The cold harsh reality of space

For a long time, I was the epitome of what is wrong with some EVE players.

I played alone (I even formed a one-man corp to put up a tower in hisec).

I ran missions.

I mined Scordite in hisec

I avoided losec like it was a pile of rancid meat.

Nullsec wasn't even in my vocabulary.

I was, as is hinted in the title of my blog, the penultimate carebear.

Things change, or they should, if you keep playing EVE. Because eventually, those tasks in EVE become so mind-numblingly boring, you will do almost anything to avoid them. I took the easy road out of Carebear hell - I joined a corp that was friendly to training folks for PvP. But this blog post isn't about me.

EVE has always been marketed as a sandbox. A game where anyone can impact any part of the game, independently or with friends. Some of the greatest marketing stories about EVE involve the actions of one person bringing about world-shaking events. And there is a growing movement to destroy the sandbox.

If you thought "Goonswarm" when you read that last line, you are actually part of the problem. If you thought "entitled whiners" then you are not. If you don't like what category I just put you in, you might want to stop reading this post now.

EVE is a game that, in every way but two, pits players against each other for everything. The obvious PvP I will only mention in passing - combat. If you buy or sell on the market, you are playing against others. If you build or invent ships or modules, you are playing against other players. If you mine (in some hisec systems) you play against others on an intermittent basis, since the belts can be mined dry. If you explore, you play against others. There are only two places in EVE you don't compete with others directly - mission running and ice mining.

However, these activities are not (and should not) be risk free. EVE is a sandbox. EVE is a multi-player game, and because it is these things, there should always be competition. Missions (and ice fields) are always there, with no competition. You can't go to an agent and be told "Sorry, I have no more missions today." You can't mine a hisec ice field dry. And therein lies the problem (and, perhaps, the answer). Below I line out proposals to change both of those activities. In my opinion (which is wrong at least 50% of the time) these proposals are better for EVE as a sandbox.

Ice Mining

• Ice should not be a limitless commodity. The sliding scale of value -> security should apply to ice just as it does to minerals, missions, rats, and any other PvE activity in EVE.
• There should be at least 3 tiers of ice in each type, with variable quantities of refined materials in each type.
• Ice tiers should also change in block size. HiSec ice should have the largest blocks (in m3) with the fewest refined commodities, losec ice should be smaller, with more material per block, and nullsec blocks should be smaller still, with even more materials per block.
• Ice fields should be smaller, and it should be possible to mine a field dry with a dedicated fleet, within a short amount of time. I don't know the exact numbers, but the amount of ice in a belt should be reduced so that a well managed squad (9 Mackinaws and an Orca) can clear a field of ice in about 4 hours. Of course, ice would respawn at downtime, just as it does today.
• Ice fields should be added to gravimetric sites. This would allow people to find and exploit small quantities of ice anywhere, and provide a tiny amount of additional security when attempting to harvest ice in LoSec or Null. Personally, I'm a fan of all mining being done from gravimetric sites, or all minerals except Veldspar being limited to gravimetric sites (and a higher frequency of spawns than exist today).
• A new rig should be introduced to further reduce cycle time: Ice Harvesting Optimization Rig I and II. A fully trained Mackinaw pilot with a fully T2 rigged and fitted ship, should be able to run a complete cycle in 3 minutes or less. This, in conjunction with the volume changes of ice blocks in losec and null, will help reduce the risk while mining. A full cycle would still be required to acquire a block of ice (per Harvesting module). Ideally, this ship (in nullsec) could pull as much (or more) ice as a Cargo-rigged Mack in Hisec in the same amount of time.

Ice Harvesting is the most mind-numbing activity I have seen or done in EVE, which means it is the easiest to script for botting 23.5/7. These changes, as a whole, reduce the raw income potential of risk-free botting in HiSec. Ice Fields would run dry, so the bots would run out of easily scripted targets. The massive reduction in cycle time (in conjunction with the reduction in hold size) would make LoSec and Nullsec ice harvesting slightly more viable (but still the riskiest PvE activity in ISK/hr for those areas). Moving ice to gravimetric sites would provide small opportunity to have low-risk higher-income ice mining.

Mission Running

Beyond the intervention of ninja-salvagers and mission-griefers, mission running in EVE is the other big lonely activity in EVE. You don't need friends to run missions through level 4, and you can (usually) do them completely unmolested for hours on end. Recent changes with the Orca has negatively impacted the small amount of PvP in mission running, so I'd like to look at this from a different perspective. Competition is at the heart of this proposal.

• Each agent should have a limited number of missions/hr to distribute. The number of missions should be inverse to the quality of the agent, so L1 agents have 4x more missions than L4 agents.
• A mission is "reserved" after a player accepts it. If a player declines a mission, it remains in the pool that agent has for that hour. If a player fails a mission within the first hour, it returns to the pool for that hour.
• The missions/hr do not "rollover" - each hour the number of missions is reset whether all of them were used in the previous hour or not.
• Agents without missions can "suggest" agents that still have missions available, within their own corporation and mission type. A player can "reserve" that mission if they so desire, then fly to the recommended system to run the mission. This reservation is good for 60 minutes only, after which the mission is released to the local mission running population.

A nerf to L4 mission running? Yeah, sort of. There are 661 L4 Security agents across EVE. If each one of these had only 20 missions per hour, that's still a pool of over 12,000 L4 missions per hour. Of course, a decent number of those are in LoSec or Null, so let's just drop 1/4 which leaves only 9,000 L4 missions per hour available. That's one L4 mission for every 4-5 players in EVE on an average hour. That means you may need to move about to get a mission, and there would be competition for the best agents. This is a nerf designed to add the smallest flavor of PvP to mission running - you are competing against the other mission runners for the limited number of resources (missions) every hour.

EVE is a sandbox. Competition against others is at the heart of this sandbox. These two humble proposals would bring the nature of PvP competition to two of the most risk-free activities in EVE, without actually increasing the risk to assets.

The Carebear in me...

The carebear in me is having a bit of fun with PI on Sisi. Assuming that most of it sorts out with good information in the market for the PI command centers and skills, those who have spent a lot of time with it in Sisi and documented things should come out way ahead in the initial PI race, but it will probably balance out soon enough. What I've noticed (and hope is not consistent) is that costs to build items like extractors and storage facilities are 100% out, with no reimbursement when decommissioning a site. I would think that in the "far-future" that some small measure of recycling existed, so those decommissioned facilities return something (like 5-10%) of the commissioning cost. Either that, or they remain available but in offline mode, like various tower modules.

As I test the various processes for POS fuel creation, I know the wormhole crowd is getting excited, to go deep down the rabbit hole and hide their POS, since they can live there all alone without needing to travel out with this change. Of course as CCP does this, and the Meta 0 removal from loot tables, it is clear that they are slowly working towards a completely player-run economy. I wouldn't be surprised if in 6 months, with the next major release (or slowly, over the 6 months) Meta 0 items and those items constructable via PI disappear from the NPC hubs. Guess it's time to get my industry alt up with Production Efficiency V, and my item BPOs to ME/PE 20/20 for the oncoming change. The lag in Sisi today was crazy though - 20-30 seconds for my hangar to show any ships or items after login. Hope that isn't a failure in the battle of Lag that will make its way to Tranquility...

Two years, Three Months, and two blogs later...

So I started playing EVE when they released a Mac OS X client back in December of 2007. Looking back, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had played MMO space sim games dating back to Compuserve, but nothing prepared me for EVE. I didn't even pay attention to the training queue for at least two weeks, I thought I could rule the game from my fancy Tristan frigate I mined HOURS to buy, and I was playing a multi-player game all by myself.

That wasn't too bad for the time. In RL I had just become a dad, and my wife and daughter occupied most of my attention. A few months later though, I had introduced a couple of co-workers to EVE and they were already in a player corp, raking up kills and flying ships bigger than I did. I was accused of being a carebear, and it was true. I hemmed and hawed about joining a player corp, but just never found the right group, or came up with a new excuse why I needed to play alone in this game where at any given time almost 30 thousand other people were in the same universe. Then came expansion after expansion, and I still ran L1 missions in my destroyer, not looking at the bigger picture. I could hop in and out of game in short time that way, even though I never made a lot of isk, and I never got a bigger ship. I kept skilling up though, dabbling here and there, today a mission runner in a T1-fit Tristan, tomorrow mining in a Navitas. Slowly I trained skills for bigger ships and better items, which really paid off once I woke up and joined into EVE Online - the real game.

I played alone until the release of Apocrypha, when I immediately jumped on the scanning bandwagon and was in a wormhole within the first 24 hours, with acceptable scanning skills. I ran into a gang of pirates in that wormhole, and they were stuck, lost and needed help to get out. We chatted, I scanned them down an exit wormhole, they invited me to their corp but I wasn't ready to play with others, I was still a loner at heart. I started blogging with a contest promoted by CCP and a new EVE-bloggers website, which went great for all of 2 months until the guy hosting the website lost everything I'd written. I started up again, but was depressed at the loss of my work, and I stopped writing. It was appropriate, then that the site shut down shortly thereafter.

My life in EVE went on, I could fly mean, T2 fit battlecruisers in my missions, I could mine in various Exhumers, even fly Iteron IVs and had recently skilled to fit and fly an interceptor. But I was slowly burning out, a lone candle in the depths of space, with no-one to share the experience with. I was the ultimate failure of EVE, almost two years into the game and I had played alone the entire time, and was on the verge of quitting. That was July, 2009.

This blog is my third iteration, the third time I try to write about my life in EVE. Welcome to my wanderings in the darkness that is EVE Online...