The first night of Crucible

So, I picked up the new Tornado BPO.  Just as I expected it was around 600mil.  650mil to be exact.  But that was hardly surprising based on the prices of existing BPOs  Baked my first one and flew it to market.  Put it up for over 200% mineral costs and it went in seconds.  Those who were more prepared are making a first day killing as these things are selling like hotcakes.  Holly cow.  Does anyone remember the short term impact of the Noctis on mineral prices?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  It was almost like there was a major war or something and the fleet replacement purchase orders had come through.

Yep that new font is going to take a bit of getting used to but it'll work.  Being able to tell the difference between certain letters like D and 0 is a nice feature to have (only took you like 7 years...).

They still messed up my plans to make fuel pellets but apparently this morning's patch to the patch will fix that.  Yay!

The Economic side is still reeling from the changes to the taxing structure.  I'm not surprised they did the change. The previous taxes were based just about strictly on the volume of the goods.  Now they are based on values pinned to market prices in November 2011.  Honestly they just cut into profit margins.  This is definitely by design.  Need for those new gantries to have value.  This shocked the less observant.  Big surprise there.  I think this is more of a case of the grognards being grognards than anything else.  It's the sort of bitching that CCP can safely ignore.  And it does introduce more isk sinks into the game.  Well played.

Production planets will need to plan their production out much more carefully.  You'll want to minimize the amount of import and export you're doing.  I suspect that P2 extraction planets will come in vogue again.  Interestingly if you look at the import export rates compared to the previous level's import export rates you'll see that once you get the product you want you're stuck using it's export tax.  P2's can be manufactured on single planets (there isn't one that can't be as I recall).  for P3's and above SOMETHING must change planets prior to manufacturing.  if you look at taxes on an item and compare those to taxes on the next lower level's item going into it, you'll notice that the lower down on the PI scale an item is the less taxes you will have payed overall if that's the item you ended up moving.  EXCEPT P0's.  Those are never worth getting out of the gravity well tax wise.

What this means.  I suspect there will be 2 types of extraction planets.  P1 types destined for the direct market of a P3/P4 manufacturing planet.  P2 planets are probably more inefficient total goods wise compared to P1 extraction planets but the end product will pay less taxes than if you'd moved the P1's from another planet to a production planet.  Expect end use P2's (those not destined to be made into P3's and P4's) to come from those planets.  For P3's and P4's you're probably better off shipping in all P1's to take advantage of the break in taxes afforded at the P1 level and then have a mix of processing nodes such that the end product you desire is attainable on planet.  I suspect this will concentrate the serious volume trade on the P1's and that PI goods that are not also end use goods will stay on planet as part of a manufacturing chain to keep import/export costs down.

You're going to say AHAH! what about Integrity Response Drones or Wetware Mainframes???  It still applies since you would have needed to move P3's and P3's can't be manufactured full chain on a single planet, so some thing (either P2 or P1) would have needed to pay taxes to make the P3.  Tough luck there.

The old gun icons are back.  Surprisingly it applied to all turrets including salvager and tractor beams.

One thing about the new nebula that is rather glaring.  You don't see any changes until you actually jump regions.  Since they are not preternaturally generated I can understand the need to do it this way.  But damn the region jumps are jarring.  Otherwise they are gloriously glorious.

As a mainly Minmatar pilot, I'm not getting the full effect of the V3'ing of the ships yet but I assume that will be on it's way for the next expansion (poor overworked art department - but they do excellent work).

It's too early to judge but so far this rather small expansion (they got this done in only 6-8 weeks for crying out loud, there were what? 20+ weeks between the summer and now?) seems like it will be judged as a mildly successful one.  We'll need to see if they can actually deliver an expansion worthy of the name for the next summer's expansion.

edit: gah! typos... sorry about that for any early readers

pps: if it looks like I spent a lot of time with a spreadsheet while flying around - the answer is yes I did.

Ah, THERE's the CCP I remember

"Fuel block blueprints will not be seeded on tranquility today"

"The new blueprints for fuel blocks, as featured in the blog Starbase happy fun time blog by CCP Greyscale, will not be seeded immediately after the release of Crucible. We are expecting that these blueprints will be seeded on the market in the next couple of days."

Thank you so kindly for messing up my travel plans.   It wouldn't be a CCP expansion without delayed features any more.

A relaxing break before the shiney

So, I did some PI (of course) and then navigated out to an ice belt over in matari space.  My alt had already been sent on afk ahead in the Orca with the Mak in it's cargo hold.  I know I know you're going to go "Let, dude, wtf are you doing mining ice?  You're making gobs of iskies doing Incursions, just buy the ice".  This is true but the incursions were down to 1 incursion last night and I wanted to pre-position myself for post-patch activities (BPO acquisition) and lay in a supply of matari ice for my alt corp's research tower when the time comes (I've pilled up quite a bit of BPOs that need research).  So I decided a relaxing evening of filling up the Orca with ice was called for.

I figure a 2-3 month run of research should get things slapped back into shape.  Need to research the bombs and a 2 BS BPOs and what not.  Getting my alt corp to do that (they're all T1 researchers) should make it easy. 

So by the end of the evening my Alt was back at my high sec base and the ice had been contracted back to my main.  My main was in place ready to rock once the patch lands.  And my other alts had done some PI work.  Fun fun.

Now I just have to survive the day at work...

I just realized

I'm a stealth blog again!  After getting dragged kicking and screaming (well no, not really, I just never asked to be put in a blog roll or a blog pack - that was never why I blogged) into the blog pack.  Twice.  I have finally regained my status as a stealth EVE blog.  I just noticed that EVEOGANDA doesn't have me listed in either the pack or the sites list.

Woot!

/me cloaks up and slinks away.

p.s., is Rixx the new blogfather?  Did he actually kill off CK?  Where are the bodies buried?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Crucible Patch Notes

For your TL;DR needs:  The Crucible patch notes are here.

Not bad

After 3 sessions of Incursion and having run 34 vanguard sites, I'm up 310mil isk over the weekend.  Unless I'm totally mistaken that should make 45k ish Concord LP when those incursions finish up (if they do - no clue how that works).

This meshes very well with my 149mil isk investment in my Scimitar.  So overall I'm ahead 160mil which is rather good considering am now over 1b again and on the 22nd of November I was at 209mil...  Ah yes, EVE is like getting on a bicycle.  Just takes a while to knock the rust off is all.

I must admit I like incursions - going in with a fleet reminds me of other MMOs where you do things as a group. People from other MMOs are going to find it rather familiar territory (with of course eve specific idiocyracies - like the danger of suicide ECM boats breaking up your rep chains).  Out of all the activities in EVE Incursions are probably the activity that bears the most resemblance to other MMOs.  The only problem is that with a requirement of having 3 logistics pilots for the first tier that actually pulls in isk, it's pretty much strictly for the veterans instead of something that could be used to ease other MMO players into EVE.  Ah well.  Another lost design opportunity in EVE.  We should be used to those by now.

As I look forward to a more relaxing evening than concentrating on keeping fellow pilots alive in incursions I'm feeling pretty good about returning to EVE.  At this point my plans post-patch are pretty set.

1) Get the fuel pellet BPOs
2) Get the Tornado BPO.
3) Convert existing fuel reserves into the new format
4) Get the 3rd account re-activated and that pile of un-researched BPOs researched (I need to consider some character moves so that the corp/research characters are all on the same account - gah)
5) Get a suitcase carrier
6) Get an isk reserve buffer
7) Head back to 0.0

On the skills front, I'm doing some emergency shoring up of drone skills (What? I can't fly T2 logi drones??? Damn it! - not to mention the T2 mining drones for that vanguard site -.-;).  I'll get back to the carrier skills once that shoring up is done.  I may slip in Command ships soon though as I killed off all the pre-requisites.

That should keep me going for a bit.

I will point out the irony of wanting to be in 0.0 but being unable to generate the income necessary to progress there in 0.0.  Good design CCP.

First serious Incursion

So I log on this morning and "head to the sound of the drums".  I.e. get in my Scimitar and open my Journal and pick a likely incursion in high sec.  So off I go to the Amarr one.

All in all a rather buys time but we hit 9 sites and got the rewards for 7 of them, so this prety much brought me about half way to pay for the Scimitar I just purchased for this endeavor.  I got lucky and there was a good FC on hand.  A Black Legion pilot - I remember those guys from the days I was in Rage back in Vale of the Silent.  They hung in nearby Geminate at the time.  At any rate, as soon as he had his 3 logi pilots, namely to other Scimitars and myself and the knowledge that we had 4 tracking links between us, he got 4 faction battleships and 2 T3 to go with his Sleipnir.

All in all it was a very good first run.  I can tell that part of the job is going to be being able to know what the spawn patterns are for each site as in this case with solid logi and dps the FC was able to burn the sites as fast as possible and we were able to keep everyone alive.  Less logi support and we would probably have been better clearing out the waves although that would have taken longer.  So taking notes for when I get my own pilots together for this one day.

So for the afternoon:  Make the rest of the isk spent on the Scimitar up and start making forward progress toward more isk for Tornado BPO and a Nidhogur.  Not to mention all the skill books for capital modules I need to acquire and command ship skill as well.

Looks like I'm back.