Botting Journey to Deep Nullsec

Posted: 2012-03-01 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment

After seeing JonnyPew’s videos on how to fit a bomber and search for bot activity in nullsec, I set on my own journey to see if I could find them action.

His guide shows how to fit a Hound, which I cannot fly. Luckily the fitting differences between racial bombers are not that high so I changed one or two modules and bought up Nemesis fit. The total was around 36 M, which included four bombs and a compliment of torpedoes.

After looking at a few regions on Dotlan, I found a pocket of space that contained a high (inhuman) amount of NPC kills. You can easily see these by filtering for NPC Kills over the past 24 hours and seeing areas where 10,000+ NPC kills occurred.

I set course and flew out of Jita 4-4 towards the unknown, 67 jumps to be exact.

I’ve spent a far amount of time in nullsec, navigating with large fleets and going on solo roams in cloakey ships so I was confident in my ability to dodge bubble camps. I did have to pass through the N-RAEL system, which is a known hotspot as it connects Empire space to the Great Wildlands. I watched the gate and picked a quiet hour to sneak in after seeing a few industrialists go back and forth.

Pretty uneventful until I got into the destination constellation, where the locals were pretty active. The final jump laded me right into a pile of bubbles. It was clear that the locals did not want a lot of traffic to get around easily.

I found a celestial, aligned, cycled the MWD, and cloaked. When I breached the bubbles, I went into warp. I made a few safe spots and refreshed the directional scanner to get a good feeling of what was around me. There was only one Force Field on scanner, a Drake, and a few frigates.

Note: Count the number of towers and force fields listed on the directional scanner. If the count does not match, then a tower is offline and you might be able to see if any goodies were left anchored.

I’ve been hanging around the deep nullsec system for a week now, monitoring activities and taking names. I haven’t pounced on a ratter yet as every time I login, I see a lonely Drake warp to a safe POS and disconnect.

Community Shout-Outs

Posted: 2012-02-21 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, featured | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments

What sources of player produced content have you been finding really entertaining? Here are a some shout-outs to my favorites over the past few months.

  1. Voices from the Void Podcast [link]. The majority of the Eve podcasts have fallen into obscurity or undergone major changes. Voices continues to deliver fresh, hilariousness content with dynamic hosts. Listening to them on Monday helps the day move by faster.
  2. JonnyPew’s guides [youtube]. Cleanly edited video guides on Exploration which have expanded into bot hunting have inspired me to go Cloakey and find fresh targets.
  3. The Alturist [link]. This PVP-centric blog is full of very technical information. The “Know Your Enemy” series describes in detail a ship class and how they are used in PVP scenarios. For an industry and trading focused person, this blog offers insight into a different area of Eve.
  4. Eve-fail [link]. Fellow industry and spreadsheet aficionado discloses his methods and bottom line profits for large projects.
  5. Jester’s Trek [link]. If you need to remain up to date on anything Eve related, this man has you covered. Any news, gossip, fits, or drama will be covered by this robo-blogger within a few minutes of happening.
  6. CCP Punkturis [twitter]. Best troll and very active UI programmer that interacts with the #tweetfleet community.

3rd Party API Advocate

Posted: 2012-02-16 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Jason Parks, the creator of the popular Aura suite for the Android platform, proposed a few questions on Google+ in regards to my platform for CSM7. For the past few months we have exchanged a few emails about our Eve projects, which would not even be possible without the wonderful API.

Given our shared passion for development work, he invited me to contribute to the Aura project. The fancy graphs and reporting logic that I have been able to generate out of my Wallet Manager site would be a wonderful addition to his suite (I hope to bring some of this design to the Eve client — more on that later).

Sadly, I don’t have a lot of time to pickup the Android framework so I haven’t taken him up on his offer to collaborate. I would, however, like to declare that given my background in 3rd party projects for Eve, the struggles of developers will be a major source of direction on my part if I become a member of the CSM.

The Questions

Here are responses to Jason’s questions that will hopefully lock-in his vote for me:

POS management redesign
Can you elaborate a bit on this? I made a post here on Google+ that has my ideas (https://plus.google.com/u/0/115407184179295920691/posts/hJyoCgbo6tZ). What do you think about it? Would you push for something like this?

From what I have read from various CCP developers, the code that runs the POS’es is old and terribly maintained. I’m sure it was written years ago with no commenting or documentation and nobody wants to open that Pandora’s box. I need more time to solidify my stance on the POS rework. I need to pull up a recent CCP post about “castles in the sky” (?) and review CCP Greyscale’s Nullsec Development: Design Goals post. Look for a post soon on this.

API
Will you be our API champion? I would like someone to raise the suggestions that many of the 3rd-party devs. I have ideas that I will raise at fanfest when I can again but we have no one to follow through on them. Making a post in on the forums doesn’t help until we have a champion on the CSM.

This sounds like a perfect tagline for me. “Blake Armitage — API Champion”. I would not be so involved with Eve if there wasn’t such an active and passionate 3rd party community. The ability to get data out of Eve breeds innovation and allows us to work with data in ways that CCP wouldn’t have envisioned.

Traders and industry focused people have come up with systems to track profitability, product movements, and margins. Large alliances would not exist if they could not keep track of their POS network, reinforcement timers, and sovereignty information.

The free time that developers put into these applications shows us the depth of intrigue that Eve brings to our gaming lifestyle. Expanding the API, while keeping security and automation exploits in mind, can do nothing but enhance the game.

I do hereby accept the title of “API Champion”.

Representation
Will we be able to engage with you after you are elected? This past cycle we didn’t have CSM contact and I’ve been forced to troll The Mattani and Hilmar 😉

Most definitively. I love to talk shop with the other space nerds.

API Fanfest News

In other API news CPP has a session at Fanfest this year where they will talk about a read/write API called “Carbon REST“. This topic is of particular interest to me and it saddens me that I have a conflict for Fanfest this year.

A developer preview of a new RESTful, oAuth based read/write API for Eve Online – Carbon REST.
link 

Carbon… REST…? Carbon (CCP’s new Framework) + REST (fancy client/server software architecture). From what I can gather, there are going to be some advances to the current API structure.

Having the ability to write data to the Eve database opens up a wide array of options for developers. Some of the items that I would like to see exposed are:

  • ability to send mail
  • add/remove and set standings for contacts
  • add/remove/manage calendar items
  • update the skill queue
  • update personal and corp (role dependent) ship fits. This would allow applications such as EFT, Pyfa, or Aura the ability to work directly with the fits stored on the server. You could walk around with your phone, update your fit, put your phone in your pocket, get home, and have the updated fit on the Eve client. Drag that fit to the market window (thank you CCP) and purchase. No more managing XML files posted on forums

All these benefits do come with a price. First, CCP will have to remain conscious of the ability to script input. Having the ability to update market orders or submit industry jobs opens up a dark sea of automation. Additionally, the mentality of actually making us login to the game will have to remain a priority. If you can do all of your work outside the client, why even login? The social aspect of Eve will suffer as less and less people login. No more posting “creative” images to local while you gaze at a POS bubble.

As with everything computer related, there will need to be a balance between available and security. Given my background in network security I feel that I can keep these interests in mind. Seriously, look at my books at work:

I feel that exciting times for developers are in the works and I would love the opportunity to be a strong representative of the 3rd party development community on the CSM.

tl;dr

“the struggles of developers will be a major source of direction on my part if I become a member of the CSM”

“Expanding the API, while keeping security and automation exploits in mind, can do nothing but enhance the game”

Vanguard Incursion Farming

Posted: 2012-01-20 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, screenshot, ships | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

For an excellent guide on the methods for running Incursions, review Jester’s Introduction to Incursions Part 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Given that I have Logistics V, Caldari Cruiser V, Shield/Energy Emission Systems V, and Multitasking IV, I found my way into an Incursion fleet running a Basilisk for a Shield fleet. I had Monday off and took the time to grind out Vanguard sites for stupid amounts of ISK. Our average was a little low due to members changing ships, but we still managed to pull in 93 M/hour.

My impressions of Incursions sites is that they are very formulaic. As a Logistics pilot, here are the steps to complete a Vanguard site in 4-6 minutes if you have the proper fleet composition:

  1. Get on voice comms. This is so you can talk about how easy Vanguard sites are and how rich you are becoming every 4-6 minutes. In actuality, you will use voice comms to yell at Logistic pilots if they are not paying attention or if someone deviated from the prescribed kill order and triggered the next wave.
  2. Anchor warps in to the site first which is usually your FC.
  3. Everyone else warps in, lands.
  4. Orbit the Anchor at 5,000 and lock up all your friends.
  5. Watch to see who got aggression first and start repping them.
  6. Before the site is finished, the FC will post an align to the next site. Active align.
  7. Site ends and rats despawn, fleetwarp to the next one.
  8. Go to step 2 and repeat.

I do agree that a change should be made to the risk/reward of Vanguard sites. Different waves, site types, and perhaps lengthening the time it takes for Vanguard sites seem reasonable in order to increase the amount of effort for the ISK.

Lucky Bastard XIII

Posted: 2012-01-17 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, ships | Tags: | 5 Comments

My apologies, I’ve been farting around in highsec running incursions with a shiny fleet, making me the 1% of incursion runners, according to the forums. An unfortunate side effect of this is very few funny stories, unless you can make the next Odyssey out of “I repped that guy when his shields went low, but then this other dude’s shields went low, so I repped him too; then the FC warped us out without saying anything and I lost my drones again”

The recent unwashed masses pissing in the free ISK fountain finally gave me a sense of scope. I’m doing the same thing over and over again to the extreme as a source of fun. As I said in a very depressing post I typed over the weekend and threw into the trashcan because it was too depressing, once you accomplish your goal you have to find a new one as fast as possible. Since my previous goal in Eve was “make lots of ISK” I was rapidly and easily curbstomping any source of a challenge with these 100-150 mil/hour sites.

Not that I’d stop doing them if the huddled dirty masses wern’t ruining the sites but STILL, point stands. No goal, no point, no fun.

So in an effort to fling myself back into my actual corp who had been wondering where I’d been for last few months, I grabbed a Buzzard, kit it out for scanning with an offline cyno and tore a new one on my way to Branch, which according to the corpmails is where we’re setting up. According to my lossmails, I titled the Buzzard “Lucky Bastard XIII” and flew off into the great void, pointing and laughing at anyone who dared try to lock me.

Until I got to nullsec where I realized I wasn’t sure exactly how to get to Branch. Sure, I knew where it was(kinda in the northy part), what it was (that place goons are fighting in), and the general area(above that circular place without sov) but I wasn’t sure what route to take. So, being a bit of a moron I started warping through gates based on which one moved me closer to a regional gate that pointed in the general direction of Branch.

That’s how I ended up in Venal. I jumped through a gate, there’s a Drake sitting there with me. “AHA!”, I think; “This is a perfect chance to test my microwarpdrive cloak trick, which is wholly unnecessary in all but the most coordinated gatecamps!”.

So I smoothly orient myself away from the gate, double click in space and press my MWD and cloak in that order at the perfect time, having practiced this over and over back when I was using the same trick on an Itty V. (Shut up, it worked and I couldn’t afford a Viator).

Feeling full of myself for demonstrating that months of pressing F1 through F4 whenever one of the ten grey bars on my screen turned red, I jumped through the next gate into a significantly bigger gatecamp. Remaining calm, I oriented myself, double clicked and hit my MWD and Cloak in that order.

“That module failed to activate since you are cloaked”.

For those who didn’t spend several hours cursing at an Iteron Mark V with an overloaded afterburner and a cloaking device, that message means that you were slightly off on your timing, activating the cloak and then the thrust module. On a Buzzard, the ship I was presently flying, this didn’t matter much except to a skilled gatecamp. Unfortunately I was still in the Iteron Mark V mindset from several months of pressing F1 through F4 whenever one of the ten grey bars on my screen turned red.

I instantly panicked and assumed that for some reason my CLOAK had failed to activate due to my cloak being active, so I mashed my F1 key again with all the panic of a velocity-fit Iteron V staring at a lowsec gatecamp.

It was at this point that my modules helpfully updated with the fact that my cloak had indeed been activated but since I had asked so kindly it was now turned off. For those who don’t know, there is a three to four second delay between decloaking and recloaking, probably for balance issues. More than enough time to lock me and therefore kill me.

In hindsight what was I expecting with a name like Lucky Bastard XIII? Here’s hoping for better luck with XIV.

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