Ice dumps & Crashes

This last week, I’ve seen a lot of icedumping. My primary ice mining system has seen it’s prices falling like a brick.

Just before the new expansion a block was sold for 250K atm it’s going or 180K.

I haven’t been to jita yet but just looking at the prices on EVE-Central it’s becoming clear that the prices are on their way down. Before panicking and dumping your precious ice though, I suggest to hold on to it for at least another two – four weeks.

The price will crash and from what I’m seeing it will crash soon. I predict a sell price of 150K per block before the market will establish itself again around the 225K mark, maybe higher.

Let’s be honest here, I’m just guessing but there isn’t anything else I can do at the moment.  I hope to ride the wave, get some cheap ice when it’s on the brink and sell it for a profit or use it to finally get a hisec-research pos.

Related articles

• Deep thoughts: The price of ice (dayineve.wordpress.com)

War is coming!

The latest expansion shook the foundation of nullsec. While it is focussed on travel and exploration, enough changes have been brought in to break the deadlock that was sov space.

The redistribution of moon goo and the need for them has changed the value of space and with it, the financial power of certain Alliances.

While it’s too early to say what will happen, one thing is clear. Nullsec will go to war, Nullsec is going to war and with it, systems will be covered in the blood of capsuleers and crew members. Death and destruction will reign and the summer of Odyssey will be remembered for the years to come.

I offer my best wishes to all involved. Have courage and bring on the sea of blood and rivers of tears!

Related articles

• To War! We are Invading Fountain! (tagn.wordpress.com)

The Flamewars: Mintchip

I’m afraid to write this post actually, In all my years as an EVE player I find this to be one of the trickiest things to give my opinion about but hey, I like a good challenge so here it goes.

The Setup

This.

Mintchip  just joined CCP and the community exploded. While most players don’t know Mintchip, most of you who are reading this, will. For those of you who don’t know, Mintchip is a “Vlogger” and has some videos on Youtube about Eve online making her half a celebrity in the EVE community. Why is the community angry about this, as this should be a good thing?

Reasons for the flames

1. flamed EVE and the community on quite a few occasions on Twitter and the forums.
2. She ragequitted EVE.
3. She uses her gender as a tool to get stuff from the community.
4. She has some euhm… personal pictures going around the internet.

Are they grounds for war?

It depends on who you ask, I think. I’ll try to explain my thoughts on this here.

1. Anyone who flames the game and the community in public and then comes back to work for said game and community loses, in my eyes, credibility. Not every bit of it however, We have all said and yelled things in the heat of the moment that we didn’t mean. But does this make me a bit distrustful? Yes. Spewing crap about the community you are trying to represent is a big NONO.
2. Well everyone has their reason to quit. I’ve quitted EVE multiple times for personal reasons. While a year is a long time to be out of the game, it isn’t too long a time. Number 2 doesn’t matter to me that much.
3. I’m on the fence on this one. I will treat this as any theft that happened in-game, she played a good game and found some suckers to go for the bait. While this is shady it is nothing that isn’t been done by other EVE players. Taking this behaviour out of game is shady, however.
4. I didn’t go and check for myself (not that kind of person) but jeezes. Having personal pictures circulating is terrible for a community rep. CCP should have done it’s homework on this one.

What Now?

Good Question. I don’t know. What will the community do? From what I’ve seen a great deal of players have been banned from the forums, arguably stating maybe even from the game and some may just quit the game because they got banned from the forums, etc. CCP might be getting a bigger backlash as expected from this.

Personal Opinion

Well if you haven’t figured it out yet, I always try to see the positive side. I will try and have CCP’s back. I’m not going to say CCP never does anything wrong (read A plea for EVE) but I will give them the benefit of the doubt to get their shit together.

While we hang on to past grievances in EVE like dogs with a bone, sometimes it’s not worth it.

Mintchip fucked up in the past. A couple of times even and we will never let her forget it. Do note though that whatever she has done, it was done without the CCP badge AND that is the most important thing to remember here. It was done BEFORE she received the CCP badge.  So I’ll stand back, keep my cool and see how it goes.The community will follow her closely and there is no doubt in my mind that any misstep will be weighed, judged and flamed.

I just don’t see the point in flaming her before the error has occurred.

So if any CCP employee  is reading this  (0.0001%) you guys sure did stir the pot this time!

CCP Mintchip… good luck. #evil grin.

DDOS, Patchday and Mintchip

So I decided to not blog or a week and the universe explodes in a ball of rage. I’m not saying the two things are related but….

Just kidding folks take a breather.

We have a lot of things to talk about.

DDOS

Servers went down for day and we all received 50K SP. I personally think CCP did the right thing on pulling the plug, making sure nothing was accessed and that it was “just” a DDOS and not smoke and mirrors for a hack attempt. The problem with flipping the switch however is that the EVE Cluster is a massive, massive system. I can hardly imagine all the procedures they have to follow to get it up and running again. As someone with an IT background and job, I can honestly say, I wasn’t surprised when DT lasted this long. EVE is a beast and getting it to wake up is a nightmare.

Odyssey

It’s here and it’s B-E-A-utiul! I don’t play on the testserver for personal reasons and was very much pleased by the update. The only thing I found strange was the spawn rate of the anomalies, the combat anomalies seemed to respawn every 15 minutes and that seemed a bit much.
Also… A LOT OF explorers. If you go hacking, make sure you have a gun on your ship as the chance of being ninjad is real.  Personal statistic: 2 out of 5 data sites.

The jump view is awesome, the scanner is awesome, the prefit 8 probes makes my lie so much easier and all in all, I’m happy from what I’ve seen so far.

I’ll be traveling to an ice anomaly this night to check out the bots there and play around with some other features of the update. So more on that later.

CCP Mintchip

This…weird.
The EVE servers went down in the weekend and while we were all detoxing of our EVE addiction, the community was in large not too upset, everyone was waiting not so patiently to log in and kill something…euhm I mean log in and update the skillqueu. Two days later a new CCP employee steps up and the forums explode in a ball of angry frigates.

So what can make a community angrier as a 12H+ DT? well Mintchip can.

I’ll be honest here and say I haven’t yet looked at the youtube vids or the ragequit-threads she posted. I’ll be honest and say I give her the benefit of the doubt. The only thing I know is that the EVE welcome thread has been removed and that Reddit is exploding HERE and HERE.

Was there someone better for the job? I have no clue, but we will find out.

 

Slowing down before the patch

I haven’t been posting this last week since I haven’t been playing much.

The new patch will be here next week so I guess  I’ve been holding out.

It’s something about the cycle, my playtime always increases just after the patch, for a good month, after which it stabilizes untill a week or two-three before the next one.

So just a little post to say, This blog will have no content ’till next week.

fly safe o7

Deep thoughts: Drama

Even in the best corps, drama occurs. It can be a nasty thing really. Sometimes it’s over something petty and small while other times it can be the drake in the middle of the living room nobody wants to talk about. Whatever reason though, drama is almost always bad.

There are two sides to each story and when only one side is heard, drama shows it’s ugly pod.  Rage fills the room, the shouting starts and before long the whole corp (or alliance) can be up in arms. Humans are a very emotional species even in EVE. the wrong button can set us off which triggers a chain reaction throughout the company we keep.

The sad part about this all is that we can’t do anything about it. We could say, listen to both sides before you rage but that is logic speaking and when one is throwing a tantrum, logic is nowhere to be found.

Everyone can be the cause of drama, all that is needed is the right poke.

Of course there are things corps can do to keep it to a minimum.

Clear communication is the most important thing. Whether it’s about ops, risks, responsibilities or resignations. Clear communication from leadership can negate a lot of potential drama.
Weeding out drama-prone people is another option and being active as a CEO is a third. There are many more but these three can cut the drama by 95%.

Remember, a drama-free corp is a happy corp.

Hacking sites getting a serious buff

Just a short one today: Check THIS out. Hacking sites just received a big buff in their ISK value.

With the changes coming to exploration, I think we will be seeing a huge increase of people trying it out the first two weeks. The competition will be fierce and after the patch and the “ooh shiny” effect has worn off, we will be left with more explorers than we are used to making it a bit more competitive which is great.

Scanning down a DED site and picking up that 50mil module or doing some expeditions and getting faction loot is always fun. In Caldari space competition is already “fairly” high. Logging in 6h after downtime, I almost never find anything worthwhile in Caldari space. Post-patch we might see this happening to the rest of hisec too.

I hope that CCP is going to look at this and might add a mechanic of not only spawning sites with downtime as it’s really annoying for EU-folks that have a day job.

CCP if you are reading this… HINT, HINT!

 

Breaking the launcher

Soo… anyone had any problems with the launcher yesterday?
*don’t flame me, don’t flame me*

I didn’t have any problem at first, I liked the look of it and could log in with no problems.

Then I was pointed to a nice forum thread filled with tears, some RL friends called and asked if I could still play EVE and after testing again well… “tranquility status unknown”

The issue was easily circumvented though by the use of .exe in the bin folder and a few hours later the issue was resolved.

I found it funny and sad at the same time though that we are so addicted to EVE, that a few hours or a few extra clicks to get into EVE makes us go looney tunes. Don’t get me wrong my eye also started twitching when I couldn’t get my alt logged in but that’s besides the point. The point here is that we care about New Eden (and our training queue) so much that we as a small community are able to spawn a dreadnaught-topic in the forums faster and bigger than let’s say a panda-driven game which has a much larger community behind it.

On a side note not relating to the launcher: The newb topics and “guides” will be postponed until June 6th, I want to make sure I don’t fuck anything up. (AKA. that it get’s changed with the launch of the new expansion)

Deep Thoughts: Social Chains

90% of the actions we take in EVE have some social consequences and while some of us use those to our own advantage, the sociopaths we are, most of us do not.

Social interaction is an important aspect in New Eden and it has the ability to chain players to a corp or role they do not like.

I presume a little back story is required:

One of my alts sits (semi-afk) in a corp. When it first joined the corp, it was small and very, very inactive. Promises for change etc were made, but hey, what do I care? She’s just sitting there while training while I keep tabs on some people.

The corp attracted (some) new blood and now it’s a little less inactive… or at least the new blood is active. The problem here is that the new guys are all really new guys, they just joined EVE, and are tops a few months old. While the seniors barely log on and those that do log on are in a comatose state.

Leadership changed hands, but there was barely any improvement. A weekly op is scheduled and has some reasonable success, so that is a good start. Sadly that is also where it stops.

New players are sitting there with their questions and no-one helps them. Everybody seems an asocial jerk in chat but on coms it’s ok.

I’ve heard at least three people complaining about the corp in the last week.

This is where it got interesting for me. You see all they do is complain. Not enough this, too much that etc etc until Leadership shows up and everyone is quiet.

When probing why they don’t leave it’s because, they are fun guys to fly with… yeah maybe but… you are flying with them only once a week? Is that worth the 15% hit you take on all ore and salvage? The afk habit of members? All the other junk you complained about?

It becomes clear that the social chain is a though one to break or maybe it’s just the nature of mankind. People are afraid of change and afraid to leave a collective hive mind. No matter how uncoordinated or asleep it is.

All around EVE I see players bitching about their corp, but they won’t leave because they are afraid they will be alone in the universe, or that the players are some kind of monsters. (to be honest, some of us are, but that’s what makes EVE great)

It shackles us to each other and sometimes that really sucks.

Why am I blabbing on about this? Simply because I want to let players know it’s okaj to move on. It’s ok to search for a better corp. It will be scare and lonely those first few hours (if you are a carebear) but that’s ok too. Leave on good terms, find a corp that is suited for you and enjoy EVE. Don’t rot away in a dark dank cellar just because you don’t want to switch corps.

Isk or joy?

While this shouldn’t be a choice it seems that a lot of players really think this is a legitimate question they have to ask themselves when logging into EVE.

Earlier today I was semi-afk icemining while cooking dinner. Local had an interesting discussion going on about ice and naturally i plugged the price of ice post.

The response from someone in local: I think it’s the other way around, the week is for business, the weekend for fun. (on the topic that in the weekend the ice would be mined out)

I found this strange to hear. EVE is a game, isn’t most of it supposed to be fun?

The short answer to this question is no. Not in EVE.

My reply is simple: it should be.

A lot of players including veterans but of course in a larger degree the newbies think that they need to “grind” isk to have fun.

They seem to think that ISK > joy. If you are spending twenty hours or more each month to be able to plex and only five or ten hours of really enjoying yourself in EVE, is it really worth it? isn’t it better to have thirty hours of joy and pay for the game rather than to bore yourself to death?

If we look at the game, apparently not. 0.0 is a place where alliances contest just for ISK. They don’t go to war because they might lose there precious moongoo, territory and isk-fields. That and “war ain’t fun”.

While blocwarfare in it’s current state indeed isn’t all that much fun, I find it depressing that the Alliances only think in terms of isk and the isk territory can bring in.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing the miners, missioners etc. If you like to mission or mine or make ships or whatever than I see no problem in that. I myself love a long grind from time to time, I love being able to semi-afk mine while playing dust or going on roams with the pvp char but I’m one of the few that find joy in the monotone sound of splitting rock and ice.

The player base is made to believe that isk is the most important thing in game. That being able to plex is more important than to find joy in New Eden. Really? I mean REALLY? Is that the example we set our new pilots? Is that the life we live in EVE?

Newbs are coming in and are advised to take a certain path for wealth. They are advised to do something they do not like just for isk. Of course they leave, of course they bash EVE and WE as the community that supports it drives them away.

If we look at the pirates that roam lowsec are the guys that get the most bang for their buck, yes they might not be able to plex every month but at least they are having fun extracting tears.

EVE is serious business not because you need isk to plex but for the meta game that surrounds it, For the alliances, the treachery, the thefts, the tears, the lies, the hatred, the community, the shit and giggles.

It is time to step up and take our responsibilities to heart.

I ask you to give everyone a chance to do what they love and not force them to play a style they hate just for the isk of it.

Special thanks to Soda for starting this train of thought.

Soda if you are reading this: the rest will follow.