Anchors

I finished the weekend off with my Main visiting the Hi-Sec island to run exploration sites (with no luck finding faction spawns) and my Main Alt back in the Low Sec pocket making extra bookmarks. It wasn’t about ISK, it was just making the most of the opportunity to undock and interact with the environment.

To achieve this both Toons had to clone jump to different regions. I have different bases of operation set up across Hi and Low-Sec with jump clones and stores of ships and assets to allow this. Often however I can feel disinclined to move my characters away from whatever my main focus of the month is.

I’ve felt this “anchoring” around many aspects of the game – Trade, PI and BPO Research stand out, where moving a character away halts or impacts the function they were being utilised for. The most obvious response to that is training up Alts.

My biggest anchors however are my +5 empire training clones. Every time I step out of them I see my skill training time increase by a noticeable amount, so I feel a subconscious desire to stay using them for as much as possible.

I have spent a lot of time and ISK setting things up so that I can flitter from one side of the galaxy to the other doing as many different aspects of the game as I want on a whim, yet I don’t tend to end up playing the game like that.

Will wonders never cease!

I actually managed to log in for a Saturday morning EVE Session – although it was only half-length. It was good to be able to actually do something in space.

I’m one month into my renewed BPO research, and it has been a bit of a godsend. Between setting the POS up that I wanted, and logging in daily to keep jobs ticking over, it has generated a surprising amount of in game activity.

Over the last fortnight I’ve moved from 200 to 270 confirmed BPO being at ME/TE 10. That leaves 500 odd more to go in my collection, and a similar number donated. I have more than a year worth of POS fuel stockpiled, so I should make a hefty dent in those.

I was careful not to over research my BPO when I first got them – but I am amazed (and slightly miffed) at just how many of them were converted with Crius to ME 9 and TE 9, requiring research.

There is one noticeable negative with this activity, it makes you inclined to leave your research characters in the vicinity of the POS, which could end up stifling your game a little. To that end I am trying to do the longer research times on my Main and Main Alt, leaving the shorter jobs to my Industry Alt who is generally around the POS’s location anyway. I also used a PLEX to start dual training on one of my accounts, to get my Second Industry Alt skilled up in the same area.

Now that the Small POS is all set up, I have mostly dismantled the Medium POS. The shorter offlining and unanchoring times for many modules makes this a far less arduous chore now. I’m just waiting for the last couple BPO to come out of its Lab before putting it offline and going through the nervous process of unanchoring it.

(Some of the defense that was mounted on the Medium POS)

I have also consolidated my POS equipment, and put up for sale the unnecessary gear I gathered during this process. I’ve been rushed and short on time, and my shopping efforts reflected that. I am still annoyed at myself for how much ISK I wasted.

(I also purchased quite a lot of stuff at abnormally high prices, and will take a bath on sales. Not much use sitting on them longer term either, I’m not likely to ever recoup at those prices.)

The last thing I managed to complete over this week was to move a couple more ships into my Low Sec home. I’ve been logging in my scouting Alt every so often to look for Wormholes to empire and check how busy the systems were. Pirate activity seems to have finally started to die down so I might try to spend some time down there. Today I found a wormhole that cut the trip to my home base from 28 jumps to 12, with only 2 of them through low sec, so I moved in a PVP Frigate and a Covert Ops.

Blink and unfortunately you won’t miss it

For self-preservation I’ve stayed away from the majority of the commentary deluge on Somergate 2014. I caught a couple blogs about the mechanics of it, and read the comments of a couple CSM members, but otherwise I’ve run a mile from the ranting and raving.

I’m not sure if it comes down to someone thinking they are being smart while being dumb, or someone deliberately setting fires, but either way I’m sure it will be dealt with. It doesn’t seem to be something you really need to get your knickers in a knot over – but people still are.

It has been the same since Incarna was released – vocal EVE players looking for excuses to be outraged. Ignoring the trolls, I think many of these people need to stop and ask themselves what is really driving their protests.

Unrelated, the other day Sugar Kyle remarked on the pleasure you can gain in EVE from all the necessary ground work required to play.

http://www.lowseclifestyle.com/2014/08/pleasure-in-planning.html

I sometimes find I get more out of the ground work than the actual result.

Microsoft says No Eve for you

Another weekend passes with no opportunity to really play EVE properly.

I walked away from my desktop PC on Thursday night as it applied window updates. I returned on Friday morning to find the PC continually rebooting. It would start, indicate windows did not shutdown properly and did I want to boot into safe mode, pause for a bit, blue screen and reboot. It had been doing that continually for 6 hours straight.

Unfortunately I couldn’t boot into any of the safe modes as they all blue screened. I also didn’t have a valid repair disk for the service patch level of Windows 7. I unhooked almost all the hardware and ran memory tests, but nothing helped. Needing my desktop to work I resorted to buying a new SSD and windows 8. I hadn’t gone down the upgrade path to 8 as I really did not like Microsoft’s direction with it, but by now the third party tools to make it more useable as a desktop environment were well known.

So my Saturday EVE session was lost to re-installing a large volume of applications.

Now I know what the initial problem was: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

Subsequent testing of the old SSD showed half a dozen or more of the core window dll files were visible but not accessible. I suspect 700+ reboots in a row probably didn’t help the situation.

Well played Microsoft, well played.  You got me to upgrade to Windows 8 after all.

One way or another, as Rixx Javix remarked, events in RL affect events in EVE. http://eveoganda.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/where-did-rixx-go.html

I did manage over the weekend to finish setting up my Hi Sec research and experiment small POS.

I’ll decommission the medium POS once the jobs running on it finish.

Hyper-selfish

I am seeing the consequences of my extra busyness that began at the start of July. Aside 60 to 90 minutes less sleep a day, I’ve noticed I’m not finishing half my blog entries. The draft folder is quickly growing. I am going to have to try and be more succinct in my ramblings.

A little while ago the overview blog for the Hyperion release was posted.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/coming-in-hyperion-on-august-26th/

I thought I would have a quick look at it from my solo point of view.

 

Wormhole changes

I don’t mind the concept of most of these changes – including the impact of mass on how far ships are spat out the other end of a wormhole passage. (Sort of makes sense in a Sci-Fi movie sort of way!) Most changes appear to be adjustments to lookup tables instead of heavy code rewrites, so should be able to be tweaked.

The updates will probably make life a little more dangerous for solo or small gangs living in wormhole space and focused on PVE – given they will have a little less warning about new connections, there will generally be more connections open, and it will be more dangerous to roll holes with bigger ships. Those focused on PVP however might find it a little better.

I can’t see it encouraging new people into wormhole space – it might even have the opposite effect. Day trips however will likely go deeper and last a little longer, and I expect most inhabitants will adjust.

The bookmark changes will be useful.

 

New Overview setup sharing

Not a perfect implementation (I saw someone suggest something like the saved fitting functionality would be better), but it will make a huge difference for me trying to maintain the overviews of 6 characters across two accounts. I can just update my main, post a link in an alliance mail, and then update all the other characters from there. I am excited by this one; although it is probably something older players will be more enthused about.

 

A new kind of Level 4 missions

This one is interesting, aside the worry about having losses on your killboard as you work the missions out. I also worry that the AI will be easily farmable with certain min/max fits. Will have to see how they are in reality. It is however something I will try as a solo player, and it might even encourage a few to PVP more. I wonder why they are not doing level 1 through 4 though. Level 4 frigate combat seems odd.

 

Incursion Scout Sites improved to be viable for small groups

I thought this meant they might be easier for small groups. I had a momentary spike of interest – maybe I can test the incursion waters on these easy sites. Maybe I can run them with two accounts? No – they will actually be harder and required 5 people, but the more viable bit is increased rewards. Moving along…

 

Otherwise there wasn’t much in the blog that will impact my game. They are changing the Ishtar, Eagle and Muninn a little. I don’t fly them, and at a glance the changes won’t encourage me to. They are lowering the activation cost of 100MN Micro Warp Drives, which again won’t impact me. New Tool tips for the market might give me 3 minutes of interest. I might get another 4 minutes of interest glancing at the new EVE Store accessories – but since I don’t use the captain quarters, I can’t see myself buying any.

It was half interesting that they suggest they will allow Multiple Character training to be available through the New Eden Store. So you might be able to use up some of your Aurum on Multiple Character training. I expect people with far more knowledge than me might write some detailed blog posts on the impact on the market of that change.

So I am really looking forward to the Overview sharing, and will spent at least a few days looking at the new Level 4 missions. It could have been worse.

Newbie Treasure Hunt

Just in case any newer players who read this blog missed it..

Pilgrim in Exile

I am organizing an in-game Treasure Hunt for newish players.

Starting time:  59 minutes after downtime on 16 Aug 2014 (11:59 EVE time)

Character requirements:  Must be between 1 month and 12 months old as of 1 Aug 2014

Ship requirements: You will need to be able to cargo scan and use combat probes (expanded probe launcher).  A MWD is highly recommended.  A fast ship with scanning bonuses is best – either a T1 exploration frigate or a Covops frigate.

Travel requirements: All locations are in high sec space.  Due to anchoring restrictions, it will be in 0.5 – 0.7 space.  It is possible that it will be shorter to travel through lowsec between locations, but it is not required.  Do so at your own risk.

Rewards:  Rewards will be modest.  Each container will have some random exploration loot.  The final container will have something useful for exploration.

Registration:  Send Tas Exile an…

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Changing my mind again and then again

I missed both my weekend EVE sessions again, which are the only time during the week I can play for a few hours without fear of interruption. While this restricted what I could do, I still ended up spending a lot more hours in game than is normal.

My BPO research continues, and will be doing so for quite some months. I am just finishing the first part of my collection, close to 200 BPO relating to consumables (ammunition and whatnot). Most of these were quick to train the gaps to get them to ME/TE 10. The process will slow down as I move into the more expensive BPO.

Since I will have the POS running for quite a while I continued the process of investigating the best one to use to cover my needs. I primarily need it to run a Design laboratory and a Research Laboratory, and until I can do my investigations, a Compression Array. I also want to be able to offline these and turn on a basic defence.

I currently have a Medium Faction Tower running, but I can get away with running a small POS. I had originally planned to use the Dark Blood Small Control Tower I already owned, and went so far as to anchor. It doesn’t however have the CPU to run the 2 labs and 1 array. (I should have foreseen that.)

The prices for Small Faction POS are currently much higher than normal and availability limited, so I ended up purchasing and anchoring a Dread Guristas Small Control Tower to use instead. This has more than enough CPU for what I need. However I couldn’t find a basic defensive setup that did what I wanted it to.

So finally I purchased a Shadow Small Control Tower and anchored that. This runs what I want it to, and will allow me to configure a suitable basic defence. (I’m under no illusion as to its ability to defend itself; this is more for amusement and inconvenience value.) I also picked up various faction POS modules to squeeze on the defence I was happy with. I now find myself with some 7 or 8 control towers.

While going through this long process – including some extended shopping trips to far flung systems to pick up some of the POS equipment, I also spent a great deal of time collecting all that POS Fuel I mentioned I purchased over the last few months. I thought that I had spent around 4B ISK on it, some for my own use, and some for speculative trading. This turned into quite a task for my risk adverse self, as it turned out to be closer to 8B ISK worth that I ended up moving in 220M and 800M ISK lots.

I will transition from my medium to small POS over the next couple weeks as some of the longer research jobs finish up.

I’ve been a bit bumbling in my approach to this. I would not normally have committed to spending so much on equipment and fuel in earlier years, but I tend to find myself a little rushed when I do get a chance to the play the game at the moment and am not as patient. I’ll have to re-sell a lot of what I have collected, and hope my actions haven’t cost myself too much.

Our own worst enemies

There’s a problem with a lot of the discussions that go on about EVE.

Raise an opinion about Null Sec or Wormhole space or Faction Warfare or Incursions or just about anything, and if you are not already deep into the game mechanic your thoughts tend not to be received well.

At first this might seem just to be common sense. However those players living and breathing these areas of the game have a tendency to be strongly myopic with their views. We get tainted discussions that usually circle back to either protecting or improving their current status quo.

That is not to say CCP is kowtowed by this. They seem to stick fairly well to the core of whatever vision they bring to the player base for discussion. This lack of inclusiveness however means we can miss unique or fresh ideas, and the direction usually heads away from shaking things up for the better. The end result seems to be a less adventurous CCP.

Nightly

I’ve settled into a pattern of having a short session in EVE most evenings. I check the status of my BPO research, cycling through logging in up to 3 characters to submit new jobs as required. I then grab my Occator Deep Space Transport and go collect some of the 4B ISK worth of POS fuel I had scattered around. Moving a couple hundred million ISK worth at time means I’ll be at this task for a while.

I’ve had the Occator for a long time, but only really used it for setting up POS. Now it is far more useful with 70K+EHP and 60K+m3 cargo space. I find myself flying it regularly.

Good to see CCP seem to have fixed the issue where BPO values were coming up as zero. Makes it easier to judge how much value you have sitting in the POS research Lab.

A Comp Newbies should be aware of

Sindel’s Angel Project (which supports new players in various ways) has turned two, and is giving away some great prizes to new players between 30 days and 12 months old.

http://www.sindelsuniverse.com/happyhappybirthday/

Worth a look into if you have recently joined us in New Eden.

 

Headaches and POS

I was feeling quite unwell yesterday. I was woken at 4am with a bad Migraine and spent the morning trying not to throw up prescription pain killers while alternating between long hot showers and laying in a darkened room. In the afternoon it had dulled to just a headache, and my wife taking pity on me took the kids out of the house. I ended up having a very long and enjoyable EVE session.

I spent the entire time looking at POS. I had 3 tabs in my EVE spreadsheet relating to them. I amalgamated them into one and updated it with the latest stats and information. I calculated the fuel costs of every small standard and faction POS and their current prices. I looked at prices in Jita and Amarr, I checked contracts, and I spent some time comparing http://eve-central.com/ and http://eve-marketdata.com/. I ended up purchasing 2 faction POS (flipping one for a 150M ISK profit a few hours later) and a couple Billion ISK in fuel blocks. I then swapped out my originally anchored small POS for another. Last of all I went over options for how I might fit it, and google searched for blogs and wiki’s on the effectiveness of various offensive mods.

Today I refit my Occator Transport, dual tanking it because there was nothing else I needed to do with the two spare middle slots, and started moving some of the fuel blocks I’ve purchased over the last couple months in preparation for Crius.  Gee they make for a big and expensive cargo.

As is common, I can’t explain why or how I found that to be so enjoyable, but it was.

This is not the reprocessing you were looking for

One of my vague ideas for exploring the industry changes with Crius was to check out the POS reprocessing array. To that purpose I dutifully purchased and anchored one.

I didn’t actually have anything to refine because – well, I had cleared my hangers of anything suitable before the last update nerfed the return rate. The other evening I ran a Covert Ops and DED 1 combat site which netted me 60M ISK and some loot to reprocess. I figured I would make use of that POS array to see how it worked and if the different return between array and POS were worth it.

(Errr, Ummm and Ahhh might be on the minds of those in the know)

The reprocessing array of course wouldn’t accept my rat loot. I tried several times and looked at the right click menu, then looked at the description of the module. “Able to take raw ores and process them into minerals.” Ahhhh, ores (and I think ICE) products only.

Not really of any value to me, so I offlined, unanchored and removed the array from my POS. As I remarked previously, I wasn’t paying enough attention when I wrote my Crius to do list.

I will say one thing for this sudden rush of BPO research. I am logging in more frequently, even if not actually doing much more in game. That means I’ve been noticing bugs and quirks – which I was pleased to find were already in the list of known issues so should be resolved over time.

In somewhat shoulder slumping news, I am missing out on my Saturday morning EVE session again today. My wife went into banshee mode on my 9 year old son after he cried inconsolably when asked to get off his laptop. Instead of a quiet house to myself and EVE, I now have to take my son to Indoor Soccer. I’d cry about it, but I wouldn’t want my wife to go all banshee mode on me.