A Scientist's Life in Eve

Well, I never imagined that I’d be writing a post like this, but write it I must.

Over the past months those who know me in game will know that I’ve been struggling with health issues.  Following a recent medical appointment, this has become more complicated, and because of this I have had to make an incredibly difficult decision, but it is one that I had to make.

As of this moment, I will not be playing Eve for an indefinite period of time.  In all probability, I won’t be coming back.

Before I get any of the standard “can I haz ur stuff” comments or mails – no you can’t.  This has been taken care of in game already, and if I ever did come back, then I will be in a position to get started again without any real fuss.

For now, I’ve just clicked on the last “cancel account” button.  I’ve not biomassed anybody or sold any characters.  I did try the “free stuff for first trade” trick in Jita, and unsurprisingly I got lots of trades pretty quickly.  I also tried “can I borrow 5,000 ISK”, and funnily enough I did get a donation of 5,000 ISK to enable me to finish selling something (hint, don’t transfer all your funds until you’re sure you’ve nothing else to sell first).

A few thank you’s to the community:

• Rixx Javix – thank you for including me in the blog pack.  I was never completely sure why you did, but thank you for allowing my blog the opportunity.  I hope I didn’t completely waste that opportunity
• Siesmic Stan – thanks for letting me be involved in the blog banters in the way you have, and thanks for your encouragement and support – you are truly a gifted writer and a gentleman of the blogging world
• Bleys – thanks for your encouragement to keep blogging, and I’m still a little bit freaked out at how easily you tracked me down
• Tur – thanks for being the most prolific commenter on my blog
• To everybody who read my blog – thanks for reading, the page views were truly humbling

To all of you who play Eve – keep the faith and don’t let CCP lose focus on what’s important – you as their customers!

To all of you who read this and don’t play Eve – trust me, download the client and play.  You may sometimes question your sanity, but you will never, ever, find a game as immersive, unique, frustrating, fulfilling and engaging as Eve online.  Do it now. Right now.

Signing off,

Eve Scientist

So today has been slightly more interesting, although significantly less productive, than I had hoped for.

The reason?  I tend to try and change lo-sec cyno systems every so often to avoid being too obvious and letting patterns build up.

So I logged on one of the cyno alts and was very disappointed to see over 200 in local, when more than 5 would be busy.  After looking at some names, and setting an Alliance to -5, followed by undocking and hitting dscan, things became much more clear.  My dscan result returned 60 Super Capital ships and various other “normal” capital ships.

I decided to fly around a bit in m pod to see what I could see…. this was what I found:

Undeterred, I quickly ran away and jumped into the next system.

I was greeted by… around 100 in local from another null sec giant, who (according to smack talk in both systems and the odd kill mail) are not exactly blue to each other.

Needless to say, I decided that this particular cyno route would be rested for some time

I always wanted to see a huge super capital fleet, and now I have.  It would, however, be nice to be one of fleet with them, even if I was only in my triage Archon as support.

What this does illustrate, though, is the vast power that can be moved across the Eve universe very easily, and also hinted at political undercurrents that could reshape the already rather curious null sec political map.

Eve online is, essentially, a game all about pitting one player against another.  There are no “safe” places in Eve.  But this rant post isn’t about that.  Don’t get me started on that topic, when I manage to be in a completely calm place, I might decide to say a few things about that.

Why, then, is it that when I want to do something I need to pre-warn various medical professionals that I am about to embark on a path which will inevitably lead to repetitive strain injury?

If I want to shoot somebody I need to click my mouse precisely 5 times and complete 9 keypresses:

1. Undock
2. Select target on overview
3. Lock target
4. F1
5. Select local chat
6. type “lol noob” and hit enter

If I want to make a ship to be able to undock with, I need to do this (some sequences may be shortened if you keep everything in one hanger):

1. Click on unified inventory – window opens
2. Click to expand list of corporate hangers
3. Make cup of tea while unified inventory queries every single item in every can in every hanger division
4. Click on blueprint tab
5. Scroll down to blueprint (or type in the name in filter if you prefer)
6. Right-click on blueprint and select manufacture – window opens
7. Click on input tab to select ore and minerals tab (no, you can’t set a default for this action)
8. Click on output to select production tab (again, no default choice)
9. Click on quantity, delete 1 and replace with the number you want, unless it happens to be 1
10. Click on installations – new window appears
11. Set filters to either be Corp or Public as required
12. Click on the location where you want to use a production line
13. Click on the production line you want to use
14. Click on ok – window closes putting you back to manufacture
15. Click on ok – window opens with materials and skills, hopefully with no red x’s
16. Click on accept
17. Do other things while job runs
18. Click on science and industry – window opens
19. Click to get jobs, ensuring filters are set correctly to show jobs with any active state and to include manufacturing and to cover you or your corp as appropriate
20. Click on green completed job
21. Click on deliver
22. Close science and industry window
23. Open unified inventory
24. Navigate to where you delivered the job (or undock and fly to POS if it was at an array in space

Now, that was a really extremely very simple job.  I made a ship. 

I’m not going to get into any depth with farmville Planetary Interaction (PI), although credit where credit is due, CCP have vastly reduced the number of clicks needed to run it in a basic form from when it was originally launched, and for that I am very grateful indeed.  However, setting up PI is still far too complicated and involved.  To just set up one planet with a simple P2 extraction and production chain to make coolant or something similar involves so many clicks it is stupid.

Invention, copying, manufacturing… all could benefit from some form of bulk activity.  For example, if I want to start inventions for 10 Hobgoblin II’s all using the same mobile laboratory, why should I have to select each blueprint in turn and then go through the whole click happy process of inventing, and then repeat the identical process a further 9 times.  Couldn’t I select a stack of 10 BPC’s (yes I said a stack – sue me!) and say “Invent”, choose the installation and set things in motion?  Wouldn’t that be reasonable?

For PI – why can’t I choose the schematic in my processor and then tell it where to get the resources from.  Sure, I can do it the old way if I want to split input, but to simplify it, I could do that or I could instead tell the processor to collect resources from one location.  Just think how many clicks that could save over multiple planets.

You know the best thing about all of this, for all of you leet Pee vee pee EFT warriors out there who are laughing at me for doing stupid things like this?  You can’t shoot me if I’m docked all the time clicking and typing trying to make things.

Make my life simpler and what will I do?  I’ll undock and mine in my Mackinaw, or I’ll fly around sites in my deadspace fitted Tengu shooting rats.  I’ll be out in space, and you’ll be able to shoot me and show me how leet you are and how fail I am.

Or things can stay how they are and I’ll have very little time for things like that, and you can complain about how empty space is and how people always seem to be docked up “afk”.  I’m not afk, I’m getting Repetitive Strain Injury.

NOTE: The Carebear Tears Files do not necessarily represent part or all of the opinion of this blog, and are written from an “angry carebear” perspective to highlight areas of the game that an average carebear might think is unfair / broken / an exploit.  Comments accusing me of tears or being stupid are, therefore, not really helpful – instead use these posts as an extreme viewpoint to be debated and agreed with / corrected / disputed.

Production has been successfully started at our new home, and various ships and modules are flying off the production line and being moved to market.

The next stage of the project is to look in more detail at material requirements and then match logistics up with what we extract locally from our own systems.

My intention is to double throughput on the T1 production lines, and to try and work out the kinks in the T2 production lines to ensure that people aren’t sitting around with empty production slots.

Key to all of this will be the base materials such as Tritanium and Pyerite, and in this sense I need to work out a good source of minerals for compression.  I’m almost happy with the items I will be using for the compression, and just need to balance that against what we are likely to harvest locally.

I’m hopeful I can open up a new source for us to supply some of our goods, potentially direct to our landlords and their allies.

Beyond that, I am trying to look further into the future and am considering whether we can leverage our Planetary resources to produce POS and Sovereignty modules.  Other possibilities would also be to look at T3 manufacturing, although this is an area in which I have absolutely no experience, and none of my characters have trained the skills to even try yet.

Booster manufacturing, which one of my Corp mates undertakes, is another thing to throw into the mix, as well as restarting the Alchemy production chain, however if I’m not careful we’ll end up with a POS on every moon – and I certainly don’t really want to be fueling all of those, as we already need 3 jump freighter loads of ice products every two months to feed our current herd of Caldari installations.

This month’s Blog Banter comes courtesy of CCP Phantom.  If you ever wondered whether CCP read blogs or listen to pod casts, I think we can definitely confirm that they do based on recent events.

So, the topic is…

“There is no finer spectacle in the universe of EVE Online than the explosive dance of weapon-laden spaceships in combat. The yearly Alliance Tournament is the jewel in EVE Online’s eSports crown and the upcoming New Eden Open  should deliver the same gladiatorial entertainment showcase.

Given the scope of the sandbox, what part should eSports play in EVE  Online and what other formats could provide internet spaceship  entertainment for spectators and participants alike? ”

Hmmm.  Interesting question.  Eve, like many games, can be quite hard to watch if you don’t actually know the game and have actually played it.  For example, many years ago one of the local American Air bases (I live in the UK btw) had yearly air shows.  At one show I attended, they had a combat flight simulator on a pair of PC’s – if memory serves the game was Falcon.  Anyway, you got to fly against an actual F16 pilot to see who would win.  This was eSports as the had the players screens shown on two large screens at the same time so an audience could watch what was happening.  It was very cool, and people there “got it”, partly because we were at an airshow, so you’d know what a plane was, and partly because it was just something virtually anybody could understand.

Eve is different.  The last Alliance Tournament was (feed interruptions excepted) very nicely done.  The overlay graphics helped significantly.  Previous Alliance Tournaments I had tried to explain to one of my daughters what was happening, and she just didn’t get it at all, even though she’s watched me playing Eve lots of times.  This time, she was much more able to understand what was happening, but still only to a degree.  Therein lies the problem.  Eve as an eSports event is going to struggle as it’s sort of on its own in lots of ways as far as games go.

I’ve seen Quake online and Counterstrike tournaments.  It’s something that you can associate with – a human or vaguely humanoid avatar running around shooting stuff.  Internet spaceships where, let’s be honest, when you’re in a fight you can’t really see the spaceships as you tend to be zoomed out with your screen full of other windows, chat channels, tactical overlay etc.

Eve does, and in its current presentation format, will continue to have a limited appeal beyond people who play, have played, or are interested in playing Eve.

Could this change though?

Look at the trailers for Eve, and I’m not talking the recent ones, I’m thinking the Dominion trailer and the Eve is real trailer.  If Eve could look like that during an eSports event, who wouldn’t watch it?  But how could that even be possible?  In reality, it’s not, but could we get closer maybe?

CCP have, as I’ve already said, made great strides with the viewing AI, but how much further could they take it?  How do actual sports handle this?  It’s all about camera angles.  Lots of camera angles.  The bits of the Dominion and Eve is Real trailers that are superb are those parts where you see grand view, and then come in close.  I’d love to be able to manually fly an interceptor how they are shown in the Eve is Real trailer.  In reality, the interceptor is flying straight towards the enemy with zero transversal and will get alpha’d off the field, not quite consistent with the image of a Tarranis dancing in between the destructive beams of energy from the Apoc’s.

CCP could, however, make it closer to a real event if they added some cameras to the event.  One of the things I noticed in the last Alliance Tournament is that the camera angle reverted when the target ship got destroyed.  To move forward, CCP need to create a separate viewer for themselves, not just rely on a sort of modified client which still does things like that.

How about if you had 4 or 5 camera drones controlled by devs / GM’s that could fly around the arena without actually influencing anything.  They’d have to be invisible and not bumpable.  The controller could choose a ship (or missile) to attach their camera drone to.  When the object is destroyed, the camera drone stays where it is, not reverting to a different place so we get to see the explosion.  Also, each ship has a default view.  The studio director has a feed from all of these “cameras”, and can then give directions to the cameras as they usually would, and then can swich to whatever is the best view.

So, that could help move the current tournament format forward a bit.  Lots of work for CCP probably, but if they’re serious about eSports, maybe that’s the sort of thinking they need?

As to what place eSports can play in Eve online… hmmm.

At the last Fan Fest, CCP talked about the possibility of Dust 514 games being something that Eve players could view and place bets on, hopefully within player controlled establishments finally using some of the Incarna features.  This would be very cool, and would strengthen the link between Eve and Dust players, possibly resulting in sponsorship deals by rich Eve players, corporations or alliances for the best Dust teams.

However, there is a problem with all of this.

Eve is a game, however in many ways the way we play the game means that Eve is real.  Confused, or do you see what I mean?  If, in my game time, I logged on and watched my favourite Dust 514 team go a few rounds, making a friendly wager or two on the outcome, I’m not actually doing anything in Eve itself.  I’m not producing things, I’m not mining, I’m not moving product or materials from one place to another, I’m not shooting rogue drones and so on.

For the Eve universe to work how it does, in many ways it needs the game to actually work as if it was real.  If people could spend their time playing poker in a player owned establishment, or could do “test combat” in risk free virtual Eve arenas for pride and ISK… what about the actual Eve universe?

It’s bizzare, but in one way if CCP is too successful in making Eve a potential eSports arena, then it could actually affect Eve in a negative way, as player numbers might increase, but the number of players actively doing things in the universe that change the universe, decreases.

This is a very alarmist and bleak view, and I’m taking things to an extreme, but it’s still something to consider when shaping the future.

This is an excellent time for the blogging and podcasting communities of Eve.  Firstly, CCP have released a dev blog which highlights the depth of involvement, and the passion and commitment invested, by those who choose to share their experiences, opinions and thoughts about the universe within which we fly our internet spaceships.

A special, and very well deserved might I add, mention was given to the Blog Banters and the brilliant job (and hard work) that Seismic Stan does in trying to herd cats through a tiny door in the hope that something vaguely coherent will result.  I must admit that I (and no doubt most of the bloggers in Eve) are very jealous, and would love our own blogs to get a mention in an official dev blog, but congratulations Mr Stan – and keep up the good work (which reminds me, I need to post a response to the new blog banter).

In addition to this, EON Magazine has, in its latest edition, also drawn a deep breath and dared to look at the grim underbelly of Eve to discover what us bloggers get up to.

All in all, it’s a great time to be writing or talking about Eve.

Well I did it, I tried life in a wormhole over the weekend.

One of my Corp mates had scanned down a wormhole in our system, and so I got an alt ready, climbed into a Buzzard and bravely warped to 10km, approached and jumped.

Local popped up with several contacts, and I rejoiced for a moment, hoping that Concord had finally fixed the bug in their systems and made local work.  Alas it was not to be, wormholes are apparently still broken, I was relieved to discover that I was still in Empire space.

Why I hear you ask?  Well, very fortunately for me, my Corp mate had scanned down a B449 wormhole.  What was even more fantastic about this wormhole, was that it put me less than a handful of jumps from Jita.

The beautiful thing about a B449 is that it can take three freighter jumps before it collapses, and the wormhole itself is big enough to let a freighter pass through.

I logged on my out of Corp freighter alt (as we currently have 4 war decs active, and they’re all of the Jita Tornado blap fit type).  He sped to Jita in a shuttle and then got into the first of the two Charon Freighters I had just purchased.  Filling his cargo hold with two iHub upgrades and moon goo to top things off, he jumped into the entry system, warped to my alt, bookmarked the wormhole and jumped in to our home system.  After bookmarking the other side of the wormhole, the freighter warped to station and docked (it’s nice controlling your own outpost so you can set standings to let neutrals dock when you need them to).

I climbed out of the freighter into a pod, jumped back through the wormhole and went back to Jita where I picked up the second Charon, again with iHub upgrades and moon goo, and got back through the wormhole to our home station.

This time, I unloaded the freighter, loaded up with things to take to market and jumped the freighter through the wormhole, collapsing it and separating us once more from the nearby Jita hordes.

As local loaded in the hi-sec entry system and the wormhole closed, I was greeted by a Heron and a probe.  If I’d waited maybe 30 seconds more, I’m betting that the Heron would have jumped through the wormhole, and my alt in a sensor boosted interceptor would have had some fun blowing up the Heron and pod, as the pilot found themselves trapped by the freighter collapsing the wormhole.

It’s a shame that this didn’t happen, but my main focus was on the freighter runs, and that worked perfectly – a kill would have just been unexpected icing on a cake.

And so ends my tale of wormhole life.  Based on my experiences, clearly not all wormholes are broken, leading to desolate areas of space that don’t work properly.  Some wormholes are actually useful, and from now on, I will happily visit the following wormhole types:

• A641
• B449
• D792

There are a few others, such as B274, B520, D845, S047 and the rather pointless N110 wormhole.  I might visit these if I get in a fix, but otherwise the other wormholes seem pretty useless

EON Magazine Issue #029

Those lovely people at EON magazine have released details of the upcoming edition.  There’s lots of things covered this time, the highlights are below:

Crime & Punishment
Imagine Star Wars without Boba Fett, or even worse, Blade Runner without
Rick Deckard. Now consider EVE and marvel at how we’ve muddled through the game for so long without a working bounty system. Thankfully that’s going to change when Retribution is released, because as part of an all-new
aggression system, fugitive recovery will be an honorable profession. We
talk with CCP to find out exactly how.

New Ships
We take a look at the new ships that will be launching this December, from
the shiny new destroyers that wouldn’t look out of place in the seas of Das
Boot, to the re-purposed frigates and cruisers that form part of the biggest
ship re-balancing effort since EVE first went live.

The Science of EVE
Without being able to travel faster than the speed of light, getting about
New Eden would be whole lot different than it is. Without warp gates we’d
all still be trying to escape Genesis twenty years from now. So just how
realistic is EVE’s version of FTL travel? To discover the answers we asked a
proper scientist to investigate.

Banter Management
Blogs have been a cornerstone of EVE community life for years, especially
the ever-popular Blog Banters; in which EVE’s greatest scribes ponder the
burning questions of the day. As we begin a new series to compile the best
of what the EVE blogosphere has to offer, we catch up on a year of happy
posting.

Also in EON #029:

• Rookie frigate Testflight
• Chronicle: Fair Game
• War Report: Delve 2012
• Dropsuit fitting guide
• Profiles of Genco, Verone and BTA
• Hero Warship: Tengu
• Faction Warfare guide
• Postcards from the Edge
• The latest CSM Report
• …and lots, lots more

You can click here to pre-order the edition now!

So you’re happily mining or shooting NPC’s in your Soverignty held null security space.  Local goes +1 and it’s a neutral.  You follow standard procedure and get safe into a POS in your Mackinaw while others jump into interceptors and battlecruisers ready to kick the intruder out.

Your repeated activation of your directional scanner fails to yield a result.  You feel the frustration starting to build as you realise that the neutral ship is cloaked.

Perhaps they’re just passing through.  Perhaps they’re hunting, yet you see no probes on scan.  Minutes pass, and they’re still there, and there’s no sign of anything on the directional scanner still.

Almost an hour later and you know that your worst fears have been confirmed.  You have an afk camper cloaked in your system.  You just know that they’re doing something else, in fact they’re probably doing anything else except for playing Eve right now.  Maybe they’re watching a film, or eating lunch, or possibly gone out to run some errands, or worse still, maybe they’ve gone to work and left their account logged on while they’re working to pay their bills.

However, can you guarantee that they’re not really there?  How can you know?  What if they’re in a stealth bomber with a covert cyno, ready to drop a cloaked fleet onto your mining operation at a moment’s notice.  Perhaps they have 50 of their Alliance ready on a Titan to bridge to your system and destroy your ratting Thanatos.

How do you really know?  Can you risk it?  Can you afford not to risk it?

Four days later, and he’s still there.  However, two days ago his Loki decloaked and destroyed a Mackinaw, and yesterday he caught your Tengu just after a new spawn in that Sanctum and now you’re retraining Caldari Engineering Subsystems back to level 5 because of it.   You’re unsure of what to do.  You’re trying to only do things when protection is available, but that’s limiting what your Corp can do, and you know that he’s not really there for 15 hours a day, but you can’t risk it alone any more – that Tengu loss cost you a cool 1.5 billion ISK.

CCP says that it wants to address the botting issue, that you should be at the screen when playing the game, not logged in but afk.  So what are they going to do to fix this problem.  Clearly this guy isn’t at his screen for most of the time he’s logged on, and so it needs to be addressed.  But what can they (CCP) do?  Here’s some suggestions:

1. Cloaking devices have a limit on the number of cycles they can do before they automatically turn off.  It could be sold to the player base as some sort of build up of energy needing a recalibration, which means that the cloak has to offline and be onlined again.  Make it a reasonable time, maybe 10 or 15 minutes.  Sure, people could have a bot or script reactivate the cloak, but then that would be against the EULA and if detected, they’d be banned for the cheats that they are
2. A new POS module which can only be used when you have Sov level IV or maybe even Sov level V.  This sends out an energy pulse maybe 30 AU in every direction which will automatically break any cloak for, say, 3 minutes.  The module will activate every hour when the POS cycles.  The module will have very large power and CPU requirements, because of what it’s doing.  This way, you could have multiple POS with this module on, all at different cycle times.  You’d have to place them around larger systems to catch all areas of course.  You own the Sov space, you should be able to break the cloaks of these people.  If they have a bot that monitors the cloak and reactivates it, then again they’d be breaking the EULA.  Ban hammer time
3. Give the new Destroyers two special modules that can only be used by these new ships.  Let them fit some sort of probe and launcher that acts sort of like a sonar.  They can launch a probe which narrows down to a random warpable point which is between 25km and 100km from the cloaked ship.  You can then use the second module that gives a rough bearing and distance report every 10 seconds.  Hide and seek anybody?

Clearly AFK cloaking is against how CCP want the game to be played, as they want you at the screen engaged in the activities within this beautiful, and violent, online universe, and not watching re-runs of Friends on the TV in the other room with a beer and popcorn.

CCP – it’s time to act.  The new Destroyers are coming… the POS rework is on the table for discussion… make it happen and stop this nonsense now!

NOTE: The Carebear Tears Files do not necessarily represent part or all of the opinion of this blog, and are written from an “angry carebear” perspective to highlight areas of the game that an average carebear might think is unfair / broken / an exploit.  Comments accusing me of tears or being stupid are, therefore, not really helpful – instead use these posts as an extreme viewpoint to be debated and agreed with / corrected / disputed.

Part of the benefit of owning our own Outpost in null sec, is that we get to set the tax rate for various things, including the refining tax.

This means that, as I’m refining things for production materials, we don’t actually lose anything, as it all ends up in the same tab anyway.  However, in order to get perfect refining, you still need a combination of the right skills, the right Outpost configuration, and possibly implants too.

The basic formula is this:

P = 0.375 x (1 + 0.02 x a) x (1 + 0.04 x b) x (1 + 0.05 x c)
S = Station base efficiency, e.g. 35% or 50%
Yield = P + S

a = Refining skill level, i.e. 0 to 5
b = Refining Efficiency skill level, i.e. 0 to 5
c = specific skill level (e.g. veldspar processing), i.e. 0 to 5

So, in a hi-sec station with 50% base yield, assuming Refining V, Refinery Efficiency V and Scrapmetal Processing II, you get:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.1) + 50% = 104.45%, i.e. 100% = Perfect

However, put this in an unupgraded Minmatar Outpost, it is now:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.1) + 35% = 89.45%, which is pretty horrible

How can you improve this?  Well with perfect skills, you would get:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.25) + 35% = 96.875%, which still isn’t perfect

The clincher is the 4% Beancounter Refining implant that sits in slot 8.  This adds an extra step in the P calculation as follows:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.25 x 1.04) + 35% = 99.35%

And there you have it.  You cannot achieve a perfect refine in an upgraded outpost.

However, plug in the level 1 upgrade and boost the refinery base efficiency to 40%, and it’s completely different.  I’ll take it as read that anybody who is serious about this will have Refining V and Refinery Efficiency V, and also will have the 4% implant it.

At level 3 specific skill (e.g. Veldspar Processing), the calculation is:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.15 x 1.04) + 40% = 99.202%

So, what this tells us is that you need the specific skills to level 4:

(37.5% x 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.04) + 40% = 101.776%, i.e. 100% = Perfect

This also shows that you actually only need a 2% upgrade to achieve perfect.

Therefore, to be effective in null sec production, you not only need a Minmatar Outpost for refining, you also need to upgrade that to level 1 refinery (approximate cost of around 6 or 7 billion ISK if memory serves), and then make sure you have Refining V, Refinery Efficiency V, Specific Skills to IV and at least the 2% implant.

For me, that would add about 50 days to my training queue to get all of the required skills for every type of ore to level IV.   I’ll probably do some of them now, and save the others up for later.  I have the benefit of having a CEO who’s already done all of that, but it never hurts to be the backup