The Call of Eve Online

Eve Online and I actually have a long history.  I think my account there is around 7 years old.  The problem is, I can never seem to spend more than a month or two there before I call it quits.  But the game always end up drawing me back.

I've played Eve mostly for its economic systems.  Combat never really grabbed me, but the lure of making millions of isk through trading or manufacturing does bring me back.   I've never been particularly good at it, as I always start off strong, but lose interest in the end.

The problem is that it ends up feeling too much like work.  Most of it ends up devolving into a lot of traveling.  Unless you are doing station trading, hauling goods from one system to another ends up being a lot of traveling.

To manufacture goods, you need raw materials.  Unless you mine these yourself, you are going to have to buy them.  Whether you find a low priced sell order, or place your own buy orders... you're going to be traveling.  I suppose you could contract it delivery, but that takes time.

Just writing this post has lessened my desire to play Eve.  The good news is that X Rebirth is out today!  That should give me my space fix.  More on that next week.

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That Eve Itch

Every so often, I get the urge to play Eve Online again.  I'm currently battline this urge, most likely caused by fanfest and the upcoming Odyssey expansion.  I event downloaded the game, so that if I do decide to play all I have to do is subscribe.

I've played Eve on and off for at least 6 years, but I always end up leaving for one reason or another.  What really holds me back from playing is that it can just be so much work.  Lets take a look at some of the activities I'd probably do.

Trading.  I have some nice tool to automatically find me profitable trades, but hauling things is just plain boring.  Sure a lot of it can be done afk, but I'd like to actually play.

I could always try my hand at trading in low-sec/null sec systems, which would spice things up.  I own a Blockade Runner which I could use, but it is still a risky proposition.  Those things are not exactly cheap.

Industry.  The thing I dislike about Industry is collecting the raw materials needed to build stuff.  I could limit my buy orders to a single station, but that means it would just take longer to fill my orders.  Going around and collecting the materials is also not very fun.

Missions.  I have a nice PvE fitted Drake I could use for Level 3 or 4 missions, but I still need to get enough standings to unlock them.  Running low level missions to do this does not sound very exciting either.

Mining.  Zzzzzzzz

So much about Eve just feels like work to me, which is why I never really stick with it.  I just don't have the time, or any real goals in the game that keep me motivated.  Making more money is not really a goal, since I could easily just buy and sell a PLEX to do that.

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Overload!

Lately, I have just been overloaded with games to play and fun stuff to do.  It wouldn't be so bad if work insisted that I, well, work to get paid.  But they do, so that takes a big chunk of time that could be spent goofing off.  Here is what I have going on this month and next.

New Vegas.  I've had Fallout 3: New Vegas for close to a year now and am finally playing through it.  I like it quite a bit, but it is pretty lengthy.  Luckily, it is open enough that I can forge my own way to the end without doing every quest thrown at me.  For example, lets take the Boomers.  I ended up just wiping them out for that artillery nonsense.  Now I am loaded up with grenades :)

Skyrim.  This Friday, Skyrim is set to be unleashed upon the world.  I expect it to suck up a pretty good amount of time in the coming weeks.  I'll be getting it on the 360, although I'm tempted to go Steam just so I can have it when I wake up.

Revan.  The third Old Republic novel comes out on November 15th.  I've read Fatal Alliances and Deceived, so I'm pretty excited about this one.  If you have not read the Darth Bane books, also by Drew Karpyshyn, you should, they are awesome.

EVE Online.  I'm currently working on my goal of turning 250 million Isk into 1 billion.  Researching Planetary Interaction at the moment to see how profitable it can be.

Betas.  I'm in the SWTOR Beta, which I play sparingly just so I keep things fresh for launch.  Wrath of Heroes is currently between sessions, but I expect that to resume soon.

Fortresses.  Warhammer Online is set to bring back Forts pretty soon.  I hope to see them on PTS in the next few weeks.  It's a big feature, so who knows when we'll actually see it live.  I'd prefer they get it right rather than rush it.

The Old Republic.  In a little over a month, Star Wars: The Old Republic will launch.  Hopefully that will be December 15th for me, since I did get my pre-order in on the day it was available.

I left a few games off of the list, like League of Legends and Sword of the Stars 2.  I try to play those when the stuff above is not tickling my fancy.

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Money, Money, Money

This weekend turned out to be rather interesting.  I had to spend some money, which was not planned.  I also re-subbed to a game so I could make some money (virtual, sadly).  In both cases, I had some fun as a result.  Lets start with the spending.

I got up Saturday morning to find that my monitor no longer worked.  I had it for over three years, so I was sad to see it go. On the positive side, it means I get a new monitor!  A quick trip to Best Buy and I had an Acer S232.  It's a 23" LED monitor that has a resolution of 1920 x 1068.  Both stats are an improvement for me.  It also only cost ~$169.  It's cheap enough that I can still get a new monitor when I upgrade my system next year.

On Friday I re-subscribed to EVE Online.  I blame Social Media (twitter, blogs) pressure for my return to the game.  The main reason I did it was because I was in the mood for a challenge.  Specifically, I wanted to have to think and plan.  I also found out that my ship was no longer stranded in a wormhole.  I guess it gets moved if your account is inactive long enough.

I'm not sure how much time I'll spend in EVE, what with TOR coming out next month.  It was only $10 for the month, so I think I'll get my monies worth. So now the question is, what to do?

I have $250 million Isk in my bank account at the moment.  My Drake is T2 shield fitted, so has about 33,000 effective HP.  It was meant to take some abuse from Sleepers, and is probably just a bit overkill for my Level 2 Agent missions.I really don;t feel like grinding missions to get to Level 3.

My goal is to turn that 250 million into 1 billion Isk.  I have pretty good Manufacturing and Trading skills, so I'm leaning towards using those to accomplish my goal. I'm open to ideas though.  It should be pretty fun, I'm currently researching trade route and products to sell.

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Why WAR: PvP

This is the first, in a series of posts, about why I play Warhammer Online.  There seems to be a generally negative perception about the game going around.  While some of it may be justified, it really has no impact on the reasons I enjoy the game so much.

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How to make a PvP MMO

Time to get in my recliner and become an armchair game designer. Making a PvP focused MMO is tough. You have to make an engaging game that keeps players coming back but it also has to be balanced. There are two critical design aspects that a would-be PvP MMO must take into consideration: Scale and Ownership.

Scale

Scale means the amount of players it takes to accomplish a goal. Let's look at WoW's PvE Scale: 1+ (solo), 5 (dungeon), 10 (raid), 25 (raid) and 40 (old raids). Nice distribution from solo to a large group and provides stuff to do for everyone.

Now look at WAR's for the RvR lakes: 6++ (Battlefield Objective), 12+++ (Keeps), 100+ (Fortress) and 48 (city instance). It clearly skews toward a much larger scale. Defenders just increase the numbers further for B.O.'s and Keeps.

This has the effect of making players feel like grunts rather than heroes. The lack of small scale goals also leaves players feeling bored and teaches them to wait for the zerg. Even PvP games such as Eve and Darkfall provide content (in the form of players or NPC's) for small groups. To keep players engaged, you must provide a wide variety of scale.

Ownership

This would be the goal or objective piece of the PvP MMO. Why are the players fighting each other? In games like Eve, Darkfall and even DAoC guilds fight over ownership of objectives. By owning them, their guild gains benefits. They lose ownership when someone takes it from them.

In WAR you don't own a keep, you just lease it for a short time. It is hard for a player to get motivated when the scale of the objective is too big. They really don't have a stake in their city or taking the enemy city. It is all transient anyway, once someone gets to the city it will all be reset.

It is important to have that feeling of ownership in a PvP game. It is what drives many wars in real life and it carries over into MMO's too. Give players stuff to own, small and large scale, and players will create their own incentive to fight.

By combining a wide variety of scale and objectives that players can own, a PvP MMO will have a solid foundation.

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Farewell Eve

Yesterday, I canceled my Eve subscription. The last month or so I have only been skill training, so this was a long time coming. I've had an on again off again relationship with Eve for at least 3 years now. It is a game I want to like, but can't.

Eve is not hard. That is a common way people refer to it to make it sound better than WoW. It is a deep game which requires time and patience, but not any harder than WoW. My main issue is that it is not an accessible game.

Before I had a full time job and family, Eve would have probably been a perfect fit for me. Now though, I just don't have the blocks of time needed to get the most out of the game. Being able to have fun in 30 minutes - 1hour of game time is critical to me. In Eve, I could maybe do a mission or mine.... which were not fun activities for me.

In my ideal Eve world I would be involved with 0.0 sovereignty. That seems to be where Eve really shines, but it is not for the feint of heart. While I may never participate in that area, it sure if fun to read the stories.

Usually I keep 2 MMO subscriptions active, so losing Eve leaves me with a free spot. I have chosen a replacement... those of you who follow me on Twitter know which one. A post about it will be up soon :)

So when my subscription runs out, my 140 million isk ship will be deep in w-space with no way out. My character in stasis, waiting for the next time the Eve bug bites.

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Eve Business Report

Over the past week or so, I have been concentrating on building up my production business. After all, I didn't spend nearly a month on Production Efficiency 5 for nothing. Luckily I started out a a few million isk and some BPC's from previous play attempts. That always makes things a bit easier.

I looked at my home area, which happily has a good amount of mission runners, and found some holes in the market. Mostly these were T1 ship modules to start, as I don't like selling ammo. It just takes too much time, for too little profit to sell ammo.

Many T1 ship module BPO's cost under 100k, so it will be quick to re-coup the cost. The drawback is that these BPO's have not been researched, and that will cut into your profit. I plug the numbers into Eve-MEEP and voila... it gives me a good idea if I can make a profit on this item. The other important piece is to check the volume of the item. If it isn't selling much in your area, it may not be a good investment.

As my modules kept selling out, I started to build some Destroyers. This upped my mineral requirements far past what I could collect myself. Using Buy orders in my solar system solved this problem and I just had to go collect the minerals. It was a little more expensive in some cases, but worth it due to turnaround time.

Manufacturing is like a snowball rolling down a hill. Momentum starts to pick up and soon you need a lot more minerals to satisfy demand. As Destroyers were selling great, I started to add Cruisers into the mix. These require much more minerals. So those buy Orders were pushed out to a jump away. They get filled very quickly, but now I have to do quite a bit of jumping to collect them all. Time is valuable, so I don't want to spend all of it collecting raw materials.

That leads me to the present. I have about 35 million isk and a couple more left on the market in sell orders. It is time to take the next step. I will start to produce on a weekly schedule, rather than ad-hoc like I have been doing. This means I will buy all the materials I need for the week at one time. I estimate this will cost about 25 million isk. My hope is that I only have to collect the materials one time a week. I will of course need a bigger transport at some point too.

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Business Questions

My main character in Eve Online is specialized in Industry. For as long as I can remember, I've always liked making stuff. While I do many activities in Eve (Mining, Missions and Manufacturing), much of my time lately has been spent getting my manufacturing going.

So far it has been going really well, in fact, too well. I primarily produce modules for ships and I just can't keep up with demand. By nature I am a conservative type, so I try to keep a nice cash reserve. This means I only like to have about 50% of my cash reserve in sell orders. So If I have 10 million isk, I like to have products worth 5 million isk in sell orders.

I am also lazy.... I mean efficient. I generally operate out of a single solar system (with a couple exceptions). So to get the raw materials, I use buy orders. As the system is busy (not Jita busy), they get filled eventually.

My problem is that I am still working from a on-demand perspective. I do not keep a stock of goods and rarely have replacements ready when I'm sold out. Manufacturing times plus buy order filling times seem to make this pretty tough.

I am pretty small still, but seem to be getting close to making the next step. How do you Eve producers handle all of this?

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Fleet Warfare

The corporation I am a member of in Eve Online is currently at war. In all of my prior Eve experience, I had never participated in the PvP side of the game. It is actually quite involved and interesting. The largest grouping (raid) is called a Fleet. The fleet (or gang) is basically a hierarchy made up of the following.

• Fleet Commander. The leader of the fleet, also called the FC.
• Wings. Each wing is lead by a Wing Commander (WC). I always think of the video game. I miss the space flight sim days like X-Wing.
• Squads. Each Squad is lead by a Squad Commander (SC), and is the smallest unit.

Eve has leadership skills which must be learned. They allow bonus to be filtered down the hierarchy and are very important. Also important are the actual skills of the commanders, as they are usually responsible for directing their subordinates during the fleet action.

An effective fleet requires four different roles for the pilots.

• Tackler. This is most similar to a Crown Control (CC) class. Small fast ships fitted with equipment (Warp Disrupters and Scramblers) used to keep the enemy from escaping. So instead of keeping them out of the fight, your goal is to keep them in the fight.
  
• EWAR. Eve has an Electronic Warfare system and ships that specialize in it. Basically, EWAR's job is silence the enemy, or prevent your side from being silenced. If your enemy cannot fire at you and cannot escape, odds are they will lose.
• Damage Dealer. Confusingly referred to as DD (there are Destroyers in Eve). These are the DPS of Eve, they are the ones who are responsible for blowing the heck out of the target.
• Scouts. Intelligence is paramount in fighting a war, and Eve is no different. Often times scouts are Covert Op ships equipped with cloaking devices. They spread out along the route your fleet may take and watch for the enemy (War Target, WT). When one is seen, they report the location back to the fleet.

All of the roles are critical when forming an effective fleet. One nice thing about Eve is the way it handles Fleet movement. At each hierarchy level, the commander can warp all of the people under him/her to a destination. This ensures you can stay together (mostly).

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Eve and the Suicide Gank

In Eve Online, there is an interesting phenomenon called suicide ganking. When in High security space, players are protected by CONCORD (NPC Guards), who will swoop in and destroy aggressors. It is not immediate, so an attacker still has a shot to destroy the player. This has been refined into the well known tactic of suicide ganking.

For the non-griefing ganker, this is really just a numbers game. I consider griefers those who do this for fun, without any in-game objective like profit. It is possible to fit a ship to accomplish this task pretty cheaply relative to your target. When you add in insurance, it lowers the cost to the would-be ganker even more.

Their targets are usually high-security miners and haulers. Their defensive capabilities are usually pretty low and have a higher chance of carrying something profitable (and nice wrecks). Groups of miners are also a tempting and common target.

One of the most common tactics for a suicide ganker is to fit out a ship loaded with smart-bombs. They are Area of Effect weapons, so work nicely on groups. They are also burst damage, so when CONCORD shows up they can get out more damage. Once the battle is over, they (or a friend) will come and try to collect the loot and wreckage.

As a part time miner (solo and group), the thought of being suicide ganks concerns me. Here are some survival tips:

Insurance. Not really a survival tip, but important. Insure your ship fully. It may cut into your profits, but so will a destroyed hulk without full insurance. There comes a point when you may not be able to survive a suicide gank, so this is a nice safety net.

Go Cheap. Since this is a numbers game, suicide gankers usually need their target to be worth the time and equipment. Hulks cost around 120 million isk and can use high cost modules, so really the ship could be worth 150 million+. A Mining Barge may only be worth 25 million. The hulk would be much more of an attractive target.

Resistances. Surviving a suicide gank is all about time. You want to live long enough to warp out or until CONCORD arrives. Your ships resistance levels mitigate damage. For example, some Shields have a base Explosive resistance of 50%, cutting that type of damage in half. Of course, there is no way to predict what type of Smart Bombs an attacker will bring. Stacking resistances can give you the time you need.

Shields. Investing in a nice Large shield extender may be worthwhile. A typical solo smart-bomb suicide ganker may put out 2500 damage every 10 seconds. CONCORD will usually arrive by then, so can your ship take that kind of damage? Adding a 1000 hp shield extender or two may be a worthwhile investment.

Alignment. If you chose to warp at the first sign of danger, having yourself pre-aligned with a station/gate will save precious seconds.

Routine. Not all suicide gankers are just bored folks who attack on a whim. Many of them stalk their targets over time, know where they will be and what they are fitting. Don't get in a rut. Change your mining habits (time and location) often. Keep your eyes on local and watch for anything suspicious.

Just some thoughts on how to survive, anyone else have ideas?

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Werit gets podded

Yesterday was a rough, but interesting day for me in Eve Online. It started while pricing out how much it would cost to build a Retriever Mining Barge. I noticed that I could make a tidy 1 million isk profit from a quick ore trade. As I need the money for the aforementioned Retriever, I bought 200,000 units, exhausting my funds.

The route was only about 7 jumps, but it did go through low sec space (.4). I have traveled through .4 space before an never had any trouble. It was also early and not many people on. So I hit the autopilot on my Badger and was on my way. Begin foreboding music.

As I jumped into low sec, I saw flashing red. Uh Oh. As I was in a Badger, there was really no escape, especially versus 3 of them. Before I could do much of anything, my ship was destroyed. A few seconds later, my pod joined it. I awoke in a station not too far away. Luckily my clone was up to date, so no skill point loss.

So what happened? I had met my first gate camp and experienced my first podding. They did not want my cargo or a ransom. We were not at war, so I guess they were just bored. My badger was insured, although not fully. I was not carrying any cargo, so I really did not lose too much. My estimates are about 400k.

As frustrating as this was, it was my fault. I could have avoided this situation without too much trouble if I was not complacent or lazy. Before purchasing the minerals, I should have inspected the route. Using the map, I can display how many ships were destroyed in a system in the last hour.



If I had checked that, I would have seen that something was going on in that system.

So here I am with 250k isk in the bank and 4.4 million isk worth of goods on the other side of the gate camped system. I could wait it out, but I have things I need to do with that money. So I decided to run the blockade so I could go put in a sell order. After running my ideas past the fine folks at Eve University, I had my plan.

Using a shuttle, I should be fast enough to get through the camp. There I sat on the safe side of the gate, pretty nervous for a video game. The key is to use Warp to 0 (zero), rather than the autopilot. It will allow me to get off the gate much quicker.



So I jump. As soon as my ship materializes, I warp to the next gate. I could have only been visible for an instant. There was definitely some activity at the gate, but i did not stick around to watch. I had made it! Phew.

I reached the station where my goods were stored and sold them. Luckily, I only had to take a very slight loss. On my way out, I ran the gate camp again without any trouble. I learned quite a bit, so hopefully I will not repeat those mistakes.

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Werit and Eve Online

Eve Online is a game I really want to play. In fact, I have played it for years. My character is almost 3 years old there. However, I have only played maybe a couple months over that time. I only have 2 million skill points. That should give an idea about how little I have actually played.

While I think it is a good game, I just have never been hooked. That is surprising, as I love games like Elite and X. It is likely the social aspect, as I have never met anyone in game or joined a corporation. So when the CoWs started to talk about Eve, I got interested again. I also found that Eve was offering a free 5 day trial. So my account has been reactivated.

I am really at a loss of what I want to do. I have 2 million SP's spread around. I could go learn the Caldari Cruiser skill, but have not yet. Currently I fly around in my Badger, Kestrel or Destroyer. Money wise I have 5 million isk. In the past I have run missions, mined, built and sold ships and traded.

I really do not want to run missions anymore. Building T1 ships seems to have a razor thin profit margin, so it barely seems worth it. Mining is pretty boring.

Trading take a bit to get into. So far I have only been able to deal in Trade Goods (like Silicon). When I say trading, I really mean hauling, as I am just buying low then selling high. Buy/Sell orders seem like the way to go, but figuring out what to do takes time.

I have been considering a venture into low-sec space. I'm just not sure if there is much for me to do there in a frigate. I am a believer in only flying what you can afford, so I really do not want to take a cruiser in there. What can I do in a frigate? I would like to keep my CONCORD standing high :)

Any ideas?

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