Faction Warfare - So, This Is Sovereignty(-Lite) Warfare

When Fweddit decided to enter Faction Warfare, they could have chosen any side they wanted. Minmatar was easily the side to be on if you wanted to be a winner. Minmatar have made an art out of steamrolling Amarrians. They've had a long while to perfect it. Morale had been a hard thing to find among the Amarr militia.

I give much credit to Fweddit for choosing Amarr. It was a classy move. They could have chose the easy road, but rather chose the road less travelled.

Now that the Goon exploits have been patched, the true strength of Fweddit -- their numbers -- are being felt. 575 members at last count. And each and every day, with every skill point, Fweddit grows stronger.

Minmatar days of controlling the southern faction battle are numbered. Yesterday, Minmatar felt the effects of their first panic. Kourmonen. A system that is the crossroad to three different pipes was on the verge of falling to the Amarr. A large number of Minnie pilots have made Kourmonen their base of operations, because of its access to every area Amarr and Minmatar space. Kourm has been in Minmatar hands since May 03 2012. A huge push was made to keep it out of Amarr hands, as the Amarr made a huge push to claim the system. The contested state reached 57% at one point. That might not seem like a big deal, but it's barely risen above 15% contested since Inferno released.

That push to retain Kourmonen wasn't without a tonne of losses on the Minmatar side, it wasn't without getting to see first hand what Amarr numbers will mean going into the future. One Plex defended, an Amarr fleet sent to their graves, and before the field could be looted, the next Amarr fleet was arriving. It was wave on wave of Amarr. There were equal number of Minmatar retreats as there were battles, and in very few of the battles could it be said that Minmatar truly dominated. It was a scratching and clawing sort of evening.

Timezones saved Kourmonen in the end. Fweddit is mainly a USTZ group. At around 2AM Mountain TZ (4AM Eastern TZ), the Amarr numbers started tailing off dramatically. EUTZ was beginning to log on, and the process of defensive plexing began. EUTZ saved the day, and actually brought Minmatar up to T4 warzone control briefly today. (60.5%, enough for people to cash out LP cheaply.) An hour later we were back into T3 control.

It's going to be harder and harder for Minmatar to keep control, to even push for T4 control, however briefly. The numbers, which used to be Minmatar's bread and butter, are now Amarr's strength. There's little defense to 200 pilots spread out across Minmatar systems, plexing the contested state upwards, lowering Minmatar warzone control. Once the Amarr start getting a handle on their primary strength, they can maintain multiple fronts of battle. This will push Minmatar strategizing and resources to the edge.

The Minmatar cakewalk is over. The fight is now on. It's going to be fun. It's a good time to be involved with Faction Warfare.

Greenscreening Coming to EVE Online

I've played around with putting our characters onto different backgrounds, but the job of removing existing backgrounds can be a little onerous, especially with my middling Photoshop skills. I've wished, for awhile now, that we had the option to put our characters onto a solid background, green preferably.

Yesterday, I decided to use the power of Twitter to ask if it might be possible.

The answer came within the hour from Erlendur, CCP Karkur, and Torfi Frans Olafsson.

And not twenty-four hours later, CCP Karkur demoed a mock-up, the image above. So, I'm excited to think that this may become a reality in a patch or update in the near future.

This took all of 4 minutes with the new green
background. Only a few pixels to manually edit,
rather than hundreds.

I have middle of the road Photoshop skills. I would expect that those folks with great Photoshop skills will find greenscreening much more useful. It would probably ease the process of step-by-step animating their characters into scenes.

I know this is just a small example, and that it isn't related to internet spaceships, but am being continually impressed since September 2011: CCP's willingness to listen and respond to its players quickly and efficiently.

I'd like to thank Erlendur, CCP Karkur and Torfi for the positive response to my suggestion, and the quick turn around on something fleshed out. I look forward to seeing it in game. I look forward to seeing how the more graphically inclined utilize greenscreening.

Stalking Soundwave

I was going to start this post with "My first exposure ..." No. "My first encounter ..." No. "I first came into contact with ..." Damn it. You all need to grow up.

My first encounter with CCP Soundwave was during Alliance Tournament IX. He was the host. I'd only been playing EVE for a few months at that point, and tuned into EVE TV out of curiosity. I was actually expecting a laughable production.

Hell, if I was wrong.

Alliance Tournament IX was a helluva production, mainly due to the personalities. Wise decisions on who to fly in as commentators, for sure, but also the host. Affable. Well-spoken. Charismatic. I found Soundwave to be funny as all get-go. His humour is dry and absurdist. That's my kind of humour. I was almost more interested in the panel discussions during that tournament than the matches themselves.

I was already pretty committed to EVE Online at that point. I'd finally found my original Ultima Online. A game of no-holds barred. But by the end of Alliance Tournament IX, I was more committed to the game. I started my Twitter account during the tournament. A week or so later, this blog. It was Soundwave's vision for EVE, the direction he wanted to take it, that had me wanting to get more involved with the community as a whole.

And then Greed is Good happened. And I was crushed after reading Soundwave's piece defending microtransactions, pay-to-win as a viable strategy. Granted, his article wasn't supporting full-on pay-to-win, ala World of Tanks, but a subset of that. It was disappointing all the same. I had a hard time reconciling what he'd written for Greed is Good, with his vision for EVE expressed elsewhere.

The summer of 2011 moved on, and a change in direction was announced by CCP. The Crucible expansion was released to much acclaim. And a large part of its success was due to Team BFF, Soundwave's pet group of developers, tasked with fixing "little things." An enormous number of little things did they fix. Soundwave's star was back on the rise again. So much so that I gave him an honourable mention when I announced CCP's Employee of the Year (an unknown and almost coveted award.)

A little over a month ago, the Inferno expansion released. As lead designer for EVE Online, Soundwave sets the expansion themes, approves (or not) major design decisions from each of the design and development teams. Generally, he sets the tone for the game in its entirety. He of course has his own bosses, and colleagues upon which to bounce off ideas, but ultimately he is the face of EVE Online. If player's aren't happy with the direction the game is heading, he's going to earn the brunt of the anger and attacks.

Crucible and Inferno have been successful enough that he's earned more praise and high fives than bitter anger. There's always going to be some of the latter, but CCP's new commitment to iteration has mitigated much of the dislike for some new features, or new features gone awry. Soundwave is committed to fixing things, not just leaving them be.

Going forward, Soundwave continues to have the best interests of EVE Online at heart. I'd like to point out a number of quotes (and I'll give you links so you can read them in context, or in full) he's made recently that make me glad that Soundwave is leading the design of EVE into the future:

Fairness ... isn't really a design philosophy in EVE.

***

Ring mining would be getting moon minerals through collaborative PVE. It would take it out of the hands of the alliances and into the players hands.

***

I'm not entirely sure I trust a system of dynamic resources in a game that's so built around settling down and carving your own piece of space.

***

I'm not sure EVE is a game that would benefit from dynamic resources. I'd much rather invest in a system where we encourage conflict through social dynamics. Where you go to war because you dislike someone and want to e-stab them with your ship.

***

What if we based it on a system where you for example could upgrade your space at the expense of someone else's space? Let that simmer for a while and people will be fighting in no-time. 

I'd rather rely on a mechanic where people poke each other than moons.

***

Are [moons] conflict drivers? Or even more importantly, are they a good conflict driver? Is the degree people fight over them (which doesn't seem to be much right now) worth the amount of money they provide?

***

I'm not sure having a tower that basically mines money is a good idea compared to having a group of people doing an activity that the alliance then has some tools to tax. 

That's another issue, making sure your alliances health/money is linked to your members. Right now it really isn't and I think EVE would be a better game if alliances would benefit more directly from their members actions, rather than a tower sitting somewhere.

***

I think POCOs require a certain minimum traffic to be interesting. If we let them be taken over in High Sec (which I desperately want to do), they'd become a lot more interesting.

***

Yes, stations should be destroyable.

***

Might also force people to only hold as much space as they actually need. :)

The overarching theme of each of those quotes is one of driving conflict and driving community. EVE Online is a game of conflict. It is a game of community. Without conflict, the game is an empty shell. Without community, from whence does the conflict arise? Lose conflict, lose community, you lose the game. And Soundwave understands this. He's concerned about giving people more reasons to fight, and more reasons to work together. If that is his vision for EVE Online, then it is in good hands.


Damn it. That all came across like Sonnet 116. It's not like that. Honest. I just respect the guy and what he's trying to accomplish.

Faction Warfare - Those Halcyon Tier 5 Days Are Over

It is entirely ridiculous that an Incursus can tank a major outpost, all on its own. Without breaking a sweat. From what I hear, a one day old alt flying a 10mn afterburning Rifter can do the same. That's more ridiculous, but any single frigate being able to survive a major plex, tanking 20+ cruiser and battlecruiser-sized enemies, is simply goofy.

I'll take the easy LP, for the time being, but this needs to be fixed. I can't imagine that working as intended is something CCP is going to claim in this regard.

More on this later, though.

On Friday I had the pleasure to read an article by Khalia over at My Loot, Your Tears. Basically it's a tutorial on faction warfare plexing, but using the warzone control tier system to your advantage. A very informative and surprising read. I had no idea that LP store prices dropped so dramatically on a tier by tier basis. Ridiculous drops. Prices reduce 50% per tier. If something costs 1000 LP at tier 1, it costs 500 LP at tier 2, and 250 LP at tier 3. WTF! is an acronym (with appropriate punctuation) that immediately comes to mind.

I paid dick-all attention to loyalty store costs and how the tiers affected those costs, mainly because common sense told me that the price difference between tier 1 and tier 5 was going to be, at most, 25%. If something cost 1000 LP at tier 1, it was going to cost 750 LP at tier 5. Oh, how wrong I was. With CCP, assumption is the mother of losing out on billions of ISK. It's mind-boggling to think that under the current system, something that costs 1000 LP at tier 1 will cost 63 LP at tier 5. That's wonky Iceland math from their banking boom era. And to think, that tier 5 warzone control for the Minmatar was a common occurrence the last two weeks (thanks to Goons taking advantage of wonky math.)

The days of tier 5 zone control are over for the Minmatar. The gaming of the faction warfare system, that Goonswarm took advantage of, has been plugged. Minmatar now have to earn their warzone control the old-fashioned way, by not relying on Goon ingenuity and Goons having more LP than they know what to do with.

(Now, I'm not here to bitch about what a bunch of Goons did to the system. I don't really give a rat's ass. They took advantage of a CCP oversight. More power to them. They did the research and testing, they deserve the spoils. Goons certainly shouldn't be bitching that the holes they discovered were patched. No reasonable person can think that earning billions of ISK per hour per person was a system working as intended. And to the people bitching at the Goons? Get over yourself, it's jealousy that you didn't have the wherewithal to think of it yourself.)

So, I doubt I'll see tier 5 warzone control again. I think Minmatar can easily maintain tier 4 control for long stretches, at least until the Amarr get more people. Yes, they have Fweddit, but since Fweddit is as concerned about capturing systems as rabbits are to be hit by trucks, the population disparity between Minmatar and Amarr still, functionally, exists.

As long as you're with a faction that can maintain high warzone control (and this, unfortunately, means that more people will flood to Minmatar than Amarr), there is still good ISK to be made by offensive plexing. But since the Amarr hardly hold any systems, you have to head up to Gallente-Caldari space and plex the hell out of Caldari controlled systems.

Which is what I've been doing this weekend.

While the iron is still hot, while Minmatar can maintain tier 4 warzone control, I'm going to make some good ISK. I'm not making the optimal 161 million ISK per hour, but I'm doing okay. And at least having fun doing it.

Incursus: Major Plex Tanking Montage (click for fullsize)

The plexing itself isn't fun. That's just orbiting a button for 10-20 minutes (depending on plex type). That's not exciting. But when a Caldari does enter my empty system, they invariably try to figure where I am, with intent to kill. They don't manage to nab me, but there are a few close calls. That you have to enter a plex via an acceleration gate is a godsend. Doubly so when they land 100km away. There's time and then more time to make your escape. Some enemy icons in system, check d-scan, range 400000 km, 360 degrees. Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.

I certainly wasn't going to fight anyone in this:

[Incursus, Caldari Plexer]
Small Armor Repairer II
Armor Kinetic Hardener II
Armor Kinetic Hardener II
Armor Thermic Hardener II

1MN Afterburner II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II

Light Neutron Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]

Small Capacitor Control Circuit I
Small Capacitor Control Circuit I
Small Auxiliary Nano Pump I

Hobgoblin II x1

The gun is mainly for show. In a major plex, you're target jammed 99% of the time, so there's no chance of shooting at any rat. (When they remove ewar from plex rats in the Inferno 1.1 update, shooting will once again be something you can do, if you want, one of those entirely optional things.)

I did learn at least one optimization of the process. Whereas tanking a major plex is worth more ISK per hour than a minor plex, your chances of completing a minor plex before some Caldari wanders through the system is much greater than completing a major plex. (The numbers: 10 minutes to complete a minor plex for ~11500 LP and 20 minutes to complete a major plex for ~28500 LP.) So whereas you earn more doing majors, you'll complete more minors before any Caldari can interfere. You get nothing if you plex a major for 15 minutes and then some Caldari runs you off. You just wasted 15 minutes of your time. You could have earned 11000 LP in those 15 minutes doing a minor, then started another (which means you would have only wasted 5 minutes of your time.)

The money to be made is pre-Inferno Incursion stupid money. It needs to be fixed. Making this sort of ISK should require some actual effort.

P.S. If any of you Fancy Hats are out there: I'm in your systems, plexing your outposts.

Peregrination

I like to post a map of where I've touched base around New Eden from time to time. The last time I took such a snapshot was back in March, and was the combined travels of Poetic and Scottish.

This is the extent of Poetic's New Eden travels as of today:

By comparison, this was the sum total of Poetic's New Eden reach nearly one year ago (she barely got outside Metropolis):

Faction Warfare - Ranks

As far as I can tell, I gain a new rank when some mysterious set of requirements have been met. I've already gained two ranks in my, thus far, short career with the Minmatar militia.

The only benefit of gaining rank goes to the enemy. The higher your rank, the more LP they get when they blow you up. Of course, this works in your favour if you can blow up high ranking enemy militia. Except, I don't know of anyone who targets the enemy based on rank. Probably because there is no quick, unintrusive way to determine rank during the heat of battle. (Bringing up the character show info window in the heat of battle is neither quick or unintrusive.)

This blog post isn't to suggest that there be a quick way to determine rank. We certainly don't need a rank column in the overview. We have more than enough columns to deal with as it is. That, and who cares. The rank adjustment to the LP reward likely isn't all that high anyhow. (Perhaps this requires some testing. Take two pilots of greatly differing rank, flying identical ships, what is the LP reward for killing each of them?)

What I am going to suggest is that rank have some added utility beyond being an LP reward multiplier.

What if rank gave fleet bonuses to those in fleet, wing and squad command positions? The kicker? Without requiring any leadership skills. Granted, the bonuses should be small, and reserved to the upper half of the rank hierarchy. These rank bonuses would further act as a multiplier to any leadership skill bonuses a character may also possess.

I'm not sure how long it takes currently to achieve the highest faction warfare rank (the Gallente Luminaire General or the Amarr Divine Commodore, as two examples), but I'm figuring it should take approximately 2 years of faction warfare involvement to reach maximum rank.

Another possibility is to give LP store discounts to the lower half of the rank hierarchy. Again, the bonuses should be small, maybe topping out at a 3% discount (which is on top of what ever other warzone discounts the militia as a whole receives.)

Rank should have its privileges.

Thoughts on the idea? It's obviously not fully fleshed out, but hopefully it will generate some further discussion and an evolution of ideas related to faction warfare rank.

Roles - Can CCP Screw-up the New Mining Barges?

The tl;dr is "Of course they can." Those with short attention spans can stop reading there, I suppose.

It seems CCP might be well on the way to making the new roles for the upcoming mining barge/exhumer iteration mostly pointless.

Two of the exhumers currently have specialized bonuses. The Skiff has a mercoxit mining bonus. The Mackinaw has an ice harvesting bonus.

How will this affect the new upcoming iteration? Where mercoxit and ice mining are concerned, it kind of makes the upcoming changes pretty pointless. If you're ice harvesting, why would you fly anything other than a Mackinaw? Whether it's Hulkageddon or not, no matter what space you're in, you're never going to choose the more sturdy Skiff over the ice harvesting bonus that the Mack gives. This defeats the purpose of the player having to make choices, having to gear their activity towards other outside forces and factors.

I'd simply assumed yesterday, when I cheered on the upcoming iteration towards roles, that the specific mining type bonuses would be removed from the exhumers. If the intention is to create a bit of a paradigm shift in the exhumer class vessels, different ships for different situations, then keeping the current specialization bonuses undermines the paradigm.

Apparently the exhumer bonuses are staying. CCP Ytterbium clarifies in some Q&A on the ship rebalancing thread:

Q: WILL EXHUMER SHIP SPECIALIZATIONS BE AFFECTED BY SUCH CHANGES?

A: Most likely not.

It's times like this when I wish CCP would actually go into some detail on their decision-making. What's their thinking on the issue? Why do they feel that removing the current specializations is the wrong course of action? Hopefully the reasons are deeper than just being lazy and wanting to push some changes out the door as quickly as possible.

But ...

If CCP did remove the mining type specializations from the exhumers, what would happen to them? Would they just disappear, or is there a way to let players get the bonus/penalty of those specializations through some other means? There are two equally valid ways for CCP to go about doing this.

1. Turn the Mining Laser Upgrade and Ice Harvester Upgrade modules into items that can load scripts. The scripts define any bonuses and penalties. Perhaps the Mercoxit Script gives a 60% bonus to mercoxit yield, while delivering an ore bay capacity penalty, along with a penalty to gas cloud formation. This concept could be expanded down the road, with scripts for every rock type. A veldspar script, for instance, giving some veldspar yield bonus and an associated penalty.
2. Mining Type rigs. Want to mine mercoxit? Install a rig on your ship. Want to increase your ice harvesting yield? Install a rig on your mining vessel. The bonus of rigs is that to replace them, you have to destroy them, which would please manufacturers.

The codebase for both of these options are already in-game. These are not unique mechanics that have been offered up by the playerbase. CCP could do either of these painlessly, and likely quickly. Both options keep the new mining barge/exhumer roles intact, giving players the flexibility to mine what they want in the ship they want to use.

Why CCP is not going down this road, I have no idea. Smacks as a quick fix to some miner screaming, versus an iteration with some real longterm potential in mind.

Roles - The Cure for Mining Whining

The upgrade path is a concept that's relatively foreign to EVE Online. Just because you've got the skill to fly an Ishkur, does not mean you stop flying Incursuses (Incursi?). Why? Because the ships have very different roles from each other.

(tl;dr The new mining barges are excellent. CCP converted an upgrade path into roles. Roles are far superior to upgrades, are more suited to the EVE Online concept.)

That's why EVE Online has the longevity that it does. CCP doesn't have to introduce new ships with every expansion cycle, because we continue to fly a very wide variety of ships, not because we have too, but because we want too. We don't give up flying our current ship simply because we now have the skill points to fly something that requires more skill points. Battleships aren't better than frigates. They're simply different.

Skill points aren't gained simply to vacate our current ship to jump into the next ship in some upgrade path. We aren't striving to reach some ultimate ship. CCP doesn't have to keep introducing new ships, because there is no ship that trumps all other ships.

Upgrade paths do exist with certain module groups. If you can use a Damage Control II, there's really no reason at all to use a Damage Control I. But if you can use a MicroWarpdrive II, you're likely still going to stick with tech one versions, because of fitting and cost considerations. With modules, there are certainly items that are better than other items within a module group, but EVE gives us a variety of valid reasons to use lesser items over their better tech 2 variants.

Where an upgrade path has existed within EVE Online, and been most glaring, is with mining barges and exhumers:

Mining Frigates < Procurer < Retriever < Covetor < Skiff < Mackinaw < Hulk^[1]

This is all about to change. CCP Ytterbium's most recent devblog announces that mining barges and exhumers will be redesigned. No longer will the upgrade path exist, each ship will now have a well-defined role to play. (As well, all of the current mining frigates will be replaced with a new ORE frigate.)

One of the complaints from Hulkageddon victims is that none of the mining ships offer an option of defense. Given how dangerous mining can be in New Eden, it is a little odd that ORE didn't design for demand sooner. ORE finally came around, their delay has been but a miner inconvenience. Players will now have their heavy defense mining barge; it will be at the expense of cargo and yield, but there should be trade-offs.

Ship Type	Resilience	Cargo Bay	Mining Yield
ORE Frigate	Low	Low	Low
Procurer/Skiff	High	Mid	Low
Retriever/Mackinaw	Mid	High	Mid
Covetor/Hulk	Low	Mid	High

The table is an oversimplification. The Skiff's resilience will likely be off-the-charts compared to the Mackinaw. None of the frigate's capabilities will be comparable to the barges and exhumers. That said, the table does give a quick reference to the design differences between the ships.

So what are the roles? Frigates, for fast agile mining fleets in very dangerous locations. The Procurer/Skiff for solo mining in high-gank areas (the ship of choice for Hulkageddon). The Retriever/Mackinaw should be a capable solo and small fleet ship in highsec and lowsec. The Covetor/Hulk for fleet mining operations with Orca support.

These changes won't cure all the mining whining. There'll still be the knuckleheads who'll go for the highest yield ships and fly them solo, no matter the inherent dangers in doing so. But with these new roles, CCP can now rightfully tell the knuckleheads to HTFU and use a Skiff. CCP can ignore their desperate forum posts, let the playerbase deal with them the way the playerbase best deals with people like this (wardecs!)

So, yeah, roles are greater than upgrade paths. This is a very welcome change to EVE Online. So, congrats to CCP Ytterbium and the other devs working on the new mining barge iterations.

^[1] An argument could made concerning Skiffs and Covetors, but the Skiff is certainly more versatile, even if it lacks defensibility and module slots. Either way, even if we flip Skiffs and Covetors in the list, a glaring upgrade path does exist.

Faction Warfare Musings

I'll start off with the good stuff. Comments on Faction Warfare mechanics, and then write a little about my experiences this week.

CCP is wise to let faction warfare stew a little before heading into any iterations. There's some stuff I'd maybe like to see, but it's hard to say right now if it is really necessary. Especially with Minmatar vs. Amarr, where the two factions are so lopsided, more time is needed for Fweddit (in particular) to skill up. As they start flexing some muscle in the near future, where the equilibrium falls will become more apparent.

I am concerned that defensive plexing awards zero loyalty points. The Minmatar side is currently giving up systems, simply so that we can take them back again for the loyalty point (LP) rewards. Roushzar, this weekend, is a good example. Let the Amarr have it and we'll take it back sometime this week. If there was some benefit to defending, we probably wouldn't be doing that. We can, at the moment, easily maintain our tier four warzone control while giving up systems here and there.

I guess the argument against awarding defensive plexing is that it will lead to farming. The solution to that is to scale defensive rewards based on the contested state of a system. If a system is stable, obviously no LP should be awarded. If a system is 99.9% contested (almost in Amarr hands), then defending plexes in that system should award half of what they would were we offensive plexing. The LP rewards then scale from that based on the contested percentage. A system that is 0.4% contested would award almost zero LP (0.4% of the maximum), and a system that is 75.6% contested would award 75.6% of the defensive plexing LP maximum. So, defensive plexing never awards as much as offensive plexing, but enough that defending your systems has some benefit, versus just constantly giving them up and taking them back.

Is that the solution? It sounds good on paper, but how will the players abuse it? Would they simply continue giving up systems, to get maximum reward? Hard to say. Is shooting for and maintaining tier five warzone control worth the effort? Maybe not under the current system, but maybe so under a system that rewards defenders to some degree.

CCP is doing the right thing, though. Watching what happens, and then using the collected data to determine what iterations are necessary. Faction warfare came out of the gate solidly built, unlike new Inferno items such as the unified inventory and the war declaration system.

***

Faction warfare missions are quite a bit different than regular missioning. The first thing that struck me is the travel. It's common to travel six to nine jumps from the agent to complete a given mission. In regular missioning, you rarely travel more than three jumps from the agent.

The second thing is that you need only kill one thing. There are no waves upon waves, no multiple pockets of rats. You kill a ship, or a structure, and then you get the hell out^[1]. The missions are designed for quick blitzing. You still need to survive a bunch of rats while killing the one thing. It's still important to know what you're doing, to be able to do it quickly, but faction warfare missions are quick in and outs.

The third thing is that as soon as you arrive at the acceleration gate, a beacon goes up, notifying everyone in system that a mission is being done. Missions are often PvP targets. So you have to be doubly aware while completing them. You're not looking for probes (because nobody needs probes to find you), but rather any ship withing 20000 kilometres of your position. If you're watching for trouble, you can get away easily enough. Like plexes, the acceleration gates have to be used to get into the mission pockets.

^[1] There are a few missions where you have to retrieve an object, but these are declined. They are poison pills. Someone else can as easily scoop the object out from under your nose, forcing you to fail the mission and take a standings hit.

***

After losing a Helios and a Dramiel during the week, I'm back to my cache of Thrashers. Still have 35 of them in station.

I was looking to change things up. After the initial successes, I was Fweddit's new primary in every encounter. That grew annoying, fast. Hard to get on killmails when you're in your pod inside of 90 seconds every fight. Harder to get any LP from plexing and system takeovers, when you're flying the six jumps back to station to reship.

I figured, to avoid being killed immediately, I needed something fast, something longer range. I had some Dramiels sitting in station in Hek, so decided to put them to use. My first fit, which I don't have, because I never really used it, was an Arty Dramiel with two Sensor Dampeners in the midslots. It was kind of a ridiculous fit, but the thinking was that if I was not going to be doing much damage from range, I could at least add some ECM for benefit. Eventually, I went with something, at least a little more traditional looking, if still ridiculous. Still not even sure how I died. I was plexing in the thing, speed tanking a major (though it might have been a medium, I cannot recall now) when a bunch of Fweddit landed on grid. I immediately began burning away. They were 30 km distant. At least, I'm pretty sure I was burning away from them. There were no red brackets in front of me. And at 5000m/s, I was pretty sure my escape was guaranteed. Yet, I was popped, by an autocannon Cynabal. I don't know what the range of an autocannon Cynabal is, but it can't be all that much. Thirty kilometres sounds pretty extreme. And yet that's what killed me. I wish I knew exactly what went down, because hard to learn from a loss, if you don't really know why the loss happened.

(Was just informed by the esteemed Pinky Feldman, that autocannon Cynabals have an optimal of 2-4km and a falloff of between 35-45km, depending on ammo. So that would explain my death. The MWD bloom didn't help matters any. And running directly away from them was the poor decision. I should have run perpendicular to their position, though the transversal might not have been enough even then.)

So I've given up the Dramiel experiment for the time being.

When the weekend came, I was once again looking for fleets. It seemed sort of a slow Saturday, so after talking with Hans Jagerblitzen, decided to give Faction Warfare missioning a try. I wasn't going to go all gung-ho at it to begin with. The usual thing people do is to fly a route between all the faction warfare agents, picking up all the missions before doing any of them. I was just going to try a few, get the hang of it. He recommended speed tanking in a stealth bomber. He uses a Hound, a faster ship than the Nemesis that I'm skilled to fly. But I built out a fit nonetheless and began tackling level three missions (standings for level fours are just out of my reach for the time being.) I couldn't get quite to the recommended afterburner speed of 1000m/s, but 988m/s seemed good enough.

[Nemesis, Faction Warfare Missioner]
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Overdrive Injector System II

Gistii B-Type 1MN Afterburner
Small Shield Booster II
Small Shield Extender II
EM Ward Amplifier II

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo
Prototype 'Arbalest' Torpedo Launcher, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo

Small Bay Loading Accelerator I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

Today went roaming with Iron Oxide. The FCs are Iron Oxide, but the fleet itself is a smattering of every Minmatar alliance. They run good, solid fleets. Mid-day to early evening (mountain timezone), guaranteed that the Iron Oxide folks are out plexing and looking for Amarr prey. I did get a solo kill on a Fweddit at a minor outpost gate. He was decked out in tech 1 to my tech 2, so nothing to really brag about, but I was happy with the solo nonetheless. I don't get them often. I'm usually the guy that gets killed.

How to Find Me On the Intertubes

If you ever forget the website address of Poetic Discourse, here are some simple search terms that have helped people randomly stumble across my blog. They will help you too.

Fixing Technetium

All the goodwill I garnered with yesterday's post, I will now fritter away with this post. I will talk about an area of the game I'm not involved with, will not likely be involved with for some time. But it is an area of the game I enjoy spectating. Nullsec sovereignty.

(tl;dr: Technetium is a depleting resource. It depletes from a region, it begins to accumulate into another region.)

I sit here in Canada, all safe and in comfort, but I still take a keen interest in what goes on well outside my borders. The uprisings in Libya. The war in Afghanistan. The near civil war in Syria. The economic crisis in Greece. Or, when he was alive, Kim Jong Il looking at things.

It's really no different with EVE Online. I enjoy reading the political situations, the battle reports, the posturing of the big alliances in nullsec. For most of the last year, the action has been squarely in the northwest, with Goonswarm taking first Branch, and then Tenal. The action was multiplied when the Russians finally decided to have a disagreement, Shadow of xXDeathXx versus Solar Fleet, and finally with Red Alliance vacating their long held space and moving to Delve with nary an argument from the folks who were living there at the time of the move.

The Russian thing is over. Russians are pretty happy to keep the status quo unless you give grave insult to boiled cabbage. Nulli Secunda doesn't have the strength to but tickle Red Alliance, and Red Alliance seems content with the tickle fight. And then OTEC happened. The northwest is now all about the brohugs.

Nullsec seems to have entered a stagnant phase.

Goonswarm and the other technetium holding alliances are content to just play buddies and reap financial reward. I'm not saying that's wrong (I might do the same were I in The Mittani's shoes), but from a spectator perspective, it's boring. It's Chinese nullsec. Everyone bitches about Goonswarm and friends holding most of the technetium supply, yet nobody seems interested in trying to take a piece of the pie for themselves.

So, how to drive conflict? The obvious answer is to entice alliances to chase ISK. Technetium is the perfect carrot. There's nothing wrong with having one resource be more valuable than any other. The game doesn't require balance in that respect. But the game should use that resource to entice players into conflict, especially players who get too comfortable having it.

The idea is to make technetium a finite resource, rotating technetium throughout New Eden over time. You take three adjacent regions, and give them 100% of the technetium in New Eden. Working clockwise, choose another three adjacent regions. As technetium is depleted from the first three regions, it begins to accumulate in the next three regions. As technetium is mined and depleted in those next three regions, it begins appearing in another three regions, in a clockwise direction around the map. I refer to this as chasing the ISK. Those that greatly desire to control technetium, will be enticed to chase it. The have-nots, as they get it, will be encouraged to defend it. The vast amounts of ISK that can be garnered from technetium encourage people to go to war over it. It is no longer a resource they can sit on.

So, for example, let's say CCP implemented this idea. The first three regions that will hold the entirety of New Eden's technetium supply will be Fade, Pure Blind and Deklein. As the moons in those regions are mined out, technetium will begin accumulating on moons in Branch, Tenal and Tribute. As the moons in those regions are depleted, technetium will begin collecting on moons in the Vale of the Silent, Geminate and Cobalt Edge regions. So on and so forth, until eventually technetium again returns to Fade, Pure Blind and Deklein.

You can think of technetium as a comet. A core central mass with the greatest concentration of technetium, and the trailing tail with ever decreasing concentrations towards its end. This comet orbits the outer regions of New Eden on an 18 or so month cycle (given average moon mining tendencies.)

It's hard to predict what the players would do with such a system, how they'd attempt to game it, but I don't foresee any sort of equilibrium evolving. If technetium isn't mined, it doesn't accumulate elsewhere. If it isn't mined, it doesn't enter the market. If it doesn't enter the market, the cost of goods requiring technetium sky rocket, which should further entice groups into war.

The idea strikes me as relatively sound, but what problems do you all foresee? How do you predict this system playing out in the reality of the game?

The Jade Constantine Conspiracy

Before getting to a discussion of the whole sordid affair, along with all the actual facts that invalidate the conspiracy theory, let me just say that anyone that believes CCP caved to Goonswarm whinging, implementing an emergency fix to curtail the dogpiling phenomenon that has been occuring under the Inferno wardec system, is a fucking retard.

(If you need a tl;dr, just read the bolded text above.)

Let's begin with one of the greatest things CCP Soundwave has ever written. This is so completely awesome, that it puts to rest completely, finally, anything he might have written in 2011 for the Greed is Good CCP newsletter.

I think the biggest issue here is that we're trying to solve different issues. I'm trying to bring the merc trade back into EVE and you're trying to add some measure of fairness into wars, which isn't really a design philosophy in EVE. 

Why would I want to balance a fight? That's never really been the goal in EVE and the war dec system wasn't built for that either. I understand that it's annoying when a big alliance war decs you, but that's hardly new to EVE. Big alliances get annoyed with bigger coalitions outnumber them and so on. That's a fact of life in EVE and we're not likely to change that direction anytime soon. The other thing is that war dec prices are determined by the value you get from them. If you want to go to war with someone, a higher number of potential targets should be more expensive. If you're a smaller alliance, this makes you a less attractive target, unless you've made someone angry in which case you're responsible for any social repercussions you've created. 

Letting attackers add allies conflicts with the notion that attacking someone is risky. If you decide you want to go to war with someone, the consequence is that he could punch harder than you anticipated. If this is just about stacking up allies, the power of that choice fades away a little bit.

Emphasis is mine. It is important to understand the design principles of EVE Online before continuing.

The meta-game is important. CCP understands its importance. Start yapping about some one or some group, expect repercussions. Blogging is not a free pass from in-game consequences. You blog about the game, you've become part of the meta-game. You do not need to be logged into EVE Online to be taking part in the game.

Making wars fair is not a design consideration. Why should war be fair? In the history of human existence, when has war been fair? Oh, we have 2 to 1 advantage over you? Oh, you don't have any cavalry? Well, we'll just sit out all our horsemen and half our army, wouldn't be fair otherwise. Sorry about that. Okay, let's start the fighting. EVE is a simulator of human conflict, artificial rules to even playing fields is not EVE, that's some other game, like World of Warcraft, with their battlegrounds and arenas. Go play that if you want a semblance of fairness.

One of the premiere features of the Inferno war declaration system is the ability for defenders to hire allies, also known as mercenaries. Much was made of this by CCP, much talk about a mercenary marketplace and a validation of a legitimate role/profession in-game. Much talk about improving the mercenary marketplace UI even before Inferno 1.0 had released. CCP was excited about this, they had plans for this.

EVE players being EVE players, the mercenary market, as envisioned by CCP, did not materialize. Instead, a Privateer system evolved rather quickly, on the very first day of Inferno's release, May 22 2012. Corps started joining any wardec looking for allies. A large number of corps were quickly attached to 30 - 50 wardecs. One corp in particular, Unquestionable Prosperity Alliance, was attached to over 70 wardecs.

Dogpiling onto wardecs is not a marketplace, this was obviously not what CCP intended.

Alekseyev Karrde, of the CSM, predicted this would happen before Inferno was released. He made his opinion known through normal CSM/CCP channels. CCP chose to wait, see what would actually happen. Player actions can be hard to predict. The dogpiling occurred as Alekseyev predicted, and CCP/CSM discussions began immediately on how to fix the new wardec system so that a mercenary marketplace could have a chance to flourish. (It's like the old John Lennon song, Give Mercs a Chance.)

CCP will be implementing these changes in the Inferno 1.1 update on June 19 2012. Four weeks after Inferno 1.0 was released.

So on to the conspiracy. Here it is in a nutshell. Jade Constantine decides to talk some shit about Goonswarm. Goonswarm wardecs Jade's alliance, The Star Fraction, on May 31 2012. Jade sets the war to mutual. The war will now last forever (or until one side or the other surrenders.) Goonswarm doesn't care, they welcome some highsec mayhem (does anybody remember Burn Jita?) Forty or so corps join the war on the side of The Star Fraction, for free. What happened here is not unique. On May 22 2012, 38 corps dogpiled onto an ongoing wardec Goonswarm had against The Honda Accord. In fact, every wardec that began or was active when Inferno released had corps dogpiling onto them as allies, if allies were requested. This has been an unintentional side-effect of the new Inferno wardec system since it was released. This is not a problem that CCP just stumbled upon three days ago.

Two days ago CCP Goliath posts on the EVE Online forums, detailing some of the changes that are going to be included with Inferno 1.1. Among them are some fixes to the wardec system that will curtail dogpiling. Jade Constantine replies, accusing CCP of giving in to Goonswarm demands and whining. Basically, he all but accuses CCP of showing preferential treatment to Goonswarm, claiming these changes to the wardec system are emergency fixes that CCP only gave credence to a few days earlier.

First of all, Goonswarm did no such public whining. Anyone that asks for links to these whines are ignored, because there are no such posts. Second of all, CCP did not suddenly realize "Hey, we have a problem here! Goonswarm is in trouble! Get the patch team mobilized!" CCP was well aware of the problem the day the patch released: 1. because every wardec (not just those initiated by Goonswarm) from May 22 2012 onwards became an abject lesson in dogpiling; 2. because the CSM was well aware of the problem. The CSM and CCP talk daily. From day one, the CSM and CCP were discussing possible ways to rectify the situation. (Hell, I wrote about dogpiling on May 27 2012.)

To make matters worse, Ripard Teg, one of the most respected and famous bloggers in the EVE-O-verse, decided to fuel the fire and blogged that he too thought CCP was showing favouritism to Goonswarm, completely ignoring any actual facts on the timeline of events. Ripard is usually better than this, even though he is a big closet carebear, who's pretty high on himself and his influence on design and development issues over at CCP. Basically, he wrote his post, not so much because he believes the conspiracy he's espousing, but because he feels if he stirs up the drama-storm to a crescendo, that he'll influence CCP to keep the dogpile mechanic intact. (That's how much influence he believes he has.)

(I'm not going to link to Jade's or Ripard's tinfoil-hattery, because both posts are terrible. If you really need to read them, they should be easy enough to find.)

So yeah, no fucking conspiracy. Remove the tin hats. CCP had made the decision that things needed to be fixed (iterated upon) starting May 22 2012. This was not a quick, off-the-cuff decision by them. The changes coming June 19 have been well-considered and planned over the last 3 weeks.

Wardec Iterations

The upcoming Inferno 1.1 patch on June 19 2012 will see some additional changes to the wardec mechanics. Namely the ally system.

I wrote about the failure of the mercenary market previously (near the bottom, after the triple asterisks.) Namely that there was no market. The Privateer system was back. This was something CCP eliminated under the old broken wardec mechanics. The Privateer system was the act of a single corporation/alliance wardeccing tens to hundreds of corporations and alliances at once, for a small fee (there was no fee increase back in the day) -- basically hundres and thousands of war targets for next to no ISK. To eliminate it, CCP implemented a rising cost for wardec fees, based on how many wars the defender was waging (which then lead to decshielding), as well as a maximum number of wardecs allowed per aggressor.

Under the new Inferno wardec system, a mercenary group can ally itself to any war looking for allies, the caveat, only on the defender's side and with the defender's approval.  At the time I wrote my post, there was one corporation who was an ally in 71 wars. All at no cost to the merc and no cost to the defender. The Privateer system was back, for the most part. You couldn't choose who you wanted to fight, but you could add a plethora of free war targets for nothing. Some wars had upwards of thirty allies attached to them. This was obviously not the intention of the ally system/mercenary market.

But EVE players being EVE players, they quickly found all the loopholes, and abused the hell out of them.

New CCP isn't going to release and ignore any longer. (To their great credit.) So, they're implementing the following change:

Added cost for hiring multiple allies for a war – hiring more than one ally now incur a cost that goes to CONCORD. The cost rises exponentially the more allies are hired into the same war.

I don't believe the costs are yet known, but if you want allies, beyond the first, there'll be a cost to the defender. The onus is on the defender to choose good, valuable allies, especially that first free one. The mercenary market may actually become a market. But then it might not. Players will determine how the mercenary market will operate (in some cases, defenders might pay mercs, in other cases mercs might pay defenders, in a lot of other cases, mercs might be free.) As it should be. What's important here especially, is that the defender has to make choices, or pay a penalty for not making them. They just can't accept every Tom, Dick and Harry corporation that wants free war targets.

The current wardec system will still allow corps to attach themselves to as many wars for which they can find defenders willing to accept their services. That is perfectly fine. If they are any good at being mercs, then they'll find defenders happy to attach them to their wars (maybe even happy to pay a service fee to the mercs.) If the potential ally isn't good or reliable, defenders are not going to give them free war targets, because it's going to cost ISK.

This new system also becomes a new ISK sink. And ISK sinks are good.

There have been some complaints relative the size differences between attackers and defenders, the usual example given is the scenario of Goonswarm wardeccing a 100 man corporation, and the defender not being able to afford enough mercs to defend properly. To this I say "Hooey!" First of all, only a small proportion of Goonswarm will even bother to hunt or camp war targets. Secondly, all that the defender needs to do is to find two or three capable mercs. Those mercs will be more than adequate to handle Goonswarm in highsec. Christ, check out war reports where Goons are involved. They're not exactly known for being able to handle themselves in groups of less than 500. And you're not going to get 500 Goons camping a couple of people in station, hell, you're not going to get 50 of them.

The complaints are just carebears playing on the big numbers without acknowledging the actual reality.

The rest of the wardec changes (caps on cost, length of ally service) are important, but are not make or break to the system overall.

Faction Warfare - Fwiend of Fweddit

Fweddit, they just want to be understood and loved. They're simple folk, but they shouldn't be judged on their simplicity. They might think that algebwa is a woot vegetable, but they know how to pwess the fire button on their Coercer spaceships, as well as we Minmatar know how to do so with our Thwashers. When not twying to beat back inevitability, they're on their planets, waising their chickens, sewing little tuxedos for them, interbweeding with siblings and cousins, playing Powerball with their genetic code. No diffewent ... well, a bit diffewent ... okay, a helluva lot diffewent than the west of us, but they have feelings and they were hurt.

Many of them took my pwevious faction warfare entwy like a Chicken Cordon Bleu. Deeply wounded would be an understatement. I got tweets, evemails, in-game conversation wequests, all asking the same thing: "y u no lik us?" Litewally. Fweddit, they like letters, not so much words.

[ 2012.06.09 19:14:37 ] Xanrith > Hello
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:47 ] Xanrith > I heard you didnt like Fweddit
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:53 ] Xanrith > thought I'd ask why?

But we got it all sorted after a manner. We are still going to kill each other. It wouldn't be wight, otherwise. But I am not now a fwiend of Fweddit. I even got these two ovations earlier today:

[ 2012.06.09 19:12:59 ] EVE System > Channel changed to Local : Kourmonen
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:03 ] Mox Lington > hi popo
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:04 ] space chikun > hi, poe
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:05 ] Xanrith > Hi poe in local
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:05 ] Celnah > HI POE
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:05 ] Dirtt McGiirtt > hi P
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:07 ] S1r DigbyChickenCaesar > hai popo
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:08 ] Mangled Boner > Poetic Stanziel
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:09 ] S1r DigbyChickenCaesar > BIG PLAYS
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:09 ] Fresnal Zone > HI  Poetic Stanziel
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:10 ] BRIMTAK > hey poe
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:10 ] Mr Turing > hi Popo!
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:12 ] Space Popess > Hi poe
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:15 ] Nex apparatu5 > GIG PLAYZ
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:17 ] Amber Zaanz > Hey poooooooe
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:18 ] David Clausewitz > i read ur blog it was a masterpiece
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:27 ] David Clausewitz > i am huge fan of ur blogs
[ 2012.06.09 19:14:38 ] Celnah > what is your autograph fee?

[ 2012.06.09 21:37:15 ] EVE System > Channel changed to Local : Sahtogas
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:36 ] bigbigpure1 > hi po
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:36 ] space chikun > hi, poe
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:36 ] Aaron Isu > hi po!
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:36 ] David Clausewitz > po
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:37 ] S1r DigbyChickenCaesar > Hai po
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:38 ] Dirtt McGiirtt > HI P
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:39 ] Kally Kendrick > Hi po
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:46 ] NickG158 Sasen > o7 poetic
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:47 ] Mr Turing > Hi  Poetic Stanziel ! o/
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:49 ] Amber Zaanz > Hi po
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:53 ] GizMoon > hold fire
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:53 ] S1r DigbyChickenCaesar > Blog plays
[ 2012.06.09 21:39:54 ] Poetic Stanziel > Hello.

So, all is good. I hope to speak diwectly with the Fweddit King (not Pontius, his fwiend in Wome) soon.

The downside to all this new fwiendship is that the Fwedditors kept forgetting they were flying spaceships, not using social media.

So, I was pwimaried quickly, most of the day. Lots of kills to be had, and Minmatar pwevailed thwough most evewy fight, yet I only ever saw the first minute of any battle. Enthusiastic fwiendship has its downsides. I may have to use an arty Thwasher the west of the weekend.

My woes aside, all hail the Fweddit fwigates, destwoyers, cwuisers, and battlecwuisers. They give us good target pwactice fights.

The Future of Mission-Related PvE in EVE Online

I wrote a thing a little while ago that talked about the fallacies of carebearing up the game. And one can't talk about carebearing up EVE Online without talking about PvE.

That, of course, got a lot of people talking about the future direction of PvE in EVE Online. Whether CCP should invest a bunch of resources improving it, or whether it should be left as is, or small changes that could be made here and there that wouldn't upset the apple cart of balance in the game.

(The tl;dr is below, in bold lettering. One sentence.)

This short little treatise is going to remove industry-related PvE (mining, research and manufacturing, trading, planetary interaction) from the discussion. These areas of PvE are very much necessary to the survival of EVE's ecosystem, most, if not all of them, need overhauls to increase the attractiveness of their gameplay.

I'm going to focus, instead, on mission-related PvE. This includes missions, incursions, epic mission arcs, COSMOS constellations, ratting, and deadspace complexes. The reason why this is going to be a very short thesis is that I don't think any of them (with the exception of epic mission arcs and COSMOS constellations) need any resources thrown at them. They are mostly fine as is, and serve their purpose well.

First, concerning missions, incursions, ratting, and deadspace. Why are they fine as is? What purpose do I think they serve? All of these serve as short distractions and diversions away from the main theme of the game, the main theme being the creation of content by the players.

With respect to EVE Online, CCP shouldn't be in the content creating business, their focus should be on the tools creating business. CCP gives us the tools, so that we may create. What content CCP does create for EVE Online (and they should create some, though it should never be their development focus) should not overshadow what the players create for themselves. Missions, incursions, deadspace, these are things players do on the side, something to pass some time, a way to earn some ISK for other areas of gameplay. These areas of the game currently serve their purpose, so the only necessary improvements (if there are any) would be minimal tweaks and fixes. No overhauls required.

Epic mission arcs and COSMOS constellations offer something different to EVE Online. They offer story, they offer depth to the New Eden universe, they immerse players deeper into the game world. Story is one area of EVE Online that CCP can expand upon, or at least iterate upon with every expansion, without it requiring much more than a person or two worth of resources (not including testing.)

I'm not suggesting any overhauls to the epic mission arc or COSMOS engines. Not at all. What I'm suggesting is far simpler, yet perhaps more effective. With every EVE Online expansion, a new epic mission arc or COSMOS constellation is introduced. With the introduction comes a continuing storyline for New Eden. This can work into much grander schemes down the road. If CCP has something planned for the Jovians (or Jovian space) four expansions from now, then the story-driven mission arcs in the three expansions leading up to that revelation could build player excitement and anticipation, to a crescendo.

Being COSMOS constellations and epic mission arcs, they do not become anything other than a short-term diversionary focus from the rest of the game, but their importance goes well beyond just the short diversion.

I'm not quite sure how CCP builds their epic mission arcs, but if they use something like LUA, then the resources to create a new arc (or COSMOS site) over a six month period wouldn't require much more than CCP Goliath himself. Resources would be minimal for something that would likely be well-received and would have a big impact each expansion.

More story doesn't hurt.

Faction Warfare - As Little Info As I Can Give You

Only a small bit of info, because there's a lot about Faction Warfare I haven't read about, or bothered asking about yet. But it'll come.

I wanted to write about my faction warfare experiences only after I got my first kills. I didn't want to do another of those preparing and leading up to posts. Tonight was that night. Gotta say, the entire Minmatar militia are good, mature people. And a tight group too. For as many alliances involved on the Minmatar side, not a lot of e-peen and ego wagging happening. At least not publicly.

Some quick notes on my first evening of faction warfare -- thoughts and other stuff:

1. The Amarr are pretty damned disorganized. Was little fleet discipline among them. They kept warping in on us in singles to begin, and then they all scattered in a following encounter, letting us kill a Drake.
2. Fweddit, like Dreddit, get completely OCD on some fad phrase and then repeat it ad nauseum in local. June is "BIG PLAYS!" month. Arg. I can't wait until July, though their new fad phrase will likely be as annoying. Maybe it's just Fweddit that is annoying.
3. Circled some minor outpost for 10 minutes, got 999 loyalty points.
4. Ended up at the end of the couple hour evening, with ~3000 loyalty points. I still don't know what to buy or where to buy, but I'll look into that when I accumulate another 97000 points.
5. I got me five final blows on ten kills tonight. Not bad. Doesn't get my anything extra, other than it looks good on my character's combat log in-game.
6. Was disappointed to learn that Gallente and Minmatar don't really fight together. The Gallente/Caldari warzone is not connected to the Minmatar/Amarr warzone. So I don't get to kill any Fancy Hats.
7. Because the Minmatar militia mostly fly Minmatar ships, it would be unwise for me to use any of my Gallente ship skills. (Unless I want to be primaried every fight.) But that's okay, gives me a reason to shuffle up the 1300 day skill plan, toss some of the Minmatar ship and projectile gun skills near the head of the list. I'm in a Thrasher currently, and doing some training to get into a Rupture.

[Thrasher, Autocannon - Armour]
400mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Damage Control II

Limited 1MN MicroWarpdrive I
'Langour' Drive Disruptor I
J5 Prototype Warp Disruptor I

200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP S
'Arbalest' Rocket Launcher I, Caldari Navy Mjolnir Rocket

Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I

I plan on giving a lot more detail on how faction warfare works, but I have yet to put any effort in figuring that out. Right now, just joining fleets and following instructions.

The verdict? It was a shitload of fun. Can't wait to do it again this weekend.

If EVE Online Were More Theme Park, Subscriptions Would Skyrocket

First of all, I'd like to say right off the bat that the title of this post is a whole lot of horseshit.

Yet, I see this idea parroted frequently. Not only by carebears, but by hardened PvPers as well. The latest comment, which got my goat, is the notion that if (or when) CCP decides to do a public IPO, that they'll be beholden to profiteering, which means they'll have to carebear the game up to increase numbers. Whereas there's truth that profit will be more of a goal (though I don't see how moreso than currently, since they already have investors), turning the game into more of a theme park fest does not mean that subscriber numbers are going to increase.

Carebears thrill that CCP might have to soften the game. Hardened PvPers fear that CCP will soften the game. Yet, many on both sides of the fence agree that softening EVE Online equates to more people playing. That idea is baffling to me, because so few games that are soft and easy succeed. And those that have softened after the fact have tended towards failure.

One thing that is truth, if CCP were to limit PvP in EVE Online, they would certainly lose a large segment of the current subscribership. There's no guarantee that loss will be replaced by an equal number of carebears. Maybe over an initial "Hmm, I think I'll try EVE" period, but no guarantee that they'll retain any initial burst which might occur.

Why?

1. There's no evidence at all that CCP can design engaging PvE content. That is the carebear game. PvE. Granted, EVE Online is currently a PvP driven game, but that's not because CCP hasn't tried to design engaging PvE systems:
   
   • The mission system is dull and repetitive. It doesn't stack up to the quest systems of even the most lowly of theme park MMOs.
   • Incursions are much the same as the mission system. Sure, they have a social aspect, but you're repeating the same content over and over again.
   • Deadspace complexes? Again, not a whole lotta variety there.
   • Mining? This is so engaging that miners are fapping to porn while the mining is being done, which is why their Hulks get blown up so often and so easily.
   It might be possible to imagine CCP designing missions and incursions that iterate every few months and are strongly story-driven, but CCP has had nine years so far to do just that and either haven't been bothered to do so, or have just flat-out failed trying.
    
2. Carebears destroy the games they play. Don't trust a carebear to know what's best for the games they play, because when their whines and complaints are adhered too, their games die. Star Wars Galaxies? Everquest II? Dark Age of Camelot? Vanguard? Where the hell are these games now? Either changed at the demand of the carebear customers or designed to be carebear utopias. They go down the drain, and the players who knew better say "I told you so." And then, what about Star Wars: The Old Republic? Even Warcraft is slowly losing their subscribers because of easy-mode changes made over the years. Carebears think they don't want challenge, think they don't want risk, but eliminate those elements of a game, they get bored and move on elsewhere. (The carebears never seem to realize why they got bored and left.)
    
3. Four hundred thousand subscribers is apparently failure for an MMO. What the hell? Few games maintain those sorts of numbers. Because of World of Warcraft's ten million subscribers, people seem to think that every middling MMO must fall somewhere between 400K and 10M. Simply not true. Some games (like SW:TOR) might have expectations of millions, but that's not realistic for the vast majority of MMOs on the market or the soon to be released. 400K subscribers is a damned solid number for any MMO that isn't Korean, isn't World of Warcraft, and doesn't have the Star Wars franchise behind it. Check out some graphs at MMOData.net:
   
   • Subscriptions (1M - 12M)
   • Subscriptions (150K - 1M)
   • Subscriptions (50K - 150K)
    
4. EVE Online is the only non-Chinese, non-Korean MMO that's been around for nine years and had its subscriber numbers increase over that time. Most MMOs never reach the nine year mark. Those that do have a sliver of subscribers remaining. So, CCP is doing something right. Or more accurately, the players are doing something right, since it's player-driven stories and endeavours that attract new players to EVE.

People need to realize that CCP is doing quite well. You remove Chinese and Korean MMOs (which are strange beasts unto themselves), World of Warcraft, and Star Wars: The Old Republic from the picture, EVE Online is at the top of the heap. It is a ridiculously successful MMO, not only in terms of growth over the last nine years, but that they've lasted nine years. If CCP keeps EVE on the path it has been travelling the last nine years (which still means to grow and expand the game, not to stagnate, but to grow it with a particular ideal: as a harsh, memorable, highly social HTFU environment), then EVE Online will no doubt have another nine years in it.

The Theme Parker's Guide to EVE Online, Part 3

In Part 1 of The Theme Parker's Guide to EVE Online I discussed character creation, the EVE Online analogues to levelling, class roles and character classes.

In Part 2 I discussed the definition of The Sandbox, quests and raids (EVE Online's analogues to them), the end-game (or lack thereof) and the all-importance of user-generated content.

Before we get to a discussion of PvP (player versus player) combat and conflict, it's important to approach EVE Online with the correct mindset. Part 3 of this series will focus on the psychology of stuff. How you interact and relate to your stuff will determine your enjoyment with the game, your levels of frustration, your feelings of loss.

There are four types of stuff in theme park MMOs, only three of which have an analogue in EVE Online: consumable, crafted, vendor, and soulbound (or character-bound) items. The ratio and importance of these categories of items are markedly different between theme park MMOs and EVE Online. Those differences will play into the psychology of stuff.

(I'll be making quick mention throughout of ISK/gold faucets and ISK/gold sinks. Faucets introduce currency into the game. Sinks remove currency from the game. Sinks are important because they keep rampant inflation in check.)

Consumable Items

In theme park MMOs, you're familiar with these items as one-time, short-term buffs. Potions. Scrolls. Food.

Boosters and ammunition would be the most obvious consumables in EVE Online.

Boosters are akin to potions. Though they are less used than their counterparts in theme park MMOs. Synth boosters offer a variety of small bonuses and are legal throughout New Eden, these are most popular with faction warfare pilots. Standard, improved and strong boosters are illegal in high security space. The see less use, except during large sovereignty fights in nullsec, when time and length of battle are more easily known (due to sovereignty timers and such.)

Ammunition is a consumable, too.

An argument can be made that everything in EVE Online can be considered a consumable item, since everything in EVE Online can be destroyed. This idea is usually quite shocking to the theme park MMO player, because very little is destructible in those games. You die, you do not lose what you were carrying, in the vast majority of circumstances. You die in EVE Online, you lose everything you were carrying.

But for simplicity's sake, and to ease you into the conceptual differences between EVE Online and theme park MMOs, we'll break-down itemization into specific categories. For the purposes of getting you up-to-speed quickly, we won't lump every item in EVE Online into the consumable category.

Crafted Items

Crafted items play a far more dominant role in EVE Online, due to the fact that the vast majority of items in use are player-created. Unlike in theme park MMOs, where the game itself supplies characters with the equipment they need, in EVE Online the players supply the other players with the equipment they need, via the market, contracts and trades. Due to the PvP aspects of the game, items are regularly destroyed, thus a constant supply of items are required by the player base. Without crafting, nothing can be accomplished in EVE Online.

Theme park MMOs, the crafted market mostly consists of consumable production. Crafting of armour and weapons is usually done pre-endgame, for new players (though even pre-endgame, this is limited, since players can still gain what they require from questing.) Once you hit the end-game in a theme park MMO, armour and weapons are mostly gained via raiding and other available end-game content.

Crafting in EVE Online is done through three types of industry: invention, research and manufacturing. Invention allows the creation of more advanced blueprints (which are used for research and manufacturing) from less advanced blueprints. Research is used to increase the production efficiency of blueprints (less material wastage at production time.) Manufacturing produces the actual item from a blueprint (along with a wide variety of materials, some of which are also manufactured) for use by other players.

Vendor Trash

Vendor trash in theme park MMOs is a gold faucet. These are items which have no value in the game other than to be sold to NPC vendors. It's a method to get gold into the pockets of the players.

Vendor trash plays very little role in EVE Online. Nearly every item has some use within the game, or can be converted into something that has use (e.g.., metal scraps being converted into minerals for use in manufacturing.) Players earn money through a myriad of different paths and options, thus vendor trash as an ISK faucet is mostly unnecessary and would be damaging to the economy overall.

That said, there do exist NPC vendor only items in EVE. Things like Quafe (the carbonated drink of New Eden), dairy products, soil, holoreels, plus many more. These are mostly used for missioning, distribution missions especially, and for new players to earn money via hauling and trading due to cross-system and cross-regional price fluctuations. (I made some good ISK, relative to being a new player, hauling stuff like frozen food and toxic waste between NPC stations in the Metropolis and Heimatar regions.)

Skillbooks are the one item in EVE that every player requires for the development of their pilots, yet the market is entirely NPC controlled. Skillbooks are a major ISK sink, so to move them to the player-controlled market would require the addition of new ISK sinks to the game.

Soulbound Items

In theme park MMOs, most items of value (especially armour and weapons) are soulbound. They are either soulbound the moment your pick them up, or soulbound the moment you equip them. Most are of the former variety, a few of the latter (which allows them to be briefly traded between players.) A soulbound item is one that cannot be removed from your character inventory, except through item deletion. The item cannot be traded to another character. (There is a subclass of the soulbound item, known as the account bound item, which allows it to be transferred to a character on the same account.)

EVE Online does (sort of) have the concept of the soulbound item. The bind on equip item. There are two: implants and rigs. Implants are items that you equip to your character. They offer a wide variety of enhancements. Rigs work similarly to implants, except that they are attached to your spaceships. Unlike bind on equip items in theme park MMOs, theses items, once equipped, cannot be removed without being destroyed.

Incarna introduced the Nex Store, which allows players to purchase vanity items for real world currency. These items remain with your character even after you've been podded. While not, strictly speaking, soulbound, they are the only items in EVE Online that cannot be destroyed, other than through deletion. They can still be traded and sold after being worn. They offer no special value other than aesthetics.

Item Churn

There is not the continual drive for stuff in EVE Online. There is no real upgrade mentality. Once you can fly cruisers, you do not give up flying frigates. Once you can fly capital ships, you do not give up flying the 100 plus varieties of sub-capital ships. Every ship in EVE is viable for as long as you play the game. They all fill different roles, different niches. A black ops battleship is not appropriate for every type of battle. There is no item churn in EVE Online, the continual feedback loop of upgrades replacing upgrades.

In theme park MMOs, that gear you just spent three months acquiring is obsolete the moment next upgrade or expansion is released. You once again begin the task of entirely replacing your current set of gear with a new set of gear. And in a few months, you'll go through the same task all over again. Item churn is one of the big driving forces of theme park gameplay.

CCP does not introduce new modules and ships into the game with every new release. There is no upgrade cycle. EVE pilots do not go through scenarios of replacing tier six microwarp drives with tier seven microwarp drives every few months. When new ships and modules are released, they are introduced, not as upgrades, but as new tactical options for gameplay. The players may choose to use them, they may choose to reject them. It's how the players learn to utilize modules and ships that determine their viability. There is no replacement strategy to the introduction of new stuff.

The Psychology of Stuff

In most theme park MMOS you cannot lose stuff (non-consumable stuff, that is), you simply continue to acquire it (you only lose it when you consciously make the choice to delete it.) If any of you are World of Warcraft players from the beginnings, you likely still have your Tier 1 and 2 armour sets, even though they are functionally useless items in the current game. You have an attachment to those items, because they represent your longevity playing the game, they represent a different time in your playing career. They allow you to reminisce. They're memory triggers.

In EVE Online you need to eliminate that sort of sentimentality. In EVE, items are created to be destroyed. Your first ship will likely be destroyed in your first week of playing. After your first year of playing, everything you first owned as a newbie will either have been destroyed or reprocessed. Getting attached to your stuff in EVE Online affords you nothing but frustration and anger. Your ability to enjoy the game will be greatly hampered by sentimentality to pixel gear.

Stop being attached to pixels. The sooner you realize and understand that your stuff is easily replaced, that your stuff is meant to be destroyed, that the destruction of your stuff is the engine that fires the EVE economy, the sooner you'll really begin to understand and enjoy the game.

And remember the most important credo for all new pilots. This should be your mantra for the first year of playing. Do not fly what you cannot afford to lose. Follow this and you're on the road to weaning yourself off of your sentimentality for pixels. If you put all your ISK into one ship to fly, then you're setting yourself up for a hard road and an empty wallet. Don't rush into ships.

Your stuff will be destroyed. It will be destroyed often. Tears over pixels affects only your enjoyment of the game.

Next Time . . .

In part four, I'll finally talk about PvP and conflict. The most vital aspect of EVE Online.

These articles continue to evolve. If you notice any inconsistencies, or have a suggestion on how to explain a concept better than I have, then please add your notes and opinions in the comments section. They will more than likely be incorporated into the article in short order.

The Entire Series

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Faction Warfare is Serious Business

Hulkageddon is over and I'm now going to give faction warfare a try. I'll be blogging about it. Nothing to do with the Inferno changes, because I didn't know dick-all about faction warfare before Inferno, so the changes don't mean anything to me. I wouldn't have the foggiest whether the changes are good, bad, whatever. Since I never did faction warfare before Inferno, I've no idea what it's like now.

Mainly I hope to kill shit. And make some money with the LP you get from it. I know there were some changes in that area. Some stuff that can only be got (or more easily got) through faction warfare? Datacores seem to ring a bell. Or perhaps it was the other way around, they used to be easier to get via faction warfare and now are harder? Fuck, I don't know. See, the changes to faction warfare are meaningless to me. I didn't really pay much attention to them, because it wasn't an area of the game I was involved with.

The Fancy Hats Corporation, the group I was with all through Hulkageddon V. Corelin and his Hats are going to be entering the faction warfare arena. On the Caldari/Amarr side. I plan on entering on the Gallente/Minmatar side.

I am Gallente. I guess I still have some roleplayer in me, because that's the main reason I'm joining that side of the battle. It's not only because my Amarr and Caldari standings are crap. Hell, if I was Caldari, I'd spend some time working my Caldari faction back up before joining. That's not the case, thankfully. Working any standings upwards is a pain in the ass.

So I have left The Fancy Hats Corporation. Sooner, rather than later. By request. Corelin sent me the following evemail today:

We're going to be doing our prep for FW pretty seriously soon. I know you have your friends in Gall FW and you are headed to join them, I do ask you to finish everything you need to in Fancy Hats in the next 24 hours so that we can do our own preparations more securely. Thank you for flying with us and we appreciate your efforts and spirit in the time you flew with Fancy Hats. 

I think that's hilarious. (Corelin is awesome as usual.) Internet spaceships are serious business. I am a potential spai. Corelin is probably right, though. Had I been hanging out with them throughout their prep, ship theory, and such as all that, I probably would have brought all the information I had straight to my new Gallente and Minmatar overseers. "Hans Jagerblitzen! Vordak Kallager! I have some juicy Caldari/Amarr information to share. Want to doff some hats?" Then we turn Fancy Hats into Tattered Hats. All is fair in internet spaceship war.

So, maybe soon I'll be fighting and killing Hats. More than likely, Hats will be killing me, but it's all fun all the same.

In a bunch of months, when I need a change from faction warfare, and The Fancy Hats have moved off to nullsec, I could be donning my dapper hat again. So, still friends, even while enemies for the next while.