I am scheduling this post to be posted automatically half a month from now. At that point our assets should be completely evacuated.
Noble Sentiments started out as an idea between a few older members of Sleeper Social Club. The idea was simple: create a C5 PvP corp that wasn't limited to innovating by directors who still had control of the direction of the corp but didn't actively play. Being led by severl who were big names and content creators in the USTZ particularly, Noble Sentiments gathered many USTZ folks from SSC who split off to join.
We settled into our home, a C5 Red Giant that was only chosen because it was already owned by one of our directors. We had our eyes set on a C5 Pulsar but ultimately diplomacy concerns meant that our plan of evicting the owners (some of whom included people like Lazerhawks) wouldn't be the best idea for a young corp.
However, early on, there was some disagreement at the director level about the direction of the corp (this was prior to me being appointed a director). Two of the biggest content creators ended up on a side against the rest of the directors and some comments made in poor taste by one of the directors at the time only served to exasperate the situation. While I advised my contacts in the directorship to quickly sort out the situation and ensure apologies ensued, it was too little too late and our two biggest content creators left for different pastures. At this point the director who made the initial comments was demoted by the CEO and other people, including myself, were appointed directors to fill in the gaps left behind.
Losing two of our biggest content creators was a big blow but not necessarily a devastating blow. We still had other content creators in the corp. However, for some people in the corp, the idea of being a small fish in a big pond was not their idea of a fun time. For others, the work required to get a new corp off the ground was not something they were interested in doing. Especially in a small C5 corp, every member needs to be on board to scan, create content, and make an effort to be around. This was more work than some people wanted to put in and other opportunities (i.e.: other established corps) were too appealing. Other people just vanished all together, which might have been fine in a big corp like SSC but was incredibly noticeable in our little group. Finally, several positive developments in our corp members' lives meant that some people just did not have time to dedicate to growing a small corp and being active.
All of these factors combined meant that we had a very small group of active individuals. This meant that content was far and few between, and with no EUTZ to speak of the USTZ was often logging into the same old chain from yesterday, usually end of life. We often times did not have enough people available to tackle some of the content we wanted to try. As the director responsible for recruitment, I worked incredibly hard to try to drive recruitment so that we could replenish our ranks. We did have interest from people who liked my recruitment ads, but unfortunately I was bringing one person in as two or more were leaving.
We switched our focus from big, expensive doctrines to small gang. This was ideal considering our smaller group of people and more focus on pilot skills. However, again, we just didn't seem to have the interest to sustain small gang work. While I wanted to drive content in this area, I was forced to spend weeks away from my computer in a dispute with my landlord followed by a move. By the time I had internet installed in my new place, activity even in the USTZ was barren. It's hard to blame anyone for that, as solo scanning the chain was something I did before moving and it was not fun to scan chains that no one was going to use.
Ultimately, the lack of participation is really what ended up killing Noble Sentiments. We started with a bunch of skilled people but I think the move out from SSC burned some folks out and perhaps others who agreed to come along were already burned out with Eve (or w-space) in general.
Do I regret coming along for this ride? No, I don't. I think that this corp could have been successful if things had panned out differently, starting with mitigating that director-level disagreement at the beginning and also by encouraging participation by having content from the very beginning.
It's unfortunate to see this good group of guys split up. I've been flying with them for a year and a half now and I've had great times with them. People are heading off in all different directions, some to bigger w-space corps and others are leaving for k-space or a hiatus from Eve.
Me? I don't know where I'm going to go yet. At this point I'm feeling a bit lost, like a piece of driftwood floating aimlessly in the sea being rocked by currents outside of its control. I was deferred from Waffles, a group I thought that I would excel in, due to an inactive killboard. And that deferral has really made me hyper-aware of the lack of killboard activity on my character. It also made me hyper-aware of the kills I was losing out on when I was flying support roles like logi when our whore drones were asked to be swapped for utility drones. One thought is to take the advice of my recruiter and join Pandemic Horde for "dank frags" and have some non-serious fun for a while, potentially joining Waffles later down the line. Other options include returning to Eve University to practice FCing in one of their campuses or join a small gang PvP group like Agony Unleashed. I would expect that my prospects of joining a C5 PvP group are low given my killboard metrics that make it seem like PvP is of no interest to me. Sadly metrics speak more loudly than experience as I've found out, so I might need to focus on racking up kills to apply to more serious corps in the future.
If you have suggestions for where I should go, I'm all ears. See you in space!
Sunday, May 01, 2016
Wednesday, March 09, 2016
New Beginnings
My old corp, Future Corps, perhaps better known by the alliance it flew under - Sleeper Social Club - has shut down. It came as a bit of a shock to me. One week we were having fun, getting fights and the next week I'm pulled into a private conversation on TeamSpeak and asked if I'm interested in joining a new corp - a splinter cell. After that conversation I took a little closer look at my surroundings and noticed the fractures appearing as I noticed people starting to get their ships ready to leave.
As it turned out, a good number of the people that I knew and enjoyed flying with were planning on breaking off into this group and I decided to go along with them. Other people that I enjoyed flying with ended up in different places, some in another new corporation and others grabbing spots in the various established w-space corporations. The one "good" thing about SSC shutting down was that it ended up spawning two additional w-space corporations. That's a net gain of one new corp in w-space, which I consider good for the space we love so much.
Even though I had agreed to join this new corp, for a while I was having some doubts as to whether or not it would be the best place for me right now. I considered joining Waffles to work on improving my PvP skills and FCing ability. I went back and forth on this and eventually ended up applying. As it turned out, I was "deferred" because of my killboard and told to go join Pandemic Horde to "get some dank kills" and "prove" my interest in PvP. I laughed a bit at this because my killboard stats were almost identical to my recruiter's killboard prior to joining Waffles - and he mentioned at one point that he didn't believe my kills would go from what they were to something higher. The irony of his statement after I had researched him probably as much as he had researched me wasn't lost on me, but it is what it is. This is not to mention that I had one quarter of the number of kills that he had in terms of ISK value while having significantly less kills in terms of raw numbers.
I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to get turned away from Waffles. I figured my skills and willingness to fly support roles like scout, logi, ewar plus a heavy interest in improving my FCing would look good to them but they were too focused on killboard metrics. As someone who is always the first to jump into a support role, I've missed out on kills more times than not. Sometimes there are no whore drones in your bay because the last person didn't refill them. Sometimes there are smart bombs on field and your drones get eaten alive before they can get on a target that dies. Sometimes you're told to bring non-whore drones so you don't have the capacity to whore at all. And other times, you're the one relaying intel to the FC from your position, in a cloaky non-combat ship - an effort that is required to get kills but also an effort that doesn't reward you with killmails. Or, in an example I pointed out to my recruiter, I've been the scout sitting on the other side of the gate watching for reinforcements or standing by to tackle should the person on the other side of the gate being killed by my friends deaggress and try to get away. All of these things don't get picked up by killboard metrics yet they were used to judge my application.
At the very least, the rejection or "deferral" from Waffles was enough to put that idea to rest in my mind. I would have happily joined them if I was accepted, but now that I've been turned away it's easier to move on with my Eve life and not think about "well what if I had applied to Waffles". This gave me renewed drive to focus on this new corp.
Getting started in a new corp is no easy task. There's tons of logistics to do (after we spent tons of time and energy moving out of our old home). Plus, you're no longer the big kids on the block. We're all used to being able to ping and have a flood of people show up. We're all used to having back up waiting just on the other side of the hole. Now, we're a much smaller group and chances are there's not very many people just a ping away.
That's okay though, this is a new experience for all of us and the fact that we're small guys means that we need to start thinking like small guys and not big guys like we used to be. That leaves tons of new and interesting options for us to pick when we're going to fight someone. I personally believe we need to be smarter, quicker and sneakier than these other guys to compensate for the fact that everyone else probably outnumbers us. Maybe we need to rely more on ewar and less on the pure numbers of DPS to break through other people's tanks. This is a work in progress and it will take time for us to get to that point.
I ended up being promoted to Director for this new corp, which I can only feel is a major vote of confidence in myself as a pilot. Director roles are never given out easily and especially not in a wormhole corporation where none of your assets are tied down in personal hangers. My focus is doing what I do best: recruitment and propaganda for our corporation. So, if you're looking to join a small, primarily USTZ C5 PvP corporation, come talk to me! Or, you can check out the corporation Noble Sentiments in-game and pop into our public channel "T0RAH Public".
As it turned out, a good number of the people that I knew and enjoyed flying with were planning on breaking off into this group and I decided to go along with them. Other people that I enjoyed flying with ended up in different places, some in another new corporation and others grabbing spots in the various established w-space corporations. The one "good" thing about SSC shutting down was that it ended up spawning two additional w-space corporations. That's a net gain of one new corp in w-space, which I consider good for the space we love so much.
Even though I had agreed to join this new corp, for a while I was having some doubts as to whether or not it would be the best place for me right now. I considered joining Waffles to work on improving my PvP skills and FCing ability. I went back and forth on this and eventually ended up applying. As it turned out, I was "deferred" because of my killboard and told to go join Pandemic Horde to "get some dank kills" and "prove" my interest in PvP. I laughed a bit at this because my killboard stats were almost identical to my recruiter's killboard prior to joining Waffles - and he mentioned at one point that he didn't believe my kills would go from what they were to something higher. The irony of his statement after I had researched him probably as much as he had researched me wasn't lost on me, but it is what it is. This is not to mention that I had one quarter of the number of kills that he had in terms of ISK value while having significantly less kills in terms of raw numbers.
I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to get turned away from Waffles. I figured my skills and willingness to fly support roles like scout, logi, ewar plus a heavy interest in improving my FCing would look good to them but they were too focused on killboard metrics. As someone who is always the first to jump into a support role, I've missed out on kills more times than not. Sometimes there are no whore drones in your bay because the last person didn't refill them. Sometimes there are smart bombs on field and your drones get eaten alive before they can get on a target that dies. Sometimes you're told to bring non-whore drones so you don't have the capacity to whore at all. And other times, you're the one relaying intel to the FC from your position, in a cloaky non-combat ship - an effort that is required to get kills but also an effort that doesn't reward you with killmails. Or, in an example I pointed out to my recruiter, I've been the scout sitting on the other side of the gate watching for reinforcements or standing by to tackle should the person on the other side of the gate being killed by my friends deaggress and try to get away. All of these things don't get picked up by killboard metrics yet they were used to judge my application.
At the very least, the rejection or "deferral" from Waffles was enough to put that idea to rest in my mind. I would have happily joined them if I was accepted, but now that I've been turned away it's easier to move on with my Eve life and not think about "well what if I had applied to Waffles". This gave me renewed drive to focus on this new corp.
Getting started in a new corp is no easy task. There's tons of logistics to do (after we spent tons of time and energy moving out of our old home). Plus, you're no longer the big kids on the block. We're all used to being able to ping and have a flood of people show up. We're all used to having back up waiting just on the other side of the hole. Now, we're a much smaller group and chances are there's not very many people just a ping away.
That's okay though, this is a new experience for all of us and the fact that we're small guys means that we need to start thinking like small guys and not big guys like we used to be. That leaves tons of new and interesting options for us to pick when we're going to fight someone. I personally believe we need to be smarter, quicker and sneakier than these other guys to compensate for the fact that everyone else probably outnumbers us. Maybe we need to rely more on ewar and less on the pure numbers of DPS to break through other people's tanks. This is a work in progress and it will take time for us to get to that point.
I ended up being promoted to Director for this new corp, which I can only feel is a major vote of confidence in myself as a pilot. Director roles are never given out easily and especially not in a wormhole corporation where none of your assets are tied down in personal hangers. My focus is doing what I do best: recruitment and propaganda for our corporation. So, if you're looking to join a small, primarily USTZ C5 PvP corporation, come talk to me! Or, you can check out the corporation Noble Sentiments in-game and pop into our public channel "T0RAH Public".
Monday, January 04, 2016
CSM Candidacies
Well, the new year means that CSM X will be winding down and we'll be looking forward to CSM XI. Already many people have announced their candidacy and I wanted to write a bit about some interesting contenders and of course those candidates who shouldn't be running for the CSM.
I'll start, like always, with the wormhole candidates.
Chitsa Jason is running and as an ex-CSM member and member of my corp, I feel it fitting to start with him. I find his candidacy post leaves a lot to be desired however having known him for about a year now, I know that he's very knowledgeable and passionate about the game. He's also one of the organizers of the wormhole NPSI fleets (think wormholer's version of Spectre Fleet) and seems to have friends all over who help him make things happen. You'll note that there's some drama brewing in his thread from other wormholers. I called some of them out on it for talking smack without putting forward candidates of their own, to which I did not receive a reply. (Later, Noobman stepped up, which we'll discuss next.) What I find mildly infuriating is that as people who live in wormhole space, we shouldn't be attacking other w-space candidates. Someone who seriously cares about w-space should be voted for by anyone who lives in w-space, period. Petty rivalries between corps should be left behind when we're talking about the potential betterment of where we live.
As I mentioned, Noobman of Hard Knocks put forth his candidacy for w-space. I know of him in two ways: one, in-game as an excellent Hard Knocks FC and director and two, out of game where he was willing to answer my questions about the Python coding that he was doing when trying to automate his w-space killboard stats. From what I've seen I think he'll be another great candidate for wormhole space.
A relatively unknown (to me) wormhole candidate is Bradford Clear, the alliance executor of P-NAH, a wormhole alliance. He seems promising to me although after reading his candidacy post I find myself itching for more information about what he wants to bring to the CSM. However, another serious wormhole candidate is great for making sure that wormholers are kept in mind when designing things like citadels and making changes to capitals, etc.
Stepping away from wormhole candidates for now, Apothne is running and I'm certain he'll get in. A fantastic FC, incredibly knowledgeable guy and all around good person he'll be great for the CSM.
Steve Ronuken is running again and will certainly be on my ballot as someone who has proven himself time and time again.
Nikolai Agnon has a very well written post about low sec, and we'll be needing a low sec representative now that Sugar Kyle won't be running for a third term (seriously, that is going to be our loss - she's a fantastic CSM). He seems very promising to me.
Gorski Car is running again, and after "filling in" for two half CSM terms I think he's close to getting an actual seat. I'm not too familiar on what he does or what he has brought to the CSMs that he has been a part of, but he's worth watching.
Other interesting candidates right now include Mr Hyde and Joffy Aulx-Gao.
Xenuria is of course running again and there seems to be a movement to elect him for the luls. He's running on a platform of reforming the CSM, but he has yet to describe how exactly he'd want to reform it, what his version of the ideal CSM would function and whether or not it's up to the CSM to push for reform themselves or whether they should stick to their duties and CCP should push through any sort of reform. As far as I'm concerned, it's CCP's job to change the CSM so it works better for them, so a vote for Xenuria is just a wasted vote.
These are my initial impressions of the CSM candidates as it stands right now. I'm sure more will flesh out as we get into campaigning season, with interviews and more questions for them to answer.
I tend to agree that the CSM has fallen on some tough times with CCP as the trust seems to have been broken. I'm hoping the next group can start rebuilding that trust as I still think that the CSM is a useful vessel and sounding board for CCP. We shall see what CSM XI brings us soon enough!
Friday, December 18, 2015
Still Manufacturing
In my last update I wrote about getting started in Tech 2 manufacturing, using the alt that I had painstakingly trained up.
It has been a few months now and I'm still working on manufacturing. I'm sure I took some time off between the last post and now, but right now I'm still selling items from one of my latest batches. I'm making pretty good profits. IPH tells me I'm often getting 50% returns, which whittle down with competition for the items in my local market. Nonetheless, it has been profitable even though the actual ISK per hour might be low.
I have found some items that sell pretty well and have been manufacturing those. I also dipped my toes into T2 ship production. Building T2 ships is just like building anything else, but it takes much longer to invent and my skills for ships are lower than my other skills, so I fail more often. Ships in my market move slower than other things too, and it doesn't help that I get undercut on slow moving items. Nonetheless, it has been fun building ships and I have a much healthier respect for people who build the larger ships.
I briefly explored building the new(ish) T3 destroyers. However, you need a POS to build them and based on what I can see you can easily lose ISK building them, especially when you factor in the fuel costs and opportunity cost of building something else. I'll still keep my eye on that, though.
Speaking of POSes, I still build out of a station. Right now I don't think I'm producing enough to take advantage of the bonuses of using a POS, but I can certainly see how producing things 25% faster would be beneficial. Assuming I could sell what I was making and continuously run the lines, I'm sure the fuel costs would wash out. However, I have heard that you need to play material tetris and I have zero interest in doing that. Building out of a station with a single hangar is easy when all you need to do is load up the T2 BPC and click build.
Right now my biggest hurdle is keeping my lines going. I tend to build everything I planned to build, sell everything that I built, then start researching what to build next/ gathering the materials. What I should be doing is keeping the lines going, because downtime in manufacturing is wasted time and wasted ISK.
It is nice seeing the wallet increasing, though. Hopefully it keeps up and I don't make any major blunders.
It has been a few months now and I'm still working on manufacturing. I'm sure I took some time off between the last post and now, but right now I'm still selling items from one of my latest batches. I'm making pretty good profits. IPH tells me I'm often getting 50% returns, which whittle down with competition for the items in my local market. Nonetheless, it has been profitable even though the actual ISK per hour might be low.
I have found some items that sell pretty well and have been manufacturing those. I also dipped my toes into T2 ship production. Building T2 ships is just like building anything else, but it takes much longer to invent and my skills for ships are lower than my other skills, so I fail more often. Ships in my market move slower than other things too, and it doesn't help that I get undercut on slow moving items. Nonetheless, it has been fun building ships and I have a much healthier respect for people who build the larger ships.
I briefly explored building the new(ish) T3 destroyers. However, you need a POS to build them and based on what I can see you can easily lose ISK building them, especially when you factor in the fuel costs and opportunity cost of building something else. I'll still keep my eye on that, though.
Speaking of POSes, I still build out of a station. Right now I don't think I'm producing enough to take advantage of the bonuses of using a POS, but I can certainly see how producing things 25% faster would be beneficial. Assuming I could sell what I was making and continuously run the lines, I'm sure the fuel costs would wash out. However, I have heard that you need to play material tetris and I have zero interest in doing that. Building out of a station with a single hangar is easy when all you need to do is load up the T2 BPC and click build.
Right now my biggest hurdle is keeping my lines going. I tend to build everything I planned to build, sell everything that I built, then start researching what to build next/ gathering the materials. What I should be doing is keeping the lines going, because downtime in manufacturing is wasted time and wasted ISK.
It is nice seeing the wallet increasing, though. Hopefully it keeps up and I don't make any major blunders.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Getting Started in T2 Manufacturing
As readers of my blog might remember, I spent a lot of time months back training up a tech 2 manufacturing character. I had read at the time that while trading was a good way of making ISK, manufacturing will scale better.
Now, to be fair, I wasn't putting enough time into trading to make scalability a deciding factor. However, regional trading was growing boring and there was too much competition in station trading to make it worthwhile for me.
I decided to move my manufacturing character out to a system away from the major trade hubs. For some time now I've wanted to seed a non-major market and explore the benefits and disadvantages of doing so. Obviously, less supply means prices can be higher, however less demand can drive prices down or not drive sales at all.
I fired up the trusty IPH tool and ran a few calculations. Not surprisingly, the sales to volume ratios were less than complete for this non-major region in the game. I generally take the SVR to give me some indication of demand in a given region and confirm it from the market window in game. I picked a couple of items that I thought would sell well and seemed to have demand and sent my freighter to a hub to purchase everything I needed.
An important note here is that I only chose items that could be built from components. I thought about doing the raw materials approach but there is a limited supply of minerals on the local market and I didn't want to spend a bunch of time manufacturing the components necessary to build whatever it was that I was building. Plus I didn't want to get into hauling and refining ores.
While my freighter was on the long journey back from the trade hub, I went and gathered the blueprints that I needed and started copying them. One important thing to know about T2 production is that you need lots of blueprint copies (BPCs). I quickly found that I was able to fill up all of my slots running copying jobs, and soon after that I was filling my slots with invention jobs. The number of slots you have is one of the biggest limiting factors to a single character doing tech 2 production. It is not surprising to me that people train up alts that have the sole purpose of being "copy monkeys" - copying blueprints so that the highly trained manufacturing alt can focus on invention and production.
Eventually, I had all my T2 BPCs and all of the components from my trade hub run. I started building the T2 items and listed them on the market. The first thing I noticed is that there were a couple others building what seemed to be the same items as me. I believe that these individuals probably also used IPH and the SVR to select items, as it seemed that we were competing in similar zones. One person in particular had a habit of undercutting in 0.03-0.05 ISK increments, which meant that I could tell that I was likely competing with the same person in different areas.
The second thing that I noticed was that it was easy to miss out on a day of the low price but high volume items like drones, for example, if you were undercut and didn't notice or weren't online to update your sell orders. Things like drones sold pretty well, usually in batches of 5 to 10 at a time, however the profits are low in absolute terms. I was starting to get flashbacks of when I was doing trading where certain items were profitable (i.e.: 20% or more) but the absolute amount of profit was too low to account for the effort it took to maintain. However, the things that have higher profit are also the things that sell slower (if at all).
After a couple of weeks of selling everything I had originally planned on selling, I ended up with about half a billion in profit. Not too bad considering I was only updating my orders maybe twice a day, before and after work, with a little more effort on weekends. I also came away with some valuable lessons, like keep track of what you planned to manufacture, because it's easy to forget what you want to make when you're faced with an hangar full of tons of manufacturing components.
With all of these lessons in mind, I sent my freighter alt back to a trade hub to pick up more supplies with some different items in mind. I'm going to see how these items sell compared to my previous ones to see if I can edge out more profit. I have also been considering renting an office in the station that I base out of so that I could limit the amount of trading between characters I do, and also would make having a copy whore much easier to manage in the future if I want to do that.
All in all, my first serious attempt at T2 manufacturing has been a success and I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks as I try to determine what items to make to maximize my profits.
Now, to be fair, I wasn't putting enough time into trading to make scalability a deciding factor. However, regional trading was growing boring and there was too much competition in station trading to make it worthwhile for me.
I decided to move my manufacturing character out to a system away from the major trade hubs. For some time now I've wanted to seed a non-major market and explore the benefits and disadvantages of doing so. Obviously, less supply means prices can be higher, however less demand can drive prices down or not drive sales at all.
I fired up the trusty IPH tool and ran a few calculations. Not surprisingly, the sales to volume ratios were less than complete for this non-major region in the game. I generally take the SVR to give me some indication of demand in a given region and confirm it from the market window in game. I picked a couple of items that I thought would sell well and seemed to have demand and sent my freighter to a hub to purchase everything I needed.
An important note here is that I only chose items that could be built from components. I thought about doing the raw materials approach but there is a limited supply of minerals on the local market and I didn't want to spend a bunch of time manufacturing the components necessary to build whatever it was that I was building. Plus I didn't want to get into hauling and refining ores.
While my freighter was on the long journey back from the trade hub, I went and gathered the blueprints that I needed and started copying them. One important thing to know about T2 production is that you need lots of blueprint copies (BPCs). I quickly found that I was able to fill up all of my slots running copying jobs, and soon after that I was filling my slots with invention jobs. The number of slots you have is one of the biggest limiting factors to a single character doing tech 2 production. It is not surprising to me that people train up alts that have the sole purpose of being "copy monkeys" - copying blueprints so that the highly trained manufacturing alt can focus on invention and production.
Eventually, I had all my T2 BPCs and all of the components from my trade hub run. I started building the T2 items and listed them on the market. The first thing I noticed is that there were a couple others building what seemed to be the same items as me. I believe that these individuals probably also used IPH and the SVR to select items, as it seemed that we were competing in similar zones. One person in particular had a habit of undercutting in 0.03-0.05 ISK increments, which meant that I could tell that I was likely competing with the same person in different areas.
The second thing that I noticed was that it was easy to miss out on a day of the low price but high volume items like drones, for example, if you were undercut and didn't notice or weren't online to update your sell orders. Things like drones sold pretty well, usually in batches of 5 to 10 at a time, however the profits are low in absolute terms. I was starting to get flashbacks of when I was doing trading where certain items were profitable (i.e.: 20% or more) but the absolute amount of profit was too low to account for the effort it took to maintain. However, the things that have higher profit are also the things that sell slower (if at all).
After a couple of weeks of selling everything I had originally planned on selling, I ended up with about half a billion in profit. Not too bad considering I was only updating my orders maybe twice a day, before and after work, with a little more effort on weekends. I also came away with some valuable lessons, like keep track of what you planned to manufacture, because it's easy to forget what you want to make when you're faced with an hangar full of tons of manufacturing components.
With all of these lessons in mind, I sent my freighter alt back to a trade hub to pick up more supplies with some different items in mind. I'm going to see how these items sell compared to my previous ones to see if I can edge out more profit. I have also been considering renting an office in the station that I base out of so that I could limit the amount of trading between characters I do, and also would make having a copy whore much easier to manage in the future if I want to do that.
All in all, my first serious attempt at T2 manufacturing has been a success and I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks as I try to determine what items to make to maximize my profits.
Friday, August 14, 2015
Problems With Citadels
Asset Safety
IMO - making Eve more safe is not a good idea in w-space nor anywhere else in the game. POSes are not safe and the POS replacement should not be safe either. If you put your assets into your Citadel, they should be very vulnerable. If you want the advantages, you have to put something on the line and it isn't just the cost of the structure, it's the cost of everything you've chosen to store inside. This serves the dual purpose of giving players a strong incentive to defend their assets.
It does not make sense to introduce more safety to the game. Clearly people are willing to risk their most expensive assets in POses as it is right now. Players don't need any incentive to use Citadels. If the benefits aren't worth the risk, people shouldn't use them.
Vulnerability and Reinforcement
With regards to vulnerability windows, I think it's a poor design choice. CCP has listened too much to whiners who want to control the safety of their structures. POSes, as they stand right now, can be attacked any time of day. Citadels, as announced, can only be attacked during certain windows and you won't even know when that is unless you're on grid when it happens. This is a problem for two reasons:
1. In k-space, you can easily go back and check a Citadel every day, multiple times per day. The system is static and can easily be accessed. In w-space, you can't. You have to dedicate an alt to sit in there for a week to figure out when their vulnerability window is.
2. Vulnerability windows don't make much sense. I would rather have more control over when your Citadel comes out of reinforcement (so if you're attacked in your non-main TZ you have the opportunity to defend in your strong TZ). People should be able to attack you whenever they want.
My next issue is with regards to how long the reinforcement period lasts. As it stands, reinforcement can easily last for a week or longer. This simply will not work for w-space. A w-space siege (that is contested by the residents) currently can take a full weekend to pull off (Friday through Sunday). It is necessary to have 24/7 control over all of the wormholes leading in and out to have a successful siege take place. Part of the reason we can get this done is because the reinforcement timers are 24-36 hours - not multiple days. Yes, it's boring, but at least you can dedicate one weekend to it and be finished.
The Citadel system can be manipulated to drag out your reinforcement over many days or even a week. It is not feasible to maintain control over a wormhole system for that long as people will simply not skip work/ school for a whole week to maintain 24/7 hole control, and if you don't maintain hole control then the defender simply can resupply and get pilots back into the system (something that isn't possible if podded out with hole control). This might make more sense in k-space where borders are always constant and you can always find your way back, but it does not work for w-space.
Citadel Defense
Finally, our new Citadels have these lovely guns and such on them - but they don't automatically respond to hostile targets on grid? This is silly. One of the nice things about a POS is that a lone or unorganized attacker is thwarted by the presence of guns and ewar on my POS. I can be down the chain and my POS will shoo away the annoying troll trying to shoot my POS for fun. (Obviously, a serious attacker could handle what my POS could throw at him.)
With the proposed system, Citadels won't actively defend themselves. Instead, you'll have to have someone manually gun the defenses. This means that choosing to leave my Citadel and go down the chain somewhere actually means I'm leaving my Citadel open to attack. What does that mean? During my vulnerability window, if I leave my Citadel I need to ensure that either someone or someone's alt is left behind to man the guns and watch out for attackers. This is not fun game play.
In fact, this is nonsensical. My behemoth of a Citadel should be smart enough to defend itself from hostiles on grid, just like POSes do. A single pilot trying to troll us and entosis our Citadel should be blapped by the Citadel. An organized group of people should be able to withstand the guns (by using logi, etc) and entosis our Citadel.
I have no problem if an organized group comes along while I'm not there and is able to tank my Citadel's guns while entosising. I do have a problem if a lone guy in a frigate can start a whole reinforcement cycle while my friends and I are doing some PvP down the chain somewhere. Come on, CCP.
Additionally, the aggressiveness of your Citadel (or other structure) should be tweakable. If you want a freeport or live in high sec, you probably don't want your Citadel blapping every neutral who lands on grid. If you're in w-space (or anywhere else) and you don't want neutrals near your Citadel, it should defend against them.
Final Thoughts
I like the overall idea of these new structures. I can see them standing in as a replacement for stations in the long run and I will be excited to see industrialists opening up market stations where anyone and everyone is free to dock.
I do think, however, that CCP needs to take a long hard look at whether or not their designs fit in with the culture that is EVE. To be blunt, making things safer is a poor direction to take. Citadels and other structures need to be high risk, high reward.
IMO - making Eve more safe is not a good idea in w-space nor anywhere else in the game. POSes are not safe and the POS replacement should not be safe either. If you put your assets into your Citadel, they should be very vulnerable. If you want the advantages, you have to put something on the line and it isn't just the cost of the structure, it's the cost of everything you've chosen to store inside. This serves the dual purpose of giving players a strong incentive to defend their assets.
It does not make sense to introduce more safety to the game. Clearly people are willing to risk their most expensive assets in POses as it is right now. Players don't need any incentive to use Citadels. If the benefits aren't worth the risk, people shouldn't use them.
Vulnerability and Reinforcement
With regards to vulnerability windows, I think it's a poor design choice. CCP has listened too much to whiners who want to control the safety of their structures. POSes, as they stand right now, can be attacked any time of day. Citadels, as announced, can only be attacked during certain windows and you won't even know when that is unless you're on grid when it happens. This is a problem for two reasons:
1. In k-space, you can easily go back and check a Citadel every day, multiple times per day. The system is static and can easily be accessed. In w-space, you can't. You have to dedicate an alt to sit in there for a week to figure out when their vulnerability window is.
2. Vulnerability windows don't make much sense. I would rather have more control over when your Citadel comes out of reinforcement (so if you're attacked in your non-main TZ you have the opportunity to defend in your strong TZ). People should be able to attack you whenever they want.
My next issue is with regards to how long the reinforcement period lasts. As it stands, reinforcement can easily last for a week or longer. This simply will not work for w-space. A w-space siege (that is contested by the residents) currently can take a full weekend to pull off (Friday through Sunday). It is necessary to have 24/7 control over all of the wormholes leading in and out to have a successful siege take place. Part of the reason we can get this done is because the reinforcement timers are 24-36 hours - not multiple days. Yes, it's boring, but at least you can dedicate one weekend to it and be finished.
The Citadel system can be manipulated to drag out your reinforcement over many days or even a week. It is not feasible to maintain control over a wormhole system for that long as people will simply not skip work/ school for a whole week to maintain 24/7 hole control, and if you don't maintain hole control then the defender simply can resupply and get pilots back into the system (something that isn't possible if podded out with hole control). This might make more sense in k-space where borders are always constant and you can always find your way back, but it does not work for w-space.
Citadel Defense
Finally, our new Citadels have these lovely guns and such on them - but they don't automatically respond to hostile targets on grid? This is silly. One of the nice things about a POS is that a lone or unorganized attacker is thwarted by the presence of guns and ewar on my POS. I can be down the chain and my POS will shoo away the annoying troll trying to shoot my POS for fun. (Obviously, a serious attacker could handle what my POS could throw at him.)
With the proposed system, Citadels won't actively defend themselves. Instead, you'll have to have someone manually gun the defenses. This means that choosing to leave my Citadel and go down the chain somewhere actually means I'm leaving my Citadel open to attack. What does that mean? During my vulnerability window, if I leave my Citadel I need to ensure that either someone or someone's alt is left behind to man the guns and watch out for attackers. This is not fun game play.
In fact, this is nonsensical. My behemoth of a Citadel should be smart enough to defend itself from hostiles on grid, just like POSes do. A single pilot trying to troll us and entosis our Citadel should be blapped by the Citadel. An organized group of people should be able to withstand the guns (by using logi, etc) and entosis our Citadel.
I have no problem if an organized group comes along while I'm not there and is able to tank my Citadel's guns while entosising. I do have a problem if a lone guy in a frigate can start a whole reinforcement cycle while my friends and I are doing some PvP down the chain somewhere. Come on, CCP.
Additionally, the aggressiveness of your Citadel (or other structure) should be tweakable. If you want a freeport or live in high sec, you probably don't want your Citadel blapping every neutral who lands on grid. If you're in w-space (or anywhere else) and you don't want neutrals near your Citadel, it should defend against them.
Final Thoughts
I like the overall idea of these new structures. I can see them standing in as a replacement for stations in the long run and I will be excited to see industrialists opening up market stations where anyone and everyone is free to dock.
I do think, however, that CCP needs to take a long hard look at whether or not their designs fit in with the culture that is EVE. To be blunt, making things safer is a poor direction to take. Citadels and other structures need to be high risk, high reward.
Monday, April 13, 2015
Learning to FC: Part 1
I've recently decided that I want to learn how to FC. I find that much like other games, convincing people to stand up and take on a role like FCing is a difficult task to do. And, not unlike other games, learning how to FC is something you need to do with experience.
Luckily, I do have experience leading, just not in EVE. I'm a raid leader for a team in WoW and have been for quite some time now. When I first took over the RL position, I wasn't that good. I realized that there were many things that seemed easy (from a line member looking at the RL job) but in reality weren't. I realized there was a lot I didn't know. However, that didn't stop me from working my ass off to become a better RL. I took copious amounts of notes, researched everything about what we were doing and tried to be as open as possible. Now I can say that I've been honored by some of my members by being called the best RL they've ever had.
From the outside looking in, the FC position seems easy. Plan something, tell them where to go, call primaries, have fun. However, I'm sure it's more complicated than that. Deciding on a primary, for example, surely isn't as easy as it seems. There are pros and cons to picking different ships as primaries and as an inexperienced FC I'm going to make the wrong calls many times. This is just one of many things that I'm going to need to learn by experiencing it. Nonetheless, I've put up some threads on various forums asking for feedback from more experienced people and I've gotten some great replies. I'll share some of what I've learned with you now.
First of all, you need to narrow your focus. What are you going to bring and where are you going to go are two very important questions to know the answers to. Many people recommended to go to low sec in "cheap stuff" and welp. Others recommended null because the mechanics are more understandable (no gate guns, no plexes, no security loss, etc). After some discussion, Faction Warfare low sec seemed to be the best place to learn because there are tons of fleets out and about looking for fights. Overwhelmingly people told me that T1 cruisers are a great place to start because they live long enough to make some decisions and mistakes. Alternatively, frigs and dessies are super cheap and inty roams are easy enough to look for carebears in null. So it was decided: T1 cruisers in FW low sec.
Of course, deciding the type of ship is one thing but deciding the doctrine is something completely different. As a wormhole pilot, I'm used to our expensive doctrines and T2/T3 ship compositions. I've never spent any time in low sec so I was completely unaware of the "meta" in that area of the game. So, I spent some time researching different doctrines. I decided to separate out my search into cheap brawling (close range) and kiting (long distance) cruiser doctrines and found some great options:
Brawling: Mallers + Augs, Thoraxes (Dickcats) + Augs, Moas + Ospreys
Kiting: Vexors + Ospreys, Cynabals + Scythes, Stabbers + Scythes, Treblecats + Scythes, Thoraxes (Pocket Rockets) + Scythes, Moas + Scythes
I actually had a great time researching doctrines. It felt like a whole new EVE to me and as I was writing these down I could picture situations in which I'd take out these types of fleets. But I had to pick one doctrine that I would use for my maiden voyage as an FC. I had heard great things about Mallers and knew that brawling is considered easier to do (both as an FC and as a line member), so I picked Mallers plus Augorors.
Now that I had decided on a doctrine, it was time to schedule a fleet. Actually scheduling the fleet is a big step, because you're firming up your commitment to take it out (there's no chickening out when people are expecting content). I picked a time that worked for me on the weekend and put up a post on our forums about it. I picked a FW system near a trade hub and designated the trade hub as the staging system (since most wormholers don't have T1 cruisers lying around). I grabbed an interceptor and Dotlan and mapped out a route through low that I wanted to take the fleet. I added the waypoints to my in-game notepad so I'd be prepared to link them for the fleet. Then I retreated back to the wormhole to wait for the time to go.
While I was waiting, I looked up all of the different low sec mechanics. What can fit into the different-sized complexes? What actions will get the gate guns shooting you? How much DPS do the gate guns do? What colour does your safety need to be? I found answers to all of these so I could be better prepared. If you live in low sec all the time, you might already know this information. Or, if you decide to go to null instead, a lot of this information is stuff you don't need to know.
Now unfortunately, as any wormholer can attest to, sometimes bob is just not willing to give you that access to k-space that you need. In fact, for all of Sunday I didn't see a single exit to where I wanted to go. We just couldn't find low or high sec exits anywhere in our chain. So, I had to call the fleet, which was a huge bummer, but we did find plenty of content in our chains that kept us busy for the day, so I can't really complain. I will reschedule that fleet sometime in the future and when I do, I'll post what I learned here. Hopefully these types of posts will help other prospective FCs.
Luckily, I do have experience leading, just not in EVE. I'm a raid leader for a team in WoW and have been for quite some time now. When I first took over the RL position, I wasn't that good. I realized that there were many things that seemed easy (from a line member looking at the RL job) but in reality weren't. I realized there was a lot I didn't know. However, that didn't stop me from working my ass off to become a better RL. I took copious amounts of notes, researched everything about what we were doing and tried to be as open as possible. Now I can say that I've been honored by some of my members by being called the best RL they've ever had.
From the outside looking in, the FC position seems easy. Plan something, tell them where to go, call primaries, have fun. However, I'm sure it's more complicated than that. Deciding on a primary, for example, surely isn't as easy as it seems. There are pros and cons to picking different ships as primaries and as an inexperienced FC I'm going to make the wrong calls many times. This is just one of many things that I'm going to need to learn by experiencing it. Nonetheless, I've put up some threads on various forums asking for feedback from more experienced people and I've gotten some great replies. I'll share some of what I've learned with you now.
First of all, you need to narrow your focus. What are you going to bring and where are you going to go are two very important questions to know the answers to. Many people recommended to go to low sec in "cheap stuff" and welp. Others recommended null because the mechanics are more understandable (no gate guns, no plexes, no security loss, etc). After some discussion, Faction Warfare low sec seemed to be the best place to learn because there are tons of fleets out and about looking for fights. Overwhelmingly people told me that T1 cruisers are a great place to start because they live long enough to make some decisions and mistakes. Alternatively, frigs and dessies are super cheap and inty roams are easy enough to look for carebears in null. So it was decided: T1 cruisers in FW low sec.
Of course, deciding the type of ship is one thing but deciding the doctrine is something completely different. As a wormhole pilot, I'm used to our expensive doctrines and T2/T3 ship compositions. I've never spent any time in low sec so I was completely unaware of the "meta" in that area of the game. So, I spent some time researching different doctrines. I decided to separate out my search into cheap brawling (close range) and kiting (long distance) cruiser doctrines and found some great options:
Brawling: Mallers + Augs, Thoraxes (Dickcats) + Augs, Moas + Ospreys
Kiting: Vexors + Ospreys, Cynabals + Scythes, Stabbers + Scythes, Treblecats + Scythes, Thoraxes (Pocket Rockets) + Scythes, Moas + Scythes
I actually had a great time researching doctrines. It felt like a whole new EVE to me and as I was writing these down I could picture situations in which I'd take out these types of fleets. But I had to pick one doctrine that I would use for my maiden voyage as an FC. I had heard great things about Mallers and knew that brawling is considered easier to do (both as an FC and as a line member), so I picked Mallers plus Augorors.
Now that I had decided on a doctrine, it was time to schedule a fleet. Actually scheduling the fleet is a big step, because you're firming up your commitment to take it out (there's no chickening out when people are expecting content). I picked a time that worked for me on the weekend and put up a post on our forums about it. I picked a FW system near a trade hub and designated the trade hub as the staging system (since most wormholers don't have T1 cruisers lying around). I grabbed an interceptor and Dotlan and mapped out a route through low that I wanted to take the fleet. I added the waypoints to my in-game notepad so I'd be prepared to link them for the fleet. Then I retreated back to the wormhole to wait for the time to go.
While I was waiting, I looked up all of the different low sec mechanics. What can fit into the different-sized complexes? What actions will get the gate guns shooting you? How much DPS do the gate guns do? What colour does your safety need to be? I found answers to all of these so I could be better prepared. If you live in low sec all the time, you might already know this information. Or, if you decide to go to null instead, a lot of this information is stuff you don't need to know.
Now unfortunately, as any wormholer can attest to, sometimes bob is just not willing to give you that access to k-space that you need. In fact, for all of Sunday I didn't see a single exit to where I wanted to go. We just couldn't find low or high sec exits anywhere in our chain. So, I had to call the fleet, which was a huge bummer, but we did find plenty of content in our chains that kept us busy for the day, so I can't really complain. I will reschedule that fleet sometime in the future and when I do, I'll post what I learned here. Hopefully these types of posts will help other prospective FCs.
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