Tell me about Eve Online

The Game Room
61

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Not true.
There is a reason that the Caldari Achura bloodline was viewed as nearly game-breaking when it first came out. If pilots have any ambition towards combat, Achura provides an amazingly strong SP/hour base for that, a very decent base for int/mem based skills and enough charisma to learn basic mission running skills. And let’s face it, you really don’t need most Social skills above Lvl 4 even if you’re a hardcore mission runner.
[/quote]

Oh yes true! I have seen this many times.

Someone rolls a combat toon and drops Charisma into the basement with a value of 3 or something low. Then they want to train up for Command Ships. Whoops! Needs Leaderships skills and the pain is palpable (and Og help you if you want to train Fleet Command). Then while they are training up they want to grind some missions for faction standing and LP for faction ammo. There is that Charisma thing again and not training up those missioning related skills gimps them.

Then say you also nerf your Int/Mem skills to be uber in the Will/Per skills for combat. Except now you have to train all those learning skills which will be slooow. And then all the support skills like Electronics and so on that need some aspects of the Int/Mem.

In the end a balanced toon is absolutely the way to go. Certainly it need not be all the same across the board. If you are going to be a combat character then by all means buff Will/Per over Int/Mem/Cha. But do not unbalance them overly much. You WILL regret it. (Caveat to this is for 2nd/3rd accounts that are meant to be hyper specialized…a single/main character needs much more balance)

Actually the Great Northern War was the prototype for all wars to follow. It is here where BoB was actually born. EVE was smaller (population wise) overall than it is today but the war lasted 9 months and saw battle across most of no-sec.

This most recent one was bigger to be sure but as a matter of percentage of EVE players caught up in it I’d wager the GNW was more encompassing of the player base.

62

Hmm this game has rekindled my interest a bit.

I played a couple years ago without having any any idea what I was doing. I was part fighter pilot, part miner and part trader. I’m thinking I might load it up again and check it out. Essentially I saved my pennies and my skills and got a pretty decent battleship, then had no idea what to do next. I couldn’t even use battleship guns, let alone use them well and it was going to be months before I could. I did get pretty good at market scavenging(buying underpriced items and reselling) so I had a decent bit of cash for my pathetic knowledge of the game., I might have spend it all on a new battleship. I remeber there were some new ships comming out soon that I was waiting for and I got into Lotro beta in the meantime. Then I got a new computer and never got around to loading up EVE, and my account expired.

Anyway I may have a few questions after I get back in and figure out what was going on.

Assuming they archive characters for later re-use. If they don’t they I guess it won’t matter anyway.

63

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Player based insurance simply isn’t doable. NPC based insurance is only doable because it creates ISK out of thin air.

[/QUOTE]

Agreed player run insurance is not doable.

There are however player run investment banks. Many were scams but some few have remained a reliable player investment mechanisms. EBank is one that comes to mind (there are 2-3 other IIRC). Note that is totally player run and not supported by game mechanics. Technically those folk could walk off with everything. However, in these cases they have made a name for themselves and care about it so I would deem them relatively safe.

64

[QUOTE=mswas]
I am very interested in the macroeconomics of the place, and how that’s managed. How they keep the market from getting glutted, and how they keep people from cornering the market on certain items.
[/QUOTE]

Oh…people try to corner the markets often enough. I love it when they try that (usually). Generally they cannot keep it going very long and it is difficult to pull off as well as hugely expensive. There will be market orders up for a wide range of prices…you need to clear the market of all of them then price your goods enough to make a profit. As soon as people see that they tend to unload stocks fast to take advantage of it. Now you have to buy their stuff too to keep the market cornered. In the end it just is not sustainable and you hope you can unload enough with enough margin to make a profit. Very risky.

However, CCP has had a few static things that suck. Initially it was T2 construction which was limited to a very few lucky BPO lottery winners. Some cartels sprung up which bought out some popular items from lottery winners so effectively maintained a monopoly. My Hulk (mining barge) cost me 600 million ISK back then.

Since this was clearly a bogus situation CCP introduced Invention so anyone could produce T2 items (with some skill, effort and luck). This broke the T2 cartels and a Hulk costs (iirc) 120 million today.

However, this dramatically increased the desire for T2 mats which are made from Moon Minerals (and some intermediate production). Unfortunately there is a static supply of moon minerals and again some very few alliances control ALL of them. Prices for those mats are dramatic (over 100k/unit). So again some very few are making insane amounts of ISK and this time for even less work than they had with T2.

Sadly most other moon minerals are barely or not at all worth the effort to mine (Promethium is valuable).

Really needs fixing.

65

[QUOTE=Donovan]
The downside, which I said I wouldn’t go into earlier, is that a lot of times, more experienced ‘PVP’* corps will decalre war on noob corps just to increase their e-peen, my first group almost folded under 3 separate wars brought to us by much more experienced players, and they came at us like bullies kicking dogs. There was very little we could do to prevent their predations - we were a bunch of frigate pilots with 2 or 3 cruisers mixed in going up against well fitted BSes, cruisers and and tech II frigates.
[/QUOTE]

Sometimes the war decs of noob corps is just bully griefers. More usually it is extortion. You can usually tell when the corp war deccing you has like 1-3 members in it. If you fight more will slide into their corp else you pay them and they go away.

Frankly it can be fun. You will likely lose a lot to them but a great way to learn the ins and outs of combat. If you stick to cheap frigates and T1 fittings it is not too expensive either (of course it can seem so to a new player). There are some pretty effective and deadly T1 cruiser setups that are cheap too that you might even take a few of their ships with you with some teamwork and a little luck.

When we formed our current corp we got several war decs against us. Since we were new I suspect they thought we were noobs. Our industrial corp has several diehard and expert PvPers in it though who use us as a financial instrument. Needless to say those griefers got a helluva surprise…carebears with teeth. :smiley:

66

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
Oh yes true! I have seen this many times.

Someone rolls a combat toon and drops Charisma into the basement with a value of 3 or something low. Then they want to train up for Command Ships. Whoops! Needs Leaderships skills and the pain is palpable (and Og help you if you want to train Fleet Command).
[/quote]

No, it’s not true. Do the math yourself in EVEmon. The time you save with a few more points of charisma is much less than than the time you save getting perception/willpower higher.

Skilling up to FC V is only about 5 million points. Skilling up to Recon V, HAC V, Command Ships V, a few of the racial Cruiser V skills, along with points in carriers and dreads? Plus gunnery? Drones? Navigation? Battleship V in at least one race? Way, way, way, waaaaaaay more than 5 million skill points.

I’ll even give you Fleet Command if you want it, although there are probably only a dozen or two players in all of EVE who actually need that skill. But the difference in training time is huge, and it’s by far in favor of those who have their points in PvP based skills. The math, on that point, is unequivocal.

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

There is that Charisma thing again and not training up those missioning related skills gimps them.
[/quote]

Like I said, my alt did it just fine and she’s also Achura.

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

Then say you also nerf your Int/Mem skills to be uber in the Will/Per skills for combat.
[/quote]

Actually, no, I didn’t, and wouldn’t. But you still save more time with high perception/willpower than high intelligence/memory if you’re going to skill up for PvP ships. Hell. Advanced Weapons Upgrades and Trajectory Analysis alone already come close to canceling out FC V, which virtually nobody needs in any case.

Again, the math bears that out for intelligence/memory too. Engineering V, Electronics V, Mechanic V, Hull Upgrades V, plus a slew of other int/mem based skills, even with the learning skills, are still millions of SP’s less than what a properly skilled elite PvP character will spend in Spaceship Command, Gunnery, Drones and Navigation alone.

67

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

However, CCP has had a few static things that suck. Initially it was T2 construction which was limited to a very few lucky BPO lottery winners.
[/QUOTE]

Or the favoured sons who got the developers to give them blueprints (The famous t20 scandal, which CCP did so much to sweep under the carpet).

As for the current moon mining status quo, it’s inevitable that valuable assets will attract the big players. The current RA obsession with playing moon pokemon (gotta mine em all) is one of the driving forces behind a lot of the drama in 0.0 at the moment. If there were no resources worth fighting over, there’d be nothing going on out here.

68

[QUOTE=counsel wolf]
Or the favoured sons who got the developers to give them blueprints (The famous t20 scandal, which CCP did so much to sweep under the carpet).

As for the current moon mining status quo, it’s inevitable that valuable assets will attract the big players. The current RA obsession with playing moon pokemon (gotta mine em all) is one of the driving forces behind a lot of the drama in 0.0 at the moment. If there were no resources worth fighting over, there’d be nothing going on out here.
[/QUOTE]

The t20 thing is old news now and near as I can tell not something CCP took lightly internally nor was it status quo there (even the BPOs he magiced up were not all that stellar). Everyone claimed CCP = BOB but they released some count at some point that showed more CCP employees were in Alliances other than BOB than in BOB (FYI I have never been in BOB…got no dog in that fight).

I agree there need to be things to fight over in 0.0 and 0.0 should have the juiciest stuff. From what I have heard assaulting these POS can be near impossible (multiple Titan defense…chain spam DD). Add in cyno jammers versus their jump bridges and so on and mostly those POS remain rather safe ISK printing machines.

Mostly though I object to static content like that (some of those plex farming deals also seem bogus). I would prefer to see something like every moon having some quantity of every mineral. In low sec a moon may only generate 0.1 units/hour of Dysp. In 0.0 it might generate 100 units/hour (so substantially more lucrative). However, if prices get to insane levels other producers can decide that 0.1/hour is now worth mining rather than something more abundant in the same moon.

That or have moons mine out. Say after 60 days the moon is empty and the Dysp respawns somewhere else at random (within usual seeding mechanics keeping it in 0.0). People need to run around and rescan moons and establish a new base and defenses.

In short something to keep it dynamic while still maintaing the value and intrigue in 0.0.

69

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
No, it’s not true. Do the math yourself in EVEmon. The time you save with a few more points of charisma is much less than than the time you save getting perception/willpower higher.
[/QUOTE]

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I agree for a very specialized character you are correct. I just do not think a new player with one account will want to be that specialized. Even if they think the pew pew is for them it behooves them to have a more balanced character. If they know they will have 2nd accounts trained up to take care of things not specific to fighting then fine. Till then more closely balanced stats should serve them better (hell…they may not even be sure which aspect of EVE they will want to focus on for weeks and even that can change again down the road as they grow bored with one aspect or another…never know).

70

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I agree for a very specialized character you are correct. I just do not think a new player with one account will want to be that specialized. Even if they think the pew pew is for them it behooves them to have a more balanced character.
[/QUOTE]
Seconded. I built a combat pilot for my first character, with charisma as the dump stat. Not horridly bad, but it was definitely neglected for Will/Per. This bit me in the arse later on when I stopped caring about fighting and instead began to play the market. The merchant skills took a painfully long time to work up.

71

I’m just chiming in to say that I didn’t know so many of you folks played EVE–I’m a minmatar close-range gunner, been playing for about six months and I’m just about to hit T2 large autocannon and battleships. I don’t play very often, though.

72

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I agree for a very specialized character you are correct. I just do not think a new player with one account will want to be that specialized.
[/quote]

Fair enough, but I’d agree with conventional EVE wisdom that ships that aren’t specialized are mostly worthless and that a jack of all trades fails because he’s a master of none.

I also think that a PvP based character can spend the bare minimum in time required to get excellent Learning skills, decent Social skills and excellent Engineering/Mechanic skills while, still, setting course for pew pew.
And along that path comes the ability to rat/mission run extremely well, in addition to engaging in ganking. All that means that earning ISK is certainly easy enough, and if they’re part of a corporation, tasks like production/mining can come from other corp members.

Plus, even with the new (grrr!) restructuring in how timecodes are going to be done, a PvP skilled mission runner can easily make enough ISK to pay for a second account. FTR, I have a PvP spec’d main (who I love) and a mining/industry spec’d alt who I really don’t have much of a use for. I’m going to start a trade alt, freighter alt and POS gunner alt, but my main still has much more of an ability to provide all my characters with ISK than does my alt. In fact, my alt’s main source of income is her datacore farming. And although she has about 2.75 K SP’s in Social, that’s proven more than enough, and my main has generally been the one to actually run the missons she gets offered with his Raven or Ishtar.

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

Even if they think the pew pew is for them it behooves them to have a more balanced character.
[/quote]

Why? While my main sucks at making ISK via, say, production or trading, he doesn’t have to as he has a perfectly decent income stream on his own. If I wanted a trade alt, too, I’d be much faster just setting his training on pause, opening up one of the other two slots on his account, and creating a (gallente?) trade alt. A trade alt, I might add, who would train Trade skills much faster than would a balanced alt, and my main could always go back to training PvP skils, again, much faster than a balanced toon. The math really does support the fact that specialization is king.

Just as an overly simplistic example, let’s say that an ‘average stat’ character wants to train Gunnery V and Connections V. It will be longer, most likely by upwards of a day or more, for that character to train both rather than having a PvP and mission alt on one account and having the PvP toon train Gunnery V and then switching to the mission alt and having that one train Connections V.

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

(hell…they may not even be sure which aspect of EVE they will want to focus on for weeks and even that can change again down the road as they grow bored with one aspect or another…never know).
[/quote]

While that’s a good point, the facts of the matter are, unfortunately, that once they do decide on a specialization, they’ll actually end up saving immense amounts of time if they re-roll for it at that point. Especially if they plan on playing for a year or more. After two years, the savings in terms of time are simply absurd, and we’re talking months of saved training.

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
The t20 thing is old news now and near as I can tell not something CCP took lightly internally nor was it status quo there (even the BPOs he magiced up were not all that stellar).
[/quote]

CCP actually tried to cover it up at first, and it wasn’t until Kugutsumen brought everything to light that they actually began to change how their employees operated in the game. Then they banned Kug.

And you are right in that most of the BPO’s were worthless, but IIRC, they also gave BoB a Saber blueprint which was, and pretty much still is, the single best 'dictor in the game. Just for the record of course :smiley:

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]

I agree there need to be things to fight over in 0.0 and 0.0 should have the juiciest stuff. From what I have heard assaulting these POS can be near impossible (multiple Titan defense…chain spam DD). Add in cyno jammers versus their jump bridges and so on and mostly those POS remain rather safe ISK printing machines.
[/quote]

Well, it’s certainly true, for instance, that BoB’s ten (or more, by now) titans in a cyno-jammed chokpoint would require enough pilots to log on and jump into system that the entire node would crash. CCP really does need to fix those mechanics, as they’re broken beyond all getout.

There have, however, been rumors that they’re going to ‘re-seed’ Dysprosium and Promethium moons so varying regions (Drone Regions, I’m looking at you) aren’t quite so useless.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, as it’ll fuck up the EVE economy, hardcore, and I hate it when CCP does that. But something has to happen. BoB being functionally invincible due to server instability, not in-game tactics is just broken.

73

Hopefully the new region they setup will help solve some of the cartel issues. Also finding new minerals will make it like the real world. When people find new sources of oil it DOES fuck up the economy.

74
  1. It really won’t change anything. It’s lowsec.
  2. EVE, thank the Gods, has virtually nothing in common with the real world.
75

Is there a page that explains corporate setup?

76

Didn’t someone make a giant ponzi-esque scheme once doing the insurence thing or am I thinking of something else (or another game even)?

77

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Why? While my main sucks at making ISK via, say, production or trading, he doesn’t have to as he has a perfectly decent income stream on his own. If I wanted a trade alt, too, I’d be much faster just setting his training on pause, opening up one of the other two slots on his account, and creating a (gallente?) trade alt. A trade alt, I might add, who would train Trade skills much faster than would a balanced alt, and my main could always go back to training PvP skils, again, much faster than a balanced toon. The math really does support the fact that specialization is king.
[/QUOTE]

A freshly rolled trade alt is going to train trade skills much faster than a balanced character? I’m waaay too tired to do the math, but I would be pretty surprised if a new character’s raw starting charisma is going to result in trade skills training a whole lot faster than even a charisma-gimped combat character with decent learning skills and a set of implants. The real advantage to a trade alt like that is that it can sit in Jita all the time to tweak prices without tying your main down.

Specialization is all well and good, but there’s so much engineering/electronics/mechanic/etc training that any combat pilot has to do, and so much ship command that any mining/industrial pilot has to do (barring the uber-specialized alts who never leave a station and exist solely to refine/build) that the best attributes for just about any main character are going to be highest in perception and intelligence, followed by willpower, memory, and finally charisma complete gimped. Shorting any of the other four excessively (except maybe memory) will most likely come back to haunt you.

Plus, a huge number of Eve players don’t ultimately follow the career trajectory they expected to when they began. I know plenty of pvpers who started Eve in mining ships, and plenty of industrialists who happen to be able to fit t2 large blasters or whatever. Balancing the major attributes makes it much easier to alter a character’s focus. Sure, you could roll up a new character, or start a second account, but some people become invested in their main and have no desire to run multiple heavily specialized characters.

78

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]
A freshly rolled trade alt is going to train trade skills much faster than a balanced character?
[/quote]

Yep. Once the API feed is back up we can roll up a set of new characters and post the EVEMon data here if you’d like.

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]

Specialization is all well and good, but there’s so much engineering/electronics/mechanic/etc training that any combat pilot has to do, and so much ship command that any mining/industrial pilot has to do (barring the uber-specialized alts who never leave a station and exist solely to refine/build) that the best attributes for just about any main character are going to be highest in perception and intelligence, followed by willpower, memory, and finally charisma complete gimped. Shorting any of the other four excessively (except maybe memory) will most likely come back to haunt you.
[/quote]

Nope. My main is Achura and put all his available points into willpower and perception. He’s currently earning about 1.5 million SP’s per month and hasn’t been significantly slowed down by any int/mem skills he’s had to learn. My alt, on the other hand, is also Achura and put all her available pointing into intelligence and memory. She blasts through int/mem based skills, but absolutely drags when learning any will/percep based skills.

Like I said above, I’d be happy to biomass one of my alts and set up a totally fresh character, and we can put yours and the new alt through EVEMon to see how they hash out.

79

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Yep. Once the API feed is back up we can roll up a set of new characters and post the EVEMon data here if you’d like.

Nope. My main is Achura and put all his available points into willpower and perception. He’s currently earning about 1.5 million SP’s per month and hasn’t been significantly slowed down by any int/mem skills he’s had to learn. My alt, on the other hand, is also Achura and put all her available pointing into intelligence and memory. She blasts through int/mem based skills, but absolutely drags when learning any will/percep based skills.

Like I said above, I’d be happy to biomass one of my alts and set up a totally fresh character, and we can put yours and the new alt through EVEMon to see how they hash out.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not disputing that a specialized character doesn’t train faster than a generalist. I’m disputing that if you have just one character it ought to be a specialist, both because there’s several million skillpoints in int/mem skills that even a straight combat pilot should be training, and because you never know what you’ll end up wanting to train. If you want to set up an R&D agent, for example. Either you roll an alt, or if you’re like me and have no desire for alts beyond a market watcher in Jita, you start training science. And then hey why not add a couple more skills and do bpo research for the corp, and now I might as well do some invention, and it’s getting to be a pain to find people to make stuff for me all the time so let’s do production efficiency 5 and some mass production…(this isn’t a hypothetical example, in case you hadn’t guessed). Actually my character is pretty heavily perc/will slanted, but I have trained a large pile int/mem skills and they’re a bit slow, but whatever. And there was no Achura when I rolled my character.

80

[QUOTE=Gorsnak]
I’m not disputing that a specialized character doesn’t train faster than a generalist. I’m disputing that if you have just one character it ought to be a specialist, both because there’s several million skillpoints in int/mem skills that even a straight combat pilot should be training, and because you never know what you’ll end up wanting to train.
[/QUOTE]

But my point is that there’s no reason to confine it to only one character, when a reasonably skilled Achura pilot can be excellent at PvP, have no problem training up Learning or Engineering/Mechanic skills, and can have an alt who can train charisma based skills much faster.

My point isn’t simply that a specialist trains faster than a generalist, but that the total time for a generalist to train PvP plus Trade plus Science (plus whatever) skills will be greater than the total time for a specialist character to train PvP skills plus the total time for a Trade/Science/Industry alt to train those skills.

That is, a specialized alt/main pair will train all those skills, using only one account, in much less time than a generalized character will. Plus, the alt will have the advantage of running missions/sitting in Jita/hauling goods without worrying about wardecs or grudges.

To elaborate a bit, my main is Achrua, PvP spec’d. With a head full of 4’s and just a hair over 4 mil points in Learning skills, he trains Int/Mem skills at 2112 SP’s/hour. Mem/Per skils at 2178 SP’s/hour and, quite frankly, trains pretty much every supplementary PvP skill (like Targeting or Sensor Linking) fast enough that I don’t notice any significant drop. Heck, he even trains Charisma/Willpower skills at a quite respectable rate of 1815 SP’s/hour.
With 4’s, his stats are Charisma: 17.6, Intelligence 24.2, Perception 28.6, Memory 22 and Willpower 25.3, he’s a specialist character that can easily add supplemental skills with no headache. I can post my InEVE profile if you’re curious to see what I’ve trained up for in a little over a year of play.

If, however, I was to want, say, Tycoon V, it’d be wonky of me to try to skill him up to that level when I could just start a trade alt and save weeks, if not months of training time.

There is no real reason not to use the two other slots on his account to get specific skills in other characters who could train them faster than he ever could.