A Sudden Change of Scenery

Never know whats in store when you log onto Eve.

After a very stressful day where our wormhole was doing its best impression of Grand Central Station, with 3 outbound and 2 inbound wormholes active, I was excited to log on for a quiet night of some home space mining.  So much for the best intentions.

Warped to our open grav site and we had already hit the good stuff and okay stuff, so i decided to open the static D.  Well damn if it wasn't what we had been waiting for.  An empty system with 37 sigs.  So i jumped in and started scanning for a grav site.  Found one quick, got one hulk mining and proceded to scan down the rest of the system.  Figured I would bomb out and learn it was a class 5 and null static or something else that would prevent a move to a "vacation property".  Well got the 4 outbound holes scanned down and they were B274, Z647, N062, and D382.  Best guess was this was a BZ static combo.  Not good for permenant home, but damn fine for a vacation site.

All told there were 15 ladar, 8 grav, 3 mag, and 6 radar, and 5 unknown (including the K162 i created).

So figure I need to make sure of at least the B274 static so I close the hole and yes its a static.  Go for vacation home.

So figures its a night I am on solo, so I start the setup of the Medium POS, while at the same time closing the D382 and N062 holes.  Got the D382 closed, but left the N062 just critical (first attempt at a 3Bkg hole, well except for that one drunk night in college, and really she wasn't that big).

So finally at about 2 hours past my intended play time I had the Medium online with 1 Corp hanger up, the hole as secure as possible, and a few ships in system, along with about 4 rambling corp emails notifying people what to do.

We are excited at the chance to mine to our hearts content and even more so at the opportunity to refine in k-space at 100%.  Here's to hoping for a safe week of cruching ABC ores.

Fly Safe,
Mick

P.S. on the recruitment front we have added 2 peeps and are still looking for a few more.  In game channel "Life in the Hole"

Support the Armadillo Module

Come to Assembly Hall and supoort the creation of the "Armadillo" super damage control module for industrial ships.

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1260042

Thanks,

Mick

Weighing In On Indy Ships

There have been several recent posts about the state of the Industrial ships and their complete lack of defenses.

I think it was best summed up here:

http://letrangeeve.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-reflections.html

Now there are a few things I hate more then flying paper mache in a rain storm, but one of them is macro miners.  Another is the person who never takes risks. 

The first type is the laughable excuse people use to justify a career in suicide bombing, but really it is the second that should be the reason.  Should there be a place in tha game for people who just want to log on their three (or more) accounts, get their Orca into a belt with boosters on, have their Hulks be able to hit the whole belt and basically Alt-Tab mine all day while at work, watching TV, eating dinner, etc.  Cause while this is not "botting" it is about as close as you can get when really you need to be at the keyboard every 9 minutes for 30 seconds.

In regards to transporting, should it be essentially zero risk to transport stuff around in High Sec?  Would creating an environment where all risk was eliminated not just add to the number that set autopilot, walk away and return 40 minutes later hovering off a safe gate where they want to be?

So how do you balance out the desire to make the game "better" for us "active" carebears (are we still carebears if we mainly live in w-space?), versus the "passive" carebears?  Make the ships way more "ganker" proof and we drasticially add to the ranks of AFK miners.  Make "Trade Lanes" where gates have ECM and guns that alpha strike a battleship, and add to the ranks of the autopilot hordes.

Unfortunetly in EVE, as with real life, every action is a double edged sword with the ability to cut in a direction we don't intend.  While being an active carebear, I do appreciate the frustration of many at the shear paper mache build of the Industrial Ships.  I agree there is no counter at this point to the tactics being used to make life miserable for Indy ships.  And yes there is always going to be a segment of the gamers who, dare I say, enjoy the abiltity to cause misery in game (do they all kick puppies outside game too, or are they just our accountants and we dont know that side of them).

Now for my suggestions.  Again, all of these suggestions are based on the desire to "reward" people for ... well, actually "playing" the game.

1) Within range of a station or gate in High Sec, like 25km, there should be a module that allows a one time, 10 second, infinite strength ecm burst.  The equal of a ECM Bomb.  Should be instant activation and would allow indy ships targeted while aligning away from a gate (prime gank time) to have a window to get away.  Make the cost relativelky high so it would make it worthwhile when transporting high value stuff, but not while running the cigarettes you got while popping NPC haulers off stations.  Justify this as a device that "calls" the gate to send a massive ECM burst to that location.

2) Add NPC haulers to the game.  The ability to bring your goods to any station in High Sec, contract an NPC hauler to take it to Jita (or where ever), and pay based on skills, standings, and cargo worth.  Would make running those damned courier missions for an NPC corp have a little more value.  Would also take away from some of the "down time" of hauling crap around.  This option should cost a boat load.  And I am not talking 1%, much closer to 10% base with top notch skills and standings getting it down to like 5%.  And it should take a day, but be absolutely fool proof.

3) For the miners, there needs to be a "Super Damage Control" module, call it the "Armadillo" module, that makes you damn near invulerable for 30 seconds, but leaves you without the ability to move.  Has to be a low slot so you have to sacrifice mining yield to use it.  Wrecks you capacitor and leaves you with only enough available to cap to make a short warp jump (1AU) for a couple of minutes (5 minutes?).  Basicially all you are trying to do is give the Calvary time to show up, be it Concord, or Friendlies.  This would make it much more feasible also to have escorts, since they would then have time to fight back against the aggressors.(hell give it to haulers to and make it a low slot to sacrifice cargo room for safety.)  Also like everything else CCP does to limit it to certain ships, give only certain higher industrials (read Mammoths, Inty V's,  all tech 2 transports, the orca, mining barges, exhaumers) the 99.9% reduction in CPU to use them.

None of these ideas are going to help the AFK miner, or the auto pilot hauler, and that is good.  But they all will help the active player and balance the game play to where at least a player as the option of trying to defend himself, or make escorts a legitimate opiton.  In the end all these options would allow a player options to sacrifice profit, by paying a NPC company, sacrifice cargo or yield, or hiring escorts, in the name of safety.

In the end, balancing game play must be a very difficult thing to do as any added defenses only adds to the saftey of the passive players, to the detriment of all us active industrials.

As an aside, is this ability to suicide, going to carry over into the "walking in station" portion of the game?  Am I going to have to worry about getting mugged on the way to the market with my 50 melted nano ribbons?  Am I going have to worry about my 100M isk I have on the poker table if a suicide bomber comes into the station?

Fly Safe and tell CCP about my Armadillo module.
Mick

A Great Guide and a Funny List

After spending a few hours mining gas, I had about an hour to kill before the refinery was done and I could put another load of our new ABC's into the thing (I hate 3 hour cycles).  So it was off to my other addiction. poker.  While palying, I also decided to do some searching around for more w-space stuff.  I came accross

http://k162space.wordpress.com/

and his list of how not to die

http://k162space.wordpress.com/2010/01/

This is just too damned funny, while actually very, very helpful.  I think #17 is by far my favorite.

Also while there, check out his guide.

http://k162space.wordpress.com/wormhole-guide/

I did not read it in depth, but certainly look forward to going back and doing so.  I am eager to see if the humor and knowledge is consistant throughout his posts.

Fly Safe (or cloaked)
Mick

Our Typical Night

So it all started when the wife said she had something to watch on TV and "I could play my stupid game" :)

So that meant a larger block (5 hours) of play time.

That meant finding a grav belt somewhere. Anywhere not in our system (as we finally got a grav site, but are saving it for fall back nights.)

So warped to our D-static (same place it had been for 3 days), and popped through.  Quick D-Scan and "damn" occupied and 4 miners and an indy on scan.  Being the peaceful type (for now), I shouted a quick hello into local.  Hmm no running for cover.  Maybe a combat probe, lets see if they are awake at the controls.  Yep that worked.  I now have their attention.  Told them if the left me alone I was going to close the hole from my side.  They agreed, but obviously didnt trust me as i didnt see anything but a merlin on d-scan for the next 15 minutes it took me to close the hole (a big one at about 2.1).

On to next D-Static.  Pop in and it looked great.  No POS, No Ships, No activity on evemaps.  After about 15-20 minutes fo scanning, no grav site, and it was a High Sec Class 2 with B274 and Z647 statics.  But the good news was a third Unknown and it was a small signiture, usually reserved for higher class holes.  After a few minutes messing with it my corpmate pinned it down and happily reported a N062 - Class 5 WH.  Good news as a K162 most likely meant an occupied system.

In we went.  Good news again in an empty and inactive system.  Quick scan got us a Ordinary grav site.  So away we went having spent about 1 hour scanning. Since my Corpmate was hauling, I broke out the prober on Ian's toon and kept scanning.

So we attacked the ABC of the first belt with our three hulks, and started into a night of mining.   (We are now just using drones to clear the spawn).  So with the miners humming, I turned attention to scanning down the rest of the system.  (Corpmate was on D-scan duty).  Quickly found another grav site and 2 ladar with C-32 and c-28 them.  Quick scan of eve-central revealed the c-32 would yield a good rpofit for Ian (as he only flys Retreiver for mining ore).

So back again and fit the Abby for gas mining (yeah over kill), and set off for the clouds.  Well needless to say one ship attacking a 5,000 unit C-32 cloud is a joke (25,000k m3 at 40m3 every 30 seconds, yeah do the math), but at least he was making isk.

Well an uneventful 3 hours passed and we managed to clear 15k of Crokite, 5k of Ark, and almost 10k of Bistot, plus 1000 units of C-32.  Not a bad night. 

And to top it off, we did not have to open our own Grav site (we would like to wait till a second one spawns before opening the first).

Also, Shout out to the two folks who joined me in "Life in the hole" in game and provided some great conversation about life, Eve and W-space.

Fly Safe (or cloaked)
Mick

Cracking the $240M nut, Is WH life worth it?

Heating a POS in the cold of space is a very expensive endeavour.  To the tune of $240M  per month.  So the question becomes how much do you have to do to justify not sitting in a nice .5 systems, mining scordite in an Orca fleet, and having to only fear gankers?

Well let us count the ways.

1) Mine.  Looking at the facts. Scordite returns are at  record levels, and zydrine and megacyte prices are as low as I have seen.  You lose 25% refining in the WH, and right now we don't have the fleet sizes to justify breaking out the orca, at the expense of losing a Hulk.  Even so, I figure I get about 150% the isk per hour in my two Hulk fleet, then I got High Sec using 2 Hulks and a Retriever in a almost maxed out Orca Boosted Fleet.  In fact, it looks like I get about $250k isk per minute more.  So first way to crack into that $240M nut is to mine 1000 minutes, or about 17 hours.  Again, this assumes I am taking on the entire $240M burden.

2) Run anomolies/Radar/Mag sites.  So variable here, since the majority of the isk running anomolies is from the Melted Nano's.  Again using a base number of $24M/hour as my High Sec Scrodite mining, and figuring I can clear and salvage about 1.5 anomolies per hour solo, it really is a wash here.   Some hours I have cleared 11-13 meleted nanos, while others I have only gotten 3.  I know there are tags and other salvage, radar site stuff and mag site stuff, but in the end it is really all about the Melted Nano's in a Class 2.

3) Ladar.  Just starting to get into this area.  Spent the night last night clearing some ladar sites and gathering gas.  Looks like I spent about 3 hours clearing 4 sites and from what I can see I will make about $40M once I can "react" it.  Not really a great return, but better then doing nothing.

4) Other reactions.  The real wildcard here.  Since reactors are limited to .4 security or less, and the Amarr tower has plenty of power and cpu, why not look to run simple reactions when the refinery or polymer reaction is not needed.  Looking at the numbers, it looks like there are reactions that can net $250k to $500k per hour, every hour.

And of course the best way to crack the nut, is to split it (among corpmates). 

So bottom line, after about a month in w-space, when comparing it to high sec.

1) Be prepared to spend more time doing non isk generating stuff.  Sure in high sec you still have to make market runs, but they are not usually 20 jumps.  Overall, I think I spend about twice the time doing non-isk producing stuff in w-space (a lot more recently with a POS setup/teardown/setup).

2) Be prepared to do whatever is available.  Our order right now is as follows:
        Mine a grav site in our system of ABC ores
        Mine a neighbor system of ABC ores
        Mine our system for Dark Ochre or Gneiss
        Combat sites (either in our or neighbor system)
        Ladar (either in ours or neighbors)
        Market runs

3) Think of ways to make money off POS when not needing the w-space equipment.


Overall, I do not envision struggling to justify the $240M it will take to keep a W-space Large POS running.  Alone, I am fairly certain I would at least get the 17-20 hour of mining in that is needed to justify the w-space existance.  As I also look to grow the corp (visit "Life In The Hole" channel ingame for our public recuitment channel), this nut will get even easier to handle.  So after about a month in w-space I am confident that there is plenty of Isk to be made, plenty of ways to lose a crap load of Isk, and a lot of fun to be had.

So as we work to establish our Class 2 presence, I continue to look towards getting the corp into a Class 4 hole within the next 45 days.

Fly Safe,
Mick 

Eve POS Refining Yields

Well after spending way too much time trying to figure the POS refining yields and searching all over I have concluded one thing.

No one can agree on the yield.

I read one post where someone insists that the Intese Refining Array is a 50% base with a CAP at 75%.  If this is the case a total noob with no skills would easily get the 75% as with zero skills you get 87.5% at a 50% station.  Can easily check that off the list of possible ways this works.

Well I thought that it was your refining rate in a 50% station TIMES 75%, but early refining cycles come out to not match this formula either.

So I just about gave up the I came accross a reference to this formula in one of the EO forums posts.

Refining yields in a 75% POS refinery = 56.25%*Skills

where Skills = (1+(Refining Skill Lvl * .02))*(1+(Refining Eff Skill Lvl*.04))*(1+(Ore Proc Skill Lvl*.05))

That would yield the following chart for yield by skills.  Rememeber it is Capped at 75% so all values greater then 75% = 75%.

So far I have been able to test this only on my skills of Refining V and Refining Eff III, and it matches the yield I got, whereas the 50% station Yield * 75% did not.

Can anyone else mining in W-Space and using a POS refinery help to confirm this formula/table?

Thanks.

Fly Safe,
Mick