Thursday 18 September 2014

C4 WH with customs offices for sale

The Foo corporations are rationalising our wormholes, and our C4 wormhole : J231341
is now surplus to our requirements.

This is a C4 wormhole with a C1 and C5 static.  It has 'perfect PI' (with 2 lava planets), that is you can extract then make all PI products.


Our price is 1.5B and it includes transfer of all 10 customs offices.

There are no dead towers in the system, and only our current holding tower.  Our tower is also available for transfer at cost.

If you are interested in purchasing it, please contact DoToo Foo in game.

Wednesday 17 September 2014

Nerf by kindness - invention changes

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/lighting-the-invention-bulb/

There are a series of changes coming (soonish) for invention including :
  • A rebalance of datacore and science skills required for invention. 
  • Merging Invention and Reverse engineering
  • Removal (and reimbursement) of data interfaces
  • Teams replacing Meta items as modifiers
  • Multiple success/failure outcomes ranging from improved ME/TE values to partial datacore refund.
  • Base chance tweaks on ship invention (most easier, freighters harder)
  • Tech III subsystem selection becomes selectable rather than chance based, but chance to succeed nerfed
  • Multiple invention runs
With the exception of multiple invention runs, these are fairly straight forward.  There will be some market adjustment as Inventors get used to the new mechanics and adjust their skills and formula.  There might be some short term datacore imbalances as pilots move to different invention skills and standings for different research agent.

Multiple invention runs will be a mixed blessing.

For most ME or TE research or copy jobs, you set the job; go away for roughly a month, and come back to a completed job.

For Invention of T2 ammunition and modules there is a real barrier of having to reset jobs every hour.  This means at keyboard, logged in, and setting an alarm.  Then of course no invention while asleep.

Until now, how well you do with invention is based on how well you resolve this pain.

Coming soon(*):  The next logical course of action is to allow players to start invention with multiple runs (...) so they don’t have to launch them manually every hour, which is what we’re going to do with this set of changes.

This will make a huge impact on your ability to submit invention jobs.  It will also make a huge impact on your competitors ability too.

When something is made easy, more pilots will start doing that activity.  Total ISK earned across all of invention might go up, but ISK/invention pilot hour drops.  It happened with exploration when the scanning changes dropped, and I am getting reports of a drop in manufacturer ISK/pilot hour from the recent manufacturing changes.  I expect this to happen with the invention changes.


(*) Soon is not real soon (Oceanus on 30 September) but more a pretend soon, at a later and currently unspecified date.

Finally, some sound advice from CCP : Please remember all of this is subject to change until deployed and that Market speculation is done at your own risk.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

CSM Matias Otero resigns, CSM Asayami Dei appointed


For those avoiding EN24, reddit, and the forums, Matias Otero, the Brave Newbies representative has been inactive for sometime, and has recently made his resignation official.

Matias has  issued his apology on reddit including
...  I've decided to resign from the CSM rather than let my seat go to waste. It was a difficult decision, as I felt that I could at least have spent some of my energy on the all-important issue of new player attraction and retention, but in the end I had to admit to myself that it wasn't going to happen. ...


CCP then had the decision on whether to replace Matias or leave a seat vacant.  If they were going to replace him, how?

So lets look at the options https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By-election#In_multi-member_constituencies is a starting place.

Option: chose from losing candidates at previous election via recount

The voting software that CSM uses easily lends itself to excluding the failed candidate.  This has the advantage of allowing voters, especially those who voted for the resigned representative, to still have their say via their voting preferences.

If CCP chose this method, then Asayami Dei is elected, defeating Awoxing Pizza-Spymaster McBlueshooter by (my count) of 181.

The (my count) qualification is that I used droop with the warren rules, which is probably not quite right.  However Sephira Galamore on the forums posted that with CSM's own voting software, that this is also the same result.

Most systems that perform this type of recount keep all incumbents in their seat and use the recount solely for electing the vacancy. (Addressing Sephira's concern on the forums)


Option: Leave the seat vacant

Do nothing is always an option, but not really one that benefits anyone.  While the actual goals of what the CSM is for are perceived differently by some, very few of these goals are met by fewer CSM members.

Option: replace with a similar candidate by fiat

Many electoral systems will appoint a member from the same political party where available.  Whether this appointment is done by a Governor, an elected body themselves, an effort is generally made in many systems to retain the existing balance by replacing 'like with like'.

Eve does not (yet) have formal political parties.  We are close but not there yet. I do not see how this would work until we have formal tickets formally acknowledging who is in the same group.



Option: replace with the last excluded candidate

This is the option that was taken by CCP in the interests of speed.  Umm.  No disrespect to Asayami Dei but please CCP, never do this again.

This has the exact opposite effect of 'replace with a similar candidate' and generally will disenfranchise those that voted for the recently vacated representative.

For an example in the extreme.  Take a common voting scenario
  • Right wing candidate gets 49% of vote
  • Left wing candidate gets 35% of vote
  • Center Right candidate gets 14% of vote
  • Others get 2%
So on the initial vote (regardless of method) the right wing candidate is elected, and 1/2 way through their term resigns.

Under this method the left wing candidate would be elected, causing the right wing electors (with 63% of vote) to be disenfranchised.

The reason that Asayami is appointed under both this rule and recount method is that in the original count Asayami was only just excluded (80 votes).

Speed was not an issue.  I found and installed and worked out how to drive similar software to perform a reasonable count within a couple of hours.  Seripha found the software that CCP uses and re-ran the vote in the same amount of time.

Summary

To minimise accusations of favouritism and whim, I recommend that CSM ask CCP for a formal method of replacing candidates, and to formalise when a representative should be replaced.

My personal preference is a recount method.

I think it is fortunate that Asayami managed to be elected on both the whim based 'last candidate excluded' as well as a more rigorous recount method.


Links

drool warren based on original vote
Original vote modified to work with drool

drool warren with matias excluded
Original vote modified to work with drool and then Matias excluded

Original vote as provded by ccp