The Right Fit

This is blog banter 57:

Obviously that is a not just a bad fit, it's horrific. But the guy might not know any better. We get these all the time circulating social media and corp/alliance chat. How do we educate players on fitting? This guy has been playing four months and can fly a BC, but has no idea how to fit one. What could be done to help bro's like this?

EVE can be a complicated game for people coming from other MMOs. Other MMOs don't have the risk that EVE does, so fitting your ship with the best of the best isn't the best idea. We've all seen the killmails posted on Reddit of multi-billion dollar losses for ships that should never have been that expensive. And then you have fits like the above, and you wonder where people get their fitting advice from.

The fact is, EVE is a game about doing research. It's inefficient to try to come up with your own fits unless you're experienced enough to know what you're doing and know what you're giving up when you add that other module in place of another. But, these fits need to be found and for that you need to go on Google and look for them. This is in stark contrast to other MMOs, where newer items are always better than older ones and you should put them on right away without consideration of how they interact together.

I look at the fit above and again, this just comes right around to the new player experience. Obviously, the game has failed in some way to teach him how to fit. When you think back to how you learned how to fit your ships, it wasn't the tutorials that really let you know how to fit your ship. It was people you encountered, it was people posting their fits in the Rookie chat, it was people in your corp giving you advice or links to different pages (like EVE University's wiki page).

How do we help people like this? I think these "people" fall in to different categories; some can be helped and others cannot.

1. The Eager Newbro

This is a new player who's ready and willing to learn, but might need to be pointed in the right direction to find the resources that they need to learn how to fit ships properly. They don't think they know better than you, and they've already learned that more expensive does not mean that they should be fitting it. These types of people are excellent candidates for joining learning corporations like EVE University (yes, I'm plugging my own corp, shut up).

2. The Clueless Newbro

This person mistakenly assumed that EVE is a game that you can pick up and start playing without having to consult materials outside of the game to learn how to play. One prop mod makes you go fast, so two obviously makes you go faster, right? What do you mean I can plug resistance holes with my lows? It's not that these types of people can't be helped, they just need to become aware of the resources around them. They need to be pointed towards wiki pages with fittings or join a corp with friendly members who can give feedback on fits. Or they need to join a corp that runs doctrine fleets so that they're told specifically what to fit so there is no room for error. Just because they're clueless does not mean they're helpless, that's the next case.

3. The "I know better than everyone" Newbro

This person cannot be helped. This is the type of person who thinks that they know everything about everything and they're going to fit two prop mods because reasons. They can post their fit, hear about how bad it is and just ignore it because even though they've only been playing for a short while, they know the game better than someone who has been here for years.

4. The "mountains of ISK" Newbro

This might not apply in this case, but as I mentioned at the beginning, we've seen cases of people who just buy a bunch of PLEX and fit their ships with a whole bunch of faction mods and then get lossmails that end up on Reddit. This person might be a combination of clueless and "I know better than everyone", but really they fall into the category of "I have a bunch of money that I'm willing to drop on the game and don't care if I lose expensive ships". I might also call this type of player "stupid" but that's just me.

The blog banter included some additional questions as well that I'd like to answer:

Furthermore, what (if any) responsibility do veterans players have in finding these players and instructing them on the finer arts of ship fitting? If it exists, does it extend beyond them into teaching PvP skills, ISK making skills, market skills, social skills, life skills...

First of all, veteran players don't have any responsibility in finding these players and educating them on how to fit their ships. However, EVE is a great game where people will go out of their way to help others as long as they're willing to be helped. How many times have you seen someone gank someone and follow it up with a convo to discuss how they could have done better, or what they should try next time? Not everyone is receptive to these types of things, but if they are, they can learn a whole bunch.

As someone who is in a learning corp, we have a bunch of players who have taken it upon themselves to educate these players and give them advice on ship fittings and other things. Certain things can be taught, passed down from older player to newer player, and paid forward when the time comes. EVE University is full of these types of things. Old players move on, new players take their place as teachers and pass along knowledge to new players where they can. It's a fantastic model, and it's clearly working. The best of the best corporations come to us to recruit, because they know our graduates have learned these skills or at least, have the capacity to learn.

And another question you can think about is this: do purposely wrong fits, aka comedy fits or experimental fits or off-meta fits, offend you or your corp? Would you, like Rixx Javix when he was in Tuskers, face expulsion for fitting your ships differently than the accepted standard?

Heh, no, these types of fits don't offend me and don't offend my corp. There's something to be said about learning by doing, and experimenting is one way of learning how to fit your ships. If you play around with different modules to see how it impacts your ship, you learn quickly what you need and what you don't. Experimental fits and off-meta fits don't bother me, because it's these people who might find the next great fit. Comedy fits? Who cares? If someone wants to mess around, all the power to them. It doesn't affect my game, other than potentially having one additional target in w-space that will be easy to kill.

All in all, veteran players passing down their knowledge to new players is a great way to ensure that there are new players to fill the shoes of older players who leave the game. But, the key is having new players who are willing to learn, willing to accept feedback and willing to put in the time to do some research and learn about why they're fitting their ship in this manner. Some corps exist out there that provide a platform for new players to learn how to fit their ships, too. But some players will have to learn by themselves, maybe because they're stubborn or maybe because they truly just don't know better. But I can imagine that the person who killed the guy above sent him a convo afterwards to give him fitting advice. And that's one of the great things about EVE, people are willing to help. The question is, was he willing to listen?

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 10

I logged in the other day to find out that the POS had been built and fueled and we had a good connection to a nearby trade hub. My mentor was bringing in the necessary gas and BNI were out in our static ganking freighters or indys as they went by on their way to the trade hub. We gathered at a nearby station and undocked at the same time, ferrying a bunch of gas quickly to the wormhole in one trip, and took it to the POS to get the reactions going. Now the reactions have started.

I'll be the first to admit that it's incredibly difficult to judge where you are with reactions if you don't have access to view it. My limited access is understandable, though, as the set up required has cost hundreds of millions, which has all been paid by my mentor.

We have a spreadsheet shared between us to keep track of certain things, like fuel and reactions and the necessary gasses and their associated costs. One thing I was most surprised about was the high cost per day of running reactions. If you have the capital to start with, I suppose daily cost of running reactions isn't as bad. For someone like me who is relatively new to the game and isn't swimming in ISK, the thought that 24 hours of reaction materials will cost 50 million is quite shocking. Ideally, you run your reactions with a full silo so that you don't have to babysit it daily. For some reactions, that's 200 million. And these aren't the most expensive reactions out there, either.

Now, to add to this, the prices of both the inputs and outputs fluctuate wildly. Profitable reactions one day become unprofitable the next. One of the two reactions that is currently being run is showing as being unprofitable right now. As I am editing this post, it has swung back to being profitable. Whether this is due to the input prices or output prices I am not sure. I do think it would be a good idea to maintain a detailed log of input costs and output revenue to ensure that profits are being made.

There is still much to learn and more things to do. Fuel will pretty soon be something that I need to think about, and I'm going to see if I can manage to manufacture it myself. That should be interesting.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 9

In my last entry I mentioned that I had come to an agreement with a reader of my blog about joining his industrial corporation that is currently doing reactions in a C1 and was offered a mentorship of sorts. He has offered to set up a POS with two lines capable of running reactions, plus a drug lab, and also offered to pay the fuel for the first month. In addition, he will give me starting money to purchase the initial gas. In exchange for all of this, I will be producing PI to offset the fuel costs, I will be manufacturing fuel blocks in high sec to save some ISK, and I will also be sourcing the gas at trade hubs and will be placing buy orders.

The other day I scanned down the high sec static from the old system and found out that I was only 6 jumps from the high sec static for the new wormhole. How lucky is that? Thank bob! I quickly jumped in and began setting up my PI chain for producing robotics. Luckily, this system has all of the planets needed to produce POS fuel, and I decided on robotics as it's the most cost intensive component of building fuel other than isotopes.

Now soon the POS will be put up and we will begin with the initial reactions. The most important consideration is deciding what reactions to run. Of course, I am limited in two ways: by the sheer cost of stockpiling certain types of gas, and the logistics of hauling that gas in. However, a third limitation is the fact that this needs to be profitable. No one gains anything if the reactions don't pay for the fuel (at the very least).

A Gallente fuel tower costs in the ballpark of 640,000 ISK per hour to run. This means that running a reaction needs to make more than that to break even, and the reactions need to be running the entire time or you will start cutting in to your bottom line. Chatting with my mentor I was told that it is best to diversify the reactions being run because the prices fluctuate wildly. Therefore, I need two different reactions that will be worth more than 640k an hour in order to break even. It looks like we have a preliminary idea of what to run, based on the reactions he's already running in the hole.

Over the next couple of days I will be setting up a factory planet to convert my P1 into P2 and then P3 Robotics. I will also hopefully see the beginnings of the reactions, too.

Solo Site Running

If you're a wormhole denizen or wormhole dweller wannabe, I'm positive that you've heard of the Drake and it's ability to easily run sites solo. For a while now, I've wanted to learn how to make a good fit to run sites solo so I could make some ISK during quiet times.

Now, I used to be a Caldari pilot when I first started playing and I used to enjoy using Missiles. Drakes are well known for running sites solo because they have a massive tank and they also have the ability to kite the Sleepers and shoot them with missiles from long range. However, Caldari ships (shield-based) are not very useful in wormholes because they need to use their mid-slots to shield tank. Mid-slots are also used for PvP mods, such as warp disruptors and scramblers, so shield tanked fleets are a rare sight in wormholes. That is, unless you're in a Pulsar, which gives massive bonuses to shield capacity. Indeed, if you're fighting inside someone's home and it's a Pulsar and they're shield tanked, you better hope you have shields also or it isn't likely that you'll win.

Anyway, our doctrine in the Uni is armor tanked ships. We fit armor, we fit points and webs, and all is good. That means that I learned quickly that I needed to switch from Caldari to something else, and I ended up picking Gallente at the recommendation of several people. So, long before I ever joined the Wormhole Campus, I switched to Gallente and started training my drone skills. I like drones because they remind me of missiles. They go out there and do their thing at range, and I can sit back and reap the rewards. I've invested heavily into my drone skills now so that my drones can hit decently hard.

So, in order to do solo site running, I needed to find a ship that was capable of doing it that I could fly. Turns out, I ended up fitting a self-repping Myrmidon with T2 reppers for it. A friend of mine was planning on running sites in his Ishtar in a C2 connection we had, so I went with him. It was a pretty neat experience. The biggest problem was certain sentries being far away on the initial warp in, so I had trouble getting in range to command my drones to take them out. I think I also lost a Hobgoblin on the very first wave. Either that, or I only brought 4 along with me for some unknown reason.

Otherwise, things went well. I made sure to avoid the triggers by using EVE Survival, and I was able to handle the incoming damage using one repper the majority of the time. The only time I had to switch to two reppers was when I was tanking the battleship. That thing was hitting me pretty hard, but I also wasn't moving. Maybe I should try getting my transversal up next time.

Also, while d-scanning, we spotted a Manticore briefly. Hm, wonder what that's doing? Now, this had been a pretty busy system. We had seen other ships popping up on d-scan also, like a Proteus and others. Near the end of our sites, I saw the Manticore decloak next to me and send off a volley of torpedos. I don't know what he aimed for, because it didn't hit myself or my friend. Maybe he was trying to help kill the battleship that was still on grid. I started locking him up to take him out with my drones and he warped off and cloaked. Erring on the side of caution, we finished what we were doing and came back with a salvager. I brought a Tristan for defense in case he showed up again. He didn't, and all was well.

My next steps are going to be to skill into sentry drones to be able to hit things further out and for more damage. Since T2 sentries are a long train, I'm going to end up using the faction versions that can be used with the same skills as required for the T1 variants. The faction versions have many of the benefits of the T2 versions but without the heavy skill requirement. However, they also don't benefit from the increased damage as you increase your sentry drone skills. However, in the mean time, it's a good option. I'm less than a day from being able to use the faction sentries, and I'll be heading back out to try them soon.

One last thing I need to remember to do is to get my Salvaging skill to 4 so that I can salvage the Sleeper battleships. I don't think battleships spawn in C1s but they do in C2s, so if I want a chance at getting more loot from them, I'll need to be sure to train up my skill by one.

Plug Your Holes!

The past couple of weeks I feel like I've been reading and writing more about EVE than I've actually spent playing it. I've also been busy in the Personnel Department of EVE University. So, this weekend I decided to get some good playtime in on my Uni character.

I logged in and, like usual, immediately checked the mapper. Our mapper is used to track our connections and it also gives me an idea of who is where and what ship they're flying. At a glance, I can tell if we have people out scouting down the chain or if there are people running sites in our static. As it turned out, people had just started running sites.

I grabbed my trusty Myrmidon and joined them. As a fairly new player, I'm fairly used to getting smashed by the Sleepers when they turn their gaze towards me. For those who don't know, Sleepers will auto aggress as you warp in to the site and they will randomly switch targets until they're dead. This is in contrast to the "tank and spank" method that appears in other MMOs.

So here I was, minding my own business, my drones happily off chasing Sleepers when suddenly I started hearing the audio queues of an aggro switch and suddenly I was yellow boxed and then red boxed, a steady stream of damage incoming. There also happened to be a battleship up on grid, as we were on one of the last waves, and it was rocking me pretty hard.

After we finished running the sites, a few of us started looking over my fit. One person, who was flying logi, asked about my resistances. As it turned out, my explosive resistance was lower than all of the rest. Whoops! I had always been wondering why I seemed to get hit hard by the Sleepers, and it turns out that a hole in my resistances was to blame. So for all the future site runners out there, be sure to plug your holes!

New Player Experience

There is no doubt that EVE is a complicated game. Before I started the game, I did some research on it and heard all about the difficult learning curve. One of the best things I ever did was stumble upon the EVE University wiki pages and apply to join the corporation afterwards.

EVE University is a training corporation for new players. With on-going classes, events and campuses in various areas of the game (high-sec, low-sec, null-sec and w-space), there is something there for everyone. Whether you are interested in PvE or PvP, there is something here for you.

I know that I wouldn't be the player that I am today without the support of my corporation. I also don't know where I'd be or what I'd be doing if I decided to go down a different path with my EVE career. It's possible that I might not even be playing the game now if I didn't join.

The new player experience is very important to all players and CCP. New players breathe life into the game and help to provide more content in all aspects of the game. Therefore it is important that these new players are set up to succeed from the beginning so that they don't get frustrated and leave the game before they've had a chance to experience it.

My question is, are new players set up to succeed when they first start playing?

New players start off completing the career agent's missions, immediately exposing them to several aspects of the game. It provides an all around good introduction, although some of the missions aren't clear. For example, there are some missions where you require a certain item to complete it but the agent doesn't give it to you and there's no indication that you need to go buy it. This unnecessarily complicates what should be a gentle first step into the world of EVE.

I've found, however, that once you're done the career agent missions, you're sort of left on the side of the road with no clear indication of where you should go next. Other MMOs have "breadcrumb" quests that gently lead you to where you're supposed to go. That's fine for a game where the path you follow is fairly linear. In a sandbox such as EVE, that won't work. How do we give new players the equivalent of a breadcrumb quest?

In my opinion, Aura should send a mail to a new player and let them know that there are certain training corporations in the game that a new player should look into to help guide them on their next steps. EVE University is the first one that comes to my mind, clearly, but there are others such as Brave Newbies and RvB. Setting a new player up with this knowledge from the get go could go a long way to helping them lay a solid foundation in the game, which in return will ensure that they enjoy playing and will stick around for a longer time.

I've recently become a Personnel Officer for EVE University, so I can see that there is a solid stream of new players lining up to join. These people find EVE University from all types of sources. That's great, but I wonder how many more there are out there that have never heard of us but would greatly benefit from what we offer.

What do you think of the new player experience? Do you think more can be done to help new players lay a solid foundation? Let me know in the comments. And if you're a new player and have questions about EVE Univesity, feel free to reach out to me, either here or in-game.

Crius: Scaling Costs and POSes

One of the big changes coming in Crius is the removal of slots for manufacturing, research and invention. Instead, CCP has decided to implement a scaling cost system that increases as industry activity increases in the system. In addition, you will be able to bid on "teams" for a particular system, and these teams will have certain bonuses that will benefit you in some way.

On one hand, these changes will remove the barrier to entry to T2 production. It has been well known that the wait for research slots in high-sec is extraordinarily large. Up to now, these long wait times have made owning a high-sec research POS all but mandatory for T2 production. With scaling costs, anyone will be able to conduct research anywhere, the only limitation being finding an appropriate station and having the ISK available to install your job.

However, these scaling costs will mean that systems located close to major trade hubs such as Jita will likely experience high costs as manufacturers look to minimize the distance needed to transport their final goods to the market. Depending on the activity in the system, the installation costs might skyrocket, meaning that people will need to spread out to keep their costs down.

Alternatively, you can invest in a POS. However, the scaling cost system will unintuitively apply to POSes as well. A POS located in a system near Jita with many other manufacturers will have high installation costs just like those manufacturing in a station. Although there are linear bonuses that apply when you have more than one assembly online at your POS, for small items the sheer number of assemblies that are needed will only benefit those who manufacture very large amounts of small T2 items. To receive the maximum bonus from ammunition or component assemblies, you would need to have 50 of them for a bonus of 25%. This seems unrealistic and poorly thought out by CCP.

From an economics point of view, investing in capital should decrease your variable costs for manufacturing. Someone who installs a job at a station should have a higher variable cost because they have invested 0 ISK into the capital required to manufacture their items. If you have a POS, you need to purchase assemblies (capital outlay), so you should expect to receive some benefit. Yes, you do build things faster by using a POS assembly as opposed to using a station. But why should the installation costs in my POS be related to people installing jobs at nearby stations or other POSes? CCP justifies is as the cost of hiring skilled labour, since apparently these arrays now need workers too. Apparently, it even applies in w-space.

As a budding T2 manufacturer, I won't be taking on these additional costs as cuts into my profit. I'm expecting to see the prices of T2 items increase with Crius, reflecting the higher cost of installing jobs. We'll have to wait to see how the market as a whole reacts to these changes.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 8

It seems like my arrangement with the new residents of the wormhole might be short lived. It seems that the new residents killed someone from an alliance and as a result, ended up being camped for days on end. I was even advised not to enter the wormhole, although I had never left. Some of their towers are no longer showing up on my d-scan, so I'm left wondering whether they left with their tails between their legs and just haven't let me know.

Interestingly, the person I was living in here with prior to the new people moving in had no issues with other people. Perhaps this is because the purpose of his corp was industrial operations only, and you don't make waves when you aren't blowing up ships of kids who apparently take it personally and proceed to camp you for days.

I've read conflicting reports on how industrial corporations are dealt with in w-space. I hear a lot that some corporations take offense if another wormhole corp doesn't put up a fight. To some, even offering a 1v1 is better than sitting in your POS and waiting for the incoming connection to collapse. I have read stories of people evicting corporations that won't offer up a good fight, because a lack of content in wormhole space can sometimes be a problem. This is especially true if you end up with bad connections or chains.

Wormhole life as an industrial corporation can be quiet if you don't make waves or annoying, depending on your luck with connections. But it certainly can be lucrative, as certain arrays can only be anchored in 0.4 and lower security space.

A few days ago I received an EVE mail from someone who has been reading my blog. He has a corporation in a C1 with good PI planets and is doing reactions and is looking to start up a second reaction tower, along with a drug lab. The idea is that I'd be able to help him with sourcing the gas in known space, get it transported to the static, and help with ferrying it in. Eventually as we worked together longer, I'd gain the necessary permissions to have more control over the POS, including being responsible for fuel and babysitting the reactions. It seems to me that this is a good way to start learning reactions, as the individual is willing to front the capital (in terms of the POS, fuel, initial gas, etc) while I help with logistics. This will be the second learning opportunity to come from someone who has read my blog, and hopefully we will be able to move forward with this. I expect the next Pioneering in W-Space blog post to have more information on this endeavour. 

Crius: Invention Changes

The industry changes coming to us with the Crius expansion have now hit SiSi, meaning that everyone who is interested in seeing what's new can log on there and check it out for themselves.

Since I'm working on a manufacturing alt, T2 production and the invention that is associated with it is something that I have been reading up on. For example, it is currently necessary to make max-run BPCs of the T1 BPO for T2 items that you wish to make. This is so you will be able to have a max-run T2 BPC with a successful invention. This will no longer be the case in Crius.

There are three important changes to invention coming in Crius:

Copy times for T1 blueprints are being reduced below the build times.

Invention now only requires a one-run BPC. If you use a BPC with more than one run, the invention process will remove one run from the original number of runs.

Extra materials have gone the way of the dodo bird, making it easier to see at a glance how many materials you will need.

These changes will improve the quality of life for T2 manufacturers as they will help to reduce the number of clicks that are required to start invention jobs. Additionally, they will help improve the quality of life for all manufacturers.

One thing I never understood was the extra materials. In addition to not being impacted by ME research, the fragmented nature of the materials meant it would take a longer time to tally up how much you needed to buy in order to install a job. Like others, I'm sure, I have been relying on IPH to let me know how many minerals I need to purchase for x runs of a manufacturing job.

It's important to note however that Crius will have many changes for industry as a whole, but not invention. More changes to invention will be coming after Crius goes live, according to CSM mynnna.

For me, these changes will be easy to learn as I haven't started working extensively in T2 manufacturing as of yet. For others who have been doing T2 manufacturing since before I started playing, it might take some getting used to. Either way, these are but a taste of the changes to invention that will becoming later down the line. I'm looking forward to seeing what CCP has in store for us.

Getting Started in Industry

I have a wide variety of interests. Of late, I have become interested in developing a manufacturing alt. There are so many skills required to make a profitable manufacturer, and some of them are a long train. In particular, Material Efficiency 5 is basically a mandatory train and took quite a while to complete.

There does not seem to be much profit in T1 manufacturing. At least, not in the system where I will be selling my goods. Therefore my goal is to move into T2 production where some of the profits lie. T2 manufacturing is interesting because of the invention mechanic, where you have a chance of inventing a T2 blueprint copy (BPC) from a T1 blueprint original (BPO) and a couple other items.

As of right now, you're all but required to have a research POS to do T2 invention in high-sec. This is because the majority of the research slots are being used and the wait time for them can be staggering. This is set to change in the Crius expansion where the limit on the number of research slots will be removed and instead and cost will scale with the demand at that particular station. This means that new industrialists looking to do T2 production will be able to do so without the use of a POS.

What this means is that as a new industrialist myself, a POS will not be necessary at low volumes of goods. However, as a stubborn individual, I will probably use a POS regardless and try to manufacture enough to at least cover the costs of fuel. It's possible that the changes to POS anchoring in high-sec will increase demand for POS fuel, driving up the price and making my tower more expensive. If that happens, I'll need to rethink things.

In the meantime, as I'm gathering skills for T2 production, I need to find what products I'd like to manufacture. It can be difficult to find profitable markets with the prevalence of tools like ISK Per Hour. It seems to me that people spot newly profitable things and rush to manufacture it, driving down the prices and profit. I was looking at the reactions market the other day and noticed the same thing. One particular type of reaction was very profitable and a few days later it had become much less profitable. I'm guessing that it's due to the fact that people switched their reactions and flooded the market with supply. Then again, it could also be due to changes in the price of the inputs. I haven't really looked into it more closely than that.

Luckily, I have time to figure out what I want to manufacture as my core skills finish training. Once those are done, however, I need to have a grasp of what I want to manufacture as I'll need to train the specific skills to be able to manufacture those specific T2 items.

When I actually start into T2 production, I'll post again with the challenges I've encountered and the lessons I've learned.

Farewell, Niss

Note: This post is behind by a week due to how I schedule my posts.

Recently, the Wormhole Campus (WHC) manager announced that he would be leaving EVE University to join Adhocracy Inc., one of the wormhole corps that live in higher-class wormhole systems.

As a fellow Canadian, it was easy for me to develop a liking for Niss. Although I wasn't around when he first started his tenure as campus manager, from what I've read and been told, the campus is a much better place because of the work that he's done. It seems like every time I logged into comms he was on there giving a detailed explanation to a question posed by one of the campus members. There was never a moment where he didn't have time to answer questions about the game, and that's one of the things that I'll miss most about him.

EVE is an interesting game, not because of the game itself but more so because the game is driven by content that comes from the community that you get involved in. Living in wormhole space is tough, and the lack of proper permissions on POSes means that you really need to have trust in those who can easily access all of your valuable belongings. It is for this reason that the friendships that blossom in w-space are strong, and the sense of comraderie is forever present.

One of the traditions of the WHC is to have a send off for pilots who are leaving us. Basically, this involves the campus getting together to shoot whatever ships are left and say our goodbyes. But just shooting his ships didn't seem right for someone who has made such an impact on many of our experiences in the campus, so an outgoing present was organized for him. As a dedicated Gallente pilot, it seemed only right that he received a Proteus filled with all of the necessities to have a fantastic party: exotic dancers, strippers, alcohol and drugs were all placed inside the hold of his ship. As we landed on grid, people shot fireworks at his new Proteus and it was a great experience.

We'll miss him around the campus, but Adhocracy has certainly picked up a fantastic new pilot. Farewell, Niss. Fly dangerously and we'll see you down the rabbit hole!

Market PvP

In real life, I am employed as a trade economist. Naturally, the EVE economy has been something that fascinated me from the minute I stepped into the game. The more that I have played, I have become more interested in the economy and how to interact with it.

It was a blog post by croda that got me started with creating a trading alt. Croda has made billions by exploiting variations in market prices and has amassed an trading - and now manufacturing - empire. His success prompted me to try my hand at trading.

The markets in EVE are not unlike markets in the real world. There are places where the high supply of goods drives down the price, and there are other places where either a lower supply or higher demand push the price higher. These variations mean that there is the potential to make a good amount of ISK by buying in one location and selling in another.

I started in a similar fashion to croda, buying small things from Jita and selling them in a distant trade hub. As my wealth increased and I started buying more expensive goods, I decided that I couldn't keep moving 120 million worth of products in my destroyer. I outsourced my transporting to PushX, a group similar to Red Frog Freight, who are able to move my goods relatively quickly for a low percentage of my profits.

However, life is not as easy as it seems for a regional trader such as myself. As more and more people realize that there is the potential to make a good amount of ISK in the market, the competition to sell certain items grows, cutting into your bottom line.

I have found that some people engage in "market PvP", which sounds unusual but it is exactly what it implies. There are people out there who aim to do better than other players. In combat situations, this means killing your ship. In the markets, it means getting a sale by any means necessary.

Undercutting is easily explained by economics. If you are making positive rent from an item that you are selling (that is, the profits are greater than zero), you can afford to cut into your own rents by undercutting your competitors to get a sale. On one hand, you lower the amount of profit that you make by doing this. On the other hand, you increase the likelihood of selling your product by having the lowest price in the market. It's very easy to get caught up in the undercutting game and forget your bottom line. More than once I have noticed that in my haste to undercut a competitor, I have ended up setting a price that is lower than what I paid for the item in the first place. Luckily these mistakes have not cost me too much in terms of raw profits, but the lesson has been learned.

Another type of undercutting is this 0.01 ISK undercutting game that many traders seem to play. Everyone undercuts each other by 0.01 ISK, since the lowest price gets the sale no matter if it's 0.01 ISK lower than the next highest seller or 1 million ISK lower. To me, this seems very tedious. When you're managing in excess of 60 different items that you need to update your prices on daily, why bother undercutting someone by 0.01 ISK? It's extra typing and is more prone to making a mistake. Sometimes I login to find that I've been undercut 15 times but the price is only 0.15 ISK lower than my original price. This is nonsense, I revise my price by -100 ISK and call it a day. I don't have time to worry about all of the decimal places, and it seems to work fine for me.

The final type of market PvP that personally drives me mad is when someone comes in to a profitable market and destroys it by selling at cost. Usually by cost I mean selling at the NPC seeded value for skill books. Technically, this is unprofitable due to the taxes and fees that are charged on the sale. However, people still come into the market and sell 50 skill books at NPC seeded cost, shutting the rest of us out of the market. It is my hope that the unprofitable nature of doing this will drive the offender out of the market, but perhaps his hope is to reclaim the market by himself once the rest of us leave.

I still have a lot to learn about trading in EVE. Hopefully I can continue expanding like croda did and build up a trading empire. That's the dream, the tough part is achieving it.

I Didn't Vote in CSM9 (And Here's Why)

I realize a post on the CSM9 elections is a little late, but I do feel that the message needs to be put out there.

I'm just going to admit it: I didn't vote in the CSM9 elections. As it turns out, I'm not the only one in that boat. There were 31,294 votes cast during these elections as opposed to 49,702 votes cast last year, a decrease of 37%.

"[T]he number of votes cast this year is significantly lower than for CSM 8. We feel that this is due to a lack of awareness about the CSM’s form and function within the community..." - CCP Leeloo

I can't begin to explain why there was such a drastic decline in votes this year, but at the very least I can explain why I chose not to vote.

I started playing EVE at the very end of January this year. After only months of playing, CSM elections were upon us and people were out in force, campaigning for votes - at least, that's what I understand now. As a new EVE player, I felt removed from the CSM in general. Not only did I not know that CSM existed when I first started playing, but I also didn't know what the CSM did for me as a new player.

In my opinion, voting in CSM elections seems to be very divisive. There is a lot of encouragement for people to vote for "your playstyle". If you live in sov-null, you need to vote for a null representative. If you live in a wormhole, you need to vote for a wormhole representative.

However, what about the new players who maybe haven't decided what their play style is yet? How can I vote for a play style if I haven't settled down in a play style myself? I gave consideration to voting for the wormhole candidates, since I had been spending a lot of time living in w-space. But in the end, I just felt that I didn't know enough to cast an informed vote.

It seems to me that knowledge of the CSM comes with time spent playing the game and also time spent engaging with the community. If you frequent blogs or the EVE forums, you start to hear more about the CSM and what they do. For new players who don't realize that all of this goes on outside of the game, there should be more focus on finding ways to reach out to them.

Ali Aras ran for CSM8 under a generalist, new player friendly platform and was elected. She was elected a second time in CSM9, mostly because of her track record of being an incredibly hard worker and participant in CSM8 (from what I understand). It's nice that candidates like this exist, but I'll remind everyone that as a new player who joined in January, I didn't know that she existed and I also didn't know that she was representing my interests.

Perhaps the solution is that this information should be made available right at the very start of the game. If new players received an automatic mail letting them know about the purpose of CSM, who their representative was and what they are doing to improve your gaming experience, they might be more engaged come election time.

The average account age of those who voted this year was 3.6 years, and that was an increase over the previous year. A true test of whether CCP and CSM will succeed in reaching a broader audience (including new players) is if the average account age of those who voted declines next year. Time will tell if they have been successful or not.

Getting involved in the world of blogging about EVE Online has given me a lot more information about who the CSM representatives are and what they do for me. Next year I plan on being able to cast an informed vote, and I am looking forward to doing so.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 7

This is the last re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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My host left sooner than expected. I logged in after work at my usual time to go through the process of refreshing my PI and transferring the P1 to POCOs. To my surprise, I warped in to find that the tower was gone. I switched over to the pod saver tab and noted that the POCOs had been transferred over a new corporation. I also noticed that the POCO tax had been changed to 100%.

A day or two later I received a mail from a diplomat of the alliance that moved into the wormhole where I was staying. My old host had mentioned our agreement to them and they were wondering if that was something that I was interested in continuing with. Seeing as how our agreement was making me 144 to 168 million monthly for a very tiny time commitment every day, I agreed to continue.

Still, though, the thought remains that I'd like to branch out of just producing P1 and try to do something more interesting. There are several options, including making P2 or higher products or trying my hand at hybrid polymer reactions. In both cases, there will be an additional time commitment required. The main problem is logistics. P2 requires two different P1 inputs to make. Generally, you'd use a factory planet to construct your P2 or higher goods. However, you need to import the P1 from your other planets in order to do so, and this increases the amount of time. For hybrid polymer reactions, you need a POS with the appropriate reactors and silos. In addition to having to bring in the materials required to do the reactions, you'd also have to bring in fuel. Then you'd also have to haul the completed reactions back out to k-space to sell. There is the potential to make a good amount of isk though. Of course, this would depend on whether or not the new alliance would allow me to set up a POS in the first place.

There's a balance to be reached here. Currently I spend a little time and get a little reward. If I invest more time, I will get more reward. The question is: will I grow tired of investing that much time like my old host did?

As an aside, I've been thinking of creating a blog where I can post entries like these. In addition to being a wormhole dweller, I also dabble in the markets as a trader and I also recently started trying out manufacturing. I do read quite a few Eve-related blogs on various subjects, so there might be some interest by newer players in reading about my perspective on a lot of these things.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 6

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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The time has come for me to move out of the wormhole that I am currently living in. My host has told me that he will be moving out and I probably won't be staying around to be at the mercy of whoever decides to move in. All in all, the arrangement that I had with my host worked very well. I produced PI that was useful to him, and he paid me a fair price for it. I didn't have to deal with the logistics of running the PI out to k-space and he got to make less trips for the necessary PI. In addition to all this, he gave me pointers to setting up a nice PI system that really helped with producing P1 goods efficiently. I will miss this arrangement that we had.

Now it's time for me to come up with something new to do with my wormhole character. My main character has been in the WHC for some time now, and I've given some thought to moving my alt in there and setting up PI. However, now that I've learned PI, this is just a menial task of logging in every day and updating everything.

One thing that I am considering is finding a new wormhole to live in and run the combat sites there solo, in addition to my PI. I would need to train my alt to be able to fit some sort of battlecruiser (I'm thinking a Drake) to be able to run the sites by myself. I've also grown curious about doing reactions as well, but I do know that it requires more of a time investment to be running in the required materials every week.

I'll definitely have to give this more thought. If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to let me know!

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 5

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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It has been a while since I updated this. In my last post, I was talking about the tax rates on the POCOs nearby and how I wanted to find another wormhole to settle in. I haven't been able to find a suitable wormhole to settle down in. However, this past week I received mail in-game from an individual who had read my mini-blog here and had a proposal for me. He had settled in a C3 wormhole for the purposes of PI and other things, but couldn't extract all of the PI goods from the planets from himself. In exchange for first chance at buying the PI I'd be making, he offered a very low tax rate in addition to tips on how to optimize my organization to extract more. Needless to say, I accepted his offer.

The other day I bid farewell to Frontier and scanned my way out into high sec. 20 some odd jumps later and I scanned my way into the new wormhole. After being fronted some start up cash to upgrade my command centers (my PI alt is supposed to be self sufficient), I set up extraction on 5 different planets, making P1 items that my host has mentioned that he will buy off of me for use in his production chains. So far, the tips that I have been given has allowed me to fill up my launch pads about a quarter of the way each day.

As of now, the money that I was fronted has already been paid back and my PI is churning along very well. Now, I wonder if there is anything else that I can do from an industry perspective to make ISK in a wormhole? Hmmmm.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 4

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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It's been a while since my last update, mostly because updating with how much new P1 product I have obtained over the course of the past day does not give much in terms of relevant content or interesting reading. However, I have learned some new things that I'd like to share with everyone.

I've been using a spreadsheet to keep track of my PI assets and made over 2m ISK (theoretically) based on the minimum Jita sell prices. However, I had to start getting my ever-increasing P1 products from my planet to my Epithal. I had originally thought that expedited transfers have 5 minute cooldowns. As it turns out, the expedited transfer from a factory to my command center has a cooldown of 20 minutes. This means that it would take over an hour to get my products transferred and launched. This isn't an ideal way of doing things.

Additionally, on the launch screen, I realized that my spreadsheet was incorrect in calculating the export tax. Or, should I say, the information that I read online was incorrect and therefore my spreadsheet was telling me incorrect things. Let me summarize what I thought and then give you the true story. Every planetary resource has a value defined by CCP. P0 are 4isk, P1 are 400isk, etc. Tax rates are a percentage of that value for every unit of P1 (in my case) that you will be exporting from your planet. Command Centers have a 15% tax for launching, meaning that the cost of exporting one unit of P1 is 60isk. I mistakenly took 15% of this value, thinking that my cost would be 9isk/unit. Whoops!

Despite my miscalculation, there is still profit to be made even if you're using Command Center launches. However, the length of time it will take to get my products off of the planet will take a while. However, the tax rates are not the only thing eating into my income. There are only two planets in Frontier, and one of them is a very large gas planet. Large planets are bad for PI because it increases the link cost of placing down buildings. Furthermore, Frontier is still occupied by my Russian friends (the same ones who own the POCOs).

I am starting to think that it is time to get my P1 products into my Epithal and take my high-sec static back to k-space to look for a new wormhole to settle in. The amount of money that I will get from selling my P1 products will mean that I will have broken even on setting up the initial planet. However, I have certainly learned a lot. I think in my search for a new home, I will be looking for the following:

1. A significant number of planets. 6 planets should be the minimum based on how many planets my one alt can handle.
2. Small planets. Gas planets are great but they hurt you with the cost of CPU and powergrid.
3. Unoccupied, truly this time. The good news about having a neighbour is that any attention in the wormhole might be focused on them. The bad news about having a neighbour is that THEIR attention could be focused on you. I know for a fact that after visiting the POS a few times, my neighbours were certainly active. And, judging by their 100% POCO tax, they want to be the only fish in this pond.
4. A C1, still. The advantage to a C1 is still the fact that battleships and higher cannot warp in. The bad thing about a C1 is the k-space static that could mean you will be getting day-trippers or WH corps rolling their C1 static to come run sites or look for PVP opportunities. Still, the ability to have easy access to k-space for selling my PI goods offsets the risk that comes with being in a C1.
5. Low POCO tax rates would be ideal. Anything below 15% would be great for when I decide to build a launch pad.

Hopefully my next update will have some good news on the search for a new Frontier.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 3

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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I've decided that my wormhole needs a name. The Wormhole Campus calls its home Innuendo, and I've decided that it would be easier if I named mine. In that case, keeping with the theme of pioneering in w-space, I've decided to call my wormhole Frontier.

Last night was a busy time in Frontier, but not for me personally. I was keeping an eye on EveEye and Wormhol.es, looking for activity before logging in. Sure enough, I saw that people were ratting in my system and there were 3 kills over the period of an hour. As it turns out, one unlucky pilot got blown up and his two mobile tractor units (that I mentioned seeing before) also blew up. These losses were pretty big, totalling over 136 million isk. I'm glad that the two people, from the same wormhole corporation, found him instead of me. I'm guessing that these guys have their home system in a C2 or C3 and have a C1 static that happened to be Frontier. Hopefully that means that today I'll be safe from them, at least, as they will have a new C1 to play with.

My PI is still churning away. Currently I have 1760 P1 products that will net me 670,000 isk based on Jita pricing. I want to talk a little bit about Jita pricing, as I managed to link my spreadsheet to Eve-Central through their API last night. Previously, I was using the median sell price for my Jita price. However, when I went to calculate the difference between filling up my Epithal with P0 resources and P1 resources, I was surprised to see that the difference was only 3 million isk. How could that make sense? As it turns out, the answer is what I'm using as the Jita price. Jita's median price for the P0 resources was skewed pretty high compared to the lowest sell price in the region, which is what I'd most likely be selling at. After making the adjustment to the API, I found that there's a 31 million isk difference between a full Epithal load of P1 compared to P0. That makes more sense.

Since my cloaking finished training, I decided to go out and start scanning down the signatures in the area. The biggest surprise was that there are 14 signatures to scan down, not including the anoms that don't need to be scanned. The second surprise was that I really need to improve my scanning skills on this alt. I was used to my scanning skills on my main, and it was taking me much longer to scan down these sites. Perhaps wormhole sites are harder to scan down than high-sec sites. Either way, I need to find my way to the market to buy some additional scanning skills. I scanned down a few gas sites and a relic site before finally finding a wormhole. Warping to it showed that it was my C1 static, and after bookmarking the location, I jumped out.

I ended up being <10 jumps from Amarr, one of the major trade hubs. I was also <10 jumps from stations with NPC seeded skillbooks, so I headed there to grab my scanning skillbooks. On my way to the station with the skillbooks, I passed through Amarr. Having never been in a trade hub station before, I was somewhat surprised to see how many people were in the system (around 600). Luckily there were only a few people sitting on the various gates that I went through. However, it does make me think about how careful I will need to be when I'm bringing a load of PI materials to a trade hub. I'll certainly need to make some insta dock and insta warp out bookmarks for the trade hub stations before I take my Epithal there. Either way, I've grabbed some additional scanning skillbooks which will hopefully help me scan down sites faster in Frontier.

After jumping back into Frontier, I decided to go check out the POS. It's still active and there actually was a piloted Vexor there tonight. Luckily he didn't see me (or didn't care) and I warped to a safe spot, then to my log out spot. On my way there, I created an unaligned safe spot that will be my new log out spot. I'll probably make another unaligned safe spot and move my mobile depot there. Luckily it still has not been spotted, even though I have the reinforcement timer as backup in case someone tries to blow it up.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 2

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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I logged on this evening to check on my PI. My cycle was up and I created 860 P1 products that, at current Jita prices, would sell for around 315,000 isk, not taking into consideration the taxes required to export from my command center. As I mentioned in the first post, using the POCO surrounding my planet is impossible because the corporation that owns it has set the tax rate to 100%. From what I have read, the tax rate is 15% of the taxable value, which is 60 for a P1 product. Based on this, the actual value of my products is around 308,000 isk, which is still respectable. At this rate, I could gain 9.5 million isk per month. A fair start, but I know I can do more. I plan to reinvest my earnings into upgrading my command center so that I can support more factories and extractors so I can grow my little PI empire. I've started another 24 hour cycle and will check back tomorrow.

Speaking of all of these calculations, I have started putting together a PI spreadsheet so that I can keep track of the value of my PI goods. Right now it's very rudimentary. However, I plan to expand it using EVE-Central's API to keep the prices updated and I also want to incorporate a sheet to determine if it's more profitable to try P0->P2 production. Once I get this sheet to look presentable, I'll be more than happy to share it in this thread.

In other news, d-scan picked up a Mobile Tractor Unit somewhere within the max range of the scan near my safe spot. I noticed as well on EveEye that there were a few dozen NPC kills today, meaning that someone (other than me) has been ratting in the WH. I can't be certain if this is someone who came in from the HS static, or perhaps another WH rolled a C1 static that happened to be the one I'm living in. Until my Cloaking skill finishes training, I can't stay around uncloaked long enough to scan for WHs.

Additionally, until my Cloaking skill finishes, I don't feel safe rushing off into k-space to try to sell my commodities. This will have to wait until tomorrow. I will certainly share my experience on my first trip to the market, perhaps tomorrow.

Pioneering in W-Space: Part 1

This is a re-post of my blog from the EVE University forums to catch you up with what I've been doing.

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I still remember the first time I scanned down a wormhole. I mentioned in the E-UNI chat that I had found a wormhole and one member suggested that I go jump through and see what happens. Looking back now I think that there might have been some people standing by waiting for the tears to flow as I got blapped by the local residents. Luckily, I didn't get blapped and I was able to explore aroud a bit before heading back to k-space. My first trip into w-space was definitely exhilirating and opened up a new path for me to explore.

Since that first time jumping into a wormhole, I have grown increasingly interested in w-space. After doing lots of reading on the wiki page and various blogs about w-space (these are very useful!), I got the idea into my head that I wanted to find a C1 to settle down in and start making a little bit of ISK with Planetary Interaction. Of course, there were a few problems with this idea. Where was I going to find an unoccupied C1? Once I found one, how was I going to occupy it? I don't have the ISK to anchor a POS and keep it fueled, plus I don't know what the return will be like on my planets. Nonetheless, I was stubborn and continued scanning down wormholes trying to find a perfect new home.

You might be asking, why a C1? I decided on a C1 for a few reasons. First, I read that C1s tend to be less frequented than the popular C2s, which have more opportunities for running sites. Second, C1 entrances have a weight restriction that precludes certain ships from entering (this makes taking down a POS in a C1 more annoying but not impossible to do). Finally, my lack of combat skills means that my primary activity would be PI and as all wormholes from C1-C6 are -1.0 true sec, the planets in a C1 can have as many resources as a C6. However, as it turned out, finding a C1 would be a big challenge.

I scanned down many wormholes in many different areas (near Aldrat, near the AMC, and near Solitude) looking for C1s. As it turned out, I found many C2s and some C3s but very few C1s. The C1s I did find were occupied with very recent activity on the killboards. However, I took every new wormhole I found as a learning experience. From the blogs I read, I discovered that you can d-scan to uncover the location of POSs that show up on a general max 360 scan. The next time I popped into a C2, I decided to practice this and find the local POS. I spotted one on d-scan and proceeded to align myself to one of the nearby planets. I narrowed my d-scan angle and sure enough, the POS was still showing up. I warped to the moon and low and behold I had found the (active) POS, shields up and all. There was some luck here in that there were only a few moons on this planet. This was a nice lesson though, if I were to set up a POS, choosing a planet with many moons would make it more irritating for someone else to scan down my POS. However, anyone with the patience could scan each moon until they found it anyway.

A few days ago I got lucky and scanned down a C1 with a HS static that has had no recent activity and appeared to be unoccupied. I warped in and D-scan showed that there was a POS nearby. I quickly scanned it down and found that it was not abandoned (shields were still up), with three unpiloted ships sitting there. I also noted that were were only two planets in this wormhole, limiting my PI options. Finally, the (one person) corp that owned the POS also owned the POCOs for the planets, and they had set a 100% tax rate. Stubborn as I am, I decided that I could live without using the POCOs and use this C1 as a training ground for living in a wormhole. With the entrance bookmarked, I realized that I had less than 24 hours to get my WH PI alt ready to hop into this wormhole.

I decided on using an alt for this adventure because PI is relatively low-maintenance and between refreshing my extractors and bringing my output to k-space to sell, I'd have nothing to do otherwise. Plus, my main had just set himself up at Solitude and I wanted to continue having fun and learning and experiencing new things. However, I had to decide what the best course of option was for my alt who wouldn't have the benefit of a POS in w-space. One of my Solitude campus mates suggested I take in a cloaked Epithal with warp stabs and a scanner probe. I thought this would be a good idea so I trained up the skills on my alt and ran around buying the necessary components to get the ship ready. I also bought a mobile depot since an Epithal can't hold a command center without 4 expanded cargoholds and I wanted those warp stabs for my trips into k-space at a later time. Also, it would be nice to have a "home" at a hidden location in my C1.

Two trips later I had everything I needed in the wormhole and prepared to settle down. I placed my command center and set up a small P0 -> P1 operation to get started. As the P1s start completing (they're already moving pretty fast with the high extraction rate thanks to the large amount of P0 available on the planet), I'll start practicing trips into k-space to sell my products. Tonight my 24h cycle will be done and I'll have some P1 to sell! That'll be another adventure all together.

Hi, I am an EVE Altoholic

Hi, my name is Jeff Kione and I am an EVE altoholic. Welcome to my blog.

The purpose of this blog is to give the reader a new player's perspective on EVE Online. My blog will primarily focus on my interests, which at this time are wormholes, trading and the economy, and industry.

One of the best things about EVE is that there is such a wide variety of things to do and to try. As someone who has a lot of interests, it was not long before I started creating alts to try out different aspects of the game. I have a WH PI alt, a trader alt and a manufacturing alt at this time, in addition to my main character. 

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I started playing EVE a few months ago when I heard about one of the big null-sec battles on Reddit. As a big MMO player, I was surprised that I had not heard of EVE Online before and I was excited to try it out. I did some research on the game and heard about it's incredibly difficult learning curve. The more I researched, the more interested I became, and I was incredibly happy when my download finished. After I joined the game, my first priority was to join EVE University because I was using its Wiki as my primary source of EVE information. 

My first goal as a new player was to get into mining because I had read much about mining being a good way to start the game. While mining does generate ISK, it was not long before I grew incredibly tired of shooting asteroids in high-sec. I participated in one (and only one) shared can mining fleet that lasted for several hours. The ISK I made from that fleet was nice, but the process was so mindnumbingly boring that I needed to find something else to do.

Exploration had been something that I was interested in after doing the exploration tutorials at the start of the game and hearing of the vast riches that could be obtained by doing it. I remember quite clearly scanning down my first wormhole and mentioning what I had found in the EVE public chat. Several people encouraged me to jump in, perhaps hoping that I would be met with a fleet of wormhole denziens on the other side. Lucky for me, I made it out of that wormhole alive, but I got bit by the wormhole bug and became very focused on gaining the skills required to live in w-space.

Fast forward to the present and I am still with EVE University. I am a member of the Wormhole Campus and I'm living full-time in w-space. I have learned a good deal about what it takes to live in w-space, and hopefully I can pass some of that knowledge on through this blog.

My next several blog posts will consist of posts that I've already written and published on the EVE University forums. They detail my initial foray into w-space, prior to my main character joining the Wormhole Campus. Once I have caught up, I will begin posting about my current endeavours.

Until next time!