The High Sec Carebear has finally moved to 0.0, Adventures with TEST awaits.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Lore, EveReader and Hydrostatic.

Today I would like to bring up a topic that often goes unnoticed in EVE, to the point where it feels like most people ignore it.
This could be down to ignorance of the subject or a complete lack of interest, it it's the former then please keep reading, if it's the latter you can stop here.
The subject is lore, yes, EVE has a tremendously rich lore behind it, some is player made and most is from the fine folks at CCP.
It can be something as small as landmarks in space, those weird beacons you can warp to that really does nothing, all the way up to one of the commercial novels written about the game.

I first got interested in EVE lore back when they featured the "Chronicles" on the front page.  The Chronicles, for those who don't know, are short stories and novellas written about the EVE universe we all live in.  The fascinating bit about the Chronicles, and indeed a lot of the lore, is that it's not solely about us capsuleers, it's about normal people and events.
The EVE universe is an incredibly dark and horrible place to live, and the lore reflects this in nearly all the stories, the Capsuleers are detached, inhuman demi gods and the little man is always getting stepped on.
It's not cheerful reading, but it is fascinating to learn about the events that shaped the universe we all indulge in.

The political machinations between the Empires, CONCORD and the various pirate factions are quite interesting and well fleshed out in various texts.  The pirate factions themselves are quite enjoyable to delve into, from drug syndicates and "zombies", to batshit crazy cultists and a space Red Cross with some serious agendas.

If the lore isn't anything you've really gotten into, but you think you'd find interesting, I have some recommendations on where to start out.

  • The EVE Reader podcast is a great place to start.  It's basically a narration of the CCP EVE Chronicles and will give you a wide coverage of back stories to the EVE universe. The narrator sounds very professional, sound quality is excellent, guest voice actors and production quality is top notch.  I can not praise this podcast enough when it comes to exposing the player base to the lore in nice, bite sized chunks.
  • The Chronicles is the stories written by CCP that the aforementioned podcast narrates.
  • The Hydrostatic podcast does an excellent job at dealing with the wider lore of EVE, they'll discuss anything regarding lore, focusing often on present events in the universe.  They have excellent guests and panels on various aspects of the lore.  Highly recommended listening.
  • There are also excellent books written in the EVE universe, The Empyrean Age, This Burning Life, Templar One and the EVE Source, there are also various other books floating around on Amazon that might be worth checking out.  Most, if not all are available in both paper and Ebook versions and they are a great read.
While you may not have been very interested or even aware of the lore up to this point, three of the four bulletpoints above are perfectly free, will provide you with hours of entertainment and a more meaningful look into the universe you play in.  

I hope you will take the opportunity to check at least some of these out, the podcasters in particular have put work and effort into this and they've done a fantastic job. 
I wish you hours of entertainment and enlightenment.

Amarr Victor.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

New Alt's and a Happy New Year.

New Eden, I wish you a happy new year, may you get plenty of killmails and narrow escapes in the year to come.  May your Killboards be green and your wallets fat, so on and so forth.

I'm sure everyone has seen all the Holiday presents we got from CCP, my personal favourites are the Friend Ship and the Drunk Bodyguard, and I'm wearing one of the jackets currently as well.  There was another gift in there that many may have missed unless you actually read the Dev Blog, it's the FREE 20 day multiple character training.  Yes, 20 days of dual account training for FREE.

This may not mean much to a lot of you, 20 days isn't much after all, there are only so much you can squeeze in on that time, but free is free.
I set me up a skill plan in EVEMON and made myself a station trader alt, just to see if I could do it in time, or how close I'd get.  I can get the most vital skills up and running in 19d 8h with a neural remap, meaning that I have a perfectly viable station trade character for free, courtesy of CCP.

I grabbed an old untrained character on my account and set up the following skill plan:

Trade - lvl 4
Retail - lvl 4
Broker Relations - lvl 4
Accounting - lvl 5

Those skills puts the queue on my character up to over 20 days, but due to an unused remap, it ended up on just over 19 days total. 
I currently have the alt parked in a major trade hub with a few orders already going. 
May not be much, station trading may not even be your thing, but it's a thing to consider since it's costing you nothing.

I expect others might use the opportunity to create hauling or cyno alts, whatever floats your boat, you have 20 days to do it at no cost, providing you're even aware of the offer.

Oh yes, the first fleet of the new year, a fast little frig fleet netted me a nice 1.2 bill pod kill along with some other stuff, very shiny.

Fly Hard, Amarr Victor.