One Man And His Spaceship

One Man and His Spaceship - now with added 28mm

2009-12-30T22:00:00.002Z

That title might be a bit bewildering for anyone who has never played with table top miniatures before, but basically 28mm is the size for the Games Workshop brand of plastic/pewter miniatures that I used to use years and years ago, before I came to Eve.

Years and years have passed, and I've been asked to get involved with it all again by a friend... so of course, I've started a new blog to track what I'm doing in there as well - technology eh, ain't it great.

You can go see more at:

One Man and His Paintbrush

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth

2009-10-19T06:38:00.002+01:00

I've just been reminded by a corpmate of mine that I haven't posted here for ages. Just to let everyone know - I havent dissappeared, just on another of my frequent Haituses (if thats spelled correctly) from Eve whilst i'm playing Aion.

Unfortunately I started craving some first person fantasy action a while back, and I vowed to never go back to WoW ever again, so with Champions Online and Aion on the cards, I started playing both of whem whilst planning to get on with a large skill training plan in Eve which I had been putting off and putting off because I couldn't stand seeing 25+ days skills train whilst I actively play the game.

I have a strong desire to see progress being made when i'm actively playing my characters, which is why I often get a lot of gratification in new games for a few weeks, i'm sure that with Aion, when I get the character to maximum level, the desire to play will wane for a bit, and Eve will once again beckon. With that I'll also have a few things I had been planning:

1) Karox will be able to make all tech 3 ships, and should be pretty good at inventing tech 2 ships for all races.

2) Lomara should be able to pilot all tech 2/3 frigates and cruisers, as well as field tech 2 guns for all of them as well.

The larger plan is to move Lomara on to battleships of course, and then possibly to carriers or other capital ships, but once I have access to all the tech 2/3 ships it'll give me 'try new toys' craving a bit of a boost in Eve.

Blog Banter 11 - The many heads of the Hydra

2009-08-31T10:41:00.003+01:00

It's time for the blog banter again... now I know I didn't take part in last months - to be honest, it was a bit too deep and philosophical for me, plus I had a really bad time with a possible redundancy situation at work (which has now been resolved and I'm keeping my job for the forseeable future) so my mind wasn't really on the game at the time. Should be back to strength for this one though.

This month's banter comes to us from Joe Brusati a long time reader of CrazyKinux's Musing, who asks the following: CCP states that T3 Strategic Cruisers are just the start for the T3 line-up. In future Eve expansions what would you like to see as the next T3 ship type. Please be specific on details about what role this ship would play, cost of manufacturing, and the different modules that would be available for it, and of course you must give your T3 ship a name!

So I guess tech 3 cruisers are a bit of a speciality of mine at the moment, what with my 'still to finish' series on them and the tech 3 building article in the recent EON magazine.

I was racking my brain thinking of something that was new and unique in the universe of eve, and thought 'why has there never been any passenger ships available to transport a few players' ?

Whilst I dont think that a passenger ship would be worthy of the expense and hassle of making a tech 3 ship, my mind wandered back to the cartoons of the 80's where more often than not, the superhero group that the show revolved around had a ship that was made of many constituent parts, which all joined together to make a larger, more powerful ship. This is the basis of my proposal - the Hydra (and just for the record, I dont really mean Power Rangers, I'm thinking about the big transformers that were made of lots of smaller transformers, or possibly even Voltron... but I guess Power Rangers count as well)

As everyone with a knowledge of mystical creatures knows, the Hydra is a beast with 5 heads... and thats the basis of my design.

4 pilots control an individual frigate sized ship, which are constructed as a completely independant ship, but without any 'subsystems' as such, each ship would be a subsystem. The price for each of these ships would be around about the price of a current tech 3 subsystem (40-50 million ideally) and be equal in power to an assault ship. A fifth pilot would control a cruiser sized ship, which was about equivalent to a HAC type assault ship individually, and be around about the same price (100-150 million or so) which would also act as the central host ship.

Each of the pilots could then fly within 2km of the host (or be together in station) to form a larger ship, which is about the equivalent in ability to a command ship.

Now for the complicated bit - how to determine the power of the ship. Obviously you couldn't use the individual weapon systems of the component ships, as you would end up with lots of frigate sized guns. In my view, the host ship (and therefore cruiser sized weapons) should determine what the fittings are on the resultant ship - the individual smaller ships which connect to it will provide bonuses based on the joint skill levels of all pilots involved. The host ship needs an interfacing skill which will allow up to 4 of the smaller ships to connect (level 1 skill to use your own ship, each level after that to add one additional ship) and each of the smaller ships can contribute towards a bonus towards engineering, propulsion, defence and offence in a smilar way to the current subsystem skills.

The real benefit of this ship over a single man tech 3 ship would be that you could potentially have up to 20 levels of skill bonuses (up to level 5 in each category by each subcomponent ship pilot) to provide a greater bonus than what is offered at the moment, making a much more deadly ship, with the obvious risk involved in that one person controls the risk for 5 pilots.

Much like the subsystem choices with the current tech 3 ships, each of the frigate type ships would contribute different bonuses, but it would need a bit of testing to make sure that 4 pilots contributing towards a 'armour hitpoint' boost wouldn't make it have rediculous amounts of armour, much as we have seen with tech 3 ships, you can have upwards of 400,000 hitpoints with the correct modules and implants, you wouldn't want a battlecruiser sized ship with the same defences as a titan for instance!

I'm still undecided if the individual pilots could control invididual weapons/systems of the host ship, or if this would be too unwieldy to organise, and if the 4 other pilots would play no real part in the running of the larger 'combined' ship other than being additional eyes for the host to keep him informed of whats happening around him/her.

So there you have it... an idea born from too many years watching cartoons in my youth... I'm really interested in seeing what others have dreamt up.

List of Participants:

A Mule in EvE - ‘Thor’ the Minmatar T3 ~ Banter #11
One Man and His Spaceship - Blog Banter 11 - The many heads of the Hydra
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah - Strategic Capitals
Achernar - Strategic Battlecruisers: the Spiders
Journey to New Eden - Eve Blog Banter #11: Introducing the T3 Strategic Mining Barge
Kyle Langdon's Journey in EVE - Strategic.... EVE Blog Banter #11
The Captain's Log - Blog Banter 11: Increasing our knowledge of the universe
Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings - Eve Blog Banter #11 - a ship called Starfury
Yarrbear Tales - Blog Banter 11: T3 Destroyers
Break Vol - Blog Banter #11
Harbinger Zero - EVE Blog Banter #11: T3 Landing Craft
Diairy of a Pod Pilot - Blog banter #11: Strategic frigates
Mike Azariah - Blog Banter #11

BPO seeding locations

2009-08-21T17:41:00.001+01:00

Does anyone know how you go about finding the NPC stations for a particular BPO these days?

I used to just look on Chruker's data dump site, but I cant find anything on there, and there doesnt seem to be any info on the Eve item database linked to the main forum either, so I'm presuming they took that info off the data dump.

Obviously im looking for the rig blueprints, but I was looking up the 'old' rig blueprints (i.e. prior to them getting size specific) since none of the sites have the latest information on them.

Tech 3 Cruiser - Proteus

2009-08-20T23:27:00.003+01:00

Its that time again... time for another infamous PDF upload.

This time, we concentrate on the Proteus, one on hand, the most devastating medium blasterboat available, and on the other, the poorest cruiser sized droneboat ever designed.

You can see the guide in all of its glory in the link below:

Proteus Guide

Expanding my horizons a bit

2009-08-16T23:13:00.002+01:00

In a break from Eve related news (kind of) I've just upgraded my computer - no longer am I running on the couple-of-year old HP laptop which has satisfied my Eve craving for all this time, I've now reverted back to having a desktop. An Acer Aspire Predator 7200 gaming rig (yeah boo, hiss should have made my own up from bits, but I was feeling lazy and it was on a sale)

Because of the added computing power I've upgraded to though, I've got a few more up and coming games that I want to give a go:

Aion - I've signed up for this, was hoping to get in on this weekends closed beta event, but thanks to the terrible download speed I get from my ISP (Sky) during the day, theres no way that the client would be downloaded in time - its currently sitting at 85% downloaded after the better part of 2 solid days on the go... so much for the '5 hours' it first estimated when I was getting 400kb/sec first thing on Saturday morning.

So it seems that I'll be in Aion when open beta comes around (pretty sure thats due soon after the closed beta events finish) on or before September.

I've also gotten signed up for Champions Online - though again, just a preorder at the moment, but that is going to come in DVD format to install rather than try and download it after the experience of Aion. Problem is that theres a great offer for Champions online that lets you get a life long subscription for about a 1 year cost... but in order to get it, you need to have taken this option before the 1st September when the game goes live.

With the pre-orders supposedly getting a 'head start' entry on the 28th of August, it does give a day or two to test the game before making the decision to drop the better part of £140 on a lifetime subscription, but knowing the uselessness of the british postal service, I'll probably not get the game until after the 1st of September and by then it'll be too late. Dunno if I should take the gamble and go for it - everyone whos played in the Beta who I know has said it's a fun game and definately should keep anyone entertained for at least a year, so the lifetime subscription should pay for itself.

I've also been getting hold of a slightly older game in the form of Dawn of War II (warhammer 40k spinoff computer game) which should satisfy my strategy cravings for a little while. The beauty of that supposedly is that its got a good online system/community which is what I always look for in games these days (I never really have much interest in offline 1-player games anymore, I get bored without some human contact after years of MMOs) so I'll see where that takes me after I learn how the game works a bit more.

Add to that I'm also discovering the joys of Quake Live (oddly enough even though its just a browser based version of Quake, my HP laptop really struggled with the framerate on it, and its taken getting the new PC to really make it shine) to give me a bit of an FPS fix means I'm covered for the forseeable future with pretty much all genres of games I've got an interest in.

Now I just need a few long skills I've got planned in Eve to finish as well so I can try something new I've had queued up for a while, and it seems that over the next few months I'll be a very busy bunny indeed.

I suppose the question for anyone out there in blog reader land is whos planning on joining me in any of these games? I'm looking for Europeans preferably so im not sitting there like the lonely old soul in the corner of a new party trying to find someone to chat to so I can make friends... I always prefer to drag my own company along and get everyone traipsing to be friends with me - I always find its easier to get groups when you have 2-3 people as the backbone of any group trying to find 1-2 more, rather than running around trying to find groups of random pickups.

Legion Guide - At last

2009-08-10T18:54:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the delay between posts, between getting sent away and following up on the few days of missed work, everythings been a bit hectic over here.

Without further ado, heres the Tech 3 Legion guide:

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Karox/Understanding_The_Tech_3_Cruisers_-_Legion.pdf

Up next, quite possibly my favourite of the ships, the Gallente Proteus - a ship that with the correct setup has the punch of a Diemos, with the survivability of a Phobos... im sure theres a Life on Mars reference in there somewhere.

Quick updates

2009-08-02T12:38:00.004+01:00

Firstly... to do with Eve... I've been on the test centre to check out the material requirements for the new rigs, and I must say, they look very nice... should be a nice little production sideline in the near future, since my alt character can make the small ones without any waste reductions at the moment (I only got the alt to PE4)

Seondly... to do with the blog - Sorry I've not updated the guides on the Tech 3 cruisers yet, I've been meaning to do the Legion for a few days now (im about 2/3 through it), but, as you'll see with point 3, its been a bit difficult

Thirdly (yeah you can tell I was getting to this from my last point above)... I've just been given a new contract to work on at work, which sort of dropped in my lap at very short notice (last Thursday) so I've been working hard to get that set up, which means I didnt have much chance to work on my Legion guide. On the plus side, it means I'll be travelling to Dubai for a meeting next week, so I won't have much chance to do anything until the end of next week at the earliest.

So anyway... goodbye rainy Britain, hello sunny Dubai for a few days at least. Should hopefully go a long way to recharging the flagging batteries.

Start of a new mini project

2009-07-26T13:10:00.002+01:00

I'm going to do a small series of mini-guides aimed at getting the most out of the 4 strategic cruisers that are curretly available on the market.

Now I'll be the first to say that this is pretty much all theorycrafting, as I've had very limited experience with these 'in the field' so if theres any really obvious bits I've missed, feel free to leave a comment and ill see about incorporating it in a revised version of each of the guides.

Now, disclaimer aside... heres the first of the guides, aimed at the Caldari Tengu.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Karox/Understanding_Tech_3_Cruisers_-_Tengu.pdf

Corp Infiltration Double Cross

2009-07-16T21:01:00.002+01:00

We've been wardecced again... nothing major, it happens every few weeks it seems.

However, this one is quite different in that they secluded a spy within our ranks a few weeks prior to the war going active...

We took on a new member who hung around with us for a few days, and after a few sessions where they joined us on level 4 missions, the guy seemed quite chatty and was quite well trained (able to solo level 4 missions at least) so we thought we would give him a go.

Anyway... after we were wardecced, we begun to suspect that there could be 'eyes in the camp' so to speak after the enemy seemed to anticipate our move - so we set a trap.

Publically, we set up a fleet that everything was known, and waited for the enemy to travel to us, in a system we dont usually form up in - sure enough they arrived in relatively short notice (now admittedly, I know that it was possible to just use a locator agent to search us out, but it was way too quick) and we sprung the trap - the secret, second fleet we had jumped in from the system over and we pincered the enemy.

Ultimately there werent many deaths, the enemy scattered, but now that they have lost their mole, the enemy have been very disorganised and its been much easier to trap them in ones and twos and pick them off.

In fact, so much so, they had resorted to posting fake killmails on our killboard (which ultimately, it was something we forgot the spy had access to still, but a quick password change has altered that)

We're looking to recruit

2009-07-10T07:09:00.002+01:00

Just a quick word out to all those in pilot-land.

Between the members of my corp, and the alliance that we are in the process of getting set up, we are looking to expand, to get a decent amount of members flying under our banner.

Eventually as the alliance, we are hoping to get a foothold in 0.0 space once we have the logistics and supply chain sorted out, but at the moment, we are quite happy with a mix of Highsec (industry/missioning) and Lowsec (anti-pirate) operations under our belt.

What we are looking for primarily (corps or individuals):

PVP focused players - we have a decent industrial backbone now in order to cheaply replace ship losses, and once we have enough cash in the pot from our in house industrial manufacturing processes, provide replacement ships lost in the line of duty. Whilst a lot of our members have decent experience of PVP, we have identified that we need more who are willing to get into the thick of the action.

If you are fine with standard NRDS rules, which are focused strictly in antipirate operations, we'd be happy to chat with you or your corp.

Experienced battle commanders would be of a great benefit.

Industrialists - We have a cash generating programme in place to fund alliance activities. We ask that industrialist players with suitable skills donate 1-2 of their manufacturing slots every now and again to build out projects that are alliance funded, which the alliance will then sell on to retain the profits for future alliance activities.

All timezones - We have members active in all timezones (as far as I know... Ive not been awake 24 hours to see), I dont think that should be any limitation to anyone who wants to join.

I'll try and flesh this out a little more a little later, but if you are interested, either drop me a line on karoxlominax@googlemail.dom, send me an eve mail in game, or reply below, and we can see about arranging time for a chat to see what we can do to help each other out.

EON 16 Errata

2009-07-09T20:31:00.005+01:00

Thankfully, its CCP's fault this time...

No doubt you may all be aware, but a few days before EON 16 was shipped out of the door, CCP released a patch which adjusted several factors to do with Tech 3 manufacturing.

It seems that its possible to get more than 3 runs now on a Tech 3 blueprint - i'm still trying to find out exactly what the effects are from the patch, but I've seen a few 10 run subsystem blueprints, so im not sure if thats the new default (I've only seen 10 run or 3 runs on the contracts at the moment, I'd appreciate some confirmation from anyone who may have done some reverse engineering since the patch)

Update: Seems that the new blueprint rates are 20 run for intact relic-run reverse engineering jobs, 10 runs for Malfunctioning relic run RE jobs, and 3 run for Wrecked relic run RE jobs - at least for subsystems anyway... still waiting to find out the breakdown of figures for the ship hulls. Theres still some issues with it as per Letrane's comments below though.

Secondly, the material requirements for the 'Fulleroferocene Power Conduits' has changed - the 4 units of Carbon-86 Epoxy Resin have been removed from the blueprint, and instead 10 units of 'Scandium Metallofullerene' have been added in its place.

You never know... maybe next time I put an article in EON, hopefully CCP wont change things just prior to it coming off the presses.

Here Riggy Riggy...

2009-07-06T23:11:00.002+01:00

No doubt everyones been up to date with the buzz from the recent Dev Blog on prospective changes for Apocrypha 1.5, specifically of which, the new plans for multi-sized rigs (which by the way, seems to have been in discussion for months, since it seemed to go very quiet after it was planned for when Quantum Rise hit and it wasn't included then)

If you havent seen the info, feel free to point your noses at the Dev Blog in question.

Now the one thing that springs to mind for me is trying to figure out which rigs will become useless in the future. I mean take gravity capacitor rigs for instance. They're fit to a whole lot of covops and recon ships to assist with probing, but as the current ones would class as the 'large' version, and theres no battleship sized scanner craft, that basically makes every gravity capacitor blueprint out there all but obsolete, as the large sized rig wont have any sales (at least unless theres something I've missed)

Now as well as that, I'm needing to find out for certain if the rigs can be refined/reprocessed back to salvage... its something that I've never tried. If they can, it shouldnt be a problem, but if they can't, expect the current gravity capacitor rigs to freefall in price close to patch day.

On top of that, the dev blog goes into thing such as looking at the downsides to rigs, and possibly putting negatives to some rigs (im presuming capacitor based ones here) or revaluating the current downsides to see if they're fair and balanced. Heres hoping that there may also be a bit of a revamp of the bonuses that some rigs give, as in some cases, the tech 2 rigs are worse than the tech 1 versions due to the calibration costs that apply to them.

Still, plenty to think about and plan... and hopefully we should have apocrypha 1.5 before the end of August (heres to keeping my fingers crossed)

Anticipation is the killer

2009-07-01T09:03:00.004+01:00

Maybe this post is going to be some psychoanalysts dream, but is there anyone else out there who finds that once a goal is achieved in a game such as an MMO for instance, then that game loses a lot of its thrill ?

A good example is hitting the 8.0 standings to use jump clones with a corp - you spend weeks and weeks with a goal, focused on getting it, and once you do finally reach it, you get this gigantic anticlimactic 'meh' feeling as if theres nothing decent to do with your time now, and struggle to adjust to the 'nothing new to do' mentality.

I find it happens a lot with single player games, you go through to get the best gun, or whatever, and then all enthusiasm for a game drops off the map for me... I've got dozens of games out there that I just stopped playing, in fact I've only actually successfully completed about 5-10 games in my entire life from a catalogue of hundreds.

I know this sounds a bit strange with the whole 'goal related achievements mentality' thing but I usually find that theres something new came along that I want to try after I hit the 'wall' in one game and monotony has set in, so I very rarely see the end of it.

I suppose thats why I quite like MMOs too - theres no real goal to it other than constant improvement, so even if I do get a short term feeling of depression that I've achieved a goal, theres always other players/friends to spur me on and give me other suggestions for things to turn my hand to. In conjunction to there being no real 'end' of the game until the servers are switched off, its a good excuse to pop in and out as the interest waxes and wanes.

Blog Banter 9: What could you do without ?

2009-06-29T13:15:00.011+01:00

Its blog banter time again, and following on from last months 'what would you like to add to Eve' this month we have:

"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completelyfrom EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

This one's always going to have lots of controversy associated with it - some people may really like one mechanic, whilst other people despise it and think its the worst thing ever... suppose it should raise a few discussion points at the very least.

Getting down to business though, the subject I want to discuss is one that has been said many a time before (yeah, sorry, I've wimped out of the real controversial subjects), and thats one about suicide ganking in High Sec space.

I can almost see the entire pirate population of Eve collectively screaming 'go back to Jita ya carebear' but still... hear me out.

Firstly, theres nothing wrong with highsec ganking, as long as theres some downside for the ganker - the person getting ganked loses everything, and the ganker, with enough insurance, doesnt lose anything other than sec status, which in many cases, they arent bothered about losing anyway.

Lets look at 2 particular cases, both of which are high profie. The first is highsec ganking of mining vessels (Hulks/Mackinaws in particular) and secondly with the ganking of traders travelling in High security space.

Hulk ganking is becoming big news, as it seems that everyone and their granny wants a high sec Hulk killmail these days (at least if the vocal mob on the forums are to be believed) and to be honest, I can see the reason why - theres no real loss for the ganker.

With 1 gank fit battleship, or 3 cruisers, you can have a guaranteed Hulk kill (unless said ganker is completely inept) as the simple fact is that the Hulks are not able to withstand any sort of level of concentrated fire. If you get decent luck with loot/modules you can pull a few million from the Hulk, and admittedly (though its their own fault) a fair few Hulk pilots still go all out for massive faction type boosters as thats whats reccomended in Halada's guide, even though they are nowhere near needed in highsec mining, and one of those can pay for dozens of future kills.

Add in the cost of insurance (and an accomplice to grab whatever modules survive the death of the ganker ship), and the ganker runs off with little to no loss, or perhaps even a fairly sizeable gain depending on what the Hulks had fitted, and the Hulk pilot is left massively out of pocket due to the fact that insurance wont cover the cost of their ship.

Ultimately, there needs to be something changed for this, the common argument is that there should be no insurance for criminal activities, which I wholeheartedly agree with - although of course, the cost is somewhat negligable even if the insurance payout was removed - instead there must be a way to make the hulks survivable enough to protect them long enough to survive a single ship/small group of smaller ships until Concord intervenes, but as a downside it should offer considerable reduction to mining output - then you can decide if you want survivable, or maximum output.

The obvious answer is a module which reduces the mining yeild by a certain percentage, but increases CPU and powergrid output large enough to fit a decent sized tank on the ship so it can survive for more than 2-3 salvoes that it takes Concord to respond even in 0.5 systems.

Coupling that with a reduced (or even completely negated) insurance payout would bring a lot more tactics into play from the ganker contingent, rather than being completely guaranteed an almost zero risk kill they would have to scan out the ship, see if its worth targetting, then bring out the big guns. There are ways and means to do this without making it blatantly obvious what you intend to do (passive targeters come to mind) or more obvious ways such as looking for a reduced number of lasers that fire from the ship which obviously should have 3 firing at once.

The second viewpoint is one of highsec ganking on haulers. I'm going to play Devils Advocate here and say that theres nothing really worth worrying about here. Theres the obvious issue with smartbombing battleships going to pop a shuttle fairly quickly if you're trying to move large value low size items, but thats a risk that can easily be negated by using a larger transport if youre worried. The same goes for haulers - if youre autopiloting without manually warping to 0 on each gate (theres one that im expecting a lot of the pirates to ask to be removed, since a lot of them lament the day warp to 15 was removed) you almost deserve to die if youre carrying an expensive cargo in a paper-thin hull.

If insurance was reduced/negated for this class of gankers, I cant see it being a major issue, as this type of activity is done in order to try and get a big payout from the cargo that is carried rather than to try and senselessly destroy the target (of course, some people may well also kill them just to cause them not to get the cargo they are carrying too, and not worry if its destroyed or not in the process)

So there we go... in summary, I would want the removal of insurance payout for ganking 'helpless' targets in highsec. Not necessarily because I see it as an unfair tactic, but simply because theres no way to prevent it (in the line of hulk ganking at least.) As well as that however, there needs to be something that the Hulk pilot can do to allow for ways to protect themselves, with obvious downsides that they shouldnt be 'survivable and able to munch through asteroids at the rate of space locusts.'

On to the other participants:

Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!
EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?
Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired
Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?
Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
Ripe Lacunae, The UI… Where do I begin… (Eve Blog Banter #9)
Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail
Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?
Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status
Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast
Ecaf Ersa (EVE Mag), Can a Tractor Tractor a Can?
Thoughts from an Accidental Minmatar Revolutionary, EVE Blog Banter #9 - Aggression timers, WTs and Stargates
Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...
Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload
A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves
Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon
Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow
The Gaming-Griefer, EVE Sucks, But I Love It: The Memoir of a Masochist
Letrange's EVE Blog, Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning Skills
Lyietfinvar, Remove that monopoly
Sceadugenga, Blog Banter #9
Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #9

Link to the guides

2009-06-25T06:54:00.002+01:00

Just a nice quick post - I've made a link in the appropriate area to the right hand side of the blog which links to the Eve Files storage area where I keep my guides. Should hopefully make it easier to find for anyone who wants to reference one of the guides than wading through the earlier posts of the blog.

Construction Skills (Tech 2 manufacture)

2009-06-21T15:25:00.004+01:00

As many of you may well know, when youre coming to make Tech 2 ships, theres some additional skills you need to worry about, which I class as construction skills, specifically, Frigate Construction, Cruiser Construction, Battleship Construction and Indusitrial Construction.

As well as that, theres also Capital Construction, which deals with capital ships, and the capital industrial ships (Rorqual and Orca) - but thats already been addressed in my Capital ships guide.

However, I could never find out exactly which skill level is needed for which hull type. So I went ahead and made a list.

I've included the list in the blog primarily for an aide-memoire for myself, but also you never know, someone else may have a use for it.

So here it is:

Frigate Construction
Level 1:
None
Level 2:
Interceptor
Level 3:
Covert Ops Ship
Level 4:
Stealth Bomber
Electronic Attack Frigate
Level 5:
Assault Frigate
Interdictor

Cruiser Construction
Level 1:
Logistics
Level 2:
None
Level 3:
None
Level 4:
Heavy Assault Cruiser
Recon Cruisers (both Force and Combat types)
Level 5:
Heavy Interdictor
Command Ship

Batteship Construction
Level 1:
None
Level 2:
None
Level 3:
None
Level 4:
Marauders
Black Ops
Level 5:
None

Industrial Construction:
Level 1:
Blockade Runner
Level 2:
None
Level 3:
Deep Space Transport
Level 4:
None
Level 5:
None

Hopefully I can tidy this up in the near future by putting it all in a much easier to read table... but until then, you can have it in its nice and raw format.

If theres any (non capital ship) that I've missed, please let me know.

(Ive added Black Ops now at level 4 Battleship Construction)

I could get by with a little help from my friends

2009-06-20T11:55:00.002+01:00

OK cheezy song title puns aside (im definately running out of songs in my repertoire, need to check the Ipod again) we've been recovering our losses from the recent war with the Accursed.

Last night we had a dedicated mission/salvaging group going on, blitzing mission after mission, and then bringing in the clean up crew afterwards to strip the wrecks bare.

First point - tech 2 salvagers are damned fine it seems - it takes longer to lock the wrecks than it does to melt them down to circuit boards.

However, we have a few routes for recovery of cash:

1) Straightforward mission running, salvaging, looting - this is fairly direct, and nothing new to the majority. We have a few decently trained market players in the alliance, and selling on of the meta 3-4 loot should net a nice bonus to the coffers.

2) Mining of those missions that are worth it. With lots of mission runners available, were usually at no shortage of available people to draw missions. With that in mind, we sometimes leave one or two of the good 'mining missions' open for the hulk-wielders to come in after and strip the roids bare. One or two really good missions are left open for the week long duration as they provide lots and lots of ore. Even with a few peoples mission-pulling potential screwed over because of these week long open missions, it should be easy enough to keep the mission running crew in active missions with everyone who can access the level 4 agents doing so.

3) Manufacturing - we make stuff from the salvage and materials, to sell on behalf of the alliance, this thereby increases the 'value' in these same minerals/salvage.

4) Market trading. Those self same market players use alliance funds to buy low and sell high to generate some nice additional cash.

5) Purchase of LP's - because of all the mission running, some people will be getting a lot of LPs they dont really know what to do with. Its planned to either buy the LPs off them (well... they donate the LPs, the alliance contributes with the direct costs from the LP store) to either sell the items on, or to stockpile things like commonly used implants and such so that there can be replacements provided for those that die in battle.

Now... aside from all of these, can anyone think of some other suitable ways that an alliance/group of pilots can do between them to generate money? We dont want to ask for direct contributions/donations, as this should be self sustaining within the alliance, as long as people are wiling to give the time to help.

And another one bites the dust...

2009-06-17T06:53:00.002+01:00

Our war with the Accursed seems to be just about over now, all bar the shouting (we got the notice that the war has been invalidated today, so its finished tomorrow) and to be perfectly honest, we got well and truly spanked.

It's nothing that we didnt expect to be honest, we're a fledgeling alliance with a large focus on industrial operations, and whilst there are a couple of very active PVPers included in the mix, there were only a few available when the enemy were logged in (timezone issues) so in the end, the enemy lost 3 ships, and we lost 60 (final figures depending on what happens today.)

It's been a good learning experience, and we've got a few good plans to get people learning via 'throwaway' ships on the test server, but one thing it has tought us is that we need to learn to be adaptable. Our opponents were all very old characters, and seasoned PVP veterans, and to be perfectly honest, when we had a ship setup, they had tools at hand to run away, dock up, change ships, and counter it.

One personal thing I need to learn from the 2 fights I was in (yeah thats all I could participate in because the bulk of them happened at 3-5am my time) is that its sometimes best to run away rather than fighting to the death - since that was the opponents tactics many of the time.

Of course, it doesnt say much for us that we were concentrating fire on one target and they still managed to down our tackler (usually me) and get away before a fleet of 8 or so ships could take them down.

Still... lessons learned and all that. We come back better prepared and a bit stronger for next time.

Tech 3 changes afoot

2009-06-12T17:29:00.002+01:00

Firstly, I've been paying a bit more attention to the Tech 3 market over the past few days, seeing where everythings settled out a bit - and it seems that from a very basic 'buy everything from the market' viewpoint, the material costs for a Tengu run to around 770 million based on Rens / Heimatar prices - add onto that the costs for running a pos to create reactions, and doing the build (buying the blueprints from the markets, so negating the cost of the reverse engineering) youre looking at somewhere in the region of 800-850 million isk.

Not too bad profit wise if you have the skills to make them, although I see them for 1.5 - 2 billion for sale on contracts, im not sure if these are actually selling or not.

However (theres always a but...) it seems that theres market changes in planning in the undisclosed future

Specifically from the recent devblog:

Advances in Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering gets most of our love in this patch. What was clear is that we have plentiful material supply besides a few exceptions and the available blueprints and materials for reverse engineering were lacking.

Intact and malfunctioning relics will now reflect the greater ease with which the ancient technology can be melded with the current technology within experimental laboratories using these relics. The number of runs each blueprint will have has been greatly increased on these two making them much more valuable to acquire.

In addition the useful data gathered during reverse engineering which can lead to datacores or hybrid tech decryptors has been increased so any outcome will be more fruitful especially in meeting the overall costs of reverse engineering.

Availability of Datacores and Decryptors

The datacores needed for reverse engineering have been generally increased in potential supply. The numbers you will get from wormhole sites and the numbers of those sites has been increased which will lead to a much greater supply of datacores and should lower the reverse engineering costs significantly.

Fullerite Volumes

Some of the fullerites have had their volume reduced which will lead to a much faster mining rate and less transportation costs for some of the gases. Easing a little the effort it takes to get the gases back to known space and the marketplace.

Sleeper Salvage Changes

There has been a set of changes to the amounts of each type possible from a sleeper wreck. The rate at which some types are dropped has been changed which will lead to easing of some bottlenecks and some parts which were being salvaged too frequently.

Change to Fulleroferrocene Power Conduits material requirements

The Carbon-86 Epoxy Resin material requirement has been switched to Scandium Metallofullerene for the power conduits. This is one of the more significant changes which will ease the pressure on carbon-86 a lot and the burgeoning costs of acquiring the gases for making carbon-86.

It seems that the market is already beginning to stagnate a bit whilst people hold their breaths to find out just when this patch will hit, so watch those prices over the next few weeks, if you can play the markets just nicely, you can possibly make a killing.

New war again

2009-06-05T07:10:00.003+01:00

Sorry for not posting much at the moment, got a bit of writers block - well actually, I've been putting the finishing touches on a couple of articles for EON, but I really dont like writing mundane, boring 'well today I went to Rens, I bought a gun, oh... and a loaf of bread' type posts.

We were wardecced yesterday by a pirate group based out of Decon who have recently been specialising in highsec Hulk ganks. Nothing spectacularly new there, but I think when we started camping them on the gate to stop them coming in, they got a bit upset and wardecced us.

All well and above board many will say... however it's annoying for me as they seem to be on an american timezone, and once again, it seems that we will be involved in another war where I might only see about an hour of action every day before sleep claims me... and in that hour we may only have a glimpse of enemy ships for a minute of that time when they pop over to us and try to bait us to fall into their traps.

Oh well, I guess its one of the hardships one must bear in corporate life (not the threat of getting killed when out doing my own thing... but the total boredom waiting for your war target to log in.)

Where have you visited

2009-05-30T09:04:00.004+01:00

OK, definately late on the ball for this one, but theres been a eve bloggers meme going around, where you display where you've visited in New Eden, thanks to the handy-dandy function which has been recently added (well... past few years I think, i'm unsure) to the galactic map.

Mine is as shown below:

First thing that comes to mind, is that I've hardly been the most explorative person out there... from looking at this, it seems that I've probably visited less than 5% of the systems available.

The second thing that jumps out at me is that theres so many non-connected spaces, with small 3-4 system runs in the middle of nowhere. Now perhaps these small pockets are actually connected (theres some very, very long interconnection pipes not shown on here) may be the case, but it just looks a little strange.

Might need a bit of a nosey around and fill the map with a bit more red over the coming weeks, just to give me something to do.

Blog Banter 8 - Something new to ponder about

2009-05-23T10:51:00.010+01:00

Blog banter time is upon us once again.

This month's topic comes to us from Ga'len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: "What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a 'nerf this, boost my game play' post like we see on the EVE forums."

The new mechanic I would like to see: Weapon tinkering.

Basically, a lot like rigging, it would be a way to use salvaged loot to alter the characteristics of weapons and modules. Maybe improving stats such as boosting shield resistances for an invul field, altering the damage type of ammo etc.

Now the first downside I can see with this is that it would probably create a massive load on the database with each module having potentially 3-5 varients with different stats on depending on how tinkering would work.

As for how it would work in game mechanics, it is of course an obvious extension to the rigging system that ships use. I can see experienced combat pilots sitting there, soldering iron in hand altering a circuit board here, adding a power flow route there, all to improve the effects of their modules.

The thing I quite like about weapon tinkering is that it wouldnt be a 'permanent' change to your ship like rigging - rigging is awkward in a way, in that if you need to repackage the ship, you lose the modifications and so on - if it was applied to modules, it would be possible to simply unfit the module, and give a bit more flexibility in moving around, and perhaps changing your guns out to use on different ships rather than being forced to use that one, and that one only.

Of course I cannot really imagine any downsides to this system on a user level, except perhaps the cost, so there may need to be some balancing issues to see about.

List of Participants:

CrazyKinux's Musing, EVE Blog Banter #8: Care for a little game of SecWars?
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, Wow, that new thing is so shiny!!!
I am Keith Nielson, EVE Blog Banter #8 - Return of the Top Gun
Once More from the Beginning, 8th EVE Blog Banter May 2009 Edition
A merry life and a short one, EVE Blog Banter #8: In the Year of Our Awesome
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Planets
Helicity Boson, Bantering the blog
Achernar, Unique adventures
Ecliptic Rift, OOC: EVE Blog Banter 8: Standings and secondary factions
The New Edener, EVE Blog Banter #8
Journey to New Eden, Eve Blog Banter #8: What new mechanic should be added to Eve?
One Man And His Spaceship, Blog Banter 8 - Something new to ponder about
Life, The Universe and Everything, Blog banter 8: mentorship
EVE Guru, EBB 8: Yarr! Prepare to be boarded!
The Ralpha Dogs, Greed Is Good, Greed Works
Rifter Drifter, Blog Banter 8: Strategic Gunnery
A Mule in EVE, Expanding EVE
Letrange's EvE Blog, 8th Blog Banter
Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #8
The Nude Nerd, Blog Banter #8
Scop's Log, Blog Banter #8: "We're caught in a tractor beam! It's pulling us in!"
Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #8: Charisma Tanking
Industrialist with Teeth, EVE Blog Banter #8: It’s Like Tetris for OCD People
Diary of a Pod Pilot, EVE blog banter #8: Killing in the name of
Talk Unfraid, Physical Communications
Sceadugenca, EVE Blog Banter #8: Fighter-Class Ships and Sqadrons
Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, 8th Blog Banter
Into the Unknown, Eve Blog Banter #8: Player Bases
EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #8
Life in Low Sec, Blog Banter #8: The Exasperation Factor
Symptom of a Greater Cure, EVE Blog Banter: #8 - Tug Me Away
EVE Journey, OOC - EVE Blog Banter #8: Marine Leader : “We have secured the ship, Sir!”
Thoughts from an Accidental Minmatar Revolutionary, All Hands on Deck! We are at War!
Ripe Lacunae, Into the Great Unknown (Eve Blog Banter 8)
Mdhi Lihu's EVE Online Blog, 009 - Blog Banter #8
Break Vol, EVE Blog Banter #8
Inanity and Doom, EVE Blog Banter #8 - If I Ran The Universe
Once More from the Beginning, EVE Blog Banter #8: Devil's in the details
The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #8

Assault ship a go-go

2009-05-22T19:43:00.003+01:00

I've been still training Karox's ship skills even though im not quite sure how much more I will concentrate on his combat skills (see an earlier post on the subject) - but in the meantime, I've just finished training advanced weapon upgrades to level 4, which has allowed me to create a couple of interesting fits which were very powergrid-tight.

Firstly, a long range (60km or more) sniper harpy. This will complement my short ranged blaster harpy I have had in my posession for quite a while.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, I have trained up Gallente Frigates 5, and found myself finally able to get into the Taranis ive been holding onto for ages, as well as the Ishkur assault frigate, both of which are recognised as damned fine PVP ships (though the low powergrid on the Ishkur forced me to wait until I had AWU4 before I could fit it out)

Im looking forward to hopefully finding some time over the weekend to test them with fleetmates in lowsec, but i'll have to hope this 'jump bug' where your display gets messed up and sticks in an endless loop gets eradicated sooner rather than later... its dangerous jumping into an unknown lowsec system and not knowing if youre going to be alive after logging back in when your overview screws up.

Now i need to decide if I want to work on skills for gunnery and ship skills to take me up into cruiser sized and larger hulls, or do I just stick with Frigates as I had planned for a while (and still currently plan as per the retirement post from before)

Considering retirement

2009-05-17T12:43:00.002+01:00

OK... OK before you all jump and scream about me leaving Eve (or you maybe couldn't care less, I dunno) - I'm not.

What I am considering is removing Karox from active combat duty, and passing the buck to my alt, whos skills are now approaching somewhat useful levels in order to go out and PVP with.

Karox's skill training list to improve his industrial side is massively long, and if I start looking at decent PVP skills as well, the skill list of stuff I would like stretches into several years.

Lomara, my newer character has trained lots and lots of the background skills for PVP (gunnery / missiles / navigation / thermodynamics type skills) and is fairly well progressed in Minmatar frigates.

I originally planned on having Karox specialised in Caldari and Gallente ships, whilst Lomara trains up in Minmatar and Amarr ships, but instead, since the 'utility skills' transfer over equally well, I've come up with a year long plan to get Lomara skilled up in each weapon system (basically, adding hybrids to her current skill plan) and all races cruisers up to HAC's and Recons, and Tech 1 battlecruisers and battleships.

Still undecided if I want to progress Lomara into Command ships, but that is still planned for Karox, where he can hopefully get into his ship to provide fleet bonuses - I have no interest in training leadership skills on Lomara, at least not in the near future.

Karox of course will still retain some combat viability with the ships/skills he has (Caldari and Gallente up to HACs and Recons) and I'll be looking to improve his gunnery/missile skills somewhat between industry type stuff, but the majority of my combat will be done on Lomara, where she wont have many 'wasted' skillpoints pushing her clone costs up into the next bracket for the odd chance that she does die.

Moving into trading

2009-05-13T08:16:00.003+01:00

In the spirit of the last blog banter, I've been looking at things that I haven't done much of in my time, and one thing that hit me was that I've never really spent time playing the trading game.

I'll admit, I've been tempted by the talk of people making billions in weeks through playing the markets, especially as margins are getting tight on production, and it's no longer making enough by itself to fund my ahem... excessive lifestyle.

I promptly took a bit of time off training up Karox to work on my super secret market playing alt (who I created prior to Apocrypha so he had a lot of trade skills already), stuck him in a fairly active market hub along with all of my Tech 2 parts made to date, about 100 million in starting collateral and decided that after that point, he would be completely on his own and not get any funding from outside again, to see if he could be self sustainable in buying/selling things at his base.

Firstly, after a few days I found it a bit pointless in selling my Tech 2 parts in the market hub. If profits were slim back in my quiet area I use, they were almost non existant in the busy hub - people always undercutting each other all the time - I gave that up for a bad idea and instead kept the plan that I'd had all along that Karox would sell his own products in the lower volume, higher profit area - especially as it was possible in the market to sell all of the 10 modules from the blueprint run in minutes if you caught it right as being the lowest value seller, but make maybe 10% of the profit I would have selling a bit slower - and also needing to keep up with demand was going to be difficult.

Instead I used the tried and tested 'resell mission loot' plan where I used the market alt's much greater number of available orders to place speculative buy orders under market value from mission runners, and resell them at full market rate, with around a 10-25% (or higher in some rare cases) markup.

First, let me say that I'm somewhat unimpressed with market trading... I'm probably not doing it optimally but in 3 weeks of trying it, I've only managed to make 150 million in profit. I mean OK, its essentially money for nothing, as I need to just log in for 30 mins a day to play around with market orders, but its still taking ages to fill my market orders, so im just selling 2-3 modules per day of the 100 or more I've placed buy orders for, which is making some ten to hundred thousand ISK profit per sell order I've got up depending how quick the parts resell for.

Now of course, im wondering how to expand on this. I really need to research the optimum drop tables for NPCs from missions in my target region so I know what to buy (anyone know if theres anything out there, or is it just lots of legwork and notepads?) or possibly move out of the module business, and into something more high ticket, such as implant trading.

More info and updates as I get more into playing market games.

Anyone know what happened to the mixed size rigs?

2009-05-10T19:10:00.003+01:00

I've been looking into rigs as a new profit making venture, and if im honest, looking to cut down the cost of actually fitting them to my ships by making them myself using bits off the market.

Now unfortunately, theres a) very little profit in rigs and b) that makes them damned expensive still.

Whats the point of fitting a couple of 15 million isk rigs to a 20 million isk ship? It would be nice if there were frigate specific, cruiser specific and battleship specific rigs to complement each ship hull size. Im sure there was something else said about that around about the time that Quantum Rise was due to be released, along with the massively overhyped 'industrial change' patch, when all we got was an Orca and a speed rebalance.

Anyway, call me well and truly miffed at yet another 'decent CCP idea' that seems to have just been swept under the carpet.

In other news, my wallet is quite a bit lighter now sent in the direction of a Mr John Rourke for thanks in producing Clear Skies 2... im busy downloading it now.

Blog Banter 7 - Expanding My Horizons

2009-04-30T06:45:00.008+01:00

Its time for Blog Banter once again. This months question is put forward by Crazykinux himself, and asks: "What 3 things haven't you done in EVE and why? Would you be willing to try one day? Why so? Why not?"

So there we go... in a system with seemingly infinite possibilities such as the principally player-driven world of Eve, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of things that people havent done, because quite simply, theres so much more than can be created.

I love the idea of the online poker systems that Mynxee has written about in the past for instance, and ways of making money that dont revolve around mindlessly plinking away at NPC's for hours on end.

But im not going to write about that thing specifically, or indeed about some of the many other things I've yet to do. My 3 points for this post are as follows:

1) Being a pirate.

I've mentioned it before on here, but I dont have the ruthless streak to jump out randomly at an innocent and want to ruin their day. That doesnt of course mean that I dont like a good fight, but on the other hand, I am always on the back foot, because the people I do fight against (specifically, player pirates) are usually seasoned PVPers themselves, which makes my relative inexperience in combat show.

I love the idea of defending an area of space (see later for more on that) against all and sundry, but dont like the idea of mindless killing for the sake of there being a target in front of you.

Add to the fact that the 'gang vs gang' (i.e. blob warfare) mentality means that its really hard to go out and just have a bit of fun without being utterly outnumbered a lot of the time, makes getting out and actually having a chance to survive much more likely with lots of planning to get into groups - and quite frankly the majority of the time people are available to settle in for an hour or two is usually a bit too late in the day for me most of the time, which also adds to the problems.

So to directly answer the question - no, I dont want to actually do this in the future.

2) Train and fly 'proper' capital ships.

I have a freighter on the account, but I dont class this as a proper capital ship, since is fairly easy to get into. I mean the all of the rank 10-14 type really, really long running skills that old pilots look into doing just because they need something to train.

On my main (Karox) account, I am playing as a jack of all trades, and as a consequence of that, I still have many years of training possibilities in front of me. I honestly dont think that there will be any time I could consider doing capital ships with him.

I have an alt account that is more combat focused, and does the majority of my PVPing. That character may well be trained into capital ships, but again, with several years of non-capital training ahead, I'm unsure if its ever anything I would want to look into.

3) Being part of a corporation that lives in 0.0 space.

This has always been an aim of mine, and it was something I was looking into a lot last year when I was a bit bored and lookign for something new.

Since then, I have returned to my old corporation, we have joined a fledgeling alliance, with grand plans, and it gives us something to work towards to have an aim to live in 0.0.

Now the reality of the situation is that we currently dont have the logistics in place (see potentially capital ships, carriers etc) to maintain a life in 0.0 as it stands, because quite simply, theres times you need to get back to the Highsec markets to buy the stuff to live with, and going through 0.0 entryway gate camps is something I dont want to have to worry about time and time again, so we need jump capable ships which can deposit us to a suitable lowsec entry point, shuttle stuff back and forward, then jump back directly into 0.0.

Out of all of these 3 points, I think this is the most likely I will achieve, simply because its not a personal goal, but one of a group of people, and with a few people working together, its possible to achieve, even if its just basing out of NPC space for the start until we get our feet under the door, and can contest for sovereignty space.

On the plus side, now that we can use blockade runners to run cargo into a system using covert cyno's and Black Ops battleships, thats one more logistics route we can cover, but unfortunately only one or two pilots in the corp can use blackops ships at the moment.

List of participants:

CrazyKinux's Musing, EVE Blog Banter #7: Eh, nobody told me you could do this in EVE!

One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 7 - Expanding My Horizon

I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #7 - What do you want to do today?

Rifter Drifter, Blog Banter 7: Trinity

Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #7 - The me I am not

Morphisat's Blog, Eve Blog banter #7 - Treading waters unknown

Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 7 - Roads Not Followed

A Mule in EvE, DD, defend against a gank & POS gunning

Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Choices

The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "One, Two, Three...three things....hahahahaha"

The Ralpha Dogs, Road Not Taken... Or Not

Melindhra's Universe, EVE Blog Banter #7 - Where no one has gone before

Life in Low Sec, Blog Banter #7: Possibilities

EVE Guru, EVE Blog Banter 7

Diary of a Pod Pilot, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #7: Stones left unturned
Flashfresh - The Pirate, EVE Blog Banter #7: This isn't me...
Nefchast’s Gaming Blog, CrazyKinux’s EVE Blog Banter #7
A Merry Life and a Short One, EVE Blog Banter #7: Syphilis Doesn't Count
Rip Lacunae, Past & Future (Eve Blog Banter 7)

My Love/Hate relationship with Invention

2009-04-18T12:23:00.004+01:00

OK for a kick off, i'm not going to join in with the whining masses saying 'inventions broke, it never works' because well... I know it does. Sometimes though, I always think that Lady Luck really, really doesn't like me.

Over the past week or two I've updated all my Science skills so I have level 3 in every Invention based skill (except for ships, but im not inventing them yet, so no rush) and I have invested in several new blueprints, which have been researched a bit (for future use) and copied ready for invention for when the skills finished training.

Now I know that level 3 in each skill isnt the best starting point, but by the 'unapproved' calculations that are known about gives me around about a 47% chance which im happy enough as a start point.

Anyway... so far I have worked on 3 new items in my invention arsenal: Energised Adaptive Nano Membranes, Nuclear S (for Barrage S ammo) and 200mm Autocannon's

To date the results are as follows:

EANM2's - 3 out of 10
Barrage S - 3 out of 10
200mm AC2's - 2 out of 10

Of course, in conjunction with that, I have managed a 4 out of 5 research on the last of my Invulnerability field 2's, and a 3 out of 5 result on Gas Cloud Harvester 2's - unfortunately the market is getting pretty tight with the cost of materials for Invulnerability fields, and theres not much sales volume on the Gas Cloud Harvesters to make them a reliable sales point.

Anyway... as I say, I know invention works, and sometimes you can get some spectacular numbers of successes... but why do they always come on things I dont particularly want them on ?

Warning about the Mybrutes site from a few days back

2009-04-16T11:37:00.002+01:00

It seems that it has picked up a whole heap of viruses and things, theres warnings all over.

If you go to the site, make sure your virus scanners are up to date.

It seems that there has been reports of the Swift.C virus being detected, which is a virus that works from Adobe Flash Player, which the site uses (as well as many others, so check any sites with flash content you go to) but supposedly the newest version of flash player has patched the vulnerability, so make sure you get flash player 10.

New Patch, New Toys

2009-04-15T13:56:00.003+01:00

Seems that everyone in the blogging eve universe is having their say about the new changes with the coming patch tomorrow.

ECM ship changes are the main focus, with some quite significant changes to the Falcon and the Rook to get them out of massive ranges (Falcon) or the Hangar (Rook)

Suffice to say that I don't really have much experience with the 'overpowered' falcon since I've only managed to train Recon ships up to level 2 so far, so I'd never done much with my Falcon other than a cursory test flight around highsec - so in short, I dont really have much to say, and I'll see just what happens when it happens, and I get to train another level or 2 on Recon ships.

The stealth bomber role change is looking a bit more interesting though. Firstly, the bomber is going to lose its ability to use cruise missiles acting as a long range sniper ship... this is good in a way, as the main problem with 150km cruise missiles were that they took about 30 seconds to hit your opponent, meaning that anyone with half a brain could leave before they had any hint of damage.

In its place, is the ability to fit Siege launchers and Torpedoes, with the role bonus being changed to no longer use 'big missiles to hit small targets' but rather 'bigger missiles to hit big targets.'

Unfortunately there are 2 problems with this new role:

1) I dont have torpedoes trained up. OK, not a problem with the system per se, but still annoying.

2) Its still going to take about 10 stealth bombers working in harmony to have enough damage to take out a battleship in one salvo - they still wont have the ability to withstand incoming fire for the second and third salvo to fire, and with the fact they will need to be quite close to the target due to the short range of the torpedoes, its putting them much closer to the action, and therefore at risk of being locked by an opponent.

Other issues are that the Bombs are going to be made easier to produce (20 per run rather than the current 3) - although im not sure if that will also have a corresponding increase in material costs to determine the expected value of the new bombs and it seems that these will also not be limited to 1 per ship now, as they are just being classed as a standard launcher hardpoint weapon.

Of course, bombs suffer in that they can only be used in 0.0 space, but for those that know their niche then they will have life a bit easier in getting them I guess.

Above all though, I'm looking forward to having another ship to fit a covert ops cloak to, mainly because as a Tech 2 cloak producer, anything that creates additional demand can only be good for sales. For my own use, it would be nice to have something other than the Buzzard to muck around all stealthy and cloak-like for a bit of a change of pace.

... Now all I need to do is try and find some time to train up Torpedoes.

Brutes - Not Eve related (Kinda)

2009-04-11T16:56:00.003+01:00

Whats better after a long day of capsuleering than going planetside and whacking friends with big sticks and swords?

Ok... maybe a nice hot bath and a good meal, but well lets leave that one go at the moment.

Mybrutes is a little web browser program that lets you have random arena battles with anyone who wishes to challenge you, and you wish to challenge them. Its been a bit of a hit in the local corp forums as everyone's been making a character... and now you can freely bash on Karox until your heart is content by simply clicking on the link and making your character (or of course, if you already have a character, im up for the challenge)

http://karox-lominax.mybrute.com

Hope to see your face smeared across my big stick soon.

Brief Update

2009-04-08T19:37:00.002+01:00

Since it seems it's been a while since I wrote anything, I'll.. well.. write something - just incase people think i've fell off the face of the planet or something.

I'm now about a day and a half away from getting barge 5 finished, and from that, one of my first goals, getting into my Hulk that I made during my initial forays into Tech 2 manufacturing, is on the cards.

From that, I then Intend to spend about 26 days (according to Evemon anyway) getting to the point where I can invent anything for Tech 2 with a reasonable efficiency (everying at level 3, with some stuff at level 4) as well as train up the subsystem tech skills, metallurgy and reverse engineering for Tech 3. That will then let me get back to training up some combat skills in the meantime. I'll also get up to cruiser manufacturing 4 to allow me sit on the brink of Tech 3 manufacturing, and do some Tech 2 cruisers and frigates.

I still dont really have much interest in training up Jury Rigging 5 and getting to level 5 on the ship engineering skills to allow me to do the final assembly on Tech 3 ships just yet, but I'll consider that after I work on my combat skills again, perhaps finally getting my Nighthawk ive been lusting after for what seems like months.

Corp wise, we've joined a new alliance this week, should be fun getting to know the new alliance mates over the coming days/weeks, and then see exactly what alliance life can offer us.

Anyway... nothing spectacular happening at the moment I'm afraid... im making stuff, selling stuff, and wondering where to spend my hard earned cash... I've invested heavily in a new batch of tech 2 advanced materials and new blueprints for my expanding focus on tech 2 and invention, so im quietly hoping there isnt a massive price crash over the next month or two whilst I get everything in place.

Hopefully with the alliance there, and all the new stuff that could bring, I might have plenty to write about in the future... and theres always the guides - I'm busy looking at the old ones to update them ready for Apocrypha, so keep your eyes peeled.

EON Errata (aka: oops, there was a misprint)

2009-04-02T18:17:00.005+01:00

I've just recieved the latest copy of EON through the post today (Issue 15) with my (hopefully) long awaited Tech 2 article inside.

And it seems I wasnt very good at proof reading it - theres a pretty major misprint on the table dealing with Alchemy (page 77) - the table supposedly lists R16 and R32 moon minerals for use in the Alchemy process, but it doesnt, in fact it lists the Gas type minerals twice.

The correct list of R16 and R32 minerals can be found in the simple reaction table (page 75) if you're desperate to look them up.

Whilst I'm on and in an apologetic mood, I also noticed that I got my sums wrong in my Tech 1 guide from issue 14, incorrectly stating that the waste factor was halved with every level of ME research done on a blueprint - this again is wrong.

In fact the correct calculation is 'Base Waste Level'/1+ ME value. Therefore at ME1 the waste is halved, at ME2 its cut to a third, ME3 its cut to a quater and so on.

Hope it's not spoiled anyones enjoyment of 2 otherwise cracking issues of the magazine.

Guide Part 11 - Exploration and Wormholes

2009-04-02T09:24:00.004+01:00

It seems now that everyone is off doing the wormhole thing (and many have been there and gotten bored) its time to produce a new exploration guide in light of the original one that I linked to now becoming obsolete.

I hope everyone finds it useful - as always, if you find some issues or feel you can expand it, feel free to drop me an email.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Karox/Part_11_-_Exploration__WH.pdf

Enjoy

Rambling Thoughts On the Brink of April

2009-03-31T15:37:00.006+01:00

Another month passes, and ultimately, another month passes in the life of Karox, intrepid explorer, manufacturing mogul and general annoyance to Angels everywhere.

Firstly, yay me, I finally broke 20 million skill points a few days back. If only I'd not taken that year long break a while ago I'd have done that a long, long time ago, but never mind, live and learn, how was I to know I'd be back.

Secondly, it seems that the last Blog Banter post was my hundredth on the blog. Woohoo for milestones.

I'm still stalled on my training for Command ships. However, im finally going a bit more focused on Exhumers, and I'm now 10 days from finishing Mining Barge 5 (already having done Astrogeology 5) and from then I'll get Exhumers skill to finally use that Hulk that's been sitting in my Hangar for months (which I've been secretly wanting to fly a while since it was my first hand-made Tech 2 ship)

Been using the skill queue to good effect as well, training up a few prerequisites for the Tech 3 subsystem tech skills (mainly science skills, and the other racial starship engineering skills) but since I've only done levels 1-2 of these via the skill queue, theres still lots of training ahead of me - Metallurgy was raised to 3 so far, but still need to get that to 4 before I can even train the Reverse Engineering skill.

I need to start deciding how to spend my time though from now for the next few months - do I refine my skills in one area, or (the more likely choice) just dot around from thing to thing and never really become specialised at anything (and therefore take forever and a day to get there) - Tech 3 manufacture isn't on the cards yet material wise or skill wise, so I dont know why im worried too much about getting those, suppose its a 'its new and I want to do it' mentality without thinking through the realistic options.

I'm hoping to spend more time on my combat side, even though I now have an alt (well.. have had one for a fair few months now, its sitting at just a little over 10 million skill points) specialised in Minmatar ships with limited charisma (yay pre-patch Achura) for combat use, but thats far from finished at the moment. I dunno if I should keep Karox as a support/industrialist character, but I'm still focusing on Caldari/Gallente with Karox and Minmatar and (eventually) Amarr with the alt (I know, I know... old racial enemies ship types on each character, it just worked out that way when I created Karox wanting to fly Gallente ships but heard that Caldari made good mission runners to get income when I first started)

I've still yet to get lost in a wormhole (I've had a bit of a tentative look around one or two of them, but nothing substantial). Tell you the truth, I'm a bit scared of it. Not in a 'yah boo sissy' way but rather the fact that I'm needing to access my science and industry stuff on a daily basis or thereabouts, and I dont get much time to log in daily (I can pop on for an hour or so every morning, and limited longer periods after work) so need to be able to access everything in a very quick time - having to find a way out of a wormhole and then back from wherever I end up at would just be a massive inconvenience for me. Add to the fact that I don't have a clue as to what ship to bring on the wormhole expedition either - I've got a Drake set up that should be ok to solo low level stuff with, but it cant really exploit the better things found in wormholes (archaeology sites, gas clouds etc) and only has 1 salvager, so thats going to be very slow going if and when I do kill stuff.

I'm definately considering going to Fanfest this year, but it seems the Early date has caused a bit of a ruckus and some people who were intending to go now can't because of the earlier than expected date, and i'm a bit worried that I'll get there and will end up not knowing anyone (hell... 50k plus people out in space at any one time, and probably 4-5 times that in total active accounts means a lot of people that could end up there, and I only know about 10-20 of them outside of corpmates)

Anyway, I think thats enough rambling for now, got a lot on my mind, including moving a fair few combat vessels to a lowsec base to start getting out and about again, I've been cooped up in the science and industry service station for way too long it seems.

Blog Banter 6 - Times, they are a changing

2009-03-29T23:59:00.004+01:00

This month's topic comes to us from Quintrala of Speed Fairy . She suggests to "write a short fiction story about the dissolution of the BoB alliance. It could be from BoB's point of view, the Goons', by neutrals in 0.0, civilians in Empire, NPCs or even rats. Write about before, during or after the coup; give us stories of market, war, people or love. In-character or roleplay. We want to know what happened, from those fictional characters that, in your mind, were part of it."

Karox sat with his head in his hands, staring blankly at the console, the breaking news on the Galnet screen flashing up stories:

'Breaking news, Band of Brothers Alliance has been dissolved' it flashed again and again, minor updates to the main body of news as the information trickled down from reporters who clone jumped to nearby systems in order to get in on the information soon.

All Karox could think about were the knock on effects, the massive spike in Tech 2 raw material costs, already vultures were buying up all of the stocks of things like Ferrogel as far as the eye could see, relisting it all at 2, 3... 10 times its value a few days earlier.

Massive strife out in the badlands of 0.0 space wasnt anything new of course, alliances fought for territory all the time, but since the Band of Brothers alliance were well known for holding several key resource producing moons in their 'backyard systems' this was going to really screw up the process for getting the stuff out to the empire systems where they could be used for production.

Whilst the complexities of the incident were slowly gathering truth (or rumour, whos to know when politics are involved) the market speculators were going hell for leather to get their cut.

The Tech 2 market, already rocked a little earlier due to the 'accounting blunder' which saw a way to get a massively increased output on the reactors, was going to suffer in the short term... and until supplies were restored, prices would skyrocket as people relist what meager amounts they have at unrealistic prices to get their share of the panic buying frenzy.

Of course, the real reason Karox was holding his head in his hands was that after buying a Freighter a little earlier, he had used up pretty much all his liquid assets, and therefore couldn't take part in the mass market hysteria and make a killing like so many others would most probably achieve.

Participants:
Speed Fairy, The Hand of BoB
CrazyKinux's Musing, No where to go...
A Mule in EVE, Rolling to the Warzone
The Ralpha Dogs, Two Tales of Glory and Honor
One Man and his Spaceship, Times they are changing
OZ's House of the Evil Dead, Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, Who the Hell are They?....
I am Keith Nielson, He Gave Up the Stars
Life in Low Sec, Six Degrees of Seperation
A Merry life and a Short One, Die Bard
Roc's Ramblings, Mythology
Dense Veldspar, EVE Blog Banter #6
Letrange's EVE Blog, A toast to the disolution of BoB
Fumbling in Space, Scarnan Vs The Fleeing Bankrupt Hordes

Need some help with Tech 3 production processes

2009-03-18T19:46:00.004Z

I'm busying putting together my first draft for my future EON article on Tech 3 manufacturing, problem is that there has been some slight (and some significant) changes from the Test server compared to what there is on the live server.

The question I have is quite simple: When reverse engineering, are the decryptors (the racial ones that you need to put in every job to determine the type of BPC you get) consumed? What about the RAM Hybrid Tech ? Is it 100% consumed with each job, or partially consumed as all RAM units are classically?

A second question is what are the outcomes? So far I've seen a 3 run BPC produced as reported on the forums as well as all of the blueprints on the contracts system. Are the blueprints always 3 run, or do you get 1 run, 10 run, 20 run or more blueprints with good successes (as I know that the end output is vairable with reverse engineering)

Whilst the chances are that theres many people not done an actual reverse engineering job (me included, which is why im asking) im hoping that the greater Eve population could spot this blog and may be able to offer some insight.

I've still got a few months until I need to submit it, so I hope that I can get something a bit more tried and tested by then, but if I can get something semi concrete in advance, it will help with writing.

Oh and by the way, look out for my Tech 2 manufacturing article in the next issue of EON due in April.

First look at Tech 3 costs

2009-03-15T14:54:00.004Z

I've created a spreadsheet to include a way to enter the costs that the market generates. Its not perfect (only includes the materials, not the costs of handling them and moving them along the production chain) but if anyone wants to use it as a starting block feel free.

Under the cost cells in the spreadsheet, you can enter your own values in the green coloured cells, but the grey ones are calculated from a previous sheet. This of course makes it the 'best case' where everything is generated from the ground up, if at any point along the chain, the parts are bought from the market rather than generated from raw materials, just alter the appropriate cell, it should filter through automatically.

They're entered now with current Jita prices of all the tech 3 parts, everything is still way too pricey at the moment as could be expected, but once prices calm down a bit it should be a good guide to make sure you arent getting ripped off.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0903/Tech_3_Parts_Sheet.zip

Also, Tareen Kashaar on the Eve forums has developed a new flowchart for the production of Tech 3 parts, which is much more comprehensive (and clears some of the errors that were there) from the originally Dev published one. This can be seen from the following link:

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Luggage/t3prod_flowchart.gif

Note that the 'known space' buyable parts (the reactions and the component BPOs) are available galaxy wide from Core Complexion Inc and Chemal Tech stations.

Premium Lite and the EeePC

2009-03-12T09:50:00.003Z

I was a bit worried about my EeePC after the Apocrypha update, its hardly the most powerful machine out there, and whilst it ran Classic mode Eve acceptably (I would never have tried to fly in space and 'do stuff'), I was worried that the upgrade to Premium (or more specifically, Premium Lite) would be simply too much for the little guy.

I must say I was mildly shocked - after turning down all the settings to low, it managed to run, and I can still do station based activities with it, which was ultimately all that I wanted to do with it anyway. Go one for the little guy.

It chugs along at a rediculously low framerate (prob about 2-3 FPS if the jerkiness is anything to go by) but hopefully that wont cause me too many problems with clicking the wrong button and making 1000 of an item when I mean to make 100 and other such comedy moments.

All in all, I'm a bit of a chuffed little bunny at that revelation.

Apocrypha: Day One Fallout

2009-03-11T08:02:00.005Z

Unfortunately I had to go out yesterday evening, so didn't have much time to explore exactly what Apocrypha had to offer, but here are a few of the highlights and lowlights (is that even a word? I've only ever heard it used in management speak) of the patch as I see it:

1) The patching process itself was quite straightforward and the servers appeared to be up according to schedule - and they didnt seem to drop out at all. I did cheat a bit and download the manual patches during the day at work though so I've no idea how the autopatcher was going to work, since I didnt want to wait 4-6 hours to download 1.5 gb of data at home, since I had to go out, and I loathe to leave the PC on when im out of the house (I always worry that the things going to explode and burn the house down)

2) The probes - This was a bit of an annoyance. Firstly, I bought a whole load of Quest probes before the patch that were nice and cheap with a view that 'at least they will probably normalise the material requirements for the probes and put them at about the mid level of where the old ones sat' but upon looking at the new core probes that were in my hangar, they had about the same refining output as the old quest probes did. Thats good I suppose for those who want to make them from new, they will be nice and cheap, but it means that all my old probes, multispecs and all, which were quite expensive (14k-21k rather than the 3k of quest probes) have lost a LOT of value. This one was my fault I suppose since I couldnt be bothered to sit through loads of patching for the test server, so didnt bother with it to any great deal.

For some reason also, pretty much all of my 'combat probes' were missing - there was only 1000 in my hangar when there should have been about 4000 (taking into a mind that the old recon probes should have converted to combat probes) - these things were pretty expensive to manufacture since they needed some Strontium to make, which was quite an annoyance to see them all disappear. Add in the massive material loss with my 17k core probes (1000 of each of the 16 types of old probe and 1000 multispecs) that was a bit of a bad side.

3) Tech 3 manufacture - I was mildly suprised to find that all of the material requirements for the strategic cruiser hulls for each race was identical, and also that each race and type of subsystem share a material table, that should make the spreadsheets for these much easier to manage. Again, blame that one on not being able to log into the test server.

4) Attribute remapping - I decided to go for a nice balanced approach, and dropped my charisma down to the minimum and the rest with a slight focus on perception and willpower. Pretty much every thread on the first page of the 'skills' forum on the Eve Online forums is asking about the best way to set your stats, and loads of Achuras asking why they cant 'get rid of their 11 points of charisma since the minimum is 5' (its because they arent taking into account that the learning based skills cant be reduced, and when you tell them they need to actually raise charisma to meet the minimum 5, they go off in a huff.) Had a bit of a chuckle at that one.

5) Wormholes - A few corpmates went into a wormhole from lowsec yesterday and managed to get minced in seconds from a sleeper BS, seems that theres still a lot to learn about those lot.

6) Training queue - Works like a charm. Managed to train all the level 1 and 2 subsystem skills, gas harvesting to level 2, and then pop right back over to Astrogeology which I had set before downtime. Seems nice and straightforward to use, so im looking forward to not having to stop a skill with 2-3 hours to go when it would finish when im at work/going to bed in the future.

All in all, looking good so far.

Halada's at it again...

2009-03-08T12:07:00.003Z

The other day, Halada, the author of quite possibly the most accepted undisputed mining guide for the Eve community is planning to release the third version of his guide, expanding into all facets of production, from mining to tech 1, tech 2, tech 3 and capital ship manufacturing, POSes, Outposts and Managing the markets.

He has said that it will be relased on March 10th, in line with Apocrypha going live, but he does state that the stuff directly related to the Apocrypha expansion will follow 30 days later, so that's giving him a bit of a barrier just incase anything changes from how its currently portrayed on the test server.

The announcement was posted on the Eve Online forums so if youre interested in keeping up with the countdown, and can suggest a suitable name, feel free to put in your thoughts.

As for me, I feel like I've had my nose put out of joint a little, since if he pulls this off, theres not much point in doing a dedicated Tech 3 production guide, since I dont think its worth my time trying to improve on something that, if its anything like his mining guide, covers pretty much everything in good depth. I'll enjoy reading it though and it's promised to be big, around 160 pages from last count or so he says.

Blog Banter 5: Me And My Shadow

2009-02-26T15:20:00.001Z

This month's topic comes to us from Mynxee of Life in Low Sec. She asks "Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is 'ruining the game'?"

I've always been a fan of alt accounts in any MMO, in Ultima Online I used to run 3 accounts (although one was inherited from a friend near the end of my own life in the game, so really I only ever had 2) and the same applies to pretty much every other game I had. I did it in UO just because I had a lot of free time and could try a whole lot of everything, so had one account that had all my 'reds' on it for PVP fighting, and one that was my 'carebearing' account for gold generation. As UO moved into its twilight years (for me anyway) and things like 'red farming for honour points' came along, I had my first taste of dual logging metagaming, where one character gained a bonus from the other character that they would take a while to get using the traditional methods.

As I moved onto other games, more specifically Star Wars Galaxies, the first steps of frequent 'metagaming' came into play – one character was a producer which supplied the combat based character, and offered buffing services for friends and myself and others who were unwilling or otherwise didn't want to buy a second account – SWG was a game where musicians and dancers, and medics and others provided combat buffs for other characters, and because skillpoints were limited, there is only so much one guy could do. There were a few RP aficionados that played those type of characters almost exclusively, but they were few and far between, and if you were to only get the services of those characters, you were almost never going to see them if they had to be played exclusively without any combat elements to their gameplay at all.

I then moved to WoW, in which I didn't run with a second account, primarily because there were decent options on there for the number of available alts on one account, and there was very little need to have 2 characters logged in simultaneously, thanks to the options of each character being able to have a couple of tradeskills running alongside the other skills, so the 'buff bots' no longer existed as each character could do a little something with their buffs so between your friends and guildmates you could usually scratch together enough to get you through whatever event was being planned.

Add to the fact that I didn't have the time to train up a second character too far (I even didn't train many alts in WoW beyond level 20) that added to my desire for only 1 character.

And then we come to Eve. Eve is a bit special as it only really allows one character per account (technically, it offers 3, but as only one can train, you may as well just be 1 per account)

Eve also has the longest 'downtime before you can do something' in it's skill training method, in that most games you can play for hours to reach a new level... in Eve, gaining a 'level' in a skill can take days, if not weeks for the more advanced skills. With this in mind, a secondary account to double your training time is a very useful tool indeed. It's not necessarily to do with having enough characters on your account to 'do everything and not have to worry about ever needing to work with others' but I can appreciate that some people see that as a major issue with those who use 2 or more characters.

Most of the time, one character will be ran as a combat character, and another as a hauler or something similar, which can help with tidying up after missions and/or when mining. In fact the miner/hauler duo is the classic 1-2 combination that seems to be used by the masses in Eve. A good other combination is a low-skill combat character for cheap PVP (i.e. someone who wont bankrupt you after a lot of deaths when you get podded with clones for 50 million skill points) along with your 'main' as well as the combination of main and cyno alt – a job which a lot of people don't want to do with their main because of the risk of dying and losing your implants/clones when lighting up the Cyno field, but ultimately provides a very useful service.

Personally, I don't see that as any major issue, and due to the sheer vast number of skillpoints that you may eventually need, some way of making them run in parallel can only be good.

Where I draw the line with alts is when they are used for a significant unfair advantage. I'm not sure if its not allowed, but having a non account alt bid on a contract that you are running to artificially drive up the price is a bit of a low blow for sure, and should be discouraged. Having an alt spy in a corp during a war (the use of which has been hotly debated in the recent Goon / BoB conflicts) is also a bit of a no-no in my eyes, although admittedly a masterstroke of espionage genius – I could only wonder if an implanted spy would work for instance if you were forced to no longer train your other character by forcing you to use one account, especially as the spy would have to be scrapped after the event most likely... that would be a lot of time/skill points down the drain that would take away from your 'main.'

Similar to the espionage issue with alts in a corp, potentially relaying information to enemies, you have the scammers and corp thieves. I don't get along with those in the slightest – there are ways to test your skill against others, but using loopholes in the system, or exploiting people's hopes/fears never sits well with me – maybe I'm just not ruthless enough, I dunno. I just wonder how many scams could have been avoided if someone was forced to no longer train their main character if they were working on a secondary one to carry out the scam, since its very likely that one person who spends their weeks getting integrated into a corp only to steal their assets would use the character a second time, at least if he hoped to be involved in a corp at all in anyway.

In closing – I can't live without my alt, especially in a game where you can only really have one character on the go per account, I like to do too many and varied things to sit and play one rigid character focus forever. Whilst they do slightly promote self sufficiency and reduce teamwork for doing things like mining/hauling its typically the boring non interactive jobs that are carried out on the second account, which you don't usually get volunteers for to help with anyway. Alts are here to stay, and as far as I'm concerned, they are very useful and do not spoil the game at all, aside from one or two examples that I highlighted.

Participants:

Epic Misadventures, This is my Alt - There are many like it but this one is mine.
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, I Missed This Month's Blog Banter!
A Mule in EvE, Meta what? Is it hurting EvE?
Morphisat's EVE Online Blog, Me, Myself and I
One Man And His Spaceship, Me and My Shadow
Ombeve, Blog Banter edition 5
Diving into PsycheDiver's Psyche, CK's Blog Banter #5: Everybody Needs Somebody
Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter
Ecliptic Rift, OOC: Blog Banter #5 Metagaming
The Ralpha Dogs, Me, Myself and I
Mad Rant, "Blog Banter - It's my party, and I'll alt if I want to...."
EVE Chick, The Handicapper General
The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "...you see mate, it's a matter of leverage, savvy?..."
New Eden Diaries, It's only a game
Oz’s House of the Evil Dead, If You Can’t Ride Two Horses At Once, You Shouldn’t Be In The Circus
Diving into PsycheDiver's Psyche, Everybody Needs Somebody

Further Tech 3 and Test Server observations

2009-02-23T08:07:00.004Z

A few little bits and pieces have changed on the test server since I last posted on this blog:

1) Attribute respecification has now been changed to a 'once a year' action. In a way, that's good for the likes of me, as it means I won't now have to worry about skill training in 6 months blocks. I'm still deciding if I want to drop a few points of willpower (my Caldari Civire original character had lots) and increase perception a point or two to get a bit faster training on my combat skills (as perception is usually primary, having a high willpower, which is typically a secondary skill isnt too useful in the grand scheme of things)

I still dont know what to do about my Charisma though - I'm fairly confident in being able to drop it to the 5 point minimum as there simply arent enough charisma based skills to make use of more points, but as I'm saying this, im slap-bang in the middle of a skill plan which has me training those self same charisma skills for my command ships and fleet boosting skills. I'm presuming any lost time I would have now from what I currently have would be made up at a later date through the higher skill point training on the higher use stats. Perhaps I will concentrate on the leadership based skills now and then respec in a month or three when I get them finished, seems to be the best of both worlds.

2) Tech 3 manufacturing seems to be getting a bit 'easier' - whilst theres still no idea how long will be spent resource gathering, it seems that CCP has identified that theres way too much variety in the different gasses, salvage and polymers involved in the manufacturing process and are reducing the number of items that are required. Whilst having lots of 'resources' makes the manufacturing process more in depth (coming from someone who used to manufacture in Star Wars Galaxies where each and every piece of material you got had about a dozen stats which affected the outcome) reducing the number of items involved helps both reduce the database load on the server (a good thing) and logistics/handling for the user (also a good thing) so it gets my thumbs up.

New 'Method' of skill training on the cards?

2009-02-12T13:41:00.003Z

It seems with the talk of respeccing your attributes once every 6 months, there will be a new way of managing your skills - no longer will you be limited to what you can get with implants and skills, but instead you can alter your attributes to get the best training speed in any given 6 month window.

If you want to train ships for instance, you will raise up the Perception and Willpower, and let the other attributes lower, as theoretically, you wont be using them.

This means a couple of things:

1) Old timers will notice the skill gap decreasing as more and more people get the lower ranked skills finished sooner (i.e. instead of training at 1750 sp/min, some people have managed 2500 or more with optimised stats on the test server)

2) People like me who tend to chop and change through skills are going to be disadvantaged if I don't take part in this sort of skill training method, as theres no other way to get such speeds without reducing other stats to compensate. It means I will have to start to think about longer running skill plans, and get what I need from the skills before moving on to something else, as it seems that its only going to be possible to alter the attributes once every 6 months. If you've minimised your intelligence for instance, you better hope you dont need to train an engineering skill in the meantime, as it will be s-l-o-w.

3) The implants market could get affected - people wont need to carry a full head of attribute implants if you're deliberately only concentrating on the skills that 2 attributes can provide. You therefore only need 2 implants at any given time.

It would be quite a nice trick to get a lot of ships and T2 weapon systems trained for nice and quick (perception/willpower based) but it means my Industrial side will stagnate in the meantime. It still remains to be seen if 6 months feels just too long for attribute respecs, but personally, i'd rather see it be fairly time-unlimited (i.e. you can respec once every day or so much like jump clones) but pay an increasing amount per go, until 6 months passes and the costs are reset (or else, you could end up pricing yourself out of changing after doing a few modifications)

More T3 manufacturing info

2009-02-11T16:23:00.003Z

Theres currently a thread on the development forum on Eve asking for feedback on the manufacturing system whilst they seed any new skills and things involved.

First thing that you notice though from the thread is that there is going to be a heavy investment in POS's for manufacturing:

1) A new reactor will be needed for the Tech 3 polymer (from gas/minerals) reactions. This will only be able to be anchored in lowsec according to CCP.

2) Hybrid Components (from the polymers and salvage) can be seemingly manufactured in a station assembly line, or a component array in a POS. Note that with Apocrypha, the component assembly array is going to have its 10% waste material removed so it has a material modifier of 1.0 instead of the current 1.1 - good news for capital producers at the very least.

3) Ship subsystems and hulls need to be manufactured in an outpost (i.e. a 0.0 player station) or in a subsystem assembly array (a new item, which it seems can be fitted to a High Sec POS if required)

4) Reverse engineering (to generate the T3 BPCs) can only be done in a new experiemental mobile lab in a POS (can be anchored in High Sec) or in an Outpost. There will be new (consumable I think) decryptors which will determine the racial outcome, it cant be chosen without some consumable item.

First look at T3 manufacture

2009-02-10T11:37:00.003Z

Firstly, you can see the various blueprints by trying to create contracts to buy them it seems, so theres been some initial postings made of the screenshots.

It seems very similar to Tech 2, making the ships requires the racial starship engineering skill to 4, as well as cruiser construction to 4 (and its pre-requisite, figate construction 4) and mechanical engineering.

The materials themselves call up components similar to the tech 2 components, and very little else (RAM units are required if memory serves correctly)

The components seem to come from a multi stage process:

1) Gas clouds (presumably) are harvested in W-Space, which gives one item.
2) This is combined with base minerals (tritanium et al) in a POS reactor to give a polymer type substance. The reaction was available on the Market.
3) The polymer is combined with salvage from the sleeper rats (presumably) to create the tech 3 components.

There seems to be a reverse engineering skill (similar to invention?) that will create the blueprints. Not sure what you reverse engineer or whatever, but there are 'hybrid tuner interfaces' mentioned and specialist datacores.

Skills required on the blueprints that have been seen are pretty much identical to the skills required to construct tech 2 components.

If these skills will change in the future is unknown, but it does make manufacturing them a bit easier to get into since its nigh on identical to T2 manufacturing. Means finding another POS to create the new reactions, or move away from T2 manufacturing, but suppose theres always pros and cons.

Tech 3 and Apocrypha Exploration - First observations

2009-02-10T08:26:00.004Z

From what I can see from the test centre reports so far (I couldnt get on to test it yesterday, was a bit too busy to log in)

Tech 3 ships have 6 new skills, the basic spaceship skill, and 5 subsystem skills. These subsystem skills need level 5 as a prerequisite from the 'obvious' skills that are linked to it and in some cases, level 3 in secondary skills, for example:

Caldari Propulsion systems (think thats the name) requires Navigation 5, whereas Caldari offensive systems (again, unsure of the name at work) needs Missile Operation 5 and Gunnery 3 (possibly Medium Hybrids, you'd think I'd remember to bring the screenshots with me!) and the defensive subsystem needs Shield Operation 5 and Mechanic 3.

It seems to be fairly well confirmed now that the initial 'skill loss' mechanic is there with the subsystem skills, which are basically rank 1 skills (i.e. approx 5 days to train a level 5 skill) and you lose one level randomly when the ship dies - the subsystem skills seem to require your standard training time (i.e. they dont train independantly to your other skills) so depending on how expensive it is to buy a T3 ship, you could potentially be locked in a training loop if you lose one every 5 days where you are constantly re-training the same skill again - of course chances are that they will be so expensive, if you lose one every 5 days, you'd be bankrupt within a month.

Probing seems to have changed quite a bit - instead of the 'chance based' system, now there is a system involving using multiple probes to triangulate a known point in space. It seems that the new system is fairly clunky at the moment (talk of the icons and UI elements being too big and unwieldy to handle) but it looks promising, but it needs some refinement - for example scan times are now down to 10 seconds, which puts a lot of the previously used scanning skills close to redundant.

Theres talk of revamping the skills and covops bonuses to make them more useful to the new scanning system, so that will be welcomed.

The only downside to the new system seems to be that you can distinguish ship types that you want to find via search filters, but all the 'classic' scan sites are now lumped together under one filter type (cosmic signatures I think theyre called) which means you cant tell a wormhole from a Gravimetric site, from a Ladar site and so on. Would be nice to get that differentiation in under the new system, but theres plenty of test time left, and it has been raised as a concern.

Tech 3 ships and skill loss.... 'Interesting'

2009-02-08T12:03:00.002Z

Said with a very thick accent of sarcasm...

I'm not sure I like the sound of this:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=992740&page=2#55

Specifically, from CCP Chronotis:

Tech 3 ships and the subsystem skill loss mechanic will be detailed by Nozh in his blog which is due out soon. As with everything, things always change before release and when Apocrypha arrives on sisi next week, we can and will be making changes based on feedback there. If it turns out that this mechanic or any other is not working out based on that feedback then we will change it or remove it.

It seems that when you lose a Tech 3 ship, some of the skills used to improve the ship will be lost. This sort of fits in with the 'experience points' system mentioned in Eon, where a T3 ship learns additional bonuses as you use it more and more, but I'm not sure if it meant actual SP, which this now seems to suggest. I presumed it was an additional experience mechanic from using the ship which worked in addition to your usual training - if you have to train up actual skill points to get the most out of the ship, which you have a risk of losing, that could be a real pain, and would seriously reduce the presence of Tech 3 ships in any PVP encounter.

I'm going to re-read the thread since I havent had much chance to read the full lot properly, but i'm eagerly awaiting the dev blog on the subject now.

A Nice bit of T3 Speculation

2009-02-07T11:01:00.005Z

Well it seems that everyone in the blogging community is buzzing about 3 subjects - the BoB/Goons fallout, wormholes, and T3 ships, since they were announced to be going on the test server at the weekend (and hastily pushed back afterwards to Monday of next week I believe)

They have released the names of the 'base hulls' for each of the races, bearing in mind that at initial release there has been confirmed that there will only be a cruiser sized hull available:

The Caldari Varient will be called Tengu
The Amarr Varient will be called Legion
The Gallente Varient will be called Proteus
The Minmatar Varient will be called Loki

These all have a baseline in 'shapeshifting' characters from various myths and legends from Japanese mythology, the Bible, Greek mythology and Norse mythology.

The first batch of T3 test pieces on Singularity will only be Caldari based models (though there will be 4 raical varients, they will all look the same) and much as with the recent QR mods, the test server will be changed a lot, so people who take part will notice many dynamic changes over the weeks to come.

I've got an inkling of which skills may be needed if they are not releasing new skills for the ability to build the ships (flying you can probably guarantee there will be a new skill released) and if its true, I'll need to look into investing in a skill that is fairly expensive at the moment, and is very rarely used - of course, its a bit of a gamble since the skill may come down massively in price once it comes to be more commonly needed and the supply picks up - or I could be completely off base and waste money on a skill I wouldnt have any use for at all.

Not sure how much information is going to be on Sisi over the next few days, but since I always struggle to get it activated and log in (seriously, I've never been on there yet, I can never figure out how to access it) I can only hope that theres enough information posted in the general blog/forum world to get me up to speed.

War is over once again.

2009-02-04T14:06:00.002Z

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have had another crushing victory in our war against Decimus Corp.

After losing only 2 ships ourselves (both frigates) and destroying 5 of theirs (a HAC, a Battleship, a Frigate, a Battlecruiser, and a Hauler they used as bait) the war was declared void due to non payment of expenses early this morning.

In true A Team style... I love it when a plan comes together.

February Update

2009-02-01T13:19:00.004Z

Just thought I'd spend a few minutes before the football local derby match to give a bit of an update on how I'm doing in all things Eve related.

1) Skills:

I've detracted a bit from my plans for a Nighthawk. Battlecruiser 5 is still on the cards, but I've been spending my time training up pre-requisite skills for Recon ships (yay, Falcon) which means I'll be able to get into training up the Recon ships skill in a bit under an hour.

I want to get the skills for an Onyx as well soon, need about 17 days for that according to Evemon to get enough levels in Propulsion Jamming.

I still need to train up the aforementioned Battlecruisers 5, but want to also get into my Hulk (about 35 days give or take), and get enough refining skills to get rid of the really bad returns I get at the moment (only got Refining 4, think I only get about 78% return on my ground down loot drops and mined stuff) by getting Refining 5 and Refinery efficiency.

I also really want to spend some time on my Tech 2 weapon systems training, working on my Hybrid Guns skills and Standard to Heavy missiles.

On top of that, I want to train up Gallente Frigate and Gallente Cruiser 5 to give me a bit of greater flexibility in combat.

2) Guides

I have just rehashed the Weapons and Tanking guides after a flash of inspiration I had last night. In the Weapons guide, I updated to include the missile damage formula that was calculated as a result of testing on Singularity during the QR beta test phase, and explained a bit how it works. In the tanking guide I included a few issues that were discussed between myself and corp mates on spider tanking, as we've been discussing issues relating to it over the past few days.

If anyone wants to see the direct link with all my guides to date, please feel free to go to:

http://eve-files.com/media/corp/Karox/

3) War

We're back at war again. Decimus Corp (DEC-X) have now decided to attack us. Nothing really to report yet, we've been fighting for 3 days, and all they have seemed to do is station hug. We moved to Lowsec to see just how interested they were in PVP, or if they were just the typical highsec griefer corp, and they neglected to follow us, draw what conclusions from that as you will.

So far there has only been one skirmish with losses, which resulted in them losing one HAC and we lost the tackling frigate we used - a good tradeoff as far as I'm concerned. An earlier skirmish brought a few chuckles as one of their pilots was forced to run, screaming in local for help after we decended on him.

And now the match is just about to kick off, so time to go.

Blog Banter 4: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

2009-01-30T16:03:00.007Z

Heres me hoping that i'm the first one to think of the corny music based title, so lets hope :)

January's Blog banter was submitted by Manasi:

"How do we, EVE bloggers, adapt to changes as they are thrust upon us (speed changes, no more ghost training, all the dev blogs, etc), or as our lives make playing the game different (more time, less time)?".

Personally speaking, I've been playing MMO's for a fair few years now from all things relating to Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and of course, Eve. In that time I've seen plenty of 'nerf' patches - at least to the point where to the general populous, the sky appears to be falling in.

With all of these, I tend to play some sort of adaptable 'class type' where I can so if there are any major changes I can learn to adapt and overcome them, learning the new methods of doing things to suit my own personal playstyle - in other words, I tend to just go with the flow and live with most of the changes.

Of course, I'm more than happy to lend support to those voices that ask to get some of the 'harsher' changes dialled down a bit, I would be a fool to simply allow anything to go through uncontested if it reduced my ability to do the things I do in the game world, but I dont threaten to quit and run off in a huff if my personal way of playing is changed drastically, I tend to just take a step back and work out how much time it would take to start a new character if necessary (or in the case of Eve, train something new) and if its not worth my time, I will quite simply just give it a few goes to see how the changes impact me, and if I'm not happy, ill wander off into the sunset and never be seen again (depending of course if friends are also considering the same action, since I tend to just congregate where friends are at/going to)

As for changes in your personal life, I cant say I've got any kids or any of the major time-sappers (demanding wife ;) ) that many people start to get around their thirties, but I have noticed that my available time has changed over these years as well - when I was at University, I could quite happily come in at 2pm from lectures, stick around to midnight and other days spend all day just messing around online.

As time went on, I got a job and started noticing my free time eroding more and more, and now between work and keeping up with my social life, I may find I spend only 2-3 nights playing on the computer.

For that, I have found Eve to be the perfect game - the offline, time-based training doesnt rely on me being online, and when I was playing a xp grinding game, such as WoW I found that I could only really support 1 character with the time I had available (after all, MMO's are made to be time sinks in their own right) so going back to the first point - if I had some major change that affected my character, I was more likely to want to leave if it made the game unplayable, as I didnt want to start again from scratch, and didn't have the time for training 2-3 characters simultaneously.

Couple that with my method of money making (industry/selling stuff in general) being fairly compatible with short online sessions, I have been able to continue to maintain my presence in the game even when I can't log in.

So there we go, another insight into my mind, as crazy and mixed up as it can be at times. Hope you enjoyed it.

Participants:

An old guide updated, and something new

2009-01-28T10:12:00.003Z

As promised in my earlier post, I have updated and re-uploaded the Tanking guide to incorporate some Quantum Rise info and add a few bits / clear up some ambiguity, as well as adding a new guide for Capital Ship Production.

I'm not sure if the Capital Ship guide can be describes as either 'too little information' or 'concise' but it seems to be a bit too short for my likes, however I seem to have covered everything that I need to do for the guide as far as I can think.

This is where you, humble reader, step in. If theres anything that you need more information on, let me know as the guide doesnt go into detailed information on exactly how the production system works in Eve as that was already covered in my Eon article, but I appreciate that many people may not read that, but on the other hand I have to respect the request that was made to me to keep the guide exclusive. As well as that more obvious omission, there could be other isses that I have just forgot about since I do this sort of thing day to day now and the commonality of it all seems to mean that I forget some obvious things that others may need to know.

So let me know if you need any more information.

And after that bit of rambling on, on to the guides:

Tanking, Version 2

Capital Ship Production

The Boring Update (TM)

2009-01-26T13:02:00.005Z

I know, not really the sort of title that will make you jump to read the post, but to be fair, theres nothing much happened to any great deal over the past week or so since I made my last post.

I find it really hard to actually want to undock at the moment, instead i'm treating Eve as a monthly paid chatroom to keep in touch with friends, in between maybe doing 3-4 round trip jumps to go grab materials and blueprints whilst doing research/manufacturing jobs.

Truth be told, I find the stage I'm at in a game the worst bit to get over - I know everyones talked about the 7 month itch many times before, and it might just be that it's come around again (i'm not sure I'll have to check my records since I came back to Eve) but i'm now fairly wealthy (enough to keep me in ships for a while, at least until I start PVPing with them, which is hard to find fleet mates, so never happens) and a decent income from manufacturing in the meantime.

I hate running missions, they're boring and repetative, and aside from grinding standings to work with other factions, there's no real point of them at the moment since my monetary needs are more than covered.

I may go out and do some exploring, since thats what everyone seems to be doing to get ready for tech 3/wormholes but most of the work involved will be skill based, and many people are training up skills on the off chance they will be needed, whereas I dont really have that luxury with a 160 ish day skill plan still in the works.

I'm finally getting back into doing some guides though - I've already amended the tanking guide based on Sumerio's comments from the Eve Uni boards and added a few more updates myself based on Quantum Rise changes, so I hope to post that later today or tomorrow. I'm also going to work on a Capital Ship production guide since I can't produce a Tech 1/Tech 2 production guide on here due to the agreement I have with EON - but I hope everyone who read the Tech 1 guide featured in the latest issue have enjoyed it, and if you have any comments, feel free to message me, im only an Eve-Mail or E-Mail away.

Phew, im glad thats over.

2009-01-15T09:05:00.001Z

Not much of an update today, but best post to just say that I've finally gotten Caldari Cruiser 5, my first rank 5 cruiser skill.

Unfortunately the ships I can access with it at the moment are fairly pitiful at best (OK, maybe I can spring for a Cerberus to give it a go, but its hardly a world changing ship) but its working towards my skills for the Nighthawk I've been aiming for.

I'm now working on Battlecruisers 5, which is another long, boring skill, and then after that, going to work more on Heavy missiles which have been left behind a bit for Cruise training when I moved into my CNR.

Then maybe get back to working on Gallente Frigates, Gallente Cruisers and Gunnery Skills which could end up actually being useful for something in PVP, and maybe also getting back to training up industrial stuff as well, since I've been meaning to get Refining 5 and Refinery Efficiency up a few levels for about oh, 3 months now.

iClone - Really useful little tool

2009-01-07T11:07:00.006Z

Over Christmas, I got my hands on an iPod Touch, which for anyone who doesnt yet know, combines both the functionality of an iPod's music player, with a fully functional PDA style component, which can load external applications from the iTunes store. Its sort of like an iPhone in that regard, it just can't dial out, but it does have wireless functionality if you can find a hotspot.

Theres a few Eve character monitors available on there, such as the excellent Capsuleer - produced, I believe by a blogging colleague, Roc Wielder (apologies if I've misspelled your name) but I have been personally using iClone, which combines a character skill monitor, with a data dump of the latest Eve Database, to include a full market browser, skill browser and other useful tools which I normally can't access when away from the screen.

It's great when I want to quickly check up the base components of any blueprints, and what modules are available for my ships or other items, as well as the requirements they need and so on.

Importing the character data in the first place is a bit complicated, you need to create your character as a 'contact' in a mail programme and synch this contact to your iPod / iPhone via iTunes but it worked first time for me, so I'm not going to complain, reading the forums seems to indicate that a lot of people struggle to get past that stage. I can only presume they arent following the instructions properly, or I've just been very lucky that the import worked fine.

Now all I need is a decent build monitor that works on the iPod (I'm presuming that this can be monitored from the API since EveMEEP does something similar) and i'll be set for all remote checking I could ever need.

Estiah - Card/Turn based online gamey thing

2009-01-05T19:38:00.002Z

I've just recently signed up to Estiah which is a "Magic the Gathering" type of deal where you design your card deck based around your combat strategy and play off against computer or player controlled opponents with similar decks.

This has a bit of a MMORPG/levelling element to it however, and because of the way the game is designed (you get a certain amount of action points every 2 hour session which you can spend or store to do several small sessions, or do one large playthough) makes it perfect to catch up with during your lunch break.

The game is very basic, no real graphics to talk about, its mainly text based, but theres some quite humerous descriptions of things as they happen.

Its entirely free to play, so if anyone is interested in it, feel free to give it a go as well, ideally using my friends code which subsequently helps me level up a bit faster by giving me a portion of XP whenever the people I invite level up themselves.

It might not be the best idea to ask me too many questions about how it all works at the moment, im still learning myself, only been playing with it an hour and used up my initial full day worth of action points really quickly, but the tutorials and FAQ/Wiki seem to give a good bit of insight.

Anyway, if anyone is interested, please feel free to join up using my friends link

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T03:24:00.004Z

Suffice to say, i've had a bit too much to drink, and this post has taken me 4 times to double check to make sure things are spelled right since drink has taken over my main functions, but hope 2009 brings more to you this year than 2008 brought me.

I really need to speak to a certain someone who didnt show up tonight, since she said she was really intrested in coming along to see the new year in....

Guide Consolidation

2008-12-26T16:44:00.005Z

As were fast approaching the end of 2008, I thought i'd better try and consolidate some of the more important infromation on the blog, namely the guides, which I hope have been very useful for those out there in pod-land.

I've been taking some tips and some suggestions for other areas to improve the guides, and most of them are now in version 2 (many thanks to an Eve Uni forums resident, Sumerio Rayej for typing up his ideas and making them easy to fit in with my guides so its just a matter of including his mods, many of which I agreed with, some of those I had to a bit of editorial tweaking to satisfy my own thoughts)

Therefore to help considlidate all your information into one easy to access package, I've deleted a lot of the old version 1 files (subsequently, the earlier links wont work on the blog anymore, so apologies if anyone finds a dead link, I'm going to go and try and remove any old ones to link back to this page, so thats why youre seeing this if you werent expecting it) please find the newest versions of the guides for your viewing pleasure:

Part 1 - Weapons
Part 2 - Tanking (updated to v2)
Part 3 - Drones
Part 4 - Electronic Warfare
Part 5 - POS
Part 6 - Missions
Part 7 - Fleets and Boosting
Part 8 - R&D and Invention
Part 9 - Scanning
Part 10 - Capital Ship Construction (new)

Now... many people will say there are some quite important guides missing from that list, but I don't want to re-write old guides that have no need to be re-done as the resources out there are already considered to be excellent. 2 of the guides I will reference below are those I use myself from time to time, and should be considered one of the best examples I can find out there for the subjects:

Hadala's Mining Guide - Link to Eve Online Forums
Joerd's Exploration Guide - Link to Eve Online Forums

In addition to this, I am not able to provide a production guide as I am currently awaiting my guide being published in the next issue of EON along with a follow up in issue 15 (Issue 14 will deal with Tech 1, Issue 15 will deal with Tech 2 just in time for Tech 3 to be coming out in March) - and because of that, I have promised them that I won't list the guide here. However, if you really can't wait for the EON issues to be published, there are a few things I can do for you:

A verbal guide to Tech 1 manufacture that I gave to Eve Uni (57mb MP3 file)
A Tech 2 component guide (unfortunately I have no idea who produced this, but it is a little incorrect in places)

As well as the in depth guides, I have also compiled some quick reference lists that many may find to be very useful:

An Eve Ships Reference List
Eve Ships in Alphabetical Order (useful for fast threat-identification in the overview)
An Implants List (including pirate and other faction implants, which has been updated for Quantum Rise)

As always, if you want a specific guide produced for any activity, please let me know and I'll look into how practical it could be for me to make it. As well as that, if you have any comments on the guides or want to make any amendments, I'll be happy to listen to you if you want to contact me by email, the address is in my profile.

Have a good remainder of 2008, and good luck with whatever challenges 2009 may bring.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T00:07:00.001Z

The clock has just ticked past midnight here in jolly old England, so let me wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

May your future endeavours be bountiful.

Confusing Market Activity

2008-12-24T10:19:00.004Z

First off, let me say Merry Christmas for everyone out there (or if you dont support Christmas, then have a good time anyway) since I missed the blog banter entry, mainly because I was crazy busy with work stuff at this time of the year (working in the power industry means that it takes a bit longer to get everything prepared for the time off for christmas to make sure theres adequate backup/response in case things do go wrong, and even though I was supposedly on holiday, I had quite a few emails to respond to/phone calls to answer during the day)

Anyway, now thats over and done with, just a quick note to see if anyone else has noticed any really strange market activity lately ?

I'm not going to reveal the details (I'm hoping its going to be a nice way to make some money) but one of the key ingredients for a tech 2 blueprint I'm making is now priced on the open market at one trade hub at much lower costs than it takes to manufacture. Im used to this with mission drop modules of course, people constatly undercut each other to offload the module at the best price for them, even if it means selling it for less than it costs to make it, since they didnt have to actually make it - but this particular module doesnt drop anywhere, at least where I know anyway.

The module is now about 250k less than what it used to sell at, and about 20k less than it costs to make it.

Its good for me of course, I can just buy them for my tech 2 manufacturing and not have to worry about making any, which saves me time and headaches, and if im lucky, I can move them a few regions away and sell them back on with the 250k markup in a region where there hasnt been massive undercutting and then rake back in a bit of money.

The really confusing thing isnt that its just one or two modules, its numbers in the 500-1000 range, and buying them all up would basically commit my entire wallet to it, so im just testing the waters for now to see if they sell.

Could be a nice little christmas present to me if it goes well... if not... then my tech 2 manufacture has gotten a touch cheaper, though im sure it will be more than offset by the increase in price in ferrogel and the other high end reaction minerals once my existing stocks run out.

The 7 Facts Meme - continued

2008-12-16T22:55:00.004Z

Seems that I have been tagged by Ombey so best get my bit in before work kicks in tomorrow.

Firstly, the small print:

Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Some (probably less than interesting, but you never know) facts about me:

1) My birthday is the same day as my uncle, who isnt very famous as far as I can gather, but also Tina Turner, who is a bit more famous, or so I've been told.

2) I've never been out of the UK on a recreational visit, and the furthest I've been on business is to Italy, so im strictly European.

3) My work however, has me dealing a lot with customers in the Middle East - yet I've never been there to visit the sites I help build.

4) The town I live in has had quite a few celebrities live in it - classically, the ancestors of George Washington (the American President) and also Brian Ferry of Roxy Music fame. Also it seems that Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand was raised there when he was very young. Our most 'infamous' celebrity export seems to be Heather Mills though (Paul McCartney's ex wife)

5) As well as my work, I voluntarily run (Treasurer and Bar Licensee) a Community Centre, which keeps me usually more busy than I can imagine at times.

6) I put on a fair bit of weight at university (the before and after pictures are scary sometimes when I look at them) and I really cant shift it back off again since then... its strange though as my weight never really changes otherwise, it hardly goes up either since I left university.

7) The most uncharacteristic thing I've ever done is voluntarily pay £100 at very short notice to do a bungee jump for charity (a friend of mine was doing it, he managed to get sponsorship, which was the main intention of the day, but I had a bit of a daredevil moment and ponied up the cash on the day to take part) - It's uncharacteristic as i'm petrified of heights, and can't even climb a ladder unless it's secured and won't wobble.

Now comes the hard Part, finding 7 bloggers to link to... most of my regular reads have been linked to already, but for the sake of trying to find someone whos not been linked with (and I hope people havent linked them since I put this post up:)

(OK, the last one is a bit of a naughty one, since he's already been linked, but its only fair I include him, hes been commenting on a lot of my posts recently, and the other blogs I follow that don't comment on my posts as much had already been mentioned)

(Unfortunately the commenting on their blogs to inform them will have to wait until tomorrow morning, as it's getting a bit late now, so if you notice your name on here, please link back to it)

Email address for you to get in touch

2008-12-15T14:13:00.003Z

I've decided to end another bit of anonymity and get myself a publically accessible email address for people to get in touch with me if they want to.

I can now be reached via karoxlominax@googlemail.com if you ever wish to send a mail, and my email address is available now via my profile at the side.

Hopefully I wont get spammed too much.

Is the T2 market going to be rocky for a while ?

2008-12-11T08:07:00.002Z

Seems that sometime over the past couple of days, there has been speculation that has rocked the very fabric of the T2 industry within Eve - and the problem is no one seems to know if its real or not, CCP won't confirm it, all they will say is that 'we have identified an exploit with POS mechanics'

It seems that since day 1 of the new POS mechanics (4 years ago now or thereabouts) there has been a problem with the reaction system on a POS - by doing certain actions it was possible to break the POS chain of input/reactor/output so that an output silo could be filled with only a minor load of moon minerals/simple reactions - basically the input materials weren't consumed, and the ouput kept on repeating every hour with 1 hour's worth of minerals in the input.

There has been suggestions that 3 major alliances stockpiled the high value R64 moon minerals (or more specifically, their simple and complex reaction counterparts that use those moon minerals) and have basically commanded the market value for those 4 years.

Suggestions were made that as much as 3,000 Billion Isk profit was made by 1 alliance from this 'making money from nothing' exploit which funded Titan projects, outposts and also gametime for those that were involved, basically meaning they got to play Eve for nothing, as they generated the isk to buy their gametime essentially from thin air (or more technically, vacuum)

Other calculations suggested that if this was fully exploited it would have the chance to generate around 406 Billion Isk over the 4 years per POS that was exploiting, but that was a very unrealistic estimate as no one would be expected to be able to sell that much material constantly - but it could explain why things like freighters were found full of moon reaction minerals in the middle of captured POSes during wars.

What will this mean for the man on the street - well, once this exploit hole has been cleared up, it's very likely that the amount of output minerals will drop (as theres apparently no way to get the same amount of input to maintain the same level of output using legitimate moon mining methods, due to the limited number of moons available) which will lead to price rises.

It already happened yesterday, there was mass market panic buying of the moon minerals involved, either for people to stockpile in case of massive price rises, or people who were buying and reselling at a mark up.

Whilst theres some indication of truth to the issue by CCP stating that they have identified and are in the process of fixing the exploit (and removing the POSes which exploited as well as the accounts) many of the more paranoid members who remember the T20 incident are simply stating that this is another 'internal corruption' issue where CCP were in on the deal, and their game-playing alts were involved in an attempt at massive market manipulation to raise the price of their stockpiled minerals to make a profit (for the record, the T20 incident, whilst I wasnt around at the time was to do with a CCP employee using his GM powers to create an unfair advantage for himself and possibly his corp)

The fallout from this should be interesting to watch over the next few days, but if you have your heart set on getting a nice new T2 toy (especially a ship, since they utilise every type of moon minerals somewhere in their components) it might be worth getting it sooner rather than later, at least if you believe the market hype.

Guide Part 9 - Scanning and Probing

2008-12-08T14:48:00.004Z

This is the 'non exploration themed' guide to scanning and probing - i.e. using the ship scanner and recon probes to find PVP targets.

I hope it helps those who are interested in getting up close and personal with those you want to find out in the vastness of space.

Find the guide linked here

A Quick personal update on progress

2008-12-05T08:36:00.003Z

Seems I've not done much in here this week, so best end the drought with a quick update on progress, whilst im working on the next guide.

I'm currently training Weapon Upgrades 5, which is due to finish early tomorrow, towards my goal of having command ships, now that I have finally begun to understand the leadership/gang boosting mechanics.

Ultimately I want to get a Nighthawk as a mission running ship, and as a consequence, I will also get the skills required to pilot Heavy Assault Ships whilst training, which I had planned but wasn't really working towards.

In addition to that, I am training leadership skills side by side to get at least level 4 in all of the base leadership skills, but ultimately, I want to get Mining Director, to pilot the Orca, and Siege Warfare Specialist so I can equip my Nighthawk with a Shield Harmoizing gang link to overcome the inevitable loss of a hardener I'll probably have when equipping a target painter in my mission ships.

Of course, for the gang link to have any benefit, it means that I will have to run my alt account at the same time to get the gang bonus effects active, so that character is training up the skills to use my Navy Raven effectively to provide the damage output for the big ships in missions, and the skills for salvaging and tractoring for if the mission is fairly easy, the alt can just sit there cloaked up and start salvaging when I'm flying Karox back to complete the mission.

Now I know this is a very specialised setup looking towards something that I don't get much enjoyment out of anyway (I'm sure many people will notice the underlying boredom involved with missions) but on the other hand, I don't particularly enjoy work either, it's just there to pay the bills, and Eve missions are treat in the same way - getting it over as quickly and painlessly as possible to get the cash to use to do whatever else I want to do.

My alt has Caldari transport ships trained up now, and is at the point where I now decide if I'm going to go train up for a Charon freighter, which would basically wipe out my entire cash reserves if I decided to buy the skills and the ship (Advanced Spaceship Command and Caldari Freighter) but its a very tempting prospect. I really want Karox's Orca as well though just to have the new toy to play with, even though thats a whole lot longer away.

Karox will have to train up mining barges to get the Orca in the process, so it's a natural process to move on to Exhumers soon after that, so I might finally get some use of the Hulk I made a few months back and didn't sell (sentimental value as my first self-made T2 ship) but of course, if I do fly an Orca, I wont have any use of the Exhumer skill either. Ultimately though, I think an Exhumer and my Alt's Transport Ships will be the primary 1-2 combination for solo mining if I decide to follow that path - again, not something i'm really interested in, but it could help to get the money rolling in.

Mission Guide (Part 6 Version 2)

2008-12-02T15:05:00.002Z

After a bit of discussion on the Eve Uni boards, I have been given a few pointers for interesting things to include in the Missions guide, and had a few other ideas myself, so along with the help of Sumerio, I have re-written the mission guide.

Feel free to discard the earlier one, and use this one instead. It has some very handy links in the document that can be helpful for anyone making a career out of running missions, and also includes some of the more advanced tricks such as farming highly valuable missions for optimum cash.

The new file is linked here

I will offer the same deal to anyone out there I've offered to the Eve Uni boards, if you can find some corrections in the guides, please let me know and ideally take my text and modify the file to suit the corrections and I'll make sure you're credited with the amended work. Whilst I like to think I have a good grounding in all of the subjects I discuss on these guides, many people out there are specialists and know a lot more than me on specific subjects, so I'll always defer unless somoene tells me some blatantly false information.

Blog Banter 2 - November 2008 Edition

2008-11-26T20:51:00.005Z

It's time once again for a few lines from everyone who is participating in the Eve blogging community to get their voices heard on a specific subject - i.e. its time once again for blog banter.

This months question asks: What drew us into EVE, what keeps us playing the game and what brought us back if we've ever left?

All 3 points seem to apply to me (having left and come back), so I'll answer them all in sequence.

1) What drew me in? I'd have to say it was a desire to have a good Scifi based game that reminded me of Elite / Frontier after finding one or two 'Elite Clones' just couldnt capture the vastness of space that I was used to with that. Along with the fact that a fair few of my WoW playing friends also played Eve gave me some people to ask for their opinions on the game, and also good starter pointers when I did get there. I can remember going to a friends house on our yearly get-togethers and seeing the game, listening to Eve Radio in the background and just generally liking the look of it. I really liked the 'train whilst offline' approach to skilling up, since I was still in WoW at the time as well, and didn't really want to get involved with 2 sets of boring repetative grinds.

2) What keeps me here... It's still a question I struggle to answer. After all, I've not logged in except to change skill training over for the best part of 3-4 days now, but the thing that keeps me interested is the potential. I love the idea of everything being player-ran where possible, the politics involved, the way that someone completely random can become a big figure in the community. I've not felt anything like that since the last 'open world' game I played - Ultima Online.

I like to keep in touch with friends too, but except for one guy who has recently returned, all my old WoW buddies have left Eve to never return shortly after I left last time (about a year and a half ago now) so I lost touch with friends there, and to compound the issue, I recently left the corp I had been in since I started in Eve because it was coming more and more deserted as time went on, and I found that I was finding less and less reason to log in. I joined Eve Uni about a month ago now to try and rekindle my love of the game, teach those newcomers who want to learn and generally make some new friends.

Unfortunately, I have to say I'm struggling with that at the moment, everyone in Eve Uni is civil for certain, but I'm struggling to find the cameraderie I had with my old corp, since Eve Uni is all about people who could leave at short notice, and only long term residents tend to get to know each other - especially those who do make friends all tend to leave together, so unless you can get into a 'clique' its hard to get well known. Add to the fact that no one ever openly reveals information in there due to the constant threat of spies, it's hard to get to sit down and just chat with people to get to know them. I'm hoping with time, I can find the same feeling with Eve Uni that I used to feel when I logged in during the good times with my old corp.

3) What brought me back... I mentioned this on the last blog banter - I was tempted by Ambulation. It was something I had always hoped would come about after it was mentioned before I left last time, and when I noticed that it was on the horizon (after seeing it mentioned on a few gaming forums I visit) the 'hunger pangs' came back. I thought after a year away, perhaps I would give it another go.

There we are - a bit short and to the point I'm afraid for this one, I've been a bit too busy with other things than to concentrate too hard on Eve at the moment, it's always the same near the end of the year, but I hope it's been a nice read for those who are interested.

Participants:

CrazyKinux's Musing: EVE Blog Banter #2: Space, the Final Frontier...

Ombeve: OOC Blog Banter 2

The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: Internet Spaceships is Serious Business

Semper EVE: The Allure of EVE

A Merry Life and a Short One: EVE Blog Banter #2 - This Is My Time

Life in Low Sec: Blog Banter #2: EVE's Enduring Allure

Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Eve Blog Banter - What Drew Me Into Eve?

Roc's Rambling: Blog Banter #2: Staying in Power

Sahirs Journey: EVE Blog Banter #2

Diving into PsychDiver's Psyche: EVE Blog Banter #2: All I Ever Wanted To Be Was A Capsuleer

Achernar: Just gathering intel

Sweet Little Bad Girl: Blog Banter #2

The Ralpha Dogs: The Appeal of the Never-Ending Story

A Mule in EVE: Mule Psychology : EvE Style

A Misguided Adventure: Blog Banter - Enduring Allure

One Man and His Spaceship: Blog Banter 2 - November 2008 Edition

Letrange's EVE Blog: That Banter Thing

Diary of a Space Jokey: EVE Blog Banter: How'd I get here ?!

Guide Part 8 - R&D and Invention

2008-11-24T12:46:00.003Z

Here's the next installation of the continuing guide.

After seeing a lot of requests from people in Eve Uni who were interested in Invention, I've penned this guide as a nice reference point.

Of course, I hope everyone has some benefit from it as well.

Click the link to get the guide itself

Guide to Industry - now with stuffy voice

2008-11-21T21:43:00.003Z

I made a voice recording of my first class with Eve uni - I've not re-listened to it, so there could be some really obvious bits that have been messed up, but on the other hand, those that listened in seemed to follow the chat fine, so I'm hoping its good.

Here's the recording of the file for any and all.

Hope it proves useful to some people, and enjoy. By the way, I'm full of cold so sounded really stuffy and had to take a break from the mic every now and again to avoid coughing like crazy over the voice comms.

Quantum Rise Implants List

2008-11-18T10:51:00.002Z

I've updated the implants list from a few posts back with the new slot numbers for the speed mods, plus the updated stats on the Slave implants.

As well as that, I have also added in the other faction implants (ORE, Thrukker etc) since they hadn't had anywhere near as much info out on there as they should have had.

The updated file can be found by following this link

Enjoy.

Guide Part 7 - Understanding Fleet Mechanics

2008-11-18T10:20:00.002Z

This is one of the areas I had very little understanding in until recently, where I have been researching and begining to understand the complexity.

With this in mind, I'm sure that there's many others who are still as confused at this as I once was, so perhaps the new guide will help medium term players as well as the new starters.

Details are here

Theres a bad moon on the Rise

2008-11-13T08:02:00.004Z

OK aside from a bit of a classic song reference, it seems that the Eve Uni has recieved its first war dec since Quantum Rise.

Should be nice to give a good look-see into how the new frigate combat systems work since they have been 'improved' with the patch and personally, I'm looking forward to it since I've never seen the uni war machine in full swing yet.

It's a bit annoying for me, as I hadn't set up my base of operations up in Caldari space yet, so I frantically went around buying ships and modules this morning in preparation, I just hope I've got time to move everything to a suitable location before the war starts late tonight UK time.

I'm not going to go into details of the war target and suchlike (I'm still not quite sure on what I'm not supposed to say in such a beurocratic organisation compared to what I'm more used to, i.e. small groups of friends) but no doubt the official words will be coming sooner or later from the appropriate people.

Gotta get around to setting up my account on the uni voice comms system and the like tonight, see if I can find someone with a freighter that has room to move a lot of bought stuff, and buy a few more throwaway ships (I've mainly been buying some of the more exotic things this morning, the cheap and cheerful will be done tonight after work) and re-set my clone, since I dont want to end up back in the middle of Minmatar space if I get killed which is what would happen.

Fun fun fun.

Certificates

2008-11-12T11:54:00.002Z

I logged in this morning to the nice new Quantum Rise splash screen filled with anticipation for the new system.

First thing I tried was to recover my certificates to see just what I had qualified for in CCP's eyes for 'piloting certificates' to determine how I fit in with the grand scheme of how the game creators view 'what you should fly to do this task'

I was a little disappointed, I only achieved generally level 1 certificates in most things, and maybe level 2 in some, but looking into the requirements to get the certificates, it asks for a lot of superfluous skills which are fairly hard to come by and are usually left for tweaking your character to get the most out of them.

To me, that should be the 'elite' level skills only - a very competent pilot who is specialised in one particular area (or has loads of skill points to spread around) - but somoene who has about a year and a quater or so of training behind them doesnt seem to have stepped off the first rung of the CCP training ladder just because I dont want to get level 5 in all my shield tanking skills and suchlike.

OK, I'll admit, I've hardly been focused in training, but for someone who can solo a level 4 missions, surely they must rank higher in CCP's view than someone who's only at stage 1 of their training plan ?

I know that ultimately the training certificates are just fluff that look nice and don't correspond directly with anything in game, but I was slightly disappointed when I only got the low level certs after thinking that I was more than competent at the things I can do well (level 4 missions, and industrial production, though I'm not quite sure how much notice is taken on the industry side of things other than the 'harvester' tree which includes mining and refining too, which I am not very skilled in by my own admission)

Guide Part 6 - Mission Running

2008-11-07T12:29:00.003Z

Part 6 of the guide focuses on one of the most basic money making methods in the game, the mission runner.

This guide is meant as an overview of the system, not a specific guide to completing the missions, however look at the end for a link to an out of game system called Eve Survival if you are not aware of the website, which can only be described as the discerning mission runners closest ally.

This Guide has now been updated

A few minor corrections & a new file

2008-11-05T10:38:00.003Z

With thanks to an intrepid band of proof readers, I've had a few corrections and amendments to my guides pointed out.

I've re-jigged the POS guide (part 5) to amend the amount of fuel held in the fuel bays

Get It Here

I've corrected some spelling mistakes on the Ships guide, and added Capital ships

Get It Here

I've added an implants guide - note that this will change with the release of Quantum Rise as some of the implants will be changed so that they can't be speed-stacked

Get It Here

Note that page 6 of the implant list PDF includes the Pirate Implants for anyone who is interested in seeing what they can do.

Back to school again

2008-11-04T08:05:00.002Z

I've joined up with Eve Uni as of last night to try my hand at teaching, it may as well go hand in hand with the massive project of guides production I've set my mind to.

I'm still finding my feet with the massive information overload that always comes with getting into brand new forums and finding my way around, but so far, it looks nicely organised even if it takes me 3 links to find something by going to the wrong place twice (you know, it was sort of like that for me in real uni too for the first week or so)

I've got to present a speech based class in order to cement my place which should be an interesting task, since I'm ususally fairly quiet in speech chat simply because of my accent (proud Mackem, or one of the various derivatives of North East England for anyone who doesnt understand the term) so most people who arent local really struggle to understand me when I'm speaking - its why I learned to type really fast.

Anyway, I'll have to try and think of a way to make the class a bit more unique for me rather than just doing 'same old same old' so that should be another interesting challenge in itself.

More updates as I get more accustomed to the new place.

Guide Part 5 - An overview of the POS

2008-11-03T15:18:00.004Z

POS's are generally myserious beasts for those that do not understand them. I hope this basic guide can go some way to raising the general level of understanding on the subject.

This Guide has now been updated

I have very little practical experience with a POS beyond day to day use in lowsec, so there could be some errors with the 0.0 uses, so if there is anything really obvious I've missed, let me know.

Guide Part 4 - Electronic warfare

2008-10-31T12:32:00.003Z

I have uploaded the fourth part of the guide, the subsection on electroinc warfare, discussing everything from ECM to target painters, as well as the classics - warp disrupters, energy vampires and webs.

You can find it here

Theres still no one come forward interested in helping me fiddle with the layout and making it look nice, so I can only presume that there's little interest, but what I'm more interested in now is finding out if these have been any use for people. Are they too wordy and don't give enough maths on how things work? Is there not enough emphasis placed on the skills that are more important than the effects ? I am doing this for no reason as it's just covering old ground ?

Answers on a postcard please (or just reply if you want to save the cost of a stamp)

Blog Banter – Ambulation

2008-10-29T06:50:00.005Z

Blog banter is a project that was proposed a little while ago where a lot of the blogs post about something specific, just to get everyone's feelings on that topic together at the same time to promote discussion and see where people's opinions lie. The first of these are to be published on the following subject: Ambulation. What are your hopes for your avatar and new functionality of stations?

If I'm honest, the prospect of Ambulation was what brought me back to Eve after all those months away after reading about it on a few gaming websites. I'm sill looking forward to it, but I'm struggling to see just how it would fit in with the world we have all been used to for so long.
I like exploring, seeing something new as much as possible, so the thought of finally getting to see the inside of those stations rather than just the docking bay had me salivating, especially as I had been playing Mass Effect recently before coming back to Eve, and the indoor scenes in that were very well done.

I do believe that it will just be a testing ground for CCP's 'real world' MMO (possibly something in conjunction with White Wolf in their World of Darkness theme which are what all the rumours seem to be pointing to) but on the other hand, if it adds something and lets them get the kinks out of the system by offering the Eve players something for free, then who am I to argue, after all you won't be forced to get out of your ship if you don't want to as far as I'm aware.

To answer the first part of the question – what are your hopes for your avatar. I want to see a nice and varied list of clothing, I definitely don't want to see everyone looking the same, and whilst I expect the avatars to appear different in line with their racial look that you can pick up from the current portrait avatars we have, I would have hoped that you could dress in a clothing style entirely to your own liking, for example to dress in Minmatar style clothing whilst being a Caldari avatar.

To answer the second part – functionality of stations, I would prefer it if there were no big yellow exclamation marks anywhere. I can't stress this enough. It seems to be the defacto way to announce that someone has something to say to you, but it's been overused. It would be nice if you have a terminal at the docking bay which acted as a mail client which also let people speak to you directly if you didn't want to meet them in person, or alternatively give you notice they wanted to see you – then you could go and speak to them directly. A portable system could be used to announce new messages (basically just increasing the functionality of the current eve-mail system in game)

I want to definitely see lots of eye candy – not the big boobed under-dressed variety (though I'm sure there will be options out there for this for anyone who's interested) but plenty of variety in the rooms you can visit. I'm not sure how possible that's going to be with system limitations, but I dont want to see every Minmatar station being generic for instance.

Casinos should make an appearance. There are systems in game at the moment to play casino games via third party applications, but it would be nice to get those programmed into the game properly, and CCP should work in conjunction with the better known casino operators to get the systems they use in game, perhaps linked across all systems to a central server which handles all the games going on at once.

As for communicating with others, that's my main hope for Ambulation. It would be nice for each room in a station to have a local voice chat channel where you could log into the Eve voice system and chat openly with others. NPC's in rooms should speak to you using voice acting, but due to limitations in bandwidth it would have to be saved to the hard drive during the install, so conversations will be limited of course. Open chat using text will exist of course, but I'm not sure how 'spammy' that will be in order to maintain the feeling of a real environment where there could be hundreds of people on a station, and maybe 10-20 of them are player controlled – of course in the thriving player populated systems where there are 300 or more players active, then transmitting all that data to that many clients will be very lag-inducing.

I can see there being a lot of system limitations in comparison to the ideal in my eyes, but if CCP can include all of these, in my eyes they will have created the perfect first person aspect of the client.

I know that some people will want combat in stations. I don't believe it will happen in the first iteration of the system, but it would be nice to include it in some way. Of course, you should be safe in the dock in your ship if you really want to avoid that opponent of yours, but as long as wars are sanctioned then it should be possible to attack opponents. If you carry out a criminal action without sufficient call to do so, you should also be attacked by the authorities. I'm not sure how to incorporate this, as I don't think an Eve FPS game is the way to go, but on the other hand, it does work quite well in Mass Effect so it can be something to think about in the future.

To see what the other participants have said about this subject (at the time of writing, some of the posts are in the planned stage so may not all be visible yet) check out the info below:

CrazyKinux's Musing: Exotic Dancers, Corporate Meetings & more

The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: Ambulation - what I hope to see

Semper EVE: Ambulation and Me

Roc's Ramblings: Blog Banter #1 - Ambulation

The Ralpha Dogs: Ambulation/Walking in Stations: A "Second Life" for EVE?

Drunk in Space: Look at how much weight he put on…
Diving into PsycheDiver's Psyche: Ambulation and Her
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Eve Blog Banter - Ambulation

I am Keith Neilson: Going For A Stroll Through EVE

Life in Low Sec: Ambulation Fantasies

Shahirs Journey: Hopes for Ambulation

A Mule in EVE: Ambulation

Protosolus: EVE: Gawking in Stations
One Man, One Ship: Ambulation
Achernar: Avatars in a spaceships game
The Shard: Ambulation
Mad Rant: Saturday Night Fever
I May Find Peace Within The Emptiness…: Walking Around…

Eon/Eve Store Update

2008-10-28T16:42:00.003Z

I've been contacted by Ian from MMMPublishing once more, he's been more than helpful in trying to resolve the issue, but after being given assurance that the magazines have been despatched, I have a horrible feeling that the blame lies with the British postal service.

A few weekends ago, no one in the local street seemed to get any post on Saturday, and based around the despatch date it seems that the magazines could be tied up with that.

I'm not sure where to go about complaining to the Royal Mail now about it, since it seems to be their fault, and I'm waiting to see if MMMPublishing can give me any proof of postage so I can wave it in the faces of the post office staff and ask for compensation.

In the meantime, MMMPublishing has offered to send me second copies of the magazines which I am very greatful for, and just want to once again promote their responsiveness and good service that I've been given in the blog - you truly do get great service from the smaller outfits. With luck, I get my magazines I need, and then can also get some compensation from Royal Mail for the first mess up they gave me so I can see about sending more money their way.

Moon mineral rebalancing soon it seems

2008-10-28T16:38:00.003Z

Seems that it will be easier to get the rarer moon minerals soon - it's going to be possible to combine lower category ones together to produce higher category ones (at a fairly poor exchange, sort of 20:1 or so)

If it's going to be worth it financially is another matter, as it could go one of two ways - increased demand on the lower minerals raises the price, or the lower demand of the higher minerals drops the price. Suppose its a wait and see game.

See the Devblog on the subject

Eve Store - A bit Off topic, but need to rant.

2008-10-27T13:26:00.005Z

Is there anyone out there who has ordered anything from the new eve store ?

I placed an order for some back issues of Eon magazine and after going through the motions (and only being able to order 1 item at a time thanks to the lousy interface) chose a 4 issue subscription since it's said that you can order 4 issues at once through that if you choose for instance issue 1, you will get sent issues 1 to 4.

Upon attempting to process the order, I got a failed message, stating that the server couldn't be contacted, and to try again later. After waiting 10 minutes and trying again, I got the same message so gave up on it as a bad idea.

Fast forward a week later, and I recieved my credit card bill, with 2 transactions on it from the Eve store.

Email sent to them to try and gather what has happened, and without getting a response from CCP or whoever runs the store, I recieved a forwarded email from Ian in MMMPublishing (those who produce Eon) to say to me that they had recieved the payment details, but as the request came through without any other info, they couldn't access it to process.

After explaining that they were happy enough to send me 8 issues instead of the 4 I had ordered (as the 2 payments had come through) they couldn't cancel one or refund it as there was no order number attached to send back to CCP to get them to refund the card.

Ultimately, I had wanted to eventually buy the 12 back issues in 3 blocks of 4 that I had missed out on to date so I was happy enough to accept the 2 sets of 4, but what worries me is what would have happened if I had kept on trying to process the payment and had 5, or even 10 payment requests on there. It seems I would have struggled to get a refund on the unrequired payments, and personally think it's a rather shoddy practice. It's making me worry about placing the order for the other 4 issues I need. It seems that MMMPublishing, though they have been very helpful in progressing the matter are a bit limited in that they can only process orders received through the eve store, which I have reservations about using again.

I'm still waiting for the 8 issues to be sent out to me, 10 days after I was told they would be despatched now they know who the order is for, which is a bit of a long time considering the amount that is charged for delivery when normally you would expect only 3 to 5 days, but I know that MMMPublishing is busy trying to process the EON13 shipments at the moment so I'm not too worried that it's taking so long, but hopefully soon I will hear from them and be able to make a decision over getting the remaining 4 issues.

Anyone else had any experience with the Eve store (new or old) and had any other issue with them, or have I just had a (hopefully) rare bad experience ?

Drones - small and deadly

2008-10-27T13:23:00.003Z

Part 3 of the continuing guide is on the benefits of using drones in their various forms.

From combat drones to specialist drones such as electronic warfare, mining and logistics, they all have a use to almost every pilot out there.

Part 3 of the guide is linked here

Guide Part 2 and Bonus

2008-10-22T16:07:00.003+01:00

I've had a few days with getting the next installment of the guide produced, unfortunately work has been fairly hectic over the last couple of days. I've now uploaded part 2, on the joys of not blowing up, or more commonly known as ways to tank damage.

As a bit of a bonus (because I've not worked out where im going to incorporate it yet) I've also enclosed a spreadsheet for a ready reckoner list of the subcapital combat ships which are available at the moment.

It doesn't go into detail on all of the ships available, as there aren't entries for all of the faction ships, or the Logistics cruisers (I'll get around to them soon I hope) but in a game that relies as extensively on threat level recognition based on the type of ship your opponent is flying, it can be quite a handy reference.

Links are below for those who are interested:

Part 2 - Tanking

Eve Ship Reference List

Post 50 - The big one...

2008-10-17T16:51:00.006+01:00

As promised in my last post, I'm starting on a fairly lengthy process to keep me entertained, and it's to write a guide to almost everything to do with Eve.

These individual guides will be produced as quick as I can find time to get them done (weekends are unlikely, and weekdays will be based around workload) but I've finished the first part - weapon systems of Eve.

I've got plans for future guides on Drones, Tanking, Electronic Warfare, the Market, Scanning and Probing, running a POS, hauling and industrial ships, and also with luck I can include my industry guide I've submitted for EON (though for the benefit of the magazine, I may wait a few weeks until the next issue has been released so as to not ruin it for them) as well as many more.

I'm always looking for interesting things to write about, so if you want to suggest a topic, let me know so I can research it a bit and try it out just incase its something I've not got much practical experience in.

These guides are way too big to be put into a blog post, so I'm linking them on Eve Files as PDF files, so for those that have OCD collection disorder, feel free to grab em for posterity.

Now... these are fairly amateurish, I'm not too good with too many fancy graphics and layouts etc, I'm just wordy, so if anyone wants to help with that and go into joint collaboration, feel free to get in touch either by replying here or sending me an evemail in game, and we can work out a way to get it going ... unfortunately theres no money involved, im just doing this as a project to stave off the boredom, but you get a chance to get your name in joint-lights.

Without further ado - Please find Part 1 of Karox's Guide to Almost Everything in Eve - Weapon Systems

This link has now been updated with a new guide

Coming soon, Post 50 Extraveganza

2008-10-16T22:57:00.002+01:00

Just thought I'd drum up a bit of interest before I go ahead and begin to write it, but to celebrate my 50th post in the blog, I'm going to look into publishing a lengthy guide on pretty much everything I've learned about piloting a ship, which modules do what, and so on, published over several following posts.

You're now reading post number 49... so coming up next (presuming I can get it done before my mind wanders too much and I write something else) is the start of hopefully a long series of reference points, that are useful for all, even those grizzled old vets among us.

It's all part of the service of being a Jack of all trades, I've got a bit of experience in a whole lotta stuff, and may as well pass on the knowledge.

Hope you enjoy it...

Increase in new bloggers and change in here

2008-10-16T11:26:00.007+01:00

There has been a massive influx of new bloggers recently, and the Eve Blogroll is now up to over 110 unique blogs I think, and more are usually added every week.

Make sure you either read the browser based link on CrazyKinux's blog (the specific post is linked to the side) or put the OMPL link from Ga'len's blog into your handy-dandy reader software to keep up to date with posts as they happen (again, see the link to the side).

Some of these have only been posting for less than a month, but their few posts are fairly frequent, and very generally very amusing or informative, and well worth a quick scan through in your lunch break or whatever you do when you are generally not playing Eve.

I've also decided to enable anonymous comments once more on my blog - I originally only allowed those with Google accounts to reply, but it's limiting those who dont want to register from having their say. Half the problem is keeping potential spam bots away and/or 'undesirables' (i.e. those that will reply with inflamatory comments for no particular reason) so i'll keep an eye on things and may move back if it's necessary.

Where do you live ?

2008-10-16T08:39:00.003+01:00

OK I'm not asking for a grid reference or postcode, in a creepy stalker-like way, but rather where in the universe of New Eden do you live? Maybe no need to be really specific, in case of possible threats of violence for those that want to track you down (thats what locator agents are for to be honest) but I've got a theory that several of the bloggers are Gallente/Minmatar based, since a lot of the blogs seem to discuss systems that I spend a lot of time in or around (Gulfnoodi, Eifer, Ammamake, Oursalert or whatever its called and Dodixie)

I'm based in Minmatar space at the moment, having moved down at an early age from Caldari Space to travel to the Metropolis region, and into Heimatar based around Hek, Eystur and Altrinur when I joined the corp I've been in since day 2 or 3 since I started.

Since then, we have moved away from an industrial focus (Altrinur was our main focus area for mining due to it's abundance of asteroid belts) and moved more towards missioning and combat, so focusing more on the Republic Fleet, which meant moving our HQ to Gulfnoodi in Molden Heath with access to level 2 through to 4 agents specialising in combat missions, and subsequently running several missions out of Emolgranlan where 'Vir the popular' holds his office.

Since I'm creeping slowly into PVP specialised around Gallente space, I'm considering moving an operational base up to Dodixie and Jel (if thats correct, i'm not sure) to have access to the level 3 and 4 missions from there, so I can get some loyalty points, and develop a way to get access to cheap faction ammo from the LP store since buying in faction ammo at sellers rates is sure to bankrupt me sooner than any losses from ships and modules will ever do.

How about you all out there in reader-land?

Time to earn my wings

2008-10-14T23:05:00.002+01:00

... In something a bit more face to face than the NPC pirate bashing and industrial PVP I've been doing so far.

Yes folks, i'm going to throw myself (sometime over the next few days since I cant be sure when I'll have time available, probably Friday) into the hectic world of PVP.

I've already spent whatever meagre profits I'd made from my Tech 2 production ventures on a couple of Thoraxes and the fittings involved, and as well as my Crow Interceptor, my Blackbird ECM boat, and my Vexor cruiser I've had on and off and hardly flew, I'll be exploring lowsec around Molden Heath and Heimatar with hopefully a few corp mates, at least one of which is fairly PVP experienced and is going to be someone im going to be learning the ropes from to survive 'semi solo' with the view to eventually being able to go out alone and survive for longer than 10 minutes.

It's been sorely needed, as I cant remember the last time I logged into Eve with a plan for what to do for the evening, it's typically just been there as a glorified chatroom for me whilst I umm and aah about doing a mission or two, but never really wanting to do one because I've worn myself out of the patience for doing the same thing time and time again.

I don't hope to take much in the way of sec hits, so we might only be hunting pirates, but you never know how things turn out, and we may have to hunt... ahem... 'innocents' if they try it on first.

No more inactive account skill training?

2008-10-13T18:56:00.002+01:00

New bit of news recently posted on the Eve online forums:

A long overdue and much needed change will be put in place with the Wednesday, 15 October 2008 patch. Ghost Training, the continuous skill gain on accounts in an inactive or expired state - will no longer function after Wednesday, 15 October 2008. This practice upsets the balance of the game, and capsuleers who actively put their time and energy into working on their characters will no longer be unfairly affected by those few who have not.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896003

Luckily I've never really benefitted from this, as I only managed to gain a few days worth of skill training from doing battlecruisers 3 to 4 when I last quit Eve, I do constantly kick myself that I didn't keep up with the extra 15 million skill points I would have expected to earn during my year off if I kept on popping on and off every 2 months or so as I set the longer skills training.

Are we asking for the impossible?

2008-10-10T20:54:00.003+01:00

The corp I'm in has quite a differing background of players, we have all sorts from 4 year old veterans to those who only started playing Eve in the summer.

Back in the day, we were once a member of Electus Matari, a fairly well known Minmatar RP Alliance, who had access to Providence space via links with Ushra'Khan when they had Unity station, which has since been taken over by CVA alliance.

We broke off from EM because as being part of a fairly industrial focused corp back then, we didn't get many benefits from the constant Amarr wars that took place, though I am also told that we didn't get treated as equals in allaince discussion matters even though we provided some of the more capable and experienced pilots whenever group activities were needed (this all happened whilst I was on my year long break from Eve so I cant really comment on this, so don't know for certain what the reason for us falling out with EM actually was)

Since then, we have been looking for an alliance to join who could let us expand our experience in the New Eden universe (i.e. give us access to 0.0 since that is the only area we are not really active in) whilst not creating too much inconvenience for those of us who do not feel ready for a life of combat.

Basically, we are looking for an alliance that would offer the following:

No forced participation for the lower experience players - several of us want to fight over space and have something to protect, but there are some that are very PVP averse and don't want to get involved in moving out to 0.0 and constantly watching their back, though they do want to join in on occasion.

Access to 0.0 space (as theres nothing an empire alliance can offer us except for slightly more expensive wardecs) preferably in the Angel regions (just because thats where we've been based all our existance, so moving all the way across the galaxy is annoying)

Fairly busy (sometimes its a bit boring only having half a dozen corpmates to chat to, its nice to have a room with 100 or more active to get the discussion going)

Anti Piracy ethics (none of us are of the 'kill the innocents' mindset)

Some things that would be nice:

Access to a good 0.0 infrastructure - A soverignty holding alliance would be nice, to have things like jump bridges setup and so on.

European timezone for Alliance - The majority of our members are from Europe, but we do have at least one American, and one New Zealander who are regularly online.

Ultimately, we had a potential chance to join Ushra'Khan directly, but it was vetoed as they generally include 4 permanent wars against Amarr corporations, so that limits where the empire staying people can remain, as they dont want to keep on constantly on the lookout for war targets, and it also makes restocking via empire systems a pain if you cant move anything around without risk of attack.

Does anyone know of any alliances out there that fit the bill ? From what I can see, its a very big wishlist, all the benefits for us with only minimal benefit for the Alliance that would host us. Most of the members do appreciate a good PVP fight if theres something worth fighting over, so for the majority it would mean they would spend a lot of their time in the 0.0 home, people just dont want all of their empire access restricted as well by wars, which limits certain Alliances as already mentioned.

I'm just feeling very trapped at the moment, I don't want to leave the corp I've basically grown up with, but on the other hand, I need something much more involved than 'go to this random deadspace pocket and kill this angel guy for me please' which is what my life revolves around at the moment, I dont have the experience or skills to be able to go randomly out into lowsec or 0.0 and expect to last for too long, so I'm looking for decent PVP minded people to tag along with just to get more experience at that side of the coin whilst im training up the next few dozen skills or so that I want to be happy that i'm giving myself the best chance at surviving.

Back to training and making money

2008-10-09T08:06:00.003+01:00

At last my focus on Tech 2 manufacture seems to be getting off to a bit of a start, albeit a slow one.

After spending a lot of time training up and sourcing materials etc, I've managed to recoup my starting losses (except for the investment in the Tech 2 component BPO's as thats a lot of cash) and I'm now back in profit again. Of course, as a result of that, it means that my material stocks are running low again and I'm going to have to buy some more useful parts.

I had quite heavily invested in the complex reaction materials that go into producing the Tech 2 components, so much so in fact that after reviewing my BPC's I'd invented, most of the parts couldn't actually be used in parts that were useful for making a profit, which has left me with a back stock of 'non useful' complex reaction components. I'm considering manufacturing the Tech 2 components without any intention of using them for production, and instead to sell them on directly. The downside to this idea is that there is zero movement of the components within the local Molden Heath market, and moving across to Heimatar or Metropolis has been a struggle to sell things for me due to the 'undercutter' effect in Rens and Hek where people will constantly undercut your prices by 0.1 isk just to secure their sale - I don't have the time to spend all day camping my sales orders to make sure i'm competitive every 10 minutes.

After getting most of my production skills to a 'useable' level (i.e. what I call most skills around level 3, since they've broken the 50% bonus effect) and the ones that need to be increased higher up to where it's needed, I've decided to move back towards training up a little more combat focus. I still need to get Astrometrics 5 for probing (I trained level 4 a few days back) but thats quite a long slog, and I don't know if I really want to go that far with it when I've got a skill training list as long as my arm.

At the moment, I'm working on Hull Upgrades 5 so I can equip another type of Tech 2 module (T2 armour resistance modifiers, specifically EANM's for my PVP craft) and then I really need to get back towards my task of getting Gallente Frigates to 5 and Small Hybrid guns and the associated specialisation up for blasters so I can get the Tech 2 guns as well. After that, I want to get rocket and standard missiles specialisation (again, need rockets 5 and missiles 4 and 5) and maybe then work on medium blasters and the associated specialisation. I also want to get a few more levels in Heavy Assault Missiles to get the Tech 2 launchers, and maybe then I will have a decent ship selection for PVP - A Crow or Taranis in the frigate class, a Thorax and Vexor in the cruiser class, and a Drake and Brutix in the battlecruiser class.

I can't imagine going any higher than Battlecruisers for PVP as I have always found battleships to be too big and very unwieldy, but after that I really need to get training for all the specialist cruisers such as the Heavy Assault Ships and Heavy Interdictors, as I've been wanting to fly those since they were introduced. As well as that, since I have a good grounding in ECM and Cloaking, a Falcon would be on my training plan, but since It's regarded as the 'flavour of the month' ship by the time I get to be able to use it, no doubt it will have been reduced in effectiveness by the time I can get skills trained high enough to use it.

Hardware Report: Caldari Navy Raven

2008-10-05T11:18:00.011+01:00

This wonderful piece of hardware has become my standard way of killing Angels on behalf of the Republic Fleet. Whilst it seems a little strange having a Caldari ship working on behalf of the Minmatar Republic, it does expose my former allegiance before I finally saw the light and moved away from my capitalistic friends and family to join the Minmatar way of life. Since then, I have trained up towards piloting all sorts of ships, both from my Caldari background, my new Minmatar brothers, and their allies the Gallente. I have yet to train any Amarr ships, and at the moment have no interest in them, however their combat prowess can't be ignored, and I may eventually move onto looking into some black market trading with enemies of the Republic to acquire some ships as time goes on.

However, the focus of this report is on the Raven Navy Issue, or more commonly known as the Caldari Navy Raven or CNR. Quite simply the Raven was once the ultimate in missile spewing death machines, and whilst the newly commissioned Golem Marauder can now take that crown, the Raven is the only ship in the reach of many pilots. The CNR is a version that had been souped up by the Caldari Navy specialist engineers to produce at much more deadly killing machine in the process. Improved numbers of weapon points, and improved shielding both compliment the ship to make it much better at the job it's intended to do - fire missiles with the best efficiency at the hulls of enemy ships.

The Navy Raven is usually only available to pilots who fly for the Caldari Navy, but some will quite simply sell their rewards to the highest bidder, and that is how I came to own one of these magnificent beasts. After a very slow 50 jump round trip from Jita and back, I took my newest addition to the arsenal, called Starbird's Triumph in memory of my faithful original Raven, Starbird which was sadly no longer required after the upgrade.

After reviewing options to fit the ship, 2 choices were available:

1) Using capacitor booster charges as I had done with the earlier Raven, and concentrate on doing damage to the enemies faster than they could deplete my shields, and hope that the booster charges would last.

2) Setting up a perment running shield which was designed to no longer need to worry about bulky or expensive capacitor charges, and gave a bit of a fallback in case of emergency.

Ultimately the decision came to one of practicality - using capacitor booster charges typically meant that on the longer missions, I would have to return to station to replace the lost charges, and because of the slow movement speed of the battleships, travelling via the deadspace gates typically took a long time to reach each gate. I much preferred a stable setup.

I had read an experiemental fit which used Capacitor Power Relays to boost capacitor recharge, and whilst this does negatively effect shield boosting by re-routing power from the boost circuits to the capacitor. What it effectively meant was that the shields boosted for less, but there was much more capacitor available to maintain the boost for longer.

In order to maintain the peak shield charge rate I would require to face off against the Angel Cartel pirate ships, I had to invest heavily in Caldari Navy technology once again.

I needed an improved shiled boost amplifier, as I was not able to equip the Tech 2 variety due to insufficient training, I had to find a Caldari Navy variety, which requires a lower level of training, and also provides a greater boost effect than Tech 2, which helps offset the loss from the Power Relays.

Additionally, I needed to boost the offensive ability of the ship, so found 7 Caldari Navy cruise missile launchers, whilst a very significant investment (around 150 times the cost of Tech 2) these provided a much greater increase in rate of fire, and also in load capacity, which meant faster killing, and less time spent recharging, all of which improves peak Damage Per Second.

The final Specification of my ship is as follows:

7x Caldari Navy Cruise Missile Launchers -Able to hit up to a range of over 170km, though skills are limited to approx 85km targetting range without third party boosting support
2x Cap Recharge II
XL Shield Booster II and Caldari Navy Shield Boost Amplifier
2x Tech 2 Shield Hardeners - Setup to specialise against the opponent's primary damage type, or general purpose Invulnerability Field II's
2x Ballistic Control System II
2x Capacitor Power Relay
1x Power Diagnostic System II- Providing an increase in shield total, shield recharge, capacitor total, and capacitor recharge, as well as boosting the ships powergrid, however this setup leaves approximately 4,000 MW available, so this is only a minor additional benefit.
The drone bay has 5 Medium and 5 Light drones equipped for removal of smaller craft that the pilot may encounter.

This setup does have some room for additional modifications, 1 remaining High power slot will allow some minor adjustment of loadout depending on the user. Capacitor with suitable skills is stable without any outside interference (neutraliser or energy vampire) with -81.6 capacitor draw, and +87.1 capacitor gain ensuring the capacitor remains stable at around 30-40% of max load.

I hope that anyone who has been interested in one of these craft finds this write up helpful, and if anyone has any comments or queries, feel free to drop me a message. Price wise, this ship cost me somewhere in the region of 860 million Isk, and whilst this does seem like a lot to spend on a ship, it has earned its value back already and is now making nothing but profit. I would advise to not use it during wartime as the ship has limited survivability against a sustained pilot attack, but it held up well against a competent corp mate who was testing out the shielding systems, managing to survive against a optimium range Megathron, eventually winning the battle of attrition against the blaster fit ship after several minutes - though against another corp mate with a similarly equipped CNR, the shield dropped in less than a minute, so do not rely on it, if you are out and get attacked, make sure you can bring backup.

The Eve Blog Reference List

2008-10-05T00:28:00.003+01:00

Since the 'Official' blog pack has become a bit of a semi-closed shop recently (CK has limited it to 30 members only) it's important to get the names of the lesser known bloggers out there recognised as well, and I've been trying to find a way to get everyones blogs listed without having to go and manually list them all. Fortunately CK has a full list on his personal blog site, but I have just recently learned that Ga'len from 'The Wandering Druid of Tranquility' has done all the legwork and managed to get a reader feed to import all of the blog info into your handy-dandy reader software (PS, for the simple fact its so simple to use and so readily available, I'd reccomend Google Reader for those who still need a one)

It works as an OMPL file which can be loaded into the reader - In Google Reader you simply just go to 'settings' then 'import/export' and point to the file you download from Ga'len's blog.

The Specific post where the blog is mentioned, and will be kept updated I believe is:

http://www.eve-druid.com/opml-download/

Hope you find it as useful as I have done, at the time of writing theres 98 Eve online blogs, ranging from informative, comedic, carebare, pirate and everything in between, i'm sure that everyone will find something to tickle their literary tastebuds.

Observations of the new Autopilot

2008-10-01T15:55:00.003+01:00

As part of the Empyrian Age 1.1.1 patch, an autopilot avoidance system was put in where you can manually choose to avoid specific systems. Pre-programmed into this is a system which avoids Jita so as to try and keep down casual 'passers through.'

This was all well and good, except no one mentioned to tell it to the department that maintains the contract system. For every item that is listed as being it Jita, the contracts sytem reported it as being over 2 billion jumps away (2,147,XXX,XXX in total if I remember the first few numbers correctly)

You'd have thought that it would have possibly listed it as unreachable or something, but maybe, just maybe they have moved Jita to the next galaxy over.

Whilst on the subject of Jita, why cant Rens or Hek start getting some of the Jita/Ammar superhub traffic. From my base in Molden Heath, it takes me 26 jumps to reach either of these superhubs, and from looking around at least 10 different regions markets over the past few days pricing up my tech 2 production bits and pieces, only 2 systems in the entire Eve galaxy seem to offer the selection and decent prices, and none of them are easy to get to within a reasonable time in a hauler.

Sometimes I wish I was a multi, multi billionnaire who could buy up half the stock in Jita and Ammar, move it down to Minmatar/Gallente space and tempt people to come there and make up another superhub to save all the time-wasted in travelling.

In other news, I've been approached by Zapatero of EON fame, who has asked me to pen an article for the next issue on my take on how to get into industry, as thats been a major theme of my blog posting recently. If all goes well, and I remember enough about writing to not really embarass myself (the last time I did any writing aside from blogs and forum posts was my University thesis about 10 years go, so I'm a bit rusty with my grammar) hopefully it will appear in issue 14, due out I believe early next year (Issue 13 is due to start shipping this week I think)

Well, that was disappointing.

2008-09-27T11:09:00.002+01:00

Got the message through today from CONCORD: The war with 'The Gentlemen of Low Moral Fiber' has been dissolved as they have not held up their side of the agreement - as a guess, they didn't pay the bill.

Aside from 2 seconds of them appearing in local on the first night the war was active, I had never seen anything of them during the entire war. Seems someone just wanted to burn a little bit of cash to waste wardeccing someone for a week.

Now though, back to business. The corp i'm in is a little in the doldrums at the moment, I'm racking my brains to think of some useful 'anyone can join in, newb or oldie alike' activities just to get the corp spirit back again, rather than sitting there grinding missions or building stuff all day and chatting.

Some things we have done in the past:

Corp Missioning nights (showing the lower guys what happens during level 4s, and earning them relatively megabucks in the meantime from their share in bounties)
Ice mining / regular mining nights.
Frigate wars - the general concensus from this was the newer players didnt want to join in because they worried they would be outclassed, but as one of our newer members ended up winning, at least we proved that wasnt always the case.

Is there anyone else out there who has any ideas a 'interesting and different' corp activities that even those without a specific skill set can get into? Ideally if it needs skills trained, they should be relatively quick to get (people can haul or mine decently for corp mining ops for example with 2-3 days training away from their preferred skill paths.

All quiet...

2008-09-24T08:18:00.002+01:00

... on the northern, southern, eastern and western fronts. In fact, we haven't heard a peep out of our war targets aside from a 2 people warping in and quickly out of the system on the first night it was active.

That may be partly because we have been spending a lot of time in lowsec recently chasing down a few pirate corporations (well... not me, i'm out there at the moment because its the best place to get research slots, but i'm watching the action with interest since im running around in my covops ship and running intel) and I don't honestly believe our would-be attackers would ever dare go out to where they couldn't dictate the fights.

In other news, I've finally sold one of the covetors. OK, i'm not a billionnaire overnight (in fact I noticed my wallet drop from 1.05 billion isk down to 104 million over the past few weeks whilst I've been investing in starting up my production operation) but I've now got a few Tech 2 BPCs to produce, which is where the decent money is hopefully going to lie. I just need a few more days training to get the skills up to where I need so I can manufacture things.

Now of course, the main issue is actually getting the components to finish off the tech 2 manufacture - now that Jita has been effectively closed to all but the first few hundred pilots on every day, it would be a struggle to get the components at their best possible price - I may have to investigate some alternate locations over the coming days as I approach 'tech 2 go time.'

After that, I've been telling myself I'm going to spend some time working on my scanning/probing skills since they have been sitting there half finished for weeks, and I really need to get back to improving my combat effectiveness, even minor skirmishes against corpmates for PVP practice usually end up with me running the other way - of course, those guys are all 4 year or more veterans so I do have a bit of a skillpoint disadvantage, but on the other hand, its always good to learn by being thrown in at the deep end, it's how I learned to swim after all, and I haven't drowned yet.

War Update

2008-09-22T13:10:00.004+01:00

So... the 'Gentlemen' have made their demands... pay up for a 'mining licence' or else we will get can flipped and hounded out of existence.

I wonder exactly what they think they are... self appointed privateers of the space lanes who have never even sniffed lowsec never mind lawless space perhaps... too scared to risk entering into space where anyone can have a go at them.

I'm at an unfortunate situation where a lot of my cash was tied up in my manufacturing endeavours - which unfortunately to say, aren't going exactly how I would have originally planned, theres no use predicting a 10%-20% profit when nothing is selling, but I suspected as much at the start, and perhaps 'pricing at usual price around the system' isnt the best method of generating sales, but on the other hand, to make anywhere near as much profit as can be made running missions, i'd need to start getting sales at those sort of margin levels... anyway I digress.

Where was I... oh yes... I'm skint in short. I've got capital tied up in dozens of smaller things, and It's leaving me a little short funded for this war. Aside from the fact that I don't risk my CNR during wartimes, which limits my ability to run missions for my corporations of choice since I don't have any other ship capable of running the highest difficulty missions, and buying a new ship, outfitting it and insuring it would be just about wiping me out.

So we have to be sneaky for this war. Not like we aren't always sneaky and do hit and runs when we need to do damage, and disappear when we need to regroup, but speaking personally, I cant afford to lose any big ships anymore at the moment, so I'm in Tech 1 frigates/cruisers again for this war... which compliments our attackers, as unlike the CE guys this lot seem to also enjoy the T1 disposable hulls during their combat from what I can see.