MMO Melting Pot Publicity Weekend

General Game-related Blathering,

Most people who come here to read my posts probably already know about the MMO Melting Pot. In fact, I think a lot of you ended up here because I was featured there. Repeatedly. Hugh obviously considers me a better writer than I do myself! In fact, here’s a small secret: One of the main reasons I finally started blogging again is because I felt like I let down some people by simply disappearing. And by “some people”, I mostly meant Hugh. (And a couple of others, but you won’t find out until you run your own publicity weekend at some point!) So I think I owe him.

Why do I write all this? Because this weekend is “feature the pot if you like it” weekend.

There are some prewritten statements on the site that you can use to help raise publicity for the pot, and if you like it, I encourage you to do so. I’ll use my own words, however: I think the pot is a great idea, and very well-done. It scouts many more blogs than I could possibly read myself (seriously Hugh, you still haven’t told me how you manage to do that!). It allows me to find out about new blogs that I might add to my feed reader. It identifies ongoing trends and discussions in blogs, and focuses and fosters debate about topics that way. And finally, it is there pretty much every single day from Monday to Friday with at least one new post.

All of that makes it much better in my opinion than most “gaming news” or even “MMO news” sites, which often are hopelessly biased. The Melting Pot, on the other hand, showcases different opinions on topics by different authors. While of course the pot staff picks and chooses featured blog articles, this still leads to a far more balanced view on things, and can lead to meaningful debate. Besides, who else would provide you with the news about ongoing debates on topics such as dungeon design, attunements, or morality crossovers between game and real world? So, in short, the pot is the very model of a modern major blog news site.

Oh no, I think he’s going to rhyme!

 

 

I am the very model of a modern major blog news site,
I’ve information where and what does happen every day or night,
I scout the blogosphere until I know who is to praise and blame
(as long as it concerns a massive multiplayer online game).

Sometimes I feature single posts although they seem pretentious,
but realize: I do it ’cause that topic is contentious!
At times I present various posts with thoughts on a single topic,
[hm…. topic… such an annoying rhyme and meter… who stresses “topic” on the second syllable?!… Ah, got it!]
my goal is that the debate will progress from being myopic!

At other times, I inform you about the staff behind the pot
or manage a most curious google map: each blogger is a dot.
In short, in matters where and what does happen every day or night
I am the very model of a modern major blog news site!

 

Sorry! Just felt like it. I’ll spare you the rest. I’m all rhymed out for today. Just go already and read the pot!

The EVE Alliance Tournament X, Part 2

EVE Online,

This is part 2 of my notes and thoughts about this year’s EVE Alliance Tournament. It seems that there were some problems with the publication date of the first post, and it didn’t show up in some feed readers, so here is the link to part 1.

This year’s stars

Finally, I can recycle a picture I used before! Ahem… I mean: The Harpy, one of the heavily featured assault frigates in the alliance tournament.

The largest difference to last year was the shift towards frigates and assault frigates that were patched in the last months. These patches buffed these ships considerably, and the tournament teams realized this. The low cost, high damage, and potential to field more EWAR made these frigates very appealing to virtually all teams, especially compared to last year, where this ship type was almost non-existent; the only ships of that hull sizes brought last year were pirate faction frigates, and in much smaller numbers. For comparison: of the ten most fielded ships this tournament, five were frigates or assault frigates. Last year, only a single frigate hull made it into the top 10, and it was a pirate frigate (the Dramiel).

No other module was discussed as much during the tournament as the ancillary shield booster (ASB). The way normal shield boosters work is that they continuously convert some of your capacitor into shield, similar to casting heals on yourself in other games: you trade capacitor (mana) for shield (life). The ASB works more like a potion: instead of using cap, it uses charges. When it runs out, it goes into a lengthy reloading cooldown. In effect, it is a bit like health potions in other games: you get some life for “free”, but you can’t use it all the time. The ASBs proved to be very powerful within the confines of the tournament. Since there was a limited amount of ships that each side was allowed to bring, it was possible for many ships to withstand even concentrated attacks without any problems until they had to go into reload. They would die eventually, but it took the opposing team a lot more precious time. It was probably a wise decision to limit the use of ASB modules to at most one per ship; otherwise, we might’ve seen battles that would’ve stalled at some point because neither side could kill off the other. I’m not sure how much influence the ASBs had with respect to armor vs. shield tanking setups; I would assume it favored shield tanking to the point that it would’ve been preferred by the teams (since at least so far, there is no armor equivalent to the ASBs), but it seems previous tournaments seemed to have similar numbers of shield fleets.

The ASBs were more powerful in the 6-ship preliminaries than the 12-ship final rounds, to the point where it was very hard to break ASB tanks for some teams. There was a lot of discussion on how long it would take CCP to nerf this overpowered module. However, I don’t think it is actually overpowered. It can just showcase its advantages very well in these setups: as soon as you have larger fleets battling each other, the incoming damage is too high for the ASB to make much of a difference; it gets overpowered almost immediately and can’t keep up with the incoming damage. I do wonder though whether CCP has plans for an armor repairer equivalent. On the other hand, armor has other perks.

Finally, a thing that makes me sad: the continuing dominance of Minmatar ships, and low number of Amarr ships in the tournament.It’s a well-known fact in New Eden that Minmatar ships are, on average, the best for PvP, and Amarr ones are the worst. I refuse to let this also  become a well-accepted fact, at least in my mind. I dislike Minmatar ship model design (to me, they look like somebody by accident soldered an engine to a discarded scrap metal heap), so maybe I’m just bitter. Nevertheless, it is obvious that EVE is like many other games in that balancing issues plague PvP. At least everybody can train for every ship type, which mitigates the problems somewhat. There is also some hope: in those ship classes that were introduced or rebalanced since last year (frigates, assault frigate, T3 battlecruisers), the numbers of fielded ships are much more even. So maybe we’ll see more even numbers in the future. Though, by the speed the rebalancing goes, that will be a distant future.

My personal favorites

I can’t decide on one single favorite game, so I’ll mention two, for very different reasons. The first one was the second intermediate round match between Pandemic Legion and Rote Kapelle. Both teams had won their first match of the group, and a win in this one virtually guaranteed progress into the elimination finals. Pandemic Legion decided to seal their progression by virtue of bringing the most powerful ships they had at hand. They brought their Bhaalgorn flagship, decked out with ridiculously expensive officer modules, and no less than four limited edition frigates with massive bonuses – these had been rewards from a previous tournament. A rough estimation is that PL invested no less than 100 billion ISK (that’s roughly 200 months of game time, if you buy them on the market) into that match. And lost. They didn’t lose all their ships though, and they made it into the finals by winning their last match, but… that match was impressive the way Ben Hur is: it’s not necessarily a great movie, but it impresses by numbers. Michael Bolton III, one of the commentators (and TEST alliance member) seemed to be close to a heart attack during the match.

My favorite when it came to the setup and originality was the last round-of-sixteen match between Exodus. and Agony Empire. Agony’s team defied all standard logic:

  • Instead of as many ships as allowed, they brought only seven of twelve.
  • The rules required that you bring no more than one logistics ship, and no more than one ship with repairs. Instead of the obvious logistics choice, they put their repair modules on a Tengu.
  • They brought several ships that are typically armor tanked into a shield tank setup.

The reason this setup worked was because of the immense tanks on each of the ships they brought. They set it up in a way that it was almost impossible for the opposing team to kill any ship, and also almost impossible to run out of capacitor, so they could keep up repairs for the whole duration of the match. Of course, their DPS suffered greatly, but their reasoning was that in the end, the team with more points would advance. Which meant killing a single frigate in the available 10 minutes would be enough to advance.

It almost worked out. Agony killed two frigates, and would’ve advanced, but then Exodus. managed to find a weak(er) spot and kill one of the Agony ships before it could be repaired back up. From that point, the match was over.

The final reason why I like this match is because I figured it out really early, while the commentators were clueless for half the match, wondering what the hell Agony was thinking bringing such a setup. Yes, I’m smug, thank you! But it was such a beautifully crafted, interdependent group of ships, with cap transfers, repairs, and massive tanks, all tailored to eke out this minimum-point victory. I’m really sad it didn’t work out in the end.

And now for something completely different

CCP has been toying with one of those fun side projects called “skyward sphere”. It basically is a light plastic cast structure in the form of an EVE Online capsule, that was to be sent to the official border of space (100km above ground) via a weather balloon. The capsule contained the names and portraits of all EVE players who had an active subscription to EVE on 31 December, 2001. Originally, the sphere was to be launched during fanfest, but bad weather made this impossible. CCP launched the sphere a few weeks later, with cameras that streamed the ascend and descent. Sadly, the balloon only got into stratosphere, but the pictures are stunning nonetheless:

I think this is a very cool idea, and CCP already said they want to try again. The footage from the launch was shown in an inter-match break during the Alliance Tournament. Preceding it, there was a very funny skit about “CCP Space Laboratories”, complete with spoofs of Carl Sagan spoof , a German rocket scientist, and “live” centrifuge experiments with hamsters. Sadly, it is not featured by CCP in their youtube video collection, and I couldn’t find it anywhere either. I really want to watch it again.

Finally, the tournament’s live streaming was… less than optimal at times. So, CCP decided to do something about it:

The EVE Alliance Tournament X

EVE Online

Because this post kept getting longer and longer, I decided to split it in two. This is part one. Part two will be released when it’s ready(tm), hopefully tomorrow or on the weekend.

And the winner is… somebody who nobody seemed to have on their list. Me neither, but that’s not a surprise, seeing how I still know very little about powerhouse corps in EVE. So, congratulations Verge of Collapse!

With that out, let’s look at a couple of features. Warning: This will contain tactical theorizing by someone who doesn’t have any clue. As always, I will try to keep it accessible to people without much knowledge about EVE. This is on the one hand to keep it understandable for non-EVE-players, but also because my own knowledge is still limited.

The rules

The tournament started with preliminary group stages, where each team was allowed to bring up to 6 ships worth up to 50 points total. The points list was decided and published beforehand by CCP. The cheapest ships (T1 frigates) cost 2 points, up to 20 points for the most expensive (faction battleships). After the group stages, the top 50% of teams went into an intermediate group stage of 4 teams each, fighting round-robin team battles, with the top two teams from each group progressing to an elimination stage. In those two groups, the limits were doubled: up to 12 ships worth up to 100 points in total. The winner was decided by looking at who had killed more ship-points of the opposing team within 10 minutes (or until one team was eliminated, then the survivor was declared the winner, obviously).

The setups

One common feature of almost all setups was a dual-battle approach. Most teams brought a group of battleships or battlecruisers for the “big fight”, and a bunch of assault, electronic attack, or plain T1 frigates for a “support fight”. In addition, many teams brought one or two cruisers for logistics (“healing”) or various forms of “debuffing” (neuts, damps). A decisive win in one of these two could decide the battle. Winning the big-ship fight left the enemy with too little firepower to win; wiping out the enemy’s support ships allowed you to cripple the big ships and sway that fight in your favor. This could make for interesting battles, because several things happened at the same time.

There were, of course, exceptions to that rule. Especially during the last battles of the intermediate group stages, if out the outcome didn’t matter any more for qualification, teams brought a lot of “comedy setups”, These fights were actually fun to watch, because they brought some variety.

Other than that, it seemed to me as if there were three main setups that worked a bit like rock-paper-scissors with each other, and another one or two slightly less popular setups. These dominated the tournament, especially as it progressed.


The Minmatar Rush: Felt to me like the most popular setup. The backbone was a relatively large group of T1 and T2 Minmatar battlecruisers, Sleipnirs and Cyclones, specifically. Typically supported by a Scimitar for logistics and ASBs on each ship (more about ASBs in a minute). These can do a frighteningly large amount of damage while being quite resilient (especially the Sleipnirs with their higher innate T2 resists).


The Double/Triple Vindicators: Seemed to work like a great counter to the Rush. The Vindicators (or, as a replacement, sometimes the similar Kronos) are Gallente faction battleships that come with a bonus to webs. If anything comes into their web range, they can slow it down by 90%. This spells doom for the Minmatar battlecruisers, who rely on speed to evade damage from battleships. In addition, the Vindicators can tank an immense amount of damage, especially when supported by an Oneiros Logistics.


The Vargurs: It wasn’t a very popular setup overall, but by the virtue of HUN Reloaded, who went all the way into the final by bringing the same setup over and over again, it made this list. On paper, it looked like a very weird idea. The Vargurs are Marauders, a class of ships that is typically associated with PvE rather than PvP. However, this setup was very flexible, and maybe HUN also was lucky that they always seemed to bring the right counter to each battle. It makes a great counter to the Vindicators, because the Vargurs can stay out of range of the webs, and project a huge amount of damage on battleships. It could also work well against Minamatar Rush teams, provided the support frigates could pin down their enemies, and the Vargurs and their Scimitar Logistics weren’t sensor damped and therefore could project damage from range. HUN even survived an ECM team, which is all the more surprising seeing how ECM is typically the Marauders’ Achilles heel. They just happened to bring support with remote sensor boosters to counter the ECM in exactly the right fight. Honi soit qui mal y pense? I don’t know. The Vargurs finally met their demise in the final match at the hands of a Minmatar Rush team with heavy dampening fielded by Verge of Collapse.


ECM: Every now and then, teams fielded an ECM setup. This is typically very risky and chance-based. Since ECM only has a chance to jam the enemy ships, the fight can easily go either way, and typically ends in total destruction for one of the teams. If you manage to jam out most of the opponents ships until you can kill one or two, you can apply more and more jammers to fewer and fewer ships, which increases the chance that they stay jammed, which makes for a safe victory. If, on the other hands, the jams do not work in the beginning, it is easy to lose one or two of your (typically much weaker in both offense and defense) ECM ships, and the fights tips the other way: you have fewer and fewer jammers left to jam the other team, ships get jammed less often, you lose more ECM ships, and you’re downhill without a chance to recover. I still enjoyed these a lot, maybe because I’m a Caldari pilot myself, and ECM is Caldari territory (and also sadly one of the few setups you actually see many Caldari ships in).


Drone Boats: Also a rather rare setup, the drone teams benefit from two properties of drones. They can reach out quite far with their drones, and they are much less susceptible to ECM, because drones keep attacking their target even if you lose a ship lock due to jams. (They also can switch between light and heavy drone types, so they can kill frigates and battleships equally well, though that wasn’t that important in the tournament, with the drone boats bringing the heavy DPS and the frigates killing each other.) Their downside is the typically more fragile drone boats, and the fact that it seems to be hard to actually get the drones to do the on-paper damage during a real fight. Also the fact that drones typically have to travel to their target first to attack from close, so there is considerable downtime if you switch targets. These downsides resulted in drone teams not doing very well overall. Props for trying, though!

I Need a Gamepad

General Game-related Blathering,

I never thought I’d say that. But with the amount of games that are console ports, it seems like a gamepad for my PC would be a wise investment. It’s just that I have absolutely no idea what I should get.

So I’m open to suggestions of any kind.

Maybe some background because I assume “I need a gamepad” is about as specific as “Good morning, I would like to buy a computer”.

  • I like the PlayStation controller. I played a lot of games with them, and got used to the layout. Conversely, I am not a big fan of the X-Box layout with the weirdly out-of-place analog pad on the left hand side. So I’d very much prefer something that looked more like the former than the latter.
  • It should work with most games. (Duh) Back when I last owned a gamepad, that wasn’t an issue. A gamepad was a gamepad. Granted, that was when my gamepad looked like a Super Nintendo controller and was connected to the computer via my Sound Blaster 16’s “game port”. So times might have changed, and a PC game ported from the PlayStation might only work with some controllers, and a game ported from X-Box only with others?
  • Wireless sounds good in theory, because I have this tendency to make a mess out of cables. On the other hand, I’m worried about battery life and robustness of the wireless connection, especially with a wireless mouse already around.
  • Price is not a complete non-issue, but if you had good experiences with comfort and longevity, I’m willing to pay for that.

So please tell me if you had particularly good or bad experiences with a certain pad, and could suggest a good buy.

Fifteen Million Skill Points

EVE Online,

One of the things I like about Wilhelm’s posts at the Ancient Gaming Noob is that they work very well for historical reference. For EVE, he has posted for years his skill point distribution at every 10-million milestone.

When I picked up EVE again 4 months ago, I was above the 10 million mark, and I didn’t even think of logging my skill points either. On the other hand, even at optimum training speed, it will take more than another two months before I hit the 20 million mark. So I’ll do an intermediate step and look at my skill point distribution when I hit 15 million skill points three weeks ago. Here we go, in decreasing order of points:

Engineering                  2,924,345
Spaceship Command            2,637,897
Missile Launcher Operation   1,664,365
Gunnery                      1,599,645
Trade                        1,338,235
Navigation                   1,117,391
Drones                         774,741
Electronics                    756,776
Industry                       690,204
Mechanics                      659,598
Leadership                     421,824
Science                        213,770
Social                         198,435
Corporation Management           1,000
Total                      ~15,000,000

A look at my current skills

The first thing you might notice is the large amount spent in Engineering, even more than Spaceship Command. This is mostly due to shield tanking skills that I trained mostly without playing during one of the previous 2-months-for-the-price-of-1 offers. It ties in really well with one of my favorite ships, the Drake, which I like to fly both in PvE and PvP. Another hefty contributor are capacitor skills – the “Core Capacitor” certificate is the only one I have at Elite level, actually.

The Harpy is the most recent ship I learned to fly on my way to 15 million SP. It’s a tough assault frigate (and the first T2 combat ship I can fly!). I really like flying Harpies, they can take a beating and dish them out. If only they were a bit faster… I can also fly their sister ship, the Hawks, but I don’t have appropriate rocket skills to make them worth it.

Next up, Spaceship command. Not a big surprise here. I’m still mostly invested into Caldari, which means I can fly everything T1 up to battleships, and currently branching into T2 frigates. At the point of that snapshot, I could fly Caldari assault frigates and was just about to finish training for interceptors. The odd-non-Caldari-out is Gallente Industrial, which I trained to V early on during my aborted industrial career. At least it means I can fly the largest T1 hauler there is.

Missile Launcher Operations: also not a big surprise, considering I was exclusively a PvEer until a short while ago. Most of these are missile support skills and the training for T2 heavy missiles. (for my Drake – maybe the fact that I have all the cool skills for it is the reason I like that ship so much?)

Gunnery would’ve been really interesting to watch since the 10 million mark. I’ll go out on a limb and claim that of the 5 million difference from 10 to 15, I spent half my skill points in gunnery. (Nevermind that this isn’t even possible because then I would’ve started at -900,000 skill points in that category. Details!) Until I joined the uni, I was all about missiles. There was no motivation for me to train guns, because missiles are just so much better in PvE. I started investing in gunnery support skills quite heavily recently though, and now can use T2 small hybrid weapons, and am now working towards T2 medium hybrids.

Trade: Of the 1.34 million skill points, 1.28 million are spent in Accounting and Broker Relations V. I trained those very early on, because I was looking into an industrial and trade career, and these meant more money made on trading. They are still kinda useful… I guess. I don’t expect to see any changes in that category any time soon.

Navigation: This is mostly support skills. Until I start using jump drives (read: not any time soon, potentially never), I don’t expect to invest a lot more points here. I got almost everything I want, except High Speed Maneuvering V. Oh. Right. Yeah. This one is really nice, but the train is soooooo long. I’ll get back to that at some point.

Drones: I can fly T2 light and medium drones of every race now, and I don’t have any plans to train up to T2 heavies any time soon. Takes so long. I really should get to work on my support skills in that category at some point, though. I’ve been very negligent there.

Electronics: I’m surprised how few points I have in that category, even though it felt to me like I trained many different things there. It’s probably because I trained almost nothing to level V, which is where the skill points ramp up.

Industry: Mostly from my early industrial days. Skills to get to perfect refining of minerals, which my alt would mine and I would pick up in my Iteron V.

Mechanics: Even though I know that my armor tanking skills suck, I’m still shocked at the low number of points invested here. I will really need to work on that soon. Only being able to fly shield tanked ships and no armor tanked ships restricts me a lot when fleets go out, because they often ask for a specific tank type.

Leadership: These were trained up in two surges. The first one occurred when I trained this character to become a competent mining foreman two years ago. The second time I touched skills in this category was recently, to be able to be a squad commander for Uni fleets, and pass on bonuses properly.

Science: I guess I’m not gud with ze science. Maybe I should reconsider my real-world occupation? I am very thankful I at least have an alt with all those scanning skills that I know I will need at some point.

Social: So not only am I too dumb for science, I’m also antisocial. Go me!

Corporation Management: I’m not even sure why I trained that. I guess I needed that one skill to anchor containers in space?

The Mandatory Titan Test

Every post with meaningless statistics needs an equally meaningless goal to measure progress to. Thankfully, Wilhelm already came up with one: How long does it take me, from my current point in time, to gather the skills to fly a Caldari Titan? EVEMon tells me it’s 118 days. So if I wanted, I could fly around in a Titan by Christmas. Well, and if I had the money. And a nullsec alliance that would allow me to fly around in a multi-billion ship without proper support skills.

Future Plans

A short while ago, I used my first neural remap ever. I’m now set up with very high Perception and Willpower skills. This means that I am very fast at training Spaceship Command and Gunnery skills, but slower at a lot of other things. Most notably, training armor tanking skills will take longer than before. Maybe I should’ve thought of that before. Oh well. But with the remap the way it is, I expect to pick up skills for a lot more guns and ships in the next few million skill points. By the end of the year, I should be a competent pilot in several races’ ships and their preferred weapons. Though, it’s hard to plan that far ahead. If I decide to join a corp, they will probably ask me to train skills that benefit them or fit with their fleet doctrines. Which hopefully should still mean mostly Perc/Will skills, so I’m not too worried. My prediction for the 20 million skill point mark: Gunnery and Spaceship Command will see the most development, with Mechanics (for armor tanking) coming third. The rest will be a smattering here and there to round off stuff.

We’ll see how right or wrong I am in about 2-3 months.

Restarting My Feed Reader

Even More General Blathering

So, as I said in my short “I’m not dead” post, I stopped reading other people’s blogs for some time, too. They had the gall to keep posting, though! The nerve! So when I opened my feed reader, I was greeted by no fewer than 812 MMO blog posts.

Oops.

There was no way I would be able to read them all in any sensible amount of time, so I had to grab my machete and cut down left and right. I went through all posts and marked as read lots of them, depending on their topics. I marked as read, but didn’t read:

  • Everything related to Guild Wars 2. I’m not all that interested in the game. Maybe I’ll try it at a later point, but I only skimmed over the beta-related posts when I was still reading daily, so this was a no-brainer. I guess if I’m interested, I’ll just read whatever posts will float by from now on.
  • Everything related to Mass Effect 3. I haven’t played the game yet, but want to at some point. I didn’t read any of those posts because 90% of them were about the game’s ending, and as such spoilers. All I gathered was that the ending sucked, and that people weren’t out of their minds with astonishment over the alternate ending either.
  • Everything related to SW:TOR. That means one blog got completed marked as read without ever looking at the posts. Sorry Shintar of Going Commando! I just never got into the game. Just like with Guild Wars 2 however, I’ll probably read what will float by from now on. From skimming over posts in other blogs, I gathered that there are server merges (probably a healthy thing), some confusion about the implementation of said merges, and an unlimited trial just like with WoW and RIFT. That’s all I need to know right now.
  • Almost everything related to Diablo 3. Beta didn’t grab me, so eh.
  • Most things related to RIFT. I read there will be an expansion. My highest character is somewhere in the 40ies. I’ll probably follow the news once the expansion is released.

Of course, that means I probably missed a lot. The whole 38 Studios fiasco is something I only heard very vague things about, and might read up on at a later point. There was some coverage about City of Steam in some blogs, but it went unread by me. Finally, sorry to the MMO Melting Pot! You’re great, but I had almost 100 posts from your feed, and seeing how each of these links to, on average, 2-3 other blog posts, that went out of hand too fast. I marked as read everything except for the last 5 posts. It’s sad, but I had to cut somewhere.

Now I’m down to 324 posts. Hm. Might still take some time until I’m back on top of everything.

My Life as an EVE Uni Undergraduate

EVE Online

Just to get going again, here one of those “what I did” posts.

It was actually quite fascinating. “Was” because I just was graduated last weekend. “Was graduated” instead of “graduated” because, in contrast to a real-world university, you don’t take exams on the way and write a thesis at the end as well-defined milestones. In EVE University, you rather rack up participation and show what is called “a general understanding of all things EVE”. So the graduation itself feels a bit like a passive process because you apply at some point and then wait. (In all fairness, it went quite fast for me, my wait was less than a week from application to graduation.)

Look mum, my first real medal!

So now that I graduated, this is a great chance to give you an overview of all the things I did in the last two months when I played:

Participation in classes: The UNI runs a nice class program. Older players give an overview over basic (shield or armor tanking, trading) or more advanced (interceptors, assault frigates in PvP) topics at pre-announced times to newer players. It’s a great system, it works surprisingly well, and quite a few people participate as part-time-teachers.

This shirt design explains what I like about the Uni.

Giving classes: To be fair, I’ve only given one class yet. It’s a topic I really like though (What is the EVE test server, and why would you want to play on it from time to time?), and I felt competent because it doesn’t involve a lot of detailed EVE knowledge, but also “common sense” from how development cycles work in other games. I’m looking into teaching more classes soon, but I’m not sure yet what I feel sufficiently competent about.

PvP: Oh yes, I did a lot of that. In fact, for a couple of days, I peaked at no. 27 (of a 2800+ member organization) for top kills on a 90-day moving window. For someone who never liked PvP before, this is an interesting turn of events. My doing PvP involved wrapping up the RvB war I talked about in the last post two months ago, moving full-time into the University’s Low-Sec camp (more about that in a second), and fighting in a whole bunch of other wars. The Low-Sec camp is a group of Uni people who (surprise!) spend most of their time in low-security space: less regimented areas of space in which you can’t expect much NPC help if you’re attacked, and therefore have to watch your own back. You tend to be able to earn a bit more money from the PvE parts of the game, but you have to make sure that this isn’t offset by being blown up by pirates.
Speaking of pirates, we had our fair share of run-ins. One problem that we had is that many pirates operate in small groups. The University’s credo is “strength in numbers” though. And like always in EVE, there are only two outcomes of a battle: if you win, you ridicule the other for being bad. If you lose, you complain about being “blobbed” (outnumbered, unfair fight!). Yes, I’m exaggerating for the sake of the argument. So the university wasn’t that well liked in some pockets of space.
At some point in late May or early June, a new patch was released that changed the war mechanics in a critical point. As an effect, it was now a lot cheaper to declare war on the Uni. And the war decs came in, mostly from pirate corps that then descended on PvEers that were not prepared to fight in (otherwise relatively safe) strongly-regimented high-sec space. Normally, if you attacked one of them, you would be blown up by CONCORD police forces (you might or might not take your target down with you if you did enough damage fast enough). With the officially declared war though, the police looked the other way. So the low-sec camp was in the line of fire from inside very fast, too, being accused of “drawing wardecs on us” by some members. It was decided to move a few systems over, but this didn’t work well, either. In fact, it worked out worse. News travel fast, and moving after being wardec’d left an impression. Within a week, we had no less than four war declarations from alliances at our new place. We fought it out for some time, while the university’s diplomats worked behind the scenes. In the end, we decided to move yet again, but managed to come up with an agreement with several of the alliances that made nobody lose face and ended the confrontation on amicable terms. Now the low-sec camp’s base of operations is at the other end of the universe, and I heard its nice, quiet, and so far war-dec free, but I haven’t had time to check it out myself yet because of the fourth thing I did:

PvE: I’ve been back to running missions for a bit. I started when the last move was announced, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It was a long move to a far-away system, I didn’t know yet what the situation would be and whether we would have to move again within weeks (which is quite annoying because moving all your ships from one place to another is quite a logistic endeavor). So I started to run missions again, with the goal of improving my standing with some of the factions. I managed to increase my standings with the Ministry of Internal Order enough that I could start running the Amarr Epic Arc by last weekend. I’m currently working on that, and it will probably take me another day or two to finish, because the missions are quite long and also harder than the typical level-4 missions that I’ve run so far. It’s nice so far though, it’s a change of pace and you get a bit of story to boot, though I’m not yet sure what to make of it.

So that’s what I’ve done recently. What next? In-game, I’ll probably stay in the Uni for some more time as a post-graduate. There are currently some interesting things evolving (that I can maybe write about soon), and I’ll see whether that interests me and encourages me to stay for a long time. Otherwise, I’ll probably go and look for a sov-holding nullsec corp.

I think another post is in order to talk about what I’ve not done recently, although I had had plans for it…

I learned one thing

Even More General Blathering

There are many things that can keep you from posting. For me, it started with being really engulfed into EVE, and the old problem: do I rather want to play, or write about playing? It continued then with extra load from work, and a bad cold that disabled me for a week. And then, suddenly, it was several weeks, almost a month, since the last post. And I felt slightly intimidated to start again. With that much of a break, you’d need a killer of a post as a comeback, right? So, I waited even more to come up with something amazing. At some point, I didn’t even read other people’s posts any more because I started feeling bad about just dropping out.

Long story short, rule number 1: never ever stop posting. It’ll just make it that much harder to get back. Write silly uninteresting stuff rather than nothing.

Tales from the War

EVE Online, ,

As I’ve mentioned a couple of days ago, Red vs. Blue declared war on EVE University, effective last Friday.

War, at least in the Uni, is weird. It’s a bit like EVE turned up to eleven: you sit around even more before anything happens, but then it all happens on much larger scales. For example, in the Uni, you are not allowed to undock during wartime if you’re on your own, you’re not allowed to fly certain expensive ships, you’re not allowed to engage in activities such as mining (although, with Hulkageddon going on, that’s hardly a limitation). So you sit in station waiting for things to happen. And wait. And wait.

And then, a fleet is formed, and you wait even more. And when you’re at the point where you think you won’t be able to take it any more soon, suddenly, you get moving. Finding a fleet, running away from a fleet, or sometimes, even engaging a fleet. Battles can be small or large, they can be even or lopsided. We’ve had it all in the last couple of days.

The war has been a mixed bag so far for both parties. We, the university, started it on a high note, scoring the first kill of the war, and winning the first few engagements. For those that do not know, winning or losing is typically measured by two things: a fleet can have a specific goal, such as driving enemies out of a system. More often though, like everything in EVE, it all comes down to cold hard numbers, in this case the “ISK efficiency”. Whoever loses more ISK worth of ships is considered the loser of an engagement.

As I said, the war started reasonably well, with the Uni being ahead with an efficiency of about 60%; meaning, 60% of all wartime losses in ISK were the enemy’s, and only 40% were ours – or, us being 50% more efficient (because 60% is 50% more than 40%. Wheeee, Math 101!). We typically lost more ships, but RvB lost the larger and more expensive ones. That shows the difference between the two corps well, too: my impression is that on average, Red vs. Blue has older and more experienced players, not to mention that they’re specifically a PvP corp, as opposed to the Uni. The Uni’s ways of engaging enemies is typically outnumbering them in huge blobs of cheap ships.

The problem with that difference is that those older players also were more eager and better able to reship – it seems their coffers are just better filled, or they’re more willing to throw money at the war. They also have more players, which makes the whole “outnumbering your enemy in huge blobs of cheap ships” point a bit moot. We definitely felt that over the weekend. We had several ugly losses, with whole fleets getting wiped out by battleship- and logistics-heavy RvB fleets. We seemed to have a ridiculous amount of spies in our ranks, with one fleet being destroyed after a five-person deep command chain was immediately killed at the beginning of the fight, and people panicking and losing coordination. By Sunday, our efficiency had come down to barely 40%. RvB also went into our home system and hit our player-owned starbase (POS) hard, driving the control tower into reinforce mode. That meant that our starbase was vulnerable, and another attack would probably mean the loss of our precious base.

Now, this is not a real problem from a financial point of view. A player-owned starbase isn’t cheap, but it’s also not hideously expensive. In fact, the initial cost of the modules isn’t even that large compared to the upkeep that you have to pay to keep them afloat. Hitting our PoS has several other effects:

  1. A POS is an absolutely safe area in space for the owner. Until the tower is destroyed, it projects a force field that makes everything inside it (except for the tower itself) untargetable and invincible. While it also isn’t possible for the owners to shoot the attackers from inside, a safe spot in space shouldn’t be underestimated in a game that otherwise is notoriously unsafe outside of NPC stations. In corporations that have fleets of capital ships (which the Uni doesn’t), POSs are also the only points where capital pilots can relax, because capital ships are too large to dock in NPC stations.
  2. A POS can make a great psychological focus. The enemy might want to take it down, you might want to defend it, with a fervor on both sides that far outweighs the economical and strategical importance.
  3. When a POS tower is forced into reinforcement, it creates a default point in time for two fleets to clash. Let me explain in a nutshell: a tower has an immense amount of shields and armor. If an enemy fleet drives the shields down to 25%, the tower enters reinforce mode for a certain amount of time, defined by its current fuel reserves. During reinforce mode, the tower is both invulnerable and unrepairable. The reinforce timer is publicly visible. The enemy fleet will want to hit the tower as soon as it comes out of reinforce. The defender fleet will want to repair the tower as soon as it comes out of reinforce. There is no better way to agree on a time to field large fleets to clash.

Calls went out. Everybody was urged to be there when the tower came out of reinforcement.

And come we did. We fielded half a dozen fleets with more than 400 pilots altogether. RvB brought a similar number. The battle was on.

And we won. We won in a battle that was immense both in numbers and in length. The whole encounter took more than 2 hours, with pilots who lost their ships trying to reship and rejoin the battle. I lost two EWAR blackbirds early on, then came back in a Drake and miraculously survived until the end of the battle. Because we’re still at war, I will only show a couple of screenshots that don’t show names. This is from the second half of the battle when many people already had lost their ships. (I’m really bad at hitting the Print Screen button when the really interesting stuff happens.) It should give you an idea of the chaos and sheer amount of shooting and killing going on:

Each icon is either a current or a deceased pilot.

The battle was large enough that time dilation kicked in at several points, I think I saw the 50% mark at least once. Everybody playing EVE at that time should have had the chance to notice something big was going on:

If you set your universe map to show ship kills in the last hour, the hotspot was impossible to miss.

I made this screenshot about 20 minutes after the large battle, so the peak was already over, and it still showed more than 1000 ships destroyed in the last hour:

That sure left a mark on the map.

Even the older players commented that it was one of the largest, if not the largest, non-capital-ship battles they’ve ever witnessed. The total tally of destroyed assets was a mind-blowing (to me) 57 billion ISK. It’s not completely fair to do the conversion (because it doesn’t factor in things such as the pains of liquidating all the involved assets, and the fact that implants, which contributed a sizable amount to those numbers, cannot be resold at all), but at the current PLEX price of 490 million ISK, that’s almost 10 years of subscription time. Or more than €1500. That’s more than $2000, for you people with the green money. In less than 3 hours. That’s… a bit scary. On the other hand, with the numbers involved, that’s probably only about €2-3 per player on average. It still gave me a bit of perspective.

After the battle was over, we finally could tend to our control tower, and repaired the shields in about an hour.

After about an hour, the shields were restored to full. My lowly POSprey probably didn't contribute to any noticeable effect, but it's the thought that counts.

Of course, the war isn’t over. It will go for at least another 3 days, and potentially longer, if RvB renews the declaration (at a steadily increasing price, I was told). Now is probably the most dangerous time for us. I’ve seen it before in raiding guilds: your finally, after much work, kill a hard boss, you are feel like nothing can stop you… and next week you will have the worst performance in history. Overconfidence is most dangerous.

We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t had the chance yet to shoot at Cyndre, I think. Then again, how would I know? I don’t even know what name he goes by in EVE. I wonder whether he was there last night.

A Short Introduction Into EVE Class Composition

EVE Online,

When it comes to game mechanics, EVE is just yet another MMORPG. It’s skill-based, not class-based, but it has distinct roles that you want to train up your skills for. The typical roles I know in other games are tank, damage, healer, buffer, and debuffer. EVE is quite similar. It lacks tanks, but adds tacklers. For anybody who doesn’t know much about EVE, I though I’d make a short overview of the “jobs”. I’ll try and look at the different roles from a fleet perspective. Of course, in very small groups, or if you’re on your own, you might want to fulfill several roles at once to be successful.

Tank

As I said, EVE doesn’t really have them. In PvP, tanks are useless. In PvE (missions etc.), you technically can try and get a ship with superior defense to “tank” damage for other ships, but there are no taunt mechanics or anything like that.

Damage

Typically done by the larger ships. For the fleets I fly in, this means battlecruisers and battleships. Above that, capital ships start, some of which can pack impressive firepower. In my case, I bought a couple of Drakes for the current UNI war. Drakes are battlecruisers that specialize in missile damage. For the most part, missiles are considered inferior in fleets, because they have a travel time to the target (whereas guns are modeled as having instant travel time for their projectiles), which means they sometimes simply might reach their target after it is actually down. The Drake is a very very capable mission runner ship though, and last time I picked up EVE, I had specialized in the two things Drakes do well: shoot missiles, and take a decent amount of damage before they go down. So Drakes it is for me. Besides, I can’t properly fly any battleships yet. I can fly around in them, but I’m not very effective at actually doing anything.

Healing

The “healer” ships in EVE are called logistics. They are typically highly sought after, because there are no really viable basic ships that do logistics well. You need to train into Tier 2 cruisers, which takes quite some time. (Or into carriers, which are capital ships, so obviously take even more time to train.) Logistics come in two flavors: shield healing and armor healing. Depending on whether the ships in your fleet specialized in increasing their shield or armor resistances, one or the other is more desirable, obviously. I can’t fly Logistics ships at the moment, hence I didn’t bother buying any. I did fit out a basic “POSprey” though. It’s a basic ship (the Osprey) that is fit to sacrifice all defenses for an at least acceptable amount of shield healing. The idea is to use it if a Player Owned Starbase is attacked: as long as the control tower of that station is up, it projects an invulnerability field around it. You can sit in the invulnerability field (hence no need for defenses) and help heal the shields of the control tower, hoping the POS will survive the attack.

Buffing

There are several things you can do to help out other ships. First of all, you can transfer capacitor energy from your ship to another. This is a job that is also subsumed under “Logistics” in EVE. Capacitor could be considered the “mana” of EVE. Most modules that you fit onto your ship will need capacitor to do anything. I don’t have experience with these kinds of ships, but I assume they would fit modules that increase their own capacitor recharge speed, so they can then support other ships by beaming it over. Second, you can fit modules onto ships that directly buff stats of your whole fleet: movement speed, shield and armor amount, etc. They have ludicrous CPU requirements that mean they can only be used on ships that come with some sort of bonus (such as “99% reduced CPU need for warfare link modules”). These ships are capital command ships, and battlecruisers. As I said, I can fly the drake, a battlecruiser, but I don’t have the skills to use warfare link modules, so I can’t be a buffer yet.

Debuffing

These are typically called “EWAR” (electronic warfare) in EVE. Debuffs come in four categories. Tracking disruptors make it harder for the debuffed ship to properly shoot enemies. Target painters make it easier to hit a target. This can be especially useful because larger ships have a hard time hitting smaller ships with their larger weapons (due to, for example, slower tracking speed – you see how the two belong together?). Sensor dampeners reduce the lock-on range for ships (you need to lock onto targets before you can shoot/debuff/buff them). ECM (electronic countermeasures) make the target completely lose all locks and unable to lock onto new targets.

That sounds very overpowered, and it would be, if not for a small detail: while the other debuffs are applied to a target and do their job 100% of the time, ECM only has a chance of working. Every 20 seconds, the attacker rolls a random number based on their ECM strength, and the attacked rolls a number based on their ship sensor strength (which is based on the ship type – larger ships typically have stronger sensors – and can be further boosted by certain modules). I have halfway decent skills for ECM, so I bought a couple of Blackbirds, which are dedicated ECM cruiser-class ships.

Tackler

These fill one of the idiosyncratic EVE niches. In EVE, it is very easy to get away from fights. You hit your warp drive button, warp far far away, dock up in a station, and that’s it, you’re safe. To actually make people stay when the fight is not going their way, you need to deactivate their warp drivers by means of warp disruptors or scramblers (I won’t go into the details of the differences between them). Many larger ships fit at least one warp disruptor module, but larger ships are typically slow, so it’s hard for them to get into range and apply their modules. This is where the small ships, frigates specifically, come into play. They are fast, they are cheap, and they need very few skills to fly. The typical role of a new player in fleets is to fly a tackle frigate, a fast, lightly tanked ship that has one or several warp disruptor modules (typically complemented by a “webber” or two, which slows down ships that it gets applied to). The hope of a frigate pilot is that he’ll be able to dive in fast, stay close to its target, and orbit around it at high speed, so the enemy’s weapons won’t be able to hit it.

That often doesn’t work, especially if you’re new to the job. So the next best thing is to dive in fast, apply a tackle and simply survive long enough that others can come in and help tackling down the enemy ship. Tackle frigate pilots die. A lot. My personal opinion is that flying a tackle frigate as a new player is both a blessing and a curse. The ships are cheap, so you don’t lose much when you get blown up. On the other hand, you will get blown up, often very early, and you don’t have much margin for error. I am not that good at flying tackle frigates, I often die early enough that I won’t see much of the actual fight at all. Nevertheless, I bought a few frigates just to have them around in case we really need more people to fly them. Did I mention they are cheap enough I don’t really care?

 

You could argue that this list lacks several roles, either because I don’t have much experience with them (travel time decrease: some ships can put up jump portals that allow fleets to quickly jump to systems several normal stargate jumps away), or I’m not sure I’d consider them a full-fledged role instead of a sub-role (scouts). Furthermore, I am still new to many EVE mechanics, so I probably got several things wrong, and forgot a bunch of interesting details. So be careful with that information, and you’re welcome to point out mistakes so I can correct them. The main reason of this post is: I realized that it is really hard for people, even other RPG players, to follow things you say and write about EVE, because many things work so differently in the game – or work similarly, but have totally different names.