Haven’t logged in my main for far, far too long. Time to shake things up a bit.
So, I’m going on sabbatical.
Loss killmails are go.
Archive for August, 2012
27
Aug
12
Pic of the day: Cyno up
Multiple-monitor screenshots. So, so good.
25
Aug
12
CSM-Player Communication
(see part 1)
Edit: New Kronos-era fits are available here.
The new medium ice harvester accelerator rig extends some of the Mackinaw’s old ice bonus to all barges, which is a big deal for new or thrifty players who want to mine ice in a tech 1 mining barge.
Note: Pre-Odyssey stats
These fits were calculated pre-Odyssey, so if you fly these in more modern times, you’ll get twice the ice yield as described here. The relative yields between each fit haven’t changed though.
Procurer
Mining ice safely is the kind of thing that the Procurer excels at. Its ore hold can store twelve blocks of ice, which is less of a problem when mining ice because the yield is much lower.
Tanky (28.8 blocks/hour)
The tanky fit is as tough as a cheap battleship, and still mines a respectable 1 block every 125 seconds (filling the cargohold in 25 minutes)
Yield (39.5 blocks/hour)
Fit for Ice yield, the Procurer can pull down a block of ice in 91.1 seconds (18min 13 seconds for full cargo) while still being as tough as a battlecruiser. If you want a tank somewhere between tanky and full yield, a Damage Control II will add about +16k effective hp.
Retriever
The Retriever is the ultimate afk ice mining boat, with a 27.5k ore bay (of which, realistically, only 26k is available when mining ice optimally)
Tanky (39.5 blocks/hour)
The Reriever will never have a decent tank, but sometimes you don’t need an awesome tank; just a better tank then the guy floating next to you. Yield is 2 blocks every 182 seconds, or a full cargohold in just under 40 minutes.
Yield (43.3 blocks/hour)
Fit for yield, the dual Ice Harvesters have a 166s cycle time, pulling down 26 blocks in just under 36 minutes. The tank is necessarily lacking, due to the processor overclocking rig. The lone mid slot is also constrained by the low CPU – an Electronics EE-603 implant still isn’t enough to fit an invulnerability field, which again doesn’t improve the tank beyond about 10.9k EHP.
Covetor
If you’re mining ice in a Covetor without Orca support, you’re doing it wrong. The ore bay can only hold three cycles, so any gain in yield is more han offset by the hassle of offloading the ice once it’s harvested.
Tanky (42.3 blocks/hour)
Three 255-second harvesters will fill the ore bay in 8.5 minutes – about the same rate as a Retriever fit for yield, but more fiddly.
Yield (46.5 blocks/hour)
Fit for yield, the Covetor is a much different beast. A trio of 232-second harvesters will fill the cargohold in seven and a half minutes. The tank is woeful, but, then again, you don’t even bring out the Covetor if you’re worried about tanking.
Parasoja from Eve-Fail has compiled a five-part guide to research and development of capital ship and component blueprints.
Doing research on capital blueprints is a highly passive income method. Although the per month profit on a single blueprint is not huge, running around 6-12% with good blueprint and research activity choices, the barriers to entry are low and the player only needs to interact with the blueprint about once per month. This makes it perfect for someone with a little isk sitting around who wants to turn it into more isk without having to spend time or effort.
There is more than one way to make money researching capital blueprints:
- Hull blueprints can be researched and sold.
- Researched hull blueprints can be copied, and the copies sold.
- Component blueprints can be researched and sold.
- Researched component blueprints can copied, and the copies sold.
This guide-ish thing will cover each of these four items.
If you’ve ever considered doing that sort of thing, take a look.
Reposted from reddit:
Raath delivers.
From his blog:
As it turns out nearly everything in eve online can be Ctrl+A Ctrl+C ed. Directional scans, mineral scan results even inventory can be copied to clipboard. So I had to take advantage of this feature and hopefully make a few lives easier.
[R]ecently someone asked me if they could copy the contents of the mineral scanner somehow. The logic was that if they warped an orca right into belt, do a scan then copy paste the results into some widget and get an overall value of the belt.
[…] I’ve added the feature to the public end as well so people not registered can use the [2] Price check feature by checking the “show refined worth” checkbox.
So now everyone has an easy to use lookup widget to get the current refined value of their current stock or that gravi belt they just discovered without all the hassle of having to enter values in one at a time. I bet even Chribba would find this feature handy for his veld fleet 😉
I checked it out last night: turns out belts in high sec are worth roughly 80M isk, unless they’ve been left fallow for a few days.
edit: see updated Kronos-era fits here.
So, the new mining barges went live, and I’ve had a few couple of days to play around with them.
My initial thoughts were:
- All the barges are tough enough to survive long enough for your drones to kill the rats anywhere in highsec, although I would hesitate to bring a Covetor into low-sec without help.
- The wide disparity of yield is gone, which is welcome.
- The CPU issues plagueing t1 mining barges are largely alleviated, to the point where processor overclocking rigs aren’t necessary.
- The specialised roles (tank, capacity and yield) are working quite well as differentiators.
I even put together a few fits to show the relative strengths and weaknesses of the hulls.
Procurer
Best for: surviving ganks
Tanky
The Procurer can fit a truly epic tank, and will definitely be the go-to ship during hulkageddon. Its ore bay of 12000m3 will be filled in 12 minutes in a tank fit, which is still a respectable 16.4m3 per second.
Shooty
A full yield Procurer sacrifices a third of its tank for a 19.5m3 yield, which will fill the ore bay in 10min 15s. This is actually pretty decent. The EM hardener can be replaced by a survey scanner while still keeping 50k+ effective hp.
Retriever
Best for: going afk
As can be seen, the Retriever can’t fit anywhere the same tank as the Procurer, and frankly, it’s pointless to even try. You can eke out an 18k tank by taking off the mining laser upgrades for a damage control and reinforced bulkheads, and using an invulnerability field, but then you have the same yield as a tanky Procurer, except still with a terrible tank.
The ore hold of 27.5k m3 will be filled in 21 mins 35s with max yield, or 28 minutes when tanked.
Covetor
Best for: mining as quickly as possible before you get blown up
So, the Covetor has a woeful tank, but doesn’t have the power grid or slots to do anything about it. Do not attempt to tank this ship.
Having said that, the yield of 23.4 is 10% better than a Retriever, and since you have a terrible tank and tiny cargohold, you might as well use mining drones and go completely nuts with drone rigs.
The 7000m ore bay fills in 5 minutes, so if you’re not jetcan mining, your yield advantage over the other barges will evaporate when you warp back to drop off your ore.
Conclusions
These changes are pretty good. They allow the miner to exert some control over how they interact with gankers (and asteroids I guess) by choosing the right hull for different occasions.
Conversely, they’re still not unkillable by a handful of Catalysts in 0.5 sec space so ganking is still a valid tactic. If you want to use cheap Catalysts, you will need friends, or you can ship up if you have fewer people. All things considered, this is a solid balance change.
CCP Sreegs made a vague and ominous post warning that people were abusing deadspace complexes and that it was now a bannable offense.
Predictably, players overheated their drama engines and a threadnaught developed.
Turns out it was all because of one guy on Failheap:
It’s me
I broke EvE
Here’s the deal:
There’s a COSMOS complex in the Aphi system called “The Labyrinth”. It is a maze of 9 rooms. In each room, there are four gates, and a special battleship and cruiser that spawn over and over relatively rapidly.You can sit there and manually farm them, but this ISK is pretty bad. Works out to about 5 mil ISK/hour for each room. At first glance, the rooms do not seem AFK farm-able via sentry drones
[snip]
However, if these problems could be solved, I realized that farming the rooms 23/7 with a fleet of AFK dominixes could yield about 24 billion ISK per month, without breaking the EULA. (24 billion AFTER paying to PLEX the necessary accounts).
~5 mil ISK/hour * 9 rooms * 23 hours * 28 days = ~29 bil/month
I decided this was something I wanted to try. I quickly solved the problems I mentioned earlier via trial-and-error.
With these problems solved, I started farming a few rooms with a few accounts. The ISK was great. However, after a few weeks, I got really sick of flying the ships into place every morning (I always get up around the end of downtime), even though I was making bank.
[…] I decided that rather than farm the rooms myself, I would recruit other people to farm and I would be the overlord of the operation. With a combination of suicide ganking and denial tactics, I would push out the competition. I would use these same tactics to keep my farmers from rebelling against me. […] Each room generated about 3.2 bil/month. I would take a 33% cut.
Within a month, I had either driven off or recruited all the competition into my organization. I had farmers in all 9 rooms farming 23/7. Each one paid me a 33% tax rate. For the next year, I collected about 9.6 bil/month and did virtually nothing other than suicide gank a few people and settle occasional disputes between my farmers. […]
TL;DR:
I got rich and forced CCP to change their bad game design
So there you have it. The story of one guy, 120 billion isk and the slumlord empire he created.
The full story is on failheap – it’s a great read, just like the guy who wrote about how he broke the Pax Amarria, the guys who made trillions on the contract sorting bug, and more recently, the faction warfare manipulations.
Serpentine's Eve 