15/05/11 08:39 AM
| Arkonor | 285 |
| Bistot | 217 |
| Mercoxit | 192 |
| Crokite | 187 |
| Hedbergite | 171 |
| Hemorphite | 168 |
| Jaspet | 152 |
| Dark Ochre | 147 |
| Pyroxeres | 118 |
| Kernite | 106 |
| Veldspar | 99 |
| Scordite | 93 |
| Gneiss | 90 |
| Plagioclase | 88 |
| Spodumain | 82 |
| Omber | 81 |
COPYRIGHT NOTICE EVE Online and the EVE logo are the registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights are reserved worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. EVE Online, the EVE logo, EVE and all associated logos and designs are the intellectual property of CCP hf. All artwork, screenshots, characters, vehicles, storylines, world facts or other recognizable features of the intellectual property relating to these trademarks are likewise the intellectual property of CCP hf. CCP hf. has granted permission to Our EVE to use EVE Online and all associated logos and designs for promotional and information purposes on its website but does not endorse, and is not in any way affiliated with, Our EVE. CCP is in no way responsible for the content on or functioning of this website, nor can it be liable for any damage arising from the use of this website. |
Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.
Old Business:
It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.
On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.
On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.
New Business:
The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.
For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].
We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.
So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.
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.
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?
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… 
I managed to get my skills trained to the point where I can begin to use Research and Development agents. They are a particularly secretive and demanding bunch of people on the whole. Once you get in with one it seems to pretty straight forward, but the initial hurdle has been immense. Science, Research, Research Project Management, any one of 20+ specific skills are necessary to even engage their services. Then there is a trifecta of skill that need to be trained to make the most of your agent’s time and earn more research datacores. Connections, Negotiation and the specific research skill all go into determining how much the agent will accomplish.
So all that to say that at Connections III, Negotiations II and Hydromagnetic Physics III, I’m earning about half a datacore per day. Given the current market conditions, this translates into about 100,000 isk per day. I likely won’t bother selling the datacores for cash though, as I will want them for invention. The Hydromagnetic cores are good with both ships and modules. I am training to also use Caldari Starship Engineering as that will be necessary for ship invention as well. This requires me to max out Mechanic which I’m sure I’ll need for hull tanking later in life.
On a more technical note, I’ve continued to update my spreadsheets to reflect the on-going nature of my skills and pursuits in EvE. Toward that end, I’ve learned a lot also from Letrange and his own calculations. I know a lot of people he’s helped out, and I can only aspire to help half as many. One of the many insights gained from talking with him is the wonderful patience he exudes as he trains, manufactures, PvPs, researches, or anything else [including make mistakes - rare].
The worksheets now calculate isk/jetcat of ore, isk/m3 of ore, refine rates, inventory current values and I am putting the beginnings of the blueprint originals in [in large part thanks to Letrange again for the motivation if not the actual format]. As is true with any work of science, it begins to take on a life of its own, apart from any previous contributions. I have all new formulae and functions and it nearly makes me giddy. Soon it will be time to buy some new shoes and handbags!
I’m always trying to make the best of both what I have and what I can do. In some cases that means being as efficient as possible and cutting costs and corners. At other times it is a matter of training that last skill to level V. Currently I’m working at wrapping up Production Efficiency to level V so that the stuff I manufacture costs less and I’ve been slumming [mission running] so that I’ll have enough LP to purchase an Inherent Industries ‘HX-2′ mining implant and then the ‘HY-2′ ice duration implant. My clone out in the Ardalabier ice fields will get the HY and the main high-sec mining clone will get the HX. I’m about half way there. If I get those all squared away, I’ll consider a set of implants for the mission clone.
On other progress fronts, I’m getting closer to having some good R&D agents with Lai Dai. I have plenty of standings, but the skills are still by major road block. For someone who likes to do a little bit of everything, getting your skills up to a sufficient level can be maddening. So in four days I’ll shift from production training to research training all the while I’ll be missioning to be able to mine more efficiently.
On the sales front, I know I’ll need more order slots, but that has also fallen in terms of importance to the other options. I’ve been putting my LP from Amarr corporations into faction laser crystals. This has been fairly profitable as they would otherwise just be collecting dust and the crystals additionally required for purchase have all been from mission loot.
Summary:
Perfection is painfully slow in coming sometimes.
Implants are worth the cost [sometimes].
LP should be available to sell/contract/trade.
Clones allow for specialization without alts.
Addendum:
Apparently magnetic cable flux disruption from a small planetoid in some far distant system is playing havoc with my pod’s electronics and it’s taking hours to accomplish little tasks like docking, warping, jumping or even just using the coms. [Some numbnut cut two major under sea cables in the Mediterranean Ocean and all of my connections are being routed to Venus first which further results in a ping of something on the order of 4800 ms.] I think the term is Sad Panda™.
I’ve finally wrapped up several skill sets that I have been wanting for some time. I can finally fly the whole range of Caldari industrial, transports and freighters. I can’t afford my Bustard, Crane or Charon yet, but I can fly them.
I also saw the devblog about the coming changes to the transports and I think they are good changes. I’m not so sure they were ‘broken’ per se, but they sure weren’t fully utilized. This may encourage more players to get into them and train beyond Transport level 1.
Also tucked into this blog is some ninja posting about the buff to the Mackinaw that allows it to finally fit two Ice Harvester Upgrades II and an increase in cargo hold that will let you hold 2 full cycles.
|
|