Chocolate Heaven

The Misadventures of a Minmatart

Your Price

isk!

What’s your price? It strikes me as an interesting question of late, with the advent of yet another alliance (even if only in name) going the way of the Dodo.

My price

About 18 months ago, I was somewhat reluctantly put into the position of being in charge again after a couple of seriously annoying corp thefts and a MIA CEO. I say reluctantly not because I disliked running a corporation previously, but because I knew it was a lot of work to get it up and running again.

Up until that point I had been reasonably happy making sales to specific clients, and helping out with the tech 1 build cycle. Our then-CEO managed at least 7 characters to deal with the rest. All of a sudden, that had to be me, and at the time I had one industrial character. Throw in the missing buckets of stock and blueprints, and you had a whole mess of things to sort out, and no idea how to go about doing it.

The desire to just sell everything and have done with it was fairly high, but I persevered for the sake of the legacy of the corporation and what it stood for. It was a bit like being handed the blueprints to creating a city and several billion Dollars/Pounds/Euros, but not being given the tools, or even being told what tools you’d need to do it. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would have just said “sod it” and cashed in. Even if it meant giving equal share to the other two people that put you in the position whereby this was an option.

So here’s a hypothetical for you, sports fans: If someone dropped 1-2 trillion ISK of assets into your lap, would you spend the next six months:

  • Liquidating your stock and retiring fat and happy, sharing the wealth with those that put you in that position – chaotic good
  • Liquidating your stock and retiring fat and happy to a secret alt and screwing everyone over – neutral evil
  • Stock-taking, rebuilding blueprint collections and calculating, eventually making a theoretical profit of 30b per month for around the equivalent hours’ worth of effort – lawful neutral (possibly…)
  • Doing something else (explain!) – ?

My price, then, depends a lot on effort. If someone could reliably give me what my stock is worth in a single lump sum of ISK, I would be tempted to do it. However, I’d find myself really bored after that, since its mostly what I do (and enjoy, I might add!) in-game these days.

And along those lines, I return to the first question as well: What is your price in-game? Bonus cookies for honesty!

3D Character Renders

My friend, Inquisitor Khan has been making 3D Eve stuff for a while now, and he’s on-and-off working on a character for me. I thought I’d show off his mad skillz by posting a few here. You can leave a comment here if you like, or visit the forum thread: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1348604

Initial render 1

Initial render 2

Newer render 1

Newer render 2

Styled like some kind of painting. I think it looks pretty cool!

The final product will need post work in Photoshop for the facial tattoos, obviously, but I think its coming along really well. Kudos to the Khan! 😀

The Great Blackout of 2010

Unless you’ve been living under a space whale, you are probably aware of the epic downtime we had yesterday and today due to CCP moving the TQ cluster to some nifty new digs. What was estimated as a three-hour operation turned into a 27+ hour trek that left many a network engineer without sleep, and surely depleted nearby vending machines of all Quafe Extreme or equivalent in the process.

In a somewhat unprecedented move of generosity, CCP has offered a shiny skillpoint rebate for everyone with an active account during that time, equivalent to the skillpoints that could be trained in that time.

…we will give an extra pool of skillpoints to all accounts (paying and trial) that were active at the beginning of this downtime, on one character per account. This skillpoint pool will be appropriately sized for the downtime time frame, universal across all accounts regardless of character attributes/implants and may be applied as each player wants.

Read the full news post here: http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=3963&tid=1

Obviously, this is going to cause some whining on the forums regardless, as those whose skill queues ended at some point in the day of EXTREME DOWNTIME™ want ‘moar skillz’ as a rebate than those that have happily (read: smugly) been chugging through their queue the entire time.

That aside, it turns out that there’s another gift in the works from our holly jolly Xmas-in-June friends at CCP. And that’s partly what I want to get a discussion going about. What do you think the present is? Answers on a postcard please! … Or a comment, that might work better, thinking about it.

Personally, I think its some kind of beta pass for Dust when it gets to that stage, which will of course cause even more whining from people who don’t have a relevant console to play it on. Spoilt brats. 😛

Opinions?