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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

WAR!

And we get War Dec'ed. Should be more serious this time. Mercenaries were hired. We'll see how it goes. My PvP guys are happy at least.

All the usual pre-war gyrations were started. They could have waited 2 days and I'd have my two Vagas ready to go. Ah well - they'll be replacements for ships I loose in action over the next two weeks.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

YeeeeeHawwww

Once again CCP Chronotis delivers:

The Loot Insurance Dev Blog of Doom™

for the tl;dr set:

  • Meta 0 drops from rats go bye bye replaced by metal scraps.
  • Meta 1-4 still there so you can still reprocess the meta 1-2 if you want.
  • Rebalance of drone poo (ratios are closer to manufacturing consumption averages).
  • drone poo also lighter, more movable.
  • Increase in trit/pye/mex amounts per refine in certain low sec/0.0 ores.
  • insurance adjusted monthly based on weighted market averages.
  • insurance coverage based on ship class.
For the ship classes:
  1. 100% for T1 tacklers
  2. much lower for longer lived ships (20-60% for T2)
  3. real low for super caps (1-10%) - loosing Super Carriers and Titans is going to HURT!
  4. 100% for T3 (but it only covers the hull)
End result:

More of the minerals on the market will be coming from actual mining (miners rejoice). Insurance being pegged to market values however will mean that there will effectively be no floor. Industrialists and miners have been screaming for these changes since forever. As far as I can see, this will have little impact on mission running (most of the isk from the drops comes from the meta 4 drops anyways and that isn't going to change).

Note that this will have no effect on suicide ganking - which is a separate issue. However this will effectively remove both the floor to mineral prices (altogether) and remove a non-mining source of minerals that was an irritant to miners since the game began.

I approve greatly of these changes.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Logistics

Once again it's time to move stuff around EVE. After laying down some mid range plans and a whole pile of meetings, I am relocating part of my fleet to a new area of operations. I've also in the last week invented 3 Vagabond BPCs and am in the process of manufacturing two of them. So I spent most of this weekend either AFK hauling or doing industrial stuff.

I will be glad when one of my science alts finally finished Starbase Defense 5. About 25 days from now. You know it's a bad skill when you say: "finally, less than a month to go". Note that, although not capable of invention or research, this particular alt is fully capable of researching ME, PE and copying any blueprint original in my collection. Very useful alt. The other two research alts are not capable of doing any research involving extra skills. Of course the number of BPOs that don't involve extra skills is substantial, so it's not a big issue.

At some point I'm going to need to shuffle some alts around. I'd like to get the 3rd research alt off my main account in order to permit him to finish up getting 10 research slots without impacting my main's leveling. I'll probably move an exploration alt into that slot from the 3rd account.

Yep I've got a 3rd account. One of the things I ran into while operating in wormhole space is that there were never enough exploration alts to go around. My intention with these alts is to turn them into exploration/cyno alts. I've got a decent plan that gives me a usable exploration scout in a month and gets the skills where I want them in 3. It's just going to be a matter of careful shuffling of alts once I get the first one done.

Oh, incidentally, those Vagabonds? Not for sale...

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Cloaky Loki

Heh, discovered something I hadn't realized about T3 ships. One is able to switch out sub-system while all the modules and rigs are still in the ships. Mind you if you've got shield rigs it's probably not a good idea to slip in an armor tanked subsystem, but the offensive systems are under no such constraint.

To test it out, I took my normal PvE fit Loki and simply slapped in the covert offensive sub-system. Out popped one of my turrets and the old sub-system, and a spare high slot was now available for a cov-ops cloak. No rig changes and no changes to the rest of the systems.

Sweet. My Loki can warp cloaked now...

Muahahahahahahha....

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The annoying half finish

Obviously I woke up grumpy this morning. Incoming rant warning.

Don't get me wrong. EVE is Hotel California and all that, you can checkout but you can never leave. There's nothing else out there like it. The CCP developers are smoking that rare stuff on the cutting edge. But one has to realize just how far EVE has come over the years. It did not start as a hyper funded AAA title. They did however have that rare thing: Vision. They also got ultimately lucky in loosing their original publisher. They have the luxury of pursuing their visions at their leisure. The level of balls that took is (Quake voice) impressive (/Quake voice). That could have gone wrong in so many ways.

But... CCP has this annoying habit of leaving features feeling half finished. They have this vision of EVE being the ultimate science fiction simulator. And as the game has grown they have been slowly but steadily pursuing this long term goal. Their skill system is geared towards this goal. They can make EVE as broad as possible without impacting the depth of existing "end game" game play. They also can go down branch roads towards their goal and determine that something didn't work. Rip up the tracks and lay a new road. Can you see Blizzard getting rid of Raid dungeons and substituting something else entirely? That's effectively what the sov changes were in the Dominion expansion.

The problem with this approach is they have still not reached their objective. And some of the side spurs are a little rickety. One of the two biggest is faction warfare. Don't get me wrong it's not too bad, and it works but one can't help feeling like a feature or three are missing that would make it truly rock. The glaring one is some form of income for the militia pilots that does not involve them quitting FW in order to build up a war chest just to blow it again. Another is for example wormhole space. Heck we know there is a 5th subsystem out there. They designed it, we still don't have it in game. There are plenty of others. T2 BPOs. The corp and alliance interfaces for CEOs (DON'T get me started on those nightmares).

The problem we have here is that we've got CCP who are pursuing their vision on one hand and the player base who are playing their game on the other hand. One of the good things to come out of the CSM is that at least we can keep reminding them that it would be nice if they occasionally finished off a project instead of constantly chasing after the new shiney. Unfortunately I think it is a case of the vision was greater than even the increased development resources they have available. Not to mention the massive projects they have underway - Tying in DUST 514, Incarna, (getting Tranquility running on infiniband at which point we'll need to drop the word effectively from the following statement: Tranquility is effectively a supercomputer).

If you follows the fan presentations and industry news and dev blogs and what not, you can see where they are going. The vision is impressive. But I reserve the right to occasionaly gripe about the occasional rough spot along the way. Je suis un grognard.

Look it up.

Monday, March 22, 2010

TGIM

You know it's been a rough weekend when you go "Thank God It's Monday". Not in EVE though. I barely got in EVE on Sunday.

I did get some alliance level org stuff done.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Energy Check

Yeeouch! I just got the Scimitar out of the oven and went searching for canonical fits. Then proceeded to drop said fits into EVE HQ's fitting tool (could have used EFT but I already had EVE HQ open). Holly mother of power drain! I can make it fit, but... *sigh*

Lesson number 396 in getting your matari pilot up to snuff: Logistics ships will show you that you have neglected your engineering skills. When other pilots are reporting a specific fit being cap stable and you only see 22s until cap-out, there is a problem. For the heck of it, I turned on all V. Yep, stable at 50%+... Well crap.

/me puts his shiny new Scimitar back in the locker and starts putting together a "get logistics up to snuff" plan.

Course now I'm left with the conundrum:

BS weapons?
Logistics?
BS weapons?
Logistics?
BS weapons?
Logistics?
...
ARRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!

I'm about a month before I need to make a decision but man this will be a tough decision...

It's caused mainly by the fact that matari ships as a whole are relatively cap friendly. None of our ships take a lot of cap to run (with occasional exceptions *cough* logistics). This is due to our weapons being cap-less. All of them. Drones, Missiles and Projectiles don't take capacitor charge. Because of this, matari pilots as a whole tend to emphasize speed and gun skills first. Sure cap is important but for a typical matari pilot, speed and guns are MORE important. So they get done first. And it's not like it takes a lot of engineering skills to get a MWD frigate cap stable. Nav skills yes, eng skills no.

So what do you think? Is the summer plan BS weapons or Logistics? I'll need to do both, it's just a question of which one first...

Side note: My previous post seems to have been like throwing meat at starving wolves, quite a bit of comments.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Yeesh

Ok, Ok, I get that the Vagabond canonical fit does not involve missile launchers....

The statement was a generic one for all Minmatar cruiser sized ships. One thing you have to realize is that most Matari pilots (myself included) tend to develop our missile skills last. This leads to a self fulfilling prophesy where in we don't tend to fit launchers on any of our ships, even those that seem to be designed for split weapons fire. I'd like to point out that when you have one weapons skill that far outstrips the other, this will be the case no matter what. Of course missiles are not as good as guns - your missile skills suck.

As much as there are good arguments for concentration on a single weapon type when fitting out a ship for gank, and 90% of the time this is indeed the way to go. However, there are times where one must know when to break that rule. The thing is that unless you work on all your weapons skill, you'll never have the option to do so. Hence me working on my combat skills to get all 4 Matari weapons systems to the same level (yes target painters are a horribly underused and underestimated weapons system).

Mind you to a certain extent this represents the pattern of skill development in EVE in general. One starts off will few skills, one concentrates on getting some key ones up to snuff, and then one branches out, one branch at a time, each time adding more options to our pallet of ships to fly and things we're able to accomplish. The real kicker is that one must be careful of chasing the shiney. For example, if you've been reading this blog, you know my summer plan is diving into gettting: Large AC, Large Artillery, Torpedoes, Cruise Missiles, Heavy drones and sentries all up to T2 levels (get all the specialization skills involved to 4). After that there's plenty of other supporting skills I've worked on that I still need to get higher - and tanking skills and what not. The point here is that I've gotten all the frigate weapons skills to those equivalent levels already. I'm finishing off the cruiser weapons right now and I'm restraining myself from diving into BS weaponry until the cruiser stuff is completed to the level I'm aiming for.

Notice I didn't say finished - good lord there's a lot of skills to get to level 5 if I wanted to do that. But either way the point here is that I am making sure I can fly cruisers and battlecruisers properly BEFORE I head off and get the BS up to snuff. I've said it before and I'll say it again: It's better to fly a frigate very well than to get into a battleship before you have the skills to fly it correctly. Too many players go way too quickly into the larger ships. Usually to the detriment of their PvP abilities. Ask Cosmik, Teister or Quebnaric, At one point Coz's skills were WAY lower than most other pilots in BOZO, but from my understanding there were few pilots who were as good at tackle and frigate work. One of the major reasons? He stayed working on his frigate and general skills way longer than most pilots do. And once he did get into cruisers he had plenty of backing skills to slap the cruiser specific skills on and make those ships work.

One of the big problems with EVE is that for the most part PVE is way too easy at the various levels. They give you no clue that you're horribly under skilled in reality since they are so easy. About the only NPCs that provide a "skill check" are the sleepers. The reality is that the core game-play in EVE is PvP. Everything else is in support of this. There is also the problem that the AI on most PvE encounters is criminally stupid.

Suggestion that CCP will never go for:

How to improve the AI and make it more realistic and challenging:

1) design each encounter with a "breaking point" where the NPCs will try to get the fuck out of dodge. THIS NEEDS TO INCLUDE MISSION OBJECTIVE SHIPS!!!

2) give them the "squadron" AI of the sleepers. Make sure the AI does concentration of fire and knows to target the drones. This would solve a lot of those AFK Dominix macro issues.

3) Balancing this: Up the bounties a bit (scenario dependent) since depending on the design of the encounter some to a percentage of ships will be getting away.

The main reason for this is that one of the features of PvP is that when you do have the upper hand you need to make sure your targets don't escape. Current PvE does not reflect this reality. It bloody well should. This "breaking point" can be applied at the scenario level or at the NPC squadron level (when there are obviously different squadrons on the field). For advanced scenarios have 2 levels: "break off" and "flee". When a squadron hit "break off" level, any ship that comes under fire will warp off, but then warp back to another squadron member (if they can). When at "flee", they will leave the scenario never to come back. ex: squadron of 4 ships - after the first is killed, they go into "break off" mode, when there is only one ship left - it will flee the scenario not to come back.

Why they will never go for this: CCP see the PvE game play as simply a way to fund the PvP, not as a training ground for PvP. They don't want it to take too long or be too challenging. As such they are unlikely to want to make things more difficult (even if doing so would make things more difficult for the macro'ers).

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Scimitar

I managed to get all the components built for the new Scimitar and popped it in the oven. It should be ready in time for any weekend operations (although I may need to work on some of my remote repair skills).

The next 24h should see the completion of Heavy Missiles V and that means tomorrow I'll be able to slip in Heavy Missile Specialization into the stream. This means I will soon be able to fly a Munnin or a Vagabond without being embarrassed by the T1 launchers. Oh bliss, Oh Joy.

The next cruiser level weapon system will be heavy assault missiles. Once that's up to decent T2 levels, I'll do a bit of things like remote shield transfer skills and what not then, probably sometime in April, I will be able to start BS weaponry to T2.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Mineral Thoughts

PvP Only Pilot Warning: *bail* *bail* *bail* ... Incoming industrial post...

Ok, now that I've scarred all the PvPers, on with the actual content of this post:

As some of you are aware, there has been some "fiddling" with insurance rates on Sisi lately. Now as an industrialist with a PILE of BPOs this does not bother me. The people who should be afraid are the miners and to a lesser degree the mission runners. Why is this you ask? Mainly because of the mineral floor. But, Letrange, what is a mineral floor you ask?

The mineral "soft" floor is determined by the Plantinum Insurance rate for T1 ships. Basically what happens is that there's an over supply of a specific mineral on the market relative to other minerals. This provides some downward pressure on the price of said mineral (you can buy it for less and it sells for less). With the changes to 0.0 and wormhole space of the recent expansions, the high end minerals - Zydrine and Megacyte are flooding the market. As the sellers compete against each other in order to sell faster, the price comes down. This is when manufacturers get in on the action.

Anyone who manufactures T1 ships should, in their spreadsheets, track the manufacturing costs of their builds. What one then does is add some extra columns to the spreadsheet showing Platinum insurance payout, Platinum insurance cost and net recoverable (i.e. one payment and kaboom the ship). Now in the real world if one makes use of insurance - the rates go up. Not so in EVE (they have the universes worst insurance adjusters). One can then track cost of ships manufactured vs net recoverable. One can even show this as a net gain. This will show the largest gain per manufacturing slot. Or one could look at the percentage of invested isk (net gain minus manufacturing cost) divided by (manufacturing cost plust platinum insurance cost) and use this to determine the most bang for invested isk (useful if you can't make use of your maximum manufacturing rate due to insufficient resources).

Once these values go above a certain percentage of "net profit per invested isk" it's worth while building and self destructing (or otherwise disposing of) ships. What does this do? Well the manufacturer then puts a lot of buy orders on the market - which sucks up minerals in proportion to the usages in the BPOs. Which if extended over time will lower supply even more relative to the minerals in over supply. Which causes some upward pressure on those mineral prices as the market runs out. This in turn, if gone on long enough, pushes the average cost of a ship close to and eventually above the "mineral floor". The only thing that pulls the "mineral basket" off the floor are extended high intensity wars. We have not seen this with the new sovereignty system. Mass capital ship death tends to provide such a demand for minerals that the end result is more demand than supply and price increases.

That's the basic idea behind the mineral floor in EVE. There are some other considerations: The high ends: Megacyte and Zydrine are much more mobile than the lows: Tritanium and Pyerite and to a certain extent Mexallon. This means there is arbitrage to be made on the lows that are not available on the highs. I've been following the changes of the mineral basket for the last couple of years and see no reason to doubt this reasoning.

Eventually if the current trend will continue - I expect all primary ores to have a roughly equivalent value per m³ with the ones containing large quantities of low ends slightly more valuable except in high sec. The big losers of course will be the low sec ores since they are more of a mix of ores than Veldspar/Scordite or the ABCs.

Then there are the non mining sources of minerals: Running missions and drones. The drone stuff will be affected just like mining. Missions however will be less affected as the drops represent a much smaller percentage of their wealth generation. The Isk bounties on NPC rats (or the value of tags for the navies) does not change.

So those represent the sources of minerals in EVE for the most part (there are a few others but they are irrelevant to this discussion.

Now on Sisi, people have noticed a difference in the insurance costs and payouts. The big one here is that it seems currently pegged close to the market average of the value of the minerals when the mirror was taking. This leads us to suspect that they will peg insurance costs and payouts to some eve-wide average. Which is fine except for the miners that suddenly see their floor disapear out from under them. "Mineralpocalyps" to quote Atika T.

This means that over supply minerals can fall as much as they want. This is not going to be however as big an issue as people make out. Sure the miners will be borked, and the mission runners will have a slight reduction in their income, but for the rest of us it simply means cheaper T1 ships (including dreads and what not).

T2 ships also seem to have some insurance adjustments. We'll need to see if this helps or hinders the issues (won't change the prices of T2 but it could affect the ability of pilots to buy replacements which would be a good thing - increasing demand).

Now what do I think about this? Humm, the intentional blindness of the QEN on the issue of the mineral floor may simply be a reflection on the fact that Dr. E may not have wanted to tip his hand. Personally I don't have too much of a problem with the mineral floor dropping out of the market. Being a jack of all trades I can focus on the most profitable activity I wish to engage in at any moment in time. Characters who have over-specialized may find their desired game style impacted. Tough luck, there are no unions in EVE to pop up the value of minerals.

On the other hand if you're a miner, what do you do. I suggest most miners start cross training into mission running if they want to keep an income going and simply wait for the price point where it's worthwhile for them to mine again once the basket gets low enough. One of the things people loose track of in EVE is that unless you buy and sell characters, no character in EVE looses their old skills as they acquire new ones (unless they don't update their medical clone). This means that since I can fly hulks I'll always be able to fly hulks. That will never go away. I can simply park my Hulk if it's not profitable for me to mine.

If the only change is the insurance rates, and if they are pegged to the 20 day running average for the entirety of the EVE market, so that it is never profitable to engage in insurance fraud, then I can see a time where mining and level 3 mission running will provide about the same level of income. At this point, all except extremely dedicated miners will probably switch to mission running as it really does not take long to get into level 3 missions. There will probably be a few whiners who will quit the game (can I have your hulks?) because they will consider CCP to have "ruined" their game. The macro-ers will probably finish switching over to macro mission running instead of macro mining.

Honestly I hope there are other changes packaged with this one such as some changes to T1 mission loot. If not the impact on miners risks being "serious".

One way or the other expect some instability in the mineral market come Tyrannis.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Good EVE meet

As those who follow this blog of long standing know, the EVE meet scene in Montreal is a fairly casual affair. The pattern we've established is that there is a meet every 2 weeks at a downtown pub on a Saturday at 7:00pm local time (23:00 or 00:00 eve time depending on daylight savings time). The usual place for the winter is a place called Brutopia (micro brewery - they make their own beer). During the summer it depends on whether it's raining or not. If not we head to a different pub with an outdoor terrace. If it's raining - back to Brutopia.

The atmosphere is fairly casual, it's not one of those "reserve the place ahead of time" kind of things. It's more of a get there, greet the bartender: "Rachelle my dear, a blonde please", sit down on a couch and chew on some EVE stories with friends. (Montreal pronunciation guide: if a word is french you pronounce it in french even when speaking in english - it confuses the non-bilinguals).

This weekend we managed to get 13 pilots in the place. One was a swede visiting from Texas (Iwat) and there were a few we don't see very often. Including one who was at his first EVE meet. Miracles of miracles, that Crazykinuk managed to show up for once (ok actually about the 3rd time - but it's a while between visits for him - the carebear brigade he's building up probably has something to do with it).

On the EVE side of things, I had way too much interference from "life" this weekend to be able to get on much (the meet was a nice break). The rest of it kind of sucked. Ah well there will be weekends like that. Light is at the end of the tunnel though. Once things re-stabilize I think I have formulated my plans for my next "arc" through EVE for myself, my Corp and my Alliance. Got to talk to the new CEO of one of my corporations as the current CEO is stepping down. Ah eve meets - discussing plans over pints of beer.

One interesting thing I've noticed as a Jack of all trades in EVE. I tend to go thru almost like "story arcs" in my adventures. I'm currently in one of those "character development" sequences between arc. Yep not as interesting as when the arcs hit I know. But necessary to the story line.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

One Scimitar???

Arg! 1 out of 10 tries worked so I only get 1 Scimitar BPC...

*grumble* *grumble* *grumble*

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Diplo stuffs

Well I didn't get a lot done mission running wise. Even when one is burned out, when one pokes one nose into EVE the dance continues. I spent over half my evening dealing with "politics".

Ah well at least I have some saboteurs to kill and hopefully some Scimitar BPCs to work with (I need to make myself one).

My hangar in high sec is getting a nice spread of options, although I will probably be getting rid of my mission running Cyclone sometime soon. It was a good fit that lasted me quite a while.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Loki vs L4

Well, I remember trying level 4's when I had just gotten into my battleship. Not particularly successful at it I may add. So I stuck to level 3's for the longest of times.

Skill training time marches on. Got my subsystem skills to 5, prety good cruiser sized gunnery skills. About the only real lack atm is a T2 shield boost amplifier on my PvE Loki fit. It's a fairly standard T2 module (no faction or officer) fit T3 Loki. 6 turrets, AB on the AB subsystem, medium sheild booster and setup to perma run EVERYTHING. (basically - undock - turn on all defenses - warp to site turn on AB and concentrate on piloting.

Having lost two Lokies to sleepers I was a little gun-shy on using it in level 4's. But I figure it's got to be better than the overkill that are level 3's. So I get Serpentis Extravaganza... Holy mother of hot knife through butter...

The entire time my shields never went below 95%... and that only when I was webbed... Down to 20m/s from the usual 6-700 (lots o maneuvering so I'm rarely at max)... I had seriously not realized that L4's were soooo.... disappointingly easy once you get in the right ship. Incidentally that Nuclear/Depleted Uranium is a god send when up against frigates who've managed to get close. And the only thing I'm mildly concerned about is webers...

In the end I'll probably run them more efficiently (and consume considerably less ammo) once I get my BS weapon skills up to T2 level... but until then this should allow me to get to "no tax refines" with the current NPC corp quickly.

I'm liking this WAY better than a Hurricane (never really could get a PVE fit I liked with the Hurricane) Which a lot of people try to imply the Loki is equivalent to. The only think I can figure out is that these people are simply not fitting the Loki right for what they are trying to do. Either that or they are jealous.

P.S. I know there are ways of fitting a much better tank on a Loki than I have. Every single one of them sacrifices maneuverability or firepower or both (or makes the loki cost as much as a dread). I'll stick with this fit for PvE thanks. When I get around to having more Lokis and get one fitted for PvP and/or squadron PvE work it'll get a VERY different fit.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Death to station games!

No, no incident promoted the title of this post. I was reading over the minutes of the latest CSM meeting and spotted something: A proposal from CCP wherein if a ship is warp scrambled, it can't dock (page 14 near the bottom)...

Must now go get drool bucket...

One of the most odious forms of warfare in EVE is the one where someone fights within docking range of a station and the minute things start to look bad, they dis-engage weapons and once the timer is up - dock.

This should make things "interesting" if it ever goes live.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Kaboom

I still think there's something broken about insuring hulls and 5 minutes later self destructing them for the insurance payout. But hey, until they remove the isk faucet, who am I to complain.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Ok, my interest just perked up...

First Kudos to Kirith Kodachi for spotting this.

The most interesting bit I spotted was that wormhole planets will be part of the planetary thing with Tyrannis. I don't mind being proven wrong about this mind you. And the rest of it though supports what I suspected that this probably won't be some new source of moon goo as some people have been hoping. It looks we're going to see something that does not interface with the existing industrial systems. I can see parts of the thing being internal to itself (i.e. some things produced improve other things in the planetary production systems). But at some point it needs to produce something that's of value to the rest of the EVE framework.

Oooooo, ability to manufacture NPC goods!!!

POS owners in wormholes just got a raging hardon.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Some manufacturing and light exploration

Well all the components of the Rapier build I'm making for an alliance pilot finally finished cooking and I was able to pop in the Rapier tonight. 2days 5hours to go. I also decided to take a look at some insurance fraud. Humm Typhoon - I own BPO, 75mil payout, 22.5mil insurance cost - 47.5mil and change manufacturing costs... Leme see market at 57mil or there abouts but sales sloooooow as molasses.

I immediately put two in the oven. I then proceed to put out buy orders for the minerals necessary to re-fill my mineral bunker to the "nominal" levels.

So the choice facing us tomorrow night: Insurance fraud in 5 min and if the mineral buy orders have filled we pop another two in the oven, or put em up on sale for like a week.

I think what I'll do will depend on whether the buy orders fill or not. If they fill there's no reason not to blow em up and have another two ready for the next evening. If they aren't filled I'll run the numbers based on having to put them up on sale and the cost for canceling the broker fee and see if it's worth putting them up temporarly just to take em down and blow them up if the buy orders fill.

You may be asking why I'd be blowing up ships at 10% profit instead of selling them at 20% profit. The answer is very simple: I can build them at a rate of something like 6 a day on a single manufacturing slot. Which makes my maximum blow up rate something like 60 battleships a day (if I happend to own 10 BS BPOs - I don't - and the isk to fund that level of destruction - not currently). Each blow up gets me 10% profit at current mineral prices. So let's look at Typhoons only and lets assume my manufacturing rate is only held up by the rate of my mineral buy orders being filled.

Basicaly if it takes 3 days (seems to be the average between individual Typhoon sales in the area) to fill my buy orders then I make the exact same amount of isk in the same amount of time selling 1 Typhoon as blowing 2 up. If I fill the buy orders faster (which is the real restriction on my manufacturing speed) then it's more profitable to blow up the battleships rather than selling them.

Basically it's a race - between my buy orders and the region's sales rate (which seems to be nicely consistent btw). And I'll be doing my part in propping up the local mineral market. Weeee....

Since I didn't have a lot of time, I figured I'd go exploring and grab a local combat plex instead of ratting or something else that doesn't take long. Found a radar site. Nailed it. Cleaned it up (Wolf vs high sec radar site = dead site post haste). Noticed the value of the 2 decryptors was worth combined 14mil isk. Not bad for a quick 15min work.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Well that takes care of frigates for now

I'm currently on a weapon skill up plan. Minmatar pilots have 3 weapons we need to make sure we've mastered properly before we can consider ourselves truly competent with our ships. The first is projectiles, the second is missiles, and the third is drones. Without getting into capital ships (yet) there are 3 levels we need to worry about: Frigate (covers destroyers as well), Cruiser (BC and Industrials) and Battleship sized weapons.

By the time I get back this evening from work, Letrange will have finished getting all frigate Projectile, Missile and combat drone specializations to 4 and will be barelling into the cruiser set that I don't already have. The current plan is to have all minmatar relevant specializations finished by the end of summer.

Note that with the drone specializations covering both light and medium drones, and the fact that I've got both medium artillery and medium autocanon specializations, I'm already fine for ships like the Rapier - which tends to be a gunboat not a missile boat anyways. Some Vagabond fits however I shouldn't fly yet.

But for all those BS weapon specializations it's going to take me to the end of summer to finish getting them to 4.

In other news, found a rather hard to find grav site in high sec yesterday, got 2 jet can's worth of ore out of it. Helped out an alliance newbie with Rifter fits and probing. Found out my tendency to use the d-scan has not disappeared at all but that I really really wish CCP would make probes one of the options for the overview filters...

Also I'm apparently still in the Blog Pack.