Free To Play EVE

Here's the prediction for an announcement at Fanfest this year: As of Citadel's release we will no longer need to pay our monthly subscription to play EVE Online. Instead we will only have to pay for characters we want to train. If we don't want to train new skills we stop paying.

The evidence is from the dev blog FANFEST 2016 - BRING ON THE WRECKING MACHINE! where they list the cosplay PLEX prizes in terms of "years of training time" rather than years of game time. Check out the image to see it for yourself:

So, dear reader, what do you think? Is this irrefutable evidence that EVE is going free to play and pay to train in the near future? Answers on a postcard.

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).

Another WWB Desktop

'World War Bee', as the current war is known, is probably the big thing happening in EVE for some time now. My last post was a bunch of propaganda linked from Reddit and I was going to leave it there for the image sharing. However I just saw Rixx Javix posted a fantastic wallpaper over on his Eveoganda blog. It's rather nice and I set it as my desktop image right away. However that didn't work for me due to the high-key nature of it. So I lazily opened up MS Paint (for some reason I don't have GIMP on my desktop PC) and butchered Rixx' image to the following inverse version. It's not as clean as the original but it works better for me. Enjoy.

World War Bee

Anyone who reads my blog will already know I don't care much for nullsec politics. By and large I am in wormhole space because I don't want to deal with the drama of massive corps and giant fleets. What I do enjoy, however, is the propaganda which accompanies a good nullsec war. It's been a couple of years since the last great war in EVE but now we have 'World War Bee'. I thought I'd share some of the propaganda, from both sides, here.

From here

From here

From here

From here

From here

Desktop image from here

However this war ends, both sides win with extra fleets and ship explosions. CCP wins being able to pimp the widespread conflict as a marketing theme. Ultimately who ends up with what areas of space is of little consequence to me.