Forum Moderation

Well after being a member for five years I've been asked to become a moderator of the Non-Scifi Whining board at Spacebattles. I have to admit this will be a new thing for me. While I've been a mod at several smaller boards they were very tightly knot together groups where moderation was needed only to get rid of spammers and the occaisional troll. Spacebattles is different. By the board stats there are 1,800 active members and a large chunk of them visit the board I'm now helping to police. This means that I will be coming into contact with people who will not agree with my decisions and I will thus have to be able to explain my actions to them and any staff.

This should be an interesting experiance.

Never Forget Your Cloak

The core rule of flying a Covert Ops is pretty limited and simple in practice.

1. Never fly without an active cloak

Or more specifically for this occurrence.

1. Never warp to 0
2. Never let anything get within 2,000m of you.

Tonight I failed at both and lost my Buzzard. I had probed down a Wormhole and warped to 0 at it knowing that it would put me about 8,000m off the wormhole and in position to cloak. What I then forgot to do was move away. While focusing on probing down all the other Cosmic Sigs in the system my first notice that I had been decloaked was the sound of artilleries pounding at my shields. 30 secs later it was over and I was high tailing it back to safety in my pod.

That was a stupid mistake that should never have happend and I gave a pilot a free kill. Simple lessons need to be reinforced every now and then even if they should never have been forgotten in the first place.

EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

Well it's time for the latest of CrazyKinux's EVE Blog Banters and this time I think it's quite an interesting question. So straight from this month's blog banter page here's the question. The EVE Blog Banter Contest!

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created byCrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

So what did I choose to remove. Well read along and find out.

For this month’s Blog Banter I’m proposing that as a game mechanic gate guns should be removed completely or at a minimum from lowsec. Gate and station guns are a fact of life in lowsec away from the reaches of CONCORD. For those that have never ventured into lowsec I’ll briefly tell you about what they are for and then I’ll outline my reasoning for why I think that they should be removed from the landscape of EVE.

Gate and station guns exist on every station and gate in empire space. In high sec they really don’t do much as any aggression that gives a player a Global Criminal Countdown (GCC) will call CONCORD to that player following shortly thereafter with a new wreck in the system. If the aggression occurs within 150km of a station or gate the stationary guns position around will also throw in their two cents but by that time the aggressor is scrammed, webbed and ECM’d to impotency anyway.

In lowsec however CONCORD don’t respond to the aggression so the gate guns become the only way your naughty GCC is punished. It is possible though to tank the gate guns just like it was possible to tank CONCORD in days gone by. This means that more experienced players can sit in their battleships waiting for their juicy prey to come by and as long as they aren’t outlaws they are almost immune from any sub-battleship aggression.

So what we have currently is a mechanic that is pointless in highsec due to super CONCORD and decreases small gang PVP in lowsec by making anything smaller that a battleship near useless for more than a couple of seconds. So my proposal is simply to remove all gate and station guns from the highsec and lowsec. This would remove the superfluous highsec guns and encourage small cruiser and frig PVP in lowsec by letting them survive for longer than a few seconds. This won’t however turn lowsec into 0.0 as all other lowsec restrictions remain in place; no sov, doomsdays, bubbles, etc. This proposal also keeps the sec hit that aggression causes which means that pirates will still become flashy after too much fun. Add on the GCC means that for fifteen minutes after aggressing you can’t go back to highsec unless you want to face CONCORD and you stop people from jumping in and out of fights. I would even suggest upping the time to thirty minutes to keep people in lowsec and offer the chance to get back at them.

What the removal of gate guns is likely to do on the other hand is encourage the use of frigates and cruisers for pirates with the faster locking times that these smaller ships provide. I feel that this is a fair tradeoff as the lack of gate guns should encourage the use of small ship gangs for opponents. Also many pirates use the smaller ships already to catch other players in belts and deadspace.

To summarize, the aim of removing gate and station guns is to encourage the smaller gang PVP and entice the younger players into the not so wild regions of lowsec while still maintaining the differences that lowsec has in between highsec and 0.0. This can help bring more players into the direct ship to ship side of PVP by reducing the bar to entry with the use of frigates and cruisers. And I think we can all agree that more PVP is always good.

Edit: Well Crazy has asked us all to add these bits and the beginning and end so that's why they've been added.

Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!

EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You

Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch

The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!

The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"

Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats

Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty

EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9

Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch

A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?

Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey

The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic

Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?

One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?

Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo

Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!

A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?

Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9

Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !

Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without

Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired

Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?

Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!

Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!

I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police

Ripe Lacunae, The UI... Where do I begin... (Eve Blog Banter #9)

Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?

More articles as they are posted!

Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail

Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9

Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules

Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?

Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06

Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status

Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast

Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...

Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload

A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves

Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon

Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow

The Gaming-Griefer, EVE Sucks, But I Love It: The Memoir of a Masochist

Letrange's EVE Blog, Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning Skills

Lyietfinvar, Remove that monopoly

Sceadugenga, Blog Banter #9

Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #9

 

MP's Spouses to Stop Getting Free Flights?

Nice loaded title ain't it. Well I've just come across a story on Stuff.co.nz where John Key has told his ministers that if they want to take their spouses or partners overseas with them on business that they will have to use their own money to do it. Now to me this is common sense. While politics seems to be largely a thankless task travel for work is travel for work, not a taxpayer funded holiday with the Mr. or Mrs. So it's nice to see one of the political leaders making a statement about it even though its up to the ministers and parlimentary services to make sure it's listened to. Here's hoping that the politicians will understand things like this will go a long way in the public's perception about their willingness to lead by example in the economic downturn and in life in general.

iPod Touch OS 3.0 New Podcast Support

Well I've just found an interesting and useful usability addition to the new iPod Touch OS for podcasts.

One thing I liked about my old iPod Mini over the Touch when I purchased it was moving through podcasts. As the Mini had the scroll wheel you could move through slowly or quickly depending on how fast you scrolled. The flat bar of the Touch meant the smallest increment was often too much, especially as some of the podcasts I enjoy push two hours. The new 3.0 OS upgrade has addressed this and I haven't seen this specific thing announced anywhere else. When moving through a podcast manually, if you drag your finger down the movement increment is reduced. Allowing to quickly and easiy place the play point where you want to.

A nice little usability touch that makes life a lot easier. Though why Apple didn't advertise this I don't know. They really need just a full size super long patch notes that people can browse.