GD 141113

A longer GD read again this week, also some comments about the four new deployable modules that are coming with Rubicon.

GD 281013

Still trying something new.

This is a read of the General Discussion forum headings and some further information for the 28th of October 2013.  It is intended to be a skim of the details and you may or may not find this interesting.

FYI it could be NSFW.

I'm going to try and find the time to break out the better microphones and other gear for next week.

GD 211013

Trying something new.

This is a read of the General Discussion forum headings and some further information for the 21st of October 2013.  It is intended to be a skim of the details and you may or may not find this interesting.

FYI it could be NSFW.

A Higher Gear

At the time of writing the Incursion 1.5 patch is due tonight, together with the long down time. I'll probably post about the fallout at some point in the future.

Coming up on the 31st of May is the Incursion 1.6 patch which brings the Carbon UI to EVE Online and establishes the framework for upcoming changes to the 3D user interface.

Following that in June we have Incarna 1.0 which I assume will be the Captains Quarters and typical with EVE Online patches some other stuff, though my guess would be not ground breaking items, just an opportunity to attach some changes/updates/exploit fixes to an already planned deployment date.

The amount of whining on the forums, especially the cess pit known as General Discussion is intense.  Funnily enough the pundits seem fairly split evenly on the topic of tonights patch, it seems they are taking an each way bet.

I would like to see agents change over time, much like an asteroid belt.  Should an agent get hammered for mission requests like those in Motsu then either the available missions are reduced or the quality of the agents/missions are reduced.

This would then force the mission runners to move elsewhere, it would also make it more difficult for the botting mission runners as their income would drop off and I assume this would be difficult to counter.

To balance this other agents in systems at least x number of jumps away would have more missions to offer, or the quality of the agent/mission would increase.  This would provide the same mission income in an area of a given size.

If CCP introduced this I think the internet would explode.

Do it.

A higher gear 190511 by Yosagi Yojimbo

A Hard Days Night

I don't post much about normal operations as it mostly consists of fleet form, travel, wait, shoot some stuff and come home.

Not very interesting.

The other night though we were tasked with taking down a Territorial Claim Unit (TCU) which we did at about 1am my time.  I logged from the game and eventually managed about four hours sleep, then logged in again the following morning while having my breakfast.

To find somebody else had placed another TCU in the same system and we had to take that one down also.

Urrrrgh!

We fleet up again and head out, once again hitting this damn thing.  This time the neutral locals were expressing their displeasure at our destruction of their TCU.  As it turned out some diplomacy was happening in the background and we were pulled off the unit once the shields were mostly gone.

Mere minutes later a red fleet enters the system and destroys the TCU, thanking us for reducing the shields the cheeky buggers.  I remained in the system the whole time cloaked up and keeping an eye on the ingress/egress gate, but the reds "cleansed" their kill mail to remove our names and only theirs remained.

Wankers.

Anyway we had noticed a Player Owned Structure (POS) in the system so after a couple of hours just ratting and doing stuff we re-fleeted and travelled once again to the target system.

Took out the guns and other annoying structures around the POS and then proceeded to destroy the TCU at the same location, after that the POS was put into reinforced at about 1am my time.

Awesome more sleep lost.

After this we headed home.

Another couple of days in C0nvicted done.

A hard days night by Yosagi Yojimbo

More RMT Details

In this post EveNews24 and RMT'ing I posted about some details of the large real money trading for ISK operation that was at iskbank.com/ru.

Now more details have been released which allow us to cross link various information like character names, corporations and alliances.

Most of the acts were perpetuated by people not in an alliance.Wildly Inappropriate alliance heads the list after the unaffiliated with $5068.45 (US dollars?) spent on "illegal" in game ISK.

Various other facts and figures are in there which you can view at your leisure.

Disappointingly I found two current or recent members of my alliance on the list, Dakahn1985 who was with The New Era until less than 24 hours ago, and Poncho87e of The Resident Haunting who is still a member at the time of writing.

The arguments about real money trading go back and forth, my position is I do not support it officially or unofficially.  However as it will always exist out of the game CCP have acknowledged this and have created a legal RMT scheme using the PLEX mechanic.

Grudgingly I can see why they had to do this, and it also supports their soon to be realised micro transaction system.

Three thousand, six hundred and ten names are on that list, assuming a monthly subscription figure of $14.95 means a potential total spend of those characters just short of $54,000 every month.

In theory most if not all of those people/characters will be banned, and that money will be a hole in CCP's finances.

I'll be certainly keeping an eye on a selection of names to see what happens to them.

More RMT Details (14 March, 2011) by Yosagi Yojimbo

Downtime!

On a perfect weeknight I'm able to exist in the Eve Online universe for 4.5 hours.  Last night we had an early and extended downtime (DT) which inserted a 3 hour dead zone into my Eve time.

Tonight the downtime is once again extended, this time by only half an hour, but once again we are shafted, but it used to be worse.

Pro tip, if you're looking for an image for your blog post, and the heading is (was) "shafted", and SafeSearch is off, consider changing the heading name before you search.

Back in the day, way back in the heady days of 2007 the official downtime was an hour, though it was often longer.  Over time the actual downtime was usually shorter than an hour and eventually CCP changed the official downtime to be half an hour.

This is progress and is a good thing.

CCP (I keep on writing CCCP) have also said they wish to eliminate downtime completely.

That's cool, I also wish to live in a five star hotel while eating lobster and directing an ever revolving cast of super models while they perform various Gilbert and Sullivan plays in the nude.

I digress.

Downtime is always going to inconvenience someone, the sad fact is I suspect my (DT) timezone has the dubious honour of low percentage playing numbers and synchronising with business hours for CCP's server maintenance.

I just wish it wasn't so.

Downtime (March 11. 2011) by Yosagi Yojimbo