Six hour documentary. Go watch it. I'll wait.

So Gott DAYAM, right? Superb. It's up to Rabbit Hole's usual quality. Touches the major events with enough detail to contextualize them. I've heard about some of this, lived through some of it. Parts of it feel like the Fall of Civilizations podcast.

EVE is the only game to which I have remained subscribed when I was not even playing. I do it because I feel it deserves to thrive. People who haven't played should be able to give it a try. To play and experience EVE is partly to become enlightened by its contrasts with most game designs. It makes you a better gamer. I not only love EVE. I'm smug about it.

o7, 25 or 6 to 4

 2023. I'm back blogging. I was back in EVE a couple times since I said I was quitting. It always turned out to be a temporary thing. It turns out that the last time I quit, I forgot to unsubscribe. So I came back to a great surprise, level five mastery of my favorite frigates, at last. So hey! Faction War stuff! I take everything back about EVE being too hard for me. I've right-sized my goals to mastering frigate-level combat in Faction War. 

I decided to focus on a ship at a time. First up, because I love its look, is the Minmatar Republic Firetail. I had a lot of fun fitting about 25 of them and learning to fly them. I found that solo dueling PvP in FW small or scout plexes is not the Firetail's strong suit, particularly. I've been told they work much better in groups hunting larger prey. 

So I saved the Firetail for fleet action and switched to the Comet for plexing, and this is more like it! I find with Gallente ships the deal is to close in and armor rep and hope. Just hope really hard. Sometimes it works. The gods of battle will decide. About 16 Comets in, I win Gudfites(tm) every so often, and I feel I'm getting the hang of it. Comets wind up cheaper than Firetails because I can make them myself in the Federal Defense Union LP store. Seems to me that rail Comet beats blaster Comet. Blaster comet punches up better. 

Since the last time I was playing around 2018, The Frog versus Squid war zone changed, from something like 60 Gallente worlds to 30 Caldari back then, to 30 Gal to 60 Cal now. Some of the war materiel that I buy for LP and sell for ISK does not get the classic 1000 ISK per LP ratio I've come to think of as my birthright. ;) That's the main difference.

The reforms made to the plexes last year are entirely to my liking. I went in a battlefield once and scratched my head at how those work. What with the optimal strategy involving the killing of your own side's NPCs. Gah. My immersion. It hurts.

The Rearguard-Command-Frontline thing? brilliant. I love it. It gives the war zone a kind of variable texture, like it says on the tin.

I'm less enthusiastic about the NPC pirates getting involved in the upcoming Havoc expansion. We already had variations in texture here with self-declared, player piracy. Perhaps when I start getting LP for some of these guys, I will come around to the idea. Here's hoping.

They say you win EVE when you quit

I unsubbed from EVE about 20 minutes before I heard Jester was quitting his blog. He totally inspired me to start this one. Funny, that. 

I like what EVE stands for. It needs to be easier to play. It's hard enough having other players out to get you when the interface isn't trying to kill you too. 

Alternately, it's too hard to play at the level I want to play it. It has to be the only game I play if I want to be as good at it as I want to be.

Dodixie Pricewatch 11 May 2014

My methodology is changing this week. I am logging in to the client to get the numbers now. I haven't created a market alt to do it yet. That probably would notch me up a few points on the Bittervet test.

Fleet Firetail: 11.5 million to 9.5 million ISK. 

Pretty clearly the blip recorded last time was not just the lack of Dodixie data. A spike shows in the price history at about that time. 

Navy Comet: 15.1 to 13.0 million ISK. 

Hey man, as soon as it hits 10 million, I'm in there again! Am I sounding pitiful yet? 

Hookbill: 18.2 to 16.5 million ISK. 

Warzone control has swung back in Caldari favor, or at least no longer in Gallente favor. I would have guessed because of the gatecamp that leads me to being in Dodixie in the first place. 

Navy Slicer: 14.2 to 11 million ISK.

Still elevated from its long stay at under 10 million.

I list the lowest sell first, followed by the highest buy. The names I use here for the navy frigates are the minimum you need to type when searching in EVE-Central to go directly to each of their pages. 

Hiatus Quietus

I've had to reorganize my EVE fandom a little bit. I think you're going to see the posting frequency go down to once a week. Dodixie Pricewatch will likely skip this week, as I am going to approach my methodology differently. I've decided EVE Central is leaving out some data that are important.

Live and let gank

Last week I commented on JestersTrek about a refreshing thought experiment he did. How would the miners, supposing they wanted to unify, resist those who suicide-gank their ships? Can they stop it from happening? 

I very much like that he is regarding the miner as a thinker with his own autonomy. I would like to take it a step further. A lot of miners have probably already seen the low prospects of success in fighting the gankers and just go on doing whatever they want. Teaming up has its own overhead in time and organizational structures. Some PvPers aren't the sort to team up either, to be fair. Live and let mine or gank or sandbox out however you like, I say.

Nonetheless, it's a good read as he goes into some detail about the odds of success of various methods the miners might employ. It resonated with me because I often have to think through my low-sec faction war lifestyle in the face of gate camps. 

Gate camps are the ants at the faction war picnic. For real. Ganging up is valid gameplay, though. I can coordinate with my buddies and have a fleet and try to break up the camps. It's all fair. Part of my fun in flying solo, in fact, is to slip past most of them and feel all bad-ass. No danger, no pleasure.

Sometimes when you express this kind of workaday sentiment about some game features being less fun than others, people will pipe up and say "play a different game." My thinking is that we should go light on that in a good-faith discussion. It does not contribute much. When someone posts simply that, as many did in the Jester post referenced above, then they are just trying to shut the discussion down. The option to quit is always there after all. We're talking because we want to have fun playing. 

That said, I reiterate that those who mine (or do any other solo activity in a game that encourages team play) have a concomitant obligation to understand what they are getting into. 

We can't do like a children's cartoon and say predator bad, prey good. 

It's like 
everyone wants to be enlightened, but nobody wants to meditate. That's the proper application of the HTFU principle.* We learn the lessons so we can have the great fulfillment of getting good at a tough game. It's not available at any lower price. 

And that's what always gets me undocking again. 

I've never let someone else's idea of a good killboard hold me back. 

* Harden The Heck Up, for my non-EVE-playing readership. 

Ship Fittings, Diablo III remix

I had a fun revelation playing Clarkson the Barbarian last weekend. I had been trying to play him like I play my Monk or Crusader, where they either dodge or block most everything so they can wade into the demonic melee and stay there putting out area DPS. Turns out it's much more effective with the Barbie, and far more interesting, to use Revenge with the knockback rune, coupled with Bash/Reverb and the dash attack with the recharge rune, to keep the enemy divided so you can defeat them in detail. 

Clarkson, yes. As in Jeremy Clarkson. From Top Gear. It was down to that or Percy.