STO....

Other than the usual daily duty officer and fleet missions I've been persisting with my "main's" winter event daily mission. It seems that I've gotten a handle on the ice racing for the daily quest.

Here's my characters run from today:

Once my character has enough vouchers to complete the event reputation, the T6 reward (Breen Chel Boalg Warship) will be claimable. I like that only one character has to earn the reward and all my other characters can then claim it.


My Engineering character, the next character I'm slowly levelling up did so to level 20 yesterday. The usual speak to the admiral and get ship quest/talk was a little strange. The human admiral spoke the Klingon version of the promotion speech.... I'm not sure it's on their radar to fix but at least Q sits on his chair properly now.

WoW....

My main character, my destro warlock has still been gearing up a little. An LFR here, a heroic there but no guild Mythics. People are still busy in the rush to Chimbo. Which is totally understandable.
It's made me ponder certain things in the game, both to wish they hadn't changed and to also like some new things. Like the universal herb/mining nodes. Or the way my Feral kitty druid works. I've levelled him to 101... it's a start.

There are also transmog sets to think about....

Despite logging in and being solo, I'm doing fine......

Space Hulk Deathwing....

It seems that the slight delay did little to improve the main problems pointed out by streamers and Youtubers who tried the Beta version. The review below shows the good and the bad. While I would get this game I think I'll be waiting a while and see if things get patched/improved.

Review by Cosmic Engine

 

Eve Online.... Day 2 gifts.

Today's gifts in game are t-shirts.
For once these avatar cloth's make me want to buy them in the real world shop....

Eve Online.... Day 1 gifts.

Thankfully the gifts for day one weren't split by being an Alpha or an Omega. The Day 1 box gave once frigate skin for each race. Gratefully received!
I hope that this type of global gifting continues. Time will tell.

 YC119 Yoiul Festival 

Planetbase....

I'm still persisting with my 1st planet's base, it still has problems with malnutrition and starving colonists despite the changes I've made.
Crop changes/rotations, storage problems, visitor intrusions, unlucky asteroid hits(despite trying to mitigate it) and starvation/malnutrition.
It's all checks and balances, too much or too little of one thing can screw you up in a domino cascade of failure. I think I mentioned that before.

It's strange that there is no alarm of notification about a lack of storage space, the game warns you with multiple visual and audio warnings for everything else.
For the asteroid mitigation, saving a lot helps. The game FAQ states that the next 20 meteor strikes are precalculated. Which is strange as they say that right after saying they are totally random. It's to stop people reloading games after a bad hit from one. So to work around it I reload my game before asteroid impact. Turn off the structure so the colonists leave it. Let the asteroid hit and hope there wasn't a colonist or two passing through the building. Then after the hit let the engineer's fix it and I turn it on/active again. So the purpose of precalculating the impact to stop people from reloading saves is worked around by people reloading the save....

The game is filled with 'And', 'If's' & 'But's'.... Sometimes RNG just makes you her bi*ch.

So if your base has lost all it's engineers and your waiting for more but for now your dependent on robots for construction.... Guess what can happen.... If your 6 bots don't return to base in time and get "killed" in a storm, that leads to a lot of 'consternation'.  

Despite having all the tech available it doesn't seem to help all that much:

When it said this:

I said yes. I was not expecting large group to mean "LARGE group":

The last milestone on this planet is the main driver to see success, the max population I've gotten to was 187:

It's all a challenge.....
It's all a challenge.....
It's all a challenge.....

WoW....

The last week has seen me do a few more mythic dungeon runs with the guildies. With the drops from those runs I've gotten the taste for gearing up. With the season that's in it there are not that many people on this end of the week. So I've been puging a lot of Dungeons, Raids & thankfully gearing up. World quests have also opened my eye's to the gearing possibilities.

Star Trek Online.... It's begun....

It only took 2 attempts to complete the first race this year. That's a 100% improvement over last years. I need to replicate this win 25 more times in the next 35 day's to get enough vouchers to claim the winter ship...

Eve Online - YC118.11 Theme "Into the Light"

I'm liking this music a lot more than any of their other recent stuff:

Star Trek Online... Winter Event 2016.

Q has returned with his winter wonderland. I like the wonderland but there is one "sport" that I dislike doing. It's essentially an ice skating race. It's annoying and frustrating. Despite any "simple" tips and tricks to get the race done, even once per day. I think it depends on the npc you race, they seem "tricky". I might try and persist with it this year.

It's not a bad thing if I don't get it as I had hopped for a ship with more of an Engineering slant. The reward is yet again more of a tactical one. So I'm better off letting my new engineering character go with last summers reward the Vorgon Xyfius Heavy Escort as it is a Tier 6. While that is a tactical ship it could work for an engineer but as a backup I bought a Mirror Universe Assault Cruiser.
Once he reaches a level to use it I'll look into maybe upgrading it to a T5-U version. Maybe maybe not.

As a side note I've been converting Dilithium into Zen as I go, maybe doing it once a week. In the past year the conversion rate has more than doubled and is still increasing better to get the "cheaper" ZEN for free now.

Parallel Universe Gaming 

 

Brent Justice

CCP for sale?

I read this yesterday. An offer to buy the company. That's an interesting turn of events. I'd never have thought it would have been considered as an option by CCP.
Makes me ponder the changes, both good and bad for the game if another games company were to take over. Would it be a bigger entity that would change and progress things or would it be a "lesser", "cheaper" company that would ramp up the microtransactions and do little else for the game.

As the news story says it's being considered, maybe there are a lot of strings attached, maybe it's just a formality to "consider" an offer. Maybe its not even a games company offer at all.
One thing is for sure is that the meta will be considering all the angles and no doubt comment, blog and podcast about it.

The video in the article is of interest as well:

 Bloomberg 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q84lz2J1wDk

Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries

Seeing this has made my day even if it is pre-Alpha....

I never liked how the following Fedcom war moved into the Word of Blake. My time in Mech 4: Merc's looks like it isn't undone by this new title. The new game takes place during the Third Succession War, this was the proceeding time before the last game's activities.  One I'm now looking forward to seeing.

http://www.mw5mercs.com/

Free is free for a reason....

I was glad to pick up NeverWinter Nights Diamond Edition for free from gog.com. They had it for free for 48 hours.

It's always nice to get games for free, the more they would have cost and the better the quality of the game the greater that 'nice' feeling becomes.



Ubisoft are finishing up their 30 year anniversary giveaway games.
The next and last of the free games is Assassins Creed III, in mid December.

Ubisoft are also giving away more in a 30 day's of gifts for December. Unsurprisingly there is a lot of crossover in the "major" free titles....

• Day 14 (07/12) : Free Assassin's Creed 3 on PC
• Day 23 (16/12) : Free Rayman Legends on PC​​
• Day 24 (17/12) : Free Splinter Cell on PC​
• Day 25 (18/12) : Free The Crew on PC​

Xbox Live members will get the following for December:

"Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition" for Xbox One, Dec. 1-31

"Outland" for Xbox One and Xbox 360, Dec. 1st  to 15th
"Burnout Paradise" for Xbox One and Xbox 360, Dec. 16-31

"Outlast" for Xbox One, Dec. 16th  to Jan.15th

Even through there is a lot being given away for free and it's a good thing to get them I doubt I'll cast more than a fleeting glance in any of those games direction. The Ubisoft 30 year giveaway has been good even with the first two games being very nostalgic for me I haven't spent much time in those games. Free is free for a reason.

Space Hulk Deathwing....

This game is really getting my gaming juices flowing and I would have bought it in it's current state of development ('full' release on Dec 8th), But there was one well known reviewer that did have a hard time running the game. Some may say he was being too harsh and some say he may have been too much a perfectionist. Either way it cast doubt in my mind. I so want it to be the game it looks like.
There are plenty of good points, maybe if I watch a few more video's and reviews I'll get the game:

Everspace updated....

The latest patch for Everspace has a lot of additions and changes.  A new player ship, new enemies, more neutral npc's. There' slots of tweaks and enhancements. It's really great to see this game advance and develop. I'm looking forward to more changes and additions.

Worth sharing....

It's been a while since I last looked up Bad Lip Reading on Youtube. The last time I looked was when they released the Walking Dead song "CARL POPPA". The latest Star Wars Song is well worth the time:

Planetbase.... Meals are killing my colonists....

Planetbase has a damning flaw. Malnutrition.

The mealmakers in the canteens are set by the game to make basic meals first in priority. They do not wait for more ingredients to be stocked to then create the complex meals. They also only hold up to 5 ingredients at a time. This limits a lot of options as well. That in itself is not such a bad sounding thing, colonists still get fed.... right. Right but what is a bad thing is that after 10 basic meals, your colonists become malnourished. Having them be malnourished is the same as starving but they are still eating. So like starving colony's, the malnourished colonists end up dying in a large wave. Like a culling. The smaller your colony is the worse off you are, as the cull may contain the only specialist or group of specialists that can help dig you out of the hole that is meal time hell.

I've read the blog's, wiki's and suggestions on steam, it is a flaw, the game designers know about it and have in at least one previous patch altered the meal makers. Weather they will fix it is an unknown to me. I hope they do but a small team can only do so much, especially with the game being out for so long and being "feature complete".

What I've found to work out best is to plant nothing but wheat. That way the wheat can be combined with the synthetic meat to make "proper" meals, burgers to be exact. That's not to say that the meal makers wait, no, they still pump out basic meals like there is no tomorrow. But at least with only one veg in stock  and all the meat in the world there is a chance a colonist will get a proper meal combination of the two products once in a while.

A quick fix is to remove malnutrition from the game. I think that is bad, I like my game that complex.

It needs a smarter meal maker for sure. Limiting the ingredients is a stop gap solution. It's gaming the system and letting luck play it's part. I hope it's fixed.

Planetbase has traffic problems as well, airlocks can be a painful bottleneck.


Dont' get me started on fighting intruders.... Although I do like turning off the airlock when the intruders are about to enter it. That way they go to the next nearest airlock, which is halfway around my base. Once they leave to go to it I turn the first airlock on. When they get near the second I turn it off. Rinse and repeat until they run out of O2 and die. Having them use up their suit O2 running back and forth between airlocks is better than having a running firefight in my colony killing security staff and colonists as they go.

I still love this game.

Eve Online.... Alts, Alts and more Alts.

Even my old "mains" are now alts.

The last patch (before today's) had an interesting interaction for my older characters. It restored my old character names. So no longer were they called Amarr Citizen or Caldari Citizen. This is not joyful for me as their original names were anything but original. I hated their original names and was glad to have them as the uniquely generic citizens. I had read in help chat that people could petition to get their names reverted but I guess CCP were getting too many petitions and decided it was better to deal with it all in one go and revert all characters back to the originals.

The 1st ever trial account has 1 character, this character is training away, he has just over 1 million SP. All the remaining skills are 3, 7 or 9 day's long, so before I know it I'll just have to check on this character once a week. As the training doesn't cost me any real world cash I might just put on a 3 day skill and still only check once a week.Given the number of accounts I'll be doing the same on I may just do them all once a week.

In my nostalgia I did find an old gameplay video of that initial character doing the old Aura voiced starter training mission.

I parked him in my main's corp with the basics for activities:

The second account has 2 characters, one like the first above in all regards including ships and gear. But the second character here only has about 650k SP. This was upped by a handy trick that increased his SP by 160k. I created two throw away alts that stopped the new player experience once they received their mini SP injectors. So once they had traded over the injector they were biomassed into oblivion. Not a bad way to gain SP for an older character. The mini skill injectors work on characters with lower than 700k SP. They say they work with characters under 750k SP but on trying a third mini injector it refused to work. The patchout today seems to have changed the SP limits for that. The upper limit on them is now a character with 1.5 Million SP.

Strange how I value some trial/free characters more than others.

Especially when considering the second character on this account. He is very very SP deficient, at only 50k SP I trained 2 skills and he is now sitting in a T1 hauler with a basic fit in an alt corp.... #lowendhaulerforlife

The next three accounts have 1 character each. All around the 1.5 Mill SP mark. They were originally my trial throwaway's. I didn't care about the long term consequences for them. I've yet to do anything besides add skills onto their queue. No idea if I'll do anything with them. They have to assets or isk.

My two old "main" accounts are in stasis, they gave no skills to train (besides one alt who needs a few skills). I am maxing out their PI storage. I may not be able to export or to see the PI density on the planets but I just turn the collectors on and then they show the density. So far they are working away and are nearly full on all the characters. A nice little payday if I get the accounts reactivated to Omega's again.

Time will tell.

That's seven accounts and 12 characters so far.

The next account was my third main, It held a character I bought but once I trained up the character I transferred it to my main account. The advent of PLEX seemed handier if I ever wanted to train him further. Which left only an alt on that account. An alt with 3 million SP and a few basic ships.

Again nothing to break the bank over.

All of the accounts including my 2 mains accounts all hold characters that I want and/or am going to keep for nostalgia. The only ones I want to use are the three misfits as I used them to break away from the normal gamplay style. That could happen again and with the three of them it might be possible to do something "more".

The last two accounts are the 60day omega pre-Alpha's that are now nearly 100% maxed out Alpha's. I wanted to use once for PVE and one for PVP. The PVP character has yet to break into faction warfare. I think the block to doing that is me/my play style and the time and effort it would need to make headway into that. Maybe I'm over thinking it. I'm pretty sure I am over thinking he overhanging never mind 'it'.

The PVE character is well placed and with the last few skills has a Gnosis for missioning in level 3's. Lvl 4's would take about 2 or more Gnosis BC's and I've yet to find a really good long term corp for that.

 

Long term I want to find that PVE corp for mission running.

I want a faction warfare home for my PVP character to learn faction warfare and PVP from that angle..   

Otherwise I have the trio of alts that I can maybe form into something mischievous.

Time, motivation and opportunity..... Not much to ask for ;-p

Eve Online.... My New Alpha's.... pt8

 
Nothing has been happening with my newest Alpha characters besides adding on skills to train.
I think the lack of any real activity is due to having too many characters to look after in this initial period of post expansion nostalgia and micromanagement.
What I have done was only tinkering with ship's and fit's. As well as keeping an eye on a few chat channels for corp recruitment as well as the help channel. It can be informative when someone asks a question and the reply can be something you thought you knew. It's the devil in the detail, it's nice to be reminded of information through the eye's of a newer player.
I'm more happy with the PVE character's Gnosis fit in level 3's now. Plenty of capacitor that I can leave the shield rapper on all the time. So much so that I may need to upgrade it to a large to keep up with the amount of damage he can take.

Planetbase....

I've been playing a fair amount of Planetbase, (currently 30% off on steam).
Sticking with my first base despite several disastrous events. Events mainly of my own doing as well as some natural events that can be unlucky like an asteroid impacting on a dorm full of sleeping colonists.


A small event tends to cascade in failure with this game. If you expand your base too far too fast you'll see your lack of engineers come to the fore when you need a new water extractor a.s.a.p.
Even if you mark it as a priority build your resources are now spread out in unfinished buildings. So while you wait for more resources to be extracted/created and then processed, your water reserves are flowing away. Next thing you know your out of water. No water means that your biodomes and food production is degrading but more importantly no water means no fuel for oxygen creation. So with everything waiting on a few blocks of building materials and a free engineer to build the needed structure it's all gone to hell. With alarms and notifications popping up the last thing you need is for armed intruders.

But it's the joy of dragging your base and your people out of that kind of scenario that makes you want to strive forward. You learn from the experience, you see what went wrong and you change your base and priorities.

Looking back on my previous stages of my base makes me think how simple is looks in retrospect but how much challenge it was at the time.

There are many facets to this game. If you want to keep your base at a good level and purely trade to gain coins for the sake of it it's possible. If your base has enough prestige and you allow visitors to use your facilities they will pay for the privilege. Get a distress signal from a wayward ship that needs medical help you can do so. If that distress signal turns our to be false and intruders attack, you need to hit the red alert button and be glad you got that extra security guard.

There are a lot of in game awards to work towards. I think I'm due an award or two but they are not highlighted yet so maybe things are not as plain as they say they are....

You can tell a lot about a game by the music. I love the game and it's music fits it so well.