The One Empire: structure, culture and drama

The killer of most gaming groups besides the ones that recruit random newbies is not gaming failure but social drama. This is something completely unrelated to the game, therefore the leaders who are mostly proficient in the game itself can't handle. Everyone can cite hundreds of events, they are all common in being completely ridiculous to outsiders and a total disaster to everyone in the same group: they know it's going to blow and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

They say there isn't a group without drama, well I managed to make one in WoW, I simply banned every non-game related chat in the channels of the group, so the members could not form any kind of social relationships with each other, therefore there was nothing to blow. However this success wasn't exportable and assimilative. Since the social person wants peer respect and acceptance, they can't have fun in an environment where they can't harvest these. They call this a "work", and I finally understand that their definition of work vs fun is "we do SOMETHING" vs "WE do something". This is not something any leader can "fix" as only a small group is ready to take the "work" approach - and surprisingly this group emerges as elite in every field. However to be more than a small elite PvP group that may do some really awesome videos but generally irrelevant for the future of the game, one has to accomodate socials.

To have The One Empire, one has to assimilate socials too, simply because they are the 99%. If it has socials within its ranks, it will have drama. If it will have drama, it will explode. If it explodes it fails. Result: The One Empire can't be built.

While the above is true, it isn't accurate. Its inaccuracy isn't obvious. Accurately: "a homogeneous empire cannot be built". For most people homogeneous is trivial as there is one proper way of doing things: his way.

The solution to build The One Empire that is not riddled with drama is to be heterogeneous. Will it be an empire at all? Will it have a character? Yes, since the problem is social at the first place so the differences are social, ergo game-irrelevant. The One Empire will be homogeneous regarding ingame issues, but will tolerate various "cultures" within the different corporations.

How? Well, the people in the alliance are members of corporations too. There isn't any difficulty having corporations of very different social cultures. One can be an all-male one that constantly send porn pictures and tell disgusting stories how "all girls are bitches" while the one next to it can be totally respectful towards women. There isn't any problem of the two to trade, pay tax for the supercap fund or fly in the same fleet - as long as the FC is capable to keep offtopic crap out of the channels, which can usually be enforced during a few hours fleet operation.

The ruleset that can make it happen:

• The members are members of the alliance first and not of the corporation. The members must answer for their acts to the alliance and not the corporation. So if someone breaks the rules of the alliance and kicked by any of the council members, the corp leader can't keep him. He gets the mail from the council member, he has to kick the guy. Also he can't invite anyone who don't accept the alliance rules or on the alliance kick-list.
• The corp leader don't have the right to kick anyone without making sure that the member lands within the alliance. There is a "default corporation" within the alliance as temporary holder for members who are in the alliance but not in any corp. All corp leaders must have an alt with inviter rights in this corp. If they want someone out of their corp, they must re-invite him to this default corp. The former member can also ask any other inviter to invite him, who will do so after verifying only that he was recently removed from one of the alliance corps without being kicked by the council. In the default corp the offtopic chat is forbidden. This corp is not destined to be the home of anyone, it's just a lobby till one finds a corp that fits him.
• If the alliance finds a corporation leader breaking its rules, the corporation is kicked from the alliance, but the simple members can move to other corporations.
• Besides alts of the officials doing official jobs, no alts get auto invited. Since there is no API way to verify, every pilot is considered on its own, to track who is alt of who would be a spreadsheet nightmare.
• The income source of the alliance is the tax paid by the corps. It's their business how to get the money from their members. If they fail to pay, they get a warning, then they are kicked out. Of course the non-leading members can go to the default corp and then find another corp. The tax has 3 elements:
  • Fixed: this is paid for the pure existence of the corp. Its purpose is to prevent lolcorps linger. Pay, be kicked or dissolve. Any corp can dissolve at will, moving the members and even the leader to the default corp
  • Member: it's a fixed number multiplied by pilot count (again: all alts are counted individually). The purpose is to prevent useless freeloaders linger in the alliance. The corp will collect this tax from the members, those who can't pay are kicked from the corp and moved to the default corp to prevent abuse. In the default corp the tax collector is a council member who is authorized to kick members from the alliance.
  • System: Star systems are assigned to corps that request them. PvP corps don't need systems, industrials do who can pay the tax from the profit made in the system. The system tax is not just a huge income, but motivate the corps to give up systems they can't properly utilize and let the systems be assigned to corps that can.
• Only the members of the corporation that owns the system can harvest resources there. Of course all alliance members can fly, dock, repair, refit, trade, clone and so on in any stations, and kill enemies in any systems but only the owner corporation members can mine, rat or refine in their system. A thief found in non-owned system is kicked out of the alliance. The point is to keep the industrial corporations competing who can utilize the space better. A thief would break it as he utilizes a resource that someone else pays tax for.
• The tax collected by the alliance are reported on a monthly basis on the forum.
• The collected tax money is distributed to the following branches, and reported similarly:
  • To the one of the fleet commanders (or their administrator alt) who use them to pay out for ships lost in fleet action or salary for doing something "not fun" like camping a gate. Such payments are public info and must be all published to prevent corruption and accusing with corruption. (easiest way: administrator alt has full API key made public)
  • To the supercap division head. This money is used to build supercaps. All supercaps are individually named and their price tag published.
  • To the head of intelligence. He buys intel and pays traitors of enemies along with salaries of deployed spies. While the names of the recipients are obviously anonymous, otherwise he had to publish complete report on the forum with items like "9B paid for the password of the POS at X-99999" so members can speak up if they think it's a waste as blowing up the POS would have been easier.
  • Secretary of state: usually to pay mercenaries and buying systems from alliance leaders who rather go away with cash than join or fight. Fully reported of course.
• The Empire is money-neutral, the above branches must spend all the tax the next month (besides a small safety amount which is clearly defined). If money starts accumulating, the next month tax will be linearly smaller for everyone. It prevents anyone sitting on too much ISK to have ideas about illegal RMT and also motivates everyone to spend. Like "Hey FC, we are bored and saw there is enough in the wallet to replace the ships, lead us into enemy space, let's make some terror among them" or "Random roamers blown up 32 Hulks this week in our space. We see you can afford to place a bubblecamp to our entrance in peak hours, so please do" or one of the FCs in the council meeting: "I see that with the current spending 4T will remain in the end of the month, so if you don't mind I'd order 12 titans and 30 supercarriers as I'd go for a capital-supercapital fleet"
• The FCs are on alliance and not corp level, they belong to a special corp "Imperial council". Only they are allowed to organize official fleets and pay from the tax money. Of course others can lead fleets but only on their own money. FCs will differ in combat style, some will run huge-fleet battles head on, others will specialize in hunting enemy roams in our space, there will be avid gatecamp-commanders and elite PvP-ers who bring their well-choosen few deep into enemy space, so everyone who wants to PvP can find an FC fitting his style.
• In official fleets the rule is "no bullshit". Those who behave unprofessionally by telling jokes, talking offtopic or do anything that would annoy members who don't share their culture are to be punished by ISK fine first, kick from the alliance for repeated or serious violation. In the fleet you are to blow up ships and not to socialize. If you can't shut up for a few hours when you should be shooting flashy reds anyway, you have no place in a fleet. Reliable info that proves that the FC failed to keep the comms clear of crap can lead to him losing his FC status.
• The corp leaders are not council members and council members cannot lead corps even on alts. This guarantees that the corporations that has a unique culture cannot force this culture on anyone. The alliance members have the right to belong to the alliance and they can do so without question in the default corp. Belonging to a "real" corporation is a volunteer action of the member and accepting him is an equally volunteer action of the community of that corp.

So the key is having a homogeneous alliance level where everyone is equal and subject to the law, while allowing corporations to be the place of social interaction in a fitting community. The member is free to find or form one that fits his taste and hang out while having to act professionally where he is mixed with people of different tastes: the fleets.


EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 19.5B Ouch! Insuring the Orca and not playing on weekend hurts! (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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Comparative advantage and highsec PI

Comparative advantage is my favorite economic idea. It's a really nice thing, it says "everyone who is ready to do some work has a place under the Sun". How does it tell it? By saying that anyone who have a relative advantage of producing something can profitably do so, even if someone else is better than him in that. Let me tell it with an example.

Smartguy is producing 10 item A in an hour or 15 item B. He wants to consume 20 A and 20B daily. If he is alone, he must spend 2 hours producing A and 1:20 producing B. Slowguy is producing 5 item A in an hour or 5 item B. He is half and 1/3 as good in producing. If he is alone, he must spend 8 hours to get his 20 A and 20B every day. Slowguy clearly sucks compared to Smartguy, why should the latter bother trading with him? Because his sucking rates are different, he sucks in creating B more than A, compared to Smartguy. So they can set up a deal: 4 item B sells for 3 item A. Now Smartguy creates all 40 item B which takes him 2:40. He sells 20 to Slowguy and receives 15 item A. He creates the remaining 5 item A in half an hour, so he'll work 2:10 every day, saving 10 minutes. Slowguy will create 35 item A and nothing else, which costs him 7 hours, saving 1 hour! Both of them won!

You might ask why there is unemployment in the World if comparative advantage is so great? Because of welfare. In the real world Slowguy won't work 7 hours creating item A, but watch TV and drink beer he bought on your tax money.

But it's an EVEBusiness post, so back to EVE, shall we. Highsec PI sucks. The valuable raw materials like Autotrophs are nearly non-existent in highsec. OK it's not true, my beginner post features an Autotroph extractor, but it was some time finding the planet. Also you have to pay 10% tax for transporting items up and down between the launchpad and the customs office. In Low and nullsec there are more valuable resources and you can place tax-free player towers. If you are doing PI in highsec, you are Mr Slowguy.

What can you do when you are behind the low-null people in every field of PI? Find the fields where your disadvantage is the smallest. There are two such fields.

One is production. Your command center and factories are just as good as the nullsec ones. So you can cut the extractors which produce seriously less materials than their low/null counterparts, buy all the P1 materials and produce them to P2-3-4. This is my coolant factory, which takes 8 water (200 ISK + 25 tax) and 8 electrolytes (480 ISK + 25 tax) and process it to coolant (8000 ISK - 900 tax). This PDF give you a complete list of production chains. The storage is there to cut the management frequency to half. I transport the elecrolytes down to the launchpad, expedited transfer them to the storage and transfer the water down too. Such production plants have two advantages: as they need no resources, they can be placed on any planet, conveniently close to your base. Also, they are pretty generic, the above could be changed to produce any 2-material P2 if the coolant prices would drop.

The pictured factory gets 1260 ISK on a coolant and produces 18*5*24 = 2160 every day. That's 2.6M profit. However it's extremely sensitive to prices, a mere 12% drop of coolant price would put it out of business. This points to the the other comparative advantage in Highsec: mine cheap crap and use it for higher quality products. Take Coolant for example. It's pretty expensive because Ionic Solutions are hard to find, especially in Highsec. Ionic Solutions can be refined into Electrolytes. I buy these, transport them to my planet which is abundant in Aqueous liquids. It's not hard to find, highsec is full of oceanic and terran planets that has nothing but water on it. Therefore water is cheap and no one bothers to mine it. I do. I send the Electrolytes down, skip paying tax for water as I mine my own, combine them to Coolant and sell it. The trick is that the lowsec guy is better off extracting more Electrolytes than using CPU and Power to mine his own Water. Actually he is better off extracting more Electrolytes than using CPU and Power to run a factory that combines Electrolytes with hauled highsec Water. The plant below has 2800 ISK profit on every coolant but produces only 6*5*24 = 720/day, providing 2M/day profit. It's lower than the previous, but the same 12% price drop would only cut the profit to half but wouldn't kill it, so I don't have to check prices often and do the tedious work of reprogramming the factories one by one to another product. Since water is really common, I managed to plant two such factories 1 jump away from Rens.

There is no EVE business report today as we were on a Holiday on the weekend and still are when the post is published. I guess I didn't make much ISK this weekend, but I'll survive that. Hopefully.

PS: Jester posted a 63 items long list of his ships. I have 3 after 3 months (transport frigate, Badger II, Orca), but I'm sure that even after years I won't have even 15% of Jesters. I'm currently in P-W remap and learn now all the ships. Then remap C-M-I and never look back, practically locking myself out of new ships for a year. Here is the list:

• Bustard: for picking up some random stuff
• Crane: for picking up stuff in lowsec
• Orca: jack of all trades, master of hiding cargo
• Stiletto: "I'm in Rens in 20 mins"
• Buzzard: "lowsec implants here I come"
• Charon: because lot of crafting is lot of tritanium
• Rhea: when my alt will be in a nullsec alliance, I can give a hand now and then
• Basilisk: to fly with my girlfriend

The hangar of my alt will be even smaller:

• Guardian: nullsec alliance small fleet
• Archon: nullsec alliance large fleet
• Avatar: nullsec alliance capital fleet boost

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Expansion suggestion: multi-character client

This idea has been bugging me for some time, so I just introduce it. I know some CSMs are lurking around, I hope they find it worthy to show it to CCP. It's something that serves both players and CCP

What would the multi-character client do? Simply after you logged in the game you could select your characters to enter the game. This one client would handle all your characters and for this reasons accounts in the hand of one person would be merged. The client would support logging in with multiple characters concurrently, assuming your subscription method supports that. Instead of Alt-tabbing between clients, you would get a bar that shows the other characters face and most important data: shield, armor and hull HP, what he does (warping, approaching, shooting/mining, being docked, idling in space). You could switch to the char with one click.

That's alone handy but here comes the real stuff: multiboxing support. If your pilots are in the same system, you could link them to one of your pilots, they would orbit that pilot and the master pilot would get extra buttons/hotkeys: order supporters to lock that target (available on overview and selected item too), open fire on that target (assuming it's locked), fire at will (shoot whatever is red, practically aggressive drone mode), heal that target (use repping modules on the target if locked). Obviously it wouldn't be as effective as having individual players behind each pilot, they would be just glorified drones, but still it would allow much better multiboxing. Also with one click you can switch to the other pilot to micro-manage.

The client could also support "perfect multibox" which is available if the ships are the same type and fit. This case everything the leader pilot does is mimiced by the supporters.

The concurrent login handling is convenient. The multiboxing support would get some customers to buy more accounts. However it seems to affect only a small playerbase that doesn't really justify the developer resources. So here come the big deals.

Only one client can run on a computer. Since the client would handle all your characters, it's pointless to run more than one client. However banning to do so would be a serious hit on account sharing, illegal account selling and illegal ISK selling. Why? If I have two accounts, I can let some buddy play with one while I play with the other. If all my characters are on one account, I can't give him one, just all at once. Also, he can't play his own account while he is playing on mine as the client either runs my account or his. If you have an illegal pilot (botter, exploiter or whatever) on the same account as other (legal or not) pilots, being caught and banned would mean losing them all. Having the illegal pilot on a different account wouldn't help alone, as playing that account would make it impossible to play other accounts on the same computer. This would significantly increase the costs of botting and other illegal activities as every pilot would need a separate computer to avoid the risk of more than one being banned at once.

Finally this client would allow much more customized payment methods which would allow CCP to make offers that more players would accept, increasing both customer satisfaction and CCP income. Currently if you buy an extra account you get one pilot who learns skills, two who don't and one more concurrent logins. This is the offer, take it or leave it. Many choose to leave it. For example if you are a trader with your main in Jita, the two alts are on Rens and Amarr, you won't pay a full subscription to have one more pilot in Dodixie. With this client CCP could sell the following separately:

• Concurrent logins
• Pilots learning skills
• Pilots not learning skills

When you activate a PLEX, you get 300 "time points" on your account. Every day a concurrent login would take 4 pt, a learning pilot 4, a non-learning 1. I just made the numbers randomly with only caring that if you use the current account you get exactly 4+4+1+1= 10/day= 300/month. The player could make changes in the client which take effect at server downtime, so can't be changed more often than daily. With this client the above trader could create his Dodixie alt (happy), while paying 1pt/day = E1.5/month to CCP, which is profit they wouldn't get otherwise.

This client would remove the all-or-nothing bar from buying another account, luring customers into it step by step. For example the above trader first just buy his passive Dodixie alt. Then he is unsatisfied by training speed (as only 1 out of 4 pilots can learn skills), so he buys one more training pilot spots. Soon he'll have enough skill points to train one more alt to freighters and to have two freighters in space he'll buy one more concurrent login. Also, the client would make the account management simpler: you just buy time points from money or activating PLEX and you do the micro-management within the client.

I'm sure that the above system would significantly increase the amount of players who use more than one PLEX for playing time (paid by themselves or by the guy who sold a PLEX on the market), even if most of them would only pay 1/3-2/3 PLEX more. However if just 1/3 of the players would choose to spend 2E/month more, that's 2.9M E/year income to CCP while actually making all players happier or at worst neutral.


EVE Business report: Friday morning 18.2B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project). The reason of the drop is that I bought myself a 650M ship and also decided that my trading alts have much more to learn, like PI and manufacturing, so the first one got Cybernetics 4 and 3 +4 implants. The remaining 2 will come from the gift. Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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Spreading information is never in vain!

Tobold wrote about something really important. He said that it's not a good time to start an MMO blog. The topic is discussed to the death. There isn't anything to write that haven't been written down, except for personal fluffs and feelings that no one cares about. In the scientific sense, he is correct. I doubt that there is a sane question one can come up in the MMO world that you can't google up an answer. Everything that you could say is repetition (or irrelevant rant). Why bother?

When I started EVE, I was worried about things like that. I was a newbie trying to talk about something that others are doing for almost a decade. Why should anyone read my posts? Will I write anything worthy? And above all: will I do anything worth mentioning or will I be noob_mining_veldspar_#548154?

The answer for both is pretty clear. My blog visits were constantly declining along with the subscribers to WoW. In 2011 Aug I had 178K visits, in 2012 Feb, only 137K. Then I started writing about EVE and got 155K in March and 153K in April (April is 30 days, if I'd be 31 like March, it would be 158K). But the stunning thing was my income in EVE. In only in my third month of playing I reached the income worth 1 PLEX (E15 in the item shop) every day. Few players have achieved it after years. I'm already in the top 10% earners of the EVE players, probably in top 1%. My ideas about making money in these game indeed work.

How? How can a new player outdo most veterans? The same way as the Goons managed to shoot down anyone in their Jita gank event, despite it's been on the blogs and forums for a month: most players are terribly uninformed. If I'd have to guess, I'd say 80% of the MMO players are virgin land for bloggers. Someone to inform. Someone to write to. "OK, if he'll ever be interested about reading something he'll Google it up, you aren't needed" - Tobold would say. He is wrong, because people are not like him. Not nearly as smart and not at all rational. They have average logic and they are socials. Both statements open fields for you to blog.

"Average logic" means "unable to follow abstractly proven points". Let me give an example. Two months ago I wrote that the proper way of transporting small but valuable items in EVE is in a small, fragile but fast ships. I explained that the pirates have very little time to click on them, scan them to evaluate if they worth attacking and perform the attack. For me, this data and the logical conclusions were enough to determine it's the proper way. But look at the comment section: 95% wrote that it's extremely dangerous and plain nonsense and you shall use a huge battleship. They also linked examples where people lost their small ships with expensive cargo. And these are the published comments, this post received extreme amount of trolls with variations of "lol 1mo n00b talking nonsense" and "ur ass will be ownd if u do this shit".

Two months passed. Most of my profit is made by interceptors carrying 1-2B worth of cargo around. For smaller loads (below 100M) I am too lazy to relog and my main carries it in the same T1 frigate I used back then. My main was targeted some times, probably because I'm somewhat famous. My alts, never. Obviously I lost no cargo to pirates. I also googled up the "examples" that prove I'm wrong. Every one of them were autopiloting (very slow) or wardecced (police don't help him). I also figured out why no pirate even tries to catch me: because the time needed to identify my interceptor alts, figure out when they are full and when empty and waiting for them to actually show up (as I play in pretty random schedule) simply don't worth it. In the same time he can catch a dozen idiots who autopilot on the Perimiter gate with 500M+ in the hold and less than 10K EHP.

My post isn't any more true than it was when I published it. The logic and reasoning is the same. One could Google that post up, why to write it down again? Because people with average logic wouldn't believe it. It doesn't feel right to carry value in something so small. Also, "most people" disagree, so it's surely wrong. Now I can say "I have huge income from it and never been ganked. It works." It's simple proof. They are capable to accept this. If you do the same experiment, you can provide proof to your readers. They don't want theories and logic what Google can find, since it's abstract and debated. They want simple proof.

Them being socials opens another important field for you to blog. While evaluating a statement on its own is one of the most basic steps of rational thinking, most people are incapable to do so. Socials value a statement after the speaker. The internet is full of ad hominem attacks and reductio ad Hitlerum because it works on socials. If the social views a person "evil" or "wortless" he doesn't believe his statement, regardless of its value. On the other hand he is ready to believe the most ridiculous nonsense if he likes and values the speaker.

In the scientific world repetition is pointless or even plagiarism. It's already written, anyone can find it. But out here, in the World littered with partially civilized apes, repetition is extremely important. If you are a good writer and get a readerbase, they will accept truth from you that they wouldn't from me or Tobold or some random guy Google threw up.

Is the time to write something new and shocking about MMOs have passed? Probably. Is it passed to teach the general public? Never. If you can write, you are needed. If you write in my field, send me a link in comment after having a dozen or so posts. If they are good, I'll link it. That's probably a couple hundred redirected visitors.


Moron of the day was sent by Garak the Tailor: This book sells for 31.5 at vendors. Please, don't turn off the warning for setting a price out of the range of the regional price.

EVE Business report: Thursday morning 18.2B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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Planetary interaction for beginners

Planetary interaction isn't a really profitable enterprise. However the "newbie-version" is a "printing money" scheme more or less. You set it up, you let it run, you collect money. It need very few skills, so it's something I'd happily suggest to a real newbie, one who just finished the career agents:

• Remote sensing 3 (x1 int/mem)
• Planetology 3 (x3 int/mem)
• Command center upgrades 3 (x4 cha/int)
• Interplanetary consolidation 3 (x4 cha/int)

All these skills take 192K points which can be gained in 4 days. Even they are not necessary, as the last one allows creation of 4 colonies, you can run with 3 if you only have rank 2 and with a bit lower output you can run with command center rank 2. The official video tutorial shows very well how the colony UI works. You should watch it or you'll have problems with scanning, placing the items and so on. The price of creating a full colony is below 5M ISK.

In short: you build command center to produce energy and CPU. You build the extractor to get raw materials. You build basic factory to refine the raw to level 1 product. You build advanced factory ...

Except you don't. The problem is on the following graph: As you can see on low level command centers you have relatively more power than CPU. So you shouldn't build items that eat your little CPU. You must build one, the launchpad to be able to get your products. Therefore you are better off building just an extractor and basic factories, despite the pro guides all advice for high quality products. They are right, except they use top level command center. You simply can't follow their advice. Instead use a colony like this: It features one extractor (the top), which is connected to a storage (the box icon). The raw material comes here. The storage is connected to the basic factories (the yellow ones) which refine it. They are connected to the spaceport that collect the product. So you set this up, let it run for a few days (make sure that the extractor program is longer than your expected return) and you collect the product.

Don't jump on the first planet! The planets differ in material availability a lot. Scan several planets. Also the prices of the P1 products differ a lot:
Bacteria 160
Biofuels 150
Biomass 460
Chiral structures 400
Electrolytes 500
Industrial fibers 500
Oxidizing compound 350
Oxygen 200
Plasmoids 320
Precious metals 400
Proteins 450
Reactive metals 180
Silicon 500
Toxic metals 320
Water 250
Note: the above are Jita prices from Monday, they are just for guidance, check the prices before you make your choice!

So make your choice, scan planets, find the one with a good hotspot featuring your material and build your colony. Low maintenance, low profit. The colony pictured above creates 2.5M income every day (2 more factories were placed after making the screenshot). Since you can have 4 colonies with Interplanetary consolidation 3, it's 10M/day. 300M/month, so this beginner colony pays more than half of you subscription.

One more thing: the spaceports I mentioned. You can get your products by approaching the customs office of the planet and interacting with it. At first you have to move the items from the launchpad to the office, you have to pay tax for that, then simply move the item to your cargo like you'd loot a box.

The beginner colony is not just a free money print, it's also an introductory for the "pro" PI. We will get to that soon.

EVE Business report: Wednesday morning 17.9B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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It's not grind they skip! (and ISK sellers)

I am in firm belief that anyone buying PLEX for real money is simply a bad player. My favorite example is that if I buy my way into heavyweight boxing, paying managers to let me fight the champions it won't make me a top boxer, just a moron paying money to be beaten up (I'm not talking about illegal buying wins, just buying the matches themselves).

However the bad players and supporters keep telling that they just "skip the grind" as it's more "time efficient" to get $15 with their real life job than 500M ISK in EVE.

Finally I found the proof why it's bullshit: EVE is not WoW. In WoW to level 85 and get full honor gear is just matter of time. Anyone who is not serious mental patient can reach the level cap. You have to be very skilled in the game to artificially create a gear/talent/rotation that cannot defeat monsters of your level. Random picking will still steamroll. I soloed 5-man leveling dungeons 4-5 levels above me. Getting honor gear is even easier, you can do it completely AFK, just create a keyboard macro that jumps every 3 minutes to prevent being kicked from the battleground.

"The grind" is defined as trivial but lengthy process that is created either due to bad design or to create content where morons and slackers can feel heroes. Skilled players hate the grind as it's just a waste of time. Leveling to 85 and getting full honor gear doesn't make you better in arenas or rated BGs at all and also it's impossible to fail in it, except for not having time to do it. One who buys a honor-geared character doesn't do anything that increases his chance to win in arenas, simply skips a timesink.

Getting ISK in EVE is anything but trivial. You cannot create a "do this and this and this" guide that provides you ISK without the chance of failing. Mining? Along came a Tornado and you are 350M behind in a second. Missioning providing 100M/hour? A scanner neut alt, 3 Tornados and your 1.5B Tengu is history. Trading can obviously go wrong. There is simply no way to make ISK without getting into trouble.

Saying that "I could make 500M if I'd have 5 hours" is just as true as "I could have a 3:2 kill:death if I'd have 5 hours". You must prove it to reliably claim it. You can only skip content without being cheater if everyone agrees that the mentioned content is trivial. No sane WoW player would claim that you couldn't level up yourself. However many-many players are broke in EVE and for this reason buy PLEX from real money. Maybe you are not among them. Maybe you really could gain ISK if you'd have the time. But making that claim without proof is empty bragging. Anecdotal evidence that "I once ran missions for 50M/hour so I could do it again" is just as good as "I killed a Hel (3% damage done), so I can kill supercaps regularly". Maybe you were just extremely lucky that one time. Or times have changed and the opponents got smarter over the years.

You can only skip grind. If you skip competitive elements, you are cheating. Skipping any competitive element is cheating. Otherwise you are on the slippery slope of "I just skip one more element" until the point of you skip it all and buy a pilot with top killboard stats and peacock around without actually killing anyting yourself. That's not against the ToS either.

There is one exception of the above: if the goal of the player is not competitive with the others. For example if your aim is to have a planetary colony in every planet of Lonetrek and you buy PLEX to start it up faster, you defeated nobody in the process, so just bought convenience for yourself. Unless of course there is a planetary community with third party sites running with benchmarks and you climbed high with your purchase. Then, you are a cheater.


A related topic: illegal ISK selling. Buying illegal ISK is cheaper than PLEX. So many of the above cheaters do it. They shouldn't as their illegal transactions are reversed and now they are with negative wallet. Seems CCP really fight ISK selling. I wrote several articles back then why do Blizzard openly tolerates goldselling. I even found a blatant goldfarmer and reported him with no effect. Why? How come that the small CCP can do something against ISK selling and Blizzard cannot. The answer is simple: according to the dev blog, 1268 accounts were banned and 4.2T ISK seized. By removing this ISK, the customers of the ISK sellers could get their ISK only from CCP, by buying 8400 PLEX-es (4.2T/500M). 8400 is much greater than 1268. So the solution is that by selling PLEX, CCP is a competitor of the ISK sellers, so motivated to stop them. Blizzard, and all other MMO developers who don't do RMT themselves can't care less. You'll see that in Diablo 3, where official RMT exists, the same Blizzard that was impotent to catch the obvious bot I reported magically will be able to catch botters.


EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 17.4B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

PS: Comment on Hulkageddon from my girlfriend: "it's overrated" My comment: with proper skills and Orca support the income is around 10M/hour which is far from being stellar, but safe (10 alpha Tornados needed, 12 if the pilot is at keyboard and overheats, ship costs 3 Tornados) and also it allows lowsec mining operations for much higher income assuming proper combat support is present as the miners are better tanked than the escort.

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"Burn Jita"? Rather burn M&S!

So the "Burn Jita" event of the Goons has ended. Several freighters and other valuable ships were destroyed in Jita and the surroundings.

But surprisingly it had little effect on the market. I saw no price peaks. Also, I made 2.5x more profit in Jita on the first day, nicely pulling up my income, despite the prices did not rise on my field. It seems that some of the traders chickened out, and others who did not overestimate the Goon annoyance were taking their share of the profit too. On the second and third day everything went back to normal, probably even the most jumpy traders returned to their schedule. My transport interceptors were happily hauling in and out from Jita during the event, with the only complication of having one extra jump: from Perimiter to Niyabainen first and then Jita. The Goons only camped the Perimiter-Jita gate.

However the huge red ball on the "ships destroyed last hour" map shows that the Goons did not fail. They held probably the largest massacre in the history of EVE. 5K+ ships were destroyed every day in Jita and the neighboring systems. Still Jita did not burn, actually did not even blackened from the smoke. If you were sitting inside 4-4 watching the market and ignore the TiDi sign you couldn't figure out that anything was going on. It was a usual weekend business day in Jita.

How can the two both be true? Because the trade is mostly ran by professionals. Players who are informed, planning, finding ways. The massacre affected random idiots who were living under a rock and managed to not know about an event that was all over the news for a month.

My own extra profit shows that the trade system has large reserves. I guess if even half of the traders got scared of the Goons, there wouldn't be any signs on the outside, as the other half could pick up the slack. The total failure of the event to affect the trade proves how robust the player ran economy is. Of course the Goons will claim that all they wanted is to have fun, and even I wouldn't question that they had a lot. However this event was probably the last when the Goons or anyone will make claims of affecting the economy with anyone giving a damn. OTEC? Bullshit, Tc price is rising since months, The Mittani just noticed it and claimed it to be his doing. Well, the last peak on the end probably is, but not by doing any effect but by scaring some morons into a buying spree. I doubt that anyone will ever be scared of such claims once more.

The Goons and others are massacring morons and slackers. Players who can't be arsed to read up even the most obvious sources or dumb enough to make proper precautions. Of course everyone can be hunted down, but if you are not a moron or slacker, it takes incredible amount of time and resources, something that even the largest alliances don't have in the necessary amounts.

EVE is a safe and nice place. Anyone who claims differently is probably a moron or slacker who got ganked because of his own stupidity and laziness. I was ganked, but not because "EVE is evil" but because I went to lowsec with a T1 industrial. I'm capable of learning from my mistakes, the M&S cannot, since they never make any: they are just unlucky or victims or unfairness.


EVE Business report: Saturday morning 15.5B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Sunday morning 16.0B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Monday morning 16.7B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

It's being the last day of this month, I created a chart of my income. It's not my full asset count as I added the ISK spent on the titan/triage carrier pilot and the PLEX-es that make my main account free (as the normal way is to pay one subscription to the company). Obviously the PLEXes used for my trader alts are not included since that's operating cost. So it's rather a "how much money would I have if I'd make money and not spend on fun and convenience": I managed to increase my assets from 3B to 16B in a month. That's 490M/day average income which is nice on its own. However what's really promising is the second order fit placed on it. It says "titan money in 4 months". But even if we go with the linear fit which is definitely an underestimation, I'll have money for a titan in 8 months. Or, if I go that way, a dozen deadspace fitted triage carriers. Are you convinced already to stop grinding and start trading?

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