The Great Land Grab

World by world we will build an empire – reach heights that were once unimaginable. But the spread of influence takes an iron will. Your interests might align with some, and with others collide with the force of suns.

You are much more powerful than you think. Creation is so precious and greed so destructive.  Your choice will make a difference – because all these worlds are yours.

This morning the great land grab began.  As all Eve Fans know, as well as our regular readers, the implantation of planetary interaction was delayed from May 26 until this morning, June 8^th.   CCP called it a “land rush” on their web site. A recent trailer for the Tyrannis expansion even ends with the words “Because all these worlds are yours.” Does this mean that the No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) team can now lay claim the planets we colonized? (We doubt it)  However, another trailer from CCP lead us to believe we can claim the planet when it says “will you rule with benevolence or ruthless tyranny?”  Even some of the some of the mmo news web sites we read were on the “claim this planet” side of the fence – like this one:

“Until now, players were only able to pillage celestial anomalies such as asteroids, moons, or gas clouds for resources. Starting in 2 weeks, pilots in the EVE universe will be able to claim whole planets (over 65,000 are available for pillaging) for their resources.”

Whether we can or can’t, the air of excitement it lent to it all is obviously intentional on behalf of CCP. A quick search of the internet didn’t show us a definite statement one way or another.  It’s not too often you get involved with a virtual land rush.  The last time we had a chance to participate in such an event was when Ultima Online (UO) launched their Samurai Empire expansion, and again when they launched their Origins shard.  Then, as now, there was a sort of nervous excitement beforehand.  A large part of this, back in our UO days, was because you knew the second  the servers went live there would literally be a virtual race across the landscape to reach a favored plot of land – and if you were too slow they would all be gone before you can say megalopolis.  In the case of  Eve Online it was the possibility (true or not) that it was first come first serve, on player per planet, that made it exciting – because there are fewer planets than there are players.

A member of the NPNM team was their of course, logging on five minutes ahead of time, expecting to be early – and was very mistaken. The moment the login screen came in to view a quick glance revealed the truth…the servers were up early.  Still, the number of players online only read 14 (that is the first time anyone on our team has ever seen that).

“It was there that we discovered that not only does the type of extractor have to match the type of material to be extracted, but the schematics of the processor also have to be set to the same material (something we didn’t see in the instructions) in order to route between extractor and processor.”  

Beneficial or Tyrannical, whether or not the entire planet is now ours, we established colonies on Waskisen III, Waskisen IV and Waskisen VII.  The first planet we claimed was Waskisen IV, a temperate planet.  It was there that we discovered that not only does the type of extractor have to match the type of material to be extracted, but the schematics of the processor also have to be set to the same material (something we didn’t see in the instructions) in order to route between extractor and processor.  

With all three colonies up and running we are not producing heavy metals, oxygen and some sort of bacteria.  We know what to do with the first two, but we are all stubbed on the product of Waskisen IV (the bacteria). We can only suppose that CCP has plans for biological warfare down the road.

*edit*

Here is the best tutorial we have found on the subject of planetary interaction so far. Too bad we didn’t find it before we set up our colony. It looks like we are going to have to add a storage facility and launch pad to our three colonies.  In the end, even if it doesn’t make alot of isk, it promises to be alot of fun.