Morphisat's Eve Online Blog

Incursion Trailer

Posted by Morphisat in Incursion on November 20, 2010

And it’s out ! You can find it on youtube as you can see below. It focuses on the upcoming Sansha’s invasion. Nice to see the Nightmares and Succubi (sp!) in their full glory ! The final music as the Incursion logo comes on screen reminded me of Warcraft though .

Incursion

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Eve Report

Posted by Morphisat in General on November 15, 2010

A few posts ago I wrote a small post on catching up with the news. Well there is another very nice website called The Eve Report that has a lot of good news and interesting articles. Check it out at http://www.evereport.com.

The EVE Report is a test for what I am calling a “Community Blog”, the idea is that anyone can signup and post on this blog. The only requirements are that the content be related to EVE Online.

The website even looks very appealing . The first eve reports podcast went up early november. Caroline sure seems to be a busy person !

You can also follow the eve report on twitter to get updates when something new is up.

news, podcast

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November Bugfix Release

Posted by Morphisat in Incursion on November 11, 2010

As we can read in yet another new devblog Incursion will be released in parts. The first part that will be released in November will contain mainly balance and bug fixes it seems :

80 new story line courier missions
Rocket balancing
Tech 2 ammo balancing
Adding faction ships to the market
Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
Anti-aliasing support
Window resizing, camera offset
Meta-item indicator icons
UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
Toggling probes in overview
POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Mind you, this isn’t written in stone, so some things might not be in it. To be honest, although it is a bit disappointing to not see real new stuff until January when the second part is supposed to be released, it’s better that the new stuff actually works . Wonder how the CCP PR machine will spin this though. The lack of a trailer so far makes me think they will start promoting the January release rather than the November one.

ccp, Incursion

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Public Quests In Eve

Posted by Morphisat in Incursion on November 10, 2010

In the latest blogpost, called the nation strikes back, CCP Ytterbium explains a bit how the Sansha Invasions in the upcoming Incursion expansion will work. It looks somewhat interesting and it reminds me a lot of Warhammer’s public quests. Only there is one big exception:

To players in the fleet that participated the most in the site in question; if there is more than one fleet in a site, others won’t be paid. CONCORD only rewards the most effective capsuleers. If you are not ready to face the competition, we recommend you either merge your fleets together, or spread out to other unchecked sites.

The fun of the public quests in warhammer (if I remember correctly, it’s been a while) was that you could just join in and everybody got rewarded according to some sort of formula of who did the most damage and a random draw. In the Eve system, the fleet that did the most damage will be rewarded, other people who happened to join won’t get anything. So basically your fleet has to be there first, other wise there is no point to participate. I don’t really like that design descision.

On the other hand, I never thought an experience in Warhammer Online would be relevant to Eve. The rewards will likely be interesting, a Concorde LP store ! Only capital mod blueprints are mentioned in the blogpost.

This was one of the first blogposts that actually dealt with incursion gameplay. I assume more will follow as the release is getting closer (soon ?).

Incursion

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Catching up on the news

Posted by Morphisat in General on October 28, 2010

Until now I never really realised that the Eve Newsletter CCP sends out every now and then is quite nice. I haven’t been playing much lately and didn’t follow the Eve news all that much, before that I always thought ‘meh, already knew that’.

It includes a summary of all the devblogs and some more headlines. Looks like I got some catching up to do !

http://www.eveonline.com/community/newsletters/vol048.html

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EON #21

Posted by Morphisat in General on October 4, 2010

The new EON has been released on Oct. 1st ! Looking forward to seeing my article on Eve Communications (an insider’s guide) in print and see what kind of graphics Richie has picked.

Last time I wrote a magazine article was years ago, an intro to Bob Dylan bootlegs for Gadfly magazine .

eon

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Incursion

Posted by Morphisat in Incursion on September 22, 2010

CCP has sent out a press release today about the upcoming expansion ‘Incursion’. You can find it here.

So what do we get:

- Sansha’s invasions, which seem to be some sort of public quest. Along with that special rewards, wealthy bounties, earning loyalty rewards and high commendation as the press release put it. Rather vague but it sounds interesting.

- New ships, most noticeably a dedicated salvage boat. Since the bpc is only sourced in Outer Ring, it will be rather expensive, especially at first. I was hoping it would be targeted towards new players, since they benefit the most from salvaging their missions and don’t have a marauder yet. But it’s nice to see that very nice hull being used again

- Improvements the CSM came up with. Not quite sure what this will be, but we’ll see. (Update: there is a devblog about these).

- Hardware and infrastructure improvement. Of course these are welcome, but to mention them as part of an expansion is a bit ridiculous. They did this before as well, and I find this as silly now as I did then

- Improvements to EveGate, forums and such. Any improvement is welcome, and forums are nice to have for newer corporations that don’t have their own yet. This makes me wonder why EveGate can’t be improved gradually. Agile is all about releasing little things a time. And since EveGate doesn’t need a client side update, why not improve it gradually. It doesn’t make sense that it’s being improved on the same pace as expansions are released.

- New character avatar builder. Don’t really care about this.

- Improvements to PI. Too little, too late I am afraid. My planets have been withering away since two weeks after the expansion. Way too much clicking for very little reward. Maybe this will be reduced, but I have pretty much already lost interest in PI.

All in all, the pve part sounds interesting, and that’s about it. Nothing to get really excited about, but it’s always nice to have more PVE stuff to do.

expansion, Incursion

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The Grind

Posted by Morphisat in General on September 10, 2010

Casiella at The Eclipse Rift is wondering about the grind in Eve. The first thing that came to my mind was YES, the grind for isk, so you can do other stuff ! When you start out you grind for standings to get better agents and more isk, so you can do higher level missions. Especially from level 3 to 4 was quite a long tedious run from what I can remember. This can be made more bearable if you can join other people’s missions in your corporation so you can standings faster.

These standings are also a requirement for miners, so you can get the best yield when refining. AFAIK these can’t be bought as suggested in the above mentioned blogpost (only corp standings can be boosted for a while, using such a service). And of course you can (legally !) buy isk in Eve using timecards, but I don’t really consider that a fun way to play as it doesn’t give much of a feeling of accomplishment. But it’s a way to get things done.

Any other grinds in Eve ? Well I guess shooting rats in belts can be considered a grind, though when there can be danger lurking in losec or 0.0, it probably doesn’t feel too grindy.

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Causality

Posted by Morphisat in General on September 6, 2010

CCP has created a followup to the ‘butterfly effect‘ trailer, it’s called causality. You can find it at www.eveuniversalglory.com. According to the press release, it’s created to help our players explain to their the differences between EVE and virtually every other game on the market. There is also some talk about limitless choice…

ccp, trailer

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