Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

EVE's market screen is a wonderful tool giving every buyer and seller full visibility of all the prices in a region. This is great for creating an efficient liquid market but it also means that buying and selling are "winner take all" games. If a competitor puts the same goods up in the same station for a paltry 0.01 ISK lower than your price then your sales won't drop by 20% or 50% they will go to zero. Likewise if your buy order is even 1 lousy cent less than the market leader you get nothing. I am convinced that only the price leader actually completes a buy or sell order and only price leaders actually make any money. If you want to be successful in EVE trading you need to pick your chosen market and you need to own that market. I don't know of an easy way to do this. From my experience you need to fight aggressively for each and every order that you hope to complete. Here are some of the things I have tried: - Set a fair price and let it sit hoping to get s...

Marb Pelico my main pilot has languished in a station reading skill books for the last week while I have been having fun with my 800k skill point alts. You can actually do an amazing amount of fun stuff in EVE with a brand new out of the box character. Fresh characters make great scouts for exploring dangerous regions of space. The small nimble noob ships can often get away from traps that would catch bigger more heavily armed prey and even if you do get caught you get a free replacement ship and clone. A fresh character is also a good way to explore your dark side if you are that way inclined. Once you accept that there is no hope of besting an opponent in a fair fight you can get up to a lot of mischief in a noobship. All kinds of theft, fraud and general blaggardism can be perpetrated within the safety net of an anonymous disposable character. Once I tired of exploring and general goofing around though it was time to put my alts to work. It is my intention to use them to earn an h...

I have been away for a few days and I come back to discover that CCP dropped a bombshell while I was on vacation . I am in the happy position of not having played for long enough to be bothered so I can sit back and enjoy the drama as it unfolds on the forums, the whining of the affected and the joyous celebration of those who have hitherto struggled under the effects of the imbalance this nerf is designed to counter. My noobish understanding of the problem being addressed is as follows. Apparently in the game as it now stands it is possible to tune up certain ships to fly far faster than the developers anticipated. At these "ludicrous" speeds (their term) the ships become almost impossible to hit granting them near invulnerability in combat. This is such an advantage that these nano-ships (named after one of the components commmonly used in achieving such high speed) have become almost mandatory in pvp combat. I don't have in depth knowledge of the issue but from what I...

I am making an alt to help Marb with a bit of trading and ferrying so I have had a second opportunity to experience EVE's character creation system. When setting up Marb I choose Minmatar Brutor for no more scientific reason that the fact that I liked their style. This time I have had a chance to study character creation in more detail with the help of two detailed forum posts from Akita T (who explains how race and bloodline choices affect character attributes) and Tiberyya Za (who provides an excellent spreadsheet detailing the starter skill packs you get with each of the chosen professions). Like many things in EVE the character creation process is far from intuitive and it is entirely possible to gimp your character from birth. Any character can learn any skill in EVE but a character with a poor set of starting attributes could take weeks or months longer to reach their desired goals. Characters attributes (perception, intelligence, memory, willpower and charisma) do not in...

It has been a while since I updated my blog roll but I have to add at least one EVE blog. Turns out that is an easy choice. Crazy Kinux is a one stop shop for all things EVE. In particular look out for the regular "speedlinking" posts in which Crazy compiles a great list of interesting EVE links.

Although I admit to using the occasional impolite language I do believe there is a time and a place for everything. I would not therefore normally have any sympathy for someone who was banned from an MMO for using profanities accompanied by personal insults in the public chat channel particularly if I heard that the banee hadn't even made it out of the two week free trial before losing the run of themselves. In StanlyManly's case though I am almost ready to make an exception because of the laugh I got from reading his elegant expression of incredulity that he could be banned from EVE, a game in which every manner of underhand human behaviour is encouraged, just because he used a few naughty words. To quote Stanly: " I guess my foul mouth and I are just too offensive for that upstanding and mature group of cheaters, pirates, market fixers, spies, liars, extortionists, backstabbers and egomaniacs." For someone who didn't even make it through the 2 week trial with...

At this stage I pretty much have level 3 missions on farm status using an armour tanked Hurricane battlecruiser: It does the same job as the amour tanked Rupture that I previously used in level 3's but has the considerably more hit points, capacitor and fire power. Having three active armour hardeners is another nice feature and allows me to tailor the tank for the expected damage profile from any given mission. Using short range autocannons goes somewhat against accepted missioneering wisdom. Unlike the Rupture the Hurricane does have enough power grid to fit longer range artillery but this short range set up is so much fun to use that I have decided to stick with it for the time being. You need to chase down enemies with afterburner enhanced speed before you can bring your main firepower to bear. HAving a slot available to fit a webber on the Hurricane is another huge advantage over the Rupture. Once an enemy gets within the 10km webber range you can pin them in place and open ...