Bullet Points on Black Friday

No Black Friday deals here, but I am not much of a shopper.  Instead I am hunkered down with the TV, video games, and a large supply of turkey sandwiches as I sort through bits of news that were not worth a full post.

Pokemon Sun & Moon Scare

There was a story out earlier this week about a bug in Pokemon Sun & Moon that was causing players to lose their game saves.  That would be a miserable turn of affairs, especially since the bug seemed to be in the end game, specifically the Battle Tree competitive battle area.  I wasn’t that far along in the game, but it seemed like Nintendo was going to have to put out a patch. (A joy of the 3DS generation is that they can patch games even if you get them on a cartridge.)

And then a follow up came out that the problem was related to people using a hack to alter their game which was damaging their save file causing them to lose their saved game eventually.  Problem avoided for me, but I imagine that there are some people in the PKHex tool community that are pissed.

Pokemon Go Holiday Bonus

If you are still playing Pokemon Go (my wife and I still play daily, even if our daughter has moved to teen disdain when it comes to the game) then you have probably seen that, in addition to the daily “first catch” and “first pokestop” bonuses, for a limited time Niantic is also giving out double experience and double pokedust.  This event lasts through November 30th.  It might be time to crack a lucky egg and evolve all those Pokemon I have been saving up.

Death to The Mittani

Or, rather, death to the news site The Mittani Dot Com, as the team there transitions from the four year old Drupal based site to the shiny new WordPress based Imperium News Network site.  The INN site has been up for a while, but The Mittani announced the official cut-over this week.  The swap over has been accompanied by a resurgence in activity.

Of course, my first concern about the change was whether or not this change was going leave yet more dead links here on the blog.  I have been assured that the old links will route to the stories on the new site, though I won’t really believe it until the old site is gone.

New Ways to Mangle My Words

WordPress.com has added a Google Translate widget to the array of options for WordPress.com users.  So I put it up on the side bar.  However, your mileage may vary, as they say.  It will probably work okay when I stick to simple declarative sentences free of jargon, but I suspect that comedy will ensue when I start in on a post about EVE Online.

And that is all I could come up with.  Time for a turkey sandwich as I try to find my way back home in Minecraft.

 

A Strange Time to Shoot Monkeys on Auraxis

These are great days we’re living, bros. We are jolly green giants, walking the Earth… with guns. These people we wasted here today are the finest human beings we will ever know. After we rotate back to the world, we’re gonna miss not having anyone around that’s worth shooting.

Crazy Earl, Full Metal Jacket

Life is heating up in the north end of null sec space.  As noted elsewhere, what has been dubbed the Casino War between SpaceMonkey’s Alliance and the gambling site I Want ISK has escalated into a concentrated attack on SMA’s home in the Fade region by groups hired by the gambling site to attack our Imperium allies.  SMA has abandoned their foothold in Cloud Ring and, after some of there own internal drama, set about to defend their space.

Of course The Imperium is there to stand by and defend SMA.  Reavers were recalled to the north.  Forces have been focused to help cover their space.

Suggestions by our foes that we reset or otherwise abandon SMA in the middle of this fight are beyond ludicrous.  Nobody gets reset in the middle of a war.  That is a recipe for disaster.  If anybody deserves to get cut, they’ll get cut when things settle down.

Besides, a war, one with regular action right in the middle of our home space, one that has fleets going up every night, with kill mails to be had, along with a brand new shiny doctrine to fly… well, is that made-to-order content or what?

So with that pot boiling, it seems like an absolutely perfect time to… tell the coalition to go play another game!

Yes, The Mittani is monetizing his followers in conjunction with Daybreak and/or/by (pick the one that suits your narrative) encouraging a team building expedition to PlanetSide 2! 

As with the H1Z1 invasion last year, there is a code you can get from the site to collect a few exclusive items.

Official graphic or something

I think the “and more” is the title Imperator.

Members of The Imperium are being encouraged to run off and play… in the middle of our war… as part of the Vanu Sovereignty on the Emerald server.

On the upside of all of this PlanetSide 2 (unlike H1Z1) is free (to the point of being problematic for Daybreak), relatively stable (though we broke the server on the first night), and being a shooter, is easy enough to jump into and out of quickly if there are no fleet ops going on at the moment.

So, good line member that I am, I went and downloaded the PlanetSide 2 client again and started trying to figure out how to play over the weekend.  It is a shooter, but it is also an MMO with advancement and upgrades and a cash shop and blah blah blah… plus, while I played it for a bit when it launched, that was a couple years back.

I think I’ve sort of got a handle on the medic role at this point.  The graphics, and thus the world, as somewhat bland.  But for a shooter where you can get a hundred people in a pretty small area killing each other, that is probably a requirement just to keep frame rates up.  The cash shop is as confusing as ever.  I have nearly 12K in what was once Station Cash on my account from subscribing to EQ and EQ2 over the last few years and I couldn’t tell you want I should spend it on.  So it just sits in my wallet.

I’m also a little less impressed with the game’s Guinness Book record.  Not only was the number (1,158 players) something of a yawn compared to EVE (4,070 at 6VDT-H) but it is clear that it was an all effort staged event because there is a hard population limit… a limit which seems to be considerably lower than the record…  and a queue for continents when that number is reached.

But those are minor gripes.  The game is fun enough in that frantic way that shooters are.  A decent distraction.  And aim bots, often the bane of such games, seem to be under control.  It is hard to tell with snipers… and I get sniped often enough… but with combat in visual range nobody seems to magically hitting their targets, a situation even I have been able to detect in the past when playing shooters.

The small yet ironic twist to all of this is that our SMA allies in The Imperium were already active on the Emerald server in PlanetSide 2.  According to their Dead Monkey Gaming site, they were headed there last October.  However, they went to the New Conglomerate on the Emerald server while, as noted, the call from TMC has been to join the Vanu Sovereignty.

So we appear to be shooting Monkeys in our own way on Auraxis, the world on which PlanetSide 2 takes place.  I know I’ve been killed by a couple.  The timing of this is interesting, even if it is accidental.

Five Friday EVE Tidbits… On Monday

Because I never quite got around to finishing this on Friday.

1- CCP and Trion Cross Pollination

Nosy Gamer noted that CCP and Trion have been exchanging staff.  Earlier in the year David “Triple A and Here to Stay!” Reid, who spent most of his time at Trion tryin’ to annoy Blizzard, moved to CCP where he adopted the tag CCP_Pokethulhu.

Meanwhile, former CCP executive producer Nathan Richardsson (aka CCP Oveur) has moved over to Trion to work on their new MMO.

All of which makes me look at the Rift Empyrean Mechanics page and wonder if I can somehow tie together Storm Legion and the EVE Empyrean Age expansion.  Surely there is a conspiracy theory or a lawsuit there waiting to be created!

2 – The War Between the Sites

Kirith Kodachi took a look at how two EVE Online news sites, the venerable EVE News 24 and the new upstart The Mittani.com, are faring in traffic.

The emergence of a competitor named after the chief Space Goon certainly shook things up.  The Mittani.com, by the yardstick chosen, seems to have hit parity with its older rival pretty quickly, focusing on content written by a dedicated staff, including an editor lured away from EN24.  Meanwhile, Riverini has repositioned the editorial stance of largely syndicated EN24 to make it the focus of Goon opposition.

Ha, ha, just kidding!  EN24 was always anti-Goon!  The last pretense otherwise has merely been removed.

3 – Bumping: It’s the New Ganking

James 315 has been attempting to create a new order in high sec.  However, rather than ganking the ice miners that occupy the space he intends to control, he has taken to bumping them instead.  And he has a blog dedicated to his efforts, complete with irate chat logs. Grief will find a way.

4 – EVE Has Sound!

Who knew, right?

Most of the time I play EVE I have the sound off because I am on voice coms or I am listening to something else.  But sometimes I want the sound.  Sometimes I want to hear that voice say, “Warp drive active.”

However I haven’t been able to get the sound to work in EVE for ages.  I have tinkered with the settings.  But there isn’t really a lot of choices there, and none seemed to have an impact.

And then I was having problems with another app and I traced that down to the Windows 7 sound mixer, which you can access via the little speaker icon on the task bar.  While I was there, I launched to EVE to see how it was set.  Sure enough, for reasons unknown, the mixer decided to turn the volume for EVE all the way off.

So if you are looking for the sound in EVE Online, try that.

5- EVE-Kill.net Still Needs Your Help

I posted last week about this.  About 90 people have donated up to this point, which puts them half way to their base goal and about a quarter of the way to their full goal.

Well, the site is still having problems.  It was up but not processing data for a lot of the weekend.  I must have seen/heard more than more than 90 people bitch about site not being functional.

So go to this link, or click on the graphic above, and donate to this site that.  Clearly a lot of us will lose the will to live if it goes down.

John Smedley Talks To… The Mittani!

A year ago, hearing something from John Smedley, the CEO of Sony Online Entertainment was something of a note.  If he was interviewed or updated his blog or actually tweeted something, that got coverage as much for the novelty of it.

Random SOE Logo

He helped bring EverQuest to life nearly a decade and a half ago, and he spoke at fanfest and like events, but for long stretches you wouldn’t hear much from him.  My personal theory is that the Star Wars Galaxies NGE sent him into hiding from the general public.  How often do you image he got accosted about that?

But in 2012 all that seems to have changed.

He is in the news, on the floor at E3, doing the keynote at GDC Online, answering anything on Reddit, saving the Macintosh version of EverQuest, and announcing big new plans at SOE.  Meanwhile his Twitter account is so alive it dominates my feed some days as he seems to be trying to drive the PlanetSide 2 beta partially through sheer force of will. (No more beta key spam please!)

Back in May I chuckled at the idea of Smed in a Drake.  I actually got an email from him regarding that post in which he pointed out he was an EVE player, went to fanfest, flew in null sec, and happened to be on the same side as I was in the war in the north.  Well, that last bit came out because he sent me a picture of his gaming rig (3x 30″ monitors… color me jealous) which included GARPA, the CFC route planning tool on his screen.  Busted!

(No, I am not going to send you the picture, and all of the above came out in other ways already, so no confidences betrayed.)

So I suppose it is no surprise that over at The Mittani dot Com, which has been covering games of potential interest to EVE players, such as PlanetSide 2, Smed sat down with Mittens himself to talk about what it took him to get into EVE Online, rumors of Sony buying CCP, the importance of sandboxes, and where online gaming needs to go in the future.

Meanwhile, if you want in on Planetside 2, you can join the Alpha Squad for a mere $39.95.

You say alpha, I say beta, let’s patch the whole thing up…

The Mittani Announces The Mittani Dot Com

Behold: real news, real quality. It's about time. http://t.co/p5zcwZRL #eveonline #tweetfleet

— ~GOON-EMPEROR OF DELVE~ (@TheMittani) August 14, 2012

That was the message from The Mittani this morning on Twitter, the announcement that there would be a new EVE Online site on the web, one modestly named after the most well known player in the game: Himself.

And so was born The Mittani Dot Com.

But it isn’t a site dedicated to The Mittani or just his writing.  Instead the plan is to create a new EVE Online focused news site.

Endie, one of the more most well spoken member of the EVE community and someone I hope will be a regular at the new site, wrote the welcome post, which opened with:

Welcome to your numbered, collector’s first edition of TheMittani.com, a gaming site with a particular focus on Eve Online.  Our goal is to create a combination of news and commentary for you that is both up-to-date and insightful, and one which combines old-fashioned fact-checking with a broad range of contributors in order to provide an authoritative source of updates for Eve Online and everything that interests Eve Online players.  We have by far the largest team working on any Eve-related site – currently over twenty people both behind the scenes and producing content, and we hope that that breadth of talent will show in the quality of what you read.

The opening post is long and covers various aspects of the “how, why, and who” of the site so far.  The goal is a focus on quality.

Our goal at TheMittani.com is to set a high standard for the quality of writing on this site.  We hope to provide as balanced a view as possible, so that those on all sides of Eve’s conflicts can come here for information, even if they sometimes disagree with the analysis of one writer or another.  And most importantly, we hope to give you something far more interesting than work to do on a Monday morning in that awkward gap between getting that first cup of coffee and fictionalising your timesheets.

So there it is.

They have even managed to avoid that common error of launching a site and having nothing to see.  There are already a number of articles posted.  Some have been seen elsewhere, but there is enough new to make it viable.

Aside from the lack of an RSS feed, it looks like a damn fine venture so far.  We shall see how it develops.

Edit: There is now an RSS Feed.