New tip. Search for items like minerals where there are a lot of NPC buy orders at, say, 2.0. Note, those orders are for station-only sales.
Note the next price for a 3 or 5 jump radius buy… often lower. Beat that by .1 and you now have some easy money!
I have buy orders for 2m units of Tritonium at 1.55 isk filled in the last hour. I can move those units to a station -in the same system- and sell for 2 isk. Handy :D
My main route into empire from our 0.0 station has been blockaded since saturday. Band of Brothers alliance & friends have had EC-P8R locked down with 200-600 people in-system for days - a massive massive operation to take down the 36 POSes that were there, in order to take the Station from TRUST Corp (a huge industrial corp that was building capital ships like motherships) and claim sovereignty over the system. It’s one jump from Torrinos in empire, so they’ve been able to resupply at will while we’re locked out.
In response, one of our major allies has virtually folded, while my lot realise we can’t be them at the numbers game and have instead moved to take targets of opportunity further north - aware of the fact that we may well be kicked out of our home very shortly :)
On a personal note, the discovery of a prototype cloaking device from a Merlin we shot down inspired me to learn how to fit up a basic frigate for cloaking + probing for safespotted ships. I now have a caldari Heron with the looted cloak, a probe launcher, and a cargo scanner. Spent last night teaching myself how to use it all, found a few safespotted shuttles in Empire space. Hoping to head into 0.0 (via the back route…) later on this week and try it for real with enemies around.
Sorry if any of that bores anyone.
Only true for fleet battles. The vast majority of kills in PvP are still from small gangs, mostly cruiser/frigate battles. A lot Tech2 stuff is generally too expensive to throw away in PvP so most people simply fly the cheaper stuff and the occasional assault frigate / interceptor, unless they’re feeling flush and reckon they won’t lose their Heavy Assault Cruiser :)
JM, tell us more about this scouting thing? How/what/where is it all about?
Curious to learn more. And the BoB stories are interesting!
I’ll dig up some threads and stuff about BoB - I generally kept clear of all the politics but when something that big happens you can’t help but get involved. Especially when it’s on your doorstep :)
My interest in scouting started when one of my corpmates had a bit of a discovery. We’re mostly based in 0.0, and need insta bookmarks for the surrounding regions for travel. So, he’s in a covops making some bookmarks for himself in a remote area, and decides to make a safespot or two. Imagine his surprise when he did a scan while at a safespot and detected several ships nearby…
The scanner defaults to 5,000,00km, but can go massively higher than that - try it when you’re in system at any time, put 99999999999 in the range and see what it defaults to. It translates to something like 14 AU I believe. Anyway, there’ll be a list of what’s there. So, you start narrowing the angle of the scan, to get the direction your target is in. Do the same thing with distance. Then bookmark another spot the other side, and try and pin it down further.
Then you get the probes out.
A probe launcher can fire probes that can scan 3AU, 12AU, 48AU, 192AU, with accuracy decreasing as you go up in size. If you’ve been good with the initial scanning you’ll only need the 3AU… you need to fire off 3, preferably from different spots overlapping the area you wish to scan. After a few minutes they’ll show you what you’re looking for. Warp to it, and you’ll most likely be accurate enough to see your target. I practiced last night and got pretty good at working out from the basic scanner whether a ship was abandoned, or ratting, or deadspacing, or just passing through, all this will help when scouting for ships.
So, my corpmate was damn good at this. Interested in where that ship was, he spent a little while scanning and probing. And ended up finding a “safe spot” where someone had dumped several Heavy Assault Cruisers, frigates, Assault Frigates, haulers, battleships… thinking that they were genuinely safe. So he told a few friends and they spent an hour or two shuttle back and forth, flying the ships back to our station.
For the final touch, he left a shuttle with our corp tags at the safespot, with the following note left in a bookmark in the cargohold:
Dear victim corp pilots,
This afternoon the my corp Space
Patrol discovered a number of your vessels
parked at various so-called “safe spots” in the
Tribute region. As you will no doubt be aware,
directive #7652 clearly states that the parking of
vessels in areas of space not specifically
designated for that purpose by my alliance authorities
is strictly forbidden. As these ships were clearly
in violation of the aforementioned directive, we
were left with no choice but to impound them.
Rest assured that your ships are being safely
stored at a secure location where they will be
given comprehensive maintenance and cleaning.
Vessels may be reclaimed at your convenience;
however, a processing fee of 6146354124.12 Isk
will need to be paid in full to cover costs
incurred before any ships are released.
The my corp wishes you a pleasant
day, and thanks you for your generosity and understanding. We would like to remind you again that
leaving expensive ships in unsecure safe spots is
a) illegal and b) really, really stupid.
Your friendly my corp representative,
xxx
We were laughing about it for days.
I’ll see if I can find some good links for stuff :)
Yeah, I’m kind of burnt out about that whole Tech 2 price inflation thing (HACs/etc.). I’ve gotten a couple tech 2 BPOs from research agents, but because they’re just ammo and a low-demand module, I pretty much gave up trying to make money off them. It’s sort of sad to see megacorps with hundreds of people doing research pick up the T2 ship BPOs every seeding round and hold the game hostage economically.
It’s pretty crap because the only people that can regularly afford to lose HACs and other ships in battle are the people that have a constant supply, which basically assures dominance in PvP over the long term for those alliances. God bless the small alliances, but if they aren’t getting full military support from the larger alliances, good luck getting anything accomplished. I’ve taken my corp into a few alliances before they dissolved (the only ones that would let us in without extortionate membership fees), and it never failed that within a few months of just doing our own thing, we would be assaulted by a conglomerate of alliances intent on making sure we left and never came back to 0.0. Very, very frustrating and expensive to boot. I’ve seen our corp wallet go from hundreds of millions to nothing and back so many times it makes my head spin…for a group of about 2 dozen casual players, that’s a pretty heavy hit to morale to say the least.
The BoB threads are in the Alliances forum but generally spammed and flamed to death. Regardless, what they did involved a massive amount of manpower and dedication but was what was probably required just to take down all those POSes (the fuelling costs for all the dreadnoughts they used must be hideous). I’m not an expert on EVE politics so I can’t really say why they did it or what they’re going to do next :)
We have a corp of about 10-15 players, 1.5Bn in loose change, and shortly the ability to build carriers. We also have every T1 blueprint and a few T2 ones. We are not a big corp, and we’re not in a big alliance. It is doable…
There’s some mercenary corp that just bought a mothership. They have fewer than 10 players.
Sounds like me and my WOW Guild… login every sunday from 14-21 for raid.
login 19-23 every monday, tuesday, thursday for raid.
Kinda lost the WTP after 1.10 destroyed my addons :\
But I really want to try out EVE Online… Is the game macro friendly, or dont you even need to macro in the game to ‘get anywhere’. How is progress handled, can I f.example set up autobid low/sell high system on the auctions and have the system handle it while I’m offline (much Like I’m trading stocks IRL)
Macroing will get you banned :) The game isn’t mod-friendly… the only thing I can think of that is in regular use is the “instant bookmarks”, i.e. bookmarks you can warp to that will drop you on top of where you want to go instead of the default 15km distance.
Sounds like you’ve been fairly lucky. I wish you the best, but frankly I’m tired of the bullshit. I’ll leave EVE to the people who have the time for it. I might go back at some point in the future, but the thought of having to recruit new players and organize mining ops is making me shudder, right now.
Eh, it does depend on what you’re trying to get out of the game. I want nothing more than some fun combat and the ability to put my different ship configs into practice on the battlefield, whilst also doing some missions etc. I get what I want. If your aims are loftier and you wish to own stations, etc, then you are in competition with the rest and you’re going to have to try to match their dedication.
Ah, so its the typical: Time > Skill game?
Sometimes you can trump time a little bit by have exceedingly good organization and management skills, but most folks don’t have the vision or time to set up a corp that would run itself reliably. EVE doesn’t really have any in-game mechanisms for hands-off management, so a corp CEO has a giant micromanagement problem on their hands 24/7, unless they have some kind of outside resources to help.
No. In order to get anywhere, you have to put some effort in. If you want rewards without effort, you shouldn’t be playing a multiplayer game :) At some point, you’re going to have to earn either the cash, the blueprints, or the allies to get to your ultimate goal if it’s a big one. It’s kinda the point of EVE… it’s a very political game, and in politics it doesn’t matter how expensive your ship is or how many skillpoints your character has.
There are people and corps / alliances who have achieved far more than me or my corp will achieve, in very little time at all.
Well, say you’re good with the railgun in Quake 2, with practice a novice player may become average, but some people are just “good” at it naturally, and become great with some effort. Thats a SKILL > Time game.
(And its multiplayer).
In DDO you get better with Time, but you can also pull off some stuff that requires more ‘twitch gaming’ skills.
Oblivion Lockpicking is another example, where you can defeat locks with skills, or with a lot of time (e.g. Journeyman/Master Lockpicking) =)
Anyway; Will you be very very limited in EVE (Akin to Everquest 1 grind) unless you dedicate your life to it?
Is Space Battles more of the type where: The biggest guns wins (most money, more time spent gaining them), or who clicks and uses the best tactics wins (within reasons, or some lucky stuff, like taking out the command bridge of the enemy ship or lucky hit causing a meltdown of the core… type of stuff).
You can’t really compare EVE to Everquest.
If you’re a solo player with no PVP experience and 2 million skillpoints, you will be handed your arse in a 1v1 with an experienced player virtually regardless of what you’re flying. Put the same player in a corp with support and he becomes useful in a gang situation. When it comes to big fleet battles, it’s possible for a smaller, better-led fleet to destroy the bigger fleet, especially as now the hardware is more capable of dealing with large numbers (lag is a bitch and used to make it pointless jumping in to engage a big fleet). But of course there is a point where overwhelming force is all that counts, and that’s where the politics comes in…
EVE is a very, very, very deep game. Very few situations are simple.
Edit: Also, FPSes require you to learn maps, to understand what weapon to use in what situation, and for team games require tactics that you simply will not grasp without putting in the effort to learn. I played Quakeworld to a pretty high level and the top players in the top clans had all of that to go with the uber aiming skills.
As a veteran of a few dozen large fleet battles, I would say that good organization can be a deciding factor in most large scale combats (calling the right targets, having the right support vessels doing repairs, electronic warfare, etc), but since most fleet actions are staged events, you won’t get many opportunities to use actual tactics. Most combat in EVE is asymmetrical because most players don’t want to get blown up for financial reasons, and there is safety in numbers. Warfare in this case boils down to various forms of ambush.
Combat itself is basically your standard ‘hit the hotkeys’ MMO style. There’s a simplistic gun tracking vs. target velocity physics model that keeps large ships with huge, slow guns from hitting small fast ships, but that’s the only real limitation. The people who own the advanced tech 2 ships are virtually guaranteed to win in a one vs. one engagement, and in some cases 2-3 vs. 1, so they are a force multiplier in that sense, and can only be purchased by those who are extremely weathy or have good connections with other players.
Sure you can. It’s the same business model, so the gameplay mechanics and content additions, when you come down to it, are the same. This goes for every single MMORPG out there, not just EQ and EVE.
The dedicated, hardcore players reap the most rewards and invoke envy in the more casual players who deceive themselves by thinking they too can be just as well off if only they just try long enough. MMOs survive by cultivating a vocal, dedicated core of players to attract new people and add revenue. It’s the same reason why casinos plant employees at slot machines that win in order to attract passing players who might not gambled at those machines otherwise.
As long as you’re ok with the business model and realise that if you aren’t going to put in the time, you won’t be rewarded with the stuff the cool kids have, EVE is for you. Just play to have a good time and if you can’t be dedicated, be content with half the game or less.
Just an aside, if you want to avoid early burnout in EVE, pick a profession and stick with it. Start a test character if you want and mess around with all the aspects of the game for a couple months and come to a decision on what you like to do.
Once you know, drop the test character and re-roll with a character most suited to your profession and STICK WITH IT. In EVE you need to fill a role, and do it well. This game doesn’t have room for the jack of all trades if you want to see what’s considered ‘endgame’ content. If you spread yourself out with multiple jobs, you’re going to get overwhelmed and not actually get anywhere.