And some more fun for the weekend, a beautiful moron:
Friday, 30 March 2012
And some more fun for the weekend, a beautiful moron:
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Do you know what a singing ransom is? The griefers tackle a ship. Ask the pilot to come on voice chat. Tell him that if he sings a song his ship will be spared. They record the "song" and then put it on the internet for public amusement and to humiliate the victim. They kill him after that of course and if he rages or tells "why? I did what you asked", they record it too and publish that for even more amusement.
What shall you do when someone tackles your ship and demands ransom? Fire everything you have, wait a second and leave ship. If you are lucky, he doesn't notice your capsule until destroyed the ship and even if he does, his weapons are on their cooldown cycle. This way you can save your implants and your dignity.
People are surprised by the action of CCP to ban The Mittani from the game for 30 days and removing him from the CSM, despite getting 10K votes. Especially that he apologized. This post perfectly describe how many times CCP failed to stop the disaster coming. They saw the slides. They could have moderated the event. They could have delayed the stream. They did nothing and now they put the blame on a guy. How unjust is that?
The speech happened 4 days ago. If they were honestly outraged over the act, they would have banned him instantly. If they were not, but a CEO (a real one, not a silly spaceship clan leader) told them to be, they would have banned him on Monday, at worst at the end of the workday. One workday is more than enough to hold an emergency meeting with media analysts, lawyers and marketing gurus, other CSM members.
How naive can you be to believe that? How naive the "spymaster", the "King of Space" could be to believe in his "mandate"?
The Goons, lead by The Mittani are nothing but trouble for CCP. They are not conquerors, they are not pirates. Conquerors need mining slaves/workers. Pirates need loot. They make content for little guys. Goons are griefers. They farm tears. Tears are taking away content. CCP shown many time that they are not Goons, but Goblins. They want profit. The Goons are just bad for business. For every Goon player, there are a dozen who left EVE because of them or didn't join because of its bad name made by Goons. Someone, probably in SONY gave the order: "The Goon behavior must go". For public success, EVE must be a place of war, not war crime. Fighting and running from pirates is fun. Being pointlessly ganked is not. If I knock out a guy in the ring, I get a champion belt and cheers. If I beat up a kid on the street, I get to prison and even my family disown me. Most people understand the difference. Goons don't. They would even call the heavyweight champion carebear for not hitting kids and tell him HTFU.
But how to remove the Goons? They are not only 3-5% of the playerbase, but very vocal and known to be bad people. If they just change ToS or the game rules to make griefing impossible, the Goons would not only make a forum nightmare, but probably also DoS attacks, hacks. To make it worse, many players don't see the difference between griefing and pirating and would assume that CCP will stop them too. EVE could easily lose all of its nullsec population on the banning of Goons. And who the hell in his right mind would remove 10+K paying accounts? The goonism must go, not the players.
The trap was set. The slides were accepted, probably even encouraged. Alcohol was supplied in great deal. Friendly audience assembled. All they needed is The Mittani to do something stupid. A drunken egomaniac front of cheering crowd making something stupid isn't a long shot.
But even if they had a reason to ban him, the Goons would be in uproar. So first, they made him sing. They told him that he can keep his CSM position, the one he fought so hard for if he apologize. So he did, destroying his credibility before the Goons and also making him unable to share the blame. He could have told "you saw the slides and OK-ed it", but now, after accepting full responsibility, he can't. They left him tackled for 4 days, making him beg and sing for his shiny little pixel mandate he grinded so hard for.
I think they enjoyed it. I'm sure they hated the guy hard for constantly messing with their game, scaring customers away. These developers lose their real life job, the investors lose their real life money if EVE goes down, and some punk named Alex came along and tried to destroy it "just for lulz". Spare me from "The Mittani did so much for the community" comments, community don't pay the bills, subscribers do. If I close my eyes I can see them reading the apology. The audience of the alliance panel had the same face when presented with singing ransoms.
What will happen now? We seen it enough times. The Hulk pilot who sings for Goons won't dare to fly anything expensive again. He becomes paranoid. He abandons his "great" plans of an Orca. He don't log in for some time. Maybe he continues playing, but will never be the same again. His person, not his avatar is broken by the song of shame. Maybe the Goons find a new charismatic leader who will lead them to evil. It will be hard as the fate of The Mittani will force the leader to always think twice if he is over the line or not. Maybe they won't find any and fade into "just another alliance warring for nullsec sov". But for the short run, their Jita madness is postponed and that's great news for CCP.
When Tobold wrote that this event will be the end of PvP games, he couldn't be more wrong. It's the very dawn of them. The developers found a way to get rid of the few bad eggs who make these games unwelcoming to the wide audience. Competitive players are playing to win. I won't gank your ship, even when I'll have the resources to do it thousand times. Why? What's the point? Actually I'll give you ships to haul for me, to mine for me, to guard the gates of my empire. Most griefing lolkids are unable to grow big enough to be a problem. They now found the way to handle the few who could grow to be a pain: as they play for ego, they are not after pixel spaceships but real life people. All the game company needs is to let them do something real life atrocious and they are out by real life laws. Remember, if the person behind The Wiz avatar would really commit suicide, Alex (not the pixel Mittani) would go to jail for long time.
What can we learn from this? The enemy of the "evil" is not "good". The helpful, sharing "good" is by definition weak to fight "evil". The bane of "evil" is the selfish goblin who coldly calculates his move, who sees people as resources. He protect the useful ones and destroys the loose cannons.
Business report: 2.5B (0.4B gifts) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
What shall you do when someone tackles your ship and demands ransom? Fire everything you have, wait a second and leave ship. If you are lucky, he doesn't notice your capsule until destroyed the ship and even if he does, his weapons are on their cooldown cycle. This way you can save your implants and your dignity.
People are surprised by the action of CCP to ban The Mittani from the game for 30 days and removing him from the CSM, despite getting 10K votes. Especially that he apologized. This post perfectly describe how many times CCP failed to stop the disaster coming. They saw the slides. They could have moderated the event. They could have delayed the stream. They did nothing and now they put the blame on a guy. How unjust is that?
The speech happened 4 days ago. If they were honestly outraged over the act, they would have banned him instantly. If they were not, but a CEO (a real one, not a silly spaceship clan leader) told them to be, they would have banned him on Monday, at worst at the end of the workday. One workday is more than enough to hold an emergency meeting with media analysts, lawyers and marketing gurus, other CSM members.
How naive can you be to believe that? How naive the "spymaster", the "King of Space" could be to believe in his "mandate"?
The Goons, lead by The Mittani are nothing but trouble for CCP. They are not conquerors, they are not pirates. Conquerors need mining slaves/workers. Pirates need loot. They make content for little guys. Goons are griefers. They farm tears. Tears are taking away content. CCP shown many time that they are not Goons, but Goblins. They want profit. The Goons are just bad for business. For every Goon player, there are a dozen who left EVE because of them or didn't join because of its bad name made by Goons. Someone, probably in SONY gave the order: "The Goon behavior must go". For public success, EVE must be a place of war, not war crime. Fighting and running from pirates is fun. Being pointlessly ganked is not. If I knock out a guy in the ring, I get a champion belt and cheers. If I beat up a kid on the street, I get to prison and even my family disown me. Most people understand the difference. Goons don't. They would even call the heavyweight champion carebear for not hitting kids and tell him HTFU.
But how to remove the Goons? They are not only 3-5% of the playerbase, but very vocal and known to be bad people. If they just change ToS or the game rules to make griefing impossible, the Goons would not only make a forum nightmare, but probably also DoS attacks, hacks. To make it worse, many players don't see the difference between griefing and pirating and would assume that CCP will stop them too. EVE could easily lose all of its nullsec population on the banning of Goons. And who the hell in his right mind would remove 10+K paying accounts? The goonism must go, not the players.
The trap was set. The slides were accepted, probably even encouraged. Alcohol was supplied in great deal. Friendly audience assembled. All they needed is The Mittani to do something stupid. A drunken egomaniac front of cheering crowd making something stupid isn't a long shot.
But even if they had a reason to ban him, the Goons would be in uproar. So first, they made him sing. They told him that he can keep his CSM position, the one he fought so hard for if he apologize. So he did, destroying his credibility before the Goons and also making him unable to share the blame. He could have told "you saw the slides and OK-ed it", but now, after accepting full responsibility, he can't. They left him tackled for 4 days, making him beg and sing for his shiny little pixel mandate he grinded so hard for.
I think they enjoyed it. I'm sure they hated the guy hard for constantly messing with their game, scaring customers away. These developers lose their real life job, the investors lose their real life money if EVE goes down, and some punk named Alex came along and tried to destroy it "just for lulz". Spare me from "The Mittani did so much for the community" comments, community don't pay the bills, subscribers do. If I close my eyes I can see them reading the apology. The audience of the alliance panel had the same face when presented with singing ransoms.
What will happen now? We seen it enough times. The Hulk pilot who sings for Goons won't dare to fly anything expensive again. He becomes paranoid. He abandons his "great" plans of an Orca. He don't log in for some time. Maybe he continues playing, but will never be the same again. His person, not his avatar is broken by the song of shame. Maybe the Goons find a new charismatic leader who will lead them to evil. It will be hard as the fate of The Mittani will force the leader to always think twice if he is over the line or not. Maybe they won't find any and fade into "just another alliance warring for nullsec sov". But for the short run, their Jita madness is postponed and that's great news for CCP.
When Tobold wrote that this event will be the end of PvP games, he couldn't be more wrong. It's the very dawn of them. The developers found a way to get rid of the few bad eggs who make these games unwelcoming to the wide audience. Competitive players are playing to win. I won't gank your ship, even when I'll have the resources to do it thousand times. Why? What's the point? Actually I'll give you ships to haul for me, to mine for me, to guard the gates of my empire. Most griefing lolkids are unable to grow big enough to be a problem. They now found the way to handle the few who could grow to be a pain: as they play for ego, they are not after pixel spaceships but real life people. All the game company needs is to let them do something real life atrocious and they are out by real life laws. Remember, if the person behind The Wiz avatar would really commit suicide, Alex (not the pixel Mittani) would go to jail for long time.
What can we learn from this? The enemy of the "evil" is not "good". The helpful, sharing "good" is by definition weak to fight "evil". The bane of "evil" is the selfish goblin who coldly calculates his move, who sees people as resources. He protect the useful ones and destroys the loose cannons.
Business report: 2.5B (0.4B gifts) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Real World economies moved away from barter trading long ago and use immaterial "money" as currency. Bartering has several disadvantages, since it need you to create or get some product you are not going to consume, nor can you produce effectively, just to pay with it. In the society where they measure wealth in goats, the smith and the tailor must also be a part-time goat-herder.
Also in this society being a goat-herder will naturally make you rich, therefore lot of people herd goats, producing much more goats that can be used by the society in its original purpose. Before you'd laugh, think of the gold-rushes, where millions of people spent a lifetime and risked their lives to get gold which provided no service to anyone and just inflated the existing gold currency.
Countries now print money that is useless as product, but very cheap to produce and serves no other purpose than being a currency. Producing money is a serious crime which deters everyone besides organized criminals from trying to create wealth without providing GDP.
MMOs seemingly use such currencies, WoW has gold and EVE has ISK. We are not paying by copper bars or tritanium, so they are fine, right?
Wrong. While the WoW gold and EVE ISK serves as a currency between players, it's actually another material. If you bring 333 veldspar to a station, you get 1000 tritanium, regardless of any other factors. If you bring 440000 ISK to a station, you get an Astrometrics book. Why shouldn't we call ISK the material of the book?
Yes, we can roleplay that they sold the book. But then we can roleplay that veldspar is a currency and they sold tritanium for it. If it would be a currency, the NPCs would have to obey the laws of economy. They would have to produce the books from materials that they would have to get from the market (including from other NPCs who also obey the laws). The books couldn't be present in infinite amount. The supply and demand would have to affect the price.
Also, just like veldspar, the players can farm ISK running missions and doing other activities. "I kill a pirate, get ISK" is no different from "I mine an asteroid, get veldspar". Pirates are the raw materials of ISK as you can convert them into it infinitely, not limited by any market forces.
The problem with this barter-based economy is exactly the goldrush: people farm ISK/WoWgold, creating nothing but inflation with no services to others. They get richer only by the amount they inflated everyone else's wealth. If everyone would spend time running missions until he doubles his current ISK, no one would be a bit richer as the prices would double, but everyone would waste his time.
How can it be fixed: everything must be player-created from materials. Of course NPCs should participate or the first player on the server is really in trouble, but the NPCs must be non-player characters, ones that are server-botted, but obey the same laws as players characters. If the books are copied like blueprints, then the NPC station must use up its own copying slot to produce books and must be unable to produce more than it can. If the NPCs sell ships for LPs, they must produce it from materials they buy on the market or mine themselves via drone Hulks (that can be equally ganked and then the station can't produce ships).
Planning a living economy isn't easy. But if you can't do it, or can't be bothered to do it, at least don't make a messup that teach the players (who are often kids) a very bad idea: that they can "farm gold" infinitely just by spending time. People who believe it then go to occupy Wall Street believing that unemployment is just made by "evil capitalists" who are too greedy to give out more daily quests to grind. We don't want punks to occupy Wall Street, right?
So if you go with bartering, do it openly and make Zydrine or something like that the currency!
Quick business tip: if you see a system bright red on the "ships destroyed last hour", check that system in eve-kill.net. Maybe it's just RvB or another war, not pirates.
Business report: 2.4B (0.4B gifts)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
Also in this society being a goat-herder will naturally make you rich, therefore lot of people herd goats, producing much more goats that can be used by the society in its original purpose. Before you'd laugh, think of the gold-rushes, where millions of people spent a lifetime and risked their lives to get gold which provided no service to anyone and just inflated the existing gold currency.
Countries now print money that is useless as product, but very cheap to produce and serves no other purpose than being a currency. Producing money is a serious crime which deters everyone besides organized criminals from trying to create wealth without providing GDP.
MMOs seemingly use such currencies, WoW has gold and EVE has ISK. We are not paying by copper bars or tritanium, so they are fine, right?
Wrong. While the WoW gold and EVE ISK serves as a currency between players, it's actually another material. If you bring 333 veldspar to a station, you get 1000 tritanium, regardless of any other factors. If you bring 440000 ISK to a station, you get an Astrometrics book. Why shouldn't we call ISK the material of the book?
Yes, we can roleplay that they sold the book. But then we can roleplay that veldspar is a currency and they sold tritanium for it. If it would be a currency, the NPCs would have to obey the laws of economy. They would have to produce the books from materials that they would have to get from the market (including from other NPCs who also obey the laws). The books couldn't be present in infinite amount. The supply and demand would have to affect the price.
Also, just like veldspar, the players can farm ISK running missions and doing other activities. "I kill a pirate, get ISK" is no different from "I mine an asteroid, get veldspar". Pirates are the raw materials of ISK as you can convert them into it infinitely, not limited by any market forces.
The problem with this barter-based economy is exactly the goldrush: people farm ISK/WoWgold, creating nothing but inflation with no services to others. They get richer only by the amount they inflated everyone else's wealth. If everyone would spend time running missions until he doubles his current ISK, no one would be a bit richer as the prices would double, but everyone would waste his time.
How can it be fixed: everything must be player-created from materials. Of course NPCs should participate or the first player on the server is really in trouble, but the NPCs must be non-player characters, ones that are server-botted, but obey the same laws as players characters. If the books are copied like blueprints, then the NPC station must use up its own copying slot to produce books and must be unable to produce more than it can. If the NPCs sell ships for LPs, they must produce it from materials they buy on the market or mine themselves via drone Hulks (that can be equally ganked and then the station can't produce ships).
Planning a living economy isn't easy. But if you can't do it, or can't be bothered to do it, at least don't make a messup that teach the players (who are often kids) a very bad idea: that they can "farm gold" infinitely just by spending time. People who believe it then go to occupy Wall Street believing that unemployment is just made by "evil capitalists" who are too greedy to give out more daily quests to grind. We don't want punks to occupy Wall Street, right?
So if you go with bartering, do it openly and make Zydrine or something like that the currency!
Quick business tip: if you see a system bright red on the "ships destroyed last hour", check that system in eve-kill.net. Maybe it's just RvB or another war, not pirates.
Business report: 2.4B (0.4B gifts)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
I was very dismissive with outside Courier Contracts where you hire other people to haul for you. Moving your assets is a key thing in trading and I believed that you must do it on your own. I'm not so restrictive now and see reasons when it's better to just hire outside haulers.
The main hauler for hire force in EVE is the Red Frog Freight. I'm using their service now with mixed results. But before I discuss the results, a little know-how how to set up a contract. It starts with right-clicking an item and choosing "create contract", then you get the interface:
You can review your contract using the menu:
Now the results: shall you use outside hauler or not? One jump costs 350K for Red Frog and picking up is 500K. Assuming 10 jumps average distance, you pay 400K for every jump. A jump takes about a minute, so you are paying 24M/hour for the service, money that you could keep if you'd haul yourself. Of course "hauling yourself" is not without costs, you must learn skills (about 10 days after you got your industrial ship which you probably will do anyway), and a freighter costs 1.2B. You must haul 50 hours to regain just your investment.
But the reason why I will get my own freighter for sure and stop using RF in the moment I do is time. If you trade well, your capital has a very fast rotation. Every ISK I invest today will worth about 1.05 tomorrow. 5.4 billion% yearly interest rate? Yes please! Of course it's just in the phase while you are capital-limited, you can't upkeep that rate forever as you reach the point when your time or simply the market demand for your items limit you and no amount of capital will increase your income. However this limit is in the range of hundred billions, until then you can count with the 5% daily profit.
Yesterday these nice frog people sat on my 1-jump transport whole day. 0.5B items were waiting for them to get it to Jita for sale. That's 0.5B I couldn't spend on buying items to resale. 25M profit lost on this one damn jump. I could haul it myself in 2 minutes if I had my Charon. 750M ISK/hour.
So outside couriers are not the evil, using them doesn't make you a trading failure (like my "I pay 10M for a lvl 3 security mission" offers make me a combat failure). But having to rely on them is a serious profit loss. If you play trading seriously, having your own freighter is a must. You can still pay others to haul some high-volume low value thing, like 1B tritanium but you must be able to do it yourself when you need it instead of waiting for days until they do it for you.
However until you have your freighter, Couriers are your only choice to participate in the large-volume business.
Business report: Buy+sell+cash+materials being manufactured: 2.2B (0.4B gift, I gave 0.1B to my girlfriend. I'll gift away the gifts I got). After discussions and some player advices I added Amarr Cruiser V to my perception-willpower remap, to be able to fly an armor logistics. That increases the length of that remap to 160 days. 5 months and a week. The time scale of this game is insane compared to other games.
The main hauler for hire force in EVE is the Red Frog Freight. I'm using their service now with mixed results. But before I discuss the results, a little know-how how to set up a contract. It starts with right-clicking an item and choosing "create contract", then you get the interface:
You can review your contract using the menu:
Now the results: shall you use outside hauler or not? One jump costs 350K for Red Frog and picking up is 500K. Assuming 10 jumps average distance, you pay 400K for every jump. A jump takes about a minute, so you are paying 24M/hour for the service, money that you could keep if you'd haul yourself. Of course "hauling yourself" is not without costs, you must learn skills (about 10 days after you got your industrial ship which you probably will do anyway), and a freighter costs 1.2B. You must haul 50 hours to regain just your investment.
But the reason why I will get my own freighter for sure and stop using RF in the moment I do is time. If you trade well, your capital has a very fast rotation. Every ISK I invest today will worth about 1.05 tomorrow. 5.4 billion% yearly interest rate? Yes please! Of course it's just in the phase while you are capital-limited, you can't upkeep that rate forever as you reach the point when your time or simply the market demand for your items limit you and no amount of capital will increase your income. However this limit is in the range of hundred billions, until then you can count with the 5% daily profit.
Yesterday these nice frog people sat on my 1-jump transport whole day. 0.5B items were waiting for them to get it to Jita for sale. That's 0.5B I couldn't spend on buying items to resale. 25M profit lost on this one damn jump. I could haul it myself in 2 minutes if I had my Charon. 750M ISK/hour.
So outside couriers are not the evil, using them doesn't make you a trading failure (like my "I pay 10M for a lvl 3 security mission" offers make me a combat failure). But having to rely on them is a serious profit loss. If you play trading seriously, having your own freighter is a must. You can still pay others to haul some high-volume low value thing, like 1B tritanium but you must be able to do it yourself when you need it instead of waiting for days until they do it for you.
However until you have your freighter, Couriers are your only choice to participate in the large-volume business.
Business report: Buy+sell+cash+materials being manufactured: 2.2B (0.4B gift, I gave 0.1B to my girlfriend. I'll gift away the gifts I got). After discussions and some player advices I added Amarr Cruiser V to my perception-willpower remap, to be able to fly an armor logistics. That increases the length of that remap to 160 days. 5 months and a week. The time scale of this game is insane compared to other games.
Monday, 26 March 2012
I wrote that PLEX trade and Diablo III RMAH are not making the games play-to-cheat. I uphold this statement in a sense that in these games you aren't cheated if you don't participate. In a pay-to-cheat game like World of Tanks, your relative strength to the average of the playerbase decreases when someone buys gold ammo, as his increased power elevates the average. However in EVE and Diablo III the item was gained with legitimate playing, then the legitimate owner gives it to someone else, for real money. In the game world (that knows nothing about real money) some pilots/heroes are getting huge gifts from another ones. A giving gift to B don't affect C.
The item buyers claim that they just "skip the boring grind to jump to the fun part". It is nonsense. Their nonsense is hidden by the fact that most socials consider direct PvP very important, therefore assume that the combat (ship battles, D3 arenas) is the "gameplay" while the previous parts are the "boring grind". They are completely wrong. The direct battle is the display of power, but not creator of it. An informed person could tell precisely who will win a battle before it takes place, just by looking at the ships/gear and evaluating the knowledge of the combatants displayed in battles. The battle itself wouldn't be necessary if people wouldn't be uninformed or delusional. The weaker one would just give up the resource and run away.
What decides the battle then? Preparation. This is the creation of power, both in accumulating items and learning the knowledge of the game. This part decides who is the winner and who is the loser, the later battle just proves that fact to the dumb ones. Of course there could be PvP-based ways of getting wealth like profitable pirating, armed escort service and system ownership wars. I'm not against PvP. Direct PvP is necessary exactly because people are uninformed and delusional, xXxamarrpiratexXx won't believe that you can blow up his frigate with a Navy Raven until you actually do.
The one who buys ISK or D3 items is skipping the gameplay where the outcome is decided and where he could lose to superior players. Such player jumps directly to the part where he shows to peers that he was great. No doubt that "PvP is fun", as it's mostly a parade, ganking a much weaker opponent, therefore no different from standing around in Stormwind on a the mount dropped by the HM endboss. These people can make their position even more easier by defining their goal as "blowing up spaceships", as even a facerolling monkey can do that (of course with terrible win:loss ratio, but his goal declaration did not mention winrate). Buying bragging rights is obviously cheating, Arthasdklol shouldn't own that dragon nor the powerful ship/sword, therefore he shouldn't be able to use them winning PvP and without real money transfer he wouldn't.
The reason why they believe that the real gameplay of EVE and D3 is boring is exactly the reason why they buy boost: because they suck. They can't compete in any high profit ISK making field (including pirating or escort services). Since they can't make money, they turn to dummy-friendly carebear options and find out that they are boring. These features are no different from gaining WoW gear by farming "heroics" for valor points: it works, but with low gear/hour and boring experience. If you want higher reward/hour and more fun, consider winning in the real gameplay, what is raiding in WoW PvE, killing strong monsters in D3 and trading/politics/profitable PvP in EVE.
People say "good fight, good fun" even when lost and they are not lying. The purpose was never to win, it was to "have fun". What kind of fun comes from losing? Actually getting your spaceship blown up is a better way to show off your wealth than blowing up spaceships. You display that you can afford an expensive ship because you are that rich. The fun comes from the belief that your peers think that you are so good in the game that you can afford to throw away expensive ships "for the lulz". Except you are not. You did not even play. You just converted a PLEX.
Quick business update: 2.05B (0.49B gift).
The item buyers claim that they just "skip the boring grind to jump to the fun part". It is nonsense. Their nonsense is hidden by the fact that most socials consider direct PvP very important, therefore assume that the combat (ship battles, D3 arenas) is the "gameplay" while the previous parts are the "boring grind". They are completely wrong. The direct battle is the display of power, but not creator of it. An informed person could tell precisely who will win a battle before it takes place, just by looking at the ships/gear and evaluating the knowledge of the combatants displayed in battles. The battle itself wouldn't be necessary if people wouldn't be uninformed or delusional. The weaker one would just give up the resource and run away.
What decides the battle then? Preparation. This is the creation of power, both in accumulating items and learning the knowledge of the game. This part decides who is the winner and who is the loser, the later battle just proves that fact to the dumb ones. Of course there could be PvP-based ways of getting wealth like profitable pirating, armed escort service and system ownership wars. I'm not against PvP. Direct PvP is necessary exactly because people are uninformed and delusional, xXxamarrpiratexXx won't believe that you can blow up his frigate with a Navy Raven until you actually do.
The one who buys ISK or D3 items is skipping the gameplay where the outcome is decided and where he could lose to superior players. Such player jumps directly to the part where he shows to peers that he was great. No doubt that "PvP is fun", as it's mostly a parade, ganking a much weaker opponent, therefore no different from standing around in Stormwind on a the mount dropped by the HM endboss. These people can make their position even more easier by defining their goal as "blowing up spaceships", as even a facerolling monkey can do that (of course with terrible win:loss ratio, but his goal declaration did not mention winrate). Buying bragging rights is obviously cheating, Arthasdklol shouldn't own that dragon nor the powerful ship/sword, therefore he shouldn't be able to use them winning PvP and without real money transfer he wouldn't.
The reason why they believe that the real gameplay of EVE and D3 is boring is exactly the reason why they buy boost: because they suck. They can't compete in any high profit ISK making field (including pirating or escort services). Since they can't make money, they turn to dummy-friendly carebear options and find out that they are boring. These features are no different from gaining WoW gear by farming "heroics" for valor points: it works, but with low gear/hour and boring experience. If you want higher reward/hour and more fun, consider winning in the real gameplay, what is raiding in WoW PvE, killing strong monsters in D3 and trading/politics/profitable PvP in EVE.
People say "good fight, good fun" even when lost and they are not lying. The purpose was never to win, it was to "have fun". What kind of fun comes from losing? Actually getting your spaceship blown up is a better way to show off your wealth than blowing up spaceships. You display that you can afford an expensive ship because you are that rich. The fun comes from the belief that your peers think that you are so good in the game that you can afford to throw away expensive ships "for the lulz". Except you are not. You did not even play. You just converted a PLEX.
Quick business update: 2.05B (0.49B gift).
Sunday, 25 March 2012
I made some long-overdue maintenance on my permanent pages. The most important change is in my core work, the "play to win vs play for fun" which was changed to be much more understandable. The concept "ego" made it much simpler and usable.
Since I still don't even have a Bustard, I focused on the aspect of the game that need no ship besides book trading: increasing standing with Caldari Navy and the Caldari State. I updated my mission post to be much more useful, it describes now a method to get about 1 corporation and 0.5 faction standing/hour.
We figured out why the idea of CPP of getting security status for killing player pirates (-5 and below) is terrible, despite sounding great: players will start alts, suicide gank newbies in their rookie ships, then these "pirates" will be farmed by mains for sec status.
Don't forget that you can join goblinworks channel inside EVE!
Of course I won't leave you without moron today neither. Let him remind you that the breakeven point of a suicide gank for a Freighter is 1B. I guess they won't attack below 1.5B since the attack has lot of organization overhead (14 tornado + 20 hauler). But 33B will surely be taken.
Since I still don't even have a Bustard, I focused on the aspect of the game that need no ship besides book trading: increasing standing with Caldari Navy and the Caldari State. I updated my mission post to be much more useful, it describes now a method to get about 1 corporation and 0.5 faction standing/hour.
We figured out why the idea of CPP of getting security status for killing player pirates (-5 and below) is terrible, despite sounding great: players will start alts, suicide gank newbies in their rookie ships, then these "pirates" will be farmed by mains for sec status.
Don't forget that you can join goblinworks channel inside EVE!
Of course I won't leave you without moron today neither. Let him remind you that the breakeven point of a suicide gank for a Freighter is 1B. I guess they won't attack below 1.5B since the attack has lot of organization overhead (14 tornado + 20 hauler). But 33B will surely be taken.
Friday, 23 March 2012
After loooong waiting for my mem/int skills to complete and cutting off several which I can live without for some months, unlike without ships, I finally made my remap to full perception/willpower, and also put on +4 implants to these slots. 
Finally, the moron of the day:
Finally, the moron of the day:
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Jester was thinking about the lack of new blood in EVE. He isn't alone in this. The people guess that it's the "too hard" or "there is one style left (the min-maxed)" are the reasons.
This is a topic where I can write from experience, as a 6 weeks old newbie. EVE is not hard to start at all. Maybe holding 0.0 is hard, maybe getting to the top of killboards is hard, maybe financing a war is hard, but starting the game, getting your starter ventures and first ships is easy as WoW. The same applies to the min-maxing. Maybe the titan-killer fleets need to be min-maxed, but you can do starter stuff in practically anything that flies. I literally hauled 1B/month profit with a Badger II and a T1 frigate, both fitted with modules below 1M.
Funnily, the one who got closest to the truth is The Mittani, who wrote that there are "community born" people who knew other players before started playing, probably exactly to play with them and there are "EVE-born" ones who started playing EVE as a game and met people there. The "EVE-born" players has it hard way all the time: they start poor and alone in the highsec, knowing nothing about the game and can only trust in their hard-earned resume, while the community-born ones join their buddies at day 1, can learn from veterans and showered with ISK.
While he mentioned the problem, did not notice which part is important in it. The problem is not that it's hard to progress without knowing anyone, it's not. The problem for an EVE-born newbie is loneliness. If I, the preacher of anti-sociality call something lonely, you can be sure it is. During my 6 weeks of EVE life I encountered people three times. Of course it's not true in the sense that the buyers and sellers of the goods I trade and the ones who ganked me at a low-sec gate were people too. However if they were bots or NPCs, I couldn't tell the difference. To make it worse, both of my human interactions were "community born", as they happened with members of my chat channel "goblinworks" which couldn't exist without this blog, which is just as an outside-EVE community as somethingawful.com, the birthplace of the goons. All interactions were short: I paid them 10-10M for completing me a L3 security storyline mission that I got after distribution ones, which they performed with their battleships in 3 minutes. We also chat on this channel about economics and EVE mechanics but this is also unpersonal, I could read the same information on a Wiki.
Social people derive fun from social experiences. They are weird people, I mean how could any idiotic chit-chat be more fun than this:
However the socials won't change and if the game want to have them, the game must change.
What makes the starting experience lonely? At first that you don't need any people to progress. Missions, ratting, trading, hauling, exploring are the activities available to new players. You can't do either of them in a group. The fact that endgame operations will need group won't help newbies. They are lonely now.
Secondly, unlike in WoW, there is no visible indicator of progress out of "the grind". WoW leveling game is also lonely, even if you can spice it up with random dungeons and battlegrounds. But you see the "dings" showing how far from you from the other people. They say that "the fun begins at max level". I disagree, exactly because I'm not social. For someone who derives fun from other people, the statement is obviously true. In EVE there is no such indicator. Also, you can't grind harder to get the necessary skills to be acceptable for a 0.0 corporation, as skills come in real time. So as a newbie you are not only alone, but you can't even see the way out of it, and you can be sure you won't get out in the next 3-6 months.
Thirdly, the scamming and non-consensual PvP make new players look suspicious. They can be scammer alts. My only human interactions, when people helped me for a price with the L3 securities would be impossible without my "community born" nature. If I'd spam some open channel for such help, everyone would assume that I'm a ganking bait.
How to fix these, without destroying what makes EVE EVE? Above all, the solo nature of early play must be changed. The missions must be either completely removed, or reworked into some group activity. They should be acceptable and completable for a fleet of 3. 3 is more than 2, which is a bad number (your fault, no yours!), but not too big to let one just AFK leech. Mining could also be more preferred, due to it's group nature. An UI interface for jetcan-selling would be wonderful to help that: the one who places the container sets a price. Anyone opening the crate is given a dialog box telling "this can contains Y pieces of Z and costs X ISK (W ISK for one piece)" and he can pick "pay" and "steal". This would remove the overhead of mining operations and allow pickup-group mining. Since there isn't much to do during mining, people could socialize.
Red vs Blue and the Faction Warfare are also great places to let a newbie start. They should get more developer support (voted for Hans, that's all I can do here, I won't fire a gun in my EVE life besides starter and storyline missions).
Finally my suggestion is to allow the creation of "peaceful corporations". They would be exactly like the starter NPC corporations: can't get into war, can't own 0.0, pay fixed 11% tax to CONCORD. But it would allow players to start their way into corporation life and be with like-minded people. The current NPC corporation chat is the mixture idiotic spam and scamming spam, everyone starts his EVE life by turning that abomination off. New players are not welcomed in real corporations as they can't contribute and can be spies, while the corporations that would take them are either scams or a "we take every1 and hepl new friends lol" idiocies that are no different from the NPC corps besides can be wardecced. A "peaceful corporation" could be governed the same way as real corporations, providing structure and a friendly atmosphere.
While I'm not starting a corporation yet, exactly because of wardecs (and to let you scam without second account), I recalculated my plans about the Perception-willpower remap once again, prioritizing the Orca over the Charon so I'll be able to run proper mining fleets in 6 weeks. And will do so, even if its ISK/hour is below my normal. I'll get my Basilisk in 4 months, then I'll join and even lead incursions. This timescale is mind-boggling from someone coming from WoW where knowing what you'll do the next day is considered decent planning.
The point: I think I found another purpose in EVE, because the old one (surviving in this "harsh and evil world") turned out to be trivial, despite many people considering it hard. The new purpose: to prove that an asocial, profit-oriented organization is more welcoming to people than the friendly social ones in a realistic environment. In most games the friendly social groups are supported by design choices that make profitable betrayal impossible (you can't loot the corpse of a groupmate you lured into a gank in WoW) and/or punished by GMs. The games also remove the costs of leeching (if one guy does a dungeon on /follow, you don't get less valor point than 4-manning it, his points are generated independently). In EVE and the real world you can be hurt by letting "bad" people into your circles, so people rather go solo (and whine about it). I'm going to prove that being an unfriendly, unhelpful, money-counting goblin is the best way to get into mutually positive relationship with people when you could be hurt.
Remember that you can already participate on the goblinworks channel, discussing info and finding groups.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.75B (0.49B gift)
And to make sure you are never without morons, take this one! If you see such, please send me comments. I won't publish them, but include it to next days morons of the day!
PS: my girlfriend found her interest in the game, exploration. She scanned down a wormhole, and against my advices, entered. Of course it was populated. But the guarding player just escorted her out and even explained what a WH corp doing there. Another proof that in EVE most people are not griefers. I mean he wouldn't even lose sec status in WH space but instead of killing her, spent some time educating the newbie.
This is a topic where I can write from experience, as a 6 weeks old newbie. EVE is not hard to start at all. Maybe holding 0.0 is hard, maybe getting to the top of killboards is hard, maybe financing a war is hard, but starting the game, getting your starter ventures and first ships is easy as WoW. The same applies to the min-maxing. Maybe the titan-killer fleets need to be min-maxed, but you can do starter stuff in practically anything that flies. I literally hauled 1B/month profit with a Badger II and a T1 frigate, both fitted with modules below 1M.
Funnily, the one who got closest to the truth is The Mittani, who wrote that there are "community born" people who knew other players before started playing, probably exactly to play with them and there are "EVE-born" ones who started playing EVE as a game and met people there. The "EVE-born" players has it hard way all the time: they start poor and alone in the highsec, knowing nothing about the game and can only trust in their hard-earned resume, while the community-born ones join their buddies at day 1, can learn from veterans and showered with ISK.
While he mentioned the problem, did not notice which part is important in it. The problem is not that it's hard to progress without knowing anyone, it's not. The problem for an EVE-born newbie is loneliness. If I, the preacher of anti-sociality call something lonely, you can be sure it is. During my 6 weeks of EVE life I encountered people three times. Of course it's not true in the sense that the buyers and sellers of the goods I trade and the ones who ganked me at a low-sec gate were people too. However if they were bots or NPCs, I couldn't tell the difference. To make it worse, both of my human interactions were "community born", as they happened with members of my chat channel "goblinworks" which couldn't exist without this blog, which is just as an outside-EVE community as somethingawful.com, the birthplace of the goons. All interactions were short: I paid them 10-10M for completing me a L3 security storyline mission that I got after distribution ones, which they performed with their battleships in 3 minutes. We also chat on this channel about economics and EVE mechanics but this is also unpersonal, I could read the same information on a Wiki.
Social people derive fun from social experiences. They are weird people, I mean how could any idiotic chit-chat be more fun than this:
However the socials won't change and if the game want to have them, the game must change.
What makes the starting experience lonely? At first that you don't need any people to progress. Missions, ratting, trading, hauling, exploring are the activities available to new players. You can't do either of them in a group. The fact that endgame operations will need group won't help newbies. They are lonely now.
Secondly, unlike in WoW, there is no visible indicator of progress out of "the grind". WoW leveling game is also lonely, even if you can spice it up with random dungeons and battlegrounds. But you see the "dings" showing how far from you from the other people. They say that "the fun begins at max level". I disagree, exactly because I'm not social. For someone who derives fun from other people, the statement is obviously true. In EVE there is no such indicator. Also, you can't grind harder to get the necessary skills to be acceptable for a 0.0 corporation, as skills come in real time. So as a newbie you are not only alone, but you can't even see the way out of it, and you can be sure you won't get out in the next 3-6 months.
Thirdly, the scamming and non-consensual PvP make new players look suspicious. They can be scammer alts. My only human interactions, when people helped me for a price with the L3 securities would be impossible without my "community born" nature. If I'd spam some open channel for such help, everyone would assume that I'm a ganking bait.
How to fix these, without destroying what makes EVE EVE? Above all, the solo nature of early play must be changed. The missions must be either completely removed, or reworked into some group activity. They should be acceptable and completable for a fleet of 3. 3 is more than 2, which is a bad number (your fault, no yours!), but not too big to let one just AFK leech. Mining could also be more preferred, due to it's group nature. An UI interface for jetcan-selling would be wonderful to help that: the one who places the container sets a price. Anyone opening the crate is given a dialog box telling "this can contains Y pieces of Z and costs X ISK (W ISK for one piece)" and he can pick "pay" and "steal". This would remove the overhead of mining operations and allow pickup-group mining. Since there isn't much to do during mining, people could socialize.
Red vs Blue and the Faction Warfare are also great places to let a newbie start. They should get more developer support (voted for Hans, that's all I can do here, I won't fire a gun in my EVE life besides starter and storyline missions).
Finally my suggestion is to allow the creation of "peaceful corporations". They would be exactly like the starter NPC corporations: can't get into war, can't own 0.0, pay fixed 11% tax to CONCORD. But it would allow players to start their way into corporation life and be with like-minded people. The current NPC corporation chat is the mixture idiotic spam and scamming spam, everyone starts his EVE life by turning that abomination off. New players are not welcomed in real corporations as they can't contribute and can be spies, while the corporations that would take them are either scams or a "we take every1 and hepl new friends lol" idiocies that are no different from the NPC corps besides can be wardecced. A "peaceful corporation" could be governed the same way as real corporations, providing structure and a friendly atmosphere.
While I'm not starting a corporation yet, exactly because of wardecs (and to let you scam without second account), I recalculated my plans about the Perception-willpower remap once again, prioritizing the Orca over the Charon so I'll be able to run proper mining fleets in 6 weeks. And will do so, even if its ISK/hour is below my normal. I'll get my Basilisk in 4 months, then I'll join and even lead incursions. This timescale is mind-boggling from someone coming from WoW where knowing what you'll do the next day is considered decent planning.
The point: I think I found another purpose in EVE, because the old one (surviving in this "harsh and evil world") turned out to be trivial, despite many people considering it hard. The new purpose: to prove that an asocial, profit-oriented organization is more welcoming to people than the friendly social ones in a realistic environment. In most games the friendly social groups are supported by design choices that make profitable betrayal impossible (you can't loot the corpse of a groupmate you lured into a gank in WoW) and/or punished by GMs. The games also remove the costs of leeching (if one guy does a dungeon on /follow, you don't get less valor point than 4-manning it, his points are generated independently). In EVE and the real world you can be hurt by letting "bad" people into your circles, so people rather go solo (and whine about it). I'm going to prove that being an unfriendly, unhelpful, money-counting goblin is the best way to get into mutually positive relationship with people when you could be hurt.
Remember that you can already participate on the goblinworks channel, discussing info and finding groups.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.75B (0.49B gift)
And to make sure you are never without morons, take this one! If you see such, please send me comments. I won't publish them, but include it to next days morons of the day!
PS: my girlfriend found her interest in the game, exploration. She scanned down a wormhole, and against my advices, entered. Of course it was populated. But the guarding player just escorted her out and even explained what a WH corp doing there. Another proof that in EVE most people are not griefers. I mean he wouldn't even lose sec status in WH space but instead of killing her, spent some time educating the newbie.
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Do you know what material research is?
How high is your research skill?
Do you have advanced mass production 5?
Production efficiency 5?
Do you know where to get datacores to T2 BP research?
No? Then keep away from production n00b!
Or not. Even with low skills and even less knowledge you can efficiently and profitably produce items. Of course not titan rigs, but items that serious players consider worthless crap. My item is trauma rocket. Yes, that newbie rocket:
Low isn't it? But the keyword is "printing". I have no opportunity cost on the manufacture as I can't produce anything worthy. My alternative is leaving my crafting slots empty. It's passive income, why leave it there? I have little to none competition due to no serious player would bother crafting this item.
So let's start the basics of manufacture: You need materials, a blueprint and a station with slots. The NPC stations have lot of slots. Some of them are empty, the rest are used. Of course you won't find empty on Jita, but a few jumps travel won't kill you. The simple items created from blueprints are sold by NPCs for low cost. They are original blueprints, meaning they are usable forever. Copies on the other hand has licensed production numbers. The crafting interface will tell you the material requirements, you get them and off you go. Don't let these slots go waste!
Some tips:
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.68B (0.49B gift)
How high is your research skill?
Do you have advanced mass production 5?
Production efficiency 5?
Do you know where to get datacores to T2 BP research?
No? Then keep away from production n00b!
Or not. Even with low skills and even less knowledge you can efficiently and profitably produce items. Of course not titan rigs, but items that serious players consider worthless crap. My item is trauma rocket. Yes, that newbie rocket:
Low isn't it? But the keyword is "printing". I have no opportunity cost on the manufacture as I can't produce anything worthy. My alternative is leaving my crafting slots empty. It's passive income, why leave it there? I have little to none competition due to no serious player would bother crafting this item.
So let's start the basics of manufacture: You need materials, a blueprint and a station with slots. The NPC stations have lot of slots. Some of them are empty, the rest are used. Of course you won't find empty on Jita, but a few jumps travel won't kill you. The simple items created from blueprints are sold by NPCs for low cost. They are original blueprints, meaning they are usable forever. Copies on the other hand has licensed production numbers. The crafting interface will tell you the material requirements, you get them and off you go. Don't let these slots go waste!
Some tips:
- The skill "production efficiency" decreases material cost
- The skill "industry" decreases crafting time
- The skill "mass production" gives more manufacture slots
- You can also research production time decrease, the "research" skill helps that.
- There are "beancounter" implants that decrease research time. They go to different slots as the +attribute implants.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.68B (0.49B gift)
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
Playing EVE you often encounter nice people who offer you help or gifts or some kind of trade that is highly beneficial for you. These people are known as scammers. Check out a few: 
You obviously don't want to be scammed, and want to know how to separate scammers from honest people. I can tell the solution: you can't. If you think you have an idea how to find trustworthy people, you are already in the group of the victims. Like the guys in the 850B scam who trusted a guy who played nice for years.
Is the situation is hopeless? Absolutely not. You don't have to trust anyone, you have to trust in the trade itself. You can easily spot a scam: it's good for you and someone else offers it. I did not have to fully read the texts above. The "I have 30B ISK to give out", the "would like to offer you a tip", the "liquidating some stock" parts were completely enough for me to stop reading. If he wants to help me, he is a scammer.
How can you recognize a honest trade? At first it's publicly available and using simple UI. I mean why bother with something complicated if simple can do it: if he wants to liquidate his mexallon, he puts up a sell order on he market. The morons who fueled the 2 Trillion Scam were looking for trade contracts instead of sell orders on the marketplace. (Some modules can't be placed on the market, but no one forced anyone to pick those). If something is more complicated than it could be, it's probably a scam (or someone is just being dumb).
Secondly it involves trust. Any move that involves trust can be replaced by a bunch of moves that don't. For example my mining fleet idea involves several small-amount transactions after. Paying all at the end involves trusting the one who picks up the ore. I don't say that the guy who prefers the "trusting" method is a scammer. He can be just lazy. He can just be a social who finds it atrocious that someone doesn't trust his word. It's safer to just walk away, because even if he is not a scammer, his careless behavior opens the door for other scammers. Or simply he can just fail to deliver. For example the "lets mine duds together and i sell the ore and we divid eqully" guy can be honest and still end you up with a loss in the form of ores in a distant station as the guy couldn't calculate that transporting all with his T1 hauler will take 1000 jumps. If he'd pay you after every ore, it would be his problem to handle the transportation, not yours.
Thirdly a scam offers high returns. Why does anyone want to offer you high returns? Why don't he keep it for himself? The common answer is that "I don't have the capital". Well dude, then you are over your head and shouldn't play outside of your league! Especially with my money! There is one and only one acceptable proof that you are able to successfully manage a 100B operation: if you have 100B. But if you have 100B, you don't need my 1.5. So if he asks for your investment, he is either a scammer, or a honest moron. Please scroll up to the pictures again and look at the second, the one with the Mjolnir missiles. It's a very obvious margin trading scam. However I can't be sure that the guy is a scammer. He can easily be a honest idiot who really thinks it's a good deal. If I'd listen to him and lose about 300M, would I be any less in loss if he had nothing to do with it?!
Business report: Buy+Sell+Cash = 1.54B (0.49B gift)
The moron of the day is this guy. People kill even empty Iteron Mark IV Quafe Ultra Edition ships just for fun. But this was no empty ship. And look at his fitting, my Badger II has more EHP! Seriously, how could he get all that money with so little brain?
You obviously don't want to be scammed, and want to know how to separate scammers from honest people. I can tell the solution: you can't. If you think you have an idea how to find trustworthy people, you are already in the group of the victims. Like the guys in the 850B scam who trusted a guy who played nice for years.
Is the situation is hopeless? Absolutely not. You don't have to trust anyone, you have to trust in the trade itself. You can easily spot a scam: it's good for you and someone else offers it. I did not have to fully read the texts above. The "I have 30B ISK to give out", the "would like to offer you a tip", the "liquidating some stock" parts were completely enough for me to stop reading. If he wants to help me, he is a scammer.
How can you recognize a honest trade? At first it's publicly available and using simple UI. I mean why bother with something complicated if simple can do it: if he wants to liquidate his mexallon, he puts up a sell order on he market. The morons who fueled the 2 Trillion Scam were looking for trade contracts instead of sell orders on the marketplace. (Some modules can't be placed on the market, but no one forced anyone to pick those). If something is more complicated than it could be, it's probably a scam (or someone is just being dumb).
Secondly it involves trust. Any move that involves trust can be replaced by a bunch of moves that don't. For example my mining fleet idea involves several small-amount transactions after. Paying all at the end involves trusting the one who picks up the ore. I don't say that the guy who prefers the "trusting" method is a scammer. He can be just lazy. He can just be a social who finds it atrocious that someone doesn't trust his word. It's safer to just walk away, because even if he is not a scammer, his careless behavior opens the door for other scammers. Or simply he can just fail to deliver. For example the "lets mine duds together and i sell the ore and we divid eqully" guy can be honest and still end you up with a loss in the form of ores in a distant station as the guy couldn't calculate that transporting all with his T1 hauler will take 1000 jumps. If he'd pay you after every ore, it would be his problem to handle the transportation, not yours.
Thirdly a scam offers high returns. Why does anyone want to offer you high returns? Why don't he keep it for himself? The common answer is that "I don't have the capital". Well dude, then you are over your head and shouldn't play outside of your league! Especially with my money! There is one and only one acceptable proof that you are able to successfully manage a 100B operation: if you have 100B. But if you have 100B, you don't need my 1.5. So if he asks for your investment, he is either a scammer, or a honest moron. Please scroll up to the pictures again and look at the second, the one with the Mjolnir missiles. It's a very obvious margin trading scam. However I can't be sure that the guy is a scammer. He can easily be a honest idiot who really thinks it's a good deal. If I'd listen to him and lose about 300M, would I be any less in loss if he had nothing to do with it?!
Business report: Buy+Sell+Cash = 1.54B (0.49B gift)
The moron of the day is this guy. People kill even empty Iteron Mark IV Quafe Ultra Edition ships just for fun. But this was no empty ship. And look at his fitting, my Badger II has more EHP! Seriously, how could he get all that money with so little brain?
Monday, 19 March 2012
I won't continue whining over the fact that large portion of EVE is "space WoW": players get tailored, instanced, a la carte missions which reward them for spending mindless time. I concentrate on the part which is not space WoW: everything can be purchased and things are destroyed. So a smart trader can get rich on the work of the "space WoW players", or at least can battle inflation.
Inflation is created by the huge influx of ISK due to mission rewards, incursion rewards, NPC bounties. Since most missioners switched to "blitzing", completing as soon as possible, ignoring salvaging, the missioners get even more cash and create even less items. What is the best measure of inflation? Plex! Plex is purchased for real money in more-or-less stable quantity, for an unchanging purpose. So we can accept the value of Plex stable and the variation of Plex price to be actually the variation of ISK value. As you can see, the price increased by 40% in a year. That's some nice inflation.
With the overall inflation, obviously the price of items increased too. For example the Raven battleship:
What causes this inflation? Obviously the welfare ISK shower. This can be proved if we look at the price of a typical LP store item. Welfare generate Loyalty Points too:
OK, we got it, missions are bad and they cause inflation and help baddies, can we move on?
Now, how can we profit from this? If the price of the player crafted items increase, we can make more and more ISK from crafting and mining as time goes on. Yes, the "lowly grind" of mining will soon outperform (or already did) mission running. Of course trading will always be better, but a smart goblin always has a fallback point, as trading has ups and downs. Also we all must start somewhere and I'd like to find a way where a beginner can make good ISK while being useful to the economy.
Mining has one more positive: it's a group activity. Social people suck in that as they form their groups from "friends" and they don't kick leeches or they must work for the "group", filling the corporate wallet (practically the CEOs wallet) instead of their own. That's why many miner mines alone or with his second account, since he don't have to carry M&S this way. But a good group of goblins seriously outperform a soloer for two reasons. At first one of the members is the "fleet booster". He buffs the whole fleet if he has the proper skills and link modules on his ship. This boost can be up to 30% efficiency.
Secondly, the miner ships are bad transport ships. Their cargohold fill up fast and then they have to dock in a nearby station. However there is a method that a group can use: the full miner ship simply throws the minerals into the space in a "jettison container" (or dock to a nearby orca) and keeps mining, while a transport ship (which can carry 8-10 times more cargo) carries the minerals to the station for all miners.
What is the goblinish way of running a mining operation? The group is lead by the businessman. It's simpler if he is in the transport ship, but can be one of the miners too. Whenever the transporter picks up a jettisoned batch of minerals, he instantly pays the miner using the give money feature. The price of the minerals is agreed before they started mining. The one who gives the mining boosts is hourly paid on a pre-agreed price. If the businessman is not the transporter, then the businessman sometimes docks too and trade the ore from the transporter, paying a higher price than the transporter paid to the miners. Of course in the first times the prices must be carefully negotiated, but then it runs smoothly. Please note that this system is scammer-proof, the worst thing that can happen to a miner is that he loses one can worth of minerals (about 1M) or the buff-giver is not paid for the last hour (2-3M as usually many people can give the boost so they break down the price).
This is not an optimized mining operation, just my girlfriend making her first steps in EVE.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.47B (0.49B gifts)
PS: The post about the ships needed and skills used is updated for Jump Freighter and Hulk.
PS2: Anyone knows why Pyerite in Jita peaked at 8 Monday 15:30-19:30, when before and after was just 5.4? Not complaining, I was hauling there from 2-4 jumps getting about 30M profit autopilot (pirates won't waste a Tornado for a Badger II with 8M cargo) but still curious.
Inflation is created by the huge influx of ISK due to mission rewards, incursion rewards, NPC bounties. Since most missioners switched to "blitzing", completing as soon as possible, ignoring salvaging, the missioners get even more cash and create even less items. What is the best measure of inflation? Plex! Plex is purchased for real money in more-or-less stable quantity, for an unchanging purpose. So we can accept the value of Plex stable and the variation of Plex price to be actually the variation of ISK value. As you can see, the price increased by 40% in a year. That's some nice inflation.
With the overall inflation, obviously the price of items increased too. For example the Raven battleship:
What causes this inflation? Obviously the welfare ISK shower. This can be proved if we look at the price of a typical LP store item. Welfare generate Loyalty Points too:
OK, we got it, missions are bad and they cause inflation and help baddies, can we move on?
Now, how can we profit from this? If the price of the player crafted items increase, we can make more and more ISK from crafting and mining as time goes on. Yes, the "lowly grind" of mining will soon outperform (or already did) mission running. Of course trading will always be better, but a smart goblin always has a fallback point, as trading has ups and downs. Also we all must start somewhere and I'd like to find a way where a beginner can make good ISK while being useful to the economy.
Mining has one more positive: it's a group activity. Social people suck in that as they form their groups from "friends" and they don't kick leeches or they must work for the "group", filling the corporate wallet (practically the CEOs wallet) instead of their own. That's why many miner mines alone or with his second account, since he don't have to carry M&S this way. But a good group of goblins seriously outperform a soloer for two reasons. At first one of the members is the "fleet booster". He buffs the whole fleet if he has the proper skills and link modules on his ship. This boost can be up to 30% efficiency.
Secondly, the miner ships are bad transport ships. Their cargohold fill up fast and then they have to dock in a nearby station. However there is a method that a group can use: the full miner ship simply throws the minerals into the space in a "jettison container" (or dock to a nearby orca) and keeps mining, while a transport ship (which can carry 8-10 times more cargo) carries the minerals to the station for all miners.
What is the goblinish way of running a mining operation? The group is lead by the businessman. It's simpler if he is in the transport ship, but can be one of the miners too. Whenever the transporter picks up a jettisoned batch of minerals, he instantly pays the miner using the give money feature. The price of the minerals is agreed before they started mining. The one who gives the mining boosts is hourly paid on a pre-agreed price. If the businessman is not the transporter, then the businessman sometimes docks too and trade the ore from the transporter, paying a higher price than the transporter paid to the miners. Of course in the first times the prices must be carefully negotiated, but then it runs smoothly. Please note that this system is scammer-proof, the worst thing that can happen to a miner is that he loses one can worth of minerals (about 1M) or the buff-giver is not paid for the last hour (2-3M as usually many people can give the boost so they break down the price).
This is not an optimized mining operation, just my girlfriend making her first steps in EVE.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.47B (0.49B gifts)
PS: The post about the ships needed and skills used is updated for Jump Freighter and Hulk.
PS2: Anyone knows why Pyerite in Jita peaked at 8 Monday 15:30-19:30, when before and after was just 5.4? Not complaining, I was hauling there from 2-4 jumps getting about 30M profit autopilot (pirates won't waste a Tornado for a Badger II with 8M cargo) but still curious.
Sunday, 18 March 2012
There are special mission places called Data Centers. These are locations in space where little outposts and ships float. You have to spot them visually unless you configure your overview to see them. Every faction has 3 places, their locations are in the link above.
The mission agents give either courier or trade missions. The couriers are the standard trivial go there, bring it there things, involving small items, so you can do them in a frigate. They give faction standing which decreases broker fees according to the formula: BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). Probably the formula is not entirely accurate, my character sheet shows 0.474% where the formula would say 0.445%, but we can accept it as a guideline. Since broker fee apply not only on sales like tax but also on unsuccessful orders, it's important to keep it low. The skill "Broker Relations" will bring us to 0.75%, no lower, so we need faction standing.
Don't underestimate this 0.3-0.4%! If I assume 10% profit rate on my ventures (I know that you have 9999999999%, no need to post a comment), then my 1.5B wealth was created moving 15B ISK. So even if I had no failed or modified auction (which I obviously had), I would have lost 45-60M in the first month of my life if I'd ignore it. This will just go up as I'll move more and more ISK. Also, keep in mind that elevating faction standing needs no ships or skills behind starter ones, you shall do it now and not when an Orca or Charon waits in the hangar.
OK, you did the courier missions. What about the rest? They are "trade" missions, you have to bring the mission agents 20 tags (3 for copper). These are items looted from various pirates. The bigger the pirates, the better the tag. Like with most items in EVE you can buy and sell them. All factions have different pirates, I list the Jita price of the Caldari ones:
The reason for the strange distribution of prices is that the lower tag missions are available to people with low standing, while the top tags are only for high standing people: much smaller demand. Of course you shall not buy any sell order for these tags, you have time, set up buy orders, that's much cheaper!
Since these tags are dropped randomly to missioners and random pirate killers who don't know the price, you can try to buy them regionwide and when enough are collected, transport them to the trade hub for sale. And then you end up like me: several tags in low-sec stations, holding my capital until I have a blockade runner.
Business report: Buy+Sell+Cash = 1.42B (0.49B gifts)
The mission agents give either courier or trade missions. The couriers are the standard trivial go there, bring it there things, involving small items, so you can do them in a frigate. They give faction standing which decreases broker fees according to the formula: BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). Probably the formula is not entirely accurate, my character sheet shows 0.474% where the formula would say 0.445%, but we can accept it as a guideline. Since broker fee apply not only on sales like tax but also on unsuccessful orders, it's important to keep it low. The skill "Broker Relations" will bring us to 0.75%, no lower, so we need faction standing.
Don't underestimate this 0.3-0.4%! If I assume 10% profit rate on my ventures (I know that you have 9999999999%, no need to post a comment), then my 1.5B wealth was created moving 15B ISK. So even if I had no failed or modified auction (which I obviously had), I would have lost 45-60M in the first month of my life if I'd ignore it. This will just go up as I'll move more and more ISK. Also, keep in mind that elevating faction standing needs no ships or skills behind starter ones, you shall do it now and not when an Orca or Charon waits in the hangar.
OK, you did the courier missions. What about the rest? They are "trade" missions, you have to bring the mission agents 20 tags (3 for copper). These are items looted from various pirates. The bigger the pirates, the better the tag. Like with most items in EVE you can buy and sell them. All factions have different pirates, I list the Jita price of the Caldari ones:
- Copper tag: 0.7M
- Bronze tag: 4.5M
- Silver tag: 1M
- Brass tag: 12M
- Palladium tag: 0.05M
- Gold tag: 0.7M
- Electrum tag: 0.02M
- Crystal tag: 0.03M
- Platinum tag: 1.3M
- Diamond tag: 0.15M
The reason for the strange distribution of prices is that the lower tag missions are available to people with low standing, while the top tags are only for high standing people: much smaller demand. Of course you shall not buy any sell order for these tags, you have time, set up buy orders, that's much cheaper!
Since these tags are dropped randomly to missioners and random pirate killers who don't know the price, you can try to buy them regionwide and when enough are collected, transport them to the trade hub for sale. And then you end up like me: several tags in low-sec stations, holding my capital until I have a blockade runner.
Business report: Buy+Sell+Cash = 1.42B (0.49B gifts)
Thursday, 15 March 2012
Vast majority of the comments were negative on my idea to remove baddie-friendly carebear features, the ones that reward players only for spending time in the game. They agreed that the game would then be unplayable for new players or those who are not in a nullsec alliance. The same old WoW bullshit: players need to be carried or they can't make it.
The people are so used to this bullshit that they don't even recognize how bizarre it is when they write it to a one-month newbie who made almost 2 PLEX worth of ISK (gifts not included) in a month, without using the "must-be" carebear features (I use them for increasing standing, my income from them is a joke). Hell, my very first post, the one I made after a few days in the game shown me making ISK via hauling and trading. I'm not some "bittervet" with the "you must do it uphill in the snow like I did 5 years ago" speech! I'm doing it now and there is no hill or snow here at all, I'm actually surprised how easy it is.
I don't need welfare. No one needs it! They just prefer it, because working is incompatible with being a lazy idiot. They don't want to think, they don't want to make effort and especially they don't want to take risks. They don't have capital either as they spend everything on some stupid shiny as soon as they get some cash. They want rewards, preferably for nothing, in the worst case for spending some time doing repetitive stuff like flipping burgers or running missions.
However the most hilarious (and in the same time frightening) comment said: "[the idea] devastate the economy and it will drop from capitalism to medieval `we produce all that we spend` model".
You idiot! In the real world who produces all that we spend? Fairies? Kobolds? NPCs? Producing and distributing things is the economy.
However I can't just dismiss him as an idiot. His thinking isn't all uncommon. Unless you live in a rock, you heard about the economic crisis. It came from exactly this nonsense. Not just 12 years old kiddies but economy professors and billion dollar investment firm managers believed that everyone can make money only by tossing papers around, without anyone producing anything. The motto "let your money work for you" is still not laughed on, despite the dollar bills are just as good in work as the brokers who worship them. Of course one can make money off others by selling them stupid papers. But a world where everyone is a scammer won't work.
The games (even the "harsh" EVE) very well mimic the thinking of social people: items come from other people, we obtain them either by getting in their good graces or taking from them. The social people find it obvious that they do some silly task for an NPC and it rewards them with items or that they kill some NPC and loot the item. Where did the item come from? Why do they have them in indefinite amounts? If they are so powerful, why do they need you for their trivial tasks? They don't ask because they find it "normal" that items just appear somewhere from thin air and all we have to do to get them is kissing or kicking the right ass.
EVE, compared to most games has a huge economic system. Players can (or with little changes, could) create practically anything. But they prefer to just line up for welfare. I understand that PvP is hard, understanding market is hard, politics (= scamming) is hard, but then go out and mine Veldspar, damn you, tritanium prices went from 4.2 to 5.0 in two weeks!
PS: the post with the carebear ideas is updated, I recognized that mining should be high-sec, since it's an industrial work and shouldn't be mixed with direct PvP. It should have it's own industrial challenge and competition with other miners.
Business report: 1.19B (500M gift), the reason for the decrease is 65M used (post Monday), and 90M given to my newly created second account alt. I can't go scam M&S corporations with a name which can be googled to lead to my less than nice&sweet blog, and I'll need skillpoints to effectively scam (mainly to haul away the loot).
The people are so used to this bullshit that they don't even recognize how bizarre it is when they write it to a one-month newbie who made almost 2 PLEX worth of ISK (gifts not included) in a month, without using the "must-be" carebear features (I use them for increasing standing, my income from them is a joke). Hell, my very first post, the one I made after a few days in the game shown me making ISK via hauling and trading. I'm not some "bittervet" with the "you must do it uphill in the snow like I did 5 years ago" speech! I'm doing it now and there is no hill or snow here at all, I'm actually surprised how easy it is.
I don't need welfare. No one needs it! They just prefer it, because working is incompatible with being a lazy idiot. They don't want to think, they don't want to make effort and especially they don't want to take risks. They don't have capital either as they spend everything on some stupid shiny as soon as they get some cash. They want rewards, preferably for nothing, in the worst case for spending some time doing repetitive stuff like flipping burgers or running missions.
However the most hilarious (and in the same time frightening) comment said: "[the idea] devastate the economy and it will drop from capitalism to medieval `we produce all that we spend` model".
You idiot! In the real world who produces all that we spend? Fairies? Kobolds? NPCs? Producing and distributing things is the economy.
However I can't just dismiss him as an idiot. His thinking isn't all uncommon. Unless you live in a rock, you heard about the economic crisis. It came from exactly this nonsense. Not just 12 years old kiddies but economy professors and billion dollar investment firm managers believed that everyone can make money only by tossing papers around, without anyone producing anything. The motto "let your money work for you" is still not laughed on, despite the dollar bills are just as good in work as the brokers who worship them. Of course one can make money off others by selling them stupid papers. But a world where everyone is a scammer won't work.
The games (even the "harsh" EVE) very well mimic the thinking of social people: items come from other people, we obtain them either by getting in their good graces or taking from them. The social people find it obvious that they do some silly task for an NPC and it rewards them with items or that they kill some NPC and loot the item. Where did the item come from? Why do they have them in indefinite amounts? If they are so powerful, why do they need you for their trivial tasks? They don't ask because they find it "normal" that items just appear somewhere from thin air and all we have to do to get them is kissing or kicking the right ass.
EVE, compared to most games has a huge economic system. Players can (or with little changes, could) create practically anything. But they prefer to just line up for welfare. I understand that PvP is hard, understanding market is hard, politics (= scamming) is hard, but then go out and mine Veldspar, damn you, tritanium prices went from 4.2 to 5.0 in two weeks!
PS: the post with the carebear ideas is updated, I recognized that mining should be high-sec, since it's an industrial work and shouldn't be mixed with direct PvP. It should have it's own industrial challenge and competition with other miners.
Business report: 1.19B (500M gift), the reason for the decrease is 65M used (post Monday), and 90M given to my newly created second account alt. I can't go scam M&S corporations with a name which can be googled to lead to my less than nice&sweet blog, and I'll need skillpoints to effectively scam (mainly to haul away the loot).
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
No tree grows to the sky, no way of trading is without limits. To maximize your income, you shall be aware of the limits of your activities, so you can switch to another type which still have room.
The first limit is time. The most typical time limited activities are mining and mission running. You can make X million by mining an hour, so you can make 2X in two hours. If you mine 25 hours a day, you get 25X million every day. Oh wait!
The second limit is demand. I make about 1.1 million over every Logistics book I sell, so to be a billionaire overnight, all I have to do is run up and down in the galaxy buying books and listing 1000 pieces in Jita. Except they won't sell in a month. While items can travel trough many hands, traders, haulers and manufacturers can do their thing on it, at the end it must reach the consumer. And people can't consume in infinite amounts. Selling more than they buy is simply making your capital sitting there. You can figure out the demand from the price history graph:
The third limit is capital. You have to buy the item (or its materials) spending cash. Actually you have to spend 24-100% of the cash (depending on margin trading skill) when you set up the buy order. You will not see this cash back until you actually sell the item. So you can't just buy up everything that looks to be profitable to sell, you simply can't afford that.
What to do?
PS: quick business report, 1.36B (0.5B gifts)
I understand that people don't want to do jumps to buy a book 70K cheaper. It's just economical to pay a little premium to me for bringing it to Jita. But the moron of the day did not buy one book. He needed 43 (maybe more from other sellers, I had no more to sell). So he bought mine. Not the ones sold by the NPCs 43*70K = 3M cheaper two jumps away:
The first limit is time. The most typical time limited activities are mining and mission running. You can make X million by mining an hour, so you can make 2X in two hours. If you mine 25 hours a day, you get 25X million every day. Oh wait!
The second limit is demand. I make about 1.1 million over every Logistics book I sell, so to be a billionaire overnight, all I have to do is run up and down in the galaxy buying books and listing 1000 pieces in Jita. Except they won't sell in a month. While items can travel trough many hands, traders, haulers and manufacturers can do their thing on it, at the end it must reach the consumer. And people can't consume in infinite amounts. Selling more than they buy is simply making your capital sitting there. You can figure out the demand from the price history graph:
The third limit is capital. You have to buy the item (or its materials) spending cash. Actually you have to spend 24-100% of the cash (depending on margin trading skill) when you set up the buy order. You will not see this cash back until you actually sell the item. So you can't just buy up everything that looks to be profitable to sell, you simply can't afford that.
What to do?
- Do the demand limited trades. They usually don't take too long, you have your usual restocking ways, you just grab some materials and sell it. Usually these operations are the most profitable, so don't miss them by spending your time on something else.
- Secondly, calculate the material costs of the time-limited activities. For example you'll run missions and you buy implants for LP+little cash to sell them for big cash. Calculate how much "little cash" you'll need.
- Spend the rest of your cash on the capital-intensive ventures, haul them to the trade hub and list them.
- Only after these start doing the time-limited activity.
PS: quick business report, 1.36B (0.5B gifts)
I understand that people don't want to do jumps to buy a book 70K cheaper. It's just economical to pay a little premium to me for bringing it to Jita. But the moron of the day did not buy one book. He needed 43 (maybe more from other sellers, I had no more to sell). So he bought mine. Not the ones sold by the NPCs 43*70K = 3M cheaper two jumps away:
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
I wrote that I had 60% winrate with the top tier tank "Object 704". That alone should prove that experience does not make players better (after the first few hours). However even more disturbing data came up.
My girlfriend finally got her Object too and off we went for some massacre. Which never came. Playing together we achieved the terrible 46% winrate. Considering that I'm alone capable of getting 60%, she must be awful. Except she had 1.33 kills, 1770 damage and 610 XP/battle, where the average player who played 5000+ games has 0.77 kills, 1100 damage, 458 XP. To make things worse, in tiers 1-7 the two of us has much higher winrate than me alone while in tier 8 a bit better. The offical page places her to #2700 in winrate, which is really good, and above mine.
So we take a player who can do 60% alone, add another way above average player and get below average winrate. What the hell? We were really puzzled and upset about the results. We started recording battles to figure out how we started to suck. Of course we had facepalm moments but usually we did great and still lost. Like some evil force provided us the most utter idiots. However the idiotfest is not an answer. The enemy should be idiots too so we should win.
The first thing we recognized is the almost total lack of the most expected outcome. I mean if there are two lanes in the field one would say that one team wins in one and loses in the other, according to which team sent more or better tanks to that lane. The outcome would depend on which lane is finished faster allowing that team to cap or attack the other lane from behind. This is the outcome we almost never see. Almost always we see all-lane defeats or all-lane victories. The replays explained why: when the red dots started to show up on the minimap, the tanks in the other lanes ignored everything and started running towards them, usually to their sure death. The side that could show up with force in one place (even in a totally irrelevant place) usually won as they could snipe down the mindless lemmings running to them one by one.
Then I checked the tank statistics again and made this winrate-tier graph. Every point is made from the average of the tanks belonging to that group and tier (so the T9 TD point is the average of the winrate of obj704, T95, Jgdtiger):
One explanation is that TDs and SPGs are getting worse as we progress in the game, so in clan wars no one shall play TD or SPG. The other explanation is more believable: the TDs and SPGs don't fit into the moronic "kill all red lol" strategy. The heavies are the ones the others rush to. The mediums are rushing. The TDs and SPGs simply don't get a shot as they are constantly blocked by rushing ones and can't rush themselves.
But why do the lines have trends? Why not TDs and SPGs are all-time low while meds and heavies are high? Because on lower tiers the new players are cautious and aware of their shortcomings. They think twice before moving. You can reason with them. If I tell a KV that running on the field of Malinovka is bad idea, he'll probably listen. From a Löwe, the answer will probably be "lol". The top tier random players learned nothing but got strong ego. They just got worse.
How could I get 60% then, alone in a TD? Because I played late night and early evening when I couldn't sleep. I played with WoT fans. I could talk to them. They proposed strategies. They cared about my line of fire!!! With my girlfriend we played in the afternoons and weekends when the worst swarm of lolkids were on. They just rushed to the first red dot like moths to the flame. Figuring this out we started playing 1-2 matches at 7 AM, right before we went work. On the left when we stopped playing in the afternoon, on the right the results after two weeks of morning games:
Figuring this out, the most obvious way would be switching to med tanks and have a massacre in the afternoon. However we came up with a much wittier solution, you'll hear about it in a few weeks.
But the result for today remains: the M&S get worse by gaining experience as they get more self-confident, but not an inch smarter. I can't even believe of more elegant proof that the M&S is not "newbie", "undergeared" or "unlucky", just a bunch of lazy idiots.
PS: Quick EVE market update cash+sell+buy 1.31 B (0.5B gifts)
My girlfriend finally got her Object too and off we went for some massacre. Which never came. Playing together we achieved the terrible 46% winrate. Considering that I'm alone capable of getting 60%, she must be awful. Except she had 1.33 kills, 1770 damage and 610 XP/battle, where the average player who played 5000+ games has 0.77 kills, 1100 damage, 458 XP. To make things worse, in tiers 1-7 the two of us has much higher winrate than me alone while in tier 8 a bit better. The offical page places her to #2700 in winrate, which is really good, and above mine.
So we take a player who can do 60% alone, add another way above average player and get below average winrate. What the hell? We were really puzzled and upset about the results. We started recording battles to figure out how we started to suck. Of course we had facepalm moments but usually we did great and still lost. Like some evil force provided us the most utter idiots. However the idiotfest is not an answer. The enemy should be idiots too so we should win.
The first thing we recognized is the almost total lack of the most expected outcome. I mean if there are two lanes in the field one would say that one team wins in one and loses in the other, according to which team sent more or better tanks to that lane. The outcome would depend on which lane is finished faster allowing that team to cap or attack the other lane from behind. This is the outcome we almost never see. Almost always we see all-lane defeats or all-lane victories. The replays explained why: when the red dots started to show up on the minimap, the tanks in the other lanes ignored everything and started running towards them, usually to their sure death. The side that could show up with force in one place (even in a totally irrelevant place) usually won as they could snipe down the mindless lemmings running to them one by one.
Then I checked the tank statistics again and made this winrate-tier graph. Every point is made from the average of the tanks belonging to that group and tier (so the T9 TD point is the average of the winrate of obj704, T95, Jgdtiger):
One explanation is that TDs and SPGs are getting worse as we progress in the game, so in clan wars no one shall play TD or SPG. The other explanation is more believable: the TDs and SPGs don't fit into the moronic "kill all red lol" strategy. The heavies are the ones the others rush to. The mediums are rushing. The TDs and SPGs simply don't get a shot as they are constantly blocked by rushing ones and can't rush themselves.
But why do the lines have trends? Why not TDs and SPGs are all-time low while meds and heavies are high? Because on lower tiers the new players are cautious and aware of their shortcomings. They think twice before moving. You can reason with them. If I tell a KV that running on the field of Malinovka is bad idea, he'll probably listen. From a Löwe, the answer will probably be "lol". The top tier random players learned nothing but got strong ego. They just got worse.
How could I get 60% then, alone in a TD? Because I played late night and early evening when I couldn't sleep. I played with WoT fans. I could talk to them. They proposed strategies. They cared about my line of fire!!! With my girlfriend we played in the afternoons and weekends when the worst swarm of lolkids were on. They just rushed to the first red dot like moths to the flame. Figuring this out we started playing 1-2 matches at 7 AM, right before we went work. On the left when we stopped playing in the afternoon, on the right the results after two weeks of morning games:
Figuring this out, the most obvious way would be switching to med tanks and have a massacre in the afternoon. However we came up with a much wittier solution, you'll hear about it in a few weeks.
But the result for today remains: the M&S get worse by gaining experience as they get more self-confident, but not an inch smarter. I can't even believe of more elegant proof that the M&S is not "newbie", "undergeared" or "unlucky", just a bunch of lazy idiots.
PS: Quick EVE market update cash+sell+buy 1.31 B (0.5B gifts)
Monday, 12 March 2012
I made my decision finally and quit playing WoW "seriously". OK, that's a lie, you can't play WoW seriously anymore. In our guild the raiding was extremely busy, pretty successful (top 10%, maybe even 5%), but after DS nerf the people disappeared literally overnight. Why bother trying on bosses that can be oneshotted in months and why bother collecting gear that will be replaced by the first green dropped by the first panda?
Many of our players gave away his wealth and quit WoW, and clearly not only from our guild, as the desperate Scroll of Resurrection shows. I do not quit WoW, partially because I signed the 1-year contract (that was a clever move from Blizz, as they offered only a vaporware for it), but also because the scenery, the stories make Azeroth a nice place to hang out (as long as you have all chat channels off and whisper and invite blocker addons). I will clearly play in Pandaria, but most probably won't bother to raid.
No, I'm not disbanding the guild, it's a good base for openraids which I believe will be the standards of future casual raiding (HC topraids are different issue of course). So if you just want to get lost in Azeroth without "/g lulz guyz i saw a hottie today lol" crap, feel free to join.
I actually figured out why WoW is a "bad game". Because it's not a game at all. It's an interactive movie. You can't win, you can't lose, your actions don't change the story, just adjust the speed you consume content. There is no "World" in World of Warcraft, even if everyone else would disappear from your server you wouldn't notice (until you'd start to wonder why there is no anal spam on /trade). You can play with the themepark toys or make your own sandbox content like these guys.
Probably there won't be any more directly WoW-related posts here. I move on. I won't come back spitting on WoW and those who still play it. I learned a lot about people, especially about the social behavior that supports the M&S. I'll make good use of it.
I've seen many bloggers saying goodbye to the game they played and blogged about. They all described the moment as blue.
Well, my blogging future can't be more blue:
Before you'd ask "why don't you form your corporation", I tell it: because there is no point having one until we have reasonable plans for 0.0 system control. Trading needs no corporation, scamming morons and slackers need you to join their idiotic lolcorp. So it's much better if we stay in the NPC corp (when not being busy exploiting M&S).
Bloggers fear to change focus due to losing readers. It's stupid:
So dear readers, if you suffer from the lack of "game" in WoW, join me in EVE. They say it's a harsh, evil world, but it's a lie, EVE is nice and friendly.
You are desperately needed to fix that!
Many of our players gave away his wealth and quit WoW, and clearly not only from our guild, as the desperate Scroll of Resurrection shows. I do not quit WoW, partially because I signed the 1-year contract (that was a clever move from Blizz, as they offered only a vaporware for it), but also because the scenery, the stories make Azeroth a nice place to hang out (as long as you have all chat channels off and whisper and invite blocker addons). I will clearly play in Pandaria, but most probably won't bother to raid.
No, I'm not disbanding the guild, it's a good base for openraids which I believe will be the standards of future casual raiding (HC topraids are different issue of course). So if you just want to get lost in Azeroth without "/g lulz guyz i saw a hottie today lol" crap, feel free to join.
I actually figured out why WoW is a "bad game". Because it's not a game at all. It's an interactive movie. You can't win, you can't lose, your actions don't change the story, just adjust the speed you consume content. There is no "World" in World of Warcraft, even if everyone else would disappear from your server you wouldn't notice (until you'd start to wonder why there is no anal spam on /trade). You can play with the themepark toys or make your own sandbox content like these guys.
Probably there won't be any more directly WoW-related posts here. I move on. I won't come back spitting on WoW and those who still play it. I learned a lot about people, especially about the social behavior that supports the M&S. I'll make good use of it.
I've seen many bloggers saying goodbye to the game they played and blogged about. They all described the moment as blue.
Well, my blogging future can't be more blue:
Before you'd ask "why don't you form your corporation", I tell it: because there is no point having one until we have reasonable plans for 0.0 system control. Trading needs no corporation, scamming morons and slackers need you to join their idiotic lolcorp. So it's much better if we stay in the NPC corp (when not being busy exploiting M&S).
Bloggers fear to change focus due to losing readers. It's stupid:
So dear readers, if you suffer from the lack of "game" in WoW, join me in EVE. They say it's a harsh, evil world, but it's a lie, EVE is nice and friendly.
You are desperately needed to fix that!
Sunday, 11 March 2012
Considering that EVE is supposed to be a harsh competitive world, it is surprisingly not. While there is easier to be competitive than in WoW for example, most players gain their wealth doing carebear stuff. The purpose of such features is to allow bad players to have something to do and progress in the game, preventing the baddies from canceling subscription. The perfect example of such features is farming "heroics" in WoW for valor points: the task can be completed literally on /follow. Let's try to give exact criteria for the "baddie friendly carebear" feature:
However it has a very nasty side-effect: botting. If a task is easy but boring, better let a bot do it. So these functions are used by bots (or AFK players without technical bot program) to create ingame wealth to illegally sell it or boost their real character with power it shouldn't have.
In WoW practically every game feature is carebear as they are available in unlimited amount of instances, they have absolutely zero impact on the world, besides rewarding the player and they are totally uncompetitive. Even random BG is such function, despite formally being direct PvP: you don't have to compete for rewards as you get honor points even if you did 0 damage, 0 healing, 0 objective cap and your team lost. Only arenas and RBGs are competitive and top raiding was made competitive by players creating third party toplists.
Considering that EVE is supposed to be a "harsh world where you shape the galaxy", the amount of baddie (and bot) friendly features are overwhelming. Most people are "carebears", gaining their wealth from missioning or ratting (grinding mob spawns which are available in every difficulty in unlimited amount). No wonder that botting in EVE is even more prevalent than in WoW. In WoW you can't sell most gear and everyone swims in gold so botting is usually done by players who want to increase the power of their own character without playing. Since you can buy anything from ISK, including game time, botting ISK is profitable so it's rampart.
WoW cannot be "saved" as it is purposefully carebear friendly. However EVE is not. Officially. Jester is looking for an elegant solution to stop botting, here you go:
What will happen to xXxipopulolxXx who don't want to mine Veldspar, don't want to haul, too dumb to trade and has 1:3 kill:death? I mean, he just wants to jump on the "awsom ship" he grinded missions for to "hav som pvp fun lol", how could he have fun (undeserved feeling of greatness) now? By buying ISK for PLEX! Which is a win-win-win for them, the good players who sold the ISK and CCP as PLEX cost more than subscription.
Clarification: carebear is not equal to M&S. It's an extreme risk and competition aversion, overall "let's all be friends" attitude and not lazyness or stupidity (though correlation exists). M&S need a huge kick in the butt, carebears just need a little push. Also, "hard" doesn't stop boting since the worst thing that can happen with a bot trying hard task is that it fails to do so and stand there empty. Competition stops boting since there the dumb bot can lose your ship which is worse than not boting and staying docked when not there.
PS: how could you gain faction standing without missions? You could donate ISK to the faction, or join the militia and kill enemy faction militia members, gaining the ISK value of the destroyed enemy as donation. (You should be able to be in a corp and a faction militia in the same time, assuming the corp and the faction has positive standing).
Where would the ISK enter to the playerbase without missions showering welfare ISK? NPC corporations could buy minerals, products and sleeper loot for a fixed low price. The factions could also place bounties on enemy militia pilots who killed lot of their militia.
PS2: quick business update: 1.16 B (500M gift). The reason for the lack of increase is spending 184.5M on books for myself.
PS3: the pug update: BWD HM 5/6 now as the hunter couldn't kite and the mages had no frost spec. Seriously, what's the odds of 2 mages having no frost spec?
- It gives the players a task and rewards him for performing it.
- The task is readily available in unlimited amount when the player wants it
- The player can pick the difficulty of the task or the task is trivial (though maybe time-consuming)
- The task does not include any kind of competition from other players and no player is motivated to stop the one doing it (random griefing doesn't count, he is not after you because of your mission)
- The activity has no other effect on the game world than rewarding the player. You sell no ore, you perform no service or harm to another player, you just got some ISK/wowgold from an NPC.
However it has a very nasty side-effect: botting. If a task is easy but boring, better let a bot do it. So these functions are used by bots (or AFK players without technical bot program) to create ingame wealth to illegally sell it or boost their real character with power it shouldn't have.
In WoW practically every game feature is carebear as they are available in unlimited amount of instances, they have absolutely zero impact on the world, besides rewarding the player and they are totally uncompetitive. Even random BG is such function, despite formally being direct PvP: you don't have to compete for rewards as you get honor points even if you did 0 damage, 0 healing, 0 objective cap and your team lost. Only arenas and RBGs are competitive and top raiding was made competitive by players creating third party toplists.
Considering that EVE is supposed to be a "harsh world where you shape the galaxy", the amount of baddie (and bot) friendly features are overwhelming. Most people are "carebears", gaining their wealth from missioning or ratting (grinding mob spawns which are available in every difficulty in unlimited amount). No wonder that botting in EVE is even more prevalent than in WoW. In WoW you can't sell most gear and everyone swims in gold so botting is usually done by players who want to increase the power of their own character without playing. Since you can buy anything from ISK, including game time, botting ISK is profitable so it's rampart.
WoW cannot be "saved" as it is purposefully carebear friendly. However EVE is not. Officially. Jester is looking for an elegant solution to stop botting, here you go:
- Get rid of all mission agents above lvl 1. Lvl 1 is good for 1 week newbies to learn the ropes, everyone else should be doing something real. The Navy Raven bought from LPs is no less "welfare epic" than the valor-point given WoW loot.
- Limit the availability of random NPC pirates (beside those who belong to lvl1 security missions). Seriously, why do the Guristas have endless support of pilots and ships? I'm damn sure that millions of them are slaughtered every month. They should have a limited resource count and should be able to set up operations according to this. If they are low on resources, they can't start new deadspace operations or incursions.
- Seriously rework mining into its own minigame that requires constant player attention, making botting hard. Like you switch in asteroid view, you must target components of that asteroid, blindly mining all makes you hit low-yield parts or even explosive gas clusters that damage your ship or blow the asteroid into useless little pieces in the space.
- Mining: it's affecting other players as provide the backbone of the economy: materials. It is in competition with other miners and pirate players going after them
- Trading/manufacturing: it's also affecting other players via providing them buys and sells and it is in competition with other traders/industrialists
- Hauling: it's affecting other players due equalizing prices between regions, it's in competition with other haulers and pirate players going after them
- Pirating: it's affecting other players obviously and it's in competition with other pirates and fighters
- Profitable fighting: it's affecting the life of miners and haulers they escort for a price or as members of their corporation, and clearly affecting the life (or rather death) of the pirates. They compete with other fighters for the jobs and with pirates and fighters of enemy corps for survival
- System ownership: it's affecting the whole playerbase (see the running theme here?) and provide service to everyone, place to mine for miners, to trade for traders, to haul from and to for haulers, jobs for mercenaries. It's in competition with other system owners which is resolved in epic battles (or hidden political moves)
- Exploring: it's affecting the life of the miners who use the grav/ladar site locations, the traders who buy the salvaged stuff and the wormhole corporations who use WH locations. They are in competition with other explores (and the pirates who hunt them like everyone else out there)
What will happen to xXxipopulolxXx who don't want to mine Veldspar, don't want to haul, too dumb to trade and has 1:3 kill:death? I mean, he just wants to jump on the "awsom ship" he grinded missions for to "hav som pvp fun lol", how could he have fun (undeserved feeling of greatness) now? By buying ISK for PLEX! Which is a win-win-win for them, the good players who sold the ISK and CCP as PLEX cost more than subscription.
Clarification: carebear is not equal to M&S. It's an extreme risk and competition aversion, overall "let's all be friends" attitude and not lazyness or stupidity (though correlation exists). M&S need a huge kick in the butt, carebears just need a little push. Also, "hard" doesn't stop boting since the worst thing that can happen with a bot trying hard task is that it fails to do so and stand there empty. Competition stops boting since there the dumb bot can lose your ship which is worse than not boting and staying docked when not there.
PS: how could you gain faction standing without missions? You could donate ISK to the faction, or join the militia and kill enemy faction militia members, gaining the ISK value of the destroyed enemy as donation. (You should be able to be in a corp and a faction militia in the same time, assuming the corp and the faction has positive standing).
Where would the ISK enter to the playerbase without missions showering welfare ISK? NPC corporations could buy minerals, products and sleeper loot for a fixed low price. The factions could also place bounties on enemy militia pilots who killed lot of their militia.
PS2: quick business update: 1.16 B (500M gift). The reason for the lack of increase is spending 184.5M on books for myself.
PS3: the pug update: BWD HM 5/6 now as the hunter couldn't kite and the mages had no frost spec. Seriously, what's the odds of 2 mages having no frost spec?
Thursday, 8 March 2012
The book "The millionaire next door" is a must read. It's not a philosophy book, it's about a study that the authors did interviewing thousands of wealthy people. The book describes their collective knowledge, a countless times proved way to become rich.
The way is pretty simple and obvious: frugality. The real millionaires live a much cheaper life than they could afford. They don't have luxury stuff, they live much lower neighborhood than they could afford and they save serious part of their income every month. So they could keep up their current life for years without income. Less than 20% of them inherited significant wealth, and only 0.02% scored big via lottery or became a star or an inventor. 80% of them accumulated their wealth in one generation, slowly, month by month.
The other people, even those who earn more than $50K/year practically have no wealth besides their home, car and furniture, and live from paycheck to paycheck.
Why this book is so great? Because - unlike others - finds the way how people do it. I mean it's 101 to "spend less than you earn", yet people can't do it. This book tells the exact thing that separates rich from poor: "They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status". So, they don't show off, don't give a damn what the Joneses think. Isn't it familiar from somewhere?
End of spoiler. Go and buy it!
PS: Quick EVE business report: cash+buy+sell orders = 1.13B (500M player gift).
PS2: In EVE the players can elect representatives, and the game developers at least listen to what they say. I was thinking a lot about CSM7, both where to vote and to tell it on the blog or not. So instead of just throwing in a name or two, I read all programs and add a few words of opinion about them. Please note that I evaluate programs and not people, spare me from "X is a liar!" posts. Also, be surprised how few actually have a program!
The way is pretty simple and obvious: frugality. The real millionaires live a much cheaper life than they could afford. They don't have luxury stuff, they live much lower neighborhood than they could afford and they save serious part of their income every month. So they could keep up their current life for years without income. Less than 20% of them inherited significant wealth, and only 0.02% scored big via lottery or became a star or an inventor. 80% of them accumulated their wealth in one generation, slowly, month by month.
The other people, even those who earn more than $50K/year practically have no wealth besides their home, car and furniture, and live from paycheck to paycheck.
Why this book is so great? Because - unlike others - finds the way how people do it. I mean it's 101 to "spend less than you earn", yet people can't do it. This book tells the exact thing that separates rich from poor: "They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status". So, they don't show off, don't give a damn what the Joneses think. Isn't it familiar from somewhere?
End of spoiler. Go and buy it!
PS: Quick EVE business report: cash+buy+sell orders = 1.13B (500M player gift).
PS2: In EVE the players can elect representatives, and the game developers at least listen to what they say. I was thinking a lot about CSM7, both where to vote and to tell it on the blog or not. So instead of just throwing in a name or two, I read all programs and add a few words of opinion about them. Please note that I evaluate programs and not people, spare me from "X is a liar!" posts. Also, be surprised how few actually have a program!
- Akirei Scytale: his post is idiotic
- Alekseyev Karrde: PR bullshit, nothing exact
- Blackberry Bold: direct democracy. Bleh!
- Blake Armitage: he is not running for CSM, he just want a job at CCP as API programmer
- corebloodbrothers: no program at all
- Darius III: it's a bugfix list and not a program!
- Dovinian: PR bullshit, no program
- Draco Llasa: wants to bring more life to 0.0 industry and warfare. Not my field, if yours, support.
- Elise Randolph: stands for low-sec small-gangs. Not my field, if yours, support.
- Fon Revedhort: mostly bugfix suggestions. Technical, without political vision.
- Greene Lee: messy posts, no paragraphs. Learn to write first!
- Hans Jagerblitzen: A coherent and huge program (his PDF linked) to support the Empire players without planning to take anything away from 0.0.
- Issler Dainze: no program, just "join me and we'll be great" propaganda
- Kelduum Revaan: PR bullshit, no program
- Korvin: not even PR bullshit, no program
- Leboe: he is for NPC 0.0 Not my field, if yours, support.
- Lyris Nairn: list of technical suggestions, no vision
- Meissa Anunthiel: "I'm everyones man, vote for me!"
- Michael BoltonIII: technical suggestions and Arena. In EVE. Abomination
- Mike Azariah: idiotic post
- Mintrolio: idiotic post
- Mu'ad Diib: PR bullshit, no program
- Prometheus Exenthal: technical suggestions
- PsychoBitch: idiotic post
- Riverini: technicals and PR stuff
- Roc Wieler: PR bullshit, no program
- Seleene: I'm honestly puzzled by his post. He has great vision. And none of it was listed on his official page. Nothing but PR bullshit. It means that he prefers getting a seat than the vision itself. Too bad, if I don't read his official post, I'd vote for him.
- Skippermonkey: idiotic post
- Skye Aurorae: PR bullshit, no program
- Sollana: goes for 0.0 station cannons. While this looks technical, I see the vision behind it: make it much easier to hold 0.0, make safer to build, live there. Not my field, if yours, support.
- StarConquer212: technical issues, no program
- T'amber: technical issues, PR crap
- The Mittani: clear vision: "If “war”, “murder” and “conquest” are naughty words that scare you, I don’t want your vote."
- Tiger Would: Propaganda bullshit, democracy bleh
- Trebor Daehdoow: Mostly technical issues, with little program hiding: "deliver improvements to the game that the current players of the game want". Worth considering.
- Two step: seems to be the man of the Wormhole-dwellers, but was hard to find it in the PR crap. Not my field, if yours, support.
- UAxDEATH: clearly for the 0.0 people, Not my field, if yours, support.
- Vincent Athena: PR crap, "I'm everyones man"
- Voloses: technical stuff, no program
- Xenuria: mix of idiotism and vanity suggestions
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
There are two resources in EVE: skillpoints and ISK. You can buy anything from ISK except skillpoints and you need them for using the various items. Standings are saving you ISK, so they belong to the ISK realm.
Every skill, has a primary and secondary attribute. When you choose to learn it, every minute you gain 1 skillpoint for 1 point of primary attribute and 1/2 for the secondary. It's obvious that you want as high attributes as possible for fast training. There are 5 attributes and they affect the following skill families:
If you are a businessman in EVE, the important fields for you will be Trade, Industry, Planetary management, Corporation management and Mechanic (spaceship and station manufacturing). They use Charisma, Intelligence and Memory. Trade uses some Willpower, but if you check the details, and they are fairly simple (x1 and x2 training time modifier) and also they are pretty basic, so you probably have them already (trade, retail, broker relations).
Since your skill training speed depends on your points in the relevant attributes, you set Perception and Willpower to minimum (17) and distribute your 14 free points between the useful ones, speeding up their training. However there is a problem with that, you need ships to perform trading:
Don't be scared by the "165 days" part! It's the time of learning to use all of them. You can fly your industrial and blockade runner in 18-19 days!
Warning: you have 2 free remaps and 1 remap per year. Mess it up and you are stuck with stupid attributes for a year! Beware that some of the ship skills have non-perception-willpower prerequisites, like Logistics, which is a willpower/perception x6 skill, needs Signature analysis and Long range targeting rank 5, both intelligence/memory. Learn them before remap. If you want a blockade runner, don't forget to learn Cloaking skill 4 before! It's not needed for the ship, but needed for the covops cloak that makes it more than a terribly overpriced Badger I.
A few more words about implants: you can implant all 5 attributes, increasing their values by 1-5 pt. 5x5 = 25, so having top implants have higher effect than neural remap (14 points to move). However top implants are expensive (18M for +4, 100M for +5) and can be destroyed by destroying your capsule, so I'd rather not use anything that I would mind losing and for me now that's +3 (9M). Of course no point to improve the implant on attributes that you don't use.
You can use some planner software like EVEMON, but to do so, you need to know what skills you'll use in a year. Reading this blog and starting with me assumes you'll trade, but there are many ways. Some of you will go station trade, others go haul, some will manufacture, some turn to mining, others will be full time salvagers for a fighting corporation and you can't tell now, even if you claim so, because you don't know enough. I know only what we will not use: the ones affecting fighting power, so I dump perception and willpower after having my ships ready.
Important tip: if you are not completely sure, go with an even distribution like my +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha. To see why it's superior to any uneven, let's make a calculation. You have 17 base points and will use +5 implants for sure in a year. Let's say you have 8 points for attributes A and B, that's 17+5+4 = 26 if you distribute them equally. If you learn an A/B skill worth of 1M points, it will take 25641 minutes. If you remapped for 8 A 0 B, you finish in 24390 minutes, saving 1250 mins. However if you do so and it turns out that a B/A skill fits better to your playing, learning that will take 27027 mins, losing 1386 minutes. So the cost of a mistaken uneven distribution is higher than the gain of a well-chosen one. So if the fighting is not completely off the table, just don't remap and run with the starter, 3-3-3-3-2 distribution.
PS: faction standing affects brokers fee and there is a pretty fast way to increase it, faster even than chaining courier missions for a storyline one. And it pays much better: the tutorial missions. While you probably done all 3, you can do it to a friendly faction and enjoy the derived modification. Amarr and Caldari like each other, so do Minmatar and Gallente. Doing them is super fast... if you still have your civilian codebreaker and salvager (or can use the normal ones), have "friendly faction frigate" rank 2 or carried your own frigates for the suicide missions and have empty industry slots. Otherwise you wish you'd be driving a hulk during hulkageddon in goon 0.0.
Every skill, has a primary and secondary attribute. When you choose to learn it, every minute you gain 1 skillpoint for 1 point of primary attribute and 1/2 for the secondary. It's obvious that you want as high attributes as possible for fast training. There are 5 attributes and they affect the following skill families:
| Group | Attributes |
|---|---|
| Corporation Management | Memory, Charisma |
| Drones | Memory, Perception |
| Electronics | Intelligence, Memory |
| Engineering | Intelligence, Memory |
| Gunnery | Perception, Willpower |
| Industry | Memory, Intelligence |
| Leadership | Charisma, Willpower |
| Mechanic | Intelligence, Memory |
| Missiles | Perception, Willpower |
| Navigation | Intelligence, Perception |
| Planet Management | Intelligence, Memory/Charisma, Intelligence |
| Science | Mostly Intelligence, Memory |
| Social | Charisma, Intelligence |
| Spaceship Command | Perception, Willpower/Willpower, Perception |
| Trade | Willpower, Charisma/Charisma, Memory |
If you are a businessman in EVE, the important fields for you will be Trade, Industry, Planetary management, Corporation management and Mechanic (spaceship and station manufacturing). They use Charisma, Intelligence and Memory. Trade uses some Willpower, but if you check the details, and they are fairly simple (x1 and x2 training time modifier) and also they are pretty basic, so you probably have them already (trade, retail, broker relations).
Since your skill training speed depends on your points in the relevant attributes, you set Perception and Willpower to minimum (17) and distribute your 14 free points between the useful ones, speeding up their training. However there is a problem with that, you need ships to perform trading:
- Faction industrial (Bustard): the bigger version of the T1 hauler, having 2-3 more cargo space and 3-4x more HP to transport various stuff, running several T4 courier missions at once or supporting a small mining operation.
- Blockade runner (Crane): stealth ship that can travel undetected. Has smaller cargo space than the T1 hauler but the stealth ability and double speed makes it a good high sec shiny transporter and able to do trading in low-sec. Don't even think of entering low-sec without it or heavy corporate escort.
- Freighter (Charon): 850000 m3 cargo and 140000 HP with skills. Can carry anything and can't be defeated by anything less than 12 battleships/T3 battlecruisers in high sec. Easy target in low-sec.
- Jump Freighter (Rhea): 300000 m3 cargo and the ability to use own jump drive, traveling without stargates. Necessary for nullsec operations. Please note that it has an expensive tertiary skill Jump drive calibration, but its primary attribute is not Perception or Willpower so can be skipped for now.
- Orca: Smaller than a freighter, slower than a T2 industrial, can't stealth and costs 500M. Terrible transport ship, except one that makes it a must: it has a 40000 m3 "corporate hangar". Items in this hangar cannot be scanned and cannot be looted, making it 100% pirate safe (griefers are a different issue). You can use it safely in the NPC corporation too. (thanks to Steel, Care, Testarossa, Belloche, AureoBroke for the info). It is also a perfect place for a serious mining operation, and a must if you want to mine. Also, unlike the freighter it has fitting slots and can be turned into a nasty tank.
- Logistics or interdictor: if you are in a player-run corporation you might be expected to join battles. That would need learning extreme amount of weapon skills that require perception and willpower. However you can bypass this by learning to drive a logistics or an interdictor. Despite they are just cruisers and destroyers, they are extremely useful in battles as their role is similar to healing and CC in WoW, but most players hate them as they don't deal damage, so being proficient in these will make you welcomed in most fleets. I'll learn Basilisk and Guardian.
- Hulk: it's the top mining ship. Need two skills: Mining Barge 5, that should be learned during this remap, and Exhumers 3, that is cheap, but it's prerequisites are not, nor they are P/W, so skip it until you actually want to drive one.
- Caldari Industrial 5, 992K points (already have rank 3), P/W
- Transport Ships 3, 48K points, W/P
- Spaceship command 5, 248K (already has 3), P/W
- Advanced spaceship command 4, 226K pt, P/W
- Jump freighters 4, 635K W/P
- Caldari Freighter 4, 452K pt, P/W
- Mining Barge 5, 1024K pt, P/W
- Mining Foreman 5, 512K pt, Charisma/W
- Industrial Command Ships 3, 64K pt, P/W
- Caldari Frigate 4, 74K pt (already have 3), P/W
- Caldari Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W
- Logistics 5, 1536K pt, W/P
- Retail 5, 496K pt, (already have 3), W/Charisma
- Broker relations 5, 496K pt (already have 3), W/Charisma
- Amarr frigate 4, 90k pt, P/W
- Amarr Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W
Don't be scared by the "165 days" part! It's the time of learning to use all of them. You can fly your industrial and blockade runner in 18-19 days!
Warning: you have 2 free remaps and 1 remap per year. Mess it up and you are stuck with stupid attributes for a year! Beware that some of the ship skills have non-perception-willpower prerequisites, like Logistics, which is a willpower/perception x6 skill, needs Signature analysis and Long range targeting rank 5, both intelligence/memory. Learn them before remap. If you want a blockade runner, don't forget to learn Cloaking skill 4 before! It's not needed for the ship, but needed for the covops cloak that makes it more than a terribly overpriced Badger I.
A few more words about implants: you can implant all 5 attributes, increasing their values by 1-5 pt. 5x5 = 25, so having top implants have higher effect than neural remap (14 points to move). However top implants are expensive (18M for +4, 100M for +5) and can be destroyed by destroying your capsule, so I'd rather not use anything that I would mind losing and for me now that's +3 (9M). Of course no point to improve the implant on attributes that you don't use.
You can use some planner software like EVEMON, but to do so, you need to know what skills you'll use in a year. Reading this blog and starting with me assumes you'll trade, but there are many ways. Some of you will go station trade, others go haul, some will manufacture, some turn to mining, others will be full time salvagers for a fighting corporation and you can't tell now, even if you claim so, because you don't know enough. I know only what we will not use: the ones affecting fighting power, so I dump perception and willpower after having my ships ready.
Important tip: if you are not completely sure, go with an even distribution like my +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha. To see why it's superior to any uneven, let's make a calculation. You have 17 base points and will use +5 implants for sure in a year. Let's say you have 8 points for attributes A and B, that's 17+5+4 = 26 if you distribute them equally. If you learn an A/B skill worth of 1M points, it will take 25641 minutes. If you remapped for 8 A 0 B, you finish in 24390 minutes, saving 1250 mins. However if you do so and it turns out that a B/A skill fits better to your playing, learning that will take 27027 mins, losing 1386 minutes. So the cost of a mistaken uneven distribution is higher than the gain of a well-chosen one. So if the fighting is not completely off the table, just don't remap and run with the starter, 3-3-3-3-2 distribution.
PS: faction standing affects brokers fee and there is a pretty fast way to increase it, faster even than chaining courier missions for a storyline one. And it pays much better: the tutorial missions. While you probably done all 3, you can do it to a friendly faction and enjoy the derived modification. Amarr and Caldari like each other, so do Minmatar and Gallente. Doing them is super fast... if you still have your civilian codebreaker and salvager (or can use the normal ones), have "friendly faction frigate" rank 2 or carried your own frigates for the suicide missions and have empty industry slots. Otherwise you wish you'd be driving a hulk during hulkageddon in goon 0.0.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Ever considered why WoW has no buy orders? Because Blizzard try to make sure that idiots are not exploited by people with brain. EVE is not WoW and in the market there are buy orders. If you accept those, you instantly sell. ISK now yay! - says the lolkid making sure that he'll run missions for ISK for the rest of his life (or converts PLEX).
If you want to make money with anything, the general rule is not to accept a buy order but to set up a sell order. The difference between buy and sell orders are usually large enough to let the station traders be rich. They are the guys who set up the buy orders and then resell the same item on the same station. Since they are mostly annoying 0.01 ISKers, please don't feed them. Keep the profit and the tax+broker fee for yourself: sell it yourself.
Of course there are exceptions from every rule, sometimes you should accept buy orders:
Don't! The rat poison that works on their WoW buddies get rid of them just as well: deep undercutting! Please look at that transaction log (oldest entry on the bottom):
On 2012.03.03 6:36 I sold the sole book I had for myself since I saw the price way over the buy price. It sold fast, so I chose to buy some more. These books are sold for 25.2M by NPCs on stations 5-10 jumps from Jita. The profit was 28.6*(1-0.0127)-25.2 = 3.03M on a single book. So I went and bought some, and started listing them. Sold 2 more when the resident 0.01 punk noticed competition and undercut. Since I was jumping in and out to Jita with various stuff, I could undercut him by 10K or something often, still I could only sell 2 when some guys bought them in rapid succession, probably in the 5 minutes window of the punk. So I cut the price by a million and since he did not give up, by another half the next day and in 3 steps by another half the day after. The profit for me now is 710K/book. Since then I'm selling happily, he probably choose to wait me out, or rather he had no choice since he is not transporting them himself but buying them on the station, having to pay the haulers fee and the tax of the sell between the hauler and him.
So calculate your minimum profit expectation and if you are undercut by a 0.01 punk, cut the price down to that minimum in 3-5 steps. He'll either go to hell, or you have to accept that there is someone who has better source or lower profit expectation. Of course it doesn't mean you shall accept a buy order, you can keep your sell order up for a few days, maybe the lower price increases the demand enough that his stockpiles are bought up and you sell too.
Before you'd ask why the hate against the 0.01 punk: I'm a preacher of capitalism and a strong believer that it's good for the World. The station trader is providing a useful service for both parties. The impatient seller can sell instantly to his buy order, the buyer will find the item on the station, he doesn't have to go there the previous day to set up a buy order. The competing station traders decrease the margin between the buy and sell prices, providing income to both parties. The 0.01 punk not only doesn't provide such service but discourage sellers to set up sell orders (as it won't sell as he undercuts them) and discourage buyers to set up buy orders, so he moves the market away from equilibrium, enforcing the belief that the market is something evil that doesn't serve the people. I'm also annoyed by his existence as it's pretty easy to get rid of him so his pure existence proves that most people has the trading knowledge of a toad.
PS: the pictures above also serve as moron of the day. Two can be seen at 03.04 10:40 and 03.06 22:55. Instead of buying my 26.9 and 26.2M auctions they set up buy orders for 29.4 and 28.9. Since no transporting was involved and setting up a buy order takes more clicks than accepting an existing sell order there is no other explanation than him being dumb. The biggest moron however is me at the top. I woke up to a car alarm and couldn't sleep back so I logged in. Recognized that almost all my books sold so I went to buy some more. Never do that half asleep, run some errand instead! I found some cheap books, checked that no low-sec gate is in the way and off I went to pick them up. When I saw CONCORD on the third gate in the row I checked the map. I bought the books on Torrinos, which is at the end of a linear chain. From Torrinos you can only go Yoma, from there Isinokka, from there Oipo, then Haajinen, then Piak. It doesn't need a genius to figure out ones route. Beyond Torrinos there is nullsec territory. This is the only way from there to Jita. All systems bright red on the "ships destroyed last 24 hours". Obvious pirate scouts at all gates, mixed with CONCORD. So I managed to buy 300M worth of books at the end of pirate highway to transport it in a T1 frigate. I made it. But it just makes me a lucky idiot.
PS2: Short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 1.002B (500M from gifts). Thanks to my luck. It could be 700M. Ouch.
If you want to make money with anything, the general rule is not to accept a buy order but to set up a sell order. The difference between buy and sell orders are usually large enough to let the station traders be rich. They are the guys who set up the buy orders and then resell the same item on the same station. Since they are mostly annoying 0.01 ISKers, please don't feed them. Keep the profit and the tax+broker fee for yourself: sell it yourself.
Of course there are exceptions from every rule, sometimes you should accept buy orders:
- The difference between buy and sell orders is so small that it doesn't worth fighting with the 0.01 punks.
- The buy order of one station is above the sell order of another, this was set up by some idiot or by someone whose time worth more than the price difference. This case you can transport to him.
- You sell on some distant station where you don't want to transport from or don't want to return to modify the offer. For example a miner who mined Plagioclase, refined it in the nearest station transports the Mexallon to Jita but sells the Pyrite and Tritanium nearby as transporting those don't worth his time.
- You ran out of open market order slots so can't set up more sell orders. This case find the order with the lowest sell-buy difference and modify the order to match a buy order to get rid of it.
Don't! The rat poison that works on their WoW buddies get rid of them just as well: deep undercutting! Please look at that transaction log (oldest entry on the bottom):
On 2012.03.03 6:36 I sold the sole book I had for myself since I saw the price way over the buy price. It sold fast, so I chose to buy some more. These books are sold for 25.2M by NPCs on stations 5-10 jumps from Jita. The profit was 28.6*(1-0.0127)-25.2 = 3.03M on a single book. So I went and bought some, and started listing them. Sold 2 more when the resident 0.01 punk noticed competition and undercut. Since I was jumping in and out to Jita with various stuff, I could undercut him by 10K or something often, still I could only sell 2 when some guys bought them in rapid succession, probably in the 5 minutes window of the punk. So I cut the price by a million and since he did not give up, by another half the next day and in 3 steps by another half the day after. The profit for me now is 710K/book. Since then I'm selling happily, he probably choose to wait me out, or rather he had no choice since he is not transporting them himself but buying them on the station, having to pay the haulers fee and the tax of the sell between the hauler and him.
So calculate your minimum profit expectation and if you are undercut by a 0.01 punk, cut the price down to that minimum in 3-5 steps. He'll either go to hell, or you have to accept that there is someone who has better source or lower profit expectation. Of course it doesn't mean you shall accept a buy order, you can keep your sell order up for a few days, maybe the lower price increases the demand enough that his stockpiles are bought up and you sell too.
Before you'd ask why the hate against the 0.01 punk: I'm a preacher of capitalism and a strong believer that it's good for the World. The station trader is providing a useful service for both parties. The impatient seller can sell instantly to his buy order, the buyer will find the item on the station, he doesn't have to go there the previous day to set up a buy order. The competing station traders decrease the margin between the buy and sell prices, providing income to both parties. The 0.01 punk not only doesn't provide such service but discourage sellers to set up sell orders (as it won't sell as he undercuts them) and discourage buyers to set up buy orders, so he moves the market away from equilibrium, enforcing the belief that the market is something evil that doesn't serve the people. I'm also annoyed by his existence as it's pretty easy to get rid of him so his pure existence proves that most people has the trading knowledge of a toad.
PS: the pictures above also serve as moron of the day. Two can be seen at 03.04 10:40 and 03.06 22:55. Instead of buying my 26.9 and 26.2M auctions they set up buy orders for 29.4 and 28.9. Since no transporting was involved and setting up a buy order takes more clicks than accepting an existing sell order there is no other explanation than him being dumb. The biggest moron however is me at the top. I woke up to a car alarm and couldn't sleep back so I logged in. Recognized that almost all my books sold so I went to buy some more. Never do that half asleep, run some errand instead! I found some cheap books, checked that no low-sec gate is in the way and off I went to pick them up. When I saw CONCORD on the third gate in the row I checked the map. I bought the books on Torrinos, which is at the end of a linear chain. From Torrinos you can only go Yoma, from there Isinokka, from there Oipo, then Haajinen, then Piak. It doesn't need a genius to figure out ones route. Beyond Torrinos there is nullsec territory. This is the only way from there to Jita. All systems bright red on the "ships destroyed last 24 hours". Obvious pirate scouts at all gates, mixed with CONCORD. So I managed to buy 300M worth of books at the end of pirate highway to transport it in a T1 frigate. I made it. But it just makes me a lucky idiot.
PS2: Short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 1.002B (500M from gifts). Thanks to my luck. It could be 700M. Ouch.
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