Over the weekend I ran across a bunch of EVE-related links that I wanted to pass along. This might become a thing in the future — we’ll see. Also, I finally got around to making a Twitter account for just EVE stuff, so you can now follow @jumponcontact for EVE-related tweeting, conversation, and posts about new posts and projects. If you’ve been following my non-EVE account, @drewwww, now might be a good time to switch over. I feel kinda bad about spamming my non-EVE-playing-friends with EVE stuff, and so am going to cut back on the EVE tweeting there, except for big project announcements.

So, back to links:

0.0 Political Updates

As far as I can tell, most of the really great reportage about what’s going on in 0.0 happens in the EVE forum ecosystem. This post has a really fantastic summary of what’s going on around New Eden and a healthy dose of interpretation and speculation. It’s some of the most readable 0.0 politics writing I’ve read in a while, although it does assume some history knowledge.

Alliance Social Network Diagram

Also over at Kugutsumen, a poster maintains a list of Alliances that are affiliated with each other through mutual non-aggression pacts – so-called “blue lists”. Basically, all organizations in EVE have the ability to set “standings” with other organizations. These standings are numbers that range from -10 to +10. In past posts, you’ve seen screenshots with people shown as different colors – these are graphical representations of the relationship between my alliance and the alliance the other person is in. Blue means they’re friendly and I shouldn’t shoot them, red means they’re enemies and I should shoot them. This is a map of people who agree to set each other as blue. You can see in the upper right hand corner there’s the tightly linked Northern Coalition. On the left are the murky politics of the southern bloc. I’m working with the original author of this visualization to produce some more complicated ones that more clearly show who are renters, which alliances are the major power brokers and (mayyyyybe) who’s actively attacking who these days. Found this via Manasi at A Mule In EVE.

Update: Great link in the comments to an influence map at EVE fail showing which alliances historically work together. See also, this perspective from NC: that’s a whole lot of people who don’t like us very much.

Essays for New Players

One of the commenters in the Metafilter article about Jump On Contact was inspired to publish a series of emails he wrote to a friend who was just starting out in EVE. They’re a great read, and cover a lot of the really basic stuff that new players care about. If you’re thinking about playing yourself, it’s a great place to start. The author covers a bunch of specific topics (low-sec space, for example) that I haven’t talked about much. All in all, I think it’s a really nice complement to my blog.

This past week has brought a bunch of attention to Jump On Contact. On Monday, the blog was announced as a new member of the long running and prestigious EVE blog pack managed by CrazyKinux. I’m really thrilled to be included. When I was first thinking about starting an EVE blog, I spent a lot of time reading blog pack members in Capsuleer (an iPhone EVE app, which includes a handy RSS reader for EVE blogs), trying to get a sense of how people wrote, what kinds of topics might be interesting. It’s crazy that only a few months later I can read my own blog in Capsuleer. We’ve also been recently the subject of a Metafilter post, and another Massively post. It’s been a fun week.

So I’d just like to welcome new readers and point out some of my favorite bits from the archives that you might not otherwise discover. First off, this is kind of a different EVE blog. I think of it more as a documentary project than a diary. I’m trying to capture perspectives on how and why the world works, and what it means to be part of it. There’s more on my larger goals and perspective in the introduction.

As part of my documentary mission, I do a bunch of different kinds of posts. There are some story-like articles describing a particular event or task like my first combat experience or liquidation of Empire-based assets. There are posts explaining fundamental game mechanics like death or the organization of the galaxy. I also keep up with current events, and try to explain how an alliance failing to pay its bills is likely to change my life halfway across the galaxy. From time to time I do larger-scale projects like explanatory videos of how fleets communicate or a visualization of how much common ships cost and what they do. I’m also pretty proud of my first pass at trying to describe why I love EVE, not in spite of its tediousness, but because of it.

Thanks for reading! Please do feel free to ask questions or leave comments. I’m still figuring out what’s interesting to people, so pointers or suggestions about stuff that you want to hear more or less about are always welcome. Perhaps at some point getting an industrialist to pitch in and cover that side of the world would be a useful compliment to my more-combat-focused experiences?

Market prices for Megacyte across different regions.

Large-scale market economics in EVE are endlessly fascinating to me, but I have very little experience playing those games. I mostly make my money from killing computer-controlled pirates, not mining. People who mine are (understandably) obsessed with the market prices for their minerals because they have to sell their mined minerals to other players; there’s no CCP-controlled way to get paid a fixed rate for their basic ISK-making activity. As with any market item, the price of minerals can fluctuate quite significantly. This makes the process of figuring out how best to make money as a miner much more complicated than my life as a pirate-killer (“ratter”, colloquially).

Over at k162, there’s a really fantastic article about the options facing miners. They have to choose where and what kinds of ore to mine, focusing both on what’s worth the most right now and what they can safely acquire. With market prices fluctuating, this makes for a really complicated decision space. That article does a great job of breaking it down.

Some quick vocabulary will help you make sense of it. He talks a lot about “ABC” ores. The way mining works is you find asteroids that generate different kinds of ore. A given asteroid type, say, “Arkanor” (the ‘A’ in ABC) can be converted into its constituent minerals at a refining station. This grid shows the mapping between asteroid/ore types and the minerals they will refine down to. Minerals are the basic building blocks of all items in EVE. To build anything, you need buckets and buckets of these different minerals in different relative amounts.

The so-called ABC ores — Arkanor, Bistot, and Crokite — are much coveted because they refine down to Zydrine and Megacyte (you can see this in the grid linked above), and they could (historically) be found only in 0.0 space. In the next to last expansion, CCP added wormholes to the game (pretty much always abbreviated as WH), which also contained the ABC ores, without the same risks and overhead of operating in 0.0.

The un-asked question here is if CCP is going to do anything to adjust these market dynamics. They’ve historically tried to maintain a balance of risk/reward where taking more risks meant you could make more money. The appearance of ABC ores in WH-space fundamentally threatens that balance, giving the rewards of 0.0 to the somewhat-less-risk-taking wormhole residents. Will they rebalance this? If you really think they’re going to, we’re approaching the time to put your money where your mouth is. Anyone can throw a few hundred million ISK into buying currently-cheap minerals on the markets and hope that the price rises in the coming months. If it does, they’ll be rewarded handsomely. If not, you could be stuck holding the bag on a hangar full of devalued minerals.

NThraller, Morsus Mihi pilot, wins a silver medal. He's the guy on the left.

Think you know who plays MMOs? Pasty-faced teenagers in their parents’ basements, right? Or maybe disaffected college students looking for lulz? How does Olympic Medalist fit into your picture?

NThraller, a Norwegian pilot in hirr (a corporation in Morsus Mihi, my alliance) took home a silver medal from the Vancouver Olympics in the Giant Slalom last week. Don’t let his sparse killboard history fool you. He’s been super active in the RAWR forums for the last few years, even when Olympic training and competition have taken over most of his time. He even provided support on a Vagabond kill the day after he placed second in the world. Now he just needs a matching medal in-game.

Contrary to the stereotype, most MMO players are older. The data’s old, but the last time CCP talked about their player base, they claimed that the average age was 27 and most players had “some kind of degree”. This is broadly similar to World of Warcraft’s demograhpics (although that data is quite old and I suspect skews older now). The one big way that EVE diverges from other MMOs is gender: 95% of EVE players are men, compared to less than 85% (depending on who you ask and when the data was taken) for WoW.

I’ve also been taken with this recent EVE-Space campaign started at Chocolate Heaven. EVE Bloggers have started posting lots of pictures of the spaces in which they play EVE. There’s a huge amount of variety (and I’ve posted a bunch of them below), and I think you can get a bit of a window into the way that EVE pilots live and play. I think they might not look how you expect.

You can find a full list back at CrazyKinux’s blog.