So it’s time: Project Newbie springs into action and my credit card is exposed to another . Character creation in Eve is a complicated beast with lots of options that a newbie isn’t going to have a clue what they do so I decided to play it safe with creation. I could min-max my way to the best character I could for short term goals, but the fact of the matter is that your starting stats and skills don’t actually matter much after you’ve been playing for a while. I decided to go with just about the same number with...

I logged in as Damuzi first thing on Sunday afternoon after having spent some time hauling goods with one of my more experience characters in order to keep my corp ticking over. I still had a bit of time to go before my frigate skill training completed so I ran some level one missions. The first thing I noticed was that some NPC ships were faster than me and could hit me from further away than my guns reached. This is a problem as it’ll lead to you getting blown up if you’re not careful so I warped out and...

I’ve had a change of heart about project newbie and I can’t see myself going down the pirating route any time soon. Instead I’m going to try to start from the beginning and play fair. No twinking and just my wits to get myself to a point where I can be a viable PvP player. Of course it’s not a fair test as I’m pretty much sorted for making cash. I can trade myself up to all the cash that I really need in a week or two but I’ll try out low level missions and mining to compare the numbers....

I have something I have to admit: I can't get to obsessed about Eve anymore. This isn't to say that I don't log on nearly daily, but I just don't want to put in 5+ hours of gaming per night. This is a problem in Eve as if you're serious a corporation is going to want you to devote a not inconsiderable amount of time to furthering the corps goals. This may be something like a communal mining night, or regular patrols. In the long term this is going to be why I quit again, but in the meantime it's...

I’ve been thinking about performing a little experiment. For all my time in Eve I’ve been good. I’ve PvPd occasionally but never started anything. I’ve never tried seeing how much I could earn from Ore thieving. I’ve never tried hunting Pirates. I’ve never tried hunting ripe looking carebears. I’ve also never tried tanking a gate gun. These are all things that I really should have tried before now, but I have two characters that I really don’t want to break. So, in the spirit of Journalism I’m going to go for the power of 2 deal again and create a...

There's been another new peak users online number tonight. It's 25709 now but probably isn't going to peak until sometime in the next hour. At the Eve gathering in Vegas last week it was announced that Eve has 112000 odd subscribers now. That makes over 1/4 of the entire platerbase logging in at once again, which means that even if there are alts (which there are) that still means that they're all logged on at once. Me? I have two accounts which are logged in. I, on the other hand, am waiting for my food to cook while watching Mythbusters so they're...

So the big geek Mac news last week was the fact that XP now runs on Intel macs (no graphics support yet so still no Eve for me on my MacBook. Damn) and the BBC noticed this yesterday and posted this. The first picture is of Steve Jobbs back in January announcing that the Intel Macs were shipping. The second picture is of two Amarr Freighters. I'm guessing that some BBC hack also wants Eve on his Mac quite badly.

Warning: This is a technical post. There are several threads on the Eve forums with people wanting to run Eve on Linux or Mac OS. According to this thread the really annoying crashes when running under Cedega on Linux. Wine is still behind of course, but it does catch up. So that's Linux covered, but it's Mac OS I'm after. Like many of the people on the boards I now only ever use my home PC for Eve and so I'm keeping an eye on Darwine waiting for it to solve a few issues that prevent it from being usable...

One of the common gripes I've heard is that people can't be a trader because they can't play around the time that the server is reset each day. The server reset is the point where all the NPC supply and demand on the market resets and you get the best prices, which could be a problem if you're at work at this time like I am, but it doesn't stop me from buying at the lowest price and selling at the highest because of the magic of buy and sell orders. What people may not realise is that these orders...

Eve News is reporting that a record 25665 players logged into Eve on Sunday night. The current power of 2 offer that is running may have helped this, but it's still a whole 25% of the subscriber base at a single time. It would be really interesting to see what sort of numbers other games get at their peak times but not many games are prepared to say.

One of the certainties in Eve is that you'll be wanting to blow stuff up very quickly. Well you're in luck because there are a myriad of possibilities for fitting your ship with various killing devices. It gets very confusing very fast though as it's not as simple as having a damage per second value on the weapon description like in something like World of Warcraft. In fact guns and missiles are a very complex subject. Missiles Missiles are the simpler of the two to understand. It basically boils down to "The larger the missile the less damage it will do to...

So there I was in a Badger 2 collecting all the useless crap that I've got spread over the galaxy. It was a rather boring badger with nothing special fitted, and nothing special in the cargo hold. So there I was pottering around with a bunch of scrap in the hold and I get fired upon by an Armageddon. As you can imagine my Badger goes pop rather fast, but the 'Geddon goes bang shortly afterwards from the authorities. My losses? 1 million tops. His? At least 55+ million. Sometimes PvP is really funny.

One of the things that really annoys me about Eve is that they never add any new music any more. Most people seem to play with the music off, which is a real shame as the music is some of the best from any game. Lucky for me though there are people out there who write that style of music. If you want more music along the same lines then I suggest you try an album called New Life from James Bernard. It fits in quite well and if you've been listening to the same music forever it's a real nice...

First of all Lum goes off to work for NCSoft so they're probably hiring for a new game. Next NCSoft announce a deal with a company called Spacetime Studios. Yep, there's a new game coming I guess. What makes me excited? Who are Spacetime Studios? Well they're made up of a bunch of developers who have worked on games such as Star Wars Galaxies. Oh, and Wing Commander and Privateer. I'm guessing it's going to be a space game, and we don't get nearly enough good space games nowadays. Privateer Online was cancelled many years ago now, but maybe its spirit...

They're taking the servers down on Thursday at 10am in order to apply this patch(needs a login). They say to set a long running skill going, but I say to set up a lot of buy and sell orders. Patch notes are as follows: Bloodlines Updates and Fixes The following issues were hotfixed after Bloodlines deployment. BP's are now returned to the correct hanger after a corp build has completed. Agent bookmarks can be warped to. Transfering characters to an account created via the Power of 2 promotion works as intended. Windows no longer automatically reopen on session change. In space icons, including those visible only when pressing...

Another beginner type post today because I was listening to some poor guy loose a very expensive ship on local last night because he didn't understand what to fly, and why. Picking your ship is a lot more difficult in Eve than picking your equipment in other games. In most games the correct upgrade path for the player is to have the biggest and best equipment that's available for them at that moment, but in Eve it's somewhat more complicated than that. There are five main classes of ships that you'll care about if you're a combat mission runner or basic...

The servers have been up and down all weekend as they patch bugs in the latest patch. This would usually be very annoying but it really screws with NPC supply and demand for goods so I'm spending all my time trying to stay at that sweet point which is having all my capital invested in buy or sell orders and therefore having no spare money available to do anything else with. When I'm at that point I can do things like eat or leave the house to do something productive. Oh well, at least it means I'm getting closer to...

Eve got a new patch yesterday. I wouldn't go as far as calling it an expansion because the only really new things are a few more bloodlines (races for any non-players who stumble across this). The server was down all day and finally came back up around 9pm-ish. Patch days are good as there's lots of downtime and downtime means that people aren't undercutting my sell orders, but on the other side my mineral and loot gear sales don't happen either. It was a reasonable day of trading dispite not being able to log on and I'm up another 30million, which...

I think I've finally settled down into a routine with playing Eve that keeps me logging in to do things when I would have been bored before. How? My corporation has expanded into Trade in a big way. I say my corp, but I'm the only member currently playing so it's not that big a deal although I do have two accounts, which is the price you pay for deciding that a power of 2 account is a good idea. It does help though as I do indeed have a combat and industrial character, but it's important to remember that...