, is actually Haargoth Agamar. He was a director, not just in Black Nova Corporation, a full director, but also in TinFoil, which is the Executor corp in BoB — or the Alliance FORMERLY known as BoB.

So, uh… basically what ends up happening is, he’s like “Well, I’m this guy” and he comes into the channel, I’m like “ok this is a BoB director, but I still don’t really believe it, gimme your username and password”. He does that, we get in, it checks out, it’s like “Wow, ok there’s some legitimacy to this story”. And, um… basically like, it’s full of a bunch of idiots who are fighting each other [in BoB - publisher's note], who are constantly talking about how great they are when they’re actually terrible… and all the good fellas, people, it’s sort of a disaster over there. And essentially, I think we’ve sort of won a cultural victory, to the point where… y’know, after… all this, people would rather be in Goonfleet and be with us rather than be with a bunch of retrips.

So, anyway, I was like “Ok, WOW, this is really awesome” so We immediately began archiving, ’cause we have automated forum archivers, as everyone is well-aware now, because *** has gone public with some of them… We started archiving the BMC forums. So we finished that, and then, he gave us the BoB main forums, including **** ****. I haven’t had BoB director access in… more than a year… and I didn’t have an archiver at the time, and I was very upset about that. It was exciting, because we got in there and started archiving that as well… because there are certain threads in there, like the infamous one when Dianabolic had talked about hiring Goonfleet back when we were in our infancy, in march of 2006, and saying that “these guys are gonna be a force to be reckoned with”, etc etc . So, I really wanted that, so I’m like “Hey, even if this guy turns out to be not legitimate, we have the BoB director access now”.

Then there was kind of a debate, you know… “what do we do with this?”  We’ve seen what happens when you try to have a director-level spy and you don’t take quick action, you have a choice: choice is either do the ’smash-and-grab’, or you can try to use them as an asset. Now, it’s sort of a shame for BoB, but frankly a director-level spy in BoB isn’t all that useful for intelligence purposes anymore. Cause they’re constantly dragging around these pets, they’re very predictable, and … sh***y, frankly… as all of you know from fighting them.

So, we start talking about assets and what Haargoth is able to take. So the first that he stole, which actually he is donating to us… I mean, all this sh*t he could keep, it would be just fine, and no one would care, it would just be his… but he doesn’t really have a use for BoB’s entire corporate, or Black Nova Corporation’s entire, capital fleet. So, uh… he’s giving us those. Which is nice, I mean, they’re down about 15 Dreads that are fitted and rigged, and we’re UP about 15 dreads that are fitted and rigged, so y’know… that’s cool. He stole their entire corporate store, which is like… litteraly hundreds and hundreds of ships, and there he can do whatever the h*ll he wants. There are several stacks of fuel of millions and millions… I think we’re very excited about that from a logistics perspective…

What’s funny about all this, and the first thing that really made me excited about this, was discovering that BoB was afraid, after the Delve invasion, of losing their space. They saw that they were vulnerable. So they moved their corporate assets to 2 NPC hubs. Which meant that they couldn’t be conquered, but at the same time, that meant that they were very vulnerable to a spy, because if this was in conquerable space, they could just kick Haargoth out. Haargoth would have all these assets in the station but he wouldn’t really be able to do anything, it’d be very difficult to actually acquire. But all the assets in question are in Head-Oc, and in TR- and Delve, which are both NPC stations, which means that, they’re ours. And we can get at them, or Haargoth can get at them and do whatever the hell he feels like, with impunity.

So, that got me excited, we spent a lotta time talking about the assets this, the assets that — this all started happening last night — and then, today I was sitting there and I was thinking… it just sorta came to me in a flash, and I realize perhaps I should have thought of it before, but we were just thinking of it in terms of a ’smash-and-grab’, and then I realized that if he was a full director in TinFoil, that… he could disband the Alliance. That he could go and kick everyone out of BoB, that we could then seize the BoB name, which is something that FirstnameLastname did with Lotka Volterra - Lotka Volterra is a corporation owned by **** ****, if you show info on it – and if a Corporation has the name, the Alliance can’t have the name.

So we sort of, in this moment of insight, we devised this plan, to disband BoB, and take BoB, and the bitter side effects to this is… an Alliance cannot be formed — like, you can form an alliance, but it takes this specific sort of character that needs 70 days worth of training to build the alliance — and then — this is the funny part — it takes 24 hours for an application to an alliance to be accepted. You can’t just ‘accept’ people to an alliance. So this means that BoB will now go and they’ll make a new alliance, but the implication of this is that… it won’t be until after downtime.

And that means that, after downtime, there’s no ‘alliance’ in Delve. There’s no ‘alliance’, any BoB tower. Which means… there’s no sovereignty.

They just lost every jump bridge that they had, they just lost every Sov 4 capital, They won’t be able to jump bridge for the next… MONTH, they’re not gonna be able to have Sov 4, until what, 3 months? They won’t have any Cyno’ jammers anywhere, they won’t have any place safe to put their capitals, any place safe to put their Titans.

And so, we felt that was pretty spiffy.

And then things actually got one-upped, on top of that, besides taking all their sh*t, destroying their alliance, taking their alliance name, and archiving all their forums which we’re gonna make public for anybody to read, um… well, actually Darius had this idea, which is that we can start messing with their membership. Y’know, Haargoth started going through Black Nova corporation, and KICKING everybody in Black Nova Corporation who doesn’t have roles – cause he can do that, cause he’s a full director – stripping the roles off of everybody else, and when he was done with that, he changed all their standings, such that Black Nova Corporation was postive to Goonswarm and negative to everybody else, and just… y’know the thing is this: Black Nova Corporation is run by a guy named Coranor, who’s Blacklight’s brother. And Coranor hasn’t really been seen much lately. There’s been a lot of infighting in BoB, because honestly, BoB is a terrible – now dead- alliance, and they all know it. We have lots of logs of them during their infighting, which is gonna be published. And — oh, I’m sorry – that’s not actually his brother – DrGonzo is his brother, I’m incorrect. Back in 30secs. [quick pause]

[We Won! We Won! Laughter - The BoB entry, on the Eve-Wiki, has everything changed to past tense already -- NICE -- That's unbelievable -- Now that they're gone, who do we kill? -- we need to f'n invade that sh*t --- much banter]

So where was I? Let’s see… Coranor has been gone, right… He hasn’t been around very much. Tholorin had a rage quit today, which resulted in a whole lot of infighting on their BoB secure channels, (and that’s where I got the quote, from the coed post)…So basically we were just waiting for when the time would be right. We were going to wait originally until 11pm, and were all ready to go with Darius with his finger on the trigger, to make the corporation, to steal their name permanently… Zappawork has been working tirelessly through this, to archive — well, actually he hasn’t been working tirelessly, he set up the program and let it run, but — SO there’S been a lotta effort to do this within the GIA community, and we’re just very happy that it paid off y’know… Coranor hasn’t been around, the other people from TinFoil weren’t around, we waited for the right time… BoB has really become a very regional alliance… well, not so much ‘region’ as ‘time-zone’-bound… they only had 70 people or less online in the entire alliance when we did this, and there was basically nobody in Black Nova Corporation. So they were completely helpless.

And the lesson is,

• ONE: Set your full directors wisely;
• TWO: TREAT your full directors right;
• and THREE: if you ever find yourself in a position of having a full director spy, who can do serious damage to an alliance, DON’T BLOW IT with some random-ass de-sov’ing attack, because this is what you can do if you actually have an idea of what you’re doing.

And that’s the end of Storytime.

[Great job, well done! Today is the best day ever! -- Can I have your children, please?]

Hopefully, this will remain in the annals of Eve-History as one of the greatest ‘Coup d’État’ of all-time.

Thanks to Geaux Tiger for his posting of this briefing, Thanks to Crazy Kinux for his Blogger pack (I would not have known about this blog without his Blogger Pack… so thanks), and Congratulations to all of Goonswarm on this undeniable victory.

For all those who are reading this, please link it up and make sure you propagate this link. It has deserved its own tag name in this blog, and it deserves to be read by anyone interested in Eve.  Also, some names I was not able to hear (it’s a low-quality transmission, and sometimes stuff gets lost in there…). For those of you whom I’ve visibly destroyed your names, please feel free to comment and I will change the names of those who want it. Of course, if anybody doesn’t want their name published, please comment again and I’ll take out your name.

Happy reading, and fly safe!

I feel someone has to put in a parallel between Eve-Online and (the original space-faring gang) Star Trek — particularly the Deep Space 9 series. That was originally a great premise for exploration of a alternate world, and it really worked for the series. Eve-Online had a stroke of genius bringing this in at a later point in game development.

One of the first things I thought of before downloading the client for my first trial was, “finally, a game about true exploration!”. That really got me going – new life forms, communication with them, trade with them, warring against them, etc…. that was truly my goal when I saw the name Eve. So I downloaded the game. I can’t say I was disappointed about not having a lot of exploration to do within the game, since there are about 5000 systems to choose from. There’s something to be said about being in a space corporation, being a miner, exploring the region of space you’re in, and so forth.

BUT, I also quickly realized that being stuck in empire space was going to be a long haul; with over 230,000 other players locked into a (not tiny, but) limited space, there’s isn’t much room left for exploration. Developing a corporate world was going to be the upside of things, and occasional sparring is something to look forward to, but yet would seldom happen. Basically, you just watch your 6 all the time. So when you look for a job in space, what you want to do is really specialize in one area of the game, and try to develop the rest alongside that.

But exploring the unknown regions of space… now THAT is something exciting. Oddly enough, I was actually in the middle of training my Astrometrics and scanner-handling skills, and getting documented on space probing. This is a perfect opportunity (for me, at least) to branch out and specialize. Besides, there IS a nice incentive to exploring wormholes… Tech III technology (read: ISK).

This is one part I’m fairly anxious to read about – how to obtain the technology, reverse-engineer it, mass produce new items, and become the number 1 Tech III prodder this side of the quadrant. I can’t wait to see all this stuf, nor can I wait to read the next devBlog… truly, exciting times in Eve.

Better warm up your Micro Warp Drives and loadout your ships… otherwise I’ll be the one right in front of you!

So, just what are these new changes? Well… I could run them as a bulleted list right here, but there wouldn’t be much point in having a blog, now would there? This is why I will explain and comment each change, so you too can get a better understanding of my motivations and their end result.

New alt

I finally decided to get myself an alt. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, an alt is an alternate character. Technically, an ALT is from the same account as your primary character – in my case, it’s a second account to be able to play 2 characters at the same time. This way, I can train for something else than the regular “pew-pew” type of character I started with.

I was looking for the most diverse possible experience. I was also looking to get a different perspective on the game – one that would involve politics, administration, and finance/trade. So I found a wiki article that showed me all the different combinations of characters that you can create, and I found that the most even character is part of the Gallente – Jin Mei – Saan Go caste. This char ended up having a 7 across the board for his attributes – which is very evened-out, and will definitely come in handy when I want to train for something other than that “pew-pew” job.

As of now, Jaime DeLaCruz (he almost looks gangsta) is already trained for Trade and Social skills, and is well on his way to be trained in Corp Management and Science. That way I will have a handle on cash issues, something Gavri’el doesn’t. He’s mostly a mission runner, and not too adept at Trade or Science. Jaime will be a fine leader one day, and I’m especially anxious to have him pilot an Orca, just so I can have Gavri’el mine by himself in his Hulk.

Another really interesting point is that I will try to keep him neutral — I won’t have him get some standing with other corps or alliances. That way, if I ever want him to be a leader, I can start him in whichever direction I want. If I ever wanna travel to a different part of space, that shouldn’t be a problem with a neutral standing across the board.

Back to Level 3

I have recently noticed that I now have access to Level 4 Command missions with the Caldari Navy. So I decided I’d take a shot – except that I was in a Dominix, and I was having trouble with an enemy Battleship at the end of a lvl3 mission. So I figured I’d start training my Missile Launcher Operation skills, so I could really hit every BS extra-hard.

So I went to buy a Megathron, since it was the one ship I could see that would really help with its 2 launcher hardpoints. And I started running a Level 4 mission.

When it took me 8 warpouts to complete it, I decided to keep playing level 3 missions, only I’d find an agent who’s worth it. And sure enough, I did. He sent me into 0.4 space for a mission.

And I got ransomed.

This is the most awesome thing to see; because I’d read about things like this happening, I was able to keep cool when they destroyed my ship and scrambled my pod. I was asked for 50 million ISK or my life. I preferred keeping my implants, so I gave them ‘everything’ I had left – along with insurance money for the ship. Luckily I was let go, and I quickly realized that Pirates, even in Eve, have a Code of Honor. They trusted me to give them everything, and when I did, they let me go. I ran home then, lemme tell ya!

Afterwards, I was told by my corpmates I was learning the hard way… I didn’t think so at the beginning, but now I’m starting to see the wisdom in that – so no more missioning in Low Sec!!!

Nowadays, I’m farming Level 3s — especially missions like Angel Extravaganza, which has a huge payout in terms of bountys and booty. (And no, I don’t mean ‘Exotic Dancers’). After every downtime, I can simply go back to an unreported mission, and do it all over again for bounty and loot. The payout for that kind of mission is 10 times as much as the speed bonus offers, which is a really good thing considering I have to pay back my destroyed ship!

Eve-Mag.com

Ever heard of this site? Great online magazine about Eve. Writers there are top notch – anyone who reads the ”Winterblink blog” or “A Mule In Eve” will be very interested in the quality articles in this site. I myself have joined the staff of writers, and it’s a true honor to write alongside such great players and writers. Hopefully you will have caught my first article — Enter Level 4 Missions. I will still be writing here, but once in a while an article will show up on Eve-Mag.com. Keep the site in your favorites – I have good stuff in store for you guys!

That said, this is my update. I’d love to write more right now, but time flies and this article needs to go online. More in another article very soon!

I should have know something was up when he just rolled on his belly and left me with the role – recruiter was supposed to be HIS job. Instead, he went to investigate the new iteration of World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

I have a whole bunch of ugly comments about that game, but seeing as no one from WoW ever dissed me for playing EVE, I’ll dispense with the bitching. Suffice it to say that Eve has, from what Ape’s told me, much more depth in its gameplay experience – yet he’s rarely seen in The Forge or The Citadel. With so much advancements in corporation matters, so much recruiting going on and so much evolution in gameplay, it’s unthinkable that he’s just not around anymore.

So here’s what I propose: visit http://drunkinspace.blogspot.com/. Post comments on his blog about coming back to the Eve Blogger community, and push him to write more blog posts! Help a great player not get carried astray by otherworldly forces!

Dude, if you read this… I hope you realize, that I don’t mean any part of what I’m about to say, but I love you. You’re the cream in my coffee. The Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L in my Large Railgun II. Please come back to Eve and Quebec-Coalition!

As 2008 was ending, I was desperate to finally get crakcing on those very tasty Level 4 missions. I’d been working on my standing for quite a while, stretching that Level 3 muscle as much as I could… even the agent must’ve gotten bored with me. I also finally realized that by training Social Lvl V, Negotiations Lvl V and Connections Lvl V, it changed my perspective on moneymaking in Eve tremendously.

But as time flew (or in this instance, crawled) forward and I kept on stabbing at those Level 3 missions, I eventually encountered a Battleship in mission. No matter what I threw at it (I spent 18 million ISK on Hammerhead IIs, may they rest in peace), I could not get past the shields of that battleship. So I called in a few favors and some friends came to help me out… twice.

It wasn’t about the cash, it’s just about getting somewhere with the standing — that standing was going to give me access to Level 4 missions. I couldn’t afford to set myself back 2 missions again.

So I discovered that my corpmates all (or mostly all) use Missiles; something I don’t do. I’m a Railgun guy, being Gallente in a Gallente ship. But at this point, not using missiles is just suicide – I can’t afford not to. So I’m training all the time, bought about 12M of Skillbooks about Missiles, and just a few missions will get me the advanced books as well (especially with all those LPs). My Missile skills aren’t that impressive yet, but at the rate I’m training them, I should have Torpedoes in no time.

Problem with this is that I fly a Dominix. My Domi is quite something; I only need another skill to ensure that any PvPer will not survive an encounter with me. But I cannot mission enough with it, since it’s not fitted with launcher hardpoints. And I need those missiles.

So, since 2009 was right around the corner, I figured I’d treat myself to a second battleship. One that is sufficiently powerful that I’ll be able to run through missions with ease… one that’s versatile enough that I can walk through any mission without having to buy 12 million worth of Drones.

Hence my choice of the Megathron.

I still have some ways to go with the skills, but it is perfectly designed for my needs. A few tweaks here and there, and a few skills here and there, I should be a top-notch mission runner. I’ll have more info about my ship in later posts… for now, I’m just content in telling you that my ship is killer.

Anybody ever notice how the front of the Mega resembles a 1980 Camaro Z28?

If anyone thinks my choice isn’t an educated one, please – enlighten me. Peace!

Especially since this subject is one that I feel was very nicely chosen. Writing an essay of sorts about a fellow blogger is a great way to promote the game, its blogging community, and our own personal web enteprises within the same stride.

So who actually inspired me to write a blog? Well… I can’t say it was one person. I read a lot of blogs, most of them diagonally, but many times I find very interesting subjects, stories, and other ideas that develop within my head. The first real blog (I should say ‘news aggregator’) that inspired me was Slashdot.org. It’s a long while ago that I was shown this site by a fellow gamer, and at the time I never really bothered to read it… until a few years later, on a worday where I particularly had nothing on my plate. I started reading this, and I discovered a whole section of technology and science that I never really was interested in, until that day. Software, hardware, programming… it all lead to an article about Wordpress.

Wordpress is a free-as-in-speech, open-source blog software. I was into the idea of writing about myself, and I really was looking for a way for people to keep up with my day-to-day activities. In my mind, it saves the time that you “lose” when you must call someone or meet them and talk to them about your life, activities, adventures, and mishaps… and then repeat ad infinitum for every other friend. With this software, I was able to “write-once, read-many”, and save a bunch of time… theoretically.

I quickly discovered that spending massive amounts of time on my computer trying to install and write a blog was keeping me away from real-life, and therefore I ran out of ideas as fast as it took me to install the software – and Wordpress is famous for its “5-minute-install”. Ha.

So all this stuff  must count as an inspiration to write, as much as reading books from some of my favorite authors Dan Brown, J.R.R. Tolkien, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Ludlum, Caitlin Keirnan, and especially Neil Peart of Rush fame.

At this point you may wonder, “but what about ‘fellow bloggers’”? I’m getting there.

First, let me thank StrangeApe. He’s a fellow co-worker, one of the only guys at work I actually get along with without getting the feeling that I’m in their way, and he’s the person I have to thank for getting me involved into Eve-Online to begin with. Being the Linux fanboy that I am, I can’t really say there are a ton of games out there that are supported on this great platform. So I asked him the question, and he sent me to visit Eve-Online’s website. Little did I know what was in store for me.

A few million ISK later, I can honestly say I’m hooked, and I can only hope this persistent world will continue to persist far beyond the next 5 years. But the referrals didn’t end there for The ApeMan.

He asked me about blog writing – gee, me? So I asked him how much he knew about running a blog. His answer, which not suitable for younger children currently reading this blog, led me to believe that I should send him to someone who already has a blog all neatly ready to go for him. And a few hours later, lo and behold – Drunk In Space was born.

StrangeApe is the kind of guy who loves to start great ideas, but totally lacks the most basic follow-through ability, and has the attention span of a common mosquito. His blog is great, and he truly shows talent for bringing up discussions that are sensible and profound. But does he write often? hmm… checking the feed, I’d say the answer to this one is “What is ‘Not On Your Life’, for 800$ Alex?”. So being the cool and composed hero that I am, I decided to help him make of Eve the most popular game on the internet.  A few trained skills later, EVEolutions was born.

I really want to make this blog something of a rally-point blog for the starting player. Something that can interest any player to further explore the boundaries of this fantastic game, and simultaneously help them resolve the most basic problems of the game. I like the idea of a discussion forum, when it has someone creating Stickies – a subject that has been dealt with and discussed enough that it should be canned. Then this is where I want to come into play.

Here’s another angle to this inspiration-driven article. Since my beginnings in Eve, I’ve been looking for multiple-player gameplay. Something that I could not get when confined to a game console unless I bought 19 controllers. So when I finally joined Apeman’s corp, I got this urge to do more. I was compelled to participate even more in corp life, and was eventually made Recruiting and Training Officer.

One of the major setbacks in my nomination was my lack of experience, and I could completely acknowledge that fact. So I started a search on how to improve my training routine, which is when I found Mynxee.

Ahhh, that lovely space creature, I must admit, she has me by the Nanobot Accelerator. Her blog, Life In Low Sec, is truly a piece of work; she’s created a sort of satellite community for herself, and being a woman heading a female-only corp makes her quite the unique Eve player, with a perspective like no other. Most of her work and involvement in the Eve game and its blogging community is starting to be felt (she comments on every blog I read, except mine- hehe), and she comes up with really good perspectives for training, involved and evolved gameplay, and blogging. I appreciate her work in- and out-of-game.

Last but not least, I do want to give honorable mention to CrazyKinux. As a fellow Canadian, I feel he truly deserves credit for putting the now-enormous blogging community of Eve Online on the map. His work is outstanding, and he is to me and many others a reference when it comes to Eve. Without him, I would not be writing this article.

Hopefully this article will help further the cause, and make Eve a more popular, more enviable destination for the average gamer. It is important to thank the people that have paved the way for us, but also to captivate our audience in doing so. I can only hope this makes it work for everyone!

Enough talk… See you online!

Yes, you read that right. I’m willing to install awesome plugins just for you, the reader.

See you out there!

Here are the rules (I’m just cuttin’ & pastin’ here):

• Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share 7 facts about myself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

7 Facts About Me:

1. I was once in a popular Heavy Metal band named EyeInside, though I don’t really like to talk about my time in that band. They were good times, but the breakup was painful.
2. I’m Canadian, but I once dated a girl in New York for 2 years, though I didn’t live there.  6½ hours of road was too far for me.
3. My first language is French, but I learned english through watching Sesame Street, and I could read english at 3 years old — before French.
4. When I was 9, I was tested for my IQ. The results explained that I could skip 2 grades of elementary school, but my parents refused; they wanted me to learn with kids my age, without intimidation.
5. There was once this kid in my class who enjoyed waiting for me after school so he could beat me up with his friends; then one day I found out his house had burned down (quite literally to the ground) because he’d left an electric fryer on while waiting for me at his usual spot. Talk about karma.
6. I am a trained Sound Engineer, but curiously I’ve never worked in the music industry. Reason most given? I’m already trained. (Such a lame excuse…)
7. I’m may be 33 years old, but I still play with Lego bricks; in fact, I’m part of a LUG (Lego User Group) called Quelug, and I’m considered an AFOL (Adult Fan Of Lego). I’ll always be a kid at heart.

 

So there you have it. Now, I’m supposed to pass this along to 7 others – here’s 7 whose blogs I dig reading:

• Kill Ten Rats
• Morphisat’s Blog
• Votrian’s Eve Blog
• Winterblink
• EveNewb
• Bitter Old Noob
• CrazyKinux (yeah, I know, he started the whole tag game… but I wanted to give kudos to the MAIN MAN.)

 

I also wish to take this opportunity to wish you all Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and a very safe and Happy Holidays! Drive safe, don’t drink yourself to death just cause you can, and please… for God’s sake… don’t eat any yellow snow.

See ya in 2009!

But you’ll find that I’m using it in a very different way than the movie did. See, I was reading through Google Reader and through CK’s blogroll, trying to find something interesting, when I came across a post by Shae Tiann from Sweet Little Bad Girl: Eve has Sound?

That post was indeed what I needed to bring forth an observation I’ve had ever since I started playing this game: what’s this music they have in there?

Being an accomplished musician myself, I can totally appreciate the built-in soundtrack of Eve; it’s kind of minimalistic, and very 2001ish in regards to its mood. Something very quiet, and almost eerie, which I find somewhat stimulating… in its own “relaxation-meditation” kind of way.

But I can also relate to all the other videogame players out there, who are used to having something more meaningful as a soundtrack. There’s always a THEME song somewhere (take Nintendo’s Mario Bros.), and I think that is cleverly setup into this game as being the military-style theme at the login screen. But the rest of the included tracks… no offense, but I don’t like them.

I’d prefer something along the lines of Pantera, Rush, Pink Floyd… there’s a lot of music I could hear playing over my gameplay. Except… I usually play in fullscreen mode, on a Linux client, and I can’t actually switch between screens (or as some might say, Alt-Tab). So I can’t turn on Rhythmbox or Winamp or Amarok or any music player. That just sucks up the system’s resources anyway, which I need for the actual came.

I’m sure that many have already thought up the same idea as me: why not integrate a full-blown music player into the game? It would be pretty simple to have it read MP3, OGG, AAC and other formats – even FLAC. We could then all manage our own playlists and stay within the confines of the game, without having to fiddle around with resources!

I hate wearing headphones, and I think it goes against the design of any game that I should have to wear an iPod while playing to hear good music. I’d rather listen to the game’s tracks… except that to me, these aren’t interesting. And I have this huge setup at home on my PC, it’s a shame I can’t use it. Besides – I have to keep the headset clear for when everybody uses the comm.

If there’s any way this idea can be forwarded to CCP, then please – by all means, take the credit if it means you’ll make it come true. I just wish I can listen to Rush’s Cygnus X-1 while fighting off pirates and taking war prisoners in space.

I was crusing the other day, slowly training towards Mining Barge Level V so that I can finally drive that big Covetor I bought a couple weeks ago, when I recieved a Corp EveMail. I didn’t expect it to be “eve-shattering” news.

Concord was reporting that another corporation had decided (quite randomly) to declare war upon my corporation. In just under 24 hours, I was going to have to defend myself. We had just been “wardec’d”. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means “War Declaration”).

Now, I thought being at war just meant that I’d have to be on the lookout for others with bigger guns — but it’s a lot worse than it seems.

Here’s the thing: we were lucky enough that the corp that wardec’d us is roughly the same size as ours, and is mostly made up of noobs. Only 2 of their 6 members seem to be really as hard-built as our most hardened and seasoned pilots, which should be ok – if we stick together.

What it also meant was that I was going to shift my loadouts from “production/PvE” mode to “PvP-only” mode. And since I’ve never done any PvP (yeah, I’m a Carebear, so sue me), then I have to switch my way of thinking.
So there goes my Mining Barge training. Now, I have to go towards Energy Emission Systems, Energy Grid Upgrades, Drone control skills, gunnery skills — the works. Just so I can put together a good enough loadout for my Battleship and hold my foot on the line of fire as long as I can. It should make for a very interesting meeting in deep space.

Y’never know who’ll end up on your blog, so I won’t put down my secrets here – no public loadout for you guys today – but let’s just put it this way: with the things I haev in store, they shouldn’t even see me coming. Not even 2 AUs away.

So here’s a recommendation for all of you who are starting out in corporate Eve: be patient. Make sure you train 1 PvP skill for every 1 PvE and every 1 production skill. Because you never know what you’ll end up doing over the next few days. As well, make sure that you brush up on your ship knowledge. You wanna know exactly how to ‘tank’ it. Good resources are out there, just Google them – you’ll find them.

‘[...]The purpose of war is to serve a political end, but the true nature of war is to serve itself.’ – Denzel Washington, as Commander Hunter, Crimson Tide, 1995

Well, folks, this is my case at present.

Having just moved into a new home, I still haven’t had a chance to put together my computer, let alone the desk that holds it, so I’m at a loss in terms of “game talk”. Oh Dear, what to do, what to do?

Well, in the meantime, it’s a good idea to document yourself. Learn as much as you can about this ‘Eve’ thingy… it might come in handy. For instance, I just finished reading CrazyKinux’s Musing, and it’s really a goldmine for any type of blog you could wish to read – and his blog is great, too.

A few of the blogs I read are really something — one in particular I found was great is Life In Low Sec, which is written by Mynxee, a female (IG and OOG) CEO, who is quite interesting and creative. She holds training exercises for her team, and they are truly something to read… she’s feeding me a lot of really good ideas in terms of what I could do as a Recruiting and Training Officer for my own corp, Quebec-Coalition.

There’s also a few podcasts out there that I really like. One is The Drone Bay, which I really like and has CK co-hosting. Another one which is really awesome is Titan Weekly, and that one is definitely one of the currently most popular in the Eve universe.

Although all this reading can get to you in a good way and help you get on your feet and really get ahead of the competition in Eve, there’s no substitution for actual gameplay. (And with this damned laptop, since it’s only equipped with an Intel 945GM graphics chipset, there’s no way for me to catch up on mine!)

Hope you enjoy the links, especially CK’s site, which hosts his BlogPack, where you will find many more blogs to read up on. Just as long as you come back here sometimes.

(Yeah, I know: this post does look like your usual “shameless plug” post, and is a little redundant from CK’s site, but what do you want from me — I’m sorta limited on material at the moment! Plus, it doesn’t hurt to praise your peers once in a while )

That’s generally what goes through my mind before writing any blog-based article, about anything. But in the case of Eve-related articles, it gets really complicated.

I’m relatively new in this game, and I’m sure some players would call me “noob” or “carebear”. I’m still in mid-sec space (never been to double-o before, and I do need to beef up my artillery before I do), so I haven’t seen all that other fellow blog-writers might have seen themselves. Consequently, this generally makes for a limited amount of talk. My need to be creative is therefore quite high.

That said, I think after looking for a subject, I can start digging into my own experiences and hopefully some of the newer players will get their interest peaked. I’d like to talk about skill management, and how I find it very complex and time-consuming.

Being a single player, discovering the skill-training system of Eve was mind-boggling at first, yet it was wonderful to me that there was so much variety and so many possibilities. It was very hard for me to know what to train for. Within lies the complication, as well as the learning curve of this entire game.

I started by reading the fiction about the game, and most of the stories and texts I read pointed me towards the free-thinking explorer race Gallente. So I started on my character as a Gallente, and trained him to be a pilot. I ended up with very strong skills in Drone control. After I learned how to manipulate the drones, I realized it could be a potentially very powerful tool, and so I trained everything around that.

But there were many more things I needed to learn about this game.

Once I found “The Eve Compendium“, I started taking some time at work (don’t tell my boss) to read up on Eve info, Eve lore, Eve tactics, choices, and the experience of others. I later found out all this skill training had to be setup in regards to what you want to be inside the Eve universe. I’m more of a group person, and if I have a purpose within, I will handle myself very well. Say, being an officer, director… that kind of thing.

So I set myself up for training my Corporation Management skills, but stopped really quickly because I definitely enjoyed mission running. And since I wouldn’t survive very long without the proper fighting skills, on I went with Gunnery and Drone skills. Little did I think about defending myself, so I forgot about the Engineering and Mechanic skills.

Wanting to move onto bigger missions, something that pays more, I figured I needed a bigger ship — so I trained Ship skills. And then I found the corp. The Flying Flyers were a bunch of friends, and were on the verge of moving on to bigger aspirations. We had inside info about the Orca development plans, so we started mining as much mineral as we could. Guess what I’m training these days?

Yep – Mining, Industry, Astrogeology, Astrometrics, Mining Upgrades, Mining Barge, and Ice Harvesting.

So when I saw the certificates system come into play last month with the Quantum Rise upgrade, needless to say I was totally shocked. “Why didn’t I have this to begin with?” So I’m really starting to dig into the certificates, and getting a different view about this whole skill thing. The way the certificates are setup, they should be a quintessential part of the game. Based on the recommendations coming from these, I have managed to re-establish my training the way it should be.

For example; I was usually missioning Command missions, but was never able to fully tank my ship. I later found out that the ships I was using were generally armor tankers, yet I was setting up the shields booster skills. Now, I have an Engineering level of 5 – much better at using the capacitor to its fullest extent, and therefore able to tank out level 2 missions. OK, so I’m still working on tanking a level 3

This is just one of the many recommendations issued by my certificates, and I am going to really go into it a whole lot deeper.

The main thing here, is to be patient. Experience will come. Skills will develop. And soon, you will also be able to bask in the glory of running level 5 missions in a fully-loaded Capital ship.

Now, in my new role as Recruiting and Training Officer, I hope to be able to help out others to hone their skill-training skills to a fine art.

Let’s just hope the learners don’t out-skill the master too soon.

Now for the in-game part.

As of today, it’s been at least 4 days since my last appearance in Eve, and although I am terribly aware that I need to get back to it, these next few days will be difficult for me as I am in the middle of many major personal changes. However, for the record I can truly say Eve is an addiction. Most people will agree with me when they say video games are addictive – one of the most addictive of which is World of Warcraft (which I don’t play, but have seen). I can tell you that the differences of being in Eve compared to any other game are really what make it addictive.

The time it takes for anyone to get anywhere in this game is phenomenally realistic. For someone like me, who’s used to playing titles like Final Fantasy (any which one), or for that matter most RPGs out there, I’m used to seeing a lot of boring game time because I need to level up. In Eve, the fact that you must eveolve (pun intended) makes it all the more real. You have to play with a weakness, which is either $$ or skills; but any which way you cut it, you’ll always find someone stronger than you in Eve. And if you’re that person, players will gang up on you. But until the time when you are all-powerful, you are at a disadvantage against the entire gameplay environment, which makes it risky. That risk factor is what makes Eve so nerve-racking, and so exciting.

This is why I mentioned theft before: Eve stole my time. I can’t shake my need to play, and I can’t bypass the need for patience. There’s just no way of cheating.

Hopefully by tonight I’ll be able to get back into my Myrmidon and go find some interesting things to do… while I wait for my skills to grow!

Therefore, I bring you all EVEolutions, my blog about Eve-Online, which will more specifically deal with my learning of this incredible gameworld, and all its different aspects, as well as some info about my in-game corporation.

Welcome to EVEolutions!

I was getting really nervous yesterday; being an Eve player on a Linux client, I was looking to get my new Quantum Rise pacth last night. I tried about 17 times to download the patch, but was confronted 17 times to a “404 – Not Found” screen. I finally got the patch downloaded around 10pm EDT.

And I am really impressed with the changes.

I read up a lot on devblog recently (not having had the time while on my honeymoon, thank you very much) and I saw a lot of the changes brought with this new Eve expansion pack. One of the major changes for me is the new Orca – totally awesome ship. This is really biased, however, since my corp is in the process of re-aligning our goals — we’re heading into major mining ops once every 2 weeks and we need a ship like that — but having read the descriptive of the ship, I’d say it really responds to a definitive need in the industrial branch of the game. The Orca will be of great service to anyone who wants to be able to change up their activities once in a while. My guess is that with this type of ship we’ll probably start seeing more variations in the types of players, even at higher skill levels, and less “pure”-anything players. That’s a big plus for the game, in my view, since this is an open-ended game, and you can spend a lot of time focusing on the same skillset. With this type of ship, it makes the game more interesting and varied, but at the same time offers a challenge as far as the planning goes. Great idea.

I also am loving the Certificates idea. I’ve recently been named recruiting officer of my corporation, and having never been in that role, it’s an interesting tool to have if you want to interview players for your corp. As well, since it,s clearly an optional add-on to the game, it makes it even more interesting and risky to show your colors. Great idea #2.

As such, closing the “ghost training” bug is a necessary thing – if CCP want to close that gap, then they should. Most of the players who have been paying for the game all this time just to train their characterwould find it unfair for anyone to just plug-in and train, then log off and come back one day and have a character all trained-up after (let’s say) 6 months.

Overall, the changes brought seem great – I haven’t had time to explore the entire palette of changes, but I truly believe that these modifications, whether brought on by players suggestions (the CSP) or CCP itself, are almost always beneficial to this truly incredible game.

—-

Onto my personal progress now.

I’ve finally managed to get myself some Tech II items that I had been longing for – Damage Control Unit II. This being my first Tech II item ever, I wanted to shed some light on what exactly Tech II is, and what kind of advantages you can look forward to when you get those items.

In any Ship Equipment item, one can look into the item description under the “Attributes” tab. You should normally see a line called “Meta Level” – this is the quality level of the item. For example, if you look fo Medium Hybrid Railgun, you can get the 200mm Railgun I and you’ll see its Meta Level is 1. Its counterpart, the 200mm Gauss Prototype Railgun I, is Meta Level 4. Essentially, the Meta Level is an indicator of the quality of the item. The higher the Meta Level, the higher the damages, or any attribute- and the higher the price.

Tech II is usually Meta Level 5.  It brings low-cost in PowerGrid, CPU, Capacitor, etc., while providing the item user with some of the best desirable results. Most players will want to load their ships with Tech II items – but there’s one big problem: you need skills.

The skills required to have access to Tech II are usually quite high and diverse. getting to Tech II railguns (in my case) means training:

• Hybrid railguns lvl 5;
• Advanced railgun specialization;
• Small Hybrid Turret lvl 5;
• Medium Hybrid Turret lvl4.

Call me crazy, but that’s a lot of time spent training.  But don’t despair – you won’t really need Tech II warfare items until you get to Level III missions (if you’re a mission runner like me), and the game is very well balanced in that sense. Just hang in there, you’ll get to it!

Here’s another thing I wanna get out there: I’m very happy to finally have a more active role in my corp. Being a mission runner is one thing, but participating in grouped missions, that’s really the best way to play this game. Once you start seeing your buddies show up on screen, it definitely kicks the fun up a notch. If I can make a suggestion to corp leaders out there: try to get newbies involved. My corp only counts about 10 players so far, but with our desire to expand, I’m thinking we’ll have training sessions, squad leaders, job assignments, etc., which are really fun to have in the game, and that I wish I could have had way before this. Don’t be afraid to take newbies under your wing – you’re only gonna make the experience more pleasurable for new players, and consequently you’ll be spreading the word about the awesomeness of Eve Online.

One last thing: I haven’t been writing all that much, but I’ll try to keep up with the pace of my blogger friends!

On that note, keep playing!

Jita’s always been a parking lot. Every time I’ve had to go through it, I’ve had the misfortune of being stuck there on Sundays, and as we all know, sundays in Jita suck. (I’ve actually been contemplating getting myself the Navy Issue Myrmidon, with the lcd screens behind the seats so that the kids don’t scream when we go through it.

Now CCP is actually correcting the problem, not by taking the traders out of the system, but by alleviating the rest of the traffic that has nothing to do there. Now, isn’t that a great idea? Almost sounds too good to be true.

I hope that this will encourage Jita-goers to actually create some sort of a “Wall Street In Space” type thing. Essentially, it would be incredible to have more marketing devices open up to us players so that we could, essentially, replicate what we do in  real life; selling & buying corp stock, promotion and marketing,having a relational index (such as the Dow Jones) pointing to the current prices and market values of minerals, etc.; having it centralized in Jita could be fantastic. I, for one, would love to train a character to play as a strict trader, capital venturer, and so on. This would be awesome.

Obviously, the amount of traffic in Jita previously prevented us from putting together anything like that; hopefully now that traffic is about to clear, we can definitely see Jita as a new kind of trading hub.

I just hope CONCORD will be there to preserve the interests of the many who control the cash flow (or ISK flow) for the entire playing field.

So the idea was a good one. Last week, StrangeApe and Philus brought in a few tables, a boxful of card decks, 14 different girls whose first names I don’t remember, and many millions of isk.

We played ’til the wee hours of morning, when the girls got tired of Strangey and left him for dead in his pile of poker chips , and they all came back to my hotel near Oichyia.

Next morning, I woke up and I realized I hadn’t slept for more than 4 hours.

I ran mission after mission after mission, but everytime, to have to warp out and go back in after half-a-mil in repairs, just got to me in a bad way. SO — I looked to my drunken pal, and begged him to spot me for a couple poker chips. He sent me a few, and I finally went berserk. I headed out to Jita IV, in my POD no less, and went shopping for a Myrmidon Battlecruiser.

WHAT a DIFFERENCE! I mean, after being drunk in space, you can actually spend a few isks and get rid of the headache instantly. It’s that simple! I recommend it to all my friends.

I’m currently looking for a nice loadout for the Myrm, which I renamed Signs Of Death. Once my loadout is done, please open the door for me and take a step back.

‘Cause MY time has now come.

(And note to the author: no more romulan ale to be served in the Iteron Party Club.)

I’ve been barking up my corpmate and work colleague’s ear, StrangeApe, and I’ve been trying to get some insight into the future of the corporation. I was trying to find out about what was next, so I would know what to buy, where to go and get it, how to go about training and missioning. But the fact of the matter is that I am master of my own destiny. I love the corp, don’t get me wrong – I just think I’ve been going about all this the wrong way.

As I write this, my pod is still safely tucked away in some random hangar somewhere in “half-sec” space… and until now I was looking for what to do.

I say until now, because I’ve decided it was time to get my own. I’m very happy with my Vexor, I like the balance I’ve struck with it, but I got GANKED big time by a PVE mission. So it’s safe to assume that I need a new ship.

I’ve scoped through most of the compendiums, the help files, the forums, and EveMON (an AMAZING tool, to be sure) and I finally found my next purchase – the Myrmidon.

The Myrm (as I call it) is a marvel of Drone control tech, Armor tanking, and electronic warfare. Though, I like to think of it as a “sniper” ship rather than a support ship – of course, you can totally go in with a team, send in drones and try to stasis everyone or jam their locks… but in the meantime, what do your turrets do? My thinking is not to have hydrid blasters – instead, I prefer railguns. The railguns will give you sniperiffic range, only to be matched by the drone interface range. Hopefully, you can avoid having to carry loads of ammo, and instead just load up some special “javelin” ammo to snipe away at enemy forces. In that respect, this makes the Myrm sound much more like a support ship, the one that stays behind to cover your asses while you’re at the frontline.

So what do you need for this? A ship – that’ll be taken care of with insurance money (at least for me – you work for your own, buddy!), the right turrets and modules, and obviously, the right skills. This is what I’m training for as we speak.

I’m not even missioning right now. I’m simply going to leave the ship stuff for later. If anyone has tanking ideas for this ship, or if you have specific loadouts you wanna suggest, please – be my guest. Right now, I’m taking a break from it all. Taking a break never hurt anyone…

… and if something comes up, you’ll let me know, right?

I went in thinking there were a few Pithi fighters to kill, but didn’t realize that the prize money of this mission was worth much more than “a few”. Pretty coon, I had killed the first 3 volleys of 15 fighters (not without hardship), and I was seeing at least 30 more showing up. And, as an added bonus, their lock-on range was about 120km, so they were able to snipe me from MILES away – before I ever got to them.

Warped out to lick my wounds, and when I came back, I made a big mistake – showed up at 0km. It took all of 15 seconds for them to drain me of about 5800 hit points. I managed to save my drones and escape, so I recharged. Took about 10 minutes to recharge my whole ship. Then I went back in.

Big mistake.

Even when entering their space at 100km distance, they managed to snipe me. Even one got himself a few heavy missiles and threw them my way. This attack really took care of my ship, and within 16 seconds, my beloved Vexor was toast.

I subsequently flew back to my base, cancelled the mission, and logged out.

Reflecting on this, I realized something: I take a lot of risks, but I should understand that the ship takes a while to turn around and warp out of any zone. Because of this, I need to have a failsafe point indicated on my HUD. Once I have half my armor gone, it’s bailing time.

Obviously, this is not my first loss, and of course, I was insured   But the problem remains that this is my fault. Going into these missions by myself is near-suicidal, but I think the biggest lesson here is that you have to learn to read mission statements before taking the assignment on. Like Strangeape said to me, there’s a bunch of new missions showing up in Eve, and this may prove very interesting to learn about. so my advice? Don’t jump into a ship and get cocky. Know thyself, and don’t try and double-dare the enemy. If you have the means, you’ll take them down – but don’t EVER underestimate the enemy.

Anyhoo… hopefully you guys have started reading my blogstream -and especially StrangeApe’s brand new blog, “Drunk In Space”. If you haven’t yet, catch it at http://drunkinspace.blogspot.com/.

Beware my return…

In those few minutes I hauled in approximately 3000m³ of junk, including a nice turret worth at least 1M$.  It really pays to loot!

Downloaded the new 1.1 patch… I still haven’t figured out what the “Services” button is for, nor why all my stuff has been displaced, but after a few minutes of rearranging windows everything was fine. I also realized how smooth everything runs now. Less flicker in the screen (this is noticeable on my install, and considering the fact that it’s a Linux client, it’s pretty cool that it got fixed), smoother animation, and a bunch of really cool window ergonomics stuff. It’s pretty cool, really. And the install went by without a hitch.

However, I do have one small problem I’d like to send CCP’s way: I was connected, and all of a sudden I got bumped off the line-up on Multiplicity. I logged back in, and was told I had to wait as I was 20th in line – I’m sorry, but what gives? I was in the middle of a mission, with five 150K$+ drones deployed, and I lost 3 off the 5 because of the bump-off. I feel I am owed a compensation, but what to do – file a complaint?

Screw it, I’ll continue with what I have… unhappily, but I’ll continue nonetheless.

6 more days til I get into a nice Myrmidon! (then we’ll see who laughs last… hehe)

By reading the devBlog, and also several other Eve blogger responses, I wanna offer my opinion to all who care. Seems to me this change will really have an effect on 2 things: stellar cartography, and interstellar economy.

To me, a change to the maps is very simple -you move from one place to the next. I think in fact, that this change will be for the best – I recently got podded in hi-sec space (0.8) and no one was there to help or stop the retard who shot me down. Luckily I had insurance and a sufficiently upgraded clone. This guy currently has a 1M isk bounty on his head, offered by me (name: terrifiedkiller), and I learned the hard way that I needed a better ship.  Now, for the most part, I know I should take care of myself, and I can’t rely on CONCORD every little thing that happens… but as a 7-day-old player, I would have expected a little bit more.  Currently, this guys is still out there, wreaking havoc on other unsuspecting newbies.

The other part is economics.  Essentially, some factions, alliances and corps, will have to reajust their ways or move out. Moving, however, can be very costly, especially when you have a POS in the sector that just got reassigned its security level.

I  suspect these changes will make many people unhappy, but I fully understand developers when they deal with an open-ended universe like this. Changes have to occur at some point, so players must adapt. Frankly, this is a must-understand type of deal between players and developers.

Otherwise, you can always go and play WoW.

My 2isk!

This is my first post about this game. I say my first, because undoubtedly there will be many more. I’ve just recently discovered Eve-Online, and it is an absolutely mind-blowing experience.

This game is, of staggering proportions. Granted, this is my first MMORPG, but I remember being impressed about GTA: San Andreas on PS2. This, however… is off-the-charts; over 5000 systems to explore, each including many planets, each planet having many moons, asteroid belts, space stations, and over 220 000 other players!!

There are several different places where I’ve found some info abotu the game. Obviously, you must start with the Eve-Online website. You may, however, want to check out these sites for much information:

• http://www.battleclinic.com/
• http://eve-search.com/
• Battleclinics Eve Beginners Guide
• there’s also a 15Mb Compendium which I will upload to this blog ASAP – well worth the download.

I’m planning to make my way through space, and when I’ve wreaked enough havoc, take it as my own.

See you out there.