How I will likely be voting

So, the CSM8 Candidates are available. Quite frankly, I’m a bit disappointed in the turnout from non-bloc candidates, which TMDC commented on recently. However, without the low-sec representation of Marc Scaurus, it was going to show holes anyway.

So, let’s get the easy ones out of the way:

DaeHan Minhyok		no	bloc
Sala Cameron		no	bloc
mynnna		no	bloc
progodlegend		no	bloc
Kaleb Rysode		no	bloc
Greene Lee		no	bloc
Kesper North		no	bloc
Awol Aurix		no	bloc
Travis Musgrat		no	bloc
Artctura		no	bloc
Sort Dragon		no	bloc
Banlish		no	bloc

I’m not voting for a bloc candidate because they’ll get enough votes regardless; if not directly, then from preferences. There’s some bright people in there, like Banlish and Mynnna, which is nice to see, but my vote won’t make a difference there.

Other NO candidates are

Grand Admiral Simo-Hayha		no	highsec, possibly James315 alt
Fon Revedhort		no	neo-nazi
Sgurd Battersea		no	no effort put in
PsychoBitch		no	who?

which leaves me in the unenviable situation of voting for practically everyone else.

Ripard Teg		yes	good poster
Malcanis		yes	good poster
Steve Ronuken		yes	industry guy
Ali Aras		yes	token newbie
apricot baby		yes	ui guy
Mike Azariah		yes	casual guy
mangara solaris		yes	rvb guy
Roc Wieler		yes	roleplay guy
Trebor		yes	csm secretary guy
Nathan Jameson		maybe	wspace
Chitsa Jason		maybe	wspace
Cipreh		maybe	wspace
James Arget		maybe	wspace
Corebloodbrothers		maybe	…
Ayeson		maybe	…

That’s in rough order of how I would preference them. Only the top seven have a shot, but realistically only two non-bloc candidates will get over the line. The others just haven’t articulated their constituency very well, and will likely be lost in the noise.

Caldari Prime from orbit, showing the impact craters of the wreck of the Shiigeru

So, tracking enhancer nerf

Tracking enhancers are due to be smacked with the nerf bat in Odyssey.

I can’t say I’m surprised; Ytterbium mentioned a few months ago that the Machariel was rebalanced at the same time as tracking enhancers were buffed, making them too powerful, so I expected something to be tweaked.

Brisbane Eve Gathering

So I went to the recent Brisbane Eve Gathering, which was pretty cool. The turnout was about 30 people, spanning the gamut of AU time zone alliances, from AIF and ANZA to AL3X, SCRAP and a token goon presence (obviously a spai)

It was a good night out, and hopefully there will be more of them – at least once per Eve expansion, ha.

Odyssey Rumors: Faction Battleships, Personal Hangar Bays

So, Odyssey has been announced as the 19th Eve expansion. Details are short on the ground, but Sarmatiko always has intel on what’s new on the Chaos build server:

The View From the Ground: Death of a Titan

From Mc Ribwich of Subdreddit:

Planetary Conquest: Building an Empire from the Ground Up

There’s a new Dust 514 dev blog out, detailing the game mechanics around planetary control by dust corporations.

This is a really promising rule set, from a game design point of view. It encourages corps to fight local battles, handles time zone issues fairly well, and rewards large corps that have the numbers to defend multiple attacks per day during the window of vulnerability.

Little things to fix gank exploiting?

A comment seen on Jester’s blog:

It seems harsh, but I’d even go so far as saying that members of noobcorps shouldn’t be able to engage in highsec (safety always on), and that you shouldn’t be able to biomass an alt with negative sec.

Although perhaps allowing the safety to be set to amber would be better, the suggestions have some merit. There are some loopholes that need to be plugged (mostly around joining and leaving a ‘pvp’ corp after every gank) but it would go a long way towards reducing zero-risk ganking.

On stagnation in nullsec

LordsServant is a HBC member well known for bad posting but today he cut to the heart of nullsec’s stagnation, and the recent calls for wargames in nullsec.

Problem is there’s no fucking good alliance leaders anymore.

Goddamn noone gets stoned or drunk and says “Hey lets go fuck those people up tonight!”

Oh, they won’t fight us – LETS FUCKING SHOOT UP their shit or punish them by taking some source of their isk/camping them in for a week or w/e.

I’ve got great memories of leaders who went out and DID SHIT. They created content for their members, they gave us the good memories, the shit that most of us joined this game for in the beginning.

What do we have now? The so called “leader” of the biggest fucking blue coalition in the game doesn’t even play the game. He comes on once every couple months to make a speech, then goes back to writing propaganda for his fucking “Fair and Balanced” Fox news wannabe website.

If eve is still around 5 years from now, how will we remember this time?

5+ years ago, we were watching juggernauts like BoB brawling back and forth with the NC. We watched the entirety of the north burn under some of the greatest focused aggression and organized pvp in the game – D2 fell and MC burned the north. We saw an entire new section of eve open up(the drones), with all the resulting land grab and stories that it involved.

We saw PL running around all over the place shooting up w/e they want(Maru Kage anyone?), and quadruple DDing ppl whenever they started to lose(lol). I remember Evil Thug screaming like a madman in heavily accented russian/english, posting about how his alliance m8s were fucking shit because they weren’t camping a gate with him in his titan 18 hours a day.

People like x13 killed the very first mothership in losec – does anyone remember how The End and Mr Xtreme used to camp Tama with a nyx almost nonstop? What about ginger magician? Infod? Burn Eden rolling into a region and SHUTTING IT THE FUCK DOWN WHILE PEOPLE COWERED IN TERROR? This shit really doesn’t happen anymore.

They’re good memories, they were content, things happened and stuff was risked.

Now all we have are these gigantic fucking bluefests where noone does anything but bitch about whatever mechanics, bitch about how rich they are, and the people at the top don’t even fucking log in except rarely.

If they’re ever toppled, we’ll only look back on this with disgust. We’re living through the antithesis of a golden age. We should be undergoing a golden age of pvp with all the content balancing going on, new ships and modules being introduced, etc etc.

CCP isn’t to blame.

It’s us. We’re killing the game. Administrators not interested in pvp or creating content for their members beyond padding their personal/alliance wallets(is there a difference?) – ingame or out of game, it doesn’t matter, “lead” the most powerful groups in the game – power that is largely gained by blueing everything. CCP has steadily eroded(at the players request) any option to exist independently in eve or to engage and be competitive in any “serious” pvp beyond bringing the biggest blob possible. Noone is to blame but the playerbase for steadily becoming more and more complacent, and pushing down those who try to fight against this fucking hibernating oozing whiny provincial morass of a playerbase we’ve become.

CCP can’t fix this so long as the most interesting thing happening in the game is fucking ship rebalancing or RvB in nullsec.

Naglfar Buff Incoming

Naglfar
+shipXLProjectileDamageRole
hiSlots: 5.0 => 3.0
launcherSlotsLeft: 2.0 => 0
shipBonusPirateFaction: 50.0

Special Ability: 50% bonus to Capital Projectile damage

Minmatar Dreadnought Skill Bonus:
5% bonus to Capital Projectile damage per level
5% bonus to Capital Projectile rate of fire per level

So, a neut-resistant, shield tanked tracking dreadnaught is now viable. This will prove interesting.