Jump Around

From the East out to the Western shore
Where many men and many more will fall
But no angel flies with me tonight
Till freedom reigns on all
And curse the name for which we slaved our days
Till every man shall his kingdom come
Flogging Molly - What's Left Of The Flag

I was spending a bit of time sending another Guristas pirate to his just rewards, when I heard about the roaming enemy fleet. A mixed fleet with a few Hydra Reloaded was moving through eastern Vale. The FC had already formed a fleet, and I joined up as soon as I'd docked my Nighthawk.

I switched to one of the 4 Drakes I had available and began to move towards TVN. Already well trained in the use of jump bridges, I covered the 10 jumps with one bridge and two gates. I was in TVN in no time, ready and formed up on a gate. Our targets had decided to start camping stations, and they were waiting in ZLZ-1Z. By the time we'd begun moving, the enemy camp had moved up to 5t-KMT station, and we moved in quickly. Disappointingly, the enemy fleet dispersed as soon as we entered local. Well, except for this genius.

So we caught the direction they were headed, and began to move ourselves. The enemy jumped into B-E3KQ and set themselves up off the gate. They had plenty of time to get to whatever range they needed. We were a bit worried about that, but the FC decided to risk it, and we jumped into them.

I had no idea if I was going to live or die, but the FC started to call targets. I noticed a Zealot firing at me, but that was it, and it seemed like the enemy wasn't immediately focusing it's fire, but that soon changed. Our first target was an enemy Tempest, and I took part in it's swift destruction, while our secondary turned tail and ran, but slowly we whittled down their fleet, and 15 ships later, the enemy gave up and warped out.

At this point they were broken, but still dangerous. While the enemy retreated through Tribute, we hatched a plan to catch them again. We took a jump bridge backwards near TVN, and moved up towards Tribute, coming at them in the direction they were plunging headfirst.

Our fun was only slightly ruined once we realized a blue fleet was already camping them in from WH-JCA. We decided to take yet another jump bridge to circle around them and get to IMK-K1.

Essentially they were trapped in W6VP-Y, with no hope but to wait us out. Our probers started to get us warp ins on them, but they dodged us pretty effectively. So we went back to IMK and waited some more.

Then yet ANOTHER blue fleet came down on the gate. After they threw up their own bubble, our FC told us to jump in system again. The probers had a good warp in this time, and they enemy tried to fight a bit. Again things went poorly, and they disengaged a bit more quickly this time.

As far as they knew, our presence meant that the IMK gate was unguarded, and they tried to punch their way through. The blue fleet there caught them, and we managed to get on a few more killmails, as the enemy fleet was effectively obliterated.

After that I went back to carebearing, picking up a Dread Guristas X-Large Shield Booster.

A good day.

Eve News Now: Episode 4

New Mic, New Video Style, New Places! Check it out.

Download here, or watch it here:

Keepin' It Fresh

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head?
U2 - One

I very recently acquired to capacity to pay for two accounts at the same time, and with my upgraded video card... I can also use them at the same time on this computer. That's a positive if I ever saw one.

There was this re-activation offer available to one of my old alts(an Orca pilot I used to pay isk to have around). 5 free days, and then 19.99 for two months. I signed her up and went about using her learning skillpoints to put her closer to a Hulk(before, basically all she could fly was the Orca).

That is right, you heard me.

My passion for PvP has not wavered with my time in Majesta, but neither has my passion for trying new things. The last time I mined, I was a few months into the game and I used an Osprey.

Hallan could actually sit in a hulk pretty quickly right now, but I've got other plans for him. Since I have HACs V and Recons V already trained, I could really use something besides Caldari cruiser to 5. I've settled on Minmatar, and after I do that, I'll go ahead and take Minmatar BS to 4 and train for tech 2 large arties. It's been a while since I've really went into a new ship class, so this should be fun.

I do just have a couple of skills to shore up first, of course. But after that, it's time for a change of style.

Speaking of changes, this blog is now an official eve fansite and stuff. You should also expect to see my next episode of Eve News Now on Eve News 24. I also have a whole new mic, and assuming this cold gets the heck out my system by Christmas day, it should be a nice podcast.

Eve News Now: Episode 3

I breathed on my mic for this one. Promise to god I'm getting a new mic(one that's not connected to my face is a good start), maybe not in time for next week, but for sure the one after. Kinda hoping the hints I'm dropping to my family gets it to me as a Christmas present, but who knows.

Check it out!

I, for one, welcome our new boring overlords.

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,
Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm mighty king,
Do you know what I know?
A child, a child,
Shivers in the cold,
Let us bring him silver and gold,
Let us bring him silver and gold.
Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker - Do You Hear What I Hear?

By the end of January, Incursion will be fully released and we'll begin dealing with the effects of the changes.

The Sansha invasion will likely be happening alongside what may be the biggest war in Eve history. Every major 0.0 alliance in EVE save the Drone Russians and the NC are currently engaged to some extent in the southern war. Will the released content get in the way of the player created content that CCP so regularly touts? Time will tell. I think this release moves us much further away from the game I started playing.

If the Incursions are a permanent fixture in the game, I think I may like the game a bit less. This is supposed to be a sandbox game, where you can do anything. Not a game where you either participate in 5/10/25 man raids or you can't play. And sure, we can ignore the incursions, but they'll be having negative effects on the system, and spreading if not dealt with. So far it looks like very difficult content with very little reward outside of storyline(and more cynically, the reward of not having to do that content again for a while).

I'm cool with that for a while, but after a certain amount of time it becomes WoW in space. Except for less really cool equipment for finishing the content.

CCP should never have focused a whole expansion on PvE content. PvE content to this degree makes you wonder why you'll pay 15 dollars a month to enjoy the same kind of stuff you could enjoy in another game that's free.

It's not all bad though. I'm able to see the CSM's influence behind a few "minor" changes like the Rockets, or the Faction Icons, or T2 ammo. CCP's getting behind the idea of fixing the low hanging fruit, which is a positive, since there are a lot of problems in Eve that can be solved with minimal time investment.

As always, and with anything, time will tell.

I love storyline stuff. I also have an affinity for carebearing that most other PvPers would find blasphemous... yet this expansion is my least favorite by far.

That cannot be good.

Eve News Now: Episode 2

Ok then, here's installment two. I tried my hand at the noise removal, I normalized everything first, then lowered the volume on a noise sample, then removed that twice from the final product. Seems to almost remove the noise without completely making me sound like a robot... so I'll stick with it. Also worked on getting the music to voice volumes about right. Oh, and I changed the format a good bit. Focusing on regions or alliances seemed like a bad idea. Now I just go through the week from start to finish.

Let me know what you think.

Download it here.

Learning Skills

With the upcoming removal of learning skills, I'm curious: What are the rest of EvE going to spend the extra points on?

I've got plans to get anchoring five, then put whatever is left in starbase defense management.

What about the rest of you?

Eve News Now: Episode 1

I've been meaning to do this for a long time now, only the tools to really make it easy have only just came out. Simply, it's a 2-4 minute podcast of me rattling off the major news items in Eve. You wanna get caught up really quickly? This is the place. I'm going to get better at editing, I promise, and if someone has an idea on how to get rid of that buzz, I'm all ears. The noise removal on audacity just doesn't do the job(without making me sound wierd, that is).

I'll be hosting it as a youtube channel as well, and if someone else can think of a place to put it, go right ahead. Download it at eve files.

I'll try to do one of these a week, since it's not too terribly time intensive.

My Immersion, It is Broken.

There're all sorts of things going on these days. What was left of the Provi NIP has disintegrated(and as one of the guys that participated in it's formation, let me tell you: not a moment too soon).

The first part of incursion has released, with some nice changes. These were my favorites:

Rockets.
Faction, Deadspace, and Officer Items have a special icon now.
The MWD and AB have different icons.
T2 Close Range Ammo no longer blows.
You can rename a ship without needing them to be active.

But since this is a good day for CCP, I've decided to use it to complain about things, specifically immersion breaking moments in EvE. This will get a bit sciency. Fair warning.

Lets get the ball rolling.

First of all...
Stars aren't pink, and they aren't green. There, I said it. Stars come in 7 different flavors, from hottest to coldest: Blue, White-Blue, White, White again, Yellow-White, Orange, and Red.

88% of stars fall in the Orange or Red category. 6 percent fall into the Yellow-White category, with the remaining 6% reserved for varying Blue and Whites(almost all whites stars, by the way). The dominant color spectrum is one thing... our sun for example has a spike in it's yellow, even if the human eye(without atmospheric scattering of blue) interprets it as white.

Same thing for any star with a spike in the green, it's light may tend to be more green, but the human eye sees it as white as well. Yet I fly through systems all the damn time with green stars. That isn't to say that a star can't form with a heavy amount of some element that makes it green(oxygen for example), but those stars would be incredibly rare, once in a lifetime sights, not commonplace.


Second of all...

Why do our ships decelerate once the engine gets turned off? Unless you're moving in a medium of some kind, that shouldn't happen. You should have to flip around and burn the engines in the other direction to slow down. Instead it's as simple as turning the engines off and waiting to coast to a stop.

Now, if someone threw a chronicle at me that said the engines in EVE are more advanced than asimple propulsion system(They look suspiciously like ion thrusters), and that they work by changing the laws of physics to make you move, we're golden(sure it's pseudo science, but it's Sci-Fi). There isn't one though, and the complete ignoring of physics makes me cry.

Third of all...

We're back to the stars again, according to this article... every system that has a jump gate should be binary, and it should have the gate(s) placed between the two stars. That is not the case. No systems with jump gates have more than one star and the few that do have no gates at all. The pseudo science was questionable to begin with, but they don't even follow it. This is on top of the fact that a huge portion of star systems are binary to start with, but none of them are inhabited. I could buy that none of them have habitable planets(that's reasonable, given the complexities of the orbits), but not that none of them are worth hooking up to for mining. Or perhaps they could use inhospitable planets high in resources to build bubbled(or underground) colonies on. There is plenty of precedent for that in the normal systems.

Fourth of all...

What eve planet type is Mercury? The rest roughly fill their roles(Venus... maybe a storm planet). Mercury isn't a Barren planet, because every barren planet in eve has bacterial life. There needs to be an additional planet type to describe rocky planets like Mercury, and there isn't one. And lets not forget the ice planet orbiting close to a star while the desert planet orbits far out.

A little bit of math and planetary systems would make a lot of sense. That would of course require actual stellar classifications. The information is THERE though, and the math could be done to bring all the systems into some semblance of realism. This is especially easy since every system has but a single star. It's not that hard to just once calculate a size, mass, magnetic field, and age for each body in a system. Rough approximations will do the job. The problem of course is that it would require quite a lot of work, but give very little as a reward.

Which is why I don't really care. Yeah after all that, I'm stating that I don't care. This is a game, and it's important to treat it as such. Sure it's not realistic, but obsession with reality is boring.

Peace.