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The following is a repost from this thread in the Assembly Hall forum on EVE’s website.  I figured I’d post it here as well, seeing as the Hall thread has almost no chance against the walls of useless issue threads getting dumped in there every hour.

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Faction warfare’s got more people into PVP now in groups, presumably they’re utilizing EVE voice for the majority of voice comms. There’s been recent attention in patches to get things more stable, which is a good thing. Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s used EVE Voice has mentioned now the integration is great, and the quality is about a billion times better than Teamspeak (arguably the more common of the third part VOIP tools used by players).

Isn’t it now about time EVE Voice gets the feature we need, and a lot of people have been waiting for since it was first integrated into the EVE client? The feature that would make it infinitely more useful than it is now?

The external client.

I say THE external client, because this was a feature Vivox has touted in the past. It exists, what does not is the provision for it in EVE. The idea is that you would run the external client on your system and if EVE dies you don’t lose your connection to the channel(s) you were speaking in.

Is this even in the cards for us here, and if so what might the timeline be? I know historically the addition of features to the client has taken a staged approach, but EVE Voice has moved along at the pace of a snail moving against an Icelandic coastal wind.

I know this still wouldn’t make it a 100% replacement for third party services, but this would be a huge boost for adopting EVE Voice as a primary method of comms during ops for a lot of organizations.

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What do you think?  Do you think CCP should finally get the Voice component into a more generally useful state?  Hit the linked thread, bump it, and give it a thumbs up while you’re at it. :)

Most people are no strangers to social sites such as Facebook and the like, which allow people to come together and… well, waste a whole lot of time.

For gamers though, the options have been rather limited until recently.  Now there’s a few great places to go to meet up with other people who have similar interests, but more than that — these sites offer gamers the ability to actually accomplish some pretty interesting things.

GAX Online
http://www.gaxonline.com/

GAX Online has been around for a little while now, in beta form. Created by the strange minds behind the MOGArmy Podcast, GAX is basically a MySpace for gamers. You get your own page, you can customize it pretty well, and link up with others with similar interests.

The concept is so slanted towards a MySpace feel that it almost comes off as a site which is missing its own point — the focus on games.  Sure there’s an Arcade with some retro flash-based games to kill time with, but overall it can feel like just another social site.

Avatars United
http://www.avatarsunited.com/

AU is a relatively new site, but has made some fantastic strides in terms of features as of late.  The concept is simple.  You play a lot of MMOs, so you’ve got avatars all over the place, but how to relate them all for people who might know you in one game but not in another?   Here’s your answer.

What makes AU neat is the fact that it’s got a veritable kitchen sink of features for you to play with.  You’ve got friends, blogs, photo albums, biographies, groups, events, etc. for EACH of your avatars.  So very quickly you can build up a big huge web of relationships between all of your games.

There’s also specific features available for each game, for instance EVE API support is available for your EVE Online avatars to display dynamic information about your character directly from the game.  Pretty slick.  The very front page of AU, when you’re logged in, is a nicely done aggregation of all of the user’s content.

Overall, it’s a site with more going on than it probably advertises.

Giant Bomb
http://www.giantbomb.com/

At first glance, Giant Bomb appears to be a review site with some reviewer blogs.  But look again.  Started up by ex-Gamespot editors who bailed after the Gerstmann-gate fiasco, Giant Bomb is like a review site mixed with blogs and a wiki.  Ok so let me explain.

You can go there and read the reviews of course, and then you can sign up and leave your own reviews.  As well you can tweak each game’s wiki entries, supply images and videos,  relate games between each other, relate objects (exploding barrels) and people (game designers, voice talent, etc.) to the game, etc.  It’s like a game review community rather than just a static site.

It’s moderated of course, even I have a few edits in my queue right now, and it seems in just one day after the relaunch (at the time of this writing) that gamers have just latched on to this like crazy, and the amount of user provided content has exploded overnight.  Add to this the social features of buddy lists and such, and GB is one of my new favorite sites.

I hope that this small guide is useful to everyone, there’s a lot of really cool sites out there which cater to the social side of gaming which the media is quick (and wrong) to paint as nonexistent. Suddenly there’s so much opportunity available on the net for people to maintain relationships among fellow gamers, and work together as a little community.

One of the most challenging things in EVE online can sometimes be the logistics of merely existing in the game. If you play for long enough you’ll end up with a ton of modules, trade goods, ships, etc. all over the place in the universe.

Recently I took at look at my assets window and had to wince at how many stations held a great big pile of mission loot, or a shuttle, or a pile of ammo I’d bought and only hauled a portion of it to where I’d needed it.

So, what to do about this? Well, make a decision like I did: commit to traveling light.

Step 0: Pick a home base

Pick a place to be your home, some place with a reprocessing plant, medical bay, and repair facility at a minimum. If you’re a builder type, consider one with factory/research facilities to suit your needs. Pro tip: make sure your home is owned by a corp/faction who likes you a lot, that way you don’t get penalized a lot for reprocessing things.

Step 1: Get your crap together.

This entails the painful process of running around in a hauler, collecting all of the assets you might have all over New Eden. Pick a primary base and haul it all there.

Step 2: Sort through it

Take a look at what you have. Buy some station warehouse containers to help with organizing your gear. Tech II and Meta-class modules are usually things you ‘ll want to keep, most other stuff like Tech I gear is so cheap it’s not worth keeping around. But go through your items and compare with the way you play, and ask yourself “do I really need this?”

What to keep? Things of value, obviously. Even if you might not want it, someone else might. Meta-class modules can fetch a decent price on the market, so you might want to do the research here and see what you can get on the free market for them. Got extra skillbooks you don’t need? Put them on the market for an amount less than the NPC price and they’ll get bought in no time.

Step 3: Spring cleaning time

What I like to do is keep a station warehouse container and name it Junk, or Recycle Bin, or something of that kind. Drag all the junk you don’t want to keep around into there so you can easily identify it later. For basics, get a second container for things you want to keep. If you’ve got a nice clean Items window with a couple of containers, you’re ready to go.

Pull out those items in your Recycle Bin back to your Items window. Select everything, minus your containers, and right click. Hit Reprocess, and look in the report window at how much yummy minerals you didn’t know you had just sitting there. If you’re pleased with that number and are now ready to commit to living light, hit OK and watch all of that crap get mashed down to minerals.

Step 4: Everything else

Ask yourself “do I really need all of this?”  Seriously, moving it around is a pain in the butt, right?  You could be asked to relocate to another region as part of your corp, to better be able to participate on ops.  It’s annoying to have to move things around so damn much (trust me, I’ve had to do this myself a few times, recently).  If you don’t need it, sell it, donate it to the corp or a friend, or just store it somewhere where you won’t need to move it around.

Step 5: Ships and fittings

I’ve been looking at how much I really need all these extra ships I cart around, once that I’ve used to try a few things out and then never really went back to try again.  It’s a lot easier to move around if you have only the ships that you need.  I don’t often rig my ships so that makes it easier to do since I can repackage them up.

Fitting wise, I’m finding it handy to have a can with the fittings of my ships in there, separate from the other stuff.  This way if I need to swap out combat fittings for some reason, I know where all that gear will definitely be.

Conclusion

In the end, I drastically reduced the amount of stuff I had all over EVE, as well as made it extremely easy to move around if it’s required.  This process worked well — for me.  Your milage may vary, because maybe you want to take the time and sell a lot of that gear on the market instead of melting it down for minerals and using/selling that.  Personally I find the latter to be much more time efficient.

So, have you ever had to do anything like this?  How did you go about it?

Like winning stuff? Who doesn’t. The folks at Battleclinic have a way for you to win some EVE swag, so click on over to their forum post and have a read on how to win.

1st prize: The Art of EVE
2nd prize: 1x 60day Timecode
3rd prize: 1GB USB EVE FlashDrive

Good luck!

News Release, 25th June 2008
‘Internet Chieftains’ Head Home from Iceland

First Council of Stellar Management meeting hailed a success

Delegates from the first democratically elected MMO player Council have declared themselves pleased with their initial face-to-face meeting with CCP (www.ccpgames.com), the developers of leading Internet spaceship game, EVE Online (www.eve-online.com).

Over 25,000 EVE players voted to select the initial nine delegates to represent them on the ‘Council of Stellar Management’ (CSM). Following the elections, the nine Councillors worked with the player base to identify and prioritise game-related issues ranging from combat through economy to design of the user interface. These issues formed the basis of the agenda for the three-day meeting at CCP’s Headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Prior to the face-to-face meeting, Councillors (and players) aired concerns that the CSM had been created simply as a PR tool to generate publicity for the game. However, it soon became apparent that senior management at CCP have really bought into the process and see a long-term role for the CSM as an important institution for player participation in the future development of EVE.

Over the course of the CSM meeting, more than 30 game related issues were discussed by Councillors and senior members of the CCP development team, which included game designers, programmers, storyline staff and members of the quality assurance team. The meetings were chaired and moderated by a neutral arbitrator from an Icelandic university.

Many issues and ideas raised by the CSM were accepted by CCP and are being built into the game development pipeline for implementation in future patches. Other ideas were seen as problematic to implement but compromises and alternatives were discussed for further feasibility investigation by CCP. A few ideas were dismissed outright on the basis of being technically difficult to implement without diverting huge programming/development resources, at the detriment of advancing other elements of the game.

“We had a great dialogue with the developers and they were exceedingly open to our ideas and suggestions and pretty straightforward in explaining technical limitations where not. It was clear that some changes we suggested were already on CCP’s agenda, but it was also nice to see the occasional ‘Eureka’, - ‘why didn’t we think of that?’ moment amongst the developers. This clearly demonstrated the value of the process both to us as players but also to CCP,” said Andrew Cruse, Chairman of the CSM.

As part of their trip to Iceland the CSM Councillors were taken to visit the birthplace of Icelandic democracy at Thingvellir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eingvellir). Thingvellir is reputedly home to the oldest Parliament in the world. From 930 AD chieftains’ from across Iceland would meet there annually to discuss the law and settle disputes. During the visit to Thingvellir, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, CCP’s lead economist, made a rousing speech describing the CSM delegates as the first ‘Internet chieftains’ and ‘pioneers’ of democracy in online communities.

“While it is very gratifying to be described as an ‘Internet chieftain’ what really matters is proving to our constituents, the players of EVE, that we have actually delivered results that improve the virtual universe in which they play. To that extent we are reliant on CCP continuing to be an active partner in the process and delivering on the promises made in Iceland,” said Sean Conover, a CSM delegate.

I just finished watching the new trailer for the Empyrean Age expansion. It’s absolutely stunning. Tonight I’ll put it on my PS3 and watch it on my home theater. :)

Go watch it, download it here:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/

9.6.2008
EVE Online: Empyrean Age extended downtime
Deployment of the free summer expansion, EVE Online: Empyrean Age, will begin at 02:00 GMT on 10 June. We anticipate the extended downtime for the deployment may take up to 24 hours. We recommend starship pilots prepare for the impending war by setting a long-training skill. During this time Tranquility will be offline as well as the two test servers, Singularity and Multiplicity, and sections of the EVE website: EVE API, EVE Insider (MyEVE), Player News and the forums.

EVE’s down for 24 hours while things are being deployed for the new EA expansion. Meanwhile on the downtime news page, there’s some seriously awesome stuff happening.

Stuff like this:

BREAKING NEWS: CONCORD BUREAU STATION DESTROYED – CONCORD DISABLED

Yulai – *** This is a breaking news story *** Scope News has confirmed that CONCORD Bureau Station in Yulai has been destroyed, and that all rapid-reaction defense capabilities of the police agency have been disabled. A general warning has been broadcast throughout Empire space that CONCORD will be unable to assist in the defense of any unprovoked attacks. This is a breaking news story that we will continue to update as more information becomes available.

Posted 11:18 GMT

Should be a very interesting landscape when we log in, methinks. :)

I’ve been so busy getting the Warp Drive Active site going that I haven’t had much time to get to my own personal blog here. Rest assured, I’m still alive. :)

The new site is coming along extremely well, and the reaction from folks has been nothing short of amazing. Part of what I’ve wanted to accomplish with the site is underway right now — getting other authors in with unique content, giving them a place to put that content up where it can be seen by other EVE players. With the informative Weekly Tinfoil series keeping people up to date on the goings-on of the Alliance world of EVE, and the new CSM Insider summarizing what the newly elected Council of Stellar Management is doing, things are going quite well.

Of course I’ve been doing the requisite comics and podcasts as usual, trying to balance working on those with my real activities in-game. MC’s no more, but the constituent corps are still very active in EVE, each one choosing their own way, and in some cases picking the same one as others.

Body Count is now in Diasho Syndicate, and these guys have been a very pleasant surprise for me. It’s always a weird thing trying to get used to playing with large group of people in EVE, but Daisho really reminded me a lot of my former MC compatriots.

So far so good, all around. :)

http://www.warpdriveactive.com is now LIVE. All comics will be published there from now on instead of the old URL, and the new site has its own RSS feeds available for both the comic and the podcast.

Enjoy!!

http://myeve.eve-online.com/council/voting/

The voting page is finally active, and will be for the next 14 days. EVE players, get in there and drop a vote for who you want to represent the players on the Council!