Sered's lives

Alliance and corp survival

2012-01-26T12:40:00.001+01:00

I’ll admit, I am getting slightly addicted to Evemaps these days; it's the site with the most accurate information on what’s going on in New Eden in terms of sovereignty, alliances, corps and such. The ebb and flow of the never ending New Eden wars are reflected on evemaps: alliances losing sov and bleeding members while others surge. When an alliance or corp is struggling, evemaps is the place where this becomes mercilessly visible.

Having been part of a failscading powerbloc once, I’m always kind of interested to learn what happens to the corps who leave an alliance. Where do they go? Evemaps, ever helpfully, provides this information in the list of former corps for an alliance: if the departed corps have joined a new alliance, it is visible there.

Surprisingly, if you take a look at that list, many corps never join a new alliance after leaving one. Whether they left their previous alliance on their own accord of were forced out I don’t know; whether that alliance failscaded or just somehow faded (as happens to highsec carebear alliances sometimes) I don’t know either. But the fact remains, that hundreds, if not thousands, of corps (and their pilots!) once were part of an alliance but are now alone.

Take another look at a list of former corps (for instance that of LEGIO) and sort it by member. A new pattern emerges: the largest corps who’ve left LEGIO in the past, have found a new home in another alliance. Many corps who haven’t, currently have single digit membership numbers. And at the bottom, there’s a set of corps who haven’t survived; they are dead. I have checked this for several other alliances, and it’s not always a given, but as a rule of thumb, the bigger corps are more likely to be part of a new alliance when compared with the smaller ones.

I can think of several reasons for this pattern. A corp may lose members when it fails to provide it’s members with access to nullsec, wh space or other lucrative resources or fun activities, for a prolonged period of time; in the end, only a few inactive pilots and a handfull of die hards will remain. Or, when you are already a small corp, it may be more difficult to be accepted into a new alliance, as your size makes it less likely that you’ll provide added value to a new host alliance.

For any pilot involved in corp leadership, there are useful lessons to be learned here. Whenever you find your corp without an alliance, make it a priority to find a new, suitable one as soon as possible (without compromising on the ‘suitable’ part of course). And second: make sure you have enough good, active pilots, in order to provide added value to your (prospective) alliance.

For a regular corp member, there's something to learn as well. If your corp is no longer part of an alliance, and leadership isn't doing their utter best to correct that situation, the long term viability of your corp may be in danger. It would be wise to keep an eye out for alternatives.

Finally, I have - a while ago - checked up on several corps we were once in an alliance with. Most of seem to suffer from a low level of activity, even when they still hold a reasonable membership number. Eve is still a game, and when that game becomes less fun because the alliance or corp isn't functioning well, people will login less too; after a while they will probably unsub. Many of these corps are in a slow decline towards death, taking an unknown number of subscriptions with them.
In this regard, CCP is more or less dependent on the player corps and alliances (overwhelmingly run by well meaning amateurs, I might add) to keep the pilots engaged and active, and hence, CCP's business afloat. What a scary thought..

(2012-01-27 made some small editorial changes; content didn't change - Sered)

Blog Banter 32 - for the children

2012-01-19T12:34:00.002+01:00

"This month's Blog Banter comes from Drackarn of Sand, Cider and Spaceships. He has foolishly chosen to poke the hornet's nest that is the non-consensual PvP debate. Whilst you read his question, I'll be finding a safe place to hide.

A quick view of the Eve Online forums can always find someone complaining about being suicide ganked, whining about some scam they fell for or other such tears. With the Goons' Ice Interdiction claiming a vast amount of mining ships, there were calls for an "opt out of PvP" option.

Should this happen? Should people be able to opt-out of PvP in Eve Online. Should CONCORD prevent crime rather than just handing out justice after the event? Or do the hi-sec population already have too much protection from the scum and villainy that inhabits the game?"

*update* a list of other blog responses to the queston raised above, can be found at Freebooted.

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Raise the price of nonconsensual PVP

After the Goons’ ice interdiction and their recent promise of a much more devastating ‘victory lap’ through highsec, we are again confronted with the question: should CCP do something about nonconsensual PVP? Should it be possible in New Eden to opt out of PVP altogether?

Yes

Eve Online has a reputation of being notoriously difficult. One of the hardest parts to understand - for inexperienced pilots anyway - are the aggression mechanics. This allows older, more experienced pilots to can flip or can bait newbie pilots - or they can resort to just suicide ganking them; that doesn't mean much to the older, more experienced pilot. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I find very little to defend in this practice. It is no sport, it doesn’t require intelligence or courage, it isn’t ‘educating the n00bs’. In my opinion, it’s just griefing, nothing more. There’s no reasonable way a n00b miner can defend himself against these practices; it’s either accept that you’re being robbed, or lose your ship.

I know for a fact that these practices have cost CCP subscribers. I have personally known several pilots who ended their fresh subscriptions (or never converted trial to paying subscription) after losing ships this way or hearing about such losses. Heck, if I hadn’t been accepted in a good newbie corp, I would have quit too, after losing my first, hard earned, shiny new Incursus to a griefer.

Yet the whole premise of New Eden is, that there is no safety, ever. It is a harsh, cold place and that is by design; it’s not by accident. It remains a single shard sandbox, fraught with danger. CONCORD was not meant to prevent crime there; not easily anyway. Let's not dumb down Eve Online even further, shall we?

Compromise: raise the stakes

Coming from a carebear background, I have a lot of sympathy for my less experienced brethren in highsec. Implementing some extra protection for them does appeal to my sense of fairness - and it would be good for CCP’s baseline as well. Yet I wouldn’t want to fundamentally change New Eden to accomplish it. But I can think of a few measures that would at least level the playing field somewhat.

For instance some extra protection, in the first 12 weeks (or 8, or 10.. please debate) of being a pod pilot. Let's determine a 'graduation age': below that, you're afforded some extra protection, if you're older than that, nothing changes when compared to the situation now.

After the graduation period ends, the n00b pilot receives a note stating he has completed his basic training and should now be aware of all the dangers out there. The note contains a link to a evelopedia page on piracy, such as this one. No extra protection is now available for the graduated pilot.

So what kind of extra protection am I thinking about? Suicide ganking n00bs is now a very one sided event, as I mentioned above, and I propose to level the playing field somewhat, by making sure the griefer/ganker gets to feel the pain too. The ganker should have to think about his action: is this kill really worth it, or not? The first step in this direction was removing insurance payout; let's take this line of thought a little further. I propose raising the security status penalties for ship killings under specific circumstances: when the pilot is below the graduation age, and the security status of the system is higher than 0.6 (or 0.5, 0.7.. up for debate), the security standings penalty is significantly raised. Penalties would be stackable: killing a mining vessel in 1.0, piloted by a pilot fresh out of trial, should carry a much more severe penalty than, for instance, killing an eight week old ratter in 0.8. Killing a two week old cyno alt in lowsec or nullsec should not carry (extra) penalties at all.

Added to this - and perhaps this should be implemented for all kinds of highsec ganks, not only for n00b bashing - the offending pilot should feel some real pain: a fine, and doing some jail time seems appropriate. So, no jumping/undocking for at least 24 hours after a suicide gank; ISK fines to you or your corp's wallet.
I'd like to see some ISK compensation for the victim too, preferrably via the insurance route, but am struggling to find a way that would allow something like that to be implemented without being exploited immediately. Suggestions are welcome..

To prevent gankers from working with throwaway characters: the griefing/ganking character is 'on probation' and can't be biomassed or sold for at least two (four?) weeks.

To prevent can flipping/baiting, I would simply suggest the ability to set a password on any jettisoned can. Anyone still can baited after that is just lazy and deserves some punishment :)

Pro and con

The upside of this (or a similar) approach would be, that nonconsensual PVP would still be available - but at a much steeper price to the ganker; this would be something you can't do too often before a character (or an account) becomes totally useless.The gank should really be worth it!

A downside is, that it's quite a convoluted system, a tad difficult to understand and implement without making it exploitable somehow. I'm sure, however, that the experienced game devs at CCP have ways around that.

Another downside; certain high sec areas would - at least for younger pilots -become temporary save havens. They’ll probably flock around the few meager belts available there, without venturing outside too much. Will the youngsters muster the courage to exit the reservation?

My final concern with any protection measure is: how will the griefers/gankers exploit it to their profit? This is something that needs to be thought of.

The written word

2012-01-14T15:25:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week I published a review of Roc Wieler’s YC113. In the introduction I mentioned that art and creativity wasn’t really a part of the Eve community, except for video.

I was primarily referring to,of course, the award winning machinima series ‘Clear Skies’. But, there are more well known Eve videos such as the ‘Clarion call’ series by Rooks and Kings alliance (and the parody Noirion Call) and countless frapsed battle reports on Youtube.Recently, CCP hosted a contest for this kind of content on eveisreal.net , allowing pod pilots to show off their video editing powers.

It takes some imagination and creativity to make these, but wouldn’t go as far as to call them ‘art’. It’s like the difference between a Discovery Channel documentary and a motion picture: both can be well made and entertaining, but in my humble opinion the first one remains a documentary, while the second one can sometimes be calledart.

Screenshots of Eve Online are often beautiful, and nicely show how impressive New Eden looks these days. I have often done my best to create a specific snapshot, for instance by positioning all elements in a certain way; I have certainly done some post processing too, cropping, adapting contrast and light/dark levels. Is it creative? Sure. Art? Possibly.

But, I have to confess, I haven’t done justice to the Eve Online community. I have neglected to mention written fan fiction! Kirith Kodachi for instance is well known for his ‘fiction Friday’ series.Several bloggers are using a 'role play' style of writing on their blogs. Eve Travel is a good example; it's a travel guide to landmarks in New Eden. And for a fan fiction/RP styled source of news, you can head over tohttp://tech4news.org/ .

There are actually quite a few role players in New Eden,who have fully immersed their in game persona in the background story CCP created. Alliances such as CVA and Ushkra’khan, while perhaps not always 100% ‘in character’ are also RP oriented. Pilots participating in factional warfare – war between the human races in New Eden – are also likely to be interested in or actively enaged in role playing. And let's not forget those real life model citizens who, in Eve Online, pose as fearful space pirates.. Many of these pilots maintain their RP persona on their blogs and twitter feeds.

It is in the written word that the Eve Online community displays a lot of it’s creative powers. I hope that, by pointing this out, I’ve made up for the fact that I have forgotten to mention it in the previous blog post..

YC113: a review

2012-01-12T11:58:00.001+01:00

The community is always an important part of a gaming experience. Back when I was (more) active in Second Life, I'd admire the creative works of my fellow avatars, and to this day, really beautiful things are created in the Linden Lab world. Second Life's community is a very creative one!

In Eve Online, there's no such thing as an artist or creator. New Eden knows industry - you can create predetermined things based on fixed blueprints - but no in world, free format creation of objects. The community discusses game mechanics, killmails, fittings, shiptypes, CCP shenanigans, nerfs and buffs.. but only rarely does art or creativity come into play, with the exception of video. Eve Online may be a sandbox where you can choose your own career, but 'artist' is not high on the list.

That's why was pleasantly surprised to see an Eve Online related work of creativity: Roc Wieler's musical effort YC113, which was released October 1, 2011. After listening to it a few times, I have to say It’s an appealing work of art and well worth a listen to. Musically, I’d characterize it as orchestral, with much drama, power and bombast: some parts could easily have been part of a soundrack to a grand battle scene in a Lord of the Rings movie. But there’s more than just these grand musical landscapes and vistas; there’s also the intimacy of a lonely piano, a deep sense of sorrow in a single woman’s voice.

If you’re familiar with New Eden, you will find that all these musical elements fit that sandbox universe in which Eve Online takes place.

YC113 kicks off with a musical depiction of the four races of humankind; and if you know something of the background of the four races, the music makes sense. Personally, I especially like 'Republic' and 'Empire', even though I’m neither Minmatar or Amarr!
Some music is dedicated to NPC pirate factions and Sansha Kuvakei. Not all is well, obviously, with these people, and the music shows it: there’s rough edges and dissonants befitting the criminal nature of the subjects of these songs.

'New Eden’s Favorite Son' and 'Love’s Pursuit' belong to my favorites in YC113. I really like them. A romantical intermezzo then follows, with ‘One Night of Mynxee’ which is not bad, but somehow sounds like I’ve heard it before.. not my cup of tea. It’s the strings, probably.

A couple of songs then deal with Incursions, and how New Eden responds. As CTA's are called and battles rage, the music is powerful and dramatic.. Punctuated yet again by almost fragile interludes. It is fair to say that by this time - almost an hour into YC113 - the music becomes somewhat less distinctive. This is not a bad thing in itself, as the music is still worth listening to, but it does, sort of, blend together somewhat.

Something strange happens towards the end of YC113: Roc Wieler dies. Yes, you read that correctly, the composer promotes himself to subject of a fiery death and subsequent burial! This begs the question who then wrote the music, doesn’t it? Or did he write it before death? And if Roc is a capsuleer, why didn't he just get a fresh clone? Just kidding, but from a storyline perspective I’d have chosen a different pilot name. Of course this would have meant that the references to the ongoing romance between Roc and Mynxee would have to be altered as well.

The finale, then, is one song but clearly consists of several distinctive parts. It begins with a very basic, bare, slow rap; almost menacing in it’s effect. Followed by another piece of orchestral music, part quiet and part exciting and wild, ending in a fade out that reminds us of the vast, cold, endless darkness that is space.
But there’s more! There is an Alternate Finale which has the same basic construction, but is different from the Finale nonetheless. It is also two minutes longer. The rap part is musically more evolved; the orchestral part on the other hand is more basic than that of the Finale. Until half way through; a sharp intermezzo divides the piece in two. The second part of Alternate Finale begins with an orchestral part, but ends with a poppy, happy sounding, upbeat part, very much unlike anything else in YC113 actually.

The closer, Aura (remix), reminds me of the ’90s Enigma: atmospheric, ambient, dreamy. Very nice, if you’re into this kind of thing.

The verdict, then. I have only two points of criticism, really. The first one: some parts sound like I’ve heard them before, elsewhere. This is probably due to the fact that dramatic, orchestral movie music often tends to have certain well defined characteristics: the way chords are used, instrumentation et cetera. It's not a deal breaker to me, but it’s still something I noted. The second point I have already mentioned: the songs between ‘Incursions’ and ‘Aftermath’ somewhat blend together. The music is fine, but it could have used more distinctiveness, to spice it up somewhat. But perhaps the music is the way it is, because a story needed to be told..

Obviously we’re not dealing with FM radio material. Don’t expect to be singing along; there’s no catchy refrains. These are stories, vividly told through music; in a dramatic fashion, orchestral, opera style. Not my usual choice of music, but I’ve found YC113 enjoyable to listen to, much to my own surprise. More information is available at YC113.

Why I play Eve Online (again)

2012-01-02T23:38:00.005+01:00

There are many reasons why I continue to play Eve Online: excitement, the whole 'single shard sandbox' thing, friendships forged over the years. Plus, of course, the beautiful scenery..

I encountered this planet when I was creating a safe spot somewhere, all alone in a nullsec system in the Catch region. The new nebula, the gas giant with the rather detailed moon in front of it - I love it. Beautiful work.

In December I somehow didn't feel like playing nullsec eve, and I remained pretty much away for a while. Still, these moods usually pass within a few weeks; this time is no different, and I logged quite a bit of space hours over the past two or three days. Back in the saddle.. feels good. And looks good, to boot!

I started reading The Empyrean Age a few days ago, and am planning to do a writeup on it when I'm finished.

Decapitated pilots

2011-12-02T13:39:00.001+01:00

Just a quick note on something I hoped I wouldn't see in Crucible anymore: decapitated avatars! For some reason, parts of the avatar sometimed don't load, with this as the result:

As you can see, the avatar is really hollow; the black and grey background is visible when you look down the neck of this poor decapitated pilot!

I know that WiS features aren't high on the list these days, but this is something that should be fixed I think, as it defeats the whole purpose of Walking in Stations.

The first taste of Crucible

2011-11-30T21:44:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, upon returning from work, the first thing I did: launch Eve Online, to download the latest patch, Eve Online Crucible. CCP was good enough to warn us beforehand about the download size: 1.5GB is quite the patch.. Containing new nebulae and new Captains' Quarters, this wasn't really a surprise but still. I remember people complaining about the 25MB download size for Second Life back in 2006, 2007 and obviously broadband is now much more widespread, but for some of my alliance mates - in civilized countries like Canada - downloading this patch took a few hours. Luckily we have 50 MBps download speeds here, so I had it in 10 minutes or so. Installing went well (on all three PC's I might add) and so far, Crucible has been a smooth ride for me.

I absolutely love the new nebulae (or nebulas?) and the sense of direction in space they provide. Same with the stargates: they now actually point in the direction you're supposed to travel! For a game environment, it all looks and feels surprisingly real. This snapshot for instance shows a regular piece of space, nothing fancy, but it really looks like a picture of our own milky way at night. I didn't think changing the nebulae could enhance the level of immersion, but it does for me.

Speaking of immersion: the new captain's quarters are a good, if incremental improvement over the first (Minmatar) one. And now that the UI allows you to switch easily between hangar and captain's quarters, I find myself using them more, too. A step in the right direction, I'd say. My wife likes them too, as you can see in the snapshot.

Other 'Flying in Space' features I am quickly getting used to: right click on a remote stargate in overview and select 'jump'; warps you to the gate and jumps you through. Very neat. Same with selecting a station from your asset list and select 'destination': autopilot will now bring you to that station and dock you. Again - very useful. The 'loot all' button is a boon when ratting or missioning, less mouse clicks!

Another feature that makes me happy: if your ship does an emergency warp (usually caused by an unintended disconnect from Eve: network failure, power failure, PC crash..) then your drones will attempt to return to the drone bay before your ship warps off. I've lost quite a few drones due to emergency warps, hopefully this will help! Plus, when you forget your drones out there (and who hasn't) the Crucible client will let you reconnect to them once you return to the area you left them in, so they don't get lost that easy.

I realise I'm supposed to sing the praises of the new battlecruisers, but the truth is I haven't had a chance to look at them properly, let alone buy or fly one. And as soon as I get my rusty Dominix out in space for a level 4 mission, I may be able to judge the positive effects of the buff to hybrid turrets; so far no experiences there either. And a myriad of other small fixes I haven't testedyet..

So far, I like Crucible; kudos to CCP for getting this out of the door.

Alliances fail - but why?

2011-11-19T11:25:00.001+01:00

To fail..
Late in 2010, NOFAD was part of Saintsamongst Sinners, a 500+ pilot alliance living inQuerious in a -1.0 truesec dead end system (in other words - a realsanctum heaven), safely under the umbrella of the IT Alliance. A fewmonths later, under intense pressure from enemies, IT Alliance is allbut dead, Saints amongst Sinners lost sov in some of the key systemsand is in full retreat to NPC nullsec and lowsec. At that moment, SaSis bleeding members and morale is at a low point. NOFAD initiallyredeploys to Solitude as ordered (while most alliance members justmove to highsec), but the alliance seems to fail and in March 2011 we- reluctantly - leave SaS. Now, not even a year later, SAS has 5 membersleft; the last real corps left on November 10. Sic transit gloriaMundi and all that.

Or not to fail..
At this moment, NOFAD is part of LEGIOalliance, as part of the Against All Authorities (-A-) ecosystem. We've endured a full onassault from DRF, lost sov, lost a few corps. Several NOFAD members,with the memories of SaS's failure still fresh, didn't think LEGIO wouldsurvive. It was all too familiar! Deja vu, been there done that..However, NOFAD decided to stay with LEGIO,as we don't want to be oneof those corps that leaves at the first sign of trouble; NOFAD is committed to the alliance it joins. So weredeployed to LGK-VPas ordered, and tried to make the best of it. In the weeks that followed, the red wave crashedover Catch and then - slowly - retreated, and while we might not be out of the woodwork yet,it seems we'll survive. -A- did not fail cascade, and neitherdid LEGIO.

..that is my question
I'm still digesting what has happened, trying to come up with an explanation as to why SaS failed and LEGIO didn't, under roughly comparable circumstances. First, I'm looking at some external factors, and then we'll take a look at what happens within the alliances.

External
IT Alliance died; Against All Authorities didn't. That's one big factor, right there. As soon as IT Alliance was no longer able to defend Querious and Delve, the whole ecosystem (intel channels, ship replacement factories, jb network, supporting supercap fleet etc) collapsed. SaS was on it's own, and under those circumstances unable to defend it's space. Against all Authorities didn't die, they just retreated to Stain as they'd done before, and survived even though they lost some (important) corps. The -A- ecosystem survived and continued to support the alliances, corps and pilots belonging to it. An important difference I think.

Internal - leadership
For it's day to day operations, SaS heavily relied on it's CEO, Felix Sidius. Pretty much nothing got done without him, and his alts did much of the hauling too. Felix is a friendly, nice guy; I don't think he likes to say 'no' and for such a fast growing alliance, there were just too many tasks in his hands. Perhaps he should have delegated more than he did? And then, at the critical 'make or break' time when SaS suffered, he became a father for the first time, too! Obviously that did put some strain on his ability to be online and lead the alliance :) So even though Felix did his utter best under the circumstances, (in my opinion) the leadership structure of SaS was not mature enough to withstand the pressure we were under at that time.
LEGIO, on the other hand, has a much more diverse leadership. The CEO, Urkrathos Ulnor, without doubt calls the shots, but much of the practical management work (forum permissions, ts permissions, web site mgmt etc) is done by Scozzy. Still others run the mining/industry division and other separately defined parts of the organisation. All in all, there's much more shared responsibility, strenght and flexibility (and hence coherence, too) in LEGIO as an organisation, than there ever was in SaS.

Ironically, pretty much the same goes for IT Alliance versus -A-. IT Alliance, while not completely run by SirMolle, was definitely his, while -A- doesn't rely on one such figurehead. Perhaps a warning to all those alliances out there that do rely on one strong leader!

Internal - the pilots
Of course you can't blame a failure on just the leadership. It's also up to the pilots to step up and do what's necessary, as best as you can under the circumstances. Within SaS it seems, there were a lot of pilots who were there just to graze, so to speak. Harvesting belt rats and Sanctums for hours on end they made off with billions of ISK, but when they had to reship to combat fitted vessels and defend their place, many left, soon, without even properly saying goodbye. In short, they were not really committed to SaS. It was both surprising and sobering, to notice how many familiar voices on TS just vanished after a few weeks of hardship..
In LEGIO there was one corp opposed to following the -A- strategy to retreat to Stain and fight from there, and they left LEGIO. Ironically, that corp died pretty soon afterwards as their members couldn't agree on what to do next. Still, as was the case with SaS, not all those who remained with LEGIO followed the redeploy orders; some rarely if ever showed up in Stain. But overall, there was more pilot commitment to remain loyal to LEGIO and fight for our survival.

LEGIO doesn't have the rich, perfect -1.0 space SaS had; perhaps therefore LEGIO didn't attract the uncommitted, profiteering, 'grazing' kind of pilot. And we're better off for it: more commitment, less dead weight.

Your thoughts?
I'm interested to hear your opinions and experiences, too! Have you ever been in a corporation or alliance that failed? Any ideas why?

Eve Online - more eye candy

2011-11-08T22:21:00.002+01:00

After losing a Drake to a roaming gang a few minutes ago, I feel the need to present you more eye candy from the Singularity test server.. just to forget the loss ;-) I've made these snapshots on a trip from DSS-EZ (Stain region) to HY-RWO (in Catch), in my somewhat rusty Harbinger battlecruiser.

(Disclaimer: the snaps were made on a laptop with a severely outdated gpu.. it should look even better on about any other PC)

YHN-3K, where the sun looks shrouded in clouds

DSS-EZ

See more below the fold..

YHN-3K - the blue nebula is actually very pretty, well done

GE-8JV - a glorious gas giant embedded in a brilliant nebula

GE-8JV

V-3YG7

HY-RWO - it's dark out here at the V-3YG7 gate

HY-RWO

Finally, on my laptop with my old GPU sometimes weird things happen to Eve Online. Snapshots like this occur every now and then; the problem can be solved by opening the picture in Paint and resaving them as .bmp again..

Eve Online - the new nebulas

2011-11-06T20:30:00.002+01:00

Of course I'm very interested in the new nebulas, now visible on the Eve Online Singularity testserver. My opinion: New Eden looks more realistic than it does on Tranquility, with a much darker space and a milky way like band of light. I like it! The nebulas themselves are clearly modeled after the Hubble space telescope pictures such as this one or this, and as such, they are more in line with what a wider audience might expect to find in a scifi universe. Personally I think they need to blend in more: right now they appear as clearly defined bright blobs in an otherwise dark sky. I'd like to see them fade out at the edges, so that you can't really tell where they begin or end.

But other than that: it looks gorgeous. I want the winter expansion - badly. Have a look at the snapshots!

(Disclaimer: the snaps were made on a laptop with a severely outdated gpu.. it should look even better on about any other PC ;-))

Junsoraert, Everyshore (highsec)

The new, clearly unfinished Raven model in Stain (nullsec)

See more below the fold..
LGK-VP, Stain (nullsec)

The new, clearly unfinished Raven model in Stain (nullsec)

Junsoraert, Everyshore (highsec)

The new, clearly unfinished Raven model in Stain (nullsec)

A planet in Stain (nullsec)

The new, clearly unfinished Raven model in Stain (nullsec)

A stargate near the Catch - Stain border (nullsec)

Catch me if you can

2011-11-05T12:00:00.000+01:00

Ever since the DRF started attacking -A- in Catch, we expected to lose sov and end up exiled somewhere in highsec. Yet -A- hung in there, and so did we; and after the DRF said they had achieved their goals and their attack lost it's vigor, we were able to recoup our lost sov and get back to 'business as usual'.

Although business is still far from usual; it's much better than that! There's still tons of reds and neutrals roaming through our neck of the woods, and there's plenty of opportunity to shoot at them.

And shooting them we did, yesterday! When I logged in, around 21.30 eve time, several corp and alliance mates were fleeted up and looking for trouble, trying to catch the neuts and reds zipping through HY-RWO and it's surroundings. Our scout reports a 12 man gang nearby; it looks promising but a little too much for our kitchensink fleet; their Scimitars would have been hard for us to overcome. But with an -A- gang also nearby, who knows.. What happens next, is some sort of intricate dance. They jump in; we safe up. They leave; we move back to the gate. Scouts report an -A- gang moving in; reds move out; we join forces with -A-, but finally decide to stay at the gate, in case they try to escape through it. It's like chess, like wild animals circling each other, looking for that weak spot, for that little mistake that will get someone killed. Catch me.. if you can!

After some fifteen minutes of this, our scout suddenly yells out on TS: the -A- gang has finally caught up with the 12 man roam we're shadow boxing with, and the fight was on. Go go go! Scimitar is primary! Go! I feel an adrenaline rush and my heart is beating, we move as quick as possible, eager to score some kills, but to no avail. As soon as you hear the scout change his language to past tense, you know you're too late! -A- had done a proper job: the enemy gang was decimated before most of us landed on grid. Good job for -A- and some of us actually got in on a killmail, but most of us missed out. GF's all around in local.

So we moved back to square one, camping the gates near HY-RWO.. and what do you know. Our scout reports a lone Vigilant on the other side of the gate! Will he...? Quickly our bubble is up and yes, there he is! We lock him, drones are unleashed, the FC asks for webs, our loudmouth Dutch pilot yells to 'BUMP, bump the f&cker away from gate'.. We get him in deep armor... come on, come on.. almost there, almost there.. and then he's gone, jumped back through the gate. Crap! Of course all of us had engaged him so we couldn't pursue. And then, suddenly, the scout yells out on TeamSpeak: RED SPIKE, safe up safe up!

Immediately we switch back from 'post fight relaxing' to 'get out asap' mode: we align to safes, to station, away from gate while the scout urges us to get the heck away. I am still en route to my safe spot, when one of our pilots says ON ME! ON ME! He's at the V-3 station where, unexplicably, a lonely red Abaddon hangs idly in space. We lock, we shoot.. no response. He must be dc'd, AFK or something like that. We expect him to dock any minute, but his ship and pod are killed without him ever moving. According to his eve-kill stats, this pilot had 15 losses for 117 kills.. this one must have hurt.Oh and that red spike? They moved out via another gate, we never saw them.

By this time it's 01.00 AM and I am as tired as a newt, so I dock up and say goodbye. My mates haven't had enough, yet, and in the following our they manage to score a few more kills: a Purifier and a Rapier. Both pilots are podded too.

All in all we had a great night. This is where Eve Online really shines. This is what I come back for!

Eve blog banter 29: I was there! With them!

2011-10-05T20:58:00.000+02:00

Today I received an email from Freebooted's Seismic Stan, regarding the next Blog Banter topic:

"EVE Online is renowned for its depth. Its backstory, gameplay and social aspects are all qualities that draw players in. What does immersion in EVE Online mean to you?"

A subject near and dear to my heart, as it was immersion that originally drew me to virtual worlds. After a while though I needed something with more action, a virtual world with game elements, preferrably scifi themed - and via a banner ad I found Eve Online.

Alien indeed
As an experienced virtual world inhabitant, though, Eve Online proved to be a much more alien environment than I expected. I did not customize my 'avatar' during account creation, because I assumed I could tweak him later.. this turned out to be false, as the original avatar had no function whatsoever. It was utterly meaningless, and definitely not 'me'. Upon logging in for the first time I found myself in something called a 'Velator', in a large cavernous space, in a system called Bourynes.. again, no avatar in sight, no human figure anywhere. In Eve Online, "you" is the ship you pilot. This is a steep barrier to achieving any kind of immersion, at least as we know it in other virtual worlds. At that time I knew several people who crossed over from Second Life to Eve Online, and I heard a lot of complaints about this issue.

Incarna
Of course this is all changing, now that Incarna is slowly unfolding in New Eden. For all it's faults and issues, the basic idea of Incarna still appeals to me, for pretty much the same reasons mentioned by The Mittani. If (ever) properly implemented, Incarna should provide the fundamentals for a full fledged virtual world simulator, both in and out of station, with a much higher level of immersion. I still want to sit at the window of a space bar near a busy undock ramp! And after reading Hillmar's devblog, I think I can say we will see that - one day.

Incarna in a ship, a pos..
Taking it one step further: I would love to be able to walk through my ship as well. They are supposed to be anywhere from a few dozen meters up to several kilometers long, staffed with dozens or even hundreds of people. Wouldn't you like to have a look at the interior? Even if it's only a captain's bridge? Or, housing modules for a POS, again with windows?

Currently I don't think CCP can pull stuff like this off, given their trouble with getting the basics of Incarna right, and the immediate need to appease the 'Flying in Space' related wishes of their subscriber base, but it sure would enhance immersion. It would also appeal to the Star Trek fans, probably.

My wife, immersed

I was there! With them!
Obviously, the lack of basic immersion didn´t drive me away from Eve Online. What kept me subscribed, was two things: emotional and social immersion. The emotional immersion is, in my opinion, caused by the sandbox nature of New Eden. There's always the risk of something unexpected, always the chance for an adrenaline rush, exhilaration, joy, raw anger and disappointment, great achievements and monumental losses.. See this forum post for a telling example.

The second one, social immersion, happens when you find a nice corp and some good people to fly with. They become friends; some of my current corpies I have known for years, I know of their personal situations, I trust them.

The emotional and social immersion of Eve Online: I was there, with them!

Why remove local in nullsec?

2011-09-23T00:30:00.004+02:00

It's that special time again: Eve Online's pilots are speculating on what might happen to their beloved game, after CCP Zulu posted a short and cryptic devblog earlier today. Currently, these speculations tend to revolve around a few important issues, with the coming nerf of the (currently overpowered) supercapital ship class and the redesign of nullsec space featuring most prominently.

Something else that's frequently mentioned, usually as part of the nullsec redesign, is that nullsec space should not have a local channel. For those unaware of Eve Online's workings: the local channel is essentially a chat channel, showing you who's in the same solar system as you. When you're flying through nullsec, you'd be wise to keep an eye on said channel. Being aware of enemies or neutrals in your area of space can be a real lifesaver!

Until Apocrypha, all solar systems in New Eden had a local channel. But the wormhole systems that where added with Apocrypha, did not. The lack of local intel means it's much more dangerous to live in wormhole space, as anyone could descend on you, guns ablaze, without any prior warning whatsoever.

Of course, there's ways to work around this limitation, but only partially, by using the directional scanner or scan probes. But those either give you incomplete information or are cumbersome to use, and not easy to combine with belt ratting or running anomalies. As such, for pilots involved in these PVE activities, removing the local channel is a major loss of available intel.

Earlier this year, nullsec PVE got nerfed: from that moment on, the occurrence of the most lucrative anomalies/complexes is limited to only those systems with the worst security rating available: -0.9 or -1 truesec. The rest of nullsec has to make do with less valuable targets to pursue, and many pilots have since moved back to highsec where level 4 missions bring in copious amounts of ISK in exchange for very little risk. So, nullsec has become less rewarding, and many systems are really quiet these days.

Would removing the local channel fix this? I don't think so. PVE in nullsec would become even more risky, and may not be worth the hassle anymore unless you happen to live in one of those rare systems with that low truesec of -0.9 or -1. Some regions don't even have those!

Cloaked ships can't even be scanned down, and their pilots already have a huge advantage over regular pilots, even when they go AFK for hours on end: there's no way to track them down, they are essentially invulnerable. But, at least you know they're there! Now take away local, and the picture gets even worse: there's no warning whatsoever of their existence anymore. A cloaked stealth bomber could be near you, and there would be no way for you to find out, until he bombs you into oblivion. Not exactly 'leveling the playing field' if you ask me, especially when you keep in mind that most regular PVE areas (complexes, anomalies, asteroid belts) in Eve Online are easily scanned down or otherwise easily available and accessible to anyone.

Removing local, without providing viable alternative ways of protection for (solo) PVE pilots, and/or increasing incentive for PVE pilots to remain in nullsec, would turn even more of the available space into deserted wastelands. I'd hate to see that happen!

Sleepers, awake!

2011-09-22T00:30:00.000+02:00

When the Apocrypha expansion hit Eve Online, lots of us eagerly jumped into the nearest wormhole to start exploring. And many of us overenthusiastic pilots lost their ship, either because we were unable to find our way back out of the wormhole, or because we got killled en masse by the Sleepers, the mysterious guardians of old Jove complexes in wormhole space.

When you're used to the regular NPC enemies in Eve Online - the belt/mission rats - Sleepers can be a nasty surprise. Their AI is more advanced, they are less predictable, making them harder to beat.

As it stands now, regular PVE in Eve Online highsec could use a bit of spicing up, and last night I wondered: perhaps it's time for the Sleepers to aggressively respond to the ongoing infiltration of wormhole space. Let them come out of their hiding, let them infiltrate regular space, let them get some revenge! Eve pilots can enter and exit wormholes.. why couldn't Sleepers do the same? If a wormhole spawns somewhere, Sleepers could appear from the wormhole and spread throughout the system, infecting belts or complexes, harassing pilots near gates or stations, perhaps even invading deadspace mission areas.

The nice thing about this is that it would create a level of uncertainty for (PVE) pilots. When you go out ratting or on a mission, you (should!) know what NPC rats to expect: each system in Eve Online has only one documented and well known type of belt rats. In missions, the type of mission rats is predictable as well, with their logo featuring on the mission description, and more explicit descriptions available on sites such as eve-survival. With this knowledge, you can fit your ship accordingly, with optimal resistance against the types of damage those specific rats do, and the appropriate ammunition that is known to be most effective against them. But if you encounter a Sleeper instead of a regular rat, things change. Sleepers do all known damage types, and therefore require a different ship fitting, and perhaps you'd need other weaponry or ammunition too. And given that wormholes come and go, seemingly without a pattern, you never know when or where you might encounter the Sleepers spawning from them.. Suddenly, the same ol' fitting for the same ol' belt ratting may not be cutting it anymore.. A lot of uncertainty would be injected into a now essentially stagnant area of Eve Online.

As for the Eve Online story line, this 'revenge of the Sleepers' could set the stage for a greater role for the Jovian race in New Eden. Eventually it could even lead to a full blown Jovian themed "Apocrypha II" expansion, featuring Jovian incursions via wormholes, or the opening of (parts of?) Jovian space to Eve Online pilots for instance.

An added bonus.. the spawning of less predictable Sleeper AI in PVE areas of Eve Online might be an extra hurdle for the botters out there, as their programs would have to take into account a much less predictable environment than today.

(blog entry banged out in response to this Kirith Kodachi blog entry)

Eve Online: ISKing in highsec

2011-08-29T22:03:00.001+02:00

This weekend I spent some time in highsec, for the first time in a couple of months. Ever since moving to Catch, I have remained there, apart from jumping back to a highsec clone to get some skill books. This weekend, however, after consolidating some assets in highsec I decided to go back to Junsoraert and take a lvl4 mission there. The agent made me a nice offer - Recon - so I checked the fitting on my Navy issue Dominix, loaded up some ammo and the right drones and off I went.

Now if you haven't run a highsec mission in a while, there's some stuff you have to get used to again. First: local is full of neutrals. The nullsec habit of continuously checking local doesn't help in highsec, there are neutrals everywhere and they are - most probably - not out to get you. Still, I don't feel comfortable in highsec anymore! To me it feels like a densely populated, run down part of downtown, with groups of shady looking types loitering on street corners. It's most definitely not 'home' anymore.

Second: the amount of damage the mission enemies (NPC enemies) do, is minimal compared to what you can expect in nullsec if you run into the wrong people. Being orbited by a couple of battleships in the Recon mission isn't anything to get worried about, if your Dominix fitted right. But in nullsec, a couple of battleships can chew through your tank in no time. In other words - these lvl4 missions aren't that dangerous, and hence not that exiting either.

The rewards, on the other hand, are plentiful. Yesterday I ran four missions (the three Recon episodes and an Angel Cartel Pirate Invasion) and I earned roughly 36 million ISK, which includes the 4 million I earned with the sale of some expensive salvage. That is 36 million ISK for an essentially risk free excercise!

In Catch, on the other hand, ISK wasn't that easy to make. Of course you could run the Hidden Dens, the Ports etcetera, but bounties were rarely so rich as in these lvl4's. The risk, on the other hand, is very real: losing your vigilance for 20 seconds can mean that, all over sudden, the Port you're soloing is crawling with reds, and you'll be sent home the shortest route possible: by being podded.

Occassionally, you can strike it rich in these nullsec anomalies, by getting an NPC faction enemy, sometimes with nice drops such as BPO's or other expensive stuff. But on the average, I'd say that the risk/reward ratio is currently skewed towards highsec. Need ISK? Run lvl4 missions for a week, virtually risk free, and you're good to go.

Of course, after the anomaly nerf a while ago, many people were saying this, but doing these two missions really showed me, how easy, risk free and - frankly - boring the ISK making process in highsec really is. And how well it pays, to boot..

Eve Online: a tale of two evacuations

2011-08-27T14:21:00.000+02:00

Almost a year ago, we founded our corp, No Fixed Abode, and found ourselves a perfect place to live: we joined Saints amongst Sinners alliance and moved to B-7DFU in Querious. We had a good time there, learning much about living in nullsec, PVP, roams, gate camps.. Then things went downhill: IT alliance came under siege and fell apart in quite a spectacular fashion. We had to evacuate our holdings in Querious: everything had to be cyno'd out. Some corp members, having amassed dozens of ships, had to do their utter best to salvage whatever they could before we lost sov. Some cyno pilots flew many, many hours to get the job done.

Fast forward a few months later. We left SaS after a while because we didn't agree with the alliance's post Querious long term strategy, and we're now part of LEGIO alliance. LEGIO owns four systems in Catch, as part of the -A- ecosystem. Of course we settle in our new home, we get to fly through HED-GP, scene of famous battles and generally have a good time in nullsec once again. And then the Russians show up. The DRF takes HED-GP, and again we begin to evacuate. And again, some members have gathered dozens of ships out there! And a Rorqual which we want to save, of course. And a POS which has to be disassembled and shipped out. Again we have to work like mad, lighting cyno's and losing cyno frigs left and right.

I have learned my lesson: from now on, I am going to 'travel lightly'. Get the ships you need, but not too much. Gather the stuff you need, but transfer valuable stuff out to highsec or NPC nullsec when you have a chance. In Eve Online, the lines on the map shift every day, and no one in nullsec can be sure they will be in the same location six months from now. Having lots of posessions in nullsec can quickly become a burden..

CCP: bad luck and derp

2011-06-26T12:40:00.002+02:00

I am employed in the IT sector, and have been building and maintaining a mission critical, internet facing transaction application for about five years now. Back in the day I helped configure the first servers and today I'm still involved in maintaining and expanding the system.

Over the past five years, we've seen intense debates between us the IT guys, project management and the business. We (IT) would demand that existing bugs be fixed first, we would wave with Service Level Agreements and point out we really ought to improve stability and performance, right now. The business guys, on the other hand, would claim that new feature 'x' was crucial in getting the important (read: lucrative) customers on board; their sales guys were complaining about losing those to competitors who already had feature 'x'.

It's a good thing that our customer base is unaware of the nature of these discussions. Whatever is decided, something's got to give! If we fix existing bugs first, users have to wait for that all important new feature 'x'. But if we build 'x' first, users will have to cope with that sluggish, unstable, buggy part of the application a little while longer..

After CCP's internal newsletter 'Fearless' was leaked to the media earlier this week, one of the first things that went through my mind was: I am just so happy that none of the brainstorming we do at our company, has hit the street like this! It would make some headlines for sure, and could have grave consequences to our company. No customer likes to read how their concerns and interests (never mind the money they are paying us!) are - sometimes cynically - being balanced against someone elses', especially not if they end up on the losing side of the equation.

My point is, that behind company walls each company discusses stuff they would never ever share with their customer base - at least not in the way it was originally phrased or written, for an internal audience only. As such I'm feeling sorry for CCP that an internal piece of communication, intended to get a discussion going, got leaked at this unfortunate time.

A while ago, several of our customers grew increasingly irritated with us, when performance and stability issues manifested themselves more and more (and yes, feature 'x' got built first). Guess who got to go and visit them? Why, yours truly of course! During those sometimes tense meetings I have discovered that it's almost always possible to clear the air by being open. Acknowledge any justified complaints without presenting weak or far fetched excuses, be honest and fortright about what's going on. Of course you have to strike a careful balance, you can't disparage the company or your own colleagues - but be as honest as reasonably possible. Almost always, the relation between the company and the customer will improve as a result.

In this area, CCP has shown remarkably little competence over the past week. After 'Fearless' leaked, they could have disarmed the whole ticking time bomb within an hour by simply restating their previous promise - done only a week ago - that microtransactions would not be allowed to disrupt existing gameplay, and that this opinion piece was just to get an internal discussion going. Even an announcement of when we could expect an answer would have helped, but all we got was silence. They waited for what, more than two days? And then they published a dev blog which totally failed to address the most pressing issues. An astounding case of self inflicted PR wounds, if you ask me; I cannot for the life of me come up with a sane reason to explain CCP's behaviour in the past week. No mature company would act like this, faced with a looming public relations disaster of this magnitude.

Sometimes we tend to forget that companies like CCP and Second Life's Linden Labs are still quite young, as an organisation. I wonder how mature they really are? They grow rapidly, venture cash pours in, offices abroad are opened, staff comes and goes, and at the same time they get go cope with a large, critical and vocal user base within a few years' time. It's hardly a surprise that, under these circumstances, a derp of epic proportions occasionally happens. But, in times of turmoil and massive customer dissatisfaction they will quickly learn the lessons they need to learn - the hard way - or they will not survive. Like my father says: 'growing up sometimes hurts'.

Two minutes hate: not unique to Eve Online

2011-06-25T19:32:00.004+02:00

Before I started playing Eve Online, I was a Second Life resident. I got quite involved, too, reading blogs, forums and such. I was blogging, too, and in January 2008 I wrote this item: The Bitching Base. A few quotes:

One of the things that's really wearing me down, is the incessant bitching that can be found in certain parts of the SL userbase. Whatever Linden Labs does or doesn't, there's always complaints - usually quite vitriolic, and there's no boundaries to the ignorance or malice that will be ascribed to Linden Labs.

Either someone is complaining about ancient graphics, or someone is complaining about Windlights' greed for grapics computing power, is only about 'pretty' - or how a skin doesn't look perfect in it.

Either someone is complaining about how LL suffocates freedom in SL by instituting more and more rules, or someone else is complaining about how the lack of law enforcement or oversight enables fraudsters to steal thousands of Lindens from gullible residents.

Linden Labs always communicates too late, too early, not explicit enough, too explicit, at the wrong location, to the wrong people, didn't invite the right people, invited everyone but meeee, doesn't care about Second Life they only care about ... On and on it goes, often in the comments to blogpost at Second Life as well.

Read 'Eve Online' for 'Second Life' and 'CCP' for 'Linden Labs' and we have the exact same story in the Eve Online community, a few years later. There are really quite a few parallels between the introduction of 'Windlight' to SL and now Captains' Quarters in Eve. In both cases, the release of an improvement deemed critical by the game studio, infuriated an already dissatisfied part of the userbase. And later, in 2009 when Linden Labs changed the rules on prims and tier, again the user base exploded with rage against a developer accussed of 'not caring' and 'being after the money'- much as a part of Eve Online's userbase now says about CCP.

It's a strange phenomenon which I have now witnessed a few times: a critical, vocal user base who, provoked by a game studio's actions, goes into full rage mode. What follows is a stampede of anger, a feeding frenzy of hate and verbal violence against the developers of their game.

Like I wrote in 2008, it's perfectly possible that the complaints themselves are justified, that's not the point here. It's the seething anger which I don't get.

But I am working on that, I have a 'Dr. Phil' theory! Often the most vocal users are the ones who are the most passionate about the game. They are deeply involved, they care, it is a big part of their life. But in the end, they are just users like everybody else - and the developer can, if they so chose, do whatever they like to the users' beloved game. Users who deeply care, who are committed, are - in the end - powerless to stop a development they deem (very) objectionable. There's a lot of potential for frustration and anger there, as impotent users rail at a game studio who really can't be stopped.

Second Life survived the turmoil of 2008 and 2009 and turned 8 years old recently. According to their own claims, Linden Labs had the best quarter in their company history in 2011. It's going to be interesting to see whether CCP can survive the current onslaught of community anger.

(edited for spelling and clarity - Sered)

Eve Online: Fighting the Darkside.

2011-06-23T14:40:00.000+02:00

On June 20th, prime EU TZ, a lot of roaming gangs were going through our part of space . It was clear we couldn't do anything against them without assembling enough pilots and get them organized properly. Pretty soon we arranged what was needed, and we were ready for a fight!

We started camping one of the gates leading into our space, and soon afer, a sizeable Darkside. alliance fleet jumped in. Those of you who have followed recent Eve Online Alliance Tournaments, know that Darkside. is a very capable PVP alliance and to be honest, I wasn't all that disappointed when they returned to a neigbouring system after bouncing off our station :)

But then something weird happened: another hostile fleet - don't remember who, to be honest - met the Darkside. roaming gang in that neighbouring system, and did a bombing run on them. After taking some losses from the bombers, the Darkside. fleet returned to us and of course they wanted to exit via the gate we were camping..

At first a lonely Darkside. ship warped to the gate and started burning away from us. He got locked, webbed and scrambled soon enough and died in a hail of missiles and drone damage. One kill! Yay! As soon as he died, however, the rest of the Darkside. fleet landed on the other side of us, and our fleet commander started calling primary and secondary targets, concentrating on their logistics ships first. For those of you who don't play Eve: logistics ships are capable of repairing the damage you do to their companions. As such you really want them dead first!

Now our corp, NOFAD, has been fighting Darkside. fleets in Querious before and I remember this: it proved very difficult to break their logistics tank. Same thing happened here: assuming we all followed the FC's orders we should have been throwing impressive amounts of damage to their logistics, but the impact was almost negligble. They, on the other hand, succeeded in killing our logistics!

This was when ee started dying: the fact that we couldn't break their logistics while they successfully destroyed ours tipped the battle in their favor. After some hectic fighting, the other hostile bomber fleet arrived as well and we were forced to leave the field. At this point I was scrammed and couldn't get out fast enough, so my Drake was toast as well.

All in all I think we scored one kill, but lost about a dozen ships, perhaps a bit more - but it's hard to reconstruct, given that our alliance killboard has been offline for a while now. Painful of course, but we fought organised and prepared, like we should have. There's not much more to do than analyse the losses, learn from them and do better next time.

Incarna: full body avatars in Eve Online

2011-06-23T14:15:00.001+02:00

On June 21st, CCP released their next expansion called 'Incarna', which - after talking about it for years - allows New Eden's pod pilots to get out of their ships and stretch their legs. Full body avatars in New Eden, finally! Of course I took my women out for a walk:

To be honest, I also have snapshots of my male characters, but the women just look better! More pictures available here on Koinup.

Functionally, Incarna is quite limited at the moment; there's not much to do in your captain's quarters, besides watching the news and accessing some ship functionality. But as a first step towards a full blown virtual universe - with avatars living and fighting in space ships and stations, but also on planets - it is a very important release nonetheless.

In the hangar, ships are still spinning! Obviously it isn't the same as the old 'ship spinning' that capsuleers used to do, but for me this is sufficient: you can stand on the bridge of the captain's quarter and see your ship from all sides.

Improvements to Incarna could be made, of course, and I expect they will. Camera movement, although praised by Kirith Kodachi, is counter intuitive to me: I want the camera to turn with the avatar. As a human, you also tend to look in the direction you walk, and's weird that this does not happen in Incarna. The lighting is still missing a bit: it's too dark in my quarters, to my taste. But, I have to admit the dark atmosphere does fit - visually and mood wise - in Eve Online. Finally, CCP succeeded in delivering a vastly better tuned Captains' Quarters when compared with the previous test version on Duality: this one is actually playable on my laptop. But I suspect more improvement in this area is still needed: the performance is not what it should be, yet.

I am happy with this first step, and I look forward to the coming Incarna releases which will hopefully fix some issues but also expand the number of accesible spaces. I still want to visit that seedy space bar!

Oh - before I forget.. I am aware that there's a lot of controversy between CCP and a part of their customer base, surrounding this release. Some pilots just hate Incarna on principle; others are angry because of the way microtransactions are currently implemented (too expensive); others are raging mad about stuff said in a PDF that may or may not have come from CCP. For now, even though some of the microtransaction stuff worries me - no game changing mt please! - I'm not going to wade into that lynch mob until I have heard from CCP themselves.

New Eve Online Incarna test on Duality

2011-05-29T19:43:00.002+02:00

Duality, the still new test environment for Eve Online, is once again open for a new round of testing, and, as before, we get to try the new Incarna feature 'Captain's Quarters'. Yesterday I spent some time on it, and while I am happy to finally see more of ~~Walking in Stations~~ ~~Ambulation~~ Incarna, it doesn't look like it's finished yet.

On the first login, my avatar was awkwardly positioned with his arms wide. Walking didn't work, he more or les slid over the floor. Logging off and on fixed this!

The second session proved to be better, as my avatar worked as expected. As I walked towards the bridge, I noticed an issue with camera movement. Usually, in other virtual worlds, the camera moves with you (the avatar), meaning that if you turn to walk in a different direction, the camera point of view also automatically moves. The camera is, at all times, automatically looking in the direction where you (the avatar) is moving or facing. That doesn't currently happen on Duality! This makes walking a bit awkward, until you manually switch the camera point of view again. I wonder if this will be fixed when Incarna goes live.

Visually, the whole environment looked distinctively grainy. It was like watching an old color tv, at times! An other tester advised me to set the graphics setting for the interior environment to 'low', and this indeed fixed it. With the grainyness out of the way, I have to say the captain's quarters themselves looked better than the previous test run. There was more light, and more little details that made it look like someone was really living there: random stuff strewn here and there in the room. And, compared to the previous Duality test, the ship sizes in the hangar have been adjusted. Even a frigate is now a real presence in the ship hangar.

Very nice: the holograpic menus which appear when you click on the holographic ship models. We've seen similar menus in CCP trailers for quite some time; good to finally see them playable on Duality:

One of the other things I noticed, is that the Duality client is quite the memory hog. I am using an ATI HD Radeon 3800 series GPU on a Windows 7 machine with 2 GB RAM, and the Duality client maxed out at 995 MB RAM.. mainly because I simply didn't have more RAM available. Other testers reported seeing memory usage of up to 2 GB. I know very well that the current Duality release is not optimized yet - as CCP has repeatedly stated - but if they want to release this on June 21st, they have a lot of optimizing to do in this regard.

Finally, there's still some work to do on the avatar themselves. Especially in the neck and face, sometimes the textures show. It may have to do with a memory shortage though.

There's real progress visible on Duality today, but CCP still has a lot of work to do. Incarna should be released on June 21, which is in about three weeks.. My guess is some CCP devs will be burning the midnight oil before then!

All snapshots of this second Duality tests can be found on my Koinup page.

Eve Online Agents: now with 25% less annoyance!

2011-05-18T01:07:00.000+02:00

..and why this is actually a bad thing, in my opinion.

For the most part of my Eve 'career' (2008-2010 actually) I have been a highsec mission runner. I didn't like mining or courier stuff, nullsec was impenetrable (or so I thought) so I remained in highsec, gradually working my way up the agent standings ladder, shooting Serpentis and such. Every now and then, I'd run out of suitable missions, as my favorite Gallente agents provided me with missions against Caldari or Amarr which I rejected in order to keep a positive enough standing with them, or mining missions which I rejected on principle.

In some ways, this was a good thing. Not having a 'Damsel in distress' to run, forced me out of my comfort zone into trying new stuff such as exploration, trading, or joining corp mates for more difficult missions or complexes. New Eden is a harsh and often unpredictable, volatile universe; suck it up and try something else!

Now that agent divisions will be removed, however, pilots such as myself around 2009 can remain safely and snugly within their comfort zone, running the same missions over and over again without surprises. And reading from the earlier devblog on the subject, I gather that the payouts may even become slightly higher as well, so permanently cuddling up to that special agent of yours is looking more and more attractive. So - more predictability and less surprises, less incentive to change and evolve, and higher rewards.

In the short term, this may look like a positive development for the PVE pilots, but with one incentive to change your habits every now and then removed from the game, boredom might become a real issue, real fast.

Where I live in nullsec, there's no Sanctums, after the last nerf. We're still doing ok, but there's a real loss of income for some. And highsec just became a much more predictable, with stable sources of income guaranteed.. To be honest, I'm not sure what CCP is trying to accomplish here.

Catch

2011-05-12T09:43:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I mentioned my whereabouts here. After leaving Saints amongst Sinners alliance, NOFAD went searching for a new place to stay. Highsec is fine as a temporary residence, but nullsec is where we want to be! It took us a while and we contemplated several options and offers, before we applied for membership of LEGIO: the Legio Astartes Arcanum alliance, which is part of the -A- environment.

NOFAD has never been much of a politically aligned corporation, although it seems most members are no big fans of the NC or DC. In Querious we belonged to the IT bloc, and here in Catch we are part of the -A- ecosystem - we don't really mind. The weird coincidence is, that our old stomping grounds in Querious - B-7DFU and surroundings to which we lost access when IT fell apart - are now again blue to us!

Life in Catch is different from Querious, but we're having fun and are happy to be out of highsec again!

Eve Online: leaving SAS Alliance

2011-03-17T19:11:00.003+01:00

Our corp, No Fixed Abode, has left the Saints amongst Sinners alliance – SAS – last weekend. When we were looking for a spot in nullsec, they generously provided us with one in Querious. We were welcomed, gear was cyno’d in, guidance and instructions were given and alliance chat/TS was friendly. I felt welcome, at home! Of course the ratting was great: in a few months’ time, I made over a billion ISK in bounties, loot and salvage even though I’m only a modest solo belt ratter, occassionally doing a Sanctum or Haven with other pilots.

But I also liked the excitement of PVP, scrambling to the gate to intercept an incoming roam of reds, frantic instructions on TS and the SAFE UP! warnings in alliance chat to all miners out there, accompanied by exhortions to get in the home defense fleet, grab a pvp ship and join the battle. It was a good – and sometimes dangerous – time to be in Querious.

SAS was there as an IT renter, and when IT failscaded, we were on our own. By that time we were IT allies, not just renters anymore: just before IT bowed out they upgraded us, and for a while we held nullsec sov without paying rent. But pressure was mounting, and after some painful losses the number of pilots in alliance chat already started to drop- slowly but steadily. The miners and industrialists vanished to highsec and several of them dropped out altogether, and pretty soon there were only a few dozen stalwarts left in B-7DFU to defend the place. The downward trend was partially masked by Querious nullsec corps joining SAS, which we absorbed when IT collapsed, but it was real nonetheless.

It became obvious we couldn’t defend the entire constellation we had sov in – not with Goons, Atlas., -A- and PL knocking at our door. After some diplomatic efforts and leadership deliberations, alliance leadership announced a complete evacuation of our Querious holdings. In hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right thing to do. Of course it’s easy to say that now, but even at the time some of us thought we should try to hang on to B-7DFU a while longer. It’s a dead end system, with a truesec of -1 and a station in it, and hence easier to defend than most systems. Why not make a last stand, try to keep it as long as you can, and go down in flames if everything fails? It could have taken weeks to clear us out of B-7DFU if we’d hadn’t given up. The political situation changes so fast – you never know what could have happened in that time.

..And looking at Evemaps, it seems B-7DFU is deserted at the moment. It has plenty of sites to run - havens, sanctums - and plenty of belts with battleship class rats.. and now, on March 17th 2011, only 5 NPC kills in the last 24 hours? Is that the best you could do, C0nvicted? Really, we shouldn't have left our Querious home..

But, when alliance leadership tells you to evacuate, you evacuate, and SAS ended up spread out over the entire cluster, waiting for what’s next. And then, SAS leadership decided to go back home, to the place SAS became what it is today: the lowsec triangle in Solitude, consisting of Aeter, Sarline and Harner systems. Of course other people live there, but it was decided we’d fight them.

NOFAD consists of what is called ‘mature players’; we even discuss our teenage kids’ exploits in corp chat ;-) We have played together for several years, we are not likely to switch alliances easily. But, I have written enough about Lowsec a short while ago.. suffice to say NOFAD didn’t like being in Solitude. We would never have contemplated leaving SAS if there had been a plan to go back to nullsec in the foreseeable future, but at the time of our leaving, it was unclear whether SAS would attempt another shot at nullsec in 2011. In New Eden, planning something three quarters to a year from now, is really a long time, it’s an eternity! We didn’t fancy spending that many months of game time in lowsec. And so, over the weekend, we left SAS. We wish them well; they really were the best thing that could have happened to us and for that we are certainly grateful.

In the mean time, we are evaluating some offers we received for other nullsec places to stay. Highsec has lost it’s charm, it’s no longer a permanent residence for us. We loathe lowsec; it’s nullsec we want to be, and that’s where we’re going again.

Eve Online: Lowsec doesn't make sense

2011-03-05T14:30:00.000+01:00

As I mentioned here before, I have spent most of my Eve career in highsec empire space (2008-2010), and the last six months in nullsec. After leaving Querious, however, we (temporarily) relocated to lowsec. I have now, for the first time in my eve career, lived in lowsec for a while, and boy it sucks. It's like nullsec without the advantages of sov; it's like highsec without the advantages of Concord protection. Allow me to elaborate..

If you're looking for PVP, lowsec is not the best place to be, as shooting someone brings a hefty security standings hit - unless the other side engaged you first. And yet, if that happens - someone engages you - there's no Concord protection, at least none to speak of. These factors combined lead to a situation where the only ones freely engaging in PVP are lowsec pirates: they don't care about security standing and the lack of Concord protection suits them just fine.

If you're looking for some ratting, lowsec isn't the best place to be either. Sure, there are some battleship class rats here and there, but generally it's still just frigates and cruisers, with poor bounties. Earlier this week I even found myself looting a Civilian Shield Booster module from a cruiser sized wreck.. For shame! For crying out loud! I have seen one belt rat with a 1.1 million ISK bounty, in the past few weeks. There's quite a gap between nullsec and lowsec in this regard, even though some lowsec systems have a truesec that's quite close to some nullsec systems.

If you're looking for mining, lowsec may have something to offer - as I don't mine I can't really tell. I haven't taken a thorough survey, but as far as I can see it's mostly just the regular space rocks around here: Veldspar, Plagioclase, Scordite, Omber.. To be fair, according to Dotlan there should also be some Jaspet and Hemorphite around, but I am not sure how much and how valuable that is. According to a miner friend of mine however, in terms of isk/hour it's more profitable to mine Veldspar in highsec. Especially given the added risk of mining in lowsec. if you decide to do it, you need to have some sort of guard around: unless you have essentially cleared out the area and maintain some kind of protection, one of those dratted pirates might pop you at any moment.

The same is essentially true for running missions and complexes in lowsec - you need to be very alert, because you may be attacked at any moment. An added risk, when you could be doing pretty much the same missions in highsec?

Now that I mention them - complexes - that's another chapter. I've scanned down four, and they were either laughingly simple (frigates with a cruiser or battlecruiser as 'endboss') or impossible to do on your own (think 10+ battleships shooting at my lonely poor Drake). There didn't seem to be much of a middle ground.

So - PVP impeded by a security standings penalty but no Concord protection to compensate for that; ratting generally not impressive in terms of excitement and/or isk earned per hour; complexes questionable and seemingly a bit out of balance; mining risky and not really worth it according to those in the know.

Tell me - why would anyone want to live here? If you do, what's your motivation? What have I missed?

EVE Blog Banter #25 - Size does matter

2011-03-01T19:47:00.030+01:00

Welcome to the twenty-fifth installment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux . The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month's topic comes to us from @Tetraetc - " Tetra's EVE Blog " - who asks: " Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? Imagine a Null Sec where anyone could build outposts wherever. Would the reduction of the alliance game mechanic, and the removal of the sovereignty game mechanics (or the modifcation of it from Alliance level to Corp level for that matter) force more PVP into Null sec, or would giant power blocs like the NC still form themselves?"

I don't feel like an expert on this topic, to be honest. But having just spent six months in nullsec, it's of interest nonetheless, so here are my thoughts.

Alliances - good
Nullsec without alliances.. not going to happen. Whether the game mechanics support it or not, there will always be groups of pilots 'with an understanding', there will be blue/red lists on forums. You can't remove that from New Eden, whether you like it or not.
Alliances in itself aren't a problem, really. I have found it very useful to be in Saints amongst Sinners alliance; our corp couldn't have entered nullsec without their help. Alliances are a great way of introducing pilots to nullsec and maintain some sort of stability in a certain area of space.

Large alliances - not so good..
It's this 'certain area of space' that is becoming a problem in my opinion. The large power blocs (consisting of a multitude of alliances and corps) with powerful (super)cap fleets are often able to project power across large parts of the cluster, by utilizing cynos and jump bridges. They can be on your doorstep, kill your POS for lolz, if they so desire - and unless you have an equally powerful cap fleet, there's not much you can do but keep systems cynojammed 24x7, which is a nuisance in itself. Even without supercaps, the large power blocs have accumulated so much wealth they can keep throwing stealth bombers and conventional fleets at you, without bleeding dry anytime soon.

No viable nullsec sov for smaller entities
In other words, a smaller corp or alliance can't really claim sov somewhere, and build it's POSes or stations, unless they are aligned with a large power bloc, either as pet, renter or ally. If they tried going it alone, they would probably not survive for long, unless perhaps, the space they claim is strategically utterly unimportant or worthless from an economical point of view. But even then someone will try to collect rent, because 'region x belongs to them'.
This is where the large empty swathes of nullsec Helicity mentions, come into play. These mostly deserted systems could easily support a number of smaller alliances (read: thousands of pilots) but as long as all nullsec space is divided between the large power blocs, there's not much chance of that happening. Nullsec won't be better occupied or developed as long as these large dominating blocs exist.

Break the bloc
Alliances aren't the issue in nullsec, the power blocs (basically anything the size of IT in 2010 or with 'coalition' in it's name) are. Their very existence keeps nullsec in a stranglehold, driving smaller alliances and corps either out of nullsec or in a perpetual state of pet/renter, which isn't doing anyone any good.
And now that IT alliance is (pretty much) history, you'd have to wonder what the future of nullsec is - a handful of (non-CCP!) alliance leaders get to determine what's happpening there... ? This can not be the intention of CCP, and unless something dramatic happens, I wouldn't be surprised to see some Icelandic intervention sooner or later. For nullsec to become alive again, the large blocs must fall.

Goons, unpredictable as ever..?
On the bright side.. after Goonswarm defeated BoB a few years ago, they lost their purpose, their goal. They became complacent and stagnant, and very nearly died; their current leadership has learned some valuable lessons then. Therefore, I can't see Goonswarm fall back to just maintaining the status quo, divide space with a few other guys and act as a landlord to renters. It's just not in their best long term interest. I would suspect them to pull off some sort of stunt in the near future - if nothing else of interest happens. Think an invasion, a standings reset.. remember, you read it here first ;-)

Participants:

Eve Online: sov lost

2011-02-27T20:43:00.017+01:00

For years I rummaged around Gallente highsec, running missions and doing some smalltime trading, usually as a member of corps with the same group of pilots I’ve known for years. Finally, bored out of our skulls, a few of us created a new corp (No Fixed Abode - NOFAD) and joined Saints amongst Sinners alliance in Querious. For the first time I was part of a sovereignty holding nullsec alliance! With the plentiful beltrat bounties, the havens and the sanctums also came the CTA’s, gatecamps, roaming gangs and skirmishes. I scored my first solo pvp kill, got killed too and generally enjoyed it thoroughly. If there’s one thing I regret, is that I didn't do this earlier!

But all was not well. We were in Querious as IT renters, but, unbeknownst to us IT was on the verge of a failscade. Pretty soon it looked like IT wasn't able to repel the assaults directed at Fountain, and when IT needed more support, they upgraded us from renters to allies and gave us the entire constellation instead of just our home system B-7DFU. But for IT, it really was too late to turn the tide and it became clear we were on our own.

For a while, we were able to withstand the annoyances of Goon cloaky SB pilots (true, that wasn't the hard part) and the occassional roaming gang of reds. But when IT caved in, we soon encountered other enemies at our doorstep. We fought off Atlas. a few times - including their cap ships, I might add. We gate camped, scored kills, destroyed a number of SBU’s, but in the end we couldn’t withstand the combined pressure of –A-, Atlas. and Pandemic Legion. After we lost a few key battles, most of us evacuated our goods to either NPC nullsec or into Khanid and bade farewell to a part of New Eden that served us well.

For the past few weeks, –A-, Atlas. and PL have been duking it out in KFIE-Z, which is a dozen or so jumps away from our former home B-7DFU, and as long as PL has the ability to hotdrop –A-/Atlas. fleets in the region on a whim, I'm not sure someone else will claim sovereignty there. The -A- guys have had their butts kicked painfully, a few times, and I don’t see things changing in their favour anytime soon. In other words: unless Pandemic Legion gets curb stomped unexpectedly, it holds the keys to who’s going to have sov in our former home in Querious.

The impact of IT's once powerful cap fleets being able to move quickly throughout New Eden via their jump bridge network, has allowed them to project power across a large expanse of the cluster, more or less allowing us to find a nice and relatively safe spot under their protection. But when IT caved, the same mechanics allowed large enemy cap fleets to knock on our doors in no time. It still seems that holding sov in nullsec is a large alliances' game; you need the cap fleet and, preferrably, the backing of a large coalition if you want to establish a long term presence.

But then.. what is long term, in Eve Online nullsec? The biggest changes on the map have often happened in very short time frames, sometimes even overnight.. remember to pay that sov bill, guys!

So, as for Saints amongst Sinners: after a turbulent time in late 2010 and early 2011, we now find ourselves in a much different place. We are reorganizing in NPC nullsec, and will be preparing for a next stab at sov in nullsec. Stay tuned :)

Eve Online: weird graphics stuff

2011-02-11T09:50:00.016+01:00

After the recent Eve Online: Incursion patches, I have had weird graphics effects on this laptop, which sports a ATI Mobility Radeon HD2300 GPU. It's not an impressive gpu, not by a longshot, but it's still supported for the current Eve client.

The first nuisance is this weird darkening issue with ATI cards on Windows 7. The solution is to upgrade to the latest Catalyst stuff, which I can't because it's not available for my hardware. Just my luck :)

The other issue concerns screenshots. If you press the printscreen button while in Eve, a snapshot is saved - by default as a .bmp in the C:\Users\username\Documents\EVE\capture\Screenshots directory. After the latest patch, there's some truly strange coloring in my screenshots:

The Windows photo viewer does not show these artefacts at all, but Picasa does. Uploading to Koinup didn't work either, this resulted in a format error: "the file you provided seems to be invalid". If I copy the picture to .jpg, the strange coloring is preserved:

Luckily, I am still able to get good copies of these snapshots, by opening them in Picasa and saving a copy, this time as a bitmap again:

Perhaps this is solved too, by installing that Catalyst 10.12 package, but first I need to find a way to get that to install on my laptop!

Eve Online: developments in Querious

2011-02-08T19:00:00.010+01:00

By now, my alliance has been in the Querious region for quite a while, and we joined them there about four months ago. Much has happened since then! IT alliance is struggling to cope with a relentless assault, mounted by Goons and other enemies, and the political landscape of our part of New Eden could change at any moment. Who knows what will happen!

Only a few days ago, we expected a huge wave of reds (enemy pilots) to wash over us; we expected to die a violent death any moment. We defiantly braced for impact, preparing to 'go down in a blaze of glory', THIS IS SPARTA!, Alamo, and all that.

And then - nothing really happened. The last big battles in the region sort of petered out, and except for a few stealth bomber cowards and the incidental roaming gangs, no big red waves were spotted anywhere near our home. Perhaps it had already broken?

Our home in Querious - may it long be 'our house' indeed:

So here we are, mentally and physically prepared for battle. We don't know if the current quiet is just the quiet before the storm; perhaps the enemy is merely taking a breather before trying to wipe us out. Or perhaps they are too busy pursuing other goals, to worry about us. Things change fast out here, these days; todays' enemy may be tomorrows' ally, reds become blue and blues turn red..

For a recovering carebear like myself, this is a great time to be in Querious. You are continually challenged: deploy to here, station yourself there, patrol this system or camp that gate, get this ship fit.. There's no time to become stagnant, you have to adapt rapidly, and you don't know today what will happen tomorrow.

It's also a time where you have to decide whether you stay and fight to defend your place in nullsec, or if you perhaps sneak out, tail firmly tucked between your legs, to hide out in highsec.. Even though this is just 'an internet spaceship game', it does feel like a real test of character vis à vis your corp and alliance mates. Obviously, I am staying, even though my PVP skills aren't that great yet.

For now, we'll be alert and ready, waiting for that red wave. It may yet come..

Eve Online: being beaten is a steep learning curve

2010-12-21T23:38:00.010+01:00

What I called "the inevitable" here happened today: I lost my drake battlecruiser. Here's how.

Earlier this evening, while I was doing some light ratting, one of our scouts reported an incoming fleet from Darkside. alliance, about 30 pilots strong. Now for a casual roaming gang, that's a bit too big.. They briefly touched on our gate, one pilot even jumped in, but the rest went on their merry way, apparently to C3N where IT has recently had their hands full. Our FC decided we should pursue, after all if these 30 men get into C3N, IT will be on hand to squash them! So the ten of us pursued.

At the C3N gate, we actually overtook one of the Darkside. guys, and before the FC's command to leave him alone and jump into C3N got through to me, I had already fired a missile at him. At that moment my fleet jumped, and a Darkside. fleet landed on the gate.. Suddenly I was surrounded by lots of ill tempered Russian neutrals! Because I had just fired a missile at a neutral, the gate wouldn't let me jump (aggro rules you must learn, young padawan) and I had to warp away as quick as I could - to any point but here, really - to survive. I was fast enough, and got out! My alliance mates however were not so lucky. At the other side of the gate, the enemy made short work of them.. IT alliance hadn't been aware soon enough of the skirmish that was about to begin, and IT's reinforcements were too late to prevent defeat. So, most of our first wave of responders made their way to our home system automatically, waking up in a fresh clone and an insurance note in their inbox after being podded in C3N! I briefly jumped back to the gate to assist a fleet mate, but warped out again when he told me he was lost anyway. Again I survived, just because I was fast enough.

A little while later, I traveled home, alone and unharmed, when the enemy overtook me and jumped into our home system. I waited for instructions from my FC, and finally made my way back in, warping straight to the battlefield, which was centered around one of our carriers - which should of course have been docked up a long time ago, given that the enemy was already in system.. From this point on, things went downhill fast. The Darkside. fleet had better logistiscs, repping their own pilots faster as we could, and we were unable to hold the field, much less defeat them. Slowly we continued to bleed ships (including my Drake), until after a while an IT alliance fleet came in to assist. Upon their arrival, Darkside. disengaged, left our home system and we were left to contemplate what had just happened.

For the first time, it seems we were a specific target for a well known pvp outfit. Helping IT alliance out does make you known here and there, apparently :) Personally, I think the whole initial manoeuver was a trap; we were lured out into the pursuit, and the enemy made sure the first responders were out of system and neutralized before entering our home system. At the same time, the lonely Darkside. pilot who went in our home system remained there, scouting out a juicy target - the Carrier - for his buddies to land on when they arrived. A sound strategy, executed with a balanced fleet - enough logistics - and good discipline. Did we learn a lesson tonight? You bet we have :-)

By the way - at least of the pilots involved in the Darkside. fleet appears in this Alliance Tournament movie: Darkside. vs RAZOR, so we were indeed confronted with some very experienced pvp pilots here..

Fleet warp

2010-12-20T22:40:00.003+01:00

Eve Online: my son hates goons

2010-12-19T22:35:00.009+01:00

Earlier this week we got word that IT alliance requested our assistance, for an operation this sunday afternoon. As we gathered today, we heard rumors about a battle being fought somewhere else; we were probably going to be bridged in to help IT.

When he noticed what was happening, my son, currently nine years of age, got very excited: he's been eager to see some large scale fleet battle. He has developed a bit of a habit: whenever we play Eve Online together, he gets us a bottle of coke and two glasses, and then sits next to me to watch. And even though he doesn't speak English, he grabs one of my earbuds to listen in on TeamSpeak :)

Our fleet was supposed to leave around 18.00; I logged in some ten minutes before that. There was a small delay, and then another one, and in the end we left around 18.30. It was a glorious sight, as around 40 of my fellow pilots warped through Querious space together! Or, against the backdrop of a barren planet, where we briefly held:

Soon, we entered the target system, and joined the IT forces already there at a nearby Player Owned Station (POS). As more and more ships warped in, it got a bit crowded. And when the supercarriers arrived - including a Minmatar Hel and a buch of Gallente Nyxes, it got really impressive! My son however wasn't around to watch that anymore, as by now the operation had been going on for over an hour and there wasn't really happening much.. he had gotten bored and went away. I promised however to call him when the enemy would arrive.

Nothing continued to happen for a long time, however, while my son periodically, and with growing irritation, inquired as to if the enemy (GoonFleet alliance) had arrived yet. They never showed up; either too busy elsewhere or unwilling to face an IT fleet this size and strenght. We were also not bridged out to another battle as we originally thought, and so, after more than three hours, we were dismissed. Lady Scarlett spoke some kind words of appreciation, the fleet disbanded, and a bunch of us made our way home.. I was asked to FC that leg of our trip, but given what was happening at home - more on that below - and that I have no experience, I declined.. would have been a nice opportunity to try it out!

By now, my son was in tears, sobbing to his mother about the stupid Goonfleet enemy that didn't show up, the stupid hour he lost watching our fleet do conga lines in a pos, the stupid maker of Eve Online, why he'd even bothered to grab coke and glasses, my stupid computer which he was going to destroy with a large axe he wanted to buy first thing tomorrow morning.. He was sad and angry. He had been looking forward todoing a large fleet battle together with his dad, and nothing had happened! I really had to spend some time to explain what we did: we secured an important asset for IT alliance, and we'll get a nice reward. Some battles are not won by shooting, but simply by showing up and guarding your assets! He accepted the explanation, but still spoke harsh words of condemnation for the Goons that didn't show up.

So there you have it, Goons. You ruined my son's sunday evening, and probably his opinion of the entire game, simply by not showing up for a fight tonight. He really has it in for you now.. you have made a fierce enemy out of him. Just wait until he's old enough to go to nullsec ;-)

Eve Online: solo versus social and the joys of pvp

2010-12-13T19:23:00.014+01:00

(It has become a bit of a long post, but I wanted to get some thoughts out on highsec, nullsec (0.0) and how I experience the transition from the former to the latter. For those unfamiliar with Eve Online system security statuses: here's a primer!)

Until recently, I was a typical highsec carebear – with one exception: I didn’t mine unless I really had to. All the fuss about nullsec alliance warfare was interesting but didn’t mean anything to me, really. PVP was just a nuisance, something those antisocial highsec griefers do to defenseless pve oriented carebears such as myself. And I considered Eve Online to be a social game, as it is an open sandbox universe with virtually limitless options, in terms of careers, development and things to do and achieve. Staying in nullsec for an extended period of time has altered some of these long held convictions, and reinforced others.

Expect the unexpected
Flying in nullsec adds a whole new level of depth to New Eden. In highsec, there’s pretty much nothing unexpected that will happen to you, if you stay in the right places and do the right things.. For instance running level 4 missions in Everyshore pretty much guarantees a modest but steady income of ISK without much surprises. In nullsec however, even in places considered relatively safe, there is always an awareness that anything might happen, at any time, in any place. A roaming gang of reds may attempt a surprise attack on your system; a lonely but very dangerous enemy stealth bomber suddenly appears out of nowhere and attacks; the large alliance you rent space from may urgently request your presence on a nearby battlefield, in five minutes thankyouverymuch. You need to be ever alert, ready to move, defend or attack. And making ISK isn’t a goal in itself, necessarily, but a tool to fund the ships and goods necessary for defense.

PVP, not so bad after all
This means my attitude towards PVP has changed as well. I still maintain that PVP between seasoned PVP characters and highsec carebears is too much of an uneven fight, but in nullsec it’s a very different game: it’s about protecting your assets. I have, to my own surprise, come to enjoy the clashes with roaming gangs and solo pvp pilots! These engagements can be entertaining and exciting, sometimes leading to extended fighting and long term feuds. So far I have been lucky only to have scored kills; I haven’t suffered a loss yet. I’m sure that moment will come – it’s inevitable – but for now my Querious stats are fine. And with the steady and much larger amount of ISK now flowing into my wallet, losing a ship isn’t that much of a problem anymore either.
One of the more fascinating things about fleet engagements and nullsec pvp in general, is the wealth of options and strategies that are available to the pilots. So many different ship types and ships, each with their own specific strengths and weaknesses, with innumerable ways to fit and use them! The level of detail and expertise that can be achieved continues to amaze me, and far outstrips anything highsec mission runners are used to.

Solo versus social
On the ‘social’ side, I must say nullsec beats highsec too. In highsec, most pilots work solo, incidentally joining forces for a mining op or a few rounds of lvl4’s. CCP is aware of this, and has been trying - for years - to get the highsec pilots to work together. With Incursion, CCP is even resorting to full blown Sansha invasions, in order to achieve this goal.
In nullsec, cooperation is the norm, rather than the exception. Some activities (ratting, easy complexes) can be done solo, but even mining often requires the presence of combat ships in order to ward off ‘belt rats’, the non player driven (NPC) enemies that spawn in asteroid belts from time to time. And higher level complexes are usually done in teams as well: much more effective and the rewards get spread over a larger number of pilots. Finally, given the constant threat of external violence, nullsec pilots are generaly forced to work together much more, in terms of exchanging intelligence, countering threats or achieving offensive goals.

Take fleets, for instance. In recent months, I have experieced two types of fleets. On the one hand, there’s the semi organized gathering of solo pilots who happen to share a chat channel. This is the type of fleets that highseccers are wont to create – chaotic, made up of whatever flies and whatever each individual likes. On the other hand, there’s the organized group of pilots, each with their own specific fleet role and orders, flying the specific ship types to match those roles, lead by an FC who knows his business (if you’re lucky of course). The first type of fleet is going to be massacred if they face a better trained enemy – no doubt about it. The second one however stands a chance against any adversary: in Eve Online, outnumbered but better organized and fc’d fleets have slaughtered numerical superior forces time and time again. As for our own alliance: we were definitely of the first, likely-to-get-massacred type not too long ago. We are currently of the second type, and we’re getting better at what we do with each engagement, and with passing week. And I'm enjoying each minute of it!

Eve Online: Conga!

2010-12-13T17:57:00.002+01:00

Last night we were called for a defensive operation in a nearby solar system. We were waiting for the enemy, but - they didn't show up. Finally, bored, our pilots lined up for a conga line in space.. when the first man started to 'approach' the last man, the circle was closed, and we rotated in space for several minutes like this :)

Eve Online: enemies defeated

2010-12-06T08:07:00.016+01:00

One evening last week, upon returning from a meeting, I heard chatter erupting from my laptop earphone - a sure sign something was going on on TeamSpeak. Usually my alliance or corp mates leisurely talk about happenings in New Eden, but now there was a lot of excitement and urgency in the voices emanating from TS.

Instead of going to bed, I quickly logged in and switched my Drake Battlecruiser to the requested PVP alliance fit. Our fleet appeared to have gathered at an entry gate to our solar system so I swiftly headed over and positioned myself for a fight.

And a fight is what we got! The first enemy ship to jump in was a Broadsword; a heavy interdictor capable of warp scrambling other ships, preventing them to warp away. We tried to put as much damage on him as possible, but his tank held and soon he trapped several of our ships - amongst them one of our carriers, and my Drake. Our FC ordered a retreat to the station as other enemies arrived on the field. Unable to warp out I burned away from the Broadsword as fast as I could; I started taking damage from other incoming enemy ships and my shield started falling, slowly but steadily. With my shields 50% down, I got out of the Broadswords' warp scrambling range and without hesitation I warped to safety. The carrier got out as well, but a few other ships were lost.

At that moment, with our fleet in disarray and having lost several ships, I wasn't quite sure how to proceed. Our FC, however, did! He rallied the troops, explained the new strategy, quickly had several pilots switch into ships needed to execute the strategy - and as soon as we could we all warped back to the gate.

This time, the roles were reversed. As the correct primary and secondary targets were called and destroyed, the enemy swiftly lost most of their fleet: their destroyed wrecks (and bodies..) littered the area around the gate. I got two of the kill mails, meaning I delivered the final blow that destroyed the ship; the Broadsword and a Hurricane battlecruiser are formally my kills.

With the last enemy either destroyed or chased out of our space, we stood down battlecomms - and celebrated a nice victory. A few weeks ago this enemy might have picked us apart, but no more.

Yet, in Eve Online's New Eden, a battle is only rarely just that - a single battle. Defeat often leads to rancor, hatred and a thirst for vengeance, and so most of the gang we destroyed last week, returned yesterday evening for another brawl. We knew they were coming, and when their first pilot entered our system, he was attacked from all sides. Missiles, lasers and drones hammered his Myrmidon battlecruiser and he jumped out again as fast as he could - unfortunately we were too late to stop him from exiting. After some deliberation and intelligence work, the fleet followed him on the way out; a few jumps from our home system, our fleet overtook the enemy and once again all of their ships were destroyed - again with minimal losses on our side. Unfortunately I missed that fight: I missed the FC's command to pursue, and by the time I got near the battlefield, it was already over. Next time..

Eve Online: Querious II

2010-11-12T22:52:00.007+01:00

Just a quick note on my stay in Querious. This space is generally held by IT alliance and we're just one of the IT allies in the region. Well, allies.. I think the proper name is 'renter' or 'pet', not sure which one is applicable to us.

We've learned a lot in recent weeks. The alliance has begun to operate in organized fleets, with proper fc'ing. We have 'eyes' in the systems leading to our home system; we have intel on what's coming our way. If a roaming gang of enemies comes in, we try to have the necessary ships for the engagement we're about to have - based on incoming ships types of course. Usually it works out, we have most ship types ready and available. We are getting better at killing neutrals (my first solo kill!) or reds who enter our space uninvited. All in all, it's a very interesting process to witness, as a ragtag group of semi carebears adjusts to nullsec and tries to become an organized and effective unit.

Just a few days ago we had a roaming gang of enemies enter our home system. We had intel on them way before they got to us: we were prepared and ready. At the gate, we had a standoff, with both parties keeping their distance, about 120 kilometers. In the 10 minute engagement they killed http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftwo of us: one pilot who ignored the FC's order to maintain formation and went at it alone - he died quickly. The second one got caught in a bubble went up just after he had hit warp, so there was no way to prevent him getting caught and killed. In return we killed one of their stealth bombers, and that's when they decided to leave. We weren't an easy prey anymore..

I jumpcloned back to highsec earlier this week: boring. Glad I made the move to nullsec! I'm sure I'm going to regret it one day, when we get serious opposition or a full blown enemy fleet instead of these small roaming gangs and all my ships get blown to smithereens, but until that day - I'm not going back to highsec. And you shouldn't, too :)

Eve Online: Querious

2010-10-30T22:10:00.009+02:00

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!

2010-10-22T10:35:00.004+02:00

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

2010-10-20T20:20:00.016+02:00

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..

2010-10-07T23:22:00.006+02:00

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.

Eve Online: becoming more social

2010-09-30T19:17:00.010+02:00

It must be about four years ago, that I first set foot in Second Life, to see for myself why IBM was making such a fuss about it. And while I have (obviously) enjoyed it, there was one thing bothering me: I didn't enjoy being in SL if I didn't have a clear goal. I need something to do, to see, to take care of.

Same with Twinity, which I first entered in early 2008. It is developing nicely, shaping up to be a nice social virtual world, but I need something to do. Chatting with Monica is always a good reason to be in Twinity, as are the mirrored cities and places. Those, and the community as a whole, keep me engaged.

I enjoy Eve Online because there's always something to do, but it's not a social world. It's a scifi themed sandbox universe, aimed at player versus player combat, player versus environment, industry, market manipulation. Large scale combat and politics between large player driven alliances color the eve online news. Yet the social connections are there, too; players meet in corporate and alliance chat channels or even in the local solar systems' channel. These connections are often quite meaningful, as corporations often have a core of seasoned players who've known each other for years.

But now space is about to become much more social, now that Incarna (also known as 'ambulation' and 'walking in stations' is finally announced for Eve Online's summer of 2011 expansion.

Finally, real avatars will be able to meet at a bar in a station and talk things over, do some games - it's not yet known what will be available in Incarna's initial release, but you get the idea. Especially in highsec trading hubs, I expect the social aspect of Eve Online to become more important.

A beautiful universe, with plenty to do and countless choices available - with meaningful, immersive, social structures in place. What's not to like!

Twinity update

2010-08-22T19:44:00.004+02:00

At the Koinup blog, I have published a new update on Twinity. It's about real estate, shopping and gambling, as Twinity's first casino opened. Interesting times in the mirror world! Read about it here: Twinity: developing, shopping, gambling...

Eve Online: perspective is lagging

2010-08-13T18:45:00.014+02:00

Much noise has been made, recently, over Eve Online and the way CCP deals with it's flagship product. One of the focal points of the emo rage directed at CCP, is the lag experienced in large fleet battles, which occur mostly in lowsec or nullsec space. This lag is a true issue as these kind of massive battles rank high amongst the features which make Eve Online an unique environment. Yet, what I'd like to point out, is that it's an issue that's not affecting everyone.

In my highsec industrialist corporation, I have not heard one single complaint about lag. It's simply not an issue we are confronted with, in our day to day gameplay - unless we visit Jita, which I try to avoid anyway. Part of our corp in in wormhole space, which is quiet by nature; some are mining in Gallente or Amarr space, where lag doesn't occur much either.

On page 14 of the recent Quarterly Economic Newsletter, we gather that most Eve Online pilots reside in highsec - over 88% actually. It is my guess that many of these players rarely, if ever, are affected by the much decried lag issues.

CCP should fix the lag issue (and they are working on it), as it is hurting one of their most important assets in terms of gameplay, and because it yields a lot of negative publicity at the moment. But in all the noise and bile directed at CCP, it wouldn't hurt to remind ourselves that for the majority of Eve pilots, fleet battle lag may not be 'the most pressing issue' after all.

Oh and while I'm on it: if you're technically inclined, do yourself a favor and read this Gamasutra article on sharding and the Eve Online infrastructure. A good read!

Eve Online: 500 pilots in local

2010-08-06T11:55:00.020+02:00

Yesterday evening, CCP and more than 500 volunteers executed another mass test on the Eve Online test server Singularity. Participating was easy this time as no client patch was needed, just a copy of the current Eve Online client.

The test involved several phases, all in the Syndicate region. First, we gathered at the F6 jumpgate in MHC where the X and W fleets, each consisting of about 240 pilots, were formed; we jumped a few times, ending up in X-B, where we up a gatecamp. Finally, we had a few rounds of fleet battle. Between the test phases, CCP staff were busy tuning the system, testing certain fixes or settings, and evaluating the results as we went.

During the first mass test a few months ago, we couldn't even gather at the gate before crashing due to lag, but this time that went much better, although my corpmates reported an increase in lag upon the arrival of the Ragnarok.

Jumping to the next system with hundreds of pilots still yielded hilarious results, with pilots being stuck for minutes before they could jump. I, for instance, got a 2.38 mins waiting time warning from traffic control. And when we finally jumped, many ended up without anything on grid - or even completely off grid. Effectively I was unable to participate in any activity for about five minutes. It's frustrating to read the fleet chat about the battle raging around you, when all you see is a nice default starfield background..

Using drones in the fleet battles seemed to have a large negative impact as far as I'm concerned. Without drones but with 500+ pilots in system, I was able to participate in the fleet battle, even firing some shots at CCP staff member CCP Atlas. Unsurprisingly, the CCP's are among the hottest targets in fleet, and CCP Atlas quickly got relieved of his Abaddon battleship :)

A few minutes later we were all cleared to release and use drones, and that's when the lag really hit. Modules wouldn't cycle, guns wouldn't fire anymore, and for quite some time launching and using drones was virtually impossible too. By this time however, the number of pilots in local had dropped considerably - it was past midnight in Europe and many pilots got killed - so you would expect lag to lessen. But with drones out, it got significantly worse.

And then, suddenly, I got hit by something massive: I lost shields, armor and hull in one volley. Insurance email arrived, informing me that my Dominix had, unfortunately, been destroyed.. yet I still had my ship and modules on screen. The shields even started repairing themselves! Obviously some things were way out of sync by that time. Time to logoff and go to bed!

One thing I learned yesterday, is that large scale fleet battle is a unique activity in Eve Online, with it's own rules and language. Many volunteers - including me - were not that familiar with the ins and outs, leading to a lot of confusion, undisciplined behaviour (keep firing when the FC tells to CEASE &^%% FIR for instance) and general mayhem. It was a real chaos at times! But, a nice fleet battle practice run for pilots like me.

It will be interesting to see what CCP gets out of this test. I think they are making progress - and they really need to - so hopefully we'll see some improvements on Tranquility in the near future.

OpenSim: the kids love it

2010-07-31T00:31:00.010+02:00

Back in September 2007, I installed my first OpenSim instance, and my kids - and their nieces - have been experimenting with it on and off ever since. With the release of OpenSim 0.7, I decided to upgrade my installation, and keep it online for a while. Frankly, it was the kids who triggered that: they asked me to start 'our Second Life' again because they wanted to play.

And playing they did! For the past two days, they have been hard at work on a new camping site - probably inspired by the summer vacation season - and I am, once again, impressed with what they've made. It has everything: a reception, a terrace, shop, sanitary facilities and cabins to stay in. The cabins are decorated to each owners' taste, too.

What really amazed me, is the quality of work these kids deliver, without any training. Sure, last year I tought them the basics, such as creating shapes from prims, linking them and using textures, but once they understood how that worked, they pretty much did the rest themselves. Today I got them started on using scripts, and that is again giving them a whole new area to play with. The first really usable chairs are appearing here and there, and my daughter is working on a revolving door! Of course they didn't write these scripts, they downloaded them from wikis, blogs and such. But, I am eager to see whether they'll get an interest in scripting in general.

Obviously, these are kids. There's plenty room for improvement in their work; especially aligning prims is sometimes hard to do. Frankly they often aren't that concerned when prim alignment is a bit off; for their play purpose it's usually good enough. Although my daughter deleted her entire shop today, as she wasn't satisfied with it anymore due to the walls and floors being aligned improperly!

I have never really worked with sculpted prims, and I'm not sure those render well in OpenSim - I think they do but I'm not sure. But after scripts, sculpties is probably the next thing I'll point them to. I wouldn't be surprised if they become more proficient with them than I was!

Many of my OpenSim snapshots at Koinup feature work created by this next generation of virtual world users. Take a look! OpenSim @ Koinup

Twinity: Miami

2010-07-29T22:26:00.006+02:00

Today Metaversum presented me with the opportunity to visit their virtual rendering of Miami Beach in Twinity, in advance of tomorrow's official opening. Of course I accepted, and I must say I'm pretty impressed with what they've achieved. More on my visit to Miami Beach is at the Koinup blog, where I am the resident Twinity blogger. Of course I have a lot of screenshots, also to be found @ Koinup!

Eve Online: nullsec adventures

2010-07-28T01:18:00.007+02:00

As mentioned on this blog before, I am currently an alliance diplomat for the MPA alliance in Eve Online. When we were offered a chance to travel to nullsec - the dangerous, lawless, but most rewarding space in Eve Online's New Eden universe - some of our corporation took it with both hands. Most of our corporation and alliance members reside in the more safe highsec areas; some live in wormhole space, but we rarely venture into nullsec. Yet for many of New Eden's pilots, nullsec is the place to be. This is where the big space holding alliances reign, where epic battles involving hundreds or even thousands of players are being fought, where campaigns lasting weeks or months are being executed. It's also the place where each and every move is potentially dangerous: there is no safety in nullsec. Theoretically the same goes for highsec and lowsec (empire space) but still, nullsec is a different story.

So after all diplomatic hurdles had been taken care of (a process which went more smoothly than I could hope for) some of us embarked on the long trip to a hospitable system in Providence.

This region had just been conquered by two alliances, Ushra'khan and Atlas Alliance, who defeated the previous owners CVA and their holder alliances in a campaign that lasted for several weeks. For many neutral pilots, CVA's loss was bad news, as CVA and their holders regularly allowed these neutral outsiders to reside in their space. The new owners, however, quickly restored some of CVA's hospitality. Ushra'khan (ticker: UK) themselves declared they were adopting a 'Not Red, Don't Shoot' policy (NRDS), essentially allowing neutrals into UK space, and some of their allies followed suit. It was this policy that allowed us to go there, and enjoy the thrills and rewards of nullsec.

From the start, however, it was clear that Providence was still in a lot of turmoil. Hostile fleets roamed the systems and blocked routes, even in Ushra'khan space; it seemed UK wasn't able or willing to enforce their 'NRDS' policy. We resided in another system, but suffered a lot from these roaming gangs of hostiles, and we lost several ships. Pretty soon, we started to feel the financial pain of these losses, and it started to look like the rewards were not enough to cover the costs anymore. So, we contemplated a retreat from Providence back to highsec, and wait for another - perhaps better - shot at nullsec space later.

While we were discussing this, news broke that the Ushra'khan alliance had been dealt a deadly blow. An undercover agent infiltrated Ushra'khan, slowly working his way up through the alliances' hierarchy; after one year of patient roleplaying and plotting, he rose to such a powerful administrative position he was able to dismantle the alliance from within, simply by ejecting most member corporations from the alliance - and steal a lot of stuff in the process, too. As this agent is now the only one left in the Ushra'khan alliance with any power - he removed all others- there's no way UK can be restored to it's previous incarnation. Whether you like Ushra'khan or not: you have to admire that kind of dedication! It's stuff like this that makes Eve Online unique, in my opinion.

As it is now, Ushra'khan still does exist, but it's no longer a meaningful entity. The corporations who used to make up Ushra'khan membership are still active and of course keep defending their space, but obviously they suffered a severe blow to morale and organization. As was to be expected, hostile alliances like Hydra Reloaded and Razor alliance are now trying to profit off the confusion, to gain sovereignty over parts of space currently owned by former Ushra'khan members. In other words: more battle, more turmoil.

Luckily I succeeded in getting my clone and most important gear (Drake battlecruiser, T2 drones, loot and some ammo) out of Providence, earlier today; it is now safe in highsec empire space. We will continue to watch the situation, which is highly interesting in itself. But it probably means we'll have to look for another, preferrably more peaceful part of nullsec to continue our exploration. A nice task for a diplomat..

Twinity update

2010-07-28T00:45:00.003+02:00

Again, it's time for a Twinity update. Upon returning from holidays, I must say Twinity is developing rather fast these days. Concurrency numbers are clearly up, and the welcome areas have daily visitor numbers unheard of a few months ago. More on that in my Koinup blog entry: Twinity: busy in here.

Overdue

2010-06-13T18:40:00.005+02:00

I've been neglecting this blog for far too long! Much has happened between the end of april and today. We've had some turbulent times in real life, which has taken a toll on gaming time. Yet, in those few hours I've had, significant stuff has happened.

As for Eve Online, I have become an alliance diplomat. Our alliance, MPA, has an invitation to join a few old friends in nullsec, which is great! But getting there is not as easy as flying through highsec, obviously; we need to work our way through several systems occupied by other alliances. So, our diplomatic team is assessing routes and neighbours, determining the best routes. The good news is: we need to cross Ushra'khan space, and UK has just declared a 'NRDS' policy: Not Red, Don't Shoot. This means that only enemies of UK will be shot at; others may freely pass (most of nullsec is 'NBSI': Not Blue, Shoot It, in which case only known friends are safe). This means at least one diplomatic obstacle removed, and we're working on the others.

Twinity is on the move. Lots of good stuff happening there, and I have written about that on the Koinup blog. Check it out, and give Twinity a try if you're not a member yet; the world can use the extra members.

Second Life is a bit of an enigma at the moment. Now that Linden labs is offering prefab houses to premium members, the rental market it taking a bit of a beating and my rentals are barely paying for themselves at the moment. Of course I'm not going to pull out, but a few extra renters would be welcome. Occupancy is too low at the moment!

Eve Online: Planetary Interaction

2010-04-23T09:22:00.020+02:00

Yesterday evening, our alliance spent some time on the Eve Online test system Singularity to explore the upcoming feature Planetary Interaction. When the next Eve expansion, Tyrannis, is released in a few weeks time, planets will become an exploitable resource, containing all sorts of ore and raw materials, to be used in building goods. It's not yet clear what those goods will be, but stuff like POS fuel and skill books have been mentioned. Here's a short summary of what we learned yesterday.

Whenever you are in a solar system, you can rightclick on the planets in your overview and click 'view in planet mode'. This will bring up a new menu, looking like the picture here above. It has two areas: 'manage' and 'scan'. You start with scanning, obviously, as you'll want to place your extractors where the resources are.

This first scan attempt, on a planet in Halle, didn't show much results; the planet surface doesn't show obvious locations where mineable resources might be found, even though the white bars indicate the resources should really be there somewhere.

A second scan attempt, in Uphene, yielded some results: the green areas contain deposits of heavy metals, so that's where I established my base. Here's the main control tower and two extractors.

These are placed from the 'manage' part of the Planet menu. You'll need to have control towers in your cargo hold, and the type should suit the planet you're exploring. There's different control towers for planetary surfaces: water, ice, lava, gaseous, temperate etcetera. I had the right type in my cargo hold, so I opened the Control Towers, and selected 'lava control tower'. Here's where it all gets a bit counterintuitive: the Control Tower menu now closes itself, and you have to click on a place on the planet to actually place the tower. After you've done that, you need to click 'submit' which is at the bottom of the planet menu, and sometimes obscured by the chat window!

Placing the extractors works the same way - but you don't have to have them in the cargo hold. Supposedly they are available in the command tower. The extractors do the actual digging, and you'll want those on the most rewarding locations on the planet. You have, again, to open the relevant part of the Planet menu, and select the type of extractor suitable for the stuff you want to extract:

Here's a closer view of my lava base. On Singularity, zooming in too much on a base results in an awful lot of lag, even when you're alone in a system.

After you have placed a control tower and some extractors, you need to link them; the control tower needs to provide the extractors with energy and computing power. Here I'm establishing a link between my main control tower and a new processing plant. Oh - don't forget to click 'submit' after every step or it won't work.

Of course, the extractors need to be instructed to do the actual extracting. If you doubleclick on an extractor, a menu appears:

The left icon with the arrow pointing down is the one used to start surveying for the extractable planet goo. The survey results can be selected for extracting.

After you've established links, you can use those to route the extracted materials to other parts of the facility, for instance the processor plant, the storage facility or the spaceport. The blue lines indicate links (which also feed energy from the control tower to the other facilities), the red lines indicate routes.

This is one of the extractors, it has already dug up some useful ore for me.

Here's where we stopped yesterday. Of course, the next steps are routing the extracted ores to a processing plant to create goods for sale, and have the space port send those goods off to space where you can retrieve them. When time allows, I hope to explore those areas too.

Eve Online : Planets

2010-04-13T21:31:00.007+02:00

With the release of the Dominion expansion in 2009, the planets of New Eden got a facelift. The next expansion, Tyrannis (eta may 2010) will turn them into valuable sources of raw materials, to be mined from space. And the new game Dust 514 will bring mercenaries to their surface, probably to fight over the installations and resources belonging to Eve pilots. For now I'll contend myself with a few snapshots every now and then.

Idly drifting near a planets' ring. The planet casts a shadow over the thin rings; you can even see the stars through them.

Come Tyrannis, the next Eve Online expansion, this planet may become a rich resource for the miners of New Eden. And come Dust 514, CCP's new game set in the same universe, it may even become the scene of fierce fights between Dust 514 mercenaries. But today, seen from space, it just looks inhospitable and cold.

This planet made me think of our own planet Mars. It probably doesn't have an atmosphere; it looks like it's been dead for a long while.

Eve Online: what's in my hangar

2010-04-12T11:46:00.009+02:00

Eve Online pilots sometimes spend a lot of time to find the precise ship and fitting they need for a certain job, and as there are a lot of different jobs, most pilots tend to have a lot of ships. So Rixx Javix at Eveoaganda asks: what ships are in your hangar, and how are they named?

Looking around in my hangar I see a nice stack of Gallente ships: Incursus frigate (for doing small incursions into lowsec), a Helios covops (same), a Catalyst Destroyer used for running plexes, a Vexor cruiser (same), a Brutix battlecruiser for low level missions, and two battleships: the Dominix droneboat and the Megathron. And an Iteron mark III. Oh and the Zephyr of course! I once bought a Drake but it got destroyed at a lowsec gatecamp and I didn't buy a new one - yet.

My ships are all named after Dutch WWII era naval ships, such as the Flores and Soemba, who earned the nickname 'Terrible Twins from the British:

"Another British officer said: "These Dutchmen have the right fighting spirit. Nothing will stop them, and they won't cease firing. The only rest they had during the nights of unceasing bombardments was when they ran out of ammunition, and then they returned, reshelled and refuelled, and were off again. They will take on anything. [...] We could not make out where the firing came from until someone said 'It 's those damned Dutchmen again; you can't keep them out of anything!' And he was right."

I have attempted to find fitting names for each ship, meaning the Iteron is named after a freighter, the Dominix after one of our primitive aircraft carriers, the Incursus after a frigate etcetera. I like a sense of history and think such a naming scheme fits Eve Online just fine.

Twinity: skating!

2010-03-30T20:47:00.006+02:00

Last week, Twinizens enjoyed the usage of an in world vehicle for the very first time, with the introduction of the skateboard. I've had a lot of fun with it already! It's way easier to explore cities and the potential for competetive fun is obvious.

For more on the Twinity skateboard, see my Koinup blog items: Twinity: Skateboard fun and Skateboarding through Twinity London.

Also fun to do: creating movies in Twinity using the Wegame utility, which is actually quite easy. This is one of the trial runs:

<a href="http://www.koinup.com/SeredWoollahra/work/243522/">Twinity Skateboarding: Museuminsel ...</a> - a <a href="http://www.koinup.com/in-twinity/on-videos/">Twinity Machinima</a> by <a href="http://www.koinup.com/SeredWoollahra/">SeredWoollahra</a> on <a href="http://www.koinup.com">Koinup</a>

My Twinity Machinima - together with lots of others, often better than mine - can be found on the Twinity Koinup machinima page. Do pay a visit!

Eve Online: mass testing on Sisi

2010-03-21T18:56:00.012+01:00

Ever since the Dominion expansion hit Eve Online, lag issues have been playing up. Especially during large fleet battles, the kind of battles that tend to take place in nullsec space between the larger space holding alliances, lag has been a real blight, even becoming a battle deciding factor at times. I am not living in nullsec space and not a member of such an alliance; in other words, I have never been in a large fleet battle, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to participate in one! Large scale nullsec warfare is completely different from my usual gameplay, as it includes ships and technology rarely (if ever) seen in highsec and employs radically different tactics. Stuff I'd like to see and experience!

Mass Test
So how does a lowly mission runner and parttime trader work his way into a massive fleet fight between the capital ships of New Eden? Simple, I participated in the March 20th mass test on Singularity, Eve Online's test environment! CCP is working hard to fix the lag issue infecting the currently deployed code, and they wanted to test some of the possible fixes on the test system Singularity (Sisi) first. So, yesterday evening, several hundreds of pilots logged on to Sisi instead of Tranquility (the 'normal' Eve Online game environment) in order to help CCP and, ultimately, themselves. For me it was not only a matter of helping, but also a chance to participate in such a fleet and see the cap ships in action.

Moveme
After logging in and fitting my Megathron battleship, I found myself a long way from where the test would be executed. On Singularity, there's an easy solution to that: I logged on to the in game Moveme channel, and got transported, in an instant, to a station in the FD-MLJ system in the Syndicate region. The testing was supposed to take place in the neighbouring system X-BV98; we would gather there and mass jump to Poitot (yet another neighbouring system) to see what would happen. There would be siege warfare and quite possible a nice battle to top things off. The good thing about battle on Singularity is, that any losses incurred are limited to the test environment and have no repercussions in the normal Eve Online environment. In other words: risk free battle!

Fleet, lag
After chatting a bit in the in game MassTesting channel, I joined CCP Stillman's fleet, left the station and set out for X-BV98, which would normally be one easy jump. The vast amounts of ships that had to move through the system, however, meant that there was indeed an enormous amount of lag. FPS (frames per second) dropped to 'average 0.1' at one time, effectively rendering the game unplayable. I decided to relog; that helped a lot and I was able to jump to X-BV98 and travel to the Poitot stargate, where an impressive fleet was gathering:

More pictures available: Mass Testing on Koinup.

Cyno beacons were lit, more and more ships arrived at the gate and I again joined the CCP Stillman fleet. The lag, however, became terrible again; joining a fleet seems to have a very negative impact on the performance.

Operation aborted
Unfortunately, this is where it stopped for me. Family duties interrupted unexpectedly; I had to log off. When I came back an hour later, battle was raging, but it was 17 jumps away. With no moveme channel available to drop me at the scene of the battle (and noticing many testers logging off) I parked my ship, left nullsec Singularity and headed for the less epic world of empire, high sec space on Tranquility. I missed my large fleet battle, but it was a good experience nonetheless. Next mass test I hope to be there again!

Twinity update

2010-03-15T20:52:00.004+01:00

I just published an update on Twinity at the Koinup blog. Main topics: Therians welcome to Twinity, an expansion to virtual Berlin, a visit to the Pergamon museum and this mornings' new release.

The Pergamon Museum, Twinity Berlin:

Eve Online: arms dealer

2010-03-07T20:47:00.011+01:00

In Eve Online, there's a never ending demand for stuff. Pilots need space ships, modules to fit them with, and ammunition - all the time, because ships get destroyed and ammo gets spent in an endless grind that only stops during downtime. Industrialists make a nice living based on this continuous demand, but they are not the only ones. There's also quite a bit of interregional trade going on, and for the past few weeks I have become involved in this part of Eve Online as well.

A while ago I needed a couple of 250mm Compressed Coil Guns: a type of medium sized rail guns which I often use on my mission running ships. On my way to a corp event a dozen jumps out of my home system, I crossed a region boundary, and while checking the local market prices I noticed these railguns were a lot cheaper here than in my home region. Immediately I saw an opportunity for making a profit, and so, on a whim, I became an arms dealer! In this neighbouring region, I bought almost all of these guns I could find for a very decent price, and started to sell them in my home region at a nice profit. After a while I ran out of cheap guns with prices in the neighbouring region rising as well, so I have had to travel further and further to get the guns at a worthwhile price.

Yesterday I found myself scouring through obscure systems, buying a few guns here and some there, creating a small stock to trade with, and that's when I realised this wasn't the way to go, I was wasting my time on petty trade! If I want to be a trader, even if it's a side job, I need to have ample supplies of the item I'm trying to profit off. I need more guns to sell! Yesterday evening, I decided to take my trusted Iteron transport vessel "Daf 95" to Jita and do some serious shopping there. Prices, while not as low as the initial stock I acquired in the neighbour system, are still favourable, so I stockpiled almost a thousand guns. I have since planted them here and there in regional trade hubs, spread over several regions. My prices are reasonable, but my profits still range from 50%-100% per gun if I succeed in selling them at these prices. The top left picture here shows, that this is definitely not a given.

Traveling to Jita, by the way, proved dangerous: on two occasions I was targeted by gate campers, in high sec no less. In both cases I was quick enough to get away before any of them could lock on to me. Afk travel to Jita is definitely not the way to go, that's for sure.. Jump through a gate, align to next gate, and warp away as fast as you can.

In the coming weeks it will become clear if I stand to profit from my first concerted effort at trade. It's a whole new game with new rules!

Yet another Twinity post at Koinup

2010-03-07T20:27:00.005+01:00

Now that I am the Koinup blogger covering Twinity, I'm spending much more time on the virtual mirror world. It has been a rewarding experience! Even though I'm following Twinity for over two years now, I must admit: there's more to write about Twinity than I thought. For instance, the new ability to design your own shirts: Twinity Shirt, Koinup style. Fashion design, creating outfits is a very important part of social virtual worlds like Second Life, and it's good something like that is emerging in Twinity as well.

Twinity surfaces in Google Earth.

2010-03-03T21:09:00.003+01:00

I have just published another Twinity blog item on the Koinup blog, this time about artist Marco Manray and his mixing of the real and virtual world, using Twinity, Panoramio and Google Earth. A fascinating concept!

Twinity: Dardo Photography Gallery opens

2010-02-27T16:54:00.002+01:00

I have just published my second guest blog post at the Koinup blog: Dardo Photography Opens. Tomorrows' opening of Dardo Photography Gallery was a nice opportunity to highlight a few interesting aspects of Twinity: the way Metaversum and the Twinizens are doing events, and the fact that Twinity is a good venue for certain types of art display. Your comments are, as always, welcome.

Second Life: 2.0 beta viewer experiments

2010-02-26T21:08:00.009+01:00

The first public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer sports some nice improvements. For me the most interesting part, is definitely the Shared Media part.

Back in 2006, 2007 when we were investigating Second Life as a business tool, we sorely missed the ability to easily work with HTML on a prim. Documents, presentations, dynamic content: it was impossible or very nearly so. A few years ago 'HTML on a prim' finally became a reality. A step forward, but it could really only be used to display a static website.

The new 'Shared Media' implementation in the 2.0 beta viewer is much more powerful. As a matter of fact, the viewerr sports a full implementation of WebKit, the open source browser engine. It allows the 2.0 beta viewer to display pretty much anything the average browser can, and as dynamic as the browser too. HTML, flash movies and games, it's all possible.

The media are placed on a specific face of a prim. I created a simple prim, and put a Google Docs presentation on it:

So far it works fine. I can login to Google Docs and work with the documents available to me. If only this had been possible a few years ago!

I have noticed that access credentials to content in a shared media texture, are stored in Webkit; they are not connected to the prim the media texture is on.
First, I created a prim with a media texture containing a Google Document for my RL Google account; I logged in and used it. Then I deleted the prim, created a new one, and put a Google document for my Sered Woollahra Google account on it. Upon saving it, the message on the media texture said my RL Google account wasn't allowed to view Google Documents owned by Sered Woollahra! I had to logoff and login back to SL to be able to use the other credentials.

Eve Online Tyrannis: a whole universe

2010-02-23T20:31:00.013+01:00

CCP surprised most of it's userbase, earlier this week, with the announcement of Eve Online's next expansion: Tyrannis. Slated to be released around the summer, Tyrannis will bring a whole new dimension to Eve Online: planetary exploration. We will be able to survey all those thousands of planets in New Eden, we will exploit the minerals and other treasures to be found through infrastructures we will build. And this will happen not only on the earthlike planets, but on all of them, including the lava planets and the gas giants.

So why is this exciting? Because planetary exploration is a missing link in the current incarnation of the New Eden universe. The planets got a visual upgrade in the Dominion expansion, and they sure look great, but they are at the moment little more than eye candy. How strange, really, that in a simulated universe like Eve Online, you can't do anything to or with a planet! Most of todays' SciFi movies, books or series would be meaningless without functioning planets. Eve Online, so far, has done without, but not for much longer.

There's precious little concrete information in the Tyrannis devblog but it seems we won't be able to walk on our planets just yet: Incarnation, formerly known as "walking in stations" will have to wait (again) until a later expansion. But Tyrannis is definitely a first step to prepare New Eden for planet bound combat as projected to happen with the new CCP game Dust 514:

In future expansions you will be able to project military force for attack and defense of planetary installations. That will be where DUST 514 will connect with EVE. But DUST 514 will not be coming out at the same time as Tyrannis, so that is at a later date.

A New Eden with functioning, meaningful planets, spotted with industrial complexes owned by Eve Online pilots, and occasionally raided by either Dust 514 mercenaries or rivaling Eve Online corporations, is a much more complete, whole universe than the New Eden we've been enjoying for the past few years. It is more realistic too - insofar something like that can be said from any internet spaceship game.

Add Incarna to the mix, and it gets even better. I can hardly wait to pilot a shuttle through a gas giants' atmosphere, dock up at our refinery station floating there, pop out of the spaceship and head for the bar where a few corp mates are enjoying a well earned drink. Tyrannis lays the groundwork for future expansions where this might very well become possible. Exiting times for an explorer like me!

Twinity releases new version

2010-02-20T15:36:00.009+01:00

I am doing a bit of Twinity guestblogging at the Koinup blog, and have just published my first article there: Twinity releases new version. I haven't guest blogged before, it's going to be interesting to see how this works out! Any feedback is welcome, either here or at the Koinup blog.

Second Life's antique beanstalk

2010-02-12T20:06:00.009+01:00

After reading Hamlet's item about the Beanstalk, the oldest user created content in Second Life, I decided to pay a visit. In SL you never know for sure whether something will still be there tomorrow, and this is definitely something I wanted to see before it would vanish.

The land the Beanstalk is on, was claimed in 2003 and is group owned. For all group members, the last login date is 'unknown'. Whether the user who created the beanstalk, Steller Sunshine, is still an active SL user I don't know. Pay the beanstalk a visit while it's still there!

Isn't amazing that we consider something created in 2003 to be ancient? Be it a beanstalk in SL or a character in Eve Online: 2003 is prehistoric, almost awe inspiring. And yet it's not even a decade old!

Happenings

2010-02-11T15:54:00.004+01:00

Upon returning from a quick skiing trip, I noticed I won the fourth prize at CK's Blog banter contest! Thanks a lot CK, my email address is seredsecondlife at gmail dot com. Looking forward to ordering some cool stuff from the Eve store!

This seemed a nice opportunity to change the blog template, too. The previous template worked fine for a while, but somehow it changed last week, probably due to a change at the Blogger side. I'm still fiddling with the layout. Not yet sure, for instance, whether I want to go to two columns or stay with three. Let me know what you think!

Finally, tomorrow my Second Life land fees are due. This is the best moment to check wether the land rentals are profitable or not, and I'm happy to report we are profitable once again! We're off to a good start in 2010; let's hope it stays this way.

Twinity: In the eye

2010-02-05T11:46:00.012+01:00

Another visit to the London Eye. The view is nice, from up here..

Twinity has come a long way, in 2009. A much more stable client, three cities online, activities to do and an emerging community. Yet, there's always room for improvement, isn't there? Here's some suggestions!

The first one, is draw distance. In Second Life I can choose to set the draw distance to a large value. Of course it will take a lot of time to load the environment if you do so, but snapshots like this one would certainly improve:

The other thing is the day and night cycle. I understand why Twinity - a mirror world after all - would have a natural day and night cycle. But, given that I usually work during the day, it means I'm mostly confined to seeing dark cities.. Enjoying the city in broad daylight, or catching a sunset or sunrise for a particular picture is, to me, not always possible! That's why I would like to be able to override the default day and night cycle.

And I miss the fog. Especially with London not yet being finished, it might be a good idea to introduce some atmospheric haze. With a bit of haze in the air, loss of detail becomes a natural thing at larger distances; currently it looks like a texture that didn't load right. It would also serve to soften the hard edges of virtual London, where the city isn't finished yet. Especially when viewed from a higher viewpoint!

Finally: I would like some movement. Now that there's a London Eye, I'd like to ride it too! Same for the sightseeing buses strewn through virtual London. Why not let me hop on to one, and do an automatic guided tour through the city? Or a boat ride over the river Thames, through Singapore harbour, the Spree river in Berlin? This might actually require quite a bit of programming; I don't know how difficult it is to build this in Twinity. But would be a very valuable addition in my opinion.

See you in London!

Twinity expands virtual London

2010-02-03T23:52:00.011+01:00

One of the most appealing parts of virtual worlds, is the ability to show world famous landmarks to anyone with a computer strong enough to run the necessary software. I can't afford to visit the Forbidden City in Beijing for instance, but I can get the gist of it through the virtual rendering, as you can see here. Another example: I have visited the Vatican's Sistine Chapel in real life, but in Second Life I could really take the time to appreciate the build, and view it from very unusual angles.

Twinity is perhaps the virtual world best suited to showing real world landmarks in a virtual setting. The platform also provides the opportunity to integrate the past and present, as Metaversum demonstrated when they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Today, Twinity's virtual London became a lot bigger. Famous landmarks along the Thames river such as the Big Ben, the Westminster Abbey and the 'London Eye' became available. Due to family matters I couldn't spend too much time, and it was already evening, but here's a few snapshots of the Westminster Abbey and the London Eye, the way a real world tourist would never be able to view them. Enjoy!

More Twinity London snapshots: at my Koinup page as usual.

Second Life: Dutchie's houseboat

2010-01-28T16:40:00.011+01:00

House boats are a common sight in larger Dutch cities, where many an old ship spends it's days converted into someone's living quarters. On my way to the office, I pass quite a few of them; some old and squalid, some pretty and well maintained. Dutchie decided to bring this local specialty to Second Life, and I must say I'm impressed with the results. The interior is beautifully done, the style matching what I'd expect a dutch houseboat to look like. I have owned houses before, but nothing comes close to this one! I am already looking for a place to put one, perhaps for rent via TBRentals. I think it looks best if there's a bit of room around it, though. Too bad I haven't got 1024m left in my tier or I'd do it immediately. Here's some snaps:

More snapshots: at my Koinup page. Want to see the houseboat for yourself? Pay a visit to Dutchie!

Eve Online: what's the appeal?

2010-01-25T20:28:00.033+01:00

In a special edition of the Eve Blog Banter, CrazyKinux asks: Why do you love Eve Online so much?

Good question. I have been active in virtual worlds from mid 2006, when the Second Life hype hit. IBM went head first into virtual worlds, and I, being an IBM watcher and corporate blogger, followed suit to see what the fuss was all about.

I never was much of a gamer. I don't own a console and never bought a PC game; I never really made it past Minesweeper as far as PC gaming goes. And yet I have been in Eve Online for nearly two years, and I'm not about to leave; because Eve Online is, to me, one of the most interesting and advanced virtual worlds currently in existence. Let me explain why.

Mythology
Tranquility's single shard model allowed Eve Online to develop a coherent mythology, that is relevant to pilots every day. It's not just a nice backdrop for staging internet spaceship fights; New Eden wouldn't be the same without the lore. But this mythology not just found in the CCP written official history of New Eden; it is created anew, time and time again, by the pilots themselves. Epic clashes between major alliances, infamous heists, notorious characters, battles won and lost! It all adds to the player created lore. These are tomorrow's myths, to be narrated to n00bs in local and corp chat for years to come. It's possible in the continuum that is New Eden, but only there.

Economy
But other than impressive stories, the single shard has also given rise to an advanced economy. One of the things that make Second Life interesting, is that SL residents design unique objects. But there is no such thing as geographical distance which would necessitate transport, or which would allow trade hubs to evolve. And: in SL you can create anything out of thin air, meaning there's no raw materials to build from; there's almost no initial cost. New Eden's economy doesn't know unique objects, but distances really count, and raw materials are needed. Sources of these raw materials need to be exploited, ores transported and sold before goods are made, which can then be sold off. Hence the need for miners, freighters, industrialists, all making a living off the production of goods. It's much more developed and realistic than other virtual economies I've seen. All in all, I'd say Second Life has a market, but Eve Online has an economy.

Corps and alliances
Lots has been said about the social side of the capsuleers' universe. Here, too, the single shard design is instrumental in bringing about something special. New Eden's player driven infrastructure of corporations and alliances - and the dynamics of trade and conflicts between those - is what's keeping Eve Online alive and vibrant. It facilitates a lot of interesting and meaningful social interaction, and it also provides the framework of much of the player driven mythology mentioned above. And again, it wouldn't be possible - not on this epic scale at least - in a sharded environment.

World view
Another interesting point is Eve Online's world view. It's not pretty, but much of the real world - unfortunately - isn't either. Second Life has more of a sixties love & peace vibe, and while it's entertaining it doesn't always feel right to me - because I don't think humanity, in itself, is like that. Eve Online shows this darker side of humanity.

While writing this down, I realised I'm missing something here. There's more! Eve Online, interesting, fascinating, gritty and dark as it can be, is also beautiful to see, plain engaging, and often fun. In the end, that's what seals the deal, that's why I love Eve Online.

Eve Online: A different mindset

2010-01-18T22:42:00.013+01:00

Helicity Boson penned a long, expletive filled rant detailing how much he hates the average carebear miner in Eve Online. I'm not a miner, but here's my thoughts on the subject.

Eve Online is often touted as a sandbox environment. Everyone’s free to choose their own direction! One of which is: being a miner. Miners provide much of the raw ore that keeps Eve’s industrialists occupied, and as such it’s one of the cornerstones of Eve’s economy – of which CCP is quite proud. I can’t state it with any certainty, but I don’t think Eve Online could sustain a meaningful economy without the miners. Yet the most vocal inhabitants of New Eden are those who chose a completely different career: the PVP pilots and pirates who insist it's fun to blow up these same miners.

From my point of view, there's a deeper difference in mindset separating the pirates from the miners, that's causing the strife between the two. Allow me to elaborate - I'll try not to be as long as Helicity, I promise ;-)

A while ago I read Edward Castranova's "Synthetic Worlds", which deals with virtual worlds, MMO games and such. Dating from 2006 it was, as far as I know, one of the first attempts at a scientific explanation of the MMO/virtual world phenomenon. Castranova describes four typical categories of inhabitants of these worlds: explorers, socializers, achievers and controllers. Explorers want to discover beautiful and new vistas, the new, the unexpected, "to boldly go..". Socializers seek the company, corp chat, doing stuff together. Achievers want to build value, hoard wealth, get somewhere the peaceful way. Finally, the controllers want to be in charge. They compete, defeat, dominate and if necessary decimate. And yet, in Castranova's words, "to them, it's all a sport".

I consider myself an explorer. I'm in New Eden to find out what's there, to try new things every now and then, to enjoy the scenery. I'm also a socializer, as I like the company, and I'm an achiever insofar that I want to be wealthy enough to replace anything I might lose. Most miners and industrialists (and mission runners) definitely fall in the socializers and achievers category. And pirates, well, I hate state the obvious, but they are of course the controllers of New Eden.

Speaking in Castranova's terms, socializers and achievers are really of a different mindset than the controllers, and these differences in mindset and character have always been a source of irritation between 'carebears' and 'griefers', in many an MMO game and perhaps in real life too. It's nothing new, really.

I recognize this difference, also. To me, personally, reading Helicity's rant is like reading the utterings of a completely alien mind. I can't for the life of me understand what's so funny about blowing up miners, why it's fun to deny some harmless n00b miner his achievement. I can't understand why he hates these people so much (apart from the insults hurled at him, that is). I don't understand why anyone would enjoy inflicting harm on (and triggering anger in) those hapless miners who are explicitly not looking for pvp. The whole concept is just alien to me. And frankly, I really doubt whether it's healthy to display so much hatred while, at the same time, saying 'it's all just a game, people' (as any controller would) to those who are angry with him.

So, even while I may not agree with Helicity - because I really don't recognize anything of his motives and urges - I can, in the framework of Castranova's descriptions, see where he's coming from. And I can also understand why an achiever type pilot would be hurt and confused with someone like Helicity blowing up their stuff. Achievers and controllers differ so much in mindset, world view and game perception, that they are almost mutually exclusive.

For achievers, the bad news is, that in the setting of New Eden, much of the game mechanics are geared to accommodate the Helicities, the controllers of space. There's (some) room for explorers and socializers, but achievers are, however important they may be for Eve's economy, very low on CCP's priority list. This is not an accident; this is by design.

CCP may probably have a low new player retention for achiever type pilots because of this, and because my own instincts are more akin to socializers/achievers than to controllers, I'm not happy with that. I have, earlier, advocated more protection for new players, perhaps in 1.0 space only. I still think CCP could financially benefit from that: it would make the learning curve more of a curve than, well, a virtual graveyard. But at the same time, I recognize it may be very hard to balance achievers and controllers in a better way, without hurting the whole premise of New Eden.

In the mean time.. fly safe, all :)

Eve Online: Roaming through nullsec

2010-01-16T12:23:00.015+01:00

I rarely leave highsec. Lowsec is definitely not appealing; it's dangerous and not very rewarding to visit. Why even bother? Nullsec however is different, and I've wanted to visit it for a long time. I first went there a few months ago, and I made it a few jumps in, until I ran into Wensley who quickly ridded me of my vessel, pod and clone. He did, however, give me some advice on how to avoid warp bubbles the next time!

A few days ago I decided it was time for another go. I bought an Incursus, fitted it with cheap T1 stuff and set sail for Poitot, where Wensley killed me before. The first few jumps through lowsec and 0.0 were somewhat exiting as I had to dodge a few pirates, but pretty soon space became almost empty. Very few people in local, no chat, nothing. At one jumpgate a disabled mobile warp disruptor hung idle in space. In another system I got caught in a warp bubble again but there was no one to shoot at me; I drifted out of the bubble and jumped safely. Jump after jump, and nothing happens! Along the way I pick up some loot in an abandoned NPC wreck, which I put up for sale.

I stayed overnight at a station in A-SJ8X, at the edge of Syndicate, not certain whether to push for Cloud Ring or Outer Ring. Knowing I wouldn't be able to dock anywhere in Cloud Ring, which is currently owned by Ev0ke alliance, I opted for Outer Ring, which is an NPC region; anyone can dock there. But still, it was quite a trip as I had to do eleven jumps to get to the nearest Outer Ring station with a medical bay.

Leaving the station in A-SJ8X, I quickly jumped to the first Ev0ke owned system, 1-3HWZ in Cloud Ring. Most systems here are deserted; I noticed a few miners and an IT alliance pilot in local, but that was it. A few uneventful jumps brought me quickly and safely to IZ-AOB, the entry to Outer Ring. A few uneventful jumps. I pick up a few abandoned drones at a jumpgate. Then another series of uneventful jumps. Finally I am at my destination, 4C-B7X. This system seems to be quite busy; 26 in local, which is the most I've seen so far.

Frankly, I've been a bit disappointed by the lack of excitement. Most of the systems in Syndicate and Outer Ring I've visited, are more or less empty and there's just not that much going on there. Perhaps this is different in the other nullsec regions, but I haven't seen it yet..

Eve Online: searching for directions in 2010

2010-01-14T19:10:00.008+01:00

Eve Online is, famously so, a sandbox environment which leaves almost all choices up to the pilot. What career to pursue, where to live and what to do: within the bounds of the setting of New Eden, you're in charge of your own destiny. That's why CrazyKinux, the Eve Online blogfather, poses the following question:

"As we begin another year in New Eden, ask yourselves "What Now?" What will I attempt next? What haven't I done so far in EVE?"

My answer, very short: I don't know - yet. I have been a miner for a short while, but for most of my Eve career I have been a mission runner. Recently I have taken up the habit of exploring systems with scanner probes, discovering hidden npc PVE sites. I've also, occasionally, spent some time in wormholes. But what's next? I haven't decided yet.

I have been offered a spot in a wormhole mining team. But while I haven't ruled it out yet, I don't exactly see myself as a WH miner in the near future. I can also keep doing what I'm doing now: run missions, scan down complexes and such, together with corp mates or alone. Having relocated to Everyshore recently, I think that will be the short term plan, but for some reason I don't feel quite at home in Everyshore; not sure I'll stay here long term.

I would very much like to spend some time in a 0.0 corp, perhaps as a miner/ratter with some incidental PVP when necessary, but I don't really have anything in terms of PVP experience. Also, given that I have a family, a busy job and loads of other stuff going on, I really need to be in a 'real life comes first' corporation and alliance, which severely limits the options when it comes to moving to 0.0.

Finally, I'd hate to leave the alliance I'm a part of. It's not that big, but I've known these pilots for quite some time, and I wouldn't want to say goodbye at this moment.

So - short term, 2010 looks like it's going to be an extension of 2009, but I'm open for new developments. Who knows what will happen!

Second Life rental update

2010-01-14T19:09:00.001+01:00

Late last year, I bought new land in Lutestring in order to create more rentals there. I provided the land, but most of the heavy lifting was done by Tropical Beach Rentals, and together we created a new project called "Lute Harbour". When it was ready, I really liked it and pretty soon the first tenants arrived. But after that, it didn't really pick up pace. Tenants came, some stayed, others left and we never got the occupancy rates we wanted or even needed. After a while we gained a few long term tenants, providing a solid financial basis, but still it's not what we needed. So after some prospective customer feedback and scant deliberation, the TBRentals team took out two of the smaller existing houses and created a new, larger house with a higher prim allowance. Let's see if that works..

One thing I've noticed, is a difference in tenants in the several regions where I own land. The homes in Fortimus Harbour and Timandra are often rented for a short period: most tenants pay per week. The occupants of Lute Harbour however, tend to pay for multiple weeks, often a month in advance. It would be interesting to know why!

Twinity: the end of London

2009-12-22T15:27:00.015+01:00

When exploring Twinity Singapore for the first time, I wandered far enough from the city center to get to the point where the city, quite literally, stopped. Metaversum hadn't gotten around to building those remote parts of Singapore. I was looking at the seams of the city, so to speak! Today the same happened, but this time in London.

Somewhere between Picadilly Circus and Knightsbridge, near Green Park, the city ends abruptly. I was on my way to Hyde Park and Kensington, but it seems those areas haven't been built yet.

By the way, as I Tweeted before: from my admittedly anecdotal evidence, I'd say Twinity London is busier than Singapore, and perhaps Berlin as well.

More snapshots at my Koinup page.

My RL job in Eve terms

2009-12-22T11:30:00.010+01:00

Yargok at Wherever I may Roam asks: 'how would your RL job be described in Eve terms'? Here's my attempt!

The aging yellow-and-blue public transportation shuttle drops me off at one of the regional traffic hubs. Even though this is isn't exactly known as the business heart of the area, this is where our headquarters are located. I am, after all, working at a financial institution of modest origins, founded by farmers, many years ago. When the fancy city banks wouldn't lift a finger to help them, these hardworking folks decided to help themselves: they created their own bank, much to the amusement of the city bankers. How the times have changed! When, recently, the aforementioned fancy city banks needed trillions of bailout ISK from any and all corp, alliance or empire that would try and rescue them, the modest farmers' bank didn't need any help at all. We're solid and we're going strong.

Before I dock up at my desk, I grab myself a quick coffee. Black, extra strong with just a little bit of sugar: that's my morning fuel. After logging on I check the vital signs of the transaction system I'm maintaining, usually even before I scan the incoming comms channels for stuff I should respond to.
All those traders, farmers and miners, selling and buying, attempting to make a few ISK: they can't operate without someone handling the ISK flow. And that's where I am, right on top of one of the main cash transport systems this bank has. Hundreds of thousands, millions, even billions of ISK change hands - daily - under our watchful eyes.

Not that I am a moneyman. On the contrary, I'm really bad at complicated constructions, small print, insurance clauses, tax forms and such afflictions of modern mankind. No, I'm one of the tech guys who keeps the wheels of this system turning. I have been for several years; I am, by now, one of the senior and most experienced team members. And the pay is pretty good, even in these times. What's not to like?

Twinity: London seesighting

2009-12-10T13:25:00.013+01:00

Once, when visiting London with my parents, my mother mentioned she would like to do 'one of those seesighting tours'. We've been teasing her with it ever since!

Today, I planned on doing another guided 'seesighting' tour through London; this time one through Twinity's virtual London. This virtual rendering of the English capital has been open to the public for a few days now, but I haven't yet had the time to really check it out, and I thought I could use this tour to make up for that. Unfortunately, the preparations took a bit too long. Apparently, many people are still having issues with voice and sound, and they kept trying to fix it while I ran out of time, so I had to drop out. Hopefully another time..

Eve Online: Arraron gate

2009-12-03T00:06:00.006+01:00

Here I am, waiting at the Arraron stargate in Chantrousse, enjoying the view of the ringed planet below. After the Dominion expansion, Eve is looking better than ever. See my Koinup page for more snapshots!

Eve Online: Dominion planet

2009-12-02T01:31:00.006+01:00

One of my first snapshot of the Dominion expansion on the main Eve grid, Trinity.This one was taken on a laptop with a lower end GPU, but I still like it! Visually, the main changes of the Dominion expansion are the star fields and the planets. Here, my Minmatar destroyer flies past an earthlike planet.

More of my Dominion snapshots can be found at Koinup.

Eve Online: weekend billionaire

2009-11-25T20:47:00.007+01:00

Today marks a special occassion: for the first time, my wallet contains more than one billion ISK. I'm a regular weekend billionaire, me! Of course I know there are traders, miners and such who make much more, but for a casual mission runner, it's not bad. Furthermore, it's more than the average Eve pilot has, according to the Q2 quarterly Economic Newsletter, which said the average Eve pilot has roughly something like 300 to 450 million ISK in cash.

Of course, now that I have this much ISK, I need to consider my options. Buying new ships? Rigs? Skills?

Speaking of which: I am now over 16 million skillpoints, as I completed Armor Compensation Explosive level 5 today. It was the last armor compensation skill I needed, I have all of them up to level 5 now. It seems I'm done learning the basic armor skills, as the certification system awarded me the Elite Armor Tanking certificate. Next up: shield skills! Currently working on shield management level 5, but that will take another 11 days.

Eve Online: A look at Dominion

2009-11-17T21:13:00.023+01:00

After seeing the Dominion trailer at CK's, I thought I'd take a look at it myself. You can already get a preview on Eve Online's test environment, codenamed 'Singularity', even though the Dominion expansion is still a month away. Getting online was easy, using these excellent instructions by Cyleus Taestar, and so (after a bit of tinkering with directories, files, shortcuts and a 479 MB upgrade) I found myself flying through New Eden Dominion style. I must say I'm impressed by some of the art work on the planets and moons! Behold:

Some of the moons look very natural, almost like a reworked picture of our own moon.

Of course there's also the Gas Giants. We have those planets too, in our own solar system, and they often look a bit bland, as pictures of Saturn and Neptune show. New Eden's gas giants are true to nature in this regard, but that makes them a bit less attractive to see as well. Our own Jupiter is more colorful, and to my taste the New Eden gaseous planets that I have seen (only a few!) could have had a bit more 'Jupiter' in them.

By the way: all planets revolve naturally and on some of them I spotted thunderstorms.

New Eden's background skies, often consisting of nebulae and stars, also seemed to have undergone an upgrade but not as dramatic as the planets and moons.

Of course Dominion is more than just this artwork update, but so far I like what I've seen. I will definitely spend more time on Singularity in the coming weeks, if only to explore the New Eden we'll all get to see when Dominion is released.

-update- Added more snapshots to my Koinup Eve Online group.

Sinterklaas has arrived

2009-11-15T00:21:00.013+01:00

Sinterklaas, the supposedly Spanish bishop Saint Nicholas dearly loved by every Dutch child, has arrived in the port of Schiedam earlier today, with his steamboat full of gifts for all wellbehaved children. He is of course accompanied by his trusted helpers, the Zwarte Pieten! In the coming weeks, Sinterklaas (often called 'Sint') and his helpers will spread presents and candy throughout The Netherlands. Sint rides his white horse over the roofs and houses, while his helpers deliver the good stuff: kids put their shoes by the chimney, and Zwarte Piet is supposed to climb down and put candy or small presents in them. Often kids will leave something nice for Sinterklaas' horse in return: a bit of water and a carrot or a sugar lump for instance.

On the evening of December 5th, Sinterklaas Evening is celebrated, with giving larger presents (both to kids and grownups), seasonal candy (chocolate letters!) and such. Often the extended family is involved, and a typical feature of this evening is, that the grownups write silly poems to go with the gifts. First you read the poem, in which someone usually sets you straight, teases you or mildy vents some frustrations; only after that you are allowed to open the present. Soon after December 5th, Sint leaves the country only to return mid November next year, when the whole ritual begins anew.

This children's feast is a real national tradition and has been celebrated in The Netherlands for hundreds of years. It (more or less) marks the start of the winter and to a lesser extend the christmas season over here. Our 'Sinterklaas' may also have been a source of inspiration for the American Santa Claus!

BlogHUD: an SL history book

2009-11-11T15:40:00.009+01:00

The very first post on this blog, dated july 2nd 2007, is about me trying out BlogHUD, Koz Farina's blogging tool from within SL. I have been using it ever since, on and off. Looking back at my own BlogHUD archive, I wondered how many snapshots and blog entries there are at BlogHUD, and so I went to find the very first post. It took some effort, but as I write this, the oldest surviving post is on page 2731. It is 174 weeks, 2 days and 22 hours old!

Given that BlogHUD currently has 2731 archive pages, and that there are ten entries per page on them, there should be over 27.000 entries in Koz Farina's database. That is an astounding collection of chronologically ordered text and images in one place. It's a tremendous timeline! Browsing through it, familiar names and places drift by, some of them long gone, others still active. It's like a history book of Second Life, one I'm glad to be part of. I'll make sure to keep contributing, too!

SL Residential

2009-11-11T08:37:00.007+01:00

Last night I was standing on a tower in Lutestring, looking in the direction of Timandra and Promissa and wondered how the view would be if I cranked up all my graphics settings to the max. After I did that, I waited for a few minutes for the view to fully rez, and here's the result:

These are generally residential sims, but the great variety in Second Life shows here as well. Towers, houses, water, mountains, beaches, clubs, a pirate ship, offices: it's all there. Too bad there's a 512 meter view range limit!

I'm going to do this again from another PC with a more powerful graphics card, see if the results get better.

The new rentals

2009-11-08T21:34:00.008+01:00

Yesterday, Tropical Beach Rentals' Zena and Ronon prepared my new rentals in Lutestring. It's a nice bay, and so we decided to call it 'Lute Harbour'. I'm quite happy with the way they turned out! Hopefully tenants will like them too; occupancy is important, after all.

Speaking of which: my rentals are still doing relatively well. A month ago, we saw a serious drop in occupancy, but it seems to have been an incident and not a trend, as occupancy rates quickly rebounded to their usual, higher levels. Financially speaking this means I'm earning, but not much, just the tier with a few dollars margin. With Lute Harbour however, I have gone up in tier, and it will take a while before it's all rented, so it remains to be seen whether the coming months will be profitable at all. But, of course, that's the business risk I'll have to accept!

Through the gates of time

2009-11-07T13:12:00.014+01:00

I still remember it clearly. I was a teenager, sitting on the couch at home watching TV: a report from Berlin, where, much to my amazement, people were breaking through the infamous Berlin wall. Confused border guards, people hacking away at the wall with large hammers, a tremendous outpour of joy and tears. People hugging and crying, the Brandenburer Tor. Mass parties, freedom! I may have been young then, but I knew I was watching history unfold itself before my eyes. I had been behind the Iron Curtain one time and it frightened me; but now it was gone.

Today I'm looking back at the Berlin Wall, in Twinity Berlin. Throughout Twinity Berlin, there are gates through which you can step back in time, and enter the Berlin that still has a wall, where stern looking officers stand guard under flags with communist symbols. Now you're in Berlin 2009, the next moment you're back in 1989.. The gates are created of appropriately grim concrete, as you can see.

Here I am, standing near checkpoint Charlie, 2009:

A few steps ahead, and suddenly..

I am very much impressed with what Metaversum has done here. Some of the images are familiar, and being born during the cold war, they still evoke emotions, even though I'm not German. Do yourself a favor, install Twinity and pay a visit to Twinity Berlin, even if it's only to take a look at the Wall - in a way you'll never be able to in real life. I have uploaded some pictures here at Koinup.

Apart from the whole Berlin Wall 20 years anniversary thing, this is a fantastic way of presenting history. Imagine stepping through a small gate somewhere in London, and ending up at exactly the same spot, but in Medieval times? Or a gate in Singapore, which brings you to the city as it was in World War II? What a great way to show and teach history! Athens in the time of Pericles; the Forum Romanum in Rome in the first century AD; or even Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. Let's hope Metaversum gets to do some of these. What city or history would you like to see recreated?

New project: Lute Harbour

2009-11-06T23:03:00.006+01:00

I caught up with Zena Silverstar and Ronon Carver of Tropical Beach Rentals, while they were preparing our new rental project in Lutestring: Lute Harbour. They were clearly afk, but sitting nicely on a poseball, so I took the opportunity to take a team picture :)

Nebraska and OpenSim

2009-10-29T12:48:00.007+01:00

Back when I started this blog, my main focus in the area of virtual worlds was business usage. IBM was experimenting with Second Life and as an IBM business partner, my then employer asked me to keep an eye on what IBM was doing. Over the years my focus has shifted a bit, but the business usage of virtual worlds is still interesting stuff and there are still plenty people believing in it. Linden Labs, anyway, still does: in a few days, they will launch their 'SL behind the firewall' offering Nebraska.

"Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, will unveil “Nebraska”, a stand-alone solution based on the technology that runs the popular Second Life virtual world. “Nebraska” is the much-anticipated behind-the-firewall solution which will allow enterprise to host their own virtual world environments within their organizations."

Kindon will unveil Nebraska at a Metanomics conference which promises to be one of the most interesting events of the year.

I'm sure I'm not the first one to talk about OpenSim vs Nebraska, but here's a few thougts. From an OpenSim point of view, Nebraska is a validation of it's existence: yes, there is a need and market for a standalone simulator. At the same time, Nebraska might be a threat to a part of OpenSim's marketshare, as companies might be sensitive to the fact that Nebraska is a corporate offering from an established company with a formal support organisation behind it, and not just something built by a bunch of hobbyists. Shortsighted? Perhaps, but this has been mentioned to me at least twice when talking about OpenSim!

From a technical point of view I'm interested in the security aspects of it. Does it require a separate directory server or can it use an existing LDAP server? Or MS Active Directory? Does it use encrypted network connections?

Interoperability is also an issue. Can I create a grid of Nebraska sims, and can I join that to OpenSim as well? How is content shared between Nebraska sims? Perhaps these issues are covered elsewhere already - I've been too busy with rl stuff to really read up on Nebraska!

Anyway, as an owner of an OpenSim, I'd like to test Nebraska as well, but I'm not sure we'll get the chance..

Twinity: London

2009-10-24T13:34:00.007+02:00

After Berlin and more recently Singapore, Twinity is about to grow again: the first snapshots of Twinity's virtual rendering of London have appeared on Facebook. From the accompanying press release I gather that London isn't finished yet, as Metaversum is looking for creative people to set up shop in virtual London.

That request kind of surprised me. Twinity aims to be a mirror world: a virtual world that mimicks the real world as closely as possible. Yet, Metaversum is looking for people to create new shops, businesses, art galleries and the like in their virtual London, and apparently these will be entirely new instead of mirrored from the real world. I wonder if this means Metaversum is changing their philosophy in this regard.

I'm really looking forward to visiting London in Twinity. I have never been in the real Berlin or Singapore, so I can't compare the Twinity experience with the real thing. I have however visited the real London, so this is the first time I'll visit a Twinity city I am somewhat familiar with in real life too.

Enter the wormhole?

2009-10-24T12:39:00.006+02:00

Things are about to change! Our corp is making plans to anchor a player owned station in a nice and suitable class II wormhole we recently located. Of course we'll have to invest a bit, but the return on investment is said to be very good, as all sorts of interesting and profitable 0.0 minerals can be mined there.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this move. I've been running missions in Verge Vendor for months now, and I'm still enjoying myself. The missions aren't that hard anymore; I can usually salvage and chat with corp members while my drones do most of the hard work. A bit of casual play, nice and relaxing! And yet, while I still enjoy it, it's becoming a bit too predictive and perhaps even tedious. And, those ninja salvagers are becoming a pest in the systems I usually operate; why provide these lazy bastards with more opportunities to salvage my wrecks? Perhaps I really do need a change of scenery and action!

But there are a few drawbacks. I've been flying a largely T2 fitted armor tanking Dominix battleship for a while and I like it, especially for it's huge drone space. However, if we move into the wormhole, I probably won't be able to bring the Domi; it's mass would probably collapse the entry to the wormhole right behind me. So what ship to bring instead? I don't know yet.

Partly that's also because I'm not sure what I'll be doing in the wormhole. My corp mates are mostly miners, going after the precious ores, but I'm not one of them. Of course the miners would need some protection in the lawless wormhole space, so perhaps I could patrol the area to protect my corp mates, but that doesn't look like a casual player task to me. Sleeper hunting could be nice, but to be effective I'd have to invest in some scanning skills. Uncertainties abound!

I really have no idea where I'll be in a few weeks and what I'll be doing, but it sure looks like the quiet mission running days are almost over. And perhaps that's a good thing.

On top of Singapore

2009-10-12T20:54:00.017+02:00

I used to be able to fly through Twinity, but when I didn't visit Twinity for a while, I forgot how. As it's an undocumented key combination, I couldn't find it anymore; I had to keep both feet on the floor. Luckily, after a tipoff from RC at the Twinity Monitor, I am now able to fly again, and here I am, enjoying the view over Singapore from the roof of Park Hotel Orchard, at Orchard Road!

Used like this, you can view a city like you'll never be able - or willing - to in real life.

Mixed news from the rentals front

2009-10-05T18:55:00.013+02:00

For years now we’ve been hearing bad news about the economy, but at the same time, my Second Life rentals have been doing fine. Each month, the rentals (some of them visible in this snapshot to the right) pay for the tier fee, and usually there’s a small surplus of a few US Dollars. Over the past year or so, this surplus slowly grew to a buffer large enough to pay for two months tier. When I got to that point, I decided to cash in those US Dollars, as I needed them elsewhere. In hindsight however, this may not have been such a good idea.

Yesterday I received a report from my land manager Zena Silverstar and her team at Tropical Beach Rentals, with some less than stellar news: the occupancy rates of some of the rentals suddenly and unexpectedly dropped considerably, at an unprecedented rate, over the past few weeks. A development we hadn’t experienced before! Tenants come and go all the time, and occupancy rates always vary a bit, but generally they stay well within a certain (profitable) bandwith and we didn't expect that to change so suddenly.

It took a while before a possible explanation was found: the occupancy drop occurred right after Zindra, the new SL 'adult' mainland, was opened. Could it be that people are moving off the regular mainland to Zindra as a permanent place to live? When asked, former long time tenants mentioned all kinds of small reasons to end their stay with us, but none of them mentioned the new adult continent ; perhaps they didn’t want to admit to moving there.

In the mean time however, occupancy has recovered a bit as rentals vacated by long term tenants are being occupied again by newcomers, and as far as I can tell my rentals are still profitable, albeit with a smaller than usual margin. Tropical Beach Rentals also expanded their staff, with support for tenants now available across a larger time frame of the day. Perhaps that helps too.

2009-10-02T15:32:00.005+02:00

Walking across this submerged bridge will make my suit wet. But the water doesn't look too cold..

Anonymously Confidential

2009-10-01T08:40:00.016+02:00

Even though this blog post starts in Eve Online, it's also applicable to Second Life, Twinity and other environments. It's about the relative safety of being anonymous online.

I'm one of those Eve Online pilots who's trying to participate in corporate and alliance chat. Talking to corp mates and alliance friends adds a valuable social dimension to the game, and unless I'm busy with the mission or task at hand, I'm available for a bit of idle chat.

But it doesn't always have to be just a bit of chat. At times, I have ended up in quite personal and sometimes emotional conversations, usually about people experiencing all kinds of difficulty at home. Alcoholism, parental abuse, broken families, a bitter divorce, legal struggles with (usually) ex wives refusing a father to see his kids, financial issues - it's all there. And it's surprisingly close to the surface; sometimes it takes just one or two questions before someone pours their heart out. I've been, at times, taken aback by the painful stories, by the hurt that's hiding behind the screen names!

In an environment like Eve Online, it's not that difficult to hide your real life identity. This relative anonimity, coupled with a feeling of trust amongst corporation mates, will from time to time lead to this kind of confidential conversations. And though the circumstances may differ, I've also had encounters like these in Second Life.

I have said it before: these human interactions adds a value to MMO style games which I appreciate a lot. It would be a cold affair without it!

OpenSim: building bridges

2009-09-05T13:01:00.002+02:00

A while ago I loaded a second island; my eleven year old niece Emma built this beautiful bridge between them. Must have been hard to position the prims!

Eve Online: does CCP love griefers?

2009-09-01T19:42:00.012+02:00

CCP, the creators of Eve Online, publish a Quarterly Economic Newsletter (QEN) in which they provide a lot of data concerning Eve's economy. In the QEN for Q2 2009, on page 13, we find this interesting tidbit:

"..However, the majority of EVE players are located in hisec space, or 70% of the total number of characters. Thus, most ISK is located in hisec. The least amount of ISK is located in lowsec space, where only 13% of EVE characters reside."

This segment of the QEN discusses the distribution of characters and ISK (Eve's in game currency) throughout Eve's single shard universe. For those of you unfamiliar with Eve, here's a quick primer on security in Eve Online's New Eden. This universe is divided in three areas, each with a different security policy. Pilots in high security space (highsec or hisec) are protected by the (quite effective) in game NPC police force called Concord, which provides the most protection on areas with security level 1.0, but a little less in 0.9, and so forth to 0.5 where a pilot is least protected. Pilots in lowsec (security levels 0.4 to 0.1) should not count on any protection; it is essentially a deserted wasteland with the occasional hornets' nest of pirates. Nullsec (0.0) is altogether different; player run alliances own these areas and they dictate who's safe or not.

Back to the QEN: it says, in short, that most of the characters - 70% - and ISK are located in high security space. This probably also means that highsec is, for CCP, the most valuable area in Eve Online in terms of paying customers. I know that '70% of the characters' doesn't directly translate to '70% of the paying customer base', but alt characters and multiple accounts are as common in highsec as they are in nullsec. At any rate, it seems that highsec pilots are instrumental in funding CCP and Eve Online. From my admittedly anecdotal experience, I think most of these paying customers are no hardcore PVP players or pirates, but peaceful miners and mission runners, carebears and newbies.

Yet the gameplay of Eve Online doesn't do these people many favours. Rather, it's the other way around. Especially newer pilots, mining or running PVE missions in their n00b ships, often fall prey to more experienced griefer players who know enough about the rules to trick the unexperieced into an unfair fight which the newbie is certain to lose. Carebear corporations, newbie corps, miners and such are a regular and easy prey for pirate corps who regularly - and often for the sheer fun of bashing weaker players - declare war on them. There's nothing you can do about such a wardec; the gameplay allows any corp to declare war (wardec) any other, as long as the wardeccing corp pays the necessary fees. For the wardecced corps, if you're not an experienced PVP corps, it often means either don't play EVE until the war is over ('dock and turtle') or run the risk of losing your ship and your expensive implants. Wars can last weeks; recently while I was on holiday, many of my corp mates lost almost a months' worth of playing time due to a series of wardecs.

I understand that this is part of the game. This is New Eden, it's a harsh environment, but still I don't understand why CCP continues to keep it this way. I have known a lot of trial accounts who chose not to become paying customers, and I know of (formerly!) paying accounts who refuse to ever set foot in Eve again after being harassed, griefed or wardecced one too many times. After all, why should I pay 15 dollars a month, only to be forced to dock and turtle almost the entire month, or to allow some griefer jerk to blow me to pieces? Not my idea of fun, really. When I just started out in Eve, I almost quit over such an incident, and if I hadn't found a good corp at that moment, I would certainly have quit indeed.

CCP loses money in cancelled subscriptions or lack of trial account retention, due to the fact that they allow pirates and griefers to harass (especially) less experienced players and corps in highsec. Yet it also seems that highsec is the region with the largest population of paying customers! These miners, pve mission runners and their corps, they just hang in there, and when they quit, their numbers get replenished with new players time and time again, despite the (CCP blessed) efforts to have them harassed, wardecced and griefed out of New Eden. They are many, but they could have been more, if CCP had wanted them to be; if CCP had given them a bit more protection.

I'm obviously not advocating a radical overhaul of Eve's gameplay. But, some added protection (in for instance the 0.8 to 1.0 regions of highsec, or in the first months of being a pilot) for certain categories of players against can baiters, flippers, griefers, or some recourse for corps against serial wardeccing pirate corps could be beneficial to player retention and thus to CCP's bottom line and Eve's long term prospects.

Twinity: Unfinished business

2009-08-29T01:08:00.017+02:00

Yesterday I decided I wanted to see the Singapore harbour in Twinity, so I walked from the city center towards the straits. Apparently not many people make it to the edge of the city yet, as my exploration even warranted some attention from Metaversum. Tonight I wondered: what if I went even further away from Singapore's city center? Would I eventually encounter a border or an edge, or would the world simply cease to exist at a certain point? And so I went on for a while - and there it was, the edge of the Twinity world!

This really is the place where the unfinished seams of Singapore become visible, and the visual effects are quite interesting.

But perhaps the most beautiful sight was this unfinished freeway, extending over the Singapore straits, in the dark blue glow of the night sky with the gentle waves of the straits below it.

The rest of tonight's snapshots can be found at koinup, as usual.

Twinity: Singapore

2009-08-27T00:43:00.007+02:00

Finally, I am able to visit Twinity again. The latest ATI patches seem to have fixed issues I had; CPU usage is now workable, even though Twinity still uses a lot of resources. I took the opportunity to take a walk through Singapore to the port near Raffles Avenue, where I cooled my tired feet in the harbour water..

Even though Singapore is not finished yet, it's nice to be able to visit a new city in Twinity.

More Twinity visuals can be found at Koinup!

Are you prepared?

2009-08-25T21:01:00.013+02:00

Many of Eve Online's pilots enjoy doing stuff together. Mining, missions or operations: it's often done with corp mates, alliance members or friends, which makes it a lot more enjoyable. Yesterday, an ad hoc team of four Alien Ship Builders did a couple of level 4 missions: Angel Extravaganza and Mordus Headhunters. Given the huge amounts of damage (dps) we could inflict and absorb (tank), neither of these missions proved to be much of a problem.

Yet, at one point during Mordus Headhunters I ran into trouble. I drew much of the aggro of the second pockets, meaning I had dozens of enemy ships firing at me at point blank range. My setup wasn't really prepared for those amounts of dps as I had only one armor repair unit fitted, and after a while I had to warp out to repair my ship. On the snapshot below, which you can click for a larger view, my shields are half gone, but my armor is still intact:

The reason I had left so ill prepared: I was running a relatively easy level3 mission solo, when we decided to run the level4's together. Without changing my fittings I jumped in, when in hindsight I should have adapted to the new, more demanding circumstances!

In the end, nothing was lost; the three others were more than capable to handle the incoming fire thrown at them. We completed the missions and cashed the rewards; in total, with the level3 and a few sales combined, I earned almost 30 million ISK yesterday.

Questions on CCP's new 'Dust 514' console game

2009-08-18T20:13:00.014+02:00

Today brought us the news that CCP, the creators of Eve Online, will bring a new console only MMO to the market, called 'Dust 514'. The funny thing is: Dust 514 is situated on the planets of the very same EVE Online universe, New Eden, we already know! Both EVE Online's space bound pilots and Dust 514's planet dwelling fighters will play a role in the story that unfolds in New Eden. According to CCP, this is "one universe, one war", and they hope the Eve Online and Dust 514 communities will merge together over time. After reading a few news reports I have a few quick questions and remarks about Dust 514.

First off, Dust 514 is an FPS, meaning the players will be walking avatars - something still missing from Eve Online. Called 'ambulation' or 'walking in stations' we have been waiting for this for quite some time, but so far this hasn't materialised. Could Dust 514 be the precursor to ambulation? If Eve and Dust 514 players are ever to meet in game, both need a real avatar. Besides, the Dust 514 snapshot below - provided by CCP - shows a command pit, floating in space above the planet, not built on it. This is clearly ambulation, but of course it could be only for Dust 514 players.

Will an EVE pilot be able to participate in fights on the planets? Could EVE spaceships affect battles by bombing enemy Dust 514 players or by providing logistical services to his own Dust 514 mercs? Could an EVE pilot 'beam down' to pick up a gun and join the fight on the planet? And if he survives, could he then take his Dust 514 buddies back up to the station for a drink at the bar? Again, without ambulation this is impossible, but there's certainly a very interesting perspective for future expansions. Although, given that Dust 514 is a console game, I don't know whether it's technically feasible for CCP to provide such a mixed environment within the current implementation of New Eden.

Second: the changes to sovereignty in 0.0 (nullsec) space. Currently, an alliance can claim sovereignty over regions of 0.0 space by placing and maintaining player owned space stations (POS'es) there. In the future, Dust 514 players get to play a role in this mechanism too, as owning stations isn't going to be enough to maintain sovereignty. You'll need Dust 514 mercenaries on the ground, on the planets, to conquer those for you as well. This may have significant impact on the balances of power and the politics of New Eden. I wonder how the big space holding 0.0 alliances think about this sudden change to the playing field.

And the existing EVE pilots? If you're a highsec PVE player or miner, it doesn't look like your daily game experience will change much, as the sov changes only affect nullsec. Also, with Dust 514, CCP is aiming for a different audience: the existing pilots can stay in space, CCP wants new FPS players for Dust 514 combat! IF CCP succeeds, the number of gamers active within New Eden will continue to grow (or grow even harder), which is a good thing for CCP and hence for all of us who like to spend time in New Eden.

Opensim: two islands

2009-08-17T20:23:00.005+02:00

Today I created a second island at my OpenSim location:

It's not that spectacular; it's just one of the default islands available for download in the Second Life knowledge base. But it's good enough for my purposes, here. I think I'll ask the kids to turn this into a park or tropical island, instead of an ordinary residential area. I wonder if they are up to it!

OpenSim amazement

2009-08-16T20:37:00.013+02:00

The new OpenSim server I created last week, has seen a lot of action in the past few days. My kids and a few nieces living nearby, are busy building annd furnishing houses. They have discovered how to work with textures, too! At first they noticed that screenshots could be saved to inventory, and they started using them as textures. After that I showed my daughter how to upload pictures found on the internet or local hard drive, and now they are creating tv's, laptops and stuff like that. They are learning fast, and I am, frankly, quite amazed at some of their work.

This nice bar is built by my eight year old niece:

My almost-ten-years-old daughter framed a tv in her new house - but also some popcorn to go with a movie:

And this is perhaps the most promising build, a beach house, still under development. This one is made by my fourteen year old niece, who's very much into interior design, and I'm quite eager to see what she's going to do with this nice place!

More pictures are available at my Koinup stream.