Archives for March 2006

Daddy’s got a new ship

March 10, 2006 by Tony 6 Comments

Well, I’m still learning things the hard way. I’m not exactly sure purchasing a new ship (A Minmatar Wreathe) was exactly the smartest thing to do. It was the old “spend money to make money” situation, but I spent money to get money that was initially mine. Either way, this new ship is a beast. It comfortably holds my old Probe in its cargo holds with room to spare. It looks like a locomotive. Unfortunately, it runs like one, too. This thing is SLOW. But, I’ve been interested in exploring some of the industrial and manufacturing aspects of EVE and this ship should suit my purposes for now.

I’m currently on my way to deliver the cargo for the mission that I unwittingly got myself involved with that started this whole mess. It’s been an enlightening experience.

Please, kids, learn from my mistakes.

Update: This is what I’ve been waiting to see:

Now I can breathe a sigh of relief and warp to my home base. 37 jumps away. Sheesh.

Carnival updates

March 8, 2006 by Tony Leave a Comment

I know we just had March’s Carnival, but the Carnival never rests. I’ve updated the Carnival HQ Page, listing the next few hosts of the Carnival. The Carnival’s next stop will be at n3rfed, hosted by the excellent Cosmik. Originally, unbeliever from MMODIG was going to co-host this Carnival, but other commitments have taken precedence so Cosmik will be hosting solo. Hopefully we’ll have MMODIG back in the queue of hosts soon.

I’m planning on hosting the May Carnival, since that will be the one-year mark for the Carnival. Should be a lot of fun.

Auto Assault

March 8, 2006 by Tony 11 Comments

Has anyone played this yet? I received a Beta Code, but having just started up EVE, I don’t know if I have time to try another MMOG or not. I’ve been interested in Auto Assault for a while, so I may still give it a try, but I wanted to hear if any of you faithful readers have given it a try.

Since I have EVE on the Lappy, I could always put AA on the main PC. Whoa. Two MMOGs playing at once. That may go way beyond nerdcore. That’s uncharted territory.

(PS – That shirt? I want that!)

Learning the ropes, the hard way…

March 7, 2006 by Tony 14 Comments

So things in EVE are starting to pick up. Problem is, I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing. There is an endless amount of information out there, I just haven’t taken the time to read any of it. I’m simply winging it right now. It has lead to some tough lessons. Two examples:

After having my fill of “Fed-Ex” courier missions, I decided to branch out and try my hand (and my ship) at a little space combat. One of my contacts had just what I was looking for — a Minmatar scout had his ship destroyed by some pirates in a region of dead space near the current base. This called for swift retribution, which I had been recruited for. The mission was simple: Destroy the leaders habitation and take out any pirates who got in the way. I was also told to leave the rest of their installation intact. No problem, nice and straightforward.

I head out to the area and locate the target. It was quite a distance a way, and there was a group of three pirates between us. I dispatched with them with impunity and headed to my target. Off to my right (or starboard, I’m not to sure about spacecraft jargon) was a group of more pirates, about ten of them. They were about a 100 klicks away, so I figured they’d ignore me. I locked on to my target and started blasting away. My little pea-shooter blasters were doing very little damage to the habitation. It was slow going and in the meantime, the pirates had taken an interest in me. Before I knew it, they had closed the gap and all had my targeted and were unloading their arsenal on me with abandon. I threw up shield booster and tried to warp out of there, but I didn’t have enough power to warp. They had taken my shields down completely, perforated my armor to nothing and were currently working on my structure when the warp drive kicked in and I flew outta there like some kind of bat. I made it back to the station with about 11 HP of structure left, nothing else. That was close. Phew. I would have been really screwed because I skimped on the insurance and would have been without a ship if they had taken me down. I repaired my ship, headed back and took out the pirates before I took out my target. It was a lesson learned.

I then decided to take it easy on the combat missions since my current Frigate isn’t really built for battle. Me contacts told me I could check any available missions from any station, so I decided to check those out. There are a ton of missions I could do. I picked one that seemed reasonably easy to do. The reward was 100k ISK for a simple pickup and drop off. No prob. It never is.

In EVE, whenever you take on a mission, they take “escrow” from you as a form of collateral that you’ll actually do the mission. For all the missions up until now, the amount of escrow was small, on the order of a few thousand ISK. Well, this mission’s escrow was 2 million ISK! I about crapped my pants when I looked at my bank account and I only had 80k in there. HUH?! This was not good. I needed to finish this mission ASAP and get my money back. So I look at the mission and set up my destination. It was 29 jumps away! I have my routing figure the safest path, so I turned off that and it would still be 21 jumps, going through some low security areas. So I switched it back and when on my way. It takes over a minute to do each jump, so it took my over half an hour, real time, to get to my destination.

I get there, locate my cargo and then my heart sinks again. My current ship has cargo space for 330 m3. The cargo I’m supposed to deliver is 1100 m3. Screwed! So I have three days to earn enough money from mining to buy a bigger ship to haul this crap away to make a lousy 100k (and get my 2mil back). In the end it actually works out okay, because I was getting back into the market for another ship anyway and I think the new ship I have my eye on will allow me to mine like a madman.

So I’m slowly figuring out the ropes. Slowly being the operative word. So while I’m mining tonight I’ll be reading up on anything I can find about EVE Online. I’ve got to be prepared for the wild world of EVE!

I am nerdcore

March 5, 2006 by Tony 4 Comments

On the TV: Halo 2, playing some Action Sack on Live.

On the laptop: EVE-Online, making mining runs in between rounds of Halo 2.

On the brain: Blogging about how much of a geek I am.

Carnival time updated

March 1, 2006 by Tony 5 Comments

… is almost here. Get your last minute submissions into the Prognosticator before tonight.

Update: Hmmm, we’re still waiting… Hopefully it won’t be too long.

Another Update: The Carnival has been posted! Looks like a few of the entries were omitted, but I’m not sure if that was the hosts choice or if there was a miscommunication (I let the prognosticator know about the missing entries). Either way, check it out!

More: Some of the submissions were relegated to Spam purgatory, so the Prog. has located the missing entries and will be updating the Carnival. I”m outta here for the night. Enjoy!

Digg the Carnival!

Virtual billboards

March 1, 2006 by Tony 5 Comments

So most gamers hate the idea of advertising in games. Me, I’m okay with it, if it fits into the game without me noticing. I’d be upset if I saw a Pepsi banner flying from a flagpole in Guild Wars. It doesn’t fit. If I happened to pass by one of the floating animated billboards in EVE Online sporting a Pepsi ad, I don’t think it’d bother me. Especially if the ad was done in a way to “fit” into the world of EVE. You know, a futuristic looking font spelling out “Pepsi: The choice of the Minmatar generation.” I think I’d be okay with that.

After reading this Business Week article (ignore the mostly irrelevant title), it looks like I’m not alone:

In American Wasteland, from gamemaker Activision Inc., for example, Jeep learned that all players were shown the 3-D vehicles an average of 23 times in 20 minutes. And 96% of those who recalled seeing the Jeep felt the vehicles fit well in the game. Feedback even more welcome to Jeep: 51% of American Wasteland players, including some not yet driving, said they would recommend Jeep to a friend, and 65% would consider eventually buying one.

I’m no marketer, but you don’t have to be to interpret those kind of numbers. American Wasteland needs cars in the street. There’s nothing wrong with making them realistic looking Jeeps (full disclosure – I own a Jeep and love it). In this case, it fits. The Jeep isn’t out of place.

Here’s the rub I have — if Jeep is going to pay to have its products placed in a game, that effectively increases the budget of the developer and publisher of the game. Simple mathematics would mean that the game would cost less to produce, a savings that could be passed on to the customer. They could even give us a choice – pay $39.99 for the ad-supported version of the game or $49.99 for the “pure” version. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that. I know I wouldn’t.

Of course, this won’t happen. But I am ever the optimist.

I still heart Bloglines

March 1, 2006 by Tony 1 Comment

If I’d actually been paying attention to the Blogline News feed, I would have known about this sooner, but Bloglines has been slowly adding features. Elliott mentioned that the icons had received a face lift and as I was editing my subscriptions tonight, I noticed they had implemented drag and drop with their folders. A nice touch. There haven’t been a ton of enhancements on the outside, but for a free service, Bloglines is still my RSS feed reader of choice. I’m in the progress of pruning my subscriptions, there’s just too many to keep track of. The drag and drop and other features are quite helpful.

On the topic of feeds, I’ve updated my Feedburner feed to also integrate my del.icio.us bookmarks (which currently aren’t many) and my newly opened Buttonmashing Flickr account. You can grab the feed here:

Click here if you want to import it directly into Bloglines:

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