What Are Wardecs? What Should They Be?

Sugar has a couple of posts up thinking about wardecs (one, two).  In the minutes of the summer summit we see that CCP has discussed the issue with CSM, which is good, because wardecs currently are a bad game design.  I have my own ideas about what should be done, which I will probably record here.  (My longest explanation so far is in Sugar's comments.)  I have also been reading others' ideas and trying to synthesize the broad themes around wardecs.  Thus, this post.

Just so it is clear, I live in wspace, not highsec.  I have one character in my corp who could be affected by wardec: my Jita alt and freighter pilot.  If I got decced, I could simply not use him for a week, or I might drop corp with practically no loss of functionality.  So the wardec system has essentially no effect on me in my current game.  I feel I can be impartial.  I would love it if wardecs became a fun and interesting play mode.  (I feel the same way about null, actually.  Die blue donut.)


Wardec as Corruption and Crime

It seems the most common current explanation for wardecs is that they are a bribe to Concord to "look the other way" for a week.  Then you get to be a criminal without repercussion and kneecap weak players.  In this view Concord is inherently and totally corrupt.

This explanation works in the sense that it accounts for many of the features of wardec: you pay a fee (real wars don't have fees), it's good for a limited time, and it feels criminal because it is typically deployed to beat up weak corps.  On the losing end, wardecs suck, and that is how being a victim of corruption feels.

It makes very little sense in terms of the in-game reality (the "lore").  Has there ever been a government that has allowed open warfare in its domain?  (No.)  Have there been cops that one could bribe to allow mayhem in public?  (No.)  Will any public sit still while, lore-wise, thousands of people are being killed due to corruption?

Also, being the subject of a corrupt government is inherently unfair and generally unfun.  Fun game play is at some level fair, and current wardecs are deeply unfair in practice.  This is why people dock up or don't play for a week.  Thus, wardec as corruption does not seem to suggest any reform that would make a fun game play for most players.  A game mechanic is probably not going to be fun when it is based on corruption.

Wardec as Sport

Another view of wardecs is that they are a Concord-sanctioned form of sport for capsuleers.  Capsuleers pay a fee and then get to play war for a week.

This explanation has the virtue of aligning with the IRL reason for the feature.  That is, it really is sport for us players, designed by CCP, supposed to be fun.  In practice, it is not fun for the vast majority of the players.  This makes it a bad design, but the intent is obvious.

Lorewise, the criticisms of wardecs -- that they are unfun for either side most of the time -- apply even more here than for bribes.  Why does Concord push this awful "sport"?  Can't they think of anything that is more fun than being docked for a week?  And why do they call it a "war" if it is a game?

On the other hand, the sport metaphor does offer a way forward.  Sports by their nature are not fun unless they are fair.  My little league baseball team does not play the Orioles, and that is good because such a contest would be totally imbalanced to the point of absurdity.  Sports are highly segmented by ability, typically via both age and sex, in the attempt to level the playing field.  Also, sports are voluntary; they are opt-in affairs on both sides.

The suggestion of the sports metaphor is thus to make "leagues" of some kind, or more generally to require only "fair" wars, and/or to allow only consensual wars.  I disapprove of this -- EVE should be about real conflict, not staged -- but it is a redesign idea that makes sense in its way.  (Indeed, the game Clash of Clans, which several in my corp are playing, seems to have taken this metaphor for its warfare.)

One suggestion in this line that I do strongly support is Gevlon's idea to have "safe" corps.  These would be player-run corps that have the safety of an NPC corp.  They are taxed a little less than NPC corps, can't anchor POSes, and are immune to wardec.  It seems like this should be a relatively easy change to program.  It would, at a stroke, remove a lot of the whining about the current wardec system, because many (perhaps most) highsec corps are basically social clubs.  So there's big bang for the CCP programmer-buck.

Here's a further idea along the line of wardecs as sport.  I might suggest that all corps be assigned a power rating, as in chess.  (Here's wiki on the Elo rating system.)  Any war declared against a corp of sufficiently lower power rating could be declined by the would-be victim without penalty.  (Wars between relatively closely rated corps could not be declined.)  Either side could "resign" and halt the war (at the expense of losing) at any time.  The resolution of a war would have to be automatically generated, and a winner/loser/draw assignment made, and the power rating adjusted accordingly.  New corps should not be allowed to wardec until their average member time in corp was, say, two months.


Wardec as War

One other view of wardec is that they are (or should be), as the label says, wars.  That is, they are the ultima ratio regum, the "continuation of policy with other means".   This idea of wardec seems to be what most people want them to be, me included.  So it has that going for it.

On the other hand, wardecs as they currently exist are very little like war.  Corps are not sovereign in highsec; Concord is, and there is very little reason to suggest they have any interest in allowing wars to be fought there.  Also, Concord's in-game power (to stop gankers) is so far beyond that of capsuleers as to make any pretensions to kingship by the latter a joke.

Furthermore, wardec "wars" don't have many features of normal wars.  Normal wars do not require paying off a higher authority.  There is no higher authority.  Wars are never known to be finite in length.  They don't always involve a warning period.  And while they can end by negotiation, they often end by the unconditional surrender of a side when it is utterly destroyed.   And they are always about something: there is some question at issue or possession being contended for.

Wardecs as war is the explanation that least fits the reality of the existing game.  Nevertheless, this would be the explanation that I most favor CCP developing on.

Wardecs should be war, which is to say they should settle something.  There should be something at stake in every wardec, for both aggressor and aggressee.  And a war should, if won, have some meaningful outcome.  Wars should be unbounded in length, because we want the test of strength to actually happen and some resolution to occur.  And a successful war should make some change in the state of the game.

Player Owned Taxation Hubs

Gevlon recently posted an idea for creating fights in highsec.  It's overstrong and not pretty, but it shows the right way to create conflict in EVE: private property.  I mentioned in that thread an idea I had some time ago.  It's not on this blog because I posted it before I started here.  So I thought I'd put it up here for future reference.

The new object is called a Player Owned Taxation Hub (POTH).  A POTH is an anchorable object like a mobile depot.  It should be large, enough to make carrying one around with you casually not an option.  So 4000m^3 at least, perhaps more.

The point of a POTH lore-wise is a means of tax collection for an empire.  To encourage such tax collection, the empires pay 50% of the taxes to the POTH's owner.  To discourage frivolous tax collection, it has a non-zero cost.  Blueprints should sell for perhaps 10m ISK, and require a handful of PI goop to build, say 2m.  We expect them to sell for ~13m ISK.

The point of a POTH game-design-wise is to encourage interesting fights in highsec, and to allow automatic tax collection in nullsec.  We'll see how that works in a minute, but first, the rules.

To operate a POTH, a player brings it to a grid, anchors it, and then onlines it.  No more than one POTH can be onlined per grid.  In highsec, some grids -- those near stations, gates and POSes -- are considered already owned, and disallow anchoring.  Other grids are first-come first served.  A POTH should take a minute or so to anchor and another minute come online.  Then the POTH will attempt to collect taxes from everyone on its grid.  We refer to a grid with an online POTH on it as a "taxed grid".

POTHs have configurable rules about what tax rate is required from each character on its grid, analogous to how POCOs are controlled.  These can be changed only when the unit is anchored and not online.  Once online, they cannot be changed without taking the unit offline (requires 30 seconds), and then re-onlining it.  The empires allow a fixed maximum rate of 40m ISK per hour.  (In nullsec, the character can set the maximum amount by hand.) That's the maximum tax rate that the POS will attempt to charge.  Lower rates can be set, as percentages of the maximum rate, according to relations with the owning character.  By default the per-standings rates might be 100% for terrible, 50% for bad, 10% for neutral, 5% for good and 0% for excellent.  In addition there should be boxes for "don't tax my corp" and "don't tax my alliance".  By default, these are on.

As soon as you land on a taxed grid, there should be a warning message.  Once you have been on a taxed grid for more than two minutes, the POTH demands tax via a dialog.  The tax is a quarter hour's worth as described above.  You have one minute to pay, leave the grid, or be criminally flagged.  Upon payment, you get 15 minutes on grid.  After 15 minutes is up, you get dunned again.  As mentioned above, of the taxes paid, half goes to the character owning the POTH.  The other half goes to the sovereign of that space, which in empire means the ISK is sunk.  If there is no sovereign, the full tax goes to the character owning the POTH.

The player should be able to respond to a tax collection popup by checking an "automatically pay this tax" checkbox.  Once he's done that, he no longer gets the popups and instead pays the tax automatically so long as that POTH has stayed online, and he is on its grid.  Note that the tax rates for a POTH cannot be adjusted without taking it offline.

A character with a green safety who does not respond to a tax collection dialog does not go suspect; instead his ship automatically warps a million kilometers off randomly.  Similarly, a character with insufficient ISK to pay the tax and a green safety will autowarp off.

A character with a yellow safety will never warp off.  If he does not respond to the popup he will go suspect.  Don't AFK-mine with a yellow safety!

Anyone has the option to shoot a POTH.  Attacking a POTH, like other mobile structures, gets you criminal flagged.  POTHs have 15000 shields and 25000 armor.  They have 200000 structure.  Like a POS, when they take any structure damage, they offline automatically.  Thus, it is relatively easy to offline one (perhaps so you can online your own), unless it is defended.  All armor and structure must be fully repaired before a POTH can be onlined.

Clever uses are left as an exercise for the reader.

Smugglers and Null

One of things I hate about sov null is that from my point of view, it's a waste land.  It's true that nobody is in local in most of the systems.  But that's not that different from many parts of lowsec and even some highsec.  Unlike those other areas, though, I cannot dock at any of the outposts/stations.  Since I cannot dock anywhere, I cannot partake of many sorts of gameplay that stations facilitate.  I cannot use the markets.  Nor can I use contracts, stash things, etc.

I can't be a smuggler, sneaking into stations when nobody is around to sell my wares.

(Actually, it is unclear to me whether or not I can actually dock at any given player-owned thing.  I assume I can't, but I don't know.  I have no way that I know of to find out other than trying.  This seems hazardous.)

I propose to loosen the perfect control currently exerted by the nullsec empires over their stations.  Lore-wise, each station is being run by a local governor.  If that governor thinks he can get away with it, he may let neutrals docks even though they are otherwise disallowed.  

Each station should have a right-click menu item "Talk to Governor".  This would be available when on grid with the station.  Or perhaps anywhere in the system.  Selecting it raises a chat screen somewhat like an agent.  I.e., a picture of the governor, a readout of your personal standings with him or her, as well as the owning corp and alliance.  Also, there should be a clear indication of whether you can dock.  For example, "you are welcome to dock at LPQZ-15".

There should be three docking-permission states.

• "You are welcome to dock at..." This message means you can dock because your corp and/or alliance is permitted.
• "Right now, you can dock at..."  Displayed when you can dock, but might not be able to later. 
• "You cannot dock at..." -- Displayed when you cannot dock.

A governor will allow otherwise disallowed pilots to dock in some circumstances.  Just as for empire factions, player corporations and alliances should have standings computed for them.  When you kill a person from a corp/alliance, you lose standings with it.

Like agents, the governors should have missions.  All kinds of missions should be offered.  Completing a mission would increase standings with that governor.  Also you gain standings with his current faction, and lose standings with all other corps/alliances which have that faction set to enemy.  No LP would be awarded (player corps don't have LP).  Unlike other agents, a governor's missions should be a random mix of all missions, levels 1 through 5.  Furthermore, unlike other agents a governor's missions are very finite.  Each governor will have either zero or one mission current at one time.  If he has a mission, it will be offered to everyone who has the standings to request it.  (The mission system would have to be tweaked to allow this.)  The first capsuleer to complete the mission can turn it in for standings.  Other capsuleers who accepted that mission fail, although this should not count against their standings since it is not a private mission.

Governors should have a cooldown between missions of some random amount of time between two and six hours.  This puts a sharp limit on farming the missions for standings, while spreading out who can get them into all timezones.

Standings are used to determine whether pilots can dock who are not explicitly allowed to dock.  (Of course the corp/alliance owning the station can always determine who is on their white list.)  Generally, the following factors increase the chance that a capsuleer can dock at a station:

• standings with governor
• standings with corp owner of station
• standings with alliance owner of station
• few or no non-idle pilots in that system who are in the alliance owning the station
• few or no non-idle pilots in that system who are in the corp owning the station

A specific formula might be as follows.  You can dock if:
 1 < standings(gov) + .5*standings(corp) + .1*standings(alliance) - #pilots(corp) - .5*#pilots(alliance)

So, in an empty system, you'd just need standings of around 1.0 with a governor, unless you'd been actively shooting his corp/alliance, in which case you'd need more.  Of course, even getting to 1.0 would require running missions in null.

Once you have standings, you could smuggle in goods for sale at the local outpost.  Store stuff there.  Get your ships out from an enemy held station, even.

Hyperion First Impressions

Hyperion has been out a few days now.  I have played now three nights, although last night was short for EVE and me.  Still, I think I have enough experience to talk about it sensibly.  So here are some impressions.

Wormhole Jumping with Impunity

I tried to warn them.

I roam wspace in a stealth bomber.  Before Hyperion, this was always a bit dangerous because when you jumped into a new system you could appear within decloak distance of a wormhole.  Now, that is impossible.  All ships, even the smallest, appear at least 6500m from the center of the wormhole, or 2500m from its edge.  (Wormholes are 4000m in radius.)  So now I can always cloak immediately after jumping.  This makes it nearly impossible to catch anyone with a covert ops cloak.

No matter how fast you lock, you cannot lock something that cloaks in the first tick after you see it.  So, I warp to some celestial and cloak.  Easy.  Your only hope is that netlag hits as I try to cloak, or I screw up the command.

If you bubble, I turn, cloak and microwarp.  Good luck catching that.  (It is at least theoretically possible.)  Or I jump back.

The only realistic chance would be to use a smart bombing battleship, and even that now has drastically reduced chances (relative to pre-Hyperion) due to the distance.  Smart bomb radius is 6000m; maximum frigate distance is 10500m from the wormhole.  (5500m to jump range.)  A smart-bomber therefore cannot get most of the landing area for the wormhole within its area of effect.  Previously, you would appear at around 2500m-6500m from the wormhole (my estimates).  Just by sitting at zero to the wormhole, a smartbomber would have a 78% chance to have you in range.  Now, a smartbomber's best chance is probably to sit at around 4500m to the wormhole.  This is harder to figure out -- requires calculus! -- but my guess is your chance to have a frigate jumper in range are perhaps 10%.

In any case, I am taking advantage of the new uncatchability of my Manticore.  I have no fear of being polarized any more.  No more five minute waits in highsec or anywhere else.  If I want to go back, I go back, and I defy anyone to catch me.

Wormhole Jump Range

I know all the C5 and C6 people are in a tizzy, but that's above my level.

Other than the effect on my bomber, this new jump range does not affect me much.  We certainly noticed it when popping wormholes in battleships.  But since they already have prop-mods on for their extra mass, it was not a huge big deal.  We did leave our Orca at home, so that's a small change.  (It means two battleship passes: hardly a challenge.)

We will adapt.  We have some plans to get in ships to web down and kill battleships, so that we can do that in our home system if someone tries it.  And I also think we might adapt our hole-popping fleet a little bit to deal with the possibility of other people trying to kill us.

High Connectivity

On the first night of Hyperion we noticed the proliferation of wormholes.  I live in a C4, formerly with C4 static.  We got a new C5 static.  So, I anticipated more connectivity.  I did not anticipate the volume, though.  Nor did I reckon that the new "small" wormholes (frigate-only) would be so common.  On Tuesday we had four wormholes, one of which was small.  Four wormhole is very rare for us; five is almost unheard of.  On Wednesday, we had six wormholes, two small.  Yesterday was more sane, just our two statics.

Because of the small wormholes, and of course the new static for every C4 in the game (which means 505 new static connections), and also perhaps because of new non-static wormholes, the connectivity of wspace has increased.  For the first two days because of the small wormholes, I would say it had increased a lot.  With small wormholes dialed down (see below), it has increased some, but it is less noticeable.

This high connectivity is going to make it hard to run sites for my corp.  Not impossible, just harder.  We did in fact run sites on Tuesday.  Using battleships, we popped all three of the holes we could pop, while picketing the small wormhole.  A fair amount of work and danger to run eight sites.  In times past, we would usually not have to pop a single wormhole to run our own local sites.

Too Many Small Wormholes

I admit that going into Hyperion, I had thought the small wormholes would be relatively rare.  I.e., that you might get one or two a week, say.  This rate seems about right to me.  The problem with them, of course, is that you can't close them.  So not only do you have to picket them to do anything risky.  It is also that their mere existence -- like that of any open wormhole -- means you cannot be sure your static(s) are closed unless you have been watching all open wormholes.  Thus, if there is one at all when you log in each night, you have to roll your static(s) to be safe.  This is painful compared to the way things were pre-Hyperion.  Thus, I felt, it should be rare.

Evidently, CCP did not think about it that way.  They put in enough small holes such that most systems had one on average.  That is, there were apparently thousands of the damned things.  People complained about this in the feedback threads.  And evidently CCP did dial it down, which explains our lack of small wormhole last night.  This is good.  So far my sample size is one for the new rate, so I cannot opine on whether it is too high.

I will state again my belief that a rate of about 1 or 2 small wormhole connections per system per week is about right.  This gives small corps the other 5-6 days to zip up and run sites or do PI.

New Trick K162s

One other aspect of the small wormholes that is still a problem is that you cannot distinguish their K162 side from any other wormhole; as a consequence, it is quite possible to think you can jump when you can't.  We ran into this on the first night, when we brought our hole-popping battleship fleet to a K162 to eliminate it only to find out we could not jump through.  (Yes, we had scouted the other side, but just did not realize what it was.)  We didn't lose anything, so it was funny.  I would not want to lose a T3 because of this though.  My suggestion: give small wormholes a distinct wormhole name on the "K162" side, except not K162.  Perhaps K002, to resemble their names on their originating side.  (The small wormhole names have the pattern "Letter00Number".  Here is a forum post with all of them.)

My System is Screwed by Mismatched Dual Statics

I was a little excited about getting a C5 static -- before I got one.  I like being able to access C5.  (Jeedmo and I ninjaed two core gas sites last night.)  What I do not like, not at all, is having a 16 hour static wormhole and a 24 hour static wormhole.

Now, one thing I dislike about this situation is simply that we have a 24 hour wormhole.  This is undesirable, at least for a small corp, a point I explained in comments a few days back.   The problem is that 24 hours really means 24-25, and that therefore you cannot easily synchronize a daily playing schedule with it.  By contrast, with 16 hour wormholes it is easy to sync it to a 24 hour clock, simply by leaving it unopened for 7-8 hours out of 24.  In any case, I thought the 24 hour static would be a bit annoying but that we could deal with it.

I had not considered what a 24 hour static means in combination with our old static, which is a 16 hour C4.  Their timeout schedules will practically never be synchronized, and if they are, it is unknown from my local point of view, because it means someone instantiated one when my corp was not around.  99% of the time, after one has timed out, the other has not.  And thus our system is always unzipped.  And people can get in and search down, and instantiate, all outgoing wormholes.

In practice, what this means is that we can never be sure we are zipped up without having to pop all wormholes by massing them.  Massing them is dangerous and takes time.

By contrast, prior to Hyperion we might have had a K162 wormhole perhaps 50% of the time, and therefore could not assume our static was closed.  But the other half we would just have our one wormhole which we had instantiated the night before, and therefore we could be highly confident it was uninstantiated when we logged on.  That is, we could be zipped a good fraction of the time without rolling wormholes.  We are a small corp, and we relied on this.  We would do PI right after logging in, or run local sites.  No more.

It would be really nice if CCP would change all statics in C4 to 16 hours.  That is, change H900 and U574 wormholes to 16 hours.  (I also would prefer it, though less, if CCP would change both statics in C4/C4+C5 and C4/C4+C6 systems to 24 hours; but this would probably require a new C4 static type, and I do not think that likely.)  I say this selfishly, of course.  But I also feel that my current system is not really viable for anything less than a large corp that can easily roll holes any time.  My corp is small.  So there is a "good for wspace" motive here too.

Right now, my feeling is I would prefer a C4/C3+C4.  I don't know.  I hate moving and I want to explore the possibilities of C5 sites.  But I am unhappy with my unchosen new situation.  Perhaps I will take my chances moving to C5.  I do not like the potential for bigger corps (which is most of them) to bring capitals to burn me out.  But on the other hand, I see enough small corps and farming corps in C5 that it seems they don't get burned out that often.

Fitting is Good Complexity

There's a new blog banter out.  I don't make a point to engage with those things unless they set me off.  But in this case, it did.  So let's talk about who's responsible for badly fit ships.

Drackarn pointed this killmail to me recently and proposed the following for a blog banter:

Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, its horrific. But the guy might not know any better. ... How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro's like this?

Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills...

Questions like this bring out the contrarian in me.  "We"?  Who's "we"?  "Responsible"?  You're telling me that via paying for spaceship pew I have assumed duties to some random idiot on the internet?

I can answer all these questions pretty succinctly.  "We" don't educate players on fitting.  It is too complex for any canned lecture.  We can offer our help if they want it.  But they have to initiate; nobody knows what other people don't know.  And there is simply no way to reach many people.  It's a game, after all, not work.  On the other hand, many learn it by themselves.  Nobody ever taught me to fit, and I doubt anyone taught you.  Of course, that particular sample is biased due to a strong survivor effect.

As for responsibility, it is not the responsibility of anyone to fit your ship but you.  Corporations?  I certainly will help my own guys, but that's a very limited responsibility.  And they know to ask.  Not everyone has a corp to rely on.  That Navy Drake pilot was in an NPC corp; no CEO.

Everyone should learn to fit.  Yes, newbs are ignorant.  So what?  Googling up decent information and resources related to fitting is not that hard:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=eve+fitting

The internet is right there, at our fingertips.  Newbs are playing an online game; you can't tell me they cannot google.  It's true that google won't always turn up an excellent fit.  But it will find something, and even the poorer fittings at battleclinic are not failfits.

Fitting is complex.  Yes, there are aspects of fitting that are "bad" complexity.  I.e., all those low meta modules.  They could collapse that variety down into perhaps three modules per type with no complaint from me.  But for the most part, fitting is a fun part of the game.  I spend hours in EFT just messing around.  I don't fly most of the fits I make.  My ship storage is quite finite and subject to loss.  But it is still useful to know what sort of fitting is likely if I run up against a ship.  Given that fitting is an important and fun part of the game, it's not broken.  The fact that people fail at it is unfortunate for them, but ultimately part of the price we all pay to have a game worth playing.

Now that I have gotten my knee-jerk negativity out, I guess I do have some positive suggestions.  Drat.  Let's go there.

I do think CCP could help, in several ways.  First, let me plug boot camps again.  The problem most newbs have is not that they don't have questions, or that they think they know it all.  It's that they don't have anyone to ask.  They need some specific, particular person who they know they can ask about all kinds of stuff, fitting included.  One of the key ideas of boot camp is to specify that person.  (Two, in my formulation.)

Another way CCP could help is by referring players to a decent tutorial on fitting that ought to be part of the EVE wiki.  (Speaking of googling for you, I just googled "eve wiki fitting" -- the official wiki has a pretty good, if long, page on Fitting Ships.  It does not link to fitting tools.  Eve U has several pages on fitting.  Fitting 101, which does link tools.  Also Fitting Guidelines.  It has links to more pages, too.)  The EVE wiki page is too long and advanced for a newb to be expected to read, and also it lacks pointers to tools.  But it's the right idea.  What do I mean by CCP "referring" players?  I mean a hyperlink from within EVE -- from within a newbie mission, and from within the "Bad Fit" popup as discussed below.

One more idea.  CCP could programmatically detecting bad fits (perhaps on undock) and warn the player.  Drackarn's banter suggests this with a bit of humor.

Now, programs are inherently dumb.  You will never write a program capable of detecting all bad fits, or probably even most bad fits.  Nor can we detect many subtle problems with a fit.  Although such abilities would be nice, they are not what is needed here.  All you need is the ability to warn players off obviously bad fits, laughably bad fits, like that Navy Drake linked above.  Here are some easy to detect fitting problems that the client could warn people about:

• this ship has civilian fittings [exception for newb missions and rookie ships]
• this ship has empty highslots and extra hardpoints
• this ship has empty low slots / empty rigs
• this ship has a weapons bonus but has fit unbonused weapons
• this ship has two+ types of weapons
• this ship is dual tanked
• this ship has an empty, nonzero drone bay
• this ship has mismatched weapons and weapons bonusing items.
• this ship uses three+ fitting modules
• this ship is too expensive for what it is
• this ship has inertial stabilizers (joke! sort of!)

(I'm sure more could be added.)  Warnings could be a popup box like Drackarn suggests, with a hyperlink to a tutorial on fitting, an itemized list of problems, a checkbox to "don't show me any more fitting warnings for any ship" and another checkbox "don't show me any more fitting warnings for this ship".  Extra bonus for an official Picard facepalm picture.  

Rules for Individual Mercenaries

Sugar has a post up where she throws out the idea of allowing characters as individuals to join into the wars of other corps without leaving their own corp.  Cool story, sis.  I think this is an interesting idea.  I think it would make for an interesting dynamic in wars.

Dire Necessity raises the objection in Sugar's comments that implementing it would be hard.  Well, it would take some time, but I don't think it is that hard.   To that end, I thought I would try to write down a list of rules that fully specify all the situations one could want covered.  Here goes.

First, here are the goals that the specific rules should allow and enforce:

1. You can join wars of alien corps without leaving your home corp.
2. You can't join wars of more than one non-home corp at a time.
3. You can't be at war except via a corp.
4. There should be no long-term affiliation with non-home corps.
5. You can never be at war with your home corp/alliance.
6. Corps can control whether their members can do this.
7. War targets (at least; possibly other outsiders) can find out about this.

Here are the specific new rules.  [Commentary in square braces.]

1. There are now two ways in which characters are involved in a war: inherited (via his membership in his home corp), and personal (via affiliation with an outside corp).  A character in a war via an outside corp is called an adjunct of that corp.  A character may be the adjunct of no more than one corp at a time.  The corp which a character is an adjunct of is called his affiliate corp.
2. Characters in NPC corps are not allowed to affiliate.  [Too powerful, since there can be no corp-level retaliation.]
3. Create a new corp role, "mercenary", that allows a character to affiliate.  If you don't have the role, you cannot become an adjunct.  [This allows corps to control what their members do with regard to the very important business of getting in wars with outsiders.]
4. To become an adjunct of a corp, there's an application process.  UI-wise, it should work much like the current corp application.  You apply, the corp OKs it, you accept.  There is a 24 hour wait, then you're an adjunct.  
5. Assuming he has the "mercenary" role allowing it, a character may apply as adjunct to any number of corps.
6. Only corps with an active war are allowed to OK applications.
7. A character may not accept a corp invite to be adjunct unless the corp has an active war.
8. A character may not accept a corp invite to be adjunct unless he is currently in zero wars (either personal or inherited).  [Corps should not have to tweak merc status to keep their members fighting in their own wars.]
9. A character cannot accept any adjunct application that would add him to any war against his home corp/alliance.  [You can never be at war with your home corp/alliance for any reason.]
10. An adjunct who loses the "mercenary" role does not lose affiliate status.  However, he can no longer accept any invite to be an affiliate.
11. An adjunct who joins a new corp drops any affiliation.  He may, of course, re-apply.
12. As is currently the case, each individual is allowed in any number of inherited wars.  Similarly, as an adjunct you can also be in any number of personal wars via your affiliated corp.
13. A UI should exist to show all adjuncts of a corporation, and this info should also be available via API.  [Other corps need to be able to find this out.]
14. When you are an adjunct to a corporation, you are automatically part of all wars of that corp.  If a war ends for any reason, all personal wars related to that war also end.  [There is no such thing as a truly individual war.]
15. If you are the adjunct to a corp and it (or its alliance) declares war on your home corp/alliance, or vice versa, when the war goes live you are immediately removed from adjunct status.
16. If you are the adjunct to a corp it is at peace (in no wars), your adjunct status immediately ends.
17. The rules for intra-corp attacks should be changed so that attacking corpmates is not allowed by Concord.  "Positive" actions (repping, cap transfer, remote seboing, etc.) made to corpmates are still allowed.  [Given that duels now exist, there is little need for this mechanic any more, and it is far more often (ab)used by awoxers than used for non-tear-extractive ends.  If you really want to spar with corpmates en masse, do it on Sisi.]
18. An adjunct counts as a member of his affiliated corp for purposes of Concord.  He can attack that corp's enemies without penalty.  That corp's enemies can attack him without penalty.  He can rep affiliated corpmates without penalty.

Go ahead and criticize.  I'll amend to close loopholes if necessary.

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.

Anomymity in Space

Here is an amusing new fitting I dreamed up.

It's a high-slot item, the Signature Disruptor.  It is passive and only one is allowed per ship.  It has low fitting requirements so that any ship can mount one.  When you have one fitted and it is enabled, you are anonymized while out in space.  In a station, there is no effect.

When you undock with a Signature Disruptor fitted, there is a special long undock sequence.  First, if in highsec a warning requiring affirmation will be prominently displayed that anonymity is frowned on and you will be chased by the police.  Next your character is removed from the station and local, as if you had logged out.  Then there is a special long undock delay for up to two minutes, where you do not display at all in local, the station, etc.  Finally you are placed in space at the undock and back into local, as per below.

When you are anonymized:

• your name appears in local (in kspace) as "Unknown". 
• your pilot info shows a special "Unknown" pilot.
• you display no corporation/alliance tag.
• your portrait is replaced with a generic anonymous one.
• your ship name appears on others' dscans as "Anonymized".  The actual ship name is not forgotten and will be shown in stations and if the Signature Disruptor is ever taken off or disabled.
• your security status is -10 -- you are flashy red.  Faction police will hunt you.
• you do not gain bounties, security status, standings, etc. for killing NPCs.
• you do not lose security status for PVP.
• you cannot initiate PVP in highsec (including against war targets) without Concordokken.
• locator agents cannot find you in space (they still can if you are in a station).

Be the villain.

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.

Kronos: the Prospects

What are the prospects for Kronos?  Here's my me-centric view, that is, I am just discussing stuff as I think it will affect me and my corp.  We live in wspace, do a lot of PVE and other carebear-type stuff, and we do some hunting when we can.  So that's my frame of reference for this.

There's a lot of stuff in Kronos I don't care much about, like ship model changes, sounds, etc.  There's new faction ships, which look good for PVP -- maybe I will get one -- but are not of any use in PVE.  There's the industry changes.  The ones to industry itself won't affect me much because I don't do much of it.  They are largely good changes, though, in my opinion.  Except for the "teams" thing.  That one seems awful to me, trying to imagine running an industrial operation.  Anyway, all in all I am pretty neutral to the whole expansion.  And I don't think most of it will affect wspace very much. 

The changes to refining, along with the changes to the POS refining modules, will probably be the biggest change for me and my corp, as well as the rest of wspace.  We've dabbled in mining before, but currently it is not very viable.  The hourly rate is not great, and that won't change.  But there is always down time when we are zipped and don't want to open up.  The main problem with mining is that it creates really huge volumes of stuff, with low value, that clog up our storage.   If we mine a full fleet for an hour, that's about all we can store.  After Kronos, we should be able to mine and compress, getting ten times the effective value out using Miasmoses.  It is even possible that we might refine our own ore and manufacture something from it.  This is something I need to look into.  In any case, in Kronos CCP are finally abolishing the punitive automatic 25% refining lossage at POSes.  Thus, refining and manufacturing is by no means out of the question.

Even if we don't mine more, I expect a lot of other wspace corps will.  So, I am hoping for more targets, even if they are only the new jumped-up Skiff.  My fondest dream is to perpetrate a mining-op massacre, solo, in a Onyx.   I wanna be like Penny.

One ship that they are revising that we might use is the revamped Rattlesnake.  Currently we use both Ravens and Gilas in our sleeper-killing PVE fleet.  Snakes might fit right in there.

What else do I like?  Well, CCP has announced hull-boosting rigs, as well as the ability to rig freighters.  The combo looks good for autopiloting, or looked at the other way, a modest nerf to freighter ganking.  Or, possibly, agility rigs for non-autopiloting.  Either way, it's a welcome improvement to a tedious task.

They have announced that they will be revising the Deep Space Transports.  A dev blog on that is promised but has not appeared yet.  This has the potential to be something we use a lot.  As I write this, I am moving stuff in and out of my wormhole using multiple runs of Epithal and Iteron V.  Imagine a ship in between an Iteron V and a freighter in size and EHP.  And which fits into sub-C5 wormholes.  I'd buy that. 

Finally, about the "Prospect".  A Prospect is a tech II Venture (dev blog here).  It is very similar to a Venture with just a few key changes:

• doubled ore bay
• large enough cargo bay to hold a mobile depot
• four low slots, but no built in warp-core stabilization
• covert ops cloak allowed

Now, I can see how miners interested in ninja gas operations into nullsec would love these.  Put a covert ops and a probe launcher in the highs, and carry a mobile depot and your second gas miner in the cargo.  Four warp core stabilizers in the lows.  Or maybe two, and two nanofibers.  Then head out to null.  When you find a good cloud in an empty system, refit into your mining configuration.  Then fly to the cloud, orbit it and mine.  Cloak up whenever anyone enters local.

But will I use them?  Hard to say; depends on the price.  I am guessing they should cost about what other T2 frigates do, that is, about 20-30m.  Right now most of the gas mining I do is not very constrained by the ore bay.  Usually I mine in my own system, where a trip to/from a POS takes perhaps two minutes after mining for half an hour.  The additional risk of loss (due to the price) does not really seem worth it to me.

In an alien system, travel time is a bigger deal.  There, maybe I will want them.  So, I'll think about it.  Still, because none of my characters have Mining Frigate V, and none are mapped for it, I will probably just put it off for a while.

I really wish they had added a small additional bonus to gas mining.  For example, 1% faster gas mining per level of, er, "Expedition Frigate" (that's the T2 mining frigate skill).  Then I'd be all over them.

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.

Sorting Robots

Here's an function I'd like to have in EVE.  Call it a Sorting Robot.  Its intended function is to make it easier to assemble sets of stuff for manufacturing, which currently is quite annoying and fiddly.

A sorting robot would probably be implemented as an in-game item.  It does not have to be an item, but let us assume it is.  CCP seems to implement most functions as items (i.e., to organize your hangar you have to use a physical container to get the effect of a "folder").

A sorting robot is a special kind of container.    Indeed, it acts as a container: you can put stuff in it just like a freight container.  However, its intended use is to allow you to program it to automatically collect and package stuff.  To this end, it has a fairly extensive set of parameters you can set.  (A UI would have to be created for this.)  The parameters are:

• a multiset of items (a multiset is a set where items can appear multiple times)
• a "where to search" variable: top hangar only, only below the top hangar, the entire hangar
• a "use market deliveries" flag
• an "auto repeat" flag
• a "mail notification" flag
• a priority, perhaps 1 to 5
• a destination (optional)
• a name string (optional)

The "where to search" is fairly self-explanatory.  The sorting robot searches for and takes stuff only from the places you specify here.  In addition, it will take stuff out of your corp's "Market Delivieries" hangar if that flag is set.

The multiset is what the robot is attempting to find and package.  The set should allow any kind of item, and any number of each type.  So, for example, you might set the robot to assemble the exact minerals you need to build 10 Catalysts, which for my Jita alt are as follows:  Tritanium - 514870; Pyerite - 145200; Mexallon - 63620; etc.

The set of items may be inputted via drag and drop, then right-click on a desired item and set its amount.  However, since the intended function is to make assembling sets of stuff for manufacturing, the more common use is to program the robot using a blueprint.  This works as follows: at any time you can right-click on the robot and there should be an item "Program from Blueprints".  If you select it, it displays a list of "blueprints" and multiplicities that the robot is currently using.  (A "blueprint" here is not an actual blueprint, but a transcription of a blueprint's information.)  The UI should allow the user to change the multiplicity, and/or remove a blueprint entirely.  There should also be an "add blueprint" function.  When you select it, it displays the Assets interface and tells you to find the blueprint you want to add.  You find it and select "Add this blueprint" or whatever; then that material inputs for that particular blueprint (as it currently is, for the current character) are recorded and the blueprint added to the list of blueprints that the robot has.  Note that each "blueprint" that the robot has a record of is simply a multiset itself; if the character's skill changes, or the (actual) blueprint is improved, then robot's copy may be out of date.

Sorting robot operation uses the robot's contents, and works as follows.  If the robot has enough of a particular item already inside it (remember it is a container), it does not look for that item.  Otherwise, it looks where it has been told to look (that is, in "where to search").  If there are multiple sorting robots active in a hangar, they use their "priority" variable to determine the order in which they will search.

If the robot finds an item (or stack of items) it is looking for which is packaged, it moves the item inside itself.  If the item is not packaged, the robot attempts to package it and then move it.  (If it cannot be packaged, the robot does nothing and the item should not be moved.)

Once the robot has the full multiset of stuff inside it that it is looking for, it wraps the stuff up into a package similar to a courier package.  The package is placed in the top level hangar.  If the "mail notification" flag is set, mail is generated to the character to notify him or her of the new package.  If the optional destination has been set, it should be set on the package.  (This destination should be automatically used for destination if the package is sent using a courier contract.)  If the optional name string has been set, the package should be named that.  Otherwise the name should be that of the sorting robot.  For example, you might name a sorting robot "Minerals for 10 Catalysts"; that name would be replicated on each package that the robot creates.

Finally, according to the "auto repeat" flag, the robot either keeps shuts itself down (it must be restarted manually) or not.  If not, then it will automatically start attempting to make another package.

Fleet Crushing Lag

Another big EVE fight.  Another failure.  This time the server node did not fall over, but apparently the side entering the field second (CFC and friends) lost because they could not get their hardeners on.  Both sides were seeing the hilarious "Soul Crushing Lag" popups.  (These are funny from my POV in wspace, where such lag does not happen.  I am sure nullies were not laughing.)

Not a joke

Trebor Daehdoow covers the thing here.  EVE combat is O(N^2) in the number of pilots involved.  So no matter how much processing power you have, linear increases in N will always exceed the processing power available.  (We hope that Moore's Law overcomes this, but it has not in the past few years.)  In short, "Fleets expand to fill the lag available".

Daehdoow covers the three ways in which CCP can address the problem: more hardware, more programming effort, and changed mechanics so that too-huge fights don't happen.  Of these, they are already maxxed out in hardware, and programming effort has already been heroic.  The low hanging fruit is already harvested.

Anyway, all that is prefatory to my idea for how to fix the problem.  And that is: remove ships from the field when TIDI gets high.  One might be "nice" about doing that; perhaps a forced logoff with a cooling off time allowing no login.  But then it is hard to think of a rationale for why ships would just disappear in the middle of a fight.  It's a huge fight: they want to be there!  And also, this is EVE: if you want something removed, kill it.

I thought about the idea of using player-controlled weapons to create such an effect.  For example, perhaps a giant area-effect weapon of some kind.  But I think this is a bad idea.  You want the effect to be guaranteed by the server, not the players, regardless of whether the players like or want it.

So, I propose a new mechanic.  When a particular server is sufficiently overloaded -- let us say, below 20% TIDI -- then there is a chance of a very damaging area-effect explosion.  Our bullshit scifi explanation might be: due to the massive energy of large fleet combat, there is a rip in the space-time continuum.

The chance for a space-time rip to happen should increase with increasing lag; for example, it might be 1% per hour at TIDI 20, then double for every point lower, so that at 10% TIDI it becomes 1% per each 7 seconds or so.  (This gives an average time for a rip to start of about a minute.)  When a rip starts, there should be some warning, such that smaller ships might be able to warp off grid.  And there needs to be a epicenter, which should be computed as the center of mass of all ships on grid.  So, put an cool graphic there, a pulsing nastily energetic looking thing.  Or maybe a black hole looking thing.  Whatever it is, make sure a warning is popped up to everyone.  Indeed: put a marker on the system map, like a cyno.

One minute after a rip is created, it explodes and vanishes.  The explosion does damage directly to shields, armor, and structure of all ships on grid.  The amount should not be mitigated by speed, but only (a) signature, and (b) distance from the rip location.  This needs to be carefully tuned, but the idea should be that even a distant, undamaged ship should be at mild danger (say, 5%) of being blown up.  Ships right on the rip  when it tears should die fairly reliably.  All other ships should take substantial damage, including hull damage.  The armor and/or shields would be reparable in short order with the sort of logistics that fleets have, but not hull, which would make it increasingly deadly to stay on grid after a series of rips.

Thus, below 20% TIDI a large fleet battle becomes something of a game of chicken.  Both sides still benefit from having a larger blob, but proportionately nowhere near as much, since both sides will be taking more or less constant (and equal) attrition.  In the limit, a large force that simply gets on grid together with no enemy ships present whatsoever would create risk for itself; basically any large fleet which causes TIDI is punished.  FCs would learn not to do that.  They'd do it only on the field of combat.

A massive null fleet battle would then have a strong reason for reserves, rather than simply throwing in all force available immediately.

Towards Hard Currency in EVE

I've watched these "blog banter" things for a while.  I have not been inspired to join.  I am not much of a joiner.  I thought the same of this recent one -- too diffuse -- but then I read Stabs' take on it.  Which kind of set me off in a related direction.  The question I am interested in is this one: "if you were EVE's new Executive Producer, where would you take the game?"

I would take as my road map EVE's crazed "reality", and try to make it make more sense.  There are a lot things that don't make sense; from among them all I am picking one in particular, the flux of in-game money.  Because markets are central to the game, and ISK mediate the markets, any unrealistic source or sink of ISK creates a situation in the game that is untenable from a "realism" point of view.  Of course, "realism" is weak tea.  Games should be fun first and realistic second, or third, or eighth.  But still I find that the connection between "realism" and fun is surprisingly strong.

So, as new Executive Producer for EVE, my goal for EVE is a completely player-run economy.  I define "completely player run" as follows: there are no ISK payments of any kind made by NPCs, and no ISK payments of any kind made to NPCs.  It's time for a truly hard currency in EVE.  An ISK that is neither created, nor destroyed.

Here's a very interesting listing of all (most?) source and sinks in EVE.  (Notice the astounding amounts spent on blue loot.  Thanks, highsec, for subsidizing my easy lifestyle.)  Let's look at ISK sources and sinks and what I plan to do to get rid of them.

Blue loot.  Currently, there are two areas of EVE that are heavily subsidized by ISK injection: wspace, and null.  (ISK are sunk mostly in highsec, as fees and taxes.)  Wspace is subsidized via blue loot, which is sold at fixed prices to NPCs.  Null is subsidized by bounties.  So, for blue loot, make it be an input to the manufacture of something.  Obvious choices are T3 BPCs, but it might also be used in a variety of other ways.  Or, just get rid of it.  Perhaps replace it with other things of use.  Minerals, even.

Bounties.  Currently, Concord pays ISK bounties.  This is modestly credible in empire.  It makes no sense at all in null.  And even in empire, it really does not make much sense given that Concord is militarily ubiquitous and all-powerful.  Abolish bounties.  To make up for them, increase the salvage and loot gained from NPC wrecks.  This has several nice properties.  First, it makes NPC ships more like PC ships; ideally one should not be able to tell the difference, but we just don't have AIs that good.  Still, that is the ideal.  Second, via reprocessing, loot would create a large source of minerals out in null, thereby inspiring local manufacture and an economy that is not based on unrealistic ISK-transfer from highsec.  Third, just as in wspace, requiring salvaging and looting would place weak, gankable ships out in space for people to gank.  Content is created relative to the current situation.  No longer can you print ISK aligned at all times, warping upon seeing any non-blue in local.

Empire Station Services.  Manufacturing slots, research slots, offices.  Currently, these are quite cheap if they are available at all.  Privatize them.  On a per-slot basis, allow ownership by individuals or corps.  Ownership would be gained via auction for initial slot sales and for slots repossessed.  Once owned, the owner sets the price of use.  Ownership by unsubscribed players is an issue: if allowed, slots may be lost over time.  So, implement some sort of repossession mechanic.  Player owners of station services automatically auction them off after five months of unsubscription.

Empire Station Markets.  The market in each station counts as a service.  It should be privately owned just like any other.  All ISK in "taxes" goes to the owner.  However, because there is only one market per station, disallow the owner from setting tax rates.  The current tax rates are applied; thus trade costs neither more nor less than now (and all those Trade skills do not lose or gain value).  The Goons Inc welcome you to highsec, indeed.

Skillbooks.  Currently these are bought from NPC stations.  Make them player-created, as follows.  When you have a skill at level V, there is a new way you can invest skill points in that skill: writing skillbooks.  Each kind of skillbook takes a variable investment in writing time.  During this time, you cannot train any skill: your "study time" is being used instead to write books.  We have a ballpark figure for how much ISK training time is worth, namely: the price of a PLEX for 720 hours.  Therefore, we can calibrate how long it should take to write a skillbook.  For example, consider a skillbook that currently sells for 1m ISK.  With PLEX at 600m ISK, an hour of skilling costs 833k ISK.  Thus, on a character that is subscribed only for the purpose of writing skills, one should be able to write a 1m ISK skillbook in roughly an hour.  If exactly a hour, then there is a good profit margin built in.  We might set it at 2 hours, under the assumption that the ability to back-convert from subscription cost (which allows many things beyond writing skillbooks) into ISK is not a 1:1 conversion.

Missioning and LP stores.  Currently, missions pay ISK.  Convert it over completely to LP.  Same deal for LP stores.  Remove ISK costs for items, making them purely LP and/or items.

Insurance.  Outside of highsec, ship insurance is absolutely absurd.  In highsec, it is merely ridiculous.  Do away with it.  If people want to fly cheaper hulls, they have the power to do so.

Unsubscribed Players.  These are probably among the larger ISK-sinks in EVE.  A guy comes into the game, earns a pile of ISK, and then quits.  To handle the situation, accounts not subscribed for six months automatically convert their ISK into commodities.  The preferred commodity is PLEX, which will be bought from sell orders at Jita, paying no more than 105% of the game's current average price.  If there is not enough ISK to buy PLEX, no further buying happens for another six months.  After that, the account buys tritanium automatically using the same algorithm.  After another six months, all remaining ISK is discarded.