Eve Online: Blink Announced as Winter Expansion

CCP announced the eagerly awaited Winter 2013 expansion for Eve Online today, revealing it to be called 'Blink'. Although the feature page is somewhat incomplete at present, it and its accompanying Dev Blog do give some indication as to what we can expect to see.

Every special edition ship - from Gold and Silver Magnates to Etanas and Cambonians - will be resurrected, with fifty of each hull being provided to the controversial lottery website SOMER Blink. A variety of monocles will also be raffled on the site, along with various other rare items. A button will also be added to the wallet window that will allow players to directly deposit isk into SOMER Blink's account, cutting out the need to search for the corporation through the People and Places window - which previously deterred many people from blinking.

Understandably this has caused a lot of anger in the Eve community; some believe it is wrong that previously dead ships such as the Golden Magnate are being revived, some believe CCP are showing favouritism towards SOMER (which some members of the community were banned for implying earlier this year) and some people just hate SOMER Blink. While some of them voiced their discontent in a forum thread, others chimed in their support for the expansion. Turelus, one of the advocates of the expansion, told us of his excitement: "I just can't wait for this expansion, it's going to be so good! I've already lost over 4 billion isk on Blink, but now I get the chance to waste even more on something I've got nearly no chance of winning! I know that sounds sarcastic, but if I sink all my isk into blinking I'll have a 1 in 20,000 chance of winning a monocle! Those are the sorts of odds I live for!"

CCP Navigator replied to the mob, though it's not known if this was a serious post as it contains several false statements, such as "SOMER Blink have been one of the most philanthropic groups in Eve." It appears Navigator has confused the meaning of 'philanthropist' with the meaning of 'thief', as SOMER has been known for making a lot more players bankrupt than it has solvent. Even those who don't support the move itself can see the positives of it though. Eve-bet have already started a bet on the number of industrials carrying the CCP-gifted prizes that will be killed in Jita. 100 billion isk has already been bet, "more than 8" is the most popular option with 1.2 odds.

Other features included giving away five PLEX to everyone who goes to Eve Vegas, along with a free ticket to stroke CCP Hellmar's facial hair for up to half a minute. This has been the most well received feature of the expansion, with hundreds of 'beard tickets' being claimed.  Warp speeds of all ships will also be increased, to allow prize carrying SOMER Blink freighters to get to their destinations faster. Although many players find some aspects of the expansion undesirable, most of them believe the beard stroking ticket promises to be an exciting feature that can be built upon in the future. Time will tell whether the expansion will be able to beat the legendary Incarna. 

Freighter Rebalancing Annouced

CCP Fozzie has posted his latest round of rebalancing work on the Features and Ideas subforum. These changes affect freighters, which will be gaining a lot more EHP in a similar way to mining barges and tier one industrials did when they were balanced. The alterations have been criticised by the majority of Eve players, with freighter owners saying the changes don't go far enough and gankers the opposite.

Freighters will receive an increase in hitpoints - taking their average EHP up to around 300k. In addition, each race will receive a special fitting attribute that will come in the form of a module or drone bay. The Caldari freighter, the Charon, will have a turret slot along with 100 PG and 40 CPU, which is designed to be used for a Heavy Assault Missile launcher. The Amarrian Providence will acquire the fittings for a Cap Recharger II, while the Fenrir will gain two module slots - a high and a low. However it will get just 10 CPU and 2PG, along with a CPU bonus to salvaging modules; it seems this new Fenrir is designed as a spacious ninja-salvager. Finally, the Gallente's Obelisk will receive no modules but will gain a 10m³ dronebay along with 5mbit/sec of bandwidth.

The reasoning behind the move was stated as being 'to bring the EHP of freighters in-line with other capital ships', but some are speculating it was done to nerf freighter ganking. With the number of freighter ganks on the rise, particularly in Burn Jita, ice interdictions and other emergent gameplay events, CCP has sought to end the departure of many freighter pilots affected by suicide ganking. Their plan seems to have worked, with many people considering resubscribing. One former freighter pilot posted "I stopped playing because Burn Jita made me paranoid about flying freighters - I lost three Nomads over two days. With these new changes hopefully I'll be able to fly safely in highsec without being attacked by Darius JOHNSON's SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO's or whatever they call themselves these days."

It's also been hailed as the 'death of nullsec emergent gameplay' by some. One inarticulate highsec carebear named Gevlon Goblin commented on the changes. "lol now those gewny faggots won't be able to killed me. i already UBER-TROLLED them in my proccruer, imagine how much fun im going to had with these new freiughters. I might just load up my fenrir with officer modules and take it through VFK!!"

James 315, Saviour of Highsec, has urged his subjects not to panic. He said he will point out why this will make no difference to freighter ganking when he finishes his 15,000 word TMC article on the topic. The CFC have announced they will try to award bounties for freighters killed in a similar way to how they are offered for exhumers killed at the moment. This has gone down well with line members, one of whom pointed out that "renter pubbies are funding the deaths of non-renter pubbies. It's the circle of life."

While EFT warriors will be relentlessly crafting new fits for these beasts, it remains to be seen whether this will stop freighter ganking or just cause more expensive but infrequent losses. With rumours of asteroid doomsdaying Orca on the horizon, carebears around the world can sleep soundly tonight.

Eve News 24 Grammatical Errors on the Rise

An independent and impartial research organisation has found that the number of grammar and spelling errors on the popular reporting site Eve News 24 has increased by 39% this week. The report, which compared all articles written between June 2-9 2013 to those published between August 25-31 2013, found that Eve News 24 standards are 'gradually decreasing.'

The evidence was put to the General Discussion subforum on the official Eve Online forum by Goonswarm's Minister of Propaganda, receiving a mixed reaction from the Eve community. Riverini of Eve News 24 told me "we're committed to delivering quality news to eastern nullsec and empire space players 24/7. This drop in standards appears to be due to an operational fault with our editing system, which has existed for around three years now and seems to be getting worse. We're looking for ways to improve our publishing process, and I'm sure we'll remain the best news reporting site in Eve forever."

 Many of the anti-EN24 commenters in the forum thread said they were 'displeased' by EN24's decreasing lack of quality over the past few years. One disillusioned former EN24 reader told me "I don't know why riverini still employs Gevlon. I literally don't understand him at all. They could at least try to correct his poor grammar in the editing stage, but somehow it just slips through the net. It's like they don't actually care about their standards at all." Gevlon Goblin, a veteran Eve News writer, commented in the thread "I was trying to improving me standards of write, with helping from riverini I am to confidence I will achieved success in English EN24."

A recent Eve News 24 post, entitled 'Corporations/guilds only have their restrictions to offer' drew criticism from readers, who vented their anger in the comments section of the article. They argued that the post had many flaws, namely that it was written by Gevlon Goblin and the article was 'completely incoherent'. The top comment informed Gevlon that he 'sucks dick' 78 times. The article contained no less than 37 grammatical mistakes, as well as a large number of factual errors. However the article was praised for its hilarity, with one commenter saying "I'm starting to like the comedy value of these posts."

Readers have also suggested that news coverage seems to be consistently anti-CFC and anti-Mittani. One fan noted he hadn't seen a single report where they admitted the CFC actually won a battle, or that The Mittani was actually a nice guy. "It's slightly suspicious to be honest, I'm not sure I even trust EN24 anymore." Despite the apparant decrease in standards, many people remain loyal to riverini's website. "Anything's better than what that goon cunt sperges. He's killing off Eve bloggers with his sperge, which is just a massive goon propaganda machine. The reason I read EN24 is because I love their completely sperge-free, high-quality articles."

There is hope on the horizon for Eve News; they are trialling a new strategy to avoid errors in their writing. They plan on copy and pasting the main source of text, with a small commentary at the start of the article. This has already worked well on one article reporting on Test's deployment to Curse, with a mere two punctuation mistakes over 17 words - an error rate of just 8.5 words per fault. There's real promise that Eve News 24 will be regarded as more than a joke one day in the distant future.

Proviblock Speaks on the Civil War

Recently, the roleplaying alliance of CVA and their lowly pets were divided. The cause of this tragic split in the relationship of pet and master is believed to be an incident during a NRDS raid on WoW, which has since caused no end of inconvenience for the ratting hordes of Provibros.

CVA declared that one of their smaller cats was to be evicted (rehomed) immediatly. Many other cats, dogs, and even individual ants answered CVA's call in an attempt to gain prime arse licking position, and proceeded to try to put Of Sound Mind in an animal rescue centre. I spoke to Equinox Daedalus, Executor of CVA and crippled pets, who told me about why they travelled down this dark parth. He was kind enough to give me an interview:
Tubrug1: Hello sir!
Equinox Daedalus: Hail! I am Equinox Daedalus, prophet of the mighty Amarr empire in the kingdom of Providence and Azeroth.
Tubrug1: So tell me E-dog, why would you get rid of Sound over such a trivial matter?
Equinox Daedalus: The mighty and glorious kingdom of Amarr was concerned about the behaviour of an Of Sound Mind player while performing a 10-man Heroic Dragon Soul raid. He alpahed the trigger, getting himself killed and delaying the whole party by the ten seconds it took to rez him. This was a devastating blow to our efficiency, leaving us with no choice other than to expel his alliance from Providence.
Tubrug1: I see... So anyway, the war doesn't seem to be going in Proviblocks's favour doesn't it? Thanks to external influence Sound's two systems seem to be unsinkable.
Equinox Daedalus: We've petitioned the gods to try to stop these interlopers from interfering. It's not fair that these completely random moon rich dicks come along to Providence and think they can get away with killing members of the mighty Amarr empire. They should at least get -5 standings to Amarr, that way they'd think twice about being complete dicks. And those Brave Newbie fuckers, don't get me started on them. They used hacks to get bombers, they used hacks to drop bombs perfectly and they used hacks to stop them from taking damage.
Tubrug1: Those are some quite perplexing reactions. I'd like to ask you a few questions from our readers, the most popular of which was 'are you mad?'
-Equinox Daedalus leaves convo-
-You are not allowed to contact Equinox Daedalus-

I asked a member of the Yulai Federation, another pet alliance based in north-east Providence, about his participation in the war. He replied "wat war!" followed by "i dont now who u r but I think i should report u 2 of sound mind, their the best pvps in provi, they can completely ASSault any1. id be scared of them if they declared warr on us, it would be rlly scary." After I bought Nimrodion up to speed with the recent change in politics, he informed be that I was a "'fcking cent' and should "fuck off back to licking G00N ass u little pussy cum 2 provi and fight me!!!11!"

Of Sound Mind seem to be very optimistic about the future, telling me they received a massive morale boost thanks to Brave Collective. A Fleet Commander told me "The battle over the station timer wasn't going too well, but then we saw 20 Brave Collective bombers decloak and throw bombs at their fleet. It was like that scene in the Lord of the Rings were the eagles were coming, and I said the Eagles are coming. It would've been better if they were actually using Eagles but they weren't. It also feels pretty good not having to do what those role playing c***s tell me to do, they were annoying twats and we never liked them anyway."

Rumour has it that CVA's arse is losing its nourishing and protective flavour and more alliances are on the verge of leaving the orgy that is the ProviBlock. Time will decide both the fate of the region and of the many alliances living in CVA's cosy rectum.

SOMER Blink Disbands, Somerset Mahm Collapses Eve Economy

SOMER Blink, Eve's most popular lottery, has folded after almost three years of trading on the dawn of their one quadrillion isk celebration. Somerset Mahm, the public figurehead behind the scam, was revealed to be the alt of a senior Goonswarm Federation director. The 300 trillion isk of profit the organisation has made has been taken and used to cripple the economy.

Nearly every single item of note was bought in highsec by a series of similarly named characters. This was quickly noted by traders and customers. The Jita market was the first tradehub to be affected, and within half an hour every non-officer and non-scam priced item in the Forge region had disappeared from the market. People attempted to relist their personal stockpile of items, but nearly all of them were purchased within minutes. Before the news could spread, the Domain, Sinq Laison and Heimatar regions were emptied as well.

Hours later, after nearly every item in empire space and many in nullsec had been stockpiled by these mysterious figures, the SOMER Blink website displayed the message "The Mittani Sends his Regards", every account was shown to be empty of isk and there were no blinks on the board. Blinkers initially believed that the website had been hacked, but after there was no response from Blink staff, they began to assume the worst.

Four hours after the economic apocalypse struck, social armageddon began to loom. Unable to acquire new ships, people began to panic. As droves of people flocked to social media such as Reddit and Twitter to find out what was going on, a new article appeared on themittani.com, titled "The Economic Changes and You", authored by The Mittani.

The post began "As many of you may have noticed, earlier today nearly every product on Eve's markets ceased to be listed. Some of you may have also noticed that SOMER Blink ceased trading minutes later. This is not coincidental. Let me take you back to January 2009, at the height of the Great War. It was at this time the idea of a 'lottery scam' was first proposed to enable economic warfare to influence BoB's markets, however the war abruptly ended weeks later. The idea was forgotten until we came up with a shortlist of ideas that could fuck the economy. The Gallente Ice Interdiction and Burn Jita(s) were conceived, but they looked as weak as Test when compared to our ultimate plan - SOMER Blink.

We weren't too sure we would be able to become large enough with our ludicrously large profit margins, but to our relief the site began to pick up steam and before we knew it we had nearly given away one quadrillion isk, while making nearly 300 trillion isk in profit. The amount we spent today was a mere drop in the ocean, it only cost us 5 trillion isk to buy every item on the market. Thanks to stupid pubbie fucks, if we relist every product at 10x the price we'll be able to do this indefinitely."

This is likely the greatest triumph any alliance has ever achieved in the history of Eve. The only markets left untouched were the CFC's home regions, causing a breakdown of the economy everywhere else. The more organised alliances will be able to trade ships and minerals using contracts for now, but weaker alliances will probably collapse. Highsec is under even greater strain, with the vast majority of pilots having no access to ships, or anything else on the market.

Attempts have been made to rally the entire forces of Eve against the CFC in a last ditch attempt to prevent the alliance from gaining the strength it needs to take over the entirety of nullsec. Unfortunately the majority of highsec residents are still not aware that Eve is a multiplayer game, and still don't understand why Blink isn't working, the Providence block have decided to settle their civil war on WoW, and PL are too busy mining enough ice to be able to move their grounded supercap fleet.

I spoke to one of the most prominent Blinkers, Replacement 234, about the revelation. He said "I'm slightly pissed off that Somerset Mahm betrayed everyone like that. I never actually made a profit from my blinking, I just kept playing blink because I had nothing else to do with the billions of isk I made from station trading. I didn't have a clue I was funding Goonswarm's evil plan for universal domination, and I'd like to apologise unreservedly to all Eve players who's experience I've ruined."

Riverini has not taken the news well. In an EN24 post, he said "I tried to told everyone that GOON RUINS EVE. But instead I got told to fuck off, and everyone said that EN24 was shit because I kept telling everyone that GOON is bad. now look who's fucking laughing, Gevlon had been trying to tell me this would happen for months. If I were on CSM, I could persuade CCP to make a new server for non GOONS, but instead you had to fucking not vote for me you fucking dicks. Now noone will be able to play on tranquillity for years because you gave all the fucking GOONS money, even though I fucking told you not to. You don't deserve to have a market you dicks.

The amount of isk Goonswarm currently possesses is roughly equal to what everyone else in Eve possesses, meaning it is likely to take years for them to run out of money, and will take even longer if they relist the products. Test were mostly unaffected by the change, since they had been relying on their Ibis doctrine since the fall of Fountain. One noobship pilot proudly told me "I didn't even use the market to get this ship, and it had a free Tritanium in it!" In this new version of Eve, Test remains the CFC's greatest foe.

Internal Revenue Service Now Offering Tax Deductions on Eve Losses

In a shocking move that had stocks rocketing to a new record precipice, the United States Internal Revenue Service announced today that the federal government will now accept tax deductions on losses incurred while running corporations inside the virtual universe of Eve Online.

Cheers would have been heard throughout all of nullsec at the announcement, but alas, in space no one can hear you scream, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that people were very happy.

“When I heard the leader of the TEST alliance was black, I just had to help”, proclaimed United States president Barack Obama at a press conference in the White House rose garden, “being the first and only brother to run America, I felt bad for Boodabooda’s troubles as CEO.  Being the only powerful black man in an entire galaxy can be very challenging, and I can definitely relate.”

The bean counters in the economic division have been crunching the numbers, and have concluded that they don’t have nearly enough beans to calculate how much money alliances such as TEST and CFC will receive in refunds next April for the fiscal year of 2013, so they just made up some numbers instead:

·         According to our calculations TEST has lost, (and can write-off up to) nearly eleven trillion dollars in financial losses for the year, and will receive two hundreds solar systems of real space as compensation. Goonswarm have complained to the CSM concerning the sovereignty mechanics these systems will use, but CCP say it is out of their control.

·         Pandemic Legion will be reimbursed for their Revenant loss by receiving the decommissioned Soviet military nuclear supercarrier Ulyanovsk, complete with fighter jets and a full complement of three thousand meth-addicted Russian Eve players.

·         Black Legion is the only alliance that will still have to pay taxes this year, being that they have lost literally nothing, and have taken everyone else’s shit.

·         CFC, who have posted the most significant loss of the year so far, eleventy-quadrillion dollars, will be owed so much money that The Mittani will be elected Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and given his own printing press to devalue everyone’s currency, and fun, around him.

And these losses just don’t cover giant alliances – even you can get a piece of the action. 

Starting October 24^th, American taxpayers can download or request form EVE544-B, and itemize losses incurred while playing Eve Online during the year of 2013.  Depending on the going rate for PLEX, taxpayers will calculate their returns by dividing their losses by the cost of a single PLEX. 

For example, if your Amarr Providence freighter was suicide ganked in hi-sec, you would take the value of the ship, approximately 1.4 billion isk, and divide it by the average price of a 30-Day Pilot’s License Extension (520 million), and then convert the result to a dollar amount.  Your return would look something like this:

1,400,000,000.00 (Providence)/520,000,000.00 (average PLEX cost)

 = 2.69 (PLEX) * $17.00 (cost) = 34 + 11.73 =

$45.73 that you can deduct on next year’s tax return! 

So the next time you are besieged in a station in low sec, don’t be afraid or hesitant to take that shiny new T3 Tengu out for a ride on the town.  Even if you get blown up, you’ll be saving yourself, and your country money!  In fact, you’ll be a downright red-blooded, eagle hugging American taxpaying patriot.

 BoB bless the U.S.!

6VDT-H Battle Report

6VDT-H recently hosted the largest battle in Eve's 10 year history, with the CFC and N3ST forces fighting over the station that was home to Test for two years. The CFC dealt what appears to be the death blow to Fountain, expanding their vast empire and their revenue as they gain control of one of the richest regions in the game.

The battle was centred around the station, which came out of shield reinforcement at 19:44, the CFC armies were in system around an hour before this time. Their flotilla was composed of seven Baltec fleets, one AHAC fleet, one Fuckyou fleet and two bomber wings, with around 2000 people surrounding the station. Test only bridged into the system minutes before the timer expired. A Test line member told me "the FCs thought the station would come out at 20:44, it was only when they watched the CFC forces on Madani's twitch channel that they realised they were wrong. An All Hands on Dick ping was sent out to bridging titans, and they managed to log on in time to send the fleet in."

Many of the CFC ships were equipped with warp scramblers to prevent the station from escaping. One goon newbro told me "after the station came out of reinforce, we were told there was a very real danger that they station could warp away. We'd been ordered by some guy with a loud dog to stop the station from retreating."

Over the next few minutes, Test fleets slowly trickled onto the station grid. The Admiral Squad, Test's squad/SiG for people who like making money, took the opportunity to run some Serpentis sites. One member proudly told me he made 5mil isk in half an hour, then proceeded to criticise CCP for the TiDi that had prevented him from making 100mil isk an hour. Finally the Admiral Squad's Nagas trundled onto the field.

The CFC's bombers were under the command on Kcolor and Dabigredboat. Dabigredboat was streaming the fight on themittani.com's twitch stream, and appeared to be extremely enthusiastic about his slightly miscoordinated bombing runs. He encouraged fleet members to 'throw bombs over there' and 'throw a bomb at that bunch of pods'. During the battle, I asked him how many R64 moons he had been promised for leading the fleet, he replied "5, 5 I think". There was also some feeling among members of the CFC bombing wing that Test had paid for their fleet using RMT. A bomber who boasted 15 Prophecy kills told me "Test are completely broke, so they can't have paid for this fleet by themselves. They're even too poor to afford Rokhs now, so they have to use battlecruisers instead. I fucking hate poor alliances."

During the middle of the battle a small group of BNI salvagers attempted to enter the system and steal modules from wrecks as well as salvage them. Unfortunately, they were killed before they could enter the system. As the battle continued to grind on, the CFC brought 200 Dreadnoughts into the system, and although they came late they still had a huge impact on the battle. Test FCs ordered their pilots to stay on field, the they disregarded the order and fled the station grid. BoodaBooda managed to rally the troops around by threatening to kick any members that left the system, and led 200 more ships to their death, killing a CFC Naglfar. They claimed it was an op success and were podkilled home.

Many CFC participants still had their ships and were bridged home, but this was interrupted when a jumping Titan was pushed out of an insecure POS and killed by NC. supercapitals. The titan pilot, who belonged to Li3, claimed that his alliance was competing with FCON for the prize of losing the most titans.

After the smoke had cleared, Test have decided they didn't want that system anyway and are now preparing to defend Delve. The CFC have tauntingly said that the money from R64s in Delve will be used to give a PLEX a day to the newbro who asks the cutest question. BoodaBooda replied with another poor quality Lord of the Rings quote.

Most non-CFC members of the Eve galaxy have not taken the news of the expanding Goonswarm empire well. One perhaps slightly misinformed Highsec miner told me "now GEWN will try to conquer highsec, but GEWN cannot conquer highsec because it is already own! CCCP should add new mecahnic to ban GEWN from highsec because they do not belong and they only make other player sad!" One philosophical lowsec pilot named Gorski Car suggested that SOLAR were all CFC alts, and that they invaded the east to deliberately distract N3 from the war.

"The only thing known for certain is that the unstoppable Goon warmachine is now in motion and it cannot be stopped! Unless every single alliance and player in Eve unites against The Mittani everyone is doomed to WoW!" - Riverini, EN24 article on the battle