Milestone

I haven't posted very much lately, mostly because I've had a week off work and I've been playing EVE pretty much non-stop.

The picture should help to illustrate.

Number OCD

I can be a little OCD about numbers - volume on the TV has to be an even number or multiple of 5. 27 is a no-no, 26 is better, 25 (assuming I can still hear it) is best.

so the patch notes cause me some trouble:

2499 new solar systems are now accessible through the emergence of mysterious wormholes throughout New Eden. These celestial gateways open doors to lucrative new opportunities for the bold and wary traveler.

2499?! Why 2499? What happened to the 2500th system, is there a secret Dev party there that we're just not invited to? I NEDE TO KNOEW!1!one1"!

Testing, testing...

My play hours over the last week and a half have been a bit unusual, and as such, I haven't quite found the time to post anything.

Monday and Tuesday last week brought snow to my part of the world and with schools being the first to close (I'm a teacher), I was given the gift of 2 solid days of EVE Online. I spent most of that time mining in null-sec whilst chaining a spawn of juicy battleships.

In related news, I broke the 700million isk mark at the week end!

I also decided to have a look around the test server. It was all really quite straightforward, copied the EVE installation directory into a new directory, applied the test patch and away I go. Then came the waiting.

It seems my character was last mirrored about 2 months ago, so I was short about 1million skillpoints and a few corporation roles. I wanted to play around with putting up a POS you see.

So first I had to renounce the roles I did have with the corp, then wait 24 hours.
Then I discovered that you can only launch a POS on behalf of a corporation, not yourself, so I had to fly into empire space, set up a 1-man corporation and then fly back to where I'd already bought all the modules!

Eventually though, I spent an interesting few hours anchoring and onlining various structures. Bizarrely I actually enjoyed doing it, made me think seriously about setting up my own POS somewhere - until I realised that the fact that test-server is not only mostly empty, and the no non-consensual PvP rules in effect made it all seem much easier than it would likely be in the 'real' world.

I started downloading the Apocrypha patch last night but I have a fairly narrow pipe so it's going to take a while before I get to play around with all the new exploration stuff (assuming they re-mirrored my character and I actually have any of the skills! in which case my POS will no longer belong to me! It's very complicated). Kirith Kodachi has written an introductory post about the new probing stuff though.

Also, I wanted to mention the recent dev blog post about the POS exploit. Genuinely interesting stuff and I just loved this part:

The opening action on our part regarding the exploit included the total destruction of all the POS complexes involved. This entailed flying to each one and basically nuking everything in sight - a fireworks show of epic proportions but with no witnesses except the GMs in the demolition team.

I mean, surely they could have just opened up a link to the database and just deleted all the various entries associated with the exploited POSs, but instead a strike force of GMs was assembled and sent off to destroy them the old fashioned way. How cool is that?!

GMs must have a fairly rough time of it, so this must have been a fantastic little party to be part of!

This week in skill training

Drones V
Astrometrics III, IV (ongoing)
Target Painting I
Armor Rigging I
Energy Pulse Weapons I

Skill Queue - Yay!

So, I've been playing EVE on and off for about 5 years; setting alarms, swapping skills here and there when all of a sudden: The Devs announce a skill queue system!

This is very exciting news.

I haven't bothered to read the forum replies, MMPORG forums make me sad, but I'm guessing their chosen method of implementation is going to come under some fire but I think it's really thoughtful. Allow me to discuss.

The Devs were talking about skill queues a while back in one of the CSM meetings and they said that they didn't like the idea of people setting huge queues and not logging on for a year. I thought this was a bit odd - surely they only care that people are coughing up the monthly fees. Reading the post above however leads me to believe that the EVE Online Development team really do love and care about the game - they actually want people to play the game.

That gives us the 24-hour skill queue. Put up to 50 skills in the queue and as long as they all begin training within 24 hours, all is good. That means all those stupid mid-range skills you can usually only get to at the weekend can be queued up and run through in a day. I also noticed in the UI mockup that you can queue the next level of a skill, which is probably the thing that I am most excited about.

Now, obviously there are going to be some limitations in this system - what if I go on holiday? But the important thing to remember is that it is the start of a system that once in place can be tweaked later - if CCP see that suddenly people are playing so much more because now they can actually use all that cool stuff they bought, maybe they'll make it even better later on.

Marvellous!

Serious Playtime

We were lucky enough here in the UK to get a whole bucketload of snow which closed schools and stopped trains and all that stuff. Being a teacher, this is most definitely Good News. I got 2 extra days of solid EVE. So what did I do?

When it's cold and snowy and you were up at 6am posting closure notices on the school website, it needs to be a pretty low-impact task. I chose a mining & rat combo.

I found myself a nice belt in my 0.0 home system with juicy 'roids and a dual-battleship spawn, parked the Mordant Entropy and made with the pew pew whilst Orobas parked the Endless Light (hulk) and munched through asteroid after asteroid.

I did this for about 20 hours in total, bounties racked up, minerals piled up and I now have a new Raven cooking in the local outpost.

I was also able to start fitting out the as-yet-unnamed Typhoon that Malphas will be training up over the coming month or so. He can already fly it, but he can't really fly it.

All in a very productive pair of snow days! Wallet is well into Orca affordability territory now but I really can't decide if I'll get enough use out of one...

This week in skill training

Hull Upgrades IV
Minmatar Industrial IV
Fuel Conservation II
Signal Acquisition I & II
Idetic Memory III
Astrometrics II