You Can Die in the Tutorial

Well I've now finished the Military career mission arc. Pretty solid introduction to PvE'ing touching on resists, aiming, firing, moving, etc. It finishes up with a mission that you will be destroyed in unless you were paying attention. It's nice to know some of the true nature of EVE makes it into the tutorial stuff. Also got a new frigate gifted as part of one of the missions. I am now flying a Tristan. Depending on what happens in the near future I may ditch it and get myself a Catalyst.

Now I'm off to a Sisters of Eve agent for what I believe is the start of the beginner epic arc. Never done an Epic arc so this should be quite interesting.

EVE Has a Tutorial?

Well here I am in the tutorial every new player gets dropped into.

This is already a vast improvement over the tutorial I got when I started. You get dropped into what I understand is a deadspace complex with a few asteroids and a single rat which orbits around. This is good because it gets people right into the game without being shocked by the menus and everything else you get when docked in a station. This part of the tutorial takes you through the core movement and combat skills. After that's done it gets you to dock up at the only station in system. This is interesting as they get you to use the dock order which warps you to zero automatically instead of getting you to warp to zero first and then dock. I can understand using just the dock as it leaves the explicit warp-to instruction till later. As a 0.0 veteran I'm more used to warping to zero before doing any action so the straight up dock seems a bit odd.

Another interesting addition to the tutorial is this big white box that floats around when the tutorial wants you to do something with the UI. I think this is awesome as it gives new players this big "LOOK HERE" thing to speed up their initial learning instead of the hunting for the 10px x 10px that might have been flashing back when I started. Another really nice feature of this is that if you have a window over the button or item then the overlapping window will become transparent so you can see the button or item the big white box is pointing to.

The way the tutorial only spawns items as you need them for a specific step in the tutorial is nice. Instead of flooding the new user with a million items you start off with nothing but a Civilian Damage Control and the first ship you destroy has the classic 1 piece of Trit waiting for you as loot.

The tutorial also links to EVElopedia pages on subjects that the space and time of the tut doesn't really allow.

The explicit tutorial steps for joining a player corp are great compared to when I started. Mainly because the tutorial now covers them.

The career missions are an interesting addition. I went and bought a combat frig before finding out that the next mission gave you one as a reward. So I'm going to follow the mission arc until finished so I don't jump ahead and waste any more ISK. Especially as I'm not going to help myself to my main's stash.

Well that was an interesting evening. Will continue to work at this and see what happens.

The Experienced EVE Noob

It's been awhile since I last played EVE so I've been looking back and trying to figure out why. Was it burnout or just boredom or something else? The conclusion I came to was a combination of burnout of trying to keep up with all the 0.0 and corpie happenings and just getting a bit bored of the ISK grind but I still love the idea and most of the execution of the game.

So the other day an idea popped into my head. Start from scratch.

Now like almost all long time EVE players I have one alt to go along with my main. But that alt was pretty much speed trained right into a role that I wanted at the time. She never had to mission, grind or anything because of her sugar daddy main. But it has been so long since I was that noob we all were sitting in that Moa fitted with missiles and small hybrids that I though it would be interesting to do it all over again but with the advantage of knowing what I'm doing.

Of course I'm making it harder for myself to keep it interesting. I'll be moving into deep lowsec and try to live there. The stomping grounds of loners and pirates. It should be interesting. I plan to post the occaisional update on what it's like to be an EVE noob through the eyes of an experienced player.

CCP CAPSLOCK AND THE PATCH NOTES

Well CCP have released the patch notes for the upcoming Dominion expansion and as usual I've taken a look at them for the interesting, useful and sometimes just funny notes. So without futher ado, here's my review of the patch notes for the Dominion expansion of EVE Online.

 

  • It is now possible to enable warning sounds for when your shield/armor/hull drop below a certain threshold.
  • Damage notification plays a warning sound whenever your shield / hull / armor drops below a certain threshold.
  • Threshold for damage notification is customizable from the HUD settings.

I hadn't heard anything about this in the past so it came as a bit of a surprise. This could be quite useful during battle, especially when entering structure or low armor. Will be giving it a try.

 

  • The jukebox now uses MP3 format for its music. Additionally, custom playlists may be specified.

Does this mean that all the ingame musiv will be available to pull out and play seperately? I hope so as I quite enjoy the EVE music while programming or doing something else that requires a bit of serious concentration.

 

  • A new "Loot Logging" optional mode has been added for fleets. This works for taking from cans and wrecks as well as for salvaging and mining. Everyone in the fleet will be notified of all these events. You can then export the logs as a text file.

This could prove interesting, especially in the larger fights where it isn't really possible to keep track of things.

 

  • You will now autojoin your fleet again if you connect within 2 minutes of being disconnected. You will not enter your old position within the fleet however.

Now if this applies to intentionally quitting and relogging during a super laggy battle then this will be very useful.

 

  • You can now report players as 'ISK Spammer' from the right click menu of a character in chat. This will remove all their messages from that channel and report it to the GM's

Well that will make the buyers and sellers in the trade hubs happier and should help CCP by making it easier. I'm also sure CCP will be cracking down on anyone who abuses this feature so only use it where appropriate.

 

  • Hacking has the following prerequisites: Science level 3(down from level 5), Electronics Upgrades level 3(down from level 5), Electronics level 1 (down from level 2), Engineering level 1 (down from level 2)
  • Archaeology has the following prerequisites: Science level 3(down from level 5), Survey level 3 (down from level 5), Electronics level 1
  • Salvaging has the following prerequisites: Mechanic level 3, Survey at level 3 and Engineering at level 1
  • Cloaking has the following prerequisites Electronics level 4 ( was 5)

Well as someone who has gone through all the time to train up these skills I'm a bit unhappy. But it should open up the little mini professions to more people which could be useful, especially for the newer players.

 

  • Trial accounts can no longer request missions from agents of level 3 and above.

I'll admit I didn't know this was a problem but I guess if you have a character running level 4's or 5's and get the trial account to fleet up, you could get their standings high enough and fast enough to make it profitable for the macroers.

 

  • You can now right click on a courier package and select "Deliver Courier Package" instead of having to find the contract.

That'll make the logistic monkeys happy. And happy logistic monkeys make happy PvP mokeys.

 

  • You can now add corp/alliances as buddies.

I'm interested to see how this will work.

I'm guessing that it will work by adding that corp or alliance to your buddy list as a single entry that you can use to quickly access their info window. This would mean that you couldn't just add all the memebers of a corp or alliance during a war to know exactly how many and who is online in the other corp or alliance.


  • A trial account does not start until the person logs into EVE for the first time, not when the trial is created or activated.

That's a nice little thing that will give trial members more time to get an idea of what EVE is.

 

  • Player owned wrecks can now be marked as "available for all", which allows everybody to take from them without causing aggression.

Well the only case I can see this being useful in is when flying with an alt or allies but generally you wouldn't be shooting them anyway, even if they do have aggro. So odd but nothing harmful.

 

  • Drones would sometimes refuse to attack certain structures; they've been given a stern talking-to and will now obey orders with more diligence.
  • Fighter drones will respond faster to return commands, instead of idling around the space coffee machine.

Is it required for drone fixes regarding their following of orders to be in every patch notes? At least they're funny though I still expect drones to randomly attack fleet members and split up without warning. ;)

 

  • The UI is now flatter and squarer.

Ahh CCP. What would we do without this short, descriptive and utterly useless patch note. I'm guessing it's a little easter egg for those of us crazy enough to read the entire patch notes.

 

  • You can no longer create more than 5 tabs when importing an overview XML file.

It was annouced a while ago but as a corp that uses the extra tabs it will mean a rejigging of the corp standard tab layout.

 

  • The items filter is no longer ignoring things with only capital letters for a name. CCP CAPSLOCK approves.

Never seen CCP CAPSLOCK but I approve of his name.

 

So that's it for the notes I found interesting. It was interesting to see that even with all the dev blogs about all the changes there were a few new ones that I hadn't seen mentioned. If you want to read the entire patch notes yourself then take a look over here.

 

All in all I think Dominion is shaping up to be a very interesting expansion. Especially as I'm a 0.0 person. Bring on the pewpew!

So that's what happend to the Macroers

Another DevBlog from CCP came out today and it answers one of the biggest questions I've been hearing recently. What happend to the macroers? A little back story for those that don't know. A couple of months ago the systems that were infested with macroers suddenly emptied and no atter the number of threads and questions aimed at CCP no answer was forthcoming. Which lead to much guessing. Eventually the consensus seemed to land on they were banned. Now we know for sure. On June 22nd during DT CCP banned 6200 accounts of RMT's and their macroers. There are some interesting graphs in the DevBlog covering both an example system Ingunn and the server load.

It's nice to see that CCP is willing to take on this issue even when it means they're going to be seeing less income.

A Killmail for a Point

One of the things I feel isn't made clear enough to new players is that you don't have to be able to fly big T2 fitted battleships or fancy T2 ships to be useful within in gang or fleet. One of the roles that new players are often suggested to do is that of a throw-away tackle. A simple T1 frigate with a speed mod and a point. Even the newest of players can fill within a day or two and it can change a battle within a few minutes if done even half decently.

To exemplify this I present my alt, Treya Trewtis, who for the past few weeks has been training her learning skills up like any good alt. After completing these I sent her to learn useful skills until we got word of a POS defense op. In response I quickly grabbed the Propulsion Jamming and Afterburner skills and trained them to level 1. I then purchased an Incursus and fit three mods: an Afterburner, Web and Disruptor.

The next day we're on our op when the Goons come to play even if they weren't the ones to reinforce our POS. Next thing I know my main is blasting away while I send my alt straight at the Goons tackling anything that got called primary. A couple of minutes later I'm running off in my Pod to pick up a new Incursus and my name is on 5 battleship kills. I had survived long enough that in fact a Thanatos had been able to lock me up and start shooting at me. Lossmail. Take a good look at that fit. Three mods, no guns (I never did launch the drone) and I was instrumental in getting five kills.

Now for the one caveat. This was a POS op so I didn't have to worry about gate guns but even then a cheap, throwaway tackle is great for holding a ship until the heavy tackles and battleships can lock and point the target up. And if you're lucky enough you may even escape.

So to the newer Eve players I want to show that even with three skills, Propulsion Jamming level 1, Afterburner level 1 and your racial Frigate skill, in my case to level 4, you can play an integral part of a combat op. So don't feel left out if all you have is a frig. Bring it along and be prepared to lose it for a kill. You never know, it may be you that actually got it by holding the target down.

Never Forget Your Cloak

The core rule of flying a Covert Ops is pretty limited and simple in practice.

  1. Never fly without an active cloak

Or more specifically for this occurrence.

  1. Never warp to 0
  2. Never let anything get within 2,000m of you.

Tonight I failed at both and lost my Buzzard. I had probed down a Wormhole and warped to 0 at it knowing that it would put me about 8,000m off the wormhole and in position to cloak. What I then forgot to do was move away. While focusing on probing down all the other Cosmic Sigs in the system my first notice that I had been decloaked was the sound of artilleries pounding at my shields. 30 secs later it was over and I was high tailing it back to safety in my pod.

That was a stupid mistake that should never have happend and I gave a pilot a free kill. Simple lessons need to be reinforced every now and then even if they should never have been forgotten in the first place.

EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

 

 

Well it's time for the latest of CrazyKinux's EVE Blog Banters and this time I think it's quite an interesting question. So straight from this month's blog banter page here's the question. The EVE Blog Banter Contest!

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created byCrazyKinux. 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!

"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

So what did I choose to remove. Well read along and find out.

 

For this month’s Blog Banter I’m proposing that as a game mechanic gate guns should be removed completely or at a minimum from lowsec. Gate and station guns are a fact of life in lowsec away from the reaches of CONCORD. For those that have never ventured into lowsec I’ll briefly tell you about what they are for and then I’ll outline my reasoning for why I think that they should be removed from the landscape of EVE.

Gate and station guns exist on every station and gate in empire space. In high sec they really don’t do much as any aggression that gives a player a Global Criminal Countdown (GCC) will call CONCORD to that player following shortly thereafter with a new wreck in the system. If the aggression occurs within 150km of a station or gate the stationary guns position around will also throw in their two cents but by that time the aggressor is scrammed, webbed and ECM’d to impotency anyway.

In lowsec however CONCORD don’t respond to the aggression so the gate guns become the only way your naughty GCC is punished. It is possible though to tank the gate guns just like it was possible to tank CONCORD in days gone by. This means that more experienced players can sit in their battleships waiting for their juicy prey to come by and as long as they aren’t outlaws they are almost immune from any sub-battleship aggression.

So what we have currently is a mechanic that is pointless in highsec due to super CONCORD and decreases small gang PVP in lowsec by making anything smaller that a battleship near useless for more than a couple of seconds. So my proposal is simply to remove all gate and station guns from the highsec and lowsec. This would remove the superfluous highsec guns and encourage small cruiser and frig PVP in lowsec by letting them survive for longer than a few seconds. This won’t however turn lowsec into 0.0 as all other lowsec restrictions remain in place; no sov, doomsdays, bubbles, etc. This proposal also keeps the sec hit that aggression causes which means that pirates will still become flashy after too much fun. Add on the GCC means that for fifteen minutes after aggressing you can’t go back to highsec unless you want to face CONCORD and you stop people from jumping in and out of fights. I would even suggest upping the time to thirty minutes to keep people in lowsec and offer the chance to get back at them.

What the removal of gate guns is likely to do on the other hand is encourage the use of frigates and cruisers for pirates with the faster locking times that these smaller ships provide. I feel that this is a fair tradeoff as the lack of gate guns should encourage the use of small ship gangs for opponents. Also many pirates use the smaller ships already to catch other players in belts and deadspace.

To summarize, the aim of removing gate and station guns is to encourage the smaller gang PVP and entice the younger players into the not so wild regions of lowsec while still maintaining the differences that lowsec has in between highsec and 0.0. This can help bring more players into the direct ship to ship side of PVP by reducing the bar to entry with the use of frigates and cruisers. And I think we can all agree that more PVP is always good.

 

Edit: Well Crazy has asked us all to add these bits and the beginning and end so that's why they've been added.

  1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!
  2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
  3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
  4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
  5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
  6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
  7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
  8. EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
  9. Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
  10. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?
  11. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
  12. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
  13. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
  14. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
  15. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
  16. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
  17. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
  18. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
  19. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
  20. Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
  21. Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired
  22. Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?
  23. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
  24. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
  25. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
  26. Ripe Lacunae, The UI... Where do I begin... (Eve Blog Banter #9)
  27. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
  28. More articles as they are posted!
  29. Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail
  30. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
  31. Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
  32. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?
  33. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
  34. Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status
  35. Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast
  36. Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...
  37. Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload
  38. A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves
  39. Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon
  40. Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow
  41. The Gaming-Griefer, EVE Sucks, But I Love It: The Memoir of a Masochist
  42. Letrange's EVE Blog, Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning Skills
  43. Lyietfinvar, Remove that monopoly
  44. Sceadugenga, Blog Banter #9
  45. Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #9
 

 

Inteceptor vs Covert Ops

To quickly lay out the scene my Alliance is currently participating in three wars. This should mean a pleathora of targets but around home we're either heavily outgunned or heavily outgun. This lead into me deciding to semi autopilot my way to the other side of empire space with my route going through Amarr. That means gate camps.

So to be a little sensible I take my Buzzard along to take care of some old assets that I've decided to retire. I'm flying through system after system with no war targets in local. I also don't notice I'm coming up on Amarr. Landing on a gate I see a single war target in a Stiletto. Thinking 'crap' I quickly jump through and have a brain fart. Instead of warping away I cloak and move off in a random direction away from gate. Stiletto pilot burns towards my last position and bang, I'm decloaked, locked, scrammed and being shot. Not expecting to survive much longer on goes the self-destruct and I slow boat towards the gate thanks to the Stiletto's scram turning off my MWD.

30 seconds later I realize I'm still at 80% shields and there are no other war targets coming to this pilot's aide. I'm sure he thought I would be an easy kill as much as I did. My 380m/s base speed combined with the rockets the stiletto was using meant I was escaping the blast radius. 5 seconds later I hit the gate and jump and quickly warp off to a planet while the war target's agression wears off.

It's interesting how in EVE things can go from crap to relief in a few moments. No matter which side youre on.

The tl;dr version: Rockets are useless against a frig doing 300+ m/s. Even if you do have the target scrammed.

EVE Blog Banter #8

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 otherEVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month's topic comes to us from me, 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."

 

Even though this isn't an EVE blog I'm a long time player and fan of it so I thought I'd jump into the blog banter and offer up my view. My first thought was that I'd like to see something like a dueling system where two players or groups of players could agree to a fight without being Concordokkend. But then I remembered an older thought that I've seen put up elsewhere:

"Claimable Low-Sec"

Now the quotes are important. I don't want to see 0.0 style Sovereignty in lowsec. That's what 0.0 is for. What I'm thinking of is something a bit more casual in a sense. And giving pirates and other lowsec corps something fun about lowsec.

The way I see that it could work is by giving corps or alliances the ability to 'register' claims with the Empire that claims a lowsec region. In exchange for a small payment of some sort (ISK, towers around moons, etc.) the Empire give the corporation free reign to destroy ships of corporations with Headquarters or Offices in enemy Empire affiliated stations.

Now to balance it out and to stop the pira... I mean corporations and alliances from having life to easy anyone is allowed to engage the ships of claiming corporations without sentry gun aggro.

Also multiple corporations and alliances can claim a Region of lowsec so they would also be able to shoot each other just to make life more interesting.

Now this would need more work but I think it could make life in lowsec more interesting by reducing the amount of GCC and the consequent sentry aggro.

 

 


Capsuleer 2.0 Review

My short review. Great app, works smoothly and it's free. Throw the devs some ISK if you like it though.

Now for the longer one. Capsuleer is an EvE Online related iPhone and iPod Touch app. At its most basic it allows you to track your skills and what you're training within EvE. The user interface is a bit spartan at the moment with only three icons working with space free for many more. The developers have said that more functions are going to be added in the future.

Adding a new toon is easy to do as you just eail yourself a specifically formatted link and your API details get added. After getting the latest info from the EvE servers your current skill queue is then within a couple of clicks with easy access from there to more information about any skill in the queue. The ability to also check the Attributes and Implants of your clone is a nice touch.

Capsuleer also contains a skill browser that displays all the skills you've trained and highlights the current skills on a char's skill queue. The skill inforation page is nice as it clearly shows the description, attribuites, prereqs and training times for the skill in question. There is also a default char with all skills to level 5 that you can use to see all the skills but as all skills are at level 5 no training times are shown. This is the biggest downside I have in day to day use with the app but it isn't a very big one.

Another nice feature of Capsuleer is the built in ability to subscribe to the blogs in the Eve blogroll and the tracking of the CCP Announcements, devBlog and Patch Notes. The best bit of this I've found owning an iPod Touch is that the entries are downloaded to local storage so that it is possible to read the entries without a network connection. One small downside is the lack of support for images on the blog so if you want to see them you have to use Safari to read them.

The final neat side feature is the Server Status. Capsuleer checks the status of TQ and Singularity and the MOTD.

On the whole I'm impressed by the quality of the app and the smooth user experiance that makes using it quite enjoyable. If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and play Eve then Capsuleer is a must have.

Capsuleer Home Page -- http://capsuleer.evesuite.com/