Author: Morphisat

Looking back at 2008

Let’s look at my eve year at the start of a new one :). Can’t quite remember what was going on at the start of the year, probably just some mining and missioning. And I started invention around the time. Mainly T2 drones, later on T2 shields. The income of that wasn’t too bad. And with the mission running that landed quite a bit of ISK.

The rakeriku corp was getting a bit rusty though, and a lot of people either left or didn’t log on anymore, new leadership and some diplomatic actions got us a place in Wicked Creek to liven things up a bit. This was in April. Quite a few members logged on more and we got some new ones as well.

Life in Wicked Creek was nice at first, but it got ugly pretty quickly. The novelty also wore off, as 0.0 isn’t that exciting, if you don’t pvp a whole lot. It’s good for the wallet though, made quite a bit of isk out there. Until it was too unsafe to undock and found myself spending most of my time in empire again. I think by july or so we pulled out. Haven’t kept track of the situation there at the moment, but I doubt it has improved. Missioned quite a bit after that and started to do more invention around the summer.

Complex 1

Also my alt Qanatas joined the Factional Warfare ! For a few months this provided quite a bit of enjoyment (general Beanflicker deserves a mention here, he setup quite a few nice fleets and was a very funny FC). Flying in fleets for the first time was interesting. Roaming about in small gangs was nice as well, somewhat more stressful as you had less people to fall back on.

Unfortunately the amarr enemy was hard to find at times, and the whole complex capping mechanic is so boring you want to pull your eyes out. The people I usually flew with started to fade away, and the whole concept got a bit boring. The FW alt is now retired for the time being. CCP doesn’t seem to be interested in this side of the game anymore. Even though it was touted at first that this was just the start, there is no indication anywhere that they will be expanding or changing the factional warfare concept…

Fall of this year saw the definite demise of the Rakeriku corp. Just about everybody has left or stopped playing. I don’t play a whole lot any more, have the feeling at the moment that there isn’t much new I can do, and  I am a bit bored with what there is. I am not interested in some pvp 0.0 corp, with obligatory mining ops etc. Have plenty of ISK so no need to mission or mine at the moment.

So I am not sure what to do at the moment. Maybe tech 3 stuff will be interesting, and that should come in the march expansion. Though on CCP’s timetable it might be later. Hopefully it doesn’t need some extremely rare 0.0 components and it will be doable for regular empire dwellers as well. The wormhole exploration might be nice to do, but we’ll have to see how that game mechanic will be implemented.

Tagged !

Ok I get it, I have to post these seven facts about myself ;). Have been tagged several times now:

1man1ship

The rules:

Here are the rules (I’m just cuttin’ & pastin’ here):

  • Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
  • Share 7 facts about myself in the post – some random, some weird.
  • Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  • Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

I am never comfortable talking about myself, but here we go !

Seven Facts:

1. In the eighties I wore black clothes and listened to the cure
2. Also had the Bono hairdo late 80s, early 90s
3. In 2001 I cut off my pony tail as my hair was getting a bit too thin to pull off the look
4. I also have a wow-blog at http://www.wow-blog.net
5. Got 2 cats named felix and streep (which is dutch for stripe)
6. Studied social history for two years, then later on ended up in software engineering
7. Used to be a big tape (you know TDK SA MAXELL XLS) live music collector

I am supposed to tag 7 other people here, but I think just about everybody I know has been tagged already ;). If you want to volunteer, let me know !

Navy Raven

And here it is. I finally bought a Navy Raven. Always thought it was a little too expensive, but now that the prices have dropped below 300mil (!), I just had to get one ;).

First Test Flight Navy Raven II
First Test Flight Navy Raven II

It looks nicer than the run of the mill Raven, and adds a bit of DPS with it’s seventh missiles launcher. Also it provides more of a buffer as it has a lot more shields ! You do go through ammo pretty fast now though, good thing I can build my own missiles !

Navy Raven 1

Naming your ships

The Ancient Gaming Noob brought up an interesting subject: do you name your ship ?

From what I remember I have always named my ships, except maybe some disposable shuttles. I started out naming them (or at least the bigger ones) after star trek ships. There is some wiki out there that lists quite a few. Then I used a list of uss aircraft carrier ships (USS Kitty Hawk is kinda cool), but that got a bit lame as well.

Now I just use whatever comes up :). My raven is still named Phoenix, most of my haulers something silly like The AFK Hauler. Omber Homber, or NomNomNom for Hulk or Retriever.

Thoughts on Quantum Rise

Quantum Rise has to be one of the most lackluster ‘expansions’ ever released for an MMO. It even touts serverside enhancements and ‘gamebalancing’ (ie. a whole bunch of nerfes) as features. I think it would have been a lot better to let the PR machine rest for a moment, and just say ‘sorry but this year we’re only doing one expansion’. The promise to do two expansions a year bit them in the rearend this time. At first the news was that this would be industrial focused, but that idea was ditched soon enough. Besides the orca there is hardly anything industrial related in this one.

Some ACTUAL features :
– the Orca, for now a very expensive ship that might be of some use in a bigger corp mining op.
– ui improvements / enhancements like the movable hud, weapon grouping. A rotating circle around my mods that is extremely annoying.

The load of problems it brought are a lot bigger though. Not even mentioned the patching process itself which was bugged once again and I had to download the complete client.

The client has a memory leak, lag is worse than ever. Battleships are even slower now (was that really necessary ? I can’t remember seeing a nano-raven) making mission with gates very annoying. Missiles have been changed to have very low explosion radius etc..

All in all a disappointment to be honest.

Tech 2 Ship Invention

Lately I have been thinking of going into the T2 ship invention business. I have a bunch of points stacked up for datacores. Also have all the skills needed, up to cruisers to build them. So I am all set to go.

Only thing that is holding me back is the entry price, the esoteric ship data interface, which costs about 120mil. It is sort of an investment though. Like a POS you can assume, unless CCP changes the drop rate of the bpc, that you can sell it again for about the same price.

Regardless of that I was wondering if there is actual any ISK to be made. Here are some calculations for a Kitsune, a t2 electronic warfare frig.

Kitsune Calculations

Part Aantal Price Total
Contruction blocks 23 480 11,040
Gravimetric Sensor Cluster 75 23,200 1,740,000
Graviton Reactor Unit 30 68,000 2,040,000
Griffin 1 200,000 200,000
Magpulse Thruster 53 29,180 1,546,540
Morphite 15 10,000 150,000
Quantum Microprocessor 45 11,400 513,000
RAM Starship Tech 4 40,000 160,000
Scalar Capacitor Unit 38 17,900 680,200
Sustained Shield Emitter 30 26,500 795,000
Titanitium Diborite Armor Plate 38 7,322 278,236
TOTAL     8,114,016

The materials are from a -4 ME bpc which is typical I think for an invented BPC. The Kitsunes go for about 14mil in and around Jita. So on face value that would be 7mil prophit a unit. BUT, the success rate of frig invention is 40%, so let’s say you need about 1mil worth of datacores. For T2 cruisers like Recons and Hacs, this drops down to about 30%, and you need more datacores to invent at all (8 even instead of 2 for frigs).

And ofcourse you need BPCs to invent, running a POS costs money as well, but thats a bit hard to calculate, if you’re lucky you also can make some money by copying your BPOs, and use some for invention on the side

So what am I going to do ? Well for now, I am just going to think about it for a while. It’s also a lot of hassle, once you have a few blueprints to get all the parts together, plus it doesnt seem to be really worth it, for just a few mil profit per unit sold. I haven’t looked / calculated the costs of other T2 ships yet, but I doubt they’re much more profitable than the above example.

Let me know what you think in the comments, and if I overlooked anything :).