High sec for a day or two

Back to another installment of I did, They did:

What I did:

The last two days I've been up in high sec tapping out against the maximum number of things in production at any one time. Good thing I've got Advanced Mass Production IV. ATM, I'm cooking up some ammo (Barrage M - no I can't sell you any - I burn thru it at an astonishing rate against sleepers), some guns (125mm T2 for my interceptor to try and see if I like that better, Dual 180mm T2 and 220mm T2 for my Loki to try.

I've pretty much figured out that which end of the gun range you go for depends heavily on what your usual target is going to be. If you're constantly up against bigger, slower ships then you want the bigger end of the range. If you're constantly up against the smaller, faster ships, you want more tracking, nope, more than that, humm, some tracking mods would not be out of place as well. Cuz guns do you no good if you can't hit the target. We'll see what works once I figure out the fit.

What the alliance did:

Sounded like lots of mining. Some random wormhole diving from the more PvP oriented. A bunch of my industrialists have been "real life'ed" and their absense has been noticed. Hope things get better for them.

One thing I need to do is start getting people organized. I've been occupied in the newbie friendly wormhole because I don't see anyone else taking over this hole atm. I'd hate to abandon it as it does provide a great training ground but we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

Planing is difficult sometimes over summer.

I finally get mine

No Pity No Mercy

'Nuff said.

Re: Blog Banter #10

Na, not joining in on this one. Too much philosophy ruins the brain.

Delays and Relaxing

Ah the summer silly season of EVE online. They can play havoc with your typical alliance leader's plans. It's a good thing that we're big enough to have some cross over in our industrial skills. Because delays and supply issues are slowing things down. At some point I really need to figure out a proper method of organizing this and splitting the T3 project up between the various producers and the various time zones. At some point I need to establish a resource bank within the alliance again. We also need to streamline logistics a bit so that there is less need for pilots to go in and out of wormholes. I need to give some thought to this.

This part of EVE is possibly the most interesting and difficult part of the game. Thanks to the logistical issues engendered by the design of EVE itself, planning forms a large part of the game. The problem comes when you need to do the planning for an entire corporation or alliance. At the end of the day the only guarantee that something will get done for sure is if you do it yourself (provided you have the skills of course). But you can't do everything yourself, so you need to hand out the work to the various pilots who can get things done. You also need to do so in a way that doesn't burn them out.

We'll see how it goes and what rabbits I can pull off of someone's shoulder.

On a more personal side, I've finally got the Interceptor skill. Oh and Coz? Your Claw fit. It's got issues. Going to need to play with it till I get a comfortable fit. My Prowler warps faster than that Claw fit (any time an industrial can get to warp faster than an interceptor, there's a problem). It also has tracking issues. Mind you that's only against small fast opponents, I can see where the tracking issues are less of a problem against battleships, but still, the Claw is meant to be the combat interceptor - wich is supposed to catch and kill smaller targets as opposed to the Stilleto wich is more of a fleet tackler for pinning larger targets.

I also finally had some relaxing time to run sites and get some mining done. Thank god things quieted down by the end of the evening. Another interesting thing is that thanks to some diligent documentation I was able to notice that someone did part of the first wave of a site and then screwed the pootch and couldn't finish it. Spotted the fact that he left the gun emplacements (Sirius turrets) alive and kicked off the 2nd spaw since all the ships on grid were part of the 2nd spawn (4 cruisers). Someone kicked off the spawn before handleing the turrets... Either way I finished the site and cleaned it up.

Strategy over Tactics

Well that was a non-event.

Hell of a lot of work by various pilots and myself, but as far as the final fight went - it didn't happen. Here is why: As I reported in the last post, we managed to engineer a wormhole displacement after getting lucky and taking advantage of the enemy's mistakes. Basically they committed the cardinal sin of not leaving enough force in the wormhole to ensure that they could find it and control it. Once the observed alt and the Raven pilot were outside the wormhole (one because he left, the other because we caught, killed and podded his ass). We managed to kill the wormhole (a B274) in short order and just as they were assembling forces in the system it was connected to, and before they managed to get someone back in (why the alt didn't get back in is a mystery but far be it from me to jiggle the enemies elbow while he's making a mistake).

Over night we engineered a further move of the system. Did I mention that Orca's rock? We then proceeded to get things ready in case they still had an alt in system. Empirical evidence suggests not after the fact but we didnt' know this at the time. One hour before the tower coming out of re-inforced, we moved the wormhole yet again and then proceeded to weaken the new hole. There were about 2-3 BS worth of capacity left. The idea being to trap a small quantity of enemy in our system which would allow our defending forces in system plenty of time to take care of the enemy BS before they could get the new hole located and the rest of the fleet sent to it.

In the end, the wormhole manipulation tactics when the tower came out of re-enforced were not necessary as the enemy never showed. We were able to repair the tower and re-stront it. Then patch it all the way up and put a hello kitty bandaid on it without enemy interfeerence. This did demonstrate that a full understanding of the strategic implications of wormhole control are important to wormhole defense and assaults.

I would rate this intrusion as a much less serious one than the first one that happened in the grotto. Although the first intrusion had less ships it did a much more inteligent attack even though it never sieged one of our towers, they only lost the fight due to our dogged determination to press on regardless of casualties. This one had more ships involved in the assault but it never came to a serious battle due to the lack of know how of the attacker.

So they lost 1 well fit PVE Raven and a pod and spent a lot of ammo. We lost a lot of ammo and time. So far no War decs from them. One of my pilots who was observing them in high sec after our tower was repaired reported that they proceeded to try and assault some other hole. After my pilot observed vairous of their ships leaving that hole with structure damage I can only asume they once again chose a hole that contained a well defened colony. I wish my fellow wormhole residents some good kills.

Of course now I have some rather angry PvP pilots to placate, since the battle didn't materialize. Man some days you just can't win even when you win. The lesson to learn here is that knowledge of wormhole control is VERY important in both the defense and assault of a wormhole systems. The ability to control the wormhole connections during your operations (offensive and defensive) can pay off handsomely.

And POS defense time

Sorry if I haven't posted recently but things got busy. A high sec based "wormhole PvP alliance" decided one of our small towers looked tasty. They put it into re-enforced before our reaction force could nail the wormhole. Since the enemy knows when it'll come out of re-enforced that's no secret. We'll see what happens if they managed to get their act together and come back and assault the tower today.

We managed to get a kill on one of their pilots operating solo in our space yesterday. So far our wormhole-fu seems to be working. I'll let you know if they manage to get into our space for phase 2. This does confirm what I stated earlier: Wormhole ops need a medium tower as a minimum defensible size. Small ones are just too easy to put into reinforced. You need a POS gunner ready at your POS to be able to defend it. So, some rather obvious lessons:

1) Don't stint on the POS itself.

2) Make sure some people skill up anchoring and get their Starbase Defense skill up to 4. Make sure to do this with any alts who's purpose is to stay at the POS and scan down exits.

3) Have backup gun positions ready to online the minute the original positions are taken offline.

4) Scanning alts should also skill up cloaking as they make great static observation points.

Point 4 was prety key in getting yesterday's kill. Although why the idiot tried to motor for the wormhole instead of simply warping to a planet after we killed his Raven? I have no clue. He was thru there often enough to get the book marks. So he has no excuse for letting himself get podded.

It's a barrier to entry, not a bottleneck, you noob...

A while ago I got into a thread in EVE-o forums. The gist of the OP's argument was that polymers represented a bottleneck in T3 production. Not because of the gasses, but because of the equipment necessary to polymerize...

Look, forcing you to buy some equipment in order to build something is not a bottleneck. It's the equivalent of forcing you to buy a BPO if you want to make some T1 ship hull. It's expensive but it's not a bottleneck, it's just a barrier to entry. And a rather feeble one at that.

Then his argument was that it had to be located in low sec.

Um... no. Wormhole space works fine and empirical evidence suggests it's actually safer than high sec, just less convenient.

Anyways people have been asking me "how much does it cost to setup aT3 production line from A to Z and what's involved".

Let's break this down:

First off, you need a POS. Since this can do quadruple duty as a base of operations, refinery, research lab, reactor pos and manufacturing hub, it's not as crazy as single expense as it may seem. Mainly because you don't run the reactor/research/assemble 24/7. In fact you'll usualy do that in that order and the rest of the time it acts as a forward base for resource extraction. Experience has shown that a Medium POS is the minimum size you want. Large allows better defense and more parallelism between the manufacturing phases but at a greater expense in fuel. Remember to pro-rate the fuel costs by function (i.e. if your fuel is going to power different modules you can't realy say all the fuel of the tower is going for T3 production. Some of it is going for defense, some of it is going for forward basing needs etc...)

So:

• Medium Control Tower = 200mil
  
• Corporate Hangar Array = 9mil
  
• Ship Maintenance Array = 18mil
  

This represents the minimum for basing purposes. Then there are the defenses:

• 4 Medium Guns @1.8mil or 2.25mil ~= 8.1mil
  
• 4 Small Guns @ 0.36mil or 0.45mil ~= 1.62mil
  
• Stasis Webification Battery = 4.5mil
  
• Warp Scrabling Battery @ 2.25mil or 4.5mil = 4.5mil
  

Again minimum defenses. It would be best if at least two pilots can POS gun.

Next we need to consider industrial modules that will usualy alternate as to who is online at any one time. Larger POSes or multiple POSes can keep more online at the same time but that costs more fuel. And we're realy looking at a "minimum effective" setup here anyways.

There is the reverse engineering step:

• Experimental Laboratory = 100mil
  

You'll probably want a refinery. Yes it's not as efficient as going to high sec. Trust us you'll probably want it anyways. This one is more optional though

• Medium Intensive Refining Array = 42.5mil (optional)
  

There is the polymerization step:

• Polymer Reactor Array = 11.25mil
  
• Hybrid Polymer Silo = 6.75mil
  
• 2 x Biochemical Silo @18mil = 36mil
  
• Silo = 13.5mil
  
• 9 x Polymer Reactions @13.5mil = 121.5mil
  

Then there is the component production step. Note that this can be done in high sec, but for completeness we'll add it to the modules here (going back and forth to high sec gets tireing).

• Component Assembly Array = 9mil (optional)
  
• 11 x Component BPOs @ 10mil = 110mil
  

And once all the above has done it's job there is the final assembly of hulls and subsystems:

• Subsystem Assembly Array = 90mil
  

The above represents the minimum (with two optional components) infrastructure investment for end to end T3 production, from the harvesting to the final assembly. Assume you will not be online modules that are not active at any particular point in time.

Note that you will need high sec datacores for the reverse engineering step. You will also need R.A.M. - Starship Tech for the assembly of hulls. These can be sourced in high sec or manufactured at the POS (note to self: find out if the component,equipment or ammo array is responsible for R.A.Ms...)

Note that the above is what I consider the MINIMUM you should have for this. So be prepared to invest: 750-800mil in infrastructure. Your fuel costs should run your 80-100mil a month. If you're not prepared to invest at least this much please do not come crying to me. Remember that this is not un-reasonable at all, a Teir 2 BS BPO usualy costs arround 900mil-1.05bil and you can only manufacture one type of ship. With the above investment you are capable of manufacturing all T3 hulls and subsystems (skills permitting). And let's recall that battleships are cheap as hell compared to the carrier to dreadnaught costs of T3 cruisers atm.

Content instead of a Spreadsheet

By some miracle of science (thank god for bottlenecks) I actually got to play the game of EVE instead of the spreadsheet of EVE for a good part of the weekend.

What I did:

Since I'm mainly in Emo Town these days, it was a question of checking Emo Town for any new sites. Running those. Then finding where the class 1 had gotten itself to and checking it out. Running sites in there.

Got some gas mining done, got a Radar site done, got various combat sites done. Any site that was not on the alliance Wiki I made sure to document the spawn patterns and any pertinent details about ships (for example Awakened Escorts are not as tough as Awakened Patrollers but do fight from father away so they take some chasing down).

At one point I did the trip back to high sec to bring some of my T3 loots back and to handle the bookkeeping on the T3 Project. Just need to get some Polymers from one of my industrialists and it'll be the Proteus's time to get "store-ified".

What my Alliance did:

Some of the newbie/less wormhole experienced pilots made their way to Emo Town. I got to run with quite a few of them and it was a lot of fun showing newbies the ropes of survival in wormhole space. As is usual with newbies - head sets are a bit iffy. Hopefully this will solve itself with time.

Two more towers made their way into BBW. BBW is an other wormhole system that we have now settled in. It will hopefuly prove to be the hub of expeditions into the more dangerous classes of wormhole space. As mentioned above sent off some project gasses for some Polymerization.

Paw's grotto did not see a lot of action this weekend as the pilots who are it's main population were sideswiped by real life.

T3 stuff:

Since handing off the sales side of the T3 operation to two of the senior pilots in the alliance, I've been concentrating on the production side of the equasion. The lack of NIMs will hopefully solve itself with the operations in BBW. At last count we have the ability to manufacture 19 hulls and over 500 subsystems. Yes my reverse engineer has been a busy bunny. Yet we still don't have full coverage of all 80 subsystems in the game. Hardly surprising actualy but still. Makes for some holes in the ability to manufacture subsystems. I suspect that it's a good thing that the cost of reverse engineering has gone down as quite a few of these runs will never get built.

I hope that we get to the point where we can choose the result of the reverse engineering just like in invention. As some of the very old inventors commented, they still have BPCs of un-popular modules/ships from the days when they could not chose the results of invention. And it's been what? at least a year since they put that ability in. We may get the same results unless CCP Chronotis relents. I'd actualy count that as more important than the NIM bottleneck. Although that itself is a pain.

Darn you RL!

Only on for an hour and a half last night.

What I did:

Scanned down sites in EMO Town. Mined some more gas from the same ladar site as yesterday. Logged off. Some days are short like that.

Not as good as i was hoping but good enough

Once again some sections

What I did:

Wow did those sites disappear. Once I logged on I did a scan of the new "Emo Town" system (it's a black hole system, hence the name). All the previous sites that remained disappeared. I suspect this is a clue to the wormhole site re-spawn mechanics. See my wormhole spawn theory section.

The next thing I did was find the class 1 system that is connected. Turns out it was un-inhabited. I proceeded to scan it down and ran a Radar site and about 1/3rd of a cloud in the ladar site in Emo Town. I did find a mistake in fitting my loaner gas harvester Stabber. I forgot the Survey Scanner I... Doh!

Then one of the alliance newbies who arrived in Emo Town wanted a taste of sleeper combat to see how they compared to high sec mission rats. So I helped him learn the Sleeper ropes by running a combat site with him. Note to self: It's time to update the wormhole BC to a proper T2 equipped BC and stop having my current issues with the sleepers. I'll get a HAS and run them in ZZZZ mode once I finish skilling up for it. However it did allow me to prove to myself that newbies operating in BC in pairs/trios should be able to handle most perimeter wormhole sites. Solo is still iffy for the less than 5mil SP pilots unless they are tackling the only spaws at ladar and grav sites.

I also showed him the usefulness of proper salvaging destroyers for cleaning up wreck sites after the combat. "Wow, this is much faster than what I was doing". We also went over such sundry useful information as how to check the health of a wormhole. Darned useful to avoid getting stuck on the wrong side of a wormhole and general wormhole specific information like that.

What the alliance did:

I must admit I prety much left the alliance to do what it wanted to do. Some people worked on their missioning, some other on random wormhole operations. Others were keeping an eye on potential systems. All in all a prety steady pace of operations was maintained. I did not hear any cries of "I'm bored" so either they are avoiding me or they are learning to self direct.

Wormhole Spawn Theory

Basically it looks like about a week after a site is first scanned down it automatically re-spawns. So here is my Wormhole Site Theory (or is it Hypothesis?)

Site not scanned down: Never respawns
Site scanned down: Respawns 1 week after scanned down time.
Site started: Respawns 4 days after started.
Site finished: Respawns a few minutes after finished.

This mechanism would explain why we keep running into un-inhabited systems with massive amounts of sites in them. It's only after one scans down (either just the first scan or the 100% point, and I suspect the first scan) that the timer kicks in on them. and they eventualy move on. Otherwise they just keep piling up in un-inhabited systems until someone comes to visit them. And even then it'll be a week before they move on if no one does something to pop them faster.

The above kind of explains the observed phenomena of inhabited system respawn rates. The problem is of course we don't know the territories of specific sites. And it would be kind of hard to track them due to the dis-continuous nature of wormhole space.

Reverse Engineering Numbers

Well I finaly ran some numbers on the Malfunctioning vs Wrecked Reverse Engineering. The impact of the change in value of datacores is very interesting. Although I haven't checked the most recent values of Malf relics vs Wreck relics vs Datacore vs Raw Materials and so on but its looking like it's reaching close to a balance point. It's still more expensive per run to use wrecked relics to get your BPCs due mainly to the success ratio. But since the overall cost per run of BPC has dropped and the materials cost gone up (due to NIMs) it's now very feasible to reverse engineer Wrecked relics.

The main reason is actually coverage. Some times you get lucky and get a popular subsystem from a Malf Relic and can profit madly. But a lot of times you're missing quite a few subsystems in your list of BPC runs and get requests you can't fill. All the extra 3 run BPCs at least allow you to make sure you CAN fill a request (or a spot on the store shelves). I am finding that at the end of it you'll get quite a few more runs than you'll ever want to or be able to build. I do wish CCP would make it selectable since a lot of BPCs will be going to waste as it is now. Maybe next patch. We'll see.

Mining

I'm going to try something a little different. I'm going to organize my blog posts in sections so that they are a little less dis-organized. This might only last a single post but you never know.

What I did:
After finally getting setup in the new hole Sunday, I logged on last night and started scanning the differences. What does this mean? Doing an initial survey of a system can take quite a while. But once you have most of the Cosmic Signatures bookmarked, it's rather simple to launch probes, re-acquire existing bookmarks (probes on 0.5 AU is usually sufficient), eliminating those that are no longer there, then probe out the few new signatures. That's if someone hasn't left bookmarks for the changes already.

The results were: 4 new sites (3 of em wormholes and 1 new ladar), both other wormhole systems were inhabited and since we're not feeling particularly combative, live and let live prevailed. That last wormhole was the regular connection to high sec.

Then I managed to get 3 jet cans of ore (2 of Arkonor and 1 of Dark Ochre - I needed the nocx). Thankfully un-disturbed. At the end I had an orca full of 4 jetcans plus of ore and headed back to my main base. The Megacyte was sufficient to fully fill up my bunkers of that mineral (yay) and I'll be switching to Bistot tomorrow. The Nocxium was only 1/5 of my needs but still keeps me from being Noxium starved in my regular production.

What the alliance did:
Found another un-inhabited class 2 wormhole. Again the plan is to spend a few days running anomalies in there (37 - they'll be a while, they had only nailed 4 by the time I logged off). Integrity spent the evening training one of their newbies. We'll be getting them up to speed on wormhole ops as they are now showing up more frequently.

Blacksteel left the alliance last monday and we've hammered out a blue on blue standing which solves a lot of potential problems with the T3 project since although most of that corp stayed in high sec and didn't get involved, a few pilots were heavily involved.

We're still looking for a better wormhole system to setup a permanent camp. I'm being picky about it. Various T3 hulls and subsystems are being built in various locations. The reverse engineering is progressing full steam. We only acheived about 50% coverage on the subsystems using malfunctioning relics. With the massive drop in value of datacores and the massive pile of wrecked relics we had been accumulating I dumped 179 reverse engineering attempts on my reverse engineering dude (poor guy). This should give us "Coverage". Coverage referes to the ability to make sure all subsystems are manufactureable. The plan is then to establish a full "T3 Store" style operations somewhere out of Jita. Basicaly all hulls and subsystems available in that store. Due to the NIM bottleneck though it will be a while before we get all the modules up on sale I suspect, once they are up we'll operate by a "build as they sell" style of production. The real overhead is getting this all up and running. Should take a while.

Skill progress:
Don't know if I reported it but I finaly finished getting the skills to manufacture Minmatar T3 Hulls (Loki). Since others in the alliance can reverse engineer, and manufacture the rest of the factions, This has allowed me to take a break and finaly get some non-manufacturing skills back on track. Dabbled a bit in some short term skills getting Heavy Assault Ship, Transport and Industrial Command up to 3 each, as well as Gas Harvesting 4. But I'm finally going to take some time and get Evasive Maneuvering 5. 9 days from now I'll be able to learn the Interceptor skill and be able to finally fly all T2 Minmatar Frigates. Yay!

Relaxing weekend

I set up a new POS this weekend in a class 2 in hopes that that class 4 connection turns out to be a regular one. As is usual in wormhole operations, time will tell. This setup wasn't bad at all. My medium POS could have everything up in a single Orca trip. The second trip was to bring in a pile of loaner ships and an extra week of fuel. Not everything described in the previous post but a good portion.

At the end of the weekend I actualy got to do a bit of mining (mostly interrupted by some noob although honestly we need to work on our intercept solutions and the proper use of broadswords). Note to self: When scaring a noob in a drake with a stabber, make sure the HIC stays at the wormhole in the direction of the closest planet to the target.

Incidentaly, black hole systems are funky, realy messes up the maneuverability of all the ships. Great for afterburning away from missiles though.

I have finally reached a milestone in my research of my BPO collection. I'm down to ships. All the non-ship bpos except 2 have been researched and I'm left with mostly ships in my research slots. The light is at the end of the tunnel. Soon I will be able to slow down on the research side of things. I aslo picked up some of the more esoteric things one can pick up BPO wise. Such as interdiction sphere launchers (and their ammo), bomb launcher (and one of the bomb bpos - ouch they hurt the wallet).

The changes to the drops are having an interesting effect. We're actually reverse engineering all the pilled up wrecked relics we had. The malfunctioning reverse engineering resulted in about 50% coverage (i.e. we have the ability to build about 50% of the subsystems). The larger number of wrecked sourced BPCs should allow us to have coverage of plenty of stuff we are missing and should allow us to put up a "store" type operation when we decide on a location. The big problem will of course be the hulls and the NIMs.

I look forward to increasing activity in wormhole space this week.

Shaking things up a bit

After all the spreadsheet changes that the wonderful patch brought (*shudder*) I've got my corp's POS up in high sec for a rest and re-fit. Need to get my T1 manufacturing skillz working over time for a day or two to prep some utility disposables.

On the list: for each faction build:
1 x PvE scanner
1 x PvE salvager
1 x PvE hauler
1 x PvE mining frigate (for newbies)
1 x PvE mining cruiser (for newbies)
1 x PvE gas mining cruiser (5 x T1 gas miners)
2 x PvP cruisers
2 x PvP frigates

ORE faction:
2 x PvE Retreiver
2 x PvE Covetors

Prep all the above in containers for ease of deployment (frigates and modules go in GSCs, the rest get their modules and ammo placed in medium cans and their hulls packaged).

Then I'll need to load master the tower deployment plan. Something like:
Load1: stront, 1 week of fuel, Initial POS modules
Load2: 2 weeks of fuel, rest of POS modules start of frigate disposables
and so on...

Not to mention separate loadouts for my POS gunner/hauler/scanner alt. he goes in with the first wave and then stays but I need to make sure that all the utility craft that he'll need are preped and ready to go.

Rigged Rifters... Droooool...

YESSSSS!!!!

The promised Dev Blog finally appeared and looks like the multi-size thing will be exactly as I expected it to be. New BPOs with lower salvage requirements and a flag controlling what size rig can be plugged into what ship class. Some of the FUD speculation on that issue was getting a little crazy on the forums.

What does this mean? It means we're going to see an explosion of rig usage. Rigged T1 frigates, destroyers and what not will make an appearance on a battlefield near you. It will be cheaper to rig industrials and cruisers/battlecruisers as well.

I suspect the most interesting un-intended effect will be that there will be a slighly different rig patterns between the large and small rigs. What do I mean by this? Just as the purpose and battle usage of the different classes of ships is different, so will their rig requirements be different as well. For example the rifter. It is unlikely anyone will seriously consider using tank rigs on it. Falloff and damage rigs? oh baby. Mobility rigs? sure. Tanking rigs are more prevalent on battleships since the objective there is to make your ship evaporate more slowly when they get primaried. This isn't realy a consideration for frigate operations. They evaporate prety quick no matter what you do, so might as well improve something that'll make a difference while they are alive.

As for all the guys whining about the researching of the new BPOs. Grow up, prefect ME on the worst rig was in the 40's as I recall, most averaged out to 20-24 with quite a few arround 10-14, so since medium rigs will be 1/5 requirement of large (current) ones and smalls 1/5 of mediums, the ME needed on these rig bpos will be much smaller than current ones. One would assume that the BPO prices will also be commenurately smaller as well. This simply means that you can bust off a whole whack of BPOs in the same 24h period if you've got your skill slots available and a high sec POS. Most serious producers have access to same so it won't be an issue past the first few days.

I will note that this is a serious buff for the newbies (always a good thing). Oh and pirates in Rifters.

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!