Probing for Fun and Profit

So I completed my Astrometrics training, or at least as far as I wanted to go for now, and so I spent what little online time this weekend I had teaching myself the ins and outs of probing.

Fortunately, there is a swath of good guides already available, and they were all of moderate aid, though no one in particular stood out.

But I had success almost immediately.  My corpmates and I ran several rat hideoutes, a nice change of pace though not all that profitable for us

My very first wormhole!

compared to shared Level 4 mission running.  But we did invest some funds into getting one of our own proficient with gas harvesting, after I locked down a cloud site.  Thirty million and change later, we’re pretty sure it was a good investment given how much we made with little effort over the weekend from just a pair of sites.

Given that I’m new to EVE still, in the grand scheme of things (I think my char’s six month anniversary is coming up soon), I was pleasently surprised by probing and how addictive it could become.  I could easily see the fun in Covert Ops on a regular basis, and as such I am undertaking the week long process of training cloaking.  There were a few unpleasant myths I think I created in my head about probing that I dispelled this weekend:

1.  I was worried that there would be too few sites and too many probers.  That has not proved true in our section of the universe.  In fact we even swapped site bookmarks with another prober last night and worked together with them to clear an exloration site to allow a new one to spawn.  I already have more stuff bookmarked than I have time or inclination to run down.  This has been a welcome discovery.

2.  I was worried that probing would be too complex for me to grasp.  While it can be an exercise in patience and three dimensional thinking, I found it to be a rather excellent puzzle/logic game in itself to play.  The variety has added spice to our life as well.  There are some nights when you just want a simple distraction from mining or mission running.  Probably from PvP too, though we are not quite ready to start sortying anti-pirate skirmish fleets yeet.  In fact the simple rat sites were actually rather fun.  My corpmate jokingly noted, after we warped into a hideout with a pair of battleships and literally blew up everything there, that perhaps we were a bit overkill.  I  told him that that feeling of power and dominence is not one that comes readily or easily in EVE, especially for newer players like us, and so it was one I could savor a bit.   Apparently he could too, because we lit up three more hideouts after that.

And so I have found that I can’t wait for Thursday night to come around, when I will purchase and outfit my first tech II ship.  I thought a long while ago that this would be an interceptor, and there may be one of those in my future yet.  But for now – silence will take precedence over swiftness.

Limiting Factors Part II: Leverage

So I went to fit my Apoc last night with whatever I could. I’m not one of those peopel that trains Large Energy Turret to five before I by a battlesehip, you see. The cap is fairly stable, some CPU fitting issues, and I’m working on those, but I really wanted it cap stable with the Armor Repper running.

So I thumb through my skills, and that whole idea of Limiting Factors rears it head again. There’s lots of ways to increase the cap on your ship, and for me in particular there were three ways.

So I chose the one that gave me the most Leverage over the Limiting Factor. The thing that I could improve with the least amount of investment that gave me the greatest result. Because there is more than one way to skin a cat.

So, to improve my cap, I had a few possibilities:

Change modules: improves cap but at the cost of tank/dps, cost: mid

Train Energy Management 5: improves cap, cost: high (16 days training)

Train Controlled Bursts 4: lowers cap costs of turrets, cost: mid (3 days)

Train Fuel Consumption 3: lowers cap cost of afterburner, cost: low (8 hours training)

My Leverage here at first glance is the AB training, though that only helps in fits with an AB, and only then with AB running. So really the best solution here is Controlled Bursts, a skill I had almost forgotten about. The great thing is that this is a skill that will improve my cap across the board, and not just with the Apoc, or the Prophecy – it will help with any ship I may roll out, save those with Projectile weapons, of course.

After I realized that, I went back over my skill list looking for options. There’s so many skills and angles in EVE its easy to forget about an option or to overlook some favorable Leverage you may have in your playbook already.

Food for thought as I finish laundry and enjoy a few hours of peace on my day off as my little(st) one naps.

I Have A New Ship

My very first battleship!

Still needs a name though...

 

It’s only taken me, what, five months to get into it?  Apparently I’m a slow leveler even in games that have no leveling.

Oops, almost forgot – fitting recommendations are welcome.

Two Words

I’m starting a meme.  Join in if you like!

A few weeks ago we played a party game called Loaded Questions.   One of the questions was: give two words to describe the current President of the US.  It was a fun question given the political tension in our country right now.  But since then I’ve found myself using the two words approach for other things in life too.   It might be that the two words are paird or it might be that they stnad alone

So here’s ten things in EVE online described using two words.  Feel free to add your own as you are inspired!

1.  Mission Running – “Easy Money”

2.  Probing - ”Trigonometry Test”

3.  Drake – “Tinfoil Bedsheet”  (regular readers of this blog now know where that came from)

4.  Small Rigs – “Cheap, Genius”

5.  Gate Camp – “Bored Troll”

6.  Tutorial Missions – “Incomplete, Helpful”

7.  Free Market Economy -  “Winning Strategy”

8.  Loyalty Points -  “Not Enough!”

9.  New Capsule Graphics -  “Radioactive Spade”

10.  Caldari Ships Design – “Bad  Acid  Trip”

Limiting Factors

I’ve been facing this thought alot, not just in the game, but in life as well.  Whenever one sets a goal and reaches out to achieve it – whether that be in life, in career, as an individual, as a corporation, in a game like EVE, or EQ2, or in real life, there are always Avenues for Advancement.

These Avenues for Advancement are the ways and means by which one achieves the goal, right?  Focusing on games (duh, its a blog about games…), you will have several Avenues of Advancement – you will have to move forward along the paths of: level, equipment, guild.  You’ll need level to be able to access and effectively engage those dungeons, bosses, or quests.  This also applies to EVE, though those avenues would be renamed: skills, isk, corporation – you need these to access various corners of the sandbox.

Now for some people, some of those avenues are harder to advance than others.  For the casual player, perhaps all of them are hard to advance – unless one has a regular group of friends IRL, or otherwise.  For the hardcore player in EQ2, leveling might be a snap, and by extension as they level, it becomes easier to acquire better equipment.  In EVE, the skill advancement is mostley an even playing surface, but even there isk can influence skill – by use of implants and remapping.

By now you are seeing that these things are by their very nature intertwined.  And so when one sets specific goals along avenues of advancement, the connections between these things can be a help – or a hindrence.  Where those things are a hindrence, they slow advancement along the avenue – and this is what I call, as the title of this post alludes to – Limiting Factors.

When I was playing Everquest II not too long ago, I ran into a wall – I had hit the mid 30’s with my Necromancer, and was enjoying time with him, sometimes solo, sometimes with two other people.  But slowly those two other people drifted away.  I never found a new guild to be a part of, and as a result, I started playing my almost exclusively solo.  This is fine for awhile, but after awhile, even playing a pet class, to really get into the meat of a game like EQ2, you need to be playing with other people.  I tried a few pickup groups and even a new guild, but never found a home.  So when AoC showed up at Target on clearence for a few bucks – and my brother asked me to try it with him…I went.  My Limiting Factor was social networking.  It was the lowest stave in the barrel.  The barrel will only hold as much as the shortest piece of wood bound within it, no matter how tall the rest of the barrel is.

In EVE, I run across this all the time – but the interesting thing is that the Limiting Factor changes from goal to goal and project to project.  When I wanted to fly an interceptor – money was the barrier – being able to afford to lose a 15-20m isk ship.  When I later wanted to set a goal for Black Ops, skill became the Limiting Factor – as a new player, I would have to cripple my basic skill training and wait six months or more to be able to fly one.  Currently in our corp, the limiting factor is again social in nature – we have three dedicated, regular players, who can come up with plenty of isk, at least for our current empire operations – but we can’t seem to get recruits on board with the corp.

While on the topic – I do not include amont limiting factors those that occur within oneself, outside the game.  Being on vacation, or emotionally unavailable for a week are not really Limiting Factors.  Neither is play time – since really it acts as a meta factor that complicates all the Avenues of Advancement.

The goal of course, is to find ways to expand the Limiting Factor, releasing the choke point in the process, and moving one forward a little easier into their chosen Avenue of Advancement.  Each problem has its own way of doing this.  And sometimes the game itself offers up a way to loosen that constriction – this was the original purpose of “rest xp” in MMO’s.  In the same way, though on a commercial side, they exist purely for profit potential, the reality of RMT transactions is that they provide a way to do the same.  In EVE Online, one of the veteran pilots in my former corp encouraged us to sell a 60day GTC – the initial influx of money would cover and fittings we needed and alleviate any fears we had about ship loss in fleet ops – it removed a limiting factor in PvP and ensured less Limiting Factors in other endeavors we would seek to undertake.

Whatever your Limiting Factors may be at the moment, its a good idea to share those with guild or corp mates, and even post it out in the open (such as I sometimes do on this blog!) to see who might be willing to weigh in on the topic or offer advice on how to handle it.  It behooves them to do this of course (mmmoooooo, go CoW’s!) because in doing so they relieve your tension and frustration and help you to remain in the game and contributing to your experience as a gamer.

In other words, whatever you may have heard from other sources, for long term viability in MMO’s – it pays to be nice.

Tip of the Day…

I have spent the last two nights in the Minmatar starting area, trying to recruit new pilots for our corporation.  While there I have been flying the tutorial missions – to have something to do, for sure, but also to test out a rumor.

I had heard that the tutorial missions provided a significant boost to your faction standings for the respective Empire in which you did them.  I asked around from some veteran pilots on this and got varying responses.

It turns out that while the majority of the missions do not, if you follow each arc to its conclusion, the final (10th) mission does in fact give a significant boost to your Empire standings.  I have completed two of the arcs, and both times I have received a flat bonus of .1 to my Empire standings – I say flat because it increases both the base and the adjusted (by the Connections skill)  are advanced by the same amount.

I have also heard that the tutorial arcs may be repeated once every three months, and I intend to find that out as well.   So if you need a little standings boost, get thee to the starter areas.  And while you are there, see if you can do a little good for all the new pilots.  The only way to whittle away the cliff is with a helping hand.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Sorry!

No update today..work is nuts this week! I did go through and expand/clean up the links section, and I have tomorrow off…see you then!

More Free Game Time

Now its LotRO again, wanting me to play for free for the next week.

Wish someone would offer me some free time to be able to play said free games. And to write longer blog posts. Sadness.

And Away We Go…Part II

Well, I think we are up and running.  There’s still a few things both in and out of game that need to be taken care of, but we are officially moved in to our headquarters and gearing up to take applications.

Now when I set up this corp, it was never intended to be a real corp, so I didn’t put alot of thought into the name (even though I did with the corp structure, since those were the tools I was using).  I created it on the fly one night, and as we are want to do when we don’t have the patience for creativity, we dip into the well of the past and select a congruent name.

Many, many years ago, I played Battletech often.  And the first mercenary outfit that I played as a part of with my friends, we named after an organization in an old cult movie favorite of ours.  The movie:  The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.  The organization: The Blue Blaze Irregulars.  Only at that point we didn’t have copies of the movie at home, only the occasional odd TV viewing.  And thus we mistakenly believed it to be the Blue Blazer Irregulars.  

So the Blue Blazer Irregulars [BB-I] are now open for business.

Now I know you are anxious to join, so please, make your way to our office in an orderly fashion!

Seriously, we are open to applications at the moment and looking for others to join us in our endeavors.  We all do a good bit of mission running, but we figure everyone does that.  For those who enjoy exploring the EVE universe, we need scouts for the Radar Rangers division.  Those who want to conquer the world of EVE economically can sign up for the Banzai Institute, our industrial & mining division.  And for those who crave pew-pew, our location offers unique and copious opportunities for low-sec warfare, (and with a bit of time and patience, the occasional nullsec roam) and there is a place for you in the Hong Kong Cavalier’s division.

And since we are new – experienced players can expect to take on active roles in the structure of the corp early on.

Here ends the recruitment advert for the day!

Seriously we are trying to figure out what all we need in game at the moment.  I’m working on the in game advert, and an online message board for us.  We also picked up some BPO’s last night and have begun churning out an industrial base for both profit and corp activities.  And getting our standings set up.  What else do we need?  Do you have any recommendations or good advice?  We’re not too proud to take it, believe me, and we want this to be a successful endeavor for all of us.