Still AFK

Turns out dual-boxing a child and a strategic cruiser is slightly beyond my abilities. Thank heavens for industry tasks and skill queues.

Datacore Production post-Agent change

The recent change to agent quality also affected R & D agents, who produce datacores for invention and blueprint research. I thought it would be useful to look at whether the change will affect the prices of the datacores.

Defacing dictionaries: yet another hobby of mine

Required Standings

Required standings are being lowered, so the maximum standing required is +5.0 for all level 4 agents. This wider availability will tend to bring more people into the datacore business, slightly lowering prices across the board.

Synergistic Agent Selection

Research skills are a long train, so it’s much better if you can use the same skill for all of your R&D agents, to save training up yet another skill. On the other hand, it’s possible that you may need to grind standings with multiple research corporations to achieve this, so there’s a trade-off.

Before the agent change, differing agent quality necessitated multiple research corporations to get the best agents for some types of datacore. Now, any level 4 agent is as good as another, which raises the possibility of grinding for fewer corporations.

Example: Mechanical Engineering

Mech. Engineering datacores are traditionally high due to the high barrier to entry; the top six agents are split between Boundless Creation, Carthum Conglomerate, Duvolle Laboratories and Core Complexion, with Thukker Mix and Kaalakiota Corporation as weaker choices. Now, the breakdown is:

• Boundless Creation: one L5, two L4 (one in lowsec)
• Carthum Conglomerate: two L4
• Duvolle Laboratories: one L4
• Core Complexion: two L4
• Kaalakiota Corporation: two L4

meaning that Duvolle can now be skipped since nobody cares that it used to be Q16, and Boundless Creation (and fellow Matari corp Core Complexion) becomes a clear choice to fill your Mech. Eng. needs.

Similarly for Nuclear Physics, which now has four credible agents from Core Complexion, making for much easier access. I’m not going to go through all the types of datacore, but I expect similar synergies from each (or across the R&D corporations themselves, where grinding one corp may be all you need to do to get some passive income happening)

Easier grinding = more supply = lower prices = cheaper Tech 2 modules = happy Serpentine.

Update: View the Eve forum for more opinions.

Vagabond Pilots: Read This

Eve Opportunist has an awesome Vagabond guide to go along with his quite decent Rifter guide.

The reason it’s good is that it shows the reasoning behind the choices made, shows alternatives and what variables they affect, and more importantly, gives you a play by play account of how to fly one.

It’s said that the best way to learn is by doing; well, there are a few problems with that:

1. It’s not much fun suiciding HACs until they ‘learn 2 fly’ it without making stupid moves
2. Your alliance may not like the losses on their precious killboard
3. Your wallet may not like those losses
4. You may not even learn anything

This last one is a biggie – there are many things that prevent you from learning from experience:

• You may learn the wrong lesson (i.e. ‘I can’t kill battleships’ instead of ‘Stay out of heavy neut range’
• You may not be paying attention
• You may not even know enough to learn from the experience (‘how did that guy suddenly go so fast with his MWD and what the hell is this nanite paste stuff?’)

So when you see a well-written guide, pay attention 🙂

AFK

Posting will be sporadic for a while – new baby arrived!

Salvage Tengu

The Tengu series:

1. Tengu Subsystems
2. Fitting a Tengu
3. Enjoying a Tengu
4. The Salvage Tengu

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Shadai  over at Sleepless in Space posted a series of Strategic Cruiser fits for combat salvaging during wormhole operations.

Turns out that the Tengu does exceptionally well in this role, too:

3x Salvager II

3x Small Tractor Beam I

1x Heavy Missile Launcher II

2x Large Shield Extender II

1x Magnetic Scattering Amplifier II

1x ECM – Phase Inverter II

1x ECM – White Noise Generator II

1x 10 MN MWD II

1x Damage Control II

1x Signal Distortion Amp II

1x Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

1x Medium Anti-Explosive Screen Reinforcer I

1x Medium Salvage Tackle I

5x Hobgoblin II

5x Hornet EC-300

1x Defensive – Adaptive Shielding

1x Electronics – Emergent Locus Analyzer

1x Engineering – Augmented Capacitor Reservoir

1x Offensive – Rifling Launcher Pattern

1x Propulsion – Interdiction Nullifier

LOL-tastic damage, but can tractor in from up to 40km and jam fairly effectively (although without the long range you’d get from an Obfuscation Manifold). You could easily swap the missile launcher for a remote shield repairer for gang work, or refit for extra jam range instead of extra tractor range if you need it.

Eve Achievements

Have you ever thought to yourself, “A self-directed game like Eve Online really needs achievements!”

Me neither.

However, someone did, and by the process of API keys, you may elect to see what milestones you have passed in your Eve journey.

Jump Freighter Manual

Apparently, people come to my blog searching for a manual about how to pilot a Jump Freighter in Eve. I don’t have one so I can’t offer my own experiences, but I have compiled a quick set of links to other sites that do.

• Jump Freighting 101: A Visual Guide <- good
• How To Move A Capital Ship @ TheAltruist
• Freighter Pilot Implants
• Tell Me About Jump Freighters @ Failheap
• The three-second Cyno trick @ Jester Trek
• Jump Drives @ wiki.eveonline.com
• Freighter questions @ skilltrainingcomplete
• Hauling @ Eve University
• Minmatar Fenris Freighter: the best freighter?
• Evemaps jump planner

Blog Banter #26: A Terrifying, Savage Beauty

Welcome to the twenty-sixth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic was proposed by @KatiaSae of the much praised “To Boldly Go” blog. Katia asks: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As an astrophotographer, I’ve found it in the stars and planets of New Eden. Where have you found it? Perhaps you’ve found beauty in the ships we fly? Maybe it’s the sight of profits being added to your bottom line? Or maybe it’s the pilot portraits you see in the comm channels? Where ever you’ve found it, write about it and post an image.” Don’t be afraid go beyond the simple visual aspects of EVE as well. Is the EVE Community in itself a thing of beauty? What makes EVE the game, the world, the Community, so appealing to you?

“In spite of all the refinements of society that conspired to make art – the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases – beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a savage garden.”

I came into Eve Online as an adult who thought he knew how the world works.

Oh how wrong I was.

The more I read and learned and experienced the world of Eve; the more that its peculiar scent seeped into my pores and spread throughout my mind like actinic light and slow poison; the more I delved into this savage world; I learned the lesson of lessons: to truly understand the terrifying, savage beauty of Eve.

Its beauty is not in the impressionist backdrops of nothingness and nebulae, nor the intimidating vessels plowing through the void; it is in the hearts and intentions of every Capsuleer.

That strive to victory; that avaricious climb towards wealth; the vicious and petty squabbles amongst the smallest of corporations and the epic and eternal and futile clashes of interstellar empires.

“You’ll sing a song of victory, eternally, though there is none to be had.”

This sound and fury is the beauty of Eve, because at its heart, Eve is life.

Just like life, Eve gives you no further purpose than that you choose to pursue. Those around you may journey with you, or against you, or travel ignorant of your passage. You are no special snowflake and that makes every victory a personal one and you soon learn that these are the only victories that mean anything.

You learn that all rules, whether those in Eve or real life are inviolable to some and mere suggestion to others and must always keep in mind that you will never know the whole story through the lies.

And yet, in the midst of dishonour and cruelty, the most steadfast and benevolent associations and societies and civilizations spring up; no truer evidence that life and Eve is what you make of it.

In short, the most beautiful, and terrible, part of Eve is us.

Other participants:

• Where the Frack is My Ship: Love at first sight
• Down By Law: “The Beauty of EVE (ooc)“
• EVOGANDA: The Ballet of Battle
• A Lush in Space: Beauty in a Bottle
• One Capsuleer Against All: Eve… Beautiful…
• Corelin: Blog Banter 26
• Roc Weiler: Beauty
• Mike Azariah: Beauty, in Certain Conditions
• Learning to Fly: Everybody is Pretty

Finishing a Fleet Shipyard

I made up for missing my last escalations by finishing two Serpentis Fleet Shipyards in three days. I did the first with two other pilots; the second with just one friend. I think I might be able to solo the next one I get; such a far cry from a few months ago when I couldn’t complete level 2 missions…