Another LNA Victory!

Congratulations to my fellow teammates and the whole of LNA!  It was a very solid win against TEST alliance, needless to say we brought a very good counter to their setup.  I'll provide a link on this post to the youtube video of our match once it is posted by CCP.   I'm very excited to see some more internet spaceship explosions tomorrow!  Don't miss our match against Exodus. at 20:15 EVE Time!

Weekend two of ATXI

I'd like to wish all of the participants in this weekend's matches the best of luck!  Be sure to tune into www.twitch.tv/ccp to watch all of the action!  Don't miss the match of TEST vs. LNA at 20:00 EVE time, it should be a good one! :)

I'm very curious to see what kind of ship setups each team will be using.  Last week we witnessed the raw power of Dominix sentry setups and that of the Vindicators/Kronos.  I imagine we'll see many more flag ships being fielded and hopefully some unique setups.  It will be interesting to see which ships get banned as well.  See you in the battle arena!

Who are Late Night Alliance?

First of all I'd like to congratulate my fellow teammates in Late Night Alliance for winning our first two matches in the EVE Online Alliance Tournament XI.  We've had a great time preparing for this tournament and to finish that strong in the first weekend is very gratifying.  You can watch our first two matches here and here.

So who are LNA?  We are a conglomerate of faction warfare corporations fighting for the Minmatar Republic.  In fact, we are one of the first Minmatar faction warfare alliances to be founded after CCP made the necessary changes in Inferno.  As Shahfluffer's put in his interview with The Mittani; we are "The alliance that was born out of a group of Faction Warfare corps made up of ‘MURICANS, Canadians, people that live upside down (Aussies and Kiwis), a random Mexican and Persian, and Gurls who would log on in "late US" timezone to kill stuffs gloriously."   You can read the entire interview here, it will give you a basic understanding of our attitude and how mighty and hairy our chests really are.

We are a group of players who log in the game to blow stuff up.  We could care less about politics, sovereignty, who's big and who's not, and the like.  While some of us do pay attention to the various happenings and changes in EVE politics, our primary focus is having fun and bagging internet spaceships.  We do have alliances and corporations who we particularly like to shoot at (Eve Uni, Fweddit), but for the most part we believe in equal opportunity engagement.  The core membership of the alliance comes from various pirates, low-seccers, and ghey knights who have been involved in FW for the last few years, our cornerstone being the infamous Bahamut420.  We drink a lot and are accustomed to tossing around "tasteful" jibes at each other.  All of us are big fans of Puffins.

Overall we're a great bunch of people to fly with.  We have our moments, as with all alliances, but for the most part we have things figured out.  Feel free to head over to our home in The Bleak Lands region if you're looking for some low-sec PVP;  at least one of us will be online willing to GCC you for a good time.  

To Matchmake or Not to Matchmake?

As my alliance prepares for the upcoming Alliance Tournament XI, I am realizing how much I enjoy organized and regulated PVP in EVE.  Now don't get me wrong, I love the "sandbox" aspect of EVE, it is one of the reasons EVE is such a great game, but I do wish there were more options for creating fair matches between players interested in fighting each other.

I've heard many of the arguments against a matchmaking system, and most of them make a fair point, but there has to be some way we can preserve the sandbox of New Eden while still enabling players to participate in fights without having to worry about being blobbed at every turn.  The possibility of being blobbed is part of the fun in itself, but I still yearn for a system that allows for a regulated fight.

I've heard many people point to FW complexes as the solution since there are restrictions on ship types depending on the size of the plex.  While its nice to not have to worry about a battleship showing up to a frig fight, it still doesn't solve to problem of being overrun by a fleet with twice your number, and the "bring more ships" option sometimes just isn't plausible.

Some have also said that one should go to Singularity (the test server) if all you want to do is blow stuff up.  To me this is another cop out; I want what I do in-game to still have a lasting effect on the game world.  When you take risk of loss out of the equation it dulls the intensity of EVE PVP.  Although I will admit going nuts on the test server can be fun from time to time :)

I'm aware of free-for-all tournaments that are hosted throughout the game universe, these are a lot of fun to participate in but utterly lack what constitutes a fair match.  I want to be able to test my skills against an equally equipped enemy with no room for argument.

The major issue I have with matchmaking in EVE is that it would take away the sandbox, or the randomness of the game.   If a full fledged matchmaking system was implemented I believe there would be a collapse of activity in the game world, which of course is a horrible thing to ponder.

 Look at World of Warcraft; there is a dungeon finder, raid finder, and a PVP system that is entirely based around matchmaking.  You can literally stand in one location and queue up for almost all of the end-game content this game has to offer.  While providing convenience for their players, the developers have consequently made it so almost nobody goes out into the game world which they so tirelessly worked over.  This kind of system would ruin EVE and must be avoided.

So how can it be done?  I think in order to preserve the sandbox, but still allow players to participate in matches outside of the alliance tournament, CCP needs to give some in-game tools to players that will allow them to set up their own regulated tournaments without running the risk of them being crashed by other players.  A system like this would take a lot of work to implement and would have to be restricted in some way, but I think it would be worth it in the long run.

I imagine a system where a CEO or executor could initiate a match against another corporation or alliance.  On this theoretical interface you could edit the match date/time, participant list, ship restrictions, ship bans, and other match variables.  It could be set up with a point system like the one currently being used in the alliance tournament, the CEO's could assign certain ship types to each of their members (without the opposing team knowing the ship types, of course).  When the match is about to take place the game would run a check on each participant to make sure they are in their assigned ship and using the allowed modules/implants.

If they pass the check the player is "locked in", they then would choose the distance they want to be from the match beacon and are teleported to the match area.  This match area could be an un-scannable deadspace pocket or off-grid system with no way in or out. Nobody would be able to perform any action until the match begins.  There could be some sort of bubble around the match area that instantly pops any ship that moves out past 125km of the beacon.  There would also have to be some sort of point tracking system to decide on a winner if the match goes over a certain time limit.  After the match is over all players would be teleported back to where they were originally before the match began, and a winner is assigned.

I know there would be many issues to be worked out with a system like this, not to mention it would take a shit ton of work to implement and fine tune, but wouldn't it be fun?  I believe all players should have the opportunity to experience something akin to the alliance tournament, rather than just those select few who get to do it only once a year.

Moving and the Science Behind the Sci-Fi of EVE

Until this last week, moving into a new home has never been distressing for me.  I would gather and organize my few posessions and load them into a truck in an order that maximized the efficiency of the packing and that of the consequental unpacking.  This time it was different, a lot has changed in my life since my last move; I'm in a steady relationship, I have a new job, and I've bought a LOT of stuff.  This time I felt like a Hoarder pilot trying to organize multiple stations worth of unpackaged goods in 10 different regions while using auto-pilot and having my assetts, sort-by, and stack all menu options disabled.  Can you spell cluster-f***?

At one point I had an amazingly nerdy thought, "God I wish I had a jump freighter."  Which got me thinking about the plausibility of future generations obtaining some of the technologies portrayed in EVE Online.  I was reminded of a series of articles published under the EVE online backstory that are mock scientific articles which give pseudoscientific explanations to some of the technologies that make the fiction of EVE possible (FTL Travel, FTL communications, Cloning, etc...)

I re-read these pieces and was very impressed with how each pseudoscientific idea or principle was presented.  Many explanations referenced and extrapolated upon real-word scientific principles and used scientific termonology while doing so, which gave the articles an air of credibility.  Out of all "explanations" for sci-fi technology I've encountered in media, these articles are the ones that really set the bar.  They were both fun to read and thought-provoking; reading them made me feel as if all of this fiction could one day become a reality

There are many leaps, bounds, hurdles, and stumbles before humanity can even hope to obtain interstellar travel, but I really hope I live to see the day when those awesome capabilities are within our grasp.  Let's hope that governments and parents alike don't lose sight of the importance of education and the proliferation of science and math.   Perhaps one day we will witness the creation of a "depleted vacuum", "mass boson sphere", or the "entanglement of quantum states".  :)