Chance to Hit Sheet

My esteemed corp mate Mr Skoll has documented his recent victory for internet spaceship science over the ignorance surrounding things that go pew pew and how they may or may not hit other things.

Not like I had any doubt that the implementation of chance to hit wouldn't match up with the design, but Azual's post prompted me to make a spreadsheet I've been meaning to make for some time.
The spreadsheet can calculate chance to hit given the parameters you feed it and puts this info into a handy graph.

You can have a look at it here.

If you think it might be useful to you, you can make yourself a copy (File > Make a copy) and play with the numbers in the white cells.

Something Is Afoot - Walking in Stations

Right now there's not much of a reason to think about Walking in Stations (WiS). Things have been quiet around it, almost suspiciously so. Still, despite the failures of Incarna, the development of WiS is ongoing, with prototype footage presented to the CSM behind the curtain of non-disclosure last summer (Ctrl+F etc.).

It makes me curious. Not in a way whether WiS is good or bad for Flying in Space. Neither do I care much about what kinda features it's going to have. Concerning WiS, I'm most curious about its place in New Eden next to EVE and DUST.

So first of all, let's have a brief look at DUST:

• It's a multiplayer first person shooter
• It's going to remain a Playstation 3 exclusive for the time being
• It's freely accessible ("free to play", as smart marketing people have dubbed this model a gaming age ago)
• It allows gameplay interaction between DUST and EVE players

One of the big takeaways of this is that DUST is going to bring a lot of people in contact with the single shard world and emergent gameplay of New Eden. It's going to cater to a target audience the majority of which wouldn't have wasted a second thought on Internet Spaceships so far.
I've often read or heard people saying something like "I love reading about EVE, but I could never get into it." It's a huge opportunity for CCP to offer these people entry to EVE, something DUST looks to achieve.

Why wouldn't Walking in Stations attempt the same?

I really don't know; reason enough for me to assume that WiS is likely to be freely accessible and aim for a target audience that for now has shown little interest in playing EVE; much like EVE players in WiS. Other than throwing a bit of a tantrum over it, that is. And that's the thing: why bother trying to "win over" EVE veterans if there are people that may adopt WiS with much less bias (but a fair bit of money to spend that's out of reach for now)?

Payment models aside, it also makes a lot of sense to me to separate WiS gameplay from EVE. Why not a more peaceful and serene setting maybe; not as scary as EVE, but sharing the same universe and allowing players of entirely different games and fancies to interact across entirely different games. Look no further than DUST 514 for a pretty convincing proof of concept.

And We're Back

Welcome to Point on Pod, I'm Jaxley. You may know me from previous blogs, such as Onslaughts of an Outlawed. I'm a lowsec pirate and as such a director of The Tuskers, New Eden's leading corp in skewing people's conception of good PvP.

Now, why get a whole new blog started in the first place? It's not too long a story: about a year ago, blogging was getting kind of stale and I wanted to see how else I could share my exploits publically. Under the label Point on Pod, I took a few forays into other formats.

PoP's first incarnation was a video podcast kinda thing. The idea was to have maybe three Tuskers roaming solo, but always staying within a couple systems from each other. They would each record the whole shebang and talk about stuff while searching for targets. The footage would be edited into an episode of about 30–45 minutes.
Shortly after an endearingly terrible test run (nonetheless promising), the two other Tuskers running the show unfortunately went inactive (coincidentally, I hope). Interest in corp was too low to build a new cast, so that was that.

Next up was a live stream. I couldn't be bothered to learn video editing myself, so doing it live was the perfect excuse. However, EVE "unplugged" and all by itself makes for a bad viewing experience. And somebody preoccupied with shooting stuff makes for a mediocre commentator at best. That aside, it didn't really suit my rather cautious play style and I couldn't get comfortable with feeding live intel to other hunters around me.

Eventually I did try my hand at editing PvP footage into commentated videos. The results turned out decent, but getting there just proved much too time consuming (think 3 hours for 3 minutes).

So it seems like I've come full circle with this here blog. Same old? Not quite: I used to limit myself strictly to covering my actual gameplay experience. This time around, I won't avoid discussing other aspects of the game, i.e. balancing, best practices or the state of certain features. You can still expect me to only cover lowsec piracy however.

Hope you'll enjoy and cheers for stopping by! o7