May 2007 Entries
All in all, I'm pretty much an Ordinary EVE Pilot, or at least like to think so. I put in about 6-9 hours a week, I do missions in Empire Space, I'm a member of the ubiqutous "small, friendly, mining, manufacturing, casual" player-corporation, who aren't adverse to the occassional bout of ultra-violence when the need arises, or even internally, although conducted in a very sporting fashion, without the malice of strangers.
I know that I'm ordinary, because the various Galaxy Maps overlays show me that the majority of other players in EVE are in the same kinds of place I...
Oh, it's a cliche, certainly, but like most cliches, based on a very evident and often repeated truth, which at the end of the day is how cliches come about. The fact that we're bored of hearing it, doesn't make it any less true. In this case, it's the one about falling off horses and needing to get straight back on again, lest imagined fear paralyze you and prevent you from ever riding again. Or something.
My particular horse in this instance is the Agent 4 Combat missions in EVE Online, and my fall was detailed previously - the destruction of...
Stalled again with The Tuesday Club, another missed session meant that it was down to two of us once more, to find productive, constructive and entertaining ways to occupy the evening. This was mostly in the form of a number of secondary quests, and of course, "filling in the corners".
The various Guild Wars World Maps have always fascinated me. Starting in Pre Searing Ascalon, pressing 'M' and seeing this vast, richly imagined and exotic continents, all fuzzy with ignorance. The Post-Searing map of Tyria is a thing of mystique and beauty in and...
Okay, so here's what happened. It was late, I was tired, and launched without doing any real homework, which at the Level 4 end of EVE Online's agent mission system, is just asking for trouble. I was bobbing along in a state of heady complacency too, having just come out of the end of a war that ended in a very successful manner, and all in all, I had that whole "I AM INVINCIBLE!" mindset - most uncharacteristic! Self-esteem? It burnsss us!
So I picked up Enemies Abound 5/5, took a very brief glimpse at the briefing window, threw a few...
Back to work in Guild Wars: Nightfall, with our injured member of the Fellowship now down to a dose of painkillers sufficiently low enough to allow the operation of a mouse and recognition of simple coloured moving shapes on a computer monitor. Not that we'd have particularly have minded them trying to participate anyway, and indeed, given that they're a Dervish/Warrior with an alarming propensity to go berserk if a monster even looks at their skirt funny, it's questionable whether we'd have even noticed!
Still RL takes precedence, and all that, but we're reunited at last and are now moving...
And just as quickly as it arrived, the war our Corporation was embroiled in in EVE Online, has gone away again. Somewhere under two weeks, and, as I speculated previously, our aggressor has decided 'we're not worth it', and issued a retraction, effectively cancelling the state of war between us. This happened in a largely unsolicited manner, without any wheedling or diplomacy on our part, and is probably about as near to a victory condition as one can expect in EVE.
To win any more convincingly, in an environment where it's not possible to actually die in any meaningful sense,...
Still a man down this week for the usual Tuesday outing, leaving our GuildWars: Nightfall characters somewhat stalled outside the Venta Cemetery Mission. This is part of the trouble that has always plagued any attempt I've made to maintain useful or meaningful MMO Friendships. Every time you add one more personal connection, it multiplies the amount of determination, coordination and patience required for all of you to remain comparable in level, or at the same place in a story, or generally equal in any useful way. There's only three of us in this particular Regular Group and already it's proving...
Meanwhile, aboard the ISD What Would Kirk Do?, things are proceeding almost entirely not how I had foreseen it, and popping back into EVE Online after a long weekend of, well, not popping into EVE Online, finds our corporation (Guild) at war again, only this time they mean business.
As with my other EVE posting, I have to be somewhat vague in the precise details, but I can say that this corp has about a dozen members, and shortly after the war declaration showed up in the Corp Window, our boss got an email dictating exactly how much money (in used...
Ructions abound in EVE at the moment, mostly due to a kind of ideological crisis among the other folks in my current Corp, and it's all quite fascinating to watch in my usual capacity of peripheral lurker.
We're a fairly typical kind of corp, much like a thousand others in the game - small but not tiny, active but not obsessive, casual but keen. I'm mostly there because one of my RL friends is in it, to be honest, but they're decent enough folks. There's something of a low-grade recruiting drive happening of late though, and while the numbers are up,...
An absentee this week from the regular Guild Wars Nightfall night, leaving two of us to pick away at a few sub-quests, poke about in Tyria, unlocking all the outposts we'd already got, with these new characters, and eventually, and somewhat inevitably, a stab at Hard Mode, on our previous 'main' Tyrian characters - the ones that had finished Prophecies.
I must admit to having gone into it with a disapproving frown before even trying it out to be honest, as the whole thing smacks of a cheap kludge to the problem of end-game content shortage to me. Mind you, it...
News of another MMO Release Delay here:
Pirates of the Burning Sea: State of the Game 04.27.07
(Via Potshot & TCSG)
In which, via a somewhat charming admission, Flying Lab admit they haven't quite got a handle on the whole Retail Thing just yet, which is fair enough, them being an Independent operation and all, and so are going to postpone the launch until they can negotiate with the Evil Game Distribution Cartels and get some kind of boxes on the shelves. I'm quite looking forward to this one (it's even on my list!), which is odd, because I don't really know much...
No card game this week, cancelled due to injury, so instead an extra evening of EVE Online. It's a bit odd these days actually, but what with four MMOs, an actual and tactile card game, and various regular Real Life Commitments, my week is pretty much booked solid! I literally don't have enough time to spend more than one evening a week in any one game, and definitely don't have time to take on another just now.
I'm sure Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is fun and all, and indeed seems to be getting rave reviews pretty much...