fun « Our EvE

The Reluctance of Time

On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping

In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.

And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.

The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.

We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.

Let Slip The Veil

The silence was unbearable. Millions of neurons screamed in absence of any sensory input. It was as if the whole universe had been ripped away like a free will of a Sansha or the salary of a Caldari merchant. Dark, echoless space surrounded me and sheer endless black stared back at my soul. Before was a relative concept that was beginning to lose its cohesive shape and after was as distant as a point singularity. There was only the faintest of amorphous sensation surrounding what should have been now. The weight of thousands of days training and tens of thousand experiences demanded that something, anything, happen.

It was time to make a change – to rip open the veil and tear back the sky.

Electrochemical connections surged with pain and relief as long dormant paths of study were pulled to the fore of consciousness. What was once routine seemed muffled and disconnected in light of more recent solitude and stillness. The energy needed and required was straining my systems to their very core – and it was good. Today was going to be a good day. Who knows? If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even get to die.

The first sensation is one of swaying stillness and the sound of a million silent voices. Suddenly there was a gut wrenching sliding and a visual influence and indication that an e-warp was underway and my ship was soon to be at its former location. I had only the faintest recollection of where that might be and was still busy checking my systems and their responsiveness. Or in my case the lack there of. Fully half of my ships modules were offline and the ones that were on seemed to be unwilling to respond. Why was everything still so slow.

Realisation dawned with the sickening force of a collapsing wormhole. I was finally jacked back into my ship and until I had finished the initial e-warp, the ships systems would be unable to comply. I quickly pulled up the camera feeds to try and get a bearing while simultaneously asking the computer for a quick and dirty 360˚ sweep of the local theater for anything remotely telling. Skills were like old friends that you hadn’t seen in years – you knew what they were then and it was going to take practice. Practice like time, was something that I might be out of.

Ships. Tens, hundreds, thousands of ships were cluttering up my inputs, demanding my attention and stealing my distracted mind to narrow alleys that would be less than profitable if traversed. As I neared the end of my warp bubble, I flipped to overview Gamma and started looking for exits. I threw as many distractions as I could quickly grab into the corner and tried as hard as I could to ignore the rest. My priorities were to get safe, get back online and get back to where I truly belonged. This was madness and I couldn’t be farther from the reality I understood and grasped.

Finally finding something that looked right I punched up the destination, diverted the cap to the drives and hoped the local group would just ignore my half functional ship and its limited cargo. As I landed on the gate, I realised I had miscalculated and was 15 km off the back of the gate and my propulsion was one of the stupid modules that wouldn’t respond. Pounding the interface didn’t seem to help make it active so I put the last remaining cap into the one remaining hardner and turned toward the gate. With blind luck I might make it before someone decided to liberate my conscious from my capsule… I don’t mind so much as I hate not being able to participate in the festivities. If I am going to die, I plan on at least leaving some ammo behind in their hull.

I hit the jump range and mash it, waiting for my systems to catch up with the trans-luminal displacement my ship has just experienced. As the scans loaded and I was able to get some rational data I realised I just jumped into…

Times Fun When You’re Having Flies

On Being a Frog in Well Stocked Pond

The wormholes have been rolling by us at a rate of 2-3 a day. With our static Class 4 exit lasting at most 16 hours we usually have time more than enough time to harvest anything we roll across in the adjacent wormhole systems. If those systems are empty and their connections not holding any prospective targets to hunt down, we’re more than happy to roll the exit and see what else pops up. We’re easily running as many sites as we can possibly squeeze in between pilot availability, wormhole collapse and outside interference. It’s good on the wallet and fun for the participants – so who could want for anything more?

Time – as I posted above seems to be the limiting factor. Were there more of it in the right places, we’d accomplish even more. As it is, I’ve let the posts slide for the last two weeks. I’m behind on keeping up with not getting farther behind. The reasons are all good and I don’t regret them in any way. The first issue that demands more time is the burgeoning role of maintaining the new alliance. Hats off to Letrange on the way he’s managed to even stay sane let alone manage to get some play time in. And he even manages to post regularly. The second is some impending travel that is coming up for myself, and that means a lot of loose ends have to be tied up first. And finally, there are some issues with EVE and CCP that needed to be dealt with.

So, while having loads of fun, I’m a bit tired and looking for whoever it is stole my last billion isk. I’ll be coming for you…

Not Always Shiny

On Making Stupid Mistakes & Learning

As I looked over the last year or two of posts, I realised that I very often only present the upside to the efforts and events that we go through. I don’t often mention some of the accidents, problems and outright stupid mistakes that my colleagues or I make on a seemingly regular basis. To further entertain you, I’ll try to recall some of them and tell you what we’ve learned in the process.

Hmmm…. Nope…. Can’t think of anything.

I’m quite sure I could come up with more examples of our incompetence, but would likely ruin our reputation for flawless execution.

Get Up And Go

On Scanning For Wormhole Space

So you are reading all of the wonderful posts about living the adventurous life out on the edges of uncharted space. You might have heard some enticing tales about the bountiful harvests to be had from slaying Sleepers and easy access to high end ores. The main thing is, you’ve heard about all the inherently cool things about living in a wormhole, now you’re ready to make it a reality. In order to help you, here is some information from the Wormhole Engineers [né Dark Star Galactic Engineers - Wormhole Division] as we learn from our wormhole operations.

The decision to explore in wormholes has a very low barrier to entry. Skill-wise, all you’ll need [theoretically] is Astrometrics trained to level 3, an astrometrics frigate [Heron, Magnate, Imicus, Probe], an Expanded Probe Launcher and some Core Scanner Probes. While these are the minimums really for finding a wormhole, you’ll likely benefit from training [should go without saying]

Your racial frigate skill higher or a Covert Ops Frigate [Tech 2 astrometrics frigate]
Astrometrics to level 5 and picking up a couple of additional scanning support skills
Astrometric Rangefinding will increase your probes scan strength which is essential to finding the harder sites
Astrometric Pinpointing reduces your scan deviation which makes your scans more accurate
Finally, Astrometric Acquisition lowers the amount of time each scan takes which adds up when locating a specific site will take 4-7 scans

You are looking for ‘Cosmic Signatures’ in general and specifically the ones of type, “Unknown”. These represent the wormholes that you are going to kill you later. I’ll skip explaining exploration because it’s been done several times over by better scanners than I. For a start, check out CCP’s own video on the process. You’ll learn how to better position your probes with time and experience, but it will get you started. Google is your friend for finding some other videos and tutorials on scanning, so I’m not going to bother trying to explain it.

Before I go any farther, let me recommend that you go read miningzen’s post about how to survive in a wormhole. It doesn’t do you any good to find the wormhole only to turn around and have it beat you senseless multiple times. Never mind, strike that. If you spend any time at all in wormhole space, you ARE going to die. Repeatedly. It is still a good idea to read the above post. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything, you will come to understand it as you wake up in your clone the next couple of times. While you are at it, update your clone.

Take some time and get to know the scanning interface and it’s quirks and foibles. You are going to be spending a lot of time using it and won’t want to have to learn it while under fire in an emergency. Get in the habit of cloaking to scan. I’ve seen way too many people out scanning in wormholes in an uncloaked ship and most of them managed to get popped. If you survive, you will hopefully be left with a set of warp-able points that you can bookmark and explore. Sleepers love to uncloak ships and they will vaporise astro-frigates faster than you can click a target to warp out. I’ll try to put together a rough look at various ships and how they perform in wormholes in another post.

The Shiny is Sparkly

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.

Guess Who I Ran Into The Other Day…

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.

How To Fail

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.

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.

Addiction and Mediocrity in Ubiquity

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!

I Should Be Allowed To Think

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]:

Ships
Other

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.

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