Salvaging

I have spent some more time on Sisi again recently, mainly testing the Rokh, which can hit from miles away with rails btw. I also got some salvaging equipment BPO’s to build a few of the new modules. These new rigs all need new components to build them, these will only be available from salvaging wrecks, but at the moment the test market is flooded with the new components. Anyway back to the Rokh testing, I have done a few level 4 missions in it, but it isn’t realy designed to be a mission boat, I expect it will be used as a Caldari sniper ship do to its nice range with rails and cruise missiles. I fitted my ship with a Salvager I, which is a high slot module, and a rig to give me a bonus to salvaging, rigs are permanent, like implants, they can only be moved from a ship by repacking it.
So when you kill a ship now you get a wreck rather than a loot can from every ship you destroy. These wrecks may not contain any loot, and may only have a chance of salvaged components, some have both. To use a salvager you need to be within 5000m of the wreck, and the wreck must have had all its standard loot removed before you can activate your salvager. Salvaging takes about 5-10 seconds, and seems to go in two cycles, as if it runs twice. Sometimes you are successful on the 1st try and you get some salvaged loot and sometimes it takes two attempts. After success or two failures you either get 1 unit of a new component or nothing, and the wreck vanishes. You can determine if a wreck has any normal loot from a distance of 5km now as your salvager will not activate and you get a message about removing normal loot if the wreck contains any.
Visually the wrecks look far better than a boring jet can, but they could still do with some polishing, they look like blown apart poly models rather than wrecks imho. I am going to test out the new battlecruisers over the weekend, I have a few sitting in my hangar to fit out and fly.
When this all go’s live I can see a big rush to be the 1st to have one of the new ships, and prices are going to be stupid, it will probably be the same with the new rigs. Even though the BPO’s are going to be on the market, the components to build them are going to be 100% player driven from salvaging, so I can see the prices being high. I plan to get a Salvager I BPO for the corp on the 1st day Kali lands, so we can hammer missions for salvage components and get in on the rig market. From memory we are looking at probably another 30-50 new BPO’s to pick from just at T1 level, so there will be lots of new modules and skills that everyone will want.
Until more testing reports from Sisi……

I'm still here

Its been a bit quiet here for the last week or so, I haven’t had much time to log into EVE either. The reason behind my absence is that I have been setting up an internet radio station, and I had a LOT of music files to tag and organise. I have managed to get the broadcast server hosted on a nice fast server, I have been streaming at 128kbps so far with no problems, I am going to test out a 192kbps stream later on today for top quality.

On the EVE front, I have become a siege warfare specialist now and can add a nice bonus to your shield resistances when I am in my Vulture, the covert ops training has paid off too, I am able to scan almost anywhere undetected…
I hear from our C.E.O that Raven production and sales are going well, so well we will have to think about gathering some more minerals soon. The idea of a buy order grates with me, when its all sitting there for free, but time is money as they say, and we all have lots of one and none of the other.
The recent patch we had to enable large patch file support is a good sign Kali is getting a step closer, the last big patch on the test server was about 35Mb if I recall correctly, but I expect the final patch to be slightly smaller, could we have Kali by December? I guess they want to get it implemented and stable before Christmas so the Dev’s can actually get a Christmas.

Oh yeah I knew there was another reason for my lack of time this last week, I am getting married next August so we have been busy paying out lots of money. At least I have finished decorating the bathroom now, might get some more EVE time…

Lastly CCP and White Wolf, when I first saw the headline my 1st thoughts were ‘oh no CCP have sold out!’, but I was wrong. The buyout of White Wolf could be a nice cash cow for CCP Games, even if its just greater advertising. Hopefully it wont lead to too much concentration on the card game side of EVE and to Vampire Space Ghosts as some have pondered upon.

ExCol Radio

I have found a new toy to play with, we have a nice shoutcast radio station now, especially for all you people. I am in the process of moving the server to a proper web host, so for the time being you will have to put up with my bandwidth, which should be ok for a few of you, but not that many. I am probably going to password protect the requests pages, mainly to keep my music library away from prying eyes.

I have just got some more advanced broadcast software, so expect some flashy cross-fades, adverts, jingles and more. I think I will set up another sub-domain for the radio stream, something like radio.bambi.ws.This is another reason for you all to go out and get a mic/headset, not only will you be able to join teamspeak but you can be a DJ too…You can DJ for free with the Oddcast plugin, available for most media players (not iTunes Bob) or I can sort you out the same software I have. As far as bandwidth for DJ’ing go’s all you need is enough bandwidth to upload 1 stream to the server, which isnt much at 96kbs or even at 128kbps its very little.

To listen go here and click the listen now link

http://bambi.ws/radio/

I have now got a proper 196kbps stream so the sound is cool.

Warp to 0m

So what does this mean? Well you can kiss goodbye to a People & Places full of insta bookmarks for starters, which should be a huge relief on the database. Lets say there are 100,000 subscribers with pretty much active accounts, each with a very conservative estimate of 5,000 bookmarks, that’s half a billion database records made redundant in 1 hit. So it’s a good thing for the servers performance and to help reduce lag, but is it a good thing for game play? For most law abiding citizens of EVE it will be a great boon, but a pain in the neck for your average gank-squad wanna-be pirate, who have just go the keys to Mummies Thorax for the 1st time. It will effectively put an end to gate camping on the exit side of a system, there might be an increase in super fast scramblers locking people down as they appear the other side of a gate after jumping, but this is much harder to do and requires some planning and spies in surrounding systems. Traders may find themselves ripped out of warp by more interdictors with warp bubbles, all good IMO.

So how does this work on the test server?
You now have the right click, warp to options of 0m, 10km, 20km, 30km, 50km, 70km, 100km, and 120km, if I remember correctly. These are available on any object you can normally ‘warp to..’ The ‘dock’ option on distant stations also makes you warp to 0m then insta-dock, while Auto-Pilot still uses the default 15km warp in distance. There is already a huge thread on the testing forums about this, 95% of people are in favour but there are the 5%, who probably are the kiddie gank-squads, who don’t like it cos it hurts gate camping. They will give some BS about it ruining EVE’s economy due to the lack of ships destroyed, but all they are moaning about is that they cant pop haulers at gates with their Scorpions and Ravens.
More to follow with more testing……

Cold Turkey

Anyone shaking yet? Guess not, its only been down for a few hours so far. So how is everyone coping with no EVE for over 24 hours, shame it’s a bit chilly in The Big Room as its nice and sunny today. I have some character info scripts to play with this evening, so I can still do EVE type stuff, I may try to put together a secure database of all my corps members. One good thing about extended downtimes is you all come and look at my websites and forums, makes me feel wanted anyway…..

If anyone is up for a few rounds of Counterstrike this afternoon you know where to find me, if you don’t follow the link over there -->
You will need a password, but if you know me you know the password or at least know how to get it. If you still don’t know then just mail me and say Oi! Gimmie the password, I want to shoot your face off in CS. Its only passworded to keep idiots out.