Signal Cartel

Via Nosy, I found out that Mynxee has started a new corp for explorers, Signal Cartel:

Signal Cartel is a corp designed from the ground up for peaceful explorers. We are based in Thera... Dedicated to the highest ideals of exploration, our corp culture is one of wanderlust, camaraderie, helpfulness, respectful behavior, and peaceful intent. We seek to provide our members with a friendly, nurturing home that includes great benefits and opportunities for learning, fun, and profit.

Mynxee, for you relative newcomers is a respected EVE blogger (now found blogging at Outlaw Insouciant) and notorious pirate PVPer from times past.  Everyone I've read seems to love her, at almost Sugar levels of intensity.  She's a good bet for a mentor and CEO.

Signal Cartel is not for me -- its corp rules forbid initiating PVP.  (I hunt.)  But it is exactly the sort of corp I would have liked to join when I started.  I know there are some explorers reading this, so maybe it's for you.

Meanwhile, I'll be setting Signal Cartel blue to my corp.  Since their principles forbid shooting me, I won't shoot them.

Killing a This-Is-EVE Newb

I killed a newb yesterday.

I see an Imicus in wspace immediately upon dscanning when entering a new system.  I am heading down a chain I scanned earlier, just checking for new wormholes and looking for people to hunt.  So, mission accomplished, so far.

Most people use Covert Ops to scan with; the Imicus is a T1 scanning frig.  That's a tell: easy meat.  More tellingly, in wspace, we scan cloaked.  It is possible to scan fairly securely when uncloaked, but it's not easy.  You have to move from time to time, and you have to be continually dscanning for combat probes.

I cast around with dscan.  The target is at a planet, apparently, with two moons.  I warp to the CO.  He is here, but moving off at microwarp speed in a direction I cannot get to.

Check the character: he is six days old.  Do I try to kill him?  Of course I try to kill him.  Welcome to wspace.  Still, I can't get him where he is.

He warps to another CO, and disappears.  I can still see the probes.  I guess he cloaked.  Well, he will have to uncloak when he warps to a wormhole to look at it.  Then, if he is slow, and he may well be, I will have a shot.  So, I sit cloaked and watch.

This takes forever.  Obviously he is not a very efficient scanner, which is not surprising considering he's six days old.  Frankly, I am amazed to find him here at all.  I am always impressed by how fearless some players are.  Not me, I am Mr. Risk Averse.

I get out the phone and start playing chess.  Four games later, about 30 minutes after I pick him up, I finally see him again on scan.  He's warping.

He stops at another planet.  I warp in to the CO again, and he is there.  Again he has headed off in a random direction on microwarp.  This time, there is a planet in the approximate right direction, and an anom in the direction of the target's deviation from the first planet.  I start to work to construct the intercept, flying back and forth to 100km to get in front of him.  I go forth and come back once, but before I can do it a second time, he warps.  I don't see him leaving grid, so I don't know where he went immediately.  But I can use dscan to look for him.  I have the system already scanned, so I can see that he has warped to a wormhole.  He disappears from dscan.  He has probably jumped into the next system, although dscan cannot tell you that for certain.  I give him time to get away from the wormhole, while I warp around the system to make sure he actually did leave.  Of course, one cannot know that for certain, but I see no probes and no Imicus on scan.  So, high confidence.

I enter the next system, a C4 with a C1 static.  Yes, Imicus on scan.  A while of messing around with dscan shows that he is very close the entrance wormhole, but off grid.  I can't get to him myself, in my Manticore.  I need combat probes.  Well, that's why I have an alt.

I log in Otto, fly to my tower and switch into my Cheetah.  I load combat probes as I hop downchain two jumps, and into the same system.  Then I move off the wormhole, fire probes, and quickly throw them out of the system.  I fleet up, then it's time for scan the guy.  This is easily done in one scan when someone is within a few thousand kilometers of a known point: just put the probes on the planet, drop their range to minimum, and scan.  Otto hides his probes again, then fleet-warps Von to the target's location... but when I land, the target is already out of range.  Grr, microwarping Imicus.  Drat.

I can see his the direction, though, and there is a combat anom positioned about right.  I warp Von and Otto there, at 100km so the sleepers won't get them.  My new plan is to scan for the target again, then warp in from here at 100km.  This will put me out in front of him, assuming he does not deviate, perhaps off at a slight angle, but I can move perpendicular to him to cut off the angle and intercept.  I am ready to hit "Scan now", but on a final narrow-beam dscan he drops off.  He's moved again!  Ugh.  I widen: where is he going?

He is going to the C1 wormhole.  I warp to 10km.  This time, I get there in time.  He is also about 10km from the wormhole, and about 15km from me.  I head right at him.  Then the standard stuff: uncloak, get systems working.  He pops before he can escape.  Then I lock up his pod.

I hesitate.  I have him scrambled, but: newbie!  Should I pod him?  I finally decide to, and launch one volley of torps.  But he is moving, and torps do not hit pods effectively in any case.  He escapes through the wormhole.

I pursue.  On the other side, no pod and no pod on scan.  I assume he is holding cloak, and I hold cloak too.  I cannot catch a pod if he just warps off, with or without sebo.  But he may not know that, and he may not realize what's happening when his gate cloak ends, which might be enough time to let me get at him.  But he does not panic, and jumps back through the wormhole.  This time, he warps clear.

OK, good on you Mr. Newb.  Actually I am kind of happy he got away.

In spite of the fact that the guy had little or no chance, it was still an amazing hunt for me.  I figured out a few nice tricks on the fly.  It's sad that I did not succeed in getting to the target with my tricks, but that's life.  Next time I will be faster.  There's a reason why people can't be safe in wspace with just a microwarpdrive.

Now I proceed to the next stage of the thing: I message the guy.  (Grr, CPSA.)

He is a bit hostile to begin with, as is understandable, but we have a nice long chat.  I tell him I was hunting him for a while. I tell him to scan cloaked.  (Yes, he did have a cloak!)  He does not know about wspace levels; I fill him in.  How does one know what wspace level a system is?  I tell him about wormhol.es (actually now pasta.gg, whatever).  I also tell him you can ID wormholes on sight from the other side, and link him to Penny.  We discuss how to scan, and I link him to Penny again.  He asks about ships, and I direct him towards Covert Ops.  We talk data/relic sites: he made 20m that morning.  Good!  Does he know how to get out?  No, he ran into a system and off the wormhole.  So I offer to get him out.  He has to trust me a little, but on the other hand, he's looking at suiciding his pod, so not really that much.  I find him (he's in a C5 off the side of the path I had probed earlier).  Then I fleet him up, have him meet me at a planet, and we warp to the wormhole.  (He thinks fleet-warp is cool.)  I get him to the lowsec exit.  I give him 5m ISK to replace the ship, and try to encourage him to keep it up.  I tell him to find people to fly with, or at least chat with.  He asks about my corp, but we can't really take a newb that raw.  But I tell him to stay in touch.  Once his skills are up a little, he might be a good fit.

One Percent Moments

I was aware of EVE for years before I ever played it.  There were two things I read that really made me decide I wanted to try it.  If I recall correctly, both were comments by The Mittani, in some interview.  One of those comments was something to the effect of, 'EVE is incredibly boring 90% of the time; you're sitting watching a spinner complete a circle.  9% of the time, EVE is moderately interesting.  But then 1% of the time EVE is just insanely fun.'  (I really ought to dig that up.)

Speaking of those 1% moments, CCP made a new trailer.  It's pretty great.  It's EVE visuals mostly synthed up by CCP, with stirring music and real sound captures of players playing the game. It's these sound captures that are the focus of the video, and why it works so well. 

The game shown in the video is not the game I play for the most part; it's the nullsec fleet game.  (Hunting solo, I make no sound at all.)  Still, a lot of the fun of EVE -- a lot of those 1% moments -- are captured.  That bit at 3:20 is just how I feel when I get a kill, even a pitiful little Venture.  Yeah! yeah!! yeaaah!!!

[Update: the interview referred to above.  My memory is not 100% accurate, but close enough.]

Anomalous Prices

CCP is running a contest that may be of some interest to wspace residents.  It is detailed in a recent dev blog titled Anomalous Materials: The Research Race of YC 116.  The key parts:

The empire navies are requesting donations of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries to help them [technobabble]. 

... this storyline and the associated donation drive will lead directly to new technology falling into the hands of players in the near future. The relative success of each empire’s donation drive will determine in what order each faction will get access to this new technology. 

Each faction navy will also express their gratitude through a special ingame item representing an honorary commission to their forces. The commissions will be given to the character that donates the highest value of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries (combined and weighted) to each faction over the course of the event.

This event is open now, and will run until downtime on Tuesday, October 14th.

So, two things of interest here.  First, until next Tuesday, Neural Network Analyzers (NNAs) and Sleeper Data Libraries (SDLs) should sell at a premium.  Ordinarily NNAs sell to NPC buy orders for 50000 ISK.  SDLs sell for 200000 ISK.  There is no reason to take less, and (blue loot being useless otherwise) no reason for anyone to offer more.  The NPC price, of course, won't change.  But the prices at market hubs will rise.

How far will prices rise?  This we cannot know.  Since the only real reason to contribute to this drive is vanity, we can imagine not that much.  On the other hand, there are a lot of players with so much wealth in ISK that they have nothing to buy with it.  If one of them decides he wishes to win this contest, the price can rise almost arbitrarily.  The supply of blue loot is only a little bit elastic.

As I write this, NNAs are selling at Jita between 115000 (high buy) and 190000 (low sell) ISK.  SDAs are selling between 300000 (high buy) to 549000 (low sell) ISK.  (We expect the two prices to stay at a ratio of 1:4, which they are very roughly.)  As one expects, the low-priced supply of these items outside of trade hubs has been completely sucked up.  I expect the prices to rise, since there was a supply of old sell orders through this morning.  From here on out, all supply must come out of stockpiles or fresh from wspace.

So, this is the time to make some extra profit.  If you are planning to sell blue loot, don't take the NNAs and SDLs to an NPC station.  Take them to a hub and profit.

A related way in which this may be good for wspace people is that there are going to be a lot of extra players in wspace this week, looking to make a bit extra from blue loot.  Newbs in lower wspace ratting solo or in small gangs?  You know what to do.

The other item of interest here is that "new technology".  Presumably CCP is planning to add some new stuff to the game.  If lore-wise a tech is a result of blue loot, there is a good chance it will be T3, or more broadly it will be something requiring inputs from wspace.  So, this may represent new wealth for us in the moderately near future.

Penny Out; Chessur In

I have been writing this blog now for a year and a half.  And of course before I started writing about EVE, I was playing it and reading other people's blogs.  Blogging is a peculiar hobby.  It is unpaid of course; nobody pays for writing of this level.  At times it seems like work.  Some people have what it takes to write a blog seeming indefinitely.  But I am not one (I know this from other blogs I have kept IRL).  And I doubt that many people are.  Writing is hard work sometimes.

It is inevitable, then, that over time anyone who reads blogs is going to have favorite blogs go dark.  This already happened to me in EVE, short a time as that has been, with Jester ceasing to blog.  And now there's another casualty: Penny Ibramovic, ace huntress and proprietor of Tiger Ears, has ceased blogging, at least for now.  She cites IRL circumstances (unspecified) in her exceedingly brief farewell note, a comment on her last post.

After 6 years of pretty much daily blogging, reaching a tidy 2,001 posts about EVE Online—2,002 now—seemed like a good place to, well, at least take a break. 

My circumstances may be changing to the point where I can't commit to writing on the same schedule, and I thought a clean break at a milestone would be better than fizzling out. It seems that my final post wasn't quite as unambiguously final as I expected. 

I may get bored and start writing again, you never know, but I am taking a break for now.

Surely it is too early to write an obituary.  Writers will write, and Penny is a writer.  (Indeed I am a bit of one.  I took up EVE blogging in part because the political blogs I'd been commenting on had gone dark.)  As I said of Jester, he'll be writing again I am sure.  Whether it is EVE Online or some other interest that Penny writes about in the future, it will be blessed by her presence.

That said, I did want to make note of it and say thank you.  Penny inspires me in several ways, which I thought I'd mention by way of saying thanks for all the memories.  I learned to hunt mostly on my own, and from other stuff I'd read online (read down for a bit more related to this).  But Penny's tales certainly strengthened this knowledge.  And I know I learned to recognize K162s due to Penny.  It's mostly simply knowing that something is possible, but Penny also had the canonical compilation of wormhole appearances.  I also want to specifically mention Penny's camera work, which is awesome.  She gets good screenies and lots of them.  Compare the spotty and/or crap screenshots I get in combat and you'll see the difference.  I am improving on that, I like to think, and that is in part due to the fact that I know from Penny that it is possible.

Another way that Penny inspired me was her in-game exploits, which made and make me want to replicate them.  I trained into Loki because Penny was flying Lokis.  (Now I am training Proteus, although that won't be ready for months.)  I trained Onyx in part based on the hope of replicating a miner massacre like Penny.  (This dream I did accomplish, although not as fulsomely as Penny did.  Someday I hope to do it again and perhaps even exceed the master.)   In game I sometime quail at some engagement, then I think to myself what would Penny do?  She'd attack.  So I attack.

In addition to in-game victories, Penny also inspires me with her sheer output.  When I have nothing interesting, I don't write.  Or I cast about for some metagame or game design idea to write about.  Penny writes what is in front of her, day in and day out.  This is hard to do.  The life of the wormhole hunter is mostly deadly dull.  Scanning, scanning, scanning.  Each day, every day, at least 90% of your time.  I don't mind it that much, but neither is it very interesting.  Oh, another gas site!  Of the remaining time, there's a bit spent lurking about, an even smaller amount spent making decisions about what to do.  And there is a razor-thin slice of time spent actually in combat or otherwise doing something inherently interesting.  This latter bit is the payoff that makes it all worthwhile.  But it's not the reality on its own.  It is pretty much impossible to convey in writing how boring a hobby hunting in wspace is most of the time, but Penny does at least point in that direction.  And she does it without being boring, by virtue of stylish writing and humor.  (Humour, I suppose.)  Her last bits of writing, reviewing Oblivion while killing sleepers, were particularly great.

And so Tiger Ears is quiet for now.  One blog does not a section make, but now that I have two blogs that I wish to record for posterity, I am making a blogroll for it.  

In vaguely related news, since I was adding the new section for quiescent blogs, I went looking for a blog that inspired me even before I found Tiger Ears, back when I was in highsec.  That blog is Confessions of a Wormhole Killer.  I've not linked it up before because it was quiescent two years ago back when I found it, and I assumed it stayed that way.  But it hasn't; there's new stuff there!  The writer, Chessur, probably more than anyone else inspired me to want to be in wspace.  So he is in my blogroll and he's got a place of honor in my heart.

Penny does too.  She probably knows that, seeing how much I refer to her.  But just in case, Penny, you will be missed.  You are already.

Hyperion

There is a new dev blog out that wspace residents will be interested in.  The next release of EVE, "Hyperion", is going to be wspace focused.

we are proposing the most significant package of improvements to wormhole space since the release of the Apocrypha expansion in 2009. 

These changes consist of:

• Wormhole effect rebalance
• A second static for Class 4 wormholes
• More randomly spawning wormholes
• Mass-based spawn distance after wormhole jumps
• K162 appearance only on first jump
• Loosening of bookmark copying restrictions

The devil is in the details.  But my initial read through has me favorable on most of these.  The only one I am still not sold on is the mass-based spawn distance.  It does not affect me personally much.  I am still concerned that it will mean no hunting of cloakies, and posted in their feedback to tell them that.

CCP has Changed Wormhole Mechanics on Sisi

Ack.  Ships appear at range to a wormhole proportionate to their mass, with capitals as far out at 40km.  But also apparently ships always appear at least 3000m away from the wormhole.  There's a minor threadnaught brimming with negativity.  A dev blog is promised.

Here is my particular concern:

It appears that every ship will always appear outside of the wormhole's decloak distance. This will make my form of hunting considerably less viable.

I hunt in wormholes. Usually I am alone, in a stealth bomber. I hunt for any kind of weak ship not in a POS, but among the most usual things I hunt (though not kill) are cloaky scouts. If a cloaky scout can always cloak safely against me, my chance of killing him is zero unless he makes a mistake or I happen to be right on top of him. Currently, there is always the incentive to go for it, on the small but real chance than he is within the wormhole's decloak distance. If he is, then I have the time to lock and can possibly kill. What usually happens is I uncloak, and I go for the lock but fail when he cloaks. This is good because I get a big thrill, and he gets a thrill. We both end up with racing hearts and feeling alive. People who feel alive keep playing.

Another thing I dislike about this is its effect on me, the hunter. It makes me safer, since currently I too can be killed if I happen to appear too close to a wormhole and someone is there hunting me. Every jump I make into a new system is a bit dangerous. Don't take that away.

Following Up

Last week I mentioned the article Driving the Meta: N+1 and the Logistics Cruiser, which I thought was quite insightful.  At the time the author, the stupidly-named "FearlessLittleToaster", promised a followup with his idea for how to attack the problems created by remote reps.  Now the followup is there: Driving the Meta: The Remote Logistics Disruptor.

I propose ... the introduction of a module called the Remote Logistics Disrupter (RLD). ... [It] would be identical in all respects to a Stasis Webifier, except that instead of reducing the speed of the target, it would reduce the amount that the target was repaired by incoming reps. The RLD would have no impact on the logistics ship, only the target of the repair disrupter.  

Following the normal stacking penalty progression incoming repairs would be reduced to 50% for the first RLD then 28%, 20%, and 17% with each successive tech one disrupter placed on the target ship. For tech two the progression would be 40%, 19%, 12%, and 10% respectively.

Interesting idea.  It won't solve the blue donut, which is a consequence of easy capital projection and there being no counter to capitals except more capitals.  But at least it's a step in that direction.

Stabs has a lolcat post that makes a good followup to Staying Hidden in Wspace:  Scouting for Dummies.  How should I scout?  I should send in Jayne!

Here's an tangential followup to last week's post, PLEX is Money.  With Chronos, CCP has a new ad on the launcher:

Treasure?

"Treasure it".  Do you think CCP wants seignorage?  I think so!

One final item.  Not a followup, but something I want to note.  Jester, the robo-blogger, has had enough.  He's out.

I am shutting down Jester's Trek. 

Now before you ask, I'm neither quitting nor rage-quitting EVE Online. But over the last few months, I've come to realize that something like 85% to 90% of the stuff I'm doing in and around EVE simply isn't any fun. So I'm going to cut out everything that I'm not finding fun and focus my time on the remaining 10%.

This leaves a big hole in the EVE blogosphere.  The best commentary I have seen on it is Mabrick's.  I share his sentiment.  Thanks, Jester, for the insight and amusement I got from you.  I do expect Jester will eventually return to writing about something, because writers gotta write.  I hope it is EVE Online.  Whatever it is, they'll be lucky to have him.

Boot Camp

This is a call for CCP to set up a system of boot camps for new EVE players.  A boot camp is a special corporation, which a newbie can join for a limited time, run by selected players.  There are three goals for the boot camp experience.  First, to provide each newb a specific experienced player or two for information, guidance and support .  Second, to teach each newb hands on how to do particular in-game professions.  Third, to establish a social environment so that newbies can meet each other and make friends.

I. Models

I think my biggest inspiration is OUCH, the Open University of Celestial Hardship.  They run a nullsec survival and PVP boot camp.  (Here's the recent dev blog community spotlight featuring OUCH.)  I am not thinking of anything that complicated, though. 

Another inspiration is EVE University.  They are a great resource, but I think that going into lowsec to live is intimidating to many newbs.  How do you make money there?  EVE U. seems like a very big step.  I think many people don't want or need that much guidance.  They just need a little bit, and they need personal attention.

I should also give a mention to the Goon training materials, and the attitudes which they seem to point to within Goonswarm.  Goons seem to be very focused on bringing in newbees, helping them, and getting them going. 

II. Why Boot Camps?

New player retention and the new player experience are big problems for EVE.  EVE is a cold, dark universe.  It's a place of griefing, of tear-extraction, awoxing, scamming, reverse-awoxing and the gank.  This is as it should be.  Keep EVE dangerous.  But still, there's a general feeling, which I share, that many newbies are lost and need more guidance and structure before being thrown in the shark tank.

I don't think we'd need boot camps if everyone was a Goon.  But most players aren't.  It is true that many corps have good recruitment and training.  But this is generally of use only to real life friends that bring in someone, because otherwise how does a new player even know about these groups?  And how does a smaller corp know that a player is not an awoxer?  They don't, and so it is generally only larger corps that recruit widely.

On the one hand, we want players to join corps because we want them to have friends in the game, because people with friends keep playing.  On the other hand, joining any corp is potentially dangerous.  This is not really a problem for a vet, who knows the score.  He should know how to check up on a corp.  He won't contract all his assets to some Goon recruiter to jump out to null.  If he does fall for a recruitment scam, he deserves to lose what he loses.  But it does run against the expectations of a newbie, and the potential loss there is much more.

Similarly, the war dec mechanic is awful.  The best response is to drop corp, so you can keep playing.  So much for your social environment.  The experienced player knows he can chat on coms or on a chat channel other than corp.  He won't lose his social environment.  Indeed, the experienced corp owner knows how to duck wardec.  The newbie?  That's unlikely.  He'll stay in corp, and keep playing, and become a cheap target.  

People always propose developing the newbie mission system more, but the problem here is that it is very hard to know what each individual needs and what he has missed.  And it is also hard to teach some of the more subtle things.  Certainly I don't see in-game tutorials ever explaining wardecs, or ISK doubling scams.

III. How Boot Camps Should Work

The boot camp is a special corporation.  Boot camps should have a distinguishable name and ticker reserved for them that normal player corps cannot take, and emulation of these names should be frowned upon.  Boot camps should be wardec-proof.  Other than that they can be normal corporations.

The CEO of a boot camp is its lieutenant; he should have one assistant, his sergeant.  Collectively these two people are the officers; they are the teachers.  The newbies are recruits; they are the students.

Officers should be required to agree to and follow a code of conduct, including the following items:

• they will always attempt to advance the best interests of their recruits
• they will advise their recruits to the best of their knowledge
• they may not recommend or discourage any specific corps as later homes; they can give general advice on how to choose a corp, but no specific advice
• after a recruit moves on, all knowledge they have about that recruit will not used in any manner, either to favor or hurt that recruit, without written (email) permission from that recruit

After boot camps get going, each officer applicant should be required to take a boot camp as a newbie, just to see how it goes and what works.

Boot camp officers should given access to newbie chat.  They should also have a special recruitment channel for boot camps.  Access to this channel should be restricted to boot camp officers, and new accounts for a limited time.  Perhaps it would be the first six months of an account.

Each boot camp should have clear skill requirements to enter.  These should not be very high, of course, but they must be there so that standard fits can be proffered, and a newbie can partake of all of the training and do hands-on.  Boot camps should require an API for the purpose of verifying skills and for advising newbies in general.

Boot camps should run for a limited time per training squad.  I'd suggest a period of no more than one month.  The point is emphatically not a long-term home.  It is acclimatization, advice and training.  At the end of each month, the boot camp should kick all recruits and start over.  Hopefully, a boot camp would have enough applicants lined up to immediately cycle after discharging the last squad.  However, this may take time.  This may allow some recruits to spend extra time in the camp.

Boot camps should take in recruits in squads, so that they join and leave synchronously.  This makes running and scheduling them easier, and also puts the recruits on an equal footing socially.  Squads should be relatively small.  I would suggest no more than 20 recruits per squad.  Maybe more could be handled, but that's where I would start.  Once the camp has its 20, it should start its training cycle.

Each boot camp should be run for a specific time zone, i.e., "evenings from 8:00 - 11:00 in Eastern Time".  This would be advertized as such, of course. Both officers would be required to commit to the same time zone.  Both officers would be required to leading a training session one night per week, at least three hours per night.  This would give the corp eight training sessions over the course of a month.  These sessions should be used for getting people on coms, then lectures and group activities.  Officers should also be logged on, though not necessarily leading anything, for at minimum 3 nights per week in addition to the one they are on duty.  This gives them time for one-on-one chat with individual recruits, or generally to help fine tune recruits as they independently do whatever they do.

I expect some variety of boot camps, but not that much.  I imagine boot camps focused on mining, exploring, missioning, etc. -- the basic highsec income staples.  In the last week, they could have a few classes on lowsec survival and attempt to make some money out there.  

One kind of boot camp that I think would be particularly fun and interesting would be one focused on PVP.  The recruits could be fleeted and taken into lowsec to be slaughtered.  They'd learn that losing ships and even being podded is not the end of the world.  They'd get adrenalin and feel the fun.  In the last weeks, two cooperating boot camps could wardec each other and have fun learning how to fight in highsec.

IV.  What CCP Would Have to Do

Boot camps can be implemented largely within the existing game.  There are a few places where CCP support would be very helpful or necessary.  I'll try to identify those.

The biggest thing CCP needs to do is to create a division of ISD for the boot camp officers.  Every officer should be screened, interviewed, and doxed similar to how ISD does things currently.  Boot camp is part of CCP's public face and must be above reproach.  There must be internal processes to remove bad and/or incompetent officers.  This would require at least one CCP employee to run.

Each boot camp officer should get an ISD account to be used only for doing boot camp stuff.  This account would be free.  Otherwise there should be no remuneration for officers -- it is a calling, not a business.  (It is interesting to think about how it might become a business.  But start small.)  Officer accounts should be allowed to give ISK and items to their (current) recruits only.  However, they may not accept gifts of money or goods from anyone except CCP.  Any ISK they have would be because they generated them in-game, incidental to their work.  If a boot camp is deemed to need special equipment (i.e., lots of frigates for a PVP boot camp), then CCP can supply those or ISK to buy them.

It would be very convenient if CCP were to implement boot camps specially, as a corporation subclass that cannot be formed by unprivileged players, and which cannot be wardecced, and in which awoxing is Concorded.  However, these effects can be simulated via special rules when using normal corps.  That is, just as there is a game rule that suicide gankers in highsec must die, there could be a rule that boot camps are not wardeccable, and a clear warning that awoxing in a boot camp is a bannable offense.  Corps impinging on the namespace would be renamed.

As previously mentioned it would be helpful if boot camps had easily distinguished names and tickers reserved for them that normal player corps cannot take.  I.e., CCP might reserve all strings "Boot Camp X" in the corp namespace for boot camps.  And they might reserve "BT_XXX" in the corp namespace.  And while I am thinking about it, they should also have a unique corporate symbol.

Finally, it would be important to refer newbies to boot camps as a part of their normal Aura training.  Explain what they are (that is, a limited-time but safe environment to learn), and that they can be found on the corp recruitment interface as follows, blah blah.  And open up the boot camp recruitment channel.

PLEX is Money

The formidable mynnna, a guy who knows a bit about economics, has an article up at TMC entitled The Great PLEX Bubble.  As you can tell from the title, his argument is that PLEX are a bubble.

Given the context [a fact-filled discussion of the supply and demand for PLEX], the conclusion is obvious: people buying PLEX off the market are tending to hoard them, rather than use or resell them.

I'll repeat here what I wrote there, since it is buried there anyway, and expand a bit.  My thesis is as follows: PLEX are in a bubble, but that does not mean what most people think it means, namely that PLEX will eventually "pop".  The PLEX bubble won't pop because PLEX are being used as money.  Money is a bubble that does not pop.  Due to peculiarities of its design, EVE has two forms of money, splitting the normal functions of money in two.

I.  About Money

What is money, and what are its functions?  You can look at the definition at wiki for some insight:

Money is any object or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past, a standard of deferred payment. Any kind of object or verifiable record that fulfills these functions can be considered money. 

Money is historically an emergent market phenomenon establishing a commodity money, but nearly all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money. Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity.

ISK is a fiat money, the ultimate fiat in a sense.  It does not need a "legal tender" clause.  It is implemented in software; within New Eden, ISK-as-money is a physical law.  Now consider the functions of money.  Certainly ISK is the medium of exchange in New Eden, and its unit of account.  ISK do store value.  So, ISK have definite monetary qualities there.  However, ISK are relatively poor as a store of value.

II.  The ISK Economy

Why are ISK a poor store of value?  It does not matter why, for the purposes of my argument; only that it is.  You can skip this section if you want.  However, it's worth understanding anyway.

ISK are a poor store of value because they are being created much faster than they are destroyed.  (Two step computed the rate of ISK dilution in 2012 as 1 trillion ISK per day entering the economy.)  Note that I avoid the word "inflation" because it has been coopted in modern times to mean a measured rise in "general" price level, whatever that is exactly.  It's inherently ill-defined and thus subject to endless debate.  Dilution is a precise concept: there are more ISK in existence.  This is a measurable thing and, for ISK, a confirmed fact.

Players can create as much ISK as they like, simply by ratting in null, or farming sleepers for blue loot, which is then sold to NPC buy orders.  Both of these are massive faucets.  (Incursions are also apparently a pretty big faucet, though I don't know exactly how.)  There are also many sinks, but the sinks are mostly one-off things (skillbooks, BPCs) or related to production; they are inherently limited.  And of course they are also disincentives for behavior; you can't farm a sink.

What is the purpose of this ISK dilution?  It is to subsidize the faucet regions (null and wspace) at the expense of the sink region (highsec).  Without the huge faucet of rat bounties, null would be an abandoned wasteland.  Similarly, wspace would be a lot more abandoned without blue loot.  Killing sleepers does have a use-valuable product (sleeper salvage, particularly nanoribbons), and so there would be some chance for market forces to help keep it viable.  But the same is not true of null: little resource extraction or production happens there.  (I hope this changes with Crius.)  And yet those huge fleet battles are priceless publicity for EVE, and the fascinating metagame with comrades keeps people subbing.  Thus, ISK subsidy.

III.  ISK and PLEX Contend

Returning to the main argument, we observe empirically that ISK is anything but a reliable store of value.  Thus, there is an opening for a second form of money.  This will be whatever commodity is found to be best at holding value; it must be in limited supply and very hard to produce, if producible at all.  In addition it should be highly liquid.  You guessed it: in EVE that commodity is PLEX.  PLEX is superb as money in this important respect.  Not ideal -- the ideal money cannot be created; obviously players can create PLEX.  But PLEX creation is sharply limited by real-world economic constraints, namely, that PLEX cost real money.  And also it is balanced by the constant removal of PLEX via use.  As such, it is not a serious problem.

Now, what happens when you have two currencies in contest?  Generally, one will out-compete the other and dominate it utterly; the loser fades away.  The reasoning here is a bit subtle, and I refer you to this excellent and provocative long-form piece on it.  Put short: because money is necessarily more valuable than the use-value of the underlying commodity, it is always in a bubble.  (The disproportion in values is extreme for fiat currencies, which have a use-value of essentially zero.)  However, unlike "normal" speculative bubbles, there is always a need for money; thus although there may be multiple money-like commodities, there can never be zero.  There must always be at least one.  And all of them look like a bubble unless you know them as money.  But multiple currencies are not stable: one will be better than another, and there is a positive feedback loop for the better one, and a negative feedback loop for the weaker.  If everyone piles into dollars, you want to hold dollars, because pesos will be become worthless if everyone piles into dollars.  Free market currencies are like Highlander: there can be only one.  (That one, historically, was gold.  It took the head of silver in a brutal contest during the 19th century.)

However, the free-market outcome -- one commodity is money, and all others not -- will only happen if the currencies are competing on a free and level playing field.  If one has a government behind it, it can take the fiat route; a legal tender law can prevent its complete demonetization.  (And indeed, fiat took the head of gold in the 20th century.)  Still, a fiat currency may retain only very limited value compared to better currencies.  This shows that it is not being used as a medium of savings; it is being used only for exchange.  Many currencies in the world today are like this.  If you get paid in pesos, you take them and spend them as soon as you can on rent and food.  If any are left and you want to save, you buy dollars.

In our case, there is no way to fully monetize PLEX, that is, not unless CCP does some serious programming.  Recall that ISK is part of the physical laws of New Eden.  (Aurum -- a PLEX derivative -- is kinda sorta a step in that direction.  But I doubt we shall ever see people spending milli-Aurum at Jita to buy a DCII.)  And ISK serve a strong purpose: taxing highsec to benefit null and wspace.  So ISK will always be with us.  But there is a way to take a lot of ISK's monetary bubbliness out of it: that way is for everyone with value to store to buy PLEX to store it.  That is what people are doing.

It is a bubble, mynnna.  Yes, indeed.  Money is a bubble that does not pop.

IV.  What Could be Done?

There are a few ways in which CCP might attack PLEX, if they wanted to de-monetize it.  The problem is the dilution of ISK: there are not enough sinks, and too many rich player-controlled sources.  As such, the price of PLEX should be sensitive to these things.  If CCP adjusts the balance of source and sink towards more sinkiness, then we should see fewer players storing value in PLEX and the price drop some.  They could do that; indeed the new industry coming in Crius appears to be more of a sink than the old.  But I doubt that the amount we are talking here is significant, and in any case the arms race out in null is not going away.  Those supercapitals don't build themselves.  Highsec must pitch in.

(Incidentally, for some exploration of what would be needed to have a rock-hard ISK, which would certainly defeat PLEX as money, you can read my old post, Towards Hard Currency in EVE.)

I see little strong reason why CCP would want to demonetize PLEX.  The main reason is that players whine about PLEX prices; that is not a strong reason.  There is at least a colorable argument that in letting PLEX bubble, CCP is squeezing out content creators.  Probably true, but not that important.  The people being squeezed out are the most marginal ones, those who can produce more than 500m per month but less than 700 (or a billion, or whatever the PLEX price is at), and refuse to pay money to subscribe.  Also, plenty of people create content without PLEXing accounts.  And for that matter, plenty of people are PLEXing without creating much content.  (I discuss this a bit with Gevlon, who criticized multiboxers.)

There are certainly good reasons why CCP should encourage PLEX monetization.  Remember that each PLEX is purchased using IRL money.  Thus, if PLEX are hoarded to preserve value, CCP gets the use of that money indefinitely.  (See the wiki on seignorage.)  They earn interest on it by putting it in a real-world bank, or they can invest it as they choose.  Another good reason for CCP to want PLEX to monetize is that it raises the PLEX:ISK price.  Higher PLEX costs are ruinous to RMTers, since the PLEX:ISK price is essentially a floor below which nobody will do RMT.  So, profits are recaptured for the company.  (The goto man in the EVE blogosphere on RMT is the Nosy Gamer; his most recent assessment of the situation is CCP's War On Illicit RMT: Reviewing PLEX.)

Thus, not only is PLEX monetization happening, it is good for CCP.  They don't have to do anything to benefit as things now stand; the process will continue.  And they seem to know this (read what mynnna writes about what Dr. E. presented at fanfest.)  As such, I do not expect PLEX monetization to reverse, but rather to continue.  And thus, if you are looking to store value, the time to get into PLEX is now.  Next PLEX sale they have, I rate PLEX a strong buy.  Next PLEX sale, I'll be putting my money where my mouth is.

CSM 9: Victory!

I promise not to bother you -- much -- with stupid politics.  But hey, stupid politics bothered me first.  He started it!  Sometimes I write about stuff that other EVE bloggers are writing about, because I read them and react.  And are they ever!  Here's a link-dump of stuff that I thought was good writing:

• Foo's Eve Musings: CSM 9 election - review of the vote
• CSM: Voter Apathy | EVEOGANDA
• Stabbed Up: CSM Voting Results - breakdown (I have a lot of comments)
• Jester's Trek: What's in a number
• Greedy goblin: CSM9 election analysis
• The CSM You Deserve | Interstellar Privateer

I. My Initial Take on the Election

I refer you to my CSM 9 voting recommendations article.  What were my goals with respect to this election?

I want to discourage you from voting.  ...  Voting when you know nothing should be seen as a shameful act, not praiseworthy.

Turnout was way down.  I like to think my discouragement helped.  Victory!

And what about for people who did vote?

What are my criteria for candidates?  Well, first of all I feel that all areas of the game should be represented on CSM.  Of them, I feel nullsec is overrepresented while lowsec and highsec are not enough.  Veterans are represented by the nature of the thing, and newbs hardly at all.  Beyond that, I care about whether the CSMs will work.  ... I don't really care as much what their specific "policy" opinions are...

Who got elected?  Most of my slate, in particular the people I selected as hard working, and those representing lowsec and newbs.  Victory!

Finally, what about the specific reason I voted?

Sugar Kyle - this candidate is the reason why I am bothering to vote.  It comes down to this: I like her.

Sugar finished third, surprising many commentators and pleasing most.  Victory!

II. Responses to Common Complaints

Most other people I read think that the CSM9 results were poor.  This is strange, because for the most part they also seem to think a lot of good people got elected.  (I.e. everyone lauds the election of Sugar; Sugar is not an acquired taste it seems.)  The handwringing is really about three things: that nullsec and in particular the Goons are over represented; that wormholes are under represented; and that turnout was low.

Why is turnout not a big deal?  Because the CSM is an advisory body, not a legislative body.  According to the modern political formula of "will of the people", a legislative body draws its power from the people; "Governments... deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed".  Consent is manufactured in many ways, but ratified by votes.  If the people do not vote for it, the legitimacy of the legislature is questionable.  Therefore, it is certainly in the interests of politicians, and arguably in the interests of the larger society, to have as many people vote as possible.  Note the inherent contradiction here, between maximizing turnout and maximizing the quality of the legislative body.  It's easier to get lots of people to vote for you if you never say anything controversial.  It's also easier to get credulous idiots to vote for you than skeptical geniuses.

By contrast, an advisory body has no power of its own; its power (if it has any) lies in giving good advice to some powerful patron.  As such, it does not matter how many or how few people voted for any particular adviser.  What matters is only: is the advice helpful to the patron?

This is why I was serious when advising people who know nothing to not vote.  Your consent to CSM is neither needed nor helpful.  The only vote that matters to CCP is your subscription.  Whereas your ignorance might reduce the quality of the CSM, by electing a useless representative over a useful one.

Now, why is bloc voting not a big problem?  Again, because the CSM is an advisory body.  An advisory body exists to give advice (duh); to do that it needs a work ethic, and it needs smart people.  That is why I emphasized those things.  It also needs expertise in what it is advising about; this is the reason to want representation from various areas of the game.  Beyond that, though, all the candidates are quite familiar with many aspects of EVE.  So blocs are not a significant problem.  And while I don't feel that the representation level is perfect, it's quite good enough.

Consider what happens in a legislative body when a party is overrepresented.  It starts making rules to favor itself.  I.e. if CSM had legislative power, perhaps the Goons could lead the nullsec blog to vote in "nerf highsec into the ground".  And CCP would have to do it.  The key thing here is that votes in a legislative body are power.  If  51% vote for a policy, good or bad, it is enacted.  Therefore, the voter needs to worry about who has or might obtain that 51%.

By contrast, in an advisory body popularity does not automatically translate into power.  The nullsec representatives can push whatever they want.  But CCP can easily take their bias into account.  They know who the nullsec guys are.

What this really gets back to is that this is CCP's game, and CCP -- for all their weirdness -- are still a pretty good sovereign.  Hopefully, the CSM can improve CCP's governance, but they are not the government.

III. What CSM9 Needs, The Big Picture

There's one more thing to say with regard to null representation and wspace underrepresentation in CSM9.  And that is that wspace is not broken in any truly deep and/or complicated ways, whereas nullsec is.  In nullsec, as I wrote at Jester's:

The problem is the blue donut, which is an inevitable result of capitals trumping everything else and easy force (i.e. capital) projection.

(Yeah, that's three different problems in a single sentence.)  To which I might add one more huge problem: blobbing and time dilation.  Nullsec is, or should be, the end-metagame of EVE for the biggest groups.  The wars out there should be a source of wonder, and inspiration; every player should want to get out there and fight -- at least a little bit.  Currently, I don't.

There's a lot one can say about null's malaise, and indeed I have ideas on how CCP might address it, some published, some not.  But whatever the solution(s) might be, it is a huge problem.  And CCP is going to be working on it soon, if Jester is to be believed.  (See here; key diagram below.)

The problem here is large in terms of in its scope, in terms of what changes would be needed to fix it, and in terms of getting nullseccers to accept those changes.  It is large in terms of EVE's and thus CCP's profitability.  For all of these reasons, I think it is good that CSM9 has a lot of nullies involved.  You or I can have all the good ideas in the world, and CCP will probably never know about them.  But rest assured that if mynnna has a way to fix null, he will be heard.  Even though his name is annoying.

By contrast, there are no fundamental problems with wspace as it is.  POSes and corp roles are deeply annoying, but they do not threaten to remove the reason for PVP in wspace.  Similarly, the horrible z-arrow probe movement is a blight on the user interface of EVE, but its existence does not make wspace hunting unfun.

I think overrepresented null may be just what we need for this particular CSM.  Victory! -- arguably.

IV. My Recommendations to CCP

As if they need them or listen to me!  Hah.  But here they are:

The system is working.  We have a perfectly adequate CSM, and perhaps even an excellent one.  So huzzah for us all!  You don't really need to change anything.

But you can do better still.  As I commented at Stabbed Up, contrary to the conventional idea that CCP needs to "get out the vote", you really should be working to suppress the vote, in the interests of weeding out dilettantes and greedy bloc voters, and thereby getting a superior advisory body.  You should institute a steep voting tax. I would say a PLEX is too much, but perhaps 200m ISK. This would cut the voting numbers down to perhaps a tenth as many, with much higher quality.

CSM Nine Voting

The voting for CSM 9 is on.  I was going to just ignore it, so far as this blog goes, but then I felt that since I was going to make the effort, however minimal, to figure out a vote, I might as well post my ideas on it for you to consider.

Still, before getting into the mud here, I want to discourage you from voting.  Yes!  In your face, Democracy!  I'll just quote myself here:

I disagree with the idea that low voter turnout is a problem. It is not. Voters are ignorant. Most players do not read blogs, do not read forums, have little sense of the history of EVE and no understanding of game design. I will grant that we cannot know who knows what; and that therefore everyone should potentially be allowed to vote. But neither should we encourage people with little to no information about the CSM race to vote. Mandatory voting is a terrible idea, even worse in EVE than in the real world.

Of course, you, dear reader, do at least read blogs.  Or at least you read blog.  Still, you may be as hopelessly ignorant of the current CSM9 candidates as, well, I am.  Or even more ignorant.  And why not?  Nobody is paying you to play EVE.  So don't be ashamed to not vote.  Voting when you know nothing should be seen as a shameful act, not praiseworthy.  (Me, I know just enough to be dangerous.)

What are my criteria for candidates?  Well, first of all I feel that all areas of the game should be represented on CSM.  Of them, I feel nullsec is overrepresented while lowsec and highsec are not enough.  Veterans are represented by the nature of the thing, and newbs hardly at all.  Beyond that, I care about whether the CSMs will work.  So far as I can tell there is a lot of work to do, and of course the work gets done on a volunteer basis.  I don't really care as much what their specific "policy" opinions are; so far as I can tell the CSMs are practically never used as junior game designers.  Rather, they are used as sanity checks.  Will the players revolt if we do X, Y or Z?  Are features P and Q a good way to address problem R?  If we implement feature F, is there a glaring stupid exploit waiting to happen?

TLDR!!  OK, enough yapping Von, just tell me who to vote for.  Right.  Here goes.  My voting list in order.

1. Sugar Kyle
2. James Arget
3. Mike Araziah
4. Ali Aras
5. mynnna
6. Steve Ronuken 
7. Psychotic Monk
8. Matias Otero 
9. Proclus Diadochu 
10. Asayanami Dei

Not TLDR!  WLRM!!  Gimme more mind-numbing "analysis"!  Here's my reasoning (such as it is) for my slate.

1. Sugar Kyle - this candidate is the reason why I am bothering to vote.  It comes down to this: I like her.  I judge only by her writing and two webcasts, but she is quite charming and in my opinion, would grace the CSM.  Oh, you want some reason reasons?  (What use, reason, I might ask?)  As you will.  Sugar writes a lot, and will replace Jester as the communicator via whom us blog-reading players learn about what the CSM is doing.  Sugar is very approachable and listens well (or fakes it well enough).  Sugar mixes the two halves of the game admirably: she does industry and runs a lowsec trade hub, and likes it.  And she is a flashy-red pirate and flies spaceships and blows people up (and gets blown up), and she likes that, too.  Sugar represents directly a poorly-represented constituency, lowsec.  She also is very interested in and attuned to the needs of newbies.

So anyway, go vote for Sugar, who probably needs it.  And then there are these other people...

2. James Arget - I am sad to say that I know nothing of the wormhole candidates.  But James is CSM8, so he is at least electable.  So, good enough.  We need a couple wormhole guys on CSM.

3. Mike Araziah - Incumbent, represents highsec.  We need that.  Also, works hard.

4. Ali Aras - Incumbent, works hard.  Communicates.  Generally sensible, even if she is sadly ignorant about the horribleness of the Z-arrow in scanning.

5. mynnna - Smart guy in spite of his annoying lowercased triple-n-ed name.  Every time I see him post I think: this is a mind to reckon with.  He posts a lot.  He is a Goon and thus part of the overrepresented nullsec bloc, and thus also almost certainly does not need my vote, nor yours.  But I think he deserves a nod, and the nice thing about the voting scheme CCP is using is you can put in guys like this who are certain to win anyway without diluting your vote.

6. Steve Ronuken - CREST is coming, and this guy develops apps.  You know: EFT, EVEMon, that sort of thing.  I use apps, you use apps, everyone who plays more than a month uses them.  CCP can't do everything, and won't do everything.  And they probably shouldn't anyway; they'd break stuff.  We want apps to be good, and we need a CSM who can push CCP on them from a position of knowledge.  Also, represents highsec.

7. Psychotic Monk - Keep EVE dangerous, full of psychos scammin' and gankin' and killin'.  This is the guy for that.

8. Matias Otero - Brave Newbies guy, included because I think he will be sensitive to the plight of newbies.

9. Proclus Diadochu  - wormhole guy.  I know nothing, other than he has shown up on a couple other lists of people I read, and so as a simple matter of bandwagoning to get represented, wormhole people should vote for him.  (Talk about voting in ignorance!)

10. Asayanami Dei - another wormhole guy.  See #9.

CCP Considers the Discovery Scanner

Back in the ooooold days... before Odyssey... it used to be that you'd never see any sigs at all, unless you popped out scanning probes and scanned.  Men were men, women were women, and newbies had no idea there was this entire dimension to the game if they skipped that tutorial and never read stuff online about EVE and never talked to anyone else, and had no curiousity whatsoever... 

But then CCP changed all that.  They implemented the "discovery scanner" in Odyssey, which is really several changes.  One is that every pilot now gets a general location for every signature in a system without any scanning at all.  The pilot need not do anything except enter the system.  Second, when you enter a system all its sigs and anoms are temporarily displayed on the main window.  And finally, new sigs that appear in a system are be pushed to a pilot in two circumstances: when an existing sig or anom disappears (everyone in the system gets a push), or when a particular pilot manipulates his scanner interface.  The thing I do is click on the "show anoms" checkbox, but I think many other things you can do will trigger a refresh.

(Incidentally, many players believe the discovery scanner pushes all signatures immediately without effort on the part of the pilot.  As far as I can tell, this is false.  New sigs appear only when you actively twiddle the scanner interface, with the exception that an auto-update will happen if any sig or anom goes away.  Now, twiddling the "show anoms" checkbox is not much work, but it does require player interaction, and very little more interaction than hitting "scan" on a deep space probe.  I have the feeling many players don't know it works, because I still succeed in sneaking up on them, and site runners I find often abort after completing a site, as they did in this recent post.  Penny still hates the discovery scanner with a white hot passionate hatred, and looks at outbound wormholes as nearly lost causes, while I don't.)

The discovery scanner was a success, I think, for CCP.  Along with the other changes in exploration they made in Odyssey, it got a lot of newbies into exploration.  Exploration boomed.  (Salvage prices crashed.)  I expect they are committed to it.

However there was a downside: in wspace in particular, hunting became much harder.  It used to be that competent groups would have one guy with probes out all the time.  That guy was supposed to alert the group to new sigs.  But many people would skip this, or the guy might have a bathroom break or he might be busy doing PVE in a site with his main.  If you rolled into the system, you had a decent chance to get some time to find locals doing dangerous stuff and gank them.  The discovery scanner changed that somewhat.  Everyone gets the effect of a built-in probe launcher that never needs probes; a fleet of 6 guys doing PVE has many more chances for someone to notice a new sig and alert the group to GTFO.

Wspace players have lamented the discovery scanner enough that evidently CCP Fozzie has heard.  Now he has a post up at the forums proposing delaying signatures for K162s:

We have been thinking about and discussing the way that the Sensor Overlay has affected Wormhole life, mainly in the ease with which players can now observe new wormhole signatures appearing (which often indicates that the entry of hostile players may be imminent).
We investigated what would be involved with delaying the appearance of signatures on the sensor overlay, but that solution is somewhat unsatisfactory since players could always return to the old trick of spamming probe scans to check for the new sigs. Basically, the Sensor Overlay had only made the existing problem more visible, and it would be better if we could get right to the source. 

The potential change would be to delay the appearance of the signature beacon when K162 dungeons spawn. This would prevent the dungeon from appearing on probe scans or the Sensor Overlay for up to a few minutes. ...

The delay could take a few potential forms, either a set timer of a couple minutes, a timer that has random elements or even one that is variable depending on the amount of mass that passes through the wormhole.

A "few minutes" seems to be five in the minds of some posters, but perhaps not so much in Fozzie's.  In any case, the thread is full of angsting and people saying this would kill wspace life (it wouldn't).  But mostly people just want back the pre-Odyssey scanning behavior.  I would be happy with that.  Since CCP is never going to remove the discovery scanner for newbs (and I support them in that), I feel the best compromise would be to make it a service that is provided in empire (lowsec and highsec) automatically.  It should not exist in nullsec or wspace unless the local system owner provides it.  (This idea I originally posted as a comment at this here blog.)

As for delaying signatures, I tend to agree with the majority of people in Fozzie's new thread that (a) if a thing exists it should be scannable, and (b) there should be a way to do due diligence.  But I do think it would be nice for wspace (and for kspace, too) if the hunter/gankee balance were pushed a bit more towards the hunters.  So, I posted there:

Here's what I think should be done. First, remove the discovery scanner's signature pushing in wspace. Sigs should never be detected in wspace without using probes. (This should also be the case in null unless upgraded, but that's another discussion.)

Second, give some more advantage to hunters. I think 5 minutes is too much. Here's what I think: use gate cloak. The general idea is: while gate cloak is held, that player cannot be detected in that system. In wspace, make K162s not be detectable until any ship that has crossed that wormhole drops gate cloak. As soon as any ship does drop its gate cloak, the wormhole is a normal K162 and can be scanned with probes. This gives an aggressor a minute to evaluate the situation, but he can only do it from that one position. Make a similar change to promote hunting in kspace: a player should not appear in local until he drops gate cloak.

To prevent wspace from losing connectivity, there should be a mechanic to make K162s eventually detectable. So, make it so that they have a 1/60 chance per minute to become detectable regardless of flown-throughness.

Also, the current design of ore anoms that are immediately knowable is unfair to rock miners. Miners cannot fight back; they should have the protection of being in a sig site. (And also mining is crap income by comparison to other stuff in wspace.) By contrast, a PVE fleet has significant PVP capability. Please revert the change that put ore sites in anoms.

Loot Spew to be Abolished

Via Sugar, good news: CCP Affinity has stated that the loot spew mechanic in exploration sites will be removed, perhaps as early as the summer release.  Hurrah!

I explored a whole bunch when Odyssey came out.  But at some point, I stopped.  I concentrated on the new ghost sites for a while.  Then I got busy moving my corp deeper into wspace, and I have not gone back to exploration.  Part of the reason is the spew mechanic; just the thought of it reminds me why I don't want to explore.

Why do I dislike it so?  A big part of it is aesthetic: it simply makes no sense within the asserted setting.  We are supposedly hacking a computer or analyzing a relic; either way, we are in search of valuable information.  Files don't magically erase themselves when you crack a computer.  And they most certainly don't launch themselves into space after setting themselves on fire.  And yet, that is what the loot-spew mechanic depicts.  It's immersion-breaking.

The other side of my dislike of the feature relates to how it works in game.  That is, that you have to be on your toes to actually collect loot.  Whenever I am about to crack a can, I pause, and I consult my cargo scan one last time.  I mentally picture the items I am looking to get, and I tell myself which loot can type(s) I am concentrating on.  I adjust my zoom to be just-so: not too far out, not too far in.  And then I pop the core and start gathering.  Click click click click...  All of that is a lot of mental work for the average payoff.  Compare it to the mental work involved in other resource gathering or farming activities.  I.e.: mining, or ratting.

And finally, I dislike loot spew because it tries (but fails) to make exploring into a non-solo activity.  Now, I got pretty good at collecting loot spew.  Given a cargo scanner, I can gather everything of value in almost every data site by myself.  But that's not true in relic sites.  Using an alt, I can get most of even that -- but I really dislike using an alt to explore.  I love setting out solo and just flying where I will; the scutwork of having to pilot two different accounts through nullsec for a modest increase in income is not to my taste.

CCP thought that loot spew would mean people would explore with another person, but I am certain this did not happen.  (They probably can tell, and that may be one reason they are giving up on it.)  The problem with bringing a second person is that you have to have such a person; and most explorers don't.  Explorers are solo guys.  Exploring is (or was) my goto activity for those times when I did not have a second person.  If you do have another person to play with, you probably don't want to be exploring; and even if you do, he probably doesn't.  And even if he does, then the two of you can still make better ISK by simply exploring separately.

About Astecus

Astecus is a friend of mine.  Well, more of an acquaintaince; you know how it is.  A disembodied guy in a videogame.  May or may not know who I am.  Still, he seems like a nice guy to the extent one can know someone via chat, reading his writings, and observing his actions.

I first met him earlier this year, before I moved into wspace full time.  Back then I used to "do my rounds", as I thought of it, in a Tengu in the Poinen area.  I was doing the exploring of that time (pre Odyssey), which meant that I was mainly looking for combat sites, but would also do radars if I found them.   Wormholes I would look in hoping for targets, then maybe come back in a stealth bomber.  The one kind of signature I had no use for was ore sites (which were sigs back then).  Here was this miner-guy who might want them.  So I just started giving him my bookmarks if I found anything.  Why not?  It cost me only a few seconds given that I was searching down Otela twice a night anyway.

Not too long after that, I joined the Otela Mining Fleet, when I wanted to do something  productive with my Jita alt.  Mining ice seemed perfect: very passive, so that I could spend most of my time on my main monitor with VK doing stuff in wspace.  And yes, in case you are wondering, the Fleet really is up 23/7.  Astecus logs in every morning (his afternoon), after downtime and sets it all up.  He is also on line a surprising amount of the time, white-knighting in a Griffin at the Otela ice.

So I've made a lot of ISK indirectly via Astecus.  He's a good guy in game full of black hats (me included when I can), building a community of peaceful miners.

All of which is to say: I am not objective.  But that stated, Astecus is exactly the sort of player that CCP wants.  He is a "content creator".  I was surprised a few weeks back to see a capital in Otela.  And I was surprised again when Daedalus gave a carrier to Astecus.  But I immediately thought it was a good decision.  Who better?

So I was really pained to hear what happened to Astecus over the past few days.  You can read about it at TheMittani.  In short: either because Astecus starting asking questions about the rules around highsec capitals, or maybe because someone complained, some overzealous GM brought the hammer down on Astecus.  He was accused of breaking the rules (which, if he did at all, was in the most innocent and innocuous possible way), and summarily convicted by the GM.  His carrier would be sent to lowsec and he would be temporarily banned from the game.  Astecus appealed and was told sorry; sentence to be carried out in a few hours.   All of this except the ban I heard from Astecus on Sunday evening while ice mining.

Since Astecus has no use for a lowsec capital and its ISK value was not important to him, he stole something and went suspect, allowing a random set of people in Otela to kill his carrier.  Then he started serving his two week ban.

The whole thing was enraging to me.  Not just the injustice, but the loss of an amazing relic by fiat.  It's like the Taliban dynamiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  (OK, I know.  That's hyperbole.)  EVE is an amazing place, and part of that is the fact that it is old.  It is old enough to have a history, not just a made-up lore history, but a history of ancient gameplay that is no longer possible or no longer viable.  This includes quirks like a vanishing handful of highsec capitals.  Guardian Vexors.  Hulkageddon.  Where there are relics, CCP should be supporting them and trying to preserve them or the memory of them, not trying to blow them up on the slightest pretext.

The good news is, CCP has rethought their awful decision.  They have apparently recreated the carrier for Astecus and presumably annulled his ban.  They will be clarifying the rules for highsec capitals.

Good for you, CCP.   I am still vexed by the lack of proportion and wisdom shown by the initial GM.  But the system as a whole has worked.

The Official VK Attitude About Somer Blink

I gotta ditch that zombie and put Stabs on the blogroll instead.  He's got another good read over there at Stabbed Up titled The Somer of Revolution: 4000 headless chickens can't be wrong:

because I like Eve that I don't wish to see the Eve dominated by this petulant "oh he got something I didn't" whining that the community is so addicted to.

It's destructive.

Whining about the monocle led to a crisis at CCP that saw 200 people laid off. Many companies fail to survive such turmoil, we're lucky we still have Eve after that. And why? Because "he gets to wear a monocle and I don't get one waa waa waa."

If you jumped on that bandwagon shame on you, you idiots almost killed CCP.

Fast forward to Scorpiongate. Some PR dude at CCP gave out some freebies. "Oh waa waa waa, I didn't get one, shoot the monument."

Sheeez. Big babies.

Now on to the latest controversy. Turns out that through a convoluted chain of kickbacks people who route trafffic to GTC sellers as affiliates can leverage Eve assets into real money. "Oh waa waa waa, I'm not getting any."

How about you get off your butt and inject some value into the sandbox?

Just so.  Look, there's a difference between me and Somer Blink.  Somer earns hundreds of billions of ISK parting fool willing players from their money, creates massive content (gambling) for CCP, and moves a lot of time codes.  And yeah, they RMT.  So what?  You know who else RMTs?  CCP.  You know: PLEX?  If CCP wishes to share a piece of their RMT monopoly with Somer, that's no business of mine.  At worst I might criticize it as a bad business decision, but you know what?  I don't think it is.  I think allowing a certain level of RMT is good for a game.

Parenthetically: what people need here is an understanding of why RMT is bad.  I am sure you have a theory.  But unless your theory can explain why PLEX are good, while other RMTing is bad, then it is not subtle enough to give any useful information on how to evaluate Somer's crypto-RMTing.  Perhaps you might think on that.

This whole situation could be resolved very easily by CCP.  They should announce as follows: Nothing has changed.  RMTing is still disallowed by EULA.  However, we are making a new "special top timecode partners" program that allows RMTing within parameters we set.  There is currently one STTP: Somer Blink.   If you move a million timecodes, you can join the program.  Now, stop your bitching and shut up, whiners.  HTFU.

Highsec POCO Predictions for Rubicon

A dev blog is out on the plans CCP has for highsec POCOs in Rubicon (coming, Nov. 19!).  Here is the summary in bullet points:

• Highsec POCOs will be attackable only while at war (that is, via wardec).
• Highsec POCOs will not be transferable while at war, or with war pending, to cut off the obvious shell-game counter to wardec.
• Highsec POCOs will still have 10% taxes to NPCs.  However the rate can be halved by the player by training the new Customs Code Expertise skill, 1% per level.  Also the assumed base value of PI commodities will be dropped somewhat, resulting in further reductions in effective taxes.
• POCO owners can set their taxes freely, in addition to the NPC tax.

I have been thinking about how this will play out.  Consider the wardec requirement.  Presumably anyone can take out Interbus COs, so there will be an initial gold rush.  But once a POCO is in player hands, it will be permanently.  And to even have a shot at it, you'll have to pay Concord for a war.

What's the cost for wardecs?  From CCP's wiki, Wars:

It costs 50 million isk, plus an additional cost for each member in the target corporation/alliance above 51. It will now start to increase with the 51st member and reach the ceiling of 500 million ISK at 2000 members.

I have seen people say the wardec cost would have a big effect, and initially I agreed with them.  It seems plausible that a 10x cost difference for war would matter a lot.  But after thinking about it, I feel it will affect only small corporations.

Consider a medium sized corp with 25 pilots.   In a battleship, each pilot can do about 1000 DPS.  POCOs have 10m shields and reinforce at 25% shields.  Thus this corp can hammer one into reinforced in just five minutes.  Killing a POCO after reinforcement is easier.  They have 250k armor and 200k structure.  So it would be very fast.  In a week of war, and unopposed, a corp could reinforce or destroy 20 POCOs a day.  Since POCOs cost about 100m ISK, the cost of the wardec is a small percentage of the capital at stake.  The cost of the fleet is much more than the POCOs it destroys.

I still expect large alliances to dominate POCO ownership.  But that is not because of wardec costs, rather because of the blobbing advantage in fleet combat, and the advantage that will accrue to any entity which can field fleets in all time zones.

It's worth discussing the time zone issue more explicitly.  POCOs reinforcement timer works differently than those at POSes.  At a POS, the reinforcement exit time is determined by time when attackers push the shields below 25%, and the amount of "reinforced mode fuel" (strontium clathrates) in the tower.  So a tower's exit time will be fairly unpredictable, but an attacker can always hope for the exit to happen at a time which is advantageous.  With POCOs, the owner specifies an exit time-window, a zone of a two hours.   Reinforcement mode lasts for a day at least, then enough time to get into the zone.  The timing of the attack has nothing to do with the exit time beyond fixing the day of the year.  Thus, a POCO's owner can set his times so that his POCOs always come out of reinforced at his best time.

One can imagine a seesaw battle between two large entities, both of which can prevail militarily at separate times during the day.  During the Australian evening, an Aussie alliance bashes all the POCOs it can get at, and defends its own towers coming out of reinforcement.  A European alliance does the same thing in its own evening.  Only on weekends can progress be made, which would be easily undone the next week.  The endgame here is all POCOs are killed and not replaced.  "They make a desert, they call it peace."

The situation would appear to be very unstable militarily.  This is especially true given that many highsec wardeccers would love to be able to wardec people and force a fight.  They would not necessarily care about actually killing your POCO, just getting you out to fight for it.  If you show up and fight, even though you lose, maybe they don't kill your POCO.  But if you don't show, they certainly do.

One other very important aspect of the economics of POCO is their return on investment.  Mabrick has a post with some relevance here: he estimates based on one player's reported PI that at 10% taxation, a POCO that is being used will earn about 19m ISK per user per month.  Unfortunately there is no hard data on how much PI actually goes on in highsec.  I would guess that most P4s are made there, though, because of their prices and the relative advantage highsec has for making P4s.  Potentially there is a lot of ISK to be made.  But it may be happening only in a very few places; hundreds of pilots make P4s in Sobaseki, one jump from Jita.  A POCO there would be golden if managed well.

But what is well?  If many Interbus COs persist, with their effective 8.5% taxes (half of 17%), then to compete players will not be able to set their POCO taxes above about 4%.  As such, their earnings per user are less than half of Mabrick's estimate.

My guess is that most POCOs in most highsec systems will not be worth much, because of the low tax rate they can command, and because very few pilots do PI there.  As such, POCOs are marginal investments.  They are risky, because always subject to wardec and cannot be taken down to escape loss like POSes can.  And they don't really pay well.  Individual corps will put them up to exploit places they are living better.  Then they will be wardecced by a larger corp and lose them, and learn not to do that.

If any group is to own any large numbers of POCOs in highsec, it will have to fight for them a lot.  Guerrilla action will make it very hard to hold onto large numbers of POCOs.  The only way I can see a single or handful of groups dominating highsec is an alliance of the vast majority of the wardeccers in highsec.  And that seems unlikely, to put it mildly.  Outsiders like the Goons simply will not be able to do it, because they will have to occupy highsec nearly continually to secure their assets, and even with a fleet in being, they are vulnerable to wardecs from guerrillas.

I do have an idea for how to make money off of highsec POCOs, but it's rather speculative, and this has gone on long enough.

Poetic Stanziel, Alas

Poetic Stanziel is dead.  This fills me with sadness.  Oh, don't worry.  The real person, whoever he is, who played Poe and blogged as Poe is still alive.  This is no Vile Rat level of awful.  Still, it's awful, and I find it hard to articulate why.  This is where my talents, such as they are, as a writer fail.  I need to be discursive and emotive like Sugar (newly added to the blogroll).  She'd do this thing justice I think.  But I am me, analytic, dry, and robotic.  I'll make do.

The facts of the matter are this: the man who formerly played Poe, and blogged under that name, decided to quit EVE a few weeks ago.  (From here out I'll refer to him as Some Nerd, his new nom du blog.)  People leave EVE all the time.  Perhaps sad, perhaps not.  There are many things in life besides EVE Online.  Bittervets bitterly drop all the time, and come back when their load of bitterness fades.  But then, a few days back, Some Nerd dropped a bomb: he's selling Poetic.

They're pixels. They're all replaceable. I can appreciate that some people get really attached to their character names, but it really isn't an issue for me. I still have the blog. I still have my Twitter. I have not ceased to exist. It's not the character name that I would miss. It is the skillpoints. I never roleplayed in EVE. That character name is just that, a name; it's not a character to me. If I return and bemoan a lack of skillpoints, I can just buy them. I'll have ISK socked away on the alt accounts. That's what the character bazaar is for.

He did sell the character.

"Brains!"

Why does this fill me with sadness?  It's not like I ever met Poetic in the game, nor have I even met Some Nerd in real life.  But I did meet Some Nerd out of game, in a fashion, and I met him in a more significant way than shaking hands at some nerd meet-up and mumbling, "I love your blog".  "Thanks".  I met him as a reader meets an author, as a brain-in-a-box who I read on the Internet.  I enjoyed his writing and read him daily for months.  And I knew him as Poe.  So Poe has sentimental meaning to me.  That sentiment remains but the attachment to some character actually in the game is now nullified.

And yet the character lives on.  There's someone out there in the EVE verse right now, walking around in Poe's body, and not doing it right.  This is creepy, like a zombie attack.

I think about my own characters.  I would never, ever sell Von.  I made him; his reputation is mine.  He is like a child in some ways.  I can certainly understand creating characters for sale; I have dabbled in that myself as a corporate project.  But I cannot see selling a character I have poured so much love into.  When I ganked that guy, when those guys ganked me, when we fought the sleepers the first time, when I figured out how to do PI, it was not just me doing it.  It was me and Von, together as one.  He's a comrade.  I don't want to lose that.

Maybe love is the difference here.  From reading Some Nerd explain his choice, it seems he never loved his character.  She's "just pixels".  This just seems awful strange to me.  I love Von, and Otto, and indeed all my characters, even my two-week ganking alt.  I love them with the love of the author for his work, as I love my words and work that I have done.  They seem realer to me than most real people do.  I love them as comrades in battle love each other, not because of who they are but what we've gone through together.

Skillpoints strike me as beside the point.  Occasionally Jayne throws out the idea of buying a carrier or dread pilot for our corp.  And I always say no; I will homegrow my own, or I will not have one.  Jayne, if he wants, can buy whatever character he wants for himself.  And the corp will of course invite that character and use him.  But I will never buy a character myself.  I would not love that character the same way, at least not at first.  That would diminish my game just a tiny bit.

R.I.P. Poe.