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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 Blake’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.

Where I Am

In a recent meme-sharing, eve-blog-wide, map-a-thon sharing session, many of us who post articles about their lives in the pilot’s pod, gave account of the places they’ve visited via the NeoCom map computer’s tracking of “Systems I’ve Visited“. For one reason or another, I skipped that part of my map and never managed to actually post anything about it. If you are interested in that still, you can look at the SIV link above and see the ground I’ve covered.

In an unrelated post, but similar theme, Godless Wanderer, recently posted a look at his skill training allocation in a graphical chart. This strikes me as a very similar meme. What are the skill breakdowns by size? Have you been spending your time in missiles or guns? Do you have support skills or just skimming along by the skin of your teeth? Where have you been?

[caption id="attachment_211" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Where I've Been [Training"]“][/caption]I’ve used both EveHQ and EveMON to track skills in the past and don’t really have a preference. I would most prefer a native client solution for the Mac, but would settle for a platform agnostic web version or similar. Having said that, I’m posting my current skill pie for your perusal. I don’t have anything to gain by hiding the numbers, so like the maps, you know where I’ve been. The extremely high imbalance toward Science is directly related to our current activities in wormhole space and the desire to get Tech Three production up and running.

Regardless of what I managed to get trained, there is always something else I want to do and no less than 4-5 new skills [plus several that need raising] to get it. I only wish EVE gave you more choices on what to train!

So feel free to jump on the bandwagon and share some of your skill distributions. I would guess that most of you probably aren’t so wildly disproportionate in your skill sets, but I could be wrong.

Transfer of Power

After several abortive and/or unsuccessful attempt to get all of our stuff moved in to our new little circle of space that we are calling home, one of our most adventurous combat pilots found a wormhole. As Letrange mentioned recently, sometimes the best place to look is in the wormholes that connect you to other wormhole systems.

It was only 6 jumps from where we started.
It was in high security space.
It had a local station.

As we’re quickly learning, there were things that obviously needed to be weighed in the balance, namely:

The high-sec wormhole had less than four hours of life.
The high-sec wormhole was over half depleted due to some other group exploring it.
The only ships we had to move stuff was an Iteron Mark IV and an aging Iteron Mark I.

So at approximately 18,000 m³ between us per trip we started taking bites out of the supplies we wanted. The modules our pilots had been requesting to refit with for encountering sleepers was fairly easy to fit. The real challenge was definitely the defensive tower arrays that had not made it in the first round.

After five or six trips, our other non-industrial, combat-oriented pilot had to head out and I decided to make as many more trips as I could. I managed about five more before the wormhole decided that it has been awake long enough and in a final surge, expunged the last of its cosmic energy.

This time though, I was on the unknown side and headed toward our tower.

Nerds Away

Slightly disappointed in the lack of questions about internet spaceships. :/

A Carebear’s Carebear

How we conceptualize the universe around us plays an important part in determining what we find enjoyable. I once commented to a friend that I am that most detestable of all MMO participants. I am the carebear’s carebear. I find an enormous amount of fulfillment and satisfaction in helping people out and even more so if that person is an industrial ship flying, mining & manufacturing, POS-building, spreadsheet yield calculating fool of an EVE player. I see EVE as a relatively inhospitable, cold place that takes new pod pilots and tends to mount their broken, lifeless corpses on the ends of blasters and auto-cannons while simultaneously spreading any remaining biomass all over the scrap metal shavings to gum up the salvage scavengers.

From this point of view it a short jump to utter fatalism, that if we’re all going to die, we might as well go out with a bang and take any poor pods we meet along the way with us. There are some people who do this very well and with aplomb. They warp, web, point, shoot and pod all in the same breath. They tend to speak loudly and carry large sticks. The are only two options, death and victory. May the gods forgive any poor pilot who happens to escape their wrath. Anyone who runs is then inept and unprepared for life and will obviously meet their end in a quick and hopefully painful manner. How dare someone not engage them in combat! What lowly, incompetent fools to think themselves above an encounter. They should be vocally and wildly ridiculed from the com channels so that everyone else can look on in disgust at their craven behavior.

Or you can decide that this is a place that obviously needs your kind and patient touch. Your isk can make the difference in a young pilot’s life. They might decide that there’s nothing worth the time and energy when the world is out to get them. Oh, how extravagant the gift of a new frigate seems to the player who loses 2 in the first couple of days. The bonds of fraternity forged on the sharing of information and piloting proficiency are strengthened by the application of liberal amounts of understanding and redemption. What uncommon operators and precious pilots lie beneath the common dross of humanity waiting to be refined?

There is a balance that must needs be reached between the pain and providence of new players. Heavenly help does not replace the harsh reality of hell in space. Neither does being beaten bloody mean better basics. If we are to watch our world continue to grow, we need each other. You pirates shoot, maim and kill. However know that I will be teaching other to run, hide and if necessary crawl.

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