Eve Illectrocuted

New Ships and Nebulae On Singularity

2011-11-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

If you head over to singularity there's a ton of new features, I started out making a video of the new ships and nebulae, but I'm probably going to have to make a follow up to cover the new ship textures and gameplay enhancing functionality.

6yo Skye Explains How to Setup a Coercer

2011-10-29T09:07:00.001-07:00

I'd planned to make this for a while, but never got around to it until TEST made their 'Lasers Are Magic' video

Of course the TEST video about about a million times more magic.

CCP Art Department Video - New Raven Model!

2011-10-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

New video from CCP on Youtube

The New nebula system really appeals to my astro geek nature, and, I do own a Raven, Navy Raven and Golem so the new model (which I predicted yesterday on failheap-challenge) will make my hangar look nicer.

Updates.... at last.

2011-10-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

I have been terribly remiss in updating this, I haven't postend anything since May. In a large part that was because Incarna sapped my desire to play Eve Online, instead I spent hours learning Pro-Guitar mode in Rock Band 3.

The second summer of rage came and went, I chose to keep my accounts active with PLEX, and in recent weeks I rediscovered some level of interest in New Eden. Mostly because I can see another bunch of long needed fixes actually getting some development priority. Yes, I'm one of those pilots who can use Large TII Hybrids, so the hybrid rebalance and Talos are looking like they'll play into my hands. I've also finished training all the basic ships skills and have level V in every racial Frigate, Cruiser & Battleship skill. The only subcaps I still have to train for are the Amarr and Minmatar Transport ships. In theory I'm a skillbook and a couple of hours away from any carrier or dread in the game, buty I'm saving my money until I need to fly one.

I have a friend in Rooks and Kings and would dearly love to fly with them, but realisticly I still don't get the dedicated screen time to PVP.

And I've found that I like making game videos, so I started publishing regular updates on my youtube page, I posted my own look at new graphics for the CQ's and cynos in te brief time they were on Singularity. And it got a decent amount of interest.

I've also taken to twitter, because writing whole blog posts can seem like too much work, you can find me at:

http://twitter.com/#!/DJSnM

Whooops!

2011-05-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

In 10 seconds of madness I managed to go from +5.0 sec status to -4.21 - there was a mining operation that consisted of half a dozen toons all clearly struck from the same mold. It was early in the morning and I was feeling like a laugh so I decided to drop a discogeddon on top of their little operation.

The first volley of SB's killed the retrievers, but the covetors were more robust and I was faced with a split second decision over whether to save my sec status, or to kill the covetors and the pods.

The ship kills were all about -4% each , so a bunch of those would have still left me in positive territory, but the pod kills are -21% each, so those last 2 covetor kills cost me dearly. Still I'm not totally excluded from hi-sec space, I can still work in 0.5 sec systems. Also, I notice the I got a sec status loss for a 6th ship, bringing me down to -4.4 . there was another covetor, but somehow It survived and died 10 minutes later, so I get the security hit without the killmail. (can someone clarify - it must have been the same ship? or could he have swapped ships at a station or the orca and lost a different one, but still had me take the sec status hit?)

Long Time No Post....

2011-05-06T09:44:00.001-07:00

I think the whole CSM 6 thing made me lose interest in writing about Eve for the last few months and we've had quite a busy few months so It really has been remiss of me to ignore this blog and its handful of occasional readers.

My in game wealth seems to be stuck around the 30bill mark, the PI revamp came and managed to introduce rendering bugs and general slowness on my system so it has fallen by the wayside, the noctis market stabilised and I stopped making billions from manipulating the nocxium market. Trading became dull again, and my trading alt is now relegated to selling the piles of mission loot that I'm farming using a passive tanked Rattlesnake, a ship that can easily pull full aggro on any level 4 mission so I can get on with other more interesting things. This is the mission equivalent of AFK mining.

That rattler however couldn't tank a pirate who I was foolish enough to engage, I jad a whole plan related to my my alt flying a noctis fitted with neuts and other ewar, but I messed things up and sat around for 15 minutes while rats shot me and his orca brought in a tengu. Yes... I should ahve shot the rats while I was waiting. I've no idea what I was thinking. but in the end we talked a lot and while the loss was embarrassing the contacts I have made may still help me turn a profit. I've since bought another rattler and fitted it with t2 Purger rigs, which gives it an omnitank north of 1700dps, more if I use fleet boosts. If I'm actually paying attention, I have more important things to do than running missions, incursions are the PVE activity of choice these days.

But yes, the most embarrassing loss was my noctis that was salvaging in a mission, while my main was droning rats to death, and meanwhile I was playing Lego Rock Band with my kids, specifically I was playing 'We Are The Champions' while a new wave of rats spawned and killed my salvage ship. I haven't been afflicted with this level of Irony since I lost a ship to a bubble camp while watching The Prisoner's escape attempt prevented by a pink bubble.

And while I didn't lose my ship on Ganknight 28 I was one of that elite group of retards who though that shooting Black Jack would be a good idea - indeed, many regular GN attendees seem to think it was the *best* idea in retrospect. The crow I was flying that day was the one I'd found abandoned outside a station in Empire, and it served me well, getting me on half a dozen killmails. Shame I lost it the next day while heading into nullsec to try running one of these pirate mission arcs, I could have easily pulled range on the dictor and AF on the gate, but instead activated my cloak after getting some range. Even more of a shame that I also managed to lose my scout's stealth bomber due to fat fingering my mwd-cloak maneuver. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to visit this agent on a sunday, better to wait to a quieter time.

Anyway, I'll leave you all to chill with your Quafe Zero (one day I hope to push my lol-dramiel above 25km/s using this)

If I Were Coding Eve I'd Fix.....

2011-02-09T11:42:00.000-08:00

Ships I would fix... if given the opportunity.

The Belicose and the Vigil are the two minmatar tech 1 ewar ships, specifically target painting, and I think they both need some tweaking.

The Vigil is actually a pretty cool ship, with a 5%/level speed bonus that makes it very popular for things like stealing loot before someone else can get to it. But the target painter bonus is essentially only useful as part of a fleet, since the weapons that a vigil has are frigate sized they won't benefit from the increased signature radius on the target. The other Tech 1 ewar frigates have bonuses for ECM, Sensor Damps or Tracking Disruptors - in theory these all have some use to a 'solo' player and even some limited use in PVE. So, I'd switch the Painter bonus on the vigil to a webber bonus - this fits in with the super fast nature of the vigil, giving it a bonus that has actual utility for the ship itself.

The Belicose has a bonus to guns, but I've always felt that it would be better with a missile bonus, specifically a bonus to explosion velocity of 10-15% per level, and give it an extra missile hardpoint. This would make it highly effective against frigates, especially when you factor in its 40m^3 drone bay. As it stands right now, if you're a mission runner working your way up through the ships you don't really have an obvious choice of t1 Minmatar cruiser to run those level 2 mission.

The Caracal, Vexor and Arbitrator are all exceptionally good at clearing the large numbers of frigates frequently found in Level 2 missions, but right now the minmatar ships just can't bring their firepower to bear on small, fast targets. If you want to run those level 2 missions quickly then the Thrasher does a great job a taking down small targets but has no tank. The stabber is nice and fast, but even with the smallest medium guns you need tracking mods to give them a decent chance of hitting those pirate frigates, plus is can only field one drone. The Rupture does a pretty good job, but it's still slower at cleaning out these easy missions compared to the other racial anti frigate cruisers.

And one other pet peeve came back to me over the weekend when I encountered a special ship in a mission:

Yes that is an Ibis, the Caldari rookie ship with a camo paint job. WTB Navy Issue Ibis, I would sincetely hope that the fix the issue that the basic Ibis has and give it hardpoints for missile launchers. It still annoys me no end that the Caldari ship that can't use the Caldari's weapon of choice.

If....

2011-02-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

While I still haven't decided whether to throw my hat in for CSM 6 I have spent some time ruminating on what my hypothetical campaign message might be. There will no doubt be some candidates who will campaign based on promises to deliver feature X and defeat exploit Y so that players who like to do Z will be happy once more.

And when they get elected they'll find out that actually working in this esteemed political position has essentially no ability to do anything concrete, at best sugestions can be made, comments can be offered and maybe you'll get some super secret information that can't be shared or acted upon without violating the NDA. So people casting their vote for candidates who promise to get CCP to do anything should prepare for disappointment.

I know I'm not the only person who's run for CSM that has made a living as a software engineer, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had hands on experience with Stackless Python. Whenever I encounter a bug in the game it's annoying enough, but having a full understanding of just how easy it might be to fix something can be truly frustrating. For example the hilarious 'divide by negative number' problems that were exposed by Rooks & Kings assault on Aperture Harmonics wormhole HQ. It was easy to imagine how to hunt down and fix the problems, but instead CCP devs just removed the wormhole effects that were triggering their bugs. I did hope that this was to give the devs time to fix the underlying code, but since the WH effects have yet to return to the game this may not be the case.

It's easy to see how the whole CSM process might ultimately drive people who would be valuable assets out of the process and into bittervethood.

Regardless, while I continue to consider running, I shall spend a few blogs commenting on what I personally would do if I really could have a direct influence on the development of the game. No crazy flights of fancy like those found in the features and ideas forum, but actual concrete suggestions with math and maybe even pseudocode....

Forget Hulkageddon - Try Bumpageddon

2011-01-28T09:42:00.000-08:00

I've suicided a few things in my day, and I've even had Skye blow some unsuspecting frigates from the sky using a gank destroyer, but really my heart isn't in this 'sport' due to the general lack of skill involved. And I'm sure there are other people out there who want to take part in the general harrassing of bots but maybe don't want to mess up their perfect security status.

So, may I suggest Bumpageddon - use very fast ships to bump Mining Barges away from the rocks they're mining, and maybe if you're lucky, away from the jetcan they're sitting on. If you work with a friend it's nice to be able to warp a hauler in on top of their ore can and just steal their stuff, but don't go killing them, that's slipping from Bumpageddon territory into Hulkageddon. Some of the bots are really dumb and if you hit them right after warping into belt they'll fly off, come to a stop and then just sit there mining nothing for 15 minutes before warping back to the station. You'll be helping 'fix' Eve's mineral oversupply without getting your hands dirty.

Bumpageddon is also great for EFT warriors who can try to find the best way to fit a 100mn MWD on a cruiser hull and balance maximum speed with enough cap generation to get it up to top speed, there's some fun theorycrafting that can get cruisers speeds well above 10km/sec - depending on how much you want to spend on faction hulls, implants and friends providing cap transfer and ganglinks. There's also something of a real thrill in seeing your speed crawl past the magic 10km/s mark (and if you like that then I'll tell you that it's theoretically possible to get a dramiel up past 20km/s).

And of course it's not just miners, you can sit on a hi-sec gate along one of the main trade routes and watch slow, lumbering freighters land 15km off the gate and slowly make their way in only for you to bump them off before they get there. With a bit of practice you can 'juggle' multiple ships until you get bored, so far my record is 4 charons which were kept from approaching the Jita gate in Perimiter. Freighter juggling is more of a delaying tactic though, you're not really affecting anyone's bottom line if you're delaying their arrival, they're on automatic pilot and it'll never get bored. If you're bumping people to annoy them it's better to hit freighters that you know have active pilots in them, get them when they're aligning for warp, or when they're undocking.

Anyway, Hulkageddon is coming, if you're a miner I suggest staying out of the main belts and mining in a mission site, and give up some of those mining laser upgrades for a damage control. The damage control will get you more buffer than anything else you can fit on a Hulk, but many miners refuse to fit them because they would have to give up either a Mining upgrade or a cargo expander. And, if someone does come along and bump you off your rock the best defence is to just go elsewhere and not complain in local, complaints will just encourage more griefing.

Sansha's Surprise Attack isn't so Surprising

2011-01-25T08:48:00.001-08:00

So, yes, a bunch of constellations are now Incursion sites and so far the results have been predictable

AFK Miners losing their ships to superpowered sansha belt rats - and by AFK I mean macros.
Pimped out mission ships dying in seconds as they try to solo incursion sites - lol!
Logistic chains dying to concord because CCP still haven't done anything about the GCC mechanics despite being warned for months that this would be an issue. CCP Soundwave finally posted to let everyone know that CCP is looking into the issue (Facepalm!)

Incursions have some good things about them, unlike missions they're a limited resource, you're competing with other pilots for access to the limited supply of Concord LP. That's a good thing.
The enemies are actually a challenge, almost too challenging, the sites are like those found in Class 4 through Class 6 wormholes. And the rewards are centered around actually accomplishing the task at hand rather than driven by rat bounties or hoovering up loot.

But I'm not convinced that in the long term the loot will be a sufficiently strong driver, most of the rewards from the loyalty point store are destined to get sold immediately to the highest bidder. I'm not sure that's really a sign of Loyalty to be honest, but lets not get hung up on semantics here.

Most hi-sec carebears will have no direct use for the Capital module blueprints, so those will go straight on the market at crazy markups. The implants might be of interest to the mission runners, but I'm thinking that the demand for cap modules will mean that these will likely only get cashed out by people who have had it with incursions and are looking for something cheap from the Concord LP store to cash out with.

Essentially, there's nothing in the Concord LP store to get hi-sec carebear corps excited about running the equivalent of hard wormhole sites.

What made people head into wormholes originally was the promise of T3 ships, so, the Concord store might be more attractive if the Concord ships were added as LP rewards. Now, obviously these wouldn't be the OMGWTFBBQ versions that get triggered because you're remote repping some stranger who decides to shoot someone else. No these would be simply equivalent to faction ships like those already being flown by the actors in the live action incursions.

Factional warfare got a bit of a boost when they intoduced new battleships which were only availble through the FW store, and this would be an excellent avenue to introduce concord hulls to the player market. Maybe CCP is just keeping this in reserve for when they iterate on incursions....

sure.

So Much For Excellence....

2011-01-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

And things had been going so well.... but then, Incursion 1.1 arrived.

First there was the last minute announcement that they would have to deprecate support for older CPU's due to compatibility issues with third party libraries, CCP promised an update on this right after last weekend, but we've gone an entire week without CCP divulging any new information.

Most evidence points to the new PhysX libraries that have arrived with the new character creator, specifically the simulation of cloth and hair as seen in this tech video:

Now, I can see why CCP might have reneged on their promise of more details when they realised that it would be a little bit embarrassing to admit that they cut off support for thousands of players over this 'feature'. The cloth and hair simulation only happens during character creation, and even then the feature can be disabled so it has essentially zero impact on the gameplay. There are foolish people on the forums saying that CCP needs to discontinue support for this older hardware so that the rest of the players can experience the features that would otherwise be impossible, I wonder if they would be so sure if they knew what the feature was.

Regardless, this was merely the first and most public problem with the latest release, since Tuesday the list of hilarious gameplay bugs has been quite extensive:

Covert Cynos became usable by regular capital ships, thus rendering cynojammers useless
Ganglinks stopped working
The new super easy weapon grouping (which, I had been asking for) was exploitable to allow firing guns out of sequence and therefor delivering almost 4 times the regular dps
If you could kill a target in a single volley then concord would not show up, look at the number of podkills in Jita on wednesday.
A buggy mission was introduced that was delivering *billions* in tech 2 salvage components.
The new fancy portrait selector, didn't actually pic the portrait, instead the last image taken was used.

The actual incursions start in a couple of days and I predict there will be many more new bugs, and I also predict there will be lots of tears as people exploit the remote rep aggression mechanic to bring concord down on hastily organised fleets accepting any random player who X's up.

Meanwhile, they've annnounced the timetable for CSM6 and Mynxee has made it clear that she's not interested in fighting CCP any longer and will not be running. That more than anything discourages me from running again.

The Eve Equivalent Of The Kids In The Back Seat?

2011-01-16T20:47:00.000-08:00

You know the scene, driving down the highway, kids in the back asking to get snacks or use the bathroom.... and in your distracted state you make a mistake.

Like when Orion kept showing me his latest lego creations and somehow I pointed my orca, with a billion isk in cargo, at the wrong gate and managed to jump into low-sec.

oh

shit......

Still, the gate was clear, and I warped to station and back to the gate without seeing anyone. And in a stroke of luck a pirate rat spawned on the gate, a commander spawn too, I could have easily killed it with my drones, but I figured there was a small chance of someone jumping in an knocking me off gate before my jump aggro wore off, so I left it behind for someone else.

New Modules in Incursion Hark Back To Old Days

2011-01-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

The main feature that Incursion is supposed to deliver is the multiplayer Sansha incursions for which the rewards are LP from Concord. These LP can be spent on blueprints for shiny new named capital modules, meta level 2 items that will give dedicated cap.

Now, we're all very familiar with the named items dropped by rats all over new Eden, many simply end up recycled because they're so darn common, while a rare few ( Mining Upgrades, Shield Boost Amplifiers etc) are worth silly amounts of money. Some very common modules don't have named versions - Remote Hull Repair systems are the most prominent example, you can't even invent a T2 version of those (fix this!).

Until the announcement of the new capital modules I thought CCP had forgotten about the named items. With the magic of the item database I can go and look into the history of Eve to reveal that the most recently added named item were Heavy Assault Launchers and Signal Distortion Amplifiers. These were added to the database about the same time as Salvaging, so that dates it to the Revelations expansion back in November 2006.

The Main Characters In Eve Are The Ships

2010-12-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

Incarna is supposedly appearing in 2011, concentrating on giving the avatars more personality - what we really want however is ships with more personality.

Look at the Millennium Falcon was a spice freighter, but it's through a lot it's been shot at, repaired at unlicensed facilities, upgraded, patched up, pushed beyond its limits, surfed an explosion and even vomited out by a giant space slug.

Or the USS Enterprise which went on it's 5 year mission, got beat around more than a few times, had some crazy scotsman work miracles to hold it together and push it beyond the limits, it eventually got upgraded just in time to deal with Vger, and later got the shit kicked out of it by the Reliant. After that Starfleet decided that repairing it was not economically viable so it was scheduled to be decomissioned only to have the former crew steal it and ultimately self destruct the vessel over the Genesis planet.

Don't you want that kind of history to be etched into the hull of your favourite ships?

So maybe it's time to completely redo the life cycle of ships to give them a real life, so here's a few ideas to think over.

1) Give Assembled Ships a Serial Number and Registration Date
I sold a noctis to some desperate pilot for 360million isk, at the time he had one of the first of the production line and for a few hours he could feel pretty pimp in his new ride. Now, there's nothing that betrays this fact I could build a noctis today and claim that this was one of the first, nobody would be able to prove otherwise. Similarly, maybe there's a ship collector who's prepared to pay a premium for a ship that was involved in some famous event, but again there's no way to prove this. So when a ship is assembled give it a unique serial number, and a date of registration, these will not be changeable, unless you repackaged the ship. Killmails would display these registration numbers as part of Concord's bookkeeping process, in space you'd be able to see the serial number of any ships on grid by doing a 'Show Info' on the vessel.
This simple feature would enable killboard developers to track individual ships, it would let people collect sightings of Supercaps, provide collectors with an unforgeable ship ID and even let Chribba realise when RMT'ers are selling the same titan again and again. (allegedly)

2) Add a combat log and travel log and other random statistics to ships
Sure, you could just use an external killboard to track kills in a specific ship, but I can't imagine it would be a huge technical stretch to add the same kill logs to the ships and make them visible inside the game. Similarly we could easily track systems visited by that ship in the same way that you can view systems visited by your character. And to satisfy the spreadsheet fans out there include all sorts of other numbers like 'Time spent in space', 'lifetime shield/armour/hull damage taken'.

3) Put all those logs in a black box which can be salvaged after destruction
The ships equivalent of a frozen corpse - either a memorial or a trophy, depending which side of the killmail you were on, the logs might even reveal important data on the victim's behaviour...

4) Long Term Wear And Tear
Ships in Eve can be restored to pristine status by on board modules, nothing ever wears out, well time to change that! The long term stresses due to combat will slowly wear out the shield emitters, power relays, thrusters, warp drives and general structure, internally the game will slowly apply penalties to the ship as daily use wears it out. Now, this means that used ships suddenly are no longer quite as good as new ships, so this in turn creates an actual reason for a used ship market to exist.
Now to offset this slow decline in your chariot of the gods you can take it in for servicing, where the engineers will take your ship into dry dock, take it apart and fix all those things that nanobots just can't deal with in deep space. This takes spare parts, time, and a facililty that's capable of building ships - the amount of time would be similar to the time taken to build the ship in the first place, but the material requirements would be along the line of 10% of the ship cost - now, owning a ship in the Eve universe costs money to keep it running, and maintaining those Titans is going to cost you about half a billion isk a month, after all it would be a shame if your jump bridge or Doomsday weapon failed to activate at an inopportune moment.
After the service it comes back almost as good as new, maybe, even better... I mean maybe you decide to pimp your ride a little more. Sure, you can put those fancy faction modules on your ship, but those can be unplugged at any time, no I'm talking about using the fancy Iridium plated fusion spike initiators as opposed to the plain old tungsten ones....

5) Only The Best For My Ride
So when you're getting your ship serviced you provide a pile of spare parts, which are of course built by players from blueprints, but for each type of spare part you have choices, you can use the designers recommended replacements, or you can save a bit of money and use cheaper bits and pieces which don't work quite so well, or last quite so long. Or you can blow money on fancier parts that eke out more performance. Installing these parts normally needs a complete strip down and rebuild of the ship, but, for those who are impatient we could make an exception for the ships coming straight from the factory. Upgraded spare parts could be added when the ship is assembled for the first time, before any rigs or modules are added, after that the only way to pimp the core ship would be as part of a maintenace service.

6) Packaged Ships = Factory Fresh
Anything that changes the core attributes of a ship, either making it better or worse cannot be stored once a ship is packaged, so if you want to sell a ship on the market it needs to be in pristine condition. This might mean you have to service a ship to bring it back to factory specs, but why bother, there's a contracts system that'll let you sell it 'as is'.
Indeed, with a decent customization system, it opens up the possibility of known ship builders who specialise in putting together ships which come with a bit of an edge out of the box.

7) Exterior Design
More options to personalise ships, alliance logs should be no problem, and you can put those notches on your nose every time you get a kill in that ship. It's not too much of a graphical stretch to add a ships name on the exterior, or the registration number if you've stuck with the default "CaldariCitizen376298's Ibis". And then there's the space dirt that makes your nice shiny Apocalypse look a little less shiny over time, or in the case of Minmatar ships, the rust decals start to peel off and have to be reapplied when your ship is serviced.
Sadly, for simple CPU/GPU load reasons other pilots may choose to disable these features and choose not to see your vessel in all its glory.

I'm sure there's more to this, but I come back to the core idea - ships need more personality and after Incarna is upon us it would be remiss if the ships of the Eve universe were nothing more than cookie cutter copies of each other.

Skye's Turning 6 Today

2010-12-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

So, a perfect excuse to link some of her Eve related exploits.

So, we played around for a bit a couple of weeks ago - ratting in hi-sec and running some missions nothing you haven't seen before. Then she got in a rebellious mood and decided she didn't want to follow the autopilot markets, instead she picked a gate and even though I warder her that it would take her into low sec she wanted to go....

You have my permission to share this with any hi-sec carebears who think they can't survive outside of Concord's domain of guaranteed vengeance.

And for all the critics that seem to think the Skye is losing her childhood because she occasionally gets to fly a spaceship, here's Skye and Orion doing some colouring.

Best bit is at the 4 minute mark where the kids discuss the merits of the Rifter.

No More Planetary Vehicles From GM (Gallente Motors)

2010-12-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

The market for Planetary Vehicles in New Eden showed massive movement this week as a CCP Big Dumb Object revealed that the biggest single source of planetary vehicles in New Eden had stopped working since the start of the month.

No doubt all the production line workers are out joyriding in their shiny new noctii.

You see, Planetary Vehicles was one of the planet products that was most difficult to make, requiring Supertensile Plastics, Miniature Electronics and Mechanical Parts - made more expensive by the fact that Mechanical parts are in demand as a POS fuel and for making robotics. However there was never any need to do this because like most commodities that existed prior to the introduction of PI there were stockpiles to be eaten through first, but unlike other commodities the stockpiles showed no sign of depletion over the last 6 months. While many of the commodities were still dropped in small amounts by various mission structures there was one specific mission which would drop enough vehicles for a thousand joyriders, so with such an abundant supply, relatively low usage and complex production chain only a moron would spend time making them.

Now, that mission no longer drops these, and CCP has confirmed this is intentional the speculators have been out in force buying them up all over the cluster. The prices have gone from a few thousand to about thirty thousand isk, but this is still less than half the price you would expect based upon the cost of the input materials so while it's a big jump in cost for the planet industrialists it's still a bargain compared to producing them yourself.

However, I did some checking and managed to find a few missions that I knew dropped PI loot, and I can confirm that this loot nerf isn't just removing one giant drop from one mission, but it's a more pervasive change that may have removed all PI drops from missions. So while everyone has been panic buying Planetary Vehicles there has also been a lesser rush for Guidance Systems.

I think this may be backwards to be honest, Guidance systems are used in TII drone production in addition to it's place in PI production, so the net demand may be higer in the long run.

Not that it matters too much to me, I have large, cheap stocks of both ready to use/sell when the time comes.

The Noctis Economy

2010-12-06T13:05:00.000-08:00

While the Noctis May be designed to operate in a vacuum the rush for its construction has not taken place in an economic vacuum. Many people looked at the new ship and saw profits in moving the BPO's to hi-sec and selling at a profit, industrialists looked at the market and knew they could make profit selling these ships.

But for many, the speculation didn't go further, and they missed out on many more ways to make money. The first thing is that those new ships needed fitting so there was an increased demand for Tractor Beams and Salvagers, but many newly minted Noctis pilots considered this an upgrade over their existing destroyer based salvage boat and simply moved the modules over. What they couldn't move over was the Salvage Rigs, and I made a handsome profit selling those rigs, and, on the back end, I placed buy orders for the destroyers at below mineral cost.

Mineral cost quickly became a big issue for the manufacturers, all the minerals showed a bump in prices and today Nocxium is now selling at 40% more than it was a week ago. It should have been obvious to anyone who looked at the BPO before its release that nocxium would be in demand, since this ship contains a much higher proportion of this mineral compared to other ships. Smart speculators would have acquired a stockpile a couple of weeks ago and sold it for a handsome profit once the demand started picking up.

I'd like to say I anticipated the mineral market but even my stockpiles got eaten up quickly after I decided to manufacture from multiple prints in parallel. Instead, I ran the numbers and started buying up battleships and reprocessing them for minerals, for nocxium I was able to buy up large numbers of mining crystals, shield boosters and other nocxium rich items to make up the shortfall and keep my production lines running and profitable. So, of course, the prices of ships are now rising to keep in line with the mineral basket, and somewhat amusingly, the cost of running a mining fleet has risen slightly as there are no more cheap crystals available.

Not that the average miner will notice, after all they think the minerals they mine are free.

3 Incursion Releases, 3 Names.

2010-12-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Playing through the new release, I'm deeply happy with the work that has been done by CCP and the contributions of the player base. (I'm also quite happy to have made billions, but that's another story). However with the actual Incursions of the name still a month a way I feel that the name need reconsidering to reflect this - here's my proposal for release names:

Incursion 1.0: "Excellence" - because this release represents a tangible manifestation of CCP's much touted 'Commitement To Excellence'. I committed to making obscene profits from the noctis rush and the related market movements.

Incursion 1.1: "Emancipation" - No More learning skills! Noobs are now free from the needs to waste their early days training learning skills, the vets no longer feel nagging guilt about not raising their advanced skills to 5. Free SP to spend on training for new toys, industrialists will make a killing selling new toys. Pirates will no doubt catch some extra tears as new toys get turned into wrecks.

Incursion 1.2: "Invasion" - Sansha Claus finally arrives and hopefully starts killing macrominers. Invasion is a way better name than Incursion, just because a dev accidently leaked the name doesn't mean that the marketdroids need to change the name.

If Only Industry Were Always This Exciting

2010-11-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was one of the 200+ pilots who logged in 4C-B7X this morning in an attempt to snag an early lead in the noctis market. Even though I got in seconds after downtime the system filled up in seconds, but the station camps never assembled themselves quickly enough to catch me or many other pilots who all had the same plan. I had been slightly worried because I'd seen a 40 man gang from IT sitting on one of the stations last night...

But they didn't bother to turn up in the morning and the undock was mostly clear. I decided my risk threshold was about 2billion isk, so I 'only' bought 5 blueprints (390million each), loaded them into my Tengu and headed to hi-sec with best possible speed. Along the way I had some conversations with other T3 pilots making the run, and many LOL's were had at the pilots in covert ops ships getting caught by the occasional gatecamp. The last jump into hi-sec at Orvolle was especially impressive with a lag inducing number of bubbles surrounding the gate, but again, I just warped right through these and into hi-sec.

Most pilots headed for Jita or Dodixie, but I set my eyes on Amarr, on the far side of the cluster, I wasn't the first person to get a BPO on the market, but it looks like I was the first one to sell one - for a cool 899,999,999 isk. Now that may see like quite a markup from my purchase price, but based on the fact that I was able to the first ship off my production line for 360million you can see that the buyer still got themselves a bargain. Unless of course they were foolish enough to start researching it first....

Be Careful What You Wish For

2010-11-29T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Incursion release has been quite a startling turnaround, in a few hours we're going to get part 1 which is essentially a bunch of player requested mods that will make Eve a vastly better game for everyone. Never in the history have Eve have we seen an expansion with this much player input, and I must admit I'm feeling more than a little excited.... although that may be the feeling of anticipation I feel trying to fly out of outer ring with some blueprints (and maybe skillbooks) in my hold.

However, we should bear in mind that this is not the first time the CCP has bowed to player pressure and made changes, and, not everyone would agree that the results were ideal in the long term.

Remember the Dominion release, Motherships renamed to Supercarriers and given fighter bombers? CCP Abathur presented the original changes which were tested on SiSi by lots of dedicated players, many of whom had never had a chance to fly a Supercap before. Then along came CCP Nozh who decided that the new supercarrier design was overpowered and nerfed the number of bombers which could be flown, in exchange supercarriers were given the ability to dock. The rage flowed from the fan community, and the supercap changes missed the release, a couple of months later we had Dominion 1.1 which essentially gave the players what they wanted - the original Abathur approved supercarrier.

Now, almost a year later, the residents of 0.0 are now grumbling about Supercarriers being overpowered and starting to think that maybe a nerf is in order.... perhaps Nozh was right.. (then again being able to dock a supercap would make station games ridiculous)

Another long requested feature which CCP finally implemented was sized rigs, I mean it was pretty sweet to be able to put rigs on a rifter without feeling guilty. However since small and medium rigs have been added there has been an inexorable rise in the number of Drake blobs flying around 0.0. The cost of fielding a drake dropped by 30million isk the day that you could put medium sized shield rigs on it, that's a big chunk of the cost of the ship, even moreso when insurance is taken into account. So, again we see that giving players what they want can cause things they don't want - blobs of drakes and lag inducing missile storms.

Anyway - on with the new release - see you in Outer Ring!

Now Is the Time To Train Learning Skills

2010-11-25T10:37:00.001-08:00

.... Because they're going away in a couple of weeks.... and all SP invested into the skills will be reimbursed.

At least in my case I have 5/4 in all stats, so I can train some learning skills faster than I can train say Leadership skills which rely on my weak charisma. When the Learning skill emacipation arrives I'll be able to take those SP and put them into skills that I've put off learning for a long time because of the training time is longer than others.

New Stuffs

2010-11-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

I thought that Invasion was a better name, but nonetheless the last couple of months have been fascinating with the devs finally aquesing to good sense and spending some dev time on the low hanging fruit that the players have been requesting.
* Rockets De-Nerfed - leading to speculators buying up all the faction and TII missile boats
* Tech II ammo de-nerfed
* Icon changes to differentiate those fancy faction and deadspace modules
* Afterburners and Microwarpdrives now look different
* Menus reorganized, so that it's harder to accidently trash your ships.
* Probes on the overview

Meanwhile CCP have decided that 'excellence' is something worth committing to and have rejiggered the release date of Incurstion, and boy am I happy to hear this. The proper release with new avatars, incursions and improved PI is pushed back to january, but the user requested fixes will be released on November 30th (and a bonus christmas present just before Christmas).

Anyway.... this is all old news, the new news is the leaking/posting of the trailer for Incursion showing us a whole bunch of ice miners getting wiped out by a Sansha invasion fleet while Mr K himself looks on (showing off the new character modellin technology). Given the number of ice miners which are macros I find myself egging on the bad guys :)

New ORE Ship - The Noctis Salvage Ship

2010-09-17T13:18:00.001-07:00

The Noctis, based off the Primae's hull we're getting a proper new ship in the next expansion. It'll be a dedicated salvager with bonuses to tractor beams and salvagers "60% bonus to tractor beam range and speed per level" so that'll be 80km range tractor beams if you train the new 'ORE Industrial' skill to level 5.

The blueprints will be seeded out in ORE space and will retail for 390,000,000 isk, so you can expect a few expensive lossmails in the days after the release as traders attempt to move these to hi-sec. I have no doubts that this will be a very popular ship replacing thousands of destroyers shoehorned into this role for the past few years. So, expect the demand for destroyers to drop off soon too.

The Next Expansion After The Next Expansion

2010-09-16T11:23:00.001-07:00

Some sharp eyed people noticed this picture which was part of this GDC Europe presentation. This confirms that CCP's current plan is for Incarna to be the Summer 2011 expansion, with a bunch of Incarnaesque features and presumably bugfixes following on in the 2011 winter expansion. The same document also puts the planned release date for 'Invasion' as November 16th, and to tie in with the 18 month plan, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Eve's winter 2011 release will be the one that ties into Dust 514.

I must admit that I'm going through a period of disinterest in Eve right now, Planetary Interaction has been the main culprit in killing my love of the game. When the asteroid video got popular I spent a day where I almost didn't log into Eve, I only remembered with minutes to spare that I had a skill completing and needed to line up some new ones. And not double clicking on a hundred extractors made me feel a whole lot better, so my entire PI infrastructure has ground to a halt.
But this has had a knock on effect on my Eve playing, now, since I'm not doing PI, I'm not really making the best use of my time, which eventually morphs into not caring about the whole game in general.

I've got enough isk and assets to buy PLEX's for a couple of years with both my accounts, hopefully they'll fix the game before by money runs out.

Real Asteroids.....

2010-08-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

This really is supposed to be an Eve blog, but I'm going to drop my guard and post a little astronomy video I created a few days ago - it seems to have become quite popular.

A Myth About Mission Rewards Busted....

2010-08-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows about the mechanics of missions will know that one of the biggest factors in determining mission rewards is the security status of the system where the agent is based. This is a hundred times more important than the agent quality, so all those pilots grinding missions in Dodixie are really missing out on a decent chunk of their mission rewards.

Now, many sources state that mission rewards that are governed by this include ISK, LP and Standing gain, and indeed I thought this was the case, so when grinding standings for a research alt I used my understanding of the game to run a bunch of courier missions in low-sec hoping that the lower security status would lead to faster standings gains.

Well it didn't, the gains were essentially identical to those of another agent with the same quality and located in a 0.8 status system, so my cunning plan was thwarted. The mission rewards and LP were slightly better, but they were a drop in the ocean compared to what I could be doing elsewhere, all I cared about was standing. (and more importantly, standing that I could gain while paying the least amount of attention to the game while working on other stuff).

Wife Aggro

2010-08-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

An corp mate had to logoff because of wife aggro, another corp member suggested using that using ECM would break her lock on him. I pointed out that this would never work in my house because we have kids and every Eve player should know that moms are "Immune to all forms of Electronic Warfare".....

Winter Expansion To Be Called 'Invasion' - Maybe

2010-07-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

It's funny how things just slip out...

In response to the bittervetstorm of discontent surrounding CCP's failure to live up to their previous promise that Incarna wouldn't take developers away from the core Eve product CCP Soundwave made a comment

http://www.eve-search.com/thread/1354510/page/40#1172

And then hurriedly changed it

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1354510&page=39#1170

If you look carefully the change was to turn the capitalised word 'Invasion' into 'a new flying in space feature'.

Now, this could be an internal codename which marketing will play with until they come up with the final title - for example Dominion was known internally as Rubicon. However the name clearly implies a certain direction or theme for the new iteration and combining this with the information that the PVE content design team is apparently working flat out for this release leads me to speculate that this will bring another big step in the back story of Eve.

My guess - the popularity of the live Sansha events has been noted and the theme of pirate incursions into empire is going to be expanded on with more mission content. But that on its own doesn't stand as a feature so perhaps the missions will have some new wrinkles - such as requiring multiple pilots to collaborate or perhaps a 'live' feature where players run PVE encounters in specific locations to help defend systems from attack.

No doubt we'll find out sooner rather than later now.

Free To A Good Home

2010-07-13T21:46:00.001-07:00

Thanks to whoever abandoned a Crow outside the Sisters of Eve Station in Soshin - I was passing through and I can assure you it'll be given plenty of the right kind of abuse.

Like Your Avatar? Be Prepared To Re-Design It This Winter

2010-07-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

The CSM summit notes are finally online, and amongst the legitimate complaints regarding CCP's development priorities and interaction with the council I did notice this interesting mention regarding the winter Expansion....

The winter expansion will focus on polish of existing features, mainly planetary interaction, and
preparation for coming expansions. The aim is to include new character modeling, which involves new
technology and new artwork.
Players will be required, when the new character creator will be released, to recreate all avatars in the
new system. CCP will probably continue to provide the paid service of remaking avatars.

So, I'll have a lot of work to do when that arrives.

Further down I noticed one other interesting comment regarding refining rates...

ORE Faction Control Tower. POS refining has a large shortfall in efficiency. Develop an ORE
Faction control tower (small, med and large...or at least large) with bonuses to either: 1. Refine wastage
percentage or 2. CPU and Power Requirements of refinery array equipment. Offsetting drawback is to
have no bonuses to defenses.
CCP’s response: The whole reprocessing system needs an overhaul and individual towers will not be
added or receive a refining boost in the foreseeable future. To phrase this in a bigger perspective the
station refining being at 100% might be the source of the problem, not the lack of more efficient POS
tower. Limiting the game-play by having a ‘perfect’ outcome with little effort is a route that CCP believes
needs to be revisited.
Session discussion: CSM asked for clarification on CCP’s response. CCP replied: The issue is not the
towers but rather the presence of perfect refinery in NPC stations, which is the guideline.

Now, If you've read my previous comments on the Mineralpocalypse you'll know I've been advocating a rebalance of the refining system to deal with the high efficiencies that even untrained pilots get when melting down mission loot in NPC stations, so I'm taking this as a sign that CCP are ready to look at this and perhaps make those skills that I spent weeks training worth a lot more.

My Poor Hardware

2010-07-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

My Eve play style for the last month has been kind of odd, I was doing a bit of travelling so all I really got a chance to do was login and manage planets. However, I also found myself at home for a few days without the rest of the family, so in theory I could get some proper playtime, but instead squandered it by playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii, which left me with only enough time to manage planets.

Then disaster struck and my laptop died on July 4th, and since then I've been forced onto my aging MacBook Pro which gets stupidly hot when I run Eve with minimal settings, lasts about 60 seconds on battery power (I need to replace that someday), and has all sorts of annoying UI problems relating to only having one mouse button, and having the Function keys requiring another key to use.

Of course, the Mac is designed around only one mouse button, my Thinkpad had been suffering for the last few month from a disfunctional Right mouse button, which makes all sorts of random things completely impossible unless you plug in a mouse. Try playing Eve without the ability to right click, you'll find that there's all sorts of things that you take for granted that are suddenly impossible.

I could take a ship out and go ratting in belts, as long as you can select something in the overview then you can warp to it, missions however are impossible since you need the right mouse button to warp to a bookmark (another reason why I'd love to see bookmarks on the overview), in theory Courier missions are possible, but you can't set autopilot destination, so you need to manually plot your course. Weapons work fine, but you can't right-click and reload or change ammo types, instead you need to open your cargo and drag the ammo to the weapon, and without the right mouse button you can't launch drones.

Oh and if you've just bought yourself a shiny new ship you're going to need that right click menu to assemble it, at least with assembled ships you can drag them from the ships window into the hangar to board them.

Mining is about the only thing you can do industry wise, manipulating blueprints for research or manufacture is all controlled by the right button, and even if you mine a bunch of ore you can forget jetcan mining, since you can't jettison anything from your hold. So warp to station once you get a full load and then despair as you realise there's no way to refine it.

Forget about managing you market orders, the best you can do is buy the cheapest thing in our current station/system/region, or place a buy order for an item. You can't sell anything in your hangar, or trade it with someone either via contracts or direct trades, and forget about using your daytrading skill until you invest in an external mouse.

However, while I complain about planetary interaction's awful UI, it had one redeeming feature for my half broken input device - you can do everything necessary to run a PI empire without ever touching the right mouse button. Although if you want to import or export products you need to use a spaceport and hope that you have customs offices on the overview...

Can't wait for that new laptop so my mac can have a rest.

Is EvaGate Too Obvious?

2010-07-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

CCP have just annouced that Eva Jobse AKA Ankhesentapemkah has been removed from the CSM for violating the NDA - details are sketchy but she denies this, and there's a great deal of speculation as to what was disclosed. This announcement is much more vague than when Larkonis Trassler was dropped from the CSM for making some market trades based upon confidential information (the scandal dubbed 'LarkonisGate'). Larkonis was allowed to make a statement explaining the situation, apologise and resign, but in this case no such statement has been forthcoming via CCP channels. This has lead to speculation that this situation is a whole lot more serious than Larkonis' inside trading, and given that Eva works for another video games company people have even been throwing around the term 'industrial espionage' - which is highly unlikely since pet doggy games have very little to do with internet spaceships.

Massively.com has contacted her as part of their coverage and Eva's statement reveals very little beyond the fact that CCP and Eva disagree as to whether an NDA violation has in fact occurred.

Quote:
When reached for comment, Eva had the following to say: "All I can say at the moment is that out of respect for the CSM, the players of EVE, as well as the good people at CCP, I cannot give any details besides my personal conviction that CCP's statement is not in relation to any of my recent publications, and that I do not share CCP's conclusion that there has in fact been an NDA breach. I am currently engaged in following up this situation with CCP."

It's unclear how much the rest of the CSM knows about the situation, Sokrates has been making a number of comments in the discussion thread, and has stated that the NDA violation is unrelated to Eva's blog which has been critical of CCP's development priorities - if that were the case I suspect that half the CSM would be on the line and I might have a chance of bubbling up to CSM status :).

Mortarion Curze Memorial Station

2010-07-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

When I first moved out to 0.0 I based out of BR-N97 which had an outpost named in memory of a Mortarion Curze, the primary character of Michael Fisher, Michael had died at a tragicly young age due to a genetic condition.

Earlier this year when Sylph dissolved my new alliance rushed to grab what we could and spent many hours to capture the station, in fact we spent way more time that we needed to because after knocking the station into structure there was a server crash and restart which meant that the station HP got reset - all 350million of them. Despite the amount of work we put into capturing this station, and the loss of some dreads due to a -A- drive by Titan fleet we decided to keep the name, most of us had come out of Sylph alliance in the last year and so there was some vestigial respect for the reason behind the name.

Now, Imperial Order has come in and taken control, they come with the support of -A- and we're in no position to refuse, so after 2 years the name of Mortarion Curze is gone, replaced by IO Command Post - chosen by a new generation of residents who no longer have ties to the old.

I wonder how many players that flew with Mortarion Curze are still playing?

Spending Those Skillpoints

2010-07-01T11:15:00.000-07:00

The process of 'spending' skillpoints is hugely different from regular training, and I've seen a bunch of pilots just applying it to whatever skill they're currently training. Considering that many of these players are the kinds to optimize and tweak skill plans in EveMon I find it quite surprising that the same amount of effort wasn't applied to the skillpoint decision.

The ideal strategy is to spend it on the skills which you learn slowest, and for most people that means anything with Charisma as a primary attribute, so, put points into those Trade, Social, Leadership and even Planetary Management skills. You may not have been planning to learn those right now, but you'll save yourself a few hours down the road. And should you have been lucky enough to get this bonus while you were still inside your <1,600,000

Myself, I realised I could put a couple of levels into negotiation, and get some extra points in leadership. Meanwhile my training towards large Hybrids V is almost over.

NPC Orders Begone!

2010-06-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

So we've had a fun week of Planetary interaction with many people realising that the fastest way to make money was to buy NPC goods and process them into something more valuable to sell. You could setup whole farms of advanced processors on hi-sec worlds, feed in mechanical parts and consumer electronics and then process these into robotics which could then be sold to NPC's for about a 50% gain in value. I made about 100million in this way in the past week, using a single toon running a bunch of barren & temperate planets in hi-sec. Some very fancy tier 4 components could be manufactured with ease using NPC components as input and those appeared on the market well before they would be expected, with production lines kick started by NPC products.

Anyway, if you didn't know this and were interested then tough luck, because CCP have removed almost all the NPC buy/sell orders during downtime. So now, planet interaction doesn't have the NPC market supporting it we can expect a slow evolution towards equilibrium as 'market forces' free themselves from NPC orders. Except that if you look at the volume numbers on NPC goods you'll see that people clearly were stockpiling items in anticipation of this moment, and right now in Jita there are already sellers dropping their stocks on market trying to guess at the final value.

Silicate Glass is a great example - old NPC orders were <200isk, but under the new PI production chains you make it by mixing Silicon (only found on lava planets) with Oxidizing agent (only found on gas planets) - so it's one of the hardest Tier 2 materials to make. As such those people who were buying up silicate glass are now selling it at over 1000isk a unit.

Robotics is an interesting one to watch though, because of the Buy->Process->Sell chain there are no doubt large amounts of these, or at least the components in people's hangars, but there's also a constant demand for these in POS fuel, and manufacturing either requires a single installation on rare plasma planets, or shuttling materials between other planets. So I suspect that actual production will be a lot lower initially (except in 0.0) as prices will be depressed, but as supplies get used up the prices will only rise until it becomes worth people's time to produce them.

The people with those fancy plasma planets are currently better off making Precious metals, and maybe once the prices for those drop, Enriched uranium. Enriched uranium from NPC orders is pretty pricey so it didn't have the same incentive to buy and stockpile. Precious metal prices currently push that even higher, but those can be extracted from barren planets, which are much more common, so the price for those will drop more readily.

Myself - I've got almost 20 planets being farmed right now, some in hi-sec/low-sec and some in 0.0 - I've already made my investment back and expect to continue to do well over the coming days, I have a few more ideas on where the market is going and investments have been made.

How is Smartbomb Range Calculated?

2010-06-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

One of those dumb questions I just had to jump on SiSi and test it out - indeed from the screenshot below you can see that the target is being damaged even though the ships centers are more than 5km apart. the range of the bombs is computed based upon the gun range and so the range is boosted by the collision radius of the models. This means that the 'volume of effect' (not area of effect - that's 2d) is larger for larger ships, and pilots putting smartbombs on their capitals are getting more bang for their buck than those who use bombs on their dinky little battleships.

Making Planetfall, Not Planet Fail

2010-06-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

So I jumped into planetside production with both feet and managed to get all 6 of my alts trained in production mostly only with level 3 skills - so improved Command Centers and 4 planets each, but the two 'mains' have gone and trained the skills for advanced command centers. I've made a few mistakes and realised that I needed to nuke a bunch of buildings and redesign my colonies, but each new one is getting more and more efficient.

For example I used to put the command center and launchpad at a spot roughly equidistant from all the hotspots and have everything feeding into it, but now I setup a command center on one hotspot and the launchpad on another hotspot and both of them can be used as buffers for materials prior to processing. Any other hotspots that are required may get a dedicated storage node if there's a decent chance that a 5 hour cycle would overload the link and require an upgrade - even though I aim for 23 hour cycles as the default it's nice to have a buffer for moments when a 5 hour cycle is possible.

And, it appears that there's been an annoying bug which causes cycle times to increase if they cover downtime, it ends up being more like a 36 hour cycle which I then pad out with a couple of 5 hour cycles. It's not the only bug affecting PI, materials get disappeared randomly, sometimes when I'm exporting them off planet. It's mostly annoying, since as far as I can tell everyone is dealing with the same problem, at least if someone has discovered a fix they're not telling. Regardless, the market is so young and chaotic that I expect that the effect of material losses is small compared to other factors driving the prices.

3 of my neutral alts are working together, I've found a pretty nice low-sec system very close to hi-sec - when you're going for low-sec planet harvesting remember that yield goes up as sec status goes down. So like the risk-reward graphs I laid out in my discussion of missions there's this discontinuity that makes the increase in rewards from 0.4 sec planets a whole lot less attractive. No, you really want to look for those 0.1 sec systems to get as close to the yields you expect in 0.0 as you can without having to deal with holding sov or sneaking though warp bubbles. So 2 alts have some extractor dominated setups in a couple of low-sec systems and the 3rd is focussing on building the final product with 4 barren/temperate worlds that are almost exclusively host advanced and hi-tech processors. I just import the products and the whole production chain goes to work pushing out a p4 every few hours, I'm still optimizing the whole thing, and over time I expect changes as some of the NPC goods I have in stock run out and need to be built - but that'll be a long time for some.

My other characters are all out in 0.0 furiously producing POS fuel stuffs, my alliance is going through a rough patch and I don't see a huge internal market for the P4's at this time, but, we'll always have towers to fuel. (and even if we end up leaving our current space, the new residents will have towers too).

Anyway - here's some pictures of my layouts..

One of my first - concentrating on making p2 and p3 materials, I only have 3 advanced processors so I switch them aroung right now, but I think I'm going to settle on a single chain soon. Notice how the command center just sits there like a wart on the side of the network?

So my improved design uses the command center as a secondary storage node - setting it on top of one deposit, and then the spaceport goes on another, on this gas planet I only really needed two locations so I get this layout that resembles a dumbell.

And this is one of those factory planets I mentioned, only 3 extractors but lots of advanced processors fed by imported materials. The local extractors may be nuked in the future to make way for more processors as some NPC stocks start to get used up.

And finally, this is the result of trying to place a command center when a red fleet shows up and made me panic, I put it on top of a deposit which wasn't needed to make POS fuel, so it just sits there completely isolated from the network.

Training The Perfect Alt

2010-06-14T10:50:00.001-07:00

With the introduction of Planetary Interaction Eve has added yet another thing that alts can do very effectively for very little skill training, and when I'm talking about 'alts' I'm really talking about the spare character slots on an account that frequently go unused because you can't play or train with them at the same time as your main.

I'm guessing the training is the main thing that holds most alts back from getting seriously developed, people don't want to devote weeks away from training their main to increase the utility of their alts. At least that's what dominated my strategies and skill selections - I'd plan things ahead of time in Evemon to tune the learning plan, and try to take advantage of those times when my main was spending time in a PVP clone without implants.

Two of my alts were created under the old character creation system, they started out with roughly 800,000 sp, I didn't really train them until Apocrypha changed the rules and added the 100% training time boost, this speed boost is a huge help to creating alts focussed for their tasks and while it was nice to be able to create a Gallente pilot with Drones 5 out of the box, it was rather less useful to have Drone Navigation 5. (For those of you who joined Eve after apocrypha you can get an idea of the old character creation system from online tools like this one). Nowadays you only get about 50ksp, so you end up with 750k more skillpoints trained at double speed in the skills you choose - for most things you want alts to do this is generally going to work out better for you in the long run.

So what do you do with those alts? Well - here's a few pointers

Planetary Interaction - The new stuff, it has the advantage that once you're setup you just need to login maybe every day or so to restart extractors and pickup finished products. Training time is light, new characters come with the pre-reqs for the basic skills, and all you need is a big enough ship to deploy the command centers, It's quite possible to carry and deploy them via cargo expanded astrometrics frigates.

Market Trading - They can sit in the market hub of your choice and update orders, trading skills let you place more orders and extend your reach, but you can make cash without any real skilltime invested. Only danger is that you realise your 'alt' is making more money than your main and turn into a full time trader.

Datacore Farmer - Requires a chunk of training time to get the skills (Science 5, Engineering/Mechanic/Electronics 5, Research 5, Lab Operation 5), and a bunch of missioning to get the standing, but once you do the datacores just keep getting produced and the only thing you need to do is pay your R&D agents a visit once a month.

Research Alt - There's always such long queues at the research slots in hi-sec, but you can compensate for this somewhat by queueing up lots of work across alts. Very easy to get skills for ME/PE/Copying and if you've got a datacore farmer setup then this is included for free. Invention takes more work, with you needing 2 science skills and a racial encryption methods skill too.

Manufacturing Alt - Get production efficiency to 5 and you can grind out more stuff, and we all know more stuff = more profit.

Neutral Hauler - Need to move something in hi-sec when your corp is war-decced - train up an alt and have them move it for you, it'll take less than 12 hours to get in a hauler. I recommend an Amarrian toon for this since the Sigil only needs Amarr Industrial 1, plus for smaller stuff you can move decent amounts in a Magnate (as demonstrated by the number of obvious macros running courier missions in a magnate.

Neutral Scout - No training needed at all, just fly the noob ship to the scout system and profit. It's nice if you can get a cloaking device, or even just make a frigate unprobeable with ECCM, it's even better if you train for covert ops.

Cyno Alt - All you need to train is Electronics 5 to get access to Cynosural Field Theory then you can put up that big sign that says "I'm Here, Gank Me!" so that your friends can jump in their expensive cap ships and then dock up while you sit stuck in space until you're destroyed. The nice thing about having your alts trained for this is it's quite often that your friends will be hunting around for someone in the right place to light a cyno, so having multiple extra options will make you lots of friends.

No Strings PVP Alt - Join Red Vs Blue and have some fun, or just

So, anyway, I tend to combine most of these functions into one - Datacore Farming, PI, Hauler, Trader, Cyno Alt - and so I spent some time trying to come up with an optimal skill plan that would minimize my training time.

I mused about the best starting race for some time -

Amarr - Win lots of points for hauling and PI because the Magnate and Sigil have lots of low slots which can make them really capacious, or harder to catch with the aid of a full rack of WCS's. They're excellent for managing PI in low-sec. Shame that they don't really have any effective low SP combat ships for missioning or PVP.

Caldari - They're the best race for missioning, The AML Caracal will make standing grinding a whole lot easier, and you'll need to do lots of grinding. They also have specialist ECM ships which are a gift to Low SP PVP, except that RvB bans ECM.

Minmatar - The Rifter and Thrasher are nice for mission grinding, but with low skillpoints I can't find a cruiser which is suitable. The Mammoth is also an excellent hauler if you want to train Minmatar Industrial up to 4

Gallente - drones are nice, especially for semi-afk mission grinding, but unless you train drones 5 you're missing out on Drone Interfacing which gives a huge boost to drone effectiveness. They also have the best Hauler in the form of the Iteron V, but that requires quite a big of investment, and by the time you're there you're already thinking about making your alt a freighter pilot.

In the end I went for an Amarrian pilot, trained frigate to 3 for the Punisher and Amarr industrial 1. Then I started training Caldari Frigate to 4 so I could Get Caldari Cruiser and fly the caracal for mission grinding. The industrial skills are all rank 4 so going purely Caldari and training Caldari Industrial to 3 to get the Badger MkII is more training time than training an extra frigate skill to level 3. I made the toon Amarrian because I figured that I'd be more likely to use lasers than I would be to use railguns.

To Get a cyno alt I'd need Electronics 5, which along with Science 5 gives me access to the Electronic Engineering and Electromagnetic Physics Skills, not the best datacores, but it saves having to train Engineering or Mechanic to 5. Add in the important PI Skills to Level 3, some basic combat skills for flying the caracal (general rule - if it gives some useful bonus, or unlocks some type of module then train it at least to level 1), some social skills - negotiation will increase my datacore yield, and some trade skills - feed them all into evemon and come up with implants/learning skills that reduce the overall training time and start cooking.

It's a Pain to grind standing when you're basicly confined to courier missions or low level combat missions, but with good agent choice and some help from other alts you can speed this up immensely.

The Caracal Setup I use for level 2's requires almost no training and is stupidly overpowered for anything it encounters -

Highs: 5xAssault Missile Launchers

Medium: 10mn Afterburner

2x Large Shield Extender

2x Shield Resistance Amplifiers (change as per mission needs)

Lows: 2x Ballistic Control System

Drones: 2x Hobgoblin

Rigs: 3x Medium Core Defence Purger

You don't need to train the skills for the rigs either, just contract the ship to your main, fit them and then send it back. Same applies for the Sigil - stick cargo rigs on it and get 16k cargo capacity without actually having to train Jury Rigging or other skills.

Anyway, between 2 accounts I now have 6 characters working on planets, now my task is to optimize the planet side interaction to reduce the amount of time I need to spend managing it - but that's another article.

Missions Need Fixing

2010-06-08T16:41:00.001-07:00

And I don't mean in the way that the chorus of people complaining about loot nerfs, giant courier packages, low-sec missions and level 5 bug fixes are wanting, I mean a complete re-appraisal of the mission process from mission availability, mission design and rewards. In short, something that will probably never happen, but you know I can dream and maybe something might happen.

One of the biggest problems with missions in Eve is that the rewards in the hardest missions largely come from the bounties and loot dropped by the NPC's in the missions, this causes many problems indirectly -

* While agent rewards provide some incentive to find high quality agents in 0.5 sec space they don't make much of a difference compared to the loot/bounties, so pilots still congregate in the same hubs.
* It encourages players to reject missions where the bounties and loot are perceived to be poor e.g. drone missions.
* It encourages farming of missions such as Recon (1/3) where the rat bounties can be collected daily for aweek.

All three of these serve to reduce variety and therefore increase the percieved 'grindiness' of mission running, which in turn will no doubt lead to players losing interest more quickly.

NPC Spam in Missions is counterproductive, from a realism/roleplay (delete as appropriate) perspective it just seems bizarre that a single battleship can lay waste to so many pirates and odder still when you see that these mission rats have lower bounties and less loot and salvage compared to their random asteroid belt cousins. Plus there's the simple fact that mission AI is terrible, the rats almost never switch targets to defend themselves against your drones, or target the non-tanked ships in your fleet. So, I'd like to see CCP mission designers commit to revamping missioning in general to have fewer, smarter, more deadly ships. The bounties and loot can be brought back in line with what you'd expect from non-mission versions of the rats, but I'd anticipate that the mission rewards due to this would still be significantly diminished.

Reducing these rewards leaves more room to boost direct agent rewards in the form of cash, LP and other widgets that sometimes get gifted to bold pilots in exchange for risking their ships. It also gives the rewards system much more room to adjust mission rewards and make those 'crappy drone' missions much more attractive to the dedicated mission runner. As it stands right now there are a number of factors that determine mission rewards

* The Agent's Quality - higher quality means more payout
* The Security Status Of The Agent's System - agents in lower sec systems pay more
* The Average Time Players Take to Run The Mission - the longer players take to hand it in, the bigger the rewards.

This last one is one of the few ways that mission runners indirectly affect each other, it's most obvious with the 'Recon' series of missions, where players like to farm part 1 for a week before handing it in while parts 2 and 3 are quick flythroughs, so the agent rewards for part 1 are 10 times the rewards for the other segments. So when I'm working up standings with a low skilled research alt I'm always happy to see the Recon mission offered because all those people holding on to the mission for a week are pushing up the rewards I get for zipping through it in a shuttle. While farming a mission that respawns awesome rats every day is currently justified by the monetary rewards I don't believe this to be a great gameplay experience.

The Security status scaling in theory provides some incentive to mission in low security space, but it really doesn't have any real effect. Firstly we've already established that the agent reward part is pretty small compared to the loot and bounties, but even if we corrected that with the agent rewards dominating you'd still be left with a simple linear function. Now - let's do a very Eve thing and use a spreadsheet to make some graphs of risk and reward....

Umm well ok blogger wants to reduce the image quality, but nonetheless you can see 3 graphs here - Reward - linearly scaling as we head to lower security status, risk - a step function that jumps when we leave Concord's protection, and the Risk-Reward ratio. Of course I just pulled numbers out of my head here, I'm putting the risk in low-sec as 3 times higher, which is probably only true if you're a pilot who's using scouts and directional to stay on top of things. The point is that the risk reward equation shows this massive dip the instant you step into a 0.4 sec system. So Even if we fudge the numbers and make it that the risk:reward eventually exceeds the peak in 0.5 sec space there'll still be this trough which will act as a natural potential barrier discouraging missioners in low-sec.

I don't believe that missions in Eve should be forcing pilots into low-sec, I do believe that those pilots who choose to take the risks should be rewarded in a way which is consistent with the risk.

So yes, CCP developers could take all these variables and could try to come up with new equations to take account of these parameters, they could collect all sorts of internal metrics on mission running and analyze the data to come up with a reward model that's makes players happy.

Or, and this is where my discussion really departs from Eve's existing mission design, they could let the players decide by opening mission availability up to a market.

How could that work I hear you ask?

The current model of mission offers is a pilot flies to a station talks to an agent and then can either accept or reject a mission (possibly with penalties for rejecting too often). The mission selected is generally random within a set of constraints - such as those described in the courier mission dev blog. No other players get involved in your mission offers unless you ask them, and clearly some agents are very busy with hundreds of pilots working hard in mission hubs like Motsu and Dodixie. This model's very limited choice and lack of interaction with other players means a radical change is required to introduce market forces to the missioning market.

Aha! So instead a mission market is created, or rather more like a mission Contracts system. You'll be able to pull up a list of missions being offered by Agents and choose which one you really want to do right now. The list of missions will be viewable by everyone, but only a subset will be visible to players, a subset that depends on location and standing, you won't be able to see mission offers from an agent if you wouldn't have the standing to accept it. And if you're too far away to accept a mission then there's no point in displaying an offer - devs can of course add a bunch of new skills to improve mission visibility and acceptance range so players will have some more things that need the charisma attribute.

So as a missioner you can pick the mission that's best for you, no more twiddling your thumbs while waiting for your 4 hour timer to expire. So an agent has a mission on offer and you don't like it because the rewards are too low, or the location isn't quite right or any of a million other reasons. Maybe all the other pilots think like you and nobody wants to run The Blockade in pirate central, so, what does the Agent do? Well he does what he's programmed to do, he gets more needy as time goes on, he really needs *someone* to beat back these pirates, so over time he sweetens the deal, increasing the rewards, and maybe dropping the standings requirement in case there's a less reputable pilot that's prepared to take the risk. Eventually, the risk-reward equation for a mission makes it the best choice for some pilot, and the mission gets accepted so it's removed from the pool.

The whole process works something like a reverse auction, and nicely simulates a supply vs demand market, it rewards mission runners who travel off the beaten path and perhaps take some risks. Or perhaps that low-sec mission represents no risk at all, because the player is treating Eve Online like an MMO and has cultured good relations with other residents in the region. Good relations works to reduce risk and therefore bumps the risk-reward ratio in the right direction.

Now obviously some consideration needs to be given to how missions get added to agents rosters, it would be desirable to maintain a healthy supply of missions and ensure that missions would always be available, regardless of how many players are accepting them. My proposal is to have each mission offer respawn upon acceptance but with a different agent either within the faction or corporation, so the mission never disappears it just moves. It may move to an agent that's less desirable because they're in a less popular NPC corp or less accessible part of space. But what's less desirable to one pilot is better for another, so again this rewards those players who step outside the herd, sorry, that should be sloth, which is the collective term used for bears.

One thing that would remain untouched would be the storyline missions, that mechanic doesn't really fit into this model and doesn't need to. I've also been considering the issues related to probing pilots in missions, and would be interested in re-examining the old penalty for scanning ships in deadspace, but tempering this with the introduction of the ability of dedicated salvage pilots to scan down wrecks once the deadspace has despawned.

OK train of though ends here....

Things Getting Borked

2010-06-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

We're getting some clues as to what CCP might do to 'fix' the PIpocalypse recycling 'exploit' from the latest changes to Singularity. The most up to date patch has disabled the ability to reprocess POS modules and new Broken versions of all the Tier 4 Planetary products have been added to the object database. So it seems entirely likely that anyone holding the unbroken products will find them replaced as of Wednesday (when the 1.0.1 patch is due to be released). The new broken items can't be used in building POS stuff any more, but they're not completely useless, they can be refined to 10,000 units of tritanium.

Now we have a clear idea where CCP is going with this, the question is how thorough they will be in following the trail of melted POS parts. Swapping all current tier 4 products with their broken versions will be easy, and it won't be much harder to cancel all active manufacturing jobs using the new blueprints and return the input materials to the installer. But people who were on the ball fast will have built and sold completed towers on the market already, at that point I don't see CCP going after completed products. So people that got in early and didn't get in too deep have probably made a tidy profit, and the copycats who rush to follow are more likely to be left with piles of worthless broken components. Then again, those components will eventually be 'collectors items' - so if I had one I wouldn't refine them.

Tyrannis Tears Roundup

2010-05-28T16:11:00.000-07:00

It's only been out a couple of days and already there have been many expressions of LOLWTF! resulting from the changes, so many that you might have trouble keeping up so here's the quick summary:

Standings System got changed and suddenly a number of POS's started shooting blues because the pilots were members of corps that weren't set at +10 standing by the parent alliance. This lead to all sorts of hilarious emergencies when expensive ships found themselves scrammed and under fire from a blue POS while alliance got on the batphone to the owners to get stuff fixed. Sometimes a rescue was sucessful, sometimes we got fancy killmails - such as this rattlesnake.

People are still whining about insurance, some are quite happy that the payout on their Assault Frigates and intereceptors have doubled, but most people are annoyed. The most hilarious example of insurance whines comes from a pilot who bought 92 ravens and insured them all hours before Tyrannis was deployed, on the incorrect assumption that the insurance contracts would retain their value. Now he's going to lose 30million per ship instead of breaking even, and because insurance contracts last 3 months he pretty much needs to lose one a day to avoid losing even more money. Of course, he claimed that this was all done in the name of assembling a cheap PVP fleet, but nobody believes this so it's even more amusing to see someone who was gaming the insurance system get bit in the arse by his own inability to research the changes.

PI gear hasn't been seeded, but it's possible to get the advanced products used for POS/Module/Stucture construction by reprocessing the same stuff bought from NPC sell orders. At first people thought it was cute to put up sell orders for this stuff and people paid a premium for it, but then it became apparent that there was potentially huge profit to be made by melting down things like Moon Harvesters and then building POS Towers or Outpost Eggs for a fraction of their NPC cost. Threadnaughts have started and already CCP Devs have stepped in saying 'we're aware of the problem, and there may be unspecified consequences', I don't think this has stopped anyone. On Saturday CCP disabled all sell orders for POS Gear, with the intention of restarting them later in the week, presumably after some 'rebalancing' of costs.

For some unknown reason the hard limit on pilots in Jita has been dropped to 1000 from 1400+, this has lead to the system gates becoming parking lots full of freighters repeatedly hitting the jump button and occasionally getting ganked.

Mission Grinders are complaining about everything, lots of people claiming that they're only ever getting sent into low-sec now, I myself while experimenting found a day old noob getting sent on a courier mission through lowsec by a Tutorial agent. The funny thing is, the patch notes tell us this is the result of a feature that got added ages ago to help spread missions to less loaded systems, but due to a programming error this was happening in reverse. So, technically mission runners should be grateful that they had this extra grace period....

The Loot balancing has resulted in significant shifts in the module markets, in particular the price of named Afterburners and Microwarpdrives has collapsed as just about every mission rat is dropping them. Many mission runners are saying it's no longer worth their time to salvage missions, which might be good for me, since I'm sitting on a silly amount of salvage components from my insurance scam operation :)

And at the other end of the player hierachy the PVP'ers are all having problems with some accidental changes to the amounts of Nanite Paste required to fix overheated modules without docking. We're talking tens of millions of isk in nanite paste to repair light heat damage to a rack of battleship guns, compared to a few percent of that at an outpost repair service. But pilots needn't worry, because the odds are that they'll get caught by surprise due to the overview update bugs, so no need to repair those guns when your ship is destroyed.

CSM5 Results Are In And I'm Quite Happy...

2010-05-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

Not ecstaticly happy, with a win of my own, but happy that Mynxee won the most votes and therefore the chair, she easily the most deserving candidate in the field and ran an exceptional campaign. She also stands above other individuals who if they had achieved chair would have had their status tarnished by suggestions that a number of their votes were due to being placed first on the candidate page, or because they spread lies like 'level 4 missions are being moved to low-sec only'.

So, myself I managed 444 votes - 28th place, around the middle of the pack, with only one more vote than Corbeau Lenoir, I'm so glad I bribed Skye with some ice cream so she'd vote for me. I'm looking forward to the elections for CSM6 - that'll be in March next year, and I figure that I managed to go from 0 to 444 votes in a month of campaigning, so with 10 months of preparation time It's not unreasonable to expect that I can increase my visibility within the Eve community and make a convincing campaign in 2011.

So, once again, congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone that participated, and a special thanks to everyone that voted in me - one day when I win CSM(N) you'll be able to say you were one of the early faithful ;)

Prize Ships for Alliance Tournament VIII

2010-05-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Details of the prize ships for Alliance Tournament VIII have been revealed - a couple of soon to be super exclusive Tech 2 Gallente ships -

The Utu is almost like a combination of the Iskur and Enyo - it has a huge 75m^3 drone bay, although it only has 25Mbit drone bandwidth so the pilots won't be fielding full wings of medium drones, but it also gets a 10%/Level bonus to drone damage. It gets a 50% reduction in heat damage, a 50% bonus to Hybrid optimal range and tracking, a 10%/Level Bonus to Warp Disruptor/Warp Scrambler Range. And of course to top it all off it gets more Hull, Armour, Shield and Capacitor just to make sure you have the edge over those far more common gallente assault frigates.

The only field in which the Enyo and Ishkur can claim any sort of an edge is the number of Hi-Slots, the Utu only gets 3, but it gets 4 mids and 4 lows so it can fit a Scram and Web. I haven't messed with EFT either but it might even have a viable dual propulsion setup.

Ahh yes EFT... because theorycrafting is all I'm likely to do with this....

Anyway, on to the Adrestia, based on the Thorax hull this is what a blaster boat should be with a 25% bonus to speed out of the box and 20%/level bonus to hybrid damage so this thing can get in range fast and lay a lot of hurt on its target. It also gets 50% bonus to hybrid falloff range and tracking speed to help with the whole 'laying of hurt' functionality, and, like the Utu a 20%/Level bonus to Warp Disruptor/Scrambler range. The drone bay is 100m^3, that's twice the size of the drone bay on the Deimos, so no need to choose between light and medium drones when loading up - and lets face it, if you're loading out this ship it'll be those super fancy Augmented Hobgoblins, Hammerheads and Warriors. It loses the utility hi-slot and gains a mid slot, and again more HP and more capacitor all around.

Of course, very few people are ever going to see these rare ships, if you have tens of billions in cash to spare then you might be able to buy one, at least when the tournament is over and the prizes have been awarded.

And then I hope that someone has the balls to make sure these ships do more than sit in hangars - my hat goes off to Admiral Goberius who flew his Mimir during the providence war.

Sansha Invasion = Great Opportunities for.....

2010-05-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

I've been using the Vigil as my main mode of transport around hi-sec, it's relatively cheap
since it has more space, faster unboosted speed (700+m/s) and a trio of warp speed rigs to shave seconds of the time taken to warp across a system. I fill out the highs with salvagers and I've found more than a few wrecks for the taking on my travels, it has no need for guns, but I usually toss a combat drone in the drone bay. In the midslots It fits a MWD - giving a boosted speed of almost 5000m/s, a Capacitor Battery and recently the third midslot is fitted with a target painter. For a while I was fitting a shield extender for more tank, but it didn't really add anything and the vigil does get a bonus for target painting.

But what use is a target painter on this ship?

Well along with the drone it's proven quite effective at getting me onto killmails for those Sansha carriers turning up in hi-sec, being able to move across grid quickly and hitting the target with EWAR from 50km out is a hugely effective way of securing my place on the killmails. On top of this, the salvagers and speed make speedy work of the vast number of Sansha Battleship wrecks that end up being left on the field of battle. I turned up to some previous events in a Hawk, but a combination of the hawk not being hugely fast (would be nice to have had that AB bonus we talked about) and the 'Slave' turning up in a Nightmare meant that the target died before I could get in range, the short lifespan of battleships is why they've switched to carriers. Sure I worked hard and blew up scores of the loyal frigate rats that were webbing and scramming other players, but my hard work was barely recognised.

So, the 'killmail whore' setup is performing exceptionally well in that respect. I'm seriously mulling over the possibility of creating a comic alt who's entire purpose is to get onto other people's kilmails. My strategy would be to fit a frigate with an ECM burst and basicly trigger it in the middle of other people's battles in 0.0, it's possible to do this on an astrometrics frigate with an expanded probe launcher so in theory you could drop scan probes around an engagement and warp right on top of targets, fire the ECM and then try to GTFO - and repeat this until you finally get caught.... One day I shall test this theory.

Anyway, at the Sansha event in Vylade yesterday I also managed to get on scene with an alt in a tackle frigate, for about 5 seconds - warped to zero, landed next to a carrier, locked, fired and got blown up by a smartbomb. At which point it occured to me I had seconds until another smartbomb cycle was going to take out my pod and the UI was running far too slowly to make warping to a celestial in time so fearing for my implants I hit ctrl-q at which point my whole system grinds to a halt and windows decides to spin while closing the app. I get control back on my main character just as autopilot jumps him into Vylade, so I head into the breach and target paint my way onto the killmail before salvaging as many wrecks as possible. I finally log my alt back in and she's still in her pod, so I bookmark her wreck, fly to station and come back in a shiny new noobship.

For what it's worth I grab the remains of my ship, and figuring I have nothing to lose if I aggro someone I look in the wrecks around me. First wreck is the remains of the carrier.... containing a Capital Shield Booster!!! Nice, now I have to figure out how to get it back to station before someone else does, a 40million isk module is fair payment for the trauma of losing my frigate.

hmm there are a lot of people sitting nearby, I wonder if they've noticed? So I jettison the shield booster from my old ship and flip the Capital booster into the same can, I hope that Slave dude doesn't come back anytime soon because now he's within his rights to shoot me. Meanwhile with my main I'm looking around for a hauler, I've got one 4 jumps away, probably too far, and on the market some enterprising individual has bought up all the haulers in system and relisted then at 1000 times their regular price. No I do not want to pay 500million for an industrial. So I head next door to Dodixie and get myself a Mammoth.

Back at the wreck site, I can see people coming and looking in cans around me, every 3 minutes I add another jetcan to the collection of stuff around me and I keep the cap shield booster switching from one can to another in an approximation of the shell game. At one point a pilot in a Cyclone comes by and steals my old non capital shield booster, just as I switch out the cap booster to another can. But either he doesn't notice the real prize, or he doesn't think to flip it into his own can, and after a tense few minutes I arrive in my brand new mammoth to secure the prize. Sometimes the most exciting things in Eve are nothing to do with shooting at anything.

That shield booster will pay for the Research Project Management skillbook my alt was about to buy.

Ore Rebalacing For Tyrannis

2010-05-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

One of the Dev's plans for rebalancing the mineral market was to increase the amount of low end minerals refined from mid range ores, the types of ore found in low sec and garden variety 0.0 systems*.

A quick examination of the test server shows the current changes as

Jaspet now refines to 439 Pyerite, was previously only 259

Hemorphite triples the amount of Tritanium from 212 up to 650, and gains 260 Pyerite and 60 Mexallon

Hedbergite added 290 Pyerite to the refinery output.

Spodumain more than quadruples its tritanium output up to 3190 from 700, and almost triples its pyerite content to 400 from 140.

So, if you're mining any of these ores I'd sit on them until the new release to maximise your profits.

* Many miners who've never left empire labour under the delusion that Arkonor is found throughout 0.0, anyone who's been there will attest otherwise, most 0.0 systems are in fact crap for mining.

Planetary Interaction In The Slightly More Distant Future

2010-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

So, deployment of Tyrannis is being pushed back by a week, and CCP has bought even more time to fix bugs with planetary interaction by pushing back the seeding of the planetary command centres until the 8th of June. That'll give everyone time to train the skills, and figure out which planets they want to use before there's the mad land rush on the 8th.

I'm actually quite happy to hear this, it's better to do things right the first time rather than rushing out something with a whole bunch of known problems.

Revitalizing Low Sec - Pirate Software Edition

2010-05-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

So last Saturday I participated in a round table organized by Mynxee regarding Low-sec and throwing around ideas on how to revitalize it and make it more distinct from Hi-Sec and 0.0. Generally the main thrust is that it needs new and unique resources and rewards and the ability to harvest those without putting players at so much risk that the risk/reward gets devalued below that of empire. People were very fond of cops & robbers themed concepts such as 'Corruption' which build an underground economy in low-sec around criminal products.

Boosters are a great example because they have a direct correspondence with the real world drug trade, and because boosters have an actual in game use in 'enhancing' your abilities to fly internet spaceships. For this reason boosters got a lot of attention with suggestions for changes that encouraged pilots to keep taking more and more to keep themselves under the influence and stay ahead of the crash. Other 'questionable products' like prostitutes, banned holoreels and plain old non-booster drugs can certainly be produced in low-sec and moved around to planets that need them, indeed if PI ever gets some decent population management features these might be great additions. Beyond these we kinda stalled in looking for 'stuff' that would be unique to low-sec, but useful to players everywhere, something that would pull people into lowsec to produce and fight over.

After the discussion a further idea occured to me - Pirate Software, Black Codes that let you break into other systems and do things you're not supposed to. Things like...

Temporarily disabling sentry guns at gates and stations, so you fleet can operate unmolested, at least until the other side notice the glitch in the network and send a squad to investigate.
Messing around with local intel, not appearing in local is one thing, but if you combine this with some of the intel redesign suggestions it could also be used to read local intel when you'd otherwise be blocked out.
When you're tackling a pilot in a belt, use our 'leet hacking skills to make it hard to call for help, CCP can't stop pilots calling for help over third party teamspeak, but they can make the 'warp to member' fail, or perhaps drop the cavalry 200km off target.
See all those offline towers? Instead of shooting them for hours just roll up and inject a software virus into it's now vulnerable processor, over the next 24 hours it'll slowly subvert the locking systems unless the owners can get on the scene and load fresh firmware (and fuel).
How about sneaking a look at things that would normally be off limit to you - wallets and hangars, some in game sactioned espionage?

Ok you get the idea, there are a whole bunch of things that people have asked for with hacking and I don't need to rewrite those proposals here, or spend weeks balancing them all. e.g. Being able to hack into an opponents ship and make shut off their enignes, disable weapons, make them jettison cargo or self destruct might sound 'interesting' but it could mean a pretty radical change to PVP. One person suggested a hacking mini game where attackers and defenders move firewalls, IPS, ICE and other widgets around a data core, but it ended up sounding like something out of Puzzle Pirates. So, full on infowar PVP isn't going to happen and really isn't necessary to get this kind of content into the game.

In the PVE context Pirate Software might be used to disable defences, open back doors, or simply give pilots credentials to allow them past something that would otherwise shoot them. Now I want to dwell on this for a moment, mission runners in low-sec fear getting scanned down and ganked, one of the big problems with NPC AI is that if you're running a mission and a pirate warps in with the intention of ganking you you've now got to deal with DPS from both the rats and the players which hardly seems fair. Now, if you're running a mission for your local shady underworld type he might give you special codes to make you invisible to the defenses, but people not in your fleet will have no such protection and will find themselves under attack. If you listen to the Low-Sec round table some people are suggesting limiting uninvited incursions through the use of gate keys, so this is a variant on this, where hostiles are used to interfere with an attack rather than simply deny it. Although, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that gates might also be hackable with the right pirate software to bypass need for a key.

As an aside - on the subject of missioning in lowsec...

I alluded to the fact that running level 4 missions in battleships makes it really easy to scan you down, and it makes travel in low-sec a matter of time before you get caught at a gate, so level 4's in lowsec can never be as profitable as those in hi-sec. If I were designing an expansion built around low-sec I'd take cues from the pirate speedboat missions and design around small mobile ships as being the intended vessels of choice. Missions might even be designed with some of the specialist ship classes - the covert ops, the stealth bomber, the assault frigate in mind.

Furthermore, pirates tend to operate in gangs, and mission runners tend to be solo - low-sec mission content might be an appropriate place to introduce multiplayer missions with goals that require multiple pilots (e.g. a gate needs a lock 'disabled', but the lock is far from the gate and respawns before a single ship could fly the distance). There was a lot of people angry at the Gallente storyline missions, they were not happy with the prospect of taking a battleship several jumps into lowsec where they'd be easy meat. However, I flew these missions, and instead of the large slow ship I took a couple of rifters along instead, 2 pilots working as a team, the first created a diversion and drew aggro on the combat ships, pulling them away from the transports they were protecting. While the second swooped in and took out the now undefended haulers, I don't believe the original mission design was built around this tactic, but you could see how a PVE encounter could be designed with this in mind. The most painful part of the whole process was travelling 25 jumps to the site and the same distance back, for a crappy reward, all the time grumbling that none of the other factions are forcing their pilots to run these 'special' missions.

All this is of course designed to provide content which isn't simply cookie cutter repeats of experiences you'll get in the safety of hi-sec, and to provide it in a manner where the risk-reward equation favours the bold both by increasing the reward and reducing the risk. Plenty of wormhole dwellers were empire only mission grinders until they were tempted by the rewards of t3 and the promise of better PVE, the same equation applied to low-sec has a successful precedent. Plenty of people want to play as 'the bad guys' without necessarily PVP'ing as pirates, but with 'Corruption' suggestion an integrated avenue for PVP leading to rewards it's not too much of a stretch to see pilots participation naturally progressing in that direction.

Anyway, all of this is a significant amount of work, CCP would have to dedicate a release to low-sec, and while I'm one of those shouting 'slow down and fix the bugs' I'm also saying that low-sec represents a significant part of New Eden that's being squandered, so it is indeed worthy of a dedicated expansion.

Oops I Accidently The Whole Server

2010-05-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

So, due to a process that generates Item ID's going offline it looks like the system lost over 100,000 items which were 'manipulated' during the hour or so leading up to todays shutdown.

http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=3873&tid=1

Time to go and petition that Titan blueprint I lost. :)

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 5)

2010-05-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

Quantime Rise, frequently referred to Quantum Nerf for its rebalancing of speed and to a lesser extent missiles - Released on 11th November 2008. One major update that's not mentioned in the patch notes, because technically it's a server side change, was the disabling of Ghost Training which created one of the longest running discussion threads in the history of the Eve forums.

69477 - Quantum Rise
- Outer Ring excavations (ORE) and Deep Core Mining (DCM) have completed a joint venture by creating The Orca.
- One of my favourite ships, partly for its looks, but mainly for the sheer utility it offers.

- Speed rebalance has been introduced, affecting a great many different ships and modules.
- Another forums threadnaught resulted from the Nano-Nerf which was intended to put 'ludicrous speed' out of reach.

- Certificates are a powerful tool to reinforce your bragging rights
- The only certificate I see people bragging about is 'Hull Tanking - Elite'

- The Crane, Prorator, Prowler and Viator can now equip a covert ops cloak
- I love my Crane and Viator, I just wish that CCP had given them all an extra hi-slot for that cloak.

- All missile types have been balanced
- They removed the 'Easy' button and replaced it with a 'Not Hard' button, except in the case of rockets where the button says 'LoL'

- The 30-day renewable license pioneered by CONCORD is an alternative to its pod pilot contract license.
- now market traders in could manipulate the costs of game time with much greater ease.

- players can now create some of the rarer moon minerals like dysprosium and promethium through reactions.
- After careful analysis of the market prices of moon minerals CCP introduce Alchemy, a method to increase supply of the rarer ones. A month later it was discovered that a number of people were using a duplication exploit to increase the supply of high end minerals and everyone realises that the analysis was based on completely false data.

70393 - The shield recharge time on the Orca has been changed to 2100 seconds
- They made it longer so people would realise that the Orca is the ultimate in hi-sec hull tanking.

71655 - We have made various performance improvements to UI rendering in the graphics engine.
- In QR they'd managed to introduce a whole lot of client side performance issues, and while fixing them they also added new options to disable bits of eye candy like drone models and explosions.

83913 - Apocrypha, released 10 March 2009
- Our Classic client has been retired to make way for Premium Lite
- Which meant you couldn't play Eve on graphics hardware made prior to 2002 any more.

- Wormholes will bring a whole new level of adventure and exploration for every pilot who dares to probe out an entrance to the unknown.
- And since we had a lot of hi-sec carebears jumping into them the 'adventure' frequently was provided by other players.

- New technology found in Wormhole Space allows players to research, manufacture and fly the next generation of cruisers.
- That was a year ago, and I'm still too much of a wimp to PVP with my 'new' shiney.

- Character attribute distribution can now be rearranged in order to diversify or specialize skill training.
- Action finally being taken on the Achura overpopulation problem.

- Scanning in New Eden has been completely revamped
- And it became truly awesome, requiring real, honest to god skill to scan down sites and targets.

- As part of our ongoing effort to bring cutting edge graphics to EVE’s players, almost every effect in game has been redone.
- Can I have the old Cyno effect back?

85476 - Going through a jump bridge or using a cynosural field will no longer cause ammunition that is being reloaded from being lost.
- Seriously, I don't care about the ammo, even the fancy faction stuff, I just want the electrified awesome that was the old Cyno.

86756 - Stealth Bombers have had their role refocused to be anti-battleship role.
- They got covert ops cloaks, epic torpedo damage and bombs that didn't make you poor, everyone bought them instead of T3.

88517 - The default overview setting for war, militia, and global criminal targets has been changed.
- triggering hundreds of friendly fire incidents until people figured out how to fix their overview.

88974 -Modules will no longer be subject to an activation delay when a ship has de-cloaked after jumping through a stargate.
- All of a sudden gatecamping had got a lot easier as pilots failed to cloak fast enough.

89883 - Jumping through a gate will no longer cause the client to lock up.
- This bug pretty much killed fleets roaming through 0.0, if you jumped in just as someone was decloaking your client locked up, frequently followed by reds killing your helpless ship as you restarted your client.

93706 - The drop rates for faction drone blueprints have been increased substantially.
- And still those augmented drones are as rare as hens teeth.

99186 - Carriers, Dreadnoughts, Motherships, Titans, Jump Freighters and the Rorqual now have special fuel bays.
- CCP deals a blow to the Honor Tank.

101786 - It is now possible to shoot objects that are 0 meters away with turrets.
- it was always frustrating to have to fly away from something so you could hit it at point blank range.

And so, we've reached Dominion, so now this series has come up to date there's nothing more for me to say - see you out there.

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 4)

2010-05-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

When we last left off Eve was about to get a massive facelift with the release of Trinity, but the patch notes reveal a whole lot of other changes, and they also didn't mention (because they didn't know) about the infamous 'boot.ini' problem.
(As I understand it builds 45017 and 45018 are essentially the same thing.)

45017 - CONCORD will now respond to aggressing drones during criminal acts by deactivating a pilot's capability to control them.
- Once upon a time it was possible that a suicide gank would succeed after the aggressing ship had been concorded as the drones continued their attack like mindless errrr drones.

45018 - Trinity Expansion
- a graphics update of gargantuan proportions
- The Trinity Trailer wins the prize for 'Most Accurate Depiction of Eve Online in an Eve Online Trailer'

- Jump Freighters, Heavy Interdictors, Marauders, Black Ops, Electronic Attack Ships
- Listed in order of importance IMHO

- Tip of the day
- Here's a tip - Vote For Me!

- Drone bandwidth is a new additional constraint on drones
- Because fielding a full wing of heavy drones from a Myrmidon was considered overpowered.

- Sansha faction ships now focus exclusively on energy turrets exclusively and shield tanking.
- and the Nightmare became truly awesome, shame they didn't go and change Sansha faction modules to align with this new vision.

- Bomb manufacturing will output 2 bombs per batch
- Later batches would increase this to 3 per batch and now 10 per batch. Now stealth bombers are *everywhere*.

45943 - EVE Voice should now work under Mac OS Leopard. Now ransomers can hear their victims sing "Dancing Queen".
- All Mac Users are Abba fans.

49137 - An issue which caused some users to be unable to type their username and password in the login window has been fixed.
- That's one way to fix lag.

51200 -Electronic Warfare Effects shown in Overview
- This was a big update with lots of ship rebalancing and a big boost for Amarr, but this small change, tucked away in the corner of the patch notes is probably the most essential thing they added.

53162 - NPC corporations will no longer be selling shuttles
- Essentially removing the price cap on Tritanium and making the mineral markets more of a market.

56866 - Empyrean Age Expansion
- You can sign up for Factional Warfare on behalf of the four main Empires
- We'll even make it worth your while... eventually.

- Black Rise, a new mainly lowsec region.
- Because we need a place to send Gallente mission runners when we add those experimental storyline missions.

- The since-long missing 6th Amarr frigate, the Magnate, has been released.
- The Gold and Silver Magnates were super rare prizes given out in 2003, now, anyone can own a cheap copy.

- Osprey Navy Issue
- At the height of Nano-Fever the Caldari were given their fastest ship yet! (Just wait for the NanoNerf - coming soon)

61817 - CONCORD have gone through multiple changes in organization and effectiveness.
- And so the current version of Condord appeared, response times were shortened, and security hits increased. Suicide ganking will surely be finally put to rest.

64311 - A new autopilot feature has been added: Avoid System.
- The 'please don't go to Jita' release, along with a new interstellar bypass system to let you navigate around The Forge without worrying about getting stuck loading Jita.

64451 - The autopilot avoidance system has been updated.
- Because the autopilot was telling everyone that Jita was 2,147,483,647 jumps away.

And so we'll pause here again, the next release was Quantum Rise... possibly the least popular expansion to date.

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 3)

2010-05-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

When we last left our epic voyage through the patch notes we'd just come to the foot of a giant 20,000 point leap in build numbers brought forth by the new build system. We were on the Dragon branch, presumably tied into the release of Eve in China, so sometime between Blood Lines and Revelations, in the middle of 2006.

25245 - Deadspace acceleration gates no longer permit the entry of carriers, freighters, dreadnoughts, motherships and titans.
- Because it just wasn't fair on the pirates.

27121 - If you decline more than 1 mission, per agent, every 4 hours you will now take a standing hit to the faction that the agent works for.
- There was a reason for this limitation, the devs managed to forget it when they removed the limitation from Factional Warfare missions.

27912 - Revelations - Another biggie with a whole lot of stuff we take for granted these days
- "New areas of space have been discovered but are under the control of the first self-aware drone, Orphyx, and his Rogue Drone descendants"
- Let the mineralpocalypse begin!

- "Rigs And Salvaging" & "Exploration"
- Ninja Salvaging!

- "Invention will open wider access to the Tech Level II industry"
- But it won't stop people complaining about TII BPO's

- "The Contracts System is a player-driven mechanism for characters and corporations to formalize work agreements with each other"
- The contracts system is a great new feature to help people scam each other.

- "New Tier 2 Battlecruisers and Tier 3 Battleships to wreak more havoc on your enemies."
- for people who hate Drakes, this is the moment the game went downhill

But most important of all we have
- "'Warp to 0 km' will be added as an option to the 'Warp' menu."
- And millions of instawarp bookmarks were deleted from the DB

28028 - You can now leave your ship while docked, resulting in you appearing in the station in a pod and your ship in your shipbay.
- there was a time when you had to keep buying shuttles when moving 'your stuffs' from one place to another.

28296 -A new probe, the Multispectral Frequency Probe
- This is the only thing that people miss from the old scanning system, the ability to drop one probe and in 5 minutes know whether there are grav/mag/radar/ladar sites worth scanning down.

29239 -The Asteroid Belts in the following systems have been mined out (removed)...
- The universe of New Eden was restructured to try and break up trade/mission hubs. It didn't work.

29316, 29630, 29969 were a bunch of client bug fixes, the kind of thing we like to see and nothing to laugh about.

30636 - Logging off inside a warp disrupt bubble (mobile warp disrupt or interdictor bubble) no longer triggers an emergency warp.
- immediately followed by a bunch of killmails from logoffski fans who didn't/couldn't read the patchnotes.

31081 - Russian UI has been revoked from the client
- but it didn't stop Russians playing the game better than your average native english speaker.

31460 - Concord war fees have changed
- AKA the Privateer nerf

32517 - It is no longer possible to create courier contracts with a duration of 0 days
- CCP doing their bit to reduce the 'Stupidity Tax'

33752 - Revelations II - Added new features to sov warfare
- Jump Bridges/Cyno Beacons/Cyno Jammers
- These are so important in 0.0 that alliance pay billions in Sov fees to keep them running.

- Outpost and Starbase warfare
- Introduced levels of boredom into PVP which were unsurpassed until the arrival of Dominion.

- Heat
- Sov warfare makes news outside of Eve, but the introduction of Thermodynamics had a much wider effect on on combat and is an essential PVP skill to have.

- The EVE Data Export project will allow players to view information about the game world, their characters, corporations and more.
- The API appeared with Revelations II, making all sorts of indispensible apps possible.

- The existing LP/Offers system has been replaced with the new “LP Store” feature.
- Prior to this you couldn't really choose what you were getting for your continued loyalty, this has had a profound effect on the prices of faction gear on contracts. And helped make mission grinding even more profitable.

34381 - Font size in chat windows can now be increased to considerably larger than before.
- And we're still waiting on the ability to do this for the rest of the UI

35106 - Cowbell
- More cowbell

36191 - Rorqual ORE Capital Ship introduced
- One day I shall be flying one.

36800 - Starbase towers, whose damage states are changing and below 95% shield are now persisted periodically in the DB.
- When can we do the same thing for outposts?

37549 - CONCORD officers will now drop the donuts and immediately deploy with the intention of smoking your criminal derrière if you remote repair criminal NPCs.
- Of course, you can still remote rep some empire faction NPC's if you want to pretend that you're roleplaying and not griefing.

41736 - EVE will now run on Mac OS X and Linux.
- it won't necessarily run well...

Next time - the release of the new graphics engine In Trinity.

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 2)

2010-05-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

So far I've covered the changes from the initial release in May 2003, through the addition of Tech II ships and gear in the Castor expansion in December 2003. The next major release was Exodus in November 2004 - Build # 2942, now this covers a whole lot of important stuff

2942 -Starbase Structures, System Sovereignty, Deadspace Complexes, Mining Barges, Destroyers, Battlecruisers, Ice Mining, System Scanning, Rogue Drones, Level 4 Missions, Player Alliances, War Declarations
- Eve became Eve as we know it with the release of exodus.

3004 - The Global chat channel has been closed.
- There was a time when the whole of New Eden could hang out in a single chat channel

3106 - It is no longer possible to complete a mission in space. You must talk to the agent to complete the mission.
- And in Dominion one of the new features was being able to complete some missions in space.

3211 - Transport Ship skill for advanced Industrials....
- Introduction of the t2 industrials, long before blockade runners got Covert cloaks

3364 - Stealth Bombers are now available from Research agents
- Stealth bombers sucked until the redesign of a year ago, now they are officially Awsome

3772 -Red Moon Rising Expansion
- Titans, Carriers, Motherships and 23 other Tech 2 ships.
- CCP expected only a couple of Titans to every be built, after all they're just giant epeens

- Tech level 1 ships have received an overhaul.
- This is where we really see racial frigate and cruiser roles crystalize with miners, tacklers, combat, missile Ewar and Scanning ships appearing. (although the amarr still lacked a scanning ship at this time)

- Drones are more robust and able to deal more damage, but players can control less numbers
- The epic drone nerf that left the Guardian Vexor as the only sub-capital capable of fielding more then 5 drones.

- Players are able to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves and their resources with the 'Eye for an Eye' and JetCan flagging changes
- Can stealing turns into can flipping

3805 - Added agent offers which dish out Empire charters needed to build starbases in Empire space.
- and within 5 minutes of the servers starting up all the moons near Jita were claimed.

3807 - Deployment of 70 dual-core, dual-CPU AMD Opteron LS20 Blades
- Fixing teh lag by throwing hardware at the problem.

3896 - Four new player race bloodlines are now available.
- And the Caldari Achura plague began.

3900 - Creating a second bloodline character on the same account no longer breaks the client window
- because it would suck to be limited to only one achura per account

3910 - Added a Reimbursement category in petitions
- so that it's easier to dash people's hopes when 'the logs show nothing'

3913 - The issue with the "your banned" window on login and session changes has been resolved.
- An issue beyond the incorrect use of the word 'your' I hope.

4557 - Windows 98/ME is no longer supported.
- and to think people whined about losing Eve Classic graphics

4561 - Bookmark copying is now limited to 5 bookmarks at a time
- A futile attempt to nerf the use of instawarp bookmarks?

After this the build number tracking system changes so, it's a good place to pause

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 1)

2010-05-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

If you didn't know already, Eve is 7 years old and so In celebration of this anniversary I present 7 years of Highlights from the Eve patch notes.

1002 - Chance of pirates to warp scramble has been added
- vast amounts of carebear pain hinge on this change in the very first Eve patch.

1031 - Added a warp to gang member option, which allows a gang member to warp to a fellow gang member if they are in the same system, regardless of visibility.
- could you imagine PVP without this?

1054 - The response time for empire police, faction militaries and CONCORD in 0.5 - 1.0 security space has been increased.
- Even in the early days suicide ganking was a valid tactic.

1058 - Anti warp scrambler AKA warp core stabilizer is now available on the market
- warp core stabilizers make their debut in the ongoing tackle arms race

1077 - Sentry guns are now deployed near stargates
- Lowsec gatecamping gets nerfed

1105 - Minmatar cruisers and battleships have had their speed bonus removed...
- Even before Nano whines there were speed nerfs

1113 - Billboards are now stationed beside stargates in empire space.
- And everyone had one more thing to remove from their overview

1128 - Advancements in Planck Bubble Generation Technologies have allowed for the creation of containers that have higher capacity than volume. All containers can now contain 20% more than the space they occupy.
- Oh well that explains everything

1165 - If you have recently participated in combat (if you attack someone or fight back if attacked) then you will from now on not be allowed to dock or jump for a period of time.
- Station games get nerfed, just a little, people still whine

1215 - The duration of insurance coverage has been expanded from one week to three weeks with no price increase.
- yet even today I don't insure anything unless I expect it to die within a week

1238 - Something about fixing mission exploits, nothing anyone cares about today.

1246 - A new "Look at" feature which allows for the camera to focus on a new object, is now available on most objects/entities in space.
- CCP boosting the Eve movie makers before Youtube had even launched.

1254 - Preferences are correctly persisted upon shutdown of the client.
- Or so they thought.... still working on this problem the last I looked.

1352 - Tech Level 2.... The blueprints will be introduced via Research Agents.
- And so the epic saga of Tech 2 BPO's is launched.

1378 - HUD Markers fade out if they are further away
- Funnily enough we were just talking in the CSM channel about proposing this as a feature...

1389 - Conquerable stations are in. & Anchorable warp disruptors are in.
- 0.0 became a more interesting place

1403 - Area of effect damage caused by missiles has been removed
- If this was still in I'd bet that Caldari wouldn't have become the carebears race of choice.

1413 - Insurance payments made on Elite Frigates that were destroyed will now use the base price of materials when a payment is made
- T2 Insurance was a hot issue even back then.

1424 - A second test server named "Entropy" has been added to the login window. This server is used for reproducing bugs and testing release candidates.
- Before Singularity was the test server, and before you had to install a patched client.

1549 - A new criminal flagging system has been added into the game
- prior to this you didn't retain GCC's for 15 minutes, and friend could still rep a criminal without getting a GCC themselves.

1618 - The person that did the most damage to an opponent after combat encounter now also receives a kill mail.
- And so the seeds of the killboard are sown.

1724 - "Cloaking now has a 30 second reactivation delay", "The cloaking proximity range has been changed to 2000m", "It is no longer possible to change or reload ammunition when cloaked."
- Cloaking had been in the game for a while already but a whole bunch of exploits had arisen, and so the modern day cloaking mechanics where introduced to nerf these.

1754 - Remote Armor Repair System modules are now available
- Spidertanking FTW

1755 - Advanced Learning Skills that boost character attributes are now available on the market.
- Because forcing everyone to train basic learning skills wasn't bad enough.

I don't have dates for these, but that brings us up just prior to the release of Exodus where CCP intended to make 0.0 really awesome and make people leave hi-sec in search of riches.

The Official 'Vote For Me!' Link

2010-05-05T21:46:00.001-07:00

Voting is now open, should you feel that I'm the best person to represent your interests I'd be honoured to accept your vote of confidence - and maybe I'll owe you a drink one day

Please Submit Your Vote Of Support Here

New Tyrannis Trailer Debuts Early At IGN

2010-05-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

Already I can hear they excited cries of Spaeschips!!!!

EVE Online: Tyrannis trailer

MY CSM Candidacy Summed Up

2010-05-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

Why do I want to serve on the CSM?
* Because I love Eve, it's the spiritual successor to Elite, the favourite game from my youth, it's unlike almost any other game out there and plays by its own rules. I want to see it continue to thrive, and believe that I have qualifications that would make me a clear asset to the CSM.

Why I'm Qualified for CSM
* 2 years of Eve, an encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics and history.
* I know all about real space science, I spent a decade in astronomical research, specificly in the field of asteroids, comets and the kind of mess they make when they hit planets.
* I'm a software developer by trade so I understand all the technical stuff that makes Eve work, and what goes on to make the technical stuff that makes Eve work.
* I've been a sci-fi fan since I was taken to see Star Wars when I was 4 years old. I'm a big fan of Iain M Banks.
* More than just a consumer of Sci-Fi, I've provided technical assistance to authors: in particular I provided technical details for a comet impact on Pern to Anne McCaffrey for the bestselling book 'Skies Of Pern'.
* I do everything in the game - 0.0 PVP, hi-sec mining, missioning, exploring, trading, theorycrafting and dreaming up cunning plans. I generally suck at all these things.
* I can be a serious player, cooking up spreadsheets for my industrial endeavours to
maximize my profits.
* I can be a sneaky player, roaming around undetected and scouting stuff.
* I fly every T1 sub capital in the game, so when people whine about ships sucking
I can say I have first hand experience.
* I can be stupid, running missions in a hulk, spelling out song lyrics using ship wrecks,
or just creating fireworks for new years eve.
* I like going back to noob characters, doing noob things and answering questions in
the rookie channel.
* I can detect a forum troll at 50AU.
* I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter, so I'm supremely capable of dealing with people who think they know everything and act like children until they get their way. I imagine this is an invaluable skill for CSM duties.

What kind of issues would I like to see addressed. (In My Wildest Dreams)

* Local Chat as an Intel Source: This is broken in many ways and many reasons, regardless of whether malicious clients can mask themselves or not the mechanic of using the chat channel as a source of intel generally detracts from the game. Proper system level intel systems should be developed for players, alliance members with correct 'permissions' should be able to open the starmap and be able to see residents across space. The data comes from various sources, in 0.0 space monitoring structures can be anchored, and of course disabled. If an alliance has sov they can control who places these, it provides another much needed reason to claim sov, and also a target for attack by enemy gangs.

* Bookmarks visible in space and on the overview: my daughter has a great deal of trouble using cascading right click menus to warp to mission spaces, I find myself engaging targets on a gate and would like to see my bookmarks around the gate so I can fully exploit my sniper ships and warp across grid. Bookmarks are already visible on the solar system map, making them visible on the overview and in space shouldn't be too hard and is a change that benefits everyone.

* Server Side Storage for all those client side settings that keep getting lost: Seriously, I've written enough client-server systems to know how difficult this isn't. I just reinstalled a system recently and find myself having to setup everything again, and re-organize all my bookmarks. Overview, ship fittings, bookmark folders and gameplay settings should be something I can backup on the server as easily as hitting escape and pressing a 'store settings on server' button and then later retrive with the 'import settings from server' button.

* Group/Ungroup Weapons Button: You've done it before I'm sure, fit your ship, loaded ammo launched, and them had to unload all 8 guns and then shift drag them together to group them before reloading. We just need a simple right click option that'll do this for us, it'll match up gun types with the same ammo, adjust the amount of ammo and do the grouping for you with no hassle.

* Simple drone controls: If you're in cruiser just learning to control drones you don't need the full drone grouping and sorting UI, you just need a button to launch everything you have and buttons to attack and return to bay. Once you're in a bigger ship you can learn the full joy of sorting your hammerheads from your hobgoblins, but lets not inflict it on anyone who's still figuring out other things.

* UI Font Resizing, now we have 1080p displays on 10" laptop screens people really do need a magnifying glass to read the screen in places. This is directly affecting the ability of people to play now and we need some effort to be made in accommodating those players without perfect vision. Rebuilding the Whole UI to accommodate larger text may not be possible overnight, but even partial updates to easy things would help.

* Visuals - with the right amount of poking and tweaking people can get anti-aliasing enabled on some graphics hardware, how much of a leap is it to get this mess of backend graphics driven configuration into a checkbox or two in the graphics quality settings? I know there's a ton of gameplay bugs that are in need of even more urgent fixes, but I would imagine that the skills and experience needed to make Eve look prettier are orthogonal to those needed to fix the ever present gameplay bugs. As such I strongly advocate that CCP make their MMO of the year 2009 look like a game from 2009

* Noob Ships: people forever debate ship balance, so I'm going to champion the plight of the noob ships. Right now there's no decent source of civilian Afterburners or Civilian armour repair systems so you can't fit them decently. The Caldari Ibis can't use missiles, the Impairor gets a laser cap bonus but can't fit enough laser firepower to make that matter and then the velator can pwn everything with it's epic 100% bonus to drone bay size on top of it's weapon bonus. Seriously, everyone owns a rookie ship, in fact, if you've ever abandoned one in space there's a good chance it's now sitting in my hangar.

* T2 Ammo: T2 ammo needs some serious love, precision missiles don't offer any advantage against small targets compares with faction versions, short range high damage ammo offers such a miniscule advantage over faction that the drawbacks essentially make it useless.

* Gallente: I never understood why an armour tanking race would use weapons that require the ship to be right on top of the target. Flying Gallente generally either means using drones, or getting a friend to hold a target down while you neutron it to death. Retooling the Hyperion into a railgun sniper is one of many changes I'd like to see considered.

* The Belicose: It's so obvious that this could benefit from having more missile hardpoints, and with it's target painters it becomes a great anti frigate cruiser, something that minmatar are lacking right now. (Caldari have AML Caracal, Amarr the Arbitrator & Gallente The Vexor). I like the look of this ship.

* Assault Frigates: Still wondering when these are going to get some more fixing after the AB bonus was pulled.

* Structure hitpoints need to be logged every periodicly: Because it sucks when a server crash resets the damage status on a 350million HP station, we don't need that kind of pain.

* Give small gangs more things to do: Current structures take too much firepower, create goals that are achievable by small gangs - killing intel beacons for example, or interfering with planetary production. Dominion's military/industry indices actually provide something that can be interfered with by small numbers of reds camping a system, but it's not something that 'feels' like success.

* Missions: Less grind, more fun. While everyone hates the new gallente storyline missions in low-sec for giving crap rewards in return for travelling 30 jumps across empire and the risk of getting shot they do exhibit some interesting features and they certainly break up the mission grind. I especially liked the fact that the ones I tried could be completed with two pilots in fast ships, one would warp in and create a diversion, getting the ships to follow her, while the second would then warp in and kill the now vulnerable haulers. Cosmos has a lot of nice bits and pieces but it needs cleaned up and the 0.0 cosmos constellations are inaccessible to most players because they're in territory controlled and protected by alliances.

* Sound Effects that Do your ship Justice: Seriously, I wrote a program that detects the creation of a new gamelog and plays a really loud explosion sound when your ship dies, and the Wilhelm Scream when you get podded . Can't we get better sounds for something as simple as the demise of your own ship? (I do think the alert sounds add quite a good feeling of urgency when things start going wrong though, good work adding those.)

* Bug Fixes vs New Features: New features bring new players, bug fixes help keep old ones, I was in D-GMTI with 1600 in local, and the lack of grid loading wasn't pretty.

* Player Bounties: when you pod a pilot with a bounty on his/her head the bounty payout should be capped at 90% of the clone cost, any cash left in the bounty stays on the pilot. If you kill their ship then then a payout is a function of the ship value. Insurance might also be restricted if you have a large bounty on your head? Bottom line, there should be no way for a pilot with a bounty on their head to conspire with another player or alt to profit from the desire of another player to see them dead.

* Ship Scan Signature & Sensor Mechanics: The current calculation of signature radius/sensor strength allows for pilots operating in hostile territory to nerf their combat effectiveness in exchange for being unprobable. This feature is a good thing, I am however uncomfortable with the fact that the mechanic is more a side effect of the ECM mechanics, as opposed to any of the other myriad measurments of how awesome your ships electronic systems are. Rationalising all this - locking speed, range, sensore strength, ECM, sensor dampeners and probe visibility is a worthy goal.

* NPC Ewar: broke broke broke, players should be able to use Ewar in PVE for more than just making an entire sleeper fleet primary them.

* Lowsec: I really liked that 'Corruption' idea, someone should work on it.

I like to play the game with my daughter, she's a pretty smart girl but even then I like to use her as an example of how the whole 'Eve is difficult' thing is a myth. Eve is complicated, yes, but it's not difficult, it may be difficult to beat pilot X in PVP, but that's not because Eve is difficult it's because he's better and more experienced than you. The difficulty of Eve is largely because of other players, if you want to build stuff in eve you don't need to resort to spreadsheets, but you'll find that the other players who do spend the effort to crunch the numbers will out compete you. Balancing the game doesn't make it easier, since everyone is subject to the new 'rules'.

Eve however has UI features and idiosyncracies that make it less *accessible* than it could be and it's in CCP's interest to deal with these oddities that inhibit uptake. The bookmarks thing is one example, another is the effort it takes to manage buy and sell orders, switching back and forth between 2 windows is just annoying. Organizing drones and linking guns could be simplified to a automagic 'organize drones' and 'group guns' button, taking a little bit of pain out but still retaining flexibility when it's asked for. Planetary interaction is introducing a whole new mess of UI concepts that we can only hope will crystalize into something that doesn't drive casual players away while other players grit their teeth and bear it only because of the profits or needs of the alliance.

TL;DR
I'm a smart guy, I do lots of stuff in Eve, so I have experience of almost everything, I'm not affiliated with any massive power block, my alliance is red to almost everyone around us now, so I'm essentially independent. I don't want to give advantages to one particular play style, I'm not looking out for the industrialists, or the missioners or the PVPers, I'm looking out for the people who like flying big spaceships and using them to blow up other ships or build more of them.

And I'm a nice guy who knows when to help rookies making noob mistakes and when to lol at veterans making noob mistakes.

Vote Illectoculus Defined for CSM 5.

POS Modules and Sovereignty Structures Now Buildable By Players on SiSi

2010-04-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

A month ago I was speculating that the final products of planetary production chains would be Implants of Skillbooks, largely based upon the fact that final product names like 'Recursive Computing Module' and 'Wetware Mainframe' sounded like the kind of macguffins a mad scientist in New Eden would use to interface with a capsuleer's brain.

Well new developments on the test server pour water on this idea since a whole bunch of blueprints have appeared in the item database which use these advanced products. These blueprints aren't for implants or skills, they're for things like Gun Batteries, Corporate Hangar Arrays, SBU's, TCU's and a whole bunch of other big things that go in deep space rather than inside our head. So it's looking like mission runners will remain the primary source of implants for the moment, and brave traders will still be able to make great profits by supplying 0.0 stations with implants.

On the other hand, people testing planet side production in its current form are reporting pretty poor returns on their investments of time and materials - one player estimated that he could make 15 units of enriched uranium per day, which at current prices worked out to 1.5million isk per month. OTOH I can fly out to a belt in 0.0 and in 5 minutes I'll have made the same amount, so I would hope that there'll be some shuffling of numbers used in the production chains prior to the release, otherwise the number of people participating will be small, until NPC sell orders are removed and prices jump to 10x their current value as market forces take control.

The Story Of Monkeysphere and The Folly of Relying On Side Effects

2010-04-28T14:01:00.001-07:00

Monkeysphere is a player who's been doing a hugely effective job at killing cloaky macro ratters in 0.0 space, you know the kind of pilot that kills high bounty pirate rats while they're alone in a system and then warp off and hide as soon as they see someone else in local chat. It's very hard to catch this kind of pilot, generally it involves lots of logging in and out in a system to trigger the warp in and out behaviour until you get lucky and end up in the same belt as the bot. Actually killing a macro ratter once you catch them is generally a whole lot easier since they're not really setup for PVP and can't react to another player outside of attempting to run off. Macro anything in Eve is not only disliked by the legitimate players, but also against the terms of the EULA, when a macro loses his ship there's not exactly a groundswell of sympathy, and robots generally lack the mastery of the English language to complain on the forums.

But when Monkeysphere killed some real-honest-to-god-flesh-and-blood ratters they complained very vocally claiming that the agressors had not appeared in local chat until seconds before their arrival on grid with a cry of OMG HAXX they rallied support and a threadnaught ensued. It's basicly 63 pages of people arguing on every side of the issue and every pilot involved has been accused of breaking the EULA, while some people who are actually educated, rather than simply opinionated, went out and developed a version of the local-cloak exploit by hijacking Eve's custom IRC system. And to add to the 'controversy' for much of this time Monkeysphere found himself stuck inside a wormhole unable to find an exit big enough to let his ship out. This of course led to tin-foil-hat wearers suggesting that the GM's were keeping him locked up while they investigated whether the logs really did show nothing. Let me make it clear that proving an exploit is possible is a long way from proving a pilot used an exploit, and lets face it, nobody likes macro ratters so a lot of people are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt based upon his stellar record cleaning up the universe.

This thread started on the 19th of April, and a week later CCP deployed a hotfix to the servers to plug the exploit, although the jury is still out on whether this fix has actually worked with tranquility and singularity running significantly different versions of the codebase.

Regardless, this whole incident really illustrates to me that Local chat as a source of intel needs overhauled anyway, it's a side effect that's core to the way people work in 0.0, and everyone ends up with all this excess UI space going to waste when they drag the chat window into a thin vertical pane. Instead we should get a dedicated UI that's more compact with narrower rows and multiple columns for standing, sec status, corp/alliance so we can sort through this data faster. Once this happens local everywhere goes to delayed mode and everyone tucks it back into their stack of chat channels never to be used again except to make the occasional 'GoodFight' after your ibis had judgement laid upon it by an avatar.

Now on top of this, the rules for what you see in local would be changed, in hi-sec everyone should generally get all the info, providing they're in good graces with the controlling faction, if your standings drop too much with the caldari you lose access to local intel in Jita, although you're probably more concerned with the navy running after you at that point. Factional warfare would be treated specially, with Militia pilots blocked from receiving intel in enemy space. The FW combat zones would be designated sensitive militarily sensitive areas with only friendly FW pilots receiving local intel, but this being FW, the faction in control of a system may change, so getting local intel is a reward for militias that make the effort to capture and control systems.

In NPC 0.0 the standings based rules would apply, if you're out of favour with the pirates don't expect their traffic control to tell you about that battlefleet in system. The real awesomeness of this plan finally shows up in the rest of 0.0 space, there's no intel here by default, but once your alliance plants your TCU and takes control you can setup a trackin station upgrade that will monitor anyone entering and leaving the system via the jump gates or those oh-so-obvious cyno beacons. Ships arriving via covert cyno's and wormholes wouldn't be detected until they do something to signal their presence, such as approaching a gate, POS or outpost. The tracking station would have to be setup away from any interference so it needs to sit in deep space, away from POS towers, and being a big hunk of electronics it's quite sensitive to things like guns and missiles. Give less than a million hp of shield+armour and maybe 10million structure, easy to disable quickly by a small gang looking for something to do while the system residents hide in stations.

As an alliance with your own space you get access to even better tools for intel monitoring, as well as intel in local alliance members (perhaps only with the correct roles) would be able to go to the starmap and see the status of all the systems they controlled. Instead of the delayed map statistics you'd be able to see numbers change much more rapidly, and you'd be able to look in the system you were about to jump into, instead of trying to find someone in your lame intel channel who's not AFK. You'd be able to see that red fleet arrive on the edge of your space, know what way they're headed and arrange the response with a better understanding of what you're facing. Unless of course the incoming fleet makes a point of sending in someone to kill your tracking stations.

The 0.0 behaviour provides new reasons to take and hold sov, it provides a proper intel dashboard to track enemy incursions and it also provides some tangible sov related targets for small PVP gangs that find their targets hiding.

And finally.... for wormholes things would be pretty much the same as right now, no intel, and the persistent fear that there might be a cloaked fleet out there waiting to announce themselves when you go and play with the sleepers.

So I may be dreaming aloud, but there's a non-zero chance of me getting enough votes in the forthcoming CSM elections, and you never know what dreams may come.

Not Another Krazy Kinux Blog Banter Entry

2010-04-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

Having been a winner in Crazy Kinux's last blog banter contest and, given that this latest competition is on a theme which I am supremely unqualified to write about I decided to pass and instead ask Skye to deliver her commentary on "The Ladies Of New Eden" -

Who the hell is steve?

2010-04-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

After the latest Dev Blog covering the redesign, redistribution and addition of landmarks to New Eden I had more than a few questions about 'Steve'
What's this Steve business?

Well you need to know a bit of (St)Eve history to get the reference - Steve was the first Titan built in the game, and also the first one destroyed, in celebration of this watershed event in 0.0 power balance the wreck of this titan is on permanent display in C9N-CC, a system in the Esoteria region.

Ascendant Frontier were one of the big alliances back in 2006, big enough to be able to throw sufficient resources at their titan construction and beat all the other alliances to the prize of having the first Titan in Eve. It was unveiled to much fanfare on September 25, 2006 - pilots from all over the empire were lining up to get experience the power of Judgement so they could show the lossmail to their grandchildren, or something like that. Ascendant Frontier were also the first alliance to deploy a player built outpost.

Ultimately BOB brought down Steve when the pilot logged out with aggro timers still active, enabling enemy pilots to probe him down and make short work of the defenceless supercapital, Steve was destroyed on December 11th 2006, not even 3 months old.

Ascendant Frontier went on to provide a textbook example of an alliance failcascade, but they made their mark on the universe of new Eden before their time was up.

CCP Nerfs The Great Deep Safe Nerf

2010-04-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

Maybe the devs took the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull (was someone losing at scrabble when they came up with that name?) as a sign that some deity was angry that he was going to have to re-sub and move his logged out supercaps into plain old safe spots. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth a new dev blog was published backtracking on many of the changes.

It'll still be impossible to use current techniques to generate new safes, but instead of disabling warping to deep safes they're going to run a script to move all bookmarks and entities in towards the star. The bug fix will go live with tyrannis, but the script may not be ready by then, so you might be able to enjoy your super deep safe spots for a while longer than thought. The boundary was also moved out to 20AU beyond the deepest celestial, so there's a little more breathing room.

And if you ever wondered how many people were really doing this......

The fun bit at the end

There are around 2,300 items outside the 20AU boundary
Around 60% of these items are ships
Around 25% of these ships are unpiloted
There are around 430,000 bookmarks outside the 20AU boundary
The furthest bookmark is 5,900,000,000 AU (95,000 light years) from its sun. This is roughly the same distance as the diameter of the milky way

Alienware AlienFX Support in Tyrannis

2010-04-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

Something I noticed on the Tyrannis Features Page:

Tyrannis harnesses the visual cue capability of AlienFX-compatible DELL machines and keyboards. The multi-colored perimeter lighting will now pulse and change when triggered by critical game events including:
Low capacitor
Warp scrambling
Autopilot waypoints and destination
Cargo full
Cap recharge levels when in jump-capable ships

Sounds kinda, but it would be even more awesome if it were a bit more general purpose - sending these kind of events to an external process that could operate any sort of visual/audible(/tactile?) cue in response to these events. Of course anything that could receive these kind of events could make bot writing a whole lot easier, so I don't expect this will happen any time soon.

Here's a video showing the keyboard lighting on one of those fancy gaming laptops, so you can imagine sitting in your carrier waiting for it to turn green and indicate you have the cap to jump again.

I Are A Winnar!

2010-04-13T12:28:00.002-07:00

Apparently my crazed ramblings on the subject of the forthcoming economic changes which are soon to manifest in the form of Tyrannis have attracted sufficient respect from legitimate bloggers to be selected as a winner in Crazy Kinux's recent planetary interaction blogging competition.

I'm seriously chuffed with this turn of events, this blog is pretty new, still figuring out what it wants to be, and as such it's still one of the less travelled blogs with only a few readers dropping by from time to time. So being recognized by Eve's Blogfather is a great stamp of approval that shows that I have some practical knowledge of New Eden and this will hopefully bring on a few more readers.

The timing of this couldn't be better as I submitted my candidacy for the Council of Stellar Management last week, largely on a whim. With luck the people at CCP won't see any glaring errors in my application, and I'll spend the next month trying to convince some of my readers that I am perhaps the candidate most deserving of their vote. However, there will be more on that subject when the campaigning starts properly. (and even more on it if I'm rejected on some sort of technicality :)

The PLEX will go to fund "my daughter's" account, so that she can continue to make cute videos for youtube.

Fly Safe

The Great 2010 Deep Safe Nerf is Official

2010-04-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=748

The New dev blog even takes all the fun out of reblogging, since they drop a summary at the top....

"Tl;dr AfterTyrannis, for any point more than 10AU outside the furthest celestial in the system, you will not be able to open cynos, create bookmarks, or warp to that location. Also, all "stuff" outside this range will be deleted during Tyrannis deployment."

So, save your effort, don't go rushing to get those soon to be rare deep safes, because they will be swept away soon, and not just the bookmarks, anything you've left parked there is being nuked. Including ship and capsules, if you log off there in May 17th expect to find yourself podded back to your clone station.

At best you might be able to pick up some safespots in some systems that are hard to find because they're way out of the ecliptic, but still within the limit set by CCP, spots that you would otherwise be unable to get to when the logoff in warp bugs are fixed. However these are unlikely to have the kind of utility that true deep safes had, unless the system is truly huge.

Myself, I did some testing on singularity and discovered that logging off in warp freezes your logoff timer until you arrive on grid at the destination of your warp. So there's no escaping arriving at your destination regardless of how far away it is. There is however an odd bug that ships on grid at the other end cannot select 'look at' while they're killing your Freighter.

What's In My Hangar?

2010-04-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

If you know my play style you'll know that I'm something of a generalist in Eve, so I've trained for all the races ships and can fly almost any tech 1 sub capital ship, albeit with less than perfect skills (I still don't have many t2 weapons systems). So following the current Eve blogged meme my answer is well.. at least one of everything.

Essentially, if it's a regular t1 sub-cap then I've bought one, fitted it, flown around, run missions and then generally put it in storage with the rest of my collection. This includes all the racial industrials ships too all the way up to the rod err god of t1 hauling - the Iteron V. Beyond this I also own all the faction frigates, all the caldari T2 frigates, cruisers and haulers as well as an Orca and a Charon.

See I'm a bit of a collector when it comes to ships, so I have many of them that I've acquired simply to add to my collection, but I have spent a bit of time in all of them and prior to this I usually take a look at ship fits to get a decent clue as to how people think they should be flown. Of course being good at missiles and drones I occasionally find my preferred fits aren't exactly what everyone else is flying.

So here's what's currently in active use, assembled, and fitted.
'SnM' - Dominix: Dual rep setup with rails in the highs and a complement of drones. Solid, low maintenance mission running ship.
'Tickle Princess' & 'Tickle Me Again' - Drake: I asked my daughter for a ship name. Classic passive tanked with t2 heavy missiles. Great for missions, and letting my daughter fly. Flew with me on many PVP fleets before I really learned the value of battleships and spidertanks.
'Geddon it on' - Armageddon: switches between ratting and pvp setups through the magic of saved fittings. This ship originally started out based in BR-N97 when I was with Sylph, then followed me out to Wicked Creek for a while, before returning (via wormhole) to Catch and recently contributed some DPS to capture the station in BR-N97 for Twilight.
'Topsy' - Apocalypse: The classic RR fleet sniper.
'Hork' - Hawk: Strictly for speed running low level plexes and missions when necessary, never PVP'd with it.
'Xb' - Charon: Xb = Extra Boxy - like the Scion Xb, but a mile long.
'Cuddle Bunny' - Orca: another one named by my daughter. While it's an industrial vessel I'm proud to say it has a kill to its name.
'No More Speed' - Vigil: fitted with 3xOverdrives, 3x warp speed rigs this is my shuttle, it'll go faster than a shuttle while autopiloting to gate and warp faster. Also has a full rack of salvagers which has made me some cash from the wrecks of the occasional hi-sec gatecamp victim.
'Rapunzel' - Abaddon: yet another one named by Skye, fitted with Mega Beam lasers it burns its way through missions pretty well, but it doesn't get flown so much now that I fly the domi.
'Karri' - Caracal: Assault missiles and passive shield tank for running low level missions and cosmos plexes where assault frigates are banned. Caracal with assault missiles is complete win. I also have the navy variant, but I've got no imagination and done exactly the same thing with it, it's pretty good at doing the archaeology stuff in cosmos sites.
'Stupid' - Arbitrator: The only amarrian cruiser I liked was the Arbitrator, the other ones have trouble with frigates in level 2 missions and bigger ships in level 3 so I never really found them effective.
'Big Nose' - Buzzard: I actually have 3 buzzards around new eden, they're useful for all sorts of things, but not being seen is the most important thing they're good at.
'Sneaky Bastich' - Manticore: I like my stealth ships, and I like my stealth bombers a lot more since they god reworked.
'The Last Mimzy' - Tengu: Again, named by Skye. I've almost exclusively used the tengu with a covert cloak and interdiction nullifier for moving freely through 0.0. For a while I was heading into deep 0.0 systems and shooting the local rats for some variation on the angel/sansha rats I'd been used to. It did get caught by the bubble bug and subsequently petitioned successfully, but since the bug has been fixed it's largely avoided any direct interaction with reds.
'xxx' - Crane: This is my third blockade runner (the previous 2 suffered... accidents), it's your basic, extra agile covert delivery machine.
'No More Jetcans' - Hulk: Cargo expanded hulk used for lazy mining in hi-sec, hasn't seen a lot of use recently because of the profitability of insurance scams as a 'semi-afk' activity while doing real work. I also keep another hulk in 0.0 which is quite capable of tanking and killing rat battleship spawns.
'The Mack Is Back' - Mackinaw: because you need ice products to fuel all our POS's
'Flo' - Vexor: Like the arbitrator, a great mission ship I fly for fun from time to time.
'Thai Phoon' - Typhoon: I found one on contracts for a ridiculously low price when we moved back into Motarion Curze Memorial, so, I put torpedos on it and it's a pretty darn effective close range ship.
'Arrowhead' - Rokh: Fitted as a sniper, but really it's sitting in hi-sec doing very little because it's shield tanked and without t2 guns it's not the epic sniper that it could be. In a couple of months though I expect to be ablt to deliver some serious hurt with t2 hybrids.
'Don't Ask' - Republic Fleet Firetail: Fitted with large rigs from the days before sized rigs and before the rebalancing. For a long time I used this as my fast transport ship, and it was great at zipping around in 0.0 generating strategic bookmarks while acting as bait. Hasn't seen any pvp since the change in rig sizes since it's now something of a collectors Item.
'Hippo' - Caldari Navy Hookbill: Again, large rigs (CDFP's), but I can't come up with a decent fit these days with those rigs so it's sitting around waiting for some love.
'Rod' - Iteron V: Cargo expanded for moving production materials from the refining station to the manufacturing station. Originally brought down to 0.0 via a WH that conveniently popped up on the day we needed to kill an outpost, letting us bring a bunch of supplies through to 0.0.
'Buster' - Bustard: Before I could fly the itty this was my hauler workhorse in 0.0, it's still preferred when the loads are small enough because it's tougher and has built in resistance to warp disruptors.
'Trieste' - Tristan: I bought this because I needed a t1 frigate for some mission, and I figured this never gets any love because it's a Gallente missile ship. I like it for missions.
'Skeewiff' - Skiff: Before I had transport ships the skiff was my transport, it warped and aligned faster than most industrials and had a decent cargo hold, it's now setup for mercoxit mining, and hasn't seen any in months.

Everything else is packaged away in storage. Except for hundreds of noobships I've picked up in space, abandoned by their owners, I've left them unpackaged to keep their original names "xxx's Velator". One day I dream of leading an army of volunteers in these noobships to glory... or something like that. Or maybe I'll just move them into one giant pile and smartbomb them.

It's Not Just About Planets You Know

2010-04-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

For a long time the closest you got to planetary interaction in Eve was when you warped through them and nothing happened, before you read any further I'll tell you that this 'feature' is not going to be removed in the next expansion - Tyrannis.

Tyrannis is being pitched as an industrial expansion which will add provide the capsuleers of New Eden access to new production processes which were previously the exclusive domain of the NPC organizations. Commodities such as Mechanical Parts, Robotics and Nanite Repair paste have previously been critical inputs to the player run economy and have so far been supplied primarily primarily by NPC sell orders on the market providing a small cash sink. Furthermore, the processes available at this time are still in progress and the most advanced products have no direct use in the game but the names - Neural Interface, Psychosocial Telemetrics, Cerebrographic Composites - wouldn't seem out of place in the kind of sci-fi technobabble used to describe the components used to manufacture implants (or skillbooks?). As such it would seem reasonable at this time to expect that the final process may finally provide these commodities and cut the NPC corporations out of the loop.

Beyond planetary production there's the more subtle set of changes being applied to fix insurance fraud and simultaneously avert the minerapocalypse that naive meddling in the affairs of minerals might summon. At first the insurance changes were added to SiSi with no fanfare and were immediately spotted by those bold test pilots, and this information was quickly seized upon by a number of armchair economists and doomsayers (including myself) who conjured multiple threadnaughts to discuss the implications of the change. CCP eventually made the official position clear with a number of smaller changes aimed at adjusting the supply of minerals from secondary sources so as to protect the miners from the collapse in mineral demand which was being fueled by insurance fraud (again, including myself). The effects of these changes are already being felt over a month prior to the release of Tyrannis as speculators make guesses about the variations in the long term prices of the minerals.
As soon as Tyrannis was announced there were of course a bunch of combat pilots immediately complaining about how the expansion gave them nothing, the fact that it had been described as an industrial expansion led to comparisons with Quantum Rise which was hugely unpopular with 'bitter vets' due to the speed rebalancing AKA Nano Nerf. This expansion is no QR, although I haven't entirely discounted the possibility of a Dramiel nerf in time for the release.

Pilots in deep 0.0 or wormholes will see the benefits of simplified logistics with the need to ferry supplies of essential NPC goods to remote bases replaced with the need to manage local production planetside. Anyone who PVP's can attest to the utility of Nanite Repair Paste, without it you simply cannot overheat your modules except in the most dire situations, and not being able to get that extra performance with any regularity is going to leave you at a disadvantage. The rest of the NPC goods don't directly affect PVP, but the reduced need for trips to and from empire space will mean fewer hauler escorts with the related ganks at gates. The biggest effect will most likely be felt for 0.0 alliances who generally have to deploy many POS's to support their operations and who are resident in systems for extended periods. Wormhole explorers could exploit planets, but many WH operations are much more mobile and it's not yet clear that moving a planetary operation from system to system will be as 'easy' as moving a POS. Wormhole residents will never have a local source of ice products which is a far greater logisitical problem than the relatively small amounts of NPC goods needed, so the benefits may not even be worth it, depending how the numbers turn out when Tyrannis is fully cooked.

One other critical economic question that remains is whether the NPC buy/sell orders will remain after Tyrannis is released. On one hand they will provide a buffer to ensure that POS fuel supplies don't run out during a transition when everyone is learning how PI works, but they will enforce a price floor and ceiling in their current form and I feel that CCP and their good Dr Eyo would rather do away with as many NPC market options as possible. Testers on Singuarlity are discovering some problems with finding some of these things for sale on the market, but this appears to be a bug with browsing the market since it affects all orders for a commodity equally. I suspect that in the long term these orders will go away, but before that we may see some adjustments in prices to increase the gap between buy and sell order prices to allow the market to adjust. Some speculators are stocking up on essential POS items like Enriched Uranium and Robotics, gambling that CCP takes the bold step of removing the orders sooner rather than later.
For the combat pilots in New Eden the transfer of production to planets will introduce new possibilities for interfering with this supply of goods, the orbital transfer points in orbit need to be visited by haulers to supply inputs. These hubs form obvious chokepoints which can be exploited either by small gangs of combat pilots actively degrading the industrial operations of an enemy alliance, or by pirates simply looking for easy kills. This could provide a much needed boost to small gang pvp at the alliance level which is suffering a lack of real attainable goals in the post Dominion era. Ganking industrials picking up POS fuel is vastly more feasable than killing hundred million HP structures, and a whole lot more fun too.
Beyond this simple tactic there's so much that Devs could do to Planetary Interaction to provide new problems for pilots to solve with combat ships rather than haulers. Let me take of my 'speculator' cap and put on my 'game dev' wizards hat and throw out how a couple of small additions to PI would add opportunities for more than industrialists.

I'd like to see NPC pirates spawning at orbital transfer points in the same way they spawn at asteroid belts, and, make the orbital transfer system refuse to transfer materials back and forth if there are rats on grid. So pilots may need to make some show of protecting their assets and drive the pirates away before the haulers can load and unload materials.
The current 'launch can' mechanic needs improved, it's impossible for hostiles to intercept the materials regardless of how good their planning is. I'd prefer to see the planetside equivalent of the station haulers which take a few minutes to travel between the planet surface and the orbital transfer point. These take a few minutes to make the journey, during which they are vulnerable to attack by other players (but protected by concord in hi-sec). Perhaps if you really invest in a planet then you can build a beanstalk instead and replace those fragile transports with a permanent bridge between the surface and space.
'We are but simple villagers, we need your help to protect us from the evil El Guapo', if you've ever used research agents for datacores then you know the drill, you get mission offers from your staff. On planetary scales the same mechanism could be used, with mission offers appearing in your journal, ignoring of failing these could lead to negative effects on your production chain, if you don't keep the pirates in check then they'll just keep stealing your stuff. Or you might need to deliver some emergency supplies to deal with a problem such as a disease or reactor problem that threatens to bring production to a halt if not dealt with quickly.

These mechanics are already in the game in other forms so development time would be minimal, the most complex would be adding and testing a bunch of new planet themed missions. Maybe some of these ideas are already in the Tyrannis release, or maybe they've already been considered and discarded for some gameplay breaking consequence that my feeble mind has failed to perceive.

Regardless, planetary interaction will change a lot of things even if you're not the kind of person to be fooling around with resource management you'll find yourself ultimately reliant on the production system. And even before then Tyrannis is going to change things in a big way through the changes to the minerals and insurance, you can't escape the effects of Tyrannis (well short of performing the classic emoragequit when you lose your pimped ship)

5 Year Old Skye Killing Pirates In Eve

2010-04-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

Continuing on her quest to dispel any myths that playing Eve is hard, she takes on some Sansha pirates in hi-sec and comes away with some truly epic loot. She's flying a punisher with minimal skill training, and shows that it's more than up for the task.

Tyrannis Minerapocalypse Dev Blog

2010-03-31T16:34:00.000-07:00

CCP officially responded to the insurance changes with a dev blog, and I can say I feel pretty good about what I've seen so far.

The insurance rates will now be dynamic recomputed based upon market prices for the commodities used to build ships, the payout you get may change over the lifetime of the insurance contract (assuming your ship lives long enough)
A number of steps are being taken to reduce the supply of minerals from secondary sources, the loots tables will be getting tweaked to replace some Tech 1 loot with scrap metal and faction tags
Drone compounds are being rebalanced to return more low end minerals. Plush compound is now even more awesome for mineral compression than it was before with a 50:1 compression ratio. Shame there's no Plush Compound BPO....
Mid range asteroid ores which appear in lowsec are getting a boost to the production of low-end minerals, with the intention of balancing the spread of ores and making those midrange rocks worth mining again.
Insurance rates for different ship types are getting tweaked, T2 ships in general will be buffed while supercaps are going to find the default insurance rates dropped to <10%

There's a bit of speculation going on, particularly among Zydrine and Megacyte which have seen their values drop significantly in the last year. Personally I wish there were a mineral futures market because I could short sell those low ends minerals that are likely to drop in value even before the Tyrannis update drops.

Oh what a noob I was....

2010-03-30T21:04:00.000-07:00

It's almost two years since I started playing Eve and while I now have something of a reputation regarding my broad knowledge of the game, but it's not something that happened overnight and while I did a few things right I made a lot of 'mistakes'.

.When illectroculus was created it was primarily because there was a special offer on steam that gave me a 21 day free trial and I'd seen the tv ads which had been playing during battlestar gallactica. I'd previously tried a 14 day trial but had been too busy with the kids to take it beyond the basic tutorial, so I signed up for the extended trial.

Mistake #1 was doing this on the same day as Empyrean Age was released (I guess that's why CCP PR had gone on the marketing blitz with TV commercials), so I couldn't even login, and my first 24 hours of account time were essentially spent trying to get logged in, but I didn't yet understand the skill training system so I wasn't all mad about missing all that training time.
Lesson Learned: Patchday = Downtime, Have a long Skill training.

When I created my pilot I had no idea how the races or attributes worked, so I pretty much chose a race and bloodline entirely on being able to create an avatar that looked like my real self - so a Caldari Civre Male. And at the time I chose the 'Prospector' background, the first step on a career in mining and industry. Until Apocrypha was released almost a year later I had 'experts' with Caldari-Achura avatars telling me I'd made a huge mistake..... not so much any more.

Mistake #2 was when I took those 5 customizable attribute points I had and use them to balance out my starting stats, leaving myself with the 8,8,8,8,7 starting attributes that pilots start with these days.
Lesson Learned: Use evemon or other character planners.

Mistake #3 was after I'd run the noob mining tutorial and had a shiny new Bantam frigate. I looked for some new missions and found an agent in a nearby system who gave me my first level 1 mission - 'Worlds Collide'. I set my bantam up with a Civilian Afterburner, Civilian Shield booster and a 75mm Railgun loaded with 100 rounds of lead ammo. Shortly after arriving and trying to run between the gates I received my first lossmail, so I can forever see how much of a noob I was.
Lesson Learned: Even easy missions can't be done in a failfit mining frigate.

Mistake #4, was when I looked at bigger and better ships, I 'upgraded' to a Cormorant destroyer because I thought it would be a good mining platform, with a larger cargo bay and more turret slots for mining lasers. I completely failed to understand ship bonuses and didn't appreciate that the bantam did an awesome job at sucking down ore (actually bantams are good at sucking at everything). I mined in that cormorant for a long time before I upgraded to an Osprey.
Lesson Learned: Ships have bonuses, learn to use them.

Mistake #5, was when I started training railgun skills to make that cormorant a decent mission runner. I ignored any missile training, after all, the ships I'd used were all turret based - the Ibis, Bantam, Cormorant, Osprey. I didn't train any missile skills seriously for a long time.
Lesson Learned: Missiles are a lot easier than guns.

Mistake #6, was buying a Ferox long before I was able to fly it with any serious ability, I tried a couple of level 2 missions in it and found that my Cormorant was vastly more effective (duh!). I still didn't have any drone skills so I was shooting at frigates with medium guns and the one missile launcher I'd put on to fill out that last slot. The Ferox got left in storage for a while....
Lesson Learned: Using a ship is not the same as being able to fly the ship.

Mistake #7, was using Giant Secure cans for mining without anchoring them first, which meant that another pilot came along in a hauler and stole my ore. So I used my Osprey's missile launcher to shoot at his badger and he warped off because I didn't have a warp disruptor. Figuring that I getter grab my ore I flew back to station and grabbed my badger and warped back to my cans, and to his Kestrel, which did in fact have a warp disruptor. The single gun on my badger didn't help me one bit. However, I did switch into a cormorant and come back with guns blazing, this time the fight went my w ay very quickly and he warped off to station, I gave chase and managed to kill his kestrel as he was waiting for his aggression timer to expire. So, my first PVP loss and kill happened, and I realised that PVP was thrilling in a way that I'd been missing.
Lesson Learned: Anchor Cans, PVP is exciting.

Mistake #8, having figured out how agents worked I'd been progressing up the corporate ladder and was running level 2 missions using my Cormorant, which was now quite capable of sniping those pesky pith pirates. I felt I could take on anything in this, and when I got offered 'Recon (1/3)', for the first time I felt my trusty destroyer would have no problem killing the rats for bonus points. It of course failed badly and taught me to read mission instructions with greater care. For good measure I also apparently had a mixed gun type setup and a Connections skillbook in in my cargo? At least I had the right kind of shield hardener for dealing with Guristas, I was clearly getting a little smarter. But for extra stupidiity points I still lost another couple of ships failing to run between gates and instead waited until downtime to let the enemies reset. I also remember running the toxic cloud in Recon 3/3 using the ferox with shield and armor tank, just for good measure.
Lesson Learned: Keep mission objectives in mind. Destroyers have paper thin tanks.

Mistake #9, the corp I'd join had had a couple of war decs already but I'd failed to have any direct contact with any of the aggressors, so when another came along it was business as usual. Business clearly being moving an empty hauler from my base in Lonetrek down to the new base in Tash-Murkon. The hauler was cheap, but the implants from the pod set me back 50million. Doh!
Lesson Learned: Autopilot during wardecs is a bad idea.

Mistake #10, took a short cut through lowsec in my Ferox, lost it to a gatecamp. I had a full rack of warp core stabs... in my hold.
Lesson Learned: never be in too much of a rush.

Now, around this time I thought I might take some time off... say in november, I had heard about ghost training, and decided I could get Battleship V training before my account was suspended. It wasn't really a mistake so much as it was a case of unfortunate timing when CCP nerfed the ghost training days after I'd hatched this plan. I had Caldari battleship 3 by this point, and access to s ome level 4 agents, so I saved up and moved from a Ferox to a Rokh, not the best mission battleship by any means but it taught me the usefulness of drones, and how to warp around grid and snipe targets. So not really a mistake, but it highlights how I managed to become a railgun focussed Caldari pilot, the Ibis really needs to have missile hardpoints.

Mistake #11, I'd been moving some stuff back and forth between 0.0 and hi-sec and wanted a better hauler, I realised I had the pre-reqs for the Transport Ships skillbook that would let m e fly blockade runn ers. This was pre-Quantum Rise so they just had higher agility ad built in warp core strength. Nonetheless, I trained the skill, bought a Crane in Jita and then realised I needed to also have Caldari Industrial V to fly it. The upside was that the change to Blockade runners was announced soon afterwards and I was able to sell my ship for 150% of the price I paid for it when QR launched.
Lesson Learned: Some ships have multiple Pre-Requisites.

Mistake #12, lost a hulk mining inside a mission in lowsec, I still hadn't learned about probes or directional scan. I did a lot of AFK mining in a hulk and realised I was getting some nice drops from the pirate rats, so I figured the drops in lowsec would be more profitable. It worked for a couple of days, then I got scanned down....
Lesson Learned: 'Safe Spots' needs to be in quotes.

Mistake #13, undocked from a station in a covert ops when war targets were camping the station. Even frigates align time is long enough for an enemy to lock you when you're not turning from a standing start.
Lesson Learned: Instawarp bookmarks are a lifesaver.

Mistake #14, Jumped into a wormhole, watched exit collapse, ended up scanning a route back to normal space 30 jumps deep inside the drone regions.
Lession Learned: It's not just other players who you shouldn't trust.

Mistake #15, went on a roam with some very expensive faction & t2 battleships, I was the sole tackler in the fleet flying a raptor. I had a friend in fleet who would apply remote sensor boosters to help me lock targets. I missed several easy kills because I had autolock turned on and kept locking and scramming my friend while the red escaped.
Lesson Learned: Disable autolock... always.

Final Mistake Writing this.
No lesson learned here.

The GTFO Maneuver

2010-03-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

One of the first things you should learn about combat in Eve is that the only guaranteed move that will keep you safe is the GTFO maneuver, warping off to a station or POS is the most reliable way to deal with a bad situation. Or just picking a random celestial and warping towards it will save your ship, especially if it's only NPC's that are laying the hurt on you since they won't give chase. Once you're in warp you're essentially untouchable, which means that a would be pirate wants to kill your ship then they have to stop you warping off to safety - hence the existence of an array of high tech gizmos designed to stop other ships from warping off. Warp Disruptors and Warp Scramblers are an essential tool for any PVP pilots, be they pirates, militia or warlords in 0.0.

Dock At A Station, usually the one you just undocked from and realised that there's a bunch of hostiles waiting on the undock point. If you're unlucky the station will have already spat you out beyond docking radius, and you need to slowboat back into range. EIther way, you have to wait at least 30 seconds before you redock, and if you shoot at anyone then the docking manager will leave you outside until you stop shooting for 60 seconds.
Jump Through A Nearby Gate it's pretty common that you'll get the OhShitIt'sAGateCamp feeling moments before you get the OhShitICan'tWarp experience. You'll have 30 seconds of cloak, and a gate that's 12km away which if frequently the fastest way out, but don't be impatient, the gate won't accept you right way because of session timers, so take a few deep breaths before gunning at the gate. Again there's also a 60 second aggression timer, so don't do anything other than gun for the gate.
Warp Core Stabilizers are modules that take up low slots, these will counteract the effects of a warp disruptor, but you may need more than one of these depending on what the enemy is using, and they're completely ineffective against interdictors. However warp core stabilizers seriously nerf your ability to lock targets which really makes doing anything other than the GTFO maneuver a pain.
Move beyond warp disruptor range, If you're faster than the enemy then you can try running, Warp scramblers are pretty short range, typically less than 10km, Disruptors are good out to 25km or more for some ships.
Get Out Of Targeting Range and the enemy will be unable to keep you locked. There are very few cases where a warp disruptor will have longer range than a ships sensors, but applying sensor dampeners to an enemy can cut down their range quite significantly.
ECM can be used to break the enemies lock on you completely, either in the form of directed ECM, an ECM burst or ECM drones, it might take a few cycles, but it will work eventually.
Energy Neutralizers will suck the tackler's capacitor dry, leaving the enemy without power to keep their jamming equipment running, or maybe just shutting down their MWD for long enough to let you pull range.
Kill the ship tackling you, or at least do enough damage to make them perform the GTFO maneuver themselves. This is the first option that occurs to young pilots, but it's also pretty unlikely to work, after all, it's what the enemy is expecting, and they wouldn't have committed to the attack unless they were expecting to prevail.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that this is not something you're going to be able to decide when it happens, odds are you're going to find yourself scrambled and feel helpless, and unless you have friends nearby to help extricate you from your predicament. Options 1 and 2 are frequently forgotten or messed up my pilots who don't know about the various timers that prevent you jumping or docking. Most of the other options require you to have special modules fitted on your ship, which requires a level of planning usually filed away under 'cunning' and #8 sucks because unless you're able to tackle the aggressor he'll run off and you'll miss out on a killmail regardless of how awesome your combat prowess was.

So yeah, there are many ways to try an extricate yourself, but odds are if an enemy has commited to battle you're at a disadvantage, get on the hotline, call in whatever support you can, overheat all your modules, and when your structure is failing you make sure you spam warp to get your pod to safety so you can spend your insurance payout on something other than a new clone and implants.

The Ugly Truth About Learning Skills and Learning Skills

2010-03-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

It's best summed up by the CCP dev who when asked about Learning Skills at Fanfest stated that he wished they'd never been put in the game, and that they've yet to come up with any viable idea for removing them from the game without pissing off large sections of the playerbase. So, everyone trains these skills because it increases the value of their gametime, even if it stalls the slow trickle of rewards afforded by training useful skills.

Eve players tend to get obsessed by skills and skillpoints, they're the only comoddity in the game for which there exists no real shortcut to acquiring, you can't buy skillpoints or exchange standing for skills. So anything that makes the acquisition of skills faster is generally considered to be of utmost importance to players, so much so that people make some really bad decisions in the name of maximizing skill training.

I've heard quite a few pilots invite their friends to a free trial, give them money for skillbooks and then say 'Don't bother playing until you've trained all these learning skills'. Result typically is that the new invitee doesn't play the game, doesn't sign up and then tells all their friends that the game sucks because you need to spend time training skills so you can train skills.
This thread on Scrapheap Challenge is from a player who created a new alt account and complained that he couldn't get his API key for 72hours (new players don't get website access immediately to limit spammers). As a result he couldn't load his details into EveMon to analyze the optimal plan, and fearful he might waste some of his 200% training bonus on sub optimal skills decided it would be better to let the account sit for 3 days with nothing training at all. Now, I've thrown a 5/4 learning plan into EveMon and no matter how hard I try I can't make a sub optimal plan that takes 3 days longer... This is a perfect case of analysis paralysis.
There are hordes of carebears who are terribly afraid of pvp because they might lose their expensive implants... but it gets worse, there are pilots who fly in 0.0 and resent jumping into a clone with no implants so they can PVP because they're end up having to train at a slower rate for at least 24 hours.
There are a ridiculous amount of Caldari-Achura pilots because prior to the release of Apocrypha these characters started off with the lowest Charisma attribute leaving more points in 'useful' attributes. Nowadays the curse of the Achura still lingers, with attribute remaps the Achura pilots are forced to raise their charisma so you find players that refuse to take advatage of remaps for fear of losing the one thing that justified their character choice years ago. IMHO Caldari Achura Males are also cursed with the worst character portraits, and so now you have a whole bunch of players regretting wishing they could change their looks (you can, for a fee, but you can't change race/bloodline, so it'd still be an ugly protrait).

The effort spent in training learning skills takes time to pay off, if you're just starting out, I'd recommend that you train some halfway useful skills first, you should start training your racial frigate skill to level 3 so that you can fly the combat frigate given to you during the tutorial missions and unlock access to the destroyers skill. Gallente should pick up a couple of levels of drone operation, and caldari/minmatar should get some missile training. Get all the upgrades skills at level 1 - Hull Upgrades, Shield Upgrades, Electronic Upgrades, Energy Grid Upgrades, Weapon Upgrades & Afterburner. That will give you access to modules that'll let you build decent ships. You should be able to do all this in 12 hours, and you should use the game's skill queue to manage this, make the 'long' frigate training your long term priority, and then push the shorter skills to the front of the queue so you can take advantage of them sooner. For the tutorials you'll probably have to train astrometrics, Industry and Propulsion Jamming depending on the path, and to be honest I recommend doing them all so that you gain practice and good loot.

Now.... if you feed all those skills into EveMon you'll find that you can take advantage of learning skills to make the Frigate training a little shorter, so go and buy the Iron Will and Spatial awareness skills, train them to level 1 so that your frigate skill comes faster. But forget training more until you can fly a Rifter/Incursus/Punisher/Kestrel, that'll let you run all the tutorial missions, and, you can even do the Sisters of Eve epic mission arc with just those basic skills. (Rookies might need help, but I've been able to solo the whole thing with <80,000sp

While you're running all these missions, making money and most of all having fun you'll be getting some learning skills to make your experience in the long term smoother.

If you feel that you need some new skills for more awesome gizmos then it really doesn't hurt you that much to train them, get some basic cruiser skills if you want to, it'll be the best ship you can fly until you sign up for a full account, and by the time you sign up for a full account you'll probably have a better grasp at the long term effects of the training system and you'll know just how much effort you can bear to expend on the whole learning skills ordeal.

Make Those Deep Safespot Now While You Still Can

2010-03-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

Space is big, and so by extension, Eve is big. You may have heard about Other(tm) MMO's where you can walk around the world in under an hour, or if you're being nefarious, you can get some epic monster to chase you from their spawning grounds into some newbie zone and laugh as it tears up the unsuspecting kids before you get punished by GM who also thinks its funny, but is 'just doing his job'. This is not possible in Eve, but don't worry there are many more nefarious things to do in Eve that are full of amusing possibilities, and the GM's won't get mad at you either, unless of course it's been labelled an exploit.

You can travel around 'grid' at conventional speeds where most of the interesting action takes place, you can warp from one grid to another inside a solar system, and you can jump from one system to another via jump gates/portals/bridges or wormholes. In some situations you can fly from one location in system to another without warping depending on the distance, your ship's speed and your patience, it's quite possible to build ships that exceed 10km/sec without running out of cap, and there are some stations that are thousands of kilometers apart, there are occasionally reasons to do this kind of thing - generating bookmarks and some fancy grid-fu. However distances inside solar systems are generally measured in Astronomical Units, which in layman's terms is loosely defined as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 1AU is roughly 150 million kilometers so you'd take a good 6 months to move this far in your speed setup.

So, warp drive is what we use, even the crappy rookie ships can travel around at 3AU/second, that's 1.6 billion billion kilometers per hour, 1500 times the speed of light, so you can cover most distances inside solar systems in under a minute, some ships are even faster than this, but it's rare that it makes a significant difference. The thing about warp drive is that you need a known destination, you can't just point your ship at the second star on the left and go straight on until morning, not least because 'morning' is a hugely subjective term when you're not tied down to the surface of a planet. The game let you warp to known celestials like planets, moons and asteroid belts, your agents will supply you with bookmarks for mission objectives, and you can scan down the locations of some things using probes. If you're part of a fleet you can warp to other pilots in the fleet, which can be a really bad idea if you don't check with them first and find yourself in the middle of a hostile battlefleet that your cloaked associate was observing.

I'm sure you know that you can make bookmarks any time for later use, and the traditional method of creating 'safe spots' is to make a bookmark when your warping between some planets. They're called safe spots because bad guys can't find you there by accident, they have to break out the probes and scan you down, and even then it's possible to cloak your ship or reduce it's scan signature enough to make it invisible to probes. This well known method lets you generate a hard to find spot inside the solar system, however, there's a technique which lets you exploit the emergency warp mechanics and get safe spots anywhere, and with enough effort you an generate a spot 1000+AU from the star.

These super deep safes are important strategic resources because moving capital ships around doesn't work using jump gates like everyone else, capital ships have their own jump drives that propel them instantaneously from one system to another. But such epic feats of navigation are not possible without a cynosuaral beacon, a device that sends a powerful signal that a capital ship can lock onto and jump to, unfortunately it's so powerful that everyone in that destination system sees it, and they can warp to it. Worse, the beacon when activated stays activated for several minutes, and immobilises the host ship making it a sitting duck with a huge flashing sign saying 'here's a sitting duck'. Capital ships are also not known for their agility, once they arrive at their destination they take a long time to get into warp, it's easy for a hostile force to respond to a cyno beacon and tackle whatever is coming through. Super deep safespots buy the incoming fleet time to warp off to another spot before any hostile forces can intercept which is generally considered 'a good thing (tm)'.

So now I've explained all that I'm sure you want to know all about this exploit, well I'm not explaining it again, there's a whole bunch of other places that explain the tricks. The goons published a guide called 'project poseidon', although they recommend using an Anathema, I found that it's more efficient to use a Blockade runner with Hyperspatial Velocity Optimization rigs, and in friendly territory Hulks and Orcas are better still.

Anyway this is no longer the big secret it once was, CCP have decided to fix the 'problem' and so if you try to use the 'logging out in warp' trick on Singularity you'll find that the ship completes the regular warp cycle first before it initiates the emergency warp. No more shall you be able to create these bookmarks beyond the edge of the system. And now there's a question about the bookmarks that already exist, will CCP delete these? Or will they become something of a shadowy commodity increasingly valuable over time as old players leave and take their bookmarks with them?

Tyrannis Teaser Trailer

2010-03-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Didn't generate anything like the 'Spaecships!' level of excitement that the Dominion trailer did amongst my kids, but I'm now counting the days until the release in May.

Things CCP Could Do To Help The Mineral Markets And Keep Miners Happy

2010-03-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

CCP Devs have confirmed that the changes to the insurance rates are indeed intentional and a Dev Blog will be forthcoming explaining this. Now most players aren't freaking out yet, even with all the forecasts of doom regarding the inevitable collapse of the mineral market, there's a definite feeling that the system is being heavily exploited and that the miners generating the oversupply of minerals are largely unaware of how much they're supported by insurance fraud.

Insurance isn't the only thing that's messing up the mineral market, and it isn't the only thing that could stand fixing. The people that are fuelling the epic mineralpocalypse threadnought are largely in agreement that the expected insurance changes would be a good thing if they were combined with some other changes to the system. Some even secretly hope that CCP have some of these changes planned for Tyrannis so that there's something to sustain those players who make mining their primary business.

So here's a short list of 'great ideas' that the devs could roll in with the next release.

Loot Refining Nerfs

Mission and ratting loot make up 40% of the mineral supply, the crappy modules get reprocessed and the minerals sold instead. This leads to an oversupply of mid range minerals which means that there's no ore in low-sec which is more profitable that the base ores in hi-sec.

Reduce Station refine rates for non-industrial NPC corporations: All those caldari Navy plants now only get 35% refine rate leading to a reduction in mineral output. Players can move loot to other stations for re-processing, but then they need high standings or they get hit with the 5% mineral tax. Besides most players are lazy and will just take the hit. Feasbility: Easy No real code changes, just a bunch of database entries.
Remove all T1 Loot: Plain Tech 1 items frequently refine into more minerals than the meta version, so only dropping meta 1-4 items would reduce the amount of minerals coming from missions. Feasability: Moderately Easy, Update all the loot tables.
Replace Meta Loot With Broken Items: to make a broken named item work you combine it with the Tech 1 item and blueprint. The broken items can't really be reprocessed into anything meaningful, so they're no longer a source of minerals, and manufacturing the named items generates more demand from the mineral market. Feasability: Complicated, needs new production paths for all tech 1 blueprints, and new items in the database corresponding to every meta item, and all the loot tables need updated.
Remove Perfect Refine Rates From Module Reprocessing: with good skills and a god station you can get every mineral out of a module that was put into making it. This could be adjusted so that it's no longer possible to recover everything, alternatively there could be different return rates for different components so that it's harder to recover high end minerals from modules. Feasability: Moderate, needs code changes and database updates to differentiate which items can be refined perfectly.

Anti Macro Measures

There's always a perception that there are a whole bunch of macro mining bots out there ruining the market for the honest players, ergo, any anti macro measure is particularly good for miners. (note that there are clearly plenty of isk farmers running courier bots in magnates around hi-sec, or macro-ratters in 0.0, mining isn't the only thing that easy to automate).

Fake Ores In Belts: We've seen Barren Asteroids and Fools Crokite in missions so extend these to belts and make them mineable for worthless ore. Have one false asteroid type for each real ore asteroid and they'll get mixed up on the overview. Unless the bot is smart enough to read the overview it will end up mining worthless ore, many bots simply repeat the same set of mouse actions in a loop. Alternatively, don't remove asteroids when they become 'barren' simply leave them there and let bots try and fail to mine these rocks. Feasability: Moderate, Need new objects for the worthless asteroids and ores, the existing asteroid models can still be used. Belts need to be re-seeded to include the fake rocks.
Nerf Respawn In Static Belts, Move More Mining Into Exploration Sites: Because the perception is that people running macros are too lazy to scan down sites, so the miners who work at it will be rewarded with bigger rocks. As an alternative to exploration, you could make asteroid locations available by talking to agents for mining corporations. You can't kill off static belts completely since they're used as locations for spawning npc pirates. Feasability: easyish, revert the respawn rate changes, add more exploration sites.
Even More Unholy Raging: ban them alll! Feasability: it's been done before, just keep doing it.

Give Miners Other Things To Do
Better Mining Missions: Mining missions tend to be interspersed with lots of courier and combat missions, and they tend to take as long as the equivalent level of combat missions but can't pay nearly as well because the loot and bounties aren't there. So, work on those mining missions a bit so that a mining character can essentially be an independent contractor to those dedicated mining corporations. Feasability: easy enough, but I imagine content creators don't dream about creating mining missions.
New Things to Build With The Minerals
All of these NPC manufactured items are cash sinks right now (well we're speculating about the new planetary interaction stuff),
POS Components: We get blueprints to transform those into the faction variants, how about seeding BPO's for building regular variants to give me something to do with those minerals. This is an established environment, so moving to player generated production wouldn't have to deal with any demand spike due to them being 'teh new hotness'.
Sov Structures: There's a lot of reasons that IHubs and similar were seeded on the market, there was going to be a huge demand on day one and no chance to ramp up production, plus there was the epic voyage of freighter convoys moving deep into 0.0 only to get hotdropped by Titan pilots playing with their new toys. Seeding blueprints for these would soak up excess minerals, but maybe with the restriction that they still need a special production facility that is only found in NPC stations so that we can still have those freighter convoys.
Planetary Interaction Widgets: they'll probably be seeded on the market on day one, simply because there'll be a huge demand, but, I can dream about building these things from blueprints so that the insurance floor dropping out doesn't mean dropping the whole mineral market with it. Since they're new there's an argument that this would be the most logical way to generate new mineral demand.
I sincerely doubt we'll see any of this in Tyrannis, everything we've seen on the test server points to a re-pricing of the mineral basket and nothing more. The biggest questions are still whether this is a static or dynamic re-pricing, and of course, whether prices will change rapidly enough to open a window for market speculators to make a real killing.

How To Setup Your Noob Ships

2010-03-16T23:03:00.000-07:00

Setting up ships can be intimidating, especially once it comes time to actually share them with the universe either by launching them into the face of hostile fire, or simply by pasting your design into the rookie help channel and getting 'critiqued' - so here's a setup for each of the rookie ships that provide some clues on how to build ships in eve and take advantage of strengths and weaknesses. While it's possible to use perfect skills and fancy gear to get crazy dps out of noobships these are actual practical fits that need minimal skill training and attempt to reflect the characteristics of the race.

Reaper
The minmatar rookie ship gets a 5% speed bonus per level of frigate skill. Minmatar ships use projectile weapons and speed, so the setup I advise for those first practice missions agains Angel pirates is....

High Slots: 2x 125mm Gatling Autocannon, loaded with Fusion S
Mid Slot: 1mn Afterburner
Low Slot: Nanofiber Internal Structure
Skills Needed: Afterburner 1, Hull Upgrades 1
Optional: Add Warrior Drone to drone bay, Needs Drones 1 & Scout Drones 1

Rookie ships are hugely challenged when it comes to power grid, they get 12.65 MW with starting skills, they're mainly supposed to fit civilian modules and the civilian afterburner only uses 1MW of that grid leaving plenty of room for guns. However, at some point pirates stopped dropping civilian afterburners and now they're pretty expensive (500,000 isk is a lot for a new pilot). So instead we go for uber speed and fit a full on 1MN afterburner that takes the top speed up to over 800m/s, and add the Nanofiber Structure for extra speed and agility at the expense of making your ship a little more fragile. The good news is that projectile guns don't take much power to run, so there's still room for a pair of autocannons. Flying this is all about moving in fast and orbiting quickly to kill the target whil ebeing hard to hit, one good hit will probably kill you.

Velator
The gallente rookie ship gets a 5% per level bonus to hybrid damage and a drone bay with room for 2 drones... so train those drone skills

High Slots: 2xLight Electron Blaster, Antimatter Charge S
Mid Slots: Stasis Webifier
Low Slots: Magnetic Field Stabilizer
Drone Bay: 2x Hobgoblin I
Skills Needed: Weapon Upgrades 1, Propulsion Jamming 1, Scout Drone Operation 1, Drones 2

Gallente's preference for close ranged blasters is hurt by the fact that I can't use a civilian afterburner due to it's expense, so I substitute a stasis web that will slow down a targeted ship and let me get in range to deliver the hurt from those blasters. However the real advantage comes from the drones which can engage most things at range, leaving the blasters in reserve for fast ships that get too close. It's eminently possible to run level 1 DED plexes in this if you keep your distance.

Ibis
The caldari Ibis gets a 10% bonus to the range of Hybrid turrets, as such it doesn't do a perfect job of reflecting caldari combat tactics since it lacks missile hardpoints, instead it's closer to their railgun snipers.

High Slots: 125mm Railgun, Uranium Charge S
75mm Railgun, Tungsten Charge S
Mid Slots: Civilian Shield Booster
Low Slots: Magnetic Field Stabilizer
Skills Needed: Weapon Upgrades 1
Optional: Add Hobgoblin drone, Needs Drones 1 & Scout Drones 1 skills

This of course commits the fitting sin of using multiple weapons with differing ranges, but the alternative is one large gun for more range, or 2 smaller guns - both options deliver less damage so this mixed gun setup wins. Note the different ammo types to keep the optimal ranges roughly about 10km, and you can hit all the way out to 20km if you switch ammo types. Keep targets at range and pick them apart. The shield booster is of course the classic caldari shield tank, the only active tanking module that can reasonably fit on a rookie ship to be honest.

Impairor
The amarrian rookie ship gets a 10% reduction to energy turret capacitor use.. so that's not really much of a bonus, it's hard to put enough lasers on this ship to make it need that bonus.

High Slots: 2x Gatling Pulse Laser, Multifrequency S
Mid Slot: Stasis Webifier
Low Slot: Damage Control
Skills Needed: Hull Upgrades 1, Propulsion Jamming 1
Optional: Hobgoblin Drone, Needs Drones 1, Scout Drone Operation 1

Actually, that optional section really is necessary, the impairor is easily the suckiest noobship because lasers take a lot of powergrid compared to other weapons, so you pretty much have to fit the weakest, shortest range ones, and even then you don't have room for much else. The capacitor bonus is a bit of a joke to be honest. This design does have the biggest tank, with 50% more hitpoints that the reaper, but it pretty much requires the enemy ships to come close enough that you can web them and then melt them with your short range lasers.
Don't feel too put out by having a sucky noobship, once you're in battleships you'll be king of the battlefield (the Apocalypse is easily the most common Battleship in fleet warfare).

From writing this article I've learned

Civilian afterburners and Armor repair units need to be more available to give noobs a chance to learn about them.
Caldari rookie ship really needs missile hardpoints.
Velator is overpowered, switch the Hybrid damage bonus to a drone damage bonus.
Impairor is weak, mostly because it lacks powergrid, civilian reps and afterburners would help, and maybe switching the bonus from the somewhat useless cap bonus to an armor resist bonus.
The reaper is a lot of fun.
Setting up noobships is like playing binary sudoku.

Comes The Mineralocalypse?

2010-03-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

The next release of Eve, Tyrannis, is now running on 'Singularity' AKA 'SiSi' the test server where all the new code gets a semi public test first. It gives some smart people access to updated gameplay elements and lets them dissect them prior to launch in the real game universe, which can sometimes lead to market speculation such as the mass acquisition of items that are expected to get more valuable while dumping items that are expected to drop in price. With the Dominion release the construction requirements of Tech 2 ships were modified in an attempt to re-balance the value of moon minerals, and sure enough the likes of promethium dropped in price, while Techetinium rose. However speculation is far from foolproof, many pilots took the rebalancing of moon minerals as an indication that Tech 2 ships would be cheaper after Dominion and sold off stocks as quickly as possible only to be shocked when the disruption to the T2 production lines caused a huge spike in the price of t2 ships.
Anyway, some people have noticed that the insurance payouts for ships have all changed on SiSi, they've mostly dropped by about 30%. They've run linear equation solvers on the mineral/payout equations to see if they can figure out the exact base values for the basic minerals and there's a bunch of speculation as to whether the new base values are static or dynamic, based on jita prices based on region prices etc etc. There's a bunch of crying and finger pointing at Suicide gank squads and statements like 'PVP should cost' and of course frequent invocation of the magic crystal ball....

Many Eve players like insurance because it gives them cash to buy a new ship when things go wrong, they see it as a safety net that protects against mistakes, bad luck, other players or all of the above. Some players don't like insurance, Miners in Hi-sec have been complaining that it enables cheap suicide ganking of their expensive Hulks, those pilots are idiots for many reasons. You see miners in hi-sec have benefited great from insurance's double life as an artificial price floor on the mineral basket.
A 'what'?
Eve's economy may be the most detailed and interesting in any virtual world, but it still has a bunch of artificial brokenness, money can enter and leave the economy via external entities which have no limit on their bank accounts. And in recent months many industrialists have realised that it's possible to make money directly from building ships, insuring them and then collecting the insurance by getting them destroyed, or simply self destructing them.
When there's an oversupply of minerals their prices drop, if they drop enough then it becomes financially viable to build battleships and collect their insurance value. The excess minerals on the market get soaked up by the insurance 'industry' until the price rise sufficiently that no profit can be made. Moreover, the value is actually determined across a basket of minerals used to build tech 1 ships, if the price of one mineral drops then the others rise until the value of the basket is in equilibrium with the insurance floor.
Since Apocrypha added high end asteroids in w-Space and Dominion added grav sites in upgraded systems the amount of high end minerals coming from Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite has increased, pushing the prices of Megacyte and Zydrine down. As a result Tritanium and Pyerite have increased to provide parity with the insurance floor, so those pilots whining about insurance enabling suicide gankers have been making way more money because their low-end minerals have been very much in demand to feed the battleship destruction lines.
If insurance rates are rebalanced then mineral value will drop - and a lot of people sitting on large stockpiles of minerals know this and may decide to dump them ahead of the release of dominion.
Or they might simply build a lot of battleships and self destruct them.

How Many Hitpoints....

2010-03-12T13:52:00.001-08:00

A rough guide regarding how tough things are in eve...

20 - The training drone in the tutorial mission

50 - The wimpiest pirate frigates you're likely to meet in Deadspace

150 - The Asteroid belt versions of those wimpy pirate frigates

500 - Typical low level asteroid belt NPC pirates.
500 - Pod

600 - Rookieships

700 - NPC Destroyers

2,000 - light combat frigates

2,000 - 'Elite' NPC Frigates

3,000 - Retriever Mining Barge

3,500 - Combat frigates (pvp setup)

4,500 - NPC Cruisers

5,000 - Mining Cruiser (Osprey/Scythe)

6,000 - NPC Battlecruisers

6,000 - Covetor Mining Barge

11,000 - Hulk 'optimized' for mining

14,000 - 'Elite' NPC Cruisers
16,000 - Mission Running Cruiser

20,000 - Hulk with anti-gank buffer tank

25,000 - NPC Battleships
30,000 - Mission Battlecruiser
35,000 - PVP Cruiser
40,000 - Heavy Assault Cruiser

55,000 - PVP Battlecruiser
60,000 - Mission Battleship

65,000 - Orca

70,000 - Tanky Tech 3 Cruisers
90,000 - Epic Bait Cruiser Fits

100,000 - Secure container
120,000 - Fleet Battleship
150,000 - Heavy Interdictor Buffer Tanked

180,000 - Freighter
230,000 - Bait Faction Battleship

250,000 - Orca, Bait tank setup

325,000 - Jump Freighter
400,000 - Small POS Guns
800,000 - Medium POS Guns

1,000,000 - Ridiculous, lolworthy, EFT Warrior T3 Bait Setup
1,000,000 - Carriers
1,600,000 - Large POS Guns
2,000,000 - Dreadnoughts
3,200,000 - Large Faction POS Guns
6,000,000 - Supercarriers/Motherships

15,000,000 - Small Control Tower, No Defences
15,000,000 - Repair and Reprocessing Services on Player outposts
16,000,000 - Cynojammer Arrays

21,000,000 - Territorial Claim Units & Sovereignty Blockade Units

30,000,000 - Medium Control Tower, No Defences
40,000,000 - Lab & factory services on Player O

50,000,000 - Titans
54,000,000 - Cloning Service on Player Outposts
60,000,000 - Large Control Tower, No Defences

72,000,000 - Large Faction Control Tower, No Defences
81,000,000 - Fitting Service on Player Outposts

192,000,000 - Infrastructure Hub

300,000,000 - Large Faction Control Tower Setup For Boring Attackers Into Submission

350,000,000 - Outpost

Now, obviously this is hugely inaccurate and should not be trusted, for one, it doesn't account for sustained tank boosting/repair/recharge which needs to be 'broken' before you start breaking into the buffer. Mission setups favour sustained tank over buffer so that the incoming damage from all the NPC ships can be soaked up in a managed faship. PVP setups concentrate on maximizing the total damage buffer, in fleets it's highly likely that all the enemy ships will be concentrating on one ship at a time and whoever is picked is going to die, so maximizing the buffer is the best way to slow them down. A mission Dominix might repair 500dps, but only have 60,000 ehp, but a PVP buffer Domi might have no local repair, but 140,000 ehp.

Your little rookie ship with a civilian gun can put out 2 dps, but with good skills and well selected gear it's possible to get almost 150dps from these free ships, with battleships optimized with close range high damage weapons can do over 1000 hp per second damage. To kill Outposts and other non-moving targets you roll in the dreadnoughts and put them in siege mode which renders them immobile while boosting their damage output, even then, capturing stations takes hours and hours.

Things To Do In Eve With (almost) No Skilltraining

2010-03-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

Do the Rookie Missions: They pay pretty well, mainly because they give you some starter ships and skills, there are 5 sets of rookie missions for each race and 3 sets of agents per race giving you 12 tutorial systems in total. You can run all of them with only a couple of extra skills required. While you're at it, the Sisters of Eve arc is pretty profitable for a starting pilot, 10million isk from all the rewards plus the loot. After all those missions are done you can consider level 1 missions from your favourite faction, but don't expect the rewads to be nearly so good.

Mine: don't bother, unless you're going to be AFK for a while, there's better ways to make money. A noobship with a full hold of veldspar will make you 10,000 isk if you're lucky.

Kill NPC Pirates (Rats) in Asteroid Belts: Strap some guns on your ship and go to an 0.5 security status system, the rats are easy and get you 7000-13000 isk each. The loot the drop is mostly crap but can be awesome, pay attention to anything dropping a tag, tags can be worth millions, especially copper tags that tend to get ignored by mission farmers because they're in frigates. Also pay attention for commander spawns - Dread Guristas, True Sanshas, Domination, Shadow Serpentis and Dark Blood - these can sometimes drop epic loot like pirate implants worth 100million isk.

Run 1/1 Plexes: You'll see these on your overview, "Sanshas Military Outpost", "Old Meanie Cultivation Center" and similar, they're always in the same places and contain a whole bunch of weak targets that respawn once an hour. In the final room you'll find something that drops awesome 'deadspace' loot, it might be a can, a ship, or a structure, and you'll get things like 'Centii C-Type Small Armor Repairer' which can sell for 10million on contracts. You'll most likely find that someone has beaten you to it maybe 75% of the time, so just keep moving and go from one place to another picking up the fancy modules. It's pretty easy to pull down 100million in modules in a couple of hours using a pilot with only 12 hours of training to fly a combat frigate.

Do all of the above in low-sec/0.0: Because you have no skillpoints and a basic ship, you have very little to lose, just be sure you learn the magic 'spam warp button' trick to escape if you get tackled and killed. And, insure your ships of course. I took a noob character into Delve when the Goons were kicking out BOB and lost about 60 noob ships, which cost me nothing in the long run, except for crappy killboard stats.

PVP With 'Friends': Train the 'propulsion jamming' skill and you can be an asset to a PVP gang, solo pvp isn't going to happen unless you're ridiculously lucky and find someone in a defenceless ship away from sentry guns. Stick a warp disruptor on a rookie ship and you can stop victims from escaping while your friends kill them. With a little more training you can get in a combat frigate with a microwarp drive and kill things as part of a team, there's a great video showing 2 pilots with less than 150,000 skillpoints flying around 0.0 and killing the locals with great success. Or you can just join Red vs Blue and die lots while getting on the occasional killmail.

Trade: Setup in your local trade hub and watch the markets, buy low, sell high, maybe move the odd pile of gear to or from the hub. The more money you have in the market the faster you'll make money from the market, you can train a few trade skills for more order slots but no training is required to get started.

Take advantage of other people's Hard Work: Profit from other people's wrecks, you'll find them all over belts, especially around Hulks which are AFK with drones out killing the local rats. They'll get kill rights on you, but only for 15 minutes, and it's highly unlikely anyone in hi-sec will have warp disruptors, so just warp out as soon as you get shot at. Do it in a rookieship and then getting killed won't cost you anything.
Many of the best wrecks in hi-sec are in missions, so train astrometrics 1 and you can scan down battleships running missions.If you're really lucky it'll be some multi room mission and the pilot will be dealing with enemies deeper in the mission and therefore no threat.
Train up the salvaging skill (about 4 hours for a noob to get the pre-requisites) and you can instead just salvage the wrecks and the pilot won't get kill rights, he might get mad but he can't do anything unless you steal stuff from inside wrecks.

Take Advantage of other pilots Misfortune: There's always wars going on and if you sit outside a trade hub, or even at some hi-sec gates you'll see other pilots getting losing their ships, again, steal from this and make a mad dash to station with your loot. If you have the salvage skill pay attention to any 'elite' wrecks, these yield tech 2 salvage components which can be worth a lot.

Take Advantage of Dumb Players: Scam contracts (doesn't work on trial), I could write a book on scams, suffice to say if you're in Jita and you see a contract posted it's probably a scam, and you should open it up and try to figure out what the scam is just so you don't fall into it, and can perhaps exploit this later. I've seen people successfully sell a piece of Carbon for the price of a Charon freighter.

Carve Your Own Path: because there's always new things to discover.

Why Can't I Fly My Spaceship With A Joystick?

2010-03-05T12:38:00.000-08:00

One of the more annoying questions that gets asked repeatedly, usually the person asking has already established that ship control in Eve is limited to double clicking in the direction you want to go, or selecting 'orbit this thing while my guns kill it'. There's a very good techincal reason for this heavy limitation on direct control, and it's all about making the game playable for pilots regardless of how slow and laggy your connection is. You see the clients and servers of Eve all run a simulation of everything in space near your ship, this is referred to as 'the grid'. The trick is to keep everything on grid moving as smoothly as possible while sending the absolute minimum amount of data between your computer and the server.

So, when you arrive at an asteroid belt the server sends you information on all the asteroids on grid, their locations, sizes and types, and after that it doesn't need to send your computer any more information, unless one gets mined out and disappears. Those rocks aren't going anywhere and you can't bump them about or change their location, even if you ram them in a titan you'll just bounce off. If there's any ships on grid they'll get loaded too, but ships are different they fly about, so the ships come with extra information describing their flight pattern, whether they're sitting still, flying in a straight line or orbiting a target. Your computer can keep track of these basic ship motions by extrapolating out from the start point, the only time updates need to be sent is when the pilot of a ship decides to change their flight pattern.

Now, this is also broadly resistant to lag, if the updates arrive a little late because you're on some dodgy wi-fi connection your computer maintain the local grid simulation and still figure out where everything is. So while your rifter is cutting an elegant arc of death around that doomed hauler there's almost no flight updates needing to be sent between the client and server, this leaves room for more important things like weapons fire and things going boom. On the other hand that joystick you use for MS Flight Simulator is sending updates to the software 50 times a second, detailed updates too, when you bump your desk and that joystick wobbles a little that wobble is carefully encoded into a bunch of x-y measurements and forced into the computer, and in a networked game all those measurments need to be forwarded to the server. That's a whole lot more data which adds to the network and server load for everyone involved.

But it's more than just this deluge of data, it's about a fair playing field regardless of your ping time, if you've ever played FPS games there'll be some 13 year old whining that he keeps getting killed because his cable connection has a terrible ping time. Ping is a measure of how long messages take to get from your computer to the server and back, and if this takes too long then it effectively slows your reaction time down so some people get a edge over others. In Eve the simulation is split into timeslices of about 1 second long (I don't know the exact length, but that's what it feels like when there's no lag), so when you click your mouse to approach and target someone that event gets sent to the server and then the actions get applied in the next timeslice. This applies to everyone's actions, so even if you've got a ping time of 300milliseconds you still have plenty of time to react.

Besides, would you really want to try steering a Battleship like you would steer a fighter jet? No you're the captain of this million ton death dealing monstrosity, you command your helmsman to approach the target while calling Scotty in the engine room to overheat the engines to get best possible speed.... when was the last time you saw Captain Kirk take the helm of a starship?

Lets face it, do you want to be Captain Kirk or Sulu?

Frigate Taxonomy

2010-03-03T15:59:00.000-08:00

There are a total of 20 basic tech 1 frigates in the game, 5 for each race each designed with a role in mind, There are also 4 basic rookie ships that are broadly similar to frigates, so I'm including them here.

Racial Frigate I

Rookie Ships: Impairor, Ibis, Velator, Reaper - frigate sized so I'm including them on the list, their main role is to give you a free thing to fly whenever you arrive at station in a pod. They come free with a (crappy) civilian gun and mining laser.
Mining Frigates: Tormentor, Bantam, Navitas, Burst - get bonuses to mining yields and cargo space, great until you can get in a cruiser or mining barge.

Racial Frigate II:

Light Combat Frigates: Executioner, Condor, Atron, Slasher - fast combat ships, useful interceptors because they're faster than other frigates, but they can't fit enough of a tank to survive for long.
Exploration Frigates: Magnate, Heron, Imicus, Probe - Get bonuses to exploration probes and usually some extra drone space. The Imicus can field 3 light drones and gets a bonus to control range.
EWAR Frigate: Crucifier, Griffin, Maulus, Vigil - Designed to support other ships with electronic warfare. The Vigil is especially notable because it gets a speed bonus which is as rare as hens teeth these days.

Racial Frigate III:

Combat Frigate: Punisher, Merlin, Incursus, Rifter - Get to mount bigger and more guns, and more room for defenses and utility modules, these will be the staple of your Eve ship diet because they form the backbone of low level missions and tacklers in PVP.
Missile Frigate: Inquisitor, Kestrel, Tristan, Breacher - Favour missiles over guns, in the case of the Kestrel this is pure win and Caldari pilots favour their missile frigate over the gun oriented Merlin. The gallente Tristan however rather unloved because there's very few other gallente ships with missile launchers.

Beyond these basic ships there are a plethora of faction combat frigates, these are generally very expensive, but significantly faster and tougher and meaner than the plain old tech 1 versions on which they're based.

The 4 Empire faction frigates are the Imperial Navy Slicer, Caldari Navy Hookbill, Federation Navy Comet & Republic Fleet Firetail - they all need the relevant racial frigate skill at level 3.

The Pirate factions have their own ships too, all of these represent a merging of 2 races ship characteristics and thus need the pilot to be proficient in flying ships from both races. They are the Dramiel (angels), Cruor (Blood Raiders), Word (Guristas), Succubus (Sansha) & Daredevil (Serpentis) - and they're even more exclusive, and expensive, than the empire faction versions.

Finally, there's the Tech 2 versions of most of the basic ships, the tech 2 versions need multiple level 5 skills before you can fly them, but they are vastly more effective than the Tech 1 versions.

Interceptors are derived from the light combat ships, these are generally the fasted ships in the game and designed to catch and lock down enemy ships and stop them escaping
Covert Ops are derived from the probe ships, they get the ability to warp around while cloaked and even better bonuses to probing.
Electronic Attack Ships are derived from the EWAR frigates and gain more bonuses to a wider range of electronic warfare.
Assault Ships take the combat frigates and make them even tougher, these can shrug off attacks and dish it out when needed.
Stealth Bombers are the tech 2 versions of the missile frigate, these are greatly loved in 0.0 because they can sneak around cloaked and then drop bombs or attack large ships with torpedos, but, one good shot will kill them.

So, I think that's them all, I hope to follow up on this with some tried and tested fits, tactics and warnings about how to use these.

How Do I Keep My Ship Alive?

2010-03-02T16:51:00.001-08:00

The universe is full of hazards that are just waiting to turn your ship into a wreck, there are many ways to counter this threat and still come home in time for dinner.

Shields vs Armor vs Structure

* Armor has the best resists, but is still weak against explosive and kinetic damage, shields are weak against Electromagnetic and Thermal damage, Structure is weak against everything.

* Shields regenerate slowly over time and automaticly repair at stations, armor and structure only get repaired if you use the station's repair services (if the station has such services, and they're not usually free).

* Shield modules use mid slots, armor and structure modules use low slots.

* Shield modules sometimes make you a bigger target and easier to hit, armour and structure modules sometimes slow you down and make you easier to hit.

* When structure takes damage, your modules might also get damaged, using structure as your primary defence is not advised.

The general rule is that Caldari ships are all about shields, Amarr and Gallente use armor, and Minmatar ships vary depending on the ship type.

'depending'

For example the Rupture has 5 low slots and 3 mid slots and slightly more armor, so it's generally going to be toughest if your fit it for armor. However the Thrasher has more mids and more armor so it's better off with a shield tank.

The Stabber is one of the few ships in the game that gets a speed bonus, it's clearly designed for speed, so any armour plates you put on it will slow it down, so it's best to try and buff its shields using its midslots....

except...

Those mid and low slots aren't solely the domain of things that make your ship tough, most ships will dedicate at least one mid-slot to an afterburner or microwarp drive, and those low slots are where your damage boosting modules go. Electronic warfare goes in the mid-slots including the all important Warp Disruptor that's essential to stop your target from running away. As a result some ships may find themselves tanked differently depending on their role - my favorite example being the Rifter.

For PVP a rifter is generally finds its midslots filled with a microwarp drive, warp distruptor and stasis web so the tank goes in the low slots and buffs the armour. However for PVE the web and disruptor is unnecessary, which means you can fit a shield booster and hardener and leaving the lows for gyrostabilizers to increase your damage and nanofiber structures to increase your speed and agility. Either way the rifter's best defence is actually its speed and ability to get in under the guns of bigger ships and so regardless of fit you need to be bold and fly this fast and close to your targets.

'Speed Tank'

Speed tank is basicly reducing incoming damage by avoiding enemy fire, you can evade turret weapons by moving perpendicular to the target, that's what the orbit button does. It's the angular speed that matters, so travelling at 1000m/s in a 10km orbit is equivalent to travelling at 500m/s in a 5km orbit or 2000m/s in a 20km orbit. The bigger the guns the slower the tracking, so just like the X-Wings attacking the death star could avoid the primary defences your little frigates can run circles around battleships with relative immunity. For missile weapons the damage formula is slightly different, but generaly, speed keeps you alive.

For new pilots with relatively few skills the speed tank is universal, set your ship up with an afterburner (one of the first skills a noob should train) and short range weapons. Orbit your targets as closely as you can and they'll have a hard time hitting you, it's easy and effective, but many new pilots prefer to fight at range due to unfamiliarity with the mechanics. I'll tell you though that my 5 year old daughter has killed hundreds of npc targets this way without losing a ship yet, so have faith in the speed of our small ships and you will prosper.

I Wonder How Many WOW Players Are Also Olympic Medal Winners?

2010-02-25T11:27:00.000-08:00

Kjetil Jansrud won silver in the mens Giant Slalom at the winter Olympics, he's also an Eve player under the name Nthraller, a member of Morsus Mihi at least according to this thread congratulating the athlete on his achievment. If you see him in the game he's also got a 95million isk bounty on his pod, and no doubt likes flying very fast.

All Roads Lead To Jita

2010-02-25T09:28:00.000-08:00

Jita Planet 4, Moon 4, Caldari Navy Assembly Plant to be precise. Jita has become the most important, populous and active system in the game, and it's not something that the developers created or designed it has emerged as a trade hub all due to players actions.

The Latest Economic report from Dr. Eyjólfur "Eyjo" Guðmundsson confirms that The Forge as a region now handles over 50% of all the trade in New Eden, all the other regions combined is less than in Jita. As a capsuleer in Eve you will most likely find yourself visiting there, or at the very least asking someone to go there for you if Concord or the Caldari State have taken a dislike to you.

Back in the early days of Eve the system of Yulai sat at the centre of the network of the network of 'superhighway' gates that could be used as shortcuts across the universe. As such for a time it was the most convenient place for trade and Yulai was the center of everything, so much that the system got too busy and CCP felt that the load on this one system was too much for their servers to handle. And so in the Cold War release the superhighway gates were removed and the regional trade hubs of Jita, Amarr, Dodixie and Rens began to take over.

Of course, the developers didn't solve the server load problem, they merely relocated it to a new hub, further developer work on the server load problem would concentrate on reducing the load and coping with it better rather than trying to break up these self organizing hubs. Gates have been added around Jita and the route plotting options gained the ability to avoid certain system, with Jita as a default. All the asteroid belts were removed, all the agents travelled to new homes and no agents will ever send you into Jita on some mission. The hardware people at CCP bought the biggest baddest server they could find, shoehorned as much RAM as they could into its case and then forced it to work 23/7 supporting the most vital system in New Eden. And on top of this there's been continual incremental improvements to make the game code more efficient.

So today, I hear that there's a hard limit of 1400 pilots allowed in Jita, after that people start having to wait at the gates for other people to leave. However we know from experience that it is possible to stuff more pilots into systems without the game crashing, but the results aren't exactly pretty. During the battle for D-GMTI over 1600 pilots were in the system fighting for control of the station, CCP developers were in the system too, observing the back end and no doubt massaging the code to keep things alive.

Jita is important to players as a trade hub, but it's also important to developers as it gives them a place to really examine how the system behaves under stress, even if you never go to Jita you're seeing the effects all through the Eve universe.

What's The Meaning of the System Info?

2010-02-25T07:50:00.000-08:00

If you look in the top right of your screen you'll see information about the system you're currently in -
Nearest: Tells you what celestial body you're closest to in the system, planets are designated by roman numerals and moons are designated by plain old arabic numbers. So for example the trade hub of the galaxy is the Caldari Navy Assembly Plant in orbit around Jita IV - Moon 4. Similarly asteroid belts orbit planets so you might be mining in 'Altrinur X - Asteroid Belt 3'. A few planets in the game have names hand picked, these don't follow the regular naming convention. Some special celestial beacons will have names that appear here too.
Name: System names generally come from CCP's random system name generator with a few special cases that are added by hand - Jita, Rens, Hek are random names. Amarr, Luminaire, Old Man Star are from the game designers. Once you get into 0.0 space the names turn into random alphanumeric strings like 'HED-GP', 'D-GTMI' & '49-U6U'. All systems in wormhole space are named starting with the letter J, followed by 6 digits - e.g. J145452
Constellation: Constellation names refer to a small group of systems, the naming conventions are the same as systems with most appearing to be randomly generated. Constellations don't really matter too much right now, but in the pre-Dominion days it was important to player alliances to control whole constellations for better sovreignty claims.
Region: Regions on the most part have human readable names, even in the deepest drone regions where machine intelligence rules the names are poetic like 'Cobalt Edge' and 'Outer Passage'. Regions are hugely important to game mechanics, markets are split along regions and you can only see buy/sell offers in the region you're in. Each region generally has one NPC faction in control and one Pirate faction appearing in asteroid belts and exploration sites.
Security Level: Every system has a security level from -1.0 to 1.0, however this level is only displayed if it's >0.0, but if you look in the database dumps you can find the true security status. Higher security levels generally mean safer systems for law abiding citizens, and more threats for pirates, or enemies of the authorities who control the region.

You are not your ship

2010-02-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

One thing I've noticed is that many new players come to eve with the perception that their entire game life is going to revolve around one ship, one ship which will be tweaked and honed until it's perfect, everything they have is embodied in that one vessel and therefore all their resources should go into it.

This misconception is a bad idea, you should have a small fleet of ships at your disposal each tuned towards one purpose. A pilot flying missions for corporations will have a primary combat ship for dealing with the missions, a dedicated salvage ship for clearing the loot from the battlefield, an industrial ship with a large cargo hold for moving the loot to a market hub for selling. Industrialists will have small, fast shuttles for moving blueprints about, and larger ships for moving materials and perhaps a dedicated mining vessel for harvesting the materials needed. PVP pilots will have a whole hangar full of ships for different purposes - tacklers, snipers, covert ops - and spares for when they lose them.

Being too focussed on one ship is a bad idea, because it's very likely that one day you might lose it, and if you've poured every penny into it then you'll have very little to fall back on. Every day there's players who profess that they're going to quit because they just lost their prized ship, and while it sucks it's a fact of life in the game. Myself I've lost over a billion isk in ships, and I keep coming back, frequently I come back in time to lose another ship to the same enemies.

There's a saying "Don't Fly What You Can't Afford To Lose" - ignore this advice at your own peril.

But, more insidious is the fact that pilots get so attached to their ships early on in the game that they become very risk averse, they carry with them the fear of the dangers in low-sec and 0.0 and choose to remain in hi-sec under the limited protection of Concord.

The new Advanced Combat tutorials introduced in Dominion have a couple of missions where you cannot complete the missions unless you lose your ship, best of all they give you some ships for these very tasks - be sure to insure them for some extra cash :)

What's in a pod?

2010-02-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

The pod (AKA Capsule) is a technology created by the mysterious Jovians which is essentially a miniature spacecraft with just enough room for a single occupant who floats inside a bath of fluid and connects to the pod via direct neural interface. This pod can then plug itself into larger ships and enable the pod pilot to command the ship with vastly greater efficiency. The same neural interface also includes the ability to rapidly scan the pilot's brain and upload this to a new clone body in the event that they capsule is destroyed. By the time your corpse spills into the deadly vacuum of space your mind has been transferred to a new healthy body, possibly light years away. Only the best get a chance to become a 'pod pilot', 'capsuleer' or 'egger' and in Eve you are one of the lucky few.

Pods are awesome because

They're little Jovian ships, Jovian tech is centuries ahead of everyone else.
They're the most agile ship in Eve so they can get into warp faster than anything else.
They have a really small signature radius which makes them hard to lock and probe.
NPC's won't attack your pod, so you can loiter around near scary sleeper ships.

Pods suck because

They're weak and can be killed if an enemy sneezes in your general direction
They relatively slow (~200m/s)
They have no room for cargo, or places to fit modules.
There's no second chances with a pod, if you get killed then it's clone time again.

Things that a pod is good for:
a) GTFO when your ship blows up, if you're just been killed by a player they'll want to kill your pod next, when your ship goes out of control find any random moon/planet/gate/station and hit the warp button repeatedly so that you don't hang around long enough to become a frozen corpse. The only way to catch a pod is with warp disruption bubbles in 0.0 or with smartbombs.
b) Travelling to another station to pick up a new ship.

Beware The Yellow Cans (and Wrecks)

2010-02-24T12:39:00.000-08:00

It's pretty common to launch from the starter stations to see cargo cans floating in space labelled 'Free Ammo' - take a look at their colour on the overview, if they're yellow then they're a trap. If you pick up anything from a can which is yellow then it's considered 'stealing' from the can's owner, as such Law Enforcement gives the owner, and possibly everyone in his corporation, the right to shoot the thief without interference. As such, PVP noobs will place these bait cannisters in space and hope that some clueless noob 'steals' from them, so that they can shoot the perpetrator and get a kill. Just in case you're unsure, eve will warn you when you're trying to take something that belongs to another player.

If the cans are Blue or White then it's ok to take things from them without being branded as a thief.

The Mythical Eve Learning Curve

2010-02-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

This image has been posted all over the web, primarily as a joke among eve players, but it also discourages some would be players who don't even get as far as the game. If you tell people a game is complicated they believe it and when they run into problems they give up more easily because they think it's due to game complexity.

The truth is it's not so much complicated as deep, but the other side of this is that it's an 80:20 proposition - 20% of the learning gets you 80% of the benefit. In Eve you never really stop learning new tricks, and at any point on the learning curve you're able to function quite effectively in the universe. Furthermore, those people that are sitting up on the top of that cliff are usually quite happy to help you out, although they might blow up your ship first to prove a point.

My kids play the game, but they don't take in the entire vista of Eve mechanics, they mainly concern themselves with flying a spaceship and shooting things. Fitting the ship, buying the parts and training the skills are left to me, and if you look at eve discussion forums you'll find plenty of other players sharing this information and doing all the complicated number crunching for you.

Character Creation

2010-02-24T10:29:00.000-08:00

Don't sweat character creation, it doesn't matter what you do, everyone in the game starts out in roughly the same way, there's no way to get an appreciable advantage over other noobs by carefully navigating the character creation system.

You get to pick

Your Race - which determines what kind of ships and weapons you start out with.
Your Bloodline - which determines what your character portrait looks like
Your Background - which changes your starting system and corporation
Your Name - Which might get respect / lols / changedbyGM depending what you use.

The only one that has any real difference is your race, your race will change what kind of 'rookie' ship you're given whenever you need one, and it will change the gunnery skill and spaceship skill you start out with. If you change your mind and want to fly another race's ships then it'll take a few hours to train to the same level.

So, character creation doesn't commit you to anything other than a name, a face and a certain kind of free ship every time you need one. So, pick your starting character based on the face and racial history, because you can't change that, and pick a good name, because you can't change that either.

Absolute Beginners - Trial Accounts

2010-02-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Eve has a trial account program which lets you play the game for free for a limited time, if you like it you can upgrade to a full account when your time is up. Standard trials are 14 days long, but if you know someone who already plays you can ask them for a referral through the buddy program and you'll get a 21 day trial instead (if you ask me nicely I might give you a referral).

During a trial your account has a few small limitations:

Can only train skills for Frigates, Destroyers and Cruisers.
Can't send money to other players
Trials can use the market, but they can't use contracts.
Will Not Be offered missions more difficult than level 2

Those are the main limitations that might affect new players, but if you hit those limits then it's time to consider getting a full account.

What Is Eve Online?

2010-02-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

Eve Online is an MMO where you fly spaceships, it's been running since 2003 and has over 300,000 players who all play in the same universe - fighting, building, mining, trading, scamming and building empires. As a player there's no real limitations on how you play the game, there's no 'classes' that dictate your abilities, every ship in the game is available to a pilot who dedicates the training time to get the skills and the in game resources, usually in the form of cold hard cash, to acquiring the ship.

As of right now, your ships are your only avatar to the world, you can't get out and walk around just yet, even though this feature has been promised soon(tm).

However that's one of the few things you can't do. Eve is a big universe and it's full of things to waste your time on.

Eve Rookie -

2010-02-24T08:45:00.000-08:00

So having played Eve Online for a couple of years I found my kids had got interested in flying internet spaceships, and I foolishly created an 'alt' account, partly so they could play, and partly because I was going to need a second account for some of my future plans. Now with a new account I got dropped back into the rookie channels and very quickly I realised that while it's nice to have 2 years of in game skills, it's equally refreshing to have 2 years of in game experience and share it with the rookies who're learning the game. And so, with that In mind I'm hoping to start writing about all the fun stuff you can do in Eve, and why you shouldn't be intimidated by the naysayers who say it's too hard, or that you can't compete because of the skill training system leaving you perpetually playing catchup. If I can teach a 4 year old kid to fly a ship then you can do it too.