Low maintenance, high income PI

Whatever you import to your planet is arriving to launchpads. Whatever you create in your planet is leaving in launchpads. Launchpads have mere 10000m³ storage space. A basic factory produces 40*0.38 = 15.2m³/hour P1 materials. An advanced one eats up twice as much. So if you run a P2 or P3 planet that has 20 advanced factories eating P1, you have to restock the launchpad every 16 hours. If you have two launchpads, 32 hours. Of course you could increase the amount of launchpads, but they eat up 3600 units of CPU, way more than anything else. An advanced factory needs 500 CPU. So anything beyond 4 launchpads is seriously crippling your output. 4 launchpads are still just 3 days worth of storage. So you have to choose: visiting your planets often (not just restarting extractors from afar, but flying to the POCO to restock) or toning down your income seriously.

From now on, you can have both. Behold the secret: This is the Neocoms producing P3 factory from yesterday. It imports Silicate Glass to the launchpad to the right, Biofuels and Precious metals to the left. Since you need 2x more from those, their launchpads are doubled... by storage silos. The silos have 1/6 as much CPU need as a launchpad and just as good for storage. In the middle you can see the command center which is on full load on both powergrid and CPU, having 2 more launchpads would demand cutting down lot of factories.

How to fill them up? By the feature "expedited transfer". You move the new batch of raw materials to the launchpad, enter your planet and expedited transfer the whole amount into the storage silo. Then exit the planet and send down another batch of raws to the launchpad. Doing this you can fill both of them, like both were launchpads. Unfortunately you can't fill more than one storage from one launchpad because expedited transfer has a time limit, you have to wait about 8 hours after moving full cargo.

Utilizing storage silos you can actually set up something like this Coolant producing colony that runs all by itself for more than 6 days:
The storage-as-launchpad can be also used by those who visit their planets often. Freeing up CPU allows more factories to run which is especially useful with those pesky high-tech factories. A P4 factory can operate with a single launchpad.

Since launchpad is 10000³ and the silo is 12000, you might want to equalize them, so you don't have 2000³ of valuable material rotting in the silo forever. Fill it with 2000³ aqueous liquids when you build up the colony!

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Business Thursday: my planet farmed it for free

"I farmed it for free" is a common statement among dumb people who are unable to understand opportunity cost. They assume that every action that earns them money is profitable, just because they got money. They ignore that they could get much more money with the same resources if they did a different action. They are practically considering the resource they had "free", hence the epic slogan.

The simple form is only common among idiots: he farms a whole evening and considers the income pure profit. However people who are not idiots, simply not careful enough can make similar mistakes. And they often do, as we will see today, with the Planetary Interaction of EVE. Imagine that you have a charming barren planet (as far as barren planets go). On this planet you have an extractor for aqueous liquids and another for base metals. Both extract enough to support 4-4 basic factories that turn these raw materials into water and reactive metals. Next to them there are 4 advanced factories eating up the water and the reactive metals, producing water-cooled CPUs. Each create 5 pieces an hour and they sell for 2300 ISK, so you generate 2300*5*4*24*30 = 33M/month with a colony. Congratulations, you made profit.

Actually not. If you'd destroy the advanced factories and just sell the water and the reactive metals for 340 and 320 ISK each, you'd earn (340+320)*40*4*24*30 = 76M/month. The profit of the advanced factories is -43M. Unless water-cooled CPU can be looted somewhere, it is created by dumb people who assume that their water and reactive metals are for free. I know, I know, they aren't dumb, just play for fun and making water cooled CPU is so much more fun than making coolants (which is actually profitable).

Making livestock and selling it for 6000*5*4*24*30 = 86M/month isn't much different from selling its P1 materials, biofuels and proteins for (110+550)*40*4*24*30 = 76M/month, so it's more or less indifferent, right? No, because simple is always better. For the first colony you have to find a planet that can support both extractors in proper amounts and not far enough from each other so you can link them. If just one material runs dry, you have to pack and go. Not to mention that the 4 advanced factories could be replaced by extractor heads and basic factories. Finally you probably noticed that 550 >> 110, so it's guaranteed that if you'd just run a single protein extractor planet with a 10 head extractor feeding 8 basic factories, you'd make much more money (550*40*8*24*30 = 127M/month). Complicated always needs to be justified with extra profit.

The above is true for higher level PI. If you are making Camera drones, Condensates, Guidance Systems, Hermetic Membranes, Industrial Explosives, Planetary vehicles, Supercomputers, Synthetic Synapses, Transcranial Microcontrollers, or Ukomi Superconductors with the current prices, you are doing it wrong. Even better: if you make any kind of P4, you are doing it wrong, each and every one of them creates less profit than a P3 factory. It doesn't mean you can't make money with them, you just could make more with a selected P3. I guess people are so obsessed with producing top tier stuff that they forgot counting. Alternatively they need the compression that P4 gives (typically in WHs)

If you make something profitable like Neocoms, it's no excuse to have an unprofitable step in it, like making Silicate Glass. Import Biofuels and Precious metals, combine them to Biocells and combine those with imported Silicate glass!

If you keep these in mind, you can get 150-200M/month per colony. People get less because they don't have an up to date spreadsheat or they use someone elses and just check the end result, not optimizing the internal chain: Neocoms are profitable even if you make them with self-made Silicate glass. It doesn't make it right though to litter your planets with silicate factories instead of more biocells and Neocom factories. Have something like this instead: Top left receives biofuels, bottom left precious metals, right silicate glasses. Left factories produce biocells, right ones Neocoms. Something is missing from the picture, it will be the post tomorrow.

If you don't want to mess with spreadsheets, it's fine. But then stick to something simple like extraction + refining to P1 and selling it. A well-ran P1 planet is more profitable than a badly ran P3. Please note that prices can change daily, what was profitable yesterday is not surely profitable today. Again, if you don't want to bother, run P1, they are always profitable, price changes can only affect the amount of profit.

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Handling server overload

TiDi is a bad answer for a problem in EVE: as players are usually distributed among the various star system groups (servers), providing low load. These servers are unable to support if thousands of players happen to jump on one system. Such events are rare but crucial moments, shaping EVE. TiDi tries to handle this with slowing down time locally, therefore decreasing the number of actions the players can perform, decreasing server load.

TiDi is bad because it allows players who are not in the besieged system to converge there. Let's say a titan is tackled by a fleet that can destroy it in 5 minutes. Only those within 5 minutes of travel time can arrive, increasing the burden of the server. However a 10% TiDi would allow everyone within 50 minutes range to arrive, making sure the system is full off observers, killmail whores and such, making the battle unplayable for those who are actually involved. Besides increasing the server load, TiDi also changes the outcome, favoring the side with larger reinforcements, practically removing large scale surprise attacks from the game.

I don't even mention the "Captain Obvious" solution: stronger servers, as they are obviously expensive. Keeping every constellation 24/7 on a server which can support an Asakai sized battle is a huge waste of money. Refusing this solution however accepts that the server can't serve everyone, in the crucial moments, leading to TiDi and the problems above.

My solution would be selective service: when TiDi reaches 75%, the system goes to "yellow mode". In "Yellow mode" frigate sized ships, shuttles, noobships, destroyers and pods can't enter the system, nor they can undock from a station inside the system. Also, those of them who are not already in combat (PvP flagged, targeting or targeted by someone PvP flagged) are logged off. When the player tries to relog or undock in such a ship, he is offered the same window we see in Jita: that offers him to magically transported to a nearby system. Fleets would be granted 1 protected slot for every 10 ships that are not "yellow-banned" themselves, so a full fleet can have 24 tacklers, warpins, cynos that can operate under yellow mode. The technical way would be a protection priority list that the FC sets and the first N ships get protection.

Yellow mode would also force drone grouping: Drones of the same type of the same ship would fly to the same spot forming a "drone group" which is a single drone for the server with corresponding damage increase (so you'd control 1 fighter-bomber that does 20x damage instead of 20 FBs). These grouped drones would have two HP bars, one for single target damage, one for smartbomb. If the single target HP reaches zero, the group becomes smaller with full HP and targeting on this group has 1/N chance to break, representing the chance that your targeted drone died (if you had a 20x FB group and a ship killed one, you have a 19x FB group and he has 1/20 chance to be forced to retarget). If smartbomb HP reaches zero, the whole group dies.

The point is to remove the ships that are likely have little to none effect, letting those who actually affecting it operate with minimal TiDi. If TiDi disappears for 5 minutes, yellow mode is cancelled.

If yellow mode is not enough and TiDi is still below 75% for 5 minutes, "orange mode" is invoked. In this mode "yellow-banned" ships are disconnected and immediately disappear from space even if they were in combat, and T1 cruisers can't enter, undock or remain unless already in combat. The protected spots for small vessels is both recalculated (you can't get a spot after T1 cruisers) and decreased to 1/15 (16 small ships for a 255 man fleet). In orange mode subcapitals can only control 1 drone group, capitals 2, supercarriers 4. So if a subcap loses 2 drones (his drone group is down to 3 members), he can't send out a second group, must recall his group and resend it full.

If even orange mode fails and TiDi is still below 75% for more than 5 minutes, red mode is invoked. In red mode everything is instantly logged off and disappearing from space except capitals, battleships, strategic cruisers, logistics, dictors and command ships. Protected positions are recalculated and decreased to 1/20. All ships are limited to 1 drone group/ship and only heavy drones, sentries, fighters and FBs can be used.

This way the server could continue to operate without heavy TiDi with little change of the event. A single black-screened titan or the fact that a dread fleet arrived from the other end of the galaxy has larger effect on the outcome than removing 500 frigates and T1 cruisers, so it's just logical to keep the battlefield clear of litter.

Please spare me from the "everyone has the right to be there" comments. The TiDi is there because the server cannot serve everyone. We can only decide who should be not served.

PS: spare me from comments that point out that this or that speciality ship (like bombers) are important. Yes, I'm bad with PvP ships, so my example list is bad. But other people are good. The point of the post is to make these people a priority list of ships and as the server can't handle the load, kick out the low priority ships.

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Brutal beat down of underskilled newbies and other things

I got a strange comment: "How is Jester, a man who flies in one of the most reknowned PvP corps in the game a champion of the carebear? What? because he doesn't support the brutal beat down of underskilled newbies? Hilarious." Such comments are easy to dismiss and delete as idiot/troll, but they often offer a genuine belief of social people.

One of the major myths of EVE is that it's not newbie friendly. That a new player - without veterans carrying them - is lost and without hope. EVE is actually one of the most newbie friendly games, due to lack of levels and clear progression path. Until you get to lvl 95 and ilvl 9999 in WoW, you are a worthless n00b for the endgame raiding or arena play. In EVE you can go out and tackle a carrier in your Rifter on day 1 and Goon newbies literally do that. You aren't carried by the fleet, you are a useful member. Similarly I made billions on my first months by hauling for people and starting to trade. The "hopeless newbie" is a myth mostly created as ego-booster: "If you’ve played Eve for any significant length of time, there have been numerous occasions where you’ve had your teeth kicked in by this cruel internet spaceship mistress. But rather than throwing in the towel and calling it quits, you picked yourself up, dusted off your implants and charged back into the thick of it. You’ve earned your position. You made it through the days when the tutorial consisted of you being handed a gun, a mining laser and being unceremoniously thrust into space with the advice “Don’t die”."

The newbies gain protection from being worthless target. Sure, anyone can pop a newbie flying his untanked destroyer, trying to finish his career agent mission, but why? To get a 1M kill report with a 0.08M pod for 15 mins GCC and sec status loss? I've never lost a ship in highsec. I once went to lowsec and got popped on the first gate, but hey, I asked for it by moving to lowsec. I even clicked off that "Concord won't protect you" dialog.

Jester and the other "protect the newbies" people don't see that they can't protect newbies without protecting a bunch of bad veterans. He is not a newbie. If you have an untanked barge in 0.5 AFK-ing, you aren't a newbie either, you are a new farmalt. The Concord mechanics makes it impossible to profitably gank a normally fitted ship without without valuable cargo. The safety system makes it impossible to trick someone into combat using obscure game mechanics. If you accept a duel or switch off your safety you should know that a fight is coming even if you've never played EVE before. The newbie protection is already fine.

The "protect the newbies" people are actually protecting bad veterans who are full of ISK but no brain and fly around in all-cargo-expanded T1 haulers with billions in the hold or farm while AFK. They use "newbie" very loosely, including several months old players. Try to tell "this newbie is only playing for half a year, give him a break" in any other game without becoming laughing stock. Why should EVE be any different? Only because a bunch of bad players try to feel good for their "accomplishment" of having 50M SP. Congratulation for being able to renew your subscription for 25 months. You are my hero!

Jester did not have problems killing genuinely clueless newbies and his alliance doesn't accept newbies. This really good blogger turned into hypocrite politician harvesting votes. I don't know which is worse, if he want to scam votes (offer to support bad players and then don't deliver when elected) or if he genuinely push CCP to make it even harder to hit those who already make the best ISK: the highsec farmers.

There is only one way to protect newbies and casuals without protecting farmalts: if you decrease the rewards more than the risks. A genuine newbie won't care if his ISK/hour drops as he is playing a game in space. A farmalt will be hurt badly.

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About CSM primary: due to the well-organized scam of James 315 those who want to fix the economy have no candidate. Therefore I suggest to not vote in the primary. The primary is needed to filter out comedy candidates and to give an initial estimation of support. This is the time for people to stand behind their candidate. We have no such. Let those who have strong affiliation choose the candidates, and then we will pick the ones that are least hostile to our case.


Personal note: reading the changes Sort Dragon implemented to HBC and Kaesong Kosmonauts leaving (or kicked, you never know due to politics) I'm wondering if I just joined TEST a bad time. I mean the point that led to my removal was definitely the forum shitstorm (mostly fueled by Kaesong members) and no one even blamed me with anything else. With proper moderation and the absence of these horrible posters my stay would probably be uneventful. Bad luck? Or maybe my case opened the eyes of leaders that it can't go on this way (the first moderation attempts were happening in my time). Or the other way: I awakened the dormant and more or less controlled trolls into burning rage? We'll never know. EVE is real.

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Silver bullet: how could CCP bring back solo and small-gang PvP without a single change in EVE

EVE players keep longing for the "good old days" before blobs took control. They sometimes post daydreams that CCP should artificially limit player organizations so their small and weak corp become competitive. Well, here you go, a simple solution that brings back solo and small-gang PvP, that will dissolve the blobs and make brave and skilled pirates roam the vast seas of pixel space once again!

Kill reports (both in-game and what the API query provides) should list only N pilots on the killer side. I mean if there are 10 people killing one ship, and N is 3, the kill report looks like:
- Victim: Joe Nobody
- Killers: Frank Awesome 18%, Jane Pirate 11%, Hank daKillah 8% and 7 more pilots.
There would be no possible way to know who are these "7 more pilots".

Why would this, despite having no effect in the game mechanics, change the gameplay fundamentally? Because killers go for kill reports to show off. Why bother to kill anyone if you don't get an API verified proof that you are awesome? You! Special snowflake who don't care about kills, just play for fun, please delete your API key from every killboard before commenting!

Currently the best way of getting a good killboard is flying in a blob. The larger, the more targets it can crush and the less likely that you get killed. You get a "kill" for everything you can put 0.01% damage on. An average blob fighter can easily get 2-3000 "kills" a month without taking any risk, having any skills or even making much effort. Been there, done that, wasted 60B on figuring out its secrets and find that what looks a big heap of trolling crap is actually a ... big heap of trolling crap.

By limiting the amount of killers on the API verified reports, every extra member in the blob would decrease your chances of getting on the report, so if you can get kills with smaller groups, you would do so due to higher chances of getting the report. The blobs, fed by undeserved kills would dissolve and change into N-man roams. N would decide the gang size, if CCP want to boost solo then N = 1, if they want small group of friends, then N is 3-5, if they want mid-sized corps to roam, then N is 20-30.

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The scam of James 315

How to get rid of an unconfortable idea? Champion it yourself.

I grow up in Hungary which was a communist dictatorship back then. The secret police did large efforts to infiltrate democratic underground movements. Not to find their members and lock them up, but to become them. As the documents of the communist secret police (which are still secret, 24 years after the fall of communism) are leaking, more and more prominent democratic "champions" were found to be secret police members. Why did they do it? Simply to outcompete genuine anti-communists who would put the communist to trial. After the fall of communism, the "democratic" underground refused to pursue communist crimes. Despite the communists killed up to hundred thousand people during the Stalinist period, during the 1956 revolution and after it in retribution, not a single communist were punished. After the fall of communism, the former communists re-emerged as rich businessman.

When a year ago I started to write that the money is in highsec, people were laughing and called me a troll. Now it's more or less common sense and the argument is shifted to "we must keep this clear unbalance or the carebears quit". Today no serious person would write "if you want ISK, join an nullsec alliance to get access to anomalies or top ores". Isn't that making a change in EVE?

The opinion about the profitability of highsec slowly changed and on August 7 an unlikely hero emerged where was only murmuring and postings: James 315 started bumping miners in Kamio to show that AFK mining is widespread and easy money print. A week later, TheMittani.com - which did not take any submissions by then - published his lengthy opinion piece. His blog was well-written from the start, unlike the "real" blogs where the author is grasping for his voice at the first weeks. Like Jester and me after years, James instantly posted lengthy posts in a regular manner, both on his site and TheMittani.com.

Due to his relentless work, he became the central figure of fighting the economic unbalance favoring highsec. Those accepting this became his supporters. He disappointed me about a month ago, at the end of February when I posted my mind-blowing results as ganker and suggested the New Order (the movement of James 315) to step up to this level and become #1 on the killboards as an unquestionable proof of the imbalance of highsec. He refused and sticked to the "for fun" approach that is unable to reach any goal - by definition, as the goal of "have fun" is to have fun.

Still, I kept endorsing him as my CSM candidate as the one who has the best platform. Recently he withdraw from the CSM election, based on excuses that were known months or years ago. Yes, NDA is a tool of CCP to silence CSM, but it was always there, along with the counter: leaking. The fact that not all CSMs go Iceland was always here too. The move that CCP decides who talks to CCP is indeed a disgusting one, clearly aimed to punish those CSMs that don't perform their intended role: protecting CCP from player anger on media the CCP can't control. But this change was published a month ago and doesn't actually silence the CSM. You can still post, practically you are only excluded from bar crawls in Reykjavík. None of these are acceptable excuses to quit the CSM election now.

The purpose of James was was to prevent any other CSM candidate to build up a campaign on the platform of fixing the economy. Everyone on this platform naturally accepted him as the CSM candidate and did not run himself. To be honest, we were happy that someone was nice enough to do this pretty work-demanding and unthankful job. It's much-much easier to post "why James is a good candidate" than go to the idiot-ridden forums to get support, then participate in endless skype nonsense about DUST with devs for the chance to grab 15 minutes pushing your agenda. CSM isn't a dream job. It's a disgusting job but someone has to do that. We were all happy that someone else did it for us.

Except he didn't. He quit the race at the very last moment, removing even the theoretical chance of a new candidate arriving, making sure that CSM8 will not have a member who talks about the elephant in the china shop: the money is in highsec and the optimal way of playing EVE is to never PvP if you want money and gank in highsec if you want kills. CSM8 will get lost in POS changes and ship rebalances which are nice to have but not really important, since if you are win-oriented you don't have any POS-es and fly only Catalysts.

Who sent James to sabotate the "fix economy" platform? My guess is as good as yours. He was a Goon and he instantly got a place on the Goon Fox News, so my suspicion is Goons, who are interested in keeping nullsec worthless, since this way no one serious want to take it from them. Would Shadoo call off a grindy but guaranteed victory if the Goon regions were actually useful?

James succeeded to keep the "fix the economy" issue out of CSM8. However he gained lot of supporters for the idea. I have to accept that his tear-extracting posts gained more attention from the average players (majority of voters) to the topic than my economic posts. I also have to accept that he taught me how to suicide gank and without him I'd never think of it as a mean to prove my point. Without James my 52B/month solo kill would have never happened. Championing your enemy is a double-edged sword, you can help them in the long run more than you hurt them in the short.

There is no point to cry over the broken teapot. CSM8 is lost for us. The rest of the candidates are either openly pro-carebear like Trebor and Jester; Goons themselves who preach griefing and competition and work on nerfing and risk-free play silently; or lost on some irrelevant issue (typically POS). I will figure out which one is the least of evil, but it is just damage control. CSM8 is not something we can win. CSM9 is a year from now, enough time to build up something that can finally fix the EVE economy.

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Business Thursday: less logins for pilots in training

Many of us have pilots in training who don't do anything else, just sit in a station and learn. Future supercapital pilots, pilots for sale and so on.

In EVE you train skills in real time and you can't queue more than 24 hours worth of skills. I mean the skill (therefore the queue) can end later than 24 hours, but it must start within the next 24 hours. In case of training pilots most of the time is spent not by managing the skill queue, but the login process. Since I stopped ganking, only 2 accounts actually play out of the 11, so the other 9 only learns. I needed a method to decrease the login numbers as much as I can.

Captain Obvious says: look at EVEMon and log in only when there is 1 minute left of the last skill and fill the queue. Captain Obvious probably doesn't have to sleep or go to work. For the rest of us, pushing the login time around isn't possible. Let's say you log in to EVE every evening, in a 4 hours long window. You fire up EVEMon and it says that a training pilot has 2 hours empty queue. The next skill in the plan has the following ranks:

1. 6 mins
2. 25 mins
3. 2:25
4. 13:50
5. 3 days 6 hours

You can queue up rank 1, 2 and 3, placing only 3 hours worth of skills into your queue. You either have to log in later today to queue the next one or hope that tomorrow you don't come home an hour late, have ISP failure or server error, because that case your training will end.

However there is a solution: The last skill on the picture, Wing Command 5, is 95% completed. When I logged in, it was the only skill in the queue with 8 hours empty queue. Instead of putting skills to that 8 hours hole, I put 22 hours worth of short skills before the current. 24 hours later all these skills will be complete. Such pre-inserting of short skills allows you to get rid of them fast while always having a long skill at the end, so you don't have to schedule your login. After you finished the short skills, your login frequency can be further decreased. Of course you should prioritize the skills that are prerequisites of others because you can't insert skills until their prerequisite is complete, being in the queue is not enough (you can queue Gallente Frigate 4 after Gallente Frigate 3, but you can't queue Gallente Cruiser after them).

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