My location was D-GTMI.  It was a major fight for sov.  I was one of the dreadnought pilots in the -A- joint fleet.  Infrastructure Hub comes out of re-enforced and I disconnect due to excessive lag.  For the next 35 minutes I try to log back in, finally get back in and my dread has 10 percent structure left.  I can’t active my armor rep and I disconnect promptly again.  I try to log back in again and currently, it’s been another 30 minutes, staring at the character selection screen, entering game as Ga’len.

So, CCP, what has happened to your quality of your game? This is what we are to expect from the “Game of the Year for 2009″?  Spending over 1 hour to log back into a node and not be able to do anything?

It’s a valid question given the continual crashes of nodes in nullsec, the forums and of course, Tranquility itself.

Ever since Dominion went live, EVE Online has had serious failures with continual node crashes and excessive lag.  The server stability has been akin to a house of cards.  Simply look at it hard and it all falls down.

Now, since Dominon patch 1.1 has gone live, these problems have increased an order of magnitude.  EVE Online used to be a quality game.  What happened?

That’s the question I am putting to the community and more importantly, CCP.  Telling us that you are having a database issue is not the answer that the community needs to hear.  Your stakeholders need to hear the details.  You do remember them right?  Everyone who plays EVE Online is a stakeholder.  You keep reminding us of that fact at each FanFest.

So, as one of your stakeholders, I am asking you CCP, what has happened at CCP that has reduced the level of quality to this abysmal level?

You are walking down the path of SOE.  You are making the same mistakes that were made with Star Wars Galaxies or at least, that is what we are seeing since you refuse to communicate in a meaningful and valid way with your player base.

Stop ignoring us, your stakeholders.  Tell us what is going on.  Tell us the details of what is broken.  We have a collective technical capiblity in our award winning community to create great solutions to problems.  Look at all the third party applications out there.  We have created some truly wonderful things that work well.  We can help, let us for crying out loud.

I am seriously rethinking my investment choices for 2010, both time and money.  Unless we start seeing some valid communication from CCP with the details of why their flagship product has fallen into this sorry state of affairs and some genuine resolution to the problems that have effectively left 0.0 game play as playable as a rock stuck in your shoe, I urge anyone considering EVE online to pay attention and really consider your choices carefully.

Am I being a bit harsh?  Perhaps I am.  The game I love to play, that I spend time writing about and spend time supporting it’s community has become shit-sauce in a failure bottle and that honestly is a disappointment of epic proportions.

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Well, here we are.  Dominion has been deployed and ahead of schedule.  Well done CCP.

I am at a loss as to what to write about Dominion.  Many of my fellow bloggers have pretty much hit on most of the awesomeness and I am continuing to add blog posts to this Google collection, so, please do take the time to read everything.  There is a lot and it’s worth it for the screenies.  Planets look awesome!

After looking at all the new sovereignty structures, I can see that freighters will be used a lot and I mean A LOT.  If you want to deploy a Territorial Claim Unit to claim sovereignty, you can do that with a transport ship.

If you want to deploy an Infrastructure Hub, you need 750,000 m3 of cargo space to carry it.  That means a freighter.  You want to install an upgrade?  You need 500,000 m3 of cargo space to carry one upgrade.

So, if you build freighters for a living in game, get busy, they demand for them just soared.  Build away my little industrialists, your time to make lots of isk is at hand.

Now, with any patch or expansion, there will be issues and people will go nuts trying to sort them out.  Head over to http://www.eveonline.com/updates/knownissues.asp and get up to speed with the issues that currently exist with the new patch.  Just a note, as of this blog post, most of these issues are being addressed with the patch being released on Thursday between 0930 and 1200 game time.  Set those long skills again.

See you out there!

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We come to it again, Patch Day.  This is the time where everyone in EVE Online spends an entire day sitting with clenched teeth and butterflies in their bellies.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS BLOG POST AT THE VERY MOMENT THAT IT WENT LIVE ON MY BLOG, GO SET A LONG SKILL THAT WILL TAKE MORE THAN 2 DAYS TO TRAIN NOW!!!!!

I always seems to come across a post on the EVE forums that  someone complaining either before or after Patch Day that they forget to set a long skill or did not set a long skill to cover the extension to the Patch Day outage.  We have also seen in the past that Patch Day will start early and we have see Patch Day be extended longer than planed, SO FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED, GO SET THAT LONG SKILL RIGHT NOW!!

Ahem, sorry about that, it had to be said…..AGAIN!

While we are all waiting for the Dominion Expansion to be deployed and for our updated game clients to download and install, you have some free time.  Go outside, breath the fresh air, clean the kitchen sink, do some laundry and when you come back, go do something else as watch Patch Day is like watching the kettle on the stove boil water.  It will take longer than you think it will.

While you are waiting, here are some things to keep you occupied:

• Read Dominion patch notes.
• Read all the blog posts concerning Dominion.
• I personally loved Mynxee’s post on Dominion, “extra special linky-love” here!! http://lifeinlowsec.blogspot.com/2009/11/dominion-patch-notes-novel.html
• Visit the EVE Online Dominion Expansion page (http://www.eveonline.com/dominion), watch the new trailer, download some screen shots.
• Head over to The EVE Online Portal (http://www.evebloggers.com) and update your RSS readers with the EVE Online OPML download file, we have almost 500 blogs in there you know!
• Go drool over the new EVE clothing at Jinx (http://jinx.com/eve)
• For some IT related humor, head over to The Website is Down (http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com) and watch some of the videos, they are truly hilarious!
• Go play a flash game, like Galaxy Wars.  Yes, it’s addictive and you will hate me for it! 
• And finally, take the time to finish your holiday shopping!

See you out there!!

Thanx to Seraphina Orina for the suggestion to listen to EVE Radio!

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Yup, it seems that Google Reader and I are quickly becoming good friends.  I’ve taken the time and created yet another shared items page.

With the upcoming Dominion expansion and all the discussion/rage concerning proposed changes, changes on changes and various confusing information that has been put forth, I thought I’d create something helpful.

So, enjoy all the wonderful posts our beloved community has written.  As more posts are made, I’ll add them to this shared items page!

Dominion blog posts:  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F03749674846786948488%2Flabel%2FDominion

Now, there have been some complaints that posts to various discussion threads concerning Dominion are missing from the EVE forums.  CCP is being accused of censorship.

People, remember this.  The forums are CCP’s property, they will moderate as they see fit and yes, there will be mistakes made by forums moderators.  Fear not, Chribba the All Powerful EVE Online God has a wonderful resource to combat this problem.  Head over to EVE-Search.com and you can read all the forum posts as they were originally posted.  You can’t respond to a post here, only read them.  So, head over there to read and post your responses on the EVE forums if you feel the need.

Here is the link to the EVE Information Portal section on the EVE-Search website:  http://eve-search.com/forum/3512.

So, enjoy your reading assignments, there is a lot to read!!!

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I’ve been spending the morning reading the new Dev blog on how CCP is fixing sovereignty.  I’ve also been reading the comments thread on the EVE forums (at 23 pages at the time of this blog entry) and I have to say, the majority  of the responses are not in favor of the changes.  Most people think it will break EVE Online to the point that no one will want to be in 0.0 space.

The TL;DR version is that a typical system will take roughly 2 billion isk a month to maintain once you have it fully developed.  Given all the upgrades to the space that you can add, you simply can not generate the needed income if you are an alliance that is considered small.  I have to agree with the sentiment on the EVE forums here, this simply will not work and all the thoughts that come into my head are already being spoken on the EVE forums and the EVE Blogging community.  The best response I’ve seen on the EVE forums sums everything up by Bobby Atlas and oddly enough, it’s been quoted in post number 666 (I’m not kidding), http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1210267&page=23#666.

Yes, our beloved EVE Blogging community, in a rare event, is agreeing with the sentiment on the EVE forums.  For ease of reading, I have setup a shared Google Reader page for those responses:  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F03749674846786948488%2Flabel%2FSOV.  As more blogging articles are posted talking about the soverignity changes, I’ll add them to this shared page.

Everyone, keep reading, thinking and posting your thoughts as there are intelligent discussions going on both the EVE forums and the blogging community.

The debater in my heart is happy to see such discussion but by the same token, I am very concerned that the upcoming changes that caused this debate will simply break 0.0 in EVE.  One of two things will result.  People will simply not go to 0.0 as the risk exceedingly outweighs the rewards or many people will simply leave EVE as it’s becoming World of Warcraft in space with 0.0 becoming arenas.

Many people are claiming that these changes are going to have an NGE effect on EVE Online.  To refresh everyone’s memory, SWG:NGE was a bait and switch upgrade.  Buy the next expansion and change the game to a new game and not let anyone know about the change until after it happened.  I was there for that and let me tell you, it was not pretty.

The sovereignty changes to EVE are not another NGE.  We all can see the changes coming and that’s what makes this different.  The part of the NGE event where Sony did not listen to the players however, has the potential to happen here.  I’ve not seen such consensus of thought and discussion on the EVE forums since the proposed speed balancing.  We all remember what happened with that change, CCP listened to the players, modified what they planned and released a better patch to the game.

I hope the CCP listens to the players again and revises what they are planning on releasing on December 1.  As it stands now, they need to delay the expansion and make the changes that everyone on the EVE forums is calling for. People think it will be another NGE, I have to agree the the potential for an NGE event set of results is there.  We will have to simply wait and see.

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