A Nice bit of T3 Speculation

Well it seems that everyone in the blogging community is buzzing about 3 subjects - the BoB/Goons fallout, wormholes, and T3 ships, since they were announced to be going on the test server at the weekend (and hastily pushed back afterwards to Monday of next week I believe)

They have released the names of the 'base hulls' for each of the races, bearing in mind that at initial release there has been confirmed that there will only be a cruiser sized hull available:

The Caldari Varient will be called Tengu
The Amarr Varient will be called Legion
The Gallente Varient will be called Proteus
The Minmatar Varient will be called Loki

These all have a baseline in 'shapeshifting' characters from various myths and legends from Japanese mythology, the Bible, Greek mythology and Norse mythology.

The first batch of T3 test pieces on Singularity will only be Caldari based models (though there will be 4 raical varients, they will all look the same) and much as with the recent QR mods, the test server will be changed a lot, so people who take part will notice many dynamic changes over the weeks to come.

I've got an inkling of which skills may be needed if they are not releasing new skills for the ability to build the ships (flying you can probably guarantee there will be a new skill released) and if its true, I'll need to look into investing in a skill that is fairly expensive at the moment, and is very rarely used - of course, its a bit of a gamble since the skill may come down massively in price once it comes to be more commonly needed and the supply picks up - or I could be completely off base and waste money on a skill I wouldnt have any use for at all.

Not sure how much information is going to be on Sisi over the next few days, but since I always struggle to get it activated and log in (seriously, I've never been on there yet, I can never figure out how to access it) I can only hope that theres enough information posted in the general blog/forum world to get me up to speed.

War is over once again.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have had another crushing victory in our war against Decimus Corp.

After losing only 2 ships ourselves (both frigates) and destroying 5 of theirs (a HAC, a Battleship, a Frigate, a Battlecruiser, and a Hauler they used as bait) the war was declared void due to non payment of expenses early this morning.

In true A Team style... I love it when a plan comes together.

February Update

Just thought I'd spend a few minutes before the football local derby match to give a bit of an update on how I'm doing in all things Eve related.

1) Skills:

I've detracted a bit from my plans for a Nighthawk. Battlecruiser 5 is still on the cards, but I've been spending my time training up pre-requisite skills for Recon ships (yay, Falcon) which means I'll be able to get into training up the Recon ships skill in a bit under an hour.

I want to get the skills for an Onyx as well soon, need about 17 days for that according to Evemon to get enough levels in Propulsion Jamming.

I still need to train up the aforementioned Battlecruisers 5, but want to also get into my Hulk (about 35 days give or take), and get enough refining skills to get rid of the really bad returns I get at the moment (only got Refining 4, think I only get about 78% return on my ground down loot drops and mined stuff) by getting Refining 5 and Refinery efficiency.

I also really want to spend some time on my Tech 2 weapon systems training, working on my Hybrid Guns skills and Standard to Heavy missiles.

On top of that, I want to train up Gallente Frigate and Gallente Cruiser 5 to give me a bit of greater flexibility in combat.

2) Guides

I have just rehashed the Weapons and Tanking guides after a flash of inspiration I had last night. In the Weapons guide, I updated to include the missile damage formula that was calculated as a result of testing on Singularity during the QR beta test phase, and explained a bit how it works. In the tanking guide I included a few issues that were discussed between myself and corp mates on spider tanking, as we've been discussing issues relating to it over the past few days.

If anyone wants to see the direct link with all my guides to date, please feel free to go to:

http://eve-files.com/media/corp/Karox/

3) War

We're back at war again. Decimus Corp (DEC-X) have now decided to attack us. Nothing really to report yet, we've been fighting for 3 days, and all they have seemed to do is station hug. We moved to Lowsec to see just how interested they were in PVP, or if they were just the typical highsec griefer corp, and they neglected to follow us, draw what conclusions from that as you will.

So far there has only been one skirmish with losses, which resulted in them losing one HAC and we lost the tackling frigate we used - a good tradeoff as far as I'm concerned. An earlier skirmish brought a few chuckles as one of their pilots was forced to run, screaming in local for help after we decended on him.

And now the match is just about to kick off, so time to go.

Blog Banter 4: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Heres me hoping that i'm the first one to think of the corny music based title, so lets hope :)

January's Blog banter was submitted by Manasi:

"How do we, EVE bloggers, adapt to changes as they are thrust upon us (speed changes, no more ghost training, all the dev blogs, etc), or as our lives make playing the game different (more time, less time)?".


Personally speaking, I've been playing MMO's for a fair few years now from all things relating to Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and of course, Eve. In that time I've seen plenty of 'nerf' patches - at least to the point where to the general populous, the sky appears to be falling in.

With all of these, I tend to play some sort of adaptable 'class type' where I can so if there are any major changes I can learn to adapt and overcome them, learning the new methods of doing things to suit my own personal playstyle - in other words, I tend to just go with the flow and live with most of the changes.

Of course, I'm more than happy to lend support to those voices that ask to get some of the 'harsher' changes dialled down a bit, I would be a fool to simply allow anything to go through uncontested if it reduced my ability to do the things I do in the game world, but I dont threaten to quit and run off in a huff if my personal way of playing is changed drastically, I tend to just take a step back and work out how much time it would take to start a new character if necessary (or in the case of Eve, train something new) and if its not worth my time, I will quite simply just give it a few goes to see how the changes impact me, and if I'm not happy, ill wander off into the sunset and never be seen again (depending of course if friends are also considering the same action, since I tend to just congregate where friends are at/going to)

As for changes in your personal life, I cant say I've got any kids or any of the major time-sappers (demanding wife ;) ) that many people start to get around their thirties, but I have noticed that my available time has changed over these years as well - when I was at University, I could quite happily come in at 2pm from lectures, stick around to midnight and other days spend all day just messing around online.

As time went on, I got a job and started noticing my free time eroding more and more, and now between work and keeping up with my social life, I may find I spend only 2-3 nights playing on the computer.

For that, I have found Eve to be the perfect game - the offline, time-based training doesnt rely on me being online, and when I was playing a xp grinding game, such as WoW I found that I could only really support 1 character with the time I had available (after all, MMO's are made to be time sinks in their own right) so going back to the first point - if I had some major change that affected my character, I was more likely to want to leave if it made the game unplayable, as I didnt want to start again from scratch, and didn't have the time for training 2-3 characters simultaneously.

Couple that with my method of money making (industry/selling stuff in general) being fairly compatible with short online sessions, I have been able to continue to maintain my presence in the game even when I can't log in.

So there we go, another insight into my mind, as crazy and mixed up as it can be at times. Hope you enjoyed it.

Participants:

• Attitude is Everything
• "If I could save time in a bottle…."
• The Game with the Thousand Faces
• [OOC] January's Blog Banter
• New Ballgames, Same Home Team
• EVE Blog Banter #4: I Don't Know
• Adaptation
• CK's Blog Banter #4
• Roll With the Punches
• Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
• We, the EVE-bloggers
• Adapt or Die
• I'm in ur blogosphere, hijackin' ur Blog Banter (4)
• Blog Banter
• Opportunity or Burden?
• Mystic Pizza
• "Stay on target…"
• January EVE Blog Banter
• Re-Prioritization
• Bonzai in my Bookcase
• Delicious!

An old guide updated, and something new

As promised in my earlier post, I have updated and re-uploaded the Tanking guide to incorporate some Quantum Rise info and add a few bits / clear up some ambiguity, as well as adding a new guide for Capital Ship Production.

I'm not sure if the Capital Ship guide can be describes as either 'too little information' or 'concise' but it seems to be a bit too short for my likes, however I seem to have covered everything that I need to do for the guide as far as I can think.

This is where you, humble reader, step in. If theres anything that you need more information on, let me know as the guide doesnt go into detailed information on exactly how the production system works in Eve as that was already covered in my Eon article, but I appreciate that many people may not read that, but on the other hand I have to respect the request that was made to me to keep the guide exclusive. As well as that more obvious omission, there could be other isses that I have just forgot about since I do this sort of thing day to day now and the commonality of it all seems to mean that I forget some obvious things that others may need to know.

So let me know if you need any more information.

And after that bit of rambling on, on to the guides:

Tanking, Version 2

Capital Ship Production

The Boring Update (TM)

I know, not really the sort of title that will make you jump to read the post, but to be fair, theres nothing much happened to any great deal over the past week or so since I made my last post.

I find it really hard to actually want to undock at the moment, instead i'm treating Eve as a monthly paid chatroom to keep in touch with friends, in between maybe doing 3-4 round trip jumps to go grab materials and blueprints whilst doing research/manufacturing jobs.

Truth be told, I find the stage I'm at in a game the worst bit to get over - I know everyones talked about the 7 month itch many times before, and it might just be that it's come around again (i'm not sure I'll have to check my records since I came back to Eve) but i'm now fairly wealthy (enough to keep me in ships for a while, at least until I start PVPing with them, which is hard to find fleet mates, so never happens) and a decent income from manufacturing in the meantime.

I hate running missions, they're boring and repetative, and aside from grinding standings to work with other factions, there's no real point of them at the moment since my monetary needs are more than covered.

I may go out and do some exploring, since thats what everyone seems to be doing to get ready for tech 3/wormholes but most of the work involved will be skill based, and many people are training up skills on the off chance they will be needed, whereas I dont really have that luxury with a 160 ish day skill plan still in the works.

I'm finally getting back into doing some guides though - I've already amended the tanking guide based on Sumerio's comments from the Eve Uni boards and added a few more updates myself based on Quantum Rise changes, so I hope to post that later today or tomorrow. I'm also going to work on a Capital Ship production guide since I can't produce a Tech 1/Tech 2 production guide on here due to the agreement I have with EON - but I hope everyone who read the Tech 1 guide featured in the latest issue have enjoyed it, and if you have any comments, feel free to message me, im only an Eve-Mail or E-Mail away.

Phew, im glad thats over.

Not much of an update today, but best post to just say that I've finally gotten Caldari Cruiser 5, my first rank 5 cruiser skill.

Unfortunately the ships I can access with it at the moment are fairly pitiful at best (OK, maybe I can spring for a Cerberus to give it a go, but its hardly a world changing ship) but its working towards my skills for the Nighthawk I've been aiming for.

I'm now working on Battlecruisers 5, which is another long, boring skill, and then after that, going to work more on Heavy missiles which have been left behind a bit for Cruise training when I moved into my CNR.

Then maybe get back to working on Gallente Frigates, Gallente Cruisers and Gunnery Skills which could end up actually being useful for something in PVP, and maybe also getting back to training up industrial stuff as well, since I've been meaning to get Refining 5 and Refinery Efficiency up a few levels for about oh, 3 months now.

iClone - Really useful little tool

Over Christmas, I got my hands on an iPod Touch, which for anyone who doesnt yet know, combines both the functionality of an iPod's music player, with a fully functional PDA style component, which can load external applications from the iTunes store. Its sort of like an iPhone in that regard, it just can't dial out, but it does have wireless functionality if you can find a hotspot.

Theres a few Eve character monitors available on there, such as the excellent Capsuleer - produced, I believe by a blogging colleague, Roc Wielder (apologies if I've misspelled your name) but I have been personally using iClone, which combines a character skill monitor, with a data dump of the latest Eve Database, to include a full market browser, skill browser and other useful tools which I normally can't access when away from the screen.

It's great when I want to quickly check up the base components of any blueprints, and what modules are available for my ships or other items, as well as the requirements they need and so on.

Importing the character data in the first place is a bit complicated, you need to create your character as a 'contact' in a mail programme and synch this contact to your iPod / iPhone via iTunes but it worked first time for me, so I'm not going to complain, reading the forums seems to indicate that a lot of people struggle to get past that stage. I can only presume they arent following the instructions properly, or I've just been very lucky that the import worked fine.

Now all I need is a decent build monitor that works on the iPod (I'm presuming that this can be monitored from the API since EveMEEP does something similar) and i'll be set for all remote checking I could ever need.

Estiah - Card/Turn based online gamey thing

I've just recently signed up to Estiah which is a "Magic the Gathering" type of deal where you design your card deck based around your combat strategy and play off against computer or player controlled opponents with similar decks.

This has a bit of a MMORPG/levelling element to it however, and because of the way the game is designed (you get a certain amount of action points every 2 hour session which you can spend or store to do several small sessions, or do one large playthough) makes it perfect to catch up with during your lunch break.

The game is very basic, no real graphics to talk about, its mainly text based, but theres some quite humerous descriptions of things as they happen.

Its entirely free to play, so if anyone is interested in it, feel free to give it a go as well, ideally using my friends code which subsequently helps me level up a bit faster by giving me a portion of XP whenever the people I invite level up themselves.

It might not be the best idea to ask me too many questions about how it all works at the moment, im still learning myself, only been playing with it an hour and used up my initial full day worth of action points really quickly, but the tutorials and FAQ/Wiki seem to give a good bit of insight.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, please feel free to join up using my friends link

Happy New Year

Suffice to say, i've had a bit too much to drink, and this post has taken me 4 times to double check to make sure things are spelled right since drink has taken over my main functions, but hope 2009 brings more to you this year than 2008 brought me.


I really need to speak to a certain someone who didnt show up tonight, since she said she was really intrested in coming along to see the new year in....

Guide Consolidation

As were fast approaching the end of 2008, I thought i'd better try and consolidate some of the more important infromation on the blog, namely the guides, which I hope have been very useful for those out there in pod-land.

I've been taking some tips and some suggestions for other areas to improve the guides, and most of them are now in version 2 (many thanks to an Eve Uni forums resident, Sumerio Rayej for typing up his ideas and making them easy to fit in with my guides so its just a matter of including his mods, many of which I agreed with, some of those I had to a bit of editorial tweaking to satisfy my own thoughts)

Therefore to help considlidate all your information into one easy to access package, I've deleted a lot of the old version 1 files (subsequently, the earlier links wont work on the blog anymore, so apologies if anyone finds a dead link, I'm going to go and try and remove any old ones to link back to this page, so thats why youre seeing this if you werent expecting it) please find the newest versions of the guides for your viewing pleasure:

Part 1 - Weapons
Part 2 - Tanking (updated to v2)
Part 3 - Drones
Part 4 - Electronic Warfare
Part 5 - POS
Part 6 - Missions
Part 7 - Fleets and Boosting
Part 8 - R&D and Invention
Part 9 - Scanning
Part 10 - Capital Ship Construction (new)

Now... many people will say there are some quite important guides missing from that list, but I don't want to re-write old guides that have no need to be re-done as the resources out there are already considered to be excellent. 2 of the guides I will reference below are those I use myself from time to time, and should be considered one of the best examples I can find out there for the subjects:

Hadala's Mining Guide - Link to Eve Online Forums
Joerd's Exploration Guide - Link to Eve Online Forums

In addition to this, I am not able to provide a production guide as I am currently awaiting my guide being published in the next issue of EON along with a follow up in issue 15 (Issue 14 will deal with Tech 1, Issue 15 will deal with Tech 2 just in time for Tech 3 to be coming out in March) - and because of that, I have promised them that I won't list the guide here. However, if you really can't wait for the EON issues to be published, there are a few things I can do for you:

A verbal guide to Tech 1 manufacture that I gave to Eve Uni (57mb MP3 file)
A Tech 2 component guide (unfortunately I have no idea who produced this, but it is a little incorrect in places)

As well as the in depth guides, I have also compiled some quick reference lists that many may find to be very useful:

An Eve Ships Reference List
Eve Ships in Alphabetical Order (useful for fast threat-identification in the overview)
An Implants List (including pirate and other faction implants, which has been updated for Quantum Rise)

As always, if you want a specific guide produced for any activity, please let me know and I'll look into how practical it could be for me to make it. As well as that, if you have any comments on the guides or want to make any amendments, I'll be happy to listen to you if you want to contact me by email, the address is in my profile.

Have a good remainder of 2008, and good luck with whatever challenges 2009 may bring.

Merry Christmas

The clock has just ticked past midnight here in jolly old England, so let me wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

May your future endeavours be bountiful.

Confusing Market Activity

First off, let me say Merry Christmas for everyone out there (or if you dont support Christmas, then have a good time anyway) since I missed the blog banter entry, mainly because I was crazy busy with work stuff at this time of the year (working in the power industry means that it takes a bit longer to get everything prepared for the time off for christmas to make sure theres adequate backup/response in case things do go wrong, and even though I was supposedly on holiday, I had quite a few emails to respond to/phone calls to answer during the day)

Anyway, now thats over and done with, just a quick note to see if anyone else has noticed any really strange market activity lately ?

I'm not going to reveal the details (I'm hoping its going to be a nice way to make some money) but one of the key ingredients for a tech 2 blueprint I'm making is now priced on the open market at one trade hub at much lower costs than it takes to manufacture. Im used to this with mission drop modules of course, people constatly undercut each other to offload the module at the best price for them, even if it means selling it for less than it costs to make it, since they didnt have to actually make it - but this particular module doesnt drop anywhere, at least where I know anyway.

The module is now about 250k less than what it used to sell at, and about 20k less than it costs to make it.

Its good for me of course, I can just buy them for my tech 2 manufacturing and not have to worry about making any, which saves me time and headaches, and if im lucky, I can move them a few regions away and sell them back on with the 250k markup in a region where there hasnt been massive undercutting and then rake back in a bit of money.

The really confusing thing isnt that its just one or two modules, its numbers in the 500-1000 range, and buying them all up would basically commit my entire wallet to it, so im just testing the waters for now to see if they sell.

Could be a nice little christmas present to me if it goes well... if not... then my tech 2 manufacture has gotten a touch cheaper, though im sure it will be more than offset by the increase in price in ferrogel and the other high end reaction minerals once my existing stocks run out.

The 7 Facts Meme - continued

Seems that I have been tagged by Ombey so best get my bit in before work kicks in tomorrow.

Firstly, the small print:

• Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Some (probably less than interesting, but you never know) facts about me:

1) My birthday is the same day as my uncle, who isnt very famous as far as I can gather, but also Tina Turner, who is a bit more famous, or so I've been told.

2) I've never been out of the UK on a recreational visit, and the furthest I've been on business is to Italy, so im strictly European.

3) My work however, has me dealing a lot with customers in the Middle East - yet I've never been there to visit the sites I help build.

4) The town I live in has had quite a few celebrities live in it - classically, the ancestors of George Washington (the American President) and also Brian Ferry of Roxy Music fame. Also it seems that Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand was raised there when he was very young. Our most 'infamous' celebrity export seems to be Heather Mills though (Paul McCartney's ex wife)

5) As well as my work, I voluntarily run (Treasurer and Bar Licensee) a Community Centre, which keeps me usually more busy than I can imagine at times.

6) I put on a fair bit of weight at university (the before and after pictures are scary sometimes when I look at them) and I really cant shift it back off again since then... its strange though as my weight never really changes otherwise, it hardly goes up either since I left university.

7) The most uncharacteristic thing I've ever done is voluntarily pay £100 at very short notice to do a bungee jump for charity (a friend of mine was doing it, he managed to get sponsorship, which was the main intention of the day, but I had a bit of a daredevil moment and ponied up the cash on the day to take part) - It's uncharacteristic as i'm petrified of heights, and can't even climb a ladder unless it's secured and won't wobble.

Now comes the hard Part, finding 7 bloggers to link to... most of my regular reads have been linked to already, but for the sake of trying to find someone whos not been linked with (and I hope people havent linked them since I put this post up:)

• Miner With Fangs (Dee Carson)
• Morphisat's Blog
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah (Kirith)
• DeafPlasma's Eve Musings
• Dense Veldspar (Ahnog)
• Postings From The Edge (Zapatero)
• Diving into PsycheDivers Psyche
  

(OK, the last one is a bit of a naughty one, since he's already been linked, but its only fair I include him, hes been commenting on a lot of my posts recently, and the other blogs I follow that don't comment on my posts as much had already been mentioned)

(Unfortunately the commenting on their blogs to inform them will have to wait until tomorrow morning, as it's getting a bit late now, so if you notice your name on here, please link back to it)

Email address for you to get in touch

I've decided to end another bit of anonymity and get myself a publically accessible email address for people to get in touch with me if they want to.

I can now be reached via karoxlominax@googlemail.com if you ever wish to send a mail, and my email address is available now via my profile at the side.

Hopefully I wont get spammed too much.

Is the T2 market going to be rocky for a while ?

Seems that sometime over the past couple of days, there has been speculation that has rocked the very fabric of the T2 industry within Eve - and the problem is no one seems to know if its real or not, CCP won't confirm it, all they will say is that 'we have identified an exploit with POS mechanics'

It seems that since day 1 of the new POS mechanics (4 years ago now or thereabouts) there has been a problem with the reaction system on a POS - by doing certain actions it was possible to break the POS chain of input/reactor/output so that an output silo could be filled with only a minor load of moon minerals/simple reactions - basically the input materials weren't consumed, and the ouput kept on repeating every hour with 1 hour's worth of minerals in the input.

There has been suggestions that 3 major alliances stockpiled the high value R64 moon minerals (or more specifically, their simple and complex reaction counterparts that use those moon minerals) and have basically commanded the market value for those 4 years.

Suggestions were made that as much as 3,000 Billion Isk profit was made by 1 alliance from this 'making money from nothing' exploit which funded Titan projects, outposts and also gametime for those that were involved, basically meaning they got to play Eve for nothing, as they generated the isk to buy their gametime essentially from thin air (or more technically, vacuum)

Other calculations suggested that if this was fully exploited it would have the chance to generate around 406 Billion Isk over the 4 years per POS that was exploiting, but that was a very unrealistic estimate as no one would be expected to be able to sell that much material constantly - but it could explain why things like freighters were found full of moon reaction minerals in the middle of captured POSes during wars.

What will this mean for the man on the street - well, once this exploit hole has been cleared up, it's very likely that the amount of output minerals will drop (as theres apparently no way to get the same amount of input to maintain the same level of output using legitimate moon mining methods, due to the limited number of moons available) which will lead to price rises.

It already happened yesterday, there was mass market panic buying of the moon minerals involved, either for people to stockpile in case of massive price rises, or people who were buying and reselling at a mark up.

Whilst theres some indication of truth to the issue by CCP stating that they have identified and are in the process of fixing the exploit (and removing the POSes which exploited as well as the accounts) many of the more paranoid members who remember the T20 incident are simply stating that this is another 'internal corruption' issue where CCP were in on the deal, and their game-playing alts were involved in an attempt at massive market manipulation to raise the price of their stockpiled minerals to make a profit (for the record, the T20 incident, whilst I wasnt around at the time was to do with a CCP employee using his GM powers to create an unfair advantage for himself and possibly his corp)

The fallout from this should be interesting to watch over the next few days, but if you have your heart set on getting a nice new T2 toy (especially a ship, since they utilise every type of moon minerals somewhere in their components) it might be worth getting it sooner rather than later, at least if you believe the market hype.

Guide Part 9 - Scanning and Probing

This is the 'non exploration themed' guide to scanning and probing - i.e. using the ship scanner and recon probes to find PVP targets.

I hope it helps those who are interested in getting up close and personal with those you want to find out in the vastness of space.

Find the guide linked here

A Quick personal update on progress

Seems I've not done much in here this week, so best end the drought with a quick update on progress, whilst im working on the next guide.

I'm currently training Weapon Upgrades 5, which is due to finish early tomorrow, towards my goal of having command ships, now that I have finally begun to understand the leadership/gang boosting mechanics.

Ultimately I want to get a Nighthawk as a mission running ship, and as a consequence, I will also get the skills required to pilot Heavy Assault Ships whilst training, which I had planned but wasn't really working towards.

In addition to that, I am training leadership skills side by side to get at least level 4 in all of the base leadership skills, but ultimately, I want to get Mining Director, to pilot the Orca, and Siege Warfare Specialist so I can equip my Nighthawk with a Shield Harmoizing gang link to overcome the inevitable loss of a hardener I'll probably have when equipping a target painter in my mission ships.

Of course, for the gang link to have any benefit, it means that I will have to run my alt account at the same time to get the gang bonus effects active, so that character is training up the skills to use my Navy Raven effectively to provide the damage output for the big ships in missions, and the skills for salvaging and tractoring for if the mission is fairly easy, the alt can just sit there cloaked up and start salvaging when I'm flying Karox back to complete the mission.

Now I know this is a very specialised setup looking towards something that I don't get much enjoyment out of anyway (I'm sure many people will notice the underlying boredom involved with missions) but on the other hand, I don't particularly enjoy work either, it's just there to pay the bills, and Eve missions are treat in the same way - getting it over as quickly and painlessly as possible to get the cash to use to do whatever else I want to do.

My alt has Caldari transport ships trained up now, and is at the point where I now decide if I'm going to go train up for a Charon freighter, which would basically wipe out my entire cash reserves if I decided to buy the skills and the ship (Advanced Spaceship Command and Caldari Freighter) but its a very tempting prospect. I really want Karox's Orca as well though just to have the new toy to play with, even though thats a whole lot longer away.

Karox will have to train up mining barges to get the Orca in the process, so it's a natural process to move on to Exhumers soon after that, so I might finally get some use of the Hulk I made a few months back and didn't sell (sentimental value as my first self-made T2 ship) but of course, if I do fly an Orca, I wont have any use of the Exhumer skill either. Ultimately though, I think an Exhumer and my Alt's Transport Ships will be the primary 1-2 combination for solo mining if I decide to follow that path - again, not something i'm really interested in, but it could help to get the money rolling in.

Mission Guide (Part 6 Version 2)

After a bit of discussion on the Eve Uni boards, I have been given a few pointers for interesting things to include in the Missions guide, and had a few other ideas myself, so along with the help of Sumerio, I have re-written the mission guide.

Feel free to discard the earlier one, and use this one instead. It has some very handy links in the document that can be helpful for anyone making a career out of running missions, and also includes some of the more advanced tricks such as farming highly valuable missions for optimum cash.

The new file is linked here

I will offer the same deal to anyone out there I've offered to the Eve Uni boards, if you can find some corrections in the guides, please let me know and ideally take my text and modify the file to suit the corrections and I'll make sure you're credited with the amended work. Whilst I like to think I have a good grounding in all of the subjects I discuss on these guides, many people out there are specialists and know a lot more than me on specific subjects, so I'll always defer unless somoene tells me some blatantly false information.

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.