Confucius says… Merchant-Soldiers

Well, I do not know, if Confucius really did say something along the following quote, but some days ago reading [1] I stumbled over it and it immediately rang something back in my mind, namely the good old question if pew-pew is the only valid way to play Eve. Here it goes:

“In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were necessary to defend the frontiers. Similiarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral…”

Plainly spoken, high sec traders are as bad as the null sec fighters and the low sec pirates. Then, the only pure and innocent souls left in Eve may be the miners, for the quote does not speak about them.

[1] Graeber, David. “Debt: the first 5,000 years” p. 260

Temporarily unavailable

Dear customer, we like to inform you, that over the next days the Rens Eystur Delivery Service will cancel its operations due to urgent mining operations far away in the Gallentean outback.

Or, in other words: besides staring at the training queue and becoming comfortable with Eve again, I had spent some time running courier jobs in the Rens area. Meanwhile I sold my old Hulk, as it was no longer the optimal choice for solo mining. Now I have a shiny new Mackinaw fitted. It does not have the bonusses as a Hulk, but a really large ore hold. And, as I demonstrated some time ago, for the solo miner ore storage is more important than mining bonus. Now I have to find a nice, silent belt to get back into mining business.

Good bye EON

I never had bought any issue of the official Eve Online magazine, and now it’s forever too late. Well, I got a good impression of EON and other, not so lucky, MMO magazines, over at “The Ancient Gaming Noob”. He too, of course, has a posting about the end of that magazine and I can’t add much. It’s nevertheless remarkable, that a quite small player in the MMO-market not only survives but could afford a well designed magazine for such a long time. It says something about the player base.

Rude Awakening…

…or: Welcome back in the world of real pixel consequence, where even “high security space” is only as secure as, say, the wild west in comparison to a full scale WWI infantery battle field. Thus, sooner or later AFK-travelling gets punished. Be prepared!

Not to mention: today I was not prepared. And flew around the fully implanted high sec clone. *facepalm* It’s not more than a week since I reactivated the account and I’ve already managed to throw away about 70 Mio ISK:

Back again

More than a year ago, I had to take a break from Eve Online. Now, after reading lots of news about changes and events in Eve I gave way to my curiosity and resubscribed. Sure, I also want to see what will happens in-game on the 10th anniversary.

So, now I have a hard time sorting all the stuff widely strewn around the universe. Obviously, I had visited a lot more places than I remeber… The first easy step was: selling the items trapped in null sec. Intentionally, I had left there one of the jump clones. Alas, I learned that my trading skill need improvement, as I easily reached the maximum number of sell orders and some items even were too far away. So the skill queue is busy too.

Still subscribed

Over at “The Ancient Gaming Noob” I did find the following piece of gamer nerddom:

To skip the opening credits, go to 0:55m.

(via
http://tagn.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/still-subscribed/
)

Some Off-Time

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

More Defense of Angry Birds

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

Unavoidable: Angry Birds

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!

Perpetuum – Online And Mobile.

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.

1. Installation: You can download and install the client as easy and seamless as Eve’s.
2. 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€.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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…?
7. 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.
8. 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.