EVE That Was

EVE has been occupying my idle moments lately.  That's good, and bad.  Well before the 85% post, I was pondering things, and dark thoughts flitted in and out of my head.  Upon close inspection, these thoughts would evaporate; I could not force them to congeal into a concise position.  But yet the feeling of unease lingered, and the comfort that I sought was elusive.  I've felt like I've been fighting a blanket that's too small on a cold winter night.  The cold keeps creeping back in.

And that's why, when Neville's 85% post hit, I jumped on it with both feet.

And yet, with time, that single post doesn't quite keep me warm at night either.

Oddly enough, it was mowing the lawn that I think has finally caused a breakthrough.  Mowing, me, and EVE go way back.  At the old house, in the summers of 2003 and 2004, I'd have to afk for an hour every Saturday so that I could go push the mower around our postage stamp in the subdivision.  During that hour, I'd hatch plans and create a mental map of all that I needed to do and all the folks I needed to contact when I returned to my comfortable chair.

Today, as regular readers know, we own 10 acres and I mow between 2 and 4 acres of it depending on the week.  Yesterday I was plotzing around on the Deere, and I happened to think of EVE in the early days, and those Saturdays long ago at the old address and how energizing that time was.  EVE was a central focus, mowing was a chore but a mental break (chainsaw therapy) that I needed to step back and look at the game strategically.

So, yesterday, I began thinking about the game in its infancy - May and June of 2003.  The feelings I had then for the game and the feelings I have today are so distinct that it feels like two very different game titles.  That's not to say one is better than the other - they're just different.  Imagine meeting your dad when he was in his 30s and interacting with him as a peer and contrast that to the father you know today in his 50s or 60s. These two individuals are the same man, but are probably very different people in terms of experience, intensity, interests, and perhaps even temperament/demeanor. Your own role as son/daughter vs. peer plays a role in how your interactions shape up - and that's similar in a way to how you approach EVE today as a returning bittervet or a noob undocking for the first time.  Your expectations and approach are different.

I think it's safe to say that the EVE of yesterday appeals to my soul better.  There's no way I can go back and relive those early days, so this is a moot thing to type about, but while the EVE of today is better in almost every way, I miss the crusty and simple aspects of the game of 2003.  I've known this for awhile, but on the mower I again realized that trying to recapture that feeling of the early days is what makes me continue to sub up.

Lately I've not been productive isk-wise or progress wise.  I've just been touring the highsec systems and regions and have been doing things more randomly; docking at different stations, visiting old systems, and just looking at the skeleton of the game that I know is still there.  I found my favored space-taxi (Amarr Navy Slicer) and popped through random gates without the shackles of using autopilot to plot my jump route.  I went to regions that I used to frequent as part of my trade routes and space trucker empire but no longer have a viable business need to visit.  I checked out some highsec citadels, visited some moons and asteroid belts, and looked at a sky that was Caldari blue.  I'd missed it.

The next 2 weeks are going to be a blur with work and Big Dumb Ride prep, but I'm hopeful that after the dust settles and summer takes hold, I'll be able to devote more time to investigate the EVE-that-was that's still within the EVE-that-is.

I say things like "more time for EVE soon" quite a bit... but one of these days, I'm going to be right. :)

One Man's Junk is Another Man's Capital Propulsion Engine

So, a few days back I posted about my general malaise (oooh, good word) and wanting to find a better way to interact with the game.

Folks here commented with some great ideas, and I'm looking at how to put some of them into practice.  Plans range from short, to medium, to very long.  The past few days have been very, very good.

But I still needed to kick start SOMETHING, else I'm basically doing a whole lot of thinking and planning and not so much actually doing.

So I started by clearing my lvl4 mission hanger.  It was full of ... crap.  There were so many stacks it literally wouldn't accept any more.  Out of the hanger came about 460M isk worth of sell orders.  When those begin to move, I have another 500M or so to put up, and maybe a 3rd round behind that.  I melted other lesser modules by the stack full.  The results of that went into my Tayra.  Which, by the way, I still call a Badger II, dammit.  I had never owned a Badger II until very recently on a whim, though my wife drove one all over the map back in the day. And across the map I went with my melted space junk, feeling a bit nostalgic.

I set out just wanting to put the raw materials into my factory station, as a way to make my inventory just a touch cleaner.  I got there, merged my new melted space junk with my existing stash, looked at my old stash of BPOs, and realized that I could make some quick isk by building.  All I needed was a touch of trit, zyd, and mega.

I used to build quite a bit.  Ships, mostly, but also capship parts and rigs.  Later, I built capship parts piecemeal as a way to filter my incidental mining content through the factory and add a bit of isk/hr to my mining yield.  More recently I've cashed out loyalty points into ship BPCs and sold off a bunch of Asteros and Stratiosi.

Today I'm a mission runner, tomorrow I may be running FW, but in my core I'm still a space trucker and spaceship builder.  In order to move forward, sometimes you need to look back.  I left my BPO stash in place at my last factory system; I think I'll make something useful from my accumulated crap, sell it, and see what I want to build next.

The Vocal Minority

Customers have departed, but I am exhausted.  So I'll write another good ol' days post while I rest up a little.

I've never written about the first collapse of Pukin' Dogs with the amount of detail contained below.  There may be 1 or 2 old Dogs reading this that may learn a few tidbits that they'd never really known.  Of course, it all happened over 10 years ago, so they may not even remember. :)

-----

At the end of yesterday's post, I had taken us to the point of EVE launch, the shenanigans of opening weekends, and the establishment of Pukin' Dogs Corp.

What evolved was a reasonably close knit group of folks from the US and UK that played mostly in highsec in the north parts of the map (Caldari, Amarr zones).  We were not rich, or powerful, but as a group we had enough depth of industry, loot drops, and hauling to be nearly self sufficient.

But as the weeks wore on, I noticed that we were struggling a bit.  Many from the original crew were beginning to burn out and leave.  Those graybeards that stayed were pushing me, via public and private convos, to push out of our comfort zone and establish ourselves as a "world power" i.e. to get into null politics.  To them, it was time to grow up and move to the "endgame" that the galaxy had to offer.

The Early Days

I have a customer (and longtime friend and former coworker) in town this week.  That's meant long days at the office talking through very important office politics and going out to dinner every night like we're 27 years old (although when I was 27, I didn't have the money to go out every night.... but whatever).

Instead of logging into the game tonight, I'll work on this post.

----
Like most characters born in early 2003, my employment history is all jacked up.  It begins with my time in VentureCorp [VNTR], and omits my time in the noobcorp (about 3wks) after launch, as well as my initial ~18mo stint as CEO of Pukin' Dogs.

Abavus was born on 2003.05.10 00:52:00 (May 9th US eastern), a few hours more than 3 days after EVE's original launch of 06 May.

EVE launched on a Tuesday.  There were server burps and other issues.  I had played beta and preordered a copy of the game, but this was well before the notion of launch-day-delivery and download on demand was more or less a pipe dream.

Can't Stop the Signal

Massively officially shut down today, but here's the spot where the refugees are landing:

For those who missed it:
We're starting fresh as Massively Overpowered.
We'll be at http://www.massivelyop.com -- it's not up yet, but when it is, mailing list.
Kickstarter soon.
https://twitter.com/MassivelyOP
https://www.facebook.com/massivelyop


Can't stop the signal!
By breetoplay

 Looking forward to it.

Edit:  Looks like some of the WoW insider guys landed here:  http://blizzardwatch.com/

Massively is Shutting Down

Yesterday I read the news that Massively was shutting down, as well as the sister sites Joystiq and WoW Insider.  This made me sad.

In years past, these sites were the first I visited in the morning and the last I visited at night.  During my WoW heyday, the Insider (and MMO Champ) were the centers of the proverbial universe.  Articles published there spawned great nerd debates in corp/guild chat, and around the printer at work (we don't have a water cooler in the main room).  Although my time at WoW Insider has since subsided, my browser says that Massively is still in my top 8 sites every time I open a new tab.

Massively's coverage of EVE was sometimes hit or miss, but during my times away from New Eden, it was the coverage at Massively that kept me in touch with the major events as they unfolded.  It was Massively and WoW Insider I had on my RSS feeds at work.  It was Massively and WoW insider that I checked on the phone during meetings.

Along a similar line, I'm going to have to figure out how to keep tabs on the useful GW2 news now.

Good luck to the Massively staff.  If there's a silver lining in this, it's my hope that the writers will relocate somewhere new, free of corporate jerks.

Throwback Backgrounds Set #1

Christmas 2007, I was lucky enough to get a 30 inch Dell monitor that ran at 2560x1600.  I'm still staring at it right now, many thousands of hours of use later.

At the time, there were very few backgrounds available for that big resolution.  I set out to make a set of EVE-releated backgrounds.  I posted them on forums, but the links are of course long gone.

I figured I'd re-release them, just because.

Edit:  They don't seem to be coming through blogger at full resolution; I'll fiddle a bit.

Some disclaimers:

1. The gfx engine has changed quite a bit since 2007; some of these are old models and old textures.
2. They were intended to be minimalistic at the time.  Some of them probably haven't aged well.
3. The ship selection represented what I was flying at the time.
4. I am not a wizard with Photoshop - wasn't then, still true today.  You get what you pay for. :)

Image dump #1 is after the cut....

Random Old Things

Off the top of my head, here are some oddities from the EVE of yesterday.

• Higher end ores used to spawn in highsec.  I spent the weekend after launch mining Hedberite and Gneiss in Piak/Lonetrek.  I still have the leftovers from that refine in my assets list; refuse to move it.
• Ores have been redistributed a few times.  We used to mine Omber in Derelik highsec; after the redistro, we mined Kernite instead.  We mined Omber in Niyabainen.
• There used to be mining belts in Jita.  Agents too.
• The original market was based on integer values only.  You could only trade in whole isk (1, 4, 5346).  Decimal points (1.99) were added later.
• Some parts of null didn't have real names at launch, and were instead coded with names like XX-1234 (similar to how Jove regions are named today on the map).  Querious, Delve, and Period Basis were originally named this way, maybe others.  I just googled and couldn't find the original names; that's how long it's been.  I do remember messing around in Fountain, Stain, and Great Wildlands very early; I think they've always had the names they have today.
• In the days before tech2, I remember cruiser-sized meta4 hybrid guns going for 6M isk each.  At the time, that was a LOT of isk.
• The original market was seeded by NPCs, i.e. NPCs bought and sold items to jumpstart things. Players would talk about buying ships at "npc price" or on the open market.   I want to say the NPC price of a Raven was 256M isk, but it's been too long for me to remember to be sure. 
• Battlecruisers weren't in at launch and were added much later.
• I still think of the Rokh, Abaddon, Mael, and Hyperion as the "new" battleships because they were added long after launch.
• The Domi used to have a bonus for the number of drones you could control.  With max skills you could field something like 15 drones.  
• The last day of beta test, CCP gave everyone max skills (see screenshot, above).  I had to work, and the servers were down by the time I got home.  My co-CEO Abbaddon got to party, though.

Skill Check!

Back in the old old corp, the cry of SKILL CHECK would result in everyone bragging, whining, or otherwise reporting what they were training that very moment.

As Grand Emperor(tm) and CEO, it was one of those things that I used to wake up the chat when things were too quiet.  Few could resist the urge to shout out, even those "supposedely" afk.

I used to know the exact date that Pukin' Dogs was founded.  It's somewhere around October 20th, 2002.  So in honor of our dozen or so years as a corp, here's my skill check:


Abavus will finish Thermodynamics 5 early tomorrow.  He finished Assault Frigs 5 just before that.  Looking at EVEmon, I have a whole gaggle of long skills, almost all of them focused around small (and some mid-) sized ship combat.  Bleh, not fun.  But hopefully useful.

Next up:  Small Blaster Specialization 5.

Primary Alt 'M' will finish Light Missiles 5 a few hours after Thermodynamics finishes on Abavus.  She's got fair to good turret skills, excellent fitting and tank, so have been chewing on some missile skills to help with Burners.

Next up for her:  Guided Missile Precision 4.

Happy Birthday [PUKE], we'll keep the lights on.


What's playing:  TOOL:  10,000 Days, Wings For Marie

Chasing the Excitement

Was talking with Mrs. Durden recently about why I'm grinding so many missions.  This quote basically sums it up:

"... I got that 'excited/scared' feeling. Like 98% excited, 2% scared. Or maybe it's more - It could be two - it could be 98% scared, 2% excited but that's what makes it so intense, it's so - confused. I can't really figure it out."  - Oscar, Armageddon

 There's something addictive about running missions. Every time I hit the 'request mission' button there's that moment of excitement/panic while the screen reloads.  What will it be? Another Damsel to save or will it be an Anomic?

And then there's the inevitable result.  It's either a feeling of disappointment/relief if it's another vanilla lvl4.  Or it's a feeling of 'oh crap' when it's an Anomic, ... a mix of panic and excitement and a little apprehension.

I've been reminded a few times lately that in the early days, EVERY lvl4 had this mix of feelings.  Many missions could be solo'd in a meta4 Raven.  Many couldn't.  Some missions needed a few buddies.  Some missions just straight got declined.  Thanks to perfect skills, gang bonuses, and min/max fits, today we chase lvl4's in HACs, Tech3s, and BCs.

Some people complain that Burners are too hard.  While I don't like losing ships, I'll say that for me they're tuned about right.  Any harder, and I'd punt most.  Any easier, and you wouldn't get the semi-addictive emotional rollercoaster that comes with clicking buttons.

Skill Plan Changes

It's funny how a little patch can change your focus.  Hasn't happened to me in a long, long while in EVE, so it's a good thing.

I'm talking about Skill Plan changes.  I have 4 skilled characters across 2 accounts (the rest have essentially only starter skills, more or less).  Least skilled character 'L' is just above the basic starter set and is set up for some lowsec scouting and shenanigans in frigates.  A cheap clone for cheap ships.  I always meant to do more with him, but never have.

Of the 3 heavy hitters, Character 'Z' is basically set up to knock out Incursions.  Perfect large turret gunnery and battleships in 2 flavors, plus misc repping, fitting, damage mitigation, and other accessory skills.  She runs a shield-fit Navy Mega and could step into a Vindi if I dumped the cash into the hull (alas, current time commitments don't let me grind Incursions).

Next most Character 'M' is my original alt and has skills shotgunned everywhere, from mining to hauling to salvage.  Wherever I need a 2nd set of hands to pick up what falls on the floor, she is there.  Combat skills are somewhat limited, and were focused around null ratting in BCs back in the day.   Her one shining block of skills are her perfect Boosting skills, and she looks mean in her Gallente command ship cranking 5 links.  She's almost as old as my main, but I resisted buying a 2nd set of implants for her until recent times (originally ... as in waaaay back ... she was my permanent resident in 0.0; she went for years training w/o any implants), and when my interest in EVE wanes, she's the one that I let lapse first.

And then there's Abavus.  My main.  A decade worth of training, not always in the most efficient manner (talent remapping, +4 implants instead of +5, lapsed accounts, etc.) but still a respectable number of skills at rank 5 (153).  He can do anything I'd need (frigates to capships and much in between) and has perfect skills in many things I don't do any more (mining, refining, researching).

For the past many months, I've logged in, looked at the Mastery tab of whatever ship I was flying, and picked something of an appropriate length.  In particular, I've been nibbling on Mastery 5 for the Golem, and working through some of the Armor tanked hull Masteries as well.

Burner missions made me revisit these habits.  Suddenly I see gaps in my skill abilities that I didn't know I had.  For example: altho he's been a missile shooter since before all the cool kids did it, Aba didn't have Rocket Specialization maxed out.  Fixed that: I'll have rank 5 in 2d 2h.  Character 'M' and 'Z' on the other hand, had both trained Assault Frigates but not maxed it, and likewise have some gaps in frigate-sized weaponry skills.

This made me make a choice (choices are good): if I were going to dual box AFs for Burner missions, which alt would I take?  After weighing skill pools, the headnod goes to Character 'M.'  Combat and fitting skills are close, perhaps even a little less than 'Z,' but the passive gang bonuses from all her Leadership training will help.

When you have nothing to train, the skillpoint game of EVE is tedious and boring.  But when you need to min/max a training queue in order to get something Important, it's always been a fun aspect of EVE.  I like looking in the nooks and crannies of a game to figure out little puzzles like this.  It's just another side benefit of new content.


What's Playing:  AC/DC: Back in Black

Incremental Improvements to Agents, MK1

Editor's note (hey, that's me!):  Been dealing with real life family stuff out of town. Things are looking up, but not been around much.

First in a Series, maybe. Probably.

-----
CCP has dabbled in "quests" a few times.  Very early on, there were COSMOS agent missions.  They were kind of 'meh' (poor payout, as I recall) and quickly ignored by the masses.

Today we have the SOE mission arcs.  They seem better received, and the one time I've gone through them I found them enjoyable.  They did bring back some memories and make me wish COSMOS had gotten a refinement pass a lot sooner; many of the ideas and mechanics of the the SOE arc are found in the earlier/abandoned COSMOS.  (Said another way:  SOE arc is COSMOS done right).

But, I can only imagine that story arcs are a huge time sink for the devs, and as static content they really don't fit the game very well.

I'll sidestep the whole "eve isn't a themepark" landmine for now and say this:  as a designer, you want to invest in things that will get a lot of player use compared to your investment (call this the play-time to dev-time ratio).  Other game systems get constant replay and have a very high play/dev ratio.  Static content ... not so much.  Folks kind of run it once and then most never return.  So, fun ... yes.  Efficient use of dev time, no.

I do still believe that there needs to be some headroom in PVE content for some more advance gameplay; lvl4's as a game system are beyond stale and could use a good stiff shot of attention.

Keeping in line with the idea of Randomly Dynamic content, and as content that can coexist with Expert Missions, I'd advocate injecting some random escalations into the existing mission roster.  I guess they'd constitute "new" missions, which may be a nonstarter (dev time needed elsewhere).

The idea is basically this:

- You complete your mission and get the timebonus.  Let's say it's the Damsel in Distress.
- Similar to current Storyline missions, you get an evemail from the Damsel ; she'd like to thank you (queue porno music).
- During your dialog with her, she insists that you go back for her dog Fifi, and she offers a reward.
- This turns into a mini-SOE arc - travel to another system, do a mission or three, talk to an agent in space, etc.
- Add a carrot at the end for completion (maybe a faction rat or two to shoot at for a chance at a ship bpc or something); else some folks will see the travel time and simply abandon them.

Key ideas:
1. The escalation should be tied to some measure of your performance. In this case, timebonus (there could be other triggers).  We want the player to feel like he's got to play well in order to get a shot at the bonus.
2. The escalation should ideally get you out of your agent's station and force you to move around a bit; otherwise this is "just another lvl4."  Want to break up the grindy grind of lvl4s.
3. The escalation should be a good thing when it happens; i.e. rare enough that it's not viewed as being a hassle.

What's playing:  The Black Keys, Attack and Release, Psychotic Girl

The Meatwagon

Here's another good ol' days post.  No particular inspiration, just felt like sharing.

In the early days of our corp (mid-2003), we hung out a few jumps into Lonetrek.  In those days the corp was still pretty centrally located (later on we would be scattered all over high, low, and null).  Once a month or so, we'd have a fun/silly event.

The favorite of these was Ibis Fight Night.  It was probably better termed rookieship fights, but most of us were Caldari and the name stuck.  We'd pick a random moon, and Mrs. Durden would jettison two cans for markers about 40km apart.  We'd split roughly in half and then fight 1v1 in rookieships.  Eventually order would break down and there'd be a big brawl.  Or somebody would race back to station and return in a Blackbird (back when you could fit torps on a BB) and hammer away at 3 or 4 of us at a time.

At the start of each session though, it was serious business, with folks fussing over their fits and trying to get intel on what other guys were bringing this month.  This was in the days before tech2, so we were scrounging through hangers looking for named loot.

The best part of the fight was the start - we'd lunge at each other like jousters on horseback, racing for optimal and wondering if the other guy had fit blasters or rails.  The km would tick down and then the fur would fly.

My favorite Ibis was called Meatwagon, and it went undefeated.  I eventually retired it, the undisputed champ.  Guys got tired losing to it, so I brought more "fair" fits and died a lot more.  The guys asked, but I never gave up the secret sauce in that fit -- a little named autocannon shooting EMP ammo.

Just now I flew across the cluster to grab a screenie of the fit, hoping we'd all get a good chuckle at how horrible it was.  However, I found that while I still have the ship, apparently I gutted the fit at some point. Apparently I needed the autocannon for ... who knows what?  (I did find a Crow with cruise missiles still fitted, and a Blackbird with 3x10mn burners on but that's a story for another time...).

Trade Runs

Sugar has been hosting a series of posts on the old old patch notes. We always tend to look at the past through rose colored glasses, but I’ve often said that the period from EVE launch in 2003 through late 2004 was my personal golden era of gaming.

EVE felt big, mysterious, and limitless. We had built a great Corp full of motivated (and funny!) individuals and were dabbling in alliances, building things, and enjoying the game. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the foundations that we built then are things I rely on today in nearly every session.

This week, I saw a link (indirectly via Sugar) to EVE-Uni’s guide on trading/hauling. A quick scan brought back a huge wave of nostalgia and the thought of “oh wow, people still DO that?” (I realize that freighter pilots make a living somehow, but I always assumed it was all through contracts, not market hauling).

I might screw this up through flawed memory or my own misunderstanding at the time, but here’s the jist on trading, circa 2003:

In the beginning, the market wasn’t entirely player driven. There were trade goods that were seeded at npc stations, and npc demand appeared elsewhere on market to consume the goods. (Most ore we mined got sold to npcs at the original “power of two” default prices of 1, 4, 16, 64,etc isk/unit. The original market didn’t allow decimals in prices [integer values only], so if you wanted to sell trit at 1.25 each you had to conduct it as a station trade with the player outside the market. Also consider that at launch, few had invested in BPOs in the opening weeks, so allllll modules/ships/whatever were provided to the public by npc seeding for the first several months. But I digress…)

Anyway, items like Robotics, Antibiotics, Tobacco, and such were in the game entirely to be trade commodities; their current uses in PI were still almost a decade away. They were intended only for folks like me to buy from an npc, move from point A to point B, and sell again to an npc.

I earned the isk for my first battleship from running Robotics across the Forge and Genesis in my trusty Bestower. In those early days, prior to isk faucets like Incursions, lvl4 Missions, and billion isk drops from faction rats, the ~110M isk for an Apoc was a huge sum of money representing weeks of time investment. Each trade run was 10-20 jumps. There was no warp to zero, so each gate had to be approached slowboat style. But on the plus side, you could cycle ABs and MWDs in warp and exit warp at your top speed.

I wasn’t the only player that had figured trading out; my competition would often beat me to the punch. The npc seedings were reset at each downtime, so EU TZ had an advantage. Tools like EVE-Central were still a pipe dream, but we made do with an alt or two scattered around the map to get market status in other regions.

In time, more folks entered the trade profession and it became harder and harder to find decent runs. Once my Apoc was bought, I moved on to other things in game, eventually landing in null for awhile.

Being a space trucker wasn't an exciting life, but it was satisfying and the returns (for that era) were excellent. As the corp CEO, it did leave me plenty of time between jumps to manage a growing corporation, chat up potential allies in other corps, plot, and scheme.

While I don’t think I’ll be dusting off the Bestower any time soon, I’m glad to see that some things don’t change in EVE.

What I'm Training: HACs 5. Thought I had it already, found that I didn't.

The Good ol' Days

As I continue to post, you are probably going to see a lot of references to life as it used to be in EVE, or comparisons of today's mechanics with what we had at launch.

That's not because I want to return to 2003, or I have some desire to roll back the patches and dev time that's been invested.  With only a few exceptions, I think that the EVE of 2014, as a product, is miles and miles better than it was in 2003.

But I do think that some of the fundamentals that got myself and hundreds of other bittervets hooked have perhaps begun to fade, and I think it would be good of CCP to squint a little and ask themselves how to capitalize on those initial feelings.  It's a tough balance - the game needs to grow to meet our expectations, without changing so much that it loses its magic.

The good news, I think, is that because EVE's mechanics and economy have been relatively stable (at least compared to many other MMOs in the 'verse), many of those first hooks are still a part of the fabric of EVE.  Sometimes, we the players just need to look.  Sometimes CCP is going to have to point us back to them.