Author: Morphisat

Invention II

As you can see in the screenshot of my inventory, I have been fairly successful lately with invention. Got all the related skills at 4 now, and the hit / miss ratio with the drones has been a lot more hit than miss ;). I also invented a few Ballistic Control Unit II bpcs. Those and the Hamerheads seem to have a success-rate of about 30%, the hobgoblins are lot higher, I would say 70% or so ?

Eve Online Invention

Luckily I found a backwater Gallente system that only had 5 days or so que time for copying blueprints. Our alliance has some laboratory facilities, which is fine for ME research but copying is still buggy or cumbersome, so I was told. But it didn’t matter too much as I needed the time to get some more data-cores from my agents. I now have two electronic engineering and two mechanical engineering agents, which gives a nice source of income as well, for the cores I don’t use.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend doing this all, as it doesn’t seem to be worth all the trouble. The past week I produced drones from the above mentioned bpc’s and am now selling the Hammerheads for around 1.1 mil. The hobgobs go for about 200k. So I might as well hang on to those. The producing part is a bit of a hassle as well, as you need these weird parts (and you have to produce the t1 drone as well) and have to travel quite a bit to get the best deals. It’s fun to be using your own drones though, and the investment wasn’t that bad since the price of the data interfaces and encryption skills have dropped considerably. Which is of-course the reason why there is so much T2 stuff on the market at the moment. But if you got a few million isk (and then some) to spare and want to see how it all works, and you have an industrial character, feel free to give invention a shot.

I have no idea if the starship production is more profitable. Probably also in bigger numbers as the starting investment is a lot higher. The starship interfaces needed are a lot more expensive.

There is an interesting analysis on the Eve-O forums that agrees with my point of view :

I would persuade small-time inventors to stay out of the business (unless it’s for personal use in remote areas of the galaxy) for the time being, because they tend to ignore the long-term (average) costs, and usually undersell their “lucky chance” products, only to hit a bad bump when the unlucky streak starts. You’re really better off just buying off the market most of the time.

Due to the chance-based nature of invention, I would recommend that you ONLY go into invention at all if your skills are good (L4 each of the 3 relevant skills) and you have a starter capital that will cover (on average) at least two, preferably three successful invention jobs per “investment batch”.

And ofcourse the invention guide if you want to get started or just see how it works.

The Seven Month Itch

From studies it seems that Eve players start to drop out after seven months. Some people probably never make it past the trial period, but lets forget about those for a moment and examine why this might be. Around 6 / 7 months of skill training, the average player will be able to fly a Battleship competently, and/or might be mining in a Hulk. As has been shown from the Economy studies (which only confirmed what most people had already seen in game) 80% of the players dwell in Empire. This probably means they are running missions or mining / trading.

So around the 7 month mark, they have a T2 fitted Raven, a few hundred million in the bank, and have seen every Level 4 mission multiple times. They might be in a nice corp of similar players, maybe do a mining op once a week, and then the boredom sets in.

“Is this all there is ?”

The player starts to log on less and less and eventually fades from the game. The same thing happened to me after about 8 months of playing enthusiasticly and being in a nice corp with a great group of people. I took a long break but eventually came back after a few months.

So what can you do about this ?

    Try something different than what you have been doing:

  • Set a long skill and take a break, you’ll be back :).
  • if you have been using missiles, get the skills for gunnery and a gunboat
  • get some jumpclones, buy a thorax and pew pew in lowsec. This might be tough as lowsec is usually empty or there are other pirates and your corp might not approve of your evil actions
  • discuss the issue with your corp, maybe there are other people that feel the same way and make plans to do something else
  • this is probably tough, as you might have grown attached to your current corp, but you might want to look for another corp that’s different from the one you’re in now. Might require some corphopping to find one that fits you
  • go to 0.0 either with your corp or join an alliance / corp that’s in 0.0
    What could CCP do ?

  • Make missions / PVE more exciting. I know this is not the direction that CCP wants to follow. Although they do try a little by adding some new ones every now and then. It seems there is a high demand for this kind of thing, as we can see by the 80% empire dwellers.
  • Give lowsec a better reward / risk ratio. At the moment, there is a lot of risk and not that much of a reward. This would give corps that are not ready for 0.0 more reason to do something more exciting, ie. have mining ops in low sec, do lvl 5 group missions (that need to be more fun / profitable) there etc. What I would not suggest is moving lvl 4 agents to lowsec, as has been suggested numerous times on the forums. People will just speedrun lvl 3 missions, or quit all together.
  • Make 0.0 more accessible. Too many gatecamps make it very hard to travel there, if you’re not part of some big alliance. But then when you’re there with no friends and no help, it’s hard to live out there. So I am not sure how to improve this situation.

So there it is, my thoughts on the seven month itch.

*update* : In episode II of the Drone Bay podcast there is a nice section on how to look for a corp, what to look for in a corp etc.. A good corp will make you enjoy Eve a lot more, so make sure to check that out.

This post has been discussed on ep. 4 of the Drone Bay Active podcast !

Patch 1.1

Today I found a newsletter (#18) in my mailbox ! Apparently I haven’t been keeping up on the news, as I was surprised to read about patch 1.1.

The Amarr Empire has long boasted about its powerful ships and a fervent willingness to destroy all that opposes them. Finally, the Omen, Zealot and Apocalypse class ships are getting a boost to reflect that devastating potential.

That’s great news ! My combat alt (who is slowly catching up on Morphisat, she’s got 20mil skill points now) is mainly Amarr and has a hangar filled with Amarr ships. Recently she has been training up missile skills and can now fly a T2 Raven to assist my Level 4 mission running. She has already been doing that in a Guardian and a Zealot (to take care of frigs and cruisers on specific missions). Also have been using a Sacrilige for that purpose. It’s an amazing tank and now with my upped missile skills it does a fine job.

Anyway it seems CCP have finally heard the numerous cries over the past years that Amarr was gimped. I hope this patch will put things right.

Some other underused ships have gotten a boost as well.

In order to satisfy your lust for carnage, modifications have also come for the Eagle, Moa, Raptor and Ferox class vessels.

Some love for the Amarr (Eve-O Forum)

Two Links

Some interesting eve articles popped up the last few days. Easy to keep track off through Virginworlds.com !

First is a little piece on Eurogame with CCP’s Reynir Hadarson :

Asked if Eve Online could still achieve new things, he said “Absolutely, we will just keep building on top of it. MMOs do not have to age. The nature of a game like Eve is that there is no need for sequels – why shouldn’t it run for fifty years?”

Second is an article on the BBC website mainly focusing on the economic side of Eve.

Science fiction trading game Eve Online is one of the most dynamic worlds, with its own economists helping players get to grips with the intricacies.

Enjoy ;).

Economy Report

The new economy report of the 4th Quarter of 2007 was posted on Eve-Online !

It is finally time for the second Quarterly Economic Newsletter (QEN), which covers the 4th quarter of 2007. In this issue we review the jumps pilots make within a certain period of time, the price level (is there still deflation?) and we put forward a new method of evaluating total production in EVE. Of course there are also market snapshots and other interesting discussions as well.

On a side note, my copy of Eon finally arrived (seems to take a lot longer since the last 2 issues) so I’ll be reading that as well in the next few days ;).

Invention

Invention Lately I haven’t been very active in Eve, just been doing some missions for the La Dai Corporation to gain standings in order to get access to better research agents. Just like The Ancient Gaming Noob I decided to give Invention a try. Though the cost to get into it, is still pretty high, it has lowered quite a bit since the racial encryption skill books, like Caldari Encryption methods have become more common drops and thus are a lot cheaper these days.

I decided to not start too ambitious and just tried a few Tech II missile BPC’s. And out of 5 tries, I got 3 BPC’s and my hacking / related research skills were at II. After that I tried my hands on Tech 2 drones, but both tries failed, even though according to the failure message I was really close. I have no clue whether those messages are even serious though, think I saw a forum thread about that once and what different messages people got. No one seems to be sure whether they are just random or have some meaning.

After the two failures I decided to skill up the related hacking and science skills and then try my hands on a Drone T2 BPC and maybe some other parts, like Ballistic Control II. And since I can use some datacores now, I will also get the skill to use more than one research agent. Shame it’s 40 Million though :(.

In case you’re wondering how Invention in Eve works or want to know more details, there is a great guide at eve-production.org: Invention Guide and the Eve-O forum thread on the Invention Guide.