22/02/10 10:55 PM
| Jaspet | 43.86 |
| Hemorphite | 49.76 |
| Omber | 54.21 |
| Pyroxeres | 62.98 |
| Hedbergite | 64.65 |
| Spodumain | 74.14 |
| Veldspar | 75.97 |
| Kernite | 80.27 |
| Plagioclase | 86.08 |
| Scordite | 92.41 |
| Dark Ochre | 99.29 |
| Gneiss | 105.88 |
| Crokite | 191.13 |
| Arkonor | 220.85 |
| Bistot | 230.63 |
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My corporate compadres, denizens of Domnion, wanton wormhole wanna-be’s are relentlessly reminding me that it has been a week two weeks nearly three weeks since I posted any information. I’ve been sorely remiss in spending much time posting information here, as I’ve been busy trying to live life in a pod out in the wilds of Apocrypha. Dominion brought some changes, but nothing overly significant to the capsuleers who fly here the wormhole. So then the question I need to answer to myself is, “What has happened?”
We’re still in the same system and we’ve managed to pick up another regular engineer. He really seems to be settling into the opportunities that exist out here in the unknown and is always eager to learn more. He laughs at our attempts to explain that living out of one or more metal boxes powered by a large metal candy cane is a “Lifestyle Choice,” but is excited about the future. We’ll have to revisit the idealism when he’s been ganked a coupled of times, podded and otherwise thrown under the bus [bus being a euphemism for Tech 2 ships with overwhelming firepower and numbers.]
The ability to run sites has picked up some as well with a fairly balanced effort at participation from all involved. We have tried [and been fairly successful] in making everything a concerted group effort, though the industrial side of things is still a bit of a struggle. The new guy has been very giddy about not only mining Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite, but being able to be compensated for it without having to worry about the market, hauling, refining, et cetra. We’re excited about his excitement too. Along the way we’ve become very adroit at operating together as a unit and understanding each others’ strengths and weaknesses. In many ways our efficiency is finally picking up and coming together.
The flip side of this situation is that we are also beginning to realize just how isolated we are. Our jargon and vocabulary has shifted significantly and we communicate in seeming nonsense to some of our corp-mates. We haul our “bloot” to market, we talk about our gases and our pre-warps, we know that “@#$@” and “aoliv89#*&” mean someone is about to die. We have reached the point where we know within a few million isk how much a particular site is worth. We can judge approximate time frames for running those sites. We have become fairly comfortable with suggesting fittings and I would go as far as to say know what should work. We have established procedures for scanning, scouting, bookmarking, mining, fighting, etc that aren’t really written down in electrons anywhere.
This is all to say that as we add new people to our endeavor out in the uncharted realms of otherwhen, we’ll be struggling not only to bring them up-to-speed, but also even just communicate.
Technorati Tags: old players, new players
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.
When the hands that operate the motor lose control of the lever
When the mind of its own in the wheel puts two and two together
When the indicator says you’re out of oil should you continue driving anyway? -(TMBG)
[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Turkish Gas Rooster"]  [/caption]
I’m not sure what to make of the fullerene gasses that we harvest in the wormholes. They are by and large fairly low revenue items, plentiful to locate and annoyingly mundane. I have to admit upfront that I am a compulsive miner. I didn’t start mining because it was a “quick revenue stream” early in a missioning or PVP career. I’m a miner because I really hate rocks. Or because I am good at it and like to keep track of rocks and what is going on with all the systems in and with my ship.
Gas on the other hand in mundane. Even for an especially hardcore mining carebear. The cycles are blessedly short, but so is the yield and the satisfaction of filling your cargo hull is just not the same. The effect is compounded by the amorphous cloud that you are working it that varies from too bright to look at to obscuring your view of the heavens around you. I feel like a waitress at a very stodgy gentleman’s club full of cigar smoke and nearly dead investment bankers hoping to die before they have to go home.
Having said all this, I’ll continue to harvest gas and clear out ladar cosmic signatures.
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.
32 feathers in my brand-new Indian headdress
32 new moons shining in 32 skies -(TMBG)
So finally I finish the long walk to Amarr Cruiser level V. It’s been a rather arduous journey toward a predefined goal that I set for myself and managed to talk another into. The completion of AC-V represents one of the milestone events that we discussed as being a relevant stepping stone along the heavily wooded path. It allowed for a bit of shiny in the midst of an otherwise long journey. Hopefully the last 10-15 days of training will fly by in comparison.
The upshot of AC-V is that it opens up the line of Tech 2 cruisers from the Empire for exploration and exploitation. Now I can fit and fly Her Highness‘ [no real devotion mind you - she just owns the flim-flamming Empire of Squirrels] logistics ships and can fly the Amarrian recons, but only with a Tech 1 fit. It seems rather pointless to fly a T2 ship with T1 gear. It’s rather analogous to giving special forces commandos Nerf® battle gear [That's another post!]. The T2 remote armor repairers and energy transfers will find a use, and only become more so as soon as I wrap up training for Logistics IV.
 
So I hit the shops and find a sweet deal on a Guardian that someone was trying to dump in Lonetrek [Amarr ships are cheaper in the State?] and flitted over to pick it up. After picking up the ship, I used some fairly ugly, low-meta, named, mission looted, gear to fit a tank on it for transport to my main hangar. I flew it quickly as I could from gate to gate, desperately hoping that anyone looking to bite into a yummy T2 cruiser would prefer ganking a Hulk to my new shiny. The trip was uneventful and I was able to even snap a couple of touristy images from the camera drones.
The whole exercise might be one in pointless futility unless I can settle on a more tanky fit that I think will allow for WH survival. Maybe the dual Guardian-lock could survive incoming Sleeper fire given the higher resists. If any of you have used Guardians in fleets against the wormhole denizens, I would be interested in your thoughts about what to slap on it.
Words fail
Buildings tumble
The ground opens wide
Light beams down from heaven
She stands before my eyes
– (TMGB)
Because I’m always a bit distracted and doing 20-30 different things at once, it often means that I hit things hard and hope I get enough to keep the project afloat until I get back around to it again. One of those projects is the ongoing Orca development project that manages to be purely theoretical in nature. All this means, I don’t actually produce Orcas, but I come back and look at their production costs in relation to the current ore/mineral prices. In update to a post of long ago [Orca Production Calculations], the following changes have been made:
An Orca can currently be broken down into its component pieces and then sub-costed into their mineral components. The overall picture doesn’t include any of the manufacturing costs and assumes NO Material Efficiency research. I am putting the picture of the calculations in this post, but I’ll try to summarise the numbers for brevity as well.
To produce an Orca requires 7 component blueprint and one ship blueprint that all average around 1.1 billion each to purchase from the market. Each of the seven components will cost approximately 4 million in minerals on average [3.2 million - 5.5 million]. Combined with the total number of each component, the cost to produce an Orca is currently approximately 310 million. Since I’m not selling Orcas, I feel comfortable in suggesting that market prices ought to be around 350m allowing for profit margins, research costs and capital paybacks.
If mineral costs continue to fall, Orca prices could stabilize as low as 325 million. Adding rigs to them will still push them up over 400 million. The cargohold optimization rigs are still running over 30 million each. The addition of the ore hold has drastically improved the Orca’s flexibility and original role performance.
In the process of dreaming about my future and while staring at the picture posted in my pod, I have already started fantasizing about potential fits and what not for my Damnation field command ship, Al Abd. Come on, admit it. You have all tried fits for ships you can’t yet fly. It’s the dirty little secret/Pandora’s Box that EFT and EVEHQ when they become prevalent. Armchair capital pilots everywhere are fitting out their supercaps to do battle in their minds eye. So skipping the reverie and amorphous thoughts about what might have been, I managed to cobble together the following [mind the Tool Tips].
- [Low Slots]
- Damage Control II
- Armor Thermic Hardener II
- Armor EM Hardener II
- Armor Kinetic Hardener II
- Ballistic Control System II
- Ballistic Control System II
- [Mid Slots]
- Cap Recharger II
- Cap Recharger II
- Cap Recharger II
- Cap Recharger II
- [High Slots]
- XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Fulmination Assault Missile
- XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Fulmination Assault Missile
- XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Fulmination Assault Missile
- XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Fulmination Assault Missile
- XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Fulmination Assault Missile
- Large ‘Solace’ I Remote Bulwark Reconstruction
- Armored Warfare Link – Damage Control
- [Rigs]
- Medium Hydraulic Bay Thrusters I
- Medium Rocket Fuel Cache Partition I
- [Drones]
- [Statistics] Using Level V Skills For Comparison
- Effective HP: 85,934
- Tank Ability: 20.56 DPS
- Damage Profile – <Omni-Damage> (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
- Shield Resists - EM: 12.50%, Ex: 89.06%, Ki: 73.75%, Th: 30.00%
- Armor Resists – EM: 85.66%, Ex: 87.25%, Ki: 89.24%, Th: 81.35%
- Capacitor: Stable
- Volley Damage: 1,121.98
- DPS: 269.28
Bah – this whole post too long to format. Nearly twice as long as dreaming up the fitting that I am sure I will iterate through at least another thirty times. Are you not entertained? Ten million to the first comment that collects all the eggs.
And so it begins…
We’ve gathered all the fuel, most all of the supplies and we’ve got a possible wormhole scanned down. It’s a gentle Class 2 system with several signatures ready to process and not too big. We’re loading the ships and I’m out making bookmarks in the new system to prep for everyone being there.
Then a few minutes later I’m back with an Orca load full of fuel and tower. After anchoring the tower and getting it online, I get the ship arrays to anchoring and head back to bring in the rest of the supplies and escort the rest of the cohort in. We all meet at the known space side of the hole and prepare to jump. One, two, three and then me.
Except, the wormhole collapsed! No! No! NO! fortunately the ones that are through have some supplies and aren’t incapable of protecting themselves, but it is going to make it a bit harder to really get started. More to come later.
While those in the western hemisphere are busy getting some rest and the little island of former Vikings is busy patching the universe, I am finally taking the time to get caught up on some of the little things that needed doing around the universe. Not the least is a bit of formatting help for the industrial spreads that I use for mining, manufacturing and invention. I have been a little bit like the hermit crab sticking an anemone on my shell. Picking of bits and pieces of useful information from here and there has resulted in a very useful, but somewhat unorganized spreadsheet.
I was also thinking this would be a good time to get some extra rest and take a long nap. This plan worked well until my boss decided that sleeping on my desk was not really the professional approach to time management. So it’s ok if we play FPS or EVE and such at the office, just not sleep.
Other agenda ideas for the downtime included going to the dentist, getting the car washed and waxed, semi-annual visit to the gym, window shopping for a new computer and finally sending Mum an email. I’m still hung up on the nap idea personally.
So what do you all do during the long patches. I especially like browsing the forums after they come back up and reading all the “OMG I forgot to set a long skill”, “Why is the game not up?” and “Can’t they hurry up! I need to log back in so I can idle in the station and whine about CCP never improving things!” posts that invariably occur with an extended downtime. It never ceases to amaze me how many times GMT confuses people. If they’re going to already confuse people, let’s make it complete and use @internet time or some such to thoroughly bamboozle them.
Ok, off to work on catching up with myself.
Among all the recent changes that have been announced coming to the galaxy, I’ve tried to hold my tongue and just let others discuss the to death. I’d like to think I had learned from experience after crying foul for the Quantum Rise Apathy Patch [personal code name QRAP!] that really did nothing more than introduce 1 new ship, a couple new ways to build it and some rear-end servicing [oh, wait, I mean "back-end, database and hardware upgrades]. The combined effect was not only under-whelming, it was quite frankly disappointing in that a supposed ‘industrial’ upgrade for EVE was little more than a collection of little patches and a mini-Rorqual. Thanks for the ship but don’t try to… Gah, have to stop going there.
So, coming back to the Apocrypha changes, I’m trying to remain more detached and aloof. I know I’ll continue to fly my ships, mine/mission/manufacture my way to dominance and generally let any changes wash over me like Trinity, Empyrean Age and QRAP have done before. I look forward to new things becoming available in the form of exploration [never mind that a Sisters' Launcher now seems like an over-investment] and wormholes [Sleeper NPCs will severely hurt me] and adding a RAM disk that just makes my mouth water. I am even excited that they are revamping the character creation process and experience. Hopefully gone will be the crazy decisions about locking yourself into something that you have no idea what it entails. New players will have a greater freedom to really explore what is possible in the galaxy before committing to a given career.
But what about the over-all experience? My burning question relates not to how well a new capsuleer can find his way out of the loading bay and into a microwarpdrive fitted Rifter, but more along the lines of, “Mistakes made early on help define all of us as pilots and who we are.” If we just let things float and allow everyone to flip around at whim, there goes some part of our ships’ souls so to speak. Don’t you want to learn as you go? The arguments against the New Player Experience [NPE] changes so far have come down to two basic points however, that completely miss the experience as I’ve defined it.
The GoonFleet, ah, goons, are upset/worried/troubled that reducing the starting pilots to 50,000 skill points will result in capsuleers being unwilling to train for 2 days to get into the aforementioned MWD Rifter for 0.0-sec PvP ops. I’m more inclined to think that people are just shocked by the appearance of the change from 800,000 average skill points to 50k. Nevermind that a new pilot will learn skills at an accelerated rate until they reach 1,600,000 skill points, it must be just plain wrong to reduce the amount of skill points you start with.
The second discussion surrounding the NPE is strangely not about the NPE at all, but about the efficacy of the Learning skills themselves. There are two distinct camps that either want them abolished/banned/nuked/removed/plastered all over the asteroid belts OR they like them and think they are a positive aspect of the game. The first crowd views them as a unholy time sink that are only trained because they are forced to do so if they want to be competitive. They are angry that they train for something that doesn’t make their ship fly faster, guns track faster, missiles fly farther, manufacturing go smoother or mining more lucrative. They just want them gone because they are a, “kick in the balls to players” who want to train real skills. The second, somewhat less vehement group either acknowledge that the learning skills, “aren’t fun” but want to keep them, or they whole-heartedly love them as one of the things that make EVE great.
I have to admit my own personal bias here, and state that I think the choice to train your learning skills or not is part of that fundamental ethos that helps the galaxy of New Eden be what it is. Pilots that fit a shield booster on a Vexor or autocannons and artillery on a Typhoon are generally laughed at for making poor decisions, but there isn’t a cry to change the system so there is one tank system, one weapon or one propulsion option.
TL/DR; The Learning skills are about choices and reward. Grow-up, make a choice and live with it. Don’t demand that something be removed because it doesn’t fit your specific style.
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![Low DPS [Divide by 7]](http://eve.finkeworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Low-DPS.png)
