I go away for a week and Eve changes

My family took a seven-day break from "screen time" which combined with a busy weekend to mean I've been away from things Eve for about ten days.  I had some podcasts downloaded from before the break to listen to on my commute, and I've seen the pings for fleets forming up, but I've otherwise been disconnected.  Now I'm ready to dive back in again.

Dynamic Worlds

The great thing about Eve is that the players change the world all the time.  There's the possibility that a system could change in FW and have locked me out of substantial parts of my assets while gone.  If you live in null you might have lost access to systems as well - though granted that world is pretty stagnant right now.  It's not like your standard MMO where the terrain around you and the forces in play are exactly the same over and over.  Barring a developer-driven new content release you'll see the same world unchanging every time.  If anything, I'd love to see more such dynamics in the game.  It keeps the game fresh if you walk out your front door (or station dock) and have a reason to look around.

Meta Moving

I look at my blog reader and see that I have 60 blog entries in my Eve section unread.  The Mittani has had I don't know how many pages of articles.  And oh, did I miss another dev blog?  And more stuff from Eve Vegas?  Right now it feels like the skeleton underneath Eve is constantly moving, and the six-week iteration cycle certainly is contributing to this.  Market speculators must be having a field day right now.  Exploration outputs to change?  Modules tiericide on the way?  Lots to try to latch onto and ride.

I get that the change right now may feel too fast for people.  Voices had been shouting for a long time that Eve needed change, and now that massive changes are coming from CCP then there is a chorus as those impacted wish they could had been done some other way.  I'm sure there's a classic Venn diagram of those who wanted change before, those who are against change now, with a overlap of some who were all for change until it turned out it was going to force them to change.  HTFU and "Adapt or Die" have long been the dismissive cries of the bittervet - now a lot of them are facing having to swallow that themselves.

Skill Queues

If there are tears on jump changes, there are tears of joy on the new skill queue limits (or lack there of).  I definitely saw that during the past week - I had to artificially move a level 5 skill up to the front of my queue so that it would be running during my absence - and it wasn't what I really wanted to be training right now.  The same thing that I'm sure so many of us do for vacations and major holidays.  Perhaps this was less of an issue for older characters for whom there is a surplus of very long running skills.  I had delayed starting MCT for an alt in part because I wouldn't be able to baby-sit them through all of the shorter skills they needed to get prerequisites out of the way.


Next time...
I also have just fired up a new machine.  I was a bit surprised to see all the things that I need to go back and change.  I'll make a separate post around that.