What you missed this week

Hey there and welcome back to ‘What you missed this week’.

Before we start ranting off this week’s events I would just like to mention that if you are a media creator, YouTuber or streamer and would like a bit of coverage in this roundup, poke me on CZ’s Discord and I’ll try to fit it in. Also, if you have an upcoming event, in game or out of game, that you want to promote, feel free to contact me on the same previously mentioned Discord.

That said, kick back with a beer or a cup of tea or coffee, and let’s get you up to speed on what you missed this week!

In the midst of trying to juggle all the metagame, security and appearance concerns, sometimes you get something outright silly happening. gigX, tl;dr: CO2’s Boss In Cheif, received a random invite from ElitistOps, a PL corp. For shits and giggles, he accepted. Like a master troll, he also took it upon himself to whelp some caps while under the corp, if only to make a splash on the killboards. Either way, silly fun was had and he was soon back in CO2s loving embrace and reddit had a fun shitposting spree with those threads.

CSM12 is just roughly around the corner, and CCP posted up the official announcement for CSM12s timeline, marking the imminent start of the official candidacy submissions. As such, the CSM forum has been quite active, with people getting in their threads. 

While 0.0 null representation can be considered to be a decent chunk of the CSM’s seats, Killah Bee (Nulli/BL/PL) stings fellow CSMs in his candidacy thread: that unlike the existing members, he actually logs in and is active as a null bloc FC, compared to the current members which he mentioned “log[gging] in once every two months”. He was polite about it and that’s about as much of a point as he made. While it seems weak to rely on just that, he’s a well-known and endorsed name that most likely won’t have issues gathering votes.

Another well-known name is Vince Draken, a long-standing memeber going back all the way to Eve’s Beta in 2003 and a top-tier FC that has actioned all over nullsec. His thread is slightly more encompassing and sheds more light on his views and experience in applying for the position, also mentioning that his focus would be ‘Citadels, Faction Battleships, Sovereignty and TiDi’. Again, he will not have much issues gathering votes I reckon.

Coming down to the little-guy level that doesn’t have a ‘brand’ behind his name, we have Arenthor Doran, of null representation yet again. Similar to politics, sometimes it’s easier to say what you aren’t, than what you are, and thus some of his main points relate to not being tied to any factions, an independent, and not being part of any of the ‘good old boys’ club or even Eve-famous. Sadly, that’s about as far as his candidacy thread goes.

Moving on we have Roedyn, apparently a very widely-versed member, with credentials adding up wormholing, trading, writing, faction warfare and currently he’s part of Wrecking Machine. His thread is well-worth a read, going very in depth about his views and expectations. One thing that stuck out was “CCP Must Own This – It is not appropriate to leave mechanics and ship balancing issues without timely periodic iterations.”, as a great mantra to have, but sadly, we all know the CSM is of limited power given CCP’s fixed schedulings and simmering-iterative process. Either way, probably the best written CSM thread i’ve seen so far for CSM12, and someone i’d be keeping an eye on.

Closing up the CSM summaries we have Jewnior McBlazing, a major trader by his words which runs on a platform of… skins and hats? Well, that’s something. Oh, and he also mentioned expanding the skill options for Alphas. And adding and riding horses in the Captain’s quarters. You can’t make this shit up.

Starting up with some ~~CONTROVERSY~~, while the rest of Eve and CCP are happy to forget that we ever gambled on online websites with ISK, and some of the players turning that into real life dosh, in the wide net that was tossed it may be just that not all that were caught in the net were actually fish. It’s easy to villify in retrospect, but a lot of players were just cogs, window-wipers and janitors in the greater scheme of things; bankers at the lowest level just made sure ISK went in and out of corp wallets properly.

While i’m not per se defending any one person, I just am troubled by these kind of seizures and bans which remain completely unanswered because ‘security protocols’. I ask anyone to think what would they do if tomorrow your accounts were completely stripped of assets, maybe even banned, and you could get no reply from CCP. A horrible prospect, isn’t it?

Moving a bit off the grime and gloom, Signal Cartel celebrated two years of.. honestly, not being horribly crushed by the rest of Eve. It’s one of the few ‘carebearing’ (in the nicest sense possible) corporations that is accepted within the wider community without scorn. Besides running the EveScout Thera WH entrance finder, which basically made Thera both the highway and the Tortuga that it is now, they also run a hosts of other programms all in the same vein of a more holier and less shady version of the Sisters of Eve. I would whole-heartedly recommend them for anyone wanting to get a different taste of Eve, even if you only toss an alt in. Who knows, you might take it up as your main soon enough.

Speaking of wormholes, they ‘broke’ again this week. Anywhere else in Eve and people’d be crying foul, but in wormhole-space, we almost welcome the ‘spooky’ of it. Sure it’s a bug and it probably has a reasonable fix, as did a whole host of them before, but it can’t help but push forward the concept of a truly wild and ever-morphing environment. I don’t think we’re ready for Left4Dead weekly/monthly random mutations, but every once in while these strange bugs make us remember to give our prayers to Bob.

On the southern front of nullsec, in the CZ-christened ScootyDooty war, we had one of the bloodiest fights this war in a struggle on both sides of the front to control V-3YG7, one of the key systems to Catch. We had WalkingInCirclesPleaseIgnore, as in, everyone with a pulse in Catch right now that’s not Goons or Stain Wagon, assaulting SW’s staging made up of two Fortizars. Following what I estimated last week, Goons only showed up in subcaps for this fight, a fight that did feature supercaps on field, but apparently Goons didn’t want to risk getting their exit cyno-inhibited yet again. So as of this friday, SW was made two Fortizars poorer has been pushed back to their namesake space-region of Stain. You can find the full breakdown of this fight on EN24, here.

Lowsec and sister-area of Geminate was also a bloodbath, following multiple engagements between Snuff and SC/EE as well as the Drone Regions Federation. A little further out was saw Brave reliving its glory days as PL attacked its staging in DO6H-Q with The Initiative showing up just to fuck with everyone in command destroyers. Wormhole space saw a decent brawl between Hole Control and HKC/Mass Collapse, video slightly below.

As usual, you can find all the battles and large engagements this week on EN24’s weekly round up, and as a little teaser, we will have a special podcast airing tomorrow which will go into further detail on the happenings in Nullsec.

CCP-wise, this week we saw new fancy skins for the Mordu’s Legion ships, using the new in-house CCP system for making these skins. It’s nice to see they’re following up on their promise of being able to roll these out decently fast once they had finished the underlying system. 

Also speaking of CCP accomplishing their promises, we’re apparently going to get insurance in Citadels come february release! Ok, fine, just personal, not corp insurance, but i’m sure everyone will appreciate not having to go to an NPC station to have their stuff insured. With this happening, the hawk-eyed observers would have noticed that means you can now insure supers as well, but apparently the payout will be in the low single digit range, so no real chance of abuse there. Still, now people can self-destruct their supers along with their caps if they don’t want to move, or to give out free kills. A few tweaks are actually coming to the release which greatly improve the quality of life, tweaks which I hear the industry people are really hyped about. Something about “Buy missing materials”.

But since life is a sequence of valleys and hills.. the issues with rubberbanding and latency plaguing Eve Online have continued unopposed. While we did get an official confirmation, the exact phrasing of this line “will soon be looking to apply a fix once a cause is identified” doesn’t hold out any hope that this will be fixed in a matter of days, instead of weeks.

Personally I didn’t have many issues this past few weeks, but then again, EUROPE#1! :euro:

We haven’t featured CorrinMor here recently, but he’s hammering away at cool animations. Click through the Rifter image below to go to his recent gallery.

Cymek also honored us with another bit of cutesy propaganda, following WalkingInCirclesPleaseIgnore coalition, from the ScootyDooty war.

I’d not post 3D printed stuff as art usually, but sometimes the outcome really is cool enough to mention. Here is Sibire’s Chimera.

Closing up we have our favorite Eve rapper, Cpt Blastahoe dropping fire with his new song, “5 In The Fleet”.

There is something to be said about daring. About being audacious and unfrightened. About looking the world in the eyes and saying, “I’m going to do exactly that“. But as much as we’d romanticise it, not all acts of objectivism are of a positive kind, as villains use the same rationament and even the same words; matters of retrospective or what is fair falter under the unabiding will of a man.

But a man is still a man, subject to being dwarfed by the cosmic forces if they wish to sway him to a certain path.

This week we’re starting with some Providence propaganda courtesy of Ahura Mashada, showing some fleet ops and some decent cinematics.

Staying the Big Fleet Club, we have another lowsec brawl, this time over an R64, thanks to Niden. Colored dots everywhere!

Just so I won’t completely dry you guys out, we have this ridiculously funny video of a strunk (stoned+drunk) Rorq pilot that is very lucky he has competent and calm FCs in his corp. A video on how to save your strunk friend and get a dread kill in the process, thanks to JohnWildkins.

Next up, RistGamingChannel with some FW solo shanigans featuring a Polarized Coercer. Yeah.

Closing up, we’re featuring Captain jdd with his first Eve video, but which has some of the most bad-ass-how-did-you-survive Curse footage I ever saw, alongside some cool solo/smallgang. Check it out!

Citadels have come and have deeply embedded in every corner of Eve Online. All corners of New Eden were affected by the anchoring of these newfound titans, wormhole space included.

When the first iteration of Citadels came out on the forums, mechanics and all, it… wasn’t received too well. Amongst the debates of Entosising and fitting, the wormhole people were also trying to push their own needs for Citadels. The battle for no asset safety and wormhole-space requirements and restrictions for Citadels was mostly won but the final iteration wasn’t really something that was ‘designed’ for wormholes, as were Citadels designed for K-space. It was a frankenstein of cut off features and hastily tossed together rough fixes that got us to where we would take it with little grumbling.

But here we are, year later, and it seems we’ve averted a lot of the pitfalls, allowing wormhole life to continue without too much interruption. But Citadels have warped how life is carried out in wormholes, just not in the direction we were initially expecting.

A thread popped up this week asking the vital question of whether Citadels make wormhole space too easy to live in.

One of the prime mentions there harkened back to one of my earlier articles, the Death of a Profession. While it didn’t exactly feature wormholes, it was based on the same premise of how much we need an expiry date for unused or uncared for Citadels. Besides the overcrowding, it makes it easy to spam Astrahuses or throw up a few Fortizars, which makes it a huge hassle to take down an entity properly occupying a system.

Even without, Keepstars as-is in wormholes are broken, given DDs and how unassailible they can be without ridiculous seeding. While it doesn’t cause a huge issue right now, a few people^{[citation needed]} have agreed they should not have gotten into wormholes to begin with, as with the limitation of Fortizars in highsec.

But returning to the matter at hand. Does Citadels make living in WH space easier? Yes. They definitely have. Between alternate clones, the ability to field a market, infinite hangar space and contracts, the ability to support caps and an unlimited population, plus the upcoming at-will Insurance, living in wormholes has never been easier or cozier. At this point you can consider living in a wormhole to living in K-space Citadel with no jumpfreighter service and where you have to scan your ‘gates’.

Still, this hasn’t brought in population in droves, if anything it has disenchanted people that thought of WH space as a sort of ‘hard mode’ to Eve. Existing large entities only got stronger due to a larger ease of logistics, and smaller entities just got happy at the lowered fuel costs for keeping a krab hole or maintaining a small PvP base.

So where does that leave us? I guess that’s the real question. WH activity isn’t exactly booming and while daytripping is a thing, the lack of a new influx of small/medium corps, even with the luxuries and ameneties provided by a Citadel, is worrying.

~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: When you get a D- on your SOTA paper.