Pandemic Contagion

Some of Pandemic Legion's spai alts have been published. If you are in a PVP corp, it would be worth checking the list to see if you have been infiltrated.

Here's a thread with more details and drama.

I am sure it will only take PL a few months to replicate their infiltration, but for the next few weeks they may have to engage on more uncertain terms.

Don't forget to vote for CSM! I am hoping to see more 0.0 representation in the next cycle, and voted correspondingly. TEST has endorsed White Tree. Goons are officially backing The Mittani and Vile Rat.

It looks like nullsec representation is good in candidates, but we will see if the voting blocks are successful at overpowering the uncoordinated masses. If you don't vote, you can't complain when the NC/CF gets all the seats and pushes onward to universal blue status with NAPS in every dimension and soul crushing carebear stares from every POS.

CSM spins around again.

CSM is back again. Between White Tree and The Mittani himself, I am delighted at the excellent choices. Here is a promo video of General Windypops railing against the NC in his CSM ticket entry:



A fun CSM quote from EVEDreddit:

This is how the CSM works:

Winners of a popularity contest get free holiday in Iceland.

These people who have no understanding of software development or running a business speak with devs, demand that everything wrong with the game be fixed immediately.

CCP nods, smiles, gives murmurs of encouragement and waves them goodbye.

CCP then tout the CSM as an example of their responsiveness and transparency with the playerbase, before going back to do whatever it was they were going to do anyway.

Repeat.

IT gets saved by CCP

We had several IT Titans and Supercaps bubbled before downtime this AM. Strangely, many of the bubbles around only the IT supercaps, but not the station or other POS that we had caged, disappeared when the servers came back up allowing the Titans to jump out.

This was very very suspicious because we can't figure out why IT Titan pilots would even think to log into a known caged POS immediately after downtown with cynos ready since the stations should have been bubbled and jumps impossible to execute. This appears to be an inside job, I hope CCP internal affairs will investigate what happened in this case. If it is just a bug, it is a huge stretch that it only affected bubbles anchored around IT supercaps.

We are working very hard to lock-down IT's main system in Fountain, and letting those Titans get away because of either foul play by CCP employees or a bug is frustrating. Camping a system 24/7 isn't easy and we don't appreciate losing those Titan kills because the bubbles we anchored disappeared. We had scouts on the bubbles up until downtime, so there is no way an IT spy was able to offline them before the server went down.

Despite this setback, we are achieving our objective of holding the system. The final battle for the 6VDT station is this weekend. IT has hired Pandemic Legion, so we are expecting a massive hardcore fight! (From PL, IT seems to be out of steam.)

IT gets back in the game. [NSFW]

IT has indicated that they are back in the fight. The cloud ring assault led by the mole didn't materialize, but we are looking forward to many fights this weekend stimulated by our reinforcement-o-rama today.

In order to show my fair and balanced perspective, here is some fun IT propaganda:

Here's to the good fights and great ganks, endless trolling, and entertaining sandbox drama!

Unicorn manifest destiny = best destiny.

Escalation!

CCP "fixed" the IT angle by going back and killing all other TCU's placed before downtime by attacks on non-IT alliances. However, TEST has not forgotten the sting of being stymied in liberating many systems from evil Delve clowns.



First, TEST wardecced the CCP Engineering Alliance.

Next we executed a brilliant counter attack!

Lag be damned!

Here's a video with some big Cloud Ring fleet action from an Alliance mate:



Posted before the Drake nerf. (Many scimitars were harmed with the making of this movie.)

Kugu swarms Kirith!

Kirith Kodachi over at Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah managed to spawn a multi-page nerd rage thread at Kugutsumen where spaceship nerds with no life rage about Kirith's post lamenting a recent low number of kills in 0.0.

Having a marriage, children, and an active career precludes spending large chunks of time in a game for responsible individuals.  If you want to be entertained by some seriously clueless "hardcore EVE players" response to Kirith's post, you shouldn't miss this Kugu thread!

The tone of superiority and condescension is fascinating.  These guys are actually looking down at Kirith for having a life.  Internet spaceship geek drama can be so entertaining.  

I was pleased to see Kirith's CEO come to his defense in the comments.  He obviously understands that KK brings something positive to their corp.

EVE News 24

If you enjoy the politics metagame in EVE, you will likely enjoy EVE News 24.  This site provides intelligent articles about the shifting Null-sec landscape as well as realtime news updates involving the big players in 0.0 space.

The site also has an in-game channel: EVENEWS24

If trolling through Kugu and Scrapheap is too painful for your nullsec news needs, you will find the informative highlights and useful info on EVE News 24 can give you the information you want without the hassle of dealing with EVE forums.

WOMEN IN EVE

Welcome to another special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!



I am completely unqualified to speculate about WOMEN IN EVE. Please don’t read this with the same voice tone as PIGS IN SPACE, as I don’t know many people (or women for that matter) who like being associated with pigs. Or space(ships). Face it, EVE and internet pew pew spaceships are for Geeks.

While there are certainly female geeks, my distant memories of middle school inform the theory that there is less socially adaptive advantage for women to embrace their inner geekdom. Geeky girls have plenty of opportunities to cross over into other social spheres, whereas the male geek may be more stuck in his social stratus in those formative years.

Despite the fact that half of us playing EVE are over 30 and over the gaming hill (defined by being unable to compete with a 15 year old in ultra-twitch FPS due to age-dulled intellect and slow reflexes), the problem with WOMEN IN EVE began in grade school. Boys with geeky tendencies get sucked into video games early. While there is a sizable and growing proportion of gynecogamers, the estrogenergic ones are dwarfed by a testosterone train (shaped like an Avatar Titan) pounding down the gaming section of your local big box store. If you want to see more women in EVE, you need a better gateway drug for the feminine young-uns than the weak Link, Space Invaders and Mario most of us cut our teeth on.

Once the brain has formed, it is nearly impossible to change deep perceptions of the utility in sitting at a computer for hours at a time yelling into a microphone while punching F1 through F4 and talking smack in local. I can’t even get my wife to play Wii with me despite purchasing fodder such as Agony Christie murder games and Lego cooperative love fests. Selling a non-hardcore gamer on EVE falls below futile into grave folly territory. I often wonder why I love the griefer-infested dark Darwinian paradise of New Eden so much myself! Sadly, that love likely betrays a Machiavellian participant in the endless chaotic drama that pulses through the best sandbox on earth.

Given the upward trend in subscriptions, I think CCP has at least been able to attract the cross dressing role player crowd in addition to the uber-I’m-not-gay homophobic mouthbreathers. Maybe CCP should stick to what they know and keep encouraging those cross dressers to Harden the Fuck Up. If a few exceptional females choose to jump on the train now and then, we all benefit. If EVE remains the ultimate sausage fest in a vacuum, at least it is a damn entertaining exercise in exploring the fun to be had on the dark side of the human behavioral spectrum with a bunch of cross-dressing spaceship fetishists. It may cost a few thousand real world dollars to have your Titan ganked by your ex-corpmates, but it is about the fun, damn it! (The fun shall not be confused with the epeen, see mouth breather comment above…)




More banter on the topic of WOMEN IN EVE:

1. The Ladies of New Eden


2. Is EVE a man's world?


3. Sorry, No Pink Spaceships Here Please


4. EVE Blog Banter: Chicks 'N Ships


5. Eve Blog Banter: The Girls Who Fly Spaceships


6. It’s not about fluffy bloody Kittens people!


7. Space Boobies Are Bad, m'kay?


8. Special Blog Banter: I Like Girls


9. Special Edition or making Eve More Casual


10. I wish my wife played EVE


11. Is there something special about women?


12. CK's Blog Banter


13. The Female of the Species


14. EVE Online Can Appeal to Women By Adding Casual Content


15. Blog Banter: The Ladies


16. Women Who Want EVE


17. Tech 2 stilettos


18. New Eden doesn't need to change for Eve – Adam needs to get over himself


19. EVE Online and… women (sorta)


20. Think Outside the Spaceship


21. EVE's monthly banter - Women, women, women


22. Girls Just Wanna Have... Guns!


23. Draco Horizons (Blog) <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants


24. Don’t change Eve for me!


25. Where Are Teh Laydeez of EVE?


26. Where Are All The Wenches?


27. EVEquality: The Rise of the Female Gamer


28. Women? In MY SPACESHIP? Is she from Mars as well?


29. Blog Banter: Captain Kirk Hates Eve 


30. The Female of the Species


31. The Ladies of New Eden


32. EVE and the X by X Genetic Succession Unit


33. Sociability V


34. Girl on Girls in Space


35. What women want (in Eve)


36. Time Is On Our Side


37. Roc Appeal <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants


38. Women in EVE


39. Getting In Touch With Our Feminine Side


40. It's a woman's world (they just don't know it yet!) 


41. Women in EVE – Can it be done? 


42. You'd Rather Be Playing The Sims, Right?


43. Blog Banter #17 – Women in Eve


44. How To Get The Betty’s


45. EVE: WTB girls?


46. All about EVE


47. Ladies to the gunfight


48. Hell hath no fury


49. The Ladies of New Eden (An Analysis on How Men are not from Mars, and Women are not from Venus)


50. EVE Blog Banter 17: The Ladies of New Eden 


51. The Ladies of New Eden


52. Getting ladies to play Eve Online


53. Why Don't More Women Play EVE?? <-- Needs a link to the original banter post in the intro


54. Getting Girls to Play EVE 


55. Et Tu, Brutus? » Blog Archive » Girls, Girls, Girls.


56. Why I don’t play Eve Online | Restokin


57. Ladies of New Eden | My Blog <-- Make sure to add a list of the other participants!


58. The female podling « Ore, Pirates, and Pods


59. Tinkers Blog: Ladies in Space


60. Ideas on How To Attract More Female Pilots <-- Make sure to add a link back to the original post!


61. Ladies of Eve - Blog Banter


62. Your agent has ended your mission for not attaining more women <- More links to participants please!


63. Let's Fly, Ladies!!


64. Bringing the Sisters to EVE


65. EnerlaNET Forums - 52 days of Eve Online


66. In Search of the Sisters of Eve


67. EnerlaNET Forums - Be a man! Fight back!


68. Getting more Eves in Eve Online


69. Making Bannan Peels Relevant: Gender Inclusiveness in CCP's EVE Online


70. Daughters of EVE


71. Women in Eve


72. “Prove It”: Women In EvE


73. It’s Hip To Be Square: Taking Videogames Out of the Basement


74. The X-Factor


75. The Ladies of New Eden... A Blog Banter Entry by Cattie


76. Gal-Ristas!


77. Question: Tell Me What You Think About This? <-- Needs to add intro (with links) and list of participants


78. Ain’t No Sunshine


79. What Women Want…


80. Lady Vengeance, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pew-Pew