EVEntually

I played out Porter's account to the end. She is now expired and on a 30 day train to Minmatar Cruiser 5. Eventually, she will be ready to fly the Minmater Force Recon, the Rapier (above). It will take a fair bit to increase her gunnery to Tech 2 Projectiles, but she already had T2 small Projectiles so stepping up to mediums on the Rapier will not take long. She already has all the other supporting skills.

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That account expires and I will be on vacation away from computer gaming for 2 weeks. Eve has the nice feature of allowing even expired accounts to continue on their training until they complete.

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When I return from vacation I will most likely activate my Masada Akiva account and continue to work on his combat skills for missioning and general ISK generation until I can buy a carrier. I have recently discovered that my little back water low security system is less than 14 lightyears from Gultran (a TOG Empire haunt). That means I have easy to acquire resources in my system and an easy to reach friendly market some 25 hops away. That may create market opportunity. If I had a carrier. But like all things in EVE... EVEntually it will come.

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Game On!

EVEr Onward

I forgot to mention that my Eve corporation decided to split from the BRUCE Alliance. One of the primary things EVE has going for it is the entirely player driven politics. The shape of EVE is defined by the players. More than 50% of the galaxy is controlled solely by player corporations and alliances. These relationships shift frequently and often spill over in to your little corner of space. The BRUCE Alliance was huge. It quickly grew to over 1500 players. But just as quickly it faded. Although, I suspect there will still be good things to see from BRUCE. By the way, BRUCE stands for BRUtally Clever Empire.

In EVE you control star systems by building permanent structures and hold them. If you hold a system long enough, you become "sovereign" and can then build an Outpost Station. Stations can never be destroyed, but you can lose control of them. Stations generate vast wealth as they tax every one that uses them for repairs, market sales, refining and production. They are the power base in EVE. An alliance is then defined by what space it has established sovereignty in and how many Outposts it controls. You can see a map of territory (updated weekly) here...

http://sov.eve-dev.net/maps/influence.png

Each of these colored blobs is a 100% player controlled alliance with sovereignty of the systems contained with in. Each of the faint dots is a star system with up to a dozen planets, asteroid belts, moons, stations and other features. Eve is huge.

BRUCE established itself by appealling to the "good guys" in Eve. We all rallied behind the ideals and the leadership of the alliance. But then the guy decided sunshine was preferable to Eve super-stardom. When the leadership changed... the alliance disintegrated. There are still shards of it, but it probably will not be able to hold what it has taken for much longer.

My corp leadership decided to move on. But I hope BRUCE does well.

By the by... the pictures I post of Eve are all real screen shots. That Providence picture below is quite large if you click on it. You can spin 360 degrees horizontally and vertically around that ship and change camera views throughout. Eve is graphically very nice.

Game On!

ForEVEr

So I spent all my game time this weekend playing EVE. I let the subscription on my main combat pilot expire so I have been limited to only my industry focused alt, Porter.

This weekend reinforced what I dislike most about EVE though... it takes forever. This is even more painfully obvious in the comparison to the speedy Guild Wars. I do like Eve, but I aways feel like it is just this close to being fun.

I was feeling eve-y this weekend so I logged in Porter. I had her based out of the Zoohan star system on the edge of Amarrian Empire space. This is a "safe" zone with high value asteroids for mining. But I was mostly alone and profits/motivation were low. Most of the other players I know were based about 30 jumps away (roughly 30-50 minutes travel) from where I was operating. But since I was sick of being on my own... I figured I might as well move over to them. I caught up with a pair of buddies that are power mining for enough minerals to build a pair of freighters.

A Freighter in Eve is the pennacle of raw volume shipping. It is a billion ISK asset and a long term goal. It is kind of cool. I say "kind of" because they really don't have a lot of great functionality. They are really, really big and they move really, really slow. They have no armament or defenses (they fit no modules) and in a small corporation like ours, they see almost no use. But hell... why not? I have trained Porter to fly the Providence Amarr freighter which while of no combat value, is one of the most majestic ships in the game (above). These two yahoo's in my corp were building the Charon--which can actually haul a bit more, but isn't nearly as cool.

Anyways, I packed up all my useful gear and moved the 30 odd hops to mine with them. The zone they are in is quiet and sparsely populated. It isn't a particularly valuable area, has no strategic value and is a blend of low security and high security. In low security zones you can be shot by other players anytime. In high security you can only be shot if you're in a war or if the attacker is prepared to commit suicide to gank you--rare, but it happens. This is not the same as 0.0 space or no security. 0.0 space has really high value asteroids and random belt "rats" (NPC ships you kill for bounty and loot). But this zone is not in (or even on the way to) 0.0. This makes about all activity in the zone harder (cuz at any moment some dork could kill you) but not high value... But whatever... we are not a power corp, but we are tough enough to scare away small groups of unmotivated gankers. Plus our territory is pretty worthless.

Regardless it was fun to mine with friends and it brought back the memories of why I play this stupid game to begin with. The team effort is amazing. When you finally find a way to make something work and profit from it, it is a boost to fun. In Eve, where that boost may be a loooong time coming, its like a double boon.

After they logged out, I moved more of my stuff to their home system and began mining and some production work. Since that's all Porter can do, I'll play around with it for a while and see how it goes. My account runs out at the end of May. I'll be on vacation the first 2 weeks of June. It will be interesting to see if I come back to Eve at all. But I probably will...

See ya later... til then... Game On!

TOGgle On? Check!

So I found a large game community of "mature" gamers. Called TOG, The Older Gamers, it appears to have members around the globe and in to virtually every video game ever known to man... including those extinct for a generation... Hehe... I guess that makes me old too. Anyway, I've linked them under Gamey Link to the right and I'll give them a go here for a while. A couple of my online buddies have been in their group for a long time so they come well recommended.

I am still enjoying Guild Wars (not unexpected in only 3 days!) I have also discovered that after buying one boxed set, you can purchase the rest online through the log on interface. In NZD that adds up to $60 per title. But then the shelf price was $90 per title. So that is a savings to me! Still I'll hold off a bit on further purchases.

Game On!

Fee-less Adventurer

I've been looking more seriously at Guild Wars. It looks very WoW-like, but no monthly fees! My webivestigation has determined it is probably not quite as vast as WoW and may have less overall content. But hell... it's free. I have enjoyed WoW, but occasionally I do become morally offended by the notion that even after spending hundreds of dollars on the game, I can't play it for free yet.

I'm thinking of doing a common build of Elementalist and Mesmer--generally refered to as a "Nuker". BOOM BABY BOOM! (obscure Tick reference) ((Tick is an obscure comicbook reference))

Guild Wars is sold in 3 "chapters"--Prophesy, Factions and Nightfall. You can buy any of them and play online. Each chapter allows you access to more zones and content--plus skills, classes and other goodies. You can play in PvE and PvP in any chapter. PvP looks to be more arena-style were you can fashion a top level character immediately or use your PvE developed character. There is also an "expansion" called Eye of the North which I guess is like a mini-chapter.

Regardless... there is a fee-less world out there. My new quest is to find the land of the Free.

Game On!

Game-less

Still in a bit of a rough patch gamewise. I still have one active WoW account, but I can only rarely catch my friends back in the states. The timezones conspire to only allow me to find play time when it is like 2 AM their time.

I cancelled both EVE accounts. This saves me nearly $40 a month and I need it. Besides I wasn't playing nearly as much. My laptop's wireless access card (EVDO) tanked and that makes it hard to play both accounts which you need to do in order to make any sort of solo game progress. Again, my timezone shift and knocked me out of playing with the folks I knew. Plus EVE is a very slow game. It takes forever to accomplish even small progress.

Work has been just busy enough to de-rail any planning on Adventures of Doom. Although, I'm hitting the point where I'll just have to wing it.

Grand Theft Auto IV just launched here in NZ. I have no desire to buy a Playstation 3, but the game looks good. I'm sure someday they'll release a PC version (PC for Personal Computer, of course, since there can be no more un-PC game ever).

Warhammer Online has derailed to late Fall 2008 and that probably means "maybe before Christmas." So that's out. There are virtually no titles on my radar worth looking at.

I'm actually thinking of falling back to Texas Hold'em.

The game I have been playing the most often now is Tetris on my cell phone... that's how desparate it is folks.

~Game On!