Odyssey Skill Reminder

Just a quick reminder, although it might me a bit late or irrelevant to you.  Skills for flying a lot of ships are changing come June 4, and you should be ready by doing a few things:

• If you have Destroyers V and Battlecruisers V update your clone to hold about 6-7 million more skill points.
• If you don't have those skill trained, that sucks, but train them as far as you can.
• If you have BC V, train all the racial cruisers to at least III, and inject Command Ships so as to get the racial Command Ship skills receive ranks in the skill (Edited based on comment 5/18/13).
• Look at the links posted further down in this post to see if there are other ships that you can essentially skill into come patch day.

Here is a nice picture that illustrates some of the changes, stolen from a very useful Eve University forum post:

This dev blog has more details.

If you are a player who is fairly well along the way to a lot of T2 ships, command ships, or who remembered to train Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V, but forgot about the other requirements, you should troll through both the posts I linked to make sure you get the most out of the skill changes.  I just double checked everything, and I'm glad I did.  My industry character had a few skills I needed to put in my queue so as to benefit from all the changes.  He will retain the ability to fly an awful lot of ships come Odyssey.  Even if he can't fit any of the weapons that would make them useful...

The most important thing is to get all your racial frigate skills to IV, racial cruisers to III, and Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V. 

The Value of (In)security

I got to reading a bit of the forum thread for the SVT ballot dev blog.  There are some wonderful quotes such as "TEST vote, please ignore."  (I love that.  Sorry TEST.  It's just funny, in a dark sort of way.)  There is the usual tinfoil hat-ery going on, even though null blocs didn't sweep the elections.  There is the important idea that no voting system can represent people who cannot vote.  Most interesting to me is the sentiment that null bloc candidates are bad.  I'm not a null bloc guy, and don't currently want to be one.  But I don't understand the sentiment.

Sharing time:  I've had the fun experience of talking with a wide range of Eve players, with some serious conversations with people from all areas of the game aside from WH space.  But I've dipped into that area enough to know a thing or two about it.  There seem to be a few major types of players.  High sec carebears, in the bad way.  High sec carebears in the "I can't be bothered with that paranoia" camp.  Low sec FW.  Low sec Pirates.  Null players.  Give-no-shits pvpers.

Out of all of these groups, one particular mindset intrigues me.  A particular quote comes to mind.  The context first: On my industrial character I was explaining offhandedly that I was going to have a chat with a Goonswarm player, and I was rather excited to see what was going to happen.  I knew very little about the upcoming conversation aside from broad strokes, and was just interested to hear a new perspective.  The pilot I mentioned this to said "You shouldn't talk to goons."

The player who said this is not a bad player.  In fact he is a great asset, and knows a lot about the game.  But (and I am assuming this) he has bough into the "Null/Goons are Bad" mentality that probably most of the non-goon players have.  Being in a new corp on my industrial character, I have been reintroduced to the high sec mindset that low sec and null are dangerous, and people who live there are bad.  These assumptions blanket a large number of players.  Some rightfully so, some for no good reason I can fathom.  Yes, low sec is more dangerous to a usual resident of high sec than just ignoring the orange and red systems.  But it's not instant death, and low sec can be a shockingly fun place to fly around in, chat in, and generally mess around with.

So where is this going?  In the forum posts on the SVT ballots there was a lot of talk and inference that null bloc candidates would ruin the game for high sec players.  While I think this is categorically false, I think it also shows an interesting lack of perspective.  There is, simply put, a lot of game mechanics that do not work or exist in high sec, or only work in neutered ways.  Without the perspective of low and null sec players, the CSM would be worse!

Here a few things most HS-only players will never or very rarely encounter:  Cynos, Capitals, many POS functions, player-driven industry infrastructure, non-targeted warp disruption, smart bombs, most black ops functionality, the finer points of aggression and crime watch, anything related to sovereignty, bridging, most forms of pvp aside from ganking, POCOs, and many other topics I am forgetting.

Those are huge chunks of the game.  Some of them have real impacts on players who only live in HS, even if they do not realize it.  At this risk of sounding like an elitist or apologist, many of the mechanics I mentioned above also require more planning, investigation, and critically thinking through the mechanics before actually engaging in something, compared to running missions or mining in high sec.  One cannot simply cyno anywhere and hope to survive.  Managing crimewatch is easier than it was, but still requires a certain understanding beyond "Wait for the other guy to shoot first".

I am also confused as to what the alternative would be to a CSM with a healthy dose of null representatives.  All High sec players?  No offense to my empire allies, but that sounds like a bad recipe.  If Eve is to have the conflict and tension that it needs to survive, we need people on the CSM who understand the finer points of what is used to create player conflict, and the mechanics by which that conflict is negotiated.  If no one blew up ships, Eve would become a very lonely,dull, and economically sterile place.  After all, asteroid minerals, salvage, and meta modules gathered in high sec have to be used for something, or those items will lose any real value.  I doubt those NPCs are really helping ship turnover rates in New Eden all that much.

And hey, if all the null sec players bitch and moan about some idea while everyone else is silent tune your ear to understand why the moaning is happening.  CSM 7 had, at my count, at least 50% null candidates.  Not a peep was heard from them against the moon redistribution.  That alone may cause more "strife" for null sec than anything since player sov space was created.  You might even think they supported it...  So for any carebears in high sec who think null candidates are killing the game, null sec CSMs may just have fought for a huge change that will help keep your goods in demand come this June.

PI: The Second Month

In my earlier wrap up of my PI challenge, I noted that I was considering running PI on all three characters on one account.  I did this.  Mainly because I though Mabrick's claims might have a silver lining if I ran it that way. There's more posts over there, you should read them.  He has some interesting views on Eve.

Back to the follow up.  As a reminder, here were the results from the first month.  The key point is that I netted about 134m in profits.

Across three characters on the same account, with 4s in Command Center Upgrades and Planetary Consolidation, I ended up netting this:

Not quite triple the total, but I had to run 2 factory planets.  And 334m isk ain't bad.  A few thoughts on this.

• I didn't even have CCU 4 and IC 4 trained at the outset.  That took about two weeks or so.  So that's lost income.  
• I was also much less serious this time around, and missed more than a few updates by margins of hours or days.  Also failed to move some ECUs when I knew I should have.  That's also money lost. 
• Due to resource imbalances, sometimes I stockpiled, and sometimes I just hauled and sold.  Not sure how that impacted things.

In regards to Mabrick's original and revised estimates of 500m or 300m/month respectively, I think both are possible if you are willing to run all the characters on an account.  With level 4 skills, 300m is more than doable, as evidenced.  500m might be, if you train 5s, pick planets with a bit of luck and wisdom, and pick the right things to produce.

So here it is, with the caveat that you need to use all 3 characters, in no uncertain terms:

Mabrick was right.

There, the crow has been eaten.  Tasted kind of like chicken.  I'm happy to be wrong, in this case.

I'll keep this project running.  I am moving my operations, as I just started up with a new Corp on my industrialist toon, and humping 22 jumps every two days is not fun.  We'll see how the new set of systems I scouted work out.  It was much simpler this time, partly from experience and partly from luck.

*****

In completely unrelated to game news, I just finished my last final in my last class in my masters program. Just have my defense to schedule and complete, and I will be officially done with higher education!  The only way I'll pile it higher and deeper is if someone offers to pay for it next time :).  But it's a crazy moment, I'm too tired to go out and drink, so here's to conclusions and momentous events!

My Little Corner of the Cluster

So ice changes, they are a coming.  Not sure how this is going to shake out.  Jester wrote an interesting take on why it might be a good idea to remove ice from high sec in the long run, and why it's ok for prices to go up.  I disagree.

First there is the problem of POSes.  For small group and industrial groups working in non-null space, the cost and effort of maintaining POSes is not insignifigant, and any real consideration of running one has to balance the cost of fuel against the potential profits from running said POS.  For a medium or large, this is already a bit of a constraint for some players, at least from an initial setup and first few months of run time.  Especially if you live in HS or LS.  In high sec you can only do so much at a POS, and in low sec you have to manage the supply chain of getting the damn blocks to your towers.  You don't have the same intel channels and blue donut protecting you.  You also don't have the same level of juicy targets to distract would-be attackers.

Second, you have the issue of inflation or across the board price increases, and the resulting impact on players who want to do research and invention.  Raise the cost of doing business, and everything else goes up in cost.  This brilliantly follows Malcanis's Law that any changes hurt new players more than old players.  Those who have a POS, an industry chain, and/or an income stream can probably just tweak prices.  For newer players, you have just raised the bar to entry on the POS, via fuel, and many of the income sources for players, by making the ships and modules that facilitate isk making more expensive.  Especially for new players who do not have access (via skills and standings) or money for the missions and ships that can easily print money.  Increased POS costs will result in increased invention costs, which will result in increased T2 costs for hulls and modules.  Overall, this will serve to depress new player ability to engage in PvE or PvP, or at least slow down the process of gearing up and moving on to the next step of the missioning/mining/exploring efficiency equation.

I understand that the price of ice affects many things going on in null and low sec, such as strategic POS placement, null industry (hee hee), cap production, and anything involving jumping ships through cynos.  So by increasing the cost of POSes, you can increase the cost of caps and super caps moving around the cluster.  This second thing may be good, I'm not sure.  But if you want to make cynos more expensive, maybe the fuel for cynos and the fuel for POSes should be two different things?

If the goal is to slow down the cynos of veteran players, maybe there is a solution that doesn't make the game comparatively more difficult for those who don't use cynos, or don't care to get involved in the affairs of null or low sec.  That group that doesn't care, they are the largest player base in Eve.  They live in high sec, low sec, and wormholes.  Let's not make the game harder on the majority just to address the minority.

CSM 8 Results, Fanfest, Stuff

10 for 14 on my picks.  Not bad, even if a few were shoe-ins.  What surprised me more was the balance of who got in outside the bloc vote.  Mike Azariah but not Unforgiven Storm?  To me that was the biggest shock.  Nice to see Mike get a seat after so much time, though.  Apparently persistence pays off, even in spite of the Null Bloc ballots.

So this thing called Fanfest happened.  I didn't go.  I followed the news as best I could.  Lots to talk about.  Too much to talk about, really.  So I'll spin out some threads in my head.

Mining

This was at the same time awesome and disappointing.  Removing grav sites to a simple system scan is a small boon to finding the things, but a huge smack in the face to anyone who wants to mine in them, especially in non-HS space.  CCP has essentially turned grav sites into FW plexes, and that will not entice any miners who want to keep their ships for long.  The one nice thing about signature-based sites in LS is the small window of obfuscation they provide for ships that are designed for some sort of PvE instead of PvP.  I imagine that will be going away in mining sites.

Mining needs a mechanics change more than a location change.

As for Ice Mining, I have no real experience or opinions on that, and I'll have to see how it pans out.

Scanning

Hooray, better scanning and probe interfaces!  This is great.  But it confounds the mining change.  By making scanning less painful, did grav sites need to be taken out of that equation?

Not sure about the minigame yet.  I'll need to play with it to see if it is engaging, or just a tedious addition.  I've never been a fan of adding complexity for the sake of complexity, so if this just replaces waiting for archeology scanners to cycle with no other changes, meh.  Will our success at the game change the speed and quality of the jettisoned cargo?  Will it be able to fail out, and remove a site that we currently would profit from?  What is the balance of the loot tables?

Jettisoning random cargo containers and then scrambling to pick them up.  Oy.  Not a fan of this, nor am I a fan of requiring a second account to facilitate the process.  Exploration, in my world, should be made more solo friendly so that players can get into it and have content unshackled from needing lots of people to engage in.  But as we have only seen a partial preview, I will hold final judgement on this as well.  Which leads to...

Exploration

There were new modules on the projector, there were hints at other unrevealed features, and without knowing a lot of this, it's hard to say if Odyssey will be a boon or a curse.  We simply know too little about what hasn't been said to judge the whole expansion yet.  If the changes above are the only changes, then that's pretty poor.  If there are more features coming, I don't know of them and must reserve judgement.

I have always seen exploration as the solo-friendly career, wandering through space, avoiding hostiles, and occasionally scoring some loot.  Thematically, it appeals to me in the lone-wanderer sense.  It seems that most of the mechanics announced are an attempt to make solo exploration (with one account) even harder to do, so I'm torn.  Making non-combat sites require multiple people just seems punitive to me.  Time, experience, and more information will tell if I like this or not.

Rebalancing

Yes, good, let's move along.  Why wouldn't I want to continue having ships made more useful?

Resource Distribution and Outposts

I can't say I have much experience with moons.  I hope the reseeding generates conflict in 0.0, as I much prefer to read about the big wars.  It also keeps 0.0 players doing two things I like: Focusing on 0.0, and blowing up and buying more stuff.  I think both of those are good for the game, so I hope the random reseeding of moons chips away at the blue donut.

As for ores and ice, it will be interesting to see if this has much impact on 0.0 players.  I'm sure some price fluctuations will occur, with low end ores, and therefore high sec mining, suffering to some degree.  It will really depend if the carrot is big enough for nullbears to undock in mining barges.  The upgrading of starbases will only really matter if null sec industry starts getting utilized, so again I think it comes down to trying to convince players to engage in a rather boring gameplay elements.  Again, time will tell!

Graphics Tweaks

Those are always nice.  Not really a game changer, but I do appreciate the game being updated.  It will make gate camps marginally more interesting to watch for the first few weeks, at least.

Overall

Despite there being a lot of info at fanfest, I still feel like I have no idea what Odyssey is about.  Most of the info released was on updates and the big resource redistribution.  This is all good stuff, but none of it really explained the name or theme of the expansion, outside the few tidbits about scanning and running sites.  What was released regarding exploration, in the state released, seems like it won't actually change gameplay all that much, and may in fact reduce some types of gameplay.  Is the odyssey CCP is referring to the final odyssey of miners from low sec?  Is it the odyssey of a few null players into ice belts? The odyssey of cargo containers into space after the hacking minigame?  None of those are particularly exciting odysseys.  No cyclops or lotus eaters or sirens.  Just bored warriors fiddling with the rigging as they sail home.

Forgive me for a little negativity, but so far small hints at player made star gates that won't be released in the expansion don't give any clues as to what is going to actually occur in June.  I was hoping for a solid preview of the expansion, an explanation of the theme and the mechanics that would bring a sense of wandering or searching into Eve beyond what already occurs.  The small hints delivered seem a wasted opportunity to get players excited.

Reasonable Foreseeability

In the wake of Burn Jita 2, I have a few thoughts:

• Who plays Eve, but ignores the metagame?
• How do haulers, one of the most at-risk groups to events like BJ2, manage to ignore it?
• What responsibility does CCP have to players in regards to known events that CCP is not actually causing?

I'm fairly sure the answers to the first two are something like "many" and "through dumb luck".  But the anser to the third is not clear.  One very angry pilot posted the following in part of a draft letter he plans to send CCP, and posted on the forums:

"Lack of capacity in Jita causing a large amount of ships (likely on autopilot) containing vast wealth to be stuck on the gates around the system."

In the larger context of the letter, he was implying CCP's lack of ability to meet player demand for access to a system was responsible for a large number of the deaths in Burn Jita 2.  This made me stop and think for few minutes.  What we have here is a player trying to apply a real world legal principle to Eve online, a game made on a pile of interconnected rules that are constantly gamed for profit and entertainment.  A lot like the real rules in real legal settings.

The principle in question is that of "reasonable foreseeability".  For those unfamiliar, this rule is often applied in cases where negligence of one party results in some sort of harm to another.  For example, if I own a store, and I have flooded floor, and fail to notify customers of this, and then a customer injures themselves by slipping and falling on the floor, I am in some part culpable for the injury, as it was reasonably foreseeable that someone could have an accident, and I failed to warn the customer.  As long as a situation exists where the first party could reasonably anticipate harm based on action or inaction, that party has a duty to inform or reduce the risk.

So did CCP fail to reasonably foresee many of the ships losses in Jita?  On one side, you can argue that any pilot using autopilot to travel is removing blame from CCP.  By letting the computer just move you around and failing to pay attention, you are allowing other players to do what they will in your absence.  You could also argue that no hauler, on autopilot or manual pilot, had a chance to make it through the gate camp because of the mechanics of hauler alignment, the power of alpha strikes, and the normal "after the fact" nature of CONCORD response.

On the other side, you can argue that in normal game functioning, in the vast majority of cases, autopilot will allow you to jump through just about any gate in the game.  System traffic causing gate locks is very rare, and not to be expected by a reasonable player.  CCP knew Burn Jita 2 would happen, so failing to reinforce the nodes for Jita and surrounding systems was negligent, and broke reasonable player expectations.  Further, if CCP knew about BJ2, and given the warning issued last year for Burn Jita, and this year for Luminaire, if no warning was issued this year, CCP ignored a situation they knew would occur.  They failed to act on a reasonably foreseeable harm to many players.

Eve is not a real legal system, nor is it governed by real legal principles.  Most of the rules in Eve relating to player aggression fall far short of the legal principles in many real world legal frameworks.  But we also know many people expect some sore of justice in Eve, and many players are angered when they perceive a loss to be unfair, out of their control, or if a loss can be perceived as CCP's fault.

I don't really blame CCP.  If you can't be bothered to keep up with the metagame in Eve, especially when it relates to large events that are public knowledge, then I have little sympathy.  Eve is known for these sorts of events.  But I'm an Eve blog writer and reader, so I'm in a minority of the player base that chooses to get into the metagame.

What do you think?  Did CCP fail in their duty to act on a reasonably forseeable situation?  Should all the ganked haulers HTFU?  I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts.

Some Closing Thoughts on PI

A few final thoughts of Planetary Interaction before I stop talking about it, at least for a while, are in order:

Characters and Accounts

Something was nagging me after finishing the PI challenge.  Just to be sure about it, I asked Mabrick if his approach was just for one character, or for an entire account.  He told me that his play-style was to focus on one character.  Take that as you will, I'll take it at face value.  But I started playing around with my alts (I have 2 accounts that are active), and found a nice string of systems that I could feed into one final production planet.  So I started building and mapping out logistics.  Turns out you make up for a lot of holes in a production line this way.

I now have 2 characters feeding a PI chain, with a third who will be added to that in a few days.  Already the profits are increasing a fair bit, more than double what I was making per day with the one character.  The logistics are also tighter, but the string of systems is helping with this.  I simply unload everything via contract into one central station, then top off the production planet as needed.  I think a new(ish) player could do well to invest about a month into an approach like this once he or she is about 6 months into the game.  I still hold that missions and ship training are going to be the best bang for my buck from the starting line, but your mileage may vary.  It wont break 500m/month, but it's enough to fund some of my other production efforts.

I already had most of the training out of the way, and by my calcs, and judicious remaps, 3 alts can be at CCU IV and Interplanetary Consolidation IV in about 36 days.  Since this is a second industrial account that also manufactures and trades, it's not a huge deal to alter that training schedule.  I doubt this will happen on my main combat account though.

I plan on posting the results of month 2 in due course.

Customs Offices

I remarked in comments that I really wish there was a way to transfer goods in-system that bypasses the space hauler step.  A commenter noted that this may be fine in HS, but it would break the risk factor in Low/Null/WH space.  I'm not sure I agree.  If you kept the POCO taxes, that would leave the infrastructure pretty much alone.  You also still have to haul out the final products you want to sell, which will invariably require a larger, slower ship.  So I'm not sold that in-system transfer is game breaking.

I would envision this system working like an upgrade to the Command Center or Launch Pad, or a new building.  You spend some extra CPU and PG, maybe pay a fuel or isk or percentage of materials cost, and get the chosen goods routed to another planet in system. This would eliminate one of the more tedious aspects of moving intermediate goods around.  In my daily PI activities, hauling seems to be the biggest chore and I would gladly make some concessions on output to get rid of it.

Logical Routing

The biggest bugbear in PI is the way routing doesn't really work.  I set up 5 new planets this week and redesigned my production planet.  Sure enough, once it went live I had more than a few broken routes.  I though I fixed them, but some Mechanical Parts keep overflowing into one of my Launchpads.  All because you have to manually enter each route, and often have to commit to an intermediary step or two in order to trick the system into validating a given route.  This is silly.

Ideally, once you put schematics into Production Facilities and connect the links, the system should be able to figure out what needs to go where.  You could even prioritize competing facilities by outputs if you had that complex a setup.  I don't buy that this would be too hard to figure out.  If I can get a Minecraft quarry and pipe mod to sort the thousands of items in that game properly with an afternoon of tinkering, the same should be doable in a non-modded game.

Passive v Solo

After a month of running PI, I will not call it passive income.  To my mind, "passive" implies a few clicks here or there and you get isk.  That is not what PI is.  PI is lots of clicks, and lots of hauling, and lots of monitoring.  If you want pure passive income, go farm datacores.  Go find a quiet market hub and do some low scale trading.  Build something and list it on the market, updating prices once a day.

PI requires time and effort, and I think many people consider it passive because it is a solo affair.  But missions and mining are also often solo activities, and one mining run or one mission takes about the same time to complete as a day's PI efforts.  To get anything out of any of those requires attention, and PI is the same.

Setup

PI setup is ridiculously obtuse.  It seems like CCP doesn't want people to be able to figure out how PI actually works, or to be able to see how changes might impact your setup.  PG and CPU are hidden behind clicks, both for your Command Center and for new structures.  Multiple "submit" steps are needed to do the simplest things.  Timers slow down the ability to quickly move things.  Due to routing, you often have to do things is one very specific way or the local union will throw an error message.  Sometimes your ECUs just wipe the settings you had for no reason at all.  The sliders don't update until you release.  Some things have to happen in space, some can happen in station.  All of these things lead to lost time, lost isk, and frustration.

Synergy

Yeah, I hate buzzwords, but I want to talk about PI in the light of other aspects of the game.  PI is good when you only have about 30 minutes to play, want to get into the game, but don't want to fall into the rabbit whole of joining a roam or starting just one more mission. For me, the real beauty of PI is providing a steady source of seed money for other industry.  My main is a FW pilot at the moment.  So he tends to lose isk, and what isk he does make is tied up in modules off in a low sec station or five.  I can get that stuff out to market now and then, but it takes some forethought and some specialized ships, and a fair bit of time.  I'm risk averse with my loot, and a CovOps can't really carry much and still be nigh-impossible to catch.  But there is a silver lining.

I can use my PI seed money to purchase building materials for items that sell for far more than the build materials.  In an odd way, Mabrick's proposition was right.  The 134m I made from the first month of PI has made me roughly 500m isk in the last month, but only because I used it to fund more lucrative operations out in low sec. FW chews through a lot of ships.  Ships need modules and rigs, and I can use PI money to buy the materials to make those modules and rigs.  Throw in some careful location scouting, and I have a trade/PI/stock route that manages to move everything along the circuit in the right order to save trips and make money. It's paying for my ship loss habit, at the very least.

So my final verdict on PI would be that as a standalone mechanic, it's pretty lousy and not a lot of fun.  Combined with some planning and other industrial endeavors, PI can make a decent income.