A lack of Malice

I had an appreciated impetus to try something new in EVE. My Alliance has had war declared on it – to allow the taking of my Custom Offices.

The attackers are a 60-odd member non-PVP focused corporation, one of who has recently read this blog. (Shout out). They seem pleasant enough.

The timing was inconvenient – I was only alerted to the war 12 hours in, and had to do my initial preparations after midnight and then in between organising dessert for a New Year’s Party. I also have a couple family functions and travel to get through before I have much free time.

Unless the attackers do something really stupid, I’m not going to be able to do much about the Custom Offices. They took to the first one with two Rokh, a Bhaalgorn, Harbinger Navy Issue, Dominix, Vexor Navy Issue and a Coercer.

So, what can a solo player do in this situation? I’m inclined to find out. I have plenty of patience and nothing better to be doing with my EVE time.

I managed to buy a Freighter and move in a bunch of supplies into the area just before the war went active. I also reactivated my Main Alt account. (How long did that last in an Alpha state? Just over two weeks?)

We will see if I generate some blog content or not.

Nothing to report

The last o7 show of the year is available.

Not a great deal in it, although some of the proposed future Fireworks look cool. They relayed some EVE statistics, including that so far in 2016, 7.1M ships have been destroyed while 56.6M have been manufactured. I hope I heard wrong – that really doesn’t make any sense.

I am logging in each day to collect the Christmas Gifts across 3 accounts – 2 paid and 1 alpha. Interestingly there are differences some days on what each account gets. Today there were no gifts and nothing mentioned on the launcher. I noticed CCP say on Facebook that the gift was a 15% discount code to be applied to their new EVE Store. They probably needed to advertise that more – I expect people might be wondering what is going on.

I am not doing much in EVE at the moment. I had a play around with the Sunesis, and more recently I purchased a Porpoise to test that out.  I’ve done a little bit of mining and a little bit of exploration.  I had two old friends return to EVE recently.  One was playing around as an Alpha Clone and chatted for a few days, but appears to have stopped logging in again.  The second made use of a discount subscription offer from CCP, but he also went quiet after a short while in the middle of trying to consolidate his assets.

12 Days of XMas Gifts – but for who?

From December 14th, for 12 days, CCP will be handing out Christmas Gifts. Each gift will only be present in your redeeming system for 24 hours so you will have to log in each day to claim them all.

https://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/the-yoiul-festival-draws-near/

One thing they did not appear to specify was if both Alpha and Omega accounts got them or not.  I assume from the lack of details that both do.  I’d wondered how CCP were going to approach that.  Having to log in daily probably works best.

We should also be seeing some new fireworks.  If they are the ones shown in the image in the Dev Blog, they are going to be rather cool.

CCP are also going to re-balance Rorquals by cutting back Excavator Mining Drone yield by 32%.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=503147&find=unread

That seems like a big nerf – the sort that makes you wonder how they got the initial values so wrong.  I think I read somewhere that since the Ascension release Rorquals could mine as much as 8 Hulks.  Now it will be 5.  If correct, again, rather surprisingly big values.  They will also be increasing drop rates related (I think) to the Excavators, to hopefully make them a little less expensive.

I am flat out busy in Real Life at the moment, so haven’t been able to do as much in EVE.  I am currently running some Level 1 Mining missions because, well, I’ve never done them before.  Once I get 16 I will move on to Level 2 missions, and so on.

Monitoring Temps

As I mentioned the other day it is a good idea to monitor your GPU temps when playing EVE.  There are lots of (free) hardware monitoring tools available, such as Speccy, Open Hardware Monitor,  HWiNFO64 or Speedfan.  (Obviously make sure you download direct and deselect any optional installs.)  The problem is that you have to remember to run them, and they take up a lot of screen space.

There are various programs that allow you to set up little screen or desktop widgets to display such information.  My old favourite is Rainmeter, which allows skins with (effort) an amazing level of customisation.  I installed the 4.0 Beta version and went looking for some of my old setups.  I had previously used Open Hardware Monitor as my source for temperature data for Rainmeter but that no longer seemed to work.  (It may have related to one being 64 bit, the other 32 bit.  I’m not sure.)  I decided to switch over to Speedfan – which required setting it up as a scheduled task so that it automatically ran in the background.  Using Benzene from an older version of the OrganiC skin, I was able to create a simple meter to monitor the GPU temps (colour coded), with RAM and CPU thrown in for good measure.

Now I just need to transfer it across to my laptop and get it working.

Not the hot you want

I have a gaming laptop I use when I travel and as a backup to my desktop PC. At the moment it is a 2-year-old MSI GS60, with an i7 CPU, 16GB Ram, a 3GB GTX870M graphics card, 15.6” 2880×1620 screen, and a 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD. It is capable, but doesn’t get much use. As I do semi-regularly, I had it turned on the other night to get the latest anti-virus definitions, apply Window updates, and ensure EVE was patched. While running the EVE client the laptop’s fan was roaring. I happened to brush the side of the laptop on this particular evening and was startled by how hot it was. I kicked off Speccy and was surprised to see the GPU was running at over 90 degrees Celsius – even sitting on a laptop cooler.

That’s not healthy.

I glanced through the EVE graphic settings and found everything was set to High. It wasn’t that way the last time I looked, but that would have been some time ago. I have vague recollections of resetting the client when trying to find a solution to the blank screen on undock issue (which I still have). I played around with the settings to bring the temperatures down while still having the game look good. It is worth remembering just how important it is to keep an eye on your GPU temps when playing EVE.

The GUI Temp on my Laptop:

42c – Idle

91c – EVE running with all Graphic settings on High

55c – EVE running with the Optimized Performance setting

73c – EVE running with the Optimized Performance setting, but the following increased – Post Processing to Low, Shader Quality to Medium and Shadow Quality to Low

I’m going to have to reinstall and setup Rainmaker so that I always have a visual indication of my GPU temps on my desktops again.