The Infinite Universe (part 2)

I should know better than to have promised part 2 of this during the week. Life rarely leaves me the time to focus on a long post like this. Plus, when I do have spare time during the week I prefer to actually play EVE. Crazy, huh?

If you've not read part one click the link and read it now.

***

The Arrival

With a loud bang our intrepid corp of explorers arrives in the distant system. As the Rorqual was using the sun as a destination lock the ship naturally lands in relative close proximity to it. There are no planets, no asteroid belts, and definitely no gates or stations available from the right click menu nor on the overview. The only thing on the overview is the sun and the system doesn't even have a registered name. The first order of business, therefore, is for the other pilots who travelled with the Rorqual to take their clones, jump into scanning ships and start scanning the system. The scanning pilots start hunting down the celestials, warping to them and making assorted tactical bookmarks like any good scouts should. This way they find where the planets, moon, and any other items of interest in the system are.

The Rorqual is vulnerable at the jump-in point and needs to be moved. Our Rorqual pilot, eager to secure the situation gets himself to one of the new tactical bookmarks as soon as possible. This is where the Rorqual reveals its next new trick. Once in position at a bookmark the pilot selects the 'Anchor' option for the Rorqual then moves his pod into another one of the ships stored in the Rorqual. After some period of time the Rorqual goes online and a forcefield is erected to protect the exploration group. Why carry a POS when one of the ships serve the function perfectly well? Our explorers are now working against the clock. They need to do whatever they came here to do and be ready to head home before their safe haven runs out of fuel for the forcefield.

Exploitation

In addition to scanning down planets and moons there also needs to be some worthwhile reason for our explorers to come to this distant system. I've already established there are no freebies on this trip. This means there are no anomalies for people to simply warp to. Everything has to be worked for. This means all ISK will be hidden behind signatures and the dangers within. Given these locations are brand new areas of space I wouldn't expect known NPC classes to exist in any significant numbers. The ship sizes which can be transported needs to be taken into consideration when designing these sites.

Exploration sites requiring little or no combat would add to the empty feeling of space - "someone had been here but has long since gone". Other sites would be well defended by tough NPCs. Some leads could be taken here from the recently unveiled Burner missions. Any NPC living this deep in space is likely to be very self-sufficient and readily able to defend itself. Finally, the complete absence of anything to do should always be an option. Exploration should not guarantee riches or, indeed, anything at all. I'd be quite happy to see people going home entirely empty handed from time to time.

Our explorers now have as long as their Rorqual-POS has forcefield fuel to make the most of the wealth they have unlocked. Why do they need a forcefield? I was just getting to that.

Conflict

This wouldn't be EVE without there being a large possibility for explosions. A lack of local and no obvious pinch-points such as gates, stations or wormholes may make combat seem unlikely. Of course the initial arrival of the Rorqual leaves it fairly vulnerable. Anyone who happens to be combat scanning around the predictable arrival point of the sun will be able to warp in and grab point, hence the need for the explorers to take both exploration and combat ships on their journey. Once the Rorqual is anchored it isn't immune to attack either. Natural resists give it an appropriate number of hit points to defend from attack. This is particularly important given the lack of other automated defences. Should the Rorqual-POS be taken into armor the necessary reinforced timer starts counting down. No point messing around with hauling strontium on the journey for this, let's just use the same mechanism as POCOs and have the anchoring pilot set the time range for reinforced mode exit. If the odds are overwhelming maybe a rescue mission could be staged to save the Rorqual with a backup team (and another Rorqual). Doubling down is always an option.

Other sources of conflict are pretty identical to wormholes with the added difficulty of how the potential aggressors get themselves staged. EVE being EVE I find it incredibly likely that there would be the formation of corps whose sole mission in life was to build up a library of potential locations to jump to hunting for explorers to explode. Of course, this would just drive explorers onto deeper and deeper destinations. Without proper planning people have a real chance of getting stranded and/or need rescued.

Conclusion

I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. I often feel there isn't enough mystery in New Eden, between the well mapped areas of k-space, the well documented routines of all NPCs and the triggers which affect their reinforcements. The infinite EVE universe could go a long way to addressing this. Simply going there should not guarantee instant wealth and sites should be slow to respawn. It should be hard to get there and challenging to exist there. Procedurally generated signatures would hopefully yield the randomness I desire and prevent people from being able to go into auto-pilot mode when running the sites. I also like the idea that people could scan themselves deeper and deeper. Of course, there would always be the challenge of getting home to Jita to turn riches of items into riches of ISK. Finally, there is no isolating yourself as people can arrive at any time. There is no wimping out on the commitment cost though so any potential gankers better be confident they can deal with the mysteries before committing their own Rorqual to the jump.

The Infinite Universe (part 1)

There has been ongoing speculation for what the promised eventual future of player built stargates will bring. A lot of the speculation predictably revolves around finally unlocking access to Jove space. Others think the gates will unlock access to some other well defined long-forgotten region of space. My personal favourite is that CCP will use player built stargates to replace the distances about to be taken from carriers and other jump-capable ships allowing the largest alliance to ephemerally replace the logistical links they currently rely upon. I think it is time to stop thinking so small and really expand our online universe. Space is infinite so why shouldn't New Eden be so?

Investigation

It's time to properly extend the exploration career to the discovery of entire new solar systems. Doing so should be a corporation wide endeavour requiring the expenditure of a large amount of resources. The basic premise of the discovery portion of this idea is a massive extension of the existing scanning skills except this will be on a galaxy map rather than a solar system map. In addition to this, each 'scanning bubble' will be controllable by a single character. This will require a minimum of four pilots to have any chance of successfully scanning a system and an optimum of seven or eight for more rapid discovery. Each pilot should be based in their own POS and each POS needs to be in a separate solar system. The further apart each pilot the greater the chance a deep scan will work.

Of course we're going to need new probes with their own mini jump drives. Like existing drives these mini jump drives will of course require fuel to jump to these distant regions of space. Deeper exploration may even expend all fuel on the outbound journey resulting in sacrifice of the probe. Will it be worth it? Of course the scan itself shouldn't be as passive as the solar-system scans. Let's introduce a new variant of the hacking mini-game. Rather than just be a random click-fest this should actually require some skill to play. Eight skilled players playing the mini-game at the same time... did I just create an online cooperative game *inside* an MMO?

Exploration

So what happens once our industrious corp pins down the jump coordinates of a distant star worthy of further investigation? Well then the real exploration begins. How do they get there and back safely? Clearly we need a new class of ship. A deep exploration ship. Sounds like something ORE would build? Meet the newly refitted deep exploration Rorqual. This refitted Rorqual comes with a modified jump drive. Unlike existing drives this one has the ability to lock to on to the single gravity well of the distant sun and jump much greater distances. The emphasis on singular gravity wells obviates the possibility of abusing the Rorqual in known space (although future use in W-space could be an interesting option which I won't consider here). Whilst making this a one-way journey would be an interesting choice it's probably not a good idea. A 'point of origin' marker would guide the Rorqual home at the end of the voyage.

So our corp is ready for their jump to deep space. They load their Rorqual with the tools of their trade - more exploration ships and quite probably a smattering of combat ships for defence from the unknown. They 'board' the Rorqual by attaching their current clone to the clone vat bay. Once prepared the Rorqual pilot initiates the jump to the distant system and all the involved parties jump as one ready to brave the dangers of the remote system.

***

This turned into a longer post than expected. I'll continue during the week with what happens next.

API NPC Changes

I rarely venture into the eve-o forums. I find them to be a wasteland of bitterness which sucks the soul and removes my desire to play EVE. The only time I go there is when some other, tougher soul tells me there is something worth reading. Right now the 'something worth reading' is a threadnaught initiated by CCP SoxFoxFour on an intended change to the data available to pull from the EVE API.

"as a heads up as soon as I can find the time I will be removing WH systems map/kills endpoint. This is data that exists in the API but not the client and is incredibly powerful. As with everything I am open to discussing this, but I will admit that you will have a damn hard time convincing me of not doing it."

 The resulting thread which followed this was at 23 pages when I last looked with a fairly even split of people who welcome the change and people who absolutely hate the idea of this information going away. Those in favour cite the reason that wormholes exist is to be mysterious with no way of knowing what is out there, particularly not from external tools pulling from the API. Those against raise the point that it is already hard to find people in wormholes and this information is the only way they can find people to kill in a long, pre-scanned chain.

I see there being two problems here which are not entirely unrelated. Problem one is the existence of this information in the API which shouldn't be there. The people pointing out that wormholes are meant to be mysterious areas with no intel not gathered with your own eyes are 100% correct. We already had wormhole system jumps removed many moons ago for this very reason. The NPC kill data should also have been removed at that point. We should not know anything about wormholes which wasn't learnt from d-scan or other in-game intel gathering means. If my corp scans out a long chain then it is up to us to station scouts in each link to wait for activity, or actually patrol the chain to find someone to shoot. The key concept here is we need to be active to find things.

The mildly related second problem was introduced with the Odyssey expansion. In Odyssey we were lumped with the wonderful new scanner. No more did we have to actively probe systems to see what was out there. No more did we have to proactively scan our own systems during operations to see if any new signatures were present in our home system or where ever we happened to be operating. No more did we have to be surprised when ships appeared from nowhere to gank us when we thought we have all our exits covered. See where I'm going with this? Ostensibly the reason for this change was to bring more people into exploration. While a laudably intention we rarely find anyone else in our chains at all. When we do we have to be really quick to catch them if they are running sites, or they have to be really dumb and not notice the new signature auto-populate in their signature scanner. The balance of risk has shifted too far and the new proposal shifts this even further in favour of carebears. I'm sure this in unintended by CCP...

I agree with both sides but the fix is not to do nothing. I fully support removing this information from the API. Wormholes are big spaces where intel comes at a premium. You should have to work hard to get your kills. The first part is scanning, the second part is keeping the intel current, the final part is the kill. The real problem here happened with Odyssey and should be removed. Get rid of the signature scanner autopopulating. Force people running sites to have probes in the air actively scanning for new sigs. Take us back to pre-Odyssey scanning. If passive intel for the hunter is removed then so too should passive intel for the prey.

My Little Caravan

One of the new personal structures coming with Rubicon is the Mobile Depot. This little structure will allow a limited amount of storage along with a personal fitting service so you can swap out ship modules while in space. The recently announced in-space changes to T3 subsystems will also be possible making this little structure potentially awesome. My friend splatus has already written about the three depots, along with their attributes, so I won't cover any of that in detail. I have been interested since these were announced to see how they would pan out for use in w-space. The main questions in my head were: does it appear on d-scan, can it be probed down, and how easily can it be shot. It was time to go to Singularity and find out.

No Dougal the depot is small... the Loki is far away.

Deploying the depot is simplicity itself. For the full wormhole experience I started cloaked and aligned to a celestial. In one fluid movement I decloaked, dragged the depot from my cargo into space, then warped off. No hanging around messing with right-click menus or anything. Once I landed I immediately about-turned to see if the depot had anchored properly to find it had.

The next thing was to answer my two questions about d-scan and probing. Warping off again I first launched Sisters core scanner probes and tried to find the signature. As expected I found nothing so swapped for Sisters combat probes. This time I got a weak signature but it was easy enough to whittle down the probe ranges before finally getting a 100% lock at the 1 AU probe range. Testing d-scan initially showed nothing on any of my presets. Digging a little revealed a new checkbox in the overview settings. Once I ticked that option the depot clearly appeared on d-scan.

Little bubbles of ping

New box to tick

At this point I was happy with how easy these things will be to find in space so the last remaining question was how easy are they to kill. From the screenshot I took it apparently took seven volleys from my cloaky loki to put the depot into reinforced mode. Something designed with damage in mind would be much quicker but, to be honest, seven volleys isn't exactly an ice age. Once reinforced a bright red reticule appears which is only visible when you are on-grid with the depot. I initially mis-read the countdown as 48 minutes but it's actually 48 hours before the structure leaves reinforced mode. While it was reinforced I was able to add and remove items from the storage space. I didn't think to try the refit option although I have read that will not work during the reinforced timer.

48 Hours!! Is Nick Nolte in there?

Given the ease by which I scanned this down I went to look for the meta versions of the basic depot. Unfortunately these were not seeded in the market on singularity. Discussions with some corp mates suggested scanning these meta objects will range from somewhat harder for the meta 2 'Wetu' depot to almost impossible for the meta 3 'Yurt' depot due to it's 1:1 sig to sensor strength ratio. If the meta items get seeded I'll give it a go, otherwise I look forward to trying to scan them down in space and hopefully shooting them 'just because I can'.

Sisters are doing it for themselves

There's been a bit of excitement in my corp with people keen to get their hands on the new Sisters of EVE cruiser, the Stratios. There's less excitement about the frigate, the Astero, as we already have covops frigates and cloaky bombers. The Stratios, on the other hand, looks like a worthy replacement for some current scanning boats. It's better than a Covops frigate because it can fit guns. It should be better than my trusted cloaky Loki because it will hopefully be cheaper. Also, dying in one won't result in skill point loss. It does remain to be seen if I can tear myself away from my precious, rhyming cloaky loki...

When I was on SiSi the other night it was to check if the new anchorables were up yet for us to see. Sadly they weren't so I played around with getting the golden pod and then with the improved warp acceleration. I then set to finding the unskinned models of the SoE ships which I read were available. So you don't also have to dig around to see them, I present the screenshots I took for your perusal.

Astero Frigate

Stratios Cruiser

To be honest, the concept work showed skins which didn't look a million miles from the very white nekkid models above. Just add some red stripes here and there. I do look forward to seeing these fully skinned and live on TQ during November. I also look forward to the names and designs for the SoE Battlecruiser and Battleship which everyone should start clamouring for around November 20th..

Quietly Scanning

I logged in to find nobody else online in my corp. Even alliance chat was silent when I waved hello. As CEO there's always plenty administrivia to take care of, but I decided to hell with that. Recently I was asked about getting EVE W-Space working by one of the guys in another hole in the alliance. After messing around I got it working fairly quickly and we've rapidly adopted it as the mapping tool of choice. Although I've scanned in groups using the new tool, tonight I decided to give our new mapping tool a proper workout alone. I would be able to learn its idiosyncrasies and just maybe find a bug or two to report and/or fix.

Starting with a clean slate in our home system I rapidly scanned down gas, gas, gas (yawn), wormhole. Our lone static unsurprisingly spat me out into a C3 which had six sigs to sift through. Someone in the alliance had already been here in the past as EVE W-Space showed me where the online POS should be. The intel was right and I stopped by to make a POS perch. I also mapped where the other, offline POSs are before launching probes. It didn't take long to identify the sigs as two Relic sites (boring) and three more wormholes in addition to the route back home. The wormholes filled all three K-space flavours - highsec, lowsec and nullsec. I jumped through the EOL hisec one first just to get the location, I repeated this for the lowsec and nullsec. All very boring and not a ship in sight to maybe shoot at.

With still nobody online I was considering giving up and calling it a night, but I really wanted to make a pretty map of our constellation. With the highsec EOL I decided to go scan the nullsec and see where it lead to. Ah, only one signature and it's where I just came from. Lowsec was marginally more exciting with two more wormholes to visit - a C1 and a C3. Neither hole had any life in it so I decided to give up and go home.

(post timed to make sure this intel is outdated)

I achieved my goal for the evening of getting to give EVE W-Space a decent workout. It's a really nice tool drawing pretty maps and making it very easy to share intel without expecting people to become ASCII art experts in the bulletin board. There are some quirks which need ironed out which is not unexpected for a code base as relatively new as this. One example is jumping into a new system isn't always detected and you have to fill in all the information manually. If the auto-detection works you get a window with most of the useful information pre-populated. It's a minor thing and when I work out a pattern to the behaviour I'll see if I can fix it. If you live in w-space and don't already have a nice tool to map your chains out you could do worse than setting up EVE W-Space for your corp.

Neglect and Dying

I've been neglecting my blog for the last two weeks. The odd thing is I've had things to write about but I've not had the time to do the writing. By way of apology here's the conclusion on Geo's circuitous nullsec journey.

To quickly recap, I had noticed from my visited systems map that not one of my toons had been to the east side of New Eden and this needed rectified. In my last post about this I had gone about a seventh of the way around the map. It is from there I resume the tale.

Continuing south with Geo I encountered very little activity in any of the edge systems. Solar Fleet owned a large chunk of the next section of space I went through and other than the occasional comment about me in 'local' I saw nobody, not even any fleets passing through. There are some rather big jumps as you head south so it felt like real progress was being made. I was still making a tactical gate bookmark and safe spot for every system so this meant progress was slow. Generally I would only do five or so jumps at a time before doing something different. I continued down through Insmother before arriving victorious in FMH-OV in Detorid.

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

That was it. I was about a third of the way around the map and I had cleared Solar Fleet's space. Now it was time to head, um, further around?! I had made it this far and found the edge of New Eden largely empty. How hard could it be? The new plan looked like this:

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

The route shown above is 181 jumps. I was only 47 jumps around so if I wanted to finish in a timely manner I would need to speed up. This meant no longer making tacticals at every gate unless I actually needed one. The next few systems flew by under this new process. I should have been doing that from the start but lack of nullsec experience seemed to have made me over cautious. Things were going great until I encountered something hitherto unseen on my journey, people actually living in the systems they held sovereignty over.

I had been making good use of the 'pilots in space' map statistic during my travels. Rarely did I see even one pilot in space. Down in Feythabolis the alliance Unclaimed. seemed to have at least 6 pilots in space in all the border systems they owned. This held up no matter what time I checked. What's more they seemed to be actively hunting me whenever I logged in. Once again my progress crawled to a halt. I sat watching each out gate for some time observing all the comings and goings which prevented my progress. I was around this time I decided to pare back my cyclic ambition. Going half circle now would be sufficient and I would resume the other half at a later date. The new destination was C-PEWN which looked like the exact opposite system from where I started in OE-4HB.

Back in overly-cautious mode it took me a few days to get the last few jumps towards my new destination. It was already thinking about scanning myself a nice wormhole to hisec and going on a Bombers Bar roam. Finally I was one jump away. As usual for Unclaimed.'s space the next system showed six pilots in space. It was my last jump so I went for it. Loading grid on the other side showed a lone Sabre. Oh crap, bubbles. It was down to me escaping the bubble under the cover of cloak. I held the session cloak as long as I dared then made a break for it. Heading directly away from the Sabre I gained covops cloak then switched direction. Holy hell can that Sabre move! He decloaked me with ease and the result was inevitable. A pod express trip to hisec was requested and granted. Well at least I wouldn't have to scan my way home.

On the plus side, I completed the revised 50% circuit of New Eden. This was way more than originally intended so I'm happy. Now for something new to do.

Wandering With Geo

Style was never
a priority

It has been a while since I mentioned my PvP alt, Geo. To be honest I've just been spinning my wheels with him. From time to time I head out and have fun on RvB Ganked roams. Indeed that is where 99% of Geo's kills have happened. Unfortunately these roams only happen once a week, at the weekend, and I'm rarely able to take advantage so I had to find something else to do.

Something else would be Bombers Bar, but for a lack of skills. Thus, I have been getting Geo trained up for the recommended Bombers Bar Hound fit. At the time of writing this it will be only another 14 days and I'll be flying a pretty mean bomber. But two weeks is two weeks so what could I do with Geo in the mean time.

Back in November I wrote a post about where I'd visited in New Eden. One thing that really stood out to me from all my maps was the big empty section that cut a swathe down the east side. As I had never visited anywhere over there I thought it would be a good idea to do so now.

Starting in the spiritual centre of EVE, Jita, I plotted a route for OE-4HB. This took me up through Lonetrek and popped me into Goon space via Taisy. I wish I'd taken a picture of the Taisy gate in M-OEE8. Bubbled just doesn't convey how covered this gate was in warp disruption bubbles of all sizes. Thankfully for me there was only a couple of ships sitting on the gate so I easily managed to get my Stealth Bomber cloaked up and safely away. The rest of the route through Tribute, Venal and Tenal was quiet with only a couple of warp bubbles on gates and almost nobody in space. In fact the only thing that slowed me down was gate rats as I'm also making myself a useful set of tactical bookmarks on the gates I travel through. Rats on gates meant I couldn't make use of my Microwarpdrive to burn to a warpable range, instead having to slowboat whilst cloaked.

Courtesy of evemaps.dotlan.net

The second leg of my journey took me out of Tenal and all the way through Cobalt Edge. I guess Razor Alliance are fighting with Intrepid Crossing right now as there were a large number of Territory Claim Units and Sovereignty Blocking Units across the systems I visited. I don't know anything about Nullsec sovereignty mechanics but systems listed as 'Vulnerable' or 'Contested' hints strongly at what is going on. I hung around for a while hoping to see some massive battle but the only action I saw was a 16 ship -RZR- fleet jump past me on their way into IRC space. I never saw them again.

Eventually I found myself in Outer Passage and in Solar Citizens space which is where I still am. I'm really tempted to hang out and see if I can bag me some miners down here. I'd love to know if the stories of bots abound are true. I'm also starting to think I could go right the way around the outer edge of New Eden. I've done about one eighth already so it shouldn't take that long...

Interestingly, in Outer Passage I found my first unclaimed system, and then another and another. I didn't think there would be any of these just lying around. Maybe someone could fill me in on why these don't have owners? Awaiting new rental agreements maybe?

Where I've Been

Mabrick over at Mabrick's Mumblings posted a snapshot of his visited systems as recorded by the EVE server. At the end he invited others to post their maps so I decided to take up that invitation.

Orea's Wanderings

You can see from this I spent the vast majority of my time hanging around in Gallente space. This betrays my first two year of EVE as a carebear missioneer. I can see a single route south into nullsec but I can't for the life of me remember what that was for. Other than that, the occasional dot shows where I've jumped out from a wormhole.

Dhal's Travels

It's really easy to see Dhal hasn't moved around much in New Eden. For a toon born in 2005 this map gives and idea of how long it took between my first trying EVE and actually subscribing to the game. Only notable thing I pick from this map is my time spent around Solitude.

Geo's Journey

Geo has only been around for this year but already his spread of travel covers a lot more of the right side of the map. Now he can fly a reasonable stealth bomber I should take him for a wander around the far right of the map and light some systems up there also.

There we go, my main characters' travels up in lights as suggested by Mabrick. So, dear reader, how about yours?

A Weekend Deployment

I was all set for a relaxing weekend. I had prepared a couple of cruisers for the 40th RvB Ganked roam on the Saturday and I had no other fixed plans. For anyone who hasn't been on a Ganked roam, you should go on one. Just remember that you will not be taking your ship or clone back in one piece. Something has gone very, very wrong if you don't wake up in a new clone with a message from the insurers of your former ship. But I digress.

We had been aware for a while of a visitor in the class 2 wormhole system which houses our academy. He had been seen on d-scan and had been chatting in local. I'm not sure if he actually tried to blow anyone up. If he did try he definitely didn't succeed. At some point he decided to blow up a couple of warp bubbles my corp had left there when we handed the wormhole over the Corp that now runs the academy. Being a little bored I decided to have some fun. I sent the visitor a bill for 30 Million ISK and requested a written apology for the inconvenience.

Sadly his response was neither imaginative nor particularly polite. My reply pointed that out to him and I was delighted to receive a response he attributed to a corp mate:

In my travels through wormhole system J######, I found my ship battered and encumbered by multiple warp disruption bubbles belonging to your corporation. During that time, my travel was detrimentally effected. I lost valuable time (which is ISK). During my harrowing navigation, my ship suffered multiple scratches and dents, both when I ran into your warp disruption bubbles as well as when I was hit by pieces of debris when I disposed of them. I expect compensation for my time and damages to the tune of 30,000,000.01 ISK. Please remit payment ASAP to avoid further loss of your corporation assets and additional monetary damages of time and maintenance. Furthermore, I expect a written public apology on the EVE Gate forums for your negligence and oversight. Please also refrain from leaving your shit all over space for people to have to work around.

Now that was more like what I was hoping for. For his part I tried to sent the 0.01 ISK balance between what I requested and what he wanted for his ship. Sadly the EVE client will allow 0.10 ISK as the minimum so I chose 1.01 and a suitable reply. I also figured I might as well ask why he was hanging around the academy. If it was for easy kills he was going to be a bit disappointed as those guys are pretty savage against single targets. His reply was slightly unexpected as he told me his alliance was invading the C2. Ooo, change of weekend plans then.

After our success at forming a local defence against nothing it was good to now be testing how successful we were as an alliance at deploying from our local wormholes and meeting up in the academy. At least with a static lowsec wormhole it would be easy to get to the destination, but with the other corps living in class four systems there was going to be luck at play for good routes to K-space.

Plans and fleet compositions were drawn up by people with more knowledge than me. Money was deposited in a kitty in case anyone was short of ISK to buy what was asked of them. Come Thursday I scanned a very nice route out of our home system. Very nice apart from the 32 jumps to Jita. I then went shopping and bought the ships I was planning to take. I do like wilful shopping sprees that aren't just the result of a ship loss.

Come Friday I had the ships hauled up to a staging point near the appropriate lowsec system and flew my gaggle of ships into the C2. It was a bit like going home. That system is where I started my wormhole career over a year ago. It gave me a fuzzy feeling inside to go back. I even still had my 'safe' bookmarks. During this time we became aware that our visitor and one of his alts had left the C2. Watchlist triggered d-scans also meant we suspected the other alts had also left as we didn't see any ships appear when he logged off. Had our visitor gone? Sadly we received confirmation of this when we announced some other corp activity meant there would be no action for us. Not being particularly trusting we decided to maintain watch anyway just in case.

At some point after several beers and boredom I decided to wander off in a bomber to Tama with a slightly inebriated Emergent Patroller. This had the expected result of us losing both our ships to pirates. I'm fairly certain that would probably have happened if the beers hadn't been flowing given the expectation of tonight had been to lose ships or die trying. It just wasn't meant to be in the pirate bolt-hole of Tama.

For all the weekend didn't provide in combat activities, it did give us good practice at a defensive deployment to another wormhole system in our alliance. I found the planning and execution of this good fun as well. Rather than just logging in to hope there were people or sleepers to shoot we had a proper mission to execute. Great stuff.

Now if only CCP could find some way to make NPC missions involved and meaningful like that.

Invasion, maybe? (part 2)

I finished the last entry with us having demolished an unexpected visitor with an unexpected POS. We were at a loss to understand the motives and we were now under wardec for some bizarre reason. I had just caught a Loki from a merc corp in my catch bubble. Was this the end? Would Zero Return Mining Inc. be looking for a new home soon?

While I was contemplating our survival chance if we attacked the Loki who was now eating my catch bubble, a corpmate jumped into C4a to gather intel. He reported fifteen ships, from Strategic cruisers to Logistics and HICs, all sitting waiting on the other side of the hole. It may have been my imagination, but his voice was a little higher pitched than usual. We decided not to engage. This was properly looking like an invasion except for one thing. There was a clue that the mercenary corp was not here to invade and displace us - their appearance was through our C4a static wormhole which led to a dead end. If they had been rolling holes to find us our visitors would have arrived via a K162.

The second clue was their announcement that we should convo them if we wanted to save our POCO. That's a threat to draw out a fight, nothing more and nothing less. Given they were going to ask for ISK and we were going to refuse there was no point in following those instructions. Frustrated, they sent a single Tengu off to plink away at one of our POCOs. I figured he'd be there a while before getting through 1% of the POCO defences. A mere eight minutes later our erstwhile invaders got bored and left. Their parting message in local informed us of their disappointment in us. Sorry guys, we saw your force and decided discretion was the better part of valour.

The rest of the evening was quiet. Our number of connections slowly decreased and I took a peek into the home system of our invasion force. Fifteen large towers?! Glad I don't have any part in their fuel logistics. But, what about our wardec and optimistic invader of the previous night? Was there more to come?

The following morning I was up early and ready for action. Chatting with come corpmates there was a sudden exclamation from the wife who had been roused from sleep a few nights earlier to help bash our invader. She'd just noticed her husbands EVEMon running with an unfamiliar character in it; a character who had a familiar name; a character who may have been anchoring a POS in our home system...

My mail to the alliance explains it best:

War update
From: Oreamnos Amric
To: Illusion of Solitude [IOS]

Hey folks, 

As you may have seen the wardec against IoS has been dropped. There is a funny story behind all this and there was never any danger (more than we normally have in W-space) behind Shirley's invasion and the subsequent wardec. 

It turns out one of Zero's members was a little bored and a little drunk. He decided to take an alt into our Shirley and plonk a tower down while at the same time assisting on the capture and killing of said alt, followed by the bashing of said POS, waking his wife to help and composing threatening mails to himself. 

All in all the response mounted by Zero to a perceived threat was excellent. While the antagonist's actions may have been known to one member of the response (himself), all the other people who got on to help had no idea and I commend them all for the reaction and eviction of our 'invader'. 

Said member of Zero is apparently a little sheepish of his actions and says 'sorry'. 

Back now we go to wormhole life as normal.

Orea

So there we have it. Our very own little live event complete with the unexpected garnish of wandering mercenaries. To be fair, almost everyone in the alliance thought the whole episode was both funny and brilliant. It changed up the pace of our life for a while and sharpened us up a little. None of that is bad.

Postface: I would like to thank people who read my previous post and mailed me offering support in the event we did need to defend our home system. While we're not bad at mounting a defence if we need to, it's really nice to know there are people who are willing to assist us. Especially as we often are targets to each other. You know who you are, thanks.

Intel Gathering

I came online today to receive an IM from a corp mate. He was pointing out a new intel tool he had stumbled across on the very slick domain name of wormhol.es. The aim of this tool is to:

"provide wormhole adventurers with a quick and easy way of finding out more information about what has gone on in whichever wormhole they have ventured into. It analyses information from a variety of sources and attempts to identify significant activity that has occured, and using algorithms attempts to identify who is and has been resident."

 The information provided includes the expected static connections you might find, the recent PvE and PvP combat statistics, who probably lives there and what they like to fly, finally you are given the most recent kill in the system courtesy of eve-kill.net.

All the useful information you could ever need

Of course the first thing I checked was the intel available for the wormholes occupied by my corp and the academy corp in my alliance. The intel seems reasonably active although the active timezone guess was a little off. Closer inspection shows the percentages used to estimate the active timezone. Possibly a tweak to the code to allow more than one active timezone would be useful as our active periods are barely split on percentages.

The site has the facilities to use the extra information provided by the in-game browser. If you grant trust to this site you are able to hit the refresh button and fetch the intel for your current location. The site claims it only uses this information for updating the viewed page but I am paranoid - this is EVE after all. I'll definitely be using this site, but from the safety of an out-of-game browser.

Fishing with the Sleepers

I think the discussion about reworking POSs is all good and well, but what about in wormhole space? In the sparsely populated areas I call home CCP have a great opportunity to do something truly different. While it is accepted that we can take a POS structure through some wormholes and assemble it to call home, how about further differentiation these unknown regions of space further buy creating a second choice?

This idea of mine has cropped up a few times in various random discussion on comms but this is the first time I've tried to actually write it down. I was prompted to scribble this down having seen the very basic gameplay demo for Incarna toons exploring Sleeper structures. Forgive me if I wander in my thoughts.

In wormhole space we should be able to capture, occupy and live in some Sleeper structures.

This is my home, there are many like it but this one is mine.

How does that strike you as a genious idea?

Fleshing this out now. How would this work initially? Well, CCP would define a subset of Sleeper structures that would be inhabitable by Capsuleers. Maybe some new artwork to create additional structures would be in order to create something suitable. But I would be quite happy with owning something like this structure.

Obviously we wouldn't want this to be an easily attainable structure to acquire so there should be a new, hard to scan down signature type 'Sleeper Domicile' could be a good name. The spawn rate of such signature should be kept really low. The idea being that players shouldn't be able to move into a wormhole expecting such structures to appear within any particule time frame. The slow spawn randomness would also make it harder for a corp to hire someone in advance to do the hard combat. The very nature of this site would push it to be the hardest type to run requiring a large investment in player combat to clear the site before they could think about taking control. Actually, by control, what if this meant something similar to the incursion or faction warfare mechanic? Sleeper control is reduced by running numerous sites and only once sleeper control is removed does the 'Domicile' become vulnerable.

Clearing the 'Domicile' site isn't the end of this though. In order to gain access we need three areas to be hacked within a limited time frame. This time frame should be too small to allow a single player to hack all three alone but large enough to take into account the random chance of hacking success. Once control has been passed to the player they own it but cannot use it. There is still a risk of despawn.

To make the ownership permanent there would be a final step similar to assembling a customs office where a set number of PI products need deposited in the structure to make it inhabitable for Capsuleers. I have no idea what a suitable level of item volume should be here. It needs to be something feasible to achieve given the mass limits and potential poor routes to haul stuff into a wormhole system. Maybe tuning the requirements to what can be made through PI in each wormhole would work. A wormhole with the ability to make all top tier PI outputs would have a requirement spread across all their possible outputs; a wormhole with only one or two top tier products would require a higher number of each of the two outputs plus some lower tier items. Probably an upgrade process could be in order here so 'stabilising' a structure to not despawn is readily achievable but  actually being able to dock all your ships requires time and coordinated effort.

There also needs to be some form of fuel requirement. There is a temptation to say this should fully consist of things found in wormhole space, but that would take away from some of the current challange of living in wormholes. I'm also not sure what facilities should be available in the structure - should it just hanger space and "Captain's Quarters"? Should it be shared storage as in POSs or more like the privacy afforded in empire-based stations? What about manufacturing, research, invention facilities? I think this should really be kept in traditional POSs with the exception of T3 reverse engineering and construction. This would be the perfect time to allow us wormholers to actually follow the T3 production process from start to end in completeness in the wormhole. The missing piece being able to assemble the subsystems in W-space. What about forcing this to only be possible in W-space?! Well, the reverse engineering and subsystem/hull manufacture anyway. It's a bit much to expect a capsuleer to buy the parts in Jita then haul them to W-space before flying their new ship.

Of course, these structures should definitely be destroyable by hostile players. They should be tougher than large POSs but I'm not sure what the defences would consist of. If there are people docked in a structure when it explodes they should find themselves back in Empire space in a new clone. If they had any possessions in the structure they get destroyed. Simple. While this is harsh, it gives a real goal to fight for if you are invaded. Reinforced timers give you a chance to be organised and also for invaders to get bored and leave.

So, what do you think?

New Alliance

In around 36 hours from this article appearing online there will be a new alliance born into New Eden. What's that you say? Nothing unusual and probably many more than just one? Well, you may be right, but this one is different; this one is being formed by me around the sister corps of Z3R0 Return Mining and Broken Wheel Mercantile and Trading. If you've been vaguely following the going on with our alliance membership you'll be aware of why we need a new alliance.

Once that has been done we can get back to our proper business of fully enjoying wormhole life for all its glory. BWMT can get back to recruiting people unfamiliar with wormhole space and turning them into killing machines. In Z3R0 we can do what we like to do too - mostly shooting sleepers. At some point though the alliance must grow. The idea is that people from BWMT 'graduate' to other corps in the alliance. At some point, though, Z3R0 will be full (or require a professional team of fuel haulers to fuel a staggering number of POSs). As such, I've been told to write a mission statement to guide our forward path.

From the handful of management courses I've done I know this is an important thing for any real business to have lest they flounder around blindly. Knowing it needs done it one thing, but how do you put a rough idea in your head onto paper? Well, today I threw something down and passed it to Splatus for his opinion. I told him not to rewrite it. His response - "Can I rewrite it?". I think he was joking...

A Year In Wormholes

Today marks the first anniversary of my journey into wormhole space so I thought I'd try and do a little recap of that time. I find it most amusing to think that just over a year ago I was in a fairly unsocial corp living in Solitude running L4 missions and thinking I was making loads of ISK. At one time there had been a small group of us who chatted in the corp channel, and even a couple of lowsec roams, but not what you'd expect for a corp boasting 300+ members. Also, we kept being on the receiving end of wardecs and there weren't enough members willing to go out and fight. I was also not so inclined to go fight, but was starting to get to a point where I was fed up either not playing or dying to a war target gate camp after foolishly running missions thinking I would be okay.

I had started getting more interested in the community aspect of EVE. I was listening to a couple of podcasts including Jadecougar's Lost In EVE podcast. This meant when Splatus, one of the few people in corp I actually spoke to, mentioned to me he was considering leaving and trying out wormhole life I decided to accompany him. There were a couple of wormhole corps we considered. I can't remember who the first corp we chatted with were but they sounded a bit too militaristic for us. There was talk of timelimits on running Sleeper sites and ridicule should you fall outside those times. We decided that wasn't for us. Next up was Jadecougar's Z3R0 Return Mining Inc. and they sounded much friendlier so we submitted APIs and agreed to the interview. The interview was probably more intense than many job interviews I've been to. I'm sure it lasted at least an hour and then Splatus and I were in.

Moving in day was fun. I had been on a shopping spree fitting an omni-tank Myrm so I didn't have to fly Caldari. I had been practising my scanning with a lovely helios. I also took in a Covetor and a 'ghetto-Noctis' Catalyst salvager. I then went nuts and filled a bunch of GSCs with random ammo and modules to haul in my Itty. With some trepidation and what I perceived to be outstanding levels of organisation on the part of Z3R0 I managed to safely get most of my shopping into our POS. I was heading out to get the last ship when there were reports of some combat ships on our route. I jumping into my Nemesis and managed to help kill a Typhoon thus allowing Splatus to move in and me to fetch my last ship. My first taste of wormhole combat.

I quickly settled into a life of running my PI setup efficiently and making a stupid amount of ISK. I had the option of dropping out to lowsec through our static to go run missions when the wormhole was quiet but I did that fairly infrequently. I very quickly realised I needed a second account with a cloaky alt to make it easier to run Sleeper sites with only a couple of people on. Life was good, then came the management 'crisis' which resulted in an opportunistic corp theft.

At that time, Z3R0 existed in two wormholes - a C2 and a C4. When Jadecougar decided to take leave from New Eden, potentially permanently, there was an assumption by the person who ran the C2 that he would become CEO. This didn't happen so he quit one night leaving us helpless. There were two ways the corp could have went at that point: sink or swim. A small number of people chose to flee the corp (at least one taking other people's 'canes with them) but for the most part people stayed. The new CEO appointed some directors then wasn't heard of again, but quite quickly we were happy with that.

There was a little concern when Jade came back from hiatus and announced Z3R0 was moving to the C4. How would we cope with no direct access to K-space? How would we survive in the significantly more dangerous space that a C4 presented? Jade was adamant that the dangers of C4 space had been greatly exaggerated to us during our time in the C2 and moving would be simple. So we found some nice guys to buy the C2 from us and we moved. Funny thing we learned was that C4 space isn't actually any more dangerous than C2 space.  As long as you run proper intel you have exactly the same chance of a wandering capsuleer popping you back to hisec in either class of space.

Moving wormholes is a logistical nightmare. It's amazing the volume of stuff you acquire in there. We lost several Orcas due to people being silly on the move out, including one containing a Tengu - oops! The move into the C4 went more smoothly and it was at that time I finally abandoned my principles and started flying Caldari. I moved into the C4 as the proud owner of a scanning Tengu and an omni-tank Drake. Subsequently I replaced the Drake with another Tengu due to the peer pressure of greater range.

In the last six months since moving we've been forced into greater displays of teamwork. Scanning is much more important now than in the C2 as we are always at least two jumps to K-space and usually more. The big change for me is I am now the CEO of Z3R0 Return Mining Inc. as Jade has left to chase a dream of nullsec. Z3R0 probably has more active members now that it ever had and we are still recruiting. Not only that, we also helped create a wormhole academy with Splatus taking the lead there. The aim of our corp has always been primarily to enjoy the game in good company and that is what we continue to do. While the corp buys PI and Sleeper loot and takes a cut from the proceeds, the proceeds of this are used to keep us out here and ease the life of everyone. Not a tactic for the corp to become space-rich but, hey, it's not like we have any shareholders to answer to.

Here's to another year of Z3R0 and Wormholes.

Lost In Hisec

In partnership with one of the other wormhole corps in my alliance we have something of a wormhole academy on the go. As part of the fun of this academy we are organising regular trips from their C2 wormhole system to our C4 wormhole system.

The first such trip was not so successful as we didn't achieve a critical mass of people. The plan had been for a minimum of five people to come from the C2 so they could function as a coherent unit. Unfortunately, as is often the case in W-space, the route in wasn't as fortuitous as it could have been. Actually, there was no route in for the duration of the time frame people were online to enter. Of course, wormholes being a cruel mistress, the moment everyone coming to visit gave up and went home we acquired a route. Two people came.

During their stay those two guys had a blast. Made lots of ISK shooting sleepers and one of them has even applied to move up from the academy corp to my corp. This pretty much was the point of the operation so it could be deemed a success. An important lesson learned was POS mechanics suck for entertaining alliance guests. More about that some other time.

So having learned various lessons from last time, the new away trip for the C2 guys was much more thoroughly planned. Primarily, an Orca has been assigned to serve as a mobile CHA/SMA for our alliance buddies. So last night was time to escort them in.

The route was less than ideal with four wormholes to jump through, three of which were end of life. Intel indicated we should have about two hours remaining on the shortest wormhole so we decided to take a calculated risk. Running the most secure operation we've ever done we had eyes on both sides of every wormhole. There was no chance anyone would get the drop on us, and if they did we all would drop on their head and have a good fight.

Slow Orca was slow and seemed it would never ever get to our entry system. In the meantime we were keeping good eyes watching all the wormholes. Intel was so good that there was almost no delay between the static wormhole from our home system collapsing and it being announced on comms. Blast! Either that was an hour early or someone didn't keep good notes. C'est la vie.

Thus the away mission for the C2 guys came to an abrupt halt. About six of our guys, including me, had no way home. There was only one thing to do - we all headed to our office station and partied the night away.

Still Recruiting

It's been a couple of months since I last posted that my corp was recruiting. We've taken in a decent number of people in that time but the summertime slowdown has started already. Someone tells me this is normal around now due to exams but it's the first time I've experienced it as CEO. There is something very frustrating about logging into find almost but not quite enough people to go raid our neighbouring wormhole for sleeper sites.

Fairly recently we had an ace scanner pilot return to active service. He'd been with us in the old C2 wormhole days. From memory, he was the Security team leader - the team I was placed in when I first joined Z3R0. Each day he's on he's doing a fantastic job scanning down our constellation and bookmarking the sigs for all the sites around us. This makes the reduced numbers all the more frustrating.

So, if you're interested in wormhole life and would like to come help us plunder the riches of our neighbours. Maybe you would even like to mildly terrorise people who find themselves briefly living next door to us. Join the "Z3R0 Return Mining Recruitment" in-game channel and come hang out with us. All we insist on is that you can fly a ship capable of warping cloaked and (to quote the Recruitment Director) "aren't an asshat". If you don't think you're ready for life in a C4 then still come and talk to us. We have plans...

Oh, and the forum link might be useful too.

Scanning Practice

It has been quite some time since I've been able to go on a serious scanning-fest. Boarding my ship to find nobody else active in the system I decide tonight is a good time to lubricate the rusty scanning skills. Jumping to our static connection I find it's approaching the end of its life. I don't particularly want to get stuck outside my home system and this evening I have choices.

Heading over to a K162 from a class 5 system I find the connection to be sound so I jump through. The system appears quiet with five towers on d-scan but only 1 force field. Looks like these guys are ensuring invaders don't get an easy beach-head. They also only have five signatures to scan so I get to work.

From the five signatures I get two further wormholes, not counting the route home. I randomly pick one to warp to and jump through to find myself in a class 3 system with an alleged lowsec route. It's been ages since I was in any empire space so I find this exciting for some odd reason. My probes tell me there are seven signatures in this system so I set to work again and find three additional wormholes. If I had more time this evening I could positively get lost in this wonderful constellation we have this evening.

The first wormhole leads to more W-space in the form of a class 2 system. It would appear to be a busy system judging by d-scan, although the mining vessels I see on my initial arrival quickly disappear. I guess these guys run proper intel and were watching me jump into the system. Leaving the now-disrupted mining fleet behind I head for the first of the remaining connections. This takes me out in Alachene in Gallente space, and I feel like I am home. Only six jumps to Dodixie making me really tempted to go visit my collection of ships nearby, but there are more holes to jump through so back I go.

I jump straight onto and through the remaining wormhole and experience an odd moment of disorientation. For some reason I expected another wormhole system but instead I emerge in the Minmatar lowsec system of Hedgiviter. This is 12 jumps from the closest market hub of Hek making it vastly less interesting than the other lowsec system.

Just at this point a corp mate who was taking care of his planet infrastructure alerts me to hostiles in the home system. A Cheeta and a Loki have decided to make a very quick mess of his Iteron V. Thankfully he gets his pod away intact but I am now left with an interesting dilemma. The corp of the hostiles is the same corp as the POSs in the C5a meaning my route home is via their hole. More unfortunate is I am in need of sleep and could do with bunking down in my own bed tonight and not some rented quarters in hisec. As nice as it would have been to visit my ships I didn't plan on staying for any length of time.

I decide to risk the journey home. My corp mate gets eyes on our side of my wormhole home and I make the leap from C3b to C5a. I hang around for a bit but all seems as quite as when I left. Presumably because they were already in our hole setting traps. Warping to viewing distance of the wormhole connection home it appears safe, but is it? Both sides appear clear and I've decided I'm going home so let's do this. Bouncing off the local star I land on the wormhole and jump. I hold cloak on my home side to see if anything happens but it doesn't. Typically, I am too close to the wormhole to engage my cloak and there are no celestials in the  right direction for me to warp off to so I pick the best of a bad bunch, engage my drives and defences and wait for the attack...

...which doesn't come. I warp off cleanly, cloak up and breath a sigh of relief.

When I set off on my night's scanning I had definitely hoped for something to shoot at but, to be honest, a loki wasn't anywhere on my list.

Unclaimed Space

Today I decided to partake in some mindless scanning. It's been a while since I've had the chance to properly get stuck in to checking out the tactical situation in our wormhole, and probably the first time since moving to the class 4 system. It was a nice and easy reintroduction with only five signatures: three sites already scanned down so just needed their codes updates; our static already scanned; ooh, a K162 to explore.

A quick check in our static revealed a system which should have static links to a class 3 system, which would give a very good chance of a route out to known space. Could be interesting but the K162 attracted me more. Depending on who you listen to, the very existence of the K162 meant someone had been to visit us and I want to know where they came from.

Jumping out the K162 took me to a system with a static hisec. Oh my, we're only two jumps to a hisec system. But what's this on my overview? A Territory Claim Unit... in a wormhole... um, last time I checked you couldn't claim wormhole space in an official manner. It would take a braver (or possibly more stupid) capsuleer than me to warp to the TCU, but just by chance I land at the planet nearest to it. Narrowing down d-scan shows there is a tower with many guns and a warp bubble in very close proximity to the TCU. Nice try guys but I don't think I fancy your trap.

There are more important things to take care of, namely finding this hisec route. Like my home system, this one only has five signatures. Discarding two ladar sites as uninteresting I find both static wormholes and a third exit wormhole. Bookmarking the statics I find myself again drawn to the mysterious K162, warping to it and landing at zero exactly at the same time as a Helios. The helios jumps through with my close behind eyeing my missile launchers hungrily. Emerging on the other side I quickly check the overview to see the helios warping off. Damn it, not quick enough. Oh, wait. I'm in hisec...

I report back to the home system with the plethora of hisec routes available to us and head back to station for a cold drink and a shower. Maybe I'll head back out in a little while - I still haven't shot anything for a while.