Humm

Last night was just some high sec logistics while my jump clone timer was running. Nothing interesting there at all. However, the relaxing piloting in high sec allowed my mind to wander. This is probably dangerous.

Crap. Started working on an evil idea for making life hard for passive moon holders and realized that even though I don't personally own a moon-goo moon, my alliance might not like me giving CCP ideas along those lines (Honest guys, it would have ended up being worse for the Russians than for us).

/me dusts off the blog

*cough* *cough*

Sorry about that, a combination of things made it so that getting into the game recently has been a bit of a chore. RL can be like that some times. Combine that with Having to move ships from station to station constantly recently (note to self: from now on in when leadership says: move to station x - move somewhere else since PL will be hitting that station next), and it all adds up to "not in game a lot recently".

Also at the rate things are going I'm probably going to be bounced up to empire soon since a good portion of my ships got trapped in one of the stations that is no longer available to us. We'll see how it all goes in the weeks and months to follow, but I definitely need to work on having a personal logistics train (read carrier and jump freighter).

Note to self for future endeavors: Should I ever become alliance leader of a null sec alliance: Making sure that the sub-cap pilots have an available logistics backbone at reasonable prices IS important to pilot participation in ops. The lack of it has resulted in my non-presence in a lot of ops recently even outside of the lack of logging in. Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. I've just had a serious lesson in that truism.

Charge of the sub-caps

One hundred kilometers, one hundred kilometers,
One hundred kilometers onward,
All at the grid of death
Warped the six hundred:
Forward the sub-cap fleets!
Bubbles on the titans he said!
Into the grid of death
Warped the six hundred.

Forward the NC fleets!
Was there a pilot dismay'd?
Not tho' the crewmen knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not the voice reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the grid of death
Warped the six hundred.

Abbaddons to the right of them
Bombers to the left of them
Titans to the front of them
Primary'd and Secondary'd
Storm'd at with Tremor and Scorch
Boldly they warped and pointed,
Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of hell
Warped the six hundred.

Flash'd all their lazors bare
Flash'd as they cycled fair
Bubbling the capitals there
Charging the DRF while
All of EVE wonder'd:
Plunged into the drone cloud
Right thro' the support they broke
Intrepid Crossing and Raiden.
Reel'd from the saber-stroke
Shatter'd and Sunder'd
Then they warped back
But not the six hundred

Bombers to the right of them
Abbaddons to the left of them
Titans to the rear of them
Primary'd and Secondary'd
Storm'd at with Tremor and Scorch
While Maelstrom and Guardian fell
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the sub-cap fleets,
Noble six hundred!

(Paraphrased from the poem Charge of the light brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in honor of my 600th' post)

600!

Well wow, I made it to 600 posts.... go me!

In other news last night was a great break from the constant CTAs.  We had a corp roam out to various DRF regions.  I was a little late to the party and we kept running into small blue roams.  Comment of the night:  "WTF, is half of Vale in Insmother?!?".  Since I was late I decided to take something a little more "evasive and survivable" and brought my cloaky Loki to the party.  Even if I didn't personally get on any kill mails the rest of the roam got a couple and we almost got a Maelstrom and a Basilisk.  Those survived by letting the Crow scout die and logging off.  Russians, they love their logoffski tactics.

We stuck around for the Basilisk logging back in but no luck.  The roam ended back in vale and there are plenty of things that need attention tomorrow night.  We'll see if it's the usual: form big blog, rep things while PL avoids us then watch PL incap thing right after we leave starting the whole cycle over again.  Meh.

Denied!

Although PL did mess around with our reinforcement lines, they didn't really make a major push into F-D49D last night.  I came, I got on a kill mail, I left disappointed.  The one problem with being on the defensive is that you cede the initiative to the enemy and need to wait for them to make a move so you can follow with a counter attack (if they haven't wipe the floor with you already of course).

In a way I was glad, since we did not have what I consider to be the better FCs on hand last night.  Not that I consider myself to be a great FC, but I've FC'ed enough myself when I was running AMC and I've flown under enough FCs that I will form an opinion on them.  Not that he's made my list of "never fly with again" FCs.  Only one made that list so far.  However, we're now flying against PL in our time zone.  Average may not just cut it.  Of course with the NC being as big as it is, if you see an FC you really can't stomach, just switch ships and join the other fleet.  There's always another fleet.

One of the big differences I'm noticing right away is that PL operates more like a mobile strike force backed up by solid supercap fleet for heavy hitting instead of the more usual alpha BS fleet of a true space holding alliance.  This means that nailing them is going to be rather hard since the NC's more militia like military is not setup for raider/counter-raider operations.  For those of us just arriving in Vale, we no longer have the option of building up ISK in order to have a stable of ship types in order to form more specialized fleets.  So we'll see how it goes.  Should be a tough war from now on in since we'll have PL roaming gangs every night.

Getting ready for the hammer blow

This evening as I get back from work, things should be heating up in F-D49D as we see the DRF/PL/Raiden. make a Major push into Vale of the Silent.  I can't predict what will happen but it has the potential to be a major battle.  Expect 1000+ in system by the time the station comes out of reinforced.  CCP better have that system and some of the surrounding ones on some servers running with steroid fed hamsters.  After last night's action (I had a ring side seat to PL busting the I-Hub 4 Aeons, 13 Nyxes, an Avatar and an Erebus, with an other Erebus at the PL POS for A-HAC fleet extraction) where the I-Hub went down rather quickly.

The equation is rather clear though.  Station comes out of 2nd reinforced - both sides know the timer.  I-Hub is gone.  So, if the reds flips the station tonight they can immediately go for the TCU and start claiming the system.  The timing of this works out such that they will be able to babysit most of their TCU on-lining during the dead time followed by Russian prime time.  The next 36 hours should determine how the opening stages of the war for Vale of the Silent goes.  Stay tuned.

Rought weekend

Between PL being hired by the DRF, a serious offensive into Vale and real life keeping me busy - it was a rough weekend.  About as rough as CCP's seems to have been.  We'll see if I can post something interesting tomorrow but can't think of anything today.

Shout out to brick

This is just a shout out to our brosefs down in Geminate in Brick Squad.  Congrats on getting sov in TDE.  You deserve it (it also made more sense than R.A.G.E having that system).  They've been there in every battle down in Geminate good or bad and have proven to be solid.  Go guys!

One of these days I'm going to have to update the fit of that tempest I keep bringing out to these fights.  It's still the original fit I designed up in high sec/wormhole space before joining R.A.G.E.  One of my Maelstroms did not last very long due to some bad FC'ing not too long ago.  But this one just keeps trucking along between Infrastructure Reinforcement Ops and fleet battles.  And I just haven't had the time to refit a few modules that should be changed out.  On the other hand I was in on 6 kills in TDE two nights ago and 7 kills in K25/O2O last night, so I really can't complain about it too much.  Especially since I got another kill mail.  At least this time the DRF didn't just stay away during the US timezone.  Great job by the rest of the time zones making sure the DRF didn't get TDE while brick was getting the (what 3rd?) TCU up.

Of course this being Thursday I expect a big DRF offensive while I'm at work with plenty of reinforcement and repair ops for us tonight and Friday.  They are rather predictable in that pattern.  Incidentally, PI is proving to be a godsend with all the CTA's going on.  At this point I'd say that 90% of my income is coming from there.  This is probably why I'm more sanguine about the loss of the high end anomalies.  When you're on constant war ops you don't have the time to run them anyways.  And the DRF have been active enough that the only people who have the time to complain are those not coming on ops.

Do you want some cheese with that whine?

The whine

First some background, from the patch notes to Incursion 1.4:

The type of anomalies spawned by sovereignty upgrades now will be affected by the security status of the system. See CCP Greyscale's blog (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=883) for more information. Please note that these changes will take effect within the first week after deployment and will not all be updated immediately after the patch is deployed.

For those of you who have had your head in the sand, this is CCP's answer to the isk fire hydrant that they let loose with Dominion.  The only surprise is the rapidity and steadfastness that CCP is approaching this change.  I approve.  I know this will be an unpopular position with the rest of my 0.0 confederates but unlike them, I have been expecting this for quite some time now.  Basically since the Dominion patch came out.  There was talk on CCPs part about increasing the sinks but obviously that fell thru.

 Possible Cheese

The problem CCP's game designers have is that they consistently design low npc cost mechanics.  Making more and more of the economy "player driven" does not necessarily imply you need to make it isolated from the NPCs.  One of the things CCP (grayscale, chronotis and other indy related devs) should look at when designing new systems or re-designing old ones is to look at where the npc interaction happens in their designs and make sure that there are appropriate sinks along the way.

For example, there are two ways to make a module:  You can make it in an NPC station (Installation costs and production time charged by the NPCs), or you can make it at an equipment manufacturing array.  Here the isk sink is represented by the PI component of the fuel used to keep the tower online.  The actual sink is the import/export taxes and the prorated planetary installation costs necessary to extract and process the materials resulting in the PI fuels.  Most of the costs in manufacturing a module at a POS are neither a sink nor a faucet.  Just a lateral transfer of isk from one player to another.  We can marry this with the fact that the PE development of a blueprint has very little impact on the total cost of a manufactured product.  So although there are sinks there they are rather small compared to the total amount of isk coming into the game through bounties.

I would seriously like to redesign the manufacturing mechanisms to be a little less abstract.  Setting up a production line should cost 5-10 times as much as a single example of the final product.  I'd change the way that manufacturing slots are setup and handled.  I would give a "size" to manufacturing lines (probalby in m3 heck why not use the m3 of the final product) and the running costs should be proportional to the length of time of the run times the "size" of the production line.  This would provide for a much more substantial "isk sink" that the current production.  Also the pvpers wouldn't bitch about it since they don't see a reduction in their "income" and manufacturers would simply adjust our spreadsheets and pass the cost on to the clients.

Doing changes along these lines would also allow us to consolidate various POS maufacturing modules to fewer modules but that the total amout of m3 of "manufacturing space" be the limit and not the number of slots.  Also reducing/elminating the setup costs if an previous "shop floor" for the same object was available and un-used.

Other thoughts

Another change I would like to see is the removal of "compression items" by changing the mineral mix of those items so that they can't be used for compression.  But I still see the need for "compression shippable items" for efficient shipping.  What I'd like to do here is have an intermediary step for hull manufacture.  I.e. instead of the current: mineral->ship hull, what I'd like to see is mineral->t1 component->ship hull where the t1 component is "compressed" compared to the mineral content.  I'd also like to re-ballance the current capital components and t2 components for this paradigm as well.  so you'd get materials->component->hull where the components are compressed vs the minerals.  This would mean it would be advantageous to ship components around vs the minerals or the final hulls.  This would spur a solid and viable market for components since they would be the "compression" item for long distance shipping.

Call me crazy but putting in some sinks instead of turning off the faucets would have probably gone over better.

Kudos to someone

... Rant ...

... Grumble ...

... Rant ...

To the DRF FC(s) who engineered that bomber trap Saturday morning at exactly 14:50, well played sir, well played.  My poor Maelstrom only got on 2 kill mails before getting erased from existence.


... Grumble ....

/me manfully restrains himself from saying things he shouldn't.