Change

I’ve started half a dozen blog posts recently but not been able to finish any of them. What seem to be simple ideas have morphed into complex novelettes that I can’t seem to wrestle into cohesiveness. The closest to being finished is one directed towards newer players, about where they can find EVE Ship Fitting examples. Hopefully I will get that done sooner rather than later.

In a follow up to my last post, the work colleague I mentioned has managed to resurrect his RAID array. After being quoted $2,500 by a specialist to try and fix it, he ended up using a borrowed device to perform low level disk clones, and managed to get the array to rebuild. Impressed with his tenacity I asked how many extra backups he had made of his photos. “None”, was his answer.

Over the last few days I have read a lot of EVE blogs, forum threads and news articles, trying to catch up a little on my reading. I’ve been thinking the EVE community seems to be back into its collective malaise – and that was reinforced by looking at page after page of angst, gloom and self-righteous indignation. There were some courageous efforts by the reasonable and rational, but they haven’t been able to drown out the vibe. I wonder if this is in part due to the constant change in EVE?

Speaking of change, my boss has left; leaving behind the battered remnants of the team and service he tried and ultimately failed to build over the last 7 years. The company and its sales force have given little focus on the team for a while now, and with customers going into receivership or being taken over, the death knell for my own position has sounded loudly for at least the last 9 months. At this point I am in the odd position of not understanding why I haven’t been made redundant.

I am not making light of my predicament. It creates a very weird sort of stress. To add to the uncertainty the job market for my skills has changed fundamentally. Much is now offshored, and the few jobs advertised are usually filled by visa holders taking salaries 40% lower than the going rate two years ago. It is likely a career change will be in order. Should I look at games design? How about becoming CCP Hermit?

Raided to death

This week I got a series of emails from a work colleague as he wrestled with a catastrophic failure of a RAID array. Like me he has two decades of experience with backups and disaster recovery, but I didn’t like his chances of salvaging anything. The tone of his correspondence became more despondent until he was forced to admit defeat. I asked what he had lost, and was told his only complete collection of family digital photos.

I’m not sure about you, but the thought of that was quite confronting.

While I have a regimented backup regime at home across 3 different devices, they are in the one location and at risk from damage or theft. I spent the time I would normally be playing EVE this weekend procuring somewhat robust USB keys, and copying the family photos, videos and music collection to them. I will leave them with my parents the next time I visit, and update them once or twice a year. I’ll have four backups now.

While RAID technology is a given in the business environments I support, I never use it at home. For the last 20 years I’ve seen it fail more often and more ruinously than just straight configured drives. Don’t even get me started on the privacy and reliability of Cloud services!

I have still been playing EVE – although as mentioned not so much this weekend. My loot container value is now up to 650M, which means I’ve earnt 100M a week since I last looked at its value at the end of May. All I am doing is logging in every day or two, poking my nose out of my home station, and probing down and running sites that happen to be there. If there is nothing I’ve gone and done some mining. It still amazes me how much you can amass over time with relatively little effort, just by clicking on that undock button.

CCP’s recent Drifter summary blog was worth a read:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/an-update-on-the-drifters/

Mark726 from EVE Travel did a great post about the complexes now available within the Drifter wormholes, which is also worth a read.

https://evetravel.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/drifter-complexes-barbican-conflux-redoubt-sentinel-vidette/

It seems to be outside the capability of me to explore this solo – even using an Alt. I continue to enjoy this NPC arc in the game anyway.

I have found one quibble with the new icons. I find it difficult to work out what I have locked and what I haven’t in the overview. That is probably more a consequence of non-scaling the client on a 28” 4K screen than the design, but I am hoping the changes they are looking at for the 90% UI scaling players helps me too.

As Splatus (https://splatus.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/winning-eve/) points out, winning at EVE can just be finding an acceptable level of activity that fits in with real life.

Third one

I visited Jita the other day. I couldn’t remember the last time I was there – it had plausibly been months.

I picked up and fitted a Jackdaw, the new Caldari T3 Destroyer. I wanted to compare it against the Confessor as a High Sec Exploration vessel.

The initial quick fit I used and tested is below.

[Jackdaw, Play]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II

Coreli A-Type 1MN Afterburner
Gistii A-Type Small Shield Booster
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Domination EM Ward Amplifier
Domination EM Ward Amplifier
Scan Rangefinding Array II

Light Missile Launcher II, Mjolnir Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher II, Mjolnir Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher II, Mjolnir Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher II, Mjolnir Light Missile
Light Missile Launcher II, Mjolnir Light Missile
Sisters Core Probe Launcher, Sisters Core Scanner Probe

Small Bay Loading Accelerator I
Small Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer II
Small Anti-Explosive Screen Reinforcer II

While the Jackdaw tanks better, in most other ways the Confessor is better for exploration. It is cheaper to fit, requires far less cargo space for ammunition, can fit a Salvager and probe launcher without impacting DPS, is quicker to change ammo, damage is applied immediately and so on.

I don’t mind the look of the Jackdaw, but I doubt it will find a permanent place in my hanger.

At least it was worth fitting and testing the hull. I still haven’t unpackaged the Svipul I purchased a while back. While in EFT that ship does a great deal more DPS and otherwise matches the Confessor, the short range of its weapons and the requirement to close up on targets means it will clearly be slower at the task of clearing sites.

During my ship testing I had time to get accustomed to the new icons. They can be a little hard to distinguish at the high resolution of my monitors, but the approach certainly provides a lot of extra information and I expect I will get used to them with time. I am not sure why some players are crying about the sky falling in on them.