Oh, hey there.
In case you hadn't realized, this place is long gone. Sorry about that.
I am however doing a thing over on www.bitter.vet, where my ramblings have found a new home. You should check it out.
You can also get in touch on Twitter: @bitterdotvet
Sunday, 15 February 2015
Monday, 25 January 2010
Dear CCP: We're sorry, we broke your server
Last night's objective: Round 2 in D-G, Providence.
ID: Brutus Septimius, [WEDIE]
Shiptype: Megathron
Titan bridge into system, all ship sections green. Pilots in local: 350.
Local starts climbing as both more allies and enemies bridge in. Soon, local hits 1100. Node was reinforced, looks like it will hold... at least for a while.
The battleship fleet goes to work, de-fanging the enemy staging POS. Stellar job from the FSI Logistics wing, few losses. Job done, we go back to our own POS.
-Break-
"Enemy fleet spotted", we hear in comms, "all battleships align Planet II. Warp in at 10 to 30, watch your spacing".
The fun starts. My ship exits warp, targets are called. I start shooting the first target, a Harbinger. Harbinger down, my guns are still pumping rounds into the void, despite my attempts to shut them off. I attempt to warp off to the safety of the staging POS, unable to shoot anything else. Targets are still being called. After about a minute of mashing the warp command, my Battleship finally enters warp.
For 20 minutes I attempt to unload my 7 425mm Railgun II's and reload them, one by one. Finally, Spike L long-range ammunition is loaded. "Load short range ammo, we're going in balls deep" I hear over the comms. "How nice", I say to myself. Unload, switch ammo, reload - another 5 minutes.
In the meantime, part of the fleet warped in; targets started being called. The real slaughter starts, as more and more pilots on each side either desynchronize, disconnect or simply cannot control their modules.
I finally manage to load short range ammo and warp in the middle of the clashing fleets. I manage to lock two targets and to fire one salvo before my connection breaks up.
Login. Character selection. Black screen, entering game. 20 minutes pass. I retry the login. On voice comms I hear we're winning. Another 15 minutes or so of black screen. Third time's a charm. I notice my wallet went up by 105 Million ISK at character login.
Wohoo, I'm dead. Login worked, my pod is just sitting there in space, near the remains of my former Battleship. Some 3 Interceptor pilots on the field, 2 of them notice me and start burning towards me. Too late, I'm already in warp.
Safely inside the POS shield, I assess the situation. Apparently my loss mail didn't generate. It had happened once before... this is getting annoying, because no straight records can be kept this way on who's winning and who's losing. Still, from the killmails that did generate, looks like our side (U'K, -A- and Stainwagon) won, not only because we achieved the objective, but from the k:d ratio as well.
All kills/losses registered, courtesy of Wollari's Dotlan.net
The Goonswarm bomber squads were once again quite effective against our Battleships and heavy support. Congratulations to them on a job well done.
Thus was the night in D-G. We then returned to our home systems to repair, resupply, rearm (and most importantly re-ship).
More carnage to come, this is just the beginning.
PS: CCP, We're sorry, we broke your server. Please buy better ones. Also, Ga'Len would like to ask you a question
ID: Brutus Septimius, [WEDIE]
Shiptype: Megathron
Titan bridge into system, all ship sections green. Pilots in local: 350.
Local starts climbing as both more allies and enemies bridge in. Soon, local hits 1100. Node was reinforced, looks like it will hold... at least for a while.
The battleship fleet goes to work, de-fanging the enemy staging POS. Stellar job from the FSI Logistics wing, few losses. Job done, we go back to our own POS.
-Break-
"Enemy fleet spotted", we hear in comms, "all battleships align Planet II. Warp in at 10 to 30, watch your spacing".
The fun starts. My ship exits warp, targets are called. I start shooting the first target, a Harbinger. Harbinger down, my guns are still pumping rounds into the void, despite my attempts to shut them off. I attempt to warp off to the safety of the staging POS, unable to shoot anything else. Targets are still being called. After about a minute of mashing the warp command, my Battleship finally enters warp.
For 20 minutes I attempt to unload my 7 425mm Railgun II's and reload them, one by one. Finally, Spike L long-range ammunition is loaded. "Load short range ammo, we're going in balls deep" I hear over the comms. "How nice", I say to myself. Unload, switch ammo, reload - another 5 minutes.
In the meantime, part of the fleet warped in; targets started being called. The real slaughter starts, as more and more pilots on each side either desynchronize, disconnect or simply cannot control their modules.
I finally manage to load short range ammo and warp in the middle of the clashing fleets. I manage to lock two targets and to fire one salvo before my connection breaks up.
Login. Character selection. Black screen, entering game. 20 minutes pass. I retry the login. On voice comms I hear we're winning. Another 15 minutes or so of black screen. Third time's a charm. I notice my wallet went up by 105 Million ISK at character login.
Wohoo, I'm dead. Login worked, my pod is just sitting there in space, near the remains of my former Battleship. Some 3 Interceptor pilots on the field, 2 of them notice me and start burning towards me. Too late, I'm already in warp.
Safely inside the POS shield, I assess the situation. Apparently my loss mail didn't generate. It had happened once before... this is getting annoying, because no straight records can be kept this way on who's winning and who's losing. Still, from the killmails that did generate, looks like our side (U'K, -A- and Stainwagon) won, not only because we achieved the objective, but from the k:d ratio as well.
All kills/losses registered, courtesy of Wollari's Dotlan.net
The Goonswarm bomber squads were once again quite effective against our Battleships and heavy support. Congratulations to them on a job well done.
Thus was the night in D-G. We then returned to our home systems to repair, resupply, rearm (and most importantly re-ship).
More carnage to come, this is just the beginning.
PS: CCP, We're sorry, we broke your server. Please buy better ones. Also, Ga'Len would like to ask you a question
Friday, 20 November 2009
CCP: "Bad capsuleer! No supercarrier for you!"
Once again a CCP Dev Blog about changes to capital ships has been posted.
TL;DR for Mothership pilots - you get to keep them in their current state for a while longer:
There's also a lot of details (and graphs) regarding how XL turrets will be changed in terms of range, dps, tracking etc.
Discussion thread - now with more rage that MS changes are scrapped.
TL;DR for Mothership pilots - you get to keep them in their current state for a while longer:
NO CHANGES WILL BE MADE TO MOTHERSHIPS IN DOMINION. Since they are part of the original rebalancing effort, the DEPLOYMENT OF FIGHTER BOMBERS WILL ALSO BE POSTPONED.Yes, this means also no fighter-bombers yet.After weeks of testing on Singularity (and players coming to terms with the changes), this happens. An interesting point gets raised by Mookuh in the discussion thread:
If motherships won't get changed for Dominion, will their HP also not be boosted? Meaning 2 Titans can insta-DD a mothership?To be honest, all in all it's a pretty wild decision from CCP to scrap the MS changes - a few days ago there was talk of allowing Supercarriers to dock, and now if a Mothership is on the field (for some inscrutable reason) it can get blown up by 2 titans doing a drive-by... good show, old chap :(
There's also a lot of details (and graphs) regarding how XL turrets will be changed in terms of range, dps, tracking etc.
- XL blasters get a massive boost to optimal range (yay Moros)
- XL Railguns are slated to have the longest optimal range of all, with falloff on par with XL Beam Lasers, but for extreme ranges XL artillery performs best.
- The difference in DPS between variations of the XL Turrets has been reduced. XL Beams deal the most damage (not by much), but have shorter optimal than rails
- The siege module tracking penalty will be reduced to -50%, out of siege tracking still gets nerfed.
Discussion thread - now with more rage that MS changes are scrapped.
Monday, 9 November 2009
3rd Quarter Economic Newsletter is out
Looks like CCP Dr.EyoG and his crew finally managed to process all the market data and have published the Economic Newsletter for Q3 2009.
A few interesting bits from the newsletter:
A few interesting bits from the newsletter:
- The most flown vessel is now, ironically, the Hulk (Raven dropped from 1st to 6th place compared to Q2)
- Q2->Q3 the number of Dreads flown has dropped by about a third (I'm surprised the number for Q2 was only 1200, given the fact that there are about 250 titans in-game), and the number of T3 cruisers has more than tripled;
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Oh look, an Interesting fix for the upcoming Dominion fiasco
I think this weekend I read about 100 forum pages arguing that the way CCP wants to get more people to 0.0... well, to put it bluntly, sucks balls.
The problem
Players feel all the Upkeep mumbo-jumbo isn't going to persuade Empire folk to move to 0.0 simply because in order for 0.0 to be attractive the rewards need to be greater, not equal, but GREATER than what Highsec (and Lowsec) have to offer. Small corporations/alliances will not want to move in a high-risk area which requires effort and isk only to make a bit more cash than in a safe area.
A solution?
On Scrapheap Challenge there's a post by a Mr. Joshua Foiritain of the "Coreli Corporation":
What he is proposing is allowing players to communicate remotely with the agents they already have (highsec, lowsec...0.0 agents, doesn't matter). CCP said adding the ability to hire agents in upgraded systems is not feasible - the code is to complicated and there would be database issues. Well then, how about simply using the agents we already have?
Expanding on the above idea
Here's the way I'd do it, utilizing many of the existing features:
A small alliance holds a bunch of solar systems and an outpost in one of them. In the system where the outpost is located, in addition to having the possibility to upgrade their territory with the current options, a new one would be made available - call it a "Long Range Secure Communications Facility" or whatever. This upgrade would cost cash to be maintained online, just like the rest and corporations would be able to tax bounty income
When this is deployed, a new Station Service is added to the outpost in the system, allowing access for each player to his/her own agents, wherever they may be located in the cluster.Players would be able to get missions from that agent's mission pool in the surrounding systems.
A few points I'd implement to insure the proposal is fair:
Ah, good question. Well, I would imagine all the NPC corporations in Eve would have interests even in the farthest reaches of space - Empire NPC corps would attempt to root out the evil at its source, or even to duke it out with the opposing Empire faction and prevent them from achieving their own goals pertaining to that piece of 0.0
Thus, it makes perfect sense to tap into the local capsuleer pool (oh, wait, that's us) and pay them handsomely for taking care of their dirty laundry, even better than in Empire, since they certainly recognize that there are many added dangers in 0.0.
Why this can successfuly attract Empire dwellers to 0.0 and make life more interesting for all involved
Empire dwellers, more specifically mission runners are given the option of doing something they are very familiar with, with increased risk compensated by much greater rewards. This will insure a smoother adaptation to the harsher life in 0.0 (losing ships, not having the right equipment at hand and making due etc)
In time, even the most hardcore mission runners will come to embrace the other possibilities their new space offers, will learn to *gasp* defend themselves (and to recognize when it's time to run away). They will also learn to fight back against invaders and to become invaders themselves.
A number of people asked in the Dev blog discussion thread what reason alliances would have to squabble over territory when the income from R64 moons is getting nerfed. Well - this might be it. Outposts in 0.0 systems with stations will offer great rewards for the controlling alliance's players. Since CCP said they won't abandon the Truesec system, this fits perfectly. Also, as this upgrade would be conditioned by having an Outpost in the system, I think it will provide incentives to drop additional ones.
Making cash for cool stuff while slapping the enemy who is trying to do the same, what more do you need from Eve?
If you've managed to read this far, you certainly must have formed an opinion about this proposal and are invited to express it in a comment below - I'd like to hear about it.
The problem
Players feel all the Upkeep mumbo-jumbo isn't going to persuade Empire folk to move to 0.0 simply because in order for 0.0 to be attractive the rewards need to be greater, not equal, but GREATER than what Highsec (and Lowsec) have to offer. Small corporations/alliances will not want to move in a high-risk area which requires effort and isk only to make a bit more cash than in a safe area.
A solution?
On Scrapheap Challenge there's a post by a Mr. Joshua Foiritain of the "Coreli Corporation":
I'm sort of confused as to why dominion would change anything, sure the new upkeep and sov system would reduce the number of colored dots on the map but at the end of the day keeping the small alliances out of your space only really requires you to throw power around...
The system upgrade stuff wont allow alliances to scale down their space at all so rather then covering their entire region with POSes and sov they re gonna claim sov on the outpost systems but still keep on using the systems without sov for ratting, moongold and plexing, which pretty much requires them to rape anyone that tries to move in.
Of course, maybe theyre only adding the basic system and well see stuff actually worth using in future patches...
On the other hand, the fix for this entire problem is easy; Allow people who are docked in outposts with the proper system upgrades to talk to their normal agents. IE: People in Delve can talk to their Caldari navy agents and get missions in delve;
- this allows 0.0 people to move back to their alliance space
- the only limit on players making money per system is lag
- alliances have more people in their space to help defend stuff
- the enemy has more targets to try and kill
- plus theres a small motivation for empire people to move to 0.0 as they can still use their normal agents and theyd get a shitton more LP in -1 0.0 systems then they do in empire.
- also since the people who dont want to go to empire can then run missions in 0.0 corps would make more on corp taxes.
What he is proposing is allowing players to communicate remotely with the agents they already have (highsec, lowsec...0.0 agents, doesn't matter). CCP said adding the ability to hire agents in upgraded systems is not feasible - the code is to complicated and there would be database issues. Well then, how about simply using the agents we already have?
Expanding on the above idea
Here's the way I'd do it, utilizing many of the existing features:
A small alliance holds a bunch of solar systems and an outpost in one of them. In the system where the outpost is located, in addition to having the possibility to upgrade their territory with the current options, a new one would be made available - call it a "Long Range Secure Communications Facility" or whatever. This upgrade would cost cash to be maintained online, just like the rest and corporations would be able to tax bounty income
When this is deployed, a new Station Service is added to the outpost in the system, allowing access for each player to his/her own agents, wherever they may be located in the cluster.Players would be able to get missions from that agent's mission pool in the surrounding systems.
A few points I'd implement to insure the proposal is fair:
- Scale mission rewards (LP and monetary reward) according to the True Security of the system, clearly over the levels the agent would offer in Empire, if it's an Empire agent. This would counterbalance the added risk of running missions in 0.0
- In order to claim rewards for LP, players still need to visit a station belonging to the NPC corp the LP is from, wherever that station may be (if you run missions from your alliance's turf in Deklein for the Sanshas' True Power corporation in Stain, you'll need to take a trip to Stain to get that Nightmare BPC).
- Limit the number of missions a player can get in a set time-frame from each station featuring this upgrade that he has access to. This will discourage alliances to simply hold one system, lock it down tight, upgrade it and use it to print isk from missions, ignoring the other types of PVE the space has to offer. If their pilots want to run more missions, they'll have an incentive to expand their alliance's territory, which will mean bloodshed and more bills to pay. Limitations should not be so severe that they cause frustrations, but should nevertheless exist.
- Make it so that in order to get work from an agent remotely you need higher standings than you normally would when contacting him in person (i.e. to remotely contact your L4 Q0 agent, you'll need, for instance, a standing of 7 instead of 6)
Ah, good question. Well, I would imagine all the NPC corporations in Eve would have interests even in the farthest reaches of space - Empire NPC corps would attempt to root out the evil at its source, or even to duke it out with the opposing Empire faction and prevent them from achieving their own goals pertaining to that piece of 0.0
Thus, it makes perfect sense to tap into the local capsuleer pool (oh, wait, that's us) and pay them handsomely for taking care of their dirty laundry, even better than in Empire, since they certainly recognize that there are many added dangers in 0.0.
Why this can successfuly attract Empire dwellers to 0.0 and make life more interesting for all involved
Empire dwellers, more specifically mission runners are given the option of doing something they are very familiar with, with increased risk compensated by much greater rewards. This will insure a smoother adaptation to the harsher life in 0.0 (losing ships, not having the right equipment at hand and making due etc)
In time, even the most hardcore mission runners will come to embrace the other possibilities their new space offers, will learn to *gasp* defend themselves (and to recognize when it's time to run away). They will also learn to fight back against invaders and to become invaders themselves.
A number of people asked in the Dev blog discussion thread what reason alliances would have to squabble over territory when the income from R64 moons is getting nerfed. Well - this might be it. Outposts in 0.0 systems with stations will offer great rewards for the controlling alliance's players. Since CCP said they won't abandon the Truesec system, this fits perfectly. Also, as this upgrade would be conditioned by having an Outpost in the system, I think it will provide incentives to drop additional ones.
Making cash for cool stuff while slapping the enemy who is trying to do the same, what more do you need from Eve?
If you've managed to read this far, you certainly must have formed an opinion about this proposal and are invited to express it in a comment below - I'd like to hear about it.
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