The Gentrification of the Western Hemisphere

As I write this, the other "writing on the wall" is the fall of Fortress Delve and the IT Alliance. Let me be clear on the first point: I am not a part of any of the alliances involved in this, the end of the "Forever War" in EVE. I have never been in IT. I have never been in an IT renter or pet, and I have never been a member of any of the alliances that make up the so-called "Northern Coalition." However, I have been aligned with forces against IT pets, when a resident of Syndicate and Outer Ring, and I have been aligned against the NC during "Max 2" - the northern invasion of Winter/Spring 2010.

The Verite Rendition map is a brilliant map of the various alliances holding sovereignty in EVE. Unfortunately, it does not have the ability to take into account the meta-blocs of the game, like the DRF, ASWagon or the Northern Coalition.

From Vale of the Silent in the Northeast,across the entire northern hemisphere to Cloud Ring, all of those alliances can be treated as one group. This is the current "Northern Coalition" founded to stand against the threat of the now two-years dead Band of Brothers (BOB), and any iteration of alliance formed from the corporations that comprised BOB, including the now-mortally wounded IT Alliance. If you assume that IT Alliance, and it's pet/renters Black Star Alliance, HUN Reloaded and BLADE are merely dead men walking in Fountain and Delve, you see that over half of Nullsec will soon be held by the (now perhaps incorrectly named) Northern Coalition. I will not make broad future assumptions about changes to the NC - instead I assume that inertia will hold the NC alliances together with blue status for the foreseeable future. Examining the map with that in mind, it becomes quite clear that the Northern Coalition of alliances (which contains upwards of 50 thousand pilots) has created a vast safe haven for the individual members to earn ISK. This, in my humble opinion, is the straw that may break the proverbial camel's back in EVE.

Nullsec has long been held up as "high-risk high-reward" and for some time, this was true in many places, but in this gentrified western hemisphere, that will no longer be true. As far as the Carrier can jump, vast ISK fields stretch before the average NC pilot, with little true threat within striking distance.

The western hemisphere of EVE has the potential to completely destroy any hope of balance in game, far beyond the damage already done by the T20, PI reprocessing, or the moon-goo fiascos of the past. Where Technetium lined the pockets of corporation and alliance leaders within the NC (and for some, trickled down to the average pilot), the vast resources of risk-free nullsec have the potential to change the wallet balance of the average NC pilot from the hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions in a short time. Safe from Black Ops hotdrops (4.5 LY max distance) and with the vast resources of the supercapital rich NC a deterrent to any smaller alliance with delusions of invasion, pilots will be free to farm Sanctums, Havens, and of course to chain multi-million ISK Battleship rats in the true nullsec systems far from any real threat. This means that rather than earning a few hundred million ISK in income per month, these pilots can make billions. By turning the entire western hemisphere of EVE into a giant ISK faucet, the average NC pilot will be able to shrug off losing carriers or faction battleships the way empire carebears shug off Drake losses in missions.

Add to that the lack of available sovereign space for a new entity to grow large enough or rich enough to even consider threatening the NC bloc, then the solidification of the NC as the sole superpower in EVE is practically a foregone conclusion. The "problem" if it is to be considered one, is that the risk-to-isk ratio in nullsec is negated in this brave new world. Even today, with the ISK or even the stockpiles of ships that the NC has at it's disposal, no entity could sustain an assault upon this group long enough to break it. The average NC alliance can replace supercapitals without hesitation, while other alliances hesitate to replace any ships that do not exactly match fitting standards.

Is there a solution? Maybe, but not one that would actually change the game for years. CCP would have to change the costs of sovereignty modules and upgrades, they would have to dynamically change the value/quality of rats in systems based on the sovereignty levels or upgrades, re-adjust the T2 moon mineral balance for ship construction (again), all of which are artificial ways of constricting this vast meta-alliance. Even with changes to those items, it would literally take years (if not longer) to cause any significant dent in the wallets of these alliances. In addition, it's likely that with CCP's track record, any changes to costs would be even more detrimental to small alliances hoping to get a start in nullsec, making that activity even more of a non-starter.

The reality is, it's time to get a character into an NC alliance, and start farming. Although it's unlikely that your wallet will reach the pinnacles of ISK that the existing farmers have (after all, they are farming ISK as you read this from your empire mission hub), the imbalance at least moves up on a sliding scale, enabling you to maintain your position in this new, vastly unbalanced world. Those who aren't able to keep their position on the sliding scale (I'm looking at you, L4 mission runners) won't be affected until they join an alliance with delusions of grandeur and nullsec sovereignty.

Time and Alternate Income Streams

Just like in our real world, money makes EVE go 'round. It takes ISK to buy whatever it is you want - that shiny new faction frigate, the Tech 2 Ice Mining Barge, or a fully decked out SuperCapital. For many of us, PvP is the life and breadth of EVE - so ISK is gained by looting the wrecks of our victims and selling that loot on the market. But sometimes, lady luck shines elsewhere, and your coffers run dry and your ships get blown up faster than you can afford to replace them. Even with the recent "buff" to T2 insurance, you can't replace a Taranis hull (let alone the mods) with the insurance payout, so what's a poor PvP player to do for ISK generation?
The obvious thing is to run missions, right? Yawn. Sitting around for hours on end doing "target, orbit, shoot, loot, salvage, repeat" makes a dull EVE session. Well, there's market manipulation, right? Frankly, too much for me, shuttling around large quantities of item X from point A to point B - not the way I want to spend hours in EVE. Planetary Interaction (if you have the skills, time and no issues with repetitive stress injuries) will provide a thin income stream, especially if your Corp or Alliance is buying POS fuels at market rates. Not too hard to set up an Enriched Uranium chain, or Oxygen and Coolant. Ice mining earns decent money - if you have something else to do while your toon sits and cycles the lasers every 5 minutes.

The inventive (and amoral) character can scam their way into millions - just look at that Caldari Navy Raven sale via station trade...

But there is actually a fairly painless path to passive isk generation: Datacore farming. On your main toon, you might already have the basic skills in place - Science V? Now you just need to pick a Scientific field to study - I'd suggest looking at Datacore prices and picking the most profitable. I'm going to use Gallente Starship Engineering as my example, even though it isn't the most profitable. So you train up the specific skill to at least IV (assuming you have the prerequisites in place - usually one of these: Mechanic V, Electronics V, or Engineering V). Then you find who researches the field you want to farm - and go to the best agent you can in that field. Open a conversation, start research, and get on with your life. Once a month or so, go visit your agent, collect your datacores, and move them to a trade hub to sell for profit. Now this gets interesting with three character slots on your account - you can take the time to train up the basic skills for all of them and get at a Level 1 agent without any work - in about two weeks you will get about 10 RP a day, which isn't much (only about 1 datacore a week) - but that's an additional 200-300,000 isk a week that you don't need to do anything to earn – just leave that alt character alone, collecting RP for datacores while you fly your main. If you have the time, and energy, you really want to get to L3 or L4 research agents (I have a corpmate who gets over 200 million a week with 2 accounts/6 toons just doing datacores).

And yes, I profit from sharing this, since I have an R&D alt who does ship invention, and the more datacores out there the better the price on them for me to buy.

When in a rut... wander a new direction

So I've lived in the same area of space for most of my 2.5 years in EVE. Well, to be more specific, I've lived in two areas pretty much exclusively. One is Gallente empire space, and the other is NPC 0.0 in ORE/Syndicate space. I've also (as mentioned before) spent most of that time in NPC corps, and one player corp (now two). The hardest part about living in the current region of 0.0 is that we are blue to practically everyone, and our alliance has a reputation for hot-drops and heavy-loss-inducing suicide fleets. This translates (loosely) into fewer and fewer options for good fights. People either safe up, dock up, or just plain leave when a scout from my alliance appears in local. This has made 0.0 boring. I never thought I'd say that, but when I can safely rat in a pipe system in 0.0 with only 1-2 safes because 90% or more of all traffic is blue, 0.0 has lost its lustre.

Fortunately this should all change soon enough, with some opportunities for good fights coming, but the last month (almost two) has seen a rut where we have to go 15-20 jumps just to find a fight. But what has happened is that some of my favorite pilots to fly with have either gone MIA (not even logging in) or rogue in losec. Now understand - I don't think there's anything wrong with going to losec and losing a little sec status, even though I am still too much of a carebear to pod someone in losec. This rut extends even to my game, as I find myself spending more time in my industry alt, getting into POS production, R&D work with datacore collection, ship invention and T2 construction. Unfortunately (for me) I'm not doing it right, as I'm not inventing and building to earn ISK - I'm doing it for the day my PvP character is interesting again.

Most interesting to me, as the fledgling industrialist, is the odd drops and fluctuations of prices as a major update to EVE approaches. The industry CEO is a wizard with this, and regularly modifies what we are building in our POS farm, based on market cycles and material prices. Since I'm just getting started, I'm not really one to say "buy construction blocks" or something, but as I'm learning more I'm realizing that sometimes, the path to success is far from straight. I've been collecting the specific datacores I need for my ship invention, via a decent (L3) R&D agent near my Losec base. A recent returning player to the corp was evaluating the datacore market recently, and informed me that we were better off researching some random datacore, selling them on the market, buying the datacores we want for invention, and still be turning a profit of several million ISK per week - with no real work involved beyond posting buy and sell orders. So rather than researching Caldari and Gallente Ship datacores, I find myself researching odd physics skills. Moral of the story - sometimes the end goal is best achieved with a winding path. I will have plenty of datacores for my invention work, I will be earning additional ISK since I'm researching popular and expensive datacores instead of the ones I need, and buying my starship datacores on the market.