For a few hours this weekend, I had the fortunate opportunity to join a null-sec survival class coordinated by a main fleet captain of the Paxton Federation. In those few hours, I can honestly say I learned more about EVE than I’ve gained in the last two months of living in Providence.
Part of this is definitely credited to the abilities of the FC, who did do a great job divulging us rookies with the do’s and don’t you dare’s of 0.0 life. But, I’d say more of it had to do with the fact that I was actually getting some brand of clear instruction in a game that has none.
And, as such, it got me thinking:
Train your corp mates.
If there’s any one thing I would say is absolutely vital to the successful induction of a fresh capsuleer to New Eden, it is proper training from more experienced pilots. Without it, a new capsuleer might as well start practicing their diving form for the plunge off the learning cliff. There is simply no hope for solo survival in space.
Of course, even with the tutorials added in Apocrypha, plenty can be said about the hugely lacking “new player experience”. As with many things in EVE, however, the lack of clear instruction puts a unique twist on a game mechanic that is taken for granted in most games—the new player being spoon fed everything from controls to tactics at every turn.
EVE’s answer to this is, quite frankly, “figure it out for yourself”. It’s a philosophy that’s the heart and soul of the sandbox MMO, and while it’s perfect for most of the game, as far as new players are concerned, it’s a shot in the dark.
Before you start quoting HTFU and preaching “too bad so sad” for players that don’t have thirty hours of game time a week to become masters of the ‘verse, let me be clear: I am not advocating new players be spoon-fed every mechanic in the game. Not only do I find this unnecessary and somewhat antithetical to the philosophy of the game, but as much as CCP claims they’re working on the new player experience, I really don’t expect CCP to try to compete with the quality of training one can get from fellow players.
That’s the point, really. It’s not just up to new players to “figure it out”, but it’s even more up to veterans to offer this help. If you’re running your own corp and sometimes get wrapped up in tech II fleets for nights in a row, or are ratting to afford your next HAC, take a moment to remember how difficult your first few months/year of playing EVE was, and see if there’s someone around to help out.
Because, chances are, you probably have a new player in your corp that’s spinning a cruiser in their station right now, at a loss for what to do next, or who to ask.
And you can be damned sure that when I finally earn my stripes as a veteran capsuleer, my first order of business will be helping with recruitment. The trials of starting are too fresh in my mind not to.
Photos of the launch at The Big Picture. Beautiful.
Not a bad article for very new players on how to manage their ships and inventory over at the Survival Guide to New Eden. Though it would seem obvious to most, there’s nothing intuitive about inventory management for completely new players. I was looking for these answers myself just over a few months ago.
…And man the porch.
Those were the simple orders from our corp leader yesterday when the CVA disband news broke. And that’s exactly what we did.
I won’t comment on the whole debacle as I think most of the EVE community is more or less in unison on the notion that a meta-game hack and the exploitation of a truly broken mechanic (sign this post to support a fix) is not real gameplay. CCP is returning sovereignty to CVA and closing the issue, but here’s hoping they learn from the mishap this time and send the repair bots to the one-click alliance disband button.
Regardless of whether it was going to get reversed or not, our corp, being part of the Paxton Federation—a holder of Providence space and friends of CVA—was not going to sit idly and wait for CCP to hit “undo”. I think it’s safe to say that CVA has enough enemies (good god you should see their reds list) to warrant concern over the flood of pilots that would be ready to take advantage of the confusion and concern apparent in Providence after the news.
So, we grabbed our shotguns and took a seat in our rocking chairs. It was kind of impressive really. Everyone seemed ready to do their part, fleets were forming left and right. The only problem, however, was that there were hardly any reds.
Of course, it would take 24 hours for CVA to actually lose their sovereignty, so perhaps pilots were biding their time, waiting to see what CCP would do, just as we were. Either way, it was surprisingly quiet—much less than the Alamo-style showdown I was expecting to log into.
I joined a roam early in the evening and stuck with it for a couple hours. A few reds were spotted. All of them were cloaks (nothing unusual for Providence). We bagged one. Unfortunately, I still wasn’t on the kill mail this time as the ship popped faster than I could lock and MWD in range. In another system, I was ordered by the FC to serve as bait to lure a ship out of cloak by innocently ratting in my Myrm. Unfortunately the ship didn’t bite, but at least I made some ISK ratting, right?
As much as I hate to see Providence get chaotic under these flawed conditions, I’d be lying if I said I wish the night wasn’t more chaotic. It’s probably just my trigger finger talking, as I’m still on the hunt for my whale (kill mail, whale mail, fail whale?), but the prospect of all-out war was a tiny bit interesting to me.
With that said, if you’re wondering why I haven’t been posting as regularly lately, it’s because I’ve made a small promise to myself to focus on in-game until I get that kill. For the time I’ve been in New Eden, the hunt for my first PVP win is getting kind of ridiculous, and it’s wearing me a little thin. So I may be light on posts until this happens. Wish me (better) luck.
Every Saturday, if life permits, I spend the morning scouring forums, catching up on longer blog reading, and researching various aspects of EVE while I sip on some coffee and throw down a bagel. Here’s where I share the more interesting findings.
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Proposal: EVE TV 2.0 - While I wouldn’t always find it fruitful to propose random game features to CCP (as if they don’t have enough to work on), I do find this one interesting, if not entirely necessary. I just think about all the value the built-in recording/movie feature in Halo brought to the game. Imagine if we could actually watch battle that recently played out, in-game, allowing us to control the camera, rewind, to analyze tactics, or simply be entertained. No more fuzzy Youtube videos—just browse the galleries directly from the NEOCOM. I’m a fan.
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OOC Forums - A non-official forum for RPer’s (only sure way to kill the trolls). Very good idea, and it looks like it has plenty of support and activity. Possibly a solid resource for those interested in EVE lore and role-play.
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Bakkhai - Found another professional designer who’s doing a similar thing as I am, farming out work for fun game-related projects. He has great stuff, and has managed to start charging for it. Give it a gander.
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EVE Lore Timeline - It’s what it sounds like. Puts it all in perspective.
During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn’s rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images.
Brilliant.
Another space-age chart, this one chronicling man’s progress to reach the moon. Beautifully designed and pretty enlightening.
No this isn’t some travel guide to New Eden. This is an image that puts our actual universe into some perspective. And as always, with things like this, my mind leaves a little more numb, a little more frightened, and in complete awe. I love this shit.
Two EVE related things I take away from this: 1) Unless I’m mistaken, of all of the sections in this map, “Sun’s Neighborhood” is actually the closest in terms of scale to New Eden. 2) I’m proud to know what AU’s are.
I absolutely loved the new Star Trek movie, but this is pretty hilarious.
Well, round one down. This past weekend I offered up my design abilities—being that it’s my real-life profession—to the EVE community for some fun, and fun was certainly had. The response was awesome, and I have enough jobs lined up for the next few weekends (so if I haven’t gotten to you yet, it’s coming). Requests run the gamut of logo designs, banners for blogs, podcast identities, and even some program design.
I can’t thank those of you that have contacted me enough, and I’m very glad the consensus seems to be that capsuleers are happy with the work I’ve done so far. I figured I’d post a progress report and do a little show and tell. Here we go:
Missions Collide
It’s a podcast we all know and love (and if you don’t, subscribe it fool!), and I’m grateful that Song Li asked me to help him out with the logo and podcast cover art. The logo is all custom-drawn typography, and the logo mark was an obvious choice for mission runners. I wanted this to feel a bit old-school—like an Atari game cover—because while mission running isn’t for everyone, it’s certainly a classic gameplay style.
Saturday Morning Starcakes
Another Song Li request for an up-and-coming podcast with a more informal tone. I’ll wait and let Mr. Li himself reveal the premise, but needless to say, it’ll be quite a treat.
Pods + Pills
This design was for my pal Crimsoneer who keeps a great blog over at Pods and Pills. The request was a logo design and a simple forum signature. Again, this is all custom typography and logo mark.
Stationside
Casiella, another fellow blogger, is on a mission to start his own podcast about EVE fiction, to put it briefly. I hope he doesn’t mind me spilling the beans here, but I’m really excited about such a podcast as I’m always fascinated with New Eden lore, and would love to hear some discussion on it.
The design consists of a custom-drawn logo (spot the mark?), a banner for a soon-to-come blog, and the itunes cover art. I had extra fun with the blog banner art, which is the image of a station fractured as if to symbolize the hundreds of stories contained within each facet of EVE. 10 points if you can spot all the characters’ faces.
While I wanted to give each one a genuinely unique character, I also wanted to make them feel like they were all part of the same universe. EVE has some pretty distinct design sensibilities (white type on atmospheric image), and working within those bounds go a long way for making these feel familiar, yet with the flexibility to become their own.
So, another update next week on round 2. Stay tuned.
Big thanks to 00sage00 for putting together a list of the most frequent EVE related twitter users, and a special thanks for actually calling it the “Tweet Fleet” per my request.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: You don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t have an EVE-related twitter account. We have way too much fun over there.
I play EVE on a Mac. While I am extremely appreciative of CCP taking efforts to make the game playable on OS X, there’s still a long list of reasons why Mac capsuleers are at a disadvantage to their Windows counterparts, aside from the awkwardness inherent in a ported game. A majority of the disadvantage I see actually exists outside of the game itself, and has to do with those staple third-party programs most pod pilots take for granted: the EVEmons and EVEHQs of the ‘verse that just don’t have Mac development.
Now, I realize that it is only a very small portion of the EVE community that plays on a Mac, and I’m not putting fault on any party here. The fact is, because there isn’t a wide base of Mac players, there isn’t a wide community of programmers available to tackle native API driven software. That’s just how it goes.
But a man can dream. And ever since I started playing EVE I have dreamed of a truly native Mac API program that doesn’t rely on Wine or any other strange hackery. I’ve wished for an app that takes the beauty of the OS X aesthetic and runs with it. The iTunes of EVE apps, if you will (say it, “yes, yes I will”).
Then I stumbled upon this post in the EVE mac forums. A kind fellow named Flammard has taken it upon himself to build such a program, and as far as I can tell he’s gotten farther than any attempt I can find before it. So, being the “sure I’ll do it for free” designer I’ve been lately, I contacted him a few months ago and offered to help him from the design side.
He admitted that design may not be a priority for a while, since he’s still working to build the functionality, and rightly so. But I couldn’t help myself, so I spent a few days mocking up my dream OS X EVE API app (mmm…acronym soup), if nothing else than to give him a little aesthetic and user-experience guidance, which he was really appreciative of.
So it has been under wraps for a while, but I figured I may as well share the mockups with the community and get some reactions. I’m holding myself to standards set by Capsuleer, of course, in which Roc has done an immaculate job merging the right dose of EVE with the simplicity of Mac design.
Without further adieu, I present vaporware in its fullest, EVEmac:
I’ve only rolled out a small sampling of a few screens, but hinting at what other future functionality could possibly be. I have also shared these designs with the Capsuleer crew, and it kicked off a good discussion on how this might influence future Capsuleer releases! We’ll have to see what the future holds, but I’ve made it clear to PyjamaSam and Roc that these designs are practically theirs already, since I was so directly influenced by their program.
While Flammard has expressed that he wants to take his API program to this direction eventually, I’m not holden to any one developer. If anyone is secretly a kick-ass Mac programmer and is so inspired to run with my design, please do contact me.
Otherwise, I hope this is a little eye-candy for Mac users out there. We can dream, together.
I have an offering I want to open up to the EVE community here—one that my future self may want to shoot me for, but he’ll deal with it.
I try to make it known that I’m a graphic designer by profession, and I’ve received a few compliments on the layout of the Chronofile and gotten some expressed interest in helping others with EVE related design work. I’ve recently helped Chainer out with a few banners to promote his site. I mocked up Roc in true Basterd fashion. I’ve done a little work with PyjamaSam on future Capsuleer updates (and I’d love to do more!). I’ve even mocked up what my dream Mac native API app might look like, in the vein of EVEmon and others, and sent it to a few developers hoping to get some programming legs on it (bigger post on this later…with pics).
I just want to let the community know that as long as it’s EVE related, I’m all for it. I have a blast working on this stuff, and would love to have a body of related work. This is where you come in.
If you’d like some ads for your site or app, need a logo for your podcast, banner for your corp forums, an alliance logo, EON ad, UI design for a web app, etc., do not hesitate to let me know. This doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily have the time or capacity to do anything under the stars, but it won’t hurt to ask.
Because I see this as you all really helping me get a body of work for an unsaid purpose (I’m sure you can use your imaginations), I’m doing this for free (no $, no ISK) for as long as I can handle. If demand ever gets so high that I need a breather, I may begin to throw in some ISK costs, but I’m not betting on that for a while.
So, hit me up with your requests if you’ve got them, and I’ll see if I can help. Thanks folks.
Those that know what Cosmos was before EVE, would recall Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series about humanity’s small place in the universe. I’m sure those same people were thinking, “Hm, someone should auto-tune the film and make a song out of it.”
Your prayers are freaking answered. Brilliant.
I’ve been living in Providence with the corp for a few weeks now, and I’ll go ahead and say that I really, really like the area. I’m finally getting familiar with the region, which, if I recall correctly, is the first area I’ve spent this length of time in. It’s comforting really, to finally know I can invest in a proper range of ships without fearing the possibility of having to pack them up at a moment’s notice.
So naturally, being settled in 0.0 space, the next order on the list has been to get some kills. And to be honest (oh, it pains me to admit this), this kill I’m hunting for will actually be my first. That’s right. In my relatively short career as a pod pilot, I have not received the fabled “killmail”.
The killmail is my Moby Dick, and I am Ahab. Ye damned whale.
I could explain my excuses for why this hasn’t occurred yet—mostly involving being in the wrong places at the wrong times—but I don’t want to get mired in the past. I’m looking forward here and my goal is clear. So now I follow through.
Last night was by far my closest opportunity yet. I was in my Incursus, running to pick up a purchased module a few jumps away, when two corp mates announce that they’re hot on the trail of a Drake passing through the region, and it was on its way to the very system I was in. When it landed, they got the tackle.
At this point I could have said, “Do you guys need help with points?” or “Do I have time to grab a DPS ship?” But my Ahab rage took over, and I wasn’t going to let another moment pass only to arrive at the last second to see the blue fireworks commence without me. I needed to shoot this son of a bitch.
So I throttled my warp in to the gate. Sure enough, the whale was surrounded by my two corp mates. I punched my MWD and had a point on him within seconds. I launched my single drone, and proceeded to contribute what little DPS I could. With one of my mates having to warp out early with hull damage, and the other tanking the missile fire with little effort, it was short time before the Drake turned its turrets on me. Once that happened, I had hardly the time to align before my Incursus popped.
From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Well, not quite. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of taking my pod, too. Boy, I showed him. /me rolls eyes.
While the battle wounded ran back to our station to grab the big guns, our tank did his best to keep the Drake in place. But, eventually, it was able to make its jump.
For the next half-hour or so came the most fun: the chase. We hopped systems and played pickle with the Drake for quite a while, and it was actually a blast. I would have rather had another chance to strike at my foe (this time with big boy blasters in my Thorax), but when we couldn’t get much help from the locals, it was only a matter of time before we lost the trail.
Regardless, it felt good to take the offense for once. So now, again, I’m on the hunt. I will find my great white killmail, and I will have its head even if it kills me…again, and again.
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