Minmatar V3 Debate – Where will the vision of CCP be?
Aaaaaarrrrrrrrrreeee Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu rrrready TO RUMBLE!!!!
A few days ago I put up my post regarding how I think the V3 update for Minmatar ships should be handled. You can read it here: http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/the-new-hound-is-how-minmatar-should-look/
Rixx Javix also took up the opinion on what concepts the new V3 should be based off of. That can be read here: http://eveoganda.blogspot.com/2012/05/minmatar-v3.html
While we do share some of the same viewpoints, there are some that we differ on drastically.
First off, let’s look at the background for our viewpoints. Let’s start off with Rixx Javix’s:
This is purely from a design standpoint, “Trust in the Rust” is not just a random slogan, but an important key to the Minmatar “mythos” which is extremely important when considering re-design. Unlike the other three races, the Minmatar ships have a certain horribleness to them that is built deeply into the cultural background of both the race itself and the pilots that fly them. If you need more explanation than that, then I fear you’ve never flown a rust-bucket, tied together with duct tape, with your internal atmosphere slowly leaking into the vacuum.
The “Trust in the Rust” concept dates back pretty far.. in fact, even before I started playing the game myself the first time. It is part of the player mythos mixed in with the game lore of a slave race just trying to hold on by throwing whatever it could at the enemy.. and beating them despite insurmountable odds. Because of their need, anything that worked would not be changed because there would be no point. Why fix something that isn’t broke, even if its ugly?
Like this:
My viewpoint, is based on something else, as I wrote here:
The Minmatar, according to game lore, were once a very advanced race of humans. In fact, here is what is said, “At one time they had a flourishing empire with a level of mechanical excellence never before or since seen anywhere.” So, here you have a culture that apparently is second to none in their capacity to build and do mechanical work. On top of that, their resources were limited because of being under slavery. This would lend itself to be a culture that required maximizing functionality, using the least amount of materials to get the job done.
In other words, they were “minimalists”.
The game lore indicates that the minmatar weren’t just throwing crap together just willy-nilly, but that their raw skill and talent was only hampered by the resources they had available. It would only be natural that the more organized they got, the more stable they got, the more resources they would be able to get and so the more cohesive and specific their ship designs would become. Older models would also be upgraded to make them more reliable, more uniform, and more modular.
Like this:
And therein lies the problem. Should the revamped Minmatar models be just a clearer, more hodge-podge collection of parts with engines or should they show off a race that is more confident in their abilities, more fearless in design and function, with ships that not just function well, but look fearsome doing it? Both have good arguments behind them. Nothing feels better to a Minmatar pilot than to see his leaking, duct tape ridden Stabber beat the pants off of some shiny and immaculately clean Amarr cruiser. But on the other hand, I’d rather have pride in both the function of my ship AND the way it looks too.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t things we don’t agree upon.. for example, both of us think “wingy bits” are critical to the lore, motiff, and design of Minmatar ships. We also agree that their distinctive edgeiness, their sharp corners, their aggressive looks and the overall feel should stay. Curves though.. the Amarr and Gallente can keep their curves, and Caldari can keep their right angles.
In the end, however, we’ll have our sharp, pointy, very non-child safe edges and massive radiator wings thank you very much.
AFK Cloaking – The Modern Eve Soap Opera
Cloaking, in Eve Online, is the ability to remove yourself from other people’s visual and scanning systems, i.e. makes you invisible. The ability to cloak is used exclusively in PVP related formats, either for intel gathering, or for first strike capacity, and also for surprise attack. It also is used to escape such PVP dilemmas.
The Modules in Question
Currently, Eve Online has three Cloaking Modules that are in common use:
- Prototype Cloaking Device I – A Tech 1 module that uses 30 CPU, and 1 MW power. Upon activation, your ship speed is reduced by 90%. Upon disactivation, you have to wait 30 seconds before you can target anything.
- Improved Cloaking Device II – A Tech 2 module that is an improvement over the Prototype. This unit uses 60 CPU, but only reduces your speed by 75% when active. When the Improved Cloaking Device deactivates, you only have to wait 20 seconds before you can target another ship.
- Covert Ops Cloaking Device II – This Tech 2 module can only be used by certain ships, such as Covert Ops frigates, Stealth Bombers, a some Recons. It has no reduction in speed and has only a 10 second wait before you can start targeting.
All of these have some additional weakness. For example, if you come within 2000 meters of another ship, it will decloak you. Another is that if you are actively targeted, you cannot cloak at all.
The Issue that Divides Them
However, all three have one very nice advantage. They can stay on indefinately. They drain no power or fuel of any type whatsoever. Thus, it has become a common practice for some enemy pilots to park their ship in system, cloak up, and go afk for hours at a time (or so one would think – there isn’t anything saying they can’t). This usually disrupts operations going on in systems and definately slows down isk profitability.. and thus.. the drama is caused.
If you have ever dealt with this issue, you know that there are two sides.. and only two sides to this issue. For some clarity on that, here are some very recent threads on the subject: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=110852 and https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=102191&find=unread just to name a very, very, very few threads that crop up out of anger and frustration. Just for clarity, here are the two groups:
- The “Its Not Broken, Don’t Fix It” Group is usually made up of pirates or pirate like characters who essentially don’t want to have to try and find a new way to gank others. Mixed in there are the ones who actually use it for strategic purposes and those generally have a pretty articulate argument that revolves around how easily it is to decloak a bomber, or how weak a bomber is in the first place.
- The second group, or the “Whaaaa! You are disrupting my Bot Mining Operations” Group tend to be industrialists, mission runners, and ratters.. the majority of which just simply want to do their own thing and not be bothered anywhere (including in WHs, null-sec, and while avoiding wardecs) by this silly thing called PVP. Imagine the audacity! Mixed in with that group are some who see the AFK cloaking as too powerful of a mechanic because there is no way to counter it.
Myself, I have been on both sides of this issue. Ursha’Khan, back during the days of Provi 1.0, used this almost exclusively to disrupt isk making operations. While I didn’t care for it, the reasons behind it are legitimate.. it was to disrupt our ability to make isk for replacing our losses. I used this tactic myself to gather intel in far off null-sec systems when we were wardeced by various alliances, so it was a useful tactic for me.
All in all though, I do find that I tend to side with the second group. Mainly this is because I don’t think a module as powerful as a cloaking device should operate without limitations. And once it is active, unless you are a complete imbecile or unlucky, there is no way someone is going find you. No other module in the game acts that way. Even the small Damage Control units have to use some cap every few seconds to keep active. All active sensor modules, all active shield modules, all active armor modules, all E-War modules, all weapon modules require either power, or fuel, or ammunition, or a combination of them to remain active and working. Cloaking Devices don’t have any limitations in their use, and in that respect, I think they are overpowered.
So, what have been more common ideas that have been put forth to deal with this?
Fixes and Wishes
The first, and probably most popular, is having a “Fuel Requirement”. Basically said, the pilot would have to have some sort of fuel (predictably ice products) that would burn off while in use. I like the fuel idea, but I can see where it really hampers long range recon when you got to fly through system after system of enemy territory. It also would degrade their combat effectiveness when used in conjuction with Black Ops fleets. Though, to what extent would depend highly on the how much fuel is consumed during use.
The second most common is actually one that seems to have some traction with CCP, and that is to have special Cloaky Hunter ships. To me, this was what the Electronic Attack Frigates should have been used for. They are currently useless and often the E-war they are paired with make them just quick and easy kills. I like this idea, but it doesn’t really “fix” the overpoweredness of Cloaking Modules, and I’m not even sure how effective they would really be in actual use.
Personally, I’m in favor of just having the cloaking device use capacitor. I think that on a full capacitor, using base skills, with no mods, that a Stealth Bomber or Covert Ops should be able to stay cloaked for about an hour. This would cut down on lazy AFK cloaking, while those actively trying to get intel could make a distance safespot, warp to it when their time is almost up. uncloak for a few minutes, then go back again. Long distance ops can still work because you are operating with the same payload and you don’t need a “fuel” to keep you going.
We’ll have to see, I guess. From what I understand, even the CSM isn’t very cohesive on this issue and we’re probably not likely going to see anything simple come out of CCP.. not when they could show off their art skills with new ships and modules. So, in the meantime, go read the drama that fills the forums on this issue.. Or better yet, do some trolling of your own. Just tell’em, Orakkus sent ya.
Freebooted: Eve – So Beautiful, I Can’t See It.
I guess the post I had plan for today can wait a day or two anyways because Seismic Stan over at Freebooted has an interesting article on getting camera angles changed.
http://freebooted.blogspot.com/2012/05/eve-online-so-beautiful-i-cant-see-it.html
It is worth a read, and more importantly, its worth pushing on the current CSM to see about getting this to happen. We have a lot of smart CCP devs right now who could probably make these changes in their sleep.. and some of these changes would improve overall visual enjoyment by a tonne (a metric, Icelandic ton.. to be sure).
So go ahead and check it out.. and figure out a way to get CCP listening to him.
The New Hound is How Minmatar Should Look
Whoever did this:
Needs to stand up and take a bow.
He/She also needs to head over to the V3 group and tag some Minmatar ships for remodeling. Why? Because that person ”gets” the Minmatar and quite a few of the Minmatar ships need to be remodelled to fit the true look.
The Minmatar, according to game lore, were once a very advanced race of humans. In fact, here is what is said, “At one time they had a flourishing empire with a level of mechanical excellence never before or since seen anywhere.” So, here you have a culture that apparently is second to none in their capacity to build and do mechanical work. On top of that, their resources were limited because of being under slavery. This would lend itself to be a culture that required maximizing functionality, using the least amount of materials to get the job done.
In other words, they were “minimalists”.
The lore goes on to describe that the Minmatars used Fusion reactor based technology, particularly for their propulsion systems. One of the problems of this propulsion system was that it generates a considerable amount of heat. That is why most all Minmatar ships have those “wingy bits” to cool off the excess heat that the fusion reactors generate. Yet, sometimes, the models don’t exactly make sense.. and worse, they don’t follow their own convention in Lore. This should be fixed. Here are the points I will be considering:
- Fusion Reactors require ways to disapate heat (i.e. Radiators). Fusion Reactors will be in Minmatar ships as both power supplies and propulsion systems. Faster ships will require more ways to disapate heat.
- Minimalist designs will try to not put pointless structures on ships if something else would be more efficient and easier to construct. However, it still means that it must be sufficient to do the job it was meant for.
- No one likes an ugly ship, so some designer “style” is allowed. However, Minmatar combat ships are typically aggressive looking, meant to look fearsome and… are somewhat “pointy”, as if to show everyone who they wish to take out.
- Newer (higher tier ships) will be more efficient and built better than their older brethren, so they will reflect a better and more efficent look.
Tech One Frigates:
Reaper (Rookie Frigate) – Recent redone, the Reaper looks like the correct combination of better cheap parts, better building techniques, and cheap labor.
Breacher (Missile Frigate) – Again, a good mix of functionality and minimal design. It works and its cheap.
Burst (Mining and Cargo Frigate) – This ship needs to be fixed. It doesn’t even look like I could hold a pilot much less a load of ore. This fails on Points 2 and 3.
Probe (Exploration and Cargo Frigate) – All in all, this ship fits the profile pretty well. Could use a makeover, but it fits all the basic functionality and task requirements.
Rifter (Close Combat Frigate) – This is perfect. Looks fast and powerful, while adhering closely to the typical view of what a Minmatar ship should look like.
Slasher (Interceptor Frigate) – This also has pretty good balance.. big radiator wings because of bigger engines. I am sorta hoping that they get rid of the “step-down” look that the origianl designers thought was awesome (no idea why).
Vigil (E-War Frigate) – This ship works as well for the Minmatar Lore. Big Radiator wings for the engines, a little more covering to protect electronics. Even a vertical style to it. The only problem with the Vigil is that it doesn’t look very aggressive. In fact, the overall effect looks rather passive.
Tech One Cruisers
Bellicose (E-War Cruiser) – This ship needs a makeover. Its ugly. I love flying Rapiers and Huginns, but the base ship needs to be remodeled as its design doesn’t make sense. Why that “H” boom structure with the radiators at the wrong end? Why have the cockpit clear out in front like that, on a long, precariously thin, walkway? Fails on the first three points.
Rupture (Combat Cruiser) – I love Ruptures, I love the look, I like how they fly. But, there does need to be some makeover done on it. It really needs to be radiator wings on this ship. They can be small ones, near the engine, or somewhere.. but its a Minmatar ship, it needs radiator wings. Also, cut off that little cabin-thingy in the front.. I know it is supposed to be the cockpit, but it looks too much like an outty bellybutton. Fails on Point 1.
Scythe (Mining Cruiser) – No changes, this ship was redone correctly.
Stabber (Close Combat Cruiser ) – For the most part, the Stabber if fine. It just needs more radiator fins to follow Minmatar lore, especially for as fast as it is. Fails partially on point 1.
Tech One Battlecruisers:
Cyclone – I like the look, but I think some radiator wings should be added to the engine section. It is an older ship after all. Might fail on Point 1.
Hurricane – I also like the look of the Hurricane, though I still think it should have a few more radiator wings for the engine area. The ones located at the side make sense for the internal power reactors. So it fails a bit on Point 1.
Tornado – No changes. Since it is a Tier 3 battlecruiser it has the best design and materials out there, so it is the new standard.
Tech One Battleships:
Typhoon – Alright, now we come to the ship that started me working on this post in the first place. The Typhoon is the fast and oldest battleship in the Minmatar lineup. Considering its age, as well as its power requirements, the ship should have multiple radiator fins. To put this into perspective, the Typhoon has a base speed of 130m/s, while the relatively new Hurricane, which flies a little faster and is almost 1/10th the mass, has radiator wings. It needs radiator fins.. big ones. It could do with a serious makeover just on the style point too. Looks a little too much like the paper-mache “Doomsday” machine from 1960′s Star Trek. Thus if fails considerably on Point 1.
Tempest – This is another ship I like.. but I don’t like the design. The radiator wings are just huge, which does give it a cool piratey look to it. But the thing that ruins the ship is that long, pointless superstructure to the cockpit. It just doesn’t make sense. And then, they put one of the radiator wings on it! Why would you do that? So, it fails on points 1 and 2.
Maelstrom – I love the look of the Maelstrom.. it is a very clean and good looking design. It looks purposeful, intent, and efficient.
It would be nice that the genius of Minmatar’s mechanical prowess would no longer equal..ahem.. “duct tape” construction. And while quite a few pilots revel in the silvery compound, I don’t think CCP could go wrong with a motto like, “Let’s make every ship look good..”
The Curse of NGE… Bioware Has It.
NGE – (n): Short for “New Game Experience”. NGE was introduced into the very popular game of Star Wars Galaxies back when it was quite popular, as a way of making it complete against Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft”. Although little is known about who actually did what, there is strong evidence that LucasArts forced Sony’s Dev team to completely rewrite the interface as well as the entire gaming system so that it resembled something closer to WoW’s interface. This was an attempt to get more people from the pre-teen and early teen market. One of the changes was that the complex and original skilltree was replaced by a simple, yet restrictive and unoriginal skill line. For the majority of players the game became unplayable and Star Wars Galaxies never recovered from the event.
Since that time, the term “NGE” has referred to any situation where either Developers or Game Owners make stupid, short-sighted changes, in the belief that they know how to make the game ”better”. “Better” in this context usually means, “Get more money now. Honesty, quality, even facts, are not considered”.
That has never proven to be true.
Fast Forward to Bioware.
I love Bioware. I love the Fallout Series, I love the Mass Effect Series, I love the Knights of the Old Republic Series. I loved games like Jade Empire and Baldar’s Gate. So when I heard that they were going to do a Star Wars MMO. I was beside myself! They could do no wrong!
Then.. they did. Twice.
First was the Mass Effect 3 Ending Utter Fail. Mass Effect 3, where all the effort you put into the decisions across three game series,decisions that could have so many different outcomes, turned out to have a truly zero mass effect at the end. Wow. Just.. amazing fail. I didn’t even bother to finish the game and its now collecting dust on my shelf. The cherry on top was Casey Hudson defending the story ending.. despite the fact that its essentially the same ending no matter what you did. “NGE” for sure.
Second is turning out to be the mess of Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. This game would be awesome IF it wasn’t an MMO. The main reason is that it doesn’t act like an MMO. I don’t have a place to call my own. I can’t customize my ship. Heck, I can’t even buy a ship that I want! And when I fly in space, yep can’t even do that my own way either. There is nothing MMO about SW:TOR.. it’s completely impersonal! Any smuggler can replace my smuggler and vice versa. I can replace any trooper and vice versa. At least in Star Wars Galaxies, you had real freedom to do things, to be where you wanted to be. Bioware didn’t even get PAZAAK into the game!
The “NGE” portion is still coming up because now EA no longer has it as a priority game, and some are even predicting that it will be Free to Play by January of next year. As one commenter said, “If it didn’t have lightsabers, you’d never know it was a Star Wars game.”
Some other interesting reads on these subjects:
Electronic Arts Hall of Shame: http://www.holdtheline.com/entries/electronic-arts-hall-of-shame.65/?page=1
BBB Blog on Mass Effect 3: http://www.bbb.org/blog/2012/04/mass-effect-3-is-having-a-mass-effect-on-its-consumers-for-better-or-worse/
MMORPG SWTOR Forums on Reviews: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/367/view/forums/forum/1242/Reviews-Impressions.html
All in all, with subs dropping fast, and EA being truly cryptic about subscriber numbers as well as indicating that they don’t put it as a high priority at this time.. it will be interesting to see if (when) SW:TOR finally falls by the wayside.
New Shinys! – CCP drops a War and Toys Blog
And it is located here: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=42269
Love is a Probe Ship
Let’s start with the juicy bits first: CCP is exploring.. well, its exploring using exploration as a way of introducing some modules into the game. Some of these new modules can only be gotten by going to hacking and pirate progression sites (via exploration) and snagging a multi-run BPC as loot. The one that will be introduced this way appear to be:
- Small/Medium/Large/X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster I
- MagSheath Target Breaker I
- Armor Adaptive Hardener I
Looks like a good time to get my hacking and probing skills improved.
Toying with the Status Quo
Now, we should look at the new modules and changes that are going to be introduced:
Armor Adaptive Hardener I – Only one can be fitted on the ship, but this is going to adjust the ship resistances based on the damage that is incoming. The big downside I see to this is that, depending on the power/cpu needs, this is a huge bonus to Amarr ships.. particular those like the Prophecy that have resistance bonuses. As this appears to be one of the modules slated to be found by exploration.. you can figure that these BPCs will catch a very high price on the market.
Extrinsic Damage Amplifier I & II – This is a Minmatar boost, though it certainly will help Gallente, and some Amarrian Drone ships too. Ships like the Vargur, Tempest, Typhoon, Maelstrom, Rapier, Huginn, Cyclone, Bellicose, Hurricane, and Rupture have the lows to spare on something like this, without sacrificing tank. However, with flip side to that argument is that most Minmatar ships field either Medium or Light drones.. and a module like this could make a ship like the Domininx or the Ishtar, could benefit this excessively.
Small to X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster I – A potential boost to Minmatar, mainly because the Minmatar have the most shield boost bonused ships. Basically this is a shield booster that uses a lot of cap, so it can store cap booster charges. This has the potential of re-introducing active tanking to small to medium sized fleets because this particular booster doesn’t pull exclusively from your cap. I am up in the air on this though because if your ship is that neuted, then likely your active resistance modules are probably offline anyways.. so you are just shortly delaying the end results. I don’t think this will replace the cap booster module either.. because you need to have the capacitor for your speed modules if you wish to get out of a bad situation.
MagSheath Target Break I – Just a much more powerful ECM Burst.. that gets better the more folks are targeting you and you as well. This will be standard equipment on all transports.
Overclocking Processor Rigs – Kinda surprised it took them this long to have a CPU rig.
Web Drones – I am up in the air on this, but I think these might be a wee overpowered. Vagabonds will definately be hauling these around, as well as any battleship that can haul drones. The possibilities are pretty extensive. This makes ships like the Ishtar into ad hoc Rapiers/Huginns for fleets. Rapiers and Huginns, on the other hand, become that much more powerful. Overall though, I think Caldari and Minmatar will benefit most from this change. Minmatar ships survive by exploiting transversal velocity, so slowing down the enemy ship more is always a benefit. Caldari pilots make out well also because Caldari ships are typically slow and their midslots are reserved for the shield tank and speed mods. So, having web drones will make them much more effective. I think some creativity may also show up here in drone setups. I figure some pilots will have 3:2 or 4:1 ratios of Web drones to Target Painting drones to help improve damage on target.
Capacitor Battery Changes - The only defense against a neutralizer has been either a Nosferatu module (which only worked if your % of cap was less than the guy attacking you) or a cap booster with charges. Not sure if this change will make a difference.. but it will certainly be interesting to see what the reflected result will be.
WAR and Friends
Well, gone are the days of the Privateer alliances that randomly wardec’d random large alliances for the giggles one gets when nailing a freighter of an alliance mate too lazy to keep up with wars. As if the major coalitions didn’t already have enough isk in their wallets. The logic CCP SoniClover uses to justify this is as follows:
The increased cost reflects the easier access to multiple targets. There have been some worries having the cost scale in this way creates incentive to declare war on small entities. Griefing on small entities is not rampant now, and with the cost increasing from 2 million to 50 million, there is no reason to assume griefing on small entities will increase with these changes.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they considered the fact that if there is a reduction of targets at the top end, then the aggressors will start targeting the smaller corps. Considering that 50 mil can be got on one good Level 4 mission, then you are going to see quite a few 130 and below member alliances and corps getting wardec’d much more often because you are much more likely to make back your isk (or fun) hitting those corps than you would trying to take on a major alliance like Goonswarm, where you probably won’t make any money back, much less even be profitable.
Besides that though, I do like the fact that they are removing (mostly) the “Dec-Shield” problem, as the War follows you into the alliance, and a new war is started if that corp leaves.. and it is at no cost to the aggressor. You also cannot join a corporation if that corporation is in a non-mutual war.
Conclusion
Overall, a pretty interesting blog.. and one that has the potential to shake up PVP for a little bit. But CCP SoniClover did say one other thing too.. “ Also, as the thinking is to start to add modules on a regular basis…” Not sure if that is a good thing..
What’s in YOUR hanger..
The Chase Bank card commercial runs through my mind every time I say phrase.
Bloody Vikings…
Well, I tend to collect ships.. and despite being so-so in PVP, I seem to have the ability to keep the vast majority of my ships nice and safe. Some of those ships, seem to have the ability to stay safe for long enough periods of time to have some history attached to them. So here is my list:
- 1x Nidhoggur Carrier- “Fallout’s Revenge”: I have flown this ship off and on for the better part of two years and I have used this to save various POSes and for general transport through low-sec and the old Northern Coalition. It was named after I heard that Bethsada Software was going to finally bring out Fallout 3.
- 1x Naglfar Dreadnaught – “Tax Collector”: The first Capital ship I owned and the first Capital ship I flew. This ship is ancient for me.. I think this was purchased for use back when m3 Corp was still living out in Essence space.
- 1x Orca – A ship I should have trained for long ago. Incredibly useful.
- 1x Mastadon – T2 Heavy Hauler.. I like to use this for longer distance jobs that don’t need a carrier or Orca.
- 1x Mammoth – T1 Hauler, all rigged up. This ship was with me when were doing mining operations out of Droselary.
- 1x Wreathe – T1 light Hauler. Got it for giggles
- 1x Prowler – T2 Blockade Runner – Very nice ship to have for getting good in and out of low and null-sec.
- 2x Noctis – Salvage ship. Not so useful now that Meta 0 stuff no longer drops.
- 1x Vargur – T2 Marauder – Despite being on the lower end of the Marauder scale, this ship helps keep me in isk.
- 1x Fleet Issue Tempest – This ship I have owned for a long time, before the changes made by Dominion. Still upset that they forced this into an armor tanker.
- 8x Tempests – All configurations from Dual-Prop (Surprisingly useful in 1v1 PVP) to heavy long-range sniper.
- 2x Maelstrom – Minmatar’s good looking battleship. Also useful in PVP and PVE.
- 1x Typhoon – A beast of an armor tanker now, and with my improved Torp and Drone skills.. a pretty savage PVP ship.
- 1x Sleipnir – Love this ship.. its just too expensive to risk most of the time.
- 2x Tornados – Not having a pair of these available is simply not an option.
- 6x Hurricanes – Much like a Tempest, too useful and too varied.
- 3x Cyclones – I just love the look of these things. Maybe someone at CCP will finally take a look at these soon.
- 1x Prophecy – Tanked to death, but also slow as hell.
- 2x Drakes – Yeah, um, these are um.. not mine. I’m just uh.. holding on to them.. for um.. somebody.
- 1x Brutix – I can see why these were so popular at one time.
- 1x Ashimmu – This is a ship I wish I could fly all the time.. the problem is that it is just too slow.
- 1x Fleet Issue Stabber – I like this ship too. Fast, manuverable.. and all guns.
- 1x Navy Issue Auguror – Just a thought experiment.. though it does have potential.
- 2x Guardian – One the two specializations that TFHC is persuing. It’s popularity is well reasoned.
- 1x Basilisk – This particular one I put together to run incursions.. Maybe I should start doing them again.
- 1x Scimitar – Gotta have one.
- 1x Vagabond – Still trying to fly this ship well.
- 2x Muninn – I actually do fly this ship well.
- 1x Mauler – Just testing a test bed.
- 1x Omen – Another test bed.
- 1x Dramiel – A corpmate who no longer plays the game gave this to me back in the day. He won like 25, or 50, of these things in a contest.
- 1x Cruor – Another overly expensive pirate frigate. But hopefully I might have the change to use it.
- 1x Succubus – The still pathetic Sansha nation pirate faction frigate. No one is afraid of a spiky dung beetle.
- 4x Wolves – My favorite ship to use.
- 2x Jaguar – Still gotta get a fit together that I like for these guys.
- 5x Rifters – Part of my plan to goof off in low-sec pvp.
- 2x Cheetahs – Nice, fast scouts
- 2x Hyenas – Hopefully CCP will figure out what to do with these guys some day.
- 1x Vigil – Better than a Hyena for TP.
- 2x Claws – Pretty fast armor tanking interceptor
- 5x Stiletto – The preferred interceptor for good reason. I use these alot to get around.
- 2x Navy Comets – Never flew these in PVP yet, but I hear they are pretty sweet now.
- 2x Firetails – Haven’t flown these enough yet… maybe in null-sec.
- 1x Worm – Never used, but now that I got my hybrid and missile skills up to par…
- 1x Hookbill – Now with Mechwarrior 2 camoflauge.
- 1x Imperial Navy Slicer – Where the pod racer out of Star Wars, the Phantom Menace (PS, I hate you George Lucas).
Hmm.. that seems a bit.. much, doesn’t it.
(wonders if he’ll be on the next episode of Hoarders…)
Second week in Hulkageddon – Two more Hulks Ka-BLAMO!
So, two more hulks fell to my guns…
http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13299667
- and -
http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13299799
Course, aside from my Catalyst sacrifices, I tried to take down another Hulk in Ylandoki.. only to lose a Thorax for the attempt..
http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13300389
Yeah.. very embarrassing. However, there is one interesting piece of information that I have derived from this. The other pilot has almost exactly the same skills as I do.. except that he has small blaster specialization at V, while I only have it at IV. Notice the significant damage difference. Looks like I need to train out some specializations.
In other news, I found that buying a Freighter may not have been the boon I had wished it to be. Yeah, that 0.75 au/s is a big factor. Normal battleships travel at 3.0 AU/s. That means that in the same time it takes for my freighter to transport two battleships from one point to another point, I could have flown both of them individually and been back ready to pick up another ship.
Aside from that, I just found out that I have managed to collect no less than nine Tempest-class battleships over the several years of playing Eve Online. I don’t have that many of any other ship.. including shuttles.
Apparently, I LOVE me some Tempests..
Here are the names of my Tempests:
Zulu Master
Turmoil
Tribal Dirge
Redemption
Recoil
Scythe
Recoilless
Song of the Violent
Subversive
Of course, in today’s modern battlefield they don’t have much use.. unfortunately.
The Push Towards “Farm and Fields”
This is an unprecedented time in Eve History for the industrial aspect of the game. The following events have taken place, or will take place in the space of a single month:
- Player Event: Ice Interdiction – This was a plan to stop the amount of Gallente ice being mined in Eve Online by taking out anyone who was mining Gallente Ice. The operation appears to have been a financial success.
- Player Event: Burn Jita – A Player Event that had one of the most influential null-sec alliances invade high-sec, and for a day, wiping out all transportation going to the central, and biggest, trade hub in the Eve Universe.
- Player Event: Hulkageddon – Another Player Event, done annually, where pirates focus on taking out industrial mining ships. Hulks, Mackinaws, Orcas, Rorquals, are on the list.. and are not safe even in high-sec.
- Security: Bot – CCP Sreegs has been on the forefront of taking down bots of all sorts. The majority of these bots either mined or ran missions in high-sec or ratted in the Drone Regions. The materials and modules were then shipped, in mass, to Jita for sale.
- Escalation: Drones – As of April 24th, Drones no longer drop “Drone Goo”. Those unique ores dropped only by Drone NPCS, which could in turn be reprocessed into high-grade, null-sec ores, no longer are dropped.. by anything.
- Escalation: Meta 0 Modules – Also as of April 24th, no NPC in Eve will drop meta 0 items (it turned out not to be entirely true, as some things like Expanded Cargohold Is and Ship Scanner Is still appear to be dropping). Meta 0 items were used in two particular fashions: First, they were reprocessed to get to their more valuable minerals, and Second, they were used in Invention. Removal of these means that more Meta 0 items will have to be player manufactured. So instead of having a resource pool, we now have a resource sink.
- Player Intervention: OTEC – Technium is the most valuable substance in Eve currently, and it is produced only from certain rare moons.. all of which happen to be own or managed by the GooNIP (yes, say it like how Stewie says “Cool Whip”). However, this has been pre-countered by CCP desire to step away from “conflict resources”, by stating possible changes that include Ring mining for what was formerly Moon goo.
Now, let’s think back about who started the concept of “Farm and Fields”. This was a major platform for the Mittani of Goonswarm when he went into the election of CSM6. Of course, the “farms and fields” initiative had to take a backburner in order to save Eve Online from the Space Barbie fixation that CCP had gotten itself into. But the question remains, is the Mittani still trying to push “farms and fields”, even after he has been defunct?
Considering all that he has been able to accomplish in CSM 6 as well as with Goonswarm, it is a sure bet that he just didn’t say, “Whelp, guess that’s not going to happen.” And the majority of Goonswarm players, after all the success they have had, will likely do whatever he bids. Add to that the reality that I think he honestly cares about Eve Online as a whole and we have a strong group of focused players, with the resources necessary, to influence change.
Let’s look at the Burn Jita plan, which had been in the planning stages for months, seems from the outset just a plan to mess with people.. just to prove how powerful Goonswarm is. Here is his quote from his blog, Sins of a Solar Spymaster,
“The truth is that we did it because we could: we wanted to see what would happen to Jita if we hit it with all the organizational might of a nullsec bloc.”
Now, if he was truly just wanting to show off, he wouldn’t have written this statement in this way. He is a lawyer, after all, so he is going to be very precise in his wording. It also helps to note that he goes on to talk about how Escalation has made mining viable again. I think the Gallente Ice Interdiction was a test case, to see if he could organize not only Goonswarm, but also others in the low-sec community. It also tested Goonswarm’s ability to weather out major events, even those of its own making. But it also was an introductory course into seeing just how much control large player organizations could exert against smaller organizations, particularly those who have little need to be concerned about game politics.
The Gallente Ice Interdiction turned out to prove to be quite successful on all the deeper issues that were behind the event. Prices for Gallente Blue Ice raised sharply on news that the POS fuel would be much rarer to get and once relatively cheap at 800isk per fuel unit, now were being sold for upwards of 2200 isk per fuel unit. This was despite the fact that the actual inventory appeared to be hardly dented at all. Goonswarm made isk on that sure.. but the real treasure was seeing just how reactive the Eve Online Industrial populace had become.
The Burn Jita project, now coupled with Hulkageddon, went after another point in the industrial complex. The Burn Jita project struck at the central hub of the Eve Online universe.. hitting everyone who ever dealt with Jita: Mission Runners, Minor Traders, Major Industrialists, Miners, Haulers, etc. The targets were picked in such a way as to discourage people from both buying and selling goods in Jita,which is why it was done on the days that Jita has the highest amount of trade. In other words, Friday going into Saturday. The constant converage of those systems forced people to more localized places, as well as put into danger trade routes that had existed for years.
Hulkageddon also served a more distinct purpose and with Goonswarm putting up tons of isk for bounties, more pirates are risking sec status losses as well as more expensive fits, to hunt down Tech 2 Exhumers.. most of which fly in high-sec, busily mining away without a care in the world until they were caught.
But let us not forget CCP, which up until recently, still had to deal with The Mittani as the CSM6 chairman. CCP Sreegs campaign against the bots was intensely pushed by the CSM. This despite many of the null-sec alliances that they hailed from were using bots or had a number of members using bots on a regular basis. Many of the updates you see coming into Inferno, some via Escalation, are changes directed and influenced by CSM 6. This includes the removal of Drone Goo and solving the problem of having Meta 0 modules being melted down for the rare minerals they house.
Finally, there is OTEC, a null-sec organization designed to manage the flow of Technetium to the rest of null-sec. A powerplay move to be sure.. but against who?
Personally.. I think its a powerplay move against CCP, forcing them to bring the concept of “Ring Mining” to Tranquility as soon as possible. The Mittani mentions it this way,
“Just like with the real world’s OPEC, ‘Everyone’ in this case means ‘us’ and ‘benefit’ means ‘ahahaha f**k you scrubs’. With discussion of ‘ring mining’ being a method of nerfing tech income, most of the organizations in nullsec that have tech moons are interested in jacking the prices as high as the market will bear, with twin benefits: making us (CFC/NCdot/Ev0ke/PL) comically wealthy at the expense of literally everyone else in the game, and making literally everyone else in the game howl in a rage about it.”
Remember, when this was developed, he was still the CSM Chairperson. I think, by allowing this particular e-mail to be, ahem, “leaked”, he is essentially forcing CCP to make something happen before OTEC becomes a real force in the world of Eve Online. Why do I say that? Because this plan goes absolutely against his “farms and fields” initiative that he thinks will save Eve Online. It also goes against what I think he hoped the lessons would be with the events that he both directly, and indirectly, interacted with.
Here is what I think are the lessons he wanted people to learn, and to work off of:
First – Gallente Ice Interdiction – Since much of the ice for all of Eve was mined in high-sec space, the Mittani had hoped to enforce the idea that, with High-sec no longer being a stable source of this resource, it might be good for alliance to start mining for that resource locally, rather than just jump to Jita, pick up what you need and go back home. At the corp and individual level in those null-sec alliances, local resources would still be harder (though more valuable) to get and so would increase the number of mining ops, as well as having local PI directed more toward filling local needs rather than just dumping whatever on the market.
Second – Burn Jita – This is the second part of the Ice Interdiction aspect. By removing the availability of Jita, null-sec alliances would be force to upend their usual logistical trade routes for new ones. These new routes might not be as useful or as profitable as Jita was and as such, might influence local industrial corps to start mining resources locally as a safeguard.
Third – Hulkageddon – A nice addition to the Burn Jita idea. Again, much of the low-end resources used for industry is mined in high-sec space, where it is quite safe to mine and ship your minerals to Jita or wherever and gain maximum profit. Hulkageddon disrupts this with a venegence and makes high-sec mining a less reliable source of resources. By adding bounties to every ten kills, Goonswarm could possibly force this to continue on even longer.. disrupting the current flow of resources in and out of null-sec and possibly making null-sec mining a more profitable and easier experience.
Fourth – Bot Removal – Bots have been seen in all sectors of Eve Online space, and the neglect of CCP to really cut these guys out has caused the eventual proliferation of supercapital ships all across Eve, and is one that will still be felt for a least a couple more years. Removing these bots has cut off a large portion of incoming resources to the Eve community as a whole, further increasing the price of all minerals.. and also making it more profitable for young miners to be viable again.. even in Null-sec.
Fifth – Drones and the Drone Regions – A few years back, in order to give new life to the recently added Drone Regions, CCP removed all drone bounties and added more drone goo to their drops. This turned out to be a gold mine to what has now become known as the Drone Russians, who using bots, both mined and blasted minerals into their holds and were able to corner the market. With the Drone Region NPCs changed, Drone goo now gone, and botting accounts being banned by the hundreds, the minerals that once flowed into Jita for all to take with ease are now gone. This has forced null-sec alliances to see revise the prices of supercapital ships.. and to see if perhaps local mining might not be a better alternative.
Sixth – Meta 0 Module Change – This change removes the ability for mission runners to also influence the mineral market. Although a minor change in the grand scheme of things, some of these Meta 0 modules could be reprocessed to give out Mercoxit, a null-sec rare ore that requires a special exhumer to mine. Now that this resource is consistantly available only through mining, there will be more reason to mine out there in the deep dark.
Now, to me, this sums up, not a war against the players of Eve Online, but an ideological battle to save Eve Online by stopping players/corporations/alliances/coalitions who are too reliant on others for support. The “Farms and Fields” initiative is still active. It still is being pushed, even as the Mittani is no longer the CSM Chairperson, he still wants null-sec to be a better place to live. And even if I am a pawn in this scheme (which I am, I don’t delude myself), this still looks like a good plan to me.
.. then again.. I could be wrong. They are Goons after all…
I iz a pirate, says I.
So, I finally get to have some PVP time last night.. and look what I got in on:
http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13249479
- and -
http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13249879
My official induction into Hulkageddon has begun.. at the loss of only 0.6 of status. Both strikes were pretty quick and probably the whole thing lasted less than a minute, which meant that even a little training on SiSi went a long way. Still, it does surprise me that both of these hulks were a.) out during Hulkageddon and b.) not fully tanked.
I guess some people never learn or listen.
The only problem I see now is that CCP Greyscale likes to listen to these people..
Patch Notes – April 24th, 2012 – Meta 0 are now… Metal Scraps?
Here a partial list of patch notes (the full list can be found here), showing the more interesting things being pushed out:
Ships
- Titans can now lock a maximum of three targets.
- XL turrets have had their signature resolution set to 2000m.
- Capital Turrets that are fitted to titans now have a new damage-scaling attribute; targets with a signature radius smaller than this size will take reduced damage from these turrets. This does not apply to dreadnaughts.
- Siege modules have had their tracking penalty removed.
A lot of Titan nerfin’ going on here, and I like it because CCP isn’t in any hurry to deal with the real problem of out-of-control production. These ships will still dominate the null-sec sov conflicts far too easily. Though, on the plus side, they are making Dreadnaughts more and more useful.
Incursions
- Vanguard and Assault Sites have been revamped with the following changes:
- NPCs have been grouped into waves and groups have been randomized; this will prevent blitzing and increase the random element within the sites.
- Spawn triggers moved from individual NPCs to the group as a whole.
- Lowered the rewards from Vanguard sites by 10%.
- For more information see this blog.
I knew this was coming, but its still a pretty significant change. However, these incursion sites will still dominate in isk profitability.. particularly with the notes that came next:
NPC’s
- All common Rogue Drones will no longer drop alloys and will instead have bounties in line with other NPCs.
- Meta 0 modules in NPC loot tables have been replaced with Metal Scraps.
- The brackets of spawn containers (for hacking containers in mini profession sites) are now being grayed out after being viewed to make it easier to know which containers are not hacked yet.
- NPC’s will always aggress you when you warp into their aggression range.
There was a lot of talk about the changing of loot tables and their percentage drop rate. However, that second line, “Meta 0 modules in NPC loot tables have been replaced with.. metal scraps.”, certainly puts that to rest. This could be a boon to newer pilots and pilots new to industry because now they will be responsible for producing Meta 0 items in large bulk quantities. This will invaribly lead to more POSes being established, which in turn will mean a price increase of PI goods.. which will mean that more low-sec systems will probably be commandeered by alliances with both PVP and industrial ties to those areas. PI probably will be “moon goo”-lite.
Market & Contracts
- A lot of modules have been added to the market that previously could only be found in Contracts. Mostly these are officer, deadspace, faction and storyline modules. Note that this only means that players can now buy and sell them between themselves.
- Modules are sorted on the market by decreasing metalevel. So when you scroll down you should see increasingly more awesome modules.
Hurray! Finally more stuff on open market! Hurray! Modules sorted by meta level now! Hurray!! This will definately lower the price of these goods over the long term, which means that they are more likely to show up on various *ahem* hulkageddon targets..
Worldshaping
- The security status of systems in Etherium Reach, Malpais, Oasa, Outer Passage, Perrigen Falls, The Kalvela Expanse and the Spire has been adjusted upwards to bring them more into line with the rest of nullsec.
I must have missed the devblog talking about this (and if someone knows it, please link it).. though I remember they were planning on doing some fixes based on CCP Greyscale’s impressions (hint, hint..) So, if the security status is being adjusted upwards.. I’m thinking that the residents are going to be none to happy when they log in today and find that they don’t have the anomolies they were hoping for anymore…
The rest of the blog didn’t have anything that seemed to interesting. Necessary, for sure, not not interesting. Well, except for: “The ‘Micro Shield Transporter’ sound effect will now cycle without an abrupt stop.” So.. who uses a Micro Shield Transporter? Really?
Inflation – Or so I tried to buy a Charon..
So, due to my desire to be more mobile, I had planned to purchase a nice, lovely Charon.
Now, while I don’t particularly think that the Charon is a very pretty ship, having one in my employ would certainly improve my ability to move large fleets of ships and equipment from one region to another. This, of course, is a great idea. It would certainly be more useful than my fearsome Naglfar class Dreadnaught “Tax Collector” and while a good carrier is always nice, my Nidhoggur class ship, the “Fallout’s Revenge”, has only been able to do one thing in the past six months and that was make a jump from one low-sec system to another low-sec system.
Then.. I looked at the price. 1.1 Billion Isk. My wallet was going to need some help especially since my purchase of “Tax Collector” was still quite recent. Not a problem.
Well.. the prices went up to 1.2 Billion Isk. Not a problem
Then the prices went up to 1.3 billion isk. Err.. yeah, not a problem.
The price shortly went up to 1.4 billion isk as of Friday morning. K, no worries.. I’ll just mission run some more.. Everybody loves my RF EMP L ammo that I sell in great quantities.
Friday Afternoon; 1.6 billion isk. Price for RF EMP L ammo where I was selling.. dropped from 1296 isk per round to 1150 isk per round (at the time, it was lower than Jita) and no one was buying RF EMP L ammo. The 200,000 rounds of my bread and butter still untouched as of Monday morning because someone dropped nearly 700k of that ammo and is collapsing the Dodixie EMP L market.
Ouch..
So, between my mission running, module selling, and purchasing of ammo for resale, I actually LOST ground in my attempt to purchase a Charon. At this rate, it would be quicker to retrain for the Freighter that I want (the sexy Providence) and just wait out for a good deal.
Boy, that Hulk is starting to look real good…
Borrowing From Other Games #1 – 18 April 2012 – SWTOR’s Companions
This is a first in a series where I explore potential good ideas that other games have introduced into the MMO gaming world. I will try to make this a regular column.. but ya know.. there are only SO many truly new things that come out any more, and I really don’t want to muscle in posts like Rixx Javix’s “Gooder Eve” ideas either.
In the Beginning
So, back to this post. One of the oldest additions to the gaming world was the concept of a “pet” class. Essentially this class was inheritly weak and had another NPC character who assisted them. In the meantime they were given abilities to help improve the NPC character. These archtypes tended to be a lot of fun but often were built to the extremes. Either they were way overpowered or they were way underpowered. In addition, since by their needs and nature they were highly independent, this usually meant that they didn’t balance well in groups.
The developers at Bioware decided to change that paradigm by essentially making everyone a “pet” class with “companions”. In SWTOR, you can have multiple companions and each usually have some skills and you can send them off to do minor missions or craft stuff for you or they can hunt with you. However, the bonus is that no matter who comes with you, you all level about the same time and by in large are pretty autonomous and know what skills they want to train, etc., etc.
All in all, SWTOR’s companions are about as non-Eve as you can get. In fact, the very mentality of their existance is something counter to many players in Eve (well, except for Drones). You don’t control what they learn, you control little of their tactics, and yet you could not get very far without them.
So.. even thinking about having a “pet” like that in Eve is unthinkable.. right?
Re-thinking the Unthinkable
Not unless it was a veteran reward.. and before you scream about how it would be “overpowered”, let me tell you about the other half of this issue.. player “alts”:
When you first log into Eve Online as a new player, you see that you have the option of making a total of three characters for your account. Initially, as a new player, you are going to think that hey, I can level up three different players. It doesn’t take long however to show that really, there is almost no true benefit to those other two characters. Sure, some might spare the time to use them as neutral spies, or as cyno alts. But with the timed skill system, any skill you need usually is best applied to your first character.. the one that already has plenty of support skills to help maximize any additional benefit.
Suppose you are still new and you think, “Ya know, I’ll train up a new character as soon as I get done training this one to where I want it.” Pretty typical thinking.. but to learn all the skills in Eve would take about.. 10 years from what I understand. Do you really want to wait 10 years to go focus on another character?
Another example is one that I am currently facing. I can fly all four racial Tech 2 cruisers and Battlecruisers, I have tons of Level 5 skills, and am pushing 80mil SP. But, with ship configurations changing rapidly, challenges to my game time, and differences in procuring isk, I find I don’t need all those skillpoints in one character now, like I did a year ago.
So, stealing a bit of the idea of having companions, why not let your other characters on your account earn some skill training time too? Here is what I propose:
Minions – Or Changing Training Times to Better Everyone
Basically, what would happen is that after one year, your training speed would be increased by 50%, AND divided into three percentage parts of 33% training speed each. You can arrange the parts to whoever you want, but you cannot go over two parts (or 66%) on any one character. So, you could either train one character at the current level of training and one additional character at half speed, or you could train all of them at effectively half speed.. but each one could be focusing on a particular area of expertise.
For Example, suppose you are currently training at say 1000 SP per hour and you have three characters, this is what your arrangement would look like:
Old (and Current) System:
Bob (PVP Pilot) – 1000 SP/hr
Daryl (Industrial alt attempt) – 0 SP/hr – Never gets used or used only sporatically and makes no isk. No benefit to the player.
Daryl #2 (Cyno Alt) – 0 SP/hr – Used only sporatically, makes no isk. Only minor benefit to the player.
New Veterans System:
Pre-One Year:
Bob (PVP Pilot) – 1000 SP/hr
Daryl (Industrial alt attempt) – 0 SP/hr – Never gets used or used only sporatically and makes no isk. No benefit to the player.
Daryl #2 (Cyno Alt) – 0 SP/hr – Used only sporatically, makes no isk. Only minor benefit to the player.
After One Year:
Bob (PVP Pilot) – 1000 SP/hr training up yet another Level 5 skill.
Daryl (Industrial alt attempt) – 500 SP/hr – Slowly training up Mining (or Trading, PI, etc), something he can do either solo or with a small group while he’s at home watching the kids.
Daryl #2 (Cyno Alt) – 0 SP/hr – Used only sporatically, makes no isk. Only minor benefit to the player.
- or -
Bob (PVP Pilot) – 500 SP/hr – Already has a ton of SP, but just would like to round out a couple level 5s
Daryl (Industrial alt attempt) – 500 SP/hr – Training up Mining because he wants to try to be an industrail.
Daryl #2 (Cyno Alt) – 500 SP/hr – Originally a Cyno alt, now he is training this guy up for Black Ops operations.
The big bonus here is that this change would reward older pilots without giving a skillpoint advantage over newer pilots, thus no one can say anyone is getting a distinct character to character advantage over others. In addition, this is a nice way to retain players who are perhaps bored of doing a particular task.. but would have to spend six months to a year learning something new, while at the same time getting pressured to train other skills for their corp or alliance.
Your new “minion” alt could be essentially training himself in skills that would be beneficial to your main, without getting in the way of the training your heavy hitter needs to do. Wouldn’t everyone like a minion like that?
Starting from Scratch – My Non-PVP, Industrial Tycoon alt
So, I am training up an alt. An industrial/hauling/cyno/etc. alt. And it turns out I was doing this just in time: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=28587 and this: http://community.eveonline.com/en/inferno/features/
As my CEO Corelin bring out in his blog (http://madhaberdashers.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-great-vanguard-nerf), this will cause some major upsets in the Eve economy. But I agree with Kirith (http://www.ninveah.com/2012/04/ripples.html) on how this is just going to be a short term problem, and that in the long run, we’re going to see much more diversity, and that means a.) More miners, b.) More targets for Pirates as well as enemy forces, c.) More targets for you to hunt down.
The part I plan to be interested in, however, is how this plays out with Supercapital production. If prices go up for all items being sold in Eve, will former supercapital producers stop building those, and start refocusing on the quicker financial returns of T2 and T3 ships, or capital ships even? Or are they just going to maintain their production, passing the costs to consumers who can pay for those ships.. and thus giving the super coalitions more power and dominance in the field of 0.0 sov? That will be interesting to see how it comes out.
Still, I think one big thing was missed. And, to be fair, it has been complained about since the beginning of the game. They still haven’t made mining fun. I don’t mean safer.. I mean fun.. as in something you would look forward to doing after a failed PVP op type fun. I ponder if they will ever get to that point.
Do You Really Need Forums? – Communication for your Masses
Forums
Stability
I am still rather surprised by how often I hear of people who steadfastly refuse to use forums, even CEOs of corporation in Eve sometimes believe that forums are a tool that has little benefit for them. So, what do Forums do for your corporation? What does it have to do with improved PVP prowess?
In a word: Stability. Yes, forums do have drama, NSFW pics, pointless reviews, and discouraging discussions, but that is part of their use, part of the need, and part of the fact that we are real, existing people, not just Policitally Correct NPC players. Forums provide a stable platform, and a stable platform is what you need if you want your corporation to grow. Forums quickly can become a solid foundation for your communication needs.
Now, before you start thinking that communication = bad jokes and lots of work, understand that every society that has ever existed, every culture, every nation, every empire, even down to the simple family, required a foundation of communication to exist. In a digital world, particularly in the 23/7 digital warfield of Eve Online, you need to have the ability to put, in a place everyone can see, what your thoughts are. If you are the CEO of a corporation, those thoughts are important. Those thoughts establish both the principles and the very culture of your corporation and who will be attracted to it and who will want to be a part of it.
Here’s a quick test. Say something, out loud, about what you want your corp to be. Did you do it? If you did great, and if you didn’t.. great. Why? Because it proves my point. I, Orakkus, didn’t hear it. And because of that, it has no bearing, no effect, no consequence to me.. ever. The same goes if you are just chatting in space, and someone asks you a question, and you respond.. either favorably or unfavorably, or just nonsensibly.. it means nothing. Most folks in that space will probably forget whatever you said the moment they leave system.
But, putting those words on forums, where your people.. and perhaps others can see them, gives them a bit of value. As a CEO, you want your words to be valued, you want your people to take them to heart and to be guided by them. But they can’t do that well, if they have no idea where to begin, and where the lines are. Even if you say to your corpmates, “Do whatever you want!”, this establishes a precident for new members of your corps, and current members too, for their activities. If two corpmates have a falling out, one can point to that and say, “Yes, I did the right thing, because these here are the rules.”
Don’t kid yourself, no human mind can handle permanent anarchy, even certified crazy people make rules for themselves, even psychopaths and sociopaths follow rules. If anarchy was our natural state, humans would have died out long ago because nothing would happen, nothing could get established. It is cooperation and communication that are the centerpieces to the true human experience.
Culture
In point of fact, this aspect is the most important part of your forums. Sure, communication is good, but its the culture that keeps people around. It only makes since, just because you understand each other, doesn’t necessarily mean you like each other. So, having forums also serves the dual function of establishing the culture in your corporation, starting from simple things like what jokes everyone thinks are funny, to in the very real sense, even helping to pay for various aspects of their real life. (A number of times, m3 Corp members helped pay.. with their own real money.. for RL situations of other m3 Corp members). That culture is one that reflects the type of people you want in your corp and it also makes the Eve world view you with a certain acknowledgement.
Culture is something that doesn’t just “happen” either. Remember when you started checking out the corporations in Eve. How often did you see various words and phrases, like “fun”, “mature players”, “Real Life (RL) first”, “Relaxed”, ”Elite”, “Hardcore” on corporate advertisements? Were all corps that used “fun” in their recruitment the same? How about those who considered themselves “Elite” or “Hardcore”? Without a doubt, when you were in conversations with various recruiters, you got to understand that one “Hardcore” corp isn’t the same as another. Truly, in order for you to be described as any thing, you need to have a record of decisions and actions that PROVE you are living those ideals. That takes both time and effort and having well-established, well-thoughtout forums will aid in this process because those choices will now be a matter of public record and a history that you can refer to.
Redemption and Rebirth
The forums also can play a vital aspect when things fail. And yes, they will fail. Add to that the somewhat shadowy background of some people and you can expect some failures to be spectacularly huge. If, however, you established your forums as a consistant communication tool, a place where everyone can go to get the facts, you now have a way of discussing issues like this on your home turf, by your own rules. This gives you a BIG advantage when trying to contain fires, and resolve an issue before your corp and your alliance explode into a million pieces. Word to the wise, those disagreements happen sooner than you think. Just make sure it doesn’t happen sooner than you plan.
Formation of your Forums
Forums should have the following (and this is from experience):
Public Area
- Recruitment Area – Included in this is a sticky detailing what you would like from those who want to join. An example app is always nice, and if you are skilled at forum software you can make some pretty nice forms they can fill out.
- Public Discussion Area – Not all of your buddies are in your corp or alliance. Give them a chance to drop a line and chat with you out of game.
Members location
- Corp/Alliance Discussion Area – This is a semi-formal area where people can vent and discuss in-game stuff.
- Announcements Area – This is the place where your leadership brings the laws.. make sure they are stickied and make sure no one can reply to them.
- Setups/Fittings – This is a good place to show both ideas about ship fits.. but also what you expect people to fly in various fleets.
- Chat Area – A non-formal area where people just go to talk. Nothing serious unless your minions want it to be.
Officer Area
- Officer Discussion Area – Need a place where your trusted advisers can talk about the goings on of the corp, about various members, and what punishments and rewards need to be dealt with.
A few other things can be added, depending on your needs, but those I listed above are pretty important to have. Either way, try to do what is best for your corp and alliance needs.
OMG!! MISSILE TRAILS! MISSILE TRAILS!
Yes, like a little preteen girl in the presence of Justin Bieber I reacted to the news and visual of missile trails.
THEY ARE AWESOME!!
SO ARE THE EXPLOSIONS!!
Other good things:
MISSILE TURRETS!!!
NEW STEALTH BOMBER MODELS!!! If the models show at concept make it to game as is.. Then Minmatar and Gallente got awesome.. real quick. The Caldari and Amarr look good, but I will train up Gallente Frigate V.. JUST TO LOOK GOOD in the Nemesis because it just looks great. The change they did to the Hound.. sexy, minimalist.. and just.. beautiful.
WARDEC Changes – What was introduced wasn’t all that indepth.. but one of them should be very favored by mercs.. A Marketplace where people can buy MERC SERVICES to protect yourself if you aren’t PVP capable. I like that.
POSes Changes – Down the road… but expect POSes to be like houses in other games. Completely scaleable from single person units.. to alliance/coalition deathstars covered with guns.
Yeah.. this was an awesome day.. and CCP Greyscale presented some of the coolest stuff. Probably because of the Crimewatch.. drama.. that he caused yesterday.
SILENT considerations
Currently our alliance, a 572 man low-sec PVP alliance, is working on settling our new home.
And it is slow going. I know Fancy Hats (I’m thinking of making a new catchphrase: “How do you fancy my hat.. now?” I think that would work.. if I start doing better in fights..) has begun doing some housecleaning in regards to getting our numbers more in line with our active membership as well as getting us square with all of our necessary evil type stuff.
Alliance-wise, I took a painful Rapier Loss, but that is to be expected when messing with local PVP. I kinda thought their fleet was a bit heavy for our forces, which was made up of BCs and T2 Recons, while their forces were Battleships, T3s, and an Onerios too. Looking at the numbers, yeah, we should have done better. But, those are the breaks so Props to VETO and Rote Kapelle for winning. Overall though, killboard activity is improving with more small gangs being available and FC coordination become a new topic of discussion.
The only other news appears to be the slow.. well, very slow migration of members into the area, and the alliance leadership is taking things rather slow as I suspect they have a lot going on. A massive influx of people and corps, plus a recent move into low-sec.. and into populated faction warfare territory. Personally, I wouldn’t mind the alliance doing an membership audit, as well as putting more effort into making a relatively safe pipeline to high-sec. The location is actually quite good if our alliance chooses to establish a serious minor trade hub as Egmar is centrally located between three popular low-sec routes and areas of activity.
Anyways, I’ll be checking PI options as well as doing some research into modules that I can trade for.. and perhaps make a nice profit to PVP with.
Dev Post – 13 March 2012 – Titan quick-fix.
An interesting post came up from CCP Greyscale:
Hi everyone,We’re not happy with the effectiveness of large groups of titans against subcapital ships, so we’re making some adjustments to titans and to XL turrets.This is a quick, surgical adjustment to solve a specific issue we have identified. It’s not a general titan balance pass, and we don’t consider titans “done” after this change. Titans will require significant further changes, and probably an overall adjustment in role, before they’re in a place where we’re really happy with them. This will require a reasonably significant amount of work, which we unfortunately don’t have the spare resources for right now. In a similar vein, we’re not making more extensive balance changes (or addressing this issue in a more technically complex way) because we’re allocating the minimum resources needed to resolve the specific issue (titans performing excessively well against subcaps in certain circumstances) satisfactorily. If you have any further questions about this paragraph, please ask away
For the immediate future and until such time as we have the resources available to do a comprehensive overhaul, we want to ensure that titans perform decently against other capitals, but do not represent a serious threat to subcaps. We want titans to have clear vulnerabilities, and as much as possible to have them acting in support of the main capital/subcap fleet rather than the other way round. We’ve already prevented doomsdays from being fired at subcaps, and this adjustment should continue that trend.
We have talked to the CSM about this, and we’re comfortable going forward with these changes in light of that discussion. I’m not going to put words in their mouths, though.
Specific changes being made:
XL turret tracking halved, siege module tracking penalty removed
This should generally make titan performance against small targets significantly worse, without seriously impacting their effectiveness against larger targets, or negatively impacting dreadnaughts in their common use-case (ie, in siege mode).
Titans reduced to 3 maximum locked targets, and base scan resolution reduced to 5
This should make trying to engage smaller targets very inefficient, due to long lock-times and an inability to queue many targets at once. This reinforces the titan’s MO as a slow-acting but hard-hitting platform (in line with the doomsday’s huge damage and 10 minute RoF). The scan res number is balanced around multiple Cormack’s sensor boosters, on the assumption that money is not a limiting factor for titan pilots, and therefore that people will shell out for officer SBs if that lets them continue do this kind of thing. Our understanding is that this isn’t standard practice right now, but we have to balance for expected behavior after the change, and for worst-case scenarios.
Expected release schedule for these changes
These changes should hit TQ some time in April. If there is a sizable release in April then expect them to turn up then; if not then we’ll announce deployment dates for these changes closer to the time.
Changes considered and discarded:
(I’m expecting at least three people to not read the word “discarded” and make angry posts about something in this section. C’est la vie.)
Titans can’t lock subcaps at all
Guaranteed effective solution, but we considered it too hacky and restrictive.
Adding a “minimum sig radius” attribute to turrets, below which damage would fall off regardless of tracking
Too big a change and more technical work than we actually needed to solve the problem.
Changing the lock time formula
As it is, the lock time formula doesn’t really scale in a nice way between battleships and capitals (the kink in the curve always happens around cruisers regardless of the scan res and sig radius), but again we decided we could solve the issue without resorting to this sort of technical work.
Changing XL missiles to match
While in a strictly regimented world we ought in principle to nerf XL missiles and remove the penalties from the siege module for them too, in practice they’re not actually a problem due to the way missile damage scales against small targets. Leaving them unchanged also serves to differentiate missiles further from turrets, which might make them more useful on capitals under certain circumstances.
Developing a Cohesive Fleet Doctrine – The Tiered System
It seems that in every corporation and every alliance, there is a single individual who has been given the task of configuring combat fleets. Invariably what happens is one of two things: a.) either the task is too complicated (usually because fleet configurations is just one of many tasks they have) or b.) They try to shoehorn an elite fleet style into their corp / alliance.. often without really taking a good assessment of what their alliance can actually do.. and pay for.
Good fleet configurations are not easy to come by. Just because Rooks and Kings can make a particular fleet set up work, doesn’t me your alliance can. Alliance discipline, number of skilled players, player isk sizes, and many other variables often mean the difference fielding a successful fleet configuration or just being cannon fodder. In addition, morale and the number of active players at any given time can really be a difficult problem to developing a solid foundation upon which to build a successful fleet doctrine.
So, how does one do that? Well, first it is necessary to ask yourself some very serious, often painful, questions. These questions also have to be paired with a realistic view of what you plan on doing. Thus, we can best align both of these within a Tiered system format:
TIER ONE – Armor or Shields
This may seem like a silly thing to start with, but it is the lowest common denominator for all your pilots. It is here that you start deciding how your fleet should think, feel, and operate. Both have their strengths and both have their weaknesses, which are crucial to your fleet composition’s success. Here are some questions you need to ask at this tier:
- What ships have the majority of our people trained for? Are they Caldari? Are they racial ships that typically use armor?
- What is the percentage of shield versus armor players in our organization as a whole? how about amoung our most active players?
- Does our environment support armor or shield tanking more than the other? Are Meta 4 tanking modules easy to get for armor.. or for shields?
Armor fleets have an advantage usually in resistances and better fitting requirements, whereas they sacrifice speed and agility. Shield fleets have the advantage to both speed and agility, and can recharge their damage too.. but that is at the cost of being a much easier target to hit. Personally, unless you have a 70/30 or greater percentage that can fly armor ships, going with Shield configurations would be your best option. Both Gallente and Amarr have ships, particular battlecruisers, that have effective shield tanking configurations. This may not make some of your guys happy, but having a cohesive tanking doctrine will make it much easier to develop tactics and as well as escape solutions when things fall down. It also makes it easier for new FCs to step up, and take responsibility because everything has already been pre-defined and the new FC won’t need to spend as much time trying to get a certain balance.
TIER TWO – What can you afford to lose?
If you are serious about developing a good PVP fleet doctrine, the first step needs to be understanding what your members can lose, reasonably, each week. I would say the very minimum that you need to achieve is one battlecruiser loss per person, per week. If most of your players cannot take a loss like that, then you need to take a look at how your members are funding themselves because that loss can be made up in one level 4 mission. This Tier also forces you to understand how many are casual players and how many are more hardcore, and of those, how many of these you can regularly rely on and when. The questions you should be asking:
- How many active veteran players do I have? How does that compare to newer players?
- Do our members make isk through corp operations, or do they make isk independantly?
- How heavy is our taxation?
- Are we willing to get rid of newer members to build a more specialized fleet?
Another important thing to think about is that you don’t want to start off with fleets that are expensive. It is true that a Tech 2 HAC fleet can be brutal to fight against, and that is a good end goal, but wiping a fleet of Tech 2 HACs can really put a damper on morale, particularly if those pilots weren’t confident in the FC, the tactics, or their ships capabilities. Starting off with battlecruisers is a pretty good idea because both Tier 2 and Tier 3 battlecruisers are pretty inexpensive to buy and outfit, plus they punch above their class. They tend to be reasonably fast, can hold out for a fair bit in a fight, and allow you considerable versatility for your members. If, for example, you plan to have a “shield-only” fleet, The Gallente Brutix, Myrmadon, and Talos, along with the Amarr Harbinger and Oracle, have effective shield tank configurations that you can use.
TIER THREE - How do you plan to expand?
While battlecruiser fleets are a good starting point, the more skilled your fleet members get, the more options you can look into. However, having your members mindlessly explore different ships can leave you having to stay with battlecruiser fleets and really minimizing any new potential, and this really will start to drain on your more skilled members. This is about the time when you have to think about how long your corp is going to be around, and where you as an organization are going to be six months, a year or more, down the road. So, the questions you need to ask yourself are:
- What fleets can we reasonably achieve now? In six months? In a year?
- What are the goals of the corporation? What are the driving forces behind those goals?
- Are we going to stay in the same location? Or are we planning on moving?
- Are we going to train to round our corporation out to be more self-sufficient? Or are we going to train to make us more appealing to a better alliance? Or do we train in conjunction with our allies, to cover each other’s deficiencies?
Much of this should already be in your alliance and corporate directors’ minds, but at this point, it needs to be clear down to each individual member. The newest members need to be able to recite the overall plans and goals of the corp/alliance without difficulty. In that way, you have already laid the foundation for future success for several goals, including the structure of the Fleet as well as who leads it, and how it is formed.
Tier Four – Capitals, when and how
The simple reality is that all alliances need to develop a plan for using, and more importantly, replacing Capital ships used in fleet operations. It also isn’t a bad idea for corporations to at least develop their own capital doctrine as well. Capitals are the new reality for low-sec and null-sec life. I remember a time when, if you had a capital fleet, you were someone not to be messed with. Now, supercapitals have become the new de facto standard for null-sec life.. and CCP still hasn’t dealt with the problem of their production and use. So, the questions you need to ask are:
- Do we really need capitals yet?
- Do we have a minimum skill requirement for capital ship pilots? How about solid fleet fits?
- Do we have a replacement plan or some sort of compensation for pilots who lose capital ships on our operations?
- Do we have a solid understanding of using capital ships?
- How disciplined/stupid are our capital ship owners?
- Do we have a working capital fleet plan?
Capital ships like Dreadnaughts and Carriers have recently increased in price, likely because of the decreased supply of minerals now that CCP is becoming more active in bot control. Because of this, they are much more difficult for individual members to replace, either because of normal combat operations or player stupidity that means there is one less capital ship that you can use when you actually are going to need it. But, if you don’t have a REASON to risk a capital ship, you aren’t likely to get a decent capital fleet in the first place. The Goals you make and stick to from Tier Three, will at least give you some idea as to how and when you need to use capitals, and more importantly, when not to.
06 March 2012 Devblog – Epic Rework in the making
I have about 78 million SP, and if you still play Eve Online, check out this devblog: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=9129
With my SP I can fly.. well, I can fly a ton of ships. This devblog clearly has me losing approximately.. 24 ships in total. 24 ships that will instantly no longer be available to me once this change takes effect (edit: see side note). Normally, this would upset me because it means I have to train for ships I use rarely, and it would add at least a couple months or so to regain my combat ability. Logically though.. CCP is right in making this change. It did always strike me as odd that so long as I could get a racial cruiser to III, that my level 5 battlecruiser skill made me instantly proficient in not only their tech 1 battlecruisers, but in their command ships as well. The same applied to interdictors, but to a much lesser extent.
Old Way:
New Way:
I do like the new ship progression in that if you want to train for a specific ship, the way is basically straight. Let’s say you are a new player and you’ve heard wonderful things about HACs. Now, you don’t have to train up a bunch of other ships to get there. Just train up the class, then the specific ship. Some of the other changes indicate that instead of pre-reqs being at level V, they’ll be at level IV. I think that is a good idea, though I am concerned that corps and alliances will change their advertisements to say “Cruiser V plus etc., etc.” instead of just stating that “Must fly Tech 2″. However, I think that for the most part, this will be a welcomed change all around because you can get newer people in better ships to produce better fleets, plus the newer people get to content faster, and the overall downgrade in fleets won’t be that great. Plus, vets will still maintain a strong edge against newcomers.
Still.. I think there is going to be quite a few unhappy vets.
That wasn’t the only interesting thing that was being said. Another interesting idea was brought about in the blog by this comment:
That is why we want to remove ship tiers altogether, then refocus our balancing philosophy to be based on role. That means finding common themes, or lines that fit ships with the same purpose, then adjusting slot layout, HP and fittings within each class to support this goal.
So, Tiers will soon be a thing of the past. Which, according to the blog, means that a good HALF of the ships need to be re-balanced. Now, as they mentioned they will instead use roles to determine how balanced these ships are. Likely, since the Tier system sort of had that in mind, there may not be as much difficulty in making the re-balance happen as one might suspect. Particularly if we look at what roles are being defined as:
- Combat ships: designed for direct fights, such vessels are usually found spear heading an attack force, or sniping from long range. Have great damage and defense, but poor mobility. A good representation would be 18th century “ships of the line“. EVE examples: Abaddon, Rokh, Hyperion, Maelstrom, Ferox, Maller.
- Attack vessels: Made for hit and run assault, or flanking opportunities. Have great damage and mobility, but average defense. Similar in role with cavalry. EVE examples: Armageddon, Megathron, Tempest, Oracle, Thorax, Hurricane, Dominix, Myrmidon.
- Bombardment ships: provide heavy fire support to pin the enemy down with constant barrage of ordnance. Have great damage and range, average defense and mobility. Can be compared to artillery. EVE examples: Raven, Drake, caracal.
- Support vessels: mainly focused on assisting a friendly force, or disrupting an enemy fleet. Have average damage, poor defense, average mobility. Electronic warfare is the prime illustration of this line. EVE examples: Scorpion, Blackbird, Celestis, Arbitrator.
- Industrial ships: provide the mining and logistic backbone to replace military losses and cover operating costs. Poor offense, average defense and poor mobility. An Oil platform is a fairly accurate depiction of industrial ships . EVE examples: Covetor, Orca, Rorqual, Iteron V.
Now, lets stop here for a second so that I can make a prediction.. it’s a safe one to be sure, but I think it will still be accurate. Here is how I think the Tier 1 to Roles conversion will play out:
Frigates:
- Combat Ships: Rifter, Punisher, Incursus, Merlin
- Attack Vessels: Slasher, Executioner, Atron, Condor
- Bombardment Ships: Breacher, Inquistor, Tristan, Kestrel
- Support Ships (2 each race): Vigil and Probe, Crucifer and Magnate, Maulus and Imicus, Griffin and Heron
- Industrial Ships: Burst, Tormentor, Navitas, Bantam
Cruisers:
- Combat Ships: Rupture, Maller, Vexor, Moa
- Attack Vessels: Stabber, Omen, Thorax
- Bombardment Ships: Caracal
- Support Ships: Bellicose, Arbitrator, Augoror, Celestis, Blackbird
- Industrial Ships: Scythe, Arbitrator, Osprey, Exequror
Battlecruisers:
- Combat Ships: Ferox
- Attack Vessels: Tornado, Oracle, Talos, Naga
- Bombardment Ships: Drake
- Support Ships: ?
- Industrial Ships: All ORE Mining Barges and Noctis
Battleships:
- Combat Ships: Maelstrom, Abaddon, Hyperion, Rokh, Apocolypse
- Attack Vessels: Tempest, Armageddon, Megathron, Dominix
- Bombardment Ships: Raven, Typhoon
- Supports Ships: Scorpion
- Industrial Ships: Orca
As you can see, initially the small class ships are balanced.. at least one that fits into each ship role. However, after that, things get a bit more.. dynamic or hazy, depending on your point of view. I think that CCP will have their hands full for two particular reasons:
- How are they going to change various ship balances without disrupting, or worse, generalizing all the races?
- How does the issue of “Active” versus “Passive” tanking get solved now?
The first problem is clearly going to be on the minds of many pilots. Are Caldari now going to be known as the “Bombardment” race? How about the Minmatar? The Amarr? Are the Gallente going to be regulated to being the “Support” skilled race? Will ECM be changed because it is so powerful in comparision that technically Caldari could be both the top Bombardment AND top Support race.. Even if the flavor of each race is kept, how is the balance going to work between four different races.. or will only a couple races have multiple ships for each class.. and if that happens, how will balance be achieved if only a couple values affect how well it does its intended role?
And then with all those other questions comes in a more subtle problem. The issue of active tanking, which are feature predominantely in Gallente and Minmatar hulls.. how can that be balanced over the proven benefits that passive tanking has in most combat situations? That I think will be a much harder question to solve.
Yet, despite these problems the overall concept that every hull serves a purpose is near and dear to my heart. I will be watching with much excitement.. and a bit of trepidation.
(Side Note: Apparently, even as I was in the process of writing this blog, some of these points came up and are in the process of being addressed. See comments here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=77673, I am disappointed that most just freaked out and their fingers went faster than their brain and eyes could go. But, on one positive note.. I am not the only one who noticed the problem that this could have with Active/Passive tanking: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=77673&p=37, Force Colonel’s comment)
Pletora of Interesting Ideas…
So, I was reading Seleene’s blog today on “Fighting for Industry” located here: http://seleenes-sandbox.blogspot.com/2012/02/fighting-for-industry.html, in which Seleene indicated the following:
When it comes to how I would like to see CCP use their resources in the near future, the top three things I would like to see happen are:
1.) Fix / Finish null sec sov
2.) Improve Factional Warfare and life in low-sec
3.) A full blown industrial expansion
This seemed oddly familiar to me.. as it was similar to my own viewpoint on how CCP should focus their own resources (for my own self promotion, click here: http://2ndanomalyfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/csm-7-occupy-everywhere-my-view-on-where-csm-7-and-ccp-should-focus/ )
Needless to say, since Seleene delved deeply into a particular secret interest of mine (i.e. industry), I decided to read through the entire article and all the comments. However, before I go on, I am not advocating any particular candidate. I like Mittens “Farm and Fields” mandate, I like several of Hans’ viewpoints, also the wardec ideas from Aleks are pretty intriguing as well. Still, I felt that this blog post was a bit different from the norm as it was the first time I had seen someone go indepth into what industry options they really wanted on the table. Also, of just as much interest, was the comments made by one of the commenters, Mara Rinn.
Seleene’s points that I was intrigued with:
- Give Industry a Full, Dedicated Expansion – “More importantly, I don’t want CCP touching #3 until they can literally put a full expansion’s worth of resources into it. It is not an easy task as everything in EVE springs from the way we mine, build and trade. I don’t want them rushing it.” – To be fair, Seleene puts this as a third priority, like I did. However, if we are going to go for a full-on expansion, then it should be at least priority No. 2.. and it may even be worthy of supplanting fixing null-sec because a truly major change like this will re-arrange null-sec on its own.
- Resource changes- As stated by Seleene, these are ideas put forth from others for years. Some sound great to me, others not so much.
- New, dead regions of space waiting to be built-up / exploited – (Do we really need more space?)
- Region-specific resources – (Possibly not a bad idea.. especially if there were some variables introduced that made sure that one ore wasn’t the “uber” trit ore, etc.)
- Dynamic resource allocation – (I’ll have to review this, because I’m not sure what exactly he is intending)
- Improved mining / Comet mining / planetary ring mining, etc… as a caveat to this, I’d like to see mining become something that requires player interaction to some extent so bots are taken out of the equation as much as possible. - (Yeah, I particularly like the idea of going to a completely non-static mining format, where resource location and amounts are changing on a daily basis and that those locations must be searched for, not just automatically bookmarked).
- New probing / scanning mechanics – (The new probing dynamics aren’t bad.. but they do need a tweak.. and perhaps it should be done in conjuction with changes in cloaking)
- Finite resources of rare resources (moon goo) – (I do like this idea. Very much so. However, something like this would, in my mind, require a massive change to how POS’es operate and are deployed).
- Massive scale construction (stargates, etc…) – (I have to admit.. not sure why this important. We still haven’t gotten Titans or Supercarriers fully figured out yet. Shoot there are too many stations in the Eve Universe as it is).
- Changes to Mining Specifically- Here are Seleene’s thoughts specifically on mining, some of which I am hoping he’ll clarify:
- I’d like to see bigger rocks. – (I could see this as this would allow for more high-sec players to mine closer to hubs).
- I’d like to see rocks with variable mineral content. – (Eh, maybe. I don’t see how this makes Eve better.. though it would make it harder for bots to be profitable)
- I’d like to see rocks with multiple layers / densities. (zomg, what if there is Kernite, Omber and morphite in the center?!”) – (I see he likes jawbreakers..)
- I’d like to see finite resources of things like moon goo have a % chance to be in a rock. – (This is a good idea, but not sure how it would play with finite moon goo without it being detrimental overall).
- I’d like to see skills affect the amounts / types of minerals you could extract from a rock. – (Yeah, I could see the benefits of this in that instead of mining every mineral, you have the option of getting a better percentage of a certain one).
- I’d like to see planetary ring mining. – (So long as its not static, I’ll be in favor).
- I’d like to see comet mining. - (See above)
- I’d like to mine / hollow out a giant asteroid and make a home there to live out of. – (Eh.)
- I’d like to see a variance in the ‘purity’ of minerals that are mined where some veldspar is worth more. – (This is either focusing industry more towards the old SWG, which I favor, or this makes something already in the game more complicated).
- I’d like to see that same Veldspar refined into Tritanium that gives a ship 10% more hit points due to it’s pure qualities… – (So, more towards the old SWG model.. that would be good.. but only if the builder can put their name on it).
- … IF you had the proper skills to use the proper blueprint that allowed you to take advantage of the improved alloys. – (I like this idea too. However, I wonder what that could mean for ship balance.)
Thoughts by Mara Rinn:
Now, as I said, it wasn’t just Seleene’s thoughts that were drawing my attention to this particular blog. It was also Mara Rinn’s ideas, which I also found pretty neat overall, though I didn’t agree with them completely(yes, I am that old).
- Logistics is too easy – “Logistics is too easy in all areas of the game. Everyone goes to Jita because everyone can go to Jita. Even people on the opposite side of the galaxy go to Jita: they just haul stuff in hisec using a freighter alt, then jump it out in a JF or carrier. Why do system star gates let through infinite freighters per hour? They aren’t smaller than region gates due to distances involved. What if there was an order of magnitude difference in throughput possible between different sized gates? What if you could anchor a SBU-type item on grid to enhance or degrade the throughput of that gate (from either side)?” – (Overall, I do understand this complaint, and I tend to think it is too easy to get JF full of stuff out into null-sec.. but I’m not so sure if the problem stems from the difficulty in setting up manufacturing in null-sec, as well as establishing supply trains inside your own community).
- Change High-sec Stati0ns – “What if NPC station refineries in hisec sucked? What if mining corporations had better refineries than navies (why does Caldari Navy have better quality refineries than Deep Core Mining)? What if POS refineries worked faster and took character skills and implants into account? Push button, receive refined product. What if NPC station refineries (and outpost refineries) had time delays too? Start the job now, come back in X minutes based on how much stuff you pushed into the hopper. What if all refineries had limited throughput? Thus your attempt to refine a few hundred units of Veldspar might take a day in Jita, but be almost instant in that Minmatar Mining Corporation facility in Aldilur.” – (If the changes mentioned here to NPC stations also were applied to high-sec POSes, then this development alone would probably fix the issue of logistics. There are a lot of good points here in this small paragraph that the CSM and CCP should definately consider).
- PI Changes – “What if PI schematics worked just the same as blueprints? This would open the door for ME/PE and the associated increase in embodied value, and the risk of losing that value when some Dust Bunny blows up your factory. There is also the scope for LP stores to sell limited run schematics for things like (for example) Serpentis Dress Skirt.” – (I like the thinking here).
- META for Everyone – “What if players could use invention to produce the meta 1-4 BPCs based on NPC-dropped data cores and special “tags” – kinda like sleeper industry. This would shut off a source of minerals competing with mining. What if drones dropped sleeper-like products that could be used to manufacture or invent drone-related goodies like modules, implants and rigs that impact drone DPS, tracking, range, velocity, control distance, etc? Again, addressing the drone-based mineral source by replacing it with an alternative industry stream.” – (I like it, but I don’t see how this will work considering how only Meta 4 items are the only items that keep some of the relevance in game).
- Other thoughts- “As for comet/planetary ring/special environment mining: these are places that grav sites could be spawned. Thus an “average Kernite deposit” might appear in a planetary ring, while a “technetium rich ice structure” might appear at a comet site. The presence of the comet would imply valuable stuff, so there would certainly be competition.”"An industry expansion might also include specialist non-combat ships and deployables such as “deadspace projectors” which act similarly to a warp bubble: they drop ships out of warp at extreme range, but don’t disrupt warp, and have a much larger radius of effect. Or a StarCraft “Arbiter” style ship which can reduce the sig radius of all objects on the grid (thus increasing the difficulty that other players will have in probing that site down). Current warfare links will reduce sig radius of ships in fleet (evasive manoeuvres), but not all objects on grid (i.e.: the site you probed down): Mining Foreman Link – Deadspace Enhancement?” – (The first paragraph seem to work in conjuction with some of Seleene’s idea mentioned earlier, and I like them because they make mining about as non-static as you can get without really changing any of the current game mechanics. I’m not such a big fan of the Bubble-lite or the Sig reducing Arbiter as I think cloaked ships are more of a problem than just being scanned down).
Well, these were some interesting ideas that I felt should be brought up and thought about for your upcoming voting pleasure. Right now the focus does seem to be on Low-sec and that is a good thing, but industry and mining do need to have their day in the sun too.
Let Me See Ship Skins as Veteran Rewards
There are a lot of things Eve players want.
But there are some things that, ya know, we are rather surprised that Eve doesn’t have. Today though, I want to talk about Ship Skins and Ship logos.
I am personally surprised that customizable ship skins haven’t made their way into Eve yet. In fact, it kinda seems rather silly that a game totally about making your own decisions.. doesn’t allow you any choice in ship colors. The funny thing is, the more I ponder this.. the more I think that this is a serious issue. It may not be as serious as overabundance of supercapitals in 0.0 fleets, but it is something that individually we desire because we all have that individual spark.
Eve really doesn’t have a way of showing that and it is a downer to see that your particular ship looks like everyone else’s particular ship. This should not be! Look at how beautiful the art department rendered the universe we fly in! Surely, it really isn’t that hard to have a simple palette of color to which we can beautify our ship?
Ah, but how about we do one better? How about we tie those options to longevity and exploration of the game? Perhaps this is a way we could see this:
All ships will have four color attributes:
- Main Color (256 colors)
- Secondary Color (256 colors)
- Window Color (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow)
- Logo (Corporate or Alliance)
For New Players inside their trial period, these choices aren’t available. Once you reach a certain number of skillpoints, say for example, 3 million skillpoints (or approximately three months worth) the palette opens up for you to design your own personal color scheme, but you can only keep one. And once you select it, you cannot change it unless you pay a very high isk price (100 to 200 mil isk). If you are in a NPC corporation, the Logo automatically defaults to that of the NPC Corp that you are in. After a year, and every year thereafter, you get to have another color scheme. Each year, CCP will present a single pattern that can be applied to any ship.. but it will only be available as a redeemable gift to active accounts from CCP.. never to be repeated. The gift will be given only to those who had been active the entire year prior.
Corporations and Alliances will have an additional two choices available to them as well, however, those designs are set up on a permissions basis, and may be restricted to certain members. If you are part of an Alliance or a player Corporation, you will have the option of choosing either the Corporate logo or the Alliance logo.
- You Should Be Able to Choose already…
Just think of how much more individual it will be…
- Any Ship… it is prophetic.
Ask yourself: “Would the Red Baron really have been so individually feared if no one knew the color of his plane, or the insignia he flew under?” Maybe it’s time for us to be able to express at least some individuality to the outside world.. especially if we aren’t in the mood to talk.
I Endorse for CSM the Following.. and other news
ENDORSING.. NOBODY!
..
Nope, I ain’t endorsing anyone. I’m not saying that my endorsement would be worth more than a hill of beans, as it most likely isn’t. I am saying, however, that I find endorsing any particular candidate is fraught with some very difficult problems.. and to be honest, it is a no-win scenario. I fall back on some life lessons I’ve learned in that respect:
- I have seen good plans be formed and end up successful because of solid team.
- I have also seen good plans die in a raging fire because of one bad member, and in particular, inept management.
- I have seen bad plans laughed at, and the one who proposed it properly ostracised.
- I have also seen bad plans turn successful because of a very smart leader.
- I have seen plans that I thought were horrible become exactly as bad as I thought they would be.
- I have also seen plans that I thought were horrible, turn out to be the correct solution.
- I have seen plans that I thought were great become staples of a successful organization
- I have also seen plans that I thought were great, turn out to be utter fail.
And finally..
- There are always unintended consequences.
In other words, I have seen too much in my life to assume that I know all the angles. Therefore, while I may give commentary and opinion about what I think about a particular path, or a particular result or viewpoint, it isn’t my place to tell you who is going to be successful.
New, New, NEW!!
First, let’s start this off with the blog regarding New Player Experience.. i.e., Rookie Ships: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3435. This blog follows on the heels of another NPE blog: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3421, indicating that CCP’s focus will be making a game that is more fun at the beginning, while not making it any easier or any simplier, though I suspect we will see changes against things that are needlessly complicated.
Anyways, back to the Rookie Ships:
The Ibis got a major overhaul, which indicates that future Caldari redesigns will mean more symmetric designs. However, I can say this is a win as the previous Ibis was god-awful ugly.
There is no doubt that this ship is a vast, VAST improvement over the old Ibis which.. well, looked like a piece of space trash. This is radicially, and wonderfully different.
The next on the line up is the Minmatar Reaper. I personally am liking the recent changes done to the Minmatar line that make them less fragile looking. Ships like the Reaper, the old Scythe, the Tempest, the Bellicose, and a few others look too fragile to be space combat ships (I mean, who doesn’t think about how easy it would be to shoot off the command section of the Tempest..). The new Reaper looks more compact and concise, while still looking like they had to bolt the ship together from spare parts.
The third on the list didn’t get much of a makeover, but that is perfectly fine as it did get its lines a little nicer. The Gallente Velator stopped looking like a sickly and limp shuttle into something a little more impressive.
The ship looks good overall, and it is interesting to see how they indicate the missile system hardpoint, maybe we might see missile systems like we see turrets soon?
The final ship listed on the blog was the Impairor, from the Amarr Empire. To be honest, I still don’t know what they changed. Maybe someone can point it out? Maybe the engines are a little different?
But, I think the most important thing is the video CCP sent out:
Did you see them? Ship skins! Wootz! Okay, now that could be a cool thing to do. Have like the option to have a single personal ship skin, then maybe a corporate one, and even an single alliance one as well.
Oh, that an get corporate logos on there. That is way more important than alliance logos in my opinion.
And finally.. Tattoos.
So, here is the latest and greatest devblog: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3430, which kind of struck me as odd because statements like this:
The purpose of all this prototyping is to make sure we provide a strong vision for avatar gameplay, have a good demonstrable idea of why it is engaging and better understand the technology we will need to create in order to make it a reality.
And:
we’re not going to wait until it’s all perfect and the interior of every ship, station, structure and city in the entire EVE Universe has been modeled, but rather when we have a feature that is its own functional ecosystem of gameplay then hooks into the greater ecosystem of EVE as a whole, and it provides good replayability.
And:
It means you won’t get it as early, but what you will get will be more ready. But it won’t be “done” in the sense that we’re done with it, because with any online game, it’s never really done. When you first ship it, that’s when you begin, and then follows the conversation with you, the players, on how we can improve and iterate on it.
Seem almost like pre-Crucible thinking. To me this says, ” We’re going to work on something, test it, make it completely reliable.. then release it to the playerbase for them to tell us if it will work or not.” The fact that they are playing with Tattoos.. right now.. is probably the biggest indicator that perhaps they aren’t focusing where they need to be. Tattoos are only great if others can see them. And right now, there is no way for others to see them. Ahem, hint, hint..
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