Salvaging Manticore

I've spent the last two weeks flying with Future Corps under the Sleeper Social Club alliance banner as part of their "sleepover" for EVE University students. They offer select Unistas a chance to live with them in their C5 hole and see what C5 living is all about. This is a story of some content I found.

I was scanning down our chain and jumped into a new hole, mistakenly mis-remembering the type of wormhole I had jumped through (it was a frigate hole). Someone quickly corrected me but I had already begun scanning this hole so I decided to continue.

There were some ships on d-scan (not unusual for a wormhole system, people often leave ships floating in their POS), but like a good scout I decided to look around for POSes first. After finding no POSes, I realized that the fleet I had on d-scan must be running sites or sitting on a hole somewhere. I know they weren't at the hole I came through, but I didn't want to drop probes and announce my presence (possibly scaring them in the process). So I decided to see if they were at one of the combat anomalies. Turns out, they were.

I land on grid with the site running fleet and copy d-scan into a d-scan parse tool and send it to my corpmates. Although I'm through a frigate hole, they decide to bring stealth bombers and dictors down the chain to gank them since they were mostly battleships with a single stealth bomber.

As they're finishing the site and the MTU is tractoring things in, we decide to catch them at the next site. I bookmark the original MTU for good measure and follow them to the next site.

I land on grid within 6k of a passing sleeper frigate and try to remember to breathe as I come very close to being decloaked in the middle of the site. I get myself into position 20km off the targets and bookmark their new MTU. We decide that bombers will warp to me and the dictors would warp to the MTU. With a bunch of sleeper battleships on grid, the fleet jumps in and warps.

Turns out, the two different MTU bookmarks confuse a couple of my corpmates and a few of them end up at the old site where a Manticore is sitting around. They pop him and rush back to the fight.

We drop a bunch of bubbles and start popping their Basilisks. Once they go down, we pop the rest of their site running fleet.

Turns out that random Manticore was a salvaging Manticore that was holding all of the loot for the site running fleet that we killed. Ouch. That ended up being 5 billion worth of kills. Not too bad for a little bit of scanning!

Analysis: PLEX Prices Are Falling

CCP recently announced that beginning January 1st, 2015, input broadcasting and input multiplexing (read: ISBoxing commands across multiple clients with one click) will be against the EULA.

The price of PLEX has been falling in light of this announcement. Why? I'll tell you.

ISBoxers PLEX multiple accounts to multibox at the same time. When ISBoxing becomes against the EULA, they will no longer be able to use those accounts for their original purpose. It is therefore likely that they will stop purchasing PLEX for those accounts, the demand for PLEX will fall and so will the price of PLEX in response.

But that is not what is causing the immediate price decrease. People with any sort of economic insight will foresee the demand decrease for PLEX and associated price decrease and will start trying to liquidate any PLEX that they might be holding on to, before they start losing ISK as the prices adjust. This is classic speculation at work.

Now, notably, as the price of PLEX drops, those who buy PLEX with real dollars and convert them to ISK will suddenly be receiving less ISK per PLEX than they used to. For some people, purchasing PLEX with real dollars will no longer be worth it and they will stop. This will reduce the supply of PLEX on the market, counterbalancing the impact of the decrease in demand.

What does this mean? It is almost certain that in the short to medium run, the quantity of PLEX on the market will decline. The impact on the price of PLEX is uncertain - in the immediate short run, prices will fall due to speculation and then demand declining. After that, the prices will stabilize at a new level that might be higher or lower than their initial value yesterday. I would imagine that the prices won't stabilize until after January 1st, when we see how the rest of the markets react to a lack of ISBoxers.

Buckle up folks, we're in for a bit of a ride.

Bait Mining Fleet

I managed to log in to EVE to do something other than processing applications to EVE University and processing the title requests of existing members (I'm a very busy bee). As I logged in I heard a familiar voice explaining to members of the Amarr Mining Campus (AMC) how they would gain access to Innuendo, our home wormhole. Sounds like they were going to be learning how to mine in unsafe space protected by PVP-hungry wormhole dwellers that always jump on any opportunity for a fight.

Our high-security static was two jumps from Amarr and as a result our wormhole was pretty busy. We had day trippers coming in to find themselves relinquished of their ships and shown the fast way home thanks to bubbles from HICs. But we also had a neighbouring wormhole connection that had a relatively new wormhole corporation inside.

There was some movement by this new wormhole corp as they lost a few ships to us. I think they managed to get eyes on our mining fleet and decided that they wanted to take them out. We warned the miners that they might be getting some company but not to fear as some of us were waiting on the sidelines, hungry for blood. "Bonus points if you tackle while continuing to mine," someone quipped as we reassured our visiting carebears.

It wasn't too long later that we saw a Deimos on d-scan with an Impairor and Condor. I'm still not exactly sure what that noob ship was doing there but what can I say, this is a really new wormhole corp. Shortly after that we heard from the miners that the Deimos had landed on grid after getting a warp-in from a cloaky Helios.

10 of us descended on the ore anomaly in rapid succession, including a HIC for snagging the pods. As per usual, I rode my trusty Myrmidon into battle (it's becoming a running joke that I always bring my Myrmidon even in the shiniest of fleets). It wasn't too long after that when the dust had settled and we had shown them the shortcut back to k-space.

Let's see, what else is new? My HIC training is done so I picked up my Devoter that I bought off of a friend and brought it to our home wormhole. While I was at is, I purchased a Guardian (my first one ever!) and also brought it back. I'm about 2 days from Logi 5 so I'm looking forward to having that done. Of course, now I'm space poor with less than 40m to my name. Time to make some money so I can buy my first Legion.

Introducing the E-Uni Podcast!

I wanted to share with my readers a new project that has popped up at EVE University: the EVE University Podcast. I've listened to the first episode and found it quite interesting. The first episode features hosts Kazon Necht (Assistant Personnel Manager) and Danielle en Divalone (Student Advocate) along with their guests Azmodeus Valar (E-Uni CEO) and Krevlorn Severasse (Teacher). 

Here is how Kazon introduced this new project:

The EVE Universe is big and filled with a lot of people who enjoy providing information for all of its players to enjoy. Among the social media experts, bloggers and podcasters are a lot of people who cover various aspects of EVE. We felt that there was a gap in the New Player Experience area and so the EVE University Podcast was born. 

Your hosts Kazon Necht and Danielle en Divalone will take you through various aspects of the University throughout each Podcast, picking an area or topic of discussion and focusing on how it impacts the Uni and the new player experience. At the end, they will evaluate the changes in the most recent patch and talk about upcoming changes in the next proposed patch.

The release cycle is scheduled to be every three weeks or so to allow enough time for events to transpire.

In the first episode we have an interview with EUni CEO Azmodeus Valar where we ask him about himself, his time in the Uni, what he's done and what he might have planned. Azmo then joins us again, after a shortened version of "Introduction to Eve University" from Krevlorn, to chat about the upcoming changes in Phoebe and what they could mean for our members.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them in soundcloud or send Kazon and Danielle a forum message or in game mail.

Where can you find the podcast link and more information?? http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Podcast

Go and give the first episode a listen and let me (and us) know what you think!

Three Domis, a Golem and an Ashimmu

This past weekend I finally had time to get some actual play time in EVE. It's been a while since I logged in and actually got to join in on a PvP fleet in our wormhole. 

A ping went out for three domis running sites a few jumps down our chain. I logged in and grabbed my trusty Myrmidon and formed up on the outbound wormhole to the good-natured heckling of some of my fleet mates - I was the only one not in a T2/T3.

Our scouts reported that the domis had turned back and entered their home system, a C5 with a very active d-scan. Apparently there were a lot of pods moving around reshipping into stealth bombers and then vanishing off of d-scan. As it turns out, they were heading out a frigate hole into another wormhole system where they were busy trying to kill a Golem (which they managed to do). 

We knew that they had scouts out and about so we tried baiting them with three T1 BCs and two Augorors, hoping that they'd see the T1 logi and come try to pounce on us. Unfortunately they didn't take the bait (or didn't see us, since at this point they were still busy with the Golem) so we had to switch to plan B. 

As we slowly moved our fleet closer and closer to the wormhole leading into their system, there was some debate about whether we should race to their frigate hole, toss a bubble up and try to get some kills, as we had been sitting around not seeing any action. Our FC ended up reaching out to them and organizing a fight. 

They jumped into us with a bunch of stuff, including four Guardians and a bunch of T3 and faction ships. We had one less Guardian than they did, so we tried to focus one of their Guardians off of the field. However, we were fighting in a Cataclysmic Variable system so remote repairs were boosted making taking down logi rather difficult. Our FC called for us to switch our DD suddenly to one of their DD, and he almost went down. Lucky for him his logibros were paying attention and brought him back up. We switched back to the original Guardian and almost broke him. At this point, they decided to bail back to their home C5 system. 

Now while most of the fighting had gone on sitting at 0 on the wormhole, a lone Ashimmu had burned out to go try to neut someone on our side. When his friends jumped back to their home system, we turned our attention back to him and subsequently blapped him. Yes, you did see that correctly; our CEO, the Director of HR and the Director of Education are on that kill mail. See, management get to have fun sometimes!

All in all, we ended up having quite the fun fight with these guys. Additionally, we had the most people online in fleet that any of us had seen in quite some time. It's been a while since we were able to field a fleet this size, since we've been losing a lot of our more experienced members to higher class wormhole corps. 

Next on the docket for me: bringing in some ships for PvP that aren't T1 BCs. I did finish up the training to fly a Legion, but I'm not quite prepared to buy one just yet. I still need to get myself a Guardian into the wormhole as well as finish up my Logistics V. Always more to do!

Research Race

CCP has annouced an in-game event regarding a research race having to do with sleepers in w-space. Until downtime on Thursday October 14th, turning in Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries will contribute to your faction's progress. At the end of the event, the order in which the factions received the highest amount of blue loot will determine the order in which a new technology will be introduced.

I'm very excited to see what this new technology is and how it will impact w-space, if at all. Tell me, are you going to be donating your loot instead of selling it on the market like usual?

Things have been busy

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I last updated my blog. Things have been so hectic at work in real life that I have had less time for EVE than normal. Let's go over some of the recent events that have happened over the past few weeks.

Hyperion has come and gone with the new wormhole changes. The changes to C4s have made chains considerably longer in my experience, and even the presence of more wormholes all together has made things rather interesting. Frigate wormholes are plentiful but I haven't been seeing too many people take advantage of them. Frigate doctrines have been discussed but not much has happened yet. I believe I saw a post by corbexx saying that his corporation was using them to gank site runners, so that's a useful application.

Crius' industry changes have had quite a bit of success, with increases in manufacturing increasing by 27% and with research increasing up to 165% due to the slot changes. Still, 27% more activity in manufacturing is a huge change and I'm betting that a large majority of that is thanks to how much easier it is to manufacture now.

CSM Matias has resigned and has been replaced with Asayanami, a WH candidate. I'm pleased with having a second wormhole representative on the CSM so this is good news for us wormhole people. I'm looking forward to see what Asayanami has in store for us.

Oceanus releases on September 30th and will be featuring more changes, including some visual updates to wormholes and a bunch of balance changes. Interceptors and interdictors will be targeted off the bat. Something not coming in Oceanus are changes to invention and reverse engineering, which should be interesting. Hopefully they don't make a change that will make all of my invention training useless!

Well that's about it for now. I'll continue to track the Oceanus changes as they're announced and post about them here.