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

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.

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.

Some of it was spent planning to leave the UK (during which time I got quite addicted to Left 4 Dead 2.
Some of it was spent living at my parents house due to us not having a house or job
Some of it was spent looking for a new job
Some of it was spent rescuing all my brother’s worldly posessions from the Queensland floods (Australia)
Some of it was spent buying a new house

Now I am finally settled and am almost back to normal. I’ve been able to spend a bit of time reflecting on how games have influenced my life and so I put together a list of games that I have played over the years, for posterity’s sake

—————
I had a commodore 64, I played pac-man and it got me hooked.
I wrote my first computer game (copied the code out of a book) and modified it when I was 6 years old.

I played Golden Axe – two player with my brother! I liked the dwarf!

I played Commander Keen and memorised Standard Galactic Alphabet, to this day, I still use it to write private notes to myself.

I went to high-school and discovered network Doom and was amazed by my friend’s massive 3gb hard drive!

I played Dune II on my brother’s 486, absolutely loving real time strategy and the cutting edge graphics!

I played a mud for a bit, got bored, made a fool of myself and got myself killed by another player because I was being an ass.

I played Warcraft II, connecting to my friend’s PC’s via direct dial into their modems.

I played Diablo the same way when that came out.

I played Starcraft when that came out – this time with the new fandangled battle.net

I played quake with my friends at an internet cafe because we were to poor to afford computers powerful enough to play it

…time passed, I got a job and got married.

I played Half life 2 when it came out – I pre-ordered it and absolutely loved the fact that because it came out BEFORE christmas, the games were actually civil and fun. After christmas all the little kids that had it bought for them came online and made it less fun. I could still hold my own for a few months but then the whole not being able to practice 12 hrs a day due to having to go to work to earn money, started to have an effect.

I don’t know if anyone reading this will remember, but we used to be able to turn ourselves into headcrabs and the combine camera things due to a bug, but those of us who did this had the decency to only use the crowbar against the players who didn’t… ahh, those were the day.

It was around this time I started taking screenshots:

It was around this time my friends and I started having regular lan parties – Counter strike was the order of the day, as was Unreal tournament.

Then, we all discovered WoW.

I remember Vanila WoW, back in early 2005:

The rush of hijacking a horde zeplin

The rush of discovering Molten Core for the first time

attacking onyxia for the first time

… and getting pwned in the face

… and kicked into the whelps

The guild going crazy over our first mag kill

our first attempt at Razagore

and insulting Nef to his face

About this time I started a Gmt+10 guild on Bronzebeard with some good friends:
http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=56115&TabID=489686

at the time, there were no oceanic servers so we all got together for late night pwnage, they were good times.

Not so good for my relationship with my wife, and so around about mid-2006 I quit WoW and started playing Guild wars, and for the first time played a female character. I didn’t have the same attachment to my Guild Wars character as I did to my WoW character, it was a game I played, not an extension of myself.

from baby necromancer

to ruler of weeping stone

to beach babe

I loved this character quite a lot though – so much that I paid quite a bit of in-game cash to get a drawing done of her:

the original

The Drawing

After a year of this, I started Eve online, and the rest of that story is documented in this blog.

I’ve also played L4D2 and Dragon age in that time.

Now, I’m back playing WoW, but I can’t bring myself to say anything about it. last time I played was patch 1.9. just before the first major Mage overhaul. I have to say…. Things are EXTREMELY easy compared to back then. UBRS used to require the coordination of 10 people and you had to fight well. now…. Ironforge is deserted, players complain when there is a slightest bit of difficulty in a dungeon. Players are leveling without knowing the things that us original players took for granted… Just the other day I healed a druid who thought he could tank BRD in feral spec WEARING CLOTH. *sigh* these young-uns get it too easy.

The only reason I keep playing is because of my friends still playing. I can’t bring myself to raid, but I did buy myself one of those ragnaros companions… I spent a good portion of my life trying to take him out, now he’s my bitch!

Ahh well, I hope that there will be many many more hours of gaming still to come.

Evemonkey out.

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

I’m moving back to australia and I don’t fancy having the daily downtime right in the middle of my peak playing time.

Looking forward to Guild Wars Two and CCP/White Wolf’s World Of Darkness but until then I think I’ll have to stick with shooting zombies

Thank you to all the corporations and people that I’ve interacted with. May the coming war between the Northern Coalition and the rest of eve, (scheduled to kick off in early April) inspire many good blogs.

I still have 8 days left on my subscription so I’ll be keeping my skills updated but for now…this is Evemonkey signing out.

Gallente Supercapitals over a deserted moon

Thankfully CCP has changed the sov mechanics so that the defending force would have had to repair the station to a certain level in order to trigger the restart of the station timer cycle.  Since we maintained superiority in the system after downtime, CVA were not able to repair the station and it was merely  a matter of waiting the three hours for our SBU’s to online again, after which, the station was taken without a hitch and the TCU was destroyed.  Later that night Sys-K’s TCU came online and the system takeover was complete.

—-

The Against All Authorities Alliance leader posted a very informative post on our forums about the current political situation.  I have to say, I really really appreciate it when alliance leader or High-Council representatives keep the grunts like us informed of long term strategies and goings on that we aren’t normally privy to.

Here are the TL;DNR points in bold and my comments:

Providence:  Remove the threat install content for us and replant the rain-forest.

This has been interesting – We liked Providence the way it was – it provided a good training ground for new pilots and some good pew for the others.  We liked the fact that there were so many targets there but we couldn’t stand by and let threats to our sovereignty stand and hence CVA had to be removed.

Stainwagon:  Big mess over misunderstandings …. AAA is keeping a close eye and trying to make sound judgment before decision.

(Apparently there was a bit of a fuss over the stain empire etc resetting a number of alliances in the area including IT alliance.  a hesitant peace has been brokered).

Northern Coalition: What to do about the threat they pose?  the Jury is still out.

The next biggest threat is now the Northern Coalition.  This interests me greatly as once again, the Eve universe has polarised into two massive groups, the Northern Coalition + goonswarm and the Southern Coalition + IT Alliance.

The Southern Coalition headed by AAA, Atlas, Systematic Chaos and IT alliance are less tight-nit, preferring to be individual alliances with the chances of good fights between all.

The Northern Coalition however is a very different story. Having spent the majority of my nullsec career in the NC I know they are Extremely tight-nit, with each alliance readily deploying their forces to aid any of the others that come under sustained attack.  and they intend to remain this way indefinately.

AAA sees the NC as the biggest threat to their existance in eve currently.  I dissagree however.  In my experience the NC has been a purely defensive arrangement with only the occasional poke into the south.  The New sovereignty mechanics have made it very difficult to engage in a sustained campaign away from home, effectively preventing the “AFK empires” that existed pre-dominion.  If alliances cannot muster their forces in time, a station system is only 5 days away from being taken over – far less than was possible in the old system, where so long as the system was not tightly locked down with the attacking forces had to be ever vigilent against new Pos’s being erected.

However, with the possibility of one half of eve uprooting and attacking the other half in a coordinated manner, the risk is minimised that each individual alliance will be vulnerable to a concerted counter-attack.

IMHO, the NC deserves to win any fight – they’ve proven to be the most solid and long-lasting coalition of alliances in the history of Eve and the recent attacks on their sovereignty in Fade and Pure Blind  have only strengthened their ties.  Triumverate, by no means an incompetent alliance has been broken on the bullwark the Northern Coalition presents time and time again.

The difference between the threat that The NC presents now and the threat that the Greater Bob Community presented last year which turned the rest of Eve against them is that the NC is not expantionist in any serious way, whereas BoB openly was.

Only time will tell, but at the moment, as it has been for the past year or so, Branch is possibly the most stable region in the entire universe.   and to take it, any opposing force will have to wade through nearly 15,000 pilots.  not something any coalition will want to do without very strong inter-alliance ties and the ever present threat of ex-providence holders re-taking their space in the south.

The long story short is that Providence region is being divided up into small little pieces by Atlas, Against All Authorities, Systematic Chaos and Ushra’Khan. Sylph alliance has completely gone from the influence map and it won’t be long before CVA disappears entirely also.

Sir Pewalot on an Erebus, waiting for a jump bridge

Today’s CTA was called in order to complete the take over of R3-K7K just before downtime. It was planned that Systematic Chaos were going to have this system, but -A- and U’K had brought a fleet to assist.

I had the pleasure of flying with my corp mate and long-time blogger Wensley of Rifter Drifter in the tempest here

The first part of the operation went smoothly – we had to take two titan bridges to get from our home system of GE- into the target system of R3-K7K. The middle system was 9UY – the Ushra’Khan-owned station system that fell a couple of weeks back.

Using only carriers/supercarriers and sub-capitals, we jumped into the target system on top of a small battlecruiser-heavy gate-camp which sensibly bugged out as fast as they could. We then warped to a POS and jumped our small dread fleet in.

carrier fleet aligning to POS

Next it was the station – We warped everyone to the station and started pew pewing it. I knew that we would likely be doing this so beforehand I contacted my mate at CCP and got them to refit my Megathron with Special GM lasers as you can see in the shot below. This meant the station dropped far more quickly than it would have otherwise.

Super-mega-ultra-pew-pew railguns

As you can see here: Wensley was a bit slack and didn’t call in any CCP favours and his weapons are somewhat lacking

Note the station name: “Science and Slave Augmentation Facility”. This is honourable work we are doing here, removing the slaver blight once and for all.

Nevertheless – there cannot be a battle in providence without some kind of drama. In all this time, despite the fact that Systematic Chaos were going to be given the system, there were no Sys-K pilots in our fleet, nor in local until just before the station was about to die (about half structure). Then a couple popped in and unanchored their Sovereignty Blockade Units, rendering the station invulnerable and preventing the system take-over just before down time.

I don’t yet know the fallout from this, hopefully it is not a prelude to war between -A- and Sys-K. I don’t think so because they’re involved in their own war at the moment apparently and they probably just didn’t want the system to be theirs anyway, but they went about it the entirely wrong way.

Now, after downtime, we’ll have to anchor our own SBU’s and wait for three hours while they anchor and online, then siege the station again – another five days of sieging……. bah. such is life in 0.0.

Also: Hi everyone reading this via Capsuleer! *waves* It feels good to be part of the blog pack! I’d appreciate some feedback: I base my blog very heavily on screenshots. is it easier to read the blog with full shots like above, or with clickable thumbnails like this:

Caldari outpost somewhere in 0.0 I don’t remember where!