The Scary Door

Recently, I took advantage of a “5 days free” offer I received in the mail after Dominion went live. CCP was obviously trying to draw people back into the game after their latest expansion, which didn’t have much content for casual players like me (mainly sovereign/nullsec changes), and is one of the reasons I decided to take a break from EVE. That, and the other members of our already tiny corp were losing interest and dropping out.

So I signed back up and enjoyed 5 free days of training, and briefly looked at the Zephyr gift ship – a unique probing ship with a cool design. But I didn’t even fit it up. I just set Battle Cruisers IV to train, threw a few things up on the market, and logged out to go play Fallen Earth.

Along with the email was another offer – join back up and you can get the first month for only $10. Not a bad deal. So after my 5-day free period, I signed up for another month, thinking that if I could get back into it, it would be a nice change of pace from the Tolkien world of LOTRO and the apocalypse wasteland of Fallen Earth.

But I found I wasn’t really PLAYING during the $10 month. I logged in to train, threw a bunch of stuff up on the auction house, bought a new mining barge (the Covetor) and fit it out, and…that’s about it. I quickly realized that I was lonely in the game, being the sole survivor of our corp.

I’d login and think, “Ok, what to do?”

“I know, I’ll try out that new Zephyr scanning ship. That’ll be fun.” But then I start to think, even if I find anything cool, I’ll need to bookmark it, fly back to station, jump in a different ship, fly back and fight/loot, jump back to the station, get a hauler/miner, come back…ugh. Logistics would just kill it for me. I really need a wingman – someone to fly muscle for me while I scan out the good stuff.

“Well, what about mining? I just learned how to fly a Hulk. I can’t afford one right now, but I can afford a Covetor.” So I bought a Covetor, fit it out over a couple of days, and then plunged into an asteroid belt to mine for an hour. I was surprised to find tons and tons of asteroids with the good stuff – Dense Veldspar – everywhere! I jet-can mined for a while, jumped back and switched to a hauler ship, and picked up almost an entire jet can of dense veldspar. Taking it back to the station, I refined it, and that’s when reality came and kicked me in the nads.

Tritanium prices have plummeted! Prices were around 4 ISK per unit in Oct 2009. Now, they’re around 2.8. Ouch. No wonder there was no one out there mining, and the asteroids belts had Dense Veldspar roids as big as a moon. I didn’t even bother to sell the trit, I just added it to the huge pile we already had.

I didn’t login for several days after that, having discovered Everquest II with my wife and playing on a PvP server, which was challenging and I was having a ton of fun. When I did take a moment to consider EVE, I realized that MMOs (and games in general) are a social event for me. I really only have fun in them when I’m playing with other people. So I started thinking about ways to fix the EVE issue, and only two solutions stood out: get more people into our corp, or join someone else’s corp.

I tried the first method, getting more people in our corp. I put out feelers on one of the message boards I follow in the hopes of attracting some like-minded gamers I would enjoy spending time with. Nothing came of it. So I took the next step and started researching a different corp to join, realizing that Genetisystems is dead at this point, and I’m not having fun directing a one-man corp.

I’ll spare you the boring details, but in a nutshell I was not able to find a corp that I could: (A) get a response from, (B) was not a zerg corp that accepts every idiot who applies, and (C) strikes a good balance between being casual but still being organized and active enough to accomplish something.

So with that final attempt, I canceled my account, threw some more things up on the market to fill out my sell order limit and stack up some ISK, and set Electronics Upgrades V to train. When I’m ready to play EVE again, I’ll be very close to being able to fly a stealth bomber.

Hopefully, by then I’ll have a reason to.

With the latest EVE patch, we now have the ability to fit small- and medium-sized rigs to our small- and medium-sized ships. Of course, with the addition of any hot new item, there’s always the price gouging and monopolization attempts that drives the price up initially. Actually, it’s one of the great things about EVE – it’s free market economy at it’s best, and worst. So, not wanting to pay 5M ISK for a 1M ISK rig, I’ve had a newfound interest in industry lately – specifically in manufacturing rigs on the cheap.

Ninja salvaging has always intrigued me; I just never got around to actually doing it. But what better time to try it out than now, with the price of salvage going through the roof? That was the mindset when my wife and I decided to finally try out ninja salvaging.

My wife is a better prober than I am (insert joke here)…so she built a scan ship (a Buzzard) and fit a couple salvagers on it. I decided to go with the ship I normally use for salvaging – a Thrasher destroyer. Knowing I’d be in deadspace areas and also unable to tractor other people’s wrecks, I left off the tractor beams and MWD and fitted a 10MN afterburner with the leftover powergrid. Here’s what I finally came up with:

Deciding it might be a bad idea to ninja salvage in the same system I normally run level 4 missions in (ie, don’t crap where you eat), we decided to jump to a neighboring region. I looked up a popular NPC corp and found a high-sec system that had a decent-quality level 4 agent in it.

After 30 minutes or so of learning the ropes of combat scanning (we ended up watching a youtube video), my wife had a fix on a battleship. She warped to the site and stayed cloaked, casing the joint from relative safety. She reported that the battleship was tied up fighting NPCs, and there were several large wrecks scattered around. So I warped in and we split up, gobbling up wrecks like ravenous vultures.

While I was flying towards one of the wrecks, I noticed it suddenly took a significant amount of damage. A couple seconds later, it was gone. I had read about people blowing up their own wrecks to prevent ninja salvagers from getting them…well dang. Still, we were able to get to the wrecks faster than the mission runner could blow them up, probably due to the fact that his time was split between us and the NPCs, and our time was solely focused on getting to his wrecks. He finally warped out about the time we were salvaging the last of them.

It was during this first encounter that I realized a flaw in my ship’s build. While it was plenty fast (1700 m/s, cap stable), its maneuverability left much to be desired. I kept sling-shotting 6+ kms past the wrecks, causing my salvagers to stop cycling on them. Every time, I had to wait til I got back to the wrecks before trying to salvage. And pulsing the 10MN afterburner didn’t help much, either – the duration was always too long, causing me to under- or over-shoot the wrecks every time.

We bookmarked that area, hoping the mission runner would come back. Since he already warped out, I went ahead and stole all the loot before leaving. I docked, and while my aggression timer was counting down, my wife scanned down another mission runner – this time a Raven.

Warping to the site and going through the gate, she reported a room full of Gurista wrecks…with no NPCs or Raven in sight. She recognized the mission as Guristas Extravaganza. Woohoo! I warped in shortly after, and saw the Raven at the gate. Apparently, he saw me too, because he didn’t bother to go in. A corpmate joined us in salvaging the next two rooms, the second of which still had six or so NPCs in it. I flew in and led the NPCs away while they salvaged. We never saw the Raven again. We figured he must have been farming the mission for the bounties, and once he saw us, decided to cut it short. After dropping off the salvage, we warped back out and looted everything.

While waiting for our aggression timers to count down, my wife scanned down another battleship, this time there were only a few wrecks and no sign of the mission runner. We salvaged and looted and got out without incident.

While keeping an eye on local chat, I noticed that the first mission runner was back in system. We decided to repay his mission a visit to see if he had decided to give it another go. My wife snuck in on him and reported that he was indeed again fighting NPCs in his battleship, but that he was also salvaging as he went. Doh! We guessed he probably didn’t like sharing his wrecks with us, so he warped out to fit a salvager on his battleship before continuing with the mission. Pretty smart…

It was getting late, so we decided to call it. Before logging off, I went back to base and designed a (hopefully) better ninja salvaging ship, this time based on the super-fast Vigil frigate. Here’s what I came up with, we’ll see how it fares on the next op:

So in conclusion, our first foray into ninja salvaging was a success. My wife was able to keep us busy with mission runners to barge in on, and the salvage was definitely nice. However, just like real-life criminals, we probably spent as much (or more) time trying to steal other people’s stuff than it would have taken to just run a level 4 mission ourselves, especially when you consider we would have gotten bounties, loyalty points, and standings increases if we ran our own. But it sure was fun for a change of pace, and we learned some new skills to boot!

I finally got around to setting up an exploration/probing frigate yesterday, after several false starts. I’ve been training up my probing and scanning skills off-and-on for a little while, but I’ve never even equipped a probe launcher on a ship. As difficult as the probing system sounds, I didn’t want to bother with it until I had decent skills. Well, skills are one thing, but to be effective you also need a decent scan ship. For Minmatar pilots like myself, the entry level scan ship is the Probe (terrible choice of name, btw…try doing a search on “Probe” setups).

A quick look in the corporate hangars and my personal assets turned up no Probe ships. The closest person selling a Probe was 10 jumps away. So I bought a blueprint and started a manufacturing job to crank out some Probes. Next day…

I didn’t plan this whole thing very well, because once I assembled the Probe ship, I realized we didn’t have any Core Probes, either. So I bought 16 of them off the market, jumped into a jump clone that has crappy implants, and headed out into lowsec with my wife (she was flying a Drake).

I quickly scanned down a Guristas Outpost with only one probe. Turns out those are very common and easy to scan down. We warped to the site and found out why. Just a few frigate/cruiser waves to contend with, and no real rewards. However, I did find out firsthand how paper-thin the Probe is: five or six Guristas locked onto me and blew up my ship before I could even warp out!

So, back to high-sec to outfit another Probe. I set this one up with inertia stabilizers to reduce my align time in case I got primaried again. While I was outfitting my ship, a player warped in on my wife as she was cleaning up the site. She warped out safely. The player convo’ed her later, telling her that he wasn’t setup for PvP, so not to worry. We decided to play it safe and stick to high-sec for our next scan, so we wouldn’t have to worry about the low-sec locals in addition to learning how to scan.

The next site I scanned down took me a while. It turned out to be a Guristas Vigil. I looked it up on my laptop – woohoo, a DED complex! However, when we warped in, we didn’t get a DED rating message or anything. This stuff is so confusing…I’ve read that some sites are “static” plexes, but then I’ve read elsewhere that the static plexes have been changed to deadspace plexes in Apocrypha, but in-game I see static plexes all the time…so I had no idea what I was scanning down.

We warped in to find a deadspace gate and checked it out. Lots of frigates and cruisers…cool. I warped out and got my Hurricane battlecruiser and we took out all the Guristas, including a battleship “Port Authority” guy. This let us go through another gate, which took us to another gate and more bad guys. The final gate dumped us in: an empty area in space with nothing around. WTF? I looked up “Guristas Vigil” on the internet and found that other people had the same problem – the final room being empty. Apparently, these combat complexes may “escalate” sometimes, and when it does you will get a final room with some goodstuff in it. The rest of the time, you get nothing.

So all in all, my first scanning experience was a success, although not very lucrative and certainly had a rocky start. The rewards were on par with a level III mission, but without the completion bonus, standings gain, or loyalty points. Hrmph. Well, I’m not discouraged just yet. I plan on training up Astrometrics Pinpointing to level IV and training for a covert ops ship. That should give my overall scanning a boost. As far as what sites to go for, I’ll probably have to learn that with practice.

A couple weeks ago, I had 50M ISK burning a hole in my wallet, so I decided to bid on a Republic Fleet Firetail – a Minmatar faction frigate – and won it for a mere 42M! I know, you’re thinking that’s pretty cheap for a frigate, but wait – it gets better.

The firetail I bought already had 34M worth of rigs installed, making this an even juicier buy. Admittedly, the rigs are combat-related in nature…stuff like Core Field Purgers and an EM shield resistance enhancer. But hey, it’s still a rigged faction ship, which made this deal a steal.

After I bought the ship, I picked it up and fit it with the best Tech I crap I could find, and started training to get all the non-weapon fittings up to Tech IIs. During this time, Wolftail sat in the hangar for a week or two, getting her daily coat of turtlewax but not logging much flytime.

So yesterday,  a corpmate mentioned that I should do something with my fancy faction frigate, or just sell it. I thought, you know…he’s right, so I decided to take her out for some real excitement. But if you’re an industrialist carebear like me, what is there to do with a 42M ISK frigate in highsec? Well, it turns out – a lot.

The first thing I did was grab a couple Dual Diode mining lasers out of the corporate hangar and set her up as a mining ship. I put an asteroid scanner in the mid slot so I can keep an eye on nearby asteroid compositions. Then it was off to do some high-speed mining!

(Click for larger image)

I decided to go with an afterburner instead of a micro warp drive, to leave more CPU and powergrid for the mining lasers. But check out that speed! I’m orbiting the asteroid at 1523 m/s, cap-stable. I’d like to see a Gurista belt rat try to hit me before I’ve filled my cargo hold with Pyroxeres – not happening!

Speaking of cargo hold, I thought of another excellent use for my Firetail – a hauler! Mining is great and all, but with only 120 m3 of cargo capacity, it’s going to take a lot of trips back to the station to clear that belt out. So back in the garage, I fitted her with three expanded cargo holds in the low slots, for a grand total of almost 211 m3 of cargo space. As you can see from the screenshot below, it’ll haul quite a bit of tritanium to market – and it’ll do it fast!

(Click for larger image)

You might have noticed in that last screenshot that I fitted a tractor beam and two salvagers on my ship. Well, that brings me to the next use I found for the Firetail – a salvager! In this screenshot, I’m salvaging a belt rat’s wreck. And no need to worry about leaving loot behind with all those cargo expanders in the lows.

(Click for larger image)

So as you can see, a Republic Fleet Firetail is a great ship to have in your hangar. It’s very versatile, capable of a variety of roles – everything from mining to salvaging. Why spend 15M skillpoints on a Hulk when you can mine with a Firetail and you only need Minmatar Frigate III? And can a Hulk whip around at over 4300 m/s with a microwarp drive on? I don’t think so!

A corpmate and I were discussing level IV missions the other day. You see, we’ve only recently begun to get level IV agents. A few level III missions are still a challenge for us to solo. We’ve tested the level IV waters a bit, running a few of the easier ones as a group. We’ve lost a couple ships, but overall level IVs seem manageable for a battlecruiser group to run, as long as we pay attention and do our research upfront.

So eventually, our discussion turned to whether or not we could solo a level IV mission in a battlecruiser and with our skills (less than 5M skillpoints). And we weren’t talking about any mission, mind you – we were talking about “Worlds Collide”. XivOps, my corpmate, had drawn this mission as his first from a newly-acquired Quality:0 agent.

My stance was that soloing Worlds Collide at our skill level and in a battlecruiser would be suicide.  I sent him a link to TAGN’s blog, where they had three Drakes and a Raven and still lost a ship on this mission. Of course, this only encouraged him to prove me wrong. I told him if he managed to solo it, I would create a special corporate decoration and award it to him. I was certain I wouldn’t need to.

So I was surprised the following weekend when I logged on and he told me he was in the middle of running Worlds Collide. He said it was going well, although there had been some sticky points and he had to take it slow and manage targets carefully. He focused on taking down the battleships fast (he had to buy faction missiles just to break the tank on some of them) and ignored the elite frigates. This meant he remained warp scrambled during much of the mission, making it an all-or-none proposition.

Later that night, I logged on and saw emails stating that he had successfully completed the mission! Attached were screenshots.

2nd Room (click for larger image):

Final Room (click for larger image):

Another shot of the final room (click for larger image):

Turning in the mission (click for larger image):

I must say I was quite surprised. So after eating some delicious crow pie, I created and awarded the Shield of Determination to XivOps:

Congrats, XivOps! Enjoy your bragging rights (while they last).

My corpmates and I have run a few PvE missions as a group now. I’m always encouraged when we have enough people online to start fleeting up, but along the way it never fails – I get hit with these little gotchas that make running group PvE missions a chore. And 90% of the “chore” is centered around splitting up the loot.

Finder’s-keepers is great and all, but over time you will see your PvE group filled with loot whores instead of battle-hardened soldiers.

When I first started playing, I was in a group with a coworker friend (the squad commander) and we had just killed all the NPC pirates. “Loot up!” he said. I remember I had a lot of questions that night:

         Who's going to loot all this?

Me: “Which wrecks are mine?”
SC: “The ones you can get to before we do.”
Me: “Are we going to split up the loot afterwards?”
SC: “Sure, we can if you want.”
Me: “So, how will others know if I just take something valuable for myself and don’t tell you guys about it?”
SC: “We won’t. That’s EVE for you.”

At the time, I remember thinking this was really strange, but cool. It’s like real life – with no artificial mechanisms in place to keep everyone honest. In WoW you can setup loot rules so when that purple item drops, everyone rolls on it and the highest roll wins. There is no chance to steal because the item just goes directly into a player’s inventory. You can also setup “round robin” loot rules, so the loot is always awarded to the next person in succession. Over time, this averages out so everyone gets a fair share of loot and there’s still some luck involved (ie, you always hope it’s your turn when the epic purple item drops).

EVE has none of this built in, at least as far as I can tell. It’s permanent “free for all”. While I respect that EVE is keeping it real, what happens if you really just want to be honest and split loot up quickly with friends you enjoy running missions with? The way I see it, your only options for splitting loot up are:

Option A: Rent a corporate hangar in the system you’re running missions in, and everyone dumps off their loot/salvage in that hangar. Later on, someone sifts through all the stuff and sells/reprocesses/etc, ultimately coming to a total ISK value for the goods, then sends everyone a split.

Problems with Option A:

• You have to wait a day or more for someone to sift through all the stuff and come to an ISK total value.
• What about items that sell better listed on the market than sold to buyers directly?
• If I have to wait several days to get my reward, I’m not going to be very encouraged to run group missions again.
• What if players are less than honest when dumping off their loot?
• What if the person who sells off the stuff is corrupt and makes “accounting errors” in his/her favor?
• What if some of your fleet members are not in your corp? Now you have to arrange to dock and trade, which is cumbersome.

Option B: Screw all the logistics of splitting stuff up, everyone just keeps what they find or salvage (traditional free-for-all).

Problems with Option B:

Admittedly, this option solves a lot of problems with trusting people, arriving at a total ISK number to split, and getting instant gratification. However, it introduces a big problem that will surface over time: If I know that most of my mission rewards are going to come from looting/salvaging, why don’t I just fit my ship with 50% combat and 50% tractor beams and salvagers. And during combat, I’ll be letting the other players do most of the fighting while I loot and salvage. As long as I keep just enough offensive capabilities to not get kicked off the team, I should be fine.

Ok, sure…this is the “EVE way”, right? Well, finder’s-keepers is great and all, but over time you will see your PvE group filled with loot whores instead of battle-hardened soldiers. The combat-focused players (the ones who actually help you succeed/blitz the mission) will stop grouping, because they always get screwed and it becomes a waste of time for them.

Solution?

What I would like to see is a loot rules system that the squad/wing/fleet commander could choose to turn on. Something that would color-tag wrecks to each player in a round-robin or random fashion. Of course, there would be nothing stopping a player from stealing someone else’s wrecks (this is EVE, afterall…) but at least you would know they’re being stolen. This way, if someone got popped mid-mission and decided to call it a night, you could still loot/salvage their wrecks.

Conclusion

EVE is an interesting paradox. Like other MMOs, they force you to group in order to experience the best content. But unlike other MMOs, they passively discourage group PvE by not including a mechanism for easily splitting loot/salvage rewards.

Or maybe there’s something I’m missing. Is there an option for splitting loot that will solve all our problems? How does your group split loot/salvage, and how’s that working for you?

Shortly after I started my career as a pod pilot (only a few months ago), I began researching low-sec and how to get started in PvP. I read a great Rifter guide that dealt primarily with starting life as a low-sec pirate. The author of the guide mentioned that you don’t need fancy skills or millions of ISK to start having fun in low-sec. You just need a PvP-worthy frigate (like a Rifter), some basic fittings (guns, web, and warp scrambler), and the expectation that at some point you will lose your ship.

So I followed the guide, fitting up a PvP-oriented Rifter. I told a couple corpmates that I wanted to pick a fight in low-sec and they were game, too. We ended up with two frigates and a cruiser in our gang. We jumped out into low-sec and proceeded to look for trouble, thinking we probably had the upper hand as far as numbers, so even though we lacked skills we would be able to put up a decent fight.

Several -10 security status pirates jumped into the system and one of them in a heavy assault cruiser (a Cerebus) jumped to our belt. We knew we were outclassed, so we decided to warp out. The frigates left the system while the cruiser in our gang went to a different asteroid belt. The pirate followed the cruiser to the belt and locked it down, popping the Caracal in 2 missile volleys. Discouraged, we were done for the night. We chalked it up to bad luck – we landed a “pro” as our first mark.

A month or so later, we decided to try it again. This time we decided to fit two cruisers each, in case we got popped on the first roam we would come back to the HQ and grab our spares and do it again. We also decided that this time around there would be no running. We all stay and we all die together.

We ran out into a different low-sec system this time around, one with less traffic. I was the “bait” in my Rupture. My goal was to tackle anyone who engaged me and hold them there until my corpmates (who were waiting just outside the system) could warp in and even the odds. It took about two minutes before a HAC and a battlecruiser found me. I called in my teammates but unfortunately I was dead before they could even get there. When my teammates arrived, the pirates split.

So we grabbed our spare cruisers and jumped back in. This time, we decided to stay together. Within a minute or two we spotted an Ishtar, another professional pirate. We engaged and all three of us were destroyed by his Ogre II drones before we could even get his shields to half.

I have since had a few more encounters in low-sec by myself, and every time I have felt incredibly outmatched. So I have to ask the question: how in HELL could a month-old newbie in a Rifter do anything except explode in low-sec? Is the guide I read just out of date? Could it be that low-sec wasn’t always filled with super-leet pirates? Where’s the newbie PvP?

I’m going to keep testing low-sec every month or so, but at this point I simply see it as a way to throw tens of millions of ISK down the drain in the hopes of lasting 30 seconds against a professional pirate. And of course, that’s assuming I have a full gang.

I can fly a Retriever mining barge, so I’ve at least spent a few skill points in Industry stuff. I started out thinking I was going to be a miner/hauler for income and do PvP or run missions as a hobby. I focused on mining for a while, getting a mining cruiser and then later a Retriever. Next, I had my heart set on a Covetor. I started getting my Refining skills up as well, so I would be able to efficiently refine the vast quantities of ore I’d be pulling in.

But then I found I could earn way more by running missions for high-quality agents and just reprocessing/selling the loot. When you add in salvaging, bounties and loyalty point rewards, mining just doesn’t stack up. Now, I mainly just keep a Retriever around for doing mission mining (especially the ones that have Omber). I’ve completely forgotten about my secure containers in 0.5 space…I’m sure they’re dust now.

I still do quite a bit of market stuff, though. The skills I have in Trading have been consistently useful. I love having 48 open market orders to play with. I can also adjust the price of my buy/sell orders from 10 jumps away while floating in space waiting on a fleetmate. Trading has allowed me to fit some very nice meta-level items on my ship and keep our corporate hangars stocked for cheap. I even occasionally fire faction ammo because I snagged it for pennies on the market.

So while I haven’t totally given up on Industry as a profession in EVE, it has definintely taken a back seat to running missions. And now that I’m almost able to run level 4 missions from a high-quality agent, I suspect I’ll be doing even less mining.

I ran Guristas Extravaganza (level 3) last night in my Hurricane. I was able to solo the mission in just under 2 hours, including salvaging (but not the bonus area). I got some decent loot and salvage out of it.

I’m mainly running missions right now so I can get my standings up with Sukkavesta corporation. They have a high-quality level 4 agent in 0.5 security space that I’m looking forward to running missions for. I suspect I’ll need backup on level 4s from my corpmates, at least until I can fly battleships.