Blizzard announced that they are doing well financially, then brought up the release of StarCraft II being pushed back to the first half of next year to coincide with the revamped Battle.net.
Maybe they will use this time to add LAN support which Rob Pardo announced was not planned for the game back in June. Ars Technica has a good article on why LAN support is important to so many of us older players.
Time and the training queue wait for no man.
It takes about 7 months or so for me to accumulated 10 million skill points in EVE Online. Whether I am playing actively or on a bit of a break, the skill points keep coming. So back in January I hit the 30 million skill point mark, and at about the same interval before that I hit 20 million and then 10 million skill points.
Since Apocrypha came out I normalized my attributes so that they are all, with skills and implants, sitting at 23.10. This means that no matter what area I decide to train in, the skill points come in at a rate of 2,079 per hour.
For me, this works, as I tend to be all over the skill tree. Previously if I was working on spaceship command skills, I would be trucking along at 2,300 sp/hr, but if I had to switch over to leadership, I would be down at 1,500 sp/hr. If I were focused only on combat related skills, this wouldn’t be such a smart idea, but being the generalist that I am, it is fine.
So after another 10 million skill points, here is how my skill point totals line up.
Spaceship Command: 8,199,285 Engineering: 5,740,869 Science: 4,948,539 Trade: 3,271,765 Missiles: 3,208,506 Learning: 3,078,488 Industry: 2,461,964 Leadership: 2,307,163 Mechanic: 1,178,568 Electronics: 1,510,936 Gunnery: 1,442,459 Social: 1,015,932 Navigation: 959,314 Drones: 670,758 Corp Management: 28,243
Spaceship Command is once again my top category. Last time around Engineering had passed it because I had focused on shield related skills. This time though there was a lot of training to fly first the freighter and then the Orca. And then when I started to slump in EVE I threw Cladari Battleships V on the list, over a million skill points right there, as an investment in the future. You need that skill to fly the Golem as well as a few capital ships.
Leadership also went up quite a bit thanks to the attribute shuffle and the requirements to fly an Orca and use that mining foreman implant. Missiles nearly doubled as well in total skill points because when in doubt I put my money in skills that make things go boom.
Wilhelm has 191 known skills, up 21 since the 30 million mark. Thanks to the skill queue that was added with Apocrypha he has just a single skill at level 1 now. That skill is Frigate Construction. I cannot remember exactly why I bought it (some plan involving the construction of frigates I would guess) and could not see any reason to train it up any further, so it remains my token level 1 skill.
Wilhelm’s skills are distributed as follows:
Level 1: 1 skill Level 2: 41 skills Level 3: 36 skills Level 4: 57 skills Level 5: 56 skills
That is 15 more skills at level 5 since the last time. I am at the point where refining things requires level V skills. I also have a lot more skills at level 2. I think I did a mass 1 to 2 training session to test out the training queue system. Level 3 and 4 skills remained pretty close to where they were before.
Finally there is the titan metric.
Way back when I calculated with EVE Mon that it would take me over 168 days to be able to fly the Caldari Titan. At the last checkpoint I had that down to 146 days. As of this point I am just over 99 days from being able to fly that titan, having shaved off 47 days, most of which was thanks to Caldari Battleship V.
Given the now constant rate of 2,079 skill points per hour, it will take a little over 200 days for me to be able to report on where I stand at 50 million skill points. That will put me at about February 17th, 2010, given that I rolled over the 40 million mark last Sunday.
Unless I train some of those remaining learning skills or buy some better implants. How much does +5 cost? I’m going to guess they cost a lot.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 