Agony Teaches CCP To Stop Sucking

So far it has been quite a fanfest. Most of the sessions have been quite good, or if not good, entertaining. As expected the alliance panel was a drunken fiasco. It started serious with eve university giving a powerpoint presentation, went to audio clips of people singing their national anthems for ransom, and ended as a mittani three way love-in between test, dns black and the mittani.

The dust514 keynote was a blast despite being an hour late due to technical issues. Orbital bombardment is good. They didn't show the opposite of ships on the ground returning fire but according to the round table that should be possible as well. It seems that they are going to start with making dust a factionwarfare tool to begin with and expand later to include 0.0.

Today's sessions were also good. Ship balancing and redesign is going to be huge. Basically there is no ship that is immune to the sweeping, and seemingly awesome changes. In short, ship tiers are going to be removed and replaced with a more role based outlook. Bonuses will align around what the ship is supposed to do, not arbitrary hodgepodge fits.

Other changes of interest are the apiece stuff for developers. Expect great new 3rd party tools coming soon.

Of course the big news for Agony is that the new producer, CCP unifex, is former agony, or at least a past student. Awesome!!!! Expect the future to be about spaceship explosions!!!

On a side note any inkling of pay-to-win is dead. Devs are publicly and privately tripping over themselves declaring that it is gone, gone, gone! This is good.

And one last thing..... Missile TRAILS!!!!

Fanfest 2012 :)

Just got into fanfest:). I got to say Iceland is really great. Everyone from the airport to the hotel to the restaurants to even the other tourists are very friendly. I am staying in hotel odinsve located in the center of reykjavik. About a 10minute walk down to the spectacular harpa convention center. The weather has been iffy.... Cold yesterday with a few snowflakes fluttering in the wind, however the sun did peak out on occasion which was nice. Today, the first day of fanfest, it started out raining. I, recovering from a night drinking with other agony members, staggered down to the site and got my tickets.

So what am I looking for from fanfest?

In general what I want to see is that CCP continues their push to get EVE to achieve its potential. There is a lot of talk about Dust514, and considering the number of press that have been invited, the launch is going to be a big deal. I just want to see that the flying spaceship part is not left in the dust.

View of the bay in the sunlight (mountains are about 1000m high)

Harpa convention center

A lineup of spaceship nerds