Ridlaw

I Think Sansha Is Avoiding Me…

Well it looks like I am the death of Incursions! The last time as a corp that we tried to go for an Incursion there wasn’t one anywhere near us and it fizzled out.

Now I’ve been looking forward to joining some of the more organised Incursion fleets that a couple of my corp mates have been enjoying and after fixing my Amarr faction at the weekend (yes… it actually worked!) I made a beeline to the only high-sec Incursion in the area. Luckily I had a friend there already and he managed to get me into one of the organised “armour” fleets as I was in a plated Hurricane and I got my first taste of a Vanguard level site run properly. This site went very quickly and within 10 minutes I had 10m ISK sat in my wallet.

We quickly warped off to another Vanguard and began working our way through the NPCs. The Sansha were dropping like flies around me and soon enough we had finished the second site and I was another 10m better off – I could get used to this…

Then my jinx hit – half the fleet had to leave and we were off looking for a replacement fleet. It looked like we were going to get another fleet when we heard that the “shield” fleet were heading out to take on the “mom” and once that ship goes down the Incursion is over.

Now from what I can gather from my brief introduction there are basically organised shield and armour fleets running most of the time with the required logistics support. Apparently there was some sort of agreement in place to only take down the mothership if there were at least 2 other hi-sec Incursions available. There was some grey area about hi-sec Incursions that were surrounded by low-sec and suddenly the shields fleet were taking on the mothership early.

After listening in on the comms chatter about this on my journey back to Hek I decided that this might be the worst possible time for me to be getting into Incursions :(

Each fleet now seems determined to take out the mothership before the other… *sigh*

It all seems very counter-productive to me – most people are getting involved with these fleets to do some challenging PVE that pays a lot better than endless level 4 missions and closing off the Incursions earlier than they have to be is just hurting everyone’s ability to do that.

The current plan from the armour people is to try to beat the shield guys to it and hopefully they’ll realise that it’s a pointless exercise and things will go back to normal.

Me? I think I’ll go back to my normal life for a week or two and see how things are after. Chasing 20 jumps across hi-sec to find out that there’s going to be nothing to shoot at in an hour seems a little pointless for now.

Aurum Schmorum

There’s been a lot of fuss this week about the introduction of Micro-transactions into Eve. There are pages and pages of largely negative reactions to the dev-blog about the new Aurum currency which is going to be used to buy vanity items.

This new currency will come from converting a Plex into a certain amount of Aurum and can then be used to purchase things like clothing, visible implants (a borg-like monocle for example), ship paint-jobs or maybe your alliance logo on your ship.

 

None of the planned items are designed to affect gameplay though. There are no +10% shield pills and no uber cash-only ships for example. Still the forums are rife with cries of CCP being on a “slippery slope”.

I don’t know where these people have been! We have had Plex for a while now and anyone with the real life cash to back them has been able to use it to buy gameplay affecting items! Want to train faster? Buy a Plex and use it to buy some +5 implants. Rifter not doing it for you? Drop a Plex on a handful of Dramiels. Want your ship to be faster than someone else’s? Buy a full HG snake set…

There was a lot of fuss last year about the possibility of spending a Plex to get an attribute remap. I can’t say I even had a problem with that. So somebody can train faster than I can! Someone with +5 implants trains faster than I do as I usually only have a +4 set in or even less if I’m in a PVP clone I half expect to lose.

Even then it makes no difference to me really – there are thousands of veterans out there with way more skill points than I have and I’ll never really “catch up” unless they quit for a while. Once they can fly a Vagabond to the max though that’s it. I can train all those same skills and be their equal in terms of physical ship ability. They might be able to fly a carrier and I can’t but I’m not looking for capital fights right now so it makes no real difference to me. If I come across them in another Vagabond we’ll be on an even playing field… Unless they’ve spent a pile of Plex on that Snake set I can’t afford yet.

Oh by the way, everything that is bought with Aurum then becomes just like any other in game item – it can be sold on the Market for ISK, it can be transported, destroyed in a fight or even dropped as loot. Also since Plex can be bought with ISK there’s nothing stopping you from buying any of these items without ever spending any real cash.

Micro-transactions are a fact of life for any gamer at the moment and a lot of other games are selling real game affecting items through their stores. I think CCP may well have nailed the perfect system doing it this way in the same way that I have always admired the Plex system. Those with a lot of real life cash get to pump some of it into the game and therefore future development and those with a lot of in game ISK can pay for their subs and shiny trinkets that way. So everybody is happy including CCP’s accountants.

Now how much Aurum do I have to spend for a set of vampire fangs and how do I get to sparkle…?

I’m kidding! Please don’t stone me!!!

A Change Of Pace

I’ve had a very lazy day today, my wife has taken the kids out for the day and I’ve spent the day in and out of Eve, eating, watching a few movies on the wife’s PC (it’s next to mine so gets hijacked when she’s out!) and for some reason messing with a test Exchange 2010 server…

On the Eve side of things I accepted delivery of my first Orca on my alt character today and later in the week I’ll even be able to fly it! I’ve been thinking about getting one for a while to use as a mining support ship and as a haulage ship somewhere between my Mammoth and my Fenrir. The thing that finally made me just go for it though was the fact that several of our corp are doing quite well ISK wise getting involved with incursions and I thought I could use my alt in an Orca as a support base for me and other members of the corp if more members get involved.

I was hoping to join up with some corp mates over the weekend and join in pushing back the Sansha but unfortunately they’re tackling an incursion in Amarr space at the moment and the Amarr don’t like me too much. With Diplomacy 3 trained I started today with a standing of -6.71 to Amarr – not so great.

This is mainly due to me taking on every mission that my usual Minamatar agents would throw at me including the large number of “destroy the Amarr” ones that get offered as I didn’t really care at the time what they thought of me!

Unfortunately in order to do more high-sec incursions I’m going to have to fix this as something like 40% of high-sec belongs to the Amarr. So I have a plan! I learnt that doing the tutorial missions would be a good start but I can’t even get into Amarr space! I can however get into Caldari space and raising Caldari faction also has a positive effect on Amarr faction as they’re such good friends.

So right now I’m going around the 15 Caldari tutorial agents and so far I’ve raised my Amarr standings to -6.29 and I’m about halfway through. Next up will be the Caldari Career Agents for another boost. After that I’m onto the Caldari Circle Agents and then I’m onto the Caldari Data Center Agents…

I’m hoping by this point I might be able to get into Amarr space and start the whole sequence again using the equivalent Amarr agents but who knows! I may have to start on the Cosmos agents as well but I won’t really know until I get closer to the time.

This is pretty much all in the name of making some decent ISK. I do love flying the Vagabond but I’ve lost a couple this week and I really can’t sustain that without a better source of income! My alt is doing “okay” so far and I’m starting to ramp up the T2 invention and manufacturing a bit more but it’s still early days at the moment and I don’t have all the skills I need to make everything.

Hopefully by next weekend I’ll be well on my way to making it into Amarr space (which covers 40% of high sec if you didn’t know) and can join in with the ISK making.

Until then… grind… grind… grind…

PS. I’ve just heard that our friends The Obsidian Front have just won their first Alliance Tournament IX match against Capital.Punishment! Congratulations guys! This is their first year in the tournament and I hope they do well.