Greedy goblin

Crashing Neocoms

2013-05-17T07:00:00.000+02:00

About a month ago I wrote that certain planetary products are much less profitable than others, making them a loss in opportunity cost. I started making Neocoms (T3) using Silicate Glass (T2), biofuels (T1) and precious metals (T1). It promised 1B/month with very little work. Now look at the price graph of Neocoms: Ouch! You might be tempted to say "bad luck", but it had very little to do with luck. An advanced factory produces 3 units of Neocoms an hour. 7 factories, 6 planets, 24 hours : 3024 units/day. Now look at the traded amount on the chart! Only 5-10K/day, meaning I produced about half of the Jita-marketed Neocoms! No doubt that such supply boom ruined the price.

This is something we don't see often in a player scale. Honestly, I did not think of it either, and paid with lack of profit for it. Sure, Goonswarm can manipulate an item, but a single pilot (no alts were involved)?!

The problem was that Neocoms isn't a common item. Most PI producers go for "all by myself" production, they produce P4 without buying anything, they extract everything and combine it on different alts. Only a few players bought or sold Neocoms, making it a very sensitive product. I've learned from this mistake, so shall you. Check the volume of the item before starting mass production.

Finally a business tip: if you are a jump freighter pilot who jumps a lot (doing it as a serious business), I'd suggest to use the training changes of Odessey to train the JFs of all four races, so you'll be able to switch to the JF that operates with the cheapest isotope. Fuel prices will be very hectic and likely to rise significantly.

Cap boosters, T2 ammo and time

2013-05-16T07:00:00.001+02:00

Two things motivated this post. One was Sugar saying "I do not think that most people would take a Drake, Hurricane, Ferox, Myrm or any other battlecruiser into low sec at the rate that people are taking Gnosis." The other was a troll commenter saying "PVE ships should never require Cap Booster Charges."

The answer for both: people are still bad at understanding opportunity cost. They don't want upfront costs and thinking ends here. A Drake hull costs 70M. That's lot of money for someone who grinds for it. They don't risk it in a random PvP situation. A Gnosis is free like the noobship, so they drive it boldly to lowsec. They could sell the Gnosis for 200M instead and buy nearly 3 Drakes, but that's beyond their understanding.

Let's get to cap booster charges. A naked Raven Navy with all 5 skills has 19.2 peak capacitor recharge. With a Heavy Capacitor Booster II, filled with Cap Booster 800 charges: 76.3. With 3 CCC I rigs and 4 Cap Recharger IIs: 76.2. The cap booster needed one slot, the second setup 4+3rig.

The Heavy Capacitor Booster II cycles in 12 seconds and needs 10 seconds to reload the 5 charges, so one charge lasts 14 seconds. If you run it all the time (you won't), you can eat 257 charges an hour (that would need 8000m³ cargohold, I told you won't). A charge costs 4000 ISK. So burning cap booster charges as fast as you can costs you 1M/hour. If you can fit something into those freed-up slots that increases your ISK/hour more than 1M/hour, it's a good choice. What can you fit? Webs, Target Painters, Tracking Computers, Omnidirectional links that make those pesky rats die faster. An MWD or MJD next to the AB for cutting travel times inside the mission. Switch to shield tank in ships that allow both tanks and fit more damage modules. Or simply fit stronger tank and decrease gank chance.

Same goes for T2 ammo. T1 is cheaper for sure. T2 does about 15% more damage, finishing the combat part of the mission faster. Since you don't consume ammo when you aren't shooting we should only focus on this. 15% more DPS means 15% more bounty, loot and mission rewards in the same time. If you made 40M/hour, it means 6M/hour. With 8 guns, 5s cycling time, you use 5780 ammo in an hour. If the price difference between the ammos is less than 1050 ISK, you are better off with T2.

Cheap is often the most expensive. Your time isn't free, the gift Gnosis isn't free either. Always mind the opportunity cost.

The perfect limited-gate highsec mission boat

2013-05-15T07:00:00.000+02:00

Next week there won't be business Thursday post, because the week will have a series of connecting posts, so this week there are two business posts!

If you have a combat mission to complete, you just drive a battleship into it and it's done. But some missions and complexes have gates that don't let battleships in. The COSMOS missions, with their hoards of faction reputation are such. Now add that you aren't really skilled into combat ships because you are a trader. Or you are skilled into ships that don't fit the damage profile of the rats inside. Anyway, you have a bunch of missions to do with no proper ship to do them. If only there would be a ship that can fire any damage profile, tank any damage profile, fit into acceleration gates, have enough DPS and tank without month-long skill training, have large cargohold, cap-stable while MWD-ing ... And if we are dreaming, why not be bold: this dream ship should be in our hangar for free instead of being a billion-ISK faction-fit T3 to buy. One can dream, right?

And sometimes, dreams just come true: This is an EM/Explo tanking and dealing fit, but you can tank and deal any damage profile by replacing hardeners and changing weaponry. The ship is in your hangar without paying as it's an anniversary gift, but it's not for free, as you can sell it for 200M currently. However that's still much less than a T3 would be. If you are low-skilled, it's even better as you can fit anything that you can use. If you are only skilled with missiles, fit it with missiles, the damage won't be perfect but will be adequate. The drone bay can hold a flight of medium and light drones, so you can always cleanse those pesky frigrats. The hold is large enough for having enough cap boosters to keep that ancillary shield booster running.

Unless you bling it or its price going over a billion (when you'll sell it anyway), you can fly it safely in highsec. Don't forget buffer-tank, being gankable by a pair of Catalysts is plain stupid, along with flying under wardec and other things you shouldn't do anyway.

Dual character training

2013-05-14T07:00:00.002+02:00

One of the new features of the next patch of EVE is dual character training. You probably already know that for a PLEX it will allow training of a second character on that account. You probably also know who are targeted: those who need a 2-5M SP alt for some purpose (cyno, scout, manufacture, research, hauling, trading...). Such alt won't need training after completion, so giving it a permanent account is pointless. Without the new feature, you either had to stop your main from training or train the alt on a different account and then transfer. The transfer cost 2 PLEX-es, but you could recruit-a-friend yourself playing 51 days free. So the new feature saves you 1/3 PLEX and the hassle to manage the account, the APIs, the transfer, making it a welcome change.

I want to talk about two things that were not mentioned: the first is the effect on PLEX prices. It's hard to tell, exactly because people used to do the training on a throwaway account that ate PLEX-es, along with the transfer. The new feature will be just a quality of life change for them. The question is: will this feature create new trainings? I mean people who choose not to start a second account and wait with the alt can now choose to start the alt, eating up PLEX-es. There surely will be, but can't tell how many. Also, the feature saves 1/3 PLEX for those who used to use a second account. So I wouldn't take this as an "Oh my God, PLEX will skyrocket, buy, buy, BUUUY" frenzy.

Secondly I'd like to tell that - despite I'm literally swimming in billions - I've never used the character transfer feature. I listed my characters on my 1 year EVE-birthday and you could see that many accounts have more than one character. Yet, I've trained them without transferring, simply stopping other characters on the account. While it was sometimes inconvenient, I did not regret my choice to wait.

You see, an account gives the ability to have a character trained and to have one more logged in. The transfer-train and the new second character training only allows you to use one of the features, losing on the other. If you don't want to have one more logged in characters, you only play a PLEX for the service of getting skillpoints now. The question is, does that character have the utility that worth 2-3 PLEX-es to train now, instead of waiting until the other character can stop training? Or alternatively, does your main really needs to train now so hard that it worth you 2-3 PLEX-es?

In the case of a business pilot, the answer is numerical. Does accounting 5, broker relations 5 saves you 250M before your other characters on the account can be stopped training? If not, then don't train them. Do the extra turns with the smaller hauler, the extra jumps to go to the station instead of setting remote orders cost you so much time that multiplied by your ISK/hour it is higher loss than the cost of the character training?

Remember! One day there will be nothing (that makes sense) to train on your account and you'll be paying only for the ability to log in and your training will go into some obscure nonsense 5. So by enough waiting, you can train all 3 pilots to anything. Since you surely pay to log in, you get the SP for free then. The question is: is the waiting bad enough to warrant paying? I already gave my answer: for me, no. I always choose waiting and did not regret it. Also keep in mind that people who can wait have bank deposits, those who can't wait have loans. The dual training feature isn't from the Devil, but think before you jump on it!

Keep it simple stupid! (or the CSM election fail)

2013-05-13T07:00:00.001+02:00

There was a massive failure of having significantly less voters this year than the previous: 49702 vs 59109, breaking a long positive trend. While CSM7 wasn't something spectacular, it couldn't cause the loss of voters, it could only cause the loss of votes for the CSM7 members re-running. If I find the president horrible, it's more likely to show up for voting next time.

I saw two reasons for failure: one is the over-complicated voting process. The other is the PR of nullsec blocks which tried to make everyone turn away from voting to increase their power. Ironically they decreased their own voters, probably because a "highsec carebear" finds more fun in figuring out a complicated voting process than a "let's shoot stuff" guy. The null blocks meta-gamed since ever, so even the second cause is CCP fault: creating a system that could be communicated as over-complicated, obscure, simply because it was.

Now, before someone would comment: STV is better than first-pass-the-pole voting. It represents the wishes of the voters better and decreases the losses via votes on losers and overvotes. The PR they finally made up "42299 votes affected CSM8 while only 31801 affected CSM7" is true.

However STV needs serious, committed voters who fill up the ballot with well-thought candidates, and this was something they could surely not expect, considering the low voting tendencies. Even CSM7 votes were 15-25% of the total vote-able accounts. CCP tried to save partial votes when large majority of the votes were lost by never being cast. The same effort to publicize CSM, to give CSM in-game tools to communicate with people, to run opinion surveys, to send the CSM "tickets", questions and town-hall-ish requests would have caused much more votes, therefore much wider support.

But still, there is no reason to not optimize the voting system. However their own results shown that most exhausted voting happened on 1-3 long ballots, while almost 40% of the ballots had this short length. It is obvious (and was obvious) that serious amount of people don't have a long priority list. He might like one or two candidates but not more. Interestingly, the 1-long ballot-"winner" was Greene Lee, who did not get on the CSM8.

CCP should have kept it simple. "Simple" is not the opposite of "optimized", as we can have both. Most IT systems offer "simple" and "expert" modes. Even the sell and buy windows of EVE market have it. The CSM election screen should have been a simple mode one, having only one slot and the candidates alphabetically, allowing the casual voters to cast one vote. Besides the "cast vote" button, should have been the "expert mode" button that leads to the current STV screen.

Of course this would have created lot of 1-long ballots, and those had 52% exhaustion value. However such vote still has 48% power, compared to the zero of the uncast vote. Finally "simple mode" wouldn't have to create 1-long ballots. There are two ways to increase the power of simple votes. One is simple ballot copy: if I simple-vote for Mynnna, I express that I trust Mynnna alone. This case it's rightful to create a 14-long ballot for me: the exact copy of the ballot Mynnna casted. Remember, I gave all my trust to Mynnna with my simple-vote. If I'm not happy with that, I can custom-vote. This system would also save lot of time clicking for bloc-voters: "just simple-vote for X guys!". The other method is not processing 1-long ballots as ballots, but directly subtract their number from the quota of the candidate, allowing the longer ballots to exhaust less. This case a simple-vote is 100% used, unless a candidate is elected alone with simple-votes or not elected at all.

Having optimized systems is good. But having simple front-end when you deal with simple people is more important. I hope CSM9 elections will be better organized.

A good example for traders

2013-05-10T07:00:00.000+02:00

Sugar Kyle who runs her own blog has a shop in Bosena, Molden Heath lowsec. Her little business is pretty successful, despite obvious mistakes (get a JF already!)

Is it some miracle? No. The lack of formal economics knowledge is irrelevant compared to the proper attitude. She has it, so her fate is to become damn rich. Her example is important exactly to show that being successful in business is not about using the proper tools, having proper item selection, time efficiency or other know-how (though they clearly affect the magnitude of success), but having the proper mindset:

Wants to serve her customers: This is a make it or break it issue. If you are in to rob everyone and run away with huge spoils, you have like 5% chance to make a great heist and 95% chance to leave busted. If you are interested in mutually profitable cooperation, you have 100% chance to make some profit.
Does what she wants: everyone, including corpmates, commenters and JF-obsessed goblins tell her what to do. She ignores them and does what she plans. If these people had a good idea how to run a lowsec hub, they'd done it themselves. So she is completely right to listen to the one who has the most experience in running a lowsec hub in Molden Heath: herself. Listening to people's opinion is a social mistake, most people have great difficulty learning to ignore them.
Doesn't want to market-PvP: people tend to spend great resources to defeat this or that competitor. They usually succeed, at the cost of losing much more money than it would cost to just coexist.
Doesn't want to get rich: another crucial thing, such ambitions just lead to overwork (which leads to exhaustion and multi-billion mistypes) and also leads to risky investments (that end up as a disaster). Working on your own schedule, working for the thing itself is the best way to have a steady income.
Focused on graphs, trends instead of direct income (or opinions): Rome wasn't built in a day. If you can't find joy in the decreasing price of Light Neutron Blasters II, you won't last long here.

So the business tip for today: subscribe her blog and try to absorb the above.

The rise of the non-aligned voter (and fail of the null leaders)

2013-05-09T07:00:00.000+02:00

Thursday is generally for business posts, and there was one for today. But it will be shifted to Friday to give space to this recent development.

The CSM election ballots are finally published and you can download it too. Many people did to calculate ordered lists, but I was interested in something else: the power of the blocks. Mynnna wrote: "Null bloc votes, as identified by Two Step: 9823+10957+5999 = 26799, 53.9% of the votes. Null bloc candidates: Five (Myself, Kesper, Sort, Sala and Progodlegend), which is about 35% of the council. I suppose you could count Malcanis as well, as the HBC ballot was instrumental in electing him and he is technically part of the bloc, but even that's only 42%. Basically, I'm saying that I think the people who were claiming that STV is all about rigging it for nullsec (ya'll know who you are) can put down their tinfoil hats. If anything we're under represented. "

Mynnna is wrong. He is wrong because Two Step was wrong identifying the voter blocks. Part of it was that he only looked for a few patterns, and looked for it everywhere in the ballot, while only the first spots had serious effect on the outcome. Below you can see a spreadsheet. Its fields show how many ballots have a certain candidate or pair of candidates in the top 7 places. I choose 7 because according to CCP that had 98.26% of the power of the ballots and because former CSMs had 7 Icelandic positions, so many people considered this an important number. The green background ones belong to one character, you can see that 12672 ballots had Mynnna on one of their top 7 positions. Next to it you can see "925", saying 925 people had both Mynnna and Ripard Teg on their top 7 spots.

Can you see the shocking result? Or just a bunch of numbers? Let me clear it up for you. At first I divided each line with the self-vote result, so every number of the first line was divided by 12672. From there the first line shows how big percentage of the Mynnna voters voted also for the other winner candidates. Then color-coded the fields, with the average value being white, below-average is red, above average is green. Finally I rearranged the candidates according to their cross-votes:
Now it's clearer, right? It shows that Mynnna, Kesper, Sort and Sala voters placed the other 3 to their ballots with high chance, though far from 100%. Only 75% of the Mynnna voters voted for Kesper, not really a good thing for CFC leadership. The cross-CFC-HBC votes were even smaller, though still high. What is more important here is that the rest of their lines and columns are red, meaning that those who voted for the CFC-HBC block ballot were unlikely to vote for other winning candidates (likely voted for non-winning block ones) and also that the voters of other winning candidates were unlikely to vote for them.

Following them comes the WH-pair. Their columns are red, so the non-WH voters were unlikely to vote for them, but their out-of-block lines are not red meaning that the WH voters were likely to support Mangala, Ripard, Trebor, instead of the WH 5 as instructed. Since the WH5 was a 5-long ballot, all of them fit into the top 7. According to the instructions, all WH pilots should have placed the 5 WH candidates to the top 5 positions in some order. Let's check it out: Ouch! If everyone would follow the instructions, we should have seen 100% everywhere! The chance that a voter of a WH candidate also supported another WH candidates was around 50%! It seems the cooperation of the candidates is not enough to make their voters cooperate! Did it matter? To see that, you should know that STV runs in rounds, every round eliminating one candidiate. The ballots that had this candidate at the top position move to the next one on the list, so the rest of the candidate gain votes. Let's see how did it happen with the Wormhole 5: The first eliminations gained 27 votes to the wormholers from voters who placed someone else first and wormholers behind. Then Cipreh got eliminated. At this move the WH top votes decreased by 155, which means that out of the 590 Cipreh voters 155 did not place another WH-er behind Cipreh. They gained 48 more voters with further eliminations and spillovers until Ayerson got eliminated, draining 310 out of 737, 42% of the Ayerson voters from the WH pool. Looking at the end of the run, it's likely that even that wouldn't get a third WH-er in, but still you can see the point. Same for the HBC-CFC block vote: when Kaleb Rysode was eliminated, 17% of his votes went to people who are not on the block list, half of it directly to the unaligned ones. When Banlish was eliminated, 41% of his votes leaked away from the null block.

After the two WH winners, there is a huge green field: the unaligned ones. See how these voters supported all candidates. They also got support from WH and Progodlegend voters, but gave no support to out-of-block candidates. It shows a huge number of votes supporting all of these candidates. Please note that the HBC member Malcanis belongs here. Despite what Mynnna wrote, the HBC votes were not getting him the seat. The Sort Dragon voters barely gave him more votes than they gave to Progodlegend and this was mutual. Those people supported Malcanis who supported the other unaligned ones. The null block was simply outnumbered by the unaligned ones. They were not simply voting randomly, they seem to like all these CSMs.

At the bottom corner sits Progodlegend all alone. His column is red, showing that no other winner had significant amount of voters who also supported him.

Hubris made nullsec leaders tell that they could place a basketball to their ballot and win. It seems their line members were not really motivated to support a basketball and many did not vote, or did not follow the official ballot! I was in TEST for months but never heard of Banlish, and probably other TEST voters neither. At least Sort and Sala often bridged me. For CSM9 the null leaders should take their own members seriously. Maybe they should run pre-eliminaries, finding candidates that have the real support of their members. Same goes to the Wormhole people. If those WH people who had no affiliation to any candidate had the same 50% "cross-support" as the affiliated ones, many WH votes were cast on non-WH candidates, mostly on the unaligned block. With 3 widely accepted candidates, they could get them all in.

Living in interesting times

2013-05-08T07:00:00.000+02:00

TEST leaving the HBC is an unprecedented move in EVE. Of course groups left bigger groups before but only when they were forced. N2S jumping out of SoCo was such. Corps leaving -A- for PL too. Jumping the sinking ship isn't heroic, but a good practice. TEST left HBC on its peak of power. It has never lost a war before. They gave up their position of the unstoppable war machine. Now they sit on two wanted regions with no means to defend them.

People tend to describe TEST as a bunch of trolls who do crazy stunts for no reason. But being crazy doesn't ensure survival. Actually, it often causes the opposite. It is likely that TEST just opted for losing its Sov.

The times aren't interesting for being the first when someone made a call that leads to its "doom". These times are interesting because I don't think TEST is heading for its doom. I think they are heading for FW-lowsec and into growth. You know, many TEST members already abandoned Sov-null and joined FW, "for fun". However "fun" doesn't keep you in ships, ISK does. According the canon, TEST should go bankrupt. Actually the alliance update says "We will defend our home with ... every last god damned ISK in our wallets."

The big thing is that I don't think it would come to this. I think they will never run out of ISK and they can continue to grow. Such growth of TEST would be the ultimate proof that nullsec is broken, you don't need Sov: the largest and strongest sov-holder willingly losing it and gaining more players on this transition. I think it would force CCP to redesign nullsec economy more than anything else, before others would follow TEST, leaving only botters in sov-null.

An even more interesting outcome would be if TEST would not lose its regions. Currently only large block members can hold land in the Sov map. Most of them would obviously not be able to hold it on its own and just gained it via block membership. I remember when Montolio was dumpster diving to find various obscure things to live in the regions we conquered. They weren't pets in the sense of following our command, they were rather maintenance guys hired as janitors of those constellations. Obviously without the might of the HBC they couldn't own a C1 wormhole on their own.

Now, since TEST thrown away the HBC shelter, it should lose its land. If it doesn't, it means that the large players have recognized that land doesn't worth having in excess. It would herald a new age where practically anyone can claim Sov in regions where no one else wants to. I mean if TEST can do it, you can too!

Welcome to the interesting times in EVE Online!

Ownership vs leadership (aka the Sort Dragon fail)

2013-05-07T07:00:00.000+02:00

Sort Dragon was the leader of the strongest EVE coalition for about a month. He managed to destroy it without any hostile pressure, financial crisis or cultural clash to solve. Without his utter incompetence, the last month would be a boring one for them where nothing happened, despite TEST changes leadership faster than an African military dictatorship.

Where did he fail horribly? He did not understand the huge difference between ownership and leadership. Ownership of an item is obvious: you control it. Ownership of people is much less obvious since every person has free will (even if most of them only goes so far to will for drink, sex and a warm place to rest). Ownership of people is the most misunderstood concept. Majority of people - who, not by surprise doesn't even owns himself - believe that it comes from the ability of punishment: "who can destroy the thing, controls the thing". Wrong!

The ability to punish someone doesn't give you control as he can hide from punishment. You need to actively hunt him down to deliver punishment which you can or cannot do. From even the most secured locations there were escapes. People escaped the Gulag or Auschwitz. No tyranny ever lasted too long because the cost of punishing the people climbed higher and higher.

Ownership of people is ownership of the things they need. The medieval kings owned their people not because they could hang those they could catch. They owned them because they owned the land needed for growing food. One could easily escape the gallows by hiding in swamps and forests. But what do you eat in the swamp? Frogs? Living in a swamp is - while possible - a punishment in itself. It's also a perfect punishment as you can't dodge it while living in a swamp and it costs nothing to the king as the swamp is there for free. The foundation of the medieval system was the fact that without the easily controllable land, you couldn't maintain a humane life.

The medieval system fell when the industrial revolution changed the method of income: from farming to industry. You can rise a factory everywhere, so the refugees could earn their food by working in a new factory somewhere else.

Sort Dragon assumed he can control various HBC alliances by the fact that he can evict them if they disobey. He was wrong for issuing commands to TEST not because he can't evict them. He can. TEST probably couldn't field a single serious doctrine fleet due to lack of discipline, lack of proper FCs and lack of supercapital superiority. You can't fight battleships or T3s with some random mixture of frigates, battlecruisers and cruisers. If some serious alliance wants to live in Delve and Fountain (someone in N3, PL to rent it out or CFC), TEST will be out of these in a month or two.

Sort Dragon was terminally wrong for assuming that TEST members will give a damn (they would use other term) for being evicted. Sov-null is just a money-sink for a line member, unless he is a botter and TEST probably has the lowest botter pilot ratio in nullsec. I didn't say they have no botters, I've said they have awful lot of real players. For real players the money is in highsec missions, mission mining, highsec AFK mining. No real player needs sov. They might want it, to have a place to call home, a flag on the map and an excuse to get fights. But the members wouldn't lose their income by losing sov.

Please note that this isn't a coalition level problem. Not even an alliance level problem. It's an ownership problem on the lowest possible management level: in EVE no player can be owned as the methods of ones income cannot be owned. It's not that TEST alliance rebelled against Sort Dragon. It's that if the TEST leadership would obey, they would have lost their members.

Without ownership, you can still lead people, simply because they give you leadership in turn of your services. The average TEST member couldn't care less who he shoots as long as he was shooting at someone, so Montolio could lead them against enemies of his choices. Montolio could build his space empire because his choices never conflicted with the choices of his line members. His power came from his understanding of his line members, knowing the fields where he was given control. But even he reached the point where his aims conflicted with the will of his line members. He wanted to attack CFC to further increase HBC power, but the line members would not follow him against the endless no-fun invasion against people who they actually liked. He recognized this and did the only reasonable thing: left his position. He could formally press on the war, but it would be lost anyway as the line members wouldn't log in.

As long as living in nullsec as a non-botting line member is not the best income source by large, the nullsec powers cannot control the income of players, so they can't control the players themselves. Top leadership positions goes to politicians who serve their people while serving their own agendas in the same time.

Update: I've just read the TEST alliance update literally saying: "we are an alliance with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE. Everything up to and including getting brutally murdered would be a great opportunity to do something new." I'm happy to see that their move wasn't a random act of trolling but came from the understanding of the same thing I've talked above. Damn, the first time I miss not being there.

Blues and morality

2013-05-06T07:00:00.000+02:00

Sugar wrote how she disagrees that lowsec pirates who shoot anything that moves are "evil" and deserve punishment in the form of poverty. However I never mixed moral into my statements that pirates eat what they cooked. There is nothing immoral in wearing a T-shirt and a short. But if you do it in winter, you'll end up in the hospital. I believe that non-FW lowsec is necessarily poor and any design change that tries to give income to lowsec pirates will either fail or some block shows up and dominate the zone, destroying its "pirate" nature.

The main "immorality" of lowsec is people hurting each other without reason. Every single society bans that. In EVE alliances killing blues (outside of organized thunderdomes) is a good way to get to the NPC corp. However this rule applies only to society members. Killing outsiders is a common activity both in real life and in games. You can get various medals if you do the bad things to "the enemy". The lowsec pirates actually not immoral, since they aren't blue to their victim, and everyone shoot non-blue "outsiders" in EVE, except the roleplayers in Providence.

Why do others consider lowsec pirates "bad" then? Because they don't "rightfully own" their land, like WH and sov-null alliances. But they are wrong, since the WH and null alliances gained their land via violence, so their ownership isn't more moral than the "gate ownership" of the gatecamper pirates.

What is the action that has poverty as consequence in lowsec? Being small-gang. Everyone else is surrounded by blues. If you are in a WH, most people in your WH are your friendlies (except when an invasion is in progress). If you are in null, blues own every system in several regions. Even the FW-lowsec residents are surrounded by friendly militia members. A blue means someone who doesn't shoot you and even better, someone who shoots the one who'd shoot you (or at least a decoy to be shot instead of you). The more blues are around you, the less likely you are shot at, therefore can farm in peace.

Since lowsec pirates have very few blues and the presence of hostiles in "their" systems is the norm, they can never farm in peace. Since they can't farm, it doesn't matter how profitable it would be to farm, so buffing income sources wouldn't help. Of course there can be a point where it's so profitable that a nullsec block moves in, fill it with blues, exterminate the pirates and start farming.

There cannot be profit without relative peace. There cannot be peace without some form of law, that is usually internalized by the social people as moral, "the right thing. A land where piracy is the norm is an impoverished land. Think of Somalia!

Farms and fields will never happen

2013-05-03T07:00:00.000+02:00

"Farms and fields" is a long-lasting plan in EVE, shared by both (certain) players and developers. In short, it means that nullsec empires live on PvE done by the members (the peasants on the farms) and roaming marauder gangs plunder them for fun and profit. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work. Yet another idea was published, but I'm sure it won't work either.

This post isn't the 1589th idea how to implement farms and fields. It's about why the idea can't be implemented and must be abandoned. The short version is: no PvE player will ever fight a roaming gang, because there is no profit in it, there is no chance to win such fight and he can't fight at the first place.

Let's start with "no profit" and compare it with the nullsec blob fights that actually happen. Why there is a profit in engaging a huge enemy fleet and no profit in engaging a small gang? The answer is that for the individual pilot there is no profit in huge fleet battles either, but the pilots are fighting not for profit, but for their "friends". Most social people don't want to be the one who abandoned their friends in the hours of need, even if they rationally know that fighting is a bad idea. On the other hand there is no such social pressure on fighting against a roaming gang. The decision to fight or not is made purely on financial basis and the answer is always "dock up, log highsec alt".

Secondly, you can win a blob fight. Structures are often saved, objectives denided from the attackers. Also the reimbursement of losses can overwhelm the enemy alliance wallet. Forming up and getting hammered can make line members not log in, slowly eating the enemy away. On the other hand, no one ever in the history of EVE defeated a roaming gang as their goal is "shoot stuff, explode and chat with bros". That goal cannot be defeated. Their ships have little value, they don't expect to keep them and they have nothing better to do with their time. You can destroy their fleet hundred times and they will still come back.

Finally a blob fight needs one to anchor up and press F1. It can be done by a miner. Engaging in small-gang PvP needs both skillpoints and game knowledge that the average "farms and fields peasant" do not have. So he cannot engage in combat even if he wants to.

No game mechanics change can force nullsec PvE players to defend their income from roaming gangs. If the changes allow roamers to make serious damage, it can make the PvE to stop and move to highsec, but nothing ever will make a miner or ratter undock a combat ship into a small-gang PvP situation.

Please note that I did not say that there can't be meaningful PvE in nullsec or an alliance can't base itself on farming members (or renters). I'm just saying that they will not provide any fights, they will either handle the PvP-er problem by using disposable ships (Retreivers, Ventures) or by docking up when any threat is present. This behavior makes roaming boring enough that only very bored people do it, therefore their threat is minimal.

Business Thursday: mission mining at large

2013-05-02T07:00:00.000+02:00

Last week I revealed an unused feature, highsec lvl 4 mining missions that provide good income for newbies and OK income while AFK to veterans. The new Odessey changes just make it more important, as ice mining will become competitive and highsec rock mining will be crushed by the low level mineral boom of nullsec. If you want to mine in relative peace for OK-ish income, mining missions are the place for you.

But there is more in mining missions than you've seen: Yes, you see it right, that mission provides 15M income with 1000ISK/LP and 30M income with 2500ISK/LP. Who provides that high ISK/LP? Pirate factions! The following factions have nullsec mining agents:

Angel Cartel
Caldari State
Gallente Federation
ORE
Shansa's nation
Serpentis
Thukker Tribe

Of course there are agents in lowsec too, for the following factions. Their income is about 10-12M for a mission:

Amarr Empire
Ammatar Mandate
Caldari State
Gallente Federation
Minmatar Republic
Thukker Tribe

How hard are they? This is me, with horrible skills, AFK-orbiting in nullsec in a Venture. While I was at the keyboard, I did not need to press a single key during the mission. Of course AFK-ing in lowsec and nullsec is not the safest thing, but hey, losing a Venture or Retreiver with an empty beta clone won't kill you. It's like the AFK-orbiting of FW-lowsec. Some frigates were killed, but most were not, simply because no one cared to kill them. This is something a few days old newbie can do in lowsec or NPC null: mission-mine. In sov-null the new ores probably provide better income, but those need refining and hauling capacity as the ore needs to be sold.

How to go large? Place a tower, put a Rorqual below the shield and run multiple miners, eating missions at the rate of 3/hour, providing 30-35M/hour/account in lowsec and 80-90M/hour/account in certain pirate-populated nullsec regions, with very small risk (a Retreiver pays for itself in 15 minutes if mining for pirate factions).

Make the botters/RMT-ers pay!

2013-05-01T07:00:00.000+02:00

The Team Security panel reiterated the lenient policy of CCP towards botters and RMT buyers. If we consider that they ban thousands of accounts every month, it's somewhat understandable that the don't want to lose large portion of playerbase who went "a bit" bad. They have zero tolerance on client hackers and RMT sellers though.

The legitimate players of course demand a harsher approach towards RMT buyers and botters, who harm their income, making many income sources, especially mining unprofitable to actual players. I think I know a middle way that both serves the interest of CCP of keeping customers who just slipped and the interest of players to get rid of botters and RMT (if there are no buyers, there are no sellers).

The solution is to mark every account who used to receive a temporary ban for minor violations and also their identified alts. These marked accounts should have two restrictions: characters can't be transferred away from them and they can't activate PLEX (or timecode or buddy invite reward or whatever) to buy subscription time. Because of this, the RMT buyers and minor botters can no longer fund their account from illegally obtained means, they must pay real money to CCP to continue playing. They can sell PLEX to get ISK of course.

Why would it work? Because it would remove unfixable players without removing too many fixable ones. To understand this, we must understand what makes the difference between these two groups! There are four ways of handling EVE subscription and ISK income:

Paying money to CCP
Farming
Cheating
Abandoning EVE

From these we can have 4*3*2=24 preference orders. However we don't have to list all 24, just those who had "cheating" at the first place, as everyone else did not cheat but went with their first option:

CPFA and CPAF: the change will have no effect on these players as they would choose paying anyway if cheating is not available.
CFPA: they will murmur as they are forced to pay instead of farm their account, but won't cancel and we don't care about the murmur of cheaters.
CFAP: they will abandon their account and they are the only collateral damage.
CAPF and CAFP: these players must be lost because they are beyond fixing. They choose that they would rather leave the game than play in any legitimate way. If you could make cheating impossible, they would quit anyway. So temporary bans can't fix them, they will keep cheating until banned.

The above can be scaled to infinity. I mean botters usually not only bot to fund their account but also to get ISK for ships. RMT buyers are probably do not only buy ISK to turn it into PLEX cheaper than CCP price but also to get ISK for ships. Forcing them to pay for their account properly would not stop them RMT/bot for their ISK. However those who are caught second time could be marked for "+1 PLEX": it means that in order to keep their account running, on the top of the subscription fee, they must buy a PLEX too. They receive this PLEX to their hangar, so they can sell it for ISK legitimally. If they still bot/RMT, they can be "promoted" to +2, +3, +4. Sooner or later they reach the point where they get enough ISK from legitimate PLEX sales to stop getting ISK from cheating.

Actually the above can replace temporary bans fully, applied not only to minor cheating violations but on those who receive temporary bans for foul language, harassment and so on. The idea behind PLEX is that the free players provide positive content to other players who pay their subscription in turn. Those who provide negative content should not get this privilege. On the contrary, they should compensate the other players for suffering them. And via PLEX they will. These troublemakers would have to pay for more and more PLEX-es after each of their infractions. These PLEX-es will be sold for ISK, the price of PLEX will decrease, making it more accessible to others, practically forcing the bad guys to pay for the subscription of their victims.

I told you! (and mining changes and CSM8)

2013-04-30T07:00:00.001+02:00

I've been telling it since the start. I started telling it when no one else did: the money is in highsec. Now, it's official: This graph was presented at fanfest, the dots represent systems, their sizes show the production and destruction in them. You can see that most production happens in highsec. This is where people make their money, either as full-time highsec players, or low/nullsec alts. Low/nullsec is only a place for PvP. Luckily CCP recognized it as a problem and the new devblog pair shows changes to nullsec industry and mining, making it more profitable than their highsec counterpart. They even addressed the AFK mining problem a bit! More on mining on Thursday.

The most important is not the set of improvements of mechanics but the below declaration of CCP Fozzie: "We intend for mining to become a major plank of many financially successful nullsec empires, and we encourage those empires to begin planning how they can best integrate miners into their plans for universal domination." Yes, they clearly want to change nullsec from "PvP or GTFO" where a frigate lolroamer was valued higher than an industrialist.

This will make large changes in the nullsec empires, as not all of them have a philosophy that allows integrating industrialists. I seriously doubt for example that Goons will be able to attract miners into their ranks. TEST will fare much better. The PL-NC.-N2S block is a wildcard, they clearly can't invite miners into their alliance but have the ability to protect a pet alliance from roamers, as they can advertise it as "have your Rorqual in the belt with tank and a cyno and we'll counterdrop anything they can drop on you". However I think the biggest winner of the change will be the "drone Russians", and I predict a strong cloalition to reborn from the ashes of SOLAR. You see, on the East there was always lot of ratting and gun-mining, they were the least polluted by the "don't give a damn just blow things up" attitude.

Besides these very welcome changes to the economy, it's time for celebration over the CSM8 too. I had a post which candidates would be best for facilitating changes like this: in the first 6 positions I suggested voting for Ali Aras and the wormhole 5, in order to represent people (newbies and wormholers) who make money where they live. Half of them get on the CSM, that's great. To the next 3 positions I suggested Mangala Solaris, Psychotic Monk and Korvin, two of them got in.

So all in all, things went the way I wanted them to go, which makes me a happy goblin.

Why EVE is the best MMO?

2013-04-29T07:00:00.000+02:00

You probably seen that I just whine on features of EVE Online. The economy is a mess, the players are dumb even to WoW standards, I can have 100x more kills than the most "elite" alliances via ganking, I can afford 3 titans now, it's too easy, blah, blah, blah. But still, here I am, playing EVE Online, "the terrible game". Why? I couldn't even answer it myself. Then one of the developers, CCP Soundwave answered for me:

"Players are not entitled to success, the pinnacle is coveted by many players, but many more will fail on the way.
CCP is perfectly fine with the fact that 99% of their players will never own a Supercapital, the fact that most aspiring sky marshals will never lead entire alliances into battle, and the fact that most spies will never infiltrate to the highest orders of their targets to deliver a coup de grace. That’s fine. Not everyone is a winner, famous players are famous because they are exceptional in some way. What is important is that players are able to form a goal and dream. They should also know they are not entitled to success though, and must be willing to work harder or smarter than their peers if they want to achieve it. EVE will not hand consolation prizes to the losers, but if they did something right, there will be natural rewards waiting for them."

Other MMOs want to make every drooling moron and slacker wear the top items, kill the last dragon, have every achievement. EVE Online is the only MMO out there where winning and losing exist and players meant to do something for winning, not just logging in and waste time. Mechanics can be fixed, features can be added if the core is solid. WoW has much better graphics, much faster fixes, much better balance, but the core is rotten: ilvl 9999 for /follow.

If you want to experience a game where "being a winner" isn't automatic and given out to everyone, come, play EVE Online!

Making mining more interesting

2013-04-26T07:00:00.000+02:00

After doing more than 80 mining missions I can see why mining is considered "not fun": your presence at the keyboard makes little difference. While it's not zero, it's small enough to not reward the player attention. Above all: miners want to mine, and not rat, so various ideas how to force them fight red crosses would all be bad as if they'd like to do that, they wouldn't mine at all. I don't say that belt rats have no place in mining, but they must be secondary to the mining itself.

That being said, barges and exhumers could use a pair of utility high slots and maybe a tractor beam range bonus, to be able to tractor in and salvage killed belt rats. You can kill the belt rats while AFK via drones and there is no point slowboating to loot them. However a tractor and a salvager would allow active miners to get some income on the side. Also, why there are rats in the belt at all? There is nothing there but ore! Sure they want the ore! So let's spice up the rats with miner spawns: a rat Venture mining our ore and not attacking. When full, it slowboats some time and warps. If you manually order your drones to kill it, you made yourself some ore from the loot!

A larger drone bay would be great to reward active playing, as switching between self-defense drones and mining drones for larger yield would be possible.

But enough of the rats, let's turn to mining itself, without huge reprogramming. Currently the ammunition of the mining laser is bound to the asteroid type. If you are mining veldspar, you should have veldspar crystal. Very interesting choice. Instead - like every ammo in the game - the mining crystals should affect the attributes of the "gun". Let me list some mining crystals, all affecting every type of ore equally. These crystals should have ice harvester versions too:

Standard crystal: like today the ore-appropriate crystal or ice harvester. Every other crystal in the list is compared to this.
Sniping crystal: half yield, optimal up to 60km, so you can mine some while approaching.
Pulse crystal: 1/4 cycle time, 1/4 capacitor usage, 1/5 yield, it's for mining with low capacitor.
Long crystal: 3x cycle time, 3x cap usage, 4x yield but provides no ore if the cycle is interrupted, the asteroid runs empty or the ore hold can't take the full amount.
ECCM crystal: 75% yield, you don't lose target on the rock if jammed
Sweeping crystal: 75% yield, stops cycling as soon as the rock is empty
Thief crystal: 75% yield alone, gained normally when you end your cycle. When any other mining laser on the same rock ends its cycle, you get half of its ore. If multiple thieves are present the victims still get half and the other half is equally distributed among the thieves. Using thieving crystal is not a crime, but it has a very distinct color, making sure that other active miners can notice and respond. AFK miners on the other hand are fair game.
Anti-thief crystal: 75% yield, protected from thieving. No distinct color from normal crystal. When the thief ends his cycle, he gets no ore and his miner stops with the message "an anti-thief laser on this asteroid destabilized your laser". The thief still gets half yield of any other lasers if they end their cycle while the thieving laser is active.
Boost crystal: 50% yield. Every other mining lasers on the same rock receive 10% yield increase. Not cumulative.

With these, miners would have something to do: switching crystals, tractoring and salvaging, switching drones which would increase their income greatly above AFK miners. The existence of thieving crystals would force AFK miners to give up 25% yield using anti-thief crystals all time.

6-8M/hour for a fresh newbie while AFK (20M for a veteran)

2013-04-25T07:00:00.000+02:00

Have you ever heard of mining missions? You probably didn't even know such things exist. If you'd ask an expert who knows the game in and out, he'd say these are horrible things where you have to warp to the mission area with a combat ship to clear out mission rats, warp in with a mining ship, slowboat 20+ kms with a 100m/s barge, jetscan mine, warp in with a hauler, slowboat with the hauler, do it with 1-2 more runs depending on hauler size. All this annoyment nets about the same LP/ISK than a combat mission without loot and salvage and 3-4x more time. Just forget it.

The expert was right until the mining barge buff. The tank buff made them able to easily handle rats and the ore hold buff removed the hauler from the picture. Now a lvl4 mining mission is: warp in a retriever piloted by a few days old pilot, slowboat once, launch drones, start mining, go AFK, dock, profit.

Yes, dear readers, the mining missions were not changed after the mining barge buff, despite now they are just as easy as AFK ice mining. I mean literally. I've ran more than 80 lvl 4 mining missions in a 0.5 system, AFK-ing for long times and only lost one barge, due to not launching drones.

The average completion time of these missions is almost an hour for a horrible skilled newbie (how I started them). A veteran with Orca boost can go up to 20 mins/mission. The payment is about 2.5M ISK and 5.5K LP, with mining connection and negotiation skills on 4. I could cash it out with implants for 1000 ISK/LP, so the income is around 7.5M/mission. (Note: 1000/LP is a baseline, you can get better ISK/LP, check http://lpstock.ru) It translates to 6-8M/hour for a few days old newbie and up to 20M for a serious veteran. Please note, that unlike FW orbiting it doesn't need any more knowledge about the game than the tutorial gives. If you can mine veldspar in a belt, you can do an L4 mining mission. All you need is Drones 4 and 4 T1 hobgoblins besides basic mining skills.

Mining missions beat belt mining in every aspect. No large volume stuff to transport, you don't have to take gates, you can't run out of asteroids, no competition can show up and gankers must scan you down first in your mission, then they must slowboat to you from the mission entrance (flashy pirates can't do that as faction police will come). So mining missions: AFK and easy as ice, safe as grav site and pays better than any highsec ore.

Tips: unless you are bound to Caldari space (due to standings), go elsewhere. The Guristas use ECM, which mean you have to retarget the asteroid, which is hard while AFK. Fit your retriever with civilian shield booster, full yield in lows, rigs should be resists against the rat damage profile. Of course you should never AFK-mine in an untanked Retriever if your implants worth a lot. The ship is cheap and ganks are practically non-existent in mission deadspaces. While the mission ores have various names, they are flavored normal ores, so you can use T2 miner with crystals. Mission reward depends on system security, mission in 0.5-0.6! 16 missions proc a storyline which gives high faction standings and good loot. The mission cannot be completed with the ore in the ore hold, must move it to the hangar.

The missions have various names and flavor texts but there are actually 6 missions, defined by the ore to mine:

Polygipsum: (Arkonor crystal). This is the nastiest mission, reject it if you can. There are 8 asteroids to mine, so you have to retarget 4 times. 44800m³ ore, you have to dock twice.
Green Arisite: (Gneiss crystal), 1 asteroid, 50km from the entry point. 44800m³ ore, you have to dock twice. The best method is jetcanning the first half, keep mining, dock when complete. Then refit the Retriever with nanos, 1MN MWD and a tractor beam, so you can get your can with much less slowboating.
Geodite: (Crokite crystal) 2 asteroids, 30 from entry, each having 22400m³, mine one, dock, mine the other.
Oeryl: (Dark Ochre crystal), 1 asteroid, 44800m³ 15 km from entry point
Ice: you need ice harvesters and the income/hour is lower than ore. The solo asteroid is 15 km from the entry and only 20000m³, so can be completed without redocking.
Gas: this is the best ISK/hour without doubt and also needs just one dock. It should be completed in a Venture. Mitigate rat damage by orbiting at 500 and have medium extender, DCII, civilian booster, invulnerability field. The Venture has space only for two drones, but they eat the rats slowly.

I doubt that it worth upgrading to Mackinaw, as its yield is only 5% better, you can't really use the larger ore hold (as 44000m³ still doesn't fit in) and its much higher price might attract scanning gankers.

I have to add, the scenery is great, lot of artwork was done on it, much nicer than belts. Not like you'd watch it:
I don't know how much time till CCP rebalances mining missions, but until then, if you are mining anything else in highsec, you are doing it wrong. Expect some nice mineral and especially ice product price increase. I mean it really takes an idiot to AFK mine for 4M/hour when you can AFK mine for 20M/hour in a much safer place. While ice miners aren't really paying attention, I still expect the ice belts to empty and mining missioning stations to run full.

The big EVE trick

2013-04-24T07:00:00.001+02:00

What is an easy game: where everyone can achieve what he wants easily.

What is a hard game: where you can only advance by becoming better and if you suck, you can't advance.
EVE is known to be the hardest MMO, with the infamous learning curve image:

The forums are full of tears of defeated, scammed, ganked players. EVE players who stood their ground are proud of themselves and look deep down on everyone else, especially WoW players. On the other hand many amassed large wealth and good killboard without much effort, showing it's an easy game. What is going on here?

The trick is that EVE - unlike all other non-trivial games - is not competitive. In a competitive game you can only progress by defeating other players. It just gets harder as you progress. To get to 1200 ELO from 1100, you just have to defeat 1150 average ELO players. To get to 2200 from 2100, you have to defeat players with average rating of 2150. On the other hand in EVE, you are never ever forced to or even rewarded for facing other skilled players.

You can gain ISK by very simple market moves, capitalizing on the laziness and dumbness of the masses. You can gain lot of kills by slaughtering miners or dumb players jumping into your gatecamp. Most "elite PvP" videos are about someone roaming around killing ratters (mostly bots).

The game is punishing mistakes and winning is mostly using the mistakes of others. Two players who aren't making mistakes are practically unable to hurt each other. You can't gank me, but I can't gank you either. However we can easily gank those who orbit a piece of ice while AFK. So the game is punishing bad players, while it's not at all demanding on the good players. So everyone who invested enough time to learn the game and not a total moron can "master" EVE and feel a winner. It's like swimming: if you can't swim, it's pretty harsh thing to be in the water. But if you learned it, it isn't hard.

PS: Tomorrow comes a business post. I've found an imbalance of a PvE system which allows you to gain lot of ISK with little effort, similarly to the old FW imbalance. Considering that the devs aren't famous for fast fixes, I predict some serious price changes in several game items, especially ice products and some people getting their titans in a few months. The best thing is that it's totally newbie friendly, so even few days old newbies (not few days old alts of informed players but real newbies with no meta-game or game mechanics knowledge) can use it. Of course they won't get titans with their one account, but they will have their faction battleship before they can sit in it (hopefully they don't fly it lowsec on the day they can).

Burn morons

2013-04-23T07:00:00.001+02:00

Burn Jita happened again, with lot of dead freighters, jump freighters, industrials and retards. Goons claim the destruction of several hundred billions of ISK already. Ships explode left and right: The Goons are spreading fear among the "pubbies" and make sure that they are known to be the unstoppable boogiemen of EVE. No one is safe from them.

I don't believe in boogiemen so instead of cowering docked, I put their "unstoppableness" to the test. I filled my Orca with double-wrapped packages, surely full of valuable goodies and did several trips in an out of Jita and the nearby systems that had high kill count. For days nothing happened, the monsters from Deklein ignored me. You might think I was just very-very lucky, but on Sunday my "luck" ran out as a Machariel and others started to bump me and Tornados shown up the overview on the Perimiter gate in Jita. A stranger convoed me too:
As you can see, after scanning my ship, the "unstoppable boogiemen" choose not to attack. Could they muster the force to take down my Orca? Probably. But there was no point as the cost of the gank would probably be too high for the lottery of the double-wrapped goodies, so what was inside will remain secret.

The "real boogiemen" would damn the cost and would just gank out of principle. But there is no such thing as "real boogiemen". The monsters are created in the mind of the morons and slackers who are unable to understand risk and reward. They fly their loot pinatas and cry "monster" when they are robbed. They don't see that the robbing wasn't random and was motivated by the loot or prestige value of their ship. If they wouldn't be dumb, they could easily fly something that doesn't worth ganking. Highsec is safe, as you can limit risks to the point where you don't really have to care, but the gankers would lose way to much to proceed:
If everyone could fit ships and calculate loot values, there wouldn't be ganking at all. Every gank victim is a fool who made himself a target. You can fly safely in the middle of Burn Jita with 40 seconds aligning brick.

Pay to socialize

2013-04-22T07:00:00.000+02:00

There are two known payment methods for MMOs. One is pay-to-play. World of Warcraft is a common example. You pay subscription and for that subscription you can participate in the game. You pay the same amount as everyone else, therefore the developers have no reason to prioritize you. The game is completely fair. The common problem with pay-to-play games is that the only way to increase income is making the game more popular and it can only be done by moving towards the most common denominator: idiots. Such games are usually "accessible" meaning trivial. Sometimes they are outright childish, like WoW by moving towards the "kung-fu panda WOOT!" kids.

The other payment method is pay-to-win, with World of Tanks being the common example. Here your wins and losses depend not on play skill or even play time, but paid money. For money you can buy outright overpowered items which allow you to massacre your non-paying peers. This method is usually more successful in the short term, the common saying is "going F2P doubles revenues", but usually gives much shorter lifespan since sooner or later even the dumbest guy recognizes that he cannot win without paying and also, grinding hopeless randoms for money loses its appeal fast.

"Pay for vanity/convenience" is another method, League of Legends is a good example, but World of Tanks is moving this way in the recent patches. Here you can play the game for free fully, but paying slows down grinding time and also provides "fun" items.

EVE Online seems to be different from all.

It's not a subscription game, as gaining enough game credits to buy PLEX to play for free is trivial task, a few planets and some random missions can generate that money in a month. You can also access vast amount of game currency by spending real money on PLEX.
However it's neither pay-to-win, as spending lot of money on a ship is the way not for victory, but becoming a laughing stock who lost the purple ship.
Since there is no defined "progression" in the game, there is no way to shorten "the grind". If you get yourself a titan pilot and a titan on day 1, it won't make you recognized as an accomplished player.

What is the business method of EVE? What is the secret that keeps the "most evil, un-fair, hard and unforgiving" MMO running for so long? I mean every MMO loses subscriptions after they get old but EVE doesn't. The solution came from thinking more about "nullsec-altruism". The solution is that in EVE you are most profitable alone. This is a consequence of the "you are never safe" design doctrine. The more PvE players are together, the bigger target they are. Also your ISK/hour is damaged by idling while chatting. But the worst thing is that if you are in a group, sooner or later someone comes up with the "great" idea of "having some PvP fun" which is a total moneysink. If you are in a PvP alliance, that's the largest moneysink that can only be approximated by asking "how much would it cost to defend our sov by only hired mercenaries?".

You can make ISK by playing totally casually and badly. Playing generates ISK, not consumes. In EVE playing with others costs you ISK. You either make this ISK by also playing alone or by converting PLEX. This is a really effective business model: "pay-to-socialize". When you are "having fun", you don't mind losing money. When you are alone, you are compensated by ISK income, motivated to keep playing.

"EVE is real" is more true here than anywhere else. Life isn't that expensive. Socializing is.
You go out on a party, that needs gifts, expensive drinks and so on.
You want to date a girl? You better get enough cash with you as you'd better bring her to a "good" (read: shamelessly overpriced) restaurant.
You want to date as a girl? You better buy some new clothes, accessories, jewelry and visit a beauty saloon.
Don't want your coworkers think of you as a loser? You better buy a new car.
Want to keep in contact with your relatives? That's lot of gas to travel and lot of gifts.

I'm rich IRL because I don't spend on these. I'm probably rich in games not because I do something extraordinary (I don't), but because I don't waste it on social occasions and also I have time to make money as I don't waste it on socializing in the game.

There is a common belief, "the rich man is lonely because greed makes him unable to love". It's not true. The truth is that the a-social person will unavoidably gets rich as he doesn't waste on socializing.

Disproving religions

2013-04-19T07:00:00.000+02:00

The problem of religions has troubled me since I know my mind. I always looked at religion as superstition, however I had to accept that I can't disprove such beliefs. This annoyed me seriously. No matter how much philosophy I've read I couldn't find any reasonable proof about the non-existence of the supernatural. I was looking at the wrong place and for the wrong question. The solution was in meta-gaming, cheating, playing to win and the question wasn't even about the supernatural.

The "created" World is far from perfect, full of disasters and mass murderers. Why there is imperfection in the World created by a perfect God? Because of free will. If I can't make decisions, there is no "I", free will is necessary to define a person. However if one has free will, he can do evil too. God cannot interfere with our actions without eliminating free will. Can't magically turn the bullets of an evil murderer soft without making the choice to be a murderer impossible.

However for God to matter, he must interfere some time. If he never interferes with us, he may or may not exist, but we have no reason to care. If he doesn't make non-deterministic choices that affect us, we are free to call him "natural laws" and completely stop thinking about him as a being. Actually a non-interfering God would be nature.

The solution to keep both free will and a choice-making God is afterlife: God doesn't interfere with our lives to let us have free will, but will interfere with our afterlife, placing us to Heaven or Hell. This scheme is told by practically every religion, exactly because it's the only way to have both God and free will.

But what is the purpose of the normal world then, if there is a much better version? To allow judgment. The people are free to act good and evil in this world, forming the basis of judgment after death. This actually turns the life into a test. All wrong and suffering in this world is the consequence of someone failing to do the right thing. This person will be judged and punished, while the righteous will be rewarded by heaven. So we have divine perfection (in heaven), perfect justice (by sending the evil to Hell) despite the World we see is evil. The natural disasters and innocent victims are not disproving this: they could be foreseen, prevented or mitigated by people who choose not to. You could have spent money on earthquake research instead of military, you could have moved away from the faultline, you could have built a stronger house. Also, the victim - if lived his life properly - is not harmed as he goes to Heaven anyway.

So life is a game that will be evaluated by the perfect God who will send the "bad players" to Hell, while rewards the righteous with divine love and perfection in Heaven. This scheme resists all atheists ideas and could not be disproved.

It doesn't need to be disproved. The problem of this scheme can be summarized with a question: how would you describe the person who steals from a shop right front of a bunch of cops? The answer is "idiot", and not "immoral". He has no reasonable chance to achieve his goal, even temporarily (he won't drink the stolen booze), and he will be punished. In a world where cops stand everywhere, no one would commit crime except the insane.

If one believes that the world is test by God who will punish the failers and rewards the righteous, he will do good, regardless his moral preferences, just like a non-insane thief will act lawfully front of the policemen. This - again - is preached by religions: the crimes are done by people who turned away from God, while the true God-fearing person is living a righteous life.

However this is a fundamental loophole in the test! Since God sees and knows all, anyone believing in God knows that he is watched and won't do bad to avoid the punishment of Hell. The members of the true church are cheating the test of God! Since these people know that it is just a test, it no longer tests their morality, only their self-control and obedience. To make the test work God must hide from the people, making it impossible for them to figure his existence out. If you would say "God likes self-control and obedience" than you must explain why different religions exist. I mean if there are two preachers, you obviously can't obey both. The perfect God would never create such a faulty test.

One could claim that the test is recognizing the true God (true moral) by picking the true church. However such test would be very unfair. One risen by religious people is usually religious without thinking about it, simply by following what's been told him. So those who born as children of the members of the true church has a huge advantage over those who were born in atheist families. To make it worse, several religions actively punish non-believers. If that is not the true church, your only chance to go to Heaven is to become a martyr. No God would make so unfair test.

Since God would not allow cheating his test and religions do nothing else but help the people cheating, - extremely ironically - the existence of a true religion and the existence of God are mutually exclusive. So there is either no God (therefore all religions are wrong) or all the religions are useless and don't bring you closer to Heaven (that's why God lets them exist).

Please note that I did not disprove the existence of God. That probably can't be done as you can't make measurements on the supernatural. Atheists are doing it all wrong, trying to defeat the idea of God. The usefulness of Earthly religions can be disproved. People shouldn't be convinced to stop believing in God, they should be convinced to stop going to church.

Business Thursday: I lose money on this trade!

2013-04-18T07:00:00.002+02:00

Another day, another moron letter:
This one informed me that I'm doing it wrong, since I sold the implant for 100M that I bought for 99M the day before. I do lose money on taxes on such trade, I'd be better off not doing it. What happened and why did I do it?

The day before the implant was 97M buy and 108M sell. So I set up a buy order for 99M and a sell order for 106M, for a 7M profit. Half day later I logged in, I found the buy order filled, and the sell order being undercut to 105M. Since I had enough implants now in stock, I simply moved the sell order to 103M. Half day later it was undercut by several 0.01-ers at 102.99999M So I undercut again, this time to 100M, which finally sold.

Did I lost money on the trade? Yes I did. But what else could I do? I have no control over the price, nor a crystal ball to see the future. I assume that the prices don't swing overnight. They usually don't. Sometimes they do. If they swing downwards, I lose money. If they go upwards and I have stocks in my hangar, I gain money.

The author of the moron letter would probably say "stick to the 108M price until it returns". However this advice has two problems: one is that I can't guarantee that the price will ever return. It would need serious investment research to guess how its price will move. Secondly is more importantly, until it happens, I can't trade the item since my money is locked in the unsold wares. Instead, I accepted that loss, regained my money at 100M and use it to buy more items at 90M to sell them 100M again.

The moral of the story is that you must decide if you are an investor or a trader. I choose the second, which means that I sell my wares at any price the best market gives. I always sell, no exceptions. I only make choices when setting a buy order and it depends on "is there enough margin between buys and sells?". If something has buy orders for 100M and sells for 102M, I won't bother. But if the margin is larger than 4%, I take it, and I can't care less if it's 80-84 or 160-166.

PS: very nasty philosophical post incoming tomorrow.

Good players vs bad players: not normal distribution

2013-04-17T07:00:00.001+02:00

Tobold reiterated the most harmful socialist doctrine: "most people are average". The doctrine says that the results of a large bunch of people give a Normal distribution, where most people are near the average.

Normal distribution describes the outcome of multiple random choices. If you add N coinflips, the most common result will be N/2, while extremes will be rare. Accepting normal distribution is accepting that the results of people are products of luck, the very opposite of meritocracy. If their results are luck-driven, then bad performers are just unlucky.

This is not true in real life:

It's time to unquestionably prove that every gamer already know implicitly: there are "good" and there are "bad" players and these are distinct groups with little in-between. For that I need data of random or complete sample of player performance results. Performance of selected group members obviously does not work, so I can't use raiding guild parses. I try to put my hands on a complete EVE-kill database, but until then, let's go with WoW LFR data. Let me show a sample, made yesterday by my girlfirend: The marked people are the tanks and my girlfriend. They will be excluded, tanks because they are under different mechanics and the screenshot maker for not being random (you are always on your screenshots). In this example data, the average damage is 23096339 with standard distribution of 9603079. Below you can see these players classified into seven groups depending on their distance from average: This data shows what it should: two distinct groups, one for players who read up, gem, enchant and one for those who just "hang out and have fun".

Please send your screenshots (with marked tanks, yourself, groupmembers) from LFR fights where players are all in the same place (no Sha of Fear and such) to gevlon dot freemail dot hu.

Structure shooting structure

2013-04-16T07:00:00.001+02:00

People in nullsec cry left and right how horrible it is to shoot structures. They often post various suggestions to change Sov warfare. However the structures are there for a reason: to prevent losing Sov to a surprise attack. The high HP makes it impossible to just destroy them with a volley and run away from the defenders, while timers make it impossible to attack in time zones out of the defenders choice. It's no wonder that Pandemic Legion forms "war games" to force the change of Sov mechanic, they are the masters of surprise attacks. A Sov system where you can win with "suddenly 100 titans" would make them unstoppable. The Sov structures with 25-75M HP must stay and may even deserve increase of HP to battle with supercapital proliferation.

However it is a valid argument that the long structure shoot is meant as an obstacle against invasion, you have to shoot 75M HP while fighting the enemy, practically demanding 75M HP damage more from attackers than defenders. But currently it's usually an inconvenience when you just have to grind down 75M HP all by itself. Sov grind should be easy if the defenders don't show up.

Let me introduce the solution: the mobile siege device!
The mobile siege device is an anchorable structure. It is 300000m³ packaged, costs 1B to build and onlines and offlines in 4 hours. You can plant one anywhere where any kind of structure is or can be anchored (SBU, IHUB, station, POCO, POS...) You can anchor more than one. After it onlined, you have to fill its hold with XL ammunition (cap booster charges for Amarr). Onlined and loaded, it automatically attacks any hostile structures (including enemy siege devices) with 8K DPS using T1 ammo, 10K with faction. It fights day and night, instantly resumes fighting after downtime, if a structure comes out of reinforcement or a new hostile structure is planted.

The mobile siege device is visible and warpable on the overview to everyone, even during onlining period, and unable to defend itself against ships. It only has 5M EHP, some 500HPS shield regen and no reinforcements or invulnerability periods. Its only defense is sending notifications to the anchoring corp. This makes its use impossible if the defenders fight, this case you must grid the structures the hard way. However if the defenders don't bother to defend, you just anchor a mobile siege device, come back 4 hours later to fill it with ammo, unanchor it a week later when it finished its job.

All I want to say is ne-ne-ne-ne-ne!

2013-04-15T07:00:00.000+02:00

The TEST drama is now all over the EVE-related sites. If you missed the main points are:

A corporation, Kaesong Kosmonauts (NORK.) left TEST alliance on good terms. The TEST leader gave them a nice farewell.
It turns out that the good terms were one-sided, as soon as they were neut, they started camping jump bridges. It turns out that camping jump bridges with supercapitals is bad idea.
Upon losing the Aeon, they go full retard on forums, trolling left and right, celebrating (and maybe contributing to) some TEST super losses
They get banned from the forums, mostly for messing with IT service authorizations
The prominent members of the corp get accepted to a Pandemic Legion corp
Now, as blues, they keep shooting TEST
TEST resets PL and according to the comments I've seen they stay neutral until NORK guys are not kicked from PL

Why is it interesting (for me, for you it's probably just a stupid drama)?
Check out the names in the center of the scandal: Richter Enderas, Araello, Madlof Chev, Dysphonia Fera and so on. They were exactly my haters. Of course others disagreed with me often, but these were commenting hate on anything I've posted, including totally technical, neutral stuff.

It wasn't always like that. I was just another commenter, gaining support and critique according to my posts originally. There was an event when these fine individuals turned on me, creating a 20 pages long collection of death threats and "nigger faggot" class insults. Only after that I became the public enemy. It happened when their leader, Richter Enderas wanted my full API and I refused because I believed they want it to awox my highsec assets. While I was accepted to Dreddit, the common opinion was that I was very wrong accusing these "bros" and while most of the people didn't jump on the "shut the fuck up publord" bandwagon, neither they opposed it. Now, when the awoxing and insulting posts of these "bros" threatens the PL-TEST relations, I hope the irony burns those who supported them.