Monthly Archives: January 2013

Making Sov more fun

I’ll prefix this all with: I’m not particularly experienced when it comes to Null, and Sov grinding. I’m not a Noob to eve, that’s just not an area I’ve gone into. Most of this stems from the arguments about it that I’ve seen on the forums.

From the sounds of it, the main complaints are:
Grinding Sov is dull, as you have to take out many multi-million EHP structures, to do pretty much anything to someone. Or camp their systems to stop them maintaining their upgrade levels.

This isn’t fun. Not fun at all.

The second is: There’s no space that’s not taken. Even if it’s not being used, it’s not available.

What I’d suggest is the following, with large parts stolen wholesale from Faction warfare.

If a system has neighbors which are not owned by the same alliance, and don’t have upgrades, they are ‘Frontier’ systems. Frontier systems do not improve in Strategic index, unless the system has levels in either Military or Industrial.

In all systems strategic index will decay, if there are no other upgrades.

Upgrades are not anchored at POS any more. They are stand alone structures which generate a deadspace field (with free acceleration gate) The owner can set the size of ship that can enter these. This cannot be changed after installation, without tearing it down. (This includes moon mining facilities)

Upgrades and levels of the indices spawn complexes, which can be attacked by people to reduce the index levels in a system (or knock out an upgrade). When the Indexes hit zero, a final complex will spawn (at a time set by the owner, or X hours away. Just to deal with off hours invasions) which will remove Sov from the system, if defeated.

The higher the levels of indexes, the larger the ships that can enter the some of the complexes. These complexes will have multiple entrances, to make camping the way in more difficult.

Effects:

  • If you can get behind enemy lines, you can blow stuff up and mess with their upgrades. And while doing so, you can be sure you won’t be hot dropped, by staying in the smaller complexes. you’ll do less damage in them, but they’ll allow you to chip away.
  • Fights should be somewhat more fun that the blobs. As you can always blap stuff in a frigate or cruiser
  • Sov isn’t an all or nothing affair. You can hurt an enemy, even if you can’t knock them out. A BLOPs fleet can cause pain.
  • You don’t need to take down a POS to get at the goo. I’m thinking a multipart facility. taking it entirely offline is hard, but damaging it so you can steal, easier.

Useful bits and pieces – Eve SDE

Once you get comfortable with the CCP way of doing things, the SDE isn’t too bad to work with. You’ll have to dig around in it to get some of the numbers you want, and sometimes it’s the opposite way round from what you’d expect, but it’s not too bad, most of the time. Here are a few more useful snippets for getting information on things.
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Why I’m in a personal corp

tl;dr: I’m a suspicious bastard. Gimme a personal POS I can let specific other people use.

I make stuff in Eve. Mostly T2 stuff. I run three accounts to do this. I’d like to be part of a larger corporation, but instead I keep my alts in a separate Corp. This is an attempt to explain why.

It’s because of 2 things.

  1. I’m paranoid
  2. I can’t control who accesses my POS, beyond some very very general roles.

The two are tightly linked, as you might guess. Either I join a Corp where they’re willing to grant me the ability to anchor stuff (and un-anchor other people’s stuff. And have other people un-anchor my stuff) or I keep it all in a single Corp.

I can’t imagine that I’m the only person in EVE that thinks this way.

What would be ideal for me is the ability to launch a POS that I can limit access to, to a very specific list of people. So only those people I authorize can use its resources, un-anchor it and so on (ideally a separate list for each)

I might trust my CEO to manage the corporation’s ISK. I don’t trust them to not take my stuff and kick me out the Corp. Only time I’d trust them that much, is if I know them, and can take it out of their hide in person.

Corp Roles and POS Management – A Vision

My fist disclaimer: I don’t run a big corporation. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that I’m missing things, or possibly making things harder. I hope not, but that’s what comments are for.

I’ve heard many problems for how corp role assignment is painful, and how that can make management of POS painful too. It mostly comes down to things not being fine grained enough. Either you can cancel every corp industry job, or you can cancel none, for example.

So what I was thinking was the following. If it’s familiar, you may have worked with POSIX user management before. It’s pretty much lifted from there.

The first step is to allow for the creation of ad hoc user groups within the corporation. I’d recommend that you can nest them at least once as well, allowing for groups within groups. Multilevel nesting would be nice, but complicates matters a little.

Ideally these are parsed at logon, and then stored, to reduce the workload. Recursion makes databases cry. Stored in the ‘brain’ for the character. This would be easier once the ‘brain in a box’ work that’s been mentioned in the past is repeated. To allow for updates without needing a log off, I’d suggest a button on the corp pages or character pages, allowing someone to get a group update. This always annoyed me in Windows 😉

In an ideal world, you could also create groups of locations/hangers. So you could have a ‘The Forge’ group, which would contain all the hangers in the Forge, and a ‘Jita’ group which is just the hanger in jita 4-4 CNAP. A seperate group for a singular POS, or multiple POS would also be handy.

At that point, you could assign management roles for a location group, to a user group. Or for a user group, to a user group.

 

Some roles would need to be split apart, so you could have an anchor role that can be assigned globally, but split the un-anchor function away from it. So the user who anchors something can un-anchor it, but not everyone else. Just the people that user (or someone with a global management role) specifies.  Ditto with arrays and labs (or jobs run from a corp hanger) A role to start them, and a role to manage them.

 

Ideally such groups would be global, capable of holding people who aren’t actually in your corporation (automatic removal when you kick someone or they leave) so you could share the ability to run jobs in your POS with people outside your corp (granted at corp, pos or array level)

It’s probably over complicated, but if you set things up right in the beginning (grant roles to groups, not people, then add people to groups) then it’s actually pretty simple to work with.