On Crucibles Of Change

So in a few moments, the universe as we know it will collapse in on itself in a cataclysmic cacophony of conniptions that we will come to call Crucible. There are changes enough for everyone, including everything from lowly munitions all the way up to galaxy spanning goodies. There are new modules/equipment as well as new ships to put them on. There are old types of equipment with new abilities and properties as well as new paint on old ships.

Perhaps more than with other releases I have been keeping an eye on this update. Regular daily Singularity updates and visits have become a part of my routine as much as my morning coffee. Perusing the differences of the new equipments, ships and visuals has become something of a habit. By-and-large, there is little in the changes that will effect my day-to-day routine significantly [with the exception of corporate bookmarks - which still seem only half of a solution]. There is a bit of internal struggle that coincides with all of this change, mostly centered around the question of, “Why do I care so much?” Bear with my introspective, belly-button browsing as I consider how all of this is affecting me so deeply.

In a bit of confession and disclosure, I have toyed with the notion of hanging up my pilot’s license and settling down into a long stasis. Over the last year has seen some interesting flak and change happen in the universe and not all of them have been useful or happy. There were times and days where I could not be arsed to haul my pod into a ship to do much of anything, let alone fly around, shoot, scan, salvage, explore…. So in the midst of all this malaise, comes a rather expected update to the universe with rather unexpected feelings attached to it.

Where there was apathy before, suddenly there is attention. Where before I felt like giving up, I am tending to feel things going up. I look forward to sliding into my ships and launching forth to interact with the others around me. If nothing else, at least there is in Crucible the concern for quality that derides my contempt and compels my attention.  I am ready for change. The world is again before me on a plate of stars waiting to be devoured with the utensils of ships and shots.

I would like to leave you all with a quick Wordle of the patch notes mentioned above. I was singularly impressed with the results and how much it reflects the essence of change.

On Using The Noctis [or not]

In a recent discussion with Penny [thank you for helping to keep Our Eve stocked and readable], the subject of the Noctis was brought up. Penny and I [and the boys too] have popped a couple Noctises [Nocti? Noctae? Noctices?] in wormholes since ORE began shipping the blueprints for manufacture and have seen a few different fits. This has raised several questions about the usage of and consequently the fitting for a Noctis. In view of my own usage, the Noctis – I would have to say that the answer to the first question is a resounding, “Maybe” and the second question has an even more amorphous answer.

On the one hand, a pilot could try and fit his salvage ship to survive. Plates and resists for protection and rigs to round out its ability to tank. This seems like a fairly tenuous position as the ship is quite fragile and will not be able to mount a very effective escape with such a high armor burden. The other option might be to generate as much speed as possible though it will be impossible to outrun all but the most inexperienced pilots.

Still a third option might be to use a cloak in a high slot to help “hide” for a moment to possibly confuse and confound a potential attacker. This can work for some ships, but the Noctis is still a big target that will be hard to miss when it does uncloak. Another problem with the cloak is the amount of time it adds to the job that the ship is supposed to be performing. Every decloak will engender a delay in targeting and the fitting of the cloak will increase the amount of time necessary to target the wrecks themselves. This can be mitigated to some extent by the application of Sensor Boosters and Signal Amplifiers. This is akin to ships fitting Ancillary Current Router rigs on Caldari ships so that anything “proper” will fit.

Penny is of the opinion that the best way to protect a Noctis is to let it do its job as quickly as possible. The less time that it spends in open space, the less time its pilot will spend updating his clone. This is true to a large extent and I believe that the fitting is only a small part of it. I would suggest that with the added bonuses to salvagers [and especially if you fit Salvage Tackle] that the onus for efficiency will fall on the tractors. Thus in general, a five-three split of tractors and salvagers will likely serve you better. This should hold true for high-sec as well as wormhole clean-up. I would suggest against a cloak as it is going to decrease the speed at which you get the wrecks locked and consequently the speed at which to process the trash floating around in space.

For the mids slots I would lean toward a microwarp drive for its ability to burn toward a gate or wormhole. It is going to make little or no difference in salvation of the ship should sneaky seeds of Satan show up to snatch your scow from you. It will however potentially get you to your destination in a more timely manner. A Sensor Booster [SeBo] is going to help get the wrecks locked more quickly and generally enable you to spend more time frantically mashing F1-F8 to clean the mess that was left floating behind. The other alternative is a Capacitor Recharger but will largely be a matter of choice.

Finally in the low slots do we come to the bones of contention. Cargo, Speed, Armor – which direction should you head? From the beginning I would suggest against a plate. It will do more harm that good to try and slap on a plate that eats up your powergrid, offers only limited improvement in tank and slows down your ability to turn, accelerate and go fast. Resists are a great option and will generally help bolster your tank so that your fleet-mates can arrive on grid in time to see you explode save you. I would avoid the expanded cargoholds unless you are working in High Security Space and you need the 3-4k m3 to store the level 4 mission loot you are collecting. Speed then is a great option to help you get close to the wrecks that are just outside your 68-80km tractor range or align when local/dscan spikes.

Your rigs are likely to just be Salvage Tackle and possibly a Low Friction Nozzlejoint or CCC if you have poor cap skills.

As I write this I am hearing and seeing a lot of negative commentary to the discussion of ship fitting in general and industrial ships in particular. Not everyone understands why they are told to fit a ship certain ways, and many more will believe whatever it is they want about ship fitting in denial of and with disregard for any suggested fittings. For those of you looking to shoot the Noctis, the best advice is just get in and apply alpha as it will go down very quickly. For those of you trying to survive, your best bet is to keep your eyes open and stay out of harms way.

On Doing Things Together

As part of an ongoing series of posts about corporation life, one of the issues that I have wanted to discuss for some time is the concept and process of being a team and cooperating. There are many pilots out there in New Eden and many of them want to be left alone.

• They are running missions and hoping Ninjas do not suddenly appear to steal their salvage.
• They are quietly mining ice with the desire for Battleterons V’s to be bothering others in some distant system.
• They are changing their sales by 0.01 isk to keep others items from being the best price.

All in all, they are not doing anything wrong other than missing out on the single biggest reason to keep paying a subscription to an online service, namely, interacting with other pilots. The single shard [Can you still call a system without other "shards" a single shard?] universe with all pilots interacting in the same temporal dataspace is essentially the paramount momentum behind being in New Eden. Even the aforementioned solo pilots rely on the rest of the universe to make their activities have meaning. They need others to buy and sell goods, power POSes full of arrays and even explode in fiery bursts of atmosphere and essential fluids. Without all of that, their activities in New Eden quickly become Sisyphean in nature.

Moar Droan Plz

For the rest of New Eden, the whole of the experience my best be paraphrased by Kirith Kodachi’s re-occuring motto, “Do Things…. With People” [though I am also sure he would like the rest of New Eden to chant, "Fix The Rokh"]. Whatever it is you like to do, I am positive there are others out there who would like to do it with you. There is always something more to do in EVE and someone new to do it with. It is an almost limitless universe with pilots constantly searching for new ways to beat the house, break the bank and burn the barns. If you constantly find yourself flying your ship solo, then you need to seriously ask yourself, “Am I doing it wrong?”

Sharing is Caring

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not advocating against solo PvP or saying there is not a place for flying a mission or ratting by yourself. There are always times when you have to step to the side and get something done. No one else can raise your security status for you as well as you can. No one else wants to solo PvP with a partner [though two-man roams are wicked fun]. I AM saying that even all of those activities are better done in the midst of a group of like-minded pilots who both want to see you succeed and are trying to accomplish similar goals. It does not really matter what those goals are as much as your agreement and participation with them.

Rep or Die

In the end, you really have to ask yourself, “Am I doing stuff with people?” and for some people the question looks more like, “Am I supporting the group of people around me, doing the things we love?” Sometimes this can mean doing things differently and even expanding your horizons to include new activities or ones that you would normally not do. I do not mean to imply that you need to do things that you do not like, but rather there will be things that must be done, and the people that you have surrounded yourself with will likely find them just as burdensome as yourself. The more you do stuff with people, the more stuff that you can do with people.

Another pilot made the point that sometimes there are people who, for whatever reasons, prefer not to be around other people. Believe it or not, but there are other people out there like them. The reality is, we all have a need to belong even if we do not want it. As much as we might hate to admit it, we do need the next person [with the occasional exceptions, but you can just pod those pilots].

On Getting Bigger, Better or Bagged

There is a natural tendency towards entropy. Universally, stars die, systems decay and heat dissipates. It is the order of things to become less ordered. Therefore, it takes energy to even just maintain things, let alone change something. This is also true for players, corporations, alliances and coalitions. They do not tend toward activity, progress or profit without work and energy being put into them. As I mentioned in Brass Tacks, WHEN relies heavily on its directors to maintain these levels of activity, progress & profit. It is not a pretty job [at least if  you look at Riyu or Mick], but they do it well. In WHEN we face entropy on several different vectors and often at the same time.

A base-level of entropy is found in the POS tower that we live out of. Without a regular infusion of fuel, it has a natural tendency to burp and die very quickly. This takes a certain amount of effort on the part of various pilots to insure that there is fuel in the tower, spare fuel in the wormhole system and ongoing procurement for fuel from various sources [markets, players/corporations, private planetary interaction]. It is not a significant level of activity, but it does exist and is a posteriori to our continued existence.

Downward Trends

Another item of concern that need to be kept up with include pilot attrition. While I would like to claim that 100% of WHEN pilots are online and in ships every day or even week, that would be a bit of a stretch. We do try to keep our active membership roles current and in any given week, close to 80% of member pilots are online and actually doing stuff [With Others - Kirith Kodachi]. Part of this has been that WHEN was a small family corporation that worked together on everything and the core active members were also the only members. As we have grown, it has been encouraging to see a high level of member interaction on a regular basis. We still have a few that are more occasional in their activity levels and we are very accommodating of their situations if they let us know.

Recruiting is another answer that we have applied to attrition and recognise as a sword that can cut both ways. While it is necessary on the one hand to have new pilots in the corporation in order to grow [and by extension do more things with more people], it can also introduce additional issues to deal with. Things like training/explaining, ship/supply logistics, storage space and organisation all become more complex as additional wetware is added to the mix. As Penny so eloquently wrote in Applicant Security last week, it is also necessary to be ever mindful of players that want to join/infiltrate the corporation with an intent towards nefarious purposes. Be it theft, sabotage, espionage or just drama, a new corporate member can make it difficult for everyone involved to enjoy their time in their ships.

In the discussion of entropic entities with corporate effects, there is also perhaps the most devastating: Complacency. What do you do when you have reached your goals and become everything that you intended? Or perhaps you are still working on the first steps and things are going very smoothly. You need to be prepared to have the next step in mind and be willing to cast the vision necessary to keep things moving forward and keep pilots engaged and excited about what is happening around them. There will come a time when success is also the very thing that can bring you down and start to erode the corporation more than just natural loss.

On Adding, Subtracting and Finding Yourself Happy

Some things are easily quantified and measured. They can be numbered, totalled, divided, analysed and reported. This is basic maths and accounting, in that you know how much of something there is and how much it is worth in time, effort, profit, etc. These are the things that most people aim for and are more than happy pursuing. More and better ships, profit, ore, isk, research, production, flying, etc.

On the other hand, there are the unquantifiables. The things that defy counting and spurn attempts to wrangle them into mathematical formulae. The time spent teaching a new corporation member the way things are done or walking a newbie through basic scanning 101 can be really hard to put a number on/in/by. How do we assign a value to the logistics pilot that kept several millions or even billions of isk on the field longer in a fight? Is there any quantitative measure for the time spent making sure the POS was set up efficiently so that arrays were easily accessed without flying back and forth all over the bubble? How about the amount of energy and resources put into manning a gate camp?

Still another thing to consider is how much isk is enough? The answer ranges from the PVP pilot who like heroin addicts, just wants enough for the next fix, er, ship to the full-on industrialist/trader who needs all of the isk to be satisfied. Most of us fall somewhere in between where we have a comfortable point, varying slightly by our preferred hulls and fittings. We could all use more and could survive on less.

Orakkus recently wrote about what it takes to be a Solid Pilot, and I think it is just as applicable to the discussion of value [and worth a plug as well]. There is a certain value to a pilot that can fully fit a sniper battleship and the one that knows she needs to stick to something else. It is often immeasurably valuable for fleet commanders to know that the the people in the fleet know their roles and can adequately fill them. I am afraid of only two things in EVE: 1) Logging in and finding that my friends have decided to pack it up and move to some other venue; 2) Idiots.

The first is mitigated by the communication channels that friends share in and outside of New Eden but the second is something that shatters dreams in fits of screaming nightmares. This is another item of value that is hard to quantify. How long do you invest in people that seem to be unable to learn or at least very slow to pick things up? Almost every cost/benefit analysis argument generally boils down into either a he-said-she-said situation or becomes so subjective as to be meaningless.

On Measuring the Value of Ships

As a confessed and confirmed JOAT, I manage to get into a lot of things, but rarely do them well. As my corporation mates would probably affirm, I’m not the one to call for overwhelming DPS, scanning, stalking, mining, PI, hauling, racing, 1 vs. 1, or drone support. IF however you happen to need all of those things in moderation at the same time, then I am the one to call. This is symptomatic of having 55 million skill points in 279 skills. I like to do a lot and be able to fly a lot of ships no matter where I go. It’s a matter of taste that I don’t really have any battleship skills to speak of other than the very limited ability to fly a Tech 2 fit EWAR Scorpion. But for ships of smaller classes, I can at least make a showing, but am far from good.

With that background in mind, I think I am fairly qualified to speak on most ships and the whole gamut of possible roles those ships need to perform. To begin with, I recently had the opportunity to pilot a good friend’s strategic cruiser. Through a series of PVE and PVP encounters it worked well and performed above my expectations, even given the obvious stats and potential. It demonstrated the ability to adequately tank a larger amount of damage than expected, manoeuvre and fly with more agility and apply more of its damage potential to the targets than anticipated. Understand that I have been fairly reluctant to fly the Tech 3 ships as they are referred to, because I tend to overestimate hype and flavour. While I knew that they were good ships and competent in their ability and application, I did not fully realise how good until the other day.

After a particularly good stretch in the ship, I made the passing comment to the owner that, “This is what a 1/2 billion dollar ship should feel like.”

I look forward to picking out a couple of my own someday to fly around and abuse.

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.

On Using PI In Our Wormhole

What seems like a sure-win situation with the planets we had available before the release has turned into an annoying state of affairs that will need a lot more work to make it a production reality. Whereas we initially had a fairly good spread of lava, gas, barren, ice, storm – we now have lava, barren, temperate, plasma, storm. This is coupled with the fact that it would appear that any two given resources needed on a planet to manufacture a specific tier 2 product are in fact separated by a fairly large distance. This requires a lot of CPU for links and reduces a given colony’s effectiveness.

After polling the other pilots who are setting up shop in the w’hole, it seems that they are needing about 2-3 million per planet set-up in extractor and refinery costs. This is assuming that you get it right and don’t have to move anything around later. We’re still in the exploratory phase and will likely end tearing down and rebuilding several times before we get it ‘right’. This is also coupled with the fact that we’ll need to start co-ordinating our productions once people have a better handle on the process.

On the plus side, we have more than enough enriched uranium to last out the decade. Too bad we can’t set up a shop out here in the nether world for pilots passing through to buy from us. Corporate Sales Array anyone?