Incursion

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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.

The Grind

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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.

The Lag Monster

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Inspired by the Eve Druid post ‘Let’s talk about lag, baby’ I decided to write something on the subject, it is the hottest topic in Eve at the moment it seems.

Let me sum up the recent events first : Eve did win the european game of the year contest by the way, despite the threadnaught of, as of now, 84 pages. Most of the concerns expressed in there and in the ‘18 month hiatus’ blog was about lag. A response (of sorts) came in the form of the dev blog called The Long Lag where a plan was laid out how ccp is going to go about trying to fix the now infamous 0.0 lag.

As there have been many forums posts and blog posts concerning lag, what I would like to talk about how have you actively changed your game play to avoid lag.  I am not talking about tweaking to the game client or staging ships in a system before a fight, I am talking about a directly change in game play decisions to avoid lag .

In my game style, in hisec, missioning exploring and what not, you don’t encounter a lot of lag. There is the odd situation where you might have some module lag in a somewhat busy mission system, but it’s been a while since I suffered from that.

eve-tracert

What I do remember and what seems to be very similar to what the current 0.0 players are experiencing, is the factional warfare ‘lag’ from about a year ago, that took quite a while to fix (investigations started early 2009). At first the problem wasn’t even acknowledged (the logs show nothing !).

This wasn’t your regular ‘oh it takes 3 secs to activate my guns’ lag, that’s why I put it in quotes. When there were more than 10 people or so involved in a battle, not only would you lag, but experience complete desyncs, still being shot after podded and being in station (very odd experience that one), and stuff like that. This certainly hampered my FW-alt gameplay, I simply gave up on it. It was unplayable and very frustrating. I don’t mind loosing ships (we’re talking ruptures, vexors and rifters here), but to loose them to technical problems is very annoying to say the least.

After all it turned out to be quite a complex bug and had to do with standings and such if I remember well. So it could very well be, the 0.0 issue is something similar. Let’s hope the recent mass tests and other data will result in a fix. Eve really needs this at the moment, as more of this lag monster will result in more bad press and dissatisfied customer. And the 18month development hiatus does not help people’s patience either.

Bunker Busting

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No no, not a post about busting CCP’s bunker, but one actually about gameplay. And the ‘broken’ factional warfare nevertheless. I reactivated my FW account when we got the 5 days back, and really liked the small fleet pvp again.

The last two weekends the minmatar recaptured 4 systems that were previously captured by the Amarr. We had three vulnerable systems the weekend before last, and a nice bunker buster fleet came in from Auga to blow up the bunkers, assisted by a few dreads and carriers.

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 bunker3

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Last weekend we had only one bunker to bust but it took a little longer as we had no capital support. Both weekends no Amarr counter fleet was formed, although they did cut off the pipe down into Minmatar lowsec, so anyone who wasn’t in a stealth bomber had a hard time coming down to help.

bunker4 bunker5

All in all it was good fun, though the busting itself is a bit boring. It’s basically like shooting a pos. BTW the domi seen here in the screenshots was lost this weekend unfortunately !

Blog Banter #19 – CCP and the CSM

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Welcome to the nineteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This months topic comes to us from @evepress, and he asks: The CSM: CCP’s Meta Game? – The CSM, an eve players voice to CCP. Right? In the grand scheme of things yes, the players bring up issues and the CSM presents them to CCP. But in its current iteration the CSM was supposed to be given small authority to assign CCP assets to projects that the CSM thought needed work on. As it has now come out this is not the case. So fellow bloggers, is the CSM worth it, has the CSM improved the game in any way, or is it just a well thought out scam by CCP to give us players a false sense of input in the game? What’s your take?

This BlogBanter comes at a delicate time, when the shit has hit the proverbial fan after the minutes of the latest CSM – CCP meeting had been released. If I have to answer this question at the moment, then I would say, No at the moment the CSM isn’t really worth it if no development time can be assigned to any issues. Of course it’s useful to keep the conversation going, but if it’s just talk and no action it’s pretty much useless. CCP does send out press releases about the CSM (at least I see the same type of articles on various press sites) so it’s still being used as a PR tool. Reading the latest ‘18months’ devblog and the responses by various CCP employees, I get the impression that at the moment CCP doesn’t really know what to do with the CSM and CCP_Zulu even seems annoyed by them.

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Overall though I think the CSM has been useful, if not only for the skill queue and various other accomplishments. It’s a really nice idea to have some people represent the players who bring forward concerns by the players. It’s then up to CCP to decide what will be addressed and what will not. Of course we do understand they can not do everything that’s being proposed, but at least some issues would be nice. I assume that was the original idea behind it…

See other participants:

  1. Growing Pains | CrazyKinux’s Musing
  2. CSM: Hoax or Serious Business? « Lost in New Eden
  3. CSM-Power to the people or puppets of CCP « A whole lot of Yarrrr!!!
  4. Gaming the CSM | A Mule in EvE
  5. A Taste Of Democracy | StarFleet Comms
  6. CSM: Player Power or Paper Tiger? | I Am Keith Neilson
  7. Governance Thrash Redux? « The Ralpha Dogs
  8. CCP Doesn’t Care: Blog Banter 19 « OMG! You’re a Chick?!
  9. The Cataclysmic Variable: It’s Crunch Time!
  10. The 19th EVE Blog Banter is upon us… and about the CSM and CCP | Victoria Aut Mors
  11. CSM: Lame Duck from the beginning?
  12. Blog Banter #19 << Dense Veldspar
  13. Be careful what you say, Roc « Roc’s Ramblings
  14. Exchange Fraking Phone Numbers « Scrap Metal & Faction Ammo
  15. Blog Banter #19: Assumptions
  16. EVE Blog Banter #19 | EVE on Real Life
  17. A Reality Check | A “CareBears” Journey
  18. Quit your bitching | Fly Reckless – EVE Online
  19. War has come to EVE | Scram Web
  20. CCP and the CSM | Morphisat’s Blog
  21. More to come…

Eve and the road ahead

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A dev blog was posted today by Ccp Zulu about what teams are working on what currently at CCP. It’s nice that they are sharing this information now, probably as a response to the release of the minutes of the CSM 5 meeting, which caused quite some turmoil.

We already knew that Incarna is the main focus for Eve at the moment, but 9 teams, 70 developers ? That sounds like it’s a bit much. And we still don’t know what we’ll be able to do in Incarna. Just walking around a bit and play station games or will there be more ?

Also 10 for evegate is a large number. It doesn’t look all that complicated to me. Then again my job is making business applications, which are mainly front ends for database manipulation, so maybe I am wrong and it’s a lot more complicated than it looks.

Anyway, this all results in this:

In the 2011 winter expansion we‘ll certainly focus more than ever before on iterating and polishing up all the features that EVE has expanded to in the then eight years. What those specific systems are, I don‘t know as we haven‘t started the planning phase for that yet.

It’s kinda tough to accept when it’s actually ‘written in stone’ like this. Basically development for Eve the Space Game has been halted for 18 months or so. And that’s just sad :( .