About Dscan Undetectability

I had a message from a reader the other day about the revamp to recons that CCP is going to do.  The specifics are found in CCP Rise's Features and ideas posting (also see the second post, pointing to his followup posts).  Quoting it:

• Combat Recons will now be permanently undetectable by directional scanners
• All eight Recons will have the capacitor cost of warping reduced by roughly half
• Where appropriate, bonuses will be adjusted to match ship developer trends
• All eight Recons are having their capacitor pool and capacitor regeneration buffed (roughly 20% increase in cap regen)
• The average maximum velocity across the class is going up by around 20m/s

(My emphasis.)  What are my thoughts?  OK, there are the latter four adjustments, which are quite anodyne.  Recons do need something, and better speed/range seems to fit.

Then there is the dscan-undetectability.  This is a major change, and one I dislike.  Still, CCP seems resolved to it.

I have seen a lot of people of the general PVP community disliking it.  You fly to a complex, and dscan.  There's a frigate on scan; you think you can beat it.  You warp into the plex, and it tackles you, and then it and its combat recon buddy (or three) roundly squash you.  Fun?

Of course, people can do that now, with cloakies.  Falcons.  Proteuses.  Do they?  Well, I don't know, not being a kspace PVP person.  In known space, you do at least have the ability to see if more than two people are in local, and become accordingly paranoid.

Here's my take on it, from my wormhole perspective.  I dislike it because to us, dscan is what local is to y'all squares.  It is our means to know whether a system is active.  Any system I enter, I fly around and look for people.  Of course people can still cloak, and they do.  But at least I can see with relative ease if anyone is out on grid doing stuff.  If a system has nobody visible, and no probes, and you watch for a while and don't see any, then it is most likely empty.

The new combat recons will change that, perhaps drastically.  No longer can I enter a system and find people earning money to gank.  The new combat recons will be able to earn money while "cloaked".  A ship that can earn money while dscan-proof is a new thing in EVE.  For PVE, at least the wrecks will give them away.  (Though they still may be worth using for small sites, instead of the site-running Tengu I am using.  I'll have to see about DPS.)

But what about those new null-style data/relic sites?  As my correspondent pointed out, those sites will be perfect to run in a combat recon.  Nobody even knows you are there to look for you, unless they are hunting using combat probes, which is rather rare.  You do lose the hacking bonus, which kind of balances it.  I suppose I will adjust by simply warping into every single relic/data site to check. But even then I cannot gank in my Manticore; it requires a second account, probably also in a combat recon since they can now make it onto grid before being detected.  Or I will have to bite the bullet and upship to a T3 to hunt in.

I probably will get a Rook to use for null sites.  Currently I use a Buzzard.

Overall, I am sure I will adjust.  Grumble.

One other thing I have to mention: it's ugly.  I am the sort of person that likes clean rules, such as "if a ship is not cloaked, you always see it on dscan."  Throwing one more exception into an otherwise clean rule is not a step in the right direction, in my opinion.  Violate it with ship fittings (i.e. cloaks): that's OK.  Violate with ship hulls, and it's not OK.  Whatever that magic stuff is that they build Rooks out of, can't they make my Buzzard from the same stuff?  Or at least a Heron?

Milking Sleeper Data Sites

A few days ago was my corporation's "Corp Night", which is our weekly get-together to run C4 or C5 PVE sites to make ISK.  (We also will attack small-gang targets of opportunity if we find them, but this is rare.)  We have been doing almost solely C5 sites because they pay better than C4.  Because of this, our home system has gradually filled with anoms.  There were enough of them that I felt it was getting embarrassing.  It's like having a messy house; even if you don't have guests, you know.  So we ran our own sites for a change.

Among the sites we ran were four data sites: two Unsecured Frontier Trinary Hubs, and two Unsecured Frontier Digital Nexuses.  Among the four, we got one of the "site escalation" waves, which is an extra sleeper battleship and an abandoned talocan cruiser.  The latter is a loot can requiring a relic analyzer, which opens via the normal minigame.  It normally contains one or two hull sections in some state of repair (intact, malfunctioning, or wrecked), which are used to make T3 cruiser hulls.  Typically one of the cans is worth a few million in loot; not bad, but nothing earthshaking.

Well, this time in the one talocan can, we got a small wrecked hull section.  It showed no price on the mouseover, because this is a new item introduced in Rhea to build into the new tactical destroyers.  In the long run, it is likely that the prices of small hulls will drop to below that of the equivalent cruiser hull.  However, in the short run the prices for these hulls are very high.  People are paying a huge premium for the first Confessors.

(Here's the EVE Central search for "hull section".  As of this writing, Jita has the following prices for high buy/low sell:
Intact Hull Section:   23m/33m
Malfunctioning Hull Section:  2.2m/9.4m
Wrecked Hull Section:  500k/3.0m
Small Intact Hull Section:  215m/350m
Small Malfunctioning Hull Section:  100m/269m
Small Wrecked Hull Section:  36m/100m )

Nice.  So moral here is: do not ignore your data sites!  Even if you don't feel them worthwhile to run for the normal blue loot and salvage, warp in to check for the Talocan relic.  If it is there, cargo scan it to see what it's got.  If there is a "Small [X] Hull Section", you want it!  Crack it in a tank with logis [update: this doesn't work; any sleepers on site means you cannot crack a can], or clear the site and crack it.

Continuing with the story... the next day I noticed that all the data sites had despawned, except one.  In that site, I had not bothered to open any cans because all the data cans in these sites are essentially worthless.  (Yes, I scanned them all.  I keep hoping for a nice blueprint or something, but it does not seem to be in the loot tables.)  Anyway, this one extra half-dead site left a slightly unkempt system.  It annoyed me enough that I decided to fly over there and crack a can just to get rid of the site.

So I jumped into my exploration Buzzard, and warped on it.  Much to my surprise, there was a Sleeper battleship on grid!  I tried to cloak, but no, too near a can!  Uh oh... Warp!  Warp!  ... and I escaped.  Whew.  As I warped off, I noticed an abandoned Talocan cruiser.

Now, I am quite certain that can was not there two days ago.   If it was, I'd have looted it.  Nor was the Sleeper battleship.  I'd have noticed that, too, when I entered the site and scanned all the cans.

What happened here?  Evidently, you get a "die roll" each time a sleeper data site is instantiated, and if lucky, you get the escalation wave (which includes the Talocan can).  We did not get it on corp night, but then the site got de-instantiated at downtime.  Coming back two days later, I instantiated the site again; the site records that all the sleepers are dead, but I got a fresh check for the escalation, and more luck.

So, the moral here is: when you check out a sleeper data site, and there is not a Talocan relic, or there is but it contains relatively low-value stuff... don't give up!  Come back the next day, and the next, and the next, and try again!  (Sites despawn on the fourth downtime after they are first instantiated, so four tries is what you get.)

Whither PLEX?

Here is a graph of recent PLEX prices, courtesy of eve-marketdata.com.  Note the long and relatively smooth ride up, then the peak indicated by the red dot, which was Nov. 19.  Then there is a small correction, with two other near-peaks on Nov 21 and Nov 24.  Then a steep decline, to where we are now.  Not enough data to say yet where it will go.  But we can analyze, and we need to decide whether to buy.  Thus, this article.

PLEX prices, past three months.

Price, as we know from microeconomics, is set by supply and demand.  Let's look at the market for PLEX.

There are several factors that I think are affecting the PLEX supply.  They are, in order of timing, the influx of "This-is-EVE" newbs, the ISBoxer policy change, and the Thanksgiving weekend PLEX sale.

"This is EVE" effect on new accounts.

The first factor is a bunch of newbs coming into the game.  Ordinarily EVE gets ~2000 new accounts per day; these include people trying the game out for the first time as well as old players creating new alts.  After the smashing success of the "This is EVE" video, which was released Nov 21, newbies flooded into the game  New account creation hit something like 8000 per day, briefly.  This has dropped back a lot, but the rate is still about 50% above normal, something like 3000 new accounts per day as I write.  I would guess that a high percentage of these accounts are new players, not just new alts.

(The image is from eve-offline.net.)

Some of these newbies are going to find out about PLEX and want to use one or two to kickstart their career.  Others (and I have spoken to two, now, out of perhaps several hundred newbies in the rookie channel whose questions I have answered) are going to want to jump right past the whole low-skill part of being a newbie, and drop a bundle to buy a skilled character.  For that they need two PLEX, plus a boatload of ISK.  So there is at least some additional demand.

Demand for PLEX can be supplied in two ways.  One is by spending ISK in the in-game market; the other is spending IRL money.  Obviously, few of these newbies are going to be able to PLEX with ISK for some time now.  They have low skills, as a character and a player.  So, we expect them to buy PLEX with IRL money and drop them into the game.  This will tend to depress prices.

Probably the main factor is the recent change in ISBoxer policy.  For some time now, ISBoxer has been tolerated by CCP.  Last week (Nov 25), CCP Falcon announced a change: no input multiplexing to anything in-game.  So, you can still use ISBoxer to log in many accounts, or to organize your windows.  But you cannot send input of any kind (i.e. mouse moves, keypresses) which affects the game to multiple clients.  This change takes effect on January 1.

Immediately upon this announcement, PLEX prices took a steep hit.  (Possibly slightly preceding it?)  This is the sharp downward move after the last peak is hit.  Obviously, people believe that because multiboxers almost exclusive PLEX their accounts (nobody pays IRL money for 20 accounts just to mine more ice), their demise will free up so much PLEX that it will significantly lower demand.

There is debate over how much of an effect the multiplexing ban will have.  Some say not much at all.  But in any case, since the ban is not even in effect yet, the reduced demand for PLEX that will happen on January 1 should have minimal effect.  Yes, there will be some reduced buying, for people that happen to PLEX their multiboxed accounts for months in advance.  And starting Dec 1 (well after the price dropped), there should be some multiboxing accounts that are starting to expire and are not being renewed.  But this effect should be minimal.

The stronger effect must be speculation.  I think that the PLEX selling is less a direct effect of the ban than indirect: because people believe it will reduce multiboxed mining a lot, they believe it will reduce PLEX demand.  As such, people think PLEX will drop, and then sell because of that -- a classic example of efficient markets pricing in all information immediately.

The final supply factor is the PLEX sale that happened starting on Friday, Nov 26.  This sale went on through the weekend.  PLEX sales don't usually tend to affect the price that much, but they do often have a small downward effect on prices.

Meanwhile, what about the demand side?

Well, there are evidently a lot of people like me.  I prefer to safeguard value in PLEX, not ISK.  As I have written: PLEX is money because it retains value much better than ISK.  As such, everyone should try to preserve value in PLEX.  And this is, evidently, what a substantial number of players do.

(There is a very interesting comment I saw by "Baki Yuku" at TheMittani, on this article about the input replication policy change:

PLEX price is where it is because people are using it as an invetment tool on a massive scale. According to CCP (last fanfest) only 45% of all PLEX injected into the market every month is being consumed. That means 65% are being brought as an investment.

Obviously it is hearsay and the math does not exactly add up.  But it does confirm my suspicion that a lot of PLEX is being used as money.)

I've been sitting on a pile of ISK for some time now, both my personal savings and my corporate savings.  However, because PLEX have been so expensive, I've been waiting for a correction.  Now PLEX drops, and there is a golden opportunity to buy.  I bought.  I think a bunch of people have.  So, collectively the demand to preserve value is sucking up excess supply.

There is one more modest factor on the demand side.  In Rhea, CCP is going to abolish clone grades.  Upgrading clones is an ISK-sink; it is about 3% of sunk ISK according the only data I am aware of on the subject.  Clone costs are basically going to go away entirely.  (CCP will raise the amount required to re-home your clone, but it is still quite cheap, and how often do people do that?)   Other things being equal, this move will marginally decrease the ability of ISK to safeguard wealth.  So PLEX win a bit here.

Summary: I think PLEX is a good buy.  All the fundamentals are there, other than possibly some decline in multiboxer demand.  But I think there is plenty of demand in New Eden for secure savings, that will offset that decline.

As previously mentioned, I have been buying PLEX for my corp and myself throughout the recent decline.  I got some at 900m, a few as low as 812m, and most around 830m.  If the price drops further, I may buy a few more, but I am mostly content with my ISK/PLEX balance.  We'll see if my purchases were wise or not.

New Wspace in Rhea

There's a new dev blog up revealing the new systems that will be added to wspace in Rhea.  You've probably already heard of Thera, a giant system with NPC stations.  

In addition there will be another 100 "shattered" systems, with no moons (no POSes!) and shattered planets (no PI).  (I wonder if CCP read my proposal to have moonless wspace systems.)  Also they'll have permanent asteroids, and ice anoms!  Hmm.  All will get one more static than is normal for a system of their level, and it will go to kspace.  So two or three statics each.

Of the 100 shattered systems, 75 will be normal systems in terms of their effects and access.  Another 25 systems will have only small wormholes as access: that is, you can only get in frigates, destroyers, and heavy interdictors.  Also, each of the small systems will have C6 wolf-rayet effect, namely, armor good, shields bad, small weapons really amped up, small signature.  

Will this affect my game?  Perhaps a little.  I don't really envision doing mining much at all; it's just not lucrative enough.  (And if I wanted to mine rocks, I can mine in my own system.)  Ice-mining, maybe.  (Though which kind of ice will there be?  I want Minmatar ice, whatever it is, to make fuel from.)  With no local POSes, I'd guess they will be anom graveyards.  So, there should good site running there.  

In any case, I don't see carebearing in them except in a zipped system.  That's asking for gank.  The extra static will make them harder to zip up, but it should be doable.

There are currently 2498 wspace systems.  Given 100 more, this gives a roughly 1 in 26 chance that any particular new connection connects to one of them.  So from moonful wspace, we should get a direct connection to a shattered system approximately once per month for most systems, or twice per month for C4s like mine.  Then we'll see.  

I think the strongest effect may be on hunting.  The chance of any particular connection leading to a shattered system is 1 in 26.  But let's say you look at 10 systems each night.  (I typically connect to at least this many.)  Then the chance to find a shattered system is about 32%!  So I'll be seeing them fairly frequently.  They seem like good places to hunt.  Indeed they seem like good places to go on safari.  

Am I excited?  No.  Maybe a little bit.  Still, it's good to see CCP adding new content.  These may not be for me, right now, but they might be places I'll get to eventually.  

I'd love to see a Hutt Enterprises Inc. form, and dominate Thera to be run as a freeport.  All non-combat ships NRDS.  

CCP to Buff Lesser Blue Loot

Via Sugar, I see that CCP is going to buff lower-end wormholes by increasing the price of the two smaller blue loot items. 

as of Phoebe on November 4th, NPC buy orders for Neural Network Analyzers will pay out 200,000 isk and Sleeper Data Libraries will be purchased for 500,000 isk.

(Currently the respective prices are 50000 ISK and 200000 ISK.  Prices are already rising in the hubs.)

Not coincidentally, just yesterday I was hauling some loot out from wspace and noticed that the prices of these two items were above par at Hek.  I figured it was some leftover demand from the competition, and sold my loot there feeling smug... for maybe 20% over the par price.  Ooops.  Don't do that.

Fozzie Backs Off Stealth Bomber Nerfs

This should be of interest to bombless bomber pilots everywhere.  After criticism by many, Fozzie and company have pulled back on the stealth bomber changes planned for Phoebe:

... the change to decloaking mechanics has been put on hold indefinitely. We are going to take some more time to work on the best way to have ships interact with cloakies and it's very possible that our eventual changes will be significantly different than what we talked about earlier. For now, cloaked ships will not decloak each other. 

We're also going to be removing some of the earlier increase in signature radius and shifting it to a penalty on the bomb launcher itself. The T1 bomb launcher will add +10m signature radius and the T2 will add 12m.

This is generally good for me, although I was somewhat looking forward to the idea of hunting scouts by warping around to wormhole signatures.  Still, mutual decloak had the potential to be a big PITA even for me, hunting solo all the time.  Certainly it would make life hard for the normal bomber pilot in a fleet.

It remains to be seen how much of a signature increase we'll see.  Note that "some".  Also, the warp speed nerf is not mentioned.  I suppose it is still planned.  Perhaps it will be worth trading off warp speed for a bit more tank, even though tank is generally pretty useless on a bomber.

"Blighted" weapons

Evidently CCP plan to introduce a new variant of all short-range weaponry, currently called "blighted".  They'll be in Phoebe.

(The name is awful.  "Blight" is a biological thing and really does not belong in a scifi game, unless you are talking about infection by nanobots or something analogical to the biological.  CCP is aware of this from the thread, where everyone is saying "ugh".  Hopefully it will change.)

Anyway, "blighted" weapons are supposed to be glass-cannon makers.  They are on Sisi right now, although CCP is saying they may change them.  On Sisi they exist in the sense that markets know about them (thus you can see their stats).  But none are actually available.

Currently they get about 10-20% more DPS than a T2 weapon of their type, and can use T2 ammo.  They seem to have T2 power and CPU requirements. Their downside, which is huge, is lowering all ship resistances to 0%.  (It's not clear to me exactly how this is supposed to work: is that resistances before or after other modules' effects?)  Another downside is (or may be) cost.  CCP is saying they will cost like faction weapons.  This will depend on how they enter game, though, as well as if they are useful. 

In their current incarnation, "blighted" weapons seem pretty useless to me.  Highsec gankers might like them, if they are cheap.  Maybe a few alpha fits in other spaces.  But there is one "blighted" weapon application that does seem useful: torpedoes on stealth bombers.  So I am keeping my eye on that.

Phoebe: Bones

CCP has a new dev blog out featuring stuff coming up in Phoebe.  There's a lot of things of moderate interest to me.  But then there is this:

Data sites get better reward balance and a variety of new items will be possible to find in these exploration sites. Data and Relic sites found in Null Security Space will also be present in wormhole Class 1-3 systems. An upcoming blog will describe the changes.

(My emphasis.)  This means for the first time there is a reason for unarmed frigates to come into wspace to seek their fortune... and also to be killed by me!  Yay!

Also, scanner window separation:

there will be separate windows for Directional Scanner, Scan Probes and Moon scanning.

Huzzah!

Of interest to everyone: UNLIMITED SKILL QUEUE!

in Phoebe you will be able to construct and start training skill queues of unlimited time length.

Finally, not in the dev blog but via Nosy, there is a very interesting rumor:

Cloaked ship decloaking others on SISI.

I'll be testing this tonight.  If this is true, it's another godsend for me.  [UPDATE: Just tested.  Yes, two cloaked ships decloak each other.]  Imagine it: you see probes in a system you've already scanned down.  So you warp around to each wormhole sig at zero, trying to find the one the guy is scanning next.  If you uncloak, it's because the other guy warped to the sig at zero.  He uncloaks too, of course.  For me, GTFO if he's in T3; engage and destroy if covert ops.  Should be particularly fun for T3s.

First time I've been excited about a new release in a while.

Oceanus First Impressions

Oceanus is not much of an expansion.  It adds very little new for anybody, and I am no exception.  Still, it is an expansion and not a glorified patch as some have said.  And all of what it does add is welcome.  So here's my first impressions of it, after going out last night for my standard round of hunting.  (I got a kill!  But that's another story.)

First, the things I have not tried: new burner missions (nor older ones for that matter), French, pasting in fits, new notification system, any rebalanced ships or modules.

So what I have noticed so far?

Oceanus is pretty.  I am not used to the new wormholes and wormhole backgrounds yet.  That is, I still cannot just look at a wormhole and know where it goes (other than C1/C2).  But I think this should be possible, so under that assumption it is good.  I think I already can look at them and tell the small wormholes from the others.  (Penny has a new post showing many of the new wormholes, similar to her older guide to wormhole appearances.)

Cloaking

And speaking of pretty, the new cloaking effect and the new cloaked appearance are both super cool.  Yes, these are nearly meaningless graphical improvements.  (Nearly -- the cloaked display does make it easier to see which way your cloaked ship is pointed.)  Still, since I spend about 95% of my playing time cloaked, and you uncloak and recloak every wormhole jump if not more often, I see the new effects all the time.   They are pretty, and when you stare at something as frequently as I see my ship cloaked, pretty matters.

Cloaked

 There is also an addition to cloaking that I did not expect: there is a cloaking sound that is quite evident now.  I think there was a very subtle one before.  Now it is not subtle.  (I may dial it down, actually.)  Because it is not subtle, I get feedback that I actually did cloak successfully.  Also there is a similar uncloaking noise, which is also nice.

I knew going into Oceanus that there would cooldown timers displayed.  I sort of thought that meant cooldown for micro jump drives.  And it does, I hope.  (Have not checked.)  But what it means for me is "cooldown" of cloak modules, which is very important.  It's a real nuisance when you want to recloak to be sitting there hitting cloak every second since there is no way to know when to recloak.  Now you can see it.  Very nice.  I am comically happy each time I go to recloak after firing probes.  This will fade.

It does seem a bit daft to be so thankful to CCP for this.  I mean, they should have done this years ago.  Literally years.  It is very helpful, and it is just client graphics; there is no server-side at all I should think.  The client already had this info, which is why it could tell you how many seconds left via the pop-up message.  All they had to do was display it.

I noticed one other thing.  It seems to be easier to see that cloaking is on via the greenish-pulsing of the cloaking module.  I can find nothing in the patch notes about this, so maybe I am imagining it.  But I don't think so.  It used to be very hard to see the pulsing greenish display unless the background was almost black.  I used to routinely rotate around my ship so as to find a patch of black background to make sure cloaking was still on.  Now you can see it pretty well up to about half-white.  This is an improvement.

One final thing I noticed today, when making the screenies for this.  CCP seems to have fixed the bug where you get a delayed cloaking effect when you raise the system map before or when cloaking.  (This bug was still there on the first two days of Oceanus.  I noticed.)  I have had a number of gasp-no! moments over this one.  So I am glad it is fixed, assuming I am not just misunderstanding how it is triggered.  [UPDATE: no, still not fixed.  Come on, CCP.]