Jester's Trek

Kill of the Week: Gank the gankers

2012-02-24T16:22:00.001-08:00

This week's KOTW is a quadruple feature, but they're all in the same "battle report":
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=12541653

Uedama, a 0.5 system on a direct line between Jita and Amarr, is becoming a common spot for suicide-ganking, even more so lately than Niarja. Pass through Uedama and you'll see a variety of battleships, Thrashers, nano-fit haulers, and Remote Sensor Booster-fit ships all waiting for the big prize to go by.

But increasingly lately, I'm seeing another two other varieties of kills happening in this system and other suicide gank friendly systems. The first are kill-mails generated by tossing a bullet or two into a suicide ganker as he gets blown down by CONCORD. It's a perfect crime, after all. You can sit at one of the gates in Uedama, and while you yourself wait for whatever it is you want to suicide gank, lock up the other destroyers and battleships in close proximity to the gate. If you they find something worth ganking before you do, you get a swell consolation prize: free and legal fire on a flashy red target, risk-free, as CONCORD ends him.

You get a kill-mail. He gets the annoyance of seeing his kill-board efficiency drop because his suicide gank losses are showing up next to his PvP losses. It's an amusing and perfect crime. Ask your corp or alliance director to do an API pull to your kill-board so you can see it.

The second type of kill that's becoming increasingly common is the sympathy gank. In this scenario, you warp to the gate with the suicide gankers and when you see them start to gank something... help them! This is most amusingly done with a frigate or even a noob ship. Of course, you're going to take the sec status hit along with them, and you're going to lose your ship along with them. That's why you should make it a cheap one. But of course, your kill-board gains the amusing spectacle (and increased kill-board efficiency) of you helping gank a freighter with an Ibis.

If your sec status is 5.0 already and you're at all interested, there's just honestly not that many reasons not to do this. ;-) Go out, get yourself on a kill-mail, watch your sec status drop back down to mere human levels, and grind it back up again...

Remap

2012-02-24T15:02:00.000-08:00

Last October, I threw a post out there where I stated the opinion that I thought EVE Online should follow Perpetuum Online's lead and delete attributes from the game. It prompted a really good discussion in the comments about the pros and cons of the idea. I still like it, myself. I got trolled here and there in the comments about dumbing down EVE, so let me be clear: I really like that EVE is a complex, deep game. That's why I play it.

But there's a difference between complexity that adds richness to a game, and complexity that adds confusion and makes things harder for new players. Attributes, in my opinion, are the latter. It's a hold-over from pen and paper role-playing games, honestly, and doesn't have much bearing on how all of us play EVE. After all, how do you think about your character? As a "PvP character that can fly HACs, Recons, BC, and Inties with maxed out Nav and fitting skills"? Or "Gallente male with high willpower and perception"?

In the meantime, I solved the problem I mentioned in my previous post on this matter using one of the holiday gift remaps. ;-) And I totally get the side of the discussion that says that the problems with attributes and how they impact skill training should be fixed with more frequent remaps. But I think that solves the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself.

So yeah, I still think attributes should be dumped.

That said, I've started playing Reckoning, the first Kingdoms of Amalur game. One of the most interesting mechanics in the game is the ability to remap your skill-set any time you like. This comes straight out of MMOs like Rift and Global Agenda, which allow the same thing. In my experience, it's unique for a single-player RPG, since these games traditionally live and die by their replayability. Who among us didn't play the first Knights of the Old Republic twice, for instance. The Elder Scrolls games build replayability right into the structure. In Morrowind, there were three competing "great houses" in the game, and joining one of them forever precluded you from joining the other two with the same character. As a result, if you wanted to try out those quest lines, you were automatically signing up to replay the game. Skyrim has a similar mechanic: a civil war (with associated factions and quest lines) is built right into the underlying structure of the game. You can take one side, take the other, or ignore both, and no matter which choice you make, you leave a few quests, shouts, and unique items behind.

Reckoning does things quite a bit differently. Within the game itself, there are NPCs called Fate Weavers who offer a service that allows you to remap all of your skill choices.(1) Want to stop being a mage for a while and be a kick-ass up-close-and-personal melee type? Pay some gold and a Fate Weaver can make this happen. It has one risky side-effect for the game right away: a lot of the replayability value of the game immediately drops to zero if you can quickly undo the choices you've made. However, it has the positive effect that you don't have to worry too much about picking "the wrong thing" since redoing all those picks is possible, easy, and not particularly expensive.

Weirdly, Reckoning doesn't buy into its own mechanic: I've already run into some guild quests that should be difficult for a character with skills incompatible with that guild. Think of a Fighter breezing through a Mage's Guild quest line, say. In Morrowind, if you weren't a damn good mage, you simply weren't offered the high end mage quests. You were promoted in line with your skills. Later ES games dropped this mechanic, something that I thought was a mistake. With Reckoning's "rebuild at your leisure" mechanic, the designers could have taken a lot more risks and gone with the Morrowind approach, but they didn't.

Here's the big question, though: when the Amalur MMO is released will it have this remap mechanic? Smart money says yes. After all, other MMOs get away with it, and a couple of micro-transactions here and there will solve any equipment problems of rebuilding your character from scratch.

Which brings us back to EVE Online. I've been asked a few times in the past couple of weeks (usually by CSM candidates asking what I think about a series of topics) what I think of the idea of limited or full remapping of skill points in EVE. In four words: I hate this idea. I hated it when it was brought up as a way for super-carrier pilots to reclaim some of their "useless" drone SPs, and I hate it in every other way, too. As I said above, I think most of us think of our characters -- for better or worse -- in terms of what they can do and what they can fly. I got a real sense of accomplishment when I sat in a carrier for the first time, or maxed out a particular skill tree, or fired POS guns, or found myself moved up to a Fleet booster position. These are rights of passage that -- though they're somewhat Skinner box-y -- are still quite satisfying and some of the best rewards EVE has to offer.

It would be a very different -- and measurably worse -- game if that were not the case. Just my opinion, though.

(1) Why a world whose back-story has it that every person's fate is set would have people called Fate Weavers (rather than Fate Readers, say) is something that either isn't explained, or is further along in the game than I am, but never mind.

Tracking Computer fit to the QOTW

2012-02-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

Ship balancing is slowing down a bit because CCP Tallest is now the father of twins (congratulations, Tallest!). Someone joked that perhaps having more than one person doing ship balancing would be a good idea, to which CCP Soundwave replied:

We actually have three people dedicated to it now, the other two are just working on other areas (titan tracking, anyone?).

Needless to say, the very next post in the thread was:

\o this is now a "Titan nerf thread" o/

Guess I don't need to tell you how I feel about this one. ;-)

It wasn't long before the first tears appeared:

God, I hope you're kidding about this titan nerf business. It's a 100b+ isk ship. What do you think it SHOULD do? Have you ever tried to accumulate that kind of isk in game? From start to finish, everything about a titan is epic -- the cost, production time, risk involved, etc. I think it's been nerfed enough -- too much even. Shouldn't the outcome of all that work be something equally epic?

Hm, let me thi-- no. It's been nerfed enough? Too much even? Aheh.

And it wasn't too much longer before Vheroki (FinFleet) opined:

I DARE you to nerf that tracking the result you will see it in the monthly bills. When i see you guys post i just want to ask for my money back after 9 years.

Your stuff. Please give it to me before you quit.

Anyway, the thread on EVE-O is quickly turning into a rage-bomb, so expect it to be locked fairly soon. There's a thread on FHC you can follow if you want, and I'm sure it'll come up on kugu as well.

Guide: Gate camp basics

2012-02-23T15:47:00.003-08:00

OK, this is not a full guide to gate-camping. I am not a gate-camping expert, and someone who is should write the guide on how to do it. However, after some months of living in Syndicate and after several months of wandering around low-sec and shallow 0.0 late at night,(1) I'm being exposed to an increasingly and distressingly large number of total fail gate-camps. It's clear that people are forgetting the basics. So at the very least, I can cover those.

This was really highlighted for me last night because one of my more insane alliance-mates (Hi Brent!) has started running a live video stream of his EVE-related (and occasionally, some of his... ahem... unrelated) activities. A couple of jumps out from his staging system, he encountered one of the worst gate-camps I've ever seen. I won't mention the alliance that was running it to avoid embarrassing them, but:

you've heard of them; and,
you would think, from their reputation, that they could do this better.

Over the course of about 15 minutes, he jumped into them twice in two different ships, one of them a armor-tanked battleship, and they never came anywhere near making his heart-rate go up, never mind killing him.

Now, to start, gate-camping is the silliest form of PvP. There's not much in the way of skill or tactics needed. It's just a late-night activity that a lot of guys do that is almost exactly akin to mining in groups.(2) You get a bunch of people together, have many beers in the safety of your own homes, and BS about a variety of topics while waiting for something interesting to happen. It's a social activity, not a PvP activity. And it's usually done entirely casually, without FCs or traditional strong fleet compositions. But so many people bring the wrong ships and the wrong tactics to a casual gate-camp...

So let's cover the basics, shall we? Here are the top ten things you're going to need to do to run a successful camp:

(1) Camp the right gate. Most people like to camp entrance pipes to null-sec, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that, but it should be done properly. In particular, camping a regional gate -- a gate that jumps you from one region to another -- is nearly always a bad idea. I said the same thing in my decloaking guide, and it's for the same reasons. It's too hard to position your gate-camp ships tactically in the right places on an enormous regional gate where ships might end up 30 or 40km away from each other, unable to provide mutual fire support. In Syndicate, for example, a lot of guys camp the Orvolle gate in PF-346. But a better place to camp this pipe -- if you must -- is the PF-346 gate in FD-MLJ. The Keberz gate in HED-GP is another popular camp location, but more successful camps are run on the HED-GP gate in SV5-8N, and so on.

Besides the fact that regional gates are much tougher to control from a mutual support stand-point, regional gates are nearly impossible to bubble, and usually, the region they lead back to is either high-sec or low-sec which means that your cross-jumping tackle (we'll get to that in a second) aren't going to be able to do their jobs. That means to escape you, all someone has to do is successfully burn back to gate, which in this day of 100MN afterburner fits, cloaks, nano, and Snake implants, they're almost certainly going to be able to do.

(2) Bring DPS. I feel silly even saying this. It's the equivalent of saying "put food in mouth, not in anus". "Bring DPS to your gate-camp." Duh. But it's amazing to me how many people don't. You're there to kill things. How do you expect to kill things without DPS?

Too often, when someone finishes their first beer and says "Hey guys, let's go camp this gate," a lot of guys say "Great!" and then they undock in assault frig, or a cruiser, or a cloaky Recon, or a Rifter, or the like. A lot of this is risk-aversion, particularly semi-drunk risk-aversion. People flying casually don't want to risk expensive ships. If the situation goes casters up, a Rifter can definitely get away where a Hurricane might not. But for Heaven's sake, bring a few ships that can put 500 DPS or more out there. And with a few exceptions, ships that can't put out at least 300 DPS should not be welcome in your camp. The number of 500 DPS ships you bring is going to define the biggest thing you can kill in 60 seconds assuming they aggress.

One 500 DPS ship: one T1 cruiser.
Two 500 DPS ships: one weak battle-cruiser, or two T1 cruisers.
Three 500 DPS ships: one strong battle-cruiser, or three T1 cruisers.

And so on. You don't need a fleet to gate-camp successfully. But you need enough DPS to kill an aggressed ship in 60 seconds or less, because he's either going to jump out, or the fleet he's baiting for is going to land on your face with both feet in 60 seconds and you're going to lose more than you kill. So bring DPS.

(3) Bring the right Recons. They're called Combat Recons. A gate-camp without a couple of Combat Recons is a failed gate-camp before it begins. Rapiers and Huginns are most required, and of the two, the Huginn is much preferred because it can apply decent DPS, because that's what Combat Recons do better than Force Recons. A good Huginn pilot can prevent enemies burning back to gate or burning out of your catch bubbles. A good Lachesis pilot with a long-range faction scram can prevent a lot of people escaping you. Hell, even a Curse can do some good with its drone damage and its ability to shut down active tanks and MWDs through neuting.

Don't overdo it with Combat Recons, though. One or two is sufficient, since they only add about 200-250 DPS each. See (2).

(4) Bring some anchorable bubbles, and maybe even a single dictor. This obviously applies only to null-sec gate-camps. But for these kinds of camps, a few bubbles are vital. If you're smart, you'll camp a pipe system: only one way in and out. In which case, three medium-size bubbles are ideal. Put one 60km or so on the line from the other stargate, on the opposite side of the gate you're camping. Put one 60km or so on the line from the closest celestial, on the opposite side of the gate you're camping. And put one 60km or so on the line from the celestial most "off-angle" from everything else, on the opposite side of the gate that you're camping.

Why on the opposite side of the gate? So that the ship that lands in it will have to take a few vital seconds turning around if they choose to make a run for the gate. Bring mediums because they're easier to work with in this configuration, and are annoying to casually kill (whereas even a very small gang will make short work of a small bubble). Put your bubbles in line with these celestials because a lot of people will warp to the closest celestial or the most off-angle celestial before warping to your gate.

If you have more than one other gate in the system that you're camping, you'll also want bubbles aligned from those gates, too. And yes, I know it's more annoying to put them on the opposite side of the gate that you're camping. But what else do you have to do with your time? Take a few more minutes and do it right. ;-) And don't worry too much about the size of the Medium bubbles. Most people camp the same systems pretty regularly. If that's the case, you should take a half-hour at some point, load a cloaky hauler with a Giant Secure Container or two full of medium bubbles, make a safespot, anchor the GSC(s) in that safespot, and bookmark that location. There, now you can pick up replacement bubbles with no problems and you have a place for excess loot you collect.

A light dictor is quite useful to have along for bubbling in cloakies that jump into your camp. This gives your decloakers a few extra vital seconds to try for a decloak. They're also very useful, if you do get something firmly tackled, for making sure you get their pod, too. Single-bubble Sabres with a lot of AutoCannons are the best ship for this sort of work because they're fast and they do fairly decent DPS. See (2).

(5) Bring light tackle with scrams. Train them in decloaking techniques. Gate camps most often happen in null-sec, which means that light tackle can do their job by tackling ships. Once the aggress order is given, the light tackle should be burning toward the target with an eye toward getting a scram applied. Scrambled targets will have a harder time burning back to gate, or will have a harder time burning out of the catch bubble they've just been caught in. High DPS interceptors and interceptor-like ships are the best for this sort of work: the Taranis and Daredevil are particularly favored, but Imperial Navy Slicers and Drams are also pretty good at this.

As with Recons, don't over-do this. Three or so light tackle is what you should be aiming for, and one of them should be sober enough to follow suggestion (6), below. A gate-camp should also be a sea of light drones, and the bulk of these light drones should be assigned to your light tackle. This not only helps them if they have to decloak something, it will greatly increase the amount of DPS that's applied to the target once the scram has been applied. Anyone who is bad enough to bring a Rifter to a gate camp falls into the light tackle category, by the way. Too many Rifters circle gates at long ranges, hesitant to engage. People, it's a Rifter. If a Rifter pilot refuses to mix it up, call him primary. That will relieve your boredom.

(6) Bring people willing to cross-jump and/or avoid aggressing. A good gate-camp should have two or three light tackle, but once a given target is tackled, at least one of these light tackle ships should not attack the target! Instead, this ship should jump the gate in case the target makes it back to the gate and jumps through. This will give your gate-camp a chance to catch that ship despite its attempt to escape. It's also smart for one or two of your DPS ships to hold their aggression as well so that they can follow the target through.

This is a thankless job and should be rotated among the small ships in your fleet, with one interceptor or the like holding aggression on one target, another holding on the next, et cetera. This light tackle doesn't have to tackle the target on the other side in case of a trap, or a target that it's clearly not equipped to handle. But gosh, if your gate-camp catches and nearly finishes off a ship, only to have it jump through the gate in structure, wouldn't it be nice to have a chance to finish it off on the other side?

The ability to cross-jump and still tackle a wounded target with a frigate, by the way, is a key reason you want to establish your gate-camp away from a regional or low-sec/high-sec gate. If you're camping a low-sec gate and the target makes it back into low-sec, your unaggressed light tackle frigate is going to do you no good whatsoever when the gate guns reduce him to slag. You'll have to rely on your ability to...

(7) Bring at least one heavy tackle ship with scrams and webs. At least one of your DPS ships should be a quick, ferocious ship equipped with a scram, a web, and a good tank. A Proteus is ideal for this task, but nearly any tough T3 or close-range HAC or quick-locking BC will serve this role admirably. This ship's job is to make it possible for your light tackle to get away from a target once the initial tackle has been established.

If you do choose to gate-camp a low-sec entry into null, this ship will be particularly useful. A heavily tanked cruiser or fast-locking BC can act as your cross-jumper. These ships will have an easier time surviving gate gun fire long enough to reestablish tackle on a target that has gotten away from you by jumping through or back through the gate you're camping.

(8) Bring a couple of alt scouts. This one should be fairly obvious. A low skill-point cloaky alt should be placed in the systems on either side of the camp to detect incoming ships, and to detect whether that lone battleship that is jumping into your camp is really alone, or just the bait scout of a much larger gang. Many, many gate-camps use a character that is in the same corp as the camp as the out of system scout. This is nearly always a mistake, and will simply serve to reveal the nature of the trap in the next system. An alt in a neutral corp isn't ideal, but it's certainly better that tipping your hand from the get-go!

If the lone battleship jumps into your camp, you aggress it, and it fights back, the alt can report if the system behind the battleship is filling up with the fleet that the battleship is the bait for, and can give you the composition of that fleet so you have a good understanding of whether you can take that fleet on or not...

(9) Don't bring the wrong Recons. If a Falcon joins your gate-camp, there's only one correct procedure for it. Ask your heavy tackle to move to close range to the Falcon. Then call the friendly Falcon primary and kill it.(3) Know why? You'll get a good kill out of this, and as long as a Falcon is with your gate-camp, you're not going to get any other good kills. People bring Falcons to a gate camp for only one reason: they intend to leave the rest of you to die if anything even remotely dangerous happens.

Falcons add almost nothing to a gate camp. They add no DPS, they prevent ships that jump into your camp from aggressing on you, and they cause people who might otherwise be tempted to fight you to call you names and deliberately avoid fighting you. If your alt scouts are paying attention to their jobs, you're not going to need the Falcon's jamming ability for anything. If you aggress on a bait ship and your alt scouts report the entry system is spiking, that information is more valuable than any Falcon jam. Tell the Falcon pilot to bring a DPS ship instead so that you can kill the bait ship and be off the gate before the bait ship's fleet arrives. Hell, even a Rook is better than a Falcon: it brings the same jams, and also brings at least some DPS.

That said, if your Rook gets excited and jams a target that hits your camp and the target has the opportunity to escape while he's forcibly deaggressed, he's going to do it. And the rest of the fleet may well decide that a Rook kill is nearly as good as a Falcon kill.

The other Force Recons have similar disadvantages, though the Rapier is least objectionable. At least it brings webs. But if you have a choice between a Rapier and a Huginn, bring the Huginn. Force Recons don't bring significant DPS. See (2).

(10) Bring a Remote Sensor Booster or two. Apply them to your tackle and web ships. This one should also be fairly obvious. Somewhere in your gate-camp should be a ship with a spare mid-slot or two, and those spare mid slots should be applied to Remote Sensor Boosters. Drakes are good for this, and a lot of gate-camp Drakes bring RSBs as a matter of course.

The best place to apply these RSBs is to your Huginn, Ashimmu, Vindicator, Vigilant, or whatever you're using as your webber and/or heavy tackler. You want those webs or scrams on whatever you're moving to kill as quickly as possible. The RSBs only work to your advantage here. If you do have to abandon the camp and pull range, a boosted web ship (particularly the Huginn) can do a great deal to keep enemy tacklers off your gang as you escape. And of course, used offensively, an RSB on a tackler can make sure that very little will escape the camp.

What was the gate-camp that my alliance-mate jumped into? A gate-camp on a low-sec regional gate into null with a couple of Hurricanes, a Tornado, three or four tackling frigates, an Eris interdictor, and two Falcons. The first time he jumped in was in a Hurricane. What can a Hurricane do against a pair of Falcons? Absolutely nothing. He burned back to the gate and jumped out after the entire gate-camping fleet aggressed on him. He returned in a Hyperion thinking he might be able to separate out and kill one of the tackling frigates before jumping away. Nope, the two Falcons again made mincemeat of the mere idea. He again had no problems burning back to gate (not even going into half-shields, let alone armor) and jumping through. Again, the entire gang aggressed on him.

In short, this gate-camp had no webbers, no heavy tackle, nobody able to cross-jump, not enough DPS, too many Falcons (i.e., more than zero)... and was being scouted directly by a member of their corp in the low-sec entry system. As it is sometimes put on Twitter... #fail.

So that's it. Ten suggestions that will make your gate-camps -- if you must gate-camp -- better. Happy camping!

(1) And a big shout-out to everyone who says hello to me during these late-night wanderings. :-) I hardly ever get to shoot at someone who says hello, but it's always nice to chat with people for a few minutes while I'm scouting around "your" system...
(2) Yeah, I went there.
(3) This is a joke. You probably should not do this.

Comment of the Week: Last word

2012-02-22T23:11:00.000-08:00

Seleene took exception to my comments attached to my endorsement post. I'm not going to try to refute it point-for-point. I am, in fact, going to give Seleene the last word and quote his comment in its entirety. I will, however, refute one point and let that stand for the rest: Seleene mentions below that in June, the CSM was busy with torches and pitchforks, and he got 32k hits on his blog. I remember being rather aggravated with Seleene back in June, and I reviewed my own blog posts to remember why. It turns out that some of the CSM was actually doing work in June... on a little thing called the May Summit minutes. Let's go with Trebor's account of who was actually doing that work, shall we?

Delivered: Trebor 7, Mittens 4, Vile Rat 2, Two Step 2
Assigned but not delivered: Elise Randolph 3, Killer2 1, Diagoras 1

At the time, I said of this, "Feel free to use this information for your CSM7 voting needs."

In late June, at the height of the Summer of Rage, I agree, Seleene got back to business: all of his posts were posted starting three days after my post above over the course of five days, the five days that anchored the Summer of Rage. His first posts after a month of nothing. And those were his last posts for two more months.

Again, I like Seleene. I respect Seleene. He's a great guy, great to talk to, extremely knowledgeable about the game, has an excellent perspective on the game, and all the rest. As Trebor correctly says in his own endorsement of Seleene, a vote for him will not be wasted. He's almost certainly going to win a full CSM seat regardless of what I think. But for my endorsements, I had to pick the seven people I most want to see in those top seven seats, without getting emotionally involved. It was hard. It was damned hard! Seleene didn't make the cut. Do I want Seleene on CSM7? Yes, absolutely. But if I had my way, he'd come in eighth.

If I get emotionally involved in my endorsements, I endorse Seleene and I don't endorse Mittens.

As for the rest, again, I will give Seleene the last word. Here it is:

Okay, I don't mind the 'endorsement' bit, but your given explanations are just off the reservation m8.

First off, I'm kinda confused as to how ANY of us could have wasted the "first few months" considering we spent the first few months in a near daily fight with CCP over... ummm... everything. That just doesn't make any sense at all. Within a month of taking office, we were in Iceland. Within weeks after that, EVE exploded into torches and pitchforks. My blog had over 5k hits in April and May. It had nearly 32k hits in June.

No, I do not blog with regularity but I do try to make it a point to do so when major events involving the CSM take place. It's a CSM blog, and it was still more detailed in terms of actual CSM events than any other candidate.

Additionally, as with other CSM 6 members, the advent of the Skype channel with CCP means that there is quite a lot that goes on which you cannot see. I know that this is a sore spot with many people, but short of copy / pasting some of that stuff, there isn't really a way to reflect efforts made there.

You say that I 'lost my focus'? How does that reconcile with the corner EVE has turned in the past 4-5 months? If anything, because of everything that went down, my focus has gotten sharper, as has that of the other serving CSM members. This comment feels as if you took something I said to you in confidence and then turned into something else.

As for my 'heart not being in this'... I don't even know what to say. What sane person that has been a developer for the game, been to Iceland countless times already and has nothing to really gain by running (fame? money? a pony?) would do this again whose heart wasn't 150% 'in it'? My heart is just fine, m8. As for being happy with an alt position, if that's where I land, fine. I won't be happy about it, but I won't work any less hard because of it.

I honestly feel as if you have taken part of the recent conversation that we had, along with other past comments, and let my willingness to be very blunt and open about certain things color your thoughts. As I said, the 'endorsement' bit isn't what I'm upset about; it's your perception of my dedication to this that I take issue with. Now you can dissect that assertion all you want, but nothing you say is going to change the fact that I feel completely sucker punched by some of your recent comments.

You can say whatever you want about what you think has or has not been done but questioning where my HEART is with regard to all of this? You have GOT to be joking?? :(

BTW - If you've been following the RU community at all, you'd know that Death is being trolled to oblivion and beyond and his chances of re-election are, sadly, not so great.

FOTW: Mission Support Dominix

2012-02-22T15:28:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go with something that's just goofy for my FOTW this week:

[Dominix, Mission Support]
Damage Control II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Large Armor Repairer II
Large Armor Repairer II
Co-Processor II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Heavy Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I, Cap Booster 400

Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Large S95a Partial Shield Transporter
Medium Remote Armor Repair System II
Small Remote Hull Repair System I /OFFLINE
280mm Prototype Siege Cannon, EMP S
Drone Link Augmentor II

Large Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Large Semiconductor Memory Cell I
Large Semiconductor Memory Cell I

Hobgoblin II x5
Hammerhead II x5
Garde II x5
Heavy Shield Maintenance Bot I x5

Eventually, almost every long-term EVE player gets themselves a support character. And whether this support character does science, mining, industry, trade, or manufacturing, chances are two things are true:

this character probably doesn't have a lot of combat skills; and,
they aren't going to be getting them anytime soon.

But, if your definition of support character also includes "carrier pilot" and has the drone skills to back that up, there's a way to make that character useful in high-sec, too. It's everyone's favorite upside-down running shoe ship, the Dominix.

While soloing L4s can be a little nerve-wracking at times, dual-boxing L4 missions is a relatively easy and low-risk way of building up ISK for newer players. But if your second account doesn't have a character that can add DPS in the traditional way, a support Dominix is an amusing alternative. Most of the skills required for this fit are easy trains -- in particular, until the support character can use T2 Sentries, T1s are fine. Ditto the three new T2 drone upgrade modules, which can be replaced with their T1 versions. This is just an end state fit.

Once in this end-state, the support character can add up to 500 DPS to an L4 mission pair, can tank new spawns with no problems, and can even provide reps to the primary character. This allows your primary shield DPS ship (a Nightmare or a Machariel, say) to refit mids to include more Tracking Computers, Target Painters, or more resists, and go without a self-rep capability. Instead, the primary DPS ship just orbits the Dominix which provides reps as needed from the two shield transfers it carries. Supporting an armor main ship is such as a Paladin or Apoc Navy Issue even easier: replace the Medium Armor repper and the shield reppers with a trio of Large Armor reppers. Or you can replace one or more reppers with Energy Transfers if you want to go that route instead and set up a mini cap-chain for those cap-hungry laser boats.

In short, this ship allows your support character to both be useful in and gain the standing benefit from running L4s right alongside your main without having to train any gunnery or missile skills whatsoever. Cute, right?

DPS is provided by either launched sentries (assist them to your main for the greatest effect), or the support Domi can just clear frigs and cruisers with lighter drones. Shield rep drones are included in case of an emergency. There's 50m3 of drone space left... fill that in with whatever you like, but the smart move is extra light drones for your main in case of losses. The support character can deploy these replacement drones, then abandon them for the main to pick up. Fit this way, the sentries have an optimal range of 48km or so, or light frigate-clearing drones have a long range.

A strong active armor tank is part of the package, and the explosive hardener can be replaced with something mission-specific if you like. The additional remote armor repper and off-lined hull repper are primarily for repairing drone damage, but can be replaced with other support modules to taste. The small gun is for drawing aggro before deploying drones if you want to use this Dominix as the initial tank. Finally, the cap booster provides a little bit of insurance to make sure the local or remote reppers can continue operating in an emergency. The Domi has plenty of cargo space for cap booster charges. The strong active tank on this Domi will allow you to go full glass cannon with your main. Warp the Domi in first, draw aggro with the gun, launch the Sentries, bring in the main DPS ship, assist the Sentries to your main, profit. You'll be amazed how fast mission rats melt.

It's a cute concept, very cheap, low effort, easy to train a support character into, and surprisingly effective! If you're looking for a way to boost missioning income but don't want to devote a main combat character to it, give this idea a shot.

Happy missioning!

First checkpoint

2012-02-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

Aaaand here's the first list of CSM7 candidates.

38 people as of 1300 on February 22, which is a bit fewer than I expected. Apparently a few people had a problem with the "real name" thing or the passport thing. Other than that, very few surprises on the list.

Things that jumped out at me:

Two Goonswarm candidates, The Mittani and Lyris Nairn. No idea if Lyris is at all an official candidate. Last year, the Goons ran four candidates, two of which were official.
Three TEST candidates, Dovinian, michael boltonIII, and Akirei Scytale. Dovinian is the official candidate from what I understand. Akirei appears to strictly be a troll candidate. MB3 was directly not selected as an official candidate, but is apparently running anyway, on name recognition. Be interesting to see if he draws TEST votes away from Dovinian.
Mintrolio is an Aussie. That may be interesting only to me. ;-)
A little surprisingly (again maybe only to me), there doesn't really seem to be a strong contingent of null-sec bloc candidates this time around. Maybe they're better at hiding this year? But there's only the one Russian bloc candidate, and other than the Goon and TEST candidates, there appear to be only one or two other true bloc candidates.
How'd you like to be on the list of the six people that passed the real name and passport requirement, but couldn't get 100 likes? Given the list of people who did get 100 likes, this is not a strong endorsement for their candidacies. ;-)
There don't appear to be any surprising missing candidates, with the possible exception of Iam Widdershins (who couldn't get a passport in time). Everyone seems to have made it through this step without any problems.
And finally, I wouldn't want to be Leboe, Prom, Alekseyev Karrde, or Elise. I think it's entirely possible that these four candidates might compete each other right out of a seat...

Looks like the final ballot is going to be between 38 and 44 candidates total (depending on how many of the final six get their 100 likes). There were 57 candidates last year. As a result, the goal of having fewer candidates this year than last was surprisingly successful. But I'm definitely not convinced the petition mechanic had anything to do with it. What did? I think there were three factors involved.

First, I think a lot of people like myself that were considering running decided not to, either because they didn't feel they could get the votes, or because they'd take votes away from other candidates. Part of this, I'm sure, is the extremely strong slate of CSM6 candidates running for reelection. But a lot of it was almost certainly the number of alliances that crashed and burned this past year, or have suffered membership problems. There aren't enough old-NC survivors to field a candidate, for instance. Nor does NC Reloaded have a strong enough presence to field their own candidate (Raiden, not at all surprisingly, has endorsed super-cap friendly candidate Elise Randolph). Much of the Russian bloc is in disarray, as is much of the southern bloc. Without a strong base to start from, getting the needed votes would be tough.

Similar, but related, I think the Summer of Rage had an impact here. There are tons of people that unsubbed from EVE over the summer, only recently resubscribed, but had enough lingering resentment about CCP to not want to go anywhere near CCP HQ.

Finally, I think there was an unspoken strategy among some of the CSM6 members to gently de-emphasize the overt public relevance of the CSM over the course of the year. I've said a couple of times that I think this was a political ploy, and I think we can call it a successful one. While CSM5 was extremely public over the entire course of their term (resulting in strong interest in running for CSM6, even among non-bloc candidates), CSM6 has been much more outwardly private, particularly late in the term.

What impact is this going to have on voter turn-out? I initially thought that we'd see an overall 25% increase over last year's turn-out. Now... now, I'm not so sure. While I still think Mittens will pass the number of votes he got last year, I think overall turn-out might actually stay about the same or even go down a little. Maybe I'm just a little more distant from this campaign than I was last year? But there doesn't seem to be as much enthusiasm for the process as there was this time last year. Could be wrong. We'll see.

Anyway, one more CSM7 related post in the next few days -- my endorsements for non-incumbents -- then I'll get off the topic for a couple of weeks unless something interesting happens.

Wabbit season!

2012-02-21T18:09:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, CSM7 election season begins in earnest with the publication of the list of approved candidates and the "beginning" of the nomination stage.

In reality, of course, the nomination stage has been going on for a few weeks now, so what gets published tomorrow will -- for most purposes -- be the candidate list. As a result, I'd like to issue two sets of endorsements this year for candidates that I'm going to support, either vocally or directly, with one or more of my votes.

I'm going to start with the CSM6 incumbents. So far, ten of the fourteen current CSM6 members have said they're standing for reelection, and as far as I can tell, all ten have easily passed the 100 "likes" needed to be considered official candidates. We can pretty safely assume that since they've been on the CSM for the last year, they're also not going to have any trouble with the other required qualifications. It's equally safe to say that of the remaining three that haven't declared, none of them is likely to be a major factor in the election since their bases of support appear to be gone. So let's go with what we have.

As I said a couple of weeks back, I'll be endorsing seven candidates: the candidates that I hope get the top seven seats when CSM7 is elected. These aren't necessarily who I think will be elected. These are who I want to be elected to those top seven seats. I'll write an additional post later on who I think will be elected and why.

Of the ten CSM6 candidates running for reelection, I am endorsing four of them: Two Step, Trebor Daehdoow, The Mittani, and UAxDEATH.

When looking at the current candidates running for reelection, I looked at three factors:

Have this candidate done the work?
Does this candidate best represent an important segment of the player base?
Does this candidate deserve to represent us?

With this in mind, let's look at each candidate in turn.

Two Step, more than any other member of CSM5 or CSM6, demonstrates the fundamental correctness of Mynxee's goal of making the so-called "alternate" members of the CSM part of the process. Barely elected to CSM6 at all and dismissed as a wormhole specialty candidate, Two Step showed that he didn't really know or care what the word "alternate" meant. He simply did the work. More than any other single member of CSM6, he has been visible to the EVE Online player base in a variety of places, and has shown interest in multiple play-styles, not just his own. Two Step still represents an important segment of the EVE player base, but I'd now argue that it's larger than simply wormhole dwellers... it's every EVE player that has no interest in sovereignty-based play and super-cap blobs. Two Step deserves a full seat at the table in CSM7, and will be a terrific balance against these powerful forces. Two Step not only has my endorsement, he'll be receiving at least one of my votes.

Trebor Daehdoow, despite my teasing, has shown that he also deserves a seat at the table. Trebor's greatest strength is his ability to get along with and balance a lot of disparate elements that have made up the last two CSMs. Yes, he's a little bit stubborn when he wants to get his way, but he balances that with the ability to listen, and the willingness to directly challenge CCP employees when it's clear they're on the wrong track. He might not agree with you (or them) when the discussion is over, but he can prove that he's listened to the arguments on both sides. I'm not convinced that very many other CSM6 members did that this year. Trebor has also shown a continued willingness to engage with the EVE player base in a variety of ways. He's also one of CSM6's strongest communicators and has done more work than the others in terms of documenting the results. Trebor will also be receiving one of my votes, the same one he got last year. ;-)

If I gave Trebor a hard time this year, that's a quarter of the hard time I gave The Mittani this year. Still, if your definition of success is "engaged with CCP", then The Mittani is the most successful CSM Chair in the history of the CSM.(1) Yes, he's frightfully arrogant, and yes, he's way more interested in his own ideas than anyone else's, but the simple fact is that where previous CSMs talked at CCP, Mittens talked to them and with them. He's also in a perfect position to use his in-game power, his out-of-game name recognition, and his personal knowledge of a lot of the CCP devs to channel player annoyance with CCP into constructive avenues, and he understands just enough of the business side to get by. If Mittens has a weak point, it's that he regards virtually the entire EVE player base as dumb-ass pubbies, but he seemed to mellow somewhat in the last year, and we can hope that he'll continue to do so in the coming year. ;-) Mittens won't be receiving one of my votes, but he doesn't need it anyway...

I don't have as much to say about UAxDEATH as I do about the other three, but it's clear that Death has done a better job engaging with the Russian portion of the EVE player base much more successfully than past Russian CSM members. He also made an effort, particularly late in 2011, to start to talk to people who don't play EVE in Cyrillic as well. There's no question that he best represents this important part of the player base. More impressive to me, though, Death has shown real open-mindedness when it came to attacks on his core play style. He's open and honest when it comes to botting, has been open to the discussion of removing drone alloys, and has a great sense of humor that even a westerner can appreciate.

Now let's talk about the people that I'm not endorsing, and why, starting with the hard one.

I'm not endorsing Seleene. Now, don't get me wrong: I really like Seleene, and of the CSM6 members, he's probably the one that I've actually spent the most time chatting with this past year. Hell, he and I had a terrific two plus hour Skype conversation not a month ago (he urged me to run, even when I told him my belief that I'd just take votes away from him). But somewhere along the way in the last year, Seleene has slipped sideways and lost his focus. I don't know any other way of putting it. Part of it is simply how darn busy the guy is. I gave him a very hard time about wasting the first few months of his term, but even over the course of the rest of the year, it was pretty clear that he wasn't 100% engaged. His blogging was greatly diminished, and his posting to the various fora decreased substantially. I'm not even convinced that his heart is in this run. I think in his heart of hearts, he'd be more than happy with an alternate seat this year, and honestly: that's probably the place where he can do the most good. The full members need his insights into CCP and the development process, yes... but I don't feel like they need his presence.

I'm not endorsing Meissa Anunthiel. This year, Meissa abandoned his traditional neutrality on political topics and on at least two occasions, directly advocated for positions where he personally or his alliance generally would directly benefit. The more glaring example was his advocacy for "wormhole stabilizers", which would do only one thing: bring the blob to the one and only part of space that is still mercifully blob-free. Meissa needs a break, and some perspective. He'll probably win a seat regardless of what I think, but I hope he doesn't.

I'm not endorsing either Elise Randolph or Prometheus Exenthal, and that is just freakin' sad. Either of them could have, and should have, been a vocal champion for non-sov-holding small-gang play. Neither has demonstrated an ability to do this. Prom is particularly disappointing... after ignoring his post for six months, when he did finally become engaged with the process, it seems pretty clear that he drank the sov Kool-Aid. Neither have been strong representatives for non-blob play. Hell, Pandemic Legion is practically embracing the blob. If you're tempted to vote either of these candidates thinking they will be champions for the small gang, I urge you to put your vote elsewhere.

And finally, neither Draco Llasa nor Darius III are representative of any particular group of EVE Online players, and neither distinguished themselves during the year that they've already had to represent us.

That leaves three endorsements, which I will be giving to three new faces running this year. Watch for that post in a few days.

(1) If your definition is "brought player concerns to CCP", then the most successful is still Mynxee.

ABCs

2012-02-21T16:53:00.001-08:00

Here's one for you casual, occasional miners out there. The pro miners already know this information. Hell, they might even get annoyed with me for talking about it. ;-)

Quick: other than Mercoxit, what are the three most valuable ores in New Eden?

Arkonor? Yep, absolutely. Bistot? Aye, say thankya, you speak true. And of course, Crok--Yeah, not so fast.

After quickly jumping from 300 ISK per unit to 500 ISK per unit in 4Q2010, and increasing to 550 at the end of 1Q2011, the price of Nocxium actually dipped down to 400 or so over the summer. It's been coming back up again and is now where it started last year, at 500. Nocxium is found in seven different drone alloys in different concentrations. When I last wrote about noc a year ago, I recommended that miners seriously consider training the skills for Hedbergite and Hemorphite Tech2 crystals...

Megacyte and Morphite have similar curves to noc: aside from some mid-year fluctuations, they've been pretty stable. Zydrine has actually lost about 25% of its value this past year. However, drone alloys are not big factors in the production of these three minerals.

But then there are the high-sec minerals... you know... the ones that are big factors in drone alloys.

Here's Tritanium, up almost 33% since the start of the DRF civil war, volume steady (dropped in only five drone alloys):

Here's Pyerite, up about 20% in the same period, volume steady (also dropped in five drone alloys):

Mexallon, up 65% and still rising (ditto):

And finally Isogen, up about 13%... but like Nocxium, fully seven types of drone alloys contain Isogen, so the fact that it's less affected is easier to understand:

What's the net result? Here's the money chart:

Prices along the top are based on Jita highest Buy orders as of 00:00 on 22 February 2012. The ISK/hour figure is the one you should look at.(1) Put Mercoxit aside since it's kind of a special case, and the top three ores in New Eden today are Arkonor, Bistot... and Hemorphite. Crokite is now sixth, just barely ahead of Pyroxeres, which is a high-sec ore!

I can't recall that happening... pretty much ever during my time in New Eden to date.

Now, without QENs and without data on the sources of minerals over the last year and change, we have no way of knowing for sure that the DRF civil war is behind these increases. But the timing is sure coincidental, ain't it?

In the meantime, if you have any interest in mining at all, now might be the time to dust off the old Hulks. At least until Hulkageddon V gets rolling, that is.(2) Still no date on that that I've heard.

(1) I assume 1900m3 per minute of mining, which is easy to hit in an unbonused Hulk with decent skills. Your values might be even higher.
(2) For reference, high-sec ice is back down to the 10-11 million ISK/hour range. Yes, even Blue Ice.

Quote of the Week: Skill with children

2012-02-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

This week's QOTW just made me laugh:

I could bombard you all with issues, such as the Titan blob problem which is slipping into runaway blob territory, or the repeated delays of the oft-requested 'Bookmarks on the Overview' feature. But instead I shall point you at my youtube channel where I demonstrate that I can teach a child to play Eve better than some adults, as such this skill with children should translate directly to dealing with the other CSM members and CCP devs.

So says Scott Manley, who is running for CSM7 under the character name of his 7-year-old daughter, Skye Aurorae. I've mentioned both on the blog a couple of times before. You really have to admire Scott's ability to apply his resources to the job. I mean, how could you say no to a cute little girl?

Amusingly, here's what Seleene had to say when he read the above, about how skill with children would translate well to dealing with other CSM members and with CSM devs:

You sound a lot like Trebor TBH! :-D :-D

What, you don't agree with this opinion yourself, Seleene? ;-)

Not much more to say about this one. It's just something to make you smile. If you want to read Scott's actual platform, here it is. In my opinion, there's not much meat there to separate him from a lot of the other candidates yet, but I wish he (and Skye) luck just the same!

Pottermore

2012-02-18T15:43:00.000-08:00

As of this writing, ten of the current fourteen CSM6 members are running for reelection. As a handy guide, if each of these ten were characters in the Harry Potter universe, here's who they would be...

(And please keep in mind that I like and respect a lot of these people. This is all in good fun. ;-) )

Draco Llasa: Professor Filius Flitwick. Wait. He was a professor? What did he look like? Short, goblin-looking dude? Huh. I don't remember him. Was he in the movies? Really? Did he do anything important? Anything I would have heard of? No?

Darius III: Peeves the Poltergeist. Could be argued that he isn't even there at all. You don't see him for ages. Then, when he does show up, he throws buckets of dog shit all over everything and everyone, cackles insanely, sings a poetic song to commemorate the occasion that he spent the last two weeks writing, then leaves (or is chased off).

UAxDEATH: Profeesor Remus Lupin. Seems like a nice enough guy. Shabby, but presentable. Gets the girl, and you're not even particularly jealous. Smart guy, and knows his shit. He usually keeps to himself, with just a few close friends around. Only a few people really understand him. He's part of your team, but watch out: occasionally, he turns into an inhuman monster that can no longer tell friend from foe, and terrorizes the countryside.

Two Step: Neville Longbottom. He's the guy that's on the varsity squad, only you can never quite see why. Then you realize that it's because he works harder than just about everyone else. Sincerely knows his shit in a limited area, and applies his work ethic to try to learn the rest. Gets back up no matter how many times he's knocked down. You suspect that he'll eventually be the one of the most important people around, but the rest of the group still won't quite get him. Forever underestimated.

Meissa Anunthiel: Firenze the Centaur. Seems to have been around longer than anybody. Could be the smartest guy around, but generally keeps his mouth shut. Stays far away from everyone else: he's usually very cool and distant. Really has only one area of expertise, but sticks to it, so that's OK. When he does open his mouth, everyone listens, but nobody is really sure they understood what he said. Occasionally, he gets really angry and points out how stupid everyone else really is.

Elise Randolph: Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge. Runs one of the most important organizations in the world, but is kind of a dick. Everyone says in public that they like him, but nobody really does except some toadies. Spends a lot of his time doing exactly the opposite of what everyone else wants. But then he shows up at the party with everyone else and seems to want everyone to like him despite the fact that his actions and his words don't match. Sincerely seems to think that everyone wants to be just like him.

Prometheus Exenthal: Professor Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody. Spent the entire term locked up in his own trunk. Despite that, he gets added to the varsity squad. Is pretty sure he knows way more than everyone else, and is really bitter and angry most of the time. Has one trick that is really impressive and rather scary at the same time. Plays by his own rules, and doesn't care if others don't like that. He definitely knows his shit, but can't convey it without pissing everyone else off. Even people that like him have a hard time saying anything nice about him.

Seleene: Professor Horace Slughorn. Used to be really important back in the day and never hesitates to let you know that. He knows everyone there is to know, and has been around for the most important events in the world. Has the souveneirs to prove it. Still, you'll always get the impression that while he was involved in these events and with these people, he was never really a driving force, or if he was, it was so long ago that it doesn't really impact the present. He's desperate to be in the club now, but doesn't... quite... want the work or the danger that goes with that. He does want the comfort and prestige that goes with it, though!

Trebor Daehdoow: Professor Minerva McGonagall. Not flashy or brilliant in the traditional sense, but has a wide array of skills. Is the hard worker in the background that makes everything operate smoothly. Consigned to forever play second fiddle to much flashier leaders. Is respected, but is hard to like. Rigorous disciplinarian with a stern front: you never quite know what this person thinks of you. Can get along with just about everyone if needed, but very occasionally is a stubborn obstacle that everyone else has to overcome.

And, of course...

Twins separated at birth?

The Mittani: Professor Gilderoy Lockhart. Completely in love with his own voice, face, and image. Loves to see pictures of himself and positive references to himself. Has only one true area of expertise, but that one area of expertise is making other people believe what he wants them to believe. Wrote a lot of stuff about things that he did, but you get the impression that he mostly takes credit for the work of others. Has a train of semi-mindless followers that idolize him, but most people that don't idolize him despise him instead. He is almost ridiculously arrogant, and completely positive that everyone wants to be just like him.

Yeah, that last one was pretty easy. And again, please keep in mind that these comparisons are just for fun. I respect the work a lot of these people have done. Yes, even Gildero-- er, Mittens. ;-)

Kill of the Week: Must be nice to be rich

2012-02-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

Let's go with a pair of pricey kills this week.

Last week, I highlighted this loss-mail from Garmon, the loss of a Alliance Tournament prize Adrestia. This week, Garmon lost a second hugely expensive ship, this time as his main...
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12427139

Even worse, this ship probably didn't last long: I've been in a lot of seven-Tornado fleets and I know what they can do. All I can say is that it must be really nice to be rich. On the other hand, figuring that the combined Hydra/Outbreak AT teams split up the BPCs for their AT9 winning ships, it's just possible that Garmon built and sold one of each of these ships to collectors. That would give him enough money to fit the rest of them for PvP...

That said, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the guts to PvP in a 40 billion ISK Vangel, and I sure wouldn't do it after losing a 30 billion ISK Adrestia five days before. In fact, if I lost a 30 billion ISK ship in PvP, I think I'd devote the next five days to having a good cry. ;-)

So, props to Count MonteCarlo/Garmon for not doing that, but dude... you might want to take it easy and fly some T1 stuff for a while. Let your alliance kill-board recover from these efficiency assassination attempts.

This kill is also worth mentioning, as a learning moment:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12431357

After having a stellar 44 billion ISK carrier kill last week, one of K162's loot transports got smited while heading to Jita to sell the proceeds of... what? Maybe four days of wormhole ops? ;-) This one is instructive because the Viator warped to station, landed 1800-1900 meters off, and then had to slow-boat the rest of the way to station while decloaked. That gave the single Tornado plenty of time to pop it.

Lots of people have "undock" bookmarks that allow them to warp directly off-grid from station immediately after undocking. This is a great idea when you're undocking while carrying something expensive. But what if you're carrying something expensive to market that you want to sell?

Well, for that, a lot of players have "redock" bookmarks, particularly around the big markets. Most of the big market stations have pretty large dock radii and are pretty big stations. The trick here is to create a bookmark within the station's dock radius that is likewise a goodly distance from the outwarp locations for the celestials surrounding that station. The Jita 4-4 station is particularly enormous and lends itself well to these sorts of redock bookmarks. Anywhere underneath and beside the right hand side of the station will do. Mine's just behind the "tether" on the front right side of the station. When I jump into Jita, instead of clicking the dock button, I warp to my Jita redock bookmark instead. When I land, I'm nearly always at 0m and can dock immediately.

But this is a bit tricky because you're going to land 2500m or so from your bookmark and in a random direction. As a result, pick a location that takes this into account. Again, Jita's an ideal station for this because it has such a big docking radius. Some of the other market stations (Amarr comes to mind) are not nearly so friendly to redock bookmarks. Even if the worst happens and you end up outside immediate dock radius, though, you'll still be at an advantage because you won't land in a predictable spot. It's a good bet this Tornado was positioned so that his optimal was right where ships were coming out of warp, most likely from Perimeter...

That was another 23 billion ISK down the drain, so 63+ billion ISK between these two kills this week, or more than most Titans cost. Again, it must be nice to be rich!

Somebody knows something

2012-02-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie.

Two weeks ago now, I wrote a little post that I called "Turtles all the way down", which was an examination of a document I received from an EVE player claiming to be a "strategist for hire" for EVE's largest alliances, particularly in the 2006-2007 time-frame. However, the author also claimed to have performed this career right up into the EVE's "modern era", though many fewer specifics were given.

Hell, there weren't all that many specifics for EVE's earlier ages.

Whenever I write a blog post that states what I believe to be factual information, God help me if I'm wrong. I'll get dozens of people coming out of the woodwork to tell me so whether it's smart for them to do so or not. Most people enjoy being right more than they enjoy keeping things secret. If I give an opinion that's at all questionable, same deal: I'll get dozens of people telling me what a moron I am. Case in point: yesterday about this time, I wrote a thing in which I professed agreement with the concept that someone who does something dumb in EVE should be publicly shamed for it, hopefully with the goal that they wouldn't do it any more. There are now 30-odd public comments attached to that post telling me how dumb that is and how ashamed I should feel about believing it.

Yes, that was irony. ;-) Someone tell Alanis.

As I write this, not counting all you Google Reader people, that post yesterday has been read about 470 times. The "Turtles" post has been read almost 3000 times since I published it two weeks ago. I expected a lot of people to say "BS" to it, and I expected a lot of people to say "there's no substance here", and indeed, both of those things happened. I said myself that the first thing I asked the author for was more specifics. The post itself has 78 comments, far and away the most comments anything I've published has received.

But not a single person came out and said "This document is BS. The author wasn't involved with XXXX crashing, because that was all me, baby." Or anything even approaching that. You'd think, after 3000 people read this document, someone would have some kind of proof that this document is BS, if it were. Somebody always knows something.

I find that interesting.

Anyway, what's below is what is likely to be my final postscript on this story. It's the log of a conversation I had with the author of the document (his character name has been changed). I've done some editing here and there to remove things like "brb" and the like, but I haven't removed any misspellings, since those tend to be distinctive from writer to writer. I also removed two irrelevant sections of our discussion. This log probably isn't of interest to very many people, but if you were interested in the "Turtles" document, you'll probably be interested in this. And it includes a piece of data toward the end that you can put to direct work if you want to learn more about the author. There's also a few more specifics about things the author says he was involved in. You'll find in the log that I have permission to post this log.

Enjoy.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Channel ID:      -27034032
Channel Name:    Private Chat (Private Chat)
Listener:        Ripard Teg
Session started: 2011.12.18 20:20:12
---------------------------------------------------------------

[ 20:20:16 ] Ripard Teg > o/
[ 20:21:58 ] strategist > Hey
[ 20:22:39 ] strategist > Good to sit down with you =)
[ 20:22:52 ] Ripard Teg > Indeed. Interesting little document you sent me.
[ 20:23:24 ] strategist > I could protest its honesty until I go blue, but the opinion you've already made will be the one that sticks
[ 20:24:03 ] Ripard Teg > Not sure I have an opinion yet, honestly. Every time I feel like I've drilled down to bedrock in this game, someone convinces me that there's this whole other level underneath.
[ 20:24:40 ] Ripard Teg > I'm hampered by the fact that while I've heard some of the stories from EVE's first age (Xetic, et. al.), I wasn't there for any of it. I didn't start playing until 2007.
[ 20:24:57 ] strategist > Xetic, frankly, became a complete shell of idiots.
[ 20:25:26 ] strategist > It used to pride itself on having the highest member count in EVE history - still true today, they still hold the record
[ 20:25:48 ] strategist > but the majority of those almost 6k members were PVE runners and miners, living in the shadows of other alliances
[ 20:26:03 ] strategist > hell, pretty sure half of them weren't active come the time it finally collapsed
[ 20:26:08 ] Ripard Teg > ::nods:: Matches what I've heard, that they were an enormous paper tiger.
[ 20:26:21 ] strategist > Even a paper tiger is scary when you're drunk
[ 20:27:18 ] Ripard Teg > Paper tigers scare a lot of perfectly sober people, given the average EVE player's desire to lose ships. ;-)
[ 20:28:02 ] strategist > Hm, usually I'd agree, but then I saw Xetic
[ 20:28:34 ] strategist > Their killboards are long lost in the aether, but there was this one moment where a 200 strong Xetic fleet lost out to 23 people.
[ 20:28:48 ] strategist > This was before capital ships became the mainstay of any EVE engagement so
[ 20:29:03 ] strategist > There is a paper tiger, and a paper tiger that has been in a bath for a month
[ 20:29:12 ] strategist > =)
[ 20:29:33 ] Ripard Teg > Heh.
[ 20:30:25 ] strategist > So yea, Poetic also has a copy - after your help, thanks so much for that BTW
[ 20:30:39 ] strategist > and he's like "Yea, more details."
[ 20:31:00 ] Ripard Teg > np And yeah, assuming I stipulate that everything in the document is true, two obvious questions spring to mind: are you quitting EVE, and if so, why?
[ 20:31:24 ] Ripard Teg > You said a lot in the doc without saying a whole lot, if you get my drift. ;-)
[ 20:31:31 ] strategist > No I am not, simply quitting the strategy game. Why, simple, business for my kind of strategist has become almost non-existant
[ 20:31:35 ] strategist > heh, the gift of the ramble
[ 20:31:51 ] strategist > I said a lot without any solid details. I'd make a good politician if I didn't hate politics.
[ 20:31:55 ] Ripard Teg > Eh, there's a difference between rambling and deliberately avoiding the juicy stuff. ;-)
[ 20:32:35 ] Ripard Teg > Simplest example: you say you were taking these enormous per month contracts... without saying what you were doing that was worth that kind of ISK.
[ 20:33:17 ] strategist > Example: giving RA pointers on how best to work with young goon in the first push through Bobbit
[ 20:33:57 ] strategist > current contract: working with certain directors of a large power holder in making plans and contingencies for the next year and a half
[ 20:34:12 ] Ripard Teg > See what I mean? You're saying stuff without saying anything.
[ 20:34:29 ] strategist > Because frankly I dont know what to say, if I'm honest
[ 20:35:07 ] Ripard Teg > Some of this stuff is five years ago, for alliances that don't exist any more. So I'd give specific specifics if you want the doc to be taken more seriously.
[ 20:35:20 ] strategist > I dont care how serious the doc is taken
[ 20:35:23 ] Ripard Teg > You hint a little bit when you use words like "infiltrate", but you don't come out and SAY anything.
[ 20:35:38 ] strategist > People can read it and count it as class A bullshit for all I care
[ 20:35:40 ] Ripard Teg > notsureifserious.jpg
[ 20:35:44 ] Ripard Teg > ;-)
[ 20:35:49 ] strategist > It's true
[ 20:36:26 ] strategist > I just wanted some well written general overview for the annuals of EVE's collective history. Like most of the writing you'll see, there is nothing stopping you from calling bullshit on it
[ 20:36:31 ] Ripard Teg > OK, let me try a different approach, then. You wrote this thing. Who is the target audience?
[ 20:36:48 ] strategist > I guess people interested in the underbelly.
[ 20:37:04 ] strategist > The kind of people who'd read these things in the first place
[ 20:37:24 ] Ripard Teg > I'm hugely interested in that, and I don't understand large swaths of this doc.
[ 20:37:41 ] Ripard Teg > A) Because I don't recognize some of the names, because I wasn't here for this part of EVE's history; and,
[ 20:38:09 ] Ripard Teg > B) Because you aren't specific enough about things. Let's take one para in particular.
[ 20:38:23 ] Ripard Teg > This is 2006-2007, I assume, from the doc's context:
[ 20:38:31 ] Ripard Teg > "Well, except for when I was being paid to infiltrate. You get quite an interesting mark on your balance sheets when the alliance you are infiltrating is paying you more than your actual bosses - but the loot you get..." (cont)
[ 20:38:42 ] Ripard Teg > "from collapsing such an alliance is worth it."
[ 20:39:05 ] Ripard Teg > I'd get very specific there. I collapsed alliance X. This is how I did it. This is how I profited from it.
[ 20:39:10 ] strategist > Was a general comment, I've infiltrated a few. LV was a big one, actually.
[ 20:39:36 ] strategist > I never directly collapsed an alliance, simply gave intel to the right people while flipping two paychecks
[ 20:39:49 ] Ripard Teg > Then you should say that: this is what I was paid to do, this is who paid me, this is what I did, this is how it turned out.
[ 20:40:09 ] Ripard Teg > Mittens gets mileage from this kind of crap because he joyfully gives specifics, but he's careful only to give specifics years after it'll do anyone any damn good.
[ 20:40:12 ] Ripard Teg > You should do the same.
[ 20:40:36 ] strategist > Oh Mittens how I love your media frenzies.
[ 20:40:49 ] strategist > He's nuked most of his ability to do anything he prides himself on, you know
[ 20:41:17 ] Ripard Teg > ::shrugs:: I'm giving you a neutral observer's perspective here. If you publish this thing, as is, there might be ten or twelve people in all of EVE that will understand it. They'll find it highly entertaining.
[ 20:41:30 ] Ripard Teg > Then there will be 5000 people who say "Hm, interesting, if it's true." That's where I am.
[ 20:41:39 ] Ripard Teg > And then there will be 25,000 people who sniff and say "bullshit." ;-)
[ 20:42:04 ] Ripard Teg > And yes, I agree. But you say you're retiring.
[ 20:42:10 ] Ripard Teg > So where's the harm in doing the same? ;-)
[ 20:42:32 ] strategist > Honestly, that isn't my sticking point
[ 20:44:05 ] strategist > The sticking point is basically that after eight years of doing it, the majority of the details have slipped into the grey of my injured brain
[ 20:44:34 ] strategist > Can you sit there and honestly tell me you remember every call you made in 07 or 08? ;)
[ 20:45:18 ] strategist > I can name the big calls
[ 20:45:19 ] Ripard Teg > Every call? No. A call that netted me 50 billion ISK? I suspect I'd remember a few details. ;-)
[ 20:45:28 ] strategist > JV1V was one of mine
[ 20:45:40 ] strategist > (as an example)
[ 20:45:50 ] Ripard Teg > Elaborate. ;-)
[ 20:46:20 ] strategist > running out of LV space with two command ship BPOs and an exhumer BPO was also great fun 9along with countless others)
[ 20:46:43 ] Ripard Teg > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy1kofLY0RA
[ 20:46:47 ] Ripard Teg > ^-- You talking about that?
[ 20:47:07 ] strategist > No
[ 20:47:44 ] Ripard Teg > ::nods:: That's the only significant link on Google that references JV1V
[ 20:47:50 ] strategist > After that. Long story short, RA and co rapetrained JV1V and took out a titan while the POS was pregnant
[ 20:48:15 ] strategist > was a big deal at the time, as RA locked out the system entirely - the gate wouldnt allow anyone else to jump in due to population
[ 20:48:25 ] strategist > was word of CCP involvement etc
[ 20:48:51 ] strategist > trust me I'm suprised at the lack of detail as well, then again the LV directorship was very very good at hiding their own shit
[ 20:49:24 ] Ripard Teg > I'd tell some of the details that you do know/remember. LV is long dead. I don't think they're gonna care. ;-)
[ 20:50:36 ] strategist > Heh, the only details that matter are that they gave everything to me, down to the locations of their supercap production facilities and production plans. Word to RA, a quick plan on how to lock out the system...
[ 20:50:43 ] strategist > ...and well, the rest is history
[ 20:50:55 ] strategist > Was the start of the complete downfall of LV that one, they never really recovered
[ 20:50:59 ] Ripard Teg > No, the rest is forgotten. ;-)
[ 20:51:37 ] strategist > Well, they lost their main supercap production facilities
[ 20:51:45 ] Ripard Teg > http://eve-history.net/wiki/index.php/Lotka_Volterra
[ 20:52:02 ] Ripard Teg > ^-- this 300 word article is the only thing anyone like me knows about LV, other than "red pen".
[ 20:51:55 ] strategist > back when it was a big fucking deal to have so much as a single titan in your alliance
[ 20:53:46 ] strategist > oh god that fucking mail
[ 20:53:48 ] Ripard Teg > And there's a treasure trove of info about LV compared to Curse Alliance. CA is totally, completely forgotten.
[ 20:53:59 ] strategist > course it would be, it died in 05
[ 20:54:35 ] Ripard Teg > ::nods:: But that's where you begin your story.
[ 20:54:50 ] strategist > There is little to say of curse alliance
[ 20:55:01 ] Ripard Teg > ::grins:: You're missing my point.
[ 20:55:11 ] strategist > I'm aware of your point ;)
[ 20:55:18 ] strategist > If you start somewhere, you should establish where it is
[ 20:55:31 ] Ripard Teg > My point is that you're not providing any detail or context to go with your story, so the major reaction to it is going to be "eh".
[ 20:55:58 ] Ripard Teg > That's why it's going to come off sounding like BS to most people, and even the people inclined to believe it are going to be saying "Yes? And?"
[ 20:56:34 ] strategist > To be honest
[ 20:56:40 ] strategist > I don't mind the latter
[ 20:57:00 ] strategist > If I wanted to go out with a bang, I would take the entirety of Goon's 2012/2013 plan and release it publically
[ 20:57:34 ] strategist > I just wanted to get something on paper =)
[ 20:57:37 ] Ripard Teg > "And step one is murdering cops?! What's step two, the neutron bomb?!" "No, I think we can find a middle ground."
[ 20:57:52 ] Ripard Teg > ::coughs:: Sorry. Die Hard 2. I enjoy quoting old movies. ;-)
[ 20:57:54 ] strategist > Yea, the fuel-air bomb.
[ 20:58:03 ] strategist > I am aware of the movie and I love it so.
[ 20:58:50 ] Ripard Teg > Point to this quote is that I think you can find some juicy details that are between "eh" and "Goon's 2012/2013 plan" that will make your story pop more and make it less likely to be dismissed.
[ 20:59:01 ] Ripard Teg > Some kind of middle ground. ;-)
[ 20:59:32 ] Ripard Teg > You can say "I don't care if it's dismissed"... but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't believe it if you did. ;-)
[ 21:00:06 ] strategist > If I cared about fame, I wouldn't have gone to extreme measured to hide for so many years ;)
[ 21:00:20 ] Ripard Teg > There's a difference between fame and recognition.
[ 21:09:10 ] strategist > The issue with recognition is that, like many things, it can cause problems
[ 21:10:23 ] Ripard Teg > Maybe, but I think the chances are pretty freakin' slim, if you're buried behind the number of alts you say you are. Even if you said "I did X", who's going to have records of alts that were in corps four years ago?
[ 21:10:49 ] Ripard Teg > But hey, I've made my point. Where you take it is up to you.
[ 21:11:02 ] strategist > I understand your point, and it just makes me love you more
[ 21:11:14 ] Ripard Teg > LOL Well, doesn't mean we're engaged or anything. ;-)
[ 21:11:20 ] strategist > Hah

Later, after a discussion about how to publish the document...

[ 21:17:12 ] strategist > I have an idea
[ 21:18:30 ] strategist > I find it a lot easier to talk about events when asked things. That's another issue I have. I can plan, happily, but I need prompts for discussion as I tend to be a reserved person.
[ 21:20:44 ] strategist > May I ask a favour, or pay for it
[ 21:21:14 ] Ripard Teg > Ask away.
[ 21:23:25 ] strategist > I'm willing to answer most questions I'm asked, all they have to be is sent to the right person.
[ 21:24:50 ] strategist > If I ask a favour I intend on repaying, any chance you can publish it as is, and send it to white rose? Any comments you wish to make about it are your own, my only request is you make it clear that i'm willing to answer...
[ 21:25:06 ] strategist > ...most if not all questions sent via evemail to ThatShyGirl
[ 21:25:19 ] strategist > (Another alt of mine =) )
[ 21:25:34 ] Ripard Teg > I gathered. ;-)
[ 21:25:42 ] strategist > only one of my reprocess alts are still alive and thats only cus it's still being used
[ 21:25:52 ] strategist > so I'm throwing market and production alts xD
[ 21:26:01 ] Ripard Teg > And sure, sounds like an interesting compromise.
[ 21:26:09 ] strategist > I'm just
[ 21:26:31 ] strategist > For someone great with strategy, I'm terrible at description, y'know?
[ 21:26:49 ] Ripard Teg > Heh.
[ 21:27:05 ] strategist > I know. Built a house on sand etc
[ 21:27:42 ] strategist > I'm sorry to ask this, and if there is anything I can do
[ 21:28:29 ] Ripard Teg > Give me 10 billion ISK and a puppy. You've got trillions. You won't miss it. :-P
[ 21:28:57 ] strategist > I would definitely miss the puppy. It's my puppy =(
[ 21:29:11 ] Ripard Teg > See? You don't care about 10 billion ISK. ;-)

Later...

[ 22:00:19 ] Ripard Teg > With regard to your doc, you want to send me an edited copy, or do you want me to edit it?
[ 22:09:15 ] strategist > The dropbox link I originally provided already has the edits you sent to me
[ 22:09:24 ] strategist > i can send it agian if you want?
[ 22:09:31 ] Ripard Teg > Yeah, please do.
[ 22:09:37 ] Ripard Teg > Didn't save the link, just the doc.
[ 22:09:46 ] strategist > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21467805/Recordings/The_Story_of_the_Master_Strategist.rtf
[ 22:10:04 ] strategist > Thankfully this should be the last time I call upon the blogging community in any form
[ 22:10:07 ] strategist > I hate being a burden
[ 22:12:15 ] Ripard Teg > And do you mind if I cut and paste the key portions from this convo into the post?
[ 22:12:42 ] strategist > Course not, though I respectfully request you replace XXXX with ThatShyGirl where applicable

And for the record, nope, I never did get that 10 billion ISK. Well, not so far, anyway... ;-)

It's a tough old world out there

2012-02-16T16:55:00.000-08:00

Viper: Now I'm not gonna sit here and blow sunshine up your ass, Lieutenant. A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what's happened, so he can apply what he's learned.

The other day, I was pointed a the following two kill-mails, both from EVE University. Here's one:
http://killfeed.eveuniversity.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18441

Here's the other:
http://killfeed.eveuniversity.org/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18477

Ignore the ships involved and focus on the comments. The first one is a direct order from a senior EVE University member demanding an explanation for a ship loss. The second is the pilot losing the ship immediately explaining what happened. I was asked what I thought about this. It's an easy question.

I approve of it completely, in both cases.

Almost exactly a year ago now, I wrote a "kill of the week" post that nevertheless focused on this issue. I concluded that post:

A key lesson to be learned from EVE is that every engagement, even a minor inconclusive one like this, is a good opportunity to self-analyze. Judge how you did. Decide how you could have done better. Learn from your mistakes.

The point to that post was that after a fight in EVE, it's critical to sit down and evaluate your own performance. What did you do right? What could you have done better? If you lose the ship, trace the cause of the loss back to the root: why did you lose the ship? Every ship loss can be traced back to something you yourself did, and maybe that something was a conscious choice. But it always comes back to your actions and not anyone else's.

In the U.S. these days, it's fashionable to give kids in competitions certificates, ribbons, or even trophies for participation. "Nobody's a loser" is the hidden message here. Even worse, a critical emotion is being lost: shame. Kids are often discouraged away from feeling shame for mistakes or poor performance. But, in my opinion, shame and self-evaluation after a loss are a critical part of the long-term success of the human race. There are very few successful people in life that haven't had to stare failure in the face, not once, but many times. If you expect to be successful, you'd better do the same: learn from failure.

But hell, learn from success as well. After every fight, sit down and evaluate your own performance. It's the rare engagement where you'll conclude you did everything right.

So, yes, I thoroughly approve of this kind of self-evaluation. I also approve of others jumping in to offer suggestions and advice. And I approve of demanding explanations when someone does something they clearly should not have done. "Nobody's a loser" clearly doesn't apply in EVE. And being ashamed of yourself will often prevent you from making the same mistake twice.

Think your alliance is tough about this? Rote Kapelle is famously vicious about attacking bad fittings, bad decisions, and bad piloting. And if you try to defend actions that are clearly dumb, you can sometimes find yourself hounded right out of the alliance as a result. After nearly every roam, either an "after-action" discussion on Teamspeak immediately follows, or an after-action report (AAR) is posted on the Rote forums, and the judgments in these AARs are almost always quick, logical, and brutally honest. This applies to loss-mails as well. Here's a good example of this in action...
http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=53607

Strong emotions -- including strong negative emotions -- engage long-term memory. If someone has to shame you to get you to remember you did something dumb and make sure you never do it again... You know, it's a tough old world out there and that's the right choice. In today's business world, for instance, you're not going to get far if you're not willing to own up to your mistakes. "Learn from your mistakes" and "HTFU" are often good advice for life as well as EVE.

But in EVE, these two lessons are critical survival traits.

David v. Goliath

2012-02-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

For those who might not have heard, Rote Kapelle won themselves an alliance tournament last weekend.

Nope, not AT10... we can't expect that to happen until May at the earliest. This time, it was an informal "Syndicate Alliance Tournament", made up of those alliances that live in Syndicate that wished to participate. It was primarily organized by Apathetic Brent from Rote, with some help from pBump and TimNeilson from Clockwork Pineapple. In the end, eight alliances initially signed up, though a few of them dropped out during the proceedings. The tourney was set up as a laddered double-elimination tournament.

Clockwork Pineapple, after losing their first match, hard-fought their way back to win the lower bracket, while Rote's initial opponent dropped out, giving us a Bye in the first round followed by two wins to win us the upper bracket. And, as I've already mentioned, Rote defeated Clockwork in the final. Agony Unleashed acted as the referee. I myself was pleased and proud to be on the Rote team throughout. Here are our three matches during this tournament from the perspective of Rote pilot Ben Booley:

Round 1: Rote Kapelle v. Flatline

Round 2: Rote Kapelle v. Flying Dangerous
(lots of breathing noises in this one)

Round 3: Rote Kapelle v. Clockwork Pineapple

I generally stay pretty quiet on Teamspeak during PvP, but you can hear me at a couple of points if you're curious to know what I sound like. I'm the guy that calls the scram on the Oracle late in the first match, and mentions a pBump message in Local before the third match starts.

For quite a while, entry into the official Alliance Tournaments has been partially through lottery. This was widely regarded as a very poor system and resulted in a lot of teams getting in that honestly had no business doing so. Last year, for AT9, CCP implemented a system where the four best finishers from AT8 would be automatically entered. The remaining 28 slots would be filled by 64 teams that would fight it out during two weekends of pre-qualifying matches involving 5v5 set-ups. The idea was that these 5v5 matches would be quick and would generate a lot of point differential. And that's more or less exactly how it worked. There were a few surprises, but for the most part, the best teams reached AT9.

At that point they were separated into eight groups of four teams each... where CCP seems to have assigned the groups randomly. How would you like to have been in the rather infamous group D with both Pandemic Legion and Hydra Reloaded? Or Group F, with We Form Voltron and P0wer of Tw0? Yeah, I thought so: in an EVE David v. Goliath match-up, David gets his ass kicked almost every time.

Groups A and G, meanwhile, comprised eight teams that collectively managed to go 11-15 and were all eliminated in short order. Hell, a lot of the alliances in these two groups don't exist any more.

Now I don't know how CCP intends to run AT10. But wouldn't it be nice to have brackets or qualifiers that made sense? Professional sports in the U.S. throw everyone into one big pile because everyone theoretically has the same chances in terms of money, players, and facilities. College sports, meanwhile, operate in brackets of teams with similar capabilities. Don't get me wrong: I still think that there should be a single final match. But the process for getting there should be completely revamped.

Perhaps use the group structure, but introduce it far later in the process, with more of a free-for-all earlier in the process? It might have been interesting, for instance, to throw 64 teams together using the pre-qualifying system from last year: two wins and you move on, then points. The top 32 teams move into a second qualifying phase that operates the same way, this time with three rounds. The top eight teams from the second qualifiers then move into a ladder tournament. I don't know... I'm just spit-balling here, but I think it would result in much more entertaining final matches and the process to get there would be more interesting.

It could hardly be less interesting: for the most part, the six quarter- and semi-final fights last year were deadly dull.

Of course, given the fiasco that the AT9 final turned out to be, CCP might be nervous about running AT10 at all... ;-)

FOTW: Super-cap tackling Phobos

2012-02-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

For my 50th Fit of the Week, let's go with something ultra-specialized. This is less a PvP ship than a support ship:

[Phobos, Supercap Tackle]
Damage Control II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Coreli C-Type Adaptive Nano Plating
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive
Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Stasis Webifier II
Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 200

Warp Disruption Field Generator I, Focused Warp Disruption
Warp Disruption Field Generator I
Cynosural Field Generator I
Dual Light Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency S
Dual Light Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency S
Prototype Cloaking Device I

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

In the anti-super-cap war that is surely likely to come, the Phobos is weapon #1. The purpose of a super-cap tackling Heavy Interdictor isn't to do DPS. It's to pin down and hold a super-cap (hopefully in 0.0), resisting all efforts to shake it off or pry it loose. This one does an excellent job of it in all respects. The Phobos is particularly good at this specialized job owing to its nice slot layout and mix of grid and CPU.

First, every single spare scrap of CPU and grid that can be applied to it is first put on the strongest tank possible: double plate, double Trimark with strong resists right across the board. This one has a minimum resist of 81% with a good armor pilot aboard, and 17000+ armor hit-points unbonused. You can make the tank stronger with more expensive modules, but hictors are a balance between expense and effectiveness. Though they can no longer be doomsdayed, they're still going to be the opposition's primary target. It's probably better to spend any additional ISK you are tempted to throw on this fit buying a second hictor for a friend instead. ;-)

Once you've done that, dual Warp Disruption Field Generators (one usually scripted, one usually not) are the next piece of the puzzle, followed by a cyno to bring in your own capital and super-capital fleet. A hictor without a cyno probably isn't doing its job. A cloaking device allows a number of defensive and offensive options. Quite often, for instance, a cloaky hictor sitting near a bait capital ship is used. When the bait is swallowed, the hictor decloaks and immediately activates its non-scripted bubble. That catches everything nearby. After the cloaking delay, the juiciest target nearby receives the benefit of the scripted "infinipoint."

The six other mods on this ship are all utility. ECCM prevents the infinipoint from being disrupted by jamming. A cap booster and Navy charges prevents the infinipoint from being disrupted by neuting. A web is useful for keeping quicker targets from escaping the hictor's bubble. Any grid or CPU you have left can be used to fit a small gun or two, or perhaps a small smart bomb. But laser Phoboses are quite popular this season, so that's what's shown here. There's also just enough CPU left to wedge on a Tech2 WDFG if you have the Graviton Physics V skill (and lots of hictor pilots rushed to get this skill when the new mod was made available).

Hictors typically operate in pairs or trios. A hictor using its points cannot be repaired, so using hictors is a tricky balancing act. One hictor will set up the initial tackle on the target and hold for as long as possible. As the hictor takes critical damage, about half-way through the last 30-second bubble cycle, the hictor's fresh backup will take over. The first hictor will then drop his bubble and point and receive reps and fresh capacitor from the large number of nearby Guardians and carriers supporting the cap-killing op (you do have those, right?). This gives the enemy fleet a poor choice: do they switch DPS to the new hictor or try to finish off the old one?

It quickly comes down to a race, and the side with the better reflexes and instincts usually wins. If a hictor pilot misjudges how much it can tank between cycles and can't drop the bubble in time, he dies. If the tackling side relies too much on a predictable rotation, one of the hictors will die. But if the bubbling side can coordinate their rotation of hictors (perhaps with a few light dictors), swapping damaged for fresh on an unpredictable cycle, there's often little a tackled super-cap can do except start looking at the self-destruct button...

As with all my specialized fits, this isn't a ship that you'll need very often. You may never need it. But if you ever think you may have call for a ship like this, have one available! The worst thing in the world is to need a duo or trio of hictors for super-cap tackling and not have them...

Happy tackling!

Absurdist theater

2012-02-15T14:43:00.000-08:00

It's been at least a week since I made fun of the CSM7 election 100 "likes" petition mechanic, so let's revisit it, shall we?

Last year, for the CSM6 election, there were 57 official candidates. In the December Summit minutes, we were told that the reasoning behind the petition mechanic was...

...to reduce the number of candidates to a more manageable level, down from 70 to perhaps 30-40 (although CCP doesn’t have strong preference towards a particular number). The number of candidates can (and does) have an influence on voters, being presented with a huge list of candidates is intimidating and having to form an informed opinion about 70 candidates is daunting to say the least.

"The CSM", among other things, responded to this strategy when they...

...also expressed concerns about using forum likes to poll support, since this could of course be gamed to flood the ballot with candidates with no real support.

But CSM members right up to Mittens himself said... well, let's just use Mittens's own words for this one as our example, shall we?

The new like-based nomination process will weed out many hopeless candidates, which is significant; past elections had a number of players throw their hats into the ring with no hope of actually getting elected, creating a long and cumbersome ballot. However, there is a substantial risk that an organized bloc will mass-vote weaker candidates past the 100-like-mark to clog the ballot; even a single well-organized corp could do this on a lark and nominate every hopeful. Future elections will almost certainly require a more strict nomination process to be effective.

I can only assume that Mittens wrote this in sarcastic jest. While I'm occasionally accused of being smug about trumpeting my correct predictions, I'm not going to be smug about this one. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see how this one was going to play out. Of course people were going to come out of the woodwork to "like" candidates they had no intention of voting for.

As of today, we're still two weeks from the final approved list of candidates coming out, and there are already -- by my very conservative count -- 47 candidates with the requisite 100 "likes". The Mittani (the official Goon candidate) and Dovinian (apparently the official TEST candidate) lead the pack with 1200+ and 625+ likes, respectively. But as of right now, Mintrolio -- who let's be clear here, has zero chance of getting one of the top seven seats -- has 200 likes, which very nearly as many as Trebor Daehdoow has!

Once the results are out, it will be quite entertaining to see how many candidates fail to get as many votes as they received likes. This process really is absurd, and for more than one reason.

Absurdism is a school of thought that says that attempting to find concrete meaning in life is futile because the amount of information available in most situations makes certainty about anything impossible. Absurdist theater relies on this philosophy for humorous effect. The most famous and well-known work of absurdist theater is The Marriage of Figaro, but let's go with one that most of you have probably seen: The "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" episode of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

In this episode, Dr. Baltar has what he believes to be a working Cylon detector, and is instructed to begin testing key members of the fleet. Who will be tested first is the major plot point, and the episode is filled with accusations and counter-accusations of things that it's impossible to know for sure used for very comic effect. The ultimate pay-off takes place in Baltar's lab with three loud arguments about who might or might not be a Cylon, working comically and chaotically at cross purposes happening at once while Baltar -- in the middle of it, but uninvolved -- tries to work. Frustrated, he finally screams "THAT! IS A NUCLEAR WARHEAD!" at the collective group, pointing to the only item in the room whose identity is certain. ;-) It's a scene that's always good for a lot of laughs.

In similar fashion, expect the next phase of the CSM7 election to be nothing short of this kind of absurdist theater, with the candidates looking to define and redefine the other candidates, and debating their qualities at cross purposes. Mittens has already gotten this phase started by openly making fun of some of the other candidates... This will continue and expand in what will almost certainly be an extremely competitive race, particularly at the lower end.

Should be fun to watch, and quite humorous. ;-)

Solo L4 Missioning, Part 3

2012-02-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

This guide continues the L4 Solo Mission Guide started in Part 1 and Part 2.

Warning: this is a ridiculously long post. Those of you who have been waiting for it will understand when you see it. ;-)

Once you have a properly fit L4 mission ship, it'll be time to do some missions. Your best friend as you do this will be the EVE Survival Guide. Even the most experienced mission-runner keeps this website up at all times as a reference, particularly for lesser-known missions.

Below, I give very short overviews of all the most common L4 missions, with the solo mission-runner in mind. If you routinely do missions in groups (even if they are groups of your own alts), then these notes will be less useful. They're intended for the solo pilot. I rate each mission in three categories:

Worth doing: Is the mission worth your time from an ISK/hour, bounty, or loot stand-point?
Difficulty: How hard is the mission to solo? This is rated from "Very Easy" to "Easy" and "Moderate" to "Hard" and "Very Hard".
Worth salvaging: Is it worth it, after you've completed the mission to dock, reship to a salvager, and return to the mission to loot and salvage?

Again, the focus here is on players with a single account. Most L4 missions are worth doing and salvaging if one has two accounts.

For whether they are worth doing, many missions are tagged as either "Yes/Complete" or "Yes/Blitz". A "Yes/Complete" indicates that it is worth doing, including any and all bonus rooms, and worth salvaging. A "Yes" tag indicates less valuable missions that still should be completed for their full bounties but perhaps not salvaged. "Yes/Blitz" missions are worth doing if one follows the instructions on how to blitz the mission in the EVE Survival guide. And finally, missions tagged "No" should be Declined if possible (though you may receive two such missions in short order and have to do one of them anyway.

All difficulty ratings are given based on a pilot with moderate skills (20 million skill points or so) using a navy faction battleship, strategic cruiser, or command ship. If your skills are below this par or you are in a standard T1 battleship, increase the difficulty factor by one level each: a "Moderate" mission for someone with par skills in a Raven Navy Issue becomes "Hard" if you attempt it in a T1 Raven, "Very Hard" if you attempt it with low skills in a T1 Raven. If your skills are above this threshold or you are in a pirate faction battleship, reduce the difficulty factor by one level (total): an "Easy" mission becomes "Very Easy" if you are in a Nightmare or if you have 40 million skill points.

The difficulty rating for each mission assumes that you trade out active hardeners for ones appropriate to that mission's rats.

Many missions have variants for different pirate factions. The Blockade, for instance, can appear for any of the five pirate factions. The variations are treated the same unless there's some reason to treat them differently. Blood Raiders missions, for instance, tend to be more difficult than those for the other factions because Blood ships neut or NOS their targets, which makes active tanking much more difficult. Guristas missions tend to be worth salvaging less than for the other factions because Guristas salvage is not particularly valuable and their loot value tends to lag significantly behind the other factions.

Not every single L4 mission is covered below, but these are the 25 or so mission varieties that you'll become most accustomed to...

Angel Extravaganza.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This mission is beloved for the large number of battleships it throws at you in small, easy-to-manage groups. Manage aggression carefully and you'll have no trouble at all. As a result, it is one of the highest-paying and yet easiest-to-complete L4s for a solo player. Angel salvage is some of the best there is, so it's worth coming back to salvage everything. Remember to shoot the silo in the fourth pocket for a 3% implant. The bonus room is nearly impossible to do without help or multiple accounts.

Assault, All.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Semi.

There's some difference of opinion about this mission. On balance, the bounties in this one are worth 20 million ISK or so, regardless of which variety you get. However, it's an annoying and time-consuming 20 million, particularly in the Guristas version, which offers missile battleships sniping you for good damage at 100+ km range. Aggression management is important. As a result, tanking this one can be tricky for a soloist and it's really best done with a pair of ships. Recognizing this, a lot of people just blitz these, and they are remarkably easy to blitz.

Attack of the Drones.

Worth doing: Semi. Difficulty: Easy/Moderate. Worth salvaging: Semi.

If you do any rogue drone mission, this is the one to do. However, whether you do rogue drone missions at all is going to depend on your interest in gathering drone alloy. Bounties from rogue drones are non-existent and the mission reward is sub-par to say the least. In terms of time expended, you will get your ISK out of this mission if you salvage it. Aggression management is very important in this mission.

Blockade, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Moderate/Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

In terms of bounties, the various Blockade missions are some of the most profitable L4s there are. However, all of them are relatively difficult to complete solo, particularly the Blood version which neuts the player ship heavily. The Sansha version can also be difficult (owing to Tracking Disruptors) if it is attempted in a turret boat. The best way to complete this mission is with a friend, keeping in mind that each wave will aggro independently. This mission used to not be worth salvaging due to the time it takes; the Noctis with its long-range tractor beams, however, now makes it worth-while. Aggression management is critical in The Blockade.

Cargo Delivery, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Blitz. Difficulty: Moderate (if not blitzed). Worth salvaging: No.

This is the ultimate blitz mission and there really isn't much point to doing these missions any other way. The bounties, loot, and salvage really aren't worth a soloist's time. My preferred method on this one is to go in in a cloaky frigate such as a fast bomber. You can MWD toward the can, and then cloak when the enemy ships appear. Slow-boat the rest of the way in, let the Warehouse decloak you, grab the Quafe, warp off.

Damsel in Distress.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Yes.

The bounties and salvage components off "Damsel" are no great shakes, but the loot component of this mission is why people do it. Every wreck will have loot, and much of that loot will be at least moderate (if not high) value. The mission itself is tricky in terms of aggression management, which is very important. The initial spawn will do some damage, and you might want to rebuild your tank some (letting Kruul plink away at you) before you shoot him back to trigger the first spawn of six battleships. After that, the rest of the mission is a downhill run. It's a good idea to keep your drones in as much as possible during this mission. They take damage from a variety of sources.

Duo of Death, All.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

The initial minute or so of this mission will probably give you a pounding if you complete it solo as twin high-bounty battleships snipe at you, probably from beyond your effective range. The trick to this one is long range weapons linked to a Target Painter, web, or both to deal with the stasis drones this mission throws at you. Armor ships will therefore have the advantage in this mission.

Enemies Abound.

Worth doing: Never. Difficulty: Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

The fifth part of this mission is nearly impossible for a solo player, and the entire string comes with standings loss with the Gallente and Minmatar factions. It's the rare missioner that wants to have anything to do with this mission.

Gone Berserk.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This is arguably the overall best L4 mission there is: high bounties, relatively easy to complete solo, and with great loot. Aggression management is the only tricky part of this mission. If you play it correctly, you'll have plenty of time between waves to rebuild your tank and you'll rarely if ever have more than five rat battleships on the field shooting you. Once you learn how to manage aggression, you won't have any trouble with this one, and it's well worth docking up to bring in the salvage boat.

Guristas Extravaganza.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: No.

Similar to the Angel Extravaganza, the Guristas version offers easy to manage smaller spawns of battleships separated into pockets. As with the Angel version, aggression management is important. The Guristas jamming is happily kept to a minimum, but the long-range missile weapons are a bit more annoying to counter. Guristas salvage is generally not worth coming back for, and surprisingly, the loot is often not worth it, either. The bonus room is much simpler than the Angel version and can be relatively easily done solo.

Infiltrated Outposts.

Worth doing: No. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: Semi.

As with Attack of the Drones, this mission is only worth doing if you're interested in rogue drone alloys. Damage is very easy to manage, particularly in the first room. Still, the entire mission only drops about 20 million worth of alloys and you'll have to devote fairly significant time to getting them; the ships (and later wrecks) are not in the nice tight clumps that Attack of the Drones offers. Overall, probably not worth your time.

Intercept the Saboteurs, All.

Worth doing: Semi. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Semi.

There is no easy way to blitz this mission, and the total mission bounties aren't all that impressive. Salvage is even less impressive, particularly for the Guristas version. Aggression management is important when running this one solo. A group of two to three battleships is ideal here and can wipe out this mission in a few minutes, making it worth-while. Solo, though, you'll have a slog. It's probably not worth wasting a precious "Decline" on, but it's a mission that will make you groan...

Massive Attack, All.

Worth doing: No. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

This one should really be a level 3 mission. That honestly tells you everything you need to know about it. Annoyingly, the rats are at very long range. As a result, if you do choose to do this mission, a fast battleship, a ultra-long-range battleship (Raven with a Sensor Booster, for instance), or a strategic cruiser are indicated.

Mining Misappropriation.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

You'll need a long-range boat to do this one, since virtually all of the rats come in at range. Either EM cruise missiles or Tachyon Beam Lasers will be your best friend. As a result of where the wrecks end up, salvaging this mission is time-consuming and annoying, but the bounties from 11 battleships make actually running the mission well worth your time.

Pirate Invasion, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This mission, with Worlds Collide, are the most difficult missions in terms of aggression management. Read the EVE Survival notes on it closely before attempting this mission. The Sansha version, in particular, can be tanked without too much difficulty as long as you're smart about aggression. Play it dumb, though, and you'll be facing 3000 or more incoming laser DPS, which can be hard to manage. ;-) Tanking and managing Pirate Invasion is a rite of passage for L4 soloists.

Recon, Part 1, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Easy/Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

Recon is actually quite difficult to solo. The full group is seven or more high-end battleships, which in groups, aggressed independently, wouldn't be a problem. However, these battleships come in on a set timer. As a result, if you have to warp off and return, you may find that all groups have entered the field, making the mission much more difficult. The second room is equally difficult for the same reason. IF you attack Recon Part 1, you'll find lots of good salvage. However, a lot of players just blitz this mission with a shuttle or interceptor.

Recon, Part 2.

Worth doing: Yes/Blitz. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

Recon part 2 is best blitzed. You can attack it with a battleship, and if you do, you'll find it an easy mission to solo. However, the great distance that must be traversed in this mission is quite annoying even with a battleship with a prop mod. It's simpler to just blitz it in a shuttle or frigate with a MWD. However, be careful of the final spawn: it can and will scram and web you if you don't warp out immediately after triggering it.

Right Hand of Zazzmatazz.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Semi.

If this mission is handled properly, it's not particularly difficult. If you've tanked for mercenaries properly against kinetic and thermal, the battleships don't actually do all that much damage. If you kill them first, you'll let the mission's cruisers get close to you, and they'll really start to hurt with their more mixed damage. Take the cruisers out first instead and you'll have an easier time of it. As a result of this strategy, though, salvaging this mission probably isn't worth it.

Rogue Drone Harassment.

Worth doing: No. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: No.

This is the most annoying of the rogue drone missions, the "mother drone" mission. If you have a strong tank, you can just blast through her, then mop up "her children." This will allow you to apply all of your DPS, including heavier drones. If you do not, you'll have to keep your drones docked and go after each group independently with your main weapons. Overall, though, unless you're a completist or have no other choice, this mission is really a waste of time. There are very few drone battleships to loot.

Rogue Slave Trader / Down the Slavers.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Easy/Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

The first part of this mission is ridiculously easy. The second part, however, is very difficult for a soloist. You'll need a strong EM/Thermal tank, and as a result, armor ships will have a much easier time with this than shield ships. There are different theories about what targets to take on first. I tend to focus on the battlecruiser rats, then the missile batteries. The frigates are very likely to scram you, so if you think you might have to warp off, make destroying them a priority. The close proximity of all the wrecks makes this one worth salvaging.

The Score, All.

Worth doing: No. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

The long distance between gates combined with the low bounty rats make this mission a good one to avoid unless you do it in a fast battleship or strategic cruiser.

Silence the Informant.

Worth doing: Semi. Difficulty: Moderate. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This is a difficult mission to tank, and is actually best handled with a friend. The opening room alone puts out more than 800 DPS in the form of five very tough rogue drone battleships at long range. The second room is even tougher, and demands very close aggression management. It's all doable, but count on spending a lot of time with this one if you try it alone. The biggest annoyance is the split in damage, between the Thermal/Kinetic damage of the rogue drones in the first room and the EM/Thermal damage of the Mercenary Commander cruisers in the second room. Salvaging is annoying due to the great distance between wrecks, but the Merc cruisers all drop good loot. This mission is often your best chance of picking up 'Arbalest' Heavy Missile Launchers, which are quite lucrative.

Smuggler Interception, All.

Worth doing: Semi. Difficulty: Easy/Moderate. Worth salvaging: Semi.

Aggression management is important in this one, with a lot of groups scattered over a fairly wide area (which makes later salvage probably not worth your time). If that wasn't bad enough, the mission also features long travel times between acceleration gates during the mission. That said, you can kill the rats as you travel and most soloists will find themselves pretty close to the gate by the time the last rats are falling. As long as you're smart with your aggression as you do this, this mission won't give you much trouble. Bounty in this one is middle of the road.

Spies, All (Angel Cartel Spies, Blood Raiders Spies, etc.).

Worth doing: Yes/Blitz. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: No.

The various Spies missions (there are five varieties) are the bread-and-butter mission of the blitz set. Almost all of them feature three ship groups. And in almost all of them, all you need do is destroy the group of ships with "Spy" in their names and the ones in the immediate area with them, then warp out to complete the mission. Neither the bounties nor the salvage make doing anything else with these missions worth your time. Turn it in and move on to the next one.

Stop the Thief.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Moderate/Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This is a tricky mission. You'll warp in at close range to a single mercenary battleship with ten or so rats coming at you from both directions. The moment you destroy the battleship, you'll be surrounded by an additional 10-15 ships, all at their perfect optimal ranges. No fewer than 10 of the ships can potentially scram you, too. Most pilots warp into this mission at range and snipe the initial battleship, then kite the resulting spawns. If you do it this way, the mission is relatively easy (though with mixed incoming damage making it annoying). If you try to take on the whole mess at short range, you'll likely have much more difficulty.

Unauthorized Military Presence, All.

Worth doing: Yes. Difficulty: Easy. Worth salvaging: Semi.

Long-range battleships will have no problems with these missions, the Raven Navy Issue in particular. Virtually all rats will be at long range and damage is very easy to manage. There will be an assortment of good wrecks when it's over, but their long range makes salvaging this one annoying.

Vengeance, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Hard. Worth salvaging: Yes.

This, like The Blockade, is another mission that really calls for you to have a friend. Still, skilled soloists can manage it, but will probably have difficulty with the Blood version due to the heavy neuting. Your ability to warp off from this mission might also be hampered by the many asteroids and large structures scattered around, so maintain situational awareness. Aggression is a bit difficult to manage because the groups in the first two rooms will all be very close to you, so if you do move around, keep that in mind. All those close-range wrecks, though, make salvaging a breeze.

Worlds Collide, All.

Worth doing: Yes/Complete. Difficulty: Hard. Worth salvaging: Semi.

This mission, with Pirate Invasion, is the premiere aggression management mission. If you handle aggression smartly, it's not all that difficult. But if you make even one small mistake in your aggression management, this mission will murder you. In particular, drones should be kept in a passive mode. The number of rat battleships involved here means you should read the EVE Survival reports on this one carefully as you run it. This mission is also annoying because the entry room requires long-range weapons or a fast battleship whereas the follow-on rooms are better for short-range weapons.

And that completes my L4 Solo Missioner's Guide.(1) I hope it's been useful!

(1) For the time being. I might do a supplement on armor-tanking L4 missioning at some point. No promises, though, so don't ask. ;-)

QOTW: Biggest game in the world

2012-02-13T16:23:00.000-08:00

From the "you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means" file comes this for the Quote of the Week:

With DUST 514 shipping this year, with bringing in the tens of millions of people that play shooters on PSN into the New Eden universe, EVE could be the biggest game in the world at the end of 2012.

The quote comes from an interview that Hilmar Pétursson and David Reid, CCP's new Chief Marketing Officer, conducted with Ten Ton Hammer last week. The quote itself is Reid talking about... wait. What is he talking about?

I've mentioned this before, but now it's time to start emphasizing it: DUST 514 could easily become the tail that starts to wag EVE's dog.

This quote simply serves to confirm that upper management at CCP is thinking that way, too. The Playstation Network has some 60 million accounts. EVE Online has, at best, two million accounts (most of those long inactive). To become an EVE-dwarfing success, all DUST 514 has to do is convince 5% of those PSN account-holders to play it for a while. If only 10% of them become long-term DUST subscribers, that makes DUST 514 an EVE-smashing success.

Does a successful DUST 514 launch automatically make EVE Online succeed? Maybe Mr. Reid and I disagree here, but no. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't... particularly since the EVE-DUST link still apparently exists only on a drawing board somewhere. Hopefully, there will be a lot of new information about this link at Fanfest in another month, but... you know... I kinda doubt it. I don't think CCP's had the time to really flesh this part of the equation out yet. Remember, the DUST 514 session at the CSM December Summit was cancelled because the DUST team wasn't ready to present anything at that time... not even the game itself. The CSM hasn't seen it. And unless The Mittani or Seleene or some other CSM6 member runs into the convention hall that first day of Fanfest, DUST 514 will be played by a random Fanfest attendee before it's played by a member of the CSM.

Am I worried about EVE becoming a subsidiary of the DUST 514 universe? Yep. A little bit.

Despite that, am I going to feel a little smug about predicting it would happen back in September if it happens? You betcha.

Will I be happy for CCP if it happens? Yeah, that too. Like I keep saying, I'm inconsistent. I'd like to see CCP succeed, and if this is what does it, more power to 'em. That said, I'm not going to be playing DUST 514. I'm going to be playing EVE.

A lot of people are predicting -- for various reasons -- that DUST 514 is going to fail. And sure, that's a possibility. If that happens, that leaves CCP with EVE as its successful product.

But the worry remains. Overall, there's a pretty remarkable lack of EVE content in this interview, despite the fact that both Reid and Pétursson keep injecting it into the discussion. It's just that every time they do, they inject it as a property to learn from, and features and technology to insert into DUST 514 and World of Darkness.

Gulp.

Step on it while the lights are on

2012-02-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

So, here's something amusing:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12405684

As I understand the story, here's what happened (but if you know more details, please feel free to fill them in in comments).

A pair of The Bastards., a well-known smaller piracy alliance were out haunting low-sec for targets when on directional, they spotted a Cockroach. A CCP employee was similarly spotted in Local. What's a Cockroach? You can see the smaller picture in the kill-mail. Here's a bigger one:

Word around the campfire is that CCP is looking for additional help with bug-hunting and are going to solve the problem in the time-honored EVE tradition of throwing money at it. Or at least throwing ships at it. That's right: rumor is that if you meet certain conditions on the bug-hunter team, you get one of these for your very own. Here's the database entry that's been spotted for this vessel. Short version: it's basically a hopped-up Gallente Incursus with a fun look and a cruiser-strength shield tank, but extremely thin resists. So, a hangar queen, but a hangar queen with potential for getting some fun kill-mails. Assuming they give it its gun turrets back. Right now, it has none.

In the meantime, though, one of the GMs seems to have temporarily given the ship a huge cargo bay and a huge drone bay. One supposes the model and art are being tested right now, and the extra cargo space is useful for moving lots of Cockroaches around.

Back to The Bastards., who upon spotting this unique ship, decide the logical thing to do is scan it down, which they do successfully. Combat ships are dispatched, a scram is applied. Then, if the story is to be believed, they followed low-sec piracy tradition and tried to ransom the CCP pilot! Sadly, the dev in question seems to have been AFK, so the two pilots took the next logical step: pew the ship, followed by pew the pod. +2 kill-mails.

Examination of the Cockroach wreck cargo then reveals an Enigma!

For those not aware, the Enigma is a Jove frigate that you can occasionally see CCP devs flying around Tranquility. Don't expect to see a kill-mail for one of those any time soon, though, because they're invariably fitted with all sorts of unique GM mods that make the ships nigh-unkillable.

This one was packaged and ready for pick-up, which the pilots in due course apparently did. Sadly, they could not fly the ship, as sitting in an Enigma requires the Jove Frigate skill... the skillbook for which does not (to my knowledge) exist on TQ. The fun of potentially selling this gloriously priceless trophy to a collector was similarly short-lived. The pilots involved were contacted by a GM, congratulated on their kill, and then found the Enigma was despawned and replaced with a pair of PLEXes.

Hee. Not a bad day's work! So moral of the story, if catch a Cockroach while the lights are on, step on it.

Lies and damn lies

2012-02-10T13:08:00.000-08:00

Posting frequency is down this week, and number-crunching is to blame. ;-) I've been spending a lot of time building the back-end behind three upcoming blog posts. This is the first of those.

A few days ago, I indicated my belief that it's going to take about 3200 votes to be a top seven candidate in the CSM7 election. Where did that number come from? After all, in the CSM6 election, to get into the top seven only required 2240 votes. So is Jester just talking out of his ass again?

Hang on tight, because I'm about to take you down the number-crunching rabbit-hole.

Let's start with this chart:

Stacked bar charts are often quite useful in comparative analysis, that is, the comparison of present-day results with like past results. They allow you to do a bit deeper dive into the sources of those results. You most often see them used in revenue analysis of large multi-national companies, or retail organizations with many stores or districts of stores. How did store #2382 do compared to how it did last year? Did it sell the same amount of electronics as last year? How did district #4 do compared to district #5? Did they sell the same total amount of electronics?

And more to the point here, how did the top store/district/whatever do compared to the top store/district/whatever last time? That's what this first chart shows: how did the top nine vote-getters do in the first six CSM elections? Specifically, this chart shows the percentage of the vote received by the top nine vote getters. The chair of each CSM is the left-most bar, with the ninth-place finisher on the right.

What should jump out at you first when looking at this chart is that every bar is almost the same length. What should jump out at you second is that every election except one (CSM4), the chair received nearly the exact same percentage of the vote. Let's look at these in order.

When generating this chart, I didn't count every single vote. Statistically, this turns out to be not all that useful, and it's not surprising. Every year, there are more candidates or fewer, more interest in the election or less. But every single election, there are votes placed for winning candidates and votes placed for losing candidates. Recently, I repeated a stat that Trebor came up with, the stat that for CSM6, he said that 70% of the votes were placed for winning candidates (the actual number turns out to be 68.5%). This entire blog post grew from the seed of me asking myself: "Is that unusual?"

Turns out, the answer is "no". See how the CSM4 election is kind of an outlier on the chart above? If you disregard that election, EVE players are very very consistent in this regard: 67% of CSM election votes are placed for winning candidates, election after election. Based on this, I stopped counting losing votes and the analysis of the remaining data became much easier. The chart above only counts votes cast for the top 14 vote-getters: the people that won either full CSM seats or alternate seats. Once you do that, 80% of these "winning" votes are cast for the top nine candidates and 20% are cast for the remaining five, and again, this happens election after election.

That's why all those bars are the same length.

It also turns out EVE voters are very consistent when electing the CSM Chair. Whether it's an election with a good turn-out or a poor turn-out, whether there are lots of people that care about the election or not, as you can see, five out of six times, the chair has received 16% of the winning vote. Even more interesting, though there's some variance in the top five and the bottom eight, five out of six times, the seventh place finisher has received 6.5% of the winning vote.

There's another way of looking at the seventh place finish specifically: if you again take out the CSM4 election as an outlier, the seventh place finisher has needed between 16% and 47% more votes than the seventh place finisher in the previous election.

What does this say about CSM7? Well, there are two ways of looking at it.

Taken as an annual measurement, each year, the turn-out for the CSM election has increased by 25% over the previous year. This doesn't show very clearly if you look at each election separately, but CSM elections used to happen every six months. If you remember that the CSM1 election took place in 2008 and the CSM6 election took place in 2011, the 25% growth curve comes out very clearly. So, let's assume for a moment that there's a 25% increase in total voters from CSM6 to CSM7. That's 61,370 votes for the CSM7 election of which 41,000 or so will be votes for winners.

If that's the case, the Chair (whomever that is) will take 16% of that: 6375 votes and the seventh place finisher will take 6.5% of that: 2675 votes. So, if voter turn-out again increases by 25% this year, then to ensure a seventh place finish in the CSM7 election, you need 2675 votes.

But let's assume for a second that The Mittani is going to be the Chair. Last year, Mittens tweeted that he received 1700 Goon votes. I believe that to be true. He also received 3600 or so non-Goon votes. Last year, the Goons officially supported two candidates, but actually split their vote in three because there were two unsupported Goon candidates that nevertheless drew off Goon votes. GSF is also bigger this year than it was last year, and has a large pet contingent. Let's assume that this split does not happen this year and Mittens picks up 500 or so votes from those pets. That will give Mittens between 3500 and 4000 Goon votes.

Last year, I estimated that Mittens received about 1500 of what I called :lolcsm: votes... votes from people who hoped that Mittens would just create some funny e-drama for them. These are the voters that put people like Mazzilliu on the CSM (where she delivered on that implied promise). Sadly for them, Mittens proved himself a non-dramatic, non-funny, reliable CSM Chair. As a result, I don't think Mittens is going to receive those :lolcsm: votes this year. They'll instead go to people like Mintrolio and Xenuria.

But I also estimated he received between 2000 and 2500 votes from people who were voting for him as a serious candidate, or because of name recognition. There's every reason to believe that Mittens will actually pick up more such votes. I'm inclined to think, in fact, that he'll double or nearly double this count of "serious" votes. All in all, I expect Mittens will pick up close to 7500 votes total in the CSM7 election.

If he does, and that again turns out to be 16% of the total "winning" vote, then the total vote count will be 72,200 votes in the CSM7 election, of which 48,300 will go to winning candidates. That means to ensure a seventh place finish in the CSM7 election, you need 3150 votes.

2675 votes represents a 20% increase from what was needed for that place in CSM6. 3150 represents a 40% increase. Both are well within the historical range of 16% to 47% that I mentioned earlier for a seventh place finish. So, consider that the low- and high-end for seventh place as far as I'm concerned: between 2675 and 3150 votes.

And if you're running for one of those seven seats, I'd hope for the lower number, but plan for the higher.

Six weeks and one day to go in the CSM7 elections.

Kill of the Week: Opposites

2012-02-10T10:25:00.000-08:00

There's only one thing that I can pick, honestly. But before we get to what I did pick, let's get to two kills I didn't. Here's the first:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12332943

George Talons, I don't know how you got all those implants. I don't know if you bought them in Jita, or if you just did a enormous ton of missions and bought them all with LP. Given your past kill-board history, it's quite likely the latter. But it doesn't matter: you are provably a moron. You've been a moron for a long time, and I hope people add you to their locator agents and start making a business out of killing you. That is all.

Here's the second kill I didn't pick:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12376010

Garmon, you are a bad-ass and I salute you! Big congrats to Darius III from BricK and the other pilots involved in killing you, but bigger congrats to you for having the stones to take this ship out and get some pew with it. You'll always be able to say that you have more kills with an Adrestia than a lot of EVE players have kills. EVE News 24 did an excellent job of covering this kill and how it happened in detail. That said, I can't imagine what you were thinking ejecting with (apparently) full structure and a suitcase. A screencap of a (living) Adrestia in deep structure on the other side of that gate would have been an immortal EVE classic. ;-)

So, what did I pick? The previous two kill-mails are opposites. Here's another battle between two opposites:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12386110

This one exists not only as another EN24 story, but as a Youtube video as well. First, I have to say I feel kinda bad for Edna 86. He's clearly a new pilot, and inexperienced. Even an experienced pilot doesn't expect to be can-flipped by a hauler of all things. Still, one of the bedrock rules of EVE is that you don't risk your money-maker: don't willingly put your PvE ships at risk. If you get can-flipped and you want to attack the flipper, dock up, undock in a PvP-fit ship, and see if you can find the can-flipper in that. Had Edna followed this very simple rule, his Mega would still be alive.

But it goes beyond that, of course: a solo armor buffer-fit PvE ship is a contradiction in terms. Passive shield fits for PvE are OK if you know what you're doing, and a buffer fit can be fine as a tank for PvE if you have friends along to provide reps. But a solo armor buffer ship for PvE? No. Had this Mega had some kind of active fit, it'd still be alive. Hell, had this Mega been carrying a remote armor repper in a high slot or rep drones (to keep one of its Ogres repped), it'd probably still be alive. This is why PvE ships should carry some means of repping armor for deployed drones.

So, the fault for the loss here needs to go to Edna.

That said, HulkUp does some excellent work here, too. Let's look at his fit:

[Iteron Mark V, Pew LOL]
Small Armor Repairer II
Small Armor Repairer II
Small Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

10MN Afterburner II
Warp Scrambler II
Stasis Webifier II
Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 400
Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 400

Light Neutron Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
5W Infectious Power System Malfunction

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I

The cornerstone of this fit are the three reppers and the dual cap boosters, which provide burst rep of about 190 DPS in the hands of a good pilot. The small cap boosters will only hold a single 400 cap charge each, but of course the Iteron V has an enormous cargo bay for holding additional charges. But the reload time for those charges has to be considered, since the reppers will quickly drain the Itty's cap. As a result, any kind of PvP ship above a T1 frig will take this Iteron apart in short order. But of course, it's not going after PvP ships, is it? I doubt very much HulkUp can-flips missile ships, or even turret ships with visible Tracking Computer effects. It's strictly built to get in very close to a rail/beam/arty-fit PvE ship and try to stay under its guns. Once that's done, the single blaster can be used to cut the target's drones out of the sky, then go after the host ship itself.

As a result, this is a ship where you have to pick your targets very carefully: primarily long-range PvE ships piloted by very new EVE players. An alt with a Ship Scanner wouldn't be a bad idea as well. And a lot of time will be involved.

This kill, after all, took 45 minutes: from 15:31 to 16:16. Still, it's an excellent kill in this week's battle of opposites! Nice job to HulkUp for providing it. ;-)

EDIT (10/Feb/12): For the curious, here is the Cockroach kill this week:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12405684

As I understand it, the two players involved spotted this ship decloaked but at a safe in this system, probed it out, and killed it. As you can see, an Enigma in cargo dropped! From what I understand, a GM contacted the two players, despawned the Enigma, but gave them a PLEX each in compensation. Amusing little kill!

Invalid opinion

2012-02-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of chit-chat on the EVE forums, Twitter, Failheap, and elsewhere about the validity of opinion.

The four subjects I've been hearing about it the most often are surrounding:

super-cap balancing (where I've weighed in here and very briefly on Failheap);
the transposition of sovereignty mechanics to NPC null-sec and/or low-sec (where I've weighed in on Twitter)(1);
the impact of incursions on the EVE economy (where I've weighed in everywhere); and,
botting (where I've likewise weighed in everywhere).

In all four cases, there's a difference of opinion among EVE's intelligentsia about whether or not the opinions of people not involved in these activities matter. And in a twist that I find highly ironic, the answer seems to be "no", "no", "yes", and "yes", respectively. Put another way:

people who don't own super-caps apparently aren't allowed to bitch about super-caps; and,
people who aren't in sov-holding alliances apparently aren't allowed to comment about EVE sov mechanics and how they're applied; but meanwhile,
people who've never run an incursion in their lives apparently are allowed to propose massive changes to incursions; and,
people who don't bot apparently are allowed to propose how bots should be dealt with.

I find that dichotomy interesting.

I put the four topics in that order specifically because the two on either end -- super-caps and botting -- are both the topics most familiar to a wide swath of EVE players. On the other hand, the two in the middle (sov and incursions) are mostly of interest to EVE cognoscenti of various stripes and are less interesting those who aren't all that involved. All four topics, however, create quite a lot of e-drama within whatever audiences do subscribe to this opinion or that one. And yet, the irony remains: there exists exact opposite opinions on whether people should be allowed to talk about four problems which are in essence rather similar.

Why are they essentially similar? Because all four of them are viewed by a subset of players as existential threats to the game.

The e-drama comes from the fact that when I say something like "people who don't own super-caps aren't allowed to bitch about super-caps" or "people who don't bot are allowed to propose how bots should be dealt with", no matter which position I or anyone else champions, there will be dozens -- if not hundreds -- of people who will call bullshit. It's just the number of people involved that differs. Most people, when presented with discussions of sov or incursions, don't care all that much. It's a smaller but vocal number of players that are up in arms about it.

A couple of weeks back, I had the "you've never owned a super-cap so you shouldn't be talking about super-caps" thing thrown in my face a few times, thought it through for a few days, and decided that while I understand that position, I disagree with it. Super-caps affect me because they affect how I play EVE: I rarely undock in a battleship without considering the possibility and likelihood of hot-drops, for instance. My hictors (of which I have a couple) are specifically fit to tackle super-caps. Even in NPC 0.0, I encounter super-caps quite frequently, though of course in smaller numbers than what I used to encounter when I was a sov warrior. And finally, my main characters are all approaching the number of SP where I have to decide if a super-cap is one of my own end-game goals in EVE simply because sometime this year, two of them are going to run out of things to train for if I decide they're not.

So like it or not, I'm involved in that one, and in a variety of ways. I could make similar arguments for the other three, two of which I've directly done, the other one (botting) I haven't.

Botting comes up with the other three despite the fact that though it inspires a lot of passion in people, it's also a topic that's becoming less controversial year by year in New Eden, not more. It used to be very clear: everyone was against botting. These days, the player base is a lot less clear cut on this issue. We're in CSM election season and trust me: all four of these topics are going to come up. But last year, you couldn't go two posts in a CSM candidate's Jita Park post before "botting! is! a! cancer!" came up.

This year so far, it's barely visible at all, except in a question that UAxDEATH was asked about it on Failheap. His answer was interesting to say the least. It essentially boiled down to "if CCP doesn't care about botting, why should I?"... and the questioners on Failheap just seems to have accepted that answer. Quite a change from last year! Last year, if you even hinted at anything other than "Death! to! bots!", you were endlessly hounded. This year so far, it's rating a "meh". Hell, that lack of passion is in and of itself becoming a source of passion for some people. ;-)

Now, invalidating the opinions of others is, of course, nothing new either in EVE or in life. I'm sure the very first caveman that pointed over a hill and grunted that hunting was probably better over there was told that since he'd never been over that hill, he wasn't qualified to say how the hunting there was. "Opinions are like assholes", the (crude) old saying goes, "everyone has one"... with the unspoken implication that most people's opinions are as unpleasant as the body part they're being compared to.

Still, I live in the U.S., which means I believe in free speech. I play EVE, which means that I can be an anti-social jerk when the mood strikes me.(2) And I blog about EVE, which means I have a pretty thick skin. The combination of those three factors means that I'm going to continue to weigh in on these four topics even if it means the occasional anonymous commenter goes out of his way to try to invalidate my opinion.

Sorry about that

P.S. Solo L4 Mission Guide Part 3 tomorrow most likely, so you can quit asking about it, anonymous commenter. ;-)

(1) Note to self: write post about the transposition of sov mechanics to NPC 0.0 and low-sec space.
(2) Hush.

FOTW: Alpha Tornado

2012-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

It was tempting to do something a little one-off this week, but no, I'm going to go very straight-forward. Here's what's emerging as the optimal alpha version of the Tornado:

[Tornado, 1400s RCU]
Reactor Control Unit II
Gyrostabilizer II
Gyrostabilizer II
Tracking Enhancer II

Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive
Invulnerability Field II
Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed
Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution
Large Shield Extender II

1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L
1400mm Howitzer Artillery II, Republic Fleet EMP L

Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

This is the ship that I mentioned a week or so ago when I was talking about tracking on larger ships against smaller ships (though for the actions in that post, I modified this fit a fair bit). As I said in that post, the last thing this ship is about is finesse. Put a flock of these 40 to 50 kilometers off targets, and -- particularly if either the target or the Tornado is stationary -- those targets will die in short order. Seven of these ships will do about 70,000 alpha. Adjusted for sig radius, that's enough to kill virtually any battle-cruiser in one cycle. Twelve or so will be needed to alpha a well-fit, well-flown Guardian. The numbers go up from there.

Let's talk about the fit first, then talk tactics.

The cornerstone of an alpha ship, whether Tornado, Maelstrom, or Machariel or anything else, is a full rack of Tech2 1400mm Howitzers supported by two Gyrostabs. With the correct faction ammo loaded, this gives you 10,000 alpha, which is what your FC is probably going to calculate based on. Thanks to boosters, faction mods, skill variation, and the like, some ships will be able to produce more than 10,000, but that's the average that's used. Anything that reduces your alpha below that magical 10k number is therefore a bad thing. This is usually due to Tech1 guns, bad ammo choices, or only fitting a single gyro. To those mods, you add a single Tracking Enhancer and a single Tracking Computer. These have two practical effects:

they increase the range of your alpha with the highest damage ammo; and,
they effectively decrease the signature of the ship that you can alpha.

If significant portions of your gang can't hit the 10k alpha number, you'll have to increase the number of Tornadoes you bring to compensate. It's also not a bad idea to have a Target Painter or two among your fleet somewhere to light up the primary. On the Rapier or Huginn is a good place to put it, or they can be elsewhere in your support fleet.

The guns, gyros, and tracking mods are the most important parts of the fit. Everything else is rather secondary, or goes toward making it possible to fit those 12 mods. This particular fit requires Advanced Weapon Upgrades V and Energy Grid Upgrades V. A variant of this fit replaces the RCU2 with a PDS2, then replaces one of the Core Defence Field Extender rigs with a second Ancillary Current Router. That version of the fit has an easier time with cap management while skirmishing but the tank is a bit thinner. Still, if you frequently skirmish with Tornadoes, that fit might work better for you; if you're caught in a Tornado, a few more thousand EHP is not going to make a lick of difference. Still, no sense making it easier for assault frigs and destroyers (the two most frequent banes of tier3s), so the rest of the mods comprise a little bit of tank.

I've covered skirmishing tactics before, but they're doubly important in this ship. Overheated without links, a Tornado goes 2400m/s, which is sufficient to outrun almost anything that's a serious threat. As a result, when skirmishing, trade out the Tracking Computer script for a range variant and try to stay 40 to 50 kilometers away from what you're shooting at, opening range as needed to avoid getting tackled. If your FC is smart, the entire Tornado gang will be aligned to a celestial or bookmark as they open range. If you notice yourself becoming the primary of the enemy gang, warp off. You don't have the tank to take any kind of real punishment, and lacking drones, you have no other GTFO options.

Tornadoes are horribly vulnerable to small tackle as I mentioned, so the support fleet for a alpha Tornado gang is just as important as the alpha. You're going to need a small contingent of anti-frig cruisers of your choice. Since the Tornadoes also lack tackle, it will also be quite helpful to have a Lachesis and a Huginn/Rapier along. Skirmish Tornado gangs should also bring skirmish links, notably the Rapid Deployment link.

One tricky part of flying Tornadoes is not to outrun your guns. Linked, overheated Tornadoes burning off a gate are so fast -- speeds above 3000m/s are fairly easy to achieve -- that it's only going to take you 20 seconds or so to burn outside the effective range of your guns. In a lot of cases, your FC will remind you how many times to cycle your MWD, but a lot of FCs forget. If you're not paying attention, you could find yourself far out in front of your fleet, cycling your guns uselessly for a miss or much reduced damage and having to take 15 seconds to reset your ship's position before the next volley. Even worse in this situation, it is even easier to over-compensate, burn toward your targets to get back into range and due to pilot error, end up getting tackled and killed. So try to be really precise when flying this ship. It's not very forgiving of mistakes.

Happy alpha!

Maid service

2012-02-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie, and probably one of those things that's only interesting to me.

One of the over-looked changes to the game in Crucible was this one:

Captains Quarters visual appearance now changes depending on the security status of the system they are in. If the Captains Quarters look shiny and beautiful in high sec, they now get more dirty and worn deep in null sec.

I've been occasionally looking for evidence of this, but haven't found it. Was it actually implemented? Here are side-by-side shots of Ripard in a -0.01 system and one of my alts in a 0.7 system. Maybe I just don't have access to deep enough null for the difference to show? Guess I'll have to find a NPC station deeper in null to check.

Oh, and I don't own that coat. I took the screenshots with Ripard on Sisi. ;-) Speaking of which, if you're curious about NeX clothes but don't want to buy NeX clothes, you can buy them for 100 ISK per piece on Sisi, have a look at them, then forget about them.

I was going to post that while cleaner quarters made sense in high-sec (where there are more Minmatar slaves available to do the menial work, natch), it didn't make much sense in terms of:

lower occupancy rates in null-sec (presumably, I get a set of quarters to myself, there, instead of sharing them with hundreds of others); and,
lowering newer player investment in moving to null (if you liked Incarna when you joined, why would you make it look worse as you gain more in-game experience?).

But since the change appears invisible or wasn't implemented, I guess these are non-issues.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

2012-02-07T16:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a list of who I consider the more interesting CSM7 candidates who are not CSM6 incumbents. Each of these candidates have either declared publicly or made it reasonably clear that they are running. To declare publicly, I would expect to see a blog post, a post on Jita Park, or the equivalent. For each, I list a very short claim to fame or reason why I think they'll be interesting. The candidates are listed in the order that I expect them to be "serious" candidates with a good shot of winning a seat.

Confirmed as running:

Dovinian (TEST candidate)
riverini (EVE News 24 Editor)
Kelduum Revaan (EVE University CEO)
Hans Jagerblitzen (faction warfare)
Alekseyev Karrde (small gang)
Michael BoltonIII (TEST)
T'amber Anomandari Demaleon (past CSM member/Ships of EVE)
John Revenent (low-sec/small gang)
Iam Widdershins (high-sec ganking)
Blake Armitage (industry blogger)
Mike Azariah (role-playing)
Lyris Nairn (non-spergy Goon)
Xenuria (tool)
Mintrolio (tool)

This post will be updated as I learn more.

EDIT (8/Feb/12): Kelduum has formally announced.
EDIT (9/Feb/12): Iam Widdershins and Blake Armitage have formally announced.
EDIT (12/Feb/12): riverini, Michael BoltonIII, Akekseyev Karrde, and Mike Azariah have formally announced.
EDIT (15/Feb/12): Dovinian is apparently the official TEST candidate.

Shotgun

2012-02-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

Today, the CSM7 candidacy period begins. CCP Diagoras says in the devblog reminding us that it's likely to be "an interesting election". I think that's understating the case by a good bit. ;-) Starting today, we should start to see official candidate posts out in Jita Park on the EVE-O forums. A few such posts are already out there.

I think we're going to see a very unusual election in terms of voting dynamics this time. I'm going to make another CSM7 prediction right now: if you're running and you're not in a null-sec bloc and you're not a CSM6 member, you're not going to make the top seven seats. It's looking to me like the top seven seats are going to get 3200 or more votes each, with a likely split of four or so null-bloc seats and three or so non-bloc CSM6 incumbents who are successful in their reelection campaigns. Newcomers are likely going to find the higher threshold impossible to crack, and I have not heard about a newcomer yet in this race that could crack that threshold the way Seleene did last year (with one possible exception).

In the mid-tier, I think we're going to see an additional three to four candidates with between 2400 and 3200 votes who just miss out on the top seven but who are going to be otherwise indistinguishable from them: null-sec candidates or CSM6 incumbents who run successful election campaigns.

In short: of the 14 CSM7 seats, I think ten or eleven of them are either going to be familiar names, or interchangeable replacements for familiar names. For instance, I don't see Killer2 winning reelection (his base is gone), but he'll be replaced with a null-sec bloc representative from the DRF, or -A-, or the like. Only the bottom three or four are going to be new faces... but interestingly enough, I think the number of votes needed for those bottom four seats is going to be a bit less than last year. I think 800 votes or so will probably do it. On the low-end, it's really looking to me like we're going to see more fragmentation than we saw last year, not less. Comments about "wasted votes" aside, I think there are going to be so many people competing for those last few seats that the margin of victory for them is going to be pretty tight and so we're going to see more of those "wasted" votes this year.

Overall, though, I think the general personality of CSM7 is going to be the same as CSM6: a very strong null-sec focused CSM with a very few wild cards here and there to make things slightly less dull and one-sided.

Right around the last week of February, I'll be endorsing who I think would be good CSM7 candidates. I'll be looking at the candidates in six categories:

Will this candidate do the work? There are some candidates that are good selections that nevertheless have not or can not demonstrate that they have the time to commit to the CSM.
Does this candidate best represent an important segment of the player base? On paper, this is an easy one, but I'm not judging this one on a curve. Given the limited number of chairs in Iceland, I'm going to pick the person I think most uniquely represents each segment of the player base.
Does this candidate project a positive impression of the EVE player base? As far as I'm concerned, the CSM is becoming too important for trolls, jerks, or :lolcsm: candidates to be part of the process. Every such candidate just serves to encourage CCP to end the CSM experiment.
Does this candidate deserve to be in the top tier? This is quite subjective, I'll admit, but I make no apologies for it. There are some people that are otherwise good candidates that nevertheless in my opinion do not deserve to be there for whatever reason.
Do I endorse this candidate? Whether or not I'll be voting for them (see below), would I support this candidate to get one of the top seven CSM seats? I'll be choosing seven people to endorse.
Will I myself be voting for them? Easy one, and a smaller group. I have four votes this year. I'll be looking to give one candidate two votes, and two other candidates one vote each. So most likely, three people will get a "yes" here, though it might be as low as two and as high as four.

Later today, I'll start a post listing who I think the more important, interesting, and unusual CSM7 candidates are that aren't CSM6 incumbents. As they publicly declare themselves, they'll get listed, so that's another post that I'll keep updating between now and February 29th, and I'll be choosing people off that list to look at in the six categories above.

Chances are pretty good that I'm going to do my endorsements as one or two posts instead of unique posts on each candidate, just so the people who aren't interested in this CSM stuff at all don't have too many posts to skip. ;-)

Let Election 2012 begin!

Proliferation game

2012-02-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

So, what's wrong with super-capital ships? Let's put them into perspective.

A typical PvP battleship -- a Tempest, say, or an Apocalypse -- costs the pilot about 200 million ISK fully fit, loaded, and ready for combat. A really pimp pirate faction battleship -- a Vindicator, for instance -- costs between two and three billion ISK. That's between 10 and 15 times as expensive as the cheaper ship. Let's suppose our pimped-out pirate faction battleship had the following advantages over its cheaper cousin:

its buffer tank is 15 times stronger; and,
it does eight times more DPS; and,
it has the area of effect e-war attack of a Scorpion; and,
it is immune to e-war itself; and,
it has an interdiction nullifier capability similar to a strategic cruiser.

Would you say that ship is a little bit over-powered? I suspect you might. ;-)

And yet this is the difference between a Thanatos costing about 1.5 billion ISK and a Nyx costing about 22 billion ISK -- 15 times more. Put rather blatantly, if Vindicators worked like this, then that Vindicator would do 6000 DPS, would have 1.8 million EHP, would be immune to e-war and webs, would have an area of effect jamming attack, and would be immune to most forms of tackle. And it would still cost two to three billion ISK.

Sign me up for one of those Vindicators, please.

But apparently a super-carrier that costs 15 times more than a carrier and can do all of those things is perfectly OK.

"Super carriers cost a lot of ISK", we're told, and sure, that's true. "Since they're so expensive, they should be better than other types of ships," we're also told, and that part is BS. The value proposition of a super carrier is ridiculously, ludicrously high. It is so far over-powered compared to other types of ships in the game that it may as well be a ship in another game entirely. Likewise, this kind of comparison renders laughable CCP's recent attempts to nerf super carriers. The tanks of armor super carriers were reduced some 15% and its non-fighter/fighter-bomber drones were removed.(1) When compared to its other advantages, I think it's pretty clear that these were weak nerfs at best, feeble and impotent ones at worst. Put into perspective, our Vindicator has 1.8 million EHP instead of 2.1 million EHP and loses its ability to shoot light drones. Color me unimpressed.

In order to truly balance super carriers and bring them in-line with the game's other ships, CCP is going to have to take drastic action. Anyone think they will?

To put Titans into perspective, let's assume for a minute that our Vindicator cost 10 billion instead of 2.5 billion. In this case, we'd have a Vindicator that, in addition to all of the advantages above, could also:

use gang links like a Command Ship; and,
would give every ship in its gang an additional massive gang bonus; and,
could jump people around the region like a Black Ops battleship, except it could do this for any type of ship and at much longer range; and,
could generate jump clones for people; and,
would do ten times more DPS than a standard battleship instead of eight times more; and,
would track targets between two and three times better than a standard battleship; and,
would be able to insta-volley one enemy non-faction battleship of its choice every ten minutes; but,
would have to give up the Scorpion-like e-war attack (awwww).

Anybody think such a Vindi would be over-powered, even if it cost 10 billion ISK? I suspect you do. But again, Titans are obviously perfectly OK too, aren't they? Yes, that was sarcasm.

Now granted, with 4300 or so super-caps in the game right now, if CCP started taking drastic action to correct these blatant deficiencies, there would be quite a lot of player rage. And that rage would just as obviously come almost exclusively from the most loyal, long-term EVE players.

But the more time CCP lets go by on this issue before they take action, the worse it's going to get. As I said yesterday, there's going to be 5500 super-caps this year. 7000 or so the year after that.

Anyone think the problem's going to be easier to solve then?

(1) With the recent addition of dead-space Invuls, the shield supers were essentially buffed, so we'll ignore them for the purposes of this conversation.

QOTW: That's a lot of supers

2012-02-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

This week's quote of the week comes thanks to CCP Diagoras. I know I complained about the trivial information that he'd been posting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, but I'm happy to report that -- if you're willing to dig -- he's posting some really interesting information now! The trick is, Diagoras gives you one bit of information today, another last Tuesday, and a third a month ago. You kinda have to put them together if you want to build a picture.

I'm going to cover some of this in detail, but let's start with this as the QOTW:

23 supercaps destroyed in Jan, alliances with most kills were Solar Fleet (5), PL (3).

Now, let's go back a month, when Diagoras said this:

Almost 1 supercap destroyed a day on average in 2011. 355 total, 269 supercarriers and 86 titans. #tweetfleet

Now, granted, there were a couple of really good-size super-cap battles in 2011, notably when the NC and the DRF first clashed last spring. So, you can't look at January's average of 0.75 supers dying per day and compare it directly to 2011's full year average of 0.97 supers dying per day.

Yet. We'll need a few more months of data first.

But one thing is clear: a few ratting Titans aside, we're seeing more super-cap blobs being used in 2012 than we saw in 2011, with generally better fits, being used in smarter ways, with fewer stupid losses. As a result, I think I can confidently predict that there will be fewer super kills in 2012 than there were in 2011. On 19 January, Diagoras tweeted this:

@DarkeMaske 4,213 supers being flown total. 3,384 supercarriers, 829 titans. #tweetfleet

Six days later, on the 25th, this:

60 titans, 60 supercarriers built in December; 45 titans, 95 supercarriers built in November. #tweetfleet

That means we're seeing 4.20 supers being built per day on average in those two months. Even if we assume that 1 super will be killed per day on average this year, that 4213 supers at the beginning of 2012 is set to become just shy of 5500 supers at the end of 2012. That's an increase of 28% in one year.

Want to hear the really scary part? If we take the November/December average as the average for 2012, that's fewer supers than were built in 2011. The total count of supers built in 2011?

2011: 1,646 supercarriers built, 370 titans built. 269 supercarriers destroyed, 86 titans destroyed. That's a lot of supers. #tweetfleet

That's 5.5 supers built per day in 2011, in fact.

Why is this a problem? Someone actually asked about this on Failheap last week. I'll have a bit to say about that tomorrow.

In the meantime, thanks to CCP Diagoras for the much-improved information! Keep it coming! I'll be piecing together a lot of disparate tweets about other topics in the next week or so.

Unintentional ally of the KOTW

2012-02-04T17:12:00.000-08:00

Presented only with the comments of the people behind the kill-mail (sic throughout):
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12319988

Baron Holbach > lol i just make my biggest fuckup for some tim
Captain Torlek > what u do this time
Baron Holbach > scanned out nice freighter and other side ready to gank and forgot pilot name
Baron Holbach > just type = providence
Captain Torlek > whoops
Baron Holbach > and providence jumped
Baron Holbach > but wront one and we nuke it
Baron Holbach > right one jumped like 30 sec later...

KOTW: Circumstantial evidence

2012-02-03T16:32:00.000-08:00

This week's KOTW is just one I found really interesting. Not particularly expensive or anything, just interesting:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12297339

First things first: Rooks and Kings are pro. I might bitch about them from time to time, but these guys know what they're doing. And in a extremely tough alliance, Guillotine Therapy is one of their best corps. They have a 90% efficiency rating measured over almost three years. I might bemoan R&K's over-reliance on reps and Logistics to put risk aversion onto a pedestal and worship it, but hey... if that's what you're going to do, this corp does it better than almost anyone else in New Eden.

So the first thing you have to assume when you're looking at a R&K loss-mail is that they knew what they were doing when they fit it that way.

Because on paper, even the idea of a shield-fit Moros is remarkably bad. And the idea of two of them is even worse. Clearly these are fail-fits. Clearly. And if you were looking at anything but an R&K ship, you could just assume that and go on with your life.

There's only one tiny tiny, baby-sized problem with this assumption. These Moroses, two just like them, and one carrier ripped the living crap out of an enemy fleet with twice their caps, a tower, and a strong defense fleet. How does that happen exactly?

The trick is where this fight happened: J151909, a class 5 Pulsar wormhole.

One of the things that null-sec and low-sec PvPers tend to forget is that a lot of the wormhole systems have environmental effects that greatly adjust the characteristics of ships that fly there. Pulsars have the following effects:

Description	Effect
Signature Radius	+85%
Armor EM Damage Resistance	-34%
Armor Kinetic Damage Resistance	-34%
Armor Thermal Damage Resistance	-34%
Armor Explosive Damage Resistance	-34%
Shield Capacity	+85%
Capacitor Recharge Cycle	+41%
Targeting Range	+85%

Suddenly, the idea of bringing an armor-tanking fleet doesn't seem like such a hot idea, does it? ;-) That means you're bringing a shield fleet into this wormhole. And as long as you're bringing shield dreads, why not bring Moroses? Few people can fly Naglfars or Phoenixes, and the only real disadvantage to the Moros is how cap-hungry its guns are. With a large cap recharge bonus, suddenly that becomes quite a bit less of a problem. The shield capacity bonus, meanwhile, gives the Moros that was killed a million more effective hit-points. Yeah... a million. So I suspect it took the defense fleet a while to get that kill...

One thing that R&K do so very right is theory-craft the hell out of their setups. A nice and often-overlooked feature of EFT is that it can simulate wormhole environmental effects with no problem. Look in the upper left-hand corner of the tool with the other ship modules, right under "Gang Assist Modules" and you'll find "Environmental Effects". Click on the "Projected Effects" button at the bottom of your ship fitting and a small window will open up below the ship's modules. Drag the appropriate wormhole effect into that box and you'll be able to see how that type of wormhole affects your favorite ship fitting.

Keeping an eye out for wormhole environmental effects is something that null-sec and low-sec corps looking for a little w-space pew need to keep in mind. If you decide to go hunting in a hole, make sure your FC or your scout is using Static Mapper or another trusted mapping site to keep an eye out for these kinds of effects! Static Mapper has the advantage that it works quite well in EVE's in-game browser.

Though this fitting looks fail at first glance, the circumstances made the ship a lot more impressive than it might otherwise appear...

Grind

2012-02-02T22:32:00.000-08:00

So, for various reasons, I'm trying to increase my standings with one of the Empire factions, and there wasn't much going on in Rote tonight (note to CCP: most of them were playing Tanks). So I grinded up some solo missions for about an hour and a half. And while I was doing it, I listened to "Beers with Bolton". I don't listen to a lot of pod-casts, but I was pointed to this one because Michael Bolton would be interviewing three people I am interested in: CCP Soundwave, The Mittani, and White Tree. Call it the first interview of the CSM7 election season.

So, I sat down and listened while I grinded, because God knows the missions themselves didn't exactly require my attention. The podcast is actually a "video" because Bolton intended for all four principals to use webcams. Unfortunately, only Bolton had a webcam, so the other three are represented by (rather amusing) stock photographs.

The total length of the presentation is about 95 minutes, and here are the topics of interest in the first two parts:

Soundwave thinks the idea that "Provi is shit, so CVA can have it" and the larger implication that there should be shit space for smaller alliances to hold is awesome. I have not the words.
White Tree is not running for CSM7. (I've updated my CSM6 Incumbents post to reflect this.)

Yep, that's pretty much it. More interesting stuff starts in part 3 of the video:

Soundwave and other CCP employees, some Sony employees, and other "selected people" can now access DUST 514 from their Playstations at home, rather than having to play-test it at the office. The CSM has not yet played DUST 514. (I knew this last one from Two Step mentioning it on Twitter.)
DUST characters and vehicles, including the ground troops, are fit just like EVE spaceships. You also start with a certain number of better assault rifles, but once you lose all of them (in battles), you can either buy new stuff, or there is "a newbie frig-like setup that you can always access."
In all other ways, DUST is "like EVE as an FPS."
The interaction between DUST and EVE "will be vague for a little while", but Soundwave thinks it will be a topic of interest for the next CSM and at Fanfest.
Soundwave says he's been playing EVE, living in a wormhole for the last six to eight months.

In part 4, I learned:

According to The Mittani, Prometheus Exanthal ignored the CSM for the first six months of the term, and only started "tuning in" very recently. That confirms my impression of him.
It's not a good idea to run an interview while drinking heavily. You might have to use the restroom immediately after asking a question, and the interviewees might decide to ignore the question.
Michael Bolton is running within TEST to be their official candidate for CSM7.
Soundwave is leaning toward just negating the moon rebalancing factor by turning them into a resource that people can mine for.
The Mittani, to my extreme aggravation, then cuts Soundwave off and starts talking about his ideas for moon rebalancing for literally six times as long as Soundwave gets on the topic.

Then, just as part five begins, Mittens bemoans the fact that wars no longer happen because of "rage and hate" and implies that holding more than a single region of sov is pointless (other than the region's tech moons, I assume). The statement that wars no longer happen because of rage and hate, and instead happen because of resources would seem to directly contradict the statement "the CSM" made about this topic at the December Summit. Maybe Mittens changed his mind.

Then finally, finally, also in part five, Soundwave gets to speak for two whole minutes without being interrupted. Yay! In that short period of time, he says:

The summer patch is going to focus on "fundamentals" and "old systems that are hampering us."
He emphasizes that the war-dec system is going to be redone, particularly as it applies to Empire war-decs.
Faction Warfare is going to receive a massive rework.
CCP is going to build in more tools for alliances to "make money off their members."
Then they're going to "get rid of the massive 'own this moon and you're set forever'" system.
They're going to look for ways to foster animosity between null-sec alliances, hopefully breaking the NAP-fest in null.
Instead of trying to foster conflict through resources, they're going to try to foster conflict through social means.

But then just as he gets on a roll, he gets cut off again! Damn it!

Later on, Soundwave mentions that he'd like POSs in EVE to be more like "houses in Skyrim": a place that you live and that's yours and set up how you like and that every EVE player should want one of. And that's a damn good idea, IMO. He also acknowledges that if they start to do something and they find that the majority of players don't like it, CCP has come to the realization that it's probably a bad idea.

And despite the fact it goes on for another 30 minutes after that, that was pretty much it. Well, other than one thing: if you're a creepy guy sending CCP Punkturis unsolicited gifts and messages, please stop. It just reinforces the gamer stereotype, and reading between the lines, this has apparently become a source of concern at CCP.

Thanks to Michael Bolton for running this, but dude: next time you have CCP Soundwave on, get him to talk. As a result, overall, it's probably not worth your time to actually listen to this. Well, unless you have some missions to grind yourself, I guess.

Turtles all the way down

2012-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

Every time I feel like I've drilled to bedrock in EVE, someone comes up to me and says "No, there's this whole other layer. Let me show you."(1)

Once a week or so, someone sends me an EVE mail or a Twitter message asking for my help with something. "How do I promote my blog?" or "What corp should I join?" or "What ships should I train for?" Stuff like that. Still, every once in a while, the request is "Will you read this and make suggestions on how to improve it?" And if I'm not too terribly busy, I'm happy to help.

I got such a request in December... and what I was asked to read was the written equivalent of a case full of explosives. In a minute, you get to read it, too.

First thing: I didn't write the document that follows. It was sent to me. I'm just the publisher.

Second thing: the document might be a massive (and successful) troll. You have been warned. Still, I have permission to publish this, and I have the name of an EVE player's account who will answer questions about it. Initially, I was going to work with an EVE news site on this, but the author doesn't have a high opinion of EN24, and over the last month, I decided to run with it myself. It might be a troll, but it's one of those things that even if it's not true... it feels true. And whether it's true or not, it's not "news" as such.

Third thing: the document goes over some pretty ancient EVE history. If you're not familiar with the names, you'll probably find the (now defunct) EVE History Wiki extremely useful. In particular, CA is Curse Alliance and LV is Lotka Volterra, alliances from what I think of as the first age (2003-2005) and second age (2005-2007) of EVE Online, respectively.(2) From my perspective, the second age of EVE Online ended when Shrike's first Titan died in the summer of 2007. A solid majority of you reading this probably started playing EVE after that happened. But the most interesting parts of the document end about the same time that Titan explodes.

Ready to read the document? Here it is (download the original RTF):

The Story of the Master Strategist

Is what's in this document true? I refer to periods lasting only two years as "ages" in the life of EVE Online because they may as well be centuries long. Stuff that happened that far back disappears into the mists of people's memories, even assuming the people involved are still around. Very few people have documented proof of anything. Still, I spent some time digging and I couldn't find anything that directly contradicts anything in this document. If it's a troll, it's a very well-executed one and maybe I just haven't been playing EVE long enough to see where it's obviously wrong.

Still, it corroborates a lot of the feeling that I'm getting about the number of layers in this game. I'll have more to say on this topic in another day or three, but there are EVE players out there with quite literally more ISK than they will ever be able to spend if EVE is still being played 50 years from now. Dr. EyjoG might believe that he has ultimate control over the levers in the EVE economy, and the average EVE player might believe incursion-runners are at fault for the price of PLEXes, but I don't believe those things.

Conspiracy theorists are looked at like they're nuts when they say that only a few people control the real-world economy. But in EVE, I'm coming increasingly to the belief that's pretty much the truth.

I personally know an EVE player whose long-term goal in the game isn't to steal a trillion ISK or to own a Titan or to lead an alliance. His ultimate end-game goal is to crash the tritanium market. The entire tritanium market. Across all of New Eden. At the same time. The last time I talked to him, his personal EVE finances ran to 15 digits... that's hundreds of trillions of ISK. And this week, I talked to someone who claims 16 digits. And based on what he told me, I have no reason to doubt him. He says there's a small cabal of people who ultimately control PLEX prices, and I have no reason to doubt that, either. In the real world, there are laws and governments to prevent this kind of thing happening, but New Eden doesn't have any of that.

So the idea that there is (or was) a small group of people sharing back-end top-level information about EVE's largest alliances is, by contrast, pretty easy for me to believe.

It's turtles all the way down.

Have a question for the author of this document? Post it in comments. I'll compile them and send them along. Have some way of proving this document a troll or a falsehood? I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, failing that, I'll have more to say on this topic (plus some of the questions I asked him) in a day or three.

(1) When I tweeted this sentence last month, Duncan Feldane joked in return "You think that's bedrock you're breathing?" Bravo!
(2) As far as I'm concerned, we're currently in the fifth age of EVE Online. It began last spring when The Mittani became Chair of CSM6 and the Haven/Sanctum nerf led directly to the fall of the NC.

Bicyclist on the roadside

2012-02-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

The following post has absolutely nothing to do with EVE. Nothing at all.

Hypothetical situation: driving uphill on a lonely two-lane mountain road, you come upon a bicyclist going in your direction at the edge of the road. Just off the edge of the road is a steep embankment, then a cliff. The bicyclist is struggling to climb this mountain road. Maybe he's just getting some exercise or perhaps training for a competitive event... or perhaps that bicycle is how he gets around. The next closest human is miles away. It would only take the very slightest nudge of your steering wheel to send the bicyclist careening off the edge of the road, down the embankment to serious injury and probably death. What do you do?

Chances are pretty good you recoiled a bit at my last two sentences, because you'd already started to picture yourself going wide into the other lane to give the bicyclist plenty of room as you passed, hadn't you?

What if the bicyclist were your worst enemy? What if you were assured that you'd never be caught? Same answer? Yeah, probably. It might be fun in the latter case to picture yourself sending the bicyclist enemy to almost certain doom, but you wouldn't actually do it. In the 21st century, we're all moral people to whom murder is anathema.

But the first laws against murder actually started out as purely practical things, about 4500 years ago. Morality had nothing to do with it. Human civilization at the time had advanced beyond the point where someone would murder you for the goat leg you had just cooked, but not by much. No, in a time when savagery, rape, slavery, and early death were commonplace, morality was the last thing on the mind of humankind. The first laws against murder were instituted by the very early religions. When humans commit murder, they tend to kill people they know: acquaintences, associates, friends, family. This was as true then as it is now. Those people tended to be of the same religion as the murderer, and the murder resulted in the net loss of worshippers. Worshippers represented power and money, so the earliest religions frowned on that sort of thing. Kings and states soon saw the practical value of this -- a citizen represented work, taxes or tribute, and a potential soldier for the army -- so they instituted laws against murder as well.

Murdering someone of a different religion, or from a different kingdom or state was perfectly all right. As a matter of fact, until pretty recently, priests would tell you that God not only condoned such murders, He celebrated them.

Living people of your same religion or state increased your religion or state's power, revenue, and prestige. Living people of a competing religion or state potentially reduced your religion or state's power, revenue, and prestige.

Hush. This has nothing to do with EVE.

OK. Maybe it does. A little.

Because the answer to my hypothetical situation in EVE is that you'd murder that bicyclist on the spot, wouldn't you? If EVE had bicycles and cars, roadsides and cliffs, that'd be one dead bicyclist. You'd probably do it, and then stop your car, get out, and shout "LOL noob bicycles sux0rs pwned u pubbie!" down the embankment at him. And in the process, you might find yourself murdering a member of our own religion, our own state, because not all of those hypothetical bicyclists who can't afford or don't have the skills for a car come back to EVE after being murdered, do they?

It's got me really wondering about the people who rage-quit EVE when this sort of thing happens.

The past few days, I've been cheerfully engaging in a little bit of EVE "class warfare", only the "upper class" this time is people who've been playing EVE for five or more years. These people, quite naturally, know way more about EVE than I ever ever will, even if I play EVE for 15 years. Just ask them.

Because even if I play EVE for 15 years, they'll have been playing for 20.

In an MMO that wasn't such a niche product, this wouldn't be a big deal. I'll bet there are more EVE players with e-fame than there are WoW players with e-fame, just because the niche is smaller and more crowded, on a single shard, where everyone runs into everyone else sooner or later. Sooner or later, you're gonna get yourself punched in the mouth, or told that you're never going to be as good at this game or know as much about this game as someone who's been playing for two more years. Don't like it? HTFU or GTFO. "EVE isn't a game for wusses" as the CSM so succinctly put it in the December Summit minutes.

Now, of course, if EVE players could murder WoW players instead, we'd do that instead in a second. That's why lots and lots of people are getting so excited about even the potential of raining fire down on DUST 514 players from orbit. God doesn't condemn such murders, he celebrates them! Because that isn't our religion and it isn't our state.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not advocating the end of ritual murder of younger EVE players by eight-year-old EVE players.(1) Far, far from it. Morality? In my EVE? No way. But it's sure got me wondering how many of EVE's problems as a niche market MMO are created by its own players, particularly its older players.

I have outside reasons for being on this kick lately, by the way. More about that tomorrow, including a long bit of reading material for all of you. I'll try to post it early so you can go back and forth to it during your respective work days. ;-)

(1) OK, most of the time I'm not. I haven't given up the idea of a couple of "5 million SP or less in this area, please" areas of EVE.

FOTW: Tournament Rook

2012-02-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favorite ships, though I don't get to fly it nearly as often as I like to:

[Rook, Gonna Get Me An Ear]
Damage Control II
'Hypnos' Signal Distortion Amplifier I
Power Diagnostic System II

Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive
Enfeebling Phase Inversion ECM I
Enfeebling Phase Inversion ECM I
BZ-5 Neutralizing Spatial Destabilizer ECM
'Umbra' White Noise ECM
Invulnerability Field II
Large Shield Extender II

Heavy Missile Launcher II, Caldari Navy Inferno Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Caldari Navy Inferno Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Caldari Navy Inferno Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Caldari Navy Inferno Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Caldari Navy Inferno Heavy Missile

Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer II
Medium Core Defence Field Extender I

Hornet EC-300 x5

Welcome to my first FOTW using the new version of EFT, 2.14.3. You'll have to convert all the FOTWs before this one to the new format. All FOTWs starting this week will no longer work in versions 2.14 or earlier. (And no doubt, as other module name changes happen in 2012, we'll have to convert several more times.)

As I've said many times, I love Recons. They're incredibly versatile and fun to fly. Certainly, they're a bit more expensive than other ships, but they make up for it with a lot of survivability and a lot of options. One thing they aren't is dull, particularly once combat starts! ;-)

This is my favorite Rook fit. Variations on this fit have been around for years and indeed, this fit is often referred to as the "Tournament" Rook because it's quite commonly used in the annual EVE Alliance Tournament. E-war ships are force multiplier ships, and are more effective when your fleet is fighting out-numbered, or "fighting above its weight class", to put it in the EVE parlance. Get into a large fleet battle with 50 ships per side and a dozen Logistics per side and an e-war platform is going to have an extremely difficult time making an impression. In a large fleet battle, an e-war platform is just an expensive target, really (unless used en masse). And this is particularly true for jamming ships, and doubly so for Rooks, which don't even have the Falcon's ability to warp cloaked or their tendency to be at ultra-long range. Rooks tend to be a bit more up-close-and-personal than Falcons (which often operate at ranges of 100km or more). Since they'll tend to be closer-in, they're particularly susceptible to being called primary early in a big fleet battle and just getting themselves killed for no good purpose.

You'll hopefully have inferred from this by now that the Rook is not a go-to ship; it's a ship that you should only undock in in specific circumstances. Those circumstances are "in support of the smallest possible small gang looking for enemy fleets of six or eight ships at most."

In short, the circumstances where undocking in a Rook is the right thing to do are being hunted to extinction in EVE Online.

The ideal fleet for a Rook to join is a fleet of about four to five total ships, where the bulk of the remainder of the fleet are DPS killers able to take care of themselves. Vagabonds, Cynabals, double- and triple-rep Myrms, assault ships, inexpensive T3s, and the like are the best companions for such a Rook. The role of the Rook is to negate the need for Logistics in this small hunter-killer group. Such a group will be looking for enemy fleets of up to about double size to engage and pick off some number of targets from. As the fleet engages, the Rook comes in and isolates three to four DPS targets from the enemy gang and attempts to jam them. In this way, a four or five ship fleet can successfully engage eight or so enemy ships because three or four of the enemy are jammed, evening the odds. Blackbirds can also be used for this role, but the Rook is superior for three reasons:

it's a hell of a lot tougher than a Blackbird;
a Rook actually brings a measurable amount of DPS; and,
a Rook demonstrates the commitment of you to your gang, and of your gang to the fight, whereas Blackbirds tend to be LOL-throw-away ships.

That last point is rather key: if you're escorting Cynabals and Vagabonds, the pilots of those somewhat expensive ships are going to want to know that your commitment in ISK matches theirs. ;-)

Once in such a hunter-killer gang, how you fly a Rook doesn't vary too much from flying any other Recon. Try to come into the fight a couple of seconds after your fleet-mates. Once you're in the fight, open range and work well outside point range. 50km or so is ideal, if you have the skills to operate your jammers at full strength from that range. You can also warp in at that range if you have that option. With decent skills, your jam strength will be something over 12, which is good enough for a 65-80% jamming chance against the sorts of things you're likely to be engaging. You'll generally want to go ahead and carry jamming drones as well, which you should immediately assign to go after enemy tacklers.

DPS is provided by Heavy Missile Launchers which operate out to 100km or more; unfortunately HAMs do not work well on Rooks as they have only a 30km or so range and you don't want to be that close. Similarly, Rage missiles are a mistake for most cruiser platforms because of the secondary effect Rage missiles have on your sig radius. Therefore, faction missiles are the way to go, which means you'll be providing 185 or so DPS. The Rook does not receive a bonus to any particular type of missile. You can go with the traditional kinetic missiles if you like, or even carry a small stockpile of all four types, but I just carry thermal missiles in my missile-firing Recons. The Caldari Navy Infernos tend to be the cheapest faction missiles, most ships have at least somewhat of a thermal hole, and your fleet-mates should not be relying on the Recon for major DPS in any case.

The weakness of the Rook is ever and always going to be the tank, particularly its enormous EM hole. Some guys mess around with ECM-enhancing rigs or even take the Damage Control off their Rooks, but I think this is a mistake. In these ultra-small gangs, the enemy fleets are going to tend toward Minmatar ships and those Minmatar ships are going to be firing faction EM ammo at you, which will go right through the Rook's EM hole if you miss a couple of critical jams. While you can and should try to work at 50km, you don't always have this luxury, so unlike some Recons, you can't just ignore your tank.

"Two red, one blue, one yellow" is the traditional jammer load-out for Rooks, though this is changing slowly thanks to the recent blaster buff. Still, for ultra-small gang versus ultra-small gang, this is probably still the right way to go. Minmatar ships are your biggest worry thanks to their DPS, but in these smaller gangs, you'll often encounter enemy Curses, Rooks, or Blackbirds, trying to do to you what you are trying to do to them. Over time, though, I suspect "two red, one blue, one yellow" will become "two red, one blue, one green" or perhaps even "three red, one green".

In a gang of five ships, it's important that you're justifying your presence. If everyone else is in Vagabonds, if you're going to be a Rook, you have to be able to demonstrate that you bring value to the fleet that compensates for the extra 300 or so DPS that you're not bringing. As a result, while you should try to be the last one to join a fight, if the fight goes badly, you should also try to be the last one to leave. If four Vagabonds and a Rook take on eight ships and it starts to go badly, the Vagas will pull range and warp off. Try to be the last one on the field, jamming enemy tacklers, so that they can do so. Off-racial jammers will do just fine jamming enemy assault frigs, interceptors, and the like. Only when the rest of your fleet is off the field should you warp off yourself.

If the fight is going well, moderate your use of jamming to try to encourage enemy ships to stay on the field. I tend to be truly evil in this regard: even when out-numbered, I'll hold one or two of my jammers in reserve, applying them only periodically and only after I'm sure that the enemy ship has his choice of targets locked up and has started firing. Then I'll jam that target once and after a successful jam, I'll leave that target unjammed for 10 or even 15 seconds so that he can get back into his groove before I disrupt it again. This keeps the enemy fleet aggressed and interested because the fail Rook pilot can't keep jams up. Keeping the fight feeling even will keep the enemy gang on the field, though of course you should not risk losing friendlies to do so. And the closer your gang size is to the enemy gang size, the fewer of your jammers you should be using. But if enemy DPS is clearly out-matching the ability of your fleet-mates to compensate, you should get those reserve jammers into action. Jamming any enemy Recons is particularly important. After that, learn which ships are the most effective at applying DPS to friendlies and concentrate your jamming there.

Rooks are enormously fun to fly when flown well, but the frequency that you should undock in your Rook is not very high. In larger fleet battles, a Falcon is a much better choice because of the longer ranges at which they tend to operate. This leaves only a limited number of situations where you can use your Rook, but be content knowing that if you are able to undock in it and use it properly, you'll get a lot of satisfaction out of the times when you can use it.

Finally, one procedural note: if there are any CCP employees reading this, please -- for the love of God -- give the Rook more power grid. Speaking on behalf of my fellow Rook pilots, I can say with a great deal of surety that we will happily trade 100 CPU for as much grid as you feel comfortable giving us. 150 more grid would be ideal. Even for a Caldari ship, the amount of CPU the Rook has is wildly ridiculous: it's more CPU than can possibly be used except for the silliest possible fits (Expanded Probe Launcher Rook, anyone?). Meanwhile, the criminal lack of grid means that there are only a few ways to correctly fit a Rook, and no good armor Rook options at all. Please fix this.

Fly annoying! :-)

All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.

Comment of the Week: Uphill through the snow

2012-01-31T19:36:00.000-08:00

From an anonymous commenter, a comment that could have been attached to any of my last four or five major posts, really:

Experience in the game is all well and good but many of the oldest players in the game are particularly dismissive of changes that newer players suggest simply because they have reached bitter vet status and are at the point that - "I had to walk uphill through the snow so you have to too"- becomes their answer to problems that should have been fixed long ago.

Ain't that the truth? It'll also work particularly well as a comment for tomorrow's tent-pole post.

January junk drawer

2012-01-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the junk drawer, part of a series of monthly posts in which I dump all the stuff that I couldn't develop into full blog posts this month...

The EVE-fail blog has documented a couple of ways for you to determine how many minutes you've been logged into EVE per account, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Change the appropriate settings in this website link:

https://api.eveonline.com/account/AccountStatus.xml.aspx?keyid=_____&vcode=_____

For keyid, replace with your new post-Incarna userID key. Your vcode is the API passcode. Then look for the "logonMinutes" field. That will tell you how many minutes that particular account has been logged into EVE.

It's not particularly useful for Ripard, because I used to log him in cloaked in this or that enemy system to hunt ratters. Then, when I had to go to work, I'd leave him logged in all day to make them paranoid. But if you're interested, for Ripard: 314,857 minutes total as of 2012 January 1.

---

Red Frog Freight is awesome. I've been saying this for almost a year now, and it's time to say it again. If you live primarily in null-sec and you do not use them for your Empire logistics, you are a bad person and should feel bad.

The service they provide is freighter logistics in Empire. You courier contract your stuff to them, with a delivery fee calculated by their automated jump planner and a one billion ISK collateral. It costs me five million ISK to have a freighter load of whatever I need moved from Jita to my high-sec staging system, where I pick it up for transport to null. The last time I contracted them such a load, I did it right before I went to bed. When I woke up, it had been delivered and was waiting for me.

They also offer "Blue Frog" for loads worth more than one billion ISK, and "Black Frog" for null-sec logistics using jump freighters. They really have this stuff down to a science. Seriously, is your time really worth only a few million ISK to move freighters full of stuff around Empire? You can contract a load to them, then run a L4 mission instead. You'll come out ahead both in ISK and in enjoyment of EVE. Use this service! Or if you have a freighter that's sitting idle on an alt, seriously consider applying to join them.

---

Lord Maldoror (with a lot of help from the actual residents) has written a fantastic overview of who lives in the Syndicate region lately. Syndicate, for those of you not keeping up, was recently announced as the most active PvP region in EVE, with more ships destroyed than any other single region in the game. I am a resident of this fine neighborhood myself, and I encourage all of you to come visit. ;-) The post does a fantastic job of laying out the neighbors and explaining when and how they do their PvP.

---

The Overheating Guide that I published in December has been updated with the information I presented in the errata a few days later. I've also updated it to reflect the UI improvements introduced to overheating in Crucible 1.1. Lunkwill spotted a problem with my four-month-old Utility Highs Guide that the rest of you missed: I forgot to include smart bombs! This has been corrected. Good catch, Lunkwill!

---

There's one CSM-related thing in the junk drawer. It almost rates a full post, but I've done enough CSM-related posts in the last week.

Prometheus Exenthal has announced that he's running for reelection to CSM7, on Failheap Challenge. This one is interesting to me because for CSM6, he ran as a champion of small-gang PvP alliances. Then, on 13 December, Two Step tweeted this:

Wow, @themittani's mind control lasers are turned up to max today. Check out what corp Prometheus Exenthal is in now... #TweetFleet #csm6

What corp was Prom in? Goonswarm, of course. Trebor and I responded, with no response from Mittens that I saw. My question: "Goon's second CSM7 candidate. c/d?" For a while, it looked like you could file that one under "c" and I was waiting to see if Prom campaigned again under a small-gang banner with the Goon corp ticker. Ironic, if so!

Instead, as of about a week ago, he's out of Goons and back in Hydra Reloaded. So now, it'll be interesting to see if he gets any kind of official or unofficial endorsement from Mittens for Goon votes. If there's one area of null-sec experience that CSM6 publicly lacked, it was small-gang experience. Prom was apparently a non-starter early in CSM6's term and pretty inactive for most it. CSM6 can hardly point to Seleene or Elise Randolph as their small-gang champions, since PL's idea of a "small gang" these days appears to be 27 Titans. ;-)

---

And finally, Siesmic Stan over at Freebooted, a very long-time EVE blogger, awarded me the "Free Boot for Blogger of the Year" for 2011. Thanks! I shall display the boot on my space mantlepiece with pride, as Yahtzee put it. ;-)

Herd the ducks

2012-01-31T07:09:00.000-08:00

EDIT (31/Jan/2012): The trick to writing is rewriting and editing. Under normal circumstances, the pieces I write here are written a day or two before all of you read them (if not longer) so I can perform these steps. This post, however, came together in much more of a hurry due to circumstances. As a result, there's a rather major mistake in it: a paragraph below in which I assume there is a good relationship between EVE University CEO Kelduum Revaan and EVE blogger Poetic Stanziel. No such good relationship exists. As a heroically bad movie with good dialogue put it: "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups!"

Had the blog post gone through a more normal editing process, I would have taken the time to fact-check this little detail, discovered the relationship, and deleted that entire paragraph. However, the piece seemed timely so I proceeded without that step. I apologize for this mistake. As newspapers put it when this sort of thing happens to them, I regret the error.

When I woke up this morning, Mittens was gloating.

Now, you might accurately say that this is nothing unusual. It's a bit like saying "When I woke up this morning, water was wet", in fact. Still, he has pretty good reason to gloat. When Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the recall race to become California's governor in 2003, that was pretty much it: he had the race sewn up. Despite the fact that there were literally hundreds of other candidates -- or, just as likely, because of this fact(1), his name recognition alone ensured that he'd be elected. When he ran for reelection in 2007, that was also it.

Similarly, I'm going to go ahead and call it now: The Mittani will be the CSM7 Chair.

I've decided I'm going to do pieces on some of the major candidates for CSM7, and one of the people that will receive such a profile is someone who said in public that he'd be going for the Chairmanship, Kelduum Revaan, the CEO of EVE University.

This is not that piece, though. This is just an intro.

When I decided to run for CSM6 last year, I was one of the first candidates to make that fact public. This year, Kelduum has that honor, I think. I'm not sure the exact date he popped up on my radar, but it was very early January and perhaps a bit before. The unusual thing about Kelduum running wasn't that he was running; hell, I'd practically expect someone high up in E-UNI to run every year. The unusual thing about Kelduum running is that word quickly went out that Kelduum thought he had a good chance of taking the Chair and believed he had something like 3500 votes sewn up from the get-go.

Rallying high-sec players to vote in the CSM elections has been a bit of a dream the last few CSM elections, and if you think anybody could do it, the CEO of EVE University could. And indeed, should Kelduum win a seat, he won't be the first E-UNI CEO to do so, and to do so based on the successful rallying of high-sec votes. But Chair? Really? EVE University only represents about 1500 pilots right now. Even if all of them could be rallied, that's substantially less than 3500 votes. When this was brought to my attention, I replied that it sounded to me like Kelduum was counting on the votes of not only every EVE University member, but pretty much every EVE player who had once been in EVE University. I added that this struck me as naive to say the least.

Back in August when Trebor ran his crowd-sourcing initiative, E-UNI made a concerted attempt to skew those votes. At the time, I was rather amused: this looked a lot like a test run for the next CSM election. How many accounts could E-UNI rally to vote a slate, following a complex procedure, on demand? I checked with Trebor, and it turns out the answer was "587 accounts". That's the number of accounts that voted the exact slate that E-UNI asked them to vote in the crowd-sourcing.

So, as far as I'm concerned, that's the size of Kelduum's base: not 3500. 587.

Still, it's respectable! I started my CSM6 run with less, and campaigned up from there. Apparently though, the word that Kelduum would not automatically have 3500 votes at his beck and call got back to him and he decided to actually ask his base: would they vote for him? And while a few hundred said "yes", a solid minority said: "I don't know. What do you stand for?"

And Kelduum doesn't seem to have much of an answer yet. Ooops.

When I saw this, I made the decision to contact Poetic Stanziel, a well-known E-UNI graduate and blogger. Would Poetic support Kelduum? Turns out I didn't have to ask. The topic is well-covered on the Poetic Discourse blog this morning, and Poetic seems to fall pretty firmly in the "I don't know" camp. Pro-tip: if you're running for CSM as an E-UNI candidate, perhaps it's a good idea to get the backing of E-UNI's most well-known blogger first. What do you think?

Now, it's not my intention here to make fun of Kelduum. If he gets his act together, there's plenty of time for him to be a solid CSM candidate and as I said, I'll be writing about him again when I do my profile pieces. But anyone who thinks they're going to make a run at the Chairmanship and take away Mittens's #chairmanforlife hash-tag needs to be a bit more organized than this.

One of the things that's going to be amusing about the CSM7 election cycle is the brain-damaged "petition" methodology that CCP came up with for vetting candidate popularity, most likely while in a drunken stupor.(2) Ironically, it is in Mittens's best interests to have as broad a slate of CSM7 candidates as possible. Not only does this dilute the non-0.0-bloc vote and reduce the threat to his control over the CSM, it has the best chance of producing a broad slate of less well-known CSM7 alternates that:

Mittens can point to later as highlighting the "diversity" of CSM7; and,
gives him a pool of people who are "just happy to be here" that can help with the actual work.

As a result, it is also in Mittens's best interests to have as many candidates as possible successfully pass through the petition process. The thing that's amusing is that he doesn't have to lift a finger for this to happen. When a well-intentioned but naive EVE player posted a thread on Jita Park advocating the creation of a block of CSM7 candidates focused on carebear issues, Goons came out of the woodwork in droves to "support" this idea.

Consider that a test run for the petition process for every carebear candidate. They're not going to have any trouble hitting the 100 "likes" needed to get on the ballot. They'll get dozens of likes from "helpful" Goons who will then -- once the actual voting begins -- vote their ordered slate of candidates. Meanwhile, more serious candidates like Kelduum who actually have a chance at getting the votes they need are going to struggle mightily with this process. If Kelduum can't get a few hundred people on E-UNI's own forums to say they'll vote for him, what prayer does he have of getting them to follow a petition process?

If you're running for CSM7 as a non-0.0-bloc candidate, I hope you're getting your ducks in a row. Right now.

(1) More on this in a minute.
(2) Be warned: I am going to making more and more harsh fun of this idea as the cycle goes on. And since I'm starting from it being a "brain-damaged idea most likely come up with while in a drunken stupor", you can imagine where I'm going to be by March.

QOTW: Never thought of it that way

2012-01-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie.

Shin_getter over at Failheap puts an interesting spin on a problem that we all see:

Modifying the game is tricky when most of the complains involves OTHER PEOPLE's experiences. Non-incursion runners whine about incursion income. Subcap pilots whine about supercapital pilots. NPC null/WH/small gang folks whine about the lack of small gang in sov blob space. Non-NC whine about NC bridge network. Non-drake pilots whine about drake fleets. Pirates whine about easy logistics done by a completely different type of players. Blob fleets whine about how they can't get into a wormhole (lol CSM). Careless highsec guys complain about suicide gankers. Miners complain about dronelanders. Carebears complain about AFK cloakers.....

Fixing the game is infinitely easier if players are trying to fix their own experiences as opposed to "zomg those "insert group" is so terribad and exploiting the shitz out of everything and should die/nerf/ban/nuke/dd/etc."

It's an interesting perspective, and one that I for one hadn't thought about before! That said, it's not exactly a silver bullet. Botters certainly aren't going to fix the issues with botting, after all...

Don't have much more to say about this one, other than I thought the perspective was interesting. The question is, do I believe it enough to stop talking about those few things in EVE that I haven't done, such as volleying a dictor in a Titan, for instance? That, I'm not so sure about. ;-) After all, I've been on the receiving end of such things, so that doesn't make me an entirely disinterested party.

Does it?

The decision

2012-01-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

Lloyd Dobler: Am I going? Am I going to England? I've thought about this quite a bit...

Let's start with the conclusion this time. Am I running for CSM7? I've decided: No, I'm not.

On Friday, I wrote a long post essentially listing the reasons for me not to run for CSM7. Not only are they excellent reasons in their own right, there are other good reasons for me not to run that I'll get into in a moment. What I didn't list in that post were very many reasons for me to run. Don't get me wrong! I have a lot of reasons to run! But right now, for me, the reasons not to run outweighed the reasons to run.

I was honestly curious, though: would someone come up with a good reason for me to run that I couldn't think of myself? The simple fact is that -- overall -- I feel like CSM6 is doing a decent job. There are definitely members of it that have been all but useless to the membership, but there are a lot of good people there, too.

And of all the people on CSM6 that I believe are doing a good job, all of them are running for reelection. I would have loved to have been one of them, and had I won a CSM6 alt seat, running for reelection would have been a no-brainer. But that didn't happen, of course. Or, if the people I feel are doing a good job weren't running for reelection, again, running for CSM7 would be a no-brainer.

So, to convince myself to run, I needed a reason why I'm a better choice to be on CSM7 than one of these people... and I couldn't come up with one. The purpose to the "Influence" post, therefore, was to see if one of you could come up with one. And everyone who tried essentially said, "You should run for CSM7 because you have a good chance of winning a seat on CSM7."

That's a little bit circular, don't you think? ;-)

So, no, I'm not running. Not only are the reasons in the Influence post good ones, but there are other good reasons besides.

First, I have to say that I'm having a great deal of fun playing EVE again. I spend the bulk of my time in EVE chatting on Rote Kapelle TeamSpeak, and a high percentage of that time in fun activities like making other people wish they didn't play EVE. ;-) In the process, I'm learning an absolute ton, and it's making me a much better pilot. Do I want to give that up to spend a ton of time reading CSM forums and connected to the CSM Skype? Nope, not really. In addition, to really feel like I was doing the job of a CSM member properly, I feel like I'd have to spend a lot more time than I do today talking to EVE players. That would take even more time.

Second, as I said in the Influence post, if I were to run, there's no question in my mind that I would take votes away from worthy non-bloc candidates, particularly the CSM6 members I favor that are running for reelection. I have no desire to do that. Even more so, though, I have no desire whatsoever to fragment and dilute the non-bloc vote more than it's already going to be diluted. The simple fact is that the methodology for the CSM7 election so favors the large 0.0 blocs that there's virtually zero chance of anyone not in one of those blocs winning one of those critical top seven seats if they're not already on CSM6. Cut down the number of voting seats and cut down the number of non-bloc candidates through the petition methodology? Excellent ideas, CCP. Not!

It is no coincidence that the bulk of CSM6 -- who represent these blocs -- thought these were good ideas. They are good ideas. For them! That the CCP representatives in the room didn't see this really makes me doubt their critical thinking abilities.

In fact, the only reason I could think of to actually run was rather selfish and political. If I were Mittens, my thought process goes like this: run and take so many votes away from non-bloc candidates that the entire CSM7 is made up of bloc candidates, thereby reducing its usefulness to CCP while in Iceland as a player sounding board. That way, perhaps they'll go with a voting methodology for CSM8 that actually... you know... makes sense.

Third, if I were on CSM7, who in the EVE blogging community is going to keep an eye on CSM7? I'm pretty sure I was the only one really keeping an eye on CSM6. ;-)

The reasons I listed in my Influence post are still the best ones for me not to run right now, though. This blog was created to publicize my CSM6 run. But -- ironically -- in the year since, the blog, my independence, and what I do here with them has become more important to me than being on the CSM.(1)

Good luck to those of you that decide to run! I'll be watching you. And who knows, maybe next year.

(1) Finally, I take a great deal of pleasure in the fact that I completely destroy the premise, logic, and conclusions of this. Next time, Yuki, perhaps you will talk to me before writing an article about what I'm thinking. ;-)

Pic of the Week: Ganknight

2012-01-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

Highly deserving of POTW honors:

You can read all about how this managed to happen over at the Through Newb Eyes blog. Go read. It's worth your time.

My favorite part of this screenshot is the spectacle of a scout without a point, though. If you remember nothing else about scouting, remember this: guns optional, MWD and point not. It's a miracle (and stupidity on the Rorq's part) that this Rorqual didn't escape by just jumping away.

All in all, though, sounds like it was a lot of fun!

Clear shot

2012-01-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

Well, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.

The post yesterday about tracking has racked up comments faster than any post I've ever done with the possible exception of me ripping on Clarion Call 3 a couple of months back. That's fine. Guess that means you guys have a strong opinion on this issue. ;-)

Still, don't get lost in the minutiae. My post isn't about whether battleship guns should hit frigates, or dread/Titan guns should hit dictors, when the pilots of those ships are flying badly. That's proven: they can, and they should. If a ship is being flown badly, it will die. I have no problem with that. It's working as intended. But that's not not not what I was looking at in my post. The key question you need to take out of my post is this:

Should a small ship still die to much larger guns if the pilot of the small ship is doing everything right to avoid damage?

Make no mistake: this question takes the skill of piloting a small ship out of the equation if you answer "yes". If you answer "yes" to that question, you're saying that an inty pilot should die to battleship guns regardless of the inty pilot's skill if those battleship guns are buffed enough. Dreads and titans and super-carriers lost their drones because they were supposed to no longer be able to affect sub-caps if they're flown intelligently. If dreads and titans can still kill much smaller sub-caps anyway, then what was the point of removing their drones? May as well give them back for all the good it did.

Those of you who are saying that I landed a glancing blow on that Ares, even if that's true, are similarly missing the point. The point is that if eight or nine other Tornados had buffed their ships the way I did, then the group of us would have been nailing frigates right and left with our large guns, regardless of the skill of the pilots of those frigates and how they were flying. Is that how this game should be? Is that how you want it to be?

So, look at that bolded question and decide what your answer is. Mine's "no".

Proven in the field

2012-01-29T00:19:00.000-08:00

So, a week or so back, I argued that Titan tracking against much smaller targets is broken. This is one of those things that I say that -- despite being controversial -- I really believe. It's not a troll. It's my opinion, which I believe we've seen proven in the field.

Oh man, was I called all sorts of names. People came out of the woodwork to tell me I was full of shit on that one. Some of them were Titan pilots today. Others no doubt hope to be Titan pilots soon themselves, and get some of these impossible kills. And most of all, I was told that the people these kills were against were just flying stupidly. I was told this repeatedly. Titan tracking is fine. People just drove right up into those Titan guns to die. Of course that's what happened.

One of the chief dissenters was LtCol Laurentius (formerly from Agony Unleashed). This is a guy that I have a ton of respect for, for a lot of reasons. Laurentius's argument was the same, but for a bit different reason from everyone else's:

@RipardTeg Btw Jester, your math on the tracking of Titans is way off. You forgot to factor in the guns signature resolution. #tweetfleet

I replied:

@LtColLaurentius Large guns against small targets do much better in the field than your calcs say they should. #tweetfleet

and his response, reasonably enough, was:

@RipardTeg I'd be glad to see a shred of evidence supporting that claim tbh. Because all you have got right now are killmails.

Fine. Challenge accepted.

One of the fleets that Rote Kapelle likes a lot are arty Tornado fleets. These are Tornados fit with 1400mm guns, plus a bit of tracking: a single Tracking Enhancer II and a single Tracking Computer II. Under normal circumstances, Rote uses twelve or so of these ships at between 35 and 40km to alpha our targets to scrap. There's not a lot of finesse involved and our ability to kill frigate-size targets with these ships is minimal or non-existent. Standard tracking is 0.012 rads/second. So, frigate-hunting is part of the support for this fleet, not the main body.

But I decided to do a Kirk and change the conditions of the test. Laurentius and the other critics of my Titan post say that if a pilot is flying smartly, then all the tracking in the world shouldn't matter. I shouldn't be able to hit, say, a fast-moving inty in this Tornado no matter what I do. And even if I hit him, I shouldn't be able to hurt him. Well, let's find out. Thanks to some adjustments to the standard Tornado fit, a supply of faction Depleted Uranium ammo, and a highly illegal-in-Empire Drop booster, I increased the tracking of my Tornado by about three-fold, to 0.036.

Now all I needed was a suitable target during our next Tornado roam. But even if one appeared, a lot of my critics say that I shouldn't be able to hit him unless he flies dumb. Laurentius says that even the target flies smart and I somehow hit him, I won't do significant damage because my gun's signature is 400m.

Hey, Laurentius and everyone else? Here's your shredded evidence:
http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=65605

For the record, Billy Colorado is one of Agony's finest nano pilots. The irony here is bigger than a Titan. I didn't expect to have the chance to prove my theory against an experienced Agony pilot, but sure. I loaded up my tracking ammo, injected the Drop, and took aim. This guy knows more about using speed and transversal to avoid damage than I will ever learn. He was moving against our fleet exactly as he should have. Anyone want to claim he was flying dumb? Check out every other ship in our fleet using large guns missing him by a mile.

Check me out, hitting him not once, but with all three of my gun groups, including the shot for the kill mail.

Laurentius's response, when I showed him this kill mail?

@RipardTeg Aww this is just wrong man. There is NO way you should be able to hit a ceptor with BS guns :) The game is broken i tell you.

The game is broken in this regard? Really? Seems to me, I remember saying that. Thank you for agreeing. ;-)

Influence

2012-01-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

One of the thing my blog does that a lot of EVE blogs don't is that I look under the covers. I pride myself on being a bit of a CCP watcher. I keep an eye on how the company that makes EVE influences EVE. I've written more than 150 posts that I've tagged "CCP". I've spent a lot of time looking at them and rereading them over the last couple of weeks.

The one thing that I've never had is inside access to the company. Nobody from inside CCP has ever sent me proprietary information from within the company. Nobody from inside CCP has ever sent me so much as an EVE mail. I've gotten a few e-mails from CCP employees over the last 18 months or so, but all of them were prompted by things that I did or said. Every blog post I've written -- yes, even "Curves" -- was written with the help of publicly available data. The things I added were intuition and analysis, and sometimes flat-out guesses. Hell, from time to time, I've said provocative things about CCP with the hope that someone would come along and say "Jester, you idiot. That's obviously not right. What's REALLY happening is..."

I love technical people. They're completely unable to keep stuff that should be secret to themselves.

Dumb things people in CCP say have been a favorite topic of mine, almost from the beginning. But I'm also highly complimentary of CCP when they deserve it. Covering CCP-related news and what I think about it has also been big. And of course, I'm not afraid to delve right into CCP's business methodology, or even right into their business. Besides "Curves", two of my most-read posts last year were one I called "Pebble", which put Fearless into business perspective, and another I wrote about metrics and metrics-based development. And an absolute ton of my CCP-tagged are me trying to influence CCP from the outside.

Still, I can count on one hand the number of CCP employees I've had direct interaction with in the last year.

Am I going to run for CSM7? Here's the honest answer: I haven't decided. Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

There's still lots and lots of good reasons for me to run, all of those reasons that prompted me to run last year, plus some all-new ones. At the top of the latter list is the compression of CSM7's "voting members" down to seven, with the simultaneous requirement that everyone who runs has to have a petition signed by 100 people saying they're deserving of running first.

Trebor throws out a statistic that not nearly enough people are thinking about in his latest blog post: 70% of the votes that were cast for CSM6 were cast for winning candidates. Really stop and think about that for a second. I sure have. I was the top vote-getter among the remaining 30%, after all. Trebor flat-out calls them wasted votes, and says that the vast majority of them went to independent, non-bloc candidates, and yeah, that was (and is) me all over. Between the petition and the reduced size of the group getting face time in Iceland, that promises to be doubly so next year. Who outside of a massive 0.0 bloc is going to be able to get that petition requirement and then get the "2900 or even 3000" votes needed to get into the top seven?

Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I can only think of four possibilities: members of past CSMs (including CSM6 members seeking reelection), people with tons of in-game e-fame, EVE bloggers, and EVE website moderators. That's a good reason for me to run: I'm one of the few people not in a blob that might have a good chance of winning.

But there's also damn good reasons for me not to run. Right at the top of that list? The old "wasted votes". I have no doubts at all that some of my votes last year came from people who would have otherwise voted for Trebor, or Seleene, or perhaps even Two Step. I equally have no doubts at all that if I run, I will take votes away from them again.

Maybe even enough votes to ensure that none of us make the top seven.

But there's a better reason than that. Outside the CSM, I have the freedom to write what I want, when I want, how I want. I'm not beholden to an NDA, and I'm not beholden to a relationship with the people that I'm talking about. I'm an outside observer, usually fairly neutral, but certainly not lacking an opinion. ;-) And I've been free to share that opinion without running it by someone first. Seleene posted a remarkable statistic on his blog that received almost no attention:

On Thursday night I was having a talk with someone that will remain nameless and was told he had run a report internally that showed PVP activity for CCP employees in July 2011. The number of devs that were involved on another player's kill mail was exactly eight. Eight out of over six hundred. Granted, July was a pretty shit month for anyone playing EVE, but that's still a staggeringly low number.

I had a chance to grab Seleene and I nearly immediately asked where that statistic had come from. Was it public knowledge? Did he have permission to release it? If so, how did he get permission to release it? That was the kind of stat I could have built up a good mad around and built a blog post out of, after all.

But the conversation soon turned to how much or how little Seleene's blog is influenced by the fact that he has to watch where he steps... because there could be an NDA under his foot waiting to go off. What I heard on this topic wasn't overly worrisome...

...but I also post a bit more often than Seleene does. ;-) CCP might need a "Jester Blog Post Review" department if I were elected.

And of course, not everything I post is tagged "CCP", and not every CCP-tagged post even brushes by proprietary topics. Even if I count every single CCP-tagged post, they only represent about 25% of my output, and the real number of posts that anyone in CCP could possibly object to is much less. And hell, direct access to CCP plus permission to share some of what they told me might mean that for every post that was lost, a different sort of post would be gained.

My ability to influence CCP from outside probably shouldn't be underestimated, though. I know for a fact that there are quite a number of CCP employees reading this right now, and I equally know for a fact that some of what gets written on this blog goes straight into CCP discussions. Would I have that same influence pigeon-holed as a CSM member?

Finally, if I won a CSM7 seat, my ability to be neutral about CSM7's performance would naturally be completely compromised. In addition to the 150 or so CCP-tagged posts on this blog, there have been 60 or so tagged "CSM6".

So, that's what's at risk if I run. Thoughts?

Strangled in the crib

2012-01-27T12:22:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I talked about one of EVE Online's mid-game problems and said that I'd be bringing up a second.

That problem, in a single word, is money.

Let's suppose you're a brand new EVE player. Let's further suppose that you're smart enough off the bat to get yourself a full set of +3 implants and broadly set up your attributes so that you can train both offensive and support skills equally during your first year without worrying about remaps too much. You find a blog from some dude named Jester who says that a good PvE target for a new to mid-level player is a Drake, and you train yourself into this ship. At the end of 100 days, you can fly it.

At this point in the game, you've spent about 25 million ISK on skillbooks, about 25 million on a Drake hull, another 25 million fitting it, and a final 25 million ISK buying the various ships and mods that were needed to get you this far. That's 100 million ISK total in your first hundred days playing EVE. You have just short of five million SP. Still, you're at the point where you can run L3 missions successfully and you can pull down between five and ten million ISK per hour doing so. You plop down 3.6 million ISK for a Caldari Battleship skill book and set your eyes on a Raven, then decide you want to join a PvP corp.

You chat with the recruiters of various PvP corps and find out to your dismay that while they occasionally fly Drakes in combat, you're going to need a variety of other ships. Over time, you decide that you're going to train Minmatar ships; that's what seems to be mentioned a lot. One 0.0 corp you have your eye on says you'll need an Interceptor, a shield HAC, shield BCs, an alpha battleship, and it will be handy to have a Tengu for ratting. After the corp learns you're nowhere near close to any of this, they suggest getting into L4 missions and someone points you at a Raven Navy Issue as a good ship to do these in. It's then mentioned that sooner or later, you're going to need a carrier.

You do some reading, and decide you want to fly Stilettos, Vagabonds, Hurricanes, and Maelstroms. Medium term, you'd like to get a Tengu, and initially not knowing their bad reputation, you set a longer term goal of getting into a Nidhoggur. You bring up EVEMon and start adding skills to the queue. You do a lot of research and load all the skills you're going to need to properly fly Interceptors, Heavy Assault Ships, and Minmatar Battlecruisers and Battleships, plus all of the relevant gunnery and support skills.

EVEMon lets you know that over the next 200 days, your SP total will rise from five million to 13 million. But it also helpfully lets you know that you're going to have to raise another 75 million ISK for skill books. One skill book, Heavy Assault Ships, is going to cost you almost 30 million ISK alone! And you haven't even bought any of these ships yet... A single fit Vagabond is going to cost you almost 200 million. A single Maelstrom is going to cost you at least 250. Fitted Hurricanes cost about 65 each and you're told you should have two or three of them. Then it's explained to you that none of these ships count unless they're carrying expensive faction ammo.

In short, the PvP corp you want to join is letting you know that to join them, you're going to have to come up with nearly a billion ISK. That's ten times the amount of money you've raised in your EVE career to date! In your first hundred days, you needed to raise 100 million ISK. But if you want to join a PvP corp on the modern EVE battlefield, in your second and third hundred days, you need to raise ten times as much.

Those instructions to look into L4 are seeming suddenly very relevant, but Ravens aren't exactly cheap: fitted, one of those will cost you 175 million ISK or so. You hope the guy that told you that you should be a Raven Navy Issue was joking, because fitting one of those would cost you another half a billion...

God help you if you take the suggestions to get a Tengu or a carrier seriously at this stage in your career (hint: the skill-books alone to get into a carrier cost one billion ISK). And all of this is for a single race. Sooner or later, it's going to be explained to you that you should probably train for and buy some Amarr ships as well... That's another whole set of skill books, because those Amarr ships use different guns, different mods, and different support skills.

This isn't a problem that EVE used to have. A couple of years back, PvP corps would have been happy to accept a five or ten million SP pilot with a small stack of cruisers, a few BCs, and maybe a single expensive ship. But over the last few years, there is one area that inflation has struck: the expectations of corps of their members, particularly their new members. Where it used to be common to see corps recruiting for five or ten million SP pilots, these days the expectation is double or triple that. And the new member had better have a good hangar full of ships right from day one. The "single expensive ship" expectation these days in most PvP corps is a capital ship or a faction-fit strat cruiser.

Is it any surprise that so many EVE players are space-poor? Is it any surprise that the most-asked question about EVE is "how do I make ISK?" Is it any surprise that virtually every serious EVE player starts a second account? Given the amounts of ISK that have to be raised so early in an EVE player's career, a second account is nearly a necessity. All PvE in EVE happens more than twice as fast with two accounts working on it. Ratting and missions go faster because two ships breaks the repairs of rats much more efficiently than one. Mining goes faster when you have a hauler along. But the second account needs skill books and ships, too, which means that while -- overall -- you come out ahead, you don't come out twice as far ahead.

And none of this takes into account a thousand incidental expenses that newer EVE players face: buying ammunition for missioning and implants and corp taxes and replacements for ships destroyed by early mistakes and ships purchased because they seemed cool but really weren't. It goes on and on. But at the center of it all are those skill books. Skill books are the monkey on the back of the early EVE player. The first few are cheap, costing only a few thousand ISK. But the later ones cost more and more and more. Two years down the line, you'll be spending hundreds of millions for a single book. And while you can put off the purchase of a new ship for a while to grind up ISK, those skill books won't wait. If you want to keep training, you have to come up with the ISK, and you have to come up with it on schedule.

And all of this assumes that you're paying for your one or two accounts with cash. If you want to try paying for your accounts with PLEXes early in your career, the amount of ISK you'll need will feel overwhelming.

This would be bad enough if EVE PvE was fun. But it's not. Put into this context, it's not surprising that so many brand new EVE players try to get into incursion fleets right off.

Veteran EVE players forget this -- after all, when was the last time they had to buy a skill book? Those most able to afford all those skill books don't need them. Those most able to afford expensive ships rarely lose them. Early EVE play does its level best to strangle new players in their crib.

Kill of the week: Alpha

2012-01-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago talking about the casual use of super-caps in New Eden lately, I mentioned that it felt like a new page had been turned in EVE's history.

Welcome to the first page of the new chapter:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12204197&nolimit

First, let's talk about the setup on how this Titan died. When your alliance gets used to flying smaller ships -- Scorpions and Maelstroms, say, or Rifters -- it takes a while to get used to the fact that some ships are bigger. The hard-learned rule in a lot of alliances is that you never warp to a Titan at zero. You warp to a Titan at 10km because if you warp to zero, you're going to land inside the Titan and you're going to bump it. Another hard-learned rule in a lot of alliances is that if a POS is designated as a super-cap staging POS, non-super-caps aren't allowed inside at all. Ever.

Goons apparently don't have these rules yet. This Titan died because a pair of dreadnoughts warped to a POS with the Titan inside, landed on it, and thanks to some help from Newton's Second Law, bumped it outside the shields. Both offending dreads were also bumped outside the shields by Newton's Third Law. One managed to jump away. A minute later, the other paid for his offense with his ship.

Before that even happened, though, the Titan was dead. Here's the video:

At 20 seconds into the video, the Titan is at 90% shields. At 29 seconds, 80% shields. At 34 seconds, the Titan is gone.

Now, don't get me wrong. I really like alpha ships. I've spent a good deal of time in a variety of them. There's something extremely satisfying about watching an enemy ship simply vanish in a few seconds despite being surrounded by Logistics ships. It takes a good FC to pull it off well, and a lot of discipline and timing on the part of the pilots in the fleet. But when it's working well, it's a lot of fun.

Still, being on the receiving end of alpha kinda sucks. ;-)

In this case, a 65 billion ISK ship with an extremely solid tank (for a shield super) was alphaed to death in five seconds by Titan Doomsdays. There were so many DDs aimed at this Titan that at least four of them didn't hit. The ship died so fast that there were almost certainly a large number of pilots in the fleet that didn't realize the fleet had just gotten a Titan kill.

Losing a Logi or a battleship or a AHAC to alpha is one thing. This... this is quite another.

EDIT (28/Jan/2012): And tonight, a PL fleet alphed an Aeon. That'll do, PL. That'll do.

Rash

2012-01-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I covered a bit of the incursion "interdiction" happening right now, and ended the piece by saying that "I think it's just possible that someone might do something rash."

Yup. As covered by EN24 last night, yesterday in Lisudeh, a major effort was launched by incursion bears to disrupt the interdiction fleet's (ultimately successful) effort to "prematurely" close the incursion in the Kisana constellation. Visit Lisudeh on dotlan today, and you'll find that about 75 ships were lost. The bulk of them were cheap Blackbirds and Celestises (Celestii?) in suicide e-war attacks on the interdiction fleet's logis and frigate-hunters, respectively.

Problem is, a couple of those attacks succeeded, resulting in the destruction of the ships.

There's an amusing scene in Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl that, as a negotiator, always tickles me. After Elizabeth Swann's rather disastrously bad negotiating earlier in the film only manages to get her captured by Captain Barbossa's gang of pirates, Will Turner goes aboard the Black Pearl intending to negotiate her release. "Don't do anything stupid," Jack Sparrow warns him as the negotiating begins. The trouble is that Will doesn't have anything to negotiate with except his own life, which for reasons of the movie's plot, is valuable to the pirates.

So Will points his gun at himself and threatens to shoot himself if his demands aren't met. "Like that," Sparrow moans at the stupidity of this action, and there's a lot of humor value to be had in Sparrow bitching about Will's decision for the rest of the movie.

Yeah, as I said, a couple of those suicidal attacks succeeded, this one and this one. There may be others.

Now, it's just possible that there was a valid declaration of war or aggression on that first one. After all, look closely at the second one and you'll see that the aggressors ended up in pods. In the first case, we don't know if CONCORD showed up to pop that Griffin or not so that might be a perfectly legal kill. That second one, though? Yeah. That looks a lot like an illegal kill to me.

There's a little-known mechanic in EVE Online that states that if you participate in an illegal kill on a ship in high- or low-sec, the pilot destroyed is granted "kill rights" on you for 30 days. Kill rights means that if the aggrieved party comes upon you in a ship, they have the right to destroy that ship, wherever they find it, whatever it is.

Even if it's, say, a two billion ISK shiny high-sec incursion ship. Currently being aggressed by incursion rats.

By successfully getting an interdiction logi ganked, False Cape and Sortido might have done nothing but ban themselves from incursions for that 30 days, unless they care to put their shiny incursion ships at risk from aggrieved party Shamblingform. And as I said, there might be others with the same kill rights. No doubt, all those incursion pilots that lost ships last night are looking very closely at their kill rights and paying a fair bit of ISK to locator agents this morning.

Guys, there's a reason that a lot of people use alts for this sort of thing...

Mid-game problem

2012-01-25T16:50:00.000-08:00

Some games -- particularly RPGs -- have a mid-game problem. Our example game for this exercise will be Skyrim. Skyrim has a terrible mid-game problem. Don't worry, EVE players. I'm going to be relating this to EVE, so stay with me.

Skyrim is a skills-based RPG where level progression is determined based on advancement of those skills. The game does not care which skills you advance. Advancing a certain number of skills allows you to level up. Leveling up grants increased stats and perks, but not increased skills. But leveling up also increases game difficulty since the game levels your adversaries partially based on your own level. Skyrim's mid-game problem comes about for two reasons:

it has both combat and non-combat skills, and treats them equally with respect to leveling; and,
several of its skills are highly dependent on luck or large amounts of in-game money in order to use adequately.

Let's talk about both in turn.

Many of Skyrim's skills, notably the use of one- and two-handed weapons, using bows, blocking with shields, and Destruction magic, are 100% combat-oriented. Advancement of these skills requires an opponent on which to use them and raising these skills increases their effectiveness. However, many others, notably Smithing, Alchemy, Enchanting, and Illusion, Conjuration, and Alteration magic, are partially or wholly non-combat-related. It is quite possible to greatly advance all of these skills, rapidly raising the character's level, without ever leaving the game's protected strong-holds. At the point where such a character finally does leave one of these strong-holds, they can find themselves at level 5 or 6... but with combat skills of a level 1 character facing multiple level 5 and 6 adversaries. Swift, frequent, and frustrating death is the result.

Almost as bad is the problem of enchantments and magic within the game. Unlike Skyrim's predecessors, learning enchantments to use on magic items happens through the destruction of existing magic items either found or purchased by the player. A similar mechanic exists for the purchase of magic spells for use in combat. They must be either found as loot or purchased from vendors. As a result, a great deal of luck enters early Skyrim play. If you intend to frequently battle dragons, you will need magic items conferring fire or frost resistance. Therefore, you must hope to either luck into receiving appropriate items as loot, or you must hope that the (randomly-generated) items up for sale by merchants will have these enchantments. You then have to hope that if you end up purchasing items to destroy to learn their enchantments, that those items won't break your wallet.

This nearly immediately becomes difficult because magic items for purchase are rare until you reach the mid-game. By the time you start to see them, the items you're forced into destroying to learn needed enchantments can be expensive.

This introduces several competing mid-game problems: do you spend your money on the spells and enchantments you need, or do you go off on many side-quests to try to luck into them, or perform those side-quests to gain the money you need to buy the items when they do become available? And while you're doing so, how do you balance skills as you level? If you forget and create a pile of potions or armor to sell and inadvertently level yourself with your non-combat skills faster than your combat skills in the process, you can find yourself facing a different sort of mid-game problem: the side-quests will become too difficult for you.

So, there's a very tricky balance involved in early Skyrim play to try to avoid these two mid-game problems. You have to balance the advancement of combat and non-combat skills as you level. If you're smart, you'll hoard much of your early gold, recognizing that it will be needed when you reach the mid-game, to fill in the inevitable holes in your enchanting ability or spell books left by unlucky loot drops. This problem is not unique to Skyrim, of course. As I said, many RPGs have this mid-game problem to one extent or another. Most people who play RPGs for any length of time recognize the balance that has to be struck to be successful.

EVE Online also has a matched pair of mid-game problems.

A little over a year ago, strictly for my own amusement, I produced the following "chart":

I posted it on FHC, and it got some laughs. Some people wanted to nit-pick about where I had put this or that item, but I was mostly trying to convey the overall experience of EVE Online as a long-term player. Whether you start PvPing in Drakes at five million SP or 12 million, whether you start solo PvPing at one million SP or 40 million, almost nobody can deny that one's enjoyment of EVE waxes and wanes with one's skill point totals...

...with what is possible to fly and what is not possible to fly.

Once you can fly Drakes, the fact that you can't fly Zealots becomes paramount. Once you can fly Zealots, the fact that you can't fit T2 guns on your Tornado becomes paramount. Once you can do that, you start mournfully looking at the cap-ship fleet you're supporting.

EVE is so often about what you can't fly, and not what you can.

And that causes frustration, impatience, and the strong desire to start playing a game where it doesn't take three years to get to the end-game goals.

That's one of EVE's mid-game problems. We're told in the CSM December Summit minutes CCP has determined that "if a user has been subscribed to EVE for three years or more, that user is very unlikely to leave EVE." Figuring one million SP every 21 days, that's about 50 million skill-points. I have three characters past that point now, and for all three of them within their specialties, there's very few things they cannot do or fly were I to put my mind to it.

But damn, did it take a while to get there. And damn, did it take a lot of patience.

The quote came from a session with CCP regarding customer loyalty, and it's great that they recognize this problem. And part of the problem is solved: at least we don't have to spend months training Learning skills any more. But on today's modern EVE PvP battlefield, where pilots are expected to be able to field a wide variety of ships -- most of them T2 -- encouraging a new player to start that three-year climb is going to become increasingly difficult. Goons -- Goons, mind -- in addition to fielding sizable battleship fleets are now fielding sizable super-capital fleets! The days of the Goon Rifter fleet are long gone, except as a way to get a few laughs. Lots of people will get to that dip in their fun at the seven or eight million SP mark ("no, can't fit that; no, can't fit that, either; no, can't fly that") and quit out of frustration right there. Once you've trained all those fitting skills, you quickly forget how long they all took, but when you're doing it... oi.

How to fix it? I haven't a clue. Current players will be loath to change anything. As I've said a lot, they'll say "I had to fight my way up the learning cliff, and it was hard. You have to, too, newbie. No short-cuts." Maybe whatever loyalty program that eventually emerges from CCP will help.

I sure wish I had that updated PCU data. It feels like EVE is out of immediate danger of crashing, but the niche that Incarna was supposed to break EVE out of still remains, and I don't think Crucible helped much. Loyal EVE players might hustle over to mmorpg.com to vote it Player's Choice Game of the Year and that's terrific, but with both RIFT and TOR rocketing past EVE here, there's still some work to be done. Remember, when mmorpg.com's editors chose, they didn't choose EVE.

What's EVE's other mid-game problem? It's related, but I'll get to that in a day or two.

Fit of the Week: Throwback Armageddon

2012-01-25T15:11:00.000-08:00

This week's Fit of the Week is one of my favorite PvP ships to fly:

[Armageddon, Throwback]
Damage Control II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Coreli C-Type Adaptive Nano Plating
Coreli C-Type Adaptive Nano Plating
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Quad LiF Fueled I Booster Rockets
Conjunctive Radar ECCM Scanning Array I
Medium Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 400

Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Mega Pulse Laser II, Imperial Navy Multifrequency L
Large 'Arup' I Remote Bulwark Reconstruction

Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I

Berserker II x5

Ripard is my combat main, of course, but I have couple of combat alts as well. While Ripard focuses on "battleships and below", one of my alts focuses on "battleships and above" (though there's a small bit of overlap). I got this alt into big yellow ships early, and he's never looked back. And while this alt isn't good for much else, when I'm flying him in an Amarr battleship, there are few better in the role. As an example, in an attack on a POS last year, this alt out-damaged every other member of the fleet not in a capital ship... and out-damaged most of the other battleship pilots by a factor of two or more. It really speaks to the abilities of an ultra-specialized character compared to a more generalized one when what you're doing favors the specialized pilot.

When I'm not flying a fast-and-furious Minmatar ship, my second-favorite is a nearly-as-furious Armageddon. Subtle, this ship is not.

Let's get the bad out of the way first: as written, this is a high SP ship. You will need perfect fitting skills to make this fit work. As I've started saying in the FOTW epilogue, feel free to down-shift this ship based on your individual skills.

Still, if you can sit in and fly this ship as written, you will find an absolute PvP monster. A triple Heat Sink Geddon with a good pilot aboard can produce 850 DPS with the guns on this ship alone. The drones add nearly another 300 DPS, allowing this boat to easily pump around 1100 DPS out to the edge of point range, or 900+ to the edge of drone control range. A Geddon with a good pilot aboard is arguably the cheapest, most effective DPS platform in New Eden. If you're not scared of this boat, you should be.

The downside is the tank. It's not bad, as such, but it's not that great in terms of resists, with only 60% resistance to explosive damage and not much better to other types of damage. It does have a really nice buffer, with nearly 30,000 armor HP. So you won't go down fast... but you'll be hard to rep without increased resists. If you want to emphasize buffer, you can drop the remote rep and trade a Heat Sink for a third plate. I find this version is too slow. If you want to increase resists instead, another option is to trade a Heat Sink for an EANM, which you can make work in a variety of ways. The most common is to downshift the Damage Control to a meta unit or sacrifice the ECCM for a Sensor Booster.

Still, by taking either of these options, you sacrifice more than 100 DPS and will probably fall below that magical "1000 DPS" mark. ;-) As I often say, you pays your money and you take your chances. Most FCs are going to assume that the Geddons in the fleet are fit to murder things with fire, with personal survival as a secondary characteristic, and highly dependent on how fast the Geddons can perform the aforementioned murder. That's the reason for the heavy drones instead of something more subtle, by the way. Again, most FCs are going to assume that if you bring a Geddon, you intend to bring the pain.

If you do die, the really nice thing about the Geddon is how relatively cheap it is. The hull will only run you about 50 million and insurance is very inexpensive since the Geddon is a tier 1 battleship. The guns are probably the most expensive part of the fit, with the dual C-Type ANPs running a close second.(1) Don't skimp with tech 2 ANPs... your resists are already bad enough.

Why do I call this ship a throwback? Well, first, there's the lack of subtlety. Fleets these days tend to do a lot of razzle-dazzle with utility e-war in either ship or drone form. This Geddon doesn't even have a point. If you're hoping for this ship to point something, you're doing it wrong. ;-) It resists enemy e-war with ECCM, pumps cap into its system with a booster, and converts that cap into fire. It's a primitive. The second reason is the remote repper. "Remote rep BS" fleets used to be a hallmark of New Eden combat, with two adversaries coming together to slug it out, subtlety be damned. This fitting harkens back to that prior era.

In the modern EVE battlefield, this isn't a ship that you'll pull out very often. It's too specialized, and vulnerable to half a dozen counters, from AHACs to nano to hot-drops. But damn if this ship isn't fun when you can pull it out.

Fly brutal. :-)

(1) As I write this, Mega Pulse Lasers are 3.65 million each, and C-Type ANPs can be had for 13 million ISK if you're patient.

All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.

Kitbash

2012-01-24T16:57:00.000-08:00

So, now that I've introduced the concept behind Kingdoms of Amalur, let's talk about the demo for Reckoning, the single-player game set in this franchise.

I've said a lot that I'm a big fan of fantasy RPGs. This is understating the case a bit. I've been a fan of them going all the way back to the "Gold Box" series of SSI D&D games on the Commodore 64 and third generation IBM PC. Yeah. I've been gaming a long time. ;-) Still, my favorites in this genre have been first person perspective games, starting with the old Might and Magic series and then with Daggerfall, which started my long love affair with The Elder Scrolls. Coincidentally, these games tend to be open world.

Still, this type of game hasn't been as popular in the marketplace as third-person isometric perspective RPGs. The champions of this type of RPG have been Diablo, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter Nights. With Skyrim released late last year (and no doubt soon to have a number of expansions) and Diablo III to get a release date any moment now, we're going to have the latest contest to see which one does better in the market. Hint: Diablo III is almost certainly going to win, thanks in large part to its multi-player component. Coincidentally, though, these games tend to be linear world, though some -- like Neverwinter Nights -- throw a certain amount of open-world content in.

So, the first question to be answered is where does Reckoning fall in this contest? The answer is it's a third-person isometric perspective game... sort of.

But let's take a step back. My favorite types of games are open world RPGs, RTS, 4X strategic combat games like Sins of a Solar Empire, and tactical games like the Silent Hunter series of submarine simulations. Based on this, it's no surprise I got into EVE Online. In the middle for me are FPS and vehicle games. My least favorite types of games are fighting games, tunnel shooters, and platformers (though I thought Braid was brilliant). I feel these last three types of games lack depth. So again based on this, it's no surprise I got into EVE Online. ;-)

The typical mechanic of RPGs is that you choose your character's race (and associated advantages). Then you choose and start to level a class. And then you purchase items, spells, or advantages that this race and class can use to advantage. They tend to be tactical games in that a fight is won or lost at the preparation phase, and depends on how well you prepared the right weapons, spells, potions, or whatever to win a particular engagement. There's also a certain amount of trial and error involved as you determine what that correct strategy is. Still, once you start applying the correct strategy, you find that it quickly overwhelms your opponent.

The typical mechanic of a fighting game or platformer is that you learn combinations of key-presses (combos), moves and counter-moves, and potentially apply quick-time events to win a fight. Preparation needed by the player is minimal or non-existent. The key component of victory is learning the tells that announce that your opponent is going to use a particular offense or defense. Once you learn these tells, you apply timing and quick reflexes to apply your attacks at the right time to inflict damage.

Granted, a certain amount of this creeps into the most tactical RPG. For instance, in Skyrim, nearly all flying dragons will hover for a bit before launching their characteristic breath attack. This gives the player sufficient time to raise their shield, find cover, or prepare some other defense. But a fighting game or bosses in platformers will revolve around this mechanic. Your opponent doesn't much care if you're using a close-up or ranged attack, or if you've consumed a potion of fire resistance or whatever.

With all this in mind, if you haven't tried the Reckoning demo yourself, here's a game-play video that you can check out.

You'll notice the third-person isometric perspective right away. But then you'll start to notice other things as well. Like combos. Like quick-time events. Like the very fast and fluid combat. Play a typical RPG of either standard type and the combatants tend to be fairly static. There's a bit of tactical movement here and there, but that's it. Playing the demo of Reckoning, I was constantly surprised at how much and how fast I was moving around. It was completely different from any other RPG I'd ever played. I still chose race, class, and items, but Reckoning is a bit more coy with these as well. These concepts are de-emphasized.

Get into a boss fight and the elements of a fighting game come to the forefront. The bosses have tells and platformer-style area attacks to avoid or counter, and your reflexes become much more important. Granted, there's a certain amount of pre-fight strategy that you can employ. There are a few potions and the like in the game. But these elements are likewise de-emphasized.

Then you start to move around Reckoning's landscape, and you realize that there are 3D platformer elements as well! Granted, there are only a few elements of this in the demo, but you can almost feel a lot more of this going on in the background. I suspect that in the full game, they'll make many more appearances.

Realizing this, I asked my friend who is working on the Amalur MMO... "This is a kitbash, isn't it? A kitbash of a RPG, fighting game, and a platformer!" He replied, "Sure is."

The demo itself includes about 45 minutes out of the main storyline mission, followed by 45 minutes in the open world environment. The controls are a bit wonky on the PC platform... all of those combos and defenses require an almost dizzying myriad of keyboard combinations. This is one of those games that will greatly benefit from playing it on a console or with a console controller, I think. I found the controls much more manageable with this interface. I was quite impressed by the graphics, too! They're a bit more cartoony than I'm used to in an RPG, but once you get into the setting, they fit quite well. The combat animations are a real pleasure to behold.

So, color me intrigued. It will be damned interesting to see how many of these elements make their way into the eventual Kingdoms of Amalur MMO. I tried to get my friend to answer that question, but he stayed true to his NDA. ;-) The idea of a open-world fantasy MMO employing these concepts is sure interesting! If the fighting-game twitch aesthetic is used for the game's PvP, I might end up being at quite a disadvantage.

But now I have this picture in my head of 30 or 40 of these characters fighting a pitched battle for control of a village in the game's world that's kind of hard to shake...

Fragment

2012-01-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

I'm just going to spit-ball here for a little bit. It'll probably result in me being called all sorts of names, but I'm used to that.

When I first started playing EVE, I did a fair bit of mining. In a game where trit sold for 4+ ISK per unit, it was an easy, low-effort way to make what to me seemed a decent income at the time. It required only a tiny bit of my attention, and most of the time I'd do it, it'd run in the background while I was doing something else. Watching a movie? Fine, I'll have the laptop on the table next to me and shift ore around every few minutes. Working on writing something? Same deal: the Hulk can do its thing on one of the side monitors. I anchored a lot of cans in a 0.7 system and filled them, then came back later and emptied them. Repeat repeat repeat. It was boring but steady ISK.

But this period of my EVE career only lasted about six months or so before I moved on to other things. I did a little more mining after I moved into a wormhole, to take advantage of the higher-value ores available there. But as I've covered before, even the draw of this faded fast. Mining itself is relaxing and low-effort, but the logistics support involved is painful. Two of my characters are able to pilot Hulks, and I still own two of them. But it's now coming up on two years since I've undocked in either of them.(1)

I occasionally think about selling them, but then part of me thinks "well, it was relaxing, and maybe someday I'll do it again." Another part of my brain thinks "Are you high? Even belt-ratting is better than mining." The two parts get into an argument, nothing is resolved, and the Hulks gather dust in the hangars. Why yes, that is how my mind works sometimes.

I don't read the EVE-O forums all that often -- the signal-to-noise ratio is usually unacceptably low for me. Still, a thread out there started by Mors Sanctitatis caught my eye with some suggestions on how to improve mining:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=59357

You can read the whole post if you like, but the bulk of it is stuff that's been covered lots of times in other fora: get rid of drone alloys, shut down T1 loot drops, change the asteroids in belts to visually show which ones are valuable and which ones are junk to make bot-mining harder. They're not necessarily bad ideas... they're just not all that original. Still, there's one suggestion in his post that strikes me as being very interesting.

A lot of people never mine in Skyrim, regarding it as a waste of time. And indeed, most of the time it is. But one of the interesting things about Skyrim mining is that every once in a while as you're doing it, the game will tell you you've mined a gemstone and you'll have a sapphire or a garnet or a flawless diamond added to your inventory. It's a nice touch! Sure, the ore itself is nearly worthless except as a means of raising your Smithing skill later, but Skyrim gemstones are a nice source of supplemental gold.

Mors suggests a very similar mechanic for EVE Online mining. Every once in a while as you mined, you'd come upon a super-compressed fragment of the asteroid that -- when uncompressed -- would be worth a lot of ISK: hundreds of thousands or millions of units of ore in that one small bit. The fragment would be dropped into your ship's cargo hold along with the rest of the ore mined during that cycle. He further suggests that there would be some kind of visual clue that would let you know which asteroids had a chance of producing this higher-quality drop, and that such fragments would be much more common in lower security space. And that one idea, I find quite intriguing! People who belt-rat do it for the ISK, of course, but the process is livened up by the occasional faction spawn... and the far-off dream of an officer spawn. And it's those faction and officer spawns that belt ratters often remember, not the drudge of the grind.

Why should mining be different?

It'd also be quite interesting from both ganking and logistics perspectives. Mors suggests that this super-compressed ore fragment would be quite small, and I agree with this approach. Say this suggestion were implemented. The Hulk you're watching suddenly turns and prepares to warp off despite having lots of rocks in front of him. Think it's time to break out the cargo scanner? ;-) In addition, I could see these super-compressed fragments gaining a value out of proportion to their actual mineral value since they could be transported into or out of null-sec in blockade runners instead of jump freighters. That might even serve to lessen a bit of the mineral compression problem.

It's certainly not the whole Bible on how to make mining in EVE less shit, but it sure strikes me as an interesting chapter! Thoughts? Is this the oldest idea in the universe, and I'm just so far behind today's EVE mining discussions that I wasn't aware of it?

(1) Well, scratch that. I undocked in one for about three minutes a couple of days after the new turret models were released to see what they and the new mining laser effects looked like. ;-)

Misses the target

2012-01-23T17:09:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of chit-chat about four changes to the Drake that CCP proposed to CSM6 during the December summit:

it would lose the shield resistance bonus and the 5% Kinetic damage bonus; and instead,
gain a rate of fire bonus and a missile velocity bonus.

We're told that such a change would re-balance the Drake which currently "does everything too well". We're also told it would potentially add more uniqueness to the Nighthawk, which is presently overshadowed entirely by the Drake.

Let's get that last point out of the way first: there's currently not really any good reason to fly a Nighthawk, other than how cool it looks. A Drake can do the same job nearly as well, for one fifth the cost. In PvE, a well-fit end-game Drake does about 370 DPS without drones; the Nighthawk does 435. The 65 DPS is not really worth the extra ISK put at risk for ratting; get a Tengu instead; just as much DPS at far lower risk. For missioning, while you might start L4 missions with a Drake, you'll soon be drawn to other platforms than the Nighthawk. All in all, these proposed changes to the Drake aren't going to change that. You can't buff the Nighthawk by re-balancing the Drake. The Nighthawk needs someone to look at it, please. Onward.

So... is this a nerf? Kirith Kodachi thinks so. So does Seleene.

I'm not so sure.

First, let's make things really clear: this change is intentionally aimed at PvP Drakes. We'll get to why in a second. Drakes are hugely common in PvP because they do consistent, reliable DPS, their fitting is really hard to get too terribly wrong, and they're easy ships to put newbies into with little effort. Enemy FCs ignore them until last because the Drake is the very epitome of a defensive ship. Almost no other ship in EVE can match it on defense.

However, that defensive nature means that Drakes have long been regarded as well-balanced PvE platforms. CCP now proposes to strip that defensive nature away.

What's that resistance nerf going to do to the Drake? Well, EHP for a max skilled pilot of a Drake with no fittings is going to drop from 24.6k EHP to just over 21k EHP if my math is accurate. A fairly typical heavy tank PvP Drake (double-Invul, double-LSE, double-CDFE, single anti-EM rig) will drop from 81k EHP to about 76k. More significantly, the PvE triple-Purger Drake will go from being able to omni-tank about 300 DPS with passive recharge to about 175 DPS.

Yeah. This is a pretty big change, and -- ironically -- it'll hit PvE Drakes a lot harder than their PvP brethren.

Why is the change so significant? The Drake is all about the resists. Today, a double-Invul PvE Drake with no Damage Control has an average resist of 72%. The resist-nerfed Drake's average will be 62%. I wrote about how important even a few percentage points of resistance are a couple of months ago. Those percentage points are even more important when the ship in question isn't active tanking. To quickly summarize the point I made in that post, 62% resists means that 100 points of shield recharge becomes 263 effective shield hit points. 72% resists means that same 100 points of shield recharge becomes 357.

On a Drake, depending on your fit, that 100 shield points recharges every six or seven seconds. Let's say it's 6.5 seconds. That means the higher resist Drake picks up almost a thousand more EHP per minute, meaning it can passively tank some combination of two or three more rat battleships, six more rat cruisers, or 12 more rat frigates. The difference adds up fast! We wouldn't see a lot of Drakes in L4 missions after this change; they wouldn't be able to survive them. Their ability to tank L3s will have to be adjusted with a lot more mission-specific tanking and careful flying.

The PvP Drakes are not going to be impacted as much. PvP Drakes close the EM hole and fit Damage Controls by and large, so the resist nerf won't hit them as hard: their resists, on average, will drop from 73 to 65. It's a 7-point change instead of a 10-point one, still big but not disastrous.

The big impact on the PvP Drakes is going to be on the flip-side... all those offensive changes. The kinetic damage change looks like a nerf, but it really isn't. Today, you can look at a Drake and think "kinetic damage". A lot of PvP ship classes out there right now that often fight Drakes -- AHACs, for instance -- go out of their way to close their kinetic resistance hole. With Drakes able to vary their damage to whatever type of damage is required, their effective DPS is going to go up a fair bit. And the missile speed and rate of fire buffs are going to make brawling HAM Drakes -- currently relatively uncommon -- absolute close-range monsters.

But let's be clear, here: CCP isn't looking at these change for the good of the ship. They're looking these changes for the good of their servers. They've had a strong desire to punch the Drake in the mouth for about a year now and are just looking for the right time to deliver that punch. CCP claims that Drake missile volleys -- particularly in large numbers -- are a big cause of server lag. These changes really effectively do two things to the Drake:

make them easier to kill and more likely to be killed, so they'll die faster and fire fewer missiles; and,
make those missiles that they do fire hit their targets faster, lessening server load from calculating missile tracks.

It's clever. But will it back-fire?

After all, there's another way to use that range bonus. Right now, FCs across New Eden know that HML Drakes -- the most common type -- can engage defensively at about 70-75km, and offensively (while chasing a target) at 55-60km. The missile speed boost is going to increase those ranges by 25%. Energy Locus Hellcats will no longer be able to hit Drakes for good damage at 70km the way they can today because the Drakes aren't going to be there any more... the Drakes will be at 80 or 85km, outside of Locus Hellcat range. AHACs, meanwhile, can no longer count on their 80 or 85% kinetic resist to save them; those Drakes are going to be firing EM missiles at them instead.(1)

Lots and lots of people are looking at these potential Drake changes... and getting excited about them. As a result, we might see more Drakes on the PvP battlefield out of this kind of change, not fewer. And we might see them just emphasizing the skirmishing role they were never intended to take in the first place. Do these changes constitute a Drake nerf? Do they really?

Well, yes: they sure are for the PvE Drakes! But that wasn't the intent. While this proposed change to the Drake is sure interesting, I think it misses the target.

(1) I almost typed "Thunderbolts", but they're not gonna be Thunderbolts after tomorrow; they're gonna be Mjolnirs.

Open world MMO

2012-01-23T14:54:00.000-08:00

I play games other than EVE. Shocking, but true, I know. ;-) For example, blogging was a bit lighter than usual in early January because I was pumping a ton of time into Skyrim.(1) I also toy with other MMOs occasionally; the little text block at the right detailing which ones isn't updated very often, but it's still reality.

Matter of fact, I think I'll sum up my thoughts on Wurm Online right now. First, my concerns: the graphics and interface are terribly dated. It might also be unique in the MMO universe in that it has a steeper curve than EVE Online, partially because of the interface, partially because of the lack of newbie-friendly areas. The instant you jump into the game, you're assumed to be an expert at it, and if you're not... well... sucks to be you.

That said, it also has some positives. The idea of strongly encouraging people to come together, cooperate, and build strongholds and towns to protect themselves from the harsh world outside is a really good one. In the same way that EVE could be the subject of many economic research papers, Wurm Online could be the subject of many anthropological ones. When you watch a community form and build up to defend itself, you really feel like you're watching a bit of early Earth history... people putting up wooden palisades to keep out the wolves... then converting them to stone when their wood-walled village becomes prosperous enough to be worth invading.

So, sum up Wurm Online as: concept good, implementation bad. And I think I'll go ahead and move it to the "departed" list. ;-)

One thing Wurm definitely has on its side is the sandbox element: it lays out the background and the story, then gets out of the way and lets the players provide much of the content. In this way, Wurm has a problem because it steps too far out of the way. But it was the sandbox element that definitely drew me in.

I'm still looking for a sandbox fantasy MMO.

For that reason, another franchise that I'm keeping a very close eye on is the Kingdoms of Amalur brand. In the interests of full disclosure, I'll say that the franchise came to my attention because a friend of mine works for the company producing part of it. However, this one would have popped up on my radar pretty quickly in any case because of its pedigree. The executive designer of the brand is Ken Rolston, who was the lead designer of the Morrowind and Oblivion installments of The Elder Scrolls series. When he left Bethesda not long after Oblivion's release, I was not happy. ;-) The party line was that he retired... but rumors swirled that he'd been pushed due to burn-out.

The first game in the Kingdoms of Amalur brand will be a single-player RPG called Reckoning, set to be released in a couple of weeks. But the second game in the brand will be an MMO... release date unknown. They're not going to run out of money, though. The company producing both products is 38 Studios, owned by former Major League Baseball player (and MMO fanatic) Curt Schilling. He makes it quite candidly clear that he's spending $100 million on the Amalur MMO, he expects it to have millions of subscribers, and he rejects free-to-play as making no business sense.

In that context, anyone interested in MMOs who doesn't have their eye on this property probably isn't thinking straight. ;-)

So those two elements would have caught my attention already, but it's the third element that has me truly intrigued: it's been made repeatedly clear that the Amalur games will be strongly open world, mated to a dense storyline and back-story (written by R.A. Salvatore). You take an open world and plop it down into an MMO, and boys and girls, what you have... is a sandbox. So... yeah. I'm keeping an eye on this one. Expect this to be the first in a series of Kingdoms of Amalur posts around here.

On the 17th, the first playable demo for Reckoning was released, and I spent some time over the weekend playing it. It's available on XBox Live, Steam, and for direct download among other places. Go check it out if you're interested. I'll have more to say about the demo in a day or two, but felt like I should introduce the new tag first...

(1) And I'll be comparing Skyrim to EVE in an important respect in a blog post before too long.

Quote of the Week: Trivia

2012-01-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

I'm torn. The quote of the week should definitely be one of the many tweets sent out this past week by CCP Diagoras. But which one?

This one is tempting:

43.74% of Tornadoes destroyed this year so far were destroyed by CONCORD or sentry guns. 1,219 of 2,787 total. Criminal. #tweetfleet

But so is this one:

54,991 capitals built in 2011 in total; Carriers being the single largest group with 24,028. #tweetfleet

But I think I'll actually go with this one, which is the answer to "what percentage of active characters with more than 5 million skill points are in high-sec?":

And the answer to the % of >5m SP chars in high sec is... 67%! Lower than any of the guesses. See the pic! #tweetfleet

CCP Diagoras has been an absolute fountain of information this past week. Go check out his tweets this week, as reported by EN24. In fact, there's only one common thread linking all the information that Diagoras has shared with us in the last week: all of it is trivial and useless. It's completely pointless! It's roughly as useful to the average EVE player as knowing exactly what percentage of Americans put honey in their oatmeal. Actually, no. It's less useful than that because at least a honey manufacturer might find that last fact useful to his business.

Transparency in business is defined as openness, communication, and accountability in the business information being communicated. When you are being transparent, you are removing all barriers to the free public access of information. Put simply, a clerk at a check-out counter ringing up the purchase of your groceries is being transparent: you know exactly how much each item costs and can make business decisions based on those costs whether you really want to buy those bananas or not. An appliance repairman presenting a non-itemized bill for $300 to fix your dishwasher is not being transparent: you don't know how much the parts are costing compared to the labor or how that amount was arrived at. True data is information produced that you can make business decisions based on.

As someone who closely followed and reported on the data produced by CCP's Quarterly Economic Newsletters and could make economic decisions about my EVE play based on the data contained in them, I find this "data" from Diagoras not only useless but actively insulting. It presents the illusion of transparency when really, it's anything but. Over the last six months or so, there's been a clear and conscious direction on CCP's part to limit the EVE player's access to useful in-game data.

And this stuff from Diagoras is a lovely example: it's trivia.

This came to a head for me when in the past six weeks, Diagoras has had time to produce not one, not two, but three devblogs full of this crap. There's time to produce this trivial garbage, but not a true QEN or even an annual economic newsletter? Really?

I've chatted with Diagoras a few times in e-mail and he strikes me as a really smart guy who has his act together. He's clearly organized, professional, and thinks things through. His actions and statements during the Fearless debacle last summer were similarly above reproach. But this stuff is not only wasting my time, it's wasting his.

How about dumping the trivia and giving us some real data, Diagoras? How would that be?

Sunday definition: Death cloning

2012-01-22T23:59:00.001-08:00

"Death cloning" is the act of instantly teleporting yourself across the galaxy by self-destructing your pod while in open space. You will awaken in whatever station houses your medical clone. You will have lost all of your implants. Don't forget to immediately pay the fee to upgrade your clone to hold your full set of skill points! If you do not, the next time you are podded, you will lose one level off one of your highest level skills and will have to retrain it. This skill loss is permanent.

Why death clone yourself? There are a couple of common reasons.

The most common reason to death clone is because your ship has been destroyed in PvP combat and you believe it not worth the trouble to fly the clone all the way back to one of your home bases. This is a choice most often made with a non-implanted clone, which are quite common in null-sec PvP combat. If your fleet had to travel several dozen jumps before finding the fight in which you lost your ship, and you do not have implants in your PvP clone, then it might be worth the cost to simply reappear back at home rather than taking the time to travel all the way back home (and perhaps get podded on the way back anyway). Time is money, as they say.

Still, there are common ways to use death clones strategically or tactically. As I said in a previous definition, many players have cyno alts that they use to light cynosural fields for the capital ships owned by their main pilots. If this is the case and you previously spread cyno ships across stations where you commonly light cynos, you can immediately death clone your cyno alt's character to one of these stations. To do so, you just dock at the closest medical station, reset your medical clone to this distant station before death cloning. You can often set your medical clone to quite distant locations.

This is even more convenient if your cyno alt is in a corporation with offices spread around the galaxy. You can reset your medical clone to any station where your pilot's corp has an office.

Death cloning is also occasionally done with trade alts, in the same way. In this case, the purpose to death cloning is to determine the prices in the market system jumped to without having to fly all the way there.

In both of these cases, it is advantageous to use clones with 900,000 SP or fewer. These clones pay no medical fees for upgrading their clones to hold all of their skill points since the free clone can hold this many skill points.

Occasionally on Sundays, I will be defining a common EVE term for those who might not have heard it. If you have a suggestion for such a term, please drop it into the comments.

Signs and portents

2012-01-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

A lot of people have been throwing a lot of veiled and not-so-veiled comments about me and whether I'm running for CSM7. I wrote the following post on Failheap Challenge today that might give those writing these comments some things to think about. Short version: that question is not as simple as you seem to think it is.

The context is my replying to a pair of posts from Bartholomeus Crane, who is one of Failheap's most notorious CSM-bashers. In the midst of one such post dismissing CSM6 as nothing more than CCP cheerleaders, he wrote, among other things:

But so does CCP, who also read this forum (and Jester's blog. Apparently it is the most read blog at CCP at this moment. Well done Jester. Aren't you glad you didn't get into this CSM? You've got more of an influence outside it! And you can write whatever the hell you like as well!).

Here is my response to Barth, which I present without additional comment:

Those two thoughts have occurred to me, yes.

With re: your main points... I read all of your posts from cover to cover Barth, but it's hard to actually agree with any of them. You're far too hard on the CSM, I think. I'll limit myself to one example, the big one, how close CSM6 has gotten to CCP.

Trebor and Mynxee might disagree with me here, but it's hard today to recall how many of CCP's development teams CSM5 managed to isolate themselves from and piss off. The Incarna team wouldn't talk to them at all, and they weren't alone. Every team in CCP could be measured based on how much or how little they were willing to interact with the CSM, some teams voting "not at all", some of them "somewhat", and only a very few were enthusiastic CSM supporters... and most of those teams were not what you would call high-impact within CCP (one was QA, for instance).

As many fireballs as I throw at CCP and the CSM in my blog sometimes, in my RL job, I'm a professional negotiator. In that capacity, I can tell you that it's damned hard to influence someone who won't even talk to you or dismisses your importance before they even come in the door. The Open Letter that CSM5 published right before they headed out the door did not help. I ticked off a number of my CSM5 friends when I blogged that the Letter had done major damage to the CCP/CSM relationship and had actively made CSM6's job harder.

When I was running for CSM6 myself, one of my major platforms was using my professional experience to re-open some of those closed doors. I said that if that's what it took, I'd buy many CCP devs and leads many many alcoholic beverages after hours to make that happen. Now Mittens and I have a lot of differences, but even you cannot now deny that his version of the same thing has been wildly successful. Hell, from your stand-point, it's apparently been too successful. Fine, you have the right to complain about that.

But the simple truth is that CSM6 has been successful in opening a ton of doors. A few of those doors are still closed, but not many. As player advocates, the CSM has much more access today than they had a year or 18 months ago. And no, I'm not one of those that gives the CSM credit for what the Summer of Rage and the associated player unsubs did to CCP. But the CSM was in the right place, with the right personality, to take advantage of it when CCP started to open up. CSM7's job will be easier because of it.

All in all, you seem to prefer a no-access CSM to what we've got today, and that's just silly.

Plans for the weekend

2012-01-20T15:56:00.000-08:00

If you don't follow incursion news in EVE, you might not be aware of this, but CSM alternate Darius III and the rest of BricK sQuAD. have made it their mission lately to close high-sec incursions as quickly as the mom spawns. There's currently a 27-page threadnaught about it on the EVE Online forums... in the Crime and Punishment section, naturally.

Since my own connection to the incursion community is known, I haven't covered this to avoid the appearance of bias. It's tempting, for instance, to rack this up as yet another veteran EVE player interdiction of new-player resources, except obviously with incursions it's nowhere near that simple since a lot of PvP vets like myself also participate in them. It's equally tempting to rack this up as sour grapes on Darius's part, but it's not that simple either since Darius could hardly do this on his own.

So, I'm going to limit my coverage of the issue to this: whether you want to call this an interdiction or not, it's certainly been effective! For the last couple of weeks, incursion bears have been very hard-pressed to find sites or build up any momentum. As soon as they get settled into a new incursion, a fleet comes along and "prematurely" kills the mom, sending the "caravan of the heavens" on its way again. There have been a few patches where an incursion has lasted a day or two past the "Mobilizing" phase, but not many!

And the issue seems to be coming to a head this weekend.

Twenty hours ago as I write this, there were three high-sec Incursions. Right now, just as the weekend kicks off in Europe, there are zero. Call this the picture of the week:

The rage in the public incursion channels is fairly epic. I think it's just possible that someone might do something rash.

Oh, and I'll just leave this here (name deleted to protect the guilty):

[ 2012.01.20 23:42:27 ] * > if I go in low sec to do that Almur incursion, they cant get my nightmare if I fit a cloak right ? :S

EDIT (21/Jan/2012): EVE News 24 has posted a terrific follow-up article on this issue. Go read it. It's very much worth your time.

Kill of the Week: Flycatchers

2012-01-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

So, at the risk of annoying Seleene (and his Titan), I'm going to go with this for my KOTW.
http://irc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12174560

Oh look. A Titan without drones just solo killed a Flycatcher.

I've said it before, and this time, I'm going to write an entire blog post about it. Titan guns are massively, stupidly, annoyingly, ridiculously over-powered. One of my beefs with Perpetuum Online when I was writing about it here semi-regularly was the fact that larger robots targeted just as fast as smaller robots and they had many more mid-slots in which to fit the PO equivalent of Sensor Boosters. So, the larger PO robots got the ability to double-dip: they had more guns to fire and they had the ability to target those guns more quickly than a smaller PO robot could counter-attack. This was a dumb mechanic. I haven't revisited PO to see if it's been fixed.

In the meantime, we have the same thing going on in EVE Online with Titan gun tracking.

I sometimes play a miniature war-game that involves man-size targets, vehicle-size targets, and warship-size targets all on the same battlefield. In this game, when a vehicle attacks a man, it does so at a large penalty. This happens despite the fact that the vehicles are presumably quite advanced, with excellent computer-controlled targeting systems. When a warship-size target attacks a man-size target, the very large penalty is doubled, making a hit essentially impossible.

And let's be clear here: a Titan solo killing a dictor with its guns is roughly the equivalent of a battleship solo killing a Warrior II with its large guns. Or a warship in the miniature war-game I play shooting a parrot off the shoulder of a man-size target.

I'm annoying Seleene here because when I pointed out this kind of kill to Seleene, he made a very large production number of the fact that while the Titans were applying DPS, it was allied Loki and Proteus strategic cruisers applying target painters and webs that made those kills possible. And while this statement is factual, it isn't really true. As super-capital ships, Erebus Titans have six mid-slots, equal to or more mid-slots than any other Gallente ship in the game. And Erebus pilots fill those slots with Tracking Computers. Oh my, do they ever. An unbonused Titan gun tracks at 0.0067. Slot four good quality Tracking Computers into those mid-slots, pop a Drop booster, and this rises to 0.022 or higher.

Or put another way, that's better tracking than my tracking enhanced Tornado and nearly as good as my tracking enhanced arty-fit Hurricane.

Dear Heaven, does this need to be fixed.

Oh, and just in case someone says "Jester, you tard. That kill is a fluke. That Flycatcher pilot was obviously doing something dumb. It was just blind luck that that Titan soloed it." Uh huh. Right. What were you saying?

I think the wrong ships in this game are being called fly-catchers.

Hive mind

2012-01-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

I seem to have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest. That's OK. I'm good at that.

When I made a lot of references to "the CSM" and a bit of group-think/group-say in terms of the December minutes, I thought it was a fun way to point out that while CSM6 has overall done quite a good job, the fact that they closed all daylight between individual members for communications purposes made accountability a bitch. It became very difficult to see where the seams were between individual members and what this or that member thinks about the game. Coming into a CSM7 election where the bulk of CSM6 is likely to seek re-election, this struck me as a bad thing.

And happily, despite this assertion being written on "a shitty blog" (to quote Comrade Chairman), a growing number of CSM6 members agree with me.

Seleene, Two step, and Meissa Anunthiel have specifically come out of their non-blogging hibernations to blog about the "hive mind" issue I brought up and their specific positions on the issues I raised. I do recommend you go out and read them. I know that Trebor Daehdoow has read my post as well and I suspect he'll be weighing in in due course. The Mittani has also read my post, but I suspect he'll be otherwise ignoring it. ;-)

EDIT (21/Jan/2012): Trebor has posted his responses to my questions.

What the other CSM6 members think, I couldn't tell you, but the other nine CSM6 members have been non-entities all year from a player-base communications stand-point so I don't expect responses from them, frankly.(1)

By the way, Meissa's post is particularly and remarkably candid for him. If you read only one of the three posts, read Meissa's. It also seems to strongly imply that Meissa will be running for CSM7 without him coming right out and saying he will. ;-) As of today, every CSM member mentioned in this blog post has confirmed a re-election run except Meissa. Every other CSM member is silent on the topic.

More to come on this, I'm sure.

EDIT (20/Jan/2012): Meissa confirms he is indeed running for re-election in the comments of his blog post.

(1) The one semi-exception is UAxDEATH, who recently started a thread on Failheap Challenge as an obvious pre-cursor to his re-election campaign.

All hail J! All hail J!

2012-01-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

And now an important message from Jester's evil twin, Garth. The opinions of Garth are not the opinions of Jester (unless they are).

There are so few heroes left in the world.

In a world that has moved long past corrupt police, politicians, and court houses to pedophile priests and parents that murder their own children because those children interfere with the real need to party, it's so hard to find a paragon of true evil any more. Some of you may ask, "Garth, you true Pillar of Evil, to whom do you look up to? Who inspires you?"

And I would answer: the hard-working men and women of the Goonswarm Intelligence Agency, and indeed, anyone who infiltrates an organization for fun and profit.

Of course, I have never read a GIA manual on how to infiltrate organizations, but I can guess how it starts. You appear to have useful skills and knowledge. You impress those that hire you with these skills, your laid-back manner and good humor, and your willingness to relocate to some distant area. Once there, you take on the really unsexy jobs that nobody else wants to tackle. Naive idiots like Jester might say that you should be measured by those that hire you on results, not effort, but that's just fucking stupid. Instead, strive to be compared to how things looked before you got there: i.e., make sure you're measured in comparison to a time when nothing was done with this thankless work.

Over time, you expand your influence and you're put in charge of larger efforts. Test your influence by getting your new corp to spend a lot of ISK on some hardware that you don't really intend to do anything with. Just see if they'll buy the things you ask them to buy; you can later say that you don't have the resources to put this hardware to any actual use. As your responsibilities grow, you'll also need to recruit some evil minions. It's not necessary to refer to your evil minions as a Task Force or give them a cool four-letter acronym, but you get extra style points if you do.

Make sure that the really important stuff all flows through your hands, though! If someone makes obvious suggestions about how this responsibility should be spread across a larger effort with more people, you should definitely let them know that such things do not scale well. If people start to tell you about rumors that you're skimming off the top, you should tell them not to rely too much on anecdotal evidence. Transparency is also obviously to be avoided whenever possible. Be sure to make it clear that releasing raw data without context would make the data meaningless.

And if, God forbid, someone actually challenges you to provide results, or shows you that things that are being accomplished in other corps but not in yours, you should absolutely curb-stomp that person for their temerity. Brook no opposition to the way you want to do things. Buzz-words and bullshit are always your best weapons, of course, but don't be afraid to bully those that suspect your true nature into submission if need be.

You spies should remember this: your best measure of success is that those you're spying on have no indication that anything untoward is happening.

This kind of evil truly inspires me. It's a pity that nobody's ever applied these tactics in real life. Imagine if you could use these tactics to make real life money without providing any real results to show for it... say, by getting yourself hired by CCP!

Naaaaaah.

The preceding has been an important message from Jester's evil twin, Garth. The management apologizes to any and all whom Garth may have offended. He should really apply Preparation H to his mouth, given what comes out of it.

Things the CSM thinks

2012-01-18T14:42:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned yesterday, since the second CSM "fireside chat" this year, the CSM has closed ranks and for all intents and purposes eliminated all daylight between individual members. We are quickly and often reminded that the CSM is in essential agreement about the issues facing EVE, that there is no internal dissent between members, and any attempt to drive a wedge between individual CSM members will not work because they live in a world of agreeable happy sunshine and unicorns and bacon where even former foes like Mittens and Trebor hold hands and sing "The Hills Are Alive" while the alternate CSM members "ooh" and "aah".

Cough. Sorry. Got carried away. ;-)

Anyway, point is: we're told that "the CSM" essentially agrees with each other on major issues. As I said yesterday, this is a great political ploy for getting CSM6 members re-elected, but not so great from an accountability stand-point. How is the voter to know which CSM6 members to vote for? In the CSM December Summit minutes, we are told many many things "the CSM" thinks, but hardly anything at all that individual members think. It would be useful to understand what individual CSM members think about the many controversial issues raised in the December Summit minutes, don't you agree?

With that in mind, I present you with a partial list of...

Things the CSM Thinks

Pilots -- most particularly super-carrier pilots -- should be given a "partial respec" of their skill-points (page 12).
The Naga is too powerful (page 13).
Super-carriers should be able to dock in stations (pages 13 and 17); and,
super-carriers should not be treated as "special snowflakes" (page 13).
Super-carriers should be given a super-carrier-specific mod for tackling other super-capital ships (pages 13 and 17).
Incursion Vanguard sites offer minimal risk (page 13).
Drones should just give ISK bounties instead of dropping alloys (page 16).
Alliances should be able to tax member ratting income (page 16).
Wars in EVE are driven by hatred and grudges rather than resources (page 16).
Fleets of Rifters should be able to tackle and hold down a Titan (page 17).
There both should and should not be a new class of capital ship specialized in tackling (page 17).(1)
There should never be new super-capital ships added to EVE (page 17).
Outposts should be destructible (pages 17 and 18).
There are multiple alliances which live in NPC stations, amass super-capitals, and hold high-value moons (page 18).
NPC station services should be destructible (page 18); and,
when destroyed, should not be repairable but should regenerate over time (page 18).(2)
Station service hit-points are at the right level (page 19); and,
they should not be a viable target for small gangs looking to force sov-holders to defend their territories (page 19).
Faction Warfare leaders should be elected (page 20).
Faction Warfare corps should be able to set the tax rates of NPC stations in low-sec (page 20).
Rewards in low-sec, particularly Faction Warfare rewards, are not high enough (pages 20 and 25).
There should be some sort of wormhole stabilizer to make invading w-space easier (page 20).(3)
Sleepers should attack POSs and/or pod people (page 20).(3)
Electronic Attack Frigates should be able to "impact" super-capital ships immune to e-war (page 21).(4)
Drakes should lose their shield resistance bonus and their kinetic missile damage bonus (page 21); and,
be given a rate of fire bonus and missile velocity bonus instead (page 21).
An Infrastructure Hub upgrade should be produced to further reduce POS fuel costs for sov-holders (page 24).
Sov bills are too high, and sov-holders don't receive any benefit from them (page 24).
Sov-holders should be able to build a module in their own space that hurts other people's sov space (page 24).
Null-sec is about hate and cruelty (page 25).
There is little enjoyment to be found in low-sec (page 25).
The contraband system should be removed (page 25).
Buying a PvP ship should be an investment that brings in ISK (page 25); and,
a destroyed frigate should provide less rewarding drops for those that destroy it than a destroyed battleship (page 25).
The person who destroys your ship should get 10-20% of your insurance pay-out for that ship (page 26), including if they gank you in high-sec (also page 26).(3)
Despite the fact CCP has a large number of assets for the NeX store, they should not be released at this time (page 30).
Players should be able to train more than one pilot per account by paying for this privelige with PLEXes (page 30).
Players don't care about their corporation logos (page 30); and,
they care about their alliance logos much more (page 30).
The unique attraction of EVE is "you can grief people" and "it's not a game for wusses" (page 32).

Feel free to use this list as a guide-post for your questions for individual CSM members running for re-election. Oh, and one more that's just fun: "the CSM" thinks fire is hot and it burns (page 30).

Finally, it's worth noting that "one" CSM thinks that high-sec income should be nerfed whenever possible (page 20), but that "other members of the CSM were quick to object to that suggestion." Guess "the CSM" doesn't agree on every single thing after all.

(1) And I thought I was good at simultaneously believing two incompatible things at once.
(2) I'm quite sure that sov-holders definitely would not create daily blobs designed to knock out these services in NPC stations in their spheres of influence.
(3) Only "some" of the CSM think this.
(4) Titan-nerfing Sentinel is a go!

FOTW: Endgame PvE Ishtars

2012-01-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

I was asked this week about good high-end Gallente PvE ships, and I've been intending to replace last year's (sub-optimal) PvE Ishtar fit for quite some time. I've encountered much superior fits to that version for both armor and shield, so this is probably a good week to go ahead and trot them out. Depending on where your tanking skills are higher, you can go with either version:

[Ishtar, Rats Missions Shield]
Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I
Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I
Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I
Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I
Beta Reactor Control: Shield Power Relay I

10MN Afterburner II
Invulnerability Field II
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Small 'Arup' I Remote Bulwark Reconstruction /OFFLINE
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

[Ishtar, Rats Missions Armor]
Capacitor Power Relay II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Medium Armor Repairer II

10MN Afterburner II
Medium Capacitor Battery II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Small 'Arup' I Remote Bulwark Reconstruction /OFFLINE
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

Both of these boats have about five minutes of cap endurance depending on skills. Both of them tank equally well (the armor version is slightly superior). For all intents and purposes, both of them do the same DPS. I haven't listed drones, but assuming HAC IV skills, you should load five each of Hobgoblins, Hammerheads, Ogres, and Gardes for most PvE work, trading to their Minmatar equivalent for Angel missioning/ratting. A good drone pilot will do about 540 DPS with Sentries, or about 475 with the Heavies. This is more than sufficient for any class of 0.0 rats and will handle L3 and L4 missions with ease. A HAC V pilot that takes this ship to 0.0 should fill the additional drone bay space gained with ECM drones.

T2 drones are obviously optimal, but you can use T1 versions while you're getting your skills up.

Both versions of this ship require somewhat extensive skills, and the higher your skills are, the more versatile you'll be able to make them. In particular, the shield version has a fair bit of CPU headroom remaining. You can fit small guns on a PvE Ishtar, but the four empty high slots also call out for salvagers. With max skills and the remote repper off-lined, you can fit three. I'd probably go with two salvagers and two 200mm AutoCannons instead. The ACs add another 50 or so DPS.

Tank in both cases is actually provided primarily by the Ishtar's small sig radius combined with the speed imparted by the afterburner. Still, both the armor and shield platforms tank at 250 DPS plus, which will be fine in both missions and in 0.0. The Ishtar is also quick enough and can apply Hobgoblin/Warrior DPS hard enough to quickly take out any scramming rats if you need to warp off. As I noted before, the armor version is a bit tankier and the tank is a bit more versatile: trade out the hardener for a rat-specific one, or you can go with a second EANM. You'll be tempted to trade the Medium Capacitor Battery for a third Cap Recharger. Don't. Doing so will do really bad things to your cap reserves.

The new Tech2 Omnidirectional Tracking Links are quite a boon to the Ishtar! A lot of guys would try to wedge a second T1 version onto the ship, but as I previously said, I really don't find it all that necessary. And with the superior T2 version, this is even more true.

If you like, you can replace mods here and there with their faction versions for even better performance, but it probably isn't all that necessary unless you want to clear CPU for a particular high slot mod or something.

The one thing I got right in my previous Ishtar post was this:

Once you head for 0.0, there are a lot of advantages to ratting in a cruiser-size ship. The key advantage is the quick align-and-warp of a cruiser-size platform. Keep an eye on Local as you work, and if you see a neut or hostile come into system, just warp off to a friendly POS. As long as you're paying attention, you won't have any problems. And even if you do get tackled and killed, the Ishtar is a very inexpensive platform and very easy to replace, not only financially, but logistically. Packaged, you easily can fit this ship and all its fittings into a blockade runner. Try that with a ratting battleship or battle-cruiser...

Rat safe. :-)

All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta 3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type of ship more aggressively and well.

Anything with four wheels

2012-01-18T08:35:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie.

JetCord was kind enough to point me at the following:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=48017

Read it, and you'll find that an EVE pilot named -- heh -- NoNamium has completed Level V of all 60 Spaceship Command skills. Yes, even the racial Titans. He has Level V in all of them, with 117 million SP in Spaceship Command alone. Reportedly, his motivation?

So if I see a ship anywhere in the galaxy unattended I can steal it - no matter what ship it is.

Hee! I encourage you to go out to the thread and offer him some congratulations.

After that's done, you can check out his skills profile here:
http://eveboard.com/pilot/NoNamium

It's lovely proof that all the Spaceship Command skill points in the world (literally) are not everything. Support skills are also very important. If you catch this guy solo in an armor-tanking ship (like this Cane), you can probably have your way with him. ;-) Without the relevant support skills trained, he'll lack both some tank and some speed.

Congrats to NoNamium on this very interesting achievement, and thanks again to JetCord for the pointer!

Consensus choice for the Quote of the Week

2012-01-17T16:20:00.000-08:00

bigmac on Failheap sums up my concern about "the CSM" having this or that position far better than I did. When Trebor said, "Two step has addressed the general issue of why we do it that way in the minutes. I am sure that if you want to know the position of a particular CSM on a particular issue, they will be happy to state it -- and if they won't, then you know who *not* to vote for.", bigmac replied:

The problem with this is, as in RL, there's nothing to prevent candidates from saying one thing to get elected and then turning around and advocating for the exact opposite in dark smoke filled rooms where there is zero accountability, followed by lying about what they did in order to get re-elected. We need to know who is advocating for what exactly in these meetings. Otherwise the process becomes corrupt just like in RL.

Well said.

The number of controversial positions in this document advocated by "the CSM" is rather staggering, honestly. "The CSM" has given voters little choice but to blame the entire group for whichever ones we want to. Two step, you're in favor of wormhole stabilizers. Trebor, you're in favor of super-cap blobs knocking out station services throughout NPC Venal.

More about these controversial positions tomorrow.