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| Liquid Billion Isk, AWW YISSS |
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Friday, 27 February 2015
Tuesday, 17 February 2015
Mining
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| Busting rocks in a Proc |
The What
As the name would suggest, mining is the harvesting of mineral resources from celestial features - asteroid belts, ice belts, or gas clouds. It's one of the easiest ways to make ISK: unlike 'rats, rocks don't shoot back. However, it comes with its own risks, most notably bumping and ganking. Despite the risks, it's still one of the most boring forms of PVE; grinding, pure and simple.
The Where
There's something to mine everywhere in New Eden - usually multiple kinds of things, so it can often be hard to know what's the most lucrative choice. The rule here is the same as with all PVE: more risk, more reward. Asteroid belts in highest sec systems have the smallest rocks with generally the lowest worth, working their way up through to the lower sec systems, then with better rocks and the other better value options becoming available in the lawless areas of space - lowsec, nullsec and wormholes. Disclaimer: I'm only familiar with high sec and wormholes at this point in time.
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| Huffing gas in a C1 wormhole |
The How
You warp in to the belt or site. You target the rock or gas. You switch on your lasers or harvesters. You collect ore. Mining is one of the simplest activities in EVE, which is probably why it is one of the career paths many players try early in their career. However, there is still quite a bit to think about in order to optimise mining, even for a brand new player or account:
- Rule of solo mining #101: don't sit on the warp in - move your ship to the other side of the belt. Don't be the low hanging fruit for gankers.
- It's generally not a good idea to refine your minerals until you have all of your reprocessing skills to V and sufficient standings with the corporation whose station you are using to refine. Generally, taking the time to train an industrial like the Miasmos and haul all that ore to a market hub will be a better option initially. For more info on reprocessing, check out the Eve Uni Wiki.
- It's generally worth checking which are the most valuable rocks to mine, not just in your local area but in the market hubs through a site like Eve Central. If you're at the point where you are reprocessing minerals to sell, then it's worth going even more in depth on an ore calculator with a site like Fuzzworks or Grismar. At the end of the day rocks are rocks and spending more than a few minutes looking around for something better cuts down your overall ISK/hr efficiency, but it's worth knowing what to look for.
- If the drive for bigger and better rocks sends you into 0.5 or 0.6 security space, don't make the mistake of thinking your Retriever or Covetor will be safe. Predators are out there and they live for juicy killmails from expensive barges. A well tanked Procurer can survive the 30 seconds it usually takes Concord to respond to a ganking attempt. Stay tuned for some fits.
- That being said, Rettys and Covs have their place - generally in fleet mining. Even in a more basic ship, the yield and range boost from an Orca pilot can make mining considerably easier and improve your ISK/hr quite a bit. Flying a well organised fleet op with Covetors and an Orca/hauler combo can pull over 10m ISK/hr, even in highsec.
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| Warning: not all mining ops include celebratory fireworks... |
For a more in-depth guide to mining, check out the Eve Uni Wiki page.
The Why
As suggested in the How, mining is one of the easiest ways to start making decent ISK, and relatively simple to get into - the tutorial missions give you a Venture, which is a solid ship to start flying and my tool of choice for Wormhole gas, which can provide way better income than you ever get mining in highsec (helped along by the rise in demand due to the ongoing release of T3 destroyers). Even if you find it bores you to tears, it's a part of the gameplay that everyone will have a brush with at one point or another, simply because minerals are the base of the whole EVE economy.
Many players mine because they need the minerals for manufacturing, but (in EVE and IRL) I'm no industrialist. For a grinder like myself, always looking towards the possible income, solo highsec ore mining is one of the least effective ways I can spend my time. But it's relaxing, simple, and, assuming the above precautions have been taken, fairly safe. If there isn't a fleet on first thing in the morning and I'm in highsec, I'll usually undock and pick up a hold ore two in the Proc while I make breakfast, etc. And there's even AFK mining - which I'll cover in another post - that allows you to play EVE and make ISK while doing the groceries, laundry, etc.
The income from my minerals is only a small portion of the month's total, but it appeals to the proletarian in me to be toiling away at the lowest tier of industry.
Sunday, 28 December 2014
Catching up: CSM 9 Summer Summit
Season's greetings :)
Eve isn't my only love - there's football, politics, writing, not to mention the beautiful people in my life - so although I can't keep away from the game for long, I'm often playing catch up on the latest developments, etc. This is particularly the case with the meta-game content.
This last couple of weeks I've been catching up on what happened at the CSM summer summit - both reading the minutes and listening to discussions in the podcasting universe (podosphere?).
In general, I think it's a pretty exciting time to be a part of EVE; some aspects, particularly in nullsec, have (apparently) been a little dull for a while, and CCP's attention has been divided to expanding into new games, but that has been scaled back, and it seems clear that those in charge have a vision for making the game a great place to be. A lot of the changes or discussions that have been reported in the summer summit minutes really show that.
One of the more controversial discussions to have taken place is one around "Awoxing", or joining a corp with the intent of killing and sabotaging your fellow corpies. For myself I think the changes discussed - to make aggression within corporations policed by CONCORD the same way all other aggro is - are really great; there will still be space for espionage and infiltration in null and low, but such activities will - and should - bear consequences in high sec.
Our corp and alliance is pretty active, for one largely based around Alliance space. We are always getting new players coming through as their first port of call after the NPC corps; some stick around with us, some stay in the Alliance but branch out, and some move out to the big alliances. We've seen a pretty big wave of newbies join up recently, especially since the This is Eve video was released. Thankfully, we haven't been Awoxed, but I've been in corps which have before, and it's not fun. It's reassuring to know that a PVPer with malicious intent can't join us and give those new guys a bad experience of the community with impunity. Of course, newbies need to lose ships to learn about the game (and most of ours have), but they should also be able to trust the players they are flying with.
Nosy Gamer wrote a good post highlighting the different perspectives here.
The discussion around ISboxer, resulting in the announced banning of ISboxer, has already had a good flow-on effect in terms of PLEX prices stabilising and the prices of minerals rising due to the volume of minerals being mined by one person flying forty ships falling.
Another couple of little tidbits that I've heard discussed in the meta recently: only 4% of Eve's players are female, which is low even compared to other MMOs that can average around 15% - or compared to real astronauts, 10% of whom are female. Some select quotes on the topic from the minutes:
That's a bit of a disappointing answer for me, as are some of the bullshit essentialist responses given in the past on the issue which effectively amount to "women don't like science fiction". Finding my current corp, which contains many women [ED: on reflection, only 4 active players, so around 20%] and has a culture I would describe as good and non-sexist, has helped me to realise just how important those factors can be when it comes to attracting or retaining women to a space. [ED: On reflection, Gamergate has shown just how important gaming culture can be in including or excluding women; I'm going to make a future post thinking about this in more depth.]
That's not to say CCP's attitude is all negative: the existence of a CSM, and the increasing amount of respect is it being accorded by CCP, reflect that the commitment and passion of the community what's so powerful about EVE. It's a sandbox universe shaped by players, and CCP understands this and actively invites players to be involved in its evolution.
Now is a good time to be one of those players - even a n00b care bear - as we all have the chance to help make the narrative.
Eve isn't my only love - there's football, politics, writing, not to mention the beautiful people in my life - so although I can't keep away from the game for long, I'm often playing catch up on the latest developments, etc. This is particularly the case with the meta-game content.
This last couple of weeks I've been catching up on what happened at the CSM summer summit - both reading the minutes and listening to discussions in the podcasting universe (podosphere?).
In general, I think it's a pretty exciting time to be a part of EVE; some aspects, particularly in nullsec, have (apparently) been a little dull for a while, and CCP's attention has been divided to expanding into new games, but that has been scaled back, and it seems clear that those in charge have a vision for making the game a great place to be. A lot of the changes or discussions that have been reported in the summer summit minutes really show that.
One of the more controversial discussions to have taken place is one around "Awoxing", or joining a corp with the intent of killing and sabotaging your fellow corpies. For myself I think the changes discussed - to make aggression within corporations policed by CONCORD the same way all other aggro is - are really great; there will still be space for espionage and infiltration in null and low, but such activities will - and should - bear consequences in high sec.
Our corp and alliance is pretty active, for one largely based around Alliance space. We are always getting new players coming through as their first port of call after the NPC corps; some stick around with us, some stay in the Alliance but branch out, and some move out to the big alliances. We've seen a pretty big wave of newbies join up recently, especially since the This is Eve video was released. Thankfully, we haven't been Awoxed, but I've been in corps which have before, and it's not fun. It's reassuring to know that a PVPer with malicious intent can't join us and give those new guys a bad experience of the community with impunity. Of course, newbies need to lose ships to learn about the game (and most of ours have), but they should also be able to trust the players they are flying with.
Nosy Gamer wrote a good post highlighting the different perspectives here.
The discussion around ISboxer, resulting in the announced banning of ISboxer, has already had a good flow-on effect in terms of PLEX prices stabilising and the prices of minerals rising due to the volume of minerals being mined by one person flying forty ships falling.
Another couple of little tidbits that I've heard discussed in the meta recently: only 4% of Eve's players are female, which is low even compared to other MMOs that can average around 15% - or compared to real astronauts, 10% of whom are female. Some select quotes on the topic from the minutes:
Ali wanted to point out that Eve has substantially fewer women proportionally than any other MMO – average MMO is around 10% while Eve sits at around 4%. She wanted to know if there were metrics as to why this may be and how they go around resolving this massive discrepancy.
CCP Dhalgren wanted CSM to know he was aware of this anomaly but his priority is to grow Eve full stop. There haven’t been any marketing campaigns generated from CCP so far explicitly with the goal of targeting women. The problem with the community-led marketing as described earlier as Ali put it is that if only men play Eve then it there are less women to attract other women. Obviously it doesn’t have to go that women attract female players and vice-versa but there is certainly a correlation.
Xander asked if there have been any case studies done into why there is such a massive discrepancy between the proportion of the playerbase that are female compared to other MMO playerbases?
CCP Dhalgren advised that no such studies have been done but for him, it’s more important to understand why anyone would want to play Eve at all irrespective of age, sex, background, etc and only after that to ask the secondary question of how do we get more of a particular demographic. He went on to emphasize however that the question on women is very important – there are women out there who would enjoy Eve but aren’t playing and CCP needs to look at how to find them.
That's a bit of a disappointing answer for me, as are some of the bullshit essentialist responses given in the past on the issue which effectively amount to "women don't like science fiction". Finding my current corp, which contains many women [ED: on reflection, only 4 active players, so around 20%] and has a culture I would describe as good and non-sexist, has helped me to realise just how important those factors can be when it comes to attracting or retaining women to a space. [ED: On reflection, Gamergate has shown just how important gaming culture can be in including or excluding women; I'm going to make a future post thinking about this in more depth.]
That's not to say CCP's attitude is all negative: the existence of a CSM, and the increasing amount of respect is it being accorded by CCP, reflect that the commitment and passion of the community what's so powerful about EVE. It's a sandbox universe shaped by players, and CCP understands this and actively invites players to be involved in its evolution.
Now is a good time to be one of those players - even a n00b care bear - as we all have the chance to help make the narrative.
Friday, 5 December 2014
The Plex Economy
I've mentioned I play for PLEX - so I thought I should say for the newbies/non-EVE gamers, what exactly is PLEX?
PLEX stands for Player License EXtension - it's an in-game item which can be bought with real money from CCP, traded in game, then cashed in for 30 days game time, skill training for multiple characters, or attire and special items through the Aurum store. In short, it's a way of converting real money to in-game ISK - or converting ISK to game time.
The economy of EVE is one of the most unique parts of the game. The total sandbox theme extends to most economic activity in game. Almost all items are made, sold and used by players; in many ways it's a kind of anarcho-capitalist paradise. It's also so complicated that CCP hired an economist for several years to help them figure out how to make it function. That complexity is a key part of the game's fascination for me.
PLEX as often been used as an indicator of economic activity in EVE. It allows for a translation between ISK and real money - which is how last year's massive capital ship fight in nullsec was estimated to cost $330,000 USD.
Unfortunately, having a way to convert real money to ISK means people will seek to convert back the other way - this is called Real Money Trading (RMT), leads to distortion in the EVE market and gaming environment, and is policed by CCP. The more RMT is cracked down on, the better the market for PLEX gets.
The recent decision to ban ISboxer, a way users can pay an outside party for access to software which can automate commands so that one computer can run multiple accounts, might not strictly be an example of action against RMT. However, it has also lead to a lot of movement on prices of PLEX, as many who were formerly using the software to grind and buy PLEX have stopped doing so. The net result, in EVE's free market? Falling PLEX prices. Good times for me :)
PLEX stands for Player License EXtension - it's an in-game item which can be bought with real money from CCP, traded in game, then cashed in for 30 days game time, skill training for multiple characters, or attire and special items through the Aurum store. In short, it's a way of converting real money to in-game ISK - or converting ISK to game time.
The economy of EVE is one of the most unique parts of the game. The total sandbox theme extends to most economic activity in game. Almost all items are made, sold and used by players; in many ways it's a kind of anarcho-capitalist paradise. It's also so complicated that CCP hired an economist for several years to help them figure out how to make it function. That complexity is a key part of the game's fascination for me.
PLEX as often been used as an indicator of economic activity in EVE. It allows for a translation between ISK and real money - which is how last year's massive capital ship fight in nullsec was estimated to cost $330,000 USD.
Unfortunately, having a way to convert real money to ISK means people will seek to convert back the other way - this is called Real Money Trading (RMT), leads to distortion in the EVE market and gaming environment, and is policed by CCP. The more RMT is cracked down on, the better the market for PLEX gets.
The recent decision to ban ISboxer, a way users can pay an outside party for access to software which can automate commands so that one computer can run multiple accounts, might not strictly be an example of action against RMT. However, it has also lead to a lot of movement on prices of PLEX, as many who were formerly using the software to grind and buy PLEX have stopped doing so. The net result, in EVE's free market? Falling PLEX prices. Good times for me :)
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