Friday 23 October 2009

Fanfest Video roundup

Okay, so I thought I'd post my thoughts on some of the videos from Fanfest 2009. I've been watching every day at lunch instead of writing Blog posts, hence the hiatus, but hours of video does tend to take hours to get through!

Videos + a brief summary of my thoughts from the weeks watching...

PVE/PVP Roundtable discussion - Awesome both of these, and some valid points being brought up in the discussions especially in regard to ECM power, and ECCM lack of it in PVP imho.

CCP Panel - great questions on future of EVE and Dust integration. In summary, initial integration is limited, but sadly we can't gank the Barges as they fly between planets. Shame.

CSM Panel
- Nice to hear from the delegates from this round. I'm not personally going to be going in for next CSM elections, but will be on the one after. I would possibly be shot if I agreed to the Sundays and trip in February right now considering other commitments with work, I'd never get to see the girlfriend.

GM Panel - Great to hear GM's are involved in scrum with regards to tools development to help them help us. Nice to hear they play the game as much as us too! Certainally beats some games I've played before - where the CS and GM experience is sometimes somewhat outsourced and seperate from the Dev's.

To watch next week Scrum and Agile Development, Game Design and the Ecomomy sessions.

Oh, and you all so have to listen to the Orchestration of in game songs - DJ Margeir was awesome. PLEASE repeat this next year - I am defeinitely attending fanfest anyhow, but I love orchestras - and orchestras playing Computer tunes is great.

Oh and you have to watch the Alliance panel presentation that Goonswarm (Darius Johnson) gave. Its not on youtube yet, but tentonhammer has the goods. Made me die laughing.

Hope you guys all have a good weekend - at the moment DSTI is concenrtating on producing items enough for the holiday period (I leave for holidays in about a weeks time now - so the mineral queue and production is concentrating on making sure I don't run out of stuff in the interim).

Oh and Rojaz - I've not been ignoring you - just I typically am away from computer whenever you chat to me!

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Fanfest

Thanks to all of the wonderful bloggers for showing us how good FanFest was this year. I'm not going to link them all as the other blog pack members have already done that this week already - but Ombeve and Roc specifically had great reviews up.

I will be going next year, the g/f has approved it, and may do the Sisters of Eve thing, she noticed my sad-face all weekend and realized why, great person she is :) I hope CCP release the dates asap for Fanfest 10 - why? Well, work leave is the only thing that will prevent me making it next year, and both early October and early November (previous Fanfest times) are somewhat contested times to go in my team. My boss likes the Caribbean in Oct/Nov, and my other colleague is actually off this week on a late summer break.

Right now, its only a few weeks until my big Vegas adventure though, so have been setting up ready for this in-game...

I've not been online much though just simply moving minerals and building vast quantities of ships (taking 20 days to build is not uncommon). This is so that I can reduce the mineral stack just a little prior to holiday...

The other big thing, is my annual accounts are due for renewal in November and I'm based in UK. I done the maths, and I've worked out that at the moment its close in price to go back to Timecards compared to buying annually (added to fact paying annually hits wallet a lot harder in Nov). At current exchange rates, a year of time codes = $209 - compared to €131.40 a year on credit card = approx £120 a year. At my banks's current exchange rates, to pounds, time cards = £134 for 360 days (ie time cards = only a 15 quid impact). I think I'll be buying in batches of ETC's - as if the Dollar falls against pound, ETC's will again beat yearly subscription prices with a movement in exchange rates. Link to Shatteredcrystal for those interested in this - disclaimer, I'll get some referral funds - but if you feel like making me happy, click on this link before purchase... I'm taking a risk that dollar will fall relative to pound basically...