Burning My Bridges One Hairdresser At A Time

As I write this the next expansion after Phoebe is due for release this evening, it is called Rhea.

December being what it is, and with the changes that came along with Phoebe, I wasn't terribly interested in blogging about anything to do with Eve Online.  Finally I realised I'd better get something down before the next expansion lands as it may be stretching the friendship to talk about the previous expansion after the next one has been released.

However what this does is gives me a window into Phoebe, the time before release, during and afterwards.  I'd also like to call this denial, acceptance, and depression.

The time before Phoebe was filled with much hysteria and misinformation.  Finally the facts were able to burn through the myths but still a certain amount of smoke lingers in some quarters.  I was, well not quite excited about the jump changes, but hopeful they would revitalise the game and help us move away from super blobs zapping around the universe to hot drop battle cruisers.  The universe had become a small place in the time before Phoebe.

Phoebe is released and players rejoiced! I was pretty happy about it.  I compared Phoebe to not quite a reboot of Eve but it was a massive change, hopefully one for the better, and I still think it is.

Before Phoebe we noticed the exodus of the renters from The Kalevala Expanse, then the region was sold to Russians, who didn't return any of our eve mails, it was time to leave also.  We left, players and then corps left us, we settled in a low sec area while the debris from Phoebe settled, it was only for thirty days and this was made quite plain.  We started receiving eve mails asking what's happening next after only a few days, more people left, more corps left.  Pretty soon the alliance wasn't viable and it essentially shut down.

We were in denial before Phoebe, still trying to live the renter lifestyle, and then afterwards in acceptance as the reality of the new expansion sank in and we were forced to change our ways.

The rest of the month plays out, we enjoyed ourselves in low sec, made some new friends, some of the bad guys learned to respect us, but it's time to move on. We head back to null sec.

In null sec, as part of the Darkness alliance, the learning curve is steep, but we've accepted that.  We, and I, are used to doing things our own way, but now we have this alliance dictating various things to us, which while expected is a little off putting, for me anyway.

We've gone from being an alliance built out of refugees from many other organisations, with one of our core building blocks, our foundation stone, is we do not have Call To Arms (CTA's).

Now we have CTA's, in fact we have several each day.  This is taking some getting used to.

Our time in low sec space was pretty enjoyable, though I personally think the game in Eve is in null sec space, so we lose some more members, some really fucking good members who couldn't get that out of their veins.

Hence the depression.

The Teshkat Intervention

We made the news!

Our alliance, and myself, was involved in a fight in Teshkat to try and save a tower coming out of reinforced that was owned by some new friends of ours.

Little did I know how epic the fight would become!

http://evenews24.com/2014/11/10/battle-report-welcome-to-valuetown/

------------------

At 09:30 Eve Time on 11/9/2014, the forces of Silent Infinity began mustering in Ordat local to attack a Violent Declaration POS coming out of RF. The Violent Declaration Executor, MrsM had a CTA scheduled for the timer and FC Hender Eirborn was ready to take on the engagement. Hender began marshaling the assorted Coalition forces and by the time the initial Silent Infinity fleet landed, the forces were fairly evenly matched with the Coalition forces, consisting of the heroic E0N and the awesomely AUStastic League 0f Grumpy 0ld Farts in addition to Violent Declarations, were relatively evenly matched with the forces of Silent Infinity. Silent Infinity had a larger number of Guardians but VD and allies had more dps.

The Silent Infinity fleet initially warped to the cluster of POS mods aligned with Planet V. Hender warped the fleet to a tactical to allow the Guardians to muster. However, before the allied forces could warp down and engage, Silent Infinity warped off the field. With downtime approaching in an hour, Hender ordered shield reps on the POS. This resulted in Silent Infinity sending in a Sniper Eagle and Naga to play cat and mouse with the allied reps.

Realizing that they would be unable to burn down the tower with only their limited subcap dps and unwilling to take a brawl, Silent Infinity lit a cyno on Impro Factory station and began jumping in their Dreads. Crucially, the dreads needed to dock and recharge their cap after jumping before sieging the POS. Hender, recognizing that a brawl with the enemy subcap fleet and enemy dreads at range would result in a slaughter, made the aggressive call for the fleet to warp to the cyno. The move caught the hostile forces napping and their cyno was down nearly instantly. Enemy dreads quickly docked to await their subcaps.

Moments later, the Silent Infinity subcap fleet got a warp in on the Coalition Guardians and came in to engage. However, once again, the quick reactions of Hender and the logistics FC paid off and the allied Guardians were off the field. This was critical as it left the entire enemy subcap fleet stranded some 30 odd kilometer OUT of undock range. Hender successfully punished the AFK for the error a Guardian, followed by enemy battleships were primaried and began dropping like flies under the dps of the allied fleet. Critically, the large number of enemy Guardians were rendered useless by the L0G0F Armageddons who performed near flawlessly. With their subcap fleet evaporating, AFK made a final bid for the tower by undocking their entire Dread fleet and attempting to warp them to the POS before downtime. Allied ships began frantically attempting to tackle warping dreads and, as downtime hit, three hostile Revelations were left trapped on the station while 4 Revelations and a Phoenix had warped to the POS. This was the final mistake Hender would allow the enemy to make.

With their cap fleet now split and their subcaps decimated, Hender ordered a quick login after downtime and began tackling the three hostile Revs trapped on station. Fearful of the weight of Geddons on the field, the AFK dreads began docking. However, at the VD POS, a VD member reported having hero tackled the enemy dreads, forcing them into Siege in an attempt to kill the tower. Hender, joined now by VD PvP Director, Thaddeus Drake, ordered the fleet to warp to the POS to trap the enemy dreads.

Once again the pilots of L0G0F proved invaluable and their Geddons began expertly draining the cap from the sieged dreads. With no sign of enemy reinforcements, the allied fleet quickly burned down the first enemy Revelation while keeping the other dreads capped out and tackled. The Phoenix was next and, with still no sign of enemy assistance, fell quickly under the dps and neuts of the allied forces. The third enemy dread to be targeted was another of the Revs. He was cap dry before even being shot and began to melt quickly under the combined arms fire. However, a call came in from the Tashkat scout. Providence had heard of AFK’s failure and, rather than lose the subcap brawl and 5 dreads to a gang they outnumber 2 to 1 in total and 8 to 0 in capitals without killing the tower, CVA had dispatched an armor gang of HACs and Logistics to attempt to save the dreads.

The enemy gang jumped in from Teshkat and began landing on grid as the third Rev exploded. Hender handed over FC to Thaddeus who switched the fleet over onto the newly arrived subcap fleet. The final two dreads exited the field during the ensuing brawl and, despite the best efforts of the allied forces, there was simply not enough weight of allied Guardians to keep the allied ships up under the newly arrived dps. After getting a few more subcap kills, Thaddeus made the call for the fleet to return to the shield and warp off.

The allied fleet docked up and celebrated a hell of a fight and a hell of win while CVA and pets went back to shooting the single Minmatar Control Tower they had paid 10 billion isk to take down.

At the end of the day, the VD Tower did fall. However, CVA paid dearly for it and the allied coalition showed that they could easily best Silent Infinity despite being outnumbered.

Battle Report

Is It?

Just How Big Is It?

A few days ago a user on the Eve Online forums asked the question.

How big in Gb is Tranquility please?

The answer, and the other associated information is rather interesting.

The entity known as CCP DeNormalized decided to field this question starting from the 17th of October 2014 until the 20th.

Text in bold and green is mine.

--------------------------

"DB is currently around 2.8 TB, 2 weeks ago it was 3 TB...

We do routine archiving to pull old log records, etc... out to separate databases in an attempt to run as lean as possible.

We also have difference services (sso/vgs/images) in different DB's, so while the core DB itself is around 2 TB (2.8 w/ free space in files for growth), the entire stack is closer to 5-6 TB total."

So that's quite large then.

"Over the course of the last year, the market tables have grown by about 500 GB :)"

I wonder if the growth rate is a constant or is speeding up.  My experience suggests the later.

"As mentioned, the core DB is 2.8 TB currently, and the image DB is around 1.3 TB.

the inventory system takes up about 250 GB (a single table w/ 2-3 indexes)
the market system takes up around 300 GB (2-3 tables and multiple indexes)
in-game mail system is around 300 GB as well (we delete most of chribba's mail just to annoy him :))"

Chribba ribbing for the win!

300Gb of in game mail, which is essentially just text files.  Daunting.

"DB is split across 2 tiers of storage, SSD (enterprise level intel disks in v7000 enclosures) for the heavily accessed stuff and 15k SAS disks for the second 'slower' tier.

I'm not that knowledgeable abuot the SAN side and how the block sizes are handed there, but as the LUN's are given to us, we setup our volumes @ 64K block size as this is the optimal allocation for SQL (64k = 1 extent = 8x8KB pages)

We do 2 full backups per day (written across 8 files for disk melting IO dumps) which take a little over 1 hour each... Hits the disks for around 400 MB/s"


"We used to run on the RamSan's but stopped about 3 years ago. They were completely overkill for our needs and at the time expanding was rather difficult.

We had 3 units, 2x 128 GB pure flashbased units and sometime later added a third 2 TB array (this wasn't flash based if I remember)."

I thought the RamSans were more recent, how time flies.


"we do different things w/ each backup - the secondary one gets shipped to a different server for reporting purposes, but you are correct, a differential would make sense in most cases here"

A full backup each time, well two of them as above.


"In this market order clean up, we noticed that there is one crazy player that has an open order for 7 years now!!!! Any order expires after 90 days unless you update it...

So this player has been modifying this one order, at least once every 90 days, for the last 7 frickin years!! haha

There are 3 items left in his sell order - I wanted to just go buy them so there wouldn't be such a big gap in ID's :)

I got over ruled on that as well

(i sent a mail to community about this guy saying he (or she?) should get some kinda medal, so we'll see what comes of that)"


"it is a sell order, that started with 20 units - 17 sold and 3 left :)

it's only like 1.6 mil per unit and not the highest in the region."


"I'm in a little more cynical :)

I also passed it onto security so they could check if it was some long forgotten about market bot sitting in someones closet praying for someone to buy the damn things so it could end itself :)"

My money is on the market bot plinking away hoping for a sale.

"the inventory system is around 250 GB - this includes multiple indexes on the same data though so we (or you) can access it faster, etc...

every item/stack per location has a unique row in the DB, for a total of around 2.2 billion rows at the moment :)"

2.2 billion!

"I've asked our SAN guys that very question ( re: expected life of enterprise SSD's) in the past :)

They say upwards of 5 year life span depending on how many writes, etc... keep in mind these are enterprise grade SSD's (with the insane prices to boot) and have extra 'stuff' to keep them alive longer :)

100% moar stuff!!! yeaaa!!!! hehe

We've yet to lose one, but I believe we're getting close to end of life and may likely replace in the coming year or so."

Damn impressive.

"The most insane part of our DB is ram IMO - we're running 512 GB of ram, so it's able to pull a tremendous amount of data into memory and that gives us great speed.

That much RAM coupled with fast SSD's (and properly indexed data) and you can do quite a bit :)

In terms of oldest item, it's a very difficult thing to find. Up until 4 years ago or so, we were recycling ID's (32 bit) so we are really able to say beyond that.

Now we use 64 bit and can trace how old items are, but I think it's fair to say that there are items in hangars from the beginning :)"

I think I've overused the word impressive, but very impressive!

Link to the thread.

Long Distance Travel Changes

It would seem in the past few days that CCP have dropped a massive bombshell with the long distance travel changes due in the next expansion.

Often I'm loath to call them expansions but this one will be worthy of the description as change it will certainly bring.

Since the announcement the forums have gone nuts, spewing many pages per minute of comments, most of them negative.

Personally I couldn't be happier!  It will bring real change to the game, makes people rethink nearly every aspect of their activities outside of empire space.

We've had some folks, in our alliance,  who almost certainly injured themselves jumping to conclusions and have abandoned null sec or even the game, maybe for a while, maybe forever.

What I'm concerned about is the negative reaction to these changes having a very negative effect on server population, and null security space becoming a ghost town.

Great for making ISK, not so great for PVP and content.

I believe the numbers quoted by CCP will be reduced a bit, if not with the first release then with the next.

The coming few weeks will be interesting to see the level of hysteria the Eve Online population will reach, and what CCP will do about that before the fateful day.

Links:

Long Distance Changes

CCP Greyscale's Forum Post about some probable limitations

Expansion Update

The previous expansion (Hyperion) seems to have only three good points.

The burner missions.

PI now doesn't need sovereignty.

Worm holes now have a kick out which is linked to the mass of the ship.

The next expansion (Oceanus) seems to be quite light in features.

What now seems to be missing from the current expansion release frequency is the anticipation.

Previously we would wait ages for the expansion, it would usually have heaps of features, and the release day would get closer and closer, finally it would arrive.

Hooray!

I don't know if we've lost or gained something with the new system.

No Account Issues

For those of you keeping track, roughly once a year when my account is up for renewal, CCP screw it up somehow and I'm then handed some extra out of game time while they fix the issue.

Here is the post from last year.

http://yosagiyojimbo.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/the-painters-are-in.html 

However this year they managed to get it right.

Well done.

Not Dead Yet

So...

How time flies when you're horribly ill and have to prioritise everything, which of course means this becomes neglected.

But no more!

Until next time anyway...

CCP have seen fit to validate this blog for another year, which I was pretty surprised about, but I guess they know what they're doing.

Don't they?

Anyway another expansion is almost upon us, but the improved update, sorry expansion, frequency has a nasty side effect of more extended down times.  This may not impact much on the non Australians amongst you but it hits us right in the prime time plums.

So that is quite annoying.

The alliance is growing nicely, more corps and more members into our corp.  We are building a nice little community in our pocket of space, which of course I've now ruined by mentioning it.  Ahh well.

I've been thinking about some more fiction, thinking about mapping it out to try and create some sort of continuing story rather than two guys talking in a bar all the time.  Though that could last for quite some time as committing the usual multi hour partially drunken conversation to the written word would fill up quite a few pages I'm sure.

"I love you mate!"

"No, no, no, no ... no, ... yes I love you too mate!"

That sort of stuff.

Before the next expansion comes out, which from memory is called Hyperion, I'll have a look at what we can expect and no doubt provide some ill thought out commentary that manages to get a significant percentage of it wrong.

/me crosses fingers

News and DT Drama

It's been a fun old ten days or so.  We have the industry update, the slew of late DT's after it, a resurgence of our alliance activity, not to mention a change of game leadership for Eve Online!

The industry update, known as Crius, finally landed and it has taken a while to figure out the ins and outs, but it is now settling down.

Crius update link

Crius patch notes

CCP Seagul is now the Executive Producer for Eve Online!

She seems to have been once of the main architects behind the change of update direction, although I believe this was mandated by a changing game landscape anyway.  So it will be interesting to see how Eve goes over the next few updates.

Finally the repeated long DT's just hammered our corp and alliance activity, but it now looks to be recovering.  As downtime is in our gaming prime time it hurts us deeply when it's extended.

A week of long DT's every six weeks when an update is released?

Yay...

Once more into the breach!

We're Number Six! We're Number Six!

An interesting article over at superdataresearch.com showing the top ten MMO's in 2013, their revenues and market share.

EVE Online comes in at number six, which surprised me.  I thought it was too niche to even be in the top ten, but apparently the subscriptions model works better for science fiction titles than fantasy.

Weird!

Article link > http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/us-digital-games-market/

The Rumour Mill

Rumours, one of the last bastions of the dull and inbred.

The latest one in Eve Online is the supposed removal of the In Game Browser (IGB).  This was posted on mittens.com and also places of value, but of course it has little merit.

Although the CCP response, which I've posted below, does suggest that once the CREST technology is mature it may then be replaced, but this is so far into the future it's just common sense.

The old will be replaced by the new.

Hardly worth the hysteria.

----------------------

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4785990#post4785990

Oh wow, this is a pretty amazing thread. Mostly filled with a lot of misunderstanding so let me see if I can clear that up before we get to the Jita riots. Before continuing though, please be advised this post comes to you from a phone and is therefore likely to be filled with even more terribleness than my usual posts. I may try and proof read this though.

So, first and foremost the IGB is not being removed anytime soon and defiantly not without a lot of discussion with the CSM and more importantly you guys. When I say not anytime soon I mean there is no plan to remove it, there is not even a plan to look into how much effort it would be to it. Removing the IGB is as best I can tell years away from happening.

So that probably doesn't help this that much as all i have done is confirm we CCP want to remove the IGB and that it is years away from happening. That doesn't help the fact that many of you use the IGB and feel losing the IGB would hurt your gameplay.

So let me try something else. We don't want to remove the IGB until we have CREST up to the point of replacing it. The most common uses of the IGB are things like DOTLAN's radar or wormhole mapping software. Both those really just need your location information, which we can supply in the an even better way via CREST. Better CREST wouldn't require you to have the IGB open. Log into some website, give it permission to see your location, and even when you are not on that web site it know where you are. This means you get your whole corp to sign up and then only those looking at the mail need to open the browser. This is better in so many ways.

The other big thing the IGB offers is the ability to open links in the client. I don't think we have looked to deep into it, but we should be able to have you press a button on web site and then via CREST it tells the server which tells your client to open some window. Maybe a tad shower but again not only is the format and technology better for developers but the number of uses and possibilities is far greater than the IGB.

I could go on listing so many other things but the bottom line is this: CREST is a far newer technology and more importantly one we can maintain far easier than the IGB. We would like to remove the IGB but we will not do so until CREST, or even maybe something else, gets us feature equal to the IGB.

Really the only question and problem with moving from the IGB to CREST is the fact that you can browse the IGB from the client versus alt-tabbing. From our, or mine anyways, understanding most of you guys have multiple monitors and that's not an issue. There are also other applications that will overlay your current web browser with the game. Things like Overwolf I think it's called. The benefits from us doing things through CREST and relying on you guys to use an existing browser are immense. We get to focus on making cool things instead of trying to maintain a customized browser in the client. Not sure you guys realize just how much work there is in maintaining something as complex as a browser and how much of a security problem for everyone this is.

Anyways, nothing is happening anytime soon, when it does it will be because we, CCP and you the players and the CSM, have had a good long discussion about it, and only once something else is in place to replace it.

I hope that elevates (alleviates? - Yos) your concerns for now. Let's get back to blowing up spaceships and building an awesome universe together and enjoying the sun... Which I might be the only one doing :P

CCP FoxFour

Three Into One?

We've been living in our own little pocket of null security space for a while now.  Our routine seems to have settled into ratting for ISK and occasional PVP, at least that's what I see from my time zone.

This is not particularly a bad thing as I don't miss the endless mandatory strategic operations, endless moving, very late nights waiting to see if anything would happen, and often it wouldn't.

The timing of DT (Down Time) is still a hard limiter on our activity, it is usually shorter these days but I suppose a mental barrier still remains for many people.  At one stage CCP mentioned the complete removal of DT.  I don't know if this is still on the table as an option but maybe a reduction in the amount of DT's could be made?  Perhaps down to twice a week for a full shut down and for the rest of the time the required functions could be done while everybody is online.  The time zone that DT occurs in is quiet so the extra server load shouldn't hurt those still online.  Of course that's why DT is placed in that time zone, it's quiet and a convenient time for CCP to perform what needs to be done.

I've been playing Eve Online since 2007, in that time CCP had the market almost exclusively to itself.  Lately though I've seen two options start to break the skin of the chest cavity and burst forth into the world.

Star Citizen is certainly the most hyped, seems to be the best funded and has yet to impress me at all.  From what I can see though it probably has the best chance for growth and change and will probably end up as a direct threat to Eve Online given enough time.

Elite Dangerous looks more impressive, it's funding level is probably lower but that's based more on educated guessing than hard figures. It certainly has a vast universe but also appears to be a single player game with some occasional multi player and MMO elements.  I have a huge soft spot for the original Elite and David Braben, and of course Ian Bell, but I'm concerned it doesn't have the depth.

It will be interesting to see over time how much these games, and perhaps others I'm not aware of, influence CCP.  It certainly means they don't have the genre to themselves any more and some real competition may spur them into a higher gear.  However the CCP juggernaut is slow to change, doesn't deliver well on promises and lately has been losing staff.

As a slight aside we hear about the staff leaving but what about the new hires?  I'm assuming of course that new hires are actually happening but if those leaving staff are being replaced, maybe the new blood is better than the old?  Time will tell.

Can the niche space MMO market support three games?  Are disgruntled Eve Online players helping to fund Star Citizen to somehow spur CCP into action?

We now have "expansions" happening every six weeks and not twice a year anymore.  The next expansion is on the 22nd'ish of July but is mostly content held over from the previous one at the start of June.  Which makes me wonder what was slated for the July expansion that has now been pushed back?  Was there anything at all?

It's going to be a time of change, change can often be good, but not always.

The Guardian and CCP

A very interesting article about the inner workings of CCP, Eve Online, DUST514 and World of Darkness.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/world-of-darkness-the-inside-story-mmo-ccp-white-wolf

Some selected quotes from the article are below.


"The massively multiplayer online game World of Darkness had spent nine years in development but was being cancelled, and its production studio CCP Atlanta slashed to a sliver of its former size. Fifty-six people lost their jobs."


"There was another problem. Several members of the WoD development team told the Guardian that this early bump in the road was exacerbated by extreme disorganisation on the part of CCP’s Icelandic management. Very shortly after initial development began, the company started blurring the lines between the World of Darkness and Eve projects."


"I once saw him looking over the shoulder of a programmer at some bit of User Interface the poor guy had hacked together. He straightened up, put fingers to lips and said, ‘No, this isn't it at all. Make it more...psssshhhh’ He hissed on his fucking fingertips, like the air coming out of a bicycle tire, and then just walked away."


"But development of Incarna was not going smoothly. “As little as a few weeks out from launch, the lead designers were still trying to add features to the Captain’s Quarters,” says Blood. “But without the time or resources to properly do so, many things were left half-delivered, to be iterated upon later – which never happened. CCP has an extensive track record of promising to return to features and never doing so. There was little discipline to the process.”"


"Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun during the annual Eve Fanfest in May, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, showed some acknowledgement of the company’s mistakes over the past few years. “I would say we’re re-focusing on simpler strategies and smaller teams,” he said. “I think that helped make us successful: EVE was made like that. And maybe we scaled up our teams and our ambitions too rapidly.”"

Ye Olde Tymes

I stumbled upon the old dev blogs from 2003, some are interesting in a historical kind of way.

I may have just created a new job description, video game archaeology.

Although actually digging up old Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried many years ago is a more hands on form.

Anyway it is quite a startling comparison between those times and the current version of CCP.

For example (verbatim) :

..that if you put two cups of water in the freezer. One at 90°C and one at 18°C, the 90°C one will freeze faster?

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1168

Would any one be interested in writing a player blog? It would be a place were players would write about their day to day life in EVE for others to read and comment on.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1165

Also fixed was the globalness of the jettison timer and it reduced to 3 minutes. We need to have the timer, as spurting cans all over the place, puts the hurt on servers and players. Note to miners; using secure-containers to do what you have been using the loot containers, gives you more capacity and password protection of the contents.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1158

Over the 2 months that we have been live, vast amounts of logs have been produced; this has been slowly degrading SQL server performance. It first became and issue last Sunday. Database load coupled with node deaths as a result of that, was the biggest reason for EVE not setting a new simultaneous users record last Sunday (we have set a new record each Sunday since release) and signup/churn last week was more than enough for a new one.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/1150

Fascinating!

The Updates Are Coming!

It would seem as I was writing yesterdays post CCP was also releasing the information about how they are going to manage releases from this point on.

Funnily enough my post was somewhat accurate about future releases being small as the bulk of the Kronos release has been pushed forward towards the end of June 2014.

However it is better they release a properly thought out and implemented industry update than something half arsed.

We will have to wait and see what we end up with.

So below this is the explanation from CCP about the future releases.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/from-2-expansions-to-10-releases-eve-onlines-new-release-model-explained/

Six Weeks Later

So ignoring all the events at Fanfest 2014 what information is useful to the player base of Eve Online, DUST514 and Valkyrie?

The biggest announcement seems to be the date of the next, and last, big expansion release.  It will be called Kronos and the release date is June the 3rd.  Kronos mostly seems to be an industry release, and that is a good thing, but the bigger news is the way CCP will handle expansions in the future.

Gone is the twice yearly cycle of updates expansions, replacing this is a release cycle of six weeks, which may, or may not, provide more expansion material over the course of a year.'

Keeping to a six week release cycle is ambitious.

CCP don't do ambitious very well.

How will they name the new expansions?

If they have to come up a new name every six weeks then pretty soon we'll be getting expansions called Snowball IX, Snowball X, etc etc.

What may happen is the old Summer (Winter), and Winter (Summer) release dates would set the name, and then six weeks after that would have a suffix of 1.0, 2.0, etc.

Who knows!

What I don't want is after six weeks we only receive a new drone, or a ship re-balance.

These have to be proper expansions, not updates that placate the masses in the short term but ultimately alienate the player base.

The Legion of DUST514

Fanfest 2014 is on at the moment, but the live feed begins at a horrible time for me and only gets worse.

So catching up on news from the get together is tough.  However overnight CCP released news about a version of DUST514 for the PC.

[Dust 514 News] Introducing Project Legion

[CVG] Dust 514 dev announces Project Legion for PC

[Eurogamer] CCP re-imagines PS3 shooter Dust 514 for PC as Project Legion

[Massively] EVE Fanfest 2014: Project Legion brings DUST 514 to the PC

[PCWORLD] Meet Project Legion, the epic new first-person PC shooter from EVE Online's creators

While it is still at least a year away, possibly more when real time is used instead of CCP time, at least it shows a forward step from the parent company.

Bombing The Ice Devils

The other day, or night, I don't recall exactly, but it was certainly in the last week.

Probably.

One of the guys in our corp, in fact the head guy.

That sounds wrong.

The CEO of our corp mentioned he'd seen a bunch of ice miners stripping the belts quite quickly and this was vexing him so.

Utilising our vast array of resources universe wide, we made haste to make this right.

Actually using some two month old alts that weren't doing much at the time, we started tracking the targets and thought about a plan.

My plan was to grab some food and then spend some quality time on the couch scratching my balls, but then we came up with a better plan!

The target was using ISBOXER (probably) to control a bunch of mining barges, an Orca and a Charon.

Our plan was to fit out a battleship, scout a warp in that lands in his tight group, and start up the smart bombs.

I was tracking the ball of ships, I had them on visual, I was cloaked.

Then they all just disappeared!

Strangely I still had the ship ball on d-scan.

Was the game bugged?

Was it lag?

Had I blacked out and was only dreaming of Eve while laying collapsed on the cool tile floor?

Then I heard a voice, it said "What if it's one of those invisibility bubble things?"

It certainly could have been.  I still had the ship ball on d-scan at approx 110 km, so I started slowly approaching them while calling out the decreasing range.

The tension on Teamspeak was rising as the distance dropped.

80km

70km

60km

50km

40km

Lost them!

Aaargh!  Where did they go!?!

I changed the d-scan to 360 degrees and I still had them at about 30km.

My aim must have been off.  Changing the d-scan back down to 30 degrees I moved the direction around a bit until I found the ship ball again.

The mission is back on!

20km

I call out to our smart bombing pilot to start aligning as it will be soon.

Suddenly I'm in the middle of a tight ball of mining barges, the Orca and Charon.

Warp! Warp! Warp!

The target says something like, "Hey what are you doing here?"

I warp off knowing the pain was about to arrive.

The battleship lands at zero on my previous position and starts banging away with the full high slots of smart bombs.

The target doesn't like this!

He starts complaining about being smart bombed, CONCORD not being quick enough, and various other things which are probably genetic.

So in the end it seems like time took on the consistency of molasses but it fact it was all over with pretty fast.

How many ships died in this encounter?

One.  The battleship.

Turns out he had the barges tanked quite adequately, and a smart bombs need heaps of capacitor.

Ahh well.

World Of Darkness Is Dead!

In news that will surprise nobody, World Of Darkness, CCP's attempt at a not very Twilight type MMO, has finally been killed off.

Sadly, potentially fifty people have lost their job with this cancellation.

The up side is hopefully, in time, the glut of Vampire and Zombie pop culture will diminish.

To be replaced by something just as crappy.

"CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:

The decision to end the World of Darkness MMO project is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to make. I have always loved and valued the idea of a sandbox experience set in that universe, and over the years I’ve watched the team passionately strive to make that possible."

Link to the full article

Sony Facebook And VR

A couple of days ago an article was released about the further development of Valkyrie, previously known as EVR.

It's well worth a read in full.

"What helped CCP get a VR prototype up and running so quickly was its vast library of historical assets from Eve Online, and the timing of VR’s re-emergence. Once a group of around 20 engineers at CCP’s Newcastle studio had established the link between Dust 514 and Eve Online, ongoing maintenance of that infrastructure was moved out to the developer’s Shanghai office. With virtual reality on the horizon, an experienced team of engineers at the ready and a bank of assets at its disposal, the natural next step was for that group to start building out a VR prototype. Valkyrie was demoed at E3 last year in its previous form, EVR, and CCP has been working on the game in earnest ever since. So even with those close ties to both Sony and Oculus, is it harder to make a VR game than it is a ‘traditional’ game? “At a high level, yes,” says Reid. “But there are a very different set of details involved here because we are all together pioneering VR gaming. It’s very different to saying ‘let me take a first person shooter and bring it to consoles and PCs’. That’s a very well established thing. In this space, those norms haven’t been established – we’re doing that now with Oculus and Morpheus.” "

http://www.edge-online.com/news/eve-valkyrie-and-how-ccp-became-the-frontrunner-in-the-race-to-define-virtual-reality-gaming/

Summer Changes The Erotica

I was going to write, albeit belatedly, about the Erotica 1 saga, but by this stage it's old news, the forum drama queens have not managed to stir up much righteous anger and, to be honest, good riddance to bad rubbish.

If you wish to relive what is rapidly becoming the distant past then visit these links:

http://evenews24.com/2014/03/25/jesters-trek-the-bonus-round/

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=332912

Some more information has been released about the "Summer" expansion.  The drone changes are probably the most talked about in our alliance, but not very much, nobody seems to be too "up in arms" about them, and we have precious few miners so those changes will hardly affect us directly.  I'm wondering what the mining changes and the previously announced reprocessing changes will do to the greater market though.

Links!

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/giving-drones-an-assist/

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/reprocess-all-the-things/

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/ship-painting-pilot-program/

Yes the ship painting program is the best thing since the guys in faction ships became excited about sliced bread.  It improves the diversity and immersion in New Eden, but I'd like to see them drop the word "edition" from  the end of ship descriptions.  It's just not needed.  For example what sounds better?

Mammoth Nefanter Edition

Mammoth Nefanter

Nefanter Mammoth

The third one is the best IMHO, but what's done is done.

The Honeymoon Is Over!

Soon after the fight in B-R5RB the various reports of the battles scale caused a large spike in new pilot numbers across New Eden.

Now that boost has finally faded away, in fact new pilots are joining at a reduced rate now compared to just before the fight.  It's possible the amount of new pilots were, in part at least, populated by people who had an interest in this type of game in the first place, and now we have to wait for that pool of people to repopulate, hence the reduced numbers.  Another theory is the actual game of Eve Online is quite different to the description in the many news reports, and CCP promotional videos, and now quite a few ex new pilots are spreading the word of this deception.

We may never know.

However we have some graphs!

The first arrow shows the massive boost of new pilots after the B-R5RB battle.  The second arrow shows where we are now, below the new pilot numbers from before this latest public relations coup for CCP.  To the very left of that graph is another new user spike from a previous unknown incident, or even an expansion update as that can sometimes excite the creation of new pilots.

The upcoming Fanfest usually generates some new and exciting videos showing the Eve Universe as CCP wishes it was, and this can generate some buzz, and therefore another boost to new pilot numbers.

The roller coaster continues!

Rubicon 1.3 Patch Notes!

Distraction!

Yes I know, quite a bit of copy and paste search engine whoring here.

The patch night is a Wednesday, not the usual Tuesday, but we will still get boned by the extended down time.

Proper link is here > http://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-rubicon-1.3

Patch notes for EVE Online: Rubicon 1.310.03.2014 15:09

Patch notes for EVE Online: Rubicon 1.3
Released on Wednesday, March 12th, 2014
CHANGES

Art & Graphic
Lighting model updated to use linear calculations for ships. This first pass of Linear Lighting increases the texture fidelity improving the richness of color and gives the graphics team much more control for future improvements. We'd like to emphasize that this first implementation of linear lighting and the first step in overhauling our lighting system. More information is available here.
The Tristan T1 hull now sports a modern design that reflects its Nemesis T2 counterpart and uses new warp-induced animations.
Asteroids are now using latest shaders and are simplified for both performance and visual quality.
All Sovereignty units are now renovated and using the latest shaders. There have been various bug fixes for the Sovereignty Territorial Claim Unit which ensures the correct visual state is represented depending on the sovereignty status.
The background images in the Character Creator have been converted into a different file format. This decreases the image file size without losing image quality.
The format for 3D meshes has now been upgraded to the latest version. All mesh files have been converted and will impact the patch size.

Drone Assist
Capped the number of drones that can be assigned to a single character at 50.
Note: this cap ignores drones owned by the asignee

German Localization
“Hardpoint” is now consistently translated as “Montageplatz” in German.
“Warp core strength” is now consistently translated as “Warpkernstärke” in German.
“AU” (astronomical unit) is now consistently translated as “AE” in German.
“Wormhole space” is now consistently translated as “Wurmlochraum” in German.
“Frontal lobe” is now consistently translated as “Frontallappen” in German.

In-Game Browser
When clicking a button in the client to buy a PLEX or enter account management that requires secure.eveonline.com, the system browser will be used instead of the In-Game Browser. (Includes actions in the character selection screen, the NEX store and the PLEX show-info window)

Items
New Hull Maintenance Bots have been added to the game in Light, Medium and Heavy sizes and both T1 and T2 variants. Blueprints for the Tech One Hull Maintenance Bots can be obtained at CreoDron stations.
Two new improved variants of the Mobile Tractor Unit structure have been added. They are known as the ‘Packrat’ Mobile Tractor Unit and the ‘Magpie’ Mobile Tractor Unit and blueprints to manufacture them can be found in Ghost Sites.
Four new cosmetic variants of existing ships have been made available in the NEX store. These ships require their completed base hull to build and have no increase in power. They can be purchased using AUR from the NEX store or using ISK from the market. For more information please see this dev blog.
Punisher Kador Edition
Merlin Nugoeihuvi Edition
Rifter Krusual Edition
Incursus Aliastra Edition
Abaddon Kador Edition
Rokh Nugoeihuvi Edition
Maelstrom Krusual Edition
Hyperion Aliastra Edition
The Police Pursuit Comet has been added to the CONCORD LP store. It is a cosmetic variant of the Federation Navy Comet and has exactly the same stats as the standard Federation Navy Comet frigate.

Miscellaneous
All data on Jovian vessels suddenly disappear from capsuleer ship databases; conspiracy theorists go wild, until a CONCORD official explains they just decided to archive the information due to a lack of recent sightings.

Russian Localization
Various strings in the Neocom and Station Services were updated.

Ships and Modules
The Remote Sensor Dampener Optimal Range and Falloff bonus on the Celestis cruiser has been reduced to 7.5% per level.
The optimal range of all Remote Sensor Dampeners has been reduced by 16.66%.
A series of balance changes to several Tech One Frigates and Cruisers have been made. The changes can be found below:
PUNISHER:
+2 PWG
+3 CPU
-20s Cap Recharge Time
+25 m/s velocity
+143000 mass
-0.45 inertia
+1 sensor strength

KESTREL:
+5 m/s velocity
-50000 mass

RIFTER:
Removed +7.5% Small Projectile Turret tracking bonus per level
Added +10% Small Projectile Turret falloff bonus per level
+10 m/s velocity
+0.01 inertia

BREACHER:
Removed +5% missile damage bonus per level
Added -5% missile RoF bonus per level
+2 PWG
+10 m/s velocity
+0.02 inertia

INQUISITOR:
+50 Capacitor
+25s Cap Recharge Time
+95 m/s velocity
-0.05 inertia
+160000 mass

BANTAM:
+30 Capacitor
+15s Cap Recharge Time
+70 m/s velocity
+0.35 inertia

NAVITAS:
+35 Capacitor
+17.5s Cap Recharge Time
+80 m/s velocity
+0.35 inertia

BURST:
+30 Capacitor
+15s Cap Recharge Time
+80 m/s velocity
+0.35 inertia

AUGOROR:
+25 m/s velocity
-0.12 inertia
+2140000 mass

OSPREY:
+10 m/s
+0.02 inertia
-130000 mass

MALLER:
+10 m/s velocity
-0.044 inertia
+1100000 mass

MOA:
+200 shields
-100 hull
+50 capacitor
+15s cap recharge time
-220000 mass

VEXOR:
-10 m/s velocity
+0.03 inertia
-210000 mass

OMEN:
+25 m/s velocity
-0.08 inertia
+1950000 mass

CARACAL:
+0.01 inertia

Skills
The effectiveness of the Corporation Management, Empire Control, Megacorp Management and Sovereignty skills have been doubled. Corporation CEOs will need to reapply their skills in the corporation management interface for the changes to take effect. The new bonuses are:
Corporation Management: +20 corporation members allowed per level
Empire Control: +100 corporation members allowed per level
Megacorp Management: +400 corporation members allowed per level
Sovereignty: +2000 corporation members allowed per level
The Repair Drone Operation skill and Drone Repair Augmentor rigs now increase the Hull repair rate of Hull Maintenance Bots in addition to the bonuses they provide to Armor and Shield logistic drones.

The Sisters of EVE
Sisters of EVE LP stores now offer Astero, Stratios and Nestor BPCs in exchange for new Rogue Drone Nexus chips:
Rogue Drone 46-X Nexus Chip for Astero blueprint
Rogue Drone 43-X Nexus Chip for Stratios blueprint
Rogue Drone 42-X Nexus Chip for Nestor blueprint
These new Nexus chips have a chance to drop from ‘Sentient’ Rogue Drones, which can be found in Rogue Drone cosmic anomalies or asteroid belts in Drone controlled regions
The Nestor has received a small set of balance changes:
Capacitor raised to 7000 (was 6200)
Capacitor recharge time lowered to 1025s (was 1154s)
Scan resolution increased to 125 (was 85)
Role bonus to range of remote armor repairers raised to 200% (was 100%)

User Interface
The Direction scanners user experience has been improved. The single field range input has been replaced by two input fields, one for km and one for AU, and a range slider. Those three input widgets are interconnected and will update when one changes. The scan angle slider has been modified to be easier to use.
Filtering and highlighting of words in chat is now possible by setting up a list of word in a setting window opened from a chat channel window. Those settings are stored on the server.
The capacity of the bays of your current ship is now displayed in a bar in the Show Info window.
The "Fitting" tab in the Show Info window has been given a bit of a facelift, and will list the fitting of your current ship or ships in your personal station hangars.
The settings for the Notification section of Evemail have been changed to allow you to have different blinking and pop-up settings for each of the Notification groups. Those settings will be stored on the server.
A new Notification group, Insurance, has been added.
A configurable shortcut to toggle between “custom” and “center“ camera tracking modes has been added.
A configurable shortcut to enable “custom“ camera tracking mode has been added, as well as a shortcut to enable “center“ camera tracking mode.
The “Consume“ right-click option for drugs has been moved towards the top of the menu.
Additional right click options are now available for celestials in the Orbital Bodies tab of the System Show info window.
You are now able to open multiple Kill Reports by holding down the shift key when clicking, just like you can do with Show Info windows and Saved Fitting windows.
The station guest list now comes with a counter for the number of people currently docked.
The station guest list can now has a compact member list icon, that only displays the standings icon and name of the player.
The station guest list now comes with a searchable filter for docked guests, which filters the list the moment you start typing.
You can now drag modules from kill reports to the compare tool, chat and other places.
Further details are available in a dev blog here.
FIXES

Blueprints and Manufacturing
The Gnosis now requires one unit of Tritanium to build instead of materializing out of thin air.

German Localization
Various consistency issues in the German translation were fixed.

Graphics
A texture was adjusted to reenable missile smoke trails.
Corrected occlusion issues causing stations to be visible through moons.
Fixed missing textures on certain dungeon stations
Isolated the Mobile Micro Jump Unit effect to activating ships only.
Modified the jumpgate transition to eliminate distorted fisheye camera effects after jumpgate travel.
Reinstated exhaust flame effects on the Rorqual.
The Purifier shows now the correct Viziam logo.

Miscellaneous
Fix for an issue where a stationary wreck that had previously been moved by a tractor beam could occasionally become impossible for some missiles to target.
Fixed an issue preventing station services from transferring/disabling properly.
Modified the Gallente Military Station to prevent ships from becoming stuck on undock.
Minor content fixes including spelling errors, object placement and mission completion triggers.
Corrected an issue giving medium-sized ships the potential to become stuck on Customs Offices.
Jump count in Incursion Global Report and for saved locations in People & Places now uses autopilot setting for calculations.

Missions and Complexes
The NPC will no longer attack you after you finished the mission: What's in a Name - Poke (3 of 5)
The Industry skill book has been added as a reward for completing the mission: Making Mountains out of Molehills (1 of 10).
The Industry skill book has been added as a reward for completing the mission: Balancing the Books (1 of 10).
A Civilian Miner module is provided at the beginning of the mission, and the misleading un-minable asteroids in the mission location have been replaced with less confusing objects in the mission: Balancing the Books (3 of 10)
The transport ship More Bark has been changed to a white cross hair transport ship in the mission: Fair Play (2 of 5).
Fixed an issue with too many Outposts being present in the level four variants of the mission: Intercept the Saboteurs.
De-spawning issues with Blood Den has been fixed.
The required mission-item was changed to "Angel Simple Trigger Mechanism" which is found in the complex in Traun for the mission: Information at a Cost.
Popups for drug production Radar sites now indicate more clearly their risk & potential rewards.
The static site "Ancient Amarr Tomb" was moved from it's moon location. This site can still be found using probes.

NPCS
The True Centus Preacher has often been found carrying blueprints for Bhaalgorn battleships. Sansha Kuvakei has personally ordered that the Preacher be reeducated to ensure that it only carries glorious Nightmare BPCs in the future.
Rogue Drone Officers have a higher drop rate on modules now and are guarantied to drop a 42-X Nexus Chip.
NPC AI has been enhanced to handle multiple targets in more robust way.

Ships and Modules
The bonus text on Scimitar and Oneiros now says "Remote Tracking Computer" instead of "Remote Sensor Booster".
Cloaked ships are no longer able to use the extended fitting range of a Mobile Depot to refit whilst still cloaked.
The velocity of Heavy Missiles is now properly affected by Bastion Module I.
Fixed descriptions of the Chimera, Wyvern, Thanathos, Nyx, Nidhoggur, Hel and Revenant to properly link the Capital Shield Emission System skill in their "traits" tab.
Fixed issue that caused some overheated tracking disruptors to affect target falloff range too strongly.
A ship that is invulnerable as it exits warp will be prevented from activating a Cynosural Field Generator until the warp invulnerability has cleared.

Skills
The "Required for" tab in the Show Info window for skills like Anchoring or Propulsion Jamming is now also listing structures like Control Towers or Mobile Warp Disruptors.

Tutorial
The CONCORD NPCs in the Advanced Warfare Tutorial Arc (9 of 10) - "Glue" were adjusted to not shoot the player if he bumped into their ships.

User Interface
On the star map, the list of station services shown in the solar system pop-ups sometimes did not correctly include 'Militia Office' as one of the available services. This has been fixed.

World Shaping
Added some missing Ore upgrade sites for certain null sec systems.
Changed names of two planets in 8S-0E1 as a part of a reward for a DUST 514 tournament:
Planet III becomes Eon Prime
Planet IV becomes Ancient Gliese

Wormholes
The aggression range of Sleeper NPC's has been adjusted in all wormhole sites.

Ship Painting Coming Soon! ...Possibly

Reavers!

So finally we may be able to soon, in the possible near to medium future, be able to paint add colour highlights to our ships via a manufacturing game mechanic.

Cool.

"Depending on the reception in Rubicon 1.3 and beyond, we can see more clearly where we stand before we start the ”Paint Shop” project with full force. Hence, the pilot program. (Pun intended? -Yos)

The pilot program began with the current, available code we have, so it isn’t going to be very representative of any possible final designs that would have more work put towards accessibility. The pilot program is also going to start small, with 9 pre-selected skins available in the first release and a gradual expansion from there. In the name of SCIENCE! we intend to collect as much feedback as possible about how this program is received. We intend to make small and measurable changes to get as much data, with as many variables as possible, to help inform our future decisions.

Our vision for the future of ship skinning includes skins available from many different sources, including some skins sold through Aurum and others available through purely in-game methods such as loyalty point stores. In the first release of the pilot program we will be introducing eight skins available for Aurum, and one available exclusively through in-game achievement."

URL:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/ship-painting-pilot-program/

The Ultimate Goal!

Waiting, Cats and Magpies

Australian Magpie

I've been busy doing not much, but their has been much of it.

The corp and therefore the alliance is slowly coming back to life, Christmas and New Years just sucked the life from everybody involved, it has taken this long for those old batteries to finally gain enough charge to login for appreciable amounts of time once again.

However Downtime (DT) is just killing us.  It's such a shame the AU time zone is so impacted by the daily downtime.  Admittedly it's nowhere near as long as when I first started playing back in 2007, back then one hour was normal, these days ten minutes is quite common.  It still breaks up the momentum, people don't login, or they've lost the energy, the zest, the get up and go they had before DT.

People drift away to other games, bed, or heaven forbid their significant other.

Heh I'm kidding, we play Eve Online.

We have cats.

Talking about cats, as SFA is happening in game right now, mine has taken to attempting the theft of cheese from the Magpies we hand feed when they approach the front door.  I'd like to say this is voluntary but Magpies are rather aggressive and if I could speak their descended dinosaur language it probably goes something like this...

Magpie 1, "Gee it's a long way from your front door to the car all the way over there."

Magpie 2, "Yeah it would be shame if something attacked your head on the way there."

Baby Magpie, "I want food, give me food, will you give me food!  Is that food?"

So while waiting for things to move forward in Eve I'm sometimes feeding the local wildlife for a variety of reasons, self preservation being one of them.

My cat, essentially being a furry tube wrapped around a mouth and stomach, is quite interested in the cheese, and not so much in the three aggressive looking magpies who are not bothered by her at all even though they are within a metre away.  I think their "fuck you" stance is frankly confusing her.

With any luck the standings we've been waiting for will be done soon and I can get back to Eve Online stuff!

Dealing With Slow Rookies

The B-R5RB fight has been a boon for new player recruitment into Eve Online.

As you can see the right hand side of these graphs represent the days leading up to the third of February 2014.  It's easy to see where the news of the fight hit the media and the clear evidence of increased new player attraction.

So much so that...

Yup.  TiDi in a starter system.

Welcome to Eve Online newbies!

The B-R5RB Turkey Shoot Fallout

So the Eve Online fight on the 27th and 28th of January in B-R5RB was rather large.

How large?

Well the figures are pretty impressive.  As of this morning when I obtained my figures (which are likely to rise as more kills are discovered) this is what had happened...

Click to enlarge

4,651 ships or other deployable objects had been destroyed.

Of those 62 were Titans, 330 were Dreadnoughts, 546 were Interceptors, the numbers go on and on.

The ISK loss was 9.67 trillion ISK.

To put that another way it was 15,064 in game PLEX (current PLEX value 642 million).

As one PLEX can be bought for $19.95 of USD that means the ISK loss was worth just over three hundred thousand US dollars.

$300,519 USD.

Remarkable!

Interestingly the market warriors have already started as the volume of Tritanium traded in The Forge was double for both yesterday and today compared to the recent average.  I also expect other prices to rise as various replacements are made to the almost staggering amount of material that was lost by the involved parties.

Click for image to stay much the same size as this

What this does in the non Eve Online gaming world is create buzz.  Gaming sites will pick up the story, non gaming sites may follow suit, and it becomes an advertising god send for CCP.

I'm sure we will be seeing the fallout for days to come at least.

Some news links:

Washington Post

Fox News

Stuff.co.nz

CBSNEWS

It's rather interesting, or just lazy journalism, that the text is mostly just a copy paste from the same source, and is factually incorrect in several areas.

CCP have also posted a DEV Blog outlining the fight and some of final numbers.

Golden Nugget In GD

I don't read the forums very much, and in particular the General Discussion (GD) area as it just seems to be the same garbage posts, ideas, etc going around and around, quite depressing really.

However!

Every once in a while their is an initial post and response that is worth reading.

When that happens I'll let you know.

...

Right now!  

Da'iel Zehn posted the following the following;

"Hello there my beloved brethren and sisters,
So my question is... why so much secrecy about upcoming content and the direction of EvE? I really hate secrecy as we have to deal with it all the time out-of-pod in RL.

So much redaction in the CSM minutes. Made me a sad bear.

Is because of the "Rabble Rabble Rabble?" Or is it all the "I'm Leaving EvE" threads or something? Is it because the threat of people unsubscribing can become a reality? What happened to the HTFU mentality introduced in that CCP rap song?

I'm curious... things used to be way more open. It gave me something to look forward to. Something to keep me excited about EvE and keep me here (as I get really bored now)."

Only seven minutes after "his" post a response from Katrina Oniseki was unusually thoughtful and well written for GD.

"Because the things talked about in the CSM are subject to change and are more often than not simply vague ideas talked about and thrown around the room without any real development work having gone into them yet. It's called expectation management.
Players as a general demographic are incapable of understanding the concept of "we haven't even started working on it yet", so we run into issues where players rage about stuff they didn't even need to know about. Let's say CCP was talking about designing a new module that does a fancy thing.

Some players will rage about the fancy thing it does and call it OP before any stats are made.

Some players will rage about CCP designing something that isn't part of their gameplay instead of fixing [playstyle], before the final functionality is finished.

Some players will rage at CCP for nerfing their playstyle in favor of [Goons/N3/carebears/pirates], when CCP isn't even sure if they want it to be allowed at all in [game area].

Some players will use the advance information to figure out how best to make trillions off the introduction of it via market games or be perfectly trained for it, spend all their money/time on getting ready for its release, then rage when CCP changes how it will be produced/used.

Finally, when CCP decides they cannot feasibly work out the technical limitations of the module, some players will rage about the half-assed functionality or the cancellation of the whole idea. Because "CCP PROMISED US THIS MODULE".

It's almost always a bad idea to present your ideas to the customers in the MMO biz before you have something tangible and polished to show them."

I was very pleased I'd decided to wade through the murky and usually foetid waters of GD this morning.

I've also passed the four hundred post mark.

Research Agent Grand Prix

I collect and sell Data Cores (DC's).  They can also be collected for use but I prefer to collect and sell them and buy what I need.  The income is pretty low these days but one hundred million ISK per month would be quite handy to a player starting out.  As I've been asked how I go about this I thought it would be easier to chisel it here for the hordes of future players to view at their leisure.

I have three pilots that collect the DC's, lets call them A, B, and C.

They all visit the exact same research agents and purchase from the agent one or the other of two different DC's.

Pilot A travels around to all the agents in something small and fast, purchases the DC's and contracts them all at each location to pilot C.

Pilot B travels around to all the agents in something small and fast, purchases the DC's and contracts them all at each location to pilot C.

Pilot C travels around to all the agents in a fast hauler, purchases the DC's and collects the DC's contracted from pilot A and B,  Pilot C then travels to the trade hub of choice and puts them up for sale at a price that should sell in the next day or so.

Once another month has elapsed do this again.

The hardest part is the initial setup as each pilot must gain enough standing with the research agents corporation to access the DC's, once that is done it becomes a high, medium, or, low income stream depending on your situation.  As it currently stands however the research points that let you purchase the DC's accumulate while your account is active, so it's a very passive income.

Which could become handy if you lose everything.

Steady As She Goes

Finally I'm back!

I must congratulate the holiday season for a wonderfully punctuated kidnap note, it warmed the cockles of my heart.

The break means CCP hasn't been up to much publicly, although some modules have been announced that I now cannot find a link for.  One of them was an anchorable module that provided a 30km "cone of silence" type bubble, the other I don't recall right now.  This and more will be scheduled for the Rubicon 1.1 release at some point in the near to semi near future.

As far as the Alliance is concerned the members are slowly coming back online after the break and we are getting into the swing of things.  We also have a few new members who seem to be working out well.

Not very exciting but that's how we roll!