Descalation

I tried clearing some highsec anomalies to see how often the escalations and faction spawns occur. So far that they did not happen even once, after about ten or so. So that is essentially useless for anyone. At least I played around with a destroyer, but seriously, what is even the point? Doing anomalies in highsec makes few hundred thousand per hour at most, which is less that L1/L2 missions. And unlike missions anomalies are a limited resource, in that they spawn on their own time are there are rarely more than one per system. And so far there was no mention of anything getting done with highsec anomalies in Odyssey. Which is a pity, because anomalies paying better than missions would encourage travelling around, rather that sitting on a single agent.

I also found an unrated complex and followed an Angel Kickbacks escalation. In a destroyer, which might be reason why this took two hours or so. Unfortunately, no rare drops. The final overseer did not, in fact, drop anything at all, and I got a single piece of T2 salvage from the whole chain. I wonder how unlucky that is. The bounties were marginal, but I suppose it would be fine for a starting player. Although with a two months character I am a starting player by EVE standard.

I get the impression that the combination of low drop rate and high value damages the balance here. Judging by difficulty, highsec escalations are supposed to be early game content, but unless they immediately focus on exploration most players will outgrow the difficulty of these things before they see even a single actually worthwhile drop. So most people, if they do them at all, will do them with zero risk.

The fact that lowsec is not low security but essentially no security, doesn't help, since it puts a cliff for progression, especially if someone doesn't want to multibox a second account as a scout. I wrote about that last time, the rewards do not scale nowhere close with the risk of losing the ship. Actually, the problem might be that the risks are not granular enough, it's either no loss, or loss of the entire ship, its fit and maybe implants. Insurance doesn't really help that much. I suppose the solution here it to make enough ISK so that losing a ship becomes a granular loss. But PvE ships are relatively expensive compared to the money you can make from PvE. And are useless for PvP.

Rally points

That did not go all that well. I took my new cruiser into a nearby lowsec pocket, and at least I didn't get attacked by anyone. There even was an anomaly. The name was was, I am fairly sure, a Forsaken Serpentis Rally Post, but the wiki says it appears in null sec and the spawn was different. Maybe it changed, or I remember wrong. Anyway, there were two cruisers and a battleship in the initial wave. It turns out that, at least with my skills, a cheap Thorax cannot take that in a reasonable amount of time. I finally took them down just on principle, but it took an hour of jumping and docking to repair the armor and recharge the capacitor, so very much not worth it for a million bounty. A the second wave spawned multiple battleships, so I just left.

A smaller anomaly might be doable, but then it would be worth less than a L3 mission. A rally point might be doable in a battlecruiser, but I really don't want to take a ship worth more than twenty million ISK, and a my missioning battlecruiser is worth way more than that, into lowsec. Maybe with way more skills… more tracking would definitely help, right now I'm missing cruisers when orbiting at blaster ranges. But I doubt it would get me past the first wave.

Alas, the reward balance does not seem to take risks derived from presence of other players into account very much. Which is understandable, because that is way too fluid to balance against. Especially considering that a static measure is meaningless, since secure sovereign nullsec is much safer than lowsec no matter what the security level is, and a dynamic is too gameable.

Flying around

I finally decided to spend some of that ISK I have been collecting, and bought and fitted a Thorax. Didn't have much time to play today, and I spent good two hours flying around collecting parts. Probably a waste of time, which is money, should have bought everything at hub for slightly more. Oh well. Total costs ended up something like fifteen million ISK, maybe a bit more. Which is probably not a good idea, considering it will take several hours to make that back if I lose the ship. And I just remembered I forgot again to insure the hull. Maybe I will remember before I take that into lowsec.

I could fit a frigate, but I am not planning on seeking PvP, because I see no point in attacking random people. And you need more than one ship to bust gate camps. Which is something I would like to do on principle. Most games seem to at least try to disincentive camping, since it is pretty obviously terrible gameplay for both sides, but well, EVE. Anyway, mostly want to see if you can actually finish a lowsec anomaly in a more or less PvP-fit (probably badly) cruiser, without getting ganked, and how much ISK would that actually make. Which I don't think can be sensibly done in a cheap frigate with skills as low as I have. Why do I still have Medium Hybrid Turrets at two?

Also training Caldari Cruisers in the meantime, not sure why, since I have yet to look at Caldari ships. But, I don't plan to even try all four racial ship skills before Odyssey, but maybe basic two. Still not even trying for Battleships. Fitting for soloing L4 missions seems to require way more other skills. I might as well finish training battleships last. Or I could, in principle, join a corp and run L4 missions in a T1 battleship… but eh.

Bronze

Nothing too interesting have been happening, and I haven't been in a mood to ramble about salvage yet. Been just griding L3 missions, to build up ISK and standing. The latter mostly for the jump clones. I still have only level three implants, so I could probably take more risks with the current one, but I don't want to. Also I plan to chain wormholes to drop into random nullsec or somewhere, just to see whats there.

Anyway, the mission structure continues to be somewhat irritating by being too random, or possibly not random enough. Since I finally got Drones V and a bunch of skills requiring that, I can complete the majority of missions without losing shields, despite having an armor tanked ship. But I can't complete L4 in a battlecruiser, and according to guides only slowly in a basic fit battleship, which I don't have skills for anyway.

I wish there was something between "squadrons of cruisers" and "squadrons of battleships". Oh well. Another irritation was again with the loot, I got a 4 million ISK missile launcher and eight million Brass Serpentis Tag, which is good on one hand, but again, that was just completely random loot from wreck as any other. This low probability drops make it difficult to figure out if looting everything is worth it.

Wormhole junk

I found a wormhole right in the system I am based on, inside a ladar side, the Token Reseirvour, so I tried my destroyer plan. It didn't quite work, the frigate sized Sleepers were easily destroyed, the cruiser sized on not so much. And they were of a weaker tier than the ones I encountered before. So yeah. I finally decided to ignore caution, and entered the wormhole without probes in a cruiser. That worked, and I even left successfully. Unfortunately just after I was finished salvaging the Sleepers someone turned up in a CovOps frigate and started dropping combat probes, so I got out without a chance to mine. Although C60 and C70 appear basically worthless anyway. The Sleeper drop are worth maybe half a million total, the salvage seems worthless, so basically that was an efficient use of time. Still, learning things. Like, if I am going to try this again, I need a Thorax or something.

Wormholes and rigs

Since I have not completely recovered from a cold I had last week I spent more of the weekend watching other people play video games rather than playing myself. Not the most auspicious launch of the blog, since I rather hoped to do something in EVE I could write about on the weekend. Still, I did some things, even if in more cursory way than if I was able to focus longer.

On Saturday I finally decided to do something with all those wormholes that were annoying me by not being radar sites. Recently I trained Cloaking III, and while I promptly lost one Improved Cloaking Device II on that Iteron, I actually bought three of those, because why not. So I put one on my scanning Imicus, replacing a mostly symbolic blaster. Scanned down a wormhole, and I didn't even forget to check its status, and after seeing that it was I the last quarter of its life found another one, leading to a C2 system.

Inside there were a POS and some ships under it, but I assumed they were offline or AFK and started scanning for sites, obviously while cloaked. While sitting very near a wormhole, which probably is a terrible mistake, but without a covert ops cloak I would have decloak to warp back. Anyway, nothing happened and I located a ladar site.

I jumped a Venture with gas harvesters, started a stopwatch and started mining. According to what I have read the Sleepers should spawn after twenty something minutes. And they did. So I jumped out. Before that I saw on d-scan someone poking around the system with core probes, but didn't leave since even if they jumped on the same site the clouds are over 30 km from the warp in point, and anyone serious about hitting a Venture ninja-mining would use combat probes anyway. Probably. Anyway, nothing happened.

I harvested 840 units of Fullerite-C72. Nominally worth about five million, but the fullerites seem to have fairly low volume in most places. I actually flew all the way to Jita to place a sell order, which haven't sold since yesterday. All that wasn't exactly worth it, but it was interesting. If I am reading the stats on the Sleepers that spawned they should be trivial to take down with my Myrmidon, but I really don't want to bring it into a wormhole. A Celestis, maybe, but it has only three high slots, so I would either have to go in without a probe launcher or drop one weapon. And it is a bit too expensive still to lose.

So I started thinking about destroyers. With only two sleepers that spawn on a ladar site this might be doable, and the forums claim that those don't respawn, so it might be possible to actually mine the site out, which would be worth considerably more than a twenty minute run. Or it might not be. But I decided to try, and bought for a few million a Corax, outfitted with launchers and a MWD, which, if the number mean what I think they mean should make it possible to kite the sleepers while hitting them from outside their targetting range. Quite slowly, but such is life in EVE if one cannot afford to fly a T3 ship with T2 weapons.

I didn't actually get to try it though. On Sunday I almost completed the fit, but I wanted to put Small Auxiliary Thrusters I to get bigger speed buffer, but there were very few locally sold. So I checked how expensive the blueprints and components were. And they were cheaper than the rig itself. Actually, the small versions of astronautic rigs build around the Burned Logic Circuit, Charred Micro Circuit and Thruster Console seemed to have prices, even if at very low volumes, that were considerably bigger than the cost.

So I decided to build some of those. I don't expect a lot from them, since the volume is extremely low, at least in the region I operate, but I am still at the stage where every five million do matter, so why not. So I spent most of my game time on Sunday flying around picking blueprints and some more of those components, setting up production, in the meantime adjusting PI, and so on. So I haven't actually flown the Corax anywhere.

Well, I tried scanning down a wormhole, but apparently either I was really unlucky, or black holes don't have sites. I saw some guy leaving the hole in a capsule, followed by a Mammoth, so maybe its better I didn't try anything with active people inside. Still sitting on the hole while scanning. I mean, what is the possible risk? If I move a few kilometers off the hole then it is highly unlikely something will accidentally (or not) uncloak me. Maybe.

On missions and PvE in general

The general opinion appears to be that PvE in EVE is somewhere between not very good and bad. After my six weeks of playing I can see there are definitely issues, both in PvE combat itself and mission structure and rewards. I don't think they are particularly terrible, though. Of course any change would have consequences which might make things worse. Also I have only done L3 missions and below and some exploration, so I have no experience with more advanced forms of PvE.

One issue that is somewhat subjective, but become apparent to me early, is that individual enemies are typically much weaker than a player ship of an equivalent class. This means that typically in a mission the player would be significantly outnumbered. Rather than give an impression of being powerful this mostly knocks me out of any immersion because I have to wonder, why are even the NPC navy ships so bad? More practically this gives combat somewhat 'whack-a-mole' feel. And makes looting tedious, especially since the wrecks tend to be spread out in an area dozens of kilometres wide. Salvage drones really help with salvaging, but even with a tractor beam looting stuff takes a relatively long time.

Of course, looting is optional. The irritating thing about loot is that it is very random, and as far as I can tell there is no way to know what the value of the wreck is without opening it. Or I suppose filling a mid slot with a cargo scanner, assuming that it can look into wrecks and/or containers. I really wish there was some indication of high value loot, or at least a stronger correlation between a type of enemy and possible loot, other that faction commanders.

Which wouldn't help with navy tags. I stopped doing missions against major faction navies partially due to wanting to avoid standing drop, but the other reason was that every single enemy ship wreck was marked as not empty. And almost always it was just a tag. And they gave no bounty, so to get anything for destroying them you had to loot every single wreck. Which is annoying and I suppose a reason why tags are relatively scarce on the market.

Another issue is that most NPC enemies are tank heavy and low on DPS. Especially effective DPS, because they seem to have no concept of group cohesion and are easily kited into separate, easy to destroy groups. This also makes missile based NPC groups disproportionately powerful. Of course, they have to be if they are to seriously outnumber the player.

Unfortunately, the effect is that once your tank gets good enough there is essentially no risk when running missions. I read that before NPC started to sometimes target drones, it was possible to just leave a good enough ship inside a mission and leave, and drone would eventually kill everything without the risk of your tank getting breached. Once you have sufficient tank the only factor that remains is how fast can you destroy enemies. Or at all. I remember I got a single battleship in one L3 mission, which couldn't even hit my battlecruiser reliably, but I couldn't get through its shields (Myrmidon without Drones V being perhaps a sub-optimal idea). Eventually I just left, refitted with five blasters and finished it, but it was still tedious.

I think missions would be better if they were more of a DPS race. Which would be more similar to how I understand, from what I have read, PVP usually goes. It would certainly be more exciting and require closer attention. On the other hand, the problem with low, but significant risk, is that the expected payout value necessary for profit varies wildly with small changes to risk, which makes it very difficult to balance without getting serious advantage to people who overpower the difficulty rating.

The lack of granularity in mission difficulty is a bit strange, too. There are five levels of missions, and the missions themselves appear to mostly scripted, as far as enemy strength goes. They seem to vaguely correspond to ship classes. But the power level of players is much more granular. Especially if you are not focusing on getting to next class of spaceships, there can be long period where the missions become trivial, and the only progress is that they get completed slightly faster, while next tier missions are still impossible or glacially slow.

I have seen an opinion that mission do not encourage playing them with multiple people, but that seems false. Due to the healing based tanks in EVE double DPS means being able to finish them more than twice as fast. Even with split rewards, this should be worth it, at least for groups of two-three people. Unless I am missing something, I have yet to try running a mission cooperatively.

Most LP store rewards appear to be wildly imbalanced. Especially modules. Even apart from the tag issue exacerbated by the tediousness of looting them one by one, the static base prices seem to be very high when compared to modules T2 counterparts. Especially considering that most of the faction modules are only marginally better. Or, in the case of Federation EANM and suchlike, no at all, attribute-wise. The only way it is better is a slight fitting advantage and lower skill level required. The former is situational at best, and the latter is useless to anyone except characters that can't really afford faction modules. It is just easier to train a bunch of levels required for a T2 module, which is around five to ten times cheaper.

I am not sure what the balance is with guns… they are weaker than T2 variants since they cannot fire T2 ammo, but requirement for T2 weapons seem to be much higher than other T2 modules, so maybe they have a niche.

Generally the situation with missions in EVE is not that terrible. I can see how they can become boring after being ground excessively, but then they were somewhat clearly, if I may try to divine the design intent here, designed to be an introduction to EVE, rather than main gameplay. Although if they do require a fit that different from effective PVP one as the internet seems to imply, then perhaps something should be fixed.