Tyrannis - Summer Update 2010

[tgr]

In the other slightly less annoying issues list, the overview doesn't always update properly (so you have to click in space then double-tab to get it working again), and for some reason apparently jita is pegged at 1200 people.

I love the first few weeks after a CCP patch.

[Stabs]

Yes, due to CCPs emergency maneuver of removing all pos mods from the market until Wednesday when the deploy the SISI patch (that has POS mods as unrefinable), people are suddenly running out of POS modules.

People are saying they have run out of POS modules in the hope CCP will make some available for them to refine for fast isk.

There's a very interesting conspiracy theory going round that CCP may have deliberately "forgot" that people could refine shop-bought POSes as a way to jump start POS manufacture by ensuring a supply of P4 components through this "mistake". It alleviates the usual issue of the high fliers holding the market to ransom until more people catch up.

[ajax34i]

I don't think they've done it on purpose, but they'd be stupid to reverse the hundreds of billions of ISK cash sink that just happened.

[Nerf]

It would actually be pretty funny if they went ahead and changed what planet goo was called in this wednesday patch and made all of the stuff refined thus far completely useless.  I doubt CCP will do it, tho :(

[tgr]

It would actually be pretty funny if they went ahead and changed what planet goo was called in this wednesday patch and made all of the stuff refined thus far completely useless.  I doubt CCP will do it, tho :(

Please, for the love of all that is unholy, don't give them ideas. They'd probably do it, too, and make even bigger fuckups to cover up for the ones already made.

[Phildo]

After some experimentation, L5s are indeed fucked.  I was just getting good at them, too.

[Stabs]

Fucked in that they now almost always route you to low sec? That is intentional, doing zero risk level 5s in high sec was never an intended functionality.

[Phildo]

Yeah sure, except that it wasn't an intentional fix.  CCP didn't say "we're going to make L5s more dangerous",  they just changed mission so they route people to less crowded systems.  For instance, I just ran a L4 three jumps away from my agent and I've never had to go that far before.  I can still get L5s in empire, I just have to be more patient.  I do appreciate their goal of making the most profitable PvE outside of wormholes and plexing more dangerous than either of the alternatives., though.

E: Amusingly, my extremely safe hi-sec L4 agent just gave me a mission four jumps away in lowsec.

[lac]

Yeah sure, except that it wasn't an intentional fix.  CCP didn't say "we're going to make L5s more dangerous",  they just changed mission so they route people to less crowded systems.

They actually did say that somewhere but I can't find the source. They said the l5 agents giving 50% of their missions in high sec systems were an unintended consequence of how the mechanic that links systems to missions works and they were going to overhaul that sometime to get a better risk/reward ratio (read nerf high distribution of high sec l4's).

[Vaiti]

Is it safe to come back to play now or will my overview explode on undocking? I'm ready to resub, just holding off till I get word that they have patched up things abit. I've given up on them fixing lag ever.

[tgr]

Some fleet blackscreened at 91 in local the other day. God knows how many systems was on the same node, but still, 91. It's so bad, it's borderline awesome.

[Stabs]

Yeah sure, except that it wasn't an intentional fix.

Intentional or not it's a good fix. It means that instead of running missions semi-afk in a faction fit rattlesnake or marauder it now makes sense to do level 5s with a bunch of guys in basilisks, ravens and drakes with a coupler of tackler frigates on guard duty. More co-operative, more about a gang with cheap ships instead of one guy with a repping alt. Even if you own a faction fit rattler it makes sense to have a cheap ship and a bunch of mates.

As for level 4s I've been doing a lot of them and they're mainly one jump away, most has been two jumps. I dropped some agent quality for a quiet location with no nearby low sec.

[Reg]

Oh yes. All the popular MMOs do the forced grouping thing. It's the wave of the future.

[ajax34i]

Personally, I'm waiting until the 9th to patch.  They had a patch today to fix some stuff, then they'll have another patch on the 8th to seed the PI command centers to kick-start PI production (and fix or break more stuff).

[Stabs]

Oh yes. All the popular MMOs do the forced grouping thing. It's the wave of the future.

There's a vast difference between forced grouping and soloing top pve content. No one in WoW solos the current raids. Besides you can still solo it but not in the pvp safe zone.

[Phildo]

Stabs, what's your name on Kugutsumen?

[Kovacs]

Oh yes. All the popular MMOs do the forced grouping thing. It's the wave of the future.

Troll much?

[Reg]

Troll much?

Whatever you like. Stabs was extolling the virtues of getting together with all your friends to do level 5s and how that was superior to just soloing them the way people had been.  It sure sounds like forced grouping to me.

Perhaps in some future patch they'll make collecting datacore welfare more dangerous as well. That would add even more fun.

[Stabs]

Stabs, what's your name on Kugutsumen?

Heh, I'm part of the 99% of viewers who's scared to register in case he hacks my PC.

[Stabs]

Troll much?

Whatever you like. Stabs was extolling the virtues of getting together with all your friends to do level 5s and how that was superior to just soloing them the way people had been.  It sure sounds like forced grouping to me.

Perhaps in some future patch they'll make collecting datacore welfare more dangerous as well. That would add even more fun.

Reg it is the top on-demand PVE content in the game barring Wormholes and Win The Lottery spawn chance officer plexes.  In all the other MMOs you have to group to do the top stuff.

Tbh I'm less bothered about extolling the virtues of grouping and more bothered about high sec being a better place to make isk than anywhere else. Even level 4s in Empire are probably better isk per risk than most other activities. Nullsec offers more but the price is either defending your space or leeching off those that do and hoping your non-participation doesn't cause your alliance to fold. Wormholes have all sorts of risk including the dangerous sleeper AI, no-local gankers and the chance that your exit disappears. Level 5s in high sec were ridiculously out of proportion to the danger of the rest of the game.

Like it or not Eve fairly clearly works on luring carebears to the wolves. That's the basic game design without which pvpers really wouldn't have much to do. It's the reason Eve is more interesting than Shadowbane.

[Phildo]

Well it wasn't possibly to solo L5s in a timely fashion either.  You needed to at least own two accounts in order to make it profitable, which is a significant time or isk investment.  I can do the same thing with complexes in 0.0, which are significantly safer than running lowsec missions since local is an actual intel tool in nullsec.

[Stabs]

Well it wasn't possibly to solo L5s in a timely fashion either.  You needed to at least own two accounts in order to make it profitable, which is a significant time or isk investment.  I can do the same thing with complexes in 0.0, which are significantly safer than running lowsec missions since local is an actual intel tool in nullsec.

We were not discussing running level 5s in low sec. We were discussing using several characters to keep taking missions from a low sec level 5 agent where the mission was in an adjacent high sec system. It used to not be very hard to chain high sec level 5s if you and your alt(s) could each have their own personal 4 hour lockout window and the distribution was biased towards busier systems.

[Reg]

Reg it is the top on-demand PVE content in the game barring Wormholes and Win The Lottery spawn chance officer plexes.  In all the other MMOs you have to group to do the top stuff.

I don't disagree. It's still forced grouping though isn't it?

Tbh I'm less bothered about extolling the virtues of grouping and more bothered about high sec being a better place to make isk than anywhere else. Even level 4s in Empire are probably better isk per risk than most other activities. Nullsec offers more but the price is either defending your space or leeching off those that do and hoping your non-participation doesn't cause your alliance to fold. Wormholes have all sorts of risk including the dangerous sleeper AI, no-local gankers and the chance that your exit disappears. Level 5s in high sec were ridiculously out of proportion to the danger of the rest of the game.

Like it or not Eve fairly clearly works on luring carebears to the wolves. That's the basic game design without which pvpers really wouldn't have much to do. It's the reason Eve is more interesting than Shadowbane.

It bothers me that people can't make a decent living in low or null sec too. Every 0.0 pvper I know has at least one alt doing boring things in empire just to pay the bills when they'd rather be doing something that's actually fun.

Unfortunately, nerfing money making in Empire doesn't make 0.0 any more profitable. It just means more time spent doing boring shit in Empire to pay for your pvp.

And I don't believe EVE works at all in "luring the carebears to the wolves." If it did then they wouldn't still be doing ineffective mission nerfs in Empire like they have been for the last several years.  Empire is more crowded than ever and a lot of that crowd are people whose mains live in null sec but can't make enough money there to get by.

[Phildo]

I know Stabs.  I was one of those people who had just started running hi-sec L5s a few weeks before the patch hit and half that time I was under war decs and couldn't exploit it properly.  It's the best isk/hour I've ever made in this game and I invested about 2 billion isk in my tank, so to only get a month's use out of that ship before having it rendered useless is extremely frustrating.

[Sir T]

There's no way in hell I'd run a mission in low sec these days. Its just too damn easy to gEt probed down and killed by a pirate gang. Too much risk and sod all reward.

And you can make the comparison with WOW raids all you want but in WOW raids other bigger clowns can't raid your raids, potentially destroying your ability to do those raids ever again.

[ajax34i]

Noob question:  Why don't alliances organize themselves into separating the PVPers from the civilians (carebears) into different corps, where the civilians do the industry shit and pay for the ship reimbursement program, sov costs, war stockpiles, etc., and the PVPers pvp for free (reimbursed ships) and go have their silly wars and don't have to worry about maintaining the stupid infrastructure?

As far as I can tell, all it would take would be getting rid of the draft (completely do not count the carebears as being able to x up for fleets, even if the war is at their doorstep - tax them all you want to support the war, but don't expect them to x up mandatory.)  

Yes the alliance would appear bloated and weak, but in effect your 800 PVP'ers are enlisting the help of 800 carebears to support the alliance while they go fight.


Edit:  Himo, unprobeable T3 ships are becoming the rage, actually.  I've even seen pirates whine on the official forums that they can't probe out Tengu's.  Get your ship's sensor strength bigger than its sig radius (and don't use drones), and you're set.

[Sir T]

Its been done before. D2 ran itself that way.

[ajax34i]

So where does the system fail?  That's where the "noob" part of the question is, I'm not getting it.

[MahrinSkel]

The PvP side of it gets arrogant, and the industrial side gets fat and sloppy.  If the shit hits the fan, the carebears are too busy trying to get their shit out of harm's way to do real logistics work, and the PvP'ers refuse to fight without their free ships.  D2 died two months and a thousand lightyears away from their "last stand", when McFIX carrier tactics started eating up battleships faster than replacement could be built.

--Dave

[Amarr HM]

Heh, I'm part of the 99% of viewers who's scared to register in case he hacks my PC.

+rep from the 1%  :P

[Kovacs]

The PvP side of it gets arrogant, and the industrial side gets fat and sloppy.  If the shit hits the fan, the carebears are too busy trying to get their shit out of harm's way to do real logistics work, and the PvP'ers refuse to fight without their free ships.
--Dave

Sure that's what happened to D2 but honestly I'm not sure that's a universal truth.  You can't make somebody do what they don't want to for very long in this environment.  Industrialists will always do industrial things with other industrialists, PvP'ers will do PvP'like things with other PvP'ers and never the twain shall meet (more or less).  The alliances that make it work survive and the ones that don't you know, don't.

[Phildo]

I believe PI is going live tomorrow.  Better set some long skills, because it's going to wreck the database.

[MahrinSkel]

The PvP side of it gets arrogant, and the industrial side gets fat and sloppy.  If the shit hits the fan, the carebears are too busy trying to get their shit out of harm's way to do real logistics work, and the PvP'ers refuse to fight without their free ships.
--Dave

Sure that's what happened to D2 but honestly I'm not sure that's a universal truth.  You can't make somebody do what they don't want to for very long in this environment.  Industrialists will always do industrial things with other industrialists, PvP'ers will do PvP'like things with other PvP'ers and never the twain shall meet (more or less).  The alliances that make it work survive and the ones that don't you know, don't.

What I'm saying is that you can't make it an explicit division, at the alliance level.  Specializing can work, but if your chains of command and your social networks become effectively overlapping sets, with each side identifying by it's *function*, rather than by common cause, shit gets ugly.  Every alliance has corps that are more industrial, or more political, or more PvP focused, and individual corps often have exactly the kind of situation you're talking about (the rich bastards pass the hat to keep the best PvP'ers in the corp cutting throats and supporting the corp's killboard stats).

--Dave

[ajax34i]

According to a few player reports on General Discussion and the Market forum, CCP have removed the NPC orders for the PI stuff at downtime today, so the market for POS fuels (and POS components?) is currently fluctuating.

[Setanta]

And you can make the comparison with WOW raids all you want but in WOW raids other bigger clowns can't raid your raids, potentially destroying your ability to do those raids ever again.

Although in Vanilla WoW it was incredibly enjoyable having your raid camping the entrances to MC and BWL on Blackrock PvP server, thereby denying others entrance and ruining their night. :D