Ecliptic Rift

First in an occasional series

The “cloak and dagger” elements of EVE Online have long attracted many players. Perhaps no incident illustrates this more clearly than the now-legendary Guiding Hand Social Club operation against Ubiqua Seraph. This alone has drawn hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new players to EVE, who routinely cite the PC Gamer article as “the reason I joined this game”.

This article examines the different sorts of operations and technologies available to players with an interest in subterfuge of various sorts within EVE.

Real Life Terminology

In “real life”, NATO and associated organizations (like the United States Departments of Defense and State as well as the US Central Intelligence Agency) draw a distinction between “covert” and “clandestine” operations. A covert operation conceals the actual identity of the organization that sponsored it (deniable), while a clandestine operation conceals the fact of the operation’s existence itself (hidden). Clearly, these definitions leave room for lots of overlap. Many clandestine ops will also need to occur covertly. This won’t always hold true, though, as a group may use a front company or execute a “false flag” operation to make it appear as though a third organization has sponsored it and thus deny their own connections to it.

While I don’t know whether the term “black ops” actually has an official definition, it usually describes operations that qualify as both covert and clandestine, frequently because they would present significant political or ethical challenges (assassinations, torture, etc.)

EVE Terminology

The above definitions don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ship classes in EVE. But similar terms do have usage in New Eden, as below:

In EVE, covert operations ships refer to small, frigate-size craft that can warp while cloaked. They also focus either on astrometrics (finding facilities and ships otherwise difficult or impossible to pinpoint) or on the use of special weaponry including area-of-effect bombs and the use of battleship-sized siege missile launchers with torpedoes to deal significant damage far above what other ships their size can normally accomplish.

Recon ships have significant electronic warfare capabilities, such as tracking disruption, sensor dampening, electronic countermeasures (jamming), propulsion jamming (stasis webifiers or warp disruption), and target painting. Some classes can warp while cloaked; others cannot, but instead focus even more on greater EWAR capacity.

Blockade runners do not themselves fight. Rather, these transport ships can warp while cloaked and carry much larger cargo than combat ships. This can greatly aid a fleet by carrying jump fuel or moving other supplies securely past enemy-controlled zones.

Black ops ships differ in several significant ways. These ships have battleship-sized hulls and can create jump bridges for other blacks ops ships plus craft that use covert ops cloaks, including covops frigates (as above) plus blockade runners, recon ships, and appropriately-configured strategic cruisers. All these ships have jump harmonics 2, though black ops ships themselves cannot fit these cloaks. They do this via links created directly to other ships that have created covert cynosural fields. This allows most of a fleet to bypass the stargate network, though at some point a lead ship will need to use that network to reach a target location and create the covert cyno field.

Operation types

Broadly speaking, we can class related operations along three axes:

1. Deniability: ranges from public declarations of war (no deniability) to discreetly hiring mercenaries to false flag operations using front companies or alts. Tied to covert operations.
2. Secrecy: ranges from frontal assaults to moving through unpopulated systems to using cloaked ships or surreptitious information gathering.
3. Location: ranges from in-space assets to in-station (not attackable through normal means) to “metaspace”.

Example operations

Using this framework, we can see the relationships between different operation types. At the base point, we have a public war declaration by one alliance on another leading to frontal assaults on in-space assets (such as starbases or territory control units). This has no secrecy or deniability and takes place in a well-defined location.

Moving along the deniability axis, we can have conflicts involving mercenaries, possibly hired secretly, so that no one outside the client and mercenary knows of the relationship. This can go up to using front organizations or alts to execute an operation, with no connection back to the sponsoring organization.

Moving along the secrecy axis, we move up to using scouts to move through empty systems or outside scanner range (thus avoiding defensive reconnaissance) to using cloaked ships or covert cynosural fields. Traditional in-space electronic warfare has little bearing here, since pilots can only prevent others from detection using scanning equipment or seeing ships on the overview with cloaks.

Moving along the location axis, we move from in-space combat (ships and starbases shooting at each other) to in-station operations (e.g. stealing from corporate hangars) to fighting in metaspace. This might include attacks on out-of-game assets (e.g. copying confidential data like battle plans) to attacking the morale and cohesion of an organization.

These operations frequently work best when used in combination to accomplish defined objectives. For example, in alliance warfare, in-space territorial assaults have much greater chances of success when conducted with significant knowledge of the enemy’s battle plans or sabotage of his communication channels. Alternately, stealthy attacks against in-space assets (stealth bombers attacking supply convoys) often require advance knowledge of the convoy’s location and direction, either through direct observation or through infiltration and espionage.

In future articles, we’ll look in-depth at various types of operations, including well-known examples and organizations.

I hadn’t done this in a while, so after having lost an experimental Ishtar doing agent work, I put together an improved model.

[Ishtar, Hacking]

250mm Light Carbine Howitzer I
Sisters Core Probe Launcher
Improved Cloaking Device II
2x Salvager I

Codebreaker I
10MN Afterburner II
Drone Navigation Computer I
Cap Recharger II
Survey Scanner I

Medium Armor Repairer II
2x Energized Reflective Membrane II
2x Energized Thermic Membrane II

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I

5x Valkyrie II
5x Hammerhead II
5x Hobgoblin II
5x Warrior II
5x Garde I

The Survey Scanner does almost nothing. I just dislike empty equipment slots. And the howitzer has only one purpose: get the enemy’s attention so that they’ll focus on me and ignore my drones.

When I took it out in Derelik lowsec, I immediately found a Provisional Sansha Outpost. That didn’t take long, and it turned out that they had a True Sansha inspecting the facility. Among the remains of his ship once my drones finished with him, I found a nice Low-grade Slave Epsilon and a few other bits of interest. Nation may be creepy as hell, but they produce good stuff.

Anyway, the new setup performed just fine. That auxiliary nano pump works especially well, actually. By increasing repair amount rather than just speeding up repairs, I keep my capacitor efficiency up and get out of trouble quickly.

New pilots frequently mention “getting podded” as one of the risks they fear in lowsec. Losing implants can indeed get very expensive, especially if you’ve got hardwirings in your head.

Fortunately, you can take steps to reduce your risk significantly. Experienced pilots generally already know these, and don’t have any world-altering advice. Keep reading, though, if you worry about this happening to you.

In general, only two circumstances will lead to getting podded and lay completely outside your control: lag and bubbles. Every pilot knows about the former. Latency in system response happens to the best of us, and if it strikes you, then just be sure you have the ISK to update your clone. And if you lose your ship in a bubble, then the enemy has an excellent chance of warp scrambling your pod before you can get away due to the nature of the tactical environment.

However, outside of these two situations, you can normally avoid losing your pod. Let’s say you’ve gotten into a fight and you realize you’re going to lose. The enemy has broken your tank (putting on more damage than you can repair) and you will definitely go down in flames before he does. But he’s got a point on you (“you are unable to warp because you are warp scrambled”) , so you can’t get away.

Understand that, while he has your ship pinned down, he does not have your pod. When he destroys your ship, your pod will initially not have any tackle on it. So before your ship actually explodes — when you’ve already dropped into low armor or structure — select an off-grid celestial (e.g. star, planet, gate, station) and start repeatedly issuing a ‘warp to’ command. At first, of course, this won’t work due to the enemy tackle. But as soon as you end up in your pod, it will have the command in queue. Due to the incredibly high agility of your pod, your pod will warp away instantly. The pod’s very low signature radius also means that the enemy will have great difficulty locking you before you get out of sight.

Don’t wait foolishly at the target celestial, though, because someone may follow you. As soon as you land, warp to a safe spot. If you don’t already have one in that system, start making one while you warp your pod away the first time. Create several spots and bounce around the system while you gather your wits and figure out what to do next. I don’t recommend automatically docking until you can evaluate the situation. Depending on the situation, you might warp to a stargate and leave the system, or you might swap to a new ship in a station (watch out for camps, though), or you might just dock up and wait until they leave.

If you have questions, please post them here, or of course ask your favorite experienced pilot who isn’t me…

Quote from: Kazzzi on 2010-06-02 at 18:17 PM

Here are a few basic rules for roleplaying in EVE:

1. You are obligated to invent arguments against every single thing your enemy says, even if they are stating true facts or their point makes perfect sense to your character.

1a. Or you can have your character agree with your enemy on a single point, then proceed to argue how they could have argued that point better.

2. Everyone must RP the way you think they should, otherwise their RP is wrong and you should thus inform them.

3. An IGS thread must stay on topic for the first 3 posts, after that it’s fair game for derailing.

4. If you aren’t creative enough to think of a way to communicate with someone IC, their RP must be wrong and you should thus inform them.

5. If your enemy has an event, accuse them of grandstanding and looking for attention.

6. If your enemy tries to enjoy eve, accuse them of trying to be relevant.

7. You should never perform a heroic action when petty bickering will suffice.

8. Whenever it suits you, you have no actual political enemies, they are just pirates.

9. Your character should never believe something if you ooc know it couldn’t be true.

9a. Or you must set out to convince everyone OOCly that it’s true.

10. If all else fails, you didn’t want that insert anything here anyways.

Failure to follow these simple rules will result in your character being biomassed by the RP gods.

Amendments 1a and 9a courtesy of the lovely and talented Vieve Tisserand.

New bloggers frequently ask how to get folks to read their blogs. Sometimes, even bloggers who have done this for a while wonder how to increase their readership. Not that you suddenly want thousands of daily visits to our EVE blogs, since we all do this for fun and not a second job. But you probably do want somebody to read it, because otherwise you wouldn’t bother, right?

So let’s talk about some basic ways to get folks to notice your blog. We won’t spend time on advanced techniques, nor on SEO, at least not this week. And I certainly do not ever intend to give tips on the “darker” side of driving traffic with so-called black hat techniques, since these often border on the fraudulent and illegal, defeating the purpose of building real community. But let’s see about some good stuff. (Be sure to comment with any techniques that have worked for you!)
Read more »

Apart from blogging and maybe YouTube, Twitter might be perhaps the most popular form of social media among EVE players. Setting it up doesn’t take any special skills or knowledge, and we’ve formed a small and incredibly supportive community we affectionately call the “Tweet Fleet”. We egg each other on, help spread the word about what everyone else has going, discuss and debate, and generally provide the right sort of online friends and community.

I thought I’d share with you a few ideas from my years using Twitter, and I hope more of you who already participate in our thriving, growing group will join in with your own ideas in the comments. And of course, please follow me on @casiella and send me an @-reply to let me know!

1. Create an account specifically for EVE-related tweeting. Twitter doesn’t require you to only use one account, and many clients like Tweetdeck (my personal favorite) explicitly support the use of multiple accounts. So if you use Twitter for personal or professional purposes, just create another account for EVE. You will also avoid annoying your non-EVE playing friends with constant discussions of killmails, ISK, and patches…
2. Use your EVE avatar for your profile picture. This immediately creates an obvious connection to the game, letting anyone you follow know that you’re not a spammer.
3. Set up your Twitter profile. Once you’ve created your account, choose a design or, better yet, upload your own background picture. Fill out the fields, especially the “bio” section” and maybe a URL if you have one. Don’t just use your Twitter profile as your URL, though, because that sort of defeats the purpose. If you don’t have any other EVE-related profile anywhere, at least use your EVE Search URL, like mine (except with your own character name, naturally).
4. Tweet about EVE. By this, I mean not to tweet regularly about non-EVE stuff. Not to say you should never mention RL, but the bulk of your tweets should revolve around EVE in some way. And don’t just tweet your blog posts, though nobody will mind if you do this as part of general participation. Twitter is about conversations, not broadcasts.
5. Follow the Tweet Fleet. The easiest way to do this is to follow @00sage00/tweetfleet using your preferred Twitter client or at the link I just provided. He runs the most popular EVE-related list on Twitter, though far from the only one, so this will automatically get you following the bulk of EVE-focused Twittereans. Right now, he has 225 people on the list, and you’ll also get @ccpgames and other CCP Twitter accounts this way.
6. Get on the Tweet Fleet list. Just send an @-reply to @00sage00 and ask him to add you to the list. Assuming you’ve sent a few game-related tweets and don’t look like a spammer, he’s pretty easy-going about it.
7. Use the #tweetfleet hashtag. At the end of some of your game-related tweets, particularly those you’d like to get some sort of response, just add “#tweetfleet” and perhaps “#eveonline”. (A hashtag is just a way of marking a tweet for a particular topic.) Lots of folks have a running search in their Twitter client for those hashtags and you’ll get lots of new conversations that way. In fact, be sure to keep a search for the #tweetfleet hashtag yourself for discussion specifically thrown out there for the community.
8. Respond to the “questions of the day.” Occasionally, somebody will send a tweet with “QOTD” and the #tweetfleet hashtag. This means “question of the day”, and so you should respond and generally join in the chatter. Be sure to include the hashtag yourself!
9. Participate in Follow Friday. Every Friday, you’ll see a bunch of tweets tagged “#followfriday” or maybe just “#ff”. This is just a way of people recommending other folks you might want to follow. Look in particular for tweets also tagged “#tweetfleet”, of course. And share the love: if you found somebody particularly interesting or worthy of attention, throw it out yourself. They’ll notice it in their mentions/replies, and probably reply back to you, too. It’s a great way of establishing a little deeper connection.
10. Retweet other people if they say something cool. You might just want to help get the word out about an announcement. Or maybe you really liked something somebody just said. A retweet is sort of like a QFE on forums. You can either do it old-school (copy the tweet into a new message, then preface it with “RT @username”), or new-school which just reshares the tweet to your followers with a special bit that shows who retweeted it. Either way, nearly all up-to-date Twitter clients support this, sometimes with one click.

Obviously, you shouldn’t consider any of this some sort of “requirement”, and you can do lots of other things to increase your participation and maybe even reputation. But the more of this you follow, the more conversations and interactions you’ll have!

And, by the by, what about you existing Tweetfleeters? Any additional thoughts or suggestions?

This post kicks off a new, weekly series here at Ecliptic Rift, Social Sunday, in which we’ll look at the best ways to use social media related to EVE Online. Feel free to jump in with your own comments, constructive criticism, suggestions, and questions.

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Most of us don’t write EVE blogs for fame and fortune. Okay, a few people might do it for fame, but certainly not fortune. Personally, I write this blog for two basic, interrelated reasons: I enjoy it, and I like talking with other EVE players with somewhat similar interests and outlooks. Not too similar, though, otherwise the conversations will get real boring, real fast. That means that comments matter just as much to blogs as good posts do. So today, I want to talk about encouraging commenting on your blog.

1. Make some decisions about who can comment. You could allow fully anonymous comments, or perhaps require commentators just to specify their name, URL, and maybe an email address. (Get ready for a good bit of moderation to avoid spam and whatnot.) Beyond that, you could require them to have an identity from another site like Google, Twitter, or OpenID. This latter system basically allows users to log into another site, like Wordpress or Yahoo!, and use that ID elsewhere. This way, they can prove their identity without having yet another password to remember.
2. Don’t require only one specific sort of ID. This will just discourage comments. Some blogs only allow you to comment with your Google ID, for example, and for those of us whose EVE identity doesn’t reside in the Googleverse, we frequently just won’t comment even if we’d like to do so. You should allow multiple forms of authentication, which with both allow visitors to comment easily as well as reduce spam and sock puppets.
3. I seriously recommend using some form of commenting system, like Disqus or IntenseDebate. Both work well, integrate with multiple blog platforms, and only have fairly minor differences between them. Whichever you choose will do the job pretty well. This sort of system will allow your commentators to retain ownership of their words. They can have a record of what they write on different sites and can easily keep up with ongoing conversations, rather than comment and disappear. They can also choose to publicize their comments (e.g. via Twitter), which will encourage more people to come check out the conversation.

   A side benefit: since switching to a system, I’ve stopped receiving any comment spam whatsoever. I just don’t see it appear at all. Even if I didn’t get any other benefit, that alone would make the whole thing worthwhile. Allowing comment spam not only discourages readers, it will end up causing your site to get dropped from search engines. And you could end up allowing all sorts of malware, including keyloggers and other account stealing programs, to use your blog to attack fellow players — or yourself.

4. Allow users to choose to receive future replies to the same post via email. Even if you don’t use this sort of system, you want to encourage your visitors to come back and continue to participate in the conversation. Otherwise, they’ll come and say something, then someone else will respond and the first commentator will never know. Some people won’t want to use the option, but many will.
5. When folks do comment, reply to them. Engage in conversation with them, and sound like yourself. After all, they took the time to come tell you what they think, so be friendly and polite. Personally, I find this one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of blogging.

What other suggestions do you have to encourage commenting?

I’ve wanted a strategic cruiser for some time, but held off from training Racial Cruiser V because I didn’t have tech II projectiles (for a Loki) or missiles (for a Tengu). Then I realized, hmm, I do have skills for tech II drones (light and medium) and decent drone skills overall, plus pretty good armor tanking.

So here’s the Proteus fit I think I’ll use for lowsec and nullsec exploration, primarily for radar (hacking) sites. The targeting delay introduced by the cloaking device won’t matter so much to a more-or-less focused drone boat; the railguns mostly help grab aggro and add a bit of DPS. The philosophy grows from my exploration Myrmidon, and you may want to replace one of the rigs with a gravity capacitor.

According to PyFA, with this setup and my skills (plus Gallente Strategic Cruiser and Subsystems all to IV), you’ll end up with something like 27k EHP against a uniform distribution. I tuned this particular setup against Sansha rats, but of course you’ll want to adjust to your region. In particular, note that it won’t be as strong against Angels due to the Proteus’s natural weakness to explosive damage. I can tank 484 HP/s, which should really do just fine in most cases. I might end up tweaking that down, actually, if needed, so I can improve capacitor stability (this ship’s primary weakness).

I welcome additional thoughts and suggestions.


[Proteus, Exploration]

Salvager I
Improved Cloaking Device II
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
Expanded Probe Launcher I

Codebreaker I
Omnidirectional Tracking Link I
Drone Navigation Computer I
10MN MicroWarpdrive I

Medium Armor Repairer II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Reflective Membrane II
Energized Thermic Membrane II

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Thrusters I

Proteus Defensive - Adaptive Augmenter
Proteus Electronics - Emergent Locus Analyzer
Proteus Engineering - Capacitor Regeneration Matrix
Proteus Offensive - Drone Synthesis Projector
Proteus Propulsion - Interdiction Nullifier

Valkyrie II x5

NB: This guide presents a very basic introduction to making ISK through trading. More detailed strategies are left as an exercise for the reader.

One of the least expected bits of the economy in New Eden is that you can often make a lot more ISK via trading than manufacturing. In part, this stems from the fact that we pod pilots can’t make everything – the so-called “named modules, for example – and so we have to feed the market demand. Other factors like convenience and lack of information can also come into play.

The age-old maxim to make money trading is “buy low and sell high“. This means that a lot of pilots spend hours scouring the market for goods whose lowest “sell” order is lower than the highest “buy” order. At first glance, this makes sense, but in reality very few goods have this sort of imbalance. Generic trade goods will have this property at times; the margins, however, often mean you could make a lot more ISK elsewhere. At any rate, those sorts of routes disappear as quickly as they appear.

So, instead, the trick is to reverse that with your own orders. Set up buy orders high enough to bring in goods but low enough that you can resell the items at a decent margin. Your buy orders should cover mission hubs so that you get a constant supply of goods. Generally speaking, you’ll want to set your sell orders in trade hubs, at least when you get started.

Here’s an instructive example. In the Minmatar Republic, the best agent for the Republic Fleet is Vir Honn (level 4 quality 18) in Emolgranlan, which turns out to have a lot of mission-runners due in part to his presence. Minmatar battleships often rely on projectile weapons, particularly artillery, so we look at the market data for large artillery and see the data shown at right:

Ignoring the one outlier (which will fill quickly), the highest buy order that will cover Emolgranlan is about 3.4m ISK. Yet the sale price in Rens is 3.7m, and in Lustrevik they go for 4.5m (though at lower volume as Rens gets far more traffic). That spread is where a trader makes his money. On the price history, notice that the volume tends to stay between 50 and 100 a day, so there’s enough to make a decent profit.

So set up a buy order a touch higher than the highest one there. Some traders work in increments of 0.01 ISK, while others prefer to compete with larger jumps. Remember, though, that you hurt your own margins first, and that the market will always fill the cheapest available sell order, so don’t set the increments too large.

Once you’ve bought a few, truck them over to your nearest trade hub. In the case of Emolgranlan, that might mean Lustrevik as mentioned, but your volume will improve tremendously (at a hit to your margins, of course) by running them a few more jumps over to Rens.

Trading has many more tricks, particularly when you trade skills like Margin Trading or learn more about the regions in which you’re trading. But the basic path comes down to this:

1. Find a commodity with sufficient spread and volume to generate profits proportional to the capital you will use.
2. Issue buy orders just above the highest that cover the area from which you want to buy.
3. Once your orders fill, pick up the items and transport them to trade hubs.
4. Issue sell orders just below the lowest in that hub.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!

After Rettic mentioned his desire for a ship he’d never have to refit, the ensuing discussion reminded me of how well the Myrmidon did as an all-purpose low-sec solo exploration ship. If that’s your thing, then this ship will do quite well. I don’t quite recall which hybrid charges work best for this purpose, but they really don’t matter as the drones make up most of your offensive punch anyway. If you work primarily in a given area, you could replace the EANM with region-specific hardeners. And with 400 m³ of cargo capacity, you can pull up quite a bit of loot before needing to do something with it.

Assuming the pirates don’t get you first.

UPDATE: Thanks to sharp-eyed commenter knucklesamich, I’ve made a key change so that the fitting actually works. Due to my user error when tinkering with Python Fitting Assistant (pyfa) and trying to check actual capacitor usage, the old fitting went way over the CPU limitations of the Myrmidon. I recommend replacing the Omnidirectional Tracking Link with a Cap Recharger II. However, if you find yourself able to handle incoming fire with just one active armor repairer most of the time, you might think about using a named target painter instead. Sorry about that, and props to knucklesamich!

UPDATE 2: Some folks have asked about powergrid usage. Remember that you only need to online modules that you can use, so you might not want to keep your analyzer and codebreaker online at the same time.

[Myrmidon, Exploration]

Salvager I
Core Probe Launcher I
Improved Cloaking Device II
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M

Analyzer I
Codebreaker I
10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Medium Capacitor Battery II
Cap Recharger II

Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Capacitor Power Relay II

Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I

Hobgoblin II x5
Hammerhead II x5
Valkyrie II x5
Warrior II x5