Timezone

It's currently 8:35 AM local time as I type, and I've been gaming for an hour and a half. I'm hauling ore for a mining fleet with a dozen people from Europe and the US. We are chatting on teamspeak; they are sorting out dinner as I brew my morning coffee.

As an Australian player, I've gotten to know some of the guys involved in Eve Down Under. As they say, AUTZ = best tz... but i'm rarely on in our primetime, local evenings, to take part in the shenanigans. I usually prefer to game in the morning or during the day. So that ends up leaving me online during late EU or US tz - right now. Our regular fleets start at 20:00 Eve time, which in daylight savings means 07:00 local.

This does make it difficult to game with the few other Aussies I've been in corp with, since I'm usually on while they are at work and vice versa - but it's a great opportunity to make friends from all over. Those of us with matching schedules get to know each other pretty well, and SLYCE has a pretty good casual culture - we run sites or missions while having a laugh on comms.

Shoutouts: The Carebears

So this will be an ongoing series of shoutouts to those who are out there in the Meta doing something I consider to be representing the "carebear" playstyle. Some of these peeps might not consider what they do "carebear", but they are people who I've looked to for inspiration and ideas on the way I play.

Firstly, to Mike Azaraiah, CSM member, owner of the blog A Missioneer in Eve, and frequent podcast guest. His style of narrative posting is very interesting and unique, and he often sees a side of the story that other, more direct players might miss when it comes to upcoming changes or the kind of content creation going on in the game.

Secondly, Von Keigai, owner of the blog Deep in EVE, for this interesting post on high sec ice mining. The reasoning and philosophy behind it applies to other forms of gankable mining (basically all of them) just as much as ice. Otherwise he's also a wormholer, which is a place I find myself ending up more and more these days (pretty much 100% of undocked playtime during our current wardec and the previous couple too), and he's documenting some of his more exciting adventures there.

That's it for now. There will be more.

Dominix Fit - The Droneboat

Ahh, trusty space potato

Here is my Dominix level 4 mission running fit. The Domi is a warhorse of EVE, for both PvP and PvE. It has one of the biggest drone holds of any battleship, a very solid armor tanker with seven low slots, and six high slots to pack a punch. For an idea on common fits look no further than Eve Uni. This is what my sniper fit looks like:

And here it is in EFT plain text (I hope this means people can copy and paste it into EFT; if you are too lazy to put all this in manually, Eve mail me: TrickyH Shazli and I'll send you the fit).

[Dominix, Domi latest Serp]
Damage Control II
Armor Kinetic Hardener II
Large Armor Repairer II
Armor Thermic Hardener II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II
Cap Recharger II
Heavy Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I, Cap Booster 400
Large Micro Jump Drive
Drone Link Augmentor II
Drone Link Augmentor II
Large 'Solace' Remote Armor Repairer
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge L
Large Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Large Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Large Capacitor Control Circuit I
Hammerhead II x5
Hobgoblin II x5
Warden II x5
Garde II x5
Salvage Drone I x5

Why a big space potato like the Dominix? Firstly, there's a logical progression in Gallente skill training through smaller ships like the Vexor and Myrmidon. You can use a lot of the same basic modules and skills for your tank, guns, and drones as you work your way up. As missioner ships go, the Dominix is on the cheaper end, and it can be skilled for at tech 1 within 30 days, so even if you progress onto something more blingy, it's a good ship to aim for if you're interested in missioneering.

Most of my DPS with this boat comes from the drones, which is par for the course with the Domi. Longer range sentry drones hit out comfortably to the 102km drone command limit using two Drone Link Augmentors (and 7 mil SP in drones, mind). Sentries are fantastic for DPS, but they can get a bit painful to come back for and pick up, especially in a slowboat like this, so you end up sitting in space while they go to work. When I first started on a battleship I tried flying without using them, with heavy drones instead, and it's WAAAY tougher tactically.

The Droneboat in action

My standard tactic for a l4 mission in this ship is pretty simple: if the 'rats are within 50km of the warp-in point, I microjump out to around 100km range, load up some Iron or Lead charges, drop the Wardens and start picking off the frigates while they are busy moving straight towards me, working my way up in size until everything has gone pop. So long as you carefully manage pocket aggro, most missions can be completed this way without ever needing to warp out.

I fly for Gallente corps at the moment, which means a lot of Serpentis, who basically can't hit you at 100km. Angel Cartel can be a pain - especially the bonus room on Angel Extravaganza, in which I often have to warp out after taking out the turrets, which means a 5 minute slowboat back through all the other rooms. Another note on corporations: unlike the Eve Uni fit with Energized Adaptive Nano Membranes providing across the board resistance increases, I fit two active modules. The two in the example are tailored to Serpentis - Thermic and Kinetic - but I swap them out based on the advice of Eve Survival.

You'll notice I have Salvage Drones in there, but using Cap Booster 400 to keep that tank running means you'll only just have enough room for the MTU, so you definitely need to keep another looting ship handy. I have a Vexor fit with salvagers, and just use the Domi's salvage drones when you have some sort of slowboat distance to travel, or when you're in a fleet and helping to chew through a room before moving onto the next mission.

Flying with a Domi like this in a fleet is very powerful. It's got a solid tank so it's great to take aggro while newbro corp-mates bring in cruisers or destroyers and pick off targets. Multiple Domis can tear through tough missions like AE or the Epic Arcs. I'll be trying the Gallente arc for the first time soon, so look forward to reading about that :)

Another Day, Another Space Dollar

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:

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.

WAR! Woah-Woah-Woah-Woah

So it turns out a fellow lefty on my Facebook page likes to prey upon the carebears of Eve. I can't really figure it - in many ways we are the proletariat of this game, collecting the raw resources through various forms of basic grinding that go into the hulls and modules for PVP fights and alliance tournaments. Almost all minerals being collected out in null sec space get put straight into making titans and other capital ships, so most of everything else out there is bought in the market hubs and comes from us too. But each to their own. Now we are at war with CODE. Fuck 'em.

One of my golden rules for playing EVE is - never take a risk you don't have to. A legal war dec means CONCORD won't keep us safe from our war targets. That means regular activities like mission running, mining or hauling goods all come with the risk of getting ganked. Our Alliance's SOPs are not to do any of these activities during a war; if we can see there are no WTs online we might risk something, but for notorious suicide gankers like these guys, its not really worth it.

So what can a highsec carebear grinder like me do for the week the war will last that doesn't incur unnecessary risk? For a long time for me, the list was short and mostly involved playing other games or doing productive things, but lately I've been branching out a little more. I'll make more confession posts in full about each of these activities, just wanted to reflect on what there is to do during wartime for anyone who might be tempted to stay in an NPC corp and avoid war forever.

• Planetary Interaction (PI): It is generally a background process, but when you spend more time than usual sitting in station it can seem a little more fun to micromanage the process. There's still danger in taking a hauler through space to sell the goods, though, so if need be I collect them in a station until war is over.
• Station Trading: Although I've got a Dodixie jump clone to safely get in & out of the closest market hub to home, I'm finding it more fun and profitable to trade in our home region of Verge Vendor. It's a pretty quiet market, but has some virtues: less need to babysit orders and adjust them every 15 minutes to ensure they aren't outbid by another player, and with the right mix of items which people want to pick up close to home, I can trade enough volume to be growing my ISK satisfactorily. Plus if I were to get caught by the WTs, backup is only a few jumps away.
• Cloaky cloaky: using a cloak and microwarp drive it's possible to navigate lowsec space fairly safely, and the same principle applies in highsec too. This is a way to move goods around discretely, although I don't have room to move any ships or large quantities of rocks which will also have to wait before I can sell them. I've also recently gotten into a stealth bomber, which can warp while cloaked without the use of the cloak+mwd trick... and could be used for laying traps on our enemy, too ;)
• Wormhole Living: Some of our alliance mates live in a wormhole - we've got bases in both a c1 and c2 - and this war is the first time I've joined them living there for an extended period. Other corp mates have tried basing themselves out in our lowsec base also. Both come with the risk of PVP violence, but I think the wormhole is a little safer due to the lack of a local chat channel obscuring who is inside. Normally I just have my PI running in here and occasionally pop in when someone's scanned a good site; now I'm having a bit of fun being the one who does the scanning, and gets first crack at whatever goodies pop up. It's brought in a fair bit of ISKies, although since the risk is higher I'd normally be happy just grinding away in high sec :)

This isn't exhaustive, of course; more a chronicle of what I have been doing than a suggested check-list. There's many forms of PvE at which I'm still a n00b, and one of the reasons why I started this blog was to force myself to stop procrastinating and giving those different activities a go.

At the end of the day, I think of myself as a high sec care bear, but I can enjoy the thrill of flying in more dangerous space and earning the rewards as much as the next player. They just aren't at the core of my gameplay. It comes down to your goals in the game - what you find fun about it - which will be the subject of a future post.

Mission Running

Since this is my first post in the series about the kinds of activities I do in EVE (what I'll be calling my "confessions"), a note: I'll cover all the basics of how to go about doing it, but not in particularly great depth as there are generally much better how-to guides out there. I'll link any of those I've found useful. Instead I'll spend most of my time talking about the "why" - why it is I do this part of the game, why I take enjoyment out of it, why I'm repping for the people who do these kinds of activities and get tarnished with the label "carebear" for it.

The What 

Mission running is one of the most basic Player Vs Environment (PVE) activities in EVE, starting with the tutorial missions that introduce the player to the game mechanics and give you your first ships. You dock your ship in a station owned by an NPC corporation. Agents of that corporation offer you a mission, generally involving flying somewhere, doing something (blowing up pirates (rats), mining ice or asteroids (roids), couriering an item), and coming back when you've completed the objectives for your reward. The more missions you do with a particular corp the higher your standing with them gets - and as your standing grows, more agents and better missions become available to you.
 

The Where

Anywhere there's an NPC station there's generally some sort of agents available. Players tend to concentrate their efforts in "mission hubs", though, where several high-level agents of the same type are available in close proximity, so if one gives you a bad mission you can move onto another.

The How

As always, the best place to study the mechanics is Eve Uni Wiki's page on the topic. The majority of mission running, particularly at the high end, is done for Security agents, and involved blowing up a deadspace pocket(s) full of rats for the bounty on their heads, the salvage you can take from their wrecks, and the ISK and corporation Loyalty Points (LP) you get given for completing the mission.

A few notes:

• always check the mission out on Eve Survival. Their search function can be screwy so I usually end up googling the mission name, faction and level to get the details. They catalogue exactly what kind of damage will be done by who as well as giving handy tips on managing aggression and how to blitz the mission if that's your goal.
• I've only recently started using a Mobile Tractor Unit. This is a noobish thing to admit, but whatever. As soon as you can afford to buy one, do it; definitely by the time you are running level 3 missions. Pop it down as soon as you enter the pocket and as you're blowing stuff up it's hauling it in and stripping it of modules, allowing you to get right to the business of salvaging the wrecks once you're done blowing everything up. SUCH a timesaver.
• Flying in a fleet is great when you are starting level 4s, especially if you're only skilled to BattleCruiser level or only just got into a Battleship. I lost my first Dominix to lowly NPC rats flying solo; having a more experienced player along for the ride meant I wasn't riding on the edge of my tank. 
• That being said, once you've trained the skills and got the procedures down to comfortably solo a L4 mission, you probably lose ISK flying in a fleet compared to what you could be making doing it yourself - unless the fleet is well organised with a dedicated salvager and logi. 

The Why

Mission running is a pretty basic form of PVE activity in EVE, but after two years of running level 4s it's still fun to crack your knuckles, warp in on the bonus room of Angel Extravaganza, and let rip on a whole fleet of rats. Plus there's something fun about tinkering with a fit, or coming up with a new one, and trying things a little differently. If you're after something a little more challenging, there's the Epic Arc missions - once you get standing to 5 with a faction you get access to this narrative-driven series of missions, generally tougher than their equivalent level. Another option for a challenge is the recently introduced burner missions - a special type where you can only fly frigates, and will face a single enemy with the equivalent fit and skills of another player. I'm yet to do one!

Why spend time mission running: it's pretty safe ISK, good reliable isk per hour, and more fun than putting lasers on rocks. Plus it's pretty much the only way to increase your faction standings, which come in handy for things like refining and sales.

Why not: once you've run the same mission a few times over they can get pretty tedious, and it's also not the most lucrative PVE activity by far. For me it's a staple; when our corp isn't at war I like to put in a good couple of hours of solo missioning, plus our corp's once weekly mission fleet, as a minimum. But once I've done that I'm usually looking for another way to make the ISK.

Mission "griefing" - hostile players warping in on your deadspace and taking your kills/attacking you - isn't that common in high sec space. Although it does happen, it's only occured to me once in several years - so much less so than miner ganking,. However a good l4 mission fit is a more expensive boat to risk than a miner and requires more skill points to fly well (in a coming post I'll link my normal Dominix fit and discuss some tactics). There's no such thing as risk-free ISK in EVE, but the risk for missioning is minimal.

Despite the above considerations, I think missions are a great fleet activity. They are a good way for newbies to cut their teeth on the procedures of flying in a fleet, as well as for the vets to help newbies turn in for higher level rewards quicker than they'd make on their own, and a way to make some ISK while having a laugh - I'll never forget two corpies starting a duel over the 10m3 of Quafe needed to complete a mission! For us, a corp of mostly high sec care bears who dip our toes into other areas, Mission Mondays is a common denominator.