I’m always amused when organizations in EVE behave like organizations in the real world. Faced with what was essentially a press-release and pep-talk delivered by Sir Molle to his faithful troops, the Northern Coalition leaders prepared their response. Not content to let the South lay out its plans and attract attention, Vuk Lau, the leader of Morsus Mihi and nominal head of the Northern Coalition, organized an address to the pilots of the North.

Compared to Sir Molle’s wandering address a few days ago, Vuk kept his address short and sweet. In front of 1600 members, he announced a contest to produce the best propaganda posters on the theme “Best Friends Forever”. If Molle’s goal is to break us up, our goal is clear – stick together.

Then we got a duet of Never Gonna Give You Up starring Vuk Lau and Plague Black (another alliance leader) and that was it. You can hear a clip of it in this wonderful propaganda newscast produced by a Morsus Mihi member. The singing starts at 3:17.

The message was clear – no matter what happens the North sticks together. I was a little let down at first. I kinda wanted a big inspirational speech (this video is linked all the time in our forums), internet spaceship-style. In retrospect, though, this works even better. While Molle didn’t clearly articulate a reason for this campaign, Vuk made it pretty simple and clear. Even in the face of daunting numbers (the Southern Coalition outnumbers the North by nearly 2-1 in members), we’re in this to have fun, kick ass, and keep the North united.

Unsurprisingly, war in the North is going to entail a bit of a change of pace here. At the very least, you’re going to have to put up with a bit more cheerleading than normal. I’m hardly a dispassionate observer here. I’m happy with my home in the North, and will do whatever I can to defend it. I’ll try to provide even-handed coverage, but lets not forget where my allegiance lies. In any event, it should be a wild ride and I hope you’ll follow along!

After the fall of Goonswarm in Delve, and the nearly-complete campaign to kick CVA out of Providence (some notes on that here, in the first item), the major forces in the South—IT Alliance (-IT-), Against All Authorities (AAA), Atlas (ATLAS)—needed a new scapegoat. It has long been rumored that the southern alliances might band together as a sort of ad-hoc “Southern Coalition” to counter the long-extant “Northern Coalition” made up of Morsus Mihi (RAWR), RAZOR (-RZR-), Tau Ceti Federation (TCF), Mostly Harmless (-42-), Majesta Empire (ME), Wildly Inappropriate (WI.) and assorted smaller organizations. These major political players will be the major political players on the blog for the next few months – I’m sure there will be stories to tell about each of them as this campaign rolls out.

Northern Coalition leaders have pretty publicly exhorted us to spend March building up our coffers of money so we can afford weapons for the coming war, projecting that we would see a major offensive at the beginning of April. It’s now April first, and their predictions were right on target.

Fleets of Southern Coalition freighters and carriers have spent the last few days moving war materiel into position in the low-sec space adjacent to the Northern Coalition’s borders. IT Alliance’s leader, Sir Molle announced the outlines of the plan in his address to the Southern Coalition on Teamspeak. In front of 800 pilots, he laid out the goals for this operation:

The end goal of all this is not to take space. The end goal of this is not to take stations, not to take space, not to take moons. The end goal is simple. It is to break up the NC.

You can read the whole thing here, but it kind of drags. It has some details about the organization of their attack and logistical plans for deploying a forward base close to our territory. Preparations should be complete sometime today, and combat will likely commence in earnest over this coming weekend.

I’m not really clear on the casus belli here. He doesn’t even lay anything out any particular grievances, not even the obvious realpolitik attack-the-other-superpower justification. Can’t say this sort of unspecified grudge match would be that compelling a reason for me to fight. We’ll see if it sustains the SC’s pilots for what may well be a long fight.

Our motivations are much more basic – defend the North. That’s something I can get behind. Bring it.

Every six months, CCP releases a free expansion to the game, introducing a major new mechanic. The last expansion, Dominion, refreshed the 0.0 sovereignty mechanics. Apocrypha, the expansion before that, added wormholes and Tech 3 cruisers. The next expansion, Tyrannis, is adding something called (dryly) “Planetary Interaction.”

Thus far, planets in EVE have had pretty much no role. In the fiction, they house billions of people and drive the interstellar economies and politics. In practice, though, players never interact with them. They’re beautiful (as of the latest expansion, which refreshed their graphics), but almost entirely useless. This expansion changes that. Players will be able to extract, refine, combine, and ship all kinds of new resources around the surface of planets. Players will design and manage networks of these new buildings based on planets’ surfaces. Eventually, this will all plug in with DUST 514, CCP’s upcoming team FPS game. Eventually, players of the console-based game will be able to serve as ground troops for corporations in EVE, attacking enemy ground installations.

We’re still three months out from Tyrannis’ launch, but CCP has been releasing a stream of details about it. They started off with a Dev Blog post – the primary channel for EVE’s designers and developers to interact with the EVE community. At that point, we got a very high level view of the goals of the project, plus an awesome MS Paint diagram of what the UI looks like.

Relatively soon after that, CCP’s current development version of this feature was released to Singularity – the EVE test server. This means anyone can log into this alternate reality version of EVE and play with upcoming features. This includes the first drafts of planetary interaction. A pilot in EVE University (my alma mater!) put together a wonderful video demonstrating the UI (embedded below).

This kicked off a process as old as MMOs – deconstructing new game mechanics. For some people, this is the game. Being the first person to figure out how to build effective planetary mining and manufacturing systems is really satisfying for some kinds of players. For these people, EVE is giving them the experience of doing what amounts to original research. Early adopters will figure out the optimal ways to do this process and then write guides and make videos explaining it to the rest of us. After a few months, I’m sure these groups of early adopters will have worked it all out, collaborating across forums and in-game chat channels and the whole system will be as well understood as wormholes are now. We’re seeing the beginnings of that now, on blog posts like this excellent one. (If you want to read more posts like that, this post by CrazyKinux has links to all the major posts on the subject.)

But those heady first days of confusion and frustration are an experience that you won’t find in other genres in quite the same way. Plus, if you figure this stuff out quickly you can be making a mint while the rest of the galaxy catches up. I’m sorely tempted to make an industrial character to give this a shot…

Map of military development indices in Tribute.

I mentioned in passing in the last article about ratting that some systems are better for it than others. All 0.0 systems in EVE are characterized by “development indices” on three axes: military, industrial, and strategic. The first two indices directly effect how well you can farm in the system. The higher the military index, the more cosmic anomalies will spawn in the system. The higher the industrial index, the more high value mining sites will spawn.

You can’t just pay to upgrade the development indices in your systems, though. You have to actively raise the development level in the system by farming. Each NPC pirate you kill in a system raises its military development level slightly. If you have enough people killing enough pirates, you can level up the quality of that system for that kind of farming. You have to work to keep it up, though — over time, the development level will fade.

There are two big implications of this system. The first is that a 0.0 system can now support many more simultaneous farmers than it used to. If you only have an average of 2-3 people online over the course of the day, they won’t be able to maintain a well developed military system. The development level will decay faster than they can kill rats to increase it. This encourages people to clump up. Better to max out the development level in one system than spread out across a bunch of systems with poor development levels.

There’s a subtle tradeoff here, though. Every system your alliance owns costs quite a bit of ISK: 180M ISK/month just to own it, plus a bunch of other costs to upgrade it. So you don’t want to have a bunch of systems you’re not actively making money from. And since everyone is clumping up in fewer systems now, all those extra systems you own are burning a big hole in your wallet.

The solution? The farming metaphor shows up again: serfdom! With all these expensive (and fertile) fields, it makes a lot of sense for the owners of the space to install serfs. Serfs pay a monthly fee back to the alliance that owns the territory (a fee substantially higher than the upkeep costs for that system) and moves in its own farmers. This makes sense for the serfs because they get a system that they can efficiently farm. It makes sense for the alliance because they don’t have enough pilots of their own to farm the systems effectively. As with feudal serfs, these space-serfs tend to have some similar obligations to their lord. If the area comes under attack, they’re generally expected to take up arms and help with the defense. They tend not to be as large or well organized as the major alliances that own space, but every ship counts. These serf-corporations are usually referred to as “renters” or “pets” (although pets often has a slightly different connotation).

The other big implication is for long-term warfare. Because un-farmed systems lose their development levels, a concerted campaign of disruption and harassment can scare away all the farmers. If this is sustained, the development level of the effected systems will fall, harming the incomes of all the pilots based there. This can be a super effective tactic for smaller groups trying to weaken larger groups without resorting to all-out combat. Star Fraction, a long-lived major alliance announced just such an operation:

Therefore, Operation Black Lustrum, in which the Star Fraction will wage war against the economic and industrial base of our targets. … In particular, the development indices pertaining to military and industrial activity serve as keen and acute indicators of the economic health of a territory and the alliance that administers it.

There’s a longer overview article about how this campaign is progressing that describes a bit more about how this works. So far, it looks like this kind of guerilla warfare is pretty damn effective at decreasing development levels and choking off income streams. The North is thankfully clear of these kinds of tactics so far, but it may just be a matter of time before our farming gets shut down in favor of serious combat.

0.0 Politics Update

The 0.0 political updates written by Murr over at Kugutsumen are really phenomenally good. I know I linked to these last week, too, but since then he’s written another one. They’re super dense and might be overkill for non-players, but they’re well researched and detailed and give at least a flavor of the high level geopolitics that I don’t really see that well.

The chunk of the report about Providence is particularly interesting. Providence is a region owned by an alliance called CVA, and it’s run by role-players, and has a pretty solid role-playing base. This may seem like a sort of weird notion if you’re not familiar with it, but being a role-player in a world like EVE means you talk from the perspective of your player and strive to maintain the fiction of the world as much as possible. I have no idea how this works in practice. In World of Warcraft, role players get segregated onto their own servers, but in EVE’s single shard, role players have to coexist with everyone else. What complicates this role-playing perspective is that CVA is role playing racist, slave-owning, expansionist, religious zealots. Their stated goal is to annex all of the known EVE universe for their religious dynasty. We can only assume that the CVA leadership holds their meetings in-character, so playing the role of Hitler-denying-his-imminent-fall feels entirely appropriate.

They can’t expect their non-role-playing allies to put up with it though, and it looks like they’re hemorrhaging member corps faster than they’re losing systems.

Scouting and Fleet Communication

Very much enjoyed a pair of articles at A Scouts Domain this week. The first was about how to be an effective fleet commander over voice-chat. There’s a lot of practice advice there for people thinking about trying to FC. It’s also a window into what that role is like for people who don’t play.

The second article was a similar treatment of the role of the scout. Scouts are critical to a fleet’s success, and the article does a great job clearly deconstructing what a scout needs to do and how. More than most roles in fleets, scouts don’t rely on having a great ship. For scouts, it’s all about their skills and knowledge and instincts. It’s a tough and often thankless job, but a fascinating and challenging one.

“Asset Liberation”

Mynxee put together a wonderful story about a heist she pulled, stealing a freighter and command ship from an unsuspecting corporation who were storing them inside a player-owned-structure. It’s a great story, and she does a wonderful job of capturing the emotions and worries of these kinds of pseudo-criminal activities. She may well convert me to piracy yet.

Ratting at an anomaly in 0.0. Note bounty value in the upper right hand corner.

Virtual worlds are driven by metaphor. In these new kinds of worlds, we need something to grab on to that helps us make sense of the world in terms of ideas we understand. From this we get notions like “tanking” (having lots of armor that lets you take lots of damage), “pulling” (attracting the attention of computer-controlled ships so they move towards you), and “farming” (doing some task repetitively to gain resources). I’ve been doing a lot of that last one recently, and it’s a surprisingly apt metaphor that I want to dig into a little bit.

After the panic and chaos of fighting Triumverate in Pure Blind, Morsus Mihi has settled back into Tribute, intent on rebuilding our coffers of ISK so we can fund our next big conflict. There are two basic ways that people extract value from 0.0 space: mining and ratting. In both cases, each solar system periodically generates stuff that has value. For miners, this means asteroids that can be mined for ore, which turns into minerals for item construction. For ratters, this means computer-controlled pirate ships (rats) that generate a “bounty” when you kill them (and sometimes drop valuable items). I’m going to focus on how the ratting side of things works, but it’s broadly similar for miners.

The first consideration is where to farm. For some complicated reasons I’ll go into this weekend, there are better and worse systems to do this. Some systems are better tended farms than others. These systems generate more rats per hour. These rats appear in asteroid belts (where asteroids appear, too) and cosmic anomalies (where asteroids are rarer / less valuable). The better the system is for farming, the more anomalies you have to choose from, and the higher value rats you’ll find in them. Battleship rats tend to be worth about 1M ISK in bounties each, battlecruisers are about 200k ISK, and cruisers are about 125k ISK. After you clear out an anomaly by killing all these rats, you have to wait for it to respawn with new pirates. Returning to the farming analogy, each anomaly is like a field on a farm. After you harvest it, you have to wait a little while for it to grow back. Plus, having more fields means more farmers can work simultaneously. A system being actively farmed at capacity can only support maybe 3-4 farmers simultaneously.

Map of Tribute, with darker green / yellow / red systems the site of large number of rats killed.

This is not a super fun process, but it’s an extremely reliable way to make money. I log on pretty much every night and run one or two of these and make about 30-50M ISK/hour. I could make more if I had a nicer ship and better weapon skills which would let me deal more damage to kill pirates faster.

From a macro-economic perspective, farming is a big way that CCP injects money into the world. While miners have to sell their products to other players, money is basically created for me out of thin air. No other player cares if these pirates are alive or dead, CCP just invented this system to give combat-trained players a way to farm in 0.0 space where there aren’t (with some complicated exceptions) agents to give you missions to run. This is also part of how corporations make their money. Every time I blow up one of these rats, my corporation (The Graduates) takes 15% of the bounty in a tax. This goes directly into the corporation’s coffers and funds various corporation expenses, like reimbursing me when I lose my ships doing stupid things in fleet ops.

My transaction history after ratting. Note corporate taxation entries

Farming also requires a certain amount of geopolitical stability. I’ll write more about that side of things over the weekend, but suffice to say that having lots of enemy fleets moving through the systems you’re farming in drastically disrupts the process. (Tribute is pretty quiet these days, but you can still kinda see this in the player-deaths map compared to the npc-deaths map.) So while we have a few moments of peace before the rumored upcoming hostilities between the North and the South, I need to build up a nice reserve of ISK to fund my increasingly expensive war habits. Swords to plough-shares and back again.

This topic is continued in Part 2 of this article. Check it out to see how this mechanic forms the foundation for economic warfare in 0.0 territorial fights!

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.