25/08/10 15:39 PM
| Jaspet | 55.92 |
| Omber | 55.99 |
| Hemorphite | 62.18 |
| Pyroxeres | 68.21 |
| Hedbergite | 74.04 |
| Veldspar | 65.77 |
| Kernite | 88.68 |
| Plagioclase | 84.13 |
| Scordite | 68.17 |
| Spodumain | 75.94 |
| Dark Ochre | 95.49 |
| Gneiss | 95.24 |
| Crokite | 172.65 |
| Bistot | 216.26 |
| Arkonor | 270.56 |
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Which describes how you’re feeling all the time
Which describes how you’re feeling all the
Feeling all the time – (TMBG)
Who knew, but apparently the lack of postings has something to do with CCP and the immanent release of the newest expansion Dominion for EVE. We’re all on pins and needles wanting to know what is going on and how it will affect us and where it will all lead. This fascination/ apprehension over the coming changes is responsible at least in part for the lack of verbage being generated by yours truly.
Or it could simply be, we’ve been busy with our projects and are trying to keep them all afloat. On the training front, the pursuit of Amarr Command Ships continues apace, but my arch-nemesis has managed to beat me there. I’ll have to settle for being the gal who keeps her alive when the DPS pilots all get ganked. Of course that is assuming my Guardian isn’t the primary anyway. 
Probably needless-to-say, but the coming changes have people screaming their heads off on the forums about gimping this and nerfing that or buffing the other guys stuff at the expense of ignoring their own personal needs. Let’s just be honest with each other, what we all really want to see are faction Destroyers and Battlecruisers.
I know, I know, I said that I would quit
All right, I promise, no more after this
You don’t know how I’ve tried
To forget what it was like – (TMGB)
So things have been busy and I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. Who knew that managing a bunch of raving lunatics with delusions of insecurity could be so much like running a corporation. All that time at the asylum is finally paying off. [Warning, excessive use of <sarcasm> makes my hands overly tired so just apply liberally where you feel it's appropriate to make it interesting for you to read.]
Towers: Apparently you have to keep putting fuel in them. Otherwise minor details like shields, guns, labs all go offline.
Labs: Mostly full of jobs, except for when something happens to a tower.
Wormholes: Much fun. I hope to stop running errands and get back in them.
Combat: I think I remember fitting a ship with something other than cargo expanders once upon a time. It was cool. I died.
Skills: Battlecruiser V was cool and the implications are still settling in. Though it’s nice to be able to jump in all the racial BCs, albeit without being able to weaponise them currently. I can fit a whopper tank to them all, but not so much DPS. I blame the ferrets.
Corporation: Growing. Leaps and Bounds. More people means more annoying opinions opportunities, but also more things to manage. Need to train Delegation [5% workload reduction per level] to level 4 and start handing off some of this stuff.
Organisation: What? Hmm? I filed that here in the stack of papers on my desk back in the tower that went offline. I’ll get back to you January 4th. Some year.
Mining: See combat. [I think I warped to a belt in a NOS Drake. Sadness.]
Invention: Lot’s of invention going on. Need to get some of it finished.
So a little bit everything goes a long way toward getting nothing accomplished. Happy times! 
Crimsoneer, over at Pods And Pills has let fly with a recent article following up on some forum posting about the efficacy of the learning skills in EVE. I had started initially to comment on it, but decided that given the sheer length of the comment and the thoughts I had, it was worth of a post in and of itself in response.
tl; dr; The game is full of choices. Everyone thinks their choices are right. Everyone else is wrong.
To begin with, full disclosure – I have all of my learning skills maxed. It was and is something I chose to do, fully cognizant of the the time, effort and results of such a decision. I have another character that doesn’t have the learning skills to find his way out of a wet paper destroyer. Both of them are more fun than a Minmatar in a leotard in a traveling Gallente circus. Ok, on with the show…
There is a lot of posting and controversy and heated words flying around about the status of carebears, game changes, felt/perceived needs and I really have to sit back and chuckle. The same people who routinely say, “It’s just a game, lighten up.” also seem to want everyone to “HFTU” at the same time. This is not directed at Crimsoneers article, but applies in the sense that we all have preferences about how we want thing to be.
In response to Crimsoneer, it seems a bit of fallacious to say on one hand,
No matter which tough choices you make, who pops you, who you get scammed by, where you get your PLEX from, every choice is designed to promote you having fun.
and then turn around and say:
Forcing you to make the choice between training your learning skills now, and thus boring yourself to death now, or training your skills later and getting bored then, isn’t a choice between option A and option B: it’s a choice between sucking now or sucking later.
It seems then you want there to be hard choices in EVE, but you don’t want there to be hard choices. I realize you said hard choices and ‘suck(y)’ choices, but ultimately isn’t that a matter of perspective? To play the advocate for a moment, how exactly does choosing someone to pop me or scam me promote me having fun? Isn’t boredom a relative concept as well? To me it seems like the learning skills fall squarely into that hard choice category. Thus you end up asking yourself the difficult question, “Am I willing to do this? Is it worth it for that extra skill point I earn?” If the answer is no, move along, nothing to see here. However, some people might actually think it’s fun to train the learning skills. Sure, they’d take them free if you were giving them away, but the same could be said about Heavy Assault Cruiser level V.
There is nothing to force you into training those skills. No guns against your head. If you wanted to just ignore them, you are certainly able to. Heck, it will even save you money so that you can buy another cruiser or four.
I can understand that it might seem/feel/be boring to train something that doesn’t seem to/feel like/be able to give you another ship or module or combat edge in space. I am worried where reasoning that such-and-such skill is boring will lead to. What about Science skills, will they be next? Many of them only let you earn datacores more quickly from agents and are a legacy to a former time. Is it really worth it to have them in the game? What about social skills? They only increase the rate at which you increase your standings or loyalty points with a corporation. Surely they should be eliminated too.
How about we replace it with two skills that are mutually exclusive [if you train one the others are blocked]:
Then we still have a really hard choice and you don’t have to mess with anything that doesn’t make the game fun for you.
If you don’t believe me now
You’ll never believe me now – (TMBG)
Ok, it looks like I might have been a little to personally enamored with living in a black hole. Really though, who could resist the sheer, unrequited and unbridled draw from a purely science stand point. Here we stand on the brink of a natural phenomenon so powerful that the very fabric of time and space are subject to its whim. Why, the gravity of the situation alone should inspire the kind of awe to last a couple of eternities worth of exploration. Well, apparently, “not so much” as one of our pilots put it.
So, the real issue turned out to be less of the anomaly and more of an issue with being so deep. We had scouts scanning out double digit paths through class four and five wormholes to find any kind of exit into known space. I don’t mind taking a freighter full of fuel or supplies or ice cream to a place they can import from, but if they can’t even get an exit all the logistics in the world is still going to fall short for them.
So after just a few short days in the class 4 with multiple static class 4s, we have moved next door to a class 4 with a static class 3 that is much more likely to have some kind of route out to known space. This will appeal to both the mission and industrial minded pilots who want to be able to come and go for various reasons as well as the pvp oriented personnel who want better access to replacement ships and modules.
No, no, baby I ain’t convinced it ain’t so bad as you paint it
There’s plenty more heads of hair for us out there – (TMBG)
In case you don’t regularly look at minerals on the market and in case you might not noticed the prices of ore across the board have fallen sharply. In some cases, the minerals are lower than they’ve been in over a year. Things like tritanium are now abundantly available and no longer cash cows that they had become. Even the high end minerals that have historically been expensive are coming down. I don’t have a picture for the greater market as a whole as I just don’t keep up with everything, but I do keep a fairly close eye on minerals [the ore chart keeps getting updated].
I’ll refrain from speculating on the causes. Causality is a slippery slope that eventually leads to politicians philandering and your milk turning bad.
The results have not yet begun to filter down, but a cursory analysis [scribbling on back of an Al Abd picture in my pod] indicates that it could affect Tech 1 production costs by as much as 15%. While this good for the producers, I doubt we’ll see a corresponding change in consumer prices anywhere near that much, if at all. Maybe it will finally pay off to make T1 things again?
[caption id="attachment_328" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Class 4 Wormhole - Sold"]  [/caption]
The fourth incarnation of our frontline, wormhole, attack base is online and operational. We still have a few details to sort out and getting it all in was a bit taxing, however we are satisfied with the location and hope to hang out for a bit before bidding adieu to the current class 4 home. The resource collection has begun, but the depth of the rabbit hole is going to make this location a bit more challenge logistically. We are 4-5 holes deep and finding a way out is sometimes a bit “precarious” to say the least [one exit was 20 jumps through low-sec on the other side of the universe from where we needed to be]. This also means that a few of our pilots are still on the outside waiting to get in. They are excited about shooting sleepers and asteroids and gas clouds and even intruders.
[caption id="attachment_331" align="alignright" width="150" caption="That Looks Painful"]  [/caption]
The tower itself is running well and fueled for quite some time. Everything is a learning adventure and we will continue to adapt. The second adaptation we’ve had to make is something we were aware of from the beginning and had tried to compensate for. The wormhole has a spatial anomaly called a Black Hole that our pilots have begun to call by all manner of unseemly names that I can’t bring myself to post. It isn’t the prettiest system I’ve ever seen, but there are times when you can forget about the painful, pulsating rip in the fabric of space and get on with your business. Needless to say, we are learning more about the realities of the black hole as opposed to the statistical information about black holes. Professional tip from some amateurs: Target Painters. They are working wonders. Really.
With the last wormhole processing wrapped up and the current one in preparation, we’ve decided to make some modifications to our approach. As we’ve been increasingly been in contact with forces that do not have our best interests in mind. Pirates, would be invaders and even other carebears, er industrialists want to use our space for their own gains. It would be fair to stay that until now, we have been fairly tolerant of visitors, as long as we are able to go about our business. Thus we arrive at something that has been coming for some time, but has been put off several times.
Enter the Suicide Death Squad – Dark Star Division for controlling the amount of time we end up having to do things differently. The basic premise is the fact that many of the people looking to have their presence felt in our system are more interested in the numbers. They want to see such things as, “Total Isk Destroyed” and “Isk Recovered” and “Loot Stolen”. We evaluated our options with regard to said mentality and decided on a course of action. For now I’ll sit on the details, but will let you know how it works out.
Ouch! I usually add a title after I’ve written something up. It stems from a long habit of writing without titles and basing them off of either the content that has been produced or some obscure, arcane reference made in the article that is only tenuously tied to the rest of the content and thus only understood by my psyche and perhaps the asteroids that I spend so much time talking to [apologies to the gas clouds, I've just been busy lately]. However I thought that perhaps I ought to stop and take stock of the last month or so of output and see what I can learn and where we’re headed as well. Back to the title; I thought perhaps after adding it that it might appear like I only manage to post information monthly, but upon review realize that it only seems like that because I’m sad that I just don’t get more up there for you. Thus, I will mix in some information you might be interested in about my activities along with some information that you might be interested in about the statistics related to my postings.
[caption id="attachment_319" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Visits"]  [/caption]
I had been trying to get the WordPress Stats plug-in to work for several months, but managed to repeatedly get results of zero visits a day [sorry Mom, I know you were reading!] and once I even had -4. I’m not sure what happened, but as of September 13th, the whole contraption started reporting visits as well as the other reference information. I wouldn’t have even noticed that, but for a mis-click on “Blog Stats” instead of “Dashboard”. So I started perusing the results and checking back from time to time. There were several surprising things that I just wasn’t expecting when I started looking back at the visits, searches, references and onward traffic. I printed the daily views graph all to include in the post and quite by accident the median daily post number was highlighted.
It seems that for the half of September that I was able to get statistics for I managed to get 674 visits. I have to admit a certain amount of joy in this. I fully expect that half of that was Mom trying to see if I had finished training for a Command Ship yet. The average number of visitors was 39 and the median was 32. If those just seem like random numbers to you, let me put it into perspective. I didn’t know of more than four people who had visited the site and to find out that nearly 8 times as many visits had occurred as shiny [please help me with the illusion and don't mention unique page views, etc].
Another odd number I’d like to point out is the number 1. Apparently that is how many of the same search results led to my page being located and served. At no point in the last 17 or so days did people search for same terms to find my page. Again, the number doesn’t mean anything. I just like things that are different.
Posting about fittings and ore prices appeared to be my niche, without really trying to hit anything in particular. I have no intention of trying to replicate something you can find somewhere else like the fittings of BattleClinic or Scrapheap. They do fittings better to a certain degree, but they also aren’t the one in my ship and have little to lose by suggesting an alternative that may or may not work. I appreciate their feedback, but also like the fact that my fittings are my own.
For the postings ore prices, I have noticed that they have been steadily coming down across the board as I update the page. I don’t have enough meta-data to extrapolate anything as interesting as causality [a slippery, dangerous area to tread into with the best of information], but I really am kind of surprised. I don’t rely on ore as the primary means for my income as much as I once did and only sell a Charon-load or so a month of tritanium these days.
Finally, as I realise this post is nearly as long as my skill plan for a carrier, I’ll wrap up with some training thoughts.
- Learning skills suck, but boy am I glad I have them. For now I’ll lump them in the same category as whiny pvp pirates who can’t handle changing mechanics, I’d rather not deal with them, but I’m glad they are there to provide more depths and aspects to the universe I love to swim in. Train them well and they will change your world.
- Support skills does not mean the ability to fly an industrial ship full of capacitor charges. Train electronics, engineering, WU/AWU [I hate you too!], science, mechanics, navigation. Just because there isn’t another module or battleship attached to the skill doesn’t make it worthless. I know none of the readers would fly without having these trained, but share with your new corp-mates.
- Training for a command ship has actually been a really gratifying long wait. It is a destination that becomes so much more along the journey. By the time I finish up the training for the command ships I will also have gained the ability to fly logistics and heavy assault ships along the way. In point of fact, after the first command ship, it will only take about 3 weeks to fly any other race’s set of logistics, HACs and command ships. I will still need to cross-train for the weapons systems, but the broad, hit-or-miss, seemingly random training to this point is actually paying off at this point.
- I believe in doing things well if I can. Training something to level V is not a sign of weakness or stupidity. Ok, it’s not always a sign of an idiot, the author might well fall in those categories.
Ok, I’m done till next month. [Ok, really I'll probably try to post something tomorrow but will fail miserably, feel bad about it, mope for two days and then rinse and repeat until next month rolls around.]
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