Tag Archives: opinion

Some thoughts on the From Extraction to Production Blog

This blog has been somewhat controversial in some circles, to utilize classic understatement. This isn’t going to be a rant, because A, rants aren’t productive, B, there have been enough already, C, I see where it’s supposed to be going. Or at least I think I do.

Rorqual changes:

These have been coming for a long time. They need to happen. Yes, they’re painful for those who have invested in a rorqual mining fleet. How much have those people made off the rorqual fleet they have? If they haven’t at least made it back by now, they either timed it really badly, or they’re fibbing. They need to happen, because the rorqual fleets hovering up the ore in the universe (and building titan fleets) was the main thing which prompted the start of scarcity. It was never going to go back to the way it was. Should they mine a bit more? I could see that. Should they out mine a hulk? I would say nope. At best a Mack. (which is the high ore hold exhumer. not the high yield one.)

It might be worth thinking about reducing the volume of moon ore, to boost its mining rate, without boosting the rate for regular ores. That way you’re not messing with the production of moon goo as much.

Orca change (and Porpoise)

Pretty much inherent in the Rorq change. These are no longer solo mining ships. They’re Mining boosting ships, which can do a little mining on the side.

Oh, and the porpoise needs a bigger cargo hold, because of:

Compression

Good idea, needs some tweaking. Waste is there to cause choices. (Who remembers the days of compressing with 425mm rails?) Takes too long for some types, should be able to load from a specialist hold. Even if that load is drag and drop. Or better, should be able to be cycled, and use ore like fuel. so you don’t need to load it at all. (problem here is, nothing which uses fuel has outcomes depending on what the ‘fuel’ is. Maybe ammo which determines fuel types or something?) Just a thought.

Waste

To blatantly steal something from someone on the forums, rename this to Tailings. and make damn sure you don’t use the verb waste anywhere, because it feels terrible. you didn’t ‘mined X units and wasted Y units’, you ‘mined X units, with Y units of tailings.’ Even if you leave it as waste, ‘mined x units with y units of waste’ feels better than being told you ‘wasted units’. Yes, it’s just a slight rewording, but it’s an important one. People are emotional creatures. The meaning is the same, but the impact is different.

Also, change the order of operations, so you get your ore first, _then_ the waste is removed from the asteroid. That way, you don’t take away ore from people. They always get what’s left in the asteroid at the end.

Oh, and add a mining boost which reduces waste. Maybe add it to the effect with the crystal preservation? probably on percentage chance rather than multiplier, but both would be interesting. Percentage multiplication of the waste percentage. so a 50% bonus would be 50% for T1, and 17% for T2. (more effect for T1)

Gas huffing

Keep this on the smaller ships. Boost it on the barges.

Barges

Don’t see why the changes in tank and fitting were done to the skiff/procurer. Shield tank makes sense there, and hacking off a sixth of the shield hp and sticking it on armour doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I do like the higher BW though 😉

I don’t expect CCP to change anything major with what they’re doing. I’ve been at this too long to this. But there’s always space for tweaks, and those can be pretty major

And there is more coming. The dynamic distribution.

I may have more thoughts in future, but this is it for now. I have a nagging feeling I’ve forgotten things.

Solving the WarDec ‘problem’

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I’ve made no effort to hide the fact that I think that WarDecs need work. That they’re inherently lopsided. That said, I don’t want to get rid of them. That would make highsec far too safe. People could anchor things with pretty much no chance of losing them. I’ve been kicking round a few ideas on how this could be ‘dealt’ with. That’s what I’m going to share here. I’ve mentioned it to CCP, but I don’t expect anything to happen soon, if it ever happened. They’ve got their hands full with some really large systems.

The core of the idea is simple:

Anchor a structure to declare a war. If that structure explodes, the war ends.

Not complicated, is it? Now a defender has a reason to undock and fight. If they win, the war is over. Maybe add an invulnerability to wardecs from that corp/alliance for a period (Week? Two weeks? Not long) Allies now have a concrete goal (Blow up the structure).

The key is it’s counterplay to the declaration itself. And there’s a degree of limiting for how many wardecs you run. Because every group you Dec can attack the structures which are running the wars for the other groups. Off time zones can be handled by Allies, if the Attacker tries to make it harder to attack, by setting it when no-one involved is on.

Yes, small groups will still be stomped by large groups. That’s always going to happen. But now there’s action they can take, rather than having to deal with an attacker that always fades if they manage to get a small fleet together.

There are a bunch of twiddly bits to set, of course.

  • How vulnerable are the structures? (I’d say at least one hour a day. Maybe a few extra hours which can be scattered around).
  • What do the structures cost? (Cheap)
  • What fuel do they structures take (This is the replacement for the isk cost to concord. Maybe some LP based things from pirate lp stores/drops, in addition to other fuel)
  • Where can it be anchored? (I’d suggest highsec, in the same constellation as the defenders head office)
  • When does the war end (I’d suggest the following downtime)
  • Edit: How is fuel burnt. (To keep some risk for the attacker, you put in fuel for 7 days. It’s all burnt to online it.)

 

And if you want a lore reason for the change?

Concord finally noticed a corrupt department taking bribes to turn off protection for people. They canned them. Now you have to hire hackers to do it for you. They have specialist equipment which requires microgravity, and can’t have a warp core in the same structure.

Making Sov more fun

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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.

Why I’m in a personal corp

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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

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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.

Hulkageddon

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Once again, Hulkageddon is rapidly approaching. This will be my first, and I have to admit, I’m going to be interested to see the result of it.

While I’m mostly a High-Sec carebear (my forays into PvP are a different story), you’re not going to hear a word of complaint out of me for this. Well except, perhaps, for the complaints about the chafing from rubbing my hands in glee over the ISK I’ll make selling Destroyers and Tornadoes.

I guess I can understand the complaints from people that only mine, those people that mine and pay for their many accounts with Plex. I don’t agree with them, but I do understand them. Just like I can understand the complaints from people who carry hundreds of millions worth in a T1 Industrial which gets ganked. Neither is particularly valid. I’ll refer you to Rule 2.

But it’s not as if they didn’t know it was coming. This is the fifth Hulkageddon and plenty of notice has been given on when it starts. Avoiding it is easy. And if you are Plexing, just hold off on renewing till it’s done. Hours for plex will cover this nicely. You should have some ISK set aside for a rainy day, after all.Especially with the way that mineral prices are shooting up.

The funniest thing is, guess where all the ISK will end up. With the miners and manufacturers. Almost everything in EVE comes from you. Certainly all the ships do.

So, I welcome Hulkageddon. It’s not going to be banned. It’s not going anywhere. Don’t mine while it’s on and you’ll be fine. Or find somewhere out of the way, and watch local. Even better, spin up a PvP alt, and go hunting. You might find you enjoy it.