Been awhile since my last update. Every character is basically now in Empire and with a rather small mining fleet, that’s what’s mostly occupies the time when I choose to login. However, mining is rather boring even if it allows multi-tasking to catch up on reading or re-watching BSG.  Mining fleet essentially makes up of maxed-Mining Director with Orca and 3 Mackinaws (Hulks with tiny cargo-holds don’t work well now).

As for rest of activities:

• Mission grinding is a bore when there is no new mechanics there
• Wormholes isn’t too suitable with limited time
• Null-sec is pretty much not the right environment when you have 2-3 hours per week.

So, when I saw this post EVE Online Development Strategy (CSM Public), it seemed like the CSM is discussing points which are very valid on getting subs more engaged.

The competitive advantage of EVE is the enduring community of players CCP has earned over the past decade, whose ambitions, successes, setbacks, betrayals, and battles provide infinitely more content and headlines than giant-panda-themed dungeon bosses. CCP’s challenge is to maintain this advantage by keeping existing subscribers engaged while steadily attracting new players.

Agree fully with the sentiment here. CCP seems to have gone full-on “iteration” mode and forgotten the need for new incremental content. While it’s great to see ships being re-balanced, UI issues being fixed, there needs to be growth in the gameplay. They seem to swing wildly from lots of new fluffy stuff (which is forgotten) or lots of good work on the existing game. Perhaps a better balance is needed to attract the vets.

For the time being, with 4 subs, I’ll still continue to support the game (as there is nothing like EVE Online) but with games like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous and X-Rebirth coming up, sure seems there is going to be many pull factors to focus attention on them instead.

Eight months! That’s how long since I’ve last played EVE on a consistent basis. Other than the occasional logging in to switch skills, RL has occupied most of my time as well as a new MMORPG called “Aion”

The characters in EVE are progressing nicely with capital skills being trained slowly (EVE has the unique? system of learning new skills in real-time). Jar is counting the days till the next big mining op while Mica is currently stuck with a shit-load of assets in Fountain after he was booted out of the corp for being away for too long. Bad timing to get busy IRL when living in active 0.0!

Came across a post today that illustrates the real world cost when a ship is created and lost in PvP. Sobering to note I’ll soon be able to fly 100USD ships and getting them blown up!

Those of you who browse this site (I do wonder with RSS readers these days, does site design matter?) will notice that the background and header images changes pretty frequently. This is all thanks to a nifty piece of code by Matt Mullenweg at http://ma.tt/scripts/randomimage/.

I tweaked the code a little to run a cron job on the script so that it would serve the background and header of the site as a static file without requiring a script load every time the page was refreshed.

There’s a total of 6 background changes and up to 24 header images (as of this post) that is picked up automatically and served as I add new ones. The latest from the faction frigate series (more to come as soon as this war dec is over) is shown below.

Welcome to the eighth 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 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 here . Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Ga’len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: “What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a ‘nerf this, boost my game play’ post like we see on the EVE forums.”

Ship Boarding!

Part of the unique ability in the X-Universe series of games from EgoSoft was the ability for the player to script almost every action in the game. Some truly ingenious scripts were released like Carrier Commands, MARS fire control and ship boarding using marines. Now if we could use the NPC passengers in EVE Online for this purpose, it would make ship capturing a possibility instead of destroying a ship every time and looting it (such a waste of good resources).

The conditions for this to work is that Marines or Mercenaries need to be in your cargo hold for this to work and the target ship can also stock similar personnel to defend his ship. Obviously new skills and support skills needs to be trained like “Boarding Crews” etc and passenger transportation would actually be useful (Personally I have exotic dancers and spiced wine on board my ships).

Sample logs as you activate a module that sends a raiding party onto target’s ship when their shields fail (it would be great if we had an Ion cannon weapon which only affected shields?):

Marine Leader : “Approaching airlock… activating cutting lasers … we have a good seal.. get ready men!”

Loud bangs and Fighting ensues and after some time, the experience of the crew and the defense crew determines if the target capsuleer should be expelled from the ship and sent home.

A quick search for “Salvage Tug” on the Features and Ideas Discussion shows a lot of people wish there was a new class of ship to enhance gameplay. With ship boarding, it’s conceivable that boarded ships are then towed away to a station for re-use or profit.

Of course, the exotic dancers on board should be claimed

Other Banters:

My new CEO just showed me a link to Dilbert’s comic strip about spreadsheets which instantly made us laugh. In my corp, a few of us run and plan production by our spreadsheets. From budgeting to sharing jobs between corp members, Google Spreadsheets is our savior with all the different time zones. We have spreadsheets for ore/ice mining, Capital/T2 production, POS setups etc and he said the above comic illustrated exactly how he felt

Was checking out Wing Commander CIC News when I came across a blog by Pix who spent a year re-living the Origin series of games. Normally it wouldn’t have registered on my read list but Wing Commander popped up and I felt compelled to know how this guy survived the CGA/EGA screens in this day and age of 1920×1200 gaming.

I’ve been a huge fan of Wing Commander series since I got hands on my first PC many years back. Each series was eagerly waited for and bought when it released at the local games shop. My last attempt to relive the games felt short mainly due to time constraints and also having real difficulty adjusting to the CGA quality graphics. The storylines of course was still very enjoyable in particular Wing Commander 3 and 4 with live action movie scenes (a rarity in those days) while Prophecy was lack lustre and saw the series come to an end.

Take a look at Pix’s experience here and relive Wing Commander through his efforts :

Wing Commander
Wing Commander 2
Wing Commander 3
Wing Commander 4

There’s also of course Strike Commander and Privateer which I was fond of. With the recent attention in space MMORPG, there seems to be a revival of interest and we might finally see a worthy successor to Freelancer (a culmination of the genre IMHO during its day). I’ll be watching and hopefully participating in Jumpgate Evolution and Black Prophecy when they release. EVE is great but sometimes, you just want to get behind the cockpit and use the Force

Bunch of site updates added to spruce up the look and feel of the website. Ga’len over at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility wrote about new services to enhance the EVE blog experience. I took a look at the code to implement Pluggit buttons over at Podlogs and it was pretty easy to get it going.

I’ve been using the Pixeled WordPress theme to great effect but have given it the EVE treatment by adding graphics from my travels in New Eden. There’s a total of 20 header images and 6 background images which are rotated via crontab so that each visit should bring something different. You can view all the images here or just be surprised

These are my favorites, a Megathron during a fleet warp and a backlit shot of the Brutix while gas cloud harvesting in unknown space.