New Eden Pilot

EVE Quarterly Economic Update is a gem for those who enjoy digging deep. It contains all kinds of analysis, and from the 2009 Q1 version I found this excerpt:



These characters are approximately just short of a year. As expected, the Caldaris enjoy their missiles and Minmatar like to shoot guns, but what strikes me the most is how much Spaceship Commands stands out. People are clearly flying a lot of ships that their support skills aren't supporting fully. Probably it's worse, many pilots are probably underflying their ships to a great extent. Shields will be lower, armor weaker, guns poorer, tracking missing more often, not so agile, not so speedy. Et cetera, et cetera.

My current skillplan for a perfect Arbitrator lasts for another year. Some of it will not be trained, like Weapon Disruption V (5% cap reduction for tracking disruptors), but most is basic skills as can be found in the 'core competency' certificate. These skills will help no matter what one flies, and will always be useful when you undock.

Have you ever thought about how many skillpoints you leave behind in your hanger? No real use for Amarr Cruiser V when flying that Thorax, huh? Maximizing the usefullness of your skills you have can go a long way when planning for a young pilot. Focus focus.

Fly safish lads
D2

After launching your bombs, you complete the bombing run by warping off. But warping to zero is predictible (a.k.a. dangerous), and to 100 likewise. Hunting interceptors most often follow at those distances.

The best is of course to warp to a safespot, but if you for some reason need to warp to an object in space, at least be a little less predictable.

Since you cloak up after bombing, you will land cloaked, and the only thing you should worry about is someone landing on top of you (+/- 2.5 km). That might happen if you warp to zero, also if you warp to 100.

Luckily there's an alternative: Set your own warp-out distance.



Right click the warp-to button, set your custom distance, and enjoy custom warp-to's.

The pre-loaded warp-to's are
- 10 km
- 20 km
- 30 km
- 50 km
- 70 km
- 100 km

I find 65km to be nice, you should chose whatever you like. Enjoy.

So I got thinking, about gank and tank.

I've held a long term affection towards Amarr. I love to go on long roams, sometimes deep into wormholes and stay there for days, even weeks. Not running out of ammo is pure gold. And Amarr armor is hard. Hard. Very Hard.

For cruisers I've been especially fond of the Arbitrator, the EW&Drone boat. But given the amount of drone skills I've now aquired, what's more natural than to at least think about Gallente, and for cruisers their Thorax and Vexor?

To cut to the chase, I summarized some fittings, all level V skills, and compared DPS and Tank. Yes I know it's simplistic, but it's not meant to be more than a start. Here's the result:


Seems the frogs can deal out some serious blaster damage in adition to their drones. Most envyous however is the Vexor's 75Mbit/s bandwidth, allowing for 3 heavy drones or sentries where the Arbitrator only has 50Mbit for 2 heavies. Yes, that point is outside of the Gank/Tank diagram, showing that the analysis is simplistic, but it's still interesting.

Oh how hard it is to stick with decisions when new knowledge continuously creeps in :-)

D2

So, a few months ago, I started flying in EVE Online. Gradually, and over time, I have developed real world emotions for the people I play with. Friendships, excitement, pity, anger, schadenfreude, relief - all very human emotions, but evoked over pixels on a computer screen.

For me, the stages have been as follows

1 - Human vs AI
At first, all the server controlled spaceships and human controlled spaceships were just the same. But gradually I started to like the human opponents due to the simple fact that they were human. Even though we didn't interact, chat or speak, I liked knowing that there was another guy (probably) in the other end. Their actions were less predictable, and the honor involved in winning or losing was greater.


2 - Steady group
After joining EVE University, I started to meet the same guys again and again, and over time we developed aquintances and to some degree a friendship. Not deep friendships like with people you knew from kindergarden, but somewhat likely to friendships developed between regulars at a bar. You walk into the bar, people recognize and greet you, you continue the chat from yesterday and everyone has a laugh. Good times.


3 - Sharing the common goal
Surprisingly, maybe, after a while I started caring for these drinking mates. At the time EVE University was under a barrage of attacks, and I increasingly found myself concerned about the other guys. As I progressed in skill and knowledge, I felt responsible for taking new guys out for a spin, for helping out, for being there besides them when the shit hit the fan. On the way home from work, I felt real concern. It both amused and surprised me, but the feelings where real. Of course I knew it was all a computer game, and all conflict resided in a server in London, but vritual or not, relationships between humans can span such small hindrances.

4 - RL != RL
Finally, I have lately come to realize how the real world is not so real after all. Before you take this as metaphysical voodoo or me smoking my socks let me explain to you my professional life. I work as a financial consultant in a multinational company, serving clients on all continents, across all timezones and cultures. Over the years my team which is spread all across the globe, have worked together on multiple projects, collaborating on both email and telephone, but rarely in real life if at all. A typical delivery can be to a client in one country, produced by a trio of consultants in two to three others. Over time relationships develop. I always mock Dan when Manchester United lose a game, I chit-chat with Jackie about her travels and the wather around Chicago is nice to drop in a line about to Tom. But at the end of the day these people are just an email adress with a voice on a phone. Slightly Truman show'ish, and very virtual, but that is how real life is for many of us.


So to sum it up - Virtual life is more real and real life is more virtual than people seem to think. I expect this trend to continue in the years to come.

Finally, the war ended against our former teacher ended. The war will no doubt stand out as a milestone in the history of Eve University, and I can truthfully state that I have learned more from this campaign than from any before.

Lessons learned:

1 - Everyone is a legal target, even altruistic corporations like EVE University. But be aware that although your beef is with the leadership, hundreds of noobs will suffer lockdown as well. And ganking our POS? Yes it's a legal target, and in theory we could fill it with bonus-giving commandships. But seriously dude, when was the last time EUNI ever had a commandship? We're struggling to bring battleships and battlecruisers to the frontline.

2 - It's nice when opfor brings it. Much better to just step out the door and bam, be on the frontline. Chasing war-targets all around new eden is no fun, having them in Korsiki is much better. It's harder and harsher, but at the end of the day it's way way better. Good one to opfor.

3 - It's always personal. War-dec'er and former EUNI Director of operations Dee Carson states it's not personal. He is wrong. I sincerely believe him when he states that he himself holds no personal grudge against his former corporation. I sincerely believe that this is not personal for him. But many on the recieving end took the war-dec personally. It is a basic premise of human relationships that you can only control what you yourself do, not how the other party reacts to your actions. A street mugger doesn't hold personal grudges against his victims, but be damn sure the victim will want personal retribution. I am somewhat surprised that Dee Carson seemingly does not understand this nuance.

4 - It's never just pixels. MMO emotion is emotion too. MMO relationships are relationships too. EVE is more than mere pixels.

5 - Under preassure, coal becomes diamonds. Many new and young commanders stepped up, both SC/WC/FC. All hail the young leaders!

6 - Drama will blow over, but will not be forgotten. EUNI is proceeding in a calm and professional manner, but former directors now in opfor will struggle to regain their former love or respect.

Offensive FC combat probing is great. It brings together the power of both scout and FC, and allows an FC to hotdrop a fleet on any target no matter his position. Snipers and stationary loners have never been worse off.

Here's the concept.

1. The FC employs an expanded probe launcher, and fills up with combat probes.
2. Probes are positioned around points of interest, for example a gate and a station.
3. Cloaked scouts are positioned at the same points, to provide visual. These scouts can be stationary, so T1 prototype cloaks on a frigate works great. If you fear spies, don't have scouts in fleet so fleet-members can't warp to them. Since it's the probes that provide warpins, not the scouts, the scouts can be hundreds of kilometers out, as long as they are on grid.
   
4. The FC scans continuously, and scouts report any targets of interest. Since scans take less than 10 seconds now, chances are good that a target won't slip through.
5. If a target is found, FC ninja-warps fleet to the warp-in acquired by the probes.

For illustration, this picture shows a typical situation from the war. A warp-in point on the incerceptor is aquired through probes. Note that in this case I'm alone, on grid with opfor and without a fleet. The point of the picture is just to show how probes can produce warpins. Note also the friendly chat with Melissa Dawn who agreed on the picture in a quiet moment of our battles. Thanks!



Fleet should be relatively homogeneous with regards to optimal range, since everyone will be hot-dropped at the same range from target. 10km or 20km is typically used, since it is inside tackling range, but outside smart-bomb range.

Here's a ship I've FC'ed in:
Droneboats are good for this, since they dish out decent DPS even without turrets/missiles. Also, when the FC flies a ship like everyone else, he's less likely to be singled out as a target by opfor.

With barbarians at the gate, Eve University sets up a true gatecamp. No less than 84 pilots, young and old, fresh and seasoned, frigates and battleships, you name it we had it.

This, my friend, is a true gatecamp:

The cats and the mice
After Action Report, 4th of May 2009

Miaauu, said the cats, stretching and yawning. We're hungry, but we're lazy too. Lets just sit here the mousehole and wait for a mouthful to come out.

Peep said the mice, look at all those big cats. Let's just stay in here where it's warm and cozy.

Hum de dum said Dr D, lets try something different


Problem
Opfor knows everything about us.

They know who we are, where we are, what we fly, how we fly, what we think, how we think, the friggin colors of our socks. They know our modus operandi, our reason d'etre, our casus belli. Heck, if they grow tired of war, they might just as well set up shop as psycho-analysts for all of us.

They know this, not only because they have spies in corp chat, alliance chat, teamspeak, most fleets and probably quite a few command channels, but mostly because they're the ones that taught us almost everything we know. Fighting our former teachers is hard, because the element of surprise is more or less gone from our reportoire. They know everything we know, but we know only the subset they taught us.


Challenge
Change up. I have long wanted to fight them in a non standard way. Since we have only one standard way of fighting, almost any change would add something new.


Opportunity
Scouting throughout the war has shown many situations like this:



See that one guy down to the right? Far far away from anyone else? The sniper? The loner? The straggler? The one not in with the pack? The one all alone? Him I want for breakfast!


Tactical thoughts
Opfor is skilled, and flies skilled. Often in battleships, battlecruisers and T2 cruisers. Basically, they have us outgunned by a ratio I don't even want to compute.

So what to do when the other guy has the bigger gun? You duck, sidestep, hop around and make sure that even if he does hit you, he doesn't hit too hard. This calls for a frigate swarm.

Frigates (T1) are great in that everyone can fly them and they are cheap. A frigate loss doesn't matter at all. T2 frigs dish out decent DPS and support. All frigates are quick, fast, agile and nimble. A frigate can outfly the guns of a battleship, and missiles waste a lot of explosion power on a small sig-radius ship. However, expect to lose quite a few, because most frigs are not designed to tank.

What we did
A call out in alliance chat got a couple of wing & squad commanders, and we had a 30 man fleet. One by one, we undocked from the clear stations and gathered at the POS, which ofcourse is watched by opfor spies. We also got a remote repping Domi to POS in case we needed repairs in space.

Now starts the fun.

The wing commander is assigned the task of moving all pilots around through various positions in space. Just move, move, move. We expect opfor to have pilots in fleet, so pilots are basically being told "get ready to warp", and then suddenly they're ninja warping. Frigs can do this, because of their short align time, and when the whole fleet is in the same ship-class, the fleet moves as one.

School of Applied Knowledge (SAK) is still camped, but we start ping-ponging back and forth on grid. Bam, in at 200 below, out. Boom, in at 150 west, out. Zip, zoom, ping, pong. We have trusted eyes on SAK and soon the wartargets starts moving too. They warp out here and there, and at one point SAK is totally free. Hah! The rest of the fleet can undock.

The fleet is complete, from here on it's a story of warp-in points.

The new combat probing system is brilliant for this kind of work. Drop a probe-set around a station, and basically enjoy 60 minutes of warp-in points of all war-targets.

So we continue zooming around Korsiki while the scouts go for warp-ins. A couple of times, the scout get's too close to station and is decloaked. At other times, the warp-in is set up but aborted in the last second as the WT moves away. But two times we had an enemy sniper Eagle warp in and cloak, but we still managed to fix his position. The fleet is brought in close, and we hope to decloak him. Being so close with 30 bloodthirsty frigs was a true opportunity. However, other WTs were on grid, so we couldn't really spread out and search as much as we would have liked. So we warp out to a planet, get's followed by the enemy, but warp out once more.

The second time we go for the sniper Eagle the scenario basically repeats itself.

At this point, we see WTs are being much more active. They don't sit still for long, but instead warp around when camping. They bring in more and faster ships, to counter us. So we decide to call it the day.

Anyways, it was nice to get some vacuum under the wings again. Cheers to all involved, and warm thanks to WC & SCs for top notch execution.

This is why we scout. A typical scene from the recent war against Seppuku Warriors / Vertigo, opfor is gathering forces outside Osmon SOE.



And if you ever thought scouting was boring, try sneaking up on a enemy fleet for warp-in points or stealth bombing. If anyone tells you they're not pumping adrenaline here, they're liars. This is scary stuff.

Note how the overview now shows everything, each little tidbit of containers / biomass / station guns shows up sorted by distance. Going forward at half throttle, to be sure this is all under control.