Blog Banter 2 - November 2008 Edition

It's time once again for a few lines from everyone who is participating in the Eve blogging community to get their voices heard on a specific subject - i.e. its time once again for blog banter.

This months question asks: What drew us into EVE, what keeps us playing the game and what brought us back if we've ever left?


All 3 points seem to apply to me (having left and come back), so I'll answer them all in sequence.

1) What drew me in? I'd have to say it was a desire to have a good Scifi based game that reminded me of Elite / Frontier after finding one or two 'Elite Clones' just couldnt capture the vastness of space that I was used to with that. Along with the fact that a fair few of my WoW playing friends also played Eve gave me some people to ask for their opinions on the game, and also good starter pointers when I did get there. I can remember going to a friends house on our yearly get-togethers and seeing the game, listening to Eve Radio in the background and just generally liking the look of it. I really liked the 'train whilst offline' approach to skilling up, since I was still in WoW at the time as well, and didn't really want to get involved with 2 sets of boring repetative grinds.

2) What keeps me here... It's still a question I struggle to answer. After all, I've not logged in except to change skill training over for the best part of 3-4 days now, but the thing that keeps me interested is the potential. I love the idea of everything being player-ran where possible, the politics involved, the way that someone completely random can become a big figure in the community. I've not felt anything like that since the last 'open world' game I played - Ultima Online.

I like to keep in touch with friends too, but except for one guy who has recently returned, all my old WoW buddies have left Eve to never return shortly after I left last time (about a year and a half ago now) so I lost touch with friends there, and to compound the issue, I recently left the corp I had been in since I started in Eve because it was coming more and more deserted as time went on, and I found that I was finding less and less reason to log in. I joined Eve Uni about a month ago now to try and rekindle my love of the game, teach those newcomers who want to learn and generally make some new friends.

Unfortunately, I have to say I'm struggling with that at the moment, everyone in Eve Uni is civil for certain, but I'm struggling to find the cameraderie I had with my old corp, since Eve Uni is all about people who could leave at short notice, and only long term residents tend to get to know each other - especially those who do make friends all tend to leave together, so unless you can get into a 'clique' its hard to get well known. Add to the fact that no one ever openly reveals information in there due to the constant threat of spies, it's hard to get to sit down and just chat with people to get to know them. I'm hoping with time, I can find the same feeling with Eve Uni that I used to feel when I logged in during the good times with my old corp.

3) What brought me back... I mentioned this on the last blog banter - I was tempted by Ambulation. It was something I had always hoped would come about after it was mentioned before I left last time, and when I noticed that it was on the horizon (after seeing it mentioned on a few gaming forums I visit) the 'hunger pangs' came back. I thought after a year away, perhaps I would give it another go.

There we are - a bit short and to the point I'm afraid for this one, I've been a bit too busy with other things than to concentrate too hard on Eve at the moment, it's always the same near the end of the year, but I hope it's been a nice read for those who are interested.


Participants:

CrazyKinux's Musing: EVE Blog Banter #2: Space, the Final Frontier...
Ombeve: OOC Blog Banter 2
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: Internet Spaceships is Serious Business
Semper EVE: The Allure of EVE
A Merry Life and a Short One: EVE Blog Banter #2 - This Is My Time
Life in Low Sec: Blog Banter #2: EVE's Enduring Allure
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Eve Blog Banter - What Drew Me Into Eve?
Roc's Rambling: Blog Banter #2: Staying in Power
Sahirs Journey: EVE Blog Banter #2
Diving into PsychDiver's Psyche: EVE Blog Banter #2: All I Ever Wanted To Be Was A Capsuleer
• Achernar: Just gathering intel
Sweet Little Bad Girl: Blog Banter #2
The Ralpha Dogs: The Appeal of the Never-Ending Story
A Mule in EVE: Mule Psychology : EvE Style
A Misguided Adventure: Blog Banter - Enduring Allure
One Man and His Spaceship: Blog Banter 2 - November 2008 Edition
Letrange's EVE Blog: That Banter Thing
Diary of a Space Jokey: EVE Blog Banter: How'd I get here ?!

Guide Part 8 - R&D and Invention

Here's the next installation of the continuing guide.

After seeing a lot of requests from people in Eve Uni who were interested in Invention, I've penned this guide as a nice reference point.

Of course, I hope everyone has some benefit from it as well.

Click the link to get the guide itself

Guide to Industry - now with stuffy voice

I made a voice recording of my first class with Eve uni - I've not re-listened to it, so there could be some really obvious bits that have been messed up, but on the other hand, those that listened in seemed to follow the chat fine, so I'm hoping its good.

Here's the recording of the file for any and all.

Hope it proves useful to some people, and enjoy. By the way, I'm full of cold so sounded really stuffy and had to take a break from the mic every now and again to avoid coughing like crazy over the voice comms.

Quantum Rise Implants List

I've updated the implants list from a few posts back with the new slot numbers for the speed mods, plus the updated stats on the Slave implants.

As well as that, I have also added in the other faction implants (ORE, Thrukker etc) since they hadn't had anywhere near as much info out on there as they should have had.

The updated file can be found by following this link

Enjoy.

Guide Part 7 - Understanding Fleet Mechanics

This is one of the areas I had very little understanding in until recently, where I have been researching and begining to understand the complexity.

With this in mind, I'm sure that there's many others who are still as confused at this as I once was, so perhaps the new guide will help medium term players as well as the new starters.

Details are here

Theres a bad moon on the Rise

OK aside from a bit of a classic song reference, it seems that the Eve Uni has recieved its first war dec since Quantum Rise.

Should be nice to give a good look-see into how the new frigate combat systems work since they have been 'improved' with the patch and personally, I'm looking forward to it since I've never seen the uni war machine in full swing yet.

It's a bit annoying for me, as I hadn't set up my base of operations up in Caldari space yet, so I frantically went around buying ships and modules this morning in preparation, I just hope I've got time to move everything to a suitable location before the war starts late tonight UK time.

I'm not going to go into details of the war target and suchlike (I'm still not quite sure on what I'm not supposed to say in such a beurocratic organisation compared to what I'm more used to, i.e. small groups of friends) but no doubt the official words will be coming sooner or later from the appropriate people.

Gotta get around to setting up my account on the uni voice comms system and the like tonight, see if I can find someone with a freighter that has room to move a lot of bought stuff, and buy a few more throwaway ships (I've mainly been buying some of the more exotic things this morning, the cheap and cheerful will be done tonight after work) and re-set my clone, since I dont want to end up back in the middle of Minmatar space if I get killed which is what would happen.


Fun fun fun.

Certificates

I logged in this morning to the nice new Quantum Rise splash screen filled with anticipation for the new system.

First thing I tried was to recover my certificates to see just what I had qualified for in CCP's eyes for 'piloting certificates' to determine how I fit in with the grand scheme of how the game creators view 'what you should fly to do this task'

I was a little disappointed, I only achieved generally level 1 certificates in most things, and maybe level 2 in some, but looking into the requirements to get the certificates, it asks for a lot of superfluous skills which are fairly hard to come by and are usually left for tweaking your character to get the most out of them.

To me, that should be the 'elite' level skills only - a very competent pilot who is specialised in one particular area (or has loads of skill points to spread around) - but somoene who has about a year and a quater or so of training behind them doesnt seem to have stepped off the first rung of the CCP training ladder just because I dont want to get level 5 in all my shield tanking skills and suchlike.

OK, I'll admit, I've hardly been focused in training, but for someone who can solo a level 4 missions, surely they must rank higher in CCP's view than someone who's only at stage 1 of their training plan ?

I know that ultimately the training certificates are just fluff that look nice and don't correspond directly with anything in game, but I was slightly disappointed when I only got the low level certs after thinking that I was more than competent at the things I can do well (level 4 missions, and industrial production, though I'm not quite sure how much notice is taken on the industry side of things other than the 'harvester' tree which includes mining and refining too, which I am not very skilled in by my own admission)

Guide Part 6 - Mission Running

Part 6 of the guide focuses on one of the most basic money making methods in the game, the mission runner.

This guide is meant as an overview of the system, not a specific guide to completing the missions, however look at the end for a link to an out of game system called Eve Survival if you are not aware of the website, which can only be described as the discerning mission runners closest ally.

This Guide has now been updated

A few minor corrections & a new file

With thanks to an intrepid band of proof readers, I've had a few corrections and amendments to my guides pointed out.

I've re-jigged the POS guide (part 5) to amend the amount of fuel held in the fuel bays

Get It Here

I've corrected some spelling mistakes on the Ships guide, and added Capital ships

Get It Here

I've added an implants guide - note that this will change with the release of Quantum Rise as some of the implants will be changed so that they can't be speed-stacked

Get It Here

Note that page 6 of the implant list PDF includes the Pirate Implants for anyone who is interested in seeing what they can do.

Back to school again

I've joined up with Eve Uni as of last night to try my hand at teaching, it may as well go hand in hand with the massive project of guides production I've set my mind to.

I'm still finding my feet with the massive information overload that always comes with getting into brand new forums and finding my way around, but so far, it looks nicely organised even if it takes me 3 links to find something by going to the wrong place twice (you know, it was sort of like that for me in real uni too for the first week or so)

I've got to present a speech based class in order to cement my place which should be an interesting task, since I'm ususally fairly quiet in speech chat simply because of my accent (proud Mackem, or one of the various derivatives of North East England for anyone who doesnt understand the term) so most people who arent local really struggle to understand me when I'm speaking - its why I learned to type really fast.

Anyway, I'll have to try and think of a way to make the class a bit more unique for me rather than just doing 'same old same old' so that should be another interesting challenge in itself.

More updates as I get more accustomed to the new place.

Guide Part 5 - An overview of the POS

POS's are generally myserious beasts for those that do not understand them. I hope this basic guide can go some way to raising the general level of understanding on the subject.

This Guide has now been updated

I have very little practical experience with a POS beyond day to day use in lowsec, so there could be some errors with the 0.0 uses, so if there is anything really obvious I've missed, let me know.