Ashireka's Adventures In EVE

I was interested to see Mynxee had put up a page for people to brainstorm ideas around how to “fix lowsec”:

http://criminallowsec.ideascale.com/

Lowsec has definitely been odd, and I’ve definitely had concerns with figuring how to smoothly progress from my highsec activities to “the next step”.  Lowsec, to me (and I’ve posted as much on that site), is kind of the “worst of both worlds”.  You have the lawlessness of nullsec, which means you have absolutely no real protection there, and the security status problem of highsec.  I have no real reason to go there as a law-abiding citizen of EVE, because there’s little reward for the risk of getting ganked.  And I have no significant reason to go there for PvP, because if I engage when I have the advantage, I take a security status hit and I’m not able to easily leave/dock/escape (and if I do it too much, I’ll never be allowed back in highsec).

This makes it, well, fairly useless.  Which sucks, because if I want to get in a quick, no-commitment ratting session, lowsec is the only place I can really go to find cruiser-sized opponents (and the occasional “entry level battleship”).  Highsec’s belts are way too easy, and the exploration sites tend to be not significantly better.  Lowsec has the difficulty level I’m looking for, but it just tends to be too risky.  If I’m there for ratting, I’m likely not in a good position to defend myself in PvP — and if I’m there in an exploration ship, I’m definitely at a significant disadvantage.  The rewards just aren’t there.

But the rewards can’t be better than nullsec, and the risk can’t be as minimal as highsec.  So it’s a conundrum.  One idea I had was to make lowsec systems both safer and more dangerous for aggressors.  When someone attacks someone in lowsec, make them attackable by anyone in that system for the duraing of their criminal flag.  And announce their status to the world.  This would act like a “call for help” — the person being attacked sends out an SOS to the entire system asking for assistance.  This gives people looking for PvP the opportunity to legally attack “criminals”, providing the possibility of a player-operated police force.  This would add the potential for some safety to people in the system.  Of course, it also adds the potential for corruption as well; a player-operated police force isn’t guaranteed to respond to a call for help, or perhaps won’t respond without payment.  Maybe they’re all “in on it” and have been paid not to respond.

I think the security status deduction would have to be removed, though.  If you’re risking getting attacked by anyone who shows up in system, you shouldn’t also be penalized for performing that attack.  Of course, if that was removed, we’d need to figure out how the security status penalties would work, because without penalties, there’s no way to prevent nasty pirates from getting back into highsec systems…

I think it’s an interesting idea that could potentially make lowsec a much more interesting place, removing some of the “worst of both worlds” elements, providing reasons for good guys AND bad guys to spend some time there…

It’s been another long while since I’ve posted.  Personal life, and particularly business life, have been rough on me lately.  But, I have a new, hopefully not-insane job lined up, I’m starting to come back down from the clifftop as I wind down my current business, and hoping to restore some balance and harmony to my life.  New job will require me to be in an office, though, so I won’t be able to get in gametime on business hours as I could potentially do over the next week or so…

Anyways, what’s been going on…  PI has been fairly underwhelming.  The babysitting required doesn’t seem to warrant the value of the products.  I’ve been building Robotics, which I’ve been funnelling into my production of 150mm Light Autocannon IIs (which I’ve been fairly successful at).  Of course, I could probably have bought the parts I needed in the quantities I’ve needed for about 1/1000th the cost of setting up the PI structures, but I digress.

I dipped into lowsec and turned off my research guy there, in favor of a not-quite-as-good one closer to home and without the agita of lowsec.  I still have quite a bunch of gear stashed in there, though…  Maybe I’ll go back for some decent belt rats…

Speaking of which, I’m definitely coming to grips with the idea of trying to get back to some pew-pew.  Since I’ve been away for a while, my training hasn’t been seriously important (actually been spending the time away working on some longer-term stuff, like Astrometric Pinpointing V).  The fear of losing my implants is starting to get outweighed by the fact that I’m not even sure I would miss them if they were gone, and the fact that I really probably don’t care about the skill training time at this point to worry about them.  Whether I simply jumpclone to my non-implant character, since I can, or simply continue to play with my implants and figure if I get podded, no big deal, I’m not sure…

Speaking of not sure, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth moving on to Battleships finally, and the Large Projectile Weapons that go with them.  I’ve trained up my medium stuff (cruiser, battlecruiser) almost to maximum, although I’ve trained very little of the specialist cruiser-class ships (no HACs, no HICs, etc) is it worth training battleships?  Aside from the large projectile skills, which I’ve had no need for until I get into a BS, I figure I have most of the supporting skills already anyway…  It should take no more than a day or so to at least be minimally proficient…

Oh well.  I’ll have to think about it some more…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted — been a while since I’ve put any significant time into EVE.  Real life has a way of getting in the way.

But I had to come back to check out Tyrannis and Planetary Interaction.  I have to say, as interesting as it is, it’s…  well…  isolating.

I trained up to level 3 in all the PI skills across the board during the time leading up to when the command centers were actually seeded in the marketplace.  Once they came out, I immediately hit a Barren and Plasma planet in my home system.  I did not set them up terribly well to begin with, but it probably only cost me a few million ISK, all said and done.  And then I was generating Mechanical Parts and Nanites (although I should’ve been producing something other than Nanites on the barren planet, like Construction Blocks — something I could actually use).  This is all in high sec, by the way, because I don’t really head out of my carebear safety zone very often.  Which leads me to my next point…

So far, the PI stuff has actually been fairly isolating, rather than interactive.  You have four choices for extraction plans — a 30-minute plan, a 5-hour plan, a 23-hour plan, and a 96-hour plan.  Each has different output cycles which causes the “output per cycle” number to vary, but that’s a distraction, because the real key question is how many cubic meters of output do you get per minute?  In all cases, near as I can tell, you get more output per minute with the shorter plans.  Don’t let the fact that the “output per cycle” is lower for the 30-minute plan than for the 5-hour plan.  The retrievable quantity for the 5-hour plan is only about 5x the quantity for the 30-minute plan — but you can run the 30-minute schedule six times in that period.  The 23-hour plan is about 2x the total quantity of the 5-hour plan, but you can run the 5-hour plan 4 times in the same period…

So ultimately, you are basically trading off convenience for output.  If you want higher output, plan to babysit the extractors.  And that creates a bit of the problem.  How you handle the case where you have command centers and PI set up on different planets scattered around?  I haven’t actually bothered to see if you can manage a planet remotely — I know that I can sit in a station and manage the planets within the system from the Science & Industry tab, but I’m not sure if I can manage a planet in ANOTHER system the same way…  Hmm.  I should test that theory.  I guess I could just go off to another system, dock, and see if I can manage my existing colonies.  If I can, then screw it, I can go drop colonies in other systems and not have to worry (too much) about jumping back and forth all the time trying to keep up with extractor scheduling…

Anyways, it’s interesting, but so far, not very productive.  I realize I’m doing high-sec and you don’t get significant resource yields until you hit very lowsec, nullsec, or WH planets, but even then, the products aren’t terribly useful.  Most of the products are for POS construction.  SOME are T2 construction components, and that’s what I’ve been focusing on (Set up a Robotics construction scheme so I can build some 150mm AC2’s I’ve invented), but the cost to set up the industry is far in excess of the current value of the components.  CCP hasn’t expired the NPC sources and drains for bits that already had them, and the market hasn’t matured on the new ones (like Nanites)…  So only time will tell if PI is something really viable for the casual player, if it’s just for the power player, or even if it gets to the point where the only people who will have any interest in doing it are those who will actually consume the products — POS builders/fuelers and T2 manufacturers…

Okay, it wasn’t the “windfall” of 76mil that I got a few days back, but in that same system this evening, I scanned down a radar site and managed to pull four decryptors worth just a hair under 20mil a few hops away (according to EVE-Central, those were some of the best available buy orders as well).  And I only needed to pop two frigates, which I probably wouldn’t have had much trouble doing in a rookie ship, let alone the Cyclone I was using.

I managed to note another radar site in the system, but even with seven probes sitting directly on top of the yellow dot, I couldn’t get more than 58% signal strength on it.  I grabbed a Cheetah I had lying around, tossed a probe launcher on it, and managed to get to 76% with six probes, but still, there was no way I was going to get it.  It was apparently a Local Serpentis Minor Shipyard.  I have to wonder what treasures were in that, if I couldn’t get even that close to a 100% lock using a Cheetah (+30% bonus for my CovOps skill), with +20% bonus from my Astrometric Rangefinding (I really do need to train that up some more…)  Oh well.  20 mil is still pretty good for the effort it took.

Hopefully this weekend I’ll get some more exporation in, and next week, I’m really hoping to try to take some downtime from work and will likely put it towards some EVE time…  Here’s to hoping…

I got home late from work today, IRL, and decided to poke my head into the game for a while.  I needed to decide what to train next anyway, as Battlecruiser IV was going to finish up in less than 20 hours and I know for a fact I’m going to be really busy with IRL tomorrow (and likely the rest of the week).

I set out in my scanning Cyclone (I love having all those high slots, so I can fit a scan probe launcher and a salvager and still have a decent set of guns, and the mids, so I can fit a codebreaker and an analyzer and still have an AB and some shielding…) and found a Phi Outpost in a neighboring system.  I thought, what the heck.  it’s a 4/10 DED rating, which lets BCs in, so I zipped the one hop back to home and refit for all guns and shields and went back in.  First room was eerily quiet, but some ex-corpmates of mine said that was normal.  Second room, there was a big honkin’ BS.  I engage.  A little tentative, because I’m waiting for swarms of things to appear and totally overwhelm me.

But they didn’t.  The BS gets range on me a little too easily, and the fight turns into a kiting operation, as my attempts to orbit at 20km (for my arties to stay at optimal range) keep finding me at 19km and the ship just turns tail and runs.  However, pulsing my shield booster to try to keep shields afloat, I finally get the repping beast beaten, and find a bunch of stuff inside.  Of particular note is the Corelum C-Type 10MN MicroWarpdrive, which, as it turns out, has a contract to buy for 76.75mil ISK, just six jumps away!  Woot!

Now, for a lot of pod pilots, this is a drop in the bucket.  But this represented a 30% increase to my wallet.  Selling it has taken my wallet up over 330mil ISK — When I sell off the overseer’s thing, I should be almost exactly at 1/3rd of a billion ISK.  I’ve never gotten that much money from a single scan-down, or a mission, or even any previous deadspace complex…

It’s made me unusually happy.  Too bad I’m so exhausted I don’t think I’ll play anymore tonight, nor will I likely put in much time for the rest of the week.  :P

I actually played with EVEMon to generate a pie chart of my skill points, and noted that most of the major categories, I’m actually fairly well balanced in where my skill points have gone.  Talking to an old ex-corpmate of mine last night, were giggling about how he still only had about 50k SP in his Leadership skills; even I have more than that at this point.  I think it probably makes a lot of sense that my pie chart is fairly well balanced, given that my tendency in EVE has been to ‘dabble’.  Here’s what it looks like:

Pretty balanced, eh?

My biggest wedge is Electronics, with about 3.2mil SP…, followed by Gunnery at 3mil.  Engineering clocks in at 2.8mil, Industry at 2.6mil.  Learning, Mechanic, Science, and Spaceship Command are all between 2.1 and 2.4mil each…

I was actually fairly surprised at just how evenly I’ve put skill points towards all those categories…

(I was tempted to title this “Tyrannis:  Kiss My Asteroids Goodbye”, but that doesn’t really reflect my feelings…  :) )

This is my first entry into a CrazyKinux Blog Banter competition.  Here’s the discussion point:

Tyrannis will see some new industrial and planetary interaction opportunities like we’ve never seen before in New Eden. It’s a step in linking EVE Online and DUST514 as well. So I need you to write what you believe are the short and/or long term consequences of this development, in terms of the new industrial capacity it presents to players, in terms of the opportunities for pirates, for industrialists, for sovereignty, etc. Surprise us!

I’ve been pretty excited to see Dust 514 come out; I’ve actually been playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2 lately because I haven’t had the brainpower or time to play EVE, and I would love to be able to dip into a little EVE-related FPS action when I’m pressed for time or just don’t feel like thinking about gate camps and transverse velocities and all that jazz…

So Tyrannis is definitely the first step towards that.  Putting stuff on planets.  Before you have a good reason to fight over a planet, there has to be a value there, and Tyrannis is definitely putting the value there.

Now, let me preface this by saying that while I’ve been a bit of an independent industrialist, I have not spent a significant amount of time in nullsec, or wormhole space, and haven’t done much in lowsec, either.  I’ve never set up a tower, never figured out how to do any of that.

But as I started to foray into Tech II manufacturing, I realized there were all these components that I needed, and while I could find the BPOs for the components, the materials to build those components were things I’d never run into before, like pure elements like Tungsten.  After some poking around and trying to understand the rest of the manufacturing process, I came to understand that these are things mined from moons in nullsec or wormholes, and had to be ‘reacted’ in POS structures.  Things I would never be doing on my own, and definitely not if I was trying to be safe-ish in highsec.

Now I hear that Tyrannis is moving (or just adding) some of those elements on the various planets, including those in high sec, and that pilots will be able to set up shop on planets, even in high sec.  In fact, it sounds like high sec planets won’t really have any colonization limits, except that the resources pulled from the planet will be fixed, and thus divided by the number of mines, so the more players, the less resulting output for any given player.

That’s actually a good thing, I think.  It doesn’t lead to a horrible “land rush”, where the first on the servers after the release date, with the most money, can simply take over a planet by pure virtue of being “First!”  It also opens up the opportunities for conflicts in Dust 514 — the old “this planet ain’t big enough for the both of us” concept, while at the same time not necessarily preventing the opportunities for sharing resources amicably.

Short term, I’m really hoping to see the various component, erm, components (the things that are used to make the components that are used to make other things) more readily available around EVE, and not just in Jita.  With my home turf being Verge Vendor at the moment, any Tech II components I need are in very short supply — not that they’re overpriced, they just simply aren’t for sale.  I’ve put up buy orders even with some margin over what Jita is asking, and I still get no movement on those orders.  Of course, if this happens the way I hope, then it means there will be a bit of a glut on components that might take a while to shake out.

I’ve always been appreciative of the EVE universe, that there’s nullsec areas, and that there are things that are only available in the “insecure areas”, thus giving reasons to take more risk.  Of course, my problem has always been that, as a primarily solo character, there’s almost no way for me to move out there successfully without joining an existing corporation, or at least an alliance, and then being beholden to the greater group for the safety that results.  Moving these elements onto planets in highsec means I might have a chance to get some of those items more easily, but it also means there won’t necessarily be as much reason to head out to nullsec in the near term (although I guess the ABC ores would still be a big reason to go, so it may not be so much of an impact).

Long term, well, the sky’s the limit for what this could all mean.  There is so much room for interesting things.

Maybe planetary conflicts are NOT under CONCORD’s jurisdiction, so while you can’t be attacked in orbit around the planet, there’s nothing stopping someone from bombarding your PINs from space.  Perhaps that gives you some aggression flags against the owners, much as can flipping does, but since you probably won’t want to pick up your PINs regularly, there’s more reason to guard your investments actively…  I can easily see corps/alliances patrolling their planetary industries, hoping to discourage anyone from attempting to damage their infrastructure.  Of course, that wouldn’t stop someone from doing it — they have to take the first shot, at which point you’ve probably already lost your PIN, being able to attack the aggressor would just be a revenge maneuver.  There’d have to be some way to proactively protect your planet.  Maybe planetary orbit becomes “privately owned”, such that, once you have established a presence, attacking other ships from within the orbital distance is not covered by CONCORD; this would allow you to chase away potential invaders, but if they warp out, you can’t necessarily chase them (a location-dependent aggression rights flag).

Following that idea through, I can see corps/alliances trying to set up rotating patrols of their planets, to discourage/intercept any ships attempting to attack the resources…  Or perhaps to prevent them from establishing their OWN bases on the planet themselves (since once they’re established, they’d have rights by CONCORD to be there, and no longer attackable).  Of course, that means the new corp also cannot attack the existing corp, as rights have not been contested.  And that might be where Dust 514 comes in.  The initial attack is just to get the command structure down on the planet, running any blockade that may have been there.  Once the beachhead has been established, it’s up to the ground pounders to try to annex the other space and force the other companies off-planet.  Maybe war is declared in space, so that the companies can attempt to blockade each other, preventing key supplies to power the ground war from being delivered…  Blockade runners may literally come into their own.  And all in carebear highsec, of all places…

There are definitely possibilities.  If I had any time at all, I might be able to actually think of some more…  Alas, work beckons…

Time sure flies when you’re exceedingly busy with work.  When I have just a little bit of free time, it’s a lot easier to just pop in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and kill a few people in very short bursts, than it is to log into EVE and actually try to figure out what to do for the next undefined period of time.

There isn’t a whole lot you can really pull off in EVE if you don’t have a good sense for how much time you have to play in a session.  If I know that I have next to no time to spend on the game, I’ll still log in to set up my skill queue (been training up a lot of week-plus skills lately, knowing I won’t be likely logging in much during the week), and I have a few trades that I make regularly (standing buy orders that I turn around and resell for decent margins).  But if I know I want to play for more than five minutes, but DON’T know exactly how much time I’ll have to play, it’s really a bit tricky to plan out.

Missions could be really short, or really long, fairly randomly.  And not finishing a mission because you get called away can be worse than not running the mission in the first place, in terms of expenditure of ammunition, and the loss of standing.  PvP is just too unpredictable.  Belt ratting in high sec isn’t worth the time if you’ve got more than two million skill points, and belt ratting in low sec is too dangerous, again, if you end up getting called away.

Highsec exploration isn’t too bad (looking for the elusive archeo/hacking sites), but is very hit & miss.  The combat sites found there so often aren’t much better than belt ratting.  Highsec mining is a possibility, but is so very boring if your intent is to actually “play” (it’s great if you are mostly interested in chatting with people, though, because you can do both pretty easily at the same time — make money while you chat, not a bad tradeoff)

I’m hoping to get back to this game eventually.  I’ve started working on training out my Minmatar Cruiser skill (which I never did get much beyond 3) and Battlecruisers (again, not much beyond 3), partly because I figure I’m not playing much at the moment anyway, so might as well toss some of those long-term skills on the queue, and partly because I figure if I do come back, I might want to start trying those level 3 missions again, and having those skills up will come in handy.

The idea of trying to move back into lowsec a bit still occurs to me.  If I’m not actively playing the game much, being broke isn’t so much of a problem…  Not that my wallet is hurting.  After selling a Wolf, and making some good profit selling Bomb Launchers, I’m back up to about 235mil ISK, which would buy me plenty of PvP Rifters if I wanted to go that way.

I’m just still not sure at all if I want to go that way…

It’s been a month and a half since my last post — it’s been about that long since I’ve had any time to actually dive into EVE with any real purpose (and still not sure when that would happen).  I did get a short hour in over the past week and managed to invent another Wolf bpc, which was good.  I’ve just this morning apparently finished training Frigate Construction V so I can actually *build* those assault frigates now!

The other milestone is that I was informed this morning that my clone needs to be updated again.  I’ve just gone past 25.6mil skill points…  I don’t think I actually even had to use a clone since the last time I upgraded…  And that kinda brings me to an interesting pondering.  Since I’m not playing a lot, my wallet isn’t all that fat (I’ve gotten it back up to 235mil ISK after finally selling off the tech 2 frigates I’d invented and done some building/selling of Bomb Launchers), and with the extra skill points, the cost of getting ganked goes up further…  But one probably expects that the access to ready cash goes up according to skill total, when really, for us “sporadic players”, it doesn’t.

It almost makes me want to pause training and try starting up a new char from scratch, since I’m not really sure what I want to train next anyway…  Of course, that would imply I have time to actually play the game at all, too…  so it’s probably still not entirely worth it.  Then again, maybe…  Oh, I dunno.  I need to figure out how to actually get time to play regularly, but with the family, a part-time step-kid, and this crazy startup environment, I really don’t know when that would be…

So I wasn’t in the mood for EVE, and thought I’d try Planet Calypso (Project Entropia), a “free-to-play” sci-fi game that’s kinda somewhere between EVE and Second Life.  The game has a “real world” currency conversion, so you put money in, and you can take money out (if you make it).  Although you can’t really “lose” things in game (at least, not that I’ve worked out yet — maybe in PvP), everything in the game “decays” or uses some kind of consumable (like mass quantities of ammo).  So, of course, you have to put more money in (or earn it) in order to keep going.

This, I realize, puts an interesting spin on the EVE concept of “only risk what you can afford to lose”.  ISK in EVE is somewhat easy to come by.  You can mission aggressively and make some good dosh, at least enough to keep things interesting while you recover your riches.  Calypso, on the other hand, you’ve got this equation to real money.  “Crap,” you say to yourself, “I just spent twenty cents shooting this stupid creature, and all I got was a tooth worth a penny.”  Was it worth shooting the creature?

I don’t know.  The minimum deposit is ten bucks, though, so I gave them that.  I almost feel rich, but even though I’ve only spent about 30 cents out of it, I already feel awkward about spending money on specific actions.  I’ve never felt that way about EVE, thinking, “Should I really waste the ammo on that pirate?  Will I make back the investment?”  In EVE, chances are, if you can kill it, you’ll make back the investment (a simple highsec belt rat returns 8k, usually, and definitely takes less than 8k in ammo to take down — especially if you’re using lasers with no real ammo expenses!)…  In Calypso, there’s a really really good chance you WON’T get it back.

On the other hand, the hall of fame and the announcements made talk about people who mined something out of the game “worth 3000 PED”, which, when you realize that equates to $300, makes you sit up and wonder how you could get in on that action — or, how much money did that person spend in order to accomplish that feat?

It’s an interesting diversion while I ponder what I do next in EVE…