Blog Banter 44 : Thoughts on Local

 

Blog Banter 44: Is There Anybody Out There?

A conversation, led by the literary pugilist Poetic Stanziel and fiction champion Rhavas, has been rumbling in the bowels of the blogosphere for a few days now. Due to popular demand, for posterity and for the attentions of CCP Sisyphus of Team Player Experience, I have been asked to envelop this discussion into a Blog Banter. The community has spoken and so Drackarn has provided the following question:

“The local chat channel provides EVE players with an instant source of intel of who is in the system. With a quick glance you can tell who is in system and what your standings are to them. War targets, hated enemies, friends and corp mates all stand out clearly. Is this right? Should we have access to this intel for free with no work or effort? Should the Local chat channel even exist? Should normal space be more like wormhole space where the Local channel appears empty until someone speaks?”

[See blogpost for current links]

 

Personally, I like how local works now for the most part. I am a PVPer- a part of Factional Warfare, and sometimes pirate.

My corp likes to roam and hunt, and having local makes that fairly easy. I do not think it a great idea to make the roaming process even more time-consuming by having to scan every system at various points for potential targets.

The idea of having stations camped by people you don’t know are there seems like it’d be such a headache.

I just don’t like the idea of changing things really.

However, if things were to change I would prefer something like this:

1. Have an opt-out-of-local-chat button, which would mean there would be no text in local. There could be some sort of flag beside your name so that others would know you’ve opted out. It would be so much easier to opt out than to block people who annoy you. Granted there is the blink off button, but it’s not the same. People usually have local always open, regardless of blinking or not.

2. Allow pilots who cyno into systems or come into known space via worm holes be on a delayed time in local. Wormholes are mysterious, shadowy places where it makes sense not to show up in local. That’s kind of cool for wormhole space. Jumping into and out of wormhole space should be mysterious!

For known systems, we have stargates that would be recording who passes through those gates. Hence, why it kind of makes sense for that intel to be in local. However, if someone came into system via wormhole or are cyno’ed in, then that information wouldn’t be immediately available. Perhaps a five-minute delay?

Black ops would become so much more fun!

3. Down for maintenance stargates. It could be fun if randomly stargates weren’t able to broadcast their information for local for X amount of minutes per day. So that could mean if you jumped through a stargate that was ‘down’, then you’re not going to register in local.  Maintenance would be infrequent, but there would always be a slight possibility of something more being out there, I think that’d make things a little more interesting!

Why the recruitment forum sucks.

My recruitment thread on the EVE forums got locked for 48 hours because my corp mates were posting on it telling about their experiences in our corp.

Apparently that is against the rules.

As I was browsing other recruitment threads, I saw where one post got locked down because the author ‘bumped’ his thread by putting battle reports.

Apparently that is against the rules too.  

And no offense to these people, but they posted with ‘bump’ with several different accounts on the same day and no one said anything.  Oh, and these guys didn’t follow the ‘rules’ either.

But no one said anything there either.

(and those were just the first 3 I clicked on)

So obviously the ISD (the guys & gals who run the forums) pick and choose those who they will punish for whatever reason.

Kind of annoying, really. I think they if they are going to go all rule nazi, then do it to everyone.

However, I think those rules should really change. They are very unhelpful in the recruiting process. Corp members should be able to post on their corp’s recruitment thread. Others should be able to recommend other corps as well. It’s the height of absurdity to not allow these things.

If the point of the recruitment forum is to pick up new pilots, to give a sense of what your corp/alliance is about, then why not allow the people who are actually IN the corp to have their say? Why lock a thread because it shows a battlereport, a very clever way of showing what the corp is about?

I also think the Recruitment forum is an unorganized mess. Why can’t there be sub forums to make finding specific types of corps a tad bit easier?

It should be something like:

Recruitment – General
Recruitment – Pilots ISO of a Corp
Recruitment – Null Sec Alliances & Corps
Recruitment – Factional Warfare Corps
Recruitment – Pirate & Low Sec Corps
Recruitment – Mercenary Corps
Recruitment – Wormhole Corps
Recruitment – High Sec Corps
Recruitment – Mining & Industrial Corps

I think it makes  more sense to have it easier for a player to find what they are looking for instead of forcing them to wade through 10 pages to find 3 kinds of corps they are looking for.

A couple of links.

Here’s a video of the Old Man Star fight from the Gallente perspective.

And here is a new blog from one of my very new recruits to In Exile.  It’s going to be both in-character kind of stuff and regular stuff.  Loving it so far! 

Shalee’s Warzone Diaries, part 3

At the time of writing this, it is 3am in ‘Shalee time’ (because I refuse to learn any other time zone, sorry), so things are bound to be garbled and misspelled, but I’m super keen to write this because I’m intent on writing more for the blog (so people quit nagging!)

Today was pretty fucking awesome for the corp. We had the usual small skirmishes here and there, I was logging on and off throughout the day, trying to get real-world things done but I was paying attention and the guys racked up a lot of kills! So proud.

The one I’m most jealous of is this one, a dreadnaught! Apparently they got a bonus battleship too.

Here’s what happened. I was just logging in when the fleet was on break, but then Almity floods corp chat with something like ‘NOW NOW NOW UNDOCK GO GO GO.’ I stupidly decided not to join because I wanted to get a recruitment interview out-of-the-way. Not even fifteen minutes later they were preening over that juicy kill mail!

Apparently they had gotten word that Lilly Lola was shooting at a POS (I think) though he did have a support fleet with him. As our fleet got one jump out, Lilly’s fleet abandoned him to die! Only one poor brave soul warped back to help Lilly- or maybe he was just clueless, who knows, but he died too, as seen here. Really Ursha’Khan, leaving a bro behind. So sad.

So then, not much later, Almity starts a fleet, armor cruiser and down, a particular favorite of ours lately, with logi of course. It’s In Exile., Fweddit, Agony, Moar Tears, and a couple of Knights of the Nyan. Perhaps more, but that’s all I remember atm.

With logi set up, we leave Egghelende, swing by Kamela and pick up the rest of our fleet. FC sets destination to….

Old Man Star.

A collective groan over comms, followed by musings on how much closer it would be if we could travel high sec. (For those who don’t know, more than half of militia can’t go to highsec cause of *ahem* sec status)

However, the 19 or 20 jumps went by relatively quickly with only one pit stop to wait for Pinky Feldman who DC’ed on a gate. You see that Ursha’Khan? We don’t leave our bros behind!

Eventually we arrive in Old Man Star and announce our presence. We hop next door into Heydieles and run a plex, giving them ample time to gather up a fleet. After we capture the plex, we get word that they are intending to fight us, that they need more time. We go back to OMS and settle into another plex.

We nearly run that plex down as well when finally our scouts start reporting their fleet movement. ‘Time to brawwwwl‘, as Daisha is fond of saying.

I was one of the six logistics we had; five augorors and an exequror. I have to admit the adrenaline was pumping once their fleet warped inside the plex. We were very much outnumbered and out logi’ed. We had 39 in fleet, they had about 60 (from what I was told, if someone from the otherside of the fight wants to confirm/deny that’d be great!)

Also I was told that they had two fleets instead of one, so maybe that’s why they had so much logi as well.

Regardless, it was one hell of a fight that lasted over half an hour or more.

Really I always enjoy doing logi, it’s such a challenge to block out everything that comes instinctively. Usually if you’re DPS, you lock the primary and secondary, guess what you think are going to be the next few targets, lock them up as well and apply damage until someone explodes. You are in tune with your FC, you listen to his voice only and let him guide you through the fight. But as logi, you pretty much have to block out the voice of the FC and be so much more aware of everything around you. You have to make certain you’re anchored up, staying in range, getting your cap transfer running, and then it’s a matter of diligently getting reps to those who are broadcasting.

And tonight that broadcast window was rolling!

Doing that for 45 minutes was nerve-wracking! I think we did great with keeping people alive, we barely lost anyone early on. At one point, after we’d repped a punisher for the seventh or eigth time, I was thinking, wow how are you not dead yet! Same for our blackbird pilot, you know Ewar is the first to go!

To make matters even more frustrating, they started to jam us out. Oh, and our FC disconnected in the middle of the fight. However, we had someone pick up target calling so it went really smooth.

Eventually towards the end, we lost one of our augorors and the FC finally called the fight, having us warp out. I think that’s pretty much where we took most of our losses, when we had to pull out. I think we did pretty well for being out numbered and for them having the home system advantage. I know several of them reshipped a few times, judging by the killmails.

Props to the Gallente for bringing it, it was one of the best fights I’ve been a part of in a long time! It was well worth the trip out there.