More on Empyrean Age

Yeah, I should post here a bit more often. Got lots of things I want to write about, but for now I’m going to write a bit more about the EVE expansion Empyrean Age. It seems I covered most of the mechanics a couple of weeks ago, the interesting thing however is how this was going to turn out on Tranquility. I think I can say it turned out good. People seem to be very excited and looking at topics like this, this and this it seems CCP succeeded in their mission.

Personally I’ve been having a lot of fun. My corporation directly signed up. My most flown ship last week has actually been the Punisher, which is lots of fun with lots of Rifter hulls around to blow up. It’s great to see all those random people, veterans and newbies, form up in fleets with eachother and attempt to blow up the other side without much complaining when they get blown up themself, I’ve barely seen whining so far actually. New unknown people stand up to take some initiative and lead fleets, one of these Caldari fleets actually blew up three Red Alliance carriers and reinforced their POS in Black Rise.

Yesterday I actually joined a Militia fleet instead of usual corp fleets just to check that out. Everyone joined Eve Voice, the people that didn’t/couldn’t got kicked from the fleet. The FC seemed to be a friendly and enthusiastic guy, but also seemed to be overly careful and I actually got the idea he hadn’t much actual PvP experience at all, but he made a plan and sticked to it. Things could’ve done a bit more efficient perhaps, but the guy was good in leading this sort of thing. And he seemed to be very excited about Factional Warfare, full of plans for the future. Fun to see people cooperating with eachother, trying to get more organized by creating channels and forums. New trade-hubs close to the frontlines emerge. People create Punishers and other frigates to give them away for free to people of the militia. Fun stuff.

I do wonder how it will persist. Seems to me that there are a lot of new corporations focusing on Factional Warfare and I’m sure those will continue to do so, but the complex conquering to take over systems seems to be a bit meaningless. Risk versus reward hasn’t really been rebalanced as I hoped for. Nobody is going to bother with those FW missions. People that just conquer complexes and run when they see an enemy get higher ranks, while people that have killed 20+ people still got 0.0 standing and that’s a bit.. wrong. (Kind of hard to fix though) Most efficient way of conquering complexes (and systems) seems to be just getting someone in an interceptor pulling away all the npc’s, while someone else captures the point. And that’s just wrong. Personally I see it just as a helpful tool to find PvP. PvP fun is the goal and the complexes/missions are just a tool. I’m not going to focus on conquering as many complexes as possible.

I’m curious to what will happen in the next weeks and in the next months. Likely is that CCP will balance and add some stuff to it, but I hope it won’t take them a half year again. I also still think Alliances should be allowed and hope they’ll fix that as well. And I’m looking forward to that trailer.

New blogs, some quicklinking and more #2

It’s been a few months since my last blog-roll update. I once promised myself to keep up a blog-roll with every worthwhile EVE blog on it. I’m not sure all of them are worthwhile, you decide.

Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle - More than decent blog of someone that plays EVE, he recently argued that MMO will fade into history because of all the WoW clones. I disagree on that. AoC already almost sold a million times, there’s a big market for MMO’s and I’m sure there’ll be more open EVE-like MMO’s in the future. Actually, I believe EVE-like MMO’s - are - the future. Ah well.
Sweet Flag - Blog about games in general, including lots of MMO stuff. He tried out the EVE trial and stopped with it. The loser. Still worth reading though.
The Photoshop Whore - Not a blog about photoshop, thankfully. Mostly singleplayer games.
how do i play game? - It’s a blog of someone who never played a game before, then starts playing Half-Life as his very first game and reports his progress on a blog. He’s busy for 2 months to get past the Blast Pit. Hilarious!
a Mule in EVE - New EVE blog. Quite active as well. I like it.
Eve newb - EVE newbie with a blog. Enough said.
Eve-Pirates - Another pirate blog. I’d almost say there are more than enough of them by now.
Weekend Warriors - EVE weekend warrior.
Lordyu - Gamer that just started a blog and also just started playing EVE again.
Oliver Brown - Posts about anything, including EVE.
House Marek - Blog of one of ‘my ammatar allies’. I guess. Good read. Mostly In Character.

That’s all blog-wise. I’ve also updated my essential EVE reading list with the PCGamerUK article on the Great War of a while ago.

I don’t think I currently have any other cool links, but I could suggest you to read this on my other blog. It’s about a Anti-Piracy proposal that could turn the internet in a virtual police stuff.

That’s all.

Experiences of Empyrean Age on SiSi. (little update)

Came home and saw CCP added the Emperyan Age on SiSi (the test-server). Quickly installed the thing to try it out. I’ll write up my brief experiences here, including a couple of screenshots.

Logged in an Amarrian station as usual. Quickly spotted the new Militia button in the menu on the right. Clicked on it and saw this “Fight for the Empire” window. Clicked on enlist and got this message back. Yep. I’m not very high on standing, I’ve never really bothered with mission-running in EVE. Ah well, guess that will have to wait. Found out they changed the character screen as well, there’s a new Decorations tab, which was (of course) empty for me.

I set course for Huola in the Bleak Lands, since I was pretty sure I’d be finding some of the new FW complexes there. I ended up talking with a Bug Hunter and another friendly random person that were cleaning some of the complexes for the Empire. The Bug Hunter was able to provide some answers to a few of my questions. Useful.

Anyway, like in the “beta” FW on Tranquility, there are complexes in all the FW low-sec regions, people can uncover these complexes with the on-board scanner. When the complex is uncovered a beacon of it appears on the overview for everyone in the system, so everyone can easily warp to it for attacking/defending, no matter if you signed up for a militia or not. These complexes have an outpost you can capture by flying within 20km, doing this angers the npc’s there who start attacking you. These npc’s respawn every now and then in different strenght and probably at random times. They aren’t extremely hard, but probably hard to do completely solo. It takes 15 minutes to ‘capture’ this complex for your faction and the others have this time to successfully defend it. I believe the beacons disappear again after a while when they’ve been defended, at least this was the case in the ‘beta’ (or more like alpha) version we participated in months ago. And if you stay there for 15 minutes the complex is successfully captured.

Then there’s also Control Bunker in every capturable system. The Amarrian model of it appeared to have a glitch on my computer. I couldn’t lock this Control Bunker, but the bug hunter told me these things can be taken down when the opposing faction has done ‘enough’. This probably a major thing and you can expect both factions to group up for a big fight when these things are switching. When it’s taken over, system sovereignty also switches.

Another important thing of all this is the complexes and how it restricts ship-types from using the star-gate to warp in. As you can see in this screenshot, the outpost only allows frigates, cruisers, destroyers and industrials. This is a way of CCP to have more small skirmish warfare and let ‘newbies’ be more useful. But there appear to be different types of complexes that allow different types of ships. The bug hunter told me there were complexes that allowed battleships as well and that these complexes are more likely to appear in 0.1 than 0.4 systems. So the lower the sec-status, the more ‘important’ the complexes are. I asked him if there were complexes that allowed capitals, he said he didn’t know.

One of the ‘bugs’ of FW on Tranquility was that it had complexes in high-sec, which then become impossible to defend because the attackers are protected by Concord. I’m not sure if they’ve changed this, but it wouldn’t suprise me.

I’ve got no idea about the rewards and all the fluff around it, but the militia corporations got lots of stations and agents. I wasn’t able to get missions from the agents as I wasn’t enlisted. I think these missions are rather similar to usual missions as you’ve to blow up npc’s as well, but it’s still a bit different and I assume the rewards are much better. It does however work in ‘levels’ again, so you’ll have to build up loyalty. Prepare to grind. I heard of one person that did a lvl1 mission for the Imperial Crusade and had to shoot down some npc’s in a low-sec minmattar system 14 jumps away, so it isn’t completely similar. It’s probably a rather risky adventure as well through all these potentially harmful systems.

What I personally think of all this? Well, I think I’m optimistic. I’m not that much interested in the missions, rewards and other fluff (I’m a rather anti-materialistic person in MMO’s), but I think there are a lot of people that are. But I do like blowing up other players (and usually getting blown up myself) and I’m looking forward to this new target-rich environment. These low-sec regions are probably going to be a lot more filled. RiskvsReward is likely to be better balanced, which was very much needed. Lvl 5 missions are going to get a boost as well.

I do have to say however that this stuff reminds me a lot of the outdoor-PvP things in World of Warcraft. Yep. I know it’s totally wrong to compare WoW with EVE all the time. As a wise person once said, comparing EVE to WoW is like comparing WoW to a 8 player game of Unreal Tournament. But still, Silithius / Eastern Plaguelands and some regions in the Burning Crusade expansion had similar capturable outdoor PvP points. I remember I was very hyped up for these additions in WoW when they were announced and was very disappointed when I played them ingame. Factional Warfare also is a form of ‘Controlled PvP’. Big difference is however that EVE always got it’s consequences and the scale of these new capturable complexes is much bigger than the stuff in WoW. It’s a lot less meaningless. But still…

You could also argue that capturing systems by capturing lots of complexes and a control bunker is somehow silly and a bit unrealistic. I agree on that, but the POS warfare also got some silly restrictive mechanics currently. Perhaps even sillier. Also, I wouldn’t know a better way of implementing Factional Warfare in EVE. I think it’s decent enough and I’m very curious to how the ’sandbox of EVE’ is going to respond to the new mechanics. I actually think nobody is able to exactly predict that. I mean, would 0.0 alliances even bother signing up if they were able to? How much influence would they have over the fights? How much negative impact would it have on newbies? Would there be huge blobs moving around, lagging around and if so, would they be there for long? Even CCP wouldn’t be able to answer these questions.

Back to alliance issue. Greyscale has responded to some of the (constructive) criticism and I liked his post. He still said that his argument for not allowing alliances was a ‘design’ decision and not a technical. I still consider that a rather weak design decision, but he also hints that alliances may be able to enlist in the future as it seems to be technically possible with 10 minutes of coding and two weeks of bug-testing. Woah. I really hope they’re going for it after the initial influx is gone. It’s stupid to restrict it.

That’s it. Long post it seems. Intended to only write my experiences briefly, but I once again failed miserably. Here are some two screenshots of the militia offices and one funny log that was dropped by some tribal minmattar pilot. 1, 2, 3.

- update -

I talked about the missions from the militia shortly. There’s another ‘addition’. When someone goes to ‘deadspace’ for a mission it only lights up a beacon named ‘Exposed’ that provides a warp-in point to the stargate for everyone. So with FW missions there’s no need anymore for someone to probe the mission-runner down. Very nice in my opinion!

Only the reward seemed to be rather low. Only 60k for a lvl3 mission. It might also have something to do with the rank you’re having, I don’t know.

What a shame (Deus Ex fun)

After some blog linked me towards this brilliant youtube video, I spend a hour watching hilarious Deus Ex videos on youtube. Here are some of my favourites:

Alec Jacobson, skilled swordsman.

Seems CCP pulled off a virtual 9/11

And holy shit, it’s amazing. Read about it here and checkout that video broadcast, which is a teaser trailer for the new expansion. And that trailer is amazing, especially the first time when it was totally unexpected for me, must have watched it 20x times myself by now. It’s short and brutal, nice voice-casting and has some scary alarm as music in the background. It made me shiver a bit the first few times. I’m sure I’m not the only one who directly thought about 9/11 (or Pearl Harbor). It also directly has a smell of conspiracy (just like 9/11 and also Pearl Harbor), it was a peace-price winning Admiral after all, there’s something fishy going on.

Good stuff. CCP also just launched the feature page for the new expansion, click here. That banner alone is worth staring at.

But personally I found out something yesterday that lowered my excitement drastically. It seems that corporations have to leave their alliance to participate in Factional Warfare. I heard that rumor before, but thought that CCP couldn’t be silly enough to be - that - stupid. Reading that feature page it also seems individual people have to leave their corporation to sign-up for Factional Warfare…. Seriously, what the heck are they thinking?

It’s not a big thing for my alliance, as PIE is the only corporation in it, but I think our case is a minority case. Most of our enemies and allies are in a completely different position. This would mean that a 0.0 controlling alliance like CVA could impossibly participate in Factional Warfare.

I still hope I am misinterpreting this stuff or CCP better come up with some very good arguments behind this decision in the next dev-blogs.

Factional Warfare dev-blog

And finally CCP bothered writing a decent dev-blog and it’s about Factional Warfare. Wooh. It will also be available on Sisi (test-server) this weekend. I got even more excited when I saw CCP Linghorn say this in the comments thread: “

If you sign up for a faction you can be attacked by anyone in opposing factions anywhere. it is that in low-sec we have marked out control points which will bring the combat to them making it easier for you to find and take part in.”

And that’s exactly what I was hoping for. It’s what I wrote some time ago here. No matter how awfully implemented the rest of FW could be, because of this factional ‘extensive’ war-dec system it’ll be an awesome addition to the game.

It will however be a big mess in the first weeks, I’m sure there’ll be some whining on the forums, but it’ll balance out after a while. There are a lot of people (including me) that love a target-rich enviroment and these people will be satisfied with Factional Warfare.

Voting.

I’m voting for Hardin, what ya voting for?

MMO’s and (Real-Life) leadership

I found this link a few days ago about leadership and MMO’s and how it applies to real-life business:

Tens of millions of people are honing their leadership skills in multiplayer online games. The tools and techniques they’re using will change how leaders function tomorrow—and could make them more effective today.

Tomorrow’s business landscape could well be alien territory for today’s business leaders. At many companies, important decision making will be distributed throughout the organization to enable people to respond rapidly to change. A lot of work will be done by global teams—partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority—that are assembled for a single project and then disbanded. Collaboration within these geographically diverse groups will, by necessity, occur mainly through digital rather than face-to-face interaction.

What on earth will leadership look like in such a world—a world whose features have already begun to transform business?

Suspend your skepticism for a moment when we say that the answers may be found among the exploding space stations, grotesque monsters, and spiky-armored warriors of games such as Eve Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. Despite their fantasy settings, these online play worlds—sometimes given the infelicitous moniker MMORPGs (for “massively multiplayer online role-playing games”)—in many ways resemble the coming environment we have described and thus open a window onto the future of real-world business leadership.

The whole article doesn’t have many new info for me, but it’s always nice to see your own views being detailedly confirmed by some smart academic people. Personally I find this stuff fascinating. MMO’s are a great place for (young) people to explore and build-up abilities they were unaware of. And communities in MMO’s of-course often require a lot of organization. The big 0.0 alliances in EVE have a incredibly complicated structure and the big successful raiding guilds probably have an efficiency that puts the average company to shame. Of course there’s something that can be learned from MMO’s.

I remember playing in raiding guild in WoW for a short while a long-long time ago (must be 3 years ago?), we actually had a 14 year old kid as raid-leader in Molten Core back then. Funny right, having a 14 year old kid leading 40 mostly grown-up people (probably including one or two ‘very’ old 40+ people), he was at almost every raid and he was damn good as leader. Even funnier were the few times when he wasn’t able to show up. We failed, miserably. Wiping on bosses we had on ‘farm-status’ for several weeks.

And I think that’s just hilarious. That nobody was able to replace this kid (well, I’m sure that after a while someone competent would’ve stood up). It’s something unique that can’t be found outside multiplayer gaming. And I dare to say it was quite a worthwhile experience for the kid as well.

Personally I believe I learned quite a bit from MMO’s as well. Especially in WoW as an officer, sometimes raid-leader and dealing with a raid-alliance, including all the drama, having to keep everyone happy and occasionally leading a raid-group. Yes, I do believe I (as a young person, still) learned some useful things about humans and I probably take more leading responsibility in my daily life than I would’ve done otherwise. I really believe that my 2 years in WoW have been more than just a time sinker and that it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Oh, and for the interested people. There’s also an article about the same subject by IBM that probably is around a half year old now, it’s actually even more interesting than the harvard business article above and has some fun interview-quotes of players and game screenshots. PDF can be found here.

‘The Empyrean Age’, the upcomming EVE expansion (and novel)

Yep. I just read it here on Warcry, it seems the new expansion title is out and there’s some confirmations of things I already expected. Factional Warfare will indeed be out soon and the novel of Tony Gonzalez (with the same name) will explain much of the background story leading to it, nice marketing trick, CCP.

“The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be “The Empyrean Age,” the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.

“The universe of Eve has always had this fragile peace between the races and now that’s going to end,” Massey said. This means war and that is the core new feature: factional warfare. “People can actually take an active role and choose sides for who they want to fight for and who they want to fight against.”

More details on this expansion are going to trickle out over the coming months, but it marks - at long wait - the culmination of the plan that was once upon a time called Kali and has now turned into not one, but four epic expansions: Revelations I, Revelations II, Trinity and now The Empyrean Age.”

I’m still a bit unsure about FW and how it’s implemented, but I’m extremely curious to the new dev-blogs and can’t help being pretty psyched about this. This - will - be a huge thing indeed. And I really believe that EVE as a franchise might become pretty big as well.

Current ‘to-do’ games

Alright, there really are some EVE/MMO related things I’ve been intending to write about for weeks now, but I can’t find the time and again I’m going to talk about something different.

Since I quit WoW and started to play EVE, I also broaden my horizon on pc games a bit. For some reason EVE and games ‘next’ to it worked much better than playing games ‘next’ to WoW. I don’t exactly know why it’s like that, but I can easily decide to not play for a couple of days, which was for some reason different in WoW. Might have to do something with me having less ‘responsibility’ in EVE where I’m a ’simple peon’ in my corporation, compared to my officer-status in WoW, but I also think it has something to do with the game itself.

Anyway. After playing WoW for 2 years I missed a lot of brilliant pc games, I played myself through the Half-Life 2 episodes, played some Team Fortress 2, Portal ofcourse, picked up Civilization 4 another time and since I started to follow RPS, I actually got a lot more enthusiastic about pc games in general.

But there’s just so much to play, that’s why I decided to write-up all the games I want to play, so I can go follow the list and go through them all. Doing this might motivate me to actually finish those damn games.

1) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I remember looking forward to playing this game back in ehr.. 2001 or so? It actually got out  in 2006 and I played a little bit of it last year, but left it unfinished for reasons I don’t remember. It’s one of those games that feels a bit clumsy and unpolished. At the same time it’s very atmospheric and , it can really suck you up for an immersive (and horrifying) experience. I guess it’s a bit like EVE that way, you need to put something in it to get more out of it than you can in the avarage game.

So I’m going for it! At the moment of writing the installer just notified me that STALKER is installed. Yay. I’m going to start a completely new game with patch 1.0005 and this Obvilion Lost mod, from what I’ve heard STALKER got a very active modding community and this mod supposedly adds a lot to the game, by actually balancing/fixing/adding some important features the developers left unfinished. It’s always a bit scary to start playing a game you don’t know all that well with some mod, but I heard STALKER gets a lot better with it.

2) Assassins Creed. Which is new on pc, got out a week ago or so. I saw some people playing it a while ago, even played it myself, the game itself looks brilliant and fun, but the voice-casting made me cringe and the storyline appeared to be awful. So I’m a bit mixed about it, but I guess I still should give it a go. I think it’s one of those games that could’ve been totally brilliant if the makers dared to take some risks with the storyline, there’s so much potential in the theme. But now instead of a Deus Ex, it’s just another above average action game. Ah well, still a must-play for me I guess.

3) Pathologic. After reading the brilliant series on this game on RPS I just had to play this game. Go read it, it’s the best stuff I’ve read the last couple of weeks and I read a lot. It appears to be a horrible bug-filled unpolished game that people don’t even enjoy playing. But at the same time it’s a totally brilliant and atmospheric game. People compare it with movies. Most people don’t enjoy watching a Requiem for a Dream, at the same time you can’t deny the brilliance of movies like that. It’s the same with Pathologic, you need to put so much in it to get barely anything out of it. After reading about it on RPS (first time I actually heard of this game and it’s already out since 2005), I just had to give it a try and I ordered it sunday. It already arrived by mail today. I’ll give this game a go, I wonder if I’ll get through it.

4) Vampire The Masquarade Bloodlines. Another brilliant, but horribly bug-filled and unpolished game. Again I got inspired by a RPS article. I played it a bit years ago, can’t remember much of it, but I know it’s potential. I need to get into the World of Darkness a bit more anyway and this game seems to become a lot better with some much-needed patches and fan-made modifications.

5) The Witcher. Almost want to say ‘another brilliant, but horribly bug-filled and unpolished game’, with some awful voice-casting as well. Since that is what it was last year. But this year the makers announced an extended edition that should fix a lot of the frustrations I had with it, in the 2 hours I dedicated to it last year. I still heard a lot of good things about it, so I guess I should play it and this free extended edition is a remarkable thing from the developers.

I’ll stop with this list for now. These are my goals for the first few months. There’s much more, like System Shock 2, Medieval Total War 2 with decent mods. More Civ4 Beyond The Sword, started a marathon singleplayer game a few weeks ago which I should finish someday (I’m also looking for a decent multiplayer group to play this game with),  there’s also the just released Europa Universalis 3 and that’s a game-serie I’ve always wanted to get into. Then there are the Introversion games Uplink and Darwinia which I both want to finish. There’s also Deus Ex, people often remind me that completing it 5 times already (years ago) is not enough.

Then there’s more on the horizon. Like World of Goo, which I really can’t resist buying when it comes out.

And then… Then there’s also EVE. Which I’ll continue to be playing…