Friday Bullet Points on Deck for Summer

Back in the day I used to have a regular “mail bag” feature that took items from the blog inbox… reader submissions and press releases… that I thought might be interesting.  I don’t get much reader email these days and the press releases… where to even start?  Leaving aside the non-gaming updates, and the interview offers for random “experts” on even more random topics, the best one I’ve seen in months was about a Hello Kitty mobile app.  It even has a video, if that is your thing.

Bullet points though… I can pull those from anywhere.  All of which was a too long way of saying we’re back to the Friday Bullet Points thing again.

• Steam Deck

Probably the big PC gaming announcement of the week was the Valve announcement of the Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck hardware

Basically it feels like Valve looked at the Nintendo Switch and said, “Yeah, we can do that and then some.”  No doubt experience garnered with the failed Steam Machine helped them along

It runs on the Linux based SteamOS, plays games directly from your Steam library, has a docking option that allows you to hook up a keyboard, mouse, and monitor if you so desire, and is supposed to be available by December, with pre-orders opening up today.

Pricing is “aggressive” according to the company, starting at $399 for the 64GB base model and rising to $649 for the 512GB top end unit.  It seems pretty cool.  There are games in my Steam library that certainly favor a controller for input, and $400 for a mini gaming PC seems like a pretty good deal.  But I’ll probably wait and see on this one all the same.

Picking additional coverage to link to is tough as literally any web site that has any connection to video games has an article up by now, so there is plenty out there about the device.  Still, IGN’s article links to a FAQ they put together with Valve, so I’ll link to that.

• Pokemon Go Fest

Pokemon Go turned five this month and the annual Pokemon Go Fest is this weekend to celebrate.  I haven’t really felt the need to buy the $14.99 in-game ticket to join in on the event in the past.  Some things, like all the special raids, are there for everybody.  But this time around they knocked the price down to $4.99 and have a pile of thing available for those who buy in, so my wife and I spent the money.

the 2021 event price

It is summer, we can go outside again, and it isn’t like the war in New Eden will miss me for a couple of afternoons.  I also have to go feed somebody’s cat on Saturday, a walk which will take me past at least three gyms.

• Pokemon Go Five Year Collection Event

It is lucky for Naintic that we bought the event tickets before we finished the warm up event.  For the five year anniversary there was a run to collect all of the starter Pokemon from the first six generations of the game.  They were out in the wild, so the first dozen or so were easy enough to collect.  But there are always a few who seem reluctant to show up.  We found out that the daily tasks related to the event always had one of the starters, so the night before the deadline we were out at the community center, which has a a bunch of Pokestops, doing tasks to try and get the last two we needed.

Take 5 pictures of a wild Pokemon was a common task

After some persistence, my wife ended up getting her final catch.  I got my final one the next morning… a totodile if you are interested… so we were able to collect the rewards.

All of the starters checked off

They were some Pokeballs (yawn), a few rare candies (decent), and a special encounter.  The hope was that it would be something good.   Instead it was the anniversary Pikachu.

5 year Pika

That would have been cool… had that Pikachu not been littering the pavement throughout the event.  They were everywhere.  I wasn’t even bothering to catch them.  My wife about exploded when she saw the reward for the effort.  So here is hoping we get a bit more from the weekend’s run.

• Pokemon Go Raid Achievements

Earlier this month, in advance of the anniversary, Pokemon Go got some big updates on the graphical front.  It is no longer either day or night.  Dusk and dawn see the light change as the sun moves through the sky.  Shadows are also more realistic.  When joining a raid there are some splashy new graphics.  And, there are now raid level achievements for things like most damage, final blow, and best dressed.

My wife got the final blow, but I just make this look good

There are, of course, badges for getting raid achievements… achievements for achievements are my favorite achievements I guess.

I can hit hard when I want

The interesting one is the traveler award, which goes to the remote raid pass person furthest from the gym.  I’ve had one friend from Japan get the furthest I’ve seen so far.

That is pretty far away… I was about 1km from the gym

• Diablo II Technical Alpha Updates

I am trying to be cool about Diablo II: Resurrected.  We’re not getting it for a while, so no need to get all excited about it.

The return of the classic

But then we get updates from the company about how the technical alpha is going and it becomes hard to sit on my hands.  I want to play.  As a pre-order I will get a chance in about a month I guess.  That isn’t too far down the road.  Time flies.

• Reserve Bank Keys are Coming

Back when CCP was nerfing ratting by forcing the ESS on it last November, they setup a main bank, which can be stolen from ratters, and a reserve bank, which would require special keys that were not yet available.  Since then trillions of ISK has built up in the reserve banks across null and low sec space.

CCP has announced that the reserve bank keys are finally coming.  They have put the keys, which can be found in low sec sites, up on the test server so people can try them out.

I expect comedy will ensue.  A few keen players will get in, figure out the system, keep quiet about whatever flaws there are, and otherwise position themselves to act the moment that the keys are released on the live server, at which point there will be a rush for them.  The winners will likely be the preppers and large groups that will rob their own reserve banks.

I expect that the reserve bank keys will be live on July 27th unless some tragic flaw is found, reported, and actually investigated by CCP.  At least they put the ISK payout flow on a timer,  made the keys specific to a particular quadrant of New Eden, and gave us two flavors (5 minute and 15 minute) so all the reserve banks won’t be empty in a week of furious activity like they did with structures a while back.  And, like the main bank, the payout is in bonds that need to be redeemed at an NPC, so they can be lost even after the heist.

 

Lurking in Catch

Over the the last two days I have posted about a serious entosis effort, but much of the entosis work in the war so far has not been serious.  As I mentioned in the past, trolling via entosis can be a low effort way to annoy your foes.

The host of Alliances arrayed against us have been doing this sort of trolling.  It has largely been confined to Querious and it seems that Brave Collective has been the primary factor in these pin pricks.

Having hunted them for a bit I decided to return the favor and set out for Catch where much of their sovereignty lies.

It seemed like a simple enough task.  I had done a bit of entosis work back in the Casino War.  Things had changed a bit since then and the whole high speed cloaky Rapier option seemed to no longer be a thing.  So I looked around and grabbed an Atron entosis fit from one of the kills I was on, copied it to the clipboard, then imported it on one of my alts sitting around in Jita.

I bought the pieces, fitted it up, and flew my alt down to HED-GP, the high sec link to the Catch region and Legacy space.  I wasn’t dead set on Brave as a target, but TEST was further along and a chunk of their space is right there.  I was a little nervous jumping in to HED, it being traditionally a heavily camped gate, but nobody was home when I passed through.  I was able to fly off, warp gate to gate, until I was into their space a bit.  I found an empty system, warped to the ihub, locked it up and clicked the button.

I received an error.  You need to be in an alliance to do sovereignty things and my alt was just a high sec character I skilled up to run abyssal sites a while back.  What to do?

I logged in my main, put him in a travel Ares which I knew my alt could fly and them sitting cloaked up while I flew through Delve and Querious, through the big camps guarding either side of the 49-U6U and 4-07MU gate, through the hostile staging in FAT-6P, and into Catch and Brave’s section of that.

I formed a fleet with my alt and, after burning a couple of safe spots and gate perches in an empty system, I warped to my alt and had both characters eject and swap ships.  Now I could entosis.

I had decided to copy not only Brave’s fit, but also their later tactics.  Early on I was catching people on ihubs regularly, but after a bit they changed over to doing the warm up cycle and then, at the first sign of anybody in the system, would align away and turn on their MWD so to be far off the ihub before anybody landed.

That Arton fit can go the full 4,000 m/s allowed with an entosis link fit, so it moves away rapidly and you need something fast to catch it.

With that plan I warped to the ihub, set myself to orbit at 15km to keep myself within the 20km maximum range, locked it up, and started the entosis module.

I then sat there orbiting for the five minute cycle of the module as it warms up.  At that point you are committed.  You cannot warp off, cloak up, jump to another system, or dock.  You just get to stay on grid.  But during the warm up no alert goes out to the owners either so nobody is likely to bother you.

Out hitting an ihub

And then the first five minutes go by and the real attack cycle begins.  It looks just like the warm up, your entosis beam on the ihub, but once it starts the alert goes out to people in the owning alliance that it is being captured.  Then the fun begins.

I waited until somebody arrived in system then aligned away and turned on the MWD to get myself up to speed.  I was quickly out of entosis range, so my attack stopped, but I still had to wait the full entosis cycle before I could get away clean.

Meanwhile, the locals began to show up.  My empty system went up to 17 people and most of them came to visit the ihub at  some point.

Around the ihub

A couple of them chased me.  You can see that Atron on the overview was about halfway between me and the ihub.  I kept ahead and once the entosis cycled down I waited for my MWD to start a fresh cycle, activated my cloak, and turned off 90 degrees to keep anybody who was traveling straight towards me from decloaking me when the passed.  I was safe.

The locals, however, were not best pleased.  They abused me in local, all the more so when I cloaked, told me my attempt was pointless and didn’t bother them anyway.  But I followed one of the strict rules from Reavers, which is to never talk in local.  That seems to annoy people more than anything I could possible say, and they kept trying to goad me as if to prove my point.

Meanwhile I had my neutral alt out in Catch in a ship I wanted back in Delve.  So I flew them back down the path I had come, through the staging, through the two gate camps (tossing a dscan in local on the Imperium side of the gate to give them a peek at what lay beyond), and into NPC Delve where I docked up and contracted the ship back to my main to pick up later.

I sat around cloaked up with my main in the background, coming back in a couple hours to spin up another entosis cycle, which drew another crowd.

But I realized I had a problem.  Not thinking things through, I had flown out in my “do all the things in subcaps” main, who I would want to use on fleet ops.  But now he was stuck in Catch in an entosis Atron and was unlikely to get past the camps back to Delve.

I know my main alt could take over, but I had him setup to fly caps if a big fight broke out, so didn’t want to get him stuck out in Catch either.  So I went to see if another alt I had in KarmaFleet could help.  As it turned out, I had trained him up just enough to fly out to me in a Malediction, swap ships, and take over the entosis gig.  I had to use some of my unused skill points, but that was what they were around for.  So Claude Ring flew out through all that stuff, swapped ships, with Wilhelm, and Wil flew back.

Now Claude sits out in Catch and flips on the enotsis module a few times a day while I am working.  I setup in a system, wait for nobody to be home, then warp to the ihub and get up to my mischief.  I start the entosis up, set a four and a half minute timer on my phone, and get back to work.  When the timer goes off I tab back and get ready.  When the second cycle starts and the alarm goes out, I wait for somebody to arrive in system, align out, light off the MWD, and wait for the fun to arrive.

The fun is in the chase.  I run away and then the locals land and come after me.  At 4K m/s not just anything is going to catch my Atron, but there have been some game attempts.

I had a Jaguar closing on me quickly enough that I was worried, despite a 300km head start, that it was going to catch me before the entosis module cycled down.  But for whatever reason, he gave up, then stopped, then came after me again.  By that point I was able to cloak up, veer off, and watch him sail by.

He got close, but not close enough

I realize that I could just warp off.  I have safe spots in the systems where I now ply my trade, and that would let me get away, but cloaking up to play submarine while the locals try to decloak me is more fun.  It also keeps them looking for me, and they clearly need something to keep them busy.

One smart person landed at the ihub in a Hecate with a probe launcher and probed me down to warp to me as I was burning away.  That was probably the second closest I have come to getting caught, though with my speed by the time they got a fix on me and warped I was well out of range and was able to cloak up before they got another fix on me.

So I keep at it and take screen shots when somebody gets close.  This Caracal got in the neighborhood.

RunsBeforeWalks walks on by

I have the tactical overlay on so you can see which direction both of us are headed.

Mostly they do not get that close.  One person, Shaarak, asked me in local how close he had come.  It was hard to keep to my no talking in local rule, since they are a regular who chases me often, but I did.  Still, if they somehow come across this post, this was their closest pass so far.

Sharaak at 16km passing by

Probably the most terrifying moment was when my account expired.  I was on grid and a couple of people were flying around looking for me and I suddenly got the big “GO OMEGA TODAY!” pop up and realized that I had purchased game time, but had not made it recurring.  So I scrambled to quickly re-subscribe… though apparently when you go Alpha while cloaked it doesn’t de-cloak you right away, so I survived.

My alt is still sitting out there.  I wasn’t sure how long he would last, but my worry now is that he is going to run out of strontium clathrates, the fuel needed for the entosis module, before he gets blown up.

Anyway, all of this summed up in meme form.

All things go brrrr

So it goes.

Update:   Oops, got caught trying to get out of Catch since I wrote this. (It was supposed to post yesterday, but then I had a battle to write about.)  You will note that there was no stront left in the cargo bay.  I should have just run more out in an interceptor.  Next time.  But I have already slipped another Atron past the gate camp in V-3YG7, so I can start again soon.

CCP Should Build its Own EVE Online Kill Board

Over the weekend we were once again reminded about how much CCP and the EVE Online community depend on unpaid third party developers for much of the game’s knowledge infrastructure.  As part of the null sec blackout both ZKillboard and DOTLAN EVE Maps hid data that we have grown accustomed to having, with ZKillboard going completely dark for the weekend.  This led to glee, annoyance, and reactive behavior by various parties.

Forget ZKill, welcome to GKill!

When Monday morning rolled around the data blackout was removed and the sites returned to normal and, while it was a cute stunt to hype the blackout idea, it also made the point that information we have grown very used to accessing depends on the goodwill of people neither beholding to us nor CCP.

Squizz of ZKillboard and Wollari of DOTLAN both deserve our gratitude and respect for what they have contributed to the EVE Online community, but part of me has long felt that their stepping up largely came about due to CCP’s failure to do so.

EVE Online is past its 16th birthday and CCP has yet to create an in-game map that is half as useful as DOTLAN. (Or, for that matter, GARPA or the PDF maps that one guy made back in the day or even the old book of maps from EON Magazine, errors therein included.)  In fact, they managed to create a new in-game map that was even less useful than the original one.

How do you manage that?  Seriously, WTF CCP?

So you can see why third parties step in and end up filling an important role for the New Eden community.

Still, the blackout behavior was, as I started with, a reminder of how much we depend on these third parties and how much things would hurt if they got tired of their mostly thankless tasks and decided to move on.  And, while I hate to get all “EVE is dying!” the game is old and has seen better days and higher PCUs.  So I think it might be time for CCP to step up and start owning some of the services to which we’ve grown accustomed.

And my proposal is that they start with an official kill board.

Why a kill board?

Well, for openers, they have demonstrated that they cannot create a useful map… or, Lord help us… a UI comprehensible by mere mortals.  But a kill board is just a web site… they can do those, I’ve seen them… which displays data drawn from a database.

Then there is the fact that we’re pretty much down to one community-wide kill board.  EVE Kill is long gone… remembered via some dead links here on the blog… and Battle Clinic likewise shut down back in 2016.

Also, the software used for ZKillboard is open source, so they could start with that.

The whole thing could be setup at the data center in the UK, so it would have direct access to all the information needed to populate it.  And, after a modest start CCP could expand upon it, adding features and reports.

The upside would be a single reliable source for kill information as well an opening to perhaps a more advanced version of a kill board.  There has long been talk about getting support ships like logi on kill mails.  I am a logi pilot and I am against CCP wasting time trying to get logi on kill mails.  If CCP ran the one true kill board, it might end up being easier for them to pull data in order to create battle reports that would list out all participants, including logi, boosters, and whoever.  And, if CCP ran it they could also tune the amount and type of data that gets posted.

The downsides though… well, it would likely take up a dev resource that might otherwise be working on something else, and they would have to maintain it over time.  As a company they couldn’t even maintain the wiki they used to have.  A lot of people don’t like kill boards for a variety of reasons.  And, as attractive as a single source of truth kill board and battle report tool might sound, the flip side is that it also becomes a an intel tool with perfect recall.  None of the kill boards have ever come close to 100% coverage, and when there were three big kill boards running they were at times comically at odds with each other.  But with CCP holding all the data, they could lay bare every kill whether you wanted or not.

I don’t want to put Squizz out of business.  But I also don’t want to be left with the anarchy of no community kill board if he tires of the work or the lack of gratitude from the community.

Does this seem reasonable?  Or should CCP tackle something else, or maybe just leave well enough alone for now?

EVE Online Summer Season of Skill Points

CCP once again proves they think we’re all about out skill points… and they are probably not wrong.

Login rewards in the form of skill points return to New Eden as CCP announces the Season of Skills event.

Things capsuleers do to themselves…

Unlike the 16th Anniversary event earlier this year, where you had to log in for 16 days during the event to claim all your skill points and other goodies, the Season of Skills event will be broken up into three parts.  But each part will reward you with skill points, and an Omega character can come up with at least a million it seems if they actively peruse things.

All date ranges are from downtime to downtime, which means they start on the first date after 11:00 UTC and end on the second date before 11:00 UTC.

Bonus Skill Point Week – July 17-25

Log in every day throughout Bonus Skill Point Week and get free Skill Points.  The traditional split between free and subscribing players will be in force.  Alpha pilots can claim up to 200k skill points over the week, while Omega will get up to 650k skill points.  Cerebral accelerators, which speed up skill training will also be awarded.  I hope we get a SKIN or two along the way as well.  Some SKINs will be on sale, but I want more.

Skilling Spree – July 24-August 21

Get rewards ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 skill points for killing Triglavian invaders.  A single kill each day is worth 10K skill points.

Bonus Skill Points Weekend – August 23-26

Log in each day over the weekend  even more skill points.  Alpha clones will get 75,000 skill points  while Omega clones will get 250,000 skill points if they log in all three days.

What Does It All Mean?

I guess it means that we love it when CCP generates skill points out of thin air and simply gives them away, but hate when they generate skill points out of thin air and sell them.

At least we hate it in the short term.  Three weeks later and CCP is still selling that starter pack that got so many people so bent out of shape, but it doesn’t seem to bother anybody now.

Anyway, I won’t say “no” to most of these free skill points, though I doubt I’ll be killing Triglavians for the middle segment of the event.  I honestly have no insight nor idea what is going on with the high sec end of the invasion event.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to draw a constraining circle around a few things, it sounds like the invasion events might be resolving towards the end of August, so that might also be the point when we hear what CCP has become definite about the null sec blackout as well.

Other coverage:

• Evehermit – Skill Point Explosion

MER – Pre-War Delve Numbers

CCP has released the monthly economic report for June 2018, and it might turn out to be an interesting report for comparison sake.  June was a month of dull peace in Delve, with ratting and mining and production and commerce rolling along unhindered.

But now, in July, we have conflicts in null sec.  Pandemic Legion has deployed to the southeast to join in on the attacks on TEST and the Legacy Coalition while the Imperium has taken PLs absence from the north as an opportunity to roll north, drop a Keepstar, and start pounding on Circle of Two and Guardians of the Galaxy.  That not only pulled a bunch of capsuleers north, but also the super capital umbrella that protects Delve as well, leaving those who didn’t get the word (which always happens), or thought they were invulnerable, open to attack.

So we can look at the June numbers as a baseline for how war changes output in Delve.  And we can start, as usual, with the mining numbers.

June 2018 – Mining Value by Region

We even have the bar graph back this month.

June 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Delve is, as usual, far ahead of every other region in mining output, and second place is Querious, which is also controlled by the Imperium and the host to the monthly “locust fleet” operations to harvest moon output in the region.  The scourge of the Rorquals I suppose.

Delve was up 600 billion over May, which is fairly impressive because the mining value measurement depends on the price, and prices were again down in June.

June 2018 – Economic Indices – Three Year Snapshot

If the price of minerals is still headed down but mining value in Delve is up, that means a lot more ore had to get mined.

Mineral prices aren’t close to their all time low yet, as the long term chart shows.

June 2018 – Economic Indices Long Term

But the trend is still way down.  Cheaper prices make it harder to get rich as a miner… unless you’re running a fleet of Rorquals… but they also make manufactured items cheaper overall in Jita.  If you’re not a miner, this is probably good.  If you are, it probably pisses you off.

On the NPC bounties front, Delve also held on to its top spot.

June 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

Again, we have the bar graph back.  Several of those went missing for the May report.

June 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

Delve, despite its dominance, was down almost 2 trillion ISK compared to May.  Meanwhile Branch was up, the place where the groups in the north have fled to escape the attentions of the Imperium SIGs and Squads.

Fade was up, almost doubling from May’s 396 billion ISK number by hitting 747 billion ISK.  That is no doubt due to Circle of Two moving in and settling down in the region and having the first half of the month free of attacks as the Imperium took two weeks off in June to give its pilots a break.  I suspect that number will be down in the July report due to the return of the Imperium.  Rumor has it that GigX has forbidden anybody to rat in anything more expensive than a VNI or mine in anything better than a T1 barge.

The share of bounties across sec status remains heavily tilted towards null sec.

June 2018 – NPC Bounties by Sec Status

High sec, which was trending up a bit over the last couple of reports, was back down to 6.2% of the total, while overall bounty payments saw a slight decline over the course of the month.

June 2018 – Top 8 ISK Sinks and Faucets

On the trade front The Forge was in no danger of losing its top position.  Jita remains the place to go to buy and sell.

June 2018 – Trade Value by Region

The bar graph shows the dominance of Jita more clearly.

June 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

That dominance is such that they have to make a bar graph without The Forge in order for people to see how other regions stack up against each other.

June 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

There we see Domain, home of Amarr, still comfortably in second place, with Delve trailing behind in third.  After that are the three other New Eden high sec trade hubs, then Geminate, home of Pandemic Horde.

For contracts however The Forge is not as dominant.

June 2018 – Contracts Trade Value by Region – Bar Chart

There are a lot of contracts in Jita, but Delve is not far behind.  As usual, I suspect this is because a lot of things like fleet doctrine ship sales, capital and super capital sales, buy back schemes, and some raw material sales are done via contract.  Still, overall, contracts remain a small item in Jita relative to the main market.

Then there is production.

June 2018 – Production Values by Region

Previously Delve was the top region for production, though the three regions in the vicinity of Jita still combined to well out produce Delve.  However this month Delve slipped, dropping from 40 trillion ISK in production in May to 33 trillion ISK in June, putting it in close competition with The Forge, which held steady with 32 trillion ISK.

What happened in Delve?  Did we run out of pilots rich enough to buy a titan finally?  Is that why The Mittani was was extolling us to get alts into supers if we already had a main in one?

Anyway, production was down.  We will see if a war suppresses it further or if losses… should we join battle in any serious way… will spur production in order to replace them.

And so this month’s chart of interest is the destroyed value by region.

June 2018 – Destroyed Value by Region

War in New Eden may make this chart interesting to compare with next month’s chart.  But I also wanted to compare it against May’s chart to see what Into the Abyss did to the numbers.  I was wondering if the losses in abyssal pockets would up the numbers.  But abyssal pockets aren’t in normal space, so in places like The Forge, ever a hot spot for suicide ganking, destruction numbers actually went down 800 billion ISK.

So Into the Abyss didn’t change the chart, but I suspect war might.  So we will revisit this one again next month.

Finally, I will close with the usual regional comparison chart.

June 2018 – Regional Stats

That just nicely summarizes the stats for a few key regions.

Those were the June numbers.  But now, in July, war is on, both in the northeast around Fade, where the Imperium is pressing on CO2 and GotG, and in the southwest, where Pandemic Legion is leading a large but loose coalition of alliances against the TEST and the Legacy Coalition.  If both conflicts carry on, the numbers could change up quite a bit.  But wars can also end suddenly.  We shall see.

Again, you can find the monthly economic report here.  It includes many more charts than I choose to review and has all the raw data if you care to make your own.

History of the Entire World, I Guess

From nothing until right now.

 

Also, you could make a religion out of that.

There are Pokemon in the Chicken

From a friend of mine in the suburbs of Chicago, the Pokemon GO thing is still going into the weekend.  I’ve seen informal offers around town here in Silicon Valley, but this came as an email offer from Kick’s Chicken Cafe.

Kick’s is throwing down lures

But will the chicken be as tasty if hackers bring down the servers?