Trust

In the real world there are many facets to abusing trust which can result in a myriad of outcomes. Sometimes the only repercussion is being outcast from a group of friends which, if you place little value in said friendship, may make whatever you gained worthwhile. Other times there can be legal ramifications if your position allows you to steal or otherwise break the law. In between these areas is a whole spectrum of variation. To add to the complexity the outcome of an abuse of trust also depends on how forgiving the people you betray are.

Online gaming takes the concept of 'trust' and screws with it somewhat. It takes the real-world ideal and looses off the moral restrictions we are normally subject to. In most areas of EVE there are many mechanisms available to mitigate the dangers of abuses of trust. If you are in a hisec/lowsec/nullsec corp you can keep all  your stuff in your own hanger. Corp directors have the largest burden of trust but even they cannot take from members' hangers leaving only the corp wallet and limited assets as pickable fruit. Here the risk rises from hisec through nullsec as the potential earnings of a corp rise. Still any theft is limited to corp assets and a properly prepared CEO should be able to mitigate the issue should it arise. If an unrecoverable theft is experienced then you were probably doing it wrong in the first place.

For corporations who live solely in wormholes we are presented with a separate set of challenges when it comes to managing risk and trust. While we have the same issues concerning the corp wallet there is also the additional problem that all assets in a POS are technically corp assets. Members are allocated to a POS and a hanger and are restricted by permissions to a particular tab in said hanger. There is always a risk, however, that one member could steal from another member due to screwed up permissions. If that occurs the fault ultimately lies with the CEO. Also there is a total lack of segregation beyond the POS level for ship maintenance arrays. This means a single thief can have a significant impact on the morale of a corp (but only if the corp lets them).

I was chatting with one of the guys in our newest corp to join my alliance. It was the end of a fairly quiet corp fleet night and I'd had some wine. The conversation topic went to the state of POSs and I was restating my standard position of being largely happy with the current state of POSs. I really don't have too many problems with them. It would be nice to have permission granularity right down the the hanger level - i.e. restrict pilot 'John Doe' to tab '1' in CHA 'a' at POS 'Praise Bob' - but I'm not keen on too much more security beyond that. To me living in wormholes is like an extended camping trip. Nothing in the hole is worth anything. To realise its value you have to take it back into K-space. People who forget this important detail are setting themselves up for failure and cannot blame CCP for lack of security features should the worst happen. I see a lot of talk about the 'sanctity of the sandbox' and how EVE is a game based on players creating content from the tools we are provided. If this is truly the case why do we so despise POSs? Why not embrace the 'tool' for what it is and learn to love our "pulsating bubble of trust".

Just a Little Patience

I get home from work on Friday evening to a message on the alliance jabber server from one of my guys. Seems the people living in our static are moving out and, being the good neighbours we are, we decide to help them. Our current scout needs to take a break so I log in with Orea and park myself on the perch we made near their POS. I realise they still have a decent number of modules to offline and unanchor. This could be a long wait.

During the course of the evening I watch a rather disorganised POS pulldown. One of my corpmates comments that we should jetcan a prop-mod for their Iteron V just to speed things up. Eventually our targets realise warping off and back to the next thing they want to unanchor and scoop is faster than slowboating around. By now I'm required elsewhere to watch a film with my wife. Others are watching the POS efforts unfold and I'm floating back and forward between the film and fleet chat to see what's happening. Just as my film ends the locals offline their POS and almost immediately start onlining it again. WTF?! Oh, they left a PHA anchored and need the POS online to unanchor that before they can unanchor the POS properly. Also, we now have a Proteus guarding their hisec connection. Guess what guys, we're already in here plotting to kill you!

Cue even more waiting, watching, and discussing how terrible they are at pulling down their POS. We watch one guy log off followed by a new contact appearing on d-scan in a noobship. Okay, that'll be his alt leaving the hole. Noobship jumps out, new contact logs off, old contact logs back on. Guess we were correct. Now they have one guy leave in a pod and return in a pod 10 minutes later. What was he doing? Why did he leave and return in a pod? Why is he sitting next to that Tayra? Oh, I know, he needs the skill to fly it and in 22 minutes he'll jump into it. Turns out we were spot on with that prediction and he warps out with the now unanchored PHA.

Our initial plan was to hang around until they unanchored the POS then blow up what we could before stealing the POS when it unanchored. Due to the Laurel and Hardy show they exposed us to we modify that slightly. New plan is to warp down as soon as they down the bubble. Hopefully they start unanchoring the POS before they see us, if not tough. We've waited too long and can't be sure they won't online the POS again or do any manner of unpredictable crazy.

By now we've been watching these guys for six hours. We just want to shoot something - anything. A corpmate who has a habit of wandering through traps logs on and receives that as a warning. I have eyes on the tower. Another corpmate is watching the hisec. A third is ready to go from our home system in a Phobos. After the longest time they offline the POS and I shout "go go go". I warp down and land on what is now only a Mammoth and a Buzzard. I kill the Mammoth and the pod flees. Someone calls that the Proteus jumped into hisec. Is he running away? Damnit! I get the Buzzard into structure then stop firing so someone else can get on the killmail. That explodes and I get the pod.

Sadly, the POS isn't unanchoring. Like everything else these guys did tonight they even took too long to click the appropriate buttons. We're considering what to do when our Phobos pilot mentions he has the Proteus in a bubble but is taking damage. Wait, didn't the Proteus jump out? Turned out he jumped out and back in to crit the mass on the hisec hole. Presumably this was part of their unanchoring strategy? Whatever reason he did it for he was now polarised and we warped off in his direction to end another ship. Expecting a fight I also had my industry character jump into a Brutix for some extra dps. As expected, the Proteus' shields melted as I had my indy character warping to our static hole. The armour started to vanish surprisingly fast as I entered warp to join the fight with the second character. I noted the Proteus set his drones on Orea's Loki but this didn't worry me much as his armour was almost gone now. Really? So fast? Just as my second character landed the Proteus exploded. I started shooting the pod but he got to the hole and jumped out with structure damage.

We looted, salvaged and shot the wrecks plus took the corpse back to our 'meat locker' container. During this we noticed they had a character we didn't know about re-online the POS. This meant taking the fuel which dropped in the Mammoth was really important for us just to annoy them. By now it was really late and two of us had to leave. My parting shot to our Phobos pilot was to have more fun with these guys when they went for more POS fuel. It seems he took that to heart and got five more kills. Including two in hisec which required sacrificing a smart-bombing Naga to the powers of Concord.

More Mobile Structures

Some of the new mobile structures have a theme of rewarding active players and punishing the inactive ones. One example of this would be the mobile depot which can still be scooped when reinforced and then reanchored somewhere else if you wish. Another is the syphon units which steal various reaction materials from a POS if the owner of the POS doesn't notice it's there.

I had an excellent idea for a couple of extra mobile structures I would hate to see in existence. The fact I would hate to see them means they must have some merit. The structures are the "POS Fuel Syphon" and the "POS Fuel Accelerator". Without going into actual numbers, these modules would act thus:

POS Fuel Syphon - This anchorable would behave in a similar manner to the other syphon structures. Every hour this structure takes a number of fuel blocks from the POS it is anchored near and stores them for anyone passing by to take. An additional percent of blocks is wasted during this process. The number of blocks would be related to the tower size meaning a small POS would only lose a quarter of the blocks per hour that a large POS loses.

POS Fuel Accelerator - This module causes the POS it is anchored near to burn its fuel at an accelerated rate. This anchorable has a similar effect to the syphon in that it makes the POS run out of fuel faster. This anchorable is a pure 'dick structure' as the person laying it down gains no material benefit from the module. I would make this module a one-time structure which cannot be scooped back up. I would also make the effect stronger than the syphon as its intention is purely to make the POS run out of fuel rather than some sneaky slight-of-hand theft.

Both of these modules punish people who have POSs but don't spend enough time at them. Defending against either of these modules would be trivial for the active player or corp who live in their POS or system containing it. People who put a POS on a moon then visit it once a month to fuel it up could get an early surprise in the form of low fuel alerts sooner than expected.

While writing this it also occurred that a similar module for accelerated fuel burn could be used to speed up strontium timers. For anyone looking to defend their POS this shouldn't be a problem as they could take care of the structure as it appeared. For undefended timers it would allow an offensive force to remove a tower more rapidly. So, what do you think? If everyone hates this idea equally it must be a good idea, right?

Writers' Block

As you may have noticed I have been a bit lax in my posting recently. A large part of that was Christmas and New Year preparations and subsequent recovery. Since then I've sat down several times to write something but never really gotten anywhere. It's not that I don't have anything to write about. The problem is I come up with ideas for topics when away from the computer and can't remember them when I'm back at it. I guess I need to buy a little notepad or something to scribble down ideas. Who said paper was dead?

My lack of blogging is in no way mirrored by an equivalent lack of time doing EVE stuff. For the week between Christmas and New Year we had an alliance gathering in the wormhole of a third-party. What started as our C5 brethren trying to elucidate a fight from a nearby C3 escalated quickly to a fully-fledged eviction. I didn't make it to the initial reinforcement of the POS. I did make it in a couple of days later to help explode their tower. I was top damage dealer too which was nice even if doing so was simply pressing F1 then chatting on comms. Nasty meanies we are. It feels a little bad of us but being willing to fight is part of living in wormholes. It's one thing to not be able to stand up a fleet at any given time but the ships these guys evacuated showed they could have fought back if they wanted.

Just into the New Year and we were welcoming a new group of people into the wormhole. I was just about to log off when my long suffering corpmate, Epigene, announced on comms he had a couple of Ventures on d-scan. I said we had no chance of catching them but was still talked into combat scanning them down while Epi went back for an Onyx to bubble them. I've read the correct way to combat scan, using direction and range to pre-place your probes before actually calling them into range and catching the targets in one scan. I've tried this and I suck at it. I went for the more familiar route and treated scanning these Ventures down like I would a wormhole. One scan, two scans, three scans and I had them. Probes in and I waited for the Ventures to vanish spooked. That never happened and with Epi arriving in someone's Onyx and a new recruit in a Cruicifier I warped the three of us to the scanned ship sig. We landed on their heads, Epi bubbled up and we killed both Ventues and both pods. I got all four killmails. Not bad for going to bed.

Since then we also staged our second monthly alliance roam. We headed into Providence, as we had done previously for our December roam. For some unknown reason CVA have us set to kill on sight so we figure we may as well earn that standings for something. In December we had fun with them, driving a Naga fleet off and killing a few other things. This time around we were not so lucky and got squashed between two CVA fleets. But, well, it was a laugh anyway. The second part of the roam saw us trying out something called "Duck Fleet". This is a fleet dreamt up by Fatal Ascension which comprises a bunch of MWD Algos destroyers filled with drones. All the Algos anchor on a fast frigate who leads the way. Another fast frigate gets all the drones assisted to it and goes off to tackle things. The anchor keeps the ball of Destroyers moving rapidly around on the edge of drone range while the tackle frigate leads another ball, of drones, around. The drones deal massive instant damage to most things the tackle gets a point on. Flying this takes practice and we had a laugh getting the hang of it. Mostly it's just the tackle and anchor frigates who need to actually concentrate though. We got a couple of kills even if we did suck slightly at running this type of fleet.

All in all I've been having a decent time in EVE. Unusually for me it has involved a lot of PvP. Thankfully I'm almost only ever the grunt and not in charge of the pew.

A Very Neat POS

It was still quiet in corp when I was out and about on Friday. We had a terrible route into deep lowsec and some new members moving up from the academy corp. My intention was to head out to lowsec and see if I could find another wormhole in the lowsec system leading somewhere better. Jumping into our c3b I noticed several ships on d-scan. Aware that there had been Noctis activity earlier in this hole I decided to swung past their POS to see if any of the ships had pilots. Sadly none of these ships were piloted but what I did see was so disturbing I had to make a video.

See those almost perfectly spaced batteries? I was greatly disturbed by those. And not one, not two, but three perfect arcs of said batteries! These people clearly have way more time and/or patience than I do. This almost makes me think any improvement to the POS anchoring system should be opposed. Just think of the monstrosities that people will create. I already have one corp mate talking about setting up a POS with a Pac Man face.

CCP Abandon POSs

In case you missed it, the CSM summit minutes are out. You can go read the 113 pages of minutes if you like. I can't bring myself to read something as verbose as that so I'll go with the digested output from others.

The first rage inducing thing that has come out of these minutes is CCP's position on the POS rework. Bizarrely, CCP has the opinion that only a very small number of people who play EVE are impacted by the terribleness that is the POS management system. The last time I checked there were POSs in highsec, lowsec, nullsec and wormholes. For sure the terrible permissions system does not impact the teeny little corps who have a single person managing their POS. As soon as you try to have any sensible level of hierarchy in a larger corp you run face first into the limited flexibility of the massive number of permissions available.

Bob help us wormhole dwellers who actually have to live in a POS. The POS security is probably the single largest sticking point for corp recruitment. Before I can recruit someone I need to form as good a picture as possible of who that person is and what they are likely to do to the existing members. Is this person a nice guy? Is he a total asshat who's going to steal all our ships? Is he a spy who aim is to offline the POSs as soon as he gets the rights to react some gas? While this is all part of living in wormholes, I would also like to be able to relax some and take many more people in to enjoy the first-class content we have access to in W-space.

CCP started to go down a route of removing complexity for the sake of complexity. This problem still exists in spades with POSs. If you've ever done gas reactions you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you have ever been unfortunate enough to set up titles for reasonable secure hanger tabs or to allow people to have the correct permissions to make them useful without giving dangerous levels of access you'll know what I'm talking about. Unfortunately CCP only see this one side of the problem - the person making the permissions.

The other side is the inconveniences the rest of the players who have any interaction with POSs have to endure. Many wormhole corps have a POS per small group of corp members. This means the whole corp has to deal with getting in a ridiculous quantity of POS fuel on a regular basis, taking time away from more enjoyable activities. POS passwords became slightly less annoying recently, but the fact we need them at all is a pain.

Two Step has a forum threadnaught up to show CCP just how small the affected player base actually is. There are 79 pages as I write this. I suggest you go add a message there to show your support to fix this embarrassingly broken aspect of life in New Eden.

Or wear the t-shirt to Fanfest