However now they are firing 20% of their staff because of their continued fuck-ups. And during a stroke of brilliance someone decided that they should fire part of the community team (Which includes Fallout, Wrangler, Zymurgist and Pann).

Regardless of who is getting fired, this is a difficult time for both the people fired and the people that have to tell them the news. However it is just stupid that they are firing people that are doing a good job, and that were responsible for communicating with the playerbase. Not to forget that this is a PR failure as, logically, the community team is well known by, well, the community.

I regained hope, and felt like CCP finally got their shit together, but now I just realized they’ll never, and that they’ll continue to make shitty decisions.

To Fallout, Wrangler, Zymurgist, Pann, Maidensteel and everyone else that got laid off. I wish you the best of luck, may you find a new (And hopefully similarly/moor awesome) job.

~Xeross

Editorial/Index Page

The first page that was missing and I guess the most interesting, was the index page. Containing the disclaimer that was stripped out for some reason. And some more info on what Fearless actually is.

It does more or less match Zulu’s devblog yet it seems to more vaguely say the same thing as the “Often exaggerated” that the devblog is talking about.

The Disclaimer

The views put forward in this magazine do not refl ect general CCP company policies or decisions and are strictly individual opinions, written by CCPers or about CCPers who feel strongly about these issues. This is confi dential internal information.  lease respect that every company has its trade secrets and that you are privy to those at CCP.

Editorial

Based on the assumption that as a loyal, clever CCPer, you  must have read previous Fearless issues, you know that this new one (the first one this year) is looking kind of different. We’ve changed things: the way you hold it, the tone of what you read in it, the way it makes you feel. Fearless is getting more, well, fearless. It’s asking some tough questions, its writers are experts in what they write about and it’s one of the best issues I have had the pleasure of producing. Fearless aims at becoming an objective news-stop, journal even, for you, the CCPer. It aims to involve you. It wants to know what you think, how you feel, what you do – at your favorite place to be in the day, five days a week: CCP. And it couldn’t come at a better time. As EVE edges closer to being the grand dame of gaming, turning 8 years old this month, and our other game titles continue their prodigious growth (yes, World of Darkness too – you got the t-shirt to prove it), our development road map is shaping up stronger and better. However, as a subscription based golden goose, EVE needs to incorporate the virtual goods sales model to allow for further revenue – revenue to fund our other titles, revenue for its developer: you. The model also supports the notion of creating a meaningful experience and identity for the player (more in our main feature on page 4).

For EVE, it will combine the forces of subscriptions with those of smaller sales. A whole new currency, the AUR, for these sales, means a whole new world of possibilities. And that’s just for a published game – think of what virtual goods sales can do for the likes of a console title like DUST (page 10) and the obvious value they would bring to the fashion passionate in World of Darkness (page 12). But change is married to reservation, and depending on the reservation levels, its spectrum of adoption ranges from those totally for it, to those vehemently against it. A debate piece takes on brave souls who courageously tread on contested territory, arguing about hot topics, thematically varying with each Fearless issue. See this issue’s virtual goods sales argument on monetization versus design integrity on page 6.

But before you begin to moan about the loss of everything Fearless had in the past, we’re still running some regular features – like profiles of people, and photos you forgot you’d uploaded to the CCP library, produced now for your colleagues’ viewing  pleasure. I’d also love to hear from you. Our next issue will have a “Letters to the Editor” section, if I receive enough (fan) mail.

So tell me what you think. As a CCPer, sharing an opinion is the least of your worries.

Employee Survey

Page 10 of the PDF has the employee survey they conducted, one thing does really correlate with Glassdoor.com (This is on a scale of 0-5)

It has results from both 2010 and 2011 and the ratings have dropped it seems.

Misc

Apparently some photos of CCP employees and some infographic of sorts, not that interesting.

Download

For comparison the old one

Update: Added editorial/disclaimer due to request

Accidentally an internal bulletin…

My crappy yet possibly useful summary.

Then suddenly Hilmar

And now, will the devs criticize the management, don’t think so:

CCP does not take criticism well and often ignores retrospectives. Criticism is considered to be a negative attitude and is severely frowned upon. A lot of effort goes into maintaining a good morale with a lot of internal PR. After all it’s cheaper to print posters than pay an average salary to employees.

And does CCP care about us the players, nope:

Fun game play is not a priority, promises made to investors and aesthetics are. ‘If it looks good then it is good’ is an often heard motto. CCP is committed to use technology in EVE as well as WoD and DUST, so certain features are made and used in EVE knowing they will not be fun, nor fit EVE and no one expects them to be appreciated by the playerbase. Alienating the playerbase of EVE further. Objections from employees who point this out are waved away.

Have fun reading this and more on glassdoor.com

Hope this brings people up to par.

~Xeross

From EveNews24

After receiving this email 24 hours ago, I held it up and classified as a troll in kugutsumen.com foreplay, which is where a some of our intel gets validated. I refused to believe this email was real, but evidence, confirmation from several sources including agents with very close ties with CCP has confirmed it, I refused to believe it veracity.

After reading the CCP Zulu release, we broke down as we became aware of the similar direction between the CCP DevLog and this “leaked email”, we decided to calm down and post this after heavily consulting advisors, ex-game developers and well informed EVE online players.

The email to which we hold no authorship, editing, nor claim to be true based on the fact that we are still in denial/shock even a day after, we are assured to have the “Hilmar” writing style, no-one before other than the original source of our leak reffered to the newsletter as ‘fearless’ and the content of the email certainly goes inline with the poorly received DevBlog message CCP Zulu expressed.

We Do not claim the veracity of this email it came to us via a Drop Box (just as the newsletter), yet the evidence has been mounting all day as we keep digging around and other clues has been pooping up or keep in mind that maybe we Eve News24 are being peons to the well planned machinations of persons willing to destroy CCP.

Said this, Read It and Make Your Own Conclusions.

— Email Starts—-

Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:16:54 -0400
To: riverini@gmail.com
Subject: ccp ceo global msg sent today
From: evewatch@hush.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”UTF-8″
Message-Id: <20110623221654.CF1E76F438@smtp.hushmail.com>

sent by hilmar to ccp global list-

(strt)

We live in interesting times; in fact CCP is the kind of company that if things get repetitive we instinctively crank it up a notch. That, we certainly have done this week. First of we have Incarna, an amazing technological and artistic achievement. A vision from years ago realized to a point that no one could have imaged but a few months ago. It rolls out without a hitch, is in some cases faster than what we had before, this is the pinnacle of professional achievement. For all the noise in the channel we should all stand proud, years from now this is what people will remember.

But we have done more, not only have we redefined the production quality one can apply to virtual worlds with the beautiful Incarna but we have also defined what it really means to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life when it comes to launching our new virtual goods currency, Aurum.

Naturally, we have caught the attention of the world. Only a few weeks ago we revealed more information about DUST 514 and now we have done it again by committing to our core purpose as a company by redefining assumptions. After 40 hours we have already sold 52 monocles, generating more revenue than any of the other items in the store.

This we have done after months of research by a group of highly competent professionals, soliciting input and perspective from thought leaders and experts in and around our industry. We have communicated our intention here internally in very wide circles through the Virtual Economy Summit
presentation at the GSM, our Fearless newsletter, sprint reviews, email lists and multiple other channels. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say. Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change.

We went out with a decisive strategy on pricing and we will stay the course and not flip flop around or knee jerk react to the predictable. That is not saying nothing will change, on the contrary, in fact we know that success in this space is through learning and adapting to _what is actually happening_ and new knowledge gained in addition to what we knew before and expected.

All that said, I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished as a company, changing the world is hard and we are doing it as so many times before! Stay the course, we have done this many times before.

(end)

R

Now there’s also been a devblog stating that the prices are as intended, and that they have internally been approved because frankly “People also buy expensive clothing in real life, so also in a virtual world” so virtual goods, not microtransactions.

Aka here have these $1000 virtual pants, why, because some people also pay that IRL. Yes real  logical thinking right there, will people buy this, well at least not until real Incarna and then people will still be like wtfno I’ll just keep my standard outfit.

Now CCP Pann posted a thread on the forum asking people for more time (This was before the above devblog), and he/she (I have no fucking clue here) summed up a few of the issues, except for, yes you guessed it, the issue of fearless. Anyway to sum it up, another threadnaught.

Pann had to leave due to a family emergency and had to abandon the thread because of this, I don’t care whether people think this is true or not, just take it as true and lynch some management guy if it turns out it isn’t hmk, thanks.

Also apparently the use of the Fearless internal bulletin is to discuss provoking and controversial subjects in the game dev community. Letting 2 people each take a standpoint as if they are on the other extremes of the spectrum. Whether this is an attempt of damage control or actually true I dunno but it does sound plausible.

This has mostly been a hack it together post with some of the recent happenings, figured I’d throw it out, might do a more thought out post if I find time and motivation (Writing good posts is hard work people, hence the forums are full of terrible posting).

Xeross, out.

So according to the newsletter ships, and various items that get consumed (Such as ammo and the like) will eventually see Aurum costing additions. This disappoints me as CCP has always claimed they would restrict the MT to vanity items only.

I also find the tone in the internal bulletin slightly disturbing, it’s too cold and different from how CCP markets itself to the outside world, which really is a shame.

Now we’ll see how this ends, I’m writing this down while I can barely keep my eyes focused, so I’m crashing now, gnight.

Update (June 26th)

First of all the PDF has been verified by CCP as legitimate. It also turned out the initial version released was missing some pages, including the editorial page (see here).

Now the opinions in the PDF were over-exaggerated, as was reported in the CCP devblog and is said less clearly in the editorial. Now as these were purely employee viewpoints it still is problematic. This because CCP promised us no MT, and then we get MT. And then they promised vanity items only, so why do you even need to discuss non-vanity items if you already decided on not introducing them.

And as of today still no word from CCP.

~Xeross

Update: Full version of the PDF now

Update 2: Updated due to additional info found in full PDF

For example the “Looking Glass Ocular Implant” (Or in other words monocle) goes for 12000 Aurum. Now with a Plex equalling 3500 Aurum and going for €20 each that gives us around €70 for a monocle.

All the other items have similar problems, albeit that their prices are lower, yet a lot of them still cost over €20. Which means that you could pretty much buy the same thing, IRL for a cheaper price.

a CCP employee on the forums even replied with something along the lines of “You wouldn’t want a cheap implant replacing your eye right”, to the question why the monocle costs €70. Whether we are being trolled, or CCP is being stupid (Or both!) I don’t know, I guess time will tell.

~Xeross

Now the first thing, Captain’s Quarters have been released, so you can now login and walk around. Though it was greatly underwhelming, probably due to a few things.

First there’s the engine still having quite a few bugs and glitches, then there’s also the problem of the station environment being a resource hungry monster, ah yes and you walk way too slowly.

An example of a glitch would be my character completely disappearing apart from his hair, You can relog to fix it, but still it should rather not exist.

Now next to this it eats quite some resources, which can be seen in this here threadnaught this being the first release there’s probably still a lot of optimization possible.

To be honest, getting the new character creator was a lot more exciting than these captain’s quarters, this expansion just feels useless, adding nothing, and seeing your ship in the hangar doesn’t give you the idea of massiveness I hoped it did.

Now we’ll have to wait and see what happens, I’d prefer more focus back on the spaceships again rather, or make something that feels like it adds to the game rather than being a gimmick.

~Xeross

We just wiped out the login server for Eve Online, and it accidentally took their website out at the same time: eveonline.com

- LulzSec

This was a random attack, they were taking suggestions for targets, and apparently someone suggested EVE Online. Now your account data is safe, as they merely crashed the servers by overloading them with a massive amount of requests, which means they don’t actually have access to the servers.

Some people seem to be saying that LulzSec is just claiming they did this while it was down due to other reasons not related, yet everything they listed on Twitter as something they targeted was actually down (And I doubt 4 websites can coincidentally be down at the same time, and get noticed by 1 entity).

~Xeross

P.S.: Yes I do get enjoyment out of this.

Update (14 Jun 7:13PM EVE Time)

CCP has taken down all the servers to investigate the attack, this may indicate something more severe happened, or it is just another display of CCP’s stupidity.

Update (14 Jun 9 11:24PM EVE Time)

Tranquality is back online, and CCP has confirmed it was a DDoS and no security breach was detected (source)

So we’ve recently been playing around with our Intrepid Crossing friends in Cobalt Edge, we’ve had a few nice roams and even got a free Rorqual (Thanks guys!), but recently it seems IRC can’t be bothered to fight, whether it’s their tactic to bore us to death, they just can’t be arsed, or I just pick the wrong roams, I dunno.

Anyway today’s roam started out in VFK, luckily there were Maelstroms available again so I quickly purchased one, got my ammo and headed on out, after rallying all gates were green until Cobalt Edge.

After waiting for everyone to arrive we roamed around for a bit as there had been reports of carriers and alike being around somewhere, they however decided to stay inside the safety of a POS shield so we had to somehow aggravate IRC to come play.

This basically boils down to reinforcing various things such as their jump bridges, stations and alike, aka your average boat op. After having reinforced various structures around cobalt edge, and even paying a visit to their staging system of E-BYOS nothing came out to play.

Well nothing, a small bomber gang did come play, they should be proud that they managed to kill a few Rifters while only losing about 8 bombers, other than that we managed to kill some idiots that were AFK in a POS by bumping them out, so nothing really exciting.

After having incapacitated another part of their jump bridge network and putting an iHub and station into reinforced we decided to go home as they didn’t want to come out and play, so my Maelstrom will live to die in a horrible fire another day.

~Xeross

Basically I logged in to see one of my orders for 200k of a certain item was fullfilled, however they weren’t in the station they were supposed to be in. I checked through the assets window, checked all my ships to be sure. Just nothing nowhere to be found.

I’ve opened a petition because I’m sure I’m not that fucking stupid that I lost these items, and then there’s also this 1k of another item that wasn’t in my hangar. 4 days without hearing from CCP so far, guess I’ll just have to be patient.

~Xeross

Update: Being the dumbfuck I am (Living up to the goon name of worst players in EVE) I forgot that corp orders go into a deliveries thing in-game so clicking that button I saw my lost goods o/

So where the last post was a write-up of what CCP managed to fuck-up this’ll just be a rant on the idiocy that accompanied the development of these new forums.

Every single person that’s in the programming business (Including webdevelopers) have at least some basic knowledge of how this fucking stuff works. For example the cookies, every webdev knows that anything you store in the damn bastards can be edited by the end user, so at least use proper checks or proper cookies.

And now there’s people saying it’s a simple oversight but it’s not, even every person I know at my school that’s currently doing webdev knows this fucking thing. And I highly doubt it can be that fucking hard to implement a way to store data alongside your fucking forum sessions.

And then there’s the ip/account banned guy that posted, how fucking hard can it be to block those, 1 simple fucking SQL query in your log-in or posting code is all it takes, it just doesn’t make any god damn sense.

Oh yes and the fucking forum signatures, really you don’t sanitize the value of the cookie, not that this should be stored in a cookie to begin with, but if you’re being stupid you might as well hide your stupidity with data sanitization.

And the last thing, they used existing open-source forum software, I encourage using open-source software, but don’t fucking claim it’s made in-house when you’re just modifying some open-source code, and being terribad at modifying it at the same time.

The only scenario that is remotely plausible is that the forums were developed by some interns, but even then one of them would’ve realized the cookies aren’t secure. Now I hope that monday devblog sheds some fucking light, but I highly doubt it.

Once again, Xeross out.

P.S.: Yes my idea of a rant is adding the word fuck a lot in my sentences, deal wiz it

So CCP made a huge blunder with the “awesome” new forums, shortly after they were opened to the public a multitude of exploits was found, and their response as always was top notch.

In-house Developed Forums…

So one of the statements from CCP was that the new forums were going to be completely developed in-house, but as multiple people soon found out there were certain urls starting with yaf_ in them present in the forum software. And with some googling one finds http://yetanotherforum.net/

So it turns out the forums are using some open-source .NET based forum as their base, which in turn spawns a few other problems (Even though it would’ve probably been easy to prevent them).

Insecurely stored sensitive data

One of the issues found was that certain data was stored in the cookies, and this data wasn’t being validated server-side again. This data included both signatures and the current character ID.

This meant that anyone could pose themselves as any character by changing this value, this eventually resulted in people being able to post in the announcements forum and even read forums that are normally not available to them.

XSS Exploits

As I mentioned previously also the forum signature settings were being stored as a cookie, and people soon found out that one could simply modify that cookie to include any kind of HTML they wanted into their signature, including <script> tags.

This would open up a whole myriad of possible attacks, just check the wikipedia article on Cross-site Scripting to get an idea of what’s possible. Simply said everything is possible though, people can change the behaviour of the entire page that this malicious signature is being displayed on. In short, bad stuff.

Posting from a banned IP

At one point a post was made with the poster claiming they are posting from a banned account from an IP that has been banned, I can’t verify it, but if it’s legit that means they failed to implement the current banning system into the forums too.

CCP’s Response

So far CCP’s response on this has been that they’ve taken offline the new forums and reopened the old. And that on monday the 11th of april more info will be released. There might’ve been other statements on twitter and alike but this is what the official frontpage says.

Not just the forums

Eventually this is now not just about the forums anymore, for example Mandrill’s Loss of Faith post. Which seems to say that more and more things are going wrong at CCP, and that they need a more enterprise-style mentality, because in essence they still work with their hobbyist enthusiasm that they started with.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see what the Monday devblog will be and if CCP will step up their game soon, I definitely hope they read Mandrill’s blog post and I hope they can get something of value from it.

…

Finally I have to credit Helicity’s post or most of the details I posted regarding the forum exploits, and I also recommend you read that as it’s a good write-up. And also credits to whomever made the banner that I used for this post.

Xeross out.

Now I haven’t gotten any combat reports for these roams because I suck and I’m lazy.

Anyway, enjoy this little update in the meantime.

~Xeross

Luckily there was a roam planned this evening (Even though some lazy faggot forgot to put it up on the calendar) and I just decided to hop in. And luckily the preferred ship type was a Drake.

Made sure it was reimbursement fit, stocked up on ammo and drones, and off we went.

Went to the staging POS, waited for 45 minutes to leave, and headed on out. Multiple jump-bridges and jumps later we find ourselves in the beautiful Fountain.

After jumping around a bit these people that seem to be members of the River Styx. engaged(And probably some other random people). They kept moving away from us but luckily their logistics didn’t do well and we managed to pop a few, until most of  ’em fled the battlefield.

I managed to get in on 2 of the 4-5 killmails (Might be more, I suck at counting this shit apparently). And if I recall correctly an allied fleet jumped in to help (I should really start taking notes during this kind of shit so I can get a decent report up).

After that some jumping around occured and ended up in finding nothing, after this we headed home and because I was distracted for some reason I ended up being 10 jumps behind and the damn node crashed (DB apparently fucked up according to CCP).

When the node came back online I found myself on a gate with a neutral Vagabond luckily it didn’t seem to chase me (Not sure how effective a Vaga is against a Drake anyway), and I managed to jump my way back home.

Definitely going to try and roam more actively, fun stuff.

Anyway, Xeross out.

This month’s topic comes to us from @Tetraetc – “Tetra’s EVE Blog” – who asks: “Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? Imagine a Null Sec where anyone could build outposts wherever. Would the reduction of the alliance game mechanic, and the removal of the sovereignty game mechanics (or the modifcation of it from Alliance level to Corp level for that matter) force more PVP into Null sec, or would giant power blocs like the NC still form themselves?”

Have alliances and the sovereignty system limited the potential amount of PvP in null-sec? No I don’t think they have, they might have impacted the scale of the PvP, but surely not the amount. There’s plenty of PvP in null-sec, actually just as much as you want to do yourself, if you want more, plan more ops, simple.

And has it limited the amount of RP? I don’t think it did that either, it allowed for large alliances to form, of which some are even RP alliances, so I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of RP out there.

And a null-sec without sovereignty, I don’t really think that would really change a lot, it would cause a bit of panic in the beginning but everyone would eventually settle down and not a lot would change, why would groups suddenly splinter without the actual sovereignty mechanics, I just don’t see that happening.

And if you could place a station anywhere it would still require a good amount of control over the location because you would get crushed by anyone if you don’t.

We as the human race will always form groups, and we’ll always end up with power blocs, in New Eden, and in the real world, regardless of explicit ownership of a certain region of space by some mechanic, as we’ve seen before in New Eden, we don’t need an actual game mechanic to achieve things, we’ll just abide by unwritten rules.

~Xeross

Participants

• CrazyKinux’s Musing: EVE Blog Banter #25: And by Alliance you mean…..?
• BB25 What sov changes will come? | A Mule In EvE
• Confessions of a Closet Carebear: Alliances and Sovereignty
• Blog Banter 25: Nerfing Nulsec « OMG! You’re a Chick?!
• Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? | Nitpickin’s
• Blog Banter #25: Alliance and Sovereignty Limiting PvP in 0.0? | Sarnel Binora’s Blog
• Blog Banter #25 – Mad Haberdashers
• Alliances and sovereignty | Eve Online Focus
• …Shall we not Revenge?: BB 25: What if the Alliance vanished?
• Blog Banter: Alliances and Sov
• EVEOGANDA: BB25: Sov ‘n Go!
• » TBG:EBB#25 – Alliances and Sovereignty To Boldly Go
• Freebooted: BB25: Leviathans of the Deep
• Wrong Game Tetra ~ Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
• EVE Blog Banter #25 – Human nature what art thou? | Way of the Gun
• Who cares about Sov? – Hands Off, My Loots! ~ well sorta like an entry! :p
• The 25th EVE Blog Banter: Alliances and sovereignty – The Phoenix Diaries
• Achernar: The space commute
• Wandering the Void…my EvE musings. – Blog Banter: Alliances and sovereignty
• (OOC) CK’s Blog Banter #25: How To Break EvE. « Prano’s Journey
• Captain Serenity: Blog Banter #25 – Crappy mechanics
• Helicity Boson » Blog Banter #25 Nullsec and sov.
• BB #25 – “With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?”
• Boom! Hull-Shot?: It’s the End of the Eve as We Know It
• sered’s lives: EVE Blog Banter #25 – Size does matter
• 25th EVE BB – Medieval Solutions to Spaceship Problems | Inventions of a New Eden Industrialist
• Eve Blog Banter #25: “Have Alliances and Sov Limited PvP and RP in 0.0?” « Align Outbound
• Banter 25: Sovereignty, Alliances and Power Blocs | TheElitist
• Blog Banter 25 – But I just left all that! « A Scientist’s Life in Eve
• Nobody likes losing « One capsuleer against all
• &gt;&gt;&gt;Vigil Ant: Alliances and SOV by Munny’s eyes.
• Latro’s Bunker: Blog Banter 25 -Nullsec and Sov
• A “CareBears” Journey » Blog Banner #25: Alliances and Sovereignty, and their affect on PVP and RP
• Blog Banter #25 – Unstoppable « Roc’s Ramblings
• More to come…

I did get some decent profits on some random items again now, though I’m not really actively working the market at the moment (Because it’s a pain without a decent scanning tool).

Anyway, I’m off, still need to sell this big stack of ammo I have left.

~Xeross

Upon arrival the fleet was already waiting for the site with the Sansha Mothership to spawn, however as people got impatient we decided to do another site first.

So we warped to this site, activated the acceleration gate and killed everything off, it was a small site so no rewards unfortunately.

After that the main side with the mothership finally spawned, after the initial fear of the unknowing washed off it was pretty much a boring, kill fighter bombers, shoot mothership, etc. fight.

So I really wonder what CCP tried to achieve with this, it’s more boring than missions and requires more people to do it.

Why would anyone enjoy doing this in their free time, even though the 90m ISK was nice, and some of the drops are nice, other than that it’s boring and I can make more money in less time through other means.

I guess there’s that group of dedicated PvE people that enjoy doing this stuff, and I guess it does have something to have a medium-sized group to PvE and laugh around with.

Well that’s it, we’ll see if I ever revisit these again.

~Xeross

This to get rid of the continuous boring grinding that is ratting, PI might be repetitive but a lot less time intensive.

I’ve also taken a look into Datacore Grinding as that’s another more passive income, we’ll see how that goes, still need a lot of skill training.

Also with trading I just made 120m ISK profit, on 1 single item type, so that’s pretty fun.

Regards, Xeross

After getting everyone together we started chasing the same gang that killed me before that (And that was trying to destroy our frigate roam), they kept running away, even though they were outnumbering us.

We did manage to trap a few of them so I got a couple of kills so all in all a good way to end the night.

We continued to chase them around for a while, but eventually they gave up and disbanded, while we were hoping for a full on fight.

Now onto the next roam…

~Xeross

So they were sitting in Torrinos and I thought it was low-sec, but yeah it wasn’t. Bye Rifter.

After that I continued to the next waypoint because I’d get a new Rifter there, after that we jumped into PF-346, and due to my failure to communicate I stayed in PF- on the gate we came in through.

Only to suddenly hear the scout shouting a 12 man gang was incoming, I managed to GTFO and warp to Planet 1. And then I somehow came up with the brilliant plan to just warp to the FD-MLJ gate, and this and somehow this was the result.

So back in my home system now, done for tonight, at least sort of had fun, perhaps I can stay alive for actual pewpew next time.

So I figured big fucking deal I’ll just keep spamming the jump button until I jump. And then suddenly after like 15 minutes and multiple relogs I see all hud bars flash red.

So yeah that already pretty much meant trouble for me, so I relog, and yes I find myself in a god damn pod.

So I figured I’d just petition it as it wasn’t lost in PvP combat and I didn’t have time to react because I never spotted the damn rats.

But yeah of course, some bullshit about how lag is on my side of the system and not on their side, and well the usual.

And next to this GS would of course not reimburse ships that got lost to rats.

So I’ve been set back around 140m now, I purchased the Mael because I would only be losing 30m isk or so if it would ever get blown up.

This has caused me to pretty much lose motivation for now, I still have a drake so I guess I’ll just have to force myself into taking that out so I’m not completely inactive.

Great job CCP, great job.

P.S.: Yes it’s a full post bitching at this little thing, but at least it makes me look sort-of active

So what was bought:

• Ratting Hurricane
  • Standard Hurricane fit for ratting
• Ratting Maelstrom
  • Standard Maelstrom fit for face-melting any belt rats
  • Going to be used after having the skills
• Sniper Maelstrom
  • GSF Reimbursement Flavour

After this I still have around 500-600m isk left so it wasn’t that big of an investment.

However I already managed to blow up the Hurricane, an advice to myself and everyone else, make sure there aren’t any asteroids in your way while ratting if you know you might need to warp out.

So I now already switched to the Maelstrom with some compromises on the guns as I can’t use the T2 yet, so as soon as I can use them they’ll be used.

~Xeross

Bringing just 20% of their total alliance size would’ve been enough to outnumber us 2 to 1 but they only managed to get around 500-600 people on the field which means it was pretty much a tie in terms of numbers.

IT was there to defend their SBU’s and they did attempt to but had to leave the field every time they engaged, I don’t know if it was the lack of morale, shortcomings of the FC or something else, but it was clear that they weren’t doing too well.

evenews24 seems to back this up by reporting the following “35Bil isk was recorded lost from IT & Allies versus the 17Bil lost by the Deklein Coalition”, that means that IT has lost more than twice the ISK than the DekCo did.

After IT fled the system the caps joined in and we quickly took care of the SBU’s, and after this a foolish move by SirMolle was reported, and from what I understand this mistake has already been made once in the past.

Basically the entire IT fleet docked up in one station, which meant we just needed part of our force to camp them at their location and the rest could run rampant around Fountian.

Now I don’t know how much damage we did during this part of the op as I was already on the train back home, but I’m sure evenews24 or evereport will report on this.

~Xeross

So time for some massive lagfests, useless chatter on teamspeak and not forgetting to open Pidgin for jabber.

So far the cache reading part works, and uploading through http works too (Even though it’s just 1 executable that might come in handy if someone wants to use it for his own website or something), I’ve also written a crude plugin-esque thing to allow for easily adding more analysing modules.

So far I’ve thought of the 2 following things to analyse the market, would love to know the things you came up with to analyse it.

Simple volume based calculation

When an item gets uploaded get the highest buy order and lowest sell order, calculate the difference, and multiply that by half of the average volume of the last 5 days.

This is something that’s quite easy to implement and it’s the first (And only thing for now) that I’ll add.

Advanced prediction/snapshot based calculations

This is something I’ve given a good thought and involves comparing multiple snapshots of the same item in order to determine the buy and sell averages. This is quite tricky as you need to account for disappearing orders which can be caused by either it selling out or people cancelling it.

This would give a pretty good estimation of how much profit there can be made with this item, more accurate as the simple calculation, however this is not so trivial to implement.

—

So how do the other traders analyse the market ?

~Xeross

With Incursion giving us glimpses of what Incarna will have to offer (the the Character Creator), this month’s topic, by @Minerpewpew, comes just at the right time. He asks “What are your thoughts on how Incarna will effect the current EVE Online social dynamic?” I’d like to see this questioning go a bit further. How will this affect EVE’s player base? Who will Incarna attract? New players to the genre? Seduce old players back into the game? Will we see new players come in that will never leave their station? Please explore to the best of your abilities!

WiS, Ambulation, and now Incarna, the fabled expansion that would allow us to walk in stations.

This expansion has for a long time been just a concept and something that might come in the future, however recently with the coming of the Incursion expansion and signals given off by CCP it seems it’s definitive that this will be released soon™.

So will it attract new players, I’m sure it will, Incarna will allow for another addition to role-playing, and will satisfy the dress-up need of people. And it will also attract the people that felt disconnected because their character was only a spaceship.

Will it bring old players back, well to a limited extent I think, and for the same reasons new players would be attracted.

Will we see players that never leave their station? Well that would mean the starting areas would get overcrowded, I think there will be players that spend most of their time in stations but they will also travel from station to station.

Now although it isn’t in the scope of this Blog Banter it will be interesting to see how free CCP will let us be with this new expansion, player-owned tailor shops, bars, etc. they can decorate themselves perhaps? One thing I know is that it’s gonna be pretty cool (Well for the first few minutes at least).

Well that’s it again.

Xeross out.

Participants

• BB 23: What comes with Incarna? | A Mule In EvE
• Captain Serenity: Eve blog banter #22 – Force Fed
• Blog Banter XXIII – Incarnal Desires | I am Keith Neilson
• Blog Banter 23: Nobody Will Use Incarna — the remix « OMG! You’re a Chick?!
• Confessions of a Closet Carebear: Blog Banter #23: Who enters the new incarna(tion) of EVE…
• Depth of Vision (Blog Banter 23) | Interstellar Privateer
• Blog Banter #23 – Shiny « Roc’s Ramblings
• Drifting: The 23rd EVE Blog Banter (December 2010 Edition) – Topic: Incarna
• Blog banter #23: The Incarna effect « Diary of a Pod Pilot

So yeah I’m probably a bit late with this post but I blog when I feel like it and I felt like writing this so here it goes.

So a while ago TEST decided to drop 14 TCUs in IT space (Well they had no sov but it was their space) right before an extended downtime.

Once the downtime was over IT filed a support ticked claiming that this was an exploit (Once they figured out what had happened), and in the end the TCUs were destroyed by a GM and refunded (Who with that confirmed that this was considered an exploit).

Now this raised quite a few questions in the community, as it became apparent that TEST wasn’t the only one that gained sovereignty during downtime and due to the fact that this has probably happened before.

Some say that IT gets special treatment by CCP, now when speculating one could state that IT probably isn’t the only one that has reported this kind of issue, but someone (From within CCP) could possibly have made a GM aware of this specific incident, again purely speculation.

On the other hand, this might be the result of the large scale approach TEST took in this assault, yet I do not see that as an excuse to undo this one and not the others.

Now if this is an exploit where do we draw the line ? Can you online POSes/structures during (extended) downtime or now, where does it end.

Now I’m not too sure where I stand on this, the way CCP has acted has its shortcomings as others “got away with it”.

This could just be seen as clever use of game mechanics, however the 6 hours (or something) that it takes to online a TCU have been implemented to grant a defending alliance the time to act upon it, and by onlining them during downtime TEST clearly bypasses this mechanism.

So in the end I guess the reasonable conclusion would be that the correct decision has (sort of) been made, however it should have also been enforced on all other sov. changes that happened during downtime.

Edit: Sorry for mixing up alliance names, fixed

This month topic is brought to us by L’Dene Bean of Nitpickin’s who asks: Why, and how did you pick your corporation? Is your loyalty solid or just until a better placed organization “recruits” you. The shorter version: Who holds your Unshakable Fealty and why?

The “Oh how original” part is referencing to the subject of the mail sent out by CK from which I “stole” the post title.

So even though CK has already welcomed you in the above paragraph here I will also welcome you to this 22nd Blog Banter, which in my opinion has a really interesting subject, so let’s get started.

As EVE is a game and games are about entertainment and fun you should always do the things that will get you the most fun out of  a game, whether this is endlessly mining some asteroid or placing square blocks on each other to form a tower (Minecraft), the end goal is having fun.

So when it comes to corporations in EVE I will join a corp that does what I find fun at that moment, such as joining a null-sec corp when that seemed fun (Yet that was just coincidental as my corp itself decided to merge into a null-sec corp), or joining a low-sec alliance and becoming a pirate.

Even when I leave a corporation I will miss the people in it (Well some of  ‘em), however it’s hard to maintain social activity with them once you have left their corp (Other than hanging around in their public channel).

So am I loyal to a corp ? Yes, if the time I want to leave is deemed bad I will stay until a better time has come to leave, I wont steal any assets or leave any loans open, or take borrowed items with me, that’s just not something I do.

And even if a corp would disagree with you leaving, if you wouldn’t leave that would end up with you possibly not playing the game for a long period of time so that would do no one any good.

(Oh great another conclusion paragraph) So I am loyal, I won’t fuck anyone over or break a promise (Unless someone else fucks me over first), aaand I ran out of things to list here.

Xeross out.

Participants

• Blog Banter #22: Corp Loyalty « Evil Silents
• Confessions of a Closet Carebear: Corporation Loyalty – Brothers and Sisters till the end?
• Who holds your Unshakable Fealty and why? | Nitpickin’s
• loyalty isnt for sale | A Mule In EvE
• Blog Banter #22: Corporation Guilt? | Sarnel Binora’s Blog
• Ask Not What Your Corp Can Do For You… « The Lathspell of Mithrandir
• New Eden History Student » Blog Archive » Why I went to college
• Esprit de Corps
• where the frack is my ship?: Blog Banter 22: Home is where the heart is
• A “CareBears” Journey – Am I Loyal, Or Just Complacent?
• Captain Serenity: Blog banter #22 – Loyalty?
• Not a Nice Game (Blog Banter 22) | Interstellar Privateer
• CK’s Blog Banter #22: A Fighter’s Heart « Prano’s Journey
• EvE Blog Banter #22: Where We Stand EvE Blasphemy
• divagoth | wandering the gaming landscape
• The Eternal Ninja – The Fang
• An Amarrian Capsuleer: Blog Banter 22: Corporation Cooperation
• Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog: Bastard for Life
• Double Threat: Blog Banter #22
• Drifting: Blog Banter #22: Corporation Loyalty – Brothers and Sisters till the end?