Mashing buttons since 1984
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!)
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 m
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!
Related Posts
EVE Online Impressions
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.
… 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!
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.
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:
Well, I’m currently in the middle of a mission in EVE and I’ve got a five-star gate jump to make, so now would be a good time to post some of my impressions of EVE Online.
That’s right. I’m blogging my impressions of EVE as I’m experiencing them. I’m hardcore like that. EVE is hands-off like that. (For now, I hope)
To be honest, I don’t know what to think about EVE yet. The game world is HUGE. I don’t think I’ve ever played in a game with so much real estate. I’m no astronaut, but if I was, I bet this is what space feels like. The game itself seems like it is very complex. The beginner tutorial took me about two hours to finish and I feel like I barely scratched the surface. The gameplay could probably be done without any graphics (TW2002!) but that would be a shame. The game is gorgeous.
Actual game play so far has been a mixed bag. Traveling has been boring, and there’s nothing you can do to make it any better (at least that I know of). You simply select your destination, hit auto-pilot, and you can walk away. I understand that when I start traveling in low security zones that I’ll have to be aware of my surroundings, but for now I simply chart my paths to be as safe as possible. Actual playing is a funny thing — other than the mission I’m currently doing, I’ve just been mining asteroids, which means I am not really doing anything. I warp to an asteroid belt, pick out a couple asteroids and I start mining. It takes me a few minutes to fill up my holds and then I go back to base, drop it off, rinse and repeat. The tutorial showed me how to do missions, but for I’ve mainly concentrated on mining and I’ve racked up a decent amount of ISK (EVE currency). I’ve already bought a new ship and am earning toward another one. It sounds boring, but I’m occupying myself with other things (blogging) while I’m mining. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment and enjoyment, but I can’t explain it. The buttonWife think it’s lame that I say I’m playing a game that I’m not really playing, but I’m liking it so far.
Leveling up is another interesting thing. You don’t gain experience for doing anything. You just pick a skill and you train it. Then after a certain period of time, you gain the next level in that skill. So right now, I’m training for level 4 mining. I started it Saturday night and I should finish training it tonight. Training goes on, even if you’re not playing. I like that idea. It’s the grind without the grindstone.
All that being said, there’s a huge amount I haven’t experienced, but of the little I have, I like it. I’ll keep playing, giving it a couple weeks worth of trying it out. The weird thing is, if my laptop died tomorrow, I wouldn’t have a problem with walking away from EVE. It hasn’t gripped me yet. I’m going to give it some time, but we’ll see.
The EVE Online client. Deep down, I’m really hoping it’s a 21st century incarnation of TradeWars 2002, a game I loved to play on my local BBSes. Here’s to hoping!
Update: Why is picking a character name the hardest part of making a new character?
More:: Too tired to update much more. Finished the tutorial (LONG). Game looks amazing — there’s a lot to like, some things that I’m not too sure about, and traveling in this game is not exactly what I thought it would be. I fell asleep on the way home from my last mission. More later…
Flickr is fun, because you find things like this that make you laugh.
Some of the people I play Halo 2 would definitely medal in “CryBabying”. (Zing!)
(Update: After reading AFKGamer’s Flickr post, I decided to setup a Buttonmashing Flickr account so I don’t have to clutter my personal Flickr account with my gaming detritus)
Okay, that was weak.
I’ve decided to take the EVE Online plunge this weekend. I’m going to download the client sometime tomorrow and then give the game a whirl for the two week trial. I’ve long resisted paying a monthly fee for a game (even though I did it with Neocron), but I’ve already learned to justify it, if I decide to play past the two week freebie. If I buy a game a every couple months, that’s at least fifty bucks I’m dropping on a regular basis. If EVE is as good as I think it might be, it would only be forty bucks every three months, actually saving me money because I’m not buying other games. Yeah, that’s the ticket! EVE Online is a like a computer game coupon! The buttonWife will be so happy with all the money I’ll be saving!
I’m thinking about putting the game on the laptop, since I’ve heard there can be stretches of downtime while you’re doing certain things, so I want to free up the main PC while I’m playing. Then I can work on “The Queue” while I’m playing EVE. That blows my mind, man!
So if any of you buttonMashers have any tips/comments/suggestions (like “RUN! Don’t download this game!”) let me know. If you’re looking for someone to game with, drop me a line and I’ll look you up once I get in the game. I’m looking forward to it.