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.