Adding Weight to Wars

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After reading a lot of post about wardec changes, and thinking about the new v the old systems, and then digging into my own thoughts, I keep finding myself asking:  What is the point of War Declarations in High Sec? At the core, a war dec allows Corp A to pay a penalty (isk), and in exchange Corp A gets a free pass to kill anyone in Corp B for a period of time.  Simple enough, you are paying to suspend the normal rules of the game.  But what is the point of this suspension of rules?  It is clear for Corp A, if ship destruction and loot, or the more esoteric value of tears are considered valuable.  Corp B gains very little.  A change to learn how to harden up, possibly get some kills or loot, or a chance to sit in a station for a week to hopefully bore the attackers into not paying for more rule suspension.  Oddly imbalanced no matter how you look at it.  And if you have made it this far, I promise there is an actual point to MY ramblings on this topic. What is missing in this whole equation of war decs Continue Reading →

Fail Fits and Rookies

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Edit: A commenter noted that I am wrong about the tutorials teaching players to use multiple tank types.  This is very probably right.  I do no think that alters my fundamental point. Read this over at Poetic, and the comments.  Always a fun time, reading the comments.  I’m torn on how to handle fail fits.  I’m sure I have some fail fits that I like, elite players be damned.  I also want to laugh at fail fits.  But then I wonder, did that fail fit player buy some PLEX and go nuts, only to get his investment all blowed up and not understand why?  And why do so many people ignore advice from those that blew them up?  Questions without answers.  But one thing could be done. CCP could make the tutorials actually teach people about fits instead of having tutorial missions that encourage fail fits in a roundabout way.  I’m talking about those starter tutorial chains that give you a frigate, then give you an armor repper, then give you a shield booster.  And each mission tells you to use that specific module.  Not very good.  Arydanika talked about this on her blog a few weeks or months ago Continue Reading →

Faction Warfare in Inferno

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I just read the new dev blog.  My two main accounts are faction standing agnostic, in that they decline any and all anti-faction missions because I have a habit of relocating to various areas in space.  Grimmash so far has 8+ standings with the Amarr Navy, Federation Navy and Ishukone Watch, as does my industrial pilot.  On those characters I value the ability to get perfect refines and jumps clones anywhere, and I like being able to fly in any area of space without wondering if gate guns are going to light me up like Paxista smuggling a certain book. But my third account has a frigate pilot that does not care a whit about faction standings. She’s only meant for fun.  The new FW changes excite me, and after a week and half of the trade alt training for more order slots, I may have to get that pilot up to Tech II projectiles.  The thought of having meaningful, structured pvp appeals to me.  I spent an all too brief stint in RvB, having fun blowing people up, and I have… 50 or so Rifters and half as many Thrashers languishing over in the RvB systems.  I could up Continue Reading →

Day 30: 30 Day Market Challenge

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Final Results: THE END! And a record setting day!  And this gem happened today: Lesson:  Pay attention to your buy orders when you type them in.  This guy put an extra “1” in the hundreds digit, and I made about 70 mil off his mistake.  Woo! Recap  30 days ago I gave a fresh alt 5 million isk and just the basic trade skills.  Then I almost exclusively traded in stations, setting buy orders and flipping those to sell orders.  I started in Jita, moved to Amarr and then to Dodixie, and ended up back in Jita.  5 mil was turned into 1,461 million, or a 29,236% increase is value.  Here is the overall chart of the daily reports: You can see the dips when I moved, as I cleared out stock before moving on. My final Trade skills are: Accounting 4 Broker Relations 4 Marketing 4 Procurement 4 Retail 4 Trade 4 I didn’t even use all of those skills. Hypothesis:  You can pay for a PLEX with a new character just by station trading. Results: True. Addendum The full guide will be coming with lots more info.  I expect to have it done sometime over the weekend.  As Continue Reading →

Day 29: 30 Day Market Challenge

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Results: I had my last final today, so not much happened.  Tomorrow is wide open though, so I am hoping for a strong finish!  Aside from my busy day, not much to report.  Mostly trading in weapons and various mid slot modules lately.  I did nothing special, just flipped a lot of orders while on campus.  The final write up / guide is also underway.  Expect that in the next few days.

Day 28: 30 Day Market Challenge

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Results: PLEX was purchased and redeemed today, so I am adding this cost in to the total to keep the numbers making sense.  A 485 mil loss would seem a bit substantial, no?  Aside from that, new record day with 172 mil in profits!  My return to Jita appears to have been a good idea.  This goes back to the point of turnover. Margins in Jita are not as good as many other trade hubs but the goods move!  I only had about half of my usual order slots going as I ramped up in Jita again, and I still crushed it compared to Amarr or Dodixie.  Being able to choose from all the weapon types is a huge boon. At this point I don’t really care if my margins increase in actual dollar amounts.  If I can maintain roughly 100 mil margin a day I can easily PLEX two of my three accounts and still be building wealth.  If I can keep up the 150 m mark, then I will never even have to use profits from other account to pay for the game and fund ships.  I also just got a job!  So for the summer at least, Continue Reading →

Escalating Your Inferno

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Aside from the 30 Day Market Challenge I have not been as active in Eve this month because I am trying to find a job, and my spring semester is ending, hence finals…  Oh the life of a grad student.  But here are some off the hip thoughts on the Escalation. Flashing Lights I got to see the new status effects in the flesh today while running missions.  It is a very nice addition, and it makes easier to tell if that stupid frigate is webbing me (not that important) or scramming me (more concerning).  Also, as I tend to mission in Caldari boats seeing any sort of target painting or an inept npc tracking disruption is entertaining.  C’mon pirates, a Drake already has a sig the size of Ohio, and a Tengu gives no shits about your turret effects. Looting the Corpses Also in missions, I find the loot drop changes to be very nice when I salvage.  Instead of ignoring the drops until I get around to refining/selling/whatever, I get excited when I see a pile of named mods gloriously uncluttered by other junk.  I almost wonder if it would be worth CCP just taking out the metal Continue Reading →

Day 27: 30 Day Market Challenge

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Results: So I moved again, woo.  Back to Jita.  I was in Dodixie for long enough to realize that it is hot mess at the moment.  Although you cannot prove bots exist, I’ll be damned if they haven’t infested that joint.  I sat for about fifteen minutes updating orders, and a slew of odd updates would come every single time after I updated.  Some would be for the exact same price, .01 isk above or below me depending.  If I have to deal with that, at least I can do it where more people are buying and selling stuff.  So, back to Jita.  It’s rather frustrating moving tens of millions of isk back and forth and having very little to show for it. The nice part is that my liquid isk is up to 855 mil.  Not bad, not too much locked into inventory.  I will need to buy PLEX (in game) in the next day or two.  I’ll likely add that to the running total to indicate the monthly total, in the spirit of this challenge. I will take this moment to say this: I’ve proved the hypothesis of Beamer Grey and myself.  You can make enough isk station Continue Reading →

You Can’t Stop the Signal

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Bit of a think piece here. There have been many discussion about intel gathering and the function of Local in the various regions of space.  I always find it odd that our comms travel at FTL speeds.  Our ships do too, actually, but that is another issue for another post.  While thinking about the value of local, I’ve had some random ideas to inflict upon you.  These ideas are generally meant to affect communications between systems, not inside a particular system. Comms in Empire It seems odd to me, given sec status and jump gate control by factions, that everyone always gets to see the whole local list and chat.  Why would the Gallente let a known criminal use their gates and their comms?  I’ve always envisioned that the comms system in Eve uses the jump gates to get around the Cluster, with all of our messages making trips similar to our ships.  So perhaps chat could become a function of your standing with the various empires, with high standing payers getting higher priority and criminals or negative standing players cut out of the loop.  Effectively the jump gates would see your pod status and use that to determine your Continue Reading →

Day 26: 30 Day Market Challenge

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Results: Nothing like a good day to wipe clean the previous three.  86 mil to go to hit the revised goal.  Not a whole lot to say, except meta modules are still where it’s at.  In an case of synchronicity, Ripard Teg was talking about my experience in the previous market challenge post here.  I thought it was a nice explanation that I failed to realize.