Chocolate Heaven

Wel­come to the twen­ti­eth install­ment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blog­ging extra­vag­anza cre­ated by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthu­si­astic group of gam­ing blog­gers, a com­mon topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post art­icles per­tain­ing to the said topic. The res­ult­ing art­icles can either be short or quite extens­ive, either funny or dead ser­i­ous, but are always a great fun to read! Any ques­tions about the EVE Blog Banter should be dir­ec­ted to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter art­icles at the bot­tom of this post!

With the recent com­ple­tion of the 3^rd install­ment of the Hulk­aged­don last month, @CyberinEVE, author of Hands Off, My Loots!, asks: “Griefing is a very big part of EVE.  Ninja Sal­va­ging, Sui­cide Gank­ing, Trolling, and Scam­ming are all a very large part of the game.  What do you think about all these things?  You can talk about one, or all...but just let us know your over­all opin­ion on Grief­ing, and any recom­mend­a­tions you may have to change it if you think it’s needed.”

Take a face­palm, or some “d’oh!”, or even some ragequit, and place it between two freshly baked slabs of stu­pid­ity, and you have a scam­wich. You can even spice it up a little with a few slices of ‘over-tired’, a dash of ‘drank-too-many-beers’ or even a healthy ‘it looked good on paper’ salad. The con­stant here though, is the bread, which in this ana­logy is the stu­pid (in case you missed it).

In order for scams to work, someone needs to be stu­pid. This doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean that the vic­tim is stu­pid, but rather they have to have a stu­pid moment, or act stu­pid. This hap­pens to every­one at some point. From play­ing when overly tired and buy­ing that expens­ive shuttle because it looked like it was 9k rather than the 9m you got billed (*raises hand of shame*), to invest­ing bil­lions into banks that even­tu­ally go belly-up when a dis­gruntled caretaker/director has had enough (*retracts hand of shame*).

Your isk, and your time in the game are your respons­ib­il­ity. There lit­er­ally is no point in cry­ing over spilt milk. Once you’ve fallen prey to a scam­mer, that’s it. That isk, or that [insert asset type here] is some­thing you’ll never be see­ing again. Even the months you inves­ted in train­ing that prom­ising young recruit only to have them go all Mr Hyde on you and nick the con­tents of the corp hangar — assets and time — all gone.

I sup­pose this is the anti­thesis of a pre­vi­ous post where I proudly pro­claimed that you should trust every­one within reason and just use your com­mon sense more. The most import­ant parts of that sen­tence are com­mon sense and within reason. There is — and always should be — vari­ous degrees or levels of trust. You gen­er­ally trust that when you’re cross­ing the road with the green man/walk sign that nobody is going to run you over. Like­wise, you gen­er­ally trust that in high-sec space, nobody is going to shoot at you without sanc­tion to do so (or without suf­fi­cient reward to neg­ate the pun­ish­ment for try­ing). But, if you invest in that not-a-pyramid scheme Yvonne from mar­ket­ing said was a sure deal, or invest your isk in an IPO, you run a reas­on­able risk that you’ll never see your money again.

Who is to blame in these lat­ter examples? Is it Yvonne from mar­ket­ing? Nope, its you, ya big ninny! Use your nog­gin! As I said before; scams work because people have moments of stu­pid­ity. As Eve has grown, there’s been more people to have stu­pid moments, and so there’s more scam­mers. You’ll never be rid of them because they ply their trade by per­fectly legit­im­ate means, and people are inher­ently greedy. This in turn leads to them tak­ing risks that they ordin­ar­ily would not.

Other stuff

You’ll find that a little com­mon sense (and occa­sion­ally some spite) goes a long way for other ‘unfair’ things in New Eden.

• Grief­ing — Don’t rise to it? Go some­where else for a while, or play some­thing else for a bit. There’s other games than Eve, or even (le gasp!) the out­side world. I hear pubs are a great place to social­ise and get drunk. Its like Eve, but with less PVP.
• Ninja Sal­va­ging — This is the one I don’t get. So many people whine about it. Just shoot your sal­vage as they get near it. You don’t get the profits, but you do get the sat­is­fac­tion of deny­ing them the same. They’ll soon find someone stu­pider and/or whi­nier to bother.
• Sui­cide Gank­ing — This won’t hap­pen unless you’re stu­pid enough to fly a kestrel filled with PLEX or sim­ilar, but really... Who’s stu­pid enough to do that?
• Trol­lo­lo­lo­lol­ing — A bit like grief­ing, but easier. Just ignore it. Some­times trolls are not imme­di­ately obvi­ous, but it usu­ally becomes clear after a short while. This is when you should just walk away, do not under any cir­cum­stances attempt to feed the troll unless you are a) bait­ing it, b) a can­ni­bal troll.

That’s all there is to it really. My down and dirty over­view of naughty things in Eve... Not those naughty things, you pervert!

I wanted to do some­thing much longer and more in-depth about human nature and anonym­ity, but last week my com­puter sort of melted and I didn’t have the time or motiv­a­tion to do some kind of epic, so I’ll be sav­ing it for another time — you lucky, lucky people!

A week later than I expec­ted, but all the bet­ter for it really — gave me some time to pol­ish some of the dodgy CSS, and spruce up the graph­ics a bit more.

Unlike the last iter­a­tion of the blog, this one is sub­stan­tially pret­tier than its pre­de­cessor. This is helped in no small part by Art­works of Awe­some™, cour­tesy of the amaz­ingly tal­en­ted Sienna. You can visit her web­site by click­ing here, or go to her Devi­antArt gal­lery by click­ing here. Some of it is not really work-safe, just FYI.

One thing with this lay­out has left me per­plexed. Of the tri­bal sym­bols I’ve used...

• The Vher­okior is either the leaf or a swirly thing depend­ing on what you go by: Offi­cial doc­u­ment­a­tion shows the leaf, but in-game char­ac­ter cre­ation and data dump shows the swirl, so who knows.
• Sebi­estor either has or hasn’t got mul­tiple ‘bridges’ between the two halves, again depend­ing on where you look. Data dump has the bridges, every­where else doesn’t.
• Brutor is ver­tic­ally sym­met­rical in the data dump, but only has the fangs/horns on the upper side every­where else.

So I just went for whatever I found first, then got into a quandary and researched it with no defin­it­ive answer later on. So its stuck like this for now. Yay! If you have any insight to this one, lemme know.

Also let me know if any­thing breaks. It looks all right in test­ing on Fire­fox, and I think it should be fine in IE/Opera/Chrome/Safari as well, but I’ve not had time to prop­erly check it. It most likely looks ter­rible in IE6, but that’s what you get for using crap tbh. Any feed­back is appre­ci­ated. I fully intend to evolve this theme a bit based on feed­back and my own ideas, so hit me with whatever!

Apart form that, noth­ing really inter­est­ing just yet. I’m still work­ing on some new posts in the back­ground about his­tor­ical mumbo-jumbo, so keep your eyes peeled.

After months and months of pon­der­ing on it, I’m going to be mak­ing some changes to this ‘ere blog.

They will almost entirely be aes­thetic, of course, because I get fid­gety sit­ting on any one style when I can change it eas­ily myself. I say eas­ily, but it’ll take me the rest of this week to get it close to how I want it. If work were to gra­ciously give me a free day, it’d be done tomor­row night, but alas...

I’m fore­go­ing the niceties of design­ing for IE6. You shouldn’t be using it any­way, its bad mojo. BAD MOJO.

I’ll also be say­ing ‘sod it’ to the tra­di­tional minimum-width rule, instead design­ing for a 1280px width min­imum. I remem­ber play­ing Eve on a 1024×768 res­ol­u­tion, you could hardly see any­thing, so if any­one has still got that kind of screen, go upgrade: screens are cheap these days!

What’s your price? It strikes me as an inter­est­ing ques­tion of late, with the advent of yet another alli­ance (even if only in name) going the way of the Dodo.

My price

About 18 months ago, I was some­what reluct­antly put into the pos­i­tion of being in charge again after a couple of ser­i­ously annoy­ing corp thefts and a MIA CEO. I say reluct­antly not because I dis­liked run­ning a cor­por­a­tion pre­vi­ously, but because I knew it was a lot of work to get it up and run­ning again.

Up until that point I had been reas­on­ably happy mak­ing sales to spe­cific cli­ents, and help­ing out with the tech 1 build cycle. Our then-CEO man­aged at least 7 char­ac­ters to deal with the rest. All of a sud­den, that had to be me, and at the time I had one indus­trial char­ac­ter. Throw in the miss­ing buck­ets of stock and blue­prints, and you had a whole mess of things to sort out, and no idea how to go about doing it.

The desire to just sell everything and have done with it was fairly high, but I per­severed for the sake of the leg­acy of the cor­por­a­tion and what it stood for. It was a bit like being handed the blue­prints to cre­at­ing a city and sev­eral bil­lion Dollars/Pounds/Euros, but not being given the tools, or even being told what tools you’d need to do it. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would have just said “sod it” and cashed in. Even if it meant giv­ing equal share to the other two people that put you in the pos­i­tion whereby this was an option.

So here’s a hypo­thet­ical for you, sports fans: If someone dropped 1–2 tril­lion ISK of assets into your lap, would you spend the next six months:

• Liquid­at­ing your stock and retir­ing fat and happy, shar­ing the wealth with those that put you in that pos­i­tion — chaotic good
• Liquid­at­ing your stock and retir­ing fat and happy to a secret alt and screw­ing every­one over — neut­ral evil
• Stock-taking, rebuild­ing blue­print col­lec­tions and cal­cu­lat­ing, even­tu­ally mak­ing a the­or­et­ical profit of 30b per month for around the equi­val­ent hours’ worth of effort — law­ful neut­ral (possibly...)
• Doing some­thing else (explain!) — ?

My price, then, depends a lot on effort. If someone could reli­ably give me what my stock is worth in a single lump sum of ISK, I would be temp­ted to do it. How­ever, I’d find myself really bored after that, since its mostly what I do (and enjoy, I might add!) in-game these days.

And along those lines, I return to the first ques­tion as well: What is your price in-game? Bonus cook­ies for honesty!

My friend, Inquis­itor Khan has been mak­ing 3D Eve stuff for a while now, and he’s on-and-off work­ing on a char­ac­ter for me. I thought I’d show off his mad skillz by post­ing a few here. You can leave a com­ment here if you like, or visit the forum thread: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1348604

Ini­tial render 1

Ini­tial render 2

Newer render 1

Newer render 2

Styled like some kind of paint­ing. I think it looks pretty cool!

The final product will need post work in Pho­toshop for the facial tat­toos, obvi­ously, but I think its com­ing along really well. Kudos to the Khan!