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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In a brief return from being lost in space, our intrepid explorer and CEO of Penny Ibramovic Engineering [PIE] drops by to bring us another of her delicious posts to read after dinner. Enjoy.
The manufacturing division of Penny Ibramovic Industries is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Whilst it is reassuring to check my wallet and see a steady stream of income based on profit from sales, that income is dwarfed by the continued success of the wormhole engineers. Raking in tens of millions of ISK for most wormhole operations makes my market sales look like petty cash. One wormhole operation can plump my wallet up with enough iskies to cover all my sell orders on the market, whatever outrageous profit margin I added at the time, rather than waiting weeks watching the cash trickle in. Production may offer a steady and generally reliable income, but it’s slow.
Admittedly, I am hardly a business entrepreneur at the moment, but nor will I be with my home out in w-space, as I will not be able to commit the necessary time to making a fortune off the market. Indeed, access to any market information is impossible in w-space, hence my need to return to New Eden to monitor prices and make adjustments. If I simply accept that manufacturing and sales is not currently a cost-effective use of my time, maybe I will be better off. It isn’t as if my researched blueprints will disappear or suddenly become useless. All that will happen is I will lose the incremental adjustments to my wallet as my modules sell. But I think I may miss that.
However much I like living out in w-space, my anti-social nature enjoying the solitude, the sell order transactions in my wallet continue to give me a link back to New Eden. It’s not that I want to interact with these capsuleers, I actually quite like that I don’t have to just because I run a business. But w-space can feel very empty. Local channel remains quiet and unpopulated, regardless of who may be in the system. Even if there are others in the system, space remains big enough that you are unlikely to encounter them, except perhaps when passing through wormholes. And you don’t really want to encounter other capsuleers in w-space, unless you’re specifically looking for them.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Tourism In EVE"]  [/caption]
Not that I pay attention to the local channel when I am in high-sec, though, I actively ignore it. And idly hitting d-scan in high-sec—out of curiosity more than w-space habit—reveals far more activity in the system than makes me feel comfortable. I am sure all that activity was occurring back when I was living in high-sec, I just wasn’t aware of it. But now that I am used to the deceptive tranquility of w-space, appreciating all that is going on around me in high-sec makes me oddly claustrophobic. I need space. But just as much as I need space, I need to feel connected, even a little. Inferring that life continues by the wallet transactions of capsuleers buying my products gives me that connection. I suppose sometimes you just want to look out the window to be reminded of the world you are ignoring.
It seems that one of the great things about keeping a blog is the ability to look back and try to objectively review “how it’s gone” for whatever time period you care to arbitrarily select. Some folks take a monthly snapshot while still others look at a week or a quarter or a year. I’m choosing the end of the calendar year because I can and wanted to.
I’d like to have a full break down of the monthly page views or unique visits or bits transferred, but for some reason, my stats got wiped at the end of August and so really only have the last third of the year to make comparisons from. Having said that, we can make wild, sweeping extrapolations and expositions of what it must have looked like were the numbers still in the database.
You likely see something similar show up again later with better numbers as more time has been captured by the statistical tracking software.
Hot Cha, where are you?
Everybody’s eyes are closed
I can’t see why I miss you so
So Hot Cha, where are you? -(TMBG)
I’ve previously written about the immortality that capsuleers have to face on a day-to-day basis. Our own longevity is both a boon and bane and is a topic I’d like to pursue and review in depth more later. Several others have also mentioned this and how they have dealt with the issue. The good folks over at Galactic Water Cooler have even dealt with the issue on their wonderful podcast [specifically episode number 176]. If you don’t know who GWC is then I recommend you do something drastic. Stop reading this and go visit them right now. I’ll wait.
Right then, welcome back. Although immortal, many times the capsuleer is just not jacked in. The lights aren’t on and no one is home. The neurons just aren’t firing. This is completely different from the previous entry about not being in a coherent state-of-mind when danger come calling. This is when the pilot just isn’t plugged in at all. Recently the little jack at the back of my head where the pod jacks fit has been loose. It just doesn’t work right all the time. Seems intermittent and somewhat random, which makes the whole issue harder to diagnose. I’ve been in and out of the local fix-it shop several times and seem to have it fixed until the next time that I need
I once had a dream of a gleam, of a gleam in my eye
And I’ll have it till the day I die
I had a thought bubble of trouble, of trouble and strife
And I’ll have it for the rest of my life -(TMBG)
- It Sucks
The warm fluid surrounds me. The merest thought engenders actions that serve only to indulge the slightest whim of my fancy. The only thing missing is euphoria of human contact – and that is easily overlooked in lieu of the near omnipotent control available via my synaptic pathways. I am the capsuleer. I am immortal.
And good thing too – when a capsuleer falls asleep in their pod, bad things™ happen. Take for instance the most recent escapades while harvesting gas. It’s not a difficult job and sometimes your mind wanders. This time it hasn’t just wandered, my mind has set out on full scale expedition to calculate the inertial energy involved in blinking. My mind was gone, Gas Gone, as it were. Fortunately, my partner, the estimable scanner extraordinaire and EFT mogul, Mick was along with me, happily sucking in his own share of gas. [With his Tech 2 harvesters and the ability to mount 5 of them, his share is larger than my share.] So at least one of us is on guard, paying attention to d-scan, watching for probes/ships and generally preparing for anything.
Um, no.
Ripping a hole in fabric of time and space, two cocky jockeys in significantly powerful ships step appear right next to us, locking us down and shredding what little is left of our ships, pods and dignity. I know they had to have cheated because sure an alarm would have went off in my head [if I had been paying attention] and no one can sneak up on Mick. Unless of course we happen to be mining gas. I am more convinced that some of the fullerenes either leaked from the cargoholds into our pods, or messed with our sensors.
In a heart and frankly hull pounding few seconds, I am relieved of a small Gallente cruiser with 4 gas harvesters and some expanded cargo modules. Mick is in a similarly equipped Dominix and well insured. In the interminable few seconds that it takes for the foes BS to lock our pods, we are desperately and simultaneously trying to exit the warp disruption bubble the Onyx has thrown up, spamming the ‘warp to’ button and praying that something would go horribly wrong with their systems in the meantime.
The last thing I happened to see before waking up somewhere else is my pod flying through Mick’s wreck and thinking, “It should be bigger for a battleship”. I honestly feel a bit dazed and confused, not unlike waking in an unfamiliar room after traveling and having to remember that you even made a trip. It begins to filter back in bits and pieces. Gas. Exequror. Onyx. Domi. Megathron. Pods. Flash. At first it seems strange to be in a station, having flown so long without docking. And where is my ship? My pod? “Oh, look, someone left a selection of ships for me to chose from. How thought of her.”
So now I get to start over. The ship and modules were relatively cheap and no great loss. I have other. I lost some expensive implants, but frankly I considered them lost soon after I plugged them. If I was worried about losing them, I would have never undocked, let alone fly around in a wormhole. I managed to somehow remember that I had a jump clone somewhere in the universe with some old ‘plants in her head and after running into every conceivable error managed to repeat the whole unpleasant wake up in an unfamiliar place routine of a few minutes ago.
This station turns out to actually be quite far away from anything, which I think maybe why the clone was out here to begin with. I have also neglected to leave a ship in the hangar resulting in a hurried search of the market for an appropriate shuttle or frigate to get out of the system in. A few moments later I am busy flying a Gallente shuttle across seventeen jumps back home, 11 through low-sec. Why choose the low-sec route? Well, I just lost my ship and several million in implants, who really cares if I lose a few more low level implants. Besides, the 29 jumps through high-sec was more likely to kill me.
In a final twist of irony, I had been trying to get out of the wormhole for a couple of days to get some manufacturing jobs installed for some of my corp-mates. Using this fortuitous depodification, I zip over, put the job in the oven to bake. Carpé Diem.
Sensing that enough adrenaline has finally burned off to allow an attempt at sleep, I decide to call an end to flying and dock up for interim. I am immortal, yes, sleepless, no.
Ok, I admit it. I am in awe, struck dumb by the sheer enormity of what has transpired. In case any of you missed it:
Dominion has come.
And it is good. At least every little bit that I have seen from with in our little part of the unknown space we live in. With all the little things that have happened in the client, it really does feel a lot like EVE 3.0 instead of just an expansion. The marketers missed the opportunity to really push this as a major update to many of the parts that make EVE feel like EVE. With all of the updates to the UI as well as the actual graphics used for the systems, it is much more apparent that things have changed. And after one measly day in, I think it’s wonderful.
I’m sure there are a lot of little things going on around 0.0 involving sovereignty changes and support/logistics for them. There are some nitpicks, glitches and annoyances [hide windows?], but on the whole, I think it is a great update.
And finally – I can easily update this from inside my pod. Beware.
Posted from J130554, deep in the heart of nowhere and using the browser in EVE.
For the more observant readers [both of you], this is no surprise. For the rest of you, this wonderful piece of elocution is a wonderful guest post from a frequent partner in Sleeper related homicides and other nefarious asteroid related crimes. Please welcome and read, Penny Ibramovic, author of the wonderful Tiger Ears –Kename Fin
I sit docked at a station, keeping an eye on business. I open up the market interface to see how my orders are selling. I check if stations have received new deliveries and I am being undercut, modifying my prices if necessary and sustainable. Based on the market information, I instruct my production facilities to install new manufacturing runs, hoping that my mineral stocks allow it. If not, I hit the market again to buy more processed rocks. During all of this, my Crane floats serenely in the hangar as I conduct all my affairs through interfaces connecting directly in to my pod.
My thoughts naturally drift to wondering what it will be like when Walking in Station (WiS) becomes a reality, when I am flushed out of my pod goo and set free to explore stations beyond their hangars. Instead of staring at my admittedly beautiful ship behind several windows of information, I could be watching people, probably other capsuleers, from a table in a café, sipping on a cappuccino, albeit still from behind several windows of information. It would make quite the difference to see capsuleers come and go. Individual privateers will get new mission briefs to be completed, or groups of pilots all leave the area at once, boisterously heading off for a scheduled mining operation, or maybe quietly sneaking away to roam local low-sec systems for easy prey. Still daydreaming about the possibilities, I check my current station to see who also is currently docked.
 Space is big, and not just the parts with nothing in it. There are thousands of stars, hundreds under the umbrella of Concord in high-sec. Each system has several planetary bodies, many of them have stations in orbit, and a few planets more than one. Even if a system looks busy, with maybe twenty capsuleers present, the choice of place to dock means you are unlikely to find more than five or so capsuleers in the same station at any one time. Some of them may probably be shaking off a clone jump, or worse, and not feel in the mood to be seen in public. WiS sounds like an interesting idea, until you realise how lonely it is out in space.
Even the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Jita probably won’t be interesting more than a couple of times, after dodging scams and pushing through crowds to finally get served or find someone you know. And unless you dock in the navy station at Jita IV, moon 4 you still may struggle to find others to talk to. If it weren’t for intricate communication relays, allowing for real-time conversations across the galaxy, many capsuleers could go days without speaking to another person. But maybe that’s the problem, the universality of some channels meaning there is little need to gather in specific stations, so capsuleers don’t. It’s a slim hope, but maybe when it becomes possible to meet outside of our pods more capsuleers will be more likely to dock somewhere specific.
[caption id="attachment_404" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Capsuleers getting drunk before Angel Extravaganza"]  [/caption]
It’s a slim hope to expect pilots to congregate, if only because navigating systems can get tedious. Jumping across several systems is seen as a necessary means to an end for most tasks, but it is yet to be seen how many capsuleers are willing to jump five, six, or maybe a dozen systems to meet face-to-face, for a corporation meeting or a simple chat about ship fittings, when a simple communication channel could be opened instead. Indeed, it needs to be seen how WiS communications are handled before this can be properly gauged. Speech bubbles floating above capsuleers’ heads could make the air crowded quickly, and whilst the ephemeral nature of the conversation may appeal to some shady characters, the necessity of continually having to repeat yourself will annoy others. If WiS relies on the same communication window as other channels, I am sure many pilots will question the wisdom of spending half-an-hour flying to a station only to monitor a chat channel that would be identical ten systems away.
None of this is to say WiS can’t, or won’t, bring new aspects of capsuleer life to New Eden. Personally, a change of background whilst in a station will be welcome, even if it is only me and the waiter in the VIP room. I won’t get so desperate as to mingle with my crew or other civilians. And there is definitely one feature that would make docking in a particular station enticing: PvP. It would really add to the atmosphere of a station and lead to more interesting social dynamics if it were possible to spike a rival’s drink, start a bar fight, or stab a dastardly pirate. And I think this is the real purpose behind Dust 514. It may begin with ground battles for planets and moons, but Dust 514 must surely soon be revealed as the prototype system for WiS. You can leave your pod behind, but don’t forget your weapon.
Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)
As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!
Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.
There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.
![Low DPS [Divide by 7]](http://eve.finkeworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Low-DPS-tm.jpg)
Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.
So what have we learned from all of this:
- Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
- Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
- Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
- Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
- Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.
And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.
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.
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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![Low DPS [Divide by 7]](http://eve.finkeworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Low-DPS.png)
