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.

Must Try Harder

My 2016 blogging campaign began with the goal of posting more frequently. I didn't think I would get back to the heady heights of 2012 but I was looking for at least one post per week on average, ideally six posts per month overall. Things were going pretty well for the first five months but then real life decided to take a dump on me in June when my work went under and I was made redundant. That's where blogging definitely took the back seat for the rest of the year.

Finding a new job for the first time in over a decade was interesting. Acclimatising to the new job was interesting. The hectic uncontrolled nature of the new workplace was interesting. All of this 'interesting' left me with not much spare time or energy. I had the choice between blogging or playing EVE. Sorry, dear reader, I chose to play EVE.

Citadels have been anchored. Roams have been roamed. Traps have been sprung and ships have been both lost and killed. I still fly with the same wonderful group of people every week so I'm happy to say my lack of blogging isn't a reflection on my lack of game time. Although I still don't get enough time to play...

This year I return with the same hope as last. A weekly blog with a couple of bonus posts per month where possible. Hopefully my remaining three readers will multiple into 12 by the end of the year. Stick with me and we'll find out. If there's anything in particular you would like to me write about drop me an email at orea@ofsolitude.net.