Learning to delegate & on the T3 road

One of the differences that you notice as your alliance fills up and you start having a few more people involved in what's going on is that you need to learn that you can't do it all on your own. Knowing how to do everything - yes that comes in handy when you get frustrated pilots and giving them answers that solve their problem or at least give them the right direction to solve them comes in rather handy (they are likely to listen to you later on). But doing everything - not enough time in the day.

That's what your Minio... fellow alliance pilots are for. As an example After the first couple of weeks we now have enough T3 resources to start examining production and maybe getting some of that phat lootz up on the market. So one of my pilots (precocious type) went and plopped a tower in wormhole space to get some reactions out of it. The next day a different pilot (see below) went and got the resulting polymers out of wormhole space and into high sec, after keeping a bit for some projected manufacturing, we went and used part of the rest to fill a buy order and the rest is up for more than the buy order. With that act we've managed to move up a rung from being purely T3 resource gatherers to T3 manufacturers (well the start of it). The next step is obviously to get more of different polymers and be able to manufacture the T3 components.

I was in high sec attending to setting up my income stream while all this was going on. Kind of funky quarterbacking things happening in different empires while staying in one place.

We're getting some amusing stories out of these adventures. For example After the initial entrance in high sec disappeared the next one was over in Esoteria and some shmo from Atlas popped in at one point and threatened to grab a fleet to kill the tower. I shudder at the risks, but my pilot proceeded to calmly wait till the 0.0 resident went away (whether just to go away or to get some buddies and come back) then ran his orca back and forth to kill the wormhole. He got lucky and made it back to the wormhole side. Since there was at least one other scanner pilot on the WH side he figured that investment in POS > Orca cost so if he lost the orca - *shrug*. Well, HE shrugged, personally I think I have some new white hairs. The next system it connected up to was in high sec Amarr space as described above. Relatively quiet system so it lasted a good long while but what was amusing was that even though connected to high sec, he was stuck in the wormhole system even more effectively than if it had landed in Delve or somewhere since he is KOS in amarr space (ran a few too many 'kill the amarr ships' missions so his standing after diplomacy is -6.8 with Amarr).

He also learned that the "care package of modules" that needs to go in the ship maintenance POS module needs to be a bit more completest than he initially thought (spare hull and remote hull repairers do come in handy for example - maybe some spare mining lasers modules for that osprey so you can pass the time away if you're stuck in system).

Personally I learned that when you're in a class 5 system and you're on the 3rd spawn of a radar site and your Cyclone is all alone near the spawn and they've got scrams, it's not a good situation... Ah well, next Cyclone please.

During one of the jaw sessions about what we were learning various pilots were commenting about my insistence on starting with T1 Meta0 ships. Which I have been sticking with. I needed to be clear that my insistence was mainly for a few reasons that did not apply in their situation.

First of all I was insistent because I don't want pilots ending up in the situation of one of them where he brought a rigged out T2 equipped Myrmidon to wormhole space and managed to get it blown up. Then proceeded to inform us that that was it no more wormhole stuff for him for the next week because it would take that long to refit. This is where, as a leader, I start having problems. There are people in EVE with wildly disparate income levels. Some pilots try to fly the same ships as the richer pilots (keeping up with the Jones), but without the bank roll. That was the reason for the instructions to keep to T1 Meta0 ships for the first two weeks. As a leader and occasional FC, I'd prefer you to be on ops in a T1 ship able to contribute rather than missioning to replace ship losses you couldn't afford in order to fly a T2 equipped ship. A T1 ship that's there regularly contributes more than a T2 ship we see for 2 days out of 10. I'd rather have a newbie in a frigate giving me intel on all the ops than A mid life pilot that only attends one op in 10 because he's constantly missioning to replace his lost ships. If you've got the bankroll to support the losses, fine, but if not please stick to ships who's loss rates you can support. Since my personal income stream is not yet setup, I'm sticking to the cheaper stuff for now.

Onto some commentary on the T3 front.

We'll be running into some interesting mechanics over the next two months. The requirements for T3 manufacturing pretty much reduce the pool of pilots that could do it out of the box. Even with certain pilots concentrating in certain areas it'll probably be a month or two before we'll be able to manufacture some sub-systems or hulls. The bottleneck won't be the BPC's or the Reactions as i initially thought but the availability of pilots who can actually BUILD the darn ships and sub-systems. This should solve itself over the next 2 months as those who didn't have all the prerequisites slowly get them filled in, but it remains that we'll see demand for T3 resources and Components/BPCs relatively low for the first two months and then pick up gradually.

This means I'm expecting the resource prices to drop steadily for the next 1-2 months as the supply way outstrips the manufacturing capacity. People who had the prereq skills will have a field day and make a killing on the ship and subsystem sales. This means we'll see a reduction in supply costs with the ship prices staying rather high for about the next month and a bit, then slowly as additional manufacturers come on line the demand for T3 resources will increase pulling resource prices back up or at least stabilizing them while the prices of the ships will finaly start to drop at taht time. Don't expect price stability in the T3 market place for at least 3 months though.