Scanning and you

Posted: 2009-12-27 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments

I won’t lie; I’m a work-shy freeloader when it comes to scanning. Usually, by the time I sleep through my alarm, eat breakfast, take a shower and get around to logging on, there’s either a grav to hit or a WH to haul ore through for the next paycheck. Unfortunately, I can get dedicated to the tiniest things, and my brain won’t shut off till the task is complete.

This is why it’s currently… four in the morning and I’m still trying to scan a highsec exit. So, scan tips.

An important think to remember in wormholes is that there are two types of wormholes: incoming and outgoing. Or, as I like to call them, “someone’s found us” and “we found another empty neighbor”. Most WHs will have a static type, which means that at any given time if you start scanning that WH you will always find a WH of the given type, for example, a c6. Since the WH we currently reside in has a static C6, this makes scanning a route to highsec all kinds of fun and laughs, when you consider that C6s are the deepest you will go into WH space and are therefore have the lowest chance of a nice highsec to cart 400,000 m3 of ore out of.

Anyway, here’s the process I’ve developed that works for me:

1. Go through the WH/warp to empty space

2. Don’t forget to BM the WH before you do anything else.

3. Open your scanner, go to the directional tab.Turn off active overview settings and press scan. If you don’t see scan probes, PoSes, pos guns, ships, or anything that looks threatening, proceed to step 4. If not, inform your corp mates, and proceed to step four carefully.

4. Launch four probes, then move 15km away from the WH.

5. Cloak.

6. Set one of the probes to 32 AU and move it to the center of the system. If the probe does not encompass the entire system, set all the probes to 32 AU and do the best you can.

7. Press “Scan”, wait 5-10 seconds, then look at the signatures that result. Whine to your corp about how many signatures there are (if over 15) or how unlikely a highsec exit is (if lower than 15).

8. Choose a signature at random.

9. Set your probes to one size bigger than the sig..sphere. If the sig is a red dot, set the probes to 8 AU.

10. Move your probes into a 2D diamond shape, and move as group (shift-click) so that the four circles form some sort of weird shape covering the circle completely. Hit scan again.

11. If the signature disapeared, and there are no other signatures, make your probes one size bigger and scan again. If there are other signatures, go back to step 9 for that sig.

12. If there are now two signatures of the same name, curse quietly to yourself. Move your group of probes slightly up or down so that only one sig is encompassed. Rescan. if the sig vanished, move the group over where the other sig used to be. If that sig vanished as well, curse a bit louder, increase probes by a size and scan again, going back to step 9.

13. If the sig formed a 2d circle: Curse again. Make the probes one size bigger, encompass the circle, and scan again. Go to step 9.

14. If the sig formed a red dot: Silently cheer to yourself. Go to step 17.

15: If the sig turned yellow: look at it in the scanner menu. If it’s the type you want, cheer and go to step 17. If not, angrily right click and select ignore this signeture. Go back to step 6

16. If the sig turned green: Yay! You just found something! Make sure your ship is cloaked and warp to 20km of it. Bookmark some object with an informative name:

“Bitchin Crokite” is not informative. “Excep. core Crokite” is. “I hate scanning” is not informative. “Static C6” is.

17. Reduce your probes by one size and adjust them to keep forming the diamond around the dot. Press scan again and go to step 9.

18. Fake a disconnect so you don’t have to help scan another damn c6 w/ 30 sigs in it.

In flowchart form:

Son of Dominion nullsec mining

Posted: 2009-12-23 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , | 12 Comments

The father.

Let me just start this with a phrase I’ve always, always wanted to use but could never achieve the correct context:

I effing called it.

As of Dominion, WH mining is no longer the best mining profitable task, having been completely outstripped by nullsec mining. For the chain of logic that lead to this conclusion, look no further than the following paragraphs:

I was sitting in a WH belt, mining and thinking about how much I love mining in WHs, when I saw probes on the directional. Entering a professional state of panic, I told my ship to warp to PoS and waited the agonizing seven seconds before my 200 mil ship was safe, all the while asking if the probes were ours or someone trying to kill us for the fun of it.

The probes weren’t ours, so you can imagine my surprise when I wasn’t trapped in a bubble on my way to the PoS; and the greater surprise I had when the pilot convoed me to say hi and not “Grrr, Grrr, you win this time, but we will have your very expensive ship for our killboards. Arrrrgh” or whatever pirates say. Apparently, through some act forgotten to me and him, our respective corporations had set each other to blue, which was strange, as his corporation was a nullsec habiter and we were a highsec mining corp. He revealed himself as an old WH miner that left the WH for nullsec come Dominion, with good reason, so he said. He invited me for a look around his nullsec, as his alliance and all nearby alliances were NBDS. Immediately suspicious, I took my sister gear off my covops, slapped on a normal scanner and flew after him. After flying past an impressive warp bubble on a gate:We made it to his alliance’s industry V system, and he excused himself while I scanned out some gravs. The small ones were easy to get too, and contained about 80k of ABC ores, and the large ones were slippery, but similarly had a goodly amount of ABC ores and some BS wrecks, one of which I found a survey scanner on, one of the items we never seem to have in the wormhole.

The dude explained to me that the belts would refresh themselves about every 36 hours, and were able to support thirty hulks with orca and rorqual bonuses happily, aside from some hostile stealth bombers who liked to AFK in system.

The feeling I was experiencing at this moment was akin to beating your head against a brick wall when suddenly someone walks up and points out a Styrofoam wall a few feet to your left. That… dispenses candy or something when you beat your head against it. This nullsec system had cyno jammers up for five systems in any direction, local chat, an intel channel to point out threats five jumps before they came near, and most mortifying of all, a station where the ABCs that in the WH we had been carefully compressing and hauling slowly to Jita, were being refined at a 4% tax w/ a 100% yield.

In Apoc, the WH was king. It seems that the WH has been king for too long, and I have heard from CCP from somewhere that “We never intended to have long-term habilitation in wormholes”, which would probably explain why grav sites stop appearing in our WHs after a week and a half, and why we can’t set up moon miners.

If CCP wants to shift focus from WH mining to nullsec mining, that’s fine. I mean, Apoc made WHs king, now Dominion comes along with vast changes to nullsec, they’re gonna want attention to nullsec more, and better belts seems the best way to do it. It just seems ta me that they overdid it just a tad. Unless a nigh-infinite source of every conceivable ore type next to a perfect refiner seems reasonable to someone out there?

(Actually, the dude told me that they don’t have enough tritanium for their manufacturing, so they’ve been jump freightering it in. I kid you not)

Similarly heard from the dude, CCP made the belts overly rich because they expected the changes in sovereignty to make everyone and his dog start fighting bloodily over every square mile of space-dust. Since in actuality, the big alliances are consolidating their space to conserve cash and there really being no reason to expand, there’s much, much less fighting than expected, the market is going/already has been flooded w/ lowsec minerals, ecetera. I really hope that CCP makes a few small tweaks to these gravs before WH turns into the equivalent of mining veldspar in lowsec with local minimized, one jump from highsec.

Also, the dude explained to me how to use that newfangled sovereignty button for something other than remembering how to spell sovereignty, and it’s pretty detailed on every concivable system, but it is odd that there’s been seven ships and one pod destroyed in my wormhole’s “region”, whatever that is.

Ooooo, shiny. Heere, shiny shiny shiny

Posted: 2009-12-20 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

Don’t propel footwear at me, but I’m gonna reference another MMO. Most if not all of you were young at some point.

For those of you who have suddenly been transported to the hippie era, catch up to me when you can.

When I was in middle school, a friend told me about a new, free, exciting online game called Runescape. By Eve standards, a terrifyingly simple game where in your dps was determined by your strength and attack stats, your tank was your defense stat and whatever armor you happened to be wearing at the time, and that was it. The market would sell items and buy items from players at a price set by GMs, it was infested by L33tspeakers, ect, ect.

The reason I cornered you and started rambling about how online games stunted my childhood is because of one specific item in Runescape, called the Party hat. Way back in 2000 or some year before I started playing, Jagex (the makers of Runescape) released party crackers on new years eve. These things, when pulled, would make a small sparkle animation give one of the pullers a party hat, an equippable, tradable item that had no effect on anything at all, except to make the players around you think “Hey, that guy knows how to pull a party cracker”.

At time of last checking (six months ago), party hats are worth 30 million gold pieces. In Eve terms, that’s about two to three bil, and in comparison, the last thing I did before quitting Runescape was utilize the game’s only passive income mechanic and, after four or five months, buy a set of the best, coolest-looking armor there was, with a matching scimitar, battleaxe, longsword, 2-hander, and boots for 10 mil.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make somewhere was that, even in a carefully-controlled market, people want what can no longer be found. The Zephyr is an example of this, since the moment people got their hands on them for the first time, they were going for 50 mil in dodixie. The big difference from Runescape, tho, is that resentful people who want the Zephyr and don’t want to pay for it are going to blow you out of the sky faster than you can say “Hai guyz lookit mai cul ship”.

Functionality wise, it’s a scan ship without bonuses, slower than a shuttle. It’s only saving feature, that Sleepers won’t try to kill it, will lead to some nice screenshots but that’s about it. The lack of defensive, offensive, or cloaking capabilities means that you had best know how to avoid combat probes should someone else be in the WH with you, with an actual scan ship which, from past experience, has enough offensive capabilities to kill a frigate sized ship. Since the average new eve online player as of a few months ago doesn’t know what combat probes are, I’d say that as soon as killmails start accepting the new ship data, we’re gonna see lots of wrecks in wormholes.

Actually, it’s other saving feature, the fact that you can fly around pretending to be Count Dooku for a few brief, wonderful moments until the aforementioned blowing out of the sky shenanigans, makes it a nice ship IMO. The unique model and jerks(read again: players) destroying everyone else’s Zephyr will ensure that four to five years from now; you’ll probably be able to trade one for a Mothership. Sorry, super-carrier.

Hulkamania running wiiiiiild!

Posted: 2009-12-19 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Please don’t throw  something at me, but I’m going to draw a comparison to WoW and Eve. In WoW, each server has about 2-3 thousand people. The equivalent of our market is an auction house, of which there are three of. There is no “Want to buy” option, and you can only post auctions, with buyouts.

Here’s where I’m going with this: cornering the market is fairly easy. For those who enjoy shooting things instead of making spreadsheets, let me explain: cornering the market is basically where you feel like increasing your wealth by 30% or so, by making other people complain. The only requirement to do this is to have so much ISK or gold pieces or whatever that a new player would sell a kidney to get as much as you have. In Eve, by comparison, with fifty thousand players online on a good day, you need so much cash a new player would murder a small town for their organs before you can think about cornering. Add to that that the issue I’m griping about today cost 100 mil before the cornering, don’t wonder if you see 3-4 towns go off the map soon.

Where were all these rich players when I was mining in a navitas?

The base concept is simple: pick something that everybody wants, say, hulks, or something, and buy all of them on the market, and relist them at 120% of the price you paid. As regular people see your sell orders for 120 mil, they will either undercut you by a little or a lot. If it’s a lot, like, say, 105 mil, then buy their order and relist it at 120 mil. If it’s around 119.5 mil, either buy it or ignore it if you’re low on funds and might need to buy more of the ships at 100 mil. Anyway, what this does is make all the miners very upset because they still really, really badly want hulks but they have to pay more, and since you have all the hulks, they have to buy from you. eventually, your strategy makes critical mass and you either run out of money and the price goes back down, or the new price becomes the norm and you get rich and everyone poorer than you whines when you pour that money into cornering the exotic dancer market or whatever.

Anyway, according to marketeers who enjoy making spreadsheets and some normal people, the cost of hulks first rose to 140 mil because the moon rebalance made some new goo expensive and the old expensive goo cheap, but no-one wants to sell the old goo cheap, so the prices now include twice as many expensive components as before. The fact that hulks are now at 190 mil is because jerks (read: players) with lots and lots of isk want more isk for some reason so they are all cornering the market AT THE SAME TIME. As such, hulks are spiraling high.

Way, way back in my life, my dad told me a story about the zebra… tulip? I forget. Anyway, the story was that people sold the tulip to other people, and the other people would sell it to other people for more, and on and on and on until one dude said “Why the hell am I trading my house for a case of flowers”. And the price went back down, to the sadness of all the flower sellers.

Since I mine in WH space with several friends, all in hulks, we’re being more careful than usual with our scanning tomfoolery, since 200 mil to replace a hulk doesn’t sit well with any of us. A quick check of EFT shows hulk max yield at 1360, and my yield at 1166. Covetor max is 1234, and 1019 for me.

So, according to that, first:

My mining yield is really sub par, so I should stop training drone interfacing and get back to ABC IV refining skills.

and second:

A Covetor isn’t that big of a step back, and I can certainly weather using one until hulk prices balance back out. God, I hope they balance out. WH mining is stressful as it is without feeling like you’re flying a ming vase.

As a parting note, why the heck can’t I moon mine in WH space? Seems reasonable to me. I suppose the counter argument would be that no-one can attack your PoS without a goodly time investment and luck, but considering we’re limited to one system before the logistics increases exponentially while tied to a fuggin rocket ship, woudn’t that balance things out a bit?

Fly… very carefully.

Deus ex machinomgpwn

Posted: 2009-12-17 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

It had all happened so fast.

Among the many phrases running through the man’s head at that moment, that one was prevalent. The pieces of the proud Achnavah V floated slowly around him, named for an old friend in old times. It wasn’t the newest ship, wasn’t the cheapest, but it was the best he could find with the money he had, not counting the added cost of removing the pod interface so he could fly the thing. Hell, he had been flying the barge for months and was still afraid to pull or turn one of the many, many levers that surrounded the chair, not after the last one he tried had tried to eject the pod that wasn’t there and almost vented the atmosphere (and him along with it) into a sudden, chilly death. Figuring that terrifying experience proved some god or devil was watchin out for him, he had signed up for this expedition. The poster next to the bar made it sound glamorous, promising food, bed and very nice pay, completely shut off from the outside world. After the first few months, however, the outside world found them again.

A pang of loss ran through him as the rotation that had been spinning him slightly to the left and forward for the last ten minutes turned his visor towards the pile of scrap metal that used to be his ship. It could be worse, he reflected. The other miner could have not pinged his scanner (his own scanner currently required 6 levers to be held down while turning a knob, and after the first week of carefully holding down those and only those levers with his body while turning the knob with his teeth, he had scrapped the whole complicated business, assuming that the other, more expensive ships and people would spot danger much more efficiently), and the few second of cursing with his spacesuit could have been replaced with him cursing without atmosphere at the hull of the nearby battlecruiser class ship burning through his ship. The random lever he had kicked at with his foot while struggling could have been something other than the engine bulkheads, which would have not stopped the explosion from the engine room that would have killed him if he had not pulled the ejection lever after accidentally kicking the bulkhead lever. Yes, he reasoned, as a salvage beam played over his suit and the pile of metal he used to fly, it could certainly be worse.

He was about to start listing the ways his situation could be better when the beams suddenly stopped trying to determine if the metal just below his left knee was worth anything and vanished without a sound. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a beautiful yellow explosion, which was puzzling. What barges that hadn’t gotten away had been destroyed completely ten minutes ago, leaving him the only survivor in the belt which, just a few scant minutes ago, had been happily mining. Well, as happily as you can pull 3 levers for each strip miner every three minutes and seven others once the cargo hold was full, all of which in the most difficult positions to reach.

He REALLY should have tipped that engineer. In hindsight, the man was smirking at him a bit too much as he had left the station.

Wanting to see more of the yellow light, the pilot cursed as he rotated out of view, being treated instead to the ships who had been picking his barge’s corpse a few seconds ago lighting their engines and hightailing it in the direction of the light.  His frustration at this suddenly winked out with nary a farewell as the section of space in front of him shimmered and coalesced into the ship his friend had purchased before joining him on the expedition, citing a small disclaimer on the poster that being able to operate scanning equipment and detect the fluctuation of this hellhole-pocket of space they were in would result in a nice bonus. The ship had been cheap, it’s systems ranging from anywhere from second to fourth hand, and the scan Equipment worked most of the time. In keeping, the cloaking device that the merchant had assured him was straight from the Caldari navy supply store he had given his friend for his last birthday could only work for three minutes at a time.

The ship was ugly.

He was sure that the designer of the Gallente scanner fitted ship had had a glorious dream of a ship with sleek curves, that would be pleasing to the eye while designed to be invisible. He was similarly sure that somewhere along the line an engineer took the glorious, beautiful design and scrapped it due to a drunken bar bet, replacing the blueprints with those of an item generally seen in the hands of exotic dancers on holoreels.

Regardless of how he felt about the ship in general, as the green glow of a tractor beam guided him into the cargo hold and the ship burned space-rubber out of the , he didn’t give a flip what the damn thing looked like.

/*

Written suddenly while wiring the new lights for the kitchen. Not based on actual events, though some have been close. Seriously, the way the helios looks is why I cross-trained my main for caldari frigate, the damn thing looks like some sort of vibrator. In my opinion.

*/

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