A Terribly Repaired Silver Paint Job with a Dead Stem Rose on the Dashboard

Mostly I'm creating a post in this increasingly erratic blog for the very slight amusement of the date today.

However we do have some news, and by we I mean CCP.

Fanfest has been cancelled.  Not a shocker considering the pace of the corona virus, and the raft of other events that have already been cancelled, I expect the 2020 Olympics will be next.

Oh, and if you're viewing this somehow in a dystopian future, after the virus has wiped out a fair portion of humanity and society has broken down.  Good on you for having a working computer and inexplicable access to the internet.  Well done!  You're a survivor!

In other news the 32 bit client has finally been killed off.  This has made some people unhappy, but it's the internet so that was pretty much guaranteed.

Seriously.  If you're still running a 32 bit only machine in 2020, you've got your moneys worth out of that thing.  Let it retire, it needs some sun on its face, some sand beneath the toes.  Let it live a little, before it's recycled into butt plugs or something.

Russia 2020 is coming up!

Remember that corona virus?  Yeah, expect this event to be cancelled also.

About the only other thing I care about will be the frigates spawning, chestburster style, from the wreck of your battleship.  Now that is cool.

I fully expect something critical will be broken by that patch.

How exciting!

Little War Decs

A while back CCP changed the way war decs worked.  More or less, if you don't own structures as a corp or alliance you cannot be war decced, and cannot war dec others.

This was a good change.

The metrics at the time quite clearly showed most defenders were only so on paper, they rarely managed to destroy an attacking ship, and it was driving away players.

However...

We now have the rise of the locust.  The corps, and sometimes alliances, that own no structures, so they can travel through high security space with relative impunity stripping the resources of others, and moving onto the next fertile field to repeat the process.

I propose the little war dec, the name needs some work, we will workshop it later on. ¹

Essentially a corp or alliance can be war decced, even if they own no structures, but only for a limited time, say 24 or 48 hours, and then afterwards they have a cooldown of double the war decced time, and an increase in the war dec cost for an equal amount of time to the cooldown.

So if I wanted to war dec, as an example a corp called LOCUST, for 24 hours, it would cost my corp 200M ISK.  Then after 24 hours they would be immune from further war decs from anyone for 48 hours, and for the 48 hours after that the war dec cost would be 400M for another 24 hour war dec, or 800M for a 48 hour one.

The war decs do not roll over, they finish after the chosen amount of time, with a maximum possible of 48 hours, but they might have a short pending time of 4 hours per 24 hours.

Targets with structures would/could be invalid for this type of war dec, but the current war dec system would cover  them.

You could then target specific corps or alliances for your own tactical or strategic reasons.

But what if we went further?

Imagine, if you will, a war dec system that allows you to target a specific type of enemy asset.

Either using the existing war dec system, or my revolutionary (BSI²) little war dec system above.

For a reduced cost, or time, or something, you would only be able to attack their mining barges, or just the Orca's, or maybe the Orca and freighters?

Or for giggles just war dec target their Deimos's to frustrate that one guy who uses his as private high sec transport between his home systems.

Chaos.


¹ You know we're not changing that name.
² Bat Shit Insane

Eve Time Alternative

As logging into the Eve Online servers is quite hit and miss at the moment I decided to try something else.

From time to time I play some War Thunder.  I'm not good at it, but sometimes I'll have a good game.

This time I recorded it.

Here is my story.

Chung! Chung!

Eve-Offline Helps Me Clean

I've not been able to login into Eve Online in any way for the past nine hours.

Eve Online has been the victim, supposedly, of a DDOS attack that has caused all sorts of issues.

Certainly the server, Tranquility, is not healthy, as can be seen below.

Normally we would see smooth curves as the time zones come and go, with a large dip during downtime, and then a surge of pilots very soon afterwards.

Helpfully, at least for me, it's a good time for some spring cleaning, in summer, and high humidity.

My sweat is just a pre-soak for the grout.

Right?

A great day to get things DONE!

Even the fish had a tank cleaning out of sequence, they now probably think it's the end of days.

However I'm running out of things to do.

Nine hours have gone past, with seemingly no fix on the horizon.

It would be nice if a solution could be found within the next three hours.

Then a thought occurred.  Are we all being forced to "win" Eve?

The 64-Bit Completion

Interestingly this also seems to work quite well on my Linux machine, which is nice.

The blurb from CCP below.

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https://www.eveonline.com/article/q4m3zu/64-bit-client-transition-complete

If you would like to discuss this dev blog please head over to this thread on the official forums.

In May 2019, the 64-bit client open beta for EVE Online was announced and it went live a few days later. Although this was opt-in, over half of EVE’s players activated within four months which was well above our expectations.

Then in September the 64-bit client was made the default with the results being closely monitored.

The transition away from the 32-bit client is now fully complete and the EVE community deserves an enormous "thank you" for all the valuable feedback provided during the opt-in phase and beyond. The 64-bit client ensures that EVE Online can continue to grow, while also reducing the development time associated with maintaining two clients.

Sunsetting of the 32-bit client will take effect from Wednesday, 26 February.

Our metrics data shows a small number of users were on 64-bit capable hardware but still running a 32-bit operating system. In these cases we would encourage people to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system where possible.

We’ll be raising the minimum memory specification for the client to be 4GB as a result of the move to 64-bit. We're also taking the opportunity to update the space requirements to 23GB to match the additional game content that has been added in the past year.

Our ongoing investment into our technical infrastructure, such as this transition to the 64-bit client and upcoming support for DirectX 12, is all a part CCP's commitment to EVE Online into the future.