Regional Local

This week during Eve Vegas, CCP expressed their long-held displeasure with local as an intel tool, but that they weren’t ready to launch a comprehensive change to the mechanics.

At the core of the problem is a need to communicate with people in the same system that doesn’t also announce the presence of new pilots entering that system. Some players simply advocate wormhole local, in which players don’t show up until they speak, but CCP has been resistant to this in the past for all areas of space, and I tend to think this would take something special away from wormhole space.

At the same time, CCP expressed a general dissatisfaction with the ease of null ratting isk generation and the speed of level 5 mission blitzing. In both cases, a new pilot entering local is a cause for concern, albeit much more so for null ratting. I don’t think the payouts are the problem as much as the early warning detection local provides; when you feel incredibly safe, it’s very easy to earn isk in null, perhaps too easy.

So, let’s kill two birds with one stone: Regional Local.

When Should You Let Your Kids Play Eve?

I try to stay connected with Eve when I travel and can’t actually log in. I’ll check my alliance forums, our corp Discord, update Evenova, read through Reddit, and check zkill for activity. We all have a few minutes here or there to stay informed, and when you’re unable to log in, those snippets of info are like water to a man in the desert.

This week, I read a comment on Reddit about how a man and his son would use Eve lingo in the real world. That got me thinking about the background of that kind of situation.

At first, I thought about how very few people are really suited to playing Eve. It’s an unforgiving game that doesn’t protect you either from the wickedness of other people or the consequences of your actions. Rather, it rubs your face in both. Most people aren’t made with stern enough stuff to endure that for entertainment. On the one hand, I’d deem it a sign of good parenting that his son enjoys Eve enough to not only play it, but internalize the lingo. To me, that reflects well on his parenting.

On the other hand, he lets his son play Eve. That’s just not right on so many levels. This really is a twisted game, with the full display of humanity on display.

So, is he a great or a terrible dad? At what age is it okay to let your kids play Eve?

Colonizing the 30-Minute Session

I’ve been playing a lot of Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO as the kids call it) in the last month or so. Trading really has freed up the time I used to spend ratting in Eve. Really, you can’t ask for two games that are more different than CS and Eve.

Where Eve is all about making your own path and creating opportunities and goals, CS spoon-feeds you one of four or five possible routes on every map and clear objectives. Save the hostages, or plant the bomb. That’s it. There isn’t anything more complicated than that.

Counter Strike is all about a single skill, twitch reflexes. You need to be able to line up a shot and fire as fast as possible. It’s based on physical reaction time, so it’s a much more difficult skill to acquire. Eve, on the other hand, requires many skills that are much easier to perfect. The challenge comes from applying them when you see that yellow box appear around your target. Success in Eve requires a much more difficult skill to acquire: contextual decision-making. It’s borne from situational awareness, something that most games don’t need.

As a result, it takes a lot longer to become proficient. You’re not teaching your hands to do things, you’re teaching your brain to work a different way. It requires commitment over months or years. And each play session of Eve requires significant time. It can often take half an hour or more just to get to your destination. Form-ups may take half an hour again. And then you need to make your way home. It’s unlikely that an op will go faster than two hours from start to finish. It consumes an evening entirely.

And that’s Eve’s main problem.

Restocking the Pond

For the past couple years, CCP has done a great job of providing overhauls to pretty much every key PvP mechanic in the game. Stations and POSes are being converted to Citadels, new ships were launched, and null sovereignty was completely redefined. It took a lot of work, and it changed a lot about one of the key selling points of the game: sovereignty by large player groups.

At the same time, we saw a group of bankers take down a coalition of alliances that many considered to be unstoppable. Many people, including myself, argued that the CFC would only fall as a result of internal rot. While that’s certainly true – key corps and players defected as a result of a delayed boredom – the catalyst was one banker stealing from another.

That’s right, a complaint between bankers led to the complete obliteration of an empire that had stood for over five years. What a time to be alive! Granted, the CFC didn’t really fight, as much as it sought to preserve as many of its supercap assets as possible for a future rebuild. There were some good fights, but not nearly as many as you’d expect.

And yet, what was the effect? PvPers absolutely loved it, and a lot of players joined groups like Spectre Fleet to participate in such a historical event, even if they had no reason to particularly hate the CFC. Alliances that had grown fat from years of ratting were ejected, replaced by many more smaller alliances. And, as a result, the CFC – what remains of it – decided to move to Delve, hopefully creating a new PvP hotspot in the process.

That’s all wonderful as far as results go. Yet, the average logged-in users declined yet again. More people are “winning” Eve by quitting. And Citadel clearly hasn’t generated the mass influx of new blood it intended.

Why?

Making Trading Easier

A couple days ago, someone on reddit asked what sort of tools for Eve the community was asking for. At first, nothing came to mind, but after deciding to start up a trade empire (read: market stocking), I do have a suggestion after all.

Any time you do any trading, there are a few key things you want to know. What's your buy price? How fast are you likely to sell through your stock (allowing you to replenish and put that profit back to work as principle for the next round)? And, most importantly, how profitable is it for you?

Now, this last bit is actually quite difficult to calculate. To understand it, you need to know the price you buy at, the price you sell at, and the quantity moved. Now, if you're selling one item, that's not that difficult to keep track of. You can open up a spreadsheet and pull the data, then compare the results to see what you're making.

But what happens when you have a hundred different items selling piecemeal as you adjust your prices to reflect the competition? Your sell prices are all different? They're interspersed with other items, with restocks of items you sell through, etc. etc. Your wallet balance can't tell you if you're making money, since your profit is being fed back into your operation.

Plus, you may salvage or loot any number of additional items, rendering "Transactions" useless too.  You may be looting missions, looting wrecks from your kills, and repackaging and sellling ships you don't need anymore, creating a lot of mess.

At any given time, your wallet balance is an imprecise measure of your profitability.

So, if there are any enterprising individuals out there, I'd like to see a tool that allows you to track your market orders and calculate profit and loss over time, filtering out unrelated items. In an ideal world, you could customize which items you track, either by a clipboard pull/copy & paste or by tracking items sold on market order. If it pulled directly from the api this would be a tool I'd use every day.

I'm relatively new at trading as a profession. In the past, I've tracked perhaps ten items at a time, and the prospect of doing it with jump freighters, full fittings, modules, ammo, and implants is definitely going to require some additional thinking on my part.

I'd love to hear how other traders do it - not their items and routes, of course, but what tools do they consult every day to do their business? What's the first thing they do when they log in?

Tips for Adjusting Overview Colors

The overview is the most vital means of interacting with Eve, and it's critical to get the right information you need in any given situation. As of the June 2016 patch, each character can have up to 8 overview tabs set up at a time, with an unlimited number of overview profiles.

These overview tabs are highly customizable, and I encourage you to spend a little time creating your own. Because you can import and export your whole overview set between characters, you only need Or, you can search for "Eve overview packs" to find some pre-made ones. I don't use any of them, though, so I can't recommend a good pack. I put together about two dozen of my own combinations, which I use for specific situations. My standing overview tabs are:

• PvP: Despite the name, my first overview includes everything that could do damage to me or be relevant for PvP, including NPCs, bubbles, and basic warp-outs.
• Reds + Gates: Includes only non-blue, non-fleet member ships and stargates. This tab is for when I'm in a fight or scanning for targets and don't want the extra clutter.
• Fleet: One of the new tabs added since the 5-to-8 expansion, this tab includes only fleet members.
• Loot: Wrecks and cargo containers; incidentally, my cargohold also has a filter for 5 mil+ loot.
• Misc: Jack-of-all-trades overview tab, which I swap out as necessary with my niche presets.
• Planet: The second of the new tabs, the planet tab used to be one of my "misc" profiles.
• Belts: The third of the new tabs, also populated "misc" occasionally.
• Probes+Bubbles: As my last tab, I can shift+tab to this one from my primary tab, "PvP" to quickly check the area for anything that might block my travel, including anchored and dictor bubbles.

I should also point out one overview profile I recommend everyone have: a "safety" profile. While this profile doesn't find its way onto a tab, it's my default scanning profile. This safety profile is identical to my "Reds +Gates" profile, but also includes both core and combat scanner probes. I can't over-state the value of this profile. While I started using it when I'd run cosmic signatures in hostile null space (to see both ships in dscan and any time they'd drop probes), I found it to be absolutely essential when going whaling as well. I didn't always have the luxury of dropping a mobile depot and swapping to an armor repairer in a completely empty system, and being able to see both probes and hostile ships at the same time was critical in preventing me from missing a probe scan cycle as I changed overview tabs. It saved me more than once.

But all of that would be highly confusing if not for one fun option: overview tab colors! After all, it's easy to forget which tab you're on, or what the different tabs are for. Eight tabs is a lot for the eye to capture, and it's a psychological fact that the maximum number of elements an average person can keep in their mind at once is 7. Some can manage more, some can manage fewer. Colors help break up the tabs. But, there's no easy way to set up color options.

Rather than reproduce the description of how to add color to your overview tabs, I'd prefer to refer you to the master reference at stackexchange.com. Follow this guide and you can sort your overview in a quick, meaningful way.

This is much easier to keep track of. If you don't like the colors indicated in the guide, you can choose any colors you want. Just reference a color code guide and change the field within the color tag.

Anyways, experiment and find something that works for you. But, with eight overview tabs to use, you shouldn't ever lose a ship - or an opportunity for a kill - because of fumbling for the right preset.

Good luck out there!

Revamping ECM

With one more post before my 400th (and the typical "past 100" review), I thought I might as well raise another thorny problem. What to do about ECM?

Each race has its own special electronic warfare abilities, of course. For instance, the Gallente warp disruption ability was absolutely vital for many fleets - albeit not as much now with the Orthrus - particularly for any fleet that focuses tackle ability on only a couple ships. This powerful ability was paired with the relatively useless sensor dampening. With the Minmatar, target painting is nice, but rarely makes a difference in small gang or solo fights, whereas the webbing range can help dictate engagement range in a meaningful way.

Perhaps owing to their status as the oldest of the four current empires, the Amarr have the best and most useful advantages for small gang and solo, the neuting range, neuting amount, and tracking disruption bonuses. Those three abilities make the Curse and Pilgrim fearsome beasts, able to hold down, suck dry, and render impotent any turret or missiles ships (with missile disruptors). Really, they only need fear drone boats.

And then, there's the Caldari ECM, the bane of nearly any fleet, of any size. If the other ECM ships can be considered a force multiplier, ECM is really a force halver. For, unlike the other abilities that all diminish the combat or defensive capability of a ship or a fleet, ECM completely annihilates it.

Or, it doesn't. An ECM ship either entirely removes an enemy vessel for the fight for the length of its successful jam, or it has absolutely no effect. It's effectiveness is based purely on chance. Even good fitting techniques - fitting the right jams for the kind of ship you're facing - only increases or decreases that chance. Ultimately, random-number generation determines the success.

That fact alone put ECM on the rebalance block. So, what should we replace it with? I certainly can't say for certain, but there are a few options being suggested.

Flagships or Bodyguards?

At the expense of getting two posts out of a single topic (I'm totally shameless enough to do it), I figured a different take on the "flagship" concept (covered in this month's blog banter) deserved a second post.

The blog banter itself was a reaction to CCP's suggestion about adding a new class of ship to the game, a flagship, which would be highly durable and serve the purpose of allowing a pilot to stay on grid for a significant period of time, specifically to counter headshotting by the enemy fleet.

Suffice to say, this provoked a bit of discussion.

One reader in particular was skeptical about having a special ship class have permanent effects tied to it, and suggested an effect that would buff the FC's ship instead:

I'd have it be a more nebulous mechanic born out of the Fleet window which applies an effect much like a Links but to only one pilot. The real trouble is bracketing this effect to only occur in 'real' fights where headshotting is an issue.

This line of thinking tied in so perfectly with a comment my wife made that I wanted to explore it a bit further.

This Is How You Succeed

On my latest post, a reader made a comment about the difficulty in applying the "lose 100 ships" theory to learning PvP:

Most players (most PEOPLE) have a low tolerance for failure. Add in the shame of a killboard and comments, as well as smacktalk in local, or taunting by alliance members, and you'll have people backing off from PVP entirely. You raise that threshhold and not give a crap what people think (including yourself!) then and ONLY then will you see results. Oh, yeah, expect to lose a billion or more before your first solo kill, most likely. Mainly because you wont find a solo player, just gank groups...and THEN you find that single pilot, he has to fight back and not run. THEN you have to WIN. Losing gains you experience but not knowledge; losing ships doesnt teach you what to do. It teaches you other people can beat you a lot.

I hear this argument a lot, and I wanted to decompress it a bit. I provided a quick response, but quickly realized I could put together a whole post in and of itself. There are a few things going on here:

1. Players have a low tolerance for failure.
2. Players don't want to be publicly shamed.
3. Getting meaningful fights is difficult.
4. Losing doesn't gain you knowledge, only that it's easy for you to lose.

At its heart, these four points speak to a very specific mentality that fulfills itself, one that is quite common these days. At its heart, it speaks to the fact that our society doesn't teach us how to either overcome adversity or how to learn.

The Helpful Fleet Member: Being a Scout

There have been a lot of good guides about serving as a scout in a fleet. Typically, I'd just refer people to some of the older ones (like here, here, or here). However, all of those are fairly old, and probably due for a re-up. With many older bloggers having left the game, I'll give it a go.

I recently joined a new alliance, and with it, I've been thrown into a different culture. Repercussus is filled with pilots who generally know what they're doing, and TISHU added to that the swagger to throw around the big toys regularly and with extreme skill. In both groups, it's easy to forget about the skill involved in every little piece of making a fleet successful.

More importnatly, it's also easy to forget that some of the things bittervets take for granted are actually difficult skills to learn.  One of those is serving as a scout in a fleet.  I was recently on a fleet where our scout was struggling to position himself effectively for a warp-in on the enemy fleet. We were on grid for perhaps five or six minutes as he worked up a suitable warp-in... far too long for tactical purposes.

This was his first time fulfilling the role, and he deserves credit - not scorn - for trying to learn a new role. And to the credit of our FC and fleet members, they were all patient and respectful as he worked through the struggle.

So, here we go.  How do you scout in Eve Online?

The Terrain of Space

Sugar Kyle is admit the winter CSM summit and raised a very interesting question about choke points in New Eden.

Some regions of Eve are defined by their lack of watering holes. Venal has only six systems with stations in them, and all of those are centrally located within the region. Whole wings of systems are without a market, forcing players back into the center to dock, repair, and re-provision. Great Wildlands and Outer Ring are the same.

Other regions, like Stain and Syndicate, are absolutely lousy with stations. They can support larger populations and tend to host turf wars as the different groups fight it out. Both sheep and wolves tend to congregate there. To use a military equivalent, these are the hills and plateaus upon which armies can build their camps and fortifications.

Your major trade hubs are in the north-east of Empire space, with huge swaths of territory between them and the southern null-sec regions. You’ve got a lack of symmetry in where the best regions are located in terms of rats and moons. New Eden is not uniform.

Then you have the chokepoint systems Sugar discussed. Most relevant to me right now is J5A and B-DB, separating Fountain from Cloud Ring. Unless you want to add an extra six jumps to your route or wait for a direct wormhole to your destination, you need to run that gauntlet, often with catastrophic results. There’s the Tenal-Cobalt Edge stargate that spans a distance of about 14 LY. And plenty others.

I Swore I Wouldn't Write about the CSM…

Mike Azariah put out an article today offering an opinion on why players should care about and vote for the CSM. In it, he spends a little time talking about some disagreements on the purpose of the CSM according to the CSM white paper. He also makes a parallel between voting for the CSM and voting for politicians in the real world.

Now, I swore I wasn’t going to make a post about the CSM this year. At first, I used to be all-in with the importance of the CSM. Now, my attitude is very much, “Who really cares?”

And I am provide some context behind that. Mike makes two popular arguments that are, at their core, deeply flawed approaches to the CSM. So popular, in fact, that even CSM candidates seem to misunderstand what the CSM is.

And I’m going to make some parallels with my own career in marketing, as well.

All of a Sudden, We're All Talking CSM

I don't talk about the CSM that often. It's not out of any specifically strong feelings. In fact, I've recommended that folks vote for CSM in the past, and mentioned how important I thought it was. But I typically don't follow their exploits with bated breath, or even read CSM summary posts by other bloggers.

Part of that is my firm believe that we as a society apply democracy a bit too liberally. Not everything needs or deserves a vote. Sure, I think it's the finest system in the world for organizing a government for citizens who are location-locked into a specific country. The key, though, is that everyone involved in that country and in that democratic system has equal amounts vested into the success of the enterprise, and equal amounts to lose if they get it wrong. Democracy needs seriousness and a deep familiarity and awareness of the issues, as well as no readily available and easy-to-access escape plan.

That said, it's a terrible idea for a lot of other things. While you may take your kids' feelings into account, you make decisions about them bilaterally (or unilaterally in single-parent homes). They don't get a vote, because they don't have the context and knowledge necessary to make an educated decision. Nor do you give airplane passengers a vote on the route the pilot should take.

When all parties aren't equally vested, you also don't utilize democracy. My mother wants to redesign her living room. I used to live in that house, and have somewhat of an interest in keeping it looking good. I also want her to eventually move out to where my family is located now, and I want to keep the house in good repair for them to sell it at a profit. But while I am slightly vested in how the living room looks, she's the one who owns the house, and she's living in it day-in and day-out. Her level of vestment is much higher than mine. It'd be ludicrous of her to give me an equal democratic vote with her in how the living room looks. Nor am I going to make career decisions because two of my friends - outnumbering me - feel I should.

Then, there's the "bail option". When you're tied to the success or failure of an endeavor, you'll take it much more seriously than when you're passing through. I shouldn't have an equal vote as a hotel owner about how their room looks. I have to live there for one night; that hotel owner's very livelihood depends upon making design decisions that ensure profitability for decades, potentially. She's not going to let my wife and I out-vote her about how her hotel is designed.

Along the same lines, democracy is a ludicrous method for a gaming company to choose a trusted user group.

Scaling Fatigue?

Yesterday, I was reading an article by Kyle Aparthos over at TMC talking about local mobility in Eve.  His comments coalesced around some of my own opinions about jump fatigue and mobility.  On the one hand, I absolutely agree that capital fleets should not be able to jump across the galaxy at a moment's notice to participate in fights the way they did before fatigue.

But, on the other hand, it doesn't make much sense for a capital to be stuck in one system for at least 5 minutes or - if you're doing it right - 50 minutes to clear your fatigue.  That seems a bit ridiculous if you just want to jump to a nearby system.  Fatigue was meant to reduce the effective projection of capital forces, not to destroy the tactical advantage of jump drives entirely.

Let's get one thing straight... it is tactically unfeasible for capitals to take gates to defend a whole constellation under fire.  One set of bubbles can clog a capital fleet for 15-20 minutes, and when dealing with defense mechanics in place, that eliminates the value of capitals to attack multiple aggressing fleets.  Small entities are effectively hamstrung to having to deploy their limited capitals in only one system, perhaps two, during a reinforcement cycle.  That utterly defeats the purpose of the system in regards to allowing smaller entities to defend against larger ones.

So, long-range travel and force projection, bad.  Local force projection, good.

Entitlement and the Brick Wall

As may be no surprise to readers, I'm a big fan of trying to improve myself through my life.  In the same way RPG players try to amass new skills, abilities, and assets to take on the big boss, I believe you should constantly assemble more tools to help you thrive as an individual.  Now, that "thriving" can mean different things to each individual, and the skills and situations you pursue are different from person to person.

What matters isn't that you seek a specific goal, of course, but rather that you regularly test yourself and throw yourself into the fire to be tempered by it.  To me, everyone is born in a state of uselessness, and you harden and improve yourself through your experiences.  It's not possible to "corrupt" or "ruin" yourself, and "purity" is synonymous with "untested" and "unimproved".

So, as one can imagine, in Eve, I genuinely look at losses and hardship as the very point of the game.  Let the simple level-grinding, pushing buttons to earn candy, and going through a process to achieve a desired result rest with single-player games.  Eve, at its core, to me is a live test environment, where the entire point is to implement your success strategies in an environment of friction, chaos, setbacks, and unpredictability.  Eve is the chaos and the resistance pushing against your desires, and within that tension lies all of the satisfaction when you finally overcome and succeed despite all the forces arrayed against you.

I desperately value this element in Eve specifically because the rest of the world seems to be sliding more and more towards a sense of entitlement.  Getting a college degree entitles you to a good job, or even A job, right?  And if you don't earn six figures, why we better sue to have our money returned or our student loan debt forgiven.  Never mind that your degree was in theoretical extraterrestrial sociology...

Or, when you forget to cancel your account by the start of the next billing cycle, you're entitled to have the charge pro-rated, right?  Or you're entitled to not being offended... ever.  Or you're entitled to play an online interactive game exactly the way you want without anyone interfering with your own ego-maniacal Vision playing out before you.  These days, we deem ourselves as gods of our own lives.

I ran into one of these little Gods who decided to throw a tantrum last night, and he exemplified the quintessential bad habit of failed Eve players.

Eve Lotteries’ 2T Celebration

Some eagle-eyed readers may have noticed an advertisement on the corner of my blog for Eve Lotteries.  Earlier this month, I had occasion to try out their service.  They gave me 10 million isk to play a couple blinks and I ended up walking away with a Brutix Navy Issue and two Hookbills.  Not a bad take, all tolled!

Eve Lotteries began in the wake of the Somer Blink shutdown.  A real-life web developer, Thorr VonAsgard, was virtually addicted to blinking, and when one of his favorite pastimes was taken away, he decided that instead of complaining, he’d do something about it.  Eve Lotteries was born, a site operating in a similar fashion to Somer Blink, but with a far more appropriate and descriptive name.  It went live on February 18 of this year.

Fast forward to this month, when Eve Lotteries surpassed two trillion in payouts provided.  It’s a huge threshold they've reached very quickly, and they’ve decided to celebrate with a host of giveaways totaling 40 Bil isk, including a supercarrier and 14 separate billion-isk giveaways.

I encourage you to visit Eve Lotteries to get your piece of this prize pool.  The celebration ends on August 30!

Logistic Diagnostic

Ah, logi-bros.  The people who love them the most want to be them the least.  Logi doesn’t appear on killmails, despite how much they help the fleet.  And while a combat ship stands at least a chance of surviving if they have to disconnect mid-fleet, logi ships tend to be utterly helpless when traveling alone.  Sure, it’s a role that requires you to be actively thinking and responding to the battle – particularly if you’re a logi anchor – but when the fleet loses, you’re the second person (behind the FC) that your fleet blames.

But they’re absolutely essential to any fleet, right?  How many doctrines have you seen that won’t undock without at least 20% of the fleet flying logi ships?  In small gangs (though, you could argue that “gangs” have no logi, while “fleets” do), the presence of even one more logi can make the difference between victory and defeat.  I’ve seen fleets with three logi successfully brawl fleets with only two without taking any losses.  Every logi matters.

Only… let’s look at what logistics really accomplishes: it repairs damaged ships to keep them alive for longer.  When working correctly, it denies the enemy a kill.  When it works highly effectively, it denies the enemy any kills at all.

But the ripples in the pond don’t stop there. 

I Don't Think That Means What You Think That Means

For the past several months, I’ve been hearing how null-sec players are “risk adverse”.  It’s the insult du jour ever since the topic of sovereignty rebalancing and FozzieSov in particular were raised.  According to the narrative of those who use this term, null-sec players are too afraid of loss to engage in the behavior they would prefer, and as a result, like frightened sheep, they herd together in great big coalitions and collections of allies.  This, in turn, results in the “big blue donut” view of null-sec, in which everyone “who matters” got together to form cartel-like collusion agreements to avoid their possible risk.

This view of Eve downplays any possible mechanic-reliant issues with the game and instead places the blame on players taking actions out of fear or a desire for safety, resulting in a terrible experience for null-sec players.  The players are to blame, not the game.  In fact, only a few greedy players are to blame, the coalition-leaders who serve as a star chamber pulling the strings and forcing everyone to dance to their tune.

In this case, “risk adverse” players are the great evil facing Eve… if only we could change the attitude of players, the reality of a boring null-sec would change.

Only… that’s not what “risk adverse” means.  In fact, “risk adverse” doesn’t mean anything.

BB65 - Easiest One Ever

I admit, I don’t see the blog banters all the time.  I’m very bad at that, and I apologize.  These topics are typically a really great way for readers to crowd-source the community’s opinions about certain topics, and it’s very helpful to read a variety of viewpoints on them.

This month’s blog banter is all about attributes:

Does Eve need attributes? It's been discussed a lot recently. Unlike other MMO's your characters attributes don't make a difference in day-to-day gameplay. They simply set how fast you train a skill. Is it time to remove attributes from the game or totally revamp their purpose? Do they add a level of complexity to the game that is not needed? If you really need to use a 3rd party application to get the most from it should it be in the game? Should they be repurposed with each attribute adding a modifier to your ship? Are attributes a relic from the past or are they an important part of Eve - You make your decision and deal with the consequences?

Should attributes be removed from the game?  Yes.

Moving on…

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Long Live ECM?

Well, FozzieSov has hit, and the first set of timers has begun.  It looks like more than 280 timers were created yesterday alone.  So far, predictions from around the community that FozzieSov will succeed in burning down all the things are looking encouraging. 

So are predictions that the well-organized are more than capable of dealing with the hassle.

Suffice it to say, I’m incredibly disappointed in the enemies of the Imperium.  Very few systems were successfully pushed into reinforcement.  Apart from a MOA internal message, I didn’t see much in the way of significant efforts to attack.  It should surprise no one that Goonswarm came into FozzieSov with very high indexes throughout most of its core systems (ie. Deklein).  Indexes were around 5.5 or higher, providing plenty of time to react to reinforcement attempts.  With sufficiently compressed space, it looks as if Fortress Deklein is certainly still a thing, perhaps more so after FozzieSov.

As I was watching Slack, my corporation was responding to multiple attempts to shut down station services and swat off folks trying to entosis EC-, the gateway system to Torrinos and Caldari high-sec.  We saw a lot more traffic coming through that system, including a hostile gate camp made of three Orthrii.  That bump in activity was encouraging.

Yesterday did see the various Eve forums and Slack fill with a solution to troll entosising that pretty much headshots all of my concerns, though.  After all, to frustrate an entosis effort, you don’t need to pod the aggressor, or even kill his ship.  All you need is to disrupt his target lock to prevent his entosis cycle from succeeding.

That’s right my friends.  The supercap king is dead.  Long live ECM.