Carebears and bots walk hand in hand

Considering that EVE is supposed to be a harsh competitive world, it is surprisingly not. While there is easier to be competitive than in WoW for example, most players gain their wealth doing carebear stuff. The purpose of such features is to allow bad players to have something to do and progress in the game, preventing the baddies from canceling subscription. The perfect example of such features is farming "heroics" in WoW for valor points: the task can be completed literally on /follow. Let's try to give exact criteria for the "baddie friendly carebear" feature:

1. It gives the players a task and rewards him for performing it.
2. The task is readily available in unlimited amount when the player wants it
3. The player can pick the difficulty of the task or the task is trivial (though maybe time-consuming)
4. The task does not include any kind of competition from other players and no player is motivated to stop the one doing it (random griefing doesn't count, he is not after you because of your mission)
5. The activity has no other effect on the game world than rewarding the player. You sell no ore, you perform no service or harm to another player, you just got some ISK/wowgold from an NPC.

The most important thing to recognize is that farming limited spawns (resources or mobs) is not carebear, even in a game with no PvP: the target is limited, so the farmers are competing with each other for the loot in two ways, at first by actually getting the spawn, secondly at the marketplace where the loot sells low due to oversupply. The reason why farming is replaced by quests/missions in MMOs is exactly to protect the baddies from competition with other players. No matter how many people run random HCs in WoW or missions in EVE, there is always a next instance, and there are unlimited rewards available to anyone, which is only mitigated by overall game world inflation (ISK in EVE, ilvl in WoW).

However it has a very nasty side-effect: botting. If a task is easy but boring, better let a bot do it. So these functions are used by bots (or AFK players without technical bot program) to create ingame wealth to illegally sell it or boost their real character with power it shouldn't have.

In WoW practically every game feature is carebear as they are available in unlimited amount of instances, they have absolutely zero impact on the world, besides rewarding the player and they are totally uncompetitive. Even random BG is such function, despite formally being direct PvP: you don't have to compete for rewards as you get honor points even if you did 0 damage, 0 healing, 0 objective cap and your team lost. Only arenas and RBGs are competitive and top raiding was made competitive by players creating third party toplists.

Considering that EVE is supposed to be a "harsh world where you shape the galaxy", the amount of baddie (and bot) friendly features are overwhelming. Most people are "carebears", gaining their wealth from missioning or ratting (grinding mob spawns which are available in every difficulty in unlimited amount). No wonder that botting in EVE is even more prevalent than in WoW. In WoW you can't sell most gear and everyone swims in gold so botting is usually done by players who want to increase the power of their own character without playing. Since you can buy anything from ISK, including game time, botting ISK is profitable so it's rampart.

WoW cannot be "saved" as it is purposefully carebear friendly. However EVE is not. Officially. Jester is looking for an elegant solution to stop botting, here you go:

• Get rid of all mission agents above lvl 1. Lvl 1 is good for 1 week newbies to learn the ropes, everyone else should be doing something real. The Navy Raven bought from LPs is no less "welfare epic" than the valor-point given WoW loot.
• Limit the availability of random NPC pirates (beside those who belong to lvl1 security missions). Seriously, why do the Guristas have endless support of pilots and ships? I'm damn sure that millions of them are slaughtered every month.  They should have a limited resource count and should be able to set up operations according to this. If they are low on resources, they can't start new deadspace operations or incursions.
• Seriously rework mining into its own minigame that requires constant player attention, making botting hard. Like you switch in asteroid view, you must target components of that asteroid, blindly mining all makes you hit low-yield parts or even explosive gas clusters that damage your ship or blow the asteroid into useless little pieces in the space.

If we do these, the following options remain for a pilot to gain wealth:

• Mining: it's affecting other players as provide the backbone of the economy: materials. It is in competition with other miners and pirate players going after them
• Trading/manufacturing: it's also affecting other players via providing them buys and sells and it is in competition with other traders/industrialists
• Hauling: it's affecting other players due equalizing prices between regions, it's in competition with other haulers and pirate players going after them
• Pirating: it's affecting other players obviously and it's in competition with other pirates and fighters
• Profitable fighting: it's affecting the life of miners and haulers they escort for a price or as members of their corporation, and clearly affecting the life (or rather death) of the pirates. They compete with other fighters for the jobs and with pirates and fighters of enemy corps for survival
• System ownership: it's affecting the whole playerbase (see the running theme here?) and provide service to everyone, place to mine for miners, to trade for traders, to haul from and to for haulers, jobs for mercenaries. It's in competition with other system owners which is resolved in epic battles (or hidden political moves)
• Exploring: it's affecting the life of the miners who use the grav/ladar site locations, the traders who buy the salvaged stuff and the wormhole corporations who use WH locations. They are in competition with other explores (and the pirates who hunt them like everyone else out there)

Since everything would be PvP (either battle or market/political competition), botting would end overnight, I mean good luck botting PvP! It would also solve a problem that is permanently on CSM discussions: the "highsec carebears" having too much protection. With these changes being a "highsec bear" would be equal to "being broke", so only true newbies would do that. Everyone else would have to engage in some form of PvP (combat, market, politics) if they ever want to fly anything bigger than the starter mission destroyer.

What will happen to xXxipopulolxXx who don't want to mine Veldspar, don't want to haul, too dumb to trade and has 1:3 kill:death? I mean, he just wants to jump on the "awsom ship" he grinded missions for to "hav som pvp fun lol", how could he have fun (undeserved feeling of greatness) now? By buying ISK for PLEX! Which is a win-win-win for them, the good players who sold the ISK and CCP as PLEX cost more than subscription.

Clarification: carebear is not equal to M&S. It's an extreme risk and competition aversion, overall "let's all be friends" attitude and not lazyness or stupidity (though correlation exists). M&S need a huge kick in the butt, carebears just need a little push. Also, "hard" doesn't stop boting since the worst thing that can happen with a bot trying hard task is that it fails to do so and stand there empty. Competition stops boting since there the dumb bot can lose your ship which is worse than not boting and staying docked when not there.


PS: how could you gain faction standing without missions? You could donate ISK to the faction, or join the militia and kill enemy faction militia members, gaining the ISK value of the destroyed enemy as donation. (You should be able to be in a corp and a faction militia in the same time, assuming the corp and the faction has positive standing).

Where would the ISK enter to the playerbase without missions showering welfare ISK? NPC corporations could buy minerals, products and sleeper loot for a fixed low price. The factions could also place bounties on enemy militia pilots who killed lot of their militia.

PS2: quick business update: 1.16 B (500M gift). The reason for the lack of increase is spending 184.5M on books for myself.

PS3: the pug update: BWD HM 5/6 now as the hunter couldn't kite and the mages had no frost spec. Seriously, what's the odds of 2 mages having no frost spec?

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The millionaire next door (and a long CSM7 PS)

The book "The millionaire next door" is a must read. It's not a philosophy book, it's about a study that the authors did interviewing thousands of wealthy people. The book describes their collective knowledge, a countless times proved way to become rich.

The way is pretty simple and obvious: frugality. The real millionaires live a much cheaper life than they could afford. They don't have luxury stuff, they live much lower neighborhood than they could afford and they save serious part of their income every month. So they could keep up their current life for years without income. Less than 20% of them inherited significant wealth, and only 0.02% scored big via lottery or became a star or an inventor. 80% of them accumulated their wealth in one generation, slowly, month by month.

The other people, even those who earn more than $50K/year practically have no wealth besides their home, car and furniture, and live from paycheck to paycheck.

Why this book is so great? Because - unlike others - finds the way how people do it. I mean it's 101 to "spend less than you earn", yet people can't do it. This book tells the exact thing that separates rich from poor: "They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status". So, they don't show off, don't give a damn what the Joneses think. Isn't it familiar from somewhere?

End of spoiler. Go and buy it!



PS: Quick EVE business report: cash+buy+sell orders = 1.13B (500M player gift).

PS2: In EVE the players can elect representatives, and the game developers at least listen to what they say. I was thinking a lot about CSM7, both where to vote and to tell it on the blog or not. So instead of just throwing in a name or two, I read all programs and add a few words of opinion about them. Please note that I evaluate programs and not people, spare me from "X is a liar!" posts. Also, be surprised how few actually have a program!

• Akirei Scytale: his post is idiotic
• Alekseyev Karrde: PR bullshit, nothing exact
• Blackberry Bold: direct democracy. Bleh!
• Blake Armitage: he is not running for CSM, he just want a job at CCP as API programmer
• corebloodbrothers: no program at all
• Darius III: it's a bugfix list and not a program!
• Dovinian: PR bullshit, no program
• Draco Llasa: wants to bring more life to 0.0 industry and warfare. Not my field, if yours, support.
• Elise Randolph: stands for low-sec small-gangs. Not my field, if yours, support.
• Fon Revedhort: mostly bugfix suggestions. Technical, without political vision.
• Greene Lee: messy posts, no paragraphs. Learn to write first!
• Hans Jagerblitzen: A coherent and huge program (his PDF linked) to support the Empire players without planning to take anything away from 0.0.
• Issler Dainze: no program, just "join me and we'll be great" propaganda
• Kelduum Revaan: PR bullshit, no program
• Korvin: not even PR bullshit, no program
• Leboe: he is for NPC 0.0 Not my field, if yours, support.
• Lyris Nairn: list of technical suggestions, no vision
• Meissa Anunthiel: "I'm everyones man, vote for me!"
• Michael BoltonIII: technical suggestions and Arena. In EVE. Abomination
• Mike Azariah: idiotic post
• Mintrolio: idiotic post
• Mu'ad Diib: PR bullshit, no program
• Prometheus Exenthal: technical suggestions
• PsychoBitch: idiotic post
• Riverini: technicals and PR stuff
• Roc Wieler: PR bullshit, no program
• Seleene: I'm honestly puzzled by his post. He has great vision. And none of it was listed on his official page. Nothing but PR bullshit. It means that he prefers getting a seat than the vision itself. Too bad, if I don't read his official post, I'd vote for him.
• Skippermonkey: idiotic post
• Skye Aurorae: PR bullshit, no program
• Sollana: goes for 0.0 station cannons. While this looks technical, I see the vision behind it: make it much easier to hold 0.0, make safer to build, live there. Not my field, if yours, support.
• StarConquer212: technical issues, no program
• T'amber: technical issues, PR crap
• The Mittani: clear vision: "If “war”, “murder” and “conquest” are naughty words that scare you, I don’t want your vote."
• Tiger Would: Propaganda bullshit, democracy bleh
• Trebor Daehdoow: Mostly technical issues, with little program hiding: "deliver improvements to the game that the current players of the game want". Worth considering.
• Two step: seems to be the man of the Wormhole-dwellers, but was hard to find it in the PR crap. Not my field, if yours, support.
• UAxDEATH: clearly for the 0.0 people, Not my field, if yours, support.
• Vincent Athena: PR crap, "I'm everyones man"
• Voloses: technical stuff, no program
• Xenuria: mix of idiotism and vanity suggestions

Oh my! Most of the candidates are idiots, "vote for me, I promise you the Moon" PR whores and wannabe tech support guys. Hard to see people who actually have any idea what to do with the position they go for. My first preference is simple: Hans Jagerblitzen is clearly supporting the playerbase I'm in. The secondary preference will surprise most of you, since he is the living symbol of griefing what I fully reject. But we share our views about the weak and the fate they should have. The Mittani it is. Too bad I only have one vote!

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Ships and remaps

There are two resources in EVE: skillpoints and ISK. You can buy anything from ISK except skillpoints and you need them for using the various items. Standings are saving you ISK, so they belong to the ISK realm.

Every skill, has a primary and secondary attribute. When you choose to learn it, every minute you gain 1 skillpoint for 1 point of primary attribute and 1/2 for the secondary. It's obvious that you want as high attributes as possible for fast training. There are 5 attributes and they affect the following skill families:

Group	Attributes
Corporation Management	Memory, Charisma
Drones	Memory, Perception
Electronics	Intelligence, Memory
Engineering	Intelligence, Memory
Gunnery	Perception, Willpower
Industry	Memory, Intelligence
Leadership	Charisma, Willpower
Mechanic	Intelligence, Memory
Missiles	Perception, Willpower
Navigation	Intelligence, Perception
Planet Management	Intelligence, Memory/Charisma, Intelligence
Science	Mostly Intelligence, Memory
Social	Charisma, Intelligence
Spaceship Command	Perception, Willpower/Willpower, Perception
Trade	Willpower, Charisma/Charisma, Memory

If you are a businessman in EVE, the important fields for you will be Trade, Industry, Planetary management, Corporation management and Mechanic (spaceship and station manufacturing). They use Charisma, Intelligence and Memory. Trade uses some Willpower, but if you check the details, and they are fairly simple (x1 and x2 training time modifier) and also they are pretty basic, so you probably have them already (trade, retail, broker relations).

Since your skill training speed depends on your points in the relevant attributes, you set Perception and Willpower to minimum (17) and distribute your 14 free points between the useful ones, speeding up their training. However there is a problem with that, you need ships to perform trading:

• Faction industrial (Bustard): the bigger version of the T1 hauler, having 2-3 more cargo space and 3-4x more HP to transport various stuff, running several T4 courier missions at once or supporting a small mining operation.
• Blockade runner (Crane): stealth ship that can travel undetected. Has smaller cargo space than the T1 hauler but the stealth ability and double speed makes it a good high sec shiny transporter and able to do trading in low-sec. Don't even think of entering low-sec without it or heavy corporate escort.
• Freighter (Charon): 850000 m³ cargo and 140000 HP with skills. Can carry anything and can't be defeated by anything less than 12 battleships/T3 battlecruisers in high sec. Easy target in low-sec.
• Jump Freighter (Rhea): 300000 m³ cargo and the ability to use own jump drive, traveling without stargates. Necessary for nullsec operations. Please note that it has an expensive tertiary skill Jump drive calibration, but its primary attribute is not Perception or Willpower so can be skipped for now.
• Orca: Smaller than a freighter, slower than a T2 industrial, can't stealth and costs 500M. Terrible transport ship, except one that makes it a must: it has a 40000 m³ "corporate hangar". Items in this hangar cannot be scanned and cannot be looted, making it 100% pirate safe (griefers are a different issue). You can use it safely in the NPC corporation too. (thanks to Steel, Care, Testarossa, Belloche, AureoBroke for the info). It is also a perfect place for a serious mining operation, and a must if you want to mine. Also, unlike the freighter it has fitting slots and can be turned into a nasty tank.
• Logistics or interdictor: if you are in a player-run corporation you might be expected to join battles. That would need learning extreme amount of weapon skills that require perception and willpower. However you can bypass this by learning to drive a logistics or an interdictor. Despite they are just cruisers and destroyers, they are extremely useful in battles as their role is similar to healing and CC in WoW, but most players hate them as they don't deal damage, so being proficient in these will make you welcomed in most fleets. I'll learn Basilisk and Guardian.
• Hulk: it's the top mining ship. Need two skills: Mining Barge 5, that should be learned during this remap, and Exhumers 3, that is cheap, but it's prerequisites are not, nor they are P/W, so skip it until you actually want to drive one.

So I will do the following: after learning the basic skills that I need for everyday use, I use one of my two free neural remap and go for perception and willpower and then learn:

• Caldari Industrial 5, 992K points (already have rank 3), P/W
• Transport Ships 3, 48K points, W/P
• Spaceship command 5, 248K (already has 3), P/W
• Advanced spaceship command 4, 226K pt, P/W
• Jump freighters 4, 635K W/P
• Caldari Freighter 4, 452K pt, P/W
• Mining Barge 5, 1024K pt, P/W
• Mining Foreman 5, 512K pt, Charisma/W
• Industrial Command Ships 3, 64K pt, P/W
• Caldari Frigate 4, 74K pt (already have 3), P/W
• Caldari Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W
• Logistics 5, 1536K pt, W/P
• Retail 5, 496K pt, (already have 3), W/Charisma
• Broker relations 5, 496K pt (already have 3), W/Charisma
• Amarr frigate 4, 90k pt, P/W
• Amarr Cruiser 5, 1280K pt, P/W

I'll remap for 7 pt Perception, 7 pt willpower and with +3 implants I'll be done in "only" 165 days. Since I've learned cybernetics 4 already, I can put in +4 implants if I'm swimming in money (only after having a top insured Charon in the hangar), saving 5 more days from the remaining ones. After that I'm done with perception and willpower, and remap for +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha, and will never learn spaceship command again.

Don't be scared by the "165 days" part! It's the time of learning to use all of them. You can fly your industrial and blockade runner in 18-19 days!

Warning: you have 2 free remaps and 1 remap per year. Mess it up and you are stuck with stupid attributes for a year! Beware that some of the ship skills have non-perception-willpower prerequisites, like Logistics, which is a willpower/perception x6 skill, needs Signature analysis and Long range targeting rank 5, both intelligence/memory. Learn them before remap. If you want a blockade runner, don't forget to learn Cloaking skill 4 before! It's not needed for the ship, but needed for the covops cloak that makes it more than a terribly overpriced Badger I.

A few more words about implants: you can implant all 5 attributes, increasing their values by 1-5 pt. 5x5 = 25, so having top implants have higher effect than neural remap (14 points to move). However top implants are expensive (18M for +4, 100M for +5) and can be destroyed by destroying your capsule, so I'd rather not use anything that I would mind losing and for me now that's +3 (9M). Of course no point to improve the implant on attributes that you don't use.

You can use some planner software like EVEMON, but to do so, you need to know what skills you'll use in a year. Reading this blog and starting with me assumes you'll trade, but there are many ways. Some of you will go station trade, others go haul, some will manufacture, some turn to mining, others will be full time salvagers for a fighting corporation and you can't tell now, even if you claim so, because you don't know enough. I know only what we will not use: the ones affecting fighting power, so I dump perception and willpower after having my ships ready.

Important tip: if you are not completely sure, go with an even distribution like my +5 int, +5 mem, +4 cha. To see why it's superior to any uneven, let's make a calculation. You have 17 base points and will use +5 implants for sure in a year. Let's say you have 8 points for attributes A and B, that's 17+5+4 = 26 if you distribute them equally. If you learn an A/B skill worth of 1M points, it will take 25641 minutes. If you remapped for 8 A 0 B, you finish in 24390 minutes, saving 1250 mins. However if you do so and it turns out that a B/A skill fits better to your playing, learning that will take 27027 mins, losing 1386 minutes. So the cost of a mistaken uneven distribution is higher than the gain of a well-chosen one. So if the fighting is not completely off the table, just don't remap and run with the starter, 3-3-3-3-2 distribution.


PS: faction standing affects brokers fee and there is a pretty fast way to increase it, faster even than chaining courier missions for a storyline one. And it pays much better: the tutorial missions. While you probably done all 3, you can do it to a friendly faction and enjoy the derived modification. Amarr and Caldari like each other, so do Minmatar and Gallente. Doing them is super fast... if you still have your civilian codebreaker and salvager (or can use the normal ones), have "friendly faction frigate" rank 2 or carried your own frigates for the suicide missions and have empty industry slots. Otherwise you wish you'd be driving a hulk during hulkageddon in goon 0.0.

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Be poor, accept that buy order (or give it up to 0.01 ISK punks)!

Ever considered why WoW has no buy orders? Because Blizzard try to make sure that idiots are not exploited by people with brain. EVE is not WoW and in the market there are buy orders. If you accept those, you instantly sell. ISK now yay! - says the lolkid making sure that he'll run missions for ISK for the rest of his life (or converts PLEX).

If you want to make money with anything, the general rule is not to accept a buy order but to set up a sell order. The difference between buy and sell orders are usually large enough to let the station traders be rich. They are the guys who set up the buy orders and then resell the same item on the same station. Since they are mostly annoying 0.01 ISKers, please don't feed them. Keep the profit and the tax+broker fee for yourself: sell it yourself.

Of course there are exceptions from every rule, sometimes you should accept buy orders:

• The difference between buy and sell orders is so small that it doesn't worth fighting with the 0.01 punks.
• The buy order of one station is above the sell order of another, this was set up by some idiot or by someone whose time worth more than the price difference. This case you can transport to him.
• You sell on some distant station where you don't want to transport from or don't want to return to modify the offer. For example a miner who mined Plagioclase, refined it in the nearest station transports the Mexallon to Jita but sells the Pyrite and Tritanium nearby as transporting those don't worth his time.
• You ran out of open market order slots so can't set up more sell orders. This case find the order with the lowest sell-buy difference and modify the order to match a buy order to get rid of it.

Now let's discuss the most annoying thing a trader has to face. No it's not pirates, not even griefers, it's the 0.01 ISK punks. They are exactly the same bunch that undercut your WoW auctions by 1 copper. They utilize their playing frequency to always be on the top of the auctions, making sure you sell nothing unless you camp the station. They are often the creators of buy orders and since you can't sell, you'll give up and accept their price.

Don't! The rat poison that works on their WoW buddies get rid of them just as well: deep undercutting! Please look at that transaction log (oldest entry on the bottom):


On 2012.03.03 6:36 I sold the sole book I had for myself since I saw the price way over the buy price. It sold fast, so I chose to buy some more. These books are sold for 25.2M by NPCs on stations 5-10 jumps from Jita. The profit was 28.6*(1-0.0127)-25.2 = 3.03M on a single book. So I went and bought some, and started listing them. Sold 2 more when the resident 0.01 punk noticed competition and undercut. Since I was jumping in and out to Jita with various stuff, I could undercut him by 10K or something often, still I could only sell 2 when some guys bought them in rapid succession, probably in the 5 minutes window of the punk. So I cut the price by a million and since he did not give up, by another half the next day and in 3 steps by another half the day after. The profit for me now is 710K/book. Since then I'm selling happily, he probably choose to wait me out, or rather he had no choice since he is not transporting them himself but buying them on the station, having to pay the haulers fee and the tax of the sell between the hauler and him.

So calculate your minimum profit expectation and if you are undercut by a 0.01 punk, cut the price down to that minimum in 3-5 steps. He'll either go to hell, or you have to accept that there is someone who has better source or lower profit expectation. Of course it doesn't mean you shall accept a buy order, you can keep your sell order up for a few days, maybe the lower price increases the demand enough that his stockpiles are bought up and you sell too.

Before you'd ask why the hate against the 0.01 punk: I'm a preacher of capitalism and a strong believer that it's good for the World. The station trader is providing a useful service for both parties. The impatient seller can sell instantly to his buy order, the buyer will find the item on the station, he doesn't have to go there the previous day to set up a buy order. The competing station traders decrease the margin between the buy and sell prices, providing income to both parties. The 0.01 punk not only doesn't provide such service but discourage sellers to set up sell orders (as it won't sell as he undercuts them) and discourage buyers to set up buy orders, so he moves the market away from equilibrium, enforcing the belief that the market is something evil that doesn't serve the people. I'm also annoyed by his existence as it's pretty easy to get rid of him so his pure existence proves that most people has the trading knowledge of a toad.

PS: the pictures above also serve as moron of the day. Two can be seen at 03.04 10:40 and 03.06 22:55. Instead of buying my 26.9 and 26.2M auctions they set up buy orders for 29.4 and 28.9. Since no transporting was involved and setting up a buy order takes more clicks than accepting an existing sell order there is no other explanation than him being dumb. The biggest moron however is me at the top. I woke up to a car alarm and couldn't sleep back so I logged in. Recognized that almost all my books sold so I went to buy some more. Never do that half asleep, run some errand instead! I found some cheap books, checked that no low-sec gate is in the way and off I went to pick them up. When I saw CONCORD on the third gate in the row I checked the map. I bought the books on Torrinos, which is at the end of a linear chain. From Torrinos you can only go Yoma, from there Isinokka, from there Oipo, then Haajinen, then Piak. It doesn't need a genius to figure out ones route. Beyond Torrinos there is nullsec territory. This is the only way from there to Jita. All systems bright red on the "ships destroyed last 24 hours". Obvious pirate scouts at all gates, mixed with CONCORD. So I managed to buy 300M worth of books at the end of pirate highway to transport it in a T1 frigate. I made it. But it just makes me a lucky idiot.

PS2: Short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 1.002B (500M from gifts). Thanks to my luck. It could be 700M. Ouch.

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Griefer-safe EVE life

Griefers are the plague of EVE and make its bad name. They aren't pirates who go for loot but kiddies going for "tears". It's common belief that griefers can't be avoided, they are a menace that can hit you anytime and there is nothing you can do about it. You can of course stand up and start again but you are never safe. You must always look over your shoulder and still they will hit you. EVE is not safe. It's not for "carebears".

I'm completely sure that this belief is the most important reason why many prospective players stay away from this great game. Who wants to play in an environment where a 12 years old kid who stole the credit card of his daddy can destroy your ingame life at will?

What I'm telling here is not a trick to avoid most griefers. No self-restricting rules come like "make a 0-m dock bookmark to every possible station" or "check ships destroyed in last 24 hours statistic every 5 minutes and if it increases in your system instantly dock and log".

The point is neither that griefers are vastly overestimated. This scientific research says that people who fear something see them bigger than they are. Since people fear griefers, they way overestimate their number. If we'd listen to the amount of whine about them, we'd guess that an average person is griefed several times a week. I've never been killed in EVE in high sec. How many exact encounters can you recall that happened to you or someone you personally know (not "some guy my buddys roommate once talked about")?

No. I'm offering you advice that can make you 100% safe from this plague. The griefer is a simple creature, he wants to cause ... [intensive drumming] ... grief. He wants to see some evidence of his target is being sad or angry. His second account is reading the local chat and if you are in the newbie starter corporation, the corporation chat. He may even initiate direct conversation to taunt you. I have no idea what he wants or why he does it, it's completely alien to me, but instead of moralizing or analyzing, just accept his motivation to get "tears".

The griefer will be killed by CONCORD. He surely don't care about it, otherwise he wouldn't do it. That's why he looks unbeatable: he cannot lose anything he cares about, you can. However he very much care about your feelings about his ship blowing up. Remember that he thinks that loss of the ship is the way of suffering and seeing others losing ship is fun. You saw him losing his ship, so you're having fun. All you have to do is make sure that his loss is greater than yours, and somehow communicate this to him. Unless you are doing something stupid like carrying several hundred millions in lowbie ships, the first is given. The game is designed the way that in high security space pirating is not profitable against average targets. You can increase this difference by having a premium insurance. It's not cheap, but a worthy investment, not just ISK but safety-feeling wise.

Now you have to communicate it. The easiest to do so in your bio that you can edit on your character screen. Add something like "I'm paranoid, have my ship max insured and never fly or carry anything I can't replace easily". And do so! If you bluff, you'll still be afraid, even if the bluff works! This way you can never be griefed. Your ship can still be destroyed but all it gives you a good laugh over the idiot who was spectacularly blown up by the CONCORD.

This is the reason why the tag is "philosophy". I doubt if the fear of loss of pixels keep people away from EVE. It's the social idea of being in the mercy of 12 years old kiddies. The solution is recognizing that you are not. They can only harm themselves and give you a good laugh. This way you present them the unsolvable dilemma: "If you rickroll someone who actually likes Never gonna give you up, you are giving him a gift!". Because that is needed: while we don't understand what is fun of destroying some total strangers ship, but a true goblin always have fun when sees M&S suffer because of their own idiocy.

If you get blown up by some of them, please try to start conversation with him and send me the log where he desperately tries to prove that he won and you should be sad now and that he "knows" that you are crying and he is "having fun"! Let's share the laugh on this blog!

Of course the above doesn't mean you should ignore the basic EVE safety rule: never fly or carry anything you can't replace easily. Oh wait, the platinum insurance just replaced your ship, the only cost will be the new insurance.


PS: short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 912M (500M gift)

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Hauling shinies

The PuG update: the first openraid ran very well, 3 BWD HM bosses died:
This was a true pug, from various realms. While stupid mistakes happened, not more than in guild raids (the druid who was told to switch cat form when targeted by Atramedes switched bear form for huge laughter for example). I definitely see cross-realm pugs as a future of casual raiding. Of course such pugs can't compete with HM guilds, but they are perfect way of completing content without being forced to boost M&S.

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In EVE you can transport various things between stations, mostly for profit. However there is a risk of being killed by pirates or griefers even in high security space. To lower that risk, you must understand that there are two kind of things to transport: shinies and large stuff.

Shiny things are small but valuable. A skillbook takes up 0.01 m³ space and can cost 10-100 million. A single +5 implant is 1m³ and costs 100M. You obviously won't fill your cargohold with these. You can make good money transporting these, much better than by doing missions:
On the other hand their great value makes them good target for pirates. He scans you down, kills you, CONCORD (the police) kills him, his buddy grabs the loot and flies away. Griefers mostly don't bother to scan but you can bump into one while your cargohold has half your fortune in books.

What to do then? Common sense says to only transport these in strong ships that can't be destroyed. That's the worst idea you could get, there is nothing in EVE that can't be shot down.

The way to relatively safely transport shinies is the opposite, doing it in a frigate or a faction shuttle. To understand why, you must understand how traveling happens in EVE. It starts by undocking the station. Your ship instantly appears outside, but invulnerable until you perform an action or 30 seconds pass. You warp to the stargate and just when you arrive the stargate pulls you in. The stargate transports you to the other star system, where you are cloaked until moving or 30 seconds. So you can't be harmed when you just arrived to the space via stargate or leaving station. You can't be harmed while warping.

However you don't warp instantly. When you give the warp command, the ship must turn to the target and speed up to 3/4 thrust before warping happens. The faster you do it, the less time the enemy has to notice you, click on you, complete the targeting and activate his warp scramblers. You might noticed that cargo ships turn slow and accelerate slow. The acceleration speed depends on your mass, your inertia modifiers and your agility.

So to warp fast you must decrease your mass, inertia modifiers and increase agility. Frigates has the lowest mass among ships and good inertia modifier. It can be further decreased by inertia stabilizer module. The skills Spaceship Command and Evasive Maneuvering increases agility (actually decreases since EVE calculate this backwards).

There is one more vulnerable spot: when you give the "dock" command away from the station, you warp to it, but not surely close enough. The docking request can be done from 2500m, but the "docking request accepted" message arrives only after 500M, you are vulnerable in the meantime. Solution: go away from the station with an empty ship, give the "warp to 10km" command and then just fly into the station. Stop inside it and bookmark that location. Give the "dock" command there, if it's instant, the bookmark is good. Make this bookmark the destination of your flight back and when you arrived there give the dock command to the station.

There is one more thing to keep in mind. You can't start a warp next to an object as you must speed up before you could initiate warp, where you can pass trough even planets. So if you leave the station and issue warp command, you see your ship slowly going around the station, while being vulnerable. There are no such blocking objects at stargates and you leave your home station empty, so you are vulnerable to this problem only once: when you leave the station where you picked up the cargo. To prevent being vulnerable, do the following:

1. Leave the station empty and initiate warp to the first stargate with the "warp to 0 m" command. If the warp is instant, return to the station and proceed with the cargo.
2. If your ship starts to go around the station, redock.
3. Leave the station empty again and look the ship from behind. Close to the middle of the screen is where your ship is heading. Seek some object there. Another station, asteroid field, planet, moon. Just not the "pith depot" or a player placed container please. These objects are "front of the door" of the station, unblocked. Save their location.
4. If there is no object visible simply try different stargates and celestial objects. Undock and see where you can jump without being blocked.
5. Redock and leave with cargo. Warp to this object using the "warp to 50km" or some other non-0 distance. You will warp instantly. While in warp set your destination to your real one and when you arrived, instanly give the jump order to the first stargate.

More safety tip: if you are extra paranoid, run the course with an empty ship. If your ship starts targeting something automatically, it's a sign of someone is targeting you, probably for a scan. This case you can delay your transport.

One more skill to be mentioned: warp drive operation. This skill decreases warp core energy consumption. It is important when you have to warp between stargates that are far from each other. If you don't have enough energy, you will stop in the middle of nowhere losing time (= money).
 

The map can be configured to show recent kills, so you can avoid systems with serious pirate activity:

The obvious EVE rules apply: don't carry anything you can't afford to lose and don't go AFK while in space while carrying anything worthy of attacking. Using autopilot while transporting shinies indicates terminal state mental degeneration.

And keep in mind that all my experience is coming from high security space and I don't recommend any newbie to try them on low or null sec.


PS: short business update: Cash + buy orders + sell orders = 888M (500M gift)

PS2: if you are a pirate getting ideas, I'm transporting these by a newbie alt, so good luck scan down all the hundreds of frigates, shuttles, rookie ships that travel there every hour.

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Fly Badgers!

The first ship that I flied after the beginner missions was the Badger, the smallest Caldari transport ship. The first photo on my first EVE post illustrated this ship:
The Badgers are still close to my heart. For this reason I started to buy them up. For the sake of nostalgia maybe. Or rather:
I wish I knew why do they buy Badgers in mass in Jita. I mean anyone but a total newbie can fly the much better Badger II which doesn't cost significantly more. And if they buy little Badgers since they can't afford the big, why can't they do a 4-jump trip to the starter solar systems, where the newbies who got this ship as a mission reward are selling it for peanuts? Anyway, in business their motivation doesn't matter, profit does. As long as they buy, I sell.

To increase the profitability, I do the same with Cormorants (Caldari destroyers). The reason why newbies are selling their strongest combat ship is again beyond me, along with the near-infinite demand for them in Jita, but again: my place is transporting instead of asking questions:
My business plan is simple: I fly to the newbie system with a shuttle carrying a cargohold expander I module. I assemble the Badger, fit the expander on it, put the shuttle and the Cormorant into the hold and fly it back to Jita. 450-500K profit over 900K capital for a 2x4-jump high-sec transport which can be done by autopilot? Yes please! As a bonus, I can carry a few odd books that the newbies sold too on the Badger (of course not an expensive one that would get pirate attention).

Buying them is easy, I set up buy orders for the ships in the newbie systems, so I never have to worry of running out of Badgers. Actually, the situation is quite the opposite:
Seems I got myself into the same situation as before: I have way more Badgers than I could handle and new ones are arriving while you are reading this. However this time I was prepared, which leads us to the industrial system to learn today:
Reprocessing is the act of turning a product, a mineral or ice into raw materials. You can see on the picture that I don't get all the materials. Some lost to "unrecoverable" and other bunch to "we take". The first is affected by skills using the following formula: SC+0.375*(1+R*0.02)*(1+RE*0.04)*(1+SP*0.05)

• SC is the station constant, it's 0.5 for NPC stations
• R is the Refining skill
• RE is Refinery Efficiency skill, it needs Refining 5 to be learnable and takes 3x more time to level up than basic skills
• SP is special processing skill. It's not one skill but many, like Veldspar processing, Scordite processing. The basic ones are easy to learn, but the rare ores, ice and scrapmetal processing (ships and modules count as scrapmetal) are all learnable after Refinery Efficiency is rank 5. This skill takes 5x time than basic skills to learn

On the picture you can see 97.8% yield which is reachable by Refining 5 and Refinery Efficiency 4 which can be learned in reasonable time.

The "we take" field is affected by your standing with the station that can be increased by doing missions to them. It's 5% at 0 standing and linearly decreases, reaching 0 at 6.7 standing.

Please note that raw materials are very small in size, only 0.01m³ and some are pretty expensive. 500000 Noxcium fits into a Badger and costs half PLEX. So rather don't transport 500K Noxcium in a Badger. Take several turns instead to avoid pirates. If you want to implement it, remember that Badger is Caldari, there is similar ship for every faction.

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