MMOs

If you play EVE, pay with time cards. Especially if you’re European.

Basically it comes down to the US$/€ exchange rate. I also happen to be part of an affiliate scheme selling them through Shattered Crystal, but even if I wasn’t, I’d tell you anyway (in fact I waited a little longer to post this while I found a good affiliate scheme :P).

I’ve explained the whole exchange rate thing a bit better as well as given more info about Shattered Crystal on my EVE Online Time Cards page.

CCP have announced the patch details for Revelations 1.3. Nothing new as such is being added but it is a a pretty cool update nonetheless. Below are some of the points I feel especially important or cool.

Firstly, Jita should be a little less crowded afterwards. It will probably still be a trade hub but it’s asteroid fields are being removed and the school stations are “under new ownership” (and hence no longer selling skills). A bunch of other stations are suffering similar consequences.

Expeditions are more likely to be triggered by exploration sites and Data Interfaces (used for invention), BPCs, and materials will drop more. The new scanners will have their tech II mineral requirements removed also making exploration cheaper.

Best quote from the patch notes:

Moved all of the humans and animals located in the normal ‘commodity’ groups into the ’livestock’ group, to prevent the poor things from being squeezed into small cargo containers by unscrupulous players.

A recent update to EVE Online has made exploration (brought in a couple of weeks ago with Revelations) easier. How much easier? I don’t know since I was never successful before the update. But today I had my first success.

If you look around the EVE forums there is an in depth guide to scanning. I’ll give you short guide. First bit of info, you’re going to do most of your scanning on the solar system view. Get to this by clicking on the map and selecting solar system view from the top of the overview. Secondly you’re going to need a few skills, specifically Astrometrics III and whatever it’s prerequisites are. As with everything in EVE there are others that will help you.

Now, to actually scan. Open your scanner and from anyway in the system launch a Multispectral Probe. This scans an entire solar system and tells you if it finds a reading and what type. The type determines what type of probe to use next. You need “a bunch” (at least 5 or so per system) of “X Quest Probe"s where X is the type of the signature (gravimetric, lidar etc.). You can find stuff with the wrong probes but it will take more scans. Go to each planet in the system and launch one of the Quest probes. When you get to the inner planets you’ll have to choose which to cover since you can’t launch a probe within the range of another. When they’re all ready, select “Cosmic Signature” from your scanner and hit analyse.

Hopefully it will find something. If not, hit analyse again. Once you have something, things get easier. With a lot of luck the accuracy will say 0m which means you’ve found and go warp there and see what it is. More than likely there will be a deviation of some sort and you will have to scan a bit more. So warp to the signature and destroy any probes that can “see” it (you can see the scan range of the probes you have selected in the scanner window).

The next bit is a little hard to explain. There are different probes besides the Quest probes - for example Sift (make sure they begin with type though, gravimetric for instance, otherwise they aren’t the probes used for exploration). Each of these probes has a different range - the shorter the range the more accurate they are. You want to use the shortest range probe that has a range greater than the deviation of your result. So deviation of 0.37 AU (which I got) can be found with the Sift probe (rand of 1 AU). So drop the probe and scan. Unfortunately (As was the case with me), you may need to scan multiple times (with multiple probes). But with any luck, you’ll find something :)

Below are some screenshots taken during scanning and of the Omber asteroid belt I found. Not the most exciting thing to find but I was in empire space and I’d guess the really cool things are in low sec and beyond.

There’s a new blog entry about the overhauled gang system in EVE Online. It’s basically gone all hierarchical.

You can still create gangs as normal, but they no longer receive gang bonuses. To get the bonus the gang must be upgraded to a fleet. A fleet contains wings, wings contain squadrons and squadrons contain members. And each level has commanders. And all the commanders give gang bonuses (meaning a player can get a bonus from all three of his superiors).

Oh, and the first half of Kali now has a name: Revelations.

Well after taking a little break from EVE Online (damned real life getting in the way again :P), I’m back in. And although I haven’t been playing for a couple of weeks, since this is EVE Online I’ve been able to keep my skills ticking over :)

Of course when the JETA counter reaches zero (that would be Julia ETA - cute eh?) I’ll have another two week break. But I have a skill that needs 16 days to train so I’m prepared.

The current problems with EVE Online mean that Kali, the next big update will probably be delayed at least a month. But some more details have been released in the latest blog, including screenshots of the new seamless zoom feature.

The idea is to integrate the map into the main display and simply let you zoom out - from your ship, through to solar system, region and finally all the way to the whole galaxy.

Kali Testing

I was just looking through the ships and found the most specialized ship in there. By “most specialized” I mean one that is suited really well to a single task and really badly to anything else.

There is vaguely a choice of four (one for each faction) so I went for the best one. It is the Charon. The Charon is a freighter designed for carrying stuff. And that’s basically it. It’s very good at it though. A Badger, the Caldari industrial can carry about 5,000 cubic meters of stuff. The Charon can carry 785,000 cubic meters. All this comes at a price. Firstly, it’s very slow - 60 m/s without skills. And you can’t even put a microwarp drive on it. And it’s not that the Charon has limited CPU or power or anything (which it does) but that it has no fittings. That’s right, not a single slot. There are a couple of other sneaky uses for it though. It has high shields and very high armour and hull which means it might distract the enemy in a big fight. You’d hope that they’d assume it was carrying something important. Or along the same lines you could use it as bait maybe but there are much better ways to do that.

Besides missions, deadspace complexes can be a good way for a new player to earn money in EVE Online. If you completed the tutorial (which you really should) you will already have visited a deadspace complex. If you haven’t, they’re basically EVE’s version of dungeons*.

I wouldn’t suggest trying deadspace complexes (complices?) if you’re really new since level Is aren’t really worth it. And to be honest I never tried level IIs, but level IIIs definitely are. I can do them in a badly-fitted cruiser without much of a problem so a well-fitted Frigate shouldn’t be out of the question, and if you can get a friend in there with you you’ll be fine.

Inside you’ll find lots of drones which unfortunately don’t have bounties on them and they don’t drop much cool loot. What you will find though is a couple of interesting containers with “Overseer’s Effects” in them. Although it may not be guaranteed, the ones I’ve seen are 5th Tier Overseers Effects and 7th Tier Overseer’s Effects - the latter are worth 600,000 ISK if sold to the right people. The right people being DED (a division of Concord). It may take you a few jumps to get there but 600,000 to a new player should make it worth it.

I just got the Level I mission, “Worlds Collide”. The story is that some civilians got caught up in a fight between Guristas and Angels and you have to rescue them. It was offered to me for about 250,000 ISK (including bonuses) so I accepted.

The first part was easy. Lots of pirates and my Moa (a Caldari cruiser) freshly fitted with heavy missiles barely got scratched. Unfortunately the acceleration gates (there were two - one Angel and one Gurista) only accepted frigates. I tried in a badly fitted out Condor and lasted about three seconds… Luckily NPCs pirates don’t go for pods and the Condor was given to me free by an agent. Since I couldn’t be bothered to properly equip a frigate that wasn’t going to use again I had to give up on the mission. So beware of that one.

A new patch called “Dragon” was deployed to EVE recently (it took a whole day and they still have an extended downtime today to fix some problems it introduced).

The biggest change for new players (or anyone hanging around Empire space) will be the new agent missions. For anyone really new, on board stations are agents. These are NPC characters who hand out missions to players. Early on, missions are the best way to make money. To be offered a mission by an NPC you need good standing with the NPC (or with the NPC’s corporation such as Lai Dai or even the NPC’s faction such as Caldari). New players will always have a good enough faction standing to find an agent who will help them. Before, most missions were courier missions. Go somewhere, pick something up, go somewhere else, drop it off. Courier missions have new been almost completely removed. Instead you get combat missions. For the low level agents (I and II) these involve killing pirates and rogue drones. Occasionally you also have to fetch back some loot or blow up a structure as well.

For the most part this is a good thing for everyone. The main advantage is they’re more fun. The second advantage is that overall, you get more money. Although you may have to pay for ammo you also get the bounty for blowing up pirates. The only disadvantage is combat missions get harder much faster than courier missions. If you do lots of missions then level II agents (who pay more) become available to you before you can actually do them. Yesterday I nearly blew up when I came across pirates that were harder than I expected: Level I missions tend to have pirates around the 3000-6000 ISK range which you can do in a frigate. A couple of level II missions I did had the same pirates but lots of them. Then suddenly I come across a pirate in a Moa (a Caldari cruiser) with a bounty of 50,000 ISK. Since I’m in a Moa I managed to complete the mission still but I had to regroup and recharge my shield and do it in two attempts.

So to summarise, the new missions are good, but beware.