I want indignation, and I want it now.

Earlier today I was flying through various regions looking for the Minmatar Freighter Skill.  In 13 days I will be able to fly the Minmatar Freighter, making the full set.  (And another goal marked off for my Main.)

While piloting between gates, I was watching the chatter in Corp about the Goon’s continued sponsorship of Exhumer kills after Hulkageddon officially finishes.  While there were no Carebear tears, the suggestions on how it might be countered were a bit cringe worthy.  For example, one idly thought how cool it would be if every miner swapped their Hulk for a Battleship, and then headed out to the Goon’s 0.0 capital in mass.

Yes, very cool indeed for the Goons.

I can understand some of the frustration.  You like mining in Empire – but there is someone from 0.0 called The Mittani who dislikes people who play EVE that way.  He has the financial means to rage an indefinite griefing event against you, and there is nothing plausible you can do about it.

Sounds like fun.

I can’t imagine the complaining (sorry, sweet Carebear Tears) will see CCP intervene, but it might in the long run force them to provide some mechanism to reduce the Miner’s sense of helplessness.

(Edit – here’s the link I forgot to add – https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=115068 )

Speaking of complaining – the new Inventory Window is coping its fair share of it.  Actually – more than its fair share.  I stopped reading the threads about it on the EVE forums – I just got too embarrassed at the level of tears and rage.  I am not really a fan of the interface – it is still too inconsistent and buggy.  In fact, I would prefer to have kept the older interface but add divisions or tabs to containers, and use the new interface to replace the assets window.

The reaction (aside the initial POS performance issues) just seems so out of proportion.  It is like people are desperate for the taste of indignation, and any excuse will do.

Minmatar Freighter skill book procured, time to head for home.

That was quick…

CCP was quicker to respond than expected.  The Inferno 1.0.1 patch notes included these lines…

“Fixed an issue where the new Unified Inventory would reopen every time a character jumped, docked, undocked or otherwise performed a session change.”

 “Inventory window locations that are still accessible between docking and undocking will now remain open. For example a ships Drone Bay, if opened in a separate window”

 “Fixed an issue where Corporation hangars would not load correctly”

That will hopefully resolve the main things I was complaining about with the new Inventory window.  (Although I am steering clear of mining and looting missions just for the moment…)

Inventory Window with a mind of its own

I updated the client and log into Inferno.  I realised none of my Toons are anywhere near a missile ship, so I will have to wait a bit before enjoying those new visuals.  I checked out the new War related information to find it, well, kind of underwhelming.   Never mind – I have the new inventory Window to get used to.

Performance seems ok and its use is mostly logical.  I always keep my ship cargo hold open and anchored at the bottom of the screen – so I separate it from the Inventory window, minimise the index and filters, and resize it to suit.

I undock, and my cargo hold window jumps back to the middle of the screen in the new inventory window format, with the index opened again.

I can’t separate the cargo hold window using shift (I assume because it is the only window), so I minimise the index and filter, resize it, and move it back down to the bottom of the screen – again.  I make several gate jumps and the window stays where I left it.

I then dock in a new station, and find the Cargo hold window jumps back to the middle of the screen in the new inventory window, with the index opened again.  Ok, I think I know how this is going to work.

So I undock, and the inventory window disappears, as does the Cargo window.  I click on the Cargo icon and it opens anchored in the right spot and the right size.

Not ideal, but at least it seems to be remembered.  I guess I can live with that.

I jump into the next system, and the cargo window disappears.  Huh?

I dock at a new station and again the inventory window opens by default on Cargo.

I undock.  No cargo window.  I manually open the Cargo window.

I jump into the next system, and the cargo window disappears.

I jump into the next system, and the cargo window automatically opens.

I jump into the next system, and the cargo window disappears again

I dock – and no inventory window appears.

By now I am assuming there isn’t a proper logic to this, and it is buggy.

I head back home with my trade goods, with the Cargo window opening or closing by itself after every jump.

I dock back at my home station – and my corporate hanger isn’t showing up in the inventory window.  I open the Corpration Assets window, but can’t copy anything into it.

So I undock, close the cargo hold, redock, and thankfully have my Corp hangers are again in the Inventory Window.

I don’t know.  It seems that every time CCP makes changes to the UI they introduce bugs.  Bugs which you just can not fathom how you would miss them in testing.  Going forward I will try to kepe my Cargo Window Anchored in the Inventory Window, and not have it (or any other inventory window) openned while jumping between systems or docking.  Hopefully CCP will finesse this moving forward – but a the moment the new Inventory window appears unreliable and inconsistent in its behaviour.

Light a match

Today’s the day of the Inferno release.  The Patch notes are up.

http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?newpatchlogID=72746

 

Overall I am not particularly enthused with this expansion.

I wrote a long post about the various additions, but kept finding a sarcastic edge to my commentary.  It is the Faction Warfare changes which irk me.  In part they seem too arbitrary and on initial view seemingly unbalanced.  More than that though, I am left with the impression of CCP being too heavy handed.  It hurts my notion of a sandpit.

I am looking forward to seeing the new Missile effects and Stealth Bomber hulls.  The latest EVE Trailer uses them to maximum effect.

http://au.ign.com/videos/2012/05/21/eve-online-inferno-teaser-trailer

 

I see much of the War Dec changes as positives.  No longer needing to vote on War is good – it can now be triggered by the CEO or Directors.  Corps fleeing Alliances will carry the War Dec, and Players fleeing Corps will not be able to rejoin new ones immediately, both good changes.  The possibility of putting surrender terms against a War Dec is also long overdue.  The public war reports might be interesting – although soft targets might find them a source of more griefing.  The Ally / Mercenary support concept is also cool – although I wait to see how it is actually utilised.

Out of the new modules, it is the Ancillary Shield Booster which interests me the most for solo and small gang PVP.  I hope they don’t end up being too expensive.

There are some items of minor concern.  CCP is starting the transition from Tier to Role based classifications for ship hulls – one of those was changing the Tormentor Frigate from a mining to a combat ship.  I have wondered at what they will be leaving as mining frigates – if anything.  They were an important first step for an industrialist.

There was this little note – “Research Point amounts will not be adjusted in any shape or form with Inferno release”.  So you if you have not cashed them out, they will halve in value overnight.  I guess they are like certain Government Bonds.

Another little item – “Market tax has been increased from 1% to 1.5% as a part of our initiative to keep the EVE economy healthy.”  I wonder at the specific goal of that – and how it keeps the economy healthy.  I guess it depends on how you look at the change – only a 0.5% increase in the cost of doing business, or a 50% increase in a tax.

And the last one that stood out – ““If a player logs back in whilst his ship is still in space at a 1-million-km emergency-warp point, their ship will now be vulnerable to warp disruption bubbles at this location as it attempts to e-warp back to its original position”

Some recent community blogs which add more detail:

The Ally System:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=72742

 

The Skin colour changes in the character generator:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=72330

 

And more detail on the Factional Warfare (although check the release notes for more specifics)

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28659

 

 

More fool me

We are at war again – a different variation of the same group behind more than half our Dec’s.  I had to get my Industry Toon out to do some shopping for Alt 1, but otherwise I don’t expect any impact.

The shopping required was for skillbooks.  With a view towards the proposed racial changes to the Battlecruiser skill, I have just finished up training Amarr and Caldari Frigate and Cruiser V skills on Alt 1.  That gives him the complete set.  I picked up the various Energy Turret and Strategic Cruiser skills that he was missing, which I am now training.

I am mindful of how underutilised that Alt is.  His 91M SP is rarely used for anything but the occasional scout or boosting role.  I’m not sure if that is a sign of CCP’s genius that I have felt that I had to spend so much time on an almost unused account, or my own foolishness.

My Industry Alt finished off Interplanetary Consolidation V and was able to setup a new planet for the last ingredient needed for my PI production goals.  I need to adjust extraction rates however on a couple raw ingredients as I am coming up too short on a couple of the shared ones.  I’ve also ran 10 invention jobs for the following modules, getting:

T2 Damage Control, getting 7 successes
T2 Adaptive Invulnerability Field, getting 3 successes
T2 Cap Recharger I, getting 5 successes
T2 Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane, getting 7 successes
T2 Micro Auxiliary Power Core, getting 4 successes
T2 Power Diagnostic, getting 7 successes
T2 Survey Scanner, getting 4 successes

I haven’t started producing any of these yet – I first need to re-do my entire T2 production spreadsheet to make it easier to keep track of costs.

Last of all my Main Toon ventured back into Wormhole space.  This time it was quiet and I saw no sign of active pilots, aside a single frigate wreck.  I was a little rustywith scanning, made worse by some of the systems having an excess of sites, so I didn’t get as far as I had hoped.  I also had an “oops” moment when I used d-scan to pin-point the location of a POS but got it wrong.  Not what you want when warping around a POS with bubbles on scan.  I am parked in Black Rise now, waiting for the next time I have a couple hours spare.

The Line

Chribba has another Outpost to his name – this time in the rather famous HED-GP.  He had an Outpost in 9UY4-H Providence for over a year, leaving it open for anyone to dock.  I seem to recall reading that he had at least one earlier to that, but only for a short period of time.  The fact that can happen in EVE endears the game to me.

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/outpost/HED-GP

 

There was a new DEV blog out with some refinements to announced updates:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=42269

Good to see the cost of war against large alliances has been reduced through a somewhat complicated looking equation.  I must admit I hadn’t realised before that the minimum cost of any war is now 50M ISK.  That might cut down a fraction on the griefing of small corps.  (Well, I did say a fraction.)

It also covers 7 of the new modules coming into the game – the biggest from a PVP point of view will probably be the Ancillary Shield Booster’s, which are fed from Cap Boosters.  They are also changing the Capacitor Battery, which will now reflect a portion of Nos and Neut effects back on the attacker, which could be interesting.

Not all of these modules however will be seeded directly on the market – some will only be available in BPC drops from professional sites and rats.  I’m not entirely sure I like that.  Some of these new modules could make quite a difference to standard fits – but the scope and impact will depend on just how readily available they are.  If they end up being the equivalent of faction modules, they might simply not be used by the masses, which would be disappointing.

 

Last of all, something I have been sitting on.  This was raised across various EVE blog sites a while back – including on EVE News 24

http://www.evenews24.com/2012/05/04/tweetfleet-to-get-screwed-by-goonswarm-next/

In short the Goons are looking to use their numbers to possibly disturb and troll EVE related twitter feeds.  I am not a Twitter user – but understand there is a very active EVE community, including CCP employers such as CCP_Diagoras (who puts a wealth of interesting game related statistics up). I assume they want to make the main Twitter tags unusable through flooding.  I briefly read the Twitter terms and conditions, and it doesn’t look like the Goon’s would be technically doing anything wrong.

Does this cross a line?  There are certainly some in EVE who follow the credence that the ends justifies the means – such as the illegal hacking of EVE related forums, or the Denial Of Service attacks on Voice Comms or Websites.  While I don’t condone it, it is usually being done for an in game benefit.

The threat from the Goons doesn’t really seem to be about an in game benefit.  (Well – I guess it might build more comradery, or reinforce the Goon being Goon legend.)  They are looking to disrupt and grief people outside of the game or game specific forums, for their own amusement.  I know by writing an EVE related blog that I would likely face trolling through comments, being called an idiot in EVE forums or on other blogs, and possibly get hassled in game.  While not an especially pleasant thought, I accept that.  I hadn’t considered the surprising lack of boundaries some people have when it comes to what is only a game.  The whole thing just doesn’t seem to sit well with me.

Faction Warfare Datacores

RL is knocking me about at the moment, so I am only logging in EVE once every two or three days.

My two day PI schedule tends to slip out to 3 or 4 days, but the setup is effective enough for a first iteration.  Trade has died away – even more so than expected.  Very little is moving.  Whereas a couple of weeks ago I was competing against 4 or 5 active traders, now it is down to only 1.  (And they are updating their orders almost as infrequently as I.)

There was a Dev blog on the Faction Warfare (FW) changes:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28659

My Corp / Alliance can’t be involved as our membership includes relaxed empire dwellers, and FW is not Carebear friendly.  For me, the thought of ending up with very low standings against one or more factions that you would then have to tediously grind back up again to use their space is just unbearable, so I won’t be getting involved either.

Even though most players don’t do FW, we are all about to be directly impacted by it due to the datacore supply changes.  Datacores are used in the T2 invention process.  The number of datacores I collect from my research agents will drop by half, and come with an extra tax.  Instead the FW pilots will be expected to supply the market from their LP store purchases.  We will have to wait and see where the price and availability of supply ends up like.  I do however get the strong impression that a small number of people will be able to manipulate these changes to make an excessive profit for themselves.

From an industrialist point of view it doesn’t really matter – you adjust your prices to suit the new supply costs and pass it on to the market.

I’m mildly annoyed at the personal income nerf.  I currently make around 100M a month on my datacores – although it takes a couple hours to fly two Toons around the 70+ jump circuit to collect and sell them.  It is not enough to make a huge difference to my game, but it adds up over time.  It also makes it a little harder for those players who like to source as many of the raw ingredients they can for themselves.  But that is EVE – the rules of the game change and you adjust.

And that would be it – except I still find myself irritated.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1230077#post1230077

CCP Soundwave commented “We want to move T2 production more towards low and zero-sec. This gives us a very cool venue for FW to influence the rest of the universe instead of being a closed-loop system.”  Later he also remarked “All I can say is that if you’re good at killing things, you’ll benefit”.

I can’t say I was surprised that CCP Soundwave was involved – he usually gives me the impression that he’s far more PVP focused.  I’m not sure what it is – probably just my own Carebear tears and bitching and moaning.  I look to CCP to provide balancing, new tools for the players, and new options.  Manipulations like this however seem to be more about CCP saying “this is where and how we want you to play the game”, which I don’t like from a sandpit point of view.

Taking the timely reminder from Ardent Defender ( http://ardentdefense.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/public-service-reminder-rd-agents-datacores/ ), I ran around and collected all my datacores before the nerf hits in a couple of weeks.  I “sold” them to my Industry Alt to stockpile for her invention.

EVE is 9 years old today

I’ve been playing EVE for the last 5.5 years.  My Main has 97M SP, my main Alt 90M.  My in game assets would be worth over 30 Billion ISK.  While I am more of a casual player who prefers to be self-sufficient, I have spent more than half my career in corporations run by other players.

As with previous years, CCP are giving away free stuff.  For the most part these follow the new trend set last Christmas by being somewhat underwhelming. I now have more refining skill books than I know what to do with.

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28620

The system my Industry Alt lives out of is generally quiet, although it is not uncommon to have a couple individual miners working the belts.  Since Hulkageddon started, this is the more common view on D-Scan:

Someone was running low level missions in a destroyer while I was moving around some trade goods and sorting the PI installations.  It was amusing to see the innocent movements of the pilot spook the miners, who decamped and docked for a while.

There have been another two DEV Blogs from the Security Team:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28581

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28628

 

The Nosy Gamer (a blog well worth following) posted a series of interesting posts relating to the war on RMT and bots:

http://nosygamer.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/ccp-sreegs-unleashed-three-week-update.html

http://nosygamer.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/ccps-war-on-bots-questor-developer.html

http://nosygamer.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/ccps-war-on-bots-questor-tears-mixed.html

 

I am keeping half an eye on the upcoming changes in the Inferno Expansion.  The new inventory system is getting some rave reviews from within my Corp, although it sounds like it isn’t bug free yet.

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28637

 

The kill mail updates are partially interesting, although as with most features CCP introduce that mimic a function 3rd parties have already filled, I’m not sure it will change how players collate and report on these things.  Being able to save the fittings though within the game is nice.

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28602

 

Some of the War Mechanic changes were noted – although the new pricing is just bizzare and makes no sense to me.  There are extra reports and such, which might be of interest if you are into that sort of thing.  It will be interesting to see what they end up deciding on with regards handling players joining and leaving corps with war decs on.

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28542

 

There were other DEV blogs related to the Escalation release which I hadn’t flagged – such as more UI tweaks (must remember to try out updating my orders from the market tab):

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28606

The EW notification icons (a good idea)

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28603

Details of the Rogue drone system Security changes:

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28587

And so on.

There have also been a lot of interesting Forum posts, Facebook comments, Tweets, EVE News articles, Blogs etc which help to convey the scope of the upcoming release, and the fact many aspects of it are not yet set in stone.  Six months ago I would have said this meant they would not make it into the release, but Crucible showed CCP is more adapt at getting changes across the line.  The video’s I’ve seen of the new launcher effects look excellent – and I suspect they might have the same sort of visual impact as the Nebula did, and just yet again up the visual goodness.   The replacement stealth bomber hulls also look great.

What’s in your hanger?

Jester remarked on the ships he owned and the background to their name in this post:

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/whats-in-your-hangar.html

My first thought was “Mmm, interesting”, followed soon after (to be brutally honest) by “Mmm, that’s an easy Blog Post”.

It actually turned out to be a somewhat painful process – particularly as I messed up the calculation and had to go back and count them all over again.  I ended up with 88 hulls on my Main and primary two alts.  I gave up at that point – but would have a dozen more on my last two trained Alts.

My Main has 59 ships in 11 stations.  Alt 1 has 22 ships in 8 stations, and Alt 2 has 7 ships in 2 stations.

These are split up into:

28 Frigate Hulls – Probe (Cyno) (x7), Kitsune, Crow (x2), Taranis (x5), Ares, Raptor, Manitcore (x3) Helios (x6), Anathema, Cheetah

5 Destroyer Hulls – Thrasher, Sabre (x4)

22 Cruiser Hulls – Arbitrator, Celestis (x2), Exequror (x3), Rupture, Scimitar (x2), Basilisk, Arazu (x3), Curse, Pilgrim, Falcon (x2), Rapier (x2), Loki, Tengu, Proteus

5 Battlecruiser Hulls – Hurricane (x3), Cyclone, Drake

1 Battleship Hull – Rattlesnake

2 Carriers – Archon, Thanatos

25 Industry Hulls – Badger Mk2 (x2), Iteron V (x5), Noctis (x3), Viator (x2), Occator (x2), Obelisk, Orca (x3), Covetor (x3), Hulk (x2), Mackinaw (x2)

 

The above number is down a dozen or more as I went through a bit of a cleanup spree over the last couple months. It also might sound silly, but I had not realised that I had three Orca’s until just now. I also picked up a couple hulls going through the asset lists that I had forgotten all about, such as the Anathema and the second Falcon.

As you would expect, these ships are spread across Empire, Low Sec and NPC 0.0.  The names are written in code which relates to entries in the EVE Fitting Tool – basically a couple characters to represent its focus (such as haul for hauling), the version number for the fit, and if it is rigged or not.  It doesn’t make for interesting reading…

 

Who needs plans

Happy with my bookmarks and understanding of the lay of the land around my new chosen NPC 0.0 Station, I logged in on Sunday to do some PVE.  Within minutes a neutral entered the system, opened a Cyno, and two Carriers flown by pilots from a well-known pirate alliance jumped in and docked.  A few minutes later a Tengu undocks, drops probes, and is on the hunt.  That put an end to my plans.

A few days later I log in again at around the same timeframe with the same plan – but soon after neutrals log or jump into the system, open a Cyno, and bring in a couple Jump Freighters.  Then EVE does an emergency reboot, and my plans fall through again.

The Carebears game is always controlled by other people…

One of the carriers sat protecting the Cyno on the earlier encounter.  I had considered dropping a bomb on the Cyno frigate for laughs, but held off as I did not understand the mechanics used by the Sentries on the NPC 0.0 Stations.  Apparently they only respond if you directly target and shoot at the station – and don’t respond to bombs if you haven’t targeted it.  I’ll have to give that a go next time.

The Mittani claimed a somewhat heightened impact from the Burn Jita event in his most recent article for Tenton Hammer:

http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/78

While I am sure it had a physiological psychological impact (as would his warning that it might happen without notice on any of the other trade hubs in future), I’m not sure it really had any more than a momentary economic impact.  A month long Hulkageddon supported by 0.0 Money might however.  I am intrigued to see if I am caught up in it during my PI and trade runs in my haulers.  I have already changed the route I take to pick up buy orders (to crisscross a main highway instead of running along it), plan to minimise how long I spend at Custom Offices, cut down on the value of what I carry, and never auto pilot (although I don’t do that generally anyway.)

I just finished training the last of the Invention related science skills to rank IV – and have various BP copies coming out of the labs about now.  Any efforts in that regard are also likely to be impacted by the Technetium price increases (whatever the real underlying cause).

Again – my game is controlled by others…