Eve: London pubmeet, a report

I went to CCP's Eve pubmeet at the Loose Cannon in the City of London on Friday. It was attended by CCP Guard, CCP Soundwave and CCP Unifex so thanks to them for coming along.

It was very friendly. I was fully in mingle/socialiser mode and went around chatting to people. If you're reading this because I met you there then welcome!

I met people from Red v Blue, The Initiative, Goons, -A-, PC Gamer's corp, a chap who only plays on SiSi, two wonderful professional corp robbers and some dastardly pirates whose corp name I've forgotten. A good mix of people but perhaps slightly confirming my theory that pvpers are more extrovert than Empire carebears.

It was extremely well attended. I'd guess there were close to 200 players there and it certainly surprised Unifex who had thought there would only be around 50. It looked like just about everyone got chatting, there weren't many people who didn't start talking to their neighbour at random. Also people were pretty upfront, I didn't get a sense that people were being guarded with important OpSec secrets.

There was a talk from Unifex followed by brief talks from Soundwave and Guard. It was a little hard to hear and the Q&A session that followed was almost impossible to hear. Which was a shame because I actually asked Soundwave to comment on ring mining but couldn't really hear the answer. The gist I got (which I confirmed afterwards with other people) is that ring mining is definitely coming, will be in either in Inferno (due May 22nd) or in the Winter expansion. Ring mining is an alternative method of collecting moon goo by mining it in ships from planetary rings. I'd guess they will be new ship types and new sites which may mean that Winter is more likely than Summer for this feature. That would also make development sense as Inferno is meant to be war-themed so adding a major industrial feature might be better done the patch after.

I got some swag. A free drinks ticket, a Quafe shoulder bag and a DUST beta key. Thanks very much for those! Now I guess I have to buy a Playstation 3.

Someone was also handing out a piece of paper advertising a meetup group:

Support a London Internet Spaceship regular (once per 3 months) meeting by joining the group at http://www.meetup.com/eve-online-london

I've used meetup before for a D&D group, it's quite a good method to arrange this kind of thing. I've registered my interest and if you're interested go along and help get this started.