The fifth Eve community newsletter is out so I thought I'd take the oportunity to have a quick comment on what it says is happening soon in Eve. Skip this if you want informed opinions. First up is the change in the politics. The news stories when you log in have been hinting towards this more and more recently and judging by the picture the 4 main empires are going to have somewhat frosty relations with each other. This is one of the reasons why I'm grinding Minmitar standing at the moment (the other is that I didn't want to be...

The big problem with Agent 4 missions is that some of them take a long time to complete. Sure, some of them are very quick but there are one or two that just take me longer than I was planning on spending playing because I was planning on getting to bed at a sensible time. With the missile changes this is just going to get worse. As an experiment I tried a mission as (I think) it would be with the missile changes. Using a Raven and several passes with refitting inbetween I warped in and used small missiles on the...

Last night I tried my first agent 4 mission. Of course I get the extravagansa so cue one long night of experimenting and killing things. The result? Before I got too tired and went to bed I had 4/5 stages clear and was up around 20million in bounties alone. I'm betting that the server downtime today respawns those first 4 stages so I can't actually finish the mission before the time runs out. Not that it matters that much though as I'm certainly in profit from this mission so far. So, what have I learnt so far? EM torpedoes hurt...

OK, I admit it. I'm a lazy Eve player. I sit in my Raven and missile spam everything in the mission without much thought as to where I should be or what tools I should be using. My setup works perfectly for Agent 3 missions but part of this whole agent 4 preparation has been to understand how I can be most deadly. I realised exactly how lazy I am when one of my corp mates was muttering about needing spreadsheets while working out the maths behind firing his guns. Since I shall be back in the world of guns at...

Last night I went up against a battleship in an agent 3 mission in order to test out my fitting. The first thing I learnt was that with the right shield hardeners I can just about ignore the torpedoes that it was throwing at me. In fact the Moas that were also there were doing far more damage than it was. The second thing I learnt was that they shield boost like there's no tomorrow and I had the wrong cruise missiles for its shield resistances. 6 cruise missiles was just about causing staus quo with the shield level. Lesson...

Sometime soon, probably at the end of the month, the way missiles work in Eve is going to be changed. At the moment they work so that as long as your target is slower than your missiles then odds are they're not going to be able to avoid being hit. The changes will mean that bigger missiles can't hit smaller ships and so if I launch an anti battleship style missile at a frigate then it's going to do a lot less damage if it hits. Also the speed of the target reduces the damage caused, which means that teh...

This weekend I put the shield hardeners back on my Raven and did some Agent 3 missions. I remember why I took them off in the first place now because all of the missions suddenly became far too easy. I guess this means that I can't put it off any longer: I need to talk to an Agent 4. I'm really not too sure about how well I will last against an NPC battleship at the moment because there are big changes comming to the missiles ingame. I've been up against battleships twice in Agent 3 missions and the first time...

Eve is a funny game. On one hand it's hardcore PvP and corporation (guild) based, and on the other hand it's the one game that I always come back to. I don't play the Alliance game, and m y experiences of PvP have been rather few and far between. I have even survived a couple of encounters surprisingly enough. One was with a Merlin back near start out in 0.0 where two pirates with frigates started something and I almost took down the first before the second decided it was time for him to join it. I warped out down...

One of the advantages of having played Eve for a long time (albiet on and off) is that I have some very high skills. Since Eve uses a time based skill gain system instead of the usage based model that most games have it means that if you stop playing and don't cancel your account you can keep improving as look as you log in every month or so to to start a new skill training. Now I haven't done that for all of the time since launch, but it does mean that I'm more inclined to not cancel if...