Afraid

Two days off sick (honestly sick, not “I want to play internet spaceships” sick) allowed me to start a trial account in EVE to decide if I wanted to get back into it.

After an hour or two of a steep re-learning curve, I finally got the hang of shooting things. I remembered all the problems I initially had about not being able to shoot missiles without having to buy the skill, and made a couple of dumb mistakes like buying a new frigate one mission before getting one free from the agent. Still haven’t got the overview working the way I want it.

Anyway, long story short. I reactivated my account. I am still flying as Akura Kawanaka and I logged into the game where I had left off – in high sec in my Occator, after having moved all my stuff out of the space owned by my previous alliance AAA.

Now, the problem I have here is, I put myself into a corporation that I owned “0.0 veterans rest and relaxation corp”, but to prevent impulse spending I had moved all my cash to the corp wallet and made my alt (on another account) the sole accountant for the corporation. the corporation tax rate is also 100%, so I am now relatively pennyless (200million isk) with the remainder sitting in a corporate account that I can’t access unless I reactivate my other account……which I really don’t want to use this time around.)

so while I mulled this over, I moved myself and my stuff back to the mission hub of Amo/Lustrevik that I used to frequent prior to moving to 0.0 space.

Occator in flight by Starlight with a beautiful Nebula in the background

so… now what to do? I don’t really have time for 0.0 (at the moment), I think I’d like to try trading/industrial for a living, but they tend to take a long time to get into and all my skills are pvp related except for hauling…..

Missions then? they bring a good amount of isk in. I do get bored doing them after a while but my RL friend will be doing them for a while when he joins up so I figured that would be a good option.

Turns out I had a very good PVE fit Hyperion sitting there waiting for me.

Hyperion in station

anyone know how to make your character smile for screenshots?

anyway, also in anticipation of missioning, I bought a Noctis, one of the new dedicated salvage ships (battlecruiser size?).

Noctis by starlight

problem is though. I’ve lost my confidence…. I’m still hesitant with the overview and still not sure of myself with missions. last time I missioned was over 3 years ago! I don’t have the money to replace my current ship…. what if I get killed in my first lvl 4 mission I do? what if I find that missioning is so dull that I want to get into pvp but can’t because of RL commitments?

for the first time as a pod pilot, I am afraid…..

Eve Monkey may be returning to Eve

Having had a hiatus in WoW for about a year and then getting involved in minecraft for a bit (www.timgaming.com = awesome (legitimate play) server – my username there is whitehatnetizen). I finally have a real life friend who may be joining Eve. This has finally given me the kick up the butt I need to maybe resubscribe.

My main minecraft house on timgaming is just behind spawn. yes, mine is on the right – I don’t build box houses.
There’s a statue of Sub-Zero in the basement also incidentally the top half design is by monkeyfarm (see youtube) and also an automated melon farm by him as well.

The EVE changes since I left in 2010 look absolutely awesome. I’m not sure I have time for 0.0 alliances now days but we shall see.

In related news, I have a baby Evemonkey, perhaps it is the neural implants left over from my time in Eve, but… I have called her Eva….. was going for Eve, but think Eva rolls off the tongue a bit better

Can we make fights complicated for DPS only? (and other stuff in my life)

I’m the sort of gamer that very much enjoys achieving a goal as a group. I always prefer playing with a team of humans verses computer players or other humans rather than a 1 on 1 scenario. I like First person shooters where two teams go up against eachother, I love 5-mans, raiding and organised pre-made pvp in MMO’s. And of course, because of this, I absolutely loved the 700+ ship fleets and 1600 ship battles that we regularly formed in EvE Online when I played that.

My current game of choice is WoW again. I played back in vanilla back in the day and quit about a week before patch 1.11 (the mage revamp if I remember correctly). back then I was very hard core. I joined a raiding guild early and got my first epic drop from MC when I was lvl 59. Fast forward 5 years and I come back from the UK after having spent an absolutely fantastic year playing EvE Online and I return to my mage which is sitting at lvl 60. I quickly level it up to 80, just in time for Cataclysm to hit and then get to 85. At this point, I make a concious decision not to join a raiding guild. There is too much going on with my life to be able to schedule nights raiding. and so I’m left with 5 man dungeons and the occasional PUG raid.

However I’m very dissatisfied with playing a mage. For those that havn’t seen it, here is basically what an arcane mage does these days. While pumping out huge numbers, there’s really nothing special to it.

(I don’t know where this came from originally so I can’t give attribution – a friend emailed it to me)

Now, to be a good mage, or even just a good player, there’s obviously more to it. Is there a mob that needs to be CC’d? is the healer tanking agro -> CC the mob, or frost nova the mob so the healer can move out of the way, or in last resort take agro on that mob so healer is free. etc. but really, for me, the boring rotation, combined with the 15 min DPS queues for random dungeons and the fact that I absolutely hate questing (it’s an MMO for crying out loud, why would I want to kill things by myself?) caused me to roll a healer just after 4.1 came allong.

and so Elenova was born. a Resto Shammy. I instantly fell in love with healing – here was something that was a challenge, almost regardless of which instance was being done. if the healing was easy, I tried to out-dps the lowest dps class. I set mini challenges like minimising the amount of over healing I did, or trying to anticipate big incomming damage from particular bosses with a heal dropping a fraction of a second after a slam etc. I loved the fact that I always knew what was going on with every party member. I knew everyone’s roles and had the added challenge of having to look after myself, stand where I should as well as be aware of everyone else at the same time.

This was fun!

When I eventually got into ZA and ZG, though, I realised something. Initially I had trouble with some bosses. A lot of the mechanics require being constantly moving around or being aware more acutely of what the boss is going to do next. This is fine – it’s great – I still have the challenge that I wanted and as long as everyone does what they should, then it works.

What occured to me though was on about the 4th or 5th time wiping on the first boss of ZG (Venoxis). Now, this guy has (what seems to me) excessively complicated mechanics. I have not been in a group that can get him down first time yet and I have not been in a group where there hasn’t been at least 2 people dead by the end of it (sometimes myself). It occured to me that while a healer has a critical job, there are some instances where the tank has a hard job and some where the healer has a hard job, but there are none that I know of where the DPS have something difficult to do other than standing in the right place.

my question really is: Is there a way to increase complexity for DPS only? if you make it so that there is a maze of poison on the ground and poison beams chasing you around the maze, then this is complicated, but it’s also complicated for the healer, who has to avoid the beams and the maze and also keep everyone who doesn’t do this perfectly alive! anything that complicates the fight for DPS, complicates it for the healer.

Anyway, I got a bit frustrated at that point and rolled a tank, which I’m very much enjoying. It’s the first Melee character I’ve ever played and I absolutely love it. it is currently lvl 52 so we’ll see how it goes when I get to 85.

Other things that have gone on with my life (why I havn’t been blogging):

I did the Oxfam Trailwalk: http://trailwalker.oxfam.org.au/brisbane/
This is a 100km hike in 48hrs through a National Park in Brisbane. My main excuse for not blogging is that every weekend since March we’ve been out training.

My team only made it to 41km unfortunately. the reason being that at about 30km, in pitch black at about 6pm, a lady came running back down the track yelling “does anyone know CPR!!?!?”. One of their team had collapsed. Our team performed mouth-to-mouth and CPR until the ambulance came. The event was very well organised: every 100m or so, there was a numbered marker, so if you got in trouble, you could let them know exactly which marker you were at and despite the fact you would be right in the middle of bushland, they would know exactly where you are. It was because of this, that the ambulance got there within 11 minutes of the initial call.

But the guy unfortunately didn’t make it. We are pretty sure that he was dead by the time we got there, but you have to try CPR, you can’t not.

So we walked the last 10km in silence. This took us 3hrs to do because of the steep hills around that area and the others in the team didn’t realy have the heart to continue after that. We also found out that one particular part where we would have had to cross some streams, the water had risen 1m. so where in training we were able to cross these streams by stepping on rocks and branches, we would have had to wade through thigh height water at 3am in the morning in the middle of winter followed by another 50km of hiking to the finish….. and so we all gave a collective “bugger that” and pulled out.

It’s interesting analysing my feelings about the incident on the trail. I’m not generally an emotional sort of person, and at the time I was completely clear headed and so were the others in my team. they got in there and did what they needed to do, I helped clear the area of hiking packs and poles so the ambulence could have some room. it wasn’t until a couple of days afterwards that I found myself getting pissed off at the world in general for no reason at all. everyone responds differently to death and I responded by getting angry and frustrated. in some shallow superficial way, it’s not unlike the feeling that one would get after spending a lot of time preparing for a raid in WoW, the fight goes very well except something out of your control happens at the last minute and you wipe. Except this time you can’t just get up and try it again. That was your only chance.

Could we have run faster to get to him? could we have realised he wasn’t actually breathing sooner? should we have started CPR before trying to see if he had a pulse? I don’t know… why the heck did he have to die anyway, he was only 40 years old and that was the 5th Trail walk event that he had participated in.

anyway, these are the thoughts that went through my head the past couple of weeks.

In other news:

I’ve read “the use of weapons” and “the player of games” by Iain M Banks. “the use of weapons” in particular was extremely good! I’ve never finished a book and literally said “Wow!” in a stunned “omg….. O…M….G..” manner at the end because of the ending. this book did that for me.
I’ve attempted to start “game of thrones” by George RR martin, but I just can’t get into it.

also in other news:
My wife came up to me on wednesday night and looked like she was about to cry.. “what’s wrong!” I said. and she pointed to her belly. and so Initial reports indicate there may be a mini-Evemonkey on the way. This is good, our guild needs a hunter

Surface Detail

I have just spent the past week reading Iain Banks’s novel “Surface Detail“.

This is the first of Iain’s books that I have read, and only half-way through I realised that this was part of a group of books all set in the same universe. Despite this, it most definately was able to stand on its own, and at no point did I feel I was missing a back story.

The exception being the very last sentance where I felt the book was giving me one of those “meaningful looks” like it should have meant something. It turned out it related to one of his earlier books and it was only then I relised that they should probably have been read as a series.

I was a little bit confused at the start – the first three chapters deal with three entirely different characters, seemingly in three entirely different worlds or times and they all die at the end of the chapter (sorry for the spoiler, it’s a minor one).  This took the wind out of me a bit.  I found it difficult to pick up the book to start the fourth chapter, dreading another completely unrelated story.  I even began to wonder if the book I had bought was actually only a collection of short stories.   I was very wrong.  After persisting into the next few chapters, everything began to pan out.

As with all good science fiction, Surface Detail tended to focus on the philosophy and moral right and wrong. Specifically in this case: What death means, whether physical punishment for crimes is justifiable by the deterrance it provides to those not punished, and what defines a soul. Iain does a very good job of describing the technology contained in his books, especially considering I had not read any of his novels before. The new concepts were easy to understand and the explanations seemed to be done tactfully without insulting the reader’s intelligence or making it too obvious that he had stopped the narative in order to explain something.

Banks did an extraordinary job of pulling together disparate story lines and merging them into a climax.  Of course there are still questions that I have in my head, and story threads that never quite got explained, but then I believe that this is a good thing (in moderation).  Compare to some of China Mieville’s books.  His whole book-writing philosophy seems revolves around the theory that it is the unknown that engages the reader (i.e. in a horror movie, it is more exciting if you only see small, hurried glimpses of the antagonist, rather than knowing exactly what it is – see the original predator vs the rest of them).

Anyway, It has been a while since I have read good science fiction (I am usually a fantasy type of guy), but book has definately encouraged me to read more of it. Specifically I will be reading more of Iain’s books.

Mud

So I feel for Japan.

My home town, in January went through some of the worst flooding it has had for 35 years.

In no way am I comparing what Brisbane experienced to what Japan is going through now, but I can sympathise in some small way. while their houses got washed away by a wall of water, ours got filled up slowly over the course of 24hrs or so. in the end though… All that is left is the mud.

Here’s a few shots of around the area I live from back in January

This is my brother’s next door neighbor. the day before the waters rose to his second floor

you can see where the water came up to on the wall and the plants with the mud line

this is a major highway

underneath this, is a picnic area and playground. the trees that you can see the tops of are at least 15m high

it’s the sludgy, stinky mud that gets you in the end… given that the sewerage treatment plant broke down, we were literally up shit creek

Many many people volunteered even if they weren’t affected. We had one person who owned a bobcat come around to help clear out rubble. he had his small son in his lap as he operated the machine. At one point he grabbed a mattress that was lying on the curb in the jaws of his bobcat’s bucket and literally wiped the mud off the street with the mattress

Those that could not physically lift heavy things made food for those who could, and when we had finished helping out close relatives everyone went to help neighbors. the community spirit was surpurb.

whole suburbs looked like this during the week or so afterwards

My brother took loosing his $30,000 grand piano quite well considering

This last one is courtesy of birdiecanfly (my sister in law) on flickr.com:

So yes, this is my little corner of the world. it’s been a busy year. I sincerely hope those in Japan recover quickly and well. It will take many years, but let it be as quick as it can be. Our thoughts and prayers are with you Japan.

It’s been one year

It’s been one year and the itch to blog is begging to be scratched….

The problem I have though, is that I don’t play EVE anymore. As much as I want to play, I no longer have the luxury of hours upon hours after work and on the weekends to spend in fleets. No computer game will ever compare to my time in Eve, I’ve tried pvp in WoW, Warhammer online and guild wars, but they don’t compare to eve in the slightest. pvp in Guildwars actually takes some skill and teamwork, but nothing beats 1500 people all online striving against each other to hold a virtual star system.

However, I want to blog about many things – other computer games, other geek-type stuff, wine, whisky…. is it right to do it here? is it right to turn evemonkey.wordpress.com into something not about eve?

if only I had a generic moniker like “ancient gaming noob”.

This blog still gets upwards of 40 hits a day. So for those of you reading and who liked my previous blog style…. What should I do?

Yours Interwebly
Evemonkey

#Tweetfleet Shoot the fleeing goons roam!

Are you part of the tweetfleet? do you want to have a bit of fun tomorrow after down time? do you like killing Goons?

Saturday 30th January 2010 13:00(ish)
Form up in Orvolle
Tech 1 cruisers and frigate scouts. bring your own reppers, bring mwd’s and cheap weapons/ammo
Mission: Get to S-U8A4 without dying, or die trying, or at least kill lots of goons while dying trying…

Need volunteer FC or I can do it if you all want to die horribly in balls of flame.

Sorry for the late notice, lets see if we can get the numbers anyway. tweetify, publicise…. gogogo!!!

if it goes well, perhaps we could make this a regular monthly thing.

HICS need redesigning

As I collect all my stuff, preparing to move back out into nullsec, I look at Gothic Robo-chicken, my trusty Onyx-class heavy interdictor. Sitting there, collecting dust ever since I could fit a t2 galente battleship and started flying them instead.

It occurs to me, that the Heavy interdictor is no longer fulfilling the role it is designed for. This, quite frankly, sucks.

Here’s why:

TL;DNR: Because of Titan

The long story: Cast your mind back to pre-dominion times

Titans had an area of effect weapon, that pretty much blasted any sub-capital that wasn’t a heavily tanked battleship. Your battleship fleet set up for gank and not tank? Boom, one doomsday and you’re sitting in a pod, Dual doomsdays and local drops by the exact amount of pilots that were in your fleet. Most alliances in the Northern Coalition therefore mandated that their battleship fleets should be able to survive at least one doomsday device.

a poor defenceless support fleet gets blasted into space dust, their battleship fleet barely hanging onto their ships by the skin of their structure while a Malicious titan laughs at the effects of his Doomsday Device

Both Titans and Motherships are immune to electronic warfare. This includes warp scramblers and so interceptors are useless against them. The potential for area of effect doomsdaying renders standard interdictors, destroyable, err, destroyer-class vessels less than survivable should a second titan come to assist the first supercapital.

Enter the Heavy Interdictor: A cruiser class vessel with the Effective Hit points of a heavily tanked battleship, able to project Warp bubbles if need, sacrificing manoeuvrability and speed, but also able to pin supercapitals with a focused warp disruption script, maintaining manoeuvrability and speed, making it hard to hit. Double doomsdays from titans of different races? Pah! A mere inconvenience. Doomsday destroy your fleet? Hold the supercapital in place, light a cyno when you’re fleet is ready to jump back in. Supercapital ships lived in fear of the cyno-HIC.

Small gang cruiser warfare? Oh, I’ll just take my cruiser class vessel with the hit points of a battleship and a bubble generator and infinite warp scrambling power along and see if we can’t trap a HAC or three at a gate.

They were Gods in nullsec.

Now: Post dominion:

So, what are Heavy interdictors good for now?

Tackling supercaps?
Titans now only hit one target at a time. Battleships no longer need to be tanked against Doomsday devices. You can tackle a titan and it can have ten doomsdays go off without reducing the effectiveness of your 100 man battleship fleet, despite the fact they are all glass cannons.

Sure, the supercapitals are still immune to ewarfare but I can buy and equip five standard interdictors for the price of one Heavy interdictor. And if a titan doomsdays, none of the interdictors die. And they have the manoeuvrability and speed almost equalling frigates.

Small gang warfare? Ok, they may be still good for gate camps, but if given a choice between a 30 million ship and a 160 million ship just to have a bubble up on a gate, heck – if you’re camping a gate why not deploy a large static bubble? That’s only 5-10 million.

Tackling tech III ships: ok – I admit, this is the one specialist role remaining. Only a focused warp disruption script can tackle a interdiction nullifier equipped strategic crulser. How the hell am I supposed to catch one though.

Tackling supercapitals in lowsec: ok, the HIC remains the only thing that can tackle super capitals in lowsec. I know I don’t fly in lowsec very much, but I’ve only had that happen once, and it was a fluke.

Wormholes? Please… you can’t fit a supercapital in a wormhole. Use an interdictor, although perhaps it would be nice to pin down a carrier… hmmm.

Gate camping in empire: Ok, a remote sensor boosted Onyx or Broadsword is still king of gate camps in lowsec, but why not have I don’t know… five interceptors for the same price.

My point remains: The Heavy Interdictor’s unique ability to pin down supercapitals while surviving multiple doomsday devices, is obsolete. And sitting on gates in lowsec is not what the ship was designed for.

What should happen:

In My Humble Opinion, the following changes should happen to HIC’s:

1) Hit points reduced
2) Warp disruption field generator range extended to at least give it a bit of advantage over a standard interdictor
3) The addition of scripts to change the properties of the bubble for example (and these are just ideas, some perhaps overpowered):

a) Make the bubble area of effect tracking disruption.
b) make the bubble area of effect webbing.
c) make the bubble area of effect sensor boosting (for friendly fleets)
d) make the bubble area of effect hit point boosting (portable shield for fleets)
) My personal favourite: Make the bubble Area of effect cloaking. Remember that protoss ship in starcraft that could conceal troops, revealing only itself..

Warp cloaked? Able to use black ops bridges? Perhaps too overpowered…

I’m not asking for a buff, I am just asking that it be looked at again in the light of the dominion changes.

High-sec is not for the faint hearted.

I have to admit it, I’m slightly bored.

It’s only been a week since I wrote my previous post saying the massive bitch-fight between the NC and Tri-co was getting to me and I couldn’t commit enough time to be useful to my corporation in the defensive operations… and I’m sick of high sec.

Two sad things have happened since my move:

Before I joined my alt’s corp I had a bit of a foray into lowsec, where I used to hang out, in my Dramiel. It’s fun trolling the pirates: burning along at 6.5km/s, watching the probes go out, seeing them warp in, but being 100km+ away by the time they get there. Teehee – ok, that got old after the 4th or 5th time. So for fun, I shot my alt. I got a global timer, telling me that I was a criminal yay – ok I’ll just avoid stations and gates for 15 minutes – that’s easy enough, warp to a safespot and cloak up.

The timer expired and I jumped back into highsec… and get a message saying I’m a criminal, and another 15 minute timer popped up… wtf? Ok – I’ll just avoid gates and stations for 15 minutes – that’s easy enough – warp to a safespot and cloak up. Went to make a cup of tea and came back to see my pod floating next to my dramiel wreck….. I never knew that the police actually came to find you. I knew concord did but not the boring old faction police: WTB – magic faction police scan probes that can find cloaked ships in safespots.

I wanted to fly my tengu. I looked at it, made a huge leap of logic and decided that because I was in highsec empire I didn’t need an interdiction nullifier, swapped out to some intercalaced nanofiber propulsion doosywatsit, and scanned down a plex in Lustrevik system. I warped there and wanted to see how my 0.0 buffer tank would fare against the rats. It didn’t do too well. I hit the warp button and nothing happened. Oh… that’s right – npc’s can warp scramble, wish I had a drone bay, wish I didn’t have all my highslots filled with utility modules, cloak, probe launcher, cyno gen…. boom went my 400 million isk E-peen….

…and I’m bored of doing high-sec missions.

Don’t get me wrong – they’re rewarding, both monetarily but also in the “yay, I killed a rat, only 10 more and the agent will like me slightly better” type of way that other MMORPG’s achieve by levelling up.

It’s not how I remember doing missions. I remember flying my raven with t1 modules and t1 drones and having an adrenalin rush as I frantically hurried to kill the warp scrambling frigates so I could get out and let my shields regen and get back before the wrecks disappeared after their 2hr limit.

But it’s been well over a year since I last did an actual mission and my skills have improved significantly (even including cross training from caldari to galente). Advanced weapons upgrades V and Galente battleship V mean that I can fit the ships pretty much however I want and get the maximum battleship bonuses, Large hybrid specialisation at IV means that my guns rip through npc battleships, and galente drone specialisation IV mean my T2 medium drones kill frigates and cruisers before I can even lock them. Armour skills, trained to a high level by mandate of Mostly Harmless alliance’s battleship replacement program, is such that my armour rarely goes below 80%, and that’s only when I go afk to make a cup of tea and read a good book while my drones lay waste to everything on the grid.

Eve online: PVE you can play while reading a good book.

All of this, and the thing that has convinced me most that I need to get out of high-sec and back into the pvp that I love is that over this entire week, my best screenshot is a flying secure can with wings, shooting rocks:

It’s time to leave the carebear zone I’m afraid. It’s far too expensive and dangerous for my tastes. At least, in nullsec you aren’t living in constant fear of being killed while afk cloaked in a safe spot…

I have succumbed…

For a long time now I have adamantly refused to get a second account, but I folded yesterday after hearing the corporation leaders on the weekend call for anyone who could assist in freightering the large bits of infrastructure upgrades required for post-dominion to nullsec.

yes, my main is about 30 mins away from flying a freighter should I bother to buy the skill, but I’m not going to be moving him through empire, which has no intel channels and where I can be blown away by some privateer scum sitting on the gates.

And so I have recruited an empire-hauler alt, she is about 30 days away from flying a freighter/blockade runner/etc. I’m going to skill her up in these things and possibly frigate V with cloaks so she can scout. then decide whether I just want her to be transferred to my main account or if I want to keep paying monthly for this luxury.

anyway – here she is: