Gaming from where I least expect it
June 6, 2012 1 Comment
But the lows are low.
Some days, you’re darting between sites, killing enemy targets with impunity. Other days, you make 19 jumps to catch the tail end of the action, hearing about it the whole way, only to find the k-space entrance was rolled 3 minutes before you showed up, and the new one is literally 2 jumps from where you started.
June 5, 2012 1 Comment
If you followed my link yesterday and read more than just the reply at Syncaine‘s site, you’ll see that INQ-E is moving into a new wormhole, with a new alliance, with what is supposed to be stupid profit potential. I was not trying to come out and talk about it yesterday, as I have some crazy security fear holding me back most of the time. I should know better considering the CEO is a blogger (extrovert) and another highly active member is also a blogger at KTR (Cyndre).
Syn detailed out a lot of what this means in general, and I’m pretty excited about, and a bit curious. Classes start again for me on June 11th. That’s real soon, and not the Soon™ gamers are used to dealing with. No, this is the measured in days and nearly hours soon of real life. What that means for my free time is that it will be crushed to a pulp, waking up at 5am getting home at 8:30-9:00pm for the remainder of the summer. So, I’m happy I’ll be able to still move in, and participate on my own time without feeling like a mooch as I would have in our commune in the C3. Now, I get paid for what I do, as little or as much as I can. Which alleviates any feelings of regret or resentment amidst the corp members.
June 4, 2012 Leave a comment
A good chunk of my game-time these last couple weekends has been spent “testing” Dust514, and by testing, I mean playing. The NDA is pretty strict, so I’m just going to tell you that. I’ve been playing it.
Whenever I possibly can.
As for EVE, wormhole life has been chugging along at a good pace. It has allowed me to be fairly casual in my approach to gameplay, which surprises me. I’m able to just log into the game and update my PI stuff on nights I don’t have a lot of time (for whatever reason), and in actuality, we have enough competent people, that it has felt almost like a dearth of activity unless you are able to be on for a fleet op. Like Cyndre said though, there’s a sense of us having stretched the current life to its fullest. We’ve hit a groove, and have been digging it in pretty well. The question of where we go from here and how soon is an ever-present query. I expect good things, and soon.
EVE Inferno related news is that the recent patch (1.06) hit. EVE expansions are an interesting beast, in that there’s rarely an immediate effect that has instant impact on your game life. Instead of recreating the world like traditional themepark games, whether by obseletion of the old or actual revamp of the existing, EVE expansions merely redefine and add greater depth to the existing. The Inferno expansion overall is probably one of the more impactful, in that it had a direct effect on industrialists and drone space that could be felt pretty quickly by most.
I just re-looked at my title, and realized people may think I only wanted to talk about EVE. That wasn’t the intent, but I find it humorous that two games I’m taking part in, both have the word Inferno as a prominent current inclusion. I wanted to just mention that I hit level 60 with my Monk in Diablo 3 and made my way into Inferno difficulty. Which is ridiculous, what-the-fuck, hard. Normal was a breeze, Nightmare was still pretty simple but had some challenges, Hell was genuinely difficult, and Inferno just kicked my ass up and down the street for the couple of hours time I gave it. The rewards had better be fantastic to warrant the level of masochistic tendencies required to stay in it. I’m still on the fence on whether to stick with the Monk to at least get the items I need to finish upgrading my Jeweler and Blacksmith, or to just move onto a possibly more forgiving ranged character.
All-in-all, good times all around.
May 23, 2012 1 Comment
Inferno Hit today! Here’s pretty pictures!
Others have said, I have said, but EVE still impresses me as the best looking game in the MMO market. Maybe I’m just a sci-fi nerd (I am), maybe I just have a hard-on for the beautiful vastness of space (I do), but years of continual graphical updates and continual content to this game has won me over too.
I didn’t think I liked the Manticore from the previews I saw of it, but I was wrong. Very wrong.
May 3, 2012 11 Comments
Massively, this is, well, just abysmal. I thought Syncaine was just being his typical pot-stirring, self.
I was wrong.
It became clear to me that the author has fuck-all of a clue about the full breadth of the Burn Jita event when I read this reply of his too a commenter:
The thing that gets lost whenever people talk about the goons is that they’re a drop in the bucket. They may be the biggest alliance in EVE, but they’re largely insignificant in terms of individual gameplay.
I played EVE heavily all weekend and much of last week, both with my corp (which was missioning and mining one jump away from Jita) and solo, and never once did I catch even the faintest whiff of those guys.
CCP likes to highlight their larger fleet activities because it shows how impressive the game’s tech and hardware is. And some of the more clueless gaming websites that don’t actually play EVE go “oooh wow, Burn Jita, let’s write that up because it sounds cool and we’ll get page hits,” but the net effect on EVE’s gameplay is minimal. I’m not really trying to convince anyone to play, you either like it enough or you don’t, but not playing because of goons or players like them is making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
I emphasized the portion I found particularly humorous. His reply was about equal in length to the actual article he wrote. An article on what is arguably the biggest event in MMOs that will happen all year, and he dismisses it because he’s either unwilling to go into the reality of the long-term repercussions of this event, or too short-sighted to see it. I like to believe it’s the former, because the myopia would have to be enormous for the later to be true considering the plan has been plastered openly in multiple places, and a reporter for the site should not have any excuse to miss the information.
The bigness of this event is more than just the awesome, and I use that word in the traditional sense, implication of a game studio giving freedom to players and letting us do our own thing within the rules of the world they created. It’s even more than just the ideological impressiveness of a fully realized sandbox game. At the bare-bones, base, individualy-impacting reality of it, it’s part of a large devious plan to make tons of money by driving up prices of highly-sought goods (that means you pay more). I’ve read before that if you dig deep enough, all motives for war are economically driven. In EVE, you just don’t have to dig very far, or even at all. *cough* OTEC *cough*
A devious, multi-headed plot that includes massive warfare in outer-regions, sneaky back-room deals with dubious partners to corner a market, mixed with a declared bounty on all people outside of your group to create a high-demand for your soon to be sole-supply of necessary production goods.
But hey, people are making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
Edit: Here’s a link to give you an idea of the worth of the tech-moon war to the victor, and what a sudden high demand for it’s goods will do. (also fixed a major DERP)
May 3, 2012 4 Comments
Last night, I went out to scout some systems in my Buzzard for a corp-mate going to hi-sec with shopping list. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Beach, this is an event similar to when Leonardo DiCaprio and Tilda Swinton go out to pick up the necessities for the inhabitants of their jungle paradise home. Well, in one system I was going ahead to scout, I came out of the gate, in my default cloak.
Some things I was not aware of:
Oh, how three small pieces of information could have made a world of difference for my poor carion-eater-inspired ship. You see, as I was relaying the information to the corp mate who was waiting to see what the status was, my gate cloak dropped, and the enemy sitting on the gate had a sensor booster to insta-lock me and then take me out in just a few short volleys. By the time I realized what was going on, I was into structure, and then quickly saying good-night to my pretty, pretty ship.
After a few moments of cursing and vitriol, I asked in vent what went wrong, and the three listed information points were made clear to me. As well as a good method of (more) safely traveling in a cloaked ship.
Eve is a harsh teacher, and as frustrating as it can be at times, you can usually learn something from every encounter.
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