Archive for January, 2010

Shuttling ships to market

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

An exit is found to New Eden. Although it leads out to my manufacturing region, the wormhole is reaching the end of its natural lifetime, giving only a few hours before it collapses. 'Only a few hours' sounds like a long time—and it is—but the timing all depends ...

Design a better map, not a quest helper

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

With the recent patch, a new quest helper has been integrated in to the main World of Warcraft client. As is typical when a feature is added for convenience, I am sure there have been detractors of the quest helper, probably even before it was used, complaining about making ...

Idle thoughts

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I still don't have a titan. R: 'What are you supposed to do with a titan?' Me in particular, or in general? R: 'You.' I can bump your AFK Helios out of the shields and pod you, for a start. Maybe I don't need a titan for that. W: 'It would be cooler, though.'

Mining interrupted by Sleepers

Friday, January 29th, 2010

There are a couple of corporation capsuleers at the w-space tower, but not enough to attack Sleeper sites. One of the pilots is happy to find a gravimetric site and shoot rocks, which is a good plan given the pleasant company. Unfortunately, he cannot use the Tech II ...

Avoiding the Executioner

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Another day of scanning. Without enough colleagues to engage Sleepers there is little else to do in w-space. I wouldn't mind the lack of w-space activity so much if it didn't take so long to scan an exit back to New Eden that I then can rarely take ...

Three scanning boats are better than one

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Cosmic signatures having reference codes simplifies multi-capsuleer scanning. Rather than having to return to the corporation's w-space tower or jettison a container in order to share bookmarks, it can be more time-efficient to give the reference of a found site and let others interested resolve the signature independently. ...

Filesystem Checkwits delve in to Blackrock Depths

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

We return to Blackrock Depths, and this time we have the key. It's not much of a cinematic opening, but at least we can bypass all the areas we visited last time. Instead of marching in to the main reception area, where dwarves and hellhounds await, we sneak ...

Scanning is computationally easy but manually tedious

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Scanning is vital in w-space. You need to scan to find a wormhole to get in to w-space, and you need to scan to find an exit wormhole. You need to scan to find Sleeper sites to run, or to hunt down other capsuleers. It is unsurprising ...

Co-operative scanning

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Scanning today is a team effort. It's helpful for each signature to have its own six-digit reference, common for anyone probing the system, as it allows the task of scanning to be split amongst more than one capsuleer. A signature is formed by three letters, a dash, and ...

Class equality

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Ancient Gaming Noob gains a level using the Looking For Dungeon tool and concludes that DPS classes are interchangeable. Running through an instance several times with the same tank and healer, but different DPS, could superficially make DPS look replaceable, but there are several factors overlooked. Lower-level instances ...