New Patch, New Toys

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

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

Need some help with Tech 3 production processes

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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'

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

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.

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

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

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:

• Attitude is Everything
• "If I could save time in a bottle…."
• The Game with the Thousand Faces
• [OOC] January's Blog Banter
• New Ballgames, Same Home Team
• EVE Blog Banter #4: I Don't Know
• Adaptation
• CK's Blog Banter #4
• Roll With the Punches
• Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
• We, the EVE-bloggers
• Adapt or Die
• I'm in ur blogosphere, hijackin' ur Blog Banter (4)
• Blog Banter
• Opportunity or Burden?
• Mystic Pizza
• "Stay on target…"
• January EVE Blog Banter
• Re-Prioritization
• Bonzai in my Bookcase
• Delicious!

An old guide updated, and something new

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)

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.

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

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

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

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

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.