Eve blog banter #21 - Low Sec, The Forgotten Part of Eve

Welcome to the twenty-first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month topic comes to us from @ZoneGhost who a few months ago asked "Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?" Is it? I'd like us to explore this even further. Is Low Sec being treated differently by CCP Games than Null Sec (Zero-Zero) or Empire space is? Can one successfully make a living in these unsecured systems where neither Alliance nor Concord roam to enforce their laws? What's needed? Or is everything fine as it is?

I don't feel that strongly about getting changes to low sec. Perhaps that's because I dont go to low sec that often because i don't think there's anything worthwhile to do there and perhaps it needs a few changes and some expansions to make it more attractive. Or maybe not.

At the moment the only time I visit low sec is with my cyno alt, when I need to move my carrier around or when im hauling goodies that ive purchased from Jita back to my carrier. In this case I like the fact that most people are scared off by tales of lawless pirates blowing up un armed (or pathetically armed) industrial or PVE ships. It means I can safely cyno in and out of the system and my alts cyno ship can live to cyno another day :)

If major upgrades were done to low sec space to make them more attractive, what would it do? would high sec suddenly be less congested or 0.0 be less contested? Whatever the consequences, bringing more pilots into low sec is undesirable for many. I (and many others) would have to be much more wary with carrier runs. Right now in one of my jump systems there is only 3 people. That number is plenty. It is already a dangerous operation bringing in a carrier worth easily over 1billion isk, and I would be putting that at more risk each low sec jump than i have to now if it become more inhabited.

"Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?"

So to sum it it up, yes. Low sec is the forgotten part of Eve. Please keep it that way.

*[<> ! <>]*      

Also don't forget to check out some of the other great blog banters for this month below

1. CrazyKinux's Musing: The Lure of the Wild
2. Banter 15: Arr, Yer be talkin’ bout me lowsec | TheElitist
3. Banter 21: Low-sec- Chocolate Heaven
4. Subs' suds: Forever a noob in Eve: Low-Sec - the forgotten part of EVE Online
5. Blog Banter XXI - Lo-sec = Low Priority? | I am Keith Neilson
6. In the Ghetto | A Mule in EvE
7. where the frack is my ship?: Blog Banter 21: What's good for the goose...
8. Blog Banter #21: Change? | Sarnel Binora's Blog
9. Low Sec = Wild West ~ Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
10. a merry life and a short one: Low Sec: I Wanna Talk to You
11. Low Sec = No Sec | Diary of a Garbageman
12. EVEOGANDA: Blog Banter 21: Friggin' Low Sec
13. Drifting through the Stars: Blog Banter #21: Low-Sec - The Forgotten part of EVE Online
14. Captain Serenity: Eve blog banter #21 - Low Sec, The Forgotten Part of Eve
15. Low Sec: the Best part of EVE Online | Nitpickin's
16. Aeroxe's Assault - “Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?”
17. Eve Blog Banter 21 | A Scientist's Life in Eve
18. Latro's Bunker: Eve Blog Banter 21 - Low-sec
19. A "CareBears" Journey » Blog Archive » EVE Blog Banter #21: The Low Sec Conundrum

Fly Safe,
Serenity one

Update #2 - Finally!

More API changes. Pretty much what CCP are doing is changing all the item ID's from 32bit integers to 64bit, type ID's from 16 bit to 32 bit and flag ID's from 8 to 16 bit. This will give them more room to move in the future when more items are created and need a unique ID.
In the devblog by CCP prism x, he says "this is all done to future proof Eve Online for all the incoming awesomeness..." [because] "For years now we've been teetering on the brink of running out of unique ID's and it has put a lot of stress on maintenance... as well as development constraints on new features. To see what this affects and find out what it all means, read the devblog here.

As stated in another post of mine, the "incursion" expansion set for winter 2010 (simmer in Australia) will bring in a replacement for the static 10/10 complexes that were taken out of eve due to corporations and alliances farming them. The replacement complexes are aimed at group PVE. I personally cant wait to try these out because u find any PVE activity is exactly 6.5 X better in a group!

Theres an eve store sale ending in 3 days (on sept. 30). Popular ship models are down to $99 and you could grab a tee for as little as $15!

Also on September 30 there will be an extended downtime (roughly 3 hours) while Tyrannis 1.1 is deployed. Changes will include back end changes to the user interface and planetary interaction and best of all several mac client issues have been resolved, finally! (Half the time i play on a mac and some of the bugs are really irritating). The mac fixes include client crash issues, mailer cache error and the one affecting me, font rendering in the in game browser. That picture at the above is what my in game browser looks like at the moment lol.

Fly safe,
Serenity one

Drone comparison

I have been using more and more ships with drones, such as the Chimera, Raven and Ishkur. Every time i need to check something like what drone does the most damage or what one has the highest velocity i have to go into the market, look at all the drones little info windows and try and compare them, which takes a long time. That is why i spend an hour today gathering information from in game and also off the Eve Online Wiki's item database [link] to create this table so i can quickly see what drone is best for what situation.

How to:

• Show the drones for a specific race:
  click the drop down menu underneath the "Faction" heading then click the desired race.
• Show a specific drone:
  Click on the drop down menu underneath the "drone" heading then select the desired drone.
• Show all drones in a specific class:
  Click the drop down menu beneath the "Drone Class" heading and select the class of drones you want to see.
• You can also sort by damage type, following a similar method.

This and many more guides can be found on my Guides page
I hope this can help some people because it sure helps me :)

Fly safe,
Serenity One

My Great Escape

This is a response to "what's your greatest escape story?" by "A Merry Life and a Short One". The original post can be found here.

I'm sitting on the gate, aligned to the pos and killing some high bounty rats in my drake. The gate fires and a red pops up in local. Instead of doing the logical thing and warping straight to the pos, what do I do? Yea greed takes over an I say to myself "screw the red, I have time for one more rat" The red has now decloaked in their Phobos (Gallante heavy interdictor) and is burning for me. At that time I didn't know a HIC was able to scram at extreme range. I was over confident an thought I could warp away before he could get a scram on me seeing as he was 35km's away. I'm almost done with the rat and the reds still ages away (33km). Now all of a sudden he yellow boxes. Then red boxes. Then that little symbol that I've always dreaded appears next to his ship in the overview, "what. The. Fuck. He has me scrammed from 30km!"
I get a cold chill as local Spikes with 3 more reds an the gate flashes 3 times in quick succession.

I'll quickly add, we had just made the trip out to 0.0 escorting our corp's orca with our pos in it so we were all in bs / bc's an we were all fitted with ECM drones in case we hit a red fleet so the orca could get out.

Ok now on with the story.

The Three reds that jumped through were all in drakes an decloaked on the other side of the gate, about 40km away. They all red box instantly and there heavy missiles hurt.

*Warning bells go off reminding me that my shields are almost gone.*

I launch my ECM drones at the Phobos hoping to throw off its lock. The drakes almost immediately go from red to yellow and my drones start taking damage. I am forced to recall them when two go pop. Damn, I thought ECM drones would work.

*Again the warning siren sounds as i go into low armour.*

there's nothing I can do. My drones don't work and all my Corp mates are busy. There's just a couple of alliance guys coming from 10 jumps out.

*I'm in structure now and it's disappearing. Fast!*

Holy fuck this is my last chance! I launch the last three ECM drones and I'm yelling all sorts of shit to get them to jam the Phobos. Come on, come. On!

*Half structure*

Come on... Then bam! The phobos's lock drops, and I'm away. Warping to the pos an letting out a huge sigh of relief.

===

Fly smart, (don't be a retart)
Serenity one

P.s sorry to the 5 ECM drones that died to save me. It was for the greater good I swear!

Hardcore Gaming: check these two out

FireFall

This game looks really fun although i have not been given a beta key yet so haven't tried it yet. You can sign up for the beta here.



From Firefall:
FIREFALL is a team-based action shooter. Join your friends in an epic online campaign across a vast open world to stop the Melding and fight for the survival of humanity against the army of the Chosen. Advance your army and character through technological upgrades. Level up different character classes. Compete for supremacy in various multiplayer game types. Push back the Melding. SAVE EARTH!

World of tanks

WOT is a massively multiplayer online action game in which your objective is to capture the enemies base or massacre all of their tanks. you start out with a two light tanks and you are able to get straight into the action which I really like. WOT is an epic game and I really recommend you try it out (its free). Get your free world of tanks beta code here then sign up over here



From WOT:

World of Tanks is a team-based massively multiplayer online action game dedicated to armored warfare. Throw yourself into the epic tank battles of World War II with other steel cowboys all over the world. Your arsenal includes more than 150 armored vehicles from America, Germany, and the Soviet Union, carefully detailed with historical accuracy.

enjoy,
Serenity one

Update #1 - Api Improvements

CCP Prismx, CCP Stillman and the operations team have been busy for the last month or so improving the overall performance of the API. On one of the reserved API servers an application was causing long response time from the API. After they removed this the average response time dropped dramatically. They also moved the API onto a brand new set of disc arrays again reducing response time. On Monday, September 27th all existing API logs will be deleted so download any that you need. The logs are being deleted because a more efficient table to record the logs in has been made and it would take roughly 4 hours to copy the exiting logs across. From that point only logs for the previous 7 days will be kept. read the full story here

The next mass test taking place on the singularity test server will be on Saturday, September 25 at 20:00 UTC and will run for approximately 1.5 hours. read more about it here

In other news my corporation [Metalworks] just finished their huge construction project and onlined the "powered by vegemight" station. Yes, we are Australians :D

Reassesing Goals

one quick announcement before i get into this post:

I am going to start posting once a week with fiction / random post ect. and at least once a week i will post an update of all the stuff that is happening to do with eve whether it be competitions you need to enter or a dev blog worth reading (although you can check the side bar to the right, under "devblogs" where all the latest dev blogs are listed).

and now the post:

So i was thinking, what are my goals in eve? And I realised that i don't actually have any! When I started playing eve my goal was to fly one of the big ships, like a carrier. i looked up at those mighty hulls and thought they would be bring me joy. So now i am at that point, i bought myself a chimera (you can see my guide about them here) and it isnt everything i thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, i love it! it is my favorite ship that i have flown in the game so far and i love how the wallet blinks every 10mill but that alone doesnt make me want to log in because i dont have anything i am really working towards.

The chimera just hasn't quenched my hunger (or is that thirst? i don't even know if pod pilots eat food! but we definitely drink vodka) and i am still looking for bigger and better things. Or is it? and thats when i realised, in going straight for the big guns i have missed out a lot of the smaller ships. I "can" fly them, just never done it. So my next step in the wild world of Eve is going to be small ship pvp and i have bought a one just for the occasion.

Yep the onyx. Man that is a sweet ass hunk a' metal! its got around 120k effective hit points, a warp disruption field generator and! crap thats all i can think of right now lol. Since i got the onyx i have flown it in 2 gangs but didn't get any kills and i have done 2 gate camps and guess what? no kills... I think its because pvp is much more time consuming than PVE. If I'm doing a sanctum its east to just recall my drones and warp to a pos when i need to take a break. In pvp you don't really have such luxuries. A pvp roam (well one that you actually get kill in) can take 3 hours and you might be deep in enemy territory so you cant just up and leave. I am still going to try and get in as many fleets as i can and i am going to join a gate camp as we speak (wish me luck).

Oh BTW check out this standard buffer tanked onyx for fleets: Fleet onyx with buffer


Fly safe,
serenity one

Importing Overview Settings

If you are wanting to know how to set up your overview for yourself rather than import someone elses settings you check out these Massively.com guides. Otherwise continue reading :)

• Setting up your overview - part 1
• Setting up your overview - part 2

It is important (very useful) to have sets of overview settings loaded into different tabs in your overview. I have a whole lot of them, ranging from pvp to planets and moons which i can quickly switch between depending on what i need to see. I know it takes quite a long time to create all these sets so that's why i am going to show you how to import a set into your Eve client that someone else has made.


On a PC:

1. Download A good set here
2. Unzip the file
3. Copy the file to your User -> Documents -> EVE -> Overview folder
4. If the "Overview" folder doesn't exist, create one: "Overview" (capital O)
5. In game go to Overview Settings on your overview window, and select the last option "Import Overview Settings"
6. Select the file you just copied and check all the presets you would like to install
7. Press Import

On a Mac:

1. Download the latest version here
2. Unzip the file
3. Copy the file to your User -> library -> Preferences -> Eve online preferences -> p_drive -> My Documents -> EVE -> Overview folder
4. If the "Overview" folder doesn't exist, create a new one called "Overview" (with a capital O)
5. In game go to Overview Settings on your overview window, and select the last option "Import Overview Settings"
6. Select the file you just copied and check all the presets you would like to install
7. Press Import

hope this can help some people.

Fly safe,
Serenity one

Carbon

CCP have been busy. they have been testing character technology for incarna and have been blogging about the Carbon framework they use with all there games and what they will most likely use for the characters in incarna.
Here is a preview of the carbon character technology. It is short but it looks pretty damn good.



Theres also another video showing off the physically simulated clothing using NVIDIA APEX which can be seen here.



CCP have blogged about it the carbon framework and the different teams within CCP lately and its a good read (if your into that kinda stuff). Also the main carbon page on the CCP website if you want to read more about it could be found here if you clicked.
 
Also dont forget to check out the Incarna trailer (i am sure everybody has seen it but for some reason i hadn't till now) which can be found round about here. Eve has really come long way. Here is "this is eve" and "this is eve II" by loxyrider. personally i think they are the a couple of the best eve video's.

That be all for now.

fly safe,
Serenity One

Prizes an Stuff

Take at look at this guys review of eve online (WARNING: British accent)
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/208-Eve-Online
i love Eve an this guy sort of pissed me off, but i do have to admit he is damn funny in some of his other game reviews, well maybe not funny but he tells it how it is (which is funny).

To take my mind off that i entered the Eve Online universal glory sweepstakes and I'm going to have a crack at the deviant art design a ship contest. If you think you can draw and wanna go in the contest for a chance to win a year subscription to deviant art and an apple ipad, you can check out the rules and enter here or if you want a chance at cool prizes including a free year eve subscription and a new PC click here!



Fly safe,
Serenity one