Wednesday 11 February 2009

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!

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