My First Look At Captain's Quarters

Over the weekend instead of spending my Eve Online time grinding status with the Brutor tribe, I downloaded the Duality test client and took a look at the initial public version of Captain's Quarters.  CCP Tanis warned that the devs were "still at the chisel-in-hand-in-front-of-a-marble-form stage," but with Star Wars: Galaxies not satisfying my desire to walk around a game in an avatar, I decided to brave an MMO test server for the first time.
CCP Tanis' warning was very true as I experienced periods both in and out of Captain's Quarters where I could not move and the screen froze up.  Yes, this truly was an alpha version of the game's build, so I expect just about everything is subject to change.  The devs already had a list of issues to work on by the time I logged in on Saturday, so I won't mention those here.

One thing I'd like to see change is for the devs to put a light dimmer in the main room of the Captain's Quarters.  It was very dark and hard to find some of the features.  Finding the re-customization button was almost impossible.  And sometimes I couldn't find it even when I knew where to look.  Sometimes watching the screens in the dark is enjoyable, just not all the time.  Of course, CCP could come up with a lore explanation for the darkness and then the NPC station masters could offer better quarters for sale in another iteration of CQ.

Did I mention Captain's Quarters are dark?

The only other thing that really bugged me about Captain's Quarters was that the main screen would turn off and then the bulkhead behind the screen is visible.  Actually, once I started looking for it, the bulkhead is visible when the screen is showing news as well.

I won't go into what I think about the new crash tutorial because I really think that the lag interfered with the testing experience.  Yes, I'm pretty sure that the lag prevented parts of the tutorials from displaying.  If you are interested in my thoughts, you can read my first Eve Online forum post with my impressions in the feedback thread.  That's right, I played for over 1 1/2 years without posting on the forums. 

One thing I would like to add that I didn't feel was appropriate for the feedback thread is that I hope that CCP comes out with jewelry, especially wristwatches or some sort of wrist comp.  The avatars have a habit of looking at their wrists whenever they are idle for too long.  The avatars wouldn't look so silly if they had something on their wrists to actually look at.

While playing around on Duality I decided to make a movie showing my experience.  Wandering Rose does the honor of walking around and that is her Hurricane in the docking bay.  I had to do a lot of editing because I never did have more than 30 seconds of play before being hit with a "spatial anomaly."  The actual experience was not as smooth as the video might lead you to believe.

Video: CCP Soundwave Explains Why TQ Crashed - The Elephant Incident

I finally finished manufacturing my Mastodon and needed to come up with a name.  So I figured I would commemorate CCP Soundwave's classic explanation of why Tranquility crashed on the second weekend of Alliance Tournament 7 back in 2009.  Of course, that led me to tracking down the mp3 file from the broadcast, which I found on EVE Files.

Now, I came up with the idea of trying to post the clip on the blog so I could share it.  The only problem is that Blogger does not allow for uploading sound files.  However, if I turned the clip into a Windows Movie file, I could then post it on YouTube and show it that way.  So I took the plunge and created my first video.  I hope you like it.

I couldn't figure out how to include this information, but no elephants were harmed in the making of this video.