What you missed this week

Hello there, and welcome to the first edition of ‘What you missed this week’, an Eve-Centric weekly roundup made up half of community-updates, half of out-of-game news and half unrelated nonsense.

We’ll talk about people, in and out of game happenings, cool stuff people have written, drawn or created and we’ll close it up with a little Sunday column. So kick your feet up on this lazy Sunday, grab a cold one and let me tell you about the interesting machinations that Eve and its community got themselves into this week.

Space-Important People News

So people have gotten really concerned about other people this week; Mr. Hyde apparently dropping off the face of the planet, taking his dank videos down with him (rip sweet solo vids). Everyone panicked, then tossed FRIGATE MENACE jokes, as they saw his twitter and various online social media also being taken down. People speculated, as they are wont to do, and everything from the Bad scenario to him getting hired by CCP has been floated. The only thing we do know is that the CSM got confirmation that he’s fine.

Is this the end of Mr. Hyde? Will he still head over to Iceland for the second summit? Nobody knows, but I bet probably real life caught up to him and he cut himself off cold turkey to focus on his studies. So, the Eve community now has room for one (1) kick ass new video creator, just saying.

Speaking of concern, people also, out of the blue, got concerned for our Dear Leader Xander a few days ago. The CrossingZebras staff can utterly confirm and assure you that he’s completely fine, and still gaypwned. 

In more serious news, Bobmon has announced his stepping down from EVE News 24 as Editor In Chief, leaving behind Salivan Harddin to bear the brunt of running the colossus that is EN24. He’ll still be around as a regular staff member just that now he’ll be flipping jellybeans into his mouth as deadlines approach. Either way, after being around for closing to a year myself here on CZ, I know some of the hard work that goes into keeping this machine running, and full props to Bobmon for keeping up with it, even with all the other important space-stuff he was doing at the time.

“This is a direct continuation of my predecessor’s vision.”

We asked Salivan to comment on any new direction EN24 might be taking, to which he responded that “EN24 is committed to reporting battles and events across the cluster and will continue to do so under my tenure as Editor in Chief. As always, we welcome readers and writers from every quarter and encourage debate and criticism. It is my hope to expand both the site’s readership and its coverage to give all the different communities of the game a voice. This is a direct continuation of my predecessor’s vision for the site and I will not be breaking from it.“

Speaking of writing, Capri Sun KraftFoods wrote a controversial and very poignant piece about something that has been on the minds of people seeing the bigger picture: the militarization of newbie corps, or in his words, why newbie corps suck. The concerns are valid and wide-reaching, and I agree and stand by a good deal of the article. Thing is, you need a certain amount of gravitas, or some big balls, to float this concept and not get downvoted into infinity on reddit and completely dismissed by the community. There were only a handful of people that could breach this subject and expose it without getting lynched; Capri being one of them. The other one would be Space-Jesus-Can-Do-No-Wrong-Good-Guy Elise. (#CZisPLshill)

In other news, well-known and hated loved, all-around cool guy PERUNGA has apparently left the game, extracted his SP and distributed his assets. As always, i always feel sorry when someone that has brought so much engagement to the game decides to leave, especially if it’s caused by in-game causes. You’ll be missed and i hope the newbies of today grow up with your portrait on their wall, while fast-forwading through an ‘Eye of the Tiger’ training montage.

Closing up, infamous shitposter and ganker extraordinaire, Globby has found some of his friends suddenly banned after a gank, which prompted him to make a realistic and picture-perfect depiction in Paint about the whole thing, explaining how and why CCP were pricks. As much as i’d dislike his posting style, his woes on this matter are factual and important. If people can’t play the game without worrying they’ll get banned for unknowingly breaking the occasionally-enforced rules, then why have the mechanic there? 

That said, let’s move on to… *drumroll*

News Eden

Coming further out, there’s reason to celebrate as after Alpha Clones were unleashed into the waiting arms of lowsec gankers, Eve Online peaked at 51,082 players! The first high this big since January 2014, FYI. While the drop-off during the week was expected, we’re still keeping some very constant numbers, peaking at 40-45k daily and even in dead times having quite a few players.

CCP, OP SUCCESS!

In space news, there’s been some kind of big kerfuffle around M-OEE8, Tribute is falling, CO2 beats in retreat. I’m sure this has some kind of repercussions and will change the face of null-sec as we know it, again, but i looked around my corp Citadel’s window in J-space and everything seemed the same. Either way, I guess Cymek’s propaganda was not stronk enough to melt super beams.

The mammoth New Eden Trading Company effort, to create an universal space-highway of freeported citadels using obscene amounts of money, is still going full steam ahead. And they have lore bios, and fancy infographics, and everything! Oh, and the comments on that Reddit thread are hilarious, with Chribba making an appearance; the words “Darth Chribba” having been uttered.

Speaking of wealth, obscene or not, here’s another reminder of why you are horrible at Eve and how you could have been filthy rich if only you desiccated the dev blogs, paid needle-point attention on Sisi and had huge capital to back up any actions. Myself, finding a Rogue Drone AI chip in some drone escalation just a few days after felt like the universe at large giving me a penny as I scurried off saying “oh gee, thank ya mista'”. Alternatively, apparently you can get /really/ lucky with strongboxes if you want riches.

Moving on to more esoteric pursuits, the Pod and Planet judges are still deliberating on the worth of each individual piece submitted for the yearly Pod and Planet Eve-based fiction writing.  There have been a truck-load of great pieces submitted this year, and I urge you to skim through them and see if anything catches your fancy. A lot of people worked quite a bit on them and it’d be a shame to be read only by the judges and other participants.

In the land of the rising sun, the Eve community is a hardy one, even if they’ve been losing numbers. A representative has posted a rare cry for help as support for their language is seemingly grinding to a halt and they fear a full shutdown of the efforts. Given that the Japanese are just a few steps ahead of the Russians in their mastery of the English language, a shut down of the localization might mean us losing that entire community.

The Art Corner

This week we had CorrinMor illustrating some of his fantastic new animations, Cymek with a cute new propaganda picture, Razorien with some STUNNING M-OEE8 pics, and our very own Niden with a pan-out of the new Raitaru EC ‘sploding.

More from CorrinMor here.

More from Cymek here.

More from Razorien here.

More videos from Niden here.

Extra Credit

Even if Halloween is behind us, its spirit lives on in Old Hollow’s Eve Online as we’ve had a few ‘spooky’ moments this past week. Someone was so spooked that he deleted the username he used to post this thread in which ak_eve told him the flash-light camping stories of Sellyn’s Incident, Authothysian Lancers and, of course, 1001 Wormholian Nights. And of course, the Children of Light.

RavenTomoeDarjeeling got the scare of his life hitting upon this while on his travels, and Shinzo_Shikimira‘s UI got possessed by maleficent forces. That, or he did some kick-ass mushrooms. Speaking of mushrooms, we really shouldn’t give any to our avatars, as they’ve been known to get very NSFW when under the influence of them/game bugs, as told by RandomAlienGaming.

The full moon also brings out all the crazies. 

We’ve had a very, ‘YOU KILLED MY MERLIN NOW YOU’RE ENTIRE ALLIANCE DIES’, moment, as related by Demented471 upon meeting this cheerful bloke. But we also got some of the other types of crazies, conspiracy theorists crawling out of the woodwork, claiming either that V0LT is dying, or that SNUFF is dying. In the end, aren’t we all dying? One second at a time? (#im14andthisisdeep)

Either way, anything can drive a man mad, but setting up a jump bridge network exactly on the dot and realising it won’t work due to CCP_Round() surely takes top spot, as crankyape702 can attest. So take that as a warning, Eve can cause everything up to community split personality.

Reks of the Week

We have two prime candidates for this week, both mind-boggling and both ridiculous. We’ll start with this absolutely atrocious Vindicator kill, graciously taken out of its misery by the good folk at Miniluv. 

If that doesn’t inspire you, alternatively, we can also explore the merits of a blaster-fit, shield-tanked, cloaky Legion killed by Straight Outta Wormholes.  

What’s on TV?

This week’s video spotlight catches a fantastic video by Stitch K, getting hotdropped in his Torpedo Golem by a Naglfar, and the subsequent Chessur-channeling, speedtanking the dread. In a Golem. Worth a watch.

Douglas Thompson presents us with a play-by-play solo stealth bomber hunting spree, showing us how cool it still is to play space submarines.

Killtec over on his channel did a cool super-tutorial from A to Z on gas huffing, focused especially on Alpha Clone efficiency. Honestly i’d love for this to be Alpha’s first ‘occupation’ in Eve, since they learn /so/ much from doing it, from a player-skill perspective.

And closing this set up, if you ever wanted to see a hulltanked, man-tanking, face-full-of-blasters montage of a Hecate tearing down cruisers with 1000 dps, Otto Von Bismarck (the other one) has you covered with this Wardruna-filled music video set to explosions and the blood of his enemies sparkling frozen in space.

The Thought of the Week

Closing up with a little column, there was a thread that bubbled up to the surface, in close proximity to CCP’s new marketing strategy of #myEVEstory which i recommend you watch here if you want to cringe beyond your wildest expectations.

CCP has tossed a load of minds, high profile and exceptionally talented people, together, and managed to scrounge up the remasterised draft of the widely panned ‘I Was There’ trailer. I have no words how bad this is, from the pseudo acting to the badly-used CG, it falls completely hollow. Worse off, it’s part of a SERIES, which apparently is the series they wanted to roll out to get Alphas into the game. Woe is me. 

On the other hand, one random dude on Reddit, Erutor, presented a concept of turning the bad omen meme of Eve losing players, “Eve is dying”, into a powerful mantra that playing Eve is to die in it, Eve – is – dying. I found that completely fantastic and very Eve-like. Denying the world and ourselves the common conceptualization that our game is dying and gritting our teeth while smirking that Eve /is/ about dying, is great.

I have no idea why the hell CCP doesn’t continue with the idea they started with the F2P trailer earlier, that Eve is hard. If you’ll permit me one gamerism, Dark Souls and the reborn roguelike and survival genres are testament that games are looking for challenges. Instead of sweet-talking them into becoming miners and pve-ers (by telling them stories of dying horribly?), why aren’t we goading them into aggression, to dare them to take New Eden by the balls, army knife in their teeth, and show it who’s boss.

Is this just another segment of CCP being tone-deaf to the world at large and the gaming industry itself? Maybe. But i really hoped they’d strike it out of the park, for our brand-new Alpaca’s sake. (couldn’t resist)

~Cosmo

In any case, thank you for reading our first foray into this new periodical piece we’re trying out, please offer suggestions and ideas in the comments, 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: I don’t know what the hell this is. NSFL.