Friday, February 13, 2009

OK, I Tried EVE Some More

This post is officially 5 beers and a bit of Sake deep, but I felt I owed it to the community(!) to come clean after playing a bit more EVE. If I just go to sleep, I won't bother posting this later and it needs to be said (dammit!). I tried EVE agin tonight, and actually became more and more frustrated with it, until I saw in chat that you get a BETTER SHIP (zomg!) and better quest givers after having completed the tutorial. I did the tutorial beofre, a long time ago, but apparently forgot this little nugget of love.

So I made another toon. Ixobelle is dead, but "Ixo Belle" lives on! Doing the tutorial was actually really helpful (imagine that). Remember last post where I said it would be sweet to have a little co-pilot instead of being dumped in space alone? Yeah, that's the tutorial. I'm a noob for having not given it the full treatment the 1st time around, so sue me.

Turns out that basic things like 'warping to quest location X two jumps away' (which gave me such a hard time before) can be achived by just right clicking anywhere in empty space, and scrolling down the drop menu to where you choose the mission you're on, and do a 'go there now!' kinda thing. You still have to activate autopilot, but it all makes MUCH MORE SENSE after the tutorial.

Yes, the robo-chick voiceover is still pretty annoying. 'You need to mine some feldspar to continue. Go mine some feldspar. There's a feldspar asteroid right over there, dipshit, not sure what you're waiitng for, but I'm a robo-chick, and I have all of eternity to wait. No it's cool. Take your time, fleshheap.' etc etc.

Anyway, yeah. maybe more hangover posts to come in the morning, but there's also this 'foreigner tax awareness' seminar I need to get to, so ... maybe the followup will have to wait.

But it'll probably be coming EVE-NTUALLY (lol c wat i did ther?), which is more than I would have said about five hours ago. ;)

11 comments:

Cap'n John said...

You get a better ship after completing the Tutorial? Crap. I did that and somehow missed out on getting my ship.

I need to create another Trial account and have another bash at it, not that my life can support two MMO Subs at the moment, but then that's what Free Trials are for ;)

It did seem awfully complicated, and even though I had screen res set at something like 1280x1024, with all the HUDs I still didn't seem to have enough room on my screen to actually see what was going on in space.

But maybe that's what flying a real starship will be like. You won't look out a giant window into space (because you'd get a horrible case of spatial disorientation), instead you'll have a bunch of screens displaying all the information you need to get the job done.

I went into EVE thinking it would be an Elite-type Sim, so was disappointed. Perhaps I'll like it a little better second time around, knowing more what to expect.

If possible, have fun in that "foreign tax awareness" seminar. Hey, on that note. If U.S. seminars provide coffee and donuts, do Japanese seminars provide Green Tea and Mochi ;)

Rich said...

sadly, yes, i'm sure there will be tea and ... something ;)

i'm still whacking away at EVE, but have yet to uncover this alleged ship... apparently (now they tell me!), completing the tutorial gives you access to a better quest giver, which leads to another ship. I'm still in my reaper, but have a much better grasp on things.

I'm suffering through it, though, at this point, and am not really seeing the light at the end pof the tunnel. perhaps it gets better, but i'm thinking tomorrow i'll be spending my gaming hours between Street Fighter 4 on the PS3 (omg post incoming) and WoW on the PC.

EVE is just too big a can of worms to concern myself with at this point.

Anonymous said...

You get the ship as quest rewards. You have to actually assemble them when you get them. You get a couple different ships. Back when I did it it gave me the mid level frig half way through (a condor for caldari) and then at the end it gave me a Merlin. So if you read the rewards of your quest it will let you know when you get the ships

Anonymous said...

I played the tutorial and thought it was pretty neat. But I decided after spending a while spinning around other ships in combat i decided it felt a bit too disconnected and it was more like watching tv than playing a game.

A friend said later that the tutorial is awesome fun, but once you venture out your likely to get toasted by assholes in battle cruisers and so on.

Khatib said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Khatib said...

Heh... I'm a dick.

I sent you that BoB vs Goons story the other week, and then got wrapped up in work and forgot to drop back into the blog and offer up extra info on stuff in the comments.


I agree with you quite a bit on EVE though. I pretty much love EVERYTHING about the game -- except the combat. Flying an Excel spreadsheet is a pretty solid take on the game. I myself am not playing EVE right now, and that's the reason.

It's everything else besides the combat that makes it so incredible though. The community, the rivalry, the sense of loss when you lose a ship, the sense of pride when you kick someone else's ass, the amount of dependence you have to place on your friends and corpmates when you venture into low-sec space, the incredible betrayal you feel if one of them dicks you over and steals your shit...

And most of all, just the overall wariness you feel when playing the game in low sec. When you know ANYONE could shoot you, ANYONE could steal from you, ANYONE offering to help you could really be trying to scam you... And that if they did scam you, CCP, the devs would have their back on it and say "Hey, you were dumb enough to fall for it? You deserved it pal. Live and learn."

The taking of space, the changing of alliances. All that stuff is amazing.

As far as you were saying how from what you can see, what Goons did to BoB didn't actually accomplish much, just "reset" some names or whatever... Let me try to elaborate on that.


When a corp holds a system (area of space) for long enough, with player owned structures, they get sovereignty over that space. There are 4 levels of sov, 1 being lowest, 4 being highest. At sov 1, fuel cost to run player owned structures (pos's) drops. At sov 3, they can start building supercapitals, huge ships, and build jump bridges (warps jumps to make travel much easier/safe/quicker for everything from economy to defense of space) and "cynojammers" which keep enemies from being able to bring motherships and other supercaps into the fight against you.
At sov 4, POS's become actually unattackable by opponents. Opponents have to bring you into Sov 3 before they can attack your Sov 4 stuff. It takes weeks and months to build Sov up.

So -- when the defector managed to disband the alliance, it dropped the Sov on EVERY system BoB held, which happen to be the most lucrative cash farming systems in the entire game. It basically opened this massive can of clusterfuck all over the entire game.

Market prices went crazy, several different alliances started heading into that space and tearing up anything they could, trying to just do damage, make piracy runs, make sov claims on space that was previously pretty well locked down, etc, etc. And of course, dropping to no Sov, BoB lost the ability to move freely around their own space, as their jump bridge network went down, and they had a lot of POSs in Sov 4 systems that were previously unattackable, so were not defensively reinforced, that now were attackable, and sitting there basically naked just waiting to be blown to bits.

Sov should start flipping this weekend, and for sure next week, as it takes 7 straight days of POS supremacy (more than the other guy, and you can drop one per moon or planet, and only 5 in each system per week, per alliance). So it's just now starting to be a week since the invaders could drop enough POS's to start claiming some of the newly freed up space.



As far as overall damages, Just in the last few days, BoB made a huge "call to arms" operation, basically a CTA is an "everybody better show the fuck up cause we NEED it" op. And with their best turnout, they still got mowed under HARD by goons and goon allies. Estimated BoB losses were over a half a trillion isk, which is pretty much well over $15,000 USD in RMT prices.

So when $15,000 in virtual goods get destroyed in two days, you can be shit is stirred up pretty hardcore.

Like I said, I don't play any more, but I'm having a hell of an entertaining time following all this.


Oh, and as a side note, the bad blood between BoB and Goons runs incredibly deep as well.

Basically, as has been mentioned before, there is no skill cap in EVE, so older players can always do more than younger players. ALWAYS. Well, BoB was all older players. Beta and launch guys, and they were elitist as fuck about everything. Telling newbies to stay the fuck out of 0.0 space (0.0 security rating, "null sec", no laws, full on PvP with no penalties of any kind. Also the only places you can hold space)

So they were the elitist old timers, with more money, more ships, and more power, also hording all of the conquerable space, and spitting on newbies... who in many cases had played for a year already, but didn't have the 3 years of skills most of the old timers did.

Goons said, fuck that, we're gonna try to take some space anyways, with superior numbers and hordes of the tiny weak ships we can actually afford and can actually fly. That and BoB and their ilk are the kind of people who take games WAY too seriously, and that's kind of the whole SA forums thing -- fuck people who take the internet seriously.

BoB got pissed at this, and came out and made a big announcement that -- and this is a quote "There are no Goons." Basically stating their intentions to completely wipe goons off the map. Kill them at every opportunity, until the corporation ceased to exist.

Goons got pissed at that, and vowed to one day royally fuck up BoB's shit. And over the past 3 years, the managed to push BoB into a corner, to the point that BoB was only really sitting on the most valuable space in the game, rather than the much larger tracts they'd once held. And now, 3 years into a long, drawn out conflict, Goons managed to actually steal the alliance ticker from BoB, AND royally fuck all their space in the process.

So now BoB flys under KenZoku or some name like that, and are about to lose half or better of the space, and will likely failure cascade into losing all of it.

-- Failure cascade being defined as the following:


No one (with the possible exception of RISE I guess, I dunno) ever lost a war in Eve because of money. Wars are lost because people lose heart and stop logging in and coming to ops.

Eve is a game, and no one wants to play a game just to get brutally massacred over and over. So alliances eventually reach a point known as "failure cascade," when lost battles lead to hopelessness which leads to fewer people fighting which leads to more lost battles, and so on.

A failure cascade is usually the last event in an alliance's history: it's very difficult to recover. Goonswarm did it once, but it took a titan nerf and the subsequent death of Shrike's titan (read: massive surge in morale.)

BoB is not there yet, but there are already early signs.

Anonymous said...

I actually read the above wall of text. Good comments.

Maybe when the next xpack hits if they revamp a few things (like make it easier for newcomers to catch up and not have a clusterfuck of things to learn the INSTANT they start...and, and combat) then i'll pick it up. If not, oh well. One less mmorpg = more time irl.

It was fun for a few days, but not really. I got lost, hated the quest deadlines...got bored quick.

I however love the player controlled and manipulated aspect. I wish more games had that.

Khatib said...

Actually, if you want a HUGE wall of text, someone just mentioned this post from the CoH forums on the SA boards as a good summary for all the non-EVE players that have been following the incident, and it covers a LOT:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=13027715&page=0&fpart=17&vc=1

Anonymous said...

Around friends of mine, EVE is getting a reputation as a relationship-ruining game. Now mind you, I don't buy much into whole game addiction theories, but it does play a lot into the oooh-shiny-buttons-huge-dashboard-of-them obsessions that can possibly lead to a neglected SO.

Kinda funny that so many people are trying it this weekend (of all weekends) after the big news of drama. =)

Anonymous said...

Ok whoever that guy is on CoH forums is an absolutely wonderful reporter wish I could tell him so.

THat is by far the best wrap up of this whole situation I have seen. Hell i've been updating the forums just to see new info as he reports it.

What I don't understand is how is he so informed he said he doesn't play yet he seems ot have a wonderful grasp on the cost, time and politics involved in all this.

Khatib said...

Pretty sure he used to play, and he's just reading the forums and checking killboards a lot.

Make sure to either go page by page and search for his name, or just go to his profile, view all posts, and then go post to post in that thread, as he is making pretty consistent reports that are mostly accurate.

He's got a few minor details wrong, but the bulk of it is right on the mark.

It's interesting that after that first post that I linked, where he seems to be buying into the CAOD forums (Corp, Alliances, and Discussion -- the official EVEonline drama forum section) mentality. Thing is, serious business corps like BoB and friends try to spin things and post press releases and stuff all the time, whereas goons are content to just make sure they and their allies know what's happening, and not trumpeting every victory or spinning every defeat to the masses. So CAOD, while spammed by goons, is not actively politic'd by goons. But after that first major post, this guy starts to see the writing on the walls in the killboards and realizes that BoB/Kenny isn't putting up much of a fight and is losing a LOT.