Ship Replacement Program

Like many other players, I often fall into the shorthand jargon of EVE Online and, while I do attempt to explain things now and then, some things I gloss over or forget about.  So when I got a message on Discord asking what “SRP” was, I figured that might for a decent blog post topic.

“SRP” stands for “Ship Replacement Program” and gets thrown around as a noun or a verb depending who is speaking.  It refers to a feature of many larger null sec alliances that reimburses pilots when they lose ships when on sanctioned operations.  The idea is that if you’re out there losing ships for the objectives of your corp or alliance,  you shouldn’t bear the full financial burden for meeting those objectives.

There was a time when elite PvP groups disdained the idea of SRP, but most large null sec groups these days have some sort of way to compensate member losses.  It is pretty much seen as a necessity to be able to keep the membership bulk required to sustain a null sec empire beyond a certain size.  A small, tight group can get away with giving SRP a miss, but when you get beyond Dunbar’s number you start having to make people feel the taxes collected are being used well and that being a part of the organization doesn’t drive people away due to combat being financial disincentive.

And different groups have different methodolgies for dealing with SRP.  I have been told, for example, that Pandemic Horde has a currency system for reimbursement and that presence on operations ears you credit towards SRP.

I will describe how it works in Goonswarm Federation and KarmaFleet, as that is what I am familiar with.  GSF, in the words of The Mittani, had strived to achieve “fully automated luxury gay space communism” for its members before the war and has managed to maintain many of the perks from when the “Delve Time Unit” was generating a large amount of income for the alliance.  That includes an SRP program that offers good levels of reimbursement.

For my example I will use one of the fights from 3-DMQT where I lost several ships.  I went out in a Drake on my main account with a Scythe on my alt, both in the same fleet.

Yes, I can bring my Drake

I had purchased the initial Drake off of an alliance contract for 140 million ISK.  I purchased the platinum insurance, which is assumed in the GSF reimbursement calculations, for 20,772,702 ISK, putting my total investment in the ship at 160,772,702.

And, as related in my post about the fight, it blew up.

With its destruction, Pend Insurance paid me 69,009,242 ISK, so I was now in the hole for the loss 91,763,460 ISK.

I then filed for SRP.  We have a web app called “Affordable Care” for that in GSF.  You have to provide the external kill mail link from you character sheet (interactions, combat log, losses) and paste that in.  That points to the API entry that will return all the data about the loss.  You also have to past in the fleet op ping that came over Jabber.  This includes information about the fleet so they know what doctrine you were supposed to be flying, who the FC was, and how the fleet was classified.  In this case it was classified as a strategic operation, or StratOp, which generally yields the highest level of reimbursement.

There are about a dozen categories in the Affordable Care app that cover a variety of situations, but most line members get “strategic,” “peacetime,” or “shit shack.”  As noted above, “strategic” gets you the most reimbursement and is provided to pilots flying correct fit doctrine ships on designated operations.  “Peacetime” is basically not used right now, but before the war that covered roams and other PvP action using doctrine ships.  “Shit Shack” is for things outside of doctrine fits that you have opted to bring on your own without the FC requesting it, and is largely at the discretion of the SRP team.  It can sometimes be used when you bring the right hull but the wrong fit so you get something for your loss, but you don’t qualify for strategic reimbursement.

But for that Drake I qualified for strategic reimbursement.  That got me 95 million ISK from the reimbursement team, which paid me before I had even managed to get back in the fight.  The Affordable Care app even gives me a little report on each loss I submit, so for my Drake I got this.

Drake One Loss

My ship blew up at 00:59:57, I submitted my loss at 01:05:24, and was paid at 01:05:54, or basically 30 seconds after my submission.  SRP isn’t always that fast, but when a big fight is on the SRP team doesn’t like to fall too far behind, so when they are on deck the response is quick.

And, after all of that I was 3,236,540 ISK ahead.   Not exactly retirement money, but losing that ship did not ding my wallet at all.

Because the fight was still going on I bought another Drake off contract, again for 140 million ISK, insured it again, undocked and got back in the fight.  Unfortunately I made a total rookie mistake and forgot to check if the rigs had been fit.  That Drake was blown up as well and you can see the rigs in my cargo in the kill report linked.  I didn’t notice until I got the Affordable Care update and found my request denied.

Drake Two – Missing Rigs

Another quick response, this time in under 30 seconds.  I guess they look at your rig slots first.  That mistake on my part made my ship considerably more vulnerable to destruction.  I was actually getting reps and, had the rigs been there, might have survived.  Instead, my dumb mistake put me back 91,763,460 ISK.  But when you get burned you learn.

I would not have even filed for SRP had I realized I had forgotten to fit the rigs.  I was just so intent on getting back in the fight that I forgot to check.

So I was back in 1DQ1-A again and purchased a third Drake off of contract, again for 140 million ISK, insured it, and was back in the fight… but not before checking and fitting the rigs.  A good thing too because that Drake was also destroyed.  Three ships down.

Drake Three – This Time with Rigs

This was at about the crescendo of the fight, so I guess I can forgive the SRP team for taking two whole minutes to get me paid.  They were working furiously behind the scenes.  As I mentioned in a past post, one person filed for SRP on seven Drakes.

And, of course, being back in 1DQ1-A again, I bought a fourth Drake, fit the rigs, undocked, and got back in the fight once more.  By this point, however, the lowest price Drakes had all been purchased.  That Drake was 145 million ISK so, had I lost it, I would have been down about 2 million ISK.  That is the price of some T2 modules though, so wouldn’t have bothered me.

Fortunately I did not lose that fourth Drake.

My alt, however, lost his Scythe towards the end of the fight.  Logi, especially T1 logi, generally benefits from generous SRP.  So while I bought the ship for 28 million ISK, spent 3.5 million ISK on insurance which paid out 11.5 million ISK, leaving me about 23.5 million ISK in the hole, SRP paid out 25 million ISK, making me whole on that front.

And then KarmaFleet, which has an add-on SRP program to encourage people to fly certain ships, such as logi, put another 15 million ISK in my pocket.  So I made money on that round.

Overall though, I put four Drakes into that fight because I knew that, if I did my part of things correctly, the alliance would make me whole on the price of the ships.  Had I been paying my own way entirely, I am pretty sure I would have stopped at two Drakes and let the fight play out without me.  And, given our losses, I suspect that others would have not re-shipped and we would have not ended the fight with as many Drakes as we had.

Drakes at the end of the fight

Of course, things are not always perfect.  Drakes that day were the right price with the right insurance and the right reimbursement.  But the price of ships depends on the market and the SRP team, while it does keep up, can’t adjust every time the market is a bit tight and there are only a few pricey contracts left up for grabs.  And certainly for ships that do not insure well, like the T2 and T3 hulls, the SRP is a balm.  A Jackdaw nets you about 4 million ISK on insurance, but cost over 110 million ISK on contract usually.  Getting 90 million ISK in SRP gets people reshipping in those.

And then there are capital ships and special SIG and squad fits that have their own dynamics in the program.  The only time I felt I had been denied SRP it was for a SIG fit and when I asked the leader about it, they reimbursed me themselves.

But for most line members if you have the doctrine right ship with the right fit, and remember to fit your rigs, the program buffers you from bearing the financial burden of fights.  That, in turn, incentivizes line members to go all in, even with losses, so the alliance can win its objectives.

Basically, with the war on and the losses I have sustained, which I track in the weekly updates, I’d be, if not close to broke, much more conservative about joining ops, were it not for our program.

Graduation Day

Today my daughter graduates from high school.  While a mere high school education is something many sneer at these day, it is still the culmination of a lot of work.  It is rightly a proud moment for both parent and child.

He mortarboard decorated

And my daughter has done more than just get through high school.  She was very involved on campus, took hard classes, volunteered, and even took a zero period class her junior year, which involved getting up earlier than most teens can manage.  I would have never done that in high school.

Come the end of summer she will be off to college.  A transition in life for all of us.

A simple and common suburban story.  But we live in interesting times.

A pandemic, a crumbling economy, the worst unemployment since the great depression, and protests against injustice and police brutality against African Americans… all of which have been made manifestly worse for every American by an obscenely narcissistic president whose calculations are only ever based on what he can do in a given moment to benefit himself… means that normalcy isn’t a thing even out in the suburbs.

We are under both stay at home orders due to the pandemic and a curfew due to protests.  Social distancing requirements mean that there will be no traditional graduation ceremony nor any sort of grad night party.  We will be having a drive through graduation instead.  Students have a time slot when their family can drive up.  Students will hop out of the car, get their diploma, have their picture taken on the set where this will take place, then get back in their car and drive off.  The pictures will be assembled into a video with music and narration that will be posted in a couple of weeks so relatives can see the ceremony.

Not the big event she was expecting back at the start of her senior year.  She is disappointed.

The future is uncertain as well.  The college she will be attending has been saying that there will be classes as normal come the fall semester, that students will live on campus and, while some precautions will be necessary, things will be mostly normal.  But they haven’t committed to that wholeheartedly yet and a lot of other schools… like the whole California State University system, with 23 campuses and nearly half a million students (not to be confused with the University of California system and its 10 campuses and quarter million students)… have already declared that come the fall some or all learning will be remote.  So we are still waiting on that.

And yet we know we are better off than many.  I still have my job.  The bills are still getting paid.  My wife, a real estate agent, managed to close a deal during the pandemic, which is a key part of the whole “paying for college” plan.  We’re still healthy as is our extended family.

Things are still pretty good, all things considered.  So we’re thankful for that.

Stomping About in Pure Blind and Tribute

Suppose They Gave a War and Everyone Came?

When you bring the whole team out to play it can sometimes get crowded on the field.

The war against PanFam, the “glassing of Tribute” was promoted heavily in the Imperium and that promotion was responded to enthusiastically.  As I pointed out, over a thousand individuals were on coms for the first move ops north, almost two weeks back.

A giant armada, arriving in the north and keen to blow things up… leads to some problems now and then.  There is at time a :goonrush: to get into fleets, even fleets that are not promising kill mails or combat.  I have started seeing this dialog pop up quite often.

feel the :goonrush:

That is something I am used to seeing if there has be an op pre-pringed and hurfed about before hand.  Everybody wants to go to the big battle.  But over the weekend I was seeing that come up for ops pinged as “we need to chase some people away” or “we’re going to reinforce a structure.”

At one point yesterday there was a call to sweep away a 15 person gate camp that had the temerity/bad luck to setup on a gate in our staging system and, even though I was already logged in and tabbed over to join the fleet immediately on seeing the ping, I was too late.  The fleet was full.

The gate camp seemed quite put out, complaining in local about having a 256 person fleet dropped on their camp.  Somebody pointed out that they were happy enough getting kills at a 15:1 advantage, so getting dropped on by a fleet with a 17:1 advantage over them seemed appropriate.

So, when the command team can arrange it, they do set up opportunities for larger groups to shoot things.  There was a call to blow up a Fortizar one gate over in Pure Blind from our staging.  I went over with the Eagle fleet that was called up first.  And then another fleet joined.  A fleet of Leshaks added their firepower after a bit.  Then supers dropped in.  Then the titans landed.  Everybody got a chance to take a shot at the structure.

Fortizar in the face of overwhelming force

So an undefended Fortizar… as somebody pointed out, an alliance with the name Skeleton Crew could probably not be expected to have the staff to cover such events… that the dozen Leshaks could have easily killed on their own ended up with a kill mail that had over 500 people listed on it. (There is a 4K video of this shoot if you are interested.)

For one of these ops I actually got my alt out in an Ibis just to get that on the kill mail.

Ibis supremacy

The tale of the Ibis is mildly amusing and might become a post of its own if I run out of things to write about this week, which is feeling like a distinct possibility.  I need another big fleet fight or Daybreak to do something silly or I’ll end up writing about things like the CSM14 elections.

Anyway, moving on.

The other problem with having a thousand eager pilots on hand and ready to go at any given hour of the day is that the locals in Tribute are perhaps rightly not inclined to come out to play, seeing how eager we are to drop the hammer even on immobile, undefended targets.

We did get that fight last week and, even having lost the objective and had the ISK war turn against us at a ratio of 2:1, the appetite for fleets and ops seemed to have only gone up.  People on our side came out of that fight eager for more.  In the Eagle fleet it felt like a win despite knowing the result.

The next night the call went out to form up to cover some more entosis operations and, as before, fleets filled up.

Two full fleets sitting on titans ready to go

Our goal was just to keep the enotsis ships safe as they vied with the locals over the nodes in the constellation.

The humble Drake as enotosis ship

We ended up in PNDN-V while PanFam ended up forming and sitting on the other side of the gate in 15W-GC.  Ships from either side that went through that gate got melted pretty quickly.  The gate also split the constellation in two, with us holding two systems and the locals controlling three.  That meant that we were unlikely to win the entosis war.  However, the same also went for the locals as enough nodes were spawning in our two systems that they couldn’t finish the defense.

Sitting around with not much to do, a streamer who was covering the event was linked in fleet, so we got to watch their view.  They had two views, one from either side of the gate, so we could see them and they could see us.

The streamer in question, Lumpymayo, was clearly on the PanFam side of things and much of the chat seemed to be him and his supporters calling us cowards for not coming through the gate to fight them despite the fact that we out numbered them by at least a 5:4 ratio.

Every so often we would get called to type, “Hon hon hon” into the Twitch chat, that being the adopted meme/war cry of the deployment.  This came about after we anchored the Keepstar on the doorstep of Tribute and Asher came on coms to tell us “op success.”  He asked everybody on the coms, close to a thousand people again, to all key up at once and say, “Hon hon hon,” which was to be done with a heavy French accent.  The coms chaos, recorded here, was enough to crash my client.  But the Keepstar was renamed “Hon hon hon” and that is now our local spam of choice.

After an hour or so of that the FCs had us go to the gate and jump through, and we took on the locals and their camp.  I was again in the Eagle fleet and we quickly anchored up and started shooting targets as they were broadcast.

Anchored on the Monitor

This went much more our way.  While a small engagement compared to the previous night, it was satisfying to get to blow things up all the same.   I once again got to lock up and shoot at Dreyden Trovirr from the Open Comms show.

Locked up yet again

This time around their logi was unable to support itself so Dreyden blew up along with a lot of their logi.  The enemy was chased off grid after a short clash.  The battle report showed things tilted our way.

Battle Report Header

After that there was much “Hon hon hon” in Lumpymayo’s Twitch chat and even he had to concede we had won the field that time.

Lumpymayo signals the results

Not only did we get a nice little blood letting, but we won the objective.  However, the objective wasn’t the entosis struggle in Tribute.  Rather, we were there to pin down the locals while Dead Coalition (formerly GotG) reinforced systems in Tenal, leading to the renters up there handing over a pile of structures to them.  Tenal had been the happy crabbing grounds for PanFam.  Now, however,

Over the weekend we also spent time working on the ihubs and TCUs in the 1P-VL2 constellation, which includes the famed system M-OEE8, scene of a number of famous battles.

Ihub entosis work

This went largely uncontested and on the initial pass all of the ihubs and TCUs were reinforced.  Following up on this the focus was on M-OEE8, which is the gateway system to empire space and which houses a Keepstar.  The ihub was destroyed, the TCU was flipped, and the Keepstar was reinforced.

 

GSF on the map in Tribute

The Keepstar is now down to its final timer and the question is whether or not there will be a fight over it or if this will be akin to the Fortizar mentioned at the top of the post, where we pile in a bunch of ships just to get on the kill mail of an otherwise undefended structure.

It seems possible that the locals will pass on this fight.

The rumor is that PanFam is even now planning to withdraw into the drone lands in eastern null sec, to the Malpais region, which is the core of their rental empire.  Lacking any nearby NPC or empire space, that would likely put them out of reach of the Imperium and its ability to project sufficient power to do more than harass them.  There is also word that PanFam, after the fiasco in Tenal where renter groups handed over citadels to the attackers without a fight, that they will no longer allow renters to deploy their own structures.

We shall see how much more fighting goes on in Tenal and Tribute.

Supporting sources on this topic are, unfortunately, all from INN since other sources, including Reddit, seem somewhat subdued on the topic right now.  I’ll add more if/when they show up.

• INN – Dead Coalition Moves into Tenal
• INN – M-OEE8 Keepstar Reinforced
• INN – M-0EE8 Keepstar Final Timer Set

One Hundred Million Copies of Minecraft

The news popped up yesterday that Minecraft sales had exceeded 100 million copies.

Who buys which version where…

The number, as of June 1st was actually a bit past 100 million.

Complete with delusions of sovereignty

Probably more surprising is that the game has sold, on average, 53K copies a day in 2016.  Not bad for a game getting to its fifth birthday.

Over on his blog SynCaine attributes this to the idea that good games simply do well.  That is underselling the achievement by a long shot.  For a cross platform title that puts Minecraft behind only Tetris, which has sold nearly 500 million copies in the last 30 years, appearing on platforms as diverse as programmable calculators, iPods, just about every gaming console ever, and whatever OS you happened to be running back in the day.

SynCaine then proceeds to bait the bear that is World of Warcraft, opining that if only Blizzard hadn’t started to make the game suck after The Burning Crusade the game would still be growing today.

This is a bad argument.  Or, at a minimum, an argument that doesn’t necessarily follow from Minecraft’s success.

To open with, the comparison appears to be subscribers versus total sales.  Total units sold would be more apt.  But we do not know how many copies of World of Warcraft Blizzard has sold.  Furthermore, even if we did, I would argue that for this measure, we should count not just copies of the base game, but also every copy of each expansion as a sale, at which point it isn’t hard to get to a number that surpasses Minecraft, at least on the back of a napkin.  WoW had already passed 100 million accounts created two and a half years ago.  (Complete with required infographic.) All of them may not have bought a copy of the game, but a lot of them bought a copy and an expansion or three.

The orc says, “Look at me!”

WoW has been growing this whole time, if you just count people who have played as opposed to those currently subscribed.  After all, one item you can derive from that Mojang chart is that 66 million people who bought Minecraft don’t bother playing it on any given month even though it is free.

Then there is the whole pricing aspect, because WoW and every expansion has cost more than a copy of Minecraft, and then there is a subscription on top of that, something that chases some people off.

But there is really one key difference between the two games that will keep WoW from ever having a chance to do what Minecraft has done with such a small team.  You can leave aside things like price, expansions, subscriptions, and all that, because to my mind it comes down to one main item:

Mojang doesn’t make content.

They make the client and an open source version of the server… but all you need is the client… and have left nearly everything else to the community that has formed around the game.  It is all in the hands of the players.

Don’t like the default settings?  Change them!  There aren’t enough settings?  Run a third party version of the server!  Don’t like the looks or want some new feature?  There is probably a mod for that!  Don’t like the current version?  Set the client to run an old version!  Want somebody to host your server?  So many choices!  Play solo?  Check!  Play with friends on a closed server? Check!  Make an open server for anybody?  Check!  PvE?  Check!  PvP?  Check!  Creative mode?  Check!  Hardcore perma-death?  Covered!  Special maps?  All over the place!

And yes, not ALL of those options apply to the three versions of Minecraft.  Again, the PC Master Race gets the greater range of flexibility.  But even on the console version, the most limited of the three, Mojang still doesn’t make content.

Meanwhile Blizz needs to come up with new content every year… though they can only manage to do it every other year… and every new change or expansion alienates somebody from the installed base.  There was no perfect path forward that would please everybody.

And you can’t just set the client to run WoW 1.8.1 or some such because you liked how things were in 2006.  Meanwhile the market closed in as the flip side of everybody making what essentially became niche WoW clones means that the player base has other options when the current batch of content wears out.

Even League of Legends, which SynCaine also brings up, depends on Riot not screwing up balance too much and to make new variations of the game and to stage big events and the like to draw attention to the game.

Mojang has created a sandbox game that has achieved a life of its own.  Even the space-sim-sandbox of my heart, EVE Online, has to provide content for its players.  Minecraft just drops you in a fresh world and tells you to punch a tree.  You want something?  Go build it.  They don’t even care about a player economy.  Design it away?  It’s been done.

And they succeeded!

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, Mojang barely markets the game… and still they are selling 53K copies a day.  And then there is all the revenue from licensed products like shirts and foam picks and LEGO sets.  They have created something special here.  It is beyond being a game, it is practically an ecosystem.

Minecraft is one of those odd exceptions, beyond merely “good game sells well,” one of those games that was in the right time and place for success.  But then again, so was WoW.