Nasty Wormhole Tune

It is often said that CCP hates people who live in wormholes. This is usually in reference to the heavily aged POS code and the inability to refit T3s in W-space. I generally ignore and possibly mock people making these complaints about wormholes being hard to live in from time to time. Sure the POS mechanics could be heavily improved but I don't ever want them to reach a level where everyone has their stuff segregated into personal storage. If I did want that I'd live in K-space. The T3 issue was a little more problematic given T3s are born in wormholes, but CCP have now addressed half the problem - refitting subsystems in wormholes - so this, too, can be swept aside and ignored. CCP do not hate wormholers.

... or do they...

The other night it was quiet in the hole. EU timed people had left and US timed people were yet to appear. I was alone. I decided to turn the volume up on the music. As that particular slider stiffly moved to half volume I was greeted with the sound of a very nervous cellist scratching away moodily at his cello. Very dark sounds for a very dark area of space. I waited with baited breath to see where this dark intro was going to lead. How would this moody piece of music develop to emphasise the solitude and danger hidden in these reaches of wormhole space?

An hour later I realised I was still listening to the cellist with the nervous twitch. Possibly he was just cold and shivering. At any rate I was of the opinion he should just give in to the cold and die so I didn't have to listen to this single track any more. CCP does hate wormholers, or at least the subset of us who actually turn the music on from time to time.

(sidenote - I miss the jukebox. At least with that I could have picked something worth listening to)

CCP's other hard game

The Danger Game is the board game created by CCP in order to fund their dream of creating our beloved EVE. Although it arrived ages ago with my collector's edition box set I only just got around to setting it up and reading the rules.

Only the beginning...

I'm sure it's one of those games that will benefit massively from playing to learn the flow of it. At least, I really hope so because right now I am as lost as if someone asked me to FC a fleet fight.

Alliance (and friends) December Roam

Our industrial division kindly donated 50 Drakes to the alliance with the insistence that they be whelped on some foolishness. I added a handful of Ospreys I had lying around and we had ourselves a theme roam. For reasons unknown to me CVA have us set as "Kill On Sight" making destination number one obvious - Providence. I took a bunch of screenshots over the course of the roam but one of our Interceptor pilots was filming the whole thing and spliced together the Providence incursion while I slept.



With various people having to head off we went back to hisec for refreshments before discussing where we would go next. Nobody had any bright ideas so instead we started looking for hotspots of activity in the in-game universe map. While that was being trawled we set off in the general direction of Barleguet, home of Brave Newbies Inc. They seem to be a fun bunch always up for a fight so if we were going to dispose of all these surviving Drakes somewhere it would be a certainty that they would help do just that. En route to Barleguet our scouts discovered a hive of activity in Aulbres. It appeared to be a massive frigate fight was happening so all we could do was fly right in and give them something bigger to shoot at. And shoot us they did.

Primary is, um, shoot things...

All in all it was a really fun night. The only problem we had of the evening was the form-up time of just after midnight. This confused a whole load of people who took "Just after Midnight on Sunday" to mean "Sunday night". This meant people were going to be 24 hours late. Oh well, next time we know better. Thanks to the scouts, logi and of course the FC for making this a fun night. I love it when my alliance gets together and does stuff. This is what makes us more than just a gaggle of corps who happen to fly under the same banner without actually knowing each other.

Reinforcements

I can't remember if I posted it on this blog (and I'm too lazy to check), but one of the things I most expected to happen post-Rubicon was an excess of reinforced depots outside the major trade hubs. Given I spend most of my game time in various flavours of "Unknown Space" it has taken a week before I eventually found myself in any trade hubs. The sight that awaited me in Amarr was exactly as I suspected, if maybe a little less concentrated than expected.

A different kind of Red Ring Of Death

Later on I had the misfortune to find myself in Jita where a similar picture was painted. I am confused though. I was 100% certain these depots would be anchored outside the trade hubs and 100% certain they would mostly be reinforced. I was right on both counts but I don't know why this is the case. What was the motivation behind launching these depots? Did the people who put them out there seriously think they wouldn't be shot at? Do they really want 3000m3 of extra storage so close to a station? What about the people who bothered to shoot them? Anyone taking a pot-shot would have been flagged as a suspect resulting in the rest of the ships outside the station shooting at them. What's the point?

Somewhere deep in my head I must understand why this happened because I knew it would be this way. I just can't unlock the rationale. So, dear reader, please enlighten me to this madness.

More Posterity

On the eve of EVE crossing the Rubicon I took more screenshots to record for posterity. As many of you know, the old certification system is going away to be replaced by ship mastery. For a lot of people this will be considered a good thing as many of the certificates are a bit outdated now. For me, as useful as I hope the new mastery system will be, I will be a little sad at them passing into history. Certificates didn't exist when I first played EVE in 2005. A lot of the problems I had back then was from overload at the vast array of skills I could train. I had no idea what would be a good idea and what wasn't. In the end I didn't make it past the two week trial back then. The same story happened in 2007 when I gave EVE a second chance. By 2009 the certificate system existed and what a major difference it made to me.

I trained many skills since then, some following the certificates and others ignore them completely. There are two categories of certificates I got to elite level which I am rather proud of - Elite Core skills and Elite Defence.

Elite Core Skills

Elite Defence Skills

I have no idea how my skills will shape up under the new mastery ratings so let the record show I once was Elite at something.

My Little Caravan

One of the new personal structures coming with Rubicon is the Mobile Depot. This little structure will allow a limited amount of storage along with a personal fitting service so you can swap out ship modules while in space. The recently announced in-space changes to T3 subsystems will also be possible making this little structure potentially awesome. My friend splatus has already written about the three depots, along with their attributes, so I won't cover any of that in detail. I have been interested since these were announced to see how they would pan out for use in w-space. The main questions in my head were: does it appear on d-scan, can it be probed down, and how easily can it be shot. It was time to go to Singularity and find out.

No Dougal the depot is small... the Loki is far away.

Deploying the depot is simplicity itself. For the full wormhole experience I started cloaked and aligned to a celestial. In one fluid movement I decloaked, dragged the depot from my cargo into space, then warped off. No hanging around messing with right-click menus or anything. Once I landed I immediately about-turned to see if the depot had anchored properly to find it had.

The next thing was to answer my two questions about d-scan and probing. Warping off again I first launched Sisters core scanner probes and tried to find the signature. As expected I found nothing so swapped for Sisters combat probes. This time I got a weak signature but it was easy enough to whittle down the probe ranges before finally getting a 100% lock at the 1 AU probe range. Testing d-scan initially showed nothing on any of my presets. Digging a little revealed a new checkbox in the overview settings. Once I ticked that option the depot clearly appeared on d-scan.

Little bubbles of ping

New box to tick

At this point I was happy with how easy these things will be to find in space so the last remaining question was how easy are they to kill. From the screenshot I took it apparently took seven volleys from my cloaky loki to put the depot into reinforced mode. Something designed with damage in mind would be much quicker but, to be honest, seven volleys isn't exactly an ice age. Once reinforced a bright red reticule appears which is only visible when you are on-grid with the depot. I initially mis-read the countdown as 48 minutes but it's actually 48 hours before the structure leaves reinforced mode. While it was reinforced I was able to add and remove items from the storage space. I didn't think to try the refit option although I have read that will not work during the reinforced timer.

48 Hours!! Is Nick Nolte in there?

Given the ease by which I scanned this down I went to look for the meta versions of the basic depot. Unfortunately these were not seeded in the market on singularity. Discussions with some corp mates suggested scanning these meta objects will range from somewhat harder for the meta 2 'Wetu' depot to almost impossible for the meta 3 'Yurt' depot due to it's 1:1 sig to sensor strength ratio. If the meta items get seeded I'll give it a go, otherwise I look forward to trying to scan them down in space and hopefully shooting them 'just because I can'.

For Posterity

With CCP turning off the old portrait server for the last time I decided to record my past and present looks here for posterity. I think Orea aged reasonably well, but Dhal is looking a bit tired. Dhal does have the excuse of being 4 years older.

Oreamnos Amric - circa YC111

Oreamnos Amric - November YC115

Dhal Ramat - circa YC108

Dhal Ramat - November YC115