Blog Banter #61–Hang in there

Welcome to blog banter #61. For more entries head over to Ninveah’s blog.

TurAmarth asks this question: “What would we encourage ALL new players to do in their first month to get them to subscribe long term, if we had to give out one set of advice for everyone (which we do if we’re giving general advice) ?”

My first reaction was to respond with ‘do a bit of everything and see what you like !’. But I think the new tutorials already do that, though of course somewhat superficial. One month is not enough to scratch the surface. After a month you get a somewhat basic understanding of the game, if I remember well. The best advice would be to join a corp like Eve Uni that is focused on learning things.

As far as other advice, all the usual things apply: Don’t afk autopilot through low sec. If a deal is too good to be true, it’s usually a scam. Actually assume everything is a scam, unless you have determined, it’s not Winking smile.

Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose. Don’t sell you battle cruiser to get that battleship, have a ship to fall back on, in case things don’t go according to plan. Save a little longer, be patient. And I think that last point is important in Eve. It’s a different state of mind that the current, I WANT IT ALL AND I WANT IT NOW trend in society. Be patient, do your research and figuring things out is, for me at least, the most fun about Eve. It’s very rewarding that way. In case that’s not your cup of tea, Eve might not be your thing, things aren’t handed over on a silver platter.

Also “Hang in there when things go sour’’ would be good advice as well, come to think about it Winking smile. That’s probably the best thing I can come up with as a 9 year old vet, haha.

Phoebe

The website for Phoebe, the patch that will be released next week, as I write this, is up. Of course the biggest change is the 0.0 movement change as it’s called on the site. It stirred up a lot of unrest on the forums. But since I have no involvement in 0.0, the Sensor scanner change is the most interesting one for me. Living in a wurmhole means you do  a lot of scanning, so this change, well it’s more an enhancement really, is welcome.

Scan and display bookmarks, missions and other locations relevant to your day-to-day play. Color-coded markers and display filtering makes it easy for you to quickly spot the marker you are looking for.

And finally an endless skill queue ! About time really ;).

BB #59 – Terrain

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 59th edition!

[stextbox id=”black”]

For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
This month’s version comes from commenter Zappity who asks:

Probably been done before… What about local force projection (as opposed to the longer distance force projection that is often talked about)? I think of ‘terrain’ in EVE to be how systems are mapped together by gates. Strong tactics which exploit terrain have historically been extremely important in deciding battle outcomes. How does this apply in EVE in the presence of cynos?

Related to this, you have the option to explore the topic of wormhole systems with effects (Black Holes, Cataclymismic variablestar, etc) and if similar environmental effects on certain grids/deadspace or system wide should be explored for known space?

[/stextbox]

Terrain and space is a little hard to simulate. As Kirith mentions line of fire in his entry using structures and such, that would definitely be interesting, but usually, space is very empty. I don’t know the first thing about Cynos, so I won’t be going there.

Now regarding the effects, like wormholes have. Over at the Eve wiki you can check out the various effects. The pulsar and wolf effects would most noticeably change the environment for the battle. This will decide whether you are going in armor tanked or shield tanked. It will give the ‘home team’ a definite advantage I’d say. Other effects will affect ammo type and or weapon types.

Would this be suitable for known space ? Maybe in 0.0. In hisec if you would implement this in a system with agents, it would make mission running very trivial, or very hard. People would flock to the system with the generally known best effects, creating new over populating problems. You could of course rotate the effects, not sure if that would work. I am sure someone would come up with a website where you can check the best effect with lvl 4 agent and such.

All in all I think implementing something like this in K-space would spice things up, but in Hisec it would create new problems, and also make things more confusing for new players. Maybe try it out in a few systems first ? Or would people flock over there then ? Eve is so complicated sometimes Winking smile.

More participants at http://www.ninveah.com/2014/09/blog-banter-59-terrain.html.

Wormhole Colours

This devblog from a couple of days ago explains how the wormhole colours will get updated in the upcoming ‘Oceanus’ patch. Importantly, you can still see the nebula of the system you are traveling to in the middle of the wormhole and the wormhole will still wobble to indicate how much life it has left in it. In case you’re wondering what those colours are, check out Tigerear’s blog post on the subject matter. It has everything you wanted to know and more :).

You can read more on Oceanus in this blogpost. No big changes as far as I can tell. The new cloaking effect might be nice though.

UPDATE: Patch notes have been released. The update will come out at sept. 30th.

Crius – Laziness exposed

We all know that people are kind of lazy by nature, but Crius can actually show that by looking at the price index of the industry facilities used.

This is in Uedama and the systems around it. As you can see it’s about at 30%, Ikao is busier, around 50%. Only the labs are near 100%, except for the lowsec one.

Lazy1

Now this one, I didn’t even know people actually did production in Jita, are these people never leaving the system or the station ? Even just a system next door it’s cheaper. Or are the price differences insignificant to the end products price ?

Lazy2

Just something I noticed, and I thought it was amusing Smile.

Taking a look at Crius II

The part I of the previous blogpost suggested there would be a part II and I wanted to look at the POS changes. But it seems not that much has changed. Of course the biggest change is that you no longer need standings in order to put up a POS. Or a starbase, as CCP calls them. You still have to ‘pay’ the faction in which you put up your POS with starbase charters by the way.

Another big one is that the blueprint now have to be at the POS in order to be used. So no longer training that ME from the safety of a station. I guess this was done in order to induce combat. It’s more cumbersome, that’s for sure. And people will have to be smart in moving their blueprints around.

There will also be a new POS module for losec manufacturers, the Thucker Component Assembly array, which will speed up the manufacturing process and will reduce the materials needed for Capitals, T2 and T3.

Crius is just around the corner, it’ll be released on July 22nd. It will take quite a while before the market will see it effects, since there is of course still a load of stock manufactured under the ‘old’ system. Interesting times ahead !

Dev blogs:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/starbase-changes-for-crius/

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-industry-all-you-want-to-know/

Taking a look at Crius I

From a recent CCP email (quoted here, because it has all the links to the devblogs) :

[stextbox id=”black” caption=”Crius links”]

Crius is the name of the next release to be deployed on July 22nd. As you might recall, EVE development moved away from the traditional six month expansion cycle to a much faster six week release deployment.

Crius itself brings a major change to industry in EVE Online – including changes to manufacturing and invention. As EVE is a very complex system and industry being at the core of EVE, you can expect a lot of changes that will ripple through the universe:

· The Science and Industry user interface is completely rebuilt and made much more user friendly.

· Refining, reprocessing and compressing are made more meaningful and intuitive. Skill matters!

· All industry slots will be removed including NPC stations, outposts or POS arrays.

· The more jobs are installed in a specific star system, the more expensive it will become to install additional jobs. Centralization costs.

· NPC teams can be hired to give benefits to whole star systems, this will benefit everyone. Centralization helps.

· Material and Time Efficiency levels on blueprints will change and be capped to ME 10 and TE 20 with each level giving a fixed benefit of 1% point. Additionally all static blueprint data, such as copy and research times, will be streamlined and adjusted.

· Industry related POS structures will give you benefits, the more structures you have, the more you benefit (until an upper level).

· Moon mining available in 0.4 security space.

All these changes and more are already available on the Singularity test server. Check it out!

Additionally you can expect several quality of life improvements, for example for the often discussed tooltip changes.

[/stextbox]

I have indeed checked out the changes on Sisi today and here are a few screenshots to show you what changed. First of all planetary colonies are no longer under the industry tab, but in the business menu.

NewMenu

Continue reading Taking a look at Crius I

BB 57–A perfect fit

[stextbox id=”black” caption=”Blog Banter 57″]

Drackarn pointed this killmail to me recently and proposed the following for a blog banter:

Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, its horrific. But the guy might not know any better. We get these all the time circulating social media and corp/alliance chat. How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro’s like this?

Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills…

And another question you can think about is this: do purposely wrong fits, aka comedy fits or experimental fits or off-meta fits, offend you or your corp? Would you, like Rixx Javix when he was in Tuskers, face expulsion for fitting your ships differently than the accepted standard?

[/stextbox]

 

Let me address that last point first. I would never be part of a corporation that has obligatory standard builds. I can see why corporations use them, a big fleet with all sorts of fits, some are bound to be bad, so you maintain a standard. In the early days of factional warfare people joined fleets with all sorts of ships and fits. The variety made it a lot of fun. And I like to come up with my own fits, it’s part of the charm of Eve. Of course if you have logistics, you have to decide armor or shield tanking, I am not against that at all Winking smile.

drake-armor

With that said, on to the issue of teaching new players how to fit a ship. We have all been there at the start of our Eve career and just slap whatever you got on to your ship. Pretty soon you start noticing that that doesn’t work very well. I might be old school, but basically I think people should educate themselves in fitting ships. It’s not THAT hard.

First thing you need to get out of your mind is multipurpose fits. Do one thing and do it well. Stick to one type of tanking and one type of weapon. Not saying there are no exceptions, but it’s a good general rule to go by. Then check the slot layout and the bonuses the ships gives and you’re almost there. This way you might not come up with the  most efficient perfect build ever, but it’s a good place to start, and you won’t have a fail fit as in OP’s example.

Eve is a game where you have to do some reading and googlin’ to find the info you need. And with wikis and blogs that have a lot of info it’s not very hard to find. So am I saying that all is fine, and CCP should do nothing ? What would be nice to see is some sort of suggested build / fit button, that says ‘most players fit this ship like this’. Or a little bit of text that says how you’re supposed to fit it ? You can still slap an armor repairer on a drake if you so desire, just a few little hints and or tips would be nice for the newer players amongst us.

Other participants at ninveah.com.