About the Discovery Scanner

Penny at tigerears has a screed up opposing the discovery scanner.  I can certainly see her point and agree with her insofar as it makes hunting in wspace too hard.  By showing almost immediately when there is a new wormhole connecting to your system, it makes it almost trivial to maintain fleet security while doing stuff in wspace.  Just do this:

1. resolve all signatures in your system
2. close all wormholes incident to your system
3. ignore all existing sigs.  Keep the discovery scanner open
4. Do whatever you want, in near-total safety.  So long as no new signature appears, goto (4).
5. [a new signature appeared]: immediately abort and return to a POS (or cloak up in a safespot, whatever).  Goto (1).

One other annoyance with the discovery scanner: if you are hunting, you don't always want to launch probes.  If you don't, there is no way to turn off the display of signatures.  This is usually what you want, but not always:

Kiptain, I kinna see a thing!

The main thing I may disagree about with Penny is that I really like the idea of showing newbies that there is an exploration game there.  People argue that this is something that should be done in the newbie intro missions, and it should.  (It was when I did them a year ago.)  But this is not enough.  Newbs are overwhelmed with information when they do those missions.  They need more than just that.

Anyway, here's what I posted at tigerears, which I might as well replicate here.

I think there are some fairly simply changes that would help.

First is the suggestion that Mara makes, to restrict the discovery scanner's ability to detect sigs to ships with a probe launcher. This does not solve anything fundamental, but it means that at least one person in a fleet needs to use a high for a probe launcher, and that that person needs to pay attention to the discovery scanner. The average grunt in a warship should not get all that free information.
It would still be too hard to sneak up on anyone, but at least in this case a small fleet would not have N potential eyes to see, just 1 or maybe 2.

To serve the end of alerting newbies to the unknown: give all T1 frigates the built-in ability to detect sigs with their discovery scanners. This means that for the first few weeks, when the newb is running around in a frigate, he'll see sigs regardless of whether he has fit a probe launcher. And he will also see them intermittently after that, whenever he uses a frig to get around fast or whatnot. Hopefully these will be enough to get him interested if exploration will be something he likes. Most players most of the time won't be able to see sigs on discovery.

Second fix needed is to make the discovery scanner run automatically only when you enter a system. Running it that one time serves the end of piquing the interest of newbies in "the unknown out there". But once is plenty. The auto-run should be restricted to the least usage possible, and I think "enter a new system" is that.

Third, make the discover scanner runnable via player click on the "scan" button. If probes are out, the scan acts as it does now. If probes are not out, you get a new discovery scanner sweep. This allows active players, but only active players, to get the benefits of the discover scanner.

Selling a Player Owned Customs Office

Before my corporation moved into its current C4 wspace system, we were in a C1 with highsec static.  Our goal there was making money via PI, which we certainly did.  (One of these days maybe I will write up what we were doing.)  Over the roughly four months that we were there, 4 characters were making about 3 billion ISK per month.  However, it was a lot of work.  That was one of the reasons we moved up to a C4 system: killing sleepers is easier and more fun than moving around PI goods.

When we left our old system, we left behind two POCOs that we had put up after shooting down Interbus ones.  (The other three planets had POCOs owned by another corp; I asked nicely when we moved in, and they let us use them for free.)  My policy was to let anyone who want to use them to do so free; this is better than having them shot down.  Anyway, only one guy had asked me since we left, and I set him blue and forgot about it.

Yesterday I got eve-mail from him, asking about selling the POCOs.  He wanted to know how much I'd sell my POCOs for.  I told him "at cost", which I had to figure out.  Here's what I wrote him (prices as of July 2, 2013).

To build a POCO, you need to start with a Customs Office Gantry, which currently costs 53.5 million at Jita (buy price). (Sell price is 56.9m.) Then you have to bring some PI goods, as follows: Broadcast Node 8, Recursive Computing Module 8, Self-Harmonizing Power Core 8, Wetware Mainframe 8. You put those in the gantry, then do an "Upgrade" on it, and it turns into a POCO.

The costs of the PI goods (in millions) are as follows:

Broadcast Node: 1.27 - 1.34
Recursive Computing Module: .88 - .93
Self-Harmonizing Power Core: 1.28 - 1.44
Wetware Mainframe: 1.32 - 1.39

So, the total cost of a POCO (minus labor costs) is 91.5m at the minimum, up to 97.7m. I offered them to him for 91m.  He convoed me and accepted the deal.

The issue of trust came up.  We discussed using a trusted third party but he was OK with just doing one at a time.  Boom, he gave me 91m.  So I starting trying to figure out how to effect the transfer.  There is a tab on the Corporation window that shows all corp assets, and there are a few right-click menu options for them, but you cannot transfer them there.  I found no way to do it.  After failing to discover a means in-game, I googled for information on it.  I could not find a clear answer, but my conclusion is that one cannot transfer a customs office except by being in the system with it.  In system, there is a menu option on the right menu to transfer ownership.  (I already knew about this, because it is option that I wish was not present where it is.  It is bad UI design to have a almost never-used menu item on a frequently used menu.)

So I told my buyer that I'd have to fly down to do it.  I gave back his 91m.  He told me the system that the static was currently in, which was 25 jumps from Jita.  I flew out my market alt in a frigate.  Eventually, got there, fleeted up, warped to him, and entered the system to effect the sale.  (He joked about killing me as soon as I got in.)  We did the transfers one by one to minimize his risk.  He accidently paid me for a non-existing third POCO.  (I was tempted to joke about stealing his money, but didn't.)  Gave his money back again.  The whole thing was about 1 minute.  Then I autopiloted back.

I generally dislike the idea of requiring physical attendance in-system to sell a corporate asset.  On the one hand, requiring presence does have an interesting effect on wspace, where you cannot get to an asset simply by knowing which system it is in.  On the other hand, it's painful to have to drive 50 jumps to sell something, and for what?  How does this add to game play?

Certainly in terms of "realism", it's absurd that I cannot sell something remotely.  Indeed, you can sell all normal assets remotely, via contract at any station.  The same should be true of extra-station assets.

The Ice Price Rise di'n't Materialize

Before Odyssey happened, I projected a significant price rise in ice and ice products.  This was based on CCP's description of how ice would change: according to their plans, they were going to put only enough ice in the new ice anoms so that if each anom was depleted 5 times per day, highsec could generate 80% of the amount of ice it generated pre-Odyssey.  My assumption is that they did as they said.  We can certainly see the ice anoms and we know that the respawn time is 4 hours.

A quick look at ice product values at the eve-markets.net site shows the trend over the last 180 days.  Here are the graphs for two ice products that I care most about, Helium and Nitrogen isotopes:

thanks to www.eve-markets.net

The price certainly did rise.  The dev blog describing the changes happened April 26.  The price spikes right then and stays high, however there has been a slight tailing off since then.  One very interesting aspect of these graphs is that the buy price has not changed much.  The sell price has almost doubled

What is interesting about this from my perspective is that I have put in several hours of ice mining recently.

One time I logged my ice miner and looked in Otela, then Osmon, and finally Wuos, and there was no ice in any of them.  But within an hour there was, and he mined straight for another few hours.  Three other times I have logged in and there was ice in the system he was in.  This is a small sample, but it suggests that ice anoms are not being mined out quickly.

The other evidence I have on that score is the number of ice miners in the anomalies, and how long they have lasted.  All four times I have mined, the number of ice miners was initially low.  Then it increased, but only once was there more than 10 miners at a time in any anomaly.   And in all of the cases except that one, I logged off the game (usually after about 2 hours of mining) before the ice anom was depleted.

At 190000 ISK per block of White Glaze, and mining about 1 block per minute, the income is pretty good considering how much work it is.  You can still do it on a second monitor while doing something interesting on the main monitor.  On the other hand, the income from ice is still not as high as I predicted would be necessary to draw in nullsec production.

There is one interesting aspect of ice product sales that is interesting to ponder.  Here's the 180 day graph for Caldari Fuel Blocks:

The price has moved in sync with Nitrogen, which is what we expect.  But note the volume.  It declines a bit around the timeframe of the announcement, but has rebounded.  Volume is now almost exactly what it was in the steady, normal market operation in the first half of the graph.  (This pattern is also there in the two isotopes graphs above.)  I suppose that part of that may be due to people re-subbing for Odyssey, who had unfueled towers that they then fueled.  But part of it is just inexplicable to me.  When price rises, as it did, quantity will decline (if other things are equal).  In any case, there is no evidence as yet that people have been pulling down marginally profitable towers.

So, the small evidence I have shows that current ice production simply is not that great.  Ice is not being massively mined in highsec, and the price is not yet high enough to incent substantial production in nullsec.  (Lowsec is too dangerous.)  But volume is not decreasing.  My guess is that a massive amount of ice products have been stockpiled since the exhumer buff of Inferno.  This stockpile is gradually being spent down.  Ice will go higher.  I expect much higher.

Odyssey Exploration for Newbies

Jester has a post up ruminating upon the idea that maybe exploration is a feature that breaks "Malcanis' Law", which states that "Whenever a mechanics change is proposed on behalf of 'new players', that change is always to the overwhelming advantage of richer, older players."  I think exploration is great for newbies to make money with.  So, let's discuss it.

"Exploration" is what I am calling the profession of moving around in a light ship, scanning for data and relic sites to hack.  

Note that before Odyssey, exploration used to be a somewhat different mini profession, where you moved around looking for (mainly) combat sites, with (maybe) radar (data) or mag (relic) sites as modest add-ons.  True newbs might concentrate only on the radar and mag sites, but these did not pay very well, at least in highsec, and outside of highsec, there were rat guards that made running such sites impossible without substantial DPS -- and if you had guns, the combat sites paid better.  (These days, there must be players out looking for combat sites and their rewards, but I am not sure what to call them.)

So: exploration.

Ganking and Grilling

After a bunch of routine housekeeping, I noticed aliens in my wspace system killing sleepers.  It was just me logged on from my corp, whereas they had five Tengus and two Drakes.  I am in my exploring Buzzard.  So, the immediate question is: what do I do?  To complicate matters, it is about 5:00PM.  I am grilling outside tonight, so I need to start cooking pretty soon.

I try to bookmark all four of the combat anomalies, which since I have been sitting there, are all still on my scanner list.  However, I can't bookmark two of them.  Hmm, evidently those are the ones they've already hit.  OK, I'll just warp there... nope.  Curse you CCP!  Why did you change this?  But I get two of them bookmarked.

After some thought, I decide to get in Artemis, my cloaky Tengu.  I change ships and immediately warp out to a safe spot.  Well, they should have seen that on dscan or via a cloaked scout watching me and the tower... but did they?  I cannot know.  Let's see if they slip up.  There is no reason why a gang of 7 characters ever needs to be vulnerable to one Tengu.  On the other hand, they may be sloppy about salvaging.  Already there are enough wrecks that I expect them to salvage using a Noctis.  The question is, do they escort it?

About this time all the ships disappear except one Tengu.  Probably an offgrid booster.  I am tempted to look for it using combat probes, but there really is not time for a hunt, and I am not sure I can actually get a 100% on a proper booster in any case.  I expect they have moved on to the anomaly which is in the outer planet of my system, out of dscan range.  I warp to it at 100, and sure enough.  Here they are killing sleepers.  I drive the opposite direction until I am at about 150 km from them.  I make a perch.  Then I watch them chew sleepers for a bit.

They finish the site.  Will they salvage now?  No, looks like not.  They warp and disappear from dscan.  After I wait a little while, hoping for a Noctis, I decided it isn't coming; this is consistent with the fact that the wrecks in the inner system were not salvaged when last I saw.  Should I loot some wrecks myself?  I could, I suppose, but that might tip them off and would be pretty involved for someone who's supposed to be prepping corn for the grill.  I do take the opportunity to uncloak and load Scourge Rage heavy assault missiles instead of what I had loaded.

Then I fly to the last anom at 100, and there they are.  I really do have to AFK for a while now, so I make a kind of bad perch, then warp back to my first, better perch.  Then I sigh and leave the computer.  Real Life strikes just when you don't need it.

I fire up the grill, get the meat ready, chop up broccoli for steaming, and get corn ready to grill.  I stick food on the grill and I have a minute or two... so I wander back up to my office to see what is shaking.  The enemy has had 20 minutes free of my attention.

I am lucky today.  My timing is perfect.  There is a lone Noctis on grid with me, 160km off, about half-done salvaging the wrecks.  D-scan says: nobody around but us.  OK, go time.  Hands shaking.  I warp to 10 from a wreck that he is driving towards.  I end up about 15 km from him; I turn and approach.  At about 10 I uncloak.  Hands really, really shaking.  This is ridiculous -- I can barely click a mouse on a button.  OK, I get the lock started and start trying to click my warp disruptor and painter and launchers.  My assault missiles start hitting him.  I am almost on top of him.

I start clicking d-scan.  First time, still clear.  But now I see a Tengu.  He's into armor.  Go!  I see four Tengus, uh oh.  Will they make it in time?  I clear the structure, Noctis goes boom.  I never even saw the pod; I am too busy clicking the wreck and looting it.  I get the loot.  I try to get free.  The four Tengus land on grid, right on top of me and the wreck.  I need something to warp to fast; I hit the sun and warp-to.  I try to cloak.  I don't know if they started to lock or not; it was too fast.  I am out, and cloaked.

Did I mention I am lucky today?  Really lucky?  I look at the loot I scooped... wow.  200m+.  (It turns out all the melted nanoribbons dropped, as well as most of the blue loot.)

Now I am landing on the sun, and what is here?  A pod.  The Noctis pilot.  Probably cannot catch him.  I land, and am uncloaked.  I fear the Tengus and immediately warp to my tower.  I try to lock the pod anyway, just on the off-chance it works, and I do manage to lock him.  Click on missiles?  I warp.  Oh well, I am too spazzed out to seriously contemplate taking the chance.  Keep your pod, Mr. Too Slow.  I warp and cloak.

Landing on my tower, I am uncloaked.  As fast as I can, I dump the loot in the loot can, and then warp out, cloaked, to the second perch.  We'll see if lightning strikes twice.

I have to cook again.  First, though, I really need a beer.

After dinner 45 minutes later, I get a spare moment.  Curious, I head to my computer to see what is up.  My grid has been salvaged.  Too bad.  No ships or wrecks on dscan.  I scan down their wormhole, and fly to it.  Interesting, it's currently highly disrupted.  Oh well, so much for that.

A bit later I notice that the number of sigs has dropped from 4 to 3.  Did they close it?  I warp over: yes, it is gone.

Lessons learned: first, I am a terrible PVPer because I react too strongly to it.  I suppose this goes away with exposure, but wow.  I have not gotten adrenaline so much as that before in PVP.  My hands were literally shaking 3 inches back and forth, uncontrollably.

Second, escort your Noctis.  (My corp does.)  Those Tengus came pretty fast; I would guess they were sitting on my system's side of their wormhole.  But that is not fast enough.  Or at least, not fast enough given the Noctis fitting... if you are going to hang out a Noctis out on its own, it needs maximum tank.  Do not rely on being able to warp out in time: you will be busy clicking on wrecks and looting wrecks and running salvagers and tractor beams.  You will not be paying close attention to dscan and even overview.

If you are going to salvage in one sweep after running sites, I don't see much use for a cloak on your Noctis. So the fit could be improved quite a bit there.

Third, if you are going to stick a Noctis out there unescorted, get your ECM drones out so that at least you have a chance of getting a jam.  One jam might have saved this guy, if the Tengus were spidering (I could not tell).  It would have at least meant that I would have lost my Tengu, assuming they had a point.

Finally, don't rush.  The total loot that the Noctis had on board was around 350m.  That's much more than one one C4 anom's worth: I would guess it was three anoms, probably salvaged in the order they were run.  With just one extra warp per anom, most of that loot could have been safely jetcanned next to the wormhole for a Tengu to grab and safeguard.  More generally, even if you are salvaging truly by yourself, make a safespot somewhere in the system, and anchor a small can there to put loot in.  Then if you get killed, you only lose the loot from the site you were doing, not all the sites.

Housekeeping in Off Hours

Had a full day of EVE yesterday.  Got on a lot earlier than normal because the Boy was busy playing outside with the neighbor kids.  So I was on by myself, typical.

Lots to do: scanned down my C4 (4 anoms, 1 ore anom (bleck), four sigs (all old and previously bookmarked in corp)).  And then the neighboring C3.  The C3 has a lowsec static.  One tower with nobody home.  A lot of anoms, 20 or so, and nine sigs, mostly gas.  Last two sigs I look at are the static and also a second wormhole connecting up from another lowsec system.  In my experience, kspace people almost never come into wspace from lowsec or null: if they are there to begin with, they are not hunting wormholes.  So it looked good for later exploitation once my corpies got online.  But that was going to be a few hours.

I trigger all the gas sigs to get their sleepers coming.  Then I do real life for a while.  Coming back a bit later, I take a PVE Tengu into C3 and kill all the little sleepers in the basic gas sites.  Then I come back and salvage in a salvage Venture.  My thinking here is to set up gassing, later, if no corpmates show up tonight.  And also make a little money.  As it happened, not a single nanoribbon in salvage, so basically not worth it.

Dotlan map showing jumps in 24 hours.  Gankers like traffic.

With nothing much to do but time to play, I did some housekeeping chores.  Since I wanted some stuff from the world, and one of the lowsec exits was relatively close to Jita (12 jumps, or 9 on a more direct route through lowsec), I grabbed all the small valuable stuff we had in our loot container in my Buzzard and went for it.  1.2 billion on a tissue paper ship: exciting.  There was a huge camp at Tara, but I was going the other way so nyah.  (Went back the longer way.)  There was one thrilling moment when I drive up to the Jita gate in Niyabainen and got rejected.  Big traffic jam there.  Instead of sitting there trying to get in, with who knows what oggers cargo scanning me, I detoured to New Caldari to try again.  Still rejected, and another big jam; I flew off to Aokannitoh to one of the stations that buys blue loot, and sold it.  This lightened my load by some 600m ISK, and also allowed me to route around to Ichuki, one of the less-used Jita entrances.  I got rejected there too, a few times, but made it in pretty fast.  Whew.  

Once in Jita I traded all my stuff to my trade alt, getting back various stuff in return to go back to wspace.  In particular, wanted a pair of +3 implants for my PI alt because I have been waiting to get dual training going.  (Was on a trip recently and was not sure I would be able to play at all, so I had delayed turning on dual training for both my accounts.)  Also wanted a set of implants for myself: a cheap optimization for heavy missile damage as is appropriate for someone who expends most of his firepower in a PVE Tengu.  Grabbed this stuff and headed back.  This went without incident, so I logged off to log my PI alt.  Fussed with EVEMon to get a skill plan ready.  Got the new implants in and dual training started.

Then relogged my main and sat around at my POS, while I started selling things and buying things with my trade alt in Jita.  Gotta decide for each type of object whether to sell to a buy order or do a sell order.  Then there was a whole list of new stuff to buy for the wspace POS: new ships (the new Navy Scorpions with the newly buffed cruise missiles are great value for the money); the fitting for the scorps; more heavy missiles; some new Iteron Vs.  All in all a billion in new hulls and a half billion in new fittings and missiles.

About this time it is getting close to time for me to fire up the grill out in real life, and start cooking dinner.  Just as I am getting ready to leave the computer, I notice something odd: there's a new sig in my system.  I hit the dscan and, uh oh.  Sleeper wrecks.  Wait, am I in my own system?  Yeah... scroll down... Tengus.  Lots of 'em.  And two Drakes, too.  Well.  Seems we have visitors...

Hacking in Odyssey

The day Odyssey came out, my wspace system got a highsec static via its static C3.  I went down looking for a radar site (now a "data" site), or a mag (now "relic").  And on the first try, I found one!  I had a little more scanning and bookmarking to do.  Came back and.... nothing there but some asteroids.  Someone had run it in few minutes it took me to get back in a Heron.

I'm going in!

Last night our kspace static plopped down in lowsec, in Black Rise.  So again I scanned from my Tengu and found a data site.  This time, I came back in a Buzzard (wanted the cloak), and I got to it first.  Indeed it appears factional warfare space is a great place for a Odyssey hacker.  Lots of people moving around but none of them were interested in me.  I never saw any probes but my own in ~2 hours of scanning and hacking.  I suppose they were all too busy looking for buttons to spin or PVP in small ships.

Anyway, after the first site I jumped one hop and found a system with 4 data sites and 1 relic site.  Since each site had 5 cans or so (8 IIRC in the relic), I got a substantial number of hacking minigame attempts in.  Ali Aras wrote up a very good overview on how the new game works at TheMittani.  Go read that if you are interested in learning.

I rather enjoyed the minigame.  It is a normal EVE window and does not take over your screen -- you can still dscan fine, although you need to remember to do that.  The game itself is not that hard and the strategy seems pretty basic.  Try to expand your network of explored nodes.  Grab utilities ASAP.  Hold off on exploring Data Caches until you've explored around them (in case they turn out to be firewall nodes, although I found a lot more of them were utilities than nasties.)  Don't attack any nasty nodes (firewalls, antivirus) until you have to.  (The one exception is Restoration Nodes, which you should almost always attack immediately.)  My success rate was pretty high; I'd guess I succeeded on about 80% of the cans.  This was with mediocre skills on my part -- Hacking III, but in a Buzzard w/ Covert Ops IV, and the Buzzard had two rigs Small Memetic Algorithm rigs.

I disliked the loot spew pretty strongly.  Just like 98% of all other players.  It is very "unrealistic" -- I complained about that to CCP on the forums last week (based on info from sisi).  As released, it is still clicky and fussy.  You have to be zoomed in near enough to differentiate items from each other (since you are looking for only some of the can types).  But zoom in too much and they move so fast they are hard to click on.  Also it appears to be the case that being close to the cans matters, since the "tractor" effect (which is not a tractor beam!  Just a tractor beam!) takes longer for distant cans and time is short.  So this means you also have to fly your ship to stay near cans.  This also was fussy and annoying.

The sense of losing my loot was pretty strong.  I was getting maybe half of it.  About halfway through the night I was joined by an alliance mate.  He just scooped loot, and this helped.  With two of us we got probably 90% of the loot.  Partly this is because I think he was better than me at piloting, flying around towards the loot.  Incidentally, my friend also had a codebreaker and he did one can.  I found this out by trying the same can, and it turns out that only one analyzer at a time can be activated on a can.  That's right -- if someone beats you to a can, you can't hack until he gives up.

I think that I could improve my play a lot on loot-spew gathering.  In particular I noted that when you mouse over some cans, you sometimes get a little preview of what is in it shown near your HUD.  (Maybe the ones I did not get this for were empty?  Or I just did not hover long enough on a moving object?  (Arghh!!)  Dunno.)  So it may be possible to mouse over and ignore a good part of the spew.  OTOH it may just be that I was not doing it right somehow.  The time was very short and I was frantically busy trying to control the UI.

I was disappointed when I got to the last site, which was the one relic site.  I had an analyzer (oops -- "relic analyzer"), and was eager to open the minigame and see something different.  But it was not different, practically at all.  Other than having less coherency (due to the fact that I had rigged by Buzzard with the rigs that are for data hacking), the game was identical.  There were "firewalls", etc., in my relic.  The loot was different (and at least for me, crap -- this is after all Gurista space and Guristas have crap salvage).  That was about the extent of the difference.  I expect CCP will iterate on this.  At least make some different themed art and give the firewalls different names.

I am going to try to explore some with a cargo scanner to attempt to make the spew more tractable.