Moving Day

Dear readers,

It is with some excitement that I have a big announcement.  Warp to Zero is moving to a new home!  All of my future posts, guides and articles will be posted at Grimmash on Gaming, at www.grimmash.com.  I am moving from the Blogger platform to a hosted Wordpress.org platform.

Not much is changing for now, besides the visual layout of the blog.  But I felt it was time to move for a variety of reasons.  

While Blogger is wonderful platform, I want more freedom to really edit the nuts and bolts of the site.  Along with that, I want more experience running a website from the ground up.  My family has always been involved in using the internet to promote our hobbies and businesses.  As the resident tech “Expert”, I decided that learning more managing my hobby website would be a good way to learn how to help my family reduce their dependency on limited platforms.

Regarding my blog, it was started to be all about Eve.  As my life and gaming habits adjust I find myself still wanting to write about Eve, but also about other games, and other types of gaming, more extensively.  I thought about trying to rework this site, but given the nature of Blogger, I decided to make a clean break.  As I said, it is a great platform, but I want to have more control over how I can share content.  Running my own website with full control should improve both the reading experience and my ability to curate my ramblings.  

I also want to start carrying more interesting articles for a variety of topics and games, and the new platform should make these more accessible.  Moving forward I hope to establish a more regular post schedule, with at least two posts a week and better guides or features like reviews or photo galleries every week or two as things come up.  

All of my content will be carried over to the new website.  The posts and comments are already in place.  Some of the guides and longer articles I’ve written for this site are in need of some serious editorial work, so they will get much needed attention and revision, and will find a new home once I think they are suitable as long term reference material.  The categorization system will get a complete overhaul to take advantage of the Wordpress.org category system.

The new site will be a little rough around the edges for a bit as I get in and tweak things to the point where I decide to settle in.  After all, no project is ever done, just abandoned at a certain point.   I am a hobbyist in the website creation field, not a professional.  Any considerations to improve the website are more than welcome!  

To all those that have been kind enough to link to my site in blogrolls or link lists, please consider updating the URL and title for my site.  At the least it will keep your link list dynamic!

To all of my readers, over forty thousand since I started this blog a few years ago, thank you for reading and commenting, and join me at my new home!

More Changes!

Hello!

I've been so busy playing Eve and working on stuff for me new corp that I haven't had time to polish up any of my articles.  I guess that is a good thing...

Since I have a bit of a backlog, and a tentpole series as Jester would call it, I am going to hold of on posting the longer articles until I get them finished up.  I am also going to wait a bit, as I am finalizing a relaunch of my site.

Yep!  Pretty soon I will migrate to a newer, cleaner, more controllable website.  All the old stuff here and comments will port over, but I will have better tools to share pictures, archive guides and resources, and some of the other stuff I am looking to try out.  So keep an eye on this space, as a belated spring cleaning is on the way!

Fly smart!

A Liberating Lack of Local

I am a few weeks into full-time wormhole life.  It's becoming quite enjoyable.  Aside from the fun of popping around and exploding all sorts of things in all sorts of spaces, so far the biggest appeal of wormhole life has been the sheer variety.

Many ways of playing Eve kind of prod you down a path of specialization.  The skill system rewards this.  Focusing intensely on one thing is usually the most effective way to structure a play session.  Usually splitting your attention between various flavors of Eve dilutes the whole experience.  Wormhole space forces variety, though.  The random nature of what sites spawn in the hole has a huge impact on what each day will bring.  Your statics and your K162s might bring treasures hidden inside tentacled Sleeper shells or PvP just waiting to happen.  You never know, and you usually have a few options to choose from.  Logging in and launching probes is the first step to finding out what the game is bringing you on any given day.

In the last few days I have mined gas and ore, cleared sites, avoided bubbles, run PI, and started planning some low-intensity industry, all with a friendly group of players that like helping each other out.  We have flown in every security level besides null, found some great payouts and some lackluster evenings of just chatting while keeping an eye on a combination of daytrippers and WH corps duking it out and hoping to catch us with our probes down.

All of this is not without effort or without risk.  But the balance of activities keeps everything fresh, and the almighty Bob of Anoikis seems to give enough nice payouts to make the whole thing seem worthwhile.  I have to commend the design balance in WH space.  It really is a great way to see a lot more of Eve than whatever rut you may find yourself in.

Fanfest 2014: TwitchTV

So, it has been a busy few weeks.  I moved, again.  I am refinishing multiple pieces of furniture.  And in Eve I am making a lot of transitions that have left me with a bunch of half written articles, but no time to edit them into postable stuff.  But I did follow FanFest pretty closely.

There were a lot of things announced: Legion, new ships, the "new" dev cycle, and other stuff I am forgetting.  I tried to follow it as close I can, and I bought the HD Stream through Twitch TV.

While the content of FanFest was great, I have been rather disappointed by the stream.  I work during normal business hours in the US EST timezone. Because of this I was hoping to use the mobile app on my iPhone to listen while working as I could, and then come home and watch the other panels while unpacking the new place.  This did not really work out so well.

The mobile app for Twitch is pretty awful.  Laggy, drops connections all the time even with good data signals, and worst of all, it plays advertisements on a stream I paid for access to.  That last bit is just plain stupid and greedy.  Nothing quite matches the experience of the feed dying, reloading the app, and then having to sit through 30 secs of ad roll just to get back to the presentation.  Bush league stuff, Twitch.

Second, and I am not sure if this is on Twitch or CCP, but it is almost a day after the end of FanFest, and of about 54 panels that I can count on the schedule, 16 have been uploaded to watch after the fact.  That is 30% of the panels.  So paying for the HD stream was not really worth it, from the perspective of being able to see most of what happened.

Edit: Apparently roundtables were not recorded, at all.  That sucks, but I just didn't notice it when I bought the stream.  I guess caveat emptor.  Still waiting on CCP Presents, or anything from Saturday though.  Would have been nice had that been uploaded before the work week starts.

I've delayed a few posts, especially regarding Industry stuff, because I wanted to see what came out at FanFest before writing up my takes on everything.  We'll see what gets posted in the next few days, but I am not too hopeful at this point.

All that said, I enjoyed being able to see the Keynotes and a few other panels, and overall I am impressed with a lot of the decisions CCP is making going forward in the Eve Universe.  I hope to get a few posts up this week with the information we do have, especially regarding the future of Eve, as I think a lot of things can be inferred from the news over the last few weeks!