The one rule to keep to be absolutely safe in EVE

Jester wrote how complicated EVE is and how easy you can have losses on mechanics you didn't understand and had little chance to learn it due to no documentation. He is wrong. You can avoid all hurting losses by keeping one simple rule: "don't mess with anything that you'd hate to lose". This is a slight rephrasing of "don't fly anything you can't afford to lose", a rule told to every newbie many times.

Yesterday I misclicked and instead of "create contract", I clicked "plug in", so my station trader alt has now 5% more firepower with large hybrid turrets and 5% more armor HP. Bye-bye 0.28B. Was it a honest mistake? Yes it was. Was it due to some obscure mechanic? Yes, since I couldn't plug in these implants earlier, their requirements were stealth-nerfed to cybernetics 4 from 5. Did I immediately filled the implant slots of all my alts with random 1% implants? Of course I did.

But did it hurt? No. I have more than 100B in implants that aren't even listed on the market. The loss can't even make a visible bump on my chart. If it was on my first week, I'd lost everything I had. But in my first week I did not run around with 100+M implants. I was selling skillbooks I bought from newbies in Uitra and Akianavas.

The point is that you shouldn't mess with things that consist large amount of your assets. One day or the other you'll lose it. This is why people should have insurance on their homes, despite on the long run they lose money on it: to not suffer a crippling loss. Having a supercarrier with 200M in the wallet is a disaster waiting to happen. If your total assets are 30B, then even dreadnoughts are risky for you, stick to T2 fit, full insured carriers, that's only 600M to lose, you'll manage.

People push things too hard and suffer for it. They shouldn't live on the edge. People keeping the one rule can safely learn on their own experience. This is why I didn't buy a titan pilot, despite people told me. I could afford a titan when I was 5 months old. But I think I'd lost that titan already, and losing 90B when all you have is 150 is dumb. In other words, I could afford to have a titan when I was 5 months old, but I couldn't afford to lose it. So I would have been like the ordinary titan pilots who never log in or even quit the game. I'm sure that I will lose my first titan in a few months due to my own mistake, and I wanted to wait to the point when I can honestly say that "this was dumb, now let's do it again without the stupid part" instead of shouting obscenities to my keyboard.

Now I have a humble suggestion to CCP that would greatly increase its customer retention: since most losses are connected to ships blowing up, the hurting losses could be removed from the game by demanding players to have 2x more liquid cash than their ship's worth (hull+fit+cargo). If you have a 100M ship, you must have 200M cash in your wallet to undock. If you are already outside but don't have the money, you can't use offensive modules on it, so you can move it, but can't use it.

With this, CCP could enforce people to keep the only one rule needed to have a pleasant gaming experience instead of a ragequit over losing everything to a misclick: don't mess with things you'd hate to lose.

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Dirty way to cleanse EVE from dirt

Ali Aras wrote how she rejects porn links in EVE, because it shows people like here objectified. I flew a lot with TEST (being the workaholic I am, I barely missed a stratop) and I can tell she got it easy. In TEST battlecruiser fleet chat was full of pictures with two or more people like me and no people like her. Luckily the Foxcat fleets were leagues better.

Ali Aras also wrote her solution: petition these people (even blues) to CCP who then receive their well-deserved bans. This happened in TEST fleet often, Beffah (military director who is also female) often pinged "please don't report blues".

These gave me an idea. EVE is a dark place, full of spies, convospammers, corp thieves and such. Instead of writing long posts how racist or misogynist speak is wrong, you can be an anti-dirt spy. That's simple: you join an alliance under the guise of an "adorable newbro", fly in fleets, don't sabotate anything except you file petitions against people who violate the EULA. There are hatespeakers, botters, porn-link spammers, ISK sellers and all kind of filthy people out there. With a nice little petition you can suspend or even ban their account.

This can be elevated to the next level: warring empires can activate their spies to deliver a killing blow to the enemy by getting their members banned.

Is it mean? Does it kill the "fun"? Is it unfair? Is it a jerk move?
Welcome to EVE Online!

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0.5T

I haven't post a business report for a long time. The reason is simple: I'm still trading the same implants as almost a year ago, there isn't much competition. What's the reason for this post then?
This is the amount of money I made with trading. I don't have this sum, I have some invested, a lot in implants to sell and spent some on various projects. Yet, this is what I made in the one year and four months of playing EVE. With the 16B gained by the mistype of a buyer, I passed half trillion ISK this week. That's about 1.2B/day, approximately 0.5-0.8B/hour actively played.

This result in itself a proof that the money is in trading, in moving goods from impatient sellers to impatient buyers. I'm not having any "skillz", I do nothing that anyone couldn't repeat. The way to earn a supercarrier a month is open for everyone.

What will I do with it? I don't have explicit plans. I have to stay in highsec for a week or two more to finish a project (which will change highsec L4 security mission running) but then, I probably start looking around in nullsec. I'm sure there is a need for some cash.

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Wrong ragequit over a right reason + the importance of the dot

Sugar pointed us toward the direction of an epic fail: guy lost a 2B collateral, 1.2B value cargo in a tanked Mammoth industrial to a suicide ganker. In the forum topic he announces his quitting from the game and also his opinion about the game being horribly unbalanced, if a 140M fitted Tornado can finish his 1.2B thing in highsec.

He is an idiot, no doubt. But his idiocy lies only in not recognizing the horrible unbalance before he suffered it. While having a big hole on the street is the fail of the road maintenance corporation, you are still stupid to jump into it.

The game is not unbalanced in the sense that the 140M Tornado could oneshot the 3M hull with 3M fittings. The design problem is that industrials naturally has a high pricetag due to their cargo. If you put 400M fittings on a 40M drake hull, you are an idiot and can avoid it by fitting T2 modules instead of faction and deadspace to Drake. Putting cargo into a ship is equal to putting on fittings loss and gank-loot wise. However the only alternative of putting 1.2B on a 3M Mammoth is not flying the Mammoth.

And here we arrive to the fundamental T1 hauler problem: their pricetag and defense is way too low for the cargo they are meant to haul by any veteran player. Of course there should be a cheap and weak hauler for newbies, but anyone over 1 month old will haul at least 100M, and for them all T1 haulers are useless. The ragequitter is right that the T1 haulers are broken, his fail was still flying one. I haven't flown one since my first month. When I started my ISK empire by hauling skillbooks, I realized that even a nano-fitted Condor is better for the job. Later when I had skillpoints I moved to a 300K EHP Orca and a 600K EHP cloaky Tengu.

A hauler that can be ganked economically with 1B cargo is by definition a noobship only for newbies. CCP Rise must design haulers for veteran players too. Alternatively it can be declared that blockade runners, freighters, Jump-freighters and Orcas are the options for veterans, but then the whole T1 hauler bunch should be replaced by a single Ore hauler, and the skillpoints put into racial industrial skills should be refund and its description should contain "IT IS TOO WEAK TO DEFEND any cargo over 100 million ISK, consider using transport ships, Orca or a freighter instead".

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You might noticed that the dot is an important thing in EVE Online. Not only because it's a running joke to put it to your corp and alliance names, but because if you delete it while you set up a buy order, you end up like this: Yes, he paid 16B for a 0.16B implant, thank you Ingeborg Tim very much. I told many times not to disable the warning box if the price is out of normal range. I tell it again, maybe it holds.

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Why there are no NPC teammates?

Have you ever wondered why there are no NPCs to hire to do group content? Blizzard just introduced flexible raids to deal with the "group not full" problem, when the solution is so trivial: introduce an NPC that does acceptable DPS and can be hired for raiding. It wouldn't be any good, but better than an empty spot.

In EVE Online it's even more problematic. You see, EVE is a game of alts, I know exactly one player who doesn't have alts in the game (my girlfirend, and she is too casual to matter). CCP games said that the average account/player is above 2, yet there is no officially supported method to multibox. To make it less understandable, setting up a "follower" AI would be like 30 minutes work for a programmer: warping needs no programming as squadwarp is already available, the only coding needed is when the boss jumps or activates warp gate or jump bridge or titan, the follower does the same, upon landing activate tank and propulsion start orbiting its master, lock it up, activate helping modules on it, then attack whatever the master attacks with all offensive modules. Such ship would be much worse than a player as it needs to be capstable with all modules perma-running, couldn't overheat and couldn't attack anything else than the primary of the master. Yet it would be a welcome addition.

The reason of the missing NPC teammates isn't programming, it's a fundamental game-design thing: an NPC teammate would set a barrier of skill for players. I mean a player who is worse than the NPC is rejected from every team, including teams of equally useless players. If a drooling moron starts a team, he will also include NPCs in the hope that they can carry him than taking other drooling morons. Such feature would remove a significant playerbase from the game as they would be outcast and ridiculed as "worse than a dumb NPC". Actually that NPC is just as good for a doctrine fleet than a player, or even better as it's never late, it doesn't spam the chat, won't go AFK, doesn't DC, doesn't mind if asked to stay docked and doesn't jump the gate on arrival when it was explicitly told not to.

While I wrote it would be worse than a player I meant it would be worse than someone who can overheat, warp off when needed, switch targets without orders, keep its position on its own, keep up Ewar on others than primary. Sure, there are such players, but not many, otherwise no one would field F1-bashing fleets that are prone to bombing runs. The pure fact that both sides of the "great 2013 Summer war" use "anchor up, permarun MWD, click broadcast, press F1" fleets prove that the average player isn't far from that very primitive bot. And I'm sure they wouldn't like to find this out the hard way, being devastated by a 50-man corp with each member running 20 accounts, fielding 1000-"men" fleets.

The game companies need human players, so even PvP games go great length to prevent players figure out that they are horrible. World of Warcraft still don't have a built-in damage meter. In EVE there is no way to set up a fair fight, while it's told to be because of the "dark universe", it's actually because it keeps the loser in the game as he can always blame link alts, faction modules or blobbing. In League of Legends the rating system was hidden behind this "bronze-silver-gold..." nonsense, to make sure that the 600 rated moron never finds out that he is indeed a 600 rated moron. I needed to dig to find some source to figure which tier and subtier belongs to which ELO rating and how it translates to ones position in the playerbase (and its numbers don't add up). Even if I failed to search well, the point is that I need to do even more effort to find out how am I performing.


PS: if you know a reliable source that translate League of Legends subtiers to player positions as "silver 4 = top 12%-top 8%", please link.

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Why the bind-on-pickup and mudflation?

Tobold wrote how trading kills MMO games. He is indeed right in that both the "item collection" and the crafting part of the game is only there for the bleeding edge players, everyone else is better off for buying their junk. Diablo III became infamous in being an item collection game with no one collecting items. Same for crafting: what you craft is only useful if you are on the first day of the expansion.

He also mentions mudflation as a necessity. This is the current inflation of item level. First as your character levels you gain better and better items for doing the same things (killing 10 boars), then on top level every patch gives new level of gear. This is a necessity as otherwise the "complete" character can't do anything.

He concluded that the best is having no trading between players, therefore making everyone grind out his gear, to prevent them just pick them all up from the AH.

In EVE everything is traded. And real money trading is sanctioned. On your first day in the game you can legally buy a titan pilot with a titan. How come that anyone still playing this game? Because there is item destruction. Even if the case you are a very focused player and want to play only one kind of spaceships like logistics, your item collection doesn't end with having all 4 logistics cruisers in your hangar, because you need replacements. A lot. In a nullsec war you can easily lose them by dozens. On the other hand in Diablo III only newbies on lvl 15 need lvl 15 weapons. Even if there is a constant influx of new characters forever (there is not), the amount of lvl 15 characters is constant and the amount of lvl 15 weapons increase day by day.

World of Warcraft deals with it two ways: one is bind on pickup which is indeed removal of trading, if you equipped it, you can't sell it. The other is mudflation where every item are made obsolete and everyone are motivated to grind new out and destroy the old. Tobold is right that banning trading works.

But banning trading essentially makes the game single-player. If I can't give my teammate items, we aren't a team at all. We just do the same single player game and chat while in it.

The real solution would be item destruction. Then the game could have trading and need no mudflation or even inflation of levels. New encounters could be on the same item level, just new dance and lore. Item destruction doesn't have to mean item loss. Many players don't play games where they can have losses (I resist the urge to comment on them). Item destruction can happen as an inevitable wear. Durability decrease over time and the item becomes junk, needing replacement. This way there will always be someone buying new daggers.

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The horrible industrial rebalance

CCP Rise published his ideas about industrial rebalancing. I seriously doubt he ever flown one (except as a bait). He creates two industrials for each race: a tanky and a large-hold one. The remaining Iterons will be foster children.

His ideas don't address the fundamental industrial problem: they are all stepping stones. The Caracal isn't just a stepping stone of the Raven and the Tengu. It needs the same skills and runs well on lower level, so someone who learns for a Raven or Tengu usually plays with a Caracal until he gets there. But the point is that after he can fly a Tengu or Raven and even have these ships, he still has reasons to fly a Caracal. CFC often sends fleets of them to Fountain. The Caracal is a ship on its own right, not just a stepping stone flied only by newbies. On the other hand the industrials, even with the rebalance are worse than the Orca in every aspect. Even the new "tanky" hauler has less EHP than an Orca and even if you take the paper-thin T1, fill it with cargo expanders and rigs, it'll have less cargo space than a max tanked Orca.

I think the reason why CCP Rise doesn't see the problem is the fundamental difference between industrial ships an combat ships. A combat ship can accomplish its mission despite dead. If you are defending your system with Caracals, dying and reshipping 10 times but saving the timer, you won. If you shot just one Tengu while losing 10 Caracals, you even won the ISK war. Also if you just want fun, roaming in a band of Caracals will do: you'll have fun despite you'll return as a new clone. This creates a position for cheap ships for veteran players.

On the other hand if an industrial dies, it failed its mission in every aspect. It lost the cargo and made its owner sad. No industrial pilot who did industry (and not comedy fleet or baiting) was ever having fun in a fight. Even if you survive a gank attempt it's not "yeah I won, I'm the man" but "Thank you Jesus!". The purpose of an industrial pilot is to transport valuable cargo, so making the ship cheap doesn't help with the loss. If you don't care about your cargo, you don't transport it, but reprocess and sell it to a buy order. An industrial pilot will pick the safest ship that can do the job. In highsec it's the Orca or a Freighter, in other spaces it's the Covops hauler or the Jump Freighter. After they can fly these, they will fly only these. If the situation is too hot for even these ships, he doesn't fly anything and saves his cargo until it's safer. T1 industrials and even the "deep space transport" are obsolete ships flied only by newbies who can't fly or can't afford the "proper" ship.

To give a reason of existence to T1 industrials, you must give them a role where they beat the Orca, Freigher, JF or Covops. Let me offer some ideas:

• Sigil, Badger, Wreathe, Iteron: they are designated noobships, they all cost about 0.5M, on a resaonable fit, they can carry about 4000m³ and tank about 10K.
• Bestover: tanky highsec hauler. 4000m³ cargohold without expanders but no one would put expanders on it but armor tank. Fully tanked it has 300K EHP.
• Hoarder: wormhole hauler. 200m/s while flying under T2 cloak (can't warp cloaked). Bonused for scanners.
• Mammoth: combat hauler. Bonus to salvage cycle speed (not strength), can fit both armor and shield tanks (enough slots and powergrid), but cannot fit cargohold expanders. 100K tank with good fittings, 3000m³ cargohold, with proper fittings 1000m/s, 5 secs align. Its purpose is to fly with fleets, loot and salvage.
• Badger II: relic/data site hauler: automatically collects the loot from the loot-explosion.
• Iteron 2,3,4: specialized haulers: they can carry about 50k m³ of various kind of items: ore, PI, fuel.
• Iteron 5: like today, the baby-freighter, the last stepping stone before the big ones.
• The 4 currently useless "deep space transports" would become useful again if they got interdiction nullifying bonus and some more warp stab bonuses as +2 won't save you in the world of +2 long points. I'd take the the +2 strength and give +100% effect from warp core stabilizers, allowing them to have 10 warp strength if filled with 5 warpstabs.

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