Saturday 21 November 2015

PI

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Tuesday 7 July 2015

Planetary Colonies, not Interaction



High security space Planetary Colonies (PC) (previously Planetary Interaction (PI)) is different to low and null security space Planetary Colonies, so they will not be talked about here.

The yields in high security space are lower, most likely as a penalty against the safety of this space, and so you must try and gain the most material from each and every planet you are extracting material from.

My end goal in this example is to produce Coolant.

I have six pilots extracting material from roughly half Storm and Gas planets.

Each pilot extracts the raw material on the planet, Aqueous Liquid and Ionic Solutions respectively, which is then converted on that planet, using the Basic Industry facility, into Water and Electrolytes.

Each pilot then collects the Water or Electrolytes and returns it to the same station as each other pilot, they then contract it all too the manufacturing pilot.

The Manufacturing Pilot (MP), who also does a small amount of extraction, then gathers all these contracts and will then have quite a pile of Water and Electrolytes.


The MP then takes those items to the Manufacturing Planet, of which this particular pilot has two.  If the facility is empty 13,000 of each item can be moved to the input launchpad, this charges the system, if the advanced industry and routing has been setup the industry modules will now have enough material to start production of the coolant, which means another 1,760 of each item can now be moved into the input launchpad to replace the material now being converted into coolant in the advanced industry facilities.

Your actual figures may vary.

The advanced industry then routes the finished coolant into the output launchpad, which can then be picked up from the Player Owned Customs Office (POCO).

To keep the coolant production going all the time the input launchpad must be filled with material twice in a twenty four hour period.

To try and simplify it...

T0 Material (Aqueous Liquids or Ionic Solutions) > T1 Material (Water or Electrolytes) > Transport to Station > Contract to MP.

MP T1 Material > Manufacturing Planet > T2 Material (Coolant) > Transport to Station > Transport to Trade Hub > Profit.

So most of that is pretty straight forward, but here is an image of a manufacturing planet.



 Notice the two launchpads in blue, the top one is the input and the bottom the output.  Material is introduced into the input launchpad from the POCO, it is then routed into the various advanced industry modules that are waiting for it, once they have made the coolant they route it into the output launchpad on the bottom, and that will then appear in the POCO and can be exported from there into your ship.

To find out what can be produced on which planets in Eve online I find http://eveplanets.com to be quite useful.

Tuesday 19 May 2015

Worried About Numbers

I stared at the flashing cursor for quite a while, hoping the rhythmic flashing would magically make the words appear.  Eventually they did, but no magic was involved, just effort.

I've not had much to write about lately, hence this blog has been very quiet.  I'd assumed nobody was reading it apart from myself, but low and behold some people do, so here we are again.

What I would like to write about is the current alliance we have found ourselves in while waiting for FozzieSov to appear and then settle down.  Violent Declaration is that alliance and unfortunately such a topic is off limits at the moment as I'd like them to improve across the board, so we are trying to lead by example, and I prefer not to shit in my own nest.

The new ship skins have been released, which are pretty cool, I look forward to more skins.

The server numbers are well down, as of right now, 5:45pm, Tranquility has 16,513 players and DUST514 only has 972.

The average number of players online this year, from January until May the 19th is 29,000.


The previous year, 2014, had an average of 41,000.


2013 had an average of 48,000.


You can see the trend.

Admittedly we now have potential alternatives to Eve Online in the form of Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous.  They are quite different games but if you lump them all together in the "Space MMO" genre they could, and probably have, grabbed some of the player base away from Eve Online.

CCP are trying to fight back by increasing the tempo of expansion/update releases, and come mid year 2015 the changes to null security space sovereignty may make it less of a grind, which could entice some old players back to the game.

Will it entice new players though? 

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Voting Time!

It's voting time.  Yay.

Federal government, state government, local government and CSM!

It's all too much, one of them has to go.

Remove state government and create a department at the federal level that looks after each state or territory.

Which of course keeps the CSM election because who doesn't want to vote for the folks only wanting a free trip to Iceland, that need yet another boost to their inflated egos or are just plain maniacs.

This time we get to choose from over seventy candidates, it would have been over one hundred but thirty odd didn't return their validated identification in time.  That's probably hard to do from jail.

Do they let you play Eve Online in jail?

Yes, yes they do.

Anyway to get a handle on the frankly ludicrous amount of candidates their is a web site that can help.

On a side note what will be the maximum number of potentials, two hundred, three hundred?  Where does it all end?

Have a look here for a web site that will ask you questions on what you think is important in a CSM candidate (the answer my (bodypartis not appropriate) and with any luck that will help you with your final decisions.

Unless of course your a goon or in some large power bloc because you've already been told how you will vote and a CCP stooge will probably check you've voted the correct way.

The penalty for not voting the correct way means you'll have Mittens as a leader.

Oh wait ...

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Tiamat is an Expansion?

Tiamat has been released without any real drama from what I can see.  Except of course for the two idiots, and probably others since, who have lost shiny ships to The Drifters.

https://beta.eve-kill.net/kill/44679087/

https://beta.eve-kill.net/kill/44674857/

Patch notes for Tiamat are here.

To be honest I find Tiamat to be pretty lacklustre for an expansion, even with the addition of The Drifters, but over the few days and weeks the quality of this enhanced update will become apparent.

Meanwhile, CCP Peligro has posted an image of two pilots run by CCP that hold confiscated money from various miscreants in the game.


Yes that's trillion, not billion

Monday 16 February 2015

Too Many Shades of Grey

Rokusaburo started a convo with me while I was sitting cloaked in space keeping an eye on some war deccers.

"So I heard Chuckles quit the alliance leadership and disappeared." he asked.

"Yeah, sorta.  I was away enjoying some R & R as it was that time of year." I replied.

"Of course." he replied with a voice that suggested he'd also tilted his head forward as he said it.

"When I came back from the festivities, and bothered to check my comms I found the message that he'd quit, given me the CEO position, and vanished."

"Any idea where he went?"

"None whatsoever.  So I've been constructing a fake mental reality that puts him down on some planet somewhere herding goats, or whatever the local equivalent of a goat actually is, and some day he'll appear again and ask us if we missed him." I was smiling a bit while saying this.

"Will you have missed him by then?"

"Yeah ... probably, but I'll be buggered if I'm going to let him know that."

"So you're in WGP now, obviously not the CEO of The Grumpy's, how'd that happen." he asked, getting a bit nosy.

"I knew that Chuckles was the alliance glue, so I put it to the remaining members what the direction should be, every answer was different, so I disbanded the corp, well I tried to, and removed it from the alliance.  Corps come and go, people come and go, this is New Eden, but eventually you meet up with them again, especially as we all now live forever." I said.

"Oh okay.  Oh before I forget have you seen the news about these Drifter people?" said Roku changing the subject.

"Yeah I did.  Kick arse ships and tactics worries me a bit, But what's with all the grey?"

"I know!  The suits they appear to be wearing look pretty snug, with some implants or whatever the hell is going on there.  The female one looks pretty hot.  How many shades of grey do you think she is?"

"I snorted in a sort of laughter, "She'll probably kill you and wipe your remains off her shoe. You think every female that looks at you is hot, even from a damn holo image!"

"Well most of them are, especially pod pilots.  Have you ever seen a fat one?"

"Well no, but perhaps all the fat ones are stuck in their pods never to leave and that's why we don't see them.  That's not pod goo my friend, it's just extra pod pilot clinging to the inside of the egg."

"Ewwwwwwww!" he exclaimed a sound not out of place in a school yard.

"Yeah I know." I said trying not to think of the actual image.

"Anyway we have war deccers to keep an eye on so we'll catch up soon, yes?"

"Certainly will, have a good one, out." he broke the connection.


Saturday 14 February 2015

Drifting Towards PVE Excitement

Drifters are going to be a new NPC race in Eve Online in news which has surprised the shit out of me.

I'll put some info and a link below but essentially they'll be at the harder end of NPC's, have some intelligence but at the moment have no bounties, or loot.  I expect that to change once it releases with the Tiamat expansion on February the 17th.

This news also saves the Tiamat expansion from being a pretty ordinary update in my opinion.

Superiority complex?


The Drifters are upon us, and they are not to be trifled with. The new NPC faction (or Jovian sub faction) will enter the game in the next expansion, Taimat, dropping on February 17th. The Drifters pilot extraordinary battleships that are set up to challenge even the most experienced players. Much like Incursions and burner missions, this is more high end PVE content from CCP.

The Drifters are not your typical NPC’s. They are built on the new the AI (Tale System) that was introduced with Incursions, improved upon in Burner missions, and is being used to power Circadian Seekers and, now, the Drifter battleships. The future of PVE is highly intelligent and coordinated enemies that will chase you, wait you out, and mercilessly pod you. A truly terrifying experience. So far, they will not attack you unless you provoke them by attacking them first. Drifters, however, are a new faction and have standings so, conceivably, they will attack on sight if you have low standings with them.

The origin of these Drifters is shrouded in mystery, but they seem to be related to the Jove. Their spawns are found around unknown structures (aka, listening towers) and strange wormholes found in New Eden, regardless of security rating. Some players speculate they have come here through wormholes, while others suspect they have been here a long time and are just now being discovered or declaoked. Lore enthusiasts are relishing the speculation, as many theories and clues are pieced together. Officially, no one knows who they are or what they want.


Thursday 29 January 2015

Rage Quitting Over HyperDunking

I will put the links and details below but first my thoughts.

HyperDunking, to the person in their expensive ship, moving expensive stuff, will look like cheating.

Which it isn't according to the current game mechanics and CCP, and this will cause some people to quit the game in disgust.

The obvious solution is to increase the tank and spank on hauling type ships, which cannot be done on them all.  However not everybody reads the forums, looks at the dev blogs etc, and this current attack vector, which is skirting so close to an exploit it's not funny, will hurt the game.

Now the cat is out of the bag and pretty soon every in game dickhead and his mate will have stationed so many destroyers in system the choke points will need valet parking.

I give it four weeks until CCP changes the police response enough to make this an exploit.

Links:

Eve News 24

CCP's Response

Sunday 11 January 2015

The Pillows of Priscilla Saxon

The corp has died, and I flicked the switch.

You may remember from the last post, over one month ago (you should be ashamed - Yos) that our corp was having issues adjusting to the new alliance lifestyle of Call To Arms (CTA's) all day everyday.  Well that seems to have broken the corp.

People were not logging in, or if they were it was on alts outside of the corp to do other stuff in low or even high security space.  I realised after a while that logging in was a chore, it wasn't something I wanted to do but it was something I had to do, night after night.  Often I'd just login to chat with the fellas, only to find I was the only corp member online in game and chat.  Lonely.

So Christmas happened, then New Years and all the bullshit that is packaged with both of those events.  I took a few days off, partly because I was pretty busy out of game but also I wasn't feeling the love of Eve Online during the "magical" holiday period.

Just to talk about the insanity of Christmas for a moment.  People get so wound up about that time of year, the streets are jammed with traffic, the shops are packed, etc etc.  It's not as if they put Christmas on a different date every year, it's the same date people!  Stop being insane about it and put a small amount of planning into your life.

This year I think I'll go sailing from the 20th of December until early January sometime.

That sounds lovely.

Anyway ... after a few days off I sit down to log back into the game, but I always fire up EVEMon first, and I see more messages than I've seen in a while, and one from the CEO.

However the message from the CEO has the title of an older message from somebody else who left the corp, one of the stalwart, but also somehow variable guys that comes and goes from the game.

With an increasing feeling of unease I check the message and yes the CEO has quit the leadership position, handing it to me, and also the game.

Wow!  Okay!  Welcome to depression town, population me.

I didn't find this out until a day had passed, so the corp members had been dealing with this, hoping I would login to start putting out the fires, but I didn't login until the following day.

This probably made my CEO life more difficult as rumour, gossip and fear absolutely love a vacuum, but in the end I don't think it made much of a difference.

The corp had been slowly losing members since our move into the Darkness alliance and I'd been concerned about the long term survival of the corp anyway.  I sent out a mail to all members asking what they thought the future direction of the corp should be, I received responses from a very small percentage of the membership, and each person wanted something different.

So I pulled the plug, flicked the switch, swung the blade, etc etc.

Rather than the corp limping along and being booted from the alliance, and then everybody would have little to no time to evacuate themselves and their gear, they now had twenty odd days to get out in an orderly fashion, find a new corp, move or sell their gear, and start fresh.

I would have loved the corp to continue, to try and keep that history going, but Eve Online isn't like that, Eve is very temporary, with the exception of the massive juggernaut corps and alliances, things come and go.

I've been in some great corps in the past that I thought couldn't be matched and then I was a member of Oh Bugga, which is, which was, the best corp I've been in without exception.