Another Exciting Sandcastle

EvE is a sandbox and thus your experience in the game is what you make it. A lot of that has to do with the people you interact with, the friendships you make, and the stories you share. I've had the delightful experience of conceiving an idea and working to make it an in-game reality with Hellcats. And as an extension to that, getting elected to CSM5 by campaigning on a mainly "fix low sec" platform. It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Draining work at times--which is why I took a couple of years off from the game after my CSM5 term (2010) ended. When I returned last year, I vowed to play casually--just wandering around with no particular agenda, enjoying the sights of New Eden and interaction with the community.

But I swear they put something in the sand in this sandbox. Something that makes it impossible NOT to want to grow ideas into realities.

Thus I find myself at the beginning of another exciting endeavor in affiliation with the fine folks at EvE-Scout ("We scout so you don't have to."). Soon after my arrival in Thera, I started scouting for them. We began talking about exploration as a career and what a fine thing it would be to create a home, a haven, for explorers who just want to wander between the stars on their own agenda.

Much talking later, Signal Cartel was born: a corp devoted to the highest ideals of exploration, nurturing to new players, and many other things besides that are practically foreign in New Eden culture.

We are, as they say, not your average EvE corp.

But I--a former pirate who adores PvP and believes that EvE should always remain deadly dangerous for the inattentive and unwise--am completely excited about what we hope and plan to do, even though it most decidedly has nothing to do with PvP.

Rather, the mission of Signal Cartel is to embrace and promote exploration as a career choice, to provide a haven and home for explorers, to help new players fall in love with New Eden through the lens of exploration, and to provide useful services to all of New Eden through our membership in the Eve-Scout Enclave alliance. All in a corp with a culture of neutrality, respectfulness, non-aggressive behavior, generosity of spirit, helpfulness, and friendliness to all. Such things are antithesis to many EvE corp cultures but we believe that there are a lot of players out there with an explorer's heart who will embrace just such a culture with enthusiasm. If you're one of them, we invite you to learn more and consider joining us.

And to those of you who say, "OMG where is Mynxee and what have you done with her?!", I say "I'm in the sandbox, building another exciting sandcastle!"

Recruitment Post on EvE Online Forums

Discoveries: City of God

While on a wander through Amarr space, I came across a beacon for City of God in Shastal so I went to take a look. I discovered a desolate and haunting testimony to unhinged megalomania, but the view from the ruined monument toward what is left of Caroline's Star and the nebula is beautiful.

There is much waiting to be discovered in New Eden.

What interesting things have you come across lately?

Eve Character Portraits

In real life, I'm an artist who specializes in watercolor pet portraits, mainly dogs. Like these, for example:

When I was in Stay Frosty and the Summer Frigate Smackdown was posted, I decided to offer a character portrait as a prize...there's not that much difference in painting dogs vs. people.They both involve the same things: accurate drawing and rendering, getting the values right, and so forth. Cervantes Marovinjun won the portrait prize. I was originally going to do an ink and watercolor sketch but decided to do a fully rendered watercolor portrait. Cerv was quite happy with the portrait and talked about how meaningful the portrait is to him because (like any of us who have characters we've nurtured for years) he's very attached to his character. Not surprisingly, I hear the same thing frequently from the pet owners when I deliver their pets' portraits.

I was musing about Cerv's portrait in my in-game channel (The Retreat Lounge) and wondering if there was any market for hand-painted character portraits. Niraia immediately commissioned me to paint hers! We agreed on a slight wardrobe adjustment to show off her *cough* assets a little better. I was really glad when she agreed on pink as it's my favorite color. And...another happy customer!

So, I guess this is a thing then. If you want your character's portrait painted (or to gift a portrait to someone else or purchase one as a prize for your event), click the Gallery page at the top of the blog for more info about this creative service. I'll add portraits there as I complete them. 

Crossing Zebras and Hellcats Reloaded

Just a short update on some cool things that have happened in the last week or two.

First, Dian Lung has launched a reboot of my old corp Hellcats under the name Hellcats Reloaded. I'm so happy to see her run with that and looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Second, Xander Phoena of Crossing Zebras has asked me to write for them. The focus of my articles will be "EVEtrepreneurs"--those players who take the initiative to create or organize something for the community, whether it's a one-time or ongoing offering, whether it's large or small, new or old. My editor at CZ, Niden Sommer, suggested I write about Hellcats Reloaded for my debut article and provide a Hellcats retrospective as background. My first article "EVEtrepreneurs: Hellcats Reloaded" has been published and you can read it here. Please do leave comments on the CZ post and on Reddit.

As a follow-up, Rixx Javix has published an article about his experiences with women in Eve and how they shaped his rookie experience and perception of the game. I am hoping to feature as many women Eve players as possible in my EVEtrepreneur series of articles. But of course, every player who's doing something interesting, useful, or fun for the community is a potential subject and you should let me know about them!

Please send your suggestions to me via Evemail, or email (mynxeeofeve at gmail dot com), or find me on Skype (Mynxee). Thanks and fly safe (or dangerous, as you prefer)!

Homebase Thera

After finding an easy way into Thera thanks to EvE-Scout, I have spent several days wandering around the system looking at the sights and being entertained by the Local banter. It kind of reminds me of Amamake in the old days when that system was a brawling, chaotic lowsec Wild West kind of a place (it might still be actually, haven't been there in awhile). I love the nebula colors in Thera and exploring the mysterious ruins. Certainly makes one wonder what happened here (and whether the recent changes to and disappearance of Caroline's Star--leaving only an oddly symmetrically shaped glowing artifact--are somehow related to any of that).

After chatting with the EvE-Scout folks, it turns out scouting for them is is a natural fit with what I currently enjoy doing in-game. They have a great project underway: their growing network of scouts scan down signatures in Thera. Those sigs are put into Tripwire, which in turn feeds the Eve-Scout Web site. Scouts also aid people in system by providing intel about camped wormholes and stations among other things. If you'd like some help or eyes getting into or out of Thera, join the in-game channel EvE-Scout and ask for assistance. 

EvE-Scout has some exciting plans and ideas for expanding their project over time. I am thrilled to be involved with such a useful and community-minded effort in these early and formative days.

Anyway, because I enjoy the scouting there and because Thera provides opportunities to jump out and roam to so many other places, I'm going to make it my homebase for the foreseeable future. If you come to visit, say hi in Local!

My little Astero Pocket Rockets is my favorite ship to fly right now. Isn't she pretty? I never get tired of looking at her.

OOC: The Irksome Visual Challenges of Rhea

Mostly I love the changes in Rhea. Almost everything looks very pretty; the new content and overall changes are great. However, one little thing is having a very big impact on my enjoyment of the game.

That thing is the difficulty of being able to clearly see the boundaries of my chat windows against a black background such as the solar system map (which is displayed frequently when I am probing or otherwise examining a solar system) or the blackness of space. Here's an example:

Keep in mind that I often have a lot more unstacked windows open than what you see here. I can't tell you how often since this patch that I have accidentally closed private convos or other windows because I couldn't easily see what I was clicking on. It is beyond irritating. Prior to Rhea, I could create a custom color scheme that allowed me to meaningfully set the color and transparency of windows so that their boundaries were easily visible. That is no longer an option. Instead we are given a bunch of so-called color themes that are *barely* distinguishable from one another. The new transparency slider makes zero difference against a black backdrop as shown above.

The worst element of the new design is that the boundaries and backgrounds of all in-game windows except the currently selected one are black--except for a few that have have barely discernible faint highlights on the top and bottom edges. For example, my Drones window has these faint highlights but not the Selected Item window. Furthermore, the bounding lines of all windows including the currently selected one are so thin and faint that they are extremely difficult to see. These two issues combine to create a huge amount of visual confusion when I have a bunch of in-game windows open and overlapping each other in random positions. I'm pretty sure it's not just my 56-year old eyes being the problem. It is very simply thoughtless and terrible user interface design.

In case you're wondering, I play Eve on Windows running in a Parallels virtual machine on my iMac 27" with 16 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB graphics card. It is perfectly capable of running Eve on high quality. Here are the graphics and general settings at the time the screen shot above was taken:

The Sisters of Eve theme is the lightest option available and even it sucks. I am fucking frustrated at no longer having sufficient control over my in-game settings to make the goddam game windows easily seeable. FFS, these windows are central to being able to play the fucking game! How can I play if I can't easily see and manage them? *RAAAAAGE*

I hope that Eve's UI designers come to their senses and give us back some control over how we can configure the in-game windows' colors, or at least the contrast. It's design hubris in the extreme for them to impose their own ideas of color and contrast choices when individual players have such widely varying visual challenges and preferences. There is no good design reason in the world to not AT LEAST permit players to adjust the contrast in their own game client, and at best allow color and transparency customization as was possible before.

And hey, if I am missing something obvious about how to make my in-game windows more visible and discernible from each other, then I'm all ears. 

IC: Floating in Evati

Transcript (click preceding images to embiggen):

RANDOM HAIKU

wtf tackled!!!

must be hax cuz i was cloaked!

or...uhmm...maybe not.

29 July

YC116

#podjournaling break is over!

Recently I've been doing well on the poker tables. It's my habit to find somewhere interesting to sit cloaked up in my beautiful Astero and simply enjoy the scenery when I am not focused on a hand. I found an old battlefield in Evati that had glorious colors emanating from the structures there. My ship sensors didn't complain so I sat a long while and watched a few faction ships on their rounds. 

Evati brings back a lot of wonderful memories of running with the Bastards when Hellcats was in its heydey. Glad to still be in touch with many old friends from that time.

Speaking of old friends, one popped up out of the blue and managed to convince me to join him in RvB [Red vs Blue]. I keep my ties to SF [Stay Frosty] but RvB is a very good fit in terms of "action when you want it".