If Only Industry Were Always This Exciting

I was one of the 200+ pilots who logged in 4C-B7X this morning in an attempt to snag an early lead in the noctis market. Even though I got in seconds after downtime the system filled up in seconds, but the station camps never assembled themselves quickly enough to catch me or many other pilots who all had the same plan. I had been slightly worried because I'd seen a 40 man gang from IT sitting on one of the stations last night...



But they didn't bother to turn up in the morning and the undock was mostly clear. I decided my risk threshold was about 2billion isk, so I 'only' bought 5 blueprints (390million each), loaded them into my Tengu and headed to hi-sec with best possible speed. Along the way I had some conversations with other T3 pilots making the run, and many LOL's were had at the pilots in covert ops ships getting caught by the occasional gatecamp. The last jump into hi-sec at Orvolle was especially impressive with a lag inducing number of bubbles surrounding the gate, but again, I just warped right through these and into hi-sec.

Most pilots headed for Jita or Dodixie, but I set my eyes on Amarr, on the far side of the cluster, I wasn't the first person to get a BPO on the market, but it looks like I was the first one to sell one - for a cool 899,999,999 isk. Now that may see like quite a markup from my purchase price, but based on the fact that I was able to the first ship off my production line for 360million you can see that the buyer still got themselves a bargain. Unless of course they were foolish enough to start researching it first....

Be Careful What You Wish For

The Incursion release has been quite a startling turnaround, in a few hours we're going to get part 1 which is essentially a bunch of player requested mods that will make Eve a vastly better game for everyone. Never in the history have Eve have we seen an expansion with this much player input, and I must admit I'm feeling more than a little excited.... although that may be the feeling of anticipation I feel trying to fly out of outer ring with some blueprints (and maybe skillbooks) in my hold.

However, we should bear in mind that this is not the first time the CCP has bowed to player pressure and made changes, and, not everyone would agree that the results were ideal in the long term.

Remember the Dominion release, Motherships renamed to Supercarriers and given fighter bombers? CCP Abathur presented the original changes which were tested on SiSi by lots of dedicated players, many of whom had never had a chance to fly a Supercap before. Then along came CCP Nozh who decided that the new supercarrier design was overpowered and nerfed the number of bombers which could be flown, in exchange supercarriers were given the ability to dock. The rage flowed from the fan community, and the supercap changes missed the release, a couple of months later we had Dominion 1.1 which essentially gave the players what they wanted - the original Abathur approved supercarrier.

Now, almost a year later, the residents of 0.0 are now grumbling about Supercarriers being overpowered and starting to think that maybe a nerf is in order.... perhaps Nozh was right.. (then again being able to dock a supercap would make station games ridiculous)

Another long requested feature which CCP finally implemented was sized rigs, I mean it was pretty sweet to be able to put rigs on a rifter without feeling guilty. However since small and medium rigs have been added there has been an inexorable rise in the number of Drake blobs flying around 0.0. The cost of fielding a drake dropped by 30million isk the day that you could put medium sized shield rigs on it, that's a big chunk of the cost of the ship, even moreso when insurance is taken into account. So, again we see that giving players what they want can cause things they don't want - blobs of drakes and lag inducing missile storms.

Anyway - on with the new release - see you in Outer Ring!

Now Is the Time To Train Learning Skills

.... Because they're going away in a couple of weeks.... and all SP invested into the skills will be reimbursed.

At least in my case I have 5/4 in all stats, so I can train some learning skills faster than I can train say Leadership skills which rely on my weak charisma. When the Learning skill emacipation arrives I'll be able to take those SP and put them into skills that I've put off learning for a long time because of the training time is longer than others.

New Stuffs

I thought that Invasion was a better name, but nonetheless the last couple of months have been fascinating with the devs finally aquesing to good sense and spending some dev time on the low hanging fruit that the players have been requesting.
* Rockets De-Nerfed - leading to speculators buying up all the faction and TII missile boats
* Tech II ammo de-nerfed
* Icon changes to differentiate those fancy faction and deadspace modules
* Afterburners and Microwarpdrives now look different
* Menus reorganized, so that it's harder to accidently trash your ships.
* Probes on the overview

Meanwhile CCP have decided that 'excellence' is something worth committing to and have rejiggered the release date of Incurstion, and boy am I happy to hear this. The proper release with new avatars, incursions and improved PI is pushed back to january, but the user requested fixes will be released on November 30th (and a bonus christmas present just before Christmas).

Anyway.... this is all old news, the new news is the leaking/posting of the trailer for Incursion showing us a whole bunch of ice miners getting wiped out by a Sansha invasion fleet while Mr K himself looks on (showing off the new character modellin technology). Given the number of ice miners which are macros I find myself egging on the bad guys :)