Abyssal Sites

When I first heard about the addition of Abyssal sites to New Eden I was a little sceptical. I instantly christened them "Abysmal Sites" and let it at that. Once they arrived in the game I largely ignore them; a mix of disinterest plus fear of the unknown (as in unknown if I'll lose an expensive ship). However, as will all things, curiosity eventually got the better of me.

Fast-forward a bunch of months. My opinion has been reformed to considering Abyssal sites as a fantastic addition to New Eden. I love the work done by the art team in them. The massive asteroids are spectacular to behold. I'm looking forward to those creeping into other areas of New Eden. The randomness of the rats in the site makes for wonderful variety. You don't go in knowing that there's x of rat A, y of rat B, and z of rat C. You have to learn which to shoot first and, once in the site, you have to pick target order quickly.

The main aspect of Abyssal sites I like most is they are "instant-on". If I have 10 minutes to spare I can jump into EVE and go run a Calm or Agitated site. If I have a bit longer then I'll jump into a Fierce. So far I've not tried the hardest of the sites - the Raging and Chaotic. It's worth noting that returning from these sites will leave you flagged as a suspect. This means other pilots can await your return and legally shoot you. If you do decide to run these sites you should do so from a safe-spot and hope nobody combat-scans the signature down.

I've you're looking for some instant gratification in EVE then I'd recommend you give the Abyssal sites a go. EVE Uni has a good article covering just about all you need to know. Have fun out there.

I'm still here

Despite things going rather quiet here I am still playing EVE. In fact, I've been online and 'playing' for the past four nights in a row. "What have you been up to?" I hear you ask. I'd love to say it's been the riveting stuff of interest. However, the reality of the situation is thusly:

First, we joined Anomalous Existence (N0MEX). By "we" I mean the active denizens of Z3R0 Return Mining Inc.". We joined knowing full well that their EU presence was somewhat lacking. We'd been told that there were a handful of people who would be online during our time. Figuring this for a reasonable "reverse-recruitment" opportunity it made sense for us. Sadly, the reality of the situation was maybe two or three people were in corp during our game time. Those people tended to be actually playing other games and waiting for content to happen. On top of that, their archaic bookmark scheme required a reference manual for which folders to leave bookmarks in. We decided that as nice as the people we met were, N0MEX weren't for us.

Decisions had to be made. We still have a wormhole under IoS alliance control. Should we go back to that? We quickly decided that was a terrible idea. With only a handful of players, we have no right to be holding our own space. The obvious solution is to go wormhole diving.

Wormhole diving is the act of living in K-space but using W-space as your primary hunting ground. With our small numbers, it seems like the perfect middle-ground for me. We have nothing to lose beyond our ships. There is no 'home-ground' advantage. There is simply the pure fun of the hunt.

Oh, and we're no long Z3R0 Return Mining Inc., just call us IoS(dot)!

All good things...

Fear ye not. New beginnings are coming. And Z3R0's not dead, it's merely resting.

Circuit Training

Over the years the size of Z3R0 Return Mining Inc. has shrunk to become dangerously small. Those of us left are good friends and many of us have met in the real world. This makes the prospect of closing down Zero unpalatable for us all; moving as a group to another corp would dilute the friendships. Plus we'd be at the whim of people we neither know nor whom would understand our seven years of collected in-jokes (beep, beep). The upshot of this is sometimes we need to find innovative ways to entertain ourselves on an evening of EVE.

A couple of weeks ago was one such evening. We'd encountered a fleet of at least a dozen pilots who were taking heavy advantage of a hisec connection very close to Jita. They had a guard on the hisec wormhole but it was still very tempting to trigger a suicidal fight - a temptation which increased as the evening went on. In the course of scanning our chain in the other directions, I found a second hisec connection which was also one jump from Jita. This second hisec was a single hop from the first hisec! If we can't fight them, we might as well troll them.

I hopped into my pod and headed out to their cloaky camp on the first hisec. My plan was to look like I was going shopping and would be coming back with something juicy for them to shoot. I parked my pod on the hisec connection, waited until I saw a Flycatcher on D-scan, then jumped out. Rather than head to Jita, though, I took myself to the other entry to our chain and headed home to dock back up. After 10 minutes or so I did this a second time, and then a third. All the while scouting desperately with my other account for something more suitable to actually fire some ammo into.

On comms, we were having a good old laugh assuming they were utterly confused how I was only ever heading out in the same direction and never returning. I have no idea whether the scouts on the hole had any idea what was going on. I don't really care either; my corp is all I'm interested in keeping entertained. And in the wasteland that is wormhole space, one needs to take entertainment where one finds it.

Daftly Doings

Okay, folks, it's a new year and time to do some daft stuff. I realised over the past few years I've managed to spread a  lot of ships and random junk around most of New Eden. For sanity's sake, and for something random to do, I needed to collect it all in one place and sell the ships I don't fly anymore. This took the best part of three days and resulted in six billion ISK worth of unwanted ships.

This isn't even all of them!

Of course, there's always some random crap in a random location far away. In this case, there was a very Expired Cerebral Accelerator in a Blood Raiders station in Nullsec. To get there is 42 jumps from Jita. The item is worthless. The only sensible thing to do here is trash the item. But where's the fun of being sensible? It's much better to pour myself a whisky and fit myself up an uncatchable interceptor. Let's see what Nullsec has awake today.

More a Gatecamp than a gate camp

The first 20 jumps of Hisec were completely uneventful. Once I got away from the local scam-chatter of Jita there was absolutely nothing to distract my attention bar the profusion of anchored structures in almost all Hisec systems these days. Lowsec was entered at Vehan with a pilot called Vehan Gatecamp on the outside but no sign of an actual gate camp on the inside. In Hier, there was a small gate camp of four ships - nothing exciting - and this theme continued until the end of Lowsec and my entry to deepest, darkest Delve.

A gate camp was 'Hier'

I've never lived in Nullsec. I never fancied the ring-kissing, safe-ratting lifestyle. This means Nullsec still maintains an air of mystery for me, and with mystery comes the fear of the unknown. My first jump, Goon-inhabited 1-SMEB, had a Nereus and Machariel sitting on the gate. An interesting combination that smacks of confidence. Use your bait for looting the field! The rest of the gates in were clear, but every system had someone somewhere. Much more active the average deep Lowsec system.

I docked and collected my Expired Cerebral Accelerator then began the return journey. The route home was even less eventful. In A-ELE2 there was a Hurricane sitting at the entry gate. As I flew through the systems I kept track of the numbers in local. It was interesting to discover that Nullsec is more populated that Lowsec. For my small sample size, there were 1.5 pilots on average per Lowsec system compared to 4.5 per system for Nullsec. It's a really small sample and I'd love to know if this holds true for more areas of space. Has EVE truly become Hisec and Nullsec only?

Where's the wormholers at?

This is our map from a few nights ago. It's not the most expansive map in the world but with the hisec connection there's a certain expectation of entertainment to be had. Sadly there was not a single engagement. Not a single shot fired. The largest ship we saw was a Magnate and he liberally shat himself before jumping back to hisec.

I increasingly find myself wondering if wormhole space is dead. Are we the dinosaurs of a bygone era?

Flying the Flag

The newest release of EVE Online is with us. Release 119.5 went live today and brought exciting things such as:

• Blood Raider Shipyards
• Beautiful New Suns
• Shattering PLEX into little pieces
• Killing Aurum off
• New CONCORD ships for players

But the most important feature of the 119.5 release was far and away the alliance logos being mounted onto citadels.

It's been a long time since the IoS logo was commissioned. In that time it's changed colour and been 'weathered' by CCP. Nevertheless it still looks like one of the best logos in game (yes, yes, I am biased) and it looks even better projected from the top of an eight kilometre high tower.

As an added bonus my glorious mug appears elsewhere on the citadel. I'm less sold on that idea, to be honest, but it's still kinda cool.

All dock at the feet of Oreamnos the Great, or some bollox like that.

Not an Orca

Somehow I managed to play a reasonable amount of EVE last week. We even saw the occasional person to shoot at! On Thursday we were hunting when I spotted an Orca somewhere in system. Oh hell yeah! I'll kill some Orca. The Orca started hauling stuff between a Citadel and an Engineering Complex so we got ourselves set up with a stop bubble. Our first and very visible attempt to catch the Orca failed terribly so we came up with an alternative - catch whatever the hell came to shoot at us. The following video shows how that went. I'm the voice who eventually becomes FC and calls the Stratios primary.

Enjoy that? Think you can do better? We are always recruiting ;-)

The final score looked like this. Note that I'm missing because I mainly acted as a diversion and neither died nor was killed.

CSM XII

Once more it's time to vote for the CSM and this time around I really couldn't care less who gets in. As far as I know the outgoing CSM has been relatively drama-free which evidently equates to bad marketing. Mind you, I've pretty much drifted away from most of the meta surrounding EVE so probably wouldn't know if there had been drama.

I had a look at the list of candidates for CSM XII and the names were all pretty unfamiliar. Only seven of the 64 names rang any bells, and not all those seven were for good reasons. I turned to the wisdom of Rixx Javix to pick my names. I did swap Steve Ronuken to the top though.

If you haven't voted yet get your arse over to the voting page right now and bang in some names. Drama or not we players still want CCP to have access to players to use as sounding boards. Hopefully the quiet CSM XI shows CCP have learned how to leverage such a focus group without giving away too much information to be abused.

Zen

The cathartic nature of the aural ping,
as the bubbles resize and draw you in.
Danger lurks somewhere within.
Can ye find it? 

Gas, gas, data, relic, null,
probes in space unearth the soul.
Can I find somewhere to go?
Do ah care? 

Chain is forged and none shall see.
Sitting waiting patiently.
Writing terrible poetry.
Scanners pause.

Lost In EVE

Back in the mists of time, when I first joined Z3R0 Return Mining Inc., the corp was primarily a PvE
corp. To a certain extent we had teeth we would bare at times, but our primary activities revolved around running sites, sucking gas, or building things. Fast-forwarding through the years we have moved back and forth between becoming more PvE focused or more PvP focused, but never fully dived into either camp.

A couple of years ago when I thought the time was right I tried to position us as a PvP corp who did occasional PvE to pay the bills for ships. The problem with that is people would join the corp, realise we weren't always wanting to form fleets to go out hunting, then log off and/or quit the corp due to doing too much PvE. Conversely, off the back of that, I positioned us as a PvE corp who like to shoot at people and the exact opposite problem rises up. People who don't want to PvP get upset when we want to shoot at other folks.

As it stands, with a new year underway, I'm having a think about how to position the corp in the obligatory EVE-O forum post. I've tried honesty and it didn't have much truck with people. I've detailed my stretching of the truth and that just leads to disappointed people. It seems that EVE players just don't get the concept we play the game with, namely we'll do whatever Bob presents to us. Be it shooting people, running sites or sucking C5 gas, so long as we can do it while consuming plenty of alcohol and having hilarious conversations we're happy. Hell, the perfect night brings in all of those options.

EVE players seem to expect a focus on a single aspect of the game. Large nullsec alliances get the luxury of creating silos of player activities so people take part in their favourite aspect. I have no intention to go to Nullsec. More powerful wormhole alliances occupy multiple holes with each member having a hole to 'Krab' in and not pollute their main pewpew home. I prefer the idea of not gaming the system, but to have each pilot (or family of pilots, as I see alts) truly earn the ISK 'at home' to enjoy New Eden. So I sit here contemplating a recruitment drive but have no idea how to position it. Saying "We do all the things" appears to be worse than lying.

Opening a New Map

Out with the old

Intel is everything in wormhole space. Our daily routine revolves around scanning for routes. Presenting the chains we find as accessible maps is a massive requirement for us. In the beginning we used ASCII maps in the bulletin board. Then almost exactly three years ago we started using EVE W-Space for creating our chain maps. Unfortunately this requires the in-game browser to track each pilot's current position. On Tuesday the in-game browser was retired from the client and EVE W-Space lost a massive part of functionality.

Thankfully I had been preparing for this by trying other pieces of mapping software. I prefer to host the code myself so that ruled out Siggy from the get-go. The first option to try was the other well-known mapping project of Tripwire. It installed easy enough and I got it up and running with no problems at all. When I started using it I just didn't gel with the interface. With three years of EVE W-Space mapping left to right, I didn't like the top-down mapping in Tripwire. Everything also felt small, again likely caused by the emphasis on larger nodes for each system mapped in EVE W-Space. After one evening spent mapping with Tripwire I was done and looking for another option.

In with the new

One night on comms someone suggested a newer project called Pathfinder. I had a quick read of their website and agreed to give it a go. Once again, installation was trivial and I had the software mapping for me in no time. Right from the off I had the same complaint as with Tripwire regarding the size of the node bubbles. Unlike Tripwire though, Pathfinder has free placement of each system. You can click and drag the system type indicator (C1, C2, H, etc.) and move the bubble where ever you want. This means we could continue to work with left-to-right mapping.

Another nice feature is the page loads in system kills within the last 24 hours. This gives you an instant idea if there may be people lurking around to shoot at (or die to). One final feature I quite like is the route planner will use the mapped connections to calculate the fastest route somewhere, using wormholes if required. It is rather nice seeing the distance to Jita is eight jumps while I'm sat in a random nullsec watching nobody do anything.

If you are in the market for a new mapping tool and want to host it yourself I can thoroughly recommend Pathfinder. Or, if you're not as paranoid as me you can always use their hosted version.

The Hidden Chair

Almost everything was unpacked now but there was still no sign of the writing chair. Oreamnos had been asking everyone he'd seen, and spent hours digging through the computer inventory, but it was as if the chair had never existed. Walking past his writing desk for what felt like the millionth time since the new office was set up Orea noticed a small piece of white paper had been left for his attention; the writing simply said "Check out the view".

There had been no reason to open the shutters on the office's massive view port. He knew the view of a distant sun was hugged by artificial representations of the wormhole system's planetary orbits. Still, the note had been left for a reason and with nothing better to do right now he might as well take another look outside. An instruction to the citadel's computer made the shutters slowly roll open.

"Bastards!", Oreamnos swore out loud to nobody in particular. There, right in the middle of his window, occluding the view and bracketed by the computer as 'Unknown' was the clear outline of his favourite leather writing chair. "I'll kill them all!"

Image by Rhiana Kurosawa, aka prime suspect

Unpacking

"About bloody time" Oreamnos though as he wandered through the mess of his new office. In the corner, recently uncovered, was an antique oak writing desk which he hadn't seen for weeks. Looking around he realised the battered leather chair which went with the desk was yet to be unpacked.

Stalking off, muttering about incompetent janitorial staff, Orea went to see if his new citadel contained a decent glass of rum anywhere.

When Bloggers Collide

My friend and fellow blogger, Splatus, finally managed to vacation in the UK. After over five years of playing EVE together we finally got to meet in person. He also brought a gift which will give me many hours of reading enjoyment.

I also had a gift for him, a good beer and glass with the alliance logo etched on it.

It was great to finally meet someone I've been in almost daily contact with, through EVE, for five years. I was told it can't take so long until our next meeting but next time I've to go to the USA. I'd better renew my passport then.

The March Of The Newbie

The eternal march of the newbie is continuing in EVE Online. Not satisfied with streamlining the new player experience, CCP are adding in the essence of a daily 'quest'.

It's about bloody time this happened. To someone with a character as old as mine a pitiful ten thousand skill points is nothing. It is less than 0.01% of my current SP and I've only been playing since very late 2009. To a new character who is all excited and enthused about getting into their next ship faster 10k SP is massive.

As far as I'm concerned this is a genius move by CCP to aid new players along in the game. I would just like to request an additional 20k SP daily for Sleeper kills in w-space. I promise we'll try not to shoot too many of the intrepid newbie explorers (crosses fingers).

The Beautiful Game

EVE is 13 years old but she definitely doesn't show her age in the graphics.

The Road to Discovery

A long time ago I gained a degree in a biological science. I really enjoyed the time I spend in the lab doing science stuff such as ELISA tests, PCR or running DNA though gel electrophoresis. Apart from one seasonal job as a government scientist I sadly never followed my studies up with a science career. Naturally I was rather pleased when I heard CCP were going to add a 'citizen science' feature into EVE. It sounded like something I could get my teeth into, time permitting.

Project Discovery lets you donate time to the real-world analysis of human proteins. In game it is masquerading as analysis of Drifter cells. There is a token payment of ISK which I would probably have loved to be receiving as a new player. On the first day I did 45 samples and ended up with about 2 million ISK in the bank. I have made a point of trying my best to analyse the samples. EVE being EVE, of course, there will be players out there simply burning through the images as rapidly as possible with little care for accuracy. This is a shame because what CCP and MMOS are trying to achieve is a fantastic thing. I really hope they have good statistical analysis going on in the background so we don't create a conduit for dumb, selfish EVE players to mess data up in the real world simply because they want to maximise the dreaded ISK per hour metric.

Spare time progress is slow

Who watches the watchlist?

These people don't watch me :-(

After a false start the latest update of EVE was rolled out on Wednesday last week. A large number of changes were introduced in that update but the one I want to mention is the fundamental change to the watchlist feature.

For as long as I have been in New Eden we've been able to add contacts and tick a little box which also puts said contact on a 'watchlist'. From that moment on we are notified when that contact goes on and off line. For my first couple of years in New Eden this watchlist was solely used for tracking friends or people I wanted to get in contact with for some reason (e.g. a recruiter for a corp). When the little notification appeared I could convo the person to say hello.

Once I moved into wormholes the watchlist took on a whole more important role. With a local channel you can see when people log off by their name disappearing from the system when you know they can't have left any other way. In wormholes we don't have local so the watchlist filled that intel gap. With the watchlist we could easily see when a potential target had went offline. This let us know we could stop waiting for them to go do something where we could potentially kill them. Watching patterns of people logging on and off also gave a fairly accurate insight to which characters were alts of each other. If you see three characters log on and off within a few seconds it is a pretty safe bet they are all just one player.

In this regard, removing the watchlist is a rather large nerf to wormhole life. Now we won't be able to know with any accuracy if someone is cloaked up in a given system or actually logged off. We won't be able to watch an industrial ship head out to hisec and know whether he is just being really slow at coming back or if he logged out. We won't be able to add all the members of a small corp to instantly know when they come online, useful if we're doing bad things in their home system. Guess what though? I'm totally okay with all that.

To add someone to your watchlist all you needed was a character's name and you could find out instantly if they were online or not. You didn't even need to have seen them in space to know. There wasn't anything you could do to prevent others adding you to their watchlist either. It was perfect intel and it was free. There is no place in New Eden for that. One of the things I like about living in wormholes is the difficulty associated with acquiring information about your surroundings. It takes proper teamwork (or a ridiculous army of alts) to effectively scout your chains. With the removal of the watchlist the onus on good scouting just increased.

Ghosties

At some point many months ago the pirate ghost sites were introduced to New Eden. As a wormholer I didn't really pay much attention to these new sites. The other night one of these pirate sites appeared in our home system, possibly for the first time ever, so we got a small hacking fleet together.

Now that right there is a pretty easy warning to be had. Even if you gloss over the running-together of "above" and "board" it is fairly clear the Serpentis don't want us warping to the site. So, what else are we supposed to do? That's right, our small hacking fleet warped right in.

It turns out that the Serpentis aren't quite as accommodating to guests as I may have hoped. Bob protected me and my shield booster kept me on the shiny side of dead. Something scared the Serpentis off before they could finish me. Nonetheless I came out of the experience knowing to respect the Serpentis defences more than I have to date.