Warehouse system for the New Order

The power of the New Order grows fast, we are able to cleanse a constellation from rebels in a week or two. Miners who refuse all the light of The Code have no place in highsec! We moved to North Everyshore just two weeks ago, and we are already moving south again as the targets ran thin. This is great news for us, but also lot of trouble for me, who is engaged in supplying the New Order with catalysts and fittings. Currently we are using 2-3 HQs to cover a zone (which is usually a constellation or two) and the Knights ride out from these, taking 1-2 gates to hit the followers of The Machine.

There is a tactical and a logistics problem with this: the catalysts aren't aligning fast, so they are easy targets of vultures. A single long-point ship can take down a cata by scramming it until the faction police arrives and kills it. Taking gates is problematic already and as the amount of rage among the bot-aspirants grow, it will eventually become impossible. The logistics problem is that it's impossible to keep so many HQs seeded. Seeding needs capital, market orders and market update time. As we are operating in larger and larger land, the number of HQs to seed are increasing.

As first countermeasure I checked my transaction log and deleted 1/3 of the items, the ones that didn't sell well. The following items remained on the list:

• Anode Light Ion Particle Cannon I
• Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I
• Catalyst
• Federation Navy Antimatter Charge S
• Gallente Shuttle
• Gauss Field Balancer I
• Initiated Harmonic Warp Scrambler I
• Insulated Stabilizer Array I
• Light Ion Blaster II
• Light Neutron Blaster II
• Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
• Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
• Prototype Sensor Booster
• Regulated Light Neutron Phase Cannon I
• Scan Resolution Script
• Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
• Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
• Void S
• Zainou 'Deadeye' Small Hybrid Turret SH-603

Out of these 19 items 14 are looted from destroyed catalysts so I need to set buy orders too to let looters quickly return them to me and to Knights to get rid of their excess. However since most items are reused by the team, I set buy orders only in Brapelille. Also about 5-6B capital locked down in escrow and items. Obviously the amount of HQs I can handle is limited even with the decreased item list.

To solve this problem, I designed the warehouse system: one warehouse within 4 jumps of any target system. I try to match them with tactical HQs, but they aren't the same, there will be more HQs than warehouses. The purpose of the warehouse is to allow Knights to shop nearby. The shopping should be done by a normal sec status character who buys for his main or for his fleet. The destroyer fittings are small, so a battleship or Procurer/Skiff with cargo extenders can transport for a whole fleet. Using T1 industrials is obviously not advised. I will build up warehouses as the New Order moves. Warehouse stations should have repair facility (because the looted guns are damaged from overheat) and preferably factory slots to manufacture catalysts.

OK, the Knights (or second level traders) can shop in the warehouses. But what about Catalyst hulls? They'd need T2 industrials, Orcas or freighters to move more than one at a time. To solve this problem, here is an ambitious plan: Hulls seeded to every relevant system. So the Knight docks, buys hull, his alt or fleetmate gets fittings from the nearby warehouse and he can do his holy duty without taking gates. I will list the Catalyst hulls purposefully high, like 30% above Jita to discourage hostiles from buying it out and to encourage people to import/manufacture hulls. I'd be happy if I wouldn't sell a single hull because that would mean others took this not really profitable - yet essential - duty from me. I'll simply serve as an emergency hull provider, if all else fails, you can still buy from me, without insane cost (currently 1.9M).

The first Warehouse will cover our recently abandoned operations: North Everyshore. The warehouse will be Carirgnottin IX - Moon 5 - Impro Factory. Below you can see the map of the covered zone without lowsec and 0.8+ security systems unless they are bridging to targets: Yes, I'm not happy about those 4-5-6 numbers, but Deninard is surrounded by lowsec in every other direction so can only be supplied from this side and alone doesn't deserve a warehouse. The neighborhood of Bereye has no ice belts and is close to the next warehouse, which is Jaschercis III - Moon 1 - Federal Freight Storage: The third warehouse, Brapelille IV - Moon 2 - Federal Freight Storage: This is a relatively small, but busy zone, full of rebel miners.

The fourth warehouse is fully my design, I moved in here first and found so many rebels that I choose to build a warehouse to support fighting them. The HQ is Mesybier II - TransStellar Shipping Storage, 5 jumps from Dodixie:

Read More

Business Thursday: station trading metas

"Metas" are named variations of T1 modules. For example the Light Ion Blaster I has the following metas:

• Anode Light Ion Particle Cannon I
• Limited Light Ion Blaster I
• Modal Light Ion Particle Accelerator I
• Regulated Light Ion Phase Cannon I

They are all better than T1 and worse than T2. They are dropped by NPC pirates killed in complexes, mission sites and belts and acquired by those who looted them. They are used by people who can't fit T2 yet and people doing T2 production.

There are awful lot of metas in the game. Practically every T1 have some. This market is extremely abandoned, practically no one tends it. The Jita sell orders are often 10x higher than buy orders. You can make nice profit by setting buy and sell orders for them in Jita, where the volume is the highest. Most metas are cheap, in the region of 10K-2M, so the profit on one isn't great. But you can sell dozens to hundreds every day which isn't bad money. Also, meta-trading is very good start for a new trader due to the low investment cost. You can start trading with a few million ISK capital and bad skills, since the margin is 20-30% instead of 2-3.

How to start? Pick one item class, like small lasers and check their price history. If the volume is relevant and the maximum and minimum are far from each other, you can set up your shop. Don't try to 0.01, decrease the margin aggressively to 10-30%. Keep even low margin for a week or two, the 0.01 punks usually have little tolerance for that.

After you stabilized the price of your selection of metas in Jita, you can extend to other hubs, moving your wares with courier contracts. At the end you can try regional buy orders and get items collected for you by couriers.

Read More

Highsec EVE: the most anti-social game ever

When even Jester speaks out against ganking in EVE, we are probably facing a problem. When everyone tells EVE is too harsh on a new player, something is wrong. Not necessarily the way they think, but it's surely wrong some way.

I started exactly like the the newbie mentioned in the horror stories: no knowledge of the game and no friends, and pretty late, less than a year ago. Others known the game inside-out years before my character was created. They owned titans before I owned by first destroyer. According to the myth, I was set up for failure and only a miracle could save me. Instead of failure, I gained titanic wealth, I was not ganked once after the initial noob mistake of driving a Badger II to lowsec, I was not scammed and I experienced nullsec on my terms. And on top of that I got these so easily that I spent several blogposts whining how easy EVE is and how disappointed I am because of that.

Let me recite my motto: I do not believe in personal awesomeness. I'm a solid believer is that whatever I do can be repeated by an average person. Every time we see someone doing something unbelievable, we don't face an extraordinary man, we face an average guy using some knowledge we do not own yet. When we face a large group of people failing in something where we don't, we see equal people who are poisoned by some bad belief.

Since I never had to make serious effort for my achievements, I never felt in a cut-throat competition with equals and gaining my wealth rather looked like a 5-800M/hour grind than awesome winning, it's rather the second case. It's not that I know something right, it's something that the average EVE player does wrong. I've read another article of Jester several times because I felt it's important but didn't know how. The mistake of the average EVE new player was right there, explicitly stated:

CCP Solomon: The strong prey on the weak, but the weak aren't responding, and nobody's getting particularly fun or nourishing game play out of this. Is that a failure?
Seleene: Well then maybe they need to get more friends and they need to learn to defend themselves better in a PvP game.
Seleene, CSM head tells exactly what every successful and powerful player would suggest a newbie: get more friends and learn PvP. This answer is fundamentally and completely wrong and any new player following it is set up for failure, poverty and ragequit.

They don't give this advice because they are evil, but because their highsec newbie memories have long faded. Or they never was a highsec newbie, they are probably "community born" who podjumped to their out-of-game friends to nullsec on day 1. Nullsec mechanics favor blobbing. A fleet of 200 defeats the fleet of 100 unless extreme difference on their skill and/or ISK. Also, the fleet of 200 can force the fleet of 100 to fight by taking their space assets: moons, stations, systems.

Highsec (and somewhat lowsec) is completely different from nullsec and not because of bubbles, cynos and doomsdays:

• Everyone can dock everywhere.
• No one has significant space assets that he'd care to lose.
• Neutrals are everywhere.
• Shooting neutrals is expensive due to Concord and faction police in case of low sec status.
• NPC corps can't be wardecced, player corps can.
• PvP between NPC corpmates is equal to shooting neutrals, PvP between player corpmates is allowed.

Between these mechanics a blob helps you little to win. If the enemy sees it, can dock up anywhere. If you are neutral to someone (and no kill rights or suspect or whatever), you need to sacrifice overwhelming resources to kill him assuming the target isn't stupid or AFK. No one ever had a positive ISK ratio in a suicide gank against a non-moronic target. If there are 1000 people wanting to kill me but has no right to, I'm not forced to dock, I can easily wage a 90-95% ISK ratio war on them by undocking gunless, max-insured, max-tanked battleships into their blob or easily find a straggler, scan him with a neutral alt and drop a hard counter on him.

Highsec, where the most new players start their EVE life is the most anti-social game ever: the mechanics actively penalize having friends. The more friends you have, the weaker you are. Every new corpie increases the chance of you being awoxed, scammed, robbed or wardecced. If you have zero friends and you are not oblivious to the basic game mechanics, you are practically invincible.

The newbies are devastated not because the game is harsh or unbalanced, they are devastated because they come with a strong, wrong belief that is reinforced by the veterans: "the strongest EVE ship is friendship". No. If you are in highsec, it's equal to self-destruct. CCP knows this, this is why wardec costs scale with target size, to somewhat protect the people with lot of friends from being obliterated. Remember the one time when Goons ran to CCP to save them: when Jade Constantine caught them in a highsec forever-war against practically every highsec PvP-ers. You can't blame Goons for having no friends or being shy of PvP, still they couldn't handle it.

I didn't progress despite of having no friends but because of it. I naturally played solo so did not even encounter the limitless amount of traps the average newbie falls. I couldn't be wardecced, I couldn't be awoxed, no spy could get into my trust and no bad player leeched on me. Joining a highsec corp is like taking from the "Gift for newbies" container.

Let me make a simple suggestion that makes EVE much more newbie-friendly: ban player corporations from highsec. Something like "the Empires has fed up with the destruction caused by capsuleers, so they decided that every capsuleer who do not pledge their allegiance to them are no longer protected by them", making every player corp member perma-suspect. Of course give a huge "if you get into this corp, everyone can freely shoot you in highsec" warning for the application interface. This would mean exactly what is already true for members of larger nullsec alliances: you are safer in your own sov-null than in highsec. Hell, player corp members would be safer in lowsec too. This way social players would go to low/null, while newbies who did not learn the game yet would be safe in Highsec from the largest danger: the siren song of noobcorps. Make every corp post a warning like this: and let only those corps to survive that can do so in low, null or WH. They can be good homes of newbies, unlike these horrible idiocy-hives in highsec.

Read More

Best place for solo kills

Better late then never, I dipped my feet into solo PvP. You know, like the other people, in a small ship, blowing up mostly, killing some frigs, having fun...


Did you believe that in a second? Me wasting time in frig nonsense? Don't you remember when you were telling that I have to start from below, learning "the art of pew" and I replied with screenshots flying logi in fleets taking 3 regions and winning the largest supercap battle of 2012?

This is me (related shipkill) doing solo PvP literally the first time of my EVE life:
Here is the butcher's bill from my first day (Jan 27) spent solo PvP-ing:

• 12 ships and 8 pods killed
• 12 ships and 0 pod lost
• 4890M (2 more B over that pod) destroyed, 132M lost, 97.4% efficiency.
• 168M looted, 21M peacefully acquired on the side

Before you'd think I just hit the one-in-a-million Jackpot, here is one from Monday. If it's not luck, I must be a natural-born PvP God, right? Of course not. You could have learned that I don't attribute anything to personal "skillz", but to knowledge that anyone can gain. It's always the method that is awesome, not the guy following it. These numbers are stellar for a solo PvP-er, because he is hunting for fellow pirates, lost newbies and cyno noobships in lowsec. I went where the money is: highsec. When I finally could fit T2 small blasters to my Catalyst, off I went to solo-gank Retreivers, covetors and Hulks.

Ganking these is much easier than ganking exhumers. They have little natural tank and they rarely fit with Damage Control or adaptive invulnerability field (and even more rare to have them switched on). The barge itself is 4x more expensive than the Catalyst killing it, so 80% efficiency is guaranteed even if you take no pods. Unless you made some newbie mistake, the kill is guaranteed, since they are AFK/bot.

Barge pods are suprisingly expensive. I mean the New Order found all the expensive pods in barges, not exhumers. The reason for that is exhumer pilots are dedicated miners, who have a set of +5s at best. On the other hand barge pilots are either newbie miners (their age tells) or part-time miners. You know, fearless missioner at night, AFK-miner at day. Or nullsec PvP-er when he can play, mining all day when he can't play.

What you need to solo-gank barges? Two accounts: one is the scout/looter, the other is the ganker. The scout should drive a Procurer of Skiff to prevent rage-ganking. Don't forget to fit strip miners or ice harvesters depending on what belt you are after. Fit tank, afterburner, passive targeter and ship scanner to the scout, go to the belts, scan down Retreivers, Covetors, Hulks and if they are not tanked, go near them and start mining. You warp your ganking Catalyst to the target and collect pod. Don't forget to pull concord first in all systems you want to hunt by shooting customs office in the first, docking with your pod in the second, undock in noobship, dock in the third and so on. If there is a stationless system in the hunt area, start there shooting the customs. In a 0.6 system you can hit up to 10K EHP with chance to catch the pod and 12K without it. After Concord destroyed your ship, warp your pod away and the scout should loot your wreck. If there is no one else around, you can also loot the target, which makes you suspect so you have to dock up. If 10-20M dropped, it worth waiting a few mins. Don't forget to dock up even if you are not suspect and unload your small cargo hold and ore hold. You can get significant amount of minerals while ganking.

The main benefits of solo ganking is independence. If you can supply yourself (can be done with an Orca or even with Red Frog contracts), you can set up shop anywhere in the Highsec, you aren't bound to any group. Solo you probably won't gather vultures who camp gates or belts in order to pad their killboard with destroyer kills. Vultures are collecting concorded Catalyst wrecks (they are available to everyone) and try to pad their killboard with Catalyst mails.

The main downside of solo ganking is newbie-unfriendliness. It needs you to know what you are doing and also good skills in driving Catalyst. If you are new to barge ganking, I recommend joining the New Order and taking your first steps in a fleet. Don't forget to add your limited API with kill-log only to neworder.mindflood.org

Remember: every barge you kill increases mineral prices, bringing consequences back to the game.

Read More

Game harshness, death penalty, miners

"EVE is a harsh, dark universe" is all over the marketing. Why? Because here unconsensual PvP happens. "By undocking, you consent to PvP" they say.

My old WoW character reached 50000 kills in July 2011 and ended his career with 96000 kills, despite I shifted to EVE around 2012 spring. So in my last year I had around 4000 kills/month. Very few EVE players have so many kills. In WoW I was very far from being top PvP-er. So the "sweet fluffy WoW" is much more PvP-ish than EVE. Let's look at League of Legends and World of Tanks. These games are pure PvP, you can't advance your character without PvP. Every match is direct PvP. Yet these games are rather considered casual fun games than harsh and unforgiving. On the other hand the original X-com had no PvP but the mind-controlling aliens still haunt me. How?

The solution is that PvP itself don't make a game harsh. If you die in WoW, you resurrect in a few seconds without losses. Even if you are corpse-camped, you can talk to the spirit healer, take a 10 minutes debuff and pay a pitiful repair sum and you are out of PvP. WoW has very low death penalty.

Harshness = death_chance * death_penalty
PvP indeed increases death chance since you can always choose safe, overgeared PvE, but PvP finds you. However if death is meaningless, it doesn't matter. What is the death penalty in EVE? You lose your ship, maybe your pod too and also your cargo. Is that a high death penalty?

It depends on the cost of the ship and cargo. And this is where EVE is constantly nerfed. While PvP-ers are always worried about EVE is made "space WoW" by making PvP harder, and cry loud on every mechanics change that makes it harder to trick someone into PvP, they are fundamentally wrong as WoW already has more PvP than EVE. What they mean is making EVE just as loss-free as WoW, but they are ignoring the second part of the equation. Even worse, many prominent PvP-ers and even the self-defined griefer Goons are premiere supporters of nerfing losses.

The supercapital nerfs (and the ongoing cries of "supers are still too powerful") make the game fluffier than closing any loophole that allowed newbies to be tricked into PvP. The T1 cruiser rebalance removed more harshness from EVE than the imaginary "completely safe highsec" could ever do. Why? Because they allow players to be useful in ships they don't mind to lose. With the original doomsday you had to put your capitals to the line to stop an invasion as subcaps would be eliminated by a pair of titans. That was risky for both sides. Lolling around in Drakes (the epic ship of Goons) is safe. The nullseccers are just as risk-averse as the "carebear pubbies" they hate. They just recognized long ago that the key of safety isn't decreasing the chance of losing your ship, but decreasing the cost of the loss.

Since Retribution even the Drakes are history of the once harsh game, as battlecruisers are now considered expensive, "serious fleet" ships, the "fun PvP" is done in T1 cruisers that are pocket change even for a few weeks old newbie. Next patch will update T1 battlecruisers to further cheapen fleet battles. Flying anything that has a relevant price tag will be the territory of highsec missioners and Pandemic Legion.

The infamous exhumer rebalance was indeed a nerf to the harshness of EVE, but not because they got some extra HP. The real nerf is the increased ore hold that makes AFK mining easy. The easier mining is, the more mining will happen. The more mining, the cheaper minerals. Cheap minerals are cheap ships, less death penalty. CCP - just like every MMO developer - nerfs the game to cater the "casual" (read: bad) players. While the PvP-ers guard the "EVE-spirit" vehemently, protecting it from any limitations towards PvP, the nerfs of death cost is unnoticed or even celebrated. Cheap ships are good for all, right?

EVE will never be nerfed into a place where you can't kill another player. CCP is constantly nerfing it into the place where that other player won't care about the loss.

Against this nerf there is little player resistance. I've yet to see a single CSM opposing a change that makes a cheap ship stronger or ships generally cheaper. Practically only the New Order fights against diminishing death costs by destroying the farming machines (AFK-ers and bots).

So if you want EVE to be a harsh place (instead of Space WoW with dark marketing), you must:

• Demand expensive ships to be strong and cheap ones to be weak, to force people risk expensive ships if they want to win in PvP.
• Demand the removal of "insurance", giving welfare to those who lost their ships.
• Resist every change that makes it easier to obtain materials needed for building ships.

Of course you can take matters to your own hand and blow up AFK miners. There is no point trying to blow up active ones, you'll either fail or only win using extreme amount of resources. AFK-ers on the other hand are both very easy target and may give up on their activities. They are AFK because they want ISK without effort. Defending their ship needs effort, it's easier for them to simply not mine when they don't play.

Read More

Catalysts, fittings, seedings

This post is probably only useful to Knights of the New Order, but maybe other market seeders (low-nullsec traders) can benefit from it too. For everyone else, let me post the question of a ganked miner: (No, he wasn't taunting or crying, he honestly didn't know that you can lose your ship in highsec)


At first let's talk about ganking catalysts. They are simple to fit: magstabs to lows, blasters to highs. To mids you have to choose between one or two sensor boosters, afterburner or warp scrambler. Use small hybrid burst areator and small hybrid collision accelerator rigs. However there are several versions of each item. No sane man would fit faction or deadspace items on a suicide ganking ship, so we just focus on T1, T2 and meta items. On the left of the table you an see the overheated DPS of the various guns with a perfectly skilled pilot using rigs and T2 magstabs. You are not a perfectly skilled pilot, but the ratios are the same for everyone. As a general rule, every meta level gives 5% DPS, T2 is much better than even meta 4 and and moving up in the electron - ion - neutron way gives another 6%. So as first idea, don't use electrons. Ever. Ions are different because of their much easier fitting. A T2 neutron catalyst has little CPU and powergrid left for medslot items. Also, ions are significantly cheaper than neutrons.

On the right side you can see the magnetic field stabilizers. Moving up the meta level you gain about 2.5% DPS, with Magnetic Vortex stabilizer being almost as good as T2, but with significantly worse fitting demands. I also seeded all 5.

Now let's look at the prices (K ISK). They are current average of sell and buy, but that's not surely the best data, see below:

Version	Small ion gun	Small neutron	Magstab
T1	29	60	80
Meta 1	15	110	90
Meta 2	45	220	130
Meta 3	155	500	265
Meta 4	350	1150	555
T2	1150	1300	1000

As usual you have to pay larger and larger amounts for small upgrades. However don't forget to compare the costs to the cost of the whole gank, including your opportunity cost. If the total cost of the gank is 15M then 1% DPS upgrade for 150K isn't a bad deal, even if the individual item is 100% more expensive than the previous version. The T2 gain is 46% over T1, so its price is well justified. 2 T2 Catas are equal to 3 T1. The metas are harder issue due to their lower gains. However the Meta 1 and Meta 2 are so cheap that you really shouldn't use T1.

Now let's look at the price changes of Anode light ion particle accelerator:The rest of the guns are the same. This is a problem. The T1 and T2 items are manufactured by players and their price more or less linked to their material costs. However metas are NPC drops so the supply can't really increase. We use these things up pretty fast. I don't know where the price will stop. Maybe there is a serious hidden supply of them, metas being reprocessed. This case the higher prices will increase supply. If there is not, the prices can run up to the point where the demand stops. This can mean that sooner or later those who can't use T2 will have to use T1. Let's hope for the first option. The magstab prices are more stable since magstabs are used by every gallente and non-missile caldari pilots, not just by newbies like the small meta guns.

The meta and T2 ions, neutrons, magstabs, along with catalyst hulls, Experimental 1MN afterburners, prototype sensor boosters, rigs and Initiated harmonic warp scramblers are available in all 3 HQs. The expensive ones are about 10% above Jita sell price, the cheap ones have higher margin simply because their transportation and handling cost more than the item. The hulls have a higher margin too because they are large and takes lot of time to transport them. The price difference is needed to prevent hostile buyouts.

In the Tolle base I also set up buy orders for these items, so you can dump your excess or loot from destroyed ships. I simply don't have order slots left to set buy orders in the other two HQs.

Read More

Business Thursday: how to control the market

Before the post, a quick tip: Audit log containers have a great functionality, they can't be repackaged until the last log entry is 3 weeks old. This is there to protect the log. However we can use it against accidental repackaging. Have you ever repackaged a container, mixing the carefully selected items with others? I did, since then I'm using audit log containers.


Now about the market control. Controlling the market is exactly what you think it is. You decide the running prices, you decide how much profit you want. If you reach market control, you can extort any prices from the hapless people. How can you do it?

You can't.

Whoever you heard of bragging that he controls the market here and there, is either

• a liar
• someone who operates in the middle of nowhere and could "extort" a lost newbie or moron once a year
• who controls production like the Tech cartel did with Tech
• who controls consumption, for example an alliance leader buying out all the Lokis, relisting 2x higher and then declare that the new doctrine is Lokis and everyone must buy one by tomorrow or kicked
• a market swing happened on its own and someone claims he did it

The market cannot be controlled. It will always return to equilibrium and those who try to mess with it don't fare well. The reason is simple: price elasticity. No one is forced to buy anything from you now. There are alternative sources, there are alternative items, he can go out to farm himself or simply wait a few more days. There is nothing in the World that forces him to buy your overpriced product. You on the other hand have to constantly buy out undercutting offers, constantly increasing your stock, usually gained on above-normal price. You could still make profit on these if you could sell it at extortionist prices, but you can't.

Traders are slaves of the invisible hand. It is a very generous master who showers the obedient ones with riches. However it slaps the rebellious into poverty. I've yet to see a single successful guy who intentionally messed with the prices (without having control over production or consumption). The "successful" market controllers are usually liars, sometimes just dumb who don't count their own time and celebrate that they could sell a 3x priced stuff after two days of 0.01-ing without sleep.

So, don't try to be smart, don't try to make it to the front page of the EVE news sites, don't try to do anything worth bragging. Just set up decent buy orders, resell the items with a reasonable margin, transport to other hubs if they are under-supplied and money will just pour into your wallet.

Read More