The Reavers Drake Race

The comedy race event returned last night, with Ranger Gama setting up another run for the SIG.  It was the fourth such race for Reavers this year, and the third one I was able to make.

The first one was actually almost exactly a year ago, in 2017, so not really this year I suppose.  That was the first one.  We flew Daredevils around the north, hanging out on the Pandemic Horde Keepstar as one of the way points.

I missed the second one, which also flew through the north, while the third one was out of Delve and had us flying Ventures.

This time around Ranger had a bigger ship in mind.  This time he set us up with Drakes.  As usual, the fit was more for comedy than anything else, with four festival launchers as the main armament.  They were also fit with hyperspatial rigs for faster warp speed, but the prop mod choices were frigate sized.  The one saving grace was that he fit a micro jump drive.

Nine of us were there for the race.  Ranger handed out the Drakes and I immediately insured mine, figuring that such a big target was likely to be blown up flying through the hostile space that we would likely be traversing.

It also gave me a chance to use the Drake SKIN that came with the holiday event in EVE Online, the Chromodynamic Candy SKIN.

At the Keepstar with the fresh Drake SKIN

I also grabbed some mining drones.  Ranger was offering a bonus prize for the first person to show up with a cargo filled with Veldspar.  He also wisely bought all of the Veldspar off the market in 1DQ1-A to keep us from simply buying it before we started.  We would have to mine it ourselves, or buy it along the way.

Then he gave us the route and we were off.

Candy Drakes on the way

We had to travel first to ZWV-GD, then to 0-MX34, then to C9N-CC, and finally to HED-GP where we needed to warp to Ranger’s alt to finish the race.  The total distance was 67 gates.  That route would put us through some fairly active systems.  But first we were off toward Period Basis and our neighbors to the south.

Hitting a RED Alliance gate

We started out with most of us neck and neck gating our way to the first way point.  It didn’t seem like we would face much trouble until we hit TEST space.

Middle Management Dino on the Gate

And, sure enough, just a couple of gates into the Paragon Soul region and TEST space we came through into a gate camp.  At the time Ranger was first through the gate, followed by Losmortos Nolm and then myself, with most of the rest close behind.

A bubble was up on the gate as we came through.  Ranger was the first to break cloak and managed to pull all the aggro immediately.  Losmortos Nolm managed to slip past while I tried to activate my micro jump drive before breaking cloak.  That led me to fumbling about a bit, which let those behind me break cloak as well.  That probably saved me as I was able to MJD out of the bubble and warp off while the camp was busy with other Drakes.  In all more than half of those in the race, five Drakes, were blown up and the pods destroyed as well.  Ranger Gama, Arianhrod Begin, Shokalokaboom, Buer Argarves, and Roy Garfield, were all done in 0SUF-3.

Meanwhile, Hoff Talvanen, who was running behind, managed to get picked off back in Period Basis in VYO-68.

That left only myself, Losmortos Nolm, and Grodd Gandar still in the running.  Losmortos Nolm and I were already past the camp so kept on the most direct route while Grodd Gandar, who was also a bit behind, decided to take an alternate path to the first marker.  That put him many jumps behind us.

Losmortos Nolm and myself had a fairly smooth run after that.

Into the Minmatar part of null sec

It wasn’t until we had hit C9N-CC and had turned around for HED-GP that the first bit of trouble came up.  We ended up with an Ares flying along with us.

The Ares decided to take a run at me, getting ahead of me through a gate and pointing me.  However I was able to light the MJD again and jump away from him and then warp off, jumping through the next gate while he was still waiting on his aggro timer.  But he was quick and tried to grab me two gates down the line.  At this point Losmortos Nolm was maybe half a system ahead of me.  I took the next gate and, instead of following along, I warped off to an asteroid belt hoping to maybe mind a bit for the Veldspar prize and ditch the persistent Ares.

The Ares kept on going, following after Lormortos Nolm, so I was alone in the system.  However, the rats in the asteroid belt were not happy to see me and I had nothing with me to take them out.  Also, I had forgotten how slow mining drones are.  I recalled them, then had to fly towards them before warping out, my shield down below the 10% mark.

That delay put Losmortos Nolm about eight gates ahead of me.  He was good about mentioning what he was facing, giving me some heads up as to what was coming.  It wasn’t until GE-8JV that he ran into significant numbers in space.  There a battle seemed to be in progress between the locals and some Imperium pilots with about 100 people in local.  The conflict seemed to be centered on the gate to V-3YG7, with forces on both sides of that gate.  Losmortos Nolm managed to slip past.  But by the time I got there a camp of Brave pilots were on the far side of the gate.  When I came through there was a bubble up.  There was enough firepower to take me down before my MJD could spin up.  My ship exploded.  I was out of the race.

Candy Drake coming apart

Losmortos Nolm managed to get through into HED-GP and was the winner of the race.

Meanwhile, Grodd Gandar, who had taken the long route around, was still something like 40 jumps from the finish line.  However, being that far behind worked out for him.  He had been watching the Gate Camp Check site, but by the time he arrived in the vicinity of GE-8JV the battle had subsided and the gates were clear.  He was able to slip through and get to HED-GP and Ranger Gamma’s alt.

He also said that he had collected a cargo hold full of Veldspar along the way.  However, it wasn’t clear how to verify that, so his Drake got blow up so people could examine the kill mail and see what he had on him.  Sure enough, a bunch of Veldspar was in his cargo hold.

And so another race ended.  First place went to Losmortos Nolm and second to Grodd Gandar, with the third place prize being rolled over for next time.  The route most of us ended up flying looked like this:

The route with death locations noted

Grodd Gandar went through Stain, which added a lot of jumps to his path.

It is always interesting to see who is out and about in space when we are flying.  There is very much a randomness to it.  You can fly through a dozen systems and see just one or two names in local, then stumble upon a gate camp or a battle with dozens or even a hundred people around.  They will be for a bit, then gone a little while later.  The same route can be safe for one person and a death trap for somebody else ten minutes later.  But that is the way of null sec.

Where Are All the Ship SKINs?

The joke that isn’t really a joke has been about CCP being unable to run a store to sell EVE Online merchandise.  Granted, there are difficulties serving a world-spanning audience, and everybody who says, “They could make so much money if the just sold…” is completely wrong… I went over all that already… but it still seems to take them to get something going only to be disappointing.

The in-game store though, the New Eden Store, that ought to be different.  That has no shipping or currency conversion or inventory cost issues.  Just get the art team to make some nifty, infinitely reproducible ship SKINs and put them up for sale.   I know there are people who don’t like ship SKINs, but there are people who don’t like puppies and kittens as well.  And judging from the fleet ops I go on, there are plenty of people who do like SKINs.

Reavers fleets are always full of skinned ships

And if you have a titan it seems like having a SKIN is almost mandatory judging from what I saw of those fleets over the summer.

Something, something, titans will never be common…

So, with that in play, you would think the New Eden Store would be full of ship SKINs.

Not too full, mind you.  I get the whole scarcity and exclusivity thing.  And, of course, the UI of every online store becomes a burden when there are more than 20 things in any given shopping category, so you want to avoid bloat.

Even given all of that, I still fully expect that I should be able to open up the New Eden Store and find a SKIN for the ship I am flying, no matter which ship it is.

But, this is CCP, so of course I can’t.

It is the holiday season… you know, when people go shopping for gifts, a time when it is good to have a full selection of items available… and the Reavers had a Secret Santa gift exchange again this year.  The person I drew wanted an Apostle and I figured I could swing that.  But I hate to give just a ship.  I like ship SKINs and so throw some in with every Secret Santa gift.  I even have a few of the Blaze SKINs socked away to go with gifts at a later date.

So I wanted an Apostle SKIN.  But when I opened up the New Eden Store I found that there were no Apostle SKINs for sale.  Frankly, there are barely any Amarr SKINs for sale… or Minmatar.  There are just five Amarr and six Minmatar SKINs in the store.

I hope you are flying one of these ships if you want an Amarr SKIN

Gallente is a bit better.  They have some coverage, though it is far from universal.  Only the Caldari, of the four main empires, seems to have a good selection of SKINs.  They are mostly the white Ghostbird SKIN, which I admit I really like, but at least you have an option as Caldari. (The Triglavians, the new hawtness, have a couple SKINs per hull available, and the Gila is also well covered.)

But no Apostle SKIN.

I had to get out an alt in Jita to go shopping.  And that is okay.  I understand that SKINs from events and old SKINs area meant for the secondary market.  And I was able to find a Purity of the Throne, a Dark Iron, and an Exoplanets SKIN to go with the gift.  I had to run them out to Aridia in an interceptor so my main could pick them up and fly them back into Delve, so a little inconvenience, but not much.  I just feel lucky that I was able to find three quality SKINs without breaking the bank.  If he had wanted a faction battleship SKIN I might not have been so lucky.

I won’t pretend I am an expert on in-game, cash shop marketing, but it does seem like the holiday season would be a good time to have a selection of SKINs available for a much wider selection of ships.  And the art team at CCP has show itself able to knock out a good SKIN on short notice for fundraising events.  So what is going on here?

Players Will Optimize

I remember back to the early-ish days of TorilMUD, back when I was first getting into groups to do zones.  Doing a zone was akin to what we would call raiding now, where a max size group, sixteen characters total, would set out to fight their way through a series of rooms and bosses, culminating the in the main boss of the zone.

Specifically, I remember doing the City of Brass zone.  It was a popular zone to do for quite a while, one done almost every boot. (See an old post about how MUD crashes were a good thing back in the day.)  It was an older zone, it wasn’t too big, there were a couple of possible drops for class quest items so somebody was always keen to go, and the general loot was pretty decent if you were just starting off doing zones.  There were upgrades to be had and everybody wanted that flaming halberd for an alt.

Back then the approach to the zone was slow and plodding.  Once through the Plane of Fire (you needed flying gear or the spell plus a fire protection item to go on this run) , the group would assemble and prepare outside the first room.  Once spells were up the tanks would roll in, engage the mobs in the room, call everybody else to come in, and we would unload everything to clear the room.

We would then sit down, mem up our spells, then stand when we were done.  When the call “spell up” came again, we would hit all our targets… as a druid I would cast vitalize, a hit point boosting spell, on some of the non-melee characters and maybe barkskin on the tanks and anybody who requested it… then the tanks would move into the next room, call us to come in, and we would burn down the next room.

It was rinse and repeat, taking down every room as a set piece battle.  At boss mobs we would get special instructions.  When spell feedback was introduced, a mechanic that would damage players if two people cast the same area effect damage spell at the same time, there would be some coordinating of who would cast which spell first.  But otherwise it was the same thing every room, and it stretched out the time it took to run the City of Brass into a three hour event.

But as time went along the runs began to speed up.  First, the overall quality of people’s gear began to improve.  This made players more effective at slaying mobs as well as surviving fights.

Then there started to develop an ideal group composition.  For example, whoever was leading the zone would never take more than one druid unless there was an empty slot that they couldn’t fill.  They wanted a caster who could do the “dragon scales” spell on the tanks rather than the lesser spell “stone skin.”  There were classes with buffs that were deemed essential for a run.  Getting the right group comp made runs go more smoothly, especially at boss fights.

And the zone itself became a solved problem.  The efreeti never changed.  There were a couple of random spawns, but otherwise how to do the run was well understood.  There were no surprises, a well defined route existed, and the boss mechanics were old hat.

Finally, there was a big change in how zones were run.  Groups stopped doing each room as a set piece battle.  Clearing up the trash mobs on the way to the boss was now easier due to gear upgrades, so we would roll through all of that with the various casters just keeping critical buffs up, refreshing them at need.  To sustain this, the concept of “mem out” was introduced, where the raid leader would call “mem west” or the like to indicate where the casters could move to refresh their spells while the battle was still raging.

The latter kept everybody busy.  Rooms with trash mobs took marginally longer without everybody blowing their whole catalog of damage spells, but that was heavily outweighed by the reduction in pre and post battle activity.  Only boss fights got the big “spell up” treatment. The time to run the zone, from starting out in to returning home to Waterdeep, approached an hour if everything was going right, and it almost always did.

That is a pretty big speed up compared to three hours from the doorstep of the zone.  And the time improvement didn’t stop there.  TorilMUD, around for more than 25 years at this point, has never raised its level cap.  Instead, it has maintained some semblance of stability by adding in new, harder zones for those at the level cap while re-balancing equipment over time with an eye towards keeping most level 50 zones viable.  That generally means any gear that seems over powered, like the glowing crimson dagger or the haste enhanced grey suede boots, are likely to get a nerf sooner or later.

Still, even with that optimization happens.  Old hands who have run a thousand zones have a bag full of gear so can pull out a set perfect for each task.  I bet if I told long time zone leader Lilithelle I needed something from the City of Brass today, she’d throw together a group of eight to ten people and drag me along, finishing the zone in 30 minutes or less.

As the kids say, “Cool story bro.”  But what am I getting at here?

This is what happens to content over time.  Player optimization alone pretty much cut the run time for City of Brass by two thirds.  And that three hour number was after the “learn the zone and the bosses” part of the process.  Add it some of the usual gear inflation and that time is now down to one sixth the original time, and doable by half a raid group.

This is what happens to content over time, especially PvE content.  It becomes a solved problem.  Players learn how best to assault things and share that knowledge.

Sometimes that is okay.  In MMORPGs where expansions use levels and gear to gate content, it is pretty much expected that older content will be made obsolete.  Often, after enough time has passed, old raids become solo projects that people run to collect gear for cosmetic reasons or to fill out missed achievements.  That is certainly the accepted state of affairs in World of Warcraft.

In other games it can be problematic.  In EVE Online optimization is an ongoing battle for CCP.  Without levels as a gating mechanism any new PvE content is pretty much solved immediately.  So, despite there being something like four thousand NPC missions in the game, the PvE is generally considered boring and is subject to pretty extreme levels of optimization.  This goes especially for null sec anomaly running, where titans are the latest high yield ratting option.

Only the Abyssal deadspace content isn’t completely solved, and that is only because it has a random aspect to it.  Once you start one you are committed and cannot go back and refit if you have chosen poorly.  And even that is only an issue for the level five runs.  CCP last said that the percentage of Abyssal deadspace runs that ends in a PvE death is very, very low.  I cannot find the number at the moment, but 3% springs to my mind.

Then there is PvP content in New Eden, where The Meta constantly strives to find the optimum ship for given circumstances and CCP is constantly tweaking ships in order to try to bring balance to the force, only to find that suddenly every big alliance is now focused on a specific hull for its main doctrine while the small gang and low sec forces have a new favorite of their own.  And then there is suicide ganking in high sec.  That has become one of the few PvP solved problems at this point, something CCP needs to shake up somehow.

And so it goes.

The thing is, a game’s core player base will always optimize.   But outliers and new players tend to get left out of that.  If a studio focuses only on the core, a game can become impenetrable to new players.  But if you don’t focus on the needs of the core your most loyal fans may get bored and walk away.

The Tale of the Two Chocolate Pies

I am almost done with maybe half a dozen posts, but I am tired and haven’t finished any of them, so you get a Christmas vignette instead.

We were up at my father’s house for Christmas, which is about a 3 hour drive away, which is part of why I didn’t finish anything.  Six hours in the car will do that.  Also, I started playing RimWorld when we got home.  That will eat up time.  So here I am writing this on Boxing Day, with the cat watching me… from a box… I am serious.

A cat in a box watching me write on Boxing Day

Christmas dinner is a pretty stock standard tradition there, and the menu never varies.  My step-mother does the most well-done prime rib possible every year.  And by well-done I mean cooked so that the colors red or pink are nowhere visible.  The president would approve.  Whatever.  She’s coming up on 80 and will do what she damn well pleases.  The meat was still tender and enough horseradish sauce makes up for most sins.

Anyway, after dinner I was sitting at the kids table with my daughter and a few of my nieces to avoid the determined clean up operation gets set in motion the moment it appears people are done eating.  All evidence that there was ever a meal must be eliminated.  The first time my wife ever came to Christmas we went up the street for about 45 minutes to visit my grandmother and by the time we got back both dinner and desert had been served and cleaned away to oblivion.  We ended up eating Christmas cookies in the car on the way home we were so hungry.

My daughter and nieces range from 13 to 24, and two of them are involved in Hollywood so often have interesting tales.  But in the midst of a discussion which involved season five of BoJack Horseman and Ted Danson’s folding straw, my 19 year old nieces saw that desert was being put out on the counter and felt the need to point out that there were two chocolate pies.

Let me make that clear.  There were TWO chocolate pies.  This was significant.

This was important to her because last year, unbeknownst to me, she did not get ANY chocolate pie.  All of the chocolate pie had been eaten before she went to get any, so her chocolate pie aspirations had been thwarted.  Her brother, who has the last piece, declined to share his pie with her, which was no doubt the shocker of the century.

This situation last year was apparently intolerable because there were TWO chocolate pies on the counter.  I imagine my sister had heard enough of this that she just made sure nobody would lack for chocolate pie.

As we are not talking about any sort of extra special chocolate pie here.  This looked to be the stock standard, no-bake, pudding in a pie crust desert that is out every year with its siblings, the pumpkin and coconut pies.  Chocolate was just now 50% of the “pies currently on the counter” demographic.

My sister confirmed that there were a pair of chocolate pies for the reason stated, and did so with a weariness that comes from trying to balance the demands of three teens under her roof.

So when the time came to serve up some pie, I got up and got myself a slice of chocolate pie, just on the off chance there would be a rush for that particular flavor.  I mean, last year we ran out before my niece even got a slice.

I actually had two slices, and managed to get them both without depriving my niece of her slice.  I must admit that my sudden lust for chocolate pie was, in part, to see if we could eat it all again before she got any.  But there would be no pie denial melt-down of any sort.

There was enough chocolate pie for all who desired any.

As I stood in the kitchen by the trash, helping to hide all evidence that there was any desert served after the meal we had so successfully disappeared, my niece walked up to scrape the remains of her pie into the trash.  In her hands I saw a paper plate with a huge glop of chocolate pie filling, missing really only the crust.  The main essence of the chocolate pie, the actual chocolate bit, appeared mostly untouched and she was happily dumping it into the trash.

So I called out in a loud voice, “After all of that talk about chocolate pie, are you telling me that you don’t actually like chocolate pie?  That all you really wanted was the crust?”

My niece confirmed this in a mildly embarrassed voice.  I turned towards my sister and called to her, even louder, so that everybody in the room could clearly head, “Did you see your daughter’s plate?  She was so anxious that she get some chocolate pie that we have TWO chocolate pies, and she is even now scooping almost all of the chocolate from her slice into the trash, having only eaten the crust?”

My sister was willing to play along in some public shaming, but the look in her eyes was, “Welcome to my life.”

In the end, nobody even took a slice from the second chocolate pie.  All of the chocolate pie related needs, including my second slice, were met by the first pie.  The second pie was entirely superfluous.  But at least it got a mention here.  They also serve, who only sit and wait.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

From the Jita 4-4 undock to Middle-earth to Waterdeep to Stormwind or where every you find yourself, have a good holiday.

Winter fireworks on the Jita undock

 

Reviewing My Game Time for 2018

Returning to the round up of 2018.

Most years I have something of a forward looking post in which I try to pick and/or guess at what games I might play in the coming year.  It remains a good reason why I don’t do monthly gaming goal posts or the like.  My ability to forecast my gaming mood is pretty iffy.

Well, sort of.

If I simply said I was going to play the same old stuff as last year and the year before, I would be pretty spot on.

Instead, these posts are also a way to try and convince myself to go play something new.  Sometimes the fact that I played nothing from the list isn’t my fault.  Look at the history:

• 2017 – I played nothing from the list, though arguably only two were playable
• 2016 – I played none from the list, but most didn’t ship
• 2015 – literally nothing I listed went live
• 2014 – I played Warlords of Draenor, which was a gimme really
• 2012 – Actually tried most of the items on the list
• 2011 – Tried 3 out of 5 eventually, but then The Agency was on the list
• 2007 LOTRO (shipped!)
• 2007 Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Didn’t ship)

There were years when almost nothing I was looking into shipped.

Given the fact that new titles of interest are pretty sparse, my 2018 list, posted back at the beginning of January, was focused on older titles I had not played.  I put together a list of “classic” MMOs that I had not played, listed out the pros and cons of each, and figured I should go back and give one a try.  The list was:

1. RuneScape
2. Ultima Online
3. Dark Age of Camelot
4. Anarchy Online
5. Silkroad Online
6. Maple Story
7. Entopia Universe
8. A Tale in the Desert

And, to give myself some minimal credit this year, I did in fact go and play Anarchy Online for a few hours.  I have the screen shots to prove it.  But I didn’t spend much time with it and I didn’t make any attempt to play anything else on the list.

In think the big lesson from that was that nostalgia is necessarily transferable.  I’m okay going back and playing EverQuest now and again and dealing with all the archaic aspects of it, but only because I was there when that was the state of the art.  Anarchy Online just felt old and awkward without any redeeming happy memories.

So what did I play in 2018?  Well, I have a handy chart for that!  Belghast does a chart like this, and I have copied him before and am back at it again.

2018 MMO Play Chart

EVE Online was the staple of my MMO year.  I’m not as invested in it as I once was, but I enjoy watching it and talking about it still and I am good for a few fleet ops a month.

Pokemon Go is sort of an MMO, and getting more like one as time goes along.  It is also the one game my wife and I play together, and it doesn’t take much time out of your day to keep up.  It probably helps that my work campus has six Pokestops and a gym.

World of Warcraft ebbed and flowed.  I was finishing up Legion early in the year, unlocking flying and all that.  Then there was a break before I came back in the warm up to Battle for Azeroth.  I still have things to do there, but have wandered off yet again.

Minecraft, despite our world being very quiet of late, still got some attention from me, usually around big public works projects.

I spent some time with Rift Prime.  That was nice to go back to for a bit, though it also wore out on me after not too long.  But that’s okay, I only feel nostalgia for the base game.

EverQuest II came and went twice.  I did have a pretty good run with my berserker up to level 100, at which point the game went back to its coy mode of indicating where I ought to go next.

But EverQuest II crapping out was fine because the LOTRO Legendary server came along and, despite my skepticism, I was clearly into that.

I did take a serious run at Shroud of the Avatar.  It is an odd, awkward, seemingly deliberately archaic game.  I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually did like it however.  As happens with these sorts of things, in the end my subconscious won’t let me log in and waste time playing something that I am not really enjoying.  At least not for very long.

Then there was the flash in the pan for both Anarchy Online and Black Desert Online.  I played both for about the same duration and then walked away.

So that gets me through MMOs.  But I did play some other games over the course of the year.  I mean, look at that big empty space in June.  I was surely playing something else.

Steam can tell me what I was doing.  According to it I spent time playing the following this year:

1. Civilization V
2. Vietnam 65
3. Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
4. Bomber Crew
5. Fallout 4
6. Oxygen Not Included
7. RimWorld
8. Stellaris
9. Sudden Strike 4
10. Hearts of Iron IV
11. Train Simulator 2018

Some of those I have written about, like Vietnam 65.  Some are games I just return to over and over, like Civilization V and Age of Empires II.  There are a couple I should write about, including Oxygen Not Included and Bomber Crew.  Then there are the usual tales of buying things after 8pm on Steam because they were on sale despite the fact I could guess these games were not for me.  Fallout 4, Sudden Strike 4, and Hearts of Iron IV all got me to fall into that trap.

Lesson there, don’t buy anything with the number “4” in the title.

And finally there is Train Simulator 2018.  There is a post about that coming.  Basically I said I would do something with it if the right circumstances arose… and they did.  So I felt compelled to live up to that past statement.

That is where I spent the bulk of my gaming time in 2018.  I think for 2019 my forward looking statement will probably be simply more of the same.  We shall see.  It isn’t January yet.  I often come out of the holiday season rested and optimistic.

Some Better Luck with Operation Permafrost

Thanks to a tip in the comments from the last post about the event I went looking at the December patch notes… patch notes get updated for follow on fixes… and I did see that CCP ended up doing some tweaks for the Operation Permafrost event, so I thought I might give it another shot.

It is what we have now

Among the fixes listed were missing ore and NPCs podding players.  I was having problems with the former and am glad to have not had to experience the latter.  That can be a nasty surprise.

I was able to get out the Procurer again and actually found some ore beyond the west gate that I was able to harvest.

Procurer mining like it should

I don’t know if the asteroids still only respawn at downtime or not however, since the site I entered was empty of other players.  So the asteroids I found there might have been respawns, but it is possible that the rush to mine was done already.

Here I was finally able to discern deeper differences between this and the Crimson Harvest event.  Again, while similar to a certain degree, CCP sought to change things up some.  During the Crimson Harvest event the tasks from The Agency seemed to be pretty much infinitely redoable.  You mined so many units of the event ore, get the points, then do it again.  Kill so many NPCs, collect the points, do it again.

You can view that as dull or serene depending on how you look at it I suppose, but I gather CCP felt it was more towards the former.  So for the mining side of things it did start off with a series of “mine X amount of ore” followed by “mine X+Y amount of ore.”  But then it started in with some other tasks, like reprocessing a set amount of ore.  I flew back to a station to do that.

Then there was more mining to be done, then a requirement to process a given amount of ore using the structures in the West pocket, which I didn’t know you could do until that came up.

Using the structure

At that point I had to go back to the station where I had stashed a load of the ore to bring back in order to meet the goals for that task.

On the way back I decided to figure out the three tasks asking you to examine each of the three gates.

There is no “examine: option

I had previously used them and looked at the info display for each gate, but that didn’t seem to do anything.  Google didn’t help either, though I did find one guy’s video about the event where he too couldn’t figure out what to do.  Fortunately, in the comments, somebody said to use the “look” command on the gates from the overview.  Doing that got Aura to pop up and explain each gate in turn and let you claim the claim the rewards for the tasks… which were worth one point each.  This is why I wasn’t in a hurry to figure it out I guess.

Aura explains it all

The words about the gas cloud harvester would come into focus shortly.  Once I was done with the next ore refining and harvesting assignments the tasks moved on to gathering Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor.  Gas.

More than a dozen years into EVE Online and I had not once harvested gas.  Still, how hard could it be?

Something in the back of my brain knew that the Venture was the choice for gas harvesting.  I had to go get the skill and train it up on my alt, but I had some free skill points hanging about, so I popped that up to level IV right away.

Then there was fitting the Venture.  Being a mining frigate it is small and not very tough.  I recalled Johnny Splunk telling tales of avoiding NPCs while harvesting gas in by speed tanking them.  Signature size also plays into that, so I decided to go that route.

I toughened up the Venture against thermal and kinetic damage to give myself a bit of buffer, fit two gas harvesters to collect the vapor, fit a rig to give me a little more capacitor space, then strapped an oversize prop mod in the form of a 10MN afterburner, something meant for a cruiser hull, onto the ship.  That prop mod would let me go 2km/sec but keep my signature smaller than a 5MN microwarp drive would.  And it all fit.

I headed back out for the site, went through the West gate, and started up the gas harvesters.  I also set myself to orbit the gas cloud at 1km, since the gas harvesters only had a 1,500m range, and lit the afterburner.

150km out from my warp in I realized that the gas cloud was effectively zero distance from anywhere on grid, so set myself to orbit one of the structures at that range, trucking along at 2km a second.

Venture running along

That kept me far away from the Mordu’s Legion NPCs that were spawning.  They would try to lock me up and I could see them firing missiles… you can see some missiles in that screen shot above… but nothing seemed able to touch me.

Blazing away at me with missiles to no effect

I seemed pretty safe.  The harvesting, however, was taking some time.  Each cycle only harvested two units per collector, and I had two tasks set for me, one to harvest 350 units and one to harvest 400 units.  So I left myself in my big orbit slowing gathering up gas.

I also had along a pair of Hornet II drones to take care of anything that might stray into range.   I think they got maybe one frigate.  Otherwise they just flew along with me.

Hornet drones just following along

With nothing happened I was lulled into a false sense of security.  I seemed to be pretty much invincible in my orbit.  So I walked away from the computer as the numbers slowly counted up.

I came back to find myself still in orbit, however I was now just in my pod.  The wreck of my Venture say in space not too far behind me.

Just a wreck now

I had gotten pretty far along however, almost half way to 400 units harvested.  I didn’t look at the kill mail, thinking it was likely just a bad luck NPC spawn or maybe one of them had managed to cut me off somehow.

So I went on back to Amarr and fit out another Venture, the same as before.  Then I went back and, thinking maybe I hadn’t gone far enough out in my orbit, I aimed away from the warp in and put a good 300km between me and the nearest NPC, harvesting as I went, and started an even bigger orbit.

Venture venturing out

Once set I tabbed out to look at something else, then tabbed back only to find myself dead again.  Well, clearly I was doing something wrong.  So I grabbed another Venture in Amarr, but didn’t waste time fitting much to it.  Gas harvesters and the prop mod was all I brought with me this time.  I went for an even larger orbit.  In addition, some other people had showed up, so I figured they might give me some cover.

Look at them in the distance

I hung in for a bit, enough to finish the harvesting tasks and get another, when suddenly I was taking damage.  I turned to warp out to one of the local citadels, shutting down the AB, but before I was aligned I was in my capsule yet again.

I saw the damage flash by on screen, but had to go check the logs to be sure about what I had seen.

[ 2018.12.21 19:51:31 ] (mining) You mined 2 units of Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:31 ] (mining) You mined 2 units of Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:45 ] (combat) 355 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:50 ] (combat) 253 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:55 ] (combat) 123 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits

I went and looked more closely at the kill mail and saw that I had been done in by an “invisible cloud.”  According to zKillboard, invisible clouds are doing in lots of ventures and destroyers.

So I now I knew that the site hits you with damage every so often, enough to blot out my ship in ten seconds from the first hit.  Well that wasn’t going to work out with the Venture.

I hadn’t notice this with the Procurer since it was getting hit by NPCs pretty constantly and is pretty tanky.  But I would have to be quick, aligned out, and, more unlikely, paying attention to the screen to warp off to safety before I was hit.

Meanwhile, I had another task for 350 units of vapor and a new task asking me to refine a bunch of vapor at the structure.  And, of course, I had lot both my ship and all the gas I had harvested.  I was starting to tire of the whole routine again.

But I can see how the pattern of the event changed when compared to the rather more simple Crimson Harvest event of earlier this year.  CCP decided they wanted to go with a more directed experience, setting a selection of different tasks before players to get them doing various things.  I suppose this has some merit.  I did learn a bit about gas harvesting after more than a dozen years playing.  But the whole random invisible cloud attacks on grid put me off the whole thing.  And unlike some events given through The Agency, the tasks do not appear to reset.  I’m still on the hook for harvesting and refining more gas, which isn’t worth the price in Ventures to my mind.

I did manage to get through the second set of rewards and on my way to the third, sitting at 269 points into the event.  And there is still more than a week to go.  Maybe I’ll get out and blow up some Mordu’s Legion ships with medium sized weapons… another rather specific task… to round out the event.  Or maybe I’ll learn to hack.  That is another thing I’ve managed to skip so far in the game.

Out of the Hole and Back to Delve

After the second Keepstar kill a lot of those not in the Initiative took move ops out of the J115405, the wormhole known as “Rage,” having gotten the show for which they came.

But looking at the kill mails, the second Keepstar wasn’t as popular as the first.  Close to 1,400 people managed to get on the first one, but the second time around the number fell below 900.

I guess a second act isn’t as big of a draw.

The word had come down that Reavers would be sticking around in the hole for a while longer to join in on the structures still remaining.  As pings came up about fleets leaving for Delve or other ways out of J115405, the question about what we were doing would show up in Jabber.  The response from people like Zed Starshine was always that we were staying.  That persisted until Sunday when Asher pinged that we should get back home by any reasonable method.

So I blame Zed for my late start.

At that point I had passed up at least two fleets heading back and wasn’t sure if the alternate plan was still available.  I might have to scan myself out, though that was why I dragged along my alt in an Astero.  Now that the word had been given to bug out, I cleaned out my hangar, loaded up my ships, and got ready to travel.  Anything I couldn’t carry I stuck on the Hound that I looted, which I insured and had my alt undock.  Then I set it to self destruct and shot it for good measure.

Insurance fraud on the undock

I wasn’t the only one doing insurance fraud.  The way out was being reserved for cruisers and smaller ships.  Battleships and battlecruisers were not being let through on the threat of being blown up.  If you had a big ship you would either have to wait until official move ops were done or blow it up for the insurance payout.

While I missed a couple of fleets, the Initiative had a ratline back to normal space setup to get people out on their own.  To us that they had a fleet setup with instructions in the channel MOTD.  You had to warp to a carrier guarding the current out hole.

The Nidhoggur guarding the hole

There you would get a set of bookmarks that would guide you from hole to hole until you got to normal space.  I grabbed the bookmarks with my alt.  At the time there were two routes home.  I took the shortest one, which dropped into low sec.

I then dropped the fleet and formed one with my two characters.  I figured I would warp in with my alt, then have my main warp to him.  So I jumped through the first hole, then realized I didn’t know what to do with the bookmarks.  I motored off the hole I just went through and cloaked up and I Googled how to use bookmarks in your cargo hold.

It turns out you just need to open up your people and places window, go to the places tab, and drag the bookmarks onto it.  Easy.

That done, I remained confused for a bit as the first of the two bookmarks didn’t show up.  I realized, once I dragged the second one that the first was for the hole we had just gone through.  So once the second was in my places, I warped my alt to that, found the hole, and warped Wilhelm there to go through.

The Guardian goes through first

On the far side of the hole I found myself in Aridia.  That is a handy place to be if you’re heading back to Delve.  I was just eleven jumps from 1-SMEB, the gateway system to the region.

Of course, if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that I was also only four jumps from Fountain and a direct connection to the new jump bridge network.  I actually knew I was close to Fountain, but I was uncertain about the state of the new jump bridges and it wasn’t until I was well on my way home that somebody linked the updates jump bridge map that would have showed me how to get home that way.

I know that for next time I guess.

But the route home via gates in Aridia wasn’t exactly a tough alternative.  And I saw a few people who were clearly taking the same path.  My Astero went ahead to check the path as the Guardian plowed on behind.  But the path was clear.  There was word that Black Legion had been staging in Sakht, the system in Aridia that connects to 1-SMEB and Delve, but while I saw a couple of them there they were not out in force.  They certainly were not camping the gate, so it was through and into Delve and the jump bridge towards 1DQ1-A.

The jump bridge in 1-SMEB

From there it was just two gates to home, where I warped to the Keepstar, only to find I was on the wrong Keepstar.

On the wrong Keepstar

I wasn’t even aware that we had two Keepstars in 1DQ1-A.  That is what happens when you stay deployed in the north for almost a year.  Also, the Imperium has so many structures in the system that I am surprised I can find any specific structure I want.

And so ended the wormhole expedition with both of my ships back where they started, a few kill mails and paps on my record, and a bit of loot in my cargo hold.  It was kind of a strange time being in a wormhole for a week.

I wasn’t there long enough to get used to logging in and seeing nobody in local.  Well, at least I didn’t see an accurate, up to date count of players in system at the top of the local chat window.  Various members of the Imperium were talking in local at any given point of time.

I was, however, in the hole long enough to feel the sense of isolation.  One of the things I am used to in New Eden is the ability to just get up and go where you need to.  It isn’t always safe or wise, but you can just set your destination and take gates to where you want to be.  When you’re in a wormhole, life is not so simple.  You cannot just jump clone out and back as I understand it, and I am not even sure how people can find the same wormhole twice when scanning things down.  Definitely a different EVE Online lifestyle.

Anyway, a recap of the whole thing in my posts:

• Waiting for a Hole
• Fort Knocks Way Down in the Hole
• Sotiyo Boom
• A Keepstar Waits in the Hole
• The Other Keepstar Falls in Rage

And then what has been written elsewhere about it:

• INN – Attack on Fort Knocks
• EN24 – The Inevitable Fall of Fort Knocks
• The Nosy Gamer – The Death of Fort Knocks
• INN – Continuing Battle Coverage and Opinion
• INN – In Their Own Words (interviews with key leaders in the event)
• NER – The Initiative Leadership Update 
• Reddit – The above, but on Reddit with lots of salty responses
• CCP – The Scope video covers the event