The wonderful Orca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The deep undercutting strategy is usually considered an aggressive, market-PvP way. You destroy the profit for everyone, making them leave. It works wonders on 0.01 ISK-ers as they are utilizing time to get profit. If they are not making any, they lose lot of time for nothing while you lose only a little.

However it doesn't work all the time. Some of them are just persistent. They don't play for the ISK, they 0.01 just for the sake of PvP. To feel like the king of Jita. Others look back later when you'd try to cash in. A third is not a single person but a collective of random guys who are not so dumb to sell to a laughable buy order but not so smart either to do anything more than check market details and type in the current lowerst order -0.01. You clearly can't scare them off. Of course you shouldn't give up the market to such competitors. Behold the permanent undercutting method. It's purely PvE, ignores the other sellers as players, just treat them as factors in an economic situation.

The system is based on the elastic supply and demand curve. In simple terms: if the sell price decreases, the sell volume goes up because people who couldn't afford the old price buy now. If the buy price increases, the volume goes up because more and more people find the item worthy of farming/hauling/buying from LP. Obviously the increases can't go on forever as the sell price can't be below the buy price. We can conclude that the volume is highest when the sell and buy price is the same, which is another economy 101 statement.

Obviously if the buy and sell prices are the same, the trader has no profit. Actually you have no profit if they are within the tax + broker_fee range. But usually they are very far from each other. The permanent undercutting method is the following: when you place a new buy or sell order, set it close to the existing one. Of course not 0.01 but the nearest million. When updating the price, check how many items are undercutting you. One seller with 100 items is more problematic than 10 with 1. Depending on the amount of undercutters (most of them will 0.01), make your cut, about 2-20% of the price difference of buys and sells. So if the sell is 150M, the buy is 100 and I'm undercut by a single guy with a single item, I undercut him by 1-2M. If several undercut me, I undercut by 5M. If I have to scroll to find my order or find a large-volume order above me, I undercut by 10M.

The most important part is that to wait between price updates. At least half day, but a whole is maybe better. You can effectively trade even if you update only few times a week. If you check back in 10 mins, you'll find it undercut by several 0.01, you cut again by 5-10M, few more cycles and you destroyed the profit. The point is not to sell before the 0.01 punks. That's impossible. The point of decreasing the sell price is to increase the sell volume to the point where the buyers buy out all the 0.01 punks above you and you.

You can claim that you won't sell anything since the 0.01 punks are having 0.01 buy orders above you too so they constantly buy and sell. This is technically true, but irrelevant. The buyers and sellers are not constant streams so there are always micro-swings in the market. This hour 10 guys bought and 2 sold, next hour 3 v 7. When the buyers are over-represented, the sell orders are bought out and the buy orders can't keep up. When sellers are over-represented, the opposite happens.

To make it better, the 0.01 punk utilizes his time to gain trades. Your profit/hour is (sell-buy-tax&fee)/10 seconds as you can set up a buy/sell order or update it in 10 seconds. His profit is (sell-buy-tax&fee)/time_spent_camping. As you keep cutting the price you find that after a point you don't need to undercut anymore as they choose to wait you out. Then you sell first. It usually happens with me below 4% sell-buy difference. So Accounting 5 and low broker fees are a must.

Remember, the point is that it's a permanently running strategy, not a campaign. You either make profit or have no losses (besides few seconds of time). The 0.01 punks have no chance against you, even if they are ready to camp 24/7 for no profit because they are fighting market forces and not you.


Tuesday morning report: 38.7B. (1 PLEX ahead, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt, 0.1 on Rorqual)
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Where The Mittani is right and wrong

The Mittani (the leader of a sov-holding and obnoxious griefing alliance) wrote a valuable and interesting post. He is surprised that players feel entitled for not being ganked in EVE. He is completely right that CCP advertises every possible way that it's a PvP game where you can be shot down by other players. Someone not knowing the key feature of the game he bought is an idiot.

He is also rightfully surprised how big part of the playerbase is completely ignorant about the community aspect of an MMO, despite MMOs are defined as games with community aspect. Someone who plays with a Hulk and never heard of Hulkageddon until the point he is ganked is an idiot.

I also agree with his description of other MMOs: while good skills are needed for the endgame, you can get to the top level and play infinitely in a clownsuit with laughable spell choices. Let me add what I had to experience in WoW at the end: good players were forced to carry bad ones who contributed near-zero but got equal chance to receive rewards.

I fully agree with "Of course, one of the most horrifying lessons of EVE is that the Enlightenment ideals are false; the power of reason doesn’t actually lift the population out of the muck, because they’re too busy AFK mining or undocking Kestrels full of PLEXes.".

There cannot be another solution than his: we must somehow make these people to think. To stop being bio-bots and start being thinking humans. Since I'm more or less completely opposing anything that The Mittani says and does, if we agree on something, it's probably right.

However I completely disagree with the practical plan how to do it: "To prevent EVE from becoming a PvP-optional themepark of the sort that coddles this shameful demographic, something must be done - the players who actually do participate in the EVE community must either educate these people about the nature of the game, or blow them up."

His idea seems solid: offer education and deliver punishment for those who fail to learn. However his horizon is bound by his intelligence: he suggests something that works on us. When I was ganked, I asked around. I was quickly informed about killboards and the fact that I was passing a very busy lowsec gate in a paper-tanked T1 industrial. I wasn't ganked again, mostly because I'm either flying something that aligns under 2 seconds and still have 8K EHP for smartbombs, or I'm flying an Orca with 200K EHP. I found EFT, forums and learned, just as The Mittani hoped. I'm sure it happened the same for him too. If it worked on us, it must work on them too!

No! Being a moron or slacker is not a qualitative state "a bit dumber than me". It's a yes-or-no state. If you apply pressure to an M&S he gives a tantrum or runs away. He is unable to learn in his current state. Ganking M&S and hoping that they start to play smartly is just as good idea as punishing a 2 years old for peeing into his pants. The same thing works perfectly on adults: peeing on the street (along with its usual cause, public drunkness) is punished by law and rarely happens. An adult is capable to understand the demands and capable to control his body. He can avoid peeing outside of a toilet, some just choose to not do so. If we punish them, they'll learn. A child can't. He is simply unable to control his body and must learn how to do it.

The child found it normal to pee whenever he pleased in baby-age and it's a new expectation for him now. Just like the average EVE player might encountered the idea that failure has consequences the very first time in his life. Remember, real life is polluted with "protect children from stress", "no child left behind" and other atrocious things. Just like the 2 years old who used to wet his diapers, these players find it completely normal that the World responded to their failure with acceptance and even rewards, repeating that they are special snowflakes and perfect the way they are and deserve flashy achievements in games for logging in.

However there is a solution, the one that every child psychologist would suggest: don't punish him for wetting his pants, reward him for sitting on the toilet when he needs to pee. If we want EVE to be a place where M&S turn into useful humans by playing, then the advice of the child psychologists must be followed. Terrible players neither shall be punished, nor rewarded for being terrible. They must be rewarded when they show signs of improvement. For this I'd suggest a simple rule: Highsec is completely safe, but all highsec PvE activities (ratting, missioning, mining, exploring) are designed to provide about 10% ISK/hour of what they would in lowsec. The the fact that other players have much-much better ships will make them want to get it too. Also, to prevent them from peacocking in PLEX-ISK-ed deadspace fitted Navy Ravens, design all highsec PvE activities to make battleships/battlecruisers useless. All rats and missions shall be behind warp gates letting only frigates, destroyers and cruisers in, belt rats are small frigates, no incursions in high-sec.

Instead of being motivated by fear (that only leads to childish answers: tantrum or quitting), they would be motivated by positive things: earning ISK, getting a better ship. One by one they would seek out for means to get the rewards. They would fail some times but then they could always fall back to the safety of highsec.

Of course to implement this, we would have to deal with another bunch of forum-crying childish idiots: those who derive their fun from beating up someone who can't fight back. They actually love the M&S for providing them constant reassurance that there are worse failures in the universe than themselves.

Saturday morning report: 35.0B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Sunday morning report: 36.5B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
Monday morning report: 38.0B. (0 PLEX behind for second account, 1.1B spent on Logi/Carrier/Titan alt)
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