Bounty exodus

Blog Banter # 53 - A state of disrepair and jury rigging

Today's topic comes from a tweet from @erlendur in a conversation he was having with a pilot about having multiple overview tabs open in separate windows:

So that is the topic this month: The Overview. Is it sufficient? If not how can it be improved? Is there some way to replace it? Does it give too much information, or not enough? Please be creative and specific as the overview currently is the heartbeat of the GUI.

 There are numerous solutions to overcome the deficiencies, most notably Sarah Schneider and Blitz Kotare's overview importable .xml files. Plus, a very pvp oriented 'fix' to overview/bracket appearances using pictures:

The result is quite...erm...colorful. I find the effect to be more pvp friendly, and nullsec oriented than anything


The problem with the default overview these profiles are attempting to fix is the 'default' overview setting options aren't really helpful to the dedicated, specialized things eve players tend to get into.

Actually, there's no "Combat" or "Missioning" or "Exploration" that caters to the needs of players, and the 'Brackets' option (the one that shows you icons in space, not the overview itself) is woefully inadequate to keeping lag/performance issues under control.

So the aim of those two profile packages is to make things not only Aesthetic but informative to specialized uses.

I myself have endeavoured to created such a profile package for carebears, and for the most part, i feel i have succeeded. I decided that in order to take best advantage of the mechanics of 'import' and 'tabs' that having multiple files based on career choice, and more importantly, the amount of performance issues (aka. lag) you want to avoid having was the best of both worlds. Not only that but i made sure the number of "selected type settings" was 20 total shared by all 10 'import' XML files - compared to 29 types (excluding the 5 divisions) & 1 xml for Sarah's, and 27 types & 4 xml (solely color styles) for Blitz's. Below are the two core overview profiles you can import at will to tailor your overview needs. The top picture shows the "Belter" type profile and the bottom picture shows the "Shepherd" type profile. the names were inspired by C.J.Cherryh's sci-fi series, "company wars."

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EDIT: I looked at the way Sarah's overview pack displays the 'hover over' cursor information. (the ship type listed first, then [alliance], then pilot name, and lastly ship name;  Blitz's used this rather aethetic format i'm not quite sure was the purpose of...And the ship type last...i wonder what advantage that gives?
I think i'm going to adjust my profile to be more like Sarah's (ship type first, pilot name bolded)...and i think i'll tone down the tone size. I still like yellow tho.
As you can see in the picture to the right, with OMNM's profile top, Sarah's middle, and Blitz's bottom (red profile), the information shown is much better than the default by far.

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Am i happy with the options i am forced to work with, and the lack of ability to see exclusively WarTargets...not to mention the annoyance i have with the way bountied pilots crop up when i'm trying to ensure every single instance of a wartarget's attributes is checked? Not really...That's kind of a big deal: Not being able to separate wartargets into a tab of it's own (outside of null-sec)...You see, if i choose to check solely pilots at war with my corporation, and uncheck everything else, you'd THINK that would make things simple wouldn't it? but, no, if a pilot has an attribute i have unchecked, say a bounty - no matter if they are clearly at war with me - they won't appear in that type of overview settings.

Besides this annoyance about highsec wartargets (most use background colors to ensure target selection, as a jury rigged solution) the other issue that custom profiles can't jury rig a solution to is bountied pilots are probably the number two problem facing the overview...since CCP fixed what wasn't broken a while back anyone can bounty any pilot with zero restrictions.

TL;DR   So if CCP somehow worked a solution so that we could have a "wardec" tab showing only wartargets (by separating bounty indicator from the attributes and having it appear some other way, say perhaps in the 'ships' settings as a check box) that would be an improvement.

EDIT: having differentiation in beacons (especially cynos) would be great, plus something else in that vein but it's slipped my mind

Blog Banter # 52 - Just another day as an astronaut

"For the past four and a half years, the graph has hovered around that 30,000 mark; it is, for all intents and purposes, a plateau. But everything must come to an end sooner or later and that is what this blog banter is about.
What's on the other side of that plateau?
Is there any path for CCP to follow to raise those numbers upwards for a sustained period, or is EVE going to enter a decline to lower logged in numbers from this point? How soon will we see an end to this plateau? Months? Years? Or will you argue that 'never' is a possibility? Or you can look at the root causes of the plateau and tackle the question if it could have been avoided or shortened if CCP had taken different actions in the past.
Also, what would EVE be like with an order of magnitude fewer or more players?"

This is a continuation of a topic from Blog Banter #50, at least the way i look at things.
Jester's Trek tries to spin it as from "Retribution" but that's hogwash since it was Apocrypha that broke the 30k mark, and without it I daresay we would have never breached that limit.

What stuff was in that expansion?

• sharing corporate fittings
• sharing overview settings (filter/states)
• exploration revamp (i was actually pretty good at the old way. lol)
• eye candy (the total overhaul of the graphics)
• localization
• skill queue for the casual players
• career agents and epic arc* agents to give the n00b that feeling of immersion with the official story
• more industrial options (tech3)

That's a lot of powerful stuff for CEOs to offer as interesting things to branch into for our recruits, and gave us powerful tools to help the n00bs (aka new customers)
oh wait...
we're supposed to welcome them with duel popups, trolling in local, can baiting, aggro traps, scams, awoxing, and the like because we all know the victims actually enjoy the surprise buttsex, amirite?

There was a MMOG i played, called JumpGate, that did have an order of magnitude lesser than EVE, that also had too many killers being listened to by ego stroking developers. Yeah, that game died...really never took off...stagnated until they turned the servers off.
Got pretty lonely out there as the influx of players couldn't keep up with the brain drain of carebears as griefers harvested ever more tears for their addiction...yet who were the loudest most obnoxious squeaky wheel? That's right, the griefers.

oh wait...
we're supposed to call them "The core of any MMOG" *cough*bullshit*cough*

What if we were a magnitude greater in population? the new WoW? mining in missions would be commonplace, that much i can guarantee you among the barren belts before DT.  Ice anomalies would be stripped bare in minutes. Smartbombing battleships would be all the rage for suicide gankers, and greed fit retrievers would keep the catalyst builders swimming in isk. n00b CEOs falling prey to hordes of awoxers would make the story of Ubiqua Seraph like some cute grandpa tale of woe, and noone would remember m0o corp except us oldtimers.


*shrug*
On the other hand, in support of the 'plateau is fine' camp, there's the argument - which has merit - that says the fantasy genre has more sway among the fickle populous on the internet than the subculture of sci-fi.


Whatever happened to E&B? I was playing JumpGate while that game floundered and died.

The root cause of the plateau are obvious: Apocrypha promised more of something better, socially, not just playing tiddlywinks with ship rebalancing for the bread and circus pvp crowd who think "social networking" is getting peer acknowledgment from kicking sand in someone's face.

It's been 10 years of beta-level programming for the social fabric (aka player corporations) that has huge loopholes for lazy lowest common denominator griefers to fly a gnosis through. Do you think we don't all notice the elephant in the room? How fancy are the emperor's new clothes?

What if this new phase of CCP Seagull's vision of promises to allow sharing of personal hangars with corp members heralds a revamp of the roles and access that have plagued the social fabric of this game?

edit: saw this video via the "this week in eve #28" links that had this image:

corporate roles made simple and secure

Sorry about the picture spam. Just been a while since i revamped my corporate roles. earlier post with details is here
The reason i revamped the titles (i give no individual roles out based on the reasonable assumption it would become a mess real fast) was to make things even simpler:  give out access first then add roles, in a leapfrogging pattern (more access then greater roles)

How many alts is enough?

Fozzie's official line...is it just fluff? a troll?

So, EVE does have a rich story but we don't have any plans on making a single player game out of it. It is, at its core, a multiplayer game. It's about this shared experience together. Sometimes, players will play on their own entirely. Sometimes, they'll play sometimes with other people. But even when you're playing alone, you're still in a world that's shared with all these other people. And everything you do, every time you shoot an NPC and make some money, every time you buy some ammo, all that is affecting everyone else and that adds a lot of depth to it. It just wouldn't be the same game if it was a single player game.

So if they understand that, they might just understand there are different playstyles of equal business value to them.
There's another blurb (in their facebook 'about' section) that sounds positive, and which i find optimistic:

War, Industry, Socializing, Exploration... These are the 4 major aspects of EVE, and serve as the foundation for our virtual world.

Although, the  achiever type seems strangely to be now 'industry'...are they? is a missioner considered "industry"? Is a miner an achiever? Well, certainly not the laid back kind like myself. lol. hmm.  Well, that's besides the point really since the above quotes are impartial nonpartisan ways of viewing eve-online (not simply the oversimplified world of hard core combat pvp)

problem is, is this spiel simply window dressing and that the line "the core of this game is pvp [combat]" means all players are born equal, just some are borne more equal?

another quote from the same interview:

Will you ever allow us to build stargates? It would be pretty interesting to have systems that will require you to build an exit yourself. 
"Yes, yes, we definitely will. That's something that has been announced by our senior producer as early as our last Fanfest and we reiterated that that our vision for the future of the game includes allowing players to build major projects together. One of those projects will be player controlled and player built stargates. I'll say that the result of that may not be what people expect. They may not take the form that people expect, but yes, we are definitely working on in the future allowing people to build stargates. 
The last changes in corp industry roles were very nice but there is one more step to go: Corp Hangar! How about a private tab where a member can share access to BPOs without letting everyone take them? Such a tab could be limited by role assignment. Better yet: A section of your private hangar that allows "view" access to other corp members. 
Yep, so a better way of allowing people to use your BPOs without having control to take them is something we've been thinking about for a while, and is definitely something that we would like to do. Um, I can't say for sure exactly how that implementation is going to work, but it is something we definitely want to do, yes. "

 basically, that works currently as having 'view only' access to certain corp hangars based on roles. now, whether Fozzie understands this or not is besides the point - they're looking to enlarge that ability in a way that would definitely please me greatly.

Planetary Recolonization

High sec forces a base tax rate of 10%. this is independent of player corp tax (which is added on, and is not affected by the skill,  'customs code expertise')
The security rating of the system will lower the planet's richness the further you increase towards 1.0

There are two important things to teach for setting up a colony. One is the fiddly little detail of routing confirmation (something i find i forget every once in a while); The other is actually creating a colony that's intuitive and hasslefree.

For the former there are no easy ways about it. it's pure rote with the last step being the most important.

http://eve-files.com/dl/266278

http://eve-files.com/dl/266279

http://eve-files.com/dl/266280

http://eve-files.com/dl/266281

http://eve-files.com/dl/266282

For the latter there are a number of shortcuts that make colony life sooo much easier.
To start off with always right click on the planet and enable 'show other colonies'*, then without moving around zoom in and place your colony HQ right in the center. This curtails the game code from trying to center it's screen on wherever you placed this redundant** device.
Upgrade the HQ right away to your maximum and hit submit (i find it's more expensive to upgrade one level at a time.)
That's "Stage One" (i use "stage" to mean each time you hit 'submit')...stage 2-6 are below:

http://eve-files.com/dl/266283

http://eve-files.com/dl/266284

http://eve-files.com/dl/266285

http://eve-files.com/dl/266286

http://eve-files.com/dl/266287

http://eve-files.com/dl/266288

http://eve-files.com/dl/266289

http://eve-files.com/dl/266290

http://eve-files.com/dl/266291

http://eve-files.com/dl/266292

http://eve-files.com/dl/266293

http://eve-files.com/dl/266294

 *- If you click on an individual HQ icon of another player their infrastructure icons will appear on screen. Very handy for finding out exactly where the least punked places on the planet are (and remembering where you placed your alts' colonies so you don't punk yourself)
**- If you ever need to use the HQ to launch into space, simply turn off a few mining heads at an extractor and create a temporary link from your colony to the HQ and expedite a transfer(s) that way.

Mining

okay, for a venture in fleet with two miner tech2s (and a mining upgrade in low) and a 40 second duration (orca) and 200m3 per cycle per module (mindlink) ...so say you only mined 'scordite' and 'pyroxeres' (basic kind) that gives ~175 isk/m3.

So that's 6.3m isk/hr

If you sold the ore straight to buyers at amarr (oris) you would make a bit less...

49.08 isk/unit pyroxeres (in an hour you could have mined...120,000 units) ...selling ore straight would make you 5.889,600 isk


23.78 isk/unit scordite (240,000 units) ...so in an hour that would be 5,707,200 isk

i'm fairly sure the changes to ores in odyssey haven't been reflected in changes here ...for a long time.

Arkanor gives 10,000 tritanium as a bonus(instead of 300);  Biston gives 12,000 pyerite as a bonus (instead of 170);  Spodumain gives 71,000 tritanium and 9000 pyerite (instead of 700 and 140 respectively); Crokite gives 38,000 tritanium (instead of 331); Dark Ochre gives 25500 tritanium (instead of 250); Gneiss composition changed dramatically: 3700 trit (from 171), 3700 mex (from 171), 700 iso (from 343), unchanged zydrine (at 171)...although, has it become garbage all the same?  Hedbergite gives 290 pyerite as a bonus (unchanged otherwise); Hemorphite gives 650 trit (from 212), 260 pyerite, 60 mexallon as bonus.

Jaspet, back in the day, used to be total shit but now it looks fairly respectable.

Actually, since Grismar.net is so outdated (and absolete) there is a better site for ore now:
 http://eve.battleclinic.com/ore_compression_calculator.php#ore