Playing Diablo II Resurrected on Battle.net

Diablo II Resurrected has been my game of choice for a couple of weeks now for a few reasons, not the least of which was the server and queue issues that New World was having at its launch.

Seems a bit ironic now, doesn’t it?

We heard you liked queues

As I mentioned at the end of Friday’s post, Blizzard has a whole post up of their own about the problems they have been having and some of the fixes they have put in place, including that queue shown above.

I find the whole thing quite interesting, both because I am a bit impressed that 20 year old net code is holding up as well as it has, and because it is interesting to see how player behavior has changed over the two decades the game has been around.

The end game of Diablo II was always a grindy effort to get that perfect drop that you knew had to be out there.  The RNG is a cruel mistress in Diablo II.  My “almost done with nightmare” necromancer is still using some gear from Act II of normal mode because literally nothing better for my spec choice has deigned to drop.

But now, in 2021, the game is a solved problem, with guides to which specific mobs to farm for your item.  So people have been putting up BNet games, killing the mob, leaving them, and putting up a fresh one over and over in order to farm for items.  And, of course, that is rippling back on the servers and everybody else just the way it did in WoW when people were constantly resetting instances to farm a specific boss.

No new problems, just new circumstances.

Of course, this isn’t the first time BNet has had problems, and my gut reaction after having played Diablo and Diablo II at launch has been to simply avoid making BNet characters if at all possible.  A lot of the outrage about there being no local character mode for Diablo III wasn’t because we were all still keen to drag our computers over to a friend’s house for a LAN party, but because we’d all been there with online character before.

The Diablo III launch proved that point.

Then there is how quickly Blizz used to be in deleting your Diablo II BNet characters if you hadn’t logged on for a few months.

So the solution seemed to be to make offline characters.  They’re stored on your drive, the world is spun up and save locally, and you even get the same map for your ongoing local game.  One of the pissers about BNet games is that your exploration is always for naught once you leave your game.

And that was certainly my go-to when Diablo II Resurrected landed.  My first few characters were offline.

Then the group picked up the game and… well… there is no more LAN option, so if you want to play together you play on BNet.  So I started rolling up characters for non-group play on BNet as well, including my necromancer who has made it all the way through.  I might as well keep all of them together now that we have those three tabs of sweet shared storage… which I have totally filled up already.  I can’t bring myself to start tossing yellow and gold items until I am out of storage.  And I have been saving every rune, gem, or jewel as well.

Overall, playing on BNet hasn’t been much of a problem.  There are occasionally some network blips and we had a problem yesterday where I couldn’t join anybody’s game and they couldn’t join mine.  But I had been online and logged into BNet for a couple hours at that point playing one of my other characters, so the service seemed to have tucked me off in a corner on my own.  The issue was fixed by logging out and then back in again.

In the end, I have only see a queue twice so far.  The first time it was only a few people deep and I was connected in a couple of minutes.  That was Saturday when EU and US prime time was overlapping.  The second time, the 70 deep queue pictured above, was at 10:30pm Pacific time on Saturday night, which seemed a bit odd to me.  I guess people to the east of me were up late playing.  But Diablo and Diablo II were always games suitable to late night play.  Their atmosphere is enhanced by darkness and a late hour.

And even that queue was down to a single digit in the time it took me to go grab a drink and make myself an evening snack.

I don’t know what the policy is on character deletion there days though.  I hope they’re a little more lenient now that storage is a damn sight less expensive than it was 20 years ago.  The support site still says they’re purged if inactive for 90 days.  That was another reason to roll up a local character.  We’ll see how that plays out I guess.

Bubble Wrap Plan Gets a PAPI Keepstar Anchored in NPC Delve

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.

–King of Swamp Castle, who only took four tries to get his castle built

On the bright side, the Imperium didn’t have to sacrifice another trillion ISK in ships.

Today saw the fifth attempt by PAPI to get a Keepstar planted in NPC Delve, this time in YZ9-F6, the site of the failed trap last week.  When the Imperium jumped in and warped to the structure to start the fight, we found it surrounded by 149 warp disruption bubbles.

Bubble wrapped Keepstar

There were also dictors putting up bubbles inside the bubbles and various groups of hostiles deployed around the Keepstar.

When the timer hit zero they managed to get the Quantum Core in right away, so we didn’t even get the free hits we got away with last time around.  But there were so many objects on grid that people were getting disconnected as they warped onto grid.  There was a momentary discussion about what we should do, but the timer was ticking down in real time.  In the end, there did not seem to be a way forward, so after some small clashes we turned around and went home.

Bubble fly by

The battle report shows a very small amount of losses compared to previous battles.

Battle Report Header

I had to go in and fix the battle report to get people on the correct sides.  That is a sure sign that not much happened, when the BR tool doesn’t know where to put people.

We were, of course, out numbered as usual, though not by the margin that the BR might suggest.  There was around 4,500 people in local, so the numbers on the BR are an under count of people who who showed up, since it only grabs people who were on a kill mail.

4,438 in local as the timer started

If you came and left without blowing something up (or getting blown up yourself), you were not added to the tally.

Bubbles in bubbles with more bubbles showing up

So PAPI has their foothold in NPC Delve.  Now where will they go from there?  Have they changed their mind about avoiding our Keepstars?  Or has the past two weeks of fighting in NPC Delve convinced them that would be a bad idea?  Either way, some of us got most of our Sunday back to do other things.  But somebody had to hang around and clean up those bubbles.

Other coverage:

• New Eden Post – PAPI Keepstar Fully Operational in YZ9-F6, NPC Delve

The Canadian Visitor

Warning: This is a Tales from the Blog sort of story and involves page view stats.  No video games are mentioned.

I like to watch the traffic stats for my blog, less because they are meaningful at any given moment… web stats are a polite lie most of the time… but because I like to see what brings people here and the patterns of interest.  As I have said in the past, even an flawed system of measurement, applied consistently, can reveal patterns that even an accurate single data point cannot show.

So when I noticed a big pop in page views a couple weeks back, I started looking at what might have caused it.  Running a WP.com hosted blog means that I do not get to see raw data, but I have a couple of avenues to check that can be lined up to indicate what was going on.

The first check is usually to see who is referring traffic.  Often a traffic spike is related to the site, or a specific post, being linked somewhere with some visibility.  Every so often, for example, somebody will link the Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID! post gets linked to one of the World of Warcraft sub-reddits and between a dozen and a couple hundred people will click on that link.

This is very easy to spot in the basic stats.  The referrer will be obvious and the post linked will have a bunch of page views which will push it to the top of the daily list.

This time there were no referrers that stood out and no particular post seemed to be getting traffic that could account for the jump in total page views.  In fact, referrer and post stats seemed very much within the recent norm, while page views were exploding.  The second day of this saw the site get just over five thousand page views but Google, always the default top referrer, had only sent me 350 viewers, and the top post of the day only had 30 page views.

Sometimes that means somebody went scrolling through the blog.  I have the theme set up for infinite scroll, so you can just press the page down or arrow key and scroll all the way back to September 2006 if you have the time and patience.

But when you do that, a page view gets counted for every ~20 posts and gets attached to the Home Page view stats.  The Home Page, somebody showing up at the base URL, always has the most page views on any given day because I don’t hide post content and make people click on titles to read a whole post.  I could do that, and I am sure my page views would go up, but I don’t like that on other blogs so I don’t do it here.  As I always say, be the blog you want to read.

And this might have explained all those page view.  The flag counter widget on the side bar did not show anywhere close to the number of page views that WP.com was showing me, which is consistent with somebody doing a long scroll, as the widget only gets loaded once when you do it.

That is one of my checks on the WP.com stats.

Also, the visitor count, WP.com’s attempt to track daily unique visitors, was very low relative to the page views.  The visitor count is very broken, more so than page views I would guess, since I can get referrals from seven different locations, which implies seven different people visiting, and WP.com will tell me I had two visitors so far.  Also, the Flag Counter widget would count a different number, maybe five, maybe seven, just to confuse the issue.  As I said, web stats are a polite lie.  But, again, if I ignore accuracy and look at trends, somebody doing the long scroll tends to widen the gap between page views and visitors.

However, the Home Page only showed about 400 views, leaving a few thousand page views unaccounted for.  So nobody did the long scroll.

Then I noticed that Canada seemed to be way over represented in the demographic stats.  Again, specific count is probably garbage, but trends are likely reflective of reality, and the usual daily trend tends to look something like this.

Typical top five distribution

Those countries tend to be in the top five in that order every single day.  That is the same order displayed in my annual blog wrap up, the fourteenth of which I posted back in September.

On the peak day, however, the country list looked like this.

The big day

Germany was a bit down that day… they tend to trend up with EVE Online posts… while Canada was through the roof.

But where was all that traffic going.  There was no referrer sending me that much traffic, there was no single page that seemed to be receiving it, and the visitor count indicated that it wasn’t a bunch of people in any case.

So I drilled down in the WP.com stats.  It will show you all the pages that got traffic on a given day, with a page view count.  And there I noticed that after the usual fifty or so on a given day that get multiple page views, there was a long, long list of pages that got exactly one page view.  Hundreds and hundreds of pages with a single page view.

At that point I think I figured it out.  This person, from Canada, started with one post, probably the latest one, and began viewing the all one at a time.  At the bottom of each post there are links that let you view the next and previous posts in the chronological order of their appearance.

I think this person sat there and clicked through, page by page, each post using those links.  That explains all the page views, the low user count, the lack of referrals, and the fact that no single page, not even the Home Page, saw a spike in traffic.

And the flag counter widget?  I thought that it would reload with each new page and count a page view there.  But when I tried it myself on my phone, it seemed to ignore the count of views if I went post to post that way.  But it is much more interested in unique visitors than page views.

So this whole post adds up to the fact that one person, from Canada, appears to have paged through nearly every singe post on the site, one at time, over the course of two days.  The page views did not come in a single burst, but took time to accumulate over those two days.

Or, alternatively, somebody in Canada ran a script that scraped all the content from the blog one page at a time.  So if you see another site that features a lot of familiar content, let me know.  I’d like to see where I am being backed up!

Friday Bullet Points Return to Norrath

There has been some news coming out of Daybreak since the layoffs announced last Friday.  I do not have a huge amount to say about any of them at this time, which makes them all perfect for another Friday Bullet Points post.

• Holly Longdale on the The EverQuest Show

The EverQuest Show finally posted their previously teased interview with EverQuest and EverQuest II Executive Producer Holly Longdale.

For those not interesting in watching the 23 minute long interview, the EverQuest Show has also kindly posted a transcript on their site.

While Bhagpuss has a deeper look at the interview, things that popped out for me were:

• • EverQuest population is currently half on live servers, half on retro servers
  • Expects EverQuest to be around at least for another decade
  • The size of character database entries is a limiting factor
  • There will be another Norrath title some day

There is more in there, especially about the passion of the team, but that is what stuck in my brain and made nice bullet points.

• Torment of Velious

The EverQuest team announced the next expansion for the game, Torment of Velious.

Coming later this year

The producer’s letter that contained the new describes some of what we can expect from the expansion including:

• • Level cap raised from 110 to 115
  • 6 new zones
  • All the usual more quests, more raids stuff

Pre-orders will go live this coming Wednesday and there will be the usual array of collector’s edition goodies.  Beta for it is coming up soon and a December launch is expected.

• Miragul Server

Also in the above linked producer’s letter it was announced that there would be a new progression server launched on November 5th to help celebrate the rapidly approaching EverQuest II 15th anniversary.  Named Miragul after the lich of Everfrost, it will start players at level 85 in the House of Thule expansion.

• Blood of Luclin

There was also an EverQuest II producer’s letter which also announced the next expansion for that game, Blood of Luclin.

No expansion splash screen yet.

As with the EverQuest expansion it features some of the same expected items:

• • Level cap raised from 110 to 120
  • All the usual more zone, quests, more raids stuff

Not a lot of details there.

Pre-orders for Blood of Luclin will go live on November 5 with, as expected, plenty of collector’s edition goodies for those willing to spend the extra cash.  The expansion is slated for a December launch, with a beta period coming up.

• Rivervale Server

As with EverQuest, the EverQuest II team is also launching a special server.  The Rivervale server will have no locked content and will allow players to start a level 90 heroic equipped character if they so desire.  It basically sounds like a fresh live server that requires a subscription.  Not that it is a bad idea.  Some people like fresh servers and not everybody likes the timed content unlocks.  No word on exp rate or other details.

• Anniversary Events

As noted, next month sees the 15th anniversary of the launch of EverQuest II.  The producer’s letter also mentioned that special anniversary events will kick off on November 7th.

As with the interview on The EverQuest Show, Bhagpuss has also has a post about what we know about the expansions, servers, and events so far.

• EverQuest II Custom UI Outage

No all is peaches and cream in Norrath.  They grim reaper of the layoff may have passed them over, but problems still lurk.  In an effort to track down a server lag problem that has been plaguing the game, all custom UI addons, including the ubiquitous EQ2maps, will be turned off this coming Tuesday, October 22.

The outage is not permanent, but how long it lasts depends on how quickly any problem is found.  It is hoped the outage can be turned off as early as Friday, but it will remain in place as long as it is needed to debug the problem.

Details and compensation are in a forum post.

And so it goes in Norrath.  More information on most of the above will likely be arriving soon.

Heading to EVE Vegas 2018

That time of the year has arrived, at the other side of the calendar from EVE Fanfest in Iceland is EVE Vegas.  This coming weekend, October 19 through 21, CCP will be setting up in the city most closely representative of New Eden, if only New Eden still allowed gambling.  CCP has a dev post up covering the various aspects of the event.

EVE Vegas 2018

There will be a lot of eyes on CCP as this will be the first public event for the company after the acquisition by Pearl Abyss, the deal having closed on October 12.

I expect that the keynote will cover this in a very “everything will remain business as usual” sort of way.  Neither CCP nor Pearl Abyss wants to rock the boat right now, so a sense of soothing continuity seems like the best plan.

Still, if you want to panic about something, you can go check out the job posting for the new Monetization Director position at CCP.

You will work with Project Managers, Directors and EVE development teams to strengthen monetization designs, vision and process.

As it turns out, CCP is in it for the money.  Who knew?

EVE Vegas is also where we’re likely to hear about the next big thing for EVE Online.  We are at the end of the year where we often get a big, named release as opposed to a monthly update, and CCP like to announce that sort of thing in front of a live studio audience.

We will no doubt be hearing about CCP’s other New Eden related plans.  There is a presentation for Project Nova on the schedule.

For the fourth year running I will be attending EVE Vegas.  This year, in a change up from my usual lurking off on the side, I will be doing a presentation.  If you are going to EVE Vegas as well you have a good chance of spotting me at 4pm on Saturday in the Social A room.

EVE Vegas 2018 – Saturday Schedule (Pacific Time 16:00 = UTC 23:00)

Yes, my topic is blogging.  Go with what you know.  I will be attempting to evangelize the joys of blogging about internet spaceships.  So if you are in Vegas, have a badge, aren’t going to the Abyssal Deadspace round table presentation, and cannot find anything better to do, you can see me mumble into a microphone about the history, future, and reality of blogging.

If you are viewing from home… and CCP is streaming a lot of the event on their Twitch channel… then you’re not going to see me.  While some presentations are being streamed, the block of time where I am speaking is being used for Stream Fleet.

EVE Vegas 2018 – Saturday Streaming Schedule

Given that at least one slide of my presentation goes over the new media options that have supplanted blogging over the last decade, the irony of being pre-empted by streamers is not lost on me.  I suspect they looked at the list of speakers and put the two most dull topics into the same hour so they could turn the camera elsewhere.  Hard to blame anyone for that.  But at least the pressure is off and I don’t have to worry about accidentally saying “fuck” or anything.

Anyway, there it is.  I will be at EVE Vegas to hear what is coming for the game live and in person as well as communing with my fellow blogging types.  These events do tend stratify into groups, so it is probably telling that I’m over in a corner talking about CCP and New Eden rather than at the bar drinking and being loud.  Look for reporting on the event and some pictures next week.

Addendum:

After writing this I got the email from CCP about watching EVE Vegas remotely which includes a streaming schedule that is different from the one on the megablog post linked above.

Alternate universe streaming schedule

I suspect that the one in the in the original post is correct and that somebody just copied the presentation schedule rather than the streaming schedule, but who can tell.  Maybe you’ll see me, maybe you won’t.  We’ll only know when the time comes I suppose.  But now I’ve gone from wondering what I should wear to not caring what I wear to again being concerned about what I will wear.  I’m thinking one of the Open Comms show T-shirts.

Fall Movie League – Foreign Domination

Week Seven of our Fall Fantasy Movie League is now in the rear view mirror, meaning we’re past the half way point of the 13 week season.

Way back at the beginning of week seven the picks available seemed to offer multiple possible avenues to success.

 Happy Death Day         $350
 Blade Runner 2049       $237
 The Foreigner           $143
 The Mountain Between Us $99
 It                      $95
 My Little Pony          $84
 Victoria & Abdul        $80
 Kingsmen                $71
 American Made           $71
 LEGO Ninjago Movie      $70
 Marshall                $62
 Flatliners              $34
 Battle of the Sexes     $24
 American Assassin       $9
 Til Death Do Us Part    $7

Happy Death Day, a murder mystery meets Groundhog Day film, seemed to be clear to top the box office and was priced accordingly.  Blade Runner 2049 was only in its second week, so still had potential to deliver at its lower price.  And then there was The Foreigner, a Jackie Chan vehicle that

Any of those three seemed possible anchors for a successful pick.

At its price, Happy Death Day seemed the least likely of the three to be the winning pick, even if it exceeded its estimate, which it did in spades, bringing in $26 million while only expected to hit about $20 million.

Blade Runner 2049 had been predicted to be a slow burn, a movie that wouldn’t be strong out of the gate, but which would sustain its box office over time rather than dropping 50% on the second week.  I calculated that if it could just keep the second week drop to 45% or less, it was a strong candidate.

Meanwhile The Foreigner felt a bit under priced.  At $143 a screen you could get six screens of it, plus a couple of fill ins, and if it exceeded its $10 million estimate by even a bit it would be a strong contender.

The good news, for me, is that I went with six screens of The Foreigner and two screens of American Made, which turned out to be the perfect pick of the week, shared with 415 other players, good for $106 million.

Fall Week Seven Perfect Pick

The bad news is that I picked it on my daughter’s account, my alt account, where I put the pick I didn’t take for my main account.  Wilhelm went with four screens of Blade Runner 2049, Battle of the Sexes, and three screens of American Assassin.

My Fall Week Seven Picks

This was me letting my gut out vote my brain.  I’ve beaten myself with my alt pick three weeks out of seven now.

I was down to the wire deciding which way to jump, and in the last moment I went for Blade Runner 2049 more because I wanted it to do well than because I really believed it was going to make my goal.

And it did not make my goal.  It dropped 53% over opening week, reinforcing the suspicion in the back of my brain that perhaps the cult classic status of the original Blade Runner didn’t mean it was as popular as I thought it was.  A basic projection problem.  I liked it, people who talk about it generally like it, but that did not translate into a mass audience.  RIP my Blade Runner 2049 plan and any hopes of a sequel.

Still, my picks were not the worst in the bunch though… not to be mean… I did worry a bit when I saw Isey and I had identical picks.  The scores for the week went down like this:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $101,436,978
2. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $98,288,772
3. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $97,984,090
4. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $84,946,755
5. Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $72,994,597
6. Kraut Screens (T) – $72,607,820
7. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $70,991,190
8. Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $64,869,289
9. The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $64,869,289
10. I HAS MOVIES (T) – $64,869,289
11. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $64,294,226
12. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $66,533,492
13. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $59,853,529

Meta League legend

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

Ocho and Bel both stopped picking over the last few weeks, so Liore’s league has been dropped from the list since I am the only active player there now.

Those at the top went heavy on The Foreigner, which pulled in $13 million plus was the best price/performer, giving it a $2 million boost, making it worth $15 million per screen.  That is almost as much as Blade Runner 2049.

Past that are the people who anchored on Blade Runner 2049 or Happy Death Day, which came out to be about equally poor choices in the end.  That left the overall scores as follows:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $597,259,405
2. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $585,837,180
3. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $552,625,270
4. Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $537,907,722
5. Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $523,575,221
6. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $522,053,084
7. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $521,039,080
8. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $520,856,126
9. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $496,420,772
10. The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $438,879,656
11. I HAS MOVIES (T) – $425,994,240
12. Kraut Screens (T) – $415,521,600
13. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $254,764,219

Week seven put me way at the back of the pack for the MCats league.  Catching Corr seems unlikely unless he forgets to pick.  Otherwise he generally picks as well as I do or better every week save the first.

However SynCaine and I remain neck and neck in the TAGN league, though both of us had best be wary of Pak who, despite starting a week late, is catching up to us.

And that leads us into Week Eight, which has the following options:

Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween    $411
Happy Death Day              $202
Only the Brave               $201
Geostorm                     $186
The Snowman                  $167
Blade Runner 2049            $128
The Foreigner                $105
It                           $57 
Same Kind of Different As Me $53
American Made                $50 
The Mountain Between Us      $49
Kingsmen                     $47
LEGO Ninjago Movie           $42
My Little Pony               $35
Victoria & Abdul             $31

New on the list are Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween, which doesn’t appeal to me, but I have long understood that there is no accounting for taste, Only the Brave, a wilderness firefighting tale that seems spot on given recent events, Geostorm, a natural disaster flick that seems maybe a bit too spot on given recent events, and Same Kind of Different As Me, for which a pithy summary eludes me.

The top six movies on the list are all potentially anchors.  (Going all-in on The Foreigner would leave $160 on the table, which is never a good plan.)  I am not sure which way to jump at this point.  Boo! is too expensive relative to current estimates while nobody is going to convince me that seven screens of Blade Runner 2049 are a good idea after the current results.  So my own anchor will likely be something in between those two.

Fighting the Blood Raider Menace or How I Rat

l have been meaning to write this for a while.  This isn’t any sort of guide on how to rat, but a checkpoint wherein I describe how I currently approach the task.  It is one of those posts that I wish I had written, say, yearly, just to see how things progressed.  I expect people will comment to tell me I am doing it wrong, which is welcome, if only so that others might learn from my mistakes.

If I had written this a year ago it would have been about fighting the Guristas menace.  But now we live in Delve and it is the Blood Raiders we seek to suppress.

Also, this post should not be confused with the Crimson Harvest event, which is kicking off today.  I only realized that was hitting today after I had written most of this, so the timing is coincidental.  But I’ll still use the Blood Raiders graphic from event.

Blood Raiders! Wooo!

My ratting ship of choice is the Ishtar, and I am still using the same hull I hauled down from the north in my carrier a couple of months back.  Or maybe I flew it down on its own.  I don’t remember off hand.  Anyway, I have since refit the modules and now run it with an armor tank rather than a shield tank as I did previously.

The main defensive modules on my Ishtar are a Reactive Armor Hardener, which nicely adapts to whatever damage type is being thrown at you (EM and thermal in the case of the Blood Raiders), a Medium Armor Repairer II, which keeps the armor belt on the ship repaired, and a 100MN afterburner that keeps the whole thing moving along fast enough to avoid fire without increasing the ship’s signature radius.  Most everything else fitted are modules to enhance drone range, speed, or damage.

Ratting, as I do it, consists of taking out anomalies in the system which I call home.  The term always conjures up the mental image of hunting asteroid belt rats back in the day.  Our home has an upgraded ihub and affords a range of targets when I open up the scanner.

What I see on the scanner

There is a whole hierarchy of difficulty in anomalies, which you can read about over at EVE University.  Out of habit or tradition or whatever, I always run the local flavor of Forsaken Hubs.  Somebody (Gaff I think) once told me that they were the best effort to ISK value.  At one time they were very easy, because they spawned nothing smaller than a cruiser and never used tackle or ewar.  That got changed a while back, and now there are frigates that will point you.

Forsaken Hubs tend to be popular and if I find them all occupied I step up to Havens, which yield more ISK but are also more work.

When it is time to rat, I undock from the citadel and choose a Forsaken Hub from the list of Cosmic Anomalies.  I warp off to the one I have chosen… you can just right-click or click on the “warp to” button… with an overview up that shows blues.  If I land and see somebody else in the anomaly, I move off to another one.  If the anomaly is empty, has no wrecks, and shows the starting wave (which is always the same) I settle in to fight.

The broken orange crystal asteroid, the center piece of all forsaken hubs

The first thing I do is make sure my hardeners are on.  Then I deploy my mobile tractor unit.  That will collect up all the wrecks and loot them for me.  After that is deploying I set myself to orbit the MTU at 25km and turn on the afterburner.  At about that point the Blood Raider ships are generally waking up to the fact that I have arrived and start targeting me.

This is where I sometimes forget to save the location of the MTU as a bookmark.  I will want to come back to that spot after the anomaly despawns and is no longer on the scanner.  So far I have only lost a single MTU because of this, but it is still an “Oh yeah, I need to do this!” part of the routine.  I also swap to the an overview that only shows hostiles, NPC or otherwise.

Once all the NPCs have me locked and are shooting at me (red boxed) I launch my drones and send them after one of the battleships.  Every so often the first wave will suddenly change its mind and target one of my Praetor II heavy drones and I have to call it back.  Once it is back in the drone bay fire generally resumes on me and I send out a replacement drone to join the fight.

The point of maximum incoming damage generally happens when my ship is motoring out to its orbital range.  Once in a while that happens in such a way that my path lines up with the hostile lasers and every shot is a hit and I have to change course.  But once I am out in my orbit and past about 750 m/s in velocity, most shots miss.

Lots of shots, not many hits on me

After that, the anomaly is pretty hands off.  The drones, set to group and be aggressive, just move from target to target blowing them off.  I will mention the drone settings if only because for the longest time I did not know they existed and used to have the “problem” of my drones running off and picking individual targets.  The “focus fire” option fixed that for the most part.

Drone Window Settings

At this point I usually find something else to do while the anomaly runs.  I keep an eye on local and the intel channel and the health of my drones, just in case, as I work on bills or outline a blog post or go through screen shots or play a game on the iPad.  Last night I filled in my vote by mail ballot while running a forsaken hub.  It is not exciting game play and I cannot bring myself to do more than two anomalies at a sitting.  I get restless.  But if I have something else to work on, it is at least a lucrative side activity.

Our intel channel is quite active and the only time I haven’t had a lot of warning about somebody coming our way is when they came through a wormhole in our system.  I still have to click on the systems where hostiles are reported now and again to see how far away they are, but I am starting to learn the nearby systems.

When the waves with frigates come up I generally step in, target them, and make the drones kill them off first.  Then the rest of the wave runs by itself.

Drones take care of another NPC

At the end I will have blown up ~40 ships.  The first few waves are consistent, the final couple seem to vary as the wreck count and the bounties paid out seem to fluctuate from one run to another.  The bounties totally up to about 25-28 million ISK per run.

I made this much ISK while voting

Once the last NPC ship is down, I head back to the MTU and scoop in the cargo hold so I don’t forget it.  Then I load up whatever loot is left in the can that the MTU leave behind.  The Ishtar’s hold can sometimes carry all of the loot.  Even when it cannot, all that is left are usually a couple of larger items like smart bombs.

Then I warp back to the citadel and dock up.  If I have a damaged drone, I stay tethered a bit before docking to let the citadel repair it. (The repair progress doesn’t actually show, but when I go out again the drone is repaired.)  Once docked I take all the drops and move them into the cargo bay of the blockade runner I use to move loot so it doesn’t clutter up my hangar.  Then I swap over to my Noctis.

The Noctis

The Noctis is fit with salvage rigs and a full set of salvagers in the high slots.  I warp it off to the bookmark, as the anomaly has generally despawned by that point.  If I get the pop-up that indicates that it hasn’t, I usually hold off a minute or two and sit there tethered.  Etiquette as I was taught is to let your anomaly despawn before you go back to finish looting so as not to hold up the next spawn, as only so many of each anomaly can be present in the system at one time.

Once I arrive at the bookmark I pick up any remaining loot and then set about salvaging all of the wrecks that were piled up at the MTU.  I used to leave the MTU and all the loot for the Noctis to pick up, but then I kept forgetting to move the MTU back into the cargo hold of the Ishtar.  Coming up with a routine that minimizes errors is a priority for me.

Digging into the salvage

Once the site has been swept clean, it is back to the citadel to drop the salvage and remaining loot in the blockade runner. (Also, it is surprisingly difficult to get all the salvagers running on individual wrecks then turn off the UI and take a decent screen shot before some of them have cycled and turned off.)

Eventually the blockade runner starts to fill up and I have to figure out what to do with all of the loot.  Back up in the north, when shipping to Jita was cheap, I used to send it all there to be sold.  Now with shipping being more than double the price, I pick through what to send to Jita and what to sell locally.  There are lots of low ball buy orders to ignore, but for things like salvage there are some that are competitive with Jita prices, so I sell locally.

Some things are just over saturated in Jita so the prices are depressed.  Propulsion modules seem to be a bit too common in Jita, so I tend to just list them all at our staging base where I get a much better price.  They sell out pretty quickly.  Other items get shipped back to Jita to be sold.  All told, the loot side of running an anomaly can generate almost as much as the bounty side of things, though getting that ISK is much more hands on.

That is my ratting routine, such that it is.  It isn’t nearly as lucrative as my selling skill injectors, something I can do from the safety of Jita 4-4, though that business makes ISK mostly because I don’t care about buying PLEX for that account.  I just buy skill extractors, pull skill points out every 8 days, and sell the injectors, pocketing 300+ million ISK in the process.  But ratting still puts some ISK in my pocket and is something I can do when I have other, real world things to do as well.