Category: General

The usual category I will post under

Navy Scorpion vs Navy Raven

No it’s not a pvp encounter ! Just a little post in which we compare the two for the purpose of mission running.

Slot layout and bonuses :

Seven launcher slots vs. Six launchers (both have an empty one to fit a tractor beam or salvager or something else)

Six mid slots vs. eight mid slots.

Five low slots vs. four.

Scorpion Bonus:

Caldari Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to Cruise and Siege Launcher Rate Of Fire and 5% shield resistance per level

Raven Bonus:

Caldari Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to Siege and Cruise Missile Launcher Rate Of Fire and 10% bonus to Torpedo and Cruise Missile Velocity per level of skill.

The scorpion has a bit more cpu and powergrid making it very easy to fit however you like it. The Scorpion seems to be a bit more expensive at the moment. But it’s not that much of a difference (about 550mil vs. 600mil or so ?).

Navy Scorpion

Basically if you want a beefier tank, which is very easy to fit, and want to have an afterburner to burn between those mission gates a bit faster, the scorpion is a very fine choice as a mission runner.  Also with eight midslots there is plenty of room for either extra tank or a target painter.

If you’re already tanking missions with ease in a vanilla raven, and just want some extra firepower, the Navy Raven is a good choice.

What you can also do if you have an alt that helps you out mission running, is get the scorpion and give the navy raven to your alt :).

Of course the rattlesnake or nightmare are in a class of their own, but it depends for what faction agents you run mission for in case of the nightmare, but pirate faction ships are in another price range I would say ! And I don’t have any experience flying them to compare them against the above mentioned ships.

A Forgotten Milestone

Oops, somewhere in the past month or so, I hit the 50 million skill point mark. Yes yes I know, not that great for a character from late 2005 (oh I got my eve birthday coming up), but I had a few breaks here and there and mostly I have been using +3 implants, because I am cheap.

Here you can see how my points are distributed. A lot also in gunnery, Morph can now use all T2 guns, except for the Amarr ones (got Bela for that).

skill_chart_morph

What else is there to train ? I am not interested in capitals, as I got no use for them. Maybe a few more drone skills, and perhaps some others to V instead of IV.

Market Square Heroes

So you trained up your industrial skill, got that production efficiency to 4 or even 5 and bought a few nice BPOs or BPC for your hard earned isk. Or maybe you’re going into the invention field and picked up some datacores from your agents. Now you’ll have to sell your goods otherwise all your efforts would have been futile. And that’s when the time comes that you have to study the market.

Actually the ‘buying the bpos’ might have been a bit too early. You might want to study the market for a niche you can fill before that time.

So far in EVE I have distinguished a few different type of markets. There are the trade hubs, mission hubs and ‘off markets’. Those aren’t really hubs of any kind, but more for people that happen to be in system, or live near that system.

The hubs tend to have slimmer margins but higher volume. Even the difference between two close by hubs can be significant though. For example Rens and Hek and only a few jumps from each other. Yet Hek tends to have higher prices. Also there are more 0.01 market warriors out in Rens. When you put up ammo there, don’t be surprised to find some one else undercutting you by 0.01 within an hour. Jita is the ultimate 0.01 undercutters paradise, unless you want to do daytrading, I wouldn’t go there, unless you want to sell your goods very fast and dump them there on the market.

market1

Pvp gear tends to shift quickly near low sec areas / hubs. I assume these are pirates or Factional Warfare soldiers picking up the goods, like 220mm cannons, T2 ammo, warp disruptors II, warriors II etc. Of course if you’re really gutsy, you can bring your goods to low sec and sell there for higher profits. Fit your industrial with warp stabbers, or buy a blockade runner, and don’t forget to scout for gatecamps ahead ;).

What this all comes down to, is where do you want to sell your goods ? If you’re making a high volume of products, you might want to settle for lower margins and try to sell your stuff at hubs. If your gear is mission oriented, like T2 shield hardeners, ravens, cruise missile launcher II, or ammo, you can settle for lesser volume, but higher margins at a mission hub.

Or you can find an area that doesn’t have a lot of your particular product and try and sell it there for higher margins, and less volume. Or spread your goods around and make a trip in your industrial or freighter ! It all comes down to a good study of the numbers, especially the screen above, will tell you a lot about prices and the volumes that are being sold in your region.

Apocrypha 1.5 Downtime

Enough of all the DUST discussions, let’s focus on the upcoming patch (which is taking a little longer to deploy due to database issues). We’ll see what DUST will bring and what kind of impact it will have on the game.

Looking forward to:

– Small and med rigs. Sniper trashers, speedier rifters / better falloff. The list goes on ;). Also it will be cheaper to rig BCs, which is nice. Ships like a Myrm, Drake and the Cane are so much nicer when they’re equiped with rigs.

– Extra 5ok m3 Ore hold for the Orca

– Factional Warfare lp store. Though it seems the lp rewards for pvp kills are mediocre at best. I assume this is ‘prenerfed’. But running FW missions with the corp might give a lot more lps for goodies from the store.

– FW lag fixes. The ksequencer fix already worked very well for me, but not for all, and not for new players that didn’t know about it. Now that it will be built into the client, I hope it works even better, also considering they extensively tested it on the testserver.

– Mission Story Epic Arc – more content is always nice ! I’ll be starting the caldari arc this weekend I think, will keep an eye on the bug reports though. Hope it works right out of the gate.

Well that’s my summary of patch 1.5 :). Let’s hope the servers will be up soon !

Thoughts on DUST 514

As any eve player with an internet connection already heard, CCP have announced their upcoming FPS/RTS/MMO console game DUST 514. First of all, I don’t own a console, nor am I planning on getting one in the near or distant future.

At first I thought, ok that’s nice, it’s in the eve universe, fine by me. But then the german site Golem.de announced that the game will rely heavily on interaction between the ‘dusties’ and the eve pod pilots.

And that is where I think this game is bound to fail. Will there be enough dust players in the first place to have an impact on the eve universe ? Will these players be interested to make a commitment for months to a corp / alliance ? Will the DUST game be fun if they stay in their starter corp ? And what impact will that have ? Will there be mutual chat channels, and if so, will they be different from the rookie help channel ?

Will this interaction, the merge of communities really happen ? It seems to me that the game will fall or succeed depending on that concept.

dust514

To have an outside game have an impact on the Eve universe (and a console game at that) is just a bad idea. But maybe it will all work out and I will have to write a blog post saying that I am wrong in the future ;).

Links:

Jon Shute’s Blogpost

Massively announcement

Forum Thread (the main one, there are plenty of others)

CrazyKinux Blog

Keith Neilson’s Blogpost(s)

Interview with CCP Ceo

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 !