January Has Been Slow
Published January 25, 2012 | 
January has been a slow month for me, at least in-game. Adhar and his sidekick (alt) Vlad have been skilling up, but work commitments have kept me largely out of game (and away from Twitter, and Google Reader, and… pretty much anything resembling fun.) So if it seems a bit quiet, well, it has been.
Coming to the realization that I simply don’t have the ability to invest in what it will take to develop a corporation from the ground up (at least not right now), Adhar turned over the reins of AK Sciences to Vlad (now officially a 1-pilot corporation), and set off for the Amarr Militia Office.
Why faction warfare, in a blog largely dedicated to economics and such? The short answer – there’s nothing like field work to gather a bit of research. Plus, a deeper experience in PvP is long overdue for Adhar – at just over 42,000,000 skill points, he’s got passable skills as a frigate pilot (I don’t) but most of his experience is pure industrialist. Blame the feisty pirates of the Tweetfleet (I’m looking at you, Stan and Rixx), but it was long overdue to get some combat time in.
Then January arrived, with a whole year’s worth of work staring my team in the face, all seemingly eager to get started. Right. Now.
So Adhar’s joined the militia, has a T2-fit Punisher, and is camped at a station near the Amarr / Minmatar lowsec border. I’ll keep you posted as the ship losses mount, and any observations about the economics of Lowsec. Flashfresh had a great post recently about The Bastards that described some elements of POCO warfare.
EVE Blog Banter 31 – That’s Not a Moon!
Published December 30, 2011 | This month’s intro text, by Seismic Stan:
As any games journalist would probably tell you, a true and complete review of a Massively Multiplayer Online game is impossible. MMOs are vast, forever evolving entities with too much content for a single reviewer to produce a fair and accurate review. However, a collection of dedicated bloggers and EVE players (past and present) with a wide range of experience in various aspects of the game might be able to pull it off.
This special ‘End of Year’ Blog Banter edition aims to be a crowd-sourced game review. Using your gaming knowledge and experience, join the community in writing a fair and qualified review of EVE Online: Crucible. This can be presented in any manner of your choosing, but will ideally include some kind of scoring system.
With each Blog Banter participant reviewing the areas of EVE Online in which they specialise, the result should be a Metacritic-esque and accurate review by the people who know best.
EVE Online – End of Year Review
As others have noted, reviewing the entirety of EVE is (for most) a fool’s errand. New Eden is a mammoth place, full of opportunities for the inventive player. From the newbie miner to mastering the metagame, it’s a big, big place. Consider this – it’s possible to “play” EVE without logging into the client for days or weeks at a time. A game you play…when you’re not even playing the game. How very Baudrillard.
Industry
Although Crucible didn’t impact industrialists in a major way, POS logistics aside, the manufacturing side of EVE remains as deep and complex as ever. The term ‘crafting’ applies in other games, but those are to EVE as Lego bricks are to an auto assembly plant. Same principles, radically different level of depth. Consider the Tech 2 production chain; it requires components from 4 completely independent disciplines (invention, mining, moon mining, and planetary interaction). The principles aren’t particularly challenging – buy the skills, train them, play the mini-game for that discipline (or buy them on the market).
The series of factors that renders industrial activity so compelling is the interaction with other players, the challenge of logistics, and the vagaries of the market. Profit potential shifts on a regular basis depending on impacts to any of the supply chains necessary to success. Some are more susceptible than others, and other players are always looking for the same market opportunities. Perhaps the only thing that might render industrial activity closer to its real-world counterpart (and still be playable) would be some level of branding and product differentiation.
Delving into the individual industry professions is beyond the scope of this review, although I will point out that each of them is played in a different way from the others. Playing ore miner is not the same as moon miner, is not the same as planetary interaction colony manager, is not the same as researcher / inventor. Some would rather hear the pings and groans of a ship hull failing under a storm of incoming fire than play industrialist, but there’s no doubt that it draws a great many people in (or there’d be no markets.)
PvE Content
I’m familiar with two facets of PvE in EVE: Missions, and Anomalies. Both are ISK faucets – they bring assets into the universe to enable player action. Neither are particularly exciting or have any lasting impact. In other MMOs, the quest system is at least nominally story-driven. Because EVE is a sandbox, however, CCP hasn’t found a way to offer a content experience that progresses the pilot through New Eden along a plot line. The Epic Arcs do this to some degree, but the universe doesn’t change really as a result.
Regular missions grow repetitive very quickly, especially for players inclined to run them excessively as an income stream. Anomalies are much the same, although you get to play the ‘probing’ mini-game.
EVE is a horrible game if you play solo; it is most definitely designed as group game, and solo players are generally hindered in their progress at every step of the way. The irony is that as much distrust as there is in EVE, you must trust to some degree to drink New Eden to the fullest.
The Market
The New Eden markets deserve a separate consideration from Industry. Playing the market game as a station trader (ie, cash on arbitrage) has never particularly enthused me, although it’s certainly a path to riches for the dedicated pilot. The intriguing thing about the market is that it’s almost completely player-driven, and therefore a form of PvP in its own right. (Skill books and blueprints come to mind as notable NPC holdouts).
Player Housing
Ok, that’s what it would be called in some other games. In EVE it represents a game of thrones played on a grand stage. Ranging from an individual pilot’s station hangar, to a high-sec small research POS, to a mighty nullsec outpost, each of these elements represents a place for the pilot to drop some assets, to put down roots. Someday, perhaps, Incarna will evolve to provide the corporate offices we hoped for back in 2008. The ability for an alliance high command to collectively view a 3-d rendering of a battlespace, sent by pilots in system, would be an amazing addition to the immersion.
To this must be added the Captain’s Quarters, which drags the score down on the implementation side, but still gets high marks for initial vision.
PvP
Bigger, more deadly, deeper, and with longer-lasting implications than any other game I’ve ever heard of. When a game comes along that deletes your account and steals your car when you die, I’ll concede the point.
A fleet battle with 3,000 ships – as others have noted, this is undreamed of in other games. When Time Dilation hits Tranquility, larger engagements should become even more commonplace.
The tactical complexity involved in the various types of PvP is equally as compelling. Solo PvP, small gang, gate warfare, station camping, sniping, blasting, ‘blob’ warfare, gate interdiction, trade-route ganking, and vanilla piracy; all have their own compositions and fail/hail fits, tactics and traditions. 3v3 Battleground? Pfft.
The MetaGame
In another MMO I played quite a bit, Scott Johnson did an amazing job with a very popular podcast. Our guild had some forums. That was largely the extent of the metagame in my experience. New Eden has… Chribba, Wollari’s Dotlan, EVE-Central, Mord Fiddle, the CSM, Failheap, and the blogosphere-sphere-sphere-sphere. Oh, and IRC channels. And EVE Radio. And Voices from the Void, and Tech 4 news, the list goes on and on and on. This is due in large part to the fact that EVE is a single universe – there are no shards, and so we’re all playing the same game, not just the same content, and that would seem to make all the difference in the world.
It’s not uncommon for nullsec alliances to engage in psyops and communications disruption OUTSIDE THE GAME before undertaking a big invasion. Seriously, DDOS’ing someone’s Mumble/Jabber/TS/Vent server so they have no fleet comms when your fleet jumps in? Amazing.
Stuff I’ve Got No Input On
* Nullsec – haven’t been down there since POSs were used to claim sovereignty, so no comment here.
* Wormholes – haven’t been to one, but really enjoyed Clarion Call 3.
* Piracy – haven’t been a pirate, although the ragtag bunch on the tweetfleet make it look like a great romp of fun!
* Griefing / Scamming (separate from piracy in method, but not intent – to separate the pilot from their ISK) – although it’s strangely reassuring to see Barbie in Amarr when I visit.
Reviewer Background
I played EVE quite heavily from early 2006 until mid 2008, returned briefly when Incarna rolled, and returned again just ahead of the Crucible expansion. During that initial play period, Adhar was CEO of 2 industrial corporations, lived in high, low, and null sec during the era of POS-Sov. The return to EVE during Incarna yielded some time with the Carbon character creator. Now I’m back with Crucible, and have been working out a deeper plan for Adhar’s time in New Eden. It’s these experiences I’ll rely on for this review; as they say, ‘write what you know’.
The rest of the reviews are over at Freebooted (Seismic Stan’s Blog). If you’ve made it this far, take your masochism to the next level and read the thirty-odd other reviews!
Business Models, or “What My Corporation Wants to Be When it Grows Up”
Published December 22, 2011 | I’m fascinated by business models, revenue streams, market segmentation, and long-term profit potential. It’s part of the reason I returned to EVE – there’s no better simulator (sandbox) that I’m aware of that involves fun AND education.
AK Sciences (Adhar’s corporation) is working on its business model – what differentiates this corporation from the other 50,000 just like it? There are many, many ways to make ISK as a capsuleer in New Eden, and just as many guides explaining how to go about it.
But a good business model goes a step further – it knows *why* it makes money, and the conditions necessary to ensure longevity (or the indicators it’s time to move on to greener pastures.)
A lot of what I see in corporate recruitment posters is the same monotonous drivel one gets reading the want ads in the Sunday paper. “Join us, make money, someday we’re going to live in 0.0!” Yeah, ok. Because there’s no product differentiation in EVE (your T2 AB is the SAME as my T2 AB, down to the serial number / database ID), what makes one corporation different from another isn’t so much what it does, but how it does it.
This would indicate that most of the fringe corporations in New Eden exist because the average capsuleer doesn’t really pay attention (much like your average minimum-wage earner doesn’t pay attention to the stock price of the McDonald’s they work for). Phrased another way, most businesses are still in business because all of the other businesses suck as bad as they do.
As Jim Collins wrote in the (now classic) business book “Good to Great“, one of the fundamental keys to success is getting the right people on the bus. That certainly applies to recruiting in EVE, but it also requires some conceptualization of where you’re going as a corporation. Don’t recruit the best fleet commander in the cluster if you’re going to have him or her watch your fleet turn large rocks into small rocks – she/he will be bored and either leave or cause problems.
Knowing which business model will be effective for your corporation requires some understanding of how New Eden functions. A nullsec sovereignty-holding executor corporation has a much different operating model than a high-sec mining corporation. (Hint: it goes beyond hurling ‘nullbear’/’carebear’ epithets.) Each requires very different staffing and operational profiles, as well as time commitments, infrastructures, logistics and administrative demands.
So when you see a corporation that’s running missions in High-Sec but wants to get to Null-Sec, odds are that corporation doesn’t have a solid plan, and if you join, you’ll be looking for a new corporation in fairly short order.
Figuring out a business model for a corporation, and reading the signs for corporations with strong business models are topics for other posts.
Planetary Interaction, Fuel Blocks, and Margins – Update for 12/14/2011
Published December 14, 2011 | This week shows PI prices doing about what I’d expected – rising to cover the cost of Empire taxation, in order to preserve profit margins. There’s an added wrinkle that I think is going to keep prices high! If you’ll recall from earlier posts on this topic, I expected most of the margin to show up in sell prices, but low- and null-security planetary interaction was expected to exert some downward pressure on the prices.
Well, I might have underestimated the greed of the great alliances. In a recent podcast, one of the hosts mentioned that their alliance was going to be setting tax rates for POCOs in their region to be just shy of Empire rates! Nice coup for landlords, that. It’s another revenue stream for the large power blocs, which will also have the impact of raising the ceiling on the future of PI prices.
If you’re sitting on a stockpile of resources, you can probably wait a while longer before liquidating to pick up some additional profit. The past week’s dip in some commodities is a flat spot on a longer growth line.
Posted in Analysis, Crucible, Planetary Interaction | 
fuel blocks, fuel pellets, pos pellets | 
1 Comment
Pocket Empires – PI Customs Offices in Low-Sec
Published December 9, 2011 | 
Given all the changes to PI (especially for those suckers over at Interbus – short that stock), it seemed worthwhile to do a bit of field work. At issue was whether or not corporations were as yet taking advantage of the opportunity to develop their own fringe empires.
Preparation for this little excursion was fairly simple – cloaky ship and updated clone – check. Tweak an Overview tab to show customs offices – check. Slightly more challenging was the choice of a roam (can you call it a roam if you don’t plan to kill anyone?) route. To begin, I hypothesized that industrialists prefer a modicum of stability in their environment to keep the profits flowing. Easy reach, there.
Based on that assumption, this first excursion took my trusty Recon into a low-sec pocket. Low sec pockets are areas of low-security space surrounded by high-security space, and thus harder, though not impossible, for pirate gangs and fleets to regularly roam through. This particular pocket was less than a dozen jumps away, and contained a near-perfect setup for a low-security planetary empire. There were a few systems without stations, a couple with lots of asteroid belts, and a high number of planets.
The big question – how many of those planets would have player-owned customs stations?
As it turns out, all of them. In the first low-security system I jumped into (0.4), every single one of the 10+ planets had a player corporation POCO (player-owned customs office). Not only that, but all of them were owned by the same corporation. Interesting!
Doing a bit of research, most of the other capsuleers in the system were members of the same alliance, although from different corporations. The picture was becoming clearer – this system was home to not just a low-security industrial corporation, but an entire alliance.
Moving on to the next system, the customs office picture was very similar – every planet had a player-owned customs office orbiting it, although not all from the same corporation. A few of them were corporations that didn’t belong to the umbrella alliance, suggesting multiple tenants in this region of low-sec.
Heading deeper to a 0.3 system at the very back of the pocket (no space station), I found that none of the planets had POCOs – all were still owned by Interbus.
Throughout this exercise the directional scan showed the usual assortment of towers and ships hiding behind force fields – most of them armed to the teeth, as you’d expect in an area where the opposition can hotdrop a dread fleet.
Although fairly short, this field work clearly revealed that CCP’s plan to push entice more pilots out of empire appears to be working.
Posted in Crucible, Planetary Interaction | Crucible, PI, player-owned customs office, POCO | 2 Comments