Short Takes

A few small items to round out the week.

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There is a new Pod and Planet EVE Online fiction contest running! Despite winning the Grand Prize last year for my entry "Borrowed Time" (/shameless plug), I am unfortunately not entering this year. Part of it is because I'm pretty busy at work and at home, but another part is that I just don't have an EVE story to write in my head right now as everything has been pushed out as I build a story in my head for a personal novel writing project I've been working on. Good luck to everyone entering and I'm hoping to return with an entry next year.

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Yeah, this happened:

The Twins decided they wanted to try playing EVE and I finally let them create characters and putter around in the newbie system together, killing rats and mining. I supervise closely because they are only seven, and its made me appreciate a lot of things we take for granted like warping and docking. They love killing rats and seeing what loot they get, every time asking "Is this rare? Is this item rare, Daddy?" in a hopeful voice. Sorry sons, that civilian after burner is NOT rare.

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Neville Smit had a big piece on rethinking war decs and a lot of what he says resonated with me. Check it out.

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The dev blog on the EVE Economy was a great read and had some awesome graph porn, and a point early on that CCP Quant wanted to point out:

Moving on to Production and Destruction in EVE, here is a graph showing the total value destroyed (orange) vs. the total value of end products(e.g. excluding components) produced (blue):



Here you can see that, contrary to some conclusions that can be drawn from the PCU graph, activity is not going down overall. If we normalize it by unique logons, we rather see those numbers increasing, meaning that those playing now contribute relatively more to the sandbox than the general population in the previous years, which is a great sign:

I'm not 100% convinced that fewer people doing more production and destruction is a better measure of the health of the game rather than PCU, but I agree its a hopeful sign and compelling argument.

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From the same dev blog, this image warms the cockles of my heart:

Once you get past the high sec regions, the next three are all low sec and all part of the Gallente-Caldari war zone. Low sec == best sec.

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That's all, have a good weekend!