Close but no cigar!!

We received a newsletter here at No Prisoners, No Mercy – this one was for Eve Online. Now nothing is unusual about that of course.  We are still receiving newsletters from every MMO we have ever played.  The way we look at it is that it’s sort of like joining a cult…once they have you they figure you are always a member.  Or to paraphrase a military phrase “grab them by their disk drives and their bank accounts will follow.”

The difference is that this particular offer actually had one of the No Prisoners, No Mercy team thinking about the offer.  She actually thought about resubscribing…and then she laid down until the feeling went away.  Now what, you might ask, is it that would tempt our own Julie to come back to Eve Online? Isn’t this the woman who has said on several shows that she “just doesn’t have the ovaries to play Eve Online any more?” Isn’t this the same woman who wrote the article “Zen and the Art of Astroid Mining” for Virgin Worlds.Com? The answer, of course, is that it is.

Here is what was so tempting:

Oh you little temptress you!!

As you will hear Tipa talk about on show 52 (it’s been a busy holiday we promise to get show 51 out on early release soon) one of the “big push” game mechanics over at the CCP offices these days has been space exploration…and this space ship is just the ship for it. Here is why in an excerpt from an article by CCP Wrangler:

“The Zephyr is a unique starship design, relying almost entirely on solar winds for sublight propulsion. Super-light sails allow it to ride the torrents of photons streaming through space, and its barebones construction gives it a tiny sensor footprint and almost negligible mass. Originally conceived by the ascetic Intaki polymath Valsas en Dilat as a demonstration of minimalist starship design, it was never intended as a commercial venture. The recent discovery of the uncharted Sleeper Territories and their myriad wormholes has brought the Zephyr new attention – its mass makes it an ideal exploration vessel. Valsas remains adamant that the Zephyr never sees mass production, but at the close of YC111 he authorized the Intaki Syndicate to distribute a single hull, paired to a specialized Prototype Iris Probe Launcher, to every registered capsuleer…And here‘s what makes it unique: It has it‘s own special probe launcher (for wormholes) and Sleeper NPC‘s won‘t shoot it in the same way that all NPCs won’t shoot pods.”

Now it isn’t the thought of shelling out another $20.00 or so to “come back to the fold” that stopped her.  No, thats not it.  There were several determining factors, the first of which was the thought of zooming through Sleeper Space in her brand new ship.  Now while the article by CCP Wrangler says that the Sleeper NPC’s won’t shoot at the ship nothing says that other players won’t – which of course means that they will.  There is nothing that will loose you your wonderful collectible space ship  faster than actually using it.  Now if there was some way to actually participate in the whole pve aspect of Eve Online without getting blown out of space that might be another story. But as any long time Eve Online player will tell you, the only place in Eve Online that is truly safe is inside a space station hanger…in other words no where is safe in Eve Online.

So…as tempting as the Zephyr is, as nice as it might be to sail the solar winds of the Eve Online universe, they still haven’t managed to overpower the siren song that is the draw from Star Trek Online.

*edit byJulie*

If it reached the point where the folks at CCP actually gave a damn about the PvE side of the game I might be tempted to come back. But everything I have seen so far shows that they still have a “hands off/anything goes” attitude and the “walking in stations” has become vaporware, while Cryptic is actually doing it.