A Scientist's Life in Eve

Well we’ve obviously upset lots of people, all at the same time.  Well, actually we’ve upset three sets of people.  In reality, we’ve probably upset absolutely nobody and just appeared to be a soft industrial target.  Whichever individual or combination of the above options is true, we currently have three active hi-sec wars to contend with.

As usual there seem to be a minority of pilots who seem to think that they can “get away” with a quick trip to Jita in their industrial ship when war targets are online and active.  I’ve even seen an answer from somebody in Alliance that “it’s ok, the ship is empty and I don’t have any implants in”.  Seriously?

I appreciate that Eve is a harsh place.  Space is cold and harsh, and so a game about space surely shouldn’t be anything but?  Hi-sec wars have their own specific set of game mechanics, and your best friend is the session-change timer.

Our response so far has been to form up a large fleet each night and hang around.  The wars have stopped mining and missioning operations, although our core manufacturing activities (T2 ships and equipment) continues as if nothing was happening.

So far we’ve grabbed a kill and had a loss, although that was mainly due to a badly fitted ship and not calling for reps – lesson learnt hopefully.  However, the tangible outcome of these wars is that we’re giving the newer members valuable experience on how to fly in fleets and it certainly makes a change to shooting rocks and mindless NPC’s.

The third war dec have been spotted moving in the system next to us, and it would look likely that they are moving some ships and equipment in to allow for quick changes during engagements.  An interesting tactic, but given that a major trade hub isn’t exactly far away, the tactic could be questionably restrictive, although I guess every jump required to reship to allow you to shoot us poor helpless carebears is time wasted and points not on your killboard

For now, we will just operate our usual tactic of forming response fleets and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really expect we will get many kills.  The usual pattern is that the war dec Corp picks off the occassional stupid / careless / lazy pilot for a quick easy kill, while we tend to blue ball them so they run and hide.  Not particularly exciting, and quite frustrating as a (slightly) more experienced pod pilot, but I guess it gets the job done.  Being industrialists we rarely win the ISK war as somebody in an industrial biased Alliance always seems to decide that mining in a Hulk with war targets in system is a good idea, but the main thing is it is improving fleet operations, and maybe we’ll get lucky and get a few more kills yet.

A post title with two completely different meanings!

Part 1 – The Elephant in the room

I decided to stay silent on the whole series of events that have unfolded over the past week or so.  Please don’t take silence as apathy, as I passionately enjoy playing Eve, and as a Scientist and Industrialist, and as the CEO of a Corporation who’s main focus is Industry, the information coming out of Iceland was disturbing to say the least!

Rather than knee jerk, I simply made a couple of non emo-rage forum posts to ensure that my opinion was recorded (if not read by CCP), so that CCP could be helped to judge the player’s thoughts, even if some of them were really quite unpleasant.

The most recent dev blog and the CSM heading to their nearest airport was what was needed to reassure me.  Yes, MT are here and I’m convinced that they are here to stay.  Yes, if they didn’t need me to take out a second mortgage on my house I would actually buy some clothing for my Avatars, but probably not until more items were released and until I could actually meet other people in station.

No.  I would never, ever, support MT for items that affect the game by offering an advantage.  I won’t repeat the reasoned arguments about why RL cash –> timecodes –> plex –> ISK is not the same as RL cash –> Aurum –> Roden Special Edition Ship with extra bonuses.  One doesn’t unbalance the economy and the other will affect manufacturing Corporations like mine to some degree. 

I’m encouraged at the passion and commitment shown by the Eve community over the past week – the protests in Amarr and Jita, forum threadnaughts of incredible proportions.   I’m also really disappointed by some of the reactions too.  Personal attacks aimed towards some devs.  Some forum threads being such obvious trolls but not even adding to the debate.  If you want to see how to create controvesy in debating, read CCP’s Fearless newsletter

EDITED 29 JUNE – Thanks for comments noting my mistake.  I meant CCP Zulu, not CCP Fallout, and have corrected the post from this point onwards.

I guess the thing I have found most disappointing, although I do understand some of the behaviours and emotions behind it, has been the reactions by CCP Fallout Zulu and the CCP CEO himself.  For CCP Fallout Zulu, I think he was guilty of one of the main problems of electronic communication methods such as forums and emails.  Once you click send or submit, it can often be impossible to retrieve the situation.  My general rule in high stress situations is to simply not hit send until I’ve walked away, had a tea/coffee, done something unrelated and then gone back and read it as if I was the recipient.  I always end up amending what I’ve written knowing that if I’d hit send I would have had more problems to resolve than I’d started with.  The problem with CCP is that they had already waited far too long to respond, and so I guess the added pressure to “get something out” ended up in the unfortunate first response from CCP Fallout Zulu.

Mr CCP CEO.  I sincerely hope that “your” email is not really yours, or that it was an unfinished draft that somebody picked up from your wastepaper bin or something, otherwise I think it displays some breathtaking arrogance.  Arrogance can be a good trait when used in moderation and appropriately.  To succeed in business it is a necessary part of the equation, but it is not the whole equation.  Again high stress situations may have influenced the email, but really I can’t understand why (if it is gunuine) you would send an email like that out as it is clearly not in step with the reality that was outside his office door.

CCP has a bit of a mountain to climb now, due to a combination of internal security lapses (i.e. leaked information) and poor communications (i.e. too long to respond and please get somebody to check your draft before you send it!).  This entire event has been damaging to their reputation both with their existing player base and, via external media, their potential player base also.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I hope that the CSM can help them learn.

However, from my point of view the situation is under control.  I voted for the CSM, and Selene was one of my choices so when they fly out to Iceland later this week, I’m being represented as a player.  I’ll wait and see what the outcome is, but as long as the “no Aurum for golden ammo” pledge remains (and realistically I can sadly still see that happening at some point in Eve’s future), CCP will be collecting my subscription each month, and when (if) they fix the NeX store and add more things and more rooms where we can meet other Avatars, then I’ll be buying some vanity items to outfit my Avatars also.

Part 2 – Visually stunning

Ever since I started playing Eve, I’ve been playing on an old laptop with all graphics settings to minimum (or off if possible) and experiencing serious lag when dual boxing, especially if I had to go to Jita – which I do regularly.

Yesterday I took delivery of an Alienware M17x laptop with Eve pre-installed.  Actually it had Tyrannus installed, so although technically it was Eve, I had a large patch download to complete first.

What can I say?  I turned all settings to maximum (except AA, which I put to medium) and then logged in.  Wow.  Dual box.  No problems.  Just wow.  Eve is beautiful, and after over a year of playing it, yesterday was almost like the first day I logged in again.  Perhaps this was a timely event, as it helped me to realise part of the reason I play Eve.

On a side note, QuakeLive is also now much better, although I still suck

Due to the extended downtime yesterday I haven’t yet managed to patch and log on.  I’m glad I changed my queue from a 1 day 4 hours skill to a 4 day skill otherwise I’d have been sitting there with an empty training queue on my main.

What has become crystal clear however, is that CCP have made a really odd pricing decision with the clothing store.  I’ve seen figures ranging from 45 US dollars to 68 US dollars for a monacle, and a skirt apparently costs the equivalent of one plex.

While it was clear that CCP were not going with the SecondLife model of us being able to design, make and sell our own clothing items (I did that when I used to play SecondLife), I’m a bit confused as to why they have set the prices so high.  I guess the idea is that the uber rich can buy their fancy clothing and the mere grunts will have to put up with the freebie boots and t-shirt.

However, how does this fit in with the new players?  Are they really going to sub into the game and then spend a few months’ worth of subscription on buying a new jacket and some good looking shoes?  I’m not convinced.  Although I can see that CCP have tried to set prices so that the vanity items are rare and therefore have value (otherwise why not just give us all the items for free), I’m not sure that their marketing department has really researched their pricepoint very well.

However, at this point I will stop and direct you to what I consider a very well thought through blog on the subject – The Hydrostatic Capsule.  I recommend you read it though.

Part of my RL work involves working with benefits and reward within my company, and so I started thinking about designing a package for my Corp to encourage and reward participation, as well as give the recruiting Director more to work with when approaching potential victims new members.

Broadly, our Corp activities can fit into mining, manufacturing and PvE.  We will also be doing regualar Corp roams into null sec, and so that needs to be included in any reward and recognition package.

The first thing I did was look at the Corp expenditure (office rental etc) and Corp income from dues.  We operate a dues system based on skill points of your main and any alts in Corp.  This allows us to have a near 0% tax rate and in theory should be very new player friendly.  I’m happy that our income exceeds our monthly fixed costs, so that at least is a good start.

The next thing to do was to see how best to recognise participation.  Eve online has the Corp Decorations feature, and so this seemed like the perfect start.  I’m in the process of designing some medals which can be given out on a monthly basis, based around the activity groups above.

Thing is, a medal is nice and everything, but you need something else, and also balance.  It would be pointless to have a mining reward that ended up just being given to the same person each month, with the newer players using mining barges (not exhumers yet) wondering how that level of ore harvesting is even possible.  I’d like to reward both.

The same works for other activities such as manufacturing and PvE activities.  By having the Corp tax rate set at near (but not actually at) 0%, I can still guage who’s doing missions and use that to select people to receive a reward.

PvP is straight-forward.  We have a killboard.

However, what do you actually choose as rewards?  Do I give a crystal pack to the miners, or maybe even something more meaningful for the newer miners?  PvE – I’m not going to be giving away CNR’s, certainly not monthly, so what could that entail – a bunch of T2 ammo perhaps?

Balancing the rewards so they are meaningful, but not over the top or laughably small – this will be important.  Another thing to consider will be a “special” award, a Director’s choice award for something out of the ordinary that a member might have done or achieved during the month.

I guess the main thing here is to see whether there’s an appetite for such a rewards system, and then to refine the rewards.

Comments to this post with ideas and suggestions would be very much appreciated.  If you were in my Corp – what would you want to see as a (realistic) reward and why?  What would you expect to have to do?

This post is all about final considerations in setting up a move to nullsec.  Listening to CCP Soundwave being questioned about the vision for nullsec space in between Alliance Tournament matches was very revealing.

In essence, CCP would like to rebalance the relationship between hi sec and null sec (no mention of low sec ofc).

Currently, although hi sec is very reliant on both low and null sec space for moon goo for all things T2, that is probably about as far as it goes, with the exception of the rare deadspace modules that get dropped from sites.

However, 0.0 space is very reliant on hi sec space for all sorts of things.  POS fuel for example, from my experience this seems to regularly come from armies of “afk” players using Mackinaws in hi sec systems to farm ice fields.  Ships and modules – why risk your blueprints in lawless space when you can simply bring it all in via a jump freighter or suitcase carrier.

During our time in 0.0 space, we tried to buck the trend and took over 1,000 BPO’s out to an NPC station (not going to put them in a station that could be captured!).  We mined and manufactured as best we could, however the following issues were encountered:

• Base mineral availability
• Moon goo availability
• Lack of demand

Now let’s look at each in turn.

Base Mineral availability:
So you have a choice of ABC or Veldspar and Scordite.  Clearly people mined ABC.  However this isn’t exactly useful for building, as all it ends up doing is giving you lots of ISK worth of surplus minerals to sell in hi sec which you use you buy… tritanium etc.  You’re then risking a jump freighter to bring in maybe 34 million tritanium.  Wow, that’s not even enough to build a carrier.  Not good.  But why mine Veldspar in a belt which leaves you vulnerable, when you could be in a grav site in an upgraded system mining expensive ores instead to bulk up your wallet.

Moon goo availability:
OK, so when we were in 0.0 we were making Tungsten Carbide and Sylramic Fibers – a good source of income.  However, this was really only useful for a small part of our T2 manufacturing, and therefore we sold the surplus at Jita and used the ISK to buy other needed materials like nanotransistors and other racial carbides etc.  However, what of others in the Alliance – couldn’t we trade with them or buy with them?  Apparently not.  Now I (really) hope that that was a simple failure of our Alliance and the NC generally, but I’m not convinced and the best we managed to achieve was buying some sulfuric acid, but the supply was unreliable at best and eventually we set up a medium POS to do it ourselves.

Lack of demand:
This was perhaps the biggest killer, and the most frustrating of all.  We’d make ships and modules and put them on the market at, say, Jita +5% or Jita +10% maximum (sometimes actually a lower than Jita prices), only to find that either they were all purchased by one person and immediately put up for a huge markup, or that they just sat there and didn’t sell.

Carebear tears I hear you cry!  Well, not really.  The answer to the profiteering was that we’d made the profit that we wanted, so we just built more and put them up to stop the person profiteering.  This wasn’t how we wanted to do things though, as we were then using our finite resources to repeat something rather than move on and put something else that was needed on the market.

The second issue was much more of a problem though.  We could see that the items were being used (and lost) based on the fleets around us and Alliance killboard, yet our items were sitting on the market unsold.  This is where the real answer was found.  Why buy local and possibly compromise on your fit, when you could get to Jita or Rens quickly, albeit at risk, and buy precisely what you wanted.

The second issue will, I think, therefore have been partly addressed by the nerf of jump bridges, but with suitcase carriers and jump freighters, I’m sure this will still exist.

Summary:
So really, as a Corp, to exist out in deep null sec, you realistically won’t be able to be truly independent.  Despite my previous posts, you’ll have to travel to hi sec to buy materials, ships and moudles.  You could be self-contained with fuel, and some (if not all depending on how you can influence your miners) minerals, but realistically you’ll probably be using your jump freighter to bring in tritanium and pyerite, and squeezing T2 building materials into the spare space.

At this stage it’s clear to me that CCP could maybe encourage players to exist more independently in null sec, but ultimately it’s up to us, the players, to set up the market, to make the trading arrangements, to populate the markets at fair prices, and to make the trade routes of our competitors as dangerous as possible

I’m starting to look forward to the idea of returning to nullsec in the future.  Not yet, but I think it’s going to happen in the future.

As an aside, in 3 months I’ll have an almost perfect logistics alt flying all four logi ships with the Logistics Elite certificate, and in about 8 months my main will be almost perfect in a Damnation, and my PI alt will be flying a carrier and jump freighter.  Depending on how things work out – maybe that would be a good selling point for getting into nullsec?

OK, following from my last post, and a very helpful comment, the base figure we arrived at for revenue was 2.5 billion ISK per month.

Now let’s be honest that I’ve possibly cheated a little bit by marking POS fuel as zero cost.  Clearly POS fuel is actually quite expensive, but my illustration is based on trying to survive in deep null-sec where you may be three or more jump freighter jumps away from the warm cuddly blanket of hi sec and trading hubs with legions of macro miners harvesting ice.

Instead, I’m working on the basis that your Corp will organise mining operations to collect ice, and that you will refine that ice at a POS to get 100% yield, and that you will collect the other POS fuel by mandatory PI donations from your Corp.

As an aside, to fuel one completely stacked out Caldari Large POS will require you to collect 216 blocks of the enriched racial ice block (eg Pristine White Glaze) and a further 18 blocks of Dark Glitter, i.e. a total of 251 ice blocks, which in a Mackinaw with Exhumer 5 (no Orca or Rorqual bonuses) would equate to just under 6 hours ice mining per week per large fully fitted POS  (workings are 11 cycles per hour, 4 blocks per cycle, refining in POS array, 100% yield with ice). 

OK, so now that fuel is dealt with we need to get some ISK 

Corporate Tax:
There are various ways you can make ISK in 0.0.  You could, for example, set a tax rate to collect bounties from your members as they use the system upgrades you’ve installed.  This is perfectly reasonable, but remember we’ve only upgraded to level 3 arrays, so we won’t get Havens and Sanctums even if the true security status is low enough.  You need to balance the tax with your member’s requirements too – they need to be able to buy things like ships, modules and ammo, and for some they also need to be able to afford their plex each month.  Setting too high a tax rate won’t necessarily increase your revenue as you might lose members, or at least restrict your recruitment opportunities.

General information I can find by trolling the Eve online forums is that you can probably safely get around 12 million ISK per hour in the sites that will spawn.  I’m not going to complicate things by considering the implications of living in drone territory right now.  So, say you set your tax rate to 15% you’ll get 1.8 million ISK every hour one of your members rats.  So, from ratting alone, you’d need just under 1,400 hours of ratting to take place per month to make your 2.5 billion ISK.  So that would be 10 members ratting for around 35 hours each per week – that’s probably a bit unlikely as you’re giving them a 9-5 job, Monday to Friday with one hour unpaid lunch :O

Still, this should still be viewed as a source of income to a degree and maybe you’ll be able to get around 300 million ISK per month from tax in this way if you have 10 members ratting for 4-5 hours each per week, not entirely unreasonable.  So that leaves a shortfall of 2.2 billion ISK.

Moon Mining:
This is what bankrolls a number of the largest null sec Alliances.  However, let’s be honest and admit that as a renter you’re unlikely to be presented with a Tech moon in your rented system, at least certainly not for the low monthly rental that has been quoted.  It is possible that the landlord Alliance might actually have POS up mining on all the best moons, but I’m banking on the fact that you have some normal moons available for use.

We’re going to use sylramic fibers as an example.  Firstly on the basis that you have all the materials in system, and secondly on the basis that you’re missing Chromium for making the Hexite.  I’m also not going to review POS fuel requirements, as you’ll just have to arrange for your members to spend longer in their Mackinaws – sorry, I’ll leave you to explain that one.

So basic calculations are that you make two batches of Sylramic Fibers per hour, resulting in a total of 12,000 units per hour produced, giving you revenues of just under 1.1 billion ISK per month.  Realistically you will need two large Caldari POS dedicated just to this. 

If you have to buy the Chromium, this will cost you around 120 million ISK per month, dropping your net profit to just under 1 billion ISK per month.

Therefore, with taxes from ratting and moon mining, you’ve got around 1.3 billion ISK of revenue each month, i.e. we’re just over half way.

Other Income Streams:
Beyond this point your options are probably pretty limited to the below:

• Mining
• Manufacturing (including normal capitals)
• Planetary Interaction

A combination of any of these three could help you to varying degrees.  For example if you ran weekly Corp mining ops and you had say 5 Hulks mining for 4 hours each with all proceeds to Corp, you could easily get at least 1.5 billion ISK of minerals per month, which takes you over the 2.5 billion ISK level.  Remember though, you’ve now got your miners doing two Corp ops each week, one for ore and one for ice.  They need to make their own ISK too, although economies of scale will work as you hopefully you might have 10 or more miners operating.

Manufacturing is a bit more of an unknown and depends on your local market.  For example, buying ore from your mining members and using it to make ships to sell to local residents could be quite profitable.  Using your x-large ship assembly array for more than just storage and making carriers instead could also bring the ISK flooding in.  The risk should be mitigated by bringing in blueprint copies of everything only, and certainly no high value BPO’s ever.  So you can lock them down in a station with an office – what happens if the player owned outpost you had your BPO’s in becomes owned by another, less friendly, Alliance?

Finally there is the great ISK resource known as PI.  In my last Corp when we were in 0.0 space, we gave our members free Command Centers and some ISK to set-up their planets.  We also offered guidance on how to set-up the and operate the planets if needed.  The only condition was that one planet had to be dedicated solely to the Corp and used to produce a specified P1 product to agreed levels.  The other planets were theirs and they were encouraged to set up the planets to produce things such as POS fuels to sell to the Alliance.  This would also work in a rental set-up where your members could sell POS fuels in the local market, or worst case scenario for shipping out to Jita at a later date for sale by the Corp on their behalf, for a fee of course.  This should realistically allow your Corp members to be able to gain personal income of 100 to 200 million ISK per month quite comfortably, which is well on the way to a plex and will certainly cover a couple of good T2 fitted battlecruisers per month.

The PI donated to Corp would then be converted into other things, possibly all the way up to P4, and could then be used to make POS modules and Sovereignty Structures, again for sale in the local market.

Income from these are uncertain, and depend on your member activity and market conditions, but again I would have conservatively estimated a minimum income of 500 million to 1 billion ISK per month.

Summary:
So, where have we ended this part?  Hopefully you should be making at least 1 billion ISK profit per month, raising to around 1.7 billion ISK after the first three months, subject to losses etc.  Your members should all be making enough ISK to plex themselves, and everything is lovely.

Unfortunately this is Eve and null-sec, so realistically you could find yourself in the middle of a warzone, or getting ganked for fun by Pandemic Legion and so on.  However, null sec is not meant to be safe, and your business model needs to reflect that in its risk/reward ratio.  If your model doesn’t allow for you to be having fun and making a high profit margin (hot-drops excepted), then you shouldn’t be trying it, as you’ll end up overworked, bitter and frustrated.

NOTE: I’m not saying that living in 0.0 space is easy, and I’m not trying to over-simplify it, quite the contrary.

There will be a follow-up post to this (i.e. part 3) when I’ll cover some other things to consider, albeit from my own experience of living in 0.0 space.

I was talking with somebody the other day about the differences between hi-sec, 0.0 and wormholes, myself mainly from the hi-sec and 0.0 when we were part of the NC in the Vale and Geminate regions.

Now that the scene is set for most of 0.0 space to be owned by the DRF and rented out, the topic of 0.0 rental came up and the costs associated with this.

Although the conversation ended before it was complete, I did my usual and loaded up Excel to run some numbers.  The output was really quite interesting.

NOTE: Below costings amended following a comment made below about this post.  Original rental cost was guestimated at 500 million ISK per month, I’ve increased this to 1 billion ISK per month, which may still be conservative.

Rental Fees:
The easiest part of the equation.  Let’s put it at a round figure of 1 billion ISK a month.

Sovereignty:
Yes, you need Sovereignty, so add 180 million per month for the TCU upkeep fees (hope Concord give the the TCU a full valet for that price and not just a quick pressure wash to clean the outside).

You also actually need a TCU in the first place, so add another 51 million ISK.

PvE Upgrades:
Well of course we want to make the most of our space, whether you like mining, ratting, complexes or exploration.  Let’s say that you like a bit of everything.  You also fancy

1x Infrastructure Hub  –  230 million ISK
Pirate Detection Array 1-3  -  300 million ISK
Entrapment Array 1-3  -  300 million ISK
Ore Prospecting Array 1-3  -  300 million ISK
Survey Networks 1-3  -  300 million ISK
SUB-TOTAL = 1.43 billion ISK

Infrastructure Upgrades:
Well, you might also have lots of large shiney things and want a capital ship maintenence bay to store them in, and a nice cyno generator to make the trip home hassle free (just don’t tell Pandemic Legion where you’re going, when you’re going and what in).

Capital Ship Maintenence Array  -  390 million ISK
Cynosural Generator Array  -  45 million ISK
Cynosural Navigation upgrade  -  100 million ISK
Cynosural Navigation maintenence costs  -  60 million ISK per month
Supercapital Construction Facilities upgrage  -  50 million ISK
Supercapital Construction Facilities maintenence costs  -  30 million ISK per month

Adding it all up:

Ok.  I think this would be a fairly reasonable set-up to get you going.  Of course you’d need to provide one or more POS and associated basic modules such as defensive and offensive modules, as well as anything else you need such as Ship Maintenence Arrays and Corporate Hangers (note – we use large ship assembly arrays instead due to the superior storage they offer over the Corporate Hangers).

So let’s add up the cost:

One off-costs for equipment and upgrades  =  2.066 billion ISK
Ongoing monthly costs = 1.270 billion ISK
i.e. your first month total will be 3.336 billion ISK

So, assuming you’ve always wanted to live in 0.0 and had 2 billion ISK that you just wanted to spend and write-off then the equipment and associated upgrades takes care of your ISK… oh actually no, this must be seen as a medium to high risk investment, as all of the equipment and upgrades can (and will at some point) be destroyed.  Depending on where you rent, this might be a short or long term investment, and unpredictably so.

Coupled with this are the regular monthly costs you now have of just under 1.3 billion ISK per month.

Let’s say that you plan to use PI and ice mining (yawn) to cover all your POS fuel so we’ll not count those costs (wrong! it’s still cost, but for the purposes of this we’ll ignore it).  You had the POS control towers and modules just sitting there gathering dust, so no more expenditure required there either (again – return on investment anybody?).

So, you now need to set a timeframe to recover your initial investment of around 2.1 billion ISK.  Shall we say 3 months?  So, you need to make profits of 700 million ISK per month to pay off your initial investment (let’s not cover losing your system and stuff before then – that’s not a nice thought).  You also need to make 1.3 billion ISK per month to cover your ongoing monthly costs.  You also want both your members and your Corp to actually make some ISK out in 0.0, otherwise what’s the point?  Let’s round it to a conservative 500 million ISK per month.  So, 700 million ISK + 1.3 billion ISK + 500 million ISK = 2.5 billion ISK of revenue required per month.  If your set-up lasts more than 3 months, then your net profits will increase at that point from 500 million ISK per month to 1.2 billion ISK per month.

 However, you may decide to use the surplus ISK to reinvest in further upgrading your Pirate Entrapment level for example, or maybe adding cynosural suppression with its associated 600 million ISK per month cost so you can “safely” produce those supercapital ships without the risk of a hot-drop (wrong! subcap fleet takes out cyno jammer and it’s all over as the 50+ supercaps jump in and ruin your day just as the baby super carrier is about to be born).

So, your Corp is making ISK, your members are making ISK.  Oh wait, we haven’t actually discussed the mechanisms to make ISK yet.

That’ll be covered in the next post.

My only comment at this stage is that revenues of 2.5 billion ISK per month to give a net profit of 500 million ISK per month is, on the face of it, pretty poor and not a big enough margin of error.  So in the next post when we cover revenue streams, I think we’ll try to set revenue levels at around the 3 to 4 billion ISK per month level to be more sensible.

The current hi-sec war seems to be having it’s usual effects.  The members of the Corp who have high ISK requirements to pay for their PLEX, or those who have a dislike of anything war related have dropped Corp.

The other effect is that frustration creeps in and expresses itself in various forms.  In this war the effects have been amplified due to the fact that the first few engagements the Alliance has had have not been particularly successful, and interspersed with this there have been the usual needless losses due to somebody deciding to try and continue to mine or mission, or move a ship from somewhere while things seem “quiet”.  These losses haven’t exactly been met with enthuasism of course, and this has then led to frustration and some internal politics.

However, things are being smoothed out.  Last night I finished off my manufacturing and invention jobs and just as I did, one of the known neutral scouting alts appeared in local.  The call went out on comms and a check that everybody active and online was in a fleet was made.  We had cloaky eyes at the station and at the gate and sure enough gatefire and a flashy red war target appeared.

Unfortunately this story doesn’t end in a victorious explosion of the nasty red ship, in fact we actually lost a scout ship due to a freak decloaking event.  However, what we did do was form up a good fleet composition and make sure that the war target’s neutral scout got to see the fleet.  We also immediately reshipped into a heavier fleet composition as soon as they left local on the understanding that they usually reship to meet the known threat.

Although no kills were to be had, the main task for that fleet was to judge their response and we’re all now looking forward to the next encounter, whether it results in a win or loss.

Really – does every hi-sec Corp / Alliance get this many war decs?

Our current war dec appears to be much better organised than many of the others.  I could whine on about honour and mechanics etc, but that would be pointless and could be classified as carebear tears, which I am most definitely not shedding

The war dec seems to function by using neutral cloaked alts to provide intel and warp-ins against anybody foolish enough to present an easy target of opportunity such as a mining barge,  industrial or mission fit bling ship.  They also utilise neutral remote repair – how original

This war dec will certainly be much more interesting in that the Alliance will need to think.  It will need to sort out fleet composition, take more care in setting the terms of the engagements, and also decide if/when to engage the neutral remote rep.

So far the killboard is all the wrong way - oops.  This will change and the number of people willing to x up and get in fleet just from my Corp alone was encouraging.

How does this affect anything else?  Well, to be honest it doesn’t apart from reducing the weekly mining take.  Some people will inevitably drop Corp during the dec to continue to mission and mine to pay for their plex, but the vast majority of the Corp are fitting ships and checking their clone is up to date.

Now as for my skills queue, my logi alt is back to training Minmatar Cruiser 5 ready for the Scimatar, and my Damnation queue is progressing well.  I’ve decided to get Caldari Cruiser 5 before I remap for the second part of the queue so I’ll be planning to fly a Nighthawk too.  But for now, I’ll take the opportunity to get myself the Caldari Battleship and fit up a nice ECM Scorpion – I have all those T2 ECM skills, I might as well use them while I’m waiting to unlock the Falcon.