The July Monthly Economic Report and the Lull Time in EVE Online

CCP dropped the Monthly Economic Report for July yesterday, a little earlier in the month than usual.  I take this as a further sign that not much goes on at CCP in August, so nobody was too busy elsewhere to run and post the report.

EVE Online nerds harder

That they had time to run and post the report early doesn’t mean that we got a better report.  As gets pointed out in the discussion threat about the July MER, there are still issues including the missing Pochven region and data bleed through across months.  But you work with the data you have, not the data you might want.

While August is a lull time for CCP, July saw the big lull in game.  The weekly peak concurrent numbers that I had been tracking since the start of World War Bee were at their lowest as the stalemate in Delve carried on into its third month and PAPI leadership was talking about taking the summer off.

We all know how that turns around in August now.

An interesting side question revolves around the sudden bump in player wealth at the end of July.  Was that the 235 million ISK in login rewards all Omegas got at the end of the month, the effect of people coming back when the final battle of the war suddenly loomed and PAPI was calling people to get re-subscribed, or a bit of both?  Down below we get a number for the login rewards, and it doesn’t seem like enough for that big of a bump.

July 2021 – Money Supply Over Time (with highlight)

But otherwise the MER is, as always, a month behind so we’ll have to just pretend we haven’t skipped ahead to the good part.  (Or the bad part if you were in TEST or Brave.)  Still, you can see the war slipping away in the Delve net imports/exports numbers for June and July

In June the Delve net trade balance was 138 billion ISK in imports, while in July that changed to 4.69 trillion ISK in exports.  That is a lot of stuff leaving the region.  Somebody was on their way out the door early.

Production

The last few months we have been looking at the impact of the industry changes on production in New Eden, so we may as well start there again with the chart and the red line that tracks it.

July 2021 – Production vs Destruction vs Mined

As you can see, the slide in production continued into July, then turned around a bit mid-month to start climbing a bit.  It is still well below any recent dip, but there was also the slow down in the war and the decline in active users.  The numbers in the regional stats showed 85.23 trillion ISK in production, which is down about 3.5 trillion from the June number, even though the month saw an increase as it moved into August. (The chart goes to August 9th.)

The top regions for production were:

1. The Forge – 15.33 trillion
2. Delve – 9.19 trillion
3. The Citadel – 6.59 trillion
4. Lonetrek – 6.55 trillion
5. Vale of the Silent – 4.37 trillion
6. Fade – 3.91 trillion
7. Sinq Laison – 3.52 trillion
8. Domain – 2.83 trillion
9. Placid – 2.34 trillion
10. Malpais – 2.22 trillion

Numbers did not change much over the June numbers.  As usual, a lot of the production occurs in the regions adjacent to the Jita trade hub.

Destruction

With the war in a lull the destruction numbers remained flat, ringing in at 27 trillion ISK, down slightly but not a significant amount when compared to June’s 27.65 trillion.

High sec remained to the top of the list when it came to destruction.

1. Lonetrek – 1.82 trillion
2. Delve – 1.82 trillion
3. The Citadel – 1.76 trillion
4. The Forge – 1.58 trillion
5. Vale of the Silent – 1.57 trillion
6. Metropolis – 952 billion
7. Querious – 871 billion
8. Sinq Laison – 813 billion
9. Domain – 793 billion
10. Genesis – 746 billion

Delve was in the running, narrowly edged out by Lonetrek, but the three regions around Jita again dominate together, being the prime location for suicide ganks and war targets.

Given what we have seen in August so far, Delve should see a huge uptick in destruction if CCP doesn’t botch the numbers as the did back in December.

Mining

Mineral prices started rising again in July even as production stayed low.  This might be due to mineral bottlenecks in the production cycle.  Some higher end mineral caches have likely been burned through at this point.  I mentioned the morphite crunch last month.

July 2021 – Economic Indices

Mineral prices remain very high despite the drop from the record prices of recent months.

On the supply side, 20.57 trillion ISK in ore was mined in July, down about 4 trillion from the June number.  The top regions were:

1. Vale of the Silent – 1.16 trillion
2. Domain – 1.02 trillion
3. The Forge – 934 billion
4. Metropolis – 686 billion
5. Insmother – 635 billion
6. Lonetrek – 507 billion
7. Kador – 499 billion
8. Etherium Reach – 489 billion
9. Genesis – 488 billion
10. Everyshore – 484 billion

High sec space still holds most of the slots, but Fraternity still tops the list in Vale, FI.RE in Insmother, and Slyce, a PanFam ally, in Etherium Reach.  Those are the null sect hot mining spots.

ISK Faucets

There was a new faucet on the chart in July, the “Redeemed ISK Token,” which I assume is the ISK Omega accounts got for the login reward campaign I mentioned at the top of the post.

July 2021 – Faucet end of the chart big chart

You might need to click on that image to bring it to full size in order to read it… I know I have to and the print is pretty tiny even then… but I underlined the new token item, which apparent injected 9.4 trillion ISK in the New Eden economy.

That doesn’t give us the full extent of the login reward largess, since that ran into August, so some people won’t have redeemed all of the 235 million ISK, and some will have left it in the redemption queue, but if everybody happened to collect and redeem in the first five days, that would be about 40,000 Omega accounts.

Put that number as the new floor on how many subscribers there are.  There can’t be less than that and likely much more.  I’ll follow up on that next month.

The redeemed ISK token also appears on the faucets over time chart.

July 2021 – Top Sinks and Faucets Over Time

That dark blue line spikes up pretty hard at the end of the month.  For a short bit of time it was bringing more ISK into the economy that the other faucets.  But it was also a limited time item, a short blip.

Commodities remained the top ISK producer as usual, with incursions in third place.

July 2021 – Top Commodity Items Over Time

As usual, the wormhold crabs brought in the most ISK with Sleeper components.  Abyssal space and incursion rewards were pretty close, while the miscellaneous line must be related to the Minmatar Liberation Day events that showed up in the second week of the month.

As for NPC bounties, those totaled up to 24.74 trillion ISK in value in July, down just 1.5 trillion from June, with the top regions being:

1. Vale of the Silent – 1.88 trillion (Fraternity)
2. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.09 trillion (PanFam)
3. Insmother – 1.0 trillion (FI.RE)
4. Tenal – 995 billion (Fraternity)
5. Esoteria – 993 billion (Army of Mango)
6. Tribute – 894 billion (Fraternity)
7. Branch – 867 billion (Fraternity)
8. Oasa – 846 billion (Fraternity)
9. Querious – 831 billion (Brave)
10. Delve – 828 billion (TEST)

We are back again to null sec taking all ten spots.  Fraternity was especially active, but it has been clear from their position on the war and the TTT that they aim to be a significant null sec power in their own right.  Delve and Querious show that TEST and Brave were really bought into the idea of living in Imperium space, an idea shattered this month by the collapse of the PAPI coalition.

Trade

Finally, there is trade, which was up in July, hitting 513 trillion ISK, up from the 489 trillion ISK in trade that June saw.  The top regions for trade remain as consistent as usual.

1. The Forge – 370 trillion (Jita)
2. Domain – 39.75 trillion (Amarr)
3. Delve – 15.75 trillion (Imperium/PAPI)
4. Sinq Laison – 14.43 trillion (Dodixie)
5. Lonetrek – 12.09 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
6. Metropolis – 10.75 trillion (Hek)
7. Heimatar – 8.26 trillion (Rens)
8. Essence – 4.65 trillion (Gallente High Sec)
9. The Citadel – 3.63 trillion (Caldari High Sec)
10. Vale of the Silent – 3.23 trillion (Fraternity)

And so it goes.

The next report will be interesting.  Destruction should be way up again, trade up due to fuel scarcity, and the remains of the ISK token login rewards to account for.

As always, you can find more charts and all the data on the MER dev blog.

The Fall of Niarja and the Shape of High Sec

Surprise!  Niarja became low security space last night!

Things have changed here

I had not been paying much attention to the Triglavian invasion event.  New Eden is a big enough sandbox that I can play in my own area and not care about what was going on in high sec.  Delve is many gates from the nearest high sec system.  Also, the war.

And then Niarja became the next Triglavian target and everybody lost their minds.

Niarja is a 0.5 high sec system known primarily for two things; being a prime spot for suicide gankers and being on the direct trade route when traveling between Caldari and Amarr space in general and the trade hubs of Jita and Amarr specifically.

When the Triglavians take a system, the security status of that system drops by 0.1.  That change would drop Niarja to 0.4, making it low sec and turning it from a place to suicide gank to a place to simply gank people passing through as CONCORD responses would no longer occur.

Meanwhile, the “safe” route from Jita to Amarr would go from 10 gates to 46.  I am not sure how much trade is specifically between those two points and how much of the traffic is from Jita to points beyond Amarr, but either way Niarja looked to become another low sec danger spot on the shortest route between regions.

The forces of chaos, in which I include CCP, seemed quite eager to see Niarja fall.  Others seemed quite angry at the prospect.  At least one group was sending out mail messages in game warning people that they had better not get caught supporting the Triglavians.

Signed, a friend

I am sure that was just some fun role play.

And this was all a high sec affair… until it wasn’t

Early yesterday Legacy Coalition declared that they were going to protect high sec by siding with EDENCOM to make sure the Triglavians didn’t take the system.  Dunk Dinkle of Brave posted a truncated image from what looks to be a Discord message that said:

THE COALITION DIRECTIVE IS TO SECURE NIARJA

At some later point Vily posted elsewhere that the coalition had just decided to fight the Triglavians because the Imperium had sided with them.  World War Bee was coming to high sec.

To my knowledge, up until then, there had been no official effort by the Imperium to influence the events in Niarja either way.  Word later came out that incursion squad had gone there on the down low to push things in favor of the Triglavians.  But once Vily reacted it became an official Imperium operation.  Pings went out to get people to pile on for the Trigs.

Once I saw that was going on, I logged in a high sec alt just to see what I could see.  The gate to Niarja was suitably adorned with the Triglavian logo.

A new sheriff is in town

Inside the system, the battle was tilted towards the Triglavian side.

77% in favor of the Triglavians

Ashterothi, who was providing status updates on Twitter, reported that the Trigs had been as high as 85% at one point, but EDENCOM had slowly worked that down into the 70s.

The fighting is done by blowing up NPCs that spawn at sites in the system.  If you want the Triglavians to win, you go to the EDENCOM sites and shoot the spawns, and if you support EDENCOM you warp to the emerging conduit sites and shoot the Trigs.

Some sites from the probe scanner window

I was not on as an Imperium character so couldn’t join their fleet, but I spotted them and watched them take down a couple of the EDENCOM sites.  (I also saw a Brave group shooting up an EDENCOM site, and I am not sure what was going on there.)

It was already late for me and I wasn’t going to be able to join in so I docked up at one of the Raitarus in the system.  The Triglavians seemed to be edging up every so slightly as time went along, but it was going to take some time.

When I work up this morning however, I logged in to check and found I was in a low sec system.

The Triglavian sky is strange

The Mittani was smugging about having cut the high sec travel route as it apparently impacts Legacy and their own ability to resupply.

Broke the galaxy in half today, because fuck you, that's why~ #tweetfleet #eveonline pic.twitter.com/UMnDBbB62b

— ~Abolish the Police~ (@TheMittani) August 18, 2020

Meanwhile, the battle for the system carried on and the Triglavian side hit the final luminality.

EDECOM gives up at this point

Niarja is effectively a null sec or wormhole space system now in terms of security status.  That doesn’t make much difference to haulers, as low sec status was going to keep them away in any case.

In the short term I will be interested to see what this does to trade.  Does making Jita 30+ jumps further away make Amarr more valuable?  Does it grow as a trade hub out of Jita’s shadow?  Or was its proximity to Jita what made it the second trade hub?  Does Jita shrink?  Does this help Hek, Rens, and Dodixie, the lesser trade hubs?  What happens to the market?  What happens to shipping charges?  There is a lot there to unpack.

For the longer term I am back to wondering what CCP’s end game plan is for the Triglavian invasion.  It was a happy fun PvE event for quite a while, but now with more and more high sec systems falling to the Trigs (The Agency says 16 systems are now in final luminality) what is going to happen?  Will the Trigs remain and their systems be changed for good?  Will they reach some accord with the empires and become the fifth Beatle empire?  If there is a fifth empire will Max Singularity and the Sixth Empire demand some high sec space of their own?

CCP has never run an event like this in high sec.  In the past high sec followed the rules of TV sitcoms, where things can go crazy for a bit, but at the end of the episode the status quo must be restored.  It will be interesting to see if they want to return to the way things were or have a new long term state of affairs in mind for high sec space.

Other coverage:

• CCP News
• Imperium News
• SparkoMarko Gaming
• Evehermit and follow on

Chaos Fatigue

Do you press one of these buttons when you log off from EVE Online?  CCP added them a while back as something of an exit survey.

Thumbs up or down?

For about a week after they showed up I diligently and thoughtfully clicked one of those buttons every time I exited the game.  And then I stopped.

I stopped because, on reflection, this seemed like data collection without value.  It lacks any context and, given human nature, can be waved away by circumstances of the moment.  There is always something going on that will allow CCP to say, “Well, that i just because we announced X and a few people are mad about it.”

I would not be surprised to find out that the buttons are not hooked up to a backend that stores the results, that CCP put them in there as just a way to deflect anger into the void.

It is a very Reddit-based response, let people down vote the game when they are upset because it lets you feel like you have done something, even though down voting never changed anything because it can always be explained away.  And that makes it very appropriate for the Chaos Era that CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson has declared for EVE Online.

Things have been somewhat chaotic since the Invasion expansion arrived back at the end of May.  That brought Triglavian incursion-like events to high sec, leading to NPCs camping the routes between tutorial and career agent systems and the joy of logging in an alt only to find you had best just log off because you’re system is now an NPC kill zone.

Didn’t want that 10K skill points anyway

And, of course, that has expanded, so hanging out it a belt in a 0.9 system might end up with you getting blow up right  away as well.

Didn’t want that Venture anyway

CCP also spread the chaos to null sec, which has tended to monopolize the headlines (Because who cares about new players?) with Drifter attacks and the Blackout and the sudden VNI nerf and the tax increases and now the coming cyno changes, with the promise of more changes to come.  I have mostly watched this from the sidelines, this blog being little else than that.  If you’re reading this you are in a tiny, obscure part of the EVE Online player base.

Just the other day CSM14 representative Dunk Dinkle was encouraging people with strong opinions on these changes to speak up publicly.

If you have a strong opinion about the upcoming changes, be sure to voice your opinion publicly. CCP is looking at many things, from tweets to forum posts to even this: pic.twitter.com/1orLRl7ckn

— Dunk Dinkle (@DunkDinkle) August 15, 2019

To me, strong opinions are part of the problem with any EVE Online discussion.  PvP players can be exceptionally vocal… roll footage of the forums of every PvE focused MMORPG ever… and the chaos era changes have brought them out en masse to cheer CCP for making changes that disrupt the status quo.  Anybody speaking against the chaos is shouted down because their motives are based on self-interest.  As such, every CCP proposal seems likely to go forward unchecked, since it isn’t difficult to find a wave of vocal support for them.

So the chaos will continue until morale improves.

However, I wonder if chaos is really a viable long term strategy.  Hilmar mentioned the novel The Three-Body Problem as one of his inspirations during that interview on Talking in Stations.  It was already on my list of things to read at some point, so I picked it up last week.  I have gotten far enough along to see where Hilmar swiped the idea for the Chaos Era.

In the book there is a video game which experiences alternating orderly and chaotic eras.  During the orderly times the player society of the game progresses.  During the chaotic eras nothing is predictable and everything is in disorder.  CCP seems to have decided that is the path forward for EVE Online.  They want to keep changing things constantly so that nothing is predictable in anything but the immediate time frame.

What I found interesting in the book was the player reactions to the chaotic eras.  While a select few persist through those eras, trying to discover a pattern to the chaos, the vast majority dehydrate themselves and are stored away, only to be revived when the next orderly era appears.  Then everybody gets back to work on progress in the game.

I could not help but associate the dehydrated state in the book with something akin to becoming an Alpha clone in EVE Online.  People often find chaos to be wearing over time, not what they want to devote themselves to as their hobby.  I know I am feeling a bit weary from the chaos era of New Eden, and barely any of it has an impact on me.  Only the coming cyno revision will change some aspect of my play.

And there is a very vocal choir that supports the chaos, which means that CCP would have to work to see a reason not to keep on with it.  So I suspect that the chaos will continue.

But it makes me wonder if chaos a viable long term strategy?

Addendum: After writing this, I listened to the Talking in Stations interview with CCP Rise, and it sure sounds like chaos is the long term strategy CCP has chosen.  My question as to whether or not we take Hilmar and CCP Falcon and their vision of where they want EVE Online to go appears to have been answered.

Blaugust and Making Comments on Comments

In which I try to write another post that is somewhat relevant to the spirit of Blaugust.

Blaugust Reborn

I have admittedly fallen completely off the writing prompts for the event.  I think we’re supposed to write something nice about developers or something this week, but I don’t have anything for that, so I am writing this instead.  This is why I write a blog solo and not as a collaborative effort or, heaven forbid, for a site run by somebody else.  I will write about what I damn well please when it damn well pleases me.

So I am going to write about comments.  Blog comments.

As noted elsewhere, getting a comment on a blog post… at least a comment that isn’t trying to sell you Cialis or a school public address system… why are there even spam comments for school public address system… does a lot to keep a blogger motivated.

Page views are nice, but they are sterile.  A large percentage of the traffic that comes to this blog arrives via Google and is likely made up of people who, if not here by a complete mistake, are unlikely to stick around and become fans of the site.  By my own estimate there are maybe 80 to 100 regular readers of the site, not all of whom visit every day.  So if I have a day with a thousand page views I am pretty sure at least 90% of that are people who are just passing through, never to be seen again, an estimate sustained by how often “gay elf porn” shows up in the search terms that bring people here.

And 90% is probably optimistic.  As like as not that number could close in on 99% some days, and it might as well be 100% if the only feedback I ever see is page views.

But a comment… a comment if affirmation that somebody showed up and read what you wrote and was invested enough to write a response.  A good comment can be a motivator, inspiration to carry on blogging, a source of ongoing topics, and a reason to check your notifications.  Comments help sustain blogging.

So as a blogger, and one who has some level of feelings for blogging and the local neighborhood of blogs, I ought to be out there leaving comments.  I am pretty sure I’ve brought this up before, but most recently Syp mentioned it in a Blaugust post of his own.  He is, by his own admission, a hypocrite on that front, but at least he admits it.  A Syp comment is a rare item indeed.

I am not as bad as him on that front, but I do feel I could comment more often.  Whether or not I comment often depends on my mood, the time, and which device I am using to read a post.  I am extremely unlikely to leave a comment from my phone.  On the other hand, if I am sitting at my desk at home in the evening and trying to write a blog post for the next day I am very likely to wander off to other blogs and leave comments in an a not too subtle method of avoiding the work at hand.

But, as a blogger, there is a whole different aspect of comments to consider, which is the reply to comments on your own blog.

I am, again, not as good at this as I probably should be.  Going back once again to last year’s Syp-scaring statistical nightmare of an anniversary blog post, I write about 13% of the comments on this blog.

Viewed from the “motivating me as a blogger” point of view, that seems like a lot.  It is me typing away more than one in ten times, like I don’t spew enough words in my posts to begin with.

On the flip side, as somebody who leaves comments, that seems like it might not be very much at all.  I likely do not respond to comments often enough, and I measure that from my own experience and reaction to the affairs on other blogs.

To pick on Syp again, because he is a famous actually-gets-paid-to-write person in our blogging neighborhood, as well as a convenient scapegoat, I often pass up leaving a comment over at Bio Break because I know he almost never replies.  What the hell is up with that?  He rarely even leaves a comment on his own blog.

And I have to admit if I go to a blog and leave comments on any sort of regular basis and never see any response, then my motivation to keep it up diminishes over time.  I mostly comment on Syp’s blog because I recognize most of the people who also comment and it is more to have a conversation with them than to respond to Syp who, so far as I know, rarely even reads the comments.

I compare this to leaving a comment over at Inventory Full where I know that Bhagpuss will respond to nearly every comment left.  By his own admission this is directly related to his pre-blogging time when he used to just comment on blogs and explained how much getting a response motivated him to continue leaving comments.

So, while not the worst at responding to comments, I could stand to improve.

Part of my issue there is a general problem with acknowledging praise.  If somebody goes negative or disagrees I will dive right in, but if somebody says something nice I am silent.

And that sort of applies to leaving comments as well.  It isn’t all that common for me to just say something nice unless I have something to add to what was written.  I feel as embarrassed leaving just a compliment as I do when getting one.  Generally I will try to find a way to link directly to a post I like as a sideways way of acknowledgement rather than a comment.

Anyway, I have meandered around for a thousand words now to say that we should all leave more comments, myself included.  And replies.  More replies.

Also, if you’re going to leave a response to a comment and you’re on a blog that doesn’t have threaded comments that sticks replies directly to the comment in question, at least give some hint as to the person to whom you are replying.  If you don’t like using “@heyyou” in your comments, at least mention the person in passing.  The tidy aspect of me hates the ambiguous reply where you aren’t sure who the reply is aimed.

Finally, to get to this week’s real prompts; game devs, thanks for doing your thing.  Sorry some of the community goes nuts every so often or thinks that you have to tailor every single game ever to their needs.  But that is ever the flip side of passion.  Everybody loves when people are hyped up about their product, but hates it when that goes wrong.  If you ride the lightning you’re bound to get shocked now and then.  Also, sorry about the crappy pay and that I likely didn’t buy your game.  But if you wanted money you could have sold your soul to enterprise software like I did.

One Hundred and Eighty Million Skill Points

In which we explore the musical question, “Do I have enough skill points yet?”

The answer is clearly, “No!”  At least not yet, not in a world where there are more sub cap related skills to learn and where Asher comes up with new doctrines that are helped by having skills to level 5.

And so it goes.  I have two other characters on my main account who are starved for skill points… I threw a skill injector at one so he could at least run a cyno… while Wilhelm Arcturus, my main, continues to keep a training queue that is two years deep.

Anyway, the story of Wilhelm’s skill point progression so far.

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battlecruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017

And now he is at 180 million, seven months after the last post, right on schedule.

Actually, he hit 180 million about a week and a half ago.  But this is one of those posts that can sort of go as I have the time, so long as it still lands in the same month.  I had other things to write about over the last week or so, enough other things that I doubled up daily posts for a couple of days and I still have a few topics in the “catch up before it is too late” bin.

Anyway, this is my skill point distribution as of when I pulled the numbers for this post.  Categories that saw a change in skill points are marked with an asterisk.

 Spaceship Cmd 59,729,416 (59 of 75)*
 Gunnery 17,197,141 (36 of 46)
 Fleet Support 12,896,000 (14 of 15)
 Drones 11,704,870 (22 of 26)
 Missiles 11,059,167 (22 of 26)*
 Navigation 9,660,314 (13 of 13)
 Engineering 7,253,895 (15 of 15)
 Electronic Sys 7,189,415 (14 of 15)
 Armor 6,131,137 (13 of 13)
 Shields 5,994,039 (11 of 13)
 Science 5,462,151 (21 of 39)
 Resc Processing 4,569,908 (22 of 28)
 Trade 3,271,765 (9 of 14)
 Targeting 3,207,765 (8 of 8)
 Neural Enhance. 3,202,510 (7 of 8)
 Scanning 3,028,369 (7 of 7)*
 Subsystems 2,199,294 (16 of 16)*
 Planet Mgmt 1,612,315 (5 of 5)*
 Rigging 1,312,395 (10 of 10)
 Production 1,157,986 (5 of 12)
 Social 1,130,040 (5 of 9)
 Structure Mgmt 1,084,784 (2 of 6)
 Corp Mgmt 24,000 (2 of 5)

Total ~180,000,000 (338 of 428)

Of course, there is Spaceship Command up at the top still.  And, as usual, it saw the bulk of the new skill points show up, getting almost 8.5 million of the 10 million new skill points.

Probably the biggest addition there was training up to Command Ships V.  I can now fly a boosting ship like the Damnation and, with the right implant, provide the best possible fleet boosts.

A Dark Damnation

Of course, there is the question of how often I might do that.  I fit out a Damnation for the Reavers deployment to H-ADOC and flew it a few times there.  But then we got back home and the fit for main fleet is different and I had the Armor boosting implant and fleets seem to want the Information Warfare implant, so I either have to destroy an expensive implant to swap or manage clones carefully.

Clone management is easier with Citadels, if you have one handy that is set up for it, but I am also running out of extra clones to hold implant sets.  Asher has implants required for some doctrines, so I have a number of clones tied up with various implant sets already.  Life is complicated.  Poor me.

I also hit Interdictors V, just to have that handy, as well as Minmatar Strategic Cruiser V, because it sounded like the Loki might be the coming thing after the T3 revamp.  But I haven’t flown one yet.  I also tossed in Marauders due to a rumor that there might be such a doctrine, and Mining Frigate V, because it was a short train, picked up a couple of sub caps I couldn’t fly, and was at a time when I wasn’t burning to train something else.

After Spaceship Command I did invest a little time in Missiles.  With Defender Missiles becoming a thing after so many years, I trained those up a bit.  I also racked up a couple levels of specialization for missiles types, since we now fly a couple of missile doctrines.

Subsystems, the subsidiary skills for strategic cruisers, went up some despite the fact that CCP removed four of the skills, one from each empire, and refunded the skill points. (Which I put into Command Ships V, which took a few days off of that.)  However, with what seemed like enthusiasm for the Loki, I trained all the Minmatar subsystems to V and made sure I was at IV or V for all the skills for the Legion and the Proteus.   The net result was that the total skill points in subsystems went up.

I also trained up to Command Center Upgrades V under Planetary Management to give me enough power/CPU to run an extra extraction head on some of my planets, since there always seems to be an imbalance in the two resources I am harvesting.  Now the lower output resources gets an extra extractor.

And, finally, I started training up scanning.  My alt is all level V in scanning and I have gotten used to having that sort of ability handy, so now I want to duplicate it on my main.  This always happens, I get something on one and want it on the other.  I actually have a list of skills in my queue that I want to re-spec for, including scanning, once I am done with a couple more Spaceship Command skills.

Oddly, for the probably the first time in the history of these posts, I ended up with the same number of skills two posts in a row.  I had 338 skills last time and I have 338 skills this time.  Of course, that must mean that I trained four new skills as CCP took away four skills.

Anyway, this is how my skills shake out by level trained.

 Level 1 - 1
 Level 2 - 7
 Level 3 - 42
 Level 4 - 98
 Level 5 - 190

190 skills at level V puts me up 8, while 98 at level IV is an increase of 17 skills at that level.  I rounded up a few level II and III skills it seems since last time.

And speaking of last time, at the one hundred and seventy million mark I noted that I was in danger finishing up my benchmark metric of being able to fly all of the sub caps.  Last time I only had the Endurance and Prospect mining frigates, the Occator and Viator Amarr transport ships, the Loki strategic cruiser, and Marauders.  I can fly all of those now, which I think means I can fly all the sub caps.

Everything else on the Spaceship Command list is related to capital ships.  I suppose I could fantasize about flying all the capitals, but that seems a bit silly… and expensive.  Training up the Jump Freighter skill might be useful, since I have Caldari Freighter trained up already as well as the Navigation skills related to capitals.  That would give me the Rhea.

Maybe Spaceship Command will stop growing so much every time.  After I get the two remaining strategic cruisers to V, what else will I need.  Marauders IV maybe.  But after that, do I really need, for example, Black Ops V?

I suppose we’ll see when I hit 190 million skill points, which ought to come around some time in March of 2018.  And if you’re just dying to see what skills I have trained, you can see them all here.

Who Has Successfully Changed Horses Midstream?

To start this off, I feel like I first have to address my own point of view on the topic to be covered, so you see where I am coming from.

I actually played right field, but that isn’t a metaphor

I tend to be something of a fatalist in many things, but in video games especially.

For me that means I come to a video game with the view that it is a series of rules and constraints that I have to work within in order to win, progress, succeed, or whatever, and that the idea that the developer ought to change them just to suit me rarely enters my head.  There is more than a bit of the rule following engineer in me.  I take what I am given and try to make it work.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t kvetch about the details of various games.  This blog is a testament to that.  If there is a mechanic that is awkward or horribly inefficient, I will complain about that or suggest improvements.  But that is mostly for myself, to record how I feel about a game at a given moment, and my comments tend to be about tactical issues rather than strategic vision.  I do not expect anybody to be paying attention and I am generally surprised when anything I think might be a good idea actually comes to pass through whatever means. If something changes, I can almost guarantee it had nothing to do with me.

But to suggest that a developer change what is the driving philosophy or core game play elements title to accommodate my tastes would be bizarro world strange.

As an example for illustration, I do not enjoy League of Legends, so I simply do not play the game.  The complete lack of LoL posts here attests to that.  I do enjoy five person PvE dungeons.  Again, plenty of posts to back that up.  But the idea that I should start pestering Riot to make a five person PvE dungeon version of LoL would only occur to me in the context of listing out things I would likely never do.  Despite the fact that their engine could probably handle it, five person dungeons isn’t what LoL is about.  So I don’t post about how they should accommodate my vision here, on their forums, on Reddit, or anyplace else.

And I realize that might just be me, given how often I see people suggest that if only game X had feature/aspect/mini-game Y, then they and thousands to millions of like minded individuals would rush to the game, bringing success.  Many an arm chair developer has a plan to save a given game or even the whole industry based suspiciously on their own tastes in video games.

This all comes to mind because of the persistence of the “walking in stations” idea in EVE Online.  Kirith Kodachi wrote a great post on the topic, a “what if” scenario, where walking in stations becomes a success, which illustrates the whole problem I have with the idea.  The feature essentially requires CCP to develop a new game, distinct from the space focused current game, in order to make walking in stations anything beyond a gimmick.

Whatever you think about it, you cannot deny that walking in stations would require fundamentally different game play than what is the focus of EVE Online today.

However, I don’t want to get into the holy war over whether or not walking in stations would be a good thing though.  And believe me, my own relationship with the idea isn’t as cut and dried as you might think.

Instead, I am looking for examples from other games, especially MMORPGs, where the developer has, after launch, departed from their core philosophy or game play plan, and achieved success beyond what they had previously seen.

When has the idea that more people would play a game if it changed fundamentally actually come to pass?

I can only come up with examples where greater success did not follow.

I think of Trammel and consensual PvP in Ultima Online, or Star Wars Galaxies and the NGE, or that “fine, we’ll give you a PvE progression experience” expansion for Dark Age of Camelot that I cannot remember the name of right now, or the distraction of PvP in EverQuest II.

Which is not to say somebody didn’t like all of those things.  One of the lessons you learn from blogging is that any feature, no matter how bad or annoying it is, will have somebody stand up for it and declare it their favorite thing ever.

But none of these led to greater success.

Even World of Warcraft, which is, as always, the outlier in this, having the budget to add in all sorts of non-core features, still lives and dies on their core PvE content.  Five million people did not drop out of the game last year because of problems with battlegrounds, arena combat, or pet battles, they dropped out because they didn’t like, or too quickly consumed, the overland, dungeon, and raid PvE content.

So plenty of negatives, and I didn’t even start down the path of gaming franchises that remain successful year after year despite offering up nothing substantially different in core game play.  Everything from Pokemon to Civilization to Call of Duty that goes from success to success with only minor variations seems to argue against changing horses midstream.  Find your rut and stick with it forever!

But just because I can’t come up with an example of success in this regard doesn’t mean there haven’t been any.  There are more things in online gaming than are dreamt of in my rather limited philosophy.

Who has done it?  Who has made a success of a fundamental change of game play or philosophy on a live game?  There has to be some example out there, even if it is a special case that worked only because the conditions were just right.  I would prefer an MMO example, but something MMO-ish would suffice.