Mysterious Mysteries

Well, Tony and I are getting ready to ship out for Austin tomorrow so we can sell anime merchandise to the convention goers at Ikkicon on Friday and over the weekend. Unfortunately we won’t be able to bring very much Ramune with us (the wholesalers only have three boxes left), but we have plenty of strawberry pocky to sell. And a bunch of wall scrolls to sell, and our PVC pipe wallscroll display to hang some of them on.

So if anybody reading this happens to be going to Ikkicon, drop by the dealer’s room and say hi to us at Eroth Productions. We’ll be the same odd pair we always are, long-haired me and short-haired Tony. Heck, Tony even tells me we should be directly to the right as everybody enters (not that conventions have messed up our location before, mind you…).

Well that was a strangely productive way to spend an all-day downtime. Rather than sit around bored all day, I decided to dust off the half-finished draft of my new guide and finish it.

So enjoy it guys. The link to where I host my guides is, as always http://evefiles.mysterious-mysteries.com. I plan on updating it later with some specific setups and information about ships larger than destroyers, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Also, I eventually want to do a similar guide for Minmatar ships. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Amarr or Gallente ships to really do guides for them, but who needs them anyway?

As I have been saying a lot for the past few weeks, I’m waiting to update my Science and Industry guide again because Invention is so horrible at the moment, I cannot envision CCP not fixing things.

I would love to say that I knew how bad the situation with Invention was from experience, but the truth is that I just don’t have the money to get involved with that. Billions of ISK for a single data interface that can be used to run one Invention job at a time (it won’t be used up or anything, but still)? I have some money, but I’m not made of the stuff.

And then there’s the poor returns on the Invention jobs if they succeed at all. Now, the people testing haven’t been using BPCs with maxed out runs or anything, which I think may be part of why they can only get tech two BPCs with a single run, but their Invention jobs still fail to come up with anything an awful lot.

But anyway, the sorry state of Invention has been what was holding me back. But since I am tired of waiting, I am placing my personal deadline on January 7. If by then CCP has not announced a pending (or even desired) improvement to Invention, I will edit the Invention section of my guide appropriately, and re-insert the language mentioning that the Science and Industry interface’s Blueprints tab can’t find blueprints that have not been used yet (I had thought the bug was fixed, but I was just misreading the patch notes).

So cheers everybody, and happy industry.

We did try to give The Company another playthrough, but we learned that while I was very well aware of what The Company was all about once the ball got rolling, as a player I find it very hard to get to that point. All the other RPGs I’ve played (even Tony’s unreleased ones) have very strong cues on how to start. Maybe it’s just because I’m indecisive somewhat, but The Company’s lack of a strong cue made it too hard for an already nervous me to get started.

This re-affirms the value of short one-page fiction pieces being written and placed into the book. The stories would be short enough to not be obnoxious, but transmit a picture of play “as intended” and allow players to work from some known point of comfort.