14/06/10 11:39 PM
| Jaspet | 47.03 |
| Omber | 47.14 |
| Hemorphite | 55.62 |
| Pyroxeres | 57.70 |
| Hedbergite | 66.18 |
| Veldspar | 66.67 |
| Kernite | 70.01 |
| Plagioclase | 72.02 |
| Scordite | 75.25 |
| Spodumain | 80.33 |
| Dark Ochre | 98.81 |
| Gneiss | 100.86 |
| Crokite | 185.46 |
| Bistot | 232.34 |
| Arkonor | 288.02 |
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Continued from Part 1 and Part 2…
In an attempt at trying to remember things honestly, I will try to mention when things went well or failed miserably so as to present as clear a picture as possible of the reality of flying with a random collection of fruitcakes, nut cases and loony birds. We’ve pulled people in from all over the place and from time to time it has happened that they were of a lower quality than we would have preferred. It’s inevitable I imagine as there are all kinds of pilots looking to be all kinds of ship captains involved in all manner of endeavours. It would be extremely naive and a bit arrogant to assume they all thought like we thought, flew what we flew or were interested in the same thing via the same approaches. Oddly enough, just knowing that doesn’t seem to keep it from happening. Many corporations [ours included] often take far to little time to evaluate a potential employee and his fit with the organisation as a whole.
But more about that later, first I wanted to take a closer look at some of the potential recruiting methodologies and comment on their relative effectiveness. The first method we’ll dub the “Passive Method” and requires the least amount of effort and energy on the part of the recruiter. This can usually take several forms and can be a combinations of vectors. Some of the possible implementations include placing a note in your corporation’s information window to the effect, “We are recruiting,” or “Sign up now,” to let passer-bys know that you are open to members. Some slightly more involved passive recruiting efforts might be a forum post on EVE Online or some of the other frequently populated sites. And finally there is the recruiting advertisements within EVE itself.
All of these passive methods rely on the individuals seeing and responding to your information. The motivation and initial moves belong to the other pilots and are theirs to make or not.
The second type you might guess is the “Active Method” where you are going out of your way to target, engage and draw specific individuals into your corporation. This can be an intense and involved process with multiple personnel working to illicit a favourable move from an already known pilot. This involves ongoing conversations via both public and private channels; overt recruiting and posting in the forums; targeted EVE mails to the pilots in question; active referrals and contacts with other pilots of the corporation and alliance. This targeted, active recruiting is all about going after either a specific individual or a specific skill set that your organisation realises that it needs.
All long the spectrum from Passive to Active is any combination of the two. Often experience, necessity and effectiveness will require a combination of the two methodologies.
Finally, a quick word about making sure the “new prospects” and “potential recruits” are the people that you’ll want in your organisation long term. In addition to any thoughts and dreams you might have about a role and the people that will fill it, so to do the people who are possibly coming to work for you. They see themselves as gaining something out of the transaction and rightly so. If they can’t learn, grow, build wealth and generally prosper in the position and corporation, then they really need to be somewhere else. It’s not rude or arrogant to show someone the door, offer suggestions about other places they might flourish or generally pass them over and keep looking for the right person. It would however be wrong to stuff them into a role that was antithetical to who and what they were and where they were headed. And while it may temporarily solve a staffing issue, it isn’t going to help your corporation out in the long run either.
Happy Head Hunting.
In continuation from the previous article…
Recently I found myself discussing the bygone era of naivete with regard to flying ever bigger, faster, deadlier, efficient, specialised and ultimately more expensive ships. We have all come a long way since our Ibises and Velators. The time since we’ve used civilian weapons [if ever] is far away and mostly gone are the days when the fittings and ships are limited by the skills we haven’t trained or isk we haven’t earned. We still flounder a bit on the first few times we do something new [ship fittings and how to effectively use a Stealth Bomber], but by now we know where to look for the information and make fairly educated choices and decisions based on that information.
Given that we are now what I would consider Intermediate level pilots, we are probably prime for various and sundry problems brought on by our decent into madness [Is linking to your own posts rather akin to talking to yourself? If so, I also have posts whereby I comment on my own posts thus creating a dialogue. Sadly, I'm probably going to end up posting a comment on one of my posts about a link to a post or comment of my own thus degenerating into complete insanity. I apologize to myself in advance.]. Having nearly gone off the deep end one too many times, it occurs to myself [and others, I'm far from unique or inspired], that fresh meat is needed to halt the rapidly encroaching madness. Either that, or we’d like to begin drafting some people so that we at least statistically reduce the number of insane pilot actions.
Actually, we’re debating bringing on a few newer members that we can ultimately train into effective capsuleers according to our own images while exploiting their current skills for our gain. We’re probably going to start with some dedicated salvage/mining personnel to help offset our tendency to let the mining sites in our wormholes degrade to uselessness as well as help accelerate the speed at which we can work over the various anomalies and signatures there-in. Having employed all manner of recruiting means in the past, I thought we might also benefit from some of the other blog readers/personalities out there who might like to take a chance on wormhole mining and salvaging.
I am hoping to wrap this up with a segment on some of the other recruiting methodologies and their relative effectiveness.
I’ve never been around to see my blood. Residing in the insular world of my pod, I can scarcely recall a cut, scrape or wound. There tend to be two extremes with regard to the health of which ever clone is currently in my pod. Either the pod is whole and I’m as sound as a space whale in a gravimetric anomaly or I’m out there, quietly floating and bumping into your pod. Unlike my ship, and to some extent my mental state of being, there is no shield, armor or structure on my clone. When the pod finally cracks, I am a corpsicle.
Given the relative lack of hematological comprehension, it could explain some of the trouble that good corporations have recruiting quality employees. Though certainly not the only issue, it has an effect on how a corporation views its staff and how it might view potential recruits. Those corporations that operate with the majority of their membership being older players may have lost some of the visceral implications that getting destroyed engenders. These old blood players are good, solid, reliable and for the most part trustworthy members of the corporation, but they ultimately can’t remember what it was like to see ten thousand isk in their wallet and think that whatever they did to get it was worth it. It happens to everyone, despite attempts to “always remain young” and to “keep it real” the older members simply have a different outlook. Not good or bad, just different. Thus there are two issues: the offerings of the corporation itself and what the individual pilots bring to the system.
With respect to recruiting, it is important to understand [or at the very least be cognizant of] this difference in approach, philosophy and even bankroll for a new pilot. Jaded and older players may see less use and appeal in free frigates and jump clones. They may not be willing to fly with people that just can’t fit a T2 armed and armored ship. It is outside of their preferred play style and comfort zone. They aren’t against offering helpful advice or helping with various activities on an ad hoc basis, but it is not their primary focus or feel. It may be hard to get them interested in recruiting, even in the face of overwhelming decline in numbers or attitudes.
Several different approaches to recruiting exist and all of them have merits and problems. In the context of getting your existing players on board with the programme, it is even more necessary that goals and directions be clearly defined. Expectations need to be established [and met] before there will be corporate buy-in. There have been several good articles written on teamwork, corporate organization and procedure. There are also several good articles about finding a corporation for pilots, old and new alike. This is all well and good, but often I’ve noticed that corporations themselves don’t have a clear plan for recruiting. The clarity of purpose, expectations and drive are often limited, confused or unrealistic. They don’t know how to properly interview candidates for applicable fit. The interview with a prospective is as much or more concerned with how the corporation fits the prospective pilot, and not about what the pilot can bring to the hangar.
While it is important to help a prospect understand what the corporation is doing, where the holes in membership currently are, what other pilots are flying, it is more important to seek out what a future member’s needs are. What are they interested in doing and is that something your corporation can commit to? Do they need ships? Income? Community? Stability? Low-sec/high-sec/null-sec? Power and prestige? Skills? If they have a hard time finding purpose in EVE, they are likely to be unsatisfied with everything until they do. People tend to gravitate toward a comfortable niche. Your corporation either needs to find out what their niche is or be the corporation to increase their understanding of their niche.
Now listen all you swingers, don’t you try to tag along
I know monkey see, but monkey’s dead, for you it would be wrong
Put a dime in my jukebox, you’ll only hear this song
And it won’t be fun for long -(TMBG)
The end is nigh!
The end has passed and off into the night we continue swimming past planets, moon and stars. Wormholes open and close and wars and rumors of wars are left in our wake. All and all, everything continues on as it did before, so what is different?
Training for the Damnation has been completed. Mostly. Sort of. There are few days left to fit the armored warfare links, but everything else is fit and fine. I should be jumping for joy, holding parties in low-sec pirate filled dens of iniquity and generally announcing it to every stray passer-by I meet. Instead I’m merely looking at the next couple of weeks of training and thinking, “Now What?”
The whole trip to Damnation has been a grand adventure. It marks the third, major, long training plan I’ve completed. The first plan was learning skills, which can be debated ad nauseam both on the forums and in various other postings. They were long, arduous and imminently debatable, however I have never once regretted doing it. The second was maximizing my asteroid warfare potential, including a few weeks on Exhumer V, Cybernetics V, and a host of ore specific refining skills to level IV for tech 2 crystals. Again, there were parts of it that I probably could have cut corners on, but I haven’t regretted being able to field a really sweet Hulk, that can mine about 27 m3 of ore per second without being in a gang and significantly more with a good Orca pilot boosting.
Finally, the trip to the Damnation, which has been a slightly longer journey than the others. Over all it was uneventful and all the skills that I have picked up in the interim have been useful across the board. In the beginning it started with the look for a decent armor tanked missile ship to swim alongside my remote armor repairing corp-mates. The Sacrilege was an option, but wasn’t really able to fit a decent remote rep fitting. The Damnation could do that, had enough tank to be able to use ballistic computer systems without sacrificing tank and could still theoretically fit a RR with it’s missiles. The DPS worked out to a similar end as the Drake with the added benefits of helping the whole fleet’s tank.
Now that I’ve reached the Damnation, I have to admit I’m feeling rather blasé about the whole thing. I love flying it. It corners like an Orca, tanks like a very large plated battleship and hits about like a Drake, but from slightly farther away. This is all well and good, but my eyes were taken by something else shiny that had cropped up along the way.
Somewhere along the way I realized that in and amongst the skills for a Damnation, was hidden the skills for a Guardian logistics ship. So on a whim I began to research them, ask questions and look at fittings for them. I got to looking at just how the efficiency of remote repair modules compared to their ‘local’ counterparts. What did it take to use them and or abuse them. Since the Guardian is also bonused for energy transfers, I threw that into the mix as well, looking at how that could be used to the best advantage. I began to develop a real sense of respect for 0.0 fleet logistics pilots and the work they do. Flying a logistics ship well takes a fair amount of capacitor savvy, shrewd targeting and really tight fittings. Tried and true skills like weapons upgrades and advanced weapons upgrades have no effect on RR’s and Xfers, so it’s down to rigs, reactors, PDU’s and CPUs to make it work.
[Editorial Aside]:
I tend to scoff when I see CPUs, PDUs and Reactors on a lot of fits. They are mostly used to compensate for a severe lack of real fitting skills or to ‘tide one over’ until their skills catch up to their hulls. [I still maintain it would be an interesting study to compare the number of killmails between the pilots having 'helper' modules like CPUs/PDUs/Reactors versus their opponents.] I fully understand that even given max skills and an expensive implant, occasionally you still run into a fit that just won’t. I myself have used these modules to great success in the past and will continue to do so in the future and even recommend some fittings that do so.
All of this to say, “Congratulations logistics pilots for making it all fit. Large remote modules on a cruiser hull with a tank that survives and makes things so much easier for the other pilots to just shoot things.”
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! 
Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.
Old Business:
It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.
On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.
On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.
New Business:
The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.
For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].
We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.
So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.
I’ve finally been able to get some time to sit down and actually play, write and most importantly fly! The second stage of wormhole operations [WH 2.0] has been proceeding at full steam. I sincerely apologize to anyone wondering what was going on. We managed to find a nice little class three wormhole system with a static, high-sec, regenerating wormhole. I’m hoping to be able to use this as our staging ground for further wormhole operations and production ventures. In effect, the wormhole space gives us a small, portable pocket of null-sec from which to operated out of, without the associated hassle of carving said bit out from some existing alliance death-grip.
It is exciting to think and dream about the future possibilities of T3 production and supply, but at the same time we need to remain grounded in reality. We’re trying to work out what our needs are as opposed to what we’d merely like or want. Do we need that large faction tower? [probably not.] Do we need the ability to manufacture the full range of T3 hulls and subsystems? [Maybe as many as we can get, but understanding that we probably can't compete with the larger alliances.]
We have for all intents and purposes created a mini-alliance with in the corp. We have a dedicated group of wormhole engineers [what we're calling the people doing everything in the WH] and another group that are still in high-sec. We’re not opposed to a full fledged alliance, but currently don’t see the benefits outweighing the costs. Perhaps in time my views will change.
In news unrelated to WH’s, I noticed that I am nine days away from celebrating my one year anniversary with the Engineers. It has been an interesting and fun time, and it is neat to look back on all of the things we’ve accomplished and learned. I’ve moved from barely flying my Retriever to being a proficient ABC miner in a fully tricked out Hulk. I’ve expanded my personal BPO collection to include most all of the other ships and modules that I like to fly and use. The corporation has moved from selling a variety of T1 modules, ships and ammunition into an ever increasing number of T2 items and ships. I know there is still a lot of things we could do and improve upon, but we’ll get there. Step by step.
Well, there’s been a complete dearth of posts from myself as I’ve had a very busy two weeks. Though I’ve been able to fly around a lot, I haven’t had much time to sit down and compile a coherent thought. [Those of you who are reading this, stop laughing at the last statement about coherence.]
We removed a couple of no-shows from the corporation. It’s always a tough decision to make, but after only popping in once after joining, you begin to wonder at their future potential. We’re about as laid-back as you can get in an industrial corporation, but we do prefer at least some warning that you might be scarce for the next couple weeks, months, years. On the flip side, we’ve had three new people join us that are shaping up nicely to be good support for the corporation.
In a comment to a previous note, someone asked about the exact difference that the training skills made in terms of skill training. I’m working on adding all of this up and will try to get a more complete answer calculated. I know for instance that training your learning skills can reduce the time to get into a Hulk from over 90 days to slightly less than 60 days [including time spent on the learning skills. Similar calculations are true for PvP, PvE and Market Mavens. I'll try to have a more complete answer for you in the future. Have to spend some quality time with my trusty calculator.
On a related note [calculations], I’ve managed to rebuild my spreadsheet [with kudos to Letrange for an interim sheet while mine was reduced to electrons] to a pre-crash state. It’s a good thing that the School of Applied Knowledge trained me well to handle this sort of thing before I started piloting around the rest of the galaxy. I can now reliably pick various BPO’s that we own and run the numbers to see if we will make a profit on them. Given that we mine almost all of our ore, the manufactured products are technically all profit, but realistically only if we make more off the pieces than we make off selling the minerals outright. We could undercut a lot of markets to move merchandise, but would only be hurting ourselves. By giving the inventory full market value, we cut into our profits as well as weaken the overall market by potentially providing a cheaper source of refinable ore. I’ve done the same thing to others by buying large quantities of items that were more profitable when refined and either resold or manufactured into to more valuable items.
I’m working at slowly rebuilding my wallet as well after spending a lot of getting some production underway. I’ve got a fairly decent supply of various T1 drones on the market and they are providing a steady [if somewhat low] amount of income. I’m also working on doing a lot of jobs for the FedMart corporation out in Everyshore. I need the ability to refine my ore out there more than I have loyalty to my Caldari upbringing.
More to follow…
Just as a quick post, the price of Tritanium has skyrocketed over the last week. Prices in some areas have broke 5 isk/unit and many low-sec areas easily in the high 4’s. In high-sec hubs there are regular orders of 3.8 isk/unit. The price for a jetcan of Veldspar then has broken 3 million and is rapidly approaching 3.2 million as I write this. Currently it takes amost twice as much Omber to equal Veldspar. I’ve updated the sidebar to reflect the price changes. Interestingly enough, the other minerals have mostly fallen in the wake of tritanium’s climb.
In other mining news, my corpmates and I have noticed that there seems to be an overall decrease in the size of asteroids available. Due to heavy mining, many belts are being kept in a perpetual state of regeneration and only about 50% full. It means more work as we try to keep up with production demands and resource management.
On an unrelated note: shout out to Kyle Langdon and his Journeys In EVE who recently stumbled across Our EVE here. Update the Isk/Jetcan and you misspelled my name!
As a carebear industrialista, I am extremely excited about the flood of production communiques that are coming out of major research and development corps all over New Eden. New industrial command ships and reactions for moon materials are coming as are changes to some of the blueprint manufacturing amounts. One thing that has caught my eye and caused me to nearly get goosebumps was the seemingly innocuous announcement that ship equipment that have activation times would soon also have little countdown gauges to tell you how far along in the cycle said equipment has gone.
Oh wonder of wonders! Now we will be able to see how long until the next activation of any repeating module takes place. On one off, non-repeating equipment, the change is only mildly useful. But on the equipment that is set to auto-repeat, the change is monumental. Finally, modules can be planned around and taken into account. For us, the way this plays out is with the mining lasers and strip miners. No longer will it be necessary to overspend time whittling away at a roid that can easily be half-cycled or less. It will be easy to see how much ore you pull in a full cycle and then cut off the beam at a fraction of the cycle close to it’s final amount.
For example: Say your Hulk can strip a modest 1400 m3 per cycle. There is a Dense Veldspar rock floating 12 km off your port stern that scanners indicate has 9000 units left. At roughly 2/3 of the cycle you can cut if off, finish the roid and be ready to move on to roid number 2. While is isn’t new functionality in and of itself, it will now be so much easier to see. Miners, watch your timers. Keep them close to the final cycle you need. Any miner worth her morphite will be able to tell you how much ore they are able to pull from any given roid in a cycle.
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