Sunday 16 September 2012

Day 90 : Stories

I do the jump gate tour to pick up all the bits and bobs I left scattered across Sinq Laison during a previous evening of hammering out all the level 2 COSMOS missions. They are worth it if you need an evening of not thinking too much. It’s a bit of a shame that I’ve transferred my Warcraft attitude of grabbing the mission, reading only what I need to do and hardly ever why. I need to stop doing this since the stories in the missions aren’t as bad as I’ve heard some people say. Not always of course, but I feel like I’m missing out a bit, especially since I can’t do these missions again. I’d like to engage with the EVE PVE storyline a little more. Sometimes it feels a little thin on the ground compared to a fully PVE game, which of course EVE isn’t so there is a good reason for that. You can’t have everything, it’s primarily a PVP sandbox. I can’t go throwing my toys out of that sandbox just because I want an evening of being pandered to. If I want to be told stories I can go read a book or watch a film. Having said that New Edens ongoing story does enhance the atmosphere in the game. I do enjoy the unique natures of the four player empires, I have played the game while engaging with the story surrounding these PVE entities.

People are already out there merging the sandbox and PVE. Some are doing it by writing EVE based fiction (http://splatus.wordpress.com/fiction/ and http://sandciderandspaceships.blogspot.co.uk/ to name two) , others coming up with cool ideas (http://eveoganda.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-unexplained-journey.html for example). I’m wondering if there is anything I could come up with. I’m not confident enough to write fiction, I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of either EVE or the history of EVE to know what player made story events might be possible. I’m going to have a think. I’ve my own story of moving through EVE but I just did a grind for rep’ so something has to change in case I burn out.

Yesterday I saw this on the forums.

http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73381

It seems to have since vanished but there are summaries and discussions elsewhere on the forums

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=270

Some quick thoughts.

The new ORE mining frigate I would have bought anyway to try out. I’ll really help get noobs like me on their feet initially if the price is reasonable. The dev blog mentions “ninja mining” though. I hadn’t thought about that. Ninja mining sounds like a good laugh. I can see me wasting a few of these frigates while attempting to get through gate camps into nullsec space in an attempt to add the high end ores to my samples set.  

The new Gallente destroyer looks like it will be drone based. I already like fighting with drones, fortunate considering I’m Gallente, but a destroyer based on them sounds like a lot of fun.

It looks as if the Exequror is being changed to be a pure logistics ship. This one disappoints me. I’ve got one that I regard as my cheap blockade runner, since I’ve no time to get into the epic skill queue stretch that is involved in getting an actual blockade runner. This ship has been my equivalent of a Firefly class hauler, and is shamelessly called Serenity. This change makes me glum. I can’t see Mal Reynolds turning over a profit as a space healer.

The Thorax sounds as if it is being buffed up a little. I need to be ready as I really want to fly one of these in combat and at the moment I’m hampered by fittings issues due to poor skills in anything larger than frigates. By the time I get to fly one I’ll already have skills to fly a Brutix.

The Vexor is unsurprisingly classed as good already. I’ve a lot of fondness for this hull.  I’ve used it for mining, salvaging and as a backup combat drone boat with some sniping ability. It’s a good all rounder for a new cruiser pilot to buy.

I do some reading around the EVE blogosphere as usual. I’m trying to keep up with a lot of different blogs and it is already hard enough dealing with my own backlog. I make this worse by discovering a few more. I really need to find some way to limit the amount I’m trying to read or it’ll become a full time job.

The first is http://lucaspadecaineve.blogspot.co.uk He is attempting to duplicate an experiment originally done by http://flight-of-dragons.blogspot.co.uk/  It sounds like a cool way to approach learning PVP and now I’m going to have to read both. Lucas Padecain is also flying with an EVE pal of mine, Captain John Crichton, who I met in the early days. Once I get my skills up to spec I might have to suggest a joint venture.

The third blog is http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com
I arrived here after a post on twitter and read an amusing summary of the current arguments about voting in CSM members (http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/hot-csm-topic-voting-for-the-csm/) but find another post where RL time constraints, and perhaps not a little boredom, has led a non-noob pilot back to mining (http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/writers-block-industry-and-mining). As a “bit” of a miner myself ( a shoddy one who doesn’t even have Mining V ) I’m intrigued and after posting  find out that the author reads this blog! Quite how I am going to cope with the epic amount of content on http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com I don’t know. It reminds me that one of the things I wanted to do with this blog was go back and try and convert it into an ebook format then I could read it back while on the underground. I can't be that hard to convert a blog post to ebook format, it's just zipped up XML. It might be interesting to try it, mind you EVE has already eaten up any coding time I had.

So nearly three months in, still finding stuff out, still learning. There is more about EVE out there than I can possibly absorb in anything under a year and the finish line keeps on moving.

EVE Track of the Day

Stories From The Bar - The Infadels

4 comments:

  1. Ahhh.. damn you Euros and your ninja mining! It really is only people who can be on right after downtime who can experience that particular flavour of game play. The Grav sites all regenerate over downtime, and in 0.0 there are very specific goals and targets you have to meet in order to keep the industry index up on a system. The industry index can be view on your game map and is displayed for ALL systems. That means you want to find those few and foolish who actually gets their industry up to level 5. Then, you will get in there, scan down their grav sites and mine the hell out of it until only the spud and the veld remains (The spud is a HUGE rock in the middle of the field.) Then you GTFO with your goodies.

    Probably the most fun you can have while mining!

    ReplyDelete
  2. you really can't link blogs without checking out www.minerbumping.com. James 315, the patron saint of high-sec miners, is downright hilarious. The blog is a hilarious and funny read.

    ReplyDelete
  3. we definitely have to do a joint venture sometime! lookin forward to it!

    ReplyDelete
  4. My Exequrors are all called Serenity TOO!!

    No guns, just speed and salvage gear with some cargohold rigs for 'hidden places'.

    *sigh*. Interestingly, the new version gains 3 low slots and may actually make a better 'blockade runner'. Too bad the cargo capacity is going to drop.

    ReplyDelete