White Wolf Store Selling EVE Novel

MMORPG.com is reporting that the White Wolf store is selling the EVE novel now. Thisis great news for those of us who live on this side of the pond and don’t particularly care to spend a ton of cash on shipping. It’s available in paperback and hardcover formats, and probably will cost a bit more than the average book.

But hey the average book isn’t an EVE book right? 🙂

UPDATE: Just paid for a hardcover copy. Can’t wait.

UPDATE 2: It’s worth noting the followsing from the White Wolf store:

All copies of EVE: The Empyrean Age purchased through the White Wolf Online Store are autographed by the author. Quantities are limited.

That should sweeten the deal for some 🙂

The Future of EVE Voice

The following is a repost from this thread in the Assembly Hall forum on EVE’s website. I figured I’d post it here as well, seeing as the Hall thread has almost no chance against the walls of useless issue threads getting dumped in there every hour.

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Faction warfare’s got more people into PVP now in groups, presumably they’re utilizing EVE voice for the majority of voice comms. There’s been recent attention in patches to get things more stable, which is a good thing. Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s used EVE Voice has mentioned now the integration is great, and the quality is about a billion times better than Teamspeak (arguably the more common of the third part VOIP tools used by players).

Isn’t it now about time EVE Voice gets the feature we need, and a lot of people have been waiting for since it was first integrated into the EVE client? The feature that would make it infinitely more useful than it is now?

The external client.

I say THE external client, because this was a feature Vivox has touted in the past. It exists, what does not is the provision for it in EVE. The idea is that you would run the external client on your system and if EVE dies you don’t lose your connection to the channel(s) you were speaking in.

Is this even in the cards for us here, and if so what might the timeline be? I know historically the addition of features to the client has taken a staged approach, but EVE Voice has moved along at the pace of a snail moving against an Icelandic coastal wind.

I know this still wouldn’t make it a 100% replacement for third party services, but this would be a huge boost for adopting EVE Voice as a primary method of comms during ops for a lot of organizations.

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What do you think? Do you think CCP should finally get the Voice component into a more generally useful state? Hit the linked thread, bump it, and give it a thumbs up while you’re at it. 🙂

Some New Social Gaming Sites

Most people are no strangers to social sites such as Facebook and the like, which allow people to come together and… well, waste a whole lot of time.

For gamers though, the options have been rather limited until recently. Now there’s a few great places to go to meet up with other people who have similar interests, but more than that — these sites offer gamers the ability to actually accomplish some pretty interesting things.

GAX Online
http://www.gaxonline.com/

GAX Online has been around for a little while now, in beta form. Created by the strange minds behind the MOGArmy Podcast, GAX is basically a MySpace for gamers. You get your own page, you can customize it pretty well, and link up with others with similar interests.

The concept is so slanted towards a MySpace feel that it almost comes off as a site which is missing its own point — the focus on games. Sure there’s an Arcade with some retro flash-based games to kill time with, but overall it can feel like just another social site.

Avatars United
http://www.avatarsunited.com/

AU is a relatively new site, but has made some fantastic strides in terms of features as of late. The concept is simple. You play a lot of MMOs, so you’ve got avatars all over the place, but how to relate them all for people who might know you in one game but not in another? Here’s your answer.

What makes AU neat is the fact that it’s got a veritable kitchen sink of features for you to play with. You’ve got friends, blogs, photo albums, biographies, groups, events, etc. for EACH of your avatars. So very quickly you can build up a big huge web of relationships between all of your games.

There’s also specific features available for each game, for instance EVE API support is available for your EVE Online avatars to display dynamic information about your character directly from the game. Pretty slick. The very front page of AU, when you’re logged in, is a nicely done aggregation of all of the user’s content.

Overall, it’s a site with more going on than it probably advertises.

Giant Bomb
http://www.giantbomb.com/

At first glance, Giant Bomb appears to be a review site with some reviewer blogs. But look again. Started up by ex-Gamespot editors who bailed after the Gerstmann-gate fiasco, Giant Bomb is like a review site mixed with blogs and a wiki. Ok so let me explain.

You can go there and read the reviews of course, and then you can sign up and leave your own reviews. As well you can tweak each game’s wiki entries, supply images and videos, relate games between each other, relate objects (exploding barrels) and people (game designers, voice talent, etc.) to the game, etc. It’s like a game review community rather than just a static site.

It’s moderated of course, even I have a few edits in my queue right now, and it seems in just one day after the relaunch (at the time of this writing) that gamers have just latched on to this like crazy, and the amount of user provided content has exploded overnight. Add to this the social features of buddy lists and such, and GB is one of my new favorite sites.

I hope that this small guide is useful to everyone, there’s a lot of really cool sites out there which cater to the social side of gaming which the media is quick (and wrong) to paint as nonexistent. Suddenly there’s so much opportunity available on the net for people to maintain relationships among fellow gamers, and work together as a little community.