Listen Now

Hi everybody! Hi. Episode. We….got distracted. And then Padre poked us until we came back. Thanks, Padre! Turns out there’s a lot of stuff piles up when you get distracted for six months. We poke around the new alpha/omega clone differences, catch up on our mail, talk a bunch of nonsense and get excited about the NNNPE. (Also Nick fails to avoid talking about VR and submarines. Standard.) Expect updates at a slow rate – maybe every three weeks or so – but we do have more in the can.

In this episode (which very much didn’t go up before Fanfest, so no high-fives for Ruskey…) we mostly erect a POS. It wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d been led to believe! We also talk about: * Antiseptic mouthwash. I was wrong. Corsodyl is a brand name. It contains chlorohexidine, which is what I was thinking of. I’m sure nobody cares, but I don’t like leaving mistakes uncorrected. * The tragic loss of my Panther to a highsec gatecamp and our terrible, terrible contributions to a Provibloc cruiser roam. * Is it possible to play Eve casually? This is something we’d like to explore further in future. * Searching for things – ammunition particularly – on the market.

This is a day late because Nick’s in Korea and everything’s harder when you’re reliant on hotel wifi…. but in this episode we talk about: * Project Discovery, in which Nick discovers that learning things at the same time as talking about them is hard. Also Nick and Will and not very good at this yet. * Nick’s Good Idea – a miniatures game to represent small-ship Eve combat on the tabletop. Well, now I have an Ultimaker2+ on my desk, I need to find things to use it on. * Attack Vector: Tactical and why it’s important to try to make games which are fun as well as mechanically functional… * It was Arthur C Clarke, apparently. Clarke’s First Law. * Nick attempts to explain how a Space Fountain works, and realises he understands….well…..at least 75% of the concept. But it’s not rocket science, right? * Nick attempts to explain the Plug Nozzle and really doesn’t do a good job of it. But that actually *is* rocket science. Or at least rocket engineering. * Can you trade (TF2) hats for PLEX?

Hi! So, we’ve been away a month – sorry for that. While real life shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, we do now have a couple of episodes in the buffer so with luck we’ll be maintaining the regular schedule for a while again. In this episode we talk about: * Buying PLEX (so Will can stop being a space hobo sleeping on Nick’s space couch.) * Virtual Reality; some upcoming technology and why Nick is heartbroken about the Valkyrie alpha. * Fun with Tech 3 destroyers * Possible schemes to allow Will to remotely visit Fanfest. Maybe a Sheldonbot? Next time; on to Project Discovery and Nick’s Cunning Idea…

So, having tried small scale PvP with Jin’Taan last week, we tried some larger scale PvP, going out on a 50-ship SPECTRE FLEET roam he was FCing. While we did record audio during the roam, it’s fleet comms and doesn’t make for great listening, so we recorded the episode after we got back. For most of the episode, Nick was lugging a freighter over from Amarr to Dihra to move Will’s giant pile o’ abandoned crap from our expired office to the shiny new one. Which it turned out wasn’t *strictly* necessary… One of the things I mentioned was the Eight Kinds of Fun – this is a concept I’ve really got a *lot* of mileage out of when putting together groups to play games together to figure out who enjoys the same kind of thing. There’s a good writeup here. The other thing we talked about was communities with non-toxic comms cultures (by which we mostly mean that it’s not okay to use sexist/racist slurs or abusive language, treating each other with respect and so on.) That’s something that matters a lot to us, and apparently to a bunch of people as well. I don’t have experience with a wide range of Eve communities, so I can’t really recommend any such places, aside from Eve University. If you’d like to suggest any communities that have that sort of culture in the comments, we’ll put together a list. (Note that I can’t personally vouch for most of these – check them out at your own risk!) * Nick recommended Eve University. * Trony recommended Of Sound Mind as having had a robust and consistently enforced policy. * Rixx Javix recommended the alliance A Band Apart (of which he is the executor) as having a zero tolerance policy towards racist/sexist language. * Ned Thomas suggested Signal Cartel (and that fits with everything I’ve heard about them.) * Bataav and Sakaane Eionell suggested the Intaki Liberation Front.

So, Jin’Taan very kindly took the two of us for a PvP roam around Providence and explained some stuff to us. In summary, Will did something stupid, then we got our first kill, then Nick did something stupid (critique my fit!) It all evens out. Props to Jin for managing our particular brand of ineptitude. It was an awful lot of fun. We should probably also mention that Jin is running for CSM XI. There are interviews with him in various places.

Hi everyone – this is actually an episode we recorded before Christmas – immediately after which I went to Germany, and then Christmas happened and we were all horribly busy for a month. But, life is normalising again, we’ve logged back into the game and we have some plans. So, before we start any of that, here’s three quarters of an hour of us dealing with the treasure hunt cans from Ep 35. Well, mostly us getting ridiculously confused by the simplest things and failing. Thanks to everyone who got involved in searching, finding, leaving us surprises and otherwise contributing. We *did* get the cans in the end! And now let us never use a Medium Secure Container again… Finally, a link to Neville Smit’s Morning Maniac Grants program. If you have an idea for a cool in-game project and could use some seed funding – especially if you’re a new player or want to help new players – head on over to http://nevillesmit.com/morning-maniac-grants and check it out.

So – our listener Akin Paru set us a challenge a while ago, after we mentioned treasure hunts. He (or she) set us up a secure cargo container in the Irnin system and challenged us to find it by scanning. We decided to take them up on that! And we learned a critical thing. Along the way, we talked about contracts and fitting. If you want to listen to the full unedited horror of us trying to find things to say for two hours while getting increasingly frustrated, then the MP3 for that can be downloaded here: Nick And Will Won’t Get These Two Hours Back.    

Inspired by Discoriander, we decide to set up our own small drug empire. Or, at least, try making some boosters. Step one: we’ll need to mine some gas…. And Will realises he doesn’t know how to fit ships.

Back in the saddle! We’ve been a bit slow on the recording front recently; my teaching load has temporarily quadrupled, and Will’s had surgery. We’ve missed a lot while we’ve been working slowly though our buffer, and we had a lot to catch up on. This episode is a bit of a monster, and we barely leave the Mail window.

So, we went to EveNT! It was a total blast and we had a lovely time, hanging out with both old friends and people we met for the first time. This is a story of hardship, sleep deprivation and hilariously bad tournament performance.  This is our story…. TL:DR – player events are great fun and we heartily recommend them, even if you’ve never met any fellow players before! Also, you may have noticed that our update schedule has slowed down a little of late (to about one episode every two weeks rather than every week.) This should be a temporary blip; the period from October to the of the year keeps me extremely busy at work. Please bear with us; we do understand that regular updates are important to many of you.

Hey all, Really sorry for the delay on this episode. I’ve been travelling around Europe like a madman and spending far too much time waiting for or sitting in budget airliners (and eating cheese; it’s not really been a hardship.) Ironically, this hasn’t actually delayed us recording – the buffer’s had two episodes sat in it the whole time – it’s just been about getting the edit up online, and my access to internet’s been really flaky. In this episode, we talk (at some length) about the recently announced Eve Road Map, taking the game through the autumn and winter and into next year. There are some really exciting concepts looming – the battlecruiser rebalance, the exciting new T2 anti-interdictors, and citadels coming eventually. Enjoy!

In this episode, we talk about: * The regional market and eve-central.com * Using gender-neutral language, or at least making an effort to * Tourism! * The City of God, Emperor Zaragram The Mad, Saint Tetrimon * (I guess that isn’t a statue of Zaragram II, since all representations of his face were destroyed after his death.) * So, PIE Inc. is a corporation; in fact a/the founder of CVA, not an alliance. * COSMOS Agents (in passing, anyway.) * Shout out to Mark726 @webspaceships and evetravel.wordpress.com Questions to the floor: * How do you lay out your screen? * Is there a clever way of picking mission agents to give you the right Corp’s storyline agent, short of sitting down with dotlan, eve-agents.com and a marker pen?

Recorded before EVE_NT, we did some * A short sojourn into D-Scanning via the means of Wayne’s World style flashback. * Shout out to Ion Fury, who delivered us a quick unplanned PvP schooling. (Twice.) * Evanova. I meant Evanova. * A scam! A thoroughly transparent scam! Thanks, Tim…. * Mail call! With some high quality trolling by our beloved listeners. * Returning to the farm to collect the goodies * Regional trading and why I don’t. As a side note, we had a lot of fun last weekend at EVE_NT. We both sucked terribly in the PvP tournament, but we met lots of lovely people. Shouts out (off the top of my head) to Fellblade, Wyxie, General & Tiberius Stargazer, Starbug, Ruffige, Tarek Raimo, Niden, Gorski Car, Chiyachan, Unseen Onzo, Drechlas, and the whole of Gemini Talon. (Also Fozzie and Guard! Oops.) Let us know in the comments how much money you make per tick PvEing, and what sort of PvE you do?

We ran out of war, so we’re back in Highsec. And we’re mostly reading mail. * We IMMEDIATELY tangent off onto in-game spam, how to open multiple mails at once and other “intricacies” of the mail system. * Let’s Play Identify The Exciting Ships People Have Given Will * Nick has a (mercifully brief) rant about X-Men First Class getting their missiles wrong. * Corpses! And the creepy/non-creepy Things People Do With Corpses spectrum. * Language evolves! Suck it up, chaps. Totes amazeballs. * We get a bit pretentious about language. Sorry. (It was the tribes of Gilead and Ephraim, incidentally.) * WAR! P I R A T notice us. We consider our options, and choose jumpcloning out over surrender.  

This episode is a day late and we’re very sorry for that – on the other hand it’s a monster. It’s mostly late because it was a hell of an editing job – as well as being over an hour long, we were using FRAPS to record fleet audio, and it turns out it was recording at a slightly different rate from Goldwave, so over time the fleet voice channel de-synchronised from our voice recordings. To make things worse, the FRAPS feed had Will’s voice in it too, so synching was really important. (Sorry Doug!) In this episode we took advantage of the Imperium’s brief invasion of Providence to get Will some experience in a large nullsec fleet, flying with Corebloodbrothers and Provibloc as temporary members of Gemini Talon. Admittedly, since we only thought of this about six hours before the show and he didn’t have time to drop corp roles and join a Provibloc corporation, Will was in a six-hour old character flying an armour Vigil with a target painter and an Entosis Link. Retrospective The Imperium deployment to Provi was quite a lot of fun, overall. I think both sides learned a lot about how to Fozziesov, and there was a pleasing amount of generally civilized behaviour on both sides. I saw writing from both sides afterwards which was more introspective and respectful of the enemy than the usual chest-beating Eve nullsec propaganda stuff. I think the final tally was knocking out about half of the IHUBS in Providence (although that was from a sift through Dotlan at the end of the week and trying to work out which Ihubs were brand new from the ADMs, so I might have underestimated.) From a Provi point of view, was nice to feel like we had slowed the invasion enough not to meet its initially stated goals. I’m pretty sure that the Imperium could kick over Provi’s bins with a little more effort and time, but it was a boost to realise we could fight back effectively.

Taking a break from shooting things, we try out some Planetary Interaction. Turns out it’s quite hard to explain PI quickly, so this episode is over an hour long. And that’s pretty much just an hour of talking about PI, building a quick colony, and going off on the usual wild tangents…  

Well, we finally complete the new player experience, killing Will’s pod on the Amarr undock to complete the Opportunities map. Twenty five episodes is a nice round number, and we’ve done what we set out to do. (Obviously we’re not stopping there – there’s a ton of things in Eve we haven’t tried yet – but it feels like a nice point to draw a line under and call that Chapter One or something.) Now, since Will had implants worth, oh, five thousand ISK or so, we had to get him a jump clone first to avoid losing those. There’s a slightly confused event at the end of the episode. Having checked the combat logs and killboard, I think what happened was: * Aerry Serlat undocked/arrived at 20:46:19 in an Atron with a sec status below -2.0 in a 1.0 Sec system, so the station sentry guns immediately started locking her up. She scrammed Ruskeydoo a tick later, which triggered a CONCORD response. * Aerry opened fire at Rusky’s pod with three Light Electron Blaster I, missing with the first salvo and doing minor damage with the second. * Aerry’s Atron then got evaporated by sentry guns before CONCORD could arrive (less than 8 seconds after opening fire), around the point where Will was saying how much the Providence looks like a rebel transport from Star Wars. * Rachel Wolfe, lurking off the gate in a fast-locking Svipul, locks up and blows away the now criminal-flagged Aerry’s pod – including 40M ISK of implants. * Will carries on talking about how pretty the Providence looks. The whole thing happened in under ten seconds. In many ways, a case study in how not to conduct a HiSec gank, but that’s probably for the best. It certainly entertained me. Sorry Aerry!

This episode was recorded after a break of a few weeks, and apparently we did an awful lot of dithering. If it sounds like the sound’s corrupted, don’t worry – that’s just Doug saving you from listening to an exceptionally bit by fast-forwarding through… We discuss: * The risk of gatecamps on nullsec entrance gates – chokepoints where camps can use warp interdiction bubbles. A brief mention of intel channels. * The price of “fame” – a Karmafleet member undocking to follow us out in a gank-fit Catalyst. Thanks to Yulai Federation, whose gatecamp he appears to have run into. * How to fly out of a bubble. When I say “turn your monitor” I mean turn your camera. Turning your monitor isn’t going to help anyone. * Saved by NRDS! A fight which we would have lost in seconds if they’d decided to actually open fire. * Diplomacy! * Will wants an actual spaceship. Of course he does.

Our flirtation with frigate PvP continues! We fight again, this time both in long ranged ships, and this time someone dies. Who is it? I shall remain silent here to preserve the suspense! * Will muffs the opening AGAIN * Will received a present so exciting he doesn’t really know what it is or does… * It turns our Eve Time isn’t something that nobody thought about. See Wiki article and Chronicle * We mention Sarah’s Overview Pack – a terrifically useful thing to download