Operation Invention

This blog is starting to become like so many other blogs on the internet, with updates coming few are far between. Well this time I have a valid excuse, I have been in hospital getting cut up by the doctors. Well in my time away not much has changed within EVE. Dev’s are still being accused to cheating and fixing things, with very little or no proof, the flame wars on the forums still carry on. You would think the average age and IQ of EVE players were both 14 from half the ranting on the official forums, if there is a God, bring back EVE-i.
So what have my minions in EVE been up to recently? I have been investing heavily into R&D and invention, bit in training time and ISK. I suppose I have spent close to a billion ISK in skills and R&D kit and spent many weeks training Science skills to a semi-respectable level. Being Gallente by descent and a fan of Caldari ship engineering I decided to centre my research around these two races technologies. Chances of success whilst inventing are pretty slim, and the chance of invention from ships is even slimmer, that said I have had enough success to make back my investment. My 1st success was with yer good ol’ staple Cap Recharger II’s, I can remember when these were selling for 20 mill plus, now they are less than 10% of that, but that’s still a huge amount of profit. Module invention seems to be around twice as easy as ship invention, with the chance of success very roughly being around 50/50 with mediocre skills.
Ship invention is where everyone thought the ISK was gonna be, but these invented BPC are nowhere near the license to print ISK that the BPO are. If you want anything more than a single or dual run copy you are looking very poor material efficiency which will rack up the manufacturing cost, keeping the BPO owner ahead of the inventors. If you want a good example o fthe great invention depression just look at the HAC prices, most notably the Cerberus. It wasn’t that long ago they were selling for 250Million plus, now we are looking at 90 mill. I wont tell everyone how much of this 90 mill is still profit or they will drop further ;-) So is this a good thig or a bad thing? As far as I am concerned I think it’s a good thing, we are now seeing the glut to the market, with manufacturers undercutting each other desperate to shift their goods. The old timers will be stockpiling materials and ships now waiting for the market to pick up again as all the wannabe HAC pilots realise they are “not as ‘ard as they fort dey waz”.
All in all invention has to be good for all, Its taken ‘some’ of the T2 BPO monopoly away from the lucky few, reduced the cost of the overpriced modules and ships, and given the average player a chance at building their own tech 2 kit.
P.S WTS Cerberus 250 Mill o.n.o

Wars and Dirty Devs

Well these two topics seem to have generated some heat on the forums over the last week or two. The thing about wars in EVE is that they tend to become forum based rather than actually fighting in the game itself. I suppose if you have 70% of all the alliance members holed up in stations scared to undock they need somewhere to accuse the other side of playing dirty. For the rest of us non-alliance people is great, EVE lag drops off, more ships are sold, salvage loot is more readily available on the market, so bring on the war. Both sides will scream things like n00b, cheat0rz, exploit, lame, pwn etc etc from deep within their own territory. It tends to be the people who wont actually go risk their own ass that do all this yelling while the serious pvp people just get on with it as normal.
I am sure both sides will be claiming that the other side has x number of Devs on their side dishing out free titans to anyone that can pilot one. Personaly I don’t think any CCP employee should be able to have any live/public account in EVE. Rather than trust them to play by the rules, which never works, EVER just have a simple blanket ban due to conflicts of interest. Also the people who knowingly benefited from these Devs outrageous behaviour should also have their accounts wiped. It may sound a little harsh, but there are rules for a reason….

Newbie Killing Spree

Now this isnt what you might think its gonna be, its not a post about some l33t pywats going on a killing spree in a newbie system. This is more of a tale of a well planned newbie alt with less than a days training under his belt.
I shall not mention any names to keep the assasins identity a secret and to save the shame it would bring to his victims.
Our newb was created with one thing in mind, to pvp from day 1, and to win. So a Minmatar character was born with an intensive milliatry and combat background he was ready for action as soon as he got his pod pilots license. A quick trip to an educational station and he had some more skills to help him despatch rivals. A cheap frigate was required, and quickly purchased, along with the best fitting that could be afforded and that skills allowed. Once this was all done it was time to challenge some pilots to a not so friendly 1v1, man on man fight to the death. Its not hard to find people willing to go 1 on 1 in neatral teritory.
His first victim must have been laughing when he accepted the duel, as he had 2 whole years more skill training under his belt than our newbie alt.
To make things fair and more sporting both pilots agreed to fly the same ships, again at this point the older character was probably laughing his socks off. So the duel was set and pilots met at the agreed location. As soon as the duel started it was apparent who was going to win the fight, as the first volleys of fire were exchanged you newbie's ship hardly took a scratch while the 'old hand' was halfway thru his shields allready. I think it was about then he stoped laughing.... The battle only lasted a couple of minutes and was serriously one sided, our newb was hardly damaged while Mr Laughypants (not his real name) was warping to a station in his pod.
Since this 1st battle our brave newb pilot has gone on to bag many more prizes, still with very little training. It just go's to show what can be achived with very few skill points placed in the right places. The last I heard our newbie is now aiming tech 2 artillery at people, which comes as a shock to them from one so young....

Google Ads

Thanks to anyone who has clicked thru on my google links, I never thought they would work, but I have amassed a few dollars just from this crappy blog site. Nothing thats gonna be life changing, hell I dont have enough for one months broadband bill in there yet.
If you do click thru on the ads and bump into me ingame just say you love my naff blog site and who know I might bung you some ISK. I wont give you ISK to click, but I might gift you some ISK for liking my blog.

Back again

Hopefully the changes in the last patch will relieve the boredom somewhat, or at least the cost of being bored. Scanning had become an expensive hobby to find very little, in Empire at least. With the reduction in build costs for probes people can now afford to throw far more probes at finding a location. Also with more NPCs dropping salvage loot it should be easier to build rigs, and hopefully the prices will become a little more realistic. The economy seems to stabilise more and more after each patch becoming more and more player driven, which is great, but as with real life, the latest toys always cost you shit loads, and you can buy them for half price a few months later.

Probe rant

The patch came and went without too many hitches, for me at least anyway. There were, as always a few annoying ‘new features’ added, like the ability to make all your bookmarks invisible to the IGB. There were of course the usual changes to the odd module and ship tweaks, but this time they really hurt a lot of production corps. After the introduction of the new scan probes, a lot of people invested in the blueprint and the materials to supply the market, some of which weren’t the cheapest around. Now after the last patch we find all these probes now only require standard minerals to build and thus have has their build cost slashed. There are now a lot of people with 1000’s of probes that are now only worth 50% of their build cost. Now this may just sound like a bitter probe manufacturer out of pocket, but it has wider consequences. When these probes were discovered they lead to a great demand for Strontium Clatherates and the price of these went thru the roof. Maybe there removal from probe build requirements was an attempt to balance this sudden shift in demand, who knows, but it would have been nice to be warned in advance. Its good that interdictor sphere probes still have the expensive build costs, us carebears wouldn’t want to see too many of those around 0.4 system gates.


POS News

Since my last entry we have set up, taken down, moved and re-established a little POS of our own. All I can say is you learn from your mistakes, its amazing how off putting a gate camp can be when all you want to do is take some fuel to your POS system. Anyway we moved our shinny new POS from a 0.5 system surrounded by 0.4’s to a safer system a little closer to HQ. The main aim of the POS was to provide the corp with available lab slots for research, we now have 9 mineral and 9 time research slots, plus 3 copy slots; all of which have been pretty much full since going online. All that time training Scientific Networking is now finally paying off, 9 jobs on the go all from the comfort of my Raven.
Keeping the POS in fuel has proved easy so far, and doesn’t require too many hours ice mining, I think roughly, 5 Mackinaws with Tech2 mining equipment can mine enough ice to keep our POS running for a week in about an hour and a half. (Oddman did the math on that if it wrong)

Been a while

Well here we are again, all recovered from the festivities and back to the real world grind. I didnt get much of a chance to play EVE over Christmas and the New Year, ever other bugger has the time off work too, and they all want to do stuff. I have had some long term Learning skills going for the last month or so, and not done a lot else in EVE.

Saying that I have been building a few rigs and selling them for obscene amounts of ISK on the market. I have also fitted a few to a couple of my ships, the Capacitor Control Circuit rig works a treat on a Raven. The prices for rigs and salvage loot is still stupidly high, hopefuly people will start to lower the prices soon. Mineral prices have gone thru the roof too, since all the new ships arrived on the scene. I suppose everyone wants it all and they want it now.

System Scanning

System scanning received a big revamp during Kali, making it more of a mini profession rather than just a backburner skill you always have had and never really used. Don’t get me wrong, you can still use the normal probes, which will probably become known as recon probes as they fit in the nice new, fast recon probe launcher. I believe these are only useful for finding ships these days. You wont go finding hidden deadspace complexes with them.
Kali saw 17, and as of today 18 new probes, and a few new skills to boots your astrometrics skill. The probes come in 4 main flavours, each available in 4 strengths. You have Gravimetric, Magnometric, Ladar and Radar, each type being split into Quest, Pursuit, Comb and Sift models. These 4 probe models cover different ranges from 4AU down to 0.5AU, becoming more and more accurate as you reduce the scan range.
To start scanning a system you need to 1st pick a suitable target system, you want to look for a system with a few planets within 4AU of each other, as you will be able to cover more space in less scans. The new complexes and deadspace regions are all to be found within 4AU of a planet. So you pick a planet and fire out a Quest probe when you arrive, you must ALWAYS have a probe of the same type in your probe launcher as they one that is scanning for the results to work. A system scan takes a LONG time, but this can be reduced by flying a decent covert ops ship and training some advanced astrometrics skills. Choosing the flavour of the scanners you use is pretty much a guess to start with, but a good starting point is to use the same probe as the type of native rats ships use. I mean use a LADAR probe to scan in regions owned predominantly by races that pilot ships using LADAR sensors.
When you run your 1st scan you want to pick Cosmic Signatures to scan for (or whatever its called), this should only find your new complexes, asteroid belts gas clouds etc. If you get no results from your 1st scan, try a different flavour of Quest probe. The ‘wrong type’ of probe may still pick up a signal, but it will be much weaker and have a greater margin of error. If you get a long range hit with a probe and its of a good signal strength, this is the time to warp to this spot and start with the short range, high accuracy probes. If you pick the correct type again you should get 1 0m margin of error hit and be able to warp right to your newly discovered complex. It may not be a good idea to warp to this spot with your scanning ship, as some of the areas have no gates and just drop you right in the action. Another thing to bear in mind is you get no difficulty rating, as you do with standard complexes, so warping in with a shuttle or a disposable frigate is the key.
I found a rouge drone complex last night in a high sec system, had a peek with a shuttle, and everything looked easy, a dozen or so drones. I decided to take my Hawk in for some rocket related carnage, oops! sums up this decision…. There were a couple of drone types in there I had not seen before, and the ones I had, appeared to be a fair bit tougher than usual. My hawk was down and out in under a minute webbed and scrambled within seconds, the dozen or so drones that I spotted on the 1st shuttle based encounter turned out to be a few more than a dozen. I would say it was on par with a hard level 3 or easy level 4 mission and this was in a 0.8 system… So be careful or take a buddy with you to get shot 1st….
As of todays patch things may have changed. There is to be a multi-frequency scan probe added, I guess this will scan all types better than the ‘wrong type’ of probe but not as good as the ‘right type’. It will probably make an ideal ‘primary scan probe’ discovering the 1st general signal. We shall see……….

Apres-Kali

OK so here we are, post-kali (pt1) all the newness have been revealed, if you scuse the pun…
So what joy have we been given ad a pre-Christmas present… the one that will effect every single player in the lovely warp to 0m and the effective instadock. Gate campers, STFU, no I mean it really Shut The FUK UP! Enough already with whining and moaning. Of ocurse we also have the 3rd tier battleships and a new range of battlecruisers, nice as they are they are not gonna effect everyone. Most ships have had a boost to shield and armour too to make battles last a little longer.
Wrecks, love ‘em or hate ‘em they are here to stay, it appears we have an addition to the wrecks AI coming up in the next patch, not sure why a wrecks needs AI, maybe its gone all ‘I can’t let you do that Dave…’ when you try to salvage it, who knows. Hopefully they will increase the chances of salvage loot with the next patch too, as it does seem a little scarce at the moment.
R&D has had a huge facelift too, you can now invent yer own tech II stuff (technically) although finding all the bits you need to run an invention cycle may prove harder than most expected. I have done some research into this and it appears that the only places to find the new data interfaces you need is via the new mini-profession of exploring. You will need to start using exploration probes to hunt down the new complexes where you ‘might’ find a data interface in a locked container or archaeological site, so hacking and archaeology are gonna be needed as well.
While we are on surverying and scanning, there is a new kind of scan probe launcher, the recon probe launcher, which has a much sorted scan time that the original scan probe launcher, I think it is only useful for finding ships though. I haven’t had a chance to try one of these yet, but I will be going on a probe hunting mission later this afternoon.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now, back to my day from hell at work.