f13.net

Soon we will have 51% majority over the systems in Providence.  Outpost 42 of 84 is up.

Is there an actual goal of 100% coverage?

They are trying to out empire, empire space.

Its actually very very impressive that they are able to do this in what is widely and correctly said to be shitty space. Kind of puts into context other people rather less stellar achievements with their pavements made of solid platinum.

Better space gets fought for, and over.  You can build a lot of outposts for the cost of a top-tier capital/supercap fleet.  There's also a tendency (fallacious, IMO) to see each outpost as a strategic vulnerability, and not build them except in the most obviously strategic or economically productive systems.

Intensive exploitation can let you squeeze a lot of isk out of even crappy 0.0.  There's a mentality, left over from pre-outpost, fixed complex days of much lower 0.0 population, that you should try to collect the cream from as much territory as possible, rather than thoroughly developing a smaller space.  Providence shows how wrong-headed that is since the development of JB's and Exploration (which give multiplicative effects to intensive development).  The strategic depth of large territories has turned out to be exactly the kind of vulnerability that gets outpost building beyond the minimum shunned, conferring logistical weakness and complicating diplomacy with comparatively little economic gain.

--Dave

IIRC exploration content is the exact same regardless of truesec.  Actual sec status matters, but presumably Providence exploration sites are the same isk-wise as any other 0.0.  c/d?

For that to be true better regions exploration would not be worth more than flat out npcing (possibly less), so I doubt it.  We also do not get gas clouds.  High end ore belts are pretty rare.  Deny.

Dave - agree thoroughly, and our own consolidation mirrors this, as does our intensive development of our space (another outpost and two upgrades this week). Goons now live in one and 3/4 regions where we had eight last year. Concentrating in one place also has cultural and defensive advantages: look at providence's famous response time to gangs.

Pezzle - I think you're right. We can't shift for mining sites in delve, which are pretty worthless nonetheless since the minerals are the same as the belts. Harder to be ganked in, I suppose. In provi I would find one a week, though the minerals were the same.

Are there decent mission agents in Providence?

There are none. Another little bonus of npc delve, courtesy of bob's alts in aurora back in the day. You only get them in npc 0.0 (venal, syndicate, curse etc) and little patches like delve and geminate.

Providence has no NPC outposts.  You must venture to underprivileged regions like Delve for those.

It really does suck!

You thought we were lying all these years?  Providence may in fact be the worst 0.0 region in EvE.

I assumed there was at least SOME hyperbole, as with most things in EVE.

While maybe not technically in Providence, Zoar and sons have multiple Q4L20 agents around Ziriert. They pay really well and with 6? agents between 3 stations it's pretty damn easy. I haven't done any missions there since we lost access to the local intel channel but I'd imagine with the new changes to scanning it would be a fair bit nastier than it was before the scanning change.

Yeah, and trying to use those agents without being in the good graces of whatever ragtag band of dipshits currently happens to be winning the station-camping fight is an exercise in frustration.  At least control of Stain was comparatively stable.  Also, Ziriert is, ultimately, just Empire lowsec, of which there is no shortage that is more conveniently placed to the markets.

If you think 0.1 agents pay well, you've obviously never run missions in NPC 0.0, especially low truesec systems like those near the back of Stain.

Anyway, there's nothing about the Providence Miracle that couldn't be replicated elsewhere, except that anyone else that diverted so much of their economic output to outposts would not be able to maintain enough of a capital fleet to keep the space long enough to see the payoff.  Providence made it through the gap by being so crappy nobody wanted to take it.  Taxes, refining splits, and fees for a well-populated station system with a strong economy make R64 moons look like chump change, but only if the area is politically stable and militarily secure for a long and uninterrupted period.  Even now taking it would be killing the golden goose, driving away the economic activity that makes the space worth holding.  Paradoxically, it's Providence's poverty that makes it possible for it to be rich.

Providence has actually done what I had hoped could happen in Querious: Made the transition to a new "business model" of social organization, oligarchic mercantilism.  If BoB was Rome, and the Goons are Byzantium, Providence is Venice.

--Dave

KIA and ZA may not be strictly in the RSF, but don't they show up for RSF things? 

The posts about Providence are more or less accurate.  I do think creating another one of these areas would be more difficult today.  When we started up 0.0 was still in a land grab.  Alliances (and the corresponding mega alliances) were much smaller.  Joshuas infrequently updated maps showed huge swathes of territory claimed by various groups.  I can tell you that a player could go for a week at a time (or more!) in a system and not see another person.  All those outposts are expensive to run and it is done without the benefit of money machine moon goo.  We had the advantage of building it up slowly.  The cost of securing all those outposts for an NBSI invader would outstrip the regions value many times.  That and of course we are not utterly terrible.  As I told a member of BoB a few years ago.  We could be beaten, but we can beat anyone who would rent the space from you.  Anyone strong enough to dislodge us can compete for better space.

Speaking on that fight with AAA and friends a week or so ago in Catch.  The official forum squabble over k/d ratios had AAA losing 17 Battleships (it was more like 70).  Providence forces will hopefully continue improving.  Morale remains high and it seems like we get more positive feedback on fighting than we ever used to.  Maybe that is simply a larger population.

Answering the question about outpost coverage.  I honestly do not know.  I doubt very much that 100% coverage is sustainable.  We will build them as we can.  We are also fortunate to have a number of very talented and very generous industrialists among us.  Perhaps one day CCP will actually sit at the table with us and discuss Amarr Empire expansion.

The other thing about CVA is that you made the decision to go hard industrial way back whereas Uhsra'khan went hard military. (I was a member of UNITY around that time) Then you moved in and dislodged UNITY right after VETO lead a large member of pirate corps in the Privateers one and only attempt to actually use their forum PVP prowess to take space. It failed, with Verone's final move to addempt to ransom provedence for a billion isk bieng given the middle finger by Unity. But it left Unity weak and you were able to kick them out. But the fact that You were left there for a long time for verious reasons after that let that industrial power build up the region.

Ascn made great use of crappy space too, and so did Goons, which explains the speed of Delve's development since we conqoured it. BOB had the best space handed to them and their industry was set up by at least one dev to take advantage of future development (T20 ran their capital construction program) so they had no experiance of the hard graft of spinning gold out of dirt. Goons and CVA do. I think it would be amazing of CVA got their hands on some decent space, or space was leveled a bit.

That would be amazing. I would like to see spaced leveled out. If only to mix up the status quo and give other alliances more dough to fight fun wars with.

It actually was by Exploration, it's just that the majority of 0.0 has been focused on the R64 chess game and failed to notice.  Exploration allows a far higher "carrying capacity" for 0.0, with far more people able to use a single system without having to get in line or look for less crowded areas, and it's pretty much equal across regions. FIX was trying to make the transition to a high-density Exploration based economy, but got "helped" to death by BoB.

In this lies a lesson for the rest of 0.0: When your people are bitching about not having enough belts and provoking incidents by crossing into someone elses claimed space, yank them up short and tell them to fit probes and actually *use* the space they've got.  Why fight iteration 473 of the FAT cage match (or whatever the local equivalent of a tempting but unsecurable prize is), when *every* 0.0 system has Arkonor, when you look hard enough?

--Dave

While "every" system may have arkonor, bistot or crokite, depending on the region, it will not do so every day.  In somewhere like Providence you will get a single high-end belt in a given constellation once a week or so.  That may be more frequent now that the last Apocrypha supposedly boosted exploration site numbers, but it would have to be a big increase in shitty space.

Exploration also sucks for the yanks, who get very little once the Russians and Euros have cleaned out all the decent exploration sites, often very soon after downtime.

My understanding is that when one site despawns, another spawns instantly somewhere in the region. If true that would put the lie to the above statement.  It might not be another 10/10, of course.

However exploration is fairly work-intensive and very spiky in its payout.  You can go for weeks with crappy loot and then one day hit the multibillion jackpot.  I think Mahrin may have been alluding to this when he mentioned that it raises the carrying capacity.  If belts are free, it's more consistently profitable to use them, but if they are crowded, exploration adds an option and thus some capacity.

Archaeology, hacking and regular combat sites respawn immediately after completion somewhere else in the same constellation/region, I don't know about mining ones but they probably follow the same pattern.
DED complexes respawn with a timer, DED3 complexes spawn at least a couple of times a day. The lucrative 0.0 DED10 complexes probably spawn only once every day and that's why people who log in right after downtime have an advantage.

All I know about exploration, is that it sucked total donkey balls in empire space.

In high sec, archeology is utter crap. Absolutely ridiculous. It's very common to analyze 3 containers and get less than 10k isk worth of t1 salvage.
Hacking is better. You find at least one decryptor, they are worth about 10 mil a piece (I think) and there usually aren't any rats about so you can loot in your covops.
I don't know what rocks are worth mining over veld but hidden belts are quite easy to find.
Combat sites are lucrative when they fully escalate, you get some nice bounties and faction stuff.
DED3 (and 4 in 0.5) give you C type faction loot, frigate size for DED3 and cruiser sized for DED4. If you are luck you can make some good cash of those, if you are unlucky it's a drone DED complex.

So when is CVA going to start pushing for multiple player dropped stations per system being allowed?  :awesome_for_real:

You mean when DID we start pushing?  :drill:

I would not get carried away with profit estimations on Providence.  It is very hard to calculate, industry is fairly well distributed.  Our service fees are very low and at least in my case there is no corp tax.  We do make profits and we do build in sustainable limits.  A bottom line figure?  That would be an interesting bit of trivia.

I recall docking an Apoc costing 300k-ish isk, then again I have no idea what low and high is in this regard  :awesome_for_real:

When killing one NPC can get you over a million, I'd say that's reasonable.

Best rats in Providence are (were?) 950k.  And only two of them in a spawn.

And Phildo didn't chain!

Still it's peanuts.

The npc upgrade means we get 1.1m as the top end.  Ore and sec are the same so it is not much of an increase.  Better than nothing though.

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1191423&page=5#134

Someone who claims to have funded 9 Providence outposts outlines why Providence makes no money for the folks who have sunk the most isk into it.

Some of what he says is just wrong.  With only a couple of dozen people basing themselves from the Zoo (Z-UZZN), no docking fees, nearly constant warfare and siege, a sizable fuel bill for garrison POS, and giving 40% to the alliance, the return on the Zoo was 8-10% per month.  Unless competition has pushed the refining tax rate in Providence down to 2% or less (and if it had, people wouldn't be compressing and hauling their ore to Empire), there's no way they aren't seeing a significant return.  By the same token, he says "we see no income from ratting", but of course they *do*, in the form of taxes and docking fees from the ratter's economic activity (as well as more minerals from their recycling of crap loot).

He's worried about wormholes?  Has anyone actually managed to use wormholes as a strategic back door?  Or is it more typical that somebody pops out of one, sees they're in Providence, says "Thank God" and uses that wormhole to bring out their loot in 0.0's safest region?  If I was still playing, I'd put region-wide "Jita - 20%" buy orders for W-space materials in Providence and try to turn it into the hub of Wormhole exploration.

If I didn't know better, I'd think he realizes that making the rest of 0.0 more like Providence will mean less reason for it to be so densely populated.  But he shouldn't worry too much, network effects and the first-mover advantage will keep it there for quite a while.  If anything, it's been population capped by sheer over-grazing, and he should be happy to see the upgrade path that will open up growth again.

I've noticed that some very smart people just can't wrap their heads around "Emergent Systems".  It's a breakdown between two basic forms of intuitive thinking: Linear mathematics, and parallel procedural.  If you can't imagine what happens when lots of things are happening at once without trying to reduce it to a single linear process/narrative, you think directed emergence is bullshit that can't possibly work.  CCP seems to have been blessed with some people who are *very* good at parallel process thinking, and recruited more.

--Dave

As a matter of interest, we in Goonswarm actively sought out wormholes with which to harass Scorched Earth.  Although sometimes the wormhole would collapse before the whole fleet could get back (thank goodness I was in a cerb and not a rokh that time).  That's barely strategic on the attacker's end: even GS Recon, who were actively seeking out womholes for moving fleets around, only occasionally found one from where we were to where they were.  But the recipient, if a known target like Providence, might find that when lots of people in lots of places all look at a wormhole to them as an opportunity then they have to treat the constant threat as a constant one.

I think that there wil be far more pressing risks to them, though.

What taxes would the ratters pay? Most ppl who rat in provi aren't in CVA. He has a very good point in that it's not really any benefit to CVA at all to upgrade the ratting in their systems if their own members don't rat.

CVA pilots do rat, but that does not pay for sov upkeep.  As for the wormhole comments?  I do not think it is a serious threat, simply something we would not upgrade because it does increase risks and WE will not benefit greatly from it.  If we raise the fees less people come.  Many already haul all salvage to empire.

Remember we have to compete with level 4 missions.  In a crowded and poor region that can be difficult.  The bottom line is, we are concerned about the costs.  No information on costs has been released.  Our model depends on income OUTSIDE Providence.  I am sure we will survive, it simply becomes frustrating when you feel ignored again.

To be fair, he was not saying there was no difference, just that it was small. This may be justified if the cross elasticities are small or if that income was a negligible portion of their income. Though he certainly miscalculates supply increase effects from loot [prices of goods to him will go down]

Really the question of upgrading seems pretty uncertain at this point, since CVA needs to be cognizant of "not being good enough to invade"

Who is that directed at?

I am firmly in the camp of 'upgrades go poof on hostile takeover'

The closest Jade may ever get to destructible outposts.

Perhaps CVA could be helped by taxes going to the sov holder rather than the player's corp (in conquerable space at least).

I think this should definitely be looked at.

Dandy, and just how many years before that is looked at?

Vote for me (http://www.antipwn.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=7) and I'll push for that.

/stump

While that would have difficulties in implementation as a blanket change (ninja ratting in hostile space, for instance), the treaty system should definitely allow a propportion of the corp tax to go to the system-holding treaty partner.

Also very unmanageable for those who chose NRDS.  

I should clarify that.  It is possible it can be implemented in a way that does not require constant negotiations.  Perhaps a treaty office in an outpost.  Hit button, read terms, click accept.  If it requires the interaction of two parties it is unworkable.

More of a general observation over a lot of the objections.  They seem rooted in a linear analysis where the complainant imagines a narrative and uses that as an evidence the proposal won't work, without being able to wrap their head around how all the other things that will be happening at the same time will affect it.

--Dave

I wasn't talking about an optional system, I was talking about an automatic one. As I understand it CCP want to implement treaties that sound as though they will allow sov holders and interested parties to formalise terms for rent, taxes, standings etc. That's all on top of my suggestion which is simply that tax revenuegoes to the sov holder where the taxable economic activity happens and not the corp that the player belongs to. If I shoot rats in CVA space then CVA gets a cut of my bounties instead of my own corp. This adds value to NRDS space for the sov holders and encourages conflict over good ratting systems - if I'd rather rat in your space than in my own then either we should come to a friendly arrangement or we should have a fight about it. It could even work in Empire or NPC 0.0 although it doesn't have to. It could also be extended to include all taxable activities but, again that's not really necessary either.

I do not think that is a fair assessment.  Plenty of people are asking how it will work, giving examples of how the player made systems work and asking for more details.  Of course this system can work, it probably will.  The "hey look at all this cool shit we are planning" press release style is irksome in a persistent world environment.  Giving details can only improve the quality of feedback. 

Basically this is where a lot of MMOs go wrong before anybody writes even a single line of code, and especially where they go wrong in live management. CCP does seem to grasp that this is what it's all about, maybe better than even Blizzard does. (Blizzard spends a lot of time trying to damp down potentially emergent feedback loops in their product.)

If a virtual world could consistently demonstrate to people outside of it how directed emergence is persistently achievable, that could be a pretty significant contribution independent from whether it's fun or not. I'm convinced that it happens in Eve, but I'm not entirely sure that even the insiders who are ostensibly "directing" these processes have a clear bird's eye view of how it all comes together--in fact arguably, you can't have a bird's eye view of it if you're trying to direct it. The hardest thing of all with emergent thinking is to describe it to others after the fact, you almost have to experience it viscerally.

This seems very busted. If I want to ninja rat, sov holders should bodily evict me, not raise their taxes so I slink away elsewhere.

They should evict youif they deem that you pose a security risk. In most of NBSI space that would be the case anyhow. For NRDS areas like Providence where, as already discussed, the sov holders want to encourage space-tourism, then it's cool to incentivise you shooting their rats.

What I'm trying to say is this is open to abuse by sov holders against hostiles. If CVA could get a cut of my bounties while I, a hostile, am in their space, then they can de facto prevent me from ratting in their space all without ever engaging me in a fight. This model is wrong.

I will grant you there is not a ton of risk of abuse in Providence specifically, but this mechanic could easily be abused in quite a few other regions. Geminate, for instance.

To put it in different terms, if system upgrades are determined by player activity, you can't create mechanics which passively discourage activity by hostiles. Discouragement of hostiles needs to be active, by friendly gangs. Or else we're back to the absentee landlord system of 0.0 sov again.

Who, in their right mind, goes into a hostile's space to rat?  Unless you're talking about "squatters", and there's not a lot of places left for them since JB's allowed the isolated high value systems to become conveniently reachable.

--Dave

People who want to fight better rats or different types.  We get people from Providence in Delve and Querious occasionally.  Amarr Holymight and I used to occasionally rat in deep Catch when we lived in Providence, too.

Aye Phil but FAT was owned by allies at the time and we had station access, not that it wasn't glut full of roaming hostiles I might add. It's simple to prevent abuse put a cap on the max amount of tax charged in a system say 10% or 20%. Other than that I think it's a good idea I can't see the ninja ratters making enough noise for it to be an obstacle in implementation.

Officer/Faction ninja hunting is/was popular enough in Delve.


There is no real difficulty in implementation. Rats in sovereign space are working against the current space holders. If you're shooting them, whether or not they're letting you, you're doing them a favor.

I ninja ratted in Catch during a down cycle of the war.  I was blown up by a group of Providence holders, who camping a remote gate for some reason.