Spreadsheet Update: 5punkers in Space

[friznit]

Since there still a few active and semi-active 5punkers knocking about, some even in 5punkorp still, I thought it'd be nice to give a little update as to what we're all doing. The Names List hopefully shows who of us still have accounts and where we're lurking but what are we up to in game?

Edit: I changed the title to reflect that this is a post about us Eve players rather than the state of the game itself. To read about the upcoming expansion, planetary interaction and the future tie in to the console FPS MMO DUST 514, you'll have to look elsewhere

Friznit - IT Alliance invading the North

Dynamic Influence Map

For myself, I'm currently in Anzac Alliance. As the name would suggest, that's predominantly an Aus/Kiwi crew, but it's actually a single big corp that's part of IT Alliance (formerly Band of Brothers + Greater BoB Community). I like it because it's active, typical Aus no bullshit sense of humour, hands off leadership and they let you get on and do your own thing. I joined with a couple of long time friends who I've been flying with since Mercenary Coalition collapsed at the end of Delve War 2.

IT Alliance is currently in the opening stages of a mass invasion of the North. The Northern Coalition, led by the heavy weights Morsus Mihi and Razor with a whole bunch of smaller allies, are putting up stiff resistance in Pure Blind. Separate from the IT thrust, but aligned to the same Sourthern Coalition, ATLAS Alliance are fighting a holding and harrassing action in Tribute whilst Against All Authorities winds up the annihilation of CVA in Providence and gears up for a push into Tribute and Vale, opening up a second front for the NC and splitting their horses.

Meanwhile, 'independent allies' of IT are keeping their foot on the kneck of the would-be resurgent Goonswarm in Cloud Ring, now renamed LODRA and significantly less swarmy since their disastrous failure cascade and collapse back to empire 3 months ago. Goons are, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

[friznit]

Today was a sad day in Eve. I paid my first ever ransom to pirates in empire.

An empire based mercenary corp war dec'd my empire carebearing POS. Since my main char is currently the other end of Eve fighting the good fight against the russian hordes there was nothing much I could do about it, and losing the POS wouldn't have caused an excess of :effort:. 250mill is chump change these days, but I still feel dirty.

I am now going to hire mercs for 1bill to grief the fuck out of them out of principle.

[friznit]

CCP just announced they're nuking learning skills and giving everyone 5mill skill points to spend for free.

If you know what this means, you'll be like "oh. Cool."

If you have nfc wtfiboa then you'll be all "wtfyboa" and likely move swiftly on to the WoW hate thread. Or Minecrack.

Did someone mention that Pirates of the Burning Ring had gone F2P?

[Shada]

oh cool, learning skills were balls

[buzzmong]

They were bollocks, so it's nice to seem them go, however....I want to be compensated for the time I spent learning them.

Not only do the lvl one skills themsevles with high stats take 5 days to go from IV to V. I've also just trained a couple of the adv ones from IV to V since I've come back.

Bit wasted now as I could have spent that on getting T2 Large Lasers and BS V as well.

But the main irk for me is all that wasted aggregate time back from when I started. While I essentially lost a month learning the basic ones to V originally, the small differences in training time over the years from when I was slowly increasing them probably equates to a lot more than 5 million SP.


Ah well, I can't do anything about it, suck it up and move on.

[friznit]

Dual screen support, antialiasing and movable views. Shiny



Unfortunately someone worked out that Drakes (a low skill point entry level battlecruiser) in large numbers work very well in laggy situations and are very difficult to counter. Now everyone is flying them exlusively, so it's all got terribly boring (even more so, if you found it terrible boring before).

I think I'm pretty much done with this game. 5 years is a good innings mind you.

[Morrill]

I think I'm pretty much done with this game. 5 years is a good innings mind you.

Sorry to hear that Friz. I know you liked the game.

[buzzmong]

Unfortunately someone worked out that Drakes (a low skill point entry level battlecruiser) in large numbers work very well in laggy situations and are very difficult to counter. Now everyone is flying them exlusively, so it's all got terribly boring (even more so, if you found it terrible boring before).

Thing is, barring the low SP requirements, Drake blobs are a symptom of CCP's ham fisted attempt at the entire capital ship line. Dreads were the only balanced inclusion, possibly the carrier range is ok, but MOM's and Titans are broken. Especially MOMS.

It's the previlant use of MOMs that have stopped the BS being used in 0.0 combat due to being hotdropped far too frequently. BC's hit nearly as hard, sport decent tanks, can hit smaller vessels easier, have a bit of GTFO ability, and more importantly, are cheaper.

If it wasn't for the Drake being shit easy to skill for, you'd just see 'Canes instead with the current state of the game being what it is.

There's something massisly wrong when fleet fights are totaling 126 super caps in a single battle. Pandemic Legion vs Northern Coalition a couple of days ago, the former fielding 57 super caps, the latter with 69. It resulted in 8 titan losses.

Something seriously wrong considering ships like Titans were meant to require an decent sized alliance to support a single one.

[friznit]

Whilst I agree entirely that all capitals including SC's and Titans are far to prevalent, the correlation with drake armies doesn't stack up. We didn't stop using bs because of hotdrops or cost (some bs were actually profitable to lose before the insurance changes don't forget) - RR BB balls were stealth bombed out of the game, sniper bs went out because they couldn't track low sig armour hac gangs and were replaced with drake blobs, which could. Turned out the drakes also worked remarkably well in lag. Ironically the only effective counter to drakes is the very high alpha heavy tanked bs such as arty abaddons, so it's kinda gone full circle again. Unfortunately not many people can fly those cos you need Amarr BS 4 and T2 arty to make it work properly.

Regardless, the advent of JB's, portals, JF's, mass cap fleets and cyno gens has made New Eden a very small place. All those pipes that used to be full of people travelling around are dead now as they just jump their stuff directly from empire to a station in 0.0 I've not travelled around space using gates for years, which is a terribly flaw in the game design.

[Grimmie]

Does that mean nobody here plays eve any more?

[Dog Pants]

Oh, that's tragic. I was only saying to Anery just before Christmas that some of my fondest experiences of Eve was blockade running.

[friznit]

Does that mean nobody here plays eve any more?

You don't play Eve as such But yeah, barring one or two transient semi-lurkers and the occasional use of the Eve client as a social networking tool, that's the last of 5punkers in Space

[Grimmie]

Aww, sad times. I remember being too scared to leave Frulegur VIII for greener pastures.