EVE Character report - August

Here is my character report, I hope my plans help you make yours and that your comments help me refine mine. If not, move along, nothing to see here. I try to use a simple format that can be copy-pasted and updated. First an overview table, then detailed description of characters. Unused characters are ignored.

Char#	Personal data	Account#	Implants	July SP	August SP	Remap	Last month focus
1	Gevlon Goblin	1	4	6.82	7.39	P7-W7	Caldari Cruiser 5
2	Hek trader	1	3	1.04	1.15	C4-W10	Broker 5
3	Scout/cyno pilot	1	3	1.38	2.66	I10-M4	Navigation skills
4	Amarr trader	2	4	2.33	2.76	C5-W4-M5	Broker 5
5	Dodixie trader	2	4	2.37	2.79	C8-W6	Broker 5
6	Rens trader	2	4	2.37	3.29	C8-W6	Broker 5, Wholesale 5
7	Logi/Triage pilot	3	5	6.42	8.40	I10-M4, later P10-W4	Support, Minmatar cruiser 5
8	Rorqual pilot	4	5	2.69	4.68	I10-M4	Support, JDO 5
9	Ragnarok pilot	5	5	2.15	4.10	I10-M4	Support skills
10	Nyx pilot for sale	6	5	1.78	3.76	I10-M4	Support skills
11	Titan pilot for sale	7	5	1.29	3.38	I10-M4	Support, JDO5
12	Girlfriends' character	8	4	7.90	9.82	P10-W4	Gunnery skills

You can see the benefits of EVE Offline: those characters that are just sitting on a station in perfect remap with +5 implants are collecting about 2M SP a month. Also, by having various characters on different accounts, you can catch up with veterans. No one can learn rank 6 skills, more skillpoints mean ability to fulfill more roles, to fly more ships. That can also be achieved by different accounts.

1. My main, Gevlon Goblin. I'm still in P-W remap and gained little SP as the focus was on the scout. I'll learn the skills for the ships I'll use in rest of my (foreseeable) life: a Basilisk with logi 4, a Charon, a blockade runner, an Orca which I'm already flying and a stealth bomber to fly lowsec. My future is clear: Jita will be my home and Science and Trade Institution my corp till the end of days. I'll make ISK for nullsec ventures. After I finished the ships, I'll remap for more trade and industry skills.
2. This pilot practically never leaves Hek - Boundless Creations Factory and does only trading. Future plans: finishing trade skills (Accounting 5 is missing among many other 5s). Then learning research skills to work with the agents to trigger storylines and some passive income from datacores.
3. She is my first nullsec pilot, her job is to scout for the rest pilots, do exploration and open cyno if needed.
4. She trades in Amarr and practically does nothing else. Learns more trade skills. Maybe industry.
5. She trades in Dodixie and practically does nothing else. Learns more trade skills.
6. She trades in Rens and ran my planets. I switched them off, because I am cutting back my moneymaking.
7. She trains for logistics and triage carrier. Almost done with a Scimitar, then train for Nidhoggur. This pilot will participate in fleet actions.
8. While I'll fly in null, I won't stop being an industrialist there. So my Rorqual alt has born. Still in newbie phase, learning of Int/Mem. In a month remap to Cha/Will to learn Mining Director and Wing command to be able to boost a mining fleet. Finally remap P-W for my ships: the Rorqual, a freighter and a jump freighter. It is followed by industrial skills, needed to compress ore.
9. This pilot has long way before flying anything but a shuttle. Still months in Int/Mem and Int/Perc support skills, then I learn fleet boost skills, then Perc/Will almost forever for a Titan. See below.
10. To experiment with Character Bazaar, I started training a Nyx pilot. We'll see how much profit this sale will provide
11. My second titan pilot. Originally planned as Avatar, but multiboxing titans would be some serious negligence. He'll be the holder char for my backup titan and learn titan-related skills. Will be sold when ready, replaced by another titan sitter.
12. On the top of my own accounts, I give a PLEX a month to my girlfriend, as it would be stupid to pay for it with real money. She is still extremely casual, though starts to show signs of getting a clue about the game. She has two ships now, got a Noctis for looting/salvaging, but everything else is done by her Rokh. That ship improved a lot. She does L2-L3 missions, having 8 dual 250s (lowest DPS but highest tracking speed large rails) and a tracking computer with tracking script increased her effectivity greatly.

There cannot be a character report without yet another titan plan. The last month shown significant changes in large fleet warfare, the Drake fleets of earlier times are mostly replaced by Rokhs, Maelstroms and other slow but high EHP - high DPS things. Here signature radius is not so important, EHP is. So my Titan pilot will probably learn Caldari Titan: The faction power diagnostics was chosen for having +6% shields instead of 5 like the officers (at the cost of lower capacitor regen and powergrid). As you can see only 2 shield modules are overheated as this setup can be upheld for 6 mins. With all overheat the EHP goes up to 110M but only for 2 mins. The ship is self-buffed, receiving the bonuses of her own links, providing +35% shield HP for the whole fleet, the best available alpha protection.

However there is word that CCP considers removing off-grid boosting. If that happens, " Claymores and Lokis, which give skirmish bonuses, lack the ability to fit decent armor tanks" which would be pretty bad for the upcoming Tengu fleets (and the remaining drakes). If that happens, I'll fly a skirmish command ship:

Saturday morning report: 145.7B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
Sunday morning report: 146.5B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
Monday morning report: 147.8B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

The great shitworm scam

In the late 1980-es Argotechnological scientists found that a certain type of earthworm is very effective in processing manure and other agricultural byproducts into fertile soil. This time in Hungary the communist regime was collapsing and the people looked at starting business as a way to reach the western wealth in months.

In their foolish hope to get rich by tending shit-eating worms, they started buying such worms and use them in their garden. No, not to process their non-existing manure as it was suggested by the scientists, but to produce more worms for sale. The price was pretty high due to the insane demand created by the swarming fools. As the worms doubled their numbers in 3 months, the business had the prospective of doubling capital in 3 months.

Unfortunately the utility value of the worms was pretty low. I mean they decomposed manure into soil. Soil is used in agriculture and agriculture isn't the field where prices are skyrocketing. You can get a decent income for your time, sure. There is a reason why "farming" is the word used to slowly but surely generating income by work. No wonder that after every available fool were pulled in and no more newcomers were buying worms, the huge shitworm-Ponzi-scheme collapsed and the worm-owners had to face the fact that their capital was lost as their worms worth about zero.

So we have a hilarious "scam of the century": about 1% of the whole Hungarian population was scammed, the total loss was in GDP% magnitude, tens of thousands of families lost their home they mortgaged to get worms and dozens who lost everything committed IRL ragequit. You know what's missing? The scammers.

It seems that in the great shitworm scam no one got rich. Sure, those who jumped in early made some cash, but the total profit of the "scam" was nothing compared to the total loss. The money wasn't taken, it was wasted, mostly on time spent tending worms instead of working and on buying shit. Literally. I mean the frenzied fools were paying money to buy manure despite the intended purpose of the process was to get money from the manure-owners for handling their bio-hazardous waste.

At this point we reached the central reason why people can be scammed. Not because they "trust the wrong guy". There was no "wrong guy" in the great shitworm scam. They lost their money because they believed in a stupid plan. "Trusting a guy" means "I believe he is not lying". You can trust most people. However them lying or not is nearly irrelevant. Just because they honestly believe that shit and worms will make you rich, it won't be true.

Let's get back to the worst scammer of EVE. After he made my third highest visitor count after undergeared and another scammer he wrote: "I was in a rush IRL, so I kind of hit the bullet points and didn't stop to actually convince him that I was trustworty". Let's imagine an alternative reality where he is not a total failure and actually convinced me that he is trustworthy. Would he have my money? No, after some more hours of chatting I'd close the discussion with "I'm sorry but your plan won't work" and would believe that he is just another honest moron.

Forums and blogs are full of "do this FTW", "this is fail", "I agree with X", "u haz no experience shut up" (if experience would help getting an argument, they'd already have it and could share it) and other commenters who clearly have no argument or point, just spread whatever nonsense happen to be on their mind. Do you think they are all scammers?

The world is full of honest morons, intelligent scammers are actually a delight among them. When someone says "do X, trust me it'll work", you shall refuse not because he is maybe a scammer (he is mostly not), but because the plan will most probably fail spectacularly due to his incompetence. You must be aware of every detail of the plan and understand it well. If you misunderstood the plan, you aren't scammed, but dumb. People are trying to misguide you into stupid plans every day. One being liar instead of honestly stupid is an irrelevant detail.


There are situations when the other guy says "I won't/can't tell you the plan. You must trust me". The perfect example is the FC at a Titan bridge telling the fleet members to jump in. He doesn't tell you where you are jumping, it can be a purposeful trap or simply a dumb battle plan that is just as smart as "let's warp to the undock of K-6K16".

Now what? He won't share you the plan. You can choose to trust him or just quit his fleet. What shall you do? Here comes what I wrote about "nullsec-altruism". By giving up control over the asset, you lose it, by definition. You can hope that he will give it back to you, but you can never trust in that. So you must ask yourself do I want to gift the asset to him? If you want to give a gift to him or the group he represents, sure, do it. If you don't, don't.


PS: As I read about the -A- supercarrier massacre, I was thinking about an idea how could a supercapital pilot save much value of his tackled super. As far as I know, ships can be refitted during combat if there is a friendly carrier around. So if the supers are beyond help, their 10-20B fitting could be removed, jetcanned, picked up by a nearby T3 fitted with interdiction nullifier and warped to safety. Could it work?

Friday morning report: 143.8B I made some modifications on my item list, liquidated some items, hence the drop. (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

License, tax, rent

Yesterday I mentioned an idea that deserves a much deeper analysis, namely that alliances should sell PvE licenses to players instead of taxing them. Let's assume 300M license fee, 60M/hour income, 20% tax:
As you can see, any serious PvE player is better off with a license than a tax. He is more likely to join a licensing alliance than a taxing. Tax is only preferred by casual PvE players, typically PvP-ers ratting on the side. The alliance needs nothing but separating its space between taxed and licensed one and punishing those who were found in licensed land without license.

Why is it good for the alliance?

• Because it draws the more serious PvE players to the alliance, the ones who pay more
• The gym-trick: most income of gyms come from people who decide to lose weight/live healthy and pay the entrance fee for a month but don't come at all or just once. Many players who would not do much PvE, therefore pay no tax would buy the license saying "I'll grind hard this month to finally get my carrier". The fact if he actually does or not is irrelevant for the alliance, as he already paid.
• Easy recruiting: if you recruit someone, he can be a spy, awoxer or simply an annoying idiot. If you recruit him into the licensing corp and have to kick him tomorrow, he still paid his license fee
• Easy taxing of mining: ratting can be taxed, mining not. You must set extra rules to administer the amount of minerals and collect fees. The typical way is demanding refining on the station which disallow the easy transportation in Rorqual compressed form. With license there is no such problem. Any member will gladly blow up unlicensed miners for free.

Now let's see how such licensing would differ from system renting: The renter is a corporation, the license-buyer is a pilot. When you deal with corporations, you have to take the good with the bad as you lack the administrative power to filter every member. Also most corp leaders wouldn't be happy if you'd tell them who to take. With the licenses you cut the corp leaders out of the loop, you contract directly with the pilot. If he fails to deliver or makes trouble you kick him and only him. If a corporation makes trouble, you have to kick it whole, including the non-offending players. A corporation has its own culture, the players are mostly loyal to the corp. If the leader decides that they leave, they do. A player, licensed alone has no other culture to join so even if he arrived solely for ratting income he'll find friends in the alliance, therefore will more likely fight for them when things get rough. Finally, most PvE players are in highsec and alone (in a crop with 2 alts, family members). If you recruit renter corps, they can't join. By offering personal licenses, you can reach the individual player and can get him to join.

While other administrative means are possible, let me suggest a simple and effective way to handle licensing. The alliance creates a new corp, lead by one of the trusted directors. His job is to handle the PvE players. Both existing alliance members and foreigners can apply. The existing members get in instantly, the newcomers are scanned for obvious spies/troublemakers and may required security deposit. Of course it needs the alliance to be trustworthy, no sane man would pay security deposit to GSF for example. If the alliance used to be scamming, then even monthly fees can be problematic and weekly payments are needed until the system proves itself to be not a scam.

Some trusted alliance PvE players are promoted to officers of the corp who monitor chat against unwanted behavior. Remember that if you want to lure PvE players to nullsec, you must provide answers to their noobish questions and ASCII penises that several people consider answers on chat don't suffice. These "moderators" are also needed to hint alliance propaganda and root out whining, allowing the alliance to culturally assimilate the newcomers, as them joining in fleets would be a good bonus on top of the fees they pay. Of course the promoted officers should receive some form of salary for their work, like discount in the license fee. They should also have enough PvP knowledge to be able to both advise the PvE newcomers in PvP and lead them against minor enemy troublemakers.

The moron of the day is undoubtably him. He transported 7B worth of implants in a Rifter that had no fittings at all. No nanofibers, no tank, no nothing.


PS: quick news, a CCP Diagoras tweet: Top nullsec stations for market trans on Apr 22nd: 6VDT (5,741), VFK (4,055), C3N (1,759), L-C3 (1,711), E-BY (1,691).

Thursday morning report: 143.6B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

After Tech alliance budgets

Tech alliances were considered "dirty rich" despite their income wasn't that high. I mean the whole CFC-HB made about 1T/month which is just 20x bigger than my individual income. However it was nearly 1T/month more than the non-tech alliances. It was enough to not only pay for sov bills but also have a reimbursement policy. Those who lost a doctrine ship in fleet action got the cost back, being able to buy a new ship for free. This was a large bonus as it allowed casual PvP-ers to join. They could fly in the fleets with no additional costs. Without reimbursement the pilot must grind enough ISK to get ships and be motivated enough to fly it in battles where losing it has huge risks. The reimbursed fleets shown clear and obvious superiority in numbers over non-reimbursed ones.


Now what? With the recent Tech changes the Tech alliances lost their former financial superiority. Look at this TEST accounting sheet: 40% of their income (107B/month) is coming from Tech. In February it was 73%. No wonder they are losing 49B/month due to increased sov costs and increased reimbursements from the intensive battles.

How can an alliance get money from the post-tech era to be able to upkeep reimbursements which is more or less the IWIN button in EVE sov wars? Let's dig that sheet more. TEST has income from other moons too, as non-Tech moons also have minerals that sell for some price. Those provide 62B. They get 37B from station and PoCo taxes (broker fees, PI, manufacturing...) 53B from taxing bounties and such. Again, not as chest-beating but to show how small the budget of the largest alliance is: these numbers are all in the same range as my personal 40-50B/month income. Well, they could increase bounty taxes but the low number shows exactly that few people gather bounties and higher taxing may further decrease their number. They could increase broker fees but those can easily be dodged by direct trading or not trading at all but hauling to highsec and sell there.

There are two ways out of this for those alliances that want to upkeep reimbursement in the post-tech era: one is some form of VIP-membership that costs significant ISK/month for benefits. Such system would lure IRL rich people (who convert PLEX) and highsec industrialists into nullsec. Having just a few dozens of them would solve the income problems of the alliances. However when I had a similiar idea, it failed badly, exactly because of lack of benefits. Why should anyone pay for something that can be gained for free? If I wanted to join TEST I could just start a reddit account, post some, start a new account unrelated to my blog and could join. As there is no demanded minimal contribution (in WoW it's common to demand 3*4 hours/week attendance or kick), there is little room to give VIP benefits. The only way to implement something like that is first to make a non-VIP baseline with demands like 3 fleets/week mandatory, one of them is alarm clock, and then allow to skip it by payment. Membership payments could also work in "elite" alliances (like PL) where people want to join for prestige.

The other one is supporting and taxing nullsec PvE. It means that creating mining and ratting fleets with protection and instant mineral/loot buyouts to make it profitable for PvE players despite the taxing. I mean if you just tax PvE without providing superior support, the PvE players just go away to other, cheaper alliances or to their highsec alts. PR and propaganda can help here, giving respect and cheers to the alliance PvE players, so they prefer to stay in the alliance over going somewhere for higher profit but being called "lol carebears". Such PvE activity can be fostered by dedicated PvE corps where the similar-minded members can easily find groups and exchange information. Organization is needed for taxing mining as you can't set mining taxes the same way as bounty taxes. You must be there in the mining fleet to evaluate how much minerals were gained to calculate the tax.

Now let me suggest an advanced way that cuts out the administration overhead from PvE fleets: ratting/mining license instead of tax. Tax is a kind of punishment for doing the activity. You rat 2x more, you pay 2x more. When you make the decision to log your ratter or not, the tax says "don't". This is fine with the casual PvE players (who are actually PvP-ers earning ISK on the side) but more serious PvE players (who want to earn serious ISK) are scared off by taxing and the administrative overhead. For them it would be much more tempting to pay for a license once a month and then do PvE tax and administration free. Also, the license system would allow fast recruiting, as the joining member pays in advance, so if he turns out to be useless, annoying or spy he still provided one month license money.

Anyway, in the post-Tech era the alliance budgets must be filled by members doing PvE. One way or another the PvE (or PLEX-converter) players must be lured into the alliances because without them even the sov costs would be problematic, not to mention the reimbursements.


PS: I reworked the blog structure, making it easier to find old but relevant posts. Read the about page

Wednesday morning report: 141.9B (which is 40% of the whole TEST asset) (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

Minimal wage and PLEX price

How much an average EVE player makes? This is a question that we don't have direct data for. All results are anecdotal (mine included). This question is important to answer to plan our own place in the EVE economy.

The one solid point we have is PLEX. It's sold around 480M on the EVE market and you can buy it in the item shop for about $15. About 100K PLEX sold a month and there are about 400K accounts, so its a pretty high volume item to have an equilibrium price. We can assume that one buys PLEX for real money if he can make more real money an hour than by grinding in EVE.

Players use to say that "I easily make $15 an hour so for me it's much better than even the best station trading". However they make a mistake here. Most people in the World don't make $15 an hour. Before you'd answer "who cares" or go into some thinking about the average salary of an average EVE player, let me tell you that it's totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter how much an American phone tech support operator wants to earn, as the phone tech support is outsourced to India exactly for the lower salaries. The transportable products are generated at the countries where the salaries are lowest. So if ISK farming is profitable for a Russian, he simply make wannabe American ISK farmers unemployed.

There are lot of Eastern Europeans and Russians in the game. In these countries game costs are significant factor. Lot of players play on hacked WoW servers because they can't afford a WoW subscription. Now if there is an MMO which can be played fully for free (not a "you can log in for free but must pay $ for every useful item"), it would be clearly popular among the often unemployed or simply poor young adults, income-less children, adult unemployed, housewives, disabled people, pensioners and so on.

The minimal wage in these countries is around $4000/year. If we assume 40 hours/week, 48 workweeks a year, we get $2/hour. This is the salary you can get an employee to do hard labor in Eastern Europe. Students work for less in the summer, especially if we consider taxes.

So a PLEX is $15. 1 hour work worth $2, so earning 1 PLEX is 7.5 hours. 1 PLEX is about 0.48B, so the average income of a person is below 60M/hour.

Where can be mistakes in this calculation? One obvious is that generating ISK in EVE can be a fun activity, so people do it even if it's not profitable. But wait, such players are ready to "work" for less than 60M/hour. One can claim that EVE PvE (that makes the ISK) is so bad that people rather pay real money to skip it, or those who can't afford to pay it simply don't play EVE. The fact that vast majority of the EVE players are in highsec (where PvP is very limited) disproves that.

One can assume that for cultural reasons Eastern Europeans and Russians don't really play EVE, so the few of them simply can't generate enough ISK, so the Western players are not outplaced from ISK farming. So 200M/hour is the average which is around the US minimal wage. However if it would be true, the few playing Russians would be extremely rich (in terms of ISK) as their farming activity would be richly rewarded. So Russian alliances would be the supercap monsters, but actually the mostly American CFC-HB has the supercap power. Also, if you could get about $4-6 by playing EVE an hour, RMT would be all over the place and illicit ISK sellers. The main reason of limited RMT in EVE is that non-bot ISK farming is unprofitable, even if we consider Eastern European, Indian or Chinese workforce. The truth is the ISK farming is so unprofitable as real world work that no man (only bots) do that.

We are out of counter-arguments and have to face that the income of an average player is pretty low, probably around 40M/hour. This allow people with lot of $ to amass relatively large ingame wealth by converting PLEX as their real life earning power is much-much higher than their ingame.


Tuesday morning report: 141.1B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

Bubble-camp survival guide

So, you want to haul little things in nullsec or just want to scout around. As I posted already, I flied around the map, losing covops only to ignorance. You practically can't lose these ships unless you do something silly.

First, the fitting. Your covops frigate need nanofiber internal structures in the low slot, a microwarpdriver in the middle and a covops cloak on high. The rigs are debatable, you can use either polycarbons for more speed or thermal shielding to jump further via microwarp. You can put on some small tank with adaptive invulnerablity or small shield extender, but the latter increases your signature radius, making it faster to lock you.

Skills recommended (besides the ones required for ship and fittings):

• Evasive maneuvering: faster align
• Navigation: faster travel
• Energy management: more capacitor
• Energy systems operation: faster capacitor recharge
• Acceleration control: faster MWD
• Thermodynamics: overheat MWD
• Warp drive operation: decrease capacitor need for warp

The simplest bubble camp is the warpout camp. You jump trough the gate and the gate is bubbled, you can't warp. You are gate-cloaked so can look around, select a direction where no wrecks, containers or ships can break your cloak. If there is a celestial there, you can align it. If there is none, you can double-click the space where you want to go. If a direction is surprisingly easy, it can be a trap, a cloaked ship can wait there.

You doubleclick or press align, then instantly the microwarpdrive and the cloak. "Instantly" means after the ship starts to move. While you can't use modules cloaked, they finish their last cycle. This is why I prefer the long cycle provided by the thermal shielding rigs. The campers will see you decloak-recloak. They have a second to approach you with microwarpdriver. If they get closer than 2000m, you decloak and can't recloak in 5 seconds. You can't recloak if they lock you. So it's important to choose a direction that is not flying directly into them. They don't know where you are, just guess after your last position, this is why it's important to get as far as you can by using MWD. After you got out of the bubble, just warp away cloaked.

If the gate thrown you to a very unlucky place, close to containers, wrecks you can always jump back by running to the gate. 12 km with overheated MWD is just a few seconds and you can cloak at some point. If you are decloaked at any point, it doesn't mean instant death. MWD instantly and you can reach the edge of the bubble before they can blow up your ship. If you go for the gate, you must wait for the session change to complete or you can't jump.

While this isn't hard in theory, the screen will be full of things in reality that can be overwhelming first time. I strongly suggest practicing. Go to a bubblecamp (Torrinos gate always bubbled) and pass it some times with an insured, empty ship.

The surprise-bubble is the advanced way. There is no bubble, so you casually start warping. They create a bubble before you could complete the aligning so you can't warp. The point is that you did not start the MWD, so you won't be far from your last position, therefore you can be more easily decloaked. The solution is simple: don't warp away casually when there are more than 1 non-friendly are in the system. Start aligning, hit cloak and MWD. After reaching warp speed, warp. You'll warp a few seconds later if there is no bubble, if there is you MWD-ed away from the last known position.

The most advanced is the warpin bubble: If you warp from the gate on the top to the gate on the bottom, you'll fly on the green line, which is crossing a bubble, breaking your warp. The campers carefully placed a container on the impact point, so you'll instantly decloak. The solution is not jumping between gates when there are more than 1 non-friendly in local. You shall jump to a celestial and then 70-100 km to the gate, so you arrive from a different direction and land outside a bubble that completely envelops the gate. You can maneuver between the campers or turn back if they are too good.

The most common reason of dying in a covops is not taking it seriously. If you need to go AFK, if you want to Alt-Tab, first warp to a celestial, be cloaked there while AFK. Don't do "just 10 seconds AFK" things while flying in enemy space.
Watch local channel, check the map for "ships destroyed the last hour".
Don't warp to belts. They can be large and even if you warp to 100km you can end up between asteroids decloaking you.
Be extra careful in tubes. They are series of systems where you can go just one way. The homeowners can get ahead of you via jump bridge. If you see someone following you (same guy in local for a few jumps), just warp to a celestial and AFK for some time.
Watch your capacitor. Long range warps can empty it, making you unable to use MWD.

With a strategic cruiser you can fit a propulsion subsystem called interdiction nullifier and an offensive subsystem called covert reconfiguration, making your ship immune to bubbles and able to cloak.

The most important thing however is that everything can be caught. When you go to enemy space, always have forward scout. If you are the forward scout, have nothing of value on the ship (you can have an exotic dancer), have it platinum insured (it won't pay much, but little is better than none), don't have expensive implants (no matter how tempting to use nomad set), have your medical clone updated and placed somewhere where you have replacement ship.


PS: Some conspiracy theory for today. GSF will soon reset various allies to TEST and PL. This means they will be neutrals to GSF members, therefore attacked. Still they keep on being blue with TEST and PL which makes little sense and seem to be good for nothing but misunderstandings and friendly fires. Resetting whole HBC (Honeybadger Coalition, the name of TEST, PL and allies) makes sense. Being blue to HBC makes sense. Being blue to part of them not. I think it's a masterful move from TEST and GSF leadership in order to solidify their power. Its purpose is to make small HBC alliances to dissolve and pilots/corps join into TEST alliance (or PL). It would perfectly make sense as Dreddit, the major corporation of TEST is bigger than these alliances, so there is little reason to threat them as separate, powerful entities.

Saturday morning report: 134.4B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 1.9+0.5 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.7+0.5 on Ragnarok, 1.1+0.5 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift) Evemonkey sent the 2.6 back as they re-deployed to Delve and no longer kill MateDot.
Sunday morning report: 136.1B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
Monday morning report: 139.2B Nice! (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)

Read More

Screenshots from all over nullsec

Since my scout alt has improved in skillpoints significantly, it was time to go for a longer journey to nullsec. Here is the planned way: The real "systems visited" map shows that I had to interrupt the journey to reship to another Buzzard, after I lost the first one in Ezoteria. I returned trough Stain so I actually visited more nullsec regions than I planned:
And the beautiful screenshots I made all over New Eden:
I choose the Battlecruiser skillbook for the post as it's a necessary skill for every pod-jumping newbie and veteran alt. Of course I checked ammo, implants, other skillbooks. The results are pretty poor. Besides Deklein and some low- or NPC-null systems the market is in terrible shape. The reason for it is the poor population of nullsec: This picture shows the pilots online in the last 30 minutes at prime time, with 40K people on the server. As you can see, highsec is illuminated, low and null are deserted. I think the numbers (60-80% for highsec) are underestimations. People call themselves nullsec and lowsec pilots when they spend most of their time in highsec.

One can wonder which was first? There is no market because there are no people, or there are no people because they can't sell or buy anything and must haul themselves or go highsec. I will definitely build up a nullsec hub somewhere to figure it out.

Monday comes a bubblecamp survival guide. After I lost my ship to a warpin-side camp and figured out, I traveled nullsec with relative safety. While you can lose covops ships to well-planned bubblecamps, you can travel in enemy space long if you do it right.

Friday morning report: 132.8B The miners are in overdrive, buying all the mining implants. (2.5+1 spent on main accounts, 1.9 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.7 on Ragnarok, 1.1 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar).

Read More