September 2006 Entries
From the ‘That’s No Moon…’ desk, this titbit:
Eve Online: Ascendant Frontier completes first Titan. (via Kill Ten Rats, Heatless Gamer, at al.)
And you thought opening the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj was time-consuming. From the news post, the construction of the Amaarian Titan-Class ‘Avatar’, detailed here, cost around 160 Billion ISK in materials and blueprints, and took the Ascendant Frontier Alliance, itself a grouping consisting of around 22 member Corporations, and just under 4,000 players, around eight months to complete.
(For reference, one Agent 4 mission will take me about 45min to complete, and earn me around fifteen million ISK, or so.)
Quite...
An Optimist whispers: “hi want to go ST? we ready to go”
I blink, almost crashing my Velociraptor 2000 GT, (which I call ‘Cherie’ on account of its unsettling grin) into a passing plague-frenzied bear, who looked as surprised as I was. I was galloping back through the Eastern Plaguelands to the Bluwark, carrying a particularly worrying flask of grim-looking liquid plague for the inspection of those nice Argent Dawn folks. Undead are all pretty much the same to me, but apparently there are Bad Undead, and Even Worse Undead, and these Argent Dawn folks pay well for various interesting guerrilla...
Another successful outing in Planetside last night, with my ‘Florence Nightingale’ character, detailed previously. Some quite hectic fighting on Ceryshen – the awkward icy ravine-based one, and one of the stagnant three-way fights that seem to be quite typical of late.
It’s understandable of course – if 70-90% of all enemy troops are having a private fight between themselves someplace elsewhere, it does rather leave your own team with little to do but sit on their hands in Sanctuary, splinter off in to dozens of small squads and start hacking empty and unattended enemy bases, or just mount up and pile...
Went and had a look at the much-vaunted Second Life “Burning Life” thingey the other night.
Burning Life
It’s very much all the buzz in SL at the moment amongst the more avant-garde in-crowd of that virtual world, and based on the real-life Burning Man festival, it does rather encapsulate the general utopian free-spirited zeitgeist of the more creative portion of SL’s population, not least of all including Philip Linden himself (see previously linked podcast).
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting to see, but slapping ‘Burning Life’ into the search window soon found the place. It consists of 12 specially set...
Fancying something a little bit different, I rolled up a new soldier in Planetside last night. That’s one of the good points of being a Reservist – ‘alting’ becomes quite trivial to do, as ramping a completely new character up to BR4 takes minutes in the VR Training area, and BR5 and BR6 come swiftly thereafter, and also you don’t have the responsibility of a BR25 CR5 character sat in the next character slot down, that you’ve worked hard to achieve, and really ought to be using.
I picked NC, as they seem to consistently have the lowest population on my...
Staying with EVE Online a moment:
Gaming Nexus: All About The ISK (Via Vrigin Worlds)
Don't worry...more harrowing Planetside war stories soon, but this whole EVE Investment Bank scam had managed to pique even my interest, so it's interesting to get a round up of what CCP, (the folks who made and run EVE) think of it all. Mostly these thoughts seem to be in the 'Oooh...interesting, but you guys can do what you like,' school of thought, and I guess they're right. The whole thing was essentially players convicing other players to give them their money, and then logging out while...
Just after I posted the previous, this:
MMORPG.com: 30K PCU Broken
More congratulations due! EVE Online reaches it's 30,000 online mark, which is particlarly impressive as they're all in the same gameworld, and as we all know, nobody likes Sci Fi, so bonus kudos there. (Sort by Genre - 146 Fantasy, 38 Sci Fi and 16 Other).
Of course I'm not really playing EVE at the moment, so am in no real position to judge, but I do wonder if a single world with that many people in is a plus point, or a minus. Certainly it makes for a busy universe, full...
Happy Ten Thousand to Second Life:
New World Notes: Concurrent Affair
Seems like SL has reached the 10,000 concurrency mark, which is surprising in a number of ways – less than a year ago, two or three thousand players online at once was more usual, and yet it’s actually a surprisingly low number, considering all the news and hype and talk you see on the thing.
For perspective, this figure works out at about three full World of Warcraft servers, out of literally hundreds, or about a third of the EVE Online cluster at its busiest, still making SL something of a niche...
In a pleasingly symmetrical experience to that of my last post, I also spent a mind-ravaging amount of time visiting towers in Planetside as well recently. The two games work well together, I’m finding, and most nights I’ll put in an hour or two of ultra-harsh ballistic mayhem before grabbing a bite to eat, and then relaxing with a good virtual plywood-based tinkering project. I’m not sure if this makes me more of a rounded human being, per se, but certainly a more balanced kind of obsessive online escapist at any rate.
Two towers in particular occupied much of my most...