New Dominion Trailer

As CCP said on their Twitter account "serious pew-pew in HD". If you have the extra time to download the HD version, do yourself a favor and do that.

Well, that didn't work out so well...

The other day I made that attempt to run up to the EVE Gate for no particular reason. I had forgotten about my MWD, but decided that chances were that wouldn't make a great deal of difference, so I popped a same-scale afterburner instead, and since I didn't want to wait to train for T2 HAM launchers, slapped in best-named on a new Drake hull (I had the cash, and decided why blow a ship I'm planning on actually needing?) and opened my map interface.

After setting New Eden as my destination, I fiddled with my autopilot settings, flipping between "shortest route" and "prefer high-sec". The high-sec route would have taken me from Tash-Murkon, my starting point, and looped me back into Caldari space before heading back towards New Eden. The high side would be that I wouldn't hit low-sec space until four jumps from my destination. Going straight, though, would shave a dozen-ish jumps from the path. So, in the spirit of biting the bullet, I set the straight shot as my course, checked to make sure my clone was up-to-date, and undocked.

Everything was going pretty smoothly. I saw a few pirates in local, but never ran into them as I dashed from stargate to stargate, ready to hit that "jump" button right when I came out of warp. It seemed like a decent tactic to me - least time vulnerable, moving quickly, trying to seem as non-tempting as possible. (Yeah, a BC flying by itself. How is that not tempting to a competent pirate?)

I was making a habit of checking corps for the pirates I was seeing in local - good way to try and see if there was a gang in operation. I saw a pair of pirates sitting on a gate as I jumped - same corp. I don't remember what ships they were in - I think BCs, but my memory could be spotty there. Either way, my spider-sense started tingling when I saw them. A session change and, yep, two more pirates on the other side. I didn't even bother waiting to see what they'd do - I just clicked a stellar in front of me and spammed my "RUN AWAY!" button as fast as I could - best case, I lead them on a bit of a chase, they get bored after a jump or two, and I get away scot-free. Granted, that would do me no good whatsoever on the return trip, but... what the hell. Unfortunately, before my warp drive kicked in, they got a warp jammer on me. So, I did what any smart battlecruiser skipper would do - I slapped on my afterburner, hardeners, waited for the auto-target function to finish, and opened up with my HAMs on the ship that was firing on me. Only when my launchers were cycling did I bother to see what was firing on me, and I felt both gratified that my instincts were right, and at the same time a sense of "why the hell did I do that?" Because I discovered I had an Abbadon-class battleship and a Broadsword-class heavy interdictor on my tail. To my credit, when I saw the Abbadon for what it was, before I even pulled info on the Broadsword I had changed targets - while I didn't stand much of a chance trying to go toe-to-toe with either of them, I at least had a bit more of a chance trying to disable the Broadsword's jammer and thereby make an escape. (Yeah, I know, not really. But it was the best play available.)

So, the battle ended with predictable results. I managed to whittle the Broadsword's shields down and start in on her armor about the same time as the Abbadon got my shields down. Unfortunately, Caldari ships are extremely shield-reliant. My hull and structure melted away while I kept running and hoping a miracle would happen - I got out of range of the jammer, he got sloppy and fried it via overheating, or something similarly unlikely - and my Drake went poof.

I was fairly philosophical about it - it was a bit of a gamble doing this run by myself anyway - and at least the guys (Germans, I think) were good sports about it and took a moment to transmit quick "GF"s before blowing my pod out of space... and sending me back to Tash less one Drake with all the fixings, and the proud(?) owner of a new Ibis and a few tons of tritanium.

So... thanks to the Army drilling the habit of doing an after-action-review (or AAR), I can draw three lessons here. One: My fit, when actually running it for real, probably isn't half as fail as I thought it might be. If I can take an Abbadon's fire long enough to break through the shields of a Broadsword, well, maybe I have a chance of success when I do my actual planned fit and have some backup to help out. Two: I need to learn to trust my instincts a bit more. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference in the long run, but when I saw the two guys watching the gate when I hit it, maybe I should have headed for a different gate. Three: It may be simply a lack of experience, hindsight being 20/20, or both, but my first instinct in a situation like this has got to be to take the EW ship first. By and large, IMHO, if you've got ships acting as tacklers for the rest of the group, they're the weak link and need to be eliminated as fast as you can get rounds downrange.

So, yeah. It may have cost me a Drake and a pod, but I got a decent taste of what I'm going to be looking at when I move to null-sec. I won't say I'm ready - God knows I'm not! - but at least I'm making progress...

Mark Raynor, Interstellar Tourist?

I know I've said in the past that as soon as I get my skills trained up for it, I intend to move out to 0.0 space. And I did mean it. I've only got a few weeks left (thanks to deciding that knowing how to use probes would also be useful), and running level 1 missions is getting damn boring, since most of the higher-level agents out there don't want to talk to me, and/or I don't want to talk to, as I'm trying to preserve my empire standings for now.

So I was playing around in the map today, and noticed the system with the EVE Gate was clearly marked. I'd noticed that before, but I also noticed that I was a mere... 15 jumps away. Granted, most of that was through low-sec space, and I know that at times low-sec can be more dangerous than null-sec. But... soon enough I'll be combat-ready in my battlecruiser (which I'm whimsically christening the Nike, and not after the shoes; and +10 internet points if you can correctly identify where I got the name from), and I'm thinking about fitting her out and having her maiden voyage be heading to the EVE Gate, just to say I've been there.

I debated about putting together a fit for something smaller, faster, and perhaps stealthier, like a frigate or maybe a recon ship, but I didn't really feel like it'd be worth training up those skills just for a trip to play tourist, and, to be honest, I feel more secure - perhaps falsely, I admit - by having my Drake-class BC as my internet spaceship.

So... in the next couple of days, you may see some pics from me. We'll see.

(Also, Dragon Age: Origins, Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, and Assassin's Creed 2 have collectively sucked any residual productivity out of me for the forseeable future. Just FYI.)

Dominion Sov Costs Announced

CCP just posted a dev blog detailing the costs for maintaining sovereignty over a system. I'd make a post about it, but... hell. I've not even gotten to 0.0 yet (34 days and counting, according to EVE HQ) so any comments I could make would be not more than random, uninformed babble. (Granted, I do that on occasion anyway.) So, I'll let them that have experience with the old system, and possibly those with experience with the new system on SiSi, have their say over the next few days.

For the tl;dr crowd, here's the table they posted, but I'll pass along CCP's warning that neither names nor costs are final here.


Oh, also, Dragon Age: Origins is out. I've been playing since Tuesday. It be awesome.

Maybe I Just Don't Get It...

I'm a bit of an odd duck in the EVE blogging community. (Anyone who knows me in real life would be making snide commentary right now about how I'm an odd duck in life. But I digress.) I try to stay abreast of things in the greater EVE universe so I can (hopefully) provide a well-thought out, reasoned commentary. God knows if anyone actually reads this - according to FeedBurner, I have about 80 subscribers, though I suspect the vast majority are folks that download the OMPL for all the couple hundred EVE blogs out there. (Again, digressing. Sorry.)

Anyway, I kinda get what the Council for Stellar Management is - they're the direct voice of the players to CCP's developers. I think this is a good thing, and I could wish for more games to do this same thing; though of all the MMOs I play (EVE, City of Heroes, Champions Online, and Lord of the Rings Online), EVE is by far and away the most player-driven MMO. I don't think I'd be that far off to say it's probably one of if not the most player-driven MMO in the world.

But all that said, this is the second CSM election since I started getting back into EVE after a military deployment. The first one was just starting when I got back into the pod, and I didn't really pay it that much attention, and figured I'd be better off waiting to figure out what was going on until I was able to observe the process from the beginning.

So now here I am, and I've been reading posts and interviews and websites... and I just can't seem to muster the amount of caring that most other players seem to have for any of the candidates. To be perfectly honest, a lot of it may be that I've still yet to dip my tootsies into the waters of 0.0 and PVP in general - though if all goes according to plan, in a little less than 40 days that should be changing - so few of the campaign issues (for lack of a better term) that most CSM candidates have been talking about really don't affect me much, if at all. Right now, I piddle around in Empire space, doing missions and generally just mucking about until such time as I make my move to join the rest of my alliance in 0.0, so a lot of the time I read the issues, scratch my head, and wonder what the hell they're talking about.

So now, as I sit up at 0400 in the morning for some godforsaken reason, considering all of what I've read and thought... I start to wonder - should I care more than I do? Should I be more worried about this campaign? Or should I just let it slide - as I would imagine a majority of the more casual EVE playerbase does - and not pay any attention this time? And is this what the majority of Americans think come election time when they don't bother to even register, much less vote?

I dunno.

But I'm certian that this kind of thinking leads to more interesting thinking than talking about how a PVE mission I played the day before yesterday ended up with my buffer-tanked Drake-class BC being chased and shot at by no less than eight Gallente BBs, and after I got out of range of the Gallente stationary missile batteries, my shields hovered right around 85% long enough for me to shoot my magazines dry. Because tanking eight NPC BBs in a Drake probably isn't that impressive, when you get right down to it.

Now, if I can pull that off in PVP combat, expect to read about it five minutes after the gang breaks up!

CVA Incident Reaction, and My (Eventual) Move to 0.0

Yay, another post that combines two separate topics!

First, CVA's disbanding and their reinstatement by CCP. The official word from CCP on the forums, via CCP Wrangler was, well, I'll just let you read it yourself:

After receiving a petition from CVA regarding their alliance being disbanded we launched an investigation as per our policy. Our experience in similar situations has often been that accounts were not hacked but, rather, the alliances were disbanded due to failed payment or enemy infiltration. In this case, however, we discovered that the account of the alliance executor was hacked by ISK sellers.

CCP needs you to help us fight RMT by not buying ISK! It may seem like a minor thing to do, all things considered, but keep in mind that these people steal credit cards and hack accounts to get ISK to sell. By choosing to purchase their ISK you are creating a demand for their services and the illegal activities that support them.

Hell, who needs ISK sellers when you can sell PLEX, amirite? That's how I was able to afford to jump into battlecruisers. But regardless, we here at Inanity and Doom (and by "we" I mean "me") do wish CVA all the best; from what I've heard about them, they sound like a cool bunch of folks. Congrats to them for getting their space back.

Now, CCP, go add a cooldown to the "disband alliance" function, or one of the other proposed mechanics to make sure this can't happen again. Yeah, it won't help stop RMT - but that's what stuff like Unholy Rage is for. But that's a nice segue into my next point.

After the Goons pulled off their disbanding of BoB, had I been doing this "blog" thingamajig back then, I would have made a prediction, that might have been proved partially right by what I'm terming the "CVA Incident." Even if you have to bribe someone in an enemy alliance executor corp, stacking that against the costs of ship replacements, modules and rigs for those ships, the metric craptons of ammo you'd expend, clone replacement, and the blood, sweat, and tears of your alliance, it is very probable that the more cost-effective and efficient method to destroy your enemies, or to open a new war, would be to use that "disband alliance" function - giving you a space of, depending on when exactly you do it in relation to downtimes, relative timezones, etc., as much as a day to rush in and attack the individual corporations and bite off chunks of their space, just as the Goons did to BoB. Is it sneaky, underhanded, and just a tad evil? Yeah, but this is EVE.

Now, I rather expected to see something like that happen again. Granted, it wouldn't always happen - bribery is a hell of a lot harder when all you have is internet spaceships and internet money. But, either by bribery or infiltration, it might not be that hard a goal to go after, especially if you and your target aren't actively shooting each other at the time.

Granted, the CVA Incident isn't exactly like what happened with BoB - the one at fault was a real money trader, not a second Haargoth, and I rather expect that in the days to come, CVA will go through their inventories and discover, somewhere, a financial loss - CCP didn't roll back the servers, they just restored CVA through their GM powahs. Given the way CCP is approaching the situation, I would tend to anticipate CCP will compensate CVA for any discovered loss that they can demonstrate a link to this incident - either by giving them replacements for what was lost, or crediting them with the cash equivalent. Or however this ends up working.

But still, it may be worth it for alliance leaders to start thinking about background checks on prospective executor corp members and/or other officers. Just a thought.

---

Now, the second topic I have. If you've read my blog before, you might be aware that I've been tooling around in Empire space for a while while the rest of my corp and alliance has been blowing stuff up in null-sec. What I plan to do is hang around in Empire space and build up some more cash and skill points for the next 45 days or so, getting myself trained up for a particular ship build. It's based on a fitting that I saw on BattleClinic, which I adapted to what I would actually be able to use for myself. It'll do for now, anyway.

Note that I'm not saying where I am, what corp or alliance I'm in, where my alliance is, nor posting a ship fitting. Part of it might be paranoia, but I prefer to think of it as just being in the habit of practicing operational security and informational security - God knows anything that gets posted on the internet is there forever. Maybe it's just four years of service in the U.S. Army asserting itself - being that I was in intelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC were something I lived with on a daily basis. Hell, I even made posters.




But anyway, I just figured posting even that little bit of what I was doing in a public forum, even if nobody pokes me about it in the future, would help me cement my plans a bit more into my brain.

It's my blog, gorramit. I can do what I want.

EVE Blog Banter #13 - A question of impact.

Welcome to the thirteenth 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 here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us from Zargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!

(Warning! Post was written at 0320 local time! Brace for possible babbling and insanity!)

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I'll explain why.

My first MMO wasn't World of Warcraft, a fact that I suspect is rather dissimilar to most folks. My first MMO was City of Heroes, and on a friend's recommendation I joined the unofficial RP server, and the only times I haven't been playing the game were when my computer was broken, or I was deployed by the military. And one of the things I love best about City of Heroes is their mission arc system.

"But EVE has epic arcs!" That's not what I'm talking about. Every contact you are introduced to you has an arc of missions for you, that suck you into the universe of Paragon City and make you actually feel a little bit more like you really are a superhero, dealing with threats the regular cops can't handle. They're all a bit like a trade paperback of a comic book, now that I think about it. And it's a system I thoroughly enjoy, and one I'd love to see the CCP developers work a little more into. I don't just want more missions. I want arcs. I want to feel like my capsuleer is actually having an impact in the New Eden cluster instead of going out and killing more pirates, or carrying and fetching crap from station to station.

Yes, I know EVE is - by design - PVP-centric. I fully admit that, and I'll be honest, there are times when I've thought about starting a second character and getting them involved in EVE University, and learn from them a bit more about this PVP thing. (Simpler, I think, would be to just get someone in my corp to talk me through the jump clone process and join up with them in 0.0 space... I fly battleships, so learning by doing wouldn't be too expensive...) But to me, if I'm going to do PVE, then dagnabbit, I want story. I want immersion. I want to feel like I'm making a difference. That's what EVE's PVE experience is missing. Not a bigger variety of missions. Not more agents. Not even more epic arcs. I want to see - or at least read about in the post-mission briefing! - the consequences of my actions. The folks involved in wars out in 0.0 get to see that, on the EVE site, in E-ON, or on the forums, but for the pod pilot out just trying to fight off NPC pirates? All you get is coming back to a station, a list of repairs, pick up more ammo, and then get a bare "thanks" from your mission agent.

List of Participants:

1. CrazyKinux's Musing - Your Mission, should you decide to accept it...
2. Zen and the Art of Internet Spaceship Maintenance - First Blood
3. The Elitist - Guristas Invasion
4. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility - ...It's another episode of Design Star: EVE Style...
5. Level Cap -Epic Battles
6. Roc's Ramblings - The Cave of Time
7. Aether - Teach a man to fish...
8. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah - Mission: Tangled Webs
9. Adventures in Mission Running - I can haz spaceship?
10. Nuke Thoughts - EVE Blog Banter 13
11. Diary of a Pod Pilot - Distressing The Damsel
12. Guns Ablaze - Dynamic Missions
13. Achernar - Confidential Report
14. Escoce - EVE Trader - Missions with player adversaries
15. Hands Off, My Loot! - Blog Banter #13, no witty title
16. Inanity and Doom - A question of impact
17. Cle Demaari: Citizen in EVE - See the Universe
18. A Starry Eyed Pod-Pusher - Wormhole Extreme!
19. Mike Azariah - Missioneer, not mouseketeer