EVE-Mag.com

Feeding the Addiction

Published on 24. Nov, 2008 ... written by Silene Derbhan, Tags: Articles, Reviews

by Silene Derbhan …

Starry nights

A constant buzz strangely fills your dreams of empty space. As your mind quickly adjusts by warping to an asteroid belt, you begin mining and the regular sound of lasers calms you in your sleep. But an angry hand pushes your back with growing violence, and you finally have to open half an eye. And groan.

“Whaaat …”
“Shut your fucking alarm clock down or I’ll break the thing on your face …”

Now you are awake. It’s 3.07 am, and your alarm clock is buzzing and trembling beside your bed. It’s time to change your skill training. A quick log in, Energy Grid Update Level 5, log out, and you’re back to bed and dreams of a majestic Kronos warping to unknown worlds.

The last Blood Raider is not dead, but you’ve almost cleared the entire pocket. The ship suddenly shakes as if the Overdrive Injector wanted to burst out of the hull. You’re still far away from critical damage, yet it seems you’ve completely lost control of the ship. Huh? Frack, the angry hand again.

“You’re gonna be late for work! How about you quite waking up in the middle of the night?”

Rightly so. When I’ve maxed out all my skills. 11163 days to go. I keep that thought to myself and realize I am already quite late. I won’t have the time to log in for a quick ratting this morning. Can someone remind me why I have to work?

“To pay for your fucking alts, moron.”

Oops, I must have said that out loud. A few minutes later I open the door of the apartment, and stare painfully at the black screen on my desk, unable to find the strength in me for a long day without my beloved ships. I have a new MWD whose production should be finished in three hours. I’m sure my HAC will rock with this one. Ouch, ok, going now.

The office is already filled with the same old faces and their hypocrite smiles. I wish I had this Dual Pulse Laser II somewhere near to clear the atmosphere. I sit bitterly at my desk and activate my trusty Damage Control Briefcase full of goods. It’s time for EVE offline.

Angry skies

For the unfortunate majority of us, there is an obligation to have some kind of daily job, which will turn us away from EVE for at least eight hours a day. And it can be daunting to see all those moments spent on a crappy computer when Tranquility is just a few servers away… So you gotta make theses hours count, especially if you have a job than doesn’t require too much of your time or attention. And what better way to optimize your time than preparing your next mission during your lunch hour? Or maybe while waiting for your next customer to call?

Here begins my quest for EVE offline.

And a quest it is, since the obstacles and traps are many. If you are working in an American company, you must navigate the minefield of filters that restricts the websites you can access. I know that my company considers games to be as problematic as porn, blogs, forums and alcohol. And unless you are working in the IT department of your company, you probably don’t have the administrator’s rights that would allow you to install, say, Evemon. Of course, if your employer is a bit lenient on firewalls and such, you may be able to access EVE-O forums and give plenty of occasions for Ecaf to get pissed off. But not in my workplace. Still, you can find some very useful tools and websites to feed your daily need of EVE at work. Here is my selection of things you can carry around on your USB key or check on internet, to stay in contact with EVE at all times.

EVE on the web

For whatever stupid reason, most filters need their targeted tags to appear in the title of the website you want to visit, or at least be present as a keyword on the website. Fortunately for us, it leaves a few very good websites accessible, since they lead the filter to believe they are talking about serious stuff:

EVE Mag: Stay away from that crap. Seriously. Big bunch of assholes and … ouch, there goes my Harbinger, thank you Smak. You friggin’ paid for it dude!

EVE Tribune: The grandfather of EVE-related sites, EVE Tribune is an invaluable source of information. Run by a gang of ranting bitter writers, it offers some of the most comprehensive, knowledgeable and well written articles on the internet. You should not believe everything they say, but you’d be well advised to remember it. From ship reviews to never-ending rants on each and every patch, there’s a lot of great stuff lying around for your reading pleasure.

EVE Network News: The page is a pain to open with a bad connection and IE6, but you will find lots of things here. The main page links to almost every major site/podcast about EVE, so you may find some which can be opened from your workstation. As the name implies, the site is more news-oriented, so it complements well EVE-Mag and EVE Tribune.

EVE Training Monitor: It’s been a few years now that Google stole my life, literally. Everything that happens to me is there, from gmail and the web albums to the igoogle page I cannot live without, you could know who I am just by accessing my Google account. And my most loved gadget of this igoogle page is Eve training monitor, a simple app which displays your name, your wallet’s content, the skill you are training and its ETA, with a nice countdown. If you are really bored, just lose yourself in the hypnotic bliss of the countdown.

EVE Commander: You can’t really get much closer to perfection. Basically, EVE Commander is a website that uses your API to display everything there is to know about your character. In fact, it goes much deeper than that. First of all, EC shows your wallet history, and the options here are so clever that it is almost a statistical tool to analyze how you earn your money, what your are doing with it, and how it could be improved. It also registers all of your assets, by station or by type, with the major problem of sorting the assets by alphabetical order and not really by type. It is perhaps working for most of the users, but I find it highly counter-productive if you want to have an overview of your possessions and don’t know by heart the name of every named mod in your hangar. The next options are incredibly useful for industry players, since they keep track of your production lines, market orders and even the price of items on the market (after a very simple configuration).

The awesomeness keeps going with the ship section in which you can see every ship you own and their current fittings. Then comes the character section, a very clear overview of your stats and perks. The skill part is in itself a small Evemon. Not only do you see the skills you have and their level, but you can click on any skill and see the time it would take you to get it to any level. In itself, it is a mini database updated with your own characteristics. It won’t replace Evemon for the planning part, but still is a very useful tool.

EVE-To-Go:

There are a few items to keep EVE in your bag at all times. From books to small apps or files which can easily be put on an usb key and provide hours of entertainment. Yes, hours.

EVE Fitting Tool: I don’t have to explain what it does, do I? The nice thing about this little application is that it is just an exe file. No install needed! And if you are a clever capsuleer, you should never undock before checking your setup in EFT. It works especially well with EVE Commander, since you can keep an eye on what you really own, what should be bought, and how much time until a needed skill is learned on EC, while adjusting your setup in EFT.

EVE Master Data Sheet: I have a very conflicted love story with EMD. She becoming too old to fuel the desire in me, but still have this experience only real women can pretend to. In short, EMD is the ultimate geek wet dream. An excel file loaded with cross referenced tables, multiple tabs and impossibly complex XML data management. Unfortunately, the file has not been updated since December 2007, and some things are either missing or inaccurate. But it still is one the best tools in the galaxy. You can use it as a planner, a reference database for skills and ships, and statistical tool on your character’s progression, a mining forecast tool… This is an incredible effort in compiling every area in which your skill training may have an impact. Just type a different level in any skill, and you will see the impact on the whole chain. Very imposing at first glance, but well worth the effort.

EVE Chronicles: If you have a few free hours, EVE chronicles, novellas and background explanations are a good read for any player. And you can find them all in a single free pdf file on the official site!

EON: The official EVE magazine is a gorgeous piece of glossy paper and most of the articles should please you if you are interested in the game. In my opinion, the content varies between mildly interesting to very good, from pieces of fiction to ship reviews, it covers pretty much all aspects of EVE online.

EVE Official Soundtrack: This soundtrack is a mystery to me. Where you have almost 50 tracks in game, a lot of these being stunningly beautiful space ambient themes, the poor CD only packs thirteen tracks. And some of them are really not the best music written for the game. Anyway, it still delivers the specific “space mood” we all love, and can be a good way to isolate you from the annoyance of phones ringing and keyboards being hit all around.

This is a very personal list, and you may find stuff out there that I either missed or was not able to access. The most undisciplined among you in possession of a portable video device could even encode the myriad of EVE videos available to watch them when work is getting too slow. But remember : you need this job to keep playing!

20.00hrs EVE-time … I love this Quantum Rise welcome page. Life begins.