Close, but not close enough… yet

As you may already be able to tell, I haven’t been playing EVE as much as I originally intended to over the past couple weeks. Unfortunately that was mostly my fault as I, rather foolishly, decided to re-activate my EVE Online account during the last few weeks of the college term. And as a result of that I was way too busy finishing off college work to get into EVE even for a little while. What little time I did have, I spent playing Spore (which I bought only recently).
Luckily though, my Christmas holidays have now started so I’m going to be gifted with hours upon hours of free time.

During the one or two times I was actually able to get into EVE, I didn’t really get anything constructive done (on my part anyway). I got quite a bit done for Heather though, on the other hand.

After making my way to Duripant, where she ended up starting, I bought myself a few EP-S Gaussian I Excavation Pulse mining lasers and fitted them to my old Pirating Brutix as that was the only ship I took there.

Blasphemy, right?

Surprisingly, after about half an hour of mining we got just over 9000m³, so I decided to stop there as that was roughly the capacity of the Iteron Mk I I bought. I wish I’d known how good a Brutix can be at mining back when I’d started out, I would be a lot richer than I am at the moment. I’m sure that there’s countless weeks of Brutix mining I could have done while waiting for my Mining Barge skills to train. I could be quite a rich man, as opposed to my 5ish mil right now.

That little bit of mining got us a hefty (newbie-wise) 330,000ish ISK, which I split 50/50 with Heather to go towards buying her first frigate. I did try to convince her that I didn’t need the money but she insisted that I took at least half since I did most of the mining.
While I will admit I was enjoying the somewhat relaxing mining, I was itching for someone to try and steal our ore so I could lock the bastard and stop him in his tracks. Maybe do a bit of ransoming while I was at it. Ah well, maybe another time.

I’m going to try and see if Heather will write a blog post about her experience on her EVE trial but we’ll see. I’m interested in how she felt about EVE Online itself and her time spent learning how to play.
Time to see if I can figure out the Authors & Users section of the WordPress Dashboard.

Fly safe y’all.

CONCORD Gatecamp?!

Last night, I finally managed to join a new corporation. I’m now a member of the Skies Tis Moiras Corporation, who have just recently become a member of the Xenotech Celestial Coalition.

Anyway, while transporting a couple ships to my new home-system (Warouh), I came across a huge amount of CONCORD ships flying around the Kaaputanen stargate in Niarja. I’d never seen so many ships in one place, let alone CONCORD ones. There must have been at least 60 of them, just sitting there doing whatever it was they were doing. There must have been a hell of a fight there for that many to turn up, the most I’d seen turn up at one time was about 10.

On a side note, I’ve been reading some of the news on the EVE site and it seems that tensions between the four empires are getting worse. Recently the Gallente Federation Navy and the Minmatar Republic Fleet begun a joint military exercise in Metropolis. Even though the Federation Senate and the Republic Parliament delayed the military exercise by a few days, they still went ahead. Much to the aggravation of the Caldari State and the Amarr Empire.

A spokesman for the Caldari Navy said “It’s bad enough that they feel the need to rattle sabres. It’s alarming that they have the audacity to do it on the border of the State, but most of all, it’s disgusting that they feel they are able to conduct this exercise so soon after the atrocity at Malkalen.”

Personally, I can’t wait to see how this plays out while we’re waiting for the Empyrean Age release.

Fly Safe.

Singularity… Testing… Testing… – Empyrean Age

Earlier this week, I decided to check out the Empyrean Age patch on the EVE Test Server (Singularity). I was originally going to have a quick look the day after but as I couldn’t sleep at the time, I thought I may as well do it sooner rather than later. The first, most obvious change was the login screen. I have to say, I was hoping they wouldn’t change it much. I prefer the Trinity login screen with the camera zooming over and out from the EVE logo but that’s not to say that the Empyrean Age version isn’t cool looking.

The first thing I noticed upon logging in, was the colour scheme change, which is a now a creamy brown but as always if you don’t like it, you can change it to something you’re more partial to.

Eager to try out the militia feature, I clicked the Militia button in the Caldari station I logged into to see if I could pick which Militia I wanted to join. Much to my initial disappointment, you can only join the Militia of the race of the station you’re in when you click the button. It was only after thinking about this for a minute that I realised that it made perfect sense. After all, I’m sure a Gallente Militia recruiter would find it exceptionally hard recruiting capsuleers to fight the Caldari and Amarr while in a Caldari station.
So, I then had to find my way to a Gallente station in the fringes of the Caldari State’s section of Empire space. Which, surprisingly, wasn’t that hard. I eventually found one in Otosela, only a couple jumps away from Tasti.

After clicking the Militia button, I was presented with the window you can see in the screenshot below. In this window, you can see a short few paragraphs that seems to essentially be a call to war. Which, given the circumstances, is probably what it is.
Under that, you can find a short (very short) list of consequences of your decision to join the Militia. These consequences being;

• You will be at war with our enemy’s militia.
• Entering enemy-controlled high-security space will result in your being attacked by the powerful navies of that faction.

You also get some recent news on the right, relating to your chosen race. So far it only consists of an RP news post and a test post, but I would expect that territory capture summaries will also be posted. But don’t quote me on that, just a guess.

Fortunately for me, I had enough good standing with the Gallente Federation to join their Militia. This was quite surprising, as I don’t remember ever doing very many missions. So, I’m not entirely sure how I got high enough standing to join the militia. That said, I’m also not entirely sure what standing you need to be able to join the militia. For all I know, it could be quite a small amount.

Anyway, after clicking the “Enlist Me” button, you’re taken out of your corporation (if you joined while in an NPC corporation, I assume) and put into the Federal Defence Union corporation. You are also able to see your rank (Federation Minuteman being the lowest) and your time in the militia. There are also a small selection of statistics, covering the total number of militia members in the different militias, kills, victory points and systems controlled. As well as all of these statistics for you personally, and your corporation.
And finally, below that, there are three lists. These being: nearby systems, dangerous systems and conquered systems.

I didn’t have time to have a look around anything else as by the time I’d gotten this far I was feeling extremely tired and my bed seemed too inviting.

A last note before retreat to my bed, I noticed something while looking at the Federal Defence Union information page. In the description, it states that the Gallente were provoked by the “destructive Caldari”. Now, unless I’ve missed something quite important, as far as everyone knows the Gallente are supposed to be the only empire to commit a destructive act. Does this mean that there’s more to come? Maybe the Caldari destroy a Gallente station, or bomb a Gallente inhabited planet?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Fly safe.

EVE Linkage

I haven’t had the time to get into EVE much over the past couple days so I don’t really have anything remotely interesting to write about. The only thing that has happened to me lately is being on the way back from Jita to Tasti and being blown up by a pirate gate-camping in a Badger MkII. Unluckily for me, I was too busy taking these two screenshots to notice that he was flashing red and that he had targeted me.

Luckily for me, I was only flying in a shuttle (and not my beautiful and valuable Myrmidon) and I had nothing in the cargo bay; and although I was podded, I had no implants (valuable or otherwise). So I didn’t really lose anything of any importance or great value, just 940,000 ISK for the new clone.

Anyway, back to my original point, links. Over the past couple days, I’ve found some great guides, apps and general bits of news that I thought you guys and girls may find useful or interesting. A couple, I’ve posted before but I thought I’d post them again in case you may have missed them or we have some new readers that hasn’t seen them. So here goes.

Applications:

• EVE-MEEP -Eve-MEEP is the host for a wide array of tools that provide the vital calculations necessary for any serious industrialist. These tools take advantage of data accumulated by Eve-MEEP to help with everything from production to mining to trade.
• EVEMon – A lightweight, easy-to-use standalone Windows application designed to assist you in keeping track of your EVE Online character progression.
• EVE Fitting Tool – Great program in which you can try out and test new fittings for ships you have or are thinking about buying.

Guides:

• The EVE Compendium – A compendium of EVE knowledge, mostly in the form of guides. Pretty much any guide you’ll need is in this compendium.

Maps:

• 2D EVE Maps – Does what it says on the tin, 2D EVE maps by Ombey (and not Omber Zombie as I wrote earlier for some reason).
• EVE Alliance Map – A galaxy map, regularly updated with alliance territory locations, pirate infestations, alliance war zones and current political power blocs.
• EVE Influence Map – Similar to the alliance map above but instead shows influence.

It’s been a while…

Evening guys and girls. As you may have noticed, a few weeks ago I stopped posting without any prior notice or warning. I made promises to certain people that I would start posting again soon but that never happened and that, I am sorry for.

My original reason for my lack of posts was that I had to move out for a short while because of family problems. After those problems passed, I moved back in and got back to playing EVE to give myself something to blog about. This worked for a bit but eventually my plan fell through and someone in the house managed to go over my ISP’s fair use limit which ended up lowering my connection speed from 3Mb/s to 128Kb/s, which in turn meant that I couldn’t play EVE as I was stuck in Jita. And as we all know, Jita is hell to get out of even with the best connection.
After all this, I somehow (by some stroke of luck) managed to get myself a girlfriend. Which means that I’m now spending less time online and, as a result, having less time to play EVE or write any blog posts. On top of that, I’m going to be moving house on Monday or Tuesday and I won’t be getting an internet connection in the new house for at least two weeks.

But, in spite of all that, I will be trying my absolute best to keep updated and write blog posts from now until Monday/Tuesday and from then, until I get online in the new house.

On a side note, I’m still waiting for people to give me their opinions on whether I should stick with my current blog layout or change to a new one. So, to make it easier for you to make a decision I’ve put two screenshots together, one of the current design and one of the design I may have.

There are two sidebars at the bottom of the layout on the right but they looked a bit messy so I cut them out of the screenshot. The reason I cut them out is that if I were to choose that layout, I would tidy the sidebars up quite a bit so they fit in more with the layout as a whole. Also, by all means if you know of a layout design that I can use (i.e. a design for blogs on wordpress.com) and that will look better than either of these, tell me the name and I’ll take a look.

Until I get my next post up, here’s a funny little animation that came bundled with my new Samsung YP-S5 MP3 Player.