What ship is that?: Interbus Ship Identification System

Look at all these ships!!!

My Amarr Ship Tree. 

One of the draws of EVE when I first started playing was all the ships that it had.  I saw my friends playing and talking about all these different ships and I remember thinking, " I want to fly them all. As I started learning the ropes of the game I saw that it was going to be much easier said than done because hey there are a love of ship in New Eden. How many you ask? There are 277 different ship hulls in EVE with 228 of them being able to flown by player characters. That is why I love the Interbus Ship Identification system because it shows all the different ships in the game, and with the Mastery System it shows you, your level at piloting the ship.

My Gallente Ship Tree.

If we compare these first two pictures we are looking at both my Amarr and my Gallente ship trees. I was impressed by my Amarr tree to be honest, because it showed I was closer that I thought to flying other ships. If we look at me Gallente we can see I can fly all Gallente SubCap ships outside Interdictors and Black ops . I also noted that I have must of them at level IV mastery only missing out a few certificates. I did a skill plan and found that I'm only 104 days out from mastering 85% of the subcap ships to V. I have a new goal cause like I said, I'm a sucker for this type of thing.

Cool ship, but what does it do?

Navy Comet Line

With the introduction of Teircide, (the ship rebalancing that CCP has been doing the past two years) one the things they often talked about was ship lines. Theses were supposed to groups of ships that all fit into the same classification. Such as the Navitas is a T1 frigate but is it part of the the support line of ships, that includes, Exequrors, Oneiros and the Nyx supercapital, as well as the Inquisitor and (in)famous Guardian.
With over 228 ships it can become overwhelming trying to know them all and their traits. This where the ISIS comes in. if you hold your mouse over a ship you can little blue boxes above it. This boxes give you the traits of that ships. If we look at the Navy Comet then we can see it uses small weapons, it's a combat ship, meaning it is used for frontline brawling.  It's main weapon system are Hybrid turrets. Last that it uses armor tanking for its main defense.

Phobos Line

If compare the Comet to a tech Cruiser hull such as the Phobos, we are able to see how this lines come together and cross. First we can see that the Phobos uses Medium Turrets. The circle after that shows that it's main purpose is not brawling combat like the Comet, but is Tackle for large fleets. It uses Medium Hybrid turrets as it's main weapon system and like the Comet it is mostly armored tanked. The last box shows that is uses a warp prevention system, interdiction bubbles.
Quickly looking at ISIS we see that both the Comet and Phobos share some groups of skills both are turret ships, both are armor, both use hybrids. In this way they both share some lines of training. But we need to look at one more ship if you want to see a full ship expressed.

Deimos Line

Where the Phobos and Comet only shared three lines, the Deimos are line members. They both are Brawling combat armor ships that use hybrid weapon system. Using ISIS we are able to see that if we are looking for a tech II Cruiser that uses the support skills we use for the Comet, then the Deimos is a good choice for us. This give us a clear line of what skills we need to train at each step to prove to our next system.
While ISIS and the ship Mastery System are not huge game changers in New Eden, I feel they are two of the cooler systems in the game and are only going to improve over all immersion in the game.

I don't often do this, but what new feature in Rubicon do you like most and why? Leave a comment below.

Crossing into Rubicon: New Mastery System.

I think that my favorite thing so far in the Rubicon expansion is the ship mastery system and the revamp of the certificate system. I am a sucker for this kind of things anyways, but in my opinion CCP as really flushed out whole system to improve gameplay for both new and old players. It is very clear and simple to understand and it does does not take much work to access it. in the old certificate system it was easier to use a third party system than the game to look at them. This new system under the show info tab and just players a better idea what skills they really need to fly ships.

If we look at the Incursus we can see that I have ship mastery to four. I have all the skills needed to fly the ship at a decent level. If you have read my skill training blog you can recognize some of the certificates on this page. A few new ones are the Gallente Target Management and Tackling certificate. Target Management is looking at you ability to target hostile ships as well as your ability to use ECCM. The Tackling certificate is taking in account your ability to use warp scrams, disputers and webifiers. The rest of them are the same as they were.
If you are new to EVE, I suggest that you train the skills for Armor tanking, Core ship, Tackling and navigation to their level 4 requirements as soon as you can, because they will be used for other ships and are not racial skills such as turrets and missiles.

Now if we look at the level V mastery we can see that I still need to acquire Target Management, Navigation, and Small Hybrid turrets skills to reach full mastery of the Incrusus. If I click on the certificates I can see each skill needed for lvl 5 mastery and even add time to my skill queue from that tab.
While I haven't played around with all the features the Rubicon has came out with, this one is becoming my favorite as it is showing me that even with my skill planning and different skill list, I have several holes and gaps with many of my ships. over the next few months I'm going to keep using the mastery system to close those gaps and fill in those holes on my ships to give me a larger edge in combat.
As a CEO this also is great skill so that can get new pilots into ships faster and they can have the plan for flying that ship at their finger tips in game.

CCP Causes Tears: The Live Event that lives in Infamy

With all the hate on the last one, I want to say that all the people complaining are wrong with telling CCP to stop doing Live Events. They need to do more.  They need to keep trying to find new ways to get more player interacting with each other. That is what Live events are all about.  They are about players interacting with players.
Did the event have some flaws, sure it did. But it got players out of comfort zones which is a huge win for CCP. It got people out there doing something that they never would have done before. It also brought all three systems of the game together, High, Low, and Null, it was more inclusive than other events that CCP has done in the past.
CCP needs to do more events like this one. They should be encourage to keep doing events. If you look at through the eyes of pvp, no one wins their first ship fight, unless they are really lucky. CCP while this wasn't the first, this was the largest one that CCP has done. Over 3000 people tried to be involved.
I want CCP to do better events to be sure, but saying that should stop doing them is the wrong attitude about it. The event time needs more time and feed back for these events and needs to do more in terms of planing for sure. I have every confidence that this will happen and future events will be better.
On a closing note Alaric Faelen has the best note on any of these threads. This guy gets it. He understands, and is right. if only one guy that did this event, says "Hey I want another shot at them, or I want to be in that alliance."  Then this event is great success.

The only players that lost, were those that didn't participate. Doesn't matter whether people came out in kitchen sink high sec fleets, or shiny null sec doctrines. Just so long as they came out to play. CCP didn't create an ounce of content with their live event.....the players that undocked and came out to fight created the content. It's CCP that owes you a thanks. For the new PvP'ers and care bears that showed up- GF's to you. Don't let the people too scared to lose fake spaceships pee in your Cheerios. You came out, fought and died. That's all any of us did. Hopefully you had fun. Hopefully you realize that being blown up in a game is still fun. If just one care bear realizes that losing internet spaceships doesn't matter and moves out of high sec, then the live event succeeded.