So Trinity came and went and was something of a mixed blessing, as it turned out, not least of all logging in for the last few days and seeing a stonking great 'DO NOT REBOOT!' Message of the Day. I gather there was some kind of troubles with it mucking about with critical Windows XP system files? For the first time since I got it, I find myself glad to own Vista, which by all counts was largely immune to the somewhat alarming boot sector destruction hijinks.
Mind you, it wasn't just that, and there's a pretty huge list of outstanding issues that seem to have arisen from what they're calling EVE's 'Premium Content', and associated server-end gubbins:
OGRank: EVE Online: Trinity Known Issues
In which CCP put out some rather frank build notes. Seems there's a bit of work to go on it all then, and the fancy new graphics are only a fraction of the troubles. Mind you, I'd not noticed any of it myself, and the biggest problem I had with it all was that the upgrade lost me my hidden Anti-Aliasing settings. In the end I'm using the Catalyst Control Centre out in windows to force AA, and even that doesn't work if you turn on EVE's own new HDR lighting settings. Over-blown super-glow stars are nice enough, but I just can't live with the Jaggies, so the HDR is off. The only other user fiddleable control for the new graphics is Shadow complexity. Since that's the thing that hammers my FPS the most in all games, that's all the way off too. Huh. Oh well, I'm sure a new graphics card isn't too far off (I have a Radeon X1300, by the way), and with the Catalyst managing things form behind the scenes, the FPS is acceptably high, the edges sufficiently smooth, and the shininess nicely...er....shiny!
My pride and joy!
The move is halfway done. I managed to find a nice quiet long route to the new corp frontier, and a combination of luck, timing and careful study of the map saw me get my two main ships through; a Helios and a Hurricane. The other two 'keepers' from my previous collection, the Ishkur and the Tanaris, can come on down at a later date, as to be honest, both were mostly trophy items that I have no idea how to use properly! The rest of my fleet consisted mostly of Tech 1 Frigates and Cruisers I'd accumulated out of a kind of obsessive Pokemon-like collector's impulse, rather than any real necessity. Still, travel light and all, and I sold and/or melted down most of the junk I'd previously had.
The new location is quite well chosen actually, a pocket of low-sec (0.4-0.1), with a buffer zone of high-sec (0.5-1.0) space between it and the rest of the galaxy, making it a bit of a rockpool, isolated from the dangerous seas of 0.0 proper. That won't stop a capital ship with a Jump Drive getting in, although smaller gangs of -5 Sec Pirates won't make it through the conventional High Sec jump gates intact without a lot of hastle, and to be honest, there isn't an awful lot there for them anyway. It's a quiet area, with most of the basics, but a much quieter market than in the core empire systems, meaning that a lot of what we'll need, we'll have to make for ourselves.
One thing that's struck me is that the local chat lists in this area, are mostly occupied by people with little blue icons next to their names. Clearly our people have been talking to their people, and despite it being low-sec, and therefore a place were people can shoot at you and get away with it, I'm actually seeing friendlies in the local lists. Well, friends is a loose term - our diplomacy person doesn't know every member of these blue corps personally, and there's always one lurking psycho, but it's nice to know that the folks around us are more inclined not to open fire than open fire.
I think that's the big problem I've always had with PvP - I've always gone at it alone. This time it's different, and with the expedient of shared channels for intel and that kind of thing, a surprising number of corps coexist in this area, with only such laws as that come to agree on, for protection. It blows on the dying embers of my faith in humanity, it really does! Meanwhile, back in Empire, a corp doesn't really need to have allies, standings or diplomacy - its either ignore everyone, or WAAAAAAAR!
My own time in region I shall hereafter refer to as 'Rockpool', is mostly spent either scanning for Exploration Sites in the Helios, or Ratting in the low-sec asteroid belts with the Hurricane, which provide Cruiser and Battlecruiser targets, which is nice, particularly since the Agents of the area are only giving me Level 1 and 2 missions, making the belt rats a much more lucrative proposition. I really ought to work on the standings a bit though. Agent 1 Combat missions in a Battlecruiser are much like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and mostly I just park up and let the drones out to play.
I've never liked Asteroid Mining in EVE, in any shape or form, but quite a few in our corp do, and one of the things I hope to make myself useful with, is being on call in a decent PvP-fit ship, in case interlopers show up and start kicking off a fuss in this otherwise quite tranquil lagoon - a kind of roving militia. I hope its having an encouraging effect, if nothing else, as I have only the occasional and very staged in-corp PvP Tournament type of kill to my name so far. I'm not aggressive enough to go full-on pirate, but hopefully, by placing myself slightly in harms way, like this, I may get a chance to learn the ropes a bit, in the pursuit of a worthy cause; looking after our own. I don't imagine the Battlecruiser will last long, and after that's gone, it'll be onto the Cruisers for a bit, I expect, until I can start to confidently expect at least a 50/50 chance of winning. We'll see. Probably turn out that these mining folk are every bit as capable in combat as me, only better funded. Afterall, there's only so many SP you can put into rocks, and all that mineral income has to go somewhere...
I quite like having this smaller playground to be honest. The Galaxy of EVE is a huge place, but very little of it matters, I've always found. Sure, my stuff is mostly in system X, and the corp office is in system Y, but one is much like another. With this smaller map of relevant systems, perhaps some of the sprawling universe of EVE might start to feel like a kind of home...