The Farstrider Scout

I pulled a rather costly mistake in EVE recently; a combination of allowing myself to be distracted by the ongoing Alliance tournament, flying in low-sec with my freighter, not paying attention to the people in the system and gambling at their benevolence, picking the wrong place to jump to, and then attempting to log out as my ship was being blown to pieces.  Ultimate cost to me – 700 million ISK for the freighter, and another 100 million in implants for my clone.  Fortunately I was running on an empty hold, having just delivered some cargo (to a member of the corporation who’s corp/alliance mates blew up my ship, oddly enough) and had been on my way to a different station in the same system to pick up a load for somewhere else, so no loss there.

About an hour later I was back in the system, moving my cargo the slow way – in a cargo ship with a hold 1/29th the size of the late Kismet, and I was chatting with the same people who killed me.  I think I was being pretty good natured about the whole thing – I know when I made a mistake, and a stupid one at that.  But as far as stupidity goes, what followed tops even that…

One of the players – we’ll call him “Max”, because I don’t recall their names – puts out an offer:  Join our corp so we don’t kill you anymore.  I counter with a joking remark that now they’ve stooped to extortion.  He asks me how that is, and I point out that he’s effectively said “Join our corp, or we’ll kill you.”  He is still at a loss and replies that that wasn’t what he said at all.  Riiiiight.  I leave with a “I’ll consider it”, and let the matter drop.

The next day though, I get an in-game mail from their recruitment officer.  It’s obviously a canned message, but I’ll put it here because I really don’t think I can convey the stupidity inherant in the message…

Hey, would you be interested in joining a new corp? I only try to recruit people we kill. It usually gets us better recruits, because if they can overcome their loss, reason with their killers, realize their folly and grow a pair, they can become a very decent player when it comes to EVE

So, here’s what I can tell you about the worst alliance in EVE. General Tso’s is a large mass of idiotic assholes that take nothing seriously. They play the game, and they really don’t care what happens. Usually when they fight, they get owned, because not only are they noobs and can’t form any decent mass, but they always pick off more they can chew. General Tso’s are some of the biggest griefers around, but don’t fear them because they are nothing but the dirt on the ground. They like harassing people, and no one, not even members of their own family are free from the agony. When it comes down to it, however, General Tso’s are nothing but a band of interweb dorks with no real social life and try to compensate their small phallus’s by making other people rage in game.

Here’s the serious note. There is nothing serious… this is a game. If you can take getting your balls busted, like to joke about poo, sex and other naughty stuffs, then you should fit in. If you can hold your own, and you don’t get offended by topics such as religion, gore, sexual behaviour mainly composed of the homosexual nature, racism, politics and anything else close to being offensive, you’re already a member and don’t realize it yet. So get your loser ass into our corp, or get your loser ass corp in our alliance. Or war us. We’ll fight provided the tactics are right, until our little bums are red with rashes from getting pounded, and then we’ll run and hide until it all blows over. And then the game goes on…

Toss Jade Elaira a convo. He’s a rather interesting male/female hybrid. Or maybe you’ve already heard of him… Or maybe you know him, you just don’t know it. After all, Jade is sending you this because he’s had some contact, major or minor, with you before.

So basically, you’re a bunch of idiots and losers, and telling me this is going to make me want to join your corp…  Why?  How?  I don’t know, this one is beyond me.

The great land rush is on, and has been for several hours now.  I actually managed to arrange my sleep cycle so that I would be able to get up in time to stake a claim before most of the population of EVE was in on it.  Still, the population drove up drastically after 8 am EST, when the servers come back up from maintenance.  On my first pass through the Old Man Star system, enroute to pick up my planetary command centers, there was one person besides myself.  On the way back, however, there were 14 – and Old Man Star is lowsec.  My only mistake at first was bringing a ship with not enough cargo space to hold the command centers – knowing I was going through lowsec, I started out with a cruiser, but eventually ended up coming back with my blockade runner, which I think made much swifter time between jumps.

I’m quickly learning that the Planetary Interaction (PI) system will be a long term investment for those that want to stick with it.  I imagine that the prices for certain resources and supplies that used to be provided by NPCs will fall now that these things are provided by the players.  Given a few months though, there will be those that get bored with it and go back to their usual lifestyle, and the prices will rise again, though probably not nearly to what they were before.  In the meantime, it has become easy to exploit the laziness of others, since there were only about ten or twelve systems that the command centers were seeded in (at least in the Essence region – I can’t speak for elsewhere), and so it’s easy enough to buy a bunch up, take them to a system that they haven’t been seeded in, and re-sell them at a greater price.  There are some people charging double what they originally sold for – and they’re being bought.  I imagine that eventually these too will become player-created, though whether it is a planet-side construction, or made from a blueprint at a station, I can’t say.  Personally I find the planet-side creation of commodities to be a lot more enjoyable than trying to build something space-side.

Honestly, there’s one huge, fatal flaw in the current system.  As it stands right now, other players cannot destroy or interfere with your planetary infrastructure…  but that ability to destroy what others create is one of the great wonders that makes the EVE universe turn, and evolve!  Imagine, if you will, if all of the player owned stations (POS) could never be destroyed or taken over?  The universe would stagnate, people would lose interest, and game population would drop.

There is one other game that exists, that the PaleStardevelopers hate to have compared to EVE because they are so vastly different that there is very little comparison.  With the release of Tyrannis, that gap grew a little smaller.  This game is called DarkSpace, and it can, and will be said, that they did planetary interaction FIRST, and in my opinion, they did it RIGHT too.  In their static universe – metaverse, as they call it – planets may be built up as industrial, technological, or just pure “battlestars” where every available build spot that is not required for power or personnel, has some sort of weapons platform on it.  The opposing team has the option of bombing it into oblivion, and then capturing it, or simply landing enough troops on the surface to overwhelm the garrisoned forces and capture it with (most of) the infrastructure intact, or any varying level of the two.  If the planet is built up in the correct manner by an experienced player (“skill points” have no role in this – it is all up to player knowledge and skill), it takes a large and coordinated fleet to overwhelm planetary defenses and capture it.

I am not saying that CCP should copy Palestar exactly (in fact I’m wondering if they’ll take issue over simply the planetary interaction system being a copyright infringement of some sort to begin with), but change is definitely needed in that area.  How to implement such a change in a way that is fair to even the casual player who wishes to stick with PI however, is beyond me, and will likely take until the arrival of Dust 514 to come about.

For those that aren’t in the know, EVE Online released their latest expansion, Tyrannis, last week, along with their new social portal, the EVE Gate.  With this new expansion, the face of EVE undergoes a massive transformation as they take their next steps into bringing about their console MMOFPS (which I sincerely hope they release for PC as well), Dust 514.  Players will now be able to interact with the planets themselves, instead of just mining the numerous moons around the EVE universe, placing structures and gathering resources in what is supposed to be a step to phase out the remaining NPC driven portions of the economy and put it entirely in the players’ hands.  The full portion of this doesn’t go into effect until 6 days from now, and at the moment all people can do is train the neccessary skills required to make the most out of the expansion, and I made sure that I’ll have next Tuesday off so that I can try and get my grubby fingers into what is promising to be a massive land grab.  But at what cost does this come?

The first, most visible cost already, has been the planets themselves.  They’ve changed considerably.  One of  my “home” systems is Ommare, a second-to-dead end system in the Essence Region, held by the Gallente Federation, and this is where I first noticed the changes.  The first planet you see, or used to see, I should say, when coming into the system from Cat, the “opening” to our dead end road, is Ommare X.  Originally, it was a beautiful reddish brown desert, or “arid” planet, with a few sparse weather patterns swirling in the atmosphere.  A brief side note here – kudos to the art teams that did the planet surfaces, because with few exceptions, they’re beautiful.  Now, no longer an “arid” class, this planet, the outermost one in the solar system, has become an “ocean” class planet – pure water, sparse weather systems, and a hurricane/typhoon at each pole.  Science, I would think, would dictate that due to the distance from this solar system’s star, it should be an “ice” class planet.  Sadly, I do not have any screenshots showing the planet prior to it’s sudden change.

Oh, it’s on now!

2010.02.05 06:34:00

Victim: Dereth Renner
Corp: Geezer Gaming corp.
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Abaddon
System: Eglennaert
Security: 0.8
Damage Taken: 22219

Involved parties:

Name: takedoom (laid the final blow)
Security: 4.5
Corp: Goram Innovations
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Hyperion
Weapon: Electron Blaster Cannon II
Damage Done: 16249

Name: Snake Bliskan
Security: 3.9
Corp: Goram Innovations
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Ishkur
Weapon: Hobgoblin II
Damage Done: 5970

Destroyed items:

Adaptive Nano Plating II
Proton L, Qty: 65 (Cargo)
Heavy Capacitor Booster II
Large Capacitor Control Circuit I, Qty: 3
Multifrequency L, Qty: 5
Large Armor Repairer II
Reactor Control Unit II
Tachyon Modulated Energy Beam I, Qty: 2
Cap Booster 800, Qty: 5
Cap Recharger II, Qty: 2
Valkyrie I (Cargo)
Carbonized Lead L, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
1600mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I
Hammerhead I, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Nuclear L, Qty: 100 (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Damage Control II
Hobgoblin I (Cargo)
LiF Fueled I Booster Rockets
Multifrequency L, Qty: 3
Reactor Control Unit II
Tachyon Modulated Energy Beam I, Qty: 6
Cap Booster 800, Qty: 16 (Cargo)
Valkyrie I, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
1600mm Reinforced Crystalline Carbonide Plates I
Hammerhead I (Cargo)

Yes, you’re reading that title correctly. I had to go AFK while playing EVE the last night, and spent about an hour away from the keyboard. When I came back, my desk was in disarray – moreso than usual, at least – and the headphones were on the floor.
There on the monitor, however was some strange messages from my character in local chat. Ok, so that’s par for the course – she’s done stuff like that before, though usually it’s sending messages over Xfire.
But later, I went into the screenshots folder to look at a few pictures I had taken earlier, and lo and behold, there were five more pictures in there that I hadn’t taken!  She had even gone so far as to open up the map after taking a picture of the stargate I was at…