Eve Needs a Tock, Not a Tick
Posted: 2013-01-07 Filed under: eveonline 13 CommentsThe Clock Keeps on Ticking
The computer industry uses a term called “tick-tock” to describe progress in the CPU-release cycle. A tock represents a major breakthrough or a radical change in architecture while a tick refers to an incremental upgrade that while noteworthy, is nothing to rave about.
Intel’s new processor increased in Base Frequency from 3.4 GHz to 3.5 GHZ? That’s a minor enhancement when compared to changing architecture of Intel’s Sandy Bridge series processors.
I thought that the CSM7 cycle would have been a period of major change but rather we saw a laundry list of items receive work. The Crucible, Pre-Inferno, and Inferno cycles got developer time assigned to work on a backlog of ticks.
Granted Retribution contained a lot of ticks, but I wouldn’t call them a tock when looking at the scope of changes that came when Tech 2, Capital Ships, and Wormhole space were introduced.
My current sentiment are mirrored in Marc’s recent post:
…There are murals that could be painted to guide the way for EVE’s development for the next ten years, rather than looking at the last ten years and trying to fix all the mistakes. Not to say that mistakes can’t be addressed, but instead let’s try addressing them in new and inventive ways. Let’s kill two birds with one stone – set past wrongs right while also providing new and exciting content, or the frameworks for content generation, to attract a whole new generation of EVE players.
CSM Season Opens with Two Declarations and a Drama at Malefactor
Code Life Cycle
Working daily with a team that uses the same Agile software development methodology as CCP, I understand their struggle because we have many of the same challenges in our environment.
From what I have gathered from reading over CSM minutes, staff interviews, and perusing the Developer comments on the forums, a major hindrance to the advancement of the Eve world was in their inability to decouple their code.
If you made a small change to one section, it will affect thirteen other places that rely on it — oh, and all of the code is undocumented and the developer that wrote it no longer works here. As developers have changed seats and coding methods have advanced, I’m sure the style and quality of the current code is far more elegant and efficient. It can be easily tested and regression tested (something I think they have a problem with in previous years).
In the past few years CCP would develop, deploy, and then fix-on-failure. Compare the amount of patches and bugs in the 2009/2010 releases to the recent Retribution deployment. I haven’t worked out the numbers, but I feel it is significantly less.
The decoupling steps have been happening are ticks that will (hopefully) lead us up to a major tock. Two major examples of steps to decouple sections of code can be seen with changes that came in the Crimewatch redesign and the rework of Hangars.
CCP has stated repeatedly that the Crimewatch system was old, clunky, and filled with a ton of fringe cases that they had to handle with bulky nested code. With the re-write of the system, they have reduced the amount of arcane scenarios into a more manageable rule system that they can support.
The recent changes to Hangars took a section of code that treated Hangars in POS’es, Ships, and Stations as the same entity and made them separate. Now making a change to the branch that handles a Carrier will not longer need to be tested against POS’es or Hangars.
I see this Hangar change as a necessary step to enable the development of an entire new section of code that will handle POS’es. There was no way to use the existing branches to handle all the design requirement that we are requesting in the new POS system. Now that POS Hangars have been decoupled, they can truly start working on the new POS design.
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock
Time moves on and more cycles pass as we march through time. Hopefully we can have some major tocks coming up rather than ticks now that a lot of smaller, necessary work has been done to set us up for a major architecture change.
Just as Marc stated in his post that I quoted from, demand more of the next CSM and yourself. We have the power to put people in place that will help us drive the changes we want.
[Jan 07 update]
Comments from CSM7 Member Hans Jagerblitzen:
Carrier Runs 1-22
Posted: 2013-01-06 Filed under: eveonline, industry, market | Tags: archon, chimera, nidhoggur, thanatos 3 CommentsOverview
The fruits of our trading operation have seen the growth of a Heavy Industry branch of our operation. The initial ISK outlay to start the operation was high, but our market research proved the venture to be viable.
The Numbers
We have been running for around 25 days and we have sold 22 hulls. So far we have been very pleased with the results and velocity of sales. As expected the Nidhoggur has a smaller margin and velocity when compared to the other racial types.
Heavy Industry
We have reached a point where we can keep all 7 Carrier BPOs in production. Our mineral sourcing, compression, and transport operation has been moving materials along with ease.
An industry goal for 2013 is to expand into Dreadnought production. We have purchased the Capital Component and Weapon Blueprints. Once they reach acceptable ME/PE levels, we’ll start to produce Dreadnoughts.
Desktop Video Card Upgrade
Posted: 2013-01-05 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: gtx 260, gtx 670 2 CommentsI upgraded the video card on my main desktop from an aging GeForce GTX 260 to a GeForce GTX 670 that can support for up to four monitors. Additionally I added a 24″ ASUS monitor to serve as the new center monitor.
What I thought would be a renewed time of actually playing Eve devolved into a MySQL query session to work on trading and profitability projections. I guess we all play the game differently.
I am really impressed with the card’s ability to run three clients at full screen (1 @ 1920×1080, 2 @ 1680×1050) with full effects and HDR enabled.
2012 Trading and Industry Report
Posted: 2012-12-21 Filed under: eveonline, industry, market, ships | Tags: archon, charon, chimera, deadspace, faction, ishtar, maelstrom, nidhoggur, obelisk, oracle, procurer, retriever, rokh, sabre, scimitar, talos, thanatos, tornado, vagabond, zealot 6 CommentsOverview
Another year of growth and transitions into larger projects.
Module, gun, ship construction and trading proceeded as it did the previous year. With reliable income from trading, we expanded our operation into heavy construction by adding a Carrier construction wing to our operation.
From these numbers we can see that our operation is facing more competition as margins were slightly lower than the previous year. To overcome this, we migrated our inventory to higher per-sale profit items. The drastic change in quantity can be explained by dropping Ammo as a common trade item.
This overview shows the benefits of spreading your trade load between high ticket, low volume items and more volume centered low price items.
Quick Numbers
Q1 and Q2 saw renewed vigor into trading as I started to invest more time into logistics and product research.
Q3, July especially, was a record breaking time as I took any liquidity and moved it back into assets. This also marked our shift into high ticket items. Additionally, at this point in the year my trading partner and I had a lot of time to devote to our operation.
September into October is a busy time for me personally. I took a long vacation October and was away from Eve for a few weeks. Everyone needs a break and our performance numbers directly show this.
Highlights
Procurer speculation with the Inferno Patch.
Outsourcing some Highsec logistics with Red Frog Freight during busy periods.
Expanded trading into High Meta items.
Expanded construction and sales into Carrier hulls.
Invested 133 days of training into Racial Cruiser Construction V and Jury Rigging V to enable Tech 3 hull and subsystem production in the coming year.
Invention
Though there are profits in invention, I found the process of gathering materials, inventing a BPC, putting the component parts together to be uninspired; I had no real focus this year with invention. Most of the time I spent in this area was spent making Drones and increasing my stock of -1/-1 Anshar prints for a rainy day.
My two invention characters have 4-4-4 skills. I have found the training return of getting 5-4-4 or even 5-5-5 skills to marginally increase profits. Since the train time to get a Science skill to 5 is around 20 days, I have not felt the need to sink time into polishing off the skills.
I did keep a database record in order to produced the below summary of my invention statistics The overall success average came out to be 48.2%, which falls in line with any invention guide.
High Meta
With the addition of Faction, Deadspace, and Officer modules to the market, I saw several trading opportunities throughout the year to work with these items. I had little to no interest in using the tedious contract system to trade these items so when they were added to the general market, I rejoiced.
Here is a summary of the performance of items by Meta levels. Faction and Deadspace items traded well and brought consistent high profits.
Escalation Barge Teiricide
With the changes to mining barges in the Escalation patch, my partner and I mainly targeted the Procurer hull as its build requirements changed the most with the patch. We speculated that the new barges would cost more post-patch so we build a large stock before patch day.
We ended up selling 288 units for a profit of 2.48 B. We put a smaller amount of effort into Retriever hulls and managed to build and sell 44 for a profit of 431 M.
Fear the Sabre
I had limited success with trading other racial Interdictors. The Sabre is the champion of them all and hopefully we see some further balancing to these hulls in upcoming patches.
Alpha Maelstrom to Rail Rokh
This year we saw the popularity of the Alpha Maelstrom as a viable Nullsec fleet composition fade away in favor of the Rail Rokh. I was slow to react to this change and by the time I got my Rohk BPO researched to an acceptable level, the switch to the new doctrine was already underway.
Rigs and Guns
The core rig types (Trimark, CCC, and Field Extender) continued to be a solid performer. If you sell a ship in an area, you should also sell related rigs to popular fits. Let this be a lesson in item cross-selling for anyone building, stocking, and selling ship hulls.
The core gun types seen below also provided some income over the year.
GoonSwarm Shrugged, I Smiled
During the GoonSwarm Ice Interdiction, I speculated on POS fuel and turned a profit. I made 648 M doing some passive trading in Jita on Oxygen Isotopes. In addition, people started to panic and predict that other Isotopes were going to be affected also. I made some early buys on Nitrogen and then sold them off at the height of their price level.
High Meta
I have focused on and found a number of High Meta items that have proven to be very profitable. I’ve blanked out the names of them because I don’t yet want to disclose the item types at this point in time.
Implants
As expected implants were a high performer.
Standard Modules
High volume modules provide a small source of income as working with these items means you are in a competitive and often saturated market.
The new Drone Damage Amplifier modules sold very well, but I had poor success with the Reactive Armor Hardener.
Batch Ammo
I have continued to have limited success with ammo. I have found the velocity of trading to be very slow which I think is due to the nature of ammo production and consumption.
Since ammo jobs are batch based (meaning that when someone runs a production job they are producing a large bath of ammo rather than a single unit), production has periods of high volume. Additionally when someone buys ammo, that person tends to buy a large stock and slowly work though the pile.
I keep stocking ammo with the intention that it will move, but I always am unimpressed by the numbers.
Tier 3 Battlecruisers
The popularity of the Tier 3 BCs remains high as I was able to make a profit on every racial type of them. Surprisingly the Oracle and Talos have been outselling the Tornado.
HAC Favoritism
The Cerberus has remained a poor performer with no production or trading opportunities arsing this year. The Ishtar remains a strong seller as a preferred AFK mission ship while the Vagabond holds up the PVP end of the HAC spectrum. I fully agree with Kirith Kodachi’s recent comments on the upcoming rebalance initiative that will eventually hit HACs.
Tech 2 Logistics Falling From Grace
With the recent rebalance of Tech 1 logistics, I expect my production and trade of Tech 2 logistics ships to decline. As Jester pointed out, the proficiency of the Tech 1 variant can cheaply replicate the Tech 2 variant.
Future Ventures
Champion CREST API changes and development with the community to enable 3rd party tools to flourish.
Pressure the CSM for industry and mining changes.
Though the Carrier project is new, it is proving to be profitable so we expect the expand the operation. We are going to look into Dreadnought production in addition to carriers.
Build from stockpile of Tech 3 hulls and subsystem BPCs.
Build backlog of invented Anashar BPCs.
Solitude Highsec Island Research
Posted: 2012-12-21 Filed under: eveonline, industry | Tags: gererique, maire, niballe, octanneve, oerse, solitude, stoure, vecodie 2 CommentsContiguous Highsec may have a large number of stations for research, but they are almost always busy with long wait queues. If you have the mettle to speed around Lowsec or have access to jump capable ships, you might want to consider other areas for your research.
When I could not find an open or low wait slot in Highsec, I usually took a shuttle into a neighboring Lowsec region to find open research slots. Thankfully I never encountered a boosted locking ship or smartbomb camp. After a few months of easy access to ME research slots, my Lowsec area started to get overrun so I started to look elsewhere for my needs.
After looking at Eve maps a few areas stood out to me. The Solitude region in particular contains a Highsec island (non contiguous to normal Highsec) that I have found to be perfectly isolated in terms of researchers.
There are several Highsec stations with (at the time) open or extremely low wait ME slots: Stoure, Vecodie, Octanneve, Maire, Oerse, Gererique, and Niballe.
I flew around between these systems with Capital Part and Ship BPOs with no trouble at all. Every gate between the Highsec island systems was never manned with campers.
When looking for open slots, I often noticed a few extremely long research jobs. I infereed based on the time that these might be Titan/Supercarrier jobs.
I imagine that this type of Highsec island is perfect place to get additional ME/PE levels or copy your Titan/Supercarrier BPO. No POS to get reinforced means no risk from external factors. If I were vested in these type of large research projects, I would home here.
k162space 