Tyrannis: The Ice Age

With the coming of Tyrannis in the New Eden cluster, quite a lot of planetary bodies experienced radical changes in their climate. Take my corp’s primary planet for example. Our infrastructure hub It seemed to orbit quite a nice and lush paradise that would make for a nice shore leave.

But then it seems like the winds of change came and that same, nice world was drawn into an ice-age.

I am not sure what happened. I fear it could have been space-dust blowing from an opening wormhole, getting caught in the gravity field of the planet and obscuring the sun. It could be our destruction of nearby asteroid belts as well. Somehow asteroid shrapnel, rock pieces and dust from the processing factories of the exhumers could have fallen down and wrecked havoc with the ecosystem. Both scenarios are very dark ones, and should probably warn us, that we capsuleers should try to be more considerate and more aware of the consequences of our actions!

I hope my endeavors on that ice planet will help restore balance to it again by slowly melting said planet’s ice.
At least I do hope I don’t end like the now infamous Omvistus  from the report of a rather unfortunate planet.

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I do like Planetary Interaction (PI) and am quite fond of that chronicle! I am looking forward to see what the next iteration on PI might bring. Especially I am hoping for some kind of consequences/impact on actions in PI. So that we can see who are Tyrants and who at least try to be benevolent.  Perhaps we have only seen the benevolent side yet? And the Tyrant-side is yet to come?
Let’s pretend it might be and envision capital planat-eaters (like Star War’s World Devastators) or orbital bombardement, or looking at the coming Dust514 battles from dark rooms in orbital command centers  Incarna-Style together with said mercs and discussing strategy and logistics. One can always dream, correct?

Data Crystals: PI goody for PvE Storyline Content and Roleplay?

This is an idea I had of a small little gadget that could be used for a lot of interesting things: Data Crystals. EVE includes as small utility notepad, but it yet doesn’t have a method of storing and exchanging text messages in-game. In-game text messages are mostly shared (aside from eve-mail and chat ofc) by two methods:

1. In missions/exploration we tend to get pop-up message windows.
2. For players to exchange text either cans or bookmarks are used.

What about a small goody (perhaps made out of miniature electronics or chiral structures in PI) that would help enhance content and widen the options for both of the cases above? The gadget could possible look like a data chip or crystal, with the possibility to right-click on it to edit the description text (just like the "change name" option for ships and cans) to simulate the text data contained in the chip.
Possible uses would/could be:

• Storyline information: Aside from those pop-up windows in missions these items could be part of mission loot containing further hints to other missions/sites. The text wouldn’t be "lost" like the info-text if you click "ok".
• Background info/hints: The crystals could hint at background info for use in the events which are gathering momentum now.
• They would ease setting up scavenger-hunt like player-made events.
• They could be used for in-game roleplaying or help players "script" their own mission for events (like setting up cans containing a data crystal with cryptic information and so on).
• It would be a way to leave messages in wrecks after other players destroy your ship (also for roleplaying).

To limit their impact on storage capacity on the database side, at least the player-created messages that can be stored in those cans should be limited to e.g. 140 characters and they should be reprocess/destroyable.

I hope this idea would not use too many resources/time for CCP to implement and could have uses in a variety of scenarios.
A further possibility would be to enable the text to be "ecrypted", needing either a password or an application of the Hacking skill to "open". Uses for that might be:

• Mission loot that that contains hints but can't be accessed till another hint is found (in the form of the password) thus creating a kind of PvE puzzle either for one player (for missions and epic-missions) or for a group of players (for events).
• Enabling players to do the same (though players should not be able to edit the text of pve content data crystals).

What do you think? Would this fit better into the Ideas part of the eve-forum or better into Assembly Hall?