Ecliptic Rift

Welcome to the eighteenth 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 to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow year after year. For some of you who’ve been here since the very beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming style evolved through the years or months since you’ve started playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance – say manufacturing. Let’s hear your story!

Like most everybody, I’ve evolved my playstyle over time. In fact, I haven’t stopped evolving my playstyle.

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I worked out a deal with the Angels. They will sort of look the other way while I start up some planetside development in the redacted system, with the understanding that my efforts for the Archangels will continue for now. I’ve started to build a bit of a rapport with them. They have lots of lab space available out here, but I still haven’t gotten access to the tech that really interests me. All in time.

On the other hand, they have some weird agents. Seems one of them had a bad experience with dolls as a child, lost a bet, ended up ranting about wearing a meat costume, and eventually I brought him a frozen corpse. Creepy stuff, but I think he had come off some boosters. Hell, with the Angels, who am I to tell them “no”? So I did it, and now he’s all upset and having me try to cover for him. At least I’ve got something on him now. Heh.

Also, if the Guardian Angel keeping an eye over my “rehabilitation” sends me for another load of veldspar, I may have to kick him in the gonads. That’s the best he can do for me? Get 100 m³ of veldspar? Damnit.

A former associate, Joron Darkdust, has gotten back in touch recently. He pulled himself out of whatever hellhole had swallowed him up and seems to have fallen in with some interesting folks. I hope it works out for him.

On my end of the cluster, however, I have continued my mission running for the Angel Cartel. While Curse has quite a few podders floating around, by the time I get moving, they’ve all docked up. I frequently have no other pilots in Local, and even when I do, they’ve yet to try to probe me out. Living in W-space taught me to live off the directional scanner, and so I keep a close eye on it despite the fact that it hasn’t happened yet. I believe it will soon enough, though.

Interestingly, the Cartel hasn’t had me dealing with any Republic forces out here. I suspect that the RSS has some sort of arrangement with them, because I haven’t heard of so much as a surveillance outpost. On the other hand, in addition to the expected Sansha elements, CONCORD recon forces, and occasional independent mercenaries, the Gallente Federation has quite a bit of activity out here. They like me a lot less these days.

But we all make choices, don’t we? I mean, the Cartel has sort of started to warm up. The Dominations don’t, of course, but the Archangels have, so hopefully they’ll start to have interest in working out some deals. They have things I want, I can do things they can’t, and it might even turn out that I can help with, erm, publicity.

I don’t think I’m a carebear. Or perhaps, not completely.

Sure, most of my gameplay has little to do with direct combat PVP. I mostly explore, trade, possibly run some missions, or go about some science & industry (invention, manufacturing, etc.) I don’t seek combat PVP, at least not with my main character, and in fact I believe she has zero kills.

But the majority of that activity I just listed occurs in lowsec and, these days, increasingly in nullsec (usually NPC sovereignty). I don’t complain when I get hit — rewards require risk, and that thrill of danger makes the game fun for me. I make most of my ISK from setting buy orders in lowsec and moving the results to highsec to sell. Rens works great for this. This funds the rest of what I like to do, honestly, and if I didn’t do that, I don’t think I’d really stop much in highsec at all.

The reasons why I don’t PVP much have more to do with meatspace than my desire. I have little kids who need (and deserve) attention, and they don’t quite understand “Daddy’s scouting right now, he can’t come see your new drawing / Lego construction / squirrel face”. And frankly, even if they did, I enjoy that latter stuff even more than I enjoy Internet spaceships. Voice chat (a clear requirement for almost any real combat PVP) also suffers because of the background noise from my household. I don’t like the noise very much, honestly, but it goes with the territory. I don’t get to choose one without the other.

So I don’t call myself a “carebear”. I don’t even call myself a PvE player, because running missions in nullsec while having to evade bubble camps and keep a close eye on the D-scan for combat probes seems to me to have lots of PvP to it. I suppose I could say, at most, that I play with a “non-aggressive” style.

I know that others out there feel the same way: they seek out dangerous situations and accept the risk happily, don’t whine when things don’t go their way, but they don’t specifically look for combat against other players, either.

We should stop accepting the false dichotomy of “PvPer versus carebear”, because EVE doesn’t work that way.

So I went back out to Curse to try to patch things up with the Cartel. I’m hearing some interesting rumors about some of their research results, and just raiding their Metropolis data centers hasn’t gotten me what I want. Playing nice with the Dominations should help, right?

Not so much. The agent who’d finally worked with me promised to kick me up to a Domination, but didn’t actually get me connected to him. Now she suddenly won’t talk to me herself, either. Fine, I thought, I’ll work with one of the lower-order agents.

Either they have some internal issues, or I got suckered, because after doing a bunch of work to eliminate mercs who’d threatened SoE hospitals, they sent me into one of their own heavy fleets… while I flew a Wolf. That didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, really, so now I’m down one assault frigate (and a pod from trying to fly back to Derelik, but that didn’t matter much).

I did make it back to Derelik after all, which got interesting on its own. But I’ll have to recount that bit later. And I still need to get things sorted with the Cartel.

When I play RPGs, I always struggle with choice. So many options from which we can choose. Think about the career options in EVE, for example. You have pirates, nullsec warriors, explorers, miners, traders, researchers, builders, mission runners, militia, smugglers, diplomats, salvagers, haulers, and more. Each of those has specialties as well: fleet commanders, scouts, capital ship pilots, inventors, high-sec research starbase operators, station traders, and so forth.

In EVE, of course, those choices generally don’t mutually exclude each other. You don’t get locked into a “class” from which you’d have to respecialize and lose all your prior abilities A pilot who starts out mining can decide to start training combat skills, go pirate, and end up as the CEO of a nullsec corp that specializes in small-squadron warfare, and he could still go mine if (for some odd reason) he decided to do so. Some choices might not work simultaneously, of course, but over the course of your career trajectory, you can do anything.

I find myself at a crossroads right now. Primarily, of course, I am an EVE blogger — a freelance writer who just blathers on and on, writing about whatever strikes my fancy. But I also do a good bit of trading / exploration / hauling, sometimes with some research and manufacturing or even mission running in the mix. In the past, I have engaged in factional warfare, scouting and tackling for an anti-pirate alliance, a wee bit of piracy, salvaging, W-space living, running roleplay corporations, fiction writing, EVElopedia editing, and mining.

Lately, though, I’ve started to think I want to grow in another direction. I feel like I might have something to contribute towards PvP. It takes essentially no training time for a pilot to scout and tackle effectively, and not much more to provide effective electronic warfare support. I have a number of alts that could easily become mains, moving Casiella to a background character for fiction writing and semi-passive income via datacores, trading, and perhaps some science and industriy.

This doesn’t contract my thoughts on nonviolent play, I should note. I have a character dedicated to truly nonviolent play who will start to see more action next week, but he primarily exists for roleplay (in a solo corporation) and planetary management. Some press releases on the Intergalactic Summit, checking on my planetary production networks every four days or so, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so maybe I just can’t easily decide. I don’t know whether that’s wrong… see? I did it again!

A new devblog titled “Courier Missions Revamp” actually grabbed my attention, although the designer who wrote it has a slightly dry style. Granted, these represent pretty much the pinnacle of carebearship, but see below for why they actually do matter (to, um, carebears).

The key changes:

• Courier missions now feature their own versions of the commodities produced via planetary management.
• They also will have a minimum and maximum cargo size and standardized travel distance for each level:
  1. Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation.
  2. Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.
  3. Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.
  4. Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be a neighboring constellation.

This matters because many pilots use courier missions to rapidly increase their standings with a given corp or faction. 16 courier missions go more quickly than 16 combat missions, although much less increase per mission. So if someone wants access to better R&D agents or a preferred storyline agent, this sort of activity really helps.

These changes please me. And that’s what matters, right?

Mynxee put up a thread in the Missions and Complexes forum today titled “Low Sec Opinions & Perceptions: What Are Yours?” I posted a response there, but I thought I’d include it here too for further discussion. Please contribute to the thread, but you know how delicious your comments taste to me…

One part of me says that dynamic agents (e.g. locations, quality, etc.) would make things more interesting, but another part of me says that exploration should do that for us. In the meantime, I think I may run out to Derelik tonight, heh.

My response below the jump.
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CCP Chronotis published a dev blog today titled “The Circle of Life“. First, a quick summary of the coming changes:

• Tech 1 Meta 0 loot drops from NPCs will be nerfed, replaced with scrap metal and tags.
• Rogue drone compounds will increase both in quantity and in mineral yield when reprocessed.
• Low-sec space will get additional low-end (e.g. veldspar) and null-sec (e.g. arkonor) ores.
• Ship insurance will now pay out based on a defined percentage of the market value of the construction cost.
• Tech 1 ship payout will receive a slight nerf.
• Tech 2 (and faction) ship payout will get boosted, depending on the role of the ship (e.g. higher payouts for tackler classes).
• Tech 3 ship payout will get boosted based on the hull cost (not subsystems).
• Supercap ship payout will receive a heavy nerf.

These increased payouts will remain significantly lower in proportion to ship cost than those for tech 1. For example, Vagabond payout will increase from about 12m to about 33m.

Suicide ganking will not receive additional nerfing in this iteration beyond the reduction in tech 1 payout. However, CCP would like to do something more about this in the future.

Payouts dependent on role changes get tweaked manually. As an example comparison, covops ships should die infrequently and thus receive less than tacklers, which will die more frequently. This is counter-intuitive from an immersion point of view but makes much more sense in terms of game mechanics. (I suspect the details here will end up causing lots of controversy and rethinking by pilots.)

Chronotis made a vague statement about fixed moon mineral supply not causing a spike in T2 ship prices. (I speculate that this has something to do with the resultant materials and components from planetary interaction.)

They’d also like feedback on automatic insurance rather than having to manually insure ships individually.

If you have specific feedback for CCP, you’d better go participate while you can!

So CCP have released the patch notes for Dominion 1.1. Thought I’d muse on a few that caught my eye, which don’t include capital ships simply because they don’t (currently) affect me in any meaningful way. My comments in double parentheses.

Voice fonts have now been added to EVE Voice. This new feature will allow you to alter your voice during chat to increase or lower pitch or to change from male to female voices. This is certainly not going to be abused in any way. ((RAWR!))

The Laboratory Operation Skill can no longer be trained by characters on trial accounts. ((Too bad, but I do get why they needed to do this.))

Deadspace areas now correctly spawn in the same solar system for the mission “Portal to War.” ((That always confused me. Tiny change but a welcome one.))

New wallet API functions have been added. ((Anybody know what that’s about?))

Heavy ships will now properly align themselves towards their warp destination so no more warping sideways or backwards. ((I think they explained this in a slightly confusing way but I’ll wait to see it on TQ before I comment further.))

Extra URL validation has been added to the in-game browser when adding sites to the Trusted/Ignored list. ((Good, but they might have waited to include this note until after deployment.))

CCP Tuxford can no longer shut down TQ on a whim. ((CCP sounds like a great bunch of folks who have fun working together, heh.))

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