Incarna 1.1 and Ice

So the new forums are being (re)Released, this in its own right should be good, now I did use the forums before they got took down last time and they weren’t too bad there was some glaring problems with them, which really should not have made it into the release they released but CCP did see the error in their ways after a largish security breach was found in the code.
Now I’ve had a poke around the test forums but I’m not yet sure if they have fixed the huge quotation marks that were in the last iteration, for the people who didn’t see them before these quotation marks were so large they were adding on 4 lines of space without actually adding anything into this space other than the quotation image on the left hand side. So hopefully this has been fixed to save some real estate on the screen.
They will be adding some new stuff to eve gate and making it look a bit more spiffy which should be good. Now I don’t use eve gate as a social networking site like CCP hoped I would, all I simply use it for is reading my eve mails on my phone when I'm away from my pc. This I believe is more use then most people use it, however if CCP can do it correctly then I believe that they could very possibly get it to be used how they wish it to be used.

In mining terms it’s been slow. I had my birthday yesterday so spent most of last night out with friends so no mining happened then and before that I was in Wales again so absolutely no mining has been happened since Tuesday night last week, which means in the long run I could very possibly be able to only sub one account this month which isn’t too bad as I can still mine with just one account but it does mean that I can’t have my boosts from the Orca which I still have to buy anyway so currently my second account is just training up till I can get him an Orca to sit in and increase my ISK per hour from 8-9 mill to 14 mill.
I’m also still going to get some more account’s it will just be when I can actually get the ISK in-game to buy two new plexs which hopefully at the rate I’m currently mining should be the end of this week. Now the first two account I’m going to train them into Hulk's. However what I’ve been thinking is after that with me living in high sec the roids aren’t that big and trying to multitask with more than 4 characters mining, targeting fresh roids/ emptying the cargo hold could overwhelm me so which about ice. Now I live in a system with a ice belt so it wouldn’t involve moving anywhere, the roids never pop and all the multitasking I would need to do is making sure the cargo hold was empty into the Orca and then having the hauler warping back and for emptying the Orca's hold so I would not need to warp off the Orca and lose any boost. So after 4 mining account's this could very well be the better idea until I can move to null and get my strip miners on those massive rocks.
Either way hopefully I should be opening two new accounts by next week and tripling my current ISK input within 2 months.

Camping trips and more accounts.

So I’ve been really busy the last fortnight was running the three peaks of Yorkshire one weekend off the Wales the next week and the down to London for another week so I have had no access to a computer that could run eve, so on the blogging front there was nothing to actually say.
Well I’m back now and unfortunately due to my last fortnight of camping I wasn’t able to make any ISK but my accounts time still run out so I’ve had to sell all my minerals to cover two more plexs. So that’s my Nidhoggur minerals gone and I now need to build up my stockpiles again, which means that my plans to move to null have to be moved back while I get some more minerals. That’s one of the set back's Delve is currently not safe and won’t be for a while so I’m going to put off the move indefinitely. So I’m still going to build myself a Nidhoggur but I’m going to put it in a low sec system until I’m ready to make the move to Delve.
Well in going with an Indy persona, industrialists like to have more than one account. I have currently got two a mismatch of a character that can do most things but not well and my second account which is a perfect logy pilot/carrier pilot and is now training for command skills and the command ships. Now this is good as my main character can build and mine but mining with it doesn’t give much in terms of ISK or minerals. Now if I was to get two new accounts and solely train them to mine then my ISK per month can triple. As my carrier pilot can’t even fly a covetor there’s no real need to get him into a mining ship, however he can fly an Orca, which means boosts. He can fly a Rorqual but as I am in high sec I can't use it so it’s not an option.
So this month for the price of two plexs I’m going to be getting 4 accounts which is a blessing as I will be using the buddy program to open up the two new accounts.

EVE Vegas

So been listening to the coverage of eve Vegas on eve-radio, and I’ve got to say that its positive stuff. Now as I am posting this I am still on the Saturday coverage and haven’t yet got to anything on Sunday but what I’ve got to say is that its positive. The fact that their saying that they will be balancing a large thing and some small things is going to be a big highlight for each patch. Now the big balance that is coming in the winter expansion is going to be the balancing of capital ships and super-capitals. Now as someone who has lived in null sec and is soon to be moving back into null sec, this is going to be a great balance. I am a carrier pilot myself, ok it is a Nidhoggur so I am the medic of the medic's I love the aesthetics of the Nidhoggur and wouldn’t want any other carrier and my main carrier. Now I would love to get into a Hel, and yes it is the worst of the Super carrier's, however it is in my eyes one of the most beautiful super carriers of the lot bar maybe the Nyx. I can fly a Hel and my Nidhoggur pilot is almost perfect in terms of a carrier pilot all I am missing is the 15 - 20 billion ISK I require to buy one. But now that I'm moving to null and in 4 days’ time I will have Capital Ships Construction 4 finished, I should be able to get myself some time with a Capital Ships Assembly Array and see if I can produce me a rusty old Hel.
Anyway back to EVE Vegas and the balancing, so this winter expansion we will have the capital ships balance, but for next year’s summer release it has been said that we will be getting a Gallente weapons rebalance. Now this also personally affects me as a Gallente player since I started eve over 2 years ago now I have always seen and heard how bad hybrids are in terms of damage, range, tracking etc. etc. However I have always stuck with Gallente ships so training tech 2 weapons was kind of a no brainer, I really only use the turrets to complement my drones, as when I’m missioning/ratting I will use my awesome space potato (the Dominix) which the main armament is the drones means that the turrets are really only there to complement them. So with the balancing of hybrids this time next year I am really looking forward to as my Kronos will become even more awesome, and the adequately nicknamed Assault Battleship (the Vindicator) will become an amazing ship to fly in both PvP and PvE.
In other words I am already loving what I have heard from EVE Vegas and I will post another blog or two if I do hear anything else that I believe would be good to type about.

Mining

So I believe that the last post is going to be the last post about ranting at the community as that won’t get me any readers. So I’m going to start with what this blogs really going to be about.
Null sec.
This is mainly going to be null sec industry as I am a Indy pilot at heart. But for any pvp action that I get myself into then I will post a comment about that too. I will be following the news and giving my views on them, but I’ll keep these to a minimum unless people actually want to read these.

So yesterday I bought myself a hulk after selling the mackinaw. This alone will boost my mining output, but I also have got my hands temporarily on a orca. Which combined with Trebs great command skills means I can strip 0.5 belts in 5 hours with just a single hulk and an orca. Now I have been toying with the idea of starting 1 or 2 new accounts and getting them into hulks but I’ve never needed to before as I haven’t mined enough but now that I’m going to null sec to join THORN-Syndicate again as a Indy pilot I feel that I could do it. I will just need to make sure that my pc can actually handle it, as its currently just about does 2 eve clients and a Minecraft client.

So yes I will be moving to null to be a Indy pilot, running PI planets again, and making ships sub and capital class hopefully as I will have the skills for them by the time I actually want to move down there.

Rioting and Nullsec

Well things have happened in the last two days. I’ve had an invite from and old corp of mine Thorn Syndicate which is re-merging and are going to join Brick Squad. I am still deciding if I will go for it, but I am looking at going. It will mean that I’m back in null sec which I’ve been pinning for a while now. The only requirement for me to join as I’m an ex member is to have a capital ship. I used to have a Nidhoggur however I sold that last month to pay for plexs. So it means either ice mining and selling to stuff then buying a carrier, mission run and then buy the carrier, or mine proper asteroids and build myself a carrier. I am leaning more towards the mining asteroids and then building one myself, so time to sell the mackinaw and work with the covetor as I’m not going to buy a hulk, with their current pricing.

Anyway onto the riots. So last month we had the large riots in the 4 major trade hubs of eve, if you haven’t heard of these then where have you been. What I see is that it is just a bunch of whiners hurt that CCP is changing the game and putting it into a new direction. However what they need to see is that CCP has not changed the direction they are taking EVE at all, this has been the direction they have always had for EVE. Now I know not everyone in the riots were rioting because of the captain’s quarters. Some were rioting because of nexus I have already put a post about that so will not come back to it here. Some more of the rioting was because of the leaked internal newsletter. However even in this people have not had the full message. Yes eve-news24 posted this newsletter but they did not post the whole newsletter, they have missed a large portion of it. Now some of the newsletter that was missed I agree eve-news24 should have missed, it was personal information about CCP staff and did not need to be released, however what was missed was the front page where there is a statement explaining that the views that were written in the newsletter did not give the views of CCP and where purely speculative. This is the major section that the newsletter did not show the definite way the CCP will be taking EVE and that gold ammo will not be added into the game. However the major problem after all this happening is the CCP did not just come out and say that no gold ammo is not going to be added and people would have been rioting so much. Well the people who just wasn’t to disrupt the game would have still rioted but who cares about them and they should just leave EVE.

Anyway either way it shows that if the players of EVE really want to show their views they can.

Null sec

Now I don’t live in null sec anymore, however I did spend the entirety of last year there, so I would say that I have some knowledge of how it works.
So the DRF own the drone regions half the South and the majority of the North and to be honest I believe this is too much space. No CCP won’t be stepping in as this is a sandbox and it is player run, the problem will need to be sorted out by us the players. Yesterday some news appeared that the DRF had lost interest after the massive losses from the Goons, Test and the Deklein coalition when they can’t bring in the massive amounts of supers they have and their not using a exploit to being these in.
The real problem I have is the DRF went in supposedly to break the massive blue ball that was the Northern Coalition however they have gone in with more blues then the whole of the NC had anyway so all they have done is contradict themselves throughout the whole campaign which seems to have stalled after so many sub-capital losses and the recent caging in of their super caps in their own pos's.
I do believe that the goons and the rest of the cluster-fuck coalition will attack the DRF and take back the North, but I can’t see this happening till after the promised super carrier nerf this winter.
What I would love to see is a mass attack on the DRF from all sides and completely obliterating the DRF and kicking them out of the drone regions, but it’s more likely me winning the weekly lottery on eve-radio.
Tomorrow I will be talking about my views with the recent riots in the major trade hubs of eve.

Back and other things.

Ok so it’s been awhile since I last posted, lots been happening both in-game and out. So the Tech 2 stuff didn’t go great. I didn’t have the time to play the game properly to actually put myself fully into it so I only went in half-heartedly, this was a mistake which I hope to fix this summer. Along with a lot of other things. The corp did join the Amarr militia for a while and that didn’t go too bad we got some kills, Well I didn’t as I’m not a pvper in anyway as my Killboard shows.
I have been meaning to set up some PI in the low sec systems around where we live but currently can’t get myself to do it, Going to wait till I get my alt into a black ops and then just covert cyno into the systems to grab the produce.
My main ISK income currently is ice mining, yes this isn’t the best income by far and its most likely the worst, however it means I can play the game and make ISK while working on my other things, namely setting up Minecraft servers, writing game reviews and typing up pages of coursework.

Ok now onto the main reason I really wanted to post on here. The micro-transactions. While I am writing reviews I will read other people's reviews and many game news sites. The majority of which have had at least one news article about eve and its micro-transactions. The problem that I have with this is that they do not get the full story. Many will be posting how the monocle costs $70 and that's overpriced, with this I agree it is a lot for an in-game item and CCP could have done better with their roll-out of the system by also integrating the cheaper items. However my real problem is that the news sites bring across that this is the only way that you can buy the items. They do not see that players can spend ISK which they gained from mining, ratting, mission-running etc. I have been talking to some people mostly on the eve-radio irc channel and they been saying things like people have still had to buy the plex with real money, my response to that is that yes the people have had to buy the plex but they sold it for ISK, so they then don’t care where the plex goes after they have got the ISK safely in their wallet. I for one buy the plex and convert it into game time as I don’t have the real life money to pay for eve currently but still wish to play the game. So in conclusion I really do wish for game news sites to actually fully read up on the news story’s before posting them. However I know they won’t and many people in the comment sections for the eve news articles wil complain and all I can do is post on these comments and finish off the news article so people can actually read the full story on the eve micro-transactions.

In other news my main character also turned 2 years old 14 days ago, seems strange 2 years ago eve was different and there were many friends who used to play. Ive been through a couple of corps and really enjoy eyed my two years of playing, all I can say is roll on the next 2 years as I can say that I won’t be leaving eve for the foreseeable future, even if some of the community continue to annoy me enough to walk outside and do something else.