The Upper Hand is on the Other Foot Now!

As it turns out I was looking at how CCP was wrong about wardecs in entirely the wrong fashion.  I focused on it from the standpoint of someone who wanted to throw out wardecs and maybe grief some people.  I didn’t see the absolute bonanza of opportunity beating up on an entirely different class of people.

Idiot nullseccers.  Any major nullsec alliance that puts in a wardec is going to probably regret it quickly.  There will be a dozen predator corps and alliance ready to pounce on them and terrorize any ships in highsec.  Heck look at Goons and Test in Poetic’s post.  It’s easy to be a badass in deep null when you have a few dozen/hundred of your closest friends.  The guy in a freighter hauling stuff to/from jita?  Probably gonna need a heads up.  Those mission runners in Motsu and Penirgman ain’t so safe either.  Now to some extent this might be intended by the alliance heads.  Chase out the carebears that never contribute.  Fine.  Love it.  However CCP has swung the pendulum over to the defender by providing them easy access to plenty of wardec loving folks to grief the griefers.  This gives any major alliance that doesn’t have it’s strength in highsec a VERY different choice than they had a few weeks ago.  First they can  go ahead with the wardec as normal, realizing that they expose themselves to every swinging dick(head) in empire who wants a piece of them.  Second they can just wave off and ignore whatever the problem is, and third they can find someone else (or create an alt corp/alliance) to handle the issue.

Not exactly a huge adaptation, but it points to the major flaw in the new wardec system.  Throwing out a wardec is now a HUGE liability.  If you are on the hook as the aggressor you are exposed to anyone who wants to join the fun and pound you senseless.  The question is:  Who wants to be that guy?  Who wants to be the other guy scoring easy kills?  I know everyone talks about “good fights” but let’s face it, it’s fun to post 50 killmails with no losses.  Lots more fun than to post the 50 lossmails.

The marketplace is a bit of a joke, as Poetic already pointed out.  If you want help there’s plenty of people willing to throw in for free.  The only reason you’d even think to offer money would be if you had assets requiring defense, in which case you might have to actually take some steps.

Offensive wars bring with them all the liabilities with limited opportunities, thanks to no way to force a fight.  Defensive wars bring far greater opportunities with fewer chances for nasty surprises.  I don’t really have a problem with this.  Any kind of PvP should require exposing yourself to risk.  What I do wonder is why anyone would throw out a wardec, especially “professional” highsec pvpers who can simply wait for a juicy wartarget to jump in against.

I’m using it every time I can

You Got Story in MY EvE

NPC story in EvE is rather limited.  The Role-Play community rather decries it and swarms all over live events every time they happen.  I am not a huge fan of role plying but I do pay some attention to the RP community.

Today my attention was called to a thread on the EvE online Forums.  The most common refrain was “Join nullsec wars and make your own storyline. That’s what makes Eve great for me. Players make history. Not devs and writers.”  and comments like it.  Here’s my problem with that; not everyone wants to drive their own story, not everyone can handle or enjoys the skulduggery, chest beating, and occasional infantile outbursts that happen in null.

I’ve been part of a major, successful alliance all of twice.  With Cult of War I took part in the great wars of nullsec, and found I enjoyed greatly the sense of community, the battles and even some of the reverses.  Sadly it ended badly, with COW being chased out of null in ignominy.  The loss of resources, opportunities, and friends was painful, but not very.

FWA was something else entirely.  The alliance literally flew apart in a mess of backstabbing and accusations.  All the opportunities, all the friendships, all the effort and all the hopes wrecked by other players.  As a CEO I had very little say in what happened, the rank and file had practically no say at all in what happened.

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to go into that end of the pool.  Even highsec in EvE is a deeper, more dangerous pool than other MMOs.  We put sharks in the shallow end.  The deep end has monsters.  At the same time historically CCP has done a lot of storytelling from live events in highsec, to chronicles, to news events.  This gives interesting content to people who want to play the game, but don’t want to subject themselves to the whims of the “monsters” of EvE.

I may be am harsh towards the more bearish elements of EvE but frankly they play the game to, and bringing them in is one of the surest ways of having more PvP players and targets.  Eventually they will sharpen their teeth and claws and move on to bigger things, or at least find a way to make my ships cheaper.  However with the EvE story languishing, or being provided in what amounts to a single channel dominated by the Mittanis, Helicitis and their ilk.  This means that people who can’t see the point in EvE, or who might want to try but aren’t into the “hardcore pvp scene” don’t have an alternative that they can see.  We might know better as players, but what do people coming in see?  What opportunities are available to people who want to SEE the story, but might not was to really CONTRIBUTE to it?

CCP can look at it, and weight the positives and negatives.  They probably have.  In my experience the communities in MMORPGS scream bloody murder on the forums in the hierarchy of PvPers > “hardcore” PVErs > Regular PVErs > Market Goons > RPers.  This has almost nothing to do with how important that portion of the community is, how big it is, or the state of its issue of the moment.  PvP could be completely brilliant and PvP folks will whine and scream about something.  Market could be buried under a horde of bots and there will be whispers.  RP could languish without an update for years and the RP folks get ignored as they post in character on their own forums decrying the uncaring NPCs lack of interaction.

Empire needs to change in some fashion.  The actions taken by both the capsuleer players and the NPC leaders need to be seen.  The universe needs more awesome.  Most of EvE doesn’t care about the 412th battle of NOL.  They want to see what happened in Jita.  More players have been to Jita than NOL.  It shouldn’t take a lot of resources, heck the team working on it seems to have always had a handful of people.   CCP doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, they do need to push it once in a while though.

I’m using it every time I can

EvE Patch Day

EvE Patch Day used to be a fiasco every time.  The first patch I had to deal with was Trinity.  That was a mess.  A HUGE mess.  A “Throw Someone Out the Window” caliber mess.  From here they went to Empyrean Age which went more smoothly than Trinity not through any particularly brilliant skill, but rather from CCP having set the bar so low with Trinity that they were able to stroll over it without effort.

Quantum Rise was another one of those “Server down, Server up, server down, server up” patches, with mini-patches throughout the week, and ran VERY long to boot.  Apocrypha went very smoothly considering the scope of its content, but I still recall being very glad I had a long skill in.

For my money Dominion was the first expansion that really didn’t require the “Ok I need to have a week long skill set on patch day” mindset so common in the EvE community.  While the server came up and down like a basketball for a couple days, the patch and subsequent patches were handled well and resulted in a successful patch day.

Today I noticed that the downtime was extended a half hour, the server came up, and went right back down.  Hotfixes have become the norm, and I suspect today will see at least one or two more, with maybe a half dozen spread throughout the week.

I look forward to the new missile effects, and learning the new inventory better than I bothered with on SiSi.  I think Faction Warfare is about to explode with new faces, and old ones returning.  I also look forward to seeing wardecs continue to languish relatively useless as CCP hasn’t addressed most of the main issues facing them.  Maybe they will iterate on them.  It only took 3 or 4 years to iterate on Faction Warfare after all.

I’m using it every time I can

Well That’s Different

So CCP has put in a module that will change blob warfare, and I think opens the door to a concept I think is LONG overdue.  From today’s Dev Blog

MagSheath Target Breaker I - Mid slot. A module that has a chance of breaking the lock of ships targeting you, the chance increases the more ships target you at one time. Also breaks your locks. Reduces scan resolution significantly as a downside. Only one can be fitted at a time and the can not be fitted to capital ships.

Well then…. that should change things a tiny bit.  Blobbing people with tons of cheap ships suddenly gets less effective.  Smaller fleets of more capable ships with better pilots become preferable to huge blobs in some circumstances.  What circumstances those are depend a lot on how widespread the module is, and the hard numbers on exactly how easily it breaks locks as numbers go up.

First thought – 20-30 close range gank ships can use this module to really go to town on large blobs.

Second thought – Logis will HATE this.  Soon as someone pops that mod they had better broadcast for reps because there’s no discrimination between friendly locks and hostile locks.

What’s going to make a big difference is how common the module is.  At first it will command a princely sum, how long that lasts depends a lot on how common the BPC drops.  I won’t go in to how bizarre it is to not have BPOs for this item, but having it as a drop for a while might be fun.  I might even run a few profession sites.  Or not.  If this ship shows up only on the specialists, like Arazus, Rapiers, (or Lachs and Huggy bears) then it won’t affect much in the game, if it shows up on Drakes and other line-of-battle ships, expect some shifts in the fundamental nature of fleet composition.

If it’s only on small ships then you will get “Hit Squads” of small, skills players flying faster ships to go in and assassinate people against whom the massed firepower of the fleet may not be effective anymore.  This actually sounds really cool, not sure how well it would play out in real life.

If it shows up on every shitfit drake in a 400 man fleet… well the other guy might go with a smaller fleet equally heavily supported with these modules and try to carve apart the larger fleet using their own numbers against them.   Also might make escaping ganks easier in PvE ships.  Heck might be a fun module for PvE ships in general if it works against rats.  At the very least provides a somewhat reliable GTFO button.

No matter what this module ends up doing it signals a clear sign that CCP is pushing back against the Blob.  I’m glad to see it, but I think it brings another problem into focus.  Discriminating between “Friendly” and “Hostile” locks.

In modern aviation and even in ground combat vehicles transmit their location and information to friendly units and commanders through transponders of one sort or another.  This potentially reduces or eliminates friendly fire and allows friendly assets to support each other without making the enemy’s job easier.  In EvE if you want to assist your buddy with reps or such you have to lock him.  There is no difference between locking your buddy in one of the (currently outdated) RRBS gangs and locking onto a hostile.  The same mechanics applied for friendly or hostile targets.  This is… well… unusual.  If I was designing a system in an environment where the safety of my ship was likely to depend on friendlies being able to target me, I’d include something in the transponder code to “boost” my signature to people in fleet, allowing them to lock faster.  Additionally targets locked that are friendly should show on a separate bar stacked below or to the side of the normal one, depending on orientation.  The “selected target” should NEVER jump bars.  This would allow ships that use both offensive and defensive modules (carriers, Domis, bad scimitar fits, RRBS if they ever come back into fashion) to quit whoring in on their buddies KMs, and encourage supporting modules in fleets that could benefit from them.

I’m using it every time I can

Reinforce Success

So Massively finally had a good article about news from a space-based MMO.  Too bad it’s not about EvE.  At least not directly.  If you go through to the actual forum post, Gozer (Ghost Busters name, Top Gun avatar, true child of the 80s) makes a few comments that help put last summers issues in some perspective.

Cryptic has some fun games.  Champions and STO are both fun, and free.  They do have rather limited resources.  Perfect Worlds has given them much more money to work with than Atari did, and STO has seen a bit of a renaissance, but some old problems have stayed around.  PvP is one of them.  The folks at Cryptic have all of one dev working on PvP.  One.  They realized that they have to focus on what works for them.  The Star Trek audience wants PvE.  They don’t want to shoot each other, they want to explore strange new worlds.  As a result their PvP stinks, and they are looking at putting it on the chopping block completely because dropping it wouldn’t really affect the bottom line.

Last summer part of CCPs problem was the revelation that the number of people working on walking in stations dwarfed the number of people working on Flying in Space.  This amounted to mortgaging the future without doing anything to even maintain the present.  In the military you talk a lot about reinforcing success.  In the business world it’s finding (and exploiting) your niche.  If you attack on a wide front you don’t send more troops into the meat grinder occupying 1/3 of your troops, you send them to help exploit the breakthrough the other 2/3 created.  If Apple succeeds in distinguishing themselves as a company that markets products to trendsetters and fashionable folks, they should work more on that, not trying to build servers for major corporations.

Today CCP is again working on ships.  We have seens ships, ships, and more ships, graphics, and PvP changes from CCP because that is what EvE does.  Walking in stations would be the business equivalent of Apple focusing most of it’s developers on a new widescreen HDTV system.

You can expand your market, you can find a new niche and maybe CCP can find a way to create a new market for a broader EvE community.  That’s fine, but you can’t just pour water down a well and hope for gold to float up.  It turns out gold doesn’t float up.  If CCP wants to expand they need to use their resources rationally, small groups of devs building up to a larger group, while maintaining their effort on EvE.  STO is going this route, they have one dev taking a look at PvP in their game to see if it is worth maintaining.  If it is, they will add more resources without hurting the core game.  If it isn’t they will pull the plug and use those resources more profitably elsewhere.

In the future look for CCP to focus on EvE.  I expect Dust 514 to land with the sound of 10 lbs of bird poop and stay there.  Shooters have sequels because the money is on the release.  Yeah they sell map packs, but the draw is the newest, shiniest graphics.  CCP can’t deliver that and they aren’t even going to get  sales at release.  I think it will start flat and drop from there, resulting in massive losses and an even bigger dependency on EvE.  You’ll know there’s trouble on the horizon if CCP shows bad numbers for Dust and puts more devs on it to try to save the sinking ship.

I’m using it every time I can

Obligatory SiSi Post

Played around on SiSi when I could finally get on it.  I have to say the art team has done some damn good work.  The missile effects are sexy.  How sexy?  I’m about ready to trade Cloaky Loki for a Tengu to run around in null and sec back up.  It’s that good.  Didn’t have time the chance to try out the new modules, as they aren’t seeded.

The shield booster looks pretty bad.  It uses cap charges (X-Large can fit 6 Navy Cap Booster 400s) yet it has an activation cost of 470 GJ?  Does it inject cap and activate at the same time?  It boosts for 490 HP every 4s, the base T1 is 450 every 5 so a definite edge there. The problem?  It fits 6 navy cap 400s.  3 800s.  Once those are consumed?  60s reload time.  Also:  it runs your dog over in the street.  Those 60 second reloads are an eternity in a fight.  You will be dead and gone unless you are kiting so well you are taking practically no damage.

Oh and then there’s the inventory.  I can’t decide if I love this so much I’m giving up women or if I hate it so much I’m going to build a giant cannon and barrage CCP headquarters from central Iowa.  There is SO much info but it’s compressed.  There’s ONE sheet.  Like this:

Want to move something around?  Drag and drop, it highlights the bay you will drop it to (thank god) and updates the estimated price down in the lower right.  The filters are neat too.  I should check that out in m Jitamart hangar with one of m indy alts.  The one quibble I have so far, and it is a minor one, is to say that the Amarr T1 ship icons look very old school.  Like pre-trinity.

Also I want to buy all those ships for 9,580,000 isk. Contract them to me Aunenenenen please?

That’s a minor quibble.  Really minor.  The ships themselves look very nice and VERY tough.  The Golden Fleet is here for business, not partying.  Now for the part you want.  Missile spam.

and one more

Seriously I don’t care how badly missiles suck.  With these effects I’m using them.

Anyway next time I play around on SiSi, maybe they’ll remember to seed the modules next time so I can see how evil my AFK mission Domi is.  Also I should throw around some wardecs to see at least how THAT part works.  Someone else on SiSi want to throw a dec on Fancy Hats there so we can play with it a bit?

I’m using it every time I can

The Last Hulkageddon

Hulkageddon is a time-honored event in EvE.  Since 2009 Hulk Ganking has been a part of EvE’s culture, with 2 events in 2010, another in 2011 and this one, possibly the last in 2012.  CCP (Greyscale) is all about making life easy for carebears.  CCP (Greyscale) has battered gankers with constant nerfs over the last few years.  CONCORD gets faster, and more effective.  Players with GCC lose control of their warp drives and can’t board fresh ships limiting them to one attempted gank every 15 minutes.  This means that gankers have to constantly develop new tactics and improve their methodology, while the carebears pretty much enjoy a safer and safer experience.

Of course it hasn’t all gone the way of the ganked.  This year we have two new tools that should ensure some hilarity.  Tier 3 BCs and the upgraded dessies.  An untanked hulk can be ganked by a single Tornado, or 2-3 catalysts VERY easily.  Swarms of arty thrashers will likely make another appearance as well.  In 0.6 and below you should easily get too shots off (maybe in 0.7) and 5 thrashers will tear an untanked hulk to shreds.  An untanked mackinaw will go down even faster.  Heck even a tanked mackinaw in 0.5 is vulnerable.

Now seeing as gankers tend to be more community oriented when it comes to events like this, and we share information whereas most carebears will be ignorant of Hulkageddon even several days into the event, despite enormous amounts of advertising; even though CCP (Greyscale) continues to stack the deck against us we work to improve, and this Hulkageddon will likely be the most successful one yet.  Even with fewer ganks / pilot / hour, even with faster response times, even with all this crap, we will succeed.  That will drive the carebears mad.  Some will respond like I did when my carebearing was interrupted.  Learn to pew.  Some will ragequit.  MANY will forumwhine; and when those forum whines hit CCP Greyscale’s screen…

He does what it tells him to.

He will do something that will surprise everyone even though it should surprise no one.  He will come out with a devblog, or a forum post saying something along the lines of “Since SoniClover came up with the perfect solution to all your highsec PvP needs with wardecs we are going to remove the ability to shoot neutral ships in highsec.  I know you are all real excited about this new era of EvE.  Throw out some wardecs and try out the new system!  You’ll love it!  What are you doing with the torches and pitchforks?  Put me down nonoNoNoNONONONONOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo…….”

CCP has already moved a LONG way to protect it’s carebears.  There’s no reason to believe they wont continue this path.  In 2009 ganks were simple.  Even an utter PvP nub like me could gank a hulk solo in 0.6 space.  Let me suggest some things that hulk pilots could do to protect themselves during this event.

Team up.  Tank your ships, have a friend along in a scimitar providing remote reps.  A gank squad will involve 5-8 toons if they are using dessies.  I’ll make your hulks practically invincible with 5.

3 hulks, fit for tank.  Resists, extenders, all the basic stuff.  Look up the fits.  1 Orca providing leadership bonuses.  MOAR RESISTS!  A scimitar orbiting at 50km with 4 large reppers, ECCM a little bit of tank and reps permarunning on the other 4 ships.

But no.  That’s too hard.  It’s too much to expect people to make the attempt to defend themselves.  They should be able to expect complete safety sitting at 0 in an untanked, expensive, oft-targeted ship during the most heavily advertised event of the EvE year.  Let’s just make CONCORD insta-spawn everywhere, or better yet turn off the gankers’ guns.

So go out and enjoy Hulkageddon.  Really dig into it.  FRAPS it, gank as much as you can as often as you can as long as you can.  Because this is likely to be the last.  We can adapt as much as we want, but we can only do so much when the other side’s “adaptation” consists of whining to receptive Devs.

I'm using it every time I can

RMT, the Economy, and YOU

Yesterday Ardent Defender linked a post from the EvE: Online Forums.  I’m going to copy the post here just in case CCP decides to whack it.  It comes from a gent named “Former Scumbag” and talks about his misadventures with RMT.

As I look at my -10 billion ISK wallet and shortly later my banned accounts I’m only a little bit surprised that it happened. I want to start off by saying I will never buy third party ISK again. It’s just like throwing your money down the drain once you get caught — and you probably will these days.

I know this will cause a great deal of many people to post negative comments and I deserve them. My kind are a plague in Eve and overall it’s good that I was banned and my ISK taken out of the Eve economy. So yes, I know I deserve to die, I’m a scumbag, and will always be one, etc. But let me try to make up for what I did by exposing what I did and telling other RMTers who think their method is perfect that it will fail.

First why did I buy ISK via the #1 leading RMT seller (against EULA) instead of just buying a PLEX from CCP (EULA friendly)?

Because I’ve been doing this for a long time without an issues… I was arrogant and a capitalist. I could take the same amount of money that would be required through legal means and end up with twice the amount of ISK. I also hadn’t been caught yet. I’m still a bit perplexed how I was caught, probably on mere suspicion alone. Maybe not.

But I’m done with buying ISK, as I now see CCP is very determined to stamp this out. I suppose I’ll be a good person and work on scamming people for ISK instead of buying PLEX (just kidding – maybe).

tldr; I’m a bad man and if your a bad man you’re going to lose everything.

HOW ISK SELLERS SELL ISK

Normally it works like this:

Option A) ISK selling company uses bots to farm the drone regions. I’ve noticed that they always went for Plush Compound and Glossy Compound. (Market tip here — check what these refine into and realize that they suppressed certain mineral prices)

and/or

Option B) ISK selling company pays other players for ISK at a rate lower than they sell it. I don’t know the details on how it exactly works as I’ve never sold ISK. But I believe the contracted players use minerals or other high value items and transfer them to the ISK selling company.

(Also scamming, hacking accounts, etc so it’s claimed — although I don’t think that’s truly legitimate claim as it would be their supplies very unstable and they’re always stable…)

1) The ISK selling company then sets up a front corporation (the do this on a DAILY basis) with a random boring corp name made by a day old character.

2) Some how they transfer drone alloys, minerals, or moon products to the front corporation.

3) RMTer sends PayPal or Credit Card payment to bad RMT website.

4) The RMTer then is told to apply to join Random Boring Corp Name and to dock at Jita 4-4

5) The ISK selling bad people then purchases X amount of X item as a corporation market order.

6) Once the order is filled they open Deliveries then go to Deliver to Member and select the RMTers name.

7) The RMTer then sells the items at Market Value and quits the corp.

There’s no wallet log of the RMTer getting the items so it’s believed to be the safest way to do it, also their in the same corp so the activity is considered the same.

My specific process would be the above but with these changes for when I bought it:

1) I would create an alt say BobLikesYou33

2) After I received the items from the ISK sellers and sold them at Market I would have a few billion ISK in my wallet

3) I would then purchase high value items with low volume in mass (level 5 implants, PLEXes, etc)

4) I would then randomly give away whatever I had left to scammers in Jita local (to make more links and hopefully hide my true account and maybe get some dirty scammers banned if I got caught trololol)

5) I would buy a shuttle, put a few BILLION of stuff in it.

6) I would login to my main (on a different account) and go to a safe spot in Jita in a pod.

7) I would fleet up with my RMTer alt then have the shuttle with billions of RMT warp to my main.

8) Then the RMTer would leave the shuttle, leave fleet, and my main would board the shuttle and dock it.

9) I would terminate the BobLikesYou33 character

10) I would then wait till it was flushed and make a new BobLikesYou33 character

This was so (or so I thought) there would be no paper trail or if there was CCP wouldn’t look hard enough for it… maybe it would overwrite something in the database. At one point I even had a corporation dedicating to buying ISK with 5 separate accounts to shuffle things through.

WHAT ITEMS DO ISK SELLERS USE?

Glossy Compound, Plush Compound was the old favorite, recently they’ve been changing that as CCP has been banning more people I assume (or maybe in prep for the drone region nerf).

New items: Tritanium, Moon Products, Salvage Products.

I hope this information some how helps CCP fight this and I hope it discourages RMTers from making the same mistake I did… Repent or faceth the ban wave from doom.

There isn’t much new information here that hasn’t been put out in other places before.  This is the first time I’ve seen this much in this kind of detail, and putting it in the EO forums has an extra bit of punch to it.  Some points I’d like to add:

1. Old skool – Drone Poo being used by RMTers as a vehicle for sending isk.  I feel safe asserting that the drone regions were heavily botted, and this link to the other end of the EULA violating spectrum makes me think that this might be the main reason CCP removed Drone Poo as a drop.
2. CCP can track a lot more than we think – The trails might be faint and impossible to see on our side, but they exist.  Also this tells me that every petition answered with “The logs show nothing” is a lie.  The logs show something.  What is behind this curtain?
3. The methodology is heavily dependent on very young characters – Many CEOs are alts.  I’ve used alt CEOs myself a few times.  Forming a new corp with a CEO character should be setting off alarm bells.  It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see a character with low SP, low time in game, and large transactions, even if they aren’t for isk.  Presumably CCP has felt the same way, hence their ability to catch more people.  Still it seems odd that it took this long for them to find methods this effective.

Long-term this will affect all of us.  Botting and RMT dying at the same time can really shake up the economy.  Botting going away (and drone minerals going away on top of that) will spike mineral prices.  However it seems that minerals were also used to facilitate RMT.  This would tend to inflate the value of isk, taking that away will cause prices to deflate.  Isk itself will be harder to get, making it more valuable to have.  In theory at least.

I’ve said before that mining needs to be looked at.  If people are going to do it it has to be profitable.  That time is nigh.  Mining is an eminently safe profession in general, as long as you are intelligent about how you do it.  Players want something for their efforts however, and 15-20 million an hour doesn’t cut it when missions are nearly as safe and far, far more interactive and profitable.  If mineral prices continue to go up, we will get more miners doing the work, it will be more profitable and fewer people will PvE by missioning.  This may or may not dilute the need for more minerals, which may or may not result in people choosing to leave mining again.

I think the value of minerals will go up.  I’m not exactly Nostradamus to make that prediction.  I think the value of isk will go up as well.  This is a bit dicier.  I think the isk faucets will go down as a net whole.  That is less isk will enter the game, and will be needed to buy more and more expensive stuff.  I think prices will still go up some, even as the value of isk rises, and this could cause a problem.  People like being able to buy a battleship for only an hour or two of effort.  They like an Abaddon that costs less fully fitted than a new one does now, let alone what it will cost in a week.  Heck they liked the price of Armageddon’s at 59 million a lot more than they like Drakes at 70 million.  This will make people leave the game.  This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but there needs to be an influx of new players.  I don’t see one on the horizon.  This expansion might be the least successful of all time on the “curves” standard that Ripard Teg has published so widely.  It makes players poorer without offering new riches to offset things.  It draws the economy back, and while it might inconvenience the rich, it will beggar the poorer players.

I'm using it every time I can

The Great Vanguard Nerf

DevBlog Here

Important quotes

After collecting a lot of valuable feedback from you guys, we decided to give the spawns more variety, without significantly altering the difficulty of any one spawn.  This was done by grouping the NPCs into waves, and moving the trigger to spawn the next wave from an individual NPC to the group as a whole. This will mean that you now need to kill the whole wave to trigger the next one, rather than just specific NPCs.

and

Feedback and our internal statistics also confirmed that Vanguard sites had an excessive reward-to-effort-ratio in comparison to other Incursion sites, so we have reduced their reward by 10% to keep them more in line with the compensation expected for this difficulty of site.

Emphasis mine.  Or to put it another way:

This is a body blow to the shiny blitzer fleets, as they now need to be able to kill every last Reynyn (or however it’s spelled) to get spawns.  All those Maras at 80 klicks?  Gotta go son!  I expect that this will cause a lot of fleets to form for HQs or Assault sites now, as Vanguards will take much longer and be less predictable.

Oh and expect prices to continue to rise as drone region botters now generate isk instead of ore, meaning build prices go up due to restricted supply and isk continues to flow into the economy even without as big an incursion faucet.  Oh and remember that Meta-0 mods are no longer dropping meaning virtually all isk has to come from miners.  This is going to do some damage to the economy.  Battleships are already up roughly 70% over the last year, some have more than doubled.  This wasn’t a huge problem when there was isk to pay for it.  Now the isk faucest are adjusting, mostly down for highsec folks and up for nullsec, while prices will continue to go up. Most likely quite a bit.

CCP has always stated they wanted more people in null to drive conflict.  I think they are about to get it with a vengeance.  And no I’m not talking about the crappy AF I’ve got in Penirgman.

Paging Dr. Eyjo.  The economy is looking a bit sick.  Now if you will excuse me I’m going to gank hulks for a month… while I train all my alts for hulks.

I'm using it every time I can

 

Greyscale Must Go

Ripard Teg noted this post on the EvE forums.  I’ll quote about the same stuff he did, with my own comment.

This sort of gameplay is emergent and cool and interesting and something we very much enjoy seeing players discover, but it also sits in a particular kind of design grey-area where it’s not really something we want to be seeing (for reasons I’ll describe in a second), but something that’s benign enough that we’re not actually going to take action to nerf it just because of that, but also nevertheless something that we’re not going to explicitly exempt from larger changes if they happen to impact it.

The reason we don’t really like this sort of thing is that pre-fight fitting decisions are supposed to be one of the fundamental decisions of EVE combat. Most MMOs let you change your weapons and armor more-or-less on the fly. We don’t, and there are clear and long-standing design principles behind that. SMAs let you make that decision *closer* to the fight, but they’re not there to let you change your fitting *in* the fight. Yes, we need more interesting decisions that players can make during combat, that’s one of the fundamental problems with our combat model right now IMO, and yes, removing this option will take some interesting decisions out of combat, and that makes us sad.

To which I responded:

So tactics that give smaller fleets a chance against blobs and supercaps are going away. Got it.

Seriously, I get having pre-fight fitting decisions being important. LOADING MODS FOR ADDITIONAL FITTINGS IN YOUR CARRIER IS A PRE-FIGHT FITTING DECISION. What’s more important is it is a decision that allows an outnumbered fleet to bring more to a fight than it could otherwise. R&K has (very publicly) shows how they used it to tank supers with standard caps. This change doesn’t do much to nerf titans. From what I’ve been told, nearly any situation where a titan gets pinned on the field it’s either going to die or it isn’t and the fit don’t matter at that point. If you DO want to use this to nerf titans… fine. Titans can only refit at a POS or from a supercarrier. Don’t nerf subcaps. That’s a ridiculous solution to problems caused by supers.

At this point let me go to stuff that would be unwise to say on the EvE forums.  Greyscale is a complete moron who it seems has never logged into EvE.  His ideas on the crime system were absolutely terrible and this is piling stupid on top of stupid.  He’s also responsible for certificates, which are of dubious value beyond a very few, alchemy, which has of course completely fixed the problem of some moon goo being too rare, the learning skill changes, which I actually liked, anomaly changes… ohhhh my.  Jump bridge and Fuel block changes.  Now the right decision was made when it comes to fuel blocks.  However it took a LOT of time to convince him to make changes to let faction towers keep their existing bonus.  He’s also responsible for all the fun with removing the mines, again, which he fixed.

He does pretty well with a lot of things, but there’s a difference between doing well some of the time, and being good for the game.  Greyscale has time and again come up with absolutely terrible ideas, which he clearly refuses to run by the CSM.  No one who has ever enjoyed non-wardec hisec pvp could possible think most of crimewatch was a good idea.  There’s still no incentive to fight a wardec under the new system the current model of “wait a week and see if it goes away” will change to “wait a week and it WILL go away” with the possibility of some idiot hiring mercs rather than skipping a week.  The logi changes are good, but any idiot could read the forums and see that those changes were necessary.

And that’s the real problem.  All Greyscale has done with his good initiatives is read the forums.  CCP has people who read the forums and bring them good ideas.  The CSM.  Greyscale’s original ideas stink on ice, he’s like a bad amateur magician who pulls back the cloth and constantly disappoints when the rabbit has changed into… a rabbit.  He’s been there for 5 years.  He brings nothing to the table beyond literacy and his place in the driver’s seat is not only undeserved but damaging to the game.

Get the bum out.

I'm using it every time I can