Coupla Quickies

Everyone here is safer for my efforts with the US Army Reserves.  That’s right I watched grown men pee for 3 hours.

Trying to come up with good questions to ask when joining an alliance… Good questions to hear from them (with the answers)

I have a brief window to play more EvE, then two weeks of Army stuff, then another couple week sprint, then a MONTH of garbage.  I will try to keep up the posting and even do some

WordPress needs to update it’s Android app.  Black background with black text.  Not easy to blog from work.

CCP Needs to set up a mobile site for those of us stuck with crappy DoD supervised internet.

**NINJA EDIT**

Read this https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=42987

Brought to you by the keen eyes at gamerchick

See you in space.

I'm using it every time I can

EvE, WoW, SW:TOR and MMO meta changes.

So what with the Holidays starting and all I haven’t had much time for EvE.  Added to that my computer has been VERY wonky and I’ve had more time for thinking and looking than I have for actually getting in game.  Stupid RL.

So my friend Hex from Don’t Stand in the Fire brought something to my attention:  This.  It represents a complete dumbing down of the game to the point where I cannot see how the high end players are going to like this.  The cookie-cutter will get even simpler and the min-maxing will be so obvious that even the simplest players will all have the same build as the geniuses, and the people that want to try different things will be handicapping themselves and it will be obvious that they are doing so.

EvE is too complex.  Ripard Teg is trying to figure out the Meta levels of T1 mods.  I think that those naming conventions are great as they are a HUGE drive to training T2 and who cares if T1 Meta 4 is actually better I can’t figure out which one it is.  EvE is taking steps to make things a little more straightforward without losing difficulty.  WoW is dumbing things down.  A lot.  Part of the reason is they have to dumb down isn’t the talent tree.  It’s the “Spell book”  Power Proliferation is a huge problem.  I’m not going to go into it too deep here, but they are responding to the fact that people have too many choices not by reducing the confusion over the choices, but by making them for people.  It would be like EvE saying “Well people are having trouble understanding meta mods, so we went ahead and did away with all the  extra meta mods, Faction, Deadspace mods and officer mods, so now there’s 1 T1, 1 T2, 1 Faction, 1 Deadspace, and 1 Officer choice”

That isn’t what people want.  Yes EvE needs to get simpler but they can simply name things differently.  WoW can handle it similarly by getting rid of powers it doesn’t want people to use rather than making their talent system Hello Kitty Online material.

SW:TOR has been a lot of fun.  Of course I have time to write this blog because it’s over a 1 hour delay to get into my main’s server, but it is what it is.  SW:TOR has me thinking a lot about the point of games.  The point of EvE is PvP.  Every action and choice you make affects the game for other players.  It helps some and it hurts some.  Trust me.  WoW is endgame raiding based.  As you can hear on Zero Punctuation you want bigger numbers to get rid of the enemy numbers so you can get more numbers.  You get the idea.  The only real PvP happens on the markets, and from what I hear it actually gets rather cutthroat.

Yes I know there’s arenas and crap.  You think I care about PvP where, when you die, you respawn with exactly the same gear and get a reward at the end of the match even if you spent it all sucking and bouncing off trees?  Screw that.

SW:TOR is story based.  Yes there’s WoW-esque PvP, and there’s even some endgame content that I expect to be min maxed to a joyless pasionless waste of time long before I bother to hit max level.  There’s a story too for people who are too lazy to pick it up.  In fact there’s 8.  One for each base class.  Let me say that again.  Bioware has 8 stories each of which will take you dozens of hours to play through.  In one game.  Try getting that much play time from a game.  Add in the MMO staples of “PvP” and raids and dungeons and you might find it to be quite a deal.  I know it’s already cut into my EvE time a bit.

I'm using it every time I can

Not gonna be around this weekend

SW:TOR Beta test calls.  Enjoy EvE.  I’ll be back monday.

Read this:  http://madhaberdashers.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/assumption-of-risk/

A Brief History of Corelin 3: Sandboxes don’t mix

I came back from the swamps of scenic Ft. Polk to find my friends had mostly given up.  A few of the closest were still plugging away, and the war was over thankfully.  Lots of drama was emerging, I’ll give a brief summary here, but really it’s not my story.

A guy named R3dskull had been very welcoming when some of our guys started playing in lowsec around Faswiba.  I’d had a few conversations with him, and others were equally friendly or more so.  he seemed like a guy giving good advice.  Come to find out he’d gone into a paranoid rage and decided to have us wardecced and griefed out of the game because we were spying on him and trying to drive him out of his home.  I’ll leave it to Star to tell the full story as, while I have heard enough to earn him my undying enmity I want to make sure the facts are presented more correctly than I can present them.

Not the last time we’d run into this kind of character.

End result:  I’m drifting around, chatting with the friends I have, and I try out providence.  I finally had the skills to actually do something out there so I took the trip out.  My perception of CVA was this incredibly powerful unstoppable force that happened to have chosen to use its powers for good instead of evil, rather than them being a bunch of prats who occupied nearly worthless space and could mostly fend off the few people interested enough to try to blob their way through their towers.

I mostly drifted around, trying new (pve) things, running L4s, sometimes even on my own, sometimes with friends who drifted in and out trying to recapture the magic majesty we had found when first we played, and preparing for my second trip to Iraq.  I arranged for a friend to take care of my skill training as I did not expect to have much internet access and even less time.

Next Part:  What’s all this PvP about Anyway?

What about Major Kong?

Wow it’s been busy.

So real life has been interfering with EvE, hence me having no posts and not doing anything interesting in EvE for a couple weeks.  We had one abortive battle in Ertoo where we managed to not notice most of our logistics chain wasn’t with us and our DPS couldn’t overcome their reps so we got THOROUGHLY welped

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=10219671

Ouch.  We had a plan.  It wasn’t what we went in with, and it showed.  Mayhem. had a plan, they followed through, brought a better fleet and clearly had much less confusion than we did.  We managed to THOROUGHLY cover ourselves in shame in that fight, and there were a lot of spectators for the fight.  /le sigh

Ok Here's the Plan... wait... CURSE YOUR SUDDEN YET INEVITABLE BETRAYAL!

Two days later the Army Reserves tells me I haven’t done my AT for the year, (I know, I’ve been asking about it) and tells me I need to report SOON(TM) so i say no problem I’ll be there tomorrow.  College students don’t have awful schedules during the summer.

Of course once this is done I head to Florida for a week, because fuckit I wanna go see friends.  So I’m keeping a low profile, trying to help my guys have fun and logging on when I can.  I forgot how tired you get after even a boring day on duty in the army.

Anyway don’t expect any phenominal posts unless something excellent comes up before I get back from my work/vaca.