Come and chill with us, play some games, nom some chocolate, eat snags and play Cards Against Humanity.
Tickets will cover entry, BBQ lunch, Curry Dinner, Gourmet Coffee and 3 cans of soft drink. Other snacks and nibbles will be avaliable for purchase.
Note: We are continuing to hold these smaller events in the airconditioned “Chapel” which is a sharp right turn from directly inside the front enterance instead of the traditional “Rear Hall” location.
Curries:
You will have a choice of 7 curries ranging from completely mild to one that will challenge even the most experienced of vindaloo connoisseurs. There will be 2 vegetarian and 5 meat.
World of Tanks: The Introduction
A very interesting free-to-play game which can be a bit difficult by yourself. We’ll be going over the basics, doing some training matches and showing you how to get better tanks.
Games that will be likely to be played at the event:
The Internet Spaceship game EVE Online is one of the oldest MMOs which still has a growing user-base. The reasons for its ongoing popularity would have to be the player-driven content along with the enormous size of the game universe.
Battles involving thousands of players are not uncommon and with the universe being a single server (or shard), every player can effect every other player to one extent or another.
Player organisations grow to tens of thousands of players and major conflicts in game have involved over 50,000 people across hundreds of solar systems. By yourself, EVE Online can be boring. With friends, it is amazing.
TL;DR (Short Version)
InLAN is doing an Introduction to EVE Online. This will involve both online and LAN party events. New and returning players welcome. Those who have attended InLAN or are friends with an InLAN Admin are welcome. Submit your details here to sign up. If you have any questions, please contact us.
EVE Online is Different
EVE Online differs from most other games in that if your ship is blown up, it is gone and will need to be replaced. So dying has a real impact on your in-game finances. For many new players this is a significant issue, but with our “Learn To Play” events, you’ll receive in-game currency, free ships and help to mitigate these losses. A common saying amongst EVE Online pilots is “Don’t fly anything you’re not prepared to lose”.
In most MMOs, if you behave badly, the administrators will often penalise you for this through warnings, suspensions or bans. Sometimes you’ll even get banned just for hurting someone’s feelings. In EVE Online you can do almost anything provided it does not violate the end user license agreement. Some people find piracy to be their niche in the game, others will spy for their alliance, others still will act as criminals who scam and steal from others in game.
Key things to know about EVE Online:
• It is a single universe for all players
• There are no “levels”, only “skills”
• Your abilities in game, called skills, are accumulated over time even if you are offline
• There is no limit to your skills and nobody has yet learnt them all on a single character
• All skills are passive and will either unlock new ships, weapons and modules or improve their effectiveness
• A new player can be effective with only a small amount of training and skills
• Player groups, often known in other games as “Guilds” are called Corporations
• Groups of Corporations can join together to form an Alliance.
This video is a new pilot orientation produced by EVE Online’s publisher. It may give you a bit of a feel for what the game can be. It is best viewed full screen in HD.
What can I do in EVE Online?
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
There are several core things you can do in the game, the amount of enjoyment is often directly proportional to the number of your friends participating. Activities can be broadly categorised into either Player vs Player (PvP) or Player vs Environment (PvE).
Player vs Environment – PvE
This primarily comprises of you verses Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in missions and other in-game activities. The main reason for this is to generate money to spend on ships, modules and other items. Not all of these activities involves shooting things, but most of it does.
Missions
Most space stations owned by NPC entities offer a number of mission agents which can give you a task to complete in exchange for money and sometimes items. These missions can involve combat, logistics or mining. In high security space, these are the lowest risk method for income generation.
Mining
Most solar systems in the game have one or more asteroid belts which can be mined for minerals which can be refined and used to build items in game. Except for the special masochist, mining by yourself is a boring process. In groups it can be entertaining.
“Ratting”/Anomalies
In space with a low security status (primarily 0.0) this is one of the most profitable ways to generate income. This is what we will generally be focussing on. In groups, even new players can earn a significant amount. “Ratting” is the common term for flying around a solar system killing hostile NPCs. Most “ratting” is done in anomalies but can also be done in asteroid belts. The hostile NPC ships appear (some say “spawn”) and you receive a bounty for each one destroyed. Anomalies are more difficult than asteroid belts. The rarer variants called “signatures” provide a greater challenge and can give greater rewards.
Player vs Player – PvP
This is the area of EVE Online that most people will either love or hate.
EVE Online is roughly divided into three areas from a safety perspective:
• High Security – security rating between 0.5 and 1.0 – if you attack another player here, the space-police (known as Concord) will appear and blow you up.
• Low Security – security rating between 0.1 and 0.5 – there are no police here but attacking another player will reduce your own security status.
• Null Security – security rating between -1.0 and 0.0 – Often called nullsec, anything is permitted here.
Most PvP occurs in low or null security space. We will be focussing on small or medium size Player vs Player in nullsec.
What we’re doing
InLAN will be running a series of events, both online and a LAN party to introduce new players to this amazing game. Without help, many people try the game and find it too complex. New players often end up feeling utterly helpless because of the learning curve, we mitigate that by providing lots of help, plenty of in-game resources and people to play with.
If you played EVE Online in the past, and wish to try again, or return to the game after a long absence, you are also welcome at these events.
At this point, if you do not have an EVE Online account, do not sign up for one. We will email a link for an extended trial account when we are ready to proceed with the events.
Everyone participating will be invited to join an EVE Online corporation which owns some of the best territory in the game. This alliance runs events (also known as “Fleets”) throughout the day and comprise of people from all over the world.
Who can join?
Things you will need:
A reasonably modern PC or Mac which is able to run the EVE Online client.
The system requirements can be found here. If you are unsure, please contact us with the specifications of your computer.
A reliable Internet connection
The game involves in game loss of items when you die, simply disconnecting where you are can often result in your ship dying if you can’t reconnect within a short amount of time.
Time to Play
For each session that you play EVE Online, you will get the best results if you can allocate a couple of hours uninterrupted. This is by no means compulsory, but you’ll find that during any PvP activities, if you have to leave your computer for anything more than a few minutes, you may come back to a dead ship.
A microphone and headphones
Much of the coordination and socialising is done via a voice chat system known as Mumble. At bare minimum you’ll need to be able to hear what is going on. It is highly recommended that you have a set of headphones with a microphone attached. Using speakers and a microphone is discouraged as it often causes disruption.
Due to the nature of EVE Online, only those who attend InLAN or who are friend with an InLAN Admin can participate. To express your interest, please fill in this form and we will contact you with more information once we determine times for the events. If you have any questions, please contact us.
InLAN Steak Edition was an enormous success, the first LAN we’ve sold out days in advance for many years. Being a special once-only event, we limited the number of people to just 22. Very glad we did, perfectly cooking twenty steaks on a mediocre BBQ is a challenge.
Photos of all our shenanigans can be found on Flickr and Facebook.
Glenunga Gourmet Meats really looked after us in the meat department. Beautiful 350gm scotch fillets which were lightly seasoned and then cooked medium rare. The only complaints were from those who wanted more.
After first-hand experience with the learning cliff of Planetside 2, we asked NightShade to run an introduction to the game. Over an hour he went through a lot of the basics and got us all up to speed on how to play this huge free to play MMOFPS.
If you have a suggestion for a game we can run an introduction session for, let us know!
Dave’s Quiz Time made a triumphant return with topics ranging from 5.25″ floppy disks and Microsoft Excel Easter eggs to James Bond and Wayne’s World. There was much hilarity and far too much candy distributed.
Our next event will be the return of The Great Friday LAN: 29th of March 2013 (Good Friday)
The team at inLAN wishes that everyone had a safe and enjoyable time with good food, friends, family or how every you have celebrated this period of the year. We all look forward to getting together for InLAN: Steak Club Edition soon. More details on tickets to come.
Just as a side note, while I was looking for an icon for this article, I used Google image search for the term ‘mlp’. I usually keep safe search off or at moderate because it often removes legitimate results… eye bleach please.
The importance of having not only a secure password, but a variety of passwords was recently highlighted though an interesting situation. For many years, I was doing what most people did on the Internet. I had only a couple of passwords which I used for most websites and a few unique ones for sites requiring higher security.
Yesterday I received this email:
A log-in attempt from the following location is currently awaiting your authorization.
Address: 14.117.20.132
City: Zhuhai
Region: 30
Country: CN
This email came from an automatic system implemented by ArenaNet for Guild Wars 2. If you attempt to log in from an unfamiliar location, it sends a message to your verified email address asking if the login attempt should be authorised. An excellent way to reduce the chances of your account being compromised.
The email is only sent if your username and password are correct so this set off some alarm bells. One of my secure, but general use passwords had been compromised. Most likely by a poorly designed site which doesn’t store passwords in a hashed format.
What this means is that I had forgotten to change my password for Guild Wars 2 to something different and more secure.
For the last few years, I have been changing my passwords so that every site has a randomly generated, unique password. They’re all stored in the cloud, double-encrypted with secure passwords. I use 1Password to create, store and access my passwords. It runs on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. It also has plugins for all major browsers to allow automatic entering of passwords.
1Password isn’t free, but I believe it is worth the price. There are cheaper alternatives such as LastPass (free with a “pro” option) and KeePass which is free open source software.
So heed my warning. Don’t use the same password everywhere. At worst, check out KeePass.
Gamespot has posted a 14 minute video of Far Cry 3 gameplay. It does contain some minor spoilers for the first section of gameplay but certainly looks brilliant. It was captured using a console (probably Xbox 360) so expect PC versions to look better with support for DX11.
I found one of the comments regarding jumping puzzles interesting given that they were playing on a console. Jumping puzzles which are challenging on a console are generally simple on a PC, so will the content be different to maintain the challenge?
Far Cry 2 was brilliant. I’m a sucker for open world sandbox games. Far Cry 3 is due out at the end of November.
Many of us purchased Borderlands 2. If you were lucky enough to pre-order at the right time, you should get the Mechromancer character unlock when it is released for free. Here is a rather excellent video about Gaige, the Mechromancer.
