If you, by chance follow this unregularly updated block you may have noticed the long current gap. For I am having a break from Eve, there are no news at the moment. Someday I’ll be back. So long: fly safe and thanks for the fish 
Shortly after my own post about Angry Bird I found this quite positive video comment on The Escapist Magazin:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/4081-Angry-Birds-Is-Not-Sh-t
It is only some days ago that I did belong to the poor group of modern humans without a smartphone. Finally I joined the club and now I am the owner of some Android device. When setting up the phone and browsing the Android market, I stumbled over the unavoidable Angry Birds. Of course, after all the kerfuffle and hype in the media, I was curious what it would be like . Now that I’ve played the first few levels I’ve to admit that it is a very nice game: great and well-fitting graphics, optimal for touch screens and last but not least addictive like Tetris or Lemmings. The levels are short enough to do one or two while in the train after office. And for the same reason, it’s no great deal to start a level over and over again to finish the level as best as possible (something that appeals to my inner perfectionist). Definitely a thumbs up!
Most Eve players know the description text of the skill “Thermodynamics” which tells you to frown about a perpetuum mobile. But what about Perpetuum Online? Well CCP did, unvoluntarily, some advertising für Perpetuum when it launched Incarna and angry people in the forums posted links to alternative games, one of those is Perpetuum. These days on our RL corp meeting I glanced over someones shoulder when he played it. I got interested to explore the differences and commons by myself.
- Installation: You can download and install the client as easy and seamless as Eve’s.
- Account: Every created account comes with the usual 2 weeks trial. In this trial period you cannot access the player market and most other social and economic features are restricted. Subscriptions are non-recurring – you must explicitly activate the next game month. The price is lower: 1 month in Perpetuum ~ 9€ vs. 1 month in Eve ~15€.
- Character creation: looks alot like the old Eve-character creation: five steps of background story selections which decide about your initial extensions (Perpetuum-speak for skills) and attributes. As an Eve player you should have some intuition about what you get.
- Avatar portrait: A lot of settings to adjust, but the final image in the game is even smaller than in Eve. The optical features are worse than in the old Eve character portrait system.
- Tutorial: The tutorial consists of two parts. At first a basic tutorial teaching the controls. Then follows a series of quite interesting and diversive tutorial assignments (Perpetuum-speak for missions).
- After the tutorial: Now that I’ve mastered the basic assignmentd I feel a bit left alone. I see the same set of level 0 assignments in the Alpha bases, even the objective’s locations don’t change. So it yells a “Grind!” at me. Maybe the full account, with view to the market, could give some push via production. Or going into the null sec areas…?
- Pro: Everything feels like Eve with robots. Some things are even better: The GUI looks more modern and stable. You can’t miss starting a new skill (extension) – all extension points are accumulated onto the account and then spent into the skills.
- Contra: Everything feels like Eve with robots. Often you think “I know how that works, easy stuff”. Then again you have to learn a complete new nomenclature for things you already know. The area is quite small at the moment. And combat is more simple than in Eve. As I found in the forums, there seems to be no angle/vector calculation on attacks, no thing like tracking, signature radius or speed tanking – although in a WASD-controlled game one would expect some bonus from skillful movements and the right attack angle
Fazit: Made very well, it is a promising newcomer. Nevertheless it is not tempting enough to divert me from the Eve sandbox. Or, told the other way: although I’m not doing much in Eve it takes up all my designated gaming time.
Saturday night I relocated my mission running base. As there are Lvl 4 agents in a nearby low sec system I plan to peek in there and have a look if they by chance offer missions in a nearby highsec system. So I fitted another Helios as a cloaky shuttle (all speed and such). When done, I ran some small volume courier missions – carefully NOT by autopilot. On my way back from Jita I was passing by an Iteron which seemed to run by autopilot in low sec!? Well, on the next gate a flashy Rokh did await. I snuck silently through the gate. Then I got curious what happend to the Itty. I burned back to the gate, jumped through and saw the wreck of the hauler. Now I got greedy and I went straight to the wreck to see if anything valuable was left. It was: another lesson in Eve game mechanics.
- The Rokh either decloaked or warped in.
- I tried to run from the wreck to reactivate the cloak before the Rokh could get a lock on me.
- Finally I wondered why the Rokh dealt damage without having a target lock…
Solution is: the Rokh did not bother with target locks, he just smartbombs small targets to even smaller pieces. When you look at his killboard you see that he regularly does so to keep a high kill count.
Well done video blog about microtransactions.
(@CCP: yes – you’re mentioned)
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/3689-Microtransactions
AFK-cloaking is easy. AFK-autopiloting too. But the latter can be expensive, even in Highsec:
- Activating autopilot: 0 ISK
- Tempest gank fit: 80 million ISK
- Courier packages blazing to smithereens: 900 million ISK (*)
- Decision to never again fly AFK carrying such values: priceless
In fact, all the valuable cargo was destroyed, the best drop was one nanofiber T2 module. But that is only small comfort…
(*) collateral, not real value
The cards are on the table: our permanent AFK-cloaking guest plainly did blackmail us: offering ratting time. Well, this means war. Griefer – we know where you carriers are parked…
Nevertheless the ability to stay cloaked and unscannable for as long as you want is a known nuisance CCP seems not to care about. A lot of suggestions have been made in the CCP-forums. But the balancing is not easy. If you penalize cloaking to much the cloak ships become useless. If the penalty is easy to avoid it’s not helping either. Further, CCP has not only to balance combat but also money flow (see “faucets and drain” at virtualworldeconomics.com). To much on the faucet side and you get inflation. To much on the sink side and you loose players. An AFK-cloak-camped 0.0-system is a reduced faucet and so I’d say CCP will declare this as “working as designed” and wait up to which grade the players will live with it.
Today a corp event was scheduled to raise money for (surprise) our corp. All went well, the financial goal was easily reached. Only one neut shortly disturbed the evening – but we drove him away (alas, no kill mail). Afterwards I did one more anomaly run for my private wallet. Then I accepted two nice courier contracts: a sum of 35M ISK for following the jumpbridge highway and autopiloting to Jita. Plus, I could verify the new layout of the local jumpbridge network – which had to be altered due to the Incarna patch. Still a todo is the moving/fitting of some PvP- and tournament-ships.
After the Incarna patch there was a large uproar in the Eve community, but you can already read that all over the internet:
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=935
http://tagn.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/the-incarna-summit-results/
http://evehermit.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/incarna-thoughts-07/
In the meantime I had not played much for a variety of reasons:
- waiting for the Incarna storm to settle down
- waiting for my old Navy Domi to sell (was a bit short of ISK recently)
- waiting for the broken jumpbridge network to become repaired
- waiting for Geddafug to complete some hauler and freighter skills
- …
- last but not least: fine summer weather in the good old MMO “Real Life”
But I’m getting back into the game. Geddafug has the necessary hauler skills and Ahb adds Contracting to the team (so he can sit in 0.0 and delegating the courier tasks to Geddafug). In the short term Ahb shall fit some cyno frigs, then training towards a Falcon. The ISK shortage got already compensated by some PLEX (yesss, this means “evil RMT”). In the future, some ships will be moved too. And I need a number of cheap frigs for the corp tournaments. Oh, and there are some PI installations to care about.
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