Category Archives: Meta

Why medical clone costs needed to go.

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The short version:

It was a mechanic which discouraged people from actually flying ships. That is, discouraged them from playing the game.

The longer version:

While clone costs aren’t really high, until you start getting into the really high levels of SP, they form a mental block for people. ‘You’re flying a Rifter. Your Pod costs more than the ship’. You don’t get any benefit from upgrading your clone. You just don’t get smacked with a penalty.

It’s a tax on PvP, which gets worse the longer you play. The better you get, the more you lose when you die. Sure, you’ll find PvPers who say that they rarely lose their pod. You’ll find that these people spend the vast majority of their time in, probably, Lowsec. While it’s possible to lose a pod there, you have to be pretty bad to do so. Wormholes and null, however, are the land of bubbles. Pity the poor Sabre pilot, who is almost certain to lose his Pod, as he’s probably going to be inside his own bubble when he dies.

If there was actually a meaningful choice with Clone upgrades, that would be another matter. But there isn’t. You either upgrade your clone, or you’re an idiot (disclaimer: I miss Minmatar Battleship 5)

So, CCP removing medical clone levels is a good thing. They’ve stated that they’re not finished there, that the removal is a quality of life change, which opens up more possibilities for future changes. Sure, they could have waited. Some people have said they should have. I disagree. Removing a gangrenous limb, without having a prosthetic available, isn’t a mistake. Remove it now. Put something better in, when it’s ready.

Is it making Eve easier? A little. But if you’re really complaining about someone not needing to remember something before undocking, well, there’s nothing I can say which you’re going to listen to. Hardness, here, is nothing to do with skill. It’s just annoying crap.

Being Podded still has consequences. Death still matters. Someone with a full snake set isn’t going to brush off a death. But they got to make a choice there. They chose to risk the implants, and got a reward for it. Clone grade doesn’t really enter into the risk/reward there. You can choose to risk a skill. Your reward is, you pay a little less. Not really meaningful against the penalty of losing a great deal of skill points.

 

Oh, and yes, you’ll no longer be able to get someone to pod themselves down to no skills. My tear bucket is over there. Go fill it.

CSM 9 voting list

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The Election is almost on us, and that means suggested voting lists. As you can’t just put me 14 times, I have a number of suggested candidates. Other than myself, I’m not really suggesting any particular order (me first!). Pick people that are appropriate for your play style, or where you live.

If you’re an industrialist, consider voting for the wormhole candidates, as they’ll have a clue about the pain involved with working with POS, as they live out of them.

  • Me! Steve Ronuken.
  • Mangala Solaris – A good understanding of small gang warfare
  • Jayne Fillion – Another good understanding of small gang warfare, with good theory crafting skills.
  • Ali Aras – An incumbent who’s done a good job keeping lines of communication open.
  • Sugar Kyle – A low sec trader. Lowsec needs work, and Sugar knows.
  • Proclus Diadochu – Wormhole candidate. Wants to hit on POS and corp management.
  • James Arget – An incumbent wormhole candidate.
  • Mynnna – Yes, he’s a goon, but he knows his stuff. Incumbent.
  • Mike Azariah – An incumbent for the ‘casual’ player.
  • Xander Phoena – Another goon, yes. He’s, on the other hand, loud and opinionated. Which isn’t a bad thing.
  • Psianh Auvyander – More small gang warfare, and the merc perspective.
  • Matias Otero – BNI is a wonderful concept.
  • DJ FunkyBacon – I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s not generally /that/ wrong. And he’s another Lowsec advocate.

Yes, I know that’s only 13 people. can’t expect me to do all your work 😉

 

Vote match may be of interest.

CSM – NPC Corporations

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I’ve had someone asking me about my feelings about NPC corporations, on Twitter, and while I answered him, I thought I’d give a fuller answer here.

NPC corporations are fine. But there should always be an advantage of not being in one. Also, you shouldn’t be able to use one to avoid consequences.

So, let’s go through various play styles, and see how I’d like to change things.

Mission Runners

I’m fairly happy with the current settings for them. Possibly add an LP tax, which converts LP into LP for their NPC corp. Perhaps slightly lower standings gains for other corporations or ‘opposing’ factions. Those are pretty minor though.

Miners

Right now, there’s little reason for miners to leave an NPC corporation. It exposes them to war decs, but other than social aspects, they gain little. This is less than ideal. However, I have other plans that I’d like to implement for mining, involving the removal of static belts, a prospecting system, and the ability to stake a claim on discovered sites, for your corporation. Mine in a claimed site, go suspect. So, NPC corp members can only claim for the NPC corporation, which means any other NPC member can come along and take the ore you spent time finding. It’s a similar downside to now, so it’s not exactly a nerf, with the benefit of additional game play. As an associated idea, I’d like for Mining missions to have regular ore, where you pay a tithe to the corporation, for the right to mine at their claim.

Gankers and Greifers

I know they’re not the same. But they get the same benefits from being in an NPC corporation. Someone can’t get help to retaliate. In this, there’s no way to do it without an ability nerf. I’d suggest automatically shunting people to the faction warfare corporation, when they drop below security status -1.0, maybe -2.0. Allows for mistakes, doesn’t allow for evading consequences so much. Military service for ‘hooligans’.

Industrialists

As long as you do all your industry in station, there is no reason to leave an NPC corporation. I’d like to see limitations on all industrialists in NPC run stations, capping the number of slots you can use per station (3 perhaps) with the addition of an industrial array you can anchor in space, for easier slots, with a lower entry cost than POS. Renting would also be good.

Haulers

I can’t think of a way to incentivize PC corp haulers over NPC corp ones. Everything that came to mind also came with a simple way to bypass.

Dedicated PvPers

No real benefit from being in an NPC corp. No real downside.

tl;dr: I’m not a fan of people staying in NPC corporations because it’s the best idea for what they do. So there need to be bigger changes than just taxes and the ability to anchor a POS.

Retooling Industry in EVE. Blue Sky

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Industry in EVE needs work. It’s not been touched, save for the addition of new things to make, in quite a while. When people talk about it, they tend to talk about things like changes to the UI, to make it simpler to put in jobs in batches, or adding a queue. What I’m going to suggest here is more involved than that. It’s not a ‘This should happen’ piece, but more a discussion point, to see if it sparks any ideas with people.

Industry in EVE, except for big multistage projects like capitals, can be very reactive to market shifts. It’d be interesting to introduce something which interferes with this. Which promotes longer term planning. The easiest, and simplest, way to do this is to introduce a retooling delay. So to install a job, you’re going to have to wait a little time for the facility to get ready to produce your things.

You could probably get away with having the ability to ‘prototype’ a thing, reducing the retooling delay, for an increased cost and time per unit. So if you just want one thing, you can get it made custom, for double the cost of mass production, but quicker.

It would be wise have a cost involved with the retooling as well. Materials, rather than ISK. Another use for R.A.M. and some PI things perhaps.

This would favour long runs, over short ones.

It would probably be worthwhile to change the process to get away from the ‘Put a job in to cook, come back a week later and hit deliver’, and move to the ‘set up the production line, make sure it’s kept fed, and you can retrieve the product when you want’ that you have with PI. You can always leave it for a long time, but you don’t need to. beneficial from a cash-flow perspective, as you don’t need to tie up your isk for a very long run.

This would impact of the use of low run BPCs. So you’d use those as a material in the production line. As long as you can keep it fed with new BPCs, you can keep it running. Run out, and the line comes to a halt, waiting for you to reload it.

We’d have to move to personal production facilities, as station lines would become clogged. With the code in place for personal structures, I don’t think that’s a major issue. Though you’d want to be able to chain facilities together. Say, a central storage facility, that nearby manufacturing facilities can pull from, at a corp level (Ideally something with a decent permissions model)

The PI model really would work quite well, as long as you could reduce everything to a drag and drop. Having to set up routes for 15 odd materials would be a pain. Being able to drag and drop multiple at a time from a storage facility would be easier.

Multipart ships could become a more complex thing, instead of the ‘make all the parts, then make the ship’ you could do ‘make the parts, and have them feed into the ship building as they’re made, requiring X of each part to get past each milestone. With each milestone taking a minimum length of time.

So, for milestone 1, you’d need X capital construction parts, and takes a minimum of 4 days.
Milestone 2 would up the requirements to an additional X capital construction parts, Y cargo bays and Z engines, and take a minimum of 5 days.
Milestone 3 would take the rest of the parts, and another 5 days.

You could just build all the parts at once, then build the ship, but then you’d be looking at the time to make the parts + 15 days. Or you could set up the lines to feed the ship build. If you’re making multiple ships at once, then you can change it to flow differently. So you have lots of lines doing capital construction parts, and not many on engines and armour.

T2 already does this in places, with the requirement of the T1 module/ship. Some T1 things could have their complexity increased.

It would be important to have ‘running a production line’ and ‘owning a production line’ being different things. Players who don’t use their own/corporate facilities have to pay the retooling cost, or a fee to keep a line inactive. Personal lines could be set up then mothballed (Materials fee after it’s been inactive for an extended period, to bring it back up to spec), or left running.

The entry fee would have to be fairly low, in terms of skill and material costs, so as not to disadvantage dedicated new players. Add a skill to cover how many lines you can manage inactive?

So, thoughts?

Navy Doctrine Fits

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There have been a few criticisms coming out of the recent live event, which saw a bunch of people leaving high sec to attack a target in NPC Nullsec. Most of them were people whining. Some were more valid, mostly focusing around in game organisation.

This post flows from one of the latter.

One of the biggest differences you’ll find between a Fleet from a large, well organised alliance, and a scratch fleet drawn together from randoms, is that the alliances fleet will contain ships which are far closer to each other in fit. You’ll have your DPS ships having similar ranges, everyone in the same kind of tank and so on.

That’s difficult to manage with a scratch fleet, as there’s no central source saying ‘Fit your ships this way.’

A side issue is: Newbies and noobs have this tendency to fit their ships badly. Newbies can break themselves from this, generally with the help of their corporations, and sometimes sites such as Battleclinic, or Eve Uni’s fittings.

However, it’s a bit difficult to send players off to look at third party sites, from the tutorials.

What would be good, in my very humble opinion, is if the Navies of New Eden (read CCP) were to publish some Doctrine fits. Tying it into ISIS would be great, though possibly a trifle excessive.

Then, when there’s a live event being run by one of the Empires, there can be a link to the doctrine fits, which may help shape the randoms into something a little more cohesive.

The moment that CCP release the SSO, I’m planning on sticking together a Doctrine storage system, for those groups without dedicated IT resources, which could be used. But something basic from CCP would be good. We don’t need a fit for every ship, but it would be nice to have the basics covered, both the T1 version, and the Navy version. Possibly some core T2 ships too.

Then you can add doctrine fits for some other things. Such as exploration fits from SOE, or fits from ORE, which fit a decent tank on the miners.

Teaching players to fit ships isn’t a simple thing. Examples go a long way.

Industry Iteration

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tl;dr: In this post, I talk about how I’d change industry, to shake things up a bit, while not crippling anyone. Change highsec slots and costs to make station based industry less attractive.

A lot of the following depends on significant updates to POS, and corp role management. Specifically the ability to launch POSes for personal use, or at least a lot more strictly tied down on usage rights. The ability to say “Person A can use this POS, but person B can’t. Person B can use this other POS which person A can’t (Person C can use both though)” is very important. Without it you have to depend on trust, which just really doesn’t work. Access groups on POS are thus important. And the ability to use BPO/BPCs from personal hangers.

It’s said that null-sec industry is stillborn, due to the ease of manufacturing in High-Sec, with its myriad stations with many many slots.

Some people would recommend just removing the slots, but this has some issues when it comes to newbies. I have an alternate set of suggestions:

  1. Have the price for slot use rise, when the number of empty slots falls below a threshold. This is in a similar fashion to how the price of Offices rises, when there are none free in a station. I’d base the rise on a percentage free, however. so when you drop below 50% free at downtime, it rises a little. When you drop to 10% free it rises even faster. Exactly how much is a more complex matter, but increasing above 33k per hour isn’t insane.
  2. Specialize the slots. If you’re manufacturing in a POS, you have to decide which arrays to launch, to get slots able to manufacture certain things. Specialize the available slots, perhaps by Corporation, so you can’t just set up shop in a station and manufacture /everything/ there. Imperial Armaments for Ammo and modules. But not ships or drones, for example. Make Ammo slots more common that others, to give newbies a break (as most people start on ammo)
  3. Increase the fuel cost for charters for POS, depending on the number of free moons in a system/Number of POS in the system. Possibly looking at surrounding systems too, but that’s a little more up in the air. This will: A: spread manufacturing across highsec more cleanly. B: make null-sec more viable as they don’t have that cost.

Manufacturing near Jita should cost you more than doing it 20 jumps away, purely due to competition for space and slots.

I’d also like to see the ability to stick in a bunch of identical jobs at the same time. Even if it’s restricted to ‘identical jobs, in the same facility’. That’d help.

POS changes for EVE

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This is all inspired by A post by Two step about where he’d like to see POSes going.

I pretty much agree with what he’s saying, but it inspired a few more detailed thoughts than I was happy putting into a comment on someone elses blog. So, I’m writing this one.

 

The method for placing POS modules appears to be a reasonable one. I’m happy enough with it as that is, except I’d like it to require modules to be connected, before they can be powered up. This would need a connector module, or another ‘useful’ module, like a lab, hanger, assembly aray, you name it. That way, you’ll have a ramshackle arrangement, but it’ll be a thing. Rather than a few disparate modules all hanging there, with some sort of power beaming tech, and wireless communications 😉

That pretty much matches with what was mentioned in fanfest. This is good.

 

I don’t like the central tower idea. It makes upgrading to another size more difficult, and it means someone can go ‘large tower, this much in the way of resources.’ What I do like, is the following:

  • Every module still requires a certain amount of power, and CPU.
  • Power is provided by dedicated power station modules, which have no CPU requirement, and each have their own fuel bay.
  • CPU is provided by dedicated control modules. These have a power requirement. If you have a charter requirement, they would go here. Possibly add charter requirements for SOV space (Sov holder’s choice) with a ‘Pirate’ Control module that avoids it, while providing significantly less.
  • The first module to be anchored is a power module. And this can be /anywhere/ in a system. No moon requirement.  Then a CPU module.
  • POS shields are provided by another module. Ideally with a variable power requirement, depending on the range you want. Multiple modules are possible, allowing for intercecting bubbles of POS shields. If you want to store a Titan in one, it’ll cost you a lot more power, requiring a more powerful Power station. If a shield is taken down, it exposes the things within it. Multiple shields reduce what is exposed. I wouldn’t want for the shields to be stackable though.
  • Power Stations come in a number of sizes, each providing a different quantity of power, and each using a different number of fuel blocks. A more powerful module may cost more than multiple smaller modules providing the same amount of power, but it requires less work to keep fueled, as it’s just one bay, rather than multiple. It’ll also take up less space, making shield requirements smaller.
  • Docking up is possible, but will require a dedicated module.
  • All station services are possible, but require dedicated modules for each. This includes market services, but they’re only advertised to people who have the standing to use it.
  • A cheap module to allow people to see your POS on the overview.
  • Defense modules as normal.
  • A ‘cloaking’ module, to make it harder to scan down. Including ships docked up in it. Hard, but not impossible to scan. The higher the power rating, the easier it is to scan. this can be mitigated by more cloaking modules. But these should be expensive to run, at least CPU wise.

 

As for anchoring, I’d open it up to allow individuals to do it for themselves, as well as on behalf of a Corp or Alliance, as well as allowing the transfer of the POS as a whole between any of the three. If the owner doesn’t have the standing for the POS increase the charter cost. Delegation of POS access should be from the Owner’s standings to th User/Corp/Alliance, with each level being overridden by the earlier. Ideally, like with the research services, you can allow access on a slot by slot basis, without people being able to change other people’s jobs.

Something I’m not sure about yet, is a War Dec immunity on a POS. If this was allowed, on the other hand, all services on the station would have to be made public (and on the overview), with a suitable cost cap. Possibly with an on-going cost, too. Pretty much to make it a break-even endevour. This would mostly to be to move things into player hands, and out of NPC hands, without the ability of wardecs to cripple high-sec. It doesn’t quite feel right though.

 

I’ll probably have another post, as I think about it more.

A Boy and his Pod.

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Time to spew my drivel over yet another stellar cluster. 🙂

Who am I? I’m a Carebear, and I’m a small time PvPer. Different Characters, for different purposes. I won’t say I’m good at PvP. Hilariously bad is possibly a better description right now, but I’m working in it. Long term, I’ll be throwing up stuff about that.

What will I have on this Blog? My opinion, in most part. Maybe a little fiction, if I’m feeling brave (and creative). Advice on things, though I guess that falls under opinion once again. I’m not a well known EVE personality. Not yet, at least 😉 I’ll probably also add some stuff on coding for the API, and the use of the static data export. If there’s any specific thing people are interested in, drop me a line at @fuzzysteve on twitter.

On the rest of this site you’ll find some tools for industry that I put together. If you have any comments, suggestions or requests, drop me a line.

I still have to decide on a killboard to use. I’ll probably end up with just Evekill or similar. And long term, I’ll be looking for a corp to join with the PvP alt.

 

Now, off to kick off a few production jobs to support the brave Eggers protecting New Edens helpless asteroids. Have to let them recover, after all. Conservation.