Not so ugly

I remarked back at the start of July that this blog might be turning ugly. It appeared from the WordPress spam I was receiving that the account options I used to remove ads and allow customisation were being combined in a more expensive subscription that I was not willing to pay for.

Wilhelm Arcturus from https://tagn.wordpress.com/ suggested the old account options were still being billed for him regardless. That has turned out to be the case for me as well. I must admit some of my blogging enthusiasm had been sapped by the presumed loss of those options. I prefer the site looking – in its own way – neat and clean.

The next in game EVE event, starting in 5 odd days, is one based in the Abyss pockets.

https://www.eveonline.com/article/pdgi51/secrets-of-the-abyss-kicks-off-in-one-week

It is probably just a jaded perception, but I wonder if this is a random idea from CCP, or if they feel like they need to try and get more people to use the sites. Aside some statistics provided during EVE down under, has anyone heard if the Abyss sites are considered a widely used success, or have they become another niche sub-part of the game?

I still have a small collection of Filaments in my main hanger but have yet to use any of them. I have purchased and trained up all the Precursor hull and module skills to rank IV – but again have not used any of them. I just haven’t been enamored by some of CCP’s design decisions around this newer aspect of the game. Maybe I am just a recalcitrant old man now.

CCP have also continued their recent tradition of lots and lots of sales on PLEX and Game time purchases. Most of the bonuses on offer relate to extra ship skins or attire, which I find very underwhelming, but the other day they offered their Value packs with notable discounts. These are packs you can buy only one time for each account.

https://secure.eveonline.com/dlc/

I picked up the Galaxy Pack for half price on one of their sales – for $70 AUD I received an extra 90 days of Omega game time (~$54) on my account, 1100 PLEX (~$55) for skin purchases, 2 Multi-Pilot Training Certificates (~$55), 5 Skill Extractors (~$35), and 7 ship skins and a couple clothing items. The multi-pilot training certificates and extractors I will put aside for a rainy day.

There have been some large battles in EVE recently, with lots of Titans and Supercarriers fielded. During some of these there have been Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the game infrastructure, impacting a lot of players negatively. Whether triggered by one side or the other trying to give themselves an advantage, or some look at me oddity trying to make themselves feel important, I don’t know. More interesting has been the vitriol directed at CCP for not being able to entirely mitigate the impact, or about how some apparently innocent people are unable to log in as their IP addresses fall into a range blocked by the anti DDoS service CCP is using. It seems very much like Victim blaming at times. More and more often the vocal part of the EVE community seems to be a whiny little shit.

A new record maybe

(Version 2 of this post)

It has been over five weeks since I had posted – possibly an inauspicious new record. I hadn’t noticed.

I’m still logging into EVE once a week or so but doing little other than playing the skin collecting game. I have on several occasions really wanted – needed – to be able to do some mindless mining. The reality is however you need to pay attention when mining now, and that defeats the purpose of using it to relax.

I noticed that someone has picked up the EVEMon project and moved it off the old API. I haven’t tried it – but it is available here if anyone wants to give it a go:

(Edit.. changed link from current version on GitHub to the EVE Forum post that gets updated to the latest version as it is released:)

https://forums.eveonline.com/t/evemon-4-0-7-beta-esi-edition/75953

I am sporadically playing World of Warships. I tend to play a ship until I win its first battle of the day – which gives an XP bonus, then move onto the next ship. A consequence of that is I tend to end up with a large collection of ship lines all at the same Tier. At the moment that tier is VIII. I have been stuck at this point for a very long time – generally only around half way to Tier IX. To make matters worse – I find myself in Tier X matches more often than not, and even when I play at my very best, I have very little impact on the finally result.

I am only getting to Dungeon and Dragon’s Online once a month or less. I am meant to have Wednesday Night off to play, but my wife scheduled an activity for my Daughter on that evening.

Most of my gaming now is a session or two a day of Hay Day and SimCity on the iPad.

The main reason for this lack of free time is that I spend the vast majority of my days and evenings as a taxi service for my two kids.

EVE – even if I could find something new and interesting to do – just can’t get a look in.