Eve was patched again today and so the first thing that I did was check the forums to see what they have changed that would catch me out. It's a pretty minor patch this time as it's the last one before Shiva, which is the next major expansion that is due to be released in a month or two. I don't care about most of the changes this time, but there are a set of skills that have been added that are advanced learning skills to boost your attributes more. Skill training in Eve is just a matter of setting...

Mining in Eve is dull. You point your ship at an asteroid and shoot mining lasers at it until you have the minerals that you want. I've spent some time this week mining so that we can build my new battleship and believe it or not this is the first time I've done a serious amount of mining in the game. So, is it dull? Oh yes. It's also easy enough to allow you to do other things at the same time like watch DVDs or fill the dishwasher. I've even taken to wondering around the house carrying my tablet...

None of the news sites are reporting it yet, but another hundred people logged in tonight over the previous record number of logged in players at the same time. Not a major increase, it's now at 11381 (which reminds me, my copy of  THX 1138 arrived this week), but it's still an impressive number of people to have in the same game at the same time.

After having been stuck with a security rating of 3.9 in Eve for a long time (mainly because I wasn't playing) I finally got it to tick up to 4.0 this week. This is still far from my high of 7.2, but that was reduced down to 3.something when CCP decided that the security system needed changing due to the fact that people were gaining security status too easily. The system is quite simple. If I were to shoot another player who doesn't have a low enough security status himself then I loose some of my status. In order to gain...

CCP currently has an offer for Eve where you can pay an extra €35 and get a second account for 6 months. Running a second character, known as an alt, is common in online games and Eve especially makes it hard to play more than one character on the same account because of the fact that their skill system only allows on character on any account to gain skills at the same time. One of the main reasons for having an alt in Eve is to be able to run a respectible character as well as a pirate, or to...

The NPC Interceptors have two very annoying abilities. The first is that they can stop you running away from a fight if it's ging badly, and the second is that they are very fast. Because of this when I recieved a mission with lots of red writing warning me about them I was more than a little nervous about how my poor cruiser, which has trouble hitting things close to it at the best of times, would fair. I took the opportunity to beef up my "oh crap I can't hit this poxy little frigate at 1k" defenses and set...

After the patch went in people started having a little panic about loosing ships from harder missions. It seems like missions are scaling for your ships at the moment, but since I haven't found a replacement level 3 agent who gives kill missions yet after I decided to move to a different side of the galaxy I haven't noticed that much of an increase in the level 2 kill missions. They're a bit harder, but I still didn't get hit once. The good news is that I had a blockade mission that kept throwing Gurrista Demolishers at me, and every...