Ah, the life of an alliance leader...

Too many hats, not enough time.

Lucky, I have been an alliance leader long enough to know how to deal with this.

/me starts looking at his pilots wondering who he's going to voluntold for various jobs within the alliance projects.

/me also expects the cockroaches to skitter for the dark as I shine a flashlight on them.

Blog Banter #9: Bye Bye Learning skills

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

"Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

Well darn. Congratulations on finding a blog banter that I can whip off in a very short time. Took me way too long to settle on it but yep I finally did.

I'd get rid of learning skills. Lock stock and barrel. They are one of the leading causes of newbie pilots abandoning EVE. With all other skills you get a sense of progression. These are seen as simply a hurdle to suffer through. Most senior pilots advise newbies to do them as early as possible, which makes the problem worse. They should be summarily removed. Up the basic stats to keep a decent learning rate but scrap these entirely.

That's it. What? you expected a long argument?

List of Participants:

1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE!
2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter - It's the Scotch
4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
8. EVE's Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
9. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won't You Die?
10. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
11. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
12. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
13. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
14. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
15. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
16. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
17. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
18. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
19. Facepalm's Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
20. Memoires of New Eden, You're Fired
21. Kyle Langdon's Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What's a Titan?
22. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
23. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
24. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
25. Ripe Lacunae, The UI… Where do I begin… (Eve Blog Banter #9)
26. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
27. Estel Arador Corp Services, You've got mail
28. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
29. Deaf Plasma's EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 - Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
30. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 - Do we really need to go AFK?
31. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
32. Harbinger Zero, Blog Banter #9 – War Declarations & Sec Status
33. Warp Scrammed, Blog Banter 9 – Never Too Fast
34. Ecaf Ersa (EVE Mag), Can a Tractor Tractor a Can?
35. Thoughts from an Accidental Minmatar Revolutionary, EVE Blog Banter #9 - Aggression timers, WTs and Stargates
36. Mike Azariah, I don't put much stock in it...
37. Rettic's Log, Blog Banter: Overview Overload
38. A Sebiestor Scholar, [OOC] EVE Blog Banter #9: Slaves
39. Diary of a pod pilot, [OOC] EVE blog banter #9: Because of Falcon
40. Roc's Ramblings, Blog Banter #9 – Taking Things Slow
41. More articles as they are posted!

Monday is Patchday

Just a quick update (still editing that wall'o'text down to some reasonable posts).

Apocrypha 1.3 is on the way (cliky the link to get to the patch notes).

Of note for T3 and wormhole buffs:

• Several changes have been made to fix the cost of Tech 3 production: the volume of some gases required will be halved; the drop rate of the Neurovisual Input Matrix salvage item has been increased; and the material requirement for the power conduits has been switched from carbon-86 to Scandium Metallofullerene.
• Reverse Engineering will see several improvements. We are increasing the drop rate of Tech 3 datacores, increasing the runs on the blueprints from reverse engineering jobs and increasing the presence of radar sites in wormhole space.

and:

• Multiple changes have been made to the anchoring and onlining of starbase modules and structures. All offensive starbase structure anchoring times have been reduced by 50% and all offensive starbase structure online times have also been reduced by 50%. Defensive starbase structures such as hardeners will have their anchoring, online and un-anchor times reduced by 50%. Finally, all starbase tower un-anchoring times have been reduced by 50%.

This means that by tuesday-wednesday we should see the start of a flood of T3 stuff pooring into Jita. I suspect that the market manipulation attempts on modules should decrease over the weekend as we now have a deadline for when the T3 can flow again and the "well I can wait till after monday to pick up my T3 hull/subsystems" mentality takes hold.

We'll have to wait and see how much the changes reduce the bottlenecks of T3 reverse engineering/manufacture. The results should be good for the customer though and we should see a bit of a reballancing of the value of reverse engineering vs materials. As CCP rightfully observed, one of the big bottleneck was the BPCs. As everyone gets into reverse engineering with the better results this should drive down the value of rellics and datacores "I've still got 200 runs left of loki engineering subsystems, no need to reverse engineer any more of those for a while". Although since there is not control over the result, we may see the prices remain relatively high as a lot of people keep trying for the "best" sub-systems in any particular ship/position (with the corresponding pile up of less popular ones).

Yikes

Well, got a wall of text, but it needs to be split into multiple posts and organized. I'll feed that one out later in parts.

Farewell Simba

This is to note the passing of Simba the very first Assault Frigate I ever owned. As the very first assault frigate I ever owned I over-rigged it in order to make sure it could fit dual T2 medium shield extenders. My more PvP oriented jags usually made due with a single medium shield extender in order to fit the web/scram one really wants on a heavy tackler/dps machine. Not to mention much less expensive rigs - if any.

Didn't notice the 2nd spawn apearing in a bonus room in the plex - so started warping out too late. Then ran into an object (doh!). Needless to say I did not get to warp in time.

In other news, this weekend saw my first invented and built T2 ship. A Claw interceptor. This is an after effect of getting my research alts firing on all pistons (they get me the bpcs) and running some invention jobs from my stockpiles of datacores (man those are running out fast). None the less this represents another sign post in my development as an industrialist.

Ah well my next Jag will be built by myself. Just need Frigate Construction 5...

Relaxing in WH space

Well as the settled system I was operating out of went to a high sec island, giving me the excuse not to travel to HQ I needed, I was able to get some serious WH bouncing going. Found that there were 3 wh connected to the system.

1st one was the standard exit to high sec. An island this time. *shrug*
2nd was an X702 leading to low sec. Meh, didn't feel like ganking pirates.
3rd was an other Wormhole system. Humm now we're talking.

Ok, time to go exploring, I let another pilot running combat sites in the settled system know and off I go in my trusty probe of easily replaced scanning (It really doesn't feel Minmatar unless you're flying something that could be blown up by sneazing on it).

Quick tour of the system map and the relevant planets reveals that this system is un-occupied. Had an M267 connection to our own system, so still no clue what class I'm in. Pop the probes and cloak up...

Plenty of anomalies but only 5 sigs, anomalies indicate this is probably a class-5 or 6. Running down the sigs I find 2 more wh's and 2 sites (1 ladar - can't gas mine personally and we have plenty of reserves of those gasses - meh, 1 radar - but we don't have the forces present to go for it - bummer). Both wh go to further wh systems (incidentaly confirming that I'm in a class 5 atm).

At this point the other pilot joins in for some wh exploration in his Helios. He picks one of the new holes and I pick the other.

Once again a non-inhabited system. Woah, reverse of the previous system, plenty of sigs, few anomalies. Once again I fire up the scanner and start running down the sigs. Eventualy i find 2 grav sites, an other ladar site (meh again) and a 0.0 connection (again incidentaly confirming that I'm in an other class 5).

My buddy got unlucky and the hole he chose went to an inhabited system. After almost "oopsing his ship at a POS", he comes back and heads for the new wh system I'm in with the intention of exploring in 0.0 for shits and giggles.

At this point I decide - humm about an hour and a half left before it's time for bed, time for a few jet cans of Arkonor. So I kick off one of the grav sites (i.e. warp to it so that it's spawn cycle kicks off). Head back to the settled system and grab my Jaguar, while dropping off wh bookmarks of the route to my hauler alt. Back and kill the spawns (updating the alliance wiki with spawn information as i go), back for a salvager, salvage the stuff, back for one of the spare covetors and settle in to suck on some Arkonor.

So making liberal use of the d-scanner, I settle in for some nice wh mining while listening to the further exploration adventures of the other pilot. The nice thing about being experienced is that we know when holes are dangerous and when not. All holes along the route stayed nice and stable all during the operation. 5000 units of Arkonor and 60000 of Scordite (just to finish off that last trip) later I head back to the settled system and log for the night.

Note that that was about 3 jet cans of Arkonor - current market value at what? 20mil per jetcan or so? Not bad for some relaxing exploration followed by some un-interrupted mining.

It's always fun when you go deep diving in wormhole space. You never know what you'll find - heck so far we've got a spare Thanny and a loaded Obie out of just such jaunts.

EvE and the Propaganda wars

«Il n'y a que deux puissances au monde, le sabre et l'esprit: à la longue, le sabre est toujours vaincu par l'esprit.» - Napoleon Bonaparte

EvE has it's wars. And as with real life, it's not always the strongest that win the wars but often the most tenacious. It is very interesting in EvE the way that sometimes the morale of the pilots has much more to do with who wins a war than the number of SP of the pilots.

Whether Kenzoku is retreating to empire or not, I cannot say. Goonspin would have us belive this to be the case. But I can't help feeling that BoB was conquered due to morale issues more than militarely. Goonswarm simply broke their will to fight.

I remember when the corp with obviously more senior pilots decided to place a POS in the system we had occupied. I knew going into the fights (putting the tower into reinforced and later assautling the tower as it came out of reinforced) that we'd take losses as we were inexperienced with POS assaults. Indeed we did. 8 Battleships died to secure that tower's death. We did managed to kill 2 Tech II cruisers, but I thought that with the losses we gave up we'd see them again. I remember thinking "Ok, this is the a PvP corp out of 0.0 and their indy friends, all they are looking for is fights so we'll see more of them soon enough, they still have a scout in system. We're giving them killmails they'll be back." Imagine my surprise when they failed to show up again. As it became apparent that they weren't coming back, I asked on of my CEOs: "Don't tell me we broke their will to fight".

Of course as Napoleon also pointed out that victory is easy, profiting from it is much trickier. Time will tell if the various victors (and the current lack of Kenzoku sovereignty is a yard stick to measure the victory by) can profit from the situation and cement their supremacy or whether they fall to bickering and strife. Time and the shifting landscape will tell.