Housekeeping

Removed the blog Dense Veldspar from the list as it stopped posting about four months ago and now has been removed from blogspot.

I'll have a look around and replace it with a few more active ones as I come across them.

You may have noticed I replaced the header image a little while ago.  After briefly flirting with a mostly red image I've settled on the current one.

CSM 6

The CSM results are in for 2011.

All hail the new Chairman of CSM 6 with only 43,731 voting against the probably not criminally insane The Mittani aka Mittens.

Total votes were 49,096 with Mittens gathering 5,365 of those and his minions amounts from 3,813 to 1,986 each, view here for exact figures.

Of interest is the fact that 21,516 accounts voted for nobody in the top 9, or nearly 44 percent of the correctly submitted voting population.

With the first CSM meeting beginning on the 18th of May 2011 we don't have long to wait for the fireworks to begin.

Trickling of Fanfest

Being in the land of Vegemite and VB we are out of sync with the live presentations from Fanfest.  So we then have to glean this information from forums posts, other blogs and whatever CCP sees fit to release between pub crawls and telling us all how awesome they are.

Witness the vision of the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mlVuLs_Nw&feature=feedu

Think about that demonstration for a moment, realise most of it will not be delivered for years, if at all.

Might as well forget about it huh?

CCP, show us what you can guarantee you will deliver inside 12 months time.

If you must insist on wowing the crowd with shiny things then be honest about the expected delivery time, not CCP time, not Valve time, but real deliverable completed product that we can enjoy.

Wanted!

EyjoG Appears to have Jogged Off!

The Eve Online Quarterly Economic Newsletters (QEN) are once again Missing In Action (MIA).

The CCP economist, Dr. EyjoG  has not been heard from since the late third quarter of 2010.

As you can see from this link the frequency of the "quarterly" reports has been spotty with only 2009 being able to claim four quarterly reports.

I could have missed the memo but my assumption of quarterly reports is four of them are required in a calendar or financial year.

I found them interesting as they gave me a snapshot of the Eve universe as a whole, letting me take a peek into some facets of the game that are closed to me by choice or circumstance.

Perhaps come Fanfest we'll receive some news on this.

I wouldn't hold your breath.

The Value of a Moment

From time to time I chat with people who are trying out manufacturing in Eve Online.  Invariably they mention the minerals they mine are worth nothing as they mined them, and therefore their value is zero or near zero, if you divide the amount of minerals mined by the minutes in an hour for example.

I'm paraphrasing here as what was actually said probably had various "lols" and shout outs to "homies" etc etc.

Figuring out the value of minerals is actually quite easy.

Just send me, Yosagi Yojimbo, everything you have that comprises of minerals in some form or another.

You don't want to do this?  Why not?  You say they have value?  Well then you've just figured out those minerals you mined are worth something after all.

The second way people value, or don't value minerals, is by some valuation of their time.

Potentially this is a self confidence issue but if you value your time at zero dollars or ISK then you're kidding yourself.

One hour in game is an hour you'll never relive, ever.

Assuming that during an hour in game you will perform some sort of ISK making venture then that hour has a value.

Various activities in Eve can earn different amounts in that hour,  if your capabilities both in and out of game could earn 500 million ISK per hour, but the activity you actually perform only earns 350 million ISK per hour then you are losing 150 million ISK per hour.

Many reasons could exist for this gulf, perhaps you've done the 500 million ISK per hour activity so much you'll "rage quit" unless you can get a break, this is a valid reason and forms part of a stress management strategy.

Remind me to form a Yoga franchise in Eve one we finally get Walking In Stations come 2014.

Kidding.

But not about the Yoga franchise.

Getting back to time valuation, it's a personal thing.  I value my time in game, even if I'm just logged in and using the In Game Browser (IGB) to type this entry into the blog as it's relaxing compared to what I normally do.

Diversification is the key, have many money making schemes in Eve, two of the best passive ways at the moment are Planetary Interaction (PI) and the research agents who will "sell" you datacores which you then sell for ISK.

Don't think for a moment your time or minerals are worth nothing, this will not maximise your ISK per hour potential.

It's CSM Time!

Yes it's that time of the year again when we vote for numerous unlucky bastards to represent the users and fly to Iceland at least once and chat with CCP about the direction of the game and just how much oil to swallow before going on a pub crawl!

(takes a breath)

Hold on a sec that sounds pretty good.

Mind you I'm in a climate that when it drops to 20 degrees Celsius people start saying how cold it is.

Of course the voting system they are using is wrong as it virtually guarantees that whoever gets in has been voted against by the majority.

Rejoice in reading the comparisons between First Past the Post and Preferential voting systems!

My Alliance gave all of us a recommendation on who to vote for, which is to be expected, who you actually vote for is your own business.

One of the candidates is The Mittani (aka Mittens) of Goonies.  I must admit some people are going to vote for him in the grim fascination of seeing what might happen.

However if he wins, he loses.  CCP will not make the changes he'll request, if/when he flies off the deep end and abuses/threatens them he's gone.  When his term is over and nothing has been achieved his currency will be worth less then Zimbabwe's.

Vote One for Mittens!

The Sound of Sound

What you may have noticed oh kind and intelligent reader is the addition of an audio track on some posts.

Recoil in horror at my dulcet tones as I choose some blog posts to recite with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

The "audio" label has now been created to help you in your search for listening nirvana.

As the online system I'm using has limited storage capacity at some point in the future I'll have to delete the audio from the oldest tracks, but that will be a couple of hundred tracks in the future.

Ironically this post does not have an audio track.

A Hard Days Night

I don't post much about normal operations as it mostly consists of fleet form, travel, wait, shoot some stuff and come home.

Not very interesting.

The other night though we were tasked with taking down a Territorial Claim Unit (TCU) which we did at about 1am my time.  I logged from the game and eventually managed about four hours sleep, then logged in again the following morning while having my breakfast.

To find somebody else had placed another TCU in the same system and we had to take that one down also.

Urrrrgh!

We fleet up again and head out, once again hitting this damn thing.  This time the neutral locals were expressing their displeasure at our destruction of their TCU.  As it turned out some diplomacy was happening in the background and we were pulled off the unit once the shields were mostly gone.

Mere minutes later a red fleet enters the system and destroys the TCU, thanking us for reducing the shields the cheeky buggers.  I remained in the system the whole time cloaked up and keeping an eye on the ingress/egress gate, but the reds "cleansed" their kill mail to remove our names and only theirs remained.

Wankers.

Anyway we had noticed a Player Owned Structure (POS) in the system so after a couple of hours just ratting and doing stuff we re-fleeted and travelled once again to the target system.

Took out the guns and other annoying structures around the POS and then proceeded to destroy the TCU at the same location, after that the POS was put into reinforced at about 1am my time.

Awesome more sleep lost.

After this we headed home.

Another couple of days in C0nvicted done.

A hard days night by Yosagi Yojimbo

More RMT Details

In this post EveNews24 and RMT'ing I posted about some details of the large real money trading for ISK operation that was at iskbank.com/ru.

Now more details have been released which allow us to cross link various information like character names, corporations and alliances.

Most of the acts were perpetuated by people not in an alliance.Wildly Inappropriate alliance heads the list after the unaffiliated with $5068.45 (US dollars?) spent on "illegal" in game ISK.

Various other facts and figures are in there which you can view at your leisure.

Disappointingly I found two current or recent members of my alliance on the list, Dakahn1985 who was with The New Era until less than 24 hours ago, and Poncho87e of The Resident Haunting who is still a member at the time of writing.

The arguments about real money trading go back and forth, my position is I do not support it officially or unofficially.  However as it will always exist out of the game CCP have acknowledged this and have created a legal RMT scheme using the PLEX mechanic.

Grudgingly I can see why they had to do this, and it also supports their soon to be realised micro transaction system.

Three thousand, six hundred and ten names are on that list, assuming a monthly subscription figure of $14.95 means a potential total spend of those characters just short of $54,000 every month.

In theory most if not all of those people/characters will be banned, and that money will be a hole in CCP's finances.

I'll be certainly keeping an eye on a selection of names to see what happens to them.

More RMT Details (14 March, 2011) by Yosagi Yojimbo

Downtime!

On a perfect weeknight I'm able to exist in the Eve Online universe for 4.5 hours.  Last night we had an early and extended downtime (DT) which inserted a 3 hour dead zone into my Eve time.

Tonight the downtime is once again extended, this time by only half an hour, but once again we are shafted, but it used to be worse.

Pro tip, if you're looking for an image for your blog post, and the heading is (was) "shafted", and SafeSearch is off, consider changing the heading name before you search.

Back in the day, way back in the heady days of 2007 the official downtime was an hour, though it was often longer.  Over time the actual downtime was usually shorter than an hour and eventually CCP changed the official downtime to be half an hour.

This is progress and is a good thing.

CCP (I keep on writing CCCP) have also said they wish to eliminate downtime completely.

That's cool, I also wish to live in a five star hotel while eating lobster and directing an ever revolving cast of super models while they perform various Gilbert and Sullivan plays in the nude.

I digress.

Downtime is always going to inconvenience someone, the sad fact is I suspect my (DT) timezone has the dubious honour of low percentage playing numbers and synchronising with business hours for CCP's server maintenance.

I just wish it wasn't so.

Downtime (March 11. 2011) by Yosagi Yojimbo

EVENews24 and RMT'ing

EVENews24 has covered this pretty well so we await the CCP response and for further information read http://www.evenews24.com/2011/03/09/in-isk-we-trust-iskbank-com-exposed-thousand-of-customers-outed/ and http://www.evenews24.com/2010/03/09/iskbank-com-client-list/

Obviously unauthorised Real Money Trading (RMT) is bad for a variety of reasons.  The typical spread of individuals will be guilty but what will be interesting is which, if any, of the large alliances are also guilty.

So, What's the Velocity of a Sheep in a Vacuum?

In the Eve Online version of space we need constant thrust to maintain a velocity otherwise we coast to a stop in a short amount of time.

Gravity does not seem to have an effect as I can approach any celestial body at any distance and I don't have to worry about falling into the gravity well.

In New Eden millions of objects, missiles, hybrid charges, projectiles etc etc have been fired from the ships of the residents.

Where does this all go?  Not in a database sense but I suppose in a role playing sense.

I assume they just coast to a halt some distance from the source ship and then just sits there.

Should these objects just continue forever, and every once in a while somebody is hit by some random projectile which on the combat log comes from "somewhere"?

/me shrugs

* The practical maximum velocity of a sheep in non Eve Online space is 2997.5 km/sec. (link)

Reduced Shipping Costs

In this post Disabled Shipping and Blog Recognised I lamented the high cost of shipping to my part of the world as a $19.99 mug would actually cost $101.50 when freight is included.

CCP has finally seen the light and have introduced a new freight option which would now reduce that mug from $101.50 to $32.47 if I choose the cheapest USPS option.  This now makes the Eve Store items a possible purchase for me.

However.

What is the USPS like?  From the acronym I assume it's the United States Postal Service so with the drop in freight cost are we also seeing a drop in handling quality and speed?

I don't know the answer to this so I'll see what the feedback is and go from there.

That should not take anything away from the fact the shipping is now reasonably priced which makes the Eve Store a viable option for many more people than previously.

Explaining Yosagi Yojimbo

I was asked during a station hit, which was ultimately unsuccessful, the origins of my name for Eve Online, Yosagi Yojimbo.

In 1988 a game was released for the Commodore 64 computer and others called Samurai Warrior : The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo

Mostly a sideways scrolling adventure game it had features of combat and honour which were not present in many games of that period.

Later on I discovered the game was based on a Japanese comic called Usagi Yojimbo, which translates as Rabbit Bodyguard.

By now my interest had been piqued but the best was yet to come.  Usagi Yojimbo is itself based on the legendary Japanese figure from the fifteenth and sixteenth century called Miyamoto Musashi.

I strongly recommend you read about his exploits via the Wiki link above, it's well worth the effort.


Musashi is known as the author of The Book of Five Rings which is considered a classic treatise on military strategy,  much like Sun Tzu's The Art of War. 


Time passed.


I finished up with another MMO whose name shall not be mentioned ( WNSNBM ) and decided to try out Eve Online. I had known about Eve for a while but some RL friends were in that MMO ( WNSNBM ) so I spent some time with them.


Then I gave Eve a go in 2007 and promptly fell in love.  Back in the C64 days I played quite a bit of Elite so I saw this as the logical modern extension, albeit more complex.


I created a starter character so I could learn the game, that character was disposable and is long gone, I don't even recall his name, but for a few weeks I learned the basics of the game.


One thing I discovered was by default the list of names in the chat channels was alphabetical, so I decided a name that started towards the end of my alphabet would be more desirable.


I thought about this while learning the game, I don't recall the exact process but the name Usagi Yojimbo appeared in my mind, I searched for that name in game and other people already had it, or versions of.


So I thought about how I would say the name out loud, and very shortly I arrived at Yosagi Yojimbo which was unique in game and also the internet, as a Google search for that name will lead you directly to this blog.


At the time of writing I'm now three and a half years into Eve Online.  I'd be lying if I didn't say the experience has had its rocky moments but the game is expanding, growing, and I want to see where it leads.

EVE Blog Banter #25: And By Alliance You Mean Blob?

Welcome to the twenty-fifth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles here.


This month's topic comes to us from @Tetraetc - "Tetra's EVE Blog" - who asks: "Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? Imagine a Null Sec where anyone could build outposts, wherever. Would the reduction of the Alliance game mechanic, and the removal of the sovereignty game mechanics (and the modifcation of it from Alliance level to Corp level for that matter) force more PVP into Null sec, or would giant power blocs like the NC still form themselves?"


It's about time I jump aboard the band wagon and attempt a serious and thought out response to the recent Blog Banter.


Corporations like clumping into Alliances, Alliances like these clumps as it helps their "winning" chances.  Alliances clump with Alliances into power blocs, these power blocs steamroll the rest of the Eve population for a time, but nobody stays on top forever.


Clumps eventually get broken up for a variety of reasons, politics, boredom, game changes etc etc.


Our recent experience with Pandemic Legion (PL) has shown me that Jump Bridges (JB) are over powered and should have their effectiveness reduced.  I would like to see JB's only able to move hull sizes above Battleship, everything Battleship and below has to go the long way.


Would this reduce the huge power blocs?  Probably not but it would give the others a chance to attack those fleets having to jump through many gates to arrive at the destination.  It would reduce the power projection possibilities that are currently available which may, over time, help re-distribute the political map.


Sovereignty (SOV) is a tough one for smaller Alliances.  For example we have tried to raise SOV several times only to have a PL smack down fleet which has dozens of supercaps arrive, destroy our stuff, take the station and leave.  Sometimes in the time it takes me to perform a bio break!


So what is the fault here?  The large power blocs at the moment or the SOV mechanics?  I think both but I feel a potential fix to the SOV mechanics could actually be made by reducing the ease these blocs can project their force.


So to answer the first part of the question, yes PVP is currently limited but this may be caused by other factors than SOV and the Alliance structure.


Making it more expensive for Alliances to hold larger space, by charging an exponentially larger amount for each SOV item doesn't really work as all I'd do is split the Alliance up, take the same places but now for much less ISK and create "blue" agreements with the other segments thus tying it all together.


Alliances like to clump and they like to win!


I cannot see how adding or changing the SOV mechanic to Corporation level rather than Alliance level will matter. The Corporations are just a projection of the Alliance and any non-Alliance Corporation who raised a SOV structure would be smashed by Out Of Game (OOG) timers and the previously mentioned power blocs.


The Role Playing (RP) aspect of this I don't have an opinion on as I've never RP'd and I'm not sure I know anybody in game who does.


To conclude, I believe if you want more PVP then a reduction to the ease of power projection would be required which may then increase null sec traffic which should then improve combat possibilities.


Or maybe not, Eve Online players are a resourceful bunch.


Participants:

1. CrazyKinux's Musing: EVE Blog Banter #25: And by Alliance you mean.....?
2. BB25 What sov changes will come? | A Mule In EvE
3. Confessions of a Closet Carebear: Alliances and Sovereignty
4. Blog Banter 25: Nerfing Nulsec « OMG! You're a Chick?!
5. Have Alliances and the sovereignty system limited the amount of PVP and RP potential in Null sec? | Nitpickin's
6. Blog Banter #25: Alliance and Sovereignty Limiting PvP in 0.0? | Sarnel Binora's Blog
7. Blog Banter #25 - Mad Haberdashers
8. Alliances and sovereignty | Eve Online Focus
9. ...Shall we not Revenge?: BB 25: What if the Alliance vanished?
10. Blog Banter: Alliances and Sov
11. EVEOGANDA: BB25: Sov 'n Go!
12. » TBG:EBB#25 – Alliances and Sovereignty To Boldly Go
13. Freebooted: BB25: Leviathans of the Deep
14. Wrong Game Tetra ~ Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
15. EVE Blog Banter #25 – Human nature what art thou? | Way of the Gun
16. Who cares about Sov? - Hands Off, My Loots! ~ well sorta like an entry! :p
17. The 25th EVE Blog Banter: Alliances and sovereignty - The Phoenix Diaries
18. Achernar: The space commute
19. Wandering the Void…my EvE musings. – Blog Banter: Alliances and sovereignty
20. (OOC) CK’s Blog Banter #25: How To Break EvE. « Prano's Journey
21. Captain Serenity: Blog Banter #25 - Crappy mechanics
22. Helicity Boson » Blog Banter #25 Nullsec and sov.
23. BB #25 – “With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?”
24. Boom! Hull-Shot?: It's the End of the Eve as We Know It
25. sered's lives: EVE Blog Banter #25 - Size does matter
26. 25th EVE BB – Medieval Solutions to Spaceship Problems | Inventions of a New Eden Industrialist
27. Eve Blog Banter #25: “Have Alliances and Sov Limited PvP and RP in 0.0?” « Align Outbound
28. Banter 25: Sovereignty, Alliances and Power Blocs | TheElitist
29. Blog Banter 25 – But I just left all that! « A Scientist's Life in Eve
30. Nobody likes losing « One capsuleer against all
31. >>>Vigil Ant: Alliances and SOV by Munny's eyes.
32. Latro's Bunker: Blog Banter 25 -Nullsec and Sov
33. A "CareBears" Journey » Blog Banner #25: Alliances and Sovereignty, and their affect on PVP and RP
34. Blog Banter #25 – Unstoppable « Roc's Ramblings
35. Nobody likes losing « One capsuleer against all
36. EVE Blog Banter on PVP in Null Sec « Evehermit's Blog
37. Sleepless in Space: Blog Banter #25: Moar Low Sec!
38. Escape Velocity: BB#25: The Condition of Mere Nature
39. Imagine a Null Sec…. « the hydrostatic capsule
40. Blastrad tales » Coagulation
41. Yosagi Yojimbo - Gallente Exile: EVE Blog Banter #25: And By Alliance You Mean Blob?
42. More to come...