Make the botters/RMT-ers pay!

The Team Security panel reiterated the lenient policy of CCP towards botters and RMT buyers. If we consider that they ban thousands of accounts every month, it's somewhat understandable that the don't want to lose large portion of playerbase who went "a bit" bad. They have zero tolerance on client hackers and RMT sellers though.

The legitimate players of course demand a harsher approach towards RMT buyers and botters, who harm their income, making many income sources, especially mining unprofitable to actual players. I think I know a middle way that both serves the interest of CCP of keeping customers who just slipped and the interest of players to get rid of botters and RMT (if there are no buyers, there are no sellers).

The solution is to mark every account who used to receive a temporary ban for minor violations and also their identified alts. These marked accounts should have two restrictions: characters can't be transferred away from them and they can't activate PLEX (or timecode or buddy invite reward or whatever) to buy subscription time. Because of this, the RMT buyers and minor botters can no longer fund their account from illegally obtained means, they must pay real money to CCP to continue playing. They can sell PLEX to get ISK of course.

Why would it work? Because it would remove unfixable players without removing too many fixable ones. To understand this, we must understand what makes the difference between these two groups! There are four ways of handling EVE subscription and ISK income:

1. Paying money to CCP
2. Farming
3. Cheating
4. Abandoning EVE

From these we can have 4*3*2=24 preference orders. However we don't have to list all 24, just those who had "cheating" at the first place, as everyone else did not cheat but went with their first option:

• CPFA and CPAF: the change will have no effect on these players as they would choose paying anyway if cheating is not available.
• CFPA: they will murmur as they are forced to pay instead of farm their account, but won't cancel and we don't care about the murmur of cheaters.
• CFAP: they will abandon their account and they are the only collateral damage.
• CAPF and CAFP: these players must be lost because they are beyond fixing. They choose that they would rather leave the game than play in any legitimate way. If you could make cheating impossible, they would quit anyway. So temporary bans can't fix them, they will keep cheating until banned.

The above can be scaled to infinity. I mean botters usually not only bot to fund their account but also to get ISK for ships. RMT buyers are probably do not only buy ISK to turn it into PLEX cheaper than CCP price but also to get ISK for ships. Forcing them to pay for their account properly would not stop them RMT/bot for their ISK. However those who are caught second time could be marked for "+1 PLEX": it means that in order to keep their account running, on the top of the subscription fee, they must buy a PLEX too. They receive this PLEX to their hangar, so they can sell it for ISK legitimally. If they still bot/RMT, they can be "promoted" to +2, +3, +4. Sooner or later they reach the point where they get enough ISK from legitimate PLEX sales to stop getting ISK from cheating.

Actually the above can replace temporary bans fully, applied not only to minor cheating violations but on those who receive temporary bans for foul language, harassment and so on. The idea behind PLEX is that the free players provide positive content to other players who pay their subscription in turn. Those who provide negative content should not get this privilege. On the contrary, they should compensate the other players for suffering them. And via PLEX they will. These troublemakers would have to pay for more and more PLEX-es after each of their infractions. These PLEX-es will be sold for ISK, the price of PLEX will decrease, making it more accessible to others, practically forcing the bad guys to pay for the subscription of their victims.

Read More

I told you! (and mining changes and CSM8)

I've been telling it since the start. I started telling it when no one else did: the money is in highsec. Now, it's official: This graph was presented at fanfest, the dots represent systems, their sizes show the production and destruction in them. You can see that most production happens in highsec. This is where people make their money, either as full-time highsec players, or low/nullsec alts. Low/nullsec is only a place for PvP. Luckily CCP recognized it as a problem and the new devblog pair shows changes to nullsec industry and mining, making it more profitable than their highsec counterpart. They even addressed the AFK mining problem a bit! More on mining on Thursday.

The most important is not the set of improvements of mechanics but the below declaration of CCP Fozzie: "We intend for mining to become a major plank of many financially successful nullsec empires, and we encourage those empires to begin planning how they can best integrate miners into their plans for universal domination." Yes, they clearly want to change nullsec from "PvP or GTFO" where a frigate lolroamer was valued higher than an industrialist.

This will make large changes in the nullsec empires, as not all of them have a philosophy that allows integrating industrialists. I seriously doubt for example that Goons will be able to attract miners into their ranks. TEST will fare much better. The PL-NC.-N2S block is a wildcard, they clearly can't invite miners into their alliance but have the ability to protect a pet alliance from roamers, as they can advertise it as "have your Rorqual in the belt with tank and a cyno and we'll counterdrop anything they can drop on you". However I think the biggest winner of the change will be the "drone Russians", and I predict a strong cloalition to reborn from the ashes of SOLAR. You see, on the East there was always lot of ratting and gun-mining, they were the least polluted by the "don't give a damn just blow things up" attitude.

Besides these very welcome changes to the economy, it's time for celebration over the CSM8 too. I had a post which candidates would be best for facilitating changes like this: in the first 6 positions I suggested voting for Ali Aras and the wormhole 5, in order to represent people (newbies and wormholers) who make money where they live. Half of them get on the CSM, that's great. To the next 3 positions I suggested Mangala Solaris, Psychotic Monk and Korvin, two of them got in.

So all in all, things went the way I wanted them to go, which makes me a happy goblin.

Read More

Why EVE is the best MMO?

You probably seen that I just whine on features of EVE Online. The economy is a mess, the players are dumb even to WoW standards, I can have 100x more kills than the most "elite" alliances via ganking, I can afford 3 titans now, it's too easy, blah, blah, blah. But still, here I am, playing EVE Online, "the terrible game". Why? I couldn't even answer it myself. Then one of the developers, CCP Soundwave answered for me:

"Players are not entitled to success, the pinnacle is coveted by many players, but many more will fail on the way.
CCP is perfectly fine with the fact that 99% of their players will never own a Supercapital, the fact that most aspiring sky marshals will never lead entire alliances into battle, and the fact that most spies will never infiltrate to the highest orders of their targets to deliver a coup de grace. That’s fine. Not everyone is a winner, famous players are famous because they are exceptional in some way. What is important is that players are able to form a goal and dream. They should also know they are not entitled to success though, and must be willing to work harder or smarter than their peers if they want to achieve it. EVE will not hand consolation prizes to the losers, but if they did something right, there will be natural rewards waiting for them."

Other MMOs want to make every drooling moron and slacker wear the top items, kill the last dragon, have every achievement. EVE Online is the only MMO out there where winning and losing exist and players meant to do something for winning, not just logging in and waste time. Mechanics can be fixed, features can be added if the core is solid. WoW has much better graphics, much faster fixes, much better balance, but the core is rotten: ilvl 9999 for /follow.

If you want to experience a game where "being a winner" isn't automatic and given out to everyone, come, play EVE Online!

Read More

Making mining more interesting

After doing more than 80 mining missions I can see why mining is considered "not fun": your presence at the keyboard makes little difference. While it's not zero, it's small enough to not reward the player attention. Above all: miners want to mine, and not rat, so various ideas how to force them fight red crosses would all be bad as if they'd like to do that, they wouldn't mine at all. I don't say that belt rats have no place in mining, but they must be secondary to the mining itself.

That being said, barges and exhumers could use a pair of utility high slots and maybe a tractor beam range bonus, to be able to tractor in and salvage killed belt rats. You can kill the belt rats while AFK via drones and there is no point slowboating to loot them. However a tractor and a salvager would allow active miners to get some income on the side. Also, why there are rats in the belt at all? There is nothing there but ore! Sure they want the ore! So let's spice up the rats with miner spawns: a rat Venture mining our ore and not attacking. When full, it slowboats some time and warps. If you manually order your drones to kill it, you made yourself some ore from the loot!

A larger drone bay would be great to reward active playing, as switching between self-defense drones and mining drones for larger yield would be possible.

But enough of the rats, let's turn to mining itself, without huge reprogramming. Currently the ammunition of the mining laser is bound to the asteroid type. If you are mining veldspar, you should have veldspar crystal. Very interesting choice. Instead - like every ammo in the game - the mining crystals should affect the attributes of the "gun". Let me list some mining crystals, all affecting every type of ore equally. These crystals should have ice harvester versions too:

• Standard crystal: like today the ore-appropriate crystal or ice harvester. Every other crystal in the list is compared to this.
• Sniping crystal: half yield, optimal up to 60km, so you can mine some while approaching.
• Pulse crystal: 1/4 cycle time, 1/4 capacitor usage, 1/5 yield, it's for mining with low capacitor.
• Long crystal: 3x cycle time, 3x cap usage, 4x yield but provides no ore if the cycle is interrupted, the asteroid runs empty or the ore hold can't take the full amount.
• ECCM crystal: 75% yield, you don't lose target on the rock if jammed
• Sweeping crystal: 75% yield, stops cycling as soon as the rock is empty
• Thief crystal: 75% yield alone, gained normally when you end your cycle. When any other mining laser on the same rock ends its cycle, you get half of its ore. If multiple thieves are present the victims still get half and the other half is equally distributed among the thieves. Using thieving crystal is not a crime, but it has a very distinct color, making sure that other active miners can notice and respond. AFK miners on the other hand are fair game.
• Anti-thief crystal: 75% yield, protected from thieving. No distinct color from normal crystal. When the thief ends his cycle, he gets no ore and his miner stops with the message "an anti-thief laser on this asteroid destabilized your laser". The thief still gets half yield of any other lasers if they end their cycle while the thieving laser is active.
• Boost crystal: 50% yield. Every other mining lasers on the same rock receive 10% yield increase. Not cumulative.

With these, miners would have something to do: switching crystals, tractoring and salvaging, switching drones which would increase their income greatly above AFK miners. The existence of thieving crystals would force AFK miners to give up 25% yield using anti-thief crystals all time.

Read More

6-8M/hour for a fresh newbie while AFK (20M for a veteran)

Have you ever heard of mining missions? You probably didn't even know such things exist. If you'd ask an expert who knows the game in and out, he'd say these are horrible things where you have to warp to the mission area with a combat ship to clear out mission rats, warp in with a mining ship, slowboat 20+ kms with a 100m/s barge, jetscan mine, warp in with a hauler, slowboat with the hauler, do it with 1-2 more runs depending on hauler size. All this annoyment nets about the same LP/ISK than a combat mission without loot and salvage and 3-4x more time. Just forget it.

The expert was right until the mining barge buff. The tank buff made them able to easily handle rats and the ore hold buff removed the hauler from the picture. Now a lvl4 mining mission is: warp in a retriever piloted by a few days old pilot, slowboat once, launch drones, start mining, go AFK, dock, profit.

Yes, dear readers, the mining missions were not changed after the mining barge buff, despite now they are just as easy as AFK ice mining. I mean literally. I've ran more than 80 lvl 4 mining missions in a 0.5 system, AFK-ing for long times and only lost one barge, due to not launching drones.

The average completion time of these missions is almost an hour for a horrible skilled newbie (how I started them). A veteran with Orca boost can go up to 20 mins/mission. The payment is about 2.5M ISK and 5.5K LP, with mining connection and negotiation skills on 4. I could cash it out with implants for 1000 ISK/LP, so the income is around 7.5M/mission. (Note: 1000/LP is a baseline, you can get better ISK/LP, check http://lpstock.ru) It translates to 6-8M/hour for a few days old newbie and up to 20M for a serious veteran. Please note, that unlike FW orbiting it doesn't need any more knowledge about the game than the tutorial gives. If you can mine veldspar in a belt, you can do an L4 mining mission. All you need is Drones 4 and 4 T1 hobgoblins besides basic mining skills.

Mining missions beat belt mining in every aspect. No large volume stuff to transport, you don't have to take gates, you can't run out of asteroids, no competition can show up and gankers must scan you down first in your mission, then they must slowboat to you from the mission entrance (flashy pirates can't do that as faction police will come). So mining missions: AFK and easy as ice, safe as grav site and pays better than any highsec ore.

Tips: unless you are bound to Caldari space (due to standings), go elsewhere. The Guristas use ECM, which mean you have to retarget the asteroid, which is hard while AFK. Fit your retriever with civilian shield booster, full yield in lows, rigs should be resists against the rat damage profile. Of course you should never AFK-mine in an untanked Retriever if your implants worth a lot. The ship is cheap and ganks are practically non-existent in mission deadspaces. While the mission ores have various names, they are flavored normal ores, so you can use T2 miner with crystals. Mission reward depends on system security, mission in 0.5-0.6! 16 missions proc a storyline which gives high faction standings and good loot. The mission cannot be completed with the ore in the ore hold, must move it to the hangar.

The missions have various names and flavor texts but there are actually 6 missions, defined by the ore to mine:

• Polygipsum: (Arkonor crystal). This is the nastiest mission, reject it if you can. There are 8 asteroids to mine, so you have to retarget 4 times. 44800m³ ore, you have to dock twice.
• Green Arisite: (Gneiss crystal), 1 asteroid, 50km from the entry point. 44800m³ ore, you have to dock twice. The best method is jetcanning the first half, keep mining, dock when complete. Then refit the Retriever with nanos, 1MN MWD and a tractor beam, so you can get your can with much less slowboating.
• Geodite: (Crokite crystal) 2 asteroids, 30 from entry, each having 22400m³, mine one, dock, mine the other.
• Oeryl: (Dark Ochre crystal), 1 asteroid, 44800m³ 15 km from entry point
• Ice: you need ice harvesters and the income/hour is lower than ore. The solo asteroid is 15 km from the entry and only 20000m³, so can be completed without redocking.
• Gas: this is the best ISK/hour without doubt and also needs just one dock. It should be completed in a Venture. Mitigate rat damage by orbiting at 500 and have medium extender, DCII, civilian booster, invulnerability field. The Venture has space only for two drones, but they eat the rats slowly.

I doubt that it worth upgrading to Mackinaw, as its yield is only 5% better, you can't really use the larger ore hold (as 44000m³ still doesn't fit in) and its much higher price might attract scanning gankers.

I have to add, the scenery is great, lot of artwork was done on it, much nicer than belts. Not like you'd watch it:
I don't know how much time till CCP rebalances mining missions, but until then, if you are mining anything else in highsec, you are doing it wrong. Expect some nice mineral and especially ice product price increase. I mean it really takes an idiot to AFK mine for 4M/hour when you can AFK mine for 20M/hour in a much safer place. While ice miners aren't really paying attention, I still expect the ice belts to empty and mining missioning stations to run full.

Read More

The big EVE trick

What is an easy game: where everyone can achieve what he wants easily.

What is a hard game: where you can only advance by becoming better and if you suck, you can't advance.
EVE is known to be the hardest MMO, with the infamous learning curve image:

The forums are full of tears of defeated, scammed, ganked players. EVE players who stood their ground are proud of themselves and look deep down on everyone else, especially WoW players. On the other hand many amassed large wealth and good killboard without much effort, showing it's an easy game. What is going on here?

The trick is that EVE - unlike all other non-trivial games - is not competitive. In a competitive game you can only progress by defeating other players. It just gets harder as you progress. To get to 1200 ELO from 1100, you just have to defeat 1150 average ELO players. To get to 2200 from 2100, you have to defeat players with average rating of 2150. On the other hand in EVE, you are never ever forced to or even rewarded for facing other skilled players.

You can gain ISK by very simple market moves, capitalizing on the laziness and dumbness of the masses. You can gain lot of kills by slaughtering miners or dumb players jumping into your gatecamp. Most "elite PvP" videos are about someone roaming around killing ratters (mostly bots).

The game is punishing mistakes and winning is mostly using the mistakes of others. Two players who aren't making mistakes are practically unable to hurt each other. You can't gank me, but I can't gank you either. However we can easily gank those who orbit a piece of ice while AFK. So the game is punishing bad players, while it's not at all demanding on the good players. So everyone who invested enough time to learn the game and not a total moron can "master" EVE and feel a winner. It's like swimming: if you can't swim, it's pretty harsh thing to be in the water. But if you learned it, it isn't hard.


PS: Tomorrow comes a business post. I've found an imbalance of a PvE system which allows you to gain lot of ISK with little effort, similarly to the old FW imbalance. Considering that the devs aren't famous for fast fixes, I predict some serious price changes in several game items, especially ice products and some people getting their titans in a few months. The best thing is that it's totally newbie friendly, so even few days old newbies (not few days old alts of informed players but real newbies with no meta-game or game mechanics knowledge) can use it. Of course they won't get titans with their one account, but they will have their faction battleship before they can sit in it (hopefully they don't fly it lowsec on the day they can).

Read More

Burn morons

Burn Jita happened again, with lot of dead freighters, jump freighters, industrials and retards. Goons claim the destruction of several hundred billions of ISK already. Ships explode left and right: The Goons are spreading fear among the "pubbies" and make sure that they are known to be the unstoppable boogiemen of EVE. No one is safe from them.

I don't believe in boogiemen so instead of cowering docked, I put their "unstoppableness" to the test. I filled my Orca with double-wrapped packages, surely full of valuable goodies and did several trips in an out of Jita and the nearby systems that had high kill count. For days nothing happened, the monsters from Deklein ignored me. You might think I was just very-very lucky, but on Sunday my "luck" ran out as a Machariel and others started to bump me and Tornados shown up the overview on the Perimiter gate in Jita. A stranger convoed me too:
As you can see, after scanning my ship, the "unstoppable boogiemen" choose not to attack. Could they muster the force to take down my Orca? Probably. But there was no point as the cost of the gank would probably be too high for the lottery of the double-wrapped goodies, so what was inside will remain secret.

The "real boogiemen" would damn the cost and would just gank out of principle. But there is no such thing as "real boogiemen". The monsters are created in the mind of the morons and slackers who are unable to understand risk and reward. They fly their loot pinatas and cry "monster" when they are robbed. They don't see that the robbing wasn't random and was motivated by the loot or prestige value of their ship. If they wouldn't be dumb, they could easily fly something that doesn't worth ganking. Highsec is safe, as you can limit risks to the point where you don't really have to care, but the gankers would lose way to much to proceed:
If everyone could fit ships and calculate loot values, there wouldn't be ganking at all. Every gank victim is a fool who made himself a target. You can fly safely in the middle of Burn Jita with 40 seconds aligning brick.

Read More

Pay to socialize

There are two known payment methods for MMOs. One is pay-to-play. World of Warcraft is a common example. You pay subscription and for that subscription you can participate in the game. You pay the same amount as everyone else, therefore the developers have no reason to prioritize you. The game is completely fair. The common problem with pay-to-play games is that the only way to increase income is making the game more popular and it can only be done by moving towards the most common denominator: idiots. Such games are usually "accessible" meaning trivial. Sometimes they are outright childish, like WoW by moving towards the "kung-fu panda WOOT!" kids.

The other payment method is pay-to-win, with World of Tanks being the common example. Here your wins and losses depend not on play skill or even play time, but paid money. For money you can buy outright overpowered items which allow you to massacre your non-paying peers. This method is usually more successful in the short term, the common saying is "going F2P doubles revenues", but usually gives much shorter lifespan since sooner or later even the dumbest guy recognizes that he cannot win without paying and also, grinding hopeless randoms for money loses its appeal fast.

"Pay for vanity/convenience" is another method, League of Legends is a good example, but World of Tanks is moving this way in the recent patches. Here you can play the game for free fully, but paying slows down grinding time and also provides "fun" items.

EVE Online seems to be different from all.

• It's not a subscription game, as gaining enough game credits to buy PLEX to play for free is trivial task, a few planets and some random missions can generate that money in a month. You can also access vast amount of game currency by spending real money on PLEX.
  
• However it's neither pay-to-win, as spending lot of money on a ship is the way not for victory, but becoming a laughing stock who lost the purple ship.
• Since there is no defined "progression" in the game, there is no way to shorten "the grind". If you get yourself a titan pilot and a titan on day 1, it won't make you recognized as an accomplished player.

What is the business method of EVE? What is the secret that keeps the "most evil, un-fair, hard and unforgiving" MMO running for so long? I mean every MMO loses subscriptions after they get old but EVE doesn't. The solution came from thinking more about "nullsec-altruism". The solution is that in EVE you are most profitable alone. This is a consequence of the "you are never safe" design doctrine. The more PvE players are together, the bigger target they are. Also your ISK/hour is damaged by idling while chatting. But the worst thing is that if you are in a group, sooner or later someone comes up with the "great" idea of "having some PvP fun" which is a total moneysink. If you are in a PvP alliance, that's the largest moneysink that can only be approximated by asking "how much would it cost to defend our sov by only hired mercenaries?".

You can make ISK by playing totally casually and badly. Playing generates ISK, not consumes. In EVE playing with others costs you ISK. You either make this ISK by also playing alone or by converting PLEX. This is a really effective business model: "pay-to-socialize". When you are "having fun", you don't mind losing money. When you are alone, you are compensated by ISK income, motivated to keep playing.

"EVE is real" is more true here than anywhere else. Life isn't that expensive. Socializing is.
You go out on a party, that needs gifts, expensive drinks and so on.
You want to date a girl? You better get enough cash with you as you'd better bring her to a "good" (read: shamelessly overpriced) restaurant.
You want to date as a girl? You better buy some new clothes, accessories, jewelry and visit a beauty saloon.
Don't want your coworkers think of you as a loser? You better buy a new car.
Want to keep in contact with your relatives? That's lot of gas to travel and lot of gifts.

I'm rich IRL because I don't spend on these. I'm probably rich in games not because I do something extraordinary (I don't), but because I don't waste it on social occasions and also I have time to make money as I don't waste it on socializing in the game.

There is a common belief, "the rich man is lonely because greed makes him unable to love". It's not true. The truth is that the a-social person will unavoidably gets rich as he doesn't waste on socializing.

Read More

Disproving religions

The problem of religions has troubled me since I know my mind. I always looked at religion as superstition, however I had to accept that I can't disprove such beliefs. This annoyed me seriously. No matter how much philosophy I've read I couldn't find any reasonable proof about the non-existence of the supernatural. I was looking at the wrong place and for the wrong question. The solution was in meta-gaming, cheating, playing to win and the question wasn't even about the supernatural.

The "created" World is far from perfect, full of disasters and mass murderers. Why there is imperfection in the World created by a perfect God? Because of free will. If I can't make decisions, there is no "I", free will is necessary to define a person. However if one has free will, he can do evil too. God cannot interfere with our actions without eliminating free will. Can't magically turn the bullets of an evil murderer soft without making the choice to be a murderer impossible.

However for God to matter, he must interfere some time. If he never interferes with us, he may or may not exist, but we have no reason to care. If he doesn't make non-deterministic choices that affect us, we are free to call him "natural laws" and completely stop thinking about him as a being. Actually a non-interfering God would be nature.

The solution to keep both free will and a choice-making God is afterlife: God doesn't interfere with our lives to let us have free will, but will interfere with our afterlife, placing us to Heaven or Hell. This scheme is told by practically every religion, exactly because it's the only way to have both God and free will.

But what is the purpose of the normal world then, if there is a much better version? To allow judgment. The people are free to act good and evil in this world, forming the basis of judgment after death. This actually turns the life into a test. All wrong and suffering in this world is the consequence of someone failing to do the right thing. This person will be judged and punished, while the righteous will be rewarded by heaven. So we have divine perfection (in heaven), perfect justice (by sending the evil to Hell) despite the World we see is evil. The natural disasters and innocent victims are not disproving this: they could be foreseen, prevented or mitigated by people who choose not to. You could have spent money on earthquake research instead of military, you could have moved away from the faultline, you could have built a stronger house. Also, the victim - if lived his life properly - is not harmed as he goes to Heaven anyway.

So life is a game that will be evaluated by the perfect God who will send the "bad players" to Hell, while rewards the righteous with divine love and perfection in Heaven. This scheme resists all atheists ideas and could not be disproved.

It doesn't need to be disproved. The problem of this scheme can be summarized with a question: how would you describe the person who steals from a shop right front of a bunch of cops? The answer is "idiot", and not "immoral". He has no reasonable chance to achieve his goal, even temporarily (he won't drink the stolen booze), and he will be punished. In a world where cops stand everywhere, no one would commit crime except the insane.

If one believes that the world is test by God who will punish the failers and rewards the righteous, he will do good, regardless his moral preferences, just like a non-insane thief will act lawfully front of the policemen. This - again - is preached by religions: the crimes are done by people who turned away from God, while the true God-fearing person is living a righteous life.

However this is a fundamental loophole in the test! Since God sees and knows all, anyone believing in God knows that he is watched and won't do bad to avoid the punishment of Hell. The members of the true church are cheating the test of God! Since these people know that it is just a test, it no longer tests their morality, only their self-control and obedience. To make the test work God must hide from the people, making it impossible for them to figure his existence out. If you would say "God likes self-control and obedience" than you must explain why different religions exist. I mean if there are two preachers, you obviously can't obey both. The perfect God would never create such a faulty test.

One could claim that the test is recognizing the true God (true moral) by picking the true church. However such test would be very unfair. One risen by religious people is usually religious without thinking about it, simply by following what's been told him. So those who born as children of the members of the true church has a huge advantage over those who were born in atheist families. To make it worse, several religions actively punish non-believers. If that is not the true church, your only chance to go to Heaven is to become a martyr. No God would make so unfair test.

Since God would not allow cheating his test and religions do nothing else but help the people cheating, - extremely ironically - the existence of a true religion and the existence of God are mutually exclusive. So there is either no God (therefore all religions are wrong) or all the religions are useless and don't bring you closer to Heaven (that's why God lets them exist).

Please note that I did not disprove the existence of God. That probably can't be done as you can't make measurements on the supernatural. Atheists are doing it all wrong, trying to defeat the idea of God. The usefulness of Earthly religions can be disproved. People shouldn't be convinced to stop believing in God, they should be convinced to stop going to church.

Read More

Business Thursday: I lose money on this trade!

Another day, another moron letter:
This one informed me that I'm doing it wrong, since I sold the implant for 100M that I bought for 99M the day before. I do lose money on taxes on such trade, I'd be better off not doing it. What happened and why did I do it?

The day before the implant was 97M buy and 108M sell. So I set up a buy order for 99M and a sell order for 106M, for a 7M profit. Half day later I logged in, I found the buy order filled, and the sell order being undercut to 105M. Since I had enough implants now in stock, I simply moved the sell order to 103M. Half day later it was undercut by several 0.01-ers at 102.99999M So I undercut again, this time to 100M, which finally sold.

Did I lost money on the trade? Yes I did. But what else could I do? I have no control over the price, nor a crystal ball to see the future. I assume that the prices don't swing overnight. They usually don't. Sometimes they do. If they swing downwards, I lose money. If they go upwards and I have stocks in my hangar, I gain money.

The author of the moron letter would probably say "stick to the 108M price until it returns". However this advice has two problems: one is that I can't guarantee that the price will ever return. It would need serious investment research to guess how its price will move. Secondly is more importantly, until it happens, I can't trade the item since my money is locked in the unsold wares. Instead, I accepted that loss, regained my money at 100M and use it to buy more items at 90M to sell them 100M again.

The moral of the story is that you must decide if you are an investor or a trader. I choose the second, which means that I sell my wares at any price the best market gives. I always sell, no exceptions. I only make choices when setting a buy order and it depends on "is there enough margin between buys and sells?". If something has buy orders for 100M and sells for 102M, I won't bother. But if the margin is larger than 4%, I take it, and I can't care less if it's 80-84 or 160-166.


PS: very nasty philosophical post incoming tomorrow.

Read More

Good players vs bad players: not normal distribution

Tobold reiterated the most harmful socialist doctrine: "most people are average". The doctrine says that the results of a large bunch of people give a Normal distribution, where most people are near the average.

Normal distribution describes the outcome of multiple random choices. If you add N coinflips, the most common result will be N/2, while extremes will be rare. Accepting normal distribution is accepting that the results of people are products of luck, the very opposite of meritocracy. If their results are luck-driven, then bad performers are just unlucky.

This is not true in real life:

It's time to unquestionably prove that every gamer already know implicitly: there are "good" and there are "bad" players and these are distinct groups with little in-between. For that I need data of random or complete sample of player performance results. Performance of selected group members obviously does not work, so I can't use raiding guild parses. I try to put my hands on a complete EVE-kill database, but until then, let's go with WoW LFR data. Let me show a sample, made yesterday by my girlfirend: The marked people are the tanks and my girlfriend. They will be excluded, tanks because they are under different mechanics and the screenshot maker for not being random (you are always on your screenshots). In this example data, the average damage is 23096339 with standard distribution of 9603079. Below you can see these players classified into seven groups depending on their distance from average:This data shows what it should: two distinct groups, one for players who read up, gem, enchant and one for those who just "hang out and have fun".

Please send your screenshots (with marked tanks, yourself, groupmembers) from LFR fights where players are all in the same place (no Sha of Fear and such) to gevlon dot freemail dot hu.

Read More

Structure shooting structure

People in nullsec cry left and right how horrible it is to shoot structures. They often post various suggestions to change Sov warfare. However the structures are there for a reason: to prevent losing Sov to a surprise attack. The high HP makes it impossible to just destroy them with a volley and run away from the defenders, while timers make it impossible to attack in time zones out of the defenders choice. It's no wonder that Pandemic Legion forms "war games" to force the change of Sov mechanic, they are the masters of surprise attacks. A Sov system where you can win with "suddenly 100 titans" would make them unstoppable. The Sov structures with 25-75M HP must stay and may even deserve increase of HP to battle with supercapital proliferation.

However it is a valid argument that the long structure shoot is meant as an obstacle against invasion, you have to shoot 75M HP while fighting the enemy, practically demanding 75M HP damage more from attackers than defenders. But currently it's usually an inconvenience when you just have to grind down 75M HP all by itself. Sov grind should be easy if the defenders don't show up.

Let me introduce the solution: the mobile siege device!
The mobile siege device is an anchorable structure. It is 300000m³ packaged, costs 1B to build and onlines and offlines in 4 hours. You can plant one anywhere where any kind of structure is or can be anchored (SBU, IHUB, station, POCO, POS...) You can anchor more than one. After it onlined, you have to fill its hold with XL ammunition (cap booster charges for Amarr). Onlined and loaded, it automatically attacks any hostile structures (including enemy siege devices) with 8K DPS using T1 ammo, 10K with faction. It fights day and night, instantly resumes fighting after downtime, if a structure comes out of reinforcement or a new hostile structure is planted.

The mobile siege device is visible and warpable on the overview to everyone, even during onlining period, and unable to defend itself against ships. It only has 5M EHP, some 500HPS shield regen and no reinforcements or invulnerability periods. Its only defense is sending notifications to the anchoring corp. This makes its use impossible if the defenders fight, this case you must grid the structures the hard way. However if the defenders don't bother to defend, you just anchor a mobile siege device, come back 4 hours later to fill it with ammo, unanchor it a week later when it finished its job.

Read More

All I want to say is ne-ne-ne-ne-ne!

The TEST drama is now all over the EVE-related sites. If you missed the main points are:

1. A corporation, Kaesong Kosmonauts (NORK.) left TEST alliance on good terms. The TEST leader gave them a nice farewell.
2. It turns out that the good terms were one-sided, as soon as they were neut, they started camping jump bridges. It turns out that camping jump bridges with supercapitals is bad idea.
3. Upon losing the Aeon, they go full retard on forums, trolling left and right, celebrating (and maybe contributing to) some TEST super losses
4. They get banned from the forums, mostly for messing with IT service authorizations
5. The prominent members of the corp get accepted to a Pandemic Legion corp
6. Now, as blues, they keep shooting TEST
7. TEST resets PL and according to the comments I've seen they stay neutral until NORK guys are not kicked from PL

Why is it interesting (for me, for you it's probably just a stupid drama)?
Check out the names in the center of the scandal: Richter Enderas, Araello, Madlof Chev, Dysphonia Fera and so on. They were exactly my haters. Of course others disagreed with me often, but these were commenting hate on anything I've posted, including totally technical, neutral stuff.

It wasn't always like that. I was just another commenter, gaining support and critique according to my posts originally. There was an event when these fine individuals turned on me, creating a 20 pages long collection of death threats and "nigger faggot" class insults. Only after that I became the public enemy. It happened when their leader, Richter Enderas wanted my full API and I refused because I believed they want it to awox my highsec assets. While I was accepted to Dreddit, the common opinion was that I was very wrong accusing these "bros" and while most of the people didn't jump on the "shut the fuck up publord" bandwagon, neither they opposed it. Now, when the awoxing and insulting posts of these "bros" threatens the PL-TEST relations, I hope the irony burns those who supported them.

Read More

Preventing all corp thefts

Corp thefts are happening left and right. The story is simple: someone who has access to corp assets gets pissed off with the corp and takes it. Some joined exactly to take it, but they are minority. Corps want to limit it with various "no drama" drives and API checks, obviously without results, as thefts are still happening.

The solution is pretty simple: you can't steal what's not there. Can anyone tell me why should a corp have any assets? No, I don't go full objectivist here, denouncing all public services. However a public service like fleet reimbursement doesn't need public property. The reimbursement officer can have that money in his personal wallet. The best is to have a dedicated alt as officer who does nothing else, so his wallet is not trashed up with ratting ticks and sales. Sure, he can steal the wallet, but only the reimbursement wallet and only him. It's much smaller risk than "any officer can steal all wallets". Also, the reimbursement waller can be limited to the daily costs, there is no need for him to have tens of billions rotting there, the CEO can send him a few bills whenever the wallet is running low and any member can check that characters API. The same can go to everyone who does public services: he gets access only to a weekly amount of resources needed to do his job.

Several cases the CEO himself stole the goods. How can this be prevented? Simple: he also has to have access to a weekly amount of resources needed to be redistributed. If the cash-flow is properly designed than the wallet of the CEO alt is always low, despite the large amount of money coming in and out.

The worst thing is community owned non-money assets. For example the corp owns a moon that the logistics guy manages with the corp-owned JF, using corp-owned fuel and filling it to the corp hangar where the market guy jumps it to Jita with the (other) corp owned JF and sells it for the corp wallet. No need to say that any of them can take the JF, the moongoo and the money. Alternatively: the corpies mine for free, supported by the corp-owned Rorqual, fill the minerals to the corp hangar where the manufacture guy makes corp-owned ships and modules using corp-owned BPOs and then later give out the "free" ships to members. This will end with a bunch of Megacyte jumping away in the Rorqual along with all the BPOs.

This is completely unnecessary. The correct way of doing this is: moon-guy owns the tower, manages it with his own JF, sells it to the market guy who pays with his own money. The corp gets a monthly rent fee for the moon from the moon-guy. No one can actually steal anything besides one month worth of rent. The mining guy should owns his Rorqual, pay the miners for their minerals (lower than Jita of course, but they would surely sell to him instead of hauling it themselves to Jita). The miner guy sells the minerals to the manufacturing guy who pays with his own money, makes the ships with his own BPOs and sells it to the members.

Finally we have to address emergency funds. Having low asset prevents theft but also prevents adaptation to emergency. If a whole fleet of faction battleships needs to be reimbursed, having a wallet with only a few B in it is bad. A corp should have enough money to cover such unforseen expenses. But it doesn't mean that the leader or any officer needs to have it. It can simply be ordered that every member must have X billion emergency fund in cash in his own wallet. The CEO can check it via APIs. So when the rainy day comes, he can just say: emergency time, everyone please pay 1B to cover the expenses of the current crisis.

Please note that by the above changes, I did not actually change any corp activities: the same guy fuels the same tower and the same people are flying the same ships funded by the same people. Only the money routes were re-planned to avoid money or assets collecting in places where people can steal or waste it.

---

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations."

Rest in peace, Margaret Thatcher

Read More

Business Thursday: for science!

Let me show some contract sales:What was I selling? Researched Catalyst and Antimatter charge XL blueprints. Both had one month of PE and one month of ME research. I sold 20 Catalyst BPOs already, which cost me 10M to buy from NPCs and 50M to sell each.

At first let's think about Catalysts: a hull costs around 1.2M, so having a perfectly researched BPO saves 0.12M. To make buying my blueprints profitable, you have to produce 333 hulls from each. I think most people will not produce so many and those who mass-produce probably had their own BPOs researched. But buyers are usually bad at math and having a "good BPO" feels good.

So - despite common belief - researching BPOs is a pretty profitable activity. Not only it had 400% return on capital, but I doubt if I bothered more than half an hour with one batch of BPOs (10 pieces, due to Advanced Laboratory Operation 4), so the active profit is 800M/hour.

The nasty part is that it's a passive income. Creating the blueprints takes about 2 months, and one character can handle 10, so that stellar 800M/workhour income translates to 400M/month passive income. This isn't the thing that will get you a titan by May. But it is the thing that creates you a nice "free" money pouring in.

What can you research? Open the contract interface and look for various blueprints to guess their price. Popular T1 hulls and mineral compressing modules are all good, lot of people want to "save money" by making their own ships.

Who should get involved: people with empty slots in their accounts. There is little reason to not spend 1 month to teach a dedicated alt research skills and covops frig. Cyno alts are also great researchers, as they are already in lowsec. The cynoed in ship can move the cargo. Permanent lowsec residents can also supplement their income. Character trainers can also research both on the learning capital pilot and the empty slots.

Who shouldn't do it? Permanent null and WH pilots as moving to the research station would take too much time. Permanent high mains with expensive pod are also not advised to walk around in low, though they can suck up the long highsec research queue times and research the same BPOs in 3 months.

Read More

Improving new player integration

Ali Aras posted her thoughts on new player experience. They are pretty good and similar to my suggested changes of the tutorial. However her idea to create more newbie-friendly ratting places isn't something I like, because it doesn't help new player integration. Give them good enough newbie missions and you get awful lot of solo missioners who play the game for a few months until they manage to "progress" their missioning ship to the point where it's worthy of suicide ganking.

In this post instead I suggest various features that help players without out-of-game connections to integrate into the world. It's not that hard as the current missioning and ratting system isn't hostile to low SP players. I mean an established player + a newbie playing together could earn more than separately. However newbies are usually not flying together with experienced players - unless they are out of game friends - because of the management overhead and trust issues. While the experienced player would benefit from having a sidekick, it's not large enough to make him spam channels to find one or to risk grouping up with a mission ninja who steals the objective and ransoms him for it.

I suggest the following systems to be introduced:

• Looter/salvager cooperation: the experienced player needs to click just a few buttons to make himself available for such cooperation, he just have to set the reward % and the home station. The newbie can accept with one click, it instantly places him into a fleet with the experienced player (with that being the boss). His job is to loot and salvage for the missioner/ratter. Whatever he loots/salvages in mission deadspace areas while in such fleet goes into a plastic wrap in his ship cargohold, similar to the courier contract packages. When he is done looting, all he has to do is docking on the pre-set "home station" and press "complete". He has 6 hours to do so after accepting the cooperation. Failing to do so (which is needed to steal the contents) will become available on his public cooperation history and the missioner can set up criteria to exclude players with fails. When he completes the cooperation, he gets the automatically calculated value of the package * reward %. So if he collects 20M worth of loot and the missioner offered him 20%, he gets 4M instantly from the missioner.
• Frigshooter cooperation: the missioner/ratter also needs just a few clicks to seek such cooperator, providing a bounty multiplier. The newbie who accepts this cannot loot or even salvage the mission (unless he is also in a looter/salvager cooperation). His job is to fly his destroyer or frigate and shoot mission frigs and destroyers. After the ones he kills he gets the normal bounty and the multiplied value from the missioner, who will gladly pay for those pesky jamming/webbing/scramming frigrats to be handled.
• Minilogi cooperation: the missioner/ratter sets if he wants armor or shield and how much does he pay for 1000 units. He can also pay for uptime minutes of remote sensor booster or tracking link. The accepting newbie must be in a T1 or T2 logistics ship. He joins the fleet, he can't loot/salvage, his job is to keep the missioner up, so he can trade tank for DPS on his ship.
• Miner escort cooperation: same as the Frigshooter. The miner sets up a bounty multiplier that he is ready to pay to the newbie after every belt rat he kills within 50km of the miner. These rats of course can be looted or salvaged. This way the miner can have mining drones instead of self-defense ones. A bit of upgrade to the belt rats could "encourage" having escort.
• Dustminer cooperation: the miner sets up a reward/rock. The accepting newbie must have a Venture fitted with survey scanner. His job is to mine within 50km of the miner, eating up asteroids that have less minerals than one cycle of strip miner. He gets reward if the rock disappears when he cycles or manually switches off his miner. He can keep the minerals he mines and he gets reward for destroying tiny rocks, saving the pro miner the time wasted on a cycle that nets only partial results, or the risk of fitting a rock scanner himself, compromising tank.
• Canminer cooperation: the miner anchors a special container and starts mining, moving his minerals into the can. The newbie accepting the cooperation sees only plastic wraps in the can, his job is to haul them to the home station of the miner and press complete. This way the miner can use a low ore hold Hulk for better yield and save the dockup times.
• Orca boost cooperation: the Orca holder sets up a reward/m³ request. Accepting miners can see what links the Orca offers and his booster skills. They must pay the reward after every m³ they mine while in the cooperation. Obviously the reward should be smaller than the yield increase they receive from the Orca. This way even a Venture miner can have Orca boost.

You can invent similar cooperations, the point is simple: let experienced and low-SP players play together with as little management overhead as possible. Player cooperation is the only way to circumvent the Malcanis law, as any method where NPCs provide income to new players would be abused by veterans.

One more idea: move every Cosmos mission and complex loot to the marketplace from contracts. Experienced players gladly pay premium for the loot they need to complete an L1-L3 Cosmos mission to save time doing them. Farming Cosmos items could be a good income source for newbies, but they don't know about it as the items have no liquid market.

Read More

How to earn several billions with words?

Gaining billions with words? It must be scamming!
True, and it is a very immoral kind. You must make fellow people believe an atrocious lie: that EVE Online is a good game.

If you are ready to damn your immortal soul and lure unsuspecting people into the land of ganks, scams and AFK ice mining, log in the account management and choose "Buddy program". Click on the big green button and it creates a link which you can publish on your blog or Facebook, Twitter or whatever service you use to waste time with imaginary friends. My link is on my "try out EVE Online" page.

When your victims fall for your scam, they subscribe EVE and the evil Icelandic demons give you your 30 silver coins that you need to first claim on the "Buddy program/past invites" link:

I claimed some game time for my main account, the rest in PLEX. These became redeemable. Be careful, not to redeem them on a pilot who is in deep nullsec, select your Jita alt:

Note: none of these "buddies" were my alts, or anyone I know, just people clicking on my link on the blog.

Read More

Refined thoughts on highsec wardecs

There is always a discussion on Wardecs and CSM election refueled it, due to the only re-running CSM7 member, Trebor supported the idea of eliminating wardecs. I wrote several pieces myself but now I want to write a new, completed piece that doesn't argue based on an ideological platform (one is free to be left alone vs one is free to gank newbies). I want to analyze and explain.

Wars are between organizations. The target of a war is never a person, not in real life, not in EVE. The ultimate defeat in a war is not death of people (they die on winner side too, and very few wars ended with the death of all losers) but the total destruction of the organization. World War II ended with the Nazi Reich disappearing. Band of Brothers in EVE disappeared too. It doesn't mean that Germans disappeared from the face of Earth, nor that old BoB members all unsubscribed.

In low, null and WH you get access to unique mechanics and blues by joining an organization. You can't just use stations, POCOs, POS-es as you wish. Only members of organizations can do that. By joining, you also become ally (blue) to many other players who will not shoot you, and might even save you from others shooting you. More importantly you need to join specific, unique organizations to access that specific resource. To dock in K-6K16, you must be member of TEST or its blues. Joining NC. doesn't help with that. Similarly if you want blues who are capable to jump in supers to save your ratting Nyx, you'd better join PL and not Proviblock.

In order to keep having these resources and blues, the organization providing it must exist. A war defeat can mean you lose them. In order to keep them, you must fight. Of course you can choose to not fight and forfeit the resources and blues. But you clearly have something to lose if the organization goes down.

In highsec you can access almost every mechanic without joining a player corp. Other players are not allowed to shoot you, would they still do so, CONCORD will soon arrive, much faster than any friendly player ever could. Finally even the resources linked to player corporations (no tax on missioning, POS access) aren't unique: any corp is capable to provide them, including a 1-man altcorp. So that particular highsec corp provides you nothing.

Of course highsec corporations can have social value, as it holds the friends of a player. However it's not bound to the corp organization, the social values aren't in danger if the corp needs to be dissolved and reformed under a different name.

Within the current highsec rules, corporations have no value, so you have no reason to fight for them. Wars targeting these corporations therefore have no point either. The only people they can harm are those who are ignorant of the game mechanics and fail to dodge wars like everyone else. For informed players a wardec is no threat, just inconvenience. Getting rid of wardecs is a straightforward solution. However making corps having unique values would be much better. If they could provide bonuses to players, they would fight for them or at least hire mercenaries to protect them.

Read More

Voting for the economy on the CSM election

The elephant in the china shop is the totally messed up economy of EVE: in a game that is marketed as dark and harsh every loss can be replaced in total safety, while AFK.

Yet there are practically no CSM candidate who tries to change that. It's not a mistake and not only the product of a - probably Goon - scam. Most players are pretty happy with the current situation: they can engage in risk-free PvP while boosting their ego with the "I'm standing my ground in the most hardcore game existing". Yes, it's so hardcore. Not even Cute Pandas Online allows AFK farming.

Not having any direct candidate doesn't mean we are powerless to vote for a change. We can support those who are useful or at least neutral to us! The first rule is don't vote for any nullsec candidates. They are the kings of the hill at the moment, so they could only lose by any change. Their interest is to not change EVE in any way, besides bugfixes, UI improvements, minor ship tweaks. Each and every one of them will oppose any significant game change as it could cause new powers to emerge and take their positions. Please note that it doesn't need one to be an official block candidate, any members of nullsec are interested in keeping the status quo.

There are 31 candidates, the "say no to Null" rule filters the list well:

1. Ripard Teg: Rote Kapelle (NPC Null is null too, he was ready to grind structures just to evacuate those deemed "carebears" from Syndicate. What could be more Null-ish?)
2. Mangala Solaris: RvB
3. Malcanis: The Initiative
4. Kaleb Rysode: GSF
5. ProGodLegend: Nulli Secunda
6. Banlish: TEST
7. Chitsa Jason: Exhale (Wormhole)
8. Sort Dragon: PL, HBC
9. Nathan Jameson: Talocan United (Wormhole)
10. James Arget: Sleeper Social Club (Wormhole)
11. Greene Lee: AAA (Do they still exist?)
12. Trebor Daehdoow: Dirt Nap Squad. (Who the hell are they?)
13. Ayeson: Hard Knocks Inc. (Wormhole)
14. Ali Aras: Of Sound Mind (Providence, and I know she should be discarded for it, she is an exception)
15. Mynnna: GSF
16. Psychotic Monk: NPC corp
17. Travis Musgrat: NC.
18. Sala Cameron: PL
19. Kesper North: Gentlemen's Agreement (CFC)
20. Unforgiven Storm: GSF
21. Awol Aurix: TEST
22. CoreBloodBrothers: The Volition Cult (Providence)
23. Riverini: NC.
24. Mike Azariah: Some random corp
25. Cipreh: Existential Anxiety (Wormhole)
26. Korvin: Some random corp
27. Artctura: Fatal Ascension
28. Steve Ronuken: Some random corp
29. Roc Weiler: FW militia
30. DaeHan Minhyok: Li3 Federation
31. PsychoBitch: Some random corp

14 left, one as an exception. Is it a coincidence? Now let's find those who go to the top positions to our list by evaluating the remaining candidates:

• Mangala Solaris: RvB is a highsec-based lolPvP group. "lolPvP" is to be understood as no consequence, no risk PvP. You might noticed that I hate lolPvP. However RvB does it in highsec. It is a good thing for the game to keep the lolPvP-ers as subscribers, they have a place under the Sun, but not as a main feature. If the economy changes drive lolPvPers out of null, they must go somewhere. An RvB candidate could promote features which would help CCP create a "lolPvPer refugee camp" in highsec where they can do their nonsense without interfering with the universe. So he wouldn't be bad for us (nor really good).
• Chitsa Jason, Nathan Jameson, James Arget, Ayeson, Cipreh: the Wormhole bunch. I've never lived in WHs and don't really plan to change that. However Wormholers live the way Nullseccers should: they earn their money where they live. Our enemies claim that if people couldn't earn ISK while AFK, everyone would quit the game. Every single wormhole resident is a living proof that earning ISK outside highsec is possible, the game won't die if it starts being dark instead of looking dark.
• Trebor Daehdoow: the last remnant of the disaster called CSM7, with only one purpose: help CCP earn more money. I doubt he is aware that CSM works for the players against CCP.
• Ali Aras: the exception from the above list. Providence is the least nullish part of null and her platform has nothing to do with Providence: it's newbie experience and teaching (making them able to compete as opposed to nerfing competition). I support her for the same reason as the WH-residents. The game needs new players to decrease risk-aversion of CCP. Currently they are in the position of "these are our players, we must cater to them as we get no replacement if any leaves." She is a new (returning) player, not a bittervet who uses the newbie card for extra voters while can't care less. She also has limited support to our cause.
• Psychotic Monk: he goes for highsec aggression increase. That would serve as a fix to risk vs reward. However he can't care less about the economic aspect and increasing risk in highsec is the direct opposite of what CCP is been doing. He could be useful us in a limited way.
• Mike Azariah: his official page says "Every style, Every group, EVERY PLAYER has a place and a right to be represented." probably the lamest beg for votes ever.
• Korvin: solo-player content is his platform. Not hostile, neither useful to us.
• Steve Ronuken: "A casual manufacturer in High sec shouldn't be priced entirely out of the market." MINION OF HELL, BY FIRE BE PURGED!
• Roc Weiler: "I do not have an agenda for any one item, or even a group of items. The views of every player are valid to me." He just beaten Mike Azariah!
• PsychoBitch: comedy candidate

I suggest to place Ali Aras on top and the 5 WH candidates in any order you wish (my list is Nathan Jameson, James Arget, Chitsa Jason, Ayeson, Cipreh). Follow them with Mangala Solaris, Psychotic Monk, and Korvin.

Please remember that in STV your vote don't expire until it elects a candidate, if your first and second get elected without you, your 3. 4. 5th don't get enough support from others, but your 6th does, he gets your vote, if you put his name on the ballot. Actually you should fill out all 14 slots, pick those who are least harmful for our cause! Unforgiven Storm (GSF) has an industrialist platform, Riverini (NC.) never supported AFK farming on his site, Ripard had some industry posts and he is not AFK-leeching/L4 farming, Malcanis has a bullet point "people should farm in sov-null". I'm totally out of ideas after this point. Please don't be lazy, click-click-click, on all your accounts!

Read More

Business Thursday: keep that hangar clean

Efficient working needs clean workplace. Only careless people keep a mess in their hangar. With various containers you can keep your personal stuff away from items belonging to various business projects.

So far, so good. The problem comes with buy orders. You set them and they fill. Filled buy orders throw items of different kind into your hangar every day. To keep it clean, your have to sort that mess often. It's lot of annoying work.

However there is a solution: you can set filters that show only a subset of items. You probably know that. What you may don't know is that you can make much better filters than "ammunition" or "skillbooks". You can create very specific ones, by listing the names of the included items:
The above filter collects all the items on one of my market quickbar groups. When I select that filter, I can only see these, so they can be moved by one click.

Read More

Oh, those comments!

The comment section of my blog is readable only because of aggressive moderation. If you check out an unmoderated forum, you find a mess. You can guess how my comment section would look like if you check out my posts copied to EN24. Same post, no moderation. Take for example this one. 64 comments at the moment. Maximum 2 or 3 could be considered worthy. The rest are not even attempting to be worthy. They are insults, memes, random one liners and such.

To have an argument, someone has to be wrong. The very purpose of arguments is to help wrong people stop being wrong. It's OK to be wrong in an argument. But they are not wrong, their comments do not offer any arguments or points. Just insults, memes, offtopic and such. I've seen the same in TEST forum, where I found very few arguments replying to my posts. I got instead of whole pages of "shut the fuck up" and pictures of Korean pop bands (it's some TEST meme).

The simple explanation is the writers of these are retards who honestly think that a picture of a Korean girl disproves an argument. However that level of idiocy would probably render someone unable to function in life and need him to be locked up in a mental hospital before he jumps out of the window as he can fly. OK, some of the comments, typically the offtopic and the meme-spammer can be simple attention seeker, the "look mum, I'm on the Internet" kind. Some comments can come from drank or high ones.

But what about the insulters, the "do you even" and "lolwut" spammers? They aren't even cute like the Korean pop singers. Let's assume that they are capable of understanding that their post will not convince anyone about their opinion. In this case what do they want? I mean the participants of an argument want to prove that their opinion is right. But these commenters aren't even trying.

The solution is that the above, obvious-looking claim "in an argument people want to prove their opinion right" isn't true. It's only true for a small group of people, the rational thinkers (or simply: thinkers). They believe that there is a rational truth and they want to have it. They want to be right. The socials on the other hand can't care less about the objective truth. They don't want to be right. They want to feel good.

When they are not trying to feel good by being drunk, high or having sex (usually alone), they are trying to feel good by claiming some statement which will make others like or respect them. Socials like to be loved and respected, even if that provides them zero rewards. The typical example is the woman who wears make-up in the shop, enjoying that bypassing shoppers consider her beautiful, despite none of them gives her anything for being beautiful.

The rational thinker would say: "I think your opinion is wrong and I try to correct it". The social says "Your opinion makes me feel bad. I make you feel bad in return". Their bizarre comments are designed in a way that other social would indeed feel bad because of them and stop posting opinions that hurt the commenters. My "fans" in the TEST forum became a spectacle on their own, people - without actually agreeing with me - expressed amusement over their desperate and futile attempts to make me stop commenting. The point is to understand that these people are not ignorant who need teaching, but people who actively reject reason for feelings.

This explains how could people believe in communism, fascism and other mad ideologies. The fun fact is that these never had any - even wrong - scientific basis. There weren't a single argument to prove that some people are sub-humans and some are übermench, nor a system that measured human value. Just think about it, the nazis who lived and died (literally) according to some twisted Darwinism and breeding had absolutely no attempt to measure the "arian-ness" of an individual. The greatness of Germans and the worthlessness of Jews was simply declared. Similarly there wasn't even an attempt to prove that self-employed small-businessmen and farmers are exploiters. They didn't even have employees to exploit, yet they were declared as exploiters in communism. The people who believed in these weren't misinformed or ignorant. They had no rational reason to believe these, yet millions did, simply because it made them feel good (yay, I'm an übermench/my poverty is not my fault).

This also tells us how can their opinion changed. Not by arguments, they ignore that. People stopped being fascists and communists because starving, poverty and being defeated, bombed, invaded are not fun. World War II and the Cold War didn't disprove these ideologies in the eyes of their former believers, simply connected them to bad feelings, so they were no longer were wanted.

The above shows why sugar-coating and being polite and sensitive are wrong advices. The only way to make a social change his mind about an idea is exactly what he does to us: to insult him. No one ever convinced a social by arguments since he can't care less. The only way to make him stop believing something is making feel bad about it.


PS: I can't process comments until today evening.

Read More

Fixing nullsec without a highsec nerf

In EVE, the risk vs reward is extremely skewed since highsec is completely safe unless you do stupid things. This makes an infinite reward/risk ratio in highsec that can only balanced if the reward goes near zero, so removing L4s, maybe even L3s, incursions, all ores but veldspar. CCP obviously don't want to turn half the universe into a newbie zone where no one else can live.

However nothing else seems to work. Not even the extreme buff to FW (before the fix) moved large population out of highsec. Sure, the brave few moved. But most preferred continuing to AFK-mine ice. Something else must be done.

It seems people refuse to give up safety while farming. If they want safety, the only way to make nullsec profitable if we give it to them. How? At first, I'd suggest to make larger part of nullsec NPC null, to preserve the current Nullsec environment. Move whole regions into the hands of Sanshas, Guristas, Blood raiders. The rogue drones could get their own NPC null with a human NPC anti-drone faction owning the stations as bastions against the drones.

The Sov-null would get a huge transformation: the sov-holder could set up upgrades that make solo and small gang roams very hard, along with AFK-cloaking. For example an upgrade that pulses every minute, breaks cloaks, places a beacon where non-blues were at time of the pulse, and lists them both on local channel in the system and in all nearby systems. Local would be changed to delayed like WHs, so blues who are not revealed by the pulse are not seen. Skilled hostiles could still sneak in, so there wouldn't be perfect safety, just like you can be suicide-ganked in high, but a bored kid in a trasher couldn't lock down a constellation.

Of course nullsec is not highsec as it can be conquered. Intel doesn't help much against an invading fleet. Sov null is already blob vs blob PvP, not much would be lost if other forms of PvP would be cut back. Small gang and solo roams could operate in NPC null and lowsec, hunting those who mission to pirate factions. So while Sov-null would be safe, it wouldn't be safe for free. To have it, you must defend it flying in the blob.

This way there would be reason for "carebears" to move to nullsec. Some of them would settle at a renter status, paying for the ability to PvE in null. Others would get to their introduction to PvP with it's easiest form: blob F1-bashing, as a grunt of the nullsec holder. Some might actually leave the safety of Sov-null for pirate LP or small gang PvP.

Of course Wormholes need some help too, or they would be emptied by this safe-nullsec. I'd suggest to give them the ability to set IHUBs in WHs, formally claiming Sov, getting equal buffs, and some really juicy extra: the ability to build supercapitals in their holes. As a bonus, Sov would also allow outpost construction, making the POS problem obsolete.

Read More