"EVE: Player Blogs" via Ga'len

This is my entry into Silver's First Annual Fiction Contest. Sorry for the length, normally I'd chop it up into more manageable pieces.

I'm proud of my office. It's a Noir owned and operated office, but I still call it mine. The floor tiles are this special turquoise color that nobody makes anymore. The door is made of kanta wood and glass. The building is old, the office is old. Not quite as old as my profession, but it's getting there. I'm an Ex-Cop who "freelances" as they call it in the Caldari State Police. Mostly I work for private clients, and sometimes busywork from the corporate guys to keep the doors open. A private detective isn't always that picky about what jobs he does.

I looked up when she said, "Jonathan Dreck?" It was reflex. You hear a voice that soft, that pretty... you look up. She stood in my doorway like an angel that had just avoided drowning. Her brown trench coat stained dark with the rain. Her soaked hair framed her perfect face like a painting.

As she dripped water from her chin onto my turquoise tiles, I answered her, "Yeah, that's me,"

She sighed, as if she was relieved. I watched her take her coat off and hang it on the coat rack. She was wearing a tight red dress under it. I'd just popped a couple of crash to start my day, and her dress was riding higher than I was. When she sat down across from me, I smiled.

Her eyes were the kind of blue that made you think of the ocean, and her lipstick was so red it made you think about your own mortality. This was the kind of woman I had thought they didn't make anymore. If I'd known they did, I probably would've taken better care of myself. Still, I wiped the crumbs from my mouth and pulled out my pen and paper.

"Noir has a reputations for discretion, can I count on you to keep that up?" She said, lazily tracing a line across the desk in front of her.

"Is it raining tomorrow?" I said with a laugh. To an offworlder that phrase may've seemed out of place, but here on New Caldari Prime, the answer to that question was always yes.

"Good," She stopped and looked intently into my eyes, "Because I need you to find out who killed me,"

"Oh, another one of those," This wasn't the first reactivated clone to come into my office trying to find out who got them reactivated. I got at least one a month, and after my first few run-ins with ex-husbands and old friends I learned these weren't cases you took lightly. Or at all if you could avoid it.

She perked up at the comment, "You've got some experience in this then?" She said with that same soft and pretty voice.

"A fair bit, yeah," I said, knowing where this would lead.

"Can you help me then?" She asked, with a note of pleading in her voice.

"I make it a point not to get involved in clone cases, it just gets messy,"

"I can make a deposit of ten thousand isk, if that's enough,"

"Sure," I said picking up my pen, "What's your name?"

"Angela Fields,"

As a supplement to the Ultimate Guide to Hauling I am pleased to publish this partner document, hopefully you will find some of it useful.

So now you can recognise a good or a bad courier contract. What next?

Well, it all depends on where you will be flying and the types of risk involved.

If you are mainly transporting huge amounts of cargo in hi-sec and perceive little risk then the freighters are an obvious choice.  read more »

Well following up on the blogging community posting pics about their EVE-Spaces, I had to spend a bit of time to clear up the mess and then take a couple of shots I didn’t think it would take me the better part of 2 weeks to clear it but as they say – better late than never :-p

Well here it is:

3x LG Flatron W2486L – 1080p LED screens driven by 3×8800GTX (triple-SLI able motherboard from ASUS but without enabling SLI is the trick to run this) gives an awesome desktop for EVE. I opted to go for nVidia although it doesn’t support running 1 client on all 3 screens at the same time (as ATi does) but I can run my 3 toons at the same time, each on it’s own 1080p screen which is pure awesomesauce!

Playing eve along me are various gadgets and geeky stuff as you can see below – and yes I am loaded with Microsoft hardware as well – the wrist pad is the latest addition – and boy it’s comfortable Oh and yeah.. I haven’t quitted smoking just yet either

QP

Crazy Kinux posted a link to a video done by the Eve Uni guys on PI. Planetary Interaction is being introduced to the next Eve expansion, and will finally allow us to play more with our environment in our sandbox. No pun intended. Previously you could only play with the moons, via moon mining.

I did my stint with moon mining, and I can tell you, unless you have all the infrastructure etc in place, it is a ball-ache of note. I was lucky, I had two large Caldari towers in one system, and just needed to bring Chromium from another system 2 jumps away for a full Sylramic Fibres reaction. I did this for about three months before I had enough and took down the towers and sold off the equipment. Every day, log in, empty the silos, move some raw materials from the one POS to the other. Make no mistake, if you are lucky enough to have a good reaction, or a few corp mates that can help, it’s not a bad way for positive income. I only had a Rorqual and some Badgers to move the fuel around, so once a week I had to jump to empire, load up with fuel, offload the end-product and ship it to Jita (I did have a freighter alt). If I had to do it all over again, I suspect I might just use a Jump Freighter, but for the little isk I made (around 700m nett profit a month) it was just not worth it. I can do that while having more fun.

Which brings me to the point of this post. The interface seems slick, (and I loved the look of the new Scorpion in the video). I just can’t help but feel that it might end up the same as moon mining, only to a lesser extent. Grab the most valuable spots, defend it, and then make money from it. The planets in normal safe (1.0 to 0.5) space will obviously be grabbed and over farmed (unlike moon mining where systems have to be 0.3 or lower sec to mine). Low sec will also be used to a large extent, same as Black Rise when they released it. Within the minute BR was available, the hordes were seen moon probing for the more valuable moon goo’s to make isk from.

This is where I would like to see the 0.0 alliances benefit again. Face it, living in 0.0 is tough but the spoils are great. Before ore prices went for a ball of shit I could easily make 600mill isk on a weekend mining away at Arkonor / Bistot. Now, it’s maybe worth half of that? The new Sov system makes it difficult for alliances to hold large regions of space with only a tower or two to fuel. If you don’t pay the bills, you suffer the fate of Goonies.

Ideally if a system in the butt end of space has a planet with some worthy ores, it would be great to be able to profit more from it than the high-sec Veldspar miner or lvl 4 mission runner. Here I also hope that the planetary assets are distributed more equal than moon goo. A region like Great Wildlands had something like two Mercury moons, and nothing more valuable, while a region like Delve had more valuable moon-goo than you could shake a stick at.

Alas I think we will have to see where it goes and how successful it is in the end. One thing seems sure, I might have to finally invest in a jump freighter….

Me and my corp joined an alliance that are based in the Drone regions and sometimes it feels like Siberia. It’s in the middle of nowhere, its poor, barren and we rub elbows with the Russians.

The ratting is interesting, never thought I’d get to use my Carrier as a big BS with fighters out. I dont even have a ratting BS for my main anymore.

I warp in the carrier and try to aggro as much as possible. There’s one version of the hardest Cosmic Anomaly, a Horde, that has bunkers as triggers which means I can blow them up using smartbombs and get all the spawns at the same time.

My alt usually sits next to the carrier nuking frigs and cruisers while the Archon’s Fighters chews through the BS rats. Looting and salvageing is also a challenge. The hardest anomalies drops about 4 500 m3, which fills the carrier in two goes.

Each anomaly takes somewhere between 30-60 mins to run and the wrecks are usually spread in a 40km radius around the carrier which means that an orca, marauder och strategic cruiser is super nice to use for looting. Always nice to find new ways to use your new toys…

For those with less SP or a smaller budget, its a little harder. Then it seems to be easier just to try to hit the belts collecting hiend alloys from tripple spawns.

That’s right folks.  For people in the USA, Daylight Savings time ends on Sunday, March 14 at 2 am.  Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead 1 hour.

Here’s your weekly highlights for this week.

• HellFleet continues it’s fun with a recent heist of assets from a high sec pos.  Valarissa returned from a break, shooting things with us on a roam.  Much fun ensued.
• Rettic over at Rettic’s Log is working on his musical talents.  He’s mixed two different soundtracks for your listening pleasure while you play EVE Online.  Head over and check out his collections, Sounds for Flying.  They are really cool to listen to!
• CCP gave us a nice dev blog on some of the fun with Planetary Interaction that is coming in the next expansion.
• Although I am no longer a member of Ushra’Khan, I do keep up on what’s going with the War in Providence.  I’ll keep adding information as it comes my way.
• More people updated us with what their EVESpace looks like.
• Alexander Gianturco AKA The Mittani gave a presentation at the GDC 2010 this year.  I am looking for a copy of his presentation online.  If anyone has it, please link it in the comments, I would be interested in watching.
• As always, update work for the blogs listed on The EVE Online Portal and the OPML download files Mandrill and I maintain continues.  Mandrill has an update coming around March 21, so keep your eyes open for that update.

See you out there!

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Tags: EVE Online, EVEbloggers.com, EVESpace, Expansion, GDC2010, OPML Download, ProviWar, The EVE Online Portal, The HellFleet Bloggers, The Mittani, Ushra'khan, Valarissa

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Once again we take a look at the weeks Dev Blogs from CCP, with witty commentary provided by me…

The biggest week yet for the Breakdown with 4 Dev Blogs to analyse and comment on its hard to know where to begin. Only three of this weeks blogs are covered s I gave the PI blog its own special breakdown yesterday.

Dev Blog Snipah: Alliance Tournament VIII

CCP Claw gives us the lowdown on rule changes and developments for this year’s alliance tournament.

Nothing reall major has changed with regard to the format of matches and they haven’t introduced any esoteric and arcane rules as they often do for the Fanfest Tournament.

Notable changes are a new handicapping system giving teams who don’t field ships up to their full compliment of points a slight advantage in scoring and the introduction of Flagships (AKA bullet magnets).

Not being a regular follower of the Alliance Tournaments (I only really watched the finals last year) I don’t quite know how these changes will play out and am not really in any position to judge. No doubt we’ll find out once the tourney get under way.

Retrospective: How Was the CSM Summit in Iceland

I’ve already covered the minutes of the CSM Summit, but this Dev Blog adds some of the CSM’s thoughts on how it all went, worth a read if you want to know how your representatives feel about the resposibility they’ve been given and their opinions of how CCP are dealing with them.

Account Security

Account security was one of the thing discussed by CCP and the CSM during the summit, and seeing a Dev Blog about it so soon afterwards is only to be expected.

This should be necessary reading for every EVE player out there but can be boiled down to some key points. Think of them as the commandments which every EVE player should follow unless they want a nasy hacker devil to steal their stuffs (or worse):

1. Thou shalt not use the same username and password for different games.
   If you must play another online game besides EVE, don’t use the same login details, hackers will often harvest logins from other sources and use brute force to try lots and lots of them. They’ll occasionally get a hit and then its bye bye stuffs.
2. Thou shalt change thy password regularly.
   Self-explanatory this one. This doesn’t mean swapping between the same two or three passwords every so often, but coming up with a completely new one.
3. Thy password shall be a strong one.
   Don’t use common words, use upper and lowercase letters, use numbers. Make your password long. (IMO 16 characters would tax even my awesome brain to remember but if thats what they say, who am I to argue)
4. Thou shalt not share your login details with anyone.
   Not only is this common sense, sharing your account details is also agains the EULA. So if you are hacked and it is discovered that you gave out your login details to someone else then it may be the banhammer for you.
5. Thou shalt not accept files from strange sources.
   This is more general internet common sense, but trojans and keyloggers can hide pretty much anywhere, even in image files. So be aware of what is getting onto your computer and where its coming from.
6. Thine anti-virus is thy sheild and sword, use them wisely and often.
   Another no brainer for anyone connected to the internet. There are plenty of decent free anti-virus packages out there so being poor is no excuse. Personally I use AVAST, but if you reall feel that you have to pay for one I would go with Kaspersky. Norton and McAfee are really not worth the money and can severly impact the performance of your computer (they’re a bugger to get rid of too).

What are you doing still reading? You should be either playing with the planets on SiSi or updating your system’s security (jusdge for yourself how to prioritize that, I know what I’d pick)

M out

In my exploration adventures I stumbled (yeah right, sat and pinned it for a while like every night) the Angel Fortress complex. It’s the one good thing about living in the ass end of space (Great Wildlands). There aren’t that many explorers around, and I can usually find a good site or two during an evening. I like exploration sites because I feel they give far more of a challenge than most of the lvl 4 missions I have run (except maybe AE4 Bonus Room), and the rewards are on par and sometimes better. Yes, in good space (proper -0.5 and lower sec systems) you can make more isk ratting, but I like the challenge of exploration. I would love to do a few lvl5’s again, but the risk vs the reward is just waaay too high

Angel Fortress itself is a fairly simple complex, and if managed right can be done with a range of ships, probably Golem, Ishtar or Tengu and Drake in my case. I have multiple accounts, so why not use them. It has two rooms, each with the usual scattering of NPC’s, BS’s, BC’s, cruisers and frigates. The first room has around 9 BS’s and frigates etc. I made the Drake take the aggro, then zoomed around in the Tengu first shooting the cruisers and bc’s while the Drake’s drones killed off the frigates (some do warp scramble). Once it was all wrapped up, it was off to the second room.

Less BS’s initially (I think around 6) here so the Drake took aggro first again, and then while it was shooting the BS’s I zoomed around in the Tengu killing off the smaller stuff and then worked on the BS’s as well. Once all the NPC’s were popped I started working on the Angel Battlestation. Some more NPC’s (3 BS’s and some support) spawned, and they were fairly quickly dispatched. Once you started hitting the station further a Domination Warlord with a 7.5m bounty spawns, and I know of a alliance mate that has had a Machariel BPC drop from it. With my luck, I got a tag and ammo. *shakes fist*

As mentioned in my previous post, I just love how CCP have redone some of the graphics of the structures, and the Angel Station is no different. I spent some time taking a screenshot or three from different angles and the level of detail is actually pretty amazing. You can see what looks like a command center, possibly a factory or industrial area, a undocking port for ships. I eventually killed off the Battlestation and it dropped some standard ammo and crap, and I didn’t get the escalation, much to my annoyance, but thats life and exploration for you. I would like to one day when I have a few hours spare, sit and write a fictional story about what life must like on one of these outposts, but thats something for another time.