What you missed this week

Top of the morning and welcome back to ‘What you missed this week’, an Eve-centric weekly summary of the beating heart and soul of the Eve community over this past week! So sit yourself down in your comfortable chair, take your cat into your lap, send the wife away with the kids, get cozy with a steaming a cup of warm tea or coffee and let’s just Delve right in …

Shaking the pillars of trust in Eve’s high-powered Titan and supercap trading circles over the week we had Darknesss, repeating the ‘s’es, throwing away all his reputation for a Vanquisher. Apparently this wasn’t for the ISK, given the fact that Darknessss, as one of the top three major players and trusted traders, regularly handled a lot more ISK than the 320bil the Vanquisher was worth. This theory is supported by his channel’s MOTD changing to a bad movie pun of ‘revenge is mine‘. At least Mittens’ phrase was cooler.

In any case, if that’s what he called revenge, I really think he should have paid out the 320bil to someone with a bit more imagination to craft his one-shot, single-chance, breakout Sith move. But he’s burned now so bummer. Oh, and DARKNESS., the alliance, wants to make clear that they have nothing to do with the dude, it’s just a name match-up. COINCIDENCE?!

Coming back from last week, apparently Mr.Hyde’s videos have been put public again, but his twitter handle is still down and his reddit user shows minimal activity. No more news surfaced as far as i’m aware, but it’s clear more than ever that he just wanted to refocus his priorities on becoming a non-space-important RL lawyer. Boo.

If Hyde doesn’t want to have fun, Suitonia certainly does, deciding to try on the unicorned logo of KarmaFleet on his Kestrels for a while. I don’t know what he gets out of this, but the magic of the GoonHammer has rubbed off on him it seems as only a few days later he almost soloed an Utu, a very expensive AT ship. Was this an elaborate bait from the Utu? Was Suitonia… *gasp* BAD? More at 11.

he promptly sold it for a nice chunk of profit after tempting fate

Speaking of expensive AT ships, a Cambion was sold for 50 mil accidentally in Jita. Yep, you read that right. It appears Tzuko, the owner, was multi-selling some shit (Assault Frigates) from his hangar and didn’t realise what else he was selling. The lucky buyer, a user going by Jakeal on Reddit, did the manliest thing he could do, fit it and took it out for a drive. Given that he also has more sense than balls, he promptly sold it for a nice chunk of profit after tempting fate. Quoting someone, “son of a bitch, this is why people have those damn buy orders up, isn’t it?”.

Speaking of one-off events, CCP Fozzie lit the speculation barn ON FIRE with a single tweet saying ‘something BIG happened’. It didn’t take much and rumors went out of control. 

Initially players eagle-eyed activity in Jove space, jumps to be exact, but that was quickly shut down as CCP just futzing around doing things live on TQ. The tinfoil press continued unopposed. Players then moved to a simpler answer, that of someone anchoring a Sotiyo, the XL Engineering Complex, which was shut down by Fozzie himself saying that ‘that was not what I was referring to’, finished up with a ‘Big congrats though!’. Talk about sucking the joy out of putting up the XL EC, huh?

The most interesting part of this whole shenanigan was when people started hyping up the fact that it may be the Palatine Keepstar. You know, the one that’d cost something stupid ridiculous like 1/15ths of player assets and a year of PI harvesting. Besides remembering how ridiculous it is, Lord Maldoror also chimed in with the talks that were had with Serenity’s players to see if they can get on the Palatine case. Apparently Serenity can’t make it due to some items not existing on Serenity, which were only seeded on Tranquillity. That’s a bummer.

the palatine [..] would cost 3 million bloody dollars

I’m surprised just how much discussion was sparked over the Palatine in this event. And more than anything, after properly taking in the numbers, I realised we’ll never see it on TQ. Not because it’s a lofty goal, but that we’re not there in terms of throw-away resources for us to even recklessly push this through. Just saying, if one were to want to buy all of the mats with IRL cash, it’d cost 3 million bloody dollars. Holy shit!

In the end, this little run around was not solved, even if some people got so far as to reach for straws in the form of the Children of Light supposedly getting figured out, and Fozzie kept on smugging about it. We’ll see if this comes up next week.

Closing up the list, recently CCP Karkur made a r00d comment on twitter in regards to exploration and cherrypicking cans. It exploded everywhere. As a longtime explo myself, I fully agree, but scanning cans was never supposed to be a ‘thing’. People will whine that it will make explo more dangerous if they have to sit in the site more. I say ‘GOOD’. Eve is too safe anyway. And everyone whining about crap in cans, if you want guaranteed income go rat your ticks. Exploration is still absolutely fantastic for ISK.

Leaving all the big names behind, let’s see what the ‘little people’ are doing.

New Eden was the site of a memorial roam for Ski Absolution, the members joining up in Procurers and other assorted industrial ships. Cynos were lit, as is tradition, and good fights were had. There was a bit of unfair play by some of the participants, it has been reported, but all in all everyone came out of it with fun had. I didn’t know Ski Absolution, but i’m glad people cared for him as they did. 

Moving on to the SiliconValley part of our little newsection, third party development has hit a huge stride this week as Evemon got picked back up again under the guiding hand of Ashilta. I saw a lot of long sentences and big words and i think he needs a lot of help, so if any of you out there know your code from your underwear, see if you can lend your skills, since, quoting him, ‘Evemon is more broken than I thought‘.

if you don’t have a degree in Funky Math. Like Apothne.

With EFT out of the picture, Pyfa is the reigning king of MINMAX eftwarrior-ing and just yesterday was finally updated for Ascension. A cool note was in the changelog which said that, after so many months and a lot of math, Reactive Armor Hardeners were made properly calculable in Pyfa. That’s a fantastic outcome to see how these things actually end up working, which is ridiculous to understand if you don’t have a degree in Funky Math. Like Apothne.

It’s also no big secret I utterly loved EveEye Maps, so I was happy to find out that Risingson, the developer, came out with a shrunk variant of it for mobiles. The iOS was out for a while, but he recently launched a version for Android completed with SSO and Crest tracking. He’s working on getting back the same filter functionalities the old EveEye maps had, but I do have to admit, I would have liked a desktop app instead. Still, I got a big enough tablet to tide me over.

EveCall was also released to the eager public. I love the concept of it, it constantly checks your game logs, and the moment you’re attacked, it sends a ping to discord or slack with your name and such. Pretty fantastic and i’m surprised it’s the first i’m hearing of something like this. 

Closing up the tech section, ISK-starter is also now a thing. Ran by the Eve_NT and former-Evebet crowd, it’s hoping to be the next way of funding projects across New Eden and outside of it. Just saying, but Crossing Zebras is also on there if you, like, you know, want to donate, and things.

Apparently some things happened in Faction Warfare this week, regarding Nennamaila. Given that CZ recently pushed out an article on the matter which got SLAUGHTERED by controversy worse than the Starks at the Red Wedding, i’m not saying a single word on this, so just take reddit’s and Lynx’s opinion on it.

The same excitement was also found in nullsec this week since, as always, important shit went down. Tl;DR some supers died. But worry not citizens of New Eden! There’s always more where those came from as people are apparently throwing them around as skittles nowadays anyway.

Most likely unrelated to anything, but the ability to use PLEX went offline for /reasons/ this week, an issue quickly patched by CCP. I think it was so quick not even CCP had faith it’d be solved in such short time, the PR machine going full-spin announcing the issue’s existence. 

maybe get a quick pull on Goliath’s beard or toss a tomato at Fozzie while they’re there

Finishing up with another CCP story, they’re finally putting together a methodology for allowing tours into their offices that’s a bit more coordinated than ‘PM Falcon on reddit or twitter’. I never really got people just showing up and expecting to be run through a quick tour, maybe get a quick pull on Goliath’s beard or toss a tomato at Fozzie while they’re there. In any case, it’s a two-week minimum announce and it’s heavily paraphrased with ‘we do this because we’re nice and can cancel it and say ‘no’ at any time if we want’.

Oh yeah, and some of the plebs like me that didn’t speculate Elite Drone AI’s are now farming them like crazy in one specific L4 mission and most likely will crash the market soon enough. Thanks guys.
 

This week we had a host of cool art projects that came to fruition. Starting out we’re showing off RixxJavix’s non-CCP-affiliated fantastic #myEVEstory series. More of the series here. And also my total-ripoff of his concept.

Keramatzmode shared with us a coolAF Condor drawing.

CaldariPrimePonyClub worked with the new projection system to make… Tailor Swift Nagas? You know what, I dig it. Also a few other fleet setups as well in the link.

Pladim shared a very cool bit of art with us over on reddit.

Over on Deviantart we have Gentaro-de-Averial doing a sweet Templar CG piece.

And since art isn’t just visual, we also had Sindel Pellion enchanting us with another pop-hit-turned-Eve-Online song.

‘There are hundreds of thousands of pilots in the world, and they all desire one thing, AY-ESS-KAY.’ That’s how Aura once greeted us a long time ago.

Not much has changed from those times, pilots are still ruthlessly stealing eachother’s stuff, from small things to fantastically large things like entire Citadels. Some already consider themselves wealthy beyond belief, even if their stash of officer and deadspace mods are worse than T2, while other people are in the process of getting rich, or so they think, before realising that luck is a finnicky thing.

I guess it didn’t take long for us to hit the road of avarice, haughtiness and narcissism once we started getting skins, skins, and even MORE skins for us to kill and cheat ourselves over. But still, however you slice it, we will always tune back to the age old quandaries of our human condition.

Given that you are a fresh-faced newbie, if you receive 900mil by a mistake by a corpie, do you return it it, or do you take it and make a run for it? And if you do, will you soon realise that the shroud of betrayal can cast a longer shadow than you might think, and revenge can be just around the corner for anyone willing to put in the time?

But New Eden is a huge place. Who can find you amongst the thousands of stars? Maybe you can hide yourself in the fringes of null, meddling in their unstable politics and learning their histories.

Maybe you will even live enough to see The Great Reset. Or maybe you will live just enough to see the dagger in the shadows as it whispers softly in your ear ‘was it worth it?’.

Ravens are an old folly for young capsuleers and I think no other men drank as much as the Caldari engineers that developed the Raven; seeing their baby atrociously misused like it’s been known to be. Just take a look at this example, killed by jj gunsIinger in Jita, ofcourse. 

But if only that’s where those foolish capsuleers would stop. The engineers moved on to develop the Golem. A mighty marauder class ship. No one would foolishly fly this marvelous piece of engineer—

Well, apparently they were wrong, as shown by this Golem taken out of its misery by CalMil, weighing in at 24.5 bil. That’s quite a bit of ISK right there, I mean, I don’t know how we could top that.

Just tuning in? Sit back and let’s see what Youtube had in store for us this week. Starting off, you all have to watch this fantastic InitialD sketch. It includes a Citadel and a Hurricane Drift Issue, by Loghunter.

Sticking with Winmatar, Cosmo Blink, some other dude name Cosmo, shows us how to solo PvP a bling Panther. Includes balls of steel.

Sticking in the solo PvP vibe, we have JevinsCherries Akiga using a variety of BC hulls on unsuspecting lowsec residents.

Increasing the gang size from solo to small, we end up with Azimandi showing us a fantastic use of kitey cancer in the form of the Cynabal wrecking face with its fleet in an overlong engagement.

Or you could just utterly not be good and just enjoy yourself with your friends. This is what Mr. Mysterious is succeeding at doing in his We Suck At: Eve Online series, here presenting themselves trying to run a sleeper site. (PS: where are these guys when i’m scouting chains 🙁 )

If you had enough entertainment, or just desire some cool background images to roll on your screen, Adan Dimaloun did a roundup of the major battles of November, nullsec specific.

Eve has been inundated with a lot of fuzzy-feeling innocent newbie stories. While rare and precious before, they’ve started blending in by this point, and they all end the same, people throwing ISK, info and well wishes their way and that’s that. I usually know how that ends. They soon realise ISK doesn’t buy long term fun, and while not all, some just drop out, never to be heard of again. 

So i’m not really keen on those stories. What I am keen on, are these types of stories.

In short, we have a relative newbie, just a bit over a month old, that researched and did his homework. Age old story of wormhole shenanigans, but this time it didn’t end with the newbie just getting his ship destroyed and tossed a bit of ISK and a kind convo. 

He went out there again, he was smart, he kept his wits around him and he knew his options. He knew what resources he had available to him, what mistakes he made and how to circumvent them. This newbie showed more sense, if not execution, than some people that have been playing for a lot longer.

And that’s when I realised why I enjoyed this type of stories so much.

These kinds of stories rekindle my faith that we, as a community, will be ok. Even with the braindrain that we’re suffering, people that have played for years upon years moving on, deliberately or… less deliberately, there is hope. This guy gives me faith that we have not ran out of smart people to turn into FCs, leaders or logistics pilots. We have not ran out of people that can actually create meaningful additions to the sandbox and we have not ran out of quality people that can join our little game and leave their mark. They are still there somewhere, and they still pick up and get to be part of Eve Online.

We’re going to be ok.

~Cosmo

Thank you for reading this edition of ‘What you missed this week’. If you think we missed something, share it in the comments section, i’m sure a lot of people still want to check out more things. Also please leave any suggestions and ideas you may have in the comments as well, and as always, if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, please toss a nickle or an iskcent into our real or virtual wallets to keep this going with the same aplomb and quality.

PS: Illumitanni sees all, the confluence of memes, France and Hek is soon upon us, praise Xenuria.