Ecliptic Rift

I haven’t posted a lot lately, for reasons unrelated to recent EVE drama (about which I do not intend to say more, because I’ve grown tired of the back and forth). Between illness in the family—nothing serious—and some business travel, I haven’t even played as much as I’d like. That probably reflects a healthier approach, to tell the truth, since my play sessions seem to have both shortened and grown less frequent. And when I have played, I’ve started to move away from my traditional science / industry / trading activity. I still do some of that, of course, but just as a sideline.

First, I purchased a character as a “fixer upper,” with the idea of correcting some flaws in its training and reselling. Evidently the previous owner hadn’t always taken care to update the medical clone after losing a pod, so the character has some holes in it. That should come to fruition in the 4th quarter this year. In the meantime, the character has started to repair its security status through some nullsec ratting and such.

My focus, however, has come to rest on my high sec pirate: salvaging and scavenging (looting) with an eye to eventually shooting down mission runners and miners. Other, more evil plans have started to take shape as well, but no action on them yet. I’ll have more to say about that once I get a better idea of what I actually intend to do about them…

I’ve just gotten tired of EVE feeling like a job: “I need to log in and check my orders and restart my extractors and haul to market and decide what to produce next and…” Flying around deadspace in a Vigil to find the most valuable pickings, while dodging lasers and blasters? Much more fun. And then trying to do so in a way that keeps me from losing my ship to vengeful mission runners? Way more interesting than throwing up my hands in frustration at traders who destroy everybody’s margins.

So I will keep drifting to the darker side of EVE. After all, it should feel like a game, not practice for RL, right?

Lately, I’ve had more fun in EVE Online than I’ve had in this game for a long time. This hasn’t come from just one thing, but I’ve changed up my normal activity, and that’s helped a lot.

On a sekrit alt, I went out prowling highsec belts for someone to shoot. I made a little cash ratting, but in some systems I ran across existing wrecks. I salvaged them and, when possible, looted them. This worked particularly well when a Thrasher decided he didn’t like me taking the loot, which gave him rights to shoot me. I suppose the fact that I yellow-boxed (targeted) him added to that. So he opened fire on my Rifter. He promptly lost his destroyer for it, which turned out to have a fail fit: mixed hull, armor, and shield tanking, plus both artillery and ACs.

That felt good. Not because of the tears — none flowed forth — but because I’d done something “bad”, gotten away with it, and had a solo kill to my name for my trouble. Well, to my “sekrit” name, but I didn’t do it for e-fame anyway.

In another vein entirely, I recently noticed that a market hub had none of a particular item available, and that the item in question normally listed for several hundred thousand ISK. I picked one up in another system, brought it back to the hub, and listed it for one thousand times the normal price. So (as an opsec-preserving example) if it normally listed for 100k, I’d list it for 100m.

This means that customers in that station will buy my item if they just hit “buy” from the group listing and have their range set to Station. If they don’t look closely, they’ll fail to notice the “100,000,000″ doesn’t look exactly like “100,000″.

Personally, I don’t see this as a scam: I put out a sell bid and an individual chooses to take it, without me directly targeting him for a scam or lying. Caveat emptor.

This doesn’t have to work very often to make a lot of ISK. Suddenly I realize that I don’t need to scrape together cybernetic implants from the market to haul and resell. I don’t need to deal with markets poisoned by traders who have no idea how to preserve their own margins and price stability for everyone. If just one of these sells every week or two, I can easily afford what I want to go have fun doing other things.

Like shooting Hulks.

When I play RPGs, I always struggle with choice. So many options from which we can choose. Think about the career options in EVE, for example. You have pirates, nullsec warriors, explorers, miners, traders, researchers, builders, mission runners, militia, smugglers, diplomats, salvagers, haulers, and more. Each of those has specialties as well: fleet commanders, scouts, capital ship pilots, inventors, high-sec research starbase operators, station traders, and so forth.

In EVE, of course, those choices generally don’t mutually exclude each other. You don’t get locked into a “class” from which you’d have to respecialize and lose all your prior abilities A pilot who starts out mining can decide to start training combat skills, go pirate, and end up as the CEO of a nullsec corp that specializes in small-squadron warfare, and he could still go mine if (for some odd reason) he decided to do so. Some choices might not work simultaneously, of course, but over the course of your career trajectory, you can do anything.

I find myself at a crossroads right now. Primarily, of course, I am an EVE blogger — a freelance writer who just blathers on and on, writing about whatever strikes my fancy. But I also do a good bit of trading / exploration / hauling, sometimes with some research and manufacturing or even mission running in the mix. In the past, I have engaged in factional warfare, scouting and tackling for an anti-pirate alliance, a wee bit of piracy, salvaging, W-space living, running roleplay corporations, fiction writing, EVElopedia editing, and mining.

Lately, though, I’ve started to think I want to grow in another direction. I feel like I might have something to contribute towards PvP. It takes essentially no training time for a pilot to scout and tackle effectively, and not much more to provide effective electronic warfare support. I have a number of alts that could easily become mains, moving Casiella to a background character for fiction writing and semi-passive income via datacores, trading, and perhaps some science and industriy.

This doesn’t contract my thoughts on nonviolent play, I should note. I have a character dedicated to truly nonviolent play who will start to see more action next week, but he primarily exists for roleplay (in a solo corporation) and planetary management. Some press releases on the Intergalactic Summit, checking on my planetary production networks every four days or so, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so maybe I just can’t easily decide. I don’t know whether that’s wrong… see? I did it again!

A new devblog titled “Courier Missions Revamp” actually grabbed my attention, although the designer who wrote it has a slightly dry style. Granted, these represent pretty much the pinnacle of carebearship, but see below for why they actually do matter (to, um, carebears).

The key changes:

• Courier missions now feature their own versions of the commodities produced via planetary management.
• They also will have a minimum and maximum cargo size and standardized travel distance for each level:
  1. Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation.
  2. Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.
  3. Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.
  4. Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be a neighboring constellation.

This matters because many pilots use courier missions to rapidly increase their standings with a given corp or faction. 16 courier missions go more quickly than 16 combat missions, although much less increase per mission. So if someone wants access to better R&D agents or a preferred storyline agent, this sort of activity really helps.

These changes please me. And that’s what matters, right?

I have done some reading on Gandhi recently, beyond the “sound bite” version we get in Western culture. I’m actually really interested in the opportunity to discuss some of these ideas about nonviolence within the context of EVE Online, as opposed to real life.

Personal views

I don’t have a good way yet to express how I actually feel about it IRL: sort of “I wish I could be the sort of man that practices that belief”, or maybe “I aspire to that”. This concept of satyagraha, or “civil resistance” (not really a good English word for the concept) strikes incredibly close to what I think I should be, and it builds upon the concept of ahimsa. It’s just hard. I’ve had Gandhi on my mind for some time now, and I’ve experienced my own “crisis of faith”. Please note that I don’t really like that phrase, as it sounds overly dramatic for what I feel at the moment. I’ve simply taken some time to re-examine the expressions of my values in an effort to get to the core of them, not necessarily to change the foundations but to focus on them. This helps me do that, in a sense.

Note, I definitely don’t mean to say that games cause violence, nor that how one chooses to play EVE clearly reflects one’s RL values. A player who engages in piracy within the game probably does not kill and steal in real life. However, I personally would like to explore the possibility of a truly nonviolent play style, particularly within a PvP-focused game like EVE.

In-game background

EVE has no “good guys” in its background lore. Despite some efforts by individuals on the staff there, we’ve managed to preserve a fictional universe that, in terms of the human motivations and qualities, looks realistic. Some individuals may overall act with greater humanity, ethics, or morality, but in general no particular faction can lay a broad claim to “heroes” or “villains”.

With that said, certainly some act with less violence than others. The Sisters of EVE come to mind on one end of the spectrum, for example, and I don’t doubt that at least some religious orders within the Amarr Empire have similar humanitarian goals and efforts. (Even the Amarrians have more than one dimension to them.) And, given the extreme variance within the Gallente Federation and their overall adherence to what we would think of as modern Western ideals of classical liberalism, certainly some within that faction probably also follow this sort of path. I don’t know as much as I wish I did about the Intaki, but they have potential in this direction as well.

So, despite the endless warfare within the cluster, or perhaps even because of it, one can see small corners within it that fit characters who wish to follow that path. This only really matters in terms of fiction, roleplay, and character development, but those things matter to me and quite a few other players.

This really only addresses the question of non-violence, however, and not the civil resistance philosophy for which Gandhi became so well-known. I’ll probably have to address that in the future separately.

Mechanics

This actually gets a little more complicated. After all, one who makes claims in opposition of violent solutions before facilitating them directly acts with hypocrisy and inconsistency. So while “industry” sounds like a simple answer, we have to look a little more closely.

Miners typically can do so without ever having to destroy someone else’s ships, although belt pirates can present an issue in some locations. And selling materials on the open market resolves most of the ethical issues I’d foresee, though some might prefer instead to provide them via contract directly to producers whose ethics match their own.

In manufacturing and research, though, things can get a little murkier. Clearly the bulk of the market serves combat pilots: most ship hulls, for example, and quite a bit of the modules and equipment. Industrial pilots not wishing to contribute to that part of the market can choose to produce industrial and engineering equipment. The same goes for those of us focusing on trade.

The Tyrannis expansion should open up more possibilities in planetary management. The analogues to current industrial activities look fairly clear for the purposes discussed here.

While discussing some related matters with a friend, another idea occurred to me. Ironically, the actual inspiration comes from the Python Cartel, a group of pirates and (dare I say) griefers. But their Amamake Defense Force initiative actually shows how combat pilots could use their electronic warfare skills to try to neutralize opposing forces without firing upon them. What would happen if groups dedicated to that sort of engagement began to show up more often?

Conclusion

I’ve explored the OOC and IC motivations behind an interest in a truly nonviolent play style within EVE. And clearly our shared pastime offers enough variety in game activities to support many different pilots. Therefore, my readers and friends can expect to see Casiella shifting back in this direction, complete with (hopefully) appropriate internal character development to reflect the sort of person she’s been for some time as well.

In the Exploration channel the other night, we started to discuss EVE’s complexity and the infamous “learning curve” graph everyone knows so well.

First, let me note that nearly everyone who refers to this graph or talks about a “steep learning curve” actually uses that term totally wrong. A learning curve depicts the rate of knowledge transfer or skill progress, so that if the curve moves upward very rapidly, in fact the learner will acquire new information very rapidly. Conversely, if it takes a long time to learn something such that incremental learning moves very slowly, you have a shallow learning curve. Remember, every time you communicate ineffectively, Oveur kills a kitten.

Part of the issue with EVE lies, not in the difficulty of learning within the environment, but in how much information a new player needs to acquire. I don’t have any hard data on this (bad hacker!) but I suspect that players learn very very quickly, particularly in supportive environments (e.g. player corps that take time to help newbies).

Then a relatively new player stated that only PVP has this sort of complexity in EVE. When I pointed out how ridiculous that sounded, and used the example of trading, someone else said, “what’s so complicated about ‘buy low, sell high‘?”.

If you want to reduce trading to that one maxim, then you might as well describe Minmatar PVP tactics as “hit orbit, F1, and scram.”

In reality, most areas of EVE have levels of complexity and nuance that the uninitiated don’t understand. Large-scale fleet combat looks to me like getting on grid first, calling primaries and secondaries, and hoping like hell you have more guns and RR than the other side. I don’t doubt in the slightest, though, that I just grossly oversimplified it, mostly because I’ve yet to participate in that scale of fleet combat.

So the player next to you in Local who does something different than you? Sure, he might just be a total n00bbear, but he also might have glimpsed a level of intricacy you didn’t even know existed.

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:

1200mm Scout Artillery market

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!

I hate undocking in low-sec. Actually, I just hate not getting any updates from the traffic controllers about conditions on the grid around the station. That leads to losing a blockade runner and lots of ISK.

Props to the pirates, though, who evidently had a pretty decent operation given the number of wrecks I saw once I did undock (and before I got my pod out of there). My wallet didn’t like the experience, but that’s how low-sec trading goes.

NB: I had most of this written prior to Helicity’s rant. And I generally with much of that rant, actually, but after further reflection I realized it went too far and I needed to respond. Other worthwhile posts include those from Black Claw, Kirith Kodachi, Kant Lavar, and Luccul.

For all the talk about “carebears” in one direction, and “pirate Nazis” or whatever in the other direction, these folks really miss one of the core points about EVE: playstyle diversity.

Pirates and other PVPers need the folks they call “carebears“. Who else will produce their ships and modules and ammo and drones? Who else will buy the loot they pick up from their enemies’ wrecks so that they have ISK for new equipment and other fees?

And the real “carebears” — not just non-combat players, but those who express total moral outrage at not being left alone — need the PVPers. Who else will buy their stuff in significant quantities, or create demand by destroying other people’s stuff (that will then need replacement)? Yes, individuals might take a loss due to ganks or gate camps, but a bit of care can avoid most of that. And at any rate, we still make profits over time. Rewards require risk, after all. (Related to this, not all non-combat players actually count as carebears.)

Look, this should all be really obvious to everyone. But evidently it’s not, whether due to willful ignorance or an inability to play well with others (meaning sometimes you have to lose graciously).

We can’t all get along in-game, because that would get boring. In fact, we really shouldn’t: EVE revolves around competition in various guises. But can’t we all get along out of game?

The first banter of 2010 comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: As we begin another year in New Eden, ask yourselves, “What Now?” What will I attempt next? What haven’t I done so far in EVE? Was it out of fear, funds, or knowledge? What steps and objectives will I set myself to accomplish in order to reach my ultimate goal for this year? EVE is what you make of it. So, what is it going to be for you?

Destination : Future by gilderic

I’ve had a rough idea of how I would like 2010 to go (EVE-wise) for a while, at least in some senses though not necessarily others. So let’s take a look…

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