Tiles in the Mosaic...

~or “Some Cool Features Coming in the Mosaic Release… and How is ‘ol Tur BTW?”

So I know I had not updated in a while… part of why I am not a recognized ‘fan site’ is my helter-skelter-lack-of-an-actual-posting-schedule thing… so I thought I’d bring ya’ll up to date on all things me/Tur and EVE as you know yer just dying to KNOW…  =]

I haven’t been blogging on much or even loggin on much these past few months… Mostly been playing PI Online (seems Skill-Q Online went away with the skill queue changes…). Not anything bad per se, just moar RL>EVE is all…

My job is going well, Monday is my 6mo anniversary… and I can start using built up Vaca time for ‘stuff’… or not and save it for an actual vacation. Keep in mind I have been an IT Contractor for 17 years… YEARS… and contractors rarely if never get vaca or paid time off or sick leave or, well ANY benefits outside of base payrate X hours submitted. I also have full medical insurance (of my own) for the first time in the same span of years so to say I’m happy on the career front is putting it mildly.

One slight downside is my hours… 9AM to 6PM US East Coast TZ. And my job like so many is not the kind you can always walk away from when the big hand hi-fives the small one right at 6P… many days I don’t get out till 7ish and Friday I dint leave until after 9PM… While I like the later start making for easier mornings, as I am not a ‘morning person’ by any means, the later arrival back home makes for shorter time in which to get things done ‘round the old place… and then there’s all the usual time burners and most nights now I find I just don’t have the energy to do a few hours online.

The rest is just the usual getting busier out-of-doors as the weather starts to warm up and ‘things’ become needful… yard work, tractor, driveway, Jeep, pigs, horse… yeah, pigs and horse. My wife decided late last year that she is a pig farmer at heart and we are raising pigs. For meat. Yup. My dottir calls the little ones, “Bacon Seed”…   =]

Plus this seems to not be limited to just me… several, well most, of our main content makers and enablers have had more on their plates IRL than over the winter so overall corp activity is down. But no one seems to be really worried that we are dying or stagnating or anything really negative… it’s just part of the usual ebb n flow of the mix of RL and our shared virtual lives in EVE.

OK, so the RL update is done, on to teh fun stuffs…

In EVE we have a bunch stuff comin down the pipe so to speak, CCP has a new site up called EVE Update in which one may get a glimpse of the future… of things to come. The next update, Codename Mosaic, is gonna drop this coming Tuesday April 28th… just 2 days from my typing this. EVE Update is a great site to get a decent snapshot of what’s in the works and I thought I’d work my way down the list offering the Interwebs ‘My Opinion’ ™… as if anyone asked…  The ones I CARE DEEPLY about havs Pictures!!!    =P

Permanent Ship Skins…  A personal meh for yours truly…

Now, you just let ME chose the colors and where they go and put MY Corp Logo on my ships and you will see me get embarrassingly mud-on-head excited… but until then, ifn you get you one a them ‘fancy nano-painted’ ships, well yer just one of the crowd buying someone else’s idea of how your ship should look… You might as well just get all Quafe ships with Quafe logos and be a flying billboard… not me.

Opportunities for all… Great for noobs… to bad I’m a vet, sounds like a far better way to get into EVE.

3D Starmap… Still deciding how I feel about this.

One thing you cannot deny is that the New Map sure is purty… just not sure how much added functionality, if any, it brings… I can say I did not like how it showed my “Visited Systems”… Very hard to see the systems you had NOT visited and one thing I liked in the old map was you could SEE the comparison… now you get a poor low color view of really only the systems you have actually been in and the circle they use to show number of visits does not scale enough to readily ‘see’ any real difference.

Burner Missions: Serpentis and Blood Raiders… Good.

These are the new Cruiser level Really Dangewus missions… I have not myself tried any of the burners for that would mean I would have to spend time, over and above store runs, in Hisuc and… well… I’d rather hit myself in the face with a hammer TBH… I’ll keep killing C5 Sleepers in a ‘Cane if it’s ok with ya’ll… and making far moar ISK than any “mishes” could ever net me to boot… But I do hope them as like ‘em like ‘em even moar now.

New Assembly Effect for Anchorable Structures… OK, now we’re sotra talkin!

I have HATED… (yes ‘all caps’ HATED) the way in which we build structures in New Eden since the first time I shoved one o them fugly as hell potato sacks out of the ass end of a Hoarder and watched as our POS ‘Tower’ “Magically” appeared from said ‘potato sack’ (if you’ve ever done it you know what I’m talking about, if you haven’t, please for the love of Bob, don’t so you can retain some tiny smidgin of belief in science in EVE… cause the way structures are “grown” in EVE is the stuff of pure WoW magic…)

And, TBH, this new mechanic, while light years better than the old way is still so far off the bat (personally, ‘tis me blog ya know…) that I can’t say as I ‘like’ it… but I will accept it as a tentative step in the right direction, though a faltering tentative baby step at best…

“So what do YOU want Tur?” you ask… Why, thank you for asking…    =]

[Wall-o-Text Warning… and no, ya don’t get no TL;DR… read it ifn yer interested…]

BUILDING a Planetary Orbital Station in SPACE should require at least 1 Deep Space Transport (or something with the same or larger Fleet Hangar capacity) for a Small POS, 3 DST’s for a Medium and 5 DST’s for a Large. ALL ships MUST be on grid at the same time, all will be loaded at or near max Fleet Hangar capacity (hence DSTs or larger) with the PARTS required to construct the given POS. The number of parts required would be manageable, say 10 for a Small, 30 for a Med and 50 for a Lrg, meaning 10 POS parts would fill a DST Fleet Hangar.

Note:

Yes this kinda screws with OMCs (One Man Corps) and solo players… it does seem to sorta force them to create alts or actually break their Vow of Hermitedness and debase themselves to actually talking or even (eee gads) working with other players… I dunno… mebbe a solo player could contract NPCs to bring the other loads out to the job site?? I’m quite sure this is naught but a bugaboo that can be worked out… later… mebbe much later…    =\

Anyhoo… The DSTs (or whatever) would need to be fitted with a “Construction Tractor Beam” (CST) module required to place the various parts together, and no, not the standard Salvage Tractor Beam (STB), though the CTB module could be based on the STB module in Industry… but the CTB could not only pull something to you, it could also push something away from you or hold something in place (and no, it would still not work on ships so you in the back quit whining…)

You also would need a “Construction Foreman” (new skill) and a “Foreman” variant of the CTB that would be required for construction to take place. The Foreman will be one of the hauler pilots and would oversee the whole job. The Foreman would have a Build Plan for the POS to be built in the form of a script that is loaded into the “Foreman” CTB.

All haulers would ‘anchor’ for personal/corp/alliance all the parts they carry (and yea I feel we should be able to select those levels of ownership)… These would appear in space in a “Construction Container” (special Jet Can) and the Foreman would call for each piece as required. The pilot with the requested piece would activate his CTB on it and (the CTB would) place it where needed. The Foreman would then activate his CTB to ‘weld’ it in place… this continues until the POS is completed at which point the Foreman just fuels her up and hits the Big Red Buhtan to raise the POS Forcefield.

Note: a POS could NOT be ‘partially’ built, once construction starts you are on a timer albeit a generous one, but all the parts need to be welded in place in order and before the clock runs out or the POS fails, breaks apart and you have to scoop all the parts back to cargo and start over again.

There would need to be a std hauler or 2 for fuels and stront same as now, or for that matter you could carry enough fuel in the std cargo hold in the DSTs to online the FF. Defense and interior modules would of course be staged as usual ready to bring in…

This whole effort could easily be designed to take approximately the same time it does now. But a well disciplined and well practiced crew could learn to shorten that time to its theoretical minimum…  And with this POS Construction would be an actual interactive ACTIVITY instead of a passive waiting game… one which in the history of EVE has been mostly spent waiting to get jumped, blobbed and die and to watch your POS get stolen to boot. This new mechanic gives us new gameplay, new modules and skills, new BPOs and BPCs for new ‘stuff’ to make for the market… hey, someone has to make all those POS parts and CTB mods right??

Does this mean it would not be as dangerous or moar dangerous than today’s mechanic?? I dunno… so why don’t let’s try it and see hrm?  Anyhoo… back to our not so regularly scheduled programming…

T3 Destroyer Rebalance… I have a Confessor and Svipul… but I live inna hole and we really haven’t had a real use for them so I can’t say I’ll see any real difference in gameplay as I am not that experienced with them yet… so this one is kinda meh…

New Control Tower Forcefield Effects…

Love it… crazy about it… don’t ever want to lose it…

Already blathered on about this in my last post here…

Mosaic Theme Song…  EVE has sound????

TBH I have not cared one whit for any of the theme music in EVE since they shut off the Incursion Theme… I have been faithful enough to give each a listen, but after a few minutes I shut off the theme music ‘cause nothing has ever come anywhere close to getting my blood up like those drums did… Heck the music of Incursion was actually part of why I chose to be a Matarii… it sounds so tribal and raw and pure…

 

Higher Nullsec Mining Yields… Oh joy, more love for (1) the space I couldn’t care less about and (B) the gameplay I couldn’t care even less for… Oh I know this is BIG STUFF for many, not dissing their game… (well, ok mebbe a wee bit of dis for nullsuccers…) but it’s just not for moi.

Two Factor Authentication… Hooray Moar Security!!!!  Boo Less Freedom to Hack!!!! Wait, wat??

Sensor Overlay Update…  FUKKIN BOUT DAMN TIME.

The ability to TURN OFF the Gods Damned Discovery Scanner Sweep has been badly needed… as a matter of fact that whole idea shoulda died horribly and noisily in the crib…

But I can now go back to at least pretending I am an Explorer in a Vast Uncharted Frontier… instead of just one moar sad Pedestrian milling about in the Billboard Covered Starscape we actually live in.

Corporation Roles Interface Improvements… I actually should be jumping up and down over this one… I used to be a POS Manager and yeah, it does suck. But I know of things that suck worse and all in all once you understood it, it was what it was. Now understand I am NOT saying it was good or shouldn’t change but…

I look at changes like this and worry about Nerf Creep… those small changes to make ‘this’ just a little easier and make ‘that’ just a little less complex… and when you add up all those inconsequential ‘little’ changes it one day ends up with us now really bitter vets crying in our Ruum an Quafe over the good ‘ol days when EVE was harsh and hard and not full of 13 year olds playing in Creative Mode…   yuch.

Visual Upgrades For Environmental Content… I am all for better visuals… but I do worry about the effect on players with lower end video capabilities. I play EVE onna simple Laptop, an HP Pavilion Sleekbook 15, not a Power Gamer System by anyone’s lights… but I must say I recently upgraded to 8GB RAM (from 4) and I can run dual clients at full video boogety with no real issues...

So, while I have my concerns they are outweighed by CCPs relentless, and so far successful, efforts to keep the client as clean and lean as possibly while giving us a visual right-out-of-the-box-experience bar none.

I know some guys who go to great lengths to push their systems and mod games like Skyrim to the point of being Uber Real… and yet EVE is as visually stunning (to me) as all that without the mods and without all the low slots full of Water Cooled CPUs…   =]

Battlecruiser Warp Changes… Faster is good… ‘nough said.

Nullsec Infrastructure Improvements… so very much less than meh.

New Damage Control Module Icon…

Me no like. Want suitcase back. Bad CCP… no donut.

This is a change without a reason. Explain WHY it had to change and if logical, I will accept it, until then this is change simply cause ‘change’ and that is simply not good enough. There is value in History and Legacy and Tradition… not all change is ‘good’... Dunt believe me? just ask the guy with one foot if all ‘change’ is good.

Import Clipboard Skill Queue… Hrm.

I miss the old skill queue… ok, go ahead… scream and yell and throw things…

OK, you done? No?…

OK, are you done now? I do hope you got that out of your system.

Ok, so as I said I miss the old 24 hr skill queue. Why? Cause skilling doesn’t MEAN anything anymoar. I never know what Tur has learned or when he has crossed some Big Skill Line and can now use T2 Heavy Missiles… ‘cause Aura doesn’t say in her oh so damn sexy voice, ”Skill training complete.” anymore… ‘cause for me to have any idea where I am in skilling I have to go look and I have NO REASON to go look anymoar ‘cause Tur’s Skill-Q is FULL for the next YEAR so I can just fahgetaboutit… and I don’t like that. No, not one bit I don’t.

Skilling used to be an active part of my game… it was something I and all of us managed and thought about a lot and planned for and around and it was something we DID. It was something you checked on EVERYDAY... and I miss the excitement of knowing I could now use T2 this or that… This is, to me, a perfect example of Nerf Creep.

Oh please CCP make Skilling easier ‘cause it’s Hard and it makes me Have to DO stuff and it makes me Have to Log On and that irritates me and it should be a game and it should be EASY… oh, and while yer at it can you just give me ISK, ‘cause Running Missions are Hard and running them makes me Have to DO stuff and running them makes me Have to Log On and that irritates me and it should be a game and it should be EASY…  see? Nerf Creep. So yeah… I miss the 24 hour Skill Queue.

Mac Client Improvements…  Finally!! Something I care about even LESS than nullsuc!   =P

Th, th, th That’s ALL FOLKS!!!!

Fly Wreckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=