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.

Gratitude

:sadface:

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.

The Beautiful Game

EVE is 13 years old but she definitely doesn't show her age in the graphics.

Brief Break

I took a brief break from EVE this past 10 days. I had been reading about an epic adventure going on in Elite: Dangerous, the Distant Worlds expedition. The people involved in that project are flying with approximately 1000 pilots to the opposite side of the galaxy. Their route will take them some 80 thousand light years before they reach the destination. When I learned of this epic quest I thought I would try and catch up with them and then join their main fleet.

This turned out to be a pretty optimistic and foolish idea. I don't play E: D enough to have much money in the bank. I fitted out my ship with the best jump drive I could. This got me only 15 LY per jump. If I'd known how far away the overall journey was at that point I'd have given up there and then. Over the course of the past 10 days I spent way too many hours each day jumping five systems at a time then scooping fuel at a sun before continuing on. I made it to checkpoint 1 fairly quick and felt smug. I would catch them up in no time. Getting to checkpoint 2 probably took 16 hours of continuous play. It was at this point I realised quite the scale of the journey. I had travelled one eleventh of the way to the centre of the galaxy. Getting to the other side was double that!

I soldiered on through the past week jumping system to system whenever I had some spare time. I was slowly closing the gap on the main fleet but I was starting to think I would be lucky to meet with them before they reached the end of their outwards journey. I don't even want to think how many hours I spent jumping away from the main bubble of inhabited systems. The journey stopped being fun and became a proper chore. In my head I still wanted to catch a group of people I was over a month behind.

It was a nice day yesterday. I was doing some maintenance on my motorbike while pressing on with my mission in Elite. I would do my 5 jumps then go do some more work outside while refuelling at a sun. It was going well until a neighbour visited. Then another. So we sat outside and chatted. After about an hour I suddenly remembered about my ship refuelling at the sun. I came in just in time to see it overheating through solar exposure and my life support failing. Ah, bollocks! I was 11,000 LY from any chance of repairs. No way I could cover more than 1000th of that distance in the five minutes of oxygen I had.

Boom!!

It had taken me a week of not-insignificant time to get so far away from the start. It took less than an hour of distraction to send me all the way back to the beginning. I felt a lot more punished by that than anything EVE has ever dished out to me. Elite: Dangerous picks up a lot of criticism for a lack of content being built in. In the true nature of a sandboxy game the lack of content is largely created by a lack of imagination. I salute the organisers of the Distant Worlds expedition. They are better people than I for the journey they organised. Maybe I can scrape together more credits, buy a proper exploration ship, and join them on their next epic adventure.

Eclipse

Season's Greetings

Drinking Horn and Homebrew

Merry Christmas to one and all. I hope 'Sansha Claus' was good to you. He was certainly good to my kids. I can't get close to my computer for discarded wrapping paper, toys and boxes. I've eaten far too much turkey, ham, stuffing, trifle, etc. I'm working on drinking too much. I'm on the mulled wine just now but I am looking forward to my tasty homebrew in just a little while - a dry-hopped IPA and a Peach and Passionfruit cider, if you're interested.

I've got some fun planned tomorrow with my son playing Story Mode Minecraft and Skylanders. This is the time of year for family so New Eden can wait.

Operation Frostline: Proportionate Response

Carriers can't take the gates, you know :-(

Get yer rigs oot

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BB 68 - This is My Rig

What do you play Eve on? I'll show you mine if you show me yours! Are you pew-pewing on a laptop? Plotting universal domination on a 12 monitor set up? Mining away on a 50" TV? Is your set up located where your other half can speak to you or do you lock yourself away for hours in your Eve themed shed? How do you play your important internet spaceships?

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When I bought a complete PC way back when I was at university I swore I would never again buy a pre-built computer. That was the effect PC World had on me. Since then I never have and get a lot of satisfaction from building my own rigs. Even if doing so is pretty damn easy these days.

Odd mouse position, plus sideways mouse, to minimise shoulder pain. Try it, it works.

This is my desk, which lives in my lounge. My wife insists on it being there else she "would never see me". This causes problems for being on comms so I try to minimise that when anyone else is in the house and awake. I have a pair of widescreen monitors and generally have the one directly in front of the keyboard containing a full-screen client. The monitor on the left will have some mix of Teamspeak, web browser and another client or two running. A third monitor would be sweet but my graphics card would likely struggle. In the background you can see my collectors edition rifter as well as a little Airfix Harrier GR3 I've been building whilst on some Black Ops stuff recently (damn they can be boring).

The main tower itself sits on the floor to the left of my desk. The desk has a cupboard which is meant to store the tower but that only serves to cook the PC in its own heat exhaust. The case is some random case I picked up from somewhere on the internet. It has a perspex side so I can see the pretty LEDs inside. This has the less useful side-effect of also showing all the dust that gathers in there. There is no optical drive because this is no longer 2001. On top you see my innuendo-laden Thrustmaster HOTAS X which I bought to play Elite: Dangerous. It's been months since it saw any use.

To the right you see what the perspex side lets me look in on (I may have dusted it for the photo). The mainboard is from MSI. The CPU is a quad-core Intel i5 running it 3.4 GHz. The CPU should be good for 4.3 GHz but if you look at the bottom you'll see a 600 watt PSU which is my guess at why that speed is unstable. To facilitate said overclocking I cool the CPU with a Corsair H20i water cooling unit. The GPU is an ageing Radeon HD 5770 which came pre-overclocked (I like things running overclocked you can see). The 8 Gig of RAM is Teamgroup Vulcan running at 2133 Mhz, and has pretty red anodising. Space is left in case I felt the need to go to 16 Gig, which I haven't yet. Finally the OS lives on a 240 Gig Crucial mSATA drive which you can see just below the Corsair CPU block.

So there you have my rig. With the exception of the old graphics card and PSU it is plenty of PC for me just now. It can reasonably run three EVE clients on the rare occasion I need to do so. I can just about get away with running two on full detail but three is a no no. I'm going to need to fit out a computer for my kids to share soon so it may just be more cost effective for them to get my old graphics card and I get a new one. That's what I'll be telling my wife anyway!

Fade to Blue

As previously mentioned here, CCP recently put out notification that alliance logos were to be resubmitted. The resubmitted logos were subject to new rules and guidelines meaning there was no guarantee logos already in the game would be accepted under the new regime. Possibly somewhat foolishly I was pretty confident that the existing logo for Illusions of Solitude, a chameleon on a Einstein-Rosen bridge would be accepted. I was wrong and rejection came in the form of a rather vague email telling me it was "not of sufficient quality to be included". I understand CCP art department are a busy bunch but I am not sure how they expect to get a better quality resubmission when they don't give any clues what was wrong with the original submission.

As he was...

So I had a bit of back and forth with CCP Falcon, the bearer of the above bad news. He gave me his best guess that the colour saturation was too high and possibly the use of our iconic chameleon wasn't ideal. We're rather attached to our chameleon, so much so we even named him 'Reginald Green'. Getting rid wasn't an option as far as I was concerned. With Falcon's help we settled on desaturating the red colour for the alliance initials and fading Reginald to blue to match the wormhole he was sitting on. I guess it makes sense, I never scout a wormhole without a cloak so why should he? I made my changes and resubmitted the logo with assurances from Falcon that it would be fine.

Changing...

After two weeks I'd still not had any positive reply. I took this as good news as the original submission process was only proven successful when the logo appeared in the game. Confirmation of acceptance doesn't seem to be a strong point with CCP. This weekend I was reading the 'This Week in EVE' forum post by CCP Phantom and noticed a link to another post listing the approved alliance logos so far. I was delighted to see my alliance listed in amongst the long list of other alliances who've been successful in their logo submissions. I can't wait to see which formerly iconic logos have fallen by the wayside to the new logo requirements. Will Goons still have their little bee? Will LAWN still have the fantastic gnome? On the 2nd of June I guess we will all know.

Brr!! Who turned off the heat!?

So thank you, CCP Falcon, for putting up with my slightly stroppy tone of email while I was trying to figure out how to change my logo to something acceptable without destroying it. I'll buy you a beer at the Glasgow meetup to make up for it.

Alliance logo do over

In case you missed it CCP have reopened the submission process for alliance logos. As part of this they have changed the requirements and logos already existing in the game need resubmitted for approval. Approval is subject to the new conditions meaning existing alliance logos may soon be consigned to the dustbin of the past. I didn't have a 512x512 version of the Illusion of Solitude logo but I did have the Adobe Illustrator vector file which I could use to create a higher resolution version. After a little while re-adding the trailing lines which break out of the mouth of the Rosen Bridge I was ready to submit it to CCP. I then went and made a giganta-huge version which I should be able to use for just about anything in the future. I hope CCP re-accept our logo as I would truly hate to lose our mascot - Reginald Green the Chameleon. More than one new recruit has told me they were attracted to our alliance because of the bright green lizard and at fanfest a few wormholers also recognised it. Long live my iconic friend.

Click for the massive.

Epicentre

Shattered Wormhole Epicentre

Sometimes it is easy to miss the beauty that exists within the EVE universe. Instead of paying so much attention to d-scan, sigs and (heaven forbid) local, take a moment to just sit still. Find somewhere safe, turn off your interface and sup from the graphical delights of New Eden.

To Kill A Titan

The lesser spotted, titan killing Venture

Pretty Lights

Welcome to the light show

Due to the changes in wormholes we recently retired our ancient fleet composition of remote repair shield Tengus. Our new fleet composition is based around a core of logi. The dps is provided by whatever people feel like taking so long as it has the appropriate tank type and enough buffer to not stress the logi guys out too much. The long range of the logi can make for pretty light shows as you can see above.

Bob giveth

Since Hyperion came out there has been so much more scanning to do in wormhole space. Sadly this additional scanning doesn't seem to come with additional combat to make it worthwhile. Either we find nobody, someone hiding in their POS force field, or a force who simply dunk us into the ground. The latter of those options is still more fun than either of the others but I'd rather be the one doing the killing.

On Tuesday evening I was sitting in front of the computer eating dinner when my corpmate, Rhianna, sent a message out on Jabber - "Orca outside POS forcefield in 5a1". A screenshot followed showing the ship sitting just outside the forcefield - a fairly safe position for something with a likely high EHP. A quick discussion and we decided to set up a bombing run to at least wake up the Orca pilot if not actually kill him. Bomb perches were set up as I logged in Orea and another toon. Once I was shipped into a pair of Manticores I jumped through to get into position.

I was barely clear of the wormhole when a pair of Armageddons landed on the connection back home. They jumped through and back, obviously looking to roll the wormhole. We decided trying to kill a 'geddon on the wormhole was a much more exciting prospect than just a wakeup call to the Orca pilot. I manoeuvred my two bombers into position whilst Rhianna got back to the POS to watch what happened there. What happened was the two pilots logged off. Boo. Clearly I didn't cloak fast enough as they landed on the wormhole and they got scared off. With that it was time to log off myself and go help my wife with the kids lest I risk non-consensual 'pvp' IRL!

Several hours later we decided to go help out our logged-off Russian neighbours by clearing their expensive gas site. Since we gained our new C5 static we've discovered a couple of the gas sites are actually worth running. In fact the ISK earned is comparable to running C4 combat anomalies yet the risk after clearing the initial sleepers is only a handful of Ventures. We get to about 85% of the gas cleared when the locals start logging back on. Their POS is off d-scan from us but a Revelation somewhere isn't. Not unduly concerned about the Rev (we're in Ventures after all) we continue to suck gas whilst a scout gets eyes on the POS and then probes down the Rev.

Someone call the Red Cross?

"Second Rev at POS plus the Orca is back. Other Rev is running sites!" is exclaimed across comms. Really? This guy is running sites and knows we are here. Another voice pipes up "hole home is critical". Ah bollocks, that's why he's unconcerned. We can't kill either Rev, or the Archon which just appeared from nowhere, but we can finish the plan to wake the Orca pilot from his boosting trance. As we leave to drop the gas off and reship their scout, glupishkin, does the unthinkable and breaks silence in local to say "bye bye". His thoughts must have changed as three of us head back in Manticores for some mischief. As we warp to the earlier bombing perch made for surprising the Orca all the cap pilots warp back to their POS.

"The Orca pilot has logged off". I'm aligned towards the Orca and closing distance as this message comes over comms. I start counting in my head ready to launch the bombs at the last moment I know I can still hit the Orca before his emergency warp kicks in. Our three Manticores loose their bombs and warp off. Only one of us gets a PvP timer. I'm feeling disappointed at this when Rhianna says "won't he have a timer too?". Oh hell yes! And he logged off already so doesn't know! We have 15 minutes to scan down his Orca which is no longer under the safety of the POS guns. Now we can really kill it.

Image courtesy of The Wormhole Diaries

It feels like forever while the Orca is scanned down, but scanned down it is. We all warp to it and the earlier unthinkable but now inevitable explosion happens. The pod immediately warps off under emergency warp mechanics but a quick scan locates that too. We loot what we can, shoot the rest, then head home deeply satisfied with Bob's gift of Orca and pod.

Ships of Many Colours

This appeared in a dev blog today. It would appear we are getting ever closer to properly customisable paint jobs on our internet spaceships.

You really want to click this to make it bigger

People sometimes sound surprised when I mention I don't play EVE fully zoomed out. I like my pretty spaceships and play at a zoom level where I can appreciate them. I'm looking forward to CCP releasing another render like the above including my favourite looking ship - the Caldari Navy Megathron...

Empty Echoes

Last month I wrote a very short post bemoaning the apparent lack of people in wormholes. As if to further highlight this we scanned down the following chain at the start of this week.

More holes than Swiss cheese

In the whole time scanning I didn't see a single ship. Well actually that's a lie, there was a Buzzard who launched probes on a wormhole then burned right past me. Of course the single ship I saw all night decloaked me and meant I'd have no hope in hell of catching him. So unfair.

Adding insult to injury we discovered the other arm of connections from home only had a single other hole and lots of anomalies to run. Rather than hunting down people to shoot we would have been better rolling the long chain away and making some ISK. It was too late by the time we realised. Bah!

Let's End Asteroid Belts

There are some systems in New Eden which have a ridiculous number of asteroid belts. The top ten most populous have between 38 and 50 belts each. This is an absurd amount of belts in any one of those systems. Taking just the 50 from the top system and spreading those around the rest would be an improvement but still too many in my opinion. I also don't get the logic of making them all so small. Back in the dark days when I played EVE solo I would happily spend a Saturday or Sunday mining my way through an entire asteroid belt or two whilst doing other stuff around the house. I would do this with a single Hulk which offloaded to an Orca every now and then. Where is the idea that one ship could possibly mine a failed attempt at planet formation anywhere close to logical?

It's time for CCP to end this madness. Static asteroid belts need to go and what replaces them needs to grow. In wormholes the only mining offered to us is in ore anomalies. These used to be signatures which required scanning but for some dumb reason that was changed to allow anyone to instantly warp to them. Now only insane (or insanely bored) pilots mine in w-space. I am aware that these anomalies also spawn in k-space but my proposal is that should be the only source of asteroid to mine. Return ore sites to be signatures once more and force the miners to go scanning for them. In hisec, as enticement to keep searching for new sites, add in occasional higher-end ores to beef up the ISK/hr metric that some people find so important. In lowsec increase that ratio and just maybe the added security of requiring probes to find the sites will get more people mining there too (but probably not). And make the belts five to ten times bigger than they currently are. Get some sense of ridiculously huge scale planted in there.

A belt, today, in hisec (feeling sleepy already?)

Finally, miners still complain about how boring it is to mine. Why not liven this up by adding in a variation of the hacking mini game? Each pilot would have to 'unlock' the asteroid before they can start mining from it. Unlocking would take the form of analysing the rock looking for the most precious seam of ore to extract. Successfully analyse the rock and your mining would yield a better form of the ore. You would extract Fiery Kernite instead of plain old Kernite.

Of course there are downsides to this plan. People who don't actually want to mine but feel they have to do it to make ISK will complain that they have to pay attention to the game in order to make ISK. My opinion here is that of course you should be paying attention to the game when you're earning ISK. ISK shouldn't be something which just flows into your wallet. In any case you're paying attention for gankers anyway, aren't you? Plus we just made it a little safer for you to mine away from these gankers whilst giving you a (real world) skill-based way (how fast can you click?) to increase your potential earnings. If that isn't enough, go do something else and one of two things will happen - the cost of minerals will increase until it is worth your time to go mining again or other people who're still happy with the ISK/hr ratio will keep mining.

It's time to shake up the mining industry. CCP let's get it done.