What I love about Eve #4: Freighter Kills

Here's a story that demonstrates one more thing I love about Eve. As we all know, the Dominion patch has changed how alliances can claim territory in 0.0 space. Now, they must deploy various structures in their systems to claim them and upgrade them to support things like jump bridges and so on. One item that needs to be deployed is something called an infrastructure hub, which is an enormous structure that must be moved by huge freighters out to the alliances' systems to be deployed.

Now huge freighters filled with expensive cargo regularly move around New Eden, but not usually in such numbers at the same time as is happening now when the alliances are upgrading their territory. This has provided an opportunity for mischief, which in typical Eve fashion has not been neglected.

In an ISD post on the Eve Online web site, there are reports that dozens of freighters have been ambushed and destroyed as they deliver the infrastructure hubs needed by their alliances. One alliance reportedly lost 17 freighters when an opposing alliance attacked a fleet of freighters moving equipment out to null sec. As a freighter may cost 1 billion ISK, and the infrastructure hub it was most likely carrying costs 500 million, the losses from these ambushes is significant to say the least.

Just one more reason to love Eve...

PPL featured on CrazyKinux' web site

Check it out! My corporation, Phoenix Propulsion Labs, is featured on Crazy Kinux' blog. You can see the article here: http://www.crazykinux.com/2009/12/phoenix-labs-few-proud-industrialists.html.

The means of production

According to some communist leader back in the day, it was he who controlled the means of production who had the real power in society. Well, I have now been given control of the means of production for my corporation, having been granted access to the corp hangars where we keep the blueprints we use to build tech 1 stuff. In addition, I've been added to the roster of builders, and now will be assigned stuff to build every week.

The funny thing about production is how easy it is, and yet how nice it feels to be a bigger part of our corporation's main money making operation. While all I can build right now is tech 1 stuff, by providing extra build slots to the corporation, the higher skilled builders can concentrate on building more interesting stuff. And since the tech 2 stuff starts life as tech 1 stuff, I'm providing the base items that get our who production process started. It's just one more way to contribute to the success of the corporation, and it feels good.

So while I am no more powerful than I was before, there is still something to be said about having access to, if not control over, the means of production.

D-Day Arrives...

Yesterday was the launch of Dominion, and overall I would say the launch was remarkably smooth. I know that a lot of the update was around 0.0 changes, but there were a number of changes that were really cool for any player.

The new browser that it built into the game is fantastic. It is not only usable (unlike the previous browser), it is actually quite fast and renders pretty well. Previously I would have to switch to windowed mode if I wanted to surf and mine at the same time. Now I can just use the in game browser to give me something to do while I am mining.

"X-ing up" looks like it will be a thing of the past with the new Fleet Finder. I used it last night several times and it really works well.

Finally, the mail looks much better. Our corp doesn't do much with mail, probably because the in game mail system was so bad, but the new system looks pretty good.

It was a successful deployment in my book, especially considering the fiasco of the last patch I went through when doing a gate jump was a crap shoot!

Way to go, CCP!