Kill 10 mogus

There are various gaming skills that one can practice while having fun. If you like to test your reaction time, FPS games are for you. If you like combination and thinking, chess is there for you. MMOs aren't the best for this as they don't provide instant action. I think chess would be much less popular if you had to level to 90 before your first match by killing about 10000 pawns, first with your pawn, then by your rook, bishop and finally queen.

MMOs are perfect for those who enjoy optimization. There is a task that isn't hard but lengthy and by being smart you can speed it up by large. You combinate, practice, read up and your speed improves. I love to optimize and pretty good in it. You can see that from very simple basic actions (buy an implant in Jita, haul it to Rens and sell it) I can conjure up a working system that makes me extremely rich in games.

As I said, I play World of Warcraft - Mists of Pandaria, mostly for the story-graphics content. But my wish to optimize things caught on me. I quickly figured out that Tol Barad still gives the best honor/hour if you win in 5-15 mins, and honor gear is the easiest way to improve your ilvl to raid finder level. I also found out how can you do all the Golden Lotus dailies in 10-15 mins, netting like 1000 rep and 40 valor point, making this a faster VP source than running "heroics" even with a competent team.

I enjoyed playing WoW doing these. But the constant news stream don't even let me forget the big picture: I optimize for nothing. The optimal way of getting higher ilvl gear is simply logging out for a month. When you log back, you get it for free. Everything that I could earn now will be baseline stuff in the next patch and even until then there will be hotfixes to make it trivially easy to get. For example the mentioned Golden Lotus quests get some "developer attention".

In EVE everything I get is mine until I lose it by being bad in the game. My Orca will be just as useful a year from now as it is now, the only way to lose it is to fly it to Rancer or something. Caldari Navy standings won't get obsolete like Baradin Wardens. But in WoW the general rule is that everyone must get everything. The raid content I want to see and farm gear for will be completed by literally AFK people in a few weeks when players run out of votekick charges.

I canceled my WoW subscription. Unfortunately I had a 6-month plan so I'm paid until late December. You know what was the most shocking? Upon cancelation there is a questionaire wanting to know why I'm leaving. Half of the options were various wording of "the game is too hard for me", another 1/3 is "my account was hacked". The closest to the reason of my leaving is "There is nothing I can do", which is not true. I could do so much in WoW: I could level fishing to 600. I could get max rep with Gina Mudclaw. I could level up archeology. Hell with these, I could be really awesome and great by having the best battle minipet on the server yay!!! There wasn't a single option about "the non-trivial content became a twitch game" or "whatever I get will be inflated into baseline in a month". They don't even want to know about those who - you know - wanted to play an MMO. All they want to know how could they salvage those who want to play their storyline-comedy single player game that needs constant internet connection for DRM and as a bonus got a shared capital city with other players. We aren't simply out of the core audience anymore. We no longer exist in the eyes of Blizzard. We are not even a niche group for them.

I said that I will probably resubscribe on the next expansion to see new content. I probably won't. At the end of the questionaire there was a question about "do I plan to resubscribe". They didn't ask for a reason here or I'd write "because of your damn questionaire that can only imagine that one can leave because he is too dumb for even current WoW".

A "farewell gift" from WoW were Cheats and Kargim. The first was OK-ish, Kargim did 9K!!! DPS and died in the fire. However we couldn't kick him because his guildmate did not let it. Now what else can we do than boost him to more valor points? Misdirect the boss on him! After we did, his mage friend ran off and pulled the whole instance. He died and the swarm came on us. The 2 days old 90 tank held the whole instance and we 3-manned all with the boss. So World of Warcraft: boost retards in piss-easy content.

---

PS: about an MMO where your actions has consequences, check out the nullsec warfare report of EVE Online. One of the larges alliance just lost their capital city to us.
And to avoid looking a fanboy: I was still 4 days away from being in the fleet that did it.

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Tuesday morning report: 178.3B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

Read More

Bounties: the rise of alliance PvE/industry

The bounty system is a total disaster now. If you set a bounty on someone, he'll claim it himself on an alt. Honestly I can't imagine how could this system be implemented without being totally exploited. But CCP is on the plan to do do it in the winter expansion. For this post let's assume they succeed and placing bounty on you would mean that someone who is not your alt/friend can get profit by killing you.

The interesting thing is that the new bounty system allows you to place bounties on corporations and alliances. Then killing the members of these corps/alliances would earn the killers money. While hunting Randomguy#124324 for a few million ISK you can get for his cruiser is clearly not a profession, but for roaming PvP gangs it would be very profitable to go to the land of an alliance that has a bounty on it. Even if the payment is just 10% of the ship price, a ratting Tengu kill could provide 100M ISK. The effect of such bounties would be devastating to the targeted alliances. They would be hunted by dedicated PvP-ers. Also, killing them in fleets would be an income source, so it would be much easier to get pilots to a CTA against them. If the bounty system would work and the bounties would be non-irrelevant, the alliance with bounty on its head would find many-many enemies.

If the bounty system would be implemented this way, the age of the AoE-doomsdaying titans would be back: an established, rich alliance can crush its enemies by placing a nice bounty on them. All you have to do is place a hundred billion on them and freelancer small gangs, sov-less "elite" alliances and such will make sure that in a month or two you can SBU their whole region, they won't be undocking even in an Ibis. This can of course be speeded up by sending out fleets where you are practically paying your pilots for killing them. Please note that the payment rate couldn't be higher than 20-30% to avoid exploiting, so 1B bounty would mean 3-5B damage to the enemy.

Placing 50M bounty on the "mean bad guy" who killed your AFK hauler on Rancer is one thing. Placing a meaningful bounty on an alliance that permanently lure non-sov holding PvP groups to their land costs hundreds of billions. Not everyone can afford it. However an alliance with stable income can. Ratting tax, moon income, renters: they all provide funds not only to reimburse fleets but to destroy your enemies. Definitely better usage of funds than buying supers that stay logged off. Having enough bounty funds would be a kind of "IWIN" feature, since EVE is being EVE, as long as you can pay, there will surely be someone who gladly go out and claim this money by killing your enemies.

The largest change this will cause is most probably the end of the renter system. Practically all coalitions excluding CFC has renters as income source, HBC trying to build one now. Putting a bounty on GSF, -A- or PL is probably not the best idea as they might even enjoy the fights and their morale increase can outweight their ISK losses. However the renters pay ISK especially to be left alone with CTAs or other PvP. They just want to rat in peace. Put a bounty on them and they'll be back in highsec in a few weeks (where you need to suicide gank them for the bounty which will be non-profitable).

---

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Saturday morning report: 174.8B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)
Sunday morning report: 175.3B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)
Monday morning report: 177.0B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

Read More

My first PvP in EVE

This is an extra post, the real post for today is here. Who would have thought, but the day has came in EVE when I flown out in null to get things blown up. Like everyone told, one has to start in a frig.

In the dreams of poor people maybe:
Fleet PvP isn't that complicated: you are fleet warped, jump with the others, orbit the anchor ship, turn up your MWD and fly with insane speed: I've managed to fit a 1MN MWD on my Scimi. Wonderful. Luckily, the enemy did not show up, otherwise it would end fast for me. This way I had time to fix my overview. And keep my implants because I forgot to clone jump and was in a full +5 clone.

OK, this was enough comedy for this day right? Well, add what kind of fleet it was:
Now the good stuff: GQ2S-8 station taken. 0SUF-3 IHUB:

The above fleet was at restart time. The main fleet action was 2 hours later. We had unbelievable rumors spreading: -A- actually undocked! So we gathered: There were 4 fleets, Navy Apocalypses, Drakes, Instacanes and bombers. This time I was prepared (sort of). Overview ready, jumped in a cheap combat clone (read: +4P/W), 10MD MWD on ship (since I missed some support skills it needed some "creative" fitting, but I had 3 large reppers, shield extender and MWD), and what mattered most, I learned that there is a "no chatter" channel on the fleet Mumble, where I only hear the FC. So I joined the Drakes and found 4!!! other Scimis with me. Later they managed to get 3 more. Not really encouraging, but I found courage in the fact that they are just Drakes, if my transport interceptor had died when I was 3 months old, that would have been a larger kill than the annihilation of this fleet.

So off we went. Jumped to Paragon Soul and after some warping up and down we jumped in a gate with the enemy fleet beyond. Waited for grid load and the missile barrage started. Sent my drones on the logi anchor before I was jammed for three cycles with several other logis. We lost 2 logis and several drakes while stay aligned. Finally my jam was over and could start repping, catching some Drakes and a command ship from popping, not catching some more drakes. This phase last for about a minute when we fleet warped away from them because our bombers arrived and thrown their gifts to the unsuspecting SoCo. We warped back, caught some survivors of the bombing run, made the rest run. If you click on the battle timeline of the report, you can see very well what happened.

After that there wasn't much to rep. The enemy was locked into a POS shield while we destroyed the Cyno jammer, the guns and other services:While orbiting the anchor I updated some orders alt-tabbed. One important thing to null fleets is to always have something else to do while in it.

Finally all fleets gathered up at the station:
Using the "look at" button on a randomly selected blue created the final screenshot of the day, an inspirational one, saying "this will be me in 2 weeks":

Since I wanted to finish the transportation packages of the day, I choose to utilize the newly captured space: docked in the station of GQ2S-8.

Read More

(I'm not) defining lowsec

This is a rather short post, will be one more today, about my very first PvP action.

Sugar reminded me of a problem that I read about a lot: lowsec development has no aim, lowsec has no "definition". I agree, but we must clarify how to define a zone? I think the problem comes from trying to define it via its PvP options. It's wrong. You can PvP everywhere. The lack of bubbles is not a defining trait. It is not something that makes one say: "hey, I want it so much that I move there!"

Every sector of the game world must be defined by its economy. X zone is the place where you go for Y. The gatherers of Y serve as food for the gankers, gankers serve as food for PvP-ers. Lowsec suffers from lack of resources. No resources: no farmers. No farmers: no gankers. No gankers: a handful of PvP-ers are killing each other.

• If you want stuff safe/AFK, go highsec.
• If you want top ore, officer drops, moon materials, go nullsec.
• If you want T3 materials, go WH.
• If you want lot of LP, go FW-low.
• But why should you go non-FW low?

Lowsec needs a distinctive income source. One that is unique to it, one that can only come from low-farmers. Alternatively an income source that is much-much better here than anywhere else. If "I want to farm X" people would go lowsec, there would be life there beyond random encounters between PvP-ers.

Below I list a bunch of wild, random ideas to give an economic role to lowsec:

• Hauling: remove cynos from lowsec too, force null/WH players to haul their stuff trough stargates. Then gankers would camp gates and PvP-ers could kill gatecampers. This can be spinned up by separating Amarr/Caldari and Minmatar/Gallente spaces by lowsec systems, forcing the trade between them to pass lowsec.
• Pirate LP: it's kind of lore-ish, lowsec is considered pirate land anyway. Make the Amarr, Caldari, Minmatar, Gallente, Ammantar and Khanid lowsec either into FW-low or high or null and create lowsec in the land of Guristas, Sanshas, Blood raiders and such. Without bubbles, the blobbing null fleets can't make massacre over small gangs, so these zones would be small-gang pirate land.
• Middle ore: rebalance ores/minerals, so Tritanium, Pyerite, Mexallon comes from highsec; Isogen and Noxcium exclusively from lowsec; Megacyte, Zydrine and Morphit from null and WH. Or easier: move all ice to lowsec.

These ideas are probably not the best and someone who actually know lowsec can come up with better ones. However the point is obvious: lowsec must have a unique economical advantage.

---

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Friday morning report: 171.7B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

Read More

Mists of Pandaria is too fun to survive

One of my recurring problem with MMOs is the "this is fun" statement that defends a change based on how much fun it provides. Death penalty is not fun, minipets are. Now I'm not trying to claim that ones fun is nuisance for others, nor that some forms of fun don't belong to MMOs but to other type of entertainment.

Now I challenge the fun statement itself, based on Mists of Pandaria. I really like this new WoW expansion and it worth all the money I spent on it. I clearly play much more WoW than EVE now, which isn't what I planned. Don't worry, it won't last, exactly because Mists of Pandaria is fun.

Monkey gives laxative to sad pandas? Hahaha.
"Hozen party animal" being a real name of a trashmob? Muhahaha!
Rabbit-like humanoid mobs steal farm equipment and try to grow them? I laughed so hard!
Alementals? You got it, ALE-elementals?! Hahahahahahaha.
Yak-wash? God I rolled off my chair!

In MoP every second quest is a comedy which makes MoP questing addictive and funny. You don't want to miss the next joke, you read over the quest text looking for a hint, try to figure out who will end up locked in the outhouse, covered in manure, tarred and feathered, turned into rat or simply show himself a total idiot.

Same thing second time? That's lame. The main problem with "fun" is that it's based on novelty. The old joke isn't funny. An old joke is annoying. Without laughter over virmen there is nothing left but annoyingly fast-repopping mobs blocking my way from the quest objective. When you can no longer laugh on the "hozen party animals" all that's left is dancing between barrels.

The cinematics, the linear questing, the "story" is fun itself, even if not on the "hahahahaha" way. But second time it's simply awkward. That wall was broken long ago and even the wall-breaking beast was killed by a kung-fu master who could press literally one button. Why am I back where I was weeks ago? In old WoW the static World made sense: the actions of one warrior made little difference. Yes, you killed 10 wolves and you got paid. You helped that little farm with the wolf problem, but you know that there were more than 10 wolves, right? You saw them yourself. There are enough wolves for the next warrior. Now, in the story-based MMO you aren't one warrior who does his part. You are the hero who saves the World from all kind of terrors. You see the world changed (phasing) by your actions. The next guy should see the consequences of your actions. But he doesn't, he is the same hero on his own story and will kill the same epic evil I killed weeks ago. Funny that I wrote about this problem 4 years ago. Shame that Blizzard did not understand how is it a problem and choose to fix it by simply hiding it from our eyes by phasing. It's the ultimate alting-killer: you can pretend that the other players don't exist and you are a hero, but doing the very same stories as your alt is pretty dull.

The "fun-hahaha" and the "fun story" made Mists of Pandaria a fun game. But totally killed replayability and grindability. On the fourth month still fighting against the burning legion felt much more epic than still clearing rabbits and drunken monkeys from the same stupid brewery. A world must take itself seriously if it's meant to last. Fun games simply don't. You pick them up, you have fun with them and move on. MMOs want to last, so MMOs shouldn't be fun. Just check out EVE or vanilla WoW. They aren't much fun, but they last for years and kept collecting subscribers instead of losing them.

I love MoP and I'll totally going to buy the next WoW expansion. But I see absolutely no reason to keep my subscription in between. OK, maybe for one month a year from now to do the patch contents.

---

I made my very first nullsec trade adventure. I bought Drug manufacturing books seeded by null NPCs (for example Guristas) and hauled them to Jita. Since the neighboring nullsec is blue, it wasn't that hard in a cloaky frig. I bought them for 20M and selling for 25M. That's 5M profit on a book. Not much. On 100 books on the other hand that 0.5B. Just be careful, getting killed in a frig with 2B cargo can make you be famous!

---

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Thursday morning report: 170.4B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

Read More

Entitlement vs opportunity seeking

I started reading Minerbumping after its author posted some really good economy posts. I kept reading for the hilarity. The author is a roleplayer in EVE who tries to enforce ice miners in the neighborhood of Halaima to be not AFK. When he finds one AFK-mining, he bumps it away. "Bumping" in EVE means crashing his ship into other one. This action does not harm either ships but they both bounce from each other according to their mass. Since no harm was done, the act of bumping does not considered hostile by the game code.

The act becomes amusing when the miners call him various less-than-nice things, form hate groups, spam petitions against him rather than simply not AFK mine. It's true that he collects "mining permits" but I don't accept it as being extortion, since the sum is trivial (10M/year) and also he has no means to punish a non-paying but non-AFK miner. The point of bumping is to move the miner far enough from the asteroid to be out of range, making its miner beams to deactivate. An active player can of course re-activate them, so bumping an active miner is a waste of time. Also I don't think it's possible to bump a miner from zero to 12 km if he actively navigates and has a propulsion mod. Bumping a bot is equally pointless but bots can be reported.

OK, funny roleplayer gets hilarious forum/chat tears, what's the point? The point is that the ice miners can't recognize his actions as useful service that can be turned for their own profit. You know, if life give you lemons, make lemonade. If I were so poor that I had to mine myself, I wouldn't mine anywhere else than his space. Why? Because for the trivial payment of 10M/char he would clear up my competition! The space patrolled by the Minebumping team is the perfect one for a multi-account, Orca supported gang. With several accounts you always have things to do: empty hangars, scan, reposition ships, move cargo to reprocessing, move minerals to a hub, so you can't really go AFK anyway. AFK mining is typically done by solo account PvP-ers who have a miner alt left to run when he is not around. When he comes back, he has a full hold of ice which he can sell to buy himself another cruiser for lolpvp. Serious miners don't go AFK because they like mining.

The reason why the Minerbumper effort is not valued by active miners is either because there aren't enough active miners (majority of the miners can be lolpvp alts) or because they are so full of entitlement that they can't even consider the benefits. All he can see is "someone wants to tell me what I can't do" and then focus his efforts to defy it. This is idiotic. Almost everyone and everything can stop you from doing things. Such is life. Giving a tantrum makes no effect. You just have to find the best possible outcome of it. Whenever you are about to say "he can't do this to me", remember that he just did. You are entitled for nothing. If you want something, you have to take it yourself. Of course if you can stop someone from stopping you, go for it. But "can" comes from your abilities and not from some "moral" or "ethics".

---

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Wednesday morning report: 169.7B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

Read More

September business report

As you can see there isn't anything to brag about. This is my collected assets graph, which displays how much ISK I had if I'd pay subscription for my main account, wouldn't have non-business accounts and wouldn't donate to TEST alliance. My actual assets are 166B, 100B of it is cash and buy orders the rest is in wares.
The graph has linear trend, serious fluctuations and only 1.17B/day (35.7B/month) growth. The large gap in the graph is when I was AFK for a weekend, that surely taxed my income. Well, I've had much better. My main problem is that despite I made serious attempts to change my item list, half of it is still implants that can be purchased in the Minmatar and Caldari FW shop:
The FW reward system was implemented with a bad design and serious exploitable flaws (AFK frigate can complete battleship size complexes, stealth bomber can complete L4 missions) allowing the participants to practically print ISK in the magnitude of 2-300M/hour.

To make it worse, it's not a constant flood of implants but happen in pre-planned pushes which are followed by a price collapse and then a recovery. Of course I can speculate on it and score several billions in an hour by buying them up 20-30% cheaper than I'll sell in a week:
But my business model above all needs stability and the current market is everything but. Why don't I just leave it and go somewhere else? At first because I'm still not starving. 36B/month is clearly a setback but it's still not threatening me with having to do missions or rat myself. I'm still not sure that there are better ISK/hour activities in the game, including FW exploiting. If it would remain my income forever I could keep giving 20B/month to TEST and still get a titan before my pilot can fly it.

Secondly and more importantly FW will be fixed on Dec 4. Then things come back to normal and my income will go up. It doesn't worth liquidating my assets, get into something new just to liquidate that 2 months later and come back, finding my old field polluted by 0.01-ers. I still remember the early times when I had to deal with them. I don't want to do it again.

So while I'm less than happy, I'm fine with my business and has a clearly positive expectation on the future. Of course to be safe, I started a little side business both as emergency and to check if there is an even more lucrative field than my current.

---

The post of yesterday has been updated with new data.
It doesn't deserve a post but clearly deserve a paragraph: While the FW disaster isn't even fixed yet, CCP is running headlong into another fail: bounties. Bounties cannot be implemented into any game mechanics. Period. If they try it, it will be exploited. The most obvious way to exploit a bounty on your head is to pick a ship that has good insurance (payout-price is close to ship price) and then get your ship killed by alts/friends. Insurance + bounty + salvage can easily be above the ship price.

For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec but don't know how, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
No business report today as I'm in the middle of a change in the business.

Read More