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Monday, May 31, 2010

Smart Bomb This

As I mentioned two posts ago, I'm setting up a new tower. I just got thru setting up the preliminary defenses and the backup guns/combat pos modules (still need to get some hardeners and some ECM modules put down). Just so you can get an idea of how to avoid getting large quantities of your modules smart-bombed out of existence (thus making your attacker's job easier), every single module outside the shields is at least 20km from any other module.

Pls bring smartbombs, k, tks, bai.

Last night, we ended up in a nice high sec island in Derelik. Very calm and relaxing. Got to run the sites, got to anchor all these extra guns and get them loaded. The idea behind backup guns is that as the existing ones are shot out you simply online the extra ones. Or if your attackers only shoot at the online ones, you suddenly appear and online all the rest, dragging out the pain as much as possible.

I took this pic right after anchoring the last of the backup guns. After Wednesday's update I will pickup some spare hardeners and some ECM modules (and spares) and finish off the defenses. Then it'll be time to install all the industrial equipment (*shudder* - 10-30 min per module). I got the hybrid reactor and it's silos installed already. Soon I will be back in the T3 business.

Learning interceptor work

Note to self:

If you're in an interceptor fit ship (aka anything that can do over 4k m/s) and you KNOW that Warrior II's are on your ass, there is no way to outrun them - it's time to warp out. Thanks to big mike in Amamake for confirming that.

So, how was your weekend?

After the planetary spin of the deployment of last Tuesday's Tyrannis update, none of our settled systems got "lucky" and had full coverage. Full coverage in the Planetary Interaction sense means that all 15 PI raw materials were available. More problematic of course was the fact that even both systems put together did not get full raw material coverage. So...

We found another system that itself did not have full coverage. It did however provide complementary coverage for our two existing systems. In other words by being in all 3 systems we have all 15 resources available to us as an alliance. When we found it, the system we just settled looked like it was at the tail end of being evacuated. So I spent the weekend settling in. My suspicion is that the prior owner vacated to a "better" system for themselves.

The good news is that with none of them having the right "planet mix" to be a one stop shop, all 3 of our systems are not as attractive to getting thrown out of as they would otherwise be (attacking large POS'es in wormhole space is painful enough if you don't have a serious justification to do so). We're big enough that we need multiple systems anyways, so we can won't have a problem making use of "incomplete" systems, so long as the sum of our systems is complete.

Lets just say that my Orca got a workout this weekend and leave it at that.

In a side note, I seem to have gotten over my burnout since the prospect of settling in a wormhole system did not raise the usual dread. A sure sign that I'm back in the saddle.

On the issue of the wonderful SNAFU CCP has given us. As much as it's THE update fuck up of Tyrannis, in the long run it won't have much impact. Resource producers will get less of a profit bump at the the start of things and the P4 materials that hit the market should be good to bridge the period of time between towers being permanently removed and the production lines coming online.

I will admit to being pleasantly surprised at the affordable nature of the POS and Module BPOs. I was expecting them to be much more in line with the battleship BPOs and Capital ship BPOs (i.e. about 10x targeted item value). This should alleviate a bottleneck to adoption.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

There was a big Kaboom

All POS and probably Sov structures have been removed from the market. And there looks to still be a two week lag before we see even the start of PI resource extraction...

This may be only a temporary measure. This may be permanent. CCP did not post any info on this that I could find. Regardless of whether it's only part of their plan or if it's all of their plan we (capsuleers) have to deal with the fallout.

POSAGEDDON starts today. Good luck all and batten down the hatches, the gun bunnies are about to earn their pay.

EDIT: And POSAGEDDON goes back on hold as CCP Navigator explains that the NPC orders will be restored June 2nd prior to going bye bye for real at some later point.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Impending Kabooooom

Originally by: CCP Chronotis
Hi Folks,

There is indeed an issue where you can reprocess the starbase modules whilst they are still regulated by the old market supply prices and use those materials to manufacture other more expensive modules. This unfortunately was a timing issue with our transition to planetary interaction from old to new supply routes and as can be seen, was not handled in the appropriate way.

For those of you looking forward to Planetary Interaction on June 8th, do not worry as these issues will be cleaned up and appropriate measures will be taken to ensure there will be a viable market for you. Those of you currently gambling on profiting from this error should heed that as a warning before splashing more isk here.

Apologies for this bug and further updates will follow in the future!

-Chronotis




Linky. I bolded the interesting part.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Devils Advocate Time

I had a very interesting conversation with an alliance pilot last night. He is under the suspicion that the reprocessing of towers is not a bug, but was intentional on the part of CCP. Dr. E and CCP Chronotis were probably worried about the spool-up time of the manufactured side of PI (the so called P1 thru P4 part). He posits that it was always intended that the player re-cycle existing modules in order to make sure there were enough P4 materials on the market so that once the towers and what not are pulled, people are able build towers until the more natural P1 thru P4 planetary manufacturing picks up the slack.

This may also avoid the usual effect of having the first units to hit the market to be so overpriced that they simply kill any tower re-supply until prices come down which would have some very bad effects on 0.0 space. i.e. due to the flood of cheap P4 available initially we may not get the massive price spike at the beginning of things. It may hurt extraction adoption initially since people will look at the prices and go - "return is not worth the isk invested and my time". Remember that with PI you need to calculate ROI since any isk you spend on the control tower and any of the pins/routes is gone. You only recoup this isk when you sell product.

The evidence he has for this being intentional: When you reprocess the existing tower you don't get any capital construction parts like you would if you reprocessed an orca (apparently he's done it twice - with the orca). This means that reprocessing (once the NPC goods aren't on the market any more with their fixed prices) won't be a very good idea since the way it works now any minerals you pump into a tower go bye bye even if you recover all the P4 materials.

Also CCP is on record as delaying the release of the Planetary Control Centers "because of issues of scale". Which does not tell us exactly what they were worried about although I suspect it was the hang time between removing the NPC goods and the industrialists spooling up manufacturing.

His personal suspicions is that this is what the indy guys at CCP intended, but he also thinks that their original schedule and estimates for this got thrown out of whack by the changes in dates.

My position is that ok, this is not totally outside the realm of possibility but that we'd know for sure if CCP reacted before the weekend. If they react today it'll mean it was an oversight and they fucked up, if we don't see some action it'll mean it's intentional and they were simply being quiet like they did with the shuttle removal. Evil bastards.

Well it's a position anyways. And as the pilot stated (I'm quoting him here - verbatim) it's only his opinion and:

"If you don't like it you can step outside and go play a game of hide and go fuck yourself"

Methinks he has run into one too many asshats on forums somewhere.

Get ready for contravercy

Brace yourselves, here we go again. In true "exploit any weakness to the max" style of player base the industrialists of EVE are, a whole bunch of people are exploiting point 3 from my previous post.

At least the GMs are aware of the situation, but this could get ugly fast. The longer CCP takes to come up with a solution the more draconian it is liable to be and the greater the eventual uproar. Buckle in and fire up some popcorn. Apparently you can buy some modules, melt them, make a large tower for less than 100mil or something crazy like that.

All over the place

This post will be quite schizophrenic. A bit like this update. Notes from the trenches:

1) Apparently the new standing mechanics resulted in quite a few "friendly fire... isn't" incidents at starbases as they proceeded to shoot alliance members in the face.

2) 125/250/500mil for a Control Tower blueprint, 25mil-75mil for guns, 50mil for warp scram/warp disruptor/stasis webbifier batteries, 100mil for Mobile Labs etc etc etc. Overall not too bad. Less expensive than I had feared, more than I'd hoped - probably priced just right.

3) Existing NPC seeded starbase modules and what not are reprocessable. This has resulted in sell orders for the Tier 4 PI products. This should prove amusing in the extreme.

4) Still no Control Centers - due to the above, they should have at least released the basic ones... ah well, we'll live.

5) In the good news/bad news departement, neither of the alliance's settled systems got a good mix of planets. The bad news is this means we'll probably go hunting for a 3rd wormhole with intention to possibly shut down one of the two existing ones (bad because everyone else will be doing the same). The good news is that the two existing systems are not going to attract more than the usual occasional attempts to evict us.

6) all 3 of my accounts are skilling up for PI. Looks to be a relatively short haul before the characters are "acceptable PI" and I can switch my main back to his combat plan and the alts onto other alts.

7) Picked up my first capital component BPO. Not however my first capital related BPO - that belongs to some Capital projectile turret BPOs I have owned for a while.

8) Amusing inconsistency of the evening: Large xxx batteries use XL ammo right? So why does their construction only involve a single large turret??? (Across the board inconsistency at least).

9) Quit a few of the POS modules won't need to be ME researched (they are already at "perfect")

10) Looks like there are very few "perfect" systems (one with all resources present)- expect them to be contested.

Some predictions:

Expect high sec ice systems to develop into good pos modules selling spots (pick up towers and pos fuel at same spot).

Something is going to happen with the reprocessing thing - make hay while you can.

The rare resource on lava planets is going to go thru the roof value wise.

Barren, Gas sourced products are going to be common as dirt.

Expect to see an exploration gold rush in wormhole space and some nasty battles over choice systems. Should be "interesting".

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Tyrannis

Is up.

Denied!

Well, I'm still at work so even if it finally went live I would not be able to get on. Thank god I got on 30min before downtime last night to make sure certain characters had full multi-day skill queues. it's an hour late, the web site is groaning under the load and still no EVE. Next update from CCP at 20:00 eve time.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Yep, I called it.

Mynxee got in as Chair for CSM5. Gratz.

Monday, May 24, 2010

Some tips

A noob character just got his frigate fried at one of my alliance's POSes. The fit was just maximum fail. So, in order to further the use of good scouting practices amongst the player base (or at least avoid the impression that you need to go back to kindergarden and start your education over again), I bring you the following tips:

1) Yes the imicus is the correct ship to make a wormhole scouting ship out of (this is about all the noob/alt got right)

2) Why only the core probe launcher? The ship was designed to use the extended launcher and it takes, what? level 2 instead of level 1 to use? Take the extra half hour. Do it right.

3) Just what did you think you were going to accomplish with a single rail gun? Tickle someone?

4) Ok for some strange reason you want to be able to defend yourself. Um you realize of course that the Imicus is the gallente T1 drone carrier of the T1 frigate class... Drones are your little friends, bring them with you. They can probably hit harder than you can with your single pop gun so they would literally quadruple your damage output (feeble tho it is).

5) Two shield boosters... In a gallente frigate... No, just no, go stand in the corner with the dunce hat.

6) A plate and small armor repairer. Well at least you got an idea for the lows. Not a great one but it was at least within the realm of reasonable. For a 1.0 sec system in high sec.... ratting.

We killed your ship in a wormhole (well our passive defenses did anyways). Just about every ship in our inventory could have done the same except for the haulers. The sleepers would have had less problems than our POS did. This bring us to the point that we're not sure you had a clue about what your were doing mr. MECTb Pa. When you fit a ship, you need to understand the role you want it to play in your plans. I don't care what you though your plans for this ship were (beyond learning how core probes work), but if you're going to use T1 astrometrics frigates for wormhole exploration you need to understand certain parameters they will be operating under.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a very big proponent for the use of T1 astrometrics frigates for wormhole work. BUT I understand their limitations and the role they need to play VERY WELL.

The first consideration is what you are going up against. Wormhole space. Assume anyone who is not blue to you will shoot you on sight. You are in a noob corp (University of Caille). You are blue to no one. Draw your own conclusions.

Next. Sleepers hit harder than your ship can conceivably be setup to handle. You will not be using an astrometrics frigate to run sites. Any fittings that promote this are useless and a waste of a slot that could be better utilized for the role an astrometrics frigate is designed to fill.

Next. Most ships that you will run into in wormhole space will be bigger than you are. Use this to your advantage and fit for evasion. Did you know it takes a certain amount of time for a larger ship to lock you down so it can fire on you? Did you know that you could setup your ship so it can get from 0m/s to warp well within the amount of time it takes for a larger ship to lock you down unless it has been specifically fit to lock down frigates? I draw your attention to the Inertia Stabilizer module. My own experience leads me to belive that this module is actually twice as valuable for a frigate trying to evade things than a warp core stabilizer.

Next. Once you get by the "I can only fit a core probe launcher" stage always fit an extended probe launcher. You never know when you'll find an abandoned ship and it would be a shame that you were unable to get to it because you could not throw out combat probes... Yes getting your electronics skill up to the point where you are able to fit this is painful in the begining but see the next paragraph.

Next. Have you noticed that you spend quite a bit of time paying attention to your probes and not to your surrounding space while you are scanning? Doesn't this make you the least bit nervous? You do know your ship can be scanned down if it's not cloaked right? Remember if you can do it to them, they can and will do it to you. FIT A CLOAK! THAT is what will save your ass. Sure you can't warp cloaked. Who cares, that's only useful if you're going to check a POS out. Why were you checking a POS out in an uncloaked ship. Could you not see on your d-scan that we had POS defenses up and an active force field? Sure signs that there's a good chance for active guns.

What? you say your overview does not show force fields? FIX THAT NOW!!!! *grumble* *grumble* *grumble* ... noobs...

This is not to say that T1 astrometrics frigates do not make great scouts - they do. But some caveats about using them.

1) they are not combat boats. Don't ask them to go into a combat situation (except as a cloaked observation platform em-placed ahead of the action).

2) Use other ships to do something with what you find (that's what the bookmark feature is for)

3) Do not check out active POS'es with them - that's the job of the cov-ops or something similar.

4) Learn to use the D-scan - very useful on a normal ship - indispensable for scouting.

5) Prioritize evasion and avoidance in your fit. Getting blown out of space 5 min after you start scanning is embarrassing. Fix that.

This has been an AMC public service message for the promotion of good scouting practices (or at least non-fail ones).

Counting down

Well here we are. Two days before a patch. This patch has the potential to change quite a bit once one gets through the patch notes. Sure the PvP players are going to be disappointed. They always whine unless there's new toys to pew with. Well, except for the scorpion pilots - most of those are excited.

CCP needed to make this patch relevant. The amusing thing is that it's now going to be relevant no matter how bad the PI feature itself is. I have a feeling that just like the CEO controls and corporate UI that it's just going to be one of those features we'll need to live with (for the most part). Why you ask? Because of what the feature is going to be used for. Towers and Sov structures.

Think about it. Towers have some convenient uses and some critical uses. One cannot emphasize enough how critical Sov structures are. Not to mention outposts. IF you have the fleet to be able to stand up to what ever is coming at you. Those structures are what will slow the enemy down enough for you to fight their fleet off. Not to mention they are key in allowing your alliance to exploit 0.0.

Want to skip the horrible queues for research in high sec (not to mention do it more cheaply)? Setup a tower for BPO research. Want to make T2 or T3 ships? You'll need a tower or outpost for research and assembly and there's no way to escape using a tower to react the gasses. Any reaction for that matter needs a tower. Any moon mining needs a tower. So, no towers = no T2, no T3. Want to establish a jump bridge network? Towers. Want to build a super capital? Towers AND sov structures. Want to operate a mining op in a system without a station? Better have a tower to retreat to.

You need to move on beyond the newbies to understand just how important these structures are for capsuleers. Most PvP players at least at the low sec level and when doing sniper HAC roams in 0.0, find that the cruiser/battlecruiser classes are the sweet spot for PvP fun. But there's a reasons that battleships are the backbone of the 0.0 fleets (as it should be for something named battleship). They are the backbone of any good tower assault/defense fleet as well. For FCs dealing with POS assets and attack/defense of same, the go/no go consideration is the battleship fleet. Without starbases to attack and defend, the battleships (not to mention the dreadnoughts) would be much less popular than they are now.

Most people consider the Dreadnought and Carrier and large battleship fleets to be the "end game" of EVE. To a certain extent this is true. But do not loose sight of the fact that the reason these are there is because of the towers and what can not be done without them. We're now being put into the pipeline for supplying these critical items. Because of this, I have no fear that PI will, eventually, be successful. There is no choice. These items are too critical to the functioning of the end game. However PI will initially seem like a bust as early adopters get bored and leave it just as the market gets the staged removal of the end products.

Remember for people to get into PI beyond a little dabbling, it has to be profitable. For it to be profitable there needs to be demand for its goods. Until the NPC sell orders are removed there is going to be no demand. Egg (PI) meet Chicken (CCP). I can foresee market forces buying PI materials on the cheap while the demand has not yet kicked in. And hoarding for the day that the towers and stuff are removed from the market. Manufacturers like myself will be picking up the BPOs. But from what we can see there should be a TONNE of them and we suspect they will be in the cruiser to supper captial range in cost. BPOs usually cost 10 times the intended final price. Expect a full sized tower BPO to cost 4 bil. Expect there to be a bit of a lag before there are enough to go around. And even then only those who can see the writing on the wall, that no matter how little profit there is right after release, once those goods go bye bye, there is enormous profit to be made.

I'm sure the rich large alliances are laying in stores of towers and sov units. These should tide a part of 0.0 over until the market stabilizes. Mind you it will also tie up enormous quantities of capital. The end result is going to be chaos when the training wheels come off. The industrialists of EVE should be fairly busy within about a month.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Now that the polls are closed

I'm gaining a suspicion that Mynxee has a good chance of being the next CSM Chairman. Due to the even handed and non-strident tone of her blog she IS attracting plenty of votes outside what would normally be considered her constituency (Pirates). She is also well known so she is one of the more obvious choices for those who are familiar with the EVE Metagame.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and call it Mynxee as the next CSM Chairman. (The voting is over so this won't affect anything).

I put my hardhat on

Sometimes you just feel like chatting with your friends while sucking down ore. I know that a lot of PvPer's can't get into the Zen-like mindset. But that's cool, different strokes for different folks.

So I log into EVE last night and scan down the local system to see what random chance has brought me. Answer? Not a lot. Just a single high sec encounter sig. So I grab my wolf. I really need to change it's fit one day - it's setup PvP with a passive armor tank and I really should change this to active tank PvE fit based on how I use it more often. And head in.

Humm, first room is kinda empty but ooo shiny, Jaspet and Hedbergite. On I go to the 2nd room. Looks like someone abandoned the chase - wrecks but still some ships up. In I go to kill what's left as my alt starts salvaging the existing wrecks. That done I decide that some mining is needed (more mins in reserve and I may be able to make some spare battleships or sell em for iskies when the PI BPOs come out).

So I get mining in my Covetor. My alt switches to his Iteron V (the trick to not de-spawning sites is to make sure that at least one ship is at/in the site at all times). A few hours later (and some good jawing about upcoming changes and getting caught up on alliance gossip) I have 15k of Hedbergite, 25k of Jaspet and 1.275 mil of Tritanium. The thing to remember of course is that Jaspet and Hedbergite are getting a boost next Tuesday. So don't refine those for now.

Ores that are getting a boost in PI: Jaspet, Hedbergite, Hemorphite, Spodumain. Hold of on refining these until Tuesday whey they will result in more minerals. I probably should have mentioned this earlier since I knew it earlier but there you you. This information IS buried in the forums but is hard to find. Next step: keep an eye out for some Nocx and Isogen and build a battleship for sale to make some iskies for buying blue prints come Tuesday.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Scratch 2 russian radar sites

And I log in last night with the intention of making some iskies. Got to build up a bit for the PI blueprint spree that will kick off next Wednesday. Found out some alliance members had found an off-lined tower in a class 4 (130 sites? ouch - may the shwartz be with you trying to find the static). They were pounding on it in order to harvest the off-lined guns and defenses. They were way too many jumps away over in amarr space, so I said "have fun".

Meanwhile I jump in my cov-ops and get scanning in local space. 1 anomaly, 1 combat site and a wormhole...

Dive into the wormhole. Humm, inhabited. Single Amarr small tower with guns and missile batteries. Force field is up so at least it's not abandoned. Let's check it out. Using the d part of the d-scanner we determine that planet 8 has the POS. Some astute work with the moon overlay allows us to shortly determine that it is at moon 4. Warp to 100... Nice I ended up 300km from the tower. Nice Amarr Control Tower Small. The loadout is not bad (6 guns, scram, e-war all online, the 4 missile batteries offline so not fail - probably filched them from some other tower and just anchored them for the lols) Fairly typical small tower setup. The spread of defenses is sub-optimal since there are only 2 groupings each of which could be smartbombed. I took pics. One un-occupied Covetor sitting around inside the shields.

Some investigation of the corp who owned the tower revealed that they are a Russian 7 man corp belonging to the Wormhole Warriors alliance (also looks Russian). A quick check of the time zones involved indicates that it should be 5:00am Moscow time. A time in the morning when all good Russian pod pilots should be passed out on the couch with a bottle of their favorite vodka cuddled up close. Time to see what else is in this class 2 system.

Some scanning later during which I coordinated with Cozmik who was looking for some isk making opportunities for the evening (having just acquired his shiny new vaga) and I have the sites nailed down.

1 grav, 2 radar and 3 wh (including the one we came in from). Quick check of the two other connections for risk evaluation revealed a class 1 and system D-0UI0 in Detorid (unclaimed system between Atlas and The Federation). Humm, not too risky then. So after fleeting up with Coz (in his Hurricane) and me in a PvE spec Cyclone we decide to nail the two Radar sites. Coz not being interested in mining and me being able to crack cans.

Since we have the two radar sites documented to a fare-thee-well, it was rather simple to nail all the spawns and scoop/salvage all the goods. Some switching to a different ship to crack cans while an alt salvaged away as Coz kept d-scan pealed for any interruptions allowed us to polish everything in these sites off except for the Veldspar in the 2nd site. We did not get lucky and there were no Talocan frigates (can't have everything).

Disposition of the loot and the salvage and can contents allowed us collect 35 mil and change each. Not bad for an inhabited C2. Think we scared the pants off a poor probe pilot on the way out. Hopefully the next few days will prove just a lucrative.

Side note: I know I could be making more isk more frequently if I was living in a wormhole. At the moment though a bunch of us are taking a rest from wormhole life. It is more time consuming and stressful and although we're making less isk we're finding it more relaxing atm to be in high sec.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Of two minds

A conversation sometime in the last week got me thinking. About EVE and it's small/large player base. Posts by Tobold and others added food for thought. This is leavened by my own experiences and thoughts about the issues.

First some points of reference.

EVE has a large-ish PvP population. This is true it seems to be hitting the top end of the PvP population scale. When you figure with 330k players, if you take the populations of low sec and 0.0 you get 20-25% of the server population in those two zones. You can argue that the high sec PvP'res are balanced by the low/0.0 sec industrialists. So about 66k+ players could be considered PvPers. It's more complex than this since there are quite a few who do both carebear and pvp activities but as a rule of thumb it should do. If you compare to other PvP centric MMOs you'll find this is more than respectable.

EVE has a small overall population. Well yes compared to WoW. Also compared to the aspirations of the triple-A titles. On the other hand it's beaten the crap out of quite a few triple-A titles.

The issue.

In conversations with other pilots and when talking to potential EVE players the one thing that sticks out is that even though that can handle the fact that 0.0 and low sec are no holds barred pvp "zones", the biggest problem and the one that leads them to quit the game before it's even started is the ganking of newbies in high sec. Even when they have no problem with low sec or 0.0, they quit because of the legalized griefing that goes on in high sec and the lack of any ability to protect industrial assets short of towers (due to the isk barrier to entry newbies can't usually afford towers).

To me (and I know some will disagree and that's fine) this means that EVE is filtering out many more potential players in order to please a relative few. Thus lowering potential long term income for CCP. You can argue it anyway you like, but the truth is EVE allows griefing. Different people will have a different definition of where it's at but except for the griefers themselves everyone else agrees that there IS griefing in high sec.

Now for the of two minds part.

Then I have to consider the impact on the game of having even more players join EVE. We've reached the point where EVE is butting up against the edge of the technically possible. Full marks to CCP for staying the course with their one shard design, but the sad truth is that there's only so much population the server can handle without the larger fights lagging out horribly. There are some fundamental design issues and technology issues CCP has to overcome to push the bar higher at this point. So a large population increase would actually make things worse from the lag point of view, Jita and Fleet fights specifically.

This is why I'm of two minds. Not because I think that CCP sticking to their argument that EVE is supposed to be Dark and Dangerous is valid (you can do dark and dangerous without pandering to the griefers). But because it's a Darwinian way of keeping the population growth in check so that it matches the hardware growth of the server (or vaguely within spitting distance).

Conclusion

So in the end I'm ambivalent about the high sec griefers. One one hand they are legalized school yard bullies (and thus scum of the galaxy). On they other they keep the server population in control and keep the ratio of PvP players to carebears withing reason (which is needed for a non-deflationary economy). Incidentally I'm drawing a very big difference between Pirates in low sec and Griefers in high sec (not that there aren't pirates that also grief in high sec). Most of us really don't have much of an issue with low sec piracy as such.

So, what are your opinions on the subject?

Monday, May 17, 2010

More on PI

A very interesting post in answer to a thread by CCP Incognito.

The thread.

Here is the interesting part:
D) There is no redistribution of resources, it works like a hole. You dig a hole with extractors and it fills back in over time. If you dig at the same rate as it refills the hole it will never empty.
Humm, looks like we won't need to move extractors around too much. Once you have the pattern of resources on a planet, the concentrations may go up and down due to extraction but the initial picture is pretty much were things will stay. So for the most used planets you may want to spread yourself over a few medium level concentrations if you thing the other players will concentrate on the richer deposits and empty them out. In wormhole space however go for the good stuff right away as the number of players will be restricted.

I'm in your wormholes, I'm stealing your sites

Random what I've been doing post.

This weekend saw the alliance back in it's usual operating areas. The two wormhole systems were relatively quiet (read; no major incursions needing the rest of the alliance to go help out). So we were able to get on with our carebear side and get some iskies in the wallet.

Having gotten my 0% tax refines at my current station, it was time to look at more lucrative enterprises than level 4 missions. So I've been scanning local space and scouting out local wormhole connections and seeing what they have. It's been amusing. The two most recent wormholes I've been in to run sites have been inhabited (aka Forcefield up) but obviously I've been lucky and it's been outside of their normal hours. Incidentally, would the alliance "The Revival of the Talolcan Empire" or what ever it's called please explain to your corporations that Missile launchers on a POS are currently FAIL until CCP gets around to fixing the problem... So tempted to call an op...

Anyways after a few combat, mag, radar and even some Bistot later (I was running short of Zydrine), the wallet is much better off. When you're running solo it's better to stick to class 1 and 2. It also seems to be better for the melted nanoribbons count (more dead hulls = better chances of getting melted nanoribbons). Anyways the interesting part here is how relaxing I found it to run sites with a clean d-scan. Being an old hand at wormhole diving and doing it with a purpose built insured battlecruiser (Landing into a situation where the enemy is cloaked up is always a possibility) and an alt for the salvaging/hauling made it rather easy. Although some rust was showing (for two entire sites I had forgotten that Cyclones have drones.... /me facepalms).

I've also been running some high sec sites when I have less time (or I need Tritanium). More for the speed with which they can be done. Send in Assault frigate. Kill everything. As soon as there are no more spawns, send in the alt in a salvager while I go get my covetor. Then once everything is salvaged switch the alt to the hauler and get hauling whatever ore I'm mining.

Friday evening I even managed to get in on the Sansha Wyvern kill. Spent most of the fight going after Dragonflies. Just got in on the kill at the very end. on the bright side at one point in my slasher I had tied up 3 Dragonflies... Nice thing about slashers - just plain hard to hit.

Sunday rolled around and it was time for a weekend roam. This one I decided that I needed to learn how to fly interceptors better. So I had setup some Slashers and some Vigils as the equivalent of interceptors (4030 m/s with the Slasher and 4975 m/s with the Vigil - with T1 throw away fits). The idea is to use the cheap ships while I get up to speed on HOW to fly these before I throw away some Stilettos. I think the roam was 3 BC/C, 1 Stealth bomber and myself in the Slasher. Obviously I was scouting ahead of the rest of the gang.

Not a very successful gang in the sense that we didn't get lucky and engage anything. The first pirates we found were a little to cagey and we were unable to get them in an engage-able situation (safespoting - made me wish I was in my cov-ops). So we decided to head over to Heimatar. Sure enough we found some pirates in and around Offugen and Atlar. A few too many operating in a dispersed patern. i.e. some on both sides of a gate and also on other gates in both systems they had presence in. A few too many to get a successful kill before they got reinforced and wiped us out. Although the rapier was tempting (but would have insta-obliterated me). We ended the roam with a pop up to high sec as two of us had to leave.

So a bit of everything this weekend.

I am disappointed we won't see any planetary interaction for 3 more weeks though.

Friday, May 14, 2010

And CCP blinks

Tyrannis is DELAYED. Looks like someone got cold feet "identified scalability issues". In other words they figured out that the projected adoption rate would not provide enough PI goods to fill the demand of sov warfare...

Holy underestimation, Batman!

With the aid of one of my alliance pilots we did a little tour of the blueprints on Sisi last night. I take back everything I ever thought about this expansion being a placeholder expansion. This is going to be one of THE major industrial expansions for EVE. The mechanics of PI itself are rather lackluster. What's going to kick things in the pants is what you can do with the new end products of PI.

Control towers, POS modules, Sov structures, Station Materials...

There are blueprints for all of these on the market in Sisi. Pardon me but OMG is this big. Oh and BTW, just about all of them use Capital Construction Parts... The implication for the cost of a tower BPO is staggering. I fully now expect all these BPOs to cost between the price of cruiser BPO (probably for things like small POS gun batteries) all the way up to capital ship BPOs (for things like large control tower BPOs and Sov structures).

People have been concentrating on the extraction methods without considering the implications of switching ALL of these things over to player manufactured. You know all those "cheap" Capital Construction Part bpc's on the market? wave bye bye to the "cheap" part. They just got popular. Getting into PI? - not so hard, getting into tower and module manufacture? I hope you got your capital construction skill to at least 1.

This is a heads up people. PI itself is only the tip of the iceberg. Think about it you want to put a research tower up in high sec? PI material demand. You want to claim sov in 0.0? PI material demand. You want to replace that moon mining tower that got killed? PI material demand. You want guns on your POS, Ship maintenance array, etc... PI material demand... Eventually.

The adoption problem

Here is my worry. CCP is going to phase out NPC goods over the next few weeks. They say they are going to monitor the adoption of PI. I don't have a problem with controlling the phasing out of the NPC goods. BUT! I have a problem with the "monitoring" part of that process. Here is my reasoning: Until the NPC goods are gone there is no way to judge the true "demand" side of the equation. And on top of that, none of these things exist in isolation. Each category of NPC goods (including towers and the rest that can now be made) that you remove from the market changes the demand side of the equation in an uneven fashion. In other words you won't be able to judge the true adoption rate and true production capacity UNTIL ALL the goods are removed.

If my suspicions are true about the costs of the BPOs, well that's a barrier to entry to the most profitable segment of PI. The money won't be in the materials for the most part. It'll be in the end products. If the BPOs can't get into the hands of the manufacturers fast enough, then the demand won't be there. Which will reduce demand of PI products and affect adoption (under the impression that it won't be profitable at the start, which will lead to supply shortage compared to production capacity eventually. Basically until the end product is removed from the market, there is no reason to get into manufacturing it. If there's no reason to get into manufacturing something, there is vastly reduced demand for the items that go into making it. This could seriously screw with adoption numbers during the switch over.

It's a chicken and egg problem.

Conclusion

I've always wanted that the player manufacture the towers and what not. Not sure whether I've mentioned it in a blog post or and EVE forum post. I have been on record as saying "until they let us manufacture towers and what not they won't have a serious industrial system". Well... I may need to eat my words on that one. Control tower manufacture here we come.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Making Plans

So I watched the hockey game last night before EVE. Sue me, I'm a Montrealer. And into the next round we go habs go.

When I did log in, an impromptu confab about the defenses in one of our wormholes got underway. A review of the POSes and their upgraded defenses and a discussion of further steps to take was had. This was back-dropped by my expectations of increased POS warfare post removal of the towers from the NPC market. Someone pointed out that CCP has stated that the removal of the NPC goods will be staged (i.e. most getting removed a week to a month after the 18th or something like that.

One one had this will give us time to get tower production up to speed. On the other this will make PI un-profitable initially and could hurt it's adoption. We'll have to see. If, as I posit, there is an upswing in POS warfare following the removal of control towers from the NPC market, then there will be serious isk to be made in the tower market.

Incidentally I'm also suggesting an increase in wardecs against corporations/alliances with towers in high sec space. We'll see how this develops.

Various MD and TS forum dwellers are complaining about the amount of work that PI is to get a "decent" rate of production (clunky interface - too many clicks). I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those situations where increasing the rate of extraction beyond a certain rate will be a lot of work. But if you set it up and just go for a more leasurely production you may not get the rate of production that micromanaging everything will give, but you'll end up more sane at the end of the day. However, if this is the case, in order to get sufficient production you'll need to get a LOT of pilots involved in it. Unsurprisingly most of the pilots who will be interested in getting into this are all in high sec - where the resources are the scarcest. This being the case it's entirely possible that there will be a shortage of control towers down the road. Mind you at least it will be profitable to make towers. Demand should see to that.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

More PI

And it's now 6 days until long skill day. So I've been digging deeper into the mass of threads about the latest version on Sisi. The interesting thing I noticed is the raw material/planet type map is firming up. The basics look fairly solid now. Each type of planet can have 5 different resources. There are 7 types of usable planets (Shattered planets are not usable apparently). There are 15 raw materials. 3 of these are available on a single type of planet. Once you have all these 3 types of planets you only need 2 other planet types to have all resources covered.

To get Autotrophs you need a Temperate planet.
To get Felsic Magma you need a Lava planet.
To get Reactive Gases you need a Gas planet.

Once you have these 3 planet types though, there are only 2 resources you don't have available. These are: Planctic Colonies and Noble Metals.

To get Planctic Colonies you need an Ice or a Ocean planet.
To get Noble Metals you need a Barren or a Plasma planet.

Assuming ice and barren are going to be more common than Ocean and Plasma this means that with the following 5 planets you'd be able to get all 15 resources:

Temperate, Lava, Barren, Ice and Gas.

So then the question was: can I engineer it so that I'm getting 3 resources from each planet?

Temperate: Autotrophs, Complex Organisms, Micro Organisms.
Lava: Felsic Magma, Non-CS Crystals, Suspended Plasma.
Gas: Reactive Gases, Ionic Solutions, Noble Gasses.
Ice: Planctic Colonies, Aqueous Liquids, Heavy Metals.
Barren: Noble Metals, Base Metals, Carbon Compounds.

Well well well, what do you know, you can. Now this does not guarantee quantities and what not. But at least with the 5 planet types listed I am guaranteed that I'll be able to make all tier 4 end products as well as the intermediate products. This means that with a single character one would be able to manufacture anything that can be built with PI. This is good.

My suspicion that we'll be seeing a large amount of POS warfare right out of Tyrannises gate. Up until now if someone had his POS blown up he just got one from the unlimited stockpiles in high sec. Whether those stockpiles are going bye bye right away or after a few weeks is irrelevant. Once the NPC sources go bye bye POSes (and their modules) will need to come from the PI side of things. Depending on adoption of PI by the player base this could provide a "shock bottleneck" effect. Say [IT] or [PL] or [.-A-.] goes on an anti-POS offensive in enemy space. Specifically targeting moon goo towers. We'll find out very fast whether the big alliances stockpiled their towers. Once those stockpiles run out replacement towers will be coming out of PI. This could provide a bottleneck to replacing destroyed towers. Large amounts of alliance funding come out of moon operations. Should those income sources turn out to be much harder/more expensive to replace than previously this could prove to be seriously problematic to the large space holding alliances. And anyone else who is a serious tower consumer (High sec research, wormhole residents).

It's going to be very interesting to see how sustained the effort is going to be to produce PI products from the player base. Some good large offenses in 0.0 though and we could see rather asymmetrical demands for PI products. Think of it this way: More towers get destroyed -> less fuel needed for current towers, but more towers needed. As the towers go out, fuel usage goes up. If a lot of moon towers get destroyed -> T2 moon goo goes up as well as tower demand -> T2 production goes down and less need for Non-moon related goods for T2 production.

It looks like we'll get a balancing act within the PI products with lower demand for intermediate products when there's high demand for end products and high demand for intermediate when there's low demand for end product. The question is: will the replacement rate of towers match the destruction rate? Spikes? Ah EVE the endless complexities you bring.

Incidentally I suspect that the usual suspects are in full blown hoarding mode atm. This is one of the major reasons I suspect that we'll see an immediate removal of all NPC goods involved from the marketplace. CCP can depend on the hoarders to tide things over until production picks up. The other thing is that this is also going to make for two classes of pilots - location tied and mobile. Most of the pure PvP players will probably not be getting into this for two reasons. One it's carebear stuff (stigma attached) and two it ties you to a location.

One thing I just thought of though: Do you need to be within range of a wormhole system to decommission a PCC? If so people who "loose" a wormhole they have PI in may find themselves at a massive dis-advantage since they would be unable to put down new PCCs until they decommissioned the existing ones... it could make PI unusable for a character.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Planetary Interaction and you

I think this PI thing is going to turn out to be more interesting than I thought. Think about it. The entire T2 industry depends on starbase towers. Starbase towers are now dependent on PI... Ask yourself "what happens if the major T2 moon goo producers go to war on each others towers"? How fast can those towers be replaced? POS fuel? ex-NPC Materials for T2 manufacture? How large are the stockpiles? How soon will existing stocks get depleted?

I suspect that things are going to get interesting VERY, VERY quickly. For newbies I would suggest that getting into POS fuel production is a safe bet. There are a LOT of towers, they will all need fuel. Admittedly most tower owners will try and make sure they have a sufficiency of supply for themselves. But we'll see what happens.

So? What part of the PI stuff are YOU going to be getting into? Are you even going to try?

What EVE is

It's interesting, when one reads about EVE one sees many posts about what it is. EVE is a PvP game. EVE is an economic simulation. EVE is a sandbox. After much cogitation I'm going to throw in my own definition:

EVE is a wargame.

You're going: "WTF Let?" aren't you? Look at it. From a strategic wargamers point of view. It's got asymmetric warfare. It's got concentration of forces issue (very Napoleonic war type of issues that). It's got scouting and fog of war. It's got spies (it's not a question of are you paranoid, the question is are you paranoid enough?). It's got an economy and economic warfare. What? you thought it was for lols that IT (the ex-BoB dudes) is going after NC (northern coalition) moon towers?. If you look at all these things you see the makings of a kick-ass wargame of the first order. Some of this stuff is just not available to most wargames (the whole effective spying thing). It's like the worlds biggest 4X game where we're the ship captains. It's got Machiavellian politics the level of which would make any 100 year war leader pale. We've got raids (support fleet roams). We've got set piece battles (POS and Station/Sov fights). We've skirmishes (when one roam runs into another at what ever scale)

Heck, back in 1984 I read a little known science fiction book called Valentina: Soul in Sapphire. In one scene one of the main protagonists is recreating the battle of Jutland and playing over what the authors project the internet would be like. From what I can see the only thing they got wrong was the number of players playing. In the book the character is only playing against one other player. Based on gaming and wargaming at the time this is pretty good projection. In reality it lacked scope. We've effectively got the same sort of thing but instead of just one player against one other player it's entire hordes of players against other hordes of players.

The point is any long time wargamer will look at EVE and see all the elements that went into a great wargame. Once you've modified the hell out of it, turbo charged it and slipped vast quantities of beer into it (and possibly some hallucinogenics). It's one problem is that it's so big and the point of view of the individual player so small that it's easy to loose track of the scope of things. As pod pilots we're mostly grunts. FCs and Alliance leaders can see more of the picture but then again when you've got a game of Diplomacy going on with hundreds of other players large and small - no one has a clear view of what's really going on.

But at the end of the day, it's a wargame. Read up on your Sun Tzu and your Machiavelli.

Monday, May 10, 2010

All over the place

The weekend started early Thursday night. Some intruders (3 tengu and 2 BS from initial reports) had put one of the towers in one of our wormholes into reinforced and shot at another tower.

By the end of Thursday night they had logged off in system (at least 2 of them). This tower was stronted to the max and would come out Saturday at noon local time. Orders were given for a reinforcement op on friday night in preparation for tower defense on Saturday (with various and assorted people salivating at the slight possibility of Tengu kills.

Friday. The reinforcement op went without a hitch. All known enemy pilots were locator agent found and only two were still left in the system. Logistical movement of spare ships was also accomplished and the forces were now in system for the next day.

Saturday. The day started well with a good turnout of pilots. The operation was mostly uneventful and no losses were had on either side. This operation was characterized with decent although not spectacular wormhole control on our side and a lack of mistakes on the opponents side. Various POS owners were critisized for their lack of defenses. Situation rectified (grrr... ya tells em and ya tells em but they don't listen until the get attacked). Both remaining known pilots evacuated without our catching them or them getting a kill.

Biggest mistake? We had wormhole control and failed to use it correctly. When you have control of the wormholes it's possible to weaken it and station sufficient BS forces outside the hole to force a collapse in a single jump. A typical tactic of PvP pilots is to warp to a wormhole and shoot at something before jumping out. The first Tengu employed this tactic against one of hour HICs. Had we gotten on the ball earlier on the fight we would have been able to bottle him up by closing the door in his face while he shot at our HIC. With incoming tackle and dps the situation would have been in our favor rather quickly. The second pilot stayed chill until he was able to egress after the tower was re-stronted and repaired.

End of the weekend: Did some class 1 wormhole diving to build up some isk, blew most of it on a Covetor and Iteron V and fittings. All enemy pilots confirmed out of system and we'll have to wait for the week to see if they had any scout alts left in system.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

7 years

And yesterday(?) was EVE Online's 7th birthday. I've been playing for 3 years 3 months now (longest continuous presence in an MMO so far). I must say that it's been a wild ride so far as my posts have indicated. In that time I've seen quite a lot of changes.
  • The dissolution of the T2 lottery.
  • Implementation of HIC class.
  • Implementation of Industrial Command class.
  • Changes to probing mechanics.
  • The "speed nerf".
  • Sov mechanics.
  • New graphics engine in the client.
  • The introduction of warp to zero.
  • The introduction of align to.
  • And many many other changes.
If there's one thing that's constant, it's the rate at which EVE evolves. This keeps it fresh. As much as Tyrannis is a hard sell, it still brings another block to the edifice that is EVE. Planets are no longer going to be just the "warp your pod to" places to escape pod death. Or "moon aggregators". The only thing that we really have to worry about is the fact that CCP has a track record of letting their expansions feel half finished compared to other MMOs. On the flip side they also make more changes to their MMO than other companies would dare to. It's been paying off for them.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

VOTE!

Since as someone pointed out my blog is mostly read by experienced pilots and/or self starting pilots, I will only say: Go and vote!

My 3 active accounts will.

I know some of you couldn't care less of the politics of the way the game is evolving, but for the rest of us, the CSM is our representatives face to face with CCP. Lord knows we need someone to keep hammering them to fix the bugs. And the lag. Even if all they do for us is advise CCP on issues and what not, it will be better than not having the CSM. So VOTE!

Once the voting is closed I will put up my prediction (don't want to influence the vote).

Monday, May 3, 2010

Spoiled Little Children

I suddenly had a realization where a long time irritant of trying to explain EVE came from. I'd like to thank Tobold for the revelation. Contrast the following points of view:

Newbie coming from most other MMOs: "Wow, this is great, I can fly anywhere in the game"... Immediately tries to fly to 0.0... "Holy crap I just got blow out of space for no reason what so ever"... "This is griefing because I wasn't doing anything but minding my own business".

Experienced pilot finding a neutral pilot in an NPC corp flying in their space: "Yo! FC, we've got a potential alt scout in system XX-XXX, you got anyone in the area that can respond?"

Experienced FC: "Support squadron 1 go chase down that idiot, scouts head to systems YY-YYY and ZZ-ZZZ and see if there's anything that guy could be scouting for".

Here is the issue: The newbie may BE minding his own buisness, but there is no way to tell a newbie apart from a scout. Not to mention a spy. The fact that the newbie has not realized this is because he is conditioned to be the "star" of the game by most of the other MMOs out there. Other MMOs try and make the player feel like they are the hero, that they are better than anyone else, that only their actions and intentions matter. This conditioning causes them to act like spoiled little children who can't play well with other. Grow up, we're treating you like an adult. The grownups in EVE live in a world where realtime spying on the opponent is not only expected but assumed to be happening even when it isn't. I operate assuming that I've been infiltrated by spies (I hope they find us highly boring). All mid level to large alliances operate in this environment.

Get it straight: a lot of the high sec stuff (suicide ganking, can flipping) IS greifing. 0.0 is not. It's politics and metagaming. It's not about you, it's about what you could be representing. It makes the diplomatic situation in Europe prior to the First World War look like a model of stability. Your assumed experience (based on when your char was created) is meaningless since one of the common things is to use low skill point alts as scouts. That 2mil sp char that suddenly finds itself in 0.0 space is actually more likely to be the alt of some 50mil+ skill point pilot giving way more information away to "the enemy" than any alliance feels comfortable with giving up. The ship he's flying may be setup to be a cyno boat. The truth of the matter is that "scout" is a fairly critical to large fleet operations. SP do not make a good scout. Observation and clear communications make a good scout this is eyeball mark I stuff, a 1h old character can do this. This is one of the reasons we say newbies CAN make a difference in EVE. Even when we have a hand full of experienced high SP scouts using cov-ops and fleet recons, we can always use a few extra eyes in frigates to keep an eye on surrounding systems.

The unwillingness of certain new players to understand in the true environment the rest of us deal with is the cause of a lot of grief between the experienced player an the newbie. The fact that most newbies feel more comfortable in corporations made up mostly of newbie corporations and one or two experienced pilots is understandable (I've known quite a few high SP assholes that are poison to a growing corp). This however does nothing in instructing them of what really goes on at the alliance level and what alliance leaders and FCs have to deal with. The fact that the game mechanics allow for a lot of true griefing in high sec does not help. It doesn't prepare one AT ALL for the reality of 0.0. There has been REAMS of information published about the realities of living in 0.0. Yet newbie after newbie insists that according to their experience they should be able to waltz in and do what they want how they want WITHOUT REGARD FOR OTHERS.

Well boyo, I've got news for you, you have no way of proving you're a newbie, so excuse me while we treat you like any other 50mil SP intruder running a scouting alt for his fleet. The fact of the matter is you didn't run into a griefer, you ran into the pros and they flattened you without a second thought and you were forgotten as a rather idiotically easy kill about 5 minutes after it happened. Just because YOU are incapable of seeing the damage a 2mil SP character can do does not mean the rest of us are incapable of seeing (not to mention have seen in the past). We will do something about it. Scouts don't exist in isolation. The age of a character means NOTHING at this level. The abilities of the player behind the character is EVERYTHING.

The unfortunate thing is that because this is a SANDBOX in the sense that CCP just provides the mechanics, and we do with them what we can get away with, CCP isn't really in control of what the players do with the sandbox once they get their hands on it. The mechanics allow for scouting alts, scouting alts will get used. This is the major reason for the NBSI policy most 0.0 entities use. Now that CVA has been kicked out of providence I don't think there are any NRDS entities left in 0.0. There's a reason for that.

This inability to connect your actions and how they may look to others together with the whining to high heaven afterward is what makes a lot of newbies look like spoiled little children instead of adults to most experienced EVE pilots. This is why the reaction to this attitude tends to be fairly harsh. You act like a spoiled little child, you'll get treated as one.

A bit of the pew

So this weekend was a weekend of a few small gangs tearing thru lowsec. Nothing major as we simply are wanting to inexpensively get some newbies into PvP and get some rust off of the rest of us. The plan to do this is simple: Small T1 frigate/cruiser gangs until we stop making stupid mistakes. Go for what we can find pirate wise. Since we need to keep our sec status high in order to be able to enter all of high sec at a moments notice, pirates and 0.0 (k or w) are the only places we can get some action against.

On Friday I finally finished getting Republic University up past 6.7 and I now have perfect refines at their stations. What immediately followed was the melting of vast quantities of loot followed by manufacturing of "disposable" hulls. Now that the hulls are built it's a question of fitting them out slowly but surely (at about one hull type a session).

So my blueprint collection is getting a workout. My manufacturing slots are being kept hot by other members of the alliance who also need hulls built. It helps that I have all T1 Cruiser and T1 Frigate hulls covered.

Tally for the weekend:

in on kills: 1 x Phobos, 1 x Taranis, 1 x Hurricane
losses: 1 x Maller, 1 x Thorax, 2 x Rifter

Since the losses were fully insured, the loss column is not as bad as it looks, especially considering the Phobos and Taranis. If you know they are not coming back (we were running 3-4 man gangs all weekend) you might as well fully insure them. Especially at today's mineral prices.

All in all it was a good thing we kept to the inexpensive practice ships. There were plenty of mistakes going round. At one point someone thought they were remote repping me... with their scrambler? That last fight against the Iskur was just fail (3 Rifter vs Iskur). That thing can pack a LOT of drones for such a small ship... More practice is necessary until the techniques improve. I was quite happy with the hurricane engagement out of all the fights. Both the Phobos and the Taranis pilots were idiots. The cane though was a good fight. I managed to keep my Rifter alive thru it's kill before loosing it to the Drake. Vexor x 2, Arbitrator, Rifter vs Hurricane, Drake.

The interesting thing is having gone thru faction warfare and gotten "decent", I can spot where we're doing plenty of mistakes. Need to level up PvP and the only way to do it is to practice, practice, practice.