Tyrannis

Tyrannis was announced on Feb 19th. You may all have been wondering if my lack of posting about it has anything to do with my burnout. The answer is nope, it has to do with the lack of details that were not covered prior to that post by CCP t0rfifrans.

The summary (can't really call it details yet can we) that was posted matches pretty solidly 1 for 1 with what was announced at fanfest. So this is the promised summer expansion. Based on the position of the T3 frigates and modules in the fanfest presentation and the Jovians and what not, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even if we get some bug fixes and some more balancing changes, what is listed there is pretty much going to be what we're going to get. I've been holding off commenting pending the subsequent dev blogs with more meat.

Now lets take a look at the wish list:

• Incarna
• Formation flying
• Improving low sec
• More wormhole stuff
• More faction warfare stuff

If you were looking for any of these, you're going to be severely disappointed.

• Planetary flight

It looks, from CCP Oveur's comments at fanfest that feature this got moved to DUST 514. So we're probably not going to get it for EVE proper.

And then of course there are the perennial irritants:

• 4th bonus on assault frigates
• Fixing the cov-ops cyno problem for T3 cov-ops subsystem (think that's still there)
• Fixing black-ops (they need fuel bays in the worst way and they need them to be plentiful).
• Fixing large fleet lag.
• Fixing rocket explosion velocity
• Fixing POS missile launchers (omg they should be fixed I think the problem here is the missiles they chuck have their explosion speeds based on the raw missile value, but these values are balanced to be workable once player skills affect them - brilliant balancing skillz there).
• The corp/alliance interface needs some love (hell we'd settle for an offhand acknowledgment).
• Resource balancing would be nice (and if you don't want to balance it at least make it targetable).

As great as the industrial system is in EVE there is still much that could be done to improve it enormously. But due to the concentration of PvP by the devs it languishes behind the PvP content quite a bit. It's too bad in a way. The horrible part is when you realize that it's light years ahead of any other MMO's crafting system. At least they've left themselves with plenty of improvement room should a competitor come along.

Out of the most recent dev blog however there is one good piece of improvement coming along:

Well, in the process of implementing the new standings system, it has been determined that it's easier to rewrite Alliance standings than make the old system play nice with the new Contacts system. As a convenient side-effect of this, Alliance standings will now be used whenever stations or starbases make a standings check. This, we hope, should make managing these things much easier in most scenarios.
- CCP Grayscale

All I have to say is "Oh thank fucking god!". It's not so bad when you have an alliance with a short list of corporations but managing this when you have at least 8 different corporations with POSes is a nightmare (and has resulted in friendly kills).

In the end however, this is looking like a "we're putting in infrastructure" expansion. Nothing individually interesting, but putting the blocks in place for future developments. In some ways it's disappointing. In other it's good, at least we get things instead of having an expansion only every year and a half. The disjoint happens when people start to expect Cataclysm level expansions every 6 months. I prefer having regular expansions who's scope is not so large. The price is that features can take quite a while before we see them after they've been announced.

Side comment: To the idiots who are complaining that the art departement should be working on the lag issue: ARE YOU GUY TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE IDIOTS? Friggen trolls.

Blog Pack

To answer klok in the previous post's comments, I don't run the blog pack. That's CK's baby (yep, I've met the guy - although I'll start to think he's a figment of our collective imaginations if he keeps never showing up to the Montreal EVE meets).

Now it may be that my posting frequency is maintaining itself. I used to have a blog when I was in FFXI. There was no community support or blog ring when I was doing it then. Regardless of such, I'll keep blogging about EVE as well. Being in a blog roll or blog pack has never had anything to do with what drives me to blog. It's nice having a community of fellow bloggers who all blog about the same things, but the truth is that it's never been why I blog.

Roc's comments about the fact that it needs to be chosen by CK and not selected by some e-peen popularity contest however is dead on the isk. Personally I think 40 or 50 is too much for the blog pack. The other issue is that posting frequency needs to be addressed. I'm willing to entertain the concept I'm one of the more frequent posters, but then my list of blogs i follow is rather limited, so I have no way of judging whether that's the case or not. Going through all the blogs and sifting for post frequency and quality would be a full time job for a publishing editor, let alone someone who has a wife, two kids and a full time job. So I can understand CK's feeling that he's been letting it languish.

The other issue is that You have a derth of leadership blogs (I'm one of the few) or carebear blogs (also one of the few) and a slew of pirate blogs (chatty bunch aren't they?). In the end, whether I'm on or off the blog pack, is CK's decision. I had advised him that I felt that my posting quality had reduced and therefore it warranted my removal from the blog pack (in my view). You have to realize that I made that decision based on my own feel for what I was writing, not based on any qualitative/quantitative analysis of the relative merits of my blogs vs other blogs. Shae Tian also indicated that she'd feel more comfortable if she was not in the blog pack due to the reduced posting frequency, so I'm not the only one holding their presence on a blog pack up to a high standard. I think CK needs to have a regular (every 2 months) going over the blogs in the pack to weed out blogs where the frequency has dropped too low, and get new blood in. Ideally the blog roll needs to be re-organized into categories. Something like The Belfry (web comic list site) would be ideal, but would take quite a bit of coding and what not to setup. No, I'm not volunteering.

In other news - Dwarf Fortress is EEEEBBBBIIIILLLL. Friggen got drowned in dwarf immigrants before I was ready to handle the influx in my latest game. Need to tone down the amenities at the start.... EVE only thinks it's got a learning cliff.

Don't argue, The Mule is right

1st, go read Manasi's blog entry. Back? Good...

Alliance Leaders, CEOs, Directors will all agree, we'd much rather you be able to fly a ship effectively than have you in a ship for which your skills are not yet ready. THIS INCLUDES THE DAMN SUPPORT SKILLS.

One of the problems newbies have is a leftover impression from other games that bigger is better. Leme ask you a couple of little questions: Is a bigger screwdriver going to help you with the little screws holding your glasses together? Is a bigger dick going to help you think smarter? Well?

The truth is the EVE designers are not total idiots (well except for some aspects of the economy as the blow up by Atika T implies). They are however masters at giving people enough rope to hang themselves with. Can you get into a battleship withing 2 weeks? Yep. Should you? Well... I guess it's just a matter of how fast you want to rage-quit. Unfortunately it's not just your character who needs to learn thing in EVE. So do YOU! You might think that all those navigation skills are useful only for unlocking modules to put in your ships because you've heard they are useful. Ask any experienced matari pilot and he'll tell you not only do they have them all maxed, they could use one of two more entire nav skills.

Engineering, Electronics, Mechanics. They all have a place in making ALL your ships fly better, target faster, hit harder and take more punishment. One of the most common comments from people who've moved up too fast then fixed their issues is to get back in a frigate and say "man, I don't remember this ship being this good". The ship was never bad, the problem is that until you get some of the support skills in place, YOU are a bad pilot.

One of the problems with the NPC missions is that they in no way provide an "skill check" for your skills. The rats are too easy to kill. So "but I can do level 3 or level 4 missions" is not good enough.

The numbers

The less carebearish of you may want to run screaming for the hills...

NOW!

For the rest of you here are the promissed numbers. These are on approximate Jita pricing, except for the mineral values which were local. Note that I could do better than Jita if I was selling the salvage locally.

Link to PDF

Notes:

• This was just to get a feel for the feasibility of generating salvage for T1 rigs in wormhole space.
• Obviously unless you have specific need for a piece of salvage not generated by Matari or Amarr ships, use the Burst and the Tormentor to blow up.
• Anything above the mining frigates is too expensive to justify blowing up without insuring fully.
• You'll need to blow up cruisers to get circuits (one of two generic types of T1 salvage).
• The profit percentage is way down - this is due to the upfront cost of the cruisers and also due to the fact that there was a loss on the Rifter since I didn't insure them to Platinum levels.

As usual, your millage may vary. Since this experiment showed me what I'd need to do to generate rig material in wormhole space it has served it's purpose and I won't be continuing it. The results are interesting anyways.

Scattered Musings

Been a while since I've done a comment piece. I do keep reading blogs and other EVE sources of information.

Goonswarm

Ok, I'm Canadian, and I'm usually fairly polite. But. Go read the following link. Linkage. Done? KK, I must ask the following question of The Mittani: "Butthurt much?", cuz man I've seen less whine from a carebear getting suicide ganked two days in a row.

Dominion Issues

The generic issue with Dominion is not the cost of sovereignty, although certain alliances are having a hard time adapting to it, the big issue is the asymmetrical lag that has been plaguing large battles lately. I've been following the "ships lost" in Providence and other regions quite a bit lately and the fleet fights are just as big as before Dominion. Here I suspect we're seeing the after effects of the "Corefication" of the eve server code. Don't forget that one of the things CCP is doing is ripping apart the EVE server code, finding the parts of it that were not EVE specific, isolating them for use in other projects and re-locating the EVE specific parts on top of the new skeleton. This will pay long term dividends for CCP as it will allow them to leverage their technology. The problem from our (the player point of view) is that Dominion is effectively version 1.0 of this technology. It's going to take the next two expansions to iron out the bug introduced by this change. The good news of course is that most areas of code are at least getting a good scrubbing at the low level even if it doesn't show at the interface level yet.

As far as large fleet battles/campaigns go, The deaths in the last 24h of dotlan statistic is very interesting I'd love to compare statistics of each downtime to downtime period for the 6 months prior to dominion compared to the most recent data post-Dominion. It doesn't look like the numbers of ships lost is any less than it used to be. They are spread out over more time and there's a lot less of sudden "titan spikes" than their used to be. I get the feeling that campaigns will become much more morale dependent than before. To a certain extent it's almost like trench warfare. In that you see a lot of ship death in a few key systems. Then suddenly something or someone not directly related to the military side breaks and you see a mad scramble for the areas where the break occurred. It looks very much like the sort of situations towards the end of world war 1 where both sides had pounded on each other for so long, when one side suddenly had to deal with a success, they were unable to fully exploit it since their logistics weren't ready for the sudden victory.

As far as alliances controlling large swaths of territory, as far as I can see [.-A-.], Atlas, [IT], heck even [TCF] seem to be able to control their territory quite well and within budget. I am highly amused that one of my predictions for the sovereignty changes is turning out to be dead on the money. The one were large alliances would let sov drop in systems near their territory but not necessarily abandon control of said space. The most recent provi-block war was the direct result of this. [.-A-.] let sov drop in some systems in northern catch but still considered them part of their territory. A Proviblock holder assumed this implied that they no longer wished to control said systems and decided that they didn't need to do any diplomatic dance before moving in. This turned out to be slightly shortsighted on their part, as [.-A-.] then proceeded to eject them and push the point home most forcefully that even without sovereignty these systems came under their sphere of influence.

Some alliances seem to be having sov bill issues. I suspect that the ones having trouble are the ones with relatively weak logistical/industrial arms. That doesn't cover the Goonplosion since as I understand their logistical capacity should have been there. Sounds more like a "we didn't want that sov anyway" type of fail cascade. It sounds like The Mittani is trying to spin-doctor things for the common goon in order to make the lack of sov objectives more palpable. "CCP has made 0.0 sovholding pointless so we're going to be an NPC 0.0 alliance instead and simply abandon all the objectives of the last 3 years work". I also thing their name change will have long term negative impact on their propaganda efforts.

Tyrannis

This should be very interesting. I'm left wondering about what we'll see in the way of additional development and the impact it will have on the economy of EVE. The doom and gloom guys are out in force. I have yet to see any impact CCP has had on the EVE economy that has ended in doom yet. If anything CCP does not have enough confidence in the EVE market to absorb system design changes. They keep doing things by half measures when the economy is impacted. We'll have to see as the forthcoming dev blogs show up over the next 3 months or so.

Salvage

Continuing the slaughter of helpless hulls in the name of science, I came up with some interesting information.

After 130 frigate hulls blown up and salvaged (without bothering to insure), no circuits were salvaged.

10 cruisers (insured) resulted in circuits (about half the salvage).

I'm lucky the experiment is happening with the basket of minerals being so low that insurance fraud is the order of the day. I was actually at a profit without needing to salvage a single wreck. The issue for my wormhole sourced rigs though is that after 130 frigates I'm fairly confident that circuits don't drop from frigates (although they are a great source for the other salvage). This means that sacrificing cruisers is necessary for building rigs if one is doing it entirely withing wormhole space. Annoying (and expensive) but since it was looking like it wasn't going to be possible at all, quite possible.

I promised the numbers on all of this but the spreadsheet is not quite ready yet.

T1 Salvage

So I got thinking. Dangerous, I know. Wouldn't it be nice if I could make rigs in w-space out of local resources instead of having to ship them in...

Then my brain goes: wait a sec, player ships are salvageable...

You can see where this is going. But not being the cautious EVE industrialist that I am I decided to experiment first. I also didn't remember what was the salvage situation of shuttles. So the night before last I whipped up:

10 x Amarr Shuttle
10 x Caldari Shuttle
10 x Gallente Shuttle
10 x Minmatar Shuttle
10 x Bantam
10 x Burst
10 x Navitas
10 x Tormentor

Then using my Orca and an alt (to speed things up) I flew out to a safespot and started blowing up jettisoned hulls. Using drones. Pro tip: make sure you're using small drones - preferably T2. The main reason is that this DPS does burn through any ammunition.

A certain amount of time later (the alt can target 7 things at once and has 5 salvagers on my default dessy salvager fit. Having recorded the results...

Off to the spreadsheet Batman!

And the results after plugging in the numbers (based on last week's values for both ore and salvage), were interesting.

First up the Shuttles. I had forgotten that they only salvage to Metal Scraps. Exactly one per shuttle. End result: Shuttles cost me about 7900 isk per shuttle when built in batches of 10. Between the insurance (2000 isk by default) and the tritanium from the Metal Scraps (493 in my case due to tax at the station I was using). It worked out to a net loss on the shuttles. I won't be using shuttles again.

Then it was the turn of the frigates. Well! The results were not what I was expecting. I did get salvage. Not to mention Alloyed Tritanium Bars, Armor Plates and Melted Capacitor Consoles. The end result on this little experiment is I ended up with goods worth more than the goods I started with. Including the shuttles it was a 78% profit which is highly respectable percentage, if lousy per slot per hour. Sticking to Matari and Amarr frigates it could even be quite profitable depending on the final salvage percentage (I'd need to blow up thousands of frigates to get decent data to figure out the salvage percentages per salvage per specific hull). BUT, and it's a big "but", There were NO circuits...

The 4 circuit salvages are the bread and butter high quantity salvage from NPC rats. Should this pattern hold for larger frigates and, say, cruisers (and I think it will), then there will be no way I can build these types of frigates in wormhole space and get the drops necessary to build rigs. This is because every rig out there uses circuits as part of it's recipe. So although it's good that you can profit from blowing up frigates by the metric tonne, the lack of a reason to do so (except pure profit) mean that I won't be using this technique to fill my rig needs in wormholes.

I'm going to blow up a bunch more to see if the pattern holds or it was just stupid unlucky. I may try a stack of 10 Rifters and 10 Scythes at some point just to see if it also applies to larger Frigates and Cruisers.

Blink Blink

So I made 10 nice little modules of something. It was more of an exercise. Besides I actually use said module in some of my "standardized" ship setups. I hadn't really put some effort into calculating the true costs of the module when I put it up on the market. I did the usual:

"Humm, that looks a little high, I'll put it at *blah*. That should get me some nice sales."

My gut feel was that it was still very profitable. And admittedly it was not one of the modules that you can just build out of the box with Industry I, so less of it gets to the market normally anyways.

Just ran the numbers yesterday... 145% profit and all 10 sold out within a 22h. Buying patern was one per customer which indicates no buy-up and relist action on the part of a trader. I'll note that I'm not a market hub producer. I tend to like working with the local market and having a wide spread of goods rather than narrow high volume stuff. But either way this represents a pretty good indication of pent up demand in the area.

*Blink* *Blink*

Scuse me while I go make some more...

Side note: looks like Nanotransistors are on their way up, and although I didn't check, I hear Fullerides are headed back down a little bit. Well they were overheated and reserve volume was a little short.

A use for Star Trek

Wow, did my last post get some responses... Including the suicide gankers mentioned. I guess everyone needs their 15min of fame.

Anyways, reading around the net, I have been noticing an interesting pattern. The people who have been most enjoying Star Trek online seem to be those who least like EVE Online. Now I'm sure that some people will say this hurts EVE. They are wrong. Do you get that newbie in your corp who does nothing but bitch and moan? Then when you point out ways to avoid/overcome their problems they just bitch and moan some more that your solution is not how they want to play the game? They're the type who just never seem to "get" that EVE is PvP from the moment you undock to the moment you dock up. There are more rules and consequences in high sec but it's still a PvP environment.

After a while it gets rather annoying. It's the old saying writ large: you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. After a while you begin to realize that these people are not only frustrating themselves but the rest of your corp. Well we finally have a proper space MMO to send them to that's not EVE. And from what I can read, it seems to cater to them very well. Which is good. I was getting tired of saying Hello Kitty Online is thataway. Now I can direct them to STO.

I'm probably never going to get Star Trek Online. Not enough of a crafting system to be worth it to me. Comes from being a jack of all trades. You guys may have noticed that the types of ships I tend to fly well tend to be the cloaky scouty kind of ships. Since scouting is such a large part of PvP in EVE, I get my fill of good scouting game play that way. Whether it's finding an elusive target or making sure that the combat boys are not surprised and can make informed decisions to engage or not, those are some of the great parts of EVE for me. You just don't get that in any other type of MMO than a full world non-instanced PvP MMO.

Some people like a bland, theme park, flavor to their MMOs. Other people like to use Blair's Sudden Death hot sauce. In a way I'm glad I have a bland space MMO to send these people because in the end their whining and moaning sucks the fun out of EVE faster than suicide ganking does.

So in the end, the two games being so very different means they won't really compete for audience. EVE will attract the more challenge oriented pilot, STO the more sedate theme park oriented pilot.

See I'll let you in on a little secret. In EVE the PvE stuff is not very challenging (at all). It lets you make the isk necessary to fuel your plans. That's it. Even sleepers - although more difficult than normal NPCs are not as much of a challenge as defeating an enemy fleet. Bring the right ships, know how they'll react and they can be reliably killed and processed for their chewy goodness. Other players on the other hand - that's where the challenge is. The challenge is makeing your plans work in the face of people like Red Boss and his friends. Understand that before you undock and you'll have the right mindset to survive in EVE. Get in a good corporation, learn proper PvP tactics - they'll have applications even with industrial ships. At least you'll know what limitations the other side is working with.

Anatomy of a suicide gank

For the heck of it I've been keeping an eye in Mya for the last two days. Sort of an "I'm bored let's go AFK in a cov-ops in Mya and make the pirates all paranoid". But seeing the amount of activity in local got me curious. So I went into observation mode.

Turns out these guys like to suicide gank with dessies. They get some cheap destroyers and even with -10 sec standing they have enough time to get the suicide gank done. This is because dessies can warp away to a belt before the police can get to them. Then of course they use a cloaked neutral alt to provide a warp in solution right on top of their target (made horribly easy by the fact that Hulks tend to stay put in a single location for long periods of time). I've even managed to identify the cloaky alt being used as the warp in coordinator.

So their operational pattern is clear: Get some cheap dessies set up for as much alpha as they can manage. Get them gathered in low sec. Use alt to get a warp in solution. "Warp to me at 20 from the Mya gate and you'll land on top of this Hulk". So the gank squad gathers, warps to the gate, jumps, warp to fleet member, target, attack. If the hulk should manage to be defended by some drones, they might actualy get a kill mail from one of the attackers and it'll show both police and concord on the mail. The Hulk loss mail will also be there showing all the dessies.

Rince, repeat.

All Hulk pilots that operate within a jump or two of low sec should be aware of this operational pattern.

Back to the Hyena

So I manufactured my Hyena. Tonight I finish making the component kits for the other 3 Hyena BPCs I have. I've decided, since they are currently profitable to make at least 2 more for the market keeping the last one in reserve.

So off to Jita (well at least my Jita alt after a cash infusion and a shopping list). It's mid week so the prices should be nice and low compared to the weekend spikes. Sure enough the observed manipulation of Fullerines has seemed to run it's course. Quantity on the market is nice and the price has still recovered up.

The rest of the materials show a nice mid week slump with a bit of a rise only in Fernite Carbide. Not enough to justify holding off on the purchase though.

Now for some reader mail (i.e. from the previous post's comments):

Do you just purchase when you have the need to build or do you stockpile materials and always have something in your production queues?

For T1 materials I maintain a stockpile which I fill using buy orders. For T2 I purchase in Jita when the I decide to manufacture. I don't tend to stockpile T2 materials since I don't manufacture T2 goods in industrial quantities.

I guess I really should post something in the S&I forum but how do you go about calculating the running costs of your POS?

Personally I prorate the slots based on POS usage. ex: If it's a multiple use POS and it's actually up for other purposes (for example a wormhole POS that you have anchored some industrial modules at and only occasionally turn on to do some stuff - but who's main purpose is to provide basing for corp operations) then I prorate based on the module grid/cpu usage of the module and then spread that amongst the slots to figure a per/h for specific slots. If the entire POS is devoted to a specific industrial use I prorate the entire fuel bill between the modules that have slots (for example a high sec research tower). Also note that for research slots I tend to weight the ME and Copy slots twice as high as any other slots since they are the ones who are not available in empire (yes this makes PE and Invention rather cheap on a per slot basis).

Understandably you'd take the fuel cost per hour and divide it by all available job slots but do you then factor in the various types of slots (ME, PE, Copy, Invention, Comp. Assm., Equip. Assm., Ammo Assm.) and should you be concerned when not using them all?

It depends on the POS purpose - for a dedicated POS, yes you want to make sure you're getting full usage of all the important slots all the time (up the cost/h if you can't make full usage of a slot - estimate based on your projected usage). For a general purpose POS nope - offline the modules when not in use - Any industrial use I make out of it is icing to it's main purpose. Very much like the old sov towers that would mine moon minerals to offset their fuel costs and flood Jita with massive quantities of low end "moon mud" (this is why some of the materials sold for under extraction costs).

MOAR T2

After the frustrations of the last post there was a request for a Rapier at a good price from an alliance pilot. I mentioned that I could invent and make them but it would take time. He mentions that he won't need it for about 2 weeks. So I say sure I'll look into it.

PRO TIP: If you want to save isk, plan to buy well ahead of when you'll need something. This will allow you to shop around and maybe commission a manufactuer in your corp/alliance to make the item. Don't worry the good ones will tell you when it's cheaper to buy from the market than for them to make it. It also allows you to spot and avoid market manipulation attempts on certain items.

So I get out my spreadsheet (of doom™) and get my Jita alt fired up and start plugging in numbers. Why thank you EVE HQ for the values I'll be needing in my BPC calculations. I won't bore you with the details but the exploration allowed me to spot the following manipulation attempt in full cry:

Fullerides in Jita

Now I had priced this at about 1200 isk/unit back when I was doing the Hyena calculations. and in the 15min before I did this print screen, the lowest sell order was around 2500 isk/unit! In order to get a better read on what's going on I quickly check the history:

History graph of Fullerides in Jita

Ok, note how the lowest sell order is at around 2000 isk/unit but so far nothing has sold for more than 1400 isk/unit. That my friends is how you spot a manipulation attempt while it's going on. Also the total volume up for sale looked rather low (gut feel - I don't actually track this that closely). Interestingly the overall trend is definitely on the rise.

A quick peek at Akita T's moon mineral thread in the science and indy forums reveals some interesting facts:

Fullerides are made up of
1/4 Technetium
1/4 Platinum
1/4 Hydrocarbons
1/4 Silicates

(100 of each of the ingredients will give you 6000 Fullerides)

Now Platinum saw a bubble after Dominion hit and then stabilized @2400-2500 per but is seeing some action in the last few days. Hydrocarbons @180 and Silicates @600 which go into Carbon Polymers have been relatively stable (short duration bumps not withstanding). Carbon Polymers themselves have been hit with a sudden increase in the last few days and went from @400 to around @900 it looks like. And although Technetium has had a big spike at the start of Dominon, on the short term that was un-sustainable and it has crashed back to 20k before bouncing up this week to 30k per. It's interesting that the two most expensive component parts have seen some action in the last 7 days but it's only today that Fullerides have really tried to take off. We'll have to see if the trend holds for Fullerides now it looks like stocks were getting low. Have the people doing the reactions run out of cheap pre-Dominion Technetium? Is it a simple concerted market manipulation attempt?

The long term price of Fullerides however is probably going to be up if the long term predictions for Technetium hold. Also note with Geminate changing hands there was probably a nice dip in Technetium supply while the changeover was underway which will have helped burn through some of the existing Technetium stockpiles.

Anyways getting back to the Rapier. The end result is if moon material prices don't go crazy over the next week or so, it's cheaper for me to invent and build, then sell Rapier for my alliance pilot than for him to buy it in Jita. A quick check of the effects of Fullerides shows that it should have minimal impact on the Rapier pricing even if it stays rather high. So in goes the Bellicose BPO into a copy slot.

Going over the effects of the Fullerides increase on my T2 Projectile ammo however shows that it's going to have a severe impact on T2 Projectile ammo. At last week prices Fullerides was the major part of manufacturing costs of T2 Projectile ammo. If the price spikes it's going to be worse. Expect T2 Projectile ammo to spike in the following weeks if there is a sustained increase in Fullerides prices. Average Barrage M prices are a bit elevated over their pre-Dominion days but not radically so. Should a sustained Fullerides spike materialize however, expect the price of Barrage M to head to the 400-500 per round region

Argh!!!!

I feel like I'm pounding my forehead against a brick wall some days. So there I am, taking a break from a 10 part storyline mission (If I ever find out who came up with that bright idea someone is going to need to make sure his life insurance is payed up...). Wandering through high sec in my Orca buying POS fuel (side note to self, next time use an interceptor to buy the fuel and then use the Orca to pick it up once I know where I'm flying). When the following plaint is heard read in alliance chat:

"Um... are we at war with anyone?"

This from someone I haven't seen a peep out of in over 6 months.

My alarm bells go off. Someone has done something stupid and paid the price. Sure enough after a conversation that's like pulling teeth we find out that one of the "I was just minding my own buisness" types of carebears came back to the game about a month ago. Notice how he's apparently been back a month but this is the first time he pipes up in alliance chat at least that I've noticed. Turns out that 6 destroyers just suicide ganked his Hulk in high sec...

Ok, let's see, Hulkageddon II - just finished, but probably plenty of suicide gankers left over from that. Goonswarm - freshly disbanded - a bigger pool of asshats fresh out of 0.0 and feeling the need to grief to prove their e-peen. CONCORD - still munching donuts.

Why do some pilots insist on flying in such a way as to just about guarantee that they'll get ganked? Plug into what your corp/alliance is doing. This is EVE online, not Hello Kitty Online for crying outloud (sirMolle's fetish for pink not withstanding). Things that happen in 0.0 HAVE repercussions in high sec. In our case most of us are in wormhole space. This takes communications, but avoids stupid griefing. If you're going to mine in high sec, at least use mission roids. Make the gankers work for their kills, don't fly in such a way as to hand them stupid kills. Just because you're in a Hulk does not mean you have to fly it like you've got the brains of that big green humanoid....

Seriously. Grow brain and stop whining.

This post brought to you courtesy of stupid piloting.

And the parts for the Hyena start baking

Since I have both target painter skills, I figured I'd make myself a Hyena - especially since it's cheaper than buying one in Jita or buying one localy.

Here's what all the mats and BPCs look like before you start:

Hyena - some assembly required

Note: there are two mistakes in this picture. One due to picking the right quantity of the wrong material at one point, the other due to a mistake in my spreadsheet that called for something that the BPC did not call for. Curse you copy/paste (hint: it was copied off a Cheetah calculation and one of the lines was left in). For the crazies wanting to figure it out: all component BPC's are perfect, the vigil is ME:10, the ram is ME:20 and the Hyena is ME:-4

Side note: I make exact quantity BPCs of the components mainly for he heck of it. It's an unnecessary expense and takes MUCH more time to make the copies than the 2h it takes to make the components.

Side note #2: Since an Hyena is 2500 m³ and all the materials fit inside a Huge container (1500 m³). This is a way to ship 66% more Hyenas around. Inconvinient if you have no manufacturer and manufacturing slots at destination, but it IS a way.

And here are the component manufacturing jobs:

Parts: ready in about 2h

Later tonight, when I get back from work it'll just be a mater of popping the final assembly in the oven and later on getting my pipping hot Hyena the next day.

The rush to Delve mk II?

As I said yesterday, the bills came due and we'd have full confirmation of Goonswarm intentions soon. Apparently they've decided to abandon their current leadership. Although only the goons and their opponents (and all the spies, but then again AMC is a small alliance and since we don't interact with the major alliances in any way, why bother with spies in those alliances?) know how good or bad any retreat out of Delve went, daily checking of evemaps on dotlan revealed that most of the fighting in Delve proper had died down and the heat was in the NPC section of delve. Draw your on conclusions.

I suspect what we'll see over the next few days are a mix of 0.0 politics where the various forces that were ranged against the goon follow thru on their probably pre-aranged partition of goon space. I expect IT to end up with Delve. The question is, with the goons folding as quickly as they did, will IT be in a position to rapidly capitalize on the departure of the Goons and move into Delve proper, abandoning their foothold in Fountain proper? Will they abandon their foothold in Fountain? The new sovereignty system seems to strain alliances who try to hold too much space for their sizes. Whence Querrious? Period Basis?

[.-A-.] although rather large, already control a large swath of territory. And they've got the Provibloc being recalcitrant right next door to a lot of their territory. Their negotiations with IT and Systematic Chaos will probably have been fairly simple they probably don't want Delve, so apart from some systems for their jump bridge network, should they have long terms peace plans with IT they will probably settle for peace with IT. This is rendered more likely by the apparent unwillingness of CVA to settle their little dispute. This should provide plenty of opportunity for triple-A to let it's combat forces flex their muscle without going looking for fresh enemies.

The other part of this is going to be the blind opportunists who think that they might be able to take advantage of the chaos currently happening in the south. In the long run I don't think these are going to be a big problem for the larger alliances to clean up and or turn into puppet alliances, but we'll see how it all turns out in the long run.

As for the Goons?, meh, they'll be greifing someone somewhere in EVE. We'll have to see what they do now. The rank and file and pro-goon pilots are going "wait and see, we've got plans". The Goon directorate is being rather silent at the moment though. All the noise makes them sound like desperate posturing teenagers. We'll have to see where they end up.

More T2 and thoughts on the South

Nice! 5 Stiletto BPCs out of 10 tries (my skills and the materials I use - no decryptor - give odds of about 36.something%). I'll probably build one in a few days, you can never have too many spare Stilettos.

Now for my thoughts on the south, we're about to find out just how serious Goonswarm was in their retreat from Delve/Querious. Sometime in the next few days, the payment will be coming due on the weekly sovereignty bill. If they are serious about the retreat to Syndicate, we should see a lot of systems sov go down over the next few days as goons don't bother to pay the upkeep in order to save the isk for their new more nomadic lifestyle. We'll have to see.

Meanwhile the back-fill of my combat skills continues at pace. I can now fling T2 Standard missiles. This essentially opens up the Kestrel as a viable roaming frigate for me as well as making the Breacher more viable. Need to tidy up the Rocket and Drone skills (i.e. get Rocket Specialization to 4 instead of 3 and all drone specialization skills to 4). Then it's up to cruiser weapons and getting T2 medium missile and rocket specializations in place. Once those are in place it's the grind for full rack of T2 BS combat skills.

That's a going to hurt.