A Liberating Lack of Local

I am a few weeks into full-time wormhole life.  It's becoming quite enjoyable.  Aside from the fun of popping around and exploding all sorts of things in all sorts of spaces, so far the biggest appeal of wormhole life has been the sheer variety.

Many ways of playing Eve kind of prod you down a path of specialization.  The skill system rewards this.  Focusing intensely on one thing is usually the most effective way to structure a play session.  Usually splitting your attention between various flavors of Eve dilutes the whole experience.  Wormhole space forces variety, though.  The random nature of what sites spawn in the hole has a huge impact on what each day will bring.  Your statics and your K162s might bring treasures hidden inside tentacled Sleeper shells or PvP just waiting to happen.  You never know, and you usually have a few options to choose from.  Logging in and launching probes is the first step to finding out what the game is bringing you on any given day.

In the last few days I have mined gas and ore, cleared sites, avoided bubbles, run PI, and started planning some low-intensity industry, all with a friendly group of players that like helping each other out.  We have flown in every security level besides null, found some great payouts and some lackluster evenings of just chatting while keeping an eye on a combination of daytrippers and WH corps duking it out and hoping to catch us with our probes down.

All of this is not without effort or without risk.  But the balance of activities keeps everything fresh, and the almighty Bob of Anoikis seems to give enough nice payouts to make the whole thing seem worthwhile.  I have to commend the design balance in WH space.  It really is a great way to see a lot more of Eve than whatever rut you may find yourself in.

Greedy Little Pig

As is often the case when learning a new part of Eve, I did many things right the last week and half, but the last thing I did, I did about as wrong as you can.

Wormhole life has been teaching me routines.  Log, scan, bookmark, jump the holes, scan, keep going until I find the exits I want or decide that I have looked far enough.  Check neighbors for towers.  Bookmark them.  Come home.  Use the directional scanner.  Always use the D-scan.

Our rolls have been getting more interesting of late, seemingly escalating up the series of W-Space system classes.  Tonight we rolled a C4, with some company.  The C4 led to a C1.  That C1 had some company too.  It also gave me the high sec opening I was looking for, to bring in a few more ships to use against anyone who came to visit.  So I followed the chain out, fitted up some ships, and started the process of ferrying them in.

I was warping along nicely and jumped into the C1.  Then I landed on the C1 to C4 wormhole and saw a Crow.  Somehow I hit the target button, which was silly.  I immediately jumped, not actually wanting to engage, and landed inside a bubble.  The Crow followed, but I quickly got out and continued on my way.  Then I just sat for a while, figuring I might as well let any polarization timers wear off before grabbing another ship.  For fun I went back to check the bubble, and made some extra warp-ins that would help avoid getting snared.

A bit later everything seemed clear, so I went out, and sure enough the bubble was gone.  Home free!  I got the second to last ship in, and realized that if you fly out in a ship, you have to leave it to bring another in.  So I had the, ahem, brilliant idea to just pod out, because the bubbles were gone, so nothing could go wrong.  Right?  I made it to the C1 to High Sec wormhole and landed inside two bubbles.  There was that damn Crow!  You can probably guess how that one ended.  All in all, the new implants and clone cost less than the ship I would have flown back in, so I'll consider it a decent outcome for a stupid idea.

Turns out my clone was a few jumps from Dodixie.  Time to log off in the trade hub and see what the hole rolls tomorrow.  At least I got to see the new death animation for the first time.

Down the Rabbit Hole

After wrapping up affairs in Black Rise, selling off a lot of assets, and moving others, I am ready for my next step in Eve.  I am moving into a wormhole.  Or I should say I have already moved into a wormhole.  I moved in earlier in the week. This is pretty exciting, and I hope a good number of the tricks and skills I learned in FW will come in useful.  At least I know how to use the directional scanner!

About one week in, I am reminded of this quote:

Reports that say there's -- that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

—Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense

You might not like Donald Rumsfeld, but that is not the point of the quote.  The point is that you never realize the third category of unknown unknowns until it decloaks one top of you, points you, and blows you up.  Or you realize that all of your supplies are suddenly unavailable due to corporate mechanics and a mis-click.

Lots of things have changed.  Moving from stations to POS towers, removing local chat, and suddenly having no idea what might be in the next system over, are now my day to day life in Eve.  I have never spent so much time accomplishing nothing but learning so much about how Eve works as I have in the last few days.  My skill queue has found new and interesting nooks and crannies to fill out.  Previously mysterious parts of the interface have become a new home.  And paranoia has hit a whole new level.

Objects in Space

Note: This is old material, sitting in my draft bin for a long period of time.  The links are also to the old articles that got me thinking.

Why should ships log off when players log off?  This has always interested me in Eve.  My understanding of the current mechanic is that, aside from timers, if you log off while in space, you go into a "warp stasis", where your ship is apparently in a pocket dimension that you mysteriously come back from when you log back in.  From a technical standpoint, I can sort of understand this.  There are already enough objects in space on the server.  But perhaps if you log off while in space, your ship should stay where you left it?

This would fit with the ideas behind stations and POSes.  Stations are where you go to get out of your ship, get other ships, trade, and so on.  Stattions are also the only almost completely safe space in Eve.  No one can blow up your ship while it's docked.  In space where stations do not exist, POSes fulfill this role with hangars and force fields.  Would anyone leave a valuable ship sitting in a WH outside the POS shields?

From a PvP perspective, this would make all sorts of logging strategies effectively worthless, unless you felt safe leaving a ship at deep safes and assuming no one would come find you.  It would eliminate the idea of invisible campers in WH space, assuming the residents actually took the time to use combat probes.  It would also require gate campers to actually show their presence in space instead of hiding in the warp stasis bubble.

As for what happens to a logged out ship floating in space, there are options.  I imagine the status of the ship would be to continue running whatever modules were active when you logged.  So many ships would eventually cap out, then drift once recharged.  The biggest problem I see is the problem of what happens to your velocity.  It would cause problems to have ships just... fly forever.  So maybe you program autopilot AI that says if a plaer is logged out for X minutes, the ship finds the nearest celestial and warps to it.  You could even give people the option of what celestial, or station, and what distance to choose, and if docking is completed.  You'd probably need a default of 1000km from the nearest planet if none of the player options are available to deal with station docking rights and WHs, but there could be a system.

All of this is to say that the whole log off in space mechanic in Eve seems to be a throwback to computing limitations.  In many ways, the log of mechanics still provide some rather big bugbears.  Gate camps and WH squatters come to mind.  Would it hurt to have objects in space become a little more persistent?

Wormhole Fun

I have been having some pretty awesome luck with exploration within a jump of my home system lately.  In the last few days I have found multiple Radar sites with about 20 mil of loot (in my opinion these are the easiest isk/time ratio in the game when the streak is on), I found a nice Sansha site with a 90m mod, and we found a nice little C1 that was inhabited.

I go in, make some safes, scan down the sites and investigate things.  I get on the horn and call in some backup to clear out a few sites.  Jump clones are activated.  We end up with 2 combat sites outside of D-Scan of the people living in this hole.  There are at least 2 guys logged in flying around in a Tengu and Loki.  Fun!  The best WH sites are those you are stealing out from under the "owners".  We make sure the warp bubbles are not on our warp lines to the sites.  We proceed to find out two Drakes can clear sleeper sites, but it takes a while. Apparently Sleeper NPCs know how to use EFT unlike the Empire rats, or they are just using that unreleased T4 stuff.  Who knows, maybe they have a market hub they share with the Jovians?

End of the run, we have cleared the two sites, the owners of this particular whole are not paying attention to us at all.  We were there for about 3 hours, and they never even investigated the sites we cleared.  I think my D-Scan will need a full tune up, because I mashed the crap out of that little button.  A quick trip to Jita later, and the two of us split 110m in sleeper loot, and I have another Tengu hull, albeit less shiny.

I recommend anyone go play in someone else's WH for an afternoon or evening.  It's fun, and gives you that little rush of potential (and in our case very one sided) PvP.  It also really pushes the need for good command, control and communication in a small gang.  I am becoming increasingly fascinated by this facet of the game and would love to see a more formalized training/starter version of this in EvE.  My corp has a very distinct split of highly risk averse players and a group where "no shits were given".  (Side note, trying to find an old Jester poster is ridiculous.  That was posted on the 10th and is already a page deep in his post history.)  You can guess which camp I am in at this point.

There is a whole aspect of the game outside High Sec space that I think the Empire community has unjustly turned into some horrible bogeyman.  I would love to see something in the game that pushes players into small groups to investigate space together outside the Corp/Alliance system there currently is.  I'm not advocating taking a faction fit Navy Mega into low sec 4s (I don't know anyone who has done this recently...), but trekking through WHs and Low Sec over the last few weeks in cheap, functional hulls with a few people gives an adrenaline boost that nothing in Empire can touch.  The only problem is, doing this requires a level of google-fu and willingness to go beyond any tool CCP has placed in game to organize.  Perhaps developing the fleet finder along the lines of *cringe* the WoW Dungeon Finder?  I don't want EvE to become loot-point grinding in space, but the game cries out for some small gang organizing tool.

Anyhow, if you are a bit of a bear, leave Empire for a bit.  Get a cheap BC and follow some low sec exploration sites or WHs.  It may surprise you!