Ship kills, mech kills... new blog?

So by now you have probably noticed it, I'm a Battletech fan. A big one. I guess you can partly blame Letrange for that one also as he's the one who introduced me to the Battletech universe and Mechwarrior2 in preparation of the arrival of Battletech Tesla 4.0 at Montreal's Virtual World center, back in 1995-1996. Of course, meeting a bunch of VW pilots who were there only for Battletech and didn't do much racing in Red Planet, and getting to know the BT universe and playing the old classic board game also helped turn my interest into nothing short of an addiction. You see, EVE and Battletech share an awesome quality: depth. Getting to know all the mechs and all their stats, plus getting to know all the weapons and equipment you can fit on them is just as bad, if not worse, than doing the same in EVE. And if you're into micro-management like an industrialist? Try running a full Mechwarrior campaign where you have to build each player's character with his/her set of skills, do the equipment management, calculate mech repairs and post-battle salvage... yeah, things can get interesting!

As I was mentioning in my last blog post, the Battletech community is in full uproar with Mektek's free release of the venerable Microsoft Mechwarrior4: Mercenaries, fully modified with gobs of mechs, maps and equipment. The uproar even turned into a massive storm this weekend; the demand was so great that a commercial router and a server got blown up at Mektek's ISP. Things are slowly coming back to life but it goes to show that Battletech fans were waiting for this one. I was one of the lucky ones because the release happened during my time off on friday afternoon, just as I was talking about it on this blog. When people were screaming on the Classic Battletech forums about the Mektek site dying, I was happily playing with my mechs and refitting them to my taste. It will take some time to brush the rust off but I should be hitting multiplayer matches very soon.

Which brings me back to my title. I love EVE PvP and I created this blog to write about it. Back in the Quake days blogs weren't as popular as they are now but when I wasn't practicing I was whoring forums. When MW4M came out I was just as interested in it as I am now, but Quake was taking even more of my gaming time than EVE is right now, and that lasted until 2003 when I started to put tons of time into karting, another awesome addiction which got cut short by the arrival of my twin terrors! But now the Battletech revival looks like it's happening and I just feel like talking about it. So yeah, I may be starting a second blog to talk about this side of my gaming habits. How I will write it, how often I will update it, all those things are still a bit vague. As I mentioned before I have some rust to brush off, and then I have to put my money where my mouth is and start killing some mechs. I also have to get acquainted with the various people in leagues and units (BT equivalent of corps) and find the right one for me. I don't think I'll be going into full-on role-playing, but I would be happy to find a laid-back bunch of Mechwarriors who enjoy a good battle once in a while. So essentially the new blog will talk about match reviews, mech preparation, tactics, BT lore and all-around BT goodness. I will keep the two blogs cross-linked because who knows, there might be some Mechwarriors interested in EVE, and I already know at least 2 capsuleers (OK, one's corp is in hibernation) who are also into Mech Warfare. More news on that when the ideas start to quiet down and settle into something actually writable!

On the EVE front, things are good in the not-so-carebear alliance that is AMC. Despite some mistakes here and there, the combat wing is having a total blast messing with pirates flying in the Low-sec systems near HQ, and even nearby 0.0 residents in Geminate and Great Wildlands have felt the wrath of our awesome T1 technology and TNT belt tactics! We are also getting good at making stuff happen quick; it's much more fun taking 5 minutes to meet up in space and get going than it is to wait for people fitting ships (ie: asking tons of questions because they don't know how and of course they pop the questions when the op is supposed to start) or stuck half-way across the map buying stuff in Jita!

And there you go. Look for the second blog soon, and remember that in whichever game you might fancy, autocannons are just awesome !!!

o7