A Change Is As Good As A Rest

After the initial rush of getting on lots of killmails in Delve things settled down into a pattern; login, join fleet, fight blob, die, logoff. This got boring quick. Yes it padded my killboard, and didn’t bleed the ISK too much due to the corp ship replacement programme, but was it really that much fun? Was it worth paying for two accounts a month?

I thought about it and decided that it wasn’t. So what to do next? I looked around and most of the other people that had left the corp were doing pretty much the same thing. I could head back to Empire, remove my old corp from mothballs, or find someone new to play with. I decided to try the latter and found a smallish corp in a smallish alliance based in and around Syndicate. They were all pretty much in my timezone, most of them are in my country, so it seemed like a good idea.

I moved all of my stuff out of Delve and made the carrier jumps over the new base in the north of Syndicate only for a number of the main corps in the alliance to leave and we ended up on the edge of empire. I’m still not sure about the new corp, early days, but its keeping my interest in EVE alive so that can only be good.

The Sky is Falling (Player Controlled Customs Offices)

Having dipped my toe in the waters with my alt I looked at the latest devblog about player customs offices with interest. I’ve also scanned the threadnaught, and read a few blogs on the subject. Rather than just reply on the forums, or on another blog I thought I’d put my thoughts, for what they’re worth, on here.

Once I got past the initial ‘The sky is falling’ comments I can’t see the change having too much impact on the raw and P1 goods. These will be processed on planet and can be launched from the command centre. It’ll take a bit more organisation to get volume off a planet but it should still be possible. The issue I can see for some P2 and all P3/P4 goods where the product of multiple planets is needed. You are going to need access to a customs office to get the materials down to your factory planets.

What are the options?

In 0.0 space things will operate pretty much as they do now. Its a different structure to be shot at, something for the roaming gangs, but other than that there will be little impact. The offices will have enough HP to allow for a defence fleet to be scrambled giving more PVP opportunities.

In low-sec things are more risky. You have more danger than in low-sec, a roaming gang could decide to pick on your offices. They would then presumably be flashy-red to your corp though so more PVP opportunities. You could also open up the customs office and make money from other people that want to make use of it. There is risk and reward for both the player building the office and those using it.

In high-sec things are as now, but with a higher tax. So you could perform your P1, and possibly P2 if you get a suitable planet, in low-sec, and launch using cans. Then ship to a high-sec factory planet to get your finished product. The tax increase will bite a little here but will probably just hit the margins.

In wormhole space Concord run customs offices never made sense anyway. The fact that they would spring up was a bit of stretch. This is rather like 0.0 except the systems are less populated so hit and run attacks on them would be harder to defend from. That said why would anyone bother attacking them?

Its a bit difficult to judge the overall financial impact without knowing where PI is being done now. I suspect that after the initial panic has worn off it won’t be much. The change is a boost for industry outside high-sec, albeit with additional risk added. There will still be the place for solo players to make something from PI, but as with most thing you’ll need to be in a player corp to get the best out of it.

Looking at gameplay impact and the question of why would you attack a customs office, this only seems to make sense to disrupt the flow of materials. Perhaps CCP will allow use of the hacking skill to gain access to the content of the customs office and steal materials. Say once to get into the office itself, and another for each player storage bay within it. The possibility of ninja PI is somewhat appealing.

Why no personal POS

Can you tell that I’m not getting a huge amount of game time at the moment? I keep thinking about stuff that bugs me. This one is about POS. When you deploy a POS you do so for your corporation, even if you fund and fuel it yourself, its a corporation POS. In order to do so you need to have specific corp roles assigned. Some corps are reluctant to allow new members these privileges as it would allow the newbie access to fuel stores etc on all corp POS. A spy could make use of this to strip fuel from the corp POS and have them offline.

I understand the historic reason for the corp control of POS. Prior to Dominion it was the determinator of sov in 0.0 space. We have other sov mechanics now, isn’t it worth looking a POS and being able to launch them, like other deployables, either for corp or for self?

What to do about AFK cloakies?

Picture the scene:

You’ve spent a couple of months taking a system, building up its military index to 5, shipped and installed upgrades to your infrastructure hub, and are now ready to take advantage and finally make back your ISK. What’s that? A red has appeared in system.

You dash over to the gate, pinging the D-scan for all its worth. Nothing.

You check the next system. Still nothing. The red is still there when you jump back.

You get back to your safe POS and sit. Waiting for it the red to leave. You’re tempted to risk it. There’s only one red in system, and a few corp mates. Then again, the red is from an alliance that is known to hotdrop ratters. Is it worth the risk. You decide to bait them.

A solo ship starts ratting. It runs the belts. It clears a couple of anomaly sites. No sign of the hostile ship. You log out and come back later … The red is still there. You wait for downtime and log straight in and head for the gate. Within a few minutes the red returns. No gate fire, nothing on scan. Its cloaked and staying there.

This is probably familiar to anyone in a sov holding alliance. The question is what can you do about it?

The only chance you really have is to bubble the in-gate and sit on it with a number of fast ships and pop anything you can. If you miss them at this point, which given that you aren’t going to get many volunteers to sit on a gate waiting for incoming cov ops ships, is pretty likely, there is nothing you can do. Once in system the afk cloaky has you at their mercy.

You can only really rat, or do sites, if you’ve sufficient firepower to insta-pop it and escape before any fleet can get through the lit cyno field and gank you. The fear of a single cov ops pilot stops you exploiting the system resources. What’s the point of taking your ship out of the POS shields if you could spend an hour collecting ISK only to see it all lost when you are jumped.

This has to impact people being able to make the most of the Dominion changes. They definitately impact the null-sec population density. At first look it does seem contrary to CCP’s objectives for nullsec. I don’t think it made their list of things to look at though. What could they do?

I’ve seen suggestions to make cloaks have a duration, rather than being infinite. It would be a simple change, a tweak to the cloak modules. I’m not sure it would serve the purpose on it’s own though. If people can automate ratting and mining, it would be fairly simple to automate toggling the cloak back on. You could add fuel, similar to how a cyno operates. Operating the cloak could consume X amount of some ice or PI product to keep it running. That would sort of work, ships couldn’t stay in 23.5/7 without needing to re-supply. It would improve the chance of catching them.

The other proposal I’ve seen is the exhaust gasses one. This is a Star Trek influence. The ship might be invisible to normal detection, but some energy has to escape. If some escapes then it can be detected. At this point you’ve a whole bunch of things open to you. Is it a special probe type. Very short range, and the signature from the cloaky should be very small. This would allow the cloaky to move to get away from the probes, only penalising the genuine afk cloaky. The probes would get you in the area then it would be the normal orbit with probes out to try and get a de-cloak. Not perfect, but better than at present.

I guess the final thing would be some sort of security improvement that affects cloaks. It would have to require considerable development, and cost a bit to run, but in return allow cloaks to be disabled in the system. Perhaps this could just aid the above probe solution, or affect duration, or fuel usage, from the earlier first option.

Of course we could just leave things as they are and allow an afk alt to stop people playing.

The Blob

There is a lot written, on blogs, forums, and in chat windows, about the blob and blob warfare. I’m not quite sure what a blob is. At best its an indeterminate number of ships whose only defining attribute is that its larger than the opposing fleet. So if you have solo ratters in a system that 10-15 ship roam is a blob. If the same roam comes across a 30-40 ship defence fleet, then the defence fleet view them as the blob. If the roam turns out to be the forward party of a 100 man fleet then… well you get the idea.

After taking part in a few larger fleets in the past few weeks I’d like to offer a different definition. If your fleet can kill the primary target before all of the ships in the fleet can lock it, you are in a blob. Last night was a prime example of this…

A Goon fleet jumped into our staging system and provoked a response. The Goon had a decent number of ships, we had slightly more. The FC jockeyed for position, trying to get the other fleet at optimal range. The composition of both fleets was similar, shield BC with logi support. I jumped into a Rook, I know T2 shiny ship and all that, and warped on top of our logis.

The enemy fleet was at close range to our main fleet, 50km+ to me, and the FC started calling targets. As each target was broadcast it was a race to lock it before it became the primary and get a shot off. The DPS coming out of our fleet, combined with the jamming of their logi, meant that the enemy BCs were going down after only a couple of shots at most. Any slight lag and you might miss firing altogether. The carnage continued until the enemy was outnumbered enough so that our fleet could be considered a blob using the normal understanding of the term.

The thing here is that the fighting devolved into basically lock, shoot, lock, shoot. Was this fun? There was a certain amount of satisfaction in driving off the intruding fleet. The tension really was mostly on whether you were going to be targetted and whether you’d be able to lock and engage the primary target before it was destroyed. I guess there was some tension around whether we’d win, but given that the majority of the fleet was aligned out if things started going wrong we could always warp off. So, fun? Yes, a little, but not as much fun as a smaller fleet battle where individual actions can sway the day. Maybe, large fleet battles just aren’t for me.

PI: Is it worth the effort?

I’m seriously trying to work out whether PI is worth it. Though this might be better termed ‘Is PI worth it for me?”. As a bit of background I’ll summarise my current situation.

I live in pretty decent 0.0 space. I have my main and a carrier flying alt in the same corp with access to systems with -0.9 trusec. The systems are developed and contain many high value anomalies, as well as decent belt rats with the chance of office spawns.

I set up a five planet PI production chain with my alt producing robotics. I make the P1 product on four of the planets and then move the T1 product to the fifth planet for the P2 and P3 production. This can generate 20 units of Robotics an hour based on my current skills. Given 24 hour production that gives me a maximum of 480 units per day for 30-45 minutes effort. Looking at local prices of 35k/unit this would give an income of 16.8 mil ISK if maximum production could be maintained.

Unfortunately I don’t seem to be able to keep going at that level without running short (1 day) extraction runs and moving the extractors about on the planet. This takes longer, maybe an hour a day, and incurs additional cost.

Using my main in a decent PVE ship with fighter support from my alt I can clear a Haven, or Sanctum, and salvage it in less than an hour. Doing this will get me 20-30 mil ISK/hour. Looking at the raw figures I’d be better off spending the time ratting than doing PI.

I thought about the impact of neutrals/hostiles in system. This affects both endeavours though. I can’t move materials between planets without putting myself at risk if either are in system. Its not a stretch to realise that that hauler, even a cloaky one, that’s on D-Scan could be going between Customs Offices. Also you can’t import/export materials to/from a planet unless you are uncloaked in space.

So, if PI isn’t profitable for me, who is going to do PI? I’m guessing either dedicated industrialists, or low-SP players. Anyone with the 40+ mil SP I have just isn’t going to find it worthwhile.

Could it be made worth it for me? If there was a way to remove some of the risk, or automate the process of placing extractor heads to speed up the relocation process. That might make it worth it for an individual. As it stands its just not worth the effort for me. Shame really given the effort spent on it, and its apparent importance wrt Dust.

The CSM

What is the CSM?

Literally its the Council of Stellar Management. Functionally its a means of CCP getting soundings from the player base.

How important is the CSM? Well, if the numbers taking part in the election mean anything, not very. Until the CSM election gets votes from a significant portion of the EVE playerbase then its just a talking shop. It’s the single issue lobby group in rl politics. Yes, CCP can listen to it, but if anyone believes that CCP needs to take notice of it they are sorely mistaken.

When its working with CCP to fine tune features, the CSM works fine. When in conflict it cannot do anything but fail. What real leverage does the CSM have? The answer is much less than a lot of the commentators think. I thought The Mittani understood this, sadly it appears that power has gone to his head.

The critics, naysayers, doom-mongers, un-subbers, should bear in mind that no matter how much they have invested in EVE CCP has invested more. All of the CCP staff that are castigated across the Internet have more invested than the players. Perhaps not in time, but their livelihood depends on EVE. Only RMT botters have a similar claim.

This is my second post in as many days about the latest blog banter thing. I just wish we could all get back to playing instead of people forgetting that its flying internet spaceships.

Is EVE dying?

I’ve seen posts from Selene, Roc Wieler, and Jester all espousing the same thought, that EVE is dying. They make some interesting comments, and drag out some pretty (or not) graphs, to try and persuade the reader of the truth of this. Is it true?

EVE has changed over the time I’ve been playing, and will continue to change. Not all of the changes will please all of the player base. EVE has players leaving. I’ve seen people I’ve played with leave for real life reasons, mostly because their life didn’t have time for the time sink EVE is anymore. I’ve seen people leave in principle over the NEX store. I’ve also seen some of these return when they found out that the sky wasn’t really falling.

There’s no doubt that the spaceships part of EVE is, for the moment, stagnating. There has been little content over the past couple of expansions that has benefitted those players that like to fly about and shoot other players. The sov changes that came with Dominion have now been gamed in the same way that the POS mechanic was gamed. Its familar, easy to manipulate, and not really a challenge. It needs more work.

PVE content has stagnated as well. Incursion brought some decent stuff, but its too limited, too restrictive, and not available to everyone. It serves as a show piece of how good EVE PVE could be, if they rolled out some of the mechanics around it to the rest of the PVE content. Missions deeply need some love.

Wormhole space was fun, until we settled in it, now its not something that the casual player can jump into and have fun with. The majority of them are now occupied. Anyone jumping into a WH to try and do anything than pass through has a pretty good chance of dying unless they are in a big enough gang to hold off the inhabitants.

CPP have been spending time and effort on the new player experience, to try and bring players up to speed with the complexity of EVE. This is all well and good, but once they get out of the new player experience what next? Things pretty quickly deteriorate into grinding missions, or crushing rocks.

As a player that’s spent most of my time in 0.0, shooting people or trying to make ISK, I welcome the changes that CCP propose to 0.0. The fact that they are intending to do a root and branch rework of 0.0 to make it what it should be. Sadly without spending time on missions, anomalies, and new virgin territories, this won’t last. Things will stagnate again.

I find all of the negative comments about Incarna to be amusing. Many of the same people complained that CCP hadn’t delivered on walking in stations. It had been promised for years but now, when it was delivered, its not what they wanted.  What would make these people happy? Its like the kid in the toy shop that wants everything now.

So is EVE dying? I don’t think so. Its in transition. EVE used to be a game that was solely about flying spaceships. It is still mostly about flying spaceships but its evolving into something more. As with all transitions the road will be bumpy but CCP know what they want in the end. They also know how vulnerable they are if EVE subscriptions drop off a cliff. If you ask 100 EVE players at random what needs to be done you’d get somewhere approaching 100 different answers. Everyone has their own favourite ideas and bugbears. CCP have to rise above that and steer their own course whilst keeping as many people on board as possible.

Looking outside EVE for a moment. Would the iPhone be such a success if Apple had just stuck to dealing with what people thought they wanted from a phone?

Sorry about the wall of text. The tl;dr answer is not yet.

Brick Squad = Best Squad?

So, our period of assimilation with the BORG lasted a couple of weeks. Pretty much as soon as we got settled everything went pear shaped.

The Collective was the subject of some corp thievery and lost around 320 billion ISK worth of cash and assets. This, combined with absent leadership, caused a couple of the larger corps in BORG to leave. The Collective then decided that they had enough to do with sorting out the fallout from their theft and decide to wind down the alliance.

This left us again with choices. On of the corps (UNSOL) was heading to Fountain to join TEST, a couple of our corp mates had decided to join them, tempted by the promise to be able to use their super caps I think. They then set about trying to get the better players from our corp to go with them. I considered this briefly but, as the chief instigator was an FC that only succeeded in getting me killed, I decided against that. The choice then was see what happened, or bail and head down to Stain to grief and earn ISK.

The corp then decided to rejoin Brick Squad, meaning that assets would only need to be moved a couple of systems. This was definitely preferable to a long move. So, for the moment, I’m still in Delve and back in Brick with old alliance mates. Fleets in Brick are definitely an antidote to the Merciless, don’t bring it unless it absolutely matches the alliance fit, approach. Its much more casual and, because of that, suits my game time better. I might yet head off to Stain if I can’t find a decent way to make ISK in the next couple of weeks but for the moment Brick Squad = Best Squad.

The Edge of Empire

“Warping to a belt. Two Harbingers on scan. Wait for my signal”

The voice of the fleet commander echoed in my pod. After a few days of inactivity the anticipation of combat caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. At least that’s what it felt like. Cocooned in the pod it probably wasn’t possible, but the brain is a odd thing and provided the feeling that went with the situation.

“They have engaged. Jump and warp to me now”

We pinged the request to the gate and were sucked through into Jan. Orienting quickly I told the ship to locate and warp to the commanders ship. Within seconds the warp engine engaged and we thundered through space.

As the engine shutdown and we returned to normal space I could see the damage being done by the two hostiles. The commander’s shields were holding, but only just. The odd flash confirmed that some damage was bleeding through.

“Engage the nearest ship. All guns fire!”

It was the lull between storms, the eye of the hurricane if you will, after leaving one alliance and waiting to join a new one. The corporation had largely evacuated from Guristas space to low sec and we were sitting in stations spinning. Ok, well not spinning because you can’t do that anymore, more like sitting on the couch watching the news scroll by.

This had gone on for a couple of days. I’d busied myself moving cyno alts, reviewing training plans, and buying skill books.

I’d taken a trip the length of the country and back and just logged on to check the skill queue (that was my intention honest). Anyway, one of the rules is if you are logged on you should be on comms. I connected to Mumble and saw everyone was in one of the ops channels. I joined just to listen.  They were in a fleet, in the same system I was, and had just killed a Drake. Hmmm, what to do….

I checked the time. Almost 23:40. I guess it wouldn’t do any harm just to fly out and see them for a little while. I switched ships to an arty cane and warped to meet the fleet. They were just waiting out GCC whilst the FC poked about in the next system.

There were a couple of pirates in system and he had a couple of Harbingers and a Drake on scan. We got in position near the gate as he tracked them down. He had a warp in and ordered us to the gate.

“I’ve landed on grid. They are over 100km off….”

“They are burning towards me. Hold on the gate.”

“I have aggression. Jump and warp”

I jumped in, selected warp to member at 30km, and was almost instantly ploughing through space.

“Get points.”. I didn’t have a point on the arty cane, not a lot of point if you are set up for 40+km range, so just landed on grid and started locking the targets. Or not. It didn’t seem to be working. Then I realised I was hitting the wrong key on the keyboard, maybe I was more tired than I thought. I corrected my fingers and locked up both ships.  The rest of the guys had both pointed. I threw shells in the primary, which promptly exploded. Switching to the secondary, it didn’t last much longer either. Two down in under a minute.

“Post kill mails”

I checked and found I had both. Pretty good, I’d been in the fleet less than 10 minutes and had two kills. Great!

We warped to a safe and waited out the aggression timer. In the meantime the FC scouted out another system two jumps away. More flashy reds. Most of them sitting on station though, but including a Maelstrom and a Tengu.

We continued to wait. The timer ticking down on the left corner of the screen. 5 minutes, 4, 3, 2, 1, less than a minute. Finally gone we warped, jumped, and warped again to get in position should we be needed.

“Maelstrom is warping to your gate. I’m following.”

We waited ready to jump.

“He’s aggressed, jump in.”. I clicked jump. “Proteus on field. Primary the Maelstrom, neut it out”.

We de-cloaked and started shooting the Maelstrom. I got into an orbit so as to be able to use my neut (spot the rookie error) and watched the Maelstroms shields start to fall. A Zealot appeared on field. Then a Blackbird. I was close enough to use the neut now and, with the combined effort from the fleet, the Maelstrom was soon in armour and going down.

Suddenly the overview was full of ships as a hostile gang jumped in. The Maelstrom had been bait!

“Warp out, or burn off and warp. It’s an AHAC gang we should be able to get away.”

I tried to warp.

“External forces are preventing your warp drive from operating.”

I tried to burn out with the MWD.

“External forces are preventing your microwarp drive from operating.”

Checking my overview I could see 4 ships with points on me, at least one of which was a scrambler. I pulled in my drones and headed for the gate. I was 14km away and my shields were at 90%. The battlecruiser turned and headed for safety.

12km 80% shields

I accelerated towards the gate. If I could get there my aggression timer would have run out and I’d be able to jump.

10km 60% shields

It was going to be touch and go.

8km 40% shields. They were dropping faster now, it wasn’t looking hopeful. My speed slowed and I saw the telltale webifier effect playing on my ship.

7km 10% shields.

The shields collapsed and armour melted.

I picked a celestial and started spamming warp.

My ship exploded and almost instantly my pod shot off to safety.

We lost three ships and destroyed a Maelstrom. Probably about a fair ISK loss, but it confirmed that it was too late for me and I should head off to bed.

Spot the rookie mistake? I was in an arty cane. Instead of getting close enough to use the neut I should have been burning off to range from the start. I could have sat at 50km and done almost as much damage and I wouldn’t have lost my ship. Oh well, I’ll remember it for next time.