Saturday 29 June 2013

Copy bookmarks between corporations

Some wormholes have multiple corporations working co-operatively.

One of the common items is the difficulty in having a common set of bookmarks. 

Lets assume that the bookmarks have been scanned, and are in their Corporation 's list.

  1. Copy bookmark from corporate bookmark to personal bookmark
  2. Move personal bookmark to cargo hold.  Holding shift while dragging them also works if you want to make a copy.
  3. Put cargo hold book Jetcan, Contract, anchored container, or if in station then direct trade.
The recipient player takes the bookmark and moves it into either their own personal or corporate bookmark.

You can move 5 bookmarks at a time, but it is repeatable action.

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Bookmarks#Sharing_.26_Copying_Bookmarks for someone else's recommendations.

Thursday 27 June 2013

My 2 ISK on the Eve blogroll


Eve blogs have value. I enjoy reading yours.  Some of you enjoy reading mine.

TMC and Eve News 24 are good sites to read, but there are more good posts out there than you can find on the larger sites.  A new blog is far easier to start than getting picked up by the big names.

Maintaining a basic blogpack is easy.  Most of us have sidebars of blogs we read.  For some of us, this is only a subset of the actual blogs we read (guilty as charged).

Maintaining a complete list, is somewhat harder.  It's never right and takes more time than it should.

As I have said before, I noticed that the eve blogpack was not maintained, and created my own.  (foo-blogroll.blogspot.com )

It is crude (I don't do pretty), but it is the largest pack I know.

The reason for me mentioning it, is this post talking about http://www.evebloggers.com/ and the http://blogpack.evebloggers.com/.  There are several sites referring to it.  Some commentary has been written in the 'heat of the moment'.  The realities are that the owners of evebloggers seem to have run out of enthusiasm some months ago;

There are other posts out there.  I considered linking them but I would both miss someone (causing offence), and potentially add fuel to fire.

I have been slower than I would have liked adding some recommendations, but these have now been added, and I will go 'trawling' other sites for links again soon.

As I have as the header on my blog roll site: 

  • Is your Eve blog missing? Is an Eve blog that you read missing? Leave a comment.
  • Think you can do better? Leave a comment either volunteering to assist with the lists, take over my blogroll, or leave a link to your alternative offering.
If you want to write a better site, a better list, you have my support.  If you need help with the collection of links, feel free to pillage mine, and I am willing to work with assembling a larger list.

I do have one request.  If you think that this list is worth exposing to new players, put a permanent link to foo-blogroll.blogspot.com on your own blog.  That kind of cross linking works to grow the community.

This is a cross post to http://foo-blogroll.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/eve-blog-packs.html

Monday 24 June 2013

Future of industrials

Right now, the Iteron mark V is clearly the best ship for transferring goods between low class wormholes and empire space.

It has 2 highslots, meaning you can mount both a probe launcher and a cloak.

It has an abundance of mid and low slots, giving a large variety of configurations (cargo, stabilisers, tank are the most common options)

It also is not as destructive on wormholes as the largest hauler you can take into a c2-4 wormhole.

A C2 wormhole can take 2,000,000,000 kg.

An orca is 250,000,000 kg; 4 round trips will break one.  Wormhole residents use Orcas and Battleships to deliberately break one.

An Iteron Mark V is 11,750,000 kg; 85 round trips to break one.  While each Iteron Mark V holds 1/2 of what an Orca can, the total volume that can be hauled through any given wormhole is much much bigger. I have known wormhole residents to break a wormhole with convoys of Iteron Mark V's when they get a good connection.

In a wormhole, Iteron Mark V's also have the solo survivability of a solo Orca.  That is blessed all.  I have been tackled in a wormhole with an Orca, and been tackled in my Iteron Mark V.  The only difference is how long it took me to 'pop'.  I will admit that my orca did not have 2 warp core stabilisers, an expensive mistake.  The extra stabilisers may not have saved me anyway.

http://evenews24.com/2013/06/19/dev-post-tech-1-industrials-to-get-a-rebalance/
There are two things that I have mixed feelings about:
  • Large Haulers to get only 1 high slot. (down 1).  For us the Iteron Mark V has been the pinnacle of wormhole hauling.  Easy on the wormholes, large storage, a cloak and a probe if you get stuck.  It has been the only ship to use.  The loss of that highslot means we have less fallback options; and probably means a dedicated scanning frigate per interim system (for us - generally 1).  We will have 'interesting choices' that have to be made; but for us; this is a hard nerf.
  • The Bestower takes the crown as the largest hauler (39201m3 t1 rigs/t2 expanders/max skill) from the Iteron Mark V (38433m3 similar configuration).  While the manufacturer in me rejoices; the pilot weeps. I trained Gallente Industrial 5 to have the maximum size T1 hauler.  The difference is marginal (2%), but I fear I am still coming down with the beginnings of bitter vet syndrome.

Monday 17 June 2013

Bashing down a player owned customs office

Last post I talked about bashing down a NPC (Interbus) customs office, and the hours of fun that entails.
A player owned customs office (POCO) is very similar but:
  • Players might decide to pay attention to the warning mail and get interested.  I have only ever bashed down in abandoned wormholes, so have not had to concern myself too much.
  • You may not have to bash down at all, and may instead be able to buy the customs office, assuming that the owning corp is online, but no longer living in the system.
  • POCO's reinforce when they get to 25%. 
  • The good news is that you don't have to bash down the last 25% of the shield.  I you only have 'just enough' DPS, this is a good thing, as most of that 25% still has a very high shield regeneration rate.  For those bringing several thousand DPS or more, that is less of an issue, but 25% less damage required is still a bonus. 
  • The other good news is that you have nothing to shoot at for between 24 & 48 hours, as the customs office becomes immune to all attacks ('Reinforced')
  • The bad news is that, as the attacker, you can not control when the customs office comes out of re-inforcement, it might be during your evetime, or it might be when you are at work/study, or even soundly asleep.
  • There is a great big timer stating when the POCO comes out of re-inforcement, visible to everyone in the system.  Due to my choice of systems to bash in,  I have not had to worry about owners showing up, but 'curious visitors' can see when you should turn up.
For those that don't know, a re-inforced POCO:
  • Is immune to all damage
  • Can still be used to transfer PI to/from planet.  ( http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Customs_Office disagrees, but I recall using re-inforced offices - I think)
  • Shows a timer of how long until the POCO can be shot at again.
  • This timer will initially be between 24 and 48 hours, and is preset be the defending corp plus or minus a random time not more than an hour.
  • Will come out of re-inforce with zero shield.
  • Is 'safe' at 25%. That is, it will re-enter reinforcement, if damaged back down to 25%
  • A rookie frigate immediately after becoming vulnerable can keep POCO shields suppressed.  A basic cruiser 20 minutes later might not be able to do so.  Turn up with something as soon as re-inforce finishes.

Wormhole Interbus Customs Office Bash

I hear that dreadnoughts can break an Interbus (NPC) customs office in less than an hour.

The problem with using a dread in a c1-c4 wormhole is that the only way to get one back out of a wormhole is as salvage.  The only way to get a dread into a c4 or less is to build one in that system.


Customs office in a low level wormhole system bashing is like breaking into a bank ... with sandpaper.  Being left alone with a lot of sandpaper, and you will probably break in.  You will not always be left alone.

The essential facts :
  • 10,000,000 shield hit points
  • 2,000,000 armor hit points
  • 2,000,000 hull hit points
  • 50,000 official shield recharge time.
While on the surface this looks like a mere 200 hps (heal per second) average shield regeneration, the peak shield regeneration is much higher, in fact 500 hps.

The capacitor regeneration formula (with caveats) can be found at http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Capacitor_Recharge_Rate

I have read somewhere (citation needed) that this applies also to shield regeneration, and found a slight variation (citation needed) on the above formula.  In-game experience from excessive use of breaking into banks with sandpaper suggests that this is correct.  
The numbers behind the above graph of shield regen per second are from my google doc at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlHsU_rOxWl4dEw2cjZ6Z3BOWDZqbjVpY3ZBWE1Tb3c#gid=1

Now for some numbers.  Lets say you bring 1000 dps. 10,000,000 shield; lets pretend an average 200 hps for the customs office shield.  Net dps is 800, so 12500 seconds, or 3.5 hours.  After that, you have another 4,000,000 armor/structure without any regeneration; 4,000 seconds or another 1 hour.  Totals 4.5 hours (which is very roughly correct, though I suspect a little under due to peak regeneration)

Yes, you probably should be at keyboard, and aware of your environment.  Are you going to check dscan every 5 seconds for 4.5 hours?  I can't.  I have tried, and am not capable.  Are you going to reload ammo every 10 minutes over 4.5 hours, when required?  Again, I have tried, and I can't.  I failed on a customs office bash because I tried.  Capacitor stable, lasers with T1 ammo and drones do not require ammunition, and will shoot until the earliest of a gank; successful bash; or downtime.

If you can not bring more than 500 dps, don't bother doing a customs office bash.  It is possible with 750 dps.  Possible does not mean quick.

I know that from personal experience, I can :
  1. collapse all wormholes
  2. set 3 cruisers and a destroyer onto a customs office, 
  3. hope/pray that no one hostile finds new incoming wormholes,
  4. go to sleep, 
  5. wake up to find a missing customs office
I also know from personal experience that (3) (hope/pray for no hostiles) does not always work and you can find yourself with brand new clones in highsec stations.

My customs office bashing ships have the following characteristics:
  • Glass Cannons.  These ships are replacement tanked.  That is, if you are found, then you count on replacing your ship.  There is a trivial token effort towards a tank at the very bottom of this list.
  • Ship : Laser/drone boats, with bonus to laser and drone: DPS, reduced capacitor, increased rate of fire. The other bonuses of range, tracking, resists etc are not used.
    • Gallente (Algos, Vexor, Myrmidon, Dominix)
    • Amarr (Coercer, Omen, ... I assume Oracle, Armageddon)
  • High slots : named short range laser turret (eg Heavy Modulated pulse energy beam 1)
  • Ammo : Multifrequency crystals  (T1) if you can do so and be cap stable, I have been using Infrared if not.
  • T1 drones to fill both ship and pilot slots (eg Ogre, Hammerhead, and maybe Hobgoblin).  Fill your ship bandwidth, and personal skill limit.  I have been recommended by someone with far more combat skills than I, that while you should fill your limits, 2 Hammerhead are better than 1 Ogre)
  • Low : Named heat sinks (eg Extruded Heat sink), Drone Damage Amplifier, in roughly equal numbers.   A mild preference for heat sinks if your laser damage is higher, dorne damage amlifier if your drone damage is higher.
  • Rig 1 Energy Collision Accelerator and 1 Energy Burst Aerator I of the appropriate size for your ship.
  • Mid : Named Capacitor Rechargers (eg Eutectic Capacitor Charge Array) to bring the ship to cap stable, then a tank wildcard.  I have been using one 'Cetus' ECM Shockwave and shield extenders.  I can not recall a time when these tanks would have made a difference.
Your pilots shall not have expensive implants, nor shall they have so many skillpoints you would cry at updating their clone.  Your pilot should have up to date clones.

Your decision on what class of ship to fly weighs your estimation of how much damage you will do before being ganked or coming back to keyboard vs your wallet.  Higher DPS means less time, means less chance of being ganked.  Higher DPS also means more expensive ships so you will feel the pain of a gank more.

Customs office shields do not regenerate during a standard downtime.  They do regenerate over some extended downtimes.   I have personally seen both behaviours during various customs office bashes.

If you find that you can bring 3000 DPS to a customs office bash, then peak regeneration becomes less significant.  10,000,000 @ average 2800 dps + 4,000,000 @ 3,000 DPS is 1 hour 20 minutes.  Under these circumstances, dscan/probe scanning becomes easier (generally with more players to share the scanning), reloading becomes easier.

Setting up an open move fleet means that the last one awake/online can become boss and warp the fleet home.  We think. There was a problem during a recent bash where we deliberately gave 'boss' to someone who we knew was going to be awake.

In a post coming soon, I will discuss the differences between an npc customs office and a player one.


One could almost determine what I am doing in game by looking over the last few posts.

Monday 10 June 2013

How to sell the wormhole


In previous posts, I have talked about finding wormholes, and who might be interested in buying different types.  This is great theory, but theory doesn't pay the bills until you have been given ISK.


Remember, you are going to be paid ISK largely for a bookmark to a system that you claim to be empty.  A bookmark that is generally going to expire tomorrow if your lucky, and is already expired if you are not.

As anonymous mentioned in a comment to an earlier post, wormholesales.com is your friend, post here.  The 'sponsors' of this site (Taggart) also run the in game channel "Wormhole sales".  There is also the default game provided channel "Wormholes" (TODO: Check on exact channel name).  Those associates you had from 2 years ago that were maybe thinking of wormhole space? Send them an evemail.  The Eve sales forums https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=278 are also worth trying.  I personally have had success selling via my own blog.

Be polite, mention :
  • The signature of the wormhole i.e. J100001
  • That there are no active forcefields (after checking of course)
  • Your asking price

As a buyer, I have an idea of what I am looking for in a system.  That signature allows me to use eveeye.com, staticmapper.com, or other programs to tell me what kind of system I am looking at, far better than even most sellers know.  What the signature does not tell me, and what I am buying from you, is how to get there.

Normally in Eve, when you have something to sell in Eve, it doesn't go 'off''.  Wormholes are different.  16 hours, 24 hour or 48 hours for higher class wormhole systems.  It has taken me 4 days to make a sale.  I do not want to leave my 'hauler/manufacturer/researcher' (and for you probably fighter) in a backwater wormhole for a week.  That is what scanning alts are for.  I scan down an appropriate exit with my 'do things' pilot, and then have my scanning pilot ready to fly in. 

My scanning alts have a basic scanning frigate, with a prototype cloak, expanded launcher and many probes.  Sister probes/launchers items are a bonus.  I am also in the process of fitting the new scanning mods (Scan acquisition, pinpointing and rangefinding arrays).

How long does that wormhole last?  Look at the entrance (i.e. not the K162 side) and compare the signature on this eve uni list

Wormhole sales are a 'trust' sale; two parties, generally unknown to each other, are making a large transaction.  Is the seller both competent and trustworthy.  Is the buyer similarly trustworthy?

Someone has to hand over something first; either ISK or a bookmark.  Options include :
  • Someone deciding to trust the other party; possibly with a 1/2 isk up front, 1/2 on payment.
  • Using a broker;  Taggart (via in game channel "Wormhole sales") charges a total of 10%; with the expectation of 5% paid by the buyer, 5% by the seller.  The problem with brokers is that they are not always available now, leading to a higher likelihood of wanting that scanner alt to hold the system for you.


Good hunting.  And if you happen to find wormhole with a highsec static and great PI, feel free to post it on wormholesales.com, evemail DoToo Foo, or even drop a comment here.

For an alternative guide to selling wormholes : https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=101693

Friday 7 June 2013

Patch thoughts.

The industrial is dead!

Long live the Iteron Mark V (was it really back in Feburary when I thought this might be the case?)

1 point of skill to learn, the Iteron Mark V holds more than anything else; even up against a Mammoth with Minmatar Level 5.  There are probably some specific use/fitting scenarios where the use of something else is recommended, but this will definitely streamline my PI gathering on way too many alts. 

While the Orca has larger cargo holds, it quickly destroys our C2 wormholes, if we want to shift stuff we were already using a mix of Iteron Mark V's and Mammoths depending on pilot.  Now there is one less ship type for us to stock.

Yes, Industrial tiericide is on it's way at some stage; but not yet today.

Probes no longer decloak ships

Patch Notes
I used to use a swarm of drones plus scanning probes to assist in decloaking ships.  Not often, and generally on structure defense.  I am now a sad panda.  Oh well. 



Scanning; 

I still have not done any, but from the results I have seen on both blogs and from corp member results, it is much faster.

Undock button: 

Muscles need to learn new habits.  I don't spend much game time docked in stations.  But when they do; they want to undock from the bottom left, not the top right.  I will get use to it.


Finally

I had such plans to be prepared.  Oh well, I had recent distractions; both in game (good and bothersome), as well as in real life.  ... You can't always get what you want; but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

The (partially) unprepared for patch

You know there is this great big patch coming real soon, and your a bit behind in your preparations.

You have your ship blueprints scheduled to come out when the patch does (with the intention of selling them), and you know that you have time to get those last few bits and pieces where you want them.

Then trouble strikes; a wardec is declared.  Oh bother.  Well, I had a highsec tower; was anchored a few months ago as a place to grow into, so that our market pilots could take up research in their spare time.

It is midnight local time when I get to our control tower, and hit the unanchor button.  One hour!! Really?  Oh bother.  In the meantime I dare not log off or fall asleep - at least not until I get a trusted friendly pilot over here to take in the unachored tower.

Well, our friendly pilot finally turns up in a frigate; having been 25 jumps away, while I am doggedly putting together an industrial that we can both fly, and that has space for the control tower; they are moderately large.

We are discussing the merits of my disembarking my cheap industrial in space for my fellow pilot, next to the POS, docking/logging out then heading to bed, when I am disconnected.  12:50 am.  I really should be in bed, and am drifting in and out of sleep.

Mmm.  Nothing.  No forums access either.  I check 'Aura' on my phone (also on another ISP), it has bad news too.  I place the phone next to my bed and collapse next to it.  Not that it did me any good; I woke up to a blaring alarm way way to early for work.  Check Eve, it is still down.

Go to work, come home again, and eve is just up.  Grab the POS, and dock up.  Advice for those on-lining defensive modules: when putting up a large number of POS modules, use an audible timer.  If you have 30 POS modules, each taking 2 waiting time to online, it is very easy to either (A) do nothing else for an hour, or (B) miss valuable time while doing other things.

My intention was always to use this patch to try to sell a few extra blueprints; I am still dabbling in them, and am not yet sure of what I am doing. 

I am somewhere between totally unprepared and where I wanted to be.  I should have done more specifically for the patch earlier.  Oh well.

Monday 3 June 2013

Back online

Just a short note to say Eve is back.  And that large caldari control tower that had 10 minutes left to unanchor when Eve crashed was still there, now safely docked up.

Eve Offline (DDOS)

As the entirety of eveonline.com is down and unreachable by anyone, updates are currently being posted on the EVE Online Facebook and Twitter pages. The most recent one at 17:47 identified the issues as a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack against the Tranquility cluster:

I have copied the above quote verbatim from an Ali Aris post on http://themittani.com/news/eve-offline

At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 GMT, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, we have since re-evaluated. With the highest sense of precaution we have taken Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure. We will update you more frequently via our Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/eveonline), however, an extended service interruption of several hours is expected as this process should not be rushed.


The above is copied verbatim from CCP's facebook page.  https://www.facebook.com/eveonline 

While I am not a fan of either twitter or facebook, it is a very effective method of getting your message out while your main sites are offline.

Now, my wishlist, in order :
  • Solve the DDoS attack; preferably with a dickstar, and possibly an alliance with a mercenary firm (I prefer that industrialists not to pay ransoms - it only encourages pirates).  Deathstars are not generally encouraged in first life.
  • Extended gametime to compensate players (or if necessary more free training : but allow me to apply it to alts rather than mains)
  • Extension of wardec timers (and other similar items - both in war and countdown).  (especially the countdown)
  • Re-imbursement for losses directly attributable to the crash.  (Someone may have been part way through deploying something somewhere when the crash happened.).  I see this being done by petition and definitely a lower priority.
 It's a pain - for everyone.  However, better now than at the launch of Oddysey.