Normally I fly to any wormhole I find, to see what type it is. If I am on the originating side (that is, not the K162) this is easy; just look it up. But usually it is a K162. These, you often can tell where they go by looking at their information. If they go to highsec, lowsec, nullsec, or C6 ("deadly unknown space"), you'll know. You won't know for certain for C1 through C5. But you get a good hint. A wormhole to "unknown space" goes to C1, C2, or C3. A wormhole to "dangerous unknown space" goes to C4 or C5.
If a wormhole goes to C1-C3, I may or may not go through to see what it is. This will depend on my mood, whether I'm hunting or looking for an exit, etc. But if it is to C4/C5, I always go through. I want to determine if it is a C4 system. If it is, I will always activate all of its anoms. Also, I often will search down and activate its sigs, too. At least the high-signal gas sites.
"Activating" a site just means initiating a warp to it. For non-wormholes, you'll see an intro text pop up. You don't actually have to warp there, and I usually do not. Cancel the warp as soon as you see the popup.
The reason I do this is to keep those sites moving. Anomalies, once activated, last for three more downtimes and move elsewhere on the fourth. I live in C4, and I want to get as many C4 sites in my system as I can, because they are quite lucrative. By activating remote C4 sites, I prevent them from lingering in that system unused. Activating them increases the income of C4 collectively. As such, I hope y'all other C4ers will do it too.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
Comes the Epithal
[UPDATE: Odyssey 1.1 is here, and some of the ship stats that I assume below were evidently tweaked. The fit below is still OK, but one can do a bit better. See my more recent post, Industrial Fits for Odyssey 1.1.]
Odyssey 1.1 is coming, on September 2nd. There are a lot of changes, but the one that affects me the strongest is the change to industrials. The sweeping changes can be found at this post by CCP Rise at the forums. The names of industrials will also change; the name changes (as well as all the other changes) are listed in the main dev-blog about 1.1.
Currently I haul most stuff in an Iteron V. This includes moving planet goo around between planets and to our POS, as well as hauling stuff in and out of wspace. Stuff in and out is mostly PI goods, but also ammo, some gas, and the occasional other thing: ship parts, POS parts. The Iteron V fills the primary function of the hauler the best: hauling large amounts of stuff.
The Itty V also can do well in the secondary function you want in a hauler: defense. It has the most low slots of any hauler, so if necessary it can also swap out hauling volume for defense. (Defense for haulers is mainly warp core stabilization.) For wspace PI, the defense you want is +3 warp core stabilization, combined with enough shields, hull, and armor to take a few seconds pounding from a cloaky Loki. (Outside of wspace, +2 warp core stabilization is probably OK, but I don't live out there.) Fast align is also nice, since the Loki trying to gank you may bump you to de-align you.
In Odyssey 1.1, the Itty V will no longer be the king of haulers . Instead of having one hauler that does a pretty good job on everything, but lacks the ability to have it all, CCP Rise in his infinite wisdom is giving us many different specific-good haulers that do a superb job hauling one thing.
For planet gooing, the hauler to be in is the "Epithal" (formerly, Iteron III). I've already got three of these guys bought, and will get a few more. We'll also be getting a few of the dedicated ammo haulers, and maybe one dedicated ore (gas) hauler. Here's the Epithal fit:
[Epithal, PI hauler]
'Repose' Core Compensation
'Repose' Core Compensation
'Repose' Core Compensation
Damage Control II
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
The whole design is designed to be disposable; total cost is about 2M ISK. No slots are required to serve the main function: hauling planet goo. The Epithal has a PI bay that holds 45000m^3 plus 10% per level of Gallente Industrial; thus it will be at least 49500 for anyone who can fly the ship, and up to 67500. Because it does not need any slots to do its main function, it needs not skimp on defense. It gets +3 warp core stabilization and it still has a slot left over for a damage control. (This is too good. I complained to Jester about it, to no evident effect.) If you have Shield Upgrades V, you can fit a large shield extender on it, and more hardeners.
The rigs are optional. You can leave them off entirely and the ship is repackageable. (My freighter pilot will have one to carry stuff up to the hole with.) Or, if you want to be spendy you can rig the thing with Low Friction Nozzle Joints, doubling the cost but shaving a few seconds off the align time.
Odyssey 1.1 is coming, on September 2nd. There are a lot of changes, but the one that affects me the strongest is the change to industrials. The sweeping changes can be found at this post by CCP Rise at the forums. The names of industrials will also change; the name changes (as well as all the other changes) are listed in the main dev-blog about 1.1.
Currently I haul most stuff in an Iteron V. This includes moving planet goo around between planets and to our POS, as well as hauling stuff in and out of wspace. Stuff in and out is mostly PI goods, but also ammo, some gas, and the occasional other thing: ship parts, POS parts. The Iteron V fills the primary function of the hauler the best: hauling large amounts of stuff.
The Itty V also can do well in the secondary function you want in a hauler: defense. It has the most low slots of any hauler, so if necessary it can also swap out hauling volume for defense. (Defense for haulers is mainly warp core stabilization.) For wspace PI, the defense you want is +3 warp core stabilization, combined with enough shields, hull, and armor to take a few seconds pounding from a cloaky Loki. (Outside of wspace, +2 warp core stabilization is probably OK, but I don't live out there.) Fast align is also nice, since the Loki trying to gank you may bump you to de-align you.
In Odyssey 1.1, the Itty V will no longer be the king of haulers . Instead of having one hauler that does a pretty good job on everything, but lacks the ability to have it all, CCP Rise in his infinite wisdom is giving us many different specific-good haulers that do a superb job hauling one thing.
For planet gooing, the hauler to be in is the "Epithal" (formerly, Iteron III). I've already got three of these guys bought, and will get a few more. We'll also be getting a few of the dedicated ammo haulers, and maybe one dedicated ore (gas) hauler. Here's the Epithal fit:
[Epithal, PI hauler]
'Repose' Core Compensation
'Repose' Core Compensation
'Repose' Core Compensation
Damage Control II
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]
Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
The whole design is designed to be disposable; total cost is about 2M ISK. No slots are required to serve the main function: hauling planet goo. The Epithal has a PI bay that holds 45000m^3 plus 10% per level of Gallente Industrial; thus it will be at least 49500 for anyone who can fly the ship, and up to 67500. Because it does not need any slots to do its main function, it needs not skimp on defense. It gets +3 warp core stabilization and it still has a slot left over for a damage control. (This is too good. I complained to Jester about it, to no evident effect.) If you have Shield Upgrades V, you can fit a large shield extender on it, and more hardeners.
The rigs are optional. You can leave them off entirely and the ship is repackageable. (My freighter pilot will have one to carry stuff up to the hole with.) Or, if you want to be spendy you can rig the thing with Low Friction Nozzle Joints, doubling the cost but shaving a few seconds off the align time.
Monday, August 26, 2013
New Player Tip: Use EVEMon to Find Skills
One of the hard things about being a newbie in EVE is the sheer number of skills. Once you know about a skill, you can train it, and get its benefits. But how do you ever find out about a skill in the first place? It's a problem.
The training missions push you to getting a few skills by handing out skillbooks, but there are many more skills. You'll see and read about ships, so the ship skills at least should be on your radar. The certificates system could, in theory, be useful for learning about the existence of skills. But as of 2013, certificates are ill-thought out, and basically a joke. And in any case they are not exactly obvious either. If you are lucky, you'll get into a corp where some experienced player can mentor you.
What about the solo guy? I was a solo guy, more or less, just me and my small group of friends. The way we discovered skills was via EVEMon. Then we'd tell each other.
EVEMon is a standalone program. It stands for the EVE character monitoring (and planning) program. Or something like that. It's freeware. Anyone can download it at evemon.battleclinic.com. It's useful for many things, but in particular you can use it to discover what skills exist in the game that might be something you should train now. This can save you a lot of time, as versus attempting to find out about skills in game or via the web.
To use EVEMon with your particular character, you must generate a so-called "API" for that character. You do that via the web, here. Generate a full API key. Start EVEMon, then select "File/Add API Key...". Fill in the information from the web page to this dialog. (Cut and paste are handy here.)
Now you've got your character in EVEMon, what can you do? Well, the main use is to plan skills. We'll get to that in a minute. But you can see all sorts of info about your character, and this is what EVEMon shows on each character's tab. Take a minute to look at the sort of info you can get via API.
OK, let's talk about skill plans. Select "Plans/New Plan", and input a name for your new plan. You should now see the planning interface to EVEMon. If the "Skill Browser" tab is not selected, select it. Look at the skill tree on the left side; it shows a list of skill categories. Each category can be opened to show a listing of skills.
Here is how you find out about skills you don't know about. Open out each skill category one by one, and look at the list of skills contained in that category. If the skill shows with one or more blue dots, then you already know it, and the display shows one dot per skill level which you have. For example, in the screenshot Jon has Navigation III. If the skill shows as a red X, then you don't know it and cannot immediately train it. You cannot train it (yet) because many skills have other skills as prerequisites.
Most important for the newbie are skills that you don't know, but you have all the prerequisites for. These are shown with a green plus sign. You can train these skills starting right now; all you need is the skillbook to inject. Most such skills are desirable, but you'll want to select the skill in the list to see what it does. In the example, I have selected Evasive Maneuvering. A synopsis of what it does is shown in the text box in the upper right. In this case: Improved skill at efficiently turning and accelerating a spaceship. 5% improved ship agility for all ships per skill level. 5% agility per level? That's huge! Why did nobody tell you about this? Well, I am telling you, or EVEMon is. Go get it.
Now, get some ISK, and fly to one of the "training" stations which sell skillbooks. Get EVEMon going, and start down the list. Select every green-plus skill and see if it looks useful. If you cannot figure out what a skill does from reading its synopsis, then click the button "Show what this skill enables...". This will pop up a window that displays other skills that the skill is a prerequisite for, and items that require a certain level of the skill to use. If you still can't determine what the skill does, then it's time to hit the EVE wiki and maybe the web to find out if it is useful. If the skill is useful, buy the skill book and train to level 1. If the skill is reasonably useful, plan to train it to at least level 3, and probably level 4.
Generally speaking, a combat pilot will want to get any skill he can in Drones, Electronics, Engineering, Mechanics, and Navigation, and Spaceship command. You can focus on missiles, in which case get skills in Missile Launcher Operation (but still look at Gunnery for Weapon Upgrades and Advanced Weapon Upgrades.) Or focus on Gunnery. You won't need skills in Corp Management, Industry, Leadership, Planet Management, Social, or Trade. At least not for combat; those are money-making skills. Science has some skills everyone will want.
The training missions push you to getting a few skills by handing out skillbooks, but there are many more skills. You'll see and read about ships, so the ship skills at least should be on your radar. The certificates system could, in theory, be useful for learning about the existence of skills. But as of 2013, certificates are ill-thought out, and basically a joke. And in any case they are not exactly obvious either. If you are lucky, you'll get into a corp where some experienced player can mentor you.
What about the solo guy? I was a solo guy, more or less, just me and my small group of friends. The way we discovered skills was via EVEMon. Then we'd tell each other.
EVEMon is a standalone program. It stands for the EVE character monitoring (and planning) program. Or something like that. It's freeware. Anyone can download it at evemon.battleclinic.com. It's useful for many things, but in particular you can use it to discover what skills exist in the game that might be something you should train now. This can save you a lot of time, as versus attempting to find out about skills in game or via the web.
To use EVEMon with your particular character, you must generate a so-called "API" for that character. You do that via the web, here. Generate a full API key. Start EVEMon, then select "File/Add API Key...". Fill in the information from the web page to this dialog. (Cut and paste are handy here.)
Now you've got your character in EVEMon, what can you do? Well, the main use is to plan skills. We'll get to that in a minute. But you can see all sorts of info about your character, and this is what EVEMon shows on each character's tab. Take a minute to look at the sort of info you can get via API.
OK, let's talk about skill plans. Select "Plans/New Plan", and input a name for your new plan. You should now see the planning interface to EVEMon. If the "Skill Browser" tab is not selected, select it. Look at the skill tree on the left side; it shows a list of skill categories. Each category can be opened to show a listing of skills.
 |
| I see some skills to get |
Most important for the newbie are skills that you don't know, but you have all the prerequisites for. These are shown with a green plus sign. You can train these skills starting right now; all you need is the skillbook to inject. Most such skills are desirable, but you'll want to select the skill in the list to see what it does. In the example, I have selected Evasive Maneuvering. A synopsis of what it does is shown in the text box in the upper right. In this case: Improved skill at efficiently turning and accelerating a spaceship. 5% improved ship agility for all ships per skill level. 5% agility per level? That's huge! Why did nobody tell you about this? Well, I am telling you, or EVEMon is. Go get it.
Now, get some ISK, and fly to one of the "training" stations which sell skillbooks. Get EVEMon going, and start down the list. Select every green-plus skill and see if it looks useful. If you cannot figure out what a skill does from reading its synopsis, then click the button "Show what this skill enables...". This will pop up a window that displays other skills that the skill is a prerequisite for, and items that require a certain level of the skill to use. If you still can't determine what the skill does, then it's time to hit the EVE wiki and maybe the web to find out if it is useful. If the skill is useful, buy the skill book and train to level 1. If the skill is reasonably useful, plan to train it to at least level 3, and probably level 4.
Generally speaking, a combat pilot will want to get any skill he can in Drones, Electronics, Engineering, Mechanics, and Navigation, and Spaceship command. You can focus on missiles, in which case get skills in Missile Launcher Operation (but still look at Gunnery for Weapon Upgrades and Advanced Weapon Upgrades.) Or focus on Gunnery. You won't need skills in Corp Management, Industry, Leadership, Planet Management, Social, or Trade. At least not for combat; those are money-making skills. Science has some skills everyone will want.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
A Clash Nearby as I Blunder About
It's the weekend, mid morning for me. I sit down for a look at EVE. What's happening during daylight, EVE universe? I last logged out in my exploration Buzzard, in a safespot I made in between planets. This spot is outside of dscan range of almost all locations where anyone might be in my system. So I expect to see literally nothing on scan. Instead, I see one combat probe. Are any corpmates on? No.
Uh oh.
I warp to the inner system, and sure enough, I see a long list of sleeper wrecks. Also two Lokis and a Noctis. Someone is running sites in my system.
I quickly get the probe scanner up and bookmark the two anomalies that show. With anoms bookmarked, it no longer matters if they clear them: I will be able to warp to the site. Now I start with dscan: I'll figure out which anom they are in and... well, what? I don't have the right ship. I'll have to risk them seeing me on dscan to change ships. But, I'll find them first and make a perch. So, dscan. I point at anom #1, and not there. OK, anom #2? Not there either. Er... where then?
They are in the direction of our eastern planet. There's nothing out there I have not already checked. So, for now at least I cannot get at the enemy. I start to think about getting out Artemis, which has combat probes. Or I might not switch, and try to get the site first from my Buzzard. But first I want to find out which wormholes from last night are still alive. And also, I figure that after salvaging the site they are in, they'll keep going. So if I just wait, I'll get a shot at them.
I warp out to check on wormholes. Most of them are gone. There's a C2 from last night that I know about; it is now EOL. Two others are gone. The static has moved, so I don't know where it is, other than in the inner system somewhere. I cannot search it down without revealing my presence in the system.
Well, I am going to have to swap some time, and it will be in dscan range of the enemy. So I might as well do it now. I swoop into our tower, swap into my Manticore, and warp out as fast as I can. Of course, all this takes time. If the enemy has any clue, they should have seen that. Let's see what they do. I start watching dscan.
There's only one Loki, and no Noctis. Where did the other Loki go? And what is that? A heavy assault cruiser, but with different "tag" in its name. That probably means a different corp. Which means it's a fight -- and I have no idea where it is!
On a hunch I warp to the C2. Nope, nothing is here. I warp back to a perch midway in the inner system.
Evidently a Loki has gotten killed -- there is a Minmatar Advanced Cruiser Wreck on scan. As I am pondering this, I see a Reaper on scan. What's a Reaper? Oh, it's the Minmatar rookie ship. What? And then a pod. What is happening? Oh, there's the Reaper's wreck. I guess it got killed too. But.. what could it possibly have been doing?
Things settle. The pod disappears. I am left starting at an unchanging tableau. After a few minutes of watching this, I figure it's time to deploy probes and find the static. Maybe they will try to come back to salvage wrecks. So I warp to a perch just off my POS, and what do I see but a wreck. The reaper wreck, conveniently 156km from where I am. (Here's the kill.) Did it warp to my moon out of all the moons, and get killed by my tower? Seems unlikely. I warp over to loot the wreck: I get a Prototype Cloak. Ah. They must have been using it to keep an eye on my tower. So, there's a use for a rookie ship I had not thought of. I fire probes, and quickly move off and hide again.
I search down our static's new position, and fly there to sit and watch. But nothing happens. Nobody exits or enters, and dscan does not change.
After a while, I believe that nobody is coming back. I look at the dscan longingly. A cargo container, very likely blue loot from a salvaged wreck. The Loki wreck. Two large intermediate sleeper wrecks -- 7.5m each in blue loot, and another 0-48m each in salvage. I'd sure like to get that. In theory, one can get to any point in space if one can get to points that define the corners of volume containing it. You just have to warp back and forth a lot, making bookmarks and checking the direction on dscan. I've got nothing to do for a while. This seems like a good time to see about that.
A little work with the dscan shows the range is such that the wreck site must be near our eastern planet. I warp out there, and start by getting a range from my new location: almost exactly 2 AU. Now I use dscan to halve and quarter space near me. I narrow down the position to a small area about 45 degrees down, and in towards the sun.
This is too bad. Theoretically it is possible for me to get there, but only if I had bookmarks in my system that would bracket the location in all dimensions, X/Y/Z. But I don't have such bookmarks. As such, the site is entirely beyond my reach. Sigh.
In future, I'll be making those bookmarks.
Uh oh.
I warp to the inner system, and sure enough, I see a long list of sleeper wrecks. Also two Lokis and a Noctis. Someone is running sites in my system.
I quickly get the probe scanner up and bookmark the two anomalies that show. With anoms bookmarked, it no longer matters if they clear them: I will be able to warp to the site. Now I start with dscan: I'll figure out which anom they are in and... well, what? I don't have the right ship. I'll have to risk them seeing me on dscan to change ships. But, I'll find them first and make a perch. So, dscan. I point at anom #1, and not there. OK, anom #2? Not there either. Er... where then?
They are in the direction of our eastern planet. There's nothing out there I have not already checked. So, for now at least I cannot get at the enemy. I start to think about getting out Artemis, which has combat probes. Or I might not switch, and try to get the site first from my Buzzard. But first I want to find out which wormholes from last night are still alive. And also, I figure that after salvaging the site they are in, they'll keep going. So if I just wait, I'll get a shot at them.
I warp out to check on wormholes. Most of them are gone. There's a C2 from last night that I know about; it is now EOL. Two others are gone. The static has moved, so I don't know where it is, other than in the inner system somewhere. I cannot search it down without revealing my presence in the system.
Well, I am going to have to swap some time, and it will be in dscan range of the enemy. So I might as well do it now. I swoop into our tower, swap into my Manticore, and warp out as fast as I can. Of course, all this takes time. If the enemy has any clue, they should have seen that. Let's see what they do. I start watching dscan.
There's only one Loki, and no Noctis. Where did the other Loki go? And what is that? A heavy assault cruiser, but with different "tag" in its name. That probably means a different corp. Which means it's a fight -- and I have no idea where it is!
On a hunch I warp to the C2. Nope, nothing is here. I warp back to a perch midway in the inner system.
Evidently a Loki has gotten killed -- there is a Minmatar Advanced Cruiser Wreck on scan. As I am pondering this, I see a Reaper on scan. What's a Reaper? Oh, it's the Minmatar rookie ship. What? And then a pod. What is happening? Oh, there's the Reaper's wreck. I guess it got killed too. But.. what could it possibly have been doing?
I search down our static's new position, and fly there to sit and watch. But nothing happens. Nobody exits or enters, and dscan does not change.
After a while, I believe that nobody is coming back. I look at the dscan longingly. A cargo container, very likely blue loot from a salvaged wreck. The Loki wreck. Two large intermediate sleeper wrecks -- 7.5m each in blue loot, and another 0-48m each in salvage. I'd sure like to get that. In theory, one can get to any point in space if one can get to points that define the corners of volume containing it. You just have to warp back and forth a lot, making bookmarks and checking the direction on dscan. I've got nothing to do for a while. This seems like a good time to see about that.
A little work with the dscan shows the range is such that the wreck site must be near our eastern planet. I warp out there, and start by getting a range from my new location: almost exactly 2 AU. Now I use dscan to halve and quarter space near me. I narrow down the position to a small area about 45 degrees down, and in towards the sun.
This is too bad. Theoretically it is possible for me to get there, but only if I had bookmarks in my system that would bracket the location in all dimensions, X/Y/Z. But I don't have such bookmarks. As such, the site is entirely beyond my reach. Sigh.
In future, I'll be making those bookmarks.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Waiting for a Wormhole to Expire
It is a slow evening. We have logged on to find our static wormhole strangely present, and in its end of life state. (EOL as we call it in bookmarks.) We thought we opened it yesterday -- obviously, not. Someone seems to have opened it this morning. There are no other wormholes. But we have things to do in system.
There are two new gas sites. So a couple of us slurp out all the good gas. Now we've got enough people here, so we run anoms. We finish the two sleepers left over in the one site we were experimenting on earlier this week. And there is a new Frontier Barracks, so we do it too.
By now the sleepers should have spawned in those gas sites we sucked earlier... so I take my PVE Tengu straight there from the Barracks. First site, killed, and I let our Noctis know. Then on to second. Killed. Back to base and back into my exploration Buzzard.
Check the static... still there, EOL. Go away stupid wormhole!
Well, OK. Er... what to do? Time to do my PI! In fact I need to do the "long" version, hauling goo out to many of the planets while moving other goo around between them, and bringing back intermediate and finished goo. So I get to that. Four characters. Sit watching on the hole with one at a time, while doing PI on the other account. Log off, log on. Shuffle. Log off, log on. (CCP please make this nicer.) An hour later, finally done with that.
Meanwhile most of the corp has logged off. They've done their PI too, and gone to bed.
Check the static... still there, EOL. Well, this is getting vexing. It's been two hours, I should have at least a 50/50 shot that the stupid thing goes away.
One more thing I can do is suck the small amount of near worthless gas from one of the gas sites. This will make it despawn, keeping my pretty system nice and tidy. So, I get in Ventures and go do that. This takes about 20 minutes. OK, site is gone, hurrah.
Check the static... still there. Sigh.
Nothing to do. So, I sit watching the hole on my main, and log in my Jita alt. He spends most of his time in Otela, where there is ice. Maybe there is some here. I pop out: yes indeed. Well, this might even be interesting, because the CFC's Caldari Ice Interdiction is on. I warp over to the ice in my Procurer. Procurers have a huge tank even if fit poorly, and mine is fit well. So I am not very worried about being ganked.
I show up, get my stuff running, and start mining a nearby ice-asteroid. Just as I am looking around, a gank wave shows up, and they gank a miner -- not sure what type, but I am guessing Mackinaw -- that is about 7 km from me. This is pretty close, so I move straight at it. Two of the gankers open up on me, as I notice later, because I get kill rights. At the time I don't notice; they don't perceptively lower my shields. Concord goes to work, and the gankers are all killed in a nice fireworks display. I fill my cargo hold with loot from the gankers; together it's worth about 2m ISK. I wish I had salvage drones.
I mine. I watch the our static wormhole. It stays.
12 minutes pass and my ore hold is full. I warp to station, drop ice, and return. The Goons have pulled Concord, so it is very likely they're coming back. There is one Mack in the ice, two retrievers, and several Procurers including me. The Mack is in my fleet; I warn him that he's probably next. He dismisses my warning saying he's got a 32000 EHP tank. Sure enough, he is next; boom.
I mine a few more cycles. The goons have not pulled Concord; there are 6 squads in the belt. So I am feeling quite safe. I almost pull out my Retriever, but decide it is probably not wise. It's not like I have anything else to do: the static is stubbornly there. So running back and forth to a station to dump ice is no big deal. I start reading EVE blogs to pass the time.
One more gank arrives, killing the last Retriever in the belt. OK, I had not expected that. Very wasteful -- six of them will have only gotten off a few seconds of fire.
It's after midnight. I have stayed on longer than I would otherwise because I want to see the Goons in action. But now the belt is down just three of us, and all in Procurers. It's not much of a target. I check the timestamp on the bookmark for the static. 01:08. And now is 4:31. Time to give up. Good night, accursed wormhole.
There are two new gas sites. So a couple of us slurp out all the good gas. Now we've got enough people here, so we run anoms. We finish the two sleepers left over in the one site we were experimenting on earlier this week. And there is a new Frontier Barracks, so we do it too.
By now the sleepers should have spawned in those gas sites we sucked earlier... so I take my PVE Tengu straight there from the Barracks. First site, killed, and I let our Noctis know. Then on to second. Killed. Back to base and back into my exploration Buzzard.
Check the static... still there, EOL. Go away stupid wormhole!
Well, OK. Er... what to do? Time to do my PI! In fact I need to do the "long" version, hauling goo out to many of the planets while moving other goo around between them, and bringing back intermediate and finished goo. So I get to that. Four characters. Sit watching on the hole with one at a time, while doing PI on the other account. Log off, log on. Shuffle. Log off, log on. (CCP please make this nicer.) An hour later, finally done with that.
Meanwhile most of the corp has logged off. They've done their PI too, and gone to bed.
Check the static... still there, EOL. Well, this is getting vexing. It's been two hours, I should have at least a 50/50 shot that the stupid thing goes away.
One more thing I can do is suck the small amount of near worthless gas from one of the gas sites. This will make it despawn, keeping my pretty system nice and tidy. So, I get in Ventures and go do that. This takes about 20 minutes. OK, site is gone, hurrah.
Check the static... still there. Sigh.
Nothing to do. So, I sit watching the hole on my main, and log in my Jita alt. He spends most of his time in Otela, where there is ice. Maybe there is some here. I pop out: yes indeed. Well, this might even be interesting, because the CFC's Caldari Ice Interdiction is on. I warp over to the ice in my Procurer. Procurers have a huge tank even if fit poorly, and mine is fit well. So I am not very worried about being ganked.
 |
| Tracking the elusive prey |
I mine. I watch the our static wormhole. It stays.
12 minutes pass and my ore hold is full. I warp to station, drop ice, and return. The Goons have pulled Concord, so it is very likely they're coming back. There is one Mack in the ice, two retrievers, and several Procurers including me. The Mack is in my fleet; I warn him that he's probably next. He dismisses my warning saying he's got a 32000 EHP tank. Sure enough, he is next; boom.
I mine a few more cycles. The goons have not pulled Concord; there are 6 squads in the belt. So I am feeling quite safe. I almost pull out my Retriever, but decide it is probably not wise. It's not like I have anything else to do: the static is stubbornly there. So running back and forth to a station to dump ice is no big deal. I start reading EVE blogs to pass the time.
One more gank arrives, killing the last Retriever in the belt. OK, I had not expected that. Very wasteful -- six of them will have only gotten off a few seconds of fire.
It's after midnight. I have stayed on longer than I would otherwise because I want to see the Goons in action. But now the belt is down just three of us, and all in Procurers. It's not much of a target. I check the timestamp on the bookmark for the static. 01:08. And now is 4:31. Time to give up. Good night, accursed wormhole.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Farming Sleepers in C4: Not Very Valuable
My corp originally chose C4 to occupy because we wanted to run C3 sites. We probably would have gone with a C2/C4 (a C2 system w/ C4 static), but the first system we found that we liked was a C4/C3. So we bought it, and moved in.
At the time the C4 sites seemed difficult. We were using a pure Tengu fleet, and in C4 many of the sleeper waves appear 100km or more from the warp-in point. This is not a big problem for sleeper frigates and cruisers: they come to you quickly enough. But it is a problem for the battleships, which do not come very fast and many of which want to stay at very long range. You end up having to go to them.
For a while we ran primarily C3 sites. But then we got the idea that using cruise missiles and battleships, we could run C4s efficiently. And it is quite lucrative -- much better ISK/hour than C3 sites. We have gradually upgraded our pilots and our fleet so that by now we can run C4s fairly routinely.
There is a downside of running C4s, though, for us: they are finite. This is our home system, so unlike the case for C3s, we cannot just roll our wormhole until we find a system packed with anomalies.
I have read about people farming sites in high-end wspace (C5 and C6). The idea here is to exploit the capital escalations, which evidently do get reset at downtime. As I read it, the idea was that you run the site including full capital escalations (which get 28 sleeper battleships). You kill everything except one ship, ideally some worthless frigate. Then you bring in your salvager and salvage. While it is there, you keep it alive either with remote reps or via jamming out the sleeper. Then you wait until downtime, and voila! You can run the site again. Sites remain around for three downtimes after the day in which they were first instantiated (i.e. first flown to). So you can run each site on four different days, getting more or less four times the income.
Now, in C4 there is no capital escalation. So, that aspect of what I had read about we cannot exploit. But what about the site itself? My memory was unclear as to whether it regenerated. Maybe the whole site regenerated! (This is not actually so, as I found out; read on.) So on that basis, we decided to see if we could farm our C4s.
Since last year, I am fairly sure the despawn behavior of anoms and sig sites has been changed. They used to despawn only after you killed the last enemy; now they despawn... at some point before that. I don't know, and there is no indication of this on Eve Survival. So that's another thing I wanted to find out. We ran some sites a very deliberately.
First things first: we zipped up our system.
The first night of testing we had only one site type, Frontier Barracks, which we conveniently had four of. The first site, we killed all but one sleeper frigate. As we killed each ship we watched the scanner to see which one seemed to trigger the despawn. The trigger turned out to be the second of two sleeper battleships in the last wave (the Sleepless Preservers). Anyway, we salvaged the first site just after running it, using a Blackbird to jam out the frig, which one Blackbird did quite easily.
After we left, the site despawned, taking the frig with it. Oh well.
Then we ran the other three sites, leaving the last Sleepless Preserver alive. These, we did not salvage immediately. When we finished all three, we came back to salvage. First in was a Tengu to draw fire initially. We brought two Blackbirds running 6 well-amped jammers each; this was enough jamming. Even when we missed all jams once, the battleship did not have the firepower to kill a Blackbird in the few seconds of fire it got before the inevitable next jam hit.
As of the next morning, the three sites were still there. But I did not think to fly there to see what showed up. Then during the day while I was working, someone ran them. I saw this, helpless, on staticmapper. Strangely, the number of kills was 12: 1 then 6 then 5. When I got home, I checked and all three sites were gone. So I could tell the whole sites had not respawned. But what did happen?
After some googling, I found some useful info on the forums. Here is what one Jack Miton, who seems to know a lot about wspace, said in 2012:
We left the site for another day until downtime, and this morning checked it again. No change. This is what we expected, but still it was worth looking on the offchance that we'd get more regeneration.
So, it appears that we cannot get very much by farming C4 anoms. In the case of Frontier Barracks, one can get one extra sleeper battleship per day, for three total. However, doing so is fussy (you have to bring in jammers or logi to salvage). And if you get your sites ninjaed, you may even lose (as we did the first time). So it hardly seems worth doing. Most other C4 sites are even worse. However, there is one that may be worth milking: Frontier Command Post. There is a group of three battleships in the final wave. If this group is the trigger, then one should be able to farm this for two battleships per day.
I still do not know for sure what happened the day after our first test. According to what I know now, there should have been 6 sleeper battleships there. My guess is that there was a small gas site, which the interlopers harvested fully, sleepers and gas, so that we had nothing to see.
At the time the C4 sites seemed difficult. We were using a pure Tengu fleet, and in C4 many of the sleeper waves appear 100km or more from the warp-in point. This is not a big problem for sleeper frigates and cruisers: they come to you quickly enough. But it is a problem for the battleships, which do not come very fast and many of which want to stay at very long range. You end up having to go to them.
For a while we ran primarily C3 sites. But then we got the idea that using cruise missiles and battleships, we could run C4s efficiently. And it is quite lucrative -- much better ISK/hour than C3 sites. We have gradually upgraded our pilots and our fleet so that by now we can run C4s fairly routinely.
There is a downside of running C4s, though, for us: they are finite. This is our home system, so unlike the case for C3s, we cannot just roll our wormhole until we find a system packed with anomalies.
I have read about people farming sites in high-end wspace (C5 and C6). The idea here is to exploit the capital escalations, which evidently do get reset at downtime. As I read it, the idea was that you run the site including full capital escalations (which get 28 sleeper battleships). You kill everything except one ship, ideally some worthless frigate. Then you bring in your salvager and salvage. While it is there, you keep it alive either with remote reps or via jamming out the sleeper. Then you wait until downtime, and voila! You can run the site again. Sites remain around for three downtimes after the day in which they were first instantiated (i.e. first flown to). So you can run each site on four different days, getting more or less four times the income.
Now, in C4 there is no capital escalation. So, that aspect of what I had read about we cannot exploit. But what about the site itself? My memory was unclear as to whether it regenerated. Maybe the whole site regenerated! (This is not actually so, as I found out; read on.) So on that basis, we decided to see if we could farm our C4s.
Since last year, I am fairly sure the despawn behavior of anoms and sig sites has been changed. They used to despawn only after you killed the last enemy; now they despawn... at some point before that. I don't know, and there is no indication of this on Eve Survival. So that's another thing I wanted to find out. We ran some sites a very deliberately.
First things first: we zipped up our system.
 |
| Sleepless Preserver in its native habitat |
After we left, the site despawned, taking the frig with it. Oh well.
Then we ran the other three sites, leaving the last Sleepless Preserver alive. These, we did not salvage immediately. When we finished all three, we came back to salvage. First in was a Tengu to draw fire initially. We brought two Blackbirds running 6 well-amped jammers each; this was enough jamming. Even when we missed all jams once, the battleship did not have the firepower to kill a Blackbird in the few seconds of fire it got before the inevitable next jam hit.
As of the next morning, the three sites were still there. But I did not think to fly there to see what showed up. Then during the day while I was working, someone ran them. I saw this, helpless, on staticmapper. Strangely, the number of kills was 12: 1 then 6 then 5. When I got home, I checked and all three sites were gone. So I could tell the whole sites had not respawned. But what did happen?
After some googling, I found some useful info on the forums. Here is what one Jack Miton, who seems to know a lot about wspace, said in 2012:
as for the respawn mechanics, the only things that respawn are the triggers.The next day we got another Frontier Barracks, and again we left the last sleeper battleship. The next morning we checked, and indeed things worked as Miton suggests. The group of two sleeper battleships which are the triggers regenerated. Nothing else did.
ie: if a site starts with 3 turrets, 5 frigs, 5 cruisers with cruisers being the trigger and you keep it up with 1 cruiser, after DT there will be 5 cruisers at it. frigs and turrets wont respwan.
this is not totally acurate on some sites, for example in a c6 core citadel the trigger is the warden BS but the keeper BS will also respawn.
We left the site for another day until downtime, and this morning checked it again. No change. This is what we expected, but still it was worth looking on the offchance that we'd get more regeneration.
So, it appears that we cannot get very much by farming C4 anoms. In the case of Frontier Barracks, one can get one extra sleeper battleship per day, for three total. However, doing so is fussy (you have to bring in jammers or logi to salvage). And if you get your sites ninjaed, you may even lose (as we did the first time). So it hardly seems worth doing. Most other C4 sites are even worse. However, there is one that may be worth milking: Frontier Command Post. There is a group of three battleships in the final wave. If this group is the trigger, then one should be able to farm this for two battleships per day.
I still do not know for sure what happened the day after our first test. According to what I know now, there should have been 6 sleeper battleships there. My guess is that there was a small gas site, which the interlopers harvested fully, sleepers and gas, so that we had nothing to see.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
The Various Uses of Wspace
I was looking for information on farming sleepers in C4 (not easy to find). But I did find a good discussion of the uses of various levels of wormhole space. C1 is different from C2 is different from C3, etc. Each level has its own flavor. The main post is good, but don't miss the comment by wokyr which is excellent (I learned a few things). I've been thinking about doing a post like this and still might, but until then, consider it included.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Sovereignty and Ownership in EVE
In comments, Penny mentions her attitude about owning systems in wspace:
As I got in to a discussion before, it's not that we think we own the system, but more that trying to share a system with neutrals in a class of space where NBSI is pretty standard is awkward, to say the least.(We discussed this some at tigerears back before I moved into my current system. Here is the post.) It is certainly true that sharing with strict NBSI is hard. But just setting each other blue is not difficult. But that's not what interested me here: it was the reminder of our earlier disagreement.
Me, I think I own my system. I own it in the one sense that matters: force. I have a big advantage in force projection in my system, because I already have ships there. Further, I am probably willing to spend more to safeguard my system than anyone else is to take it. I have a multi billion ISK investment, and nobody else does. Part of the way I achieve superior force is about obscurity: there are plenty of people that could take my system, but they'd have to find it first, and that's not easy. And even if they did, they would not gain anything because they don't want to live deep in wspace. Part of it is the difficulty in getting in forces: a C4 system will allow in only about 20 battleships (100m kg each) or 120 battlecruisers (14m kg per).
Another aspect of ownership in lower wspace is capitals. In C1 through C4, no wormhole can pass even a single capital ship. The only way to get a capital ship in these systems is to build it there. If you live in a system and have built a capital or two, you have a massive advantage over anyone attempting to displace you. With a dreadnaught you can reinforce their tower in an hour using one pilot. They can reinforce yours only after hours of boring structure-shooting with 20 pilots. With a carrier you repair your tower and/or POS parts in an hour. The enemy would have to sit out in repping cruisers for hours. Force economy means more effective force.
Penny is right, though, inasmuch as she construes "owning" to mean something more than occupation. There is no registry of wormhole ownership. (It is interesting to think about trying to implement one.) If you leave a wspace system, de facto you no longer own it.
Personally, I find the way nullsec "sovereignty" works completely upside down and wrong. In EVE, "sovereignty" is an actual attribute that is held in their database, known universally for every system. To get it, you have to put up special structures. Once these are online, you get "sovereignty", and its benefits, even if you never lift a finger to fight in that system. Note that I am scare-quoting "sovereignty" here exactly to highlight the artificial nature of what you are getting. Real sovereignty is the power of ultimate decision. Real sovereignty is a function of power, which flows from the barrel of a gun. In EVE sovereignty is a system attribute that allows you certain privileges, particularly lower fuel costs and to be allowed to anchor certain improvements.
In the real world, sovereignty is superior force. It is not mediated by any structures. When the US Army occupies a country, it does not immediately put up special statues to claim the area, nor are there special statues that it has to tear down. Well, unless you want to analogize armies themselves to special statues, in which case the analogy kind of goes through. But of course we already have armies in EVE -- fleets.
Wspace shows the way sovereignty ought to work. You are sovereign if you have superior force.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Stealing from Killers of Pirates
It's late in the evening. The corp as a group has just been running sites in C3a, but we're done now, and everyone has logged off except me. This particular C3 has no towers at all in it, dead or alive. So it is a decent candidate for sale. I jump my babysitter alt in, and immediately he sees a Imicus on dscan. Before we ran sites, we scanned down all the wormholes, so I know the
guy must have come either from the lowsec static, or from a nullsec
wormhole. I expect it is the lowsec, and I point the dscan there. Meanwhile, the Imicus deploys probes and cloaks. But I can see his probes on dscan so I know where he came in.
Hmm. Maybe it is time to be a monster for a while. With Von, I jump into Artemis, my cloaky Tengu, and warp out to the wormhole to C3a. I jump, and move off the hole as fast as I can. But before I do this, I see the probes vanish on dscan, and then a flash of the Imicus again. It looks like he left the system. I don't know why.
Hopeful, I warp over to the lowsec static and orbit it at 3000. Maybe he will come back in, and even be polarized. But, nothing happens for a few minutes. Well, maybe he is on the other side... it's lowsec, but worth a look.
I pop through, and there is nobody close to the hole. There are four pilots in system, though. A dscan shows something interesting: there are some Angel wrecks, and 10 Hobgoblin IIs, as well as a Drake and Myrmidon. The system has 5 signatures. My guess is the Drake and Myrmidon are at a POS or will be soon, and the hobs are abandoned somewhere. Well, I can look for them with Artemis. Or I can get a much cheaper ship. I like the latter option better, since there may be exploration sites in among those signatures.
I head back into wspace to my POS and reship into my exploration Buzzard. My plan is to head for null, but I want to get those drones I saw out, and maybe do the lowsec system sites if there are any. Since I will be looking for drones, I load combat probes while crossing C3a.
I exit back into lowsec. Well, well. Now there are 6 pilots in local. I quickly fire probes and cloak, then start looking for sigs and drones. The drones are gone from dscan. This surprises me a little; I guess the Drake and/or Myrm were using them, although why the Myrmidon was using hob IIs I don't know. There are several combat sites which I ignore. Local drops to four people. Next, a wormhole. Ignore. Local drops to three.
Now I find a gas site. Ordinarily I ignore these, but I am not feeling very ambitious tonight, so maybe I will mine some gas. (Some of the gas in lowsec, I have discovered, is very high priced indeed. Much better than any of the wspace gas one gets in C4 or lower.) I take the extra scan to resolve the signature. It's an Angel Gas Processing site, which is a mixed combat and hacking site. First you have to kill a bunch of guards, and then bring in a codebreaker. So it is of little use to me.
As I am moving probes to scan for the last site, local drops to one. Just me. Hmm, I guess maybe the locals did not like seeing combat probes.
With just me here, things are different. Maybe I can run the gas site, using a PVE Tengu. I will have to look up this site on eve-survival, but first let me warp over there at 100km, to scope it out and so I can check what is actually there against what eve-survival says.
I warp in at 100. All the guards are dead. Yellow wrecks are everywhere, all looted except one frigate wreck. But the scatter containers are intact! I look at local again to be sure: still just me. Yeah. I am going in.
To be precise, actually I am going out first. The nearest container is about 100km from me, and the furthest is 120km. I turn around and microwarp 30 km so that I can warp to the furthest one. Now I lock it and cargo scan it. It's got an implant! Ooh. I start cracking. The minigame level is low intermediate: 50/20 firewalls only it appears. Even with my medium hacking skill those are almost certain. I find the core. After a few seconds learning what kind of mini container I want at neural-boost, I am ready. (I want Equipment mini containers.) I trigger the loot explosion. It is pretty small and I easily get the implant. How much? 20m? Er... no, not really. 300k. Blah.
Now I scan and go hack the next container. It has a gas harvester I, which is worth at least a million ISK. So that's worth hacking.
The third container has the real prize: a Nanite Control skillbook. This, it turns out, is worth something like 300m ISK. Oh yeah. I get another gas harvester from the last can.
300m richer I decide to head back home. Thank you my unknown Drake and/or Myrmidon benefactor.
I need to get busy actually selling that C3 system. So I look for comparables on wormholesales.com. But you know, C3s with lowsec, and moderately good PI, just are not that valuable. I find better holes selling for 200m. Is that worth the hassle, and tying up my babysitter? I don't know so. Maybe it is the nanite skillbook talking, but I think I can do better. I bring my babysitter back home.
Hmm. Maybe it is time to be a monster for a while. With Von, I jump into Artemis, my cloaky Tengu, and warp out to the wormhole to C3a. I jump, and move off the hole as fast as I can. But before I do this, I see the probes vanish on dscan, and then a flash of the Imicus again. It looks like he left the system. I don't know why.
Hopeful, I warp over to the lowsec static and orbit it at 3000. Maybe he will come back in, and even be polarized. But, nothing happens for a few minutes. Well, maybe he is on the other side... it's lowsec, but worth a look.
I pop through, and there is nobody close to the hole. There are four pilots in system, though. A dscan shows something interesting: there are some Angel wrecks, and 10 Hobgoblin IIs, as well as a Drake and Myrmidon. The system has 5 signatures. My guess is the Drake and Myrmidon are at a POS or will be soon, and the hobs are abandoned somewhere. Well, I can look for them with Artemis. Or I can get a much cheaper ship. I like the latter option better, since there may be exploration sites in among those signatures.
I head back into wspace to my POS and reship into my exploration Buzzard. My plan is to head for null, but I want to get those drones I saw out, and maybe do the lowsec system sites if there are any. Since I will be looking for drones, I load combat probes while crossing C3a.
I exit back into lowsec. Well, well. Now there are 6 pilots in local. I quickly fire probes and cloak, then start looking for sigs and drones. The drones are gone from dscan. This surprises me a little; I guess the Drake and/or Myrm were using them, although why the Myrmidon was using hob IIs I don't know. There are several combat sites which I ignore. Local drops to four people. Next, a wormhole. Ignore. Local drops to three.
Now I find a gas site. Ordinarily I ignore these, but I am not feeling very ambitious tonight, so maybe I will mine some gas. (Some of the gas in lowsec, I have discovered, is very high priced indeed. Much better than any of the wspace gas one gets in C4 or lower.) I take the extra scan to resolve the signature. It's an Angel Gas Processing site, which is a mixed combat and hacking site. First you have to kill a bunch of guards, and then bring in a codebreaker. So it is of little use to me.
As I am moving probes to scan for the last site, local drops to one. Just me. Hmm, I guess maybe the locals did not like seeing combat probes.
With just me here, things are different. Maybe I can run the gas site, using a PVE Tengu. I will have to look up this site on eve-survival, but first let me warp over there at 100km, to scope it out and so I can check what is actually there against what eve-survival says.
I warp in at 100. All the guards are dead. Yellow wrecks are everywhere, all looted except one frigate wreck. But the scatter containers are intact! I look at local again to be sure: still just me. Yeah. I am going in.
 |
| Angel Gas Processing Site, fully looted |
Now I scan and go hack the next container. It has a gas harvester I, which is worth at least a million ISK. So that's worth hacking.
The third container has the real prize: a Nanite Control skillbook. This, it turns out, is worth something like 300m ISK. Oh yeah. I get another gas harvester from the last can.
300m richer I decide to head back home. Thank you my unknown Drake and/or Myrmidon benefactor.
I need to get busy actually selling that C3 system. So I look for comparables on wormholesales.com. But you know, C3s with lowsec, and moderately good PI, just are not that valuable. I find better holes selling for 200m. Is that worth the hassle, and tying up my babysitter? I don't know so. Maybe it is the nanite skillbook talking, but I think I can do better. I bring my babysitter back home.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
A Trap is Laid
Previously, I discovered an alien POS in our system, and watched one of its owners kill sleepers. My corp planned to attack the POS, and we blew it up. Now the site is clean.
We could stop now and call it a day. The Russians in our system would probably log in, discover the absence of their POS, and elect to leave. But I don't really want to leave that decision to them. I want to kill them and ideally pod them, so that they cannot scan out and let others back in. To do that, I have planned out a "bug zapper".
A bug zapper is a POS designed to kill people who log in at the site of a POS that used to be theirs. I got the idea from this article on The Mittani about a wormhole corp smashing another one. Quoting the author:
Anyway, way back when we planned this operation I brought in a special load of POS parts, and this is what it was for. To set up my bug zapper. Now I do just that. This link that shows the design of my bug zapper, at the very handy IGB POS Planner. Here's what it looked like from nearby.
Setting up a POS takes a while, but nobody logs in while I am doing it. Finally it is done. By this time it is about 11:00pm, and there is some chance that an early-morning Russian might log in. (I observed one of them log in at 11:30 to kill sleepers one day.) So, I get in my cloaky Tengu and sit near the bug zapper. I don't want to miss podding anyone who does log in and get killed, not to mention whoring on the killmail. But an hour passes, and no Russians log in. Finally I say to hell with it, move out to a perch 150km from the bugzapper POS, and log out.
The next morning I log in hopefully, and check staticmapper for kills, but there are none. Rats. It is possible that the Russians did not log out at their POS. Certainly logging out at one's POS is highly convenient, and I mostly do it myself. But my POS is a large dickstar, and it is stronted. I am pretty sure I observed the Russians log out there myself, over the weekend. So I am still hopeful. But I have to go to work.
Some time after lunch at work I get a message from one of my corpies: he has looked at dotlan, and two kills and two podkills have happened in the past few hours. Oh yeah!
Here are the kills: a Noctis and a PVE Tengu. Ouch. The podkills suggest that the guy had no way to scan out, and had to suicide. I do wonder why he logged in with the Tengu after the Noctis died. My guess is that he thought the Tengu could tank the bugzapper, which was true except that I onlined a neuting module for just this reason. Mwahahahaha.
A bit later, my buddy notices that there have been two more kills and podkills in our system, within the next hour after the first two. What happened there, I don't know. My best guess is that the "Russians" were actually one guy, who had brought in four characters on two accounts. Either he could not scan out on any of his characters in the ship they logged out in (which indicates very poor preparation), or maybe he simply did not want to take the time, preferring the pod express.
We could stop now and call it a day. The Russians in our system would probably log in, discover the absence of their POS, and elect to leave. But I don't really want to leave that decision to them. I want to kill them and ideally pod them, so that they cannot scan out and let others back in. To do that, I have planned out a "bug zapper".
A bug zapper is a POS designed to kill people who log in at the site of a POS that used to be theirs. I got the idea from this article on The Mittani about a wormhole corp smashing another one. Quoting the author:
For those unfamiliar with the concept, bugzapper towers can be created by onlining a tower but never entering a password. This tactic keeps the tower from creating a forcefield, yet still allows you to anchor and online mods. Pilots logging in will not bounce off the non-existent forcefield, but will instead be gunned down by the POS. Bubbles were, of course, anchored around the towers...A bugzapper is just like a normal tower, except it has no force field. Because it lacks a force field, people who have logged off in that spot will warp right on it. You put warp bubbles around it to keep the "bugs" from warping off; there is a special rule on warp bubbles that if you are logging in, you ignore them (and thus warp right through and/or into them). Then, assuming the bugzapping POS has weapons, it will lock them and hopefully kill them. POSes cannot lock anything too quickly, taking perhaps 20 or 30 seconds. Once the POS has locked, the victim will have almost no chance assuming you've got him warp scrambled, webbed heavily, neuted, and have decent DPS.
Anyway, way back when we planned this operation I brought in a special load of POS parts, and this is what it was for. To set up my bug zapper. Now I do just that. This link that shows the design of my bug zapper, at the very handy IGB POS Planner. Here's what it looked like from nearby.
 |
| Hey, why is our force field off center? |
Setting up a POS takes a while, but nobody logs in while I am doing it. Finally it is done. By this time it is about 11:00pm, and there is some chance that an early-morning Russian might log in. (I observed one of them log in at 11:30 to kill sleepers one day.) So, I get in my cloaky Tengu and sit near the bug zapper. I don't want to miss podding anyone who does log in and get killed, not to mention whoring on the killmail. But an hour passes, and no Russians log in. Finally I say to hell with it, move out to a perch 150km from the bugzapper POS, and log out.
The next morning I log in hopefully, and check staticmapper for kills, but there are none. Rats. It is possible that the Russians did not log out at their POS. Certainly logging out at one's POS is highly convenient, and I mostly do it myself. But my POS is a large dickstar, and it is stronted. I am pretty sure I observed the Russians log out there myself, over the weekend. So I am still hopeful. But I have to go to work.
Some time after lunch at work I get a message from one of my corpies: he has looked at dotlan, and two kills and two podkills have happened in the past few hours. Oh yeah!Here are the kills: a Noctis and a PVE Tengu. Ouch. The podkills suggest that the guy had no way to scan out, and had to suicide. I do wonder why he logged in with the Tengu after the Noctis died. My guess is that he thought the Tengu could tank the bugzapper, which was true except that I onlined a neuting module for just this reason. Mwahahahaha.
A bit later, my buddy notices that there have been two more kills and podkills in our system, within the next hour after the first two. What happened there, I don't know. My best guess is that the "Russians" were actually one guy, who had brought in four characters on two accounts. Either he could not scan out on any of his characters in the ship they logged out in (which indicates very poor preparation), or maybe he simply did not want to take the time, preferring the pod express.
Friday, August 9, 2013
Bashing a POS
Tuesday night is here. Since Friday, we've been involuntarily sharing our system with a Russian interloper who set up a small POS. Diplomatic outreach has failed. We've planned an attack. It's time to smash. Our plan is to reinforce the POS tonight, and then see when it comes out. After that we may have to fight to take it down, or perhaps the enemy will abandon it voluntarily. It may come out of reinforced when we are at work, and then we'll have to bash it again. This process could iterate several times. That's one reason why I wanted massively more torpedoes than we'll need tonight.
I am on by 7:30. There are only two signatures in the system, a gas site and our static. A couple of us close our static. Now we are sealed off from the rest of EVE. All we have to do is keep an eye on the discovery scanner and we will be perfectly safe, except for people who are already in our system. And we're pretty sure there are none of those, other than the probably sleeping Russians.
My corpies assemble promptly at 8:00pm. This should be about 4:00am in Moscow, so we do not expect to see any enemy. Most of us are flying Ravens with a full load of nova torpedoes and Valkyries: these will hit the small POS (which is Caldari) in its explosive resistance hole.
By 8:10 we are ready to go. We warp to the enemy POS, lock its one defense, an ECM. (This was onlined over the weekend, along with a corporate hangar array, a personal hangar array, and a ship maintenance array.)
The drones swarm the ECM, and our torpedoes smash into it. The shields drop quickly, but the armor is considerable. We have perhaps 4000 DPS total; the thing has 1.5 million hitpoints of armor. To disable it takes about 5 minutes. Fortunately, it never jams any of us. Evidently the enemy has not configured their POS's "when to attack" settings very well. (I retrospect I think we probably did not need to shoot it.)
Now we attack the tower. And -- oops. First problem: normal drones cannot attack towers. The force field prevents them from getting close enough. Welp. Next time, we bring sentries. Lesson learned. Meanwhile, we apply a bit less damage than we hoped. We each lose about 100 DPS out of 800. So, it will be a bit longer. We have to inflict is 3/4 of 12.5m hitpoints. We settle in for the grim and boring structure grind.
We have about 3500 DPS or so. The grind should take a bit less than an hour. I give a monologue on what reinforced mode is and the game-design reason for it. This kills maybe 3 minutes. There's a lot of dead air. I can see why people watch movies in operations like this. Some guys talk golf. We discuss more fully our course of action after we have reinforced the thing. Will the enemy corp (which is several times our size) do anything? The POS appears to be a "wildcat" operation, probably just one guy's alts, but that is hardly sure. It may be a base for an invasion. And in any case a POS defense would be content for the other corp. I figure I can always hire mercenaries if necessary to help squish it. Obviously at this point we are not going to coexist.
Now the tower is down to 30%. And 29%. We perk up a little. I have seen a reinforced tower a lot of times, but I have never reinforced one before. Will there be some spiffy graphic? Probably not, but I want to see it anyway. 28, 27, 26. OK, now it is at 25%. Shouldn't we see something? Yes, I explain, a reinforced tower is visible in the entire system. It is very obvious. We're probably just at 25.9 and it requires 25.0 or something.
Then it goes to 24.
Allll riiight! The enemy has neglected to stront their tower! This means it will not go into reinforced mode; we can kill it tonight; now!
We still have about 20 minutes before killing it. The grind continues, but I am much happier in the knowledge that we won't have to repeat it again and again.
We discuss what to do with the few POS parts. We'll have to kill the ECM we disabled earlier. But what about the other three parts? The internet is at hand. It seems that if we blow up the corporate hangar array, and probably also the personal hangar array, there is the normal 50% chance to drop. If we don't hurt them, we can scoop them, but then 100% of their contents are destroyed. Since we might want a personal hangar array, we decide to spare it and scoop it. We don't need another CHA, so we decide to blow it up and hope for goodies. The internet is not completely helpful: can we potentially get ships out of a ship maintenance array? We think maybe yes, and anyway we don't need another, so we'll blow it up and hope a blingy missioning Tengu pops out.
Now we are through the shields, and there is another million armor and structure. These go fast enough, and... boom! A very big explosion.
Now we bring over an Iteron V, and it first scoops a giant secure container that was here. This is, as expected, the enemy's loot can, and we score about 100m in various sleeper loot. The Iteron also grabs the personal hangar array. We blow up the other structures as planned, but nothing drops from any of them.
The site is now clean. But I am not done. I have a nasty plan.
To be continued...
I am on by 7:30. There are only two signatures in the system, a gas site and our static. A couple of us close our static. Now we are sealed off from the rest of EVE. All we have to do is keep an eye on the discovery scanner and we will be perfectly safe, except for people who are already in our system. And we're pretty sure there are none of those, other than the probably sleeping Russians.
My corpies assemble promptly at 8:00pm. This should be about 4:00am in Moscow, so we do not expect to see any enemy. Most of us are flying Ravens with a full load of nova torpedoes and Valkyries: these will hit the small POS (which is Caldari) in its explosive resistance hole.
By 8:10 we are ready to go. We warp to the enemy POS, lock its one defense, an ECM. (This was onlined over the weekend, along with a corporate hangar array, a personal hangar array, and a ship maintenance array.)
The drones swarm the ECM, and our torpedoes smash into it. The shields drop quickly, but the armor is considerable. We have perhaps 4000 DPS total; the thing has 1.5 million hitpoints of armor. To disable it takes about 5 minutes. Fortunately, it never jams any of us. Evidently the enemy has not configured their POS's "when to attack" settings very well. (I retrospect I think we probably did not need to shoot it.)
Now we attack the tower. And -- oops. First problem: normal drones cannot attack towers. The force field prevents them from getting close enough. Welp. Next time, we bring sentries. Lesson learned. Meanwhile, we apply a bit less damage than we hoped. We each lose about 100 DPS out of 800. So, it will be a bit longer. We have to inflict is 3/4 of 12.5m hitpoints. We settle in for the grim and boring structure grind.
We have about 3500 DPS or so. The grind should take a bit less than an hour. I give a monologue on what reinforced mode is and the game-design reason for it. This kills maybe 3 minutes. There's a lot of dead air. I can see why people watch movies in operations like this. Some guys talk golf. We discuss more fully our course of action after we have reinforced the thing. Will the enemy corp (which is several times our size) do anything? The POS appears to be a "wildcat" operation, probably just one guy's alts, but that is hardly sure. It may be a base for an invasion. And in any case a POS defense would be content for the other corp. I figure I can always hire mercenaries if necessary to help squish it. Obviously at this point we are not going to coexist.
Now the tower is down to 30%. And 29%. We perk up a little. I have seen a reinforced tower a lot of times, but I have never reinforced one before. Will there be some spiffy graphic? Probably not, but I want to see it anyway. 28, 27, 26. OK, now it is at 25%. Shouldn't we see something? Yes, I explain, a reinforced tower is visible in the entire system. It is very obvious. We're probably just at 25.9 and it requires 25.0 or something.
Then it goes to 24.
Allll riiight! The enemy has neglected to stront their tower! This means it will not go into reinforced mode; we can kill it tonight; now!
We still have about 20 minutes before killing it. The grind continues, but I am much happier in the knowledge that we won't have to repeat it again and again.
We discuss what to do with the few POS parts. We'll have to kill the ECM we disabled earlier. But what about the other three parts? The internet is at hand. It seems that if we blow up the corporate hangar array, and probably also the personal hangar array, there is the normal 50% chance to drop. If we don't hurt them, we can scoop them, but then 100% of their contents are destroyed. Since we might want a personal hangar array, we decide to spare it and scoop it. We don't need another CHA, so we decide to blow it up and hope for goodies. The internet is not completely helpful: can we potentially get ships out of a ship maintenance array? We think maybe yes, and anyway we don't need another, so we'll blow it up and hope a blingy missioning Tengu pops out.
Now we are through the shields, and there is another million armor and structure. These go fast enough, and... boom! A very big explosion.
Now we bring over an Iteron V, and it first scoops a giant secure container that was here. This is, as expected, the enemy's loot can, and we score about 100m in various sleeper loot. The Iteron also grabs the personal hangar array. We blow up the other structures as planned, but nothing drops from any of them.
The site is now clean. But I am not done. I have a nasty plan.
To be continued...
An Attack is Planned
It's Monday. My corpmates are back, and I have had no reply from the CEO of the Russian corp that has ninja'ed a small POS in my system. We are plotting attack.
I don't want to use our expensive PVE ships for this. It is unlikely we will face any fight in our initial POS-bash; but for the followup it is quite likely. I don't want too much exposure.
So, we look at vanilla ships of various sorts in EFT. The enemy tower is a Caldari small; this means it has 50% thermal and 25% kinetic resistance. As such, many kinds of weapons system will not be ideal. We decide to go with Ravens. We are generally missile/Caldari oriented. Ravens can use torpedoes, and these do excellent damage. Also, the damage can be of whatever type is desired. We will be using Nova torpedoes. For drones we have the rare situation where Gallente are not the best: the 50% thermal resistance actually make them the worst. Instead we will use Valkyries.
Monday night, we are lucky and get two connected systems with highsec statics. So we end up with a connection to a system six jumps from Jita. This makes hauling in stuff easy. We haul out the usual stuff, some gas, some sleeper salvage, and lots of PI goods. We haul in four shiny new Ravens, newly bought and fitted. We also haul in enough nova torpedoes to drop a small POS several times over. And skillbooks: nobody has Minmatar Drone Specialization (nor Amarr; we get both). Oh, and some new POS parts. We get the Minmatar skill training and set the time of the POS bash for Tuesday evening. Our evening is the middle of the night in Russia, so it should be safe, we hope.
To be continued...
I don't want to use our expensive PVE ships for this. It is unlikely we will face any fight in our initial POS-bash; but for the followup it is quite likely. I don't want too much exposure.
So, we look at vanilla ships of various sorts in EFT. The enemy tower is a Caldari small; this means it has 50% thermal and 25% kinetic resistance. As such, many kinds of weapons system will not be ideal. We decide to go with Ravens. We are generally missile/Caldari oriented. Ravens can use torpedoes, and these do excellent damage. Also, the damage can be of whatever type is desired. We will be using Nova torpedoes. For drones we have the rare situation where Gallente are not the best: the 50% thermal resistance actually make them the worst. Instead we will use Valkyries.
Monday night, we are lucky and get two connected systems with highsec statics. So we end up with a connection to a system six jumps from Jita. This makes hauling in stuff easy. We haul out the usual stuff, some gas, some sleeper salvage, and lots of PI goods. We haul in four shiny new Ravens, newly bought and fitted. We also haul in enough nova torpedoes to drop a small POS several times over. And skillbooks: nobody has Minmatar Drone Specialization (nor Amarr; we get both). Oh, and some new POS parts. We get the Minmatar skill training and set the time of the POS bash for Tuesday evening. Our evening is the middle of the night in Russia, so it should be safe, we hope.
To be continued...
Thursday, August 8, 2013
A Minor Threat
Previously, I discovered a ninja POS in my system. Checking it out shows that a Russian corporation owns it. Now, I am waiting to hear from the CEO of that corp. Maybe we can work something out. Or I am waiting another day for a couple of my corpies to get back from RL vacation. Then it will be a fight.
Saturday comes, and I am playing in the midday. This is evening in Russia, so I am not too surprised, when I warp out cloaked to look at the alien POS, that there is a ship there. I am rather surprised to see what it is: a Noctis. No wrecks were on dscan, either in my inner system or out here. I check the recent history of my system on staticmapper. There have been no sleeper kills. So, why the Noctis? I dunno. I sit and watch for a while but he is not doing anything. Maybe he has just left himself logged in. This is too boring.
I leave to go explore. First I warp out of range of the alien POS to fire probes. Then I search down the few sigs we have. I find the static wormhole, warp there, and hop through.
Immediately on dscan I can see sleeper wrecks and a Tengu with Cyrillic characters in its name. Well, OK, I guess I know what the Noctis is for. I want to see what his modus operandus is, so start dscanning. Some of the wrecks are out in space somewhere that I cannot get to. But I locate other wrecks and the Tengu in an anomaly. I warp over at 100 for a look, backing off to create a perch. I don't intend to attack him -- that would pretty much guarantee hostility, which I don't want until necessary. But I am curious.
It is slow going, but he finishes the site. He warps off. By this time I have bookmarked all of the anomalies of this type. Will he go do another? It appears no. He disappears from dscan. I keep watching. The Noctis appears. It salvages the site I cannot get to first. I watch this on dscan. I am tempted again to try to gank it, but it's not a good idea diplomatically. So I will just watch. It comes to do the site I am perched at. I watch as it sucks in wrecks. It gets down to three wrecks left and two cans of blue loot, then, strangely, it warps off. Huh?
I dscan. I see it briefly then it disappears. What is going on? Well, I am not above a bit of larceny. This guy should be a bit more careful in my opinion. So I warp over and steal the two cans as well as the blue loot from one wreck. Then I cloak back up and return to my perch.
After about 5 minutes, the Noctis returns. I still don't know what that was about: bathroom break? Anyway, it finishes off the three remaining wrecks and warps, and disappears from dscan. I hope he got the message: wspace is not safe.
To be continued...
Saturday comes, and I am playing in the midday. This is evening in Russia, so I am not too surprised, when I warp out cloaked to look at the alien POS, that there is a ship there. I am rather surprised to see what it is: a Noctis. No wrecks were on dscan, either in my inner system or out here. I check the recent history of my system on staticmapper. There have been no sleeper kills. So, why the Noctis? I dunno. I sit and watch for a while but he is not doing anything. Maybe he has just left himself logged in. This is too boring.
I leave to go explore. First I warp out of range of the alien POS to fire probes. Then I search down the few sigs we have. I find the static wormhole, warp there, and hop through.
Immediately on dscan I can see sleeper wrecks and a Tengu with Cyrillic characters in its name. Well, OK, I guess I know what the Noctis is for. I want to see what his modus operandus is, so start dscanning. Some of the wrecks are out in space somewhere that I cannot get to. But I locate other wrecks and the Tengu in an anomaly. I warp over at 100 for a look, backing off to create a perch. I don't intend to attack him -- that would pretty much guarantee hostility, which I don't want until necessary. But I am curious.
It is slow going, but he finishes the site. He warps off. By this time I have bookmarked all of the anomalies of this type. Will he go do another? It appears no. He disappears from dscan. I keep watching. The Noctis appears. It salvages the site I cannot get to first. I watch this on dscan. I am tempted again to try to gank it, but it's not a good idea diplomatically. So I will just watch. It comes to do the site I am perched at. I watch as it sucks in wrecks. It gets down to three wrecks left and two cans of blue loot, then, strangely, it warps off. Huh?
I dscan. I see it briefly then it disappears. What is going on? Well, I am not above a bit of larceny. This guy should be a bit more careful in my opinion. So I warp over and steal the two cans as well as the blue loot from one wreck. Then I cloak back up and return to my perch.
After about 5 minutes, the Noctis returns. I still don't know what that was about: bathroom break? Anyway, it finishes off the three remaining wrecks and warps, and disappears from dscan. I hope he got the message: wspace is not safe.
To be continued...
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
An Unwelcome Discovery
It's a slow Friday evening. Several of the characters in my corp are on vacation or otherwise not around. So, it's just me on tonight. My market alt ice-mines in The Forge, until the ice runs out. I look at a few market orders. Ho, hum.
Well, what about wspace? Maybe I can go exploring. But first, I think I should do some PI. There are only two signatures in my wspace system, which means that unless something weird has happened (like: someone has connected to my system, instantiated my wormhole, then popped his connection), the wormhole is closed. So, it's a good time to do the dangerous part of PI: trooping around to all those COs moving PI goods. This is part where you sometimes get blown up if unlucky and/or unwary. But you do not get blown up if you are sealed off from the outside universe.
I do my PI. Then I bring in my PI alts and do theirs, too. Finally I log Von Keigai back in. I'll open the static and have a look. Maybe some exploring to finish a rather dull night off.
I warp out to the static wormhole. As I approach, I run a dscan as I habitually do. (Dscanning ahead means you'll be a little less shocked if you drop out of warp and there are ships at the wormhole.) In this case I only ran the scan out of habit, but what is this? There's a ship on scan! Wait! There are a tower and forcefield on scan!
Am I even in my own system? Did I jump already and I forgot it? Minor stroke perhaps? Confusion.
No, I am in my system. I arrive at the wormhole: no ships. I dscan again to be sure; no change to that. I am not going exploring. Someone has invaded my system! There is only one planet in range, and it has only three moons. So I quickly isolate the particular moon and warp over there. Sure enough: there's a new POS here, a small Caldari tower. It's got no defenses at all: no hardeners or other POS parts. Just its force field.
Hmm. Can I kill it? A little research shows: not really. A small tower has 12.5 million shield hitpoints. This one is fresh, so it might not be fully charged, but by myself I cannot do much. Certainly not tonight, and even with the few of us I can assemble tomorrow, I don't relish the idea of multiple-hour POS bashing. I will have to wait for some corpies to get back to assemble a decent POS-bashing force.
Since I know I am not going to act in the next couple days, I write the CEO of the owning corp politely asking him what they are doing. A veiled ultimatum is laid: we must be friends or enemies. Then, my mood spoiled, I log off and go to bed.
While lying there, I realize I did all my PI with an open static.
To be continued...
Well, what about wspace? Maybe I can go exploring. But first, I think I should do some PI. There are only two signatures in my wspace system, which means that unless something weird has happened (like: someone has connected to my system, instantiated my wormhole, then popped his connection), the wormhole is closed. So, it's a good time to do the dangerous part of PI: trooping around to all those COs moving PI goods. This is part where you sometimes get blown up if unlucky and/or unwary. But you do not get blown up if you are sealed off from the outside universe.
I do my PI. Then I bring in my PI alts and do theirs, too. Finally I log Von Keigai back in. I'll open the static and have a look. Maybe some exploring to finish a rather dull night off.
I warp out to the static wormhole. As I approach, I run a dscan as I habitually do. (Dscanning ahead means you'll be a little less shocked if you drop out of warp and there are ships at the wormhole.) In this case I only ran the scan out of habit, but what is this? There's a ship on scan! Wait! There are a tower and forcefield on scan!
Am I even in my own system? Did I jump already and I forgot it? Minor stroke perhaps? Confusion.
No, I am in my system. I arrive at the wormhole: no ships. I dscan again to be sure; no change to that. I am not going exploring. Someone has invaded my system! There is only one planet in range, and it has only three moons. So I quickly isolate the particular moon and warp over there. Sure enough: there's a new POS here, a small Caldari tower. It's got no defenses at all: no hardeners or other POS parts. Just its force field.
Hmm. Can I kill it? A little research shows: not really. A small tower has 12.5 million shield hitpoints. This one is fresh, so it might not be fully charged, but by myself I cannot do much. Certainly not tonight, and even with the few of us I can assemble tomorrow, I don't relish the idea of multiple-hour POS bashing. I will have to wait for some corpies to get back to assemble a decent POS-bashing force.
Since I know I am not going to act in the next couple days, I write the CEO of the owning corp politely asking him what they are doing. A veiled ultimatum is laid: we must be friends or enemies. Then, my mood spoiled, I log off and go to bed.
While lying there, I realize I did all my PI with an open static.
To be continued...
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Some Reasonable Things
The current CSM has an initiative to get ideas for "reasonable" changes from the players. They've taken suggestions and now they have voted on them, with 99 items (a few duplicates makes it more like 96) presented for players to vote on. (Hey, why is my vote necessary? Isn't representing player what the CSM is supposed to be doing? Nevermind.) The instructions for how to vote are in a guest devblog. The CSM have a tool on their own blog facilitate voting.
I am sad that my suggestion did not make it. Grrr, CSM, you suck.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on "reasonable" and my own voting.
First, this should should be a list of small things. Stuff with high bang for the programmer-hour buck. Consider #4: Comprehensive revamp of drone UI? That might be nice, but it is too big.
Second, this is not development; it is refinement. There should be little or no effect on game balance; some of these things (like #73: Add "distress signal" mission in space) are potentially very significant. I am not voting for anything like that. I do make a partial exception here, to vote for changes that (at least in my own fevered mind) we have already been promised by CCP. I.e.: I want to be able to refit T3s in wspace including subsystems. This is a substantial change, but since CCP have already promised it, I feel that voting for it is fine. (#6: Changing T3 subs on POS SMA.) Squeak, squeak; gimme grease.
I am only voting for changes to parts of the game that I use or have used, such that I know at least little about. This is most of the list, of course, but not all. Things like #1: Alliance Bookmarks seem like a good idea, but having never been in an alliance I don't know how important they might be. I do know that the work required to implement something like that is non trivial. So, it does not make my list. I am sure if it is important other people can vote it up.
Finally, I dislike voting for underspecified ideas. For example, #12: reduce jump clone cooldown. "Reduce" could mean to 23 hours or to 2 hours, and those are very different. I did finally vote for this one, hoping that CCP would interpret "reduce" to mean a modest reduction. People play daily, often starting at almost (but not exactly) the same time. Because of this, anything on a 24 hour timer is really much more inconvenient than one on a shorter timer, i.e. 20 hours. Basically, if the average play session is 4 hours, then you want the timer to be 24 - 4 hours. That way, no matter when you clone-jump during a play session, you can jump again at the start of the next session, and make thinking about clone-jumping a part of your login.
Anyway, without further ado, my picks:
22) Status indicator to show you when you're inside a warp bubble.
43) Give the user the option of "auto stacking" inventory in both cargo hold and hangar.
06) Changing t3 subs on POS SMA.
40) Make it possible to fit mods that you don't have the skill for (they go offline).
14) Show drone health even when they are in the drone bay.
15) In addition to 'Log Off' and 'Quit Game', add a button to take you directly to the character selection screen.
46) Fix the pulse of the of the cloak module activation (and similar modules) to a steady, bright glow and then add a bright flash-out if you are decloaked by something.
17) Allow ships to be boarded from a SMA anywhere in POS shields.
07) When an SMA or CHA is destroyed, the contents should drop.
54) Let player to create, save and re-use custom scan probe layouts.
94) Allow directors to remove items from a Personal Hangar Array at a POS.
99) Provide a Fleet Bonus Information Tab to the Fleet Management Interface.
12) Reduce jump clone cool down.
02) Remove pointless extraneous requirements such as having to leave your ship and pause your skill queue before jump cloning can take place. This should be done automatically as part of the clonejump process.
Von Keigai, 22, 43, 06, 40, 14, 15, 46, 17, 07, 54, 94, 99, 12, 02
If you want to ditto my vote, you can just copy the line above, change the character name, and paste it into the voting thread.
I am sad that my suggestion did not make it. Grrr, CSM, you suck.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on "reasonable" and my own voting.
First, this should should be a list of small things. Stuff with high bang for the programmer-hour buck. Consider #4: Comprehensive revamp of drone UI? That might be nice, but it is too big.
Second, this is not development; it is refinement. There should be little or no effect on game balance; some of these things (like #73: Add "distress signal" mission in space) are potentially very significant. I am not voting for anything like that. I do make a partial exception here, to vote for changes that (at least in my own fevered mind) we have already been promised by CCP. I.e.: I want to be able to refit T3s in wspace including subsystems. This is a substantial change, but since CCP have already promised it, I feel that voting for it is fine. (#6: Changing T3 subs on POS SMA.) Squeak, squeak; gimme grease.
I am only voting for changes to parts of the game that I use or have used, such that I know at least little about. This is most of the list, of course, but not all. Things like #1: Alliance Bookmarks seem like a good idea, but having never been in an alliance I don't know how important they might be. I do know that the work required to implement something like that is non trivial. So, it does not make my list. I am sure if it is important other people can vote it up.
Finally, I dislike voting for underspecified ideas. For example, #12: reduce jump clone cooldown. "Reduce" could mean to 23 hours or to 2 hours, and those are very different. I did finally vote for this one, hoping that CCP would interpret "reduce" to mean a modest reduction. People play daily, often starting at almost (but not exactly) the same time. Because of this, anything on a 24 hour timer is really much more inconvenient than one on a shorter timer, i.e. 20 hours. Basically, if the average play session is 4 hours, then you want the timer to be 24 - 4 hours. That way, no matter when you clone-jump during a play session, you can jump again at the start of the next session, and make thinking about clone-jumping a part of your login.
Anyway, without further ado, my picks:
22) Status indicator to show you when you're inside a warp bubble.
43) Give the user the option of "auto stacking" inventory in both cargo hold and hangar.
06) Changing t3 subs on POS SMA.
40) Make it possible to fit mods that you don't have the skill for (they go offline).
14) Show drone health even when they are in the drone bay.
15) In addition to 'Log Off' and 'Quit Game', add a button to take you directly to the character selection screen.
46) Fix the pulse of the of the cloak module activation (and similar modules) to a steady, bright glow and then add a bright flash-out if you are decloaked by something.
17) Allow ships to be boarded from a SMA anywhere in POS shields.
07) When an SMA or CHA is destroyed, the contents should drop.
54) Let player to create, save and re-use custom scan probe layouts.
94) Allow directors to remove items from a Personal Hangar Array at a POS.
99) Provide a Fleet Bonus Information Tab to the Fleet Management Interface.
12) Reduce jump clone cool down.
02) Remove pointless extraneous requirements such as having to leave your ship and pause your skill queue before jump cloning can take place. This should be done automatically as part of the clonejump process.
Von Keigai, 22, 43, 06, 40, 14, 15, 46, 17, 07, 54, 94, 99, 12, 02
If you want to ditto my vote, you can just copy the line above, change the character name, and paste it into the voting thread.
Friday, August 2, 2013
A Trek out of Null
My babysitter alt is stuck way out in nullsec, 6-8QLA. I decide to fly back through null to Jita. It seems like there is a good chance to get killed, seeing as my alt has few skills and a Heron that, while it can cloak, does not have a prop mod. Any bubble camp is going to be a problem for me.
I start out. There are bubbles wrapping the gate out of 6-8QLA. Nobody is there, so, no problem. I cruise through and start jumping.
Long story short: I thought it would be harder. Null is almost completely abandoned.
In the null portion of this trip, I see a not-just-me local in five systems (out of 30). At least one pilot is, like me, travelling (I see him going the other way). Three are solos; there is one system somewhere in the middle with four pilots in it. There is no bubble camp except on the very last system, BWF-ZZ, which borders lowsec. It's got five pilots in it. I approach the exit gate with trepidation, but it turns out to be no problem. There are bubbles set to catch people going gate to gate, but I have made a detour through the inner system where there is no gate. I'm out.
I can see why people talk about "farms and fields" or "sovereignty via use". There's a lot of empty territory there. It reminded me of flying over the American west.
I start out. There are bubbles wrapping the gate out of 6-8QLA. Nobody is there, so, no problem. I cruise through and start jumping.
Long story short: I thought it would be harder. Null is almost completely abandoned.
In the null portion of this trip, I see a not-just-me local in five systems (out of 30). At least one pilot is, like me, travelling (I see him going the other way). Three are solos; there is one system somewhere in the middle with four pilots in it. There is no bubble camp except on the very last system, BWF-ZZ, which borders lowsec. It's got five pilots in it. I approach the exit gate with trepidation, but it turns out to be no problem. There are bubbles set to catch people going gate to gate, but I have made a detour through the inner system where there is no gate. I'm out.
I can see why people talk about "farms and fields" or "sovereignty via use". There's a lot of empty territory there. It reminded me of flying over the American west.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
A Sale Falls Through
So... there I am last night, exploring in lowsec, and have just found a juicy system. Three data sites and one relic!
I receive a convo request. Of course I accept it -- I never don't want to talk. Curiosity always gets the better of me: who is this guy? What's he want with me? How did I get his attention?
I say hi and he states his reason: he has seen my system-for-sale ad at wormholesales.com. Oh! Well, this is great! I've been wanting to sell a wormhole forever. It looks like I have finally succeeded. We negotiate price a bit: he talks me down to 320m, under my condition that we do it soon. In fact, it turns out he wants to do it now. Tonight. I have another 1.5 hours before bed -- so I agree.
I log my babysitter alt, who is sitting at a safespot in the system in question. I start scanning down sigs looking for the N346 static to nullsec. He gets a Taggart representative into our conversation. One of them comes in, and starts briefing us on how it will go. I finish scanning down a wormhole with my alt -- probably the static -- and I prepare to exit. But first I want to make sure I don't see any ships or probes (other than mine) on dscan. I dscan.
Oh, crap. There's a force field. DAMMIT! Someone has occupied "my" wspace system in the few days since I found it. Well, I cannot sell it like that. Failure.
I tell my would-be buyer and Taggart rep, and apologize for wasting their time. Then I fly to the wormhole anyway, since there is no point in my babysitter alt being in here any more. Sigh. It is ~40 jumps to Jita from here.
I think about trying to scan my way back up into wspace to get out more safely. But while I am sure I would eventually find a way, how long it might take is unknown. Another way out would be to abandon my cheap Heron and kill myself. But I am rather curious to see if I can make it out through nullsec. I've a cloak, and not much else. Almost no skills; this alt took a week to train. Not even a prop mod.
I start the trek.
I receive a convo request. Of course I accept it -- I never don't want to talk. Curiosity always gets the better of me: who is this guy? What's he want with me? How did I get his attention?
I say hi and he states his reason: he has seen my system-for-sale ad at wormholesales.com. Oh! Well, this is great! I've been wanting to sell a wormhole forever. It looks like I have finally succeeded. We negotiate price a bit: he talks me down to 320m, under my condition that we do it soon. In fact, it turns out he wants to do it now. Tonight. I have another 1.5 hours before bed -- so I agree.
I log my babysitter alt, who is sitting at a safespot in the system in question. I start scanning down sigs looking for the N346 static to nullsec. He gets a Taggart representative into our conversation. One of them comes in, and starts briefing us on how it will go. I finish scanning down a wormhole with my alt -- probably the static -- and I prepare to exit. But first I want to make sure I don't see any ships or probes (other than mine) on dscan. I dscan.
Oh, crap. There's a force field. DAMMIT! Someone has occupied "my" wspace system in the few days since I found it. Well, I cannot sell it like that. Failure.
I tell my would-be buyer and Taggart rep, and apologize for wasting their time. Then I fly to the wormhole anyway, since there is no point in my babysitter alt being in here any more. Sigh. It is ~40 jumps to Jita from here.
I think about trying to scan my way back up into wspace to get out more safely. But while I am sure I would eventually find a way, how long it might take is unknown. Another way out would be to abandon my cheap Heron and kill myself. But I am rather curious to see if I can make it out through nullsec. I've a cloak, and not much else. Almost no skills; this alt took a week to train. Not even a prop mod.
I start the trek.
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