Eve Online: Querious

About a week ago, we finally moved out to a system in Querious, our new nullsec home. Of course I wasn't entirely clear about what to take with me, but a jumpfreigher service had been arranged so we could take plenty of stuff with us. But not everything: I had to fly my Drake battlecruiser there myself - 53 jumps - because it has a few rigs fitted. Fortunately most of the other nullsec systems along the way were deserted and I got my ship in one piece in our new home system. Corp member Dadellus was already there, and we quickly started ratting and running complexes.

But there's a lot of new stuff to get used to! For the first time I live in 'not blue, shoot it' space; anyone who's not explicitly your friend, is presumed an enemy and must be dealt with on sight. To facilitate the 'dealing with' part, all pilots must join the home fleet. In highsec you only join a fleet when you are planning on doing stuff together, but here it's a permanent.. Lots of new stuff to learn!

(forgot to publish this when I wrote it - sorry..)

New York!

Yesterday I wrote a short blog piece at Koinup about New York, which can be visited in Twinity as of today. Metaversum recreated a part of Manhattan, including parts of Central Park, Madison Avenue, 5th Avenue etcetera. It's a work in progress, but even so it's really worth a visit!

More snapshots - again - at Koinup.

Eve Online: changes coming

I've been in Eve Online for over two years. In most chat channels, that makes me a seasoned pilot - definitely not a n00b anymore. In these two years, I have mined, ran missions, fought a few PVP encounters, did some trading, did some diplomatic stuff.. and that's about it. And I have loved it! Yet, I wrote elsewhere:

"We are mission runners, miners and industrialists. We are carebears at heart, but still we're growing tired of the predictability of highsec. We have killed Kruul so many times we lost count; we probably looted enough of his DNA to rebuild him without using DNA sequencers. And having to bring that stupid damsel back time and time again.. it's getting a bit stale."

This is from a forum post, where we asked for a nice piece of quiet nullsec space to live. We were looking for change, excitement, nullsec ratting and plexing, high end mineral mining and exotic ores to mine! Even though we didn't get many usable offerhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs at the time, we now have found a new place.

A few members of the MPA alliance have joined to form a new corp (ticker: NOFAD) which has since joined the Saints amongst Sinners alliance (SAS), and we are currently packing our stuff for the long haul to Querious, where our new nullsec life awaits us.

The funny thing is - I'm feeling n00bish again! Nullsec ratting and pvp requires other ships and fits, other tactics. For the first time we are flying in an alliance that does *not* primarly consist of miners and industrialists. This really is a different experience, and I am anxious to see what will happen.


(before I forget - anyone interested in a 21-day free buddy Eve Online trial, contact me!)

Eve Online: if Bruce and Lance..

If Lance Armstrong and Bruce Willis were ever to have an illegitimate love child, it would look like this:



This is an example of a Gallente male, according to the new Eve Online character creation tool, which is available for public testing on CCP's Singularity test server. I am impressed with CCP's willingness to throw something so obviously in early beta stage to us, the wolves:

However, the assets and the technology is far from finished. Singularity is our test server. We put things there to see how they break. You will be able to play around with a total pre-release client full of temporary assets, clunky UI, strange behavior and slow loading. You will be able to create incredibly bad looking characters, dressed funny and posed silly. In a way it‘s a marketing faux pas, since the character creator on Singularity is far from being ready. This, however, is the way we roll. We publish unfinished stuff to our test server to allow you, the players to have a go at our new technology, to find defects, to have it tested on all kinds of different hardware configurations so that we in the end deliver a higher-quality product. With your feedback, we make the game better, but be warned, this is not the final product. Some avatars will look awful and ridiculous, with glaring visual artifacts and defects. Did I mention that some of them will look awful?

..And I'm sure the results will get better over time.