Now that the Alliance Tournament is over, I wanted to take a step back and look at the teams that competed, and how everything came through. I really want to do a long-term stat breakdown to better analyze the teams (it is my sport of choice after all), but in the meantime, this will just be my impressions and my picks for this year.
If you haven’t watched the finals yet, I am going to spoil some things – you have been warned. Continue reading EVE Online Alliance Tournament
Every year, when the Alliance Tournament comes around, I reserve a bit of time to build a bracket, watch any matches I can, and pay attention to the team statistics and tournament commentary. I often joke with my friends that the EvE Alliance Tournament is my version of football – I plan around matches, yell at the screen when my team loses, cheer when my team wins, and play the armchair strategist throughout.
That doesn’t mean I’m good at it though. Continue reading EVE Online Alliance Tournament
I recently caught an episode of PBS’s Game/Show called, “Are You Weird if You Play as the Opposite Sex?“. In it, the host talked about the various reasons people play games as people of the opposite sex, which started to make me think more about why my main character in Guild Wars is a woman. Continue reading Playing a Woman in a Fantasy Game
While I missed the kickstarter, I picked up a hardbound copy of Empires of EVE: A History of the Great War of EVE Online via preorder as soon as I saw it come across, then eagerly waited for my copy to arrive. By the time I had ordered it, I had already heard/seen Andrew Groen talk about his research a couple of times, and I was excited by the prospect of a book written by someone who wanted to research and document this history of EVE with appropriate rigor (and then did it!) Continue reading Empires of EVE
A couple weeks ago, I posted a math problem that I was playing around with. This problem was born of our some ideas for my new role-playing game, as well as the basic scanning mechanism of EVE Online.
In EVE Online, if you are trying to scan down an object in space, you launch some probes and they report back the distance from the probe to the anomaly, with some amount of error, up to some maximum range. Your ship’s computer then aggregates that information and renders it as an overlay on the scanning screen. If two of your probes received responses, you would get a circle where the two spheres intersect, with three you would get two points, and with four you would get a single point (with some degree of error). You then decrease the range of the probes (increasing their signal strength) to narrow in on your target – a pretty simple and fun min-game which tickles my imagination and makes me think I know something about how science fiction scanning might occur. Continue reading The Scanning and Location Problem
Since I started playing EvE Six years ago, I have been a fan of spreadsheets. In fact, I never really gave Excel a second look until I started playing EvE, which, thinking back, is rather crazy in it’s own right. As I’ve gotten more proficient with Excel, and making it do the things that I want it to, I’m starting to bump into some of its limitations, both as an organizational tool and a number-crunching tool. This blog series is about the migration of some of my more complicated spreadsheets to databases, and, as a first look, I thought I would use my EvE Online spreadsheets – the main reason I have become so proficient in Excel in the first place.
Continue reading Spreadsheets and Databases – Part 1: EvE Online