The Stages of Every Zwift Ride

Or, at least the stages I go through on just about every ride.

As noted previously I have set myself up with Zwift, the exercise app that lets me ride my stationary exercise bike through a virtual world.

Ride On!

I have further follow ups on the whole thing, but this sort of struck me and I was motivated to bang it out, so here it is.

• Get on the bike

Kind of a given, but for me this is always a morning thing, or at least a before noon thing.  Being lazy if a full time profession, and one aspect of it in my book is getting all your work tasks out of the way as soon as possible to maximize the time left to screw around.  I want to be on board for the long lunch and a leisurely afternoon.

Also it is much cooler around here in the morning.  And then there is the drought, so I like to combine my morning shower and my very necessary post-exercise shower into a single event.

• Choose the route

I’ll go into more detail on this at another time, but I like to pick one of the pre-made routes.  You can just free ride through the world, picking whichever turns you like, but completing a route gets you an achievement and some xp and if we’re going to gamify this shit then why wouldn’t I go with something that gets me xp?

There are lots of routes that range from a couple miles to a couple dozen.  Since my goal is 20 minutes, which generally gets me about 7 miles, I look for the shorter routes.  I have learned to be aware of the climb involved, shown on the basic route info.  That 3.3 mile route with the 2,459 foot climb will take me more than 20 minutes because I’ll probably be going 4 MPH for a large part of it.

• Start to Ride

And we’re off.  I start pumping those legs, usually ramping up to about 85 rpm or so, passing some slow pokes and slackers on the side of the road.

• The First Crisis

Somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds into the ride my body will start informing me that if we’ve out run the bear or whatever the hell prompted this flurry of sudden morning activity has passed, it would be fine to just stop and go sit on the couch.

This happens every single time.  I want to stop or take a break or skip today.  I’ll make it up on Saturday, I swear.

So I have to negotiate with myself… just make it to 10 minutes, you’ll have started sweating by then so you can pretend you worked out… or sometimes bully myself… you paid how much for this Bluetooth enabled piece of gear to ride for two freaking minutes?

The crisis comes and somehow I manage to get through it most days, though if my body throws in, “Oh, and I have to pee” then things might stop.

• The Fan

At about the five minute mark the thermal build up in my body will be noticeable.  If I have forgotten to turn on the standing fan sitting in front, off to the side, of the bike, this is when that omission will become apparent.

You can just see the fan behind the bike

I have often had to get off the bike to turn it on.  Lately my wife and I have avoided this issue by simply never turning the fan off.

• The zone or something like it

There is a point where I will settle in, focus on the screen and the course and whatever and I’ll stop thinking about stopping.  My cadence settles down into what is apparently my natural rhythm, which is exactly 67 rpm.  I try to stay at 75 rpm, but the moment I am not thinking about it, I slide back into my norm.

The cadence is pretty much fixed no matter what resistance setting I have set on the bike.  I have, over time, dialed it up from 25 being the norm, to 38.  That means more power output for the same rpm.  If I dial it up too much… 40 starts to dig in a bit and 50 is comedy… then I start to slow down.

I may speed up a bit to pass somebody or keep somebody from passing me so obviously, but mostly I just cruise.

• Can we stop now?

This isn’t as dependable as that first two minute crisis, but often between the 12 and 15 minute mark I’ll start wondering if we can’t just take a break.  I’m now sweating and feel like I have some legit claim to have exercised.

When we first got the Schwinn IC4 I actually had to stop somewhere around the 15 minute mark and get off the bike and stretch because my legs would start to stiffen up from the repetitive motion.  I don’t have to do that any more.

This is also the zone where my ass may start to hurt.  A bicycle saddle, even with the gel foam padded cover, isn’t something I am yet used to.  I don’t have any fancy cycling shorts, and my old cotton khaki shorts don’t add much padding.  Still, it is better than the Schwinn 270 recumbent bike, where my back often started hurting at about the 10 minute mark.

At this point I just tell myself I’m almost done, just a couple more minutes and then all of this can stop.

• 20 minute mark

If I am doing this ride during the week, I am probably squeezing the ride and a shower in between some meetings.  That is probably an hour window, but I’ve probably screwed around a bit before the ride and want my hair to dry before I have to be on camera again, so I am looking to finish up the ride.

• Wrapping up

If I have not finished up the route, I’ll push on to do that (and collect my achievement and my 10 xp) so long as it is very close to being done.  I’ll also keep going if I am past half way to my next mile, since the game awards xp for every mile completed.

If it is the weekend I might keep going if I am in the zone and/or have picked a longer course.  My longest ride on record so far has been 38 minutes.

Not counting the first few rides where I was figuring things out, most of my rides make it to at least the 20 minute mark.  There are a couple of 15 minute rides, where I clearly didn’t meet the crisis, and one 10 minute ride where I am pretty sure work rang my phone and I had to stop.  But I am mostly keeping to my metric.

Other stages that may occur during a typical ride:

• I need to sit up and stretch – being hunkered down can get old so I reach up and touch the ceiling
• Should I pick up the weights? – the bike came with weights, I never pick them up, but I sometimes consider doing so
• The cats – they will come by and stare at me, standing way too close to the pedals
• My junk – it sometimes needs to stop moving around so much as I pedal, which I guess is why cyclists wear those tight spandex shorts
• Screen shot – I will suddenly want to take one, which means fiddling around with the iPad
• Thirst – I don’t keep a water bottle in the provided slots, but I usually drink some water before a ride

Metaliminal Storm Locations and Movement

It has been three weeks since CCP unleashed metaliminal storms on null sec space and… well… there they are.

They’re a few places now

I still haven’t come up with an answer as to who this feature was aimed at.  I remain convinced that the upside of any of the four storm flavors are so tepid that avoidance will be the primary response to them.

And if you open up the in game map… new or old… and set it for storm tracking, you can see seven storm blotches hanging about in New Eden.  The current locations and storm types are, going clockwise from the top:

1. North Fountain (Exotic)
2. Cloud Ring (Electrical)
3. Tribute (Gamma)
4. Vale of the Silent (Plasma)
5. Geminate (Exotic)
6. Providence (Electrical)
7. Providence (Plasma)

Storms on Sep 9, 2020

If that storm in Tribute were over in Pure Blind I might guess that storms are attracted to null sec regions that kind of suck.  I am not sure what Providence did to deserve two storms… I mean, aside from being Provi I guess.  And the storms in Fountain and Cloud Ring are close enough that they overlap in a system, so you can get both exotic and electrical effects in one system for now.

Dual effects, some cropping to show them both, in QXW-PV

As I went to check on each of the storms… I flew to the eye of each one… I did notice that there were very few players hanging about.  North Fountain was an exception, as I think some of the new neighbors were trying to move in.  But for the most part, the systems where there were storm effects were pretty empty.

That, however, doesn’t really prove my hypothesis, as most of the systems I flew through in between the storms were also pretty empty.  Tribute and Vale have a lot of very low ADM systems.  So, I suspect I’ll have to wait until a storm brews up some place more populated if I want to test the avoidance theory.

One of my other worries does seem to be confirmed.  A few people dismissed the idea of the storms because CCP said they would move a gate at random every 24-48 hours.  So, in theory, three weeks down the line, that first storm that started in KBP7-G in Providence could be as many as 21 gates away by now.

However, as I figured, random movement, especially in pipe systems, might also end up just moving back and forth over the same stretch of space for an extended period of time.

So that first storm has made it all the way to YWS0-Z, just two gates from where it started three weeks ago.  This does not surprise me at all.  But it does indicate that you cannot count on a storm moving away on its own.  It might just linger for weeks at a stretch.

CCP did not mention whether or not storms would have a specific duration, if they would die out on their own of just persist for all time, like a Triglavian system in its final liminality.  One might imagine that storms would brew up and fade away over time.  But one might also imagine that CCP could create a usable in-game map after 17 years and we know how that one has played out.

At least, for now, the storms are stuck in place few people care about at the moment.

The September Update Brings Cyno Changes and New Player Improvements to EVE Online

The Chaos Era continues in New Eden as CCP proceeds with the dual goals of making the game more difficult for veteran players while simultaneously attempting improve new player retention.

In my book the big item hitting the game for September is the cyno changes, which I mentioned previously.  This has been summed up in the patch notes in a single sentence:

Cynosural Field Generator I now only able to be fit to Force Recon Ships and Black Ops Battleships.

Yesterday most of the 345 ships currently flyable in New Ede could have lit a cyno, the requirement having been just a high slot.  Today it is down to nine.  If you’re like me, you’re now stuck moving your capital ships around in fleet ops unless you are willing to blow a 300 million ISK force recon hull for every jump, or a billion ISK black ops hull.  My solo trips in a cap are done, don’t undock what you cannot afford to lose being the iron law of New Eden and all.

No more of this frigate cyno stuff

The one set of hulls excused has been Jump Freighters.  Initially CCP was simply going to allow them to use covert cynos, which had its own mix of good and bad. (Which needed Cyno V on your cyno alt as well as the ability to fly a covert ops ship, but exposure would be reduced.)  That plan was changed (hopefully before people skill injected their cyno alts to Cyno V) and now there is a new cyno module just for jump freighters.  Per the patch notes:

• Added Industrial Cynosural Field Generator.
  • Can be fit by Industrials, Deep Space Transports and Blockade Runners.
  • Industrial Cynosural Fields can be jumped to by Jump Freighters and Black Ops Battleships.
  • Requires Cynosural Field Theory I to activate.

Industrials will be the new cyno ship for jump freighters.  This will also keep cyno vigils a thing, though now vigils will be held in haulers, which seemed to be a major factor here.  More room to hold fuel I guess.  The odd bit is the addition of Black Ops ships to those being able to jump to the new cyno.  I did not see a reason listed for that.

And so the chaos continues.

On the new player side of things, the big feature for September looks to be warning messages when players are fitting ships sub-optimally.  There will now be four levels of warnings in the fittings window if you commit any of these fitting sins.   The warnings are broken out into the following groups:

Crucial/Red if:

• The ship’s CPU is overloaded
• The ship’s Powergrid overloaded
• The ship’s Cargo is overloaded
• The ship is a Strategic Cruiser and is missing a subsystem

Warning/Yellow if:

• The ship has Invalid modules fitted (for example after a ship has been rebalanced or when swapping subsystems on a Strategic Cruiser)
• Some fitted Modules are not providing bonus (for example if you have a Magnetic Field Stabilizer fit but all your guns are projectiles turrets)
• Mixing turret groups
• Mixing turret sizes
• Mixing launcher groups
• Both Shield and Armor modules fitted
• Offline modules

Info/White if:

• Armor tanking a ship categorized as shield ship
• Shield tanking a ship categorized as armor ship
• Polarized weapons fitted

Skill warning if:

• Skills for the ship or fitted modules are missing
• Skills for items in the ships cargohold are missing

Hovering over the warnings will describe which tenant of ship fitting you have broken and highlight the offending modules.

Dual tanked Raven as an example

With this in place can we then assume all bad fits are on purpose?

Other items of note on the list of changes include the long promised warp timer.  Previously tossed due to technical reasons, you can now only be kept from warping by bumping for three minutes:

Ships that bump while attempting to enter warp will now automatically enter warp if they remain in the pre-warp state for three minutes continuously. Scramblers or any other form of canceling the warp will reset this timer.

The out is that if the people bumping you are willing to sacrifice a rookie ship and a warp scram to CONCORD every two and a half minutes or so, they can still keep you stuck indefinitely.  But if you’ve set yourself to warp in a belt and walked away, you’ll only bump off that asteroid in your way for three minutes… so long as belt rats don’t get you before then.

On the graphics side of things, there has been an update to graphics and shaders related to stars and wormholes.  There was a dev blog about this, but I guess it can be quickly summed up in a graphic from that.

The before and after look

Wormhole graphics will also indicate the age and capacity of the wormhole, so capital capable wormholes will be visually distinctive from frigate sized holes.

There are, as always, lots of other small fixes and tweaks in the update.  You can find details in the patch notes and on the updates page.  Word is that the update has been deployed successfully.

CO2 Keepstar in the Cross Hairs

Talk has already started about what various groups are going to do after the war in the north lapses.  In part this has been predicated on the assumption that once Circle of Two has been driven out of Fade and their structures destroyed that victory will be declared and the Imperium will go back to accumulating its huge pile of wealth in Delve.  However, during The Meta Show on Saturday The Mittani did suggest that we might stay in the north so long as we were getting fights in the Fade region, so we may be sticking around for a while.

Fade forces disposition… for the moment

Either way we have a couple of tasks left.  Back in July the CO2 Keepstar in DW-T2I was saved from destruction when the Imperium apparently didn’t know who cynojammer mechanics worked.

I guess we know the answer

That was a setback to the Imperium drive to hit CO2.  There were other targets though, so the Imperium went after the NCDot staging Keepstar in X47L-Q where the armor and final hull timer battles saw dozens of titans die along with the citadel.

There were also NCDot and PL allied Keepstars in low sec that were take out.

On the southern front, the was seems to have petered out with Fraternity attempting to anchor and subsequently losing a Keepstar of their own.  What with all of that and the two Keepstar battles in the south earlier, it has been the war of the Keepstars.

During all of that there has been an ongoing entosis campaign in Fade as the Imperium has attempted to remove cynojammers as a factor in the region, allowing it to drop its super captial force at will.  The pressure has been on and the north has formed up to defend the critical infrastructure hubs that allow cynojammers to be anchored.  But the Imperium has pushed forward, system by system, until last week when the ihub in DW-T2I was finally taken.

With that task complete, the CO2 Keepstar was reinforced very shortly there after.

On Saturday fleets assembled for the second of the three events needed to take down the Keepstar, the armor time.  Most of this had been happening in EU prime time during the week, when I have been at work.  But on Saturday I was able to get to the staging system in 6RCQ-V.  With the ping fleets were assembling and filling up.

I managed to make it into one of the Baltec fleets, with Thomas Lear in command.  Asher the Sky Marshall was in overall command of the multi-fleet operation.  We started moving out in a relatively short time span given that more than a thousand characters were logged in and in fleets.  The captial ship component jumped off on their own while the subcaps flew off to titans for jump bridges.

Waiting for our turn to bridge

With no cynojammer available to keep us out, we bridged straight into DW-T2I.  Looking over at the timer on the Keepstar, it was clear we were there early.

Armor Timer Counting Down

We were clearly not leaving anything to chance.

In previous Keepstar fights the armor timer had been heavily contested, so we were there and on grid with the structure to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues on that front.

On arrival we tethered up on the friendly Fortizar that had been anchored on the same grid as the Keepstar and waited for instructions.

Watching the Keepstar

We had not been hanging off the Fortizar for too long before Asher announced from the command channel that the locals were not going to defend the timer.  There would be no fight, no tidi, no clash of capital ships.

It was also about then that I think people began to notice that Asher had the Real Ultimate Power theme song running on speakers in the background throughout the operation, as every time he keyed up it was there to hear.  The YouTube version of the song had been discovered earlier in the week and I am pretty sure he had been playing it non-stop ever since.  Like ninjas, Sky Marshals are also mammals and are also fight all the time.

Except when the enemy doesn’t show up.

While the enemy was now not expected to take the field we still piled into the system, likely both as a show of force and to keep the locals from changing their mind.

A few tasks were handed out as we waited for the timer.  Our fleet warped over to an Athanor mining platform in the system to reinforce it.

Baltecs shooting a structure

Being in Reavers, shooting structures is practically a way of life.  With a full fleet though that did not last very long.  Soon we were back hanging off the Fortizar on our tethers wondering if anything would happen as the timer for the Keepstar counted down.

A supercarrier fleet jumped to the Fortizar and tethered up above us with heavy interdictors putting up defensive warp disruption bubbles around the supers to keep anybody from warping directly on top of them.

The supers in their orange hictor bubbles

Fighters from the super fleet were tasked to do the actual attack on the Keepstar and most of the voice coms traffic involved getting their fighters deployed and to the right location.  Even that coms traffic died off after not too long and things were pretty quiet.

I took off my headset and let coms play through my speakers while I made a snack.

As I ate that I started to sketch out some ideas in a blog post draft that eventually took form and became the post about acquisitions and CCP that went live on Saturday.  I suppose it is a productive fleet if I end up with two blog posts out of it.

The timer came out and the supers hit the Keepstar.  As expected, there was not much in the way of resistance.  A few CO2 pilots undocked to try for targets of opportunity and a Pandemic Horde interceptor fleet shadowed us coming and going, but neither were going to change the expected result.  The Keepstar itself was gunned and managed to pick off Xenuria when he strayed too close and got hit by the PDS.  But the fighters were successful in getting through the armor of the citadel and the timer for the final event was set.

Count down to destruction

That timer puts the final fight on this coming Thursday.  With the timer set in DW-T2I we withdrew back to our own staging in 6RCQ-V.

Rumor has it that the final timer will not be contested either as CO2 is already well under way evacuating assets to the Keepstar in DO6H-Q.  However, the ihub in DO6H-Q was also taken by the Imperium over the weekend, leaving the Keepstar there unprotected by a cynojammer.  It seems quite likely that we will stick around until that too has been destroyed.