Seasons Of Space

http://bit.ly/bpaQRW

Now that you’ve read that…

I’ve been conflicted over how I would feel about a purely political MMO. On the one hand, while having my beautiful signature grace the law that says, “Nuke Dictator ArtificialMonk’s* capital,” would be cool, it would be equally uncool to have it be on a law that says, “Increase citizen’s poop tax by 7.6%.”

That being said, I have trouble imagining how law making would even work. You’d have to have some incredibly adaptive system for it, a beaurocratic brother to Spore’s insane level of customization in the Creator. And then, you have to throw on top of that the multiplayer aspect (because this is an MMORPG), which would mean the lawmaking process would have to be even more robust and adaptive, although it should be noted that treaties and pacts drawn up between two players may be easier to enact.

Not to mention, would we all just start as the president/dictator/king/queen/emperor/Sith Lord of our own country, or would we start at a lower rank? Would there be NPC countries? Here’s another problem: how many players could one world hold? Would each world be a server?

Here’s What I’m Thinking:

Yes, we would all start out as the leaders of our own nations. Ideally, there would be some control over what our people looked like, their inherent characteristics (are they a violent people? Are they native to their geographical area? Does the population lean toward a religious or non-religious mindset?).

Even though these traits may seem menial, it’s important to note that enacting laws that offend the sensibilities of your people, if done often enough or on a grand enough scale (i.e. enacting a law that switches a capitalist nation into a slave-state where the slave drivers are those who had earned one million or more dollars as an annual salary every year for the previous decade) could cause a revolution to take place within your country. Ideally, there would be multiple outcomes when a revolution takes place. The worst outcome could be a total collapse of your nation. You would be left with only a margin of the populace and resources you had before, and the other nations would become their own independence NPC nations or join other player nations (which could have adverse affects on their empire). At this point you would have to struggle with whatever baggage you took with you; debt to other nations, angry citizens, etc.

The next outcome would be a civil war. A civil war would have a detrimental effect on your economy and people, but if the civil war is successful, there is the possibility of boosting morale among your supporters for an extended time, while doing the opposite for your opponents.

The last situation would be a total outrage of your citizens, but not a full on revolt. There would be a severe drop in your economy, work force and the morale of your people, but nothing that would immediately signal an end to your nation.

On the Beaurocratic Side:

Players could draw up treaties or laws between themselves using an a system built specifically for this purpose (duh.), but I’ll be honest, I really have no idea on how the mechanics of this could work. I was thinking maybe some visual representation.

For instance, let’s say there’s a particular screen that let’s you construct laws based on a selection of general law-types. We’ll say there’s Domestic and Foreign for the first two. Let’s also say that you don’t want Dictator ArtificialMonk to set foot on your lands without it meaning complete and total war (I’m talking like nukes and stuff). So in order to set this law in motion, we choose Foreign. The next section is separated into Relations, Trade, Territory, etc. We don’t want ArtificialMonk stepping foot onto our land, so we choose Territory. Next is a list that includes Claimed Territory, Foreign Territory and Contested Territory. We choose Claimed Territory and are given the options Nation or State/Province. Not wanting to play favorites, we choose Nation. Now we are presented with three options – Closed, Open, or Selective. Choosing Closed or Open will set your entire nation to be opened or closed to all foreign countries, while Selective will allow you to set a specific Open, Closed or Restricted setting to each other nation.

Open: Selected nation is allowed to pass through your borders uninhibited.

Closed: Selected nation cannot pass through your borders without provoking a predetermined outcome.

Restricted: Selected nation cannot pass into your borders unless a specific set of criteria are met such as being unarmed or paying a certain fine without provoking a predetermined outcome.

We don’t want ArtificialMonk passing into our nation at all, so we choose Closed. We are presented with a myriad of options, such as War, All Trades Cancelled, Foreign Relations Worsened, etc. We choose War just because.

At this point, we choose to finalize the law. It goes through a period of Virtua Congress deliberation and voting by the people if applicable, and after X amount of time has passed, the law goes into effect and Dictator ArtificialMonk is notified that if he trespasses onto our land, we will blow his head off his body with a Tomahawk cruise missile.

After we’ve enacted a law, we can go to the map screen. Here, we can view the map on different scales by either zooming in and out with the mouse wheel or choosing predetermined options such as World, Nation, Foreign Nations (Splits into all the different nations), and State (Splits into all your states/provinces). There’s an option to toggle Law Tabs on and off, and by flipping the switch to the On position, we are shown all the laws applicable to our current zoom level. They can be visually enhanced with lines, markers, Hello Kitty stickers, etc. that can give us an at-a-glance view of our nation’s politics.

From this home screen, we can also access a list of all the current laws filtered by different criteria across the world, see all the current projects taking place in our nation, current wars, trade routes, etc.

The only question left is whether the look leans more towards a Risk, Civilization, or SimCity feel.

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*ArtificialMonk is the gamertag of my best friend. He is not usually a raging dictator.

For an understanding of where this debate begins, click this link –> http://bit.ly/9mROkC

Rolinthor tweeted this with the comment that CCP is thinking about instituting it as a rule. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I told him I thought the whole thing was asinine (as far as real world application goes). Here’s my explanation*:

When I played baseball, I got a ball to the nuts from the batter on more than one occasion. I also got my shins bashed in from bouncing ground balls. When I played soccer, I got the wind kicked out of me at least once every game, and side tackled so much that it was an accomplishment I could stand at the end of the season.

When I played dodgeball, my face got knocked in. I was wearing glasses.

I’ve lost humiliating games, some more than the 5-pt limit in the article above. I’ve also won great games; some more than blah blah blah. The point is, neither overage (in my favor or not) affected me that much. Sure, it was a crappy mothernucker of a game, but at the end if the day I know my coach was proud of us, I knew my parents were happy, and I knew that the next time we played them, I was going to try and do better.

Today, I work at GameStop and get blamed by parents for letting kids play Mature videogames. I’m told by parents who BUY THESE GAMES FOR THEIR KIDS that it’s ruining the children, meaning we need rules and laws to keep them from seeing violent or sexual content.

I saw my first boobies when I was, I dunno, eight or something and watched Titanic. I saw movies like Lake Placid (remember the seen where the scuba guys’ entrails are everywhere?) and Jaws (there goes the captain) and never thought twice about the violence.

Movies with bad language, however, made me cuss like a sailor.

Just kidding. My parents told me if they ever heard me say those words they’d belt me.

The point is, no amount of personal injury, ‘bad media’, or humiliating loss ever negatively affected me in the long run. Why tell people that ‘awesome winning = sorry, you lose’? How about we tell the people who lost to get up and keep going?

What do you do if you’re ship gets blown up in Eve? Do you automatically get 200 million isk and your opponent’s character gets deleted? It’d be nice, but it would also turn everyone into a raging pansy. Lose a POS? Congratulations, here’s another one and P.S. Your opponents have to pay 4,000x more isk for every transaction for the next six months.

Whats the point in playing a game if you can’t ever have the satisfaction of crushing your opponents? Oh, and all those underdog stories? Pointless. They would never happen in a world like that.

Rather than coddling our kids or players, how about we tell them to get up, get over it, and keep going? Seems like a better life lesson to me.

Otherwise, we’ll end up having forums that look like WoW’s every Tuesday.

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*Disclaimer: This explanation is not an argument, merely my opinion. At no point do I think it overly coherent, laden with sound logic, or ideas and concepts that are 100% relevant. It is ultimately a guide to following my train of thought, which can be likened to following a ghost at times. With a guide dog. In the summer, and you don’t wanna move ’cause it’s soooooo huuuumiiiiidddd.

Wow. It is a dust farm in here.

Dust farm. It’s a Dust farm.

…

As many of you may know, I currently don’t have a computer right now. “Then how is he typing this?” is what you’re asking, isn’t it? I have the answer: Magic.

Due to my lack of a capable blogging or gaming platform (no, Wordpress for my iPhone does not count, as I cannot link images with it), I have been unable to blog about anything. Nor have I been able to play EVE. Which is kind of like a crack adict saying, “Yeah, I don’t have any spoons to smoke my crack with. But the worst part is, I don’t have any crack to begin with.”

But recently, someone has given me a reason to blog. For real.

Good ol’ Ankhy-tonk (the Carebear Crusader), did SOMETHING to break her NDA or DNA or DRM or CNN devil-pact she had with CCP. They didn’t really say anything about it, but Ankh was all like, “Aw hellz naw,” except in a more polite fashion. Which is kind of like that turd that used to be a gas station burrito saying, “I don’t think you extracted all the possible nutrients you could out of me; let me crawl back up your anus.” (No pictures for this one. You can thank me later.)

If you can’t tell, my opinion toward Ankh is that she’s a baby, a whiner and stupid.

What we really need is somebody like Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Someone who can stand up for what is right… for the good of all capsuleers! Someone who-…

Oh wait.

If you want what I assume to be and up-to-the-minute account of what is happening with the whole ordeal, go check out Casiella’s blog post. What’s there is probably the most that anybody knows about it, so don’t ask me anything.

In other news, the Commitment to Excellence thread is now a staggering 73 pages. Wow. Sign that crap if you haven’t already, and for the love of everything sweeter than sugar, check the little ‘Support Topic’ box, you idiots.

Okay, today was pretty awesome. I took a sweet awesome trip out to New Eden (the system), and was blown away by it. I saw plenty of stuff on the way there, like this:

An odd warp

Aside from that, I found something actually tangible:

Gate to Access

Circular construct

Coincidentally, a guy who had been on my trail popped in through the gate and high tailed it toward the ring, then deployed his drones in (what I assume to be) an attempt to knock me out of my cloak. I don’t think he knew I was about 50km off, watching him toy around like a fool.

After that, I made it safely to New Eden, and what a sight it was.

And my favorite:

The Traveler facing the First Frontier

It was amazing. I saw so many markers of the distance people had traveled. The furthest ones I could detect were a couple of Russian cans.

I was planning on dropping my own can, but I got distracted by a sudden project…

In an attempt to see if I couldn’t pick up the EVE Gate with my probes (FYI I didn’t think I would be able to, but what the heck, let’s give it a shot), I started scanning down the system. I was shocked sad when I didn’t get a hit on that giant, pulsating, radiation-spewing glowing thing, but I DID pick up a wormhole. For a second I fantasized I had stumbled across some sort of once-in-a-lifetime event where you could scan down a wormhole that lead back to the Earth system.

This thought was quickly quelled by me remembering that this is EVE, and that making such a discovery, while insane enough to be in it, has far too much potential to be a joyous happening, and therefore was deemed impossible.

But it did begin a neat little journey through wormhole space, and that was pretty cool. I’ve got pictures!

A 'silhouette' of a wormhole

The Maw

And here are some shots from inside wormhole space. I’m sure most of you have seen this stuff before, but they were all firsts for me:

Sleeper Complex

It's a gas cloud

I know I made it sound like there were going to be more than two, but, you know.

I eventually scanned a path of about five jumps before I got back to Sibot. I checked to see how many jumps it was back to Dodixie, decided it was more boring than going back through the wormholes and tons of low-sec, and turned around, back into the previously-unknown. I ended up having to only scan down one wormhole (the second to last before I got back to New Eden). I felt pretty good about myself for only forgetting one, but it was still a pain to scan down.

After I got back, I made a swift return to Dodixie and docked up for the night. Tomorrow is another day, which means another adventure.

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Heads Up:

• Just so everyone knows, I got the idea for seeing New Eden and the EVE Gate after reading about it over at EVE Travel headed by the brilliant Mark726. I was also inspired to travel by him and his blog. I hold him in high regards as a source of info, even if just passively, on exploring the universe of EVE Online.
• For anyone looking for a (generally) comprehensive guide on anything wormhole or scanning related, I highly recommend K162space, run by the Blake/miningzen fountain of hilarity. K162 is the best source I can find for this kind of stuff, even if it is thrown into a muddling of jokes and sidetracked storytelling.

Tonight I took an awesome trek out to null-sec. It was sweet awesome fun times.

Highlights:

1. I ran into my first bubble tonight. Actually, it was two, so it was more like two-for-the-price-of-one. It was in G-5EN2, heading toward 9-FOB2 (The Final Stand and Atlas, respectively). There were two warp bubbles set up to catch ships warping in from the G-5En2 entry to the exit for 9-FOB2. Like the smart man I am, I warped in at 100km (because I had read various times that this was a good idea), and ended my warp right on the mothernuckin’ edge of the bubble. I almost peed myself.

Oddly enough, I came back to this same location later, and out of the multiple trials I made of jumping back and forth between these two gates, never once did I warp into the bubble. I always landed outside of it. I also noticed a lot of people successfully jumping through the gate. Whether or not these were Atlas folks I have no idea, but somebody should really tell them that their bubbles suck.

2. After successfully jumping through the fail-bubbles, I had an eezy-peezy-lemon-squeezy time for a grand total of two jumps, before I made a warp to [some gate of which I forgot the location of] at 100km, found myself bubbled, my cloak subsequently dropped, and my brand-spanking new Helios being targeted. Me being the daring young man I am, I turned my ship right around, smashed my boot on the “Engage MWD” button as hard as I could and screamed as my ship rocketed toward the edge of the bubble.

And you know what happened? I suddenly found myself clear of it. The warpy blue gelatinous crap cleared from my view. As the enemy ship gained lock and my overview screamed alarms at me, I pointed myself toward the system’s sun, hit the warp button, and took off right as I saw the swirling tendrils of a warp disruptor grab for my ship. I pulled away from the gate, hit the cloak button, and did a jump to a bookmark I had dropped to sit and cool down for a few minutes.  I was just fast enough. I snatched victory from the swirling, glubbing, bouncing maw of defeat.

3. After deciding it would be foolhardy retarded to try and make it through that crap, I simply turned around. I had made it a good ways into null-sec, and I was not about to let some idiotic decision ruin it for me. I saw a juicy wreck on the way out, salvaged it, and found out juicy was also the same as tastes-like-poo. I also looted it, along with a canister floating nearby (why not?), and lo and beholden unto me there was a cloaked ship waiting for such a foolish act to be done.

Also, the wreck was titled ‘Some indecent adventurer’. I imagine he went in there stark naked. Tony Stark naked.

In any case, they started targeting me, and I high tailed it out of there. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as my first encounter.

4. I ended up in Onga. I spent a while testing out scanning down sites. I found a wormhole (that you may remember from my tweet). It didn’t lead to Russians. It actually lead to a system called Reset (I laughed a lot about it). I found some stuff there! I will show you.

There you go. Pretty neat, huh?

5. After taking those sweet pics, I jumped back through the wormhole (p.s. I bookmarked it beforehand hooray for me hurrahhhhhh), set my autopilot for Dodixie, and took an easy ride back home.

Tonight was a good night.

In other news, I’m continuing work on my EVE Fiction even though the contest I WAS going to enter is long done. Oh well.

For those of you in the States, I hope you have a fun and safe holiday visiting your relatives that have passed on (love you Grandma!) and remembering those who have served us!

Fly safe, pilots!

I’m working on an entry for Roc Wieler’s/CCP Tyrannis contest. As of right now, I haven’t even started it yet.

It’ll be my first step into the realm of EVE Online fiction writing. Exciting.

As of right now, I am going on halfway done with my current skill queue, which is pretty good, to say the least. I’ve stuck to it fairly well, only spending a total of about a week deviating from it in the four and a half months worth of time I’ve put into it. As of right now, it will end on September 11, and I will have trained eighteen skills to Level V. It’s a ways away, but every day, every hour, every minute, and every second is one step closer to completion.

Also, I read a very interesting article that I absolutely loved over at The Hydrostatic Capsule that I think most of you will enjoy. I won’t give you a synopsis, though. You can go read it for yourself. And if making an extra click and reading a few words is too much work for you, lay off the e-ice cream and do some mental exercises.

Okay, so I know I haven’t updated for a while, but it’s because there has been so much going on.

Let’s see, first thing on the check list is salvaging.

About a week and a half ago or so (or more,  I don’t know, give me a break here), I moved into Dodixie. I had heard that it was a mecca for salvagers, and rather than sticking around in Arnon and pooping my way to mediocrity, I figured I’d do the short trip there and see what I could do. Lucky me, it was a good idea. My first night there I made about 20 mil. I know that’s not a lot, but for somebody that’s just starting out in the profession, I feel it’s respectable. The ninja-ing was a totally different experience in Dodixie. No longer am I messing with younger players. Now it’s up to the big boys tree house. Three pilots found me in their plex and showed a display of power by locking onto me and pulling out the drones. Fortunately, Dodixie is a high-sec system, and they couldn’t do anything else. I decided to leave, but mostly because a gang of Suddenly Ninja guys had found their way into the plex before me, and were looting and salvaging it while the pilots were concerned with scaring me.

Because the salvaging has been so profitable, I’ve been able to afford some implants. Nothing crazy, but man, that little extra push really does help. Not only that, but it makes you feel a little more accomplished. I’m going to save up now, and buy some other niceties here and there. The long-term goal is to get into a cloaked frigate. More research needs to be done on it, but I don’t plan on moving up in ship size anytime soon, which means I may actually end up just selling the Vexor eventually and cross training for other racial frigates. Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.

Let’s see, what’s next… Oh, skill training. Good  segue.

Okay, so I’m still trying to get my skills up to snuff. Because I’m not going to be moving up in ships size anytime soon, that gives me the chance to focus on everything else. I mean, shoot, I’m not even moving up in gun size, my modules of choice are hardly going to change before Armageddon, and why the heck would I train anything remotely close to science and industry? So the focus is what, you ask? Why, it’s the most important thing in EVE. What good are your guns if you can’t use them effectively? What’s the purpose of fully fitting your ship if your cap can’t take it, let alone your powergrid or CPU? Why does it matter what your fighting if you can only target two of them? That’s right, I’m talking about the basic skills you probably neglected to train a long time ago. I am not going to repeat your mistakes.

I feel that this is probably the most essential part of my EVE experience. While most of these skills are going to get trained to Level V and it is going to be like drilling my brains out, it is almost unacceptable to me to not do it. It’s hard, but if I don’t get these skills trained to an appropriate level, I won’t be performing anywhere near as well as I could be. And to me, playing well is the equivalent of having fun.

Checking the list again… Umm… Oh yes, RL.

Not too much going on. Just planning the wedding, working a lot (just got promoted!), finishing school for the semester and helping out at church. Also been working on a new Magic: The Gathering deck and spending time playing the new Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii (which has helped immensely with dealing with the Level V skills I’m working on). Aside from all that business, not too much else. Also, sitting  around waiting for  Tyrannus.

Things are looking really good right now, both in  EVE and RL, and that, my friends, is awesome. But you already knew that. It was a given.

Right now, I am setting up base for August and my hauler alt Rhosyr in a system that hopefully won’t be too busy or  populated when Tyrannis comes out. I won’t share its location, nor whether it’s in high-, low- or null-sec, and I won’t share it’s current average population nor it’s traffic. No constellation, no region, no nothing. The only thing that I can tell you is that it’s not in WH-space. Not right now, at least.  Who knows, that  could change before Tyrannis comes out.

Why all the secrecy you ask? Well, for a few simple reasons. First off, I don’t want  to be in a system overpopulated, whether it be by more mature or younger players. The logic behind this is simple – crowds create chaos. If you throw enough new/old players into a system together and tell them to sort out who gets what, which is exactly what is happening with Tyrannis, you can bet every penny you have that it is going to be some sort of mad, roaring scramble to get something, and that something may not even be good. Imagine it’s dodgeball in eighth grade, and you’re that poor, unfortunate soul who picks up the crappy light-weight foam ball missing a chunk out of the side, rendering you about as intimidating as a handicapped dolphin glued to a cardboard box.

…

I also wanted to get set up in a system that covers all my planetary bases (I’m sure that narrows it down for you). Since none of us are quite sure what the logic, if any, behind the resource seeding on the planets is going to follow, I figured I’d play it safe and have at least one of every type of planet (except plasmas… haven’t even seen one of those). I also wanted to get set up in a part of space that wouldn’t see a lot of traffic,which basically means narrowing it down to the dead-end systems (there’s another clue for you). By doing this, I  kind of hope it’ll  be a little less desirable to  large-scale operations of some of the bigger corporations.

The last requirement I had for getting set up was a system that was not high-sec. This is mostly due to wanting to avoid newer players, but also because I wanted  to be in a lower security rated system (note that I said  “lower security” not “low-sec”), mostly because I feel  like I read somewhere that the lower security rating you go, the more profitable your PI ventures become. I couldn’t find the dev blog that said this, but that is what I feel like is happening, so that is what I am doing.

In any case,  I’ve found a system I  think I’ll be comfortable in, so I’ll stay here. I may do some on-the-side scouting for secondary locations, but I  feel like this is where I’m going to be for a while. Currently, my tasks include some simple mining ops to make a little isk  so that I know I  can afford the PCCs and whatnot, putting my combat alt on standby, and working on my Industrial skills.

I plan on buying at least one PCC for each planet type (except plasma) so that I can take advantage of all the planets in my system. This will also  give me the opportunity to extract as many varieties of ore, gas, etc. as I can. I would hate to limit my options right off the bat, or ever, really. The only left to do is wait and see what kind of fortune Tyrannis will bring me.

Other Thoughts:

On CONCORD:

I’m not one for roleplaying, but I couldn’t help but notice how Planetary Interaction was sanctioned and approved by CONCORD. If my understanding is correct, which I’m fairly certain it is, CONCORD  has long since established itself as a separate entity from the empires, working autonomously outside their jurisdiction for the betterment of all the people’s of New Eden. Considering planets inherently lie within the realm of their respective governments, I find it interesting that this step needed to be approved by CONCORD, which leads me to wonder… Does CONCORD have too much power?

Let’s be honest, it’s not as if this post is going to blow your socks off. I’m not carrying anything bigger than a cruiser at the moment in my main’s* hangar. The character is only a month and a half old anyways.

So what’s in my hangar, you ask? Well, my child, come and take a peek at Adainy Gwanwyn’s Fantastical Phantasmagorical World of Futuristic Future-reaching Flying Mechanoautomatrons! Note that  all my ship names are in Irish (because I am of Irish descent) while my character’s name is Welsh (because I am of more Welsh descent that Irish). I realize this is a cultural discrepancy. If you have the balls to bring that up in a game that takes place 26,000 years in the future where oak trees somehow still exist, then God help you.

Also, the Roman numeral after the name denotes how many of the said ship I have gone through.

Tapa Éan V

Ship Type: Atron

Role: This is my salvaging ship. It can fly at a (to me) whopping 3km a second. That blew my mind the first time  I saw it. I mostly sit outside of the stations in Arnon and salvage the wrecks left over from fights. This has proven profitable.

Scáth Madra

Ship Type: Imicus

Role: Scanning. This ship does absolutely nothing else. It has nothing combative nor defensive fitted to it. It has never left a 5km perimeter of the it’s station EXCEPT for when I had to move it  to another one. But that doesn’t count.

Scamall

Ship Type: Maulus

Role: I’m not sure. It’s kind of an experimental electronic warfare frigate, but I haven’t really worked on it. It’s mostly around to impress the neighbors. Kind of like your hybrid car.

Chualathas

Ship Type: Vexor

Role: Ship in the works. I currently have small guns fitted onto it, but I’m thinking of switching to larger ones when I have the chance (read: when I have the skills). I just don’t feel right toting this behemoth** around in asteroid belts only to hear a little, “Pewpew… *tink,” on the hulls of other ships. The Chualathas is my visual goal for the moment. Once I can fly this fully fitted and cap stable, I’ll be good to go.

Comments:

As you can tell, I don’t have a whole lot going on, nor am I carrying anything surprising (OMG HE’S GOT A TITAN IN THE HANGAR HOW DID HE GET THAT TO FIT)***. As stated before, my current focus is on skill training to be able to appropriately fly my Vexor. After that… well,  I’m not sure.  We’ll see what happens.

Footnotes:

*My current ‘main’ character is Adainy Gwanwyn. Due to monetary issues, August Risen is going to be on stand-by. As such, there will be a change in my Twitter username, but nothing else.

**Relatively speaking.

***You can’t.