Over the weekend I ran across a bunch of EVE-related links that I wanted to pass along. This might become a thing in the future — we’ll see. Also, I finally got around to making a Twitter account for just EVE stuff, so you can now follow @jumponcontact for EVE-related tweeting, conversation, and posts about new posts and projects. If you’ve been following my non-EVE account, @drewwww, now might be a good time to switch over. I feel kinda bad about spamming my non-EVE-playing-friends with EVE stuff, and so am going to cut back on the EVE tweeting there, except for big project announcements.

So, back to links:

0.0 Political Updates

As far as I can tell, most of the really great reportage about what’s going on in 0.0 happens in the EVE forum ecosystem. This post has a really fantastic summary of what’s going on around New Eden and a healthy dose of interpretation and speculation. It’s some of the most readable 0.0 politics writing I’ve read in a while, although it does assume some history knowledge.

Alliance Social Network Diagram

Also over at Kugutsumen, a poster maintains a list of Alliances that are affiliated with each other through mutual non-aggression pacts – so-called “blue lists”. Basically, all organizations in EVE have the ability to set “standings” with other organizations. These standings are numbers that range from -10 to +10. In past posts, you’ve seen screenshots with people shown as different colors – these are graphical representations of the relationship between my alliance and the alliance the other person is in. Blue means they’re friendly and I shouldn’t shoot them, red means they’re enemies and I should shoot them. This is a map of people who agree to set each other as blue. You can see in the upper right hand corner there’s the tightly linked Northern Coalition. On the left are the murky politics of the southern bloc. I’m working with the original author of this visualization to produce some more complicated ones that more clearly show who are renters, which alliances are the major power brokers and (mayyyyybe) who’s actively attacking who these days. Found this via Manasi at A Mule In EVE.

Update: Great link in the comments to an influence map at EVE fail showing which alliances historically work together. See also, this perspective from NC: that’s a whole lot of people who don’t like us very much.

Essays for New Players

One of the commenters in the Metafilter article about Jump On Contact was inspired to publish a series of emails he wrote to a friend who was just starting out in EVE. They’re a great read, and cover a lot of the really basic stuff that new players care about. If you’re thinking about playing yourself, it’s a great place to start. The author covers a bunch of specific topics (low-sec space, for example) that I haven’t talked about much. All in all, I think it’s a really nice complement to my blog.