EVE Blog Banter #5: Arletta and I

Welcome to the fifth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Mynxee of Life in Low Sec. She asks “Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is “ruining the game”?

It’s a good question, and unlike some previous banters, this is one that I really have a lot of experience with. Before I begin, here is a full disclosure. I have an alt. I have a mining/industrial/hauling alt. I love her, and she loves me. She’s in charge of cleaning the pod, and I bring home the bacon.

Initially, the reason for making the alt was so that my main character could start concentrating on PVP. My corp was moving towards nullsec, and we were ending our long-standing careers as carebears. I had already gotten myself a retriever, and I was moving further towards the mining side of the spectrum.  When my corp started talking about all the fun they were having in PVP, however, I decided to scrap the retriever  and train the skills to fly this new PVP Drake they had recommended.

Once we were settled in 0.0, however, I started to get a little bored with merely PVPing (and with all the Bistot around), I knew I wanted to get back to mining. This is when I created my alt account, and had her concentrate on mining. Since that time, she’s worked her way up to an Iteron V, the full Hulk setup, and all the neccesary refining skills. In addition, I’ve given her some transport ships skills, and she’s working on freighters.

I don’t believe that alts ruin the game. I do believe there may be some exploitation of the system, but for the most part, I just see alts as a way for active members to enjoy the game more (and give CCP more cash). There are things that ARE ruining the game; people using exploits, unfair resource distribution, ISK sellers, and I believe they are all much larger problems than any kind of multiple problem coming from alts.

Participants:

• Epic Misadventures, This is my Alt – There are many like it but this one is mine.
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, I Missed This Month’s Blog Banter!
• A Mule in EvE, Meta what? Is it hurting EvE?
• Morphisat’s EVE Online Blog, Me, Myself and I
• One Man And His Spaceship, Me and My Shadow
• Ombeve, Blog Banter edition 5
• Diving into PsycheDiver’s Psyche, CK’s Blog Banter #5: Everybody Needs Somebody
• Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter
• Ecliptic Rift, OOC: Blog Banter #5 Metagaming
• The Ralpha Dogs, Me, Myself and I
• Mad Rant, “Blog Banter – It’s my party, and I’ll alt if I want to….”
• EVE Chick, The Handicapper General
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, “…you see mate, it’s a matter of leverage, savvy?…”
• New Eden Diaries, It’s only a game
• Oz’s House of the Evil Dead, If You Can’t Ride Two Horses At Once, You Shouldn’t Be In The Circus
• Diving into PsycheDiver’s Psyche, Everybody Needs Somebody
• CrazyKinux’s Musing, Leave what you know at the door please!
• Diary of a Pod Pilot, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #5 Metagaming
• Roc’s Ramblings, February Blog Banter – Meta Me
• more to come over the next few days!…

The ‘Jita Incident’

We were all the noob once. None of us are perfect, and indeed, many of us have had our embarrassing moments. I remember my first moment where I truly felt embarrassed.

It was my first month on my first ever character. I was young, and had finally found a PVP corporation that would accept me, with my limited skillset. I had been spending lots of time training important skills. After weeks of training, I was finally able to get my first good PVP ship: a Kestral that I had been told would be ‘helpful’ while we were kicking ass and taking names. Wanting to be ‘helpful’, I headed to Jita to pick up the components for my new ship. We were in a war with another merc corp, so I took it on manual all the way there. Not a big problem. Once I was there, and I had docked in the appropriate station, I suddenly realized something: there were almost twenty reds in local.

Not distinguishing between reds and wartargets, I thought that there were twenty ready and willing to fight me. Doing the logical thing, I cried out to my corp for assistance. They prepared a massive fleet; over thirty of our best men, with tacklers at every gate; it was quite an operation. Then they jumped in, ready to target whomever it was that had been threatening me. They hadn’t bothered to check local; they merely targeted the ship I asked to be designated as primary. As CONCORD came out of nowhere and destroyed their ships, they quickly realized their mistakes.

Needless to say, they were not pleased with me in the least. They hurled all sorts of insults, slurs, etc, at me. They wanted me expelled. They wanted me to pay for their ships (something a new player with barely a frigate obviously couldn’t do). At the least, they wanted me out of the corp, and I was willing to go.

It was right before I went looking for a new corp that I received a conversation window from my CEO. We had a long conversation about everything; about the mistakes I made, how it hadn’t been entirely my fault, and about my future in EVE. Despite having lost a fully fitted battleship, he forgave me, and helped me work a way through which I regained the trust of my corpmates

You have to understand; at the time, I was ready to leave; to be done with the game for all purposes. I was embarrassed, I felt bad about the whole thing, and people disliked me. Had it not been for the CEO of that corp, I wouldn’t be writing this now. Were it not for him, I wouldn’t have ever learned the difference between reds and wartargets.

My only holiday wish is that wherever he is and whatever EVE career he’s doing, he flies safe, but has fun.

Other EVE Blog Banter posts:

• CrazyKinux’s Musing: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: What will your verse be?…
• A Merry Life and A Short One: EVE Blog Banter #3: What Not To Do
• Mad Rant: My Hero
• The Ralpha Dogs: A Greeting Card
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: The Station
• Diving into Psyche Diver’s Psyche: CK’s Blog Banter #3: Praise and kudos
• Roc’s Ramblings: Blog Banter #3 – PyjamaSam
• Protosolus: EVE: Blog Banter 3 – A Piratical Legend
• Achernar: Citizen Zhang
• Cosmik R5’s EVE Blog: Blog Banter: Tribute to an EVE player – Letrange
• Letrange’s EVE Blog: Is it December Banter time already?
• Life in Low Sec: EVE Blog Banter #3: Reverend Book
• Sweet Little Bad Girl: Blog Banter #3
  
• Votrian’s EVE Blog: EVE Blog Banter #3 – my influences
  
• More to come…

Some Changes

There will be a few changes to this blog. First of all, I’ve been afforded the chance to start writing an editorial (in addition to my normal articles). So you’ll see more of me over there. In addition, I’ve been added to CrazyKinux’s blogroll .
I’ll be posting links to my articles on ENN, but I also hope to maintain a good blog over here. More updates to come.

DBA 2- ETC

The most recent Dev Blog, written by CCP Oveur, can be found here. It contains a large amount of information, so I’m going to break it down into individual sections.

CCP is changing the way players buy and sell eve time cards; something that should be extremely useful for those of us who are trying to pay for our subscriptions with ISK.

Basically, the concept works like this: instead of using the secure ETC system that we’ve used before, CCP is changing ETCs into 30-day ‘pilots licenses’ which will be sold on the in-game market. You hit esc, enter in the ETC, and you’ll be given however many increments of 30-day licenses as are equivolent to the ETC you entered. (CCP is still working on what to do with 100 and 50-day cards). These 30-day licenses can go anywhere; they can be sold on the market, go into contracts, etc. They can’t, however, leave the station, so you will have to enter the code in the station you want to sell them at.

There are definately good and bad things about this. It will be interesting to see how the market responds, and what the prices are at. Mainly, I have a problem with the not-leaving the station thing. While that definately makes sense (you don’t want to have people killing others for their codes), if I accidentily redeem a card in a station I don’t have market rights to, or if I accidentily redeem it in deep 0.0, I”m going to be in a pretty nasty mood. Whether CCP will address this issue or not remains to be seen.

DBA 1- Social Networking

The most recent Dev Blog, written by CCP Oveur, can be found here. It contains a large amount of information, so I’m going to break it down into individual sections.

This first part of the analysis concerns the social networking features explained The biggest new thing coming to social networking seems to be a platform for better distribution of knowledge. CCP seems to have a social network-style plan to set up a network of blogs, player insight, etc. It sounds like we will be seeing an expanded item database, which will not only list items, but also allow for tips and tricks, detailed info, etc, on the items you’re looking at. It appears we are also going to be looking at an EVElopedia sometime in 2008, which will be accessable from most windows, and will be fully integrated into the UI. The EVElopedia will be linked with the item database, and should provide a well-linked wiki-type information database.

All of this information should be eventually linkd through the API. From the way it sounds, it seems that CCP plans to increase the usefulness of the API; up to what they call the ‘performance, security, and business’ limits.

From the way CCP is explaining it, I have an image of my head of a giant, interlinked EVE. It will be interesting to see if CCP is able to pull this off. There is obviously a lot of room for improvement, and there is a huge developer community who would be interested in utilizing an increased EVE API.

Cloaking

This article has been moved due to my newfound employment with ENN. New URL to come.

A Quick Introduction

Very quickly, let me introduce myself.

I am known to most of my EVE friends as moose, but you can call me whatever you want. Basically, I’ve been playing EVE for a year and a few months. I believe I’ve been playing long enough to have something to share with the greater EVE universe, so I’ve created this blog to share those things.

I’m a Caldari player to the core. My skills consist of two main groups: missiles, and shields. My favorite ship is the Drake, and I hate nano gangs, at least until I climb into my Crow to run some stuff into highsec. I’m in a medium-sized corp, in a medium-sized alliance, trying to carve our little piece out of 0.0.

I don’t like station games, I don’t like industry, I don’t like losing ships. Other than that, I’m pretty much open to anything in EVE.