Tuesday 30 April 2013

Fly well Kirith

Kirith, of the Inner Sanctum of the Ninvea, wanted some ISK. He had plans on doing single player PI in a wormhole. 

I contacted him, and decided that there we could come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.  I won't say how much he earned, but he posted this update a fortnight after he joined us.

We didn't chat much, apart from the odd Hi/Bye as he refreshed PI. 

He made his ISK, and has decided to concentrate on his 'murderous tendencies', and we parted on good terms.  I won't say what his plans are, but ... he's a blogger; they are not that hard to work out.

Kirith, I would love a final post on your experience with us; the good; the bad; and if needed, the ugly.  If you put it on your blog, I can't be accused of censorship.


That means we have an opening for another PI farmer.  We have an in wormhole PI buying program.  Oh for those that are interested; PI is entirely legitimate AFK farming.


I do moderate, but not excessive background checks.  We lock down player goods to divisions, and keep everything expensive locked up. 

If this sounds interesting, read this recruiting page.  Personally, I play on my 'evenings' (Eastern Australian Time), which is not the time that most of you play.  However, send 'Dotoo Foo' (or even Saissore Foo) an eve mail, if you want to chat.

Monday 29 April 2013

The day the POS went dark

 Even if all you want to do is shoot stuff, the upcoming resource balancing changes should be significant.  Today, I am pulling out my crystal ball.

I have been reading some items on the upcoming fuel changes.

From the shakeup blog : ... the maximum supply of ice from highsec (assuming that each belt is mined out completely five times a day) would provide approximately 80% of the game's ice needs. ...
highsec will still be a large exporter of ice products, being able to generate eight times the volume of isotopes used by highsec control towers.


I am unaware of the current amount of ice or ore mined outside of highsec (though I have read figures of 1% of ore in low).  I however expect that we will not see 100% utilisation of highsec ice fields.  If nothing else highsec suicide gankers will have valuable targets. 

I have read claims that there will be no more afk ice mining.  Mmm.  To me, it looks like a player needs to pay attention 2-3 times as often, in highsec at least. 

I expect that there will be an attempt to mine ice in lowsec.  There will definitely be null mined ice.  I have heard nothing about wormholes being able to mine the stuff (I can wish).


Upward pressures on ice prices, with :
  • need to scan anomalies rather than bot to the same place every time.
  • Some ice mining moving to low/nullsec and the potential of less botting there (though that might be a claim)
The obvious downward pressure on ice prices is the increased yield.

Some of your average highsec ... protected by concord miners are likely to be replaced with  null miners (though possibly alts of the same player).  New miners need new ships and fittings.  Slightly more ore consumed between now and Odyssey.

The links from the Mittani suggest that there will be demand for another 450 or so large caldari towers and modules. More PI demand as these get built.

There should also be a scramble in nullsec as the new profitable moons are fought over.

My crystal ball is murky as to what CCP mean when they say hisec can potentially supply 80% of the game's ice needs.  Are they referring to total demand of ice products, or to each isotope?

If CCP is restricting highsec by total ice, then I see Nitrogen Isotopes being in huge demand; with Caldari towers being the highsec research tower of choice as well as (as far as I know) the reactions tower of choice.   (The alternative is that CCP allows a lot more Caldari White glaze than the other racial ice types).

My crystal ball sees many Caldari towers going dark (possibly even ours), possibly replaced with other race's towers for cheaper fuel.  I also see a continued proliferation of abandoned (but otherwise sellable) POS.

Please note: This post is labelled speculative.  Let the trader beware.

Friday 26 April 2013

The CSM 8 voting process broadside

I want to see the incoming CSM act as a player advocacy group.  Best wishes and support for them. I think they will need it.

An election process, should be free, fair and transparent.  Rules should be published well in advance, and only tinpot dictators ad the incompetant change the rules part way through.

Instead we have an example of how not to run an election.

In regard to the late change to who went to Iceland,  after candidates were called for is bad.  One candidate pulled out, claiming this as a reason.  While I agree that the number of votes gained during an election is a poor guide to who works hard, decide the rules (further) ahead of time.

I did like that CSM released the code for tallying the elections.  Delaying the start of the elections due to a lack of necessary website changes, ... well we know where the QA team efforts were not allocated. 

Telling candidates that they are not eligible, when they in fact are, is less than ideal.  Either that or CCP is changing the rules mid election again (which is also less than ideal).

Telling candidates that they qualified, then deciding they had not yet is potentially disastrous.  Were any candidates told they qualified, then missed out by a few votes to get to the threshold?  This is on top of the earlier confusion about the start dates.

There was the unfortunate position of a CSM candidate being disqualified due to publicly expressed beliefs.  While I find the beliefs being attributed to the candidate abhorrent, disqualifying him after they knew the qualifying round votes was manipulative.

Next time 

If CCP or even the incoming CSM wonders what can be done to increase participation.

First, update the rules so that they are clear, specifying who is eligible and who is not.

Have an internal dry run of the election before the due date so that any problems can be identified and preferably fixed ahead of time.

If problems happen, and they sometimes do, have contingency plans in place ahead of time.  If there is a delay to the start, then just shift everything back.

Double check before you tell candidates they have made it to the next round.  Once you have told
them, stick to what you said.


To CCP : If the CSM is not important, repeat the mistakes of this year.  If the CSM is important, then get it right.  Say what you will do. Do what you said.


Maybe I am being snarky, and just had a bad time in first life.  This post should be rightfully buried under the excitement of fanfest and before the announcement of the successful candidates, to be brought out again shortly before next CSM voting season.  I really hope not to see these issues next time around.

Thursday 25 April 2013

Open letter to a recent WoW refugee, part 1 of many

Hi old friend.

It's been a while since we failed together so so often in the Firelands.  We covered many items in our chat, and there were some things I did not even mention.

Most things are re-sellable in one form or another.  The exceptions are implants (bound to a clone), and rigs (bound to a ship).  The concept of bind on pickup/bind on equip does not apply.

Missions in eve are somewhat similar to quests in WoW.  However instead of kill 10 rats, it is Kill X at spot Y.  Sometimes X is the leader; other times it is kill a sqaud.  Some are postal runs; others are mine, refine then make something.

Always be training.  I have been playing for over a year, and I still whine about the lack of skill points.  Open your portrait on the top left, skills, and then 'Open training queue'.  Make sure you 'apply' your skills.

You did the Aura missions.  This is good.  She sent you onto the career agent missions.

Do all the career agent missions at the hub Aura sent you to.

Read the text of the career agent missions.  Sometimes they ask you to carry something.  Other times they ask you to not shoot at something.  Twice you will lose your ship, the first can be totally empty, the second will need a few guns and a bit of ammo. 

Some career agents ask you to mine at a defined spot for the mission.  Once that spot is 'ticked' in your mission log, you can gather the rest of your ore at a spot of your choice.  My favourite farming spot is the market, though I suspect you will probably mine your own.

Upgrade to a destroyer when you can afford to (both ISK and skillpoints).  It makes the career agents missions easier, both in required DPS and HP, but that you can carry extra modules for mining or repairing.

When doing the exploration mission, hang around the the various cans and pick up extra 'proof of' documents.  I will pay for each complete set(*).  They seem to respawn every 5 or so seconds.  Any pilot can (theoretically) run this mission 12 times at different hubs.  I tend to run this mission at 6 different hubs per highsec pilot.

If you totally stuff up a career agent mission by not getting something; you can:
  • Create an alt and go and get the item on that alt (probably preferred at this point)
  • Find another career agent hub and repeat that agent.
  • Lodge a petition and ask for the mission to be reset.  This can be done from the question mark on the left hand side well below your player icon and 'create new petition'.  In my experience, the petitions to reset missions are answered quickly, though I prefer to try to ensure that pebcak does not apply before lodging tickets.
  • Buy the item off a contract, though I expect this is too expensive for a newbie.

Experienced players certainly have an advantage 1 on 1 in Eve.  Unlike in WoW, a large enough group of newbies can take down the most experienced player.

In highsec (high security status systems), most players will leave you alone, with the possible exception of you being in space but away from keyboard.

In low/null/wormhole systems, the consensus is 'not blue; shoot it'.  Assume anyone you do not know or has not been marked as blue will be after you as a trophy.  You will be warned by the game before going to these scary places.

You can pay for your game time with in-game currency legally.  This link shows the current prices for Plex.  I will help you explore options with this.  As you know, I live in this strange place called a wormhole, and we do this strange thing called Planetary Interaction.  We make a lot of ISK this way, but more in a later post.

There is more to come, but this wall of text is enough to read at this point.

While this letter, and the specific experiences is written to my old friend, it applies to so many others, and even to me when I joined Eve.  I fully expect to be writing this in many parts.  Each one will be labelled as WoWRefugee.



Notes (*) : This is an open offer.  Send an in game mail to Dotoo Foo, and we can arrange a price.  At the moment I am thinking around 100,000 ISK  per complete set, (and I am probably being stingy at this price).  A complete set is Proof of Discovery:
  • Anomalies
  • Gravimetric
  • Ladar
  • Magnetometric
  • Radar

Saturday 20 April 2013

Travel Advisory : Jita

Burn Jita appears to have started. 

Apparently 12% tidi in Jita according to a corporation member.  This dotlan page has kill stats on Jita.

From reports of last year, there is still plenty of opportunity to move around in Jita.  However, I would be less willing than normal to move haulers with expensive cargo in or near Jita this weekend.

Edit: It's now 'official', per http://themittani.com/news/jita-burns-redux

Quote : "This year, the carnage is not confined to Jita, ... is suicide ganking in Amarr space as well.  Reports also state that Psychotic Monk’s Belligerent Undesirables and James315’s New Order are also ganking."

Wednesday 17 April 2013

CSM voting tragic

If you have not yet done so; go and vote.  You missed out on voting early, but with sufficient alts can still vote often.

Many players will not know how preferential voting elections work.  If you don't care about the mechanics of the vote, or predictions, then this is not the post you are looking for.


At a really high level, this is the vote for the popular followed by the vote for the least unpopular,
with an aim is that if your 'bloc' gets 40% of the votes, they should get roughly 40% of the seats.

First is the vote for the popular.  Anyone with more than a quota is voted in; Surplus votes are transferred to the next candidate on the voting ticket.  Rinse and repeat while candidates have more votes than the quota.

Next is the vote for the least unpopular.  The bottom candidate is excluded, and votes are transferred to the next candidate on the voting ticket.

For more information about the specifics, this page refers to a Wright Single Transferable Vote system, which may be something close to what CCP used.  They released the source code (which is the real voting system they will use), but

Now, preferential voting systems generally give expected and reasonable results for everything but the last spot.  'Compromise' candidates get elected here. 


For those that are really keen, http://results.aec.gov.au/15508/Website/External/SenateStateDop-15508-VIC.pdf, from our most recent federal senate election. It is an election for 6 seats.



Trying (and possibly failing) to avoid the politics.

Bloc #1 with roughly 33% of the primary vote gets 2 seats (Major party)
Bloc #2 with roughly 33% of the primary vote gets 2 seats (Major party)
Bloc #3 with roughly 16% of the primary vote gets 1 seat (largest minor party)
Bloc #4 with roughly 3% of the primary vote missed out (medium minor party)
Bloc #5 with roughly 2% of the primary vote gets final seat. (don’t even know who these guys are)

Bloc #4 was a divisive party. Some loved them; Most really did not.  Bloc #5 was voted in as a compromise.


For the other states, it was the party that got just short of a quota in their own right, generally Bloc#3 that picked up the last spot.

Back to Eve, we have several bloc's.  My predictions:
  • Mynna from null is all but a certainty, with several candidates being elected on his ticket.  I don't think 'null bloc' candidates will have an outright majority, but current rules on last election would have resulted in nearly 4 candidates just on the Mittani's personal vote.  With the combined ticket in it's forms and looking at CSM 7's results, I think they will be disappointed if they don't get a majority.
  • The wormhole candidates will expect at least 2 seats.  Nathan and James are the front runners.
  • Ali Aras has made it on a sufficient number of tickets to be elected.
  • At least one prominent blogger will be elected; at a guess Ripard.
  • Trebor has the personal votes from last time to be re-elected.
  • Mangala from RVB should be elected on the back of his corp
As an aside, if a male is playing a female pilot, are they a he or a she? 

My crystal ball is far to murky to even guess at the remaining spots.  However, I will be astounded if we are not surprised by who gets spot #14.

Tuesday 16 April 2013

Wardec redux, or how it's gone


I predict that one of these days, CCP will allow us to paint our corporate logos onto the sides of our ships.  Not only that, CCP will also allow for some variations to the corporate logos.  When that day comes, I am changing our logo to a series of concentric rings

I engage in PVP, or rather, I have PVP engaged upon me.  In our corp, we fly wormhole space, lowsec and highsec.  We have lost industrial ships with too much loot.  We have been caught up in a wardec that our previous alliance set to mutual.

I have no significant or serious objection to someone shooting at us in Eve.  Its a spaceship shooting game, with a relatively strong industrial sub-game.  That does not mean that I intend to make it easy for someone to shoot us.  In fact we go to some lengths to reduce the incidence of anyone shooting our ships.

Red Frog are great for getting wormhole goods to market.  We can get our goods to highsec and create contracts.  We do not know of any hauling corporation that will haul into our wormhole space safely on 12 hours notice.  For that, we need our own haulers.


While we are primarily a wormhole corporation, we still have highsec pilots.  These pilots haul into and out of out of the wormhole, and engage in some highsec manufacture, station trading and hauling on the side. We get our thrills inside the wormhole; we don't need them in highsec too.

So, the wardec was a nuisance.  When we broke with the alliance (on good terms), we were apparently stuck in a mutual wardec. We were sad pilots; but resolved to fix the problem.

The first order of the day was to establish one or more pilots with +7 raw faction standing to allow for highsec POS.  Our highsec pilots only travel into the wormhole every few weeks, and some of our highsec pilots happen to have high research skills.

The second one was to set up a new corporation for our highsec pilots.  There is some loyalty between pilots; we know each other and know that there is not going to be an arbitrary awoxing because that is what the players do.  We also have a one player per division rule (unlimited pilots) to somewhat enforce this.  We have little loyalty to a specific corporation name.

The final order of the day was to chat to more experienced but friendly players. 

Veteran : "Why are you making a new corp?"
Foo : "Because we can't get out of the mutual wardec at a price we are willing to pay."

Veteran : "You can drop the mutual part any time."
Foo : "We tried, you can't.  We went into the war itself and tried to click on everything; nothing worked. "

Veteran : "Yes you can, CCP made it so no-one would be locked into mutual wars"
Foo : "Huh?"

I don't have a screenshot, but on the Corporation -> Wars -> 'Our Wars' tab, on the right hand side of the screen, there was a flag stating that the war was mutual.  All I needed to do was click on this and confirm a dialogue box to unset the 'mutual' section of the war.

One week later, and the aggressor corporation saw no value in paying for a war where there had been zero conflict for months.  The war expired.

I simply had missed the button to unset the war away from mutual.  I seem to be very good at facepalming.

Thursday 11 April 2013

CSM8 Voting


It does not matter if your preference matches mine, just vote.  In a preferential system, with all votes being 'formal', there is no wasted vote.  Vote all 14 slots if you have even the slightest preference.  Preferential voting systems have sometimes unexpected ways of voting that last spot.

https://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/vote/ . Do this on all your accounts.  On my browser at least it remembered the votes from my previous account to make submission of later votes easier.



I at least listened to the wormhole debate, and have a preference for established bloggers where I can and have already read your history.  I do have a preference against reading the in-game forums, so if that is the only place you talk, you are invisible to me.

I am also repeating the advice of several bloggers based on their recommendations, and been swayed by corp members.

I have a preference against preserving the status quo for established large alliances, and as such have a preference against null bloc candidates.  Null are going to have candidates at CSM regardless of what I write on this blog.

My preferences :
    1. Nathan Jameson (Wormhole 5)
    2. James Arget (Wormhole 5)
    3. Cipreh (Wormhole 5)
    4. Chitsa Jason (Wormhole 5)
    5. Ripard Teg (blogger)
    6. Ali Aras (Newbie, quit and came back)
    7. Mangala Solaris (RVB)
    8. Unforgiven Storm (Null Industrialist : but ... Null Bloc)
    9. Steve Ronuken (3rd party apps community)
    10. Ayeson (Wormhole but least active in hunting votes)
    11. Korvin (previous CSM; but ... c1-c4 wormholes are probably what you want)
    12. Psychotic Monk (Active highsec bad boy)
    13. Malchanis (recommended on many of the lists I trust)
    14. Trebor Daehdoow (incumbant; some love; some hate)

    Blog recommendations I have found in case you are seeking other player's guidance.
    Edit : Additional reccomendations.  I missed a couple of reccomendation posts from blogs I do read and have a long association with.  In my defense, finished writing the post at ... way past midnight and wasn't thinking. 

    If you have an endorsement list to add, please leave it as a comment.

    Tuesday 9 April 2013

    Standing facepalm

    Don't tell anyone but I have been playing this game for nearly a year and still had not done even an L3 security mission.  After reading I go to bar to have fun not to talk, my conscience was pricked, and it is time for me to look at more than PI and wormholes.


    Despite several pieces of commentary to the contrary, I have decided I want to get the standing for my first jump clone myself.   Stubborn and and apparently a grind.  You need a standing of 8 with an NPC corp to get jump clones.  I have trained up Infomorph Psychology to use clones.

    Previously, I had completed 6 full sets of career agents, many of the 'keeping crime in check' missions, and the cosmos agent missions.  This gave me 7 raw faction standing, and about 6.5 to an NPC corp.


    Now 6.5 is not that far from 8.  I dutifully try out my first L3 security mission.  I spend way too long worrying over fitting a ship.  Walk up to the mission; and over it falls.

    Ok. Try out a L4 security mission.  This, for a guy who's idea of a preparing for a fight is working out how many warp core stabilisers and how much tank to put onto an Iteron, was somewhat daunting.

    I pull my so called combat pilot out of the wormhole and pair him up with my jack of all trades/master of none highsec alt, and head of to the L4 mission.

    It took significantly more concentration, and far more time to complete the L4 over the L3 mission.  Then it had the indecency to give less of as standing boost.  I gave up and went back to L3 missions.

    Some were show up and not pay attention.  Another I was down to 10% hull, which was a bit of excitement for the evening.

    Before "too long", I was at level 8.  It could not have been that many missions.  The only attention I paid was that I got 2 storyline missions doing them, so somewhere around 25 missions, and certainly not chained.

    So, now where do Roden Shipyards have a medical facilityAnyone? Please?

    Before you go hunting for your own standing to get own jump clones; read this list from Eve University.

    For the record; Roden Shipyards is not there.

    Facepalm.

    Oh well, my Federation Navy standing is 5.9 (modified). and that will be useful to reduce Dodixie trading fees.