Chocolate Heaven

Maybe it was a blip on the comms, an error of some-sort.

scutter off on its way

Regardless, she showed as on-comms for a brief time, and shortly after the error, or she left (depending on your perspective), I decided to run a trace with my agent.

“I found Mori Felding for you. She’s located at Hakeri XII Moon 14 Sebiestor Tribe Bureau.”

I hopped into my trusty shuttle, scutter, and plot a course for Hakeri.

“Our old mission-running haunt” I thought to myself… Why would she go there? She can’t even undock without there being a drop-all-donuts Concord warning occurring. Logic was definitely pointing towards an error in my communications systems. Maybe I was chasing a ghost. Regardless, I had to know for sure.

Hakeri - XII Moon 14 Sebiestor Tribe Bureau

So, a while later I arrived. I haven’t seen head nor tail of my ‘mark’, and so I play what is commonly referred to as the waiting game. Scouring the entire station would be impractical, but I’ve let a few close friends in on my observations and they have told me they will inform me as soon as possible if the comms-glitch reoccurs.

…I guess I do care afterall.

I’m a sucker for collecting stuff about EVE. I admit, I mostly got the first two years of EON magazine purely for the sake of having them. Usually the content within is outdated or public knowledge by the time it hits your doormat anyway, but that’s another matter…

I bought the EVE box, not because I don’t have one (I actually have two from back in 2003, I just can’t find them anymore), but more because, like I said, I’m a sucker for collectibles.

That, and the 60 days play time is not bad for the price I paid.

Anyway, here’s a shot of the box:

The cardboard sleeve of the box

What you get is a regular DVD game box, but inside a nice shiny cardboard sleeve with a bevelled EVE logo. The front of the box opens up to show a nice scene with some of the features of the game:

..And the inside of the sleeve

I saw this first on lotro, though there they made use of artistic licence, specifically with rendering the characters, who, although are nice in the game, aren’t as nice as the box art would have you believe. With this however, its about right; the game can look like that, its just that often, it doesn’t…

Next up is the manual:

Manual pages, showing the contrast between screenshots and interface shots

Its all in black and white inside for some reason. I’m sure its a design decision, but while it looks fantastic on screenshots, it doesn’t really work that well when showing interface elements, but never mind. The most important parts of the manual are also printed in Swedish, Finnish and Portuguese. I’m assuming these are the areas the game has been released, but for all I know there might be another version for the rest of Europe.

Lastly we have the gametime card and the guest pass:

60 day gametime card and the VIP guest pass

Just for completeness sake, that’s what you get in the box. The 60 days time is nice, and the 21 day access pass is kind of cool if you know anyone that you think would like EVE that doesn’t already play… which is my problem; I don’t.

Generally, a lot of the reasons to buy the box is for people interested in trying EVE for the first time, especially with the quick-start into factional warfare (which admittedly, I still haven’t tried myself), and I have heard great things about the vastly improved new player experience. Otherwise, its good for collectors, or cheapskates who can find it for cheaper than the cost of paying for 2 months of a sub

We went through a wormhole last night.

I was running late however, and in my infinite wisdom brought an armour buffer-tanked remote-repping tempest…

We fought a bug-like thing, which the scanner showed as battleship sized. It was tough, and unpredictable. I couldn’t work out at various points how it would react. That said, we noted a couple of important points:

1. It scrambles anything within 30km
2. If it feels frisky, it will switch to and take out your drones, so be careful with that one
3. It drops weird stuff for the looting!

So, the trick is to use something long range, ideally with an active tank, and with some kind of remote repair ability so you can spider tank with your fleet easier.

These things do seem to drop wrecks, so it might be worthwhile having someone with a utility slot stuff a salvager module in there.

I can’t really comment on the loot… It made no sense to a non sciency type like me, but there was a database, and some item Evanda thought would be reverse-engineer-able.

One other thing of note, is anomalies make local unusable for any kind of intel, so make sure everyone is scanning, and have another person (preferably in a covops) scanning down a possible alternative exit should the shit hit the fan.

Oh, and its pretty out there! (I’ll erm, try to remember to capture some images next time, heheh)

The start of a new year and things are back to a reasonable pace, with 11 people contributing lots of different parts, yay!

1st Place Winner
Our Inquisitor, netting 36.71m3 of parts. Nicely done. 20mil bonus for you this round.

2nd Place Winner
Eva, with 28.66m3. 10mil bonus for you, well done.

3rd Place Winner
Taizu, with 15.3m3. You’ll be getting a 5mil bonus.

Participants

Evanda Char: 28.66m3/0 – 28mil + 10mil prize + 4 rigs
Ezekial Alexander: 3.32m3/3 – 6mil
Inquisitor K’han: 36.71m3/0 – 36mil + 20mil prize + 4 rigs
Kalahari Wayrest: 4.1m3/0 – 4mil + 1 rig
Oyabun Nobunaga: 0.76m3/0 – 1mil + 0.76m3 carried over
Quious: 8.01m3/0 – 8mil + 2 rigs
Renata Enila: 0.69m3/0 – 1mil + 0.69m3 carried over
Shiaari: 7.89m3/0 – 7mil + 1 rig
Taizu Lilith: 15.3m3/8 – 23mil + 5mil prize + 3 rigs
Ulphus: 1.67m3/1 – 2mil
Wukulo: 1.95m3/31 – 32mil

A total of 108.96m3 of parts were collected, which accounts for 10,896 parts, 43 of which were intact pieces.

Total payout this time (+ bonuses) comes to 183mil.

Statistics will follow in the following months.

Total Salvage Collected

Alloyed Tritanium Bar: 521
Armor Plates: 612
Broken Drone Transceiver: 497
Burned Logic Circuit: 1613
Charred Micro Circuit: 1607
Conductive Polymer: 219
Contaminated Lorentz Fluid: 177
Contaminated Nanite Compound: 441
Damaged Artificial Neural Network: 143
Defective Current Pump: 133
Fried Interface Circuit: 1549
Malfunctioning Shield Emitter: 350
Melted Capacitor Console: 97
Scorched Telemetry Processor: 136
Smashed Trigger Unit: 859
Tangled Power Conduit: 151
Thruster Console: 411
Tripped Power Circuit: 997
Ward Console: 140

Good work everyone!

So, here we are.

Its been three months. Half of the ‘agreed’ timeframe.

The first few weeks were certainly the hardest for me. I went from having a person I cared about and trusted enough to depend upon in any given situation – someone with whom I did everything – to having nobody. I mean, obviously, I still had all the wonderful people in the corp, but… I guess I’m quite antisocial underneath all of the fluff, and when I do find someone who understands me, and how I fly, I cling to them.

After she left, I broke down. There’s no two ways about it. I was a wreck.

I found a nice empty area for rent in one of the stations in Hedal which I have been renovating slowly. Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet aside from making it look cool… Anyway, that was my focus for a time, mostly so I didn’t have to think about being alone again.

But the other day I had a realisation.. Well, two actually.

Firstly, I hardly ever check into my pod now. I have no motivation to undock and do anything, so I pretty much just don’t bother unless I have to.

And secondly, I don’t think she’s coming back…

I started with communications with her reasonably frequently, but slowly over time, responses have been coming back slower and less frequent. And now, there has been no response for weeks.

A quick glance at Concord’s public security records confirmed what I thought: -9.4 She’s exceeding, much as she always does, but more than that… -9.4 suggests that she’s actually enjoying killing innocent people. Enjoying working for and profiting with the same corporation that she left Re-Aw last year over, for so much as associating with them.

Historically, its been proven that once she gets into a fury over something, she can’t let go. So I’m going to have to.

She’s not coming back, and I’m not sure I care…