thoughts « Our EvE

Refit for a Bit

We successfully dismantled the POS from our little corner of wormhole space and got everything moved out and back into high security space. There was one little hiccup as a bunch of fuel was exported to an island [group of high-sec space surrounded by low-sec/0.0 space] that required a bit of scouting to extricate.

We’ve learned a lot about the whole procedure and how to approach wormholes which makes the operation an overall success. The main drawback was the initial investment was probably overkill for the returns, but in terms of knowledge was likely priceless.

Personally, I have a very low wallet and need to seriously rectify that. As we are also looking at moving into more permanent tech three (T3) production, the capital investment costs are still accumulating [labs, reactors, component bpos, reactions, skills] and will need to be factored into the final evaluation. We saved all of the salvage from our time in the ‘hole as a precursor to production, but are considering putting it up for sale as a support for future wormhole expansion.

My Inner Self

I found myself mining some ice to fuel our wormhole tower. As it was an off-peak time, there wasn’t anyone else from the corporation, so I was flying back and forth. The Hulk can hold three cycles with the cargo optimization rigs, so every 13 minutes or so I would make the round trip.

As I was getting several dock/un-dock cycles, I was able to catch one of the persistent display issues I’ve been having with my camera drones. A couple of them seem to have gone rogue and I get some very odd views. The net result was the following picture:

The effect is more interesting that upsetting. Any adjustments to the cameras’ vector, and they immediately self correct.

Getting Caught Up

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.

Capsuleers Hate Learning [or How Change Gets People All Whiney]

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.

Making Plans [and Shooting Plans Down]

With the plethora of skills, ships, modules, options, directions, et cetra available in the galaxy, I am constantly torn between heading off one direction and then another. I’m sure you’ve all face similar decisions: choosing to train for a little bit more missile damage; ship agility; drone speed; construction efficiency; mining yield; scanning speed [eek]; better tank. The list goes on and on forever! An acquaintance of mine has focused on frigates and frigate related combat skills since he started playing three years ago. He estimates that in another year, he’ll have all Tech 1 and Tech 2 frigates and their associated skills trained. He is looking to possibly move into cruiser level skills then for the next 3-4 years. His comment, “What other option in the galaxy even allows for a 5 year plan?”

This got me to thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of this year. I began by looking back and taking stock of how far I have come since first hardwiring into the capsule as well as where I am currently. Corporately I’ve managed to be part of a dead and dying corp, a new alliance and finally a solid industrial corp as part of a silent, unspoken alliance. Job-wise I’ve transitioned from a mainly mining pilot to one that also does a fair amount of research and manufacturing, scanning and hauling, missioning and mining. I love the jack-of-all-trades mentality I’ve developed and really want to pursue that.

So in reflection, I’ve come across a goal of sorts: Everything. I like being utilitarian and having efficacy. I wonder what that will look like. In looking ahead, I have some more general goals like keeping my training rate high [another 20,000,000 skill points], earning money, having fun and flying ships. Given that it looks like you will be able to change your skill point specifications for the new update, a whole world of possible career options open themselves up to exploration. The more specific goals about which I might have are proving a bit more elusive. So, I wrap this up with a quick question about your goals for the year?

Always Another Skill

I finally finished up what I considered a fairly good set of mining skills for a high-sec carebear-ette. All I’m lacking is the full set of T2 mining crystals. Additionally I thought I would start working on getting started on some production skills. I finally got that rolling along and realized I should be inventing as well.

I had decided at about three to four weeks into my pod-pilot career that I should focus on running any missions with one particular NPC corporation. I looked around at what I wanted and decided I like what Lai Dai had to offer. They covered a spread spectrum of endeavors and didn’t seems to rule anything else out. I wanted to fly for them as well, but it seems their rigorous application and acceptance procedures excluded me because of a technicality of my Achuran heritage or some such nonsense. I liked their spread of stations and coverage as well as the offerings from their LP store, not the least of which was the much vaunted ‘Highwall’ HX-2 mining implant.

So after specializing for a long time and even catching some flak from my then corp mates about not using ‘their’ corp and agents, I managed to get enough standings for a perfect refine. A couple of weeks later I was able to get a jump clone. And finally last week was able to afford my much coveted implant.

All of this to say, I have a lot of standing with them and was curious if there was a way to continue to leverage that to my benefit. Well, it goes back to one other reason I had selected Lai Dai originally. There are a lot of research and development agents within the Lai Dai corporation and they cover a large area of space and range of research endeavors. I looked at the spread and realized I have access to all off their R&D agents and was only lacking the prerequisite skill areas to begin earning research points for datacores. The datacores are requirement for invention of all kinds of various modules.

I started with Hydromagnetic Physics. Why? Well, my study of Ice Processing had required that I gain more than a passing familiarity with Hydromagnetic Physics and so I could immediately access high level agents by training Research Project Management. On a side note, RPM is a charisma heavy skill in the science field that for an Achura is painfully slow to get trained. I’ve stopped training it after four rounds as it will take another month to maximize it. In the mean time, I’ve also picked up Caldari Starship Engineering so that I can possibly work on some of the ship invention as well as sell some extra datacores.

The final skill endeavor has been to get some exploration work done. I had learned enough Astrometrics to use all the various exploration probes and some of scanning speed training, but knew that at some point I would need to move into a tech 2 ship to take full control of exploration. So I embarked on a journey to train Electronic Upgrades V I could train for a Covert Ops frigate. On a somewhat related side note, it turns out I need that for something completely unrelated. Manufacturing. Really, Manufacturing? Apparently you need various encryption methods for invention which require some skill at hacking which in turn relies upon… Electronic Upgrades V. So coming full circle, I’m training for scanning again so I can invent the T2 mining crystals so I can train for level IV of the various ore refinement skills to be able to use them in my modulated strip miner 2′s. Whew. I sure hope I don’t need to train any other skills along the way…

Search of Heartache II

So hot off my recent successes with exploration, I fired up The Pogues and headed out to try and find some more hidden belts. This time I jumped two gates downstream to the last system in the constellation and figured I’d work my way back toward home. If I failed to find any results in those systems, I’d then move on up toward the other end of the constellation. Needless to say, the first three systems were busts. I didn’t get a single signature hit on any of them. (It is a good think I’m making these probes on my own now.)

On the fourth system I managed to pull up a single gravemetric signature on my Multispectral probe. I was excited, here was some yummy asteroid goodness to find and feast upon! I pulled up the system map and gauged where would be the ideal locations for my next set of probes. I wanted to get as much coverage as possible without wasting any probes. The problem is that this particular system is small and the five inner planets are all within a couple of AU of each other. I worked out a system I thought would work and started warping around laying my Quests out get a warp-able destination. The first set of probes didn’t return a signature which I had read on the datasheets wasn’t unheard of. I fired off another Multispec to make sure the hidden belt was still around and hadn’t been mined out by a competitor.

The trace still showed up, so I went and laid out another set of Quests to try and get a fix on it. I varied my pattern a little bit this time to see if a slightly different layout might get a result. On the third scan a weak signature popped upon my HUD and I was grateful to see it, even if a little bit tired by now. I was putting a lot of time and isk into this venture, as was excited to see it begin to pay off. I was still a long way from operating in the red on exploration as the first small site had more than paid for additional probes and skills, but I knew I couldn’t just rely on that. The signal strength was a paltry 0.019 and about an AU away. I warped to destination, destroyed my existing probes and popped some Pursuits into the launcher. I figured if I could get a solid hit here, I might could afford that sweet little SoE probe launcher I saw in the contracts catalog.

The net result of the evening of scanning was, I scanned with my mid-range probes for over 2 hours and never got any closer than .6 AU. Almost every scan came back negative, and those that didn’t were very unreliable. My one consolation is that the site must have been very good because I couldn’t locate it. [Note: Given my skill set, it could be that I just didn't have the ability to narrow it down.] This following hard on the heels of my earlier scan triumph, was disheartening and depressing. I still like scanning, but I’ve also seen his dark side and will be ever more scarred by it.

Search of Heartache I

Having recently wrapped up Astrometrics IV, I headed out in my trusty Heron. I really like the ideas & mechanics behind exploration and I was excited to put it to work while I was working toward training the rest of the skills on the List™. My home system was empty so I warped next door to see what they had to offer. After my unskilled 431 second scan, what should appear to my multispectral probe but a Gravimetic site. Nearly lost in excitement I warped off to the first planet, simultaneously destroying the first probe and pulling up the system map to chart out the Quest probe layout.

The tiny system had two outer planets and a group of tightly bunched inner bodies. I figured out the best way to use four probes to completely cover all of them & then began another unskilled 431 second scan. On the very first run up pops a signature with a 0.6 AU accuracy. As I warped off to the point, I again bid goodbye to another set of probes & loaded some Gravimetic Combs to track it down. The first scan returned nothing, as did the second. On the third I could scarcely believe my eyes. A signature with an accuracy of 0m!

Flush with success, I cheekily warped to 0m and scanned the asteroid contents while aligning towards my home system. It was a small to medium belt of 15-20 rocks with about 175,000 units of various Omber derivatives. Arriving back home, I jumped into the Lou Ferrigno, loaded a fresh set of Omber I crystals and cleaned out the cargohold. The rest of the corp had long since docked and headed off to other pursuits. I knew this was going to have to be a one woman show. I opted to go with jetcans and risk the flippers as I was on a role as well as a bit of a time clock. Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later I was busy loading the last of the ore and heading off to refine the whole mess.

Then I got a bit proud and maybe a tad cocky… (to be continued)

Stuck In My Pod

As of late I’ve been flying around Tash-Murkon with a song stuck in my head. I blame Mynxee for no other reason than she comes to mind as a perfect fit for the song.

I guess I just lost my carebear
I don’t know where he went
Was gonna steal all his money
The corps gotta pay the rent
I gotta brand new Hurricane
And I’m gonna fly it tonight
I wanna find some trouble
I wanna start a fight

So, so what?
I’m still a pirate
I’ve got my drones out
And got a lock on

And guess what
We’re having more fun
And now your armor’s gone
I’m gonna kill your structure
You’re all right, you’re just dead
And you’re a fool
So, so what?
I’m still a pirate
I’ve got my drones out
And got a lock on

And so on. Doesn’t that just scream Hellcats?
[All to the tune of "So What" by Pink]

Pod Pilot’s Guide to The Musings

The Musings
Some pilots may be a big overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available to them in this day and age. By New Eden 105, systems have all been settled, contested and resettled, some of them many times over. The standard, accepted methods and mechanics for doing just about everything have been codified, argued, bugged, nerfed and buffed [not necessarily in that order]. Guides, opinions, thoughts and aphorisms abound on every conceivable subject.

Through most of that, one particular pilot has posted his thoughts and the thoughts of others on his own personal information portal. Most of us would have to be crazy to generate the amount of connections and keep up with them all that he does. Which actually goes a long way toward explaining the name. Crazy Kinux, or CK for short, goes the extra mile to keep a whole lot of information, people and reviews connected. By way of analogy, think of CK’s site as an autopilot for the New Eden Pilots’ Blogerati Class ships. But even with one person collating all that data, it’s easy to get lost in the deluge. “What To Do?” Let me be of assistance.

Click to continue reading “Pod Pilot’s Guide to The Musings”

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