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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The latest patch for EVE comes out Thursday with an early start for downtime at 5 am GMT and is planned to end at the normal end of  downtime at 12:00 GMT.  For all the details, read the patch notes:

http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=187

Things that caught my eye:

• The agility and the scan resolution of some ship classes has been adjusted to allow them to have a better chance of locking ships of their own size before they got to warp. Full details are available here. This means that a cruiser will have a better chance of locking and warp scrambling another cruiser, this was something that was broker when Aprocphya was initially deployed.
• If a ship cloaks, all active modules that modify attributes, such as ECM, will stop immediately and the icons showing the effect will disappear. No more using the Cloak/Align exploit, finally.
• Cloaking a Falcon while there is a jamming cycle in progress and the jammer has been deactivated will now result in an immediate break of the jam cycle on the targeted ship. To clarify: if you start a 20 second jamming cycle on a ship, then deactivate the jamming module and cloak, the jam cycle on the target will immediately cease. No more using the uncloak – jam – cloak exploit, finally.
• Corporation directors will no longer be spammed multiple times for the same starbase event.  They will receive one mail only. But I love receiving automated in game email spam, makes my mailbox look like Jita local ** smirk **.
• Grouped laser turrets will now allow a single crystal to be changed out once it has become completely damaged. For example, if you have aa Apocalypse with grouped pulse lasers using Tech II Scorch crystals, with varying degrees of damage you can reload used crystals without breaking the weapon group. This issue annoyed me to no end, thank you CCP for fixing this one!!!

So, there you have some of the items in the patch.  Do follow the link at the top of this post to the full patch notes and remember to set a long skill training or put skills into your training queue!!

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A new patch is going live on Thursday.  The long awaited ECM balancing for Falcons is part of this one.  Read the whole deal on the patch notes page:  http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=186

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We have come to it finally, the latest expansion for EVE Online, the Apocrypha expansion.  As always, there are patch notes that you can read (http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=183) and I do recommend that you read them as there is a lot to read.

I would also suggest that you go back and read all the wonderful reviews by the many EVE Bloggers out there as they have spent a great deal of time on the test server, playing with all the new features of this expansion.

While you are stuck without EVE on patch day, I would suggest that you use this time for other activities, such as:

• Clean up your corporate forums.
• Clean up the area around your computer.
• Do some general house cleaning around your home.
• Perhaps take a shower if you are one of those ‘dedicated’ gamers out there.
• Find other things to do while you wait for the patch to install and the new client be ready for download.
• As always, expect the downtime to last longer than planned and set a VERY long skill to train.

In case you need a good laugh, here is a Star Wars related video I came across this past weekend that it just too funny to not watch.

Building the LEGO Millennium Falcon from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Some other things you could do, you could visit the plethora of EVE related blogs.  Below, we have some new additions to the OPML download.  Many thanx to Cyber over at New Eden Diaries (http://newedendiaries.com)f or these submissions!!

• Blacklight (http://blacklightsredshirt.blogspot.com)
• Blinky Blinky (http://sercedos.blogspot.com)
• Fly Reckless (http://www.flyreckless.com/blog) I don’t know how I missed this one!!
• Posting from the Edge (http://zapatero.wordpress.com)  I am such a tard, I missed this one too!!
• Addicted to EvE (http://addictedtoeve.blogspot.com)
• Personal Files, Ciarente Roth (http://ciarentediary.blogspot.com)

You can get all these and more in an easy to use OPML file to import into your favorite RSS reader on the OPML Download Page.

You could also read this great fiction that is accompanying the new expansion.  It’s been setup as a series of breaking news stories, located at the CCP Roleplayed RSS feed (http://www.eveonline.com/feed/rdfnews.asp?tid=4) or on the seperate web address CCP has setup for the expansion roleplaying news at http://www.eveonline.com/apocryphabreakingnews.  It’s definitely worth reading!!!

I would also watch the the new  trailer for the Apocrypha expansion as some of the stories do tie in with what you are reading

So, what things do you do to pass the time on Patch Day?

Tags: Apocrypha, CCP, Dev Blog, Downtime, Expansions, OPML Update, Patch Notes, Player Blogs

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In case you missed it, that past weekend was the finals for the EVE Online Alliance Tournament VI.  Congratulations to Pandemic Legion, you fought an awesome fight in the final, well worth watching.  You can check out all the matches at the CCPGames channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames).  I do recommend watching the matches as there were quite a few epic moments, including the “Hero Tanking Tempest” and the ultimate “bait Curse” in the semi-finals.  (Please do note that the semi-finals and finals are not up on YouTube as of the writing of this post but they will be uploaded as soon as they can finished getting them encoded.)

This year’s Alliance Tournament saw over 12,000 people watching the live broadcast on EVETV (http://www.eveonline.com/evetv) and a new PCU record during the Allance Tournament finals of over 51,000.  This is a huge milestone for CCP.  I personally logged onto EVE on Sunday, which I normally do not do to help the number grow.  I had my trader alt online in Jita and I have to tell you, Stackless I/O and hardware buffing for that node has helped considerable as it was rather responsive with close to 1200 people in system.  If they could only bring resources like that dynamically to fights on the fly, lag would no longer be an issue.  No, I am not going to get onto my “lag soapbox” again, it’s not worth going on and on about a problem that they have not fixed, but I do know they are actively trying to work on the issue.

Expansion Time!!!

It’s that time of year again, the spring expansion is coming.  Apocrypha goes live on March 10th, the retail box goes on sale wordlwide on March 12th.  Today was the first day that the March expansion, Apocrypha, was live on the test server.  There are a number of changes that have been made to the game, such as the addition of wormholes, changes to the scanning game mechanic as well as a few items that I will have to look at as I am intrigued by what they say, such as the 250KM drone control range and the fitting screen UI changes.  You can find all the notes for what is on the test server on the in testing link on the EVE website (http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/intesting.asp)

Linux users will not be very pleased as CCP is discontinuing support for these operating systems directly from CCP as they will no longer be producing the EVE Online game client for those operating systems, however  CCP states that they will be partnering with Cide and Cedega for those emulators to run EVE Online.  For the whole story, read the dev blog at http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=625.  I can understand Linux as market share is still very low albeit Linux is a far better and stable operating system than Windows.   Granted, in tough economic times, you focus your business so that it can produce the best results, but supporting multiple operating systems would the the ‘Holy Grail’ for an MMO as it’s a rarely touched market for the hard core gamer.  Emulator options may be feasible, but they are usually problematic for those less technical computer users.

Last but not least…

I want to shamelessly plug a new EVE website out there, The EVE Online Portal (http://www.evebloggers.com).  This site is not meant to replace any of the fine websites out there, it’s simply a ‘newspaper’ like page that puts a large amount of information in a single place.  From here you can see the current blogging stream from the EVE Blog Pack, links to current EVE Blog articles as well as current links to stories about EVE on EVE-Mag, EVE Network News and Massively.  There are also links to CCP’s RSS feeds and all the active EVE Online podcasts.  It’s not an RSS reader in a web page, it’s just a clean, simply laid out website for you to get your daily EVE information fix.  It’s a must have for your bookmarks folder or you start page for your web browser.  Be sure to stop by, you won’t regret it!!

See you out there!!!!!..

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