EVE Journey

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.

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.

From Mica’s Diary:

Knowing from past experience, I quickly noted the wormhole location back to known space and proceeded to make safe spots so that I could get to work. Decided not to risk broadcasting my arrival but it seems my worries are unfounded as nothing is on scan.

The system locus signature reads as “J104537” which apparently is known for its black hole! Its a Class 5 system which is somewhat dangerous to be in and has the following effects :

Anomaly: Black Hole
Class: 5
Attributes:
Locking Range: -41%
Turret Fallof: -41%
Missile Velocity: -41%
Drone Control Range: -41%
Ship Velocity: +85%
Agility: +85%

My fast Helios is now zipping about at 800+ meters/second! After my safe spots are made, I decide to start probing out the system and see what treasures will unfold. The first two hits are easy enough with them being cosmic anomalies. Apparently they are “Core Strongholds”. Menacing sentry towers and Sleeper frigates roam the complex. I’m glad I have my covert ops cloak to keep me safe!

Half-way through the scans, I receive a communication from a corp mate. Apparently they were in the same system! I quickly told them about the Core Strongholds and they decided to make an attempt on it. I offered to get them a good warp in so that they could use their weapons at optimal ranges. My first mistake quickly came about as I had forgotten about a new “feature” the ship techs had recently implemented.

Warping to an encounter site at range will now work the first time you warp there. Previously your ship would land at 0km from the beacon no matter what range was set for the ‘warp to’ command.

I had set the ship to warp at range but as I exited warp, I stared in dismay at the wall of a Huge Veldspar rock that caused my cloak to fail. The sleepers were fast to react, with all 4 frigates quickly warp scrambling my engines and using stasis webifiers to slow me down. I furiously attempted to burn my way out of range but with sentry tower fire blazing on my shields, I could do little but save my pod.

My corp mates in a Dominix and Tempest decided to try their luck but unfortunately with no light guns to take care of the frigates, their drones quickly got chewed up and only luckily managed to escape to fight another day. I decided to reship and get back to what I had come for. To find out how long it would take to map a unknown system.