21 June 2015

Moving On

I've been struggling to find time to enjoy EVE recently. I still hang out with my alliance in our Jabber server and I've still been making the regular fleet night I run each week. Beyond that I just haven't been motivated to log in much. This obviously carries over to the posts I make here which have dwindled down to less than one a week. Obviously with less time to play EVE there is less stuff to write about. If you add to that the little I do play is trying to recoup the two billion ISK I've lost in the past six weeks then I really do have little to blog about just now. Site running doesn't make for interesting reading.

In my alliance I always maintain that real life is more important than EVE (usually stated as "RL>EVE"). This is true and is the underlying problem for my EVE malaise. In 'RL:Work Edition' I am really busy pulling a new and rather large project under the wings of my department. In 'RL:Home Edition' I am in the process of buying a new house. I seem to be drowning under a tidal wave of paperwork with each new day bring something new to sign and send money away for. Some times I can't help but wonder if the whole thing is a long Jita scam, possibly a bonus room type of thing where they'll keep sending me more and more things to sign until I finally crack.

Not relevant to this blog post
But wait, did I say I'd lost about two billion ISK in six weeks? How did I manage that? The biggest single loss was my alt's Orca. This was lost due to drunken impatience after a hole-rolling incident which saw me stuck in a busy Molden Heath system. Instead of being patient I tried to flee to a quieter nullsec system to scan myself from. That was a mistake as the locals had the wormhole bookmarked, followed me through and popped me. Just over two weeks later, whilst running sites to recoup the cost of buying a new Orca I was caught by pilots from ArB Llc. This particularly stung as they used to be in my alliance. I'm sure they got a buzz out of killing my Gila but my wallet didn't. The final loss in this litany is also the first PvP fit ship to die. One of my corp mates had a Vexor sitting at the sun as obvious bait. Our plan was to get in, kill it, and flee before their cavalry landed. We managed parts one and two easily enough but the cavalry landed and killed my Proteus before I could leave. Swapping a Proteus for a Vexor seems fair enough to me. Did I mention I'm crap at Chess?

All is not lost, however. At least some of the RL woes are coming to an end. Pretty soon I'll be in a shiny new house (if the developer gets their finger our and stops sliding the date back). This should give back a lot of my evening time as well as take all the related things I need to remember out of my head. In the meantime I've taken some alts on a deployment to nullsec for some fun. Of course, I couldn't possibly say what that is as nullsec is all about the Opsex. Well, something like that anyway....

8 June 2015

New Icons

Just about a week ago the new overview icons landed on Tranquillity. With any change to the EVE client there tends to be a lot of bitching and whining and these new icons were no different. I caught a bunch of it on release day from our alliance Jabber server and thought nothing much about it. I just filed it under the same category I file most posts from the official eve-o forums, namely 'waa-waa-somthing-changed'. Let's face it, online gamers like to bitch a lot.

Later last week I logged on to be told to get myself into some dps quickly as there were a trio of Myrmidons running sites in our 3a1. A little bit of questioning later and it turned out there had been some to-and-fro with the guys running sites. We fully expected a trap but the only way to be sure it's a trap is to spring it. Mustering the few people we could at a relatively early time for us we went in. Comically, we warped to the wrong bookmark for their MTU at the first attempt. We then re-warped as a single group and landed in the right place on the second attempt.

As I landed on grid I was looking for the ships to call targets on and I couldn't see any. I knew they were there but I had no idea I relied so much on the overview icons to distinguish between things. In my head I thought I used the names column. Eventually I picked out a name and called primary on the basis that was all I could see. Our scout on the gate counted in the six ships which jumped in to spring the trap on us and when we realised we wouldn't even get a single kill we did our best to leave the field. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It was around about now I joined the holy-shit-these-new-icons-suck club. I am still sure a large part of the problem was lack of familiarity but I also now know a huge part is that I run my UI at 90%. Switching to 100% scaling I could see the icons much clearer and actually distinguish between different ones. OMG, CCP, did you even test this with UI scaling?

And yes, I do feel bad for asking that question.