Hulkageddon V: Unholy Union – Coming Soon

[March 4 Update: Per The Mittani, Hulkageddon is on hold until Helicity gets back to playing EVE.]

[March 31 Update: Helicity is back and it looks like this might kick off in late April.]

[April 6 Update: Helicity speaks! Hulkageddon is on for April.]

The unholy union is the fact that the Goons are sponsoring the event.

The Mittani and Helicity Together

From the announcement thread on the EVE forums:

Conflict is the life blood of New Eden.

Conflict is in the heart and soul of the Capsuleer.

Created by the artifice of man we transcend the limits of mortality and walk amongst the stars like Gods.

But the bloodline of Gods is tainted by weakness. The generations that have followed us have grown soft and weak. They cling to the skirts of the oppressive Empires that gave birth to them, they toil like slaves in the Asteroid Fields, they hide under the watchful gaze of CONCORD.

The dilution of our sacred blood must be ended, those who fear conflict will never grow strong, those that cower in slavery to the Empires will never grow strong. While their pitiful state continues, we are diminished as a whole.

So come now, all the outcasts, all the disenfranchised. The Brave, The Cruel, The Few. Come now and arm yourselves and strike down that which weakens us, so we may grow stronger.

The Empires seek to make you weak. And for their hubris, we will burn them to the ground. For we are capsuleers, and our very words and thoughts command the engines of War. We are Capsuleers, and we are Free.

…And this time we are not alone, our brethren from the outer rim, the mighty Goons have pledged their support, backed by their vast financial power we will carve a hole in the hearts of the weak and reap a bloody harvest.

There can be no other Destiny. Let them all burn.

No date has yet been announced, but it will presumably start at some point after Skyrim has settled down a bit… and when The Mittani isn’t busy fleecing suckers.  The guy in that last thread chose the name Admiral Thrawn and yet fell for that?  Clearly a naming violation of some sort there.  For those who want a more concise summary of that scan, you can find it here.

Quote of the Day – A New Fleet Interdictor In EVE

no one in the deklien coalition can get a fleet going because everyone is playing elder scrolls

-a friend in the alliance Tactical Narcotics Team

The plague that is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim seems to be everywhere tonight.  Fully half the people on my Raptr friends list are playing it or were playing it earlier.

Is it any good?

The Launch Day SWTOR Patch – How Big Do You Think It Will Be?

Not that I have any reason to be pondering the SWTOR patch process *cough* but I have been thinking about it over the last 24 hours.

Launch day for Star Wars: The Old Republic, pegged at December 20th, is not much more than a month away, which means that the final DVD that will ship in the box has either already been mastered or will be very shortly.

A dark box for dark Jedi

Working schedules backwards as a project manager was one of my favorite ways to confound the ship date desires of product marketing people.  The good ones appreciated that sort of peek into reality, the bad ones would complain up the management chain that I wasn’t being a team player.

Anyway, to get to a December 20th ship launch date that includes product on store shelves, you have to make a master, give it to the replication house to have it produced, stick the final discs in their sleeves, drop them in boxes with all the other materials, seal the boxes, put the boxes in case packs, label and send them off to various distribution centers, which in turn need to be shipped to all the possible retail outlets, all during the busiest shipping time of the year and with enough slack to ensure that nobody gets caught short.

This was all a truly painful process back in the day when you couldn’t count on internet access for immediate patches… and when companies cared about their documentation.  Did you see how big that Civilization II manual was I got?  And it was accurate and useful, not just ballast in the box to make it feel like you were getting your money’s worth.

But now, you can burn your master disc way in advance and be saved at the last minute through the miracle of the internet and its ability to deliver a launch day “make it right” patch to almost all of your customers.

And if you are shipping an MMORPG, you can patch up all your customers, guaranteed… unless you really screw up and ship a broken patcher… but that is another story.

So it is almost assured that what we get on disc for SWTOR on launch day will need to be patched before any of us can play.

But the question is, how big will that first patch be?

Anyway, back to waiting for my own patching event to finish.  3.4 GB left to download.  Time enough to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II.