BB76 - Are Fleet Commanders Special?

This month's blog banter asked a compelling question, one that touches on the importance of content amplifiers within Eve:

At fanfest CCP Fozzie proposed a potential new ship class. Let’s call it the fleet commander’s flagship for now. This is to try and prevent “FC Headshotting” where the opposing fleet knows who the FC is and alpha’s them off the field leaving the rest of the fleet in confusion and disarray. Fozzie mentioned a ship with a great tank but no offensive abilities. Is this a good idea? Is FC head-shotting a legitimate tactic? If CCP do go down the route of a “flagship” how might this work? Also is a new ship the answer or is there another way of giving an FC the ability not to be assassinated 12 seconds into the fight without letting players exploit it?

Boy, this question only scratches the surface of the deeper issue beneath it. Too often, we as commentators choose to focus purely on raw numbers. How many players live in high-sec vs. null? What's out average PCU? What's your killboard efficiency?

We're taught to think with mathematical efficiency. In school, we're taught to quantify and substantiate with X number of proof points or number of paragraphs. And too often, we try to port this tendency over to rhetorical arguments as well.

Put simply, we make the mistake of believing that the purpose of the argument is to make the more logical argument. This, as anyone knows, is foolish. Logic has little to do with human nature and the current of human passion. And far more aspects of this game are based on emotion, perception, and narrative than any of these writers would like to believe.

Then again, maybe I'm more of an adherent to the German philosophers than they are. Our world is "will and idea" more than it is fact. Facts fail to capture all the really exciting parts of life that make it worth living, and very rarely does the optimal or ideal mathematical, factually predicted result occur.

And that's the foundation of my pretty strong position on this point.

"Hey Guys, Let's Go Shoot Things"

A couple years ago, I decided to branch out and purchase my first "second PvP character" from the bazaar. While I've upgraded them over the years - selling the one I owned for a profit and buying a replacement for a discount - I saw the value in having a second character in a different corporation than Talvorian.

Each corporation or alliance bases out of the same station and uses the same group of FCs. They use the same doctrines, have the same strong time zones, and go after the same kinds of content. In the end, having multiple characters in the same corp means you get to go deeper in the same content.

I like variety. Part of me wants to help build something. Part of me just likes to get out there and shoot things. Jump clone timers mean you can't just keep swapping from location to location; you're locked into one kind of content per character per day most of the time, and certainly no more than two per day, assuming you schedule your JCs carefully.

But when you have two independent characters, you can really enjoy the variety Eve offers. I tended to keep one in sov null and another in lowsec - where I could resupply it easily and didn't have to worry about evaccing assets or using my main to carrier-jump resources in or out. About three months ago, I changed that up a little when I realized Valeria was fully cross-trained and support skilled through medium weapons and sentry drones.

I bought a dedicated ratting character to free her up. For the first time, I had two highly skilled PvP characters who were both a) free of the need to rat, and b) capital-capable. The second point can't be overlooked; a capital-capable pilot can be self-reliant for restocking and moving ships all across the map, and is much more attractive to any corp it wants to join.

Now, I just had to wait for that pesky war to slow down before I took advantage of it.

100: A Review of the First 100 Posts

My last article was post number 100 of this blog.  100 posts in 8 months.  An average of 2.4 days between posts. Nice round numbers are a great time to look back on what went well, what went poorly, and – of course, generate lots of wonderful lists and summaries.

Committing to write a blog that provides new content every couple days takes a lot of work.  While we all have plenty to talk about in corp chat or on TS while we play, recalling the small revelations and lessons for a broad audience takes a little getting used to.  At times, it’s easy to feel completely tapped out, particularly since I don’t fall back on relinking fits I find on the Internet or rehashing losses of the day.

A Pirate’s Life For Me

When I started playing Eve, I was a high-sec mission runner.  I remember watching with glee as my sec status ever so slowly began to tick upwards.  Somehow, it felt good to be +5.0 security status.    I felt like I was doing the “right” thing and getting rewarded for it.  Surely, the entire Eve community would appreciate and recognize my excellent work.

Then I joined a null-sec alliance which – surprisingly to me – went roaming through low-sec.  I attacked the primary and found my sec status actually drop!  This was impossible… I was “the good guy”.

Keep in mind, this was back when attacking someone in low-sec would drop your sec status by 0.8 or so.  So a single low-sec engagement would quite a bit of ratting to boost your status again.  Of course, this was also the age of the system-specific sec timer, so boosting it again wasn’t as much of a problem.

The End of the Small Scale Fight?

This one is going to be odd.  I don’t know where I’m going with it as I write it, so we’ll see how this turns out.  I’m of two minds regarding whether small-gang warfare is truly coming to an end, or whether it’s simply in desperate need of innovation.

Over at Jester’s Trek, Ripard Teg talks about how it’s becoming increasingly harder to find small-gang fights.  In a nutshell, the average size of a roaming gang is increasing rapidly because:

1. Effective logistics ships are easier to fly,
2. The number of skill points of an average pilot is increasing, meaning they can fly better ships and more easily fly with boosters
3. Warp speed changes make slowing down and tackling roaming gangs easier, meaning nano and kiting gangs are nearly impossibly to fly these days (a familiar tactic of hunters).
4. Pilots are generally very risk-adverse, and simply won’t engage unless odds are overwhelmingly in their favor.

This has, he states (and re-states from his alliance mate), caused a general up-tick in the size of “small gang”.  The risk-adverse nature of Eve players naturally means fleets responding to invaders are increasing in size – no one wants to reward roamers with a whole fleet of kills, which only encourages more roamers.  But hunter gangs themselves will increase in size: defenders are bringing more logi, which means the hunters need more dps to break that logi.  As players become more experienced, they learn to anticipate everything, which tends to make them more risk adverse (“I’m not undocking without five logi”).  So fifteen is increasingly becoming fifty.

Fear, the Great Motivator

In my last article, I talked about how fear can paralyze your decision-making process, and suggested a procedural approach to coping with unfamiliar and fearful situations.  But fear serves critical purposes, such as encouraging innovation and intelligent flying.

It’s important to distinguish between at least two different kinds of fear, panic and paranoia.  Panic is sudden fear that interrupts your decision-making process, such as what I discussed in the last post.  But paranoia is a type of fear born of the knowledge of all the things that conspire to obliterate you in Eve.

In the real world, paranoia is the belief that everyone is out to get you.  I suppose paranoia doesn’t really exist in Eve, since everyone IS out to get you.  But the common element – suspicion of everything – still holds true, so I’ll use the term fairly.

Fear, the Great Paralytic

Space is a big place, and in Eve, every session affords you plenty of threats you should genuinely fear.  Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that this is ultimately a game.  Maybe you’re jumping that low/high gate for the first time wondering what you’ll find.  Maybe you’re participating in your first tidi grind and worried that you’ll face soul-crushing lag and lose all control of your ship.  Maybe it’s your first time hitting that “jump to xxx” button in your new carrier.

Fear is natural.  Fear is useful.  But fear can also turn to terror and leave you unable to make rational decisions.

Everyone who has ever entered low or null has faced the familiar scenario.  You load grid in your Drake only to find a dozen ships orbiting the gate with drones out.  If you’re in null-sec, they’ll even have a Sabre to trap the pods of any unfortunate victims.  Maybe one of those interceptors is starting to get pretty close to decloaking you.

Observations on Rubicon Interceptors

Well, as anyone who has been playing the game since Tuesday is aware, interceptors are all the rage now.  Early adopters like Black Legion have begun experimenting with Crow fleets with Sabre support.

Incidentally, I was flat-out wrong when I suggested CCP would purge all charges with the Rubicon expansion.  I saw at least one Sabre launch a whole series of bubbles, a fun trick each pre-Rubicon fitted Sabre can do once before having to reload.  They were having a little fun with it, making what appeared to be skid marks in space.  My 10-bubble Sabre is sitting in my hangar until I really need it.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched them practice with the new mechanics in Doril.  In particular, I noticed that they spend some time setting up bookmarks and practicing warping to various locations.  No longer can an Interceptor simply warp to a station, be caught by his gang’s bubble, and tackle a

What’s In My Hangar – Pre-Rubicon Edition

Over at Jester’s Trek, Ripard Teg posts every year listing the ships sitting in his hangar.  He uses it to track changes in fleet doctrines, fittings, and functions over time, particularly as a result of expansions and rebalances.  I thought it was such a good idea, I’ve decided to steal it.

But instead of annually, I’m going to look at my hangar just before every expansion.  Immediately after an expansion, my hangar tends to change rapidly and chaotically, but after a few months, it’s usually pretty settled.  With Rubicon about three weeks away, I figure now’s as good a time as any to commemorate my ships for Odyssey.

So, without further ado…

Lessons: Know Your Engagement Range

Yesterday, one of our FCs took out a fleet of 27 in early USTZ, consisting mainly of Muninns with some tacklers, bubblers, and 2 Scimitars as support.  With so many sov alliances deployed to Curse, we figured we’d be able to find a fight of a similar-sized fleet.

Once we were out, intel reported a Cynabal/Vagabond gang of about 30 a couple jumps away.  We were torn between keeping our distance of it and surging on in.  We knew we’d be in trouble if they stayed mobile on us, but we’d tear them up if we could surprise them or catch them in a stop bubble.  It’d be a good test of our skills at roughly equal numbers (and a little outnumbered), so we decided to chase after them.

And this situation was the perfect example of the importance of aggression.

Our +1 scout jumped through the target gate and reported the enemy gang sitting at decloak range (about 10-15 km from the gate, spread out).  We fleet-warped to the out-gate and held until our scout – who had to burn back through and jump to survive after his gate cloak ended – could enter system again and re-confirm the fleet’s location.