Magic 8-Blog

More Eve on the brain today.  One of the things that is so intriguing and frustrating about the game is the complexity.  Its open ended and very granular.  It seems there are always about a billion additional things you want to know about skill upgrades, ships, fitting them out, etc.

Like many activities, simply having access to all the bits does not an X make.  I can walk into any REI and walk out with gear that would let me go climb Mount Everest (or at least Denali).  Access =/ achievement.  Some how, some where, some way you have to figure out HOW TO DO IT.

Eve is pretty interesting in that its one of the few games that is alternately brutal and forgiving regarding “mistakes.”  Take, for example, a time about a year ago when with less than 1.5 million skill points, my poor eye sight and disengaged brain allowed me to purchase a new clone.

Literally, a “nu” clone.  For the uninitiated, a clone allows you to preserve your skill points in the event you get podded (killed).  The default “alpha” clone gives you protection up to 900k I think.  So when I realized I had crossed that boundary, I decided to get an upgrade.

Neglecting to see the high school geometry logic in the nomenclature, instead of going for a “beta” or “gamma” clone, I somehow decided I needed a “nu”.  Mistaking 25 thousand for 25 MILLION and the skill point rating and price columns put me in my “nu” lifetime clone with a 25 million skill point capacity.

The worst part was that I had just enough money to afford it, and Eve dutifully let me purchase it without batting an eye lash.  I can’t remember now what the price was, but it was most of the ISK I had at the time.  Poof!  Gone forever.  Unforgiving.

On the other hand, buying fittings or even a ship that you can’t use (yet) or don’t need is seldom fatal and often not even inconvenient.  Simply relist the item and you might actually make a profit.  This is a good thing when you think you need something only to find out you can’t equip it, or you can’t equip more than ONE of them on your ship, or there are 50 of them sitting in your corp’s “Free Stuff” hangar, etc.

Which brings me to the real point of the post.  Wilhelm has often remarked about the mighty power of the blogosphere when it comes to Eve.  Turn your blog upside down, shake, ask your Eve-related question and out pops answers.  The good community of Eve players that read blogs will point you in the right direction and offer sagely bits of often hard earned lore.

So in that vein, I’ve got a few questions.

I’m two boxing mining ops right now.  I have a Mammoth hauler on one toon and an Osprey miner on the other.  I’m mostly mining in high sec space.

I’m looking for suggestions on outfitting the Mammoth.  Its filled with hand-me-down fittings right now, but I’m looking for improvement.  I think I’ve basically got a Miner II, a couple of warp core stabilizers, an afterburner, a shield booster or two and a couple of expanded cargo hold Is on it.

Basically, I do tag team jet can mining using the Osprey with three Miner IIs to fill up the Mammoth.  The Mammoth then makes runs to base to dump the load when full.  When waiting for a load, I fire up single mining laser to speed things along.

I don’t plan on fighting anything with the Mammoth, so any suggestions to increase incidental mining ability, hauling capacity, speed or escapability would be appreciated.

Likewise, with the Osprey, I have three Miner IIs and a missile turret for defense.  BUT, ever since I figured out how to use drones effectively, I don’t really use the turret much when rats show up.  Should I swap that out for another Miner II?

Finally, whats a good upgrade for the Osprey as a miner?  I have one toon working his way toward a mining barge, but that’s a way off.  Any ideas will be appreciated!

Eve is Go (Again)

Well, I answered the call of my dark master yet again.  I succumbed to the call and reupped both of my Eve Online accounts in a moment of weakness.  Okay, maybe it was just boredom.  Eve is one of those games where thinking about playing is almost better than actually playing.  And thinking about playing is not something I’ve been doing a great deal of lately.

I logged in to find that our corp HQ had moved 15 jumps away, so immediately I decided to haul ass literally out to the new digs.  15 jumps isn’t really that bad.  Besides, I needed to spend some time figuring out how to play again anyway.

I eventually got there and managed to get both of my characters out to do a quick bit of mining.  Wilhelm, our intrepid CEO, pointed me at a nearby system that offered reasonably high security and reasonably amounts of Kernite.  Perfect for my tag team Osprey and Hoarder to get their lasers wet again.

I two box on one system running two separate sessions (two accounts) which tends to keep the sessions a bit more “active” than just one session.  Missions I run one at a time.  Poorly.

Eve, god love it, tends to take some time.  Time to skill up, time to travel, time to play the market, time to research just what the hell you might want to do in the game.  Fortunately, much of that time isn’t really in the cockpit looking through the cross hairs.  Much of it is well, technically doing nothing.  Not nothing, but lets say, being less hands on than say a first person shooter.

So in an experiment to see if I could leverage my personal time (and the technological flexibility of Eve), I decided to install Eve on my pathetic work laptop with a view to basically sitting around with Mrs. P, enjoying pleasant conversation, HD cable and still getting something done in Eve.

To my surprise, I actually can run two windowed sessions (classic version) on my wimpy laptop even though I think the trackpad was invented by the devil.  Still, as an initial excursion, I got some skill training queued up and actually got off station to do some kernite mining.

To my surprise, not a single rat showed up as I packed the Hoarder full of kernite.  So, I hauled ore back to base and realized that my Minmatar hauling character had completed enough training to get a Mammoth.  So, a decent price being had only one jump away, I pulled the trigger and picked it up.  I still need to fully fit it out, but I transferred all the fittings off the Hoarder and took it back to base.

Now, apparently I need to pick up a Drake or two to shut Gaff up!

One Dollar, One Vote

We’re a bunch of pathetic whiners with no backbone. Keen’s got a post up about the latest details of Age of Conan’s end-game raiding grind which he takes issue with. I whole-heartedly agree that that kind of tired resource sucking design element is a big turn off. I wasn’t that interested in AoC even after participtating in the stress tests, etc. From what little I’ve seen, Keen’s PvP weekend impressions were spot on, but I digress.

The issue at hand is that here is a game that purports to have structure that Keen and I’m sure many others will find objectionable, annoying or at least off-putting. Maybe it matters little to some, maybe it matters a lot to more. At the end of the day, Keen seems resigned to vigorously object to the approach the devs have taken but will still gladly give them $50 for the box and probably some subscription revenue (not to mention whatever they get for the so-called Fileplanet “Open” beta). I’m sure many of us will find ourselves in a similar conundrum.

I did the same thing with PotBS. I was very luke warm about the game from closed and open beta but decided I’d give FLS the benefit of the doubt since I didn’t have time to personally experience all of the aspects of gameplay during beta. In retrospect, I wish I didn’t. I did know about most of them (not the buggy ridiculously broken ones, but the major design features) and even though I was somewhat iffy on whether that would be the game for me, I handed them $50 only to cancel before the initial 30 days ran out.

LotRO wooed me and I gladly gave them my $50 and subbed. I loved the early part of LotRO, but the middle bits started being unfun. I parked my accounts but kept them live and the dollars flowing to Turbine which has regularly and continually improved the game, added content and garnered my attention again. I had seen the high quality that Turbine had put into the game and was hopeful that it would evolve in the right direction (for me at least) and consciously wanted them to succeed in doing so. So I’ve paid and continue to play.

I continue to go back and forth with Eve. Its not 100% my game, but I do like what they’re doing and want to support it. But I can’t always justify keeping the subs live when I’m just not playing and not sure that I’ll come back to stay next time. Or the time after that.

WoW I’ve continued to play and bought TBC without hesitation even though I wouldn’t bring my new mains to Outland for a year after the expansion. Quite frankly, if I knew then what I know now about TBC (at release at least), I probably wouldn’t have thrown down for it on release. I’ll certainly be more careful about WotLK because I think WoW has lost its way though I’m still enjoying our group adventures.

We have two true feedback mechanisms that work with game developers– our dollars and our feet, and our feet only matter if they’ve already gotten our dollars and by then, its probably too late for us at least. The number of games that have successfully “come back” after losing someone is probably small (EQ2). The number of successful games that have grown and grown into a player base is similarly small (Eve), but have slowly grown because of their design decisions not despite them.

In the democratic capitalism of game development, one dollar (or euro or yen, or won or …) equals one vote. If we really want to see projects succeed, we have to put our money where our mouth is and buy and subscribe. We are patrons of the game arts. If, however, we object to design decisions made, then the last thing we should do is support them with our hard earned cash.

Once they’ve got it, don’t expect an audience with the game gods or even assume that you have a voice that matters. If you’re playing, you’re paying and if you’re paying, they’re doing something right (in their minds). If AoC sells 250k boxes ($12.5 million), they’ve probably gone a good way toward recouping their development cost. Tack on three more months of subs (beyond the initial 30 days) and you’ve got another $11+ million. $24 million in revenue in the first four months. Not a hit, not a giant win by any means, but enough revenue to take the pressure off the devs so they don’t have to answer the question “Why aren’t more people playing? Why aren’t more people staying?”. If we don’t pay, they have to ask those questions and hopefully win our business. If not, and they are still successful, then its just not our game.

The dirty little secret is that unless it sucks SO bad that we can’t stand it, subscriber’s remorse sets in and most of us want to see some kind of ROI on our time or dollar investment in a game. We are enamoured by the new and the promise of the better. We like the shiny, even if its dingy and often refuse to see the Man behind the curtain which is the same Man behind all the curtains of all the unsatisfying games we bought and continue to pay for.

Truth is we get the games we pay for, so we must be very careful of what we pay for.

Separated At Birth, Chapter One: Eve Online

I’ve been contemplating a series of these comparisons among MMO characters and/or NPCs with real life people for some time, but I’ve only recently gotten around to acting on this sick sick impulse. A small irony is that in Eve, I actually see the face of my character more than in most MMOs since its always visible in the chat window and I’m not relegated to looking mostly at the back of my character’s head.

So for installment number 1, I give you my character Dentikar Kapterian from Eve Online and Michael Berryman, most famous as the actor from Wes Craven’s cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes. Without further adieu, I give you, Separated at Birth, Chapter 1:

Enjoy.

What I Did in Eve While I Went to the Grocery Store

Travel in Eve can take a bit of time. Oh sure, if you don’t click on auto pilot and manually jump from stargate to stargate you can avoid the time the autopilot adds to your trip by dropping out of warp 15km out from the stargate and then powering in the rest of the way. But a long trip is still a long trip. There is a zen in it all though. You feel the magnitude of the journey. This place is big.

Since I started two boxing Eve, I created a Minmatar alt on a second account to assist my Caldari main. They don’t start particularly close in space. Couple that with the fact that Wilhelm, our corporate CEO set up our offices out in the low rent district makes for some travel challenges.
To get up and running I moved my base of ops to our corporate HQ. My main had done most of the noob missions and was probably 10 jumps from the new HQ. Kind of a pain, but not that bad. More of a cross town move than out of state (a topic soon to be near and all to dear to yours truly).

My Minmatar noob alt, however, was a full 32 jumps from our new HQ. Nonetheless, I dutifully sent him on his way (during which he was ganked at a low security gate–note to self: remember to resent the autopilot to avoid low sec space when you make an alt…) after which he eventually arrived in the not-so-wilds of 0.6 space. With the redo from the gankage, probably about 1 hour of pure hands off travel time.

Tandem mining has been very fruitful since I started the two box endeavor, but I felt a bit restless, and yes, maybe a bit sorry for my long oppressed Minmatar that he didn’t have the opportunity to really assimilate with his people before he was indentured into Caldari servitude. So, in taking a break from mining, I thought I’d run him through the noob missions if for no other reason than to get the several nice parting gifts which include skills and implants.

Of course, this meant the trek back home. For those of you scoring at home, here’s what a 32 jump run looks like (for a noob at least).

To put it in a WoW context, think taking the hippogriff from Auberdine to Feathermoon Stronghold to to Theramore, then the boat to Menethil, then fly to Booty Bay. Only longer. For those of EQ vintage, think running from Ak-Anon across Faydwer to the boat in Butcherblock then running from Freeport to Qeynos.

Traitor that he was, he returned home in a shiny Caldari frigate (a Kestrel no less) and actually had to buy a frigate to do the mining require in the noob missions. He persevered though and dutifully completed the initial Making Mountains Out of Molehills series of missions after which he returned to HQ another 32 jumps away.

I went to the grocery store. I did some laundry. I rebalanced my 401(k). I think next time, I’ll just send a post card home.