Category: Economy

Odyssey–Ice Mining

Ice Mining isn’t as horrible as I thought it would be in Odyssey. I waited to see how things would work out to post about this, my initial reaction wasn’t very positive, being an old bitter vet and all, we don’t like change Smile.

The first few days, hardly an Ice Anomaly appeared in my Ice Mining system. I guess I logged on at the wrong times. And once they did appear, about 70 pilots swarmed onto the Glacial Masses and destroyed the belt in about 30mins (or less). Checking Dot.Lan however showed another Ice system near by. And lo and behold there were only a dozen or so pilots there. So I have my Mackinaw parked there now. Other people found out as well and once the anomaly appears there are about 20 or 30 peaks in the weekends mining. So not too bad. Don’t forget that the cycle times are 50% of what they were previously so you do mine more in less time.

ice mining old styleice mining on odyssey

There will be less Ice coming into the economy though, what was once an endless supply that could be mined 23/7, is now a less common appearance. I assume that eventually once the old stock runs out, the price will go up. It’s not too bad at the moment (as I type this reasonably steady at around 200k a block for a month).

Also there are now periods of time where there is no ice to mine. My ice miner already had some scanning skills, he is now sometimes flying around, scanning in a Gnosis to kill the time in between Ice Spawns Smile.

Ice Prices

Inferno 1.2 was released about 2 weeks ago and we can see the huge impact the revamped mining barges have had on Ice prices. Apparently this is a much ‘faster’ market as the price of Trit and other ore has not moved much.

As you can see, Caldari Ice is especially tanking, with some Ice Belt systems have over 250 in local. Everybody and their uncle seems to have an alt in the icebelts now ;). Our enthusiastic iceminers and / or consumers are also trying to use the isotopes to build fuel blocks. Most POS fuel related PI products are steadily climbing in price.

The machinaw is now the miner’s choice of ship. Of course the Hulks that are out in the game won’t instantly disappear, but people are keen on getting a flying 35 m2 ore bay !

It’ll take some time before the markets settle, and the other ores will start dropping as well. Unless something happens that will make the demand for trit and the lower ores go up.

Thanks to www.eve-markets.net and http://www.evemarketeer.com/ for the nice charts :).

Manipulating Factional Warfare

A very interesting Goonwaffe post popped up today on the Eve-O forums. CCP will have to give any sort of reward system a very good thought before the bring it to the live server, since people will be manipulating the system, as you can read in this post.

Giving points according to the value of the ship and cargohold of the victim is not the smartest idea. It is clever of Goonwaffe to figure out the most efficient way to manipulate the system by filling up barges and keep killing them again and again.

Anyway, read it yourself at the Eve-O forum. The thread is already 13 pages long when I type this.

Update: The offenders will get a slap on the wrist for exploiting the exploit before reporting it according to massively.

Escalation To Inferno

Escalation to inferno will be released on the 24th of april. Thought this sentence from the press release was rather striking.

A balancing overhaul of several Incursion sites shows our long lasting commitment to care about and to improve all existing gameplay: we are continuously working to make EVE an even better place!

CCP are being serious about improving the game and don’t want to miss an opportunity to get the point across ;).

The myrmidon video they released is rather nice, if not a little short.

The drone loot change is probably the one that will have the biggest impact though. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the mineral prices !

Unholy Rage

What I posted earlier about farmers leaving Eve, has now been officially confirmed in a new CCP blog post by GM Grimmi.

During scheduled downtime on June 22nd a little over 6200 paying accounts were banned in one go.

Wow, that’s a lot more than I could have imagined. That’s a great and bold move by CCP. And it certainly has improved gameplay ! More roids in the belts, more value for your LP and no longer bumping into 12 ravens when undocking in Sivala !

The war against the RMT element continues. We strive towards driving their operating costs to unsustainable levels. Our objective is to get rid of them, plain and simple. They are a heinous nuisance and a serious drawback on our systems and resources. Credit card fraud and account hacking is their game – the recent hacking troubles have been the work of the ISK sellers. They must be driven out and kept out.

Very well said :). Seems like the are determined to keep em out. Let’s hope they will succeed !

Ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more

Ever since China banned trading virtual currency for ‘real currency’ it’s been a lot less crowded in some mission hubs. The one I am the most familiar with, Sivala, has seen a drop of over 100 pilots in local. No more bumping into a dozen Navy Ravens when you undock !

It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on the economy. Navy Ravens have already gone up in price quite a bit. Raising from 300mil (or less) to 500 – 600mil at the moment. I am sure other modules will follow. So your hard earned Loyalty Points will be worth a lot more. But on the other hand there is a smaller market for t2 shields and other mission related modules. Although judging from the ganked mission runners ship’s killboard kills, their mission ships were very oddly fitted, so I am not sure we’ll be missing them much as customers.

There have also been reports of less Ice Macro miners, so the price of Ice Products might go up as well. Haven’t seen that yet, but maybe people are still selling their old stash and the price raise might be coming soon.

China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency

Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !

This month’s blog banter is a special one, as it is also a contest ! It even made the news on the Eve Online front page. You can read more about it at ck’s blog.

Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, 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 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 here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

"Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

It wasn’t very easy to come up with something. I know a lot of things in the game could use some improvement or changes, but totally removed ? Even the things I don’t bother with in game, but other people might like, I wouldn’t want to remove.

roll_dice_small Then one Saturday morning when I checked my invention jobs, and 6 out of 7 Hammerhead II jobs had failed, it came to me: RANDOMNESS in invention ! Wikipedia says (amongst other things) : there is the sense of lack of predictability. And that is exactly why I hate it.

Sometimes you’re doing great and 4 out of 5 jobs succeed, then you hit a bad streak and you get one bpc for seven tries. Especially with things like HACs it is really a downer when three jobs, even with expensive decryptors fail in a row !

Of course the cost of invention would have to be changed. Six datacores for a hammerhead invention job, maybe up to 30 for a HAC (from 8 now) and so on. I am sure someone smart at CCP could figure out the economics. But at least you would know what you’re getting and how much it is going to cost ! Especially that last part is important, you can now estimate how much an invention job costs using the online tools, but it’s not ideal.

The title of this blogpost might suggest that I would want to remove all randomness in the game. Well, some of it is needed. Like officer spawns, exploration sites etc. Ecm as well, as loosing control over your targeting really sucks, especially when you would just totally get locked out in a fight, and you know it’s going to stay that way for as long as the falcon or blackbird is on the field. But I guess that could be the subject of another blog banter ;).

So there you have it, my blog banter #9 contribution ! Other participants:

  1. Diary of a Space Jockey, Blog Banter: BE GONE! (ah just noticed someone else uses this phrase)
  2. EVE Newb, (EVE) Remove You
  3. Miner With Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  4. The Eden Explorer, Blog Banter: The Map! The Map!
  5. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, "Beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, beacons, mushroom, MUSHROOM!!!"
  6. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, Kill the Rats
  7. Mercspector @ EVE, Scotty
  8. EVE’s Weekend Warrior, EVE Blog Banter #9
  9. Miner with Fangs, Blog Banter – It’s the Scotch
  10. A Merry Life and a Short One, Eve Blog Banter #9: Why Won’t You Die?
  11. Into the unknown with gun and camera, Blog Banter – The Hokey Cokey
  12. The Flightless Geek, EVE Blog Banter #9: Remove a Game Mechanic
  13. Sweet Little Bad Girl, Blog Banter 9: Who is Nibbling at My House?
  14. One Man and His Spaceship, Blog Banter 9: What could you do without?
  15. Life in Low Sec, EVE Blog Banter #9: Stop Tarnishing My Halo
  16. Cle Demaari: Citizen, Blog Banter #9: Training for all my men!
  17. A Mule in EVE, He who giveth, also taketh away?
  18. Dense Veldspar, Blog Banter 9
  19. Morphisat’s Blog, Blog Banter #9 – Randomness Be Gone !
  20. Facepalm’s Blog, EVE Blog Banter #9: What a new pilot could do without
  21. Memoires of New Eden, You’re Fired
  22. Kyle Langdon’s Journeys in EVE, EVE Blog Banter #9 Titans? What’s a Titan?
  23. Achernar, The gates! The gates are down!
  24. Speed Fairy, EVE Blog Banter #9: Down with Downtime!
  25. I am Keith Neilson, EVE Blog Banter #9-F**K Da Police
  26. Ripe Lacunae, The UI… Where do I begin… (Eve Blog Banter #9)
  27. Clown Punchers, EvE Blogs: What game mechanic would you get rid of?
  28. Estel Arador Corp Services, You’ve got mail
  29. Epic Slant, Let Mom and Pop Play: EVE Blog Banter #9
  30. Deaf Plasma’s EVE Musings, Blog Banter #9 – Removal of Anchoring Delay of POS modules
  31. Podded Once Again, Blog Banter #9 – Do we really need to go AFK?
  32. Postcards from EVE, 2009.07.02.00.29.06
  33. More articles as they are posted

Quarterly Yearly Economic Report

It’s here again, the economic report ! Always an interesting read :).

EVE can teach world leaders how important
trade is for any society, and how valuable trust
is within them. EVE can teach all of us that
by working together there is no obstacle that
is too large for us to overcome – there are no
bridges we can´t build.

InsideMacGames
EveOnLine Devblog

This quote is interesting as well:

The top 10% of all characters in EVE (64,500 characters in total) hold more than 88% of all ISK in wallets at any given time.

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.

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.