Scanning Practice

It has been quite some time since I've been able to go on a serious scanning-fest. Boarding my ship to find nobody else active in the system I decide tonight is a good time to lubricate the rusty scanning skills. Jumping to our static connection I find it's approaching the end of its life. I don't particularly want to get stuck outside my home system and this evening I have choices.

Heading over to a K162 from a class 5 system I find the connection to be sound so I jump through. The system appears quiet with five towers on d-scan but only 1 force field. Looks like these guys are ensuring invaders don't get an easy beach-head. They also only have five signatures to scan so I get to work.

From the five signatures I get two further wormholes, not counting the route home. I randomly pick one to warp to and jump through to find myself in a class 3 system with an alleged lowsec route. It's been ages since I was in any empire space so I find this exciting for some odd reason. My probes tell me there are seven signatures in this system so I set to work again and find three additional wormholes. If I had more time this evening I could positively get lost in this wonderful constellation we have this evening.

The first wormhole leads to more W-space in the form of a class 2 system. It would appear to be a busy system judging by d-scan, although the mining vessels I see on my initial arrival quickly disappear. I guess these guys run proper intel and were watching me jump into the system. Leaving the now-disrupted mining fleet behind I head for the first of the remaining connections. This takes me out in Alachene in Gallente space, and I feel like I am home. Only six jumps to Dodixie making me really tempted to go visit my collection of ships nearby, but there are more holes to jump through so back I go.

I jump straight onto and through the remaining wormhole and experience an odd moment of disorientation. For some reason I expected another wormhole system but instead I emerge in the Minmatar lowsec system of Hedgiviter. This is 12 jumps from the closest market hub of Hek making it vastly less interesting than the other lowsec system.

Just at this point a corp mate who was taking care of his planet infrastructure alerts me to hostiles in the home system. A Cheeta and a Loki have decided to make a very quick mess of his Iteron V. Thankfully he gets his pod away intact but I am now left with an interesting dilemma. The corp of the hostiles is the same corp as the POSs in the C5a meaning my route home is via their hole. More unfortunate is I am in need of sleep and could do with bunking down in my own bed tonight and not some rented quarters in hisec. As nice as it would have been to visit my ships I didn't plan on staying for any length of time.

I decide to risk the journey home. My corp mate gets eyes on our side of my wormhole home and I make the leap from C3b to C5a. I hang around for a bit but all seems as quite as when I left. Presumably because they were already in our hole setting traps. Warping to viewing distance of the wormhole connection home it appears safe, but is it? Both sides appear clear and I've decided I'm going home so let's do this. Bouncing off the local star I land on the wormhole and jump. I hold cloak on my home side to see if anything happens but it doesn't. Typically, I am too close to the wormhole to engage my cloak and there are no celestials in the  right direction for me to warp off to so I pick the best of a bad bunch, engage my drives and defences and wait for the attack...

...which doesn't come. I warp off cleanly, cloak up and breath a sigh of relief.

When I set off on my night's scanning I had definitely hoped for something to shoot at but, to be honest, a loki wasn't anywhere on my list.

Skill Training Complete

I used to think skills that took a day or more to learn were long skills.
Then I thought skills which took 3 days were long.
Now I long for skills which only take a week.

New Eden: Welcome to the school of patience.

Visions Of New Eden - VI

Dangerous Location

Even if you never amount to much you will at some point in your capsuleer career visit this spot. This is the undocking port at the infamous Jita 4-4 station. If you do ever find yourself in a situation where you are undocking from this point with a cargo worth billions of ISK you better have some good insurance as the passive scanner squad will have you earmarked for a proper ganking in no time.

Awaiting Hulkageddon V

A friend and I have been awaiting the commencement of hostilities that is known as Hulkageddon. This is the perennial event which draws tears by the bucketful from the miners of New Eden. During the last Hulkageddon not even simple haulers were safe as industrial ships also became valid targets.

Last I heard, the fifth iteration of Hulkageddon was due to start on January the 2nd but here we are several weeks later with nothing. Annoyingly a friend and I have been waiting for the start of this event with the aim of taking part. Between us we plan on joining both Hulkageddon and the defending initiative - Griefer Geddon - but I'm not saying who wants to join which side.

This time around, as well as Helicity Boson running the gank-fest, The Mittani has also become involved. The first delay to Hulkageddon V was allegedly due to The Goons invading White Noise's territory and I expected the actual start to be soon after that campaign was announced victorious. It has been sometime now since Mittens claimed himself victorious in that endeavour yet nothing has happened.

With this in mind it suddenly occurred to me why the games have yet to begin. We are very close to candidate selection for the next Council of Stellar Management and the proper voting should be soon after that. The Mittani, as a very serious space-politician must have his eye firmly on the ball to secure a second term as Chairman Mittens. As any politician knows, it is wise to avoid controversy during such times. Thus Hulkageddon V has been delayed further, presumable past the elections.

A little research led me to find a comment by Chairman Mittens himself stating the reason for the delay was an unexplained absence of Helicity Boson. I don't believe this for one minute. Clearly there was a conflict of opinion between Helicity and Chairman Mittens with only one potential outcome. So, next time you rescue the Damsel from Kruul's Pleasure Hub please have a check around, there may be another little someone held against their will.

BB33: Needs More Cut Scenes

This month's Blog Banter is pretty much posed by CCP and asks:

"We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems."

Now, it has been some time since I managed to work my way though the new player tutorials. To be honest I'm not sure I ever worked my way through them all. I did try about a year ago to go all the way through them with a new character but very quickly wearied to the way they jar with the experience of playing the game. They upset the flow of starting a new character by appearing as a somewhat unimportant pop-up box somewhere on your screen. The relevance of the window appearing is not always obvious. Personally, It almost screams "close this window" at me.

The most enjoyable new player experience should teach you a large part of what you need to know without you ever realising you are learning anything. I still (vaguely) remember playing "Final Fantasy VII". As I recall. this starts off with you at a train station and no idea how to control anything or any attacks to encumber you, yet you are expected to get going. I can't even remember if they actually tell you how to move but those controls are at least obvious enough to get you moving. Gradually attacks and other concepts are introduced to you as you acquire skills. The speed this is handed to you is fairly rapid but lets you get to grips with the game play without being overwhelmed. Most importantly the learning process is never more important than the story.

A similar vein of progression is generally found in car racing games where the track layouts become increasingly technical at a reasonable rate of unlocking, letting you get to grips with the physics of whichever game you are playing. Once you have unlocked all the tracks you are generally still unlocking ever increasingly powerful cars, but as you are lapping now familiar tracks you are not overwhelmed. An example of how well this works is when you take a turn on a friends game who has unlocked all the tracks and powerful cars and you jump right into a 600 horsepower beast and drive like a complete tool who's never seen a corner before.

So here's what I think - proper educational cut scenes and lots of them. Start a new character with the new 'Awakening' video. When she asks "what are you waiting for pilot?" this should open a prompt where you choose which tutorial you want to go to next. While it may be wise to go through all tutorials there is no way it should be required. A prompt at this point lets a new player focus on their choice of game play style. This can also be used to give the new player an idea of the potential play styles available to them.

Which ever training option is chosen should then lead on to a new cut scene explaining some concept, then a chance to try what you've learned, then more cut scenes until the topic has been covered. The actor could walk you through a mock-up  of whichever controls are relevant using a screen they have available in their classroom. This would also be the perfect time to give out tips ("dirty pirates are dirty" or "hisec canflippers are impotent mummy's boys"). Basically, the more information that is relayed as if you are actually being taught it in practical situations by someone with expert knowledge the more immersive the experience will be.

It should always be possible to walk away and come back at a later date to partake in some further education. The best way to control this is have the tutorials tied to starter stations. To access them you need to talk to the right agent in the right station. If you do try to engage the tutorials from anywhere else this should simple set your autopilot to the correct system and instruct you to get moving. Hell, if the character is less than a month or two old why not just teleport them and their ship to the correct place?

Let's make the Federal Navy Academy and all the other starter corps actually behave like their name suggests and properly teach something for once.

Customs Music

An interesting thing was noticed but not properly realised by myself during the Interbus customs office bash mentioned earlier this week. At the time, I was aware of music being transmitted to me but just thought it was my pod jukebox malfunctioning. Unless I'm doing something incredibly boring I usually have the jukebox volume set to zero. At that time the presence of music merely triggered me to actually increase the jukebox volume and I though nothing more of the phantom music.

A few days later I found myself at one of our own customs offices and I heard the same music as before. This time I was certain the sound was not coming from the jukebox and I realised it was the actual customs office triggering the sounds. I find it most unusual that the customs office is either broadcasting soothing sounds into space or my pod environment deems the presence of the structure to require these calming effects to be streamed into my brain. I can totally understand why one might want to hear chillout sounds after manipulating the planetary structures into an efficient workflow.

Visions Of New Eden - V

Ring-wearing rocks

Not really much I can say about this. Impressive leap of imagination to build a station around an asteroid. Crazy Caldari engineers.