Been Busy?

I have.

With my newfound corp mentors, I’ve had my nose to the grindstone, and it lead to two things:

1) Hitting 10 million ISK for the first time ever.  I know I’ll eventually reach a place where I pull this much down every night, or close to it,  but it was a milestone that I couldn’t help but be proud of.  ‘Course I ran right out and bought more skill books (only need one more of the second tier learning books now!) so I’m back down to 6 and change, but still.

2)After much gut wrenching decision making, I bought my  first cruiser:

No, you can't stop the Rhino/You can't take away what I know.

I named it Rhino, in part because it looks like one, in part because my kids are watching Bolt incessently (Rhino is the hamster in the bubbler – fearless), and also because its a great song by a long underappreciated band, The Buzzhorn.

I had every intention of buying a Thorax instead of the Vexor.  It could mine more, hit harder, and looks sweeter, but it was also alot more expensive.  And because of that, it fell beyond the principle of, “If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t buy it.”  It worked out well, as I have been able to kit the Vexor out to comparable mining levels, while loving its insane drone capacity.  Have I mentioned that I love drones?

Oh and did I mentioned I claimed my first cruiser kill as well?

Frigates that make you go boom!

So that’s all for now.  Expect the next post to be MMO Design related though…bwahahahaha—

EFT Causes Time Dilution…

Which is to say, I’d love to post, but this morning I downloaded the Eve Fitting Tool, and I spent all my lunch time today playing with it to try to decide what cruiser to buy, of the ones I can fly (Gallente).

Long story short, the Thorax rips the most ore out of the roids, but the Vexor can carry the most, while the Celestis would have the best anti-rat setup and the Exequror is a surprisingly good jack of all trades.

Jeez, this thing is addictive! I may have to uh, utilize the ol’ boss button this afternoon, if you know what I’m sayin’…

EVE: Turning Points

Well last night was a watershed night for me in EVE.  A couple of things happened that really solidified my playing experience and my time with my corp.

As you might remember, I was pondering switching corps to a subsidary of my current one that was smaller and geared more towards new players.  I had held off on that until my – “handler” I’ll call him, the corp leader overwatching me could gives some feedback on that decision.  But last night Origin Systems showed their true colors and strength for one of their newest members. 

It all started with yet another courier mission.  I’ve been doing a few missions each night, which, when added to salvage, has been netting me about 1 million ISK a night.  I got yet another mission requiring a low sec jaunt, but by now I’m pretty used to those.  The Tristan, tough as it is, is still a frigate, and thus hard to target, agile, fast, and quick to warp.  Unfortunately, this mission took me to the wrong system.  As I warped in to the one station in the system, I found a pair of blinking reds on my screen.  Fortunately I had warped to dock.  In the split second there, I managed to sneak a “Look At” and so that one of them was a Thorax or one of its variants.  It appeared to be fighting the other vessel, which I did not look at, so I figured I was safe to dart back out again a few minutes later, esp. since one of them was engaged in casual local chit-chat.  Unfortunately, that Thorax was apparently a Vigilant, and he somehow managed to lock me and pin me even as I was warping away.   Anyway, then he began to light me up with missle and blaster shots.  I think he thought he could wax me before I could get the timer down to redock, but in the famous words of Ron White, he was wwrronngg.  Back in the station, he tells me in local chat “2m and you can leave.”  Being the noob I am, I thought that meant 2 minutes, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on that required an egg timer of that variety.  Once it clicked though, I laughed at him.  That was just south of half my wallet, and nobody can stay on forever…

Meanwhile in Alliance chat, people are complaining about the lack of pew pew (see, I’m not a total noob, I know what that means!) so I mention, hey, if you’re bored…and they were.  Within ten minutes, I had a pretty belligerent gang a half dozen strong inbound from the warp gate.  No questions, no hesitation about my noobish status in the corp.  Just hard burning cavalry to the rescue action.  I felt like I was playing the old PnP Shadowrun RPG and I had just utilized the badass “summong gang” contact ability.  But unfortunately, there was no happy ending here.

I had noticed in local chat that one other guy there also had piss poor security status, and sure enough, he was an alliance mate.  I warned my inbounds,  that I didn’t know where he was or what he was flying.  Cue noob moment two, when my alliance mate calls out:  two reds on station, second is in a Chimaera, and I respond, well, you have him pretty well outnumbered.  The next line was laughter followed by a hotlink text informing me that this was a carrier, and showing me how much pew pew capital ships can dish out, especially against the T1 cruisers in my rescue party.  Some strategy was discussed, including brining in our own capital ships, but it ended up being a moot point.  My captor warped off station without warning, in the middle of taunting me in local no less.  I made a break for it under the carriers nose, my alliance saying it should be fine, unless he had smart bombs (the last scrolled onto my screen as I’m exiting the station, soliciting a naughty word from me).  But it was fine, and we all cleared the system safely.  Color me impressed with their response and help.

But the evening was young and later in corp chat, chewing the cud, it apparently sinks in just how new I am when it comes out that I’m saving for Learning Skill Books.  And my corpmate 2lost immediately puts 9 million ISK in my wallet.  Just like that!  In the process of thanking him, he indicates he’s suprised at how little I have.  And the final curtain on my noobishness rises.  Hes astounded that I’ve been mining in a frigate and mission running, and spends the next half hour giving me great advice.

Long story short, use the money to buy a cruiser and the skill for it, fit it with mining lasers, use my mad drones skills for defense, and cut down considerably on the amount of time needed to raise the money for skill books.

Boy do I feel lame.  But he is as gracious as can be, asking only that I pass it on to other noobs in due time.  No problems there!  To cap it all off, he tells me he’ll haul a couple of T2 mining lasers from the corp hanger to me (my only remaining urk-point – I still have no access even to the rookie hanger).

So my skills are training, and tonight, it looks like I’ll have my very first shiny new cruiser.  The only question is….which one?

Thanks 2lost, Origin Systems, and my to my alliance mates.  You saved my bacon in more ways than one, and helped me to have more fun in the game than I was having.  Could a gamer ask for anything more?

Saying Goodbye

Shadowbane was the great gaming paradox for me.

I saw the Shadowbane farewell post.  And I was sad.  I didn’t stay long in the game, though I achieved the highest level I ever have in an MMO in it – not that that meant anything in SB, where I once leveled from 40 to 50 in one evening of casual play.

Shadowbane was the first to offer me a character class that I positively fell in love with.  It was the first and so far only fantasy MMO to allow players to fully customize their character.  Let that sink in for a moment!  It is difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that the only game that allows you to be an axe wielding wizard will no longer exist.  And more importantly, that there is no replacement in sight.

But therein lies the paradox of Shadowbane.  It offered so much – complete customization, player created cities, lore-based servers and guilds (an RP’ers dream!), and what was effectively a linear advancement system.  But none of those amazing things that it offered really made it a home run PvP game.  In fact, I would argue that those things instead offered a tantalizing glimpse of what a PvE game should *really* look like!

So these neat things were almost completely lost on the hardcore PvP crowd that Shadowbane targeted for their player base.  More than that, the PvP nature of the game almost completely negated all of those unique gem-like qualities that it did possess.  Character customization was something I deeply desired as a player, but in practice never got to utilize because only certain builds were approved by your guild, and everything else was labeled “gimp.”  I’ll never forget the time I got caught with a wand better than the baseline one, and the ensuing firestorm that resulted from the fact that I had dared to place advancement points into a “worthless” skill that was outside the accepted build.

And what good is a linear progression that negates the endgame emphasis in a game that for PvP purposes requires endgame progression to play effectively!

So in the paradox of Shadowbane, PvP players showed up only to find themselves in a custom kitted PvE world, while PvE players either passed completely on what was advertised as a PvP game, or were completely frustrated in what little time they might have spent there.

Of course, I’m ignoring all the technical difficulties – the continual balancing issues and fixes that created an orobouros of rather large proportions, the immense game world filled with…nothing, the mechanics so skewed to group play that the only way to effectively solo was to dual box.

All that aside, I’m still sad.  I hope somebody manages to snag a copy of the code and set up a private server.  I wish I had the know how to do just that and turn it PvE.  But I don’t, so the best I can do is save a copy of the Morloch wiki and maybe one day find a way to pay respect to the good of the game through a personal project.  (Speaking of, is there some way to save a copy of the whole wiki without going page by page?  Yes, I know, I’m a packrat…)

As a goodbye tour, I will be logging in to Shadowbane occasionally over the next week until the power down, probably with my wizard Ars Moriendi, roaming around and causing trouble (on the Lore server, where else?).   Drop me a line if you want to duel or team up.

Farewell, Children of Aerynth.

Check the Rhythm of the Flavor I Wrote…

ETA: And while I get a chance here…let me clear this up.  I realized when reading some blogs this evening that someone else had the same title for their same EVE blog entry on the same day.  So…I’m changing mine.  (-:

So anytime I get out of the rhythm of MMO’s, its hard to get back in.  And that was true of EVE this weekend.  Having been out except for minor check ins for nearly a week, I was starting to second guess myself.

My CoW approved Corporation was clearly much bigger and much deeper into the game than I was, especially in the realm of Alliances, PvP, and all that jazz.  I spent most of my minimal log in time catching up on Corp/Ally in game mails and learning what terms like “nrds” meant.  And at the time my Corp was basically on a weapons free policy – shoot it unless its blue (what is that in EVE terms:  siuib?).  I was starting to feel overwhelmed.  And then it dawned on me that my missions here would be in Minmatar space – and I saw my dreams of a Navy Issue Megathron start to crumble.  On top of that, I got sent three fairly general EveMon skill plans only to realize that all of them called for the second tier learning skills – all of which run 4-5 million a piece, money I didn’t have yet.  Should I put all my money to buying them?  Start training anyway?  How much time would I have to waste?  How long would it take me to get to the 15 million I would need, and what if I lost a ship between here and there?  Especially if my Corp expected me to be running low sec patrols in my Tristan.

Well, the good news is that I bought the game box locally so I have two months of  time.  So I figured I needed to see this through.  I started looking at the Minmatar faction ships and concluded they were uglier even than I had previously remembered.   But it did get me excited again.  I love the ships in EVE, even the ugly ones, for they have their place in the universe too.

And then once I logged in I see that the diplomatic ties have forced us into less aggressive, aforementioned “nrds” stance.  My first though was “whew!” and my second thought was, “oh man, Vasov is *not* going to be happy.”

And finally I see an email that one of my Corps subsidiary corporations is smaller, newer, looking for new people, and with a cherry on top, an RP corp.  I haven’t put in for a tranfser yet, but it gave me something to chew on, especially since they are based back in Gal space (with dreams of Megathrons dancing in my head…).

So, suitably encouraged, I began a multi hour romp of mission running.  I’m sure these will get old as I do them all repeatedly, and I’ll move into more PvP…errr “pew pew” play styles, along with a more aggressive industry stance, but it was fun.  The romp even included my first ever dip into low-sec space!

I took a screen shot (will post later) to commemorate the moment, and I realized how important one bit of advice I had been given was - never use a ship you can’t afford to replace completely.  I knew, noob as I was though, that I could replace the Tristan and its gear with ease from my still limited stash, and so I dove in head first.  I did encounter a blinky read battleship that put my heart in my throat, until I realized that he was 90km off in a staring contest with another battleship, this one bearing that familiar and comforting blue color.

I pulled a couple of courier missions and was starting to wonder if it was worth it when I got one about culling some Angel Cartel ships.   Well now, this was more my style.  I hopped one system over to the encounter…and promptly got my ass handed to me.  I warped out with about 40% of my hull intact.  Warping back to my home base, I did some research and realized that perhaps it was time to upgrade from Civilian Shield Boosters x2 in my medium slots.  Wow, haha, yeah….

I made some changes with what existing equipment I could grab and decided to give it one more go.  I had managed to drop a second frigate before I warped out, so the odds were down to like 6 or 7 to one.  There was really too much red to count.

I got back in and had a little more success, warping out this time at least with some armor shreds in place and 3 less frigates to worry about.  I began to wonder what kits I needed against Angels.  Anti EM?  That was really the only weak part of my scheme at the moment….anyway a few minutes along in a deadspace semi-safe (I gather they’re really only safe with a cloak) space repping my hull and armor, and I dove back in again.

2 more frigates and a…huh, I’ve never seen that before.  Right click, Look at.  Holy moses, how many turrets is that!  Is that a…?  Yes, that is what I think it is.  My very first encounter with a destroyer.  So I remember from Vasov’s blog where he took one on in PvP  a few weeks ago to stay calm, get in close, and stay close.  I also realized this was why those frigates had been hitting me so hard – this guy had been standing on the back line throttling me the whole time.

A few minutes of fancy manuevering and dumb AI later, I had taken out another frigate while keeping some space between me and the last two reds.  I decided to salvage the wrecks closest to me and see if I could draw the destroyer to me.  It worked.  I had him one on one now.  I sent the Tristan in full bore,  and watched with some suprise as my first Sabretooth blew a hefty chunk of his shield into nothingness.  I only later learned that the Thrasher was actually less well armored than my Tristan, even without the nanofiber plates I was packing.  I manage to get in to 1300m before he danced away, but he armor was already suffering at that point, and I stayed as close in as I could.  It was over quickly.

It took me awhile to get all the salvage together, despite having trained another level of my skill to hopefully reduce the number of sweeps needed.  But it was worth it.  When I docked up that night, I was a million ISK richer.

One down, fourteen or so to go!

Wizard 102

So the weekend was pretty busy around here.  Family comes to town for Easter, which in my case means inlaws of all shapes and sizes including a total of ten guests, six adults and four kids (triplet nieces/nephews who are two years old, wake up early, and are into everything)!  So not much chance to stay up late or to play EVE since my desktop is in the office which is doubling as an extra bedroom for the weekend.

So that me to giving Wizard 101 a second chance.  And I did like it better the second time around.  I have some frustrations, but overall, its a nice little time diverter, and since it works well on my crappy laptop, it gets to stay awhile.  Can’t really decide on doing a Conjurer with Death as a secondary or a Necromancer with a Balance secondary.  Meh, DMD again.

It would easily be the second except that Death doesn’t get its first minion until 28, and heaven knows I probably won’t be playing that game that much.

I’m still not seeing the deck construction thing though, but maybe I’m just used to the sophisticated intricacies of M:tG in its heyday.  More than anything, I have to shake my head at how ga-ga everyone is over the cards that boost damage output on the next spell – aka, the Trap cards, and more specific ones like Feint.  Simply put, unless I’m crunching the numbers wrong, you are better off casting a spell than a booster,especially if you have a good wand handy (wands generally give 0-cost, 100% hit damage spells, and those spells are above and beyond your deck).

Odd.

Anyway, hope everyone had a good Easter.  Me, I’m just glad to finally have my house and my compy back…

And Then, The Silence…

And now we have lost the other Creator, Dave Arneson.

A good omen for MMO Designers everywhere.

Who will carry the torch for us now?  At one time, I had high hopes for Monte Cook, but over time those have dwindled.

Certainly the Open Gaming movement, gave us many rising stars, but none who are real icons like Gygax and Arneson were.  And don’t even get me started on the wholesale rape of the gaming community that was Hasbro and WotC’s apparent plan from the beginning.  Someday soon someone will take them to court and knock down the house of cards they built.  And the easiest way of doing that would be to revert to the original version of the OGL, publish 4th edition material, and watch them squirm and wiggle…

But I digress.  Maybe the next great wave of game designers will come from the world of MMO’s.  Someone to really open the imaginations of a new generation, to become a Creator in the way those two were.  Until then, may your creativity, hopes, and dreams guide you, in the path you should go on.

Bonus Points:  Anyone know what’s happening with Game Chef this year?  Its about that time, but nothings up on the site.  Or anyone know of any current 24hourRPG game challenges going on right now?

Wizard 101 casts “Sleep”, achieves Critical Success.

So last night, after I get the kids to bed, I come tromping downstairs, anxious to strap into my ship and began the long haul to the nearest corporate office and my new home base for operations.

And I find my wife in the office, work laptop up and running.  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ve got to work tonight.”  We have family coming in for Easter this weekend, and her boss dumped a  truckload of reports on her, and life is easier if she can use the big monitor to see all the information rather than cramming it on a 15″ screen (note to businesses: buy 17″ laptops for the sake of your employees’ sanity).

I’m understanding, but now I’m in limbo.  I have a laptop, but it doesn’t run much.  Okay, well, it doesn’t run anything except WoW, and that ship has sailed, despite a few friends nagging me to re-up again this week.  So I talk to my brother for awhile on the phone, who has called wanting to LotRO, and like me, is disappointed that we won’t get to play.  And I talk to an old friend who tells me he and his daughter have been playing Wizard101.  Now I’ve heard mixed reviews from the blogging community, but I wonder if, being kid-friendly as it is, it will run on my half dead laptop (1.6ghz, 512 ram, 32mb ATI).   Turns out from the FAQ that it will, though I will need half of my remaining hard drive space to do so.  Well…why not?  Especially since they promise I can be playing within 2 minutes and the rest will download in the background.  Now that is a nifty feature, so I’m in.

I read the guide, decide I’ll try a Conjuror and/or a Necromancer.  Being a sucker for a good Necro class, I pick one over the objections of the little quiz you take.  And I think, this will be cool.  I played alot of Magic the Gathering in my early years, and still have a half dozen well-polished decks that I occassionally pull out to mop the floor of these kids decks today (sadly, the great art of creative deck construction seems to be lost on them).  And I see on the main page that Tipa from West Karana  is quoted as saying that deck construction is muy cool, or something to that effect.  And Tipa knows her stuff, so I’m excited to try it out.

Folks, I never even finished the tutorial.  I literally was nodding off during the first fight.  Now, I’m going to give the game the benefit of the doubt and try it again at some point (especially since its A – free, and B – able to be played on my laptop).  But I have to say, I’ve never nodded off in a game before, unless it was WoW or EQOA at 3am and I’d already logged 5+ hours and was desperately trying to grind something before I passed out.  And this was 11pm-ish, and I am the quintessential nighthawk.

I think that owl may be the culprit.  If he says “whoooo” in response to a question one more time, I may go rogue like the main villain whats-his-face.

Also, just to throw it out there, while I like the hybrid RMT/Subscription policies they have set up, as well as the family plan, which allows for great flexibility and affordability, I have no idea why the subscription would hold value over the RMT for anyone planning playing long term.  Is there something I’m missing on that?  I imagine that’s one reason why the hybrid model is not being used much, despite its practical applications for appealing to a broad base of people.

When In Doubt, Buy a Bigger Ship

At least, thats’ what I did.  I’ve been planning the move to a new system for about a week now, knowing I wanted to head near Corp offices to be more accessible to those who could provide help and to get away from the starter areas.  After a brief check with a fellow CoW  to make sure I had the right system, it was time to finally do the packing.

Originally I was going to pack my best frigate and whatever percentage of my best items I could fit into the Iteron that I got in the tutorial arcs, sell the rest, and be at peace.  But the problem is that I’ve got DMD.  Decision-making disorder.  I’m the guy that when you ask him, “hey, where you wanna eat at,” goes into fits and buries his head between his legs.  Yeah, I know, hell of a problem to have in a game like Eve. 

So I ran into problems almost immediately.  I wanted to haul the refined ore that I had since my guild (err…corporation) had said something about T1 ships at material cost/you-bring-the-materials deal.  And I wanted to hang on to my mining frigate, despite having a 5 run blueprint lying around for it.   And I had run a mining trip where the Iterons mere 3,000 m3 capacity was chafing me.  But Iterons have the advantage of coming in incremental marks, and a quick check showed me that I could be in a Mark III without too much trouble, and without much in the way of cost once I sold the two Mark I’s I would get from the tutorial arcs.

Course it  took me longer than I thought it would, in part because I had a DMD attack halfway through the 5 jump run to buy the Mark III, because I realized in scanning the market that the Mark IV wasn’t any more expensive.  I’d probably still be sitting out there in limbo space if I hadn’t finally realized that the armor and structure and shields of the IV are much lower than the III, and I’m not wily veteran enough to be doing that kinda stuff yet.

But by the time I had packed everything up (the Mark III + 3 Expanded Cargohold I = just shy of 10,000 m3) I had already drawn baby and wife aggro (in that order) and decided that I would have to make the 15 jump move to my new digs later on.  Soon, oh so soon, I will be ready to rock…by which I mean starting the procees to get my first cruiser.

Holy Moses!

I was watching History channel the other day, that Battle 360 show about the Pacific Theatre (they are doing a Patton 360 this Friday, be sure to tune in if you dig that sort of thing, looks like it will be good), and they were talking about when US Navy pilots were issued the first High Velocity Aircraft Rockets for their Hellcats.   As I understand it, the 5 inch HVAR got its nickname from its initial use, wherein a pilot fired it off, saw it hit, and exclaimed “holy moses!”

And I had a kinship with that pilot, because that was about my reaction when I fired off my first missle in EVE the other night, from my brand new Tristan.

The Tristan, aka "Little Fat Man"

Now I thought the Punisher was a nice battle frigate, but it was worth every penny I spent to skill myself minimally on rockets and missles to put the Tristans launcher points to use.  I jumped out of my chair a little when the first missle leapt off its no-graphic launch point (note: personal pet peeve) and raced out towards the soon to be dead pirate.  And I swear the sound effect is sampled from the RPG launch effects in Red Dawn.

This student is clearly a fan of passive tanking options.

I’m not entirely sure that I’m doing any more damage with that launcher than I would be with, say, another railgun, but it certainly *feels* more impressive. 

Anyway, I’ve finished the 30 mission arc that I was working my way through, since I activated my pre Apoc NPE character, and now its time to go join a corp and start making my way through that epic mission arc I suppose.

Oh, and I am insanely jealous of The Common Sense Gamer’s unexpected reception of a faction battleship!  Hey D, you wanna pay it forward to a rookie, here’s your chance!  (-;