Undocked

Suit Up! From flickr user Tom

The stars aligned and I spent three glorious hours zipping around Oto, helping pew-pew 51 Templis CALSF ships into dust before losing my Catalyst (3M isk ship with 16M loot in the hold...smrt!). Our fellow Gal Mil corp "Rapid Withdrawl" put together a sizeable fleet of cheap but effective Catalysts and we cut through their even cheaper Cormorant/Kestrel/Merlin fleets, with the odd

We close a few plexes and kept our eyes several pirate Snuffbox capsuleers that harassed both sides. They dropped fighters on us a few times, giving us the chance to kill a couple of these super-drones. They were using the soon-to-be-history "Skynet" technique, which I'd never seen in action before. Unfortunately our fleet booster lost his 400M links ship, a Loki, but in fairness Snuff also kill the CalMil booster ship too, a few minutes later.

I tried repeatedly to get my video software to record but it was in flaky mode and insisted that it couldn't. Dang it.

I'm starting to tire of industry a bit, but I've begun writing a program to help me find the juiciest opportunities. Eve Online has an extensive API that allows programmers to access price data, so I'm doing what hundreds of people have already done: write a glorified spreadsheet that will identify stuff selling cheap/expensive etc. I'm using Delphi XE7, a language for which no shared libraries exist (AFAIK), but it's been easy to write my own after having watched several videos on REST/XML support in Delphi.

Market Manipulation

A couple of months ago I indulged in a little market manipulation. It stemmed from a need my corp had: we were producing a wave of cheap hull-tanked Catalysts to help in our conquest of the entire Gallente/Caldari warzone.  The key ingredient was the Small Transverse Bulkhead I rig, which, despite only costing 100K ISK to make,  cost about 500K at all the major trade hubs, thus making the ship more expensive than we'd like.

I offered to make them at cost for the corp, a nice way to help Aideron out after all the enjoyment and free jump freighter services I've been given. I bought 10 BPOs, bought the materials started churning out about 400-800 a day.

Why so many? I wanted to also see if I could reduce the price at Jita, and perhaps at the other trade hubs, although I wouldn't go to those directly. It's a really useful rig and hull-tanking is the flavor of the month, so I'd like to see if I can push the price down and get the existing sell orders, and new sell orders to come down to my level.

If I make my sell orders too cheap, and too small in number then people will just buy them and re-sell them at the prevailing higher price. My sell orders need to be too big to ignore and too big to casually buy out.

On the first day at Jita, with my 400 rigs in hand I'm looking at the market. There are two sell orders of 500-600 rigs each at 394K and several buy orders offering about 200K each for 100 or so rigs.  I decide to put up a few sell orders at 225-250K to see what happens. They're snapped up immediately...nice for my wallet, but I need the orders to stay around.

The next day I start higher, listing my rigs at 350K. One of the other big sell orders comes down from 394K to beat my price...got one! The market is moving!  I add more sell orders at 299 and 259, and also fill the the buy orders that were offering 200K. I add a buy order of my own at 100K. I'm trying to create the perception that the rig wants to cost between 100 and 200K, not 200-400K as it was.

Dawn comes and I list 160 rigs at under 179K. By this time, other sellers have been joining me at these levels. zKillboard lists the average market price at 299K. That evening I post another batch of 200 rigs at 138K...there are two good sell orders at 169K. I fill the remaining buy orders and, just to see what happens, put up a buy order for 200 rigs at 75K -- well below the cost of making them.

A wild large order appears, right where I want it.

Then the whale arrives.  Somebody lists over 4500 rigs at 138,599 ISK.  That's a huge order and if it doesn't move, that will lock the market down for a long time. Perhaps the drop in price worries them and they just want to get their stock sold...it's still a 30% profit, after all. zKillboard reports the average price of the rig, not surprisingly, as 138K.

Trying to keep the market low

Interestingly, this is only happening at Jita. The Rens/Hek/Dodixie markets are staying at 300-400K. I'm surprised that no enterprising space trucker hasn't bought our Jita stock and flown it to the other hubs yet.

I think that's what victory in market PvP looks like, though it is much easier to drive the price of an item down than up.

September 3rd
We don't need the price of this item to stay low any more, so I'm going to stop pushing it down. I'm curious to see if it will go back up again. If I stop undercutting that huge order (now around 2800 units) he may feel its safe to raise his price, which should drag the market back up again.

September 9th
After a few days of not forcing the price down, it has returned to the 500-550K mark. My hopes of getting rich quickly have faded, however, since the rig is selling quite slowly. C'mon people, hull-tanks! HULL TANKS!

September 19th 
Competition on this item has been fierce and the price got pushed down rather quickly. We're at 229K, but since Sept 9th I've sold 795 of them at Jita for a total of 318.9M, yielding a profit of 239M. I'm continuing to sell these to corp-mates in Fliet on contracts for 110K each, in sets of 30.

September 29th
In the last week the price has kept swinging between 225 and 550K. It started with a surprise overnight buyout that cleared out all the available stock under 500K, leaving me with a smile and a steady stream of high profit sales. But the price has been gradually pushed down to a mere 220K. That's still a 100% profit, though, which I'm happy to take any day, especially when I can so easily obtain the ingredients to build the item at Jita. The extra cost for building there is only about 10K per item.

October 9th
The price has stayed low and seems like to stay there. You can continue to track the price here, if you're interested.

Hobgoblin II prices tanked - I suspect a zerg rush of new industrialists

From flickr user Aeter

A few weeks after Crius was released we saw a surprising and rapid drop in the price of the most commonly used drone, the Hobgoblin II. I asked around a couple of industrial buddies to see if they knew why this had happened, but nobody did. I suspect, though, it's a simple case of supply and demand. The demand has stayed the same, but the supply must have increased.

The new industry interface makes it much easier to explore your industrial options and I think it gave a lot of people the idea to try some T2 manufacturing for themselves. Hob IIs would be a logical choice; most people can either use them or assume they can sell them easily. What puzzled me at first was the delay...why did it take a few weeks for this glut of drones to arrive? Training!  If you weren't already able to make these, there's a few skills you need to acquire before doing so. I think enough people buckled down and did the training, then invented the BPCs, then built the drones to result in the wave we saw.

Track your ship building inventory with custom filters

I came up with this a few days ago and it's too useful not to share. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of it, but I haven't seen anyone else describe it, so here goes.

I mostly assemble my own ships, and was finding it difficult to notice when I was running low on modules for each of the different fits we use. I'd type in each module name one at a time in the inventory window...that's the hard way.

Here's the easy way!

Create a custom inventory filter like this

See only the modules for that fitting in your inventory

Use the "name" match and make a rule for each module. Make sure you change the default "Match All" to "Match Any" at the bottom of the window.

To account for possible missing modules, include the number of modules you need in the filter name (in my example my ship needs 14 different things). When you use the filter, you'll see the number of matching modules in the lower right of the inventory window. If its too low, you might have zero stock of something. If its too high, you probably have more than one stack of something.

I've found this makes it very easy to see when you're running low on something (in my case, only 22 Hobgoblin IIs left) and you make arrangements to get more before it becomes critical. In my case, arrangements means either making more of the item myself, or setting up a buy order at Jita to get more of that item as cheaply as possible. By making those arrangements before you run out, there's no pressure to immediately buy stock at-whatever-price, so this method will save money as well as time.

I started a thread on Reddit; let's see what happens....it went to #1! For a little while, anyway, and sat at #2 and #3 for the rest of the day.

Aideron comms in the spotlight

A recent post on Crossing Zebras caused a minor kerfuffle, mainly about the way that Aideron uses Mumble instead of Teamspeak for communications. I believe we do this for security reasons; it's easier for us to automate the identification of those present and screen out non-Gallente pilots. The original text was even more harsh...apparently some GalMil pilots call us "little North Korea".

The rule is actually more nuanced than that: Aideron-led fleets will use Mumble, but if we join someone else's fleet, we use Teamspeak. We have also built channels for all other GalMil corps to use.
--
For my own update, it's just more of the same: trading, making T1 rigs, assembling ships for the corp. I did have a breakthrough in understanding WTF Crius did to blueprints, though. I had some T1 rig BPOs that were partially researched; I only needed 1 or 2 ME points, pre-Crius to make them "perfect" (i.e no material waste when manufacturing), when I made the rig. Crius had a hard limit of ME 10 for the BPO to be "perfect", no matter what your personal industry skills were.

Lets take the example of my Small Hybrid Collision Accelerators, using fuzzwork's BPO calculator. "Perfection" used to be 4-3-5 (4 Contaminated Lorentz, 3 Charred Micro and 5 Fried Interface). Post-Crius this went to 4-3-6, an extra Fried Interface. I took me until just a few days ago to grok that the BPOs ME level applies best on a big job. Building ONE HCA, even with an ME 10 BPO will cost 4-3-6, but building ONE HUNDRED will not cost 400-300-600. It will cost 360-270-540, a ten percent discount on material wasted.

I've moved almost all my manufacturing out of Jita, since I can make the same items near Fliet for much less cost, then move the output to market with our corporate jump freighter service. I've also started selling BPOs at Jita; there's quite a nice markup on some of them if you find the right ones, and you get to buy them from NPCs, so the supply is limitless.

[Update Oct 2014: I moved a bit of manufacturing back to Jita, for the items that I intend to sell there. Why? The fee is trivial compared with the markup on the items. I can easily buy the needed materials there, build the finished items and sell them for triple what it cost to make, without ever undocking. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's better than leaving the lines unused.]

--

I'm going to finally use my third character slot soon! Yes, I've played for almost a year with just two characters: my main and my Jita trading (and occasional high-sec missioning) alt. My wife had started playing Eve, but it didn't catch on, so I've been using her high-sec Gallente character as a hauler. However, her account will be timing out soon so I'm going to roll up a new hauler, and possible mission runner, and let the other account go to sleep for a while. I've been turning a very nice profit buying certain rat loot items in Essence, then rounding them up into piles, then using public contracts to get them to Jita for sale. I started this right after the Mordu's legion rats were added to low-sec asteroid belts, figuring that the increased traffic would result in a larger flow of valuable rat loot, and it did!

[Update Oct 2014: Still not using the 3rd character slot! I use public contracts to move my piles of purchased rat-loot into bigger piles, then on to Jita for sale. If I had more time to play, I'd make another PI character, but I don't...there's barely enough play time to make use of the two I have now.]

Time to over-indulge!

My wife and son are away visiting family for a week, so I have the whole house to myself.  Shall I catch up on editing family photos and video? Play guitar? Learn to cook Thai food? No! I'm going to play Eve till my eyes bleed!

It's been a while since I could even think about devoting a day to just playing a game, so I'm really going to enjoy this! Fliet is getting some attention from our Caldari militia enemies so there will hopefully be plenty of fighting to go around.  I've started getting into supplying fitted ships to the corp; it's easy (thanks to our jump freighter service) and the ships sell quickly.

Recent Activities

My main activity lately has been station trading, since I haven't had much time to undock and fleet up. With the Crius release coming on July 22nd, I've taken the advice of a corp mate and begun liquidating my PI supplies.  The reasoning is that changes in Player Owned Station (POS) rules will result (we think) in less demand for POS modules. With most PI products eventually being used to make said POS modules, I didn't want to be left holding a lot of stuff that was plummeting in value, so I'm selling it all off and will wait for the smoke to clear after Crius and see what the PI landscape looks like.

I'm through most of the sales and got up to a staggering (for me) 8B ISK in the wallet, with billions more in goods to be sold. I bought some plex at 757M each, just to have some of the cash stashed somewhere safely. The same day I bought them, the price of plex began a steady climb and is now north of 800M, so that was nice!  The money also came in from my stock of Gallente datacores which I accumulated when they cost around 100K or less a few months ago. The Electronic Engineering and Gallente Starship reached the 150K level again, so I began selling and got most of them out of the door.

I've continued trading in Cybernetic Arms and various tattoos. The Wreckage and Prototype tattoos seem to have found a stable price and there's a good 50M-100M profit margin between buy and sell orders.

I've watched a few videos about trading between regions, but honestly, simply doing buy/sell orders at Jita is easy and fun. I even manufacture T1 items in system and sell them during price spikes, which come along more often than you'd think. After Crius, though, this probably won't work, but I've found that if I transport less than 100M ISK at a time, nobody attacks me. I'll probably keep making the same stuff, but a few jumps away, perhaps using public contracts to move my supplies around.

Vic Vorlon existed six years before Eve did

My personalized license plates from SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO!

Well, here's a surprising blast from the past!  My parents are visiting from Australia and brought a few artifacts from the deep corners of the garage. These were my personalized number plates, created in 1997.

I was, and still am, a big fan of Babylon 5, and was able to get "VORLON" license plates. I even made a website for people to post other B5 related plates. I left Australia in 2000, left the car and plates to my parents and left it at that.

I created my Eve account, and character "Vic Vorlon" TOTALLY without thinking of these plates! Vic seemed like a nice short name (it's also my Dad's name) and Vorlon pointed to B5, and the alliteration sounded a little bit Golden-Age-Of-Science-Fiction.

Well, the plates show up and, because I was in the state of Victoria, abbreviation "VIC", Vic Vorlon was already out there six years before Eve even launched!

Newbie Consensual PvP: A more structured environment is needed

I introduced a friend to Eve Online recently and his experience has been interesting to watch. He joined my lowsec corporation, Aideron Robotics, quite quickly and got frustrated with how outmatched he was when it came to PvP. He wanted to PvP, it's probably the most interesting feature in Eve, but he couldn't use T2 guns, drones or tank, so he lost several ships while barely denting his opponents. He couldn't get on comms to co-ordinate with other corpmates due to his home environment needing to be quiet during his play times.

At first glance this seems like an unusual situation: a newb coming straight to lowsec who *also* can't effectively fleet up with other people. But while talking about his situation we came up with an idea.

High-Sec Battle Arenas

This isn't the first time such an idea has been proposed: we found a post on gamerchick42 and would like to expand on her ideas.

PvP is an important, and arguably the most entertaining, part of Eve Online. But the new player experience focuses entirely on PvE missions, with no incentive or direction offered to new players to try fighting each other. The existing dueling system makes you guess who is, or is not, ready for a round of consensual PvP, and also leaves you to guess whether your skills are a match for theirs.

Simple Version

We propose the creation of Battle Arenas, permanent structures in high-sec systems where pilots seeking consensual PvP can go. They will use a variety of filters to try and keep the fights evenly balanced. To keep it simple, and new player focused, they only allow frigates to enter.

They will be entered through acceleration gates that filter players based on skill levels and total skill points, and only two players can be in an Arena at the same time. When the fight is won, the winner is warped out and the next players can enter. The winner will receive a prize of some kind (nice loot? ISK?) and the loser gets either nothing or a smaller prize.

The quality of the prize could be determined by the difference in skills between pilots. If you managed to take down a better pilot, the prize is better. Also the losing player could be awarded prizes based on how much damage they inflicted on their higher-skilled opponent.

Risk Vs Reward: Working without a Net

A new player may not want to risk their precious ship for a thrill, so we propose a safety net. If you want to have a safety net, you are guaranteed not to lose your ship. The fight will end when the one ship is takes any structural damage. But if you win, and had the safety net on, you get no prize. If you lose, you still have to pay for repairs. If the safety net is OFF, a loss will mean the loss of your ship, but victory will mean a good reward is coming your way.

Grading on a curve

The math involved in working out how close in skills two players must be in order to have a good fight is probably horrendous. It may be to difficult to create enough filters to ensure that ONLY evenly matched pilots face each other in combat. We don't want space to be littered with arenas each with a player waiting a matching pilot that may never arrive.

Instead, maybe let ANY pilots face each other, but when in the Arena their DPS and Tank get buffed/nerfed to make them more evenly matched. Not EXACTLY even, but enough to make the fight be always interesting and always winnable by either party. I don't know what the numbers should be here; say a 25% difference in DPS/Tank? This could also be an option that both players must agree to for it to take effect, and it would also affect the quality of the prize.

Further Enhancements: 

Fleets
An enlarged arena could allow up to, say 8 vs 8 fleet fights, with the fight not beginning until both sides have a balanced number of ships and pilot skills.

Tutor

An Aura-like tutor could teach you the basics of PvP piloting: slingshots, range dictation, looking at your opponents ship to determine weapon type. Perhaps "missions" would be available, where the player would demonstrate their ability to perform these maneuvers against an NPC opponent. If its possible to help a player identify problems with their fit, that would be nice too, and maybe it could even suggest how to fly their ship.

High Score Tables

The game could keep track of relevant statistics: your win/loss ratio, damage inflicted etc and make the results public. Corporations could watch the results to identify promising young pilots and make bids to draft them into their corps. The prize for beating a particular player could be based on their win/loss ratio.

Different Game Modes

1 versus many, winner-stays-in-till-they-are-dead, NPC ships present etc.

Viewer Participation

Matches could be streamed, viewers could bet on matches (with the house taking a percentage, thus creating an ISK sink), viewers can offer their own prizes to the participants.

Automatic Cameras

It would be great if the match was visible from the viewpoint of some well placed virtual cameras, which dynamically changed the point of view in response to events in the arena. This is what would be streamed to viewers, along with ship statistics as the match progresses. Perhaps some trusted viewers could also be commentators?

We all remember the cold hands and heart-pounding action you felt the first time you went into combat with a real person, with real stakes on the line. Shooting red crosses just isn't the same. We think that Eve Online should have a rich and complex way of teaching PvP to new players and encouraging them to try it out, in a way that doesn't frustrate them and clean out their wallets.

Objections

Some players may suggest that Eve should be difficult. They're proud of the learning curve; it filters out the unworthy. But CCP, I believe, see it differently. CCP Rise's "New Player Experience" presentation at Fan Fest 2014 said they are re-thinking the whole new player experience, and I must assume they want new players to join Eve, engage with other players, subscribe and stay.  Getting those players into PvP and into player-run corporations will be a big part of that effort.

* My thanks to Allca Quisper for kicking this idea around with me.

Keep On Keeping On

Life in Eve has continued in the same vein, one that I'm very happy with. My main character has over 10M skill points now and can do some serious damage with guns. I'm getting a lot of his main skills up to level 4 now, taking a little advice from the ISIS system and also from our corporate doctrine fits.  My sideline activities of Planetary Interaction and T1 manufacturing of items for our doctrine ships has settled into a good rhythm. I've filled out my P.I roster in Fliet. It's now the three barren worlds making P4 items, a coolant planet that I supply with water (it only has to make its own Electrolytes), and a world making a couple of P2 inputs for another guy in corp.

We took a couple of cruiser fights last night against Eve University. We were on our way to another system when we ran into E-Uni on a gate in Fliet, but that engagement didn't go our way. Their numbers increased, our logi couldn't hold up and the gate guns hit us pretty hard. Also one of the Vexor pilots in our fleet, a non-Aideron pilot, refused to fight them because they were "blue" (excellent standing) to him! He was ejected from the fleet shortly afterwards; if you join a fleet, you're committing yourself to help them. You can't land in a fight and refuse to shoot, especially if it's a tough fight!

We lost about 300M ISK of ships, but re-shipped, added more logi and more focused ECM and re-engaged them in Nag. After some interesting cat'n'mouse by both sides trying to get the fight started to our advantage they fly into us at the sun. And we won! We killed 6 Vexor Navy Issues each worth about 100M ISK. I have some video from the fight which I'll edit and share with you soon.

Lost Drone Retrieval

In my solo time I've been making note of systems which have a lot of lost drones in them, as we fly through them on roams, and returning to those systems in my "Hawkeye" Imicus to find those drones and rescue them. Poor little guys, trying their best to help you and left cold and alone in the dark.  I picked up about 15M worth of T2 drones in a relaxing hour or so. It's an exercise that combines d-scan and probing, so it's good practice.

I fly to a safe spot in the system, launch probes and cloak up. Then I use d-scan to work out roughly where the T2 drones are, within a 60 degree cone, and their distance from me; the tactical display is useful here, to make sure you're searching the sky thoroughly. Then I probe that area starting at an 8 AU diameter. You could bring salvage drones too, in case you find any T2 wrecks (i.e those with "Elite" in the description, which give you Tech 2 salvage, potentially worth millions each)

[Imicus, Hawkeye]
Nanofiber Internal Structure I
Co-Processor I
Co-Processor I

Limited 1MN Afterburner I
Scan Acquisition Array I
Scan Pinpointing Array I
Scan Rangefinding Array I

Prototype Cloaking Device I
[empty high slot]
Expanded Probe Launcher I, Combat Scanner Probe I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
[empty rig slot]
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

To Do List

Like many other people I've made an Eve To Do document that I update as ideas and opportunities come to me. For someone like me with limited time to play, it helps to do what I can in advance. For example, for my PI work I needed to know how much of each input to load into the launchpad during a supply run. I did that math when the opportunity arose, then when I was able to actually get into the game, I did the run without any doubt about what to do. Similar work should be done with manufacturing - it's a spreadsheeter's dream - to make sure you're building the right thing. I also keep notes on which of my sales orders are running low so I can schedule more production in advance and move the goods when the opportunity to log in next comes around.

Tales of The Blindingly Obvious, I know, but hopefully this helps someone better plan their activities in Eve.

Checklist

Grizzled veteran runs through the checklist
from Flickr user tamara

Checklist

I seem to have become an Eve Vet :) I think it happened a while ago, but when you start drawing up checklists of what new recruits ought to know, you're definitely a vet! I did this after a couple of incidents when fleet members weren't aware of some basic concepts in fleet mechanics; I remembered that the same thing happened to me! The FC asked me to do X and I said "?" and time was wasted explaining it to me. And it was done so quickly that I didn't understand it anyway. When I learned it later it was actually quite simple and took only a minute to grasp.

I think these apply pretty widely in Eve, so I'd like to share the checklist I came up with. The idea is to keep it simple; these are the most common stumbling points that a new recruit might get wrong during our regular fleets; Bob knows I clunked into most of these and more than once. The most complex thing you learn is "Scouting 101" - how to report plexes/local population/d-scan (using eve-dingo or similar), since it is quite common for noobs to be flying tackle frigates and get asked to scout too.

SETUP

1. Setting up comms (Mumble and Teamspeak). Refer to yourself by name, not “I”. FC’s hate having to delay by asking “who is this?” when reacting to your messages.
2. Overview, especially ensuring that “in fleet”, “an ally in one or more”  and “in militia” are above “is pirate”
3. Basic Config: Set up “Z” as hotkey for “broadcast for armor”, change your ship name if needed, turn off auto-lockback and the 2950 ISK charge for communication.
4. Which of our ships can you already fly? Change skill plan to get on track.

PLEXING

5. Undock and find a plex - distinguish between available/popped plexes - know what ships can go in.
6. Warp to plex at 10, slide in (video). Orbit at distance appropriate to ship. Announce yourself as you start warp so friendlies inside (assuming they are there) know you’re friendly too. Understand that the gate can’t be bypassed. Understand that you need to be within 30km to run the timer and to be awarded loyalty points when the timer reaches zero.
7. Simple D-Scan - how to use it while inside a plex to monitor the gate (just 360 deg, 200K km)
8. Plexing: how to capture one, how to align out and escape if someone comes in. Understand if the defending NPC ship is friendly or not, and that you can't dock in enemy-held systems.
9. Tackling a target - point a ship and maintain orbit around it.

INTEL/SCOUTING/FLEET

10. Find and join fleet without asking “send me an invite?” on comms.
11. Watching Local: how many war targets or neutrals in system?
12. Basic fleet terminology: “warp to” vs “jump to”, gate is red/green, hold cloak, “anchor on me”, “ball up on me”,
13. warp to a fleet member
14. How to find/link your losses/kills in fleet chat. FCs use this to reimburse you (sometimes :) )
15. create a fleet and advertise it in militia chat (maybe too advanced for new players?)
16. using eve-dingo: get a dingo report and post URL in fleet chat.
17. Advanced d-scan: be able to scan a point (5 degrees, up to 14.3 AU away), report what you see (maybe with eve-dingo)
18. Being a scout: combines several of above skills -- going +1, hold cloak if needed, using d-scan (wide and narrow beam), watching local, maybe warping to plexes to hunt for targets, use eve-dingo to report fleet compositions.
19. Drones: Set to passive/aggressive. Use F key to direct them to attack, Shift-R to come back to drone bay. Don’t deploy until told to.

One of the nicest things about being in a corp is being able to try things like this, helping others enjoy the game and avoid some of the frustrations you encountered.

Other Activities

It was pretty quiet last night, no major push was needed, so I moved some goods around. I've got a rig manufacturing plan going in Yvangier and sell the output at three different systems. I'm going to see which ones produce the most sales; the profit is good at all of them. After setting that up I scanned Fliet's cosmic signatures and found a small Serpentis combat site. I announced it on comms and in corp chat and had three people come run it with me. At least one hadn't tried that before so I was glad I could introduce it to him. We got an escalation from it too, so if enough people are interested we'll run that tonight.

A really good couple of days in Eve

Longest fight I've had so far!

Sunday and Monday nights saw some exciting times in Eve for me. The fight you see above was a cruiser gang sitting on the Heyd gate in Old Man Star. We shipped into cruisers and took them on; it was a long battle. It took twenty minutes but we eventually won and with very few losses. We didn't get their shiny Guardians or Armageddons, but took out a lot of other ships. See here on March 3rd around 02:45 in OMS.

We had a good sized fleet last night, around 25 pilots. We started with deplexing then went on a fast tear around the neighbourhood getting lots of kills in the process. I'll make a video when I can. I mostly fly logi now, but in a Navitas you can fit one drone...might as well be a combat drone :) I got on seven kills!

My T1 industry bits are in place -- nothing major, I just wanted to be able to make all the small rigs we use on our ships. Prices in low-sec are higher, generally, than in high-sec and I've set up my manufacturing in Yvangier so I can't lose stuff in faction warfare mechanics.  There's a pilot in the corp who does free jump freighter runs from Jita (thanks!!), which is an incredibly valuable service to provide. I used that to acquire some of the ingredients and blueprints I needed to get a decent volume of stuff made.

I also fixed the audio problems on my computer - it's a bit tricky getting the microphone/speakers/volume set up so that you can properly record Eve videos, but I think I've finally got it right.

I also sold a lot of expensive items through my trader and I've finally understood what station containers are for. If you regularly receive trade items after a fleet and don't like losing them in the general mess that is your hanger, buy a couple of station containers. Keep all your stuff in them, and keep your hanger empty. When you receive new items and transfer them to your hangar, they'll be the only things there. It came in very handy yesterday when, at a moment's notice, I received a bunch of modules to fit to a borrowed ship and had to refit quickly.

Laugh of the day: This World of Warcraft player came to Eve and just did everything wrong. He spent a fortune (like $1300 REAL MONEY) buying a ship without realizing he could lose it. On losing it, he then got conned out of ANOTHER ONE, by two slick-tongued scammers. Welcome to Eve :)

The Grass Is Always Greener

From flickr user bulldog1

Our corporation recently moved back into the FW warzone, the system of Fliet, after a few weeks in Yvangier. It was recognized that this would keep us in fighting trim; deliberately putting ourselves in a system that we could lose. If you live in a system that is taken over by your opposition, you lose docking rights at the stations and you have to move out yet again. So you fight and you fight hard to keep your territory under your control. This is what it says on the box, of course: I joined a Faction Warfare corporation: fighting is what we do.

And yet.

I'd love to have a night of doing something other than plexing, but the contested status of Fliet shifts by up to 25 percentage points a day - we can't afford a night of wormhole exploration, or level 4 missioning. I could, technically, go do those things while my corpmates fight the good fight, but who wants to be That Guy? Not I; I like pulling my weight and in fact last night our FC picked me to manage the fleet while he went to take care of some diplomacy; there were about 15 of us at that point and it felt great to be trusted to not get us welped. Our corp directors have said they want to be able to take us into other areas of the game too, but for now, fighting for control of Fliet is the main event.

(side note: I think I did the right things: we were plexing in Heydieles, which was rife with plexes. There were two mediums available while I was in charge and our fleet had two Navitas repair ships. I put one, and half of the remainder of the fleet, in each plex.) Oh, and in an odd turn of events, one of our regular enemy pilots gave me a shout-out for this blog!

I don't want this to sound like a complaint - it isn't. But consider it a reminder; if you join a corporation that focused on one activity in Eve, that's what you'll be expected to do most of the time, especially if the corp's fortunes depend on doing that thing. Our corp also spends significant resources on us, supplying ships, building POSs, free jump-freighting, arranging for boosters; it'd be a churlish move to say "I'm not fleeting tonight, I wanna haul stuff around."

And if you're like me and read /r/eve, and other Eve blogs, you'll read about all kinds of other fun things to do in Eve, things you will probably not have time to do. If you're someone who can only play for a couple of hours a day (like me, married man with a child) you should resign yourself to doing what the corp needs you for and let those other activities go for now.  If you can log in during off-hours, that's a good time to go try those other things. And there's always the possibility that, for us specifically, we'll get Fliet under control and we'll be able to try other activities as a corp.

I could set up an alt that isn't in my current corp and go galavanting around New Eden. But I'd feel guilty at not helping my friends in Aideron, so that option is out.

There are some activities you can manage while plexing. Planetary Interaction is one, station trading is another. With skills like Marketing and Procurement you can even place orders directly in other systems, and create public courier contracts to have the stuff moved for you.

One-Day-Later Update: I'm Julie, your cruise director! I've been put in charge of organizing extracurricular activities for Aideron. We're picking one night a week where, if there's not a crisis occurring, pilots can go off in groups to do the kind of stuff I mentioned above. Its easy to say "let's do this thing" but the friction point is having everyone in an appropriate ship, so my job will be to make sure ships and modules suitable for PvE fits are made available.
--

In station trading news, my Jita trader is doing really well - she just sold 4 'Luxury' tshirts for about a BILLION ISK; the profit on those was about 100-150M each! She has a further 1.7B in sell orders and nearly 4B in buy orders (thanks, Margin Trading!) so - wow!

Video added to earlier post

I've added the promised video showing the successful defense of Heydieles on November 29th. We lost the system a week later, but the fights on 11/29 were a lot of fun.

Last nights fleet was mainly focused on plexing in Heyd again. We had about 13 people in fleet and scored some great kills: slicing up this T2 frigate fleet from General Tso's Alliance was fun.

One of our pilots had a Really Bad Day in Eve. He got suicide-ganked TWICE, first losing an expensive mining vessel, then losing a cargo of datacores. He fought well in the evening's fleet though, acting as Hero Tackle in one of our fights. I directed his attention to PushX.Net and hope that will make his life a bit easier when it comes to moving valuable cargo around.

Financial Weapons

This was a fun little incident that closed out my night of Eve yesterday. I had purchased a large number of rigs that weren't available at our current station. Well, there WERE a few, but instead of costing the normal 100-200K, they were listed at 1M each. Obviously someone trying to catch buyers who were desperate.

I listed mine for 175K, used a few on ships I was building and thought no more of it. At the end of the night I noticed my wallet balance was 10M higher than at last check. Sweet! What did I sell?

10 of these rigs....for 1M each! The buyer had accidentally clicked on the crazy-expensive listing and bought ten of them. The way Eve works is that in case of mistakes like this the sale goes to the cheapest offer (i.e me) at the price the buyer was willing to pay (ie 1M instead of 175K).

I chuckled and decided to offer a large refund to the buyer, assuming it was a member of my corp building their own ships, who had made a simple mistake.

I didn't recognize the buyer's name so I double-clicked on it see his corp and alliance...WAR TARGET! F*ck that guy! I'll use your money to buy the ship WITH WHICH I KEEEL YOU!

How I Made My First Billion ISK in Eve Online

Bwahahaha!

There are many "first billion" stories in Eve; this is mine.

August 8th 2013 was my first day in Eve and I hit my first "wallet balance" billion ISK (not counting assets) about four months later. My first two months were spent doing solo play: missions, manufacturing, trade and the other stuff you can read in early blog postings. This made some money, but nothing serious. I also got a 250M ISK kick-start by sharing a plex the friend who got me to play Eve.

The serious money started when I joined Aideron Robotics and started earning Faction Warfare loyalty points. We were in Tier 3 at the time, so the LP flowed thick and fast. Over the next two months I earned about 350K LP by running plexes. I was told it was best not to spend it until we had dropped to Tier 1, which everyone was sure was coming soon, especially as TEST joined FW.

The reason behind this thinking is simply supply and demand. When the LP is flowing like wine, most people spend it right away, buying and reselling items from the LP store, and their prices drop. When we hit Tier 1 and people are earning a lot less LP, they buy and resell less LP store items and their prices go up again. I watched the datacore market and decided (right or wrong) that Electronic Engineering and Gallentean Starship were the most valuable. When the price of both went above 150K I started cashing in LP, buying thousands of these datacores.

I shipped them to Jita, where the highest prices are found, using Push Industries,and sold them through an alt. I had to do this because my main character cannot go to Jita; it's in Caldari space. My alt put the datacores up on sell orders, asking nearly 200K per Gallentean Starship...and got it! I sent the money back to my main character and, hey presto, billionaire!

Next time the Gallente rise to Tier 3 or even Tier 4 I'll be plexing even more and aiming for even more LP!

In regular Eve-play news, I helped plex Ladistier up to 22% contested, but sadly this morning it was back down to 1%: we don't have consistent timezone coverage to hold our gains. I got on two Thrasher kills of the same pilot that were rather fun. After that I ran three data sites (16M ISK) and went belt ratting. Unfortunately I shot at a wreck that wasn't mine, just for kicks and was surprised to lose a big chunk of security standings. I'm only -1.6, a carebear by many standards, but it's surprisingly easy to push this number down. Remember that if it gets below -5 you can be attacked anywhere, making trips to high-sec more difficult than they need to be.  I also built several Tristans that match with our corporate fit, which saves money versus buying them from our kind industrialist :)

Fortress Heydelies

What an EPIC weekend! If you've been following my posts you'll remember that we were quickly losing control of Heydelies. On Friday night it was in the 80% range and we brought it down a little by plexing. We realized that if our corporation was the only one defending it, and we were only on in force for a few hours at night, we'd lose the system.

I woke up on Saturday morning and logged in to see where things stood....99.6! We were ONE plex away from the system going vulnerable. (side note: Once the system was vulnerable the enemy would have to attack a structure called the "i-hub", which takes a lot of firepower. The TEST ihub bashing fleet is about fifty strong, mostly battleships, and it takes about 10-15 minutes to do its work.)  I got onto our corp Google Hangout and notified the group. Luckily Marcel (CEO) was online and he advised me to notify the Gallente Militia, start a fleet and generally get things moving.

9:12 AM -- Heyd 99.6%, Dust at 1.1%

I wasn't able to actually fly due to family commitments but I got into the Gal Mil channel and alerted the troops: Paskis Robinson, Terhiss and Sharel Lennelluc were the first three to join the defense fleet and I wanted to thank them for stepping up so quickly. The system actually went vulnerable while we were getting set up! Each plex captured changes the contested status by about 0.7% and you need to capture about 150 plexes to go from zero to hero, or the other way.

9:21 AM -- Heyd 98.7%, Dust 3.3%

In case you didn't know, CCP make a first-person shooter called Dust 514. It is free to play on the Sony PS3 console only (for now). Not only is it set in the Eve universe but the two games actually affect each other. As the Gallente Dust players strengthened their hold on Heydelies in Dust 514, it takes away some Caldari control in Eve.

9:31 AM -- Heyd 97.7%, Dust 5.5%. Our defense fleet now has 5 members. Paskis and Terhiss are in the general militia channel urging pilots to join and defend Heydelies.

I asked during the weekend why Heydelies was so important; I'd heard the odd comment about it being a big deal but I'd never asked why. After all, the Caldari are conquering a lot of systems at the moment and we're not teaming up hard to defend them. The reply surprised me: its partially for strategic reasons (it connects with six other systems) but mostly to do with how difficult it was to take Heydelies back in March 2013, then we lost it in April and just regained it on October 14th. As a player its nice to know the history of a system and participate in the evolving story.

The Dust level increased to 12.5%, it's maximum allowed value, and stayed there.

Around 11AM one of our directors, Ashterothi, logged in and began a marathon session of FC'ing and diplomacy. He negotiated with a Europe-based corporation in a neighboring system to come and help us and also set up a temporary truce with a nearby pirate gang. Pirates are usually in faction warfare systems to look for fights with members of either side.  Ash was on for twelve hours and by Saturday night Heyd was down to about 65% and our fleet numbered between 20 and 30. This allowed us to also deplex neighboring systems a little, just to keep them out of vulnerable status.

We found the Test Alliance i-hub bashing fleet on Saturday night and teamed up with several other Gal Mil corps to try and attack it. We chased them across several system to the Aldranette area, but they dispersed and avoided a battle. They had flipped at least three systems into their control that day. They had spies in our fleet that threw some fapping noises at us over comms too, which was funny, lets face it.

The fighting continued the next day, again with Ash doing a lot, but not all, of the fleet commanding. It was less intense on Sunday, possibly because word had gotten around the Caldari FW community that Heyd was well defended and they should try elsewhere.

As you can see from the killboards it was a busy weekend (13-11-02 to 13-11-03) but what it doesn't show are the new associations we made. We know our friendly neighbors better now, we demonstrated our commitment to defending our home system and we got several applications to join Aideron Robotics, which is always nice. And we showed a a lot of younger players how to fight!

When I signed off last night Heyd was around 40% contested.

Funniest moment: A fleet member returned to station for repairs and was confronted by a battleship. The battleship locked him and opened fire....and was melted by the station guns!  I wish I could find the kill mail; the battleship was worth 480 MILLION ISK! The fleet member got a couple of shots in so he's the only player on the kill mail. 

While searching for the kill, I found this one instead: our CEO and the CEO of Old Man Gang, our perennial enemy, shared a kill together. Gotta be a story here, or maybe just a three-way fight with an interesting outcome.

Lessons Learned

Whew! Where to start?  

• My ideas about plexing in cloaked ships neglect the big impact that visibility has. 
• A gang of five ships can dissuade most attackers, especially if you have a repair ship. 
• Make your fleet public and regularly advertise it in the militia channel.  
• Try and have replacement ships ready to buy. 
• Take your fights INSIDE plexes, not on gates. The defender's advantage is very useful.
• Everyone should have ships ready for small or large engagements. It took a little too long to get a big fleet together to chase Test's ihub fleet.
• Commandante Chongo is a one-man Tristan army! What this guy did with a single Tristan threw us into confusion. Hats off to you, sir, and may your pod lines clog and cause you unseemly discomfort.

My video recording software, Overwolf, had the hiccups and I wasn't able to record anything.

Sneaking Around

Photo from flickr user Chaotic Good01

An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. 
  -- The Invisible Man, 1933

I did a bit of logistical reshuffling last night, moving some supplies around and building my Cloaky Venture, as mentioned in an earlier post. The fit mostly matches the Johnny Pew suggestion from his video. It cost about 2.5 Million for this.

[Venture, Low Sec Salvage]
Warp Core Stabilizer I

Medium Shield Extender I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I

Salvager I
Salvager I
Prototype Cloaking Device I

Small Salvage Tackle I
Small Salvage Tackle I
Small Salvage Tackle I



Salvage Drone I x2

A Venture has +2 warp corp stability built right in, and the addition of a another stabilizer means it will take a least 4 point of disruption to stop you. The shield mods in the mid slots bring me up to about 1500 HP, weak by most standards, but enough to survive a couple of volleys, by which time you should be running away anyway. No weapons, because we couldn't deter anyone even if we tried!

The main purpose of this fit is to be invisible when needed and to pick up valuable salvage. The only stuff worth putting time into are "Elite" wrecks   I think what I need to do is create "perch" bookmarks near gates in systems that see a lot of PvP combat, such a Heydelies. I hover there, invisible, using d-scan to see what ships and wrecks are at those gates. Eventually the gangs will leave, probably taking loot from the ships they killed, but NOT salvaging the wrecks. When they're gone I swoop in and salvage. It sounds like I'll be waiting a while, so an alternative might be to just keep roaming around low-sec looking for wrecks near gates and in faction warfare plexes. D-Scan will tell me if there are Elite wrecks in system.

Last night was a trial run and there were no elite wrecks available. I decided to enter a medium plex that was currently empty, and it was darned interesting.  After I arrived and cloaked up, two war targets arrived and it felt pretty cool that they couldn't see me. Shortly after that an allied fleet composed mainly of Ventures(?!) arrived and blew them up! They left and I got to put my plan into action; I turned off the cloak and looted the wrecks. I didn't find anything good, but I was glad to be able to put the ship through its paces.

More Gallente militia arrived, including a corp mate of mine who knew I was there and the timer counted down to 0 without further incident. I decloaked with 8 seconds left, collect 8750 loyalty points and warped out.

I want to see how quickly the cloak turns on: if I'm roaming and run into a gate camp, can I turn on the cloak before they can target me?

Meta Game - why am I doing this? Am I winning Eve?

When I posted this fit in my corp forum and asked for suggestions I got a good question back -- why am I doing this? Do I want ISK, or just for fun?  They suggested that getting ISK was easier if I ran plexes to earn LP and sell items purchased with LP, or hunted Clone Soldier rats for their tags (discussed earlier). Fun? Well, fun is fun and if you don't mind putting time into something that earns less than other activities, that's OK too.

I think the answer is "for the fun of it", and learning to use modules I haven't used and seeing how it changes the "feel" of the game.  ISK? Well, the thing is I have more ISK than I can sensibly use. I can buy ships that I'm not qualified to fly, or fit properly, but I still have the urge to get more ISK. Why? I think I want to see that I'm profitably using the expensive stuff I've bought. That would validate my decisions, showing I'd chosen the right items to buy, used them properly and got more money as a result. That may change later, but I guess it feels like the wallet balance is my "score" in the game. My balance has been dropping a lot lately, but the value of my assets is huge, about 50% more than my cash.

I am going to try to broaden my horizons a bit and measure my success as doing new and more difficult things in the game, not just watching the ISK count. Heck, I could throw in $20, the price of a cheap dinner out and have a big pile of cash (over 500M ISK); that wouldn't impress anyone or increase my fun in the game.  I should plan on getting in more ships and doing more activities in the game. And I'm doing the most basic thing I can for the corp; I should make sure I'm learning what I need to do in order to do other, more useful things too.  When I listen on fleet chat it's scary how much they all seem to know about other ships, and their ability to make instant decisions on fights is very impressive. That's going to take a while to learn.

But it's all been fun so far!

Exploration in Eve - not for me

(I posted this as a comment on Inner Sanctum, thought it was worth posting here too, slightly edited)

"The Compleat Explorer" by Griffith Taylor

I'm a new player (5 weeks in the game), and flitted around many of the features in Eve, eager to try as much as I could. I guess I'm the intended target audience for the exploration feature, which invites you to discover, using probes, Data Sites and Relic Sites in which valuable items might be found.

I became disenchanted very quickly with Exploration, which I had read that CCP wanted to be a viable alternative to mining for new players.

Well, with mining I can make a steady few million per hour AND be AFK by using a Venture with two mining lasers in 0.9 or 1.0 systems (no rats). A quick glance at the screen from across the room every ten minutes or so keeps me informed and I can easily fly the ship back to the station, drop off the ore and head back out to repeat. Dull, but I can play with my kid, talk to my wife and make ISK at a steady, predictable rate.

Exploration requires my full attention, so it needs to be either more fun or more profitable. Instead, I found it frustrating. The process of finding and probing a cosmic signature that *isn't* Another Bloody Wormhole OR a combat site takes a while. Then I have to hope someone hasn't been here recently and cleaned out the treasures. And if the treasure is still there I need to play the hacking game, which feels very un-Eve...didn't I earn this treasure by scanning the site down? THEN comes the random can chasing where you hope you pick the right ones. I used cargo scanners but they often told me there was nothing inside. Was that a bug or was the game literally telling me there was nothing worth having in there?

I can't remember finding anything particularly valuable in around five sites (all in highsec), at which point I gave up. I can get similar, or better salvage/loot by running a mission and at least I get the pleasure of combat out of that.

Anyone wanna buy some Carbon?

[Update: Thanks to Kelleris for linking to me.]

[Further update 9/24/2013:] I saw a video by youtuber PodExpress about the changes to Exploration that, in his opinion, killed exploration.

In a nutshell, here's the problem: when you find an exploration site, you'd like to know it is chock full of treasures to be found because you're the first one there. A site that someone else has already found and partly looted USED TO despawn after a short time.  So a "used" exploration site would disappear and not waste your time.

CCP made a change that made exploration sites remain alive until ALL the treasure has been taken. The effect of this is that explorers who have found the site before you will have taken the good stuff and left the crap behind for you to find (they use cargo scanners to identify which cans are worth hacking). But you can't tell this until you have spent time probe-scanning the site down and going to it.  I'm still going to give it a try, now that I'm in low-sec and can use cloaks, but I'm going to look for systems with very little traffic in them, and hope I'm the first to find the sites.

[Final update: Sep 30 2013] I've written another post after finding more information outside of the game that makes exploration much better for me.  I've posted to the official forums and hope CCP will change the game along the lines I've suggested. A couple of small changes could make this MUCH more accessible for new players.