Good Game Reviews DUST514!

Hex on the left and Bajo on the right.  

One of the Australian television shows dedicated to gaming, cunningly called Good Game, has reviewed DUST514!

Good Game DUST514 Review Article

Good Game DUST514 Review Video  (strangely it sounds like they've been huffing helium)

After the unexpected cautiousness:

BAJO
Yes, I have made it half-way through the games tutorial however. The EVE fan base is made up of some of the most committed players in the world. For example the community has its own government known as the "Council of Stellar Management", which is made up of elected players from around the world. And the developer actually flies them to Iceland to discuss potential improvements and changes to the game. If that's not dedication, I don't know what is.

HEX
So we apologise to the diehard fans, but your game is massive and intricate beyond belief and no doubt we'll miss some amazing fact or say something wrong. But now that we've covered ourselves, let's talk about the game! So Dust 514 is an online only shooter which at first glance doesn't seem particularly different from other team based shooters out there. Although it is free to play and it's nice to see more quality free to play games coming to consoles.

They then move on to the game itself:

BAJO
Yeah, so you've got your standard variety of classes to choose from including assault, medic, engineer and snipers. Matches are played out on fairly large maps, usually with sixteen players a side, although it apparently supports up to forty eight players, but we never found a match that big.

HEX
There are a few different game modes including a team death match but mostly you'll be playing a 'capture the point' mode where taking a point activates a large missile battery that will start attacking the enemies command ship. And the first team to take down the enemy ship, wins.

The usual misunderstanding about the lack of a PC version:

BAJO
I did love the gritty sci-fi design of the worlds, and the maps are great with plenty of room for vehicles and some excellent opportunities for snipers. But I gotta say it's not the prettiest game around tho, it's not awful but it's not great. It is interesting that it's a PS3 exclusive.

HEX
Yeah, you would think they would include at least a PC version given that the PS4 is just around the corner, and the uncertainty of backwards compatibility. Does this game have a limited shelf life?


Which admitedly they address further later on. For the final scores and other comments follow the links but it was a pretty well rounded review. The haters are going to hate but I was happy enough with it.

Unofficial Odyssey Patch Notes

Somebody with far more time on his hands than I has collated the features due to be released in the impending Odyssey expansion.

Obviously CCP have the final word on this but as we most likely will not see their patch notes until the day of the expansion, this will have to do for now.

http://neural-boost.com/odyssey

Whack a Mole

Another week in Eve Online.

I'm becoming more used to the new launcher on the Windows computer but on the Linux one it has stopped behaving and now doesn't display an option to input the account name and password.

Two steps forward, one step back.

This is not a major concern and I'm sure it will be fixed when I can be bothered to look into the problem.

Another problem I've mentioned recently is botters.  I've encountered mission bots in the past but today I'll be talking about mining bots.

The ice belts are particularly prone to this infestation and they hide behind noob corps to try and avoid retaliatory action.  If you watch their activities for a while you can see patterns, and if they are in their own corp then action can be taken.

I've not war decced anybody for a while so I was happily surprised to find the voting mechanism has been removed.  You want a war dec and you're a CEO or Director?  Find your target, war dec them, attack in twenty four hours.  Bing Bang Boom!  Perfect!

Less perfect was the fee as I'd forgotten it had been raised from 4 million ISK to a starting price of 50 million ISK (more info here) but that isn't as bad as it seems, I'll explain soon.

So the war dec goes live, I finish some work and come home about two hours after it starts, and kill some war targets.

Not a bad mornings work, and over nine million in bounties which reduces that nasty war dec fee.

I'd suspected they were botters but not how bad their program was setup.

They didn't warp to a safe spot when I entered system, they didn't try and warp away when I appeared on grid, the others didn't try and leave when I was killing their corp mates, pods didn't warp away immediately, it goes on and on. 

The ice fields are moving with the incoming expansion due in about one week, I'm hoping the botting programs will not be able to cope with the new system, or at the very least be delayed by it.

I'll have some fun until then though.

Eve is Down!

DDOS attack against the CCP servers?

CCP screwed up something with the launcher update?

Cosmic rays?

The end result is the same, few people can login to Eve at the moment.

Update #1 - It would seem their is a work around, it certainly worked for me.  So go to https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=238130 and download the launcher update,  install it.  My desktop shortcut was broken after this but creating a new one to the eve.exe in the correct folder fixed that up nicely.  One thing I've noticed, in addition to chat channels disappearing and other settings reverting, is the logoff option is now gone.  You have to exit the game and restart it manually every time you want to change between characters.  It takes an age to check the client file also, annoying!

Update #2 - On my linux box this update worked better.  I installed the updated launcher from the link in Update #1 and that worked fine without me having to screw around with the library settings as I've had to do in the past.  Then I launched the game and it appeared, all the settings were still there, it worked fine. Linux buff!

Update #3 - Success!  If you  leave the launcher open while in game, something I wasn't doing previously, you can switch between characters on the same account without having to login again using the launcher.

Douche Cavalcade of Stupidity

It's difficult to know what to post at the moment.

Various releases from CCP are showing the changes that are incoming with the Odyssey expansion.  At some stage I should have a better look at them but not at the moment.

Eventually it will happen to us all but real life has caught up with me recently and my time available to exist in the Eve Online universe, and converse with the mostly awesome people in it, has become more and more limited over time.

Just in case you're wondering, this is not a goodbye post, merely an acknowledgment of a change of pace.

While I hope to dip a body part into null security space at some stage again in the future at the moment that isn't possible.  Well I could do it but not to the standards that would make me happy.  Feelings of guilt had become overwhelming as I just couldn't spend the time to help the null security corporation.  Essentially I'd become a reluctant leech.

So stepping back from that, and I did this a month or two ago, and trying to exist in high security space is hard.  One description would be I was having the time of my life in Las Vegas, but realised it was going sour,  moved to a town called Safe but Boring in Utah.  Disappointing but we move on.

So high security space...what's this place like now?

I had to laugh after the ten year anniversary happened and everybody received a Gnossis battlecruiser.  I'd pass through jump gates and see some guy just sitting there in his Gnossis flexing.

WE ALL RECEIVED ONE DUDE!

I'd enter the odd system and find fleets of miners moving as if they were a flock of sparrows, moving this way and that with perfect timing.  Obviously they are bots or group controlled, which may in fact not be the case but it looked damned suspicious.

The scourge of Jita seems to have moved into the neighbouring systems and they are now polluted with local spam for this and that.  I still see the guys trying to scam with the seven Caldari something or other when in fact the contract only has the one item.  Classic. The "I'm leaving Eve and I'm giving away all my ISK" scam is also another gem.  Somebody must fall for these things from time to time otherwise why would they continue, or that's just what they think and in fact nobody falls for them but the scammers just continue on.

When I say high security space I mean The Forge which has Jita as a lesion clinging to its hide.  The other areas have various versions of Jita, Jita-lite if you will, the result is much the same.

Jita is a requirement, a necessity but going there is a chore.  Not because it's far as it is not but just the constant douche cavalcade of stupidity that emanates from this lesion in space.  Dock up, sell my stuff, and get the hell out is the order of the day.  Other people probably see it as all rainbows and shiny unicorns, a land of opportunity...good for them.

The glass is half full, the glass is half empty.  Ha!  More like the rim of the glass has a line of invisible nerve agent and no matter what frame of mind you have it'll get you in the end.

So yes this is all getting a bit dark and it's getting late.

High security space, it's like a zoo, a sterile place, but...the wilds of the nature park are just over there in the distance.

I'll explore it again one day.

Dust Off That Joystick

It seems the 2013 Fanfest has caused an avalanche of news, so here it is!

The Oculus Rift is gaining some traction, so a few devs in their spare time decided to create a game using the Eve Online tools, it is called EVR.  It is not for general release, it may never be, it should be, we need this!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/eve-online-devs-debut-beautiful-first-person-space-dogfighting-title-for-oc

Penny Arcade also believe DUST514 will change Eve Online forever.

"Soon the two worlds will be linked through their complex economies, as well as the in-game bonuses that are shared between EVE Online and DUST by controlling planets. Players in EVE Online will be able to directly fund their forces on the ground using cash they earned in space. "

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/dust-514-will-change-the-rhythm-of-eve-onlines-warfare-creating-the-most-am

Finally we have the keynote speech, also from the 2013 Fanfest.  Some interesting stuff, nothing really ground breaking but I hope the changes to mining will break the bots, at least for a while.

Am I excited about Odyssey?  Yes I am as it forces changes which will shake up the universe somewhat.  However the better organised groups, Goons etc, will adapt quickly if not universally due to their size, but they, and I mean all large groups here, can buy their way into the new regime.

What I hear often is the lament about botting.  I've been adding botters to my contact list for ages and to be honest most of them no longer login, which is fantastic.  With luck the mining changes will stop their mining bots dead in their tracks, but software being software I suspect it will just slow them down at best.

Eve Online TV Series?

File this in the "Believe it when you see it" but an Eve Online TV show is being talked about in connection with a guy who is shooting something on HBO which goes by the moniker "It's not TV, it's HBO" or something similar.

Somehow the viewing public are going to become enthralled with one house against another, treachery and honour, yada yada yada.

Yes I'm making a not very subtle Game of Thrones reference.

I'm struggling to see how a series "about" Eve Online will become popular but what it may be able to do is increase the profile of both Eve Online and DUST514.

If this happens, and it's an if that reaches Everest high, the ETA is most certainly a couple of years away.  The obvious problem there is DUST514, as by that stage the PS3 has been replaced by the next generation kit by at least one year and the players could be dropping away.  With luck DUST514 has compatibility with the "PS4", they'd be mad not to.  This assumes the series will visit the guys down there in the mud at all.

Here are some links which may just be reporting the same hoax source.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/29/there-is-going-to-be-a-tv-show-about-eve-online/

http://kotaku.com/coming-soon-to-the-small-screen-eve-the-tv-show-483795472

So watch this space but at the speed CCP travels I'll be playing Eve Online in a holographic tank before this series ever sees the light of day.