Member of the EVE Tweet Fleet

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Hauling

After the craziness of the last couple of days it was kind of nice to be able to relax a bit and simply haul stuff around.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

WTF!?!

Last night was official the crazy night. Between some internal drama in the alliance slowly coming to a head and things going just a little crazy last night my EVE life has been interesting. All of this happened as I went to pick up my parents at the airport.

So, here's a formal "You da man" shout out for TsurugiSan for last night's find. It doesn't get much crazier than capers like that. Glith for being able to do something with the find. Cathrianne and others for the logistics and scanning support. Better than finding an abandoned POS.

While this was going on, one of my other pilots finaly hit the "I know tech 3 manufacture" point in his tranning plan and it was the mad scramble to get the BPCs and T3 components to the manufacturing point. At the same time there was some rare gas - both coming from some previous work and as a find during the above madness and I was able to start the Polymerization of the missing Carbon-86 that's necessary to manufacture the components that are needed for the rest of the runs (what we had on hand was enough for 1 run). In about 10h I'll be able to manufacture enough of the missing T3 components to allow for the manufacture of all the runs of all the BPCs we've been able to reverse engineer so far.

So personally I was doing a lot of hauling last night for the little time I was able to get on.

Now for the absolute idiot in the Sacrilege. Dude (name witheld to protect the idiotic), when you see other ships on your directional overview, you do not abandon your ship. You're only lucky we didn't have Sacrilege qualified pilot in the grotto when you exited your ship to go check things out. Your only saving grace was that there was so much happening last night, nailing a single HAS was way way down the totem pole of priorities. Then you go and get the Sac killed by the sleepers???. Dude, pay attention to the terrain in wormholes - Pulsar - -22% armor resists. slowing down down to salvage cruiser and frigate wrecks in the face of sleeper battleships? We had eyes on you for most of this fiasco, just anyone who could either have stolen the Sac while you were out of it or tackled and killed you was erstwhile occupied with more important stuff.

/me shakes his head

Noob.

In all honesty last night was like filling the a flush draw on the river. Crazy doesn't even begin to describe it.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Location Crunch

It is a truism that you can only be in one place at a time. And yep I'm finding this to be mighty true. Here is the dilemma: In EVE one of the things I do is run a store for most of my income. I've described how I do this in other posts. It's a great way to make non-flashy isk in a relatively steady way and it's pretty self regulating. The only problem is that it's also constant. Once you have your wares up, there's always SOMETHING running out. Now it doesn't take a lot of time to do the following:

Deliver the most recent production and move it to the warehouse. Check the orders to see which ones are no longer there. Grab stuff from the warehouse to put up on sale. Grab minerals and BPOs of stuff that just got put up on sale and manufacture them. Check mineral bank to see if buy orders are indicated. If so put that up too. Move on to the rest of the stuff I do in EVE.

Here's the problem: When I spend a day or three in wormhole space it effectively slows down my semi-passive revenue stream. Since the more popular stuff goes out of stock fastest, I run out of the popular stuff first. Since by definition the rest of the stuff is less popular it sells more slowly and provides much less income over the same amount of time. So the longer I'm away the slower the income stream.

This is not to say that what I end up doing in wormhole space is either immediately or eventually profitable. A lot of it is, but when you run an alliance or a corporation a certain portion of your time online is spent in what could be called "politics". Whether corp internal, alliance internal or external, its part of the game. But while doing these activities, one is not usually making isk. This is why I kind of depend on the more passive income mechanisms. The market will sell my stuff whether I'm active or not, online or not. Whether I sell the datacores I collect twice a month or using them for my own T2 manufacturing, same thing. Except for the little trip to pick em up, nice passive income.

My problem is that as lucrative as the store is, it's not realy passive enough for long term revenue. I'm going to have to think about long term changes (either with alts or without) and figure out how I want to proceed. In order to truely exploit wormhole space I need to think of a way to get my K-space income to be self sustaining without the constant presence of my main.

Ah, EVE, After every lesson leanred you provide a new challenge. After every cliff assended, a new vista.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Decisions and using Buy orders

Yesterday's post was kind of terse. The reason is that I was deep in thinking about the forward planing for the alliance. Not something one talks about in public. Sort of a let's go over what worked and what did not and what can be improved to forward our objectives of becoming a T3 manufacturing alliance.

This mainly involved going over the mass of stuff we learned over the last month about how T3 and wormholes work and formulating a plan of attack in order to secure a more consistent supply of the bottleneck items as those of us who can transition from T3 gatherers to T3 manufacturers.

Dealing with internal alliance politics is of course part and parcel of this type of thing.

On a more personal front, I finally got enough isk rolling in the T1 store that I can put up mineral buy orders without impacting my running isk too badly and have started doing so once again. I've also managed to ship some of that Bistot I mined in the wormhole out to the station in high sec I operate out of. This will seriously reduce my dependence on Megacyte re-sellers in high sec (valued at what I could sell it for of course - I don't come cheap).

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Ruminating

Haven't posted in a bit, I notice. Explanation is straightforward. Not a lot has been happening in EVE atm for me. I actually took a little break yesterday and only went on to check market orders. I need to think things through on a few issues.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

That was a lot of EVE

Yesterday I was on quite a bit. Ok, I was on a whole damn lot. Between Friday and Saturday a lot got done. Humm, let's see...

1) Started my alt learning some indy skills. My main may not be getting a tower up in the wormhole for a while. The alt being a POS gunner has access to a pos with refining and assembly arrays and so a sudden need to be able to manufacture thing reared it's head.

2) Finaly got in touch with Sister Julie Whitefeather in game (from the No Prisoners No Mercy pod cast)

3) Started checking out the changes from the latest patch. This one was mainly lots of fixes but has proven to be a *skweeeeee* *win* type of patch.

4) Sucked on a Bistot roid for about 2-3 hours using a covetor in wormhole space without killing the roid. All the miners are giving this patch the stamp of aproval. Much less in the way of Grav sites but O... M... G... the size of the roids. *droooooool*

5) Our new technique for detecting intrusions is proving itself as we've managed to detect and repulse a number of intrusions into the wormhole lately. The one I'm most proud of involved our little band of mostly industrialists almost waxing a pair of Domies who incautiously decided that our wormhole was the place to operate. Cov-ops, Scorpion, Rupture, Brutix and Hound vs 2 Dominix. Although there were no losses on either side (the rupture was the only ship on our side with a point and had to warp off in structure), The fact that we had no losses and the two Dominixes vacated the system in short order means that it was a successful defense.

6) The Hound pilot is loving the new SB changes. I'm going to have to get one again and make sure my missile skills get up there once T3 manufacturing gets finished.

7) Made and tranpsported a mining frigate for one of the newbies of a younger corp that joined the alliance. Course by the time this happend we had that little engagement described above

8) The wormhole moved to a busier system and our PvP'ers took the chance to come visit and work on some of the combat sites. Once again keeping an eye out for the scan probes is paying off. One of my newer pilots is proving adept at getting pod kills of people entering and trying to leave the wormhole.

9) One of the more PvP oriented pilots went on a bit of a solo rampage in his Cerebus. Six cruisers for no loss in a random wormhole. Unzer duuuuude, well done.

10) Poped a run of 20 small mobile warp diruptor bubbles in the manufacturing slot back in empire so I can get those done. We'll be trainign people in their use soon.

11) Switched out my Rupture in the wormhole for a shield tanked Stabber because the wormhole has a Pulsar in it and the rupture was going down way too fast against the domies. I'll probably build a few more in there.

12) One of the other alliance industrial corps decided to do a POS takedown of an offlined POS in some other wormhole system.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things. Like I said - busy darned weekend. Well Tranquility is starting up, time to get back online. See you in space.

Friday, April 17, 2009

We're learning

As everyone tackles the ECM "changes" and sundry other funky new features of EVE, we found ourselves in the grotto (nick name for the wormhole system we've colonized) in order to check out the new scanning changes. And the new grav sites.

Maaaaama mia!!! the miner in me went "shwing": a roid with 15000 units of arknor, 25000 units of Crokite and 25000 units of Bistot.... There was only one grav site in the system, but the roids in the site!!!! oh yea baby, now this is what we're talking about.

So, while the miners among us were salivating we spot a Falcon name hunter-killer on scan launching probes. "everyone warp to the POS". We (there were only 3 of us) basically spent the next 3 hours keeping an eye on the overview and sticking to the realy hard to scan sites and silently taunting our stalker by waiting until he had a bait Ferox on directional scanner, re-poped his scan probes and when he did we simply warped away to the POS. We actually managed to get some gas mining done while he was trying to nail us down.

This was a great way to test out our new anti-gank scan procedures and what not. We know from our own experimentation that although combat probes can scan down the easy sites, unless you're in a ship with a scan strength bonus it's just about imposible to nail an actual low sig hidden site with them. And using the scan probes as the warning mechanism instead of the ships is the way to go (your ship may be cloaked but your probes are not).

Eventually after 3 hours of this (and with a cov-ops keeping an eagle eye on the only wormhole out of our system) one of my pilots sent the only comment in local of the entire affair: "mmmm, fried Falcon". Evidently realizing we'd been on to him the entire time he decides to up an leave and my eyes on the wormhole report soon enough "the falcon just jumped out".

Pretty sure he was rather disappointed in his new "gank falcon" (I suspect he was trying out a new solo fit as we didn't detect fleet gathering in the high sec system connected to ours). 3h of nothing. Note: we had plenty of time to get stuff in and out of the system while this was going on, not to mention some admin stuff to clean up at the POS'es as well. We had a good laugh about it.

So after last weekend's disastrous gank fests (against us), the lessons learned and new stratagems seem to be paying off. Now we need to make sure the individual pilots get trained in these new techniques. Incidentally this makes combat sites the most dangerous sites to tackle as they can be scanned down using the on-board scanner instead of the probes.

I'm a rather pleased alliance leader atm.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Taking an easy week

Well I decided to take it a bit easier this week. Sort of float along and let the other do as they will. I must say, its relaxing.

In other news my alt is now a POS gunner with the Starbase Defense Management skill at 4. This will come in handy in the WH system with the POSes. 33 days till POS gunnery 5 and then he hits the exploration skills until he's at 5/4/4/4.

On the manufacturing side after making sure my plan was in place for the development of T3 skills I have discovered that the final plan will definitly allow me to invent and manufacture and research quite a bit of T2 that I couldn't do previously.

In early May I'll be able to invent and manufacture all the T2 Projectile weapons, all T2 Projectile ammo and most T2 Minmatar frigates (all except Jag and Wolf) and most of the T2 cruisers. By the end of the plan I'll be able to invent and manufacture all T2 Minmatar cruisers.

My collection of Datacores is growing which is nice.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Getting the store sorted out

I think I may need to modify my store model a bit. I'm going to need to provide for greater hang time for individual items I have up for sale. I've been operating on a "maintain modest quantities of items on sale so that you only manufacture stuff that sells once it gets going". But the problem I'm encountering is that if I'm away for extended periods, a lot of stuff sells out and I have a massive production run to do all at once when I finally make it back to the store.

One thing I've noticed about wormhole space: Income for the most part is long term. This means that corps/alliances without the ability to operate for extended times without regular income or those that don't have multiple streams of income will be getting out of the supply side of the business soon enough.

I'm also getting rather tired of pointing out the obvious to those who don't bother to run the numbers.

I will be glad when I finish getting T3 manufacturing skills - Just finished getting those T3 science skills in place now it's time for the manufacturing side to take over the skill plan for the next few weeks.

Monday, April 13, 2009

My pilots get complacent and pay the price

Well, it was bound to happen. You tell them and you tell them and they don't listen. Then they bitch:

"But you didn't tell ME"...

or

"But I had the module in my cargo hold"

or

"The FC told me to refit"...

Ok that last one is valid, and I'll be having words with the FC, but still. The only guys who don't need an excuse are the guys who got ganked by [R A]. A beautiful ambush by some people who know what they are doing. Even there there were mistakes. Loosing an orca to a POS take down. The fact that the pilot intended to take the tower itself down with a normal hauler after moving all the other modules in the Orca does not help when he messes up and offlines the tower too early.

Then later a hulk and a Myrm to the same pilot scouting for a nano gang? Little harder to swallow. This is where their lack of understanding of the politics of EVE comes back to haunt them.

First they did not post and analyze the kill mail. Doing so would have revealed a [R A] pilot. Which is part of <-A-> these days. So there would likely have been a 0.0 connection. Sure enough after they loose the Myrm and the Hulk the Myrm pilot pipes up "hey that's the guy from before". After which I say ok there's got to be a connection to 0.0 in the Catch region. Start scanning for the other wormhole now.

Sure enough we find another wormhole - In khanid space 4 jumps from Catch. Eventualy we close that hole but still good reminder to the pilots that this is 0.0. Warp core stabs are pointless when you get bubbled (yea one more WCS will save you from that bubble ... right ... sure).

I swear - weaning carebears of the warp core stabs is like taking one of those sucker things from a baby.

Then of course while that is going on an op manages to strand 5 pilots in wh space with the only probe equiped ship on the wrong side of the wormhole...

People, for the love of your ships, if you have any scan skills at all, fit a core probe launcher with 8 probes in it in a utility high slot when you fly said ship into wormhole space. The only people who have a valid excuse are those who don't have Astrometrics 4 yet. End of story.

Scuse me I need to find some nice solid oak to pound my head against.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Finding the time

As my in game life get busier with the "joys" of alliance leadership, I find it harder to find the time to get to my blog and write things down. Part of it of course is not wanting to divulge operational items - like say the current location of the system a good chunk of my alliance is in. On the other and after action reports on stuff that ends up in the kill mails is fine.

So, various of my industrialists had gotten roughed up by some local pirates a while ago. And of course my pew pew-ers just want kills. So a wee bit of anti piracy was called for. I'm getting better at this cov-ops stuff. Last night was typical. I logged on and discovered the fleet had gone to 0.0 and managed to get killed by a carrier's fighter quite effectively. Oh dear, missed another suicide training run, whatever shall I do. So I get in fleet and find them re-fitting to go out and do a bit of pirate hunting.

Now the problem with pirates (the not so good ones) is that they tend to be station huggers. So getting a bead on one of these can be rather difficult since you can rely on them being in station unless there's some industrial to pop in the area. So I tend to operate in a cov-ops for anti pirate work. One day when I get into a rapier I"ll be using that instead.

Anyways, in I go to Mya and get my combat probes out and start scouting for pirates. I spot loganfire and little loganfire but they are way too station huggy. In the entire 2h op I think I only saw him get away from the station once. That looked like it was to kill/chase off a Maelstrom doing an anomaly. During this time I find that he is rather friendly with a yellow noobish pirate wanabe.

Side note: If you fly without getting agressed by a pirate in multiple situations where I would expect a pirate to start tackleing you including at an anomally I'm going to asume that even if you are not blinky red, you are definitly associated with this pirate and are hence open game. Pirates who hide behind higher sec status just annoy me.

Anyways so our pirate's friend is being just a wee tad less paranoid about his ships than the more tempting flasy. And we've come to the conclusion that he's effectively a pirate by his acts. I start setting up a warp in solution while telling my rabid pvp'ers to chill at a planet one system over. This takes a bit of time to setup as mr bladeddevil is coasy up on a cloud in the anomaly.

Some neaky flying later (repositioning myself by about 150km under cloak) I managed to line my target with the gate to the system where my fleet is gathering. As I aproache the line up point I call out on coms: "Ok, it's about to go down in the next few minutes, everyone aproach the gate to Mya. You will be warping to Letrange at 50, repeat you will be warping at 50.

And I managed to stop dead with my target prety much in line with the starget and exactly 50km from me.

"JUMP, JUMP, Warp to Letrange at 50, warp to Letrange at 50." - side comment - never ever say "warp to me" unless you have named your character "me". What followed was an absolutely beautiful tackle. The claw landed 4km from bladeddevil, the vexor 800m. When you're flying a cov-ops and trying to get a warp in on someone it just doesn't get much better than that. Biggest complaint about the fight: There were 3 ships that didn't get in on the kill because they were too slow.

The rest of the evening was rather un-eventful, the pew pew guys went over to Old Man Star at one point but by then I was deep in talks with another prospective corporation to grow my alliance. Such is the life of an alliance leader - an hour or two of fun followed by large quantities of adminstrative trivia. Mynxee will understand.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Blah kind of week

Well I'm slowly getting my store underway. I'm also finding that PvP'ers generally have short attention spans. Said short attention spans tend to get ships killed for no good reason. Almost as bad as the Carebears who insist that they can fly industrials in low sec with impunity.

Ah well, at least I'm learning who my loose cannons are. On the flip side, things are coming together. I'm seeing a slow down I expected in the T3 stuff as the lack of sales and forward progress is making itself felt. Wormholes on the other hand are a smashing success I'd say. Various pilots have decided (mostly on a corp basis) to setup in different wormholes and try different colonization strategies.

My more miner/industrialist guys have setup a full blown mining production base in wormhole space and are doing a fair imitation of going berserk with pent up T1 energy. They do need to get with a more planned approach though and better corp operations due to the corp centric nature of POS operations.

The more PvP experienced are going for the "forward base" concept and a more gypsy experience. The biggest problem I have at the alliance level is the concentration of gas miners. My most competent ones are in the more settled corps, the more mobile (and hence hitting more ladar sites) are less well blessed in gas miners.

All in all we'll see how the next few weeks go.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Alts and argh

I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to spend some real cash to un-screw my alts. Let's explain so you can see the problem. I have 2 accounts (and temporarily a third). Now here's how they stack up:

Letrange: my main
Let's account alt #1: CEO alt. Minimal skills just barely enough to create corps and run them
Let's account alt #2: Research/CEO alt. Again minimal skills.

Hauler account: My hauler alt (soon to be POS gunner as well).
Hauler account alt #1: Research alt only - currently market watching in Jita.
Hauler account alt #2: Research alt only.

Now here's my problem: The alts in the main account are actually relatively active and there are some extra skills I'd eventually like them to get, but it's my main account. The alts on the 2nd account don't see a lot of use as they are research alts and their activities are accomplished rather quickly. My CEO alt for example is in charge of the T3 project corp and sees a LOT of use. So while he's on my main can't be (although my main keeps training).

What I need to do is move my two research alts to my main account and my two CEO alts to my hauler account (since if he looses a bit of training time to another toon it's not critical).

This is where the ouch part comes in. I'd need to move an alt off the main account to that temporary third account move one of the resarch alts to the main, move the other ceo to the hauler, move the last research alt to the main and the first ceo from the temporary account to the hauler account. That's 5 moves at 20$ a move. ouch.

I'm still debating doing it since it will simplify my dual account one box setup. Less logging on and off my main all the time.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

T3

Ok, time to talk a little T3 stuff and why we're not seeing a lot of stuff on the market yet (nor will we for a couple of months). As you all know Apocrypha brought all that juicy T3 goodness to the EVE universe. And people are wondering why we're not seeing a large quantity of T3 ships on the market yet.

The answer is simple: Manufacturing skills.

Making a T3 cruiser/subsystem is a 4 stage process done along 2 branches. Along one branch you have ancient relics that get reverse engineered into BPCs. Along the other you get Gasses which are reacted into polymers which with salvage are manufactured into T3 components. Then finally these two branches join to manufacture a T3 cruiser hull or subsystem because the T3 ships are only made up of T3 components.

3 1/2 weeks into Apocrypha and AMC (my alliance for those asleep at the wheel) is able to react the gasses and manufacture the components. This without problem and rather quickly (still some shortages of specific gasses but hey can't have everything). We can make all the components. Still no problem. We've even started (un-successfully so far) to reverse engineer hulls and subsystems. The kicker is that last step is a doozy.

It will take me 29 more days from today to be able to manufacture a T3 subsystem. Assuming others will concentrate on the hulls, that means it will be 44days from today to be able to manufacture all T3 subsystems. Then to be able to manufacture a Loki it'll be 90 days from today, add about 22 days for each racial cruiser hull after that.

Now admitedly most of that is working up the pre-requisites. But still this means that the number of pilots that could have conceivable manufactured T3 ships in short order was actualy quite rare.

Supply and demand is going to do funny things over the next few weeks. The price of most T3 components is going to drop as the gasses, salvage polymers and components don't move very fast. BPCs will also start going down as they don't move very quickly. Slowly people will get out of the farming of this stuff as it doesn't pay very much. Then slowly over the next 2-3 months demand will pick up as more and more industrialist will finally be coming online. By which time most of the farmers (except the isk farmers) will have gotten out of the market. Then slowly the glut of components will clear out thanks to more manufacturers coming online causing a rebound in the basics prices. This combination means that the odds of of seeing a sub-1B T3 cruiser in the next year are probably smaller than people think.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

We're a bad influence

I have to laugh at the situation Cozmik found himself the other day. Being the dedicated speed freak and PvP tackler he is, he took his Taranis off to a market up to fill up on warp disruption probes for his Sabre. Only to discover that he bought too many to fit in his cargo hold.

Apparently bitching about the oversite, one of my more industrial minded pilots said: "Just shove some cargo extenders in the lows". Sure enough this cut the round trips down from 3 to 2 but hilarity ensues later on when he takes a screen shot of the fitting screen and shows off his new "Taranahauler" to other PvP buddies. I find their cries of horror horribly amusing.

The Taranahauler

Don't worry it's back in it's normal configuration. No Tarani were harmed making this comercial.