June business report

My last business report wasn't the happiest post on the blog. The linear and quadratic fit of my wealth vs time graph barely differed. While 508M/day average income wasn't bad, reaching some daily limit was scary: it would mean that you can't really make big money using your capital. You can only farm, turning time into ISK, and even if trading pays better than ratting (like 300M/hour), it's still just another grind.

However I merely reached the limits of the skillbook hauling I did back then. One of the reasons of rigorous bookkeeping is forcing you to move on. Without those charts I'd probably ran around with the same books watching my wealth grow, being satisfied by being more rich than most. But after seeing that it's nearly linear, I tossed my proven and reliable method and tried something that could end up in large loss. Well, it didn't. The wealth increase of the last month was 40.8B, 1.36B/day, about 450M/active play hour. No, I'm not satisfied. But it's definitely looking better: The difference between the linear and quadratic fit is obvious and the latter fits to the data well, both visually, and according to the R² of the fit. I'd like to emphasize how important this non-linearity is. It proves that trading isn't just the "most profitable grind", but it's providing capital-limited investment profit. The more money I have, the more I make without increasing time spent making money.

Now let's see what the fitted curves says about the future: This chart runs until 2013. Feb. 16, my first birthday. According to this, I have a serious chance to be a trillionaire before that. I'll surely have - even according to the linear fit - money for not one, but two titans. Maybe I should start a titan sitter for my backup titan. After all in EVE you shall have a spare ship to be able to return battle instantly if your first ship blows up.

However the most inspirational chart is the one that displays the logarithm of my wealth vs time:The results can be well fitted with a linear trendline. That means that the growth is actually not quadratic but - as it should be with investments - exponential with the growth factor of e^0.0276x = 1.028^x. 2.8% daily profit. That's 129% monthly increase or in other words I double my capital in every 25 days. Of course this won't stay this way as I'll soon stop being capital limited, but it's still a nice proof that trading is indeed investment and not farming.

I hope that these clearly prove the power in trading and make those of you who consider ISK-making a grind to switch to it from ratting, mining, missioning. Of course, if you like those ways, you shouldn't! You can significantly increase their income by re-investing money into more accounts doing it. It will never be like trading, but will be OK. If you are convinced and want to start getting your titan before the end of the year, join the goblinworks channel to get your questions answered. The business I currently use will be disclosed in my July 15 "blogging my profit away" post in full detail. Until then some hints: small but expensive items traded in all hubs, daily turnover, total gank safety (hauling is done by collateraled contracts).


Friday morning report (not included to the charts above): 70.4B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on Logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

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The key to riches: high re-investment rate

I got a very good comment to my Marie Antoinette post. My return on investment (how much ISK I make from 1M capital) isn't especially high, but I have an insane re-investment rate and that explains my really high income.

I mean I made 72B and spent only 3.6B on anything but making more money: 1.5B on playing for free on main for myself and my girlfriend, 1.1 spent on the Logi/Triage pilot and 1.0 on the titan pilot. The rest of the money were spent on creating more money in some way (trading, Rorqual industrial, selling a Nyx pilot). That's 95% re-investment rate.

The most obvious advice that any rich person would give you is: "spend less than you earn and invest the rest". If someone makes just $30K a year and invests 33% of it into a 5% yearly profit instrument, he'll be a millionaire in 37 years, so if he does it in his active life, he has a really nice pension fund. If someone makes $100K and settles with living on 20, investing the rest, he'll be a millionaire in ten years, and will have a 9M pension fund.

Most people don't invest so much and prefers to live a wealthy life now. Also, real life has must-be costs as you must eat even if you know that a dollar saved today is 7 dollars without any work by the time of retirement. In a game there aren't such costs. You can save almost all of your income. Most people just don't. They spend it on whatever they like or stop generating wealth when their wallet isn't empty.

Of course I'm not advocating my 95% reinvestment rate. But 50% is a reachable amount. To keep the books easy, I'd suggest a dedicated seller alt who lives in Jita. Such char can be near-maxed from 500M SP and a day running around for standings. You contract the ore, mission loot or whatever you gain by your moneymaking profession to this char. This char sends half of the income back to your main for spending. The other half stays there and only used for investments made to help you make money. It doesn't matter what way you use to make money, you'll see your income skyrocketing after this. For example you were mining but after you saved half income, you could soon start a second account for an Orca pilot who boosts, holds ore and protects your Hulk by shield transporters. If you were missioning, a logi second account can increase your income greatly. The point is to spend every second ISK you earn on the process of earning more. Soon you'll have more than you can spend.


Thursday morning report: 69.1B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

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Who won the battle?

Let's talk about an imaginary battle between Orange and Lemon alliances. It takes place at a Sovereignty Blockade Unit. Lemons enter with a 80 men Legionfleet with logis trough the gate, while Oranges have a 150 men fleet with various things from Rifters to T2 Battleships based 5 systems away on a titan. Orange FC tries to maintain close combat, bubbling the whole zone and ordering every pilot to fit a web. Since he knows that most of his fleet are rookies, he commands only a wing of battleships (mostly Abaddons) while the rest of the fleet operates under "fire at will" with the only order "if it's faster than 200m/s, web it". He calls primaries on the logis for the BS wing. The Lemon FC wants to keep distance so orders the massacre of the webbing frigs/destroyers/T1 cruisers.

In the first 10 minutes the Oranges lose about 50 various crap and some pods. Lemons are down by 3 logis. All the dead reship and return. Lemons manage to get some safe distance and start sniping the Abaddons. Orange logis can keep up due to Abaddons being tanked to the teeth and low alpha of Legions. They can't effectively return fire due to distance.

Orange FC orders the crapfleet to target and multiweb everyone whose name starts with "A" (5 Legions). These ships can't run with the rest, the Abaddons get to optimal and tear them apart. While doing this, the rest of the Lemon fleet burns out of the bubbles and kill 2 bubblers. They warp away and warp back to the other side of the battle, 60km from the Abaddons, 150 from the web-crap who were chasing them until warp. Focus on logis this time, killing 2.

The dead reship, 20 Legions warp away. Orange bubblers return and re-bubble Lemons, the web-crap is closing in. Lemons are running to the side, keep shooting dictors. When the web-crap catch them, the Legions are already at the edge bubble. They start multi-webbing everyone whose name starts with "B" and "C". The rest of the Legions keep running and take down another 2 logis. Before the Abaddons could get in optimal, the retreated 20 pilots warp to the webbed Legions in smartbombing battleships. Few seconds later the web-crap is down to a few T1 cruisers who fitted tanking modules. 80 crap ships lost with all pods. The Orange FC sees that he won't web anything again and the Abaddons can't get into optimal, so his cloaked alt lights a cyno and 10 carriers jump in 40KM from the Legions . 2 drop triage, the others send fighters to the primary. The Lemons run out of range while sniping down a few Abaddons who can't be kept up as half of the logies relogged carrier. The Lemons warp to a gate and go away.

The killboards show 210 Lemon kills including pods (7B only as Orange flies crap) and 8 Orange kills (9B as a Lemons fly top-fitted ships).

The question to you is "Who won the battle?". The possible answers are "Lemons", "Orange", "Tie" and "Important data is missing". Please stop for a while until you have your answer.

Seriously! Stop and think! Find your own answer and explanation.


The correct answer is "Important data is missing". The story doesn't tell the fate of the SBU. Hell it doesn't even tell who owns the SBU or the system! It could be a Lemon SBU and then the battle ended with Orange successfully defended their sov. It could be Orange SBU and it means they driven away the owners and now happily onlining SBUs to start removing Lemon sov. It could also be that Lemons left because they recognized that Orange don't have enough SBUs to blockade 51% of the gates, so their single SBU worth nothing and will be killed out of Orange timezone. It is also possible that either or both sides are third parties (not sov or SBU owners) who just roamed here.

In EVE many people don't play to win. The majority of EVE PvP culture is the same as the bridge-fighters of WoW: watching killboards instead of objectives. This culture is so permeating that many people don't even ask the major question: who completed his objective and who failed. If you focused on the "who killed who" aspect of the story or on the obviously bad fleet doctrines of the sides, ignoring the aim of the battle, you are subconsciously poisoned by this idiotic culture.

The fate of these people is totally out of their hand as they don't even attempt to shape the future of EVE. Since - unlike Arathi Basin in WoW - the situation of EVE can be changed by players, the future can be quite grim to them: all null controlled by strong entities and they can do nothing but wardec newbies in highsec. Or the opposite, EVE can slip into chaos with no one owning anything. Either way, it will be totally out of their control. Exactly as Sirlin said "The scrub has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win."

Of course - like all play for ego players - they keep belittling the "cheap" alliances for blobbing, calling them "F1 monkeys" or "sov drones" and show off their killboards as proof of their "skillz". But at the end they will be massacred by "F1 monkeys". The only possible outcome that doesn't end with them being in highsec shooting Ibises is anarchy in sov space, but it won't be their doing. Either alliances can't defeat each other or crumble under corp thievery and spying. While these "play for ego" players can hope for this outcome, they don't - and without changing their play can't - do anything for it.

I was bugged by some guy with idiot name on the goblinworks channel. I did not kick him instantly as his nonsense was good material for the blog. He kept suggesting to join a roaming pirate gang for fun. He even told it would be great blogging material that "Gevlon joins a pirate gang and things happened". The poor creature couldn't even comprehend that nothing ever happens in a pirate gang. They might blow ships up, they might lose ships but the dead will easily re-grind the lost ship and at the end of the day all actions will be undone. If you look at the game world the next day, you can't figure out that anything happened the day before. If you build sov or destroy it, that has lasting effect. If you destroy multi-billion ISK fleets, that won't respawn in a day. You did things. "Play for ego" PvP-ers just shot at red crosshairs, just like missioning carebears and think of themselves higher just because their crosshair had the name "Amarownzzor" instead of "Guristas invader".

Finally I'd touch the most bizarre action in EVE that can only done by really idiotic socials: self-destruct in battle. Instead of shooting the enemy, causing them some damage or covering the retreat of teammates, the social self-destructs to "deny them kills". Like anyone will care of the killboards when both them and their victim will be kicked back to highsec to camp decced noobs in Jita by those who played for win.

Obviously, there are true casuals in the game who just wander around aimlessly enjoying the scenery. There is nothing wrong with that. But these casuals don't make themselves believe that doing random things matter or make them "l33t". They probably don't know that killboards exist. They are doing their merry things which can be PvP too, but they do it for the experience itself. Not for rankings and definitely not for "tears". The general classification apply:

Question	Elite	M&S	Casual	Bored
Is he winning the game?	Yes	No	No	Yes
Considers gear, achievements, toplist position as "reward" and something that brings respect (or should)?	Yes	Yes	No	No

Don't try to misuse the term "sandbox". In a way that you'd use, World of Warcraft is also a sandbox as it allows you to collect pets or mounts or cosmetic gear. You can actually spend all your life as a level 1, fishing at Stonebull Lake. No one can question your right to play the game the way you want. But it doesn't change the fact that you are not winning (= losing) the game. Any claim that Sov wars are not equal to "winning EVE" can very easily be disproved: the Sov holders are capable to stop or even totally destroy you while you can only be thorn in their side and you only live by running when they come with force. (Note: while you can't hold sov in WH in the technical terms, I consider WH ownership an equal system ownership)

The proper meaning of "sandbox" is "you can choose how would you participate in winning": you can fly DPS and support ships, do mining, manufacture, industry, salvaging, exploration, missioning, trading and many other way. Each of them are useful in the game and contribute to the victory. The opposite, "themepark" means that only one activity (for example raiding in WoW) matters and all other activities are irrelevant-cosmetic. A pet collector gives exactly zero contribution to the success of his WoW guild, while a miner or anomaly scanner who never flies into a single battle is a valuable addition to any EVE corporation. The efforts of the carebear are not wasted because he is just running missions, but because he is not part of an entity that aims to win EVE. The same guy, under the flag of a null-conquering alliance doing nothing but the same highsec missions could meaningfully participate by donating ISK to the corp wallet and rightfully claim that "we captured NX-1234 in an epic battle" despite he wasn't there: his money was (this is an exaggerated example, he should do missions in NPC nullsec using the protection of his alliance, but you see the point).


Wednesday morning report: 67.7B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

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The character bazaar

Few days ago I wrote my character report. It's already outdated as I have one more account now. A Gallente female (character designed by my girlfriend for maximum cuteness) who will be a Nyx pilot for sale.

Account trading and Ebaying characters are bannable in all games. However in EVE you can do it completely legally. There is an official forum for trading characters. Unlike most activities in EVE, it's free of scams, since all kind of scams will be undone and punished by CCP. The rules of the bazaar is here. The buyer receives the character via character transfer, the cost of it is 2 PLEX (or E20 but I doubt any seller pays real money for that after he received billions).

Lot of people mentioned the Bazaar as income source but after reading it I had doubts. I mean most of the sellers clearly selling a character they used just stopped using. Typically someone scaling down to more casual and selling one of his characters to allow the remaining to fly without grinding. For them training up their char is sunk cost, any income is income, so they list for pretty low price. Also, exactly because they did not train with selling aims, serious part of the SP is wasted for the buyer. So it's more likely a garage sellout flea-market where people dump their trash for nickels than actual moneymaking profession. I know it's weird to call 30-40B a "nickel", but if we consider that a 100M char takes 5 years to grow up, so the buyer barely pay for the PLEX-es the owner used.

For these reasons I kept away from the Bazaar both as buyer and seller. However I felt I must try this market for blogging purpose. Found a niche that might be worthy of trying. Supercaps need a pilot to sit in constantly. Skills that he can't use in his current ship are completely useless unless the player makes a further purchase and inconvenience (and risk) to have a separate supercap sitter pilot. So a 100M pilot with 60M in various ships and guns (supercarriers have no turret or launcher hardpoints) worth exactly as much as a 40M pilot to the buyer. Please check this site that lists characters for sale according to supercap readyness: 100M chars are below 50% due to skills all over the place.

Also, supercaps are a year to learn to fly properly and most people who are chosen to be supercap pilots don't want to wait that long. Of course the proper action would be to start a supercap pilot long before you have a chance to fly one, but most people suck in planning. So they need a pilot now and ready to pay.

Finally the transfer costs is 1B (2 PLEX) so the higher the price of the sale, the smaller part you must pay. If you sell a char for 1.5B, you pay 67% of it to CCP. If you sell it for 10B, only 10%.

My plan isn't simply a 12M SP Nyx sitter (that sells for around 10B), but a real Nyx pilot. She'll have all the relevant Int/Mem support skills at 4 at least and 5 for the critical ones, including jump drive calibration 4. She'll also have fighter-bombers rank 5. I'll start selling with P/W remap after learning Gallente Carrier 4 and keep training that skill until the sale. When the sale takes place, the 1 year remap will be close or available. The char will have around 23M SP and I plan to sell for 20B+. My costs will be 12 PLEX (6B), 2 PLEX for transfer, 2B in skillbooks and 0.5B in implants (+5 set). About 10B all together.

Will she sell? Surely for some price. Surely for more than 10B. Not surely for enough to make it profitable considering the opportunity cost. We'll see. If it works, it will be a major moneymaking for me, as it's practically zero-work.

Profitability is an interesting issue: If I can sell her for 20B, I had 18% return on investment/month. If I can sell for 30B, that's 24%. Way below my current 140%/month profit. However my current activity needs active babysitting. While 500M/hour active play is awesome, calculating with 3%/day profit (that's the 140%/month), if I have 100B capital, I'll make 3B a day and it will cost me 6 hours gameplay every day. No thanks. I rather take the "lousy" 18-24% with about 10 minutes/month work, which will mean 2 hours work all together, providing 5B/hour.

Important advice for character buyers: ask when will the normal remap be available and how many bonus remaps left. The difference between learning skills on a bad and a good remap is huge.


Tuesday morning report: 66.5B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.4 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

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The expected FW-LP disaster

Everyone heard about Goons exploiting the faction warfare loyalty point system. Before you'd comment that it wasn't an exploit, let me quote Jinrai Tremaine from the goblinworks channel who told it very elegantly: "they were manipulating prices with the sole intention of affecting a CCP algorithm rather than the ingame market [of players]". CCP agrees, there are already rollbacks.

Sidenote: if you find a loophole and try to test it, simply do not interfere with other players while doing so. If the Goons would just amass 5T worth of datacores, screenshotted them and publish the results they would be the heroes of the day. They would probably got some reward from CCP. Now they look like caught cheaters crying over the lost loot.

However this post is not about bashing Goons. Not even to blame them. If not them, someone else would exploit it. And actually many did. Practically everyone in FW who openly stopped defending PLEX-es and traded systems just like the WoW players in the Tol Barad disaster. By the way I can't believe that at CCP there isn't an employee whose job is to play the #1 MMO to learn good moves and to learn from the bad ones. The funniest thing in the Goon post was that they couldn't cash out Amarr side because other exploiters always plexed the systems back. It starts to remind me of the botmaches of Alterac Valley when in off-hours both sides were filled by exploiters who were AFK-leeching on the spawn point.

This post is about how this exploit was necessary and coming from a fundamentally bad design. I mean that if you run a bank in a simple building with no guards or safe deposit or anything, you'll get robbed. The robbers are still bad guys and deserve punishment. The employees still failed to do their job so deserve to be reprimanded (like the moron who coded the price algorithm). But we can see that the whole situation was explosive and robbery could only be avoided by excellent work of the employees (what is unlikely as people fail) or especial honesty of the local population (there are bad guys everywhere).

What made the situation a powder keg waiting for someone with a cigar? Allowing players to create wealth. Players must never have any control over creating items or currency in any game. All items must be created totally independently from players who can only obtain the already existing items. Of course it doesn't prevent exploiting or cheating. However it significantly limits its effect since the only way to exploit is to gain faster (or without human effort via a bot). Both are limited by other factors, for example if you could exploit Diablo 3 making your character oneshot everything, you'd still had to travel between mobs and spend time looting and you still could only loot what the mobs had. Also, if there is a way to increase DPS, people will surely use it in PvP, causing enough forum rage to reveal the exploit in a day. Even if the exploit is PvE-only (like mining bots), if the resources are limited, players who are outcompeted by exploiters will surely inform developers (even if not in a rational way). If the exploiter creates resource, no one is directly harmed (everyone are by inflation) so no one will bother to find it and report.

EVE Online is littered by fundamentally bad mechanics where players can create items and the game hangs on devs being able to prevent players from using these mechanics differently than they "should". Some examples:

• Value is created when a player ship is destroyed: exploited by the recent Goon move, people who self-destruct insured ships when insurance payout is larger than material cost.
• Value is created via plexing FW: abused by practically every living body. I mean 100M/hour in a rifter with no risk, skillpoints, investment or anything? (the original plan was surely that it's risky and hard because of the defenders of the plex)
• Rat spawns are triggered by rat deaths: exploited by titan (bot) ratting
• Ore spawns are triggered by ore removal: exploited by mining bots
• Missions created in unlimited number when players talk to mission NPC: exploited by missioning bots, abused (not considered exploit) by mission-blitzers
• Waves triggered by killing trigger mob: abused by practically everyone and his mother to decrease the difficulty of the missions
• +6 sleeper battleship for carriers: abused by practically everyone in larger wormholes

Each of the above are attempted to be fixed by devs one by one, closing the most obvious abuse methods (titan target nerf, hunting bots, manual fixing prices...). It's only a matter of time when will someone find another loophole.

The resource creation must be fully remade to prevent such abuse: ores and rats must spawn on their own pace. Players can claim them when they want and can, but there shouldn't be any mean for them to make them spawn faster. Please note that respawing is such control. The rocks shouldn't appear faster or more in farmed systems than not farmed. It can mean that overfarmed systems run empty and abandoned systems can have huge belts. The same for rats is creating an interesting gameplay: leave a system unfarmed for a month and you'll need supercaps or an alliance-fleet to clear the accumulated rat army. Overfarm your systems and they runs empty? Time to gain some more space from those who can't protect theirs.

Missions shall be a similarly limited spawning resource. Mission agents would have an LP and ISK budget and get new batch of ISK/LP every day. Player overuses the agent: he starts to pay less for a mission. (The mission NPC loot and salvage is calculated into the payment.) Agent left alone for days: he pays a premium. The only exceptions should be career (newbie), COSMOS and epic arc missions but even they could be compensated by taking their rewards from all normal agents equally.

Waves must not be controlled by players in any way. They must be timed. If you can't loot the mission objective before the guards arrive, too bad. If you can't finish the first wave before the second, the lower level agents are your friends. If you killed the first wave in no time and don't want to wait for the second, go to harder missions or incursions. Sleepers should either hide behind no-capital acceleration gates, or have an army that can only be broken by capitals or a large subcap force.

FW must not give any form of rewards for any PvP or plexing activity. They should give access to agents and another resources, but these must exists regardless of PvP. So the agent (with properily tuned rewards) is always there but only those can access it who control the system. To reward actually fighting instead of just being in the Minmatar militia, some kind of "combat activity rate" can be on the character page and the best agents only talk to you if it's high enough.

I know it's lot of programming, but it shall only be done once and then there won't be any more exploits.

Please comment and discuss. After this idea is finalized, it's copied to the official forums as suggestion.


The moron of the week is the unnamed member of the goblinworks channel (I don't name him since he confessed himself and admitting is the first step): "I was travelling through low-sec, started to read some article on the web and forgot about eve". The next line was a link to a loss report with his podkill with full crystal set, 2.8B. Don't go AFK in lowsec!

Saturday morning report: 62.4B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 0.5 on Titan, 0.4+0.5 on Rorqual)
Sunday morning report: 64.1B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 0.9 on Titan, 0.4+0.8 on Rorqual)
Monday morning report: 65.2B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 0.9 on Titan, 0.4+0.8 on Rorqual)

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Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was the queen consort of Louis XVI of France and executed in the French Revolution. While there are serious doubts that she told the phrase "let them eat cake" when she was informed that the commoners have no bread, it's no doubt that she had no clue what is going on around her. She became an archetype of the nobles who waste a fortune while their people are in poverty. While she wasn't worse than anyone in the same circles, she still profited greatly from the politics that kept the average people in poverty and oppression. So while she might not deserved her head cut down, she definitely deserved the hate and despise of the public.

She came to my mind when I was writing the first draft for my July 15 "blogging my profit away" post. In the last week my average daily profit was above 1.5B. My income/active hour is over 500M and I won't stop until I increase it to 1B/hour. While I'm doing it, I'm blogging about making ISK and various things in and out of game. The draft of the post describing my method contained more and more "let them eat cake" ideas like "set 30 buy orders in all 5 hubs, 100M+ each" or "don't forget that due to margin trading you need cash for your buys to complete so make sure you have a few billions on every alt before you log out for the night" and "have more than one orcafleet owning hauler working for you on a daily schedule".

Are these make any sense to write down? I mean the purpose of my blog is not some Marie Antoinette bragging (where you talk casually about extraordinary things to express that these are totally everyday boring stuff for you, like "gosh, I must get my Lamborghinies washed down"). Not only because her behavior caused her some headache at the end, but because it's pointless. It's not like I can force anyone reading useless posts.

I want to show people that by trading they can get rich. But will I convince anyone if I display such wealth? If they believe that I got my money because of me being extraordinary (either as a genius or a no-life grinder) my blog has failed. I believe I'm not making anything extraordinary and anyone can do as I do. However the above comment is clearly Marie Antoinette-ish, because it's obvious that making 40B a month is huge in a game where most people (by definition) can't even get 0.5B to pay their subscription with a PLEX.

There are two possibilities. One is that I'm Marie Antoinette, just like the guy (no link found just rumors) who said "yeah I lost some titans to the Russians, but who doesn't?". This means that I'm filthy rich, my monthly and hourly income puts me among the very best. This case my business posts are generally useless and if I want to be useful, I have to post about much smaller things, like basic money management and "how to get your first 50M" posts.

The other is the community consist of two distinct groups, with one of them being much-much more successful than the other, and I'm an ordinary guy in the successful group. The best example is WoW raiding: the normal mode raids were easy and completing them gave no real bragging rights to anyone, despite only 5-10% of the playerbase did it. Completing it meant nothing more than you are not a faceroller in an ungemmed/unenchanted clownsuit. In this case it's completely normal and beneficial to post in the style that targets the elite, as the rest are the facerolling clowns and beyond hope anyway.

So please tell me: Is 10B+a month the normal thing that every decent player has (or had when he was building his supercap, can't be bothered since then)? Or is it something extraordinary and most good players are making 1-2B a month that is enough to pay for a few accounts and to replace a lost faction-fitted Tengu now and then, but supercaps are strictly alliance-level investments where lot of players work together to provide one ship to a chosen pilot? I'm fully aware that if the second option is the correct one, I'm already Marie Antoinette for not knowing, but the first step of fixing something is recognizing it.


Friday morning report: 61.6B (1+2 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on logi, 0.5 on Titan, 0.4 on Rorqual)

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EVE Character report

The idea of this post came from Poetic Discourse, a report what accounts I have and what my characters learn, what are their plans, and so on. I hope my plans help you make yours. And that your comments help me refine mine. If not, move along, nothing to see here.

1. • My main, Gevlon Goblin. +4 implants, 6.4M skillpoints.
     My training was erratic at start, since I assumed I'll make money with Industry skills. Then I made a remap to perception-willpower too early. Lesson to learn: don't remap your first char in the first three months. No matter how much you read, no matter how smart you are, this game is too complex to make a plan with that knowledge. I'm currently locked in my P-W remap and have to deal with it. I'll learn the skills for the ships I'll use in rest of my (foreseeable) life:
     1. a Basilisk with logi 4 to play with my girlfriend and to join high-sec incursion for fleet practice.
     2. a Charon freighter
     3. a blockade runner
     4. an Orca which I'm already flying
     5. a stealth bomber to pick up shinies in lowsec
     My future is clear: Jita will be my home and Science and Trade Institution my corp till the end of days. I'll make ISK for further ventures. After I finished the ships, I'll remap for more trade skills and to be able to start working with research agents. I want to explore that business, but above all I want to use those agents as 1-click storyline mission farmers. More storyline: more standings.
   • Hek alt who practically never leaves Hek - Boundless Creations Factory. +3 implants, 1.0M SP. A picture tells thousand words: Future plans: finishing trade skills (Accounting 5 is missing among many other 5s). Then learning research skills to work with the agents to trigger storylines and some passive income from datacores.
2. This is the home of three nearly identical characters: the traders of Amarr, Dodixie and Rens. They all have +4 implants, 2.2, 1.6 and 1.6M SP. The one in Rens has an interceptor that is now collecting dust in the hangar. Future plans: finishing the trade skills, learning R&D. While they have much to learn, their training will be completed in a year. Then I move one of them to another account and into the slot one learning pilot and close one of my accounts, saving the PLEX. No point having an account where no one learns skills. Of course this can change, maybe I'll pick up manufacturing, but that's unlikely as I already have my hands full with trading.
3. • This account was was started with the plans to fly a titan. Then I realized that I need to live in null before jumping on a titan, so put in a Guardian logi. Then an Archon triage carrier. Recently I realized that the titan is totally incompatible with the previous two ships. I mean I started with an Int/Mem remap to learn support skills. Will continue with P-W to learn the ships, then back to Int/Mem completing the support. That's perfect for Guardian and Archon, I'll be ready to fly the Guardian soon with Logi 4 while learning Logi 5 and the Archon skills. But what about the titan? If I learn the hull after the Archon, I'll fly a low-skill Archon for a year before I sit into the titan losing 10M SP that I spent on logistic skills. If I perfect the Archon, I can't remap back to P/W before my second birthday and then I've wasted 25M logi SP. I have to realize that the titan just don't fit in. Some dreams are too bold to pursue. So the logi/triage pilot has +5 implants, 4.5M SP, all of them Int/Mem support (besides the Cybernetics 5 that is the last remaining learning skill in the game). I'll finish them in 25 days, then learn Amarr Cruiser 5 and Logi 4 in another 25 days and WH/null, here I come! In that remap I'll learn the Archon and if the FC requests, a shield logi. Without such request I can go triage in 173 days. The timescale of this game can't stop amusing me.
   • My now unemployed Jita transport interceptor alt. In the very beginning I hauled with a T1 frigate, and did not want to hold my main down for a month, so when moved to interceptors, rather created the alt here. +3 implants, 1.2M skillpoints.
4. • While I'll fly in null, I won't stop being an industrialist there. So my Rorqual alt has born. Still in newbie phase, with only 0.8M SP, +5 implants.
     100 days learning of Int/Mem, then 76 days to learn all my ships to rank 4: the Rorqual (it can dock, like carriers, right?) the Obelisk freighter and the Anshar jump freighter (picked them for highest HP, comment if it's a bad idea and other race is better). After this comes a 45 days learning of Mining Director and Wing command to be able to boost a mining fleet. It is followed by 95 days of industrial skills, needed to compress ore. After this I learn all relevant skills to 5.
   • With +3 implants and 0.5M SP sits on this account the former CEO of The Voice of highsec. Only corporation leading skills. Will be good later if I'll ever have a corp.
5. As I said, the Titan couldn't fit into the logi/archon plan. But if you trade and get 2 PLEX worth of money a day, there is no such thing as "too bold dream". So meet my fifth account with only one character: my new Ragnarok pilot. Having 0.3M SP he is ready to conquer the +5 implants first, then the rest of the World.
   101 days of Int/Mem and Int/Perc support skills, then 131 days of Perc/Will and I will have Minmatar Titan 4 and can fly a totally useless titan. Then I'll learn the leadership skills. The length depends on how many different fields needs to be boosted. There are 4: armored, information, skirmish and siege, each takes a month to learn. Warfare link specialist is another 20 days. I don't know if I need fleet command to be fleet booster. To have that to 4 is 2 months, 40 more days to 5.
   After having the needed fleet boosting skills, I go back P/W for titan 5 and doomsday. Finally back to Int/mem to get a jump portal generator to complete all support skills. (note: if I'm in an alliance the FC might be able to convince me to get an Avatar instead. Or a Leviathan. Not an Erebus. If you don't have a dozen of that already, I'm not looking for you)
6. On the top of my own accounts, I give a PLEX a month to my girlfriend, as it would be stupid to pay for it with real money and she doesn't like EVE trading - yet. I lured her into the game to play together, but she wanted to quit soon since in this game she can't play with a "pet class" and without pets, an MMO can't be fun. I gave her a present box containing 10x Hobgoblin I and some drones skillbooks. Since then she is happily using her Rokh as a drone platform for level 2-3 missions. Please don't comment. She started all games so weird way, refused to learn from others, figuring everything out on her own.
   With +4 implants and 6.1M SP, she will finish support and "essential" drone skills in a week, and remap P/W to learn Dominix and Rattlesnake. Then she'll remap to M/P to learn the drone skills. Like, all of them. A Thanatos carrier is among the long-term plans. A supercarrier is not. When I told her it can't dock, she lost interest.

Together my characters have 18.9M SP. So it's absolutely not true that players who join later can never catch up with veterans. The skillpoints you can spend on one ship are limited. Not even the oldest veteran can have Logistics rank 6. Having more points allows one to fly more ships. However you can do the same by using different accounts and as a bonus fly together. In less then a year I'll be over 100M SP being able to fly a triage carrier, a Rorqual, a Ragnarok titan, a jump freighter, trade, research, do industry. One more benefit of the multiple accounts, besides being able to fly the ships together (giving fleet boost with the titan and healing with triage): since I'm busy with one char, I can let the others run an optimal remap and stay docked. Obviously if the titan char would be my only one, I would need to learn skills for whatever ship I'm flying, and these points would be learned on bad remap and also they would be wasted when I get into the titan. One more silly myth about EVE is down! Don't be afraid of "being hopelessly behind", join!


Thursday morning report: 61.4B (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on logi, 0.5 on Titan, 0.4 on Rorqual)

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Sexist trolls are not sexist (and not trolls)

From time to time the gender issue comes up on gaming blogs, usually fueled by booth babes or female avatars wearing string bikini "full plate armor". The posts are usually trolled with insane amount of sexist comments. If you are dumb enough to participate on any non-moderated forum or chat, you shall expect sexist, racist, anti-semitic, homophobic and similar crap. Various feminist, anti-racists and similar organizations call to arms against the rampart sexism, racism and similar activity with little effect. It seems the "internet culture" is beyond repair.

I think the reason of failure is that the starting point is wrong. The troll leaving sexist, racist, homophobic message is not sexist, racist or homophobic. Neither he is a troll. He is an idiot and a loser.

In Hungary, you can't see a political post without comments about "Galician trespassers". It's a codeword for jews. The phenomenon is the favorite starting point for anti-racists to cry racism in the major media. They have funny charts counting how many idiots commented about "Galician trespassers". I have a much more effective solution to the problem: I ask the commenter where Galicia is and when the "trespassers" arrived to Hungary. I've yet to get a single correct answer. They usually say

• east of Romania (that's Moldavia) after the first World War
• North-Italy or north of Italy (that's Dalmatia) when Mussolini got into power
• Spain with any random year number (these guys just hit Google but unfortunately the first answer isn't the one they should look for. Same for Wikipedia, the correct answer is at the "Galicia (Eastern Europe)" link)

So these "racists" don't have a clue about their "hated enemy". Why are they hating them then? Because they need a group that is worse than them to make them look more than what they are: useless idiots.

To be racist, sexist, homophobic, one must have some kind of philosophy. One that is based on ideas, misinterpreted, generalized or simply false facts, but still, a set of ideas that are not logically conflicting with each other. To be such person, you have to be a thinker, even if a bad one.

The ones we encounter aren't thinkers at all. They just picked up some code phrases "jews control the world economy", "women want to take our jobs", "muslims are terrorists". They have no idea what they say or why they say it. They just do because they need some group to look down.

You can't convince them that they are wrong, since they aren't convinced that that they are right. The words they say have no importance to them, they don't believe in the genetic inferiority of women or blacks or jews. The words they say are just tools to say what they mean: "someone sucks even harder than me". They can't say "X sucks harder than me" since it could be disproved. But a distant and large group like women or jews perfectly serve the purpose.

The feminist or anti-racist trying to silence these statements has no hope to win as they are battling with code-words ignoring the meaning. To silence them, you must answer to what they mean and not to what they say. The proper answer to "women are good for nothing but sex" is not "no they are equal people". The proper answer is "you are good for nothing". I managed to silence several "racists" simply by asking how the jews removed them from their jobs. They soon disappeared after the questions got into the direction where they had to answer "I don't have profession as I did not finish school". Those who were dumb enough to answer became laughing stock after revealing their lack of qualifications to get any decent job.

This also answers why games themselves are generally more accepting than unstructured social spaces: if a player rants about anything, someone will surely dig up his stats for a good laugh. So in a game he would naturally get the right answer (you suck n00b) from other players, without them even thinking about the importance of their answer. His reason for posting that sexist/racist rant was to belittle others to look better but got belittling responses, so he stopped.

The short version is: any competitive environment where a loser can be belittled (or even better, pwned) naturally weeds out the "someone suck more than me" posts that usually look like sexism (women suck more than me) or racism (blacks/jews suck more than me).


PS: I'm obviously not thinking that there are no real sexists or racists. However they don't comment idiotic nonsense, they write thought-provoking posts that need serious thinking to counter. They are thinkers who are wrong, not morons.

The blog has been updated with table of contents, see it next to the goblin face!

Wednesday morning report: 60.0B (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1+0.3 on Rorqual)

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You can't help the M&S

I was fighting against morons and slackers since the birth of this blog. I was proving that those who can't progress are not "undergeared" or "casual" or "newbie" but simply dumb and lazy people who deserve to be left behind. My blog slogan is "It's more fun without morons and slackers". I keep saying that social people, the ones who want to be loved and respected by peers give freebies to the M&S keeping them alive. They make themselves believe that the M&S suck because of things out of their control. It was disproved by many successful players and some of my projects like the "undergeared" was doing the same. One thing remained: the socials keep believing that while the M&S is maybe responsible for his situation, they can become better people. All they need is ... a little help (more freebies).

Since I'm playing EVE, which is dubbed as "the most harsh an unforgiving game", I'm constantly doing the opposite what I was doing in WoW. No, not about money, I'm collecting pretty nice amount disproving that a newbie can't do anything alone in this game. But with all the suggestions and philosophy posts I keep defending "carebears", claiming that they need more help and protection from the "evil griefers" who are the biggest reason for their misery (and never their own inability to think, read or act). While most readers guessed I'll be in GSF in a week with my philosophy I turned out to be yet another "bad-bad griefer" crying carebear.

My holy crusade to save the M&S from "factors out of their control" peaked in creating the Voice of Highsec. It was perfect in every possible way:

• It had an obvious way of being successful: CCP listen to CSM and votes = CSM seats.
• It was selfless. I would not profit from it in any possible way, the opposite, I sacrifice an alt spot to level up corporation management, I did the administration and the angry Goons would hunt me
• It was current. The forums are drowning in Hulkageddon tears.
• It needed very little from the "unlucky poor ones". I mean they have a very successful real life so they have little time in a "stupid pixel game" and that little time is seriously taxed by having to spend hours crying on the forums. So it would be unfair to ask them to donate ISK or participate in any activity, let alone take any risk. All they had to give is an empty character slot or a non-undocking alt, something that every carebear has (there isn't really much reason for a PvE player to spread his points between various alts except to bypass manufacturing/research/trade slots)
• It was anonymous. They did not risk any in-game or social consequences of giving support, as no one could link the joined alt to their main
• I competed no one else, I entered a virgin field. There wasn't any CSM or community support for carebears (EVE-Uni is trying to teach them to be better instead of supporting them as they are). It's not like I was competing with other, better projects
• I am not some random Tom, Dick or Harriett whose (otherwise good) plan won't work. I have one of the most read blogs in the community. CSM head Selene commented on it several times. I am linked and quoted in EVE24. I have my own channel with 50-100 people every day. Hell, I even got a congratulation mail from The Mittani for my blog. If I don't have the critical mass to make difference, no one has.

So you might guessed, the "poor victims of ganking, the casual players with rich real life and those who are simply not assholes" were swarming under the flag of the Voice of Highsec to finally make EVE a better place.

If you are a social you guessed. That's why I built this leftist dream. Well, it's time for you to face the numbers:

• 912 people checked the project page. No, they aren't just random visitors of my blog, they explicitly clicked on the page link.
• 598 people read the post on the official forums.
• 249 google hits going to various forums, blogs, community sites that discussed this idea, giving it even more visiblity
• 10 members in the corp after a week. If we subtract myself and those people who sent me a mail telling that while they live in null, they wanted to give their support to me (not the project), we get 5. Maximum 5 real carebears were ready to make a few clicks to support an organization that was created for the sole purpose of helping them.

Do you still believe that you can help them?
Do you still think that they are victims of factors out of their control?
Do you still hope that they can be better than useless crap full of entitlement?
Do you still waiting for some miracle to happen or are you ready to jump into a Trasher and give them what they deserve?!


PS: the corporation is obviously closed down and you won't find any more "save the carebears" posts here. And no, they weren't troll, I did not know how it will end. I did the "support the weak" thing as as seriously and good as I could, just as a real bleeding-heart socialist would have done it.

Tuesday morning report: 59.4B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)

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The wardec system is/was/will be unfair to Goons!

The blogosphere is uproar that CCP "rushed to save" Goonswarm from Jade Constantine. They call CCP on their "obvious favoritsm" that allow a 10K alliance to wardec a 100 man corporation and disallow the latter to gather mercenaries in any number near 10K. What can it be than blatant and total support for Goonswarm?

Obviously if two powers are at war, the bigger wins. This is true in nullsec sov and real life. From this the people generalize that "bigger is better". Goons are big, so the system favors them, right? Completely wrong!

The discussed wars take place in EVE highsec. There are no objectives like towers or stations that one side must defend or lose the war. The only activity in highsec war is killing each other. You can't send cyno-reinforcements or fly capitals, so the tools to win an encounter (battleships, strat cruisers) are available to every pilot over 10M SP. Blobbing barely works as almost every systems have several gates and stations to dock. If you form a blop, you might kill one pilot before every enemy knows to run and hide. Also highsec is full of neutrals who can be alt-scouts openly following your blop, reporting it on a channel and may even trolling it in local while the blop can't do anything besides suicide gank it. The most effective highsec war elements are 2-3 men roams. These are available to corporations of all sizes, except the family-sized ones.

Let's calculate the number of wins and defeats the two corps have. For simplicity, let's say that ships fly only in "units" which can be 1-man, 2, 3, whatever, but they only fly in this size. Also, let's assume equal player, pilot and ship strength, so a 1 v 1 battle between units has 50-50 chance. Let's introduce the value P, the chance that a unit is present in a random system. It is proportional to the sizes of corporations. Please note that P is pretty low as there are about 1000 highsec systems and even the largest corporations can only have a few hundred players in highsec at the same time. So we are looking at P in the range of 0.001-0.1. The chance that any given time a 1v1 battle happening in a certain system is P₁*P₂. The chance of a 2v1 battle is P₁*P₁*P₂ while a 1v2 is P₁*P₂*P₂. If we translate it to a huge (P = 0.1) and a small (P = 0.001) corp, the results are:

• 1v1: 0.1*0.001*1000 = 0.1 battles (the 1000 comes from the 1000 systems). Half of them is won by the big corp
• 2v1: 0.1*0.1*0.001*1000 = 0.01 battles, all won by big
• 3v1: 0.1* 0.1*0.1*0.001*1000 = 0.001 battles, all won by big
• 4v1: 0.1*0.1* 0.1*0.1*0.001*1000 = 0.0001 battles, all won by big
• 1v2: 0.1*0.001*0.001*1000 = 0.0001 battles, all won by small

So big wins 0.1/2+0.01+0.001+0.0001 = 0.0611 while the small wins 0.0501 battles, which means 55% wins, 45% losses to the big corp, despite being 100x bigger. OK, this is small difference, but still, bigger is better, right?

To continue, you have to recognize that most combat in EVE are ganks. Players can exist in two form: a hunter looking for reds (or even suicide targets) in a PvP-fit ship, or a prey sitting in an ISK-making ship (miner, hauler, ratter/missioner). You can only skip the prey phase by buying ISK via PLEX which is not an option for the average player as on average players buy as many PLEX as they sell. The above create three kind of corporations:

• Wolf corporations: they only have members who are hunting. They get ISK from loot, PLEX or out of corp alts.
• Lamb corporations: mostly highsec "bear" corporations whose members never or rarely hunt. Mission runners, miners, group of friends.
• Mixed corporations which has both kind of pilots and ships.

Imagine a war between a wolf and a lamb corporation. The damage the preys cause to predators is zero. They lose every battle. Since the chance of a 1v1 "battle", 1000*P₁*P₂, is proportional to the size of both corps, the larger either the lamb or the wolf, the more damage the lambs suffer.
Here the small (P=0.001) corp can be both the lamb or the wolf. If we increase the size of the other, the amount of ganks grow. Coming from the obvious fact that only wolves declare war, it's completely fair that wardec costs depend on target size: the more targets you want, the more you should pay.

Now comes the interesting part: wolf vs mixed and mixed vs mixed. Actually it can be discussed easily with a separation: The mixed corporation is half lamb, half wolf. Let's calculate the winrates for both small and larged mixed vs wolves for various size differences:
While the size gives a few % increase in the winrate, the corporation composition makes much larger difference. Increasing the size of the mixed to 100x bigger than the wolves increase their winrate from 25% to 27. Increasing the size of the wolves from 1x to 100x of the target only increases the winrate from 75% to 78%. Size barely affects the winrate. Of course it strongly affects the amount of battles and how it feels: for a combat pilot increasing sizes means more targets, for a PvE pilots more ganks.

Finally we have to notice that the Goonswarm isn't at all overpowered. Actually they are desperately undepowered even with the fixed ruleset. With the unfixed, "dogpiling" situation they were facing extinction. Why? Because nullsec corporations can't be pure wolves without exposing a near-pure lamb. Everyone must do some industrial activity for ISK. Even PLEX-ers must haul their items as ISK can't fly. They can't just keep their lambs in neutral corps since then their own members/allies would shoot them down in their own null, not knowing that they are their buddies alts. They could create one neut corp and tell their members to not shoot them, but for a 1000+ alliance it's totally impossible to keep this secret, the real name of "Goonlamb inc" would be outed in a day and wardecced by everyone. So all nullsec corps are mixed.

On the other hand a highsec corp can split into wolf and lamb because in highsec CONCORD limits aggression on neutrals. Also, in highsec you can keep your "lambs" in NPC corps immune to wardecs. We can assume that any highsec corp that is willingly enter into a war is pure wolf, keeping their farming alts/friends in NPC and carebear-disguised corps.

The above means that anyone wardecced by Goons can get Goons farmed by inviting pure wolf mercenaries. The mercenary size has little effect on the fact that Goons are farmed with 75-77% ISK efficiency, it only matters in the total damage of the war. Actually the ISK efficiency can be much worse as Goons who come to highsec are probably mostly haulers, so their wolf:lamb ratio can be worse than 1:1. With the dogpiling strategy the huge mixed Goons were facing a huge wolf force meaning farmed in huge scale.

The current wardec system is unfair towards null/low corporations and favors highsec PvP corps regardless their size. Of course the highsec PvE corps are always on the receiving end, but the recent changes increased their safety a lot. They can now only be wardecced by professional wolf corps, as another (bigger) mixed corp (an unfriendly lolbear corp or even Goons) are afraid that the bears stay docked while their mercenaries farm them. Even pure wolves are better off not declaring on carebears, as it would mean that the bears are docked while their mercs are fighting around 50% winrate. Instead they should wait until some dumb mixed corp declares someone and jump in as merc for 75% winrate.

Jade Constantine was never in danger from Goons. The Goon foreverwar may force him to leave his mixed corp, but allows him to sell his membership to any wolf corp, giving them opportunity to farm Goons.

The only way out of this for Goons is to form a small pure-highsec-wolf branch, a corp with well-paid pilots sitting in combat ships with the only purpose to hunt in highsec, having neut-scouts and all. This corp could wardec in the name of the Goons.

The Goonswarm itself (or any other nullsec corp) should not declare war on any highsec corp (and it's even risky on anyone else) because of dogpiling. While the new rules made it harder to dogpile, it's still possible: If your corp is decced by nullsec corps, tell your members to quit and move to a new corp. Invite an alt to the corp and make it the CEO. Set the war mutual with 1T surrender cost. Then open up the recruitment for every player in New Eden with the recruitment slogan: permawar with Goons, join and kill them! Soon your only problem will be learning Sovereignity 5.


Saturday morning report: 53.9B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Sunday morning report: 55.7B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Monday morning report: 57.3B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.6B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Join the goblinworks channel for trading, hauling, crafting discussions.

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Blogging my profit away #2

Well, if you expected some wonderful tip to make a billion a day, you'll be disappointed. Despite my income increased significantly since the last blogging my profit away post, made 30B in the last 30 days, I have nothing great to tell you, besides the fact that with 480M/plex and these prices, I made E1100 in a month which is above the median income in my country.


At first I was still selling the same books as before.

Secondly I noticed that the Badger II can be sold for 2M but produced for 1.1M, since the material prices already fell after the speculation bubble, but manufacturers did not restart. So I mass-produced them. Was good till it last:

I also noticed that coolants, which I produced on my planets were selling for 1000 ISK cheaper in Rens and Dodixie than Jita. So I set up buy orders and got the thing hauled to Jita. That was some really good money. But good things are not meant to last:

Sending several freighters to Jita may have something to do with this.

I started a really idiotic business. It has good profit but only limited volume. It's the only advice today I can recommend:
Finally I have my "experimental" business. It pays well but I can't still approximate its value. I don't write about it yet simply because I change it all the time, learning it. I already see it's huge, but also that there are much bigger players than me in it, so maybe we simply destroy the profit soon. I hope I can give you a report next month.

If someone cared to check my daily report, you could see a serious setback yesterday (I mean I made only 400M instead of the usual 1B+) and a huge jump today. The reason is that I made a full revision on my business, removed lot of items from my lists and sold them on Jita for discount just to get rid of them. While they performed OK, I recognized that half of my items are doing 80% of my profit, so the other half simply don't worth the time. As I added items to my lists day by day, I reached the unacceptable point of spending 2.5-3 hours a day with business. Even if I made 1.2B+ (that's 400M/hour), such no-lifer style can't stay. From now on, I'll insist of keeping my business hours below 1.5/day, even if it costs some income. I use the gained time to do more research or simply play. If I want to move to null/WH, I must not spend my game time in Jita. Due to the liquidations, my cash was all time high at 11B, and I invested it in the experimental business.

One great thing happened to me, thanks to my blog: a professional freighter player, having multiple pilots for cargo corps contacted me after my Orca post and offered a mutually profitable business. Instead of me learning and flying an Orcafleet, I just courier contract my stuff to him and he transport them on the same day. For 1.5% of the cargo value, I get my supply chain moved via fully collateraled contracts. Saved me the Orcas and some transporting time (as the interceptors move only if there is an unscheduled cargo due to some new item), saves me from grief-gankers and provides him nice "free" income as he already has Orcas moving in this path.


Friday morning report: 52.5B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Join the goblinworks channel for trading, hauling, crafting discussions.
Support the life in highsec by supporting our lobby organization!

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Spotlight bias and a mining Rokh fleet

We were talking about nullsec industry on the goblinworks channel and they kept re-iterating a problem: even if you "own" sovereignity not only in the system but in everything in 10 jumps and you have Cyno jammer in the system and everything in 10 jumps and stations where you can undock from and a titan sitting under the POS shield with pilot an Alt-Tab away, you still have to stop mining when the first neutral shows up in the local channel.

Hulks are extremely vulnerable and that one neutral can be a scout with covert cyno generator or simply the enemy can have a half dozen stealth bombers logged out in the system, so if you don't jump instantly, you have all your Hulks dead. Hell, he can be totally alone and still kill 1-2 Hulks. A single guy AFK-ing in a cloaked T1 frigate acts as "system wide mining jammer".

My answer was simple: a mining Rokh fleet: Note: if you don't have perfect skills, replace the cargohold with another co-processor. If you don't have Caldari BS 5, replace a shield extender with another invu.

The mining Rokh mines 1000m³/minute and has 180K EHP without boosts. With a Rorqual under the POS shield as fleet booster, and a Tengu AFK-ing below POS shield providing Shield links, you'll be busy emptying the cargohold all the time while sitting under 200K EHP. If the system is cyno-jammed, and you have some friendly AFK-ers sitting in local (the enemy don't know who they are, they can be cloaked titans) you are safe to mine.

One guy in local? Turn on tanking modules and mine on. Maybe call back the mining drones and send out the Hobgoblins if you are jumpy.
You only need to warp if local spikes or he actually commence an attack. In that case you don't actually warp, just align, let the Hobgoblin fleet kill that guy if he tackles one Rokh and warp away.

I considered "problem solved", but it was not. Actually I faced the same thing on the channel what I saw when I introduced the transport interceptors: "they will be killed". Since Rokhs are one of the most tanked subcaps in the game, they finally visioned a 50+B Tengu-fleet with covert cynos and warp scrambling stealth bombers and they were completely sure that the mining Rokh fleet will be killed.

No doubt that the fleet can be killed. Just like transport interceptors. Or fully tanked and really empty Orcas in highsec. Or supercap fleets. Yet they are usually not. You are killed in EVE in two cases:

• If you are an easy target
• Someone is especially after you

Mining Rokhs deep in a cyno-jammed enemy sov are not exactly the easiest target that a roam-for-fun would imagine. At first most roam-for-fun can't even kill them. A small gang can't even kill one if they have a cloaked Basi sitting on 70km. A medium fleet can find much-much juicier targets than them. If someone is sporting in a serious fleet they have much better ideas than jumping on 300M mining ships with 200K EHP. The gain (killing a few Rokhs) is not even near the risk (bubbled by cloaked interdictors, a capital fleet undocks and tear you to shreds).

I couldn't imagine why are they unable to understand it. I mean they aren't retards. Just like the people who were sure that I'll lose my transport interceptors in a few days if they fly with 50M (they are happy for 3 months flying with 500M). They were not idiots in the sense of telling factually wrong things, they just considered a 0.01% chance to be 100%. If you are not stupid or explicitly go for trouble in EVE, the chance of death is equal to be hit by lightning. It does happen. But very rarely.

The solution - again - was in the social psychology books: the spotlight bias. It says that an average (social) person greatly overestimates his visibility. The typical study is giving them a lame T-shirt and ask them how would people react. They are all sure that "everyone will laugh on me or at least think bad of me". However when they are placed into a group, and later the group is questioned, large majority of them can't even remember the T-shirt. Because they can't care less about the T-shirt of random Joe.

While they accept that a mining Rokh is not exactly every pirates dream, social people naturally focus on the second possibility: they want to get me. Because they care about me. Because everyone in EVE will know that I'm mining in a Rokh and will have top priority to kill me. The truth is obviously the opposite: no one will give a damn.

The deep reason behind this bias is the core idea of being social: "I'm important". No, you are not. Unless you do something spectacular (or spectacular failure), no one will care about you. This is something a social is unable to accept.


Finally, based on this finding, let me suggest a basic design guideline how to change Sov mechanics to serve as "conflict drives": make null sec safe from small gangs!

• Make cyno jammers jam covert cynos. Make cyno jammers have their own cynos, so any blue can jump to the cyno jammer itself.
• Remove logout-hiding: if you DC/logout, your ship docks in the nearest station. If there is no  station with docking rights in the system, it does an emergency warp and stays there, scannable, destroyable. So if you log out in enemy space, you find yourself in your clone station if the owners are not especially lazy or dumb.
• Create gatecamping towers. These towers generate a 100km wide warp block bubble centered on the gate, are equipped with automatic station guns with about 200 DPS and send a message to the alliance channel "Gate tower at [system] near the [gate it is anchored] is engaging [player] in [ship]". It has relatively low shield HP (about 5M), if the shield is down, it can be hacked to stop functioning until the owners come back shield rep and re-online it. Such towers could be anchored to wormholes too.

With these changes one is more or less safe in his own sov/WH. They will have a home worth living in. A home that feeds not only the corp leaders by moongoo, but the players themselves by mining/ratting spots. Currently the sov space is worthless as the "owners" feel just as unsafe as in a random lowsec system. You know, too many imaginary covert Tengufleets are hunting personally them.

With the "safe sov" they will utilize it. They will like it. It will feel home. They won't want to lose it. They will fight for it. Others will want to take it. A 1000+ battle at your service!

As a design criteria I would say "Sov system is broken still there is a single serious K-space alliance that doesn't want sov".


Thurstday morning report: 50.2B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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The importance of world persistence in MMOs

The corp and especially the faction standing affect broker fee, I wrote it several times: BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding). But elevating standing isn't a trivial job. If you double-click on a faction, corporation or agent in your standings page, you see the list of missions and their rewards in % form. A good mission gives around 5%. That is either a once-a-lifetime COSMOS or datacenter mission, or a lucky storyline you got after 16 normal mission. An average one gives around 3%. You might assume that to raise it to 100%, you need 33 missions (or actually 33*17 = 561), but it's not true. The standing change is not equal to this value. The standing change has diminishing returns: change = base_change * (1 - current_standing/10). So the actual % to accumulate for a certain standing is:
The broker fee (calculated with zero broker relations here) has an own diminishing return against standing. The combination of the two: the fee vs missions done is really-really diminished: It's safe to say that there is no reason to decrease it more after 200% collected. Don't forget that all the "cheap" ways to get standings (datacenter, cosmos, career agents) are all included, the further steps are laborious collection of 16 missions for a storyline.

Yet when I had nothing better to do and realized what I'm doing, I did some missions for standing. My last action was doing the Sisters of EVE epic arc with the Hek station trader alt. It provided 8.4% faction standing at the end, after 46 missions. Not really stellar. Gave some lore (that I could read on some site) and it was definitely more fun than another 16 distribution missions. But what was the point? I mean the opportunity cost on these missions probably larger than the gain on the broker fees over years. Yet I did it. OK, I was bored, but I could have started a WoW alt, or join faction warfare or RvB.

I was thinking why I choose this way of spending time, instead of some farming activity (I can't trade more than I do, I'm limited by capital and the lack of Orcas, the time demand of my process isn't high). Then I realized that the faction standing and the broker fees will stay with me forever. I mean the guy who got the same standings when the servers came up 10 years ago can still use them. They did not go obsolete, unless he choose a different path (turned pirate for example). The "progressing characters in a persistent world" was a basic idea among MMOs. It surprisingly worked on even me. Did not make me OCD about maxing it out (9.996 is rounded to 10.00), did not made me to care about it when I had something better to do, but when I was bored and open to random ideas, I was drawn to gain faction standings.

Surprisingly EVE remained the most true to the "progressing characters in a persistent world". You constantly gather skill points and your standings can't be lost either. You can lose ships and even implants but they are consumables anyway. Vanilla WoW had it and people swarmed to play it. Then they made a reset with Burning Crusade and people kept coming slower. Then they decided to make a reset every content patch in WotLK and the people stopped coming. Finally they introduced between-patches nerfs creating a "you'll get something better in a week if you wait" feeling and the people were leaving in masses.

After running after those silly standing percentages I'm not sure that the downfall of WoW had anything to do with content difficulty or even the dances. Maybe it was just taking away character progression.

I think "streamlining" the EVE skillpoint system allowing carriers to be learned without faction battleship 5 would be a similar mistake. You can be sure I really believe it as I'm training for carriers and I don't have Amarr BS 5. I would gain several weeks by the change. I still tell CCP: don't! Messing with anything that mean character progression can break the magic. I can't tell where it breaks. The Burning Crusade did not break it for Blizzard. But finally it will break.


Wednesday morning report: 49.8B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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The wonderful Orca

You might notice that in the last two weeks I'm near or above 1B/day profit. The market I'm working now is still in experimental phase but clearly has potential. However it's strongly limited by my transporting ability.

You know that in the first months I made my 4-600M/day by hauling skillbooks between Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and most recently to Hek in specially fitted interceptors. These things start to warp when the cloak animation is still on, so a pirate must have the reaction time of a hawk and lot of sensor boosters to even target them. They also have warp core stabilizer and enough EHP to survive a smartbombing battleship. So it's safe to say that they are practically uncatchable.

The above is true as long as we talk about a pirate who is out for some loot. It's absolutely not true if someone is out with the aim to catch me. It's hard, but clearly not impossible. It needs at first lot of observation on gates on trade routes, finding the names of interceptors traveling there daily. Then he needs a team with a forward scout, several sensor-boosted frigates with warp scramblers and an alpha Tornado. No one will bother to make this effort to catch 7-800M worth of cargo, since in the same time each of the participants could catch several autopiloting T1 industrials with 2-300M cargo. So my skillbook industry was safe and so is yours if you start building your business empire by hauling small but valuable stuff in an interceptor.

Hauling 5B of cargo is very different. Not only because the loot/time_spent_preparing is maybe above shooting idiots on the Perimiter gate. But because catching a 5B interceptor is "cool". I mean if the one of you blow up 10 autopiloting morons with 300M cargo each, no one gives a damn. If the five of you blow up one ship with 15B cargo, you'll get to the Evenews24 and the kill of the week of Jester and God knows how many forums, despite the loot/time/person is the same. Battles where 50B value is lost are forgotten in a day. The legend of the 22B Kestrel is immortal. So if someone assumes that you are flying around with such cargo, you will be shot down, no matter how careful you are. If someone wants you dead in EVE, you'll die. Your skills, knowledge, fit and care won't make any difference in that. They make difference in the cost of the gank. If you are an idiot autopiloting an unfitted Kestrel on the Perimiter gate wardecced, it will cost a few minutes. If you are really good, then a small team of pirates will spend a week setting up the trap. But at the end of the week, you'll be dead.

The above issue places a cap on hauling profit. You simply can't fly with anything above 2B in a small ship, and I'd say 5B with a freighter/fully tanked battleship. This is a lot if you are starting up. But I'll reach that cargo in a month and I definitely don't want to stop my profit from growing. Some of my profit is station-traded and the rest is distributed between the various routes. The limiting factor is the Jita-Dodixie path because the cargo of Jita-Dodixie, Jita-Hek, Jita-Rens, Amarr-Dodixie, Amarr-Hek, Amarr-Rens are together here.

Enters the wonderful Orca. It's an insurable T1 ship that has 200K EHP with cheap fittings. But it's more than just a 700M battleship. It has a corporate hangar array. This is 7 different hangars with the combined size of 40K m³. They are unscannable and drop no loot. No loot, no piracy. Griefers can still gank it, but for what? They can't be sure that it had anything in it and above all they can't prove that it had. If they go to some forum with a kill report and claim that it had 20B in the hold, they can write a page of circumstantial evidence, but the only response they'll get is "cool story + an empty orca bro". People don't want to believe that someone else scored big, so to force them to accept, the griefer must provide an API-verified proof. It can't be done if the target flies an Orca.

If you are planning to do some serious business empire based on hauling, you must have Orcas. Since they are damn slow, you need more than one. My current plan is to have one for my Rens, Amarr and Jita interceptor pilots. This way the Jita and Amarr ships meet on Inaro, they put the cargo into one of them and both of them fly to Dodixie. This way two ships are flying one jump behind each other, so the griefers can't even guess which has the cargo (or need two suicide squads). In Dodixie they meet with the Rens ship (which has the Hek cargo too). They exchange cargo with each other, put off and pick up the Dodixie cargo and turn back.

As soon as these three alts have Orcas, I can finally put the experimental business into working stage and introduce it to you in the "blogging my profit away" post of July. So if you want a piece of that, go start learning for Orca.


Tuesday morning report: 48.8B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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The voice of highsec

About a month ago Jester was upset how unprofessionally CSM7 handled a "town hall" meeting. I responded "The people never get politicians they want. They get politicians they deserve. They usually get them by inaction, letting a loud minority have the control. Stop bitching over the incompetence of CSM. Whatever they are is your fault. And mine of course."

I thought a lot how could we get better "politicians". The standard answer to anyone bitching over bad politicians is "start a party and do better". It's a mocking advice. Politics need lot of resources. Also, no matter how honest and fair you are, how much devoted you are to an idea, why should anyone believe you? You are just another stranger, telling the same panels as known liars and thieves.

The reason for the delay between that post and this, is that I couldn't come up with better idea than going for a seat in CSM8. And it's a bad idea. Not only because it would be hard to convince anyone that I'm not just another guy who wants (the pathetic pixel imitation of) power, but because few things I hate more than endless meetings and chatting over nothing. Also The Mittani is right how these things go: "The CSM is not about spreadsheets. The CSM is about persuasion, deal-cutting, and political nuance. It is not a job for a saint, someone on the autism spectrum, or someone who doesn’t understand why a quiet word in a dev’s ear after a night out drinking is more effective than days of formalized conferences. If you want to get things done, you must be able to read body language, understand how CCP itself works as a business, and determine who the most influential people at the company are." No thanks, reading the body language of a drunken guy is not my dream activity.

So me in CSM is out of the picture. What now? It took some time to find the answer: a lobby organization, The voice of highsec. Read the permanent page and join our movement to make highsec, PvE and crafting a better game. Let our voice be heard!


Saturday morning report: 43.6B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Sunday morning report: 45.5B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
Monday morning report: 46.5B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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Idea: streamlining EVE blueprint market

The blueprints in EVE are a mess. They can be originals (that can be used forever), they can be copies (with limited amount of usages), they are on various levels of material efficiency and time efficiency research. For this reason the blueprints can only be traded in contracts and usually handled by the manufacturer himself. While people sell their blueprints, it usually happens when they quit that production chain.

The above mess provides an artificial barrier from entering the production industry. You need to research your blueprints before you can start producing anything. To see how complicated this is, read the comment section of this post. To end this mess I suggest the following changes to the blueprint handling, in order to allow blueprints to be simply traded on the market system, sorting them easily instead of digging in public contracts.

There are certain "magic numbers" of ME: 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and certain magic numbers of PE: 0, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. If a blueprint has these numbers, it can be "decoupled" into "Design sheet" and "Efficiency sheet". So right-click-select "decouple" on a BPO that has ME 16 and PE 20, you get a DSO16 and a ESO20. They are two separate items. If you do the same on a BPO with non-magic numbers (for example ME 17, PE 21), you get a warning window that continuing this action will result in rounding down to the nearest magic number (resulting DSO16 and ESO20)

Performing decouple on a BPC (ME 16, PE 20) which had 10 remaining licensed runs will result in 10 pieces of DSC16 and 10 pieces of ESC20).

Currently a single blueprint can exist in maxME*maxPE*maxrun forms. After decoupling we get lg2(maxME)+1 forms of DS and maxPE/10+2 forms of ES. These can be traded on the market. So if you click on the "Badger mark II blueprint" item group, you find the following items:

• Badger mark II design sheet original 0
• ...
• Badger mark II design sheet original 512
• Badger mark II design sheet copy 0
• ...
• Badger mark II design sheet copy 512
• Badger mark II efficiency sheet original 0
• ...
• Badger mark II efficiency sheet original 50
• Badger mark II efficiency sheet copy 0
• ...
• Badger mark II efficiency sheet copy 50

That's 36 different items but the number can be tweaked by changing maximum or step size.

From the sheets you can re-make the blueprints with the "couple" function. To make it work, you must select a DSO and a ESO to receive a BPO, or a stack of DSC and an equal stack of ESC to receive a BPC with number of runs equal to the stack size (limited by max possible runs). You must recouple the sheets for research, copy, invention or manufacture.

This change would create a living market for blueprints where people can easily enter, either as buyers of lower quality blueprints, researching them for re-sale, or by buying the blueprints off the market to start production. This could be gained without taking anything away as you can use your BPs the old way, never decoupling them.

Friday morning report: 42.1B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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Idea: making EVE-mining interesting

Mining is considered the most boring activity in EVE. You just sit and watch floating rocks, pressing F1, F2, F3, sometimes moving cargo to a jetcan or Orca. No wonder that it's botted or done AFK. Let me introduce a system that makes mining a much more engaging activity: the remote mining control module.

The module has two parts, a sender and a receiver. They are matched together during assembly. The receiver is low-slot module, the sender is high-slot. The receiver can be fitted on exhumers and mining barges. The senders can be fitted on everything except exhumers, mining barges, Orcas, Rorquals.

The mining starts with the miner flying the exhumer to the belt and activating the receiver. Doing so ejects him from the ship. No one can jump in the ship, not even himself. The ship justs sits there and switches on all med and low slot modules (which should be tanking modules) as long as capacitor allows it.

The miner re-docks and re-ships to something that has the sender module and returns. As soon as the sender ship gets in 50km, the link is established and the mining ship is acting semi-automatically. If the active ship has asteroids targeted, the mining ship approaches the nearest and starts mining. If the cargohold is over 80% and the active ship has a jetcan, Orca, Rorqual targeted the mining ship approaches it and unload the ore.

The point is that the miner, instead of pressing F1-F2-F3 is flying a combat ship defending the barge. He must be in 50km or the mining stops, and must command the barge by targeting asteroids and cans so it still needs the same active presence as mining now.

Activating the sender module orders the mining barge to warp to the nearest available station and dock. This is the only way to reclaim your mining barge, therefore the barge can only be deployed in a system with a station with docking rights. If the mining barge is warp disrupted, it keeps being aligned to the station and tries to warp until the disruption ends or the ship is destroyed. If the ship with the sender module is destroyed, the mining barge becomes derelict and can be boarded.

Overheating the sender module orders the mining ship to overheat low and med slots. Since it's a command signal, the sender module suffers no heat damage from overheating, the mining barge does.

The deployed mining barge has the same tanking abilities as it would with the pilot sitting in, but the autopilot obviously performs worse than a good pilot, for example if the ship has shield boosters, it runs constantly, neuting itself. Also the receiver unit takes the place of a cargohold expander or mining laser upgrade, making the yield lower. The guarding ship also has to sacrifice a high slot, making such duos weaker than two actual players. However it would still be more engaging than pressing F1, F2, F3.

Via this system mining can be made more interesting to other PvE players, by making belt rats stronger and/or more frequent. The player would be practically ratting, keeping him busy instead of just watching rocks. Of course ratting in a decent place should have much better ratting results, but this would be mixture of mining and ratting. You would have more yield mining only, you would have more kills ratting only, but this way you have a bit of both and the income from the combination can be higher than any of the activities done alone.


Thursday morning report: 41.1B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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Insurance system: welfare for bad PvP-ers

It's usually considered that EVE is a place where you must own up your losses. That's not true in several cases, thanks to the totally messed up insurance system. It doesn't have any characteristics of a real insurance and serves only as welfare for bad players, especially bad PvP-ers.

There are four trivial rules that an insurance system must keep:

1. You must pay insurance fee to get payout on a loss: Can it be any more trivial? Not in EVE, where you get the 40% for free, without paying anything to the company.
2. Profitable, or at least neutral for the insurance company: the insurance companies make profit from getting more insurance fees than they pay out for losses. In EVE, about two times more ISK paid on ship losses than the players pay on fees. (if you have a link to the CCP Diagoras stat please comment, I can't find) This introduce ISK to the system, causing inflation. Inflation is "the tax of everyone", so the community pay for the losses the bad players suffer because of being bad.
3. No payouts for self-inflicted losses or losses suffered due to serious negligence. If you burn down your house purposefully, the insurance company won't pay. If you get injured during extreme sports, they won't pay either. In EVE the only CONCORDED players are excluded. The others are reinbursed for looking for trouble and finding it.
4. The fee depends on risks. In every real insurance, you pay depending on your personal risks. The health insurance is cheaper for a 25 years old healthy guy than for a 50 years old fat manager. In EVE if you never lost a ship in 8 years, you still pay the same fee as the guy who lost 3 dreadnoughts this month.

This must end! The community and the smart players shall not carry the bad ones, especially those who looked for trouble. I suggest the following changes:

• Get rid of the 40% welfare payment! If one pays no insurance fee, he shall receive nothing.
• Introduction of "risk ratio": this is a value on the character sheet, it's calculated as decayed insurance payouts divided by decayed insurance fees. If you paid 100M fee and got 50M payout your ratio is 0.5. Old fees and payouts are decayed by 5%/month so making newbie mistakes at the start won't haunt you forever. Also there can be a fixing factor, about 50M/month extra payment is calculated into the formula to prevent one loss to destroy the risk ratio. Please note that the risk ratio is unaffected by uninsured ships.
• If a guy has 2x higher risk ratio than another guy, he must pay 2x higher fee for the same insurance. It naturally means that for some people the fee is higher than the payout on loss, making them ineligible for insurance. They must wait until the decay and the 50M/month fixing factor decreases their risk ratio.
• The base cost is calculated to make the insurance system ISK-neutral. If the insurance company gets into debt, they rise the fees to get to zero again.
• Looking for trouble should make people ineligible for payout. This includes: being concorded, killed by faction police, killed while having can-flipper timer, having less than -5 sec status at the point of loss, participating in faction war, mutual war, or in a war where you are aggressor or mercenary, being an attacker on a non-red, dieing to someone who had kill rights on you. The insurance company shall send you a notification why they refuse to pay.

Just because you can PvP, it doesn't mean you shouldn't bear the consequences of your actions. Fixing the insurance system is necessary to make EVE more fair (= harsh, unforgiving).


Wednesday morning report: 39.9B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on LCT, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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