It has a name.
http://www.eveonline.com/odyssey
So we can expect updates to exploration and a rebalancing of resources across the zones in the game.
Will be interesting seeing the details going forward.
The last fortnight in game was a complete waste – I am not even sure I managed to undock once. Unfortunately I don’t envision that improving a great deal into the foreseeable future.
Ok – best not wallow in self-pity. I have a small window of opportunity to undock, so let’s get to it.
I have trade goods to pick up from 16 stations – one Iteron V and one Orca load from the look of it. I’ve gone back to fitting a 100MN MWD to my hauling Orca. It certainly speeds the trip up, but at the cost of nearly 20Km3 cargo space and 100K EHP of tank. The risks are relatively low, so I go the convenience route.
There is not a great deal of profit in what I am collecting. Not being able to update my orders meant I wasn’t exposed to the more profitable goods for long enough. This stuff is the scrap no one else can be bothered with. (Although having said that, it ends up being near on 150M in sell orders, and should clear profits of around 50M ISK.)
I had decided I would put in one month more of POS fuel and do some serious copying so that I could do some invention attempts later. That is just clearly not going to happen – so when I get some time I will remove my labs and leave the POS anchored but offline. No use spending the ISK on fuel, and I can easily enough put it back online when the need arises.
I have completed my Destroyer and Battlecruiser training across all my accounts, so am ready in that regard for the next expansion. My Main and Main Alt don’t have specific training goals, so both are currently just training the first things which happen to stand out when I look at their skill tree. Mostly that is just getting skills up to rank IV, even if I don’t particular need them, just so the skill lists line up better… My main is currently working on Citadel Torpedoes IV, and my Main Alt – for no reason I can remember picking it, is half way through Electronic Attack Ships V. My last account is training up one of my alts on Destroyer V.
I took a week off to recharge the batteries and get stuck into some quality EVE playing.
Then Real Life happened.
I end my week exhausted, overwhelmed, and with barely 10 minutes spent logged into the game. Posts might be sparse for a while.
I wanted to comment on the change of direction of the EVE Client Launcher –
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74573
CCP never really finished the first version of the launcher. It came with promises of future iterations that never saw the light of day. While I appreciate the change to the more robust nature of the BitTorrent protocol – it comes at a cost. For those of us who have both down and uploads count towards their monthly quota, the patch files will effectively be a larger hit. Further – some ISP specifically throttle Torrent Traffic, so patching could take longer. I suspect for each problem they resolve with such a move, they will just create new ones.
Anyone who follows this blog would know I’ve regularly tried to make reasoned posts against the vocal call to nerf Empire and force its inhabitance to play the game differently.
The chief protagonist at the moment for such demands is the CSM Candidate James 315. You can read his platform here.
James is either the most excellent of trolls, or completely clueless when it comes to understanding the average Empire player. Either way – there is no value in trying to reason with him.
Jester does a fair effort to try and do just that here – but as you can tell by the comments of James 315’s supporters – they are too busy salivating at their version of nirvana to be distracted by the trivialities of reality.
I don’t imagine CCP would court ruination by entertaining any of James 315’s Empire nerfs – but a little part of me wishes they did. The only way I could imagine this troop would accept they might be wrong is when they look upon the depopulated wasteland that would be Empire, and wonder why almost everyone just left the game instead of moving into Low or Null Sec. That is probably the only way we are ever going to hear something more sensible out of them.
In the meanwhile I am not going to bother reasoning with them. I am just going to smirk to myself, and categorise James 315 and his supporters as “comedy gold”.
I grew up in the country – moving four times during my schooling to different out of the way locations when my father took promotions. These were places where families lived on the same farms for generations; everyone knew everyone else, and the friendships between kids started at birth.
Turning up with pretty average social skills, being forced to wear my old school uniform for a term or two, and having the horrible infliction of being somewhat bright – did not bode well for me. Almost needless to say – I got bullied a lot as a kid.
My father’s advice was always to turn the other cheek – but that only ever emboldened the bullies. Midway through High School and with a couple years of Karate under my belt I started to very aggressively fight back. I didn’t care if I lost a fight or got in to trouble – my only aim was to make sure I hurt the other kid.
I won a few fights, drew a couple, and continued to belligerently shirt front anyone who tried to pick on me. Within a relatively short period of time I was no longer bullied – the worst antagonist walking away from an offered fight saying “you’re not worth it.”
I appreciated being able to discard my past and somewhat reinvent myself when I moved down to the city to go to University – pleased I had left that phase of my life behind me.
After graduating I moved into professional work environments – only to find bullying to be alive and well there too. I took the same approach as I did at school (without fists) – I didn’t rely on HR, I accepted whatever consequence that might occur – and I assertively responded to it. The impact was a little different – not only would the bullies back off, many of them respected the stance and treated me much better for it.
I’ve been working for a couple of decades now – and with age I have mellowed. Funny enough I finally understood my father’s advice. Turning the other cheek wasn’t about ignoring the behaviour and hoping it goes away. It was about understanding what bullying was, responding to it appropriately, and not allowing it to have any power over you. You still have to stand up for yourself and be assertive in its face – but your reaction to it is more important than meeting it with an escalation of aggression.
I find EVE a little confronting on the bullying stakes.
I am not throwing the term out there indiscriminately. You can be a Pirate, or a Suicide Ganker, or a Mercenary, or a Scam Artist and so on without being a bully. I am talking about those special individuals who get pleasure from other’s unhappiness, show contempt for their targets and victims, and provide all those telling excuses and justifications for their behaviour.
A younger me might have wanted to grab the little shits around the throat with one hand, and punch their face in with the other. The older me is more likely to cringe at the reactions of their targets, knowing they are feeding the bully and not helping themselves at all.
In many ways EVE rewards bullies – aggression and the subjugation of others is one of the more obvious ways to “win”. They even get to stand for the CSM and can garner enough support to win seats.
If bullying annoys you in EVE, you might want to start by understanding how little power it actually needs to have over your game. What you can do to mitigate much of it. How you can accept or ignore some aspects of it as being a fabric of the game. Much of what you can do to mitigate the annoyance is actually within yourself. Turn the other cheek – so to speak.
If you do decide to go the metaphoric path of aggressively fighting back – you better make sure you and your copious friends have the skill, temperament, time and resources to do it very well. If you don’t land a punch and hurt the bully, all you end up doing is feeding it.
…
Somewhat unrelated – but I am not sure what advice I am going to give to my two children as they grow up about bullies. My 7 year old already has more than a year of Karate under his belt – but today, the youth and the playground rules appear to have changed. Back “in my day” you never had to worry about a knife being brought to school. Fights were one on one. When someone went down people did not stand around kicking them on the ground. The worst you generally got was a few scrapes, bruises, and maybe a bloody nose – not missing teeth, broken bones, and reconstructive surgery. Strangely, for all the zeal our politicians have in trying to protect us from ourselves, life seems to have gotten cheaper in the mind of society.
I only keep an amateurish measurement of my Trade and Industry profits – based around fluid ISK. It gives me a rough idea on how my efforts are going, which is all I need. I will try to remember to update these figures monthly.
Fluid ISK at the start of March
4.0B Wallet
0.4B Escrow
0.6B Stock on Market *
===
5.0B ISK
Input Assets
1.0B Manufacturing Supplies
0.3B POS Fuel
0.0B Long Term Speculative Stock (Not valued)
===
1.3B
Known Expenses for the month
8M Office Rentals
4M Alliance Fees
75M POS Fuel (**)
===
<0.1B
(* Stock Value calculated at 80%, roughly at fire sale to Jita buy orders)
(**POS running costs mostly met by much cheaper buy orders)
I’ve already provided a trading update last week. I will try to incorporate that in my next monthly update.
As I had remarked on previously, I have recently placed speculative buy orders on low volume but expensive hulls. I picked up 3 hulls over February on these orders, flipping each at a trade hub for a total clear profit of 400M. On each sale the same pilot has sold to various module buy orders – so I presume they are fire selling assets without much thought. I can see this will be very hit and miss, but worthwhile over the long run.
I picked up several new profitable market opportunities last month. – supplying items that were not available. I don’t need to remark on them – as without fail after a week or two of high margin sales, competition would flood the market. I still haven’t bothered looking closely at the market tools that provide such Intel, but my competitors obviously are.
Evehermit 